Sparks in Cosmic Dust (10 page)

Twenty minutes’ drift brought them onto his new vector, pointing away from Zopyrus. “We’re good for now, Grace. We can run on RAM power for a bit, then tomorrow, I’ll plot us a fresh course.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m impressed. ’Course, I’ll be even more impressed with some nosh inside me. You coming?”

“Not just yet. I’m gonna watch our caboose for a while—make certain it worked.”

“Holler if it hasn’t.”

His eyes smarted and his stomach rumbled after concentrating for over an hour on the too-small navigation screens dotting his console, so Clay went to grab a bite to eat from the kitchen. There he found the others trading Kappa Max anecdotes and ribbing Dixie’s—no,
Varinia’s
—status as resident sex symbol extraordinaire. At least she had a self-deprecating sense of humor. Grace and Lyssa weren’t pulling punches.

“I used to hear smogheads mumble on about this perfect woman stripping at the Delfin.” Lyssa munched on a mouthful of potato chips. “Never thought I’d be digging in shit alongside her. Almost makes me wish I dug girls instead of boys.”

“The only thing you’ll be digging is my boot out of your ass.” Grace pilfered a potato chip. “’Course, I’ll be insisting on plenty of striptease dancing contests round the campfire while I sip Bolshoi brandies on a reclining deckchair, so Varinia’s pretty much guaranteed light work detail.”

“No, you are, by virtue of no one sticking around long enough to see your nurse striptease.” Lyssa’s grimace made everyone laugh. “I mean Christ, this has to be the oddest collection of prospectors ever.”

“I think eclectic is the word.” Varinia glanced up at Clay with warm and questing eyes. He looked away, unsure what to make of the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold twinkle in her eye.

“Well, before we get into a show-and-tell…” Grace lifted the chain holding the medicine bottle from around her neck, unscrewed the cap. “Now that you’re all here, I think it’s time to let you know a little of what you’re in for on Zopyrus.” A black dot about the size of a beauty spot rolled onto her palm from the upended bottle.

Clay snatched a cold beef sachet from the fridge, took a seat next to Lyssa, and nodded courteously at Solomon’s inquisitive stare across the table—the big guy seemed to size him up whenever the women were present.

“How many of you are familiar with Herodotus, the ancient historian?” Grace asked.

Silence from the others, but Varinia partially pursed her lips and fidgeted her hands, as though she wanted to speak but not at the expense of fitting in with her peers. Understandable. Clay had suffered that exact same dilemma most of his adult life, and now it vicariously constricted the hell out of his cool, practiced reticence. The urge to speak up for her quickly wrung out his reply. “I am. Herodotus blended fact and fancy, but he was year zero for writing journalistic history.”

“Not bad, not bad. I had to look him up.” Grace gave him a wink, and he retreated into his shell. “Herodotus cobbled together histories of all the great Hellenic and Middle Eastern civilizations of his time.” She put on a pair of old spectacles in order to feed the microdot onto the correct slide tray in her handheld digital interface. The screen blazed with lilac light. “One of his mini tales concerns a sly hero called Zopyrus, whose canny ruse echoes, and actually predates, the great wooden horse of Troy. Okay, before you lapse into scholastic stupors, just remember the old man who named the moon Zopyrus did so for a reason. See what you make of his journal entry…

“
Day sixty-five. Dear Millie, it’s nine weeks since the first pick sparked a shard of pyrofluvium. We’re digging like madmen now. Two hours’ kip a night for Bester and Cordonner—they’re manic, insatiable. Rex and I manage to restrain ourselves a little more but there’s no denying this is addictive. I daresay even dangerous. My previous digs were characterized by attrition—long-drawn, diligent workloads. This is a different beast altogether. Each of us has lost over thirty pounds of body weight, yet we rarely tire, even after twenty-hour stints in the mine. I’m starting to suspect the addiction is not merely lust for greater wealth but bio-chemical. When pyrofluvium is struck by a pick, it emits a quantity of incendiary residue—fire blood, if you will. The resulting vapor has no odor but has a potent cumulative effect on the worker. Rex is convinced it has the properties of a neurotoxin, an addictive stimulant. The more vapor absorbed into the blood, the more the brain craves it. We considered shutting down the operation for a week, to properly detox, but Rex and I were laughed off by the others. This can’t end well. Digging is going to either kill us or drive us mad. Don’t know what to do.

“Day sixty-six. Dear Millie, I have unofficially dubbed the moon Zopyrus, after the Persian infiltrator featured in Herodotus. There are interesting parallels. We have gained entry into the mines under this ancient abandoned world, and have won the key to its riches. But we must also keep the ruse a secret. No one else can know of this trove. It’s not enough for us to conquer Babylon, we must seal the mine behind us so that we can return to plunder it a second time. That might sound insane, but while we dig, nothing makes more sense.

“When the time comes, when our cargo hold is full, I hope we can escape Zopyrus. As I write this, Bester and Cordonner have come to blows at the mine entrance for a second time, and the prospect of us leaving this place as civilized men, given how much pyrofluvium remains within our grasp, seems more and more unlikely. This stuff is incendiary—in every meaning of the word. I don’t know how much more we can withstand.”

Grace set the reading device on the table. “A few things before we reach the moon.” She snatched another of Lyssa’s potato chips from her bowl, crunched it in her mouth as she spoke. “There’ll be adequate oxygen, water, a more-or-less temperate climate. This is all in the old man’s partial journal. I’ll leave it out for you to read. It’s our journal now.” She spun the device into the middle of the table. “The old man didn’t manage to seal the mine entrance before he left, so we won’t have to blast. There are many indigenous species. At least one of them is intelligent, though physically nothing like us. They were not hostile then, and his party traded with them for food and timber. I think it’s best to interact with them only when we absolutely have to.”

“Agreed.” Solomon took hold of the device, then set it down again. “That was the policy on Ferrer Five. Aliens can be touchy. What’s friendly to us might be offensive to them. I remember the indigenous there thought music was an abomination. Any music. To them it was unnatural, manufactured sound. So we had to stop playing it at any frequency, any volume—their hearing encompassed the whole sound spectrum. While we were leaving, our foreman cranked up Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ to max volume, damn near started a war. Funniest thing you ever saw. They ripped our derricks to splinters and took dumps on the wreckage. Next thing we heard, another human camp had been slaughtered in their beds. Fifty-one roughnecks. Not the funniest thing you ever saw. That’s when ISPA quarantined the planet.”

“Wagner again, huh?” Grace scoffed. “Light-years away, still pissing people off. But it illustrates the point well. Now, about this addictive property of pyrofluvium, I propose we work in sensible shifts, not too long, not too frequent. This stuff pays enough by the kilo for us to take it easy and still come out emperors after ten months. We have the opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes. The crucial factor in the whole operation is going to be professionalism. Treat this as employment, each other as colleagues, and the mining as contracted work. Don’t get carried away. Don’t take any of it personally. Remember, if we’re smart about this and we get away clean, we can always come back for more, so don’t dig like it’s the end of the world. Maintain an even keel. From what I’ve seen of you, I think this is the most promising group of grid-lickers I’ve ever lucked in with.”

Lyssa chortled, then gave a fake apology.

“See, I told you I was full of shit.” Grace winked. “But that’s all right, because I can play responsible when I have to. And so can all of you. Yes, even the blow-up doll with an attitude here, whose name might be more apt if it began with
P
instead of
L.
”

“Sticks and stones, bag of bones.” Lyssa playfully beckoned more insults.

Grace turned to Varinia. “Be ready for anything. The old man dropped hints at the geography surrounding the mine—ocean, mountains, etc.—but nothing concrete. He only started his journal after about a month, and only fractions of it survived. So we’ll have to improvise.”

“I thought you met him, discussed it with him,” Varinia said.

“He was too sick to give an in-depth appraisal. Fragmentia is a degenerative brain disease—a patient bitch. It incubates for years before it lays siege to your mental faculties. Then you go from lucid to stupid in a matter of weeks. The old man fought hard, but it was eating away his nerves, his muscles—” the old doctor twitched a frown, glanced away, “—and the tranquilizer meds left him gibbering most of the time. I had to wait for his lucid moments. Weren’t many. The maps and ship were actually a bribe.”

“He bribed you?”

“Yeah. Said he’d give me the keys to his ship and the coordinates to a fortune if I did two things for him in return. One—” she ticked the points off with her fingers, “—find his daughter on Mars, give her this journal. And two, use my medical expertise to…to help him.”

“Help him how?” asked Varinia.

“To die, of course.”

“And you
did
it?”

“Don’t talk soft. ’Course I did.”

“So this is blood money.” Solomon sank back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head.

“No, this is an old man’s will and testament. It’s what he wanted. Why the fucking belly-aching?”

“He was raised a Christian.” Varinia avoided eye contact with Solomon. “To them, helping someone to die is the same as murdering them.”

Grace shrugged. “It’s an interesting point. Not a terribly bright one, but interesting. People still believe that garbage?”

“Not really.” Solomon was quick to answer. “It’s just…nah, forget it. So did you ever give the diary to his daughter?”

“No. Like I said, she lives on Mars ’Til we strike it rich, that might as well be Neverland.”

Lyssa cleared her throat. “I’ve gotta say, Grace—from Selene quack to rock-buster—that’s one helluva career change. What’s the deal?”

“Don’t let the silver spoon CV fool you, chick. I was born and raised in a fishing village in Alaska. That’s the meat locker of North America. Made my living the hard way, through winters so cold, your pee came out as a popsicle. I was lucky to get away. But believe me, I’ve lost none of that old juice. Once I get going, you’ll all be ducking sparks.”

Everyone laughed.

“How long ’til we start the descent?” Solomon asked.

“A little over three hours,” Clay said. “Then it’s all yours, Grace. You have the coordinates.”

She nodded. “My last act in charge. When we land, everything gets shared five ways.
Everything.
So if I were you, I’d make the most of these three hours while you’ve got them. ’Cause trust me, when the work starts, you’ll wish you had them back.” With that she groaned to her feet and trudged forward to the cockpit, leaving behind a segregated crew, each perhaps contemplating what it might feel like to surrender to this new ragtag community for a while.

For Clay, it was an awkward prospect. No doubt they’d all open up at some point, bare their pasts and their characters in good faith—people left alone together often did. But he could never. It wasn’t just for his safety but for theirs too. If a Kuiper agent ever found out these people had met him, they would all be neuro-probed and then killed. No question.
So
…how to keep himself to himself for ten months in such a small camp?

It was a problem.

For the first time in their company, he felt his old claustrophobia bristling, squeezing under the inescapable eyes of scrutiny. Just like on the gurney. The experiments. Ladon. Nowhere to fly.
Those bastards.
He clenched his fists under the table, threatened to rip it from its bolts.
Must get away.
He pressed his elbows into his hips on either side of the brown plastic bag on his lap, tightening his biceps. The urge to tear the bag and its contents open chafed him like the resurrected nightmares from Ladon. That was how he’d escaped from that awful facility. He could easily do the same here…

No.

The unfamiliar sight of Lyssa and Varinia exchanging friendly winks unwound him, deflated the insane breath he’d held. What was wrong with him? He glanced around the kitchen, reminding himself this was not Ladon, not Kuiper Wells, but a friendly vessel on a treasure hunt, and these were friends, friends, friends.

Without a word, he got up and left for the sleeping quarters. Footsteps followed him out. He spun and was glad to see Lyssa’s shapely figure. She wore black slacks and a green T-shirt. Her tuneless humming made him feel safe. She accompanied him into bed, where they snuggled together in silence.

The piles of crates and secured trolleys chattered in the cargo hold as the
Taras Bulba
’s main engine stuttered into gear for an automatic course-correction. A disconcerting
neigh-eigh-eigh
erupted from the mare’s wagon. Solomon watched on, chewed his lip while Varinia fed half a syntho-apple through the open window shutter, her palm flat. She’d explained that was the correct way to hand-feed a horse, so that it didn’t chomp on her fingers instead. He knew nothing of horses, but he wasn’t convinced. The beast’s mouth opened with a breathy quiver, its impressive arc of teeth appeared as adamant as a vise.

He tugged at her blouse. “Varinia, you might want to wait—”

The mare took the apple in a heavy, smothering bite. Its slaver dripped from Varinia’s soft hand, then the horse turned away to munch in the shadows. Varinia beamed, happier than he’d ever seen her. Her bright, damp eyes let loose a tear, and she treated Solomon to a wonderfully long, silent hug that made him look upon the mare with affection. It was the first time he’d seen Varinia cry. Something in the three of them together, a strange, dreamy sense of importance he’d never encountered before, was incredibly comforting. Almost like family, but confined to a fleeting glow. A sensation he could get used to, wanted to get used to. A sensation he hoped she shared.