The Trilisk Ruins (11 page)

Thomas scrambled for the lip of the
cave and Magnus held out a hand to help him up. Telisa took out her
stunner and backed away, not seeing any target.

Magnus grabbed Thomas’s hand and
started to pull him up. There was another awful popping noise and
Thomas disintegrated over Magnus. Blood sprayed onto Telisa. She
crouched, unable to believe what was happening. Time seemed to
slow, and she found herself thinking that she had come too far to
die here. Tears were welling in her eyes.

Magnus fell slightly backward, off
balance, and released a burst from his slug thrower. The sound was
louder than anything Telisa had ever heard, even with the weapon
pointed away from her. She couldn’t see what he was shooting at, if
anything. Magnus turned and sprinted towards her. Telisa’s muscles
released, and she turned to run with him.

Telisa ran around the corner with
Magnus close behind her. She stopped short just around the turn.
Instead of the long corridor of doors they had just explored, there
was a smooth empty wall on her left with another cave entrance
straight ahead. An open corridor branched away on her right. None
of it was the same as she remembered.

“
Shit! How’d we get turned
around?” Telisa asked. Her voice sounded rapid and squeaky in her
own ears.

“
Cover the corner,” Magnus
said, pointing back where they had come from. He aimed his own slug
thrower in the opposite direction towards the other cavern. He
moved up to the edge.

Telisa set herself a meter from the
corner, holding her stunner out ready to fire. She realized she was
panting and shaking. Would something come around the corner? Telisa
heard Magnus behind her. She wondered if he planned on going into
the other cavern.

“
Let’s go this way, try and
find our way back,” Magnus called. Telisa turned to join him,
stepping closer.

The wall on the left exploded next to
Magnus. He tumbled forward, enveloped in flames and chunks of
building material. Telisa curled away, cringing from the smoke and
debris in the air.

“
Magnus!”

A second or two later she staggered
back to her feet. Magnus appeared as a shadow through the haze,
crawling forward. Telisa ran to his side and pulled him up. Magnus
stood uncertainly.

“
Somehow the thing knew
where we were through the wall,” he said hollowly.

Then he seemed to recover and started
retreating further back, dragging Telisa along with an iron grip on
her arm. They took the corridor to the right that formed the T
intersection.

“
What the hell is it?”
Telisa demanded, on the edge of hysteria.

“
Quiet,” Magnus said. “I
don’t know.”

They came to an intersection, and
Magnus turned left without hesitating. She was sure they hadn’t
been in this section before, but she was glad to be running away
from the site of the carnage.

Magnus refused to stop until they had
run down another long corridor. He checked one door and saw that it
was a janitorial closet. A motionless robot—some kind of cleaning
machine—stood inside. They checked another door, still looking
anxiously back the way they had come.

The room beyond the second door was a
kitchen. They ran inside and fell to their knees behind three
massive ovens.

“
Have you been hit? Are you
bleeding anywhere?” asked Magnus, looking her over.

Telisa didn’t answer but simply stared
at Magnus, trying to believe what had happened. One moment Thomas
and Jack had been standing next to them, talking and alive, the
next they were gone.

Then she saw that his skinsuit had been
damaged. A large patch on his left shoulder had changed color, and
a small spot looked as if it had begun to blister and melt. The
hair on the left side of Magnus’s head was shorter, seared away.
The skin on his neck was red and weeping.

“
You should have been
killed,” she whispered, running her hands over Magnus’s shoulders.
The skinsuit felt rough under her hands in patches, the rest
smooth.

“
Thank Momma Veer,” Magnus
said.

“
I knew those Veer suits
were tough, but I had no idea,” Telisa said. “If I survive to see
Earth again, the first thing I’m going to do is buy one of
those.”

“
What’s the second thing?”
Magnus asked.

“
Take you to a hotel and get
you out of yours,” she said. As soon as she said it, Telisa
regretted it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong
with me. Our friends just died and here I am...” She shook her
head.

“
Don’t worry, it’s just a
reaction to the stress. It gets harder to control your emotions.
I’ve seen it in soldiers after combat.” He seemed to consider his
words. “Besides, nothing wrong with the sentiment. Of course, we
should probably be concerned with survival right now.”

“
Of course, I agree. Let’s
just find our way back to the exit and leave. Whatever that was
that tried to kill us, we don’t have a chance against
it.”

“
Somehow I got turned
around. I thought we went back the way we came, but we haven’t seen
these corridors.”

“
We could link up and get a
map,” Telisa said. “I know the plan was not to do that, but things
could hardly get much worse. If the UNSF finds us, it’d be better
than whatever that was.”

“
Unless that was the
UNSF.”

Telisa grunted. “How could that
be?”

“
Maybe this installation is
so secret they’re willing to kill to keep it under wraps. They’re
allowed to shoot at smugglers, you know.”

Telisa considered this possibility in
horror. “Okay. Maybe it was a UNSF security robot or something. But
what harm can linking up for a map do if they already know we’re
here?”

“
No harm, unless there’s a
security flaw in our chips,” Magnus said cynically. “Go
ahead.”

Telisa called up a floor map from the
information port. In her mind she saw the room they were in and a
diagram of the surrounding area. Telisa asked for a highlight of
the quickest route to the exit. The map disappeared, and her link
was broken. Her link chip reported a transport error.

“
Argh! It’s not
working!”

“
Your chip?”

“
The information computer,”
Telisa said. She tried again while Magnus waited. Once again she
got an error. When she looked at Magnus, she saw that he had a
far-off look indicating he was trying too.

“
No good. It’s not going to
work,” he confirmed. “And there aren’t any exit signs on the
ceiling. That doesn’t make any sense, unless this place is under
construction. Or... maybe it’s designed to simulate malfunctions
caused by an attack? Some kind of a training area
maybe.”

“
Let’s just find a stairwell
and go up,” Telisa said. Magnus nodded and led the way, holding his
weapon level and ready.

Magnus led them through the halls,
checking doors at the ends that could be stairwells. They checked
two halls and then moved past a bank of elevators.

“
Look. The numbers say one
through six. This is four. The stairs have to be
nearby.”

Telisa took great encouragement from
the information. “That’s odd. I guess there’s another entrance than
the strange tube we come in from.”

A heavy door nearby proved to be the
stairwell entrance. They clambered up the stairs to the
top.

“
Something’s wrong,” Magnus
said.

“
What? We’re at the top,
let’s get out of here.”

“
There were four flights of
stairs. We were on level four. There should only be
three.”

“
Maybe the elevator doesn’t
go to the ground floor,” Telisa said, not believing it.

The two smugglers emerged cautiously
from the stairwell. They were in a corridor like the others below,
although there were no elevator doors visible here. The corridors
were clean and bare, with no decorations. Straight across from the
door there was a fire extinguisher station in the wall.

“
That’s the first one I’ve
seen,” Telisa said.

Magnus thought for a moment. “I
agree.”

They made their way to the end of the
hall and tried the door. It opened into a larger room filled with
boxes and heavy shelving on the walls.

“
Looks like spare parts,”
Magnus said. “Or raw materials for fabricating spare parts,” he
corrected, looking over the rows of metal rods and strips. The room
smelled like metal and oil.

They moved through a storage room and
some kind of machine shop next door. Then they emerged back into a
hallway on the far side.

As their search of the level continued,
Telisa became more agitated.

“
This is the top level, but
where’s the exit?” Telisa demanded.

“
It should be the top level.
We don’t know for sure unless the computer starts working or we’ve
searched it all ourselves.”

Telisa tried the computer again, but it
malfunctioned as before. The glimpse of the map she did get showed
that they were at the edge of the complex.

“
The map says this is a dead
end, but let’s check it,” she said.

They found a tiny bar at the end of the
hallway, a highly decorated and well-stocked area. Telisa looked it
over and sighed. What was this place? What guests came here and
needed to be impressed? She didn’t recognize any of the labels on
the liquor.

Magnus looked it over with her. “This
area is defensible. There’s only one way in, and the bar faces it.
We could rest here.”

“
If that thing comes
back—”

“
We have to sleep sometime,”
Magnus said.

Telisa didn’t have the strength to
argue. She walked around into the cul-de-sac of the bar. She
slipped her pack off and dropped to the floor.

Magnus followed her lead and took up a
spot next to her at the opening of the bar. Even though Telisa knew
that they were both outmatched by whatever it was out there, she
felt safer with him nearby. She thought that it would be hard to
find sleep after such a traumatic day, but somehow she dropped into
unconsciousness as soon as she closed her eyes.

Chapter
Eight

Joe stared at the anomalous section of
the glossy white wall. A meter-wide sphere had been carved out of
it, and native plants and rocks filled it like a terrarium. He
approached the niche carefully. Something moved in the
foliage.

He leveled his pistol and watched. A
small orange creature crawled slowly along the edge of the area. It
hesitated to leave the small space, circling around and then
finally coming to a halt.

“
What in the hell is going
on here?”

Joe squatted and contemplated the
chitinous creature. It had a round shell, with short spines that
stuck out at intervals to move it along. Three thick pincer arms
came out of the front. In all likelihood it was the same creature
that had tagged along on his robot’s leg. Joe could smell the musty
plant odors, reminding him of what it smelled like on the
surface.

“
I recognize you,” Joe said
to the small creature. “Finally found a spot that reminds you of
home, huh?”

The edge of the floor ended abruptly at
the perimeter of the sphere. It reminded Joe of the edge where the
corridor became a cave. The floor smoothly ended, unscarred, as if
it had been constructed to hold the soil and plants. The wall had a
depression in it, continuing the shape of a sphere from the
depression in the floor, and Joe could see the layers of building
material. Each layer had been smoothly cut at an angle, giving way
to the next deeper layer. The groove had not been built into the
wall, it had been cut or melted in.

Joe rose and walked around the unusual
sphere of vegetation. He realized as the odors became imperceptible
again that the air in the complex smelled clean like it did in
space ships, rather than like the pollens and molds that laced the
air of the surface. He surmised that the complex had an efficient
air filtering system. He continued down the corridor. He moved into
another hallway, holding his pistol ready. He had decided to sling
his rifle over his shoulder since it would be harder to wield in a
surprise situation than the sidearm.

He came across the fire control station
that the directory had hinted at, a large room with manual and
automated firefighting equipment. Two large red robots sat in
maintenance bays in the center of the room. They looked vaguely
humanoid in the torso, but the bottom halves of their bodies were
treaded like tanks. Wires and hoses were attached to the machines
as if they were people on heavy life support. Like every place he
had encountered in the installation thus far, the walls were
immaculate—free of both dirt and scuff marks. Joe suppressed an
urge to mar them in some way. Moving onwards, he glanced briefly at
storage rooms and a media lounge before moving on. When he didn’t
find any exit in that section of the complex, he turned around and
started backtracking.