‘Everyone has their moments when they get scared, Jarra. Forgive me for interfering. As I said before, I’m very aware that I drafted you into the Military.’
The hum vanished as the Colonel closed the private channel. I guessed the problems with the vid link were suddenly cured at the same moment.
‘We’ve brought spare lights, sensors and hover belts,’ said Drago. ‘Your lookups should have survived the cave-in, since they’re designed to be shock proof.’
‘What happened to our equipment cases?’ Fian looked around. ‘Oh, you’ve got them.’
‘The cases weren’t damaged,’ said Marlise.
We sorted out our lights and hover belts, then Drago and Marlise wished us luck, went back to clip their harnesses to two dangling ropes, and were lifted upwards through the hole. Fian and I moved on down the tunnel, warily checking the state of the roof. Two replacement vid bees trailed after us, the original ones still buried somewhere under the rockfall.
‘The tunnel seems quite solid again,’ I said.
We reached the next black door, and Fian set up another of his pyramids. This time we were prepared for the glowing patterns to appear.
‘Pi,’ said Leveque, almost instantly. ‘Well, actually they’ve doubled the value of pi, so their formulae would be correspondingly different. Sending you the answer sequence now, Captain Eklund.’
Fian entered the next symbols in the sequence, the door opened, and we moved on towards where a third door awaited us.
‘The doors seem to be equally spaced,’ said Leveque. ‘We can expect two more after this one.’
‘There’s another line of white crystals,’ I said. ‘It seems to be glowing very faintly now. Perhaps it’s a failed lighting system.’
‘Or possibly it’s working,’ said Leveque, ‘and the aliens are nocturnal and require low lighting levels.’
Door three was another mathematical test. Door four took the experts longer to work out, and Fian had to make two attempts to get the sequence right. Leveque’s team seemed to have been happily predicting possible mathematical sequences, and this one took them by surprise because it wasn’t just based on physics, but something quite obscure as well. Door five was faster again, and something to do with chemical elements.
I was feeling pretty powered as the fifth door opened. Our position was now directly under the alien sphere. Whatever we’d come to find, would surely be in here. I stepped through the door into a circular chamber. The walls had the usual white crystal line, and in the centre of the room was a pillar, triangular rather than round, and made of the same black glass as the doors.
‘We power it up?’ Fian’s voice sounded oddly breathless.
‘We don’t know how the sphere may respond,’ I said. ‘Do we have a fighter shift in orbit?’
‘They’ve already pulled back to the portals, Major,’ said Leveque. ‘Earth Africa solar array is on standby. You can go ahead.’
Fian did the pyramid thing, and scrolling symbols appeared on the side of the column closest to us. I blinked, took a second look, and strolled slowly around to inspect the three sides. Well, this was different. We didn’t just have one set of scrolling symbols, we had three, one on each side.
‘A final test,’ said Leveque. ‘Clearly rather more complex.’
There was a pause. A very long pause. After ten or fifteen minutes, I started getting restless. Fian was staring at the symbols and working on his lookup. I knew I couldn’t figure it out, so I didn’t even go through the motions of trying.
‘We’re looking at all three sequences, as well as the sequence achieved by combining them,’ said Leveque. ‘None of them match any of our predictions.’
There was another wait of at least twenty minutes before he spoke again. ‘This doesn’t seem to be mathematical. It’s probably based on some sort of science, but we can’t work out what. There is, unfortunately, the possibility it’s a branch of science we haven’t yet discovered.’
Even more time passed. I was bone tired by now, and aching from impact suit bruising after the cave-in. I gave up worrying about looking good for the vid bees, sat on the floor, and leaned against the wall with a sigh of relief. Whether we managed to solve the final test or not, my main worries were over. The alien sphere was obviously here to communicate with us. There wouldn’t be a war. Earth was safe. I wasn’t going to be a laughing stock. I could join the Tell clan and be part of a family.
I was actually dozing when my lookup chimed. I jerked awake and looked down at it in surprise. Why was someone calling me on my Military lookup, rather than using a comms channel? I tapped it, frowned, carefully turned off all my comms channels and answered.