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  Drefan allowed us to borrow one of his STVs to make the trip out to the scout, and Reever piloted it over the rough surface terrain with admirable skill.

  “Why do you want to survey the crater?” my husband asked as we climbed out and enabled our suit weights.

  “Black crystal has caused much sickness on other worlds. Cherijo wrote about it extensively in her journals.” I glanced back at the cluster of silver-white domes. “If it has somehow infiltrated the water supply system or food synthesizers, it could be poisoning the colonists.”

  “It never seems to have the same effect on those exposed,” Reever said. “It made the Taercal become religious zealots, and the Oenrallian stop aging. How will you tell if it is affecting the colonists here?”

  “I did not find any trace of it in the people I’ve examined,” I admitted. “But the crystal has many properties, I think, that we are not aware of yet.”

  Drefan’s engineers greeted us and were happy to show Reever the repairs they had made to the hull, engines, and navigational controls. The little maintenance drone, it seemed, had been a great help to them, as it was able to access areas of the ship that the engineers could not reach themselves without disassembling more equipment.

  While the men discussed the work in progress, I went to our quarters in the back of the ship, and found the image Reever had taken of Marel on Joren, just before we left. My heart twisted as I looked at her small, grinning face.

  “Soon, baby,” I murmured, touching the surface of the image with my gloved fingers. “Soon we will be together again.”

  I tucked the portrait in one of my utility pouches and surveyed the rest of the chamber. Neither Reever nor I had many possessions, and both Drefan and Mercy had given us enough garments to wear. I unearthed a container of Jorenian tea from a jumbled pile and checked the seal; it was still usable. I also found one of the Omorr blades Squilyp had given me.

  It was not much, and not enough to solve the mystery of what was happening on Trellus, or prevent Davidov from keeping his vow to destroy the colony.

  Tea and knives. Do you really think that’s the answer?

  Pain hammered into the sides of my head, making me clutch at my helmet. I knew the voice. It belonged to an entity that had promised to leave me alone.

  Wrong. I said I’d stop imprinting you. You’re making the connection this time, kiddo.

  The interior of our quarters on Moonfire vanished, as did my envirosuit. I found myself sitting on black, pebbly soil, looking out at an endless stretch of rust-colored water. It rushed at me in huge, curling waves, collapsing and churning up fountains of orange foam.

  A red-haired, nearly naked Terran woman appeared beside me. Two inadequate strips of cloth covered her breasts and loins; dark miniature optic shields concealed her eyes. Under her buttocks lay a colorful rectangle of cloth depicting flat red flowers.

  “It’s a beach towel,” she said, glancing at me as she poured a thick white liquid from a container onto her palm. “Take off your clothes; you could use a little sun.”

  I looked up at the blue giant star blazing overhead.It made streaks of purple and green in the yellow sky. “I thank you, no. I thought you had merged with the rest of the Jxin, Maggie.”

  “I did, I am, and I will.” Cherijo’s surrogate mother seemed unconcerned as she rubbed the lotion into her freckled skin. “You’re not doing what we talked about, but it’s not like that’s a surprise. How’s your head?”

  The question made the pain intensify. “It hurts.”

  “Get used to it.” She reclined, flattening her body onto the beach towel. “You’re stuck with it until you reconcile. Which I would do before you get off this fun-house ride of a planet. There’s serious business in your immediate future.”

  As before, her instructions and predictions made little sense. “Are you aware of what has happened to Reever and me?”

  “Aware?” She laughed. “The way you’ve been broadcasting, the entire merge wants to sever their connections. They can’t wait for the day when your life gets boring.”

  “Then you know there is a crater lined with black crystal near the ship,” I said, ignoring her sarcasm. “The same black crystal that you claimed was infecting the galaxy. Is it responsible for the problems here on Trellus?”

  “Black crystal does nothing but cause problems,” she told me, yawning and stretching her arms out before folding them over the slight curve of her belly. “But it doesn’t get all the blame this time. There’s only so much crystal can screw with.” She turned her head toward me. “Which means yes, maybe, sort of, it’s part of the problem, and no, I can’t be more specific than that.”

  “You are supposed to help me.”

  “Monitor you,” she corrected. “Occasionally pop into your brain and set you straight. Which I have done so often the merge is ready to kick me into permanent oblivion.”

  I could sympathize with the merge, whatever that was. At the moment I was tempted to drag her down to the rusty water and drown her in it. “Is the crystal in the water or the food?”

  “This time, neither.” She held up a finger with a glossy red nail. “That’s all I’m saying. You have to find out the rest on your own.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Free will. It cannot be circumvented, influenced, or otherwise fucked with.” She sighed and looked down at her front. “I miss having a body. I really loved shopping for clothes. Remember all the trips we made to the retail centers when you weren’t this doormat you’ve become?”

  “Cherijo went with you, not me.” My head felt as if it were going to fly apart. “How do I end this connection? “

  Maggie rolled onto her side. “You could ask me nicely. Say pretty, pretty please with sugar on top.”

  I repeated her words, but I was not returned to the Moonfire. She was maintaining the link between us now; I could feel it. “What more do you want me to do, Maggie?”

  “You could stop fighting yourself.” She brushed some black sand grains off her thigh. “It’s counterproductive, and I need you whole before the crystal awakens and everything goes straight to hell.”

  I remembered the vicious argument I had had with her on Vtaga. I had pinned her to a wall by the throat. Then she had mentioned that the crystal was dormant, and that when it woke, it would devour worlds. “I said I will do as you wish.”

  Maggie’s red curls bounced as she shook her head. “No can do, sweetie. I need you both.”

  “Reever will help.” I could barely speak through the pain. “Please, Maggie. My head wants to explode.”

  “So does mine,” she said without a shred of sympathy. “All right, Jarn, have it your way. We’ll talk again. In the meantime, watch your step.”

  Maggie and the alien shoreline melted away, puddling around my feet. The colors darkened and then rose, forming themselves into Moonfire’s walls and deck. A white blur solidified into Reever in an envirosuit.

  He caught me as I stumbled toward him. “I could feel her all the way on the other side of the ship. What did she want from you?”

  “I don’t know. When she speaks, I can hardly make out her meaning.” I looked through my face shield and saw the hatred and fear in his eyes. “She claimed that I summoned her this time. That I made the connection myself. But Duncan, I didn’t try. I wasn’t even thinking of her.”

  “We’re too close to the black crystal; that always seems to precipitate encounters with Maggie.” He sounded grim. “We’ll return to the dome.”

  “No.” I almost shouted the word, and jumped at the vehemence in my own voice. I clamped down on the panic his suggestion made me feel. “Not yet. I need to go to the crater, to see it for myself. I can’t tell you why, I don’t know why, but it’s important. I promised Maggie on Vtaga that I would fight the crystal, Duncan. This”—I gestured toward the view port, and the colony beyond—”is part of it.”

  “How can you fight something that destroyed her and her entire species?” he demanded. “What does th
e crystal have to do with Trellus?”

  “I don’t know, but it starts here.” I put my glove on the arm of his suit. “Please. Trust me.”

  Reever went over to one of the cabinets and pulled out a coil of cord. “I’m going to tether us together before we go near that crater.”

  “Our weights will keep us grounded.”

  “There are mine shaft openings all around here. I don’t want you falling down one of them.” He clipped one end of the tether to his suit and the other to mine. “Come on. I want to be done with this.”

  We walked from the scout toward the old mining processors. I saw carbon marks from the weapons Posbret and his raiders had fired at Reever and the engineers during my husband’s first trip out to the wreck. They reminded me of Cat’s threat. I didn’t think Mercy would turn the raiders against Drefan, but I had only known her a short time. Her hatred for the Hsktskt seemed unyielding and absolute; she might now regard Drefan as a traitor to the colony.

  The crater commanded my attention as soon as we drew within three hundred yards of its edge. It stretched out, a bowl of glittering black, for nearly half a kilometer. From the shape and size I guessed it to be very old.

  “I would attempt to take samples,” Reever said, “but given the nature of the crystal, I think conducting a visual survey first would be more prudent.”

  I looked beyond the crater toward another dark depression, near the base of one of the ore processors. “There is another one over there.” I took out the geological scanner I had borrowed from Drefan and adjusted the beam to the widest possible field. I passed it over the crater near us first, which showed as a blank oval spot on the display. As I continued to turn, the beam picked up more blank ovals: two, six, ten, fifteen . . .

  I stopped scanning when the display showed more than thirty blank spots. “There are more craters like this out there. They surround the old mines and the domes.”

  He took the scanner from me and studied the display. “Drefan said the craters were caused by ancient meteor impacts.” He adjusted the scanner’s output. “There is a network of subsurface tunnels that connect all of the craters.”

  I looked at the web of passages on the display. “Why would the colonists want to connect the craters from underneath?”

  Reever gazed out at the ore processors. “No reason, unless they are mining it.”

  “Maggie said that the crystal was part of the problem with Trellus.” The thought of someone collecting the destructive mineral disturbed me. “We may need to collect a small sample, Duncan.”

  My husband didn’t like that, but nodded.

  I held on to the clip of our tether as I slowly approached the crater’s rim. Up to the very brink, large, seven-sided crystals sprang out, jutting like shining black teeth.

  “The crystals appear to be atypical prisms,” he said. “Each has seven geometrically equivalent faces, all parallel to the same axis. That may explain why they reflect light as oddly as they do.”

  I knelt down and peered at one specimen growing from the very edge. “These were not left behind like this by the meteor.”

  “No, they appear to have grown after the impact. “ Reever began scanning the crater. “Mineral crystals can flourish in many different environments, but most need a hydrothermal source. On Terra, quartz typically grows from a mixture of silica and hot ground water.”

  I shifted my weight, and for a moment I thought something moved inside the crystal. I realized it was light reflected from my face shield, illuminating a flaw. “This one appears to have a bubble of air inside it.”

  Reever came to stand beside me and directed the scanner at the specimen I was studying. “Not air,” he told me. “It’s an inclusion of fluid.”

  “It has water inside?”

  “The faces of a single crystal can grow at different speeds and rates, which creates tiny pits or flaws in the interior. As the crystal continues to grow, its subsequent layers can seal the flaws and trap liquid inside. “ He broke off and adjusted something on the scanner.

  “These crystals grew here, on Trellus, after the meteor impact,” I said. “Is that not so?” He nodded absently. “Then from where did the liquid come?”

  He gestured at the ground. “Likely a water source beneath the surface.”

  “We need to take a sample of the crystal.” I carefully wrapped my glove around the flawed specimen and wiggled it, trying to break it free. It could not be moved even a millimeter.

  “I need something to knock it loose.” An unpleasant sensation spread through my hand, one I thought I was imagining until I saw a black stain spreading over my glove. “What the . . . ?”

  Reever jerked me to my feet by the back of my suit and held my stained glove away from my body and him. “Hold still.”

  He took from his utility pocket a clump of something stiff and motionless and slapped it over my blackening glove. The frozen Lok-teel rippled once, twice, and then billowed outward, sinking down to cover my glove. After twitching several times, it shrank back to its original size and went motionless.

  The black stain had vanished from my glove.

  “They did the same thing on Catopsa when the black crystal attacked me there,” I said, returning the helpful mold to Reever.

  He turned my glove over to look at the back side. “You never told me about that.”

  I felt the ground tremble under our feet. “Duncan.”

  That was all I had time to say before the rocky surface heaved and pitched both of us headfirst into the crater.

  Fifteen

  The glittering maw swallowed us whole.

  I could not see Reever. My body collided with falling crystals and rock as the sides of the crater fell away on top of me. I know I called to my husband, but the roar of the surface collapsing all around us drowned out my voice.

  An image of Drefan’s tortured body came back to me. His limbs had been crushed by falling ore. The same was about to happen to us, as soon as we hit the bottom of this abyss. Our envirosuits were not designed to withstand such battering.

  My body never landed, but fell endlessly until something closed around me. At first I thought it was our sleeping platform, and I was about to awaken from a very bad dream. I prayed it would be so.

  But our bed was not pink.

  The tether jerked me into something much harder that smashed through the shield of my helmet, and that was all I knew before my air was gone and my lungs flattened. Cold bit into my flesh, sinking into it, turning my blood to slush and my bones to ice.

  They will never find us, I thought as the cold receded and a soft, lovely warmth replaced it. Even if they could, the black crystal would prevent any sort of rescue. We will spend eternity together, buried alive.

  Just the three of us, together for all time? an amused, mellow voice asked. I find that a very intriguing proposition. An eternal ménage à trois. Keats was too much of a romantic, I think, and Byron far too intense and possessive. But Shelley, now I think he would have approved.

  I didn’t know this voice or the names it mentioned, but Cherijo’s surrogate mother liked to play tricks. Maggie? Maggie, can you help us?

  No, I am not your friend Maggie. But please, allow me to assist you, my dear.

  From there I went alone into the dark, still warm and held close to something, still clutching the tether in my glove. There I stayed, and my last coherent thought was of Reever and, if we died, how soon we would find each other in this next place.

  Voices summoned me back from the abyss, although they were muted, as if speaking underwater.

  “There are no signs of exposure.”

  That sounded like Tya, I thought, content to lie where I was and listen to it.

  “The suits were breached, I tell you.”

  And that voice, that was Keel. A very worried Keel.

  “After they were retrieved, perhaps,” Tya said. “What were they doing out there?”

  “Checking their ship.”

  I heard metal, cloth, and
a scanner being activated. Beneath my shoulders I felt a flat, cold surface. Seals opened, and seams ripped. Someone was removing my suit.

  Keel made a disgusted sound. “Why put all this gunk in their suits?”

  As a sharp blade sliced through the tough outer fabric of my envirosuit, something oozed against my skin.

  “It is not gunk,” Tya told the feline. “It appears to be some sort of lubricant.”

  “Pink lubricant?” Keel asked.

  “I did not choose the color.”

  I opened my eyes and squinted through the bright light. Something sticky covered my eyelids and lashes, and I had to spit out a mouthful of fluid to speak. “Keel?”

  “Close your eyes, Cherijo. I must wipe your face.” A damp cloth did just that. “There.” The cloth was held loosely over the end of my nose. “Blow.”

  I blew, and as soon as I cleared the fluid from my nostrils, the odor hit me. It was as if every rotten, decaying thing I had ever smelled had been piled around me. “Dævena Yepa.”

  “I know, it’s awful,” Keel said. “But hold still. I’m going to clean out your ear canals now.”

  A gentle suction removed the fluid in my ears, but I was too busy trying not to vomit to notice it immediately. The light was adjusted so that it did not shine into my eyes, and a strong, scaly limb eased me up into a sitting position. My right wrist throbbed, as did my back, arms, and legs, but only distantly.

  “How bad?” I asked, gagging on the taste in my mouth.

  “You have a concussion, some cuts and bruises, and a sprained wrist,” Tya informed me as she lifted me off the table. “Your mate appears to be in much the same condition.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked as she carried me across the room.

  “As you can tell, you smell worse than an overflowing waste unit,” she told me. “I am putting you in the cleanser before we all puke.”

  Once inside the unit she had to help me stand, my legs shook so much. My head cleared as soon as the jets came on, and I saw what appeared to be several inches of solid pink gelatinous fluid covering my body.

  “What is this stuff?” I stared down at myself.