Several hours later, Treyjon walked into engineering. Even though he’d promised to be support for Angela, the police had been waiting for them when they returned to the ship, so he’d had to send her and Lulu in on their own while he talked to them. Dealing with them had taken hours, but at least the police hadn’t made any threats about putting Treyjon or Angela in jail—though someone had muttered that the svenkar should be put down. Treyjon had rushed to the animal’s defense, saying that she tracked down criminals for Captain Sagitta, and that if the police wanted to kill his expert tracking svenkar, they could take it up with him.

None of them had seemed interested in doing so, especially after finding out it would have required interrupting a meeting with the archons. Eventually, Treyjon had managed to turn their attention to the men who’d been spying on Sagitta. He’d shared the pictures he’d gotten of both, and they had looked them up in the planetary database. They hadn’t found any matches. They’d promised to keep looking, but Treyjon had a feeling he would have to spearhead the investigation. Eventually, the police had agreed to let Treyjon go while they continued their investigation. He wasn’t exactly exonerated, but he was sure he would have had a lot more trouble if he hadn’t worn a Star Guardian uniform.

“You in here, Hierax?” Treyjon asked, stopping in the center of the bright engineering room, the white walls almost painfully clean. Machinery hummed even though the ship was docked with most of the systems powered down.

“Where else would I be?” came a call from behind a block of machinery.

“Everyone else is taking advantage of a night off to get drunk or have sex. Or both.”

“Not interested in either unless I can do them in here.”

“You’re not my type sexually, but I guess I could bring you some wine.”

Treyjon walked around the machinery to find Hierax bent over a workstation, tools and parts and bits of wiring scattered all over it. As usual, Hierax wore a gray tank top with his uniform trousers, his fatigue jacket, the part of the uniform he ought to be in, nowhere to be seen. Twenty pounds worth of tools hung from his utility belt, along with some of the mechanized trinkets he was known for making. The glasses he wore weren’t a part of his usual look, and when he looked up, his eyes seemed oddly large behind the lenses.

“That’s unfortunate, Treyjon. You’re missing out by not expanding your sexual horizons.”

“Yeah? Do you turn to your gizmos for hand jobs when you get lonely on long voyages?” Treyjon waved to the belt.

Hierax unclasped one of them, a bronze and silver thing with wings, then tossed it into the air. At first, Treyjon feared he was going to demonstrate its man-pleasuring capabilities, but all it did was fly up and start polishing the ceiling with tiny brushes.

“It’s only a hand job if the gadget has a hand, Treyjon,” Hierax said as if he were talking to a child. “And no, I haven’t found the urge to make sex toys since I was a horny teenager.” He grinned. “My mother was horrified when she found some of them in a shoebox. After that, I learned to disguise them or give them multiple functions. To this day, Mother doesn’t know that the crevice duster that she used to clean out the cupboards was one of my favorites.” His grinned widened.

“You’re a weird man, Hierax.”

“My school years were lonely. I didn’t look like this then, you know.” He tapped one of the substantial pectoral muscles under his tank top. “It was hard to woo the ladies.”

“What did you look like?” Treyjon asked, curious despite the more pressing matters on his mind.

“A skinny stick. I got tired of being beat up, so I took martial arts. That helped me bulk up into a slightly less skinny stick. When the Star Guardians approached me, more for my engineering knack than my combat skills, I’m sure, I got some muscle implants and started taking GrowthGain. I was afraid I’d end up being picked on here, too, if I didn’t look like I fit in.”

“Little did you know that we would pick on you anyway, right?” Treyjon slapped him on the back.

Hierax wasn’t the tallest of the Star Guardians, but he definitely looked like he fit in. Until he started talking about his passions, like building self-pleasuring dusting robots.

“At least nobody’s tried to stuff me into the spacesuit storage cabinets. That happened on my first ship during the war. You’d think humans could band together when they have a common enemy, but no, I had to knock a lot of thugly soldiers on their asses before they’d leave me alone. There was also less abuse after I fixed the engines against impossible odds and was single-handedly responsible for us evading being sucked into a Zi’i warship.”

“That’ll make a man appreciate his engineer. Did you get my pictures, Hierax? The police came up empty, but I hear you’re almost as good at finding things on the network as you are at making weird things.”

“Weird? My automatons are useful and functional, not weird.” He winked. “Just ask my mom.”

“I’m getting way too much information about you and your family today.”

Treyjon raised his eyebrows as the cleaning gadget flew back down, dropped a dust ball in a waste bin, and came to rest on the workstation in front of Hierax. He hooked it back to his belt.

“I got your pictures, yes. And I already found your spies.”

“You did?”

Treyjon felt his mood lift. Maybe he could get to the bottom of this quickly and return to the rec room to check on Angela. He felt bad that he’d left her to deal with Lulu, bad that she’d misunderstood him about that kiss, and horrible that he’d set her up to watch a man be killed at her feet. Why he hadn’t envisioned that scenario, he didn’t know. There had been definite clues all along that the female svenkar had bonded to her and would protect her, and even if that hadn’t been the situation, Lulu might have killed a man that ran at her, regardless.

Treyjon had assumed that he would catch up to the spy before it became a problem. But the man had been alert, with a hearing enhancement bug in his ear, and had heard him coming. If Treyjon hadn’t been wearing his Star Guardian uniform, maybe the spy would have reacted differently, but the man had recognized him as a threat. Little had he known, the svenkar waiting around the corner was the true threat.

He shook his head, frustrated anew with himself. Once Angela recovered from the shock of the event, she was sure to realize that it had all been his fault, and she wouldn’t look to him for support again. She might not want to talk to him at all.

The thought made him want to kick himself. He’d only just realized how attracted to her he was, and now he was going to lose any chance at having a relationship with her.

Not that she would want a relationship with him or any other Star Guardian once she learned that her people would be stuck here. Had she heard any of that conversation between Sagitta and the archons? Treyjon hadn’t caught all of it, but he’d caught enough. He had worried that taking the women home would turn into something complicated, but he hadn’t expected the archons to be worried about the Gaian planet turning into competition for their dominant role among humans in the galaxy.

“It helps if you actually look at the data I gathered,” Hierax said.

He’d moved across the room to a computer bank with a display floating in the air above it.

“Oh, is that required?” Treyjon said, walking over. “I didn’t realize.”

“I can’t believe you think I’m the weird one.”

“I said your things were weird, not you.”

“I am my things.” Hierax waved toward two faces hovering in the holographic display.

Treyjon recognized them, the two spies. Names and addresses floated under their faces, and he leaned forward.

“Marcus Alera and Brestin Lazanik? From… one from Kindarri and one from Kressin. Those planets are on the opposite side of the galaxy from each other. Any idea what their connection is?”

“They are both sellers of tramik.”

“Is that a drug?” Treyjon asked, the word vaguely familiar.

“A popular body-building supplement. It’s not as good as GrowthGain, but it’s cheaper, so lots of people buy it and ignore the side effects. It’s made by Nebula Won, a pharmaceutical company with offices everywhere. They’re originally from a border moon, VR-6. They have a whole lineup of prescription drugs, but their supplements are the moneymakers. They’re distributed by self-made entrepreneurs in a multi-level marketing shtick.”

“I… don’t know what to say.” Treyjon stared at the inscrutable faces, completely flummoxed.

“How about, ‘Thank you for looking up these people for me, and your wine is on the way.’?”

Treyjon snorted. “I can send you wine.”

He remembered that he still had to find some sweets for Angela too. Maybe that would help her a tiny bit with forgetting the day’s trauma.

“But with these people,” Treyjon continued, “I was expecting them to be career spies, to be honest. At the least, former soldiers or law enforcers. People with military experience.” He remembered how quick the dead one had been to react, and how the other one had raced off at lightning speed too. They hadn’t seemed like amateurs. “And to have a tie to—I’m not sure what, but some entity that would have an obvious reason for spying on the captain. What could a pharmaceutical company care about Sagitta or his meeting? How could they have even known what his meeting was about? Could outsiders know about the women we recovered? Maybe they got wind that the captain had been to Gaia, or at least to the Gaian solar system. Could they want to exploit Gaia? The people there? Could they want to send their operatives to sell their supplement to the billions of people on the planet?”

“Damn, Treyjon.”

“What?”

“I’ve never heard you speak so much at once.” Hierax smirked at him. “I didn’t even know your brain could string that many thoughts in a row together.”

“In other words, you thought I was stupid?”

“Well, you’re just a svenkar trainer. It’s not like you’ve got an advanced degree.”

“Are you sure your stick-like stature was the reason people were stuffing you into storage cabinets?” Treyjon looked around engineering and wondered if Hierax would still fit into a spacesuit locker.

“Maybe not the only reason. Look, I’ve got some work to do to get the ship ready to go out again, in case we get an assignment right away, but I can run some search queries in the background while I do it, maybe find out more about the company and who’s in charge. Maybe they’ve been in the news for something lately. They’ve got offices on a lot of planets, so it could go well beyond Dethocoles.”

Treyjon hated to delay, in case those strange spies had been planning more involving the captain than listening in on his conversations, but he nodded and said, “All right.”

“Oh, and this one here.” Hierax pointed to the man who was dead now. “He does have a military record. Served as an infantry soldier for six years during the war and was honorably discharged.”

Treyjon’s stomach flipped. He’d expected those spies to be criminals, or, at a minimum, to have connections to shady people. To think that one of his svenkars had killed a veteran disturbed him immensely. He vowed not to tell Angela, in case she believed she had some responsibility for the man’s death. She didn’t, but minds didn’t always work in logical ways.

“And the other one?” Treyjon asked.

That one was still alive and might continue to be a problem. He would report back to someone about what he’d heard and who had been responsible for his partner’s death.

“Nothing notable in the public record.” Hierax shrugged. “Looks like he’s been with the company for a long time, though. Maybe he went through some special internal training that could explain why he was tough to catch.”

Treyjon tried to remember if he’d voiced his thoughts that the spies had been well-trained because, if they hadn’t been, he would have caught them. He didn’t think he’d said that aloud. Maybe Hierax had simply come to the same assumption. He might think Treyjon was simple, but nobody on the ship could deny that he usually got his man.

“All right,” Treyjon said again. “Keep looking, and I’ll bring you—”

“A bottle of agiorgitiko. None of that white piss. And something to eat too. I’m tired of tiorka steaks. Bring some fassolatha from that vendor just outside the base. Not the robot. Robots can’t make decent soup. The old crazy woman that pretends she’s a prophet. Get me a whole pot of it, not just a bowl. With cheese on top.”

Treyjon stared at him, wondering if he should be taking notes like a waiter. “You know all the vendors out there will send delivery drones with your food, right?”

“The drones won’t go past the cargo hold. You have to meet them at the ramp.”

“Are you saying that I personally need to fetch your wine and soup because you’re too lazy to walk forty meters out of engineering to the cargo hold?”

“I’m not lazy. Do I look lazy?” Hierax jumped in the air, jerking his knees to his chest, then dropped and pumped out twenty pushups. He jumped back up and gestured around. “But this is my place.”

“You’re right. You are just as weird as your things.”

“Yes. Now, fetch my wine, svenkar boy.” Hierax grinned, flipped down his lenses, and headed back to his project.