"Please don"t fire," one of the men said. He had a ruddy nose and star-baked skin that almost matched his red robes.

"Surprise inspection," Arakaki barked, as if that were all the explanation necessary. Arakaki kept her weapon in the general direction of the acolytes. With their signatures logged, it would require minimal aiming to wipe them all out with a single mental command or pull of her finger.

"Where are your supplies?" she asked.

"We don"t have anything of use to you," another one said. The one who had answered had no hair. He wore a plain yellow robe.

"Show me what you have. I want to know how you survive out here."

"In here," said the bald man in the yellow robe.

Arakaki chomped down on the sliver in her mouth and followed. Her finger was relaxed near the trigger of her PAW, and her thoughts remained close to the fire control in her link.

They led her to another dismal rock room. She carefully squatted and followed them through a pulled Konuan grille. More grilles were still in place above and below, but the grilles in the other four directions had been pulled out.

"Here are many of our supplies," the man said. "Of course, we have some equipment deployed around. Solar cells and some photosynthesis modules are over our heads, on the top of the ridge."

The man indicated a waist-high pile of packs and equipment. Arakaki looked things over, still keeping one eye on the pilgrims.

She found a PSG stunner, three grenades, and two large projectile weapons. She saw clips for some other handheld projectile weapons. There were food wrappers and some half-empty backpacks. She counted eight of the backpacks.

"Where did you get that stuff?"

"That"s what little we have left of our equipment."

A metal sphere attracted her attention. At first she thought it was a grenade, but it was too large. She reached out to pick it up. As her hand approached, a small handle extended for her to grasp. It was lighter than a grenade.

So it has power...but it doesn"t offer my link any services. So what the h.e.l.l is it? "What"s this?" Arakaki demanded.

"I don"t know," the man said.

She put it within her pack without taking her attention from her weapon. "I saw your packs in the other room. These aren"t yours. Those weapons are varied. Also not yours. Some of them are new. Obtained since Holtzclaw interviewed you before."

"The UED leader? I thought he decided to leave us alone. We"ve had various members join us from all over the frontier. No deserters from the UED, though."

"Then where are they? Answer my questions or else. We"ve tolerated you for a long time. You don"t want to be on our bad side. You know we have artillery covering this site. We can send a present your way anytime we want."

"We"ve lost some pilgrims. The planet can be cruel. Also, some strangers came by from time to time. They were violent. It wasn"t our intention. But we have to defend ourselves."

"You men? You keep the pistols under your robes?"

The men were silent for a moment. "Yes, we have pistols. But usually we let the Konuan handle troublemakers."

Troublemakers...like me. Like the UED soldiers who have died?

She made a point of aligning her weapon at the head of the man who spoke. "You"re on its side, then," she said. "You help it kill us."

"Only the ones who come in here and threaten us directly. Please just leave."

"The Konuan protected us," another said.

Another of the men winced as he said it.

That must be true. Or is he wincing because he knows that guy"s a buckle bulb?

"You confuse protection with predation," she said. "Why hasn"t it eaten you?"

"We respect it. We learn from it."

"It is smart," Arakaki said. "Real smart. But why would it teach you anything?"

"If you want to see it, we can show you."

Arakaki"s face tightened. "What do you mean, show me?"

"The Konuan. We can show you. You can meet it. See for yourself. Leave your weapons, pledge yourself to it, and it will spare you."

"Like it spared the owner of that stunner there? Or the owner of that sugar kit?"

"They didn"t give up their weapons. They were a threat. It easily dispatched them."

"Finally, something I believe. Okay, show me where I can meet it, then take off."

"If you try to harm it-"

"I"ll take my chances. Now hurry up," Arakaki said.

The bald man in the robe nodded a.s.sent and walked off. Arakaki stepped away from the others, then turned to follow.

The man led her through a patch of blackvines. Arakaki scanned the sluggishly moving tendrils of the plants for concealed danger. Her eyes and her weapon didn"t note anything amiss.

Beyond the blackvines, they came to a dirty old tunnel.

This could be Trilisk, Arakaki thought. But this isn"t very deep.

She knew that under the square chambers of the Konuan, which were stacked atop each other haphazardly, the Trilisk tunnels ran from building to building. The UED soldiers had not figured out why the Trilisks had built the tunnels, though some thought it was to spy on the Konuan or conduct experiments on them without being seen.

Arakaki smelled the monster.

This guy knows what he"s talking about. The monster has been here. No doubt they"ve been sacrificing people to it all along. That"s why it left them alive. Until there are no people left.

They came to a large square room. It was a dead end at the moment, with its grilles intact.

It can still attack from any direction, and it can run if it senses an ambush. If the monster ever runs from anything.

A huge bowl in the center of the room held some bones.

What"s left of the sacrifices.

The robed man turned to regard Arakaki. She pointed her carbine at his face. "Maybe I"ll shoot your legs and leave you as the sacrifice this time," she said.

"It won"t eat me. But it will eat you, if you insist on the weapons," he said.

She made a face of disgust and indicated the exit with a twitch of her barrel. "Beat it."

"What?"

"Take off. Now. Before I change my mind."

The man frowned, but he moved to the exit.

To him, I"m just another victim to his G.o.d. We"ll see about that.

As soon as the pilgrim had left the room, Arakaki took out three grenades. She dropped two to the floor; the devices slowly rolled out to the left and right. They rolled through the grilles to take up positions in adjacent rooms.

She tossed the last grenade up through the grille on the ceiling. That was the direction of attack she feared the most: it liked to dissolve Terrans" heads off.

The grenades armed with a signature Arakaki had designed to try to match the Konuan. What few glimpses of the creature they had collected showed it was large, flat, and silent. It liked to move on walls and ceilings or across the plants just as often as it would be on the ground. It had a low body temperature despite being able to move very quickly. It was also a.s.sociated with electromagnetic anomalies, but Arakaki had just used that to make the grenades even more likely to target and strike movement when odd fields were detected.

Arakaki leaned back against the cool wall beside the entrance tunnel. She touched the grenade around her neck. Ironically, its cold, deadly presence settled her nerves. She believed if that grenade ever went off, at least she would be taking the Konuan with her. She chomped on the sliver in her mouth.

With the grenade right around my neck, it"ll be "a bang loud enough to wake Cthulhu up." That"s what he used to say about the h.e.l.lrakers.

She drew her laser pistol with her left hand, then waited.

Within ten minutes she got a ping. The UED sensor stationed on a nearby cliffside had picked something up. Arakaki had been tuning their probes to detect the Konuan for a long time. Though the probe"s mission had been to detect Terrans and Terran machines, the probes had a wide range of sensory abilities. This probe told her now that something was approaching, and it wasn"t human.

Arakaki felt a rush hit her system. She wanted to do something, to shoot or break into a sprint, anything. But she just took a deep breath and waited.

The contact slipped away for a few seconds, then came back, closer to the caves where she waited. Then it moved still closer.

Will it come in behind me or drop in from above?

The contact moved within an eighth of a kilometer, then disappeared.

It"s in the tunnels ahead of me, she guessed. Arakaki slowed her breathing and watched her weapon"s sensors. Nothing. The grenades hadn"t seen anything, either.

Another minute sc.r.a.ped by. Arakaki heard something, distant, so faint she wasn"t sure if there had even been a noise. Another minute pa.s.sed. The laser became heavy in her grasp. She leaned forward from the wall, standing with her weight even on each foot.

The probe outside picked the contact back up. It was moving away.

"Why won"t you just die?" she whispered.

The ghost moved about a quarter of a kilometer, dropping in and out of sight. Then it stopped. It didn"t leave the range of the probe. It lingered.

The d.a.m.n thing wants me to come after it. So it can kill me somewhere else.

Arakaki almost growled in frustration. Then she opened a link to Holtzclaw.

"This is Captain Arakaki, requesting a h.e.l.lraker round," she said. Holtzclaw replied within three seconds.

"You"ll have it in thirty seconds. Send the coordinates."

The ghost started to move away again.

"Frag me," she said aloud. "Scratch that," she added. "Sorry, sir."

She called back her grenades and s.n.a.t.c.hed them up. Arakaki headed out after the sensor ghost.

Chapter 9.

Magnus trailed his scout by ten meters through clumps of vegetation. He deployed his Veer suit"s head guard 50 percent with a link command, just to add protection to the back of his head. He nudged aside plant stalks with his rifle. More and more, he found himself squatting to take a peek under the greenish clumps growing on the alien foliage. From a position near the ground, he could see much farther, but it was pretty uncomfortable to crawl along for any distance.

He felt a bit sluggish. Shipboard training had gone well with all the extra s.p.a.ce on the Clacker, but he may have overdone it. He still wasn"t used to Vovokan ships or equipment. The VR facilities were amazing. And the quasi-virtual training machines he"d prayed up with Shiny"s help were top-notch as well. He only regretted that their team was so small. With the Clacker, he felt like he could train an entire company.

I don"t even want to run Parker Interstellar Travels. What would I do with more people? I guess I would train some great teammates like Telisa and hit the dirt on more unexplored planets.

Ever since the UNSF had trained Magnus to "hit the dirt" on planetary a.s.saults, he had been hooked on it. Now that he was a free agent, it was easier than going in after the a.s.sault machines and cleaning up. They just dropped on whatever alien ruins they felt curious about and poked around.

He skirted the largest ruins at the center of the city, making his way around them on the northern side. The plants were numerous, even in the city. The way they grew from the round fissures in the rocks made them look like they"d been there for a long time. Maybe they had been part of the city at its peak. But he knew that conclusion was suspect: Who knew how these alien plants worked? Maybe they somehow drilled their own holes in the rock wherever a seed fell. If they even had seeds. Thinking of seeds made him remember the green worms: maybe that was how the plant spread. Its "runners" really did run. Or squirm.

They could just as easily dig their way up from underground, he mused.

Up ahead, he came into contact with another scout unit headed back. The scout had turned back toward the Clacker once the jamming started. He turned it around and added it to his team. He checked the machine"s logs. It hadn"t encountered any humans, though it had seen one of the clear snakelike creatures hiding among the stalks.

Those things might be dangerous, even though my Vovokan spheres protected me once.

He stopped after half an hour and asked the forward scout to do a pa.s.sive scan. For five minutes Magnus waited, crouched beside the ruin of a single-room building the size of a tiny hovel. He had plenty of time to look it over. The structure looked old. It had grilles on each face. The bars on the grilles were of a different design: they were made from the plant stalks.

Like wood, he thought. But all the others we"ve seen are tough stone or ceramic. So this guy must have been poor. Or this building just predates the others.

Magnus took a peek inside with a light. As he expected, a grille was in the center of the ceiling. There wasn"t one on the floor. The walls and floor were littered with brown and green refuse that looked like rotted furniture or tools. Some short sticks came out of the walls and ceiling, but nothing else remained intact.

Magnus walked around the building to check out the far side. Two large plants grew from breaches in the rock next to the building. He saw something new there: grilles across the openings where the plants emerged from the ground. The stalks of the plants grew through the holes. The grilles matched those of the building, made from pieces of cured or painted plant stalks.

That means they went down there. Telisa will be interested. Maybe they lived in those natural plant pots before they made their own structures. Like ancient Terrans living in caves.

A small gray critter of some kind darted inside. Magnus pointed his weapon. Thoughts of the vermin that attacked him on Vovok came to the fore. He took a deep breath and mastered the nervousness it brought.

On second thought, maybe it"s a kind of animal pen to them. Those critters that live down there might have been raised like domestic animals. But they can get out. Which means the pen is to keep the predators out.

The results of the pa.s.sive scan came back. Magnus opened a pane in his PV to look over the results. The information unfolded in his mind, and he instantly saw signs of scanning coming from a nearby hill overlooking the ruins. Someone had placed sensors there to keep track of what was going on in this area of the ruins.