The Trilisk Ruins (21 page)

“
Wouldn’t they make
regular-shaped tunnels like humans do inside of buildings? The
caves seemed... so primitive.

“
The walls were irregular,
but they weren’t natural. His race probably doesn’t have an
aesthetic about regular shaped rooms. It’s not surprising
considering how different their technology looks.”

Magnus grunted in response. They were
working their way over the last rise into the valley where the ship
rested. They worked their way through the forest for a few minutes
in silence.

“
Worried?” Telisa
asked.

“
Yes, but I shouldn’t be,”
Magnus said. “If they detected the ship and they’re waiting for us,
we’re already caught. Our lights will give us away.”

“
What about satellites?”
Telisa asked.

“
This planet isn’t developed
at all,” Magnus said. “They don’t have enough infrastructure in
place to detect anyone anywhere. That’s one of the reasons why we
came here, because there’s a lot to be taken and not a lot of
resistance to taking it.”

They came to a flatter area, and the
vegetation thinned. Telisa knew they were almost to the ship. She
could see a map and their location in her head via her personal
link. Would a team of soldiers be waiting to arrest
them?

They sped up, consuming the last of the
distance in less than half an hour. At last the ship stood before
them, and Telisa let out a sigh of relief. There were no lights or
cordons of men. The forest remained silent.

Telisa could tell that Shiny was sizing
the ship up in the red light.

“
What do you think he
thinks?” she said.

Magnus snorted. “He’s probably
thinking, it’s not safe to fly in that thing,” he said.

“
I can’t tell for sure if
he’s more advanced,” Telisa said. “He seems mysterious, and his
modules are impressive, but he may have been there a long time,
collecting knickknacks. And maybe his technology is better than
ours in some areas and worse in others.”

“
Yeah, or maybe we’re
primitive worms and he’s barely tolerating us,” Magnus retorted.
The ship’s entrance port activated and lowered a ramp for
them.

“
Ship says we haven’t been
detected,” Magnus reported.

Telisa remembered that she could link
in again. It felt reassuring to link in and see the ship’s
resources available to her, like coming home. She had never before
gone as much as a day without being able to link into nearby
services.

They walked up the ramp, and Shiny
followed without hesitation.

“
Looks like it’ll be a
flight for three,” Telisa said.

Chapter
Seventeen

“
We must be crazy. Trying to
smuggle away a live alien from the UNSF,” Magnus said. He sat in a
chair, eyes closed. Telisa knew he preferred to close his eyes
while running the ship interface.

“
How could we turn him away
after he helped us escape from that place?” Telisa demanded. “It’s
obvious he wants to go with us. Would you rather he gets captured
and prodded by those UNSF monkeys?”

“
Hey, careful there. I used
to be UNSF, y’know.” Sounds reverberated through the ship,
signaling their takeoff. Telisa hoped that Shiny wasn’t getting
into trouble where they had left him in the cargo bay. Hopefully if
he could survive trapped in a mysterious Trilisk complex, he could
make it in the bay. Telisa thought she should get back there
soon.

“
Be ready to get in a pod,”
Magnus said. “I don’t know if they considered us important enough
to have called any ships back before they heard Joe’s report. We
might be in for another rough ride.”

“
What’re you worried about?
You can defeat their scanners, right?”

“
We can probably get away
from this planet. Probably. But now they’re going to be hunting for
us everywhere. They don’t have the funds to search for every
handful of smugglers that sneaks away with an artifact here and
there. But this is huge. They’ll spend a lot of money to recover
Shiny.”

“
You think they’ll know
where to look?”

“
They won’t be able to ID
this ship, at least not unless the scout ship is back in-system. It
might have scanners advanced enough to get a good look. But those
ships are expensive, there’s only a few of them, and one of them
already spent its time here. They’d only send it back when Joe
gives his report, and it probably isn’t here yet.”

“
Where should we go?” Telisa
asked. She realized that she was still very new at this smuggler
stuff, and now she was in way over her head.

“
Let’s just stay in space
for a while,” Magnus suggested. “I want to know what we’ve got in
Shiny. I also need to scan the ship carefully, in case the UNSF
managed to mark us somehow. Why don’t you talk to Shiny, see if
he’s a willing passenger, for starters.”

Telisa loved that idea. She could
forget about the UNSF for a while and study the alien and the
artifacts.

“
That sounds great! I need
to scan the artifacts, and I’ll try to talk with Shiny some more
while I’m at it.”

“
I’ll concentrate on getting
us out of here. Remember what I said, be ready to run for a shock
pod.”

“
What’ll Shiny do? We don’t
have any pods for aliens.”

Magnus grimaced. “We’ll try our best.
Maybe we won’t have to go for the pods.”

“
Okay, maybe I could show
him one.”

“
I wouldn’t. If he went in
there, he’d probably panic.”

“
A human would, if they
didn’t know what was going on. But I think he’s pretty smart. He
knows we don’t mean him any harm.”

“
Your call. Just make sure
you get in a pod if I say so.”

“
Okay.” Telisa turned and
headed for a cargo bay where she could catalog her hoard of
artifacts. She used her link to ask the computer where the scanning
equipment rested and got an odd notification.

“
There’s something wrong
with my link. It’s not working right,” Telisa said, turning back
towards Magnus. “And the ship’s computer is complaining about it
too. It says I’m hogging storage.”

That got Magnus’s attention.

“
Hogging storage? Have you
been recording a lot?”

“
Hardly anything,” she
said.

Magnus remained quiet for a moment.
Then he cursed.

“
Damn!”

“
What’s wrong?”

“
Something’s up with your
link,” Magnus said, his eyes still closed. “It’s been compromised
somehow.”

“
What?”

“
Give me a minute. I have to
fire off some comp tasks and then I can talk more.”

Telisa waited. Now she felt more tense.
Something wrong with her link? Was it the complex? Trilisk
tampering? Or had Shiny somehow damaged it?

At last Magnus opened his eyes. He
looked at Telisa for a moment in a way that scared her.

“
What? What’s going
on?”

“
I’ve discovered a UNSF
snoop program running on your link.”

“
What! You mean they’ve
tapped me? Those fu—”

“
It must have run out of
space in your local cache. We spent all that time in the complex,
and you didn’t link to anything. Usually the spy program gathers
information and downloads it at public links. But we’ve been
isolated from public links for a long time now.”

“
So everything we know, who
we are, and what we’ve found...”

“
Including Shiny, will be
downloaded next time you connect to a public link,” Magnus finished
for her. “We have to clear this out before we enter any port. It
may even be sophisticated enough to detect public ports in range
and download all by itself.”

Telisa bit back a scream of rage. The
UNSF... the ones who had taken her father from her, the ones who
tried to control everyone’s lives, had been recording her life from
a secret program placed into the link hardware at the base of her
skull.

“
Those bastards,” Telisa
lamented. “They recorded everything. Probably down to every request
for the local time. Now wait a minute, that means they know about
my employment with you, Thomas, and Jack! If they know it all,
why’d they let us leave?”

Magnus shook his head. “No, you had a
sleeper. It wasn’t active when we hired you, believe me, we
checked.”

“
You checked? You scanned my
link? How could you?”

“
We had to. It wouldn’t be
safe not to. Look, we didn’t record anything of yours. We just
checked to make sure you were clean. That’s all. I
promise.”

Telisa took a deep breath. What Magnus
said made sense. They would have to check things like that to keep
from getting caught in a society in which people could be unknowing
spies for their government.

“
That isn’t the only unusual
thing going on with the links,” Magnus said. “Since Shiny came on
board, he’s been trying to emulate our link’s handshake codes to
connect to the ship’s computer.”

“
Really? He’s trying to
break in?”

Magnus shrugged. “From his point of
view, it’s probably not so much trying to break in as just trying
to communicate. Obviously he’s detected the data we transfer on the
link frequency, and he’s trying to speak the same language. But our
ship’s computer is rejecting him.”

“
You should give him an
account. We need to learn to talk with him somehow.”

“
Okay. But I want to
restrict his access. He seems to be on our side, but he is an
alien, after all. Until we understand him better, I’ll keep an eye
on it.”

“
And my problem?”

“
We can work on that once
we’re out of the system,” Magnus said. “Link up with me and we’ll
poke around through Thomas’s programs and see if we can find
something to clean up your link.”

***

Once on the vessel, Kirizzo turned his
resources towards learning to communicate with his
hosts.

Kirizzo worked for several subcycles on
the problem. He had been recording and cataloging their movements
for some time now but had not had the chance to analyze the data in
depth. He began this analysis once it became obvious that he would
have a lot of time available.

He realized that the movements the
creatures made were too simple. They could not encode enough
information for a meaningful dialog. He pondered the meaning of
this new discovery.

Either the aliens were much more
modularized than his race and could function with very little
interaction, or else they were using other means to augment the
transfer of information.

The first idea did not fit what he had
observed of the creatures. When the time came to break off the
alliance with the third one, the original two had quickly organized
a plan and acted in a coordinated way to leave the other behind.
That implied that they had exchanged a plan. A slight chance
existed that the two had done this kind of thing many times and
didn’t have to communicate much to select a plan, but that seemed
unlikely.

Kirizzo decided to examine the second
possibility in more detail. How could they be exchanging
information?

He scanned the radiative emanations of
the environment and picked up several frequencies being used for
information transfer. This examination revealed that the humans had
artificial means of communication much like himself, via small
devices embedded in their bodies. He monitored these frequencies
and started a group of experiments to try and inject his own
transmissions into the system to learn more.

Once again the bandwidth proved to be
low. Hardly any information passed at the frequencies where he
detected activity. But it might be that their devices just weren’t
exchanging anything right now.

When he jumped in on the channel and
sent some transmissions of his own, he followed the protocol but
lacked the one-time link codes that the others used. They worked on
a principle of using passcodes to connect, but each passcode was
good for only one use. He didn’t have enough samples to try and
crack the pattern. For now it seemed all he could do was eavesdrop
on the coded messages.

Still, this system was a more modern
veneer added onto their original state in nature. Kirizzo wondered
if effective communication was required before any civilization
could become advanced. It would have taken a long time for the race
to become coordinated with an extremely limited mode of
communication. He doubted his race would have been as successful
without their original communication system based on limb
movement.

That meant that they might be able to
exchange information using senses that Kirizzo lacked. They could
have been using media that escaped Kirizzo’s attention the whole
time. The idea that their primitive base language used movement
exclusively as his race did was probably a bad assumption on his
part.

In order to make further progress,
Kirizzo would have to learn about the senses utilized by the
creatures. These natural “primitive” capabilities would be what
they used in their simplest forms of transferring ideas.