The Trilisk AI (Parker Interstellar Travels #2)

by Michael McCloskey

  They veered onto the road at top speed. Relachik set his link to process what he saw to enhance his night vision. In his mind’s eye he saw another feed of the view through his eyes, with more details. He could see a thin dust trail in the evening light.

  The authorities are temporarily out of range, the jeep said.

  “I doubt they’ve spotted us,” Arlin said over his link.

  Relachik readied his rifle by selecting the human target profile. Haven’t done that in a long time, he thought.

  “It’ll be most effective if we both shoot at once, and soon, before they see us,” Arlin said.

  “Yes. Lead vehicle. Use a lethal targeting option. They have weapons, and if we just wound them they’ll shoot back and kill us. Besides, you don’t want one of them showing up for revenge someday.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Arlin flopped his rifle beside the manual controls of the jeep. No doubt he was controlling it through his link, or he’d simply set it to follow the lead vehicle.

  “As soon as we come off this light curve... three, two, one, fire,” Relachik said with cold precision.

  The weapons obliterated the calm of the dry night air. Blood sprayed across the lead vehicle with two men in it. The jeep detected a problem and slowed to a halt. The driver behind allowed his jeep to remain slaved to the leader for a moment, then he took control of it and steered around the first jeep. The vehicle headed back out on the road, gaining speed.

  Relachik lost sight of the man. Presumably he had taken cover behind the front seats.

  Arlin shot the rear tire. The vehicle detected a malfunction and slowed to a halt beside the road. There was still no sign of the man. They arced around the blood-spattered vehicle with the bodies to pursue. There was still no sign of any passenger in the front jeep. The vehicle was fairly open, like their own; there was little space to hide.

  Relachik realized it was a trick. He scanned the side of the road. He saw the man, already fifty meters away from the road, sprinting through the sand.

  “He bailed! He’s going for cover!” Relachik said, pointing him out. Arlin brought their jeep to a halt.

  He must have jumped out as he passed the other jeep.

  “I’m headed in. Talk at you when I’m done,” Cilreth’s voice came through his link.

  Relachik brought up his rifle and accessed its advanced optics. He could see the trail of footprints leading toward a group of rocks. He scanned the rocks from end to end. He spotted a foot. It shifted. Then the man was running for another nearby rock formation.

  Relachik shot him. The round took the man down cleanly.

  “Good luck,” he sent Cilreth.

  “We have all three. Should be simple cleanup now,” Arlin said. “Should we take the vehicles off the road?”

  “No. Let’s take the storage and get out of here in case the Space Force team got that emergency override notification. Cilreth might need us, too.”

  ***

  Back at the Vandivier, Cilreth became visible at the top of the cargo ramp to greet Arlin and Relachik.

  “You’re back in one piece, I see,” Arlin said.

  “Mission accomplished,” she said. “And I’m telling you straight: I’ve never been more terrified of the UNSF in my life.”

  Relachik nodded. “All nice and clean when you got there?”

  “Yes. Whatever that Avatar thing was, it got in there and did a number on those guys.”

  “It didn’t go inside.”

  “Sure it did! Every gate, every security mount, all gone, everyone knocked out. I mean, it could have knocked them out with gas or something, but there were laser emplacements missing from corridors—”

  “It never went inside. The Avatar just flew over in orbit. No doubt it’s already left the system on its way to the next mission.”

  Cilreth started to reply, but when she saw the serious look on Relachik’s face, nothing came out. Arlin traded looks with her.

  “They carted away the criminals like so much meat,” she said, but her voice was quieter.

  Relachik smiled. “Excellent work. Keep in mind, the UNSF is what’s standing between you and the aliens. Here, Arlin and I got some more of their storage that may help. These are complete: storage and network modules, the full units.”

  “Really? Where from?”

  “We found a supply shed outside the perimeter. You never know, these may have something. Just add them to the ones you got and analyze all of them carefully.”

  Cilreth noticed a bonus drop into her company account. Relachik had been very generous.

  Damn well ought to be for sneaking around out there with no backup.

  Chapter 17

  Magnus breathed loudly beside Telisa as they walked down a glittering cave tunnel. She looked at him repeatedly, though she knew better than to ask about his condition yet again. She had already started to get on his nerves with her attention, but his stubborn refusal to confess to his pain wasn’t team player behavior.

  If he’s compromised, he should share that with me, to protect both of us.

  As if reading her mind, he spoke up. “My stomach hurts, but I’ve taken a painkiller and a stomach-settling agent. I should be at about eighty percent.”

  “Got it,” she said. “The good news is, we’re almost there. Very close. There’s an unusual area ahead on the map. At the center, there’s a special structure, a kind of vault, holding the seed.”

  “A vault? Interesting. I didn’t envision an industrial seed being held in a vault. It must not have been active at the time. Maybe it’s a backup of some kind?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. If we could talk to Shiny while we’re down here...”

  “Then we’d risk more destroyer attention. Our own communications equipment could do it, though. We’d need some relays planted in the right spots.”

  “He already talked to us once. I don’t see how it could be such a big risk.”

  Magnus shrugged. “The destroyers may pay special attention to transmissions to and from the surface. I don’t know. He knows better than either of us I suspect. He’s been watching them with those probes. I bet he’s learned a lot.”

  The tunnel widened. Telisa saw a vast chamber ahead. Some kind of passive lighting system still gave off a dull glow in a few areas, making the place look surreal, like a rendition of an eerie landscape under a full moon. They took a couple of steps into the room. Magnus and Telisa swept their lights around.

  Telisa checked Scout’s feed. The machine was somewhere slightly above them. Telisa aimed her light higher. A sort of balcony went around the entire room, allowing access from the level above them.

  In the center was the vault. Magnus kept his light pointed toward it. The vault was a huge, segmented object the size of a small house. Its curved surface looked like someone had taken a giant Viking boat, turned it upside down, and painted it silver.

  Telisa swept her light along the ground, looking for the critters. Her light settled on a burn mark on the sandy floor. Fragments of metal or ceramic lay all about the mark.

  “What is this?” Magnus wondered aloud.

  “My guess is a robot was blasted here. By a destroyer.”

  “A robot or a cyborg.”

  Telisa’s eyes looked over the rest of the platform. “There’s another over there,” she pointed.

  “And Scout’s vision above shows a couple more. There was a fight here. I hope—”

  “The industrial seed is still here? Me too. But the destroyers just came to kill everything, right? Not to steal things? Damn.”

  “Could someone else have made it here first?” he asked.

  “How many other Vovokans are likely to be out there conning aliens into coming back down and grabbing stuff? Don’t answer that. Let’s just get in and take the seed.”

  They walked to their right toward a ramp at one end of the vault. It sat on a platform about a meter above the floor they walked on. Magnus ascended the ramp first. He idly kicked away some de
bris.

  “Those pieces are...they look odd. They don’t remind me of Vovokan technology. I think maybe there was a fight and some destroyers died here.”

  Telisa joined him at the top of the ramp. The smooth hull of the vault ended abruptly before them. There was obviously some kind of door, a wide, low rectangle on the end, but it had no visible means of ingress. Three spheres rested at the base of the door. Telisa recognized them as the colorful spheres that led them here.

  “I hope you know how to get in there,” Magnus said.

  “The map he gave us has an annotation on how to open it.”

  “Ah. I knew Shiny wouldn’t forget such an obvious detail.”

  Telisa’s mood dropped sharply as she read on. “It says we have to...it shows what legs we have to raise to open it. Magnus, it involves over eighteen legs in a sequence of five moves. In the space of less than a second!”

  “Unbelievable. Don’t panic. We can figure it out. We could create our own sound file.”

  “No. Vovokans are deaf, remember? They watch the legs move. That’s how they talk. What are the chances the vault sensor uses sound instead of visual input to check the password?”

  “We can wait until he contacts us again,” Magnus offered. No. That’s reaching.

  “Tell me this isn’t happening,” Telisa said. She looked over the vault on the map again and again. She looked for more metadata attached to the map. There was a section on the vault.

  “Oh, thank the Entities,” Telisa said. “We have a digital access code.”

  “There you go. We got all upset for nothing.”

  “Not so fast. Our links can’t talk to the vault,” Telisa said.

  “Shiny’s probe here can talk to anything Vovokan,” Magnus pointed out. “Send me the code. I can pass it along.”

  Telisa laughed. “Yes! I can’t believe it. For a minute there I was imagining us hopping around like crazy people trying to speak with our limbs like a Vovokan. And even with Scout’s eight legs, we’d be short a couple dozen. Of course, the vault probably wouldn’t accept the code from anything but a Vovokan anyway.”

  Magnus smiled. Telisa passed him the code and the door slid open a moment later.

  The inside lit up. Telisa walked in onto a smooth, clean metal floor. The vault wasn’t full; Telisa saw the far side of the vault was empty. No sand. So sometimes they forego the sandy floor. Why here?

  The left-hand wall was obscured by ten or fifteen stacked cubes over a meter long on each edge. Their sides had tiny rails with a bunch of small holes. Telisa imagined a Vovokan picking up the cube: several of its arms went on each side and its tiny stubby fingers fit into the holes.

  On the right, a set of gray shelves held a collection of items.

  “Five Holies,” Telisa breathed. “Look at those...” she wandered over, mesmerized by the items. These have to be valuable to Shiny to be in the vault. They must all be useful.

  Telisa examined a cone-shaped spiral of metal with three small rods emerging from the top. She had no idea what it could be. The next item was a deep green rectangle. Its exterior was smooth except for three buttons on the front. She wondered if it was actually only a carrying case for the real item. And they’re not all Vovokan in origin. These over here are too different.

  “Yes! Shiny and I share a passion,” she said.

  “How’s that?” Magnus asked, his voice skeptical.

  “He likes alien things, too. These aren’t all Vovokan, I’d bet on it.”

  Another item caught her eye. Everything on the shelves looked shiny and new except for this piece. It was a black bowl. It looked like it had a miniature turbofan over the top opening. The surface was chipped, crusted. It must be ancient. Amazing. Shiny is nothing if not practical. I doubt it’s just for show. It almost has to be functional. Okay, maybe it is. He might keep it if it were somehow an investment.

  “Parker Interstellar Travels to Telisa Relachik. Telisa Relachik, come in, over?” Magnus said. She ripped her eyes from the trove.

  “Magnus, these are—these are all amazing. They could be priceless! Shiny obviously thought they were valuable, too. No doubt these are. And he said we could take anything we want!”

  “Whoa, whoa, calm down, please. How are we going to carry them all the way up?”

  “Scout could carry one. Maybe two, maybe three,” Telisa said absentmindedly. Her eyes danced over the items again. She saw something that looked vaguely like a projectile weapon. It had a central hollow shaft ending in two handles placed sixty degrees apart on the left and right sides.

  “And the seed? No doubt that information says what it looks like?”

  Telisa forced herself to glance back at the other wall. The cube farthest from the entrance was obviously different. It held a blue sphere of a diameter slightly less than the cube’s edge, making it look like the sphere had partially melted into the cube.

  “That’s it over there,” Telisa said. She turned back to look at the items before her.

  “Maybe you could take a look at it too, at some point. Tell me what you think. It looks a bit heavy.”

  Telisa tore her attention away from the shelves and walked over to the device they thought was the seed. She looked over the odd cube-sphere fusion.

  “Yes, this is what Shiny wants,” she said, double-checking through the map module Shiny had given her. At least we found it. Now we need a plan to move it. It has a power source. I think the destroyers would notice it.”

  Magnus nodded. His brows came together as he contemplated the problem.

  “I can’t believe I have all this stuff and we’re basically stuck down here,” Telisa said. “How can we get out?”

  “Let’s look at all our choices,” Magnus said. “We could destroy all the local invader machines. That option seems impossible on the surface of it. Or we could distract them and move the container while they’re out of range. What other options do we have?”

  “Somehow cloak the container. Or disguise it. If we could disguise it as human technology, they wouldn’t care about it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Just brainstorming ideas at this point.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t just have us power it down somehow. We could look into how to do that. What else?” asked Magnus.

  “Clear a shaft out of the planet. Put the container on a rocket, and shoot it out so fast the destroyer machines can’t stop it.”

  “Wow, that’s an interesting idea,” Magnus said. “But they just fought a war. Most likely they have ways of stopping a missile.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. How about the distraction?”

  “Maybe our invisible friends can help us with that one.”

  “We don’t know how to talk to them,” Telisa pointed out. “And the last of the spheres died outside the vault, I think.”

  “It’s going to have to be a pretty damn big distraction.”

  “We can do it.”

  “What’s your idea?”

  “The power grid. We could reactivate parts of it just like Shiny did.”

  “Ah, yes,” Magnus said. “And when thousands of powered-down Vovokan machines come back online, we have our distraction. Not bad, but the downside is, a minute later we’ll have destroyers shooting the crap out of everything that moves. The entire house could collapse on us.”

  “Their weaponry is advanced, and that means well-targeted. I think they will hunt down and kill only the Vovokan targets efficiently.”

  “Then why is half this place trashed?” Magnus asked.

  “It was full of Vovokans before. And there must have been infrastructure they wanted taken out. I don’t know. You’re right. We’ll have to be careful to activate machines in different areas of the house, far away. We can switch areas from time to time, send the destroyers scrambling all around.”

  “I’ll see if I can set up some crude controls or schedules for that.”

  “Keep thinking. I need to figure out what to take, and how to carry it,”
Telisa said.

  Magnus nodded.

  He thinks I’m being short-sighted. Putting the cart before the horse. Telisa walked over to the shelves. “I need to figure out what to take. How the hell am I going to do that?”

  “You know more than I do. Just guess at their functions and weigh their relative values. Either to us as tools, or to potential buyers when we get back.”

  Telisa pulled a silver cylinder from her pack. “Look at this. To us, it’s a powered thermos/cooler. It purifies water and brings it to the temperature we set. But what is it to an alien? It opens up, it’s hollow inside. But all the functions are visible only through our links. It’s just a hunk of metal until you rip it apart. The construction is such that you destroy it by opening it. It isn’t designed to be repaired. It’s not until you scan it that you see a battery, a heat source and sink. If you scan it with the wrong frequency or energy you can damage the link block.”

  Magnus nodded. “Yes, a difficult problem. But Shiny put all these in the vault. Or at least some Vovokan did. For all we know, Shiny is a post-apocalyptic bank robber and we’re doing his dirty work for him. But these items are probably all quite valuable.”

  Telisa nodded. He had a point. It made her feel a bit better about the decision. Yet it took her the next two hours to unpack her equipment, examine each one and pick out two for her to carry, two more for Magnus, and two for Scout to bring back.

  Magnus worked on something in his mind as she chose. He seemed to sense she was nearing readiness and approached her. “I think I have a sequence of distractions ready. How’s it coming here?”

  “Ready. If you can carry these two.” Telisa handed him a heavy sphere and a metal rod over a meter long.

  “Okay. A bomb and a pool stick. No problem.”

  She growled and he winked at her.

  “The sphere is heavy but it looks sophisticated under my passive scanner. It doesn’t appear to be Vovokan. The rod might be Vovokan. I found it by accident. It actually created a hologram that hid itself on the shelf.”

  “Oh, nice. Yes, that would intrigue me too. Okay, I’m not questioning your choices. Looks like you have a weapon there.”