Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  “Not at all, but they came up on the console that you pointed to a few days ago and said was the interface for engineering.”

  “I may have to come up there.”

  “To show me your goofy hat?”

  Indi blushed, realizing the comm must have been open still, and that Asan had heard her joking about libidos and cold showers. She hoped he hadn’t heard any kissing sounds earlier, especially when she remembered Hierax moaning as she rubbed his chest. At the time, she’d found it flattering. But she’d also thought they had some privacy.

  “Indi?” Hierax waved her over, closing the comm channel. Firmly. “I’m going to give you the hat and show you a few things.”

  “Of course.” Nerves danced in her stomach at the idea of being involved in something crucial when she had no idea how to read Zi’i or what anything here was, but she tried not to look daunted. “I’ve been waiting for days for you to let me hold one of your tools.”

  “Was this one of the ones you imagined?” He lifted the mixing-bowl-hat and placed it on her head.

  “Not exactly.”

  He combed his fingers through her braids, parting a few so that a couple of prongs reached through and touched her scalp. “These are neat.”

  “The prongs stabbing me in the head?” she asked.

  “No, your hair. The braids.”

  “Oh.” She wondered what he would think if she confessed that she had short hair and those were extensions that had been braided in. “Thanks. I was hoping for sexy, but neat will do.”

  He grinned. “The sexy parts are lower.”

  He outlined an hourglass shape with his hands, and she laughed, even if it was silly. He was silly. But maybe that was all right. She’d done serious before, and it hadn’t ended well. Someone who could make her laugh when a spaceship was rattling itself to pieces all around her wasn’t bad to have.

  “Given a chance,” she said, “I think I can make you come to appreciate the allure of my hair touching you.”

  “I’m open to experimentation.” He stuck a finger under the hat and flicked something.

  Indi twitched in surprise as it came on. Something like a video game display appeared before her eyes. Almost in her eyes. It didn’t seem like a holographic display; it seemed like she was inside of a virtual reality. She could still see Hierax and the outline of the engines, but they had faded to a shadowy gray. The game or whatever it was displayed much more brightly, a big clear tank with water in it and corks sticking in holes on the sides. A couple of corks looked loose, like they might fall free, allowing water to spill out.

  “You see the engines?” Hierax asked.

  “The engines? I see a water tank.”

  “Good. That’s—hm, this is too complicated to explain quickly, but it’s something I made during the war, when I often had to interface with Zi’i tech, even though I couldn’t read their language or understand any of their computer languages. With some AI translation help, I made this. It’s an interface that allows us to interact with Zi’i tech, with the computer doing all the understanding and then translating things into a very simplified version that we can understand. There are corks, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to keep the corks in the tank and the water from falling below the red line. In reality, you’re making adjustments to keep the engines from red-lining, but the computer—” Hierax rapped a knuckle against the metal hat, “—is doing the hard work, and you’re just playing a game.”

  “A game where the ship will blow up if I’m not fast enough at plugging up holes?”

  “The engines will probably just go offline if the water goes below the red line.”

  “Oh, so we don’t blow up. We crash.”

  Hierax spread a hand, palm up.

  “If your computer is so smart, why can’t it just keep the holes plugged on its own? Why does it need someone helping?” Indi was skeptical about the hat and the gamification of a computer interface, even if it seemed like the kind of thing her own people would do.

  “It should keep them plugged. You’re just backup. While I work on—”

  “Chief, I’ve got another alarm popping up here.”

  “You can do it,” Hierax said, patting her shoulder. “I’ll be right over here at the tow beam generator. I’m going to check a few things. You don’t have to touch anything to make adjustments. Just think about putting the corks back in, and it should work.”

  “Should.” A part of her thought he might be pranking her, that this was just some silly mixing bowl, but she did see the tank and the corks. The water was also sloshing around inside. She didn’t find that comforting.

  Hierax jogged to the generator.

  “Shit!” came an alarmed curse over the comm.

  “What now, Asan?” Hierax asked.

  But someone from the Falcon 8 answered instead. Commander Korta, his voice like two rocks rubbing together.

  “The gate has activated,” he said.

  “Explain.” Hierax glanced toward the view screen.

  Nothing had visibly changed on the gate, but Indi could imagine some battery surging to life within its casing.

  “Gladly, Chief Hierax. We’re approximately seventy thousand kilometers from the surface and will escape the planet’s grav—”

  Hierax opened his mouth, but someone else interrupted Korta first.

  “Explain the gate coming on,” Captain Sagitta said.

  The strongest tremor yet coursed through the ship, and the deck bucked under Indi’s feet.

  The water sloshed around inside the virtual tank. Two of the corks wobbled. She reached forward, as if she could push them in with her fingers, but she realized she had to use her mind. She imagined shoving them further into their holes.

  Nothing happened.

  A dribble of water started under one. Swallowing and tamping down her sense of alarm, Indi concentrated harder, focusing on one at first. She imagined a mallet tapping the cork back into its home. To her surprise, a mallet exactly as she’d pictured appeared in the air and thumped the cork three times.

  “Whatever works,” she whispered, imagining the mallet shifting to the other loose cork. She soon had it hammered in, as well.

  “I cannot explain the reason, sir,” Korta said, “though I could perhaps hypothesize. Its internal power generator has activated, and it’s putting out a magnetic field. This is causing fluctuations that are disrupting the tow beams. The computers are compensating, but it’s already a very fine balance, so—”

  “I’m aware of the balance issue,” Hierax said, all of his earlier humor gone. He was utterly serious as he did his work, fingers flying over the alien console as he spoke. “I’m doing my best to compensate on my end. How do we get the gate to turn off? It’s not going to try to form a wormhole connection to some other system from orbit, is it?”

  “I speculate that some sensor inside the gate has realized it’s being transported and has created the magnetic field as protection,” Korta said.

  Another tremor coursed through the deck, and an ominous snap came from deep within the bowels of the vessel.

  “It doesn’t need protection,” Hierax said. “It has us.”

  “Steady yourself, Asan,” came Zakota’s voice from the fire falcon. “You’re drifting away from us at a .183 degree angle.”

  “We’re having some tech issues here, sir,” Asan said, his voice strained.

  “Working on it,” Hierax growled. “We were right on the edge of having the power to make this work if everything went perfectly.”

  He didn’t point out that things weren’t going perfectly. No need to.

  A cork popped out of the virtual water tank, and Indi yelped.

  “You all right?” Hierax called over.

  “No—yes.” She could do this, damn it. It was a game, that was it. “Yes,” she repeated more firmly. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Water spilled from the tank, and the cork lay on the floor next to it. All she had to do was pl
ug it back in.

  Indi imagined herself some Jedi knight levitating inanimate objects. If Yoda could lift an X-wing with his mind, Indi ought to be able to float a cork into the air.

  Juanita ought to appreciate the reference. Too bad she wasn’t here, so Indi could share it. No, better that she and the others were on the Falcon. They ought to be safe there, no matter what happened here.

  The cork rose slowly as water poured out through the hole. Indi was aware of the level inside the tank creeping down, but she concentrated on nothing but the cork. Lifting it, turning it just so, and pushing it toward the hole. She grimaced when she met resistance. Even though it was all virtual, she could feel the water pushing against the cork. She produced the mallet again. After placing the cork, she whacked it back into the hole. The leak stopped.

  “Hah,” she said.

  Now, was there a way to fill up the tank again? The water level hadn’t dropped to the red line, but one or two more incidents like that, and it would.

  “Hierax?” she asked.

  A scream of sheer pain came over the comm.

  “What in Hades?” Hierax blurted. “Asan, was that you?”

  A stream of curses interjected with pants and grunts and cries answered him.

  “Lieutenant Asan,” Sagitta said, his voice calm as it cut through the pained yells and curses. “Report.”

  “There’s a gods damned fire,” Asan managed to bite out before switching to curses again.

  “Damn it.” Hierax backed away from the generator and ran over to Indi. He pulled a stunner off his belt and held it out to her. “I need to run up and check on that. You’ll be all right here for a few minutes, right?”

  No! she wanted to cry.

  But whatever was going on up on the bridge sounded more important than her little water tank problem. She could keep the corks in for a few more minutes.

  “Yes.” She took the stunner, trying not to consider why he might think she would need it, and forced a smile.

  “Good. Thanks.” He sprinted out of engineering as Asan’s cries of distress continued. He must have been burned. Badly.

  If he couldn’t pilot the ship, who would?

  15

  “Report, Chief,” Sagitta said, his voice coming over the warship’s comm as well as Hierax’s logostec.

  “I will as soon as I get to the bridge.” Hierax bounced from foot to foot, waiting for the lift to arrive at the bridge. He worried about Asan, and he worried about Indi, too, about the fear that had brimmed in her eyes, and about the fact that he’d spotted problems with the fuel mix ratio in the engines. It ate at him to leave engineering when everything wasn’t stable.

  The lift doors opened, and heat and smoke blasted him in the face.

  Cursing, Hierax raced inside even though flames roared from a console ahead of him—the helm.

  Through the smoke, he spotted Asan, rolling on the deck, doing his best to put out flames that licked at his uniform. Soot caked the side of his face, and Hierax could see raw, blistering burns on his flailing hands.

  There should have been automatic fire-suppression systems, but nothing had come on.

  “This ship is a piece of bantok shit.” Hierax cursed himself for not ordering everyone coming over here to wear combat armor, including himself. He wanted to help Asan, but that would be impossible until he got the fire out. “I’m here, Asan,” he yelled, so the officer would at least know he wasn’t alone.

  Hierax ran past him, straight to the environmental-control console.

  “Asan?” came Zakota’s voice over the comm. “Do you read me, Asan?”

  “He’s busy now,” Hierax yelled, searching the console for fire-suppression controls.

  As with most of the bridge stations, nothing was labeled, but he’d studied the ship and knew it as well as anyone could in three days. He slapped what should have been the manual override. Nothing happened.

  Smoke trickled down his throat and left him coughing. The air crackled with heat.

  “Get ready to exhale, Asan,” Hierax yelled, hammering controls on the other side of the station.

  “What?” came the pained response.

  A computerized voice started growling and yipping a countdown in Zi’i.

  Hierax sprinted for Asan, grabbed his arm, and pulled him over his shoulder. Sparks singed Hierax’s shirt and bare skin.

  “This’ll teach us not to wear our armor whenever we’re on an enemy ship,” he said, barely getting through the sentence before bursting into coughs again.

  Asan only groaned.

  Hierax ran for the bridge doors as the countdown descended, Asan bumping on his shoulder. The doors should have slid open, but they didn’t. He tore open the control panel to the side, hunting for the override.

  He wasn’t fast enough. The countdown finished, and a beeping came from the environmental-control station, warning that all the oxygen would be sucked from the bridge.

  “Exhale, Asan,” he ordered, though he wasn’t sure if that would be necessary in this situation. Out in space, it definitely would have been, to keep their lungs from rupturing when the air pressure disappeared and the gas inside them expanded. Better safe than sorry.

  He blew out his own air as a ferocious draft tugged at his clothes and hair, pulling everything upward, toward vents in the ceiling.

  In seconds, the fires went out.

  Hierax set Asan on the deck and sprinted back to the environmental controls. With the doors sealed shut, and their armor eight decks below, if he couldn’t get air pumped back into the bridge soon, he and Asan would both asphyxiate.

  As he punched the controls to reverse the process, worrying that it would be too slow, he thought of Indi, of how, once the rest of the crew had gotten things under control, she and a few of the officers would come up here to look for him and Asan. But they would only find them dead on the deck. How unfair. He and Indi hadn’t even gotten to rub each other yet.

  His lungs were starting to burn from lack of oxygen. Asan was on his hands and knees by the doors, trying to claw them open. He must have figured out what was going on. At least he wasn’t on fire anymore.

  The computer responded languidly, a light flashing at him a few times.

  Hurry, you Stygian-cursed piece of—

  A draft stirred his hair again. Air flowed through the vents.

  Asan gasped, then coughed, then gagged. Though Hierax wanted to suck in a deep breath, he waited until more oxygen flowed in.

  “They’re going to hit us,” Zakota blurted, panic in his voice.

  “Asan,” came a firm voice over the comm. The captain. He never sounded panicked. “The warship’s course has shifted, and you’re angling toward us. Can you correct course? Chief Hierax—”

  “Here, sir,” Hierax rasped, trying to talk and suck in air at the same time. He took several steps toward the helm, but it was a charred mess, panels melted and burned wiring exposed. “Heading for the auxiliary helm,” he yelled.

  Unfortunately, the auxiliary helm wasn’t on the bridge. It was on the auxiliary bridge, of course, to be used if the main one was damaged in battle.

  Or in fire, apparently.

  “I’ll come back for you, Asan,” Hierax yelled, leaping over his fellow officer in his haste to get into the lift.

  With the bridge no longer quarantined because it was a vacuum, the doors cheerfully opened for him. At least something was going right. He smacked the controls for Deck 3, glad he’d taken the time to memorize the warship’s specs.

  He just hoped he had the piloting chops to correct the course. Out in open space, flying was easy, but they still had the gravitational pull of the planet to worry about, along with whatever weird magnetic field the gate was putting out.

  “All in a day’s work,” he said as he ran down the corridors of Deck 3.

  “Less than a minute until he hits us,” Zakota’s voice came over the comm. “Do I raise shields, sir?”

  “We can’t do that without dropping the gate,” Sagi
tta said. “And we can’t drop the gate. Not from this height. Korta, backup plan. Enact it now.”

  “Making final calculations now,” Korta said.

  “Calculations for what?” Hierax ran onto the compact auxiliary bridge, promptly gagging at the stench of rotten meat. A dead Zi’i warrior lay in a corner beside a console. “Someone didn’t do a good job cleaning up this ship,” he growled, though he had no one to blame, since he’d been in charge of turning the alien craft into something they could use. Granted, his concerns had been more about learning to use equipment and making sure everything was online than checking for bodies in every room.

  “Hierax,” Sagitta said, but then whatever else he said was lost in a burst of static.

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  Hierax leaped for the helm and slapped a button to activate the small view screen. It showed the nose of the fire falcon ship, alarmingly close. He shoved his hands into the weird gel-matrix interface that the Zi’i used for piloting. At least it was intuitive. He tilted the nose of the warship in the other direction and urged more power from the engines.

  Thanks to the location of the camera feeding the view screen, he couldn’t see the gate, but he located a sensor display and brought up the warship’s surroundings on that. The Falcon 8 still held the big gate in its tow beam, but the angle had shifted. Because they had worried about the warship colliding with them? Or for another reason?

  “Captain?” Hierax asked. “Korta? Do you read me?”

  Only static answered him.

  The sensors showed the gate throbbing with energy, a different type of energy than it used when activating a wormhole. Was it possible its built-in self-preservation instinct viewed the tow beam as a threat? Maybe the magnetic field it was creating was intended to disrupt the beam. It was certainly disrupting communications.

  The power coming from the Falcon 8 lessened, and the warship groaned, suddenly responsible for towing more of the gate.

  “If this is your backup plan, Captain, I’m not liking it so far.” Hierax grimaced, imagining Indi alone in the alien engineering room, trying to keep the power balanced even though she had no experience with spaceships. When he had given her that task, he hadn’t intended to be gone this long.