The Trilisk Supersedure (Parker Interstellar Travels #3) Read online

  After an hour of moving through the ruins, Magnus realized something had gone wrong. Nothing looked familiar. At first he had thought he was only a bit off his previous course, and the many buildings did start to look the same after a while. But his intuition told him he had not come this way before.

  I’m off course. I don’t…ah. The cloak.

  Somehow the cloaking device must have confused his link’s mapper. The device was supposed to work through a combination of compass, accelerometer, and even incorporate the things Magnus saw. Normally it could even ping base camp or a ship in orbit for verification. But the first two, at least, must have interacted poorly with the alien cloaker. And the last one would be impossible due to the jamming. He had heard of stranger things happening. But the key now was what to do about it. Presumably he could deactivate the cloak, at least long enough to let his link get its bearings.

  Magnus hid in a caved-in Konuan ruin and deactivated the cloak. He tried to contact Shiny again, but there was no response. His compass reading showed he had been moving north. He made a note of the correct direction, which now would be southeast instead of just east. Taking a rough guess at where he really was, Magnus told his link where he wanted to go. If he left the cloak off, maybe it could get him there.

  Damn! A huge waste of time when we can’t afford it.

  The shadows within the hovel deepened. Night was coming.

  Decision time. Can I make it in the dark? Do I want to try?

  When Magnus remembered that the UED soldiers were moving out, it helped him make up his mind. If they were after the Clacker, then he had to get back first.

  Though if they had swift means of transport, then they’ve already arrived while I was wandering around the ruins like an idiot.

  Magnus left the old Konuan building as the star’s light failed, and decided to find out what Chigran Callnir Four was like after dark.

  Chapter 10

  “What?” Telisa sent to Cilreth. The tone of her last message had been alarming. There was no reply.

  Telisa grabbed the rope ascender in one hand and held her pistol in the other. The smart rope wrapped around her foot to lift her back up. Telisa heard something clack and scrape up above.

  “Cilreth!” Telisa transmitted. There was no answer.

  Sounds of a fight came from above. Telisa heard the thwump of a glue grenade launching.

  Dammit! And we sent one of the scouts back!

  Telisa crested the lip of the tunnel. She braced her elbows on the floor with the rest of her body dangling in the hole. Half her weight still rested on the smart rope though her foot.

  The room was empty. The smoldering remains of a scout lay in the corner. Telisa remembered to look up. A tan shape darted above. She yanked the trigger of the smart pistol. The shot echoed in the tiny room. As soon as she did it, some part of her mind told her to use the link command next time to increase her accuracy.

  There were scraps of wood and fabric obscuring parts of the ceiling, almost like hammocks, and the wide flower of a glue grenade covered one full quarter of the ceiling. There were lumps under it, but they looked just like more of the surviving Konuan structures. Telisa lowered her head slightly and raised the pistol, ready to fire again. A soft scraping noise echoed through the room.

  Why can I always hear it and never see it?

  “Cilreth, is that you?” she sent through her link.

  The other scout robot emerged from the tunnel beside Telisa. She heard the high-pitched whine of a stunner as the scout shot toward the ceiling. Telisa heard a scratching noise again.

  Did Cilreth go back? Why isn’t she answering me?

  A long spear shape descended from the ceiling, then opened into an umbrella over the scout almost before it could register on Telisa’s eyes. The speed was startling, scary.

  Telisa released a shot at the creature as she told the ascender to free-fall. She didn’t stay to see if the smart round struck the thing. It had a target profile specifying any non-human as a legal target, so it probably wouldn’t fly through a grille and hit Cilreth, wherever she was.

  If she’s still alive.

  “Cilreth?” Telisa transmitted.

  Of course. Cilreth activated her stealth suit. She might still have been in the room! But she would have answered.

  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 p
ointer 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.

  Good to know everything is still in working order. “Resume the advance,” he said. The squads started advancing again.

  Holtzclaw’s link announced a communication channel opening from his task force newly arrived in orbit.

  “Colonel Holtzclaw, this is the Typhoon.”

  “Report,” he said.

  “There’s another very large ship here, just like the first one,” Silvarre said. “We’re closing in on it, but I have to tell it to you straight, sir, I doubt a ship of that size—”

  Silvarre’s voice feed cut out.

  “Silvarre? Major?”

  There was no answer.

  I doubt a ship of that size…what?

  “Major Silvarre?”

  I doubt a ship of that size isn’t armed.

  Holtzclaw tried to get the Typhoon’s beacon. There was nothing. Which meant the ship had gone dark to avoid attack, or it had been destroyed. The other two ships, Scion and Griffin, were silent as well. His forces in space were engaged.

  “Step it up,” Holtzclaw sent to his squad leaders. “We have trouble in orbit. I want that ship.”

  Chapter 12

  Magnus had turned the stealth machine off long before he approached the campsite where he had left Telisa and Cilreth. His nighttime journey had been hard on the nerves, but otherwise uneventful. If anything, the planet life seemed less active at night. It was possible the majority of species here were diurnal.