The Trilisk Ruins

by Michael McCloskey

  Chapter 24

  Two days later, Telisa trudged back up the ramp into the Iridar. The weight in the sack she carried caused her to slow and wobble.

  Magnus greeted her with his slug thrower leveled.

  “Another batch!” she announced. “You gonna shoot me?”

  He lowered the weapon. “I asked you to announce each arrival with your link,” he said sourly.

  “Sorry, I forgot. Besides, half the time my link can’t get through to yours.”

  “Okay. Looks like you found some more building blox.”

  “You make ’em sound like toys. But they’re not. They’re the entire basis for an advanced technology.”

  “You sure? Maybe we just helped Shiny knock over a giant alien toy factory!”

  “I don’t think so. They’ve been in all the caves we believe make up Shiny’s preferred environment. Imagine a system where they can make any electronic controller they need from these basic blocks. They would be produced cheaply, interconnected, and programmed to perform whatever task they’re needed for.”

  “Hrm. If they’re all computing components, then they must have a hell of a distributed system.”

  “These blocks, or tinker toys or whatever you want to call ’em. The ones with the rods placed into them are emitting electromagnetic waves at frequencies that are related to the length of the rods.”

  “Ah! So the components talk to each other without wires.”

  “Yep. Just like a lot of our stuff does… except I think Shiny’s race has progressed farther along those lines. I’ve detected at least fifty separate wireless networks used by these components. And here’s a crazy thing. I took the antenna or whatever it is out of one component and put it into one that didn’t have one, and that component started talking on the network. So I think any of these modules with holes in them can speak to each other if they’re given an antenna, or whatever the green rods are.”

  “That’s weird. That’s like attaching a radio to your toothbrush and all of a sudden it starts talking to the house computer, offering cleaning services to your guests.”

  “Yeah. I think each of these modules may be generalized. They each may be their own small computer. When you give it an antenna it links to the network to see what you want to tell it to do. So it’s more like you hooked a radio to your jacket and the house told it the toilet needs cleaning and so the jacket transforms into a scrub brush and the house sends a bot to grab it and start scrubbing!”

  Magnus shrugged. “Ha. Sounds possible. A giant distributed system composed of everything from your toaster to your supercomputers. It’s a good theory, anyway. But we need to crack their protocols. Then we could try telling a fresh component to be something… maybe just copy an existing one. Test it out.”

  “Do you know how hard it is to figure out a protocol from scratch, just looking at the waveforms coming from these things at a given frequency? And what if only part of the data is on each frequency?”

  “Shiny did it to us in a short time.”

  “Yeah, maybe we should ask him how to do it.”

  “We should. For now, start simple. Work your way up from there. I’d start by assuming that each frequency is a signal with an isolated stream of information on its own.”

  “All right, well, I’m going to need your help. We need to get the Iridar’s computers recording these signals.”

  Telisa dropped her collection onto the rubberized deck.

  “Okay. But I have some areas I want to show you first,” Magnus said. “I think there’s been a fight here. That may explain why the other Shinies are gone.”

  “You think that they were defeated but the base was left intact?”

  “Well, depends on what you mean by intact,” Magnus said.

  They walked together back down the lock and out into the caverns of the base. Telisa referred to the maps in her head, looking at the layout of the base. Although the caves seemed to be naturally formed, the map gave away the order with which the oddly shaped rooms had been puzzled together to fill the available space. Telisa believed that Shiny’s race preferred the aesthetic impression of natural caverns, but in fact they were anything but natural.

  Magnus took her to a section she hadn’t seen before, near the hull of the base sphere they occupied. Telisa saw blackened sections of wall. The sand below their feet remained pristine.

  They came into another smooth-walled room. The deck had been pierced by a giant metal spike. A thin ovoid door in the side of the spike had been left open. The opening was larger than man-sized.

  “I think this was an attack site,” Magnus said. “This spike pierced the outer hull and delivered something bad into the station.”

  “It didn’t depressurize the area,” Telisa noted.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe it did at the time but it’s since been repaired. Or maybe the attackers didn’t want to depressurize the inside. They may have wanted it intact, or even been after capturing live prisoners. Who knows?”

  Telisa peered inside the giant canister. Something about it felt creepy, and she kept her distance. The inside surface held striations that she couldn’t make sense of. It reminded her of a crash pod.

  “This could be anything,” Telisa said. “Maybe it’s supposed to be here.”

  Magnus led her around the spike and into the next room. The smooth walls held black scars and fragments of metal. Two heaps of trash littered the floor.

  “So much for the cleaning system,” Telisa said.

  “Maybe Shiny’s race would only repair it if the damage is more than cosmetic.”

  “I suspect there is damage here that caused the system to break down.”

  “That may be so. Look at what this is.”

  Telisa walked closer. She saw that the pile closest to her had a silvery harness lying over a large husk—or skin—of something as large as herself. She saw fragments of legs lying jumbled all around it.

  “This is an… alien corpse. One of Shiny’s people!”

  “So is the other one. And this shrapnel in the walls indicates an explosion. These black marks are burns from some kind of energy weapon.”

  “How come they’re just here? I haven’t seen this in the other parts of the base.”

  “It’s all over in this section. This spherical piece of the base. So maybe you’re right, this sphere may have been damaged beyond easy repair. Or no inhabitants were left to order the repair.”

  Telisa remembered that the base consisted of three large spherical parts. She realized that she hadn’t explored this one yet.

  “They must have fought here. This sphere may have some special importance.”

  Magnus nodded. “The power systems are here, I think. I checked it out for artifacts, but I think most of the equipment here is inside the walls, hard to dig out or too large to take back.”

  “Well, what I wanna know is, what was in that spike?”

  “I have some clues about that, too,” he said.

  He walked further into the caverns. Telisa followed him past several more battle sites. Only the sand of the floor remained untouched; everything else had been charred or broken. Telisa counted three more piles of rubble that she believed to be corpses of Shiny’s race.

  Magnus stopped and pointed ahead.

  The burned out hull of a large machine lay in the corridor, blocking the way. Long metallic tentacles curved around the wreck, ending in sharp looking hooks. The surface of the thing sported several equipment bulbs that Telisa imagined were sensor pods or weapons ports.

  “A war machine,” Telisa said.

  “Yes. Something pretty bad if it could do this to Shiny’s people.”

  “Or if it caught them by surprise. We don’t know how warlike they are. I wonder if they were prepared for this kind of attack.”

  “Knowing Shiny, they were prepared for anything.”

  They walked over closer to the machine. Telisa touched one of its tentacles, feeling the cool metal. Then she moved over and looked at one of th
e pods, viewing it through a gash in the side of the machine. She tested its mount, trying to dislodge it.

  “Stop. I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Magnus said. “It looks a bit like the heavies the Space Force battlecruisers carry, except for the tentacles.”

  “What’s wrong? If we could get a sample from this race too, we’d be in even better shape. Something from yet another science and culture.”

  “What you might get, is ripped to shreds.” Magnus stepped around the mass and viewed it from the far side. “We don’t know anything about its weapon systems. It may have live ordnance, or it might be set to self-destruct if we poke through it.”

  Telisa sat back, frustrated. “How in the hell is a girl supposed to make a living if she can’t even grab a choice alien weapon or two without dying?”

  “Join the Space Force, then use expensive scanners and robots to grab all the stuff for you,” Magnus answered.

  “That’s what we need, some robots.”

  “Yeah, well, you know that we can’t get anything bigger than a cleaning robot back home.”

  Telisa ground her teeth. The world government and its rules. She had managed to forget about that for a while, since she had left civilization. If they had any real robots, they would have to be custom-built and kept secret.

  Robots had become widespread until their power became evident. Just as the world government had restricted lethal weapons in the hands of civilians, they had expanded the rules to cover ownership of robots. Secret groups with control of dangerous robots were routinely rooted out and exterminated by the Space Force.

  “Then we should build our own and keep them out in space, like the rich corporate executives do.”

  Magnus shrugged. “I think Thomas had some plans along those lines. But it takes money. We needed to bootstrap ourselves with a few good hauls first, before we could come up with the kind of credit that it takes to establish a cache of our own in deep space.”

  Telisa sighed. She asked for a link connection to Shiny and added Magnus to the channel.

  “Shiny, does it bother you if we ask more questions?”

  “Mild disturbance. Ask. Query. Begin.”

  “Uh, do you have any robots here?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Can we see them? Can we have one?”

  Magnus laughed.

  “Hey, it can’t hurt to ask, can it?” Telisa said aloud.

  Magnus shrugged.

  “Affirmative. Affirmative,” Shiny replied.

  Telisa’s link brought up an image of the spherical base around them, drawn in three dimensions. It spun in a confusing way, peeling off layers and finally exposing a highlighted path through the base.

  Thank you, Shiny.

  “I think he just sent me a map to them, but it’s a little more… three-dimensional than we’re used to.”

  “Well, he offered us a robot, so let’s go check it out—if you can tell which way to go,” Magnus said.

  “Yeah, definitely,” she said, making a face. “I think it’s this way.”

  They moved through the caverns with a new purpose. The route took them through the rest of the ruined base sphere and to its far outer edge. When they entered the final chamber, the light inside increased as several of the glowing cubes lit up. A wall on their right seemed to melt away, revealing a smooth-walled oval-shaped bay. Three tall walking machines stood inside, towering over Telisa and Magnus.

  “Wow,” Telisa muttered, walking forward to touch one shiny leg.

  The machines had eight slender support legs, each about as tall as the two humans. The bodies of the constructs were the size of a compact autocab.

  The machine Telisa had touched whirred to life. Telisa stepped back. Magnus crouched and pointed his slugthrower at the machine. The body slowly lowered until it hovered less than a foot above the sandy floor.

  Now Telisa could see that a clear cockpit dominated the top of each machine. The top of the lowered robot slid open.

  “I guess it can take a pilot or a rider as well,” Magnus said.

  Telisa peered into the machine. The inside had forty tiny metal buttons arrayed around the circumference. A single metal rod rose from the center with a tiny stirrup or chair at the top.

  “You think Shiny could fit in there?” Telisa asked.

  “I don’t know. I think if he were curled up he could. There’s a button for each leg.”

  “I’d assume he would use a neural interface rather than buttons. But I guess it might be a backup control system.”

  Magnus shrugged. “The important question is, how are we going to get this into the bay?”