I need to ask about that later. They watch each other talk, and use mass sense, do they also feel the hits through the ground?
A cover opened above to let them out on the new floor. Immediately two attendants darted in, but Jason and Imanol were ready. They did not have to aim; their weapons fired at a mere thought and handled the targeting for them.
Blam. Blam.
Hot bits of metal rained down over them.
The lift stopped. The second floor looked similar. Lines of machines sat along conveyor belts running the length of the factory. Jason heard the muttering and stifled cries of terrorized Citizens hiding from the battle sphere.
“What should we do?” whispered Jason.
Imanol made the hand signal for their ‘mouse-cat-dog’ tactic.
Jason pointed at Imanol, then himself.
Imanol pointed back at Jason.
I’m the mouse. Great.
It was Jason’s job to lure Shiny after him, or at least distract the alien so that Imanol could get a kill shot. It did not seem as bad in his altered state of mind.
Jason peeked from cover across the second level of the factory floor. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. He cradled his weapon and moved out slowly. He did not want to get too far ahead of Imanol. He headed straight for the center of the factory floor. When he arrived in the center fabricator lane, he looked both directions. The assembly machines stood quiescent.
Think, think, think. What am I doing? Mouse.
He exhaled loudly. More of the factory lay to his right, so Jason chose that direction. He hoped Imanol had kept him in sight. From there, Jason chose a course that was a bit more exposed than he normally would have taken. As the mouse, he was supposed to be seen. The hard part was surviving being seen. The Veer suit provided some protection, but against a Vovokan it hardly seemed to matter. If the battle sphere lurked in the factory, he would just be fried again.
He scanned the machines ahead intensely. He relied upon Imanol to spot anything that might be stalking him from the rear. Jason darted ahead past another group of fabricators. He saw a large set of structures on the ceiling of the factory floor. A group of offices overlooked the floor thirty meters ahead on his right.
A robot handler’s skynest.
The walls and floor of the skynest were transparent, though there were desks and platforms inside that blocked his vision of much of the interior. He paused to scan it.
Jason caught sight of a golden leg from behind a desk. He raised his laser carbine.
This thing should have enough power to penetrate the floor and that desk.
He popped a grenade off his belt and rolled it ahead. Then he started to fire into the desk.
Shiny darted out from behind the cover. Several things happened at once. Jason’s grenade launched itself into the air just to be intercepted by another sphere. More spheres put themselves between Shiny and Jason. Jason heard someone yell, “Duck!”
Jason hit the deck.
KABOOM!
An explosion rocked the factory. Jason felt the heat rise painfully, then recede, though he could not breathe. His Veer suit snapped up a face mask and tried to feed him fresh air as he coughed and gagged.
“Got him,” Imanol said. “Looks like you made it, though in need of hospitalization. That explosion used up your oxygen and released some toxic fumes.”
“Great,” Jason said, dropping from the simulation. He opened his real eyes and stretched a bit in the galley of New Iridar. The fogginess left his mind. Imanol was not far away, flexing his arms and legs.
“So what did we learn?” Imanol asked.
“Our coordination goes straight to conductive purple without our links.”
Imanol nodded. “I agree if by conductive purple you mean straight to shit.”
“Ah. Yes. That’s roughly it. Sorry, core world lingo.”
“We’ll work on it. Anything else?”
“The real Shiny is more resourceful,” Jason said.
“Sadly true. I’ll make sure the TSG includes even more disruption on his part.” Imanol said. He looked at the stunner on Jason’s belt.
“I want you to start handling lethal weapons out of the sim,” Imanol said.
“I don’t feel confident about it.”
“You’re afraid of screwing up.”
Jason shrugged. “That’s just smart. You kill a friend, you can’t take it back.”
“We’re just going to handle them and shoot them, not jump into a firefight. The fear of weapons is good, just like you said. It’s like racing a motorcycle. You start out nervous, so you’re careful. Then you get confident, then overconfident, and that’s when you crash. I want you to lose your nerves. But don’t lose the fear of handling them, that’s when the accident comes.”
“Okay. I agree,” Jason said. “I want to learn how to fit in on the frontier.”
“We’re way beyond the frontier now. Besides, I can hardly teach you how to act on the frontier. You just become experienced, then you fit in.”
“Then we can train. You can teach me.”
Jason did not like acting like such an eager recruit in front of anyone, but he wanted to submerge his core worlder image. The only way he could do that was to learn everything as fast as possible.
“We just did,” Imanol said.
“I mean, I want to know more about being out on the fringe, rather than being a core worlder.”
“It’s just something that comes with being someplace where everything isn’t handed to you on a silver plate.”
“Like what?”
“Like the recycling pipe under your fabricated habitat breaking open, and you having to crawl under there and fix it!” Imanol growled.
“What? What about the robots?”
“Maybe your robot, your one and only robot, broke that week. Or maybe your robot wasn’t designed to fit between the insulative slab and the bedrock under your house. Or maybe you don’t have the program handy and you have to write it yourself, and before you get it right the thing puts a couple new holes in your floor.”
“On the frontier, if a robot breaks, it can’t always be instantly replaced,” Jason guessed.
“That’s right. Often, it’s the case.”
“I don’t know... anything about fixing things.”
“No one does out of the womb. Well, not unless their parents are organized crime using neural trainers on fetuses.”
“Why would you say such a thing? No one would—”
“It happens,” Imanol growled. “But that’s not where I was heading. I’m just saying, you just have to pick it up as it happens. Just stay calm and think it through. You’d be surprised. Doing your own plumbing on an alien world really gives you an appreciation for how long it took to perfect these mundane technologies in the first place. Core worlders don’t have any respect for anything except fancy VRs and fashion, or the latest entertainer.”
Imanol’s diatribe had become rather harsh, so Jason decided not to say anything else.
“Your brain obviously still works,” Imanol said more calmly. “You just think it through. Make some mistakes. You’ll fit in just fine soon enough. Besides, like I said, we’re a whole new breed out here, even the frontier isn’t this crazy dangerous. You’ll be dead in no time anyway.”
Telisa walked in.
“Hi!” Jason said.
“Training, yes? I heard crazy dangerous,” she said.
“Getting ready to get someone back,” Jason said.
Telisa nodded.
Did she know that already?
She sat down across from Jason and Imanol.
“There are things you weren’t allowed to know as new recruits,” Telisa said. “Shiny is more powerful than you may know.”
They waited for her to continue.
“Shiny uses many artifacts, among them, some real Trilisk gems. The most valuable of all of them is a Trilisk AI which can interpret the wishes of sentient beings of different races and provide them. Almost magically,
limited to some degree by the complexity of your understanding of what you want. We called it praying things up.”
“You’ve used it yourself?” Imanol said.
“Yes. It’s truly amazing. Shiny used it to bootstrap an industrial complex on a mineral rich asteroid. From nothing to starship construction in a few weeks. I think he brought it to Earth, though I’m not sure. I think the original Shiny has it with him at all times. He knows how to screen out the prayers of other beings. So you see, it’s going to be easier to deal with him than to force him into anything. He’s also used to betrayal and prepared to counter it. It’s a major characteristic of his race.”
“He did a number on us, for sure,” Imanol said. “I understand why you didn’t tell us about the other stuff. I also get now why you said we could have almost anything we wanted.”
Telisa looked away. “I should have trusted you all more, and him less.”
Chapter 4
Weeks later the New Iridar arrived at the system Shiny had ordered the PIT team to investigate. The target system had no name, but the UNSF had a set of rules for naming systems based upon their location relative to Earth. The auto-naming algorithm called it the Idrick Piper System for casual conversation, and there was a long universal identifier to go with it that no one would remember. Cilreth almost stashed the UUID away in her link cache, then decided she could just recalculate it as needed.
“Seven planetary bodies,” Cilreth summarized to the team. She worked from her quarters, where she had set up a smaller version of her isolated workspace she had built on the Clacker. It was a sad comparison to the old one, which had made her feel like the mastermind at the center of a massive crime syndicate. Now she felt like a teenager operating out of a frontier basement.
“The target planet will be something we can visit in person,” Telisa said from elsewhere on the ship. “I don’t think Shiny would send us to investigate a gas giant, at least not without the means to survive there.”
Cilreth eliminated most of the planets based upon their environments, leaving two candidates. She told the New Iridar to scan both of them. The initial summaries came through in the few minutes it took to send energy pulses out to the bodies, receive the reflections, and analyze them. Idrick Piper IV was a vast brown vat of mud. Some compounds existed there that hinted at primitive life. Idrick Piper V held vast forests and signs of a wider variety of life. Several massive constructs were spotted among the natural flora which the computer labeled as artificial.
“The fifth planet is almost certainly the spot,” Telisa said. “Bring us closer.”
“Scanning is a priority,” Cilreth said. “Should we send down some hardware?”
“Yes. Send twenty attendants to gather details.”
“So many? Aren’t they a valuable resource?” Cilreth asked.
“We don’t want to run out,” Telisa sent Cilreth privately. “But the fewer attendants we have, the less eyes we have recording our every move. They’re more than our eyes and ears; they serve as the enforcer’s spies too.”
Cilreth activated the attendants and sent them through the smallest lock on the Vovokan ship, which was less than a meter on a side. Telisa continued the private part of their conversation.
“I haven’t really asked—”
“Yes, I’ll go planetside with the team,” Cilreth said. “We don’t have an army anymore. And this tin can ain’t the Clacker.”
“Thanks.”
“We’re going to hit the jackpot and get whatever it takes to get Magnus back.”
Cilreth meant it. She knew what it was like to find someone only to lose her.
The probes hurtled down toward the planet. They were too small to have their own gravity spinners, even with Vovokan technology, but since the New Iridar had a spinner, it did not have a high orbital speed. The attendants did not have to lose much velocity relative to the surface below, so they would be able to survive the atmospheric entry and take their places within the hour.
Cilreth kept dropping the New Iridar’s scans into a team feed. The PIT team would all be poring over the data. She received a request to access the data from an entity she did not recognize.
Oh. The battle sphere. Our big brother. Does it ask because it can’t snoop the feed, or just to give the impression it can’t snoop the feed? Or to remind me I’m at its service?
Cilreth granted the access request, then dove into it herself.
Here we go again. No doubt swarming with large predators waiting to take their turn at me. Her inner voice was sarcastic but the thought still reflected a real fear.
Cilreth saw similarities between the fifth planet’s composition and that of the core planets inhabited by Terrans. Its gravity was relatively mild, and the surface was relatively warm. It had water, but only covering thirty percent of the surface. Billions of plants or plant-like creatures covered fifty percent of its surface. Huge off-white spires rose from the ground, smooth and always curved. They looked like giant ribs cutting out of the surface of the planet. These long smooth ribs held complex webs of vine-like ropes holding aloft flat organs that looked very similar to Terran plant leaves, though they were larger, about a meter in diameter.
“Vines on steroids?” Telisa summarized. “What could those pale things be? They’re over 30 meters tall.”
“We’ll find out,” Cilreth said. “Maybe those are the Celarans.”
“The ribs could be a symbiotic plant that helps hold them aloft. Or even an animal,” Telisa said.
Glad to see her mind is on the job. She’s back into it, Cilreth thought. “The vines get big too, really big. Over a meter in diameter in some places.”
“When do we go down?” asked Caden over the network.
Cilreth rolled her eyes. She wondered if the Blood Glades champ was already suiting up somewhere.
Let him get grabbed by some tentacled horror. That’ll put out his fire, she thought.
“We have less hardware this time, so we’re going to gather more information with the probes. Then I’ll set up a TSG that duplicates the planet’s environment as closely as we can. Maybe even a few of the real critters we learn about. We can get used to what it’s like down there before we ever set foot on the planet.”
That’s good. No need to go running around down there without some preparation. And there’s no space force out to catch us this far from home. We may as well take our time.
***
A day later the PIT team had a much better picture of the planet below them. Three ruin sites had been discovered by the Vovokan scanners. Telisa opened a family of data panes in her personal view for each of the sites.
The first and smallest of the sites was dominated by a thin tower rising over 360 meters from the surface. The tower was mostly naked support skeleton except a building sat at the base and a platform rested on the top. The building’s exterior shape was composed of many flat surfaces coming together at random angles. The odd construction looked familiar. Several of their Vovokan attendant spheres had converged on the site but no other buildings were visible nearby. Nothing alive or automated had been spotted entering or leaving the building.
There may be underground areas we haven’t accessed yet, Telisa thought.
Telisa brought another pane in the family forward. Several native life forms had been observed moving through the forest around the tower. The pane displayed data gathered about these creatures. Telisa flipped through a series of insect analogues. The diversity of forms reminded Telisa of Terran insects. She saw all shapes and colors. Then she went through a series of rodent-sized critters. She saw a spiral-snake that could only corkscrew its way along a vine. The attendants had spotted a froglike leaf-eater whose flat, wide mouth was specialized to roll and swallow leaves larger than itself in one swallow. Telisa skipped through a few more creatures, making sure there were no signs of tech accoutrements that could indicate intelligence. She got to the largest creature.
The largest one is likely to be the most dangerous pred
ator, isn’t it? Or is that a flawed assumption? The exceptions would include very poisonous creatures, I guess. Poisons which hopefully are not effective on Terran metabolisms.
Telisa saw a meter-long thing hanging from one of the thinner vine branches. It was flat like an eel’s tail or a huge leech. The vine sagged under its weight even in the light gravity. It hung from three skeletal fingers on one end. Telisa spotted three more fingers on its opposite end. She decided the top was symmetrical to the bottom, so it could probably hang from the other fingers just as easily. Its coloration was actually pretty if one ignored the shape of it. A hundred or so chevrons ran across its width on both sides of its black body. The chevrons shimmered between bright colors.
Pretty, yet creepy. Those fingers look too much like super-long Terran fingers. But it doesn’t look dangerous from an objective physical analysis. Those fingers are better than huge jaws filled with sharp teeth, or an acid-belching living carpet.
Telisa’s mind tried to recall what it had been like to be the flat creature on Chigran Callnir. She railed against the mismatch of memories that did not fit her current body. It was frustrating. She could remember it, yet she could not remember the feeling of it. Like a memory of taste as experienced by someone who had never tasted, the experiences were simply too alien.
Telisa moved on to the other pane families. The next two ruins were larger. One was a series of low buildings that had been overgrown by the native vines. The buildings were the size of Terran houses set many meters above the surface, within the vine canopy. Once again the angles were strange. She saw a lot of hexagonal components, but they seemed mashed together with little reason. Telisa realized they reminded her of the buildings in the space habitat the team had visited.
Did Shiny send us to a Blackvine colony? I got the impression these aliens had reached a higher potential than we saw from that race. Though that space habitat was nothing to sneeze at. Really surprising given the confusing clutter we found inside.
Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins Page 3
