"Hrm. Maybe," Telisa said. "If a blob of protoplasm can hold a sword. They fit through the grilles, of course. You know what? It must have been hard to carry anything large around in those dwellings."

"Oh yeah, major limitation. That shows how important those grilles are to them. If your theory about predators is the explanation, there must have been a constant threat from them."

"Yet the Trilisks come here and add the tunnels below. We need to figure out why the Trilisks came here. What are they doing on these planets? Research on alien life? Conquest?"

Cilreth smiled. It would be nice to know, but they"re gone now. I"m more interested in their toys and how they can improve our lives. "So how many more grilles to get to the nearest tunnel?"

"Probably four or five more," Telisa said.

"If the grilles are for predators, you"d expect them to be sufficient on outside-facing entrances only."

Telisa turned back toward the entrance. "Ah. The scout has come back." Cilreth followed her gaze. Another scout scrambled into the room. Telisa plucked a tool from its back.

The device was a long stack of red cubes held in a silver frame. One end was broad and flat.

"That thing looks so weird! I guess given how odd Shiny looks, I shouldn"t be surprised his tools look radical, too."

Telisa pointed the flat end of the machine at the wall beside a grille and activated it. It made a gentle humming noise. Cilreth felt air moving through the room. "Whoa." She looked around.

"It"s this thing," Telisa said. "Sorry, I should have mentioned it makes a whirring sound and the air moves around a lot when I use it."

Telisa started again. Cilreth watched the stone around the side of the grille disappear. Then she saw a pile of gray liquid forming under the device.

"Yech," she said. "It"s digging so fast!"

Telisa smiled. "We need one of these on every scout," she said. "Magnus will be happy. I bet Shiny can make us more of these."

"If we can get a hold of him again. I know, he"s probably working on it."

The grille was removed in record time. A scout machine slipped into the next room. Bright reflections of silvery metal shone in the machine"s lights.

"Wow, something interesting in there," Telisa said.

Cilreth took a peek. She thought it looked like a giant spider"s web of silver fibers. "Is it safe?"

"What makes you ask now?"

If I say it looks like a spider web, it"ll sound dumb. "Sorry, just an instinctual reaction to what looks like a giant spider web. But maybe we should know what"s up before going in there?"

Telisa didn"t say anything. But she walked a second scout machine in and had it look around with the other one.

"The web things are modular," Telisa noted. "Each one is a network of filaments, roughly two meters square, with twelve little silver discs woven into it."

Cilreth watched the scout machine feeds as one of the scouts touched a web with the tip of a leg. Nothing seemed to happen. The network was bright like new, but it wasn"t sticky. Nothing moved.

"Okay, I"m heading in there. I"d like to take one of these back for further study," she said.

Telisa went in and started to collect one of the webs. Cilreth knelt down and waddled through after her.

Cilreth got a closer look at the room. Each shiny webbing had been made from filaments of silver metal. Dispersed along the web every ten centimeters or so, thick discs the size of a palm were woven into the network. The webs hung from old metal hangers built into the walls and ceiling. A few lay on the floor.

"They"ve been arranged in here," Cilreth said. "It"s just a storage room."

"Seems like it, doesn"t it? The webs could easily fit through the grilles, so they weren"t necessarily made in here." Telisa finished folding it up and put it into a black sample bag.

"I don"t have a lot of theories about these things," Cilreth said. "But next door there were weapons. So I"m thinking these could be weapons, too."

"One thing is odd...these discs here are batteries. Advanced batteries. They"re beyond anything we"ve seen in the Konuan ruins so far."

"Trilisk, then?" asked Cilreth.

"No. Too primitive."

"Then maybe the outlying Konuan were primitive slaves to the high-tech city Konuan."

"I"m thinking the Trilisks were advancing them, showing them how to improve themselves," Telisa said.

"Really? Interesting. I can easily pose a more sinister theory: the Trilisks took over, and the few traitor Konuan who served them got cool toys to keep the other Konuan in line."

"You are so cynical. It"s possible, though," Telisa said.

Cynical is my middle name. "Didn"t you experience a Trilisk memory? I take it you saw into the mind of one, and it was a nice creature? You felt it wanted to help?"

"Well, not really. It was angry at other aliens that had attacked its world at the time and wanted revenge. Not exactly a loving moment. I think it was ruthless to its enemies."

"Well, sounds like they may have been mean creatures," Cilreth said.

"Maybe, but like I said...the aliens had just killed a bunch of Trilisks, I think. I would be angry, too. The memory is just at a bad moment for measuring their overall disposition."

I bet I could tell if I had experienced it, Cilreth thought. If you could be in someone else"s head for just thirty seconds, couldn"t you tell?

The more Cilreth thought it over, the less certain she became of her initial reaction. If you read the mind of a murderer when she was thinking about her favorite restaurant, could you really pick up the killer vibe? Probably not.

They checked the grilles in each direction, looking for something interesting. Cilreth checked the grille on her left. A complicated shape lay in the darkness.

"Over here," she said.

Telisa lit the scene with her powerful flashlight. A scout added to the illumination with its own lights.

"Whoa, that"s no primitive anything," Cilreth said.

The shape was a robot. It had an upright, rocket-shaped body with a tripedal base. Its three legs were staggered at sixty degrees from its three arms. The base of the body rested against the floor. Its smooth sapphire exterior glittered in the light. From beyond the grille the upright body looked thicker than a Terran.

Almost as an afterthought, Telisa broke out of her fascinated stare and grabbed the breaker claw from her belt. Cilreth saw the move and followed her lead, drawing her stunner. Then she frowned, replaced the stunner, and took out her machete. Telisa gave her a questioning look. Cilreth shrugged.

"Maybe it"s an alien death machine so advanced the designers never thought *what if someone tries to hack its legs off?"" she said defensively. Then she asked, "What kind of robot is it?"

"I"ve never seen anything like it," Telisa said. "But its trilateral symmetry suggests..."

"Trilisks?"

Telisa said nothing, as if uttering the possibility would nix her rising hopes.

"Three legs, though?" Cilreth persisted. "How does it walk? Or, how did it walk?"

"Well, just look at them. They"re jointed funny."

"Okay, I guess nature can make almost anything work," Cilreth said.

"Think of the primitive Konuan. If they were around when this thing was operational, they must have been terrified. It would have been like a rock G.o.d to them."

"The Trilisks may well have been here playing G.o.d," Cilreth said. "Them and their prayer machines, producing things out of thin air."

Telisa paused and opened her pack.

"What do you need?" Cilreth asked.

"I"m making sure we don"t have an active AI nearby that can produce things for us," Telisa said. She finished looking through her back. "No candy bars. Their machines must be inoperative, like this robot."

Cilreth laughed. "We"re developing a checklist for exploration. Land on a new planet, step one, see if prayer works."

"Help me get this thing onto a scout. I don"t want to be dragging it all the way back."

"Yes, I"m sure we can, but they can barely fit in and out of here as it is. A scout will have to drag it."

Telisa swore. "You"re right, of course. It must have come from below." Telisa pointed out a circular portal in the floor where the Konuan grille would usually lie.

Telisa and Cilreth worked to attach the derelict machine to one of the scouts. Cilreth wished she had one of the cargo case lids to use as a sled, but those were far behind them. They finally decided an alien robot skin was probably durable enough to survive dragging until they could make a sled from plant stalks outside.

"Its perfect blue surface is creepy. I feel like I"m looking into a lake when I stare at it. What if it sucks the juice from the scout and comes back to life?" Cilreth said.

"Shut up," Telisa said.

"What? It"s not that crazy," Cilreth said.

"I know. You"re scaring the c.r.a.p out of me," Telisa said. "What choice do we have? I want that robot."

Cilreth nodded. I guess I"m being too cynical. Even for me. "Should we send it back now?"

Telisa scratched her chin then nodded. "What good would it be in a fight now? Its weapon mount is blocked." She laughed. "How are we going to break that one to Magnus? A definite design flaw. Scouts carrying cargo can"t really fight."

Cilreth smiled. "Room for improvement in version three. I think we have enough to head back to the Clacker now."

"Yes. I just want to verify we"re over a Trilisk tunnel here."

"This robot isn"t enough?"

The scout machine carrying the robot headed back. Then another scout attached a smart line and dropped down the hole like a giant spider. Its sensory feed showed a dusty tunnel below.

"It"s something very different than this building. I want to take a quick peek," Telisa said.

Oh man. We"ll never get back at this rate.

Telisa dropped down and made an appreciative noise. Cilreth kept watching the views from below through a scout robot.

"These are much more advanced than the ruins above," Cilreth said.

Telisa just stared at the walls and a nearby column.

"Did you hear me?" Cilreth asked over her link.

Telisa turned to look up at Cilreth and spoke in an excited whisper. "Cilreth, I think this area was constructed by the Trilisks just as Shiny suspected."

"I-" Cilreth began; then she heard a scrabbling sound behind her. "Something"s up here!"

Chapter 8.

Captain Arakaki made her way along the ridge toward the tunnels where the settlers hid themselves.

Of course, she had been watching them for months. One of their sensor probes sat on a nearby rocky cliff overlooking the ridge. Holtzclaw had interviewed them back when they first arrived on the planet. He told Arakaki it was a sad collection of men from some doomed expedition or settlement. He had told her the survivors were so traumatized by being hunted by the Konuan that they had started to worship it as some kind of G.o.d of death.

Arakaki rolled her eyes as she recalled hearing about it.

My race loves to escape reality through self-deception.

Holtzclaw said the men lived simple lives, eating sugar from some photosynthesis modules and the roots of a few Terran plants they managed to get growing. Arakaki knew a lot about them, but there was one thing she didn"t know. Why had the Konuan failed to kill the last few of them off? She intended to find out.

Arakaki idly chewed on a cigarette-sized strip of some tough synthetic. It was all that was left of her ex-a man literally blown to bits-and though it seemed odd, chewing on that surviving piece of his battle exoskeleton was her way of remembering him. That, and she always had to be chomping on something anyway or else she felt incomplete.

She saw one of the trees on the ridge was shedding. Its thousands of component worms were writhing along the red rocks, seeking other stalk holes. Every now and then one of the trees just did that. Some UED scientist had said it was the end of the life cycle: the tree dissolved into a thousand green worms that spread its genetic material to other stalk plants among dozens of nearby fissures in the rock. A week later the Konuan had killed him.

Some of the worms might make it a hundred meters, though the little clear shrimp things in the holes liked to scamper out and eat them. Arakaki thought it was all kind of gross, but she had seen a lot worse, even in the food courts at Terran starports.

She stopped to take an extra look. Where the green crawlies migrated, there were the shrimp-like feeders, which meant cleargliders. Did that also mean the event might attract even bigger predators in turn? The vicinity looked clear to her and her weapon"s sensors.

Finally Arakaki ignored the green caterpillars and sidled up to the opening in the rock where the settlers had been found. Her weapon detected signatures of four men just inside the entrance. She paused, listening, then slipped inside.

One of the men, bald, in a yellow robe, carefully cut up some kind of plant root. Another, also in a yellow robe but with short, light-colored hair, worked on a handheld device she didn"t recognize. The other two men looked similar, with reddish robes. They sat on the floor with their eyes closed, either meditating or accessing their PVs.

"Don"t move suddenly or I"ll blow your a.s.ses off," she summarized.

All four men started at her sudden statement. Arakaki watched carefully. Though they all moved in response before their minds could fully process the meaning of her threat, none of them reached for any weapons, so they lived.