Chapter 7
Telisa examined the brightly lit hallway. The light came from glow rods affixed along the edges of the ceiling. Thin, maroon carpet covered the floor. The walls were colored a deep green.
“It’s amazing. We could be on Earth,” she said.
“This has to be a UNSF facility. The power source—it must be some kind of secret research facility,” said Thomas.
“But why hide the entrance in the middle of a Trilisk ruin?” asked Telisa.
“And where are the guards, the security robots, the automated checkpoints?” added Magnus.
Thomas shook his head. Jack shrugged.
“Something weird is going on, that’s for sure. Should we bolt?” asked Jack.
“There should be Trilisk artifacts here. Let’s find some and then leave as soon as possible,” said Telisa. She had come so far and didn’t want to give it all up now.
Now who’s being greedy?
“Maybe the place is still under construction,” said Magnus. “But I can’t explain the field at the entrance. Unless it’s Trilisk technology the UNSF has mastered.”
The suggestion was amazing. If the UNSF had already gleaned some of the secrets of Trilisk technology, then they were ahead of what she had expected. What powers had the government scientists gained in secret from the civilian world? Could they be trusted to use the technology wisely? Telisa did not think so. The government did not have the best interest of the masses in mind anymore. It had become a beast that lived for its own growth and satisfaction.
“I see some services, but don’t link up,” Thomas warned. “Security is really lax here, but some of the services might report us if we’re not whitelisted.”
Telisa automatically checked the services available at the mention of them. She saw offers for local information, a main library service, interior lighting, and temperature… all very standard. She took Thomas’s warning seriously and did not connect. It took a surprising effort of will. She’d been accustomed her entire life to querying services without a second thought.
“Which direction?” asked Jack. He looked at Telisa. “Take your pick.”
Telisa shrugged and pointed to her left. A corridor extended past a set of doorways in that direction. Magnus took the lead and headed for the first door. He carefully opened it and peeked inside.
“Some kind of storage room. Let’s find something a little more interesting.”
No one disagreed. They moved along the corridor and started cautiously looking into each room. They found a meeting room and several more storage areas with boxes in the corners and lockers along the walls. Then they got to a series of deserted living quarters that held only bunk beds and storage trunks.
Telisa stood in the corridor and sighed in frustration.
“Hrm… either it’s just now finished and not occupied yet, or it’s been abandoned,” Telisa said. “If it’s been abandoned, then we’re wasting our time here. The UNSF, or whoever built this place, wouldn’t leave if there were still artifacts to be found.”
“There’s something strange around the corner,” Magnus said.
He was at the end of the hallway, unslinging his slug thrower. Telisa and the others walked forward to the turn in the corridor, curious to see for themselves.
After the corridor turned, it continued another thirty feet and then ended in an irregular gaping cave. There was another ordinary-looking doorway on the left wall. Everyone advanced closer to the cave, trying to see inside.
The lights of the corridor showed a natural-looking space with patches of cube-shaped blocks clinging to the walls and ceiling. The floor of the cavern was about a meter lower than the hallway flooring. The edge of the overhang looked like it had been cut, fitting perfectly into the side of the cave.
“Looks like there’s some damage to the installation here,” commented Thomas. “I don’t understand. Could some kind of earthquake have caused this?”
“Who knows? This planet’s seismicity is an unknown at this point,” Jack said. “Those blocks are weird. They remind me of something. I wonder if they’re worth anything?”
“Project blox,” Telisa said. “They look like those kid’s toys… for building all sorts of stuff.” She added bitterly, “Well, at this point we have nothing to lose by taking some. We don’t have any Trilisk artifacts to weigh us down.”
Somehow the artifacts that she had been dreaming of had not materialized other than the inoperative hulks in the building above. There had been no clue as to the source of the blackfield. Telisa wondered if they should go back to the entrance and try to break through the walls around it to find the mechanism.
Jack hopped down and approached one of the clusters. Telisa examined the edge of the floor where it met the cavern. Magnus stood next to her while Thomas milled around behind them.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Telisa pointed out. “The floor meets the cavern perfectly—so do the walls and ceiling. Where is the rubble from whatever caused this?”
Thomas pulled aside a ceiling panel.
“You think that’s weird, look at this,” he said. He pointed to a dead lighting rod above.
The LED strip stopped halfway along its length where it met the cavern, as if it had been sheared in half by a laser.
Magnus nodded. “Something is wrong. I don’t have an explanation.”
Telisa stared at the ceiling. She couldn’t think what could have caused the strange transition from hallway to cavern.
“Well, I have some of these things, whatever they are,” Jack announced. He had pried some from the wall with pliers and placed them into a container from his pack.
Thomas hopped down and reached for one.
“Don’t do that,” Jack said. “Who knows? It might be poisonous.”
“I agree—you shouldn’t touch that stuff until we figure out what it is,” Magnus said.
“Don’t touch them? This coming from the guy who just walked through the black doorway? They could be valuable. Take a few more, and we’ll keep looking,” said Thomas. “Nobody said this was safe. We could be hurt just by walking by an artifact.”
Jack turned back toward the wall, then he exploded. Flesh and blood gouted out of his chest like a bad horror sim, accompanied by a loud popping sound.
Telisa froze for a moment, watching as Thomas absorbed what had happened in utter shock. He was literally covered in blood and body debris.
“Fall back! Run!” Magnus ordered.
Thomas scrambled for the lip of the cave and Magnus held out a hand to help him up. Telisa took out her stunner and backed away, not seeing any target.
Magnus grabbed Thomas’s hand and started to pull him up. There was another awful popping noise and Thomas disintegrated. Blood sprayed onto Telisa. She crouched, unable to believe what was happening. Time seemed to slow, and she found herself thinking that she had come too far to die here. Tears welled in her eyes.
Magnus fell slightly backward, off balance, and released a burst from his projectile rifle. The sound was louder than anything Telisa had ever heard, even with the weapon pointed away from her. She could not see what he was shooting at, if anything. Magnus turned and sprinted toward her. Telisa’s muscles released, and she turned to run with him.
She ran around the corner with Magnus close behind her. She stopped short just around the turn. Instead of the long corridor of doors they had just explored, there was a smooth empty wall on her left with another cave entrance straight ahead. An open corridor branched away on her right. None of it was the same as she remembered.
“By the Five! How’d we get turned around?” Telisa asked. Her voice sounded rapid and squeaky in her own ears.
“Cover the corner,” Magnus said, pointing back where they had come from. He aimed his own slug thrower in the opposite direction toward the other cavern. He moved up to the edge.
Telisa set herself a meter from the corner, holding her stunner out, ready to fire. She realized she was panting and shaking. Would something co
me around the corner? Telisa heard Magnus behind her. She wondered if he planned on going into the other cavern.
“Let’s go this way, try and find our way back,” Magnus called. Telisa turned to join him, stepping closer.
The wall on the left exploded next to Magnus. He tumbled forward, enveloped in flames and chunks of building material. Telisa curled away, cringing from the smoke and debris in the air.
“Magnus!”
A second or two later she staggered back to her feet. Magnus appeared as a shadow through the haze, crawling forward. Fear and adrenaline made her thoughts race.
… he is going to die and I’ll be all alone here…
Telisa ran to his side and pulled him up. Magnus stood uncertainly.
“Somehow the thing knew where we were through the wall,” he said hollowly.
Then he seemed to recover and started retreating further back, dragging Telisa along with an iron grip on her arm. They took the corridor to the right that formed the T intersection.
“What the hell is it?” Telisa demanded, on the edge of hysteria.
“Quiet,” Magnus said. “I don’t know.”
They came to another intersection, and Magnus turned left without hesitating. She was sure they had not been in this section before, but she was glad to be running away from the site of the carnage.
Magnus refused to stop until they had run down another long corridor. He checked one door and saw that it was a janitorial closet. A motionless robot—some kind of cleaning machine—stood inside. They checked another door, still looking anxiously back the way they had come.
The room beyond the second door was a kitchen. They ran inside, closed the door, and fell to their knees behind three massive ovens.
“Have you been hit? Are you bleeding anywhere?” asked Magnus, looking her over.
Telisa didn’t answer but simply stared at Magnus, trying to believe what had happened. One moment Thomas and Jack had been standing and talking beside them, the next, they were gone.
Magnus’s skinsuit had been damaged. A large patch on his left shoulder had changed color, and a small spot looked as if it had begun to blister and melt. The hair on the left side of Magnus’s head was shorter, seared away. The skin on his neck was red and weeping.
“You should have been killed,” she whispered, running her hands over Magnus’s shoulders. The skinsuit felt mostly smooth under her hands, but she felt a couple of rough patches where it might have taken damage. Dried blood spotted both of them.
“Thank Momma Veer,” Magnus said.
“I knew those Veer suits were tough, but I had no idea,” Telisa said. “If I survive to see Earth again, the first thing I’m going to do is buy one of those.”
“What’s the second thing?” Magnus asked.
“Take you to a hotel and get you out of yours,” she said. As soon as she said it, Telisa regretted it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Our friends just died and here I am…” She shook her head.
“It’s just a reaction to the stress. It gets harder to control your emotions. I’ve seen it in soldiers after combat.” He seemed to consider his words. “Besides, nothing wrong with the sentiment. Of course, we should probably be concerned with survival right now.”
“Of course, I agree. Let’s just find our way back to the exit and leave. Whatever that was that tried to kill us, we don’t have a chance against it.”
“Somehow I got turned around,” Magnus said. “I thought we went back the way we came, but we haven’t seen these corridors.”
“Me too. We could link up and get a map,” Telisa said. “I know the plan was not to do that, but things could hardly get much worse. If the UNSF finds us, it’d be better than whatever that was.”
“Unless that was the UNSF.”
Telisa grunted. “How could that be?”
“Maybe this installation is so secret they’re willing to kill to keep it under wraps. They’re allowed to shoot at smugglers, you know.”
Telisa considered this possibility in horror. “Okay. Maybe it was a UNSF security robot or something. But what harm can linking up for a map do if they already know we’re here?”
“No harm… unless there’s a security flaw in our chips,” Magnus said cynically. “Go ahead.”
Telisa called up a floor map from the information port. In her mind she saw the room they were in and a diagram of the surrounding area. Telisa asked for a highlight of the quickest route to the exit. The map disappeared, and her link was broken. Her link chip reported a transport error.
“Argh! It’s not working!”
“Your chip?”
“The information computer,” Telisa said.
She tried again while Magnus waited. Once again she got an error. When she looked at Magnus, she saw that he had a far-off look indicating he was trying too.
“No good. It’s not going to work,” he confirmed. “And there aren’t any exit signs on the ceiling. That doesn’t make any sense, unless this place is under construction. Or… maybe it’s designed to simulate malfunctions caused by an attack? Some kind of a training area, maybe.”
“Let’s just find a stairwell and go up,” Telisa said. Magnus nodded and led the way, holding his weapon level and ready.
Magnus led them through the halls, checking doors at the ends that could be stairwells. They checked two halls and then moved past a bank of elevators. Telisa could not tell what floor they were on without linking to the elevators.
“The stairs have to be nearby,” Magnus said.
“There’s probably another entrance than the strange tube we come in from.”
A heavy door nearby proved to be the stairwell entrance. They clambered up the stairs to the top, then emerged cautiously from the stairwell. They were in a corridor like the others below, although there were no elevator doors visible here. The corridors were clean and bare with no decorations. Straight across from the door a fire extinguisher station was built into the wall.
“That’s the first one I’ve seen,” Telisa said.
Magnus thought for a moment. “I agree.”
They made their way to the end of the hall and tried the door. It opened into a larger room filled with boxes and heavy shelving on the walls.
“Looks like spare parts,” Magnus said. “Or raw materials for fabricating spare parts,” he corrected, looking over the rows of metal rods and strips. The room smelled like metal and oil.
They moved through a storage room and some kind of machine shop next door. Then they emerged back into a hallway on the far side.
As their search of the level continued, Telisa became more agitated.
“This is the top level, but where’s the exit?” Telisa demanded.
“It should be the top level. We don’t know for sure unless we ask a service or we’ve searched it all ourselves.”
“I say we link in. At least a dozen sensors must have already registered our presence here.”
Magnus nodded. “Okay.”
Telisa asked for a floor map, but the directory service malfunctioned. The glimpse of the map she did get showed that they were at the edge of the complex.
“The map says this is a dead end,” she said.
“Really? Mine says we’re on the south side, then it flipped out and I lost the connection.”
They walked through several more hallways, trying to match the routes up against the maps they had taken from the directory service. The actual layout did not match what either of them had received.
They eventually found a tiny bar at the end of a hallway, a highly decorated and well-stocked area. Telisa looked it over and sighed. What was this place? What guests came here and needed to be impressed? She did not recognize any of the labels on the liquor.
Magnus looked it over with her. “This area is defensible. There’s only one way in, and the bar faces it. We could rest here.”
“If that thing comes back—”
“We have to rest somet
ime,” Magnus said.
Telisa didn’t have the strength to argue. She walked around into the cul-de-sac of the bar. She slipped her pack off and dropped to the floor.
Magnus followed her lead and took up a spot next to her at the opening of the bar. Even though Telisa knew that they were both outmatched by whatever it was out there, she felt safer with him nearby. She thought that it would be hard to find sleep after such a traumatic day, but somehow she dropped into unconsciousness as soon as she closed her eyes.
The Trilisk Ruins Page 12