Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (31 page)

Ethan thought about that. He stood to get the dishes
off the table and Aria moved to help him.

“I just wish he didn’t have to bear it,” he said,
finally.

“Rigel’s strong. They both are. They’ve gotten so
many wonderful qualities from you. This is just one.”

Ethan walked into the kitchen. He had to put the
dishes directly in the sanitizer because the counters were covered with Luis’s
pottery and all kinds of fruit. He smiled in spite of himself. “Where did all
this come from?”

Aria told him of her time searching in the Karst
Mountains, and Ethan loved how she spoke about that wild place with an easy
familiarity. Polara, he thought, got her boldness from her mother.

“I made some good friends there: Evaders,” she
said. “One of them helped me get you in the boat.”

Ethan vaguely remembered a bearded man. He was
glad people had been there to help her. He would like to thank the man, but
even if he saw him now, he didn’t think he’d know him well enough to recognize
him.

Other memories were clear: the caves, the beings
who he thought had helped them. He couldn’t have imagined them. He saw them now
in his mind with too much detail.

“I need to convince them to stop the blasting,”
Ethan said. “Those creatures have their families down there. I saw a whole
chamber of sleepers. But I talked to Saras on the missive today, and I can’t
get him to listen to a thing I say. All he wants is Yynium, and he maintains
that he is not blasting anywhere near the Karst Mountains, but I don’t believe
him. I felt the blasting in the caves.”

“Well that’s no surprise. Yynium is all he has
ever wanted.” Aria began to load the dishes in her hands into the sanitizer.

“Honey,” he said guardedly, “did the doctors
think, the last few days, that my illness was some kind of—” he hesitated, “psychotic
break?”

Aria paused. “They suggested it, but I don’t
think it’s true. How did you know?”

“Saras mentioned it on the phone today. He thinks
the beings we saw were some kind of—” he searched for a word, “hallucinations.”

“No one knows what you saw down there except you,”
she said. “Maybe you should go talk to Saras in person.”

***

The next day, Ethan stood across the desk from
Saras. He clenched his teeth at Saras’s stubbornness, reminding himself that he
was there to convince Saras to stop blasting until they could figure out who
was down there. But he was getting nowhere.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Ethan said.

“Mr. Bryant, I think it’s obvious he knows very
well what he’s doing. Which one of you has a stone and steel house and which
one has a free cottage?” Veronika Eppes challenged.

“If you think that cottage, or our life here,
came free,” Ethan said, venom dripping from every word, “then you know very
little about Ship 12-22.” He took a deep, steadying breath. “We have a
responsibility to avoid hurting others. And we need to find out about them. Why
are they here? Where did they come from?”

Ethan saw the sneer on Veronika’s face.

“You disagree?”

“We’re here to get Yynium, Mr. Bryant. That is
our main objective.” She laid a hand on Saras’s shoulder. Ethan’s eyes
narrowed.

“I’m not sure that is your main objective, Ms.
Eppes.” He looked into her startling green eyes. She didn’t look away.

Saras slipped a gar fruit candy calmly under his
tongue. “Every decision we make has to be considered in light of how it affects
the company, Mr. Bryant, because what affects the company affects Coriol, and
it affects Earth. What we are doing is vitally important.” He looked at Ethan, “Mr.
Bryant—may I call you Ethan?” Ethan blinked, waiting for the next manipulation.
“Ethan, I know you understand trying to take care of the people you love.”
There was, almost, a note of sincerity in Saras’s voice. “We have to get the
fleet here before any other aliens arrive to challenge our claims on this
planet.”

Ethan sought for words. “But this threat is more
real, more present, than the one you think you’re preparing for. These beings
are here. Now. I can show you what I saw.” He reached up, pulling the thought
blocker off, steeling himself for their thoughts. But there was nothing in his
mind but a strange faint buzzing sound.

Veronika held up a hand. “Don’t bother, Mr.
Bryant. We’re aware of your telepathic abilities, and we’ve purchased, and
improved upon, the thought-shielding technologies developed by the UEG to keep
you from using those abilities here.”

Ethan listened to the strange buzzing for a
second more, then slipped his own blocker back on. He looked Saras in the eye. “I
saw these beings. They helped us.”

Ethan felt a flicker of sympathy from the man. “I
know you believe you saw something down there, Ethan. But you should know that
we’ve done scans, and we haven’t detected any significant living beings below
the ground level in that area, Mr. Bryant.”

Ethan’s jaw clenched involuntarily. “Significant?
Who decides that? Are you saying that you have detected life there and you’re
disregarding it?”

Veronika took two steps forward. “Mr. Saras is a
very busy man. He’s got several appointments this afternoon.”

“Answer my question.”

Veronika, with that inconceivable unreachability,
smiled. Her smile was cold, a stone smile. “Thank you for coming.” She walked
toward him, steering him toward the door with her presence.

Ethan looked directly into Marcos Saras’s eyes. “Are
you going ahead with the blasting?”

Saras gazed back, a faraway look in his eyes. “Nine
hundred
thousand
tons of Yynium, Ethan. Do you know how many drives that
can help build? How many ships we can bring from Earth? How many people?”

“We appreciate your visit,” Veronika said,
closing the door behind him.

Ethan ran into the other Vice President out in
the hall.

“Did you get your questions answered, Mr. Bryant?”
the skeletal man asked.

“Not really. Do you want to answer some of them?”
Ethan challenged.

Theo shook his head. “Oh, no, tough questions are
Veronika’s department.” He smiled broadly. “But listen, we’re going to have a
party to celebrate you guys getting back safe. Just a little get-together the
day after tomorrow at Saras’s. Maybe he’ll be in a better mood for answering
questions then. I hope you’ll come. And bring your family!” Theo walked away, waving
cheerfully.

The morning sun’s rays shone high on the
spaceport as Ethan pressed his hands to his temples. Was it possible that there
were no figures? That they had found their way out, somehow, on their own and
invented the figures? He tried to connect with Ndaiye on his missive, but since
the crew had been back to work these last few days, they’d been hard to reach
until evenings. Brynn hadn’t responded at all. He glanced up as Aria came into
the bedroom.

“I want to go back to the cave,” he said quietly,
hating the words as he spoke them. “I need to see if they are real.”

Aria stood beside him, running her fingers
through his hair. “Let’s go then. Luis says we can use his boat anytime, and I’ve
gotten pretty good at navigating the river.”

A few hours later, Ethan watched as Aria skimmed
the boat across the water. He smiled when he saw that it was made of Saras
shipping crates. She moved it by plunging a long pole down through the water
and, when it hit the bottom, pushing the boat forward. When a sandbar came, she
navigated around it expertly. The boat scraped the pebbled edge as it passed,
and Ethan looked up to see excitement in her eyes. Relaxing, Ethan smiled as he
settled in on the small frame seat in the center of the boat.

Ethan soaked in the beauty of the morning sun
glinting across the wide expanse of the Mirror River.

“I came out here all the time when I was looking
for you,” she said, smiling.

“I still can’t believe you found me.”

Aria seemed lost in her own thoughts as she poled
the boat over the glistening surface of the river.

She didn’t speak much, and Ethan was glad. He
needed to think through what he’d seen. Was it possible that he had simply been
overstressed, hungry, and thirsty? Was it possible his mind had created the
glistening white beings? Of course there were no ghosts. Of course no one
helped them out of that cave.

What was it that the psychologist had said? That
his mind had created a construct to embody his ideas so that he could visualize
how they could happen? It sounded less plausible to him than ghosts.

He pulled in the fresh Minean air. Ever since the
cave, he felt more fully the effects of it, and of sunlight, of brightness and
warmth. People walked around in it every day and didn’t even notice it. He
wondered briefly how long it would be before he went back to thinking that way.

Aria poled the boat aground onto the stony bank.
Ahead of them gaped the yawning mouth of the cave exit.

This was it all right. He walked just inside the
cave, to where it fell away to the pit.

Ethan paused, closing his eyes, then opening them
to peer downwards. Orange shone back at him. Aria squeezed his shoulder as she
leaned with him.

“I see it, honey,” she said.

The Yynium staircase was still there, block upon
block as far as he could see. He wanted to climb down and see if he could see
the chamber, but the pit fell sharply below him and he knew it would be foolish
to risk it again. He lay on his stomach and reached for the staircase,
straining with exertion as he lifted the topmost block of Yynium and pulled it,
scraping, backwards onto the surface where he lay at the top of the pit.

He sat, running his hands over it. It wasn’t like
the jagged chunks of Yynium he’d seen chipped out of the veins in the mines. It
was smooth and polished, the corners curved, and perfectly rectangular. It
would be impossible to mine it like this. It was as if a fine craftsman had
shaped the chunk into a piece of art. And it was grooved on the bottom. When he
peered back down he saw matching grooves on the blocks below it. They’d been
shaped to lock together.

How could the beings have done it so quickly? How
could they have moved in and out of the rock faces as they did? They must have
some abilities that allowed them to manipulate minerals.

Aria ran her hands over the block. “It’s
beautiful,” she said, and then, catching his eye. “And you were right.”

“I want to wait,” he said, “and see if they come
out. I think they might look for water at dusk and dawn.”

“I brought a lunch,” she said brightly. “And the
kids are at the Chavez’s. I told them we might be back late. We’ll just spend
the day here.”

Ethan nodded. “If I can find them, I can prove to
Saras that I’m not crazy,” he said.

Aria’s eyes were cloudy. “Good idea,” she said, “but
he’s the type that may need to see the beings themselves.” She laid a hand on
Ethan’s shoulder. “Even then, he might not care.”

The sound of a blast echoed in the arch of the
cave. It was still kilometers away, but the mining was getting closer. Ethan
had reported it to the Colony Offices, but Saras was, somehow, still only
blasting on his own land, and there was nothing to be done about that.

***

Ethan stood at the edge of the cave as night
came. He couldn’t bring himself to go inside, but he believed that his figures
came out at night, just as Ndaiye had said. He nervously tapped the translator
on his belt. He hoped he had programmed it correctly.

The clamor of the porcubats surprised him. He had
forgotten that they would be spiraling out of the cave to find their supper.
They darted through the air, twisting upward in the last scraps of light to
pass through the peaks. Even though they were several feet above him, he couldn’t
help but duck, thinking of their long spikes. Ethan darted away from the cave,
back to the river and down along the bank.

“Keep down!” he called to Aria, who was resting
on a rock near the boat.

He slowed and then glanced back toward the cave’s
mouth. That’s when he saw them. No longer shadowy figures in the half-light,
the rounded, graceful forms moved out into the gathering dusk, walking upright,
their musical voices ringing softly through the evening air.

He remained perfectly still, watching as they
moved cautiously out, adults with smaller, more childlike creatures, holding
their hands.

Their glistening silver-white skin was wrinkled,
and Ethan remembered its incredible softness. The creatures moved in family
groups to the edge of the river, where they lay down and drank, the drops of
water falling from their mouths like jewels.

So he wasn’t crazy. He hadn’t had a breakdown.
They were real, and Saras had to be stopped before they got hurt.

The creatures looked up and saw him, farther down
the riverbank, and they rose from the water and walked toward him without fear.
Ethan stood still at the water’s edge.
He reached up and
removed the thought blocker.

Aria’s clear, warm thoughts washed over him. She
wasn’t afraid. She was amazed by the beautiful, graceful creatures. Ethan
smiled and blinked, searching the voices in his mind.

Amid his own tumbling feelings, he found them.
The creatures’ thoughts were in no recognizable language. He saw no symbols,
heard no words. There was no familiar pattern that he could discern. He knew he
had found their thoughts only because there was something strikingly unfamiliar
in the known space of his mind. Ethan sucked in a breath at the strangeness of
it. Their thoughts were a swirling vortex of experience that he couldn’t
comprehend. It felt like spinning through a void. He reeled, lost in his own
psyche, reaching out and grasping at anything he could find to anchor him.

It came to Ethan just as he began to suffocate
under the weight of the alien thoughts. Like a leaf in a stream, one
recognizable thing in the twisting maze: love. He felt it among them, felt them
radiating it to each other, strengthening each other with it. These creatures
loved each other. It was deep and clear and comforting.

Ethan was dizzy. So much of their experience was
still too foreign. He put the thought blocker back on with a quick motion and
closed his eyes, feeling the silence in his head like a fresh breeze. He took a
deep breath.

“I am Ethan,” he said, the translator kicking in
and issuing a stream of Ikastn words.

One of the fathers stepped up and offered his
name. Though the translation wasn’t exact, the name sounded like Aemon, and
when Ethan tried to pronounce it back, the whole group of them seemed pleased.
Aemon took Ethan’s hand and touched it briefly to his forehead. The alien’s
skin was as cool and soft as Ethan remembered from the cave. He watched as the
being took Aria’s hand as well. She returned the gesture with a smile and a
slight nod of her head.

The being spoke again. “We are the Vala.”

Ethan was anxious to know how a Circinic-speaking
people had made it all the way here. “Is this your home world?”

A sorrowful expression crept into Aemon’s eyes. “The
Vala have no home world.”

That struck Ethan as terribly sad.

“We have been a slave race for as long as our
history records,” Aemon said, “and have never owned ourselves.”

Ethan was grateful for the translator. “Can’t you
petition for your freedom?”

“No,” Aemon replied sadly. “There’s no one to
whom we can petition. And our masters would never free us. They depend on us.”

Aria, next to him, shook her head. “Depend on
you, how?”

“They use our children in their ships,” Aemon
said.

“Use them?” she asked.

Aemon spoke quickly, but the translator buzzed an
error. Whatever Aemon was describing, the translator had no words for it. Ethan
fiddled with the settings, but “no words found” kept flashing across the
screen.

The Vala must have seen the humans’ confusion,
because he gave up trying to explain exactly what their children could do. He
simply reiterated that it was “special” and “valuable” to their masters.

“How did you fall into their hands?” Ethan asked.

“We were given to the Asgre to pay off the debts
of our former masters. We do not belong to ourselves, have not since any Vala
can remember. If the Asgre find us, we will be placed back into slavery.”

Pieces fell together suddenly, and Ethan wondered
why he hadn’t seen it before. Kaia had let slip the name of the alien race in
the dark ships over Coriol: the Asgre. This is what they were looking for.

“The Asgre are here,” Ethan said hurriedly. “They
have come to Minea.”

Aemon glanced at his family. “Then we must go
back into the caves,” he said.

“Will you be safe there?” Ethan asked.

“We will go to our sanctuary,” Aemon gestured to
the others, and Ethan felt a thrill that he had translated the word correctly.

“The white room?” he asked, then repeated the
word, “sanctuary,” in Ikastn.

“That is correct.” Aemon gestured to them to
follow as the group walked back toward the cave entrance.

“Will you be safe there?” Aria’s voice was tense.

“The Asgre cannot detect us in the sanctuary,”
Aemon said as they walked into the shadow of the cave’s arching mouth. “It is
lined with a special type of stone which is impenetrable by the Asgre sensors.”

“We call it flowstone,” Ethan said, his mind
filling with the image of the sparkling room.

Aemon nodded. “A fitting name.”

“I also saw it in the cavern where your children
are sleeping,” Ethan said.

“Yes. It makes a shelter for us. We were pleased
to discover it on this planet,” a shadow crossed Aemon’s features and he went
on, “though it can also be a danger.”

“A danger?” The Vala stood on the wide platform
of rock beside the Yynium staircase. Ethan stayed back from the edge. Aemon
lingered, though he kept casting worried glances at the other Vala.

“Yes. We ourselves cannot move through it as we
do through other stone. Its properties make it impenetrable to us as well as to
the sensors.”

Ethan smiled. “So you can travel through stone.
That’s how you disappeared so completely when I saw you in the caves.”

Aemon began to move through the rock as they watched,
sinking slowly and serenely into the limestone. “That is correct. Only your
flowstone and the metal our Asgre masters use in our cages, shackles, and slave
quarters can contain us.”

“May we see you again?” Ethan called as Aemon
moved into the rock.

“We must come to the lakes and rivers to drink.
The minerals in the cave pools are too concentrated for our bodies. We must
also have a few moments of sunlight to remain healthy, so we come out in the
early morning and early evening. We are here, should you wish to speak to us
again.”

***

The party was at Saras’s stone and steel mansion
on Yynium hill. It was a gaudy place, with imported Earthwood and Earthleather
everywhere. Just thinking of the resources it had taken to move those
extravagances through the stars gave Ethan a tight feeling in his stomach.
The children were surprisingly well-behaved.
Theo Talbot made a special effort to come and tell Ethan so.

“Your children are delightful,” he said, reaching
out to brush Rigel’s round cheek with the back of his finger. Rigel pulled
away.

“Thanks.” Ethan actually expected Polara to climb
under the tables or slide down a banister any moment, but she simply leaned
against Aria, clasping her mother’s hand and casting a blank gaze around the
room.