Hierax: Star Guardians, Book 4 Read online

  “Is it my imagination,” Indi asked after listening to numerous iterations of the repeating patterns, “or does that third one sound like the musical version of the Thue–Morse Sequence?”

  The question earned her a lot of blank looks. Even Juanita, who had some serious geek tendencies, didn’t seem to recognize the reference. Indi supposed being a science-fiction geek wasn’t necessarily synonymous with being a math geek. And recognizing math in music probably took a special level of geekiness, such as one learned by taking on an extra credit assignment using FractMus software to turn algorithms into music.

  “Please define your Thue-Morse Sequence,” came an unexpected voice from the walls. The ship’s AI, Eridanus.

  “It’s the binary sequence you get when you start with zero and keep appending the Boolean complement of the sequence obtained thus far,” Indi said.

  The blank looks around her did not change, but the AI said, “Indeed. We call it the Tioclenian Ordering. I have detected fractal patterns in portions of the transmission.”

  The alien music abruptly stopped playing.

  Indi waited, expecting the AI to say more or perhaps posit some hypotheses. But silence filled the mess hall.

  “Is it good or bad that a planet is speaking to us fractally?” Juanita asked.

  Indi spread her arms. She could imagine all sorts of bad things happening if they went down to a planet where an advanced civilization had lived. For one thing, what if the dead aliens didn’t want their ancient, abandoned stuff messed with? And what if there were security measures in place to prevent that from happening? There were energy sources on the surface, the captain had said. Like what? Nuclear weapons platforms?

  “It could just be their equivalent of a ‘Hello, world’ message they left transmitting when they died. Or abandoned their planet.” Indi decided it was more likely that beings from an advanced civilization, seeing that their atmosphere was degrading, would leave to colonize other planets rather than letting themselves die out.

  “Hello, world, or stay the hells away,” Katie said.

  “Miss Indigo,” came the captain’s voice over the intercom.

  “Yes?” she asked, wondering if she should have kept her mouth shut. In sharing her findings, had she singled herself out for some special attention?

  “Come to the bridge, please.”

  2

  Commander Hierax of Dethocoles, the ship’s chief engineer, yawned profoundly as he walked toward the bridge, the helmet of his combat armor tucked under his arm. He’d been wearing the suit for the last three days straight while he’d headed up repairs on the Star Stalker, their captured Zi’i warship. Some of the men working with him had removed their armor after Hierax had tweaked the environmental controls to make the air more palatable—and less freezing—to humans, but he’d kept his on. He’d stumbled across no less than seven booby traps while working, one of which had blown a hole in the hull of engineering, requiring some light-speed repairs to keep the atmosphere from venting. He’d also deactivated a countdown a Zi’i had set before leaving, one that had tried to order the entire warship to self-destruct.

  Even though the Zi’i hadn’t had much time between being boarded, being defeated, and being sent off in one of their own shuttles, some of the clever bastards had done their best to ensure their warship didn’t make it back to Confederation space. Not that they’d needed to worry about that. Neither the Falcon 8 nor the warship was going anywhere right now.

  Hierax grumbled and pushed his hand through his short black hair, knowing the captain would have a lecture for him when he stepped onto the bridge. Sagitta wanted him working on repairing the wormhole gate, their only potential way out of the system, save an interstellar flight that would take centuries to make, but there had been so many fires to put out on the Zi’i ship that Hierax hadn’t made any progress on that yet.

  In truth, he wasn’t sure where to start. The captain expected a lot from him, and usually he could deliver, but this was different. There were astrophysicists and engineers back home who’d made careers of studying the gates, and none of them had ever figured out how exactly they worked or how to fix a broken one.

  Hierax climbed a ladder and stepped out into the corridor leading to the bridge, but almost ran into a woman as he did so.

  She skittered to the side, throwing him an alarmed look that he didn’t feel was warranted. He hadn’t come that close to stepping on her. Admittedly, Star Guardians in their full black combat armor could be intimidating, but surely, he looked normal—if a tired and crabby version of his normal—with his helmet off and his hair sticking out in all directions.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  The last he’d heard, the captain had relaxed his rules, saying the women they’d rescued from slavers but hadn’t yet been able to take home didn’t have to stay in the rec room. But Hierax didn’t think they were supposed to roam the ship at random, especially the level with the bridge on it.

  “What? No. I don’t get lost.” Her alarmed expression shifted toward one of indignation. Or maybe that was irritation.

  Hierax might have considered her attractive if she hadn’t currently looked pissed at him. She had rich brown skin, like the people of Aksumi and Noka, and the way her long, thin braids of hair were pulled back from her face accentuated high cheekbones, a straight nose, and full lips. She wore simple brown trousers and a loose, flowing top with an interesting pattern of gold and dark blue swirls. It did not show off much skin, but he could tell she had some nice curves under it. Not that she seemed like the type of person to appreciate a man looking.

  He didn’t have time for looking anyway. Nobody ought to have time. It mystified him that men on the ship were sleeping with some of the women, including the captain himself, if the rumors could be believed. Sagitta had been the one to originally forbid the crew to interact with the women, leaving Ensign Bystrom on guard to keep everyone out.

  After another yawn, Hierax said, “Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to be up here,” then shooed her in the direction of the ladder.

  Without waiting for a response, he continued past, toward the bridge door at the end of the corridor.

  She followed after him. He frowned and thought about shooing her again, but what did it matter to him? Let the women race chariots in the corridors if they wished. All he wanted was a shower, something to eat, and at least twelve hours in his cot in engineering.

  The bridge doors opened, and he almost crashed into the back of another woman as he stepped in.

  “It’s a damned infestation,” he snapped, halting shy of smacking into her.

  When she turned to frown at him—why were all women doing that to him today?—he wished he could retract his words.

  It was Dr. Tala. Not only had she patched him up that day in the nebula when everyone had been a little crazy, including himself, but she was the one the rumors said the captain was sleeping with. Hierax didn’t need another reason for Sagitta to be irked with him. He already felt that his usually solid position was a little tenuous after his shenanigans in engineering, keeping the captain locked out and building booby traps instead of working on a mine detector. Knowing he’d been under the influence of the nebula didn’t make him feel much better about that.

  “The Zi’i ship is at one hundred percent operating capacity, sir,” Hierax said when Sagitta turned toward him.

  The captain stood behind Lieutenant Coric, who sat at the comm station analyzing sound waves floating in a holodisplay in front of her. That wasn’t her usual hobby. Had Hierax missed something while over on the warship?

  “Good,” Sagitta said.

  A throat cleared behind Hierax.

  “You’re blocking the way, hero,” the woman who had been following him said.

  Hierax turned sideways. “Yes, to keep the captain from noticing that you strolled uninvited onto his bridge. You should thank me.”

  “I’m not uninvited.”

  Hierax highly doubted that—Sagit
ta was just like him. Neither of them liked civilians messing up their domains with their grubby, irreverent hands.

  “Indi is probably here for the same reason I am,” Dr. Tala said, her tone sounding dry as she quirked an eyebrow at Sagitta.

  Hierax couldn’t tell if that was a lover’s eyebrow quirk. Sagitta was listening as Coric pointed at something and spoke quietly.

  “Which is?” the woman—Indi—asked when the captain didn’t respond.

  “A musical background?” Tala suggested.

  “I mostly dabbled,” Indi offered and shrugged. “My sisters were the ones who took all the lessons.”

  “Captain,” Hierax said, more than ready to ask if he could be dismissed. If the two women had been invited up to serenade the bridge crew, he wasn’t interested. “If you don’t need me further, can I—”

  “What do you make of that planet, Hierax?” Sagitta nodded toward the view screen.

  “Not much.” Hierax turned toward the screen for the first time, assuming the captain meant the brown sand planet they’d been flying past an hour earlier, the last time he had looked out a porthole. He twitched in surprise at what filled the screen. This new planet was definitely not dominated by sand. “Are those cities? Man-made structures?”

  “Not man-made, I should think,” came Commander Korta’s voice from across the bridge. The boulder-like Alabaster had his back to them as he studied his science station. “But certainly created by an intelligent species, one that has been gone from the planet for an indeterminate amount of time. There is no atmosphere, but evidence suggests that there was one in the past. There, in the northern hemisphere, are dried ocean beds with the fossilized remains of life embedded in the floors.”

  “We don’t know which species?” Hierax took a few steps toward the view screen, his sleepiness fading at this new discovery. Normally, he didn’t have the heart of an explorer and didn’t care that much about the various alien species in the galaxy, but they seemed to be looking at the remains of sprawling metropolises. If this had been an advanced civilization, maybe it was possible something down there could help with the gate repairs. Or, if the aliens on this planet had lived at the same time as the Wanderers, the original gate builders, maybe they would have records that included information on how the wormhole system had worked. Translating some previously undiscovered language wouldn’t be easy, though, not even for Coric, who was a wizard at that stuff.

  “Not yet,” Korta said after a long hesitation. “There is an exciting possibility, but I need to gather more evidence before making assumptions. We need to get closer.” Korta rotated on his solid base, turning his expressionless rock-like face toward Sagitta. Despite the lack of moving features on his face, he managed to appear eager as he said, “We’ll be going down for further study, won’t we, Captain? You did say that, right?”

  “Yes, Korta. Hierax, we’re reading energy sources down there. I want you to study them and see if there are any resources down there that could be used to help you repair the gate.”

  Hierax wasn’t surprised that the captain had been thinking the same thoughts as he. Not only were they trapped here until they fixed the gate, but they had left that Zi’i armada in the Scyllan System, clearly making preparations to fly to Dethocoles. The Falcon 8 might already be too late to warn the seat of the Confederation government—and Hierax’s home world—that an invasion was coming. But Sagitta would want to do his best to try, to reach Dethocoles before the invasion came. It was his home world too. Even if the Falcon 8 arrived too late to issue a warning, Sagitta would want to be there to fight, to keep the Zi’i from taking over the planet. Hierax wasn’t a warrior at heart, but he felt the same way. His parents had a ranch on Dethocoles, and his grandparents lived on one of the big orbital yachts. Hierax also had a lot of his favorite tools stored in various places on the planet. He cringed at the idea of them being destroyed by some warhead lobbed from space.

  “Should we figure out what the message says before we go visit the planet?” Indi asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Tala said.

  Lieutenant Coric grimaced, her face strained.

  “Ideally, yes,” Sagitta said. “But it sounds like that will be difficult.”

  “Yes, sir,” Coric said. “Very difficult. I’ve run the sample that’s transmitting through the database. Granted, we don’t have full access to the gal-net out here, but I have a substantial languages file here on board. As I said earlier, there aren’t any matches. There’s no way to translate an alien language without something like the Aridonis Tablet or the First Beings Compendium.”

  Tala and Indi exchanged looks.

  “Rosetta Stone?” Indi suggested.

  “Their equivalents, yes, that’s my guess,” Tala said.

  “I can see where it would be difficult,” Indi said, shifting to address the captain directly. “But what if those aliens are saying, ‘This is our planet, and we’ll blow up anyone that steps foot on it’?”

  “The aliens are gone, right?” Zakota said, from his usual spot at the helm.

  “Killer” Ku sat at the weapons station next to him, looking surly as usual, and a little bored. Apparently, there wasn’t anything to shoot at in the system. Yet.

  “So, they shouldn’t mind if we rifle through their stuff,” Zakota added.

  “Let’s hope,” Sagitta murmured. “We have little choice. Miss Indigo, I assure you, we’ll proceed with extreme caution. Maybe it won’t even be necessary to land in order to gather information.”

  Hierax didn’t know about that. He doubted they would stumble across some thousands-of-years-old server wirelessly transmitting technical manuals for the gate system.

  “Hierax,” Sagitta said. “Coric will work on translations, but I want you to get a team together to help you with studying the planet.” He scratched his jaw. “You’ll probably have to leave the ship to search and acquire useful resources too.”

  So much for not landing.

  “A team? I’ve already got Nax and Woo,” Hierax said, naming his engineering assistants. The entire Star Guardian crew numbered fewer than fifty, and not many of them had been recruited for their brains. Oh, their hunters and trackers had some cunning, and could find criminals well enough, but that wasn’t the kind of smarts that would help with the repair of ancient alien tech. “I shouldn’t need anybody else.”

  “Get some muscle for your away mission. And go down the roster to see if anyone else has skills that may be useful in fixing the gate. Varro is good with math.”

  Hierax grimaced. “Varro is good at wanking off in his accounting office.”

  “While doing math,” Sagitta said, his tone cooling slightly. “And locating and allocating resources.”

  “Yes, sir, but he’d be more of a hindrance than a help. Nax and Woo are all I need. We’ll get it handled.”

  “You’ll at least take Treyjon, Hammer, and Mikolos in case you need protection. Dr. Tala and Coric will remain up here, working on the translation—they’ll check in with you any time they discover something useful—but I want you to add Miss Indigo to your team too.”

  “What?” Hierax asked as Indi also blurted, “What?”

  “Miss Indigo,” Sagitta said, ignoring Hierax and facing her. “You are not, of course, under my command, but I assume you wish to return to your home world. Eridanus said you have a knack for recognizing patterns and that you’ve already grasped some of the nuances of the transmission. Your talent may be useful in helping Hierax and his team interpret what’s useful down there. You will not, of course, be asked to go on the away mission, but I wish you to work with my chief engineer. The sooner we get out of this system, the sooner you can be returned to Gaia.”

  Indi curled a lip as she looked over at Hierax.

  Hierax curled a lip right back at her. What was the captain thinking? He didn’t need the help of a woman from some backward planet that could barely launch a rocket out of its own atmosphere.

  “Captain,” Hierax said, “with all
due respect, an outsider is just going to get in the way.”

  “Get in the way?” Indi asked, her dark eyes flashing. “You’re the one who almost stepped on me five minutes ago. You probably get in your own way.”

  Hierax shook his head. She definitely wouldn’t be a good team player. “Captain, she’s not—”

  “Captain,” Korta interrupted, his rumbling voice coming from the speaker around his torso much more loudly than usual. “This is amazing. I had my suspicions, but until we got closer, I couldn’t verify them.”

  “Yes?” Sagitta asked.

  Hierax eyed the view screen. As they had flown closer, the surface features of the dark blue planet had grown more distinct, including the hundreds and hundreds of miles of cities. Dark cities. If there were energy sources down there, they weren’t doing anything to light up the world. Of course, it was possible that the aliens who had lived there hadn’t had eyes or needed illumination of any kind, and hadn’t built it into their cities.

  “The distinct metal alloys used in the buildings and infrastructure down there are synonymous with the materials used in the wormhole gates. Also, I’ve located an energy source emitting a signature identical to what the gates emit.”

  “Are you saying this planet was inhabited by the Wanderers?” Sagitta breathed. He almost sounded stunned.

  Hells, Hierax felt stunned too. People had found a few outposts throughout the galaxy with Wanderer ruins left behind, but they’d all been in poor condition, and the archaeologists had never found anything to help humanity understand the culture or the language of the race that had, according to legend, plucked tribes of humans off Gaia more than two thousand years earlier and distributed them on habitable planets throughout the galaxy, thus to ensure the survival of the species. The stories said it had been the last act of the last Wanderer in the galaxy before the race had moved on to a different galaxy, or perhaps a different dimension altogether.