“Let me make it easy for you,” Cilreth said. “Next time we vote to see if Cilreth2 goes on ice, you vote no.”
Aha.
“Deal,” Siobhan said.
“You’ll have your info within 24… minutes!” Cilreth said.
“Thanks.”
Siobhan was happy to make the deal. She still only asked for connections to their original Cilreth, though. She did not like the new one on some level she had not pinned down. Maybe it was some instinct that here was an unfairly superior competitor, or the knowledge a Trilisk could take her over at any time.
Okay, so my plan is in motion. But I need Telisa to buy into it. How should I sell it to her?
Siobhan started to think up a story, but then decided against it. Telisa had been a straight shooter with her, why not show her the same respect in return? Just come out and say it. Siobhan felt that Telisa might back her.
Siobhan got up and preened herself just a bit. She felt that a conversation this important should be incarnate. She sent a message ahead asking for an FTF.
She walked out and headed to Telisa’s rooms, thinking over what she would say. Telisa approved the meeting as Siobhan walked. She eventually arrived at a door mapped as Telisa’s private territory aboard the vast decks of the Clacker.
The metal door slid open and Telisa was standing behind it.
“Hello?” Telisa said. “Come on in.”
Her wounded eye always catches my attention first no matter how many times I see it. Her face was so pretty before.
Telisa’s rooms were beautiful. Siobhan had heard Telisa kept a vast workshop filled with alien artifacts she studied in her personal time. But all she saw today was a nice atrium and a small side room with drinks and a kitchenette. They sat down at the edge of the atrium. Across the way Siobhan saw a statue of Magnus. She looked away quickly and pretended not to notice.
“I want to go after a particular Trilisk,” Siobhan said. “I have business with one of these targets.”
“Which one?”
“Kagan Spero. I want him. I want that one.”
And I don’t care if the frackjammer is a Trilisk or a Terran.
“Oh. Spero. I’ve been so busy I didn’t notice that one… yah, okay, you got him.”
“Thank you, Telisa. I won’t forget this.”
“You know where he is?”
“I think so, and Cilreth is searching up some details for me.”
There was a delay.
Telisa must be doing some digging herself.
“That place is a fortress. We may have to just destroy it with a Vovokan weapon.”
“No. There are other people in there. Even if all his Spero people are despicable, there will be slaves there, too.”
Telisa took a deep breath. Siobhan knew what was coming.
“Believe me, I’ve lost sleep over this already and I haven’t even hurt people like this yet. But we can’t overthrow the Trilisks without hurting… without killing some innocent people. It just doesn’t work like that.”
Telisa looked like she was going to cry. Siobhan saw the depth of her pain.
Even if we succeed, she’ll be torn apart by guilt.
“The way I see it, I won’t feel guilty as long as I did what I had to do, but I took every effort possible to save as many as I could,” Siobhan said. “And that means going in and taking that bastard out with precision. If I fail, then call in the artillery. That way, I can live—or die—with whatever happens.”
“You’ll just die. Going up against a Trilisk by yourself?”
“Well, I thought that was the plan anyway? We have to take them out. I can use some of Shiny’s toys, too,” she said.
“Maybe,” Telisa said. “Make a plan. Let me know,” Telisa said.
Siobhan left Telisa’s rooms with a new mission in her heart. But it was not a new mission at all. It was the old mission, the one she had worked toward before she had discovered Parker Interstellar Travels.
Revenge.
She wanted to share her new excitement with someone.
Cilreth? Cilreth, and… Cilreth2. Hrm.
She stopped to think for a moment.
Caden.
She immediately felt nervous. Caden looked so perfect, and he was famous. How could she just saunter in and chat with a VR star?
He can’t possibly like me… I’m taller… my arms and legs are so long and clumsy, and he’s so graceful. Strong and dreamy.
Siobhan cursed at herself. How could she be afraid to do something so safe?
I’d rather climb into a missile tube and plunge into a star.
Siobhan started to walk toward Caden’s quarters. She looked down at her long legs eating up the ground with giant strides and tried to think of what to say.
He’s all ripped up over Arakaki’s death. He said she saved him. Maybe they were even lovers.
Abruptly Siobhan chickened out. She turned away.
Shiny.
She had never tried talking with Shiny much. Telisa seemed to adore him.
“Shiny?” Siobhan asked over her link.
“Significant fraction, portion, division of attention allocated to Siobhan.”
“What? Oh. Uhm, I am going to go and try and kill a Trilisk. Or a Terran. I need to kill someone.”
There was a long pause. At first, she thought she had lost whatever fraction of attention Shiny had given her.
“Purpose?”
“Revenge!”
“Proposal?”
“I need some kick ass Vovokan tech to make sure I succeed. I have to kill this Terran. There’s bad blood between us. Do you know what that means?”
Of course, he can just look it up if he doesn’t.
“Shiny equips Siobhan for assassination, termination, murder.”
“Yes! Please?”
“Delineate return offer.”
“What?”
“Describe Siobhan’s payment offer?”
Oh. He’s asking ‘what’s in it for me’.
“I don’t know. I don’t have much. The Terran I want to kill may be a Trilisk host. Your enemy, right?”
“Offer under consideration.”
Is that lack of enthusiasm normal for a Vovokan?
“And I could owe you one.”
Her offer sounded lame to her own ears. There was another pause.
“Agree, accept, deal.”
Chapter 6
Maxsym completed his project only days after the meeting. He felt a flush of pride.
Not many could have done this. Though part of the credit belongs to the Clacker and the Trilisk AI.
Maxsym had always been smart. Brilliant, some had said. But the pace of his innovation had always been stifled by analyses that took days, rules that stood in his way, and bureaucracy that was even worse. Not so on the Clacker.
Once Shiny and Cilreth had given him a start on the computers and allowed him to use a few prayers to the AI, he had found an amazing depth of chemical simulations. The virtual environments of the Vovokan ship could watch every molecule of a developing egg and speed up its hatching to a fraction of a second. He could run entire generations of hybrids through artificial worlds to see how they would fare. He could search through entire families of molecules and play them off against each other in virtual trials. Literally every reaction that occurred in a sample could be simulated and recorded for him to watch.
Of course all that was too much data for Maxsym to handle. But the machines around him were able to classify the reactions, give him aggregated rates of production, and show him the balance points of cyclical systems. On Earth, if Maxsym wanted to try out a crazy idea, it would take days. Here it took seconds.
Maxsym had decided to focus on something of interest to the team first. He wanted to show his thanks, and more importantly, he wanted to show them what he could do. He needed to secure his use of these resources for the foreseeable future, and that meant giving the PIT team an immediate return on their investment.
So, he dug into the biolog
y of the Terrans-as-Trilisk-hosts. Here, he had run into a construct so complex even the tools of the Clacker seemed inadequate to deal with it. Maxsym knew a lot about the human body, but these hosts were improved by so much it stunned him. He could spend years studying the optimizations built into the host bodies.
Fortunately for Maxsym, it was much easier to destroy than to create. He had found what he needed.
“Telisa?”
There was a delay. Then Telisa connected.
“Hi, Maxsym. What’s up?”
“I have a weapon we can use against the Trilisks.”
“Wow? Really? I’ll be right over.”
“No need,” Maxsym said. “I can brief you over the link.”
Maxsym winced. Will that insult her?
“I mean, at your convenience, online or incarnate,” he clarified.
“Oh. I would like to see it in person.”
“Ah. Yes. I haven’t made a deployment mechanism, so there’s nothing to see. Except an invisible, odorless gas that kills Trilisk hosts. It does so very quickly—within a few seconds—and paralyzes them immediately. They wouldn’t even have time to access neural interfaces, unless they have mental augmentation outside the Terran host that thinks much faster than we do.”
Which they might.
“Wow! That’s an amazing weapon! I had no idea you were… I didn’t expect anything from you so soon. So we can gas them.”
“I was thinking, specifically, we could use it on Skyhold,” Maxsym said.
“Ah, of course. An isolated environment. Of course, a space habitat that size…”
“Is a huge volume of air, yes. I’ve already produced enough for the mission. The Clacker is nothing short of amazing. There’s no limit to what I could accomplish here! It can record and classify a million chemical reactions in a sample and categorize them, then play them back for me. We can fabricate—”
“Yes. Tell me more about the gas, though. Focus on this task first.”
“Of course. I don’t know how to deploy it, though, I suspect someone else may surpass my abilities there.”
“We’ll do whatever it takes. Hrm. And… the effects on ordinary humans?”
“It’s toxic to ordinary humans as well, I’m afraid,” Maxsym said. “But a dose high enough to kill every Trilisk on Skyhold would likely only kill the weakest Terrans. Only the very young or old, in all likelihood. It depends upon individual constitution and genetic factors.”
There was a pause.
I’m well aware it is suboptimal…
“Thanks for doing this. We can definitely use the option. I need to think it over.”
“I understand,” Maxsym said. The connection dropped.
Maxsym was left to ponder the weapon he had made, and who it might kill.
***
Telisa cradled her head in her arms and closed her eyes. She sat in her huge bedroom on the Clacker with the lights down. Maxsym’s news should have made her feel better, but she felt more lost than before.
What are we doing?
Maxsym had given her a deadly tool to use against her enemies. Using it could cause collateral damage. How could she deploy such a thing knowing it could kill innocent Terrans on Skyhold?
This is where Magnus would tell me I have to act for the greater good, she thought. He would say someone has to have the strength to make the hard decisions. Because the universe is a cruel place.
But Magnus was not there. Telisa felt nothing but doubt and horror. She did not want to be the one to bring war to Sol.
I’ll take the weapon in myself. Scan and identify the Trilisks. Expose as few people as I can. Put some on shuttles or lock them into isolated rooms without unfiltered air. I could identify those most susceptible and protect them somehow.
Even as she thought it she knew it was not realistic. Giving the Trilisks any warning at all, even a minute’s worth, would mean probable failure of her attempt to strike them down in a lightning blow.
Is toppling the Trilisks worth the death of a kid? A grandmother?
Telisa had thought she knew the answer until she closed her eyes and envisioned people dying because of her.
Chapter 7
Kirizzo planned the invasion of Sol.
According to the huge amount of data he had collected, the defenses extended to the asteroid belt. New Space Force bases dotted the belt. There were also four large bases slightly above and below the ecliptic plane of the system to help defend Earth from threats arriving perpendicular to the plane of orbit. The bases switched sides every orbit, synchronized against each other to ensure at least one would be on each side at all times. While one pair was in the plane of Earth’s orbit, the other pair were at maximum distance above and below the planetary ecliptic.
Kirizzo had seven ships to attack the Trilisks not counting the Clacker, which the PIT team used. Despite their size, Kirizzo could completely hide them from the Terran scanning technology by any of a number of means, from electromagnetic cloaking to hacking the Terran radar systems. The Vovokan had been lurking on the Terran network for so long, he knew more about it than the Terrans themselves. Only a handful of weak AIs stood between him and total domination of their network.
In terms of firepower, any two of his seven ships could dish out more joules than the entire Terran home fleet. His point defenses could protect him from the thousands of orbital weapons platforms, if they even saw him. Finally, his ground forces, though very limited, could handle any mission on the surface he had to issue.
The Terrans were not much of a threat. But what of the Trilisks?
The Trilisks would be impossible to defeat if they still held their legendary powers. Kirizzo did not think they still did. He believed their own war had caused them to lose a lot of their technology. Otherwise, they would openly rule the Terrans and a dozen other races, and the war would be raging with the Trilisks’ enemies. That did not seem to be the case, though perhaps the Trilisks conducted war at a level so advanced Kirizzo could not even recognize it.
Kirizzo had the columns and the AI. But he feared the Trilisks might know how to access this pirated technology better than he did. He would ask the AI to reduce its range dramatically, and conduct his operations far away from Earth. He had no guess as to the range they might be able to detect and access the columns. While planning to use ask AI to hide them, another thought presented itself.
There was a Vovokan idiom which meant to turn a problem into a weapon. Kirizzo thought it might be possible in this case. If the Trilisks decided they were outmatched and wanted to flee the system, would some of them access the columns? A quick switch of bodies might prove useful. A Trilisk might seek to return to a native body if they no longer needed to appear Terran.
Then Kirizzo could blast them into atoms with a powerful explosion.
Within the bowels of the Thumper, new machine’s designs flitted across the networks. Thousands of pieces of machinery flowed to and fro through the fine sand of his distribution network. In the center of his ship, near the Trilisk columns, the pieces marched together. As the pieces joined to form larger and more complex systems, the machines working on them grew from the microscopic to the macroscopic, until finally huge cutting and lifting machines were complete.
The robotic work force then set about moving the Trilisk columns out into a series of new smaller ships—Kirizzo’s deadly Trilisk traps. The ships had powerful drive systems which were really just disguised bombs. Their components were subtly designed with an eye toward generating atom-shattering explosions.
The bait columns started their move outward, though Kirizzo kept some columns back. One column in particular remained of interest to him. It had produced copies of the PIT team, and he suspected it still held complete memory of them. That bargaining tool could prove useful if his plan came to fruition.
Or if it went horribly wrong.
***
Telisa’s link told her it was about time for her meeting with Shiny. She jumped up toward the ceiling and
dropped her hands to the floor twenty times in a rapid cycle to increase her alertness.
I have a scheduled meeting with an alien. Think about that.
She had accomplished so much. There was just a moment of satisfaction before thoughts of Magnus returned to smash it. She saw him in her mind, thought of the bristly feel of the stubble on his face. She had often teased him about his shoddy use of depilatory, though she secretly liked the feel of it. The image faded. There was only the sense of loss.
Not now. Just work.
Shiny connected on time. Telisa sent a message.
“Hi Shiny. What do we have in terms of Terran defenses at Sol?”
Shiny provided a pointer to a large body of data. Telisa opened it within her PV. A vast map of the solar system appeared with Space Force bases and ships marked in red. Telisa rotated it and zoomed in on one in the asteroid belt. A force of thirty ships were stationed there, with another two under construction in an automated factory.
Thirty ships out of a total of… four hundred deployed around Sol.
“We’ve been busy back home,” she said. “Any signs of Trilisk improvements?”
“Technological development, breakthrough, innovation curve strong, shaped, accelerated. Possible drivers: mass xenophobia, alien artifacts, Trilisk influence, increased use of artificial intelligences.”
“Can you handle everything without hurting anyone?”
“Casualties minimal. Terran fleet can be avoided, disabled.”
“Like you disabled the Bismarck?”
“More energy efficient procedures, approaches, methods. Network infiltration, infection, disruption allows software disabling, paralysis, delay.”
“I know this is a long shot, but… what if Sol is attacked at the same time? Can you ‘un-disable’ the Terran ships quickly if they have to fight?”
“Likely. Counter-proposal: Sol defended, protected, guarded by Shiny fleet.”
“Ah, yes, I guess that makes sense. How many ships do you have?”
“Seven.”
“Wow. Okay. Be careful, Shiny. Each Space Force man and woman that gets killed is less chance for an optimal outcome. Your return on this goes down, you understand?”
The Trilisk Revolution (Parker Interstellar Travels) Page 4