Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (9 page)

They hiked up and over a little ridge, then down
into a pristine valley. Ethan had never seen anything so serene. Around him,
the pale blue formations jutted from the ground, draped in greenery. The lake
was perfectly still, the peaks reflected in it like frozen kings. Zan birds,
their bright blue plumage shimmering, rose and fell on their wide wings as they
dipped above the lake, catching insects in the still morning air. Once in a
while a tail feather or wingtip would strike the surface of the lake, and then
the ripples danced across it in ever-widening circles as beautiful as music.

“Your first time here,” Ndaiye said from behind
him. “So you have never seen the ghosts.”

“What ghosts?” Ethan asked, still transfixed by
the birds.

“The ghosts of the lakes. They come at dawn and
dusk. We’re too late now, we’ve missed them. I’ve been in the mountains twice,
early in the mornings, and both times I’ve seen them.” Ndaiye looked around. “Traore’s
terrified of them, but I think they’re friendly.”

Ethan nodded. He remembered the forms of animals
like calterlek and illumbra when he’d seen them through the fog. There really
was something ghostlike about them.

Ndaiye went on. “Our people, we have a lot more
spiritual teachings than some on Minea,” he said. “We know the ghosts are all
around us, and sometimes we can see them.”

Ethan wanted to ask more questions, but Ndaiye had
work to do. Ethan watched him walk away, taking out his Suremap. As the
surveyors plotted and measured, Ethan enjoyed the spring sunshine filling the
valley. The foliage began to steam in the damp Minean heat. Ethan sought shade.
When he crossed out of the morning sun’s intensity into the shadow of the
peaks, Brynn was just leaving the valley.

“Going over the ridge?” he asked. She nodded,
toying with a silver pendant she was wearing.

“These valleys are one of the best things about
these trips,” she said brightly. Then hefting her pack higher on her shoulders,
she said, “I’ll see you at rendezvous.”

***

 Aria wondered briefly about
Ethan’s survey trip today. He’d said they were going deeper into the karst maze
than anyone had ever been yet, and while that sounded exciting, it also worried
her. Every passenger of Ship 12-22 carried with them a subtle fear of the
unknown.

With Ethan out of the city for the day, Aria had
the perfect opportunity to go check out the farms northwest of Coriol. He
wouldn’t be using his Colony Office badge on the dresser, and it would get her
into the farm much easier than any story she could concoct. As she reached for
it she paused, looking at it for a long moment, weighing the ethics of using it
to gain entry into the farm.

She was just going to look around. Anyway, she
would have a badge of her own if Saras had hired her when she asked. Maybe they
wouldn’t be in this mess if they had. She had offered her help to the Saras
company years ago, just after Polara was born, when she was frustrated and
jittery from attending to the needs of her newborn all day. She had barely
admitted to herself how much she wanted to be back in a lab, to have a test
crop to attend to, to use for a few hours a week the knowledge she had worked
so hard to earn back on Earth. But all the positions in Coriol were filled, she’d
been told, by people hand-picked to fill them. Saras had brought their own crop
specialists years before and said they had no need of her help. But Aria knew
that they needed her. Their specialists knew nothing of the advances that had
taken place in the fifty earth years that it had taken them to get here, and
they didn’t care to learn.

Aria called it “knowledge dilation,” the
telescoping of new ideas and discoveries that happened when great minds spent fifty-three
years in stasis while their colleagues continued to advance in their field back
on Earth. Though RTC was available and the specialists here had some access to
the new knowledge, many of the advances couldn’t be implemented without new
equipment, and the equipment in Coriol was still decades behind what Aria had
left on Earth. Also the specialists here were defensive of their knowledge and
resistant to change the way they did things every time a new ship came in. She
understood it on some level. It bothered her, too, that her own knowledge, so
groundbreaking here, would probably be found only on dusty bookshelves back on
Earth today.

 Either way, Saras should have brought her on
board. If they wouldn’t allow her to help, she’d have to find another way to do
so. She pulled on a formal-looking jumpsuit and slipped Ethan’s entry badge
into her pocket. Pinning her red hair up, she looked in the mirror. Pretty
convincing.

She dropped the children at Kaia’s, thanking her
profusely and promising to be back after lunch, then caught the Water District
line on the sol train.

Aria loved the near-silence of the train. She
laid her head against the cool glass of the window. It wouldn’t be cool much
longer. Bright new growth had taken over every tree outside and shoots were
pushing themselves through the drying mud. Minean summer, with its sticky heat,
was on its way.

Glancing up, Aria was surprised to see the same
tiny plants that had invaded her house clinging to the window and roof over her
head. She looked around the train and saw them everywhere.

How could they spread like this? Why didn’t they
grow out in the soil? Where were they coming from?

When the train pulled silently into the station,
all she heard was the “click” of the rail stop and the hiss of the doors
opening. She stepped out to see the street full of Saras workers, red vests
pulled over their clothes.

She followed the flow of them towards the water
plant, glancing at the map as she went. She found herself eavesdropping on two
men walking in front of her.

“Four stations shut down yesterday,” one of them
said. “Guys just standing around for three hours while they cleaned all of the
little plants out.”

“Wonder how much longer they’ll have to fight it,”
the other man said. “I didn’t even get paid the day my station went down.” They
veered off to enter the Water Treatment Plant on the left, and Aria kept going
straight down the street and out of town.

The city fell away behind her as the wide urban
street tapered and the sidewalks ended. The narrow road was fringed on either
side by broad grasses that grew taller than she was. Trees pushed their way
through above the grasses, and the tangled mass of living things pressed in all
around her. Soon she came to the gates of the Saras Company’s Food Production
Division.

The gateman seemed bored. He gave her badge a
cursory check, then ushered her in with a sweep of his hand. Taking in the
scene quickly, Aria determined that the big building to the right was probably
the main office. She walked confidently into the front lobby, where she was met
by a harried-looking man rushing out of his office. The plate on his door read “Neko
Nasani, Director of Operations.”

“I’m sorry,” he said nervously, “we don’t have
anyone from the Colony Offices scheduled for a visit today. I have none of the
proper paperwork in order.” She half-expected to be summarily tossed out, but
again she was pleasantly surprised by how many doors the Colony Offices badge
opened. Under the law, the Colony Offices were charged with keeping the
corporations in check and making sure that nothing interrupted the flow of
Yynium or even threatened to interrupt it. Their ability to sanction a
corporation or shut an operation down altogether made them people to be
appeased, not antagonized, and this man apparently was used to it.

“It’s not official,” Aria said calmly. “I’m just
here to visit with you a moment about some—” she searched for the right word, “anomalies
we’re seeing in production.”

Nasani’s eyes widened. “We’re doing everything we
can, I assure you. Everything is completely under control.”

From the way he was sweating, Aria doubted it. “But
you are having some trouble with your deliveries?” she asked pointedly.

“No, no, the deliveries are fine.” His shoulders
slumped and he waved her into the office. “Won’t you please join me in here?” As
he closed the door behind them he said, “You can understand that this is a
rather delicate issue. Many people’s jobs depend on this facility.”

“Many people’s
lives
depend on this
facility, Mr. Nasani.”

He sat heavily behind the desk, which was covered
with papers, used cups, and, Aria fought the urge to wrinkle her nose, the
ubiquitous green plants. He saw her looking at them and rose heavily, digging
in a cabinet drawer and procuring a bottle of Zam cleaner, which he used to
spray the plants and wipe them off with a used paper towel. He tossed it in the
garbage, laughing nervously.

“You can see we don’t have any trouble growing
things here!” His voice was thick with a forced cheerfulness, but his eyes darted
away from hers as he said it.

So there was a problem with the crops then. That
was something Aria could help with, if they’d give her the chance.

Nasani had swept most of the garbage and a few of
the papers into the trash with the little plants, so when he sat back down Aria
found herself less distracted by the desk and more able to focus on what he was
saying.

“Look, I’ll level with you,” he said. “I don’t
know what this thing is. It’s unlike anything I saw back on Earth, and it
breaks all the rules I know about growing things here on Minea.”

“Can you explain to me what’s happening, Mr.
Nasani? What is wrong with the plants?”

“How about I show you?”

Saras operated both a traditional and a clean room
operation out here. The clean rooms were huge sterile warehouses where
everything was controlled, including lighting, temperature, nutrients, and
airflow. They were protected from outside toxins by decontamination rooms which
all personnel passed through before entering them. While clean rooms were
useful for growing leafy greens, tomatoes, beans, and other staples, some plants
still didn’t produce as well in that environment. The rangkor tubers, corn, Minean
squash called zilen, and melons, along with other substantial bearers, were
grown out in the vast traditional farm fields behind the clean room building.

Nasani led her to the decontamination room, where
she walked slowly under the glow of the lamps that were meant to eradicate any
trace bacteria that may be harmful to the plants. She slipped a paper suit over
her clothes and paper booties over her shoes and followed the director into the
first clean room.

It was massive. Big enough to house three Minean
cottages, the clean room was filled with shining metal shelving. Each shelf
unit had seven levels, and each level was full of plants. Strawberry plants
lined the aisles in trays stacked on the high shelves with under-mounted
lighting. Lettuce, peas, and beans grew farther down the row. Each shelf had a
bank of grow lights above it and on the bottom of the next shelf, and root
trays below the plants where water and nutrients were made available. To Aria
the rows upon rows of plants should have been beautiful.

But they weren’t healthy plants. She stepped over
to check out the strawberry plants on the shelf to her left. They were brown
and limp.

Aria examined the leaves—those that hadn’t died
were covered with brown lesions. The stems were wilted, wasted away below what
appeared to have once been healthy strawberries. The berries themselves were
shriveled and black.

It seemed indicative of a pesticide or herbicide
poisoning, but here in the clean rooms they didn’t use either one. There was no
reason to. The plants were grown in a sterile environment without exposure to
disease, bugs, or even dirt that could introduce toxins. What could be causing
this?

The story was the same on every shelf.
Fast-moving blight of some kind was sweeping the crops. Aria herself had never
trusted these indoor farms. She much preferred the open fields and the soil.
Perhaps something in the outdoor portion of the facility would give her a clue.

“Can you take me to the outdoor crops?” she asked
Nasani. He nodded, leading her through another decontamination room, where they
discarded their old suits and put on new ones before walking through another
bright blue light.

But Aria’s hopes were wrecked when she saw the
condition of the outdoor plants. They had the same symptoms but had contracted
the disease in greater numbers. There were whole swaths of dead rangkors, zilen,
corn, and melons. The dead corn stalks pointed skyward like accusing fingers.
The sight of so much wasted life made Aria sick. She knelt down and ran her
hands through the soil. There was nothing obvious that could be causing this.

“I assume you’ve run soil tests?” she asked.

“Time and again,” he assured her. “There is
nothing here that wasn’t here two months ago. Nothing that would cause—” Aria
heard how his voice caught, “this.” He gestured widely with his hand.

She looked at the sky. The light from Minea’s sun
was just right for these crops. She crumbled the soil in her hands. It was
loose and rich, obviously well-mixed. She plucked a zilen leaf, turning it over
and over, searching along its hairy veins for eggs or jagged holes that would
show the presence of insects.