Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page B

creatures covered fifty percent of
its surface. Huge off-white spires rose from the ground, smooth and always
curved. They looked like giant ribs cutting out of the surface of the planet.
These long smooth ribs held complex webs of vine-like ropes holding aloft flat
organs that looked very similar to Terran plant leaves, though they were
larger, about a meter in diameter.
    “Vines
on steroids?” Telisa summarized. “What could those pale things be? They’re over
30 meters tall.”
    “We’ll
find out,” Cilreth said. “Maybe those are the Celarans.”
    “The
ribs could be a symbiotic plant that helps hold them aloft. Or even an animal,”
Telisa said.
    Glad
to see her mind is on the job. She’s back into it , Cilreth thought. “The vines get big
too, really big. Over a meter in diameter in some places.”
    “When
do we go down?” asked Caden over the network.
    Cilreth
rolled her eyes. She wondered if the Blood Glades champ was already suiting up
somewhere.
    Let
him get grabbed by some tentacled horror. That’ll put out his fire , she thought.
    “We
have less hardware this time, so we’re going to gather more information with
the probes. Then I’ll set up a TSG that duplicates the planet’s environment as
closely as we can. Maybe even a few of the real critters we learn about. We can
get used to what it’s like down there before we ever set foot on the planet.”
    That’s
good. No need to go running around down there without some preparation. And
there’s no space force out to catch us this far from home. We may as well take
our time.
     
    ***
     
    A
day later the PIT team had a much better picture of the planet below them.
Three ruin sites had been discovered by the Vovokan scanners. Telisa opened a
family of data panes in her personal view for each of the sites.
    The
first and smallest of the sites was dominated by a thin tower rising over 360
meters from the surface. The tower was mostly naked support skeleton except a
building sat at the base and a platform rested on the top. The building’s
exterior shape was composed of many flat surfaces coming together at random
angles. The odd construction looked familiar. Several of their Vovokan
attendant spheres had converged on the site but no other buildings were visible
nearby. Nothing alive or automated had been spotted entering or leaving the
building.
    There
may be underground areas we haven’t accessed yet , Telisa thought.
    Telisa
brought another pane in the family forward. Several native life forms had been
observed moving through the forest around the tower. The pane displayed data
gathered about these creatures. Telisa flipped through a series of insect
analogues. The diversity of forms reminded Telisa of Terran insects. She saw
all shapes and colors. Then she went through a series of rodent-sized critters.
She saw a spiral-snake that could only corkscrew its way along a vine. The attendants
had spotted a froglike leaf-eater whose flat, wide mouth was specialized to
roll and swallow leaves larger than itself in one swallow. Telisa skipped
through a few more creatures, making sure there were no signs of tech
accoutrements that could indicate intelligence. She got to the largest
creature.
    The
largest one is likely to be the most dangerous predator, isn’t it? Or is that a
flawed assumption? The exceptions would include very poisonous creatures, I
guess. Poisons which hopefully are not effective on Terran metabolisms.
    Telisa
saw a meter-long thing hanging from one of the thinner vine branches. It was
flat like an eel’s tail or a huge leech. The vine sagged under its weight even
in the light gravity. It hung from three skeletal fingers on one end. Telisa
spotted three more fingers on its opposite end. She decided the top was
symmetrical to the bottom, so it could probably hang from the other fingers
just as easily. Its coloration was actually pretty if one ignored the shape of
it. A hundred or so chevrons ran across its width on both sides of its