Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  An engine alarm flashed as he had the thought. Great.

  • • • • •

  A third cork plopped onto the virtual floor.

  Indi wanted to scream and pull her hair out. She did scream. Nobody was there to listen to her. But she couldn’t pull out hair without dislodging the metal hat, so she kept her hands by her sides. And she focused on lifting corks back into their spots in the side of the tank. When all this was over, she would have some choice words for Hierax and his stupid game.

  The deck bucked under her feet, and the ship groaned. How was she supposed to concentrate with all this going on?

  She stuffed a virtual cork back into the tank and imagined smacking the crap out of it with that mallet. She didn’t want it to come loose again. The mallet whammed into the back of the cork so hard that a crack appeared on the end of the cork. Damn it, she hadn’t known cork could crack.

  She willed the hammer to stop and lifted another plug to its hole, trying not to freak out about all the water pouring out of the tank, nor the fact that she could see the red line inside of it, the red line that the water wasn’t supposed to fall below.

  Next to her, in the real world of the ship, the engines throbbed audibly, pulsing light and humming. The throbbing was more intense than it had been before.

  As she slid the second cork into place, a strong stench reached her nose. Her stomach writhed, and she almost gagged. What the hell? It was as if the kimchi-like scent that permeated the ship had intensified tenfold.

  She turned toward the door, wondering if it had opened, letting in stronger odors from the corridor outside. Though she didn’t remember the scent being that much stronger out there…

  Her eyes widened—something crouched on two legs in the doorway, filling the space with its bulk. Black, furry, and fanged, like a great ape with claws like a bear and intelligent eyes that pierced her soul. A Zi’i.

  “Hierax!” she screamed, hoping he was monitoring engineering—that someone was.

  The beast bounded straight at her.

  Remembering she gripped the stunner Hierax had given her, she whipped it up and fired. The beam blasted out, striking the Zi’i in the chest.

  It didn’t slow down.

  Indi screamed Hierax’s name again and sprinted to the side, out of its path. It angled after her.

  She ran toward a gap between the wall and the back of the tow beam generator. Her metal hat clanked to the deck. She couldn’t stop to get it. The stunner was useless, and there was no time to hunt through Hierax’s tool kit for something else. All she could do was hope that the big creature would have a hard time getting her in the confined space behind the generator.

  The thing covered ground faster than a panther. As she ducked and dove for the nook, long claws swiped at her. Clothing ripped—hers. The tips of those claws brushed the skin of her shoulder as she flung herself behind the generator.

  She squirmed past conduits and cables, like a mouse hoping to evade a cat.

  All light vanished as the hulking alien reared up on two legs to peer into the nook. Indi pressed her back all the way to a bulkhead. She fired the stunner again, holding down the trigger, pouring whatever energy the weapon used into the Zi’i.

  It roared, but it didn’t back away. It definitely wasn’t stunned.

  “Thanks for giving me a totally worthless weapon, Hierax,” she yelled, wishing he were there to hear her. And to get this ugly, mouth-breathing ape away from her.

  It crossed her mind to yank out one of the cables extending from the generator to the bulkhead, hoping it turned out to be something electrical that she could thrust the end at the alien. Surely, it wouldn’t be impervious to being electrocuted. But this was the tow beam generator that she had jumped behind, the one piece of equipment she dared not damage.

  The big alien stretched a furry black arm toward her, pushing aside cables and wires, its fingers outstretched. Yes, fingers. Those great, clawed appendages were far closer to hands than paws, which meant the creature would have no trouble grabbing her.

  “Hierax,” she called again, wishing someone had given her a logostec. Was there some voice command to turn the intercom in engineering on from a distance?

  The long Zi’i arm stretched closer. Even in the dim lighting, she could make out those dagger-like claws coming at her eyes.

  Indi squatted down as much as she could in the tight space, wishing she were as slender as Angela.

  The claw probed the air right above her head. She rose slightly, her nose right next to the musky arm, and even though her stomach quailed at the idea, she grabbed its wrist with her hand and bit down. Pathetic as it was, her teeth were her only weapon.

  The Zi’i barked a noise that sounded far more like a laugh than a cry of agony.

  That arm jerked up, then came down, cracking her on top of the head. She let go, gasping in pain. If there had been space to crumple to the deck, she would have done so.

  “What do you want?” she yelled.

  She didn’t truly expect an answer, but she’d heard from Angela that the translation chip the Star Guardians had given them did handle the Zi’i language. Maybe she could buy time by speaking with it.

  “For you to fail,” it snarled, words sounding more like coyote yips and growls before the chip translated them.

  “You’ll be stuck here with the rest of us if we do.”

  “So be it.”

  The Zi’i hand found the top of her head, claws digging into her scalp as it sought to pull her out, as if she were a cantaloupe that had rolled into a corner rather than a person. Only the conduits and cables kept it from getting a good grip. She thanked her thick braids for providing some insulation.

  But it didn’t matter. With its great reach, it inched her out of the space. She tried to twist away, thinking to kick it, but the wiring behind the machine made it as hard for her to make contact as it was doing for the alien.

  “Now would be a good time for a scan and a dump of information,” she muttered, just in case the alien AI was watching her.

  Or maybe the AI should scan the Zi’i. And give it a nice seizure, so she could escape.

  Abruptly, the Zi’i let go. More light slanted into her nook as it stepped back, turning to the side. She didn’t see any sign of the AI scanner beam. Too bad.

  Something slammed into the huge furred alien’s chest.

  At first, Indi had no idea what. From her spot behind the machine, she couldn’t see much. It was another hulking creature though, not Hierax or another Star Guardian. Snarls and growls filled engineering.

  Another Zi’i? If so, why would it attack its shipmate? But the second beast was more leathery than furry, and Indi glimpsed a tail whipping about as the two combatants rolled away from her spot.

  “The svenkar,” she realized. “Lulu!”

  She had run off and not obeyed Treyjon or Angela. Because she had been on the trail of something. Not a rat, but this alien.

  The snarls and roars continued—something yelped in pain, but Indi wasn’t sure if it was the svenkar or the Zi’i. She wanted to crawl farther back into her nook, to squat down, wrap her arms over her head, and bury her face and pretend she was back home in the safety of her living room.

  But from her spot, she could see the metal hat that had fallen from her head. It lay on its side on the deck. A shudder wracked the ship that had nothing to do with the battle raging five feet away. More of those damn corks were probably popping out right now, and without the helmet, she couldn’t do anything about it. If the engines died, she, Hierax, the helm officer, and Treyjon’s surrogate child might all end up dead. Poor Lulu wouldn’t have a spacesuit and be able to get off the ship.

  Indi inched to the edge of the generator and peered out. The svenkar and the alien were entwined like wrestlers. Wrestlers with fangs and claws. They slashed and bit, blood drenching the deck. Indi had no idea which one of them was winning.

  Darting out, she snatched up the helmet. She started back to her nook, thi
nking to control the engines from the safety of it, but the Zi’i was distracted. This was her chance to help Lulu, to make sure the alien didn’t come out victorious.

  “Yeah, how?” She looked at the stunner still clutched in her hand, then looked at the combatants and their surroundings.

  Lulu had backed the alien into a corner next to one of the open-sided machines with visible coils and cables. The Zi’i might be impervious, but maybe the equipment wouldn’t be.

  The Zi’i roared and smacked Lulu with a huge meaty arm. The svenkar whined as she was flung backward, her leathery hide skidding across the deck.

  Indi fired at the coil. The Zi’i glanced at her, but ignored her, no doubt knowing the stunner wouldn’t hurt it.

  It crouched to spring at Lulu—the svenkar was shaking her head and getting to her feet, but she appeared slower than usual, in pain. Blood ran from her flank.

  Indi kept holding down the trigger on the stunner, the energy beam pouring into that coil. She started to look for better targets, something that might be a battery or at least something unstable, but then light flashed, and a boom sounded.

  The Zi’i jumped away from the explosion, whirling in the air to look at it. In that instant, Lulu shook off her pain and sprang. She slammed into the alien’s back, claws digging in, and her great jaws snapped down on the side of its neck.

  As the noise from the explosion faded, another sound echoed from the walls, the snapping of bone. It seemed almost as thunderous as the explosion.

  The Zi’i slumped to the deck and didn’t move again.

  Lulu stood over it, gashes torn in her leathery hide, blood dripping from her fangs. She looked straight at Indi.

  “I better not be next,” she told the hulking svenkar, trying to look fearless and in charge rather than terrified. She put the helmet on her head. “I have to keep this ship from falling out of the sky. Because if that happens, we’re both going to have a really bad day.”

  Lulu bent down and tore a piece of flesh from the alien’s dead carcass.

  “Well, that’s disgusting,” Indi said, but better the svenkar eat the alien than her.

  As the virtual reality image of the tank reasserted itself, she did her best to ignore the sounds of tearing flesh and smacking lips. Playing some loud music would have helped. She made a note to tell Hierax to add a music library to his mixing-bowl hat.

  16

  “Someone want to fill me in on the plan?” Hierax asked as the Falcon 8’s power lessened further.

  He was still at the helm in the auxiliary bridge, still unable to communicate with Zakota, Sagitta, or anyone else.

  The gate sagged, pulling farther away from the ships. The weight was too great for the Zi’i warship to hold by itself, but if Hierax let go, they would lose everything.

  “Unless…” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, I think I know what you boys are up to.”

  He sure hoped he did.

  He ran across the bridge, jumping over the stinking dead body to reach the auxiliary tow beam controls. He lessened the warship’s hold on the gate, matching the fire falcon’s energy expenditure.

  Over on the helm, the engineering alarm winked out. Hierax hoped that meant Indi had defied the odds and brought the engines back to a safe level.

  The gate sagged farther and farther from the two ships, the fire falcon and the Zi’i vessel once again flying side by side away from the planet. If they let it drop back too far, it would slip from their beams.

  Hierax ran a quick calculation in his head, figuring out the maximum point the gate could pull away from them before falling free. If he’d guessed the captain’s plan correctly, Korta would have already run the same calculation.

  “Damn,” he whispered. The gate was almost at that point now.

  “Four… three, two, one.”

  He shifted the beam abruptly, still hanging on to the gate but trying to thrust it toward the noses of the two ships—and beyond.

  The tow beam was intended for manipulating other ships—this big Zi’i warship, in particular, had the power to force lesser vessels into its shuttle bay—but not quite in the way Hierax was doing. He was trying to hurl the gate with a motion similar to a whip crack, slingshotting it from behind them out into the space ahead of them, hopefully with enough power to hurl it out of the planet’s gravity.

  There was no way the warship could do it alone. With the comm down, he could only hope he’d guessed right.

  The lights dimmed, and an ominous hum reverberated through the ship. It was as if the tow beam generator had drawn power from somewhere else to fulfill his request. Maybe it had.

  He would run down to engineering to check on everything, but not until he saw if—there. The Falcon 8 had manipulated its tow beam to perform the same maneuver he had done and—a thousand kisses from Kalliope for Korta—at almost exactly the same time.

  As the two beams shifted, the gate whipped past. When it reached the inflection point, Hierax turned his beam off, letting their load go.

  The gate hurtled away from them with satisfying speed. But would it be enough? Would it soar beyond the planet’s gravitational field?

  He bit his lip, eyes glued to the sensor display.

  The gate slowed as gravity asserted itself, and he groaned, making plans to fly to it and try again—if the warship had the power left to do so. But, as it flipped end over end, spinning away from the planet, it seemed to reach a point where it neither sped up nor slowed down. It spun slowly out into space with nothing affecting its path.

  “Hah.” He clenched a fist.

  “Good work, Hierax,” Sagitta said, the comm no longer jammed now that the gate was out of the way.

  Hierax snorted. “You have no idea, sir.”

  “What’s the status of your ship? We’re going to have to go pick up the gate before it gets sucked into one of the suns.”

  Hierax pushed a hand through his sweaty hair, and his fingers came away sooty. “I need a few minutes to get a status report to you, sir. And I’m going to need Dr. Tala’s help. Asan was badly burned. I’m the closest thing this ship has to a helm officer right now.”

  “That’s alarming,” Zakota muttered.

  “Go kiss an idol,” Hierax told him.

  “I already did that. Many times. That was intense.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “All right,” Sagitta said, his voice calm and hard to read, as usual. “Let’s sync up in a high orbit for a few minutes. We’ll lock on to you, extend the tube, and send a team over. Make sure that ship is stable.”

  “Will do.” Hierax tapped the internal comm. “Indi, how are you? Do you need me, or can I check on Asan? There was a fire on the bridge.”

  “Your mixing-bowl hat is making my head hot and itchy, Hierax,” she said, sounding fraught.

  He could imagine that it had been a struggle to keep the engines balanced. The fact that none of the alarms were flashing now spoke to how well she had managed.

  “I’m not sure whether that means you need me or not,” he said, jogging into the corridor.

  She issued a disgruntled sigh. “Go help your pilot. My crisis has stabilized.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Next time you tinker with this helmet, make sure you add the ability for it to play music.”

  “Music?” Hierax thought of the Wanderer transmissions and wondered if she meant something related to that.

  “Very loud music to drown out all distractions, no matter how disturbing they are.”

  “I’m happy to take suggestions regarding upgrades to my inventions.”

  “Good.”

  • • • • •

  When Hierax walked into engineering, Indi was sitting on the straw scattering the deck, the mixing-bowl helmet dangling from her fingers as she did her best not to watch the svenkar feasting.

  A part of her wanted to jump up and give him a hug. Another part of her wanted to jump up and punch him for not warning her about how stressful her job down h
ere would be. She didn’t do either, mostly because jumping up would have required too much energy.

  Hierax faltered a step into engineering, his mouth dropping open when he saw the Zi’i—and the svenkar munching on it.

  “Indi,” he blurted, running past them and to her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, just a couple of scrapes on my scalp.” She peered over her shoulder. Three long rips in her shirt showed how close she’d been to being gouged by those claws, but they hadn’t broken the skin. “Mentally, I’m fried, but I’ll live.”

  He stared at the ripped shirt for a second, eyes wide, then gripped her hands and pulled her to her feet. The mixing-bowl helmet dropped from her fingers, but he ignored it. He wrapped her in a tight hug.

  “We thought—I was told, damn it—that all the Zi’i were cleared out days ago,” Hierax said. “Asan has been here by himself for two days. It’s a miracle he wasn’t killed in his sleep.”

  “Apparently, the alien was saving himself for me.”

  “Maybe it was injured and hiding out in some maintenance shaft that our sensors couldn’t detect. That might explain why the svenkar took it down. Usually, the Zi’i are tough to kill. Even for powerful predators.”

  “Lulu had some help,” Indi said, pulling his stunner out of her pocket. “I do hope that piece of equipment over there isn’t that important.” She waved the stunner at the machine she’d targeted earlier. The coil had exploded, leaving only a small piece of warped metal in its place.

  “Uh.” Hierax looked from the stunner to the machine, and finally to the dead Zi’i. “I believe that was the air filtration unit.”

  “Judging by the overall unfiltered stench of the ship, it was already on its last leg.”

  “Possibly correct.” He grinned and brushed one of her braids away from her face.

  Indi leaned into him, almost collapsed against him. She was tired of being strong and competent. She wanted to be carried somewhere luxurious and have a man take care of her. This man. Were there any bathtubs on the Falcon 8? Would he be willing to do a foot rub? He had promised to rub whatever she wanted.