Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins by Michael McCloskey Read Free Book Online Page B

answers today!” Imanol said. “I guess I should just go
back into the ship and take a vacation while you send back a full report to
Shiny.”
    “Perhaps
you forget this is related to my specialty,” Siobhan said. “Adaptive industry
applications for colonies. These ribs were created from the crust of the
planet. I suspect they were all made at about the same time.”
    “For
the vines,” Telisa said excitedly. “They were made to support the vines. This
place has been terraformed!”
    “Celaraformed,”
corrected Jason.
    “Amazing,”
Cilreth said. “I guess we should have realized that by looking at the tower. It
has cords all over it. Like artificial vines. I assumed at first they were all
support cables, but many of them don’t add stability at all. So wherever the
Celarans came from, they like vines. This vegetation is a different color than
the Blackvines. Would they fit in here?”
    “Creatures
that live under the canopy may not be as green,” Telisa guessed.
    “Did
you see the fauna catalog? The creatures here are specialized to the vines. So
the Celarans must have brought a lot of other living things with them from
their homeworld,” said Siobhan. “That also explains the low biodiversity we
noticed. They may have brought a minimal set of living things to achieve a
balanced ecosystem, or at least one they could cheaply maintain.”
    “Or
those things are the Celarans,” Caden said. “What if they’re still
living here? Out in the vine forest?”
    “Why
would they?” asked Imanol. “These are their buildings, right? They would be
living there.”
    “Unless
something happened to make them uninhabitable,” Jason said. “Or some kind of
collapse of their civilization.”
    “They’re
aliens. Maybe they make buildings for other reasons, and still live in the
forest,” Telisa said. “Let’s investigate and we’ll learn what happened.”
    “Okay,
let’s head out. I want to see this tower in person,” Caden said.
    Imanol
bit off a snarky reply. As fun as it was to poke the wunderkind, he was anxious
to get started as well.
    “Are
we going to camp there?” Siobhan asked.
    “I’d
like to,” Telisa said. “But I guess we need to see it first.”
    Imanol
spotted the tower in the distance. It was thin and hard to see. He started
toward it.
    Soon
the entire team was walking across the burned ground. Five Terran scout robots
walked out ahead of them with a few attendant spheres. The spidery Terran
robots struggled as their thin legs sank into the fresh ash. They scuttled
along leaving deep rivulets behind.
    Imanol
did not see any rocks. He supposed they might be covered by the ash. He
wondered if the battle sphere had detected any caves and neglected to mention
them.
    Everyone
hefted a weapon. Imanol was surprised when he looked back and saw the battle
machine had stayed put.
    “DM-109
isn’t coming with us,” he noted aloud.
    “So
if we could find a ship somewhere else, we could give it the slip,” Siobhan
said.
    Keeping
it positive. Ah, the young.
    The
tower grew on the horizon as they approached. Soon they arrived at the edge of
the untouched forest. The vines and their huge leaves beyond the perimeter were
not even partially burned. Imanol was impressed. He did not see so much as a
wilted leaf.
    Precision
as well as power. If I cut a hole through some trees with my laser, it would
probably leave a black spot on the last leaf. This energy weapon was perfectly
focused out to a range.
    The
forest looked almost the same as it did in the sims they had been practicing
with. Heavy vines as thick as arms extended from the tall white tusk-shapes,
branching chaotically in all directions. Imanol knew some of the vines grew
even thicker, big enough to walk along. A few insect-sized things wandered out
onto the burned ground in confusion. Imanol looked at them warily. He felt glad
for his suit. It would take more than an average bug to bite through his
flexible armor.
    “Bugs.
The universal