The Trilisk Ruins (24 page)

“
That will be important. We
have the Trilisk facility, but it’s clear from your report that the
alien you met, whom we suspect left with the smugglers, is of a
different race. Its civilization may still be active just beyond
our frontiers. We need more information, and I intend to get
it.”

Chapter
Twenty

“
You know, he’s working the
computer resources I gave him pretty hard,” Magnus told Telisa.
They sat on mats in the cargo hold across from Shiny, surrounded by
bags of equipment and training hardware.

“
Right now? I thought he was
still working on making noises.”

Shiny’s small sphere module buzzed
against the floor again, parodying her voice.

“
Riyyyyyt Neow? Rieeeeyt
Now?”

“
I think he can do lots of
things at once. Or at least he has computers with him that
can.”

Magnus closed his eyes to check. Telisa
kept her eyes on Shiny, considering the alien’s silvery equipment
around the trunk of his body. She supposed that part of it did
comprise a computer or an alien analog of one.

“
That makes sense. It’s a
natural progression from where we are with our links,” she
said.

After mentioning the links, Telisa felt
a loss for hers again. Once the spy program had been detected,
Magnus had shut it down so he could clean out the tampering. The
entity she had queried every few minutes for her entire adult life
now stayed completely silent. Her mind felt empty without it. At
least down in the Trilisk compound, the link had responded to her
queries with polite error messages and explanations. Now she felt
lonely in her own skull.

“
Thaaaat makzzzz senzze,”
buzzed the device.

“
He must be trying to
correlate this with our readable files. It’s too bad that we can’t
link up to a net source without giving away our location or we
could download some language tutorials for him. He’ll have to make
do with our local file cache.”

Telisa knew that the ship had large
stores of knowledge that it kept to allow the most common inquiries
to occur without having to ask for external data. It wasn’t
surprising that there was little information about language though,
given that no one had accessed that kind of data before they had
left Earth.

Telisa stood up and carefully walked
forward. She pointed to herself and spoke slowly.

“
Telisa.”

“
Telllizzza.”

Telisa pointed at Shiny. “Shiny,” she
said.

There was a pause. “Shhhhineeee,” the
device whined.

Telisa pointed back at
herself.

“
Tellizzza.”

She smiled back at Magnus, but his eyes
were closed.

“
Shiny just queried the
dictionary for several hundred possible phonetic spellings of Shiny
and Telisa,” he said.

“
He can match the phonetic
breakdowns with the words? How could he know that?”

Magnus shrugged. “There must be some
kind of probabilistic approach. He hears what we say... he sees
what we do and tries to match them up with the images in the
dictionary. Then he can make and test assumptions about the
phonetic symbols and—”

“
So we think it’s possible.
I knew it would be difficult, he must have a lot of help or else
he’s a major brain train,” Telisa said.

“
To an alien it wouldn’t
even be obvious what part of the information in the definitions
represents the phonetic structure,” Magnus said. “Just figuring
that out could take a while. Just converting the compressed binary
data of the dictionary into characters would take us some time to
work out.”

“
And he had to figure out
what the image data format was. And which data were images. And
what it meant... I guess he could have cheated and looked at how
one of the wall imagers worked,” Telisa said.

“
Well, he’s ahead of where
we thought. He probably made a breakthrough when we went through
the names of everything in the cargo hold and showed him the
imagers. A lot of the pics must have matched up with stuff in the
dictionary. Not to mention all the image notations that must be in
the ship’s data cache. Probably everything we looked at for weeks
before leaving Earth is in there.”

Shiny shuffled about briefly and then
faced them with twitching legs.

“
Greeetingz.
Hellllo.”

“
Hi Shiny!” Telisa burst
out. “Hello!”

“
Queeeery. Question.
Request.”

Magnus and Telisa exchanged amazed
looks.

“
Ask. I’ll answer,” Telisa
said.

“
Destination. End point.
Terminus.”

“
Uh, nowhere. I mean,
unknown,” Telisa said. “We’re thinking about it. Someone may be
looking for us wherever we go.”

“
Request.”

“
Request away, Shiny,”
Telisa said.

“
Destination. Allocate.
Set.”

Magnus frowned. “He has a suggestion
for where to go?”

“
Hrm. I don’t imagine he
wants to go anywhere we’re familiar with.”

“
Destination.
Suggestion.”

“
He does have a course
plot,” Magnus reported, holding his eyes closed. “It is beyond the
frontier. If a human scout ship has been there, then it’s been kept
secret.”

“
Shiny, what’s there? Is
that where you’re from?”

Shiny twitched again on one side and
didn’t answer immediately.

“
Why should we go there? Can
you explain?”

“
Destination. Safe. Haven.
Sanctuary.”

Magnus frowned again. “Odd. I guess he
knows that we’re being chased?”

“
I don’t know. Does he mean
safe for us or safe for him? Or both?”

“
War. Conflict. Battle.
Shiny. Safe.”

“
Oh. So you will be safe
there. Or us too, if whoever you’re fighting finds us.”

“
Shit,” Magnus interjected.
“What if he’s fighting the UNSF? Could they be fighting a secret
war against Shiny’s race and we don’t even know about it? This
could be bad. If we take him to one of his planets, we could be
killed.”

“
Let’s try and find out
more,” Telisa said. She tried to access her link again and failed.
“Dammit. I keep forgetting my link is off. Driving me
nuts.”

“
I can fix it up. But this
is pretty distracting.”

“
Of course. I understand, I
didn’t mean that it was your fault.”

Magnus stood up. “Let me go take care
of that now. I need to make sure that I don’t overlook anything or
else they may end up in control of it again. I’m going to go into
my quarters and work on it for a while.”

“
Thanks. I’ll keep him
company while I examine these artifacts.”

“
See if you can figure out
why he’s obsessed with our destination,” Magnus said.

“
Will do.”

“
Wheel do,” buzzed
Shiny.

Magnus turned to go, but Telisa called
after him. “Magnus?”

“
Yeah?”

Telisa gave a weak smile. “I really
appreciate this. I appreciate everything. I know that this hasn’t
gone the way we planned, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“
Kinda rough for your first
sortie, huh? Fifty percent casualties,” Magnus said. “I’m glad
you’re here, too. You’re tough and smart, we’ll get through this
just fine.”

He turned and left the bay. Telisa went
over to her bags of tools and set out a small work area on the
metal bay floor.

“
Let’s figure out what these
things are, Shiny,” she said.

“
Investigate.”

“
Yeah, investigate. And try
not to get killed. This is why I’m making the big bucks, Shiny.
Messing with artifacts can be dangerous business. Not to mention
landing on forbidden planets and taking them in the first
place.”

“
Caution. Balance.
Curiosity.”

“
Hrm, yes, you understand,
don’t you?”

Telisa carefully took out an artifact,
a small double wrench-shaped link of metal. It had flat panels of
some dull gray material on one side, one panel on each end. A
hexagonal opening lay next to the panel on one end.

Telisa found a container that would
hold the artifact and set it nearby. She looked through her
scanners and picked one that did a passive analysis of
electromagnetic fields. She knew from previous results with Trilisk
artifacts that an active scanner could trigger something inside the
device, causing it to perform one of its functions. That could be
good, or bad, depending on what its function was and whether or not
it could hurt someone.

“
Let’s start out safe,” she
said. She turned the passive scanner on and looked at the inside of
the wrench object. There appeared to be two solid blocks of what
were called “Trilisk ultradense cybernetic blocks” by researchers,
one at each end, connected by a series of filaments. The cybernetic
blocks were truly black boxes to human investigators. No one had
figured out how they were built or how they worked, but each such
block was theorized as capable of receiving mental instructions
from alien brains and performing tremendous amounts of
computation.

“
It has two ultradenses,”
Telisa said. “Nothing surprising there. Standard Trilisk fare so
far. Who knows what it does?”

Automatically she tried to access the
scanner’s wireless infodump through her link and failed. “Shit,”
she mumbled.

“
Excrete,” Shiny
said.

Telisa chuckled. “You haven’t mastered
figures of speech yet. I guess you’re not so stunningly on top of
things after all. Not that I can brag. Without my link, I’m not
going to be able to get at half the information these scanners can
give me.”

Telisa stared at the wrench for a
moment longer. Why two ultradense computing blocks for one small
device? Why was it shaped like a human double wrench? A lot of
Trilisk artifacts had the gray plates which could emit radiation,
the supposed viewing panels on them. This tiny device had two of
them, presumably one for each block of cybernetic
material.

“
Well, maybe I’ll just do an
overview of everything we have since my link isn’t working,” she
said. Shiny had no comment so she put the wrench object into the
foam-lined container she had chosen. She taped an ID number to the
outside of the plastic box and set it aside.

“
Next artifact,” she called
out, as if processing a line of customers.

“
Neeeext artifayct,”
mimicked Shiny. “Function. Investigate. Theorize.”

Telisa smiled and took the next item
out of her backpack. It was the glowing ovoid thing, like a
slightly yellowish egg with a weave of silver netting wrapped onto
it.

“
Let’s see what’s inside
this thing,” she said.

“
Caution. Warning. Device.
Active,” Shiny said.

“
It’s on? How do you know?
What is this thing, Shiny?”

Shiny didn’t answer. The legs on his
twitchy side jumped again briefly. Telisa turned on the scanner and
looked down at the display. The world melted and suddenly became
horribly wrong, twisted into an unrecognizable form. Telisa felt
that she must be dying since she couldn’t feel her body, take a
breath, or see correctly. Yet there were sensations, input that she
found non-sequitur for a moment. Then came the thoughts, invading
her mind at first, and then blending with it.

Jangar looked out through
the clear panel across a barren, rocky landscape to the far towers.
His vision was highly focusable, and the far image shot forward at
his will, expanding to a clear view of the distant dwellings. Now
he could plainly see the devastation visited upon the surface by
the methane-breather’s assault.

His body twitched, and he
stepped into a new stance to let another of his sides take a look.
Jangar’s thoughts became more abstract, losing the details of the
image he had seen from the original stance. This was the death site
for three thousand of his race, yet Jangar bared his auditory
sensors in a smile. A small price to pay for the success of the
retribution fleet.

Their final revenge, to be
inflicted by the assembled home fleet of Body Riken, had passed
through two days before the assault here. The carapace-lacking
methane breathers still would not know of its approach. His mouth
tentacles writhed at the arrogance of the creatures, to think that
his race could be toyed with! Jangar’s only misgiving was that he
was not among the Body’s finest, even now cutting deep into the
methane worlds. The fleet would be ruthless, of course. The methane
breather’s worlds would be totally destroyed, made useless
forever.

An alarm transmission
triggered in the OTHER. The enemy was attacking again! Jangar
switched his focus and the OTHER took control. The view dimmed as
his primary legs propelled him down the corridor, heading for the
vertical translator. While the OTHER had focus, the submerged parts
of him made acceleration estimates and reveled in the knowledge
that revenge would be enacted.