Sparks in Cosmic Dust

by Robert Appleton

  He spread her legs, placed his palm flat on her stomach with one hand and began to rub his other fingers against her clitoris, faster and faster. She helped him pinpoint her sweet spot, and a wave of pleasure washed viscously through her, clenching her backward until she was fully splayed for him. On his knees, he hoisted her thighs and pulled her in. Rubbing her again, he slid his cock inside her as if to segue from prelude to main event without breaking the momentum.

  Oh God. He stopped rubbing with his fingers and began to penetrate her deeper, quicker, as her back and shoulders inched over the sodden grass. The squelching sound beneath her strangely fit the sensation of being ravaged in a hidden jungle. Her moans were now audible, her eyes closed and swimming in color. The faster he pounded, the closer she felt to that unearthly coining bliss she’d experienced inside the waterfall the night before. An existential craving deep in her being.

  He desisted for a moment and eased her onto her side, lifting her right leg high onto his shoulder. When he resumed, it was with a slower, more restrained rhythm, and it wasn’t enough.

  “Okay, my turn.” She lifted herself free, barely supporting her own weight on arms weak and shaking with adrenaline. “Lie back, gorgeous.” His piercing eyes stopped her heart for a moment as she shoved him down. Christ, what was it about him that stirred her insides into a maelstrom by virtue of proximity alone? Beyond chemistry. She’d been deep in lust more than once at the Academy, and with Solomon, but she’d never felt anything comparable to this.

  “Varinia, I have something to tell—” He sucked in a sudden breath when she maneuvered his cock like a joystick into her crouching sex. His next grunt excited her, cast her mind back to the threesomes she’d orchestrated with aplomb in Mr. Hughes’s quarters. Men wanted to be challenged, and she had the natural assets and the appetite to give even the most macho of men a run for his money.

  “Varinia, it’s about…last night…”

  As low as she could crouch, she slid up and down on his shaft, letting him flare against her until she felt the momentum return to their lovemaking. Then, greedily, she changed position again, swiveling to lie backward on top of him so that they could kiss as he drove up into her, his cock fully vertical.

  “What about last—” She didn’t get to finish before he accelerated into rapid action, his deepest, most accurate surges drilling right through her bliss, again and again. He gripped her hips, used her whole body to feed the motion. Finally, he gathered her breasts together with strong hands and had her utterly, soul to womb, in heaven. One more thrust and she splintered into a rainbow of colors.

  Afterward, they lay together on the warm, wet grass. Nothing else mattered. Only their shared gaze, the roused-iron-filings touch of their fingers intermingling, the anticipation of their future together after Zopyrus. Varinia soaked up the vestiges of what she was sure would be a turning point in her life. Clay’s scent, his taste, touch, everything about him seemed so familiar yet had proved every bit as fresh and exciting as she’d dreamed. She’d just shared her bed with him for the first time but, somehow, she’d known him beforehand…

  Her distracted brain couldn’t tie the threads together.

  “It’s on the tip of your tongue, isn’t it.” He caressed her suprasternal notch with his fingertips. “You felt it all the way through, but you can’t quite articulate it.”

  “What is it?” she asked. “What is it between us?”

  “My mother used to call it sparks in cosmic dust. It’s a random and unexpected match between two people…that somehow feels inevitable. We shared it last night.”

  “Don’t you mean just now?”

  “This was different,” he said. “This was spectacular. But it started last night.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean? I dumped the other guy and told you to keep your distance. So who started what?”

  “It surprised me too. The best surprise I’ve ever had, actually. I really thought you’d have figured it out by now.”

  She racked her brain for a memory she might have lost to the volatility of the previous night. What had she said to him? Hmm, nothing she’d like to repeat now, nestled against his naked sex. All she could think of was the extraordinary coining experience—or was it a dream—the mystical djinn of the waterfall who’d carved her name in iridescent light?

  Wait a minute. That was a dream, wasn’t it? Things like that didn’t happen for real…even in coining. Especially in coining—where no physical change could be effected by the traveler.

  Yet…

  …that was what he seemed to be getting at.

  “Clay?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What are you?”

  He grinned, shifted position to face her squarely. “I’m like you. We met last night in the waterfall, remember? I parted it for you.”

  “You did? But—but coiners can’t part anything.”

  “Really? How many do you know?”

  “Well, none.”

  “I thought so.” His smile faded. He swallowed. “You’ve been running for a long time, haven’t you. From the inner colonies?” She had to nod. “From some transgression that wound up on your official record?”

  “Yes. How did you—”

  “I’ve been around coiners and coining my whole life,” he said. “I know how the system treats us. And how it spits us out.”

  She began to tremble, as though her every intimate secret wanted to spill out all at once. “You—you’re saying there can be a physicality to what we do? We can make changes to the physical?”

  “Absolutely.” His all-enveloping confidence made her gasp. “You’ve seen it in action twice, Varinia. The second time was in the waterfall.”

  “And the first?”

  “Back at the flop-port. Those sons of bitches who accosted you, tried to scan your face. They’d been searching all over Kappa Max. One of them even showed me a scan ID of the woman they were looking for. An absolute stunner.” He nodded at her. “Take a bow.”

  “What? That must’ve been Archie Delaney, the shack-sheik running the Delfin. My boss. But how did you…I mean I was filthier than a grid-licker’s diaper.”

  “I wasn’t certain, not even when he made his move on you. But I wasn’t about to put our expedition in jeopardy. Not when we were so close. So I…ahem, protected you.”

  Varinia cast her mind back to the shocking explosions, the decapitations no one had had an explanation for. “That was you?”

  “Afraid so. Guilty. I made a mess, didn’t I?”

  The urge to recoil from him—how dangerous was this guy?—lasted no longer than a heartbeat. After all, he’d done it for her, and any kind of weapon was only as deadly as its wielder. “Did you try to save Lyssa that way?” The question stung her as soon as it escaped her lips. Clay was hers now, no matter how much he’d loved Lyssa Foaloak. But it had all happened so recently…

  “Yes.” He looked down, furrowed his brow, pursed his lips.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “No, I think you should know. Lyssa was already mortally wounded when I—when time intervened. You know that plastic bag I carried everywhere?”

  “The heirlooms?” Varinia guessed it wasn’t anything as cozy as she’d pictured.

  “Not exactly. It was something I stole from Ladon, a top-secret research facility I was contracted to. Kuiper Wells sequestered me on my second tour of duty.”

  “I knew you had to be military. All that space-flight know-how, the warp maneuvers.”

  “That was from my regular tour. When Kuiper brought me to Ladon, it was because of my coining ability. My expertise quickly became the physical-ether interface, or the crossover between this reality and the coining reality. You’d be astounded at what we found, the properties of ether energy when it crosses over into our physical dimension. I was one of Ladon’s top test subjects because my anchor on the coining world is a lot stronger than most. I was able to stay in astral form while all kinds of crazy experiments were tried around me�
��and on me.” His voice sank to a mournful whisper. “And those I worked with. Those like us.”

  She pulled him to her breast. “It’s all right, darling. You can tell me anything. Please, let’s share everything. We need to share everything.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Forest

  “I was a regular enough navigator, kept myself to myself, obeyed orders,” Clay said. “Until one day when I repeated the codename for an upcoming recon mission. What I’d forgotten was how I’d come to learn of the codename.”

  “During coining?” Varinia recalled her own outing at the Selene Pageant.

  “Uh-huh. That’s usually our Achilles heel—the line between what we’ve experienced astrally and what we’ve actually experienced. It only takes one wrong slip and you’re busted. No turning back. They found out what I was, and my career was over right there. Rapture’s Point, those two little words, a codename for a classified blockade-running mission, buried me. I was all set to be cashiered when, in the middle of the night, my CO called me to his office. The room was full of suits from Kuiper Wells. They said how excited they were to meet an EPT and how valuable I could be to their research—cutting-edge military projects and the like. It was either that or be washed out from the corps for good, so I signed their digi-coil contract, and three days later I was installed in the wasteland barracks on Ladon.” He shuddered. “That’s when the nightmares started.”

  “What did you do there?” Varinia still couldn’t grasp that notion of a bridge between astral and physical realities.

  “The scientists had created a kind of micro quantum interface to collect energy from the coining dimension. They call it the ether. It’s an infinitesimal shift away from this reality. It looks the same, unfolds the same, but there is no sound and no cause and effect—as you know, a coiner can go anywhere without suffering the slightest consequence. It’s like a hollow echo of the real world.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Well, that slight shift between dimensions is so slight it has no measurement. Not even the micro quantum computers can locate it. It’s a shift only the human mind is capable of making, a gateway somewhere deep inside the subconscious. So the only way they can explore the coining world is via communication with someone actually in the coining state.”

  Clay sat up and began gesticulating like a teacher fascinated by his own lesson. She couldn’t blame him. It was an extraordinary topic. “It happened quite by accident. Seven of us were told to coin inside a heavily protected pipe, to see if we could penetrate the shielding. We all made it, of course. But only one of us made it out alive afterward. What they hadn’t told us was that we’d entered the collider tube of a giant particle accelerator! The micro quantum particles exploded all around us like a hundred sudden solar eclipses. I was sure I was going to be sucked into one of them—the hole kept burning and burning, black and about the size of a one-clip disc. I sensed the others around me being sucked in, and I knew this had to be something phenomenal. I’d coined inside psammeticum engines before and hadn’t felt anything like this. It was almost irresistible.

  “I summoned every instinct I had to pull away. When that wasn’t working, when the black hole was still dragging me in, I imagined myself blasting the roof off the pipe itself—three feet of solid metal—with nothing but my force of instinct. The next thing I knew, I was floating in a zero-g hospital chamber at HQ, bandaged to hell. The entire particle accelerator complex had been vaporized. Miles in circumference just…ka-boom! Lucky for me I’d coined from the neighboring facility, which just about withstood the blast. They later told me I’d averted the formation of a catastrophic singularity in space-time. If I hadn’t breached the pipe, disrupting the vacuum, the black hole might have sucked in the whole of Ladon. As it was, the thing just exploded with the force of a small hydrogen bomb.”

  “Ah, nothing to worry about then.” Varinia frowned.

  “Yeah. That was the end of particle colliding on Ladon, but the start of a new era of coining research. As it turns out, all coiners have the ability to effect change in the physical dimension. It’s innate in the separation of consciousness from the body. We only assume that we’re ineffectual when coining because nothing affects us, and also because it takes a strong focus for us to make anything happen. Have you ever tried?”

  “Not really. Only halfheartedly,” she replied. “It’s kind of a habit until you remember where you are.”

  “Exactly. It’s conditioned. In other words…useless. You have to develop new muscles of the mind. Not arms and legs, these clumsy tools.” He grasped her arm, held it aloft. “You’re not bound by locomotion. It’s more a flexing of the imagination, and the clearer you can imagine it, the deeper you feel it happening, the more likely it will happen. It’s a kind of psychokinesis. Thrilling if you can sustain it. Frustrating until you’ve mastered it. And deadly when you know how.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Soon. You will soon.” He treated her to a passionate kiss, as if to say, “Thank you for listening.”

  “Mmm.” She hummed her delight. “So, Clay, what was in the plastic bag?”

  “A little something I managed to drag across the dimensional barrier. Ladon developed a quantum ether interface, a lattice-like configuration of energy net converters. A kind of complex funnel to cover all their bases. They called it a dreamcatcher. Their idea was to channel any trace of ether energy I could push through, in whatever form it took, and corral it in a dimensional vacuum. They tried about forty prototypes before they finally captured something I pushed through—a pint of water. No recognizable particles made it through, though. Turns out I’d squeezed a bubble of ether space-time through their dreamcatcher instead.”

  “You had one of those in your plastic bag?” She looked at him, incredulous.

  He nodded. “I stole two quantities of ether before I made my getaway. The first I used to escape the facility. It stopped time for half of Ladon for about forty minutes. That was a major event, and they’ve been searching for me ever since.”

  “No kidding!”

  “I used the second ether bubble to freeze those bastard amphibians on the beach, then I wiped them out. Those fucking—” He spat to one side, continued cursing under his breath. Varinia had seen that side of him last night, during his fight with Solomon, but Clay was a fugitive as well. And she’d thought she had it rough being on every wanted poster on Kappa Max.

  “But on Ladon, none of their other test subjects could push ether energy through, so I became their go-to guy for months. Blowing things up while coining, blowing things up while coining inside an ether bubble across the dimensional barrier, stopping time itself. I opened Pandora’s Box for them, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  His jaw muscles quivered as he suppressed livid emotions inside.

  “Time we made a move?” he said.

  Before you explode, sunshine. “Sure. We did have a job to do.”

  He flicked a smirk.

  “Unless—you’ve already checked the ship out, haven’t you?”

  “From my tent before we left. The camouflage is good.” He gathered their things.

  Varinia whistled silently in approval of his tight naked physique, front and rear. Clay was a dark horse, all right, in every way. If she hadn’t managed to peel away his layers, she might never have discovered the man beneath—the troubled, guilt-ridden yet intoxicating fugitive inside. And she felt sure she’d barely scratched the surface of Clayton Barry. The notion intrigued and chilled her at the same time. He might be perfect for her right now, on Zopyrus, but what about inside 100z? He’d have to keep a low profile forever…

  Like her.

  Coiners in hiding.

  She caught the top and slacks he threw to her. Mmm. Right now, spending a lifetime in obscurity with him sounded pretty damn good.

  “I’m guessing you’ll want to keep this between us,” he said. “Until after Zopyrus, I mean. Makes no difference to me, but that prick you
were with would probably blow a gasket if he found out we’d had sex.”

  “I know. I feel bad for him. He doesn’t deserve this—poor guy’s treated me like royalty ever since the Delfin. And he had his heart broken just before we met. I think this would kill him.”

  A bittersweet pang she’d half-expected now took hold, and she really did feel like a selfish bitch. Poor, dear Solomon. At least if they made it off Zopyrus, he could use his new fortune to reach a little higher in society if he wanted. No doubt he’d be chased by enough gorgeous women to fill a shack-sheik’s harem. Looks and clips—he couldn’t lose. But that was weeks away. He’d have to suffer until then.

  “You do know he’s snapping.” Clay magno-laced his boots.

  “Who?”

  “Solomon. He’s wound way too tight. If we don’t keep an eye on him, he’s gonna snap.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Snap how?”

  “Snap—as in blow his hatch, flip his lid, do something incredibly stupid because he’s a jealous prick who was poisoned with the God virus when he was a kid.”

  Varinia had heard enough. “Why don’t you shut it! It’s bad enough he’s all alone out here. We can be magnanimous about this and treat him like a friend, keep us a secret, or you can be a galactic fuckwit and keep goading him the way you do. That’s why he’s gonna snap. Not because of his religion.”

  Clay shook his head. “You’re wrong about him. Dead wrong. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll keep out of his way. No sense throwing rocket fuel on the fire. Let him suffer in peace.”

  “That wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  “It’s all you’ll get from me…unless he apologizes.”

  Men. New world. Same old crap. “Let’s just get to the Taras. Make sure.” She huffed, then let him help her up.