Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (8 page)

Kaia glanced up to see her reflection in the long
glass window. There was a woman unfit for a mining job. She looked around the
room. Several people her age and younger sat in dejected silence. She wondered
how often they came here, how many days they sat and listened to the list of
restrictions edging them out of their chance to earn a little scrip.

The press of people barely moved to let the three
miners and the six new miners out the propped-open door. As they passed, Kaia
caught sight of someone waving at her from just inside the door. It was Chip,
one of her passengers, and she had walked right past him. She crossed the room
to hug him.

“Chip! How are you?” She regretted the formulaic
question the moment it left her lips. She could see how he was: gaunt, weary,
hemmed in by the press of the line.

He looked away briefly. “This could be the day,”
he said with forced cheer. “I was here early, and I’ve made it in the door.”

Kaia shook her head. “What’s going on? Why are
all these people here? Don’t they all,” she corrected herself, “
mostly
all have jobs?”

Chip looked around him, catching the eyes of the
others in line sympathetically. “They do, but from what they tell me, a lot of
their jobs are at a standstill because of these little plants that the city is
infested with.”

“They’re that bad?”

“Some places. The water plant and the mill have
whole stations full of them. Usually I come here and pick up a day’s work at a
time, but the last few days, with so many of the stations down, it’s tough to
get anything.”

 
“I’m here to see what I can do
about that,” she said, patting his arm reassuringly.

But when Kaia left the office an hour later, she
had changed nothing. Saras’s employment specialist was insistent that only “skilled”
workers would be utilized. When she listed the skills of her passengers, the
man had the audacity to laugh.

“Lady,” the specialist had said, “your friends
are on the wrong planet.”

Ethan walked onto the short liftstrip outside the
Saras Company’s Coriol Headquarters the next morning. He saw the little airship
that would fly them over the forest and deep into the Karst Mountains to do the
survey the UEG had requested. Saras’s survey crew was standing on the strip,
waiting for the airship door to open. They were dressed in red jackets marked with
the Saras triangle and toting big packs. Ethan could see nine of them and
through the window of the craft, the pilot. There were six men and three women
outside. One of the women had short, curly gray hair. She gestured to the
others as she spoke, herding them toward the craft. By her commanding demeanor
and the silver triangle on her jacket, it was obvious that she was in charge.

She glanced at him as he approached. Her eyes
narrowed and she put herself between him and her team members, who were entering
the craft.

“I’m Maggie Schübling, captain of this crew.” She
had the rough voice of a miner: the growl of vocal chords worn raw by years of
breathing Yynium dust.

Ethan smiled, trying to put her at ease. “I’m
Ethan Bryant, the Colony Offices sent me to ride along with you today.”

“To keep an eye on us,” Schübling said. She
chuckled. “That’s backwards. The Colony Officers are the ones that need
watching.” She dismissed him with a grunt and followed her team onto the craft.

When he climbed aboard, most of them were already
sitting and chatting. One seat remained, near the front, beside Schübling. He
sat down and she turned immediately and looked him in the eye as the craft
lifted.

Though Ethan liked being out of the office, he
didn’t always like the role of government overseer. Whether he was doing
inspections, reports, or observations like this one, he still felt more akin to
the workers than to his colleagues in the government, but the refiners and
haulers didn’t see him as one of them. Judging from the look she was giving him—as
if he were a krech, the many-legged Minean cockroach, scuttling across the
bathroom floor—neither did this woman.

“We don’t need a babysitter, you know.”

Ethan nodded. “I know. It’s a good excuse for me
to get out of my office, though.” He meant it to be funny, but he could see
from her face she didn’t think it was.

“You don’t like working in the temperature-controlled,
reinforced Colony Offices then?” she asked.

Ethan glanced out the window. As the craft rose
above the city, he was again taken aback by the sprawling industrial district.
He could see the dust rising from the refinery, and lines of weary workers
making their way through the barren streets. She was right. He had nothing to
complain about.

“I like my job,” he said.

Coriol, like all the settlements on Minea, had
been planned and filled very carefully. Every ship they’d intentionally brought
here had doctors and teachers and managers and even strong laborers chosen for
the contribution they would make to society. It reminded Ethan of the old
playground activity of choosing teams. Each company chose, from the available applicants,
the people who would give them a competitive edge over the other companies and
fill a slot in their workforce. If he hadn’t been voted a Governor, he wouldn’t
even have a job here.

Ethan glanced past the pilot, out the front
windscreen, and saw the cottages passing underneath. They were as pretty and as
modern as the brochures back on earth had promised, but paying for their
utilities and living at the opposite end of the city from their work had been
too much for many workers, and they’d moved from the cottages to the cement
tenements in the industrial district, leaving room for the passengers of Ship
12-22 in the blue cottages at the edge of town.

Thinking about the tenements crowded, stifling
apartments that had originally been built to house the first builders and
farmers on Minea made Ethan feel claustrophobic, and he was relieved to see his
house as they passed over the edge of the city. It was easy to spot because of
all of Aria’s plants, which seemed to spill out of the house from the window
boxes she had built, and which were growing all over the yard.

The craft was very fast, and small and light.
Ethan hoped it would be maneuverable enough in between the karst peaks.

The Karst Mountains were not like the folded
mountain range to the west, where most of the other settlements were. Those
mountains consisted of large, thick peaks kilometers in diameter. The Karst Mountains
were stone towers, jagged and steep, that dropped to valley floors covered in
jungle. Vegetation clung to the towers, and their sheer faces made them nearly
unscalable.

The captain grunted, pulling his attention away
from the scenery. “Don’t get in our way today. You can take your location notes
when we touch down, but I don’t want to see you again until rendezvous.” She
reached down and pulled a device out of her pack.

It was yellow, with a black screen and the word “Suremap”
across the front of it. She tinkered with some dials and pointed it out the
window, pressing a button.

Instantly, the scene they were seeing in between
the patches of fog appeared on the screen in two-dimensional detail. She
pointed it at her feet and pressed the button again. What Ethan assumed to be
the land below appeared.

He loved the tools of various trades. When his
friend and former passenger, Luis, showed him the tools he used to work clay
into plates and cups and platters and bowls, Ethan had itched to become a potter.
Now he wanted to get his hands on a Suremap device learn the layout of this new
land.

He gazed at the screen. On it Ethan saw a sharp
spike of land directly in front of them. As he opened his mouth to shout to the
pilot, a towering stone peak suddenly materialized out of the fog and the
little survey ship banked sharply to the left. Ethan was thrown sideways
against his seat straps, glimpsing for a dizzying moment the thick forested
ridge of the karst tower they’d almost clipped.

“Sorry,” the pilot said.

“Nice flying,” Ethan replied. “Thought that one
had our names on it.”

The pilot chuckled. “It wasn’t as close as it looked.
I think we’re about there.”

The craft set down in a narrow meadow between two
of the shrouded blue monuments. Grass grew up to their knees and ringing the
field were lush trees and bushes. Ethan fought the urge to lie down and watch
the fog rolling through the little valley. If Aria was here, and the children,
he could spend the morning that way, but now there was work to be done. Though
he was along only to observe, he introduced himself to the crew and then helped
two of them, Carlisle and Collins, unload the survey crew’s equipment from the
ship. Then, as they began to fan out over the meadow, aiming their Suremap
devices around them, Ethan quickly jotted down location notes to prove they’d
come where the UEG wanted them. He stood watching them until the crew captain
glared at him, then he wandered off to let them do their work.

Ethan still loved the taste of early morning air
on Minea. It was fragrant, especially here among the karst where white aurelia
flowers glowed among the rich greenery. Thick round calpha fruits hung from
gravity-defying vines covering the limestone formations. The air was still
crisp in the shadows of the towers, and he walked a little slower as he watched
the fog shifting between the peaks. He took out his missive and snapped a photo
of himself in the meadow, then tried sending it to Aria, but there was no
connection out here.

As he left the little meadow, he heard the
laughing sound of water and followed it. The grassy meadow gave way to a narrow
passage between two of the towers and he pushed his way through the vines that
hung down from the massive monuments like a curtain. On the other side he found
a small, swift stream. Beside it, nestled between the stream and the tower, was
a boulder worn smooth from eons of rain. He settled himself on it and pulled
out a nutrition bar.

Chewing, he leaned back against the tower and
closed his eyes. The sound of the water was immensely calming, and the silence
beyond it welcome. Though he had become used to life with his wife and two
small children, and though he’d lived in the bustling city for four years, his
time as Caretaker of the stasis ship still affected him. He had been, then,
completely alone, and something about those years of isolation had never left
him. It was part of why the onslaught of other people’s thoughts had been such
a shock. If he’d been used to hearing the voices of those around him, perhaps hearing
their thoughts wouldn’t have been so difficult.

It hadn’t helped that at the beginning he’d been
swarmed by people so much of the time. They came to praise him, to thank him,
to question him. They came at all times of the day and night, and the Caretaker
had come to dread the knocks on his door.

They had known he was telepathic. He told everyone
who came. Thoughts were sacred, intimate. By hearing them, Ethan could know a
person in an instant better than their mother knew them, better than their
spouse knew them. Once, after he’d been made governor, the UEG asked if he
would gather some intel using his telepathy. Ethan had walked out of the
office. He didn’t blame them. They saw it as an advantage. But Ethan knew that
crossing into the threshold of someone’s mind was more than that.

Even when the people of Coriol didn’t come to his
cottage, the incessant presence of their thoughts was with him. He had
increasingly withdrawn from people and had found himself escaping into the
forest behind his cottage and clearing his mind in solitude.

Minea was an excellent place for that. Though
colonization efforts had continued, there were still only a few million people
on the planet. It was simply impossible to get people across the vast reaches
of space fast enough to fill the new planet very quickly. And, there were fewer
coming. Since Ship 12-22 had originally been diverted from Minea by the hostile
aliens, people back on Earth were much more hesitant to undertake the journey.

The vines next to him rustled and Brynn Tucker, a
young woman on the team, stepped through. She jumped at the unexpected sight of
him, then smiled. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t know you were back here.”

“Who’s back here?” Schübling called as she
shouldered through the vines. “Oh,” her eyes narrowed, “Bryant.”

Ethan sat up. “Just enjoying the quiet.”

Schübling eyed him then dismissed him. She waved
her hand at Brynn. “We’ve got two valleys comin’ up. You go west with the
cousins. Collins and Jade will be with me. We’ll rendezvous with Carlisle, Espinoza,
and Baker back at the craft when we’re done.” She stood aside, waiting to relay
the instructions to the rest of the group.

Brynn nodded, making her way past the boulder and
splashing across the stream, then veering off to the right. Ethan scrambled
down to follow her. Schübling didn’t want him in her group, and he didn’t want
to wait on the boulder all day, so he might as well stick with the group going west.
Behind him, two other men whose badges read “Ayo Ndaiye” and “Badu Traore,”
followed him through the stream. They chattered as the group wound their way
deeper into the maze.

“Did you go out with her last night?” Traore
asked Ndaiye, who was struggling along behind him with his pack of equipment.

“Tonight,” Ndaiye said laboriously.

“Ahhh, what you gonna do?”

“The best noodle stew in Coriol,” Ndaiye
responded.

Traore stopped on the trail and turned around to
throw a playful punch. “Cousin, you take her to the cheapest place in town, you
won’t see that girl anymore,” Traore laughed.

“Well, you know a lot about running women off,”
Ndaiye jabbed back. “Syllia took off after, what, two weeks?”

“Shut up, Ayo.” Ethan glanced back to see Traore’s
sudden sullen expression.

“Sorry, cousin, too far.” Ndaiye’s voice was warm
and apologetic.

Ethan felt for them both trying to date on their
meager wages. Scrip was tight. He’d heard things were getting tough for the
workers around here. These guys didn’t make as much as they would have back on
Earth, especially if they were relatively new. The way Ndaiye was struggling
with his pack made Ethan suspect he hadn’t worked in surveying long. And they
were the lucky ones. Surveying was relatively easy and clean work, and not a
bad way to pay off what you owed to Saras.

“Ay, Bryant.” Ndaiye’s thick accent made Ethan’s
last name sound exotic. “You been out here much?”

Ethan appreciated the man’s attempt to include
him. “Not this deep. Mostly just out to the parks with my family.”

“Nobody been this deep in these mountains but
us!” Ndaiye called. “Ahhh, you’re in for a treat today! I’m going to find you a
big juicy kwai fruit to try!”

Ethan had heard of the kwai fruit. Though common,
the kwai plant was not an abundant producer, so it took skill and no small
amount of luck to find a fruit. “I hope you can. I’ve heard they’re delicious.”

“He’s got a good eye for finding them,” Traore
spoke up. His feelings were seemingly mended and he and Ndaiye picked up their
banter again. Ethan glanced up to see the wisps of fog clearing. The wind swept
them aside and the peaks appeared at their full height above the little group.