The Trilisk Ruins (18 page)

“
It does seem familiar,”
Telisa said. “Or is it my imagination?”

“
I think it does. I’m
hesitant to jump to conclusions too, but it does really look like
whatever Shiny planned has worked. The tunnels didn’t
change.”

Magnus led the way the last few meters
into the large cavern with the equipment cache in the center.
Everything looked the same as they had left it.

“
It’s all still here!”
Telisa said.

“
Minus Joe and
Shiny.”

“
They may not be back yet. I
hope we didn’t leave too soon.”

“
I think it’s okay. Shiny
was careful to let us know what he needed, I think if we had to
stay longer he would have figured out how to communicate
that.”

“
Well, what now? If
everything is frozen in place, does that mean we can search the
whole thing and find the exit now?” asked Telisa.

“
Maybe so,” Magnus said.
“You wanna go look for the exit now, or should we wait and see if
Shiny and Joe come back?”

“
I’m already back,” came the
familiar voice of Joe. Magnus and Telisa turned to see him walking
around the cache to join them.

“
And Shiny?” asked
Magnus.

“
I haven’t seen him. Do you
think he fooled us somehow?”

“
It worked! The caves don’t
change anymore,” Telisa told him.

Joe raised an eyebrow and looked
around. “Well, this place hasn’t changed.”

“
Or any of the passages on
the way to where we waited. They always changed before,” Magnus
said.

“
I wonder how it worked,”
Joe said. “We should try and find Shiny.”

“
Or the exit,” Telisa said.
“If the place doesn’t change, we could map it all out and find out
for sure if there’s a way out or not.”

“
Okay. Let’s take a look,”
Joe agreed.

“
I’ll do the mapping,”
Telisa offered. She accessed her link computer and set up a mapping
program. She could see the map in her mind’s eye; effortlessly she
added the cache room and its exits to the center of her new
map.

“
Ready?” Magnus
asked.

“
Yep, let’s go,” Telisa
said.

The group walked down a side tunnel.
They traversed several side caverns, moving slowly so that Telisa
could map them. They worked their way through the dark caverns
until coming across the human-style corridors where Telisa and
Magnus had waited.

They found meeting rooms and a
cafeteria with a group of vending kiosks along one wall. Telisa
walked up to the machines and asked for a menu through her
link.

“
Furnam’s Chocolate
Squares?” Telisa read aloud, mocking the faux items it sold.
“Anyone want a Sloozebar?”

“
Food is food,” Joe said.
“We should break in and take some.”

“
We can do that later since
things have stabilized,” Magnus said. “Or even if they haven’t for
that matter. We’d just have to look around for long enough and we’d
find some, even if things are changing.”

Joe shrugged. “Okay. I have enough for
now. But I am a bit concerned about hoarding some more for the long
term.”

They left the cafeteria behind and
moved down another unmapped corridor. The wall on the left was made
of clear glass, displaying an abstract art exhibit. Telisa didn’t
have an eye for art, but the paintings seemed real enough until she
read one of the names from a plaque.

“
Talvent Checksparr? That’s
a crazy name. More fake stuff, I guess.”

“
How can you tell?” asked
Magnus. “Artists sometimes have weird names.”

“
Grumbit Shalzpleen?” Telisa
read aloud.

“
Um, okay, it’s fake
alright,” agreed Magnus.

The next corridor broke off in a
T-shape. Magnus started to go to the right, but Telisa turned the
other way.

“
Over here. I need to check
something,” she said.

“
Okay,” Magnus said. “What’s
up?”

Telisa didn’t answer, her face a mask
of concentration. They walked forward another twenty meters,
ignoring doors on both sides. On her mental map, the corridor they
were in collided with a spot they had been in earlier.

“
Damn!” Telisa
barked.

“
What’s wrong?” Magnus
asked.

“
The map just overlapped
itself. Something is wrong,” Telisa said.

“
Let’s head back the other
way and double check. Maybe you entered a turn wrong,” Joe
suggested.

“
I hope I did,” Telisa said.
“Okay, let’s double check.”

They turned and went back the way they
had come. After making the first turn, Joe shook his
head.

“
There were two doors in
this hall before. Now there’s three.”

“
But it stopped changing,”
Telisa said. “At least for a while.”

“
Whatever we did, it only
lasted a while,” Joe said. “The place has started working
again.”

“
And there’s no sign of
Shiny,” Magnus added.

Telisa shook her head. “I can’t believe
it. He’s abandoned us.”

Chapter
Fifteen

Kirizzo moved through a vast room
filled with angular columns of gray metal that stopped just short
of the low ceiling. Black plates embedded in the devices glowed
with symbols in a funny violet color at the edge of his visual
capabilities. He supposed that he saw only a fraction of the
wavelengths that the creators had used to view the
information.

His backside twitched slightly as he
scanned the room with his mass sense, trying to find the next door.
Kirizzo suppressed his curiosity about the devices in favor of his
effort to escape to the surface. An oppressive feeling came over
him, causing him to slow. Something was wrong. Kirizzo took another
few steps forward. Ahead, below the floor, he detected something
too massive for his senses. His head reeled. Kirizzo staggered
back, retreating from the overwhelming input.

A few moments later he began to
recover. The golden alien knew what he had encountered: a
microscopic singularity. The intense gravity close to the event
horizon would daze a Gorgala almost to the point of helplessness.
The tiny black hole was probably used as a source of power for the
energy-greedy complex. Matter could be tossed into it, and the
super-heated gases outside the event horizon would emit a small
fraction of the energy released as high-frequency radiation that
could be harvested by a sufficiently complex technology. Just
holding the singularity in place took an advanced science. Without
any support, the black hole would tumble into the center of the
planet and consume everything until no planet remained, just a
black sphere orbiting the star, a dark monster with a fat stomach
lingering where its victim once lived.

Kirizzo took a different route, trying
to avoid the dangerous area he had accidentally discovered. He
skirted the outside of the large chamber and came across a circular
opening in the side wall.

The tunnel reminded him of the entrance
that he had scrabbled down, pursued by the Bel Klaven war machines.
He entered it, moving through the tube. The inside was utterly dark
so he relied upon his other senses to find his way. It took a
familiar twisting inclined course up towards the
surface.

He encountered a blockage at the end of
the passage. Dirt and leaves completely obstructed the exit.
Kirizzo dug through the matter efficiently, scooping dirt out of
place and under him with his forelegs while several sets of rear
legs flicked it far behind him. He burrowed for a few meters down
the tunnel. He sensed the surface, a vast low-density area only a
few meters above.

The surface light flooded into the
tunnel around Kirizzo when he emerged. The light-sensitive bundles
under his gravity-sensing bulb retracted slightly to protect the
sensors from overexposure. Once his vision had adjusted, the
shining searcher darted back into movement. He flitted through the
dense foliage, taking his bearings. Kirizzo recalled the direction
of his initial approach to the complex and took off, adjusting the
tall plants out of his way with several limbs while the others
carried him along.

Kirizzo thought about his flight
through the forest as he traveled through one valley and into
another. The forest seemed calm and peaceful compared to the tumult
of the day he arrived, lulling Kirizzo into a sense of safety in
the heavy cover. He came to the hillside where he had landed and
started a spiral search for his craft.

Although a lot of time had passed while
Kirizzo was imprisoned—several revolutions of this planet around
its star—he felt sure that even if his starship had been destroyed
there would be signs. He wandered along the hillside, his legs
stopping occasionally but always moving his mass sensor bulb to
feel for anomalies underground.

It took Kirizzo a long time to find the
first piece of metal. He detected a small triangular fragment,
buried under a layer of dirt and leaves. Kirizzo recovered it and
held the clue up in a single hand to examine it visually. The plate
the piece had broken from had been shattered; tiny fracture lines
crisscrossed the item.

This was what Kirizzo had feared. The
Bel Klaven had destroyed his ship in their zeal to exterminate him
so long ago. He froze in thought.

How then might Kirizzo make his escape
from this planet? What had happened in the war between his species
and the Bel Klaven? Had they succeeded in eradicating his race from
the galaxy, or had others like him survived?

It seemed that the aliens trapped in
the nearby complex might serve as Kirizzo’s only way to leave the
planet. He might be able to convince them to allow him onto one of
their ships. From that point, it might be possible to return to a
Gorgala stronghold, if any still existed.

With his new plans formed, Kirizzo
returned to motion. His legs blurred and he ran back down the
hillside towards the complex.

***

Telisa sat on the cafeteria chair to
rest, opening her pack on the table in front of her. Across the
table, Magnus and Joe moved in on a triplet of food kiosks in a
predatory manner. They had tried to access the kiosks through their
links, but the machines refused to function. The real versions of
such machines back on Earth produced snacks for anyone who accessed
the service through their link, and the cost would be charged to
the customer’s global account automatically. Magnus drove his knee
into the plastic panels of the support column, putting white stress
fractures into one of the panels and knocking it loose. Joe
reversed his rifle and applied the stock to another vending kiosk
in a sharp thrust. His attack broke out a large piece of the
dispensing counter.

“
Not exactly health food,”
Telisa commented as she counted up her remaining food packets from
the ship.

“
We might find some other
stuff in those refrigerators back there,” Magnus said, pointing
back behind Telisa. “Go check them out if you want.”

Telisa nodded and got back to her feet,
leaving her pack behind. She had a craving for some real fruit
since the rations they had been eating, although tasty, had a
texture that left something to be desired. She thought it odd that
humans could travel through space to distant planets, but they
couldn’t come up with nonperishable food packets that didn’t grate
on the consumer after a few days.

Telisa opened up the first
industrial-sized refrigerator and started looking through it. A
couple of shelves were filled with milk containers. The lower
shelves had dozens of square cakes on small white plates. Telisa
removed the wrapping from one and took a close look. It looked like
pineapple upside-down cake.

“
Hrm,” Telisa murmured. She
closed the refrigerator and walked back towards Magnus and Joe.
They had finished ransacking the machines. They each had a pack
full of candy bars and snack packages.

“
There’s some cake in there.
If we’re going to eat it, it had better be now. It’s not going to
keep.”

Magnus frowned. She knew what he was
going to say before he said it.

“
We should eat all of our
food first. The food created here by the complex might harm us
somehow.”

Joe shrugged. “If it tastes like the
real thing, it’s probably of the right molecular
makeup.”

“
There are a lot of things
people can’t taste that can kill,” Magnus replied.

“
But that would almost be
intentional,” Joe said. “Actually, our taste buds amount to a
pretty sophisticated analysis system. If the food is off by any
significant amount, it will taste different. If the complex
creators meant to kill us, why do it by poisoning the
food?”

Telisa thought that made sense. “I
agree there’s a possibility that it is poisonous and we wouldn’t
taste it. But compared to the other dangers of this place, I’m
thinking it’ll be small.”

Magnus smiled. “Okay. Eat it if you
want. You can be my guinea pig.”