Sometimes leads come from the most unlikely places, and it was in a seedy bar at the other end of the galaxy that Megan first caught wind of these crystal pools being used to power a network of interplanetary smuggling portals. It took years of research, following dead-end leads and sifting fact from deliberate misinformation before she finally tracked them down. So there she stood in the nexus of it all, only a few hundred meters away from the bootleggers' portal controller, when she heard a sound behind her, not that of dripping water or cracking crystal, but of a stun ray powering up...

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