Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt Read online

  “Here is a shot scout nine took from deep within the habitat,” Magnus said. The others watched a Terran in a UED uniform leap from one building to another.

  “Colonel Holtzclaw,” Arakaki said.

  “The former,” Telisa added. “Now, our Trilisk.”

  Arakaki’s mouth moved slightly, but she said nothing.

  She wants to ask if his mind is dead, Magnus thought. He considered it. Chances are, her commander is really dead. But you never know.

  “We’re in luck! It’s still in the Terran body,” Magnus said. “This is our chance. Everyone, stunners if you have them. Terran target signatures. Configure your weapons to wound if you aren’t using a stunner. We’re half an hour out, or maybe an hour if we try to hang low.”

  Magnus rattled off the orders. The team was smart enough to figure that all out for themselves, but saying it out loud could stop a lot of mistakes before they happened.

  Magnus took a look at the scouts and soldiers he had available. He told the scouts to move to points along a large tube shape moving through the habitat to the center, so their route would be well monitored. Then he sent over a hundred soldiers from several stations to the area of the sighting to surround the buildings there. He cast a wide net; Magnus wanted to encircle the target without alerting it.

  Everyone was ready in record time. The PIT team checked their weapons, closed their packs, and assembled for action. They poured out of the nearest trap door and jumped off from the outside like a flock of birds taking flight.

  The unification of purpose is impressive, thought Magnus.

  The group stayed close together but made good time, hopping from building to building like superheroes. In the distance, Magnus saw a couple dozen soldier machines on their way along parallel courses.

  “There’s a good chance the Trilisk will know you’re coming,” Cilreth told the team. “I suspect it’s using networks running here in the habitat. I’m still learning about how things work in here.”

  Magnus did not envy Cilreth’s task. For Cilreth, it was learning one alien system after another. Fortunately Shiny would be able to help her, and he was already familiar with his own Vovokan technology.

  They kept up an incredible pace for over fifteen minutes. Magnus had overestimated the time it would take them. When they pressed it, they could outdistance the soldier machines in their new bodies. Though the Vovokan machines could jump off with impressive force, it took them longer to move from one side of a building to the other to make the next jump. But there were already soldier machines out ahead of them that had taken positions around the buildings where they had spotted the Trilisk’s Terran body.

  “We have an unbroken perimeter now,” Magnus said. “I doubt it would hold him if he wanted to escape, but at least we should slow him down and we’ll know where he is.”

  They made a last series of jumps. Magnus slowed down.

  This is it. We’ll know shortly if we’re in over our heads with this thing.

  “Bring up your tacticals if you don’t have them already. You’ll see the building. Soldiers will go in first.”

  “Incoming!” yelled Caden. Everyone checked his feed and turned the same direction.

  “Hold your fire,” Arakaki said. “Those are attendants.”

  A small swarm of attendant spheres approached. No one fired. The attendants arrived and augmented the pair everyone already had. Now each team member had five attendant spheres.

  “Nice! We’ll need them,” Siobhan said.

  “The soldiers are going in,” Magnus said. One hundred and twenty of the machines lined up around fifteen doorways and started to assault. It took less than thirty seconds for them to find resistance. Everyone watched the feeds.

  “Machines like we fought before,” Arakaki said. “I saw the flat disc ones.”

  “Beetles,” corrected Caden. “And the torpedo-shaped laser ones, the cutters.”

  “I’ve got the scouts around here set to alert us for anything. None of the turtles have been spotted, and I doubt there are any in that building,” said Magnus.

  They watched the feed for another sixty seconds. Robots killed robots inside. No one caught sight of Holtzclaw in any of the feeds.

  “I feel like it’s a trap,” Imanol said nervously. He kept checking all around.

  “It might be. Imanol, concentrate on the scout feeds from our flanks. The rest of us can monitor the battle inside.”

  “Will do,” Imanol said.

  Magnus noticed some of the robots he thought had been killed were showing up in visual feeds of other soldiers in the building. They were fighting other soldiers, too.

  Dammit.

  “Some of my robots are malfunctioning,” Magnus said.

  “Hacked?” Siobhan asked.

  Magnus frowned. “Maybe. Probably. A lot of robots dead on both sides. Time to go,” Magnus said.

  “Cilreth,” Magnus sent on a private channel. “I see some oddities. Please send remote kill commands to all the soldiers who aren’t online. Repeat, send redundant kill commands to all the soldiers that are supposed to be dead.”

  “Got it,” Cilreth said.

  Magnus saw there was a wide swath of the building’s center that had not been penetrated. He decided that was where they needed to go.

  “Three doors on this side. These two are pretty close together, and both lead to corridors that go deeper into the building,” Arakaki said. She had probably made the same observations.

  “We’ll go inside in two groups then,” Magnus said. “Caden and me on point of each group. Arakaki, Siobhan, Imanol, behind Caden. Telisa and Maxsym back me up. I’m going in this left door. Caden’s group on the right.”

  Everyone moved. They seemed calm, as if it were another VR drill—another beneficial effect of all the training. They were at the doors faster than their old selves ever could have moved.

  Let’s hope it’s fast enough, he thought.

  Magnus sent his attendant spheres through first. He saw a corridor with no enemies, so he dove through and joined them. His rifle was up and ready to shoot. He moved down the corridor, half expecting the gravity to shift on him. He could see the visual feeds of the others. He paid more attention to Caden’s feed so he would know if the second group hit trouble.

  They accelerated down the corridor. He had working soldier machines within fifty meters of their location. They were headed straight into a hotspot.

  I bet the Trilisk is dead ahead.

  He sent an attendant ahead to the end of the corridor. He paused to check a side door.

  “Telisa, put an attendant on that,” he said, and kept going. Telisa sent a nonverbal acknowledgement through her link. His attendant reached the end.

  Gzzzzt. Snap.

  The attendant fizzled and popped as it was hit with a laser. Magnus cursed.

  He moved closer to the wall on his left. Then it pulled him toward it, sticking him in place. He cursed again. They were almost to the end of the tunnel, but the attractive forces changed here. He started crawling on the “side” wall.

  Booom. Booom.

  The sounds of shots somewhere ahead echoed in the corridor.

  “Stay back just a bit,” he told the others. He contacted the closest soldier and told it to advance into the room ahead of him from another direction. Caden was almost to the end door of his corridor.

  “We check together. Keep some of your cover,” Magnus said. Caden sent his assent. Magnus crawled the last couple of meters. He could see the others about five meters behind him. He came to the edge of the end of the corridor. His four remaining attendants were ready to cover him. Up ahead, he saw a couple of the walls of a bigger chamber and some Blackvine junk clinging to surfaces at odd angles.

  Magnus raised his rifle to fire. Suddenly he realized the enemy was behind him. He turned around.

  ***

  Telisa’s heart was pounding as they came to the end of the corridor. She wanted to get to the next room and find some cover. The attra
ctive force shifted, so she started to walk on a side wall. Magnus dropped to crawl forward. Telisa and Maxsym slowed way down, crouching.

  Booom. Booom.

  “Stay back just a bit. We check together. Keep some of your cover,” Magnus said. The team heard the message but it was tagged for Caden. Telisa saw Caden was at the end of the other corridor as well. Magnus crawled the last couple of meters. He took a quick peek back at Telisa.

  We’re exposed out here. Magnus got to the end of the corridor. He sent a quick message out on the channel.

  “Our target is here.”

  His rifle rose, and then Magnus turned back toward Telisa and Maxsym.

  “Keep him in your sight!” Telisa yelled. Then she saw Magnus raise his rifle toward her. She felt confused for a second.

  Oh, just like in training. Something is behind us!

  Telisa ducked lower to give Magnus a clear shot past her. Something was terribly wrong. Why did he turn his back on the Trilisk? It must be a trap.

  Booom. Booom.

  Magnus’s rifle thundered. Maxsym went down beside Telisa. It looked more like a fall than a drop to a prone firing position.

  Who shot him?

  Booom. Smack!

  One of Telisa’s attendant drones struck another drone in midair. It had never occurred to her the drones would ever collide. Another drone whizzed by.

  What? Whose was that—

  Booom.

  Magnus shot Telisa. She felt the slug hit her high in the chest, going in above her clavicle. There was no pain. Just a penetrating smack. Then she felt the strength leave her body. She toppled forward from her crouch and met the floor.

  Booom.

  Another round came in, piercing the top of her arm from Magnus’s direction.

  Five entities, what went wrong?

  Telisa weakly coughed up bubbles of fluid from her lungs. More loud shots rang out. The last thing she noticed was the taste of blood in her mouth.

  Chapter 21

  Telisa awakened inside a Trilisk column. The clear surface of the inner tube still encased her. She waited as the tube slowly dropped from the ceiling.

  Uh oh. Is something wrong with the supersedure?

  She saw Cilreth standing outside.

  “Hi,” Telisa said aloud as soon as the barrier had dropped below her head.

  “Hello, Telisa,” Cilreth said.

  “I don’t like that tone. What’s up?”

  “You don’t… remember?”

  “Five Entities, Cilreth, you’re scaring me. You just stuck me in here, as far as I know. Am I the copy or the original?”

  “It’s been days. Your duplicate has been killed,” Cilreth said.

  “How? Wait. Why don’t I remember it?”

  “I thought you would. I thought… there was a fight. A bad one. Your copies turned on each other. I think the Trilisk can control minds. I guess it must have been able to block your memory upload. Either that, or, it was so traumatic you’ve—”

  “No. I would remember,” Telisa asserted.

  Suddenly Cilreth became very stiff. She had an odd look on her face.

  What? Oh. She is afraid the Trilisk did something to me. Corrupted me instead of doing the memory download.

  “It’s really me, Cilreth. Ask Shiny to see. I’ll just wait here.”

  Cilreth relaxed incrementally.

  “Original Telisa verified,” Shiny’s voice announced in Telisa’s link.

  Cilreth smiled.

  “Crap. For a second there, I thought…”

  “You thought I was about to turn on you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The others?” Telisa asked.

  “We saw all the copies die except Caden2 and Magnus2. But they’re waking up here, too. So I guess it had them kill each other.”

  “I need to catch up. Maybe we all will, if the others don’t get their memories either.”

  “Recordings collected, organized, assembled for review,” Shiny buzzed. “Ready for perusal, intake, absorption.”

  “Hi Shiny. Thanks. The scouts saw it all?”

  “Yes, a lot of it,” Cilreth said. “There were some link records and attendant feeds, too. We have it all ready for you to watch. I’d suggest you go to your room and just soak it all in? You can talk with the others once they’ve accepted what happened.”

  Telisa nodded. She left Cilreth and retreated to her room to watch her own death.

  ***

  “Telisa?” It was Magnus. Telisa had been watching the scout feeds for hours. She had skipped over some of it but took in a lot of the events, including the end.

  “Hi. How are you taking this?” she asked.

  “No words,” he said.

  “Yes. I think I’ve learned something, though.”

  “Don’t hunt a Trilisk?”

  “I think the Trilisk could control us because we were augmented copies created by the machine. It didn’t control our minds before. It had ample opportunity. I think this is some kind of built-in feature of the copies that makes it much easier.”

  Magnus didn’t answer for a moment. “Interesting. But the Trilisks can do almost anything, it seems. Or it may have discovered something here it could use that it didn’t have back on Chigran Callnir.”

  “It just makes so much sense. We’re toying with supersedure devices so powerful and complicated. Something its kind built. I believe the Trilisks could learn to control other minds, since the columns can move them around between aliens. But this one would have done that. It’s on the run. It doesn’t have a lot of technology to use, or we would have had no chance. That’s what we already figured out: it had to hunt the Terrans one or two at a time. The augmented copies must have loopholes for any Trilisk to access. Obviously it was able to keep us from getting the memories of what happened.”

  “That’s our only hope at this point if we continue,” Magnus said. “We might cut our losses and run.”

  “We won’t,” Telisa said, though she heard the reason of his words. “I need to talk with Cilreth about it.”

  “Okay. I’ll be around soon.”

  Telisa left her room and found Cilreth in Clacker. She had set herself up in a lonely, dark room to concentrate on the computer interfaces. From Telisa’s point of view, it looked like an empty space, but she knew Cilreth had it set up to show her a lot more.

  “Oh, hi, Telisa. I see you’re out of the tubes,” Cilreth said. “How are you taking it?”

  “You see I’m out? You let me out.”

  “How are you taking it?” Cilreth persisted.

  “It was so strange watching that video, Cilreth,” Telisa said. “Like watching one of those old action virtuals that used to be popular, when you’d scan your body in and become the star. It wasn’t me, but it was me.”

  “It was disturbing. At least we’re alive,” Magnus said, linking into their conversation.

  Cilreth nodded.

  “We have another… major… problem,” Cilreth said.

  “We do?” Telisa asked.

  “Shiny,” Cilreth said. “He’s not our Shiny. We’re out here with Shiny2.”

  Telisa’s mouth literally dropped open.

  “How?” Magnus snapped.

  “Shiny copied himself. He pulled some shenanigans with the copy; I don’t know what. I don’t know how. But there are two of him awake at once,” Cilreth explained. Magnus dropped several curses as she spoke. “He has some insurance, I guess, that the improved version wouldn’t turn on him. Plus, remember, the ‘improved’ version is not as much improved with him, as I guess his race already has more genetic augmentation than ours does.”

  “He told us he didn’t have the ability to do complicated things with the devices,” Magnus said. “You see? He’s not trustworthy.”

  Telisa felt anger at Shiny too. He had lied to them.

  “I don’t think he can do it himself,” Cilreth said. “He… Shiny2 kind of implied that it takes the Trilisk AI to do it. It was some kind of prayer.”
r />   “Of course,” Telisa said. “The Trilisk AI is even more than a prayer interpreter and implementer. It’s invaluable for those alone, but it can also be used to manipulate other Trilisk tools that we’d be unable to use otherwise.”

  “Anyway… if the Trilisk figures out our Shiny is a superseded copy, then I assume it can take him over, too,” Cilreth said.

  “I see you came to the same conclusion. The copies are controllable,” Telisa said.

  “Honestly, Shiny told me that was his conclusion.”

  “I suppose he wants to run away then, before he gets taken over,” Telisa said.

  “He wants to continue the mission,” Cilreth said.

  “Meet me in the mess,” Magnus said to Telisa privately.

  “I’ll have to think about the mission,” Telisa said. “We can talk about it once everyone is… I almost said ‘themselves again’.”

  Magnus dropped out of the conversation. Cilreth nodded. She looked worried.

  “Is anything else wrong?” asked Telisa.

  “Promise not to be mad?” Cilreth said.

  “What’s up?”

  “I made a copy too. I’ve been working with her to understand Vovokan tech, with a study of the habitat on the side. We’re on opposite schedules. Every day we sync up.”

  “Every day? Wow.”

  “Say something.”

  “It’s okay. We offered you your copy before.”

  “But we aren’t supposed to run both at once.”

  “Oh, you mean… one is sleeping while you’re working? I thought you meant the other one is in stasis.”

  “That’s not how it worked out,” Cilreth said.

  Telisa shrugged. “At least you two are… making lots of progress.”

  “Good. Okay, that’s it,” Cilreth said. But Telisa thought maybe she was leaving something out.

  ***

  Telisa met Magnus an hour later and tried to eat. She could not put much down.

  “I’m keeping a man prisoner. I’m not doing any better than the UNSF,” Telisa said.

  “Oh, the old ‘if we do that we’re no better’ crap? Forget about that,” Magnus said. “Actions are performed under circumstances. If you do things under a different set of circumstances than they do, then you’re different. Are you holding him prisoner to stay in power? Or just to live free? Just to survive?”