Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2)

by Josi Russell

  Theo Talbot stood on her doorstep, the porch light casting shadows around his hollow eyes. He told her the shuttle Ethan was in had disappeared in the Karst Mountains without a trace. No signal remained, no trail. They would send out a search party tomorrow, but there was no indication of what had happened to that ship. He was sorry. He had liked Ethan very much. Saras would compensate.

  Chapter 8

  Ethan felt the vast darkness expanding around him as the shark’s mouth tunnel opened into the middle of the massive cavern. All along the sides, as far as Ethan could see with the Maxlight, stalagmites were standing like silent people watching the little group as they entered. The center was a wide, smooth plain of bare rock.

  Schübling let out a gasp of pain. Even though the Emedic treatment sped up her healing considerably, and the splint’s special material took the weight and gave her mobility, she was still badly wounded, and she’d been on her feet too long, Ethan realized.

  “We need to take a minute to get organized,” he said, running the beam behind them onto the floor of the tunnel. No krech. They should be safe here for a while, anyway. He led them to the middle of the room, and helped Schübling lower herself to the ground. Brynn’s weeping had stopped, but her sniffles gave the group a somber feeling.

  Collins sat with his arm around her, and Traore sat on her other side, digging in his pack. Everyone but Brynn had made it out with their packs. That was lucky, Ethan thought, because he doubted they’d go back to get any. Though it seemed the krech spent their days up on the walls and it would probably be safe enough to go back in a few hours, the way they had swarmed made him think there wouldn’t be much left anyway.

  Jade pulled out her vest. “We oughta put these on. It was hard to see back there at the back.” She was zipping up the bright red vest over her coveralls. She tapped the round lights on the front of the vest. A pale white light immediately glowed from her shoulders and illuminated the stone directly in front of her. As the others put theirs on, their faces were lost to Ethan in the glare of their shoulder lights, but the cumulative effect was cheery.

  Ndaiye spoke up. “And we’ve got the Maxlights, too.” He switched on his big flashlight, setting it up on the stone floor in front of him while he used the Emedic to administer another treatment for the gashes on his face.

  Ethan dug in his pack and pulled out his own Maxlight, handing the other one back to Collins, who was helping Brynn with her vest.

  “We should conserve the lights.” Schübling said gruffly, struggling with the zipper on her vest. She seemed a bit more like herself. “The shoulder ones will last a long time, but the big ones will run outta juice. Jade, Traore, take one Maxlight and do a sweep of the room for any of those bugs, then turn it off. We can’t waste the batteries.”

  The two didn’t seem to mind rising and walking together into the dark. The familiarity of taking orders from their boss seemed to calm them. Ethan watched them as they circled the huge room in a spot of light. From where he was, he couldn’t see any krech on the walls. It was just smooth, pale stone all around them.

  Next to the stalactites, the people looked small. Here and there they went behind a column, where the stalactites from the ceiling had joined with the stalagmites on the floor, and lit it up from behind with their flashlight. The stone spikes they passed looked like spectators, ready to watch the little group of people who’d been thrust onto the stage in the middle of the room. Apparently Ethan wasn’t the only one who thought so.

  “This reminds me of the stadium Traore and I used to go to back on Earth to watch soccer,” Ndaiye said. “Our families would spend a whole Saturday there, watching. Just like these guys are watching us.” He gestured to the spikes. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he yelled, “GOOOOAL!” The place was so big that it took a heartbeat for the echo to bounce back.

  “GOOOOAL!” Traore’s thin voice answered his cousin from the far side of the room.

  Ndaiye’s bright smile glowed in the half-light.

  Brynn spoke, her voice muffled in Collins’s shoulder. “They don’t look scary, though.” Ethan could see just her eyes over the shoulder lights. She was peering past Collins at the spikes nearest them.

  “No,” Collins agreed. “They remind me of soldiers. Just, I don’t know, standing guard and protecting this place.”

  “And us,” Brynn said.

  “And us,” Collins assured her.

  Schübling gestured to Ethan. “Give me my pack. Thanks for carrying it.” She looked him in the eye. “And me.”

  Ethan nodded. Rough as she was, he liked Schübling. She was sincere, unpretentious. You always knew where you stood with her, and she wasn’t going to pretend. After a little getting used to, it was refreshing. He suspected she was one of the few people whose thoughts really matched their words.

  Ethan began to feel cold seeping into his legs and hands, through his coveralls and gloves, wherever his body was in contact with the stone. He stood and walked around the group. “We’re going to have to be careful not to get too chilled,” he said.

  Brynn looked up from Collins’ shoulder has he came by. “Did you turn on your Everwarms?”

  “Turn them on?”

  “There’s a control inside the zipper on your chest. They’re heated coveralls.” She tapped just beside her shoulder light.

  Ethan located the zipper and the control. He clicked the button up and immediately felt soothing warmth encompass him. He let out an involuntary sigh.

  Ndaiye and Brynn laughed.

  “I remember my first pair of Everwarms. I got them on a survey job a couple years ago in the Rainy Outback. We were soaked for three days, then a supply drop delivered a pair for each of us. It was like being wrapped in my mama’s arms!”

  Brynn fiddled with her necklace as she spoke up. “I got mine last winter. That’s one thing I like about working for Saras. They have the best gear.”

  “Unless you work in the mines,” Collins said.

  “Or the refinery,” Ndaiye agreed solemnly.

  Ethan heard long experience in the voices of the men. He’d heard about the backbreaking labor and the long days in Saras’s Yynium operation.

  “You spent some time there?” Ethan questioned.

  “Five years,” Collins said, “in the Saras mine just outside of Coriol.” Brynn sat up and Collins shifted away, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling. “Hardest work of my life. Worst part was, they didn’t pay you enough to make it so you could go anywhere else. And there wasn’t time for management training or anything, with twelve- or fourteen-hour workdays. It’s a real dead-end job.”

  “How did you get on this survey crew?” Ethan asked.

  “Same as everyone,” Collins answered, gesturing to Schübling. “The Captain requested me.”

  Ethan, surprised, turned his attention to Schübling. “Really?”

  “I came here with a survey crew early on. When Coriol was all laid out, they didn’t have work for us, so we went to work in the mines,” Schübling answered. “Worked there for eleven years without complaining.” She shot a meaningful look at her crew, obviously disapproving of their dislike for the work. “When Saras started expanding the mines, they called the surveyors back out. I’d seen Carlisle and Baker working their tails off at the refinery. Espinoza ran the accounts at the mine and I needed somebody good with numbers. I’d worked with Collins and Jade and Traore. And Traore told me about his fantastic cousin who worked at the refinery.” She scoffed, shooting an annoyed look in Ndaiye’s direction, and he laughed. “I got to pick a team, and for some reason I picked this bunch.” The warmth in her voice revealed her affection for them, though Ethan was sure she wouldn’t have admitted it.

  “And just to have it out in the open,” Brynn said, “she got stuck with me because my father is a friend of Mr. Saras.” Ethan could tell Brynn wanted Schübling to toss her a compliment, maybe about how glad she was to have her or how it had worked out fine, but Schübling didn’t work that way.

>   “Saras doesn’t have any friends,” Schübling said instead. There was a long, awkward silence.

  “Well, I’m glad to have you on the team,” Collins said after a moment.

  “I’m getting some sleep,” Schübling cranked up her coveralls and laid down on her pack. Ethan glanced over in time to see Brynn shoot a scalding look at her boss.

  Ethan watched the group get comfortable. He waited until Jade and Traore got back and reported that there was nothing but rock in the cavern before he stretched out on the smooth floor and looked up at the tall stone sentinels.

  The new morning would be breaking over Coriol. Aria would know, now, that something was wrong. The Colony office may have called her. There would be people searching. But he faced the fact that Traore was right: it would be next to impossible for anyone to guess where they’d gone.

  He heard the even breathing of the crew around him and felt a little wave of apprehension at being, again, the only one awake. Until he heard Schübling’s voice, low and calm. “I want to get these people out of here, Bryant, and I’m gonna need your help to do it.”

  Again, her directness surprised him. He fumbled for words, on the brink of telling her that he knew how she felt, that he’d been Caretaker of 4000 sleeping people once, and that getting them to safety had been the best accomplishment of his life. Although Minea felt a bit less safe now, since the shadow had crossed Lucidus.

  “Well?” Schübling’s voice scratched across the rock to him. “Are you gonna help me or not?”

  “I’ll help you, Captain.”

  “I’m not your Captain. My name’s Maggie.”

  Ethan smiled in the darkness, but tried not to let the sound of it creep into his voice. “I’ll help you, Maggie.”

  ***

  On his way to the mill, Marcos read the morning security report with little interest. As expected, the orbital defenses were up and running, and there should be no problem keeping out the orbiting ship.

  Along with basic orbital defense system, the UEG maintained an air-and-ground force in the city of Flynn, several hundred kilometers from Coriol. In addition, each company was required to keep city defenses and a private security force in their cities. Saras was no exception, and their security force could be seen practicing maneuvers and sighting in their weapons at the defense complex past the power plant.

  It was probably overkill, Marcos thought as they drove past the complex. The likelihood of these aliens wanting anything on Minea was small, especially after the extensive negotiations humans had undergone to take possession of the planet.

  Marcos was pleased about the outcome of his meeting with Veronika and Theo. He was not as pleased about the outcome of the defense committee meeting.

  Why could there be no whole victories in life? It was always a victory and a defeat, paired, or two defeats and a victory. Never a simple, pure victory.

  The hovercar stopped at the mill and Marcos gathered his things. He glanced at Veronika as she got out of the car. She’d been distant lately, and he felt that there was something he was missing. Something that she wanted him to do that he wasn’t doing. He tried to think it through as they walked into the mill.

  Dusty workers passed him on either side, their narrowed eyes a giveaway that they had something to say to him. He was startled to see how many of them had developed the mysterious purple bruising, and he stepped a little more quickly past them, pulling his elbows in to his sides so he didn’t brush against the workers.

  Veronika handed him a mask as she opened the door to the main refining floor. They walked out on a catwalk, peering down at the heart of Coriol’s economy.

  The loads of gray-blue stone streaked with bright orange Yynium came in a steady stream on the conveyors at one end of the room. They were coming from the sorting room, and before that, the loading docks. They reached the first workers, who stood ready with a resonating chisel and tapped each chunk along its Yynium fracture, leaving the small silver chisel embedded in the rock, which continued down the belt. By the time the chunks reached the third station, the chisels had cracked them wide, leaving the vein of Yynium bare and exposed on either side of the split.

  Workers at the third station rotated up to grab a chunk of rock and step to a picking station, where the thickest of the Yynium was scraped and picked out of the stone, then dropped onto fine mesh baskets on another conveyor, which carried the Yynium to the finishing room. The chunks went back on the original conveyor and down to the crushers.

  Marcos saw the crusher feeders, powder-covered men and women, tossing chunks of rock into the chewing jaws of the crusher. He saw them strain, saw their hands and arms dangerously close to the first blades, and thought only that they were going awfully slow today. From where he was he could see the purple bruising on their faces and necks. He tightened his mask.

  The crusher churned the powdered rock out into a huge, swirling tank of water, where the heavy Yynium dust fell through grates at the bottom and the rock settled atop it like a layered cake. A scraper pulled continually back and forth across the Yynium layer, mixing it into the water and allowing it to flow out over the cascading tangerine waterfall through the straining conveyor.

  There the water passed through and the Yynium dust moved on through the dryers, huge furnaces that blew the damp dust dry on the screens, and into the finishing room.

  The workers at the next station removed the screens, caked with the dried dust from the conveyor, and twisted them over the gaping chasm of the finishing drum. On the other side of the open-topped drum, workers gathered the baskets with the picked Yynium and dumped it in as well.

  The Yynium was churned and crushed in the bottom of the hopper, coming out a uniform, fine powder, which sifted into molds on a moving conveyor below. The molds went through a heater to meld the powder together, then through a press from which the bricks of Yynium, proudly stamped with the Saras triangle, finally emerged as a useful product.

  All in all, a third of the population of Coriol worked in this building. The rest worked in the Saras manufacturing factories nearby, or the Saras farms to the north or the Saras construction company or the Saras markets or the Saras Mines or the Saras hospitals.

  Marcos continued down the walkway, half-listening to Nolan, the floor manager, citing the day’s production statistics. Marcos had been right: the workers were slow today. Production was down about three percent below normal. He felt the familiar anxiety creep up on him. Whenever anything threatened Yynium production, it threatened the possibility of getting Serena here. A hard knot twisted in his chest. He reprimanded Nolan and reminded him that he could be replaced.

  “But, Mr. Saras,” Nolan’s eyes were wide, “it’s not my fault. And it’s not really their fault. A lot of them are sick.”

  “Then why am I paying all these doctors? Get the workers to them.”

  “They’ve been. The doctors don’t know what is causing it.”

  Marcos glanced at Veronika. “We’ll have to see if we can encourage them to figure it out.”

  Chapter 9

  Aria was at the Saras liftstrip as morning broke. She felt hollow. She argued with a guard until Theo pulled up to the gate in his fancy hovercar.

  “Aria,” he said kindly, “what are you doing here?”

  She and Ethan had known Theo since they arrived on Minea. He had been in charge of Saras Company then, until Marcos Saras had arrived and taken over.

  She heard the pleading in her own voice as she said, “You said there would be a search party going out this morning. I want to go along.”

  Theo seemed to consider for a moment, then waved her into the car. She shot a smug look at the guard as she slid in on the Earthleather seats. She had seen a few examples of the rougher, almost pebbly Minean leather, made from the large herbivores here on the planet, but she’d only seen it in Flynn, Minea’s capitol city, which had been established longer and had a lot that Coriol didn’t have. These seats were smooth and supple, cool to the touch on this already sti
cky morning. She leaned her head back on the refreshing surface gratefully. She quizzed Theo as he drove her directly onto the liftstrip.

  “I know it was a survey trip. Where were they?”

  “Well, we’re not sure. They were supposed to be pretty deep in the Karst Mountains, and our last transmission from them was from the survey site, but we sent out some preliminary fly-over searches last night and didn’t see any trace of them there. We also didn’t pick up any of their beacons, which is highly unusual.” He glanced at her with an apologetic half-smile.

  “Where will the search parties be going today?”

  “They’re ground crews, so they’ll be going over the survey site.”

  “Where did the crash happen?” The questions had been running through her mind all night, and now they poured out, one after another.

  Theo grimaced slightly and hesitated. Was he keeping something from her or was he just trying to speak delicately?

  “To be honest, we’re not sure. We know where they were supposed to be traveling, but we’re not finding them there.”

  “Didn’t they have a tracker on the ship?”

  “No. It was a shuttle craft, not meant for long hauls. There’s a signal beacon that is activated in event of an emergency, but not a continuous signal. There’s no sign of the signal beacon.”

  They were sitting on the liftstrip now, and Aria could see the search team loading the last of their gear from the ground into the search ship. She imagined Ethan, stepping onto just such a craft, this time yesterday.

  “Will they search the whole route?”

  Theo looked at her. “Honestly, Aria, I don’t know. The search crew chief seems pretty sure after his passes last night that they aren’t out there. We know their planned route, but we don’t know at what point they diverged from it, or even if they did.”

  “What do you mean, if they did? If they didn’t, we would see them, or evidence of them, somewhere along that route, right?”