Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (25 page)

The symbols were large and small, some simply
scratched into the bare rock, some scratched and then painted over with color.
Huge epitrochoids arched above them, and smaller ones nestled inside the curves
of the larger ones. Around the room, in dizzying variety, were the words of an
alien race.

“What do they say, Ethan?” Ndaiye asked with awe
in his voice.

Ethan was struggling to decipher them. It was one
thing to translate when he had a computer, or even texts to assist him. It was
another to try to guess at meaning with unfamiliar syntax and little context.

But one symbol he knew. One symbol seemed to
repeat itself over and over.

Monster.

Ethan tried desperately to determine the context,
reaching into his memory for anything he could remember about Ikastn syntax and
pronouns. There were words he recognized:
children, sleep, danger
, but
it was like trying to put together the shards of a broken jar. Just when he
thought he had two pieces working together, then next slipped out of his hand
and broke into two more.

“What’s this one?” Ndaiye asked, tracing the
delicate lines of the most repeated word.

Ethan bit back the word. Words had power, he
knew, and saying
monster
in a place like this, as the light faded and
the days grew more desperate, would only introduce an unnecessary fear. He
redirected them to the more neutral symbol near his elbow:

“This one is sleep. I’m not sure what the rest
mean. It’s a language that came from Xardn, so I can translate some of it, but
other words and other rules have been incorporated into it, and I don’t know
all of them.”

He dug in his pack for his missive, hoping it
still had enough juice to turn on. He’d been saving its batteries so he could
use it as a last-resort light source if necessary, but he needed to capture
these symbols. If he did get out of here, he could work to decipher them.

The missive glowed when he switched it on, and he
breathed a sigh of relief. Working quickly, he snapped photos of all the
symbols that he could adequately illuminate.

“Brynn, stand there so I can see the scale of
these,” he asked as he pointed the missive at a particularly massive wall of
glyphs. “Ndaiye, stand by that one.”

The missive’s
critical low battery
warning
was blinking as he snapped the last few shots. Its screen went dark. Ethan
tried not to debate in his mind whether capturing the symbols had been worth
wasting the last of the missive’s light as he slid it back into the protected
pocket in his pack. At least he’d have somewhere to start when he got home. The
ever-present echo teased his mind:
If
he got home.

“Who made these?” Maggie asked directly. “Some
life form from here on Minea?”

Ethan shrugged. “It’s unlikely that they came
from here originally. It’s too far from the Circinus Galaxy. And when humans
first came to Minea, there were no life forms sufficiently developed to have
this kind of language complexity, so I suspect that whoever it is, they’ve come
recently.”

Ndaiye was quiet. “I’ve seen ‘em,” he said
softly.

“What?” Maggie barked.

“I’ve seen them,” he enunciated. “The ghosts at
the lake in the mornings.”

Ethan remembered standing at the edge of the lake
with Ndaiye, a lifetime ago, remembered the man’s stories about the ghosts that
came just before dawn. Could they be the same beings that made these
engravings?

Ethan started to speak up as well, started to say
that he’d seen someone at Shark’s Mouth and Crystal Springs and that he
suspected someone was leading the Xyxos, but the way the figures had simply
disappeared and the way that the dark played tricks on them down here made him
quiet. He wasn’t sure he’d seen anything, and there was no need to add to the
growing disquiet he was feeling among them. He had the photos. If he got out,
he would decipher what they had to say, and perhaps that would tell him more
about who they were and what they were doing on Minea.

***

As the ship descended Galo began to glimpse the
planet below. There were huge mountains to the Northeast and broad, flat plains
to the west.

The settlement below him lay on the plain, curled
in a circle where the tall grasses had been cleared and the land terraformed.
Galo cruised slowly over the settlement, then turned the big ship and glided
past the settlement again. The scanner’s constant low hum grated on him.

He found himself pleasantly intrigued by the
settlement. This appeared to be some sort of mining city. He could tell by the
extensive infrastructure and the great efforts that were being undertaken that
they were obviously producing something of value. To Galo, there were two kinds
of beings: customers and potential customers. It occurred to him that perhaps
these humans might need a shipper for whatever they were mining. He had the
sudden worry that his ship, squat and dark, with its exhaust burning red behind
it, might seem ominous and threatening to them. In port cities, where ships
came and went all the time, his barges didn’t concern anyone, but here it
seemed that there were no other beings besides these humans. They wouldn’t be
accustomed to seeing other crafts and might be more easily frightened than
others.

If they had stolen his Vala, then keeping them as
customers was unimportant. But if he was misunderstanding what had happened,
and this race had nothing to do with the Vala’s disappearance, then Galo didn’t
want to lose their business. He would need to open communications with them and
further assess the situation. He engaged his translator.

The Asgre dealt on a constant basis with beings
from other worlds and he prided himself on their translator, which gave him the
ability to speak to nearly anyone. Though the equipment took up an entire room
in each ship, he was thrilled with how the translator worked and how well it
worked. When it was engaged, it scanned the area around the target race, which
was sometimes just a single ship but in this case was the whole planet, for all
communication, written and verbal. Even real-time conversations were scanned
and processed, resulting in the translator’s nearly perfect knowledge of the
language. It took some time, but when the screen lit up showing that the
translator was done scanning and processing and was online and operational, he
could speak to almost anyone he encountered.

The translator began scanning the communications
of the planet and he felt a chill of anticipation as he waited for it to be
operational. It began a countdown on the upper edge of the screen. The
translator would not be ready for hours. That was longer than Galo wanted to
wait. But there was no rushing the technology. To distract himself, he focused
on the scanner, still humming, and checked the communications lines. He was
surprised to find one switched off.

Switching it back on, he remembered why he’d
disabled it. The ship filled with an irritating buzz. It was more frequent now,
more urgent. They must be closer to the magnetic field that Uumbor had
mentioned. Galo switched it off again, basking in the cessation of the
maddening sound.

The city, from above, looked as crosshatched as
the moon that orbited Ondyne II, the Asgre home world. Only these striations
didn’t come from fault lines, they came from the humans’ planned streets and
buildings. The humans he saw far below were bipedal and bimanual. Galo shook
his head. How did creatures function with only two hands?

He noticed two ships rising into the air from
what appeared to be a defensive base at the edge of the city. Galo readied
basic defenses, just in case. He checked the translator, though he knew it
would not be online yet, and he could not yet announce his reason for coming to
their city.

Glowing on his screen was the map of the eight
human settlements. Galo traced a route up and over the large mountains as he
planned the order in which he would scan the cities, ending at the last, an
outlying city near the other mountains to the northeast. He would not rush,
though. Each city must be thoroughly scanned for Vala life signs and the Vala
trail. He could not afford to miss any clue as to their whereabouts.

Ethan saw a new weariness in the little group
when they left the Flowstone Room. They had staved off hypothermia, but never
really warmed up to the point they’d been before the chute. They had eaten
their last nutrition bar, split five ways, and the knowledge that the food was
gone made Ethan feel more desperate than he had before.

Aided by Kaia’s cells, the Instasplint, and the
Sprayshield, Maggie was walking better, keeping her balance better, and still
barking orders at every turn, but Ethan could see by the weariness in her eyes
that even she was almost out of determination.

The arched opening that they chose out of the Flowstone
Room led them to a small, narrow passage. Going in first, Ethan found a tangled
passageway that curved and looped and ran back and forth in jagged lines for an
exhausting distance through the cave. As his shoulder scraped the side, he
noticed that the walls in this section didn’t catch his coveralls with the same
rough scraping as the walls in the rest of the cave. When he shone his one
shoulder light onto the walls, he was amazed to see that like opaque orange
glass, the smooth walls reflected his light and his image back at him. The
passageway was pure Yynium. The crew made their way, single file, through the
long winding tunnel, glowing in the reflected light.

When the tunnel opened out, Ethan stopped short.
He found himself standing at the brink of a precipice. A narrow ledge led off
to his right, up into the dark.

He turned to the others. “Should we go back?” he
asked.

They came out of the tangles one by one and lined
up on the edge of the yawning chasm. The two remaining shoulder lights
penetrated only far enough to see how the rock fell away beneath their feet and
left a vast nothingness stretching in front of them.

“Hello!” Ndaiye called. There was, for the first
time in weeks, no echo. The emptiness and dark contrasted with the closeness
and light of the tangles made Ethan’s head spin. He sat down on the ledge and
leaned back against the orange Yynium deposit. It felt solid and cool and firm at
his back, comforting somehow.

Brynn sat down next to him, gazing fearfully up
the little ledge that led up and away.

Traore and Ndaiye started up the path. “I don’t
want to go back,” Ndaiye said. “I want to see where this takes us.”

Ethan admired their adventurous spirit. Part of
him wanted to go back to the sparkling Flowstone Room and stay in its sanctuary
forever. But Maggie was already shuffling after the cousins, and Ethan jumped
up to steady her. One wrong step and this could be the last of Maggie.

Brynn followed, if somewhat reluctantly. Ethan
watched every step he took. When his foot struck a rock and sent it falling
silently into the abyss, he started humming to keep himself occupied.

Suddenly, the cousins’ voices filled the air.
They were furiously excited about something, and when Ethan reached the top of
the sloping ledge, he saw what it was: stars. Reaching in front of them, on the
other side of the wide chasm, was an arched opening filled with the night sky.

***

Aria didn’t see Daniel again for days, even
though she made the trek to G building several times. Most often, she found no
one home. Once the two little girls answered her knock by calling through the
door, but they were home alone and not supposed to open it. She left the fruits
outside the door, hoping that they got them.

Finally, when she’d given up on seeing him again,
Aria was standing in line to buy the last few pathetic apples and zilen, the
squash of Minea. She looked up and saw, through the window, Daniel approaching
the market. Before he reached the main front door, though, the young man
turned. Aria paid for her purchases quickly and rushed to peer down the alley
beside the market. Daniel was emerging into the alley from a back door to the
market, a chain heavy with scrip dangling from his hand. He saw Aria on the
sidewalk. Daniel ducked his head and looked away before he turned and walked
quickly in the opposite direction. When Aria reached the alleyway, Gaynes was
standing there, holding a small silver box and smiling smugly. He glanced up,
saw her there, and glared, turning and entering a back door into his market.

***

Aria wanted to know what Gaynes had been up to.
Somehow, he’d gotten to Daniel, and with Marise gone, someone had to watch out
for the boy. She thought of an excuse as she strode to the registers.

“I want to see Gaynes,” Aria demanded. “You can’t
sell this produce. It’s obviously contaminated.” She raised her voice on the
last word, just loud enough to make the shoppers near her shift uncomfortably.
One woman glanced their direction, then set her basket down and left the store.

The clerk noticed the woman’s departure and
looked nervously at Aria. She gazed into his eyes, challenging him to deny her
request. Though she’d told herself she wouldn’t use it again, she flashed the
Colony Offices badge out of her pocket just a little.

“Okay,” the clerk said, his fear of the Colony
Offices warring with his fear of Gaynes. “Come on back.” He unbolted the door
next to his register and re-barred it after she was through. He led her to
Gaynes’s empty office, where a broad desk was topped only with a decanter of
brown liquid and a glass half full of the same stuff.

The little plants grew up near the ceiling. Aria
noted their size. They had been scrubbed away earlier this week and these were
fairly new seedlings. She glanced out Gaynes’s barred window to the alley. The
door next to it must have been the one Gaynes entered from the alley.

“Just, just sit here,” the clerk said, indicating
a dark, slick chair in front of the desk, “and I’ll find him for you.” He
turned nervously before he left. “Don’t touch anything,” he said, trying to
sound authoritative.

Aria watched him close the door and heard him
walk back along the long hallway they’d come down. Well, she was here. She went
over what she’d tell Gaynes. The produce was contaminated. People were getting
sick. He’d better stop selling it or—or what? Aria was at a loss. Saras’s Food
Production Division, who was supposed to enforce the food safety rules, was
shipping out the shriveled apples and the blighted rangkors.

As she thought about what she’d say to him, Aria’s
gaze fell on a glass-fronted cabinet behind Gaynes’s desk. Inside, behind a
large sculpture of a scrip, she could see the edge of the small silver box.

Something made her feel bold. Maybe it was her
knowledge that Gaynes was underhanded and shady and didn’t deserve the privacy
she would have afforded anyone else. Maybe it was her curiosity about what
would make Daniel avoid her like he had. What was he involved in? Whatever it
was, she slipped behind the desk and retrieved the box. Setting it softly on
the desk, Aria glanced nervously at the door. It was still closed. She flipped
the little clasps on the box and opened it carefully.

Inside was a small silver object, tapered at one
end. There were two more depressions in the lining of the box, shaped exactly
to fit two more of these little missile-shaped objects, but they were empty.
Whatever they were, this was the only one left. She lifted it out, weighing it
in her hand, and turned it over.

Aria heard Gaynes’s voice outside in the hallway.
Startled, she dropped the little object. It bounced off across the rug. She
snapped the box closed and stuck it hurriedly back where she’d found it,
closing the cabinet and moving back around the desk. She saw the little silver
object on the floor and leaned to scoop it up, then dropped into the chair just
as she heard the door open.

Gaynes looked patently annoyed when he saw her.
He walked around his desk and sat heavily in the big chair on the other side. “You’re
not from the Colony Offices.”

Aria thought fast. “I never said I was.” Then she
launched into the offense, standing up and feigning bravery. “You’re making
people sick, Mr. Gaynes. You have to stop selling these blighted fruits and
vegetables.”

Gaynes’s eyes narrowed as he looked up at her. “I
don’t force anyone to buy my stuff, lady. Who are you, anyway?”

Aria deflected the question. “Have you seen the
people with the flower bruises, Mr. Gaynes?”

“Get out.”

“Are you going to stop?”

“I’m going to call the security force, is what I’m
going to do. Get out.”

Aria could see he wasn’t going to change
anything, and as she looked past him she noticed that she hadn’t put the silver
box all the way behind the scrip statue. It had obviously been moved. She didn’t
want to know what he’d do if he found she’d been poking through his office
while he was away. His heavy hands on top of the desk looked as if he could
crack a chunk of Yynium with them, just by squeezing it.

“I’ll go, Mr. Gaynes, but think about the stuff
you’re selling. It’s dangerous.” Aria spun and walked out the door, forcing
herself not to look back down the long hallway towards him. She let herself out
the door by the register and controlled her steps, feeling her heart hammering
progressively faster until she sank into a cab and gave the driver her address.
When she did glance back toward the market, Gaynes was watching her from the
window, a puzzled expression on his face.