Ariston_Star Guardians

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  She resolved to sit down and have a long chat with Dev later, to find out if it was possible this corporate mission of theirs wasn’t as sanctioned as Mick had been told.

  “Why would he go to engineering?” Dr. Woodruff asked, coming up from that direction himself. Engineering lay in the far back, behind the sleeping cabins, and he had a toolbox and a diagnostic scanner in his hands. He frowned darkly at Ariston.

  “He’s an engineer, he tells me,” Mick said.

  “Do I have to speak nerdy again to prove it?” Ariston looked at her, smiling faintly and cocking an eyebrow.

  If he’d been handsome through the tinted faceplate of his helmet, that was nothing compared to seeing him without it, his damp, dark hair artfully tousled. She was tempted to join Dev in open-mouthed admiration, but she reminded herself that she was too old to gawk at pretty boys. Also, she was the captain of the ship and in charge of not letting any more of her people get killed.

  “You can prove it by fixing things,” Mick said.

  “I don’t need his help,” Woodruff said.

  Woodruff, who’d changed into sweatpants and a tank top, had some muscles of his own, and Mick, who noticed Dev was sneaking a few more looks at Ariston, was tempted to point her back toward her original interest.

  “I’m from Dethocoles,” Ariston said. “I’ve worked on ships like this before.”

  Woodruff looked like he might mulishly object, but he said, “Fine. This way.”

  Ariston, who was trying to towel off one-handedly while holding his gear in front of him, glanced back into the airlock. More of his armor, as well as all of Mick’s, was on the deck in there.

  “You can leave it there to dry,” Mick said. “Nobody’s going to bother it.”

  “Right,” he said, but didn’t immediately follow Woodruff. He looked down at the stuff clutched in front of him, by accident or design hiding his abs and his groin.

  Mick almost teased him about his supposed lack of shyness, but it was time to get up to the cockpit and figure out if they were in any immediate trouble or not.

  Ariston laid the rest of his armor inside, keeping his wet shirt and what looked like black briefs draped over his arm, and headed toward engineering. This meant squeezing past Dev and Mick. They stepped aside, and he nodded cordially as he passed, not looking down at Mick—she hadn’t unfolded her towel yet, so he could have gotten an eyeful. But he acted like a gentleman and kept his eyes forward. A weird, foolish part of her was disappointed, and she couldn’t quite keep from checking out his ass again as he walked past the cabins and toward engineering.

  “I see why you made him your friend,” Dev whispered, grinning devilishly at her.

  “He’s not my friend.”

  Mick had no idea what to classify him as. He’d helped her out twice now, at the wreck and again with her own ship. The Viper might have been destroyed and everyone inside killed if he hadn’t fought the men forcing their way in. Didn’t she owe him something?

  At the least, she would give him the ride to the next system he’d asked for, assuming he actually helped out in engineering and didn’t try to sabotage their computers or something. And assuming she could actually get her ship off the planet.

  With her towel wrapped around her body, Mick slipped into the pilot’s seat. She would dress later. If the men left in the ruins were talking to their friends on that salvage ship, she didn’t want to miss it.

  Dev sat in the seat next to her as Mick turned on the channel hacker, and it surfed the airwaves, looking for transmissions. With nobody else in the system using the comm channels, it didn’t have to work hard to find the only other open one.

  At first, gibberish came over the comm, but the channel hacker had built-in decryption software. Soon, working similar to the translator in her ear, it relayed what it was hearing in English.

  “…turned on us,” someone was saying, someone on the planet.

  Mick leaned forward, curious if she would get information about Ariston.

  “…don’t know who the hells he is,” came a snarl in return.

  Those words came from the salvage ship which was, the sensors told her, in orbit now. Good. Mick had worried it would be on its way down to finish off the Viper.

  “But I want him dead,” the man on the ship added. The captain?

  “We tried. But he’s good. Very good.”

  “No excuses.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll get him, but, uh—he’s in that other ship now.”

  “The one that you were supposed to collect for salvage after killing the crew?”

  Mick’s lips thinned as she listened to the plans this blatant murderer had for her crew and her ship.

  Dev’s mouth dropped open for the second time in five minutes, but for a very different reason. “What?” she mouthed. “Why?”

  “Getting to the crew turned out to be problematic. Ston came out of nowhere when we were about to burst in.”

  Ston? Short for Ariston? Mick thought the nickname sounded stupid. Did he actually prefer that?

  “But we took out her shields, sir,” the man on the planet continued. “And we damaged her good. She isn’t going anywhere. I thought we could regroup and get it, but then Gretton took off in the other shuttle without getting us first.”

  “I told him to. I didn’t want to lose another shuttle.”

  “Er, yes, sir, but you’re coming back, right? It’s almost fully dark now, and we’ve got a couple of men who are hurt. Also—” the man’s voice dropped to a whisper as he added, “—the ruins are haunted. We’ve seen… we’re seeing spirits. I think they’re restless on account of that other ship coming here to raid the ruins for treasure. I keep seeing—”

  “For the gods’ sake, Azik. Quit being a fucking baby. We’ll come down and get you in the morning.”

  “The morning?” The guy’s voice squeaked, and he sounded like a little girl more than a “baby.”

  If Mick hadn’t been in a predicament of her own, she might have laughed.

  “I’m not risking another shuttle by making our pilot land in the dark. There’s nowhere flat anywhere near you.”

  “You can put down far away, and we’ll hike out to the shuttle, sir. We don’t want to stay down here. I’m serious. Sigurd is hurt bad.”

  “Patch him up. You’ve got medkits. Like I said, we’ll be down in the morning when it’s light and we can see.”

  Mick wondered if the ship’s captain, or whoever was in charge up there, had concerns about the haunted ruins himself and didn’t want to risk any more of his men. Or maybe it was Ariston he was worried about risking his men against.

  Several seconds passed before the guy on the planet mumbled a glum, “Yes, sir.”

  The transmission ended.

  Mick stared at the comm panel, feeling glum herself. That hadn’t been as illuminating as she had hoped.

  A wave of intense weariness came over her, and she dropped her face into her hand.

  “What was all that about treasures?” Dev asked.

  “I have no idea. Haven’t these ruins been here for centuries?” Mick was far more concerned about getting her ship fixed and off the planet than in artifact hunting. If the humans who had lived here had originally come from some pyramid-building society on Earth, there were probably hundreds of artifacts from that culture in some museum back home. “Will you get Safin to figure out how many hours we have until dawn? If it turns out that our ship is inoperable, we’re going to have to get a ride out on that shuttle—and that ship up there, assuming the shuttles aren’t equipped for interstellar travel.”

  “A ride out?” Dev sounded alarmed. “We just got here. We have to set up our camp as soon as its safe. We have food and supplies along for three months, a drill rig for building a well, and a fancy filtration system. You’re supposed to drop us off and come pick us up in a couple of months. We’re not supposed to leave before we’ve even stepped outside.”

  “If we can’t get the ship—or a ship—back into spac
e, then you’ll be here a lot longer than three months. Just go check with Safin, please.” Mick closed her eyes and leaned against her armrest. Even though she didn’t like coffee—only the chocolate-covered beans—she was tempted to have Dev ask Safin to make some. “I need a minute to rest, and then I’ll go back and look at the damage.”

  She ought to be looking at it now, but she couldn’t shake the weariness that had come over her. At the least, she should go dress so that she wasn’t sitting in her chair with no more than a towel wrapped around her.

  “I’ll check, but the day is twenty-seven hours long here, and we’re near the equator, so it should be about thirteen hours of darkness. We could all sleep for eight hours and still have time to go take a scientific look at the ruins, the soil, the ziggurat.”

  “The zig-what?”

  “The pyramid-like thing. We believe this was a Mesoamerican culture, but we’re not sure which one. It should be absolutely fascinating to study. It’s too bad some volcano wiped them out. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see what they might have evolved into without Western influence?”

  “Uh huh. Fascinating.” Mick leaned her head back against the rest. Just a few minutes of napping, and she would check on the ship.

  Dev said something else, but she didn’t hear it.

  • • • • •

  Harsh sun shone down on the brown-skinned boy’s dusty face and black hair. He smiled as he walked toward the Marines in their desert camo, men from Mick’s squad. On a rare day off, they stood in the shade of a vendor’s stall and drank chilled sodas, the ultimate luxury after months on deployment, months sleeping in tents outside of the city, months repairing aircraft in heat that made Arizona seem chilly.

  The boy waved and asked for candy in broken English. Mick, who had paused to look at Arabic gold jewelry in a woman’s market stall, frowned as some intuition spoke to her. The hair on the back of her neck rose.

  “Anderson,” she called. “Check his—”

  The bomb went off before she finished the sentence. The explosion roared over cries of horror and pain, and the smoke blotted out that harsh sun. A figure raced out of the smoke—the boy, what remained of him. Somehow, he was running even though his body was half gone and blood spurted everywhere. He chased Mick, pointing at her, as if to claim she was next.

  Mick woke with a gasp, her heart slamming against her ribcage. She almost fell out of her seat, and might have if someone hadn’t rested a hand on her shoulder.

  She flinched and shied away, unable to remember who she was or where she was. Light shone down on the control console in the cockpit of the Viper, and awareness slowly returned.

  “Jesus.” She rubbed her face, her hands shaking.

  “You all right?” someone asked, the words weird and foreign even though she understood them. Ariston. Speaking in Dethocolean. “Bad dream?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she rasped, lowering her hand and trying to pull herself together.

  Half dream. Half memory. In reality, nobody had run away from that explosion, not the boy, not the men in her unit, and not the women selling drinks or trinkets in the stalls around them. Mick had never been able to understand employing tactics that destroyed as many or more of one’s own people as they did the enemy. Had she not stopped to look at jewelry, she would have been dead too.

  “Just a dream,” she whispered, one that had been frequent in the year after the event—and the reason she left the military—but one that hadn’t bothered her in quite some time. She wondered why it had returned now. “I’m fine. What do you need?”

  Mick glanced at the clock on the wall, surprised that she’d slept for two hours. She had only meant to close her eyes for a few minutes. She sure as hell didn’t feel refreshed after that.

  “I came to give you a damage report,” Ariston said.

  Mick looked at him for the first time. He stood behind the co-pilot’s seat—Dev, it seemed, hadn’t returned, or maybe she’d come and gone since Mick had dozed off. He wore black briefs and a thin long-sleeved black shirt that accentuated every muscle in his torso. She was sure he’d chosen it because heavier clothing would bunch and pinch under armor, but if he ever wanted to inspire women’s fantasies, he could definitely wear it at a nightclub.

  Not that she was in the mood for fantasies.

  “Thank you,” she said, embarrassed for having been caught napping while he had been working.

  “You might not want to thank me. I don’t have good news. Before dozing off, your engineer showed me what you have along for spare parts.”

  “He fell asleep too?”

  “Most of your crew has.”

  “They’re my passengers, not my crew, and I have more experience with ship repairs than Woodruff does. He’s a civil engineer.” Mick moved to stand, intending to go back to take a look for herself, but she was still wearing nothing but a towel, and it drooped alarmingly. She cursed and pulled it back over her breasts. She was amazed it hadn’t fallen off completely while she slept. “Maybe I should put on clothes first.”

  “Maybe,” he said blandly, watching her face instead of her cleavage. “But I also have experience, as I said, with this style of ship. We can replace the hull panels that were damaged, and I can pound out the dents, but here’s a list of what was damaged and requires replacement parts.” He stuck out his wrist, revealing one of the typical Dethocolean logostecs, computer-watches that projected information via holographic displays. It showed a depressingly long list of parts. “My logostec found your language in its database. I guess you are from Gaia.”

  He sounded moderately surprised. Why would she have lied about that?

  “We have spares of that, that, and that,” she said, pointing at items on the list. “But that JY-converter… I was lucky to get the one I have. Apparently, this is an old model of ship, and replacement parts need to be scrounged out of junkyards or custom-fabricated because they aren’t made in the factory anymore. I was told those converters never went bad.” She scowled.

  “That’s true. They rarely do, except in extreme cases. If someone shoots them, that’s moderately extreme.”

  “Moderately? What would constitute a deeper degree of extremeness?”

  He shrugged. “Crashing. Flying into a sun.”

  “Things my pilot sister has recommended I avoid. I don’t suppose there’s any chance those shuttles contain matching converters?” Mick asked, though she couldn’t imagine that being the case.

  “No, but the salvage ship itself might have one that could fit with some tinkering. Captain Eryx and the chief engineer, Mrook, keep a huge assortment of recovered parts in the storage rooms next to engineering. If they can’t get the prices they think are fair right away, they’ll wait and watch the markets until things change.”

  “They’re not coming down here though.”

  “No, that ship wasn’t designed to land on planets, even if there was a flat spot for it to do so. We’d have to go up there to get the converter.”

  “That sounds… challenging.”

  “Yes, but it may be our only option.”

  Mick sank back down in her seat, eyeing the sensor display. The salvage ship was on the far side of the planet, orbiting it like a satellite. “We listened in on their conversation earlier. Whoever’s in charge up there said he’d send a shuttle back down to get his men once it got light out.”

  “Anything about whether the men were supposed to try again to destroy this ship?”

  “Not that we heard in the transmission.”

  “I’ve been concerned that they might have enough ordnance with them to go up to the top of that pyramid and lob explosives at us.” Ariston sat in the co-pilot’s seat and tapped the control panel. “Woodruff and I focused first on getting shields back online.” A grid of the ship displayed in the air, and a green line formed around it, indicating they were up. “Good. Eighty percent power. We can work on that, but that should protect us from a minor ground attack.”

  “Thank you.” Mick agai
n felt guilty that she’d been doing nothing while this stranger worked on her ship.

  He waved an acknowledgment, but his verbal response disappeared in a yawn.

  “I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who’s unusually tired,” Mick said, then tugged open a storage bin beside the console.

  She pulled out her bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans, her private stash. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten in a while. She would have to hunt for something more substantial soon, but between the sugar and the caffeine, these ought to give her a kick to wake her up. She poured a small pile into her hand and offered some to Ariston.

  “Candy?” he asked.

  “Rocket fuel.”

  His eyebrows drew together in confusion, emphasizing that furrow he got between them.

  “Caffeinated candy from Gaia,” Mick said. “You’ll never forgive yourself if you pass on such an exotic treat.”

  “I see.” He selected one, touched his tongue to it, then made a face. “There’s powder on it.”

  “Yeah, that’s cacao and sugar, I think. And then there’s chocolate that’s—” Mick read from the description on the back of the bag, “—delicately enrobing the organic, exquisitely roasted fair-trade espresso bean.”

  “A description like that on Dethocoles would mean you were buying something hideously overpriced and expensive.”

  Mick grinned. “That’s what it means on Earth too. They’re my vice, but they’re rich and potent, so a bag usually lasts for a while.”

  His expression still dubious, Ariston placed the treat in his mouth and chewed experimentally. Faint crunches sounded from the bean breaking.

  “It’s not as sweet as I thought it might be,” he offered.

  “Do you not like sweets?” Mick couldn’t imagine it.

  “I’m just not used to them. I don’t eat them when I’m on—when I’m in space.”

  She studied his face, trying to guess what word he’d corrected there.

  “No? Seems like a good time to treat yourself.” She tossed a few beans into her mouth, wanting the caffeine kick as much as the sugar. She didn’t care much for the diluted taste of brewed coffee, so this was her pick-me-up. “Do you want something else to eat? We have a variety of dehydrated, packaged stuff. It’s not nearly as tasty as my beans, but it’s more filling.”