Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  An unusual movement in the water caught Ethan’s attention. In the ripples left by the skipped stone, some small, smooth, glossy bodies were arcing.

  Swimming lizards. Ethan would never get tired of seeing them. Called natare, they were curious and friendly, ranging in color from warm charcoal to pale lavender. The females were speckled, to help them blend into the dappled shadows under the foliage. The males had a ruff around their necks which streamed behind them as they swam after minnows to carry to their nesting mates.

  Minean creatures were not the same as Earth’s creatures, but many, like the natare, were similar to the animals of Earth. Though some had been catalogued and named, many species were still being discovered. The colonists usually referred to the animals by the names of their closest Earth equivalents, sometimes with a specific quality of the Minean species, like swimming lizards. Even after four years here, the surprising differences in Minean creatures instilled Ethan with wonder.

  The natare rode the ripples to the water’s edge, reaching their delicate feet forward and climbing out onto the bank. Their eyes were inquisitive, searching. Ethan held out his hand. Three of the little creatures came forward. They knew humans, knew that they liked the taste of the salt that humans carried on their skin.

  Soon they were licking his fingers, and Ethan took his hand back and broke off a piece of the sandwich to offer them. The boldest, a dusty purple male, snatched it and raised his neck ruff toward the others. Ethan watched them back away from the challenge on their webbed feet. But they followed the purple natare. When he wasn’t looking, one grabbed a bit of the sandwich from his mouth and dived into the water, swimming rapidly for his mate on her nest a few yards away.

  Polara’s voice surprised Ethan. “What about that one, Dada?” She said, pointing to the third natare. “He didn’t get any.”

  Ethan offered her the last bite. “Here you go. Share this with him.”

  The child brightened and took the sandwich. Ethan watched her careful steps as she crept along after the little lizard, calling, “Here swimmer, here swimmer. Come have a sandwich.” She was a bold child, a brave one, and he loved seeing her fascination with animals and people. Watching her embrace the world was one of the great joys of his life.

  And Rigel—Rigel’s quiet thoughtfulness brought him insurmountable peace. Still not talking at almost two, and deeply empathetic, Ri spent most of his time watching others closely. He didn’t walk yet, didn’t seem to need to move around and explore like Polara always had. The pediatrician had been a little worried about Rigel’s lack of speech, but after tests on his ears and cognition, had sent them home telling them not to worry, he would soon be making a racket alongside his sister.

  Ethan felt a familiar need to check on his son. Though he didn’t have the charge to look after 4000 sleeping passengers anymore, he still heavily felt the responsibility to protect the people he loved, and when he glanced toward the picnic blanket, he saw Rigel looking at him and reaching for his bread. The nearly-two-year-old had knocked it just beyond his own reach. Ethan rose and retrieved it for him.

  It was in that second, that small moment when his back was turned, that Polara fell into the lake. He heard the splash, and turned to the spot he’d last seen her. But she was far beyond that. How had she moved so quickly? She was flailing now in the inlet where the tumbling river flowed into the lake. He ran.

  Blindly, Ethan charged into the water, fighting its pull against his legs. The river rocks were slick and round, but he barely noticed as his ankles cracked into them. She was being swept by the current. He had to get to her. Suddenly, the bottom dropped away, and Ethan felt his head go under. He swam, hard, and broke the surface just in time to see Polara’s small hand reaching horribly toward the sky.

  He lunged, grasping at whatever he could. He felt her jumpsuit, soaked and slick, and clenched it, hauling her toward him and up, up toward the air. He went under, but held her above him, relieved to feel her squirming and fighting in his arms. Kicking, he rose above the surface again and gasped, “Polara! It’s all right. I’ve got you. You’re all right.”

  His girl was crying, gasping. He got her to the bank, where helpful hands of onlookers steadied him as he came out. He collapsed on the stones, cradling her in his arms, curling his body protectively around her, and speaking in a low, calming voice, though he didn’t feel calm himself.

  Her hysterical crying continued. Suddenly, he found himself singing an old Earth lullaby, gentle and low, that had calmed them both during long nights and tense moments. Slowly, he felt his heart rate returning to normal and heard the child’s tears subside.

  Aria was suddenly beside them, her arms encircling them both. She didn’t say anything, just held them, but he heard her fear in her ragged breathing.

  Soaked, Ethan carried Polara back to the blanket. He tried to still the trembling in his arms. He had watched over his family across the stars, and even now his greatest fear was that something would happen to them, something he couldn’t stop.

  Ethan pulled his eyes from Polara, who was now sipping olona juice, to catch Aria’s gaze. His wife was holding Rigel tightly. Her smile was shaky as she looked back at Ethan.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you were so fast.”

  He nodded, trying to push away the growing dread that had been sparked by Polara’s near miss. He tightened his arm around her. She was strong and bright, but still so fragile. He was going to have to guard her more carefully.

  Across the park, Ethan heard the chiming of bells. Lucidus was reaching its perigee, the moment when it was closest to Earth, and it hung bright and round in the sky above Tiger Mountain. He pointed it out to Polara as Aria retrieved from their basket the four silver hand bells they’d brought along. Polara, her fear forgotten, stood to ring hers with vigor. Its bright sound joined the others, echoing off the karst peaks as the crowd began to cheer. A few people set off bright fireworks which threw sparks of color into the air around them. Ethan smiled to see Polara, born here as a true Minean, embracing the tradition.

  Ethan glanced up at the bright planet and his smile disappeared. A dark smudge appeared and traveled directly across the face of Lucidus. Others had seen it too. The crowd sunk into an uneasy stillness, choking the clamor of the Lucidus bells. Uneasy murmurs arose at the sight of the opaque spot streaking smoothly across the planet.

  Ethan felt a surge of fear, an old apprehension.

  “It’s just an orbital defense sphere,” someone said, as the spot dropped off the crisp edge of the planet and the bells began again.

  It could be one of the orbital defense spheres. Ethan tried to let that make him feel better.

  ***

  Admiral Phillip Reagan paced in his temporary office in Lumina. His windows were open and the office smelled of mud and greenery: spring. It was his fourth Minean spring since they had made him Admiral of the Minean fleet. He’d been promoted after he arrived, when news had broken that he had disagreed with selling Ship 12-22 to the Others of Beta Alora, and now he got to oversee the ships and command the fleet. Well, train the fleet. There hadn’t been much commanding necessary in the ever-peaceful skies of Minea.

  But something troubling had been seen in those skies this morning. He shouldn’t even be here today; the day of the Lucidus festival was a UEG holiday. But something unusual had been spotted, and he wasn’t going back to the barracks until he got some answers.

  Until then, he was listening to the guitar riffs of an old Earth band. He was glad that he’d had the Caretaker’s drive, full of old Earth music and movies, downloaded from the ship on which he’d arrived before it was scrubbed and repurposed. Now, the thumping bass rhythm provided just enough distraction to keep Reagan’s thoughts from running away with all the possibilities of what that spot in front of Lucidus could have been.

  He had seen it, a shadow on the bright circle that was the planet, at the height of the Lucidus festival this morning. It showed up and moved across just as the bells r
ang in the city and the cally blossoms were released from the tops of the buildings. He had seen it just for a second, and had known it wasn’t the orbital defenses as others speculated. One thing that made him fit for admiralcy here on Minea was his impeccable eye for detail. The orbitals wouldn’t have been in the right place to transit Lucidus. The spot wasn’t the right shape or size. And he’d never seen anything pass in front of the planet at perigee.

  “You seem cool,” Sergeant Frank Nile surprised him.

  Reagan turned down the music. “Just waiting for the analysis team.”

  Nile crossed to the window. “Exciting first day down here.”

  Reagan’s laugh was a little bitter. “Yeah.”

  “So what’s your itinerary, Admiral? How long will you be with us here in Lumina?”

  Reagan breathed in the light spring air. Everything depended on what the analysis team found. “Well, the original plan was to do all the routine defense checks here in the next two weeks. Your reviews of personnel, equipment, and procedure haven’t been done in far too long. But with this new . . . development, I may be heading to Flynn. I’ve got to make sure we’re ready for whatever happens.”

  Sergeant Nile gestured toward the map of the Minean settlements on the wall. “Maybe we’ll get to try out some of our strategies, huh?” His voice was light.

  Reagan stood slowly and walked to the map, laying a hand on it. His voice was stern when he said, “Sergeant, I hope you understand that the best military strategy is the one you never have to use.”

  Reagan ran his fingers across the eight cities spread almost in an X across this part of the planet. He felt the weight of every settlement, of every person in each one. He lingered for a moment on the city that lay at the northwestern corner of the settlements: Coriol, where he lived with his daughter, Kaia. Lumina, the city he was in now, was at the opposite edge of the settlements diagonally: the most southwestern of the cities. Between them lay the Azure Mountains, a range of folded mountain peaks that divided the continent almost in half.

  Nile was at his shoulder, and Reagan saw the man glance from the map out the window, where the peaks of the Azures fringed the sky in the distance. Reagan felt a certain comfort in seeing the mountains. The Azure range was the larger of the two major mountain ranges near the settlements. Much like the Rocky Mountains back on Earth, they had been formed by folding and faulting and they rose from the plains on either side of them to elevations over 6000 meters. The other range was the Karst Mountains out near Coriol, past the Eastern Plains. It had been formed from the dissolution of Minean blue limestone into freestanding towers. It was as dramatic as it was remote and largely unexplored. Reagan had heard that a new vein of Yynium discovered underneath it was causing quite a stir among the companies. Both ranges offered a certain amount of protection to their neighboring cities.

  Nile must have been thinking the same thing. “The mountain cities will have a bit more cover than we have out here.”

  Reagan nodded. “Oculys and Kantara are in the foothills and they have our best surface-to-air missiles. Minville, Sato, and New Alliance are easily defensible from the ground because they’ve each got the Azures on two sides. But the plains here in Lumina leave us a little exposed.” He considered for a moment. “I don’t worry about Flynn. It has two advantages: being surrounded by the Azures and being in the center of the settlements.”

  Both men glanced at Coriol. It was the outlier. To reach it you had to cross the Eastern Plains, and it lay at the edge of the Karst Mountains, which did not have the altitude of the folded mountains, but made up for it in the sheer grandeur of its towers. They would at least offer a place for people to flee if anything happened.

  Reagan found himself growing increasingly tense. Coriol looked so isolated up on the corner of the map, so vulnerable. And Kaia was there now, in their blue cottage, alone. These days away from her were hard. Reagan missed her, and he worried about her. Even after four years on the planet with her, he had still not gotten used to the fact that she was older than he was now and that she was slowing down. Reagan feared the day when he would get a call that she’d fallen or that her heart, which had been beating so long now, had stopped doing its work.

  These last few years had been like his first years as a new father, when he’d found himself worrying at odd times about the myriad dangers the world posed to his new daughter. Only this time, instead of becoming more able and more independent each day, she was moving in the opposite direction, and the end of his worrying now would be very different from end of his worrying then, when he’d dropped her off for her first day of school.

  Reagan shifted, feeling the jagged weight that he’d carried in his chest since the day he’d left the Treaty Cabinet Meeting on Theta Tersica a lifetime ago. It was the weight of the knowledge that he should have stopped the sale of Ship 12-22. He had voted against the plan that had sold the ship to the Others of Beta Alora, and he planted information that he had hoped David McNeal, the original Caretaker of the ship, would find. But he hadn’t fought any harder. He had instead climbed on a stasis ship himself and had done no more to stop the atrocity.

  He saw now—and had seen the moment he closed his eyes in stasis, and for the next fifty-three years as he slept—that he should have sabotaged the slave ship, should have taken a battleship up and placed it between the Others and the innocents. Should have made it public. Should have stood in front of a microphone and shamed the UEG for their decision. He should have—should have done something.

  But he hadn’t.

  He had consoled himself with the decision’s seeming necessity and gone to sleep, expecting to awaken with all of it behind him, a blip on the otherwise bright history of humanity’s colonization.

  Only it wasn’t in the past. He lived with the effects of that decision every day as he saw his daughter lose words she had once known and people she had once loved. Kaia had forgotten her mother’s name just weeks ago, and her weeping at its loss had broken Reagan’s heart.

  Reagan pulled his gaze from the window.

  Nile fixed him with a piercing look, and Reagan realized he’d been silent a long time.

  The sergeant spoke. “Like you say, sir, I hope we won’t have to worry about defenses. But just in case, I’ll have the troops ready to show you some maneuvers this afternoon if you’d like.”

  Reagan nodded. “And pull your personnel files, Sergeant. I might as well start the reviews while I wait.”

  “Yes, sir.” Nile crossed to the desk and punched in some codes before leaving the office with a sharp salute to the admiral.

  Reagan put a hand impatiently to his head in response, scolding himself for getting distracted. This was not the time for parental regrets. He’d spoken to Kaia on the missive an hour ago, and she was fine today.

  What wasn’t fine was the strange spot that had crossed Lucidus this morning. Reagan knew what it was, even before the Anomaly Analysis Team walked into his office moments after Nile had left.

  “Sir.” The team leader, Lesharo, pushed a length of his black hair behind his ear and looked Reagan in the eye. “We’ve got some answers for you.”

  Reagan watched Smith, another member of the team, close the office door.

  “I’m not going to like them am I, Lesharo?”

  The dark man shook his head swiftly. “It’s a ship, sir.” He pulled a wide photoflat out of an envelope and handed it to Reagan.

  Though the image was grainy and sparse on detail, the inky silhouette was sinister and obviously alien.

  He tapped a code into his missive. His voice was tight as he spoke. “I’m putting the bases on alert.”

  Chapter 2

  The day after the festival, Ethan was still trying to shake the shadow in front of Lucidus from his mind. Ethan looked in on Polara as she lay sleeping. He felt a chill in the air and looked around Polara’s little room for an extra blanket.

  The room was dominated by the beautiful bed he and Aria had bought from Winn, a carpenter who
had been in stasis on their ship. Winn, like many others from Ship 12-22, was having a hard time finding use for his special set of skills on Minea, and since Ethan had been voted into the Colony Government and had a steady paycheck, he and Aria tried to help out the other passengers when they could. The bed was made of Minean wood, rich green and coarse-grained. Carved into the headboard were the most beautiful stars Ethan had seen since leaving space.

  He pulled a blanket from the dresser and tucked it around Polara. No need to wake her. He slipped out of Polara’s room and down the hall to Rigel’s room.

  Ethan expected to see his son asleep as he peeked into the next room, but the baby was sitting up in his crib, also one of Winn’s creations, smiling at his father. Ethan had the uncanny feeling that his arrival was expected.

  He slipped in and picked the little boy up. “We’re always the first awake, aren’t we, Ri?” he asked. Rigel looked up at him, his eyes as bright as the stars outside his window. Ethan scooped him up and took him to the changing table. The baby lay happily. As Ethan pulled a warm little shirt over Rigel’s head and slipped a pair of bright red pants on him, he remembered the nearly Olympic feats it had required to dress Polara when she was this age.

  Rigel was different. He lay quietly gazing at his father as he dressed him. It was hard for Ethan to explain how much he enjoyed Rigel’s company. After five years as Caretaker of a ship where the other passengers were in stasis, he still felt the need to connect deeply with other humans. Though Rigel was behind in walking and talking, he was brilliant at connection. When he looked at Ethan, it was as if he knew the very depths of Ethan’s soul. As Ethan took Rigel downstairs to feed him his breakfast, he sensed the deep calm that the child carried with him.

  Aria wandered sleepily into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of the thick gray milk made from sweetbeans, the main crop grown by the Food Production Division of Coriol. Ethan smiled at her.

  “Sleep well?”

  Aria nodded.