Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4 Page 4

  Juanita jogged in, her dark brown eyes bright as they considered Indi and the suit. She tucked her blue-tipped black hair behind her ears and leaned close to peer at the parts.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Indi said. “I’m putting this on, reluctantly, for protection from robot invaders.”

  Juanita touched the armor as if it were some beautiful shimmering silk scarf that she ached to buy from a street vendor. “You have to go outside. If they let you, you can’t pass up the chance for adventure.”

  “Watch me,” Indi muttered.

  “I asked the captain if I could go too. He said no.”

  “That’s an awful racket, Chief,” one of the young engineers said, waving toward the speakers. Even if the alien transmission sounded like notes and music to Indi, she admitted that it could make one’s hair stand on end. “Do we have to listen to it?” the man added.

  “I’m analyzing the music,” Hierax said, using what looked like a Jetsons version of a power screwdriver.

  “Do you know anything about music, sir?”

  “Just that the musicians at my school had an easier time getting women than the engineers did.”

  “Probably because musicians wouldn’t foist a confusing set of armor at a woman and tell her to figure out how to put it on for the first time by herself.” The young engineer looked over at Indi.

  “I offered to help,” Hierax said. “She didn’t want me dressing her.”

  And here Indi hadn’t thought the engineers knew she was there.

  “I think that goes over your arm,” Juanita said, prodding a piece dangling down Indi’s side.

  It beeped at them. It was like putting on a computer.

  “Thanks for the tip,” Indi said.

  “Maybe,” Juanita whispered, “we could run off to the bathroom and swap positions. I could put on the armor, and you could stay here. Once the helmet was on, nobody would know the difference between us if I didn’t speak.”

  “I think speaking is going to be required.” Indi tilted her head, listening to the unorthodox music. “Those are different patterns now, aren’t they?”

  Hierax looked over at her. “There have been two transmissions so far. From what I’ve heard of them, we’ve got about five minutes total, with ten melodies or patterns within them.”

  “There was the Thue–Morse Sequence in the first one,” Indi said, “and then this kind of sounds like a pattern based on the Henon Attractor, another kind of fractal. It’s hard to detect that with the human ear though. Can your AI pick out the—”

  “Yes, I have been analyzing the transmissions,” Eridanus said, as if he’d been included in the conversation all along. “We call this fractal the Myorka Chaotic Attractor. A third pattern, as I’ve recently identified, is the Beta Seven Set, which is based on the Golden Ratio. We are not certain yet what the remaining seven patterns represent. Lieutenant Coric is studying them from a linguistics perspective.”

  “I’m questioning whether this is a language,” Hierax said. “Unless their language has a heavy mathematical base, which I suppose is possible. But what if they’re merely sending out examples of basic mathematics to see if we recognize them? Or maybe there’s an equation lurking in there to solve. Or how about points that can be plotted on a graph? Or a map? They could be sending out star maps or information about the galaxy. In mathematical terms. Math is the universal language, after all.”

  “I thought love was the universal language,” Juanita said, smiling.

  Hierax gave her such a confused, puzzled look that Indi laughed.

  “It’s a saying on Earth,” Indi explained.

  “It sounds preposterous. Math is fundamentally the same for every species,” Hierax said. “Pi is always pi, and prime numbers are always prime. Love… Did you know that Zi’i females eat their mates if they aren’t victorious in battle? And Commander Korta’s people, the Alabasters, are sexless and divide by mitosis. They rarely pair-bond. Trax females produce eggs that the males fertilize by peeing on them. Then the females maim the males to keep them away from the nest.”

  One of the young engineers nudged the other. “I’m beginning to see why the musicians got all of Hierax’s potential love interests when he was in school.”

  Hierax squinted at them. “Did you two get the landing coordinates and find the best route to our energy source yet?”

  “Yes, sir. We have a main route and a backup option.”

  The intercom came on, and Sagitta spoke. “Hierax, what’s going on in engineering?”

  “We’re discussing love and math, sir.”

  Judging by the silence that followed the statement, the captain was unamused.

  “You’re receiving a transmission,” Sagitta said.

  “Uh.” Hierax looked around. “I’ve been listening to the ones the planet sent, but that’s it.”

  “It’s originating from the same spot as the earlier scan,” came Korta’s voice over the comm.

  “Scan?” Juanita, who hadn’t been on the bridge for that fun moment, asked.

  Indi braced herself. She wasn’t going to be the target again, was she?

  Hierax frowned at something on one of his displays, turned off the recording that had been playing on repeat, then held a finger to his lips.

  Juanita looked down at Indi’s feet. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?” Indi asked warily, following her gaze.

  A faint, tinny sound drifted up from the helmet on the deck. What fresh hell was this? Why would that specific suit of armor have been picked out for something?

  Eyeing the helmet, Indi bent and picked it up. She tilted the opening toward her ear.

  “More weird alien music,” she said, aware of all sets of eyes turned toward her. “Different patterns though. I do think we should be mapping out the notes, if it’s safe to call them that. Can the AI do that? If I have some time to familiarize myself further with your databases, I might be able to run some searches and look for patterns.” She’d helped Tala run a couple of searches on drugs, thanks to Eridanus learning English and translating the written words so she could read them. “Also, is there a way to slow down and speed up the transmissions? Maybe nothing will come of it, but maybe we’re not hearing it as the senders intended. It’s also possible that messages other than the mathematical could be hidden within the individual notes.” She remembered another school project where she’d done exactly that.

  “Does anyone else find it alarming,” came Zakota’s voice from the bridge, “that we’re talking about the senders as if they’re alive? The Wanderers have been dead or gone for thousands of years, right?”

  “At this point, we suspect they left recordings transmitting out into the system before they abandoned their planet,” Korta said.

  “Do we?” Hierax asked. “A recording wouldn’t scan us, nor would it pick out a specific set of combat armor to transmit a message to. I think it’s clear we’re dealing with an intelligence of some kind.”

  “A computer intelligence?” Juanita asked. “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

  Hierax nodded. “Our scans haven’t picked up any signs of life, though it’s possible we’re dealing with something outside of our understanding and that we lack context.”

  “It’s also possible that there is life down there and that it’s shielding itself from our scans,” Korta said.

  “The question is why is the life or the AI sending a message specifically to Ensign Thangi’s combat armor comm,” Hierax said.

  “Ensign Thangi isn’t who’s holding that armor,” Juanita pointed out.

  Indi almost dropped the helmet, horrified at the implication that some alien intelligence might have specifically targeted her. At the same time, she wished she had more of a clue as to what those messages meant. The crew’s experience here could be much different, depending on whether the transmissions were an invitation to come visit or a warning to stay away.

  “I would appreciate it,” Lieutenant Coric said, her voice sti
ff, “if you would send a recording of the new transmission to my station on the bridge.”

  “Happy to. How?” Maybe Indi could bring the entire helmet up and drop it on her station. Though, as leery as she was about all this, and the implications of somehow being chosen, she admitted that the mystery was intriguing. She didn’t necessarily want to foist it off on someone else, though she did feel like she was in over her head.

  Coric made a disgusted noise. “Help her, Hierax.”

  “Don’t forget to say please, Lieutenant.” Hierax smirked. “I am your superior, after all.”

  “Your ego is certainly superior to mine.” The comm clicked off.

  “She’s irked that she didn’t get the special message,” Hierax said, still smirking.

  “I would be too.” Juanita leaned close to the helmet, her ear tilted toward the strange music playing. “It sounds like gobbledygook to me. Do you really hear patterns in there?”

  “Yes.”

  The more Indi listened, the less she agreed that it sounded like gobbledygook. The harmonies weren’t familiar, but they weren’t as completely alien as she’d first thought, and she could even imagine learning to appreciate the music. It was the instrument that was weird, not the way the notes were put together. Maybe she should try playing some of it on Tala’s violin.

  Realizing the others were looking at her, she added, “But I want to see a computer map this out. That’s possible, right?”

  “It is.” Hierax put a hand on her shoulder and pointed her to his workstation.

  Indi let him guide her over, the boots she’d donned thudding on the deck, and the rest of the armor hanging from her hips—that was as high as she’d gotten it before all the distractions had started. She was reminded of the one time she’d let her ex talk her into skiing, and how unbalanced she had felt trying to walk around in the boots. It was hard to imagine someone wanting to fight in this getup. Maybe it got better once everything was sealed up.

  “Sit here.” Hierax pushed aside some of his projects, clearing a small space for her. “Eridanus will help you with mapping the music. If the transmissions change again, let me know. I’ll be right over there, scanning the city now that we’re closer to it, and I can get better readings.” He pointed toward the two engineers and strolled in their direction.

  As he walked, he gave her a curious look over his shoulder that she couldn’t read.

  Indi sighed. There was much here that she couldn’t read.

  • • • • •

  “We’ll land here, and then the structure with our energy source in it is here, so here’s a likely route,” Woo said, pointing to the holographic display. “We’ll have to walk, since the engines of our land darters need oxygen to run. But it’s not far. Less than two kilometers. We’ll have to figure out a way underground, though. Our original scans were a little off, and sensors now estimate the energy source itself is about fifty meters underground. We’re reading a lot of levels down there. It basically looks like half the city is under the surface.”

  Hierax nodded, grasping his chin between thumb and fingers. “We’ll probably want to explore that building, anyway. Remember, it’s not the energy source we necessarily need. We’ve just picked this one out because its signature matches that of the signatures emitted from the gates. We need tools, schematics, parts… things to help us repair the gate.” And figure out what was wrong with it in the first place, he added silently.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hierax copied the map into his armor’s helmet computer and also memorized it. From the aerial view they had, the city had an orderly, almost compelling design. It definitely didn’t look like it had grown up haphazardly or organically, like most of the old human cities from the seed era. It had been planned. He almost thought of it as symmetrical, but that wasn’t quite the term. The pattern was more complex than that. There were a lot of twelve-sided structures that interlocked with each other, creating interesting “blocks” in the city. He wondered what was significant about that number. Not a prime. Not a number in the Epikrates Sequence.

  He leaned away from the map, trying to take in the picture as a whole, rather than counting walls. Almost immediately, he sucked in a breath as he saw a pattern.

  “You have something, sir?” Woo asked.

  Hierax looked toward his workstation where Indi sat with Juanita, talking to Eridanus, who was displaying his analysis of the music in a number of mediums, graphical and mathematical.

  “One moment,” Hierax said, walking toward them.

  “We all right to have Zakota land on that building, Chief?” Woo asked, pointing to the chosen warehouse. “Nothing’s changed?”

  “Yes.”

  Knowing they only had a few minutes before the ship landed, and he would be expected to lead the away mission, Hierax strode to the workstation. He’d taken off the top half of his armor, and walked around much the same way as Indi, with the top hanging around his hips. She wore that flowing shirt on top, but he only had his grey uniform tank top on.

  She glanced over at his approach, the heavy boots giving him away, and something about him or his chest seemed to startle her. He glanced down—he wouldn’t be surprised to catch a grease stain on his shirt. But he looked normal, at least by his usual standards. Not too dirty or sweaty or smelly or wrinkly. What more could a person ask for?

  Indi recovered whatever surprise she’d felt at his approach and said, “We’ve used all three transmissions to plot the patterns on graphs, and Eridanus has been trying to find matches in the constellations, but so far, we haven’t discovered anything super illuminating.”

  Hierax nodded. “Eridanus, pull up an aerial map of the city, please.”

  “A simple task,” the AI said.

  “We’ll try to come up with complex tasks later.”

  “Miss Indigo has already been doing so.”

  “Sorry,” Indi said.

  The display of the city appeared flat on the table underneath the graphs and star maps. Hierax thought about ordering the AI to clear the holographic clutter, but he was curious to see if some of the patterns in the transmissions might be shared by the design of the city.

  “You mentioned earlier that a couple of the patterns in the music had fractal elements,” Hierax said. He’d had to take her word for it at the time, but now that Eridanus had created a visual representation of the transmissions, he could see it in a couple of the patterns.

  “Yes,” Indi said.

  “Look at the city.” Hierax pointed to one of the blocks, which was as twelve-sided as the structures within it. Then he had Eridanus pull out to a wider zoom level and pointed at a portion of the city separated from its surroundings by what might have been canals and the alien equivalent of train tracks. The word suburb floated into his mind. Whatever the Wanderers had called it, it shared the same twelve-sided shape as the blocks and the individual buildings.

  “Interesting,” Indi said, and Hierax was pleased that she caught on right away. “A second example of their use of fractals. One wonders if they might be incorporated into their language, too, in some way, though I’m not sure we’ve gotten an example of their language yet.” She looked at Hierax, and he nodded, having said as much already.

  He still believed they’d received math equations in those transmissions rather than words.

  “Oh, it’s like a fern,” Juanita said after studying the city for a minute.

  “A what?” Hierax asked.

  “A plant on our planet,” Indi said, “and a demonstration of fractals in nature. I’ve never seen anything man-made—or, uh, alien-made—like this, though. Certainly nothing of this magnitude. They would have had to plan their whole city very carefully before they started building.”

  “Yes, which makes me think this might have been a colony planet from them rather than where they originally evolved.” Hierax tapped the map, causing it to zoom out farther, to show the entire city within its scope. The twelve-sided shape was there again. “Unless they raze
d earlier cities in order to build this opus at some point. If we can figure a way to get some of our archaeologists out here, they’ll be so excited, they’ll piddle down their legs.”

  “Such appealing imagery,” Indi said.

  Hierax lifted a hand in apology. He had to remember that he was among civilians—civilian women, at that—and that they might prefer more genteel turns of phrase. Not that he was good at genteel.

  “I have a thought on the significance of twelve,” Indi said.

  “Oh?” His brows perked up. Though he hated to admit it, that had eluded him thus far.

  “There are twelve notes in an octave. Semitones, technically. Normally, I wouldn’t think there was a relationship between that and their architecture, but they did send us their transmissions in the form of music, music that, quite fascinatingly, obeys the same rules as ours. Twelve notes in an octave, as defined by their frequencies, that relate to each other by simple pitch frequency ratios. Their instruments are very strange to our ears, but the notes are the same as our notes.”

  “I don’t know anything about music,” Juanita admitted.

  Hierax didn’t, either, but he knew what frequencies were and grasped what she was saying. How interesting if the Wanderers had developed the same rules for music that humans had.

  “The short of it is,” Indi said, “that even though the instruments are completely foreign—or, I suppose, alien—to us, they’re using the same notes that we use. Eridanus, can you play the first note of the transmission they sent me? And hold it for a few seconds?”

  “Of course.”

  A low-pitched sound followed, a single buzzing noise that had little appeal to Hierax.

  “That is the same frequency of note that you would hear if I played you an A on a cello. One hundred and ten hertz.”

  “You can hear that?” Juanita touched her ear. “Its frequency?”

  “Well, I can recognize an A when I hear it, yes. If you ever want to teach yourself to play by ear, you have to be able to interpret notes you listen to so you can pick them out on whatever instrument you’re using. People usually just learn to do it intuitively, but, because I’m a geek, I’ve read up on the math behind music.”