One shuddering breath later she looked again. She grabbed a spine and moved it a bit. The spines had hook tips, but they were caught in her suit, not her flesh. The last layer had protected her from the attack, but the biological spear hooks were caught on her suit.

She grabbed the one sticking from her chest and pulled. It was stuck firmly.

I didn"t bring the d.a.m.n machete. Holy Ent.i.ties...

She did not lament long about the lack of a machete. She was still alive, and that was what was important. Cilreth came to her senses and considered her other equipment. There should be a smaller knife in her pack. She looked around for other creatures, but didn"t see anything threatening. She flicked a green worm away in disgust.

Her pack slid off her back as she lay there, allowing her to search for the knife. She found the tool, then cut away the tendrils. They were strong but no match for the sharp alloy.

I should have gone back to the Clacker. I should never have left it.

The scare had been severe, but she had been lucky. She tried to calm her nerves. Telisa might still be depending on her. Once Cilreth cut herself free, she tried to work the spines out of her protection. As she worked she ran the suit diagnostic. It reported some damage but judged itself to remain 95 percent effective.

Once she dropped the spines free on the ground before her, thoughts of returning to the ship a.s.sailed her again. But she decided to keep looking for Telisa.

How much worse could it get? I don"t want to find out.

She walked toward the next corner with her stunner in her hand. Her gaze even flitted upward occasionally, looking for anything lurking on the roof. The other wall of the building had one grille opening, but the grille was missing.

"Yes! Wait. Who did that?"

Cilreth checked over her shoulder, then took out a flashlight. She directed the powerful beam into the entrance. She saw just another ruined Konuan room. Sc.r.a.ps of cloth or paper, a few old plant stalks, and a small rock carved into something. Something with three arms and three legs.

Creepy.

Cilreth knelt down and slid through the entrance. She paused to let her eyes adjust. She examined the little statuette again.

Wait. That"s important. It shows they knew the Trilisks were here. Either that, or it"s a bizarre coincidence. If a child has twenty toy monsters, what are the chances one of them accidentally looks like the alien race living below her? Focus, Cilreth. Telisa needs you.

She checked her tunnel map in her link. Straight ahead. The grille that direction was missing, too.

Someone else has done this. But it looks like it was a long time ago.

She crawled through to the next room, and the next. All she saw was rotten garbage and a few old pieces of oxidized metal. She kept an eye out for more little statues, but she did not catch sight of anything similar. She came to the room above the tunnel.

The center of the room held a circular opening leading straight down. Just like where she had been separated from Telisa. As soon as she saw it, Cilreth nervously checked the ceiling. She started to shake.

Dammit, dammit, dammit. I"m such a d.a.m.n coward.

She turned her stealth suit on to calm down. It helped a bit. The suit still had a lot of juice. She decided to leave it on as a crutch, at least until it showed a third of its energy store was expended. She would use it now to get a grip, but she would make sure and leave plenty for if, or when, she really needed it.

I"m not really an explorer. I"m just a private investigator. Of the deskbound type.

Cilreth had a smart rope in her pack. She took it out with her suit"s ghostly outline service turned on in her PV, to help orient herself while invisible. The rope anch.o.r.ed itself and prepared to bring her down to the tunnel below.

She took a deep breath and descended.

At the bottom, Cilreth pulled the sniper rifle off her shoulder. She activated the scope with her link and flipped through various low-light options. She saw the tunnel ahead in various frequencies of light, but none of them revealed any potential dangers.

She followed the long, smooth tunnel. She kept flipping through low-light settings until she saw a light ahead. It came from a larger room at the end. She slowed as she approached. No sounds disturbed the long tunnel.

Cilreth raised the rifle before her and took one step at a time. The room looked smooth walled and of advanced make, as if constructed of one piece of metal or plastic. There was no dust. Everything there looked brand new. The room had three pillars extending from floor to ceiling. Each column was black and silver, wide, way too thick for her to wrap her arms around. In fact, she felt threatened by the fact she couldn"t see what might be hiding behind them. Two other tunnels exited the room.

Cilreth walked over to the nearest pillar. "Telisa, where the h.e.l.l are you? I don"t know anything about Trilisk stuff."

Cilreth examined the ma.s.sive pillar. It was way overbuilt, simply thicker than a metal pillar would have to be to support the ceiling. The other three pillars were the same thickness. Cilreth carefully touched the surface. The metal was smooth but it didn"t feel warm or cold.

"How can this be human body temperature? Ridiculous," she noted aloud. She tapped the surface. Did it sound hollow? She wasn"t sure.

What"s in there?

Cilreth felt a vibration. There was a sound. A low humming. She stepped away.

Suddenly the top of the pillar was dropping. Cilreth realized the surface had been moving from the moment she felt the vibration, but it had been so smooth she hadn"t seen it moving. In the next second the top had dropped almost to the level of her head. Cilreth took several steps back and aimed her heavy laser.

What am I shooting at?

The pillar"s outer clasp continued to drop. In another couple of seconds, she would know.

A clear tube had been revealed beyond the outer wall of the column. The last bit of the sheath sunk into the floor. It was filled with...

"Ugh," she grunted. "What is that c.r.a.p? Green moss?"

The inside of the tube had been stuffed with a fluffy green material. The ma.s.s must have been more than her own weight, unless it was extremely light. The color was darker than the plants above, she decided. But the closer she looked, the more she realized the ma.s.s had shape.

A ma.s.sive, three-legged, three-armed shape.

By the Five!

Cilreth"s hands wavered wildly. She dropped the barrel of her compact rifle lower, then looked around the room in case she had been so taken aback that something had approached unnoticed. But it was only her, her two attendant spheres, the three covered pillars, and the ma.s.sive, fuzzy green derelict in the tube.

If Telisa was running from that thing, she may have hidden in one of these. s.h.i.t. She may be suffocating in one right now. She could be in one of the other three!

She took a deep breath and tried to gather her wits yet again. Her shaking subsided. The thing in the tube, Trilisk or not, looked very dead. Rather crumpled toward the bottom of the tube and utterly still. Had the Trilisks looked like that in life?

Cilreth walked over to another of the ma.s.sive cylinders.

"So, how did I do that?"

She touched the pillar. Then she spoke quietly, "What"s inside?"

The hum returned. The pillar was opening.

This is madness. How can the Trilisks know how to interpret the brain of a Terran and open on command? It"s not like vastly different creatures across the galaxy could possibly have any universal wiring or patterns that would allow a machine to simply- This time the clear cylinder revealed was empty. It lit up with a violet outline of a human brain. The walls of the tube rotated with thousands of glowing symbols. Even as Cilreth watched, the brain pulsed with activity. She watched flashes of light dart here and there through the brain as the symbols danced across the surface of the tube.

A brain. My brain? It is showing me...it has a.n.a.lyzed me, read me; it understands me as easily as I can read a network service driver...

Cilreth realized she was standing, mouth open, weapon dangling from her hand like a mesmerized idiot.

"Telisa. Where"s Telisa?" she asked the pillar.

The display shifted. A new shape appeared. It was a flat, complex creature. The rendering of the creature was transparent to display some of its inner workings. An apparent nervous system flashed green. Cilreth couldn"t see any centralized brain; its nerves were laid out in a grid like some kind of well-organized electronics project.

"What? Telisa. Where is Telisa?"

The display didn"t change. Cilreth looked at the creature. It was disgusting. A living carpet with a hundred crab legs. It had four foldable antennae on top and two long, sharp-ended drinking tubes tucked underneath its body like huge fangs.

That is nasty! It must be one of our Konuan.

"Show me Cilreth," she said as a test. The Terran brain display returned. There was no discernable change in the display. The brain continued to hum with activity. A few diagrams flashed by too quickly for her to understand.

Cilreth tried to reach Magnus. She couldn"t get through. She prepared a message and told her link to send it as soon as any connection opened to Shiny or Magnus.

"I"ve found a series of complex metal tube machines. They are large enough to be used as a hiding spot. Telisa could be inside one. We should deploy some scouts to search for more of them," she recorded. Then she attached a target signature and coordinates of the device before her.

Shiny can"t get our links working too soon, she thought.

Chapter 16.

Kirizzo lurked within his enormous s.p.a.ce fortress and spied on the Terrans thousands of kilometers below. His powerful sensor arrays allowed him to see a good part of the activity, though he couldn"t see into the tunnels below the city, as they somehow blocked his scans. He believed the lower tunnels were most likely built by Trilisks. The Konuan buildings blocked some of his information, but not all. He watched both the small group allied with him and the larger group he had discovered later.

The small group was easy to observe. They had twenty scout robots that he could use to keep tabs on them even inside the surface buildings. Everywhere they went, there were always a few of the scouts nearby. The Telisa-Magnus bond remained unbroken, and in fact, Magnus refused to initiate any pairing rituals with the new Terran female. Kirizzo felt this was likely due to her age, which was at the twilight of Terran fertility.

This group"s loyalty had become almost agonizing. At this point, Kirizzo hadn"t invested as much as he could have in the relationship. Had he known it would last this long, he would have put more into it from the beginning. Yet doing so now seemed to be an investment doomed to fail. In a way, the longer cooperation/compet.i.tion cycles Terrans used made the inevitable betrayal all the more painful. Kirizzo would have to start all over again once someone turned. And he kept putting off more investment, expecting the break to happen any time now, yet the alliance went on and on.

He had studied Terran alliances. He knew they fragmented and dissolved. Yet this one endured. What was he missing? It was almost out of a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic sense of morbid curiosity that he allowed it to continue.

Their initial searches hadn"t uncovered anything of Trilisk origin. Kirizzo had resolved to start looking for clues from orbit. Trilisk equipment would leave clues he might be able to detect from great distances.

But instead he had discovered the large group of Terrans sharing the ruins. Their presence interested him, as the group was obviously interested in masking their presence from orbit. Kirizzo would not have been surprised to see a small settlement, but here was a group that hid by the ruins. Most likely it was another band of smugglers.

A group larger, more organized, and possibly better equipped than his current allies, it was also harder to glean information about.

Oh, the agony. Now he had a real reason to switch modes with the current Terran group. He should make an overture, investigate subtly whether or not these new smugglers might want to join him for mutual benefit.

What were the repercussions of a mistake? He had no homeworld to lose, but Telisa, Magnus, and Cilreth did know about his new base of operations and the Trilisk AI he had left there. What resources could they bring to bear against it? If they told the Terran s.p.a.ce force about it, what might their fellow Terrans commit to recovering his treasures?

The larger group below seemed to be set up in a highly defensive posture. They had a perimeter put up, guarded by war machines and mobile sensor units on a high state of alert. This group expected trouble, or they had already experienced it. The first thing that came to mind was that they had a.s.sumed this formation upon the arrival of his sister ship holding the Terrans, but close a.n.a.lysis showed that the perimeter had been up for a much longer time.

There was movement in and out of the tunnels. This helped to confirm they were smugglers. That and the lack of any presence of the stagnant Terran government ent.i.ty, the UNSF. These Terrans sought the same things he did-Trilisk information and technology. Kirizzo modified some search parameters. His scan picked up two interesting objects within the camp. Signatures almost certainly Trilisk. So they had already experienced some measure of success.

Kirizzo thought about other elements that might build a mutually beneficial alliance with the larger group below. In addition to the desire to obtain artifacts, their obvious lack of connections to the UNSF could be useful. Kirizzo had lost a small empire under the surface of his homeworld. His industrial seed promised the possibility of creating a new one. Should he attempt to create that new empire here, among the Terran worlds? In the open? His technological advantage carried a lot of leverage. With allies, might he hope to overthrow the UNSF and rule the Terrans himself?

The idea seemed possible. But it also sounded like a lot of work and danger for modest gain. What did the Terran civilization have that he needed? Resources, planets, yes. But knowledge? No, not really.

Kirizzo found another anomaly. Something moved down below around the group of hidden Terrans. Something with suspiciously Trilisk elements in the signature, yet it wasn"t headed directly to the camp, nor were there any Terrans nearby. Was this simply a Terran carrying and operating a Trilisk trinket? Then Kirizzo considered the readings from another angle.

Could this be the reason for the perimeter?

Suddenly a big shift occurred in the lower-frequency electromagnetic environment below. It suspiciously ended at frequencies of known use to the Terrans. Was the anomaly responsible?

Kirizzo searched for the source. He pinpointed it to machines within the larger Terran perimeter. He quickly linked the electromagnetic disturbance to a new pattern of movement within their camp. Kirizzo realized it was an attack.

The group had suppressed communications likely used by other Terrans using several transmitting devices placed on high ground around the ruins. Then they had organized into armed groups, accompanied by machines of war, and set out on foot. There were many more of them than his three allies and their scout robots, but still, these smugglers were a pathetic force even by Terran military standards. It was almost as if they had scavenged their equipment or perhaps bought old surplus from the last Terran interplanetary war.

Rather than help them, he decided to test their abilities. If they were very capable, then that made them more valuable as allies. If they took losses or did not handle opposition well, it might make them more amenable to negotiation.

Kirizzo considered direct interference. His new ship possessed weapons that could disable the Terrans" surface equipment, but unfortunately the power plant providing energy for the jamming had been brought underground.

Kirizzo preferred a more indirect approach. He had a.n.a.lyzed and solved the mathematics of the Terran scrambler, despite the fact that it had been designed to be unpredictable by enemies. Given the ability to predict the scrambler and knowledge of the target he wanted to speak with, he could alter his own signal such that the message would get through. One-way communication became possible.

He contacted ten of the scout robots and organized them to oppose the attacking Terrans. They took up sniping positions along likely routes to the east. He left a system running to allow the scouts to coordinate with each other by sending regular messages telling them of the positions and status of all the others.

Then Kirizzo resumed his agonized decision making.

He considered the large group of Terrans again. Perhaps he should negotiate an alliance with them. On the front leg, they were organized into a clear hierarchy, meaning Kirizzo would only have to deal with the leader; he could wield the entire group with a single handle.

On the rear leg, these Terrans were organized for military purposes, meaning they were more likely to use force for their own gain. Kirizzo would have to expend more energy in protective countermeasures working with such a group. Besides, if they sought Trilisk artifacts, and already had some, that put them in compet.i.tion with Kirizzo, unless they were as easily satiated with baubles as Telisa and Magnus were.

Given their advance against the scouts and his allies, Kirizzo was running out of time to decide.

Kirizzo saw a launch from the surface. Terran ships. His own ship notified him of the event. Kirizzo directed it to gather more information.

He focused in a scan. Military vessels, though out of date for the Terran s.p.a.ce force current standards. They were multipurpose a.s.sault ships, designed to carry troops from planet to planet. They looked to be more focused on landing missions rather than s.p.a.ce superiority weapons.

Not that it would have mattered. Kirizzo had the upper hand here. His computers a.n.a.lyzed the scans and found the weaknesses of the ships. He would be ready if the Terrans decided to attack without provocation. Kirizzo expected they would attempt to negotiate once they saw his ship. He allowed them to find him. Perhaps now he could enter into an agreement with the new group.

The Terran ships reached orbit. Their sluggish systems seemed to have finally located Kirizzo"s vessel. The Terrans were activating weapons systems. That much, he had expected. Then they launched a wave of missiles at him.

Aggression. Kirizzo recognized it immediately, like a scoop of fresh sand in a long-stagnant cave. His decision had been made for him. He would remain allied with his current team. He started a new planning phase for the destruction of the aggressors.

Chapter 17.

Arakaki put a round into her grille puncher and placed the hook around one bar of the grille in front of her. Then she placed the press plate against the wall above the opening and activated the puncher with her link. The device jumped sharply as it applied the force between the grille bar and the wall, breaking the grille free. She pulled the obstruction out with the hook then dumped it aside with a practiced motion.

Her link said that was the 1434th grille she"d pulled.