The Trilisk Ruins

by Michael McCloskey

  Chapter 23

  “Hi. Are you making progress?” asked Magnus.

  Telisa turned to see him walk into the bay. She smiled and pointed out the horseshoe device.

  “Some.”

  “So these can be dangerous, right? That’s why the Space Force makes it illegal to have them.”

  He winked at her to let her know he was not trying to justify their policies.

  “Yeah. Well, I could be more careful in a real lab. This is the artifact I shocked myself on,” Telisa said. “It still has some juice, even after all this time.”

  “I wonder how?”

  “Search me. I don’t know what the power source is. My scanner isn’t showing that it has any power at all. It should be dead. But it just generated quite an EM spike.”

  “Broadcast power, maybe,” Magnus suggested.

  “We left the planet a long time ago. You’re not suggesting that it could have such a range…?”

  “No. I don’t know. We could try to hook up a circuit to check it out more carefully,” Magnus suggested. He chuckled. “It might be easier to study when your body isn’t part of the conductor.”

  Telisa smiled. “Yeah, that sounds like a great experiment. Let’s set it up. I wonder how much power the thing has left? Of course, we might end up using the last bit of energy it needs to work; then we’ll never figure it out.”

  “Well, right now there’s something else up. I came down here to tell you… we’ve arrived.”

  “Where?”

  Magnus shrugged. “What Shiny called the sanctuary, I guess. It’s some kind of space station or outpost. Here, I’ll point you at our sensor data.”

  Telisa’s link received a pointer to sensor data from Magnus. Telisa closed her eyes and saw the ship’s sensor output interface in her mind. She flipped through the accumulated scans, seeing images and three-dimensional models.

  The base extended well beyond the size of the Iridar, shaped like three identical spheres anchored together in a triangle with thin filaments of material. The entire assembly shadowed a rocky moon in its orbit around a nearby planet.

  “It’s not really rotating. I wonder if Shiny’s race has mastered artificial gravity,” Telisa said.

  “I’m betting there is. They have to have gravity control or else the whole base would eventually collide with the moon. I think it’s paired with the moon, kept at a constant distance with some kind of force link.”

  “Shiny’s probably been gone from home for a while. I hope they welcome him back… and for that matter I hope they welcome us, too.”

  “I assume that Shiny will be going over there soon. Question is, will we be joining him?”

  “We could stay here, but I’m tempted to follow. There might be more artifacts, and we could meet more of his kind, see if they’re at all interested in us.”

  “They might just flush us out the airlock, of course,” Magnus said.

  “Yes, they might. But Shiny hasn’t seemed openly hostile, despite his recent takeover.”

  He shrugged. “All right. As we’ve said, he could have killed us already. Let’s follow him and see what we can learn. But make sure your link logs the way back. I assume this time the stupid tunnels won’t switch around on us.”

  “Funny—it makes sense that they won’t now, but I half expect them to,” she said.

  Magnus nodded. “We’ve learned not to take that for granted anymore. At least for a while.”

  They walked over to the equipment bags they had taken with them on the previous sortie.

  “I already restocked the food and water. And added a little more, this time,” Telisa said.

  “Can never have enough of that canned rations crap,” Magnus added sardonically.

  Shiny marched into the bay, his many legs flicking nervously.

  “Lead the way, Shiny!” Telisa said.

  The alien stood in place for a moment. One of his legs twitched periodically, making a slight scraping sound.

  “Why do you do that, Shiny?” Telisa asked.

  “Brain damage. Leg moves,” Shiny answered.

  “Wow. Sorry to hear that. At least you have nineteen other brains!”

  “True. Correct.”

  “We can go onto your base, can’t we?” Telisa asked.

  “Egress. Entrance. This is allowed,” buzzed Shiny’s generated voice.

  The statement ended the moment of inactivity. The cargo bay doors activated, filling the space with the sound of the hatch mechanism.

  “By the Five! Shiny, you’re not depressurizing the bay, are you?” Telisa asked, her voice wavering near panic.

  Magnus bolted across the bay, motioning to Telisa.

  “Go for one of the pods!” he called.

  “Pressure, present externally,” came a broken sentence from the alien.

  Telisa stared at the growing opening of the bay doors and realized that there was no screaming wind of depressurization. Instead of the darkness of space, a soft white light filtered in from the outside.

  Magnus stooped and put his hands on his knees.

  “You’re a laugh a minute, Shiny,” he said, his voice strained.

  The doors reached their maximum dilation, and the mechanical sounds stopped. Shiny moved out, heading straight down the lower door, which formed a ramp to the outside floor.

  “We’re inside the station, I assume,” Telisa said.

  She checked the sensor feed through her link and saw that she’d guessed correctly. She saw their position within one of the large spheres that formed the body of the base.

  “Should we follow him or what?” she asked Magnus.

  They walked side by side to the edge of the bay, staring out into the alien room. It looked like a natural cavern, lined with pockets of the now-familiar formations of dull beige shapes littered with green rods. Shiny was just disappearing down a side corridor.

  “Ah, I guess not,” Magnus said. “Unless you want to sprint after him.”

  “Yeah. He’s in a hurry or something,” she said.

  “It’s just like back in the Trilisk installation,” Magnus noted. “All this cave stuff is going to look alike.”

  “Yeah. I’m using my link to map it. This stuff might be a little different. Before it was a poor copy—remember the reports we read in the fake office place? This should all be real.”

  They walked down the bay ramp, looking in all directions. Telisa walked up to a bank of cubes.

  “It all looks connected. Don’t any of these aliens have a civilization where they keep a lot of junk lying around?”

  Magnus laughed. “So you can take anything that’s not nailed down?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, as things get more advanced… stuff just starts getting smaller and more remotely activated… for all we know, there’s furniture embedded in the floor, factories waiting in every wall, who knows what.”

  Telisa stared at the intricate blue panel. She didn’t dare touch anything since it was a complete mystery.

  “Where are the other Shinies? Aren’t they curious about the new visitors?” she wondered aloud.

  “I’m getting a little nervous,” Magnus admitted. “Let’s go see if we can catch up with him, since there isn’t anything just lying around for us to collect.”

  Telisa nodded. She led the way, heading out the tunnel that Shiny had raced down a minute ago.

  “Well, we won’t have any trouble finding him,” Magnus said.

  Telisa looked at the floor where Magnus indicated. She saw an intricate trail of tiny footprints, each little more than a round impression the size of a thumbnail.

  “Hrm. I would expect some sort of automated cleaning system in a place this advanced.”

  “Maybe it was shut down to save power, or because there aren’t any other Shinies here right now,” Magnus guessed.

  “Or maybe they just like living with this sand on the floor. We removed dirt from our inside environments. This sandy stuff looks pretty clean, though. It may be ste
rile.”

  They followed the trail through three chambers and a long, rough corridor before finding Shiny. The alien worked on a bank of cubes at a feverish pace. Several of his legs held blocks of the material that laced the walls, and his attendant spheres danced in and out, fusing things together almost faster than the eye could follow.

  “Shiny, where are the others of your kind? You aren’t the only one here, are you?”

  Shiny swiveled around and spoke with an orb that buzzed against the wall. “Singular. One. Only.”

  “There’s only one of your race?”

  “One, here, sanctuary. Others, elsewhere, distant,” Shiny said.

  “Is it unusual that others aren’t here?” asked Magnus.

  “Unusual. Unexplained. Mysterious,” Shiny said.

  The many legged alien turned back and skittered down the passageway. Telisa and Magnus jogged after, trying to stay close.

  “Hey Shiny, are there any… pieces of equipment around here that aren’t attached to the walls? I want something to bring back with me. Is there something here that you wouldn’t miss?”

  “Telisa maintains objective: collect artifacts,” Shiny said.

  “Yes! That’s me. You’re getting better at speaking our language all the time,” she said.

  “Collect artifacts. Begin. Commence. Select alternate location.”

  “Hrm, ahhh, so you mean, take what I want… just don’t take it from what ya got here, huh?”

  “Affirm, correct, agree.”

  A voice came to Telisa through her link. It was the smooth voice of a man.

  “Shiny ask Telisa stop, desist, cease, if critical equipment taken, stolen, confiscated.”

  Telisa glanced around.

  “Whoa… who is that?” Telisa asked.

  “Who’s talking?” Magnus asked. “My link says it’s… Shiny. I guess that’s why some of the authentication information is missing.”

  “Abandoned slow, mechanical, primitive methods. Shiny now using superior system,” the alien sent them.

  “Umm,” Telisa wondered if she should complain. “Shiny, could you use your real voice? I mean the way you used to speak, well, I’ve associated you with the buzzing voice from your… helper spheres.”

  “I will comply, fulfill, accommodate.”

  This time the voice in her head sounded like the buzzing voice Shiny had used with them before. It sounded much better to her than the strange man’s voice, which Telisa didn’t want to think of as coming from Shiny.

  “Thanks, Shiny,” Telisa said.

  “Yeah, that’s a lot better. It sounds like you really sound. Well, I mean like you… never mind,” Magnus said.

  “All right, then. We have permission from an owner. Let’s take a look.”

  Magnus laughed and nodded.

  “Lead the way.”

  Telisa consulted the maps in her head. “Let’s move deeper into the sphere.”

  They chose a corridor at random and walked through the fine sand. Telisa couldn’t see any real difference between these caverns and the ones they had encountered while trapped underground on Thespera Two. The light came from the exposed cubes hanging from walls or rising from the floors.

  They took a side branch, looking for a more interesting room.

  “Too much of this stuff all looks the same to me,” she said. “I think a human station would offer more variety.”

  “A human city would,” Magnus said. “But the insides of the Iridar look pretty much the same throughout.”

  “Hrm, yeah, I guess so.”

  “When did you first become obsessed with alien artifacts?” Magnus asked.

  “Well, that’s a change of subject,” Telisa said, but she was secretly pleased. “Let’s see. I remember one time when I was a kid poring through my dinosaur books. My father brought home a Talosian water compass. At first he let me play with it, and I remember being amazed by the thought that it had been created by creatures that weren’t people. He told me stories the few times a year that he showed up after that, and I became hooked. I sought out artifacts in museums and traveling displays wherever I could find them.”

  “You haven’t mentioned your father before,” Magnus said carefully.

  “One day years later, he showed up and took the Talosian back to the government. He told me to forget about the artifacts until I joined the Space Force. I was upset but I didn’t grow apart from him until later, when I joined a civil rights group in high school.”

  Telisa became silent for a moment. They both realized at the same moment that a noise like rushing water came from a branching in the corridor on their right.

  “What’s that sound?”

  Magnus shrugged. “Stop. Before we go check it out, tell me what happened with your father.”

  Telisa sighed. “The government kept taking rights away. They made it illegal for us to own artifacts. They stopped telling us about the new discoveries. They kept information about aliens from the academic community. At the same time, I was starting to get a mind of my own, and I became ashamed that my father was part of the force. I rebelled against my mother and I gave my father the riot act, until he exploded. He hit me for the first time ever, and told me I wasn’t his daughter. It was the worst argument of my life.”

  Magnus listened carefully.

  “Sounds to me like you’re strong and independent. Got a head of your own. Your father and your mother would be proud of you now, if they only knew.”

  “A smuggler? Running around with an alien behind his back? I don’t think so.”

  “But they would have to be proud of your resourcefulness, and the fact that you’re a survivor. You’re stronger now than before, tougher.”

  They shared another moment of silence. Telisa heard the background sound again, like a distant waterfall.

  “C’mon, enough talking about that purple paste. We’re on an alien space outpost!” Telisa said.

  They walked toward the noise. Telisa wondered if the sound emanated as noise from speakers, like a radio tuned to an empty frequency.

  They came into a larger circular chamber, with hundreds of cubes lined up along the walls. The sound came from a large hole in the wall that ejected a steady stream of sand into a bay that ran along half the circumference of the room. The sand flowed evenly through the bay until leaving from another portal in the opposite wall.

  Telisa laughed. “It’s Shiny’s version of an escalator, or a conveyor belt,” she said.

  Magnus raised an eyebrow. “Hrm. Yeah, I suppose it could be. Or maybe it’s a system that cleans the sand.”

  “We should dive in and take a ride.”

  “Not so fast. What if it’s a garbage disposal? What if you jump in and you can’t stay above the sand? You could suffocate.”

  Telisa bent down onto her knees and peered down the tunnel.

  “It doesn’t look dangerous from here… but I suppose you’re right. Who knows where it ends up going?”

  “There could be machinery under the surface that could chop you up into little pieces. I wouldn’t even stick my hand in it. But we should toss something in and see where it goes.”

  “Something bright that we would see easily if it comes back around.”

  Telisa took out her pack and rummaged through it.

  “Well…”

  “You have something?” Magnus asked.

  Telisa looked up sheepishly, holding a small piece of red fabric in her hand.

  “What’s that? Oh,” Magnus said, and smiled. He had realized it was a bright red pair of undersheers. “Let’s hope it doesn’t gum up the works. An advanced alien outpost, brought to its knees by a sexy undergarment.”

  Telisa suppressed the urge to protest that the undersheers had been selected for function, not aesthetics. She tossed the undersheers into the flow and they watched it get whisked away into the exit tunnel. They waited for the red fabric to reappear in the stream for several minutes, but they didn’t see anything but the smooth flow of the tiny ta
n particles.

  “I have a new idea,” Telisa said. “This could be a Shiny restroom. When they regurgitate those bricks, they could throw them in here to be taken away and… recycled, or whatever.”

  “Well, we can ask Shiny about it later,” Magnus said. “Let’s keep looking.”

  “Sure thing,” Telisa said. “Oh wait. If our links can connect, we could ask him right now.” Telisa connected with Magnus and sent a message to Shiny on the same channel.

  “Shiny?” she sent.

  “Present. Listening. Ready.”

  “Magnus and I have found a room… there’s a lot of sand moving around, sand like on the floor. We’re curious, what is it? A transport system, or does it clean the sand… or is it a restroom?”

  There was a pause.

  “System performs, processes, fulfills all mentioned functions.”

  “I see. Thank you, Shiny.”

  The connection was dismissed.

  “Ah… all of those. Well, there we go,” Telisa said.

  Magnus grimaced and shook his head. “That’s… well, alien.”