Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (10 page)

“You’ve had these under a microscope?” she asked
Nasani.

He nodded. “There’s no pests that we can see.”

“Are you using pesticides out here? Herbicides
for weed control?”

Nasani nodded. “Only HG9 to keep the krech off
the crops, and Bronicide for the weeds.”

Both were perfectly safe for these crops. She had
seen them used for years without a problem. But things could change.

“Have you tried not using them?” Aria asked. “A
test patch?”

He nodded, gesturing to an area separated by
steel panels. Walking over she could see that the damage was just as extensive.
It wasn’t the herbicides or pesticides.

The dead leaves rustled against Aria’s covered
shoes as she followed Nasani back toward the building. The patch around them
looked like a waning late-autumn field, not the tumble of spring vibrancy that
they should be seeing. They entered and went through the decontamination room,
leaving their suits and booties behind as they entered the main lobby.

Aria was so busy turning the puzzle over in her
mind that she barely glanced up in time to see Theo Talbot enter the lobby and
stop at the front desk.

Theo was well known for his a perfect memory for
faces and names. There was no chance he wouldn’t recognize her. She turned
abruptly to Nasani.

“I’ve got to be going. Thank you for your help.”
She tried not to sound panicky.

“Please tell the Colony Offices that we are doing
everything we can. We will figure it out as soon as possible.”

Aria felt for the man. He’d be unlikely to keep
his job if the blight went on much longer. She thanked him and slipped into the
restroom as he walked to meet Theo.

When the sound of their voices faded from the
lobby, Aria left the building and headed for Kaia’s cottage.

***

Kaia
liked watching the children. They had become part of her, now, as well as their
parents. With her father off evaluating defenses in the southern cities of
Minea for the last several months, it grew too quiet around her cottage. She
kept busy tinkering with the basic house systems, improving the heat and the
cooling and, of course, visiting Coriol Scrap to gather robot materials to
entertain the children when they came.

They were playing now with the latest creation.
Well, specifically, Polara was playing with it. It was a go-bot, an invention
of which Kaia was particularly proud. The whole purpose of the go-bot was to
evade capture. Once programmed and turned on, it would careen endlessly around
a predefined space and simultaneously entertain and tire out its pursuer. She
made the first one when she, herself, became too tired to entertain Polara
effectively.

She was slowing down. There was no doubting it
and no denying it.

She had visited the doctors about it and finally,
after the hundredth time she’d donated her blood to further medical knowledge
and save lives, she’d asked the question none of the doctors had ever
addressed: “Why have I aged?”

The doctor smiled. “Everyone ages, Ms. Reagan.”

Kaia looked away, following the lines of the
window blinds with her eyes as she blinked back tears. She reformulated the
question. “When I was on Beta Alora, and even afterwards, in the ship, I healed
impossibly fast. I thought I would stay . . . young, somehow.”

The doctor took off his glasses, cleaning them on
his lab coat. “Many people don’t realize that healing and aging are two
different processes in the body. When we receive wounds and our bodies heal, it
is the result of cells rushing to the wound and multiplying rapidly to repair
it. Your genetic modifications seem to have made that rapid multiplication
remarkably fast. However, unchecked multiplication can cause other problems,”
he searched for an example, “diseases like cancer, that blight of the
twenty-first century. So human cells have natural mechanisms to avoid endless
cell division. Each cell can divide well about fifty to seventy times, but then
the cell becomes inactive or dies. That is actually what is happening during
aging. It’s not a wound, an accident that happens and can be repaired, though there
is some promising research. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that your
modifications have changed the amount of times your cells can divide. In fact,
while your ability to repair your wounds is enhanced, your aging process is
actually slightly increased, because each time you heal, you’re using up your
supply of cells more quickly than the rest of us.”

That was three weeks ago, and Kaia was at least
glad to have an answer. That changed how she would spend her days. Who wanted
to be immortal anyway?

Kaia’s body ached as she settled into a chair
next to Rigel. Her trip to the junkyard yesterday, and her early-morning
tinkering with the go-bot, had left her sapped of energy.

The baby reached for his shoe, which he’d knocked
just out of his own reach, and she looked down and tried to speak his name.

But it wasn’t there. She started again, “Sweet—” She
waited for his name to leap to her tongue, but it was as if she had opened a
drawer in her mental filing cabinet and suddenly found it empty. His name was
gone. He looked at her quizzically, sensing, she supposed, her distress.

“Sweet baby,” she finished, fighting an edge of
frustration that was slowly pulling through her chest. She hunted for the name
again and found nothing.

The go-bot chimed as Polara finally caught it.
Kaia looked up, searching her mind. Polara squealed triumphantly and then
dropped to the floor to disassemble and reassemble the bot with the little
wrench set strapped to its back.

The baby looked dismayed that the chaos was over.
Watching Polara’s chaos seemed to be one of his favorite pastimes.

Kaia reached behind her ear and pulled off her
thought blocker, rubbing the callus where it belonged. Even it was sore today.

 Suddenly, forcefully, a memory of Polara chasing
the go-bot a moment ago flared inside Kaia’s mind, unbidden. Kaia looked
around, confused. Was this some new trick her memory was playing? Boomerang
memories?

Another image, of the baby’s shoe, laced with a
feeling of frustration and intensity, entered her mind. She glanced down. The
child was looking up at her.

His name came to her just as the realization
dawned. Suddenly, Rigel’s struggles made sense. Kaia gazed at the little boy
and nodded.

“Ahh,” she said softly. “I know now. I know your
secret.” She looked into his eyes and thought carefully of a little treasure
box, imagining it opening. Inside was a bright stuffed bear like she had as a
child back on Earth.

Ri squealed with delight. His longing for the
bear washed over Kaia and she felt guilty for showing him something she didn’t actually
have to give him. She sent him a picture of a cup of milk, and his attention
shifted to that. That she could provide. She lifted him, crossing into the
kitchen and pouring a cup of sweetbean milk. She twisted a lid on and handed it
to him.

“How does your father not know this?” she asked
the little boy as he drank.

“Not know what?” Polara asked, tipping her head
to one side.

“Rigel has a gift,” Kaia said.

“I want a gift!” Polara was up and across the
room to the table in a flash.

Kaia gathered the little girl onto her lap. “You
have a lot of gifts, too, Polara,” she said, and she began to name them.

When Aria arrived that afternoon, Kaia asked her
in. Aria was brimming with news of a crop blight. She had used Ethan’s badge to
inspect the crops at the Saras Food Production Division.

Where did grit like that come from? Kaia
wondered. She couldn’t imagine the mother of two making the decision, sometime
that morning, to knowingly enter a restricted area while pretending to be on
official business. Kaia hadn’t seen any deception in her eyes when Aria had
dropped the kids off this morning.

Kaia felt a pang of worry. If Aria got caught,
what was Saras likely to do? There was only a small incarceration building in
Coriol, as most real criminals were shipped out to the prison in Minville, on
the other edge of the settlements.

Kaia felt her mind fogging as she tried to pull
her focus back to what Aria was saying.

“. . . some kind of herbicide,
maybe? Or pesticide? Neither make sense, but I just don’t have any other ideas.”
Aria must have sensed that Kaia had something on her mind because she asked, “How
was your day with the kids? Did they behave?”

Kaia pulled back to the moment. “Aria, there’s
something you need to know about Rigel.”

Aria’s green eyes grew scared. She glanced at the
little boy on the rug, assessing that he was all right before catching Kaia’s
eyes again.

Kaia hurried to reassure her. “Rigel is
telepathic, Aria. I’ve been having rudimentary conversations with him all afternoon.”

The fear in her eyes changed to confusion. “What?
Are you sure?”

“I am. He can receive and broadcast thoughts.
They’re pretty simple right now, though.”

Aria put her head in her hands. “Oh, no. One more
thing they’ll mark on his chart.”

Kaia took the younger woman’s hands in hers,
pulling them away from her face gently and looking into Aria’s eyes.

“But you see, all those things on his chart are
tied into this one.”

Aria’s face showed confusion.

“See, he doesn’t talk because he sends his needs
to you telepathically, and you get him his drink or his bread. It’s like magic
to him. He doesn’t need to learn to say ‘drink,’ he just shows you. And when he
wants something he can’t reach, he just sends you or Polara to fetch it for
him.”

Understanding was dawning in Aria’s eyes. “So I
can hear him?” she asked.

Kaia shrugged. “I’m not sure, exactly. I can hear
him clearly, but without telepathy, I’m not sure what it would feel like for
you.”

Aria listened, trying to clear her mind, but only
her own thoughts were in there. “I’m not getting anything.”

“He may have to initiate it. Just be aware of it,
and tell Ethan when he gets home from the survey trip tonight. Maybe he can
start working with—” and then his name was gone again, and Kaia took a quick
breath, embarrassed, “with the baby on learning some basic words. I think it
will make a real difference.” She had covered up the lapse well, she thought,
and Aria seemed too lost in this new information to have noticed.

Ethan squinted into the dim interior as he
climbed onto the craft at the rendezvous. As they lifted off and the late
afternoon shadows fell, his thoughts turned to home and the evening that lay
ahead with Aria and the children. It had been a pleasant day, but he was ready
to go home, anxious to see how his family was doing. He pulled out his missive
and typed a message, but there was still no connection. He’d probably be home
before the missive connected and the message sent. Especially at the speed this
pilot was flying. As they rose, Ethan heard the missive connect and send the
photo from this morning and the last message.

The pilot wove in and out of the mountains. Ethan
saw Schübling, next to him, pull out her Suremap and take some readings. “Are
we takin’ a different route home?” she asked, a strange tone in her voice. The
Suremap reading did look different from the terrain they had seen this morning.

“I’m just fightin’ some strong air currents
between these towers,” the pilot said. “I’m seeing if we can loop around a
different way to have a smoother ride.”

Ethan glanced up from the screen just in time to
see the tower that clipped the ship and sent it spinning. Metal ripped and
screeched as the wing caught on the edge of the karst formation and flipped
them upside down. Leaves and branches tore through the broken windows, raking
Ethan’s face and arms. He didn’t breathe—couldn’t breathe—as the smoke from the
engine surrounded them. He heard one of the men wailing, and Brynn, behind him,
screaming. Schübling, beside him, was silent.

The crash lasted only seconds, but time seemed to
slow as the ship slid the last fifty yards down the peak and crashed to a stop
on its side in the thick foliage. Ethan felt a sharp pain as he turned to see
if the survey team was okay. Ndaiye sat in shock, blood streaming from cuts
along his face and neck. Carlisle, who appeared unhurt, unbuckled and staggered
over, pulling his jacket off and pressing it to Ndaiye’s face.

Brynn was quiet and pale. Ethan glanced at the
pilot, who had climbed out to see if it was safe to get his passengers out. He
seemed unhurt. The other members of the team were stirring, gasping, and
regrouping. Still, Schübling lay silent in her seat beside Ethan. He turned to
her and put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t stir. Looking up, he saw the
pilot walking by outside her shattered window. “Hey,” he called to the pilot, “we’ve
got a problem here.” But as the pilot turned to look inside, Ethan saw him drop
downward, impossibly quickly. The last Ethan saw of him was the terror on his
face.

Ethan tried to comprehend what had happened, and
then felt the ship began to shift. “Hang on!” Ethan called as the craft slid
off into a deep chasm that yawned below.

The craft rolled and plummeted, thudding into
rocks with the sound of ripping metal. The light from outside disappeared as
the little ship was consumed by a shaft deep enough to fit the entire Colony
Offices building in. Carlisle wasn’t strapped in, and he flipped forward as
they fell and slammed into the wall near Ethan. Ethan reached out and grasped
the other man’s arm, hoping to stop his wild tumbling, but the moment the ship
shifted again and began to nosedive into the dark, Carlisle was torn from Ethan’s
grasp and thrown past him to the back of the craft.

Ethan braced himself for another impact. It came,
and the screeching metal tore away from the side of the ship next to his seat.
He had a quick glimpse of stone and darkness before the ship flipped again,
freefalling. There were more impacts, more sudden jolts, more tumbling, until Ethan
could not tell up from down or the way they’d come from the way they were
going.

When the ship stopped falling, there was an
immediate, eerie silence, as if the cacophony of sounds had been swallowed up
by the immense and unknown dark outside. And then came the anguished sounds of
the passengers.

A fine dust rose through the pale glow of the
emergency cabin lights. Ethan breathed against white-hot pain in his chest,
willing it to abate as he peered outside the craft.

“Breathe,” he told himself. “Breathe.”

He glanced at Maggie Schübling, and saw her
looking back at him. Her face was still as stone, but her eyes were open, and
there was pain behind them.

“What is it?” he asked. “Captain Schübling, are
you hurt?”

She didn’t speak, but her eyes darted down to her
right leg, and Ethan looked to see the pilot’s seat crumpled over her shin, which
was bent at a startling angle. “Okay,” he said slowly. “We’re gonna get that
off.”

Ethan looked around. Outside was darkness,
ominous and solid. The little craft was tipped slightly onto its side, and he
could see the ground pressing through the hole next to him. He reached through
the gaping side of the ship and ran his fingers along the ground. Crumbly,
sticky dirt coated his fingers like cake crumbs. He hastily wiped them on his
pants. He shifted in his seat, carefully at first, then more vigorously. The
craft shifted slightly, but seemed to settle in the soft dirt. It was solid.
Ethan reached up, pausing to take a sharp breath as he felt a catch in his
shoulder, likely caused by being thrown against the harness. He braced against
the pitch of the floor and released his safety harness. Turning, he saw others
carefully moving around between the scattered seats and wounded survey crew.

Other than Ndaiye’s cuts, the cousins seemed to
be all right, and they were pulling emergency first aid equipment out of an
overhead compartment, passing it to Collins and Jade, who were attending to Carlisle.

Kneeling beside Schübling, Ethan ran a hand down
the pilot’s seat. Gently, he tried pressing it forward, but it didn’t move. He
put a shoulder against it and pushed. It wasn’t going anywhere. Schübling,
still silent, was looking at him with pleading eyes.

Pain in his shoulder and chest made him wince as
he lay down in the aisle and peered under the seat. The emergency lights on the
floor illuminated the space and he saw some hope. This was an ejection seat,
made to release from the floor. He pulled back, glanced up, and saw the lever
that would activate the charge and shoot it skyward. That would free her leg.
But he paused, leaning in to look carefully at the tangled mess of seat and
bone in front of him. It was obvious that the seat had broken her leg. What if
the leg was caught on the seat? The ejection would do far more damage. He’d
have to come up with something else. She was in shock, and the floor below her
was sticky with blood—he’d have to move quickly.

Ethan scrambled underneath the seat, peering
through the wires and metal. He saw the rails that the seat sat on and followed
them back to the seat’s attachment point. Two release clasps shone back at him,
holding the seat to its undercarriage on the rails. They were thick metal, but
made to flip up and down to secure the seat to the carriage, or in this case,
to release it. He reached back and released them both. The seat shifted and Schübling
cried out in pain as he grasped it and shoved it forward, off her leg and out
the broken windscreen onto the nose of the ship.

He turned his attention to the leg.

“Hey,” he called to Ndaiye, “I need an Emedic
over here!”

The man turned a bloodied face to him and nodded.
“Comin’!” he called. In moments he was beside Ethan with the med kit. Ndaiye
helped Schübling lean forward as he stuck an anesthetic patch on her lower back.
Ethan watched as the medicine smoothed the pain from Schübling’s features.

He pulled the Emedic from the kit. It was an
oblong gray box, metal and heavy, much bigger than the one they had at home.
Flipping it open he saw the screen and a number of attachments. Ethan pulled
out the camera and checked both ends of the connecting cable, then aimed at Schübling’s
wound. He tried to keep steady and pressed the green “Assess” button.

Immediately, a full internal picture of the
broken limb appeared on the screen. It was a bad break. Ethan pressed the
yellow “Treat” button. The Emedic’s speaker buzzed with its calm voice.

“Please attach the Instasplint at the indicated
points.” The Emedic directed.

Ethan popped open the compartment that said “Instasplint”
and removed two thick, flat, flexible bars. He wrapped them around above and
below the break, as shown on the screen.

“Instasplint attached,” the Emedic said. “Alignment
sequence initiated. Please do not touch the injury.” The screen blinked with a
barred circle with the wound picture in the middle. The bars went rigid,
pressing into the skin, and suddenly moved forcefully away from each other.
Ethan winced as the bones cracked into place, the lower leg perfectly straight
again. He glanced at Schübling, who only looked impatient.

“Please connect the injection attachment.”

Ethan found the attachment labeled “Injection”
and plugged it into one of the ports.

“Please insert the injection attachment at the
indicated point.” The screen lit up with an external photo of the wound and an
animation of the injection attachment sliding into the skin just below Schübling’s
knee. “The green light on the attachment will glow when the correct insertion
point is reached.”

Ethan drew the attachment across Schübling’s leg,
glancing at her face to be sure it wasn’t hurting her as he did so.

“Keep your eyes on your work,” Schübling snapped.

The pain medicine must be working.

Ethan looked back to see the light switch from
red to green. He pressed the long, pointed end of the attachment under the skin
and felt the pressure of the vein wall release as it entered.

“Delivering inhibitor,” the calm Emedic voice
said. “Please do not remove the injection attachment from the patient.”

 Ethan heard a hiss and waited, watching as the
flow of blood from the wound stanched.

“Inhibitor delivered. Delivering matrix material.”
There was a pause. “Matrix material delivered. Delivering bone morphogenetic
proteins. Please do not remove the injection attachment from the patient.”

Ethan’s arm ached, but he held the attachment
steady.

“Bone morphogenetic proteins delivered.
Delivering time-dilated, enhanced Reagan cells. Please do not remove . . .”
Ethan took a sharp breath. Reagan cells were lab-grown cells that had been
enhanced with Kaia’s altered DNA. They sped up healing exponentially, though it
was nothing like the healing in her own body. Delivering large quantities of
them to a wound made it possible for the body to begin rebuilding damaged
tissue immediately. Though he had known they were used in trauma cases, hearing
the Emedic say her name jolted him.

Ethan thought about what Kaia had told him about
her condition and felt the old bitterness. It was patently unfair that she
healed quickly, but she still couldn’t cheat old age.

Schübling’s gruff voice cut into Ethan’s
thoughts. “Get it outta me, already!” she barked.

Ethan looked down to see the Emedic flashing red.
“Please remove the injection attachment from the patient.” It was repeating. “Please
disconnect injection attachment and place it in the injection attachment
compartment.”

Ethan did so and the compartment slid closed. The
sterilization cycle initiated in the compartment.

“Please connect the Sprayshield attachment.”
Ethan found and connected it, then followed the Emedic’s instructions to
position it in front of the wound. “Applying Sprayshield,” the Emedic declared,
and then sprayed a thick, clear gel across the wound which hardened quickly
into a transparent cast.

Ethan was glad that when more experienced medical
personnel arrived they’d be able to view the injury and check it’s healing
through the transparent cast. He followed the Emedic’s instructions for
sterilizing, then used it to treat the scrapes on Ndaiye’s face before the
other man went to help Traore open a stuck compartment.

He scanned his own shoulder and found nothing
broken, simply a lot of bruising. He took a shot of Vein Complex to aid in the
healing of the capillaries and turned his attention back to Schübling. “How are
you feeling now?”

She shrugged. “Fine. Can’t feel anything below my
stomach, and I can’t get turned around to see my crew. Go check them and give
me a report.”

What he found was disheartening. Along with the
pilot, three others were dead: Carlisle and Espinoza lay in the back of the
shuttle, and Baker had been thrown out of the craft during the descent. That
left Brynn, Ethan, the cousins Traore and Ndaiye, Schübling, Collins, and Jade.
Seven people left. Two of them, Schübling and Ndaiye, hurt pretty badly, and
the rest fighting at least shock. Ethan himself felt sick and shaky. He wouldn’t
be the only one. In fact, he became increasingly worried as he looked at Brynn.
Her skin was ashen and she was walking around, agitated. She kept approaching Schübling
and then abruptly turning and walking away. He went to her.

“Brynn, why don’t you come over and rest a
little?” He gestured to a seat in the right side of the craft which had been
bent to a nearly horizontal position and had her lie down. He raised her boots
to the back of the seat in front of her and Traore brought over a blanket.

“Just rest,” Ethan encouraged her. “You’re okay.”
He left her with Traore and went back to report to Schübling.