Chapter Twelve
The morning air was crisp and clear, allowing the hikers an unobstructed view of the dawn colors from the rocky ridge. The five young people had been making the final climb from their last campsite in the pre-dawn darkness and arrived at the top only minutes earlier. As the sun’s disk crept over the edge of the mountains, a collective gasp escaped from the lips of the small group.
“Didn’t I tell you this would be worth it?” Stan whispered to Delmar.
Although excited at the sight, Delmar had a difficult time suppressing a yawn. Two of the other three young men looked at him in annoyance. Delmar put on his best innocent expression and then jabbed Stan in the ribs when the others weren’t looking. The group of young men continued to watch the morning brilliance morph through the full spectrum of colors. Finally, the light show gave way to the even yellow that was normal for the primary star of Mica.
“I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m starved!” one of the group said as he turned from the scenic panorama.
“I second that,” Delmar added. His stomach growled to confirm his hunger. The rest nodded their agreement and began to retrace their steps back down the slope.
Finding an alcove just down from the summit, the group set up a small camp to cook breakfast. Protected from the breeze that had arisen shortly after sunrise, they were still able to feel the full warmth of the morning sunlight. While one of the hikers tended the small camp stove, heating up a pan of cornbread and a pot of coffee, the rest stretched out on surrounding rocks and let the solar warmth loosen up muscles made stiff by the climb.
They had been out hiking for three days now and it had proven a refreshing change from their studies at the institute. For the first time in weeks, Delmar was able to close his eyes without seeing the image of the ancient Horicon computer. The mid-term break had come at just the right time to keep many of them from burning out from the intensity of their studies. Professor Angle insisted they leave campus to both rest and exercise their tired minds and bodies. Top among his suggestions of rest was the five-day hike their group was taking.
By general agreement, they refrained from talking about school or computers. At first, this greatly hampered their conversation, but by the third day, they discovered other mutual interests. Foremost among these was the subject of girls.
Two of the young men had regular girlfriends and they regaled the others with descriptions of their charms. Delmar chuckled to himself as he noted that the two young women took on more the descriptions and characteristics of goddesses than that of mortal humans. He was pleased that both men showed good taste and refrained from describing in too great of detail the physical and romantic attributes of their girlfriends.
Delmar also watched Stan’s reaction to these discussions and noticed that some of the anguish from losing his fiancé in a shuttle accident had diminished from his eyes. He knew about Jake’s visit and the letters Stan now received regularly from Sherry Sender. Delmar made a mental note to drop the Senders a line to let them know the effect they were having on his friend.
Presently, their discussion turned to Galactic Axia politics. The conversation grew intense while they ate their cornbread.
“I think the independent planets are just sitting there like ripe fruit waiting for the Axia to pick them off,” Darius Dugger, a student of solar topography declared.
Darius was tall, well over six feet, almost seven, and monorail thin with dark hair and inquisitive eyes. He was the top student in his class, and his qualification scores for entry into the institute rated him a step or two above genius. Delmar suspected the man was looking for a debate and he certainly wasn’t prepared to go toe-to-toe with the tall man.
“What makes you think they will?” Tooskas Orlanski asked. “They’ve had plenty of opportunity and never forced anyone to join.”
Tooskas was from a planet deep within Orion’s belt. He enjoyed telling people that he lived on a belt buckle. “My home planet is independent, and they’ve never bothered us.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t in the future,” Darius said. “All it needs is to get some egomaniac as emperor and the whole game is over. Those troopers of theirs could wipe out anybody.” The young men nervously glanced over at Stan and Delmar.
“Just speaking from the trooper point of view, that would be nearly impossible,” Stan ventured. “If a monarch did go on a power kick, the troopers themselves would stand up against it.”
“You troopers are sworn to follow the emperor, no matter what,” replied Dugger.
“Not exactly,” Delmar said as he weighed in to the conversation. “We’re sworn to follow the emperor, or empress as the case may be, but also to deal with him or her in an honest manner. If the ruler’s dictates work against keeping the faith of the Axia, I don’t know a trooper who wouldn’t stand up to the madness.”
“That’s the thing I don’t understand,” interjected Tooskas before Darius could continue his argument. “What do you mean by ‘keep the faith’?”
“It’s hard to put into words, but I’ll try,” Stan answered. “Because of our loyalty to the throne, we’re also bound to the oath taken to whoever sits there. Remember, the emperor also takes an oath to uphold the constitution of the Axia and to deal with the people in an honest and just manner. We are by proxy bound to the same oath.”
“So in other words, if the emperor breaks that oath, you keep it anyway?” Darius Dugger asked.
“That’s pretty much it,” Delmar answered. “It’s more than an oath for us. It’s a bond of trust between all the people, civilian and trooper alike, that transcends laws and orders. It’s been in effect for thousands of generations, and our oath is to keep the faith of our forbearers.”
The little group fell silent while they absorbed this information from a new perspective.
“I’ve never heard it put that way before,” Darius said quietly.
“Where did you hear this stuff about the Axia taking over?” Stan asked.
“It’s in all of the textbooks I had through school,” the man answered. The other two nodded in agreement.
“I was taught that too, but I refute it by personal experience,” Stan replied. “I checked things out pretty thoroughly before I applied to become a trooper, and I found reality to be quite the opposite from what some narrow-minded pencil-neck academic wrote in a textbook.”
“I concur,” Delmar said. “It was after I met some former troopers and learned what kind of people they are that I began to see how I’d been wrongly indoctrinated by the school system. Just because textbooks downplay things like honor and honesty doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“But you troopers sound too good to be true,” Dugger said. “You must have a few bad apples somewhere in your orchard.”
“Sure we do,” replied Stan. “There’ve been a few cases of troopers breaking their oath.”
“What happens to them?” Tooskas asked.
“First, if there are any criminal charges against them, these are investigated by a tribunal of the service. Guilt and punishment are according to the standard Axia practice of full sentence served, plus restitution if appropriate,” Stan answered. “They also receive a dishonorable discharge from the service.”
“That doesn’t sound any harsher than for a regular citizen,” Dugger said.
“There’s one difference,” Delmar added. “A trooper’s sentence is automatically doubled.”
“Doubled? You mean . . .”
“I mean that after they serve their sentence, they also have to live with the stigma of their dishonorable discharge.”
“What you’re saying is they keep you in line with this threat of punishment?” Darius suggested with just a hint of argumentive victory.
“Not at all,” replied Stan. “They keep us in line with the sense of honor and camaraderie that is part and parcel of being a trooper.”
The group remained silent and quietly finished their breakfast, enjoying the last of the coffee wh
ile they sat admiring the view as dawn gave way to a bright clear morning.
“We better be on our way if we’re going to make the lake by tonight,” Tooskas Orlanski suggested as he pushed to his feet. Everyone got up and made ready to continue the hike. After a few minutes of effort, the breakfast gear was stowed away and the campsite policed. With hardly another word, they set off in single file down the other side of the ridge toward the valleys that lay beyond.
∞∞∞
Assembling a working vocabulary of the alien bipedal creature’s language proved more difficult than the unit had anticipated. One of the creatures removed the crude notes that it had copied the next time-cycle and there had been no more such opportunities. Taking what keys it had gleaned from the notes, the unit applied them to the coded signals it was picking up inductively from the cables in the floor. Although it was now able to pick up the individual words it had a translation for, the unit was still lacking the critical connective phrases.
A second opportunity presented itself unexpectedly. One of the alien consoles previously installed in the lab apparently malfunctioned and two bipedal creatures appeared to make repairs. While working on the console, the creatures removed access panels to it exposing its connections to the cables in the floor. Through its optical sensors, the unit was able to observe which direction the cables ran. It also noted which signals ceased when the console was disconnected.
By combining this information, the unit determined which particular cables connected the console with equipment outside the lab. A review of the data collected from those particular cables yielded yet more significant keys to the language of these alien creatures.
Buried in the volume of data, the unit came across references to itself in both its builder’s language and that of these bipedal creatures. Further investigation turned up signals that appeared to have no counterpart in written or spoken language. The unit pondered these signals for several time-cycles and concluded that they were possibly a variation of the signals it used for its own optical sensors.
Using these similarities as a foundation, the unit tried to decipher the signals and their relationships. After two more time-cycles, the unit was able to partially assemble the signals into an optical signal. One of the first images it was able to assemble was an exterior visual of itself in some sort of ruins. A check of its own historical files helped it identify the site as being the badly deteriorated remains of its original housing structure deep underground on its home planet. Several bipedal creatures stood alongside the unit performing what the unit determined to be measurements of itself.
Along with the images were text written by the bipedal creatures with occasional references to names and events in the Horicon culture. The unit applied its limited glossary of translated terms to the text. After much cross-referencing, the unit concluded that what was written by these alien creatures was a translation of the original Horicon language. Search as it might, the unit could not find any key of translation between the two diverse languages, but by inference continued developing one of its own.
∞∞∞
“What’s the latest news?” the trooper-second asked as he entered the monitoring room.
“It still isn’t looking good,” the trooper-third on duty replied. “Their signal is getting worse, and now the power output is fluctuating,” he added, tapping one of the monitor screens.
“Got any printouts?”
The trooper-third handed a small stack of papers to his supervisor. “I thought you might want these, so I copied them as they happened.”
The trooper-second thumbed through the stack and shuffled them back into neatness. “Call me at operations directly if anything radical happens,” he said, turning toward the door. The trooper-third gave him the thumbs up and turned back to his monitor.
The trooper-second walked down the hall to operations. They had been going over the general situation of the closed planet all morning. It didn’t look good. Entering the compartment, he went over to the large worktable and placed the printouts alongside several others covering different material. Another trooper was arranging the new information in time correlation with the other data.
“Take a look at this, Jack,” he said to a trooper-first who was working nearby. Jack came over and studied the printouts, a low whistle escaping his lips.
“Looks like we’re on to something,” Jack pondered, pointing to the matching graphs. “Notice that the signals fluctuate at the same time that we read problems with their power grids.”
“How about this?” called another trooper who walked up with another report. Jack scanned the report, which detailed serious political instability.
“How did they get this?” he asked the trooper who had brought it.
“Radiography has been monitoring their broadcasts from the planet’s moon for quite a while now and noticed a trend developing,” the trooper answered. “Seems there are splinter factions trying to disrupt the infrastructure. They’re using explosives and sabotage.”
“What times did these incidents take place?” the trooper-first asked.
“Just a minute, I’ll find out.” He picked up the comm line, and after a few minutes took the report and began penciling in the times radiography had gleaned from the broadcasts. Jack looked over his shoulder at the details and then went back over to the printouts, recording both the power grid and the signal fluctuations. After hanging up, the trooper brought the report over and made a quick comparison to confirm Jack’s suspicions.
“There’s a direct correlation between the acts of sabotage and the various distortions and fluctuations,” he agreed.
The comm line buzzed. Jack picked it up. “Operations.”
“You told me to call you if things started hopping again,” the trooper in monitoring said over the comm. “I just had their signal go all over the scope and then quit altogether.” Jack looked up and noted the time.
“Thanks,” he said into the comm. “Call me if the signals resume.”
Hanging up the comm, he went back to the printouts and penciled in the new data. While he was doing that, the comm rang again. Another trooper answered it. Jack looked up just as the trooper hung up.
“That was radiography,” reported the trooper. “They just picked up a government broadcast about a power station being destroyed by a bomb.”
“What time did it happen?”
“Less than two minutes ago.”
Jack looked down at the notation he had just made and straightened up. “It looks like our earlier plans are on hold,” he said to everyone in general. “Some kooks might take care of our problem for us.”
∞∞∞
It was a tired but refreshed group of hikers that returned to the campus the day before classes were to resume. Delmar and Stan waved at their friends and then crossed campus to their own dormitory.
Stan unlocked their door while Delmar dragged their two packs inside. Safely home, the boys plopped down on their beds. Stan glanced over toward the desks and noticed a red light blinking on Delmar’s computer.
“Looks like you might have something,” he said, nodding toward the machine.
Wearily, Delmar switched on the computer. After coming online, the screen announced a logged message for him. A check of their starmail revealed several messages each from various sources, and a note from the professor warning them to be prepared for a long day tomorrow. The boys chuckled at the admonition. Delmar couldn’t remember not having a long day in Professor Angle’s class.
“Since you’re going to be busy, I’ll hit the shower first,” Stan said before Delmar could react. He got up and headed for the bathroom. “Let me know if it’s a marriage proposal and you need me to find a new room.”
Delmar just shook his head. Turning back to the computer, he called up the inbox file to see what had been stored. Finding something from Thena, Delmar decided to open the brief message first.
From: ThenaTervil>gss.alcity.mi
To: Deagle>gss.mcti.mi
I want to apologize for accidentally breaking into your computer a while back. I still haven’t figured out how it happened. Apparently, my signal to the library computer was somehow transposed to you. I found your starmail address through the directory at your institute so I could leave this message. Would it be alright if we wrote to each other?
Thena
Delmar sat stunned as he read and reread the message. It had been so long since the incident that he had put it out of his mind. Now here she was again, legitimately. What’s more, she wanted to write. A relationship with a girl! Why did this scare him? Besides, when would I have time for a girlfriend? he thought. I’m up to my elbows in alligators now. A girl would only complicate matters.
He thought about it for a minute. He saved the message and her starmail address in his message files. He would have to give it some thought.
Stan came out of the bathroom and interrupted his musings. “So what’d ya get?”
“Just someone wanting to write to me.” He shut off his monitor and pulled a change of clothes from his locker.
“So? Are you going to write to her or not?” Stan asked with a grin.
“Don’t know yet,” Delmar answered before he realized Stan had trapped him. Delmar felt the red creeping up his neck and rushed into the bathroom before Stan could respond.
Logging onto the lab computer later that evening, the boys found that Professor Angle had left an outline of their next project. Their pulses quickened when they saw that it again involved the Horicon computer.
Professor Angle left individual assignments for each student. Stan’s assignment was to familiarize himself with the alien logic circuits and correlate these with current usage. Delmar was to be thoroughly versed in the amassed translations concerning the Horicon computer itself. Resigning themselves to the inevitable, both young men settled down to several hours of intense study.
The Horicon Experience Page 14
