Chapter 5
Telisa looked at her packs of equipment in the cargo bay. The four crew members had assembled to prepare for the hike to the odd power source they had detected. A small subset of the equipment would have to be selected; there was too much for them to carry it all.
“So we just have to decide what to bring,” she said.
“Well, all the cold-weather gear is out. It won’t be getting cold here for a long time, even at night,” Thomas said.
“Okay, that makes it a little easier,” Telisa said. “How much food?”
“It’ll take a day to get there. I’d say a ten-day pack would be fine. What do you think, Magnus?”
Magnus nodded. “A ten-day pack should do. We can carry less water. There’ll be water sources out there that we can use in a pinch.”
Telisa assembled a food pack for ten days. She then considered the remaining packs.
“The terrain isn’t mountainous. Climbing gear stays,” she noted.
Jack nodded. “Yes. I’ll take some light digging stuff. Since the Space Force is looking for us, we should wear the active camo suits.”
“Okay, you’ve got digging stuff. I’ll take some cutters and a little explosive, in case we have to let ourselves in,” Thomas said.
Telisa put on a camo suit over her ordinary jumpsuit. Jack and Thomas did the same. The camo suits shifted color moodily, trying to emulate the drab gray of the deck and the flat black of their equipment packs. Telisa knew from reading the manual of her camo suit that they broke up the wearer’s heat signature as well, directing any radiant heat straight down into the ground. The suits would make them much harder to spot in an aerial or orbital scan.
She looked at Magnus expectantly. “You’re not wearing one?”
“Momma Veer already took care of that,” Thomas said.
Magnus nodded. His suit slowly turned gray and black like the other camo suits.
Telisa asked her link for background information on the phrase “Momma Veer.” She had heard soldiers say that before, but she had never bothered to learn exactly what it meant. The information came through from the ship’s cache, feeding a visual report back into her brain. Apparently soldiers were occasionally supplied with Veer Industries equipment when the government ran short of its own supplies. Oddly enough, the Veer equipment had often proved superior to government issue. The soldiers used the nickname “Momma Veer” for the company that provided for them when the UNSF could not.
She looked up the price for the famous Veer military skinsuit. At around 2000 ESC, it was a very expensive piece of equipment. Her eyebrows rose.
“For that much money, it ought to, I guess,” she said.
“Worth every credit,” Magnus said, patting the material over his chest.
Telisa hefted her primary pack over her shoulder and grabbed a second bag of food concentrate. The others carried similar loads. She saw that Magnus had insisted on carrying his massive projectile weapon as well. Telisa had her stunner and a pair of good long knives—just in case. She smiled to herself. It was not long ago that she had thought Magnus odd for carrying weapons; now she had three herself. Apparently being a smuggler hunted by the UNSF could change your attitude pretty fast. Or maybe it was the training. She had used knives many times in simulated combat now, so she felt vulnerable without them.
“I don’t feel like I could carry a whole lot of stuff back,” Telisa said. “I guess we’ll have less food and water to carry by then, though.”
“If we hadn’t been detected, we could have made better arrangements,” Thomas explained. “As it is, we’ll just have to play mule. Trilisk artifacts are so valuable on the black market that we could still carry enough to make us rich several times over if we find the right spot.”
Jack looked grim. “But I’m willing to write this one off if we have to. If we make it out, then we can try again.”
Telisa was glad to see that even Jack was ready to place safety over greed. She walked with the others to the exit.
The loading ramp was extended from the belly of the ship. Everyone sauntered out onto the lush forest floor, absorbing the alien scenery. The ship had cleared a small area of the forest, felling trees with the eddies of its gravity spinner. The plant life looked spiny, like species in arid areas on Earth, but they grew in a jungle-like density. The tiny expedition group saw a wide variety of plants, but only a few animals. The creatures appeared to be crabs or slugs that moved slowly through the trees.
“Wow, look at that,” Thomas said and pointed.
Telisa looked into the forest where he indicated. She saw that a thickset tree with a bare trunk and a wide, spiky crown supported an identical tree on top of it. The roots of the piggybacking tree intertwined with the crown of its supporter.
“There are several of them doing that,” Magnus said. “They must be getting some kind of competitive advantage.”
“Maybe the crown collects water. It’s very wide,” Telisa said. “The tree on top sends water down to its own roots, and the extra heads down to the tree below it. They deprive water from those below.”
“Or maybe the top one even helps feed the one supporting it, who knows?” Thomas said. “The supported ones probably get more sunlight.”
Jack nodded. “Well, if you’re this fascinated by the damn trees, I can’t wait to see you guys when we find the ruins.”
“They won’t spot this mess from orbit?” Telisa asked, looking back at the damage their landing had caused.
“Got it covered,” Thomas said. “Looks the same from down here, but I have us cloaked from above. Our equipment should fool any but the most sophisticated sensors. If they don’t have a scouting vessel in orbit, we should be hidden for now. Well, unless some scientist just happens to have a specialized satellite for some experiment that can notice an anomaly.”
Telisa didn’t comment on that. Apparently there were risks everywhere that she had not realized they would be taking. It must be part of the routine for an interplanetary artifact smuggler. She looked around the landing site again, wondering if there were predators out there. She hoped the noise and destruction of the landing had scared any bigger creatures away.
The group moved into the forest. Telisa looked over her shoulder at the ship before the view became blocked by vegetation. The fat ovoid shape had settled just below the surrounding treetops. She wondered if it would still be there when they got back.
What would happen if we become marooned here? Telisa wondered. Could we survive? Would I even want to live in such a desolate place?
She checked her link. The nearby ship, her equipment, and her companions’ links were the only devices broadcasting services here. The planet was truly empty wilderness.
Life without link services? Ughh.
Thomas indicated the direction and then Magnus took the lead. Telisa asked for a link from Thomas and got it. Now she could see a map of the surrounding landscape in her mind’s eye, with the destination clearly marked. They fell into a line behind Magnus, with Telisa in the rear.
“Stay alert,” Magnus said over his link. “The flora and fauna are largely unknown. If we get in over our heads, there won’t be anyone to save us.”
Telisa acknowledged the message and dug out her stunner. She attached it to the webbing on her belt. Normally the webbing held onto the stunner firmly, but if she touched the weapon with her hand, it weakened so that she could tear the stunner away easily. Then the separated fibers would intertwine again as good as new. She scanned the surrounding vegetation, searching for anything that might be dangerous.
Looking at the native trees made Telisa itch. Their trunks were covered in so many tiny spines they almost looked hairy. The spiny leaves added to their shaggy greenish appearance. She saw now that some of the spines were soft, liquid-filled leaves, but a few of the plants did have truly sharp spikes like cacti. She saw three more of the piggybacking trees, this time arranged with two specimens leaning together on the bottom to support another on their he
ads.
The spines did not seem to inhibit the native lifeforms’ ability to make their homes in the trees. Telisa saw a large variety of mollusk-like creatures oozing around, squeezing between the spines. Many sported extra protection of some sort, mostly flat plates of armor or complete spherical shells. Telisa got a good look at one hanging from a nearby limb. The creature was a round ball with holes placed randomly around it, from which tiny green legs poked out and retracted as needed. Telisa committed some images of the trees and the creatures to her link memory.
The hike continued. When Telisa began to sweat, she opened the vents in her camo suit. Her every stride pumped air over her torso and sent it down to vents at her feet. Despite the added cooling, she felt the strain of walking on the uneven ground, pushing through the heavy foliage.
The hours went by quickly while Telisa occupied herself with making her way through the alien ecosphere. She saw several more odd local creatures but nothing larger than a small dog. They broke for a light lunch at midday, with the alien sun blazing down directly overhead. The trees afforded some protection, their spines blocking a great deal of the light. Still, the humid forest seemed like the inside of an oven during the middle of the day. Telisa drank a lot of water. She wondered if they should have taken the trip during the night, but the thought of trying to make their way in the darkness with all sorts of odd creatures creeping about was not pleasant either.
After eating and resting for half an hour, they returned to the trek with a vengeance. Telisa had time to think about how close she really was to discovering new Trilisk artifacts. At one time the Trilisks had actually lived upon this planet and created installations or even cities. A race more advanced than Terrans, yet strangely absent from the current galactic stage. What had happened to them? What could have possibly caused their civilization to be destroyed? These questions and more drove her forward.
They forged on for several more hours. Telisa was glad she had been working out regularly, even if the exercise was quite different. She wondered how long Thomas and Jack could continue this level of exertion, although she figured Magnus could probably outlast them all. Her questions were answered when Jack spoke up.
“Okay, let’s take another break,” Jack said. “This hiking is killing me.”
Telisa was exhausted. The sun was no longer visible above them, although the light level told her that it had not set.
“Are we there yet?” asked Telisa, smiling at her delivery of the classic question.
Thomas frowned. “Actually we’re barely halfway. I overestimated the speed we could make out here. I suppose we should find a spot to hole up while it’s still light.”
Magnus nodded. “We could sleep in the trees.”
“That would be safer on Earth,” said Jack. “Here, who knows? Maybe the trees are more dangerous than the ground.”
“The ground should be okay, unless this planet has some particularly nasty nocturnal predators,” Magnus said. “Unfortunately, we can’t use a campfire without risking detection.”
“How about over there?” Telisa suggested, pointing to a slight rise in the terrain.
They moved over to the area she had indicated and set their packs on the ground so they could prepare the makeshift camp. Everyone arranged their tiny one-person sleeping tubes in a circle with the zippered entrances facing inward toward each other. Magnus and Telisa gathered a bunch of arm-length needles that had fallen from nearby trees. They arranged the needles facing outward around the camp perimeter.
Telisa looked at the failing light filtering through the trees. “Only a minute or two to spare, I’d say.”
“Yes, just in time,” Jack agreed. “Should we have someone awake all the time? Take shifts staying awake?”
“If anything comes around, I’ll hear it,” Magnus said, looking at the camp perimeter. “I’m a light sleeper. I think setting watches at this point would be overly paranoid. We have the spines, the tents, body armor, and a fair amount of firepower.”
They each crawled into their sleeping modules and sought sleep. Telisa opened a vent to let fresh air in and then sprawled out, resting her aching muscles. She fell asleep quickly.
At some point later, Telisa bolted instantly awake. Something was wrong. She listened for a moment and heard something breaking branches and rustling in the leaves of the forest floor nearby. She sat upright, reaching for her pack. She brought out her stunner and unzipped the opening of her tiny sleeping tube.
Magnus stood in the center of their little clearing, holding a flashlight pointed out into the forest. His slug thrower was level with the ground, the barrel pointed out into the darkness toward the noises. Jack and Thomas seemed content to watch from their tent flaps. Telisa scrambled to find her own flashlight. The noises outside were getting closer. She forced herself to remain calm and found the light.
Telisa clambered out of her tube and stood to Magnus’s right, clutching her stunner. She added her light to Magnus’s and saw some kind of bluish tentacle waving through the brush at the height of her chest. She took a deep breath and forced herself not to shoot.
The thing pushed aside Magnus’s sleeping tube with another blue tentacle. A huge shell pushed through the spiny branches, revealing the rest of the creature. It had spiny legs and about a dozen tentacles. It moved slowly out into the clearing, its tentacles wavering as it searched for the next shrub.
Suddenly, Magnus yelled maniacally and kicked the ground in front of him, sending a bit of forest floor debris flying at the creature. The thing flinched away, moving in slow motion, and then it altered its course. It pushed its way through the spines on the perimeter and crawled away.
Everyone let their tension drop. Then Thomas started to laugh. The laughter spread. Even Magnus started to chuckle.
“Well, I guess we showed it,” Thomas said. “That’ll teach it to disturb our sleep.”
“I don’t think I can go back to sleep after that,” Telisa said.
Magnus nodded. “I probably can’t either, but I don’t want to try and walk in the dark. Let’s just try our best.”
Telisa crawled back into her tent. She could still hear the giant shelled thing moving away through the brush. She tried to go back to sleep. She tossed and turned for a while. Her legs itched. When she slipped a hand into her camo suit to scratch, she felt several small bumps on her leg. She dug out the flashlight and examined herself in the tent. Her legs were covered in welts. Some of them had tiny splinters in them.
She picked at the wounds for a short while, convincing herself that they were nothing but a minor irritation. Apparently some of the plant’s spines were able to penetrate the chameleon suit. By this time Telisa had become groggy again, so she turned off the flashlight and went back to sleep.
In the morning they repacked everything and moved out about fifteen minutes after sunrise. Telisa’s legs were stiff, and walking sent shooting pains through them for the first few minutes. Her pain must have been minor compared to Jack and Thomas, who were complaining loudly.
“Oh, my legs! They’re gonna fall off!” Thomas groaned.
“Mine too. And be careful, some of these spines can go through our suits,” Jack said.
“Yes, my legs are full of them,” Telisa agreed.
Thomas nodded. “Me too,” he said.
“How bad is it? Do you feel sick?” Magnus asked.
“They just seem like splinters I got on Earth,” Telisa said. “What, you didn’t even get one?”
Magnus shook his head. “Momma Veer…”
“Argh! I should have known.”
Not only did he seem unaffected by yesterday’s hike, but he had been spared the needling as well. Telisa shook her head. Somehow none of it surprised her. In the short time since she had met him, he had given her the impression of invulnerability. It was not the kind of bragging, pretend-out-loud sort of toughness, but a quiet, understated acceptance of the world’s problems without slowing down. Telisa found herself attracted by it, but she put
those thoughts aside again. There were the artifacts and getting back alive…
They spent more hours moving through the forest as in the previous day. Telisa tried to stay alert through it all, even though the constant scanning became tedious as they moved through the forest. She challenged herself to spot as many of the local creatures as she could. Sometimes the things would ignore the intruders; other times they flashed into their shells, falling back onto a lower branch or even to the ground.
For the first time Telisa spotted a disastrous-looking arrangement of the trees that grew atop each other. A single strong specimen drooped under the weight of two piggybackers. It seemed that the behavior didn’t always work as planned. Telisa wondered if somewhere, a chain of three or four of them stacked on each other extended high above the surrounding forest… at least until the whole arrangement came crashing down.
Telisa almost asked about their progress but realized that she could check for herself. She examined the map in her mind, her current position indicated by Thomas’s navigation equipment. She could see that they neared the site of the unusual power emanations. Magnus must have been cognizant of the same thing, as he slowed their progress, scanning the area ahead carefully.
“I can see a ruin directly ahead,” he reported.
Everyone followed him closely, eager to see for themselves. Telisa made out a large gray building overgrown with the local trees and shrubs. Telisa could not tell what it was made of. It surface remained smooth despite its age. She guessed it could be constructed of some metal or ceramic.
They approached one seamless wall and then paralleled its course. When they turned the corner, Telisa saw that the wall had been breached. Some kind of root system or underground plant had shattered the wall long ago. The hole was easily large enough to climb through.
Magnus fished out his flashlight and peeked inside. He turned around and shrugged.
“Looks alien to me. Maybe Telisa should take a look.”
Telisa took her own flashlight and stepped up to the opening.
The disk of light fell upon dusty pieces of equipment larger than a Terran. The materials and angles looked right for Trilisk origin, but the dust was too thick and she was too far away to be sure.
“I’m getting a closer look,” she said, and without waiting for a reply, she switched the flashlight to her left hand, unclipped her stunner with her right, and went in.
Jack and Thomas walked up to her as she brushed the dust off the nearest device. It did not seem to have any levers or buttons, which was a good sign right off. Trilisk artifacts never did. Most human theories on the subject held that they were used through mental interfaces. There were flat black plates built into the gray metal surface. That was another good sign. The plates were display ports, made to show information about the state of the device, like the front panel of a chronometer. Presumably the readouts could provide their information via a mental interface as well, but the Trilisks seemed to prefer having the panels on their equipment too. No one really knew why.
It looked dead. Perhaps all she had to do was find out how to activate it. Unfortunately, Trilisk devices never had anything as simple and primitive as a power switch.
“Amazing. We’re the first Terrans to look at this. Real Trilisk artifacts.”
“So it is Trilisk. Any idea what it does?” asked Thomas.
“I have no idea. But I need to—”
“Let’s take a tour of the place first,” Jack suggested. “Don’t settle on anything just yet. That thing you’re looking at is probably too heavy for all of us to even pick up. You see what I’m saying?”
Telisa looked up from the mysterious cluster of equipment. Magnus was across the room, looking into the end of a giant tube that descended into the floor.
“I guess you’re right. I want to look at everything, of course, but our time is limited. And as you pointed out, we can’t carry this thing.”
Thomas nodded. “We’re excited too. I’m glad you can see the bigger picture, though. A Trilisk can opener could net thousands of ESC. We don’t need a big piece of factory equipment or whatever this is.”
Actually I’m the one looking at the bigger picture, Telisa thought. Trilisk secrets can help all Terrans everywhere. But if I do get rich, I could afford my own expeditions…
Telisa scanned the floor for something smaller. Dirt and dead vegetation lay scattered around the floor.
“This goes deeper into the installation,” Magnus said, calling to the others from the mouth of the giant tube. The tube emerged from the floor at an angle, then leveled out. The end of the tube opened a meter above the floor.
“And that appears to be the only other way to go,” Jack said. “So let’s follow him.”
Magnus extended a hand and helped the others up into the tube. Telisa took out her flashlight and shone it farther into the round tunnel. The passageway was empty. It extended as far as she could see, angling off to the right and descending deeper into the ground. It gave Telisa a rather eerie feeling. She did not normally suffer from claustrophobia, but being in a dark, dusty underground tube made her a little nervous. Their ignorance held great danger. For all she knew, they could be walking into a giant machine that could turn on and grind them up at any moment.
Magnus trudged forward and Telisa followed. The tube curved in a long spiral, leading them deeper into the planet. Telisa wondered why such a thing had been built. The answer would not suggest itself without more information. Understanding aliens could be a tough business.
They came around a last curve and the tube ended with a metal rim around its entire circumference, with a flat black hole through the center large enough for a hippo.
They walked up to the rim. Both Magnus and Telisa shined their lights into the hole, trying to see beyond the low barrier.
“It’s not just dark,” Jack noted. “It’s pitch black. The light’s not going in there.”
“No reflected light is coming out,” Thomas said. “Our ship’s stealth device uses technology a little like this to shield us from orbital scanning.”
Telisa walked forward, pointing her light at the edge of the zone of blackness. The light just ended at the border, giving no reflections.
“It’s wonderful!” Telisa exclaimed. “And beyond our current technology. We can’t make a blackfield of this efficiency, can we?”
“That’s not all,” Magnus said. His eyes had a faraway look. Telisa realized he was accessing the mental interface of his military scanner. “There aren’t any neutrinos or gravitons emerging from it either.”
Thomas whistled. “I wish we had equipment that could check for other particles. Surely it wouldn’t be that perfect…”
Telisa looked at Jack. “If we could bring whatever it is that generates this field back with us, it would be enough to pay for the whole trip,” she told him. “Enough to make us all super rich.”
Jack looked around the circular perimeter of the opening. “Let’s try. The sooner we can grab something really valuable and get off this planet, the better.”
Magnus shrugged. “Stick your finger through,” he suggested.
“You’re nuts. What if it takes it clean off? Or instantly kills all the cells in it?”
Magnus rolled his eyes. “Then we’ll grow it back when we get to Earth,” he said exasperatedly.
He walked past Thomas and flicked the end of his little finger through the blackfield.
“It’s fine,” he said, holding up the finger for all to see. Then he stuck his arm through the blackness. He pulled it back, moving the arm and testing the feel of it. “Seems harmless so far,” he said.
“Wait a minute and see if it bruises,” Jack suggested. But Magnus had already walked through.
Telisa moved up to the edge of the field. “Magnus? Can you hear me?”
There was no answer. She examined the edge of the opening carefully, looking for any details they might have missed. Telisa didn’t like the idea of just walking through to see what happen
ed. She valued her life a little more than that. After a few more moments, Magnus stepped back from beyond the field.
“Come in here. You’re not going to believe this.”