Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt

by Michael McCloskey

  The largest machines were armored repair machines, slightly concave, used to maintain the space habitat. Scheklan technology and society being the sluggish mess that it was, the machines had slowly been adapted over hundreds of years. The Scheklan had not constructed the space habitat, they had simply moved into it. One of them had finally discovered and utilized these machines to maintain the outer hull. The big machines were slow and dull but made good fighters because of durability alone. They could fuse metals, reconstruct ceramic, and fashion simple diamond plates with high-powered tools that could be used as weapons at short range.

  Another robot type was house pushers. Specialized for moving buildings around inside the hollow habitat, these robots could serve as warriors. They had powerful manipulator arms that could be used to cut things, and thrusters that could also be used for fighting.

  A Scheklan had created an army of cutting machines at some point, of which dozens of machines remained. The laser cutters had poor targeting, but if well coordinated, they could be deadly, so Keziph had recruited as many as it could find.

  The smallest machines Keziph added were dark metal discs with several short clutcher arms, used to mark areas and isolate them for passage of Scheklan. They had a powerful pressurized launching system that could shoot projectiles with dangerous velocity. In sufficient numbers they could be fatal to many races.

  Laughable by almost any measure Keziph was used to, the force could still prove deadly to those who followed the Trilisk. It simply had to buy Micet time—the miserable, insufferable Micet—so that they could bootstrap themselves back to livable means again. That would mean a real body, with three stances and real means of transport, automatic command implementation, and reintegration into the galactic whole.

  Micet could not be done before the confrontation came, so Keziph had to win or delay the enemy. It had tried to make the invaders believe the habitat was dangerous in order to slow them down, but primitives always flung themselves into danger after danger obliviously and let uncontrolled breeding procedures replace the losses.

  They had fallen so very, very far and suffered for so long. Keziph remembered the beginning of its pain. It was a fight that had left them low. Methane breathers had come into the system, bent upon eradicating the life on the Wehhid planet that happened to share the system with a planet they coveted in a much more distant orbit. It was always that way with the methane breathers. Neither side needed to fight—they could not even begin to exist on each other’s worlds. Yet each side mercilessly hunted down the other, poisoned each other’s planets, destroyed each other’s space habitats, and fought an endless war that had killed countless members of each race.

  Keziph hoped in all the time it had been away, the war had been won. But it did not hold much hope.

  Cayach had remained submerged. Since planning the escape to Holoeum, the social motivator had seldom come to the foremost stance. Micet and Keziph had their missions: there was little need to let Cayach come forward until they neared completion.

  Chapter 16

  Cilreth rested her head in her hands to wait out a dull ache. Hours of studying Vovokan computers had resulted in another bout of fatigue.

  With two of me, I can do this twice as fast with no need to integrate multiple simultaneous results. Three of me, max, on eight-hour shifts.

  Cilreth decided on two to start. She arranged a schedule for both of herselves. She decided talking would be minimal. As long as both were synced at the end of every shift, they would essentially be one person with two bodies. There would be no reason to talk.

  “Shiny? I’m ready.”

  “Proceed to indicated, displayed, targeted chamber,” Shiny said. Cilreth got a location pointer and followed it through the Clacker with her link. Though most of the Trilisk columns had been put into Shiny’s ship, the Thumper, some were installed on the Clacker and a few more back at the home base.

  Cilreth arrived at one of the Trilisk column storage chambers. The columns had been installed in a large room, looking much as they had appeared back on the planet where the PIT team acquired them. She walked up to one and stared at it.

  If understanding Vovokan technology is so hard, imagine what it would take to truly understand these Trilisk columns. Probably my unaugmented brain could never hope to grasp its secrets.

  “How do you know this will work? I mean, all the others superseded into new bodies.”

  “Shiny performed, actuated, initiated procedure on Shiny.”

  “Whoa. There are two of you around here? Oh shit. More?”

  “This duplicate only witnessed, aware, know of one copy.”

  “You are the… copy?”

  “Affirmative, correct, accurate.”

  “Where is the original?”

  “Asteroid base with Trilisk AI.”

  Of course. Shiny wouldn’t give away his trump card, even to a copy.

  “I thought your race was… uhm… I guess you can trust yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. Yah. Well I think I can trust myself. Terrans are a bit… different.”

  “Acknowledged, confirmed, believed.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “No action required. Process initiated, started, begun.”

  “Oh.”

  Cilreth had noticed nothing. Yet somehow, Shiny had already started. Cilreth looked for signs of his work. The only clue she found was a huge power draw from the column room. The Clacker could handle the demand though, at least for a time.

  The column closest to Cilreth started to rotate slowly. Then the tube exterior descended. Cilreth2 became visible inside. Cilreth turned and walked out, trying to suppress a creepy chill in her soul.

  “Shiny, I’ll continue my shift now,” Cilreth said. “I’m sure Cilreth2 knows exactly what to do.”

  ***

  “Wooooooooo!” Siobhan yelled as she sailed through the air. The wide-open sky was bright in all directions and dotted with the tiny shapes of distant buildings in all directions. The air was cool and smelled like cedar or evergreens. Her target building began to grow as she neared. She spread her arms, increasing the drag of her upper body. Her feet swung around toward the mass before her.

  At the last moment, she felt a tiny pull, then she landed just like coming back down from a high jump.

  Could I have done so well before? Only with luck. This new body rocks.

  Siobhan laughed out loud then reined herself in.

  Oh yeah. Deadly unknown place. Remain alert.

  Siobhan looked around. From her vantage point, she could not see the soldier robot that had arrived before her. It was probably exploring the house for danger. She found it on the tactical and fed its visual feed into her PV.

  Siobhan took a little walk around the outside surface. Artificial gravity kept her firmly on the building no matter how it twisted or turned, as if she were a spider or a fly walking across a ceiling corner.

  These houses are so weird. All six sides look like a roof. With doors and windows.

  She decided she simply associated the sides of the building with Terran roofs because whenever she had stood on a house before, she had been on the roof. Here, you could stand on any side of the house and be pulled toward it. Then it felt as if the house was “down”, so it became the roof in her ingrained perception.

  Siobhan looked out over an edge of the building to see deeper into the space habitat. The distant sky was filled with black specks. She did not remember so many houses being clustered together before.

  What the…?

  She stared for a moment longer. There were hundreds of them. Very distant. They looked darker, but smaller, than the houses in the distance.

  “I see some things… a lot of things in the distance. Toward the center of the habitat,” Siobhan said.

  “More specific,” Magnus replied.

  “They’re just specks. Too far away,” she said.

  “I see them too!” Caden exclaimed. Siobhan knew he had gone house hopping i
n the same direction. He had to be on a house nearby. “Are the houses closer together in that direction?”

  Siobhan almost got some range viewers out of her pack. Then she saw changes in the specks.

  They were getting larger.

  “Guys! Something is coming. A hell of a lot of somethings.”

  “Get into that house. Post the soldier outside. Everyone, find cover!” Magnus ordered. “Do it quickly. If there’s danger, we have no way of knowing what the enemy’s range might be.”

  Siobhan ducked around the edge of her house and looked for an entrance. She found a large one. It was a pair of spring-loaded panels that could be pushed open from either direction. Most of the smaller ones were made of four pieces. She drew her pistol and entered.

  The interior looked as twisted and confusing as the other houses she had seen. She stopped for two seconds to listen. Utter silence. This time, Siobhan looked at the architecture with an eye for defense. The interior was cluttered, filled with dozens of containers and machines of bewildering variety. On her left she saw a series of glass tubes with wires in them draining into a vat of green fluid, on her right some kind of human-sized electronics project with a clear plastic case. The equipment was a collection of some pieces that looked advanced and other things with technology older than Terra could produce. It gave Siobhan the feel of a post-apocalyptic society where everything had been cobbled together from old tech. Telisa had agreed with that analysis: there seemed to be no one level of technology prevalent.

  She wandered through all the junk until she found a niche to hide in. It was a spot about the size of a shower tube nestled in a short hallway between two larger rooms. From her niche, she could see parts of the outside sky through three windows, one nearby on her left and two others across a wide room on her right.

  Siobhan took stock of the doors. She saw two but knew there had to be others in the house. Most of the houses had a door or two on every side. There would be no way to cover them all. The realization made her nervous.

  Well, that’s what I get for jumping all around on my own. Caden and I should have at least stuck together.

  Siobhan opened her tactical. It showed the positions of the rest of the team as well as the soldier robots. She saw the soldiers had moved to the surfaces of the houses around them. Only one soldier was on her house, but at least there were three or four who could cover her house nearby.

  Caden was very close, on a house adjacent to hers, less than two hundred meters away.

  Should I try to move over there?

  “Everyone hold your positions,” Magnus transmitted. “Note the entrances to your houses. Caden, Siobhan, you have soldiers on the houses around you. We’re not leaving you vulnerable.”

  “And the objects?” Siobhan asked.

  “Machines. Alien, but they are machines. After the trap we experienced, I’m assuming the worst,” Magnus said.

  Pop. Pop. Zip… Bang. Pop.

  A popping noise like micrometeoroids impacting a hull started cracking through the house. Siobhan’s sharp hearing pinpointed it as coming from the side toward the oncoming machines. The alien machines were shooting at the soldier outside the house! She saw the soldier robots shooting back in her tactical.

  Frackjammers! Am I going to die now? Just when things were getting cool.

  “We’re being fired upon!” Siobhan said. Magnus would know at the same instant she did, but Siobhan was getting swept up in events. Better to overcommunicate than otherwise.

  “Hold tight,” Magnus said. She could hear the tension in his voice. She trusted Magnus already. He was not cowering. He would come to back her up when he could.

  Siobhan looked at her stunner pistol. Would it even affect alien machines? The shock baton at her belt might do better—but only at point-blank range. Siobhan took a grenade out of a side pocket in her pack. She armed it through her link and gave it a mechanical target signature.

  The door to her left suddenly opened. She had her pistol on it in a flash. But it was only her soldier machine. It was missing two legs. The outer shell looked blackened and burned.

  Oh damn, it’s halfway fragged, and I’m next…

  Her attendant spheres hovered expectantly before her, ready to protect her. At least that was what Magnus had said they would do.

  Siobhan checked the tactical again. Alien robots were landing on her house. About a dozen of them. She realized most of her virtual training had been with team members at her side. They had not done any sims where she was on her own, or close to on her own.

  Bang. Boom.

  More sounds of combat echoed in the distance.

  “It’s just you and me, huh?” she said to the soldier machine out loud. “Let’s wait for them, then!” Siobhan took an enormous breath. She was scared. And excited. Moments like these were what she had spent her life seeking.

  Working for PIT is exactly where I want to be. Until it kills me.

  Her soldier machine turned to cover the door it had used with a mounted projectile launcher. The flaps of the door started to move inward, so it shot.

  Bang! Zip!

  Siobhan heard a ricochet. Then the other door in her sight opened.

  A dark metal disc with stubby legs pushed through. Siobhan shot it with her stunner. The thing kept coming.

  Zipfft! Zipfft! Zipfft!

  A hissing sound snapped three times. Siobhan’s attendant spheres blurred. She heard the sounds of splattering metal. Something hot struck her forehead, a tiny pinprick of pain.

  Siobhan used the stunner again. Another stubby-limbed machine floated into the room.

  The Five can bite me! I won’t die!

  Siobhan updated the target signature on her grenade by selecting the stubby-limbed machine in her sight and sending the profile through her link. It took half a second, then the grenade launched itself into the room. It blurred, reached a point halfway between the two machines, and exploded.

  Whirrrrrr Kaboom!

  Shrapnel erupted in two tight cones directed at both targets. The alien machines hurled away, damaged or destroyed.

  “Yah!” she yelled out loud and through her link. She could tell from tactical chatter that Caden was fighting, too. He shot again and again, in all likelihood taking out several targets. She looked toward her soldier ally, but it was no longer sitting nearby. Her tactical showed it moving away from her.

  Siobhan took out another grenade. It already had the targeting signature of its predecessor, thanks to a nice bit of battlefield optimization built into the weapon. Her ears were still sharp because her suit’s sound curtain had dampened the peaks of noise from the shots and explosions. She heard more doors opening in the house.

  Her link told her the soldier machine was overheating, and then a small explosion rocked the house.

  Krumpf. Zing! Smack!

  Bits of debris migrated through the house like falling dominos. Items would fly one way, reach another gravity section, then fly another. They would rebound off things and fly off in random directions. The debris caused other things to start flying around in a chain reaction. Siobhan ducked.

  Zip. Crack. Thump.

  “Ah!” she yelped as pieces of the house whirled over her. She closed her eyes and looked at the tactical. Her attendant spheres kept her area fairly up to date, even though she could not see them at the moment. Two flat disc machines and a larger torpedo-shaped machine were approaching her position.

  Siobhan loosed her second grenade. She dared to watch it through narrowed eyes even though a few things were still flying around the house. It zeroed in on the torpedo-shaped robot, whirling toward it. Smoke erupted from the niche around Siobhan. She stepped out into the corridor, eyes on the grenade.

  Kill that thing…

  The grenade faltered and struck a wall. It ricocheted and hit another wall. For a moment it flew back toward her. An attendant sphere shot out to meet it, but the grenade turned away. Siobhan’s first thought was of alien jamming or interference. Finally it whirled
back toward the larger robot.

  Kaboom!

  The grenade exploded, breaking the long robot in half.

  Oh. The twisty gravity fields in here confused the grenade. But it got the job done!

  “The gravity in here confuses the grenades,” Siobhan transmitted. “They still work, though,” she added. She did not want anyone else on the team to think the grenades were useless.

  Crack!

  One of the flat discs emitted a sharp sound. One of Siobhan’s attendants intercepted a projectile. The ricochet left a hole in the wall across from Siobhan. She did not want to try her luck with more shots, so she retreated into another room in the direction the soldier robot had gone.

  “They work very well outside,” Telisa replied. “We’re moving out toward your position. Stay in there. You have… some big ones outside.”

  The new room was as much of a wreck as the one she had left. But there were no disc machines here.

  Thwump. Boom.

  Another thud sounded nearby. Siobhan turned to cover the area. Her heart worked hard. Her mouth felt dry.

  Am I going to live through this?

  The area around the thud emitted scratching noises. Without the soldier machine outside, she could not tell what it was. Siobhan decided to take a view from outside. In her mind’s eye, she selected one of the few surviving soldiers. It scouted its own house, far away. She turned it toward her house.

  What she saw made her blood run cold. A huge machine the size of a land car had attached to the house. Right above her.

  Siobhan abandoned her cover and jumped toward the other side of the house. The gravity shifted, sending her left, then forward. She fell toward a wall as if it were straight down.

  But her reflexes were sharp now. Her muscles were strong and wiry. She rolled with the impact and scrabbled away.

  Suddenly a huge rending noise erupted behind her.

  Kraaaaaack Smash!

  Aiyooooo getmeouttahere!

  Siobhan glanced back. A huge metal shell had smashed through the outer wall. Red-hot openings glowed at the edge of its armored top. She felt a wave of heat on her face. A long section of the wall turned into ash and slag above the huge machine. Siobhan leaped away, moving as fast as she dared. She started to simply assume the gravity would smash her into anything and everything. She ran recklessly forward, rebounding off of walls and piles of trash. Each time she just absorbed the impact and pushed away in another direction.