The Trilisk Supersedure (13 page)

A noise
behind her dispelled all thoughts of going back to find Cilreth.

That
thing is coming, and it’s fast. Is it a Konuan, or is it…what the grilles were
supposed to keep out?

She
thought about the spear shape that had opened, umbrella-like, over the scout.
It looked like it could have fit through the grille, from her instant
impression of it.

Telisa
sprinted down the tunnel. She had no idea where she was going, but she slid the
lightning gun off her back and grasped its two odd, vaselike handles. The heavy
device took both her hands to aim and activate. Then she turned.

Let’s
see it deal with this!

She
didn’t see a target. Nevertheless, she almost pulled the trigger, figuring the
guided missiles would find their own targets, likely to include the Konuan or
Konuan predator. Then she thought of Cilreth again. The gun could easily kill
both Cilreth and the alien creature, even if they were still back in the room.
Telisa and Shiny hadn’t yet figured out how to keep the alien weapon from
harming friends.

Open
the range.

“Come
on!” she yelled out. “Come get me. I’m down here!”

Then
she ran farther down the dark tunnel. Her light dangled at her belt. She turned
it on with her link, but the rays scattered across the floor around her rather
than illuminating what was directly ahead.

“Cilreth,
I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can, run back the way we came. I’m
going to kill the thing.”

She
activated a night vision suite, but an infrared view wasn’t very useful either.
The tunnel’s temperature was too uniform. She turned to look back. A huge manta
ray of a creature opened right next to her like a giant flower opening for the
sun.

Three Entities—!

She
felt air move by her head. Then the creature fell away. Telisa ran again. She
held onto the weapon in one hand and grabbed her flashlight in the other.

It must
have been a Vovokan sphere that saved me.

The
tunnel was smooth, slightly blue, but Telisa was only paying attention to where
it led. She saw another source of light ahead. She let the flashlight dangle
again and grabbed the weapon in both hands. She looked back. A single Vovokan
guardian sphere trailed her, but there was no sign of the other.

Telisa
slowed as she neared the end of the tunnel. A wide room opened ahead. She took
another step forward. The room beyond the tunnel looked circular. She saw two
banks of equipment or large machines on the far side.

Trilisk.
They looked just like the dead hulks they had seen on Thespera. But this time,
she saw blinking lights on the surfaces ahead. Cool air moved across the skin
of her face.

She
stepped through the tunnel and into the room. Four smooth blue columns obscured
the corners. The looked very similar to the columns they had found around the
trap on Thespera. Trilisk machines.

The air
felt different. Electric. Telisa reached for something in her pack, then
decided against it.

I’m
being hunted by a Konuan so I stop to analyze the air? Then I get eaten.

She
checked behind her. No signs of pursuit. The tunnel she had entered by was
utterly dark. She tried her flashlight, but it didn’t travel far down the
tunnel. She still didn’t see anything. The light had a weak laser option, but
she didn’t want to attract anything.

Of
course it knows which way I went. There weren’t any other turns. Or were there?

She
wondered if the Vovokan sphere was back there blocking it, or if the sphere was
destroyed, the creature cowed…no way of knowing. They hadn’t worked out the
attendant-link integration far enough for Telisa to ask her current attendant
what had happened to the other one.

Telisa
accessed her Vovokan sphere. She had a few canned commands available to use.
She told it to sweep the room. Telisa remained in place, holding the weapon. If
the sphere flushed anything out, she would be ready. The sphere took off,
slipping behind the column to her left. She watched the feed through her link.
The column had a few more cables or tubes on the far side, a couple of dim
lights, but nothing else. There wasn’t a place for anything to hide.

The
sphere continued. Telisa just stood by. She turned with her back to the pillar
the sphere had checked, sideways to the tunnel. The Vovokan sphere revealed
another smooth blue tunnel, also dark, leaving from behind the second pillar.
Then another from behind the third pillar.

So the
room is roughly square, but I’m at the intersection of three tunnels.

“I wish
I still had two guardian spheres,” she said aloud. She thought of prayer
machines again, but she dismissed it. She had already tried that just above.

Ah, but
the Trilisks might have wanted it for themselves and screened it from above,
just as Shiny kept the AI he found from working in his enemies’ houses.

“I want
a knife,” Telisa said. She knelt down and placed her pack on the ground. She
imagined a solid, shiny metal blade and a soft rubber handle. “I really need a
knife in my pack.”

She
glanced down the tunnel again, saw nothing, then opened her pack. She found
only her supplies inside.

Dammit.
I’ve been forever spoiled. I’m going to travel all over the galaxy and every
now and then try a prayer and see if it works! I can see how humans got hooked
on this stuff.

She
replaced the alien weapon on her back. Then she clutched the breaker claw in
one hand and her smart pistol in the other. Her imagination brought up an image
of the Trilisk machine they had discovered…the trilateral symmetry and its dark
sapphire coloration.

If
those machines are running, then what if robots are, too?

Telisa
froze and just listened for a moment.

What if
I accidentally kill a Trilisk robot with the breaker and cause an interspecies incident?
Or at least a species to robots-of-extinct-species incident…

Telisa
pushed down the negative thoughts and simply examined the room as the Vovokan
satellite lazily floated around her. The columns had no manual controls.
Typical of Trilisk machines. The center of the room was raised in a circular
shape, a kind of low dais only a small step above the rest of the floor. The
floor was clean, too clean. Some kind of system had to be in operation to
prevent the accumulation of dirt or dust.

Always
they have these columns. And almost nothing else. No bedrooms, bathrooms,
meeting chambers, nothing to really tell me more. The robot we found is an
exception. I wonder if the space force ever found one. I wonder if it’s
actually a dead Trilisk cyborg.

Telisa
felt a stab of guilt. She had no idea if Cilreth was still alive, if the
monster was still coming, but here she stood, wondering about the Trilisks. She
decided she had to choose a tunnel and try to get back.

Telisa
stepped onto the dais. Suddenly she felt light-headed.

“Wha—”

She
lost her balance and collapsed.

Chapter 11

Holtzclaw
walked through the haphazard clusters of alien buildings behind his men. The
surface of his battle suit maintained the broken red color of the rocks and
walls around him.  He was in constant communications with his surveillance
team, the Hellraker operator, and his mission group.

His
battle suit was simply a powered exoskeleton mated to a military grade skinsuit
and a helmet. It increased his mass by about 50 percent, but that was not a
problem moving across the hard, rocky landscape. Originally the battalion had
an exoskeleton only for each officer, squad leader, and the heavy weapon
operator, but almost all the men had them now. One of the few advantages of
heavy attrition of the unit: the exoskeletons had survived more often than the
men had.

“Any
activity back at their ship?” he asked. Though he could see the ship in one of
the panes of his personal view, he relied upon his men to sift through details
and notice things he would miss while his attention was divided.

“Quiet.
Something’s not right about it, though. This ship is nothing like I’ve ever
seen.”

“It
must be some fancy science mission one-off,” Holtzclaw said.

“Yes,
sir. You got the fancy part right. It looks like it took some serious landing
prep just to set it down. Some kind of surface construction to make a place to
sit its fat ass down planet-side.”

Holtzclaw
looked at the ship again. His man was right. The ship was radical. He couldn’t
even see any ramps or means of ingress. The landing site had several pre-built
spots to support the struts.

We must
have missed some probe that arrived ahead of time to construct those landing
pads.
“Well, it’s about to be our fancy ship,” he said.

Holtzclaw
trailed the center of his advancing mission group. He had mobilized eight
squads of five men each. A Guardian machine had been assigned to each of the
squads. Though the Guardians had been designed for perimeter security, they
could be useful in a frontal assault.

The
Hellrakers were set up and on high alert, but he preferred to capture
everything intact. More supplies for him that way. If they encountered any
resistance, he was ready to use up Hellraker rounds in exchange for whatever
was on that big fat ship they had seen come down. There were probably literally
years’ worth of supplies and equipment on that vessel. And if it was a science
expedition, it could be invaluable in trying to figure out what they hauled out
of the tunnels.

The
rest of his soldiers were taking off in the next few minutes to challenge any
assets the strangers had left in orbit. As with the ground attack, their orders
were to capture what they found rather than destroy it. Holtzclaw had put
Silvarre in charge of their assault craft.

On the
ground, his men were spread across a two-kilometer line north to south, moving
to the east. Sensor probes moved in the same direction, two to the south and
one to the north. Even though he expected all the action to take place topside
today, he had a moment of pause thinking about the engineers he had left
behind. They had sheltered underground to defend themselves against the
monster. If it chose to strike now, it could be bad. But at least he had told
them to remain vigilant. There were limited avenues of attack in the long
tunnels.

“We
have a robot here, headed away from us.”

“Kill
it,” Holtzclaw said. “Neutralize all their machines. Take the scientists alive
unless they resist with arms.”

There
was a pause.

“Got
it. Target is down.”

A
minute later, squad three, farther to the south, got another one. And another.
Holtzclaw discovered the machines were armed when the third one shot back. None
of his men were injured, and they killed it easily.

They’re
not prepared for this. They’re no match for us.

For
another half hour they swept across the old city. They killed a fourth robot in
the north; then Holtzclaw got a transmission. He caught a visual feed of the
officer. A long, straight nose divided the heavily lined face above compressed
lips. It was First Lieutenant Racca.

“We
have a couple of robots holed up in a building,” the officer said.

“Any
people in there?”

“No, sir,
not unless they’ve got stealth hardware. The probes are sure it’s just robots.
There’s at least two of them sheltering in there,” Racca said. “We could use a
Guardian machine, but I thought, maybe this would be a good test for our
Hellraker calibration?”

“Yes,
good thinking,” Holtzclaw agreed. The Guardian ammunition had also gotten
pretty low, because those machines had been taking pot shots at the Konuan for
weeks. His unit needed resupply or access to manufacturing resources they could
use to produce more ammunition. Their assault ships had basic fabrication
systems that could be used in a pinch, though they were slow and out of certain
raw materials. The fabrication systems were meant to construct critical
replacement parts for the ships in emergencies, not to supply a battalion with
ammunition. Not even a heavily attritioned battalion like theirs.

Holtzclaw
received a location pointer from Racca and passed it on. He announced the
target on the mission channel. The fire system verified all friendlies were
clear of the target.

“Incoming,”
said the Hellraker operator.

Holtzclaw
accessed a visual feed from one of the probes on the line. A small Konuan
building sat in a clearing. Nothing moved, but his men were sure at least two
of the machines were inside.

Three
seconds later the dwelling blossomed into a gigantic cloud of red dust rising
into the sky. The thunder came seconds later. Holtzclaw wasn’t sure if he could
feel the tremor or if it was imagined.

“Direct
hit,” Holtzclaw heard.