The Trilisk Ruins Part 21

Magnus greeted her with his slugthrower 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 h.e.l.l 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, programmable. 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 a.s.suming that each frequency is a signal with an isolated stream of information on its own."

"Alright, 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 her maps in her head, looking at the layout of the parts of the base that she had explored. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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. But who knows."

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 the 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.l is a girl supposed to make a living if she can't even grab a choice alien weapon or two without dying?"

"Join the s.p.a.ce force, then use expensive scanners and robots to poke through the stuff for you," Magnus answered.

"That's what we need, some robots. Then we could send them in to grab all the good stuff for us."

"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 expanded the rules to cover ownership of robots. Secret groups with control of dangerous robots were routinely rooted out and exterminated by the s.p.a.ce force.

"Then we should build our own and keep them out in s.p.a.ce, like the rich corporation 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 s.p.a.ce."

Telisa sighed. 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?"

Magnus shrugged.

Affirmative. Affirmative.

Telisa's link brought up an image of the sphere they were in 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 c.o.c.kpit dominated the top of the machines. 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 b.u.t.tons arrayed around the circ.u.mference. 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 b.u.t.ton for each leg."

"I'd a.s.sume he would use a neural interface rather than b.u.t.tons. 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?"

Chapter Twenty Five.

Captain Relachik stared at the alien base in an artificial world painted in his mind's eye by the ship's sensors. The general shape of the base was known but the interior remained mostly blank. Only a few outer regions and corridors were part of the view, places where a few teams had attached sensor drones and managed to report back despite the alien EM scrambling.

"Download what we have to orient the ARs," Relachik said aloud and simultaneously transmitted over his command link. He wondered if he was about to commit his child to death. The a.s.sault robots were not known for their finesse. "I want the alien and the smugglers alive, if possible. Make sure the controller teams are on top of that."

There, maybe I've given her a chance.

"Aye, sir," came the reply from the officer next to him, Colonel Baker. Baker handled the AR teams and would coordinate with the Seeker's a.s.sault shuttle crews to deliver the deadly a.r.s.enal that the scout ship held in her metal belly.

"Prepare to launch within the hour," Relachik ordered. So far the encounter had been a stalemate. The scout ship's sensors were almost blinded by the amazing electronic warfare capabilities of the alien base, but they had managed to figure out that the outpost was damaged in some previous battle.

Send Lieutenant Hartlet into operations, he ordered over the command link and walked into a gla.s.sed-off side room of the bridge.

Most of Relachik's officers now believed that the base they had found had been crippled to the point where it had no external weaponry it could bring to bear on the Seeker. Relachik wasn't so sure. He thought that they might be right, or perhaps the aliens weren't so hostile as to attempt to destroy the Seeker on sight. He also knew that his daughter had been seen consorting with a live alien, a shock that took a while to fully absorb.

His daughter. Telisa had been more on his mind these past few days than since her childhood. Part of him wanted to forget about her. She had chosen her own path. But he couldn't ignore the fact that she was his daughter. He'd try to save her now. Then, he'd hunt her down next time he got back to Earth, and try to set her straight. But she'd gone so wrong this time... was she beyond saving? He ground his teeth in frustration.