Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (4 page)

Marcos scoffed. “The UEG isn’t going to shut us
down for a little bad behavior. We’ll be fined, sure, but we’ve got the scrip
to cover whatever they can impose. The veins we’re in now are so sparse that we’re
pulling a lot of rock with the Yynium, and it’s possible that we’re not getting
all the rock out when we refine. We’re not on Earth, with the best of equipment
and plenty of it. This is the frontier, and you know as well as I do that we’re
making do as best we can. Still, purity is way down, and we can’t win that
grant with dirty Yynium.”

Marcos stood and walked around his desk to where
Theo leaned against a cabinet in the corner. Marcos put his hand on the older
man’s shoulder and felt the jab of bone through his jacket. “I’m not saying we
strip the deposit clean. I’m saying that we blast into the center of it, where
the cleanest cake is, and refine that for our grant sample. Just slice off a
little. Then, we play it fair and square. If we don’t win the grant, we destroy
the tunnel and tip our hats to the winner. If we do win the grant, we’re ready
to start production and get the Yynium heading to Earth twice as fast as we
could otherwise.”

Marcos saw Theo’s discomfort, though he wasn’t
sure if he was squirming because the plan went against his ethics or because he
was jealous that his upstart boss had come up with it.

Veronika came out from behind the desk, too. She
always seemed to sense the exact moment that Theo was at a tipping point. “This
way, we’re sure to win. And you, of all people, ought to want to fight for this
city. You built it.”

Marcos felt the jab of that. If it had been any
other moment, he would have called her on it. His father had built this city,
and Theo had only tended it those years when Marcos was growing up and
traveling in the P5 from Earth with Veronika. But he saw Theo caving and knew
that this was not the time.

Theo agreed, in the end, and Marcos began the
process of finding a blasting crew that could keep their mouths shut. He had at
least one person in mind, someone who had done covert jobs for him before.

***

Daniel Rigo held his breath as he walked from the
bright Minean morning outside into the dim interior of the mine. He lined up,
waiting for the next tram. He glanced at his mother, Marise. Her eyes were
weary as she peered at the dark ahead of them. Daniel put a reassuring arm
around her shoulders.

“I miss your father,” Marise said, so quiet that
only he could hear. She leaned her head against his shoulder, and Daniel was
glad he’d grown taller than her since they’d come to Minea five years ago. It
made him feel better able to protect her and his little sisters, Merelda and
Nallie, who were born here on Minea and still small. He was nearly nineteen
now, and there was a lot of protecting in his future.

“I miss him too,” Daniel said. “He loved the tram
ride in and out.”

Marise chuckled. “Only time he got to sit down. I’m
starting to look forward to it myself.”

The Yynium dust wasn’t as thick up here near the
mine entrance, but Daniel could already taste its lemony tang in the air. He
took a quick drink from the water bottle he carried with him—not much, because
he’d need it for later. The first tram left and he and Marise stepped a bit
closer to the front of the line.

Zella Panderlin, a neighbor of theirs, was
standing in line in front of them. Her pale curls, tied up in a bright cloth,
stood out in the dark of the mine. She turned and caught his eye, flashing him
a smile.

Daniel felt himself look down, embarrassed. He
had known Zella since before they’d left Earth. Their fathers had both operated
precision scoring machines in the Yynium mines back there. Thorian Rigo had
been one of the best scorers in the industry. He’d signed up thinking that
working in the mines on Minea would be similar to working in the mines on
Earth, but that wasn’t the case. The scoring machines, designed back on Earth,
couldn’t handle the volume of Yynium they were dealing with on Minea. They had
burned out quickly, and parts were half a century away.

That left the workers mining Yynium with archaic
techniques, using picks and shovels and hammers and chisels. That kind of
mining had wasted Thorian’s skills. And the wages were much smaller than they
were in the mines of Earth, too. It wasn’t the Minea that his father was
promised.

Still, his parents had been optimistic that if
they worked hard they’d catch up soon. But Thorian’s death seemed to squash the
optimism from Marise. Now, Daniel felt her weary head drooping on his shoulder
and glanced down. She was dozing before the long, laborious day ahead.

Daniel had heard that the scoring machines were
being redesigned at the heavy machinery plant in Oculys. But the redesign and
manufacturing process would take a while, and Daniel wasn’t sure that Saras
would spring for the new machines, anyway. The company had plenty of workers,
for now.

Daniel hoped that the new scoring machines would
be completed soon. His mother didn’t. She said they’d put everyone out of a
job. Still, the comfort of removing Yynium from inside a scoring machine seemed
a good alternative to this: hundreds of workers prying and scraping it from the
rock every day. Scorers were small units, and two or three could fit in a
section of the drift—the horizontal mine tunnels that followed the Yynium
veins—at a time. They had precision ore-removal attachments that scored through
the Yynium vein and neatly popped out chunks of it into tram cars that hauled
it up and out. Scorers had climate controlled cabs with air filters. Back on
Earth, his father had never come home with Yynium dust clouding his jacket. Or
his lungs.

Daniel didn’t know what the displaced workers
would do, but there had to be something better than this. The dry cough of
dustlung punctuated the air around him, and though most of the miners wore
Saras Company–issued masks, they still came home with the sharp taste of Yynium
in their mouths and the thick feel of it in their breath.

And now, another strange sickness was plaguing
people in Coriol. It started with fatigue, and moved to a fever followed by
purple bruises that appeared on peoples’ stomachs, arms, necks, and faces,
spreading rapidly until they were covered with the plum-colored patches. Daniel
hadn’t seen any of the sufferers up close, but he’d passed them in the street,
and they looked miserable.

Daniel watched Zella step onto the tram, and he
and his mother boarded a few cars behind her, flipping the pivoting seats down
as they entered. Under his boots, Daniel felt the grit from the ore the car
hauled when it wasn’t hauling people. He wouldn’t mind designing ore trams. He’d
make the seats contoured, so people were more comfortable sitting in them.

As the tram began to move, he put an arm around
his mother, tucking her head into him, so the wind didn’t sting her eyes. He
hunched over her, squinting against the wind as the tram picked up speed, and
tried not to think of it plummeting down the slope, deeper and deeper under the
ground.

He’d put windscreens on the cars, too. But that
got him thinking of the design problem that posed. The tram cars carried people
into and out of the mine, at the shift changes. When a tram emptied its cargo
of people, it went to be filled with Yynium ore that it would carry back up to
the surface. The cars had to be able to carry people and then be ready to carry
ore. A windscreen, even a metal one that could withstand being banged by chunks
of ore, would get in the miners’ way as they threw the ore into the cars. And
strong metal screens on each car would add too much weight to the tram as a
whole. Daniel enjoyed the puzzle of it as he rode. If he ever got the chance,
he’d design trams.

Or even better, hovercars. There were only a few
in Coriol, besides the round-backed hovercabs, and he loved to watch them skim
by. Theo Talbot’s was the most beautiful machine he’d ever seen.

A pang of regret filled Daniel. Last year, when
Talbot’s hovercar had come to building G, where his family lived, he’d been
outside, waiting for his father to come home and for his own shift in the mine
to start. He remembered watching Talbot unfold himself from the car and stretch
before going into the building.

Daniel and Zella and a couple other friends, Pete
and Hadib, had gone to check out the car. He remembered walking around it,
looking in at the Earthleather seats. He remembered how Zella had taken his
hand and pulled him over to see the glowing dashboard and the multiple
drop-down screens inside. He remembered the thrill of her hand in his, and the
feeling that someday maybe he could design something like this. Even though
they had a night shift to work, that cool evening the whole world had stretched
before them like an endless sea of opportunities.

Until Talbot strode back to the car and scattered
them with the words, “Rigo, you’d better go in. Your mother needs you.”

And that had been it. His father wasn’t coming
home. His mother had to come to work in the mines because his father’s contract
still needed filling and they still needed to eat. His little sisters were
immediately sent to school for the duration of his mother’s shifts, and the sea
of opportunities rose into a sea of debt that was slowly drowning them all.

***

A sol train ride after Ethan’s visit with Kaia he
was at the office. He faced his first task of the day: recording the next in a
series of tutorials on how to read Xardn. The Colony Offices valued his
expertise, and since the trouble with the Others on Beta Alora, there was a new
interest in his work with the dead alien language they had spoken.

Several things had changed in the colonization
efforts after the Earth Government had sold the 4000 passengers on Ethan’s ship
to the Others. A new fear of aliens was driving most of the spending back on
Earth, and the defense budget had skyrocketed.

When Ethan’s tutorial was finished, he had just
enough time to grab a bowl of warm, clear sweetbean soup before his meeting
with the Coriol Defense Committee. His official title was “Alien Consultant.”
He wasn’t sure if that meant he consulted about aliens or that he was an alien
who consulted. Sometimes he certainly felt like the latter. When the Offices
wanted a simple answer, it was often hard to sum up the complexity of his
experience with aliens, good and bad, into a single, always-true maxim.
Sometimes he thought he’d be a better consultant if he had never met any aliens
personally.

A Real-Time Communications session was already
going when he got there. RTC was one of the things that amazed Ethan. The
screen showed a group of people back on Earth, broadcast almost instantaneously
through the vast void of space that had taken him half a lifetime to cross.
They could never have RTC without Yynium. Even so, it was only available at the
Colony Offices and Company Headquarters in each settlement, and at the military
base. It wasn’t used frivolously.

Marcos Saras was in on the link, too, from his
office across Coriol. Hovering beside him, the skeletal Theo Talbot and
Veronika Eppes, as always.

Ethan liked to think that he and the other
governors were in these meetings to protect the people of Coriol from Saras,
but he suspected they were actually there to protect the Yynium and the
interests of the UEG. The Colony Offices were present in every settlement and
were owned by the United Earth Government.

The president of the United Earth Government was
on the screen now, with her Defense Chair and the head of the Earth Security
force.

“Though our meetings are often routine,” she was
saying, “I’m pleased today that I can report to you, as I have to the other
settlement defense committees, that construction on the Minean defense fleet is
completed.” The screen switched to images of the most intimidating ships Ethan
had ever seen. Armored and armed, they reminded him of sleek stingrays, with
wide, blunt wings and a tapered tailfin.

There were appreciative murmurs around the room,
but the president was obviously disappointed by the lack of outright cheering.
The committee in Coriol knew that however beautiful the ships, they were still
a long way from their destination. The SL-driven ships had taken fifty-three
years to bring members of the committee from Earth to Minea, while Saras and
his cronies had made the trip in five.

The president went on. “Your fleet is ready, but
we don’t have enough Yynium to send them. We need more of it than ever before.
If our interactions with the Others of Beta Alora have taught us anything, it
is that we need defenses.”

The president went on. “I have another important
piece of information reported by your defensive forces which you need to be
aware of.” There was a breathless pause. “An alien ship has been spotted
orbiting your planet.”

Ethan stood and walked quickly across the back of
the room, his heart pounding. The spot that had crossed Lucidus. He had known
it was not the orbital defenses. He breathed deeply, trying to focus on what
the president was saying.

“Though no aggressive action has yet been
observed, you need defenses out there. I want you to know we are working hard
to get them to you. But it’s vital that you maintain your city defenses until your
fleet arrives.”

Saras spoke up. “Madam President, if I may?”

“Go ahead, Mr. Saras.”