Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  Hierax’s ears perked at her admission, and he was tempted to ask her if her math interests extended beyond music, but the captain spoke over the intercom.

  “The ship will land in sixty seconds. Prepare for landing. Chief Hierax, do you have your team ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hierax said. “Me, Woo, and Nax are here in engineering, and I’ve alerted Treyjon, Hammer, and Mikolos that they’re coming along in case anything needs blowing up, punching, or shooting. They should be in their armor by now.”

  “Miss Indigo?” Sagitta asked.

  Indi’s eyes widened.

  “She seems quite comfortable sitting at my table with Eridanus at her beck and call, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Indi mouthed.

  Hierax sketched her a salute.

  “She’s still receiving a transmission,” Sagitta said.

  It wasn’t a question. Coric would be keeping him filled in when it came to all things communications related.

  “There’s an alien serenade coming in over Ensign Thangi’s helmet, yes,” Hierax said.

  “I know she doesn’t want to go, but it may be wise to take her along. Something on the planet wants to communicate with her, and since you’re going out there, a translator may be the difference between finding what we seek and getting killed.”

  “I can’t translate anything,” Indi said.

  Eridanus, showing impeccable timing, played the alien A note again, holding it so that the reverberations seemed to echo from the walls.

  “Ass,” Indi whispered.

  Hierax laughed before he could stop himself. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had cursed out the AI.

  Indi turned a glare on him, and he wiped the smirk off his face.

  “The muscle has arrived to keep your asses safe on that planet,” came Treyjon’s voice from the doorway. He strode into engineering with Angela and his female svenkar at his side.

  Their female svenkar, Hierax amended silently. It walked between them like a toddler on an outing with its parents. A four-hundred-pound toddler with eight-inch-long fangs that dripped saliva like a leaky faucet.

  “The muscle? You mean the svenkar?” Hierax asked. “I don’t have a suit for her.”

  “Guess your ass is in trouble then,” Treyjon said with an easy wink.

  “It usually is.”

  “Mikolos and Hammer are armed and armored and waiting at the airlock,” Treyjon said.

  His face grew serious as he turned toward Angela. He also wore his armor, everything save the helmet, and she looked tiny in front of him. She looked tiny next to the svenkar, too, but apparently, it listened to her better than it listened to Treyjon.

  “They need to eat twice a day, next feeding in three hours,” he told her. “You know they get crabby if you’re late with their steaks. Keep an eye out for Tank. His eyes were bloodshot this morning. Probably nothing, but if he’s got some virus, we might have to isolate him from the others. We—”

  “You’ve already told me how to take care of them, Treyjon.” Angela patted him on his armored arm. “I know they’re like your children and that you worry about them. I’ll take good care of Tank, and Salt and Pepper too.”

  “Good. I know you will. If anything happens to me, I’ve already told the captain that I think you should be trained as a Star Guardian and offered a job as my replacement.”

  “Replacement?” Her eyes flew open. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Are you joking? There’s nobody out there on that planet, right? It’s abandoned and dark and without life or an atmosphere. What could happen?”

  “I don’t know, but someone is sending us creepy messages.”

  “Dr. Tala doesn’t think they’re creepy. She’s got her violin out and is going to try to formulate some responses.”

  Hierax arched his eyebrows. That was the first he’d heard about that. He wasn’t sure whether to think it ridiculous or not.

  “I sent her some suggestions to try,” Indi said.

  Hierax appreciated her initiative. He was starting to think that Sagitta might have been right, that she was someone good to have on his team.

  “Suggestions to try while you’re on the surface with my team?” he asked her.

  She grimaced.

  Eridanus played the note again.

  “I guess the tribe has spoken,” she said with a defeated sigh.

  Juanita came over and patted her on the back. “It’ll be a great adventure. You’ll remember it forever. You’ll see.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Let’s get suited up and head to the airlock,” Hierax said, tugging his armor up over his torso.

  “Be careful out there,” Angela told Treyjon, rising on her tiptoes to kiss him.

  Hierax kept himself from making a disgusted noise—barely. He found all this lovey-dovey stuff now taking place on their serious Star Guardian ship to be off-putting. Treyjon would probably be worrying about Angela as well as his svenkars when he was out there, and he might lose his concentration and do something stupid.

  Hierax looked forward to getting out of this system and getting all the women who weren’t Star Guardians off the ship and back where they belonged.

  4

  Indi could hear her own breathing, Darth Vader-like, in her ears. She was panicking before she even walked off the ship. Hierax, Lieutenant Treyjon, and two Star Guardians named Mikolos and Hammer, people she hadn’t interacted with before, had already hopped out through the airlock hatchway. The planet might not have an atmosphere, but it did have gravity, and they landed with bent knees on the bluish-black metal roof under the Falcon 8.

  Hierax’s two engineers, Woo and Nax, stood behind Indi in the airlock, waiting. She hovered in the hatchway, her gauntleted hands gripping the sides. She kept running excuses through her mind, ways to get out of being a part of this mission that she wasn’t qualified for.

  Hierax looked back up at her, his face only partially visible through the silvery visor of his helmet. His looks had gradually shifted from disdainful to indifferent to almost friendly, especially after she’d started talking about music and math.

  For the first time, it occurred to her that she might be able to do something out here that the men couldn’t do, and perhaps, by being with them, she could help ensure everyone’s safety. She would feel bad if something happened to them because she’d insisted on staying behind and hiding in the lavatory. And it wasn’t as if the lavatory would be safe indefinitely. What happened when the ship ran out of food and water? They had to find a way out of this deserted system. If there was a chance that she could help with that by being out here, didn’t she have to go with the team?

  “You all right, Miss?” one of the engineers asked.

  “Not even remotely,” Indi said, but she bent low, put her hand on the deck, and hopped the six feet down to the roof.

  Since she had the athleticism of a rotund rock, she imagined flailing and falling down when she landed, but the armor had some kind of stabilizers, and the boots absorbed the impact from the drop. It was as if she’d hopped down a foot instead of six.

  “Huh,” she said, remembering Hierax’s remark about how his suit was like a tank.

  “You sound enlightened,” Hierax said. “Did everything about the alien transmissions suddenly click into place for you?”

  “No, I was pleased that I didn’t fall over.”

  “You have modest goals in life, don’t you?”

  “At the moment, yes.” Indi stepped out of the way so the others could jump down. “What are your goals?”

  “I’m working on an engine prototype that could allow interstellar travel without wormholes, I’m putting together example problems for a textbook that will be infinitely better than the one my academy professor wrote, I’m constructing a new cleaning automaton capable of scouring all the ducts in the ship in minutes, and I’m building a new virtual-reality program that uses a Plakoto game interface to simplify engine maintenance.”

  “What do you do fo
r fun?”

  His helmet tilted to the side. “What in my list wasn’t fun?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Lead the way, Woo,” Hierax said, when everyone was on the rooftop. He waved to indicate that he would walk at the back of the group with Indi.

  She wasn’t sure if she wanted a bodyguard or not. She didn’t want to hold the men back, but she also didn’t want to be left to lag behind.

  The men leading the group walked to the edge of the roof and hopped off without hesitating. Indi grimaced when she peered over the side. The drop was more like thirty feet than six, and the strange rails that ran past below, something like foot-high train tracks, didn’t look like they would soften the landing.

  “The armor will make it easy,” Hierax told her. “Or at least unlikely that you’ll kill yourself.”

  “How comforting. Is this the time for admitting that I’m afraid of heights?”

  “Want me to hold your hand?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or patronizing. Or both.

  “No,” she said. “Shouldn’t there be some kind of Go-Go-Gadget-Extendable-Arms that I can deploy on this armor to swing myself down?”

  She knew he wouldn’t get the reference, but that didn’t faze him.

  “Why didn’t you ask earlier?” he asked, sounding like he was grinning behind his faceplate. He gripped her hand, then popped something out of the top of his gauntlet. A hook?

  He crouched, extended the tool to clasp the edge of the rooftop, then tugged her off her feet. Indi squawked with fear as she was pulled forward. Hierax held her hand as they dropped over the side, but that sure as hell wasn’t good enough. She freaked out and wrapped her arms and legs around him.

  A thin chain extended from his hook, and after they rapidly dropped a few alarming feet, it slowed them down. They descended at a sedate pace, as if being lowered with a winch. They landed on the ground next to the other men. Hierax murmured a command, and the hook unfastened itself. The chain reeled back in, disappearing into some spool within his armor.

  “Captain says that kind of thing needs to be done in private, Hierax,” Treyjon said.

  “What kind of thing?” Hierax looked down at his armor where the chain and hook had disappeared.

  “Women wrapping their legs around you for a ride.”

  The two young engineers giggled, which was unseemly coming from grown men. Indi blushed and let go of Hierax.

  “Oh,” Hierax said, though it seemed to take him a couple of seconds to get the joke. “I can’t help it I’m so irresistible to women.”

  “Irresistible?” Indi protested. “You grabbed my hand and yanked me off the roof without warning me. If I hadn’t been so busy holding on in terror, I would have clubbed you.”

  “Real irresistible, Chief,” Hammer said.

  “This way to the energy source,” Woo said, pointing some device down the tracks and into the dark city.

  Buildings of varying heights rose up on either side of the tracks, dark silhouettes against the starry night sky. Nobody had left the lights on. If there ever had been light. The whole place had an eerie foreignness to it, and even though nothing stirred, and there wasn’t supposed to be anything living down here, Indi had the distinct sense that something was watching them. She also felt that they weren’t welcome.

  The men headed down the tracks, not noticeably perturbed by the alienness of everything.

  She took a few steps after them, but a strange white light flared up all around her, and she halted. It was the same type of light as had surrounded her on the bridge. Her heart hammered in her chest even more than it had when Hierax yanked her off the building.

  Treyjon, Hammer, and Mikolos jumped into defensive positions, pointing their bow weapons along the tracks in either direction. No enemies presented themselves, but the light grew brighter.

  Indi squinted her eyes and raised her arm, trying to block it out. Her visor grew dimmer of its own accord, but the light was still intense. Then something like an electrical current crackled all around her. She could feel it through her suit. No, it seemed to be inside her suit, buzzing and crackling between her skin and the armor.

  “Are you guys feeling this?” she shouted.

  “Feeling what?” one of the men asked, she wasn’t sure who. “I can’t see anything through this sun exploding in front of my eyes.”

  A hand gripped Indi’s shoulder. She barely felt the touch through the hard armor.

  “You’re being scanned again,” Hierax said, his voice hard to understand over the buzzing in Indi’s ears.

  “By what?”

  Abruptly, the buzzing and crackling disappeared. The light vanished, too, leaving dark spots swimming through Indi’s vision. She wobbled on her feet, her muscles weak after the weird moment. The scan.

  “According to my scanner,” Hierax said, “it came from a spot about two kilometers from here. The same place as before.”

  “Did it only scan me?” Indi hadn’t been able to tell if anyone else had been surrounded by light.

  “It pinpointed you, yes.”

  “It’s so good to be special.”

  A transmission played over Indi’s helmet comm, a new one. She groaned. If she had been back on the ship, she would have enjoyed studying it, perhaps finding more clues in it, but out here, she felt she had to focus on their surroundings. And staying alive.

  “Is anyone else hearing this?” she asked.

  “We’re monitoring your comm channel from the bridge,” Lieutenant Coric said, her voice also coming over the helmet’s comm. “And recording it for further study. Right now, I’m scanning our databases for any linguistics-related information that archaeologists might have discovered while examining Wanderer ruin sites.”

  Indi sighed and looked around, aware of all the men watching her. Her reflection was visible in their faceplates, along with the strangely shaped buildings of the city behind her.

  “I’m all right now,” she said. “We can continue on.”

  “Good.” Hierax lowered his hand—he’d kept his grip on her shoulder, as if he worried she would tip over. Certainly a possibility. “Let’s find some tools for fixing the gate. Then we can get off this planet.”

  Maybe the foreignness was making him uncomfortable, after all.

  The men headed off, once again following the knee-high rails that stretched between buildings. Hierax stuck close to Indi’s side. Normally, she would have balked at the idea of a babysitter, but being out here was even worse than hiking through a desert teaming with rattlesnakes and javelinas. She felt relieved that someone was watching out for her. Someone who, as she’d noticed in engineering earlier, when he’d only been wearing a tank top, seemed fit and athletic enough to protect her if need be. He was also a lot hotter than most of the engineers and computer geeks she knew, so if someone had to grip her shoulder, he wasn’t a bad choice. Not that his looks really mattered. It wasn’t as if she wanted to find someone to date while on this crazy ship—she still thought Angela and Juanita, and now even Dr. Tala, were totally nuts. But it didn’t hurt to admire nice attributes.

  As they walked, the engineers consulted handheld devices—tricorders, Juanita would have jokingly said—and occasionally turned around bends and onto new sets of tracks.

  Indi looked at the buildings they passed, hoping to see words or symbols etched into their walls, something that might have helped with learning the aliens’ language. From down here, it was hard to tell that the buildings had twelve sides, but she spotted smaller versions of the twelve-sided shape represented in what she guessed were doors. Most of the time, the shallow indentations were ten or fifteen feet up the sides of the structures instead of at ground level. She didn’t see windows at all.

  Now and then, spires or towers or other interesting architectural structures rose up, visible down tracks that cut across theirs, but the engineers stuck to their course, not straying to explore. That was fine with Indi. Someone had considerately ensured the stat
istics that displayed on the inside of her faceplate showed up in English. A temperature reading alternated between -211 degrees Fahrenheit and -212. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if her armor sprang a leak.

  “This is interesting,” Woo said, his faceplate tilted toward a handheld sensor device. “I’m reading gases in a structure ahead and to our left, a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen in similar proportion to that of habitable planets in the galaxy. Habitable by humans.”

  “Is someone rolling out a welcome mat for us?” Treyjon asked.

  Indi didn’t think that scan had been very welcoming.

  “It could be that the Wanderers breathed a similar atmosphere as humans,” Korta said, chiming in on their channel.

  Indi tried not to feel like they were fish in a bowl, being monitored by everyone on the ship.

  “Your own origin stories all tell of how a Wanderer came to Gaia and found a lover,” Korta continued. “That could suggest that Gaia had an atmosphere that was compatible to his physiology. Given that the Wanderer is reputed to have mated with a human woman and produced copious offspring, other things could have been compatible, too, though, of course, an advanced civilization would be able to genetically engineer viable offspring that didn’t necessarily have a natural biological compatibility. It could simply be that the so-called mating involved petri dishes and a science laboratory.” Korta’s rumbling rock voice sounded approving.

  “Could we focus on getting to the energy source instead of mating?” Hierax asked.

  “You’d think that the chief would be excited to discuss mating, since he’s so recently had a woman fling her legs around him,” Hammer said. “Maybe we should be clueing him in on what to do next.”

  “You know I outrank you, right?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That if you’re not properly respectful, I may have to send one of my gizmos after you.”

  “I’ll get one of Treyjon’s svenkars to eat your gizmos.”