The Trilisk Ruins (22 page)

Kirizzo moved through the large chamber
to which he had been directed. The walls were monotonously regular,
almost perfect in their boring rectangular theme. He found this
style to be gratingly dull, but he had expected as much after
seeing their simulated environment in the alien
installation.

Artificial radiation streamed down from
above. The obvious deduction here was that the creatures could
sense this light as Kirizzo could. He worked his way further around
the many storage containers that littered the area. The wall had an
embedded device in it, shielded by a metal grille. He scanned this
area and analyzed the function of the site.

The system placed in the wall converted
electronic impulses into movement with a network of wires and
magnets. The resulting vibrations could conceivably range into
frequencies beyond the ability of his mass sense to detect. A
possibility occurred to him. An experiment was in order.

Kirizzo couldn’t move his legs fast
enough to emulate the vibrations the device produced, but he could
reproduce them with one of his defense modules. The defense module
was capable of extremely quick interception, and its drive could
cause the module to vibrate rapidly if he told it to change
directions back and forth very fast. He instructed the device to
drop into contact with the floor and utilize its movement system to
buzz at high frequency.

Kirizzo experimented with the setup,
starting at a low frequency that he could sense with his mass
detection. As he increased the speed of movement, the disturbance
quickly left his range. He instructed the module to continue in
ascending frequencies up to its limit. When he sensed a larger mass
approaching, he became distracted from the experiment.

One of the aliens burst into the room.
Kirizzo saw that it was the smaller one, brandishing a primitive
weapon. He immediately stopped creating the vibrations, concerned
that perhaps he had broken some taboo of their culture. The alien
seemed to calm, lowering its device. Had he alarmed it?

Kirizzo repeated the experiment and
watched the alien. It showed obvious alarm as the module vibrated
again, raising its weapon and stepping back. It sensed the movement
of his module.

It appeared that these creatures used
an even more sophisticated movement sensor than Kirizzo was
naturally capable of. This revelation shocked him a little since he
had thought the creatures devoid of nonvisual motion sense
altogether. But the evidence here suggested that they could detect
movements at a much higher frequency than Kirizzo could, a rate of
millions of vibrations per subcycle.

Did it detect the movement of the
sphere or the ship’s deck? Or the resulting movement of the
molecules of the atmosphere? It could even be the high-frequency
impact of the shock waves on its outer integument, Kirizzo
realized. Either way it was a fascinating method of information
transfer.

The breakthrough gave Kirizzo the tools
he needed to begin analyzing the alien language. Unfortunately it
meant that they might not be able to communicate without artificial
help. Still, being able to understand the creatures would aid in
achieving his next goal.

Chapter
Eighteen

Magnus closed his eyes and linked into
his virtual cockpit. Display screens and controls came into being
all around him.

He turned to a display on
his left and reviewed the status of his launch decoys. The
Iridar
had dropped five
of them as it descended over the continent. Each drone now awaited
his command in distant parts of the land mass. The devices would
simulate a takeoff of his ship and hopefully distract any waiting
UNSF trap to the wrong vector.

Magnus activated the drones
and sent them off. At the same time, he brought the
Iridar
’s engines to full
power and prepared for his own takeoff. He routed power to
temporary storage pools for more drones, the EM warfare pod, and
weapons.

The core of the
Iridar
held its greatest
miracle: the gravity spinner. Although the spinner took most of the
energy consumed by the ship, it was well worth it. The spinner
allowed generation of the artificial gravity during the voyages as
well as faster than light travel. Magnus started the spinner last.
He locked down the ship and brought the
Iridar
up from the planet by using
the spinner to cause it to “fall” upward. The ship’s thrusters
kicked in, adding to the speed. He couldn’t fully engage the
spinner so close to the planet without causing vast
destruction.

As an afterthought, Magnus turned to a
new virtual panel and created a new account on the ship’s system.
He left a pointer to the flight information console. If Shiny found
his way in, he could monitor their progress through that. Magnus
thought it might help to keep the alien calm during their
escape.

He watched on several
displays as they made their way up through the atmosphere. Several
ghost images of the
Iridar
climbed up from the planet. Magnus saw the ones
generated from his launch drones as well as several other
electromagnetic fakes thrown up by the EM module. The module
scrambled many useful frequencies to confuse things for the enemy
as well as watching and interpreting the planetscape for signs of
other ships and facilities.

Magnus looked at a control on one of
the virtual boards before him. It activated at his thought. One of
the launch drones exploded. The screens lit up with the EM pulse of
its destruction, playing havoc with Magnus’s readings. He launched
two other EM bombs to add to the noise. He wanted to blind as many
satellites as possible to cover their escape route.

The
Iridar
left the atmospheric envelope
of the planet. Magnus cut the thrusters to preserve fuel and let
the spinner accelerate them. He dropped off some missiles in their
path. In a few minutes they’d activate and move to kill a group of
satellites over a different part of the planet. It would look like
they were trying to blind another part of the network. The ship
operated very stealthily, but it never hurt to overlap the
protection. Magnus wrapped their escape in deception after
deception. If someone could figure out their route, he hoped it
would be many days from now.

He relaxed a notch and watched the
displays for a while. As he’d hoped, they hadn’t had to use any of
the crash pods. They were a last resort for when a spinner failed.
The UNSF had weapons that would disable a spinner, and the
resulting g forces could smash a crew around inside their
vessel.

Magnus wondered about Shiny. He checked
the alien on a surveillance viewer to make sure things looked
normal. The creature seemed quiescent.

The mercenary looked over
the screens as the
Iridar
moved farther out. The planet behind him remained
noisy. He selected a frequency from the comm display and packaged a
message. His equipment would make the transmission look like noise;
only someone searching for the agreed-upon pattern would be able to
recognize and descramble it.

“
Hawk, I’m leaving the
target system. I’m golden. We’ll get back to you in a few weeks,”
Magnus sent.

“
This is Hawk. I read you.
Noisy, though. Hah, your noise coder must be workin’ too
well.”

“
I’m surprised to get a
realtime link with you, Hawk,” Magnus said.

“
Hello to you too, Vulture,”
Henman replied. “Yeah, well, my ship’s been dispatched towards
target system. Something about some smugglers. You wouldn’t happen
to know anything about that, would you?”

“
We’re out now. But A and B
are dead. As you know, we blew the approach so it’s noisy on the
way out.”

“
Shit, sorry to hear that.
You guys had a rough ride. The Unies want you bad, though, whatever
you did. They’re throwing a lot of hardware your way.”

“
Well, we’re a little more
golden that I can express. I’ll have to lay low for a while. We’ll
figure out a way to get you your cut, just like always. Hey, they
may have gotten a few traces of us back there. If you can snoop
around and make some of it go away, it would help.”

“
Sorry, no way. Not on this
one. If they got anything on you, it’ll be impossible for me to
make it disappear. Not without giving myself away. It’s one thing
to clean logs that no one looks at anyway or to make a random
security pic go away, but this is different.”

“
I understand,
Hawk.”

“
So have you spaced your VIP
yet?”

“
No, not this one. VIP’s the
real deal, very capable. I think there’s a lot of
potential.”

Henman laughed. “What, you’ve fallen in
love with your passenger, have you now? C’mon, Vulture, keep your
head for god’s sake. She’s just some spoiled brat who you’re hot
for.”

Magnus frowned. Henman was being a
little too specific. Even though he believed no one could listen
in, he preferred being more nebulous while in the thick of
it.

“
Seriously, VIP’s working
out well. Held it together after we lost A and B. Don’t worry...
there’s only a few of us to split the load with.”

“
I suppose. I really hope
this one doesn’t bite you, though. You’re so damn trusting. I’ve
tried to set you straight a hundred times. You’re gonna get us
screwed if you’re not careful. And I don’t mean by that eye candy
you hired, either.”

“
Don’t worry. I’ll be in
touch.”

Magnus cut the connection. He felt
anger rising in him at the way that Henman assumed things about his
judgement. He changed course to avoid any chance that their
conversation would give away his escape vector.

A calmer part of himself considered
Henman’s accusation. Had he really let his primitive drives take
over when it came to Telisa? He did have some kind of impulse to
protect her that wasn’t fully logical.

He also found Telisa’s presence to be
somewhat distracting at times. During training he remained as
professional as possible, but he found it difficult to ignore her
youthful attractiveness. Grappling proved to be the most
frustrating, when he could feel her entire body struggling against
him.

Magnus let out a sigh and ripped his
thoughts away from the grappling. They’d made it out of the system
so his next task would be cleaning up Telisa’s link.

He considered the source of the link
spy program. He decided that Jack may have been behind it just as
well as any active UNSF agency. Magnus had been aware of their
monitoring of her link for hours after the first meeting, just in
case she had decided to run to the authorities. But he hadn’t known
of an invasive modification to her link at that time.

Magnus had already isolated
the entire link. Now he copied over its storage to the
Iridar
’s computers and
sterilized the original. He performed a hardware scan to make sure
that the link hadn’t been modified except for its programming.
Everything checked out. He still needed to install a fresh link
kernel and started everything back up. Telisa would have to set up
a lot of things, but at least she’d have her link back
soon.

He set a dissection routine to work on
the program to see what it could find out. It quickly found a
catalog of the visual records it had been storing. He realized that
he could find out how long they’d been recording without waiting
for the routine to complete. He could just browse through them and
see when they started.

Images of Telisa’s recorded sight
flashed through his mind’s eye. Magnus stopped the progression
periodically, trying to determine how long the link had been
active. He caught a flash of the redly glowing caverns; a vision of
himself standing in a corridor. He flipped through more
recordings.

The next hop stopped. The image showed
Telisa standing naked before the narrow mirror in her ship’s
quarters. Magnus blinked and moved forward again. He felt a
familiar desire rising but shoved it back. It would be despicable
to spy on her this way.

He thought about what Henman had said.
If Telisa had a hidden agenda, this would be the way to find out.
But it didn’t make sense; if she worked for an agency, they
wouldn’t have the program hidden from her and she wouldn’t have
brought it up to Magnus. She must be unaware of whomever had tried
to use her vision against her.

He found that the images
started after a few days into space on the
Iridar
. He decided that made sense;
presumably she could be monitored any of a number of other ways
while on civilized planets. He archived the recordings and left
them for Telisa to see. He turned off the virtual displays and sat
for a moment in darkness.

“
We’ve dodged some bullets,
haven’t we?” he told himself. Magnus wondered how many more were
headed his way.

Chapter
Nineteen

The
Seeker
. A sleek gray cylinder with
sensor bulbs every few meters on her surface. Joe saw the green
circle of the United Nations Space Force emblazoned on the hull.
The ship extended almost 200 meters from end to end. Although not
as large as a battle cruiser, the vessel probably embodied the
pinnacle of UNSF science. The ship’s complex sensors and analytical
capabilities enabled it to catalog new systems and assess them for
suitability as colonies or detect traces of alien
civilizations.