Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (18 page)

As he stepped sideways on the sphere, he caught a
movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to glance at the shining
surface of a huge crystal several meters away. For a heartbeat, there in its
surface was the reflection of a figure. He squinted, trying to make sense of
who it was. He and Brynn were the only ones that it could be reflecting. But
when he looked again, the figure was gone, lost in the dizzying crisscross of
crystals all around them.

Ethan cleared his head as the rest of the team
came. Maggie was last, breathing hard and supported by Traore and Ndaiye. The
crazy angles of the crystals could catch reflections in surprising ways. He
turned his attention to the team as they each spent a moment in the beam of
pure sunlight. But there was no pausing the spin of Minea, and too soon the
light was gone. Ethan shone his flashlight up the small hole as far as it would
go. He could see no more than a few meters into the rock.

Maggie, resting on a fallen crystal beside the
sphere, called out, “I’ve found something.” She pointed.

Ethan turned, half expecting to see the figure
again, but she was pointing near the bottom of the sphere on which he was
standing. A slender cylinder of rock as long as Ethan’s living room back home
lay on the ground. Maggie hobbled over and picked up one end, peering at it and
running her fingers across it.

“It’s a core sample,” she said. “The bottom of
one, anyway. Sometimes, if they drill more than a hundred meters or so, the tip
of the sample breaks off. We won’t get out here. We have to keep going. There’s
at least a hundred meters of stone above us.” She peered at the sample, “And,”
she pointed at the long, orange band that made up most of the cylinder, “looks
like a lot of it’s Yynium.”

Ethan remembered Collins’s warning. Saras was
coming after that Yynium. He imagined what would happen in this chamber if
charges were set off to reveal the Yynium above it. The weighty, fragile
crystals would fall like icicles.

“We need to get out of here,” he said.

“No!” The fevered sound of Brynn’s voice filled
the chamber. “We can’t leave it. It’s outside. It leads to the surface. We have
to go up. We have to get out!” She reached toward the ceiling, her hands
clawing at the air.

The team stood silent, seeing their own emotions
played out in front of them. But Maggie was right. There was no way they could
burrow up through the rock, not if they had the tools, not if they had a month.
And they didn’t have a month. They had days before Saras started blasting.
There was nothing to say, no way to comfort the girl about staying down here,
not when they were all feeling the same thing.

She looked around desperately. “Please?” she
said. “Please? Can’t we get out here?”

Traore threw an arm around her shoulders and
spoke softly. “My parents had a saying: ‘To run is not necessarily to arrive.’”
He looked in her eyes. “We could use all our energy here and still be no closer
to the surface. We have to keep going and find a better way out.”

Brynn calmed, but sunk into a miserable quiet.
She ran her fingers nervously over her silver necklace. The team moved slowly
farther down the crystal cavern. Ethan, pushing the figure out if his mind and
instead holding onto the image of the sunlight, followed them. The soft
clinking of the crystals in his pack was soothing, like chimes in the wind.

***

As they traveled, the crystals were fewer. They stopped
at the end of the cavern where a huge fallen crystal spanned a chasm so deep,
their lights didn’t reach the bottom.

Maggie turned, “Well, nothin’ here. Let’s go
back.”

“Wait,” Jade said, “we can’t go back. It will
take us days to get back to the Teardrop Chamber. There’s an opening right over
there. This crystal’s as good as a bridge. If we can get across this, we can
keep going.” Ethan was surprised again at her courage, both to suggest crossing
the chasm and to challenge Maggie.

“And how will we do that?” Maggie said. She
seemed surprised by the challenge, too.

“We can tie a safety line on and belay while
people go across. It’s not that bad. We have plenty of rope.”

Maggie shot a look at Ethan. “All right. He’ll go
first. Make sure that crystal doesn’t crack when weight gets put on it.”

Jade rigged up a safety line and climbed back
onto one of the huge crystals to test it. Seeing her dangling from the crystal
made Ethan feel both more assured and more terrified.

He didn’t want to go first, but his mind kept
playing a scenario where he insisted someone else go and then had to watch as
the shard of crystal shattered under them and they fell. He couldn’t bear to
see that. He’d go.

The ropes cut into his armpits and thighs as he pulled
himself up onto the end of the shard. He stood, then felt the dizzying effect
of seeing the chasm beneath him. No need to show off. He crawled.

As he moved across the gorge, he tried to keep
his eyes off the darkness below him. His heart hammered in his chest. He kept
his eyes on the crystal. It made a long shimmering path to the other side of
the chasm.

“Stop!”

Panicked shouts from behind him snapped him out
of his thoughts. He looked up to see a crystal the size of a hovercab
plummeting from above. Dropping to his belly, Ethan reached around the narrow bridge,
grasping its sides and clenching his teeth. The falling crystal missed him, but
glanced off the bridge a meter in front of him, sending a percussion through it
that jarred him to his bones.

The pale chunk of crystal grew small as it fell,
and he heard it shatter far below at the chasm’s bottom. Dust rose around him
as he clung to the bridge. When he eased onto his hands and knees again he saw,
with horror, stress fractures spider-webbing the crystal bridge.

When Ethan made it
across, he belayed the line and waited. He had no idea how sound the bridge was
after the blow.

Traore came across first, then Brynn. Ethan felt
a ripple of relief when each of them stepped off.

Maggie’s crossing was agony to watch. She crawled
on her hands and one leg. She reached and pulled, reached and pulled, the
broken leg dragging behind her on the broad crystal. As she crawled along the spider-webbed
central section, a horrific crack rang through the cavern and she fell onto her
stomach as the crystal shifted slightly along a vertical fracture near its
midpoint.

She didn’t cry out, just clung there, staring
straight down into the chasm for a long moment before rising onto her hands and
painstakingly crawling forward again.

When she reached the other side, she let them
help her down, then barked, “Get it back over! We need to get them across
before the whole thing goes down.”

Traore tied the harness to the return rope and
shouted for them to pull it back.

Moments later, singing filled the cave. Ndaiye
was singing himself through his fear. It was a new song, not the lullaby of the
Teardrop Chamber, but a bolder, more bracing tune. He made it across.

And then came Jade. She scurried like a mouse,
moving quickly and lightly, her small frame hunched.

Just as she reached the midpoint, the crystal
gave way beneath her. Ethan heard her cry out, and saw her clinging to the
crystal as it fell. He jerked back on the line, shouting, “Let go, Jade! Let
go!” Her arms opened and the crystal fell away from her.

He felt her hit the side of the chasm with a
chilling thud. Her body was limp on the line when they pulled her up, but she
was breathing. She had a three-inch gash where her head had struck the rock,
and her eyes were unfocused and open.

Ndaiye, whose instinctive medical knowledge had
helped them many times already, slipped a pack under her head. He attached the
stitching attachment to the Emedic and used the last of its batteries to stitch
the gushing wound. Sliding the Emedic aside, he began to tie strips of cloth
around the wound. Ethan remembered they were out of bandages and wondered
briefly where they’d come from. Then he saw the ragged material peeking out
near the neck of Ndaiye’s coveralls. He’d made the makeshift bandages from the
soft lining of his own Everwarms.

They sat, watching Jade, for a long time. Ethan
felt helpless. Her body moved slightly with her shallow breaths, then she
stirred. The crew was around her when she regained consciousness. She seemed
disoriented and still sleepy. As they resumed their journey into the cave,
Brynn and Ethan walked with her.

When Aria heard the knock on the door the next
morning, she knew it would be Luis. His rich brown eyes were deeply sorrowful
and under one arm he carried a small crate from which his handmade pottery
peeked from dry moss like shells at the beach.

“Lo siento,” he murmured as he hugged her with
his free arm. “I’m so sorry, Aria.” He rolled the ‘r’ in her name slightly.

Aria didn’t respond—couldn’t respond. She stepped
back and gestured that he follow her into the kitchen. He set the crate on the
table.

“Do they know what happened?” he asked gently.

Aria shook her head. “They think it could have
been some kind of electrical impulse that fried the ship’s systems, or even
some kind of sabotage. The other corporations are gunning for this land grant,
too. The competition is pretty fierce.” She sighed heavily, then looked him in
the eye. “They even think it could have been some alien ship, snatching them
like the Others of Beta Alora did.” She hated saying it out loud, couldn’t come
to believe that Ethan would be subjected to that twice in one lifetime. She
shook the thought away. “Either way, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that they’re
missing, and nobody is going to be looking for them.”

Luis cursed in his native language. “What? Why
wouldn’t they look for them?”

“The search costs too much scrip. Too many
resources. They say that the survey crew had beacons with them and if the
beacons were completely destroyed, which they’d have to be for them to give off
no signal, then there’s no way the crew could have survived the crash. And
Luis, I don’t even blame them. I’ve been out there. It’s just jungle as far as
you can see. There’s
no trace
of them.”

“Where are the children?” Luis asked, glancing
around. Aria blinked. It was as if her thoughts had frozen.

“They’re with Kaia. I—I need to go out again. I
need to look for him.”

Aria sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair. She
felt the tears coming. “I can’t leave him out there, Luis. I can’t.”

“We won’t,” he promised. “He didn’t leave us, and
we won’t leave him.”

“But I don’t even know where to look,” Aria cried.
“I don’t even know where to start.”

“You come with me today,” Luis said, stepping
toward the door. “I know some places we can start looking.”

“I have a ship,” she said, desperately, “but I’ve
searched from the air and I haven’t found anything. The trees are so dense you
can’t see the ground. I keep thinking he could be right underneath us and I
still don’t know he’s there.”

Luis shook his head. “We don’t need a ship. I go
out into the mountains to get my clay and sand. We will take my boat. You can
see a lot more from the river.”

***

Luis’s little boat was finely crafted, made out
of scrap pieces from Saras shipping crates. “You made this?” Aria said
wonderingly.

Luis nodded. “With a little help from Winn the
carpenter and Mr. Saras.” He tried to smile, but the usual brightness was gone
from his face. Aria could see he was as worried as she was.

He helped her into the boat and positioned
himself at the back with a long pole, which he used to maneuver them away from
the bank and out into the river. The broad expanse of the Mirror River
stretched around them, mist rising from it in the pale morning sunlight. Aria
pulled her jacket more closely around her. She hated thinking of Ethan spending
another night out here. He’d only had a light jacket with him and though spring
was here, the nights were still cold. Every time the heat pump had come on in
the cottage last night, she had felt more acutely the fear that he was
somewhere freezing.

She almost wished that she hadn’t left the
children at Kaia’s for the night. It had been lonely and she’d barely slept.
What if they couldn’t find him? What if he didn’t come home? She pushed the
thoughts from her mind. He had to come home. She would not face life on this
new planet without him.

Luis poled on, content in the quiet. She didn’t
feel awkward asking him to help. He and the other passengers of Ship 12-22 were
their family now. This was what family did. There were others who’d shown up
this morning, after the news bulletins went out. The Karthans, the Syriskis,
the Alberts. Jed Albert had promised he would use his reporting skills to
gather information about what had happened. It was the only way he knew to
help, and Aria appreciated it, even if she felt annoyed at everyone’s focus on
what had happened.

It didn’t matter what had happened. It mattered
that they find him and that he come home to her. She tried to focus on the
forest around them, going through a list of the landmark names she’d seen on
the map: Druid Peak, The Torch, Grand Spire. The names fit the huge towers of
rock they were now floating past. They soon passed the named region, though,
and the vast unknown range surrounded them.

She watched as the mountains slipped by, one
after another, lining up like the teeth of a comb one minute, then jagged and
crowded as the thorns on a Minean chrom flower the next as her perspective on
the flowing river changed.

She’d know if he was dead, wouldn’t she? Feel it
somehow? Her mind flicked past that painful possibility and she wished
passionately that she was linked, somehow, to his psyche. She wished she, like
Kaia, could sense his mind without him speaking.

Suddenly, Aria sat up. “Turn around!” she said
urgently.

Luis looked up in surprise, but didn’t hesitate
to follow her command.

“We have to go get Kaia,” Aria explained. “We
need to bring her with us!”

***

It took them an hour to retrace their path on the
river, and it was midmorning by the time Aria knocked on Kaia’s door. She
waited, fairly dancing with impatience, but the door didn’t open. She knocked
again. Nothing. Where could she be? Aria pulled out her missive and called her.

When Kaia finally answered, there was the sound
of power tools and Polara’s chatter in the background. She was in her shop.

“Kaia, I need you,” Aria choked out.

“I’ll be right there,” Kaia said. When she opened
the door, her face was tight with worry.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is there news?”

Polara peeked around Kaia’s legs and Aria choked
on the words. Her tears came again. Kaia reached out, hugging Aria fiercely.

“I thought, since you can hear his thoughts
sometimes, you could come?”

“Of course.” Resolve replaced the shock in Kaia’s
voice. “We’re going to find him,” she said.

It was time for Polara’s school, so they dropped her
there and settled Rigel at the Karthan’s. Sonya Karthan murmured words of
encouragement and sent them a packed lunch to take along, “to keep their
strength up.”

Soon the three of them were skimming across the
river. Kaia placed an arm around Aria’s shoulders.

“Now we’ll try this, but I may not be able to
hear him,” she said, “especially if he is wearing his thought blocker.”

Aria nodded. If he was wearing his now, he would
not be broadcasting his thoughts, and he wouldn’t be able to receive Kaia’s.
Still, it was worth a try.

Kaia reached up and removed hers. Aria always
felt awkward and much more conscious of their mental dialogue when she saw them
remove the thought blockers.

She watched Kaia. The older woman’s short gray
hair moved in the breeze as she closed her eyes. Aria consciously tried to
clear her mind of thoughts so that Kaia could listen for Ethan.

They glided along the river. When Luis brought
the boat to shore, they hiked through the karst forest, all in silence. Aria
watched the dense woods around them and watched as Kaia listened.

Finally, after hours, Aria saw Kaia’s shoulders
slump wearily. She slipped the thought blocker back on, behind her ear.

“I’m sorry,” she said, tears shining in her eyes.
“I can’t hear him.”

***

Galo paced around the bottom deck of the Cliprig.
There must be a clue. Some indication of how to locate the Vala on this planet.
Though he knew their recuperation time meant they had to be here somewhere,
they had completely disappeared. Eight times this planet had gone around as he
orbited, and still his planetary scans were returning nothing. He had lost two
contracts that should have been his because he simply did not have enough
ships. His ships couldn’t travel fast enough without the Vala, and he wouldn’t
do without his ships. He had not spent his whole life making intergalactic
connections and building this fleet one ship at a time to see it all brought to
nothing by a sneaky race of fleeing traitors.

Trading across galaxies was tough enough without
these kinds of headaches. Between the cost of fuel, the maintenance on the
ships, and the cost of tariffs and bribes, Galo was only mildly wealthy, and he
wanted to be wildly so. And now half the fleet was at a standstill.

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.