Crystal Healer (36 page)

"Yes, Healer."

It felt good to strip out of my dirty garments and scrub myself under the cleanser. No one would have noticed my condition on Akkabarr, as we rarely wasted time or water on frequent bathing, but the ensleg had very different standards of personal hygiene. I smiled to myself as I remembered how I had protested when Reever ordered me to bathe daily. How ignorant I had been, and how changed I was.

I had just finished dressing when Reever arrived. I came out of our bedchamber to greet him but came to a halt when I saw him standing by the open door panel. What appeared to be every Lok-Teel on the ship were crawling into our quarters.

"I know I needed a cleansing," I said, giving the horde of mold an uneasy glance, "but surely I didn't smell that bad."

"They were waiting outside in the corridor." My husband made a sweeping gesture. "All of them."

"I used one on Shon a few hours ago in an attempt to remove the crystal infection, but the Lok-Teel couldn't absorb it." I crouched down to pick up one of the Lok-Teel. It crawled away from me and on top of another, engulfing it. I glanced around as the others began doing the same thing, and I looked up at Reever. "Have they ever joined together like this before?"

He shook his head and closed the door panel. "They may be somehow infected by the exposure to the crystal. Stand back from them." He used the com panel to signal an environmental hazard alert, which automatically locked down our quarters.

The Lok-Teel by this time had melted together into one gigantic mass, which was shrinking in and growing up into a vertical direction.

I went to the storage container and took out a pulse pistol, tossing it to Reever before taking one for myself. "Shoot it."

"Wait." He pressed a hand to his head. "It's not the Lok-Teel. Something else is present."

The merged mold began to stretch into the shape of a humanoid with a head, torso, and four limbs. The bland beige color of the form changed, lightening in some areas and darkening in others. The center of the mold turned green and became filmy, like thin fabric. The top of the shape formed a mass of curly thin red strands.

I knew who it was as soon as I saw the hair. "Maggie."

A half-formed mouth smiled."Hold your horses, slave girl. Borrowing a corporeal form takes some doing."

I held on to the pistol and took a scanner from my case. The readings showed only Lok-Teel and Reever present in the room. "She's not registering," I told my husband.

"She never does." Reever looked disgusted. "What do you want now, alien?"

"He never calls me Maggie anymore. It's hurting my feelings." Now fully formed, Cherijo's surrogate mother stretched out her arms and studied her red-varnished fingernails. "Interesting. Quite a cooperative bunch, too, unlike some lower life-forms in the room I could mention."

"If we shoot her while she's using the Lok-Teel, will it kill her?" I asked Reever.

"Probably not, but I'd enjoy it, anyway." He aimed for the back of Maggie's head.

"Temper, temper." Maggie flicked the fingers of both hands, and the pistols we were holding went flying across the room. "I can't hold these creepy things together for much longer, so let's get down to business. You have to tell the Jorenian to turn the ship around, go back, and destroy the raiders chasing after you. All of them."

I stared at her for a moment, and then laughed.

"That means
no
," Reever said. "Release the Lok-Teel and get off the ship. Now."

Xonea walked in, his movements stiff and jerky. "Duncan, Jarn," he said, his voice hoarse. "Something has taken control of me."

Maggie waved at him. "That would be me, Captain. Since Grimface and the little woman aren't listening to me, maybe you will. You have to go back and destroy that raider fleet."

"The ship has sustained heavy damages to the weapons array," Xonea told her. "We cannot attack until repairs are made."

"Offer to surrender," she suggested. "When the raiders come close enough, then you can blow your core."

"I am not destroying the
Sunlace
or killing my crew," he told her flatly.

"Why do the raiders all have to be destroyed?" Reever demanded.

"The shifters infiltrated the tribe on the surface," Maggie told him. "While you were going native, they were picking your brains every night while you slept. That's why you always woke up with a headache, Duncan. Even when you were unconscious, you tried to fight them. By the way, you lost, you wimp."

"They made me dream of Trellus?" I stared at her. "Why?"

"They wanted your memories of that happy time. Specifically, of Swap, the friendly neighborhood larval-form omnipotent being. Besides Major Pain-in-the-Ass Valtas, he's the only other being who can accelerate the growth of the black crystal."

I shook my head, trying to make sense of her babble. "Why would they want to do that?"

"You're going to love this: because they believe it will turn them back into what they were before the big breakup." She made a sound of contempt. "We tried to get through to them that messing with the black crystal is a very
bad
thing, but when you're the remnant flotsam of the most powerful civilization of all time, you tend to believe your species' dumb-ass mythology over very wise advice from the people who were actually there when the universe went all to hell."

"If they know about Swap," Reever said slowly, "then they know what he is."

"Right on the money, big guy. And here I always thought that you were the stupid half of the equation." Maggie turned to me. "Because you've prevented the mercenaries from capturing Shon Valtas, they're going to Plan B. In a few hours, they will invade Trellus, capture the worm, and force it to be their alarm clock. When that happens, say bye-bye to everyone and everything that matters, because Swap is going to eat it."

"I don't believe you," I said.

Maggie glowered. "Why else would I send you to a pretty much guaranteed death, kiddo? I mean, you're a nasty bitch with identity issues, but you're still the closest thing I've ever had to offspring."

"You are no mother to me."

"Yeah, well, as a daughter, you stink, too," she snapped back. "And thanks to the little vacations you and Reever have been taking lately, you've totally fucked our timeline. For your information, the space occupied by an object undergoing a transformation does
not
preserve all linear dimensions. There are no other options now."

I shook my head. "You're lying."

"You want proof? My pleasure." Maggie snapped her fingers, and our quarters became the surface of Trellus. "Here we are a little further along the present timeline, at everyone's least favorite vacation spot, the colony from hell."

I knew we couldn't be standing on the surface of the planet, for if we had been we would have frozen and suffocated simultaneously. At the same time, I knew we were there. Somehow Maggie had made that possible.

I glanced over at the domes in which the colonists lived, but they were all dark now. Some had been fired upon and had collapsed atop the ruins of the structures and dwellings they once protected.

Tall, thin beings in envirosuits marched out of Swap's dome in two columns. Between them slid several tons of an enormous pink worm, now harnessed to a device that wrapped its amorphous body with thousands of pastel bands. A probe attached to the end of each band seemed to be feeding some sort of green fluid into the worm's body.

"The Odnallak have forgotten a lot of things, but not how to kill everything that gets in their way," Maggie said, her voice bitter. "Or what controls a baby rogur."

Swap was led up a cargo ramp and into the belly of a massive alien raider. At the last minute he tried to resist, but the shifters' device pumped more green poison into his body, and at last he slithered inside.

Maggie snapped her fingers again, and we were walking across a meadow of orange-gray flowers under a red sky.

"Welcome to Naetriht, home of zip." She kicked aside some of the flowers to reveal the ground, which appeared to be made of black crystal. "A few million years ago, this crap ate everything that might have evolved into something interesting, before it went to sleep." She looked up as shuttles began descending on the meadow. "I swear, you could set a timing device by these guys."

Odnallak, this time dressed in some sort of ceremonial garments, poured out of the shuttles and took up positions around the edge of the clearing. A much bigger shuttle flew overhead, opening its cargo doors and releasing Swap, who fell to the ground in the center of the Odnallak.

The worm tried to crawl away, but the Odnallak took out weapons that sprayed it with the green fluid and drove it back to the center of the meadow.

I turned to Maggie. "Why are they doing this to him? He's harmless."

"Actually, no, he's not," Maggie said. "We evolved the Hsktskt specifically to exterminate his entire species, but somehow he escaped the genocide, and later the attack on the colony. For a worm, he has lives like a cat."

Disgust filled me. "You sent the Hsktskt to Trellus."

"It was a mistake. Occasionally we make them," Maggie admitted. "After that, we saw him taking care of the surviving kids and realized why he hadn't evolved into the adult form. He may be a planet-destroying monster's maggot, but Swap actually has a good soul."

"Is that why he marooned himself on Trellus?" Reever asked. "To keep from evolving?"

"That, and to study the black crystal. Swap has been trying for millennia to find a way to destroy it, same as us." Maggie gave him a grim smile. "Too late now."

The orange-gray flowers withered and turned to dust as the ground beneath them rumbled. Swap curled in on himself as massive shafts of black crystal erupted around him, shifting and crossing each other to form more complex structures. The Odnallak moved in, touching the crystal and calling to Swap, who had become a tight, pulsing ball.

"What are they doing?" Xonea asked Maggie.

"Oh, they think they're going to be transformed now," she said. "The morons."

A burst of red light came out of Swap and swept through the crystal, which dissolved it. I would have thought it destroyed, until I saw one of the Odnallak run into the shadowy air where one crystal structure had stood only a few seconds ago. A delicate black haze surrounded the Odnallak, who went still and began tearing at its robes.

Horror filled me as I saw the haze begin swirling around the shifter, slowly stripping away its skin. The Odnallak screamed over and over as it tried to get away, but the haze followed it, eating away at its muscles and then its organs, until at last all that was left was a skeleton that toppled to the ground. The haze descended, swirling gently, and when it lifted again the skeleton was gone.

All around the meadow the same thing happened again and again to the remaining shifters, until all that was left was the black haze and the tight black ball that had been Swap.

The black haze swirled around the ball now, stripping the dark outer layer away from the worm but not attacking the life-form inside.

Swap had undergone some sort of metamorphosis and emerged from the cocoon as a much larger creature, easily the size of a troop transport, with a lurid yellow-green hide and a hundred spidery limbs. He had no head, only openings on either end of his body. The biggest opened, revealing acres of teeth, and the black haze rushed into that terrible mouth, filling and bloating Swap's new body.

I glanced at Maggie. "Will it kill him now?"

"It should be so lucky." She watched, her eyes full. "He's just packing for the trip."

Once all of the haze had been sucked into his mouth, he closed it and changed shape again, growing armored yellow-black scales. He then crawled across the clearing to the empty shuttles and ate them, one by one, before looking up at the hovering transport that had brought him to the planet.

The ship landed in front of him, and angry Odnallak poured out of it, firing their fluid weapons at Swap. He stabbed his limbs through their bodies and dragged them to his mouth end, into which he flung them.

I turned away as Swap began to chew. "Stop this, Maggie. I've seen enough."

"Oh, come on," she chided. "He's going to N-jui next, and there's nothing like seeing an adult rogur eat a few cities before it gives birth to several thousand versions of itself." She watched Swap crawl into the transport, which lifted off a moment later. "Well, maybe when the little ones have their first meal."

"You've made your point, Maggie," Reever said quietly.

We were back on the
Sunlace
, standing in our quarters. Xonea had vanished, and Maggie looked terrible.

I started to ask her how she knew about Swap, but her form swayed and then suddenly burst into hundreds of Lok-Teel, which fell to the deck and began crawling around in a frantic, frightened manner.

"We promised to protect Swap," my husband said slowly. "And as offensive and ridiculous as Maggie is, I think she was showing us the truth. That is what will happen if the raiders invade Trellus."

"I know. I felt the same thing." I reached down to stroke one of the little housekeepers, which clung to my hand and shivered.

"Duncan," Xonea said over the com panel. "I just had a very long and disturbing hallucination. However, we do not detect a hazard inside your quarters. Are you clear? Is that redheaded female gone?"

"Yes," Reever replied over the com, but the hazard claxon continued to sound. "You can shut that off. It was a false alarm."

"Perhaps here, it was." My ClanBrother disengaged the lock and entered our quarters. "But we have detected another biohazard on the ship. It's in the survey lab."

We accompanied Xonea to the survey lab, the corridor to which had been blocked off at either end with the same type of energy curtains that Nalek Kalea had installed in the containment chamber. One of the ship's engineers had an interior view of the survey lab on monitor, and it showed a dark, cloudy substance had formed around the black crystal inside the chamber. "Something engaged the failsafe shortly after you sounded the biohazard alarm in your quarters," Xonea said. "But the probe unit never emerged to encase the specimen container. The control circuits appear to have shorted out."