"Good luck," Joe said and followed Magnus out.
Left alone, Telisa sat down and awaited Magnus"s return.
Chapter Fourteen.
Telisa resolved herself to a wait that she estimated at about ten minutes, given the speed with which Shiny buzzed along. Everything had happened so quickly with the alien. Telisa could hardly believe that she had seen a live aliena"even spoken with one, if you counted a lifting of its leg to say "yes" or "no".
She still held the small digging device that Shiny had given her. She rolled it in her hand, examining the faintly visible metal lace patterns around and inside the cubes. A real alien artifact. What fascinating things would she learn about Shiny"s race by a.n.a.lyzing it? And once she had learned all she could from it, could it be sold? Such a piece might command a hefty price on the black market for alien technology. She could use the money to finance other expeditions.
But first, they would have to escape this place. She listened but didn"t hear any sign of Magnus"s return. Her gaze settled on Shiny"s cache of objects in the center of the large cavern. It looked like a piece of art, made of hundreds of cubes laced together with delicate strands of molten silver. Yet whenever Shiny manipulated it, the cubes seemed almost malleable. Everything turned and glittered at his lightest touch, almost too fast for the eye to follow. What else was in that trove before her?
Telisa wanted to walk over and investigate it, but she realized that it would be dangerous to do that. A wrong move with some unknown device could kill. Or she might somehow disturb Shiny"s plan, which she desperately hoped involved escape.
The minutes dragged on. She checked her link chronometer. Ten minutes came and went. Crazy thoughts of a fight in the caves ran through her head. What if Shiny had decided to separate the humans and kill them one by one? Telisa told herself that nothing had happened. She hadn"t heard any shots or explosions.
At last Magnus jogged into the cavern.
"Oh, good. I was starting to go paranoid!" Telisa said "Hi," he said. "Everything"s going fine. Let"s go this way," he said.
Telisa fell in after him. They moved through to the other side of the large cave and out a tunnel.
"When we separate, how long should I wait?"
"We can talk about that later, over the link," he said. "We should just concentrate on remembering the direction of the cache room. Since this place is unpredictable, we need to pay attention to that so we can find each other again."
Okay, Telisa said over the link. Just checking to see if it works.
I hear you, Magnus returned.
They moved for about fifty meters as straight as they could manage through the caves. Directly ahead, Telisa saw a smooth white corridor stretching straight away. Bright lights flooded down onto the pa.s.sage and out into the caves towards them.
"Okay, you wait here. I"ll move ahead until I"m well out of sight and contact you."
"Okay. Good luck," she said and patted Magnus on the back before he strode away.
Telisa turned back to look the way they had come and took out her stunner. She thought that the heading of Shiny"s cube cache was slightly to the right of the tunnel that headed back in that direction. The tunnels would probably be different if they went back that way.
Telisa waited for Magnus"s message. She wondered what would happen if Shiny"s plan worked. Would the alien come back and get them? Where would he go? What would happen to the caves and the mazelike corridors?
I"m in position, Magnus"s voice echoed in her head.
This is crazy, Telisa sent.
Crazy but at least we"re alive, he sent. If we get out of this place, let"s make a run for it. Joe may be telling the truth about letting us go.
I want to stay and learn more about Shiny, Telisa replied.
The UNSF won"t let us. The most we can hope for is an artifact or two in our hands and escape from this planet.
Telisa didn"t want to hear that. But she thought Magnus was probably right.
Kirizzo moved slower than he had in recent memory. He estimated that the others were in their positions and now he walked away from the last observation pod, concentrating on all the ones he had set out. Only a fraction of his attention focused on the pa.s.sage he moved through. Kirizzo felt his way forward almost as much as he used his vision.
He came to an obstruction of some kind. He waited for a moment, watching his monitors and waiting for a chance to glance forward. Kirizzo set up a rhythm of checking everything in order and inserted a peek at his current surroundings into the sequence.
The center of the pa.s.sage ahead was blocked by a gray matrix of hexagonal cells. Kirizzo sensed that this backing substance was vacuous, with little more ma.s.s than air. He reached out and tore away a piece of the material in a single claw. For something so light, it showed great structural strength.
Kirizzo suspected the inert substance backed the entire complex. It filled out the volume of the installation when nothing could sense it. He took a risk and skipped looking at one of his modules. After a few seconds he peeked at its data again. Nothing had changed.
Everything had stabilized.
Kirizzo abandoned his observer modules altogether, ignoring their input. He savagely tore into the gray matrix with six or seven of his arms. His race had primitive roots as a burrowing culture, and he now returned to his origins with a vengeance. He cut through cell after cell, discarding the ragged fragments behind him as he dug forward.
Up ahead a large ma.s.s loomed. Kirizzo could feel it, a ma.s.sive wall of dense material. He cut his way through. It looked like a smooth wall of strong metal. Kirizzo cleared away the base matrix from the surface, digging along the barrier.
There had to be an exit.
I"ve had enough, Magnus said over the link. How about you?
Yes. It"s so frustrating! Let"s go back and see if we can find Joe or Shiny.
Magnus appeared from the direction he had gone hours before. He ran towards her, looking more excited than she expected.
"Something may be up after all," he told her. "The doors and the halls are the same as on my way out."
"The same? Can you tell from such a short distance?"
"Well, I think something would have changed before, even for just a couple of hallways. Let"s go back towards the cache and maybe we"ll see more."
They walked away from the human-style area and returned to the dim red caves. The tunnel angled slightly left of where they wanted to go as Telisa remembered. Then they jinked to the right through two caves and continued in the right direction.
"It does seem familiar," Telisa said. "Or is it my imagination?"
"I think it does. I"m hesitant to jump to conclusions too, but it does really look like whatever Shiny planned has worked. The tunnels didn"t change."
Magnus led the way the last few meters into the large cavern with the equipment cache in the center. Everything looked the same as they had left it.
"It"s all still here!" Telisa said.
"Minus Joe and Shiny."
"They may not be back yet. I hope we didn"t leave too soon."
"I think it"s okay. Shiny was careful to let us know what he needed, I think if we had to stay longer he would have figured out how to communicate that."
"Well, what now? If everything is frozen in place, does that mean we can search the whole thing and find the exit now?" asked Telisa.
"Maybe so," Magnus said. "You wanna go look for the exit now, or should we wait and see if Shiny and Joe come back?"
"I"m already back," came the familiar voice of Joe. Magnus and Telisa turned to see him walking around the cache to join them.
"And Shiny?" asked Magnus.
"I haven"t seen him. Do you think he fooled us somehow?"
"It worked! The caves don"t change anymore," Telisa told him.
Joe raised an eyebrow and looked around. "Well, this place hasn"t changed."
"Or any of the pa.s.sages on the way to where we waited. They always changed before," Magnus said.
"I wonder how it worked," Joe said. "We should try and find Shiny."
"Or the exit," Telisa said. "If the place doesn"t change, we could map it all out and find out for sure if there"s a way out or not."
"Okay. Let"s take a look," Joe agreed.
"I"ll do the mapping," Telisa offered. She accessed her link computer and set up a mapping program. She could see the map in her mind"s eye; effortlessly she added the cache room and its exits to the center of her new map.
"Ready?" Magnus asked.
"Yep, let"s go," Telisa said.
The group walked down a side tunnel. They traversed several side caverns, moving slowly so that Telisa could map them. They worked their way through the dark caverns until coming across the human-style corridors where Telisa and Magnus had waited.
They found meeting rooms and a cafeteria with a group of vending kiosks along one wall. Telisa walked up to the machines and asked for a menu through her link.
"Furnam"s Chocolate Squares?" Telisa read aloud, mocking the faux items it sold. "Anyone want a Sloozebar?"
"Food is food," Joe said. "We should break in and take some."
"We can do that later since things have stabilized," Magnus said. "Or even if they haven"t for that matter. We"d just have to look around for long enough and we"d find some, even if things are changing."
Joe shrugged. "Okay. I have enough for now. But I am a bit concerned about h.o.a.rding some more for the long term."
They left the cafeteria behind and moved down another unmapped corridor. The wall on the left was made of clear gla.s.s, displaying an abstract art exhibit. Telisa didn"t have an eye for art, but the paintings seemed real enough until she read one of the names from a plaque.
"Talvent Checksparr? That"s a crazy name. More fake stuff, I guess."
"How can you tell?" asked Magnus. "Artists sometimes have weird names."
"Grumbit Shalzpleen?" Telisa read aloud.
"Um, okay, it"s fake alright," agreed Magnus.
The next corridor broke off in a T-shape. Magnus started to go to the right, but Telisa turned the other way.
"Over here. I need to check something," she said.
"Okay," Magnus said. "What"s up?"
Telisa didn"t answer, her face a mask of concentration. They walked forward another twenty meters, ignoring doors on both sides. On her mental map, the corridor they were in collided with a spot they had been in earlier.
"d.a.m.n!" Telisa barked.
"What"s wrong?" Magnus asked.
"The map just overlapped itself. Something is wrong," Telisa said.
"Let"s head back the other way and double check. Maybe you entered a turn wrong," Joe suggested.
"I hope I did," Telisa said. "Okay, let"s double check."
They turned and went back the way they had come. After making the first turn, Joe shook his head.
"There were two doors in this hall before. Now there"s three."
"But it stopped changing," Telisa said. "At least for a while."
"Whatever we did, it only lasted a while," Joe said. "The place has started working again."
"And there"s no sign of Shiny," Magnus added.
Telisa shook her head. "I can"t believe it. He"s abandoned us."
Chapter Fifteen.
Kirizzo moved through a vast room filled with angular columns of gray metal that stopped just short of the low ceiling. Black plates embedded in the devices glowed with symbols in a funny violet color at the edge of his visual capabilities. He supposed that he saw only a fraction of the wavelengths that the creators had used to view the information.