Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (5 page)

“Perhaps you are aware that a rich new deposit of
Yynium has been discovered here on Minea?” In the face of aliens, Saras was
still thinking about Yynium.

“I’m aware.”

Saras’s voice had a tone of forced confidence. “I
was informed yesterday that permission to mine that deposit—which my surveyors
discovered, by the way, and reported faithfully to the Colony Offices, as the
protocol directs—”

Ethan scoffed, glancing at his Colony Office
colleagues, who showed their disgust by rolling their eyes. Saras would have
been more accurate to replace “reported faithfully to the Colony Offices” with “admitted
to finding it only after their survey was leaked to the Colony Offices.”

“—will be given as a bonus based on production
over the next seven weeks.”

The president nodded. “That’s right.”

“That might not be the most prudent choice, given
the time constraints and the UEG’s desire to get as much Yynium to Earth as
quickly as possible.” He didn’t wait for her to respond. “I have the equipment
and manpower to begin work on that deposit within the week, Madam President,
and a track record of timely delivery and—” Did Ethan hear a slight hesitation
in Saras’s voice? “And clean Yynium. If you would simply grant the land to
Saras Company now, you’d have your Yynium much more quickly.”

The president took a moment to craft her
response. “Mr. Saras, I see your point. It could be more beneficial in terms of
time to do that. But no new deposits have simply been given to any of the
companies, and I’m sure you can see the kind of precedent that might set.”

Saras began to speak, but she cut him off. “In
addition, Mr. Saras, we are talking about a few weeks to determine the best
company to award this deposit to. Though Yynium delivery is certainly
time-sensitive, we must be sure that the quality of the Yynium is superior, as
well. We want to know that when we place this new deposit into someone’s hands,
it will arrive to us as pure as possible. Contaminated Yynium from careless
mining or hasty milling is at best a waste of time, and at worst a danger. The
seven-week period will give all companies the chance to produce for testing the
cleanest Yynium possible, ensuring that we grant the deposit to the company
which will refine it best. The UEG doesn’t need sloppy production and dirty
Yynium. We need it as pure as possible.”

A look crossed Saras’s face. Ethan wasn’t sure whether
it was anger or fear, but it was gone quickly and he marveled that he had
witnessed a rare occurrence: Marcos Saras did not get his way.

At Saras’s silence, Veronika stepped in. “You can
be assured,” she said, “that we will win the grant.”

“Best of luck in that endeavor.” The president
moved on. “Now, while I have you here, I do want to commission your survey
teams, Mr. Saras, to provide for us a more extensive survey of the topography
above the deposit. We need to know what we are getting into in terms of
terrain. Can we count on you to provide for us surveys of at least the first
few kilometers above the deposit?”

Saras was still pouting. He was such a powerful
man that Ethan sometimes forgot his youth. Barely twenty-eight, he occasionally
showed the willfulness of the spoiled child he was. This time it was Theo that
stepped in. “That will take our survey crew off more directly profitable
exploration, Madam President. If we don’t win this grant,” at this Veronika
shot him a scalding look, “we’re going to need to find ourselves more Yynium to
mine.”

“We’ll pay you well for three crews.”

Saras countered quickly, as if glad to strike
back at her. “We’ll give you one.”

The president, undisturbed, considered for a
moment. “We’ll work with that for now. But—” here her voice took on a warning
note, “as you have a vested interest in this project, I’d like a Colony Offices
Governor to ride along with the survey team and make sure that the correct area
is surveyed. Governor Elias, can your Office handle that?”

Though Saras was a private corporation and could
say yes or no as they pleased, when the President of the UEG made a request to
the Colony Office, the Office said yes.

After the signoffs, the committee relayed the
president’s request to the head of scheduling at the Office. Ethan had a
sneaking suspicion that as the only Governor without a pressing docket of
must-dos, he would be the one sent with the survey crew. Actually, he welcomed
a break from the office, so when they asked him, he accepted the assignment.

Aria stood on Polara’s bed so she could reach up
near the ceiling. She swiped at the wall and peered at the cloth as she pulled
it back. Little fuzzy green plants coated it. They had been growing all over
Coriol the past couple of weeks. She folded it and swiped again. As a botanist
and crop geneticist, Aria loved plants and hated to eradicate even these, but
they were everywhere and were beginning to become a nuisance.

They seemed to grow on any slightly damp surface,
and spring on Minea was nothing if not damp. Everywhere was damp, and Aria was
finding the little plants on the counters in the kitchen, in the bathtub, and
even on the walls in the bedrooms. Was it a mold?

She climbed down from the bed and took the cloth
into the bright living room, where golden sunshine streamed in through the
windows and bathed her children, playing on the floor.

Polara was crawling around, roaring, much to the
delight of her stationary, silent brother, Rigel. He watched her happily, and
Aria felt the old pang of worry that he wasn’t more mobile and verbal himself.

She shook the thought from her mind and held the
cloth in the brightest stream of light. Peering at it, she breathed a sigh of
relief. Instead of rhizomes and sporangiophores, she saw the familiar curves of
miniscule roots and hypocotyls. Even, here and there, a tiny set of cotyledons
on the biggest of the plants. At least it wasn’t a mold.

Aria noticed Polara peering up at the green dots
on the cloth. “Are those yucky?” the four-year-old asked.

“Kind of,” Aria replied, “when they’re growing in
our house.” She crouched down and slid an arm around her daughter. “But look
closely, and you can see the little plant parts. See the tiny white roots?”
Polara nodded. “And some of them have brand new baby leaves. See?” She pointed
to the tiny wings of the bigger plants.

Polara brightened. “They’re baby plants? Like
Rigel!”

“Yep,” Aria said, straightening, “babies like
Rigel.” She glanced at the clock. “Okay, guys. We’ve got to get going or the
store might not have what we need. Polara, can you get your shoes on?”

As the dark-haired little girl bounced off to
find her shoes, Aria tossed the cloth in the sanitizer and gathered her
shopping list and her bags. Though Ethan’s work in the Colony Offices assured that
they had the scrip to get all the groceries they needed, the company store
itself had been coming up short on supplies lately. She wanted to be there
early today.

Ever since she’d gone two weeks ago and seen the
shortage, she couldn’t stop thinking about those empty shelves. Where was the
food? Saras had seedbanks and rootstock aplenty. They had tens of thousands of
acres of terraformed farmland just northwest of the city, and they had all the
fertilizer they needed. Where was the food?

Aria grabbed her scrip chain and wallet and the
kids and headed to the Market District. The scrip chain was heavy and unwieldy,
strung with triangular brass coins punched through the middle with a triangle
hole for carrying on the chain. The coins were the only currency in Coriol.
They were only good at Saras stores in the city. The stores took no other
currency and the coins were useless in any other colony. Save enough of them
and you could trade them in for UEG money, but the exchange rate was pretty
dismal, and meanwhile, you had to eat.

Catching a hovercab, she settled Polara and Rigel
on either side of her on the smooth, cool seat and made sure they could see out
the windows. It would be cheaper to take the sol train, but crowding on with
groceries and the two children was stressful for Aria. The press of people, the
effort of trying to contain Polara’s boundless energy, the weight of Rigel in
her backpack carrier, and the grocery bags in her arms always had her snappy
and strained when she got home. A hovercab was quiet, private, and convenient,
especially for grocery shopping. Anyway, they had the scrip and she might as
well use it.

Because their ship had been the responsibility of
the government instead of any particular corporation, they’d had no debt to
work off when they arrived. Aria figured they’d paid for the journey by being
sold to the Others, a cruel alien race on the planet Beta Alora, and she didn’t
feel bad that they didn’t owe the Saras company when they got here.

Many of the passengers on their ship had left
Coriol immediately to be nearer family or friends in other cities. All of the
passengers of Ship 12-22 who had stayed were placed in the only empty
neighborhood in Coriol, the newly finished Forest Heights. Forest Heights was
on the edge of the city, inconveniently far from the Market District and the
Colony Office, but wonderfully near the wooded hills and karst peaks that
ringed the city.

They rode in the hovercab through neighborhoods,
just like their own, with the little blue cottages Minea was famous for. After
the Housing District they entered the Health and Human Services District, with
its towering steel hospitals and research labs. As the hovercab pulled past the
last of the health buildings, Aria caught a glimpse of the grimy cement
tenements where many of the industrial workers lived. The blue-streaked gray
buildings were closest to the factories, mills, and the Yynium refinery that crushed
and purified Yynium twenty-seven hours a day, 420 days per year. It never
closed. The tenements were tall enough to obscure the refinery itself, which
Aria knew was there but had never seen.

At last the Market District came into view, with
its cheery red and green storefronts. Aria unloaded the kids, shouldering into
the backpack that she used to carry Rigel. She gave the cab driver twenty scrip,
and headed into the produce store.

She could tell immediately that this was going to
be a difficult day. The store was crowded with people, and the produce bins
were low. “Hold Mommy’s hand,” she said sharply to Polara as a woman with
Yynium dust on the shoulders of her black dress stormed angrily past them
towards the door.

The woman called back over her shoulder. “Don’t
bother, lady, they’re not selling anything. And when they do, nobody will be
able to afford it.”

Aria looked at the row of barred registers. It
was true. The cashiers were standing still as the people waited in line with
their groceries.

Stock boys were scurrying around in front of the
bins, swapping out the prices on every item. Their red vests bore the Saras
triangle across the back. Aria heard a deep, firm voice and turned to see the
store manager, Cyril Gaynes, speaking to a man from the refinery.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Gaynes said,
although Aria could tell he wasn’t, “but our costs have gone up today and we
must recalculate the prices before we can sell anything else.”

“We have to be back to work in fifteen minutes,”
the man said, a note of pleading in his voice. “There won’t be anything left by
the time we get off. Can’t you just open the registers and calculate the costs
there?”

“I’m sorry, every item has to be marked with the
correct label before we scan it through the register. That’s the only way the
system works.”

“The system doesn’t work,” the man said. Aria
heard the despair in his voice and looked away so he wouldn’t see her watching
the exchange as he turned and left the store. People began filing out after him
as they realized they wouldn’t make it to work on time if they didn’t leave
now. Aria pulled Polara to the back of the store as they left.

Soon, only a few people remained. Aria watched as
the stock boys marked up item after item. Beans that were one scrip per measure
were now two, and apples had doubled as well. The little packets of meat she
and Ethan used to add flavor to their stews had gone from four scrip to seven.
Now a new worry pricked her mind. She hoped she’d brought enough scrip. The
coins were unwieldy, and she tried to only carry as much as she needed for each
trip. If prices continued like this, people would be carrying scrip chains so
long that they dragged the ground behind them.

She glanced at the other shoppers. There was a
man in a Colony Office uniform and a teen who should probably still be in
school but whose dusty red coveralls revealed his work in the Yynium mines.
Aria knew he’d probably get docked the full day’s pay for being late back from
his morning break, but he stood stubbornly in front of the registers with a
meager armload of rangkor tubers, Minea’s native purple potatoes. They were the
cheapest food you could buy here, and not terrible as far as nutrition, but
Aria longed for her lab back on Earth and the chance to tinker with rangkors,
to increase the protein and breed for a thinner, edible skin. So much of the
meat was lost peeling them. She gathered a few of them from the bin herself and
shifted Rigel in her backpack as she continued around the store.

When she stepped into line behind the young miner
and an old woman in a faded green jacket, Aria’s basket was a rainbow. It was
filled with bananas, berries, dragonfruit, and sahm, the bright green leafy
vegetable that would be just like Earth’s kale if it didn’t taste like carrots.
She glanced down to see Polara taking scraping bites out of an apple, so she
mentally calculated that into the bill as well.

The registers had opened and she waited, glad
that Polara had something to occupy her attention. Waiting in lines could be
hard with an active four-year-old, and she wasn’t as good as Ethan at coming up
with distracting games to play while waiting.

An interruption in the usual flow of the checkout
line caught Aria’s attention. She glanced up to see the boy with the rangkors
arguing with the cashier.

“I DO have enough to buy them,” the boy said
angrily. “I only picked out what I could afford.”

“The prices changed, kid. You can see that.” The
cashier, another red-vested Saras worker, gestured at the bins.

“When I picked them up they were two scrip each,
and that’s what I’m paying.” The boy slammed a ten scrip piece down on the
counter with a clatter. That’s why he’d stayed then, because he’d hoped they
would honor their first prices.

Gaynes, a big, broad man, stepped quickly down
the aisle behind the bars of the register. “The price is fifteen scrip and that’s
what you’ll pay, unless you want to go to jail for shoplifting.” His voice
reminded Aria of a chained dog.

The boy’s shoulders slumped. He looked carefully
at the tubers, weighing and evaluating them in his hands before dejectedly
sliding two of them to the side of the counter. The cashier took the ten scrip
piece off the counter where it lay and Gaynes reached into the register drawer,
pulled out the boy’s one scrip change, and flipped it through the air between
the bars, where it sailed out and landed on the floor. The boy chased it
desperately, and Gaynes laughed as he watched the kid walk out the door
clutching the coin and the rangkors.

Aria felt her nails digging into her palms. She
tried to breathe calmly. The old woman in front of Aria stepped up to the
register and set her basket on the scanner.

“Forty-eight scrip,” the cashier said.

It appeared that the woman had underestimated her
purchases, too. She was flustered as she counted several times. “What should I
put back?” she asked. “I’ve only got forty-two.”

“Oh, no,” Gaynes’s voice was almost kind this
time. “You don’t need to put anything back,” he crooned.

Aria felt immediately on guard. Gaynes wasn’t a
kind man. He wanted something.

“But I don’t have enough,” the woman said,
confused. “Do I?”

“Well, I think we can probably work something out,”
Gaynes said. Aria followed his gaze to the woman’s frail hand, where she saw an
Earthgold ring. So that was it. “We don’t usually do trades, you know.”
Everybody knew. Trades were against the law in any company colony. Only Saras
scrip was accepted in Coriol. “You can make up the difference with that.” He
pointed to her ring.

She looked puzzled, then Aria saw the woman’s
mouth open slightly in surprise, “Why, why, I don’t know . . .
My husband gave it to me back on Earth.” She spun the ring nervously on her
finger.

Aria couldn’t stand it. She unclipped her scrip
chain and pulled off six scrip. Stepping up to the counter, she laid them
beside the woman’s hand.

The woman turned her eyes to Aria in gratitude.
Aria smiled, then met Gaynes’s narrowed eyes. The woman left the store and the cashier
scanned Aria’s items. Still, Gaynes glared at her through the bars.

The two rangkors still lay on the counter.
Without taking her eyes off him, Aria scooped them up and dropped them in her
basket.

“Fifty-four scrip,” the cashier said. Aria slid
three coins to him and narrowed her eyes to match Gaynes’s glare. Then she
looked away and reached down for her basket.

“This is my store, young lady,” Gaynes said as
she loaded the produce into her shopping bags.

Aria’s eyes flashed as she met his again. “Oh is
it, Mr. Gaynes? My husband and I will be having dinner with Mr. Saras the day
after tomorrow, and I’ll be sure to let him know you said so.” The subtle
backwards jerk of Gaynes’s head showed her she’d landed her blow. She took
Polara’s hand and walked out of the store. Just at the door, she turned and
called, “And thank you so much for the complementary apple.”