Magnus shrugged. "That"s not exactly what I meant, but still, it"s possible he"s doing it."

It"s dangerous enough going to the frontier. We need to trust everyone on the team. Of course, I guess I quickly trusted Arlin and Leonard. Easier to trust my own race, I guess, justified or not.

"We can get along without him for now. The jamming could mean an imminent attack, though, down here or up there in orbit," Telisa said.

"It"s worse than just losing touch with Shiny. I can only reach five scouts now," Magnus said.

"What will the others do?"

"They"ll try and complete whatever mission each is on, then return to Clacker."

"Maybe we should return to the Clacker, too," Cilreth suggested.

"We need more information. I bet Shiny will figure out how to get back in touch with us. It"s true he"s not down here by our side, but he"s a valuable a.s.set up there."

"I"m going to go take a look at our Terran friends," Magnus said. "We can"t make good decisions in the dark like this."

"Be careful," Telisa said.

Magnus looked thoughtful. "I know you"ve earned the stealth suit, but in this case it might be of more use to me. Just temporarily, of course," he said to Cilreth.

"I"d love to share," Cilreth said sweetly. "But no way is it going to fit your frame."

Magnus frowned. Telisa smiled.

"Don"t be sad. I"m glad you"re a large specimen, dear," she said playfully. "I have the stealthing sphere we picked up on Vovok, if you"d like to borrow it. And I do mean borrow! I can"t go giving away all my superpowers."

Cilreth felt a bit of jealousy. On a frontier expedition with your lover. Nice on the surface of it. Unless things go horribly wrong.

Telisa tossed Magnus the tiny sphere from her pack. Somehow the Vovokan attendant spheres knew it was a peaceful transfer, so they didn"t move to intercept.

Those things are amazing, Cilreth thought. I need to figure out more about how they tick. Sigh. Later.

"Thanks," Magnus said, slipping the sphere away in his pack. He headed off toward the center of the city. Telisa looked after him.

She"s dependent on him. But I should cut her some slack; she just lost her father. Who else does she have? I think that was it.

Telisa hadn"t mentioned a mother or other family, nor had Leonard.

"Well, at least it will go faster setting up the camp with two of us," Cilreth said. Telisa returned her attention to the campsite.

"The camp looks sleepable," Telisa said. "Let"s go take a peek in those big buildings over there before nightfall. I promise I"ll help with the camp more later."

"Without Magnus?"

"We"re both armed," Telisa said. "And we have the scouts, at least the ones close by that can still hear us."

"When he gets back, if he finds us missing..."

"I"ll leave a message here with the cargo containers. They can transfer it to his link when he gets within range. Besides, I bet Shiny"s all over this jamming problem."

"He"s certainly very capable. I"m still wrapping my head around having a giant centipede monster on my team."

"He"s not a monster. Remember that," Telisa said.

Oops. Did I say that out loud? Cilreth frowned. The comment would have slid by with Magnus, but Telisa was avidly behind Shiny and trusted him completely.

Cilreth checked the scouts. "Magnus took one scout with him. Let"s leave one to watch the camp and take three with us?"

"Sounds great," Telisa said. "I"ll tell them not to wander far off. No use in losing more. We might gain one or two as we move."

They both drew their stunners as they moved out. Telisa caught sight of Cilreth"s stunner and stopped.

"Hrm. Where are the weapons cases?" Telisa asked herself aloud.

Funny how people can be perfectly comfortable in a link conversation; then they speak to themselves out loud. Cilreth did the same thing sometimes. She thought maybe the habit formed when people were alone. They wanted to hear a voice, so they chatted to themselves aloud. So now she sometimes talked to herself inside her head, sometimes through her link, and sometimes out loud.

Telisa turned back. Cilreth didn"t answer the question because she knew Telisa could use her link to ask the cases for anything she wanted.

Or has the jamming gotten worse?

As a test, Cilreth queried the inventory service of a nearby case. It sent queries out to the other cases and found the weapons containers for her. Telisa was already opening one of them. Cilreth scanned the nearby stalks for any signs of danger.

Telisa came back with a smart pistol in her hand. Cilreth had familiarized herself with the projectile weapons, though she preferred the stunner as a safer alternative. The weapon had a few smart rounds in it, capable of locking onto any target the user specified. The smart rounds could turn away or self-destruct in flight if they neared something that didn"t fit the target profile. However, on an alien planet, one would likely forego any target profiles since it was impossible to tell exactly what kind of dangerous animal you might come across.

Cilreth"s link told her Telisa had put negative signatures into the weapon for the three Terrans, so it would be difficult (though not impossible) to accidentally shoot a friend.

"Better if we have radically different weapons by default," Telisa said. "In case something we find is immune to either one."

Cilreth nodded. She figured as much. Between the two of them and the scouts, they had a variety of weapons. She noticed the pistol had a new accessory attached to its underside.

"What"s the new device?"

Telisa"s eyebrows rose in a question; then she deduced what Cilreth was asking about.

"Oh. Under the barrel? It"s a one-shot glue grenade."

"Nice. I"m not quite used to all the weapons yet. From private investigator to planetary explorer, you know."

"Isn"t it wonderful?" Telisa asked enthusiastically.

Cilreth chuckled. So young and full of energy. "Which way are we going?"

Telisa was silent for a moment; then a scout robot headed out. "Follow him," she said.

They followed the robot out of the clearing. As they came to the first tight group of alien plants, Cilreth automatically reached for her machete.

"Shall I cut a swath through? Or do we want a low-profile trail behind us?"

"If there were no people, I"d say go ahead and cut. Predators will be equipped to find us anyway. But with people we don"t know in the ruins, let"s leave it."

Cilreth nodded. She agreed with the thinking. If she left a trail, it would make it easier for Magnus to follow if he needed to find them but also easier for strangers to find them.

"We have a box of breadcrumb devices we could use," Cilreth pointed out.

"Oh yeah. I never quite saw the usefulness of the devices before."

"They are usually just for marking a complex path for others to follow later after you"re gone. Some places screw with a link"s ability to accurately map them, and sometimes there isn"t a way to send your map to the next person to come along."

"And we can configure them to be silent when strangers come by," Telisa noted. She was probably reading up on them in her link to remind herself of their capabilities.

"But in this case, I"m wondering if we can form a bridge with them. If they can each reach twenty five meters or so, then we could daisy chain our communications back here."

"Daisy chain?" There was a delay. Then Telisa nodded. "Okay. But I hope we stop coming up with new plans every five minutes, or we"ll never get anything done!"

Young people. Every time I use an archaic term they have to look it up. "Ha." Cilreth ran back and retrieved a pack of fifty breadcrumbs. Each device was a small black cylinder, the size of five or six tiny coins stacked together. She configured them as a relay chain and told them to only offer services to the three Terrans or Shiny. Then she jogged back to Telisa and dropped the first one at the entrance of the plant cl.u.s.ter.

"There we go," Cilreth said.

Telisa pushed aside the green ma.s.ses of moss-like leaves and stepped through. Her spheres slipped through after her, dodging around swaying green mops and thick stalks. Cilreth followed.

They had walked about a hundred meters from camp when the scout stopped. Cilreth immediately stopped with it, staring ahead. She had just dropped a third breadcrumb device behind her. She accessed the scout"s view. Its Vovokan ma.s.s detectors had sensed movement ahead, over and above the normal flutter of the green plant bulbs in a light breeze. She checked the ma.s.s map. The movement was fifteen meters ahead, and slightly underground.

A trap? Thank Cthulhu for those scout machines.

"There," Telisa said through her link, sending Cilreth a visual indicator. Telisa pointed out a hole in the ground under a batch of stalks. One of the natural plant pot wells. Cilreth was able to confirm the movement came from inside the well.

Cilreth stayed put and watched. Nothing much seemed to be happening on the surface. She watched until she thought maybe Telisa would just keep going. Then she spotted something moving. This time she was ready to interpret what she saw: another translucent creature.

It was small. Then she saw another. More tiny clear creatures climbed out from the plant well. They scampered over the spiky red rock.

"Critters. Just some clear critters, like ghost shrimp," Cilreth transmitted. For some reason they reminded her of ghost shrimp in size and movement, though she could not tell if they had legs or not.

"The last small critters I found tried to eat me alive," Telisa said. She had her pistol pointed in their direction. Cilreth knew the grenade launcher was probably being armed to the signature of those clear creatures.

"You"re not going to shoot first, are you?" she asked a bit nervously.

"No way," Telisa said. "I"m not looking for trouble. Let"s just skirt around." But she did not move.

"Watch the plants for the red snake things, too," Cilreth said. "Where there"s prey..."

"Good point," Telisa agreed. She lowered her pistol.

Cilreth spotted one of the creatures pulling a piece of plant along the rock. Then it fell back into the black hole of the well carrying the debris.

"They"re carrying stuff that fell into the plant well," Cilreth pointed out. "That"s why there"s no detritus lying around. They carry it in there, and it must be for food."

"Or to grow food with," Telisa added.

"You don"t think...they couldn"t be intelligent, could they?"

"I doubt it," Telisa said slowly.

"It"s just that they could fit through the grilles."

Telisa stopped. She had to be thinking about it. "Yeah, but why are they living in a hole in the ground when they could live in the buildings?"

"Hrm. Yeah. I"m sure they"re not smart. Just trying not to make any a.s.sumptions."

They sped up as the clear colony of harvesters was left in the rear. Cilreth kept placing the trail-marking devices as they went. Within another ten minutes, their scout leader arrived at a cl.u.s.ter of Konuan buildings.

Cilreth pinged their camp through the chain of breadcrumb devices. Everything appeared to be working. She took stock of the structures. They looked similar to what they"d already seen, only taller and denser.

Cilreth checked her link for Shiny and Magnus. She still couldn"t get any response, even through the chain back to camp.

"Any reason you like these?" she asked Telisa, referring to the buildings.

"Yes. They"re situated over a system of underground chambers and tunnels. It kinda reminds me of what we found on Thespera. I"m hoping the tunnels below were used or built by Trilisks."

Telisa selected one of the five grilles that dotted their side of the nearest building. A scout started to pick away at the setting around the grille. Telisa made a frustrated sound. Cilreth took a look. She thought it might take the scout about ten minutes to dig into the building.

"I"m going to send a scout to our ship. Shiny gave me some kind of digging device; I still have it around," Telisa said. "I don"t think it"s at the camp."

"Really? Were the walls made of tough stone on Vovok?" asked Cilreth.

"I"m not sure how hard they were. Besides, it was the Trilisk trap. Thespera, not Vovok. But the item is workable enough."

"That would be cool. These bars are rugged, though. They were built to last. Impressive for a primitive race, actually."

"Well, even if it doesn"t work on the grilles, the robots get through eventually."

"I a.s.sume the walls are usually even stronger."

"Maybe. I could think of a reason why not, though. If the Konuan used them to keep predators out of their dwellings, then it would be enough to look like this was the only hole through. The predator might try to dig there. Especially if it saw or smelled a Konuan flit through there. But the predator might not try to break through what looks like a rocky mountainside."

Cilreth shrugged. "Fair enough. Whatever works for us to get around. Otherwise, I"m gonna get a pickaxe and end up with arms like Jaggor."

"Who?"

"Oh. Never mind. I"m showing my age."

Telisa nodded. If her link hadn"t been jammed, it might have told her about the old VR called Jaggor the Hunter-Gatherer. The daisy chain reference was probably in her dictionary cache. The information was most likely available in the huge data cache of the Clacker orbiting above. Cilreth was just as happy to leave the reference unexplained.

Finally the scout shifted the loosened grill in the wall. Telisa and Cilreth stepped forward and helped to break it free. Then Telisa took her pistol out again and sent a scout in.

The machine"s lights gave them a preview of the room. It looked similar to the ones they had already seen, though more cluttered. Rusted metal implements hung from racks on four walls.

"An old armory? Those could be weapons," Cilreth said.