Page 21 of Crush
But the big crusher dropped to his knee with the same calm kindness he’d shown ever since Ollie had stuck his hand in the slymusk and she’d screamed about it. He’d said he wasn’t looking for any sort of bond or feeling, which was a pity because he was so good at it.
He tilted his antennae toward Mag. “Ollie, can you tell our apex what you told your mother and me?”
Oliver repeated everything he’d already told them about hearing whispers and following whispers. But this time he glanced over his shoulder at the rock, that even under the bright lights didn’t look like anything more than an orc-sized chunk of concrete. “It’s being quiet now. I think it’s afraid of all of us.”
“Maybe Oliver heard it because he’s a child, and not so…unnerving as the rest of you.” She glanced among them with a meaningful look.
“Are we so frightening to you?” Teq asked in a soft voice.
“What are you planning to do with the rock?”
Teq’s tusks jutted, and it was Mag who answered. “Chop it up and sell it at the Luster.”
Oliver let out a little cry of dismay, although Adeline wasn’t sure if it was his own sentiment or the rock’s.
Teq glanced at the datpad on one of his wrists. “It registers with an energy field,” he murmured. “But not anything we’d normally be scanning for, not anything we’d hear.” He twitched his antennae.
Adeline frowned. “Are you saying the rock is alive?”
“I wouldn’t have said that rocks could talk either. What is your definition of alive?”
She wouldn’t answer that, not after the last few years she’d had. Maybe she would’ve registered as a dead space rock herself: cold, distant, nothing left to give.
Except these space miners had posted at the IDA that they still had use for someone like her.
Teq looked up at her. “Could Oliver try to speak to it again?”
“Sure,” Ollie chirped, jumping forward.
But Teq put out one long arm to stop him. “Let’s hear what your mother has to say first.”
They both peered up at her with almost identical beseeching expressions, though one was her familiar little boy and the other was an alien male.
She swallowed hard. “We’ll go together,” she said, hoping neither of them heard the quaver in her voice.
She couldn’t let them see she was afraid of a rock.
Teq programmed something on his datpad and the three of them returned to the giant hangar and approached the thing.
She had thought the glints on the rock were mostly the bright lights of the bay, but as they changed perspective, she realized the sporadic shimmer was coming not from the surface of the rock, like when grains of sand in concrete caught the sunlight, but at least partly from within. And there were more of the twinkles now than before. “What sort of rock is it?” she murmured to Teq.
“The surveyors weren’t entirely sure. It was partly embedded in a reconstituted rubble asteroid we were harvesting for metals and water. It scans mostly as a stony chondrite with some silicates and organic polymers. But there are also completely novel allotropes of carbon atoms arranged in crystal formations with unknown impurities.”
“It’s a diamond,” Ollie whispered. “Bigger than me.”
“Exactly the sort of thing goes for big credits at the Luster,” Teq agreed.
Adeline studied the rock, as if she could peer into the translucent bubbles like tiny windows. “But if it’s alive…”
“Obviously that changes everything.” Teq answered without hesitation, but she thought she caught a note of resignation in his voice, as if the change wouldn’t necessarily be good.
The IDA intake coordinator has been very clear that the orcs were working-class, seeking wife-mates as equal partners, not consorts. That distinction had suited Adeline perfectly at the time; she was done with the illusion that the luxuries of her life hadn’t come with an unpayable cost. But if the crew of theDeepWanderhad been relying on this windfall, she could understand Teq’s disappointment.
“Those little sparkles,” she murmured. “It’s beautiful.”
Ollie giggled. “That made it happy again.”
She smiled wryly at the rock. “My name is Adeline. And this little one is Oliver, my son. And this is crusher Teq. Who won’t be crushing you.” She slanted a glance at him.
