The Trilisk Ruins

by Michael McCloskey

  Chapter 10

  Kirizzo flashed through room after room at high speed. His attention played across the caverns briefly, always returning to a small cube cluster he carried with him. The cluster relayed the image of a room directly into one of his brains. It was the only thing that protected his hoard of collected parts.

  There. Kirizzo detected just the piece he sought. The complex had finally provided it for him as it generated the faux environment. He approached the bank of cubes embedded in the wall and removed what he needed. With this piece, he would be able to complete another sensor station.

  The golden, many-legged alien twitched slightly as he worked over his prize. The spasm originated from his ordeal with the Bel Klaven war machines that had chased him into the complex. Many cycles had passed since that memory had been imprinted.

  Kirizzo had gone through the dark entrance and fled through familiar caverns. The machines had followed after him, relentless. A deadly game of cat and mouse had ensued. Hunters and hunted had several short, brutal encounters. Each time Kirizzo narrowly escaped with his life. One of the particularly nasty episodes had resulted in a bit of nerve damage on his right rear side.

  The Bel Klaven constructs created symmetrical empty spaces in the complex of staggering geometrical complexity. Kirizzo supposed that the pseudo-intelligent machines did not have thoughts and memories that translated well to the mechanism that created environments inside the Trilisk installation.

  Kirizzo had gradually obtained clues as to how the place worked and adapted himself. But the Bel Klaven machines could not significantly alter their behavior. They remained inflexible. Kirizzo had been able to trick and defeat the enemies by using the properties of the complex against them. He lured the machines into areas where he had a defensive advantage, collected supplies from the environments produced by the complex, and even made clever traps that would confuse the enemy and render them vulnerable.

  One by one the machines died, until finally, one day, Kirizzo found himself alone. Only then had he had time to select another primary goal: escape.

  Ever practical, Kirizzo did not dwell on his injury but instead channeled his irritation at the twitch to increase his motivation. Once home, the nerve damage could be repaired. He would stick to the plan, a plan which included escape and eventual rejuvenation. Lamenting the damage would not help to correct it.

  Once Kirizzo retrieved the valuable component, he headed back to his cache, the room he monitored through his remote sensor cluster. He reached the room after a minute or two, encountering tunnels and caves that looked different than the ones he had taken on the way out. It was a cavern that Kirizzo had hollowed out to be much larger than the ones the complex typically generated.

  A mound of sophisticated cube clusters sat in the center, stacked together in an intricate pattern. They held the possibility of escape from the trap of the installation. Each cluster of cubes could encode its surroundings into a data stream and transmit the data back to one of Kirizzo’s brains where he could monitor it. Those clusters were Kirizzo’s only way of expanding his sphere of control and stabilizing the environment well beyond the range of his natural senses.

  Kirizzo pondered the visitors, aliens who shared his little prison with him. They unknowingly helped his cause by pinning down extra sections of the facility, but at the same time, they threatened all his work. If they remained hostile, they might destroy the stations as they discovered them. They had no reason to, but they might act out of ignorance, fueled by raw aggression. Kirizzo knew very little about their behavioral range. He considered strategies for protecting his investment.

  He could continue to guard the devices for the time being, although when he tried to deploy them they would be dispersed too widely for him to protect. Besides, most of his attention would be needed to watch the data and keep the sensor clusters from being subsumed by the installation. He could detach some of his personal defense modules and assign them to individual stations, but each one of the precious spheres that he went without increased his own chances of being killed by the next projectile that came his way.

  Kirizzo embarked on a calculated risk. He set one of the monitors aside and activated it. The data flowed into his mind, allowing him to see himself and the clusters in the superfluous sensory channel. He gathered up the other devices in his many limbs and proceeded through the caverns ahead. He moved slowly, keeping the view from his device under intense scrutiny. As long as Kirizzo monitored it, the room he left behind would be stable.

  Kirizzo picked his way painstakingly along, always watching the streams from his observer modules and slowly moving forward to place another. Kirizzo was placing his fourth module when he noticed that an alien had wandered into one of the rooms monitored by a sensor station. He watched it through the sensor cluster, concerned that they might recognize the equipment and damage it.

  As the Gorgala monitored the intrusion, he considered exterminating the aliens. This sounded promising on the surface, but might be shortsighted. If Kirizzo couldn’t overcome the base on his own, they might be needed. Like any living creature, they stabilized areas of the installation, drawing on the facility’s power supply. In essence, they made Kirizzo’s task easier. He decided to risk leaving them alive. He hoped that they would stay away now that he had shown his ability to defend himself with lethal force if necessary on two separate occasions. If the things were truly intelligent, surely they would give him a wide berth.

  After a few moments the aliens moved on, apparently oblivious to his devices. To the slow, sparsely limbed creatures, his modules were probably almost indistinguishable from the other Gorgalan items in the caverns. Kirizzo returned to his task of placing and monitoring the sensors.

  As Kirizzo placed the seventh module, he began to feel the mental strain of monitoring so many different places at once. He placed an eighth and hesitated, seeing that the cavern wall around his fourth had wavered and changed shape when he neglected to watch it for a few seconds. His consciousness arose as an amalgam of all the processes of the nerve clusters along his central nervous cord. As they became loaded with other work, his concentration suffered, which caused the sub-tasks to become forgotten as his primitive mind took over, seizing control of the nerve bundles to re-establish itself.

  He crawled away. If he could distance himself from the eighth module, then the volume of stable space would increase further. This would in turn draw more power from the installation’s power supply, hopefully overloading it.

  By the time Kirizzo had made his way beyond the range of the eighth module, he realized he had lost the third module altogether. It had gone unobserved for too long, and the room had been reclaimed. His third observation module was gone.

  The plan of escape was not going to work.

  Kirizzo guessed that he could not watch enough different locations simultaneously to overload the generators. This was not too surprising considering the immense power source that he had detected here. Nevertheless, he stood still for the next couple of hours, watching the data. He might be draining a reserve even now. The aliens might split up and spread apart, increasing the load. He could be seconds away from seeing a failure, he kept telling himself.

  Or this could be futile.

  He turned and retrieved the modules one by one, still watching them constantly so he wouldn’t lose another. The operation was as slow and tedious as the deployment had been. Kirizzo did not falter, and he succeeded in retrieving all the remaining cubic monitor modules.

  He had worked so long on this plan of escape. Kirizzo’s kind did not know depression, but an analog of impatience was building to almost painful levels. How best to escape the complex?

  Kirizzo’s thoughts returned to the aliens he had detected in the maze-like installation. They added load to the system. Their senses seemed inferior to his own, but stable bubbles continued to follow them through the maze. Unfortunately they tended to group together, keeping their area of influence overlapped. If they would spread
out, that would also help to consume the installation’s energy. He wondered if the aliens had deduced the workings of their surroundings yet. Might they also pursue a plan of escape as he had? Would their plan be compatible with his own?

  How could he get the others to split up? Kirizzo saw that despite his superior standing, he would need to seek the aid of the other entities trapped with him. If he could ally with them, they might not destroy the painstakingly crafted observation stations, and they could spread out to increase the load. Kirizzo did not know much about their sensory capacity, but each of them might also be able to stabilize several other locations remotely as he had.

  However, given the alien’s reactions to him thus far, it might be difficult to come to an understanding. Still, it had to be tried. Kirizzo was running out of ideas.

  His planning stage ended abruptly, and he bolted into action. Activating one of the modules and leaving it on next to the others, he detached a single defense orb and ordered it to guard the cache. Then he moved away, observing his valuable modules through the single activated one to make sure the installation did not reclaim it. Kirizzo’s many legs whirred rapidly, moving him down a twisting rock passage.

  It shouldn’t take long to find the aliens.