Ariston_Star Guardians

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  Growling, Mick took aim. From her position, she had a better bead on the man in coveralls and lined up her shot—he didn’t seem to have noticed her because he wasn’t ducking back behind the boulder. He was too busy shooting into the airlock, maybe trying to make his shots ricochet around inside the chamber to kill Woodruff.

  Mick fired. She’d hesitated because he wasn’t in armor, and shooting him in the head could kill him, but he was trying to kill her people. She had no idea how or why she was in the middle of some lawless Wild West shootout, but she would end it, one way or another.

  The man must have seen her at the last second because he jerked back behind the boulder. Her en-bolt still caught him. It looked like it grazed his temple.

  Mick sprinted over the boulder-strewn ground, hoping she could get to him before he recovered. As she ran, another armored man flew overhead, this one sailing at least twenty meters before landing hard on the ground.

  Just as Mick rounded the boulder where the injured man hid, an armored figure came up from behind him. Ariston. He gripped the unarmored man around the waist, hoisted him over his shoulder, and tore the bolt bow from his hands.

  “You going to throw that one too?” Mick asked him. “I know those first two enjoyed their ride.” She glanced toward the one he’d just thrown, thinking he might run back into the fray, but he was crawling on hands and knees in the direction his comrade had already fled.

  “I thought I’d make him my second prisoner,” Ariston said, ignoring the man’s kicking and pounding. Since he was in armor and his new prisoner was not, he could do that.

  “Who’s your first?” Mick narrowed her eyes at him.

  “You were.”

  Were or are?

  “Saying things like that doesn’t make me inclined toward liking you.” Mick thought about aiming her weapon at his chest, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. They were close enough that he could grab it from her or knock it aside. She hated to admit it, but he was a more experienced fighter than she was, and she had a feeling he had better armor than she did too.

  “That’s unfortunate, but I’m still willing to consider releasing you if you fly me off this rock.”

  “Love to, but I’m not sure about the status of my ship.”

  A roar sounded in the distance, and Mick turned in time to see a sleek blue shuttle taking off. It flew straight up, no doubt heading to where the salvage ship waited.

  “You didn’t go after that pilot,” Ariston said, sounding disappointed.

  Mick winced, the ramifications sinking in. He had destroyed the other shuttle, and her ship looked like it wouldn’t take off again without a lot of repairs, repairs they might not have the resources to carry out here. Not only were they possibly stranded, but a bunch of their enemies were, too, men who would feel angry and vengeful that they were left behind.

  “I started to,” Mick said, “but I heard gunshots. I thought my people were in trouble.”

  She looked toward the Viper’s open hatch and spotted two yellow hoods peering out in her direction. One man pointed his gun toward Ariston uncertainly.

  “That’s you over there, right, Captain?” one called. Woodruff. “Do you need help?”

  Ariston grunted, probably amused at the idea of the little handgun doing something to “help” against his armor.

  “We’ve got it under control for now,” Mick said, though she’d had little do to with it. In addition to the men Ariston had battered and hurled across the landing area, she spotted a couple others climbing to their feet and limping away.

  “Guard this one,” Ariston said, shifting his burden to set the man in coveralls down. “I’ll try to round up the others before they escape.”

  “Is it typical on your world for one prisoner to be charged with guarding another?” she asked.

  “Captain!” Woodruff blurted, shifting his aim ninety degrees and firing toward the ruins.

  Mick couldn’t see what he was firing at, but she ran in that direction.

  Ariston dropped his prisoner and raced after her.

  “Stop shooting, Woodruff,” Mick yelled, not wanting bullets ricocheting off her armor.

  She ran around a clump of boulders and looked for his target. She didn’t see anyone. Had the person already fled?

  “Did you see it?” Woodruff asked, a shake in his voice. What the hell had he seen?

  “No.” Mick peered left and right, then looked at Ariston as he came up to her shoulder. “You see anything?”

  “No,” he said, “and nothing’s on my sensors.” He gazed back in the direction they’d come from. His prisoner had disappeared. He sighed. “There’s one extra person to round up.”

  “You sure you want to go back out there?” Mick asked, eyeing the deepening shadows among the boulders and the ruins. She found her gaze drawn to the top of the pyramid, to the dark stone temple or whatever it was up there. The shadows were especially thick under that roof, and she thought she saw something stirring in them. “This place is giving me the heebie jeebies.”

  “The what? You flummoxed my translator.”

  “It’s creepy. This place is creepy.”

  “Ah. I don’t disagree, but we don’t want those men out there, thinking up trouble. When night falls, they might try to come up with ways to sabotage your ship.”

  “My ship that’s the only way off the planet for anyone? Assuming we can get it working?”

  Mick looked toward her people again—someone else had come out along with Woodruff. Someone with only a long stick for a weapon. Good grief, that wasn’t Dev’s soil sampler, was it? The two of them were gazing past Mick’s shoulder and toward the ruins, as if they saw something.

  “I’d think those guys out there would rather stow away,” Mick added. “Or turn themselves in to get a ride.”

  “They may expect the captain to send a shuttle back down to pick them up,” Ariston said.

  “A shuttle we could possibly ambush and steal if we can’t get my ship working?” Mick winced at the question, hoping it was rhetorical. But she didn’t know and wouldn’t until she got the damage reports. Also, she was well aware that she wasn’t an engineer and couldn’t do anything miraculous when it came to repairs. She’d taken a class on simple repairs and keeping the ship running, but judging by those scorch marks and the dent in the engine section, it would need far more than that.

  “Possibly.” Ariston tapped the side of his helmet thoughtfully. “The captain wouldn’t send a shuttle if his men were all captured, but he might if they’re still free. I’m not sure what they’re telling him, but the fact that I’m no longer receiving the comm chatter means I’ve been removed from the channel.” He lowered his hand. “I’d hoped to take them by surprise and move quickly, subduing everyone before they could report what exactly happened, but I may have overestimated my abilities.”

  “I say we leave them running around, see if we can hack into their comm channel from my ship, and make plans according to what we hear.”

  “Do you have a channel hacker?”

  “And a jammer.” Mick smiled at him. “You should have asked for my help in the beginning. I could have kept them from contacting their mother ship.”

  She thought he might have a quip or sarcastic response, but his gaze seemed troubled as he looked down at her. The devices had come with her ship, courtesy of the previous owner.

  Belatedly, it occurred to her to wonder if such things might be illegal. But if they were, it would be in Confederation space, not way out here. As far as she’d heard, anything went in uninhabited systems.

  “All right,” Ariston said. “I’ll take a look at your ship while you attempt to listen in on them.”

  “Look at it? Because you want to see if it has a cell sufficient for storing prisoners or because you have some skills when it comes to fixing things?”

  “I can answer both of those questions in the affirmative.”

  He slung the strap of his bolt bow over his shoulder and walked toward the Viper
.

  Mick frowned after him, wondering if he truly considered her his prisoner and why. If he did, she would definitely find a way to disavow him of that notion.

  She yawned as she walked, her eyelids gritty and heavy now that her blood was cooling. How long since she had slept? It didn’t seem like it had been an inordinately long time, but the afternoon’s events had left her weary.

  She glanced toward the top of the pyramid again, thought she saw a dark figure lurking in the shadows, and hastened toward the ship. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her suit’s scanners detected a couple of people in the ruins, the injured men most likely, but did not register any life signs on or in the pyramid.

  6

  Ariston stopped in front of the open hatch. Three yellow-suited individuals stood inside the airlock. One stood in the hatchway with a palm out toward him while another pointed a small weapon at the ground in front of him.

  He stepped aside so Mick could talk to her people. He wasn’t sure why he assumed she was in charge, rather than being some security officer who had been sent out to scout, but he felt confident that she was.

  “Captain?” the one with the gun asked as Mick stepped up beside Ariston. “Is he coming in, or…?”

  “Where’s Dr. Garcia?” a second man asked, pointing at his shoulder with the hand that wasn’t blocking Ariston. Whatever that yellow suit was for, it wasn’t blocking weapons fire. An en-bolt had sizzled through the material, probably cutting through his flesh too.

  “Dead,” Mick said grimly.

  “Dead?” All three suited people said at once.

  “The thugs that jumped out of that first shuttle shot him before I could do anything to stop them.” Mick sounded disgusted with herself.

  It wasn’t logical—she couldn’t have been expected to win against so many—but Ariston understood the feeling. His wife had been like that. Commanders—good commanders—felt responsible for their people and didn’t forgive themselves when subordinates were lost under their command.

  “Thugs?” One man looked at Ariston.

  He clenched his teeth but didn’t say anything in his own defense, reminding himself that it would be better if these people didn’t know who he was. He would stick to the story he had given Mick.

  “Let’s go inside,” Mick said, glancing toward the ruins. “We’ll discuss everything in there.”

  “All right. You’ll have to wait while we shower.” The injured man backed fully into the airlock. “We’ll go first, and then you come in.”

  “Shower?” Ariston looked at Mick.

  “There’s a decontamination shower that we installed in the airlock chamber, but there’s only room for two at a time. Maybe three if you’re especially nerdy and scrawny.” She eyed the injured man.

  “Better than being thuggish and illiterate,” he muttered, eyeing her right back. Then he stepped inside, joining the other two people, and yanking the hatch shut with a clang.

  “I don’t understand,” Ariston said. “The atmosphere here is sufficient to keep out harmful radiation, and there aren’t any toxic substances in the air.”

  “It’s to get rid of any alien microbes that could be harmful.” She shrugged. “That’s what they told me when they insisted on installing a decon shower on my ship for this trip. I admit I’ve never heard of such a thing on Dethocoles or other planets in the Confederation. Do you people use them? I admit, I haven’t gone exploring on remote planets before.”

  You people? If she wasn’t from the Confederation, where was she from?

  Ariston had heard of the discovery of Gaia a couple of years ago, but he’d also heard that the inhabitants didn’t have ships that could get them out of their system yet, and this was clearly a Dethocolean craft.

  “Our medical scanners keep records of the bacteria that should be in your body and remove any foreign ones that appear after missions to suspect planets,” Ariston said. “There’s nothing inimical on the planets that the Wanderers chose to seed human civilizations on. As I’m sure you know, this is one of those planets.”

  She stared at him through her faceplate. “I didn’t know. Maybe they did.” She waved to indicate those inside her ship.

  He was sure someone did. Why else would they have come to loot the ruins?

  Artifacts from the early days on each of the human worlds were always desirable, with some collectors paying fortunes for them. Artifacts from a world where humans had been placed and long ago died out? Even more desirable. As far as Ariston knew, this was one of only two such planets. Tynyar had been looted thoroughly and destructively soon after its discovery, causing the Confederation government to place it and this one under their protection.

  Until Ariston had arrived, he’d assumed the stories of hauntings had been circulated by the government to deter thieves. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen several of the men react to things that weren’t there, and Mick had also done that in the ruins. He himself had experienced a few instances of seeing movement out of the corner of his eye when nothing was there. He also had a dull headache starting up, but he supposed he couldn’t blame that on ghosts. This whole situation had him uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure he had done the right thing in letting the away team run off without chasing them down.

  “Where are you from?” Ariston asked, figuring he should get more information from Mick while he could. The hatch remained shut. He wondered how long the decontamination shower would take. His people took such measures when dealing with high-radiation planets or exploring new worlds—the medical scanners weren’t perfect—but he doubted it was necessary here.

  “Arizona—Earth.”

  “Gaia?” He thought he remembered hearing that the Gaians called their world that, but he’d been busy on a mission of his own when all the news had broken about the planet’s discovery two years ago. He only remembered it at all because one of the more famous Star Guardian captains, Sagitta of Dethocoles, had been involved.

  “Yeah.”

  “You fly a Dethocolean hunter-class ship. A ship favored by… bounty hunters.” He’d almost said criminals.

  Not all bounty hunters were criminals, technically, but their methods weren’t approved by the Confederation government. The government preferred to have its own law enforcers take care of hunting down criminals. But each planet within the Confederation had its own laws and some of those without huge police forces paid for criminals to be brought in. Some governments didn’t care if those criminals were brought in dead or alive. In the Confederation, there was no death penalty. The archons kept trying to get other planetary governments to climb on board with that system, but it hadn’t happened everywhere yet.

  “I won it in a Kapti game,” Mick said. “Well, technically, I just won the down payment for it.”

  He found that unlikely, but all he asked was, “How did you get out into the system from Gaia?”

  “My sister came and got me. She was one of the original women kidnapped from Earth—Gaia—a couple of years ago. She’s training to be a pilot now. In the Confederation space fleet.” She looked at him. “You have any problems with soldiers?”

  “No.”

  He wished she were one. She was competent enough in a fight that she could be. But she had confessed to having illegal equipment in her ship, so he doubted she was. He wasn’t sure if he should believe her story about the sister or not. And winning a ship in a gambling game? That seemed highly unlikely. Where had she obtained the currency to play if she was from Gaia? Their money wasn’t even on the galactic exchange. And how had she gained the familiarity and skill with Kapti in such a short time?

  He wasn’t sure how to read the considering look she was giving him. Did she think he was a criminal? Since he’d arrived with the salvage crew? Or had he somehow given away that he was on the side of the law?

  “As long as soldiers don’t bother me, I don’t care what they do,” he added, trying to sound indifferent.

  Since her crew was taking its time with the sho
wer, Ariston headed to the rear of the ship to survey the damage it had received. He would need to look inside to see the damage the engines and generators might have taken, but he could already tell it wasn’t operable in its current state. He hoped she had extra hull plating panels.

  “Once we get inside,” Mick said, “we can—”

  She spun abruptly, dropping her hand to her weapon. She stared toward the ruins. “What was that? One of the salvage guys?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Ariston said, following her gaze.

  Deep shadows lay among the ruins now that the planet’s orange sun had drifted behind the volcanos on the horizon. She fingered her weapon.

  She cocked her ear toward the ruins. “Seriously? You didn’t hear that?”

  He shook his head. He might have thought she was crazy if he hadn’t witnessed others having similar experiences.

  “I hear moans,” she said. “They’re similar to what I heard coming from the people in the wreck earlier.”

  “The wreck?”

  “The ship your people shot down.”

  He bit his tongue on an impulse to claim that they weren’t his people. As far as she knew, they were.

  “Nobody in that ship survived the crash,” he said instead.

  “No kidding. I saw them.”

  “I mean, nobody was alive after it crashed. We scanned the ship on our way down. There couldn’t have been anybody moaning.”

  She’d been gazing out into the ruins, but now she turned to look at him again. For a long moment, she didn’t speak. Then she quietly said, “We saw two life forms on our sensors. That’s why the doctor and I went out there.”

  “You saw them before the ship crashed?”

  “After.”

  Ariston shook his head. “That’s when we ran our scans. There was nobody left living then.”

  “Maybe your equipment was faulty.”

  “Or yours was.”