The hangar had a stable environment, but after being caught half-naked before, he hadn’t risked taking his gear off. But now… he wanted to touch her, damn it. To feel her skin, to look into her eyes. Was she going to be all right?
The seizure ended, and she slumped against him, only his arms keeping her from falling to the floor.
“I’m taking her to sickbay,” he said.
“We can do that,” Treyjon spoke from behind him. He, Hammer, and Mikolos had approached, their bolt bows slung over their torsos. Last he’d seen, they’d been standing guard by the exit.
“I’ll do it,” Hierax said, lifting Indi fully into his arms and turning toward the door.
“Chief, the captain would want you to keep working on the gate.”
“The captain can lick my balls.” Hierax strode toward the exit.
Treyjon jogged along beside him. “Saying things like that over an open channel isn’t healthy for your career.”
“I’m taking her to sickbay, to where that damn alien AI can’t harass her with more scans.”
“You have my word that that’s exactly what we’re planning to do. Look, Killer over there is going with us. Even if drones show up, we can handle them. Might I point out that you fell through a roof when drones showed up. Are you even carrying a weapon?”
“Fuck you,” Hierax said, peering through Indi’s faceplate as he strode for the exit. He was too worried about her to think about military courtesy.
Why had the AI attacked her? Because she’d turned on the gate? If the AI didn’t want humans putzing around in here, why had it made the environment suitable for them?
When he was only a couple of steps from the exit, Treyjon came in from one side and Hammer from the other to block his path.
“Get out of my way,” Hierax growled.
“Chief, you’re needed here,” Treyjon said, his voice gentle but firm.
“Let us do our jobs,” Hammer added, less gently. “We’re the muscle.”
“I outrank both of you. Get out of the way.” Hierax would have shoved his way through them, but he didn’t want to jostle Indi. What if she had brain damage from that attack?
Neither man moved.
“Chief Hierax,” came Sagitta’s cool voice. “Dr. Tala is waiting at the airlock to help Miss Indigo. Give her to Lieutenant Treyjon and return to the job which only you are suited to do.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Hierax said, “Nax and Woo are suited to do it too.”
“I doubt respect was on your mind when you were talking about scrotum licking. Hand her to the men. Now.”
Hierax ground his teeth. What if the men were attacked on the way back to the ship? And what if getting away from the attackers took more than grunting and shooting things? Surely, he and his brain should go along.
“Are we going to have to stun him?” Hammer whispered to Treyjon.
“Won’t work when he’s in armor.”
“Don’t make me repeat myself, Chief,” Sagitta said, his voice as icy as the sub-freezing temperatures outside.
Treyjon stepped forward, his arms forming a cradle for Indi. “I’ve got her, Chief.”
Hierax glared at him, but the logical part of his brain kicked in, forcing him to realize that if Treyjon and Hammer didn’t want him to get by, he wouldn’t get by. And all this arguing was delaying treatment for Indi.
“Here,” he said, though the word came out through gritted teeth. “Don’t drop her.”
“Absolutely not, sir.” Treyjon took Indi carefully in his arms, then jerked his head toward Mikolos and Hammer. “Scout ahead, go.”
The two ensigns leaped through the forcefield exit first, with Treyjon and Ku following. Hierax watched them until they turned out of sight, half-expecting drones to come swooping down from the sky. They didn’t. Reluctantly, he walked back to the gate, but not without kicking some of his equipment on the way.
He didn’t know why the alien AI kept targeting Indi, but it pissed him off. It also pissed him off that nobody wanted to let him go back to the ship with her and make sure she came through the encounter without complications. As if a few hours longer here would matter one way or another.
• • • • •
When Indi woke up, she realized she had been removed from the suffocating combat armor. That was a relief. She was also in the familiar white-walled sickbay, a welcome change from the dark blue-black of everything on the Wanderer planet. At least, she thought it was welcome. If she had suffered some debilitating injury, that might make her rethink her opinion.
Tala leaned over her from the side and peered into her eyes.
“Anything scintillating in there?” Indi asked, her voice raspy. Her mouth was dryer than the Sahara, and she had a headache.
“Your pupils have returned to normal.”
“Sounds like a reason to celebrate to me.”
“You had a seizure down on the planet,” Tala said, “and another one here in sickbay, despite the anti-convulsion drugs your armor pumped into your system.” She frowned. The gesture might have been for the seizures or for the suit’s presumptuousness.
“I got scanned, I think. It happened a couple other times, but I didn’t get seizures or pass out before.”
“What was it like?” came another voice from behind Tala.
Indi lifted her head, a mistake given the throbbing behind her eyes, and spotted Juanita. Angela was there, too, peering at her with concern. Juanita’s expression was more one of curiosity.
“Having a seizure?” Indi asked.
“No, getting scanned by aliens.”
“Technically, we think it’s an AI that the aliens left behind,” Indi said.
“That’s still so cool. An alien presence of some kind touched your mind.”
“It was more of a violent grope than a touch.” Indi thought of Hierax and the rest of the men in the hangar and turned her head left and right to see if any other beds were occupied. “Was anyone else scanned or hurt?”
“Scanned, no,” Tala said, “but Hammer’s suit took some damage. The men bringing you back were harried by some drones on the way. I’m not sure yet if he was injured. He refused to come see me.”
“Yeah, the captain wants everyone down there finding high-tech alien weapons and getting that gate working.”
Indi stiffened as a bunch of imagery of the gate flashed into her mind. It was so intense, with ideas and snippets of code and foreign schematics zipping past so quickly that she worried her brain would overload and she would black out again.
“Indi?” Tala touched her shoulder as she frowned at a medical display behind the bed. “Your blood pressure just shot up.”
“She’s panting like a Mastiff on a summer day in Phoenix,” Angela said, stepping up to the end of the bed and resting a hand on Indi’s shin.
The images flashing through Indi’s mind slowed down, and her brain seemed to still, focusing on one thing. The gate. In that moment, she understood everything about the gate, how the wormholes worked, the coding language the Wanderers had used… everything. But it was like a memory rather than memorized knowledge. And almost as soon as that memory appeared, it started to fade from her mind.
“Paper,” she rasped. “Get me a pen and paper. Now.”
Fortunately, Tala didn’t question her. She jogged into her office and came back with the Star Guardian versions of pen and paper, the latter with the texture of slick parchment rather than something derived from a tree. It didn’t matter. Indi sat up, ignoring her headache, and she started writing. No, she started drawing.
Her hand flowed across the page of its own accord, sketching lines and filling them in.
“What’s she making?” Angela whispered.
Indi heard the words, but she did not acknowledge them. She didn’t have time. All she knew was that she had been given knowledge, the knowledge Hierax needed to replace the broken gate with the working one in the hangar, but that the knowledge wouldn’t last.
“Music staves,” Tala said. �
�And notes. A lot of notes.”
They fell silent after that, for which Indi was grateful. She needed to concentrate. She drew so quickly that her hand cramped up several times, and she had to shake it out. The notes poured out of her with certainty, as if she were some conduit for the gods. No, for the aliens that had lived on this planet millennia ago.
When she finished, having filled ten pages with music, she flopped back onto the bed, exhausted. The pen fell from her limp fingers.
Already, her understanding of the gate system was fading. Soon, she sensed, she would be back to being a clueless Earthling.
“You should rest,” Tala said quietly, picking up the pages and putting them in order.
“Can you play that, Tala?”
“Yes, but it’s complex. I’d need some practice. Do you want me to get my violin and do it now?”
“No, Hierax has to get the new gate into place first. Those are the instructions for deactivating the old one and activating the new one.”
“And they came to you in a dream?” Tala asked.
“In a seizure,” Juanita said.
“I guess. But it’s already…” Indi groped in the air with her fingers. “It’s not permanent. I already know less than I did ten minutes ago.”
“Stay here,” Tala said, patting Indi on the shoulder. “I’ll share this with the captain and tell him what you said, and then I’ll be back to check on you.” The look she gave Indi wasn’t that comforting. It was the kind of look one gave to crazy people. Concerned, pitying, skeptical.
“Do you think I’m crazy too?” Indi asked Juanita and Angela after Tala walked out.
“Not me,” Juanita said. “That was awesome. It was just like in The Fifth Race.”
“The what?”
“A Stargate SG-1 episode. You didn’t look into a strange device on the wall, by chance, did you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay, in The Fifth Race, O’Neill looked into an Ancient device on the wall on this planet, and all the knowledge of the Ancients was downloaded into his brain. He became a super genius overnight, but then, he gradually started losing his ability to speak English, because the alien language and information was overwriting his brain. It was an awesome episode. And then when they came back to the Ancient devices in Season 7 for Lost City, that was awesome too. So many good relationship bits in that one. I was totally shipping O’Neill and Carter. I’m bummed they never got together.”
“Shipping?” Angela raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, like relationshipping. Wanting two characters to hook up. Didn’t your parents teach you anything on that farm, Angela?”
“We didn’t watch a lot of science fiction.”
“You were so unprepared for this adventure.”
“This is the truth.”
Indi closed her eyes and rested her head on the firm pillow behind her. She was tired of being on an “adventure.” And she didn’t want any alien weirdness in her head, especially if there was any truth to Juanita’s ramblings. Was it possible to have the information—the memories—in one’s brain overwritten?
“Hey, Indi,” Juanita said. “How is Hierax supposed to get the gate you guys found on the planet up into space where it can replace the other one? They’re kind of big, aren’t they?”
“Very big, yes. And I have no idea. I just… write the music.”
12
“As incredible as this is,” Hierax said, eyeing his instruments, “I don’t think there are any missing parts. This gate appears to be fully operational.”
Woo and Nax stood beside him, peering over his shoulder.
“Nice of the Gaian girl to turn it on for us,” Woo said.
“I would have found a way to turn it on physically eventually,” Hierax said, shooting him a dirty look, though he didn’t truly begrudge Indi getting credit for helping out.
He hadn’t expected much from her when they’d been back on the ship, and she’d been looking for ways to get out of coming down to the surface. He’d figured he would have to babysit, that she would end up falling in a pit if she was allowed to wander far. Instead, he had fallen in a pit. And she’d come down to rescue him. And kiss him. He smiled at the memory.
She had been nothing but helpful since joining his team. By the stars, he hoped she was all right.
“Status report, Chief,” Sagitta said over the comm. He didn’t mention scrotum licking, and his tone wasn’t as icy as it had been before.
That was good. Hierax knew he got grumpy when his buttons were pushed, and he wasn’t always great about remembering military courtesies in those moments.
“I’m running some tests, sir,” Hierax said, “but we appear to have a functional gate.”
“Can we get it into space and replace the broken one with it?”
“Er.”
“The planet has no atmosphere to deal with, right?”
“Assuming we can figure out how to open the roof of this hangar and extract the gate, the planet does have fairly substantial gravity. I can get Zakota some exact numbers, but I estimate the escape velocity to be roughly ten kilometers per second.”
“Zakota can get his own numbers,” came an interjection, not surprisingly, from Zakota. It seemed everyone was on the channel today.
“I’ll see if I can get a weight estimate of the gate,” Hierax said, ignoring him, “but from what I’m looking at here so far, it’s not lightweight. I doubt the Falcon 8 is going to be able to tow it out of the planet’s gravitational field and into space.”
“What about the Zi’i warship?” Sagitta asked.
“That… might be a possibility. Its engines certainly have more power. They have to in order to tug that barge out into space. Let me run some numbers while I give the fun job of weighing the gate and getting the roof open to Woo and Nax.”
“Don’t you love being lower ranking?” Nax whispered to Woo.
“Update me when you have a plan,” Sagitta said.
“Yes, sir, but I don’t think this is going to be as simple as you’re imagining. It took us three hours to figure out how to turn on the gate. Programming it to take the place of the other one… I don’t know where to start.”
“With ten pages of music, apparently.”
“Pardon?”
“Miss Indi wrote ten pages of music in about five minutes flat in sickbay. She claims playing it will provide instructions to the gate as to what to do to activate itself.”
Nax and Woo exchanged incredulous looks. Hierax would have been sharing in those looks, but he remembered the scans. And the seizure. Had the alien AI been delivering information when it gave her that?
“Has she recovered from the seizure?” Hierax asked.
“She’s resting in sickbay,” Sagitta said.
That was vague. Hierax didn’t like vague. He liked mathematical precision.
“I’ll get you those numbers soon, sir,” Hierax said.
The sooner he figured everything out, the sooner he could see Indi.
• • • • •
Indi sat cross-legged on the bed in sickbay while she listened to Tala play the music she’d copied down. It wasn’t soothing in the least, even when she got all the notes and the timing right. She was on her third repetition now and was getting better at it, though she had a tendency to want to add her own flair and improve the sound. It could certainly use improvement, but Indi believed they would need to play it exactly as it was written on the page.
“Can I try?” Indi asked.
She and Tala were alone in sickbay. Angela had fled the unpleasant alien music bouncing off the walls, making excuses about having to feed Treyjon’s svenkars since he was still down on the planet. Juanita had lingered a little longer, but finally, she’d also left with her hands over her ears.
“Be my guest.” Tala handed her the violin. “I can flip the pages for you.”
“Seems like a menial job for a doctor.”
“It’s not all surgeries and saving lives. There’s always
paperwork.”
“Kind of depressing.”
Indi hadn’t touched a violin in more than fifteen years and felt self-conscious as she laid her chin on the rest. But it wasn’t as if she could make the music sound worse.
She played through the ten pages, amused that it took as long to play the notes as it had to write them. Copy them down, she corrected mentally. They’d been blazing in her mind, and she’d simply put them down on the paper. It wasn’t as if she had composed something.
“You sight read well,” Tala said when Indi finished.
“Thanks.” Indi supposed they could both be ready to play the piece when the time came.
“How long did you take violin lessons?”
“I didn’t.”
Tala raised her eyebrows.
“I taught myself piano in grade school, and then I picked up my sisters’ instruments, violin and guitar respectively, and learned to play them mostly on my own too. I tended to play an instrument until I got bored of it instead of trying to master anything. I kept trying to convince my sisters—they’re older than me—that we needed to form a band. They weren’t amenable to that. I think it was more that little sisters aren’t cool enough to hang out with, than that they didn’t like the idea.”
“Teaching yourself violin isn’t easy. Your technique is really good, considering.”
“Thanks. I watched my sisters and listened in on a lot of their lessons. I don’t mean to imply I just learned out of a book. I did take some lessons when I was eight or nine, but the teachers always threw their hands up in exasperation because I was a lot more interested in playing pop and rap music by ear than the boring stuff they wanted me to practice. When I was nine, I remember playing ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ on my sister’s violin as I sang along at the top of my voice. That has to be one of the tamest rap songs out there, but my parents were horrified at having the devil’s music in the house.”
“My mom was too concerned about my older brother to care what I played or listened to.” Tala waved at the violin. “You definitely have talent. I was never great at playing by ear. I guess that’s why you picked out the patterns first. And got chosen by the alien AI to be…”
Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4 Page 15