by Allen Steele
D’Anguilo’s face turned red, and Andromeda had to bite her lip. Melpomene wasn’t the sort of person to scold someone, but her tongue could be sharp when she wanted it to be. She was probably more worried about Zeus than anyone else; Andromeda mused that she’d naturally be concerned about her lover’s fate.
“I just think it’s a mistake to assume hostile intentions,” D’Anguilo replied. “As I said, there’s probably a reasonable explanation for all this.”
“Very well. Let’s see if you’re right.” Andromeda motioned to the open airlock. “You first.”
D’Anguilo hesitated. “Captain’s privilege,” he said quietly, then stepped aside to let her be the first one to leave the ship.
The gangway was a tube with opaque grey walls that appeared to be made of some sort of plastic. Its floor had a certain spongy texture that gave slightly beneath the soles of their boots, and dim light came from concentric rings spaced at regular intervals between its ribs. The gangway led straight away from the ship for about a hundred yards and came to an end at a circular door that opened like a sphincter at their approach.
Walking through it, they found themselves in a bare room whose walls, ceiling, and floor appeared to be made of the same stony material as the rest of the node. Another sphincter door was on the other side of the room; a large screen was set in one wall, and near the entrance door was a large window through which they could see the Montero.
The entrance swirled shut as soon as they were inside. An instant later, a narrow ring lit up upon the walls near the ceiling. The ring slowly traveled down the walls, its beam touching the four people gathered in the room, until it reached the floor, then it moved back up to the ceiling before disappearing.
“I think we’ve just been scanned,” Rolf murmured.
Andromeda nodded, but before she could say anything, the screen on the nearby wall lit up, and a human face appeared on it. Obviously a comp-generated image, the face could have belonged to either an effeminate male or a masculine female, and the voice that accompanied it was just as androgynous.
“Welcome to tanaash-haq,” the image said, smiling as it spoke perfect Anglo. “Scans indicate that three people in your group are carrying weapons. Inhabitants are not permitted to bring in weapons of any sort. Please surrender them immediately, or you will not be allowed to enter.”
A panel opened within the wall beside the screen, exposing what appeared to be a disposal chute. Andromeda glanced at D’Anguilo; the astroethnicist didn’t say a word, but there was no mistaking the smug grin on his face. She grimaced, then nodded to Rolf and Mel before unclipping the holster from her belt. They did the same, and the three fléchette pistols went down the chute.
“Thank you,” the image said, its expression annoyingly beatific. “Scans also indicate that all persons in your group are wearing pressure suits. They are permitted, but you should be aware that they are not necessary within the habitat you are about to enter. You may remove them and leave them here. They will be returned to you later, along with your weapons.”
Andromeda’s heads-up display showed that, like the walkway, the room contained an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, its pressure just above one thousand millibars. She opened her helmet faceplate, took a deep breath. The air tasted fine.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I have a few questions of my own.” The image said nothing as it continued to smile at her. “While our ship was docking, one of my crewmen disappeared after he left our ship to investigate. What happened to him?” The image remained silent. Andromeda waited for an answer, then went on. “My ship’s controls were overridden by some sort of remote system, and we were brought here against our will. Why did you do that?” Again, no response except for the same maddening smile. “You called this place tanaash-haq, and said that it’s a habitat. What did you mean by . . . ?” And then the screen went blank.
“Talkative, isn’t he?” Rolf said.
Andromeda slowly let out her breath. She was stymied, and the time had come to stop being stubborn and ask for help. She turned to D’Anguilo. “All right, I’ll admit it . . . We should have listened to you about the guns, and also about not letting Zeus take the pod outside. My apologies. Now . . . do you have any other insights you’d like to share?”
“Believe me, Captain, I’m not keeping score. And as far as insights go . . .” D’Anguilo shrugged. “We’ve already offended them once by carrying weapons. I think we’d only offend them again if we continued wearing these suits. If we remove them, it may go a long way toward establishing some sort of mutual trust.”
“Trust?” Melpomene stared at him. “Do you seriously think we should . . . ?”
“Ms. Fisk . . . Melpomene . . . I realize that you’re frustrated, and that you feel like I’m asking a lot of you. But you have to remember that we’re not dealing with other humans, but danui. They’re reclusive, suspicious, argumentative, and obviously powerful enough to do whatever they damned well please. We’re going to have to demonstrate that we’re trustworthy if we expect to get any sort of cooperation from them . . . and that begins here and now.”
Melpomene continued to glare at him. Andromeda stepped between her and D’Anguilo. “Mel, I want to find out what happened to Zeus, too . . . and my son. But he’s right. This is their game, and we’ve got to play it their way. So let’s get rid of these suits, and . . . well, see what happens next.”
The helmsman reluctantly nodded, then reached up to unlatch her helmet from its collar ring. Andromeda turned to gaze out the window. “Montero, do you copy?”
“Loud and clear,” Jason replied.
“Good.” Andromeda gave him a quick rundown of everything that had happened, tactfully leaving out the part about the latest disagreement with D’Anguilo. “We’ve got a transceiver, so we won’t be out of touch for long. Sit tight. Understood?”
“Roger that, Captain.” Jason’s voice was tense. “Be careful. Montero over.”
“Thanks. Over and out.” Andromeda switched off the comlink, then went about removing her pressure suit. Once everyone was back in shirtsleeves, they proceeded to the inner door.
It opened without a problem, and they found themselves on a platform within what appeared to be a long, narrow tunnel. A cylindrical craft was parked in front of the platform. With a blunt nose, rectangular windows, and a single hatch at its front, it bore an uncanny resemblance to a subway car.
The hatch bisected in the middle, allowing them to enter. Andromeda hesitated. “A tram?” she asked, speaking to no one in particular. “Is that what this is?”
“Looks like it.” Rolf shrugged. “Makes sense. Hex is a pretty big place, after all. You’d need some form of rapid transportation to get around.” He got down on his hands and knees to examine the bottom of the car. “Can’t tell for sure,” he said, straightening up again, “but I bet there’s a maglev rail down there.”
There didn’t appear to be any choice but to step aboard. Once inside, they found little resemblance to a human-built tram. Instead of seats, there were benches on both sides of the interior; they appeared to have a thin layer of padding upon them but otherwise were bare. Another exit hatch was located on the opposite side of the tram, with a small door in the wall beside it. Next to each of the doors were large vacant areas with recessed rungs in the floor; Rolf guessed that those spaces were reserved for cargo.
There didn’t appear to be a control cab, but on the wall beside the entrance door was a backlit panel. Upon it was displayed what appeared to be a diagram of a hexagon:
Andromeda noted that the node at the top left corner was glowing red. It wasn’t hard to guess that the hexagon represented the one they were in and that the illuminated node was the harbor where the Montero was docked. But she could only guess what was meant by the rest: the geometric forms along the sides of the hexagon, the clockwise arrows within its inner perimeter, the short arrows pointing away from the other nodes, or the long arrows pointing away from the upper-left and lower-right corners.<
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“A map?” she asked aloud.
“Could be.” Rolf shrugged. “Makes sense. Maybe the arrows show possible directions we can take. But I have no idea what this means.” He pointed to two rows of figures at the bottom of the panel:
“I think I do.” Standing behind them, D’Anguilo smiled knowingly. “Those might be danui numbers.” Reaching forward, he pointed to the figure at the right end of the bottom that looked like a crosshatched diamond. “See? Four sides, with vertical and horizontal lines in the middle. Six sides, with no shapes more complex than that, except for a square every now and then.”
“So?” Melpomene asked.
“Ever looked closely at a picture of a danui? Their two forward legs . . . the ones they use most frequently as manipulators . . . have three fingers each. That would indicate that they’ve developed a base-six numerical system, just as we have a base-ten system because of the number of fingers on our hands. The square must be zero.”
Remembering the holo of the danui that Ted Harker had shown her, Andromeda had to admit that D’Anguilo might be onto something. “Okay, I’ll buy that. But that still doesn’t tell us what . . .”
“Wait a minute. I think I got it.” Rolf moved a little closer to the panel. “If this is a map, then the numbers around the edge might tell us which pod is which. And if that’s the case”—he pointed to the two rows of numbers—“this might be some sort of navigation system.”
D’Anguilo slowly nodded. “Yes . . . yes, I believe you may be right.” He studied the panel for another couple of moments, absently tapping a finger against his lips. “Which would mean that the top row, since it’s longer, represents our present coordinates, and the bottom row is our means of entering new coordinates. So the map itself may be our way of getting around within this particular hexagon.”
“Might be,” Andromeda murmured. “Of course, there’s only one way to find out.” Raising her hand to the panel, she poised a finger above the top left surface of the hexagon, the one nearest to the red-lighted node. “Brace yourselves. Here goes nothing.”
She pushed the hexagon.
The tram doors slid shut with barely a whisper, and a second later the vehicle began to move. At first, its motion was so slow that they barely noticed, but then it quickly accelerated. Yet the movement was eerily smooth; no bumps or jars, just an effortless plunge down the tunnel, whose rocklike walls raced by the windows so fast that they soon became nothing more than a grey blur. There was only the slightest hum; otherwise, the vehicle was nearly silent.
“Just as I thought,” Rolf said. “Magnetic levitation.”
“Yes,” said D’Anguilo, sitting down on the nearest bench, “but I wonder why they couldn’t have put in a pneumatic system instead. They . . . Hey! What the hell . . . ?”
The moment he sat down, the bench’s padding started moving beneath him. As if it had a mind of its own, the material reshaped itself to conform to his buttocks. As Andromeda watched, a slender hump rose behind D’Anguilo, becoming a chairback for him to rest against.
“Some sort of smart material,” Rolf said, bending down to examine the bench. “It figures out what’s comfortable for you and reshapes itself for your needs.”
“Makes sense.” Andromeda pressed the bench next to the control panel with her fingertips. “Probably designed to accommodate different body forms.”
Rolf nodded as he carefully sat down across from D’Anguilo; he grinned as his seat adapted itself to him. “Efficient . . . just like using maglev rails instead of pneumatic tubes. If these tunnels run through all of Hex, you’d have to maintain high air pressure for billions of tunnels.”
“Sounds plausible.” Andromeda carefully took a seat on the bench, with Melpomene sitting down beside her. Its transformation was unnerving at first, but in a few seconds she was as comfortable as if she were sitting in her seat in Montero’s command center. “But you’ve still got to wonder . . . How old is this place, anyway? For something this big and complex, it must have taken thousands of years to build.”
“Uh-huh. At least a couple of thousand years . . . maybe more.” D’Anguilo was quiet for a moment, then he went on. “Y’know, I’ve been thinking about that, and I wonder if it has anything to do with—”
He was interrupted by the tram’s abruptly moving to the left. Through the windows on the right side of the car, the tunnel walls disappeared for a split second. They caught a brief glimpse of another tunnel, branching away from the one they were in and receding into the distance. Then it vanished as the rock walls closed around them again.
“Must be another line,” Melpomene said. “Maybe leading to another hexagon.”
“Habitat, you mean.” D’Anguilo smiled. “Don’t mean to split hairs, but that’s what our hosts call them.” He paused, then looked at Andromeda. “Come to think of it . . . Remember what the screen avatar called this place? Tanaash-haq?”
“Maybe that’s the danui word for it,” Andromeda said, although it sounded more like hjadd than anything else. “I think I like Hex better. Anyway, what were you about to say?”
“Well, it seems to me that . . .”
Suddenly, the tram began to slow down. Forgetting the discussion, Andromeda gazed through the windows. She couldn’t see anything except the tunnel walls, but they appeared to be moving past the tram a little more slowly.
“Looks like we’re about to stop.” She carefully rose from the bench, wishing that the danui had supplied poles or ceiling straps for riders to hold on to. “Maybe we’ll get some answers.”
Before anyone could reply, light abruptly streamed in through the right-hand windows. The walls had vanished again, and it appeared that the tram had left the tunnel. The vehicle slowly coasted to a halt; a second later, the doors at the front end of the tram slid open. Andromeda looked at the others, then turned to walk forward. Melpomene, Rolf, and D’Anguilo got up from their seats and followed her toward the open doors.
They emerged on a broad platform that was open on three sides, with tiled floors and a high ceiling with luminescent panels. Just past it was an open veranda; a long railing ran along its edge. Andromeda was about to walk over to it when she noticed another control panel, identical to the one aboard the tram, recessed into the platform wall near the tunnel entrance. Pausing to examine it, she noted that the danui numbers on its top row had changed slightly. If D’Anguilo was right, and these were coordinates of some sort, it would be wise to copy them for later reference. She was about to pull her datapad from her thigh pocket when Rolf whistled out loud, followed by a startled cry from Melpomene.
“Oh, my God . . . Skipper, look at this!”
She was standing at the railing, Rolf and D’Anguilo beside her; all three were staring at something below them. Leaving the datapad in her pocket, Andromeda hurried over to join them . . . and felt her heart skip a beat.
Beyond the railing lay a vast valley, larger than any she’d ever seen. With a long range of low mountains sloping down into it from each side, it stretched away without any visible horizon until its farthest end disappeared in atmospheric haze.
The mountainsides and the valley floor were verdant with forests and open plains; grass and trees grew alongside creeks that flowed downhill toward a river that ran straight down the middle of the valley. The air was warm and unbelievably fresh, faintly scented with chlorophyll and wild spices.
Andromeda realized that they were overlooking a biopod from the vantage point of a tram platform. To their right, close to where they were standing, was a mammoth wall; apparently comprised of the same stony material as Hex’s outer surfaces, it towered into a blue sky. There appeared to be circular vents evenly spaced within the wall, each large enough to drive the tram through. Air ducts, perhaps?
Before she could study them further, D’Anguilo tapped the back of her hand. “Captain . . . look at the sky.”
It was blue and cloudless, with a bright sun at its zenith, but like none Andromeda had ever seen before in all the worlds
she’d visited. Surrounding the sun on all sides were countless hexagons—very large near the mountain ridges, incrementally becoming smaller the higher they went—that formed a tessellated pattern across the heavens. Gazing upward, Andromeda realized that she was seeing Hex from its inner surface: a vast collection of hexagons, each the same as the one in which she was standing, that stretched to the far side of its captive sun, almost 186 million miles away.
Feeling the light-headed dizziness of vertigo, Andromeda grasped the railing and took slow, deep breaths. Until then, she’d been able to assimilate everything she’d seen since the moment the Montero had entered the danui system. But this was too much. She suddenly felt very, very small, like an ant standing at the lip of a chasm. Stunned by what she was seeing, she almost missed the insistent electronic chirp coming from her breast pocket.
“Skipper?” Melpomene murmured. “The radio . . .”
“Right.” Wrenching her gaze from the weird sky, Andromeda fumbled at the pocket flap until she was able to pull out the small transceiver. She raised its aerial and spoke into its mouth. “Carson here.”
“Montero, Captain.” Anne’s voice was surprisingly clear. Despite the distance between them and the docking node, the ship’s VHF signal apparently had no trouble getting through the rock walls. “Are you okay?”
“Fine . . . we’re fine.” Andromeda took another deep breath, trying to clear her head. “You and Jason aren’t going to believe this place. It’s completely . . . I mean . . .”
“Captain . . .” Anne’s voice was hurried, almost impatient. “I’ve just heard from Sean. He’s alive, but his team is in trouble.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SIGNAL SEAN RECEIVED FROM THE MONTERO WAS WEAK, but strong enough that he was able to hear his mother’s voice. “Glad to hear that you’re still . . .” she began, then stopped herself.