Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (11 page)

“Well, just try to make ‘em all comfortable,” she
said. “Search and rescue oughta be here anytime.” She lay her head back against
the seat and closed her eyes.

As the afternoon sun washed the cottage kitchen
with gold, Aria—using a cake pan as a seed tray—mixed another handful of dark
loam into the blue Minean clay. Minea’s famed soil made beautiful houses, but
it also bound roots and blocked water. And the seeds here were sub-par. In
fact, she suspected genetic tampering, because yields on her test seeds had
been lower than expected. She had long felt the need to grow things, but the
seeds Saras sold in its gardening section each spring were hardly more than
ornamental. She couldn’t coax more than a few seedy peppers and some leggy
broccoli out of any of them.

But when she’d come back from Kaia’s, she’d been
encouraged to see a few little shoots curling out of the trays. Some of them
were wheat—real Earth wheat, her wheat—and they thrilled her with their
brilliant green. She wanted to keep them growing, so she had to try a few more
things, like abrading the clay with some more nutrient-rich soil. She’d kept a
backyard compost bin going for months, and now the thick organic material was
mixing nicely into the native dirt.

The children were both still napping. They must
have had an energetic day at Kaia’s. Aria needed to wake them and start supper,
but she stole a few more minutes to indulge in her passion for growing things.

Aria sifted the last of the new soil into the
trays. As she glanced up she saw more of the little plants growing above the
kitchen sink.

Inspecting it, she ran her fingers over the soft
leaves. These were very young seedlings, some of them just pushing out the
cotyledons—the two first leaves. Their bases branched into the webby root
system that attached to any smooth, hard surface and leached water from the
air.

She remembered Dr. Laar, one of her favorite
professors back on Earth, who had studied a group of Chlorophytum plants to see
how to increase the effectiveness of the way plants use water. She smiled as
she remembered her favorite part of the class: his accent. A small, round man,
he slipped words from his native tongue into his sentences in a charming,
absentminded way.

Before planting
,
he had said,
you must listen to the taim.

Taim meant plant in Estonian, Professor Laar’s
native language. It took her nearly a semester to figure that out. Now, it came
back to her as she realized she had started calling the ubiquitous little
Minean plant “Taim” in her mind.

A pang of sadness enveloped her as she thought
how long Dr. Laar had been dead, back on Earth. It led to thinking of her
family. Her parents, long gone, her siblings. She’d have nieces and nephews
that were older than she was now. Even they would have children and
grandchildren. Generations of her own family that she would never see. She felt
a tear sting her eye and blinked it back, refocusing on the bright little
plants, glowing in the afternoon sun streaming through the window.

Listen to the taim.
He had known, as so few seemed to, that plants could tell you what they needed.
There were ways of communicating with them. They were not so different than
people. They responded to light, to music, to kindness. Aria wondered if it was
her imagination that these little plants were straightening now, as she brushed
them with her fingertips. They almost seemed to be reaching toward her, like
they craved her presence. Perhaps they were a kind of companion plant, like
philodendrons back on Earth. Philodendrons seemed made to live where people
lived. Their glossy foliage and robust growth as a houseplant always made Aria
think that not only were they suited to the same temperatures and humidity
levels as people, but more than that, perhaps they somehow enjoyed the company
of humans.

Every plant, Aria had found, gave humanity a
gift. Perhaps it was shade, like the tall trees in the forest outside her
window, or beauty, like the aurelia flowers. Perhaps it was fragrance or
medicine, like the herbs she’d been gathering from the forest and experimenting
with since coming to Minea. She lifted a heavy chei fruit off the counter and
smelled the sweetness of its thick rind. Perhaps, like the fruits and grains, a
plant’s gift was food.

Maybe the Taim had such a gift to give. Perhaps
people could eat them? They looked a little like sprouted sweet beans in
miniature. With some encouragement, the Taim growing throughout the house was
more than enough to feed a family, and they grew remarkably fast. But to
effectively feed people, they’d need to be cultivated. Aria wondered if they’d
bear transplanting and growing in trays. She looked at the tray she’d just
filled, but the rich soil wasn’t what the Taim chose when it began to sprout.
Its seedlings liked a hard, bare surface.

A stack of Luis’ platters, plates, and bowls lay
next to her on the counter. She pulled out the biggest platter and carefully
began to lift the Taim roots off the glass of the window. They were sticky and
tiny hair-like shafts clung as she pulled them carefully away. She spread the
roots across the platter as best she could. The plants lay limply on the
colorful ceramic. This may not work.

Carrying the platter out of the kitchen, she set
it on the desk in her work room, which she jokingly called her lab. It wasn’t
much of a lab—really a spare room with a desk and some basic pieces of
equipment Ethan had procured for her over the years: a microscope, some tools,
and a strong light.

 She was tempted to pop a few of the Taim in her
mouth just to see how they’d taste, but remembered her training on poisonous
plants and decided against it. She went to check on the children, sleeping
upstairs. As she climbed she wondered what it would be like not to have food
for them in the kitchen downstairs and she felt a little surge of hope that the
Taim could help solve Coriol’s hunger problem.

As she looked at the tray of plants, she thought
about the food shortage. Why wasn’t Marcos Saras doing more about it? She had
met him plenty of times, had seen the peculiar sadness he carried with him. It
was peculiar for the most powerful man in a city, and such a young man at that,
to have such a burden. She had seen, also, his lust for Yynium. Perhaps the two
were related. He seemed to have no joy in his eyes except when he talked about
the Yynium production, how it was increasing due to their innovations, how they
would soon have enough Yynium back at Earth to send ship after ship through
space using RST.

He was so obsessed with Yynium production that
Aria suspected most of the rest of Coriol, and the Saras Company, was run by
Marcos Saras’ shadows, Theo and Veronika. They were an interesting pair, and
she could see why such opposites would be beneficial.

Aria had seen them during parties at the stone
and steel Saras mansion or at the Colony Office parties. They were always
there, always next to Saras, always watching the crowd.

Saras had always done underhanded things to keep
the inhabitants of Coriol working at peak production, but surely this food
shortage wasn’t another of his manipulations. He couldn’t be that kind of
monster. Veronika’s cold face flashed in Aria’s mind, though, and she knew she
was going to have to find out for herself what was causing it. If Saras, or his
Vice Presidents, were using it to control the people, then the Colony Offices
would have to know about it, and the sooner the better.

***

The wrecked ship’s
lights were going out one by one as the battery died and the wetness got to
exposed circuits. The survey team huddled in the damp, waiting for rescue. The
light wasn’t enough to keep them warm, but it was enough to keep their shock at
bay.

“I’m going out to take a look around,” Collins
called.

“Be careful.” Jade’s voice was strained, and
Ethan thought she might have an internal injury, though she said she was fine.

He couldn’t stand being in here any longer. Ever
since being the Caretaker of Ship 12-22, Ethan didn’t like enclosed places. He
much preferred being out in the forest or even in his broad, windowed office in
the Colony building in Coriol. “I’ll come with you.”

The two men stepped gingerly past the torn seats
in front of the gaping hole where the hatch used to be. Collins had a
flashlight, and it shone across a broad plain of the same brown crumbly dirt
Ethan had felt through the side of the ship when they’d first crashed. It was
springy and dense when they stepped out onto it, and within a few steps they
found themselves sinking a bit.

There was a sharp, acrid smell, and Ethan found
himself gagging and coughing as they struggled away from the craft.

A flash of white on the ground caught Ethan’s
attention. “Collins,” he called, “shine that light over here.”

The beam fell on the arched skeletal ribcage of a
dog-sized creature, half buried in the muddy floor. The bones were stripped of
flesh and skin, so Ethan couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a wing jutted out
from one side. Ethan shuddered. It was a huge, bat-like creature, fallen to the
gummy floor and stuck there, leaving only its bones.

He took the light from Collins and shined it
above them, but powerful as it was, it was lost in the immensity of the cavern
before it reached whatever was up there. Ethan imagined the creatures that must
be hanging above them, dog-sized bats, waiting for their nocturnal feeding
time. He glanced down with the realization that the sticky, crumbly pile they
were walking on was a huge guano field. That explained the smell.

This was the first he had seen of Minean bats,
but many species on Minea were like species back on earth. The swimming
lizards, though slightly different than lizards back on Earth, had evolved in a
similar fashion. This was probably true of bats, as well, he thought to calm
himself. Bats on Earth were mostly insect eaters, and even the hunting species
back home usually only took the odd bird or snake. These bat-like creatures
were—as he always told Polara about other animals—probably more scared of
people than people were of them.

But when he stepped off the guano field onto
hard, solid stone, he still felt a little relief. Here the great cavern narrowed
to a large tunnel, big enough to fly the ship into, if it had been capable of
flight—and if there hadn’t been enormous stalactites and stalagmites studding
the ceiling and floor of the passage. He stopped at the opening and shined the
light inside. It looked like a giant shark’s mouth, gaping open, with the huge
teeth casting shifting shadows in the beam.

Movement caught Ethan’s eye. He blinked as what
looked like a figure slipped behind one of the giant teeth on his right. Ethan
glanced at Collins, but Collins was looking back up the guano field at the
craft.

“Did you see that?” Ethan asked.

Collins turned. “What?” He peered into the
darkness.

Ethan strode to the big stalagmite and walked
around it with the light. There was nothing there. He shone the light farther
down the passage, but neither saw nor heard anything.

“Let’s go back,” he said, annoyed with himself
for letting his imagination run away. The dark was beginning to get to him.

***

Ethan had paced the aisle of the craft numerous
times in the hours since the crash. Now he crossed to the spot in the back
where Jade and Collins had just finished stacking the supplies. He tried not to
look at the two dead crew members on the floor.

They’d found nine survey packs. Ethan opened one
up and sorted through the contents: lengths of rope, a powerful Maxlight flashlight,
a pair of gloves, a vest with a round light on each shoulder, a pair of
Everwarm coveralls, four Nutriblock bars, three bags of water, a whistle, a
Suremap device, a rain poncho, a mirror, a few fuel bricks, and, in this one,
half a sandwich, a chocolate nut bar, and an apple left over from Carlisle’s
lunch.

He felt a shiver run through him. “We probably
ought to put these on,” he said, holding up the coveralls. The crew was huddled
under blankets, but they were beginning to look chilled, too.

Jade started distributing the packs. Lindsey Jade
seemed, to Ethan, tough and efficient, a younger version of her captain,
without the bitterness. He looked at the crew, watching as they took the packs.
Brynn seemed especially glad to extract her coveralls and pull them on.

Ethan climbed into Carlisle’s coveralls, then put
everything back in the pack before heading to the front of the plane. He leaned
out the broken windscreen and peered up at Traore, who was sitting on the nose
of the ship, holding aloft his Suremap device.

“Any luck?” Ethan said, quietly so that the
others wouldn’t hear.

Traore turned to him, and his bright teeth
flashed as he grimaced. “Not good news. We’ve fallen into a 150-meter shaft. It
was small at the entrance but it’s like a funnel, and it grows wider as it gets
deeper. We’ve bounced away from the opening pretty far. If you look closely,
you can see it just there—” he pointed up and to the right. As Ethan squinted, he
could make out a tiny pinprick of light—like a star. Outside, the sun would be
fading. Night was coming on, and even that light would be gone soon.

“Are they coming for us?”

Traore shook his head. “It’s unlikely they’ll
know where to look. We were kilometers off course when we dropped in here. The
ship’s signal beacon was crushed, and we’re so far down that even if we were
right under the entrance, which we’re not, they couldn’t see us from the air
when they flew over. The Suremaps have locators, but the rock above us will
block their signals.