Hex (27 page)

He'd brought the gyro down on a flat place not far from the escalator. Lusah Sahsan had told him that she would try to have members of another family there to meet them when they arrived, but apparently she'd failed to do so because there were no
arsashi
in sight. Which was probably just as well; even with translator disks, the way they spoke made his ears hurt, and he didn't want to risk any more innocent mistakes of the kind that had cost Amerigo Cayce his life.

In any case, the
arsashi
would be given the gift of one slightly used gyro. The flat bed of the escalator's lift looked as if it was just big enough to take the aircraft, but Sean didn't want or need it anymore. If everything worked out right, their next stop would be the biopod where the
Montero
had docked.

Before they left the crash site, Sean, Kyra, and Sandy had sorted through their equipment, collecting everything they'd need to take with them—sleeping bags, rations, water bottles, lanterns and flashlights, datapads, a dome tent, various hand tools—and either stuffed it into the backpacks or strapped it to their frames. The rest was given to the
arsashi
. The fléchette pistols posed a small problem; Lusah Sahsan insisted that they were contraband, and when one of her husbands volunteered to dispose of the weapons, Sean had no recourse but to surrender them. Perhaps guns were forbidden on Hex; nevertheless, he felt defenseless without them.

Lifting his pack from the back of the gyro, Sean slipped his left arm through one of its straps and let it dangle awkwardly from his shoulder. His airpack prevented him from carrying it on his back; Kyra started to put on her backpack, but Sandy shook her head.

“We're not climbing that mountain, y'know,” she said, nodding toward the nearby slope. “The lift will carry us up. And I bet a hundred colonials that, when we reach that tram, it'll be pressurized oxygen-nitrogen, and we can take off these stupid masks.”

Kyra thought about it a moment. “You're right,” she said. “Screw it.” She unbuckled the pack's belt and shrugged out of the straps, then slung it under one arm as Sean had.

A greenish grey twilight was settling upon the mountains as they carried their packs to the escalator and dropped them on the lift. A safety rail surrounded the lift, waist height for an
arsashi
but shoulder height for a human; Sean nearly had to stand on tiptoes to see the control panel attached to the rear rail. Fortunately, it was simple enough for any race to understand: three buttons in a vertical column, one with a triangle that pointed up, another with an inverted triangle that pointed down, and between them a button with a horizontal line. Sean reached up to push the top button, and with the mildest of jolts, the lift began to move.

The ascent took nearly forty-five minutes, long enough for the remaining light to fade from the biopod. Sean was startled by the starless black of the sky above the ceiling; if not for the glimmer of lights from
arsashi
settlements spread out below, the habitat would have been plunged into total darkness. Kyra opened her pack and pulled out a lantern; once she switched it on, Sean and Sandy were able to retrieve lanterns from their own packs. The combined luminescence helped a little, but there was still a spooky sense of traveling through an abyss.

“I hope you're right about the trams being pressurized,” Kyra said. “I'm starving.”

Sean nodded. Although his airmask was fitted with a small valve at the mouth that could be opened to admit a water bottle's nipple, eating was impossible without removing the mask entirely. It was frustrating to have a rumbling stomach but be unable to do anything about it even though there were enough food bars in his pack to feed him for three days.

“That'll be the first thing we do once we get there,” he promised her.

“No, it won't.” Sandy shook her head. “The first thing will be to see if we can get out of here at all.” She paused. “Sorry, but I'm not at all confident that the tram stops here.”

As it turned out, she was right. When the lift reached the top of the escalator, they saw from the light of their lanterns that the station was vacant, with a dark, empty tunnel where they'd expected a vehicle to be parked.

“I suppose we'll have to call for it,” Kyra said. “Question is, how?”

Dropping his pack on the veranda, Sean searched with his lantern until he found what appeared to be a control panel set within an enclosed wall near the platform. It had two screens, both glowing with a soft luminescence. The one on top displayed a hexagon whose inner and outer edges were ringed by half arrows pointing in various directions; he figured that it was a map of the
arsashi
habitat. On the lower screen were two rows of geometric shapes. His mother had said something about the tram using a coordinate system of
danui
numerals; Sean wondered if this was it.

“Give me the transceiver,” he said to Kyra. “I'll call the ship and see if they can patch me through to my mother.”

Kyra opened her pack, removed the transceiver, and brought it over to him. Slinging it over his right shoulder, Sean switched it on, then unfolded its antenna and pointed it toward the sky. “Survey team to
Montero
,” he said into its hand mike. “Survey team to
Montero
, do you copy? Please respond.”

He had to repeat himself a few times before Anne Smith's voice came through the transceiver's speaker.
“We copy, survey team.”
She interrupted herself with a yawn.
“Sorry for the delay. I was catching a few winks.”

It seemed like days since the last time Sean had slept; he was envious of the communications officer for having that luxury. “Would you please patch me through to Captain Carson?”

Another yawn.
“Sure . . . Hold on.”

A long delay, as much as a minute or more, during which he heard nothing but static. Then a brief crackle, followed by his mother's voice.
“Sean, is that you?”

Who else would it be?
he almost asked, until he realized how tired she sounded. “I'm here,” he said instead. “Sounds like you're asleep.”

“It's night here, too . . . or at least what passes for night. We've made it to the tram station. I flew the gyro, but had to abandon it at the bottom of the escalator. No room for it on the lift, and it's pretty much a loss anyway.” He paused, then added, “There's no tram here. Just an empty tunnel.”

“Don't worry about the gyro,”
Andromeda said.
“You won't need it if you can get a tram to come to you, and we think we've figured out how to do that.”
A short pause—it seemed as if she'd muted her headset to speak with someone else—then her voice returned.
“Tom D'Anguilo is on watch. He wants to know if you've taken any pictures or gathered any specimens.”

Sean nearly laughed out loud. “Tell him that I'm sorry, but I've had other things on my mind.”

A dry chuckle.
“That's what I thought. All right, have you found the control panel? There should be one there.”

“I'm looking at it now.”

“I see it.”

“Good. Tom thinks the bottom row are
danui
numbers, zero through six, and the top row are the coordinates for the biopod you're in. So if you want to reach another biopod, you have to use that bottom row to plug in the numbers for the top row. Understand?”

“Uh-huh. How do I do that?”

Another pause, then D'Anguilo's voice came over the comlink.
“Sean, we've never done this before, but I think that if you push the digits on the bottom row, it'll change the coordinates on the top row. Your mother . . . Captain Carson, I mean . . . copied down our coordinates, so she's ready to repeat them to you whenever you're ready.”

“Hang on a sec.” Sean clumsily shifted the transceiver's carrystrap from his right shoulder to his left. Once its mike was in his left hand, he was able to use his right to operate the control panel. “All right, I'm ready.”

“Okay, here goes,”
Andromeda said.
“Two dots joined by a vertical line . . . That's two.”

Sean found a figure on the bottom row that matched this description. He carefully pressed it with his forefinger. Nothing happened; the digit didn't give way beneath his fingertip, and the top row remained the same.

“Nope,” he said. “No change. Are you sure you . . . ?”

“Wait a minute.” Sandy was standing behind him; like Kyra, she was watching over Sean's shoulder. “If the bottom row is a keypad that's sensitive to body heat instead of pressure, wouldn't it make sense to take off your gloves first?”

Sean muttered an obscenity under his breath. He hadn't thought of that. Handing the mike to Sandy for a moment, he peeled off his gloves, then took the mike back from her and tried again. This time it worked; the top row vanished, then the
danui
numeral appeared on the screen.

“That did it,” he said. “All right, go on.”

An audible sigh of relief, then his mother continued.
“Next is an open diamond. That's four . . .”

It took a while for Sean to enter all nineteen digits into the keypad. His mother had to describe them to him, and there were great similarities between the diamond-shaped figures that corresponded with four, five, and six. One by one, the
danui
numerals gradually appeared, and when the sequence was complete, he was rewarded by seeing them flash twice before disappearing, to be replaced an instant later by the original sequence.

Sean let out his breath. “I guess that means . . .”

Just then, a brilliant shaft of light came down from the ceiling above him and the two women, capturing them within its radiance. Startled, Sean nearly jumped an inch. “What the . . . ?”

“Did a light come on above you?”
Tom asked.
“If it did, just hold still. That's a scanner checking you out.”

“Same thing happened to Mel and Jason when they used the tram to return to the ship,”
his mother added.
“It identifies which race you belong to, so it'll know what sort of environment your tram will need. Or at least that's what we think it does.”

A glowing circular band moved down the sides of the shaft until it reached the floor, then it rose to the ceiling again, whereupon the light vanished. Sean blinked against the retinal afterimage left upon his eyes. “Now what?”

Sean peered down the tunnel. He didn't see anything coming. “How long do you think it'll take for us to get there?”

Sean glanced at Kyra and Sandy. Their expressions were stunned; until then, none of them had had any idea they were so distant from the
Montero
. On the other hand, forty thousand miles—if that figure was correct—was barely an inch compared to Hex's total circumference. “Practically in the neighborhood,” he said. “Want me to fetch some ice cream on the way home?”

His mother laughed.
“Thanks, but I may not be around when you arrive. Long story, but I'm going to be doing some exploring of my own. But there will be someone here to meet you, and Anne will continue to relay any transmissions we send to each other.”

“Good excuse,” Sean muttered.

“Never mind.”

As Andromeda predicted, before long a cylindrical vehicle appeared from the tunnel. With little more than a whisper, it glided to a halt in front of the platform. Windows revealed a lighted interior, and Sean saw that the tram was vacant.

“It's here,” he said into the mike. “Signing off now.”

“Good luck,”
his mother said.
“Over and out.”

Sean switched off the transceiver, then bent down to pick up his pack. Kyra and Sandy did the same, but as they approached the tram, they noticed that its door remained shut. He was wondering why when he heard a sound behind him, and turned to see a transparent barrier slide down from the ceiling, sealing off the platform from the rest of the station.

“What's going on?” Kyra's eyes widened in alarm. “Why . . . ?”

A moment later, there was the sound of rushing air as vents opened within the ceiling. Sean suddenly understood; the tram didn't have its own airlock, so this part of the station had become one; the vents were flooding the platform with an oxygen-nitrogen mix while removing the ammonia-rich atmosphere of the
arsashi
habitat. As if to confirm this, he felt his ears pop as the pressure decreased slightly.

“Nice arrangement,” he said. “They think of everything, don't they?”

Kyra nodded but didn't speak. She seemed apprehensive about boarding the tram. Stepping closer to her, Sean took her hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. As before, he couldn't see her expression through her airmask, but she gripped his fingers tightly within her own.

The rush of air slowly faded, then the tram's doors slid open. They carried their packs inside, dropped them in a vacant area in front of the doors. The benches looked rather uncomfortable, but at least they were padded.

“Whoa. What is this?” Sandy jumped up from the bench she had just attempted to sit upon. “This thing just grabbed me!”