Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins (3 page)

“Exhale,”
someone transmitted. Caden exhaled.

Suddenly
Caden flew upward. He grunted under the acceleration. Alien leaves and branches
sliced by his face at high speed. The aircraft had launched a snatch-cable,
which had hit him and pulled with little warning.

“Just
you?” asked the voice.

“One
more, side of the tree on a smart rope,” Caden rattled off.

“I
spotted her,” someone said. “Bring me five meters north.”

“Do
we have her?” another voice asked.

“She’s
having trouble making it up. That branch is in the way.”

“Can
we clear it?”

“Negative.”

“Wait?”

“No,
she’s down. She’s down. Take us out.”

Caden
swore.

The
simulation ended. Caden opened his eyes back in his quarters. Siobhan lay in
his sleep web next to him. Caden felt a little sick.

She
died to save me... like Arakaki.

His
mood was shot. Siobhan opened her eyes.

“Don’t
do that again,” Caden said. “I want to take a break.”

Siobhan
embraced him. She was smart enough to know what had bothered him. She did not
bring out his own words against him:
It’s the only thing we can do to
prevent it from happening to us.

“Later,
then,” she said gently. She left his quarters.

Caden
decided to sleep. When he woke up, the strange mood would be gone. Siobhan was
great when he needed some space. None of his other girlfriends would have done
that. She was special. He did not want her to die.

Chapter 3

A
bright flash erupted across Jason’s vision.

Kablam!

Dust
and debris flew, obscuring his view of the street below. The smoke moved away
in the breeze, revealing a huge smoldering hole in the street. Somewhere
nearby, people were screaming.

“Yep,
it’s got this exit covered,” Jason summarized. He fell back from the rail of
the balcony and planted his back against the building.

“Okay,
come back in, we’ll try to get to him from in here,” Imanol transmitted back.

Jason darted into the factory.
He could see in his link that Imanol waited across the empty hallway. Then his
tactical went out.

“Imanol?”
he asked. There was no answer.

Shiny
has disabled our links. And next...

One
of Jason’s attendants hurled into the room. Jason told his weapon to target it
as he threw his head to the side. The sphere struck his shoulder.

His
Veer suit absorbed most of the impact, though it hurt. The sphere rolled up his
chest and found his neck. Pain arced through his body. Jason dropped and lost
consciousness.

When
he came to, Imanol stood above him. Jason tasted blood.

I
bit my tongue again. Damn little shockers.

“Get
up!” barked Imanol.

“Where
is he?” Jason asked groggily. He saw some shards of metal on the floor he
assumed were the remains of one or more of the attendants. He felt pins and
needles across his entire body. His chest throbbed, causing Jason to imagine a
damaged heart muscle.

“The
floor above us, I think,” Imanol said. He stared up at the ceiling. Jason
assumed he was trying to line up his link view with what he could see with his
eyes.

“The
stairs are to the right,” Jason said as he stood up. He got himself upright
only to fall back against a wall.

“The
right is blocked! The battle sphere blew away the entire stairwell!”

“Flank
it?”

“It
has no flank,” Imanol said. “It’s radially symmetrical, maybe even spherically
symmetrical.”

“Then
let’s get under him and attack from below.”

“How?
I don’t see—”

“We
can use a grenade to blow a hole in the floor. Hopefully right underneath him.”

“You
propose we attack a creature that evolved in subterranean environments and can
sense us through floors by tunneling underneath it. I’m sure this’ll go well,”
Imanol said, but he started to move.

“Well
they were technically subvovokan environments,” Jason said.

“Blood
and souls man!”

Jason
smiled through the haze of pain as they ran back through a hall and into the
factory. His consciousness felt like he was floating away from his body. The
pain became a distant ache.

I
don’t know what Momma Veer just popped into my bloodstream, but it’s helping.

People
cowered between storage shelves and under fabrication machines. Other forms
stood still or walked calmly through it all. Those were the android bodies,
waiting for their users to link back in, or walking back to the repository to
await a new host. Jason glimpsed at a woman sheltering beneath a desk.

That’s
what you get for coming into the factory incarnate
, Jason thought.
You should have just
remotrolled an android from home.

Jason
knew what it was like: the occasional urge to actually leave the house, feel
the real wind and sun on your face, or chat with friends incarnate. The chance
to do something in the real world every now and then just for the hell of it.
Remind yourself that there was one real world out there, at least according to
the non-simulationists. Today, these people were paying for that decision.

Imanol
came skidding to a halt. He pointed. “How about this?”

Jason
took a look. A fabrication machine fed into an adjacent lift. The ceiling had a
large trap door to allow source materials or products to be moved up to the
next floor.

“Yah,
good.”

They
ran onto the platform.

“It’s
not letting me—” Jason started, then the platform started to rise.

“Wow,
you hacked it fast.”

“Cilreth
maintains a kit for us to use on low security targets,” Imanol said.

She’s
a super valuable member of the team. I want someone to say that about me
someday.
Jason realized the drugs were making his attention wander. He tried to
force focus. Instead he just chuckled.

“You’re
high as a TRB,” Imanol realized aloud.

Jason
laughed some more.

Tachyon
receiver bases are very high, indeed.

It
took six seconds to come up to the next floor, but it felt like forever. Jason
felt sure Shiny would be able to detect them rising, either with his mass sense
or by their footsteps. As a creature that talked with leg tapping, he might be
sensitive to the vibrations in the floor.

I
need to ask about that later. They watch each other talk, and use mass sense,
do they also feel the hits through the ground?

A
cover opened above to let them out on the new floor. Immediately two attendants
darted in, but Jason and Imanol were ready. They did not have to aim; their
weapons fired at a mere thought and handled the targeting for them.

Blam. Blam.

Hot
bits of metal rained down over them.

The
lift stopped. The second floor looked similar. Lines of machines sat along
conveyor belts running the length of the factory. Jason heard the muttering
and stifled cries of terrorized Citizens hiding from the battle sphere.

“What
should we do?” whispered Jason.

Imanol
made the hand signal for their ‘mouse-cat-dog’ tactic.

Jason
pointed at Imanol, then himself.

Imanol
pointed back at Jason.

I’m
the mouse. Great.

It
was Jason’s job to lure Shiny after him, or at least distract the alien so that
Imanol could get a kill shot. It did not seem as bad in his altered state of
mind.

Jason
peeked from cover across the second level of the factory floor. He saw nothing
out of the ordinary. He cradled his weapon and moved out slowly. He did not
want to get too far ahead of Imanol. He headed straight for the center of the
factory floor. When he arrived in the center fabricator lane, he looked both
directions. The assembly machines stood quiescent.

Think,
think, think. What am I doing? Mouse.

He
exhaled loudly. More of the factory lay to his right, so Jason chose that
direction. He hoped Imanol had kept him in sight. From there, Jason chose a
course that was a bit more exposed than he normally would have taken. As the
mouse, he was supposed to be seen. The hard part was surviving being seen. The
Veer suit provided some protection, but against a Vovokan it hardly seemed to
matter. If the battle sphere lurked in the factory, he would just be fried
again.

He
scanned the machines ahead intensely. He relied upon Imanol to spot anything
that might be stalking him from the rear. Jason darted ahead past another group
of fabricators. He saw a large set of structures on the ceiling of the factory
floor. A group of offices overlooked the floor thirty meters ahead on his
right.

A
robot handler’s skynest.

The
walls and floor of the skynest were transparent, though there were desks and
platforms inside that blocked his vision of much of the interior. He paused to
scan it.

Jason
caught sight of a golden leg from behind a desk. He raised his laser carbine.

This
thing should have enough power to penetrate the floor and that desk.

He
popped a grenade off his belt and rolled it ahead. Then he started to fire into
the desk.

Shiny
darted out from behind the cover. Several things happened at once. Jason’s
grenade launched itself into the air just to be intercepted by another sphere.
More spheres put themselves between Shiny and Jason. Jason heard someone yell,
“Duck!”

Jason hit the deck.

KABOOM!

An explosion rocked the factory.
Jason felt the heat rise painfully, then recede, though he could not breathe.
His Veer suit snapped up a face mask and tried to feed him fresh air as he
coughed and gagged.

“Got
him,” Imanol said. “Looks like you made it, though in need of hospitalization.
That explosion used up your oxygen and released some toxic fumes.”

“Great,”
Jason said, dropping from the simulation. He opened his real eyes and stretched
a bit in the galley of
New Iridar
. The fogginess left his mind. Imanol
was not far away, flexing his arms and legs.

“So
what did we learn?” Imanol asked.

“Our
coordination goes straight to conductive purple without our links.”

Imanol
nodded. “I agree if by conductive purple you mean straight to shit.”

“Ah.
Yes. That’s roughly it. Sorry, core world lingo.”

“We’ll
work on it. Anything else?”

“The
real Shiny is more resourceful,” Jason said.

“Sadly
true. I’ll make sure the TSG includes even more disruption on his part.” Imanol
said. He looked at the stunner on Jason’s belt.

“I
want you to start handling lethal weapons out of the sim,” Imanol said.

“I
don’t feel confident about it.”

“You’re
afraid of screwing up.”

Jason
shrugged. “That’s just smart. You kill a friend, you can’t take it back.”

“We’re
just going to handle them and shoot them, not jump into a firefight. The fear
of weapons is good, just like you said. It’s like racing a motorcycle. You
start out nervous, so you’re careful. Then you get confident, then
overconfident, and that’s when you crash. I want you to lose your nerves. But
don’t lose the fear of handling them, that’s when the accident comes.”

“Okay.
I agree,” Jason said. “I want to learn how to fit in on the frontier.”

“We’re
way beyond the frontier now. Besides, I can hardly teach you how to act on the
frontier. You just become experienced, then you fit in.”

“Then
we can train. You can teach me.”

Jason
did not like acting like such an eager recruit in front of anyone, but he
wanted to submerge his core worlder image. The only way he could do that was to
learn everything as fast as possible.

“We
just did,” Imanol said.

“I
mean, I want to know more about being out on the fringe, rather than being a
core worlder.”

“It’s
just something that comes with being someplace where everything isn’t handed to
you on a silver plate.”

“Like
what?”

“Like
the recycling pipe under your fabricated habitat breaking open, and you having
to crawl under there and fix it!” Imanol growled.

“What?
What about the robots?”

“Maybe
your
robot
, your
one and only
robot, broke that week. Or maybe
your robot wasn’t designed to fit between the insulative slab and the bedrock
under your house. Or maybe you don’t have the program handy and you have to
write it yourself, and before you get it right the thing puts a couple new
holes in your floor.”

“On
the frontier, if a robot breaks, it can’t always be instantly replaced,” Jason
guessed.

“That’s
right. Often, it’s the case.”

“I
don’t know... anything about fixing things.”

“No
one does out of the womb. Well, not unless their parents are organized crime
using neural trainers on fetuses.”

“Why
would you say such a thing? No one would—”

“It
happens,” Imanol growled. “But that’s not where I was heading. I’m just saying,
you just have to pick it up as it happens. Just stay calm and think it through.
You’d be surprised. Doing your own plumbing on an alien world really gives you
an appreciation for how long it took to perfect these mundane technologies in
the first place. Core worlders don’t have any respect for anything except fancy
VRs and fashion, or the latest entertainer.”

Imanol’s
diatribe had become rather harsh, so Jason decided not to say anything else.

“Your
brain obviously still works,” Imanol said more calmly. “You just think it
through. Make some mistakes. You’ll fit in just fine soon enough. Besides, like
I said, we’re a whole new breed out here, even the frontier isn’t this crazy
dangerous. You’ll be dead in no time anyway.”

Telisa
walked in.

“Hi!”
Jason said.

“Training,
yes? I heard crazy dangerous,” she said.

“Getting
ready to get someone back,” Jason said.

Telisa
nodded.

Did
she know that already?

She
sat down across from Jason and Imanol.

“There
are things you weren’t allowed to know as new recruits,” Telisa said. “Shiny is
more powerful than you may know.”

They
waited for her to continue.

“Shiny
uses many artifacts, among them, some real Trilisk gems. The most valuable of
all of them is a Trilisk AI which can interpret the wishes of sentient beings
of different races and provide them. Almost magically, limited to some degree
by the complexity of your understanding of what you want. We called it praying
things up.”

“You’ve
used it yourself?” Imanol said.

“Yes.
It’s truly amazing. Shiny used it to bootstrap an industrial complex on a
mineral rich asteroid. From nothing to starship construction in a few weeks. I
think he brought it to Earth, though I’m not sure. I think the original Shiny
has it with him at all times. He knows how to screen out the prayers of other
beings. So you see, it’s going to be easier to deal with him than to force him
into anything. He’s also used to betrayal and prepared to counter it. It’s a
major characteristic of his race.”

“He
did a number on us, for sure,” Imanol said. “I understand why you didn’t tell
us about the other stuff. I also get now why you said we could have almost
anything we wanted.”