Miracle Workers (SCE Books 5-8) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [95]
As soon as I got to the ladder that would lead me up to the SA, I fired a shot with the rifle at the ground behind me, then again at one of the crystal bushes near the ladder. It wouldn’t delay the shii much, but I only needed to slow it down enough to make up the difference between its four legs and my two . . .
Excerpt from a letter from Razka on Sarindar to Marig on Nalor, sixteenth day of Sendrak, twenty-third year of Togh
. . . everything seemed fine until the barricade failed. I should have known that the curse of Sarindar wasn’t finished with me just yet.
Luckily, Commander Gomez is no fool. She gave me her tricorder device. She had modified it so that it would emit a sonic pulse. The idea was that if the monster shii came for me, I should activate the pulse.
As soon as the barricade failed, I clutched the tricorder to myself for dear life. I looked at the tableau in front of me.
A fierce wind was blowing, as often happened at night. The crystalline trees and bushes made a mild tinkling noise that almost sounded musical. To the right was the massive concave dish that was the focus of so much of our labors. Commander Gomez was climbing the ladder to the dish. The monster shii was standing at the ladder’s base. I somehow doubted it had ever encountered anything like this ladder before.
Then it turned to look at me. It ran for me.
It happened again, Marig. I froze.
But this time, I was able to push the button. Though I could not raise or activate a weapon, I was somehow able to make myself activate the sonic pulse. And it worked. The monster shii stopped dead in its tracks. Then it went for me a second time. I pushed the button again.
(In fact, Marig, it is truly not a button, but a touch-sensitive control. But allow a frightened old man to wax poetic.)
Amazingly enough, it worked again. And a third time. After that, the monster shii turned around and ran back toward the ladder. I looked up to see that Commander Gomez had climbed up to the top of the dish . . .
First officer’s log, supplemental
. . . as soon as I got to the edge of the dish, I turned to see that the shii had turned its attention to Razka. I braced my legs in the struts of the ladder, then fired a shot over the shii’s head.
Since the shii was staying about three meters away from Razka, yet facing him, I assumed that the sonic pulse I built into the tricorder worked. But I had no way to judge how long it would last, and besides, I needed to get the shii up to the dish. So I fired.
Sure enough, the shii turned around—probably deciding that Razka’s head wasn’t worth all this trouble anyhow—and ran back to the dish. It loped over to the bottom of the ladder, then tried to figure out how to climb up it.
I looked down and tried to figure out the same thing. The shii had triangular “paws”—no individual claws or fingers or anything like that. Presumably the shii that the creature emulated had evolved that way as the most adequate way to navigate Sarindar’s glassy surface. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very useful for climbing up ladders with rounded rungs.
Of course, the whole point of the exercise was to lure the shii up the ladder to the SA dish. Something else I didn’t think of. Latest in a series, collect ’em all.
Then the shii’s paws changed shape, to something closer to a human hand. That made sense. It, and its smaller companion, had taken on the shape of a shii in order to blend in with the local fauna, and, being a machine, hadn’t changed shape to anything else since then because it hadn’t had reason to.
Now, though, it did. Armed with its newfound opposable thumbs, it clambered up the ladder. As soon as the shii was about three-quarters of the way up the ladder, I did some clambering of my own, onto the outer edge of the dish. The plan was to get the shii up on the edge also, then immobilize it.
It was a good plan. So, naturally, it went all to