Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4 Page 8

  “Thirty-one,” Hierax said. “The only lockers that would have been open at the end are squares, since they’re the only numbers divisible by an odd number of whole numbers. The lockers would have changed status an odd number of times, so they’d be open at the end.”

  “Huh, that’s right.”

  “I know.”

  So much for taking him down a couple of notches.

  “My turn,” he said, sounding excited. And young. Like he was a kid on a playground. “You have a bunch of krogs and kotopo in a cage—no other kinds of animals in there. There are seventy-two heads and two hundred feet in the cage. How many krogs are there and how many kotopo are there?”

  “Uh, how many legs do krogs and kotopo have? And how many heads for that matter?”

  He laughed, and it was the first time she could remember him doing so. “One head. This isn’t Occishyla. Krogs have four legs. Kotopo have two.”

  “All right…” She set up the two equations in her head. Normally, she would have preferred paper, but it wasn’t a very difficult problem. “Twenty-eight krogs and forty-four kotopo.”

  “Yes. That was an easy one. Let me give you a hard one. No, it’s your turn. Give me one.” He sounded positively delighted to be passing the time this way, and she smirked, glad she hadn’t bored him with relationship details.

  “Wait,” Hierax said before she could dredge another puzzle out of her memory. “I see something up there.”

  His helmet lifted, shining the light farther down the tunnel.

  “A ladder going up a vertical shaft,” he said. “Hah, maybe that’s our way up.”

  Indi tried to find that promising, though she envisioned having to climb hundreds and hundreds of feet. What if she slipped and went plummeting down to the bottom?

  Hierax stopped when he reached the vertical shaft, lowering his body so Indi could see over him, or maybe so he could peer down. This new passage was perpendicular to their tunnel and extended both up and down. Protrusions stuck out from one side. Sort of like a ladder and rungs, but they looked more like soap dishes, and they were placed uncomfortably far apart.

  “Up we go,” Hierax said and started up.

  He didn’t seem to find the climb challenging, but he had longer limbs than she and could easily reach the hand and footholds. Indi had to stretch awkwardly, but thankfully, the armor gave her more strength than usual. She never could have pulled herself up otherwise.

  “I’m waiting,” Hierax said, after a few minutes.

  “I’m climbing as fast as I can,” she said, sending a disgruntled glower upward. She wasn’t that far behind him.

  “No, for my next puzzle.”

  “Oh.” She snorted, but she pulled another one from her memory. It was better than thinking about falling, especially considering that their lights didn’t reach far enough to reveal an end to their climb.

  They traded math riddles back and forth as they continued up the strange ladder, slowly ascending what had taken them seconds to descend in the transit tube. Now and then, Hierax tried to comm the rest of his team members, but he never received an answer.

  Their vertical shaft ended, and they stepped onto a horizontal platform that led into another tunnel, this one angling upward steeply. Hierax took a step, but the floor shifted, and he paused. Indi gripped his arm for support. She couldn’t detect anything that looked like escalator treads or a conveyer belt, but the floor started carrying them up the slope. There weren’t any handrails, and it would have been quite a tumble to fall backward, so she kept hanging on to Hierax’s arm. It seemed stable.

  “What do you do on your world?” he asked, not commenting on her grip. Unlike earlier, when his personal question had sounded forced, he actually sounded interested.

  “I’m a database programmer for one of our country’s geological survey offices.”

  “Map making?”

  “The maps have all been made at this point, but we look for natural resources, watch water usage, and study erosion and man-made and natural hazards. I mostly just handle the computer stuff. Katie flies the geologists around so they can look at things. She’s also one of the kidnapped women,” Indi added, doubting he knew her any more than he had Juanita.

  “She can fly?”

  “Airplanes. I don’t think spaceships were covered when she got her pilot’s license. Not that she wouldn’t love to try flying a spaceship.”

  “Hm. We’ve got an extra ship right now, but only two pilots. It doesn’t take a genius to keep it up there in a stable orbit—that’s where we left it when we came down—but if we actually had to navigate anything extreme or go through a wormhole, Zakota and Asan are our only true helmsmen. Maybe the captain should be having your friend trained as a backup pilot. Though I suppose that means being chipped, if she wants to fly through wormholes, and the training takes years. Zakota promises me that manning the helm takes experience and talent and is not, in fact, something a bantok pushing buttons with its trunk could do.”

  “Imagine.”

  Their moving floor slowed down, and a chamber appeared ahead of them. The walls grew brighter as they entered it. It looked like a warehouse with what might have been storage crates stacked against one wall. Millennia-old crates that the aliens hadn’t taken with them when they left? What might they contain?

  Hierax, apparently not interested in exploring them, looked at his scanning device and walked toward a faint twelve-sided indention on one wall. Another door?

  “I think we’re near the surface,” he said, then tried comming his people again. “Damn. Why can I get readings of the city outside, but I can’t talk to anyone? Look, you can see the ship. We’ve come up about two and a half kilometers from it. Hah, we’re farther from the ship but closer to that building with the energy source.”

  “Close enough that we can reach it before the drones find us?”

  “Maybe, if we can get out of this room.” Hierax lowered the scanner and considered the door. “If we see those drones again, I’m going to try to walk through them. We ran without knowing if they were truly a threat.”

  “You’re going to walk far in front of me when you do that, right?”

  “How will we continue our riddle game if you’re far behind me?”

  “Our comm channel between each other seems to be working just fine,” Indi said.

  “It’s the only one,” Hierax grumbled, and tapped at the wall beside the doorway.

  A built-in panel that had been indistinguishable from the wall started glowing. Indi would have to reach up to touch it. It seemed the Wanderers had been taller than humans.

  The door appeared to be the only way out of the windowless warehouse.

  “They do like that fractal shape, don’t they?” Hierax waved to the panel, a twelve-sided shape with identical smaller shapes forming what might have been buttons inside. Not surprisingly, there were twelve of them.

  He tapped one of the buttons, then two more. Each one lit at his touch and glowed more brightly than the rest of the panel. When he lowered his arm, the glow faded.

  “Security keypad?” he guessed. “Any ideas for guessing the combination?” He looked back at her.

  Indi walked forward, pleased to be consulted, though she didn’t have any ideas.

  “Not really. The number of permutations with twelve options is ridiculously high, and we don’t even know how long the combination is. If a combination is what you’re supposed to enter here.”

  “I wonder if they used Base 12 math,” Hierax said. “I’ve been looking at a lot of the buildings and measuring dimensions, and they’re very odd ones, mathematically speaking, if you use our Base 10 system. But I noticed that they got a lot cleaner in 12.”

  “That does seem possible. We use Base 10 on Earth, too. I guess because people have ten fingers and toes. I’ve heard numerous arguments for shifting to 12, since fractions, multiplication, and division would all be simpler. But it wouldn’t be such a vast improvement that you could convince governments ac
ross the world to overhaul their countries’ education systems to start using it.”

  “Yes, we’ve had the same arguments on Dethocoles.”

  “I confess that I was thinking more of these aliens’ apparent appreciation of music and use of twelve notes than Base 12 math.”

  “Maybe it’s why they adopted Base 12,” Hierax said. “Though I’m not sure I’d say they were musical aficionados based on the kotopo scratches they sent us.”

  “Yes, I have wondered if we’re listening to it correctly, perhaps at the wrong speed or something. But look—” Indi pointed at the keypad, “—those buttons could represent the twelve notes in an octave instead of just being a set of numbers.”

  “Did we decide the octave and its notes are universal? And not a human-only construct?”

  “You’d be more likely to know that than I would. Do Zi’i have music?”

  “Not that I know of. Some other species do, though it’s fairly horrific.”

  “Your human bias may be showing.”

  “If I succeed in uploading my consciousness to an android body, and am arguably no longer human, I’ll let you know if any of my opinions change.”

  “Is that a goal of yours?”

  “Not until I get old. I’m planning my immortality. The universe would miss me, you know.”

  Indi rolled her eyes. She was going to have to try harder to stump him with puzzles and dent his ego.

  “If there is a musical element, wouldn’t touching the buttons sound a tone?” Hierax asked, prodding another one. “Oh, never mind.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no atmosphere in this room. If they were making sounds, who would know?”

  “I wonder why there’s air in some of the places we’re visiting but not others. You would think someone—or something—would have to be making some deliberate choices.” Indi leaned close to Hierax to read the faint symbols embedded in the buttons. She saw simple shapes and thought they might represent notes or numbers, but there was no way to guess which notes or numbers. Had they been able to hear the buttons being pressed, if they did indeed make sounds, maybe she could have made some guesses.

  Hierax stepped to the side and prodded at the door indention. Nothing happened. “My scanner says we’ll be outdoors if we can get through this door. I should have brought one of the bolt bows. Might have blown my way out. I prefer elegant solutions, but sometimes, explosive engineering works. Oh, I do have a compact blowtorch. I wonder if that would work. And would the drones be waiting outside, or would some more fearsome robots show up if we destroyed Wanderer property?”

  “Is there any way to bring atmosphere into this room?” Indi asked, still considering the keypad. “Or at least make a bubble of it around the pad here?” She quietly ordered the camera built into the helmet to take a picture of the symbols in case they proved helpful later. Thus far, there hadn’t been much in writing. Apparently, the ancient aliens hadn’t been big on graffiti.

  “I could blow some of the oxygen out of my tank, but it would dissipate almost instantly.”

  “Almost?”

  “Maybe I could make a forcefield to hold the oxygen in for longer.” Hierax poked into the satchel he had managed to keep strapped to his torso through all of this. “I do have a lifter. It creates and manipulates energy waves to cause objects to hover, but I might be able to change the output, use the waves to… Give me a second.”

  It was more like a minute, but that gave Indi longer to study the keypad. If the buttons did turn out to play notes, what would she play? If these buttons represented all the notes, she could play any song. Could she replicate one of the transmissions that had been sent? Probably. But to what end? Why would the transmission the Wanderers had sent out to alien visitors have anything to do with codes to open doors?

  “It’s going to be a small field,” Hierax said. “And it won’t last long. This device doesn’t have the power for much more. We’ll have to squeeze in close.”

  He pressed one armored shoulder to the wall next to the keypad. It felt strangely intimate, but Indi stepped in close, her shoulder also to the wall as she faced him, less than a foot between them. Just enough room for them to reach up and fiddle with the keypad. She tried to read his face through his visor, but mostly, she saw the silvery reflection of the keypad in it.

  “The last man I was this close to for more than two seconds stole my dog,” she said.

  “What? Did you kick his ass?”

  “I should have, but I was afraid the courts wouldn’t look kindly on ass kicking. It didn’t matter in the end. They ruled that I have to pay him alimony, since he supposedly has a disability and can’t hold down a job of his own.”

  “What’s his disability?”

  “Being a dumbass.”

  “That does sound crippling.”

  “I suppose,” Indi said, not wanting to explain Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to someone who’d been a soldier in what sounded like a horrible war. Not to mention, he’d been fighting human-eating aliens earlier in the week. She would have been more sympathetic to Jace, since he was technically a veteran, albeit he’d only been in for two years, but when they’d still been married, he’d told her straight up that he was lying about his symptoms so he could get disability pay. If only she’d had a recording of one of the times he’d said that.

  “Here comes our forcefield cocoon,” Hierax said, and pointed the lifter at the floor a foot away from them.

  “Cozy.”

  An indicator on the device flashed, but nothing else seemed to happen. But then, Hierax stuck an armored finger out to the side. It encountered an invisible field, a shimmer appearing around it for a second.

  “Now for some air,” Hierax said.

  He lowered his arm and didn’t move.

  Indi remembered him mentioning that the suits could read brain waves or something and accept commands that way.

  Again, nothing seemed to happen, but then she heard a faint hiss of air.

  “Don’t use too much,” she said, suddenly realizing that he was expelling the very air that was keeping him alive down here.

  “Yes, I thought I’d leave myself enough to breathe for a while,” he said dryly.

  “Sorry, I forgot you apparently don’t suffer from the dumbass disability.”

  “If that word is translating correctly, don’t be too sure. I’m sure the captain would point out that I’ve had a few moments.”

  “That almost sounded like humbleness.”

  “Did it? Maybe there’s less oxygen getting to my brain than I thought.”

  She snorted and swatted him on the chest.

  He grinned but also tilted his helmet toward the keypad. “There should be enough air to hear now.”

  Yes, she should have realized that as soon as she heard the hiss. Frowning at herself for her lack of focus, Indi faced the twelve-sided pad and tapped one of the buttons. A buzz sounded. Was that a C? It didn’t sound much like whatever synthetic instrument had produced the music in the transmissions, but a note was a note. She tapped another one, and another buzz came out, this one higher pitched than the first. One by one, she pressed—played—the rest of the keys, nodding to herself as each had a different sound. As foreign as those sounds were, she gradually identified notes in them.

  “I hope this thing doesn’t lock you out after X number of tries,” she muttered. “And open up a trapdoor that drops you into a pit of man-eating alligators.”

  “I don’t know what an alligator is,” Hierax said, “but we know there aren’t any living creatures on this planet. They would have to be robot alligators.”

  “How is that better?”

  “Less saliva and stomach acid because robots have no need for digestion? Do alligators have stomachs? I’m just assuming.”

  “You’re an odd man, Chief Hierax.”

  “Yes, but you’re starting to like me anyway, right?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Indi said, though it was a lie.

 
He was quirky, but so what? She was too.

  Looking back, she’d always gotten along much better with smart, quirky people than sexy ones who only thought they were smart. Not that Hierax was un-sexy. She remembered him in that gray tank top and imagined he could seduce any woman he wanted. If he could be bothered to try.

  “That’s disappointing. What if I let you try out my favorite tool when we get back to the ship?”

  “With anyone else, I would assume that was a sexual innuendo, but I suspect you’re talking about that Trevibia Z-caster 5000.”

  “You remembered it,” he said, the words almost a pleased purr. “You’ll like it. Not only is it versatile, but it’s got a precision that’s unheard of in something that’s not specialized.”

  Figuring they couldn’t stand in this bubble forever—though Hierax might be able to talk about his tool forever—Indi considered the keypad again.

  A white beam flashed, and she stumbled backward. A bzzzt sounded and shocked her as the back of her armor brushed the forcefield.

  Hierax grabbed her arm and pulled her in close again, but before either of them could say anything, the beam intensified. Light filled her vision, and even when she closed her eyes, it burned red against her lids. The sensation of crackling electricity crawled over her skin, and she groaned. It was the same as she’d experienced on the other occasions, something scanning her.

  Her brain itched, and she imagined some alien computer reading her mind. Was that possible?

  Buzzing notes rang in her mind so loudly that it felt like someone was hitting her with a mallet and that her skull was a bell. She wasn’t sure if the notes came over her comm or simply sounded in her mind. Telepathically. Tons of aliens in books were telepathic. Might this alien AI be one too?

  The light disappeared, as did the crawling sensation. Her tense muscles loosened so abruptly that she wobbled on her feet.

  Hierax wrapped his arms around her to keep her upright. “Are you all right?”

  “I… think so.”

  “It scanned you again.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” She reached up to rub her temples, but only clunked her fingers against the helmet. “It played notes in my head.”