"The crew was dead before they hit the ground."

She could only imagine their last moments. "I don't suppose anyone came looking for them?"

Zain scanned the wreckage. "I doubt any of them had a chance to get emergency messages off. Besides, no one can see this place." He looked up. "An energy field creates a cover that camouflages this entire basin, concealing it. From the atmosphere, it looks like part of the normal landscape. When a ship hits the cover, it triggers the perimeter laser fire."

Lacey noted the unnatural sheen to the sky above them, and the great distance it covered. There was some serious technology at work here. "Why would someone do this?" she said, thinking aloud.

"I don't know, but now you see why I don't want to call anyone else in."

She had to admit he was right. She turned full circle. They were completely enclosed by cliffs. "Have you tried climbing out?"

"The walls are too sheer to scale without special equipment."Just as well, she thought. She didn't do heights.Sunlight glinted off the scars on the metal as she walked around the crash site.

"Bobzilla was here."

"I'm afraid so. Bad for us."

"Why?"

"Because now Bobzilla knows what we taste like. And apparently they don't care if their food is dead or alive."

"Oh crap," she said with a sigh. "It doesn't feel so good being the creamy filling."

He pulled a cylinder from his pack and uncapped it. "Water?"

She didn't realize how thirsty she was until cool water soothed her lips and throat. She moaned in relief when she'd had enough, and wiped her mouth. Her hand froze as she caught Zain watching her, then quickly looking away. Oh no, don't be doing that, she thought. Men were trouble, and this one was alien trouble. She probably didn't even know how much trouble he could be. The last thing she needed was a wildly sexy man to add to her problems.

She shoved the bottle back at him. "Thanks."

He stowed it, and they headed back to their speeder. Out of the corner of her eye, Lacey caught movement and glanced at a sudden puff of sand. Now what? She was used to the little critters that scurried in the sand around them, but this was bigger.

As she walked, she noticed another puff.

"Zain?"

He swung onto the speeder easily, looking for all the world like a cowboy mounting his steed. "They live in the sand."

Lacey slid behind him. "How do you do this all the time? Don't you run into things that want you for lunch on a regular basis?"

His mouth curved into a smile. "Mostly, they keep to themselves and ignore me. You'd be surprised how few planets I survey have discernible life."

She donned her goggles and took one final, dejected look at the carnage. Then their speeder moved out again.

"So, what happens if you run into another, well, alien?" she asked, shaking her head at the sheer absurdity of the conversation.

He shrugged. "I leave."

"Not even a 'Hello, I'm from the planet Neptune and I come in peace?' "

"I don't want to be the first alien encounter a planet has. That's someone else's job. Mine is to collect geographical data and pass it along." "Don't you get lonely?"

His masked gaze turned to her with amazing speed. "You live alone, too."

She blinked, then looked back out at the expanse of sand before them. "I have Oliver to keep me company."

His lips twisted cynically beneath his visor. "And he's such a conversationalist, too."

"Hey, at least he's alive. You talk to your computer," she snapped. "And, frankly, my social life is none of your business."

She didn't like having to defend her self-inflicted solitary confinement. So what that she worked all the time and owned the DVD for every Western known to man? There was nothing wrong with that. And who the hell was he to say anything about her life? What kind of life was this? Flying around, collecting data, getting shot at by heaven-knew-what and attacked by Bobzillas? No people, no friends, no fun. Her life looked like a damned party compared to that.

"Welcome to town," Zain announced. He slowed the speeder in front of a single domed rotunda ringed with tall archways. Thirty feet high and nearly as wide, it looked strangely at home in the desolate landscape. Scrawny vegetation hugged its foundation in the only shade available. A few stray shrubs rolled by in the wind.

"Tombstone," she murmured. An uneasy eeriness came over her.

"Excuse me?" Zain asked, looking at her.

She slid off the seat when the craft had settled to the ground. "It's from a movie. A classic. Tombstone looks just like this. Well, except for the red sand and the dome, and there's no one here but you and me. Other than that, it's deadon."

"A movie. Entertainment?" Zain deduced, dismounting.

"Right. I have a weakness for sappy Westerns. In fact, Bobzilla was in the movies, too. Well, sort of."

"Another classic?"

"I think so, but not a lot of people do," she admitted with a chuckle. "Bob didn't." She flinched. Damn. Where did he come from? Maybe Zain wouldn't catch it.

He looked at her. "Bob?"

No such luck. Really, she needed to think more around this man and talk less. Discussing Bob was definitely off-limits.

She waved a hand carelessly. "No one important." She braced herself, knowing what was to come. The old sinking feeling swamped her as it had numerous times in the last two years. But Zain didn't press, and she let out a slow breath of relief as he removed his goggles and grabbed their packs. It occurred to her that Robert would never have let it go like that. He'd have needled her and followed her around the house and humiliated her until it finally culminated in a huge fight that solved nothing and left her feeling wholly inadequate. Those memories alone still had the power to drain her.

She noticed a large ringed area a short distance away mat looked oddly familiar. Then she realized the hundred-foot-wide circle was actually raised in the sand-a henge-and inside it was a definite pattern of stubby stones. They weren't as tall as the monoliths on Earth, and there were no horizontal ledges, but the likeness was still unmistakable.

She turned to find Zain watching her. He said, "There are three other rings surrounding the dome, all identical. Do you know what they are?"

"They look just like the Stonehenge layout, which is utterly ridiculous. What would Stonehenge be doing on an alien planet?"

He surveyed the area. "I don't know. There must have been a purpose for them at one time. But there are no active signs of civilization ..." He stopped and glanced behind her. She spun around to see another puff of sand.

He pressed a hand to her back. "Let's go."

They walked the last few yards into the shadow of an arched corridor and stopped. Lacey pulled her goggles off and leaned against a warm wall, thankful for the shade. She was really out of shape for alien planet exploration.

New Year's Resolution #7: Never underestimate the value of a good exercise program.

Zain leaned against the wall in front of her, his broad shoulders filling it. She liked the way his shirt stretched across his chest and the bulge of biceps through the sleeves. Nice gene pool. He was big for an extraterrestrial, she'd guess. Maybe not. Who knew?

Zain checked the tiny screen of the personal data device he'd used back at the ship. The geek in her asked, "New toy?"

His eyes lifted to hers and she sucked in a breath. Even at a distance, she could feel a hypnotic draw. It was like boarding the Titanic. And her without a life jacket.

"This is a survey device," he said. "A combination of technologies rolled into one: communications, data storage, short-range sensors, scanners, processing power."

"I'm sufficiently impressed," she murmured. "So, why do you need me when that thing does it all?"

"Some mysteries only a human mind can decipher."

He stared at her with those intense eyes. She'd originally thought they were black, but in the daylight they were deep brown, like a good strong brandy. But it wasn't the color that held her attention. It was their keen intelligence and ruthless focus.

"Your mind appears to be one of a kind," he added.

Well, that burst a perfectly good moment. Apparently, she was the only one obsessing about gene pools. "Wonderful," she muttered to herself. "My mind. When I die, I'll donate it to science and everyone can say, 'My, what a lovely mind that woman had.' "

He chuckled and pocketed his datapad. "Let's take your lovely mind inside."

She peered into the inner sanctum. "Is it safe in there?"

"I've been here before. No problems yet."

However, she noticed he pulled out his gun and stepped into the room with great deliberation. Maybe he'd had no problems, but he was a careful man. She liked careful. Careful was good. Careful would probably keep her alive. He might be an alien, but she felt a helluva lot safer with him and his techno-weapons between her and whatever might want to eat her.

She stepped quietly behind him into a large circular domed space. It was the same room as in the Virtu-thing Zain had beamed her into. Center stage was an immense, solid-stone, half-moon-shaped counter six feet across. Around the outer walls, blocks upon blocks of images squeezed between four arched doorways. The blocks stopped about twenty feet up, where the domed roof vaulted high above, covered with a smattering of small black dots. Columns of light from the outside streaked in through the giant archways.

Lacey walked over to the center counter. It was perfectly flat, polished black stone covered with a thin layer of red dust. No markings or writing. She didn't know how Zain thought this could be controls for anything.

He came up beside her and nodded to one square on the wall. "That's where I pulled the samples from."

She moved closer and realized that the image he'd sent was one of thousands that covered every inch of the outer wall. Scanning the room, she shook her head at the enormity of the project. "There must be a thousand of these."

"Reene counted 2,280."

She looked at him as if he were insane.

He smiled patiently. "You can do it, Lacey. You understood one of them."

"I didn't understand it. I thought I saw a map of Stonehenge in it. I never said I understood what it meant or what the rest of the layers were."

"Layers? You mentioned those in your reply to me."

She blinked at him. "Can't you see them?"

He walked up beside her and stared at the block for a full minute. "No. Describe them."

Lacey stood in front of the image and concentrated, letting her eyes relax. The tiers separated for her. "Maybe four or five layers. A bunch of lines, some kind of funky lettering and little boxes with pictures in them."

Zain reached out and touched the image. "Are they all the same?"

She moved to the next block and focused. "No, different. Except"-she paused -"for the circle with the dots. The Stonehenge map."

He handed her his datapad. "Draw the layers for me.

She frowned. "You're joking, right?"His grim expression said it all. "I need to be able to see what you see.""I didn't bring my secret decoder ring with me, Zain. This is going to take close to forever!"

"Let's start with twenty in the same vicinity. That should give Reene enough to work with."

She grabbed the datapad. Obviously he wasn't taking 'no' for an answer. "Doesn't your computer already have all this from the Virtu-whosit?"

"Yes, but for some reason, he can't see the layers either. If you can identify the individual elements, he can take it from there and decipher the entire room. I'm hoping that he finds something that will point us to the master controls for the laser cover."

She stared at Zain. "And what if we lose Reene to the power drain?"

A deep frown lined his face. "We have five days. After that, the ship won't sustain itself, Reene will deactivate, and we'll be stranded."

Lacey nearly choked. "Good grief. You could have just lied to me."

"You wanted to be partners," he said with a casual shrug.

"I never said that," she corrected him with an involuntary shudder. "Partners are for fools and square dancers. I said I wasn't going to be a silent party. Big difference." Very big difference, in fact, and she was keeping it that way.

"That's good, because I don't do partners either," he said. "So the sooner you solve this, the sooner you get rid of me and go back to your wild social life."

Again with her social life. "My social life ..." She stopped. Something had moved around the side of the circular counter behind him.

Zain held his position but raised his gun, watching her eyes. She started talking again as a crimson, crablike arm slid around the center island about a foot off the floor.

"... isn't what I'm worried about." Her voice squeaked a little.

A bony leg appeared.

Zain wrapped both hands around his gun and kept up the conversation. "Describe what you are worried about, Lacey."

A little round head appeared, and Lacey focused her eyes on Zain. Her heart was beating so loud, she could hardly hear herself talk. "Company?"

Zain spun, putting himself squarely in front of her, and pointed his gun at the creature.

Lacey grabbed his shirtsleeve and felt his muscles tighten. "Don't shoot, Zain. I don't think it's going to hurt us."

She peered over the gun. A little head swiveled slightly as it seemed to look from her to Zain, cocking its head like a puppy.

"It looks as if it's thinking," she whispered against Zain's shoulder. He moved a step closer to the creature. Then it slowly withdrew around the corner and was gone.

Zain sprinted around the counter and out the doorway. He had mentioned that he was in the military, and she could see it by the way he moved. She wouldn't want to run into him in a dark alley. Then she remembered the broad-shouldered gene pool.

Well, maybe if he didn't have a gun.

He came back and she asked, "What was that?"