the crystal harvester
Brenda Cooper
Red alert words bloomed across every screen in the outpost like flames. “Rising seismicity in Fire Rose Canyon. Alert level three.”
Maricella stopped pacing back and forth in the minding room, blinking at the words. She glanced at the image of Harry’s craggy face filling one wall above the small kitchen unit. He was focusing on something other than her; he didn’t look worried. The big otherwise-blank wall showed a view from inside the canyon, the depth illuminated with man-made light. A single rock fell. The wall with the door in it showed the real-time reads from his flier. They looked normal. The last wall was useless; a window to the rock garden that the settlers had built on Schroeder’s planet. Harry loved it, but she never had; today she hated it
