Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  “He’s not going to help such a—” Hierax’s faceplate shifted skyward, and he pointed. “Mikolos!”

  Indi looked up as three of the armored men pointed their weapons toward the stars above. A dark oval shape zipped past, disappearing almost as soon as it appeared. Indi might have thought she’d imagined it, but the men were all looking that way, too, save for Hierax, who peered down at his scanner.

  More of the shapes—drones?—zipped past, and Indi jumped. She counted at least eight, though they moved so quickly, it was hard to tell. One returned to view and hovered, looking down at them.

  Treyjon, Hammer, and Mikolos pointed their weapons at it.

  “Don’t fire first,” Hierax said. “Let’s not instigate anything.”

  “We should get under cover then,” Mikolos said. “It could have weapons.”

  “I’m reading a surprisingly powerful energy signature for such a small device,” Hierax said. “It does look like it has a couple of holes that could represent weapons ports.”

  Three more drones zipped into view and hovered alongside the first one. They were almost directly over the group’s heads. Taking cover definitely sounded like a good idea.

  “This way,” Treyjon said, heading in the same direction they’d been going.

  But one of the drones zipped down between the buildings, angling to fly in front of him, almost as if it wanted to cut him off. It flew back and forth, one of its oval tips pointing toward Treyjon. He and Mikolos pointed their bolt bows at it, but backed away.

  “Do we go the other way?” Hammer asked.

  “We can circle around and still get to the energy source,” Hierax said.

  The other three drones flew down to join the first, even more effectively blocking the way forward. Hierax jogged in the opposite direction, back the way they had come. He turned at the first intersection, veering off to the right.

  Treyjon, Hammer, and Mikolos followed at the rear of the group, keeping their weapons trained on the drones behind them. As Indi ran behind Hierax, a camera feed showed up in the corner of her faceplate, showing her the view to her rear.

  Hierax tried to turn again, to parallel the tracks they had been following, but two more drones blocked the route in that direction.

  “We’re being herded,” he growled.

  “Maybe we should see what happens if we try to walk through them,” Mikolos said.

  “You volunteering to go first?” Treyjon asked.

  “We can shoot them down easily enough if they get too aggressive.”

  “That sounded like volunteering to me.”

  “Let’s just try avoiding them for now,” Hierax said, running in a direction that wasn’t blocked. “If this is Wanderer tech, it’s very possible our bolt bows won’t be enough to destroy them.”

  Two drones zipped in from a side passage and joined the others already following them. Indi had counted at least fourteen of the things now. Was this all part of a computerized security system? Or had the Falcon 8’s sensors been wrong? Was there something still living down here?

  Hierax tried to turn three more times, but each time, drones appeared to block the group. Treyjon and Mikolos fingered their weapons, but they heeded Hierax’s order not to fire.

  The drones reminded Indi of buzzing bees chasing after them, even though the lack of atmosphere meant there was no sound to be heard. She tried not to extend the analogy to the Africanized bees back in Arizona that had been known to kill people by swarming them and stinging them to death.

  “Damn it,” Hierax said, pulling up.

  They had reached a three-way Y-shaped intersection. Drones blocked both the left and right options, leading away. And more drones were crowding in from behind. If they’d had teeth, they could have nipped Nax’s and Woo’s heels.

  “Huh, that warehouse you guys saw is right there.” Hierax pointed to a wedge-shaped building between the routes ahead. “The one with gas—air—inside.”

  “A place specifically prepared for us?” Indi asked.

  “It seems possible.”

  “Do we want to go into a place prepared for us?” Treyjon asked. “What if it’s a trap? What if they were trying to lure us in by making the atmosphere nice and appealing for humans? And then when we didn’t bite, they sent their flying mini svenkars.”

  Hierax turned in a slow circle, eyeing the drones behind them. They had stopped when the group had stopped, hovering like toy helicopters. Beams from flashlights built into the men’s helmets gleamed on the drones’ smooth, dark blue exteriors. They matched the buildings and everything else around. These Wanderers hadn’t been much for color.

  “I wonder what type of propulsion system they’re using,” Hierax said. “They move more like aircraft than spacecraft, but with no air to—”

  “Sir, is that important now?” Mikolos asked, shifting abruptly to keep his bow pointed at one of the drones. It was moving about, zipping in and then zipping back out. Maybe comparing them to svenkars wasn’t inappropriate—Indi could almost imagine them snapping teeth to get their desired result.

  “Anyone see a door into the warehouse?” Hierax asked. “I’m not reading anything on the scanner.”

  Movement high up on the wall drew Indi’s eye. A twelve-sided hole appeared, and light glowed out through it.

  “Never mind,” Hierax said dryly.

  “I’ll check it out.” Mikolos slung his bolt bow over his back on a strap, jogged to the base of the building, crouched, and sprang.

  Indi gaped as he leaped twenty feet, catching the lip of that hole—doorway—with his gauntleted hands.

  “Am I going to have to do that?” she whispered.

  “Your armor has spring-like soles that you can activate,” Hierax said, “and jet propulsion boots, too, though those are more for anti-gravity situations. But they could give you a boost if you need it.”

  “I’m afraid that was your very wordy way of saying yes.”

  Hierax grinned at her and slapped her on the shoulder.

  After peering into the doorway, Mikolos pulled himself up and crouched on the edge.

  “There’s a ramp in here that leads down to the ground,” Mikolos said. “The building is mostly open, but there are some circles on the floor and what look like computers on the far wall.”

  “All right,” Hierax said, “we’ll go in for now.” He eyed the drones. “Maybe the local security will get tired and go away if we visit this place, and then we can slip out.”

  Indi doubted drones got tired, especially if they’d been resting here undisturbed for thousands of years.

  Mikolos disappeared into the interior of the building. The other men followed his lead, springing up to enter through the doorway twenty feet up. Hierax waited until last, gesturing for Indi to go first.

  “Just say ‘activate springs,’” Hierax said. “Since we didn’t set up the NCI—neural command interface—you’ll have to stick with voice commands for now.”

  Indi said the command clearly, but she envisioned not jumping hard enough and smashing into the wall a few feet below the doorway. Then she envisioned her faceplate cracking hard enough that it broke, all her air escaping, and her swift and painful death.

  “Stop it,” she muttered, rolling her eyes at herself.

  “You just turned off the springs,” Hierax said, his tone dry again.

  “Offices,” Indi said. “I love offices.”

  She ordered the springs on again, crouched, and leaped as if she were going to slam dunk a basketball, something she’d only ever done with a squishy toy basketball and a hoop set up over a garbage can in the office back in Phoenix.

  The boots worked as promised, and she soared upward, almost as if she were springing from a trampoline. Unfortunately, she missed her target, since she had zero practice at aiming herself vertically. She ended up knocking her fingers against the wall two feet from the entrance and falling back downward. She gasped, flailing as she plummeted toward the tracks. But when she landed, the boots no
t only absorbed most of the impact; they flung her upward again.

  This time, through sheer luck, she got close enough to the doorway to throw her arm out and grab the ledge. She yanked herself toward it, the armor giving her more strength than she anticipated. Her body smashed into the wall. Fortunately, the armor once again insulated her from the impact. With absolutely no grace, she pulled herself inside and onto a landing.

  She scrambled to her feet, hoping the other men hadn’t been paying attention. They hadn’t. They had already descended a ramp down to a white floor—the first non-dark-blue thing she’d seen.

  Hierax landed in the doorway behind her, and she grimaced. He would have witnessed her lack of acrobatic excellence.

  “It takes some getting used to,” was all he said, his tone surprisingly sympathetic.

  “I bet Juanita would have mastered it already,” Indi grumbled, having heard the stories of how Juanita had shot a bunch of enemies and tricked others into quicksand during her excursion outdoors at the first planet they’d visited.

  “Which one is she?”

  “Blue hair, perky, geeky.”

  “Ah.” He still sounded like he didn’t know.

  Indi almost laughed. So many of the testosterone-filled male Star Guardians had been finding excuses to interact with her and the other women that it was surprising to find one that barely knew they were on the ship.

  “She was in engineering with me an hour ago, working with Eridanus.”

  “Ahhh.” This time, he sounded enlightened.

  “Do you like girls?” Indi asked curiously.

  Maybe Nax and Woo were more his speed.

  “What? Yes, of course. I mean, not usually as much as my Trevibia Z-caster 5000 or having a challenging problem to solve, but I like the way their curvy parts, uh, curve.”

  “What’s a Trevibia Z-caster 5000?” Indi asked, not certain she wanted to know. What if it was some kind of futuristic sex bot?

  “A tool.”

  “A tool?”

  “An amazing tool. It’s only the size of your hand, but it can do everything. It saws, drills, squeezes, screws, and pounds.”

  “Now you know why the chief doesn’t need girls,” Hammer called up from the bottom of the ramp.

  “Screw you, Hammer,” Hierax called back down.

  “Will you do it personally or use the tool?”

  Hierax made a disgusted noise. “Some days, it’s like being in school all over again.”

  Completely sympathetic to being teased, since she’d been that person often, Indi patted him on the shoulder.

  “Want me to shoot him for you, sir?” Mikolos asked, giving Indi the sense that Hammer wasn’t one of the cool kids.

  “Yes,” Hierax said promptly.

  “Status report,” the captain’s voice sounded on Indi’s helmet comm.

  Judging by the way Hierax twitched in surprise, everyone received the same order.

  “We’ve run into some obstacles, sir,” Hierax said, leaning to peer out the doorway. The drones were hovering in the intersection below. All of them. “Also—”

  He jumped back as the door disappeared.

  Indi stared. Nothing had slid in to block the way. The hole had simply disappeared, leaving nothing but a wall in front of them.

  Hierax reached a hand out, maybe to see if he could poke through it, but he encountered a solid wall.

  “We’re trapped,” he added to the captain, and sighed.

  5

  Hierax paced back and forth along the back wall of the building his team was now trapped in. What he guessed were the Wanderer equivalent of consoles and computer displays were built into that wall, but no matter what he touched, nothing came to life. Illumination filtered down from the ceiling above, so energy had to be stored for use somewhere, but it either wasn’t channeled into the computers, or the equipment had died long ago.

  “This looks more like a transportation hub than a warehouse,” Indi said from where she walked the perimeter of the building. She waved to seats and tables near the ramp they had come down.

  Hierax gaped at them because those furnishings hadn’t been there when they’d first entered. The white floor had been completely open and empty, save for large silver circles at various spots.

  “Does that mean it can transport us somewhere more interesting than this?” Hammer asked.

  He, Treyjon, and Mikolos, the men Hierax had chosen for their fighting and shooting abilities, stood at the bottom of the ramp, their weapons in their arms as they kept an eye on everything. Like Hierax, Nax and Woo were wandering around and scanning anything promising.

  “Maybe?” Indi guessed. “I’m looking for some examples of a written language. If I could get some more data to send to Lieutenant Coric, maybe we could make more progress on translating the transmissions we received. And that I’m still receiving.” She touched the side of her helmet, and it sounded like there was a grimace in her voice.

  Hierax could only assume she had been singled out by the AI, or whatever alien intelligence was running this place, because she’d grasped the musical element more quickly than anyone else. The situation had to be eating Coric up. She had a background in linguistics and was a talented cryptanalyst—she’d cracked countless codes used by criminals trying to exchange goods and slaves without the law catching on. This ought to have been a challenge designed for her. But if Coric had a background in music, he wasn’t aware of it.

  “If we could find some obvious things that were labeled, it could be key in translating the language. Like a bathroom marked male and female.” Indi hesitated. “Do you think they had males and females?”

  “We don’t know much about Wanderer sexes, or if they had them,” Hierax said when nobody else answered.

  Maybe he should have brought Korta along on the mission, uncomfortable Alabaster spacesuits notwithstanding. As much as Hierax liked to think he could engineer himself out of any problem, there were times when someone with a background in the biological sciences came in handy.

  “Commander Korta, are you there?” he asked on the ship’s channel. “Indi is curious about how grownup Wanderers made baby Wanderers.”

  “That’s not exactly what I asked,” Indi said.

  He grinned at her, deciding he liked her humor. She was sarcastic and had a pessimistic streak he thought was healthy.

  “Korta?” Hierax asked again.

  It had been a while since he’d heard from the ship. The channel showed as being open, but, now that he thought about it, he realized he hadn’t heard anything from the captain after saying they were trapped. He hadn’t heard anything from anyone on the ship since the door shut.

  “Let me guess,” Treyjon said. “The walls are signal-blocking.”

  “Woo,” Hierax said. “Go see if you can get that door open.”

  Hierax had patted around it, looking for hidden switches or control panels, when it first closed, but he’d been curious about the rest of the building and hadn’t spent much time trying to open it.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The air reads as normal in here,” Mikolos said, sounding surprised. He must have missed the earlier announcement about the pocket of atmosphere in the building. “Can we take our helmets off?”

  “You could, but the atmosphere could be vented at any time,” Hierax said.

  Giving up on the wall of powered-down computers, he headed for the silver circles on the floor. There were six of them, each about ten feet in diameter. He wondered if that translated to twelve of whatever measurement unit the Wanderers had used.

  “I don’t know,” Mikolos said. “I get the feeling someone prepared it specifically to accommodate us.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be venting later, once they’ve realized we haven’t figured out how to reply to their transmissions.”

  Hierax stopped at one of the circles and tapped a toe into it. It pulsed with light.

  “Transporter beams?” Indi asked, joining him.

>   “What?”

  “Oh, I guess they don’t have Star Trek on your planet. Juanita could tell you how they supposedly work, I’m sure, but it’s just fiction. Of all the Trek science, it’s probably the least plausible.”

  “We have quantum teleportation,” Hierax offered, thinking that sounded similar.

  “You do? Like you can, er, beam an object or person from one place to another?”

  “An object, yes. Sort of. Quantum information, such as the state of an atom, can be broken down and transmitted across a planet, or even a solar system—we haven’t figured out how to do it through a wormhole yet. But to create a replica of a quantum state, the original must be destroyed in order to obtain all the information. So a person wouldn’t necessarily want to sign on for that, especially when you can get a shuttle to another planet and be there within a day.”

  “Did you say you would be destroyed as part of the process?”

  “Yeah, some people try to avoid that.”

  “Imagine.”

  Hierax poked his foot into the circle again. The light had dulled when he’d removed it, but it brightened again at his touch.

  “If this were a transportation hub,” Hierax said, “then maybe these are fancy elevators or vacuum transport tubes that take you to a magical land.”

  “Or to a trash incinerator,” Indi muttered.

  Hierax grinned. Pessimism, yes. He wouldn’t have to worry about her doing something stupid out of curiosity, like sticking her head into something that turned out to be the equivalent of a guillotine.

  “Has anyone tried stepping fully on one yet?” Hierax looked around. He hadn’t, but he didn’t know if one of the others had strolled across one.

  “I try to avoid stepping on glowy alien things,” Treyjon said.

  Hierax took his foot off again. A part of him was tempted to hop on to see what happened, but hadn’t he just been thinking about people who did stupid things out of curiosity?

  He had no idea whether the alien intellect here wanted to help them or harm them. The drones hadn’t fired, but they had been insistent with their herding. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn that his team had been detained in the Wanderer equivalent of a jail. And it disconcerted him that he wasn’t able to communicate with the ship. Was the crew dealing with any trouble back there? Would the alien intellect object to having the Falcon 8 squatting on a rooftop in its city?