The Trilisk Ruins (5 page)

Magnus showed her how to fall backwards
and roll forwards, and she practiced until she understood how the
moves were to be done. The sim felt nearly real, including the
sensation of falling onto the mat. After the initial trials, she
found herself atop a low white wall that appeared in the center of
the workout area. Magnus instructed her how to roll with a fall,
and she practiced this. Each time she dropped, she found herself
atop the wall again after a few seconds. After a while she noticed
the wall was getting taller.

“
It’s getting harder,” she
said.

“
Remember, it’s not real,”
came Magnus’ disembodied voice. “Just do your best.”

Telisa dropped and rolled a
few more times. The falls were becoming jarring. Telisa felt
anxiety building inside of her, but she suppressed it.
He’s testing me
, she
thought.

“
Just out of curiosity,
what’s the point of doing this to failure?” she asked levelly. “It
is inevitable that eventually I’m going to get hurt... not for
real, of course, but...” Telisa realized that she would be able to
learn from experiencing breaking bones and getting shot in VR,
without ever having to recover from real injury. But it would still
hurt like hell.

“
You need to know how the
technique fails. And you need to be able to perform it under
stress.”

Telisa sat atop the wall again. She
dropped, ready to collapse forward into a roll. When she hit the
ground she felt a pain in her foot, then she fumbled the roll and
the impact knocked the wind out of her. Her head hurt.

“
Good. One more time,”
Magnus said.

The pain went away. She started from
the wall again. This time she thought it looked quite a bit higher.
She hesitated. Should she complain again, or go through breaking
something? She realized her body was shaking in the virtual world.
She took a deep breath and fell off the wall.

This time the snap was loud and a spike
of agony came with it. Instead of rolling forward her legs
collapsed beneath her and she fell to the ground on her tailbone,
shocking her entire spine. She rolled weakly to one side, crying
out as the pain crested... then she found herself on level ground,
whole again.

“
When a person gets really
hurt for the first time, often they panic. And sometimes it’s
traumatic mentally as well as physically. But believe me when I say
that it gets better. A person can become used to getting hurt just
like anything else. You learn to deal with the pain and the damage
calmly, and your fear of it will subside. After a year of this
you’ll avoid injury, but you won’t fear the injury itself. It will
still hurt, but you won’t shy away from it if it’s something you
need to do.”

“
So I’ll be able to think
clearly about it, and suppress my instincts?”

“
Yes. The decision, for
instance, about whether or not to fight will be a rational one, and
it won’t be made based on your fear of injury.”

Having learned the proper form for the
rolls and the falls, she left the pure VR environment and they went
to the gym. There Magnus fitted her with a pseudo VR helmet that
provided her with fake sights and sounds along with an
instructional program. The first time she tried the roll, it was
much clumsier and more painful than she had last achieved in the VR
trials; now she was rolling with her own body in the real universe.
Magnus said that the pseudo helmet was extremely useful for
conducting mock fights with ranged weapons, and useful to a lesser
degree for practicing unarmed combat moves. Here she would train
her muscles and increase the stamina of her real body while still
in environments generated by the computer.

Finally the helmet was put aside, and
Magnus ushered her into the center of the mat that covered the
floor of the tiny gym. Without warning he pushed her backward
violently, and she fell hard, slapping the mat too late.

“
We can’t do that with the
pseudo VR,” he said, “at least not at this facility. You did well
enough for the first time, at least you tucked your chin to your
chest.”

Telisa stood back up, regarding Magnus
carefully now. She was slightly intimidated by the attack, and
dreaded that he might hit her next. Was this to be another lesson
in pain? He looked so strong, so invincible, the cut of his muscles
visible even through the heavy skinsuit.

“
Let’s see some forward
rolls without the helmet,” he said. “Your body already knows how to
do this, so it shouldn’t be that much different than the
pseudo.”

Telisa finished up the rolls and falls.
Magnus didn’t attack her again and he seemed satisfied, although he
didn’t say anything encouraging, either. She wobbled back to her
quarters completely exhausted. She went to sleep that night trying
to decide if she was mad at Magnus for pushing her, or grateful
that he took her lessons so seriously. The next morning was an
agony of sore muscles and bruises, but Telisa remained determined.
She would not shirk from these lessons no matter how difficult they
became. If she did that, the others would just decide that she was
a spoiled academic brat, someone useless for anything except
writing esoteric papers about extinct alien races.

The voyage stretched out into weeks as
Telisa trained an hour in VR, an hour with the PR helmet, and an
hour in real training in the gym every other day. She learned
falls, strikes, locks, and throws for unarmed combat. Soon she
added training programs to assemble, clean, and fire various ranged
weapons, and took part in mock firefights in the PR
helmet.

She felt good about in her new skills,
and came to realize that she was lucky to have been selected as
Magnus’s secondary. She could not imagine medical or piloting
programs to be as varied and interesting as what she was learning.
Never before had she realized the almost infinite array of moves
and countermoves mankind had developed for shooting, sparring,
throwing, and grappling. Telisa wondered if the Talosians or the
Trilisks had spent so much time figuring out how to destroy their
fellows.

As time went on no one questioned her
combat studies. She wondered what, if anything, Magnus had told
them about her performance. Since she was a solitary student, she
had no one with whom to compare her progress. She looked forward to
the physical sessions as a welcome release from the tedium of the
voyage.

She also realized that she
was starting to become attached to Magnus. She found herself
staring at his image in her mind’s eye, summoned from her link
memory. She had images of the entire crew and the
Iridar
ferreted away
there. Out in space, she had no place to download the images, so
she had to keep them tucked away in her link. It had a lot of
storage capacity, but not an unlimited amount. She’d have a lot in
there by the time they returned, she thought.

At first she had found the man distant
and mysterious, almost rude, but through the lessons he gave her,
she saw that he genuinely cared about her. His voice, which had at
first sounded cold and flat, started to sound softer, almost
intimate to her. Telisa wondered if it were just wishful thinking
on her part. She resolved to find out—after their first
expedition.

Thomas spent more and more time in the
command room as they neared the planet. Telisa gave him plenty of
space, as her own nervousness increased. If the space force
detected them here and caught them, Telisa would find herself under
arrest before their expedition even began. She tried to calm
herself and put her faith in Thomas, but it didn’t work.

Jack dropped in on Telisa and Magnus in
the gym. He didn’t usually stop by in person like this, since they
could all communicate through their intracranial links. Telisa
wondered if he was curious to see her training.

“
We came out of FTL pretty
far from the planet and took a little look-see,” Jack explained.
“No sign of the original exploration vessel. We’re going to insert
into an orbit where we shouldn’t be detectable by the ground
bases.”

“
Then we’ll select our
site?” Telisa asked.

“
That’s the plan. He should
skip us in closer—”

Red lights flashed on and Telisa’s
computer link emitted a warning tone with a calm synthetic voice
instructing her to find the nearest g-damper. There was one
terrible second when panic rose in her throat and she froze, then
she was scrambling for the exit. Magnus ran behind her, a
protective hand on her back. Jack had run for the other
side.

Telisa came to the first pod, nothing
more than a port in the corridor just large enough for a person to
dive into. The tiny chamber was designed to protect a human from
sudden accelerations that the pilot might have to apply in a combat
situation. She slammed into the dampener module and grabbed the
mask to put over her face. In less than three seconds the tiny
cramped space filled with protective foam and Telisa was plunged
into darkness. Her only connection with the outside world was her
wireless computer link, still droning its warning.

Telisa wondered if the dampener module
would be her tomb. If the ship was blown apart, would the module
break open and spill her into space, or would it remain intact
until she suffocated? Or would the ship tumble into the atmosphere
until she cooked to death? Telisa took a long gulp of oxygen and
tried to calm down, telling herself that whatever was going to
happen would happen. It was out of her hands now.

The ship buffeted violently. An
explosive sound of metal clunking and rockets firing echoed into
the g-dampener and she screamed. But it wasn’t the end. The ship
was still rocking back and forth. Suddenly everything smoothed out
and Telisa just breathed, wrapped up like a child in a metal womb.
A distant rumbling became noticeable, but Telisa just
waited.

Oh shit. Oh shit. I should
have stayed at home
, she
thought.

“
We were spotted by a space
force supply ship,” Thomas said over the link. “Luckily those
things are slugs, and lightly armed. Just hang in there, we’re
going to be planetside in a few minutes.”

Spotted by a UNSF ship. Telisa’s terror
washed away into a terrible sadness, a feeling of being cheated. If
the patrol had found them, there would be no expedition, no grand
adventure.

Telisa waited forever and then she
waited some more. Finally Thomas’s voice came again.

“
You can leave the pods.
We’re on the ground.”

Telisa brought up her pod controls with
her link and actuated the release. A spray of liquid dissolved the
foam and the hatch opened. Telisa discarded the breathing mask and
carefully made her way out. Her workout suit was wet, but she
ignored the discomfort.

The four crewmembers gathered around
the galley. Everyone was wet from a foam wash. As a group, they
reminded Telisa of a bunch of shipwrecked rats shivering on the
shore of a deserted island.

They all linked into the computer and
Thomas brought up a display of the sensor readings that the ship’s
systems had obtained during their stressful landing. He used a
mental interface to the machine to indicate spots on the virtual
map.

“
You can see the ruin sites
to the north and west,” he pointed out, as the sites he referred to
blinked in red on the display. “But what really interests me is an
installation up in the high ground to the east. I picked up a power
source there, and was getting some pretty weird readings from
it.”

“
I don’t know what the hell
you think we’re going to do,” Telisa said. “You were paying
attention when the space force tried to kill us, weren’t you? Do
you think they’re just going to let us go now? They’ll be here any
time now!”

Magnus spoke up in Thomas’s
place.

“
No, we actually will have
some time. We may as well continue as best we can.”

Telisa was perplexed. She turned her
wide-eyed stare to Thomas. “What? Is that true?”

“
I’m equipped to screen us
from orbital detection. We fired off several electronic
countermeasure modules before entering the atmosphere. I think
their jamming window was wide enough to hide us. The chances are
good that they don’t know the location of our landing site. They
might not even know that we landed for sure.”

Jack stepped up beside
Magnus.

“
Although I admit that this
is one of the worst things that could have happened, we still have
a fifty-fifty chance to make it out of this. I’m not going to just
give myself up. We can go and check this place out, and get some
artifacts. Then if the ship hasn’t been found, we might be able to
make our way out without being detected,” Jack said.

Telisa was speechless for a moment.
Then she said, “They know someone’s here though. They’ll bring in
more ships.”

“
That’ll take time, probably
weeks,” Magnus said. “There probably aren’t many security people in
system. It’ll mostly be scientists. There’s a chance they might not
even come after us.”

“
We’ll probably have to sell
the artifacts somewhere else though,” Jack conceded. “The best
prices are on Earth, but it’ll be too risky to try and bring them
in for a long time.”