Since it hurt to breathe, Mitsu decided she wasn't dead. The air against her face was oddly cool and dry, for Oleaaka, and the sound of her ragged breathing echoed as though walls were close at hand. The back of her head throbbed and she couldn't tell if her eyes were open. Everything appeared charcoal gray, but maybe that was just the insides of her eyelids. She'd never paid much attention to them before. She tried to sit up and failed.
"Don't struggle!" Kei said gruffly from above. "You're tangled in vines."
She could feel tough fibers cutting into her arms and neck. Something above flashed in the grayness. Kei's knife, she realized groggily, so her eyes must be open. She flinched.
He put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her down. "No wonder they were able to make you believe you were flek," he said, sawing at a vine altogether too near her cheek. "You're as stupid as one. Even a wet-eared cubling could have kept her footing up there."
The vine yielded to his knife and she bolted up, then wished she hadn't, as a deep stab of pain made breathing even harder. She hunched over, black dots expanding and contracting before her eyes. "If you hadn't—gotten in my way—" She had to stop and concentrate on taking a shallow breath. "—none of this—would have happened!"
A minuscule amount of light trickled down from an irregular patch of daylight far overhead. Vines had evidently overgrown the hole on the outside, masking its existence, and she'd fallen through into a cave.
She made out the faint outline of Kei looming over her, black against the dimness with his even blacker eyes. "Why in the blazes—did you come down here after me?" She paused to breathe, every inhalation a sharp pain. "It's got—to be twenty feet—back up to that hole. We'll never get out—that way."
Kei sheathed his knife with a jerk. "I did not know how far down this was, when I leaped after you."
"You should know better than to dive headfirst into an unknown situation." She struggled out of the rest of the vines, then put a trembling hand to the wall and braced herself to stand. "Or were you just afraid the fall might kill me and then you wouldn't get to do it yourself?"
"If you passed beyond the Gates of Death, I knew the Black/on/black would not believe you were dead unless he saw your body." Kei's ears flattened. "He's like that."
"Yeah." She pressed her back to the cool rock and stood there, breathing in shallow gasps. "Well, at any rate—we've got to find—another way out."
Kei rotated, head tilted back, nose twitching. The tunnel was perhaps ten feet across, twenty high. "This way," he said finally and set off to the right.
"I hope you're better at navigation than logic," she forced out and followed, supporting herself with one hand against the faint grain of the rock. The light was soon gone and she had to ease along, running her fingers over the rough stone. She stumbled often on unseen irregularities and every jolt brought additional bursts of pain from the broken ribs. Sweat broke out on her brow and trickled down into her eyes.
Ten or so minutes later, a burst of actinic blue flashed ahead of her in the darkness. She reeled back, heart accelerating, keenly aware her rifle was still above on the hillside. The afterimage danced on her retinas and Kei's snarl reverberated through the tunnel.
"Is someone down here with us?" she called.
"No." Kei's rumbly voice came out of the darkness, quite a bit ahead of her, by the sound.
"But we must have tripped a sensor. I saw a light!"
"I saw it too," he said gruffly, "but there is no one. If there were, I would smell them."
Then she realized the cavern wall was now vibrating beneath her palm. She pressed her cheek against it. "I feel something in the rock."
Boots scuffed, coming back towards her. She breathed in the musk of Kei's fur, not unpleasant, but as distinctive as Heyoka's. "Yes," he said, "I feel it too." An inhumanly strong hand closed around her arm and double thumbs bit into her skin. "Stay close to me."
"Oh, get real," she said, trying to pull free. "You can't see any better down here than I can."
"No, but I can smell out the shape of the open spaces," he said above her ear. "Come on. I saw another light, not too far ahead."
Mitsu swayed, then caught herself on the wall. "The cave's entrance?"
"Perhaps." He drew her forward, faster than she thought prudent, and she had to trust his guidance, when she would much rather have felt her own way along the wall.
In another five minutes, she saw it herself, a dim, blue, suffused glow, not the mysterious flash of before and utterly unlike outside light, unless hours had gone by, while they were trapped down here, and it was light from one of Oleaaka's four moons. She shook Kei's hand off and eased forward.
The meandering tunnel opened out into a broad gallery. The walls had been coated with a slick, white, sickeningly familiar material and, in the center of the room, sunk into the floor, were a set of glimmering crystals, thick as old-growth trees and taller even than Kei. Blue light rippled up through them like water flowing uphill. She edged forward to touch one with the tips of her fingers. It was strangely warm, vibrating, as though it had just been struck. She traced its length with her finger and the light altered its modulation. She snatched her hand back.
"What are they?" Kei said.
"Transport crystals," she said. Blood pounded in her ears. The white room, she thought. Not again, please. Not again. "Flek transport crystals."
"The trail ends here." Bey looked up, then motioned to Heyoka. "There's blood on this rock, but just a smear." He leaned down and parted the tangled silver-green vines growing along the ground to reveal a hole in the underlying rock. They quivered at his touch, then slithered away.
"A cave," Heyoka said. "Well, that explains a lot. Are they hurt?"
Bey thrust head and shoulders into the aperture, then reappeared. "I don't see them, though their scent lingers along with another trace of human blood."
"Give me a coldlantern," Heyoka said. "I'll try to catch up with them underground, in case they're hurt. You're Squad Leader. Take half the squad and scout downslope for an entrance. If you find it, sweep back this way from the inside until you meet us. Leave the rest here, in case I need assistance."
"May I come too, sir?" Naxk, a tawny young female with black points, stepped forward.
She was small for a hrinn, which had made her a late cull in her Line back on Anktan, but she was very agile. Kendd has missed a good bet with this one, he thought, but physical perfection was everything to the hrinnti Lines. "Good thinking, private," he said. "I may need a backup."
Naxk's eyes glittered, but she betrayed no other emotion. Heyoka rigged his rope and then, compact light swinging from his belt, climbed hand over hand down into the dimness below. A minute later, Naxk had descended and was at his side.
"Leave the rope!" he called up to Bey, then switched on the coldlantern. The light radiated a precise white oval that threw the rocky walls into sharp shadowed contrast. The air was cool, but not dank, so he doubted this cave had been formed by water. Probably it was an ancient lava tube, left over from the birth of the island.
He swung his head, evaluating the scent trail. Kei's path was as plain to him as if it had been drawn in phosphorescent ink. They had gone downhill, which was good. At least they hadn't gotten confused and gone deeper into the cave system. There was just a small trace of blood on the matted vines. It was likely Mitsu had only sustained scrapes.
Naxk turned her lantern on as well and prowled after him at a respectful hrinnti distance. Their shadows bobbed along the uneven walls, over unexpected protrusions and fractures, and he wondered how Mitsu and Kei had fared down here without light.
The scent grew rapidly stronger until he expected to catch up with them any minute. He would put them both on report, he thought testily, leaving camp like that without permission, wasting valuable training time. They had scenarios to run through, equipment to check, maps to study. They didn't have time for this adolescent nonsen—
He rounded a bend and glimpsed an unexpected blue glow up ahead. Artificial light? he wondered. Had they been equipped after all? Naxk froze, then edged closer, question written into the low cant of her ears. He motioned her forward.
"—is flek," Mitsu was saying. "I know it is!"
Heyoka breached the blueness, pistol in one hand, lantern in the other. He saw a large, roughly oval chamber surrounding a forest of eerie crystalline pillars. "What in the—?"
Mitsu turned to him, one cheek scraped, the hair on the back of her head matted with blood that looked black in this light. "About time you showed up," she said. Her eyes amplified the blueness until they seemed to glow.
"I wasn't expecting to have to pull you out of the fire again," he said irritably. "At least not so soon."
Her face tightened. She flushed and looked away, and he could have kicked himself.
"What we have here, sir, is a set of flek transport crystals," she said in a low voice.
"In a cave?" he said.
"Where better to hide them?" she said.
He set his coldlantern on the floor. The slick white walls seemed to soak up their voices, but he detected a faint hum just below the human range of hearing. "You might be right," he said. "If so, they've stayed hidden for at least forty-eight years while Confederation experts practically dismantled this world, searching for intact flek artifacts."
"They're considerably older than that." The blue light turned her skin an unhealthy pallid white. "The crystals we destroyed back on Anktan were barely waist-high, and were so delicate, you could break them with a rifle butt, and they'd been growing for over thirty years. These are huge."
So they were most likely hundreds of years old, he realized numbly. Maybe even more. The flek had evidently occupied this planet much earlier than anyone had ever suspected. "But they are always so careful to destroy whatever they leave behind. Why would they leave these crystals intact?"
"They were flek," Kei broke in, "so they were stupid."
Heyoka whirled upon the big hrinn. "By now, you ought to know better than to underestimate them. Flek think very differently from us, but they are not stupid. I only wish they were."
Mitsu looked even shakier than her injuries warranted. He had a sudden flash of that terrible moment, last year, when he had found her among the flek, crazed, unable to recognize him or anyone else from her past life. The wildness in her blue eyes, the pure High-Flek that was all she would speak.
She stepped toward the crystals, winced, then braced her ribs with one hand. "They're still active. Don't you feel it? They were left on. Flek could come back here whenever they want. Maybe they travel to Oleaaka all the time and no one knows it because they stay down here." She glanced back over his shoulder at the dark passages leading back into the heart of the mountain. "Maybe they're here right now."
"I wonder if the laka know about these crystals," he said numbly.
"We should destroy them," Naxk said. Her lips wrinkled back in a silent snarl as she set her coldlantern on the floor next to his. "Then no one can use them ever again."
"No!" Heyoka said. "And that's an order. No one is to touch them without authorization. HQ put out a lot of heat last year when the Anktan grid was destroyed before they got a chance to examine it. We have to get topside and report this find. I'm betting they have a team here in forty-eight hours."
Mitsu's eyes darted around the chamber, as though looking for a way to escape. Sweat beaded up on her forehead. "But we can't just leave them like this," she said. "Anything could come through and we'd never know until it was too late."
"We'll set a guard," Heyoka said. He started to order Naxk to stay with Kei, but hrinnti females and males were not comfortable working together, another cultural snag. "Two at a time, and we'll leave a com down here. Kei, take the first watch. If Bey makes it through from the other end, tell him to stand watch with you and send the rest of the squad back to camp. We'll post your relief in four hours. Naxk returns with Mitsu and me."
Kei flicked an ear in answer, but Naxk saluted crisply. "Yes, sir."
Heyoka picked up one of the coldlanterns. "Move it, Corporal," he said. "You look done in, which is exactly what you deserve. Let's get back to camp and have a med check you out."
"I'm fine," she said, but then moved too fast and sucked in her breath at a sudden jab of pain.
"Yeah," he said. "I can tell."
When the news reached the Marion up in orbit, Major Erek Dennehy didn't know whether to curse or order champagne. This was going to throw his hrinnti training schedule all to blazes. Experts from every corner of the Confederation would be popping out of the proverbial woodwork to crawl all over those caves. And who knew if this was the only find they'd make? That cave system could run on for miles under those mountains and even richer discoveries might be waiting for them farther in.
Ancient crystals, Blackeagle had said. Twenty times the size of the ones destroyed on Anktan last year, and active. If Confederation experts could figure out how they worked, they might even be able to trace them back to the original flek home world, which had never been identified. What a boon that would be! They might at last be able to carry the war to its source.
But such an intensive search was sure to disrupt the laka's quiet life again, and they were only now making a comeback after nearly being exterminated during the last occupation. According to reports, it was difficult for them to achieve viable population numbers because they were such a complicated species. They seemed to be divided into innumerable castes, each possessing a unique body configuration and speaking a separate dialect. One form apparently existed solely to translate among the rest. Because of this, human linguists had never made much headway communicating with them and laka were singularly uncooperative. It was going to be harder than all get-out to explain any of this to them.
But we have to try, he thought, and he still had to salvage what he could out of the training exercise. He'd better go on down there and see to the details himself.
Blackeagle had requested medical assistance; he had a man down. Dennehy checked the duty roster, then assigned Med-Tech Brascelli to meet him in the shuttle bay in fifteen minutes.
Heyoka dragged Mitsu out for the med's inspection as soon as the tiny, ten-man shuttle landed. She'd made herself scarce when they'd returned to camp and he had to pry her out of the supply tent over severe protests. He supposed she'd developed an aversion to doctors over the past year, which was natural, given what she'd been through.
"Two cracked ribs and a nasty cut on the back of the head," Brascelli announced, after checking the readout on her portable scanner. She was a tall, angular woman and towered over Mitsu. "No concussion, fortunately. I'll have to clean the cut, then seal it. The ribs will take several hours of deep stim to knit. She can be fit again by morning."
Mitsu looked as though she might bolt, but Heyoka nodded. "I'll check back later."
All around him, the small camp bristled with energy. Everyone was energized by the discovery and eager to go down and see the crystals. Well, he thought, they would all get their turn. It was going to take the entire squad to set a proper watch until a qualified assessment team arrived.
Unfortunately, Bey had not been able to find an outside entrance into the cave system, so the only access at the moment was through the hole Mitsu had "discovered." They were going to have to work their way out from the crystal chamber.
He took Montrose and Naxk back with him to the site, intending to post them as the next watch. Major Dennehy had already gone ahead with Fletcher, a stolid human trainee with a knack for electronics and demolitions.
Dennehy turned to him as Heyoka entered the chamber. The blue lights rippled over his face. "It's incredible!"
Heyoka caught Kei's eye. "Has there been any sign of activity, Private?"
Kei hunkered down on his heels and stared moodily into the gleaming crystalline columns. "No."
"Good," Heyoka said. "Montrose and Naxk are waiting topside to relieve you. Send them down, then return to camp and find some dinner."
Kei made a vague salute. Heyoka hoped the major was too absorbed in examining the crystals to notice, but Dennehy shook his head after the hrinn had gone.
"You're going to have trouble with that one," he said. "He's too headstrong."
"I know," Heyoka said, "but he's also a natural leader."
"And a born warrior, as are all of your hrinnti recruits." Dennehy sighed. "I've read the reports of his actions on Anktan with you last year, but he's been in training for months now and you still haven't eliminated that sizable chip on his shoulder. I suspect he's just too mature to change his ways. We'll have to recruit younger hrinn in the future, if we continue to recruit at all."
"He's impatient to fight the flek." Heyoka brushed against the slick white wall and shuddered. It smelled faintly of flek. "They all are. They've left their world and their people, everything they've ever known, to come out here and stop the flek. They aren't human and they're never going to respond exactly like human soldiers, but they are still an asset."
"Not if they don't follow orders," Dennehy said. "Private Kei looks like he wants to tear your throat out."
Very perceptive, Heyoka thought. No doubt, Kei did want to tear his throat out, just the savage other within him ached to return the favor every time those potent fight pheromone molecules danced through his brain. It was the way evolution had made them, the way their brains were wired, as much a part of them as their fur. "I'll—work on it, sir," he said. "We'll get it straightened out, or I will send him back to Anktan."
"See that you do, Sergeant," Dennehy said.
Footsteps echoed in the passageway, then Montrose and Naxk entered the crystal chamber. Seeing them together brought home to Heyoka how short the hrinnti female was for her kind, barely taller than Montrose.
"Reporting as ordered, sir," Montrose said with a salute.
Naxk also saluted, without hesitation or challenge, Heyoka noted.
"At ease," he said. "You've got the watch and Montrose is senior. If you see the least variation in color or hear any unusual sound, contact us immediately. Otherwise, you'll be relieved in four hours."
The two took up position on opposite sides of the crystals, bodies stiff, hands locked behind their backs. The blue light bathed their serious faces, one furred and tawny, the other shaven and dark, so different from each other.
"Lord, it's hard to tear myself away," Major Dennehy said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's like finding the Holy Grail. We've been searching for something like this for as long as I've been in the service."
"Same here." Heyoka gestured at the passageway. "At any rate, let's go back to camp and plan. I had a thought that perhaps, after the team gets here, you could drop the squad over on the other side of the island and let us finish the exercise."
"That might work," Dennehy said. "You certainly can't continue over here. This place will be crawling with experts."
They worked their way back through the labyrinthine cave in the chill circle of light from the coldlantern, climbed the rope ladder that had been left in place, and returned to camp.
The med's fingers were gentle on the back of Mitsu's aching head, but she hated to be touched. "Are you almost done?"
"No, I need to put you out for the stim," the med, Brascelli, said, capping the tube of the pungent sealant in her hand and repacking it into her kit. "Lie down here on the cot."
"Forget it!" Mitsu scrambled to her feet, then hunched over against the jolt of pain in her ribs.
"The bones have to remain perfectly aligned while you're under stim," the med said, "and conscious people can't be still that long. Lie down."
"I just need a day or two," Mitsu said. "I'll be fine."
"Even if I strapped those ribs, you could puncture a lung if you weren't careful," Brascelli said. "I certainly can't certify you to return to duty if you refuse treatment."
Then they would send her back to the ship, Mitsu thought. What little chance she had to shake this everpresent fear would be lost. No other unit would have her; she was damaged goods.
"Lie down," the med said. "You'll sleep like a baby."
That was the worst of it, the promise of sleep. Sleep always brought dreams these days, and, in her dreams, she was always back there on Anktan, with the flek. In the white room.
Trembling, she stretched out on the canvas cot and closed her eyes. The med pressed something cool and metallic to her upper arm and then she was floating. The clatter of the camp faded, the pressure of the cot beneath her back, the pain stitched across her ribs with every shallow breath. It was almost pleasant, to drift so . . .
The immense grid on the plain beyond the mountains was filled with coruscating lights, bizarre pinks and purples, electric blues. The sound began again, shrill and agonizing, climbing quickly toward unbearable. She stood beside the crystals in the heart of the grid and fought to save the irreplaceable facility from terrible hair-covered, verminous beasts who meant to destroy it.
One, blacker than the rest, raced toward her, visible one moment, gone the next, as though he were a poor holo image, winking in and out. She raised her laser-stick and took aim. She would kill him first, the rest later. She raised her weapon and fired.