Chapter 21
Telisa catalogued the other items, scanning and tagging them one at a time. Each of the things had an ultradense block that she could see through the passive scanner, except for one artifact, a flat, square plate the size of her palm that had ridges on its edges as if it were made of dozens of layers of metal. It seemed as inert to her eye as it did to the passive scanner.
Telisa tried to activate her link recorder to take some notes. Her link gave no reply. She sighed and summarized aloud anyway.
“That’s fourteen Trilisk items all together,” she said.
Shiny seemed attentive.
“So far I only have a clue about one of them. It appears to be some sort of communication device, or maybe a memory recorder of some kind. What’s astounding about it is it can actually translate from an alien consciousness to experiences that my brain can understand. Well, partially understand, modulo my ‘missing’ third lobe. Although it seems already that the… feelings, or senses, that the alien had are fading from my mind.”
“Trilisk. Ancient. Enigmatic,” Shiny buzzed.
“Very enigmatic,” she agreed.
Telisa pried herself up from her sitting position on the deck and started to put things away.
“You’re enigmatic to us too, Shiny,” Telisa said. “You and your forty legs and your little spheres.”
“Thirty-eight legs,” Shiny corrected.
“I’m sorry. I forgot,” Telisa said. “We’ll figure out how to grow them back, I’m sure.”
“Probable.”
“Who are you at war with, Shiny?”
“Conflict, combat. Against race Telisa cannot name. Terrans have no term.”
“What’re they like? Why do you fight them?”
“Competition. Limited resources. No optimal cooperative solution. Optimal solution, my side wins.”
An insistent tone interrupted her from the conversation. Her link awakened and responded to her first query with the current time. Telisa smiled and sighed in relief.
“Yes! It’s so nice to have a link back! Sorry, Shiny, gimme a second.”
Telisa queried for the date and received it. She asked the link for her blood sugar and it replied. It told her how long she had been awake and a list of other personal links within range. She scrolled through a list of local services offered by tiny computers placed throughout the ship. Once again, a huge amount of information was back at her fingertips—the temperature of hot water in the ship’s reserve, the number of rations stored in the galley’s cabinets, and the volume of the forward hold.
She could even see three-dimensional images of the ship in her mind’s eye. Telisa asked for an overview of her position and saw a tiny red figure, herself, sitting in a transparent green technical drawing of the ship. She queried for directions to the pilot seats and saw the route light up with a red line.
“Ha! My link works! Sooo wonderful! How did Terrans ever live without links?”
“Link dysfunction. Query. Source, cause, root?” buzzed Shiny’s tiny sphere.
“Yes… oh, ah, the cause. Hrm, well, the government, that is the UNSF… you know what that is? The government thinks that I’m a danger because I’m a xenoarchaeologist who won’t join the Space Force. But I won’t join because they take everyone’s rights away, and my father chose the force over my family when I was a kid. Or maybe it’s because I joined a group of smugglers. I don’t know; all I do know is, they control everyone too much, and they won’t let me live my life the way I want to… the way I need to.”
“Human government. Oppressive, bureaucratic, inefficient. Corrective course: decouple control of structure from organization being structured.”
“Hrm. Yeah, since when did the government ever make itself smaller or reduce its own power? Not since the last revolution. Maybe us Terrans will get it right next time… if we ever manage to get control back again.”
“Government, Terrans apply cyclical evolution strategy. Improve framework next iteration.”
“Anyway, Magnus cleaned it up and it’s so nice to have it back… I bet you’d miss your computers or whatever all that stuff you have attached to your body is, if it were turned off. Now I need to go back and look at the artifacts all over again!”
Telisa unpacked the scanner and linked with it to check out its memory of the items that she had examined. She had just brought up the first readout when she heard footsteps approaching on the deck.
“All better?” Magnus asked.
Telisa looked up at her last human companion. Magnus stood straight, in his Veer skinsuit as always, regarding Shiny.
“Much. Thanks!” she said. “I’ve been looking at the artifacts and chatting with Shiny. By the way, one of them is a memory recorder or something like that. I picked it up and suddenly it was like being in a sim except I had an alien body and alien senses.”
“Amazing what we could learn. Plus, if we can ever sell those things…”
Telisa nodded. “We’d be set for life. Except for the minor detail of being hunted criminals.”
“Jack was better about that sort of stuff, but he taught me a thing or two. We’ll have to think everything out carefully before we head back.”
“I suppose we need to talk about where we’re eventually going to go,” Telisa said.
“We need to hang low. There’re a few smaller frontier ports where we may be able to get supplies without going through too much security. On the other hand, that’s what they’d expect us to do.”
“Policy. Statement. Destination. Control. Modification.”
“We have to go hide, Shiny. We must control the destination. We’re in danger, we may be hunted. By the UNSF,” Telisa said.
“Shiny. Destination. Modification,” Shiny’s device said. Telisa tried to make sense of this for a moment.
“Telisa.” Magnus said gently. Telisa turned to regard Magnus.
“Yes?”
“Shiny has control of the ship. He’s changed our course.”
Telisa’s mouth dropped open. She tried to speak, but only an odd grunt came out. She took a deep breath.
“Control of the ship? He just learned to speak a few hours ago.”
Magnus shrugged. “In some ways, he had to master the computer systems to get that far. What I didn’t expect was his ability to find and exploit security holes in our systems. I’m convinced that he has very powerful computers of his own at his control.”
“Yes, part of his amazing equipment there on the trunk of his body. Shiny, where are we going now?”
“Stronghold. Sanctuary.”
“Well, it sounds good enough if you put it that way. One of your worlds?”
“Outpost. Existence uncertain,” Shiny droned. “War. Conflict. Damage probable, destruction possible.”
“Okay, now it’s sounding less safe,” Telisa said. “Shiny, we need control of our ship.”
“Inefficient, inconvenient, suboptimal,” Shiny replied.
“We’re your friends. You shouldn’t take over what’s ours,” Telisa said. She knew she expressed Terran expectations, not necessarily compatible to values the alien held, but she had to try.
“Sanctuary necessary, required, high priority. Shiny eliminates uncertainty.”
Telisa and Magnus exchanged grim looks.
“Come with me, let’s talk alone,” Magnus suggested.
“Query. Magnus, Telisa, communicate. Exchange privileged information?” Shiny asked.
An awkward silence ensued.
“Uhm, no. That’s just a polite way to say we’re going to go mate,” Telisa said. “Y’know, copulate.”
Shiny did not respond. Magnus’s eyebrows rose. He smiled and offered his hand, which Telisa took, and they marched out of the cargo bay.
As soon as they left the bay, Magnus raised his finger to his lips, signaling silence. Telisa nodded her understanding. He led her to the forward most g-damper pod. Telisa crawled into the tube. Magnus pulled the slugthrower off his back and slid in next to h
er. He smelled good, and Telisa realized she hadn’t been in such a private situation with a man in a long time. She smiled.
“We really ought to figure out what to do about Shiny,” Magnus said. “He seems nice, but I wonder if he’s dangerous. We’ve been over-anthropomorphizing him.”
Telisa tore her eyes away and forced herself to think about Shiny.
“We have to take control of the computers back, lock him out somehow. It occurs to me that we didn’t even ask him to relinquish control. It just kind of freaked me out—I haven’t really absorbed everything yet.”
“We could always try to blow a hole in his head,” Magnus said.
“Seems extreme. Is he threatening our lives?”
“I guess that depends on where we’re really going. I don’t know if attacking him would work… those little spheres that follow him around seem to protect him. I think we both doubt he’ll just give control back, since he took it away without asking.”
“I wonder if he knows he’s being rude by our standards of behavior, or if he cares,” Telisa said.
“You mean maybe it’s acceptable in his society to take over someone else’s ship? Sounds unlikely.”
“Shiny’s an alien. Who knows what kind of codes of behavior he follows? Speaking of which, I just got a dose of just how alien is alien.”
“What do you mean?”
“That Trilisk artifact I accidentally activated. It was sort of like a VR sim, except I was an alien. I mean, in more than just form, but in frame of mind, feelings, senses, everything. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever experienced before. Shiny told me that I couldn’t quite experience it right because the recording was for a creature with three brain lobes, and he said he has twenty!”
“If he’s capable of behavior that inexplicable to us, then he could kill us at any time. We have no way of knowing if he even values our lives. There are just too many unknowns.”
“All right. You work on getting control back, and I’ll grill him about where we’re going and what he means to do with us. He may not tell me the truth, but it can’t hurt to try. We can save the blowing-him-away stuff for later.”
Magnus nodded and stared at her for a moment.
“We should probably spend a while in here,” he said. “Just to throw off suspicion, of course.”
Telisa laughed. It seemed like they never had time to be alone, ever since things had started going wrong. How many times had she daydreamed of a moment like this since she met Magnus?
“Good idea,” she said and pulled him closer.
The Trilisk Ruins Page 33