The Trilisk Ruins

by Michael McCloskey

  ***

  An almost imperceptible shudder came through the floor.

  “What? What happened?” Telisa asked.

  The only answer came a moment later. A spray of projectiles impacted the cavern in a random pattern, sending one or two ricochets nearby. Telisa and Magnus threw themselves onto the smooth floor. Nightmare images of the deaths of Jack and Thomas raced through Telisa’s mind.

  “Purple paste! They’re trying to kill us!” Telisa snarled. “Those are Terran weapons!”

  “They’re probably moving in after us. But I don’t understand why they’re firing lethal rounds at us. I’d expect an ultimatum first, at least.”

  “My father’s a hard-core soldier.”

  “Shiny’s base must be messing with their weapons. Those rounds should have been able to lock in on us. It’s a miracle they missed. Actually, now that I think about it, they might not be firing at us. They must be firing blind, or they would have hit something in particular.”

  “See if you can guide me back. I’ll try and discourage any pursuit,” Magnus said.

  He slid the slugthrower off his back and discharged a staccato burst of rounds down the sloped tunnel. The sound stunned Telisa, slamming into her ears painfully. She had always understood abstractly that the military slugthrowers were loud, but she had not understood just how loud they really were until she experienced it in person in the Trilisk installation. Magnus released a tangler grenade from his suit and set it on the floor. It rolled away, accelerating down the tunnel, seeking prey.

  She rolled away from the opening and slightly down the hall so she could regain her feet without becoming a target. Shaking her head in a useless attempt to rid her ears of pain, she regained her concentration and linked with the Iridar. She brought a map of their path up in her mind.

  “Up ahead and to the left,” she said.

  Magnus put his back against the wall beside her. “If their scanners are working, they’ll know exactly where we are. I’ll have to stay back periodically. They’ll see that and be wary, thinking I’m preparing traps or making a counterattack.”

  “I don’t think their stuff is working at all,” Telisa said. “The bullets missed us, remember? I bet they can’t see anything and the robots are almost useless.”

  Telisa felt fear thrilling through her. She was at once excited and terrified. I wonder if the end of my life is here, she thought.

  Magnus nodded. “We can risk it. Hug the wall. If their rounds are blind, they’ll be more likely to pick you as a target of opportunity if you’re standing in the middle of the room than if you become part of the wall.”

  Magnus’s level voice calmed her. She leaned back against the cool wall of the cavern. It made her feel a little safer. She started shuffling in the direction of the ship, scraping along the irregular side of the passage.

  She laughed a little as she looked at the stunner she gripped in her hand. She hadn’t remembered drawing it from her hip. The tiny nonlethal weapon was made to protect people against muggings, not to fight off assault robots. It occurred to her that it might not even work against any robot, even a household cleaning robot.

  “Magnus, does this stunner work against robots?”

  Magnus shrugged next to her. “It can’t be good for them. But I doubt it would do anything against a Space Force assault model. But keep it out; there are probably marine teams behind the robots.”

  Telisa nodded, but she was still thinking about the robots. Then she remembered that she had brought the double-horseshoe artifact with her to show to Shiny.

  “Remember the artifact that we fired up? It generates a huge EM spike locally,” she said. “I bet that would get a robot’s attention.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Once we’re back to the ship, though, we should just leave.”

  “No, I have it with me!”

  “What? Why isn’t it on the ship?”

  “I was going to ask Shiny about it today.”

  Magnus shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt to keep it ready.”

  Telisa slipped the artifact out of her pack. She zipped the carrying container back up and slid it over her back. Telisa dropped the plastic holder on the floor and held the device in her hand. She held it by one arm carefully.

  “Okay, let’s keep going,” Magnus prompted.

  “Wait. I hear something.”

  A high pitched whine rose and fell. Telisa caught a glimpse of something in the air. She blinked. Whatever it was, she couldn’t sense it anymore. It reminded her of a hummingbird.

  “Some of those tiny orbs like Shiny had,” Magnus said. “They headed past us.”

  “What—”

  A cacophony arose from the tunnel ahead. At first it sounded like a pile of garbage being emptied from a large container. Then the thunder of slugthrowers erupted and drowned the rest out. Magnus pulled Telisa down. They hugged the floor for a moment, listening and cowering. Telisa understood now that these were the sounds of a battle.

  “The orbs are fighting the Seeker’s assault robots, right?” she asked him through her link.

  “Must be,” Magnus replied.

  Telisa was glad for the link conversation, since her ears rang so terribly she wondered if she’d ever hear again.

  At last the noise slowed then stopped. Telisa lay on the sandy floor, breathing rapidly.

  “We need to find another route, I guess,” she said on the link.

  “No. This is perfect. The orbs have made a hole in the forces ahead of us. We might be able to get through to the ship if we hurry.”

  “I don’t know. We don’t want to be in the thick of the fight.”

  “Too late. We are in the fight,” Magnus said aloud.

  Telisa felt relieved she could hear him despite her ringing ears.

  “Those orbs are formidable. They’ve probably taken the assault machines out. Keep going straight for the ship.”

  They moved through a narrow room with two adjoining passages. Magnus stayed close and covered the entrances with his weapon, but he didn’t shoot again. Telisa chose the passage that she believed would take them closer to the Iridar. Any moment she expected a shiny war machine to appear and attack them. Telisa wondered if such things only shot people, or if they had giant whirling blades to slice victims up like in the horror vids.

  They came into another room, filled with something unfamiliar. Broken Space Force equipment lay strewn all over the floor. Telisa saw green shapes mixed in amongst the carnage. She realized the green objects were uniformed bodies on the floor. Pieces of human were strewn about, splattered in blood. It didn’t look real in the colored light of the cubes. Telisa made a confused noise.

  “Shiny must’ve taken them out,” Magnus said. “It’s an assault controller team. They would have set up right after the robotics came through.”

  “Can’t the robots be controlled from the Seeker? Or even fight on their own?”

  “Yes. But teams like this are deployed for redundancy. They can also add flexibility to the machine’s strategy.”

  “Shiny killed all these men. He didn’t seem so violent with us. He never did anything—”

  “We never waved guns in his face and tried to capture him. We never invaded one of his bases. Put one of these on,” Magnus said, indicating a dead man who was still mostly in one piece.

  Telisa stared in confusion for a moment. Then she realized he meant the corpse’s skinsuit. She walked over to the smallest of the dead assault controllers, hopping over the wreckage of some equipment. The devastation was so severe that Telisa couldn’t tell what any of it had been. She got a closer look at the man. Blood poured from a hole in the suit, right above his heart. She avoided looking at his face. She didn’t want to remember what he looked like.

  “Lot of good it did him,” Telisa said, but she started to work the opening clasp at the man’s neck.

  “Just don’t take a direct hit,” Magnus said. “It works pretty well against the nerve scramblers, too. Of course Shiny’s weapons… will pr
obably still kill us.”

  “He must hate us now.”

  Magnus shrugged. “Maybe. We have more important things to worry about than our popularity.”

  Telisa unzipped the dead man’s suit. She felt a shiver run down her spine as the head flopped to one side and a stream of fresh blood trickled out of one nostril. She exhaled and shook off a wave of nausea.

  “Sorry, pal, but you don’t need Momma Veer anymore,” she whispered.

  She wrenched the arms out of the skinsuit and then realized that the boots would have to come off first. While she struggled with the operation, Magnus picked over the bodies, taking a couple of grenades and a few electronic devices.

  “Can’t they trace us with that stuff?” Telisa asked.

  “Yes they can. And they can trace us without it as well, unless our theory about the countermeasures is right. Just hope that they’re after Shiny a bit more than us. Truth is, this may be it. The Seeker is a formidable ship, and its crew is elite.”

  “Joe also said something about the EM spectrum being noisy. More evidence that they’re running blind.”

  Telisa finally got the suit off the corpse and slipped into it. The flexible garment felt thick yet soft. Her legs fit well, though being a man’s suit, it compressed her breasts somewhat. She sealed the front with a slide zipper and anchored the front flap over it.

  “How’s it feel?” Magnus said.

  Without giving time for an answer, he skipped forward and punched her swiftly in the solar plexus.

  Telisa’s eyes grew wide, but then she smiled. The blow felt like that of an old man, a barely noticeable impact across her entire torso.

  “Very nice! Spreads the kinetic energy.”

  “Yep. Course I wouldn’t go jumping off any buildings, if I were you.”

  “No problem. Wow, maybe we can get out of here!”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, like I was saying, I think that Shiny has scrambled their stuff. If they don’t have links, they probably don’t know where we are.”

  “That would explain why they fired at us after the tremor; they were firing blind in response to an attack,” Magnus said. “That could be good, in a way. If they don’t know where we are, we’ll have a chance.”

  “Drop your weapons on the floor or I will fire,” a synthetic voice commanded.

  Magnus tensed. Then he dropped his slugthrower. Telisa slumped in defeat, letting her stunner fall from her hand.

  They turned slowly toward the voice. Telisa scanned through the cavern, trying to figure out where the voice came from. She saw only dead bodies, shattered equipment and the alien blocks.

  “There,” Magnus pointed.

  A black optical palette and the barrel of a projectile weapon resolved themselves to Telisa. She blinked. Part of a robot lay on the floor. Roughly a third of its surface had taken on the color of the cavern wall. Another part of it was colored like a green USNF uniform. Earlier, Telisa had mistaken it for a piece of human corpse. The rest of it was the silver and white of metal. Telisa had thought this part of the robot was just a shattered equipment case.

  “Five holies,” she breathed.

  Even though she could see the thing now, she felt it must somehow be damaged. The parts she saw didn’t move, and the robot’s head remained at the level of her knees.

  “It’s damaged,” Magnus said. Then his voice continued in her link.

  “It’s hurt. It might be bluffing.”

  “Stand against the wall and do not speak,” the machine ordered.

  Telisa grabbed the wrench-shaped artifact in the middle as she had done when it shocked her. She felt an odd sensation in her hand. The fine hairs on her skin were standing on end. This time she resolved to hold onto it longer. It might shock her, but she felt desperate to try and take out the robot.

  Her hand burned. It twitched. She felt herself losing control of the muscles in her arm.

  I hope this doesn’t—

  A loud snap sounded in the cavern. Telisa staggered, dropping the artifact to the floor. The smell of burning electronics came to her nose. Telisa got a signal in her head that meant her link was resetting. She realized with a sinking feeling that she had just sacrificed her link memory. All her link pictures of the base and Shiny were gone.

  “Cover your face!” Magnus said urgently.

  Telisa obeyed as he snapped up his rifle and thrust its end onto the optical palette of the damaged robot. The thing didn’t move. The bark of the slug thrower smashed into Telisa’s ears. She felt a spray of metal fragments hit her arm, but through the suit it felt like a light splatter of rain.

  “Okay, let’s move it,” Magnus said.

  Telisa glanced at the remains of the battle machine as she turned to follow. Smoke rose from several places on its body. A ragged black hole occupied the space where its optical sensors had been. Eerily, its skin continued to mimic the wall and the uniforms around it. Telisa suppressed a shudder and ran from the room.