Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2)

by Josi Russell

  Galo strode out of his office and down to the main deck, making his way to the slave hold, which was guarded by two of his guards. These two mercenaries were his best interrogators.

  The heavy door, made from the one metal the Vala could not penetrate, swung hollowly open. Inside the hold, where a thousand Vala should have been, a few pathetic adults hung in the shadows of the room, their luminescent skin shining dully in the dim light.

  Galo still held enough Vala to run half his fleet, but other than these few, the rest were on ships, flung out like a net across the galaxies he connected with his shipping lines.

  Galo approached one of the creatures, who lay curled miserably on his bunk. He saw the slave stiffen as he approached. “Are you ready to tell me now?”

  The Vala didn’t respond, which infuriated Galo. “You will tell me. You will tell me how they escaped and where they’ve gone. The few of you who are left will have no mercy unless you reveal them.”

  The Vala remained still and silent.

  “I will ask you one more time.” Galo sneered. “Where are your friends?”

  The Vala, finally responding, began to tremble. Galo had visited them before and he suspected this Vala knew what would happen if he did not comply. Galo raised his weapon, pointing it at the trembling creature.

  “I don’t know,” the Vala sobbed. “They’ve disappeared. We can no longer hear them! Please—”

  Later, Galo regretted it. There were no Vala to spare, but if they were hiding information, they had to know what he was willing to do to get it. He fired the weapon twice and stepped purposefully back toward the door.

  “What have you done to work on them?” he asked the interrogators angrily. “At least one of them knows where the others have gone. I told you to find that one.”

  Before they could respond, Galo strode back into the hold. He stepped into the shadows and hauled out a very old Vala. It was Elencha, a Vala whose usefulness had passed long ago: he was neither capable of moving ships nor producing more children to move them. He had lived a slave in this room ever since Galo had collected the Vala as payment on a past due account when he was first opening his shipping company. The Vala, and their special talent, had revolutionized his business.

  “I will ask you the same question.” Galo sneered.

  “We don’t know where they are.” Elencha’s thready voice bounced throughout the room. Galo leveled the weapon.

  “Wait! Wait!” Elencha begged. “I don’t know where they are, but when I was young and we traveled, our masters tracked us. We leave a trail, don’t you know? You can’t see it, but you can track it with sensors. They tracked us then. Always.”

  Galo lowered the weapon. That was useful information. Perhaps they were finally getting somewhere.

  ***

  The survey crew passed through the opening Jade had spotted on the other side of the crystal bridge. They found themselves looking down across a steep slope slippery with fallen rubble.

  Looking up, Ethan could see that the roof of the passage had been crumbling for eons. They would have to keep an eye out to avoid being crushed by the falling rocks. Standing still, he heard the crash of one as it fell somewhere ahead of them in the darkness.

  But the slope didn’t seem too bad. If they worked their way around the biggest rocks, they could probably traverse it fairly easily. He led the group out onto it, trying to help Jade, who was still a bit unsteady on her feet.

  The rocks seemed solid enough until they made it to the center of the slope. Their careful passage was halted by the rumbling percussion of a faraway explosion. Saras. Collins had been right: he was blasting. Tiny rocks began to move under their feet and caused mini-slides everywhere they stepped. Ethan reached for a boulder to brace himself, but the boulder itself sat atop the crushed and slippery rubble, and it began to move.

  Like an ocean wave, the rocks began to slide, one after another, one into another. The six members of the team were carried along with them. Jade was swept away from him on the tide of rock. Ethan saw Maggie, and then Traore, go down. The larger rocks knocked them aside like dolls. Ethan fell to his knees, scrambling for purchase among the shifting stones.

  He clawed and fought, but the slide carried him until it piled up on itself at the bottom of the slope. He felt their sharp edges through his coveralls, their rough surfaces pulling at him as he slid.

  Ethan was trapped, pinned between two huge boulders, and buried up to his waist in the small pebbles around it. His right arm was behind one boulder, extended up and away from him. The pressure on his shoulder blade was incredible, surpassed only by the pain in his hyper-extended elbow. His left arm was free, and he reached around himself and started digging, trying to remove as much of the fine, slick rock beside and behind him as possible.

  Around him, he heard the voices of the team.

  “Traore!”

  “I’m here!”

  “Come pull me out! I’m okay, but I’m stuck!”

  Brynn’s voice. “Captain! Are you all right?”

  “My leg’s broke and I just went surfing on a pile of rock. I’m not all right. Help me get over there to Jade.”

  There was the sound of shifting rock and scraping boots. “Jade, can you hear me?”

  Jade replied with the same sleepy quality in her voice that she’d had since the crystal bridge. “I’m okay.”

  Ethan heard the crash of a rock falling from the ceiling somewhere near him. He couldn’t turn his head to see how close it had come to crushing him, but he felt the rush of air as it hit, felt it shake the slide and send trickles of pebbles flowing past him.

  Ndaiye called out, “I’m free! Who needs help?”

  “Over here,” Ethan called to him, and both cousins came running. Traore shoved his pack under Ethan’s head to support it and they strained against the chunk of rock beside him.

  It was no use. More than half of it was buried.

  “We’ll have to dig,” Traore said. They knelt on either side of Ethan, their gloved hands shoving the rock out from around him.

  It wasn’t unlike being in water, albeit very heavy water. He felt it flow around him, sections giving way in eddies as other parts were cleared. He tried to help with his left hand, but kept running into Ndaiye, who placed a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye.

  “Be still, my friend,” he said, “and let us help you.”

  ***

  When they regrouped at the bottom of the slope, they were tattered and filthy, but all alive. The light on Ethan’s left shoulder was broken, and he felt the dark more acutely. He also noticed a new chill in the cave. He reached up to crank the heat on in his coveralls and found them dead.

  “Mine too.” Traore was looking at Ethan. “Back at the Crystal Cavern.”

  The slide had pushed them into a long, shallow crevice, and the other side was a vast slope of smooth stone. It rose three meters, and Ethan could see they’d have to have get up and let a rope down if Maggie had any hope of scaling it. He started up, but there was no traction and he slid back down. He tried again with the same result. How stupid would it be if they had crossed chasms and outrun krech just to die stuck behind a smooth slope? He kicked at the rock in frustration.

  Brynn rose from the rock she was sitting on. “Let me try. I used to climb all the time in the canyons when I was a kid.

  “Sure.” Ethan stepped back. “I’ll stay close to spot you, though.” She walked beside the wall, running her hand along it as she went. Ethan walked beside her. She stopped at the steepest section. Ethan brushed his fingers across it, trying to see what had caught her attention. It was slightly rougher than the rest of the wall. He couldn’t see it, but he felt it. Brynn reached high and hooked her fingers over a tiny ridge. She put the toe of her boot against the wall and suddenly, with gravity-defying agility, she was climbing.

  From Ethan’s vantage point, it was as if she was climbing by suction, or magnetism. He could see nothing for her to hold onto. But she somehow found tin
y crevices and rough patches enough to scale the face and hoist herself up and over the edge. She sat above them, beaming down on the team.

  Ethan grinned up at her. “That was amazing, Brynn. You’ve got a gift.”

  “One.” She said, her pride evident in her voice. She stood and walked farther up the slope, out of sight.

  “The slope is much more gradual up here,” she called. “I’m tying off the rope to a stalagmite. Just a second.”

  Ethan backed up just before the end of the rope whipped down. He took it and pulled hard. It didn’t budge. He jumped a little, putting his weight on it. It was solid.

  It took the team moments to get up the rock face. Even Maggie, pulling herself hand over hand while pushing with her one good foot, made it up with the help of the rope. At the top they found a gentle, undulating slope leading gradually upward.

  The slope turned out to be a dome which led gradually downward on the other side. They passed through a short tunnel, and then into a pod-like chamber, as nondescript as it was colorless. The walls were neither white nor gray and the floor was littered with chunks of rock, but no interesting formations.

  Still, the floor was level and there were smooth patches big enough to lie down in. The strain of the bridge and the rockslide had sapped their strength and Brynn and Jade collapsed gratefully on the smooth floor.

  Traore was stomping his feet and blowing his breath into his hands. Ethan felt himself trembling, too. The cold had sunk through the coveralls, and he paced a little to keep his blood circulating.

  “Coveralls out?” Maggie asked them. When they nodded, she said, “Mine too.”

  Ethan marveled at her composure. She revealed nothing without intending to. How long had she been feeling the cold press of the cave? How long would she have gone without telling them?

  “This is the most depressing chamber yet,” Brynn said sourly. “Did you ever read that old Earth book, Bleak House?” That’s what this place reminds me of. I’m calling it Bleak House.”

  “It’s just hard to compete with the Crystal Cavern,” Ethan responded.

  “That may have been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” The wonder of it still resounded in Traore’s voice.

  “Not me,” Ndaiye countered. “Sara is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Especially when she comes in from the Food Production Division and takes her hair down outta her helmet. Mmmmm.” He sighed appreciatively.

  “That doesn’t count,” Brynn said. “Of course people are beautiful. What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen that’s not someone you love?”

  Ethan tried to describe the true Alorans, energy beings who he’d met on Beta Alora, and how their bodies shone with every color imaginable. Color somehow seemed so important after these days underground.

  “Sorry, Ethan,” Jade said, her speech slightly slurred. “I can’t see an alien being beautiful. Doesn’t seem possible.”

  Ethan sometimes forgot that most humans had little, if any experience with aliens. He also forgot the human tendency to dislike anything unlike you. He didn’t fight for his description. They couldn’t know the beauty of the Alorans, the grace of the beings, without experiencing it themselves.

  Brynn broke into the awkward silence. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is that butterfly we have here that migrates through every autumn: the ellisa sunara. Have you guys seen them? They are about this big,” she held her hands out, the size of a dinner plate, “and they’re golden. Not just yellow, but metallic gold, with metallic blue under-wings. When they fly, the sun strikes them and sends flashes of light all around.”

  They were quiet, imagining the light flashing. Ethan wished for a swarm of them now, a kaleidoscope of butterflies to brighten this drab cavern.

  “How about you?” Brynn prodded Maggie. “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Maggie was quiet so long that Ethan didn’t know if she was going to answer. Finally, she croaked out a single word that settled over them with finality.

  “Earth,” she said, and it came to Ethan’s mind, that last glimpse he’d had of it as McNeal had called him from the observation deck to the passenger hold to be put into stasis. Glowing blue below them as they moved away from it, their home had hung in Ethan’s mind and haunted his stasis dreams.

  “I miss the ocean,” Ndaiye spoke up. “That’s my most beautiful thing besides Sara. The way the ocean pulls back and the little seashells dance in the sand as the tide goes out.”

  Ethan missed the ocean too, now that he thought about it. Minea’s oceans were far away from Coriol, and because there were no significant amounts of Yynium near them, there were no settlements, either. He, like most of the colonists, had only seen the vast Minean seas on maps.

  “I miss museums,” Jade said, shifting uncomfortably. Ethan wondered if she was feeling cold. “And movies.” Ethan missed them, too. The new colonies, with their unending work mining and refining Yynium, had no time for producing entertainment. And the Interplanetary Communication System was too overloaded and too expensive to use to transmit anything so frivolous from Earth.

  They did have the libraries from the Caretakers’ drives on other ships, but most people had no way to play them. Ethan thought of Angela and Manuel, two of his passengers who had been in several movies back on Earth but couldn’t find work here on Minea.

  “I have some friends putting together a little theater production in Coriol,” he said. The statement was met with surprised silence.

  “That would be fun,” Jade said. “I’d like to go to that.”

  Brynn poked Jade. “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” she asked. “You haven’t answered yet.”

  Jade was quiet for a long moment, as if considering something, and then she slowly reached into her pack. She rummaged around and pulled out a small photoflat. Its screen glowed as she activated it. When she turned it around, there was a picture of a pale red cavern with a tiny figure inside. Ethan knew exactly what he was seeing. It was an in-womb photo of a baby.

  “When?” Brynn gasped.

  Jade held her hand over her belly. “He’ll come in about five months.”

  Even Maggie was hushed.

  Chapter 15

  Aria poled the boat up the side river. The sun was hot on her neck and sweat trickled down her back. She was glad the children were with Kaia today. Here, the landscape changed dramatically. The foliage fell away and the gray limestone lay exposed. Between the karst towers was a barren, pockmarked plain, punctuated by petrified stumps and the slant of fallen, broken, stone trees.

  Disembarking from the little boat, Aria picked her way between the craters and trunks. She crouched down beside a smooth stone stump and inspected it. As a botanist, she was drawn to the evidence of plant life here.

  But as she inspected them, she realized that she had seen these trunks before, when she was with the children in the mountains. These were the same trees they had found in the grove, the ones which had brought her comfort with their swaying.

  This had been a grove like that one. The trees, now stone, had been hit with a barrage from above. From the pockmarks, it appeared it had been a meteor shower. She imagined it then, the majestic trees scorched and broken, smoke and fire stripping the vegetation from the underlying limestone. Aria stood and walked in a wide circle, stepping over the fallen trees and around the hollows in the stone beneath. Perhaps the river had risen, too, and covered the area in sediment, because the trees were preserved, perfectly suspended in the moment that their destruction had come. They had just seeded. She saw the open flowers on the ends of their delicate, feathered branches, frozen in ashen stillness.

  Perhaps there were even seedlings around. She stood, taking a deep breath of the cool air as she peered past them. At the edge of the circular blast area, she saw what she was looking for. Immature specimens, about half a meter tall. She walked to them. They were lovely, frozen in spiky petrified rows. They had probably grown throughout
the grove, but when the meteors fell these small ones had been eradicated in the middle. Here on the edge they hadn’t received the full blast. Aria sat on the smooth, bare limestone to look closer.

  She leaned down, running a gentle finger over the still plants. Some of the plants, a little further out in the tiny grove, had multiple leaves and she knelt, leaning over and placing a careful palm flat on the ground between the plants to stabilize herself and keep from falling on them. As she did, she pulled her hand back in pain and surprise. The ground between them was sharp with tiny petrified seedlings that had pricked her palm. A few were stuck a little way in her skin, like stone thorns.

  Looking at her hand, she ignored the spots of blood to focus on the seedlings. She rolled one across her palm. Aria’s eyes widened. It was Taim—the same as the little plants growing in her cottage, on the train, and across Coriol. Those tiny little plants were the seedlings of the huge, swaying trees she had seen in the grove with the children and that had made a grove here before they’d been destroyed by what seemed to be fire from above.

  She’d read that Minea was occasionally prone to localized, destructive meteor showers. Evidence of them existed all over the planet, and she was standing where one had happened.

  Aria heard a twig snap behind her and turned in time to see a man angling away from her across the edge of the barren meteor patch. His hair lay in coarse tangles down the back of his tattered jacket, and he ran lightly on boots worn and split with use. He carried a large sack, which bounced across his back as he ran.

  “Hey!” Aria called. He glanced back and moved faster. “Wait! I need help!”

  At this the man slowed and turned, warily looking across the petrified tree stumps toward her.

  “I don’t want trouble,” he called, his voice creaky. He was, Aria saw now, one of the Evaders, those who had walked away from their debts in the cities and who lived off the land in the Minean wilderness. She had known they were out here, but she’d never seen one.