The Trilisk Ruins (31 page)

They moved through a narrow
room with two adjoining passages. Magnus stayed close and covered
the entrances with his weapon, but he didn’t shoot again. Telisa
chose the passage that she believed would take them closer to
the
Iridar
. Any
moment she expected a shiny war machine to appear and attack them.
Telisa wondered if such things only shot people, or if they had
giant whirling blades to slice victims up like in the horror
vids.

They came into another room, filled
with something unfamiliar. Broken space force equipment lay strewn
all over the floor. Telisa saw green shapes mixed in amongst the
carnage. She realized the green objects were uniformed bodies on
the floor. Pieces of human were strewn about, splattered in blood.
It didn’t look real in the colored light of the cubes. Telisa made
a confused noise.

“
Shiny must’ve taken them
out,” Magnus said. “It’s an assault controller team. They would
have set up right after the robotics came through.”

“
Can’t the robots be
controlled from the
Seeker
? Or even fight on their
own?”

“
Yes. But teams like this
are deployed for redundancy. They can also add flexibility to the
machine’s strategy.”

“
Shiny killed all these men.
He didn’t seem so violent with us. He never did
anything—”

“
We never waved guns in his
face and tried to capture him. We never invaded one of his bases.
Put one of these on,” Magnus said, indicating a dead man who was
still mostly in one piece.

Telisa stared in confusion for a
moment. Then she realized he meant the corpse’s skinsuit. She
walked over to the smallest of the dead assault controllers,
hopping over the wreckage of some equipment. The devastation was so
severe that Telisa couldn’t tell what any of it had been. She got a
closer look at the man. Blood poured from a hole in the suit, right
above his heart. She avoided looking at his face. She didn’t want
to remember what he looked like.

“
Lot of good it did him,”
Telisa said, but she started to work the opening clasp at the man’s
neck.

“
Just don’t take a direct
hit,” Magnus said. “It works pretty well against the nerve
scramblers, too. Of course Shiny’s weapons... will probably still
kill us.”

“
He must hate us,
now.”

Magnus shrugged. “Maybe. We have more
important things to worry about than our popularity.”

Telisa unzipped the dead man’s suit.
She felt a shiver run down her spine as the head flopped to one
side and a stream of fresh blood trickled out of one nostril. She
exhaled and shook off a wave of nausea.

“
Sorry pal, but you don’t
need Momma Veer anymore,” she whispered. She wrenched the arms out
of the skinsuit and then realized that the boots would have to come
off first. While she struggled with the operation, Magnus picked
over the bodies, taking a couple of grenades and a few electronic
devices.

“
Can’t they trace us with
that stuff?” Telisa asked.

“
Yes they can. And they can
trace us without it as well, unless our theory about the
countermeasures is right. Just hope that they’re after Shiny a bit
more than us. Truth is this may be it. The
Seeker
is a formidable ship, and its
crew is elite.”

“
Joe also said something
about the EM spectrum being noisy. More evidence that they’re
running blind.”

Telisa finally got the suit off the
corpse and slipped into it. The flexible garment felt thick yet
soft. Her legs fit well though being a man’s suit, it compressed
her breasts somewhat. She sealed the front with a slide zipper and
anchored the front flap over it.

“
How’s it feel?” Magnus
said. Without giving time for an answer, he skipped forward and
punched her swiftly in solar plexus.

Telisa’s eyes grew wide but then she
smiled. The blow felt like that of an old man, a barely noticeable
impact across her entire torso.

“
Very nice! Spreads the
kinetic energy.”

“
Yep. Course I wouldn’t go
jumping off any buildings, if I were you.”

“
No problem. Wow, maybe we
can get out of here!”

“
Maybe.”

“
Anyway, like I was saying I
think that Shiny has scrambled their stuff. If they don’t have
links, they probably don’t know where we are.”

“
That would explain why they
fired at us after the tremor, they were firing blind in response to
an attack,” Magnus said. “That could be good in a way. If they
don’t know where we are, we’ll have a chance.”

“
Drop your weapons on the
floor or I will fire,” a synthetic voice commanded.

Magnus tensed. Then he dropped his
slugthrower. Telisa slumped in defeat, letting her stunner fall
from her hand.

They turned slowly towards the voice.
Telisa scanned through the cavern, trying to figure out where the
voice came from. She saw only dead bodies, shattered equipment and
the alien blocks.

“
There,” Magnus
pointed.

A black optical palette and the barrel
of a projectile weapon resolved themselves to Telisa. She blinked.
Part of a robot lay on the floor. Roughly a third of its surface
had taken on the color of the cavern wall. Another part of it was
colored like a green USNF uniform. Earlier, Telisa had mistaken it
for a piece of human corpse. The rest of it was the silver and
white of metal. Telisa had thought this part of the robot was just
a shattered equipment case.

“
Holy shit,” she breathed.
Even though she could see the thing now, she felt it must somehow
be damaged. The parts she saw didn’t move, and the robot’s head
remained at the level of her knees.

“
It’s damaged,” Magnus said.
Then his voice continued in her link.

It’s hurt. It might be
bluffing.

“
Stand against the wall and
do not speak,” the machine ordered.

Telisa grabbed the wrench-shaped
artifact in the middle as she had done when it shocked her. She
felt an odd sensation in her hand. The fine hairs on her skin were
standing on end. This time she resolved to hold onto it longer. It
might shock her, but she felt desperate to try and take out the
robot.

Her hand burned. It twitched. She felt
herself losing control of the muscles in her arm.

I hope this
doesn’t—

A loud snap sounded in the cavern.
Telisa staggered, dropping the artifact to the floor. The smell of
burning electronics came to her nose. Telisa got a signal in her
head that meant her link was resetting. She realized with a sinking
feeling that she had just sacrificed her link memory. All her link
pictures of the base and Shiny were gone.

“
Cover your face!” Magnus
said urgently.

Telisa obeyed as he snapped up his slug
thrower and thrust its end onto the optical palette of the damaged
robot. The thing didn’t move. The bark of the slug thrower smashed
into Telisa’s ears. She felt a spray of metal fragments hit her
arm, but through the suit it felt like a light splatter of
rain.

“
Okay, let’s move it,”
Magnus said. Telisa glanced at the remains of the battle machine as
she turned to follow. Smoke rose from several places on its body. A
ragged black hole occupied the space where its optical sensors had
been. Eerily, its skin continued to mimic the wall and the uniforms
around it. Telisa suppressed a shudder and ran from the
room.

Chapter
Twenty Seven

Telisa loped along behind
her companion, trying to suppress the nerves that quickened her
breath and tightened her guts.
Hard to
think straight with this much adrenaline,
she thought.

The firm feel of her Veer skinsuit made
Telisa feel stronger, helping her keep some of her fear in check.
Vaguely she knew that it was a false confidence, especially with a
gaping hole in the front, but on some instinctual level it calmed
her.

Magnus turned towards her and put a
finger over his lip. Telisa caught her breath as best she could,
nodding at him. They crouched just behind a sharp corner and Magnus
took another look.

There’s three of them up
here
, Magnus sent on his link.
Moment of truth. Do you want to tak’em out by
surprise or try and spare their lives at the risk of our
own?

Telisa grimaced and buried her face in
her hands. What should they do? She made a quick
decision.

Let’s try a nonlethal
attack... if that goes sour then we kill them.

Good enough. Remember, they
have Momma Veer, too. If you use that stunner hit’em in the face
with it.

Telisa nodded. She held her stunner in
sweaty, shaking hands. They stood up and Magnus counted off in his
link.

One... two...
three!

Telisa and Magnus bolted around the
corner. Telisa saw that the intersection had large green equipment
crates in it that had been set up as makeshift cover. The soldiers
were only partially visible behind the three-foot-high
containers.

As the marines first noticed the two
loping towards them, Magnus yelled out.

“
Don’t shoot, we’re human!”
he exclaimed. The marine facing them leveled his weapon for a
second and then pointed it away as Magnus’ words sank in. The delay
caused just enough time for Magnus to step up to the nearest crate
and swing his slugthrower like a bat over the top of the obstacle.
It struck the face of the soldier who hesitated. The man fell back
out of sight.

Telisa sprinted past the first crate
and shot her stunner at a second guard. Her target shrieked and
fell back. Telisa took a blow on her back, as if someone had taken
a club to her. Vaguely she realized she’d been shot but her suit
had protected her.

She swung around but didn’t see the
third man. She decided he must have taken cover behind a crate. She
heard the whine of a grenade and almost panicked. An instant later
she saw that first man she had stunned was up on all fours, trying
to clear his head.

Telisa kicked the kneeling man in the
face, sending him reeling back. Blood burst from his nose but
Telisa didn’t stop for a second. She whipped her stunner back in
line and shot him at point blank range, in the face where his suit
couldn’t protect him. He made an odd sound like a jungle bird in
distress and then fell back, unmoving.

The sharp crack of Magnus’s slug
thrower assailed her ears again, making her heart jump. She half
expected to feel slugs or flechettes ripping through her flesh. The
loud popping sound of a tangler grenade going off erupted into the
small space of the cavern.

Telisa realized she could still move
and breathe so she wasn’t the target of the grenade. She saw
someone struggling on the ground wrapped in grey goo, a surreal
sight in the reddish illumination of the cavern walls.

“
Magnus?” she called
out.

I’m
caught
, he replied through his link.
There’s another one we didn’t see. No time. He’ll
call for help.

Telisa realized Magnus probably spoke
through his link because his mouth had been immobilized by the grey
glue of the tangler grenade. He could be suffocating even
now.

She peeked up over the crate in front
of her, holding her stunner in one hand and her backpack in the
other. She picked a crate across the way at random and hurled her
backpack over it, then sprinted around the crates on the other
side. She came across the remaining man just as he glanced the
other direction, alarmed by the noise of her backpack smashing
across the top of the equipment container. He lay prone behind a
low crate with a rifle in his hands and two more grenades sitting
on the ground in front of him. He had a full combat helmet on. Her
stunner wouldn’t work on a man with full head protection, she
thought.

Telisa dropped her stunner and slapped
down across his back. She snaked her right arm around his throat
and pulled back with all her might. The man thrashed for a moment,
but Telisa kept her weight on him and wouldn’t let him roll out
from under her. She felt the thick Veer suits between them. The
suit’s collar was keeping her choke from working.

“
Frick!” she cried out in
frustration. The man under her started fumbling with one of the
grenades in front of him. She released her choke and batted the
grenade away before he could set it. Free of her arm, the man
bucked violently to one side and freed himself. They scrambled to
their feet but Telisa regained her balance first. She grabbed the
man around the helmet in both her arms, pulled his head down and
drove her knee full force into his chin.

The blow would have broken his jaw or
nose and stunned him at the very least, except for the full face
helmet. Instead the helmet popped off under the strike. His helmet
hadn’t been strapped on! Telisa realized that she had given up her
stunner too quickly.

“
You bitch!” snarled the
soldier. The man glared at her from under a thick brow. He had a
lot of stubble on his face. His neck looked thickset.