Read Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins for Free Online

black
body. The chevrons shimmered between bright colors.
    Pretty,
yet creepy. Those fingers look too much like super-long Terran fingers. But it
doesn’t look dangerous from an objective physical analysis. Those fingers are
better than huge jaws filled with sharp teeth, or an acid-belching living
carpet.
    Telisa’s
mind tried to recall what it had been like to be the flat creature on Chigran
Callnir. She railed against the mismatch of memories that did not fit her
current body. It was frustrating. She could remember it, yet she could not
remember the feeling of it. Like a memory of taste as experienced by
someone who had never tasted, the experiences were simply too alien.
    Telisa
moved on to the other pane families. The next two ruins were larger. One was a
series of low buildings that had been overgrown by the native vines. The
buildings were the size of Terran houses set many meters above the surface,
within the vine canopy. Once again the angles were strange. She saw a lot of
hexagonal components, but they seemed mashed together with little reason.
Telisa realized they reminded her of the buildings in the space habitat the
team had visited.
    Did
Shiny send us to a Blackvine colony? I got the impression these aliens had
reached a higher potential than we saw from that race. Though that space
habitat was nothing to sneeze at. Really surprising given the confusing clutter
we found inside.
    Telisa
checked the output of the star to the radiation profile from the space habitat.
They did not match well, but this was not expected to be their native planet,
either. Maxsym had noted the light of the habitat was matched well to the
Blackvines. Or had he only been talking about the windows? She decided it was
too early to conclude the buildings were Blackvine. If they were, it should
become apparent when they arrived.
    The
fauna analysis from the second site had spotted the same sorts of insect like
creatures. Though she saw a new creature or two, the main thing that caught her
eye was the existence of the meter long eel things with the colorful stripes.
Telisa did a quick check ahead: they were at all three sites.
    A
dominant life form?
    The
last ruins site was composed of much larger buildings. Telisa’s gut reaction to
it was that it must have been an industrial complex. About fourteen large
constructs rose to the equivalent of four or five Terran stories high. A hard
pavement cover had been put over the planet’s surface around the buildings.
Despite some cracks it had held up pretty well. The native vines had not
managed to make as much headway here as they had among the second ruin.
    Telisa
immediately noticed that attendants had gone missing trying to investigate
these buildings.
    Some
kind of automated defenses ,
Telisa surmised. This is the most dangerous, but perhaps the most valuable
of the three sites. We’ll get warmed up on the others, but this is probably the
one with the greatest prizes.
    Telisa
called for a face to face to discuss the data coming in. Everyone assembled
quickly; the New Iridar was so small there was no place anyone could be
that would take a long time to arrive.
    “By
now I’m sure you’ve all taken a look,” Telisa opened. “We’re going down at the
smallest site. The tower site.”
    “Any
ideas what the tower is for?” Siobhan asked.
    “Theories
only. We’ll take a close look,” Telisa said.
    “I
think it’s for aerial reconnaissance of the planet,” Cilreth said. “I think
when these aliens came here, they set up this tower to launch and maintain
their robots to fly over the planet and map part of it out in detail.”
    “Easily
done from orbit, just as we’ve done,” said Imanol. “Why the up close?”
    Cilreth
shook her head. “I don’t know. The same reason we sent down the probes I guess.
The vine canopy hides a lot. Maybe they needed the details. I would, if I were
setting up a colony.”
    “They
needed to collect something from the surface,” Caden guessed.