Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4 Read online

  Hierax

  Star Guardians, Book 4

  Ruby Lionsdrake

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Copyright © 2017 by Ruby Lionsdrake

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for continuing on with my Star Guardians series. What started as a three-book storyline will now be wrapping up with five. After that? We’ll see!

  Before you jump into this one, please let me thank Sarah Engelke, Rue Silver, and Cindy Wilkinson for beta reading and Shelley Holloway for spending a good part of her summer editing these stories. Lastly, thanks to Deranged Doctor Design for the covers. I think Hierax may be the yummiest one in the set. Who knew the geekiest hero would get the hunkiest cover art?

  1

  Indigo “Indi” Smith was afraid.

  She’d been afraid ever since she and a few dozen other women had been kidnapped from Arizona by galactic slavers. Sure, she was on another spaceship now, one manned by the heroic Star Guardians, but so far, things weren’t looking up that much. She had been chased by slavers, fired on by Confederation ships, flown through a nebula that turned men into aggressive brutes, fired on by aliens that liked to eat people, and finally, stranded in some unexplored solar system that apparently had no way out.

  What Indi couldn’t understand was why all the other women weren’t terrified too. Even as she stood staring out the porthole in the mess hall, at a tan sand ball of a planet they were flying past, the women chatted and laughed at the tables behind her. Some of them had even hooked up with officers on the ship. As if this was the Love Boat rather than some crazy-ass nightmare reality from which there seemed no escape. How long until their ship ran out of food and the crew turned to cannibalism? Or maybe they would run out of fuel first, and the life support would disappear, and everybody would freeze out here in the dark depths of space.

  Someone tapped her shoulder, and Indi jumped, whirling around.

  “Sorry,” Juanita said, lifting her hands. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “You didn’t. I mean, it’s not your fault. It’s Dr. Tala’s fault. She kicked me out from under her desk.”

  Juanita’s brow wrinkled. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Indi took a deep breath, knowing the adventure-seeking Juanita wouldn’t understand. Indi hadn’t been trying to hide that she was afraid all the time, but she supposed she shouldn’t brag about it, either.

  “Maybe Tala had a hot date with the captain, and they needed the desk.” Juanita grinned.

  Indi grimaced. The damned Love Boat, for sure. Didn’t these people have more important things to think about than sex? Like finding a way out of this solar system and getting her and the others back to Earth? Indi didn’t know how she could help, but if anyone asked her to, she would definitely do it.

  “We were wondering if you want to spar with us.” Juanita pointed over her shoulder to where her bounty-hunter lover, Orion, stood bare chested, his brown hair tied back in a bun. Juanita only wore a tank top and gray sweat pants she must have borrowed from someone on the ship. She and Orion had been dancing around, trading punches earlier.

  “Why?” Indi asked.

  “You might find it useful. Orion has been teaching me self-defense, in case we get boarded by aliens again.” Juanita lowered her voice. “Also, so I can help protect other people—he thinks I could be invited to become a Star Guardian if I gain enough skills. He and I could both be Star Guardians then.” She grinned, as if this were the most delightful notion in the galaxy. “Just think of all the adventures I’d go on and all the books I could write about them. I’ve already got half of a new novel done.”

  “Don’t you want to go home?” Indi asked, puzzled at the notion of wanting to stay out here. Didn’t Juanita miss her friends and family? Her favorite foods? Her favorite TV shows? Indi was missing the premier of the new season of Survivor right now, and she was not happy about that.

  “Sure, I want a chance to see my parents, and let everyone know I’m okay, but then I want to see the rest of the galaxy. It’s amazing.”

  “Getting shot at by aliens that want to eat us is amazing?”

  “No, but the rest of it is. And we totally kicked those aliens’ butts, by the way. And got their ship.” Juanita pointed toward the porthole.

  The long, black, fang-shaped Zi’i spaceship wasn’t visible right now, since it was sailing alongside the Star Guardian Falcon 8, but Indi had seen it before. It was dark and ugly, just like the aliens. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want it.

  “Only because we ran away before the rest of their ships figured out what was going on,” Indi grumbled, thinking of how terrified she had been when those big, furred Zi’i invaders had broken into sickbay and started mauling people. Orion’s guts had been torn out. It was a miracle he was standing there, basically healed, with only the faintest of scars on his abdomen. The only good thing about outer space was that the medical technology was brilliant. She could see why Dr. Tala might want to stay here, but not anybody else. “I keep waiting for those ships to come through the gate after us to finish us off,” she added.

  “The Zi’i knew the gate on this end was broken,” Orion said, walking toward the porthole and frowning at something outside, “and that it would be a one-way trip. They’re probably perfectly content to know that we’re trapped in this system where escape won’t be easy.”

  Easy? Impossible was the word the more pessimistic members of the crew could be overheard whispering. No, they weren’t pessimistic. They were realistic. Not only was the ship stuck in this system, but as far as Indi had heard, there weren’t any planets with Earth-like atmospheres here. There was nowhere for the ship to go when it ran out of food and fuel.

  “Huh,” Orion said. “Look at this, Juanita.”

  Indi turned back to the porthole, though she was certain it was nothing good. In the two days since the ship had entered this system, nothing horrible had happened. She figured they were due.

  “Another planet?” Juanita asked, coming shoulder to shoulder with him.

  “Yes,” Orion said. “And it looks… odd.”

  The ship was sailing away from the sand planet now, and another one had grown visible, the light of the system’s two suns shining upon it. As close as it was, Indi wondered if it was a moon rather than a planet. It appeared dark blue, even under the suns’ brightening influence.

  “Is that water?” another woman asked, coming up behind them. Katie.

  She was the only person on the ship that Indi had known when this all started. They were colleagues from back home, the only two women working in the predominantly male United States Geographical Survey office in Flagstaff. Katie, adventurous bush pilot, had fit in with the mostly older guys there. Indigo had only been there for a few months, but she had stuck out from the beginning. Of course, that was pretty typical for her. There weren’t legions of black women in Arizona, not com
pared to Atlanta, where she’d grown up, and there were even fewer black women who programmed databases for a living. Still, she had fit in decently with the computer geeks at the startup where she’d worked in Phoenix. If not for her divorce, and a desperate need to flee the city, Indi never would have taken the job in Flagstaff.

  “No,” Orion said. “That’s land, but it looks like—”

  “It looks like the Death Star,” Juanita claimed, sounding entirely too excited about the fact. “Except, it’s more blue than gray. And it’s all dark, like someone forgot to pay the electric bill.”

  “I’m not sure what a Death Star is,” Orion said.

  “That’s a story I need to share with you. Hm, I wonder what will happen with publishing on Earth once the big houses learn that there are lots more humans in the galaxy, humans that could be enjoying their stories after a little translating.”

  “We do have our own story tellers.”

  “There’s always room for more,” Juanita said. “I plan to publish my best sellers on Dethocoles as well as Earth.”

  “You have best sellers?” Indi asked.

  “Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Let’s see what the bridge is seeing,” Orion said, nodding toward the new planet.

  He tapped the logostec computer on his wrist, and a holographic image of the blue sphere popped into the air. He swiped a finger through it, enlarging it for Indi, Katie, Juanita, and several other women who were wandering over. Indi nodded to Yulia, a university teacher around her age, who had been swooped up along with more than twenty NAU students, most around twenty years old. Indi had been gravitating toward those women who were out of school and had jobs. She barely knew the students.

  “Do aliens live on this planet?” Juanita pointed at the surface. “The continents don’t look natural. It’s like there are massive cities that cover them, but they’re dark.”

  Indi thought the planet was too far away to determine what they were looking at, but the blue-black coloring was consistent and stretched across the large continents. And it did appear to be something man-made—or alien-made—rather than anything natural. If those were cities down there, then the population of the planet had to be huge. Or it had been. Hadn’t the captain said they hadn’t detected life in the system?

  Orion shrugged in response to Juanita, looking a little confused. Meaning the crew hadn’t expected this?

  Indi didn’t find that encouraging.

  “Attention crew,” Captain Sagitta spoke over the intercom. “We are approaching a planet with evidence of a past civilization. A great deal of the land mass is covered in cities. Ruins, Lieutenant Commander Korta believes, since we detect no life on the planet. Whatever atmosphere it once had has been stripped away, so there’s nothing protecting the surface from the radiation of space. The temperature down there is two hundred-degrees below freezing.”

  The chips that had been inserted into the ears of Indi and the other women helpfully converted temperatures to Fahrenheit as well as translating words. Or maybe it wasn’t that helpful. Indi shivered at the idea of anything being two hundred below.

  There had been snow on the ground when she first arrived in Flagstaff that spring, and she hadn’t liked it. She much preferred desert heat.

  “Despite the cold and lack of life,” Sagitta continued, “we are reading energy sources down there. We are going to fly down to the surface to examine one of the cities more closely to see if we can find any resources that could be useful in repairing the wormhole gate. If this civilization was responsible for the mines on the ice planet we passed last night, it’s possible they were as advanced as we are, or even more advanced.”

  “Mines?” Juanita asked. “Did you hear anything about mines, Orion?”

  “No. I’ve been recovering from my grievous injuries and trying to convince your doctor to clear me for donut-eating.”

  “A noble pursuit.”

  “I thought so.” Orion shook his head. “It would be nice if my brother invited me to the staff meetings and kept me apprised of such things.”

  “I guess you’re still considered a civilian. Like us.” Juanita patted him on the arm.

  “That’s all right. You’re better company than a bunch of sweaty, smelly Star Guardians.”

  She leaned forward and sniffed his bare chest.

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Does this mean we’re going to find a way home?” Yulia asked from the back of the gathering crowd.

  Doubtful, Indi thought, but she kept her pessimism to herself. The women were whispering and nudging each other excitedly.

  A burst of static came from the speakers, followed by a high-pitched squeal that had Indi and everyone else covering their ears.

  “Lieutenant Coric?” Sagitta asked, his voice half-drowned out by the continuing squeal. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m… not sure, sir,” the female communications officer responded. “It’s not an equipment malfunction.”

  “A transmission is coming from the planet!” came an excited blurt from a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together. Commander Korta.

  “How can that be?” Coric asked. “If there’s no life…”

  “I think he forgot to cut the comm,” Orion murmured.

  Meaning the bridge chatter wasn’t meant for them? Indi wasn’t sure whether she was glad to be getting it or not. She hated being in the dark, but if they were about to be annihilated by aliens nobody had expected, she didn’t necessarily want a warning.

  “Well, don’t tell him,” Juanita whispered back, and pressed a finger to her lips.

  The squeals stopped, and something started playing. Music? If so, Indi couldn’t recognize the instrument, despite having a musical background. It sounded like something a computer synthesizing eight different instruments at once might spit out.

  She wouldn’t call it appealing—many of the women still had their hands over their ears—but it definitely wasn’t random noise. There was an order to it, and as it played on, Indi picked out some repeating patterns.

  “I confirm,” Coric said, “the transmission is originating from the planet, from one of the cities on the northernmost continent.”

  “If there isn’t any life,” Katie said, “who’s sending the noise?”

  “Could it be something that was recorded long ago?” Yulia asked, her eyes gleaming at the possibility.

  She was an anthropology professor at NAU, and even if she wasn’t as adventurous as some of the other women, and seemed to share some of Indi’s very founded fears of their predicament, Yulia had been excited to hear the creation stories from the Star Guardians. She’d been quizzing that green-haired fellow and a few others about their planets and societies and where on Earth—or Gaia, as the rest of the humans in the galaxy called it—their ancestors had originally been taken from.

  Juanita spun and grabbed Yulia’s arm. “Yes, maybe the civilization that developed the planet knew their world was dying, and they recorded a message to send out to visitors who might one day come to the system.”

  “Any chance of translating it, Coric?” Sagitta asked.

  Indi realized he didn’t recognize it as music. Was she imagining things? Or maybe he did think it was music, but he also thought it contained a message.

  “There’s nothing like it in my databases,” Coric said. “I’ll run some of my linguistics analysis programs. If it’s similar to an alien language we’re familiar with, we may eventually be able to translate it.”

  “And if it’s not similar?”

  “Then it may be impossible to translate.”

  “You’ve decrypted human and alien messages before.”

  “That’s different. Those have known languages at their bases, so we can use methods like frequency analysis to develop ciphers.”

  “I see,” Sagitta said. “Do your best to make something of it. Lieutenant Zakota, what are you doing?”

  “Dancing in my seat, sir. I’m starting to get a g
roove on the beat.”

  Judging by the silence that followed, the captain wasn’t amused by the answer. Or maybe he regretted asking.

  “Killer gets excited by seeing me shake my butt, sir,” Zakota added.

  Killer? Which member of the bridge crew was that? One Indi hadn’t met, and maybe one she didn’t want to meet.

  “You’re making your fetishes rattle together,” a cool voice said. “It’s distracting me.”

  “I thought you were unflappable and undistractable.”

  If there was a response, it didn’t come through the comm. They could still hear the transmission, but the chatter of the bridge crew disappeared. The captain had probably realized he was sharing more than intended with the ship.

  “Dancing?” Orion scratched his head as the transmission continued playing, cycling through its patterns again. It seemed to be about a two-minute clip that repeated. “That’s considered music?”

  “Why would aliens send us music?” Katie asked.

  “Dead aliens, apparently,” Juanita said. “It’s too bad they’re dead. Wouldn’t it have been awesome if we discovered a previously undiscovered species in this system that nobody knew about?”

  “A month ago, all aliens were previously undiscovered to us,” Yulia pointed out.

  “Yes, but we’re so limited,” Juanita said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Indi muttered, then stepped away from the group so she could better listen to the strange music.

  She nodded to herself as she listened to the mix of warbles and buzzes. There were definitely patterns. Six distinct ones.

  So, what was their significance? If this was music, could she match the sounds to notes? And would there be any use in doing so? Having sheet music of an alien transmission didn’t sound all that useful, but if this was an attempt to communicate, maybe it could be a clue.

  She closed her eyes, trying to pick out notes, though the alienness of the instrument, or instruments, made her brain hurt. As a kid, she’d prided herself on being able to play any song by ear, but she was rusty. And this was no piano solo meant to entertain. It seemed like the noises had to signify something more.