The Celaran Solution (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 9) Read online

  “Amazing! You shared your home planet with another intelligent species! And one quite similar to your own. The many similarities mean that you must share a large percentage of your genome with the extinct creatures,” Maxsym said.

  “Given our own beginnings and all the wars Terrans have had, it’s not surprising for such a situation to end with the extinction of one of the intelligent species,” Telisa said.

  “I agree. Interesting though, that the more passive of the species won out!”

  Perhaps there was also a starvation event involved that Lee did not mention, Telisa thought. They may have become very aggressive.

  “Yes, very interesting, but I’m glad the modern Celarans won,” Telisa said. She retreated to her quarters to continue to contemplate her plan of action.

  ***

  “We just got the entire team back intact. That alone was a miracle. Now you want to go and commit suicide?” Magnus said. His voice rose, but he stopped short of shouting.

  The reunited PIT team lounged in Lee’s cafeteria-room, arguing Telisa’s announcement that she intended to return to the Trilisk complex. Telisa felt certain that the glowing orb Arakaki reported seeing was Celara Palnod’s Trilisk AI.

  “The risk is worth it. That thing Arakaki saw is another Trilisk AI, no doubt about it. With that in hand, we would be able to stand up to Shiny and make sure he’s dealing with us fairly.”

  “We’ll find another way,” Magnus insisted.

  “The Trilisks didn’t kill our team. That robot or whatever it was teleported them into the Quarus ship,” Telisa pointed out.

  “And we don’t even know why,” Caden said.

  “It could have been the AI,” Telisa pointed out. “Maybe it knew you wanted to fight the Quarus with the cybernetic Celarans.”

  Stating that theory bought her one second of silence.

  “If you go in, any Trilisk inside one of those columns might decide to take your body for a spin,” Telisa9 said. “You’ll never come back.”

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. If I never come back, it’s not your problem.”

  “Trust me, it’s the case where you do come back I’m worried about,” Maxsym said.

  Telisa knew what he meant. If she came back under Trilisk control and tried to do what their Magnus had done...

  “Those columns could make a Celaran or Terran host body any time they feel like it,” Telisa said. “If there’s a Trilisk there that wants out, it’s coming out regardless. I’m the leader and this is what I’m doing. Set up more defenses as soon as I leave. Something that will take me out if you sense Trilisk activity. Or run away and go on without me. With the AI, I should be able to take care of myself until I can catch a ride back to... somewhere.”

  Telisa turned and walked out. She started to work through her link, arranging for a shuttle ride down to the temple site.

  Somehow, when she arrived at the shuttle bay, she discovered Magnus had beat her there. He stepped close to her, blocking her way, and gently put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You’ll be taken by a Trilisk in one of those columns, and you’ll never come back,” Magnus said.

  “If I don’t come back you’ll all be fine,” Telisa argued. “Things will become more normal, with one Telisa and one Magnus and no host bodies to worry about.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You know we wouldn’t all just shrug and go on like nothing happened.”

  “I want to do this. I want to take this risk. If this is the price of being a host body, then I’ll pay it. But if I get in there and walk out with the AI, then we’ve finally taken a real step toward deciding our own fate.”

  Magnus embraced her, then stepped aside.

  “Then bring back the AI,” he said.

  Telisa nodded. She took a long look at Magnus.

  This is worth it.

  Telisa climbed into the shuttle alone and closed it up. The Terran shuttle was an armored pod designed to carry a squad of men and machines into battle. It had many droppable decoys and electronic countermeasures to hide its approach. None of that mattered now.

  She thought about the AIs as the shuttle left the Iridar and headed for the temple site below. How many had the mighty Trilisks ever constructed? They obviously lasted a long time, but the ones they had found were not as powerful as they once must have been. Did they break down? Run out of energy? Go insane from aeons without their builders?

  Shiny had at least two of them. One Trilisk AI seemed an amazing boon, yet she wondered if they would be able to use it anywhere near as well as Shiny had learned to do.

  Before she knew it, the shuttle was telling her it had settled in on the surface.

  Time to go.

  Telisa found a bag in the shuttle and brought it with her.

  I keep all my Trilisk AIs in this bag, she thought. The ridiculous internal monologue helped to calm her a bit. Going into action did not generally make her nervous any more; but she was a host body, so if there was a Trilisk presence at the complex, she would have no control over her fate. The enslavement would be almost instantaneous.

  Once outside, she oriented herself on a link map and set out. She walked toward the mountain of healthy green rising before her. The sickly vines surrounded the area like a reddish-green sea around an island.

  Telisa felt an increasing sense of unease as she approached.

  What is so wrong here?

  She paused to look around and listen with her heightened senses.

  Of course. I’m alone.

  How long had it been since Telisa had been so utterly alone? She had grown accustomed to alien planets with a lack of link services, but it was more than that. The team operated in groups, whether on real missions or virtual training ones, and she had not trained to work alone in a long time.

  She resumed her progress and came to the same entrance the team had used to enter the Trilisk vine temple. The light of the star was blocked by the thick vines, but her enhanced vision served her well enough.

  The original Telisa would use her artificial eye here, she thought. It was strange to think about. She was not the being that had made most of the memories of her life.

  Telisa retraced the steps of her copy and her team. She saw the thickened vine alcoves and the trail of hardened vine cover spots the others had noted.

  That robot must come out here, she thought. It steps there, in the same places every time.

  The capstone had been replaced. Telisa supposed it could mean almost anything. Perhaps there were Trilisks down there that wanted to stay hidden, or maybe it was the duty of a robot to come by and close it up. For a moment Telisa even imagined that a party of Celarans had come in and discovered the opening, before she dismissed the idea as extremely unlikely. The real treasure of this area to Celarans would be all the healthy sap, and yet none of them were here.

  Telisa referred to the link map Arakaki had given to her.

  This is it. Trilisk columns ahead. Time to face the downside of being Trilisk Special Forces.

  Telisa descended. She came to the fork and went left as the previous team had. She suppressed an urge to run. Though impatient, she wanted to act in a confident, routine manner, as she imagined a Trilisk in a host body might act. It was most likely of no use. Her behavior cues might fool a Terran system, but anything Trilisk would have to see the truth right away. Still, some stubborn part of her clung to the idea.

  Everything remained eerily quiet as she marched through the column rooms. All the columns were fully closed now, so she was denied a live view of the ancient ground relative of the Celarans.

  She came to the clear-walled complex. It was a maze of transparent walls, ceilings, and floors littered with opaque objects. She looked at the nearest machine through a glass wall. It looked like two black rings joined at three points by silver rods with a slow-spinning disk floating in the interior.

  That is something amazing. It might be something I could spend a lifetime trying to understand.

  She looked for sign
s of the battle that had occurred, but everything looked clean and new. For some reason, she had a crazy thought that maybe there had been no fight with a Trilisk robot at all. Maybe it had all been implanted into their minds.

  No reason for that to be the case... it’s just that the Trilisks are capable of so much, and they’re so distant and unpredictable.

  Telisa followed her map and took several turns through the glass walls. No three-legged, three-armed robot came to challenge her. There was a soft sound, the hum of a machine or the gentle flow of air that surrounded her. It was constant and reassuring.

  Her sharp eyes saw colorful light wavering through several clear walls. She headed in that direction.

  The source was a floating sphere that slowly changed colors as it rotated. Thin rods moved into it with quick precision as it moved, while at other random times, the rods slid back out, floating in space around it.

  Is that thing even made of regular matter?

  “You must be weak. Been here a long time, I suppose,” Telisa said to it. The device did not answer. Telisa remembered the Trilisk AIs did not talk; they just provided.

  The AI had no Vovokan holder. Telisa suspected that meant the AI would serve anyone in range. She did not have the security enhancement of being able to screen the device from the prayers of her enemies.

  I haven’t even grabbed it yet and I’ve already thought of complications.

  “Whoever made you and used you here is long gone, I think,” she said. “I have need of you, now.”

  She gently grasped the device and placing it into her bag. It felt like a fuzzy ball charged with static. The moving rods could not be felt, only seen.

  And now, we leave. Quickly.

  Telisa returned, taking the same route she had arrived by. Her footsteps echoed among the clear walls around her. Telisa could see through parts of the floor. She saw at least six more levels below her.

  What was this place?

  She thought about trying to stay and investigate. It could be intensely interesting, but she had to prioritize: she had a Trilisk AI in a black bag and needed to get it back to her team.

  When Telisa looked back up from the view through the floor, her breath froze in her throat. A large blue machine with three arms and three legs stood directly in her way. The shock almost broke her rhythm, but Telisa managed to keep walking smoothly. She headed right for the machine fearlessly.

  I can bluff a Trilisk robot. I do it all the time. The thought passed through her mind as if just thinking it could turn it from a lie into the truth. With an AI in a bag, it might.

  Only four more steps and she would run into it.

  Suddenly the sapphire machine shot forward. It was fast, even by Telisa’s host body standards. One of its three flat sides faced her squarely, with a leg placed on either side of her feet. The forwardmost arm touched her head—and Telisa was instantly paralyzed.

  Her back arched, clenched by some unknown force. Her head flopped back, then an intense pain exploded in her chest, right below her sternum. She made a gurgling sound.

  This is it. I failed. Please stop the pain. Finish it!

  A soft blue light grew at the edges of her vision. The pain peaked, then subsided. Something had changed. Telisa felt different, but she could not pinpoint the feeling.

  Her head righted and control of her limbs returned. She looked at the robot and saw that something now floated between them. It was a 2cm thick rectangular slab of black material about the size of her hand, smeared in blood.

  Did that come from... inside my chest?

  The force released her. She regained her balance very quickly, thanks to her unearthly quick reflexes. She stared at the slab and then looked at her torso. Her Veer suit had a horizontal cut in it just under her breasts. She pried the edges apart to take a peek. There was no blood or scar on her skin.

  The black slab floated to the floor. The sapphire robot stepped aside to allow her to pass.

  She felt a tickle across her chest. She looked down again and felt her suit with her hands. The long cut had disappeared.

  Telisa stared at the sapphire machine. It was a duplicate of the dead robot she had seen on Chigran Callnir Four. They had not learned anything from it. She was pretty sure Shiny had that one now, if it had not been destroyed.

  We didn’t learn anything before, but this one is operational.

  Telisa decided not to chance trying to take the robot with her. She already had exactly what she needed. The AI was of incalculable value.

  Still, the black slab was a mystery screaming to be solved. She could not resist it. She knelt down and picked it up, then walked on by the robot.

  When she reached the entrance of the glass chambers, Telisa closed her eyes and imagined herself holding the AI in the main lounge of the Iridar. Then she opened her eyes and found herself sitting in the lounge. The AI floated above her.

  “I’m back,” she announced to the team.

  She realized she may have circumvented their defenses by returning so directly.

  Maxsym will wet himself.

  “Oh, sorry about this. I should have come back in the shuttle. I’ll wait here until you can complete the checkup. I have the AI, so... don’t shoot?”

  “Welcome back,” Magnus said.

  Chapter 19

  Marcant walked into a meeting room for a team FTF. He noted that Lee was not present and assumed she would arrive soon, though it was usual for the Celaran to arrive very early and very excited.

  When Telisa entered, it felt like the beginning of any other team face-to-face. Then he realized it was Telisa9 from her link identifier. The two copies had differentiated their links so everyone could easily tell them apart.

  She was not there to discuss the next course of action for the team.

  “I’ve decided to go back to Earth and report to Shiny,” Telisa9 announced carefully. “It will be best if I face him. There’s a fair chance he will reconstruct a team for me and give me a new mission,” she said with confidence that Marcant found suspect.

  “Maxsym, thank you for serving with me. Your scientific breakthroughs are amazing. Jamie, thank you for trusting me even after we fought your fellow soldiers in the UED. I wish you both luck.”

  Telisa9 approached Magnus, hugged him briefly, then turned to leave. She walked away robotically as if in great pain. Marcant watched her retreat.

  I wonder what happened there, Marcant thought. Tension between the Telisa copies?

  “Telisa allowed the other team’s Telisa to sleep with Magnus for a while, causing the other Telisa’s guilt to build to the point where she realized she had to go back to Earth and negotiate with Shiny to get her own enhanced leader-Magnus back,” Adair summarized privately.

  “Have you been spying on them!?” Marcant asked.

  “Spying? That implies I had to work at finding things out,” Adair said. “This was all patently obvious.”

  “Adair spends entirely too much time worrying about domestic security,” Achaius said.

  “At least I’m aware of my surroundings,” Adair shot back.

  “Well I think the team will function best with only one copy of everybody,” Marcant stated to his AI friends, breaking up the conversation.

  The “real” Telisa—at least the copy Marcant followed—walked into the room.

  “Before we start, there’s something you all need to know.” She took a flat black rectangle of pliant material and dropped it onto a table.

  “A Trilisk machine took this out of me,” she said. “Magnus and I analyzed it, and we’ve concluded that it’s a bomb. A bomb laced with the Trilisk toxin compound designed by Maxsym.”

  No one found words quickly. Finally, Caden responded.

  “You’ve been a walking, talking, Trilisk-killing bomb this whole time?”

  “Apparently so. We have no idea how it would be triggered, or why it never showed up on any scans. It’s obviously not detonated by anything Trilisk or I would have already exploded.”

>   “Maybe it would go off if you were taken over by a Trilisk,” Marcant said.

  Telisa nodded.

  “A solid possibility,” she said.

  “You, a host body, just came back from a Trilisk complex, and the toxin bomb has been conveniently removed?” Maxsym said, his voice rising. “Then you could be a Trilisk.”

  “We checked her—” Magnus started.

  “And there are ways around that,” Maxsym said sharply. He stood. Arakaki drew her weapon and pointed it at Telisa. Magnus drew a pistol from his belt, but he did not raise it.

  “Don’t panic. Everyone. Be calm and logical,” Telisa said. “If I’m a Trilisk, why would I show you this? None of you had any idea it was there, so why would I... wait. Did you know about it? Is this a countermeasure I wasn’t aware of? If so... that was very inventive! Good job.”

  “Adair!?” asked Marcant in shock.

  “I wish that was my idea,” Adair said. “I did not know.”

  “One of us put that in you?” asked Siobhan.

  “No one?” Telisa asked, looking around. She looked very thoughtful. “Maybe it was Cilreth, and the knowledge died with her?”

  “I prefer to think it was Shiny,” Magnus said.

  “So would I, but if it was Shiny, and it’s triggered by being taken over, then why didn’t our Magnus explode when the Trilisk took him?” Arakaki asked.

  “I don’t know,” Telisa said. “Maybe he didn’t have one, or maybe the Trilisk saw through the trap. After all, that robot spotted this in me right away.”

  “Exactly,” said Maxsym. “It’s almost impossible to outmatch Trilisks. They’re just too far beyond us.” His voice was calmer now, but Maxsym was clearly still deeply concerned.

  “It was Shiny,” Caden said out of the blue, with a far away look on his face. Everyone turned to look at him.

  “When I was being interrogated at Space Force Command, they said a duplicate of me blew up a bomb and died. The toxin killed some Trilisks,” Caden explained. “I just assumed at the time it was some kind of special grenade that he had used in desperation.”

  “Imanol mentioned a bomb when he described his mission on Earth,” Magnus said. “There was a host body duplicate of him on the island no one had warned him about.”