The Trilisk Ruins (28 page)

Magnus listened carefully.

“
Sounds to me like you’re
strong and independent. Got a head of your own. Your father and
your mother would be proud of you now, if they only
knew.”

“
A smuggler? Running around
with an alien behind his back? I don’t think so. I told my mother I
was going on vacation in the Mediterranean. She’s separated from
him, now. At least I still visit her now and then.”

“
But they would have to be
proud of your resourcefulness, and the fact that you’re a survivor.
You’re stronger now than before, tougher.”

They shared another moment of silence.
Telisa heard the background sound again, like a distant
waterfall.

“
C’mon, enough talking about
that shit. We’re on an alien space outpost!” Telisa
said.

They walked toward the noise. Telisa
wondered if the sound emanated as noise from speakers, like a radio
tuned to an empty frequency.

They came into a larger circular
chamber, with hundreds of cubes lined up along the walls. The sound
came from a large hole in the wall that ejected a steady stream of
sand into a bay that ran along half the circumference of the room.
The sand flowed evenly through the bay until leaving from another
portal in the wall on the other side from where it
entered.

Telisa laughed. “It’s Shiny’s version
of an escalator, or a conveyor belt,” she said.

Magnus raised an eyebrow. “Hrm. Yeah, I
suppose it could be. Or maybe it’s a system that cleans the
sand.”

“
We should dive in and take
a ride.”

“
Not so fast. What if it’s a
garbage disposal? What if you jump in and you can’t stay above the
sand? You could suffocate.”

Telisa bent down onto her knees and
peered down the tunnel. “It doesn’t look dangerous from here... but
I suppose you’re right. Who knows where it ends up
going?”

“
There could be machinery
under the surface that could chop you up into little pieces. I
wouldn’t even stick my hand in it. But we should toss something in
and see where it goes.”

“
Something bright that we
would see easily if it comes back around.”

Telisa took out her pack and rummaged
through it.

“
Well...”

“
You have something?” Magnus
asked.

Telisa looked up sheepishly, holding a
small piece of red fabric in her hand.

“
What’s that? Oh,” Magnus
said, and smiled. He had realized it was a bright red pair of
undersheers. “Let’s hope it doesn’t gum up the works. An advanced
alien outpost, brought to its knees by a sexy
undergarment.”

Telisa tossed the undersheers into the
flow and they watched it get whisked away into the exit tunnel.
They waited for the red fabric to reappear in the stream for
several minutes, but they didn’t see anything but the smooth flow
of the tiny tan particles.

“
I have a new idea,” Telisa
said. “This could be a Shiny restroom. When they regurgitate those
bricks, they could throw them in here to be taken away and...
recycled, or whatever.”

“
Well we can ask Shiny about
it later,” Magnus said. “Let’s keep looking.”

“
Sure thing,” Telisa said.
“Oh wait. Or if our links can connect, we could ask him right now.”
Telisa connected with Magnus sent a message to Shiny.

Shiny?

Present. Listening.
Ready.

Magnus and I have found a
room... there’s a lot of sand moving around, sand like on the
floor. We’re curious, what is it? A transport system, or does it
clean the sand...or is it a restroom?

There was a pause.

System you inquire about
fulfills all of those functions.

I see. Thank you,
Shiny.

The connection was
dismissed.

“
Ah...all of those. Well,
there we go,” Telisa said.

Magnus grimaced and shook his head.
“That’s... well, alien.”

Chapter
Twenty Four

Two days later, Telisa
trudged back up the ramp into the
Iridar.
The weight in the sack she
carried caused her to slow and wobble.

Magnus greeted her with his slugthrower
leveled.

“
Another batch!” she
announced. “You gonna shoot me?”

He lowered the weapon. “I asked you to
announce each arrival with your link,” he said sourly.

“
Sorry, I forgot. Besides,
half the time my link can’t get through to yours.”

“
Okay. Looks like you found
some more building blox.”

“
You make’em sound like
toys. But they’re not. They’re the entire basis for an advanced
technology.”

“
You sure? Maybe we just
helped Shiny knock over a giant alien toy factory!”

“
I don’t think so. They’ve
been in all the caves we believe make up Shiny’s preferred
environment. Imagine a system where they can make any electronic
controller they need from these basic blocks. They would be
produced cheaply, interconnected, and programmed to perform
whatever task they’re needed for.”

“
Hrm. If they’re all
computing components then they must have a hell of a distributed
system.”

“
These blocks, or tinker
toys or whatever you want to call’em. The ones with the rods placed
into them are emitting electromagnetic waves at frequencies that
are related to the length of the rods.”

“
Ah! So the components talk
to each other without wires.”

“
Yep. Just like a lot of our
stuff does... except I think Shiny’s race has progressed farther
along those lines. I’ve detected at least fifty separate wireless
networks used by these components. And here’s a crazy thing. I took
the antenna or whatever it is out of one component and put it into
one that didn’t have one... and that component started talking on
the network. So I think any of these modules with holes in them can
speak to each other if they’re given an antenna, or whatever the
green rods are.”

“
That’s weird. That’s like
attaching a radio to your toothbrush and all of a sudden it starts
talking to the house computer, offering cleaning services to your
guests.”

“
Yeah. I think each of these
modules may be generalized. They each may be their own small
computer, programmable. When you give it an antenna it links to the
network to see what you want to tell it to do. So it’s more like
you hooked a radio to your jacket and the house told it the toilet
needs cleaning and so the jacket transforms into a scrub brush and
the house sends a bot to grab it and start scrubbing!”

Magnus shrugged. “Ha. Sounds possible.
A giant distributed system composed of everything from your toaster
to your supercomputers. It’s a good theory, anyway. But we need to
crack their protocols. Then we could try telling a fresh component
to be something... maybe just copy an existing one. Test it
out.”

“
Do you know how hard it is
to figure out a protocol from scratch, just looking at the
waveforms coming from these things at a given frequency? And what
if only part of the data is on each frequency?”

“
Shiny did it to us in a
short time.”

“
Yeah, maybe we should ask
him how to do it.”

“
We should. For now, start
simple. Work your way up from there. I’d start by assuming that
each frequency is a signal with an isolated stream of information
on its own.”

“
Alright, well, I’m going to
need your help. We need to get the
Iridar
’s computers recording these
signals.” Telisa dropped her collection onto the rubberized
deck.

“
Okay. But I have some areas
I want to show you first,” Magnus said. “I think there’s been a
fight here. That may explain why the other Shinies are
gone.”

“
You think that they were
defeated but the base was left intact?”

“
Well, depends on what you
mean by intact,” Magnus said. They walked together back down the
lock and out into the caverns of the base. Telisa referred to her
maps in her head, looking at the layout of the parts of the base
that she had explored. Although the caves seemed to be naturally
formed, the map gave away the order with which the oddly shaped
rooms had been puzzled together to fill the available space. Telisa
believed that Shiny’s race preferred the aesthetic impression of
natural caverns, but in fact they were anything but
natural.

Magnus took her to a section she hadn’t
seen before, near the hull of the base sphere they occupied. Telisa
saw blackened sections of wall. The sand below their feet remained
pristine.

They came into another smooth-walled
room. The deck had been pierced by a giant metal spike. A thin
ovoid door in the side of the spike had been left open. The opening
was larger than man-sized.

“
I think this was an attack
site,” Magnus said. “This spike pierced the outer hull and
delivered something bad into the station.”

“
It didn’t depressurize the
area,” Telisa noted.

“
I’m not sure. Maybe it did
at the time but it’s since been repaired. Or maybe the attackers
didn’t want to depressurize the inside. They may have wanted it
intact, or even been after capturing live prisoners. Who
knows?”

Telisa peered inside the giant
canister. Something about it felt creepy, and she kept her
distance. The inside surface held striations that she couldn’t make
sense of. It reminded her of a crash pod.

“
This could be anything,”
Telisa said. “Maybe it’s supposed to be here.”

Magnus led her around the spike and
into the next room. The smooth walls held black scars and fragments
of metal. Two heaps of trash littered the floor.

“
So much for the cleaning
system,” Telisa said.

“
Maybe Shiny’s race would
only repair it if the damage is more than cosmetic.”

“
I suspect there is damage
here that caused the system to break down.”

“
That may be so. Look at
what this is.”

Telisa walked closer. She saw that the
pile closest to her had a silvery harness lying over a large husk
or skin of something as large as herself. She saw fragments of legs
lying jumbled all around it.

“
This is an... alien corpse.
One of Shiny’s people!”

“
So is the other one. And
this shrapnel in the walls indicates an explosion. These black
marks are burns from some kind of energy weapon.”

“
How come they’re just here?
I haven’t seen this in the other parts of the base.”

“
It’s all over in this
section. This spherical piece of the base. So maybe you’re right,
this sphere may have been damaged beyond easy repair. Or no
inhabitants were left to order the repair.”

Telisa remembered that the base
consisted of three large spherical parts. She realized that she
hadn’t explored this one yet.

“
They must have fought here.
This sphere may have some special importance.”

Magnus nodded. “The power systems are
here, I think. I checked it out for artifacts, but I think most of
the equipment here is inside the walls, hard to dig out or too
large to take back.”

“
Well, what I wanna know is,
what was in that spike?”

“
I have some clues about
that, too,” he said. He walked further into the caverns. Telisa
followed him past several more battle sites. Only the sand of the
floor remained untouched. Everything else had been charred or
broken. Telisa counted three more piles of rubble that she believed
to be corpses of Shiny’s race.

Magnus stopped and pointed
ahead.

The burned out hull of a large machine
lay in the corridor, blocking the way. Long metallic tentacles
curved around the wreck, ending in sharp looking hooks. The surface
of the thing sported several equipment bulbs that Telisa imagined
were sensor pods or weapons ports.

“
A war machine,” Telisa
said.

“
Yes. Something pretty bad
if it could do this to Shiny’s people.”

“
Or if it caught them by
surprise. We don’t know how warlike they are. I wonder if they were
prepared for this kind of attack.”

“
Knowing Shiny, they were
prepared for anything. But who knows.”

They walked over closer to the machine.
Telisa touched one of its tentacles, feeling the cool metal. Then
she moved over and looked at one of the pods, viewing it through a
gash in the side of the machine. She tested its mount, trying to
dislodge it.

“
Stop. I’m not sure that’s a
good idea,” Magnus said. “It looks a bit like the heavies the space
force battlecruisers carry, except for the tentacles.”

“
What’s wrong? If we could
get a sample from this race too, we’d be in even better shape.
Something from yet another science and culture.”

“
What you might get, is
ripped to shreds.” Magnus stepped around the mass and viewed it
from the far side. “We don’t know anything about its weapon
systems. It may have live ordnance, or it might be set to self
destruct if we poke through it.”