Sparks in Cosmic Dust (27 page)

As the moon shrank behind them, the entire region in which their dark adventures had transpired now rotated into obfuscation. Gone was the stupendous alien city in the mountains, the weird tomb of no gravity and infinite graves, the pyro cornucopia, the alien civil war long in the offing, of which they would never know the outcome. Clay eased his arm from under Varinia’s neck on the pillow. As sunlight lanced in through the porthole window over their bunk, it illuminated a sleeping beauty whose appearance, to anyone unaware of her grimy alter-ego, could only be deemed sweet and pristine. On him, the travails told harshly—his scars and abrasions outnumbered his memories of them—but after one shower, Varinia could easily be at slumber in a royal bedchamber. Not that she hadn’t pulled her weight on Zopyrus. On the contrary, her pluckiness, that underlying air of abandon she let out when the occasion called for it—and it had a number of times over the past weeks—was one of the things he loved most about her.

What would she be like as a wife? Passionate, fiercely loyal, infuriatingly opinionated, he reckoned. Like Lyssa, she would always speak her mind, and she had that stubbornness as well—her way or the skyway. On the other hand, unlike Lyssa, Varinia had a similar background to him, born in the inner colonies, well educated, betrayed by an intolerant society and spat out into the obscurity of deep space. As a wife she would never expect too much of him, and he needed that. Not to be prodded and probed by a neurotic partner. Not to be forced back into
that
mold ever again. He was who he had become, and so was she.

He ran his fingers gently through her straight brunette strands and ached to kiss her. Only the echoes of mild post-traumatic stress, a malady he hadn’t encountered since the ordeal inside Ladon’s particle collider, reminded him they were far from home-free yet. His over-anxiousness had recurred in the mine, in that claustrophobic pitch darkness, and it had perched on his shoulders ever since, alerting him to threats even where there were none.

He lay again at Varinia’s side, hoping her funky warmth might soothe him. It did. He sank into the pillow and closed his eyes. He never saw Zopyrus again.

“Clay, Varinia, I need you on the bridge. Now.” Grace’s whisper punctured his doze like a sneaky pickaxe to the brain. He shot upright and vaulted over Varinia, who was still coming to.

“What is it? Another ship?” he asked.

“Try five.”

“Jesus. They made contact?”

She jogged ahead of him down the passageway to the cockpit. “You could say that.”

Through the windscreen, he glimpsed the five red dots arrayed equidistantly ahead. They appeared very close together, even from such a distance. Grace showed him to her comm screen, then offered him her pilot’s seat. He swallowed hard and sat, pulling the screen closer. It read:

Distress-only protocol overridden. Kuiper Wells priority #713 receiver remotely activated.

To unidentified vessel harboring fugitive Roger O’Neill aka Clayton Barry. Open your rear access hatch. Make preparations to be boarded. Per Standard Military Arrest & Seizure protocol, any attempt to sabotage prisoner transfer will activate a shoot-to-kill policy. The destruction of your vessel may be required. All personnel aboard are subject to detainment under the articles of Accessory & Abetment. Post-Captain W. S. Mbenga.

“That’s checkmate, then.” Varinia gripped Clay’s taut shoulder muscles and exhaled loudly, deeply. Her warm breath tickled his ear.

He bowed, defeated.

They’d been so quiet leaving Zopyrus. Maybe too quiet. Humming through open space, even in whisper mode and without lights, was a dangerous game. A gamble that—God help them—hadn’t paid off. What if they’d blasted into warp right away and those Kuiper assholes hadn’t picked up on their trail for hours? It might have given them enough time to find an asteroid belt, the super-grav field of a giant star—hell, anything to disguise their trail.

But this? What had Grace been thinking?

“Shit.” He couldn’t have done any better. He’d proved that with his gee-whiz double-back warp on the way here—idiotic, superfluous thinking.

Checkmate?

“I’m out of ideas,” he said. “And I’m not landing you two in this with me, so—”

Not after all we’ve been through. Not when we were so close.

“What exactly do they want you for, soldier?” Grace’s officious tone demanded absolute accuracy.

“For going AWOL from my post at a classified military research facility. I’m a coiner with…unique abilities. I was helping them pioneer a new era in etheric warfare, but I found their methods repugnant, so I escaped. Killed quite a few of the bastards on the way.” He clasped Varinia’s hands on his shoulders. “They take me now, I’ll never see daylight again. They find our pyro, they’ll strip-mine Zopyrus ’til there’s nothing left.”

“Yeah.” The good doctor mused for a few moments. “You say you’re a coining prodigy?”

“Something like that.”

“He’s amazing,” Varinia said. “Like a magician.”

“You exploded those heads, right?” the old woman guessed. “At the flop-port?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Think you could explode an engine?”

Clay frowned at her, then gazed ahead. “Through space, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That—that’s incredibly risky. Over those distances, with such tiny points of reference.”

“More risky than the alternative?”

He gripped Varinia’s hands so tightly she had to pull free. “You’ll have to get me a
lot
closer. Close enough that I can spot you in a heartbeat if anything goes wrong. You’ll have to strap my body, especially my head, so that I won’t be knocked unconscious if there’s a violent jolt. If that happened, I might never get back.”

“Piece of cake.” Grace swung the secondary console flat over her lap.

Varinia sounded far away, outside the cockpit, when she asked, “So what’s your plan, Doc?”

“Hold your horses, chick. Let me make a few calculations.”

Between being nestled against Varinia’s bosom, listening, soaking in her whispered declarations of love and support, to hovering, disembodied and alone at the engine maintenance hatch, Clay felt unnaturally imbued. No longer fighting for a military wage or for mere survival, he had, at the end of this mission, a life with the woman of his dreams to look forward to.

If
the plan worked.

If
he could do what he claimed—coin an explosion in the middle ship’s starboard engine at the exact moment Grace jettisoned one of the
Taras Bulba
’s psammeticum tanks—the resulting explosion should light up half the solar system.

Would Grace be able to pilot them away in time afterward? The remaining psammeticum tank was almost depleted, so she could only manage, at best, a fraction of a warp jump. The
Taras
would then have to fly on regular RAM propulsion until it reached a deep space colony willing to replenish the tank. Grace claimed she knew somewhere, but it was weeks away.

Before he had time to clear his mind, the hatch slid open and he gazed at their stellar potentate, a five-strong chain of Heracles cruisers lit up like ocean hover-liners at night. Silently, the
Taras
approached. He looked out across her keel. Frozen alien webbing clung to the apertures behind her retracted landing gear, while several disc-shaped orange oddities dotted the underside of the nose, all the places nominally shielded during their escape from the moon’s atmosphere. Amazingly hardy life-forms, now dead, encrusted and hitching a ride to another world.

A starboard panel drew open on the central Kuiper vessel. The curtain of amber looked inviting, civilized. Its perimeter of flashing red lights did not. Men in spacesuits perched on the lip, their Intelligent Utility Pods raring to guide them out to the
Taras.
His captors. Closer to, he spied assault weapons strapped to their backs and, on one of the IUPs, a bundle containing a spare suit and helmet.

Very kind of you. Fuckers.

Ever nearer, not quite parallel, Grace maneuvered the
Taras
with an admirable sloppiness. Too careful, too precise with her overshoot and the bastards might smell a rat. The lower decks looked deserted, and only scattered windows were illuminated across the entire starboard side. A skeleton crew? He hoped so. Rank and file servicemen and women wouldn’t know what the hell they were here for. He’d been one himself. Orders crossed paychecks and dotted death certificates, inscrutable Kuiper brass stooped for nothing else. No, he didn’t want to kill anyone he didn’t have to.

But if it meant being shipped back to Ladon and being reinstalled as the sacred cow for all things ether and deadly—if it meant giving Varinia up for interrogation, examination, hell,
to become a fellow prisoner on Ladon
—if it meant their arduous adventure on Zopyrus, losing Lyssa, had been for nothing—then fuck everyone and everything who stood in his way.

The reception committee waved their arms as the
Taras
passed. Let them squirm. Grace veered toward the starboard wing thruster and turned sharply. The psammeticum cylinder slid through him like a phantom freight train. He drifted after it, his mind accelerating effortlessly toward the ship’s giant thruster. He spun to watch the
Taras
speed away. It banked low and left. On a rear panel ahead of him he glimpsed the name
Helios
in gold lettering.

Now.
He hurtled ahead of the drifting tank and stole through the Helios’s reinforced engine casing. Slick. The engine was conical, darker than hell’s coal pit at the apex, and ridged like an onyx rifle barrel. Its widest spirals still glowed ultraviolet while the mechanism ticked over.

He hovered against a violet ridge, imagining himself shrinking to the size of a human eye. Out of body, no problem. He shrank smaller still—to the size of a grain of pyro—and his perspective shifted with him. Gargantuan metal canyons curved around him, glowing violet with a vast, eerie mist.

He shot into the nearest cavern in the metal, an imperfection magnified to macroscopic scale. Barren, oppressive. He needed to be someplace bright, soft, someplace loving.
Varinia.
A swell of such urgency ballooned inside him that he physically felt the walls of the cavern cracking around him. Time at infinitesimal increments. The memory of nestling against her bosom, and the absence of her if he should fail, struck through him like a sparking tongue from the mouth of darkness.

He exploded with a force infinitely beyond him. Scale dwindled into a pinprick of memory. For a moment, the stars were no longer his ceiling, the farthest bounds of space spanned a tilt of his vision, and he looked down on nearby galaxies and galaxies beyond comprehension with equal wonder.

For a heartbeat, he saw what love could do.

Varinia whispered, “I’ve got you,” as sound and sense flooded back to him in her arms. The ship’s violent rattling made him fear the worst. What if he’d exploded the engine too quickly? The blast had caught up with them! They might not get away in time—

“It’s okay. I’ve got you.” She stroked his fringe away from his eyes. “I’ve got you. It’s all over now.”

He imagined they were back on the beach, at supper, and the night surf was crashing ashore. It had been a long day in the mine.

And the clouds were closing in.

Six years later
North-West Flatlands, Planet Rama Core B
87z from Earth

Flocks of migrating greenarrow geese scythed through a trail of silver geyser clouds, feasting on insect egg spores in the vapor, at the far edge of the Baltacha Ranch. This seasonless region held no end of wonders. But no matter how long she gazed across her three hundred acres, at the skittish horses frolicking hither and thither through the tall grass, at the family of roly-polys lazing under the Mirzin trees she’d imported from their home world as a present for one special courier retiree, at her red-orange rivulets converging to form the major tributary that fed Baas town in the next valley, no matter how often she marveled at the Flatlands’ tranquility, Varinia—here Mrs. Tonya Baltacha—had only to glance up to satisfy herself she’d earned all this.

Oh, how they’d earned this. Her and Clay—here he was known as Anton—her wonderful husband. How they’d earned this life of anonymity.

“You’re quiet today, chick.” Grace sipped her McCormick’s. “Nothing to do with me, I hope.” She sank into her chair and plonked her boots onto the porch fence.

Varinia clasped her hands on the back of her head. “Was just thinking back, that’s all—”

“Heavy tax on the past. I try to avoid it. Especially when I’ve beaten it fair and square.” Grace waved to her six-year-old grandson—her daughter had given birth to Patrick while Grace was digging on Zopyrus—as he proudly whooshed his toy rocket over the water trough. “If you want my advice, Varinia—sorry, Tonya—I wouldn’t sit around reminiscing for too long. You’ve got a great home here. It won’t be going anywhere.”

Uh-oh.
What cockamamie scheme was she about to peddle this time? During her visit last year, Grace had recommended they invest a large sum in a ridiculous global exoskeleton project, a kind of scaffold built around a world, supported by giant towers erected on the planet’s surface. No thanks. They’d had their fill of ambition for one lifetime.

“Grace—leave her alone.” Clay marched out of the house, shirtless, and dunked his head in the water trough. His efforts to fine-tune the living room holo-plate in time for the live Selene broadcast appeared to have been fruitless—and he’d definitely be cranky about it later.

“Who wants to watch that shit anyway?” Grace checked herself. “Pardon me.”

“Gramma Grace!” came the sweetest, most precocious scolding the old woman had received since she’d burned breakfast the previous day.

Grace shouted inside the house, “Sorry, Lyssa. How much do I owe you, chick?”

“Momma said grammas don’t swear.” A cute, canny pause. “One half credit for the S-word, please.”

“That’s steep.” Grace gave Varinia a wink.

“No IOUs either, Gramma. Cash only, please.”

They all burst out laughing, all except little Lyssa. Varinia loved these visits from Grace. In the years since Zopyrus, the indefatigable doctor had been busier than ever, scoping out fresh planets to mine, investing left, right and center in speculative industrial ventures on far-flung alien worlds. She’d even paid for experimental neural surgery to delay the onset of her fragmentia—successfully, too, as the medical trust reckoned she had at least another decade of good health ahead of her.

But Varinia cringed at the thought of her little daughter one day following Gramma Grace on one of her wayward prospecting trips. Treasure-hunting, Grace liked to call it in her bedtime stories, the romantic luster intact, even after all these years, all those brushes with death.

“
So,
Clay, sunshine—I mean Anton—you’re not itching for a little pick action this season by any chance? Stake’s on me. The elders on JP4-11 have decided to lease their altitude mountains in grid plots, first come, first dig. It’s sparked the biggest gold rush in centuries, and I’ve got hold of two grid squares. All I need is someone trustworthy to pitch in alongside me. Two would be better. Varinia? I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to find honest prospectors out here.”

Clay grinned at Varinia, and she quietly gasped. His glistening stubble and longish slicked-back hair dripping in the warm sun, those shoulders and torso muscles chiseled by years of working on the ranch, adding further ruggedness to his repertoire of scars, those cute, adoring eyes sparking for her and her alone, that hard-won smile a beacon of utter contentment—how could she possibly risk losing him? He laid his head sideways on his arms on the porch fence opposite, just watching her.

Grace said something but Varinia didn’t hear. She walked over to her husband, whose hopeful, upward gaze now melted the last of her. He looked so vulnerable, in such peace, nothing in coining compared to the silent forces drawing her to him. An attraction endlessly fresh yet always inevitable. He rose to meet her and, before their lips met, a tingle of girlhood dreams stirred infinitesimally inside.

“Gramma Grace, you turn it off.” Lyssa skipped out onto the porch.

“What? You don’t want to watch all those Selene princesses lining up on the magic bridge? They’re the most beautiful women in the galaxy, you know. I think you will be one someday.”

“Ee-yuck.”

Varinia kissed her man once more, then rested her head on his shoulder to admire her little four-year-old on the threshold of life.

“You don’t want to be a princess, huh?” Grace asked.

“No-wer! That’s
boring
.” Lyssa snatched up her toy bucket and spade from beneath her mother’s chair. “I wanna see what I can find. Patrick!”

The sound of rapturous applause emerged from the living room. The old doctor flicked Varinia a wink.