He shivered and wriggled the rucksack from his back. With fumbling fingers he ripped the brown plastic bag open and began to unmagno the shrink carrier. He checked himself. If he spilled the carrier’s contents, there’d be no turning back. Not ever. He’d be exposing his new friends to his oldest and deadliest secrets. The last vestige of Ladon he’d saved for the direst possible moment. Life or death.
He daren’t unleash it yet.
Before the others reached halfway, the golden-brown floor blazed bright yellow. His white fingertips trembled, ready to rip the carrier apart. An audible fizz, now a sibilant spit and crackle, turned the yellow brighter still. A flood of sunlight. There. From the path of destruction, a red glow rose and sparked like the slow-motion impact of a giant pick on pyro.
“Clay, what’s happening?” He couldn’t see her through the blinding yellow but Varinia sounded close. Shit. Now he definitely couldn’t open the carrier. She was within range.
When the light’s intensity grew too bright he shut his eyes and crouched, shielding his face. The hisses and crackles died away. A strange calm enveloped him, and he imagined himself inside an oyster of warm buttercup syrup. The taste was right there, a tongue’s reach away. He licked his lips.
A blast of molten air hurled him off his feet and forever backward, higher, faster, positive-g’ing him into the sun itself at perihelion. He couldn’t hear his own scream or feel anything but a drawn-out scalding over his entire body. The pain reminded him he was still alive, reminded him he should have died long ago. His choice. His curse. A flaming streak through nowhere with nothing and no one to guide him. The yellow bled darkly. It opened up beneath him like the lips of a black abyss. The heat subsided, then tingled. Still he couldn’t breathe but his stomach elasticized familiarly—upward, not downward.
He opened his eyes, snatched a breath and instinctively held it.
Thump. He hit water. Right side, foot and elbow first into the ocean. The impact knocked the wind out of him. The carrier shot out of his grasp as he went under. Stinging all over, he fought back to the surface and lunged for the carrier before the tide got hold of it. He coughed, held the buoyant bag close to his chest for use as a flotation device. Good thing, too, as he quickly realized his right leg had no strength. He tried to wriggle into a makeshift stroke—using his left leg and his right arm for propulsion—but threw up instead. His calls for help spluttered into bitter coughs. Blurry vision robbed him of any sense of geography. Where was the goddamn shore? How far had he been thrown? Was Varinia okay?
Finally he stopped struggling, lay back with the buoy on his chest, and the wayward waves tickled up his face to a soothingly syncopated rhythm.
From ground to flame to air to water, all beyond his control. He closed his eyes once more, drifting away, when…
“It’s okay. I’ve got you, sweetheart.” A delicate but firm hand maneuvered into place under his chin and began easing him backward through the water. Something soft but firm jabbed against his left leg, and again. But it didn’t hurt.
“Lyssa?” He couldn’t even turn his head enough to see her.
“No, hon. It’s me, Varinia. Hang in there. We’re a long ways from where we need to be.”
“Where are we?” He struggled to keep his eyes open.
She spat water over his face. “Stay with me, Clay. I can see the shore…kind of. Just imagine this is a really big whirlpool tub, and you’re the billionaire who owns it.” She swam a bit farther. “Now who else do you want in it with you?”
What a strange question. Almost a leading question. Then it clicked, and he savored the answer silently while she fought for their lives against the tide.
Chapter Fourteen
Deus Ex Machina
Varinia eased her crusted eyelids open and gummed her dry lips loose. Brown leather wheeled all around her. Dizzying. Wrong. Enough to make her shut her eyes again and start over. The fizz from surf raking sand to her left told her she’d reached the beach safely. What of Clay and Solomon? Her splayed limbs undulated loftily on a bed of pulsing air. Rhythmic. Gravity in flux. A rapid, hoarse wheezing sounded like a parched dog on a scorching day.
She opened her eyes again. The contours of a precipitous cliff scrawled by on her right. She was moving! Close to the ground but not on the ground. The wheeling leather had to be…a roly-poly? She was a passenger inside the roly-poly’s spin? How? Who had found her? Tilting her head took an inordinate effort, and she ached all over, but the two donkeys walking in file ahead, one of them carrying Clay while he spluttered limply on its back, were a sight for sore eyes.
Where was Solomon?
She couldn’t see anyone leading the convoy. Why not? How could the animals be here on their own unless…the roly-poly had orchestrated this rescue? Were they even that intelligent? She didn’t know much about them except they were excellent couriers and…riding inside one was the smoothest, most relaxing sensation imaginable.
Levitation inside a living wheel.
The drowsiness took her over again. Her eyelids grew delightfully heavy. This time she sublimed up from the calm and lifted free, apart. Coining was so much like dreaming it had gone unacknowledged for decades, the first practitioners having been diagnosed with everything from absence seizures to narcolepsy. Varinia, though, had known early on in her teenage years that her “daydreams” were too lucid, too parallel to the real world to be imaginary. Events she’d never seen, people she’d never met passed by under her disembodied vantage, and later people would comment on those events as though they’d really happened. Her secret was a secret worth having…and worth keeping to herself. For no one who “came out” as a coiner was ever accepted in regular society. The potential for spying on people in their showers, cheating during exams, obtaining private knowledge for blackmail purposes, trespassing on government property, was too much for an already paranoid species.
Guilty before proven innocent. She’d found that out the hard way.
Varinia scaled the cliff with an eager soar, between breaths, above sound, and beneath reality’s radar. She accelerated across the beige plateau—its hue must have settled after its portentous dark pulses earlier—until she reached the spot they’d been ejected from. The pictorial alien lettering. Giant. Not so impressive now that she had wings and no trepidation. She remembered Clay waving his arms, his sidearm at the ready. What had spooked him? She spied the incomplete arches, the damaged edifices behind, and decided to explore the ruined path as far as it would go. Clay had cottoned on to something untoward, but what?
The city began to blur as an insurmountable tiredness made her sluggish. She would have to coin here later, when she was better rested.
“A half dozen energy beams, at least,” Lyssa corrected Clay while daubing antiseptic ointment on his burns.
Varinia bunched the ends of her warm blanket tightly under her chin. She offered Solomon her hand. He took it and shuffled across the rug on the sand, snuggling close to her. As she kissed him, a relieved feeling swooned through her. Thank God he’d landed near the beach and not drifted out to sea. She’d never have been able to save both of them. And having to choose one man’s life over another…?
No, thanks.
The campfire reared and spat again as Grace toppled another trunk segment onto it. After their ocean ordeal, the blue flames now raged Promethean-like over the camp. Tonight, faces were glum. Not a single piece of sarcasm. The startling energy surge had them all scrabbling for theories.
“The whole mine glowed red, like some kind of current was passing through it,” Lyssa said, “so I ran outside in case it exploded or something. It was even brighter out here. Couldn’t see a goddamn thing. So I used the visor tint on my mask, and that’s when I made out the beams. There were six or seven, I’m telling you, all converged on one spot on the horizon.”
“How long did you see them for?” Solomon asked.
“Less than ten seconds. But something was glowing even brighter than the beams on that spot. Difficult
to see with the heat haze, it looked kind of like a—what’s this shape called?” She snatched a small, burning branch from the fire, and in the air drew a quadrangle with only two parallel sides.
“A trapezoid.” Clay copied the shape with his fingertip. “How big was it, if you had to guess?”
“Wouldn’t like to say. It looked miles away. About as big as a small island, I reckon. But with flat edges, just like I drew. Definitely not anything natural.”
Grace tossed the last of her mug of McCormick’s onto the fire. “Well that’s goddamn marvelous. Three of you were kissed by it, one of you saw the whole show, and we still don’t know what the fuck we’re dealing with.”
Varinia swallowed the urge to tell them where she’d been and what she’d seen out-of-body. Forget that. The last thing she needed was to be ostracized here as well. Nevertheless, it didn’t preclude her sharing her information as a “theory.”
“I flunked physics at school,” she lied, “but couldn’t this be some sort of energy transfer?”
Grace’s hawk eyes glared at her through the fire’s oily haze. Judgmental? Gazing right through her secret? Not tonight. Varinia clung to her decision and was sick of feeling self-conscious whenever she went out on a limb—describing her fake past, sharing a genuine memory, or pointing out something no one else had seen. Were they already suspicious of her ability, her talent for misdirection? Had they already discussed, behind her back, her impossible winning streak on Kappa Max? Figured it out? Knew what she was?
Screw it.
“I don’t know if either of you noticed it but there was a reddish glow coming from somewhere in the city, just before the blast. If you say all the pyro lit up at the same time, Lyssa, then it sounds like this whole mountain is being used as some kind of energy generator.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Grace said, to Varinia’s relief.
“Really?”
“Hmm, you described the stone on the plateau—” she nodded at Clay, “—as translucent. It pulsed lighter and darker in the buildup to the blast.” She pondered that for a moment, lit a cigarette using the near-white ember at the end of Lyssa’s branch. “What if that stone—the entire city—is one big solar power plant? I mean the material itself captures and stores solar energy. Then they use the pyro as a catalyst. It does possess unusual properties in its later sublimation phases, like remaining intact across the matter-anti-matter barrier. Similar to psammeticum. Sublimed pyro reacting with sunlight, under the right circumstances, perhaps through a hyper-accelerating lens, might very well produce an energy blast. But that just leads to more questions. Why is it still working when the city’s deserted? What’s it powering out in the ocean? What life-forms are benefiting, if any? And do we need to worry about any of it?”
“Yes to the latter.” Clay sipped from his bowl of what smelled like minestrone soup. “We haven’t seen any intelligent life-forms yet, but the old man’s journal is littered with mentions. He said he traded with them in the forest. He never saw where they lived, though, and he never once described the ocean. We’ll just have to see what happens. Meantime, I suggest we keep a constant lookout.”
They all agreed.
“And there’s one more thing I should mention.” He glanced once, twice, and then pointed up at the stars. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a spacecraft orbiting Zopyrus.”
Chapter Fifteen
A Day in the Life of…
Day 61, C86,000,000
Clay woke miserably, dragged himself up to a desolate gray campsite and cursed the storm-battered beach. He flipped the bird to a ring of spaceships hovering half a kilometer above the shore—Kuiper Wells escort vessels, armed to the teeth. How long had they been there? Forever?
Glancing over four burial mounds near the mine entrance sponged his heart, then hardened it when he remembered that Lyssa, Varinia, Solomon and Grace had all been murdered because of him. Those Kuiper bastards had tracked him halfway across the galaxy, and now they hovered indefinitely, waiting for him to dig his fortune. It made no sense. Nothing did anymore. The dour gunmetal sky and the sulking cliffs with their backs to him and the coarse sand insisted, in language he felt in his every castaway atom, “End it all, Clayton. You brought evil to Zopyrus. You brought death to Zopyrus. You killed them. End it now.”
Surprisingly calm and compliant, he shuffled his rucksack off his shoulders and retrieved the shrink carrier. His only regret was that the hovering Kuiper ships wouldn’t get to share his aching melancholy. Alone, then, in every way. He softly unmagnoed the carrier and bowed his head into the gaping dark inside. Cold. New. A smooth sensation of being sucked into infinitesimal constellations…lost…forgotten…
He sat up in his sleeping bag, heart thumping. Awake for real this time. The nightmare subsided as he watched the lavender dawn light from two lingering moons and a glint of sun from behind low clouds. Queer enough to be alien. Tranquil enough to spell warm weather. Each morning, he’d had little time to reflect on the bizarre events of the previous month. Moreover, he hadn’t wanted that free time. As long as the orbiting ship stayed in orbit and they kept to the inlet and the mysterious power surges didn’t hinder their work, why not simply get on with the digging?
No risk, no gain. The others had all agreed.
Millionaires in the making.
“Get your sexy ass up and rigged for work,” Lyssa called, already crunching a mouthful of breakfast. She strolled past the tent door wearing khaki short shorts and a tight dirty-yellow tank top, her hair in a ponytail. She’d also lost a bit of weight on Zopyrus. Still deliciously voluptuous. Wide hips. Face more defined, hinting at cheekbones. More or less her perfect shape. And she’d worked harder than anyone so far, without displaying any negative signs of the addiction that had afflicted the previous prospectors.
Clay stretched, kicked out of his sleeping bag, rolled onto his front and sprang to his feet. He slapped his stomach. Wow. Hardly any loose fat. In fact, he hadn’t been this toned since the military had shipped him to Ladon during his second rotation. Prospecting agreed with him, like it did Lyssa.
Varinia and Solomon greeted him at the stoves, gave him a full Zopyrus breakfast—beans, New Cumberland sausages, a Scotch egg, coffee and a piece of grapefruit. He devoured it all, wished them a productive day, then headed for the mine with a spring in his step. Such banal work awaited, yet, like the rest of his colleagues, he’d grown to love picking pyro. The knowledge that each and every stroke of his pick had a significant—no, astronomical—monetary value, both for himself and his colleagues, was like a constant, lactose-rich sweetie melting on his tongue.
Grace’s bags of pyro dust still lay on top of a crate outside her tent. Crazy old quack. While everyone else hid theirs, Grace had defiantly resolved to leave her share of the treasure out in the open. A symbol of trust. Accessible to anyone at any time. Clay had placed bets with the others as to how much Grace would risk before she started hiding hers as well. He’d guessed at twenty million clips worth. Solomon had plumbed the pessimistic depths—only ten million. A few more days, then, and the old woman would prove them all wrong. It was an inspiring thing to see…in the morning. But at night, when the fortunes were doled out, it seemed increasingly imprudent and absurd.
He grabbed a pickaxe, an oxygen mask, a tool belt, a water canteen (already filled by today’s designated outdoors crew—Varinia and Solomon), a helmet and a pair of heavy-duty gloves.
Red flashes from the dark bowels of the mine halted him. He tightened his fist on the pick handle. Fire fights at night on barren alien moons, military way stations, planets teeming with hostile hordes had emblazoned indelible tableaus and their dread echoes on his deepest memories. On the smell of sweat in black places. On fluorescent red in particular. He sucked in a lungful of pure, odorless oxygen inside his mask, then switched on his helmet lamp. Tracing his gloved hand over the contours of slick rock and rubbing the mushy alien moss together between his fingers felt silly. Childish. Unthreatening.
/>
He was ready.
“Hey, save some for moi,” he bellowed across the massive natural hollow, their pyro Aladdin’s cave, to Lyssa, who was already pounding away at the rock. His voice echoed, broke her rhythm.
“Took you long enough, Clay feet. I’m ten thousand up on you already.”
“Hare and the tortoise, darlin’.”
“Hairy ass, more like. You’d better dig in near me. Seriously, it’s bleeding red over here.”
He jogged across and inspected her rock pile. Webs of ruby pyro glistened under his torchlight. Not a bad start. “A candlelight supper says I double your output before lunch.”
Lyssa batted her eyelashes at him through her visor spotted with soot, then shrugged. “That’s not much inducement for me to win, then, is it?” She looked him up and down. “I’m getting horny. How about we play a little game?”
“Name it.” He slung his pick over his shoulder, rested it there.
“You ever heard of strip-mining?”
“Yeah. I mean…yeah.” He’d heard of the destructive industrial definition, but this sounded altogether less…objectionable.
“Whoever fills their half of the trolley first gets an item of clothing from their opponent. Winner’s choice.”
“Sounds…original.” And right now, seeing her dressed like a luscious rock climber, hotter than all get-out. “You’re on. Soon to be off.”
“Yeah? Dream on, sleaze-heaver. Ready, set…go.”
Clay hacked at a jutting overhang about waist height, demolishing it in no time. He glanced across at Lyssa’s effort—the inroads she’d already made into the flat rock face made it difficult for her to cut big chunks—and smirked to himself. What piece of clothing should he choose first? Perhaps take it easy on her, prolong the game a little? An image of Lyssa glistening with sweat, heaving away with a large tool in nothing but her panties suddenly hoisted his cock.
Sparks in Cosmic Dust Page 14