Ariston_Star Guardians

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  “I’ve heard sounds too,” Mick added, shivering when she remembered how dead people had seemed to moan in that wreck.

  “What about you?” Dev prompted Woodruff as Mick used her finger to scrawl words on the holographic notepad.

  Hallucinations, audio and visual. Headaches.

  “Same as the captain. Things out of the corner of my eye. A couple of times, I thought I saw… well, ghosts, for lack of a better term. White apparitions you could see through. That’s been when the lighting is poor. It’s stupid, but it’s made me not want to go to my bunk, even though I’m exhausted.”

  Weariness, Mick added to the list.

  “And here I thought you were staying in here to talk to me because of my wit and charm,” Dev said. “Not because you were afraid of monsters under your bed.”

  “Ghosts under my bed, thank you. And your wit and charm were absolutely what made me choose to spend time with you. I could have spent time with the weird, naked man in the mess hall.” Mick started to smile, but Woodruff added, “I left him for the captain.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. Maybe Mick read too much into the gesture, but she thought he was suggesting she was spending too much time with a guest that they shouldn’t trust.

  But if it turned out he was a law officer, did that change things?

  Not if he believed they were criminals, Mick thought grimly. Damn it, she’d had a bad feeling about this mission from the time they had reached orbit. Now, she wished she’d turned around and headed home, and to hell with the money.

  “Yes, the naked men should always be left for me,” Mick said, focusing on her list instead of accusing stares. “Medtech?” she said, waving a hand in front of the device she’d set on the counter. “Are you there?”

  “B.A.S. Delta at your service, Captain,” the medical scanner said. “How can I be of assistance?”

  “We’re trying to figure out what could cause some specific symptoms.” Mick always felt stupid talking to computers and phones and other devices, even if the technology was commonplace at home now too. “Hallucinations, weariness, and headaches.”

  “And seizures,” Dev asked, with a grimace.

  “Do we include something that only one person has experienced?” Mick asked.

  “Some people are more genetically predisposed to experience certain symptoms than others, and humans often react differently to the same stressors,” the AI said.

  “That was a yes, right?” Mick asked.

  “Yes.” The AI sounded dry. It probably knew it was dealing with a medical ignoramus. “Are there more symptoms?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Mick grumbled.

  “These symptoms all manifested after people had been outside of the ship and on this planet,” Dev added.

  “That’s not exactly true.” Mick scratched her jaw. “I was still in the cockpit when I saw on the sensor display, or I thought I saw, that there were two life forms—two people still alive—in that crashed ship. But I later learned the people had been dead since the ship crashed.”

  “You learned that from our guest?” Woodruff frowned, clearly not ready to trust anything Ariston said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure why he would lie about that.”

  “To make it seem like his people aren’t huge assholes for murdering people still alive at a crash site?”

  “They’re the ones who caused the crash,” Dev said. “I think that makes them assholes, regardless.”

  “I got there before they did,” Mick said. “I saw with my own eyes that there weren’t any survivors.”

  “Your own eyes that have been seeing things?” Woodruff asked.

  Mick sucked in an alarmed breath. What if she’d seen those people as dead, but one or two of them had actually been alive? What if they’d turned imploring eyes toward her, but she hadn’t seen it? She’d seen something else. Did hallucinations work like that? Could she trust anything she’d witnessed since coming down to this planet?

  “I think things only started happening once we got outside and were exposed to the atmosphere here,” Woodruff said. “Because Sven, who hasn’t been out there, says he feels mostly normal. We’ll have to check with Weiss to see what he’s been experiencing. He’s in his cabin now, sleeping, I imagine.”

  “But we weren’t exposed to the atmosphere,” Dev pointed out. “Mick was always in her armor, and we only went out in our hazmat suits, suits specifically designed to protect us from exposure to an alien atmosphere. If there was something in the air, we shouldn’t have been exposed to it.”

  “Maybe we had rips in our suits.”

  “That might be believable for one person, but not all. And Mick’s armor is as airtight as a spacesuit, right?”

  Mick nodded. “It essentially is a spacesuit. With a full oxygen tank, you can survive in space for several hours.”

  “I think we need to operate under the assumption that we’ve been exposed to something,” Woodruff said. “Our suits were designed on Earth. This is an alien world. Maybe there’s something out there the makers didn’t anticipate.”

  Mick figured the makers of her armor, the space-faring Dethocoleans, had anticipated everything, but she didn’t argue the point. It wasn’t as if she had another explanation.

  “Ariston hasn’t seemed that affected, either,” she pointed out, recalling that he hadn’t seemed surprised when she jumped at tricks of the eyes, but she hadn’t seen him do anything similar. “He admitted to being tired, but that’s about it.”

  “Can we leave him out as a data point?” Woodruff asked. “We’ve already decided that anything that comes out of his mouth is suspect.”

  He’d decided that. But again, Mick didn’t argue. She couldn’t prove him wrong.

  “We don’t have that many data points,” Dev said. “To dismiss one doesn’t seem like a good idea. Especially if he’s been out there as much as the rest of us and isn’t affected, or is affected to a lesser degree.”

  “Maybe he’s not letting on that he’s affected,” Woodruff said. “If he considers us enemies, he wouldn’t want to show weakness.”

  “I never saw him shooting at shadows,” Mick said.

  “Did you do that?”

  She grimaced. “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Maybe it’s because his ancestors were dropped off on another planet,” Dev said. “Could he be genetically different from us after two-thousand-odd years?”

  “That’s only about fifty generations,” Woodruff said. “There could have been some changes, but it’s hard to imagine the people in the rest of the galaxy are all that different from the people of Earth. Unless they’ve been tinkering with their genomes. They are supposedly more advanced than we are.” His lips twisted with distaste. Nobody seemed to like admitting that.

  “But the rest of the men trapped down here are affected,” Mick said. “Earlier, they were shooting at each other.”

  “Are we sure that’s not normal behavior?”

  She snorted. “I wouldn’t stake my life on it, but Ariston seemed to think it odd.”

  “Ariston, Ariston,” Woodruff grumbled. “How do we know he’s not the one who’s infected us with something? Or put something weird in our drinking water?”

  “This started before we ever saw him.” Mick, tired of having to defend Ariston, turned toward the medical device. “Let’s just see if something comes up with a scan, eh? BAS, can you check us for atypical bacteria or viruses or anything that might explain our brains doing funny things?”

  “I only have a scan on file for you, Captain,” the AI said. “Since we did not record scans of your passengers, I do not have a baseline, which would make it difficult to ascertain ‘funny things,’ unless something blatantly obvious is awry.”

  “Well, scan me first, but then do them too. Maybe we’re all kinds of awry.”

  Dev nodded ruefully and peered into her microscope as the scanner examined Mick. It emitted a beam of light that slowly traversed her body from head to foot.

&nb
sp; “What kind of scans does that thing do exactly?” Woodruff asked. “I assume those aren’t X-rays since the rest of us haven’t been asked to step out of the room.”

  Mick, who knew little of medical technology, whether Earth-based or Dethocolean, was about to ask the AI to explain when Dev set a slide aside and gave her a troubled look.

  “A problem?” Mick asked. Another one?

  “A peculiarity.”

  “I’m not sure that sounds better than a problem.”

  Dev smiled slightly. “Based on the information that Umbra gathered, we’ve been operating on the assumption that the humans who were deposited here didn’t have very long to establish their civilization and propagate the species before a mega volcano blew, which created an ash cloud around the entire planet that caused ninety percent of the flora and fauna to die off, including humans.”

  Woodruff nodded. “That’s what I was told too.”

  Mick spread a hand. She’d only been told to pilot the ship.

  “Do we have an exact date for when humans were taken from Earth?” Dev asked.

  “Uh, two-thousand years is what I heard,” Mick said.

  “Approximately two thousand three hundred and eighty-four of your Earth years,” the AI said. “I am ready to scan the next individual.”

  Dev waved for Woodruff to go next. She seemed to be finding her slides interesting.

  “Is there a comm in here?” Dev asked. “I have a question for Dr. Lee.”

  Mick moved so Woodruff could take her spot next to the scanner, and she tapped the wall panel, bringing up a map, and tapped Lee’s cabin.

  A long moment passed before a groggy, “What?” came in response to the comm’s ding. Mick wasn’t sure if it was Lee or his cabin mate, Weiss.

  “Dr. Lee?” Dev asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you had a chance to date those ruins yet? I know you picked up some samples of the rubble in the hope that carbon dating would be effective here.”

  Mick shifted uneasily, remembering Ariston’s claim that the ruins were protected. Would picking up a couple of rocks cause her and her passengers to be classified as criminals? Ariston had implied just being down here might cause that.

  “It’s the middle of the night, Dr. Bakshi,” Lee groaned.

  “I assume that’s a no. I would appreciate it if you would do so at your earliest convenience.”

  “Why? What’s going on?” Lee sounded more alert now. Intrigued by a mystery?

  Mick watched Dev, waiting for the mystery to be rolled out. She didn’t even know what was odd yet.

  “My soil analysis provides evidence to support that a major volcanic eruption did happen in the planet’s past,” Dev said, “depositing several feet of ash in this area, but it doesn’t look like it happened two thousand years ago. Judging by the layers of deposits atop it, I would guess it happened three thousand years ago.”

  Lee hesitated before answering. “I’ll date the ruins now.”

  “Good,” Dev said.

  They both sounded grim.

  “So, the volcano erupted before the humans were deposited here?” Mick asked, trying not to sound—or feel—like a dumb soldier. “What’s the significance?”

  “If I’m correct,” Dev said, “the volcano isn’t, as the galaxy apparently believes, what killed them off.”

  “Then what did?”

  “We don’t know.”

  13

  Ariston chewed on his breakfast, one of his uninspiring ration bars, and walked up to the cockpit to see if anyone was monitoring the comms for planet-to-orbit chatter. The meteorologist, Sven Safin, had been up there earlier, but Ariston had dozed for a few hours and wasn’t sure if the man was still there. Ariston slept lightly—especially when among potential enemies—and thought he would have heard Sven walk through the dining area if he’d done so, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He had woken when Mick had walked in earlier, stopping to look at him without brightening the lights. He hadn’t stirred, or opened his eyes to more than slits, wanting to see what she would do. A silly part of him had hoped she would take her clothes off and join him under the blanket, but the rational part of him had known that was unlikely.

  He remembered all too well how her eyes had widened when he’d hinted that her people were down here illegally and that some help might win her leniency. That had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, one he’d regretted almost immediately. But he’d hoped she would jump at the chance to offer her ship and her full assistance to apprehend the relic raiders. He’d wanted to be on the same side she was, but he should have known she would only be uneasy if he revealed himself as a Star Guardian.

  True, he hadn’t exactly done that, but she’d probably read between the lines.

  She’d whispered his name to wake him from several feet away, not getting close, perhaps thinking he would lash out if he were startled awake. Then she’d run a medical scanner over him, saying they were checking everybody. He’d lain there without objecting, though he’d made sure the device was a scanner. It had crossed his mind that she might want to knock him out and dump him outside of the ship.

  But all she had done was take the scan and return to sickbay. He hadn’t seen her since. Of course, he’d been sleeping since.

  He found Sven in the cockpit, also sleeping, his head back in the chair, his feet on the console. If there had been comm chatter, the man wouldn’t likely have heard it.

  Ariston sighed and settled into the co-pilot’s seat. The sensors showed the storm still raging outside and dawn less than an hour away.

  The lights were dimmed in the cockpit, but the glow of the displays allowed him to see well enough. A deck of Kapti cards with scenes on the back from the ranching planet of Kressin rested on the console.

  Maybe Sven had been entertaining himself with a solitaire game. Or maybe it was Mick’s deck. She claimed to have won that down payment playing Kapti, after all. He wondered if there was any truth to that, or if she’d acquired the ship by illegal means.

  If the latter, she should have another reason to want to work with him, so he would speak on her behalf, and they could request a pardon. But could he promise that? He didn’t know if the courts would pardon that large of a crime. Stealing a ship, or money for a ship, was a lot worse than trespassing.

  He thumbed through the deck. He knew the game of Kapti reasonably well. Even though cards weren’t a traditional Dethocolean pastime, he’d served with crew from all over the Confederation, and such games were popular on many other planets. On his last ship, he’d played numerous times with two other engineers, the helm officer, and the doctor. He hadn’t been the best at bluffing, but he’d been good at calculating odds and counting cards, so he’d won more often than he’d lost.

  Soft footsteps sounded behind him, and he looked back as Mick walked in.

  “I came to check on the status of the storm.” She quirked her eyebrows at the snoozing Sven before shifting her gaze toward the view screen. Since it was smothered with snow, there wasn’t much to see.

  “Still raging.” Ariston ran his thumb along the edge of the deck, ruffling the cards. “I have the comm alert turned up to high, so even sleeping people will hear it if someone starts talking on Eryx’s channel.”

  “You’re sure?” She looked at the meteorologist again—his eyes were twitching under his lids. Then she noticed the cards in his hands.

  “Play a game while we wait?” he offered nonchalantly.

  “Is that a hobby of yours? I thought you might do push-ups or sit-ups in your down time.” This time, her quirking eyebrows seemed to point toward his chest.

  Ariston had donned his underwear and his mostly dry black shirt, the long sleeves hiding the telltale Star Guardian tattoo on his forearm. He wasn’t sure yet if he should confirm to her that he worked for the organization. She might already know, but she might also suspect him of concocting an elaborate ruse and still being associated with the salvage ship.

  As if his rus
es were that elaborate—or good.

  He wished they could lay all their cards out on the table with each other. He was tired of the half-truths and games, games he wasn’t good at. But he had a job to do. Even if she and her ship weren’t his assignment, he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen them. Ideally, he should find a way to bring them in, for questioning at the least, in addition to Eryx and the salvage ship.

  And what would happen to Mick if he did? And if she’d done worse things than trespassing? Fines, jail time. Or a banishment back to Gaia. She’d been correct in pointing out that Gaia didn’t yet fall under Confederation jurisdiction, but that wouldn’t necessarily save her from punishment.

  “When I’m alone, perhaps,” Ariston said, remembering she’d asked a question. “But sit-ups aren’t much entertainment for two.”

  “You could do them, and I could watch.” She smirked.

  “I’d rather watch you do some,” he said, responding to the flirty comment before his mind considered whether he should or not. Should he be keeping a professional distance? It was easy to banter with her.

  “I guess we could wager such things.” Mick waved to the cards. “Loser entertains the winner with push-ups.”

  “Seems fair. How many can you do?” Ariston eyed her arms.

  A long-sleeve shirt covered them, but the flimsy, lightweight material hugged her form. Not that it mattered. The memory of her naked in the decon shower had been forever burned into his brain. He well remembered her sexy mix of muscles and athleticism and curves and femininity.

  “I haven’t practiced push-ups specifically in a while. Maybe sixty or seventy in two minutes.”

  “That’s not bad for a woman.”

  “It’s excellent for a woman. It’s not bad for a man.”

  He grinned at the touch of cockiness to her words. She wasn’t wrong.

  “How many can you do?” she asked.