The Trilisk Supersedure (6 page)

“They
made good use of the space,” Telisa noted, looking over the same machines
hanging from the ceiling.

“Yeah,
they’re mounted everywhere, even the ceiling,” Cilreth agreed.

“Any
other first impressions?” Magnus asked. He looked toward Telisa.

“These
grilles lead out in all directions,” Telisa said. “So unless this is a prison,
or mausoleum or something, they must be doorways.”

“Then
why are they all fused closed?”

“The
dimensions of the doorways are considerably smaller than the room. Our own
doors are relatively tall. The creatures must be the size of those grilles.”

“But
the grilles are solidly in place. I’m not so sure they’re doors.”

“If we
can see where that one goes, we might find out,” Telisa said. She pointed
toward the one opposite their break-in spot.

Magnus
knelt before the grille on the far wall and shined his light through the vents.
“There’s another open space through it. Large.” He set the light down and
grasped the grille with his gloved hands. He tensed his bulky frame. “It’s not
moving either. Could it be electronically locked?”

“I don’t
think so,” Cilreth said. “Hrm. I shouldn’t be too quick to judge, though.
Maybe.” She pulled off her equipment pack and set it on the ground. “We can
scan it. Or we could break one into pieces and look for evidence of internal
workings. Though if sufficiently advanced, it may not be obvious to the naked
eye.”

“This
place doesn’t look very advanced to me,” Magnus said.

“You
never know. This could be their barn, or something a bit older,” Telisa said.

“Perhaps
the grille moved directly up or sideways, instead of opening like a basic door,”
Cilreth suggested. “There could be a hidden latch. It’s probably easy to open;
we just don’t know how to do it.”

“The
outside one had no cavity to slide into,” Magnus said. “So if that theory is
correct, it must not hold for the outside ones.” They examined the grille for a
few minutes. No one could find any trick to spring it open.

Magnus
stared at the grille before him. “I think this is a time for a primitive
approach. A crowbar might work.”

“What’s
that?” Telisa asked.

Cilreth
smiled. “An old mechanic’s trick from simpler times. Nothing more than a bar of
metal to use as a lever. You packed one?”

“No,”
Magnus admitted. He stood and remained still for a moment. Then a scout robot
clambered in, presumably summoned by Magnus. The machine took his place by the
grille and started to chip away at the wall. It came away in chunks.

Cilreth
walked back around the room while they waited for the machine to dig. The place
smelled musty. She tried to imagine what it had looked like new. The grilles
made it feel like a prison. An outer layer of the wall had fallen away. It must
have been very smooth and could have been some color other than the red stone
behind.

Magnus
pulled the grille away and tucked it between two of the machines. He scoffed, “Once
again, the wall is softer than the grille!”

“Just
age,” Telisa guessed. The scout machine walked through the resulting hole. They
crawled through after it.

The
next room’s basic architecture was identical to the first. Grilles sat in the
center of walls, floor, and ceiling. Metal bars with circular holes extended
half a meter from the walls in a dozen places. Two oxidized metal tables with
six legs sat on the floor. One more identical structure was affixed to the wall
to Cilreth’s right.

“What’s
that stuff? There are…mounts or rods or something on the ceiling, too,” Magnus
said.

“And
the walls. I can’t guess what this stuff is,” Cilreth said.

“Maybe
something used to be suspended in this room, like a sleep web. Maybe it rotted,”
Magnus said.

“I have
a different theory,” Telisa said. “This reinforces something I was suspecting
earlier. Remember, there were grilles leading in all eight directions from a
cubical room, including up and down. Now you see all this along all the walls?”

“These
creatures used all the walls and ceiling, maybe even equally,” Cilreth said.

“Exactly.”

Magnus
looked up at the ceiling. “You mean, they…stuck to the walls? Hung upside down?”

“I don’t
know yet. But these things, whatever they were, utilized all six walls of these
rooms in a more equal way. Terrans focus on the floor, install cabinets or
equipment into the walls, and practically ignore the ceiling. But here, doors
lead out in all six directions. They must have clung to the walls and thus made
use of the entire room in ways that wouldn’t occur to Terrans.”

“Great.
A race of banana slugs,” Cilreth said.

“Well,
that is actually one possibility,” Telisa said. “They may have been smaller
creatures that stuck to the walls like slugs.”

Magnus
made a face. “But we’re here after the Trilisks.”

“That
doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two from the Konuan,” Telisa said.

“It
looks to me that they were primitive. Iron Age–ish, or whatever passes for iron
around here,” Cilreth said. She checked the data on the planet again.

Given
the density of this planet, iron is likely quite common.

“Yeah,”
Telisa agreed. “That does make them less interesting from a standpoint of cool
goodies to lift. But we need to rethink this city of theirs. If they use all six
walls for stuff, then in a way this city is two or three times denser than an
equivalent-sized Terran city, right?”

“Hrm.
Could be,” Magnus said. “Shiny said the Trilisks were here, so let’s keep
moving.”

“What
about the scouts? Aren’t they supposed to take the heat for us?” Cilreth asked.

“Right
now, they can’t get through these grilles,” Magnus said. “We’re going to have
to figure out a good way to get through them ourselves. Then I can try and
adapt the method to the scouts.”

“Well,
they have grenades,” Telisa said.

“Out of
the question,” Magnus replied.

“Okay,
then, scratch the flamethrowers. It’s time to deploy crowbars to your advanced
alien robot fleet!” Telisa said. She suppressed a giggle. Magnus shot her a
look.

“Well,
we need to come up with something, or it’s going to take weeks to move through
the city,” Cilreth said.

“The
Clacker
can fabricate a wide range of tools. Or perhaps the scouts just need a tweak to
their methods. I’ll figure it out,” Magnus said.

Chapter 4

Captain
Jamie Arakaki knelt to the rocky ground, allowing her to see farther. The
native plants obstructed her view less in their lowest meter where they were
mostly naked stalks. More importantly, the kneeling position allowed her to
spot the cleargliders from a distance, because the transparent creatures always
waited with their tails hanging to the ground. They liked to tease the smaller
critters out of the plant wells with their opaque red tails, then drop to
attack.

Arakaki
didn’t spot any cleargliders in the patch. She came back to full standing
position. Her dark hair had been tied back to keep it out of her eyes. She
periodically chopped off the growing tail of hair with a machete to keep it
from getting tangled in anything. She was a compact 1.7 meters of wiry muscle.
She wore a combat suit. Its surface changed colors slowly. At the moment it
displayed a moody maroon that matched the rocks underfoot.

She
walked through the patch of vegetation with a small personal assault weapon in
her hands, its empty holster at her hip. A laser dangled at her other hip.

Her
destination, a long tent, became visible just ahead. It was a remote tent,
placed to gather together small items from the nearby tunnels and evaluate
their worth before bringing them back to the assault ships. Arakaki was one of
the few people who would make the trip out to the farthest tent alone. No one
else actually
wanted
to be attacked by an alien monster.

She
heard sounds of movement inside. The PAW she held detected a target signature
within. She listened to verify it was a human. The occasional swear word or a
clearing of a throat would do it. She froze to listen. Even the sliver of tough
plastic she chewed on stopped its idle trip between her teeth, sticking
straight out from her thin lips under a canine. After a half minute she heard a
long sigh followed by the smack of skin on skin, as of someone slapping away a
local bug. Then Arakaki padded up to the entrance, giving the area a last
look-over. Her feet didn’t make a sound on the jagged rock. She glanced inside,
seeing a lone UED soldier at work at a low folding table. Then she slid
gracefully inside.

“What’ve
you got for me, Ace?”

The man
froze, then smiled. “Nice to finally be apprised of your presence,” he said
mildly. He looked at the pistol sitting on the table next to him as if to say,
A
lotta help that did me
.

“I don’t
know what they are, but there’s four of them, identical, all Trilisk for sure,”
he continued, pointing at a black pack.

Arakaki
pounced on the bag, then hefted it up to her shoulder energetically. She tipped
to one side under the weight. Ace caught sight of the move from the corner of
his eye.

“Damn,
Arakaki, you’re nothing but guns and gristle,” he said, not turning to look
straight on.

“If
something’s gonna eat me, it’s going to have to chew a long time,” she said.

The
soldier laughed. “I’ll chew on you a while,” he offered.

“Next
time for sure. Right now, I gotta go,” she said, leaving the tent without
looking back.

Within
twenty paces of the tent, she checked the probes for the latest scans on the
Konuan.

Three
hits last night around three a.m. It probably won’t show until late afternoon,
she
thought.

The
creature that hunted them liked to take a crack at the UED soldiers every
single day, though it was often turned back. It seldom returned twice in one
day and typically separated its hunts by at least ten or twelve hours. Arakaki
wondered if it slept or simply had other tasks on its plate.

But the
biggest secret about the Konuan was simply how it had survived at all, when as
far as she could tell, every other Konuan had died decades ago at least.
Holtzclaw kept saying there could be a handful left, but Arakaki felt it in her
gut: there was just one. And it loved to hunt them. To toy with them.

The
weight of the pack bit into her shoulders. It would be a long walk back.
Holtzclaw’s surviving techies would gush over the new pieces, she felt sure.

If you
told them a Trilisk pissed on it, they’d rush to examine it.

Not
that she knew if Trilisks urinated or not. But she felt that she would probably
never find out, and it was just as well, since the aliens had died out and left
the galaxy to the Terrans.

It may
have found the best Trilisk stuff for itself.
That could explain it,
she realized. She hadn’t considered the possibility before. But if anything
could explain a single long-lived Konuan that could sneak in and out of their
perimeter and hunt down heavily armed men and women, it was Trilisk technology
in its possession.

Goddamn
thing. I’m gonna blow it to bits.

Her
hand found the smooth black grenade dangling around her throat on a tough nylon
line.

Or if
it gets me first, I’m taking it with me.

Arakaki
had rigged the grenade to a pH sensor so it would detonate if covered in a
strong acid. She believed the victims were dissolved by acid secreted by the
creature, and the strong ammonia smell was due to bases it used to neutralize
the acid once the victim was incapacitated. Whether the ammonia neutralized
acid in the victim as potential food or simply kept the creature from dissolving
itself from the inside out, she did not know, but every dead soldier had been
found with his or her head half gone. If the Konuan got past her eternal
vigilance and pounced on her head, it was in for a surprise.

Arakaki
moved through the now-familiar old buildings of the original sentient
inhabitants of Chigran Callnir Four. Though she had found the empty silence of
the ruins unsettling at first, she felt at home among them now, even knowing
she could be hunted down and killed. She had made friends with the danger. She
bit down on the sliver in her mouth. In fact, she was a bit too eager for
danger now, since she had lost him. Some days, she wanted it to end so she didn’t
have to think about it even one more time.

An hour
later it was early afternoon. She had made steady progress through the empty
city. Still probably too early for the Konuan to show.

Probably.

She
approached the danger zone of the UED perimeter. Arakaki took up a position
beside a Konuan building, facing a distant hillside overlooking the ruins. She
sent her code from her link to a directional transmitter in her combat suit.