Free Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins by Michael McCloskey Page A

“Seriously?”
    Imanol
shrugged. “Must be an Earth thing.”
    “Well
this place is super famous. There are always over a million vid feed viewers at
even the dullest times.”
    “A
million watchers? Of this club? Earthers are bored.”
    “It’s
huge. It’s being broadcast to the Core Worlds, too.”
    “Wait.
You mean someone is keeping a tachyon transmitter going with a feed from this
place just so people can watch some celebs dance in another star system in near
real time?”
    “Yes.
Totally. It’s not a lot of energy by Earth standards.”
    “Those
transmitters eat up huge amounts of power!”
    “By
frontier standards,” Jason stopped to check their six. “Can I go on with my
story yet?”
    “Okay
fine. So you were there. Like a tourist.”
    “Not
just anyone can even walk in there, man. You have to be some kind of major
mogul or UNSF biggie or a serious VR star. That kind of thing. But turns out,
Core World Security escorted me through there.”
    “What?”
    “Yes.
They took me through there because they have a secret presence there.”
    “Are
you on some weird drug?”
    “No
it’s all true. My story. So this amazingly beautiful and elegant woman walks up
to me and asks, ‘Dance me up?’”
    “What?
She wanted you to dance?”
    “Yes.
A goddess. She must have thought the CWS escort were my bodyguards. So I say,
‘I can’t, I’ve got to save the Earth.’”
    Imanol
chuckled. “And it was the truth. Kind of.”
    “Well
I thought it was the truth. So she says, ‘You’d better!’ and walks off.”
    “I
wonder what she thought later when you showed up as a wanted traitor against
humanity,” Imanol said.
    Sigh.
Leave it to him to say that.
    “I
looked up her face. She’s on the board of Guriti Nervous Integration.”
    Imanol
opened his mouth, but Jason cut him off. “I know, you never heard of it. It’s
the main company putting links into kid’s heads these days. Not just Earth,
either. Did you know some of the latest links are installed right in the womb
tanks? Before the kids even come out.”
    “All
I know is, you better be ready to run from the CWS on your date with her,”
Imanol said. He stopped and pointed.
    “Look!
A cave down there.”
    Jason
followed the pointer. Almost directly under the huge vine stem they stood on,
the detritus on the forest floor gave way to reveal a rocky hole in the
surface. It looked deep.
    “Whoa.
There are caves here? Under all this?” Jason asked.
    “Apparently!
Let’s check this out.”
    “Bad
idea, man,” Jason said.
    “Why?”
    “There’s
always a cave, and it’s always bad news.”
    “Man,
you’re just a rookie out here how the hell do you know it’s bad news?”
    “It’s
always a disaster in the action VRs, I mean.”
    Imanol
rolled his eyes. “ Blood and souls , man.”
     
    ***
     
    Telisa
and Siobhan climbed back out of the building. The doors on the ceiling had no
stairs or ladders, so they had Cilreth open the door and send a smart rope
down. The difficult exit got them thinking again about how the creators had
used the doors.
    “I
guess the Blackvines can reach up there and pull themselves out? Or maybe only
robots came down here,” Siobhan wondered aloud.
    “Or
maybe Imanol is right: they were tall,” Cilreth said. Siobhan would have
expected sarcasm there, but she heard none.
    “Not
Blackvines?”
    “I’m
still mulling it over,” Cilreth said. “The Blackvines could have been living in
someone else’s space habitat. Or, they could have been their pet plants. I mean
the possibilities just go on and on. The Blackvines could have been alien
ambassadors that survived whatever killed off the Celarans. They could be
conquerors fallen back on hard times after the war. Or artificial lifeforms
created for entertainment.”
    Siobhan
decided they did not have enough information to have the slightest idea what
was going on yet. The picture she had been forming was made of flimsy
assumptions and premature