Loss #2: Austin Rhinehart was luckier. Owen Lamont’s bullet—and what kind of fanatic would shoot a thirteen-year-old?—had only grazed his head, due to Leo. Isabelle had found Austin lurching toward home, crying, blood streaming into his eyes. Head wounds, Salah said, bled a lot even if superficial. Austin had a monster headache but would be all right. Except—what did it do to a child to be shot by an adult he had trusted?
Loss #3: Claire, Kayla, and, according to Austin, a bunch of Kindred girls and their mother, were still hostage in Tony Schrupp’s survivalist bunker.
Loss #4: Mason Kandiss no longer guarded the compound. He had gone to bring back, or to bury—Marianne wasn’t clear on this—his lieutenant’s body. “A Ranger never leaves a brother behind,” Isabelle had said. Marianne, who neither understood nor sympathized with a creed that placed unit loyalty over, say, intent to destroy an entire civilization, had bitten back her retort. Anyway, there wasn’t much to be guarded against; the camp was quiet.
Loss #5 was anticipated: In six days, the spore cloud would strike Kindred.
Well, then, gains. Gain #1—
She couldn’t think of anything gained in the last several days.
Isabelle entered the leelee lab with Salah, Ka^graa, and an old woman who had to be a mother. Who? From where? Everyone sat down, exchanging I-greet-you’s in low voices, and Marianne suddenly flashed on faculty meetings at the college where she used to teach. A life ago. Several lives ago.
“Okay,” Branch said, finally aware that the room held other people and he was on stage. The tips of his ears grew red, but he had obviously thought through what he wanted to say. “We have the call-back device. Now we have to figure out how to use it, and we do that by thinking like an alien.”
All at once redness seeped from ear tips to his whole face. “I didn’t mean… not that Kindred are aliens, I mean the other ones, the aliens who designed this and… not ‘other aliens’ I didn’t mean to say that either—”
“Branch,” Marianne said firmly because there was no time for this polite fumbling, “we know what you meant. Get on with it.”
“Okay. Yes.” He drew a large breath, while Isabelle translated. “Worlders press a button, or something like that anyway, on their colony ship and it goes to… wherever it went. They press a button on their other ship and it goes to Earth. We press a button on the Friendship and it goes to Kindred. So there were preset variations in the original plans the master aliens left, or else the ships are programmable, which makes more sense. And since so far no humans know how to program them, they’re programming themselves on a simple return-to-where-you-started loop. Press the button and you reverse the flight plan.
“But what if no people are left to press that button, which is the situation on the colony ship now? You don’t just want to abandon an expensive thing like a starship. So you build and leave behind an unbreakable call-back device. This.”
He put his hand on it, and Marianne suppressed her impatience. Everyone here already knew this. Branch had a careful, linear mind, touching all bases, a good thing in a researcher, but—
“With your call-back device,” Branch finally continued, “you build in a code to use it, because even if the device can’t be damaged by anything short of a nuclear bomb, it can be stolen. Remember, you don’t know how the stone-age people you’re leaving all this with—you don’t know how they’re going to develop, what kind of society they’ll create. The device could be stolen, misused by terrorists, lost for millennia—which it was. Applying the code has to be intuitively obvious—just press the right bumps in the right sequence. The code itself can’t be too simple or it might accidentally be set off by, say, rocks falling on it. But the code might be lost or misremembered. So although complex, it has to be something that could be figured out by a society advanced enough to build the ships in the first place. A sequence of numbers that is basic to the universe.
“So what do you use?
“Not every single possible combination of pressing all sixteen bumps. That would be 20,922,789,888,000 possible sequences, and then only if the device is activated by a sequence using all sixteen bumps. At two seconds per trial, running them all would take over five million years. And the correct sequence might not even require all sixteen bumps. Is everybody with me so far?”
Marianne nodded. Branch waited until the low murmur of translation caught up.
“You can’t use constants from physics, either, like the speed of light or Hudspeth’s constant because they depend on units—meters, kilograms, joules, seconds—and there is no telling what units your stone-age society will develop if it ever builds starships.
“So you make sure that any ship still capable of being recalled sends its own code. That’s what I think is coming from the ship… listen.”
They had all heard this, but Branch played it again anyway from his receiver: one tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Long silence before repeating.
“So the problem is to translate that bunch of numbers into some sequence of pressing bumps on the call-back device. You can’t just press the numbers from the ship onto the pyramid because how do you know where to start? And there are still millions of possible combinations. No good. I think the transmitted numbers are supposed to be the key to the actual code to press. But the sequence doesn’t match any mathematical sequence—not primes or Fibonacci or anything else I can come up with. It might be based on some common, indisputable number like the days in a Kindred year, but I can’t make anything like that work, either. Yet the sequence has to be something known to the Kindred who will build these ships. I just don’t know what!”
Salah said, “Branch, it seems to me you’ve made a lot of assumptions here. Three of those tones are in two digits—eleven, fourteen, sixteen—and you don’t know that the numbers are even in base ten. The ‘master aliens’ might count in base six or base twelve—why assume they use base ten?”
“Because humans do,” Branch said, wiggling his fingers, “and they gave the code to humans.”
“Why assume the tones implies another number to press?”
“I told you. There has to be a way to narrow the possibilities and this is the most logical.”
“Why assume the transmission from the ship is a call-back code at all? It could be a Mayday call for help or—”
“Because I fucking have to assume something!” Branch flared.
They were all so tired, Marianne thought: tired of tension, tired of violence, tired of not succeeding at anything. Tired of this planet.
Branch got himself under control. “Look, the universe runs on mathematics. It’s the only shared language across all advanced cultures, all sciences. The transmitted numbers have to mean something.”
“You did a good job,” Isabelle said. “Look, let’s sleep on it. Maybe someone will come up with something.”
Branch looked at her, his eyes pleading. He was so young. Approval still mattered to him as much, or more, than survival.
Isabelle repeated, “You did a good job.”
Leo woke and, without thinking, groped for the sidearm he had insisted on keeping on his pallet. It wasn’t there. He bellowed, “Hey! Somebody!” and Kandiss came into the room. The big Ranger, in full kit, loomed over the pallet, his face blank.
The two men stared at each other. If Kandiss was going to kill him, there was nothing Leo could do about it. He said, “Give me back my weapons.”
Kandiss ignored that. “I buried him.”