Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  Indi eyed the gate and her system floating in the display. Maybe the captain was right. If her people could see the gate, they would have tried to send probes through it. If those probes had ended up in a hostile system, maybe slavers, or something worse, would have come to visit Earth sooner. She shuddered to think of hungry Zi’i invaders bringing a fleet of warships to her system.

  “Sage?” Dr. Tala said over the comm. “I’ve been playing around with assigning numbers to the notes in the transmissions using integer notation, and I… I don’t have a home run here, but one of the patterns is close enough to something that I thought I should mention it to Lieutenant Coric.”

  “Home run?” Sagitta asked.

  “Sorry, I forgot I have to use chariot-racing metaphors for you guys.”

  “What’s your something?” His tone really did do dry quite well.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Tala said, and played a thirty-second clip from the first transmission for them, “but this particular pattern isn’t that far off from pi. 3.184809493… and then the next number—note—would be double digits, so I don’t—”

  “B,” Indi blurted, a surge of excitement giving her fresh energy as she recognized the number.

  “What?” Tala asked.

  “We use A and B to represent the eleventh and twelve digits in the duodecimal system. You just gave us pi in Base 12 math. And it makes complete sense that they would use that here. They love the number twelve.”

  “Oh, excellent,” Coric said. “Another pattern solved, and that gives more weight to what we’ve been thinking, that their transmissions weren’t language examples but were instead packets of mathematics samples that the Wanderers would have deemed universal, things that other species could understand and that weren’t as esoteric as language.”

  Sagitta listened to them without interjecting, only nodding now and then. Indi had the feeling that he tracked everything without trouble even if he wasn’t contributing. He’d probably come over to make sure his experts were working on the problems without veering off on tangents.

  Did that include the map hovering around them? Indi wasn’t sure, but she appreciated that the captain seemed content to include her among his experts. And she was pleased she’d found something useful to point out, even if Hierax could have done the same if he’d been paying attention.

  “Yes, like Voyager on Earth,” Tala said—it sounded like she was talking to someone else in the room. Indi could imagine Juanita, with her passion for science fiction, standing behind her and chiming in on the space stuff.

  “That gives me something new to work with,” Coric said. “I’m tempted to run back to my linguistics computer on the bridge and drag Korta over to help with some new ideas I just had. But I’m intensely curious about this computer too.” She waved at the planets. “What else can it give us access to?”

  Sagitta poked at the floating gate in the display, as if his finger were a ship that could sail through it. Indi didn’t expect anything to happen, other than for the display to zoom in on it, perhaps, but instead it zoomed far, far out. Soon, they were looking at a map of the galaxy, or at least a good-sized chunk of it, with glowing dots in many of the systems. Some systems had multiple dots.

  “It’s the gate network,” Sagitta said.

  Even as the words came out of his mouth, a web of purple lines appeared, linking the gates like some insanely large version of Cat’s Cradle.

  “I need to record this,” he said, backing up so he could see the whole field.

  “That’s more than we’ve discovered,” Coric told Indi, her voice full of excitement. “Humans, that is. We do have an extensive gate map, but it’s incomplete. We have a science fleet that goes out, solely for the purpose of mapping more systems. They’re not discovering new ones that often anymore, but they do continue to add to the map. There are portions of the galaxy that we haven’t been able to reach because of their remoteness. Few gates ever went to the areas to start with, and some of them are now broken. I wonder if this image can show broken gates.”

  “It showed real time on my planet,” Indi said.

  “It may just be a matter of figuring out how to give it the right command then.”

  Sagitta stepped back into the display, peering at a gate represented with double circles instead of one. Indi counted four like that, but there were so many, that she might be missing some. The double-circle gates were definitely rare, however.

  “Those wouldn’t represent dead gates, right?” Coric asked. “There are a lot more than that in the system that don’t go anywhere.”

  Sagitta touched the double-ringed gate.

  In a dizzying blurring of stars, the display zoomed out again. Way out. A line appeared, leading from that gate to…

  “Theseus,” Sagitta said, a rare note of awe in his tone.

  Indi looked at him, then at the spiral cluster of stars. “We call that one Andromeda.”

  “There are gates that lead to other galaxies?” Coric asked. “I didn’t—nobody knew about this, did they?”

  Sagitta shook his head slowly. “Not that I’ve ever heard. That’s in charted space, though. Our people would have discovered it and tried it before. I suspect that’s a dead link.”

  Even though Indi hadn’t grown up dreaming of spaceships and traveling to different star systems, she still found it disappointing that they’d apparently found a road paved to another galaxy… only to discover it was out of order.

  “Because of interstellar drift, right?” a new voice spoke over the comm. That was Juanita. Yup, she was hovering over Tala’s shoulder, listening in on everything. She sounded even more excited by all this than Indi. Or anyone else. Maybe it would soon find its way into one of her novels. “That’s what Orion said when he explained the gate system to me,” she added. “That it was the reason you can’t simply take a wormhole from one end of the galaxy to the other anymore. Because interstellar drift has caused the gates to get farther apart and out of alignment.”

  “Actually, I recall you knowing the science without me telling you,” Orion rumbled from somewhere behind her. “Because of a book you read.”

  “It was a TV show.”

  “All right,” Sagitta said, “I’ve got a peace offering to give my people when I get home. The Confederation scientists will love this. Though stopping the Zi’i invasion would be even better.” He sighed.

  “What if we could fix the gate network?” Juanita asked. “Is it true you have a gate down there with you? Indi, you have to tell us all about everything when you get back.”

  “We have a gate, yes,” Indi said shortly, not wishing to take the conversation further down the rabbit hole when the captain sounded like he wanted them to get back to business.

  “If you got it working and figured out some of the tech, maybe someone could reprogram the existing gates in the network to compensate for the drift that’s occurred since the network was first built.”

  “Something to keep in mind,” Sagitta said, then headed for the gate in the middle of the hangar.

  Still in his armor, he had no trouble springing to the top of it. He walked toward Hierax, probably wanting an update or to make sure his engineer was on track. Indi supposed a lot of captaining was poking the appropriate people with cattle prods to get them working on the right things and heading in the right direction.

  “This is all interesting,” Coric said, waving at the map, “but let’s see if we can get this computer to where we are, or to shift to another program, if it has such things.”

  “Right.” Indi lifted a finger, and zoomed back in to the star map of the Milky Way, but she realized she had no idea where they were currently to zoom in further. “Where is this system?”

  “Uhm.” Coric took a couple of sure steps, but paused to peer at the options.

  Indi was somewhat mollified that it took Coric a minute to find the exact spot. She prodded one of the systems with a single gate leading to it, and the display zoomed in to the double suns
and numerous planets of this system.

  “One wonders why they wouldn’t have put more gates in their own system,” Indi said. “If this was their original home world. Or even if it was simply a system where they found a planet to colonize. Wouldn’t it have been more convenient that way?”

  “There’s a system with six gates next-door,” Coric pointed out. “And if you have multiple entry points to your own system, that means multiple doorways to guard.”

  “Ah, true. Though it’s hard to imagine people who could do all this—” Indi waved at the gate with Hierax and Sagitta talking atop it and also at the computer display, “—having many enemies strong enough to bother them.”

  “A svenkar can kill you even though it’s primitive. There are some very war-like species out there, and some of them have been around a long time.”

  Indi conceded the point and touched the blue-black planet they were on. The display zoomed in to one of the continents. The one they were on? Nobody had shown Indi a map of the planet, and she hadn’t watched their descent, so she didn’t know.

  “Uhm, Coric—is that your first name, by the way?” Indi had learned that most of the Star Guardians on board whose ancestors had come from ancient Greece only had one name, but some of the crew members from other planets had first and last names. Coric didn’t seem very feminine.

  “No, it’s Ciera.”

  “Cool, Ciera. Do you know where we are? Any chance we can zoom it in to our hangar here? I know we’re not far from a crater, but that’s it.”

  Coric issued a few hmms as she poked at the image of the planet. “It looks like there are a lot of craters. But I think… yes, there we are.”

  The display now showed a close-up satellite view of their section of the city, including the huge hangar that housed them. The crater was off to the side. Coric tapped the hangar itself, and the display changed to a view of the inside, where the various Star Guardians were standing around.

  Indi jumped, even more alarmed by the display of omniscience shown here than she had been of the Earth imagery. “How could a satellite see that?”

  “There aren’t any satellites,” Sagitta said, walking toward them again. “Not that we saw upon approaching.”

  “Then how…”

  Coric only shook her head.

  “Hierax says the gate looks very complete,” Sagitta said. “He’s trying to figure out how to power it up. On the chance it’s done from here, I’ll leave you two to figure out how.”

  How magnanimous of him.

  “I need to get back to the Falcon and check on Lieutenant Asan and our captured Zi’i warship. We may need it soon.”

  Indi had almost forgotten there was another ship around, though she wasn’t sure why it needed attention now. Wasn’t it simply in orbit up there?

  “We’ll work on it, sir,” Coric said.

  “Also—” Sagitta faced her, “—when we make it out of this system, we’ll need to rush to Dethocoles to help against the Zi’i. It’s possible that the fleet, with its admiral dead, will abort their attack, but I don’t deem that very likely. Another leader will be placed in charge. My only hope is that the fleet isn’t fully backed by the Zi’i government. There are far greater admirals that would have led it if that had been the case. That doesn’t mean it’s not very dangerous, though. It could be a part of some powerful Zi’i clan leader’s bid for the position of supreme leader.”

  “Yes, sir.” Coric sounded like she didn’t know why he was telling her all that.

  Indi didn’t know, either.

  “If we can make it back in time to join in the battle to defend Dethocoles,” Sagitta said, “it would be advantageous to have some advanced Wanderer weaponry that we could add to our arsenal.”

  “Ah, I see, sir,” Coric said. “I’ll keep an eye out for anything that might be useful.”

  “Good.” Sagitta nodded at both of them, then strode toward the exit, picking up a couple of his men along the way.

  Indi, not having any particular interest in looking for armories, poked at the image of the gate in the display. She tried holding her finger in the spot, tapping, double tapping, and making dragging motions. It was possible that this was a living map and nothing more, but if so, how did she call up other programs on the computer?

  Coric tried tapping the computer bank pictured within the display.

  Once again, the focus zoomed out, this time showing a cross-section of the building and eight floors of equipment-filled rooms beneath it. In the display, dozens and dozens of things lit up, everything from the articulating arms hanging down from the hangar ceiling, to the gate and computer bank, to spots on the walls, to machinery in floors underneath theirs.

  “Is this indicating that we can control all of those things from here?” Indi wondered.

  “Maybe?” Coric sounded no more certain about any of this than Indi did.

  Indi tried touching the gate and the computer bank again. They remained lit up on the display, but nothing happened at her touch, neither on the map nor with the physical equipment in the hangar.

  “Wish I knew how to run a query for the term power source,” Indi said.

  How did one run searches in alien databases without knowing the language they’d been created in or anything about the organizational structure?

  On a whim, she whistled the notes to the transmission Tala had been tinkering with, the one that played pi in Base 12. She didn’t truly expect that to do anything, and it didn’t, but she didn’t know what else to try.

  “Am I making things too complicated?” Indi wondered. “Worrying about computer languages when, at the root of it all, computers—at least computers on Earth—all run on machine language, and high-level languages just translate things into machine language? Binary.” She looked to Coric, wondering if the same was true for computers on other planets, human ones, at least.

  Coric nodded. “Ones and zeroes that represent electrical impulses or off and on electrical states, yes.”

  “On and off.” Indi squinted at the display. Could it be that simple? “If their first twelve digits happen to be the same as the twelve notes, which Tala’s discovery of pi suggests, then we know what one is, right? C is zero, and 1 is C sharp. And one is on, right?”

  “For us, it is.”

  Since Indi didn’t have Tala and her violin in the hangar, she pressed her finger to the switch in the display and did her best to whistle the note that corresponded to the number.

  The gate in the display filled with light.

  A clunk came from the real gate, and Hierax, still working on top of it, jumped to his feet.

  “What happened?” he blurted.

  A blue glow came from the access hole open at his feet, the light gleaming off the black armor over his shins.

  “Indi whistled a note,” Coric said.

  Hierax looked back and forth from his handheld scanner to the open panel. Several pieces of the equipment he’d dragged in and attached to the gate beeped or hummed cheerfully.

  “You figured out how to turn it on?” Hierax sounded surprised.

  “It was a very fine note that Indi whistled.” Coric winked at her. Tickled that they’d figured it out?

  Indi admitted to feeling tickled too.

  “This is brilliant,” Hierax said, running and leaping off the gate to land next to some of his equipment, his scanner still clutched in his hand.

  “You’ve made our engineer happy,” Coric said. “If you want to make our captain happy, too, you could try whistling some advanced weapons into existence.”

  “Uh, I think that might be difficult to do with binary. I—”

  White light flashed, and Indi groaned, stepping back. She knew that light by now. The damn AI was going to scan her again.

  The white light wrapped around her, blinding her, and she raised her arm and squinted her eyes shut. Shouts sounded from somewhere in the hangar. She found the edge of the computer console and braced herself as the sensation of electricity crackling a
bout her increased. If it was like the other times, she just had to wait it out.

  But the sensations intensified, seeming to center on her brain. The smell of smoke filled her nostrils, like burning rubber. Was her suit on fire? Or maybe that was her brain. Dizziness washed over her, and only the console kept her from falling down.

  “Help?” she asked, or maybe yelled. She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t see anyone, and she wasn’t sure of herself.

  “Indi,” someone yelled. It sounded very far away.

  Her senses grew overwhelmed, though she thought she heard music playing somewhere. Before she could analyze it or even identify it, she lost consciousness.

  11

  “Indi,” Hierax yelled again, pushing Coric to the side in his haste to get to her.

  The circle of light enveloping Indi faded, and she toppled sideways. Hierax caught her before she hit the ground. Spasms went through her body, and one of her arms cracked against his cuirass.

  “The occupant of suit TX-37 is having a seizure,” his armor announced. “The suit is deploying anti-convulsion medication.”

  “What happened?” Hierax looked at Coric as he held Indi. As soon as she stopped seizing, he would rush her to sickbay.

  Hells, maybe he should rush her there right now. But if she knocked something loose out where there was no atmosphere, that could turn into a nightmare.

  “I have no idea,” Coric said.

  It was as if he was looking at her through some red fog. What had they been doing over here? Hierax had been so busy examining the innards of the gate that he hadn’t been paying attention to them or the comm chatter. Had that been a mistake? When the power in the gate had come on, apparently from something Indi had done, he’d been delighted and hadn’t questioned it.

  “It looked like one of those scans,” Hierax said. “It happened before, but it never caused her to have a seizure. Indi?”

  He touched his gauntleted fingers to her faceplate, annoyed by the armor between them.