Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (36 page)

Ethan tried to speak to them, but they were
shouting.

“What are we going to do?”

“Where will we work, Ethan?”

“What do these aliens want, anyway?”

Suddenly, Ethan heard Silas’s gentle, sincere
voice. A single word, “Friends,” caught the attention of the clamoring mass.

Ethan turned to see the motivational speaker
standing with his arms raised, his artificial left hand, fingers spread, caught
the light.

“Friends,” Silas said again, and waited until
they stilled. “You are unique,” he said, allowing the silence that followed his
words to soak in around his listeners. “We were not wanted on Minea, it’s true.”
He spoke quickly and gently. “But we were needed.”

Ethan saw, like magic, the passengers quieting.
This was Silas’s gift.

“Beauty.” Silas let the word glisten in the air
and gestured toward Hannah and Luis and several artists in the crowd. “That’s
needed here. When we walk through the streets and see the tenements, with the
people packed inside, when we see the hungry children, when we see the spots of
Minean fever creeping across the skin of people we love—we need beautiful
things to kindle the flames of our hope that flickers when these painful
experiences come. We need beautiful things to draw our hearts and minds back to
that hope and lead us upward again. On Earth, lots of people are creating that
beauty. Here, if you,” again he gestured towards the passengers, “don’t create
that beauty, no one else will.”

He stood and looked at them. The passion in his
voice kept their attention. Ethan found himself caught up in Silas’s words.

“Help.” He looked toward Minz, Walters, the
Reverend, and others in the service industry. “Your gifts of helping others are
needed. You can serve. When people are weary from the mines or ill or angry,
they forget the small things—” he pointed at Minz specifically, “a clean shirt,”
then at Walters, “a hot bowl of soup,” and then at Reverend Hardy, “a prayer in
a dark moment. Never mind what Saras says, that the sanitizer and the server
can bring those, and that prayers are only needed at weddings and funerals.
Those things that you can do can give others mental and physical and spiritual
strength to get through one more day.

“When I was on Earth,” Silas’s voice grew
stronger, “I was proud and greedy. I made my money by stepping on other people
and taking it from them. But then, I fell off a cliff. Literally and
figuratively. In the desert backcountry, I slipped on a slick rock ridge and
fell thirty meters.” He paused, letting them imagine it. “It took this.”

He gestured to the stump of his missing arm, with
the artificial limb attached, and paused again. There wasn’t a breath in the
room.

Then he said, “Must have knocked somethin’ else
loose, too.”

Softly, Silas laughed. A self-deprecating chuckle
that allowed the crowd to laugh, too, and provided a perfect moment of rest in
his intense story.

He continued. “Because I didn’t want to be that
guy anymore. I wanted to find something good in people and help them embrace
it.” He walked across the front of the room once, twice, then turned toward
them. “You embrace it. Embrace what you can give the people here on Minea, in
Coriol, and even if nobody else sees its value, give it anyway and know that it
is needed.”

He stepped back, placing his one hand in front of
his chest and bowing his head. Ethan’s passengers cheered.

After that it was easy to organize them. Ethan
explained the Taim trays and sent many of them to his cottage to help Aria. The
Reverend started a conversation about other needs, especially the food shortage.
Several of the passengers committed to helping Aria with her fruit deliveries.
Walters volunteered to wait outside the steel and stone mansions and collect
food donations, which he promised to deliver all over Coriol, as if it were one
giant restaurant and he was the head waiter.

Somehow, Silas had given them, with his words, a
sense of duty, a self-respect, and a drive to overcome their challenges here
and make the kind of contributions that Coriol, and all of Minea, was lacking.

***

Aria was delighted when the passengers of Ship
12-22 showed up to help her make the Taim trays. She’d had them bring Taim from
their houses, but they needed more. While the passengers gathered at her
cottage to unpack Luis’s pottery and transfer the Taim from her walls to the
trays, she went out to gather more Taim.

Taking a large bucket with her, Aria started in
the first neighborhood after Forest Heights. She knew a few people here. Some
of them had children in Polara’s school. She knocked first on the Woods’ door,
since she had worked with Lela on some class parties last year. When Lela Woods
opened the front door, though, her smile froze.

“Hello,” Lela said guardedly, keeping the door
partially closed between them. News had gotten around that Polara was in the hospital,
that the plague had reached their neighborhood, and Aria didn’t blame her
neighbors for being scared.

“I have a strange request, Lela,” she asked
directly. “I need to know if you have any of the little plants that have been
growing everywhere.”

Lela looked offended. “Of course not. I scrape
the mold off every day. I scraped off a whole bunch today.”

Aria brightened. “You don’t use Zam on them?”

Lela shook her head. “Usually I do, but I’ve been
out for a week.”

Aria knew the next part sounded crazy. She tried
to think of a way to soften it, to make it sound like she wanted to borrow a
cup of root sugar, but she just blurted, “Do you have the ones you scraped off
today? Could I have them?”

Lela’s eyebrows drew together. Considering, she
finally waved a hand toward the backyard. “They clog up my disposer, so I dump
them in the back. If you really want them, you’re welcome to them.” Aria could
tell that collecting plants from the garbage was not something Lela approved
of, but she thanked her neighbor quickly and went to retrieve them. As she
scooped handfuls into her bucket, she glanced up to see Lela peering out the
back window at her, dismayed.

“They’re not a mold!” she called helpfully. Lela
shook her head quickly and disappeared into the depths of her house.

Aria’s hands were covered with bright green, and
the sharp, sweet smell of the little plants—almost like Earth’s mint, with a
hint of orange scent—filled her house as she carried the bucket back in to the
kitchen table.

 Aria pulled a wide oblong serving tray from a
crate, then she sat down at the table. Several of the passengers gathered
around. She glanced up at them. “When you remove them from the walls, break as
few of the tiny roots as you can.”

“Can you show us how you replant them?” Hannah
asked, leaning closer.

“Sure. Like this: Come here, little Taim,” Aria
said as she carefully grasped little bunches of the plants and disentangled
them from each other. “I have a new home for you.”

Many of them were damaged, their roots sliced
through from Lela Woods’ scraping, and Aria set those aside. The ones that were
whole, though, she carefully arranged in the trays, spreading their roots below
them.

“They want to spread their roots out, so it helps
if you don’t crowd them,” she said.

Soon she ran out of trays. There were still
plants in the bucket, so she looked for another box full of Luis’s pottery.
Several crates stood empty around her, and the bright colors of Luis’s plates
danced as the passengers snatched them up, filling them with the little plants.
It was a good thing he hadn’t given up making them. There were plenty now, when
they really needed them.

A knock came at the door. When she opened it, it
took Aria a moment to realize who was there. The cousins who had been with
Ethan in the cave: Ndaiye and Traore.

“Ethan sent us a message that you needed some
help over here,” Traore said. Their broad bright smiles added to the cheery
environment and she put them immediately to work. Ndaiye’s singing filled the
little cottage.

Maybe this could be the one really good thing
that Saras gave Coriol.

But as she looked at the trays in front of her,
she felt a pang of worry. The scraped Taim lay wilted and limp. It may be too
late. They may not make it. The broken ones which she had set aside were
already drying out, and they crumbled in her hands as she swept them into the
bucket to dump outside. They would have to get word out to people not to
destroy them.

The cure for Minean fever was growing on their
very walls, and they were scrubbing and scraping it into oblivion.

“Chip,” Aria called over her salesman friend, “I
need you to go to the HHSD and have them issue a bulletin this afternoon for
people to grow the Taim, not kill it. I want you to write it. Make people want
to protect the Taim.” She knew he could convince them. There were few people
immune to Chip’s sales tactics.

“Do you know where it is?”

Chip nodded. “The public health office is across
from the Saras Employment Office. I’ve been staring at their sign for hours
every day for a month. I think I can find it.”

“I don’t think you’ll have time to waste your
days down there for a while,” Aria said. “Saras paid well for these trays, and
that scrip is coming to all of you.”

Chip flashed a smile as he headed out the door.
He left just as she saw Hannah and two other passengers start for the door with
an enormous load of Taim trays.

“Ethan told us to take these to Polara’s school.”
Hannah called back as Aria caught her eye. Aria waved, a bright hope growing
within her. The cottage buzzed around her with activity and conversation.

What had he done? Marcos lay in his bed back at
the mansion cursing his moments of weakness. How had he let Bryant talk him
into stopping work on the new shaft? And what, really, was keeping him from
starting it again?

Looking out the window next to his bed, past a
tray of Bryant’s plants, he could see the skyline of Coriol. And he could see
heavy Asgre ships, three of them, hanging still over his city.

He wondered about the aliens. How far was their
home world? How long had they been traveling? Did they have creatures they
loved back there? Could they love?

This Taim thing seemed like an excellent solution
to the mining problem. If there were Taim, there was no gas. If there was no
gas, people wouldn’t get sick, and without people getting sick, production
numbers would go up.

But he still needed to get his hands on that
Yynium under the karst peaks. That new shaft had to go on. He had to win this
land grant.

Theo came in. He’d been distant and nervous
lately, not his usual friendly self. Perhaps he was afraid of catching Minean
fever. Marcos still hadn’t allowed the release of the news about the gas from
the mine, and now that the little trays of plants were soaking it up, perhaps
he wouldn’t need to.

“Marcos,” Theo said, “I need to discuss something
with you.” He was agitated, and paced the room with a hand in his pocket.

“What is it, Theo?”

“Something big. Something you’re not going to
like.”

“Theo.” Marcos was glad that his voice was
returning to its usual strength. “Just say it.”

Theo stopped and looked Marcos in the eye. “Veronika
is trying to undermine the company.”

Marcos had seen this coming, knew that they would
eventually go after each other. Marcos had seen it in Theo’s eyes the day the
passengers of the P5 had awakened and there were suddenly two VPs. He and Theo
both knew Veronika wanted all of it, and knew she was likely to get it, because
she’d stop at nothing to do so. She thought it was owed her. Theo had been
trying to keep her from outpacing him ever since.

“Too vague, Theo. What is it that you’re
concerned about?”

“Well, I don’t have all the information yet, but
Gaynes down at the market told me she’s been involved in some shady dealings
with some of the miners.”

Marcos sat up straighter. “Shady dealings?”

“Apparently a miner kid showed up at the market
with a sample from the mine. Told Gaynes that Veronika had paid him to steal some
from the Colony Offices Air Quality crew. The kid had one left, and Gaynes
bought it off him.”

Theo leaned in conspiratorially. “Gaynes says he
paid the kid for a sample, but when he got around to looking in the case, it
was empty. He wants the kid arrested. I need your permission to . . .
question the kid.”

Marcos heard a strange tone in Theo’s voice. “Why
do you need my permission?” The words ‘plausible deniability’ flashed in Marcos’
head again.

Theo sidestepped the question. “If these are
really gas samples from the mine, we don’t want the UEG getting hold of them. I
need to know what happened to all three of them.”

“We need to talk to Veronika about all this.”
Marcos knew where one of the vials had gone. He reached for his missive.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Theo said, “not
yet.”

“Why not?” Marcos didn’t like asking this many
questions in a single conversation. He liked answers.

Theo crossed and stood beside the bed, putting a
shaking hand on Marcos’s shoulder. “Listen, Marc, I don’t know what she’s
capable of. She was pretty worked up when she found out about you sending out
that dirty Yynium.” Theo shook his head slowly, “She told me you would bring
the company down, and you know the company’s all she’s got. She wants to run it
alone. I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do. You go confronting her
about it and she could lash out. Just let me look into it for a while. I’ll see
what I can find out.”

Marcos felt weak and worried. He wanted to hand
this over to Theo. He put a hand on the older man’s arm and nodded, wondering
how to avoid Veronika until Theo had it figured out.

Theo left, and Marcos ordered the smarthouse on
emergency lockdown.

He had to get the mines back on track. The land
grant still depended on it. With the shafts destroyed, mining the Yynium under
the Karst Mountains was the only chance he had. He picked up his missive and
called the crew leader from the karst tunnel.