Free The Trilisk Supersedure by Michael McCloskey Page A

It’s a one-shot glue grenade.”
    “Nice.
I’m not quite used to all the weapons yet. From private investigator to
planetary explorer, you know.”
    “Isn’t
it wonderful?” Telisa asked enthusiastically.
    Cilreth
chuckled. So young and full of energy. “Which way are we going?”
    Telisa
was silent for a moment; then a scout robot headed out. “Follow him,” she said.
    They
followed the robot out of the clearing. As they came to the first tight group
of alien plants, Cilreth automatically reached for her machete.
    “Shall
I cut a swath through? Or do we want a low-profile trail behind us?”
    “If
there were no people, I’d say go ahead and cut. Predators will be equipped to
find us anyway. But with people we don’t know in the ruins, let’s leave it.”
    Cilreth
nodded. She agreed with the thinking. If she left a trail, it would make it
easier for Magnus to follow if he needed to find them but also easier for
strangers to find them.
    “We
have a box of breadcrumb devices we could use,” Cilreth pointed out.
    “Oh
yeah. I never quite saw the usefulness of the devices before.”
    “They
are usually just for marking a complex path for others to follow later after
you’re gone. Some places screw with a link’s ability to accurately map them,
and sometimes there isn’t a way to send your map to the next person to come
along.”
    “And we
can configure them to be silent when strangers come by,” Telisa noted. She was
probably reading up on them in her link to remind herself of their
capabilities.
    “But in
this case, I’m wondering if we can form a bridge with them. If they can each
reach twenty five meters or so, then we could daisy chain our communications
back here.”
    “Daisy
chain?” There was a delay. Then Telisa nodded. “Okay. But I hope we stop coming
up with new plans every five minutes, or we’ll never get anything done!”
    Young
people. Every time I use an archaic term they have to look it up. “Ha.”
Cilreth ran back and retrieved a pack of fifty breadcrumbs. Each device was a
small black cylinder, the size of five or six tiny coins stacked together. She
configured them as a relay chain and told them to only offer services to the
three Terrans or Shiny. Then she jogged back to Telisa and dropped the first
one at the entrance of the plant cluster.
    “There
we go,” Cilreth said.
    Telisa pushed
aside the green masses of moss-like leaves and stepped through. Her spheres
slipped through after her, dodging around swaying green mops and thick stalks.
Cilreth followed.
    They
had walked about a hundred meters from camp when the scout stopped. Cilreth
immediately stopped with it, staring ahead. She had just dropped a third
breadcrumb device behind her. She accessed the scout’s view. Its Vovokan mass
detectors had sensed movement ahead, over and above the normal flutter of the
green plant bulbs in a light breeze. She checked the mass map. The movement was
fifteen meters ahead, and slightly underground.
    A trap?
Thank Cthulhu for those scout machines.
    “There,”
Telisa said through her link, sending Cilreth a visual indicator. Telisa
pointed out a hole in the ground under a batch of stalks. One of the natural
plant pot wells. Cilreth was able to confirm the movement came from inside the
well.
    Cilreth
stayed put and watched. Nothing much seemed to be happening on the surface. She
watched until she thought maybe Telisa would just keep going. Then she spotted
something moving. This time she was ready to interpret what she saw: another
translucent creature.
    It was
small. Then she saw another. More tiny clear creatures climbed out from the
plant well. They scampered over the spiky red rock.
    “Critters.
Just some clear critters, like ghost shrimp,” Cilreth transmitted. For some
reason they reminded her of ghost shrimp in size and movement, though she could
not tell if they had legs or not.
    “The
last small critters I found tried to eat me alive,” Telisa said. She had her
pistol