Sparks in Cosmic Dust (17 page)

Three or four clambered up him, and in concert shifted their weight to his back, toppling him.
Bitches.
If he was going, he’d take as many with him as he could. He struggled onto the torso of a fallen monster and thrust himself backward.

Crunch!

Broken shells? Limbs? He elbowed anything that squirmed beneath him, hurting his own arms but causing significant damage to his smaller foes. Until the next wave of onrushers swamped him completely. Crushing pressure. He couldn’t breathe. Nor move. The irresistible force of his fury broke under a torrent of black shells.

A pocket of daylight gave him hope. Greater shrieks and crunches than ever before. The sheer packed nature of the army trying to get at him rendered them individually impotent. They were too eager. The pocket of light drew wider over his legs, and he managed to fold his knees up to his stomach, to curl himself into a cocoon.

Crunch, crunch!

More weight lifted from him. He gasped for a vital breath, looked up, and was amazed to see a human hand reaching for him. Instinctively he took it, clung tight and scrabbled upright into an arena of outright carnage. Dead crustaceans were strewn everywhere. White blood mixed with sand and hacked limbs swamped the beach. Still more rushed in on their crab-like legs, far too many to count.

Lyssa, though, had fought them back. Dripping with white sludge, hair loose and a-tangle over her face, she looked savage. She handed Clay a lethal rock shard from her belt and retrieved a second for herself so she now had one in each hand.

No time to ask how she got them. The crustacean general struggled to its feet behind her and let loose a deafening caw to action. The entire monstrous host now converged without trepidation. Lyssa’s bargaining chip, her last lifeline, had just sounded the end. She decapitated it with a double slash of her sharp weapons.

“Lyssa!”

“Look out.”

The horde brushed their fallen general aside and leaped on Lyssa, hacking and clawing at her sides underneath her swings. She cried out but swung on. Enraged, Clay stumbled into the fray and took out three monsters with wild swipes. One grabbed his free arm. Lyssa pulverized it, first with a double stab through its shell, then with a vicious stomp on its head. She whirled like a dancer dealing death—sublime but terrifying movements, as if to some economical rhythm spelled by a reaper within. Enemies fell right and left. Corn in a white hurricane. Who
was
she?

Clay suddenly recalled his own brand of destruction. The secret he’d toted across the galaxy for such a time as this.
The shrink carrier.
He scanned the cliff base.

“There.” It lay out beyond the farthest ranks of creatures, between two rocks in the sand and a green ocean pool. How could he get there?

“You slimy motherfuckers! Get your claws off—” A painful scream curtailed Lyssa’s barrage. Before Clay could get there, she collapsed under a series of brutal stabs. She went quiet. The bastards carried on stabbing, gouging, hacking at her bare skin while she lay in a pink cocktail of blood.

A wrenching dilemma—split-second, life or death—tore Clay in two. Help Lyssa now and throw both their lives away? Or try for the shrink carrier and give himself a chance—maybe even a chance for them both? The latter meant she would be at the creatures’ mercy for that bit longer, but…

He bolted to the rock wall as fast as his smarting legs could manage. The monstrous tide swerved with him, but they’d congregated nearer to the sea and were nowhere near as quick. He clambered over loose rocks, sprinted across bare sand. The ear-splitting shrieks and scurrying shapes closed in, and he knew he couldn’t get there in time. No way. There wasn’t enough of a gap.

Thinking of Lyssa being gored to death after saving his life shot red mist over his senses. He committed to a reckless leap…

Reckless
…for Lyssa!

He sprang from the first jutting rock and hurled himself over the swiping claws of two murderous creatures.

Landing inches from the carrier, he yanked it to his chest and ripped the magno-zip open…

Chaos, then nothing. A tableau of absolute stillness. As delicate as the parting of lips after a nervous kiss. He now existed in a microscopic slide, slid under time and clicked into position. Here was his nightmare, frozen for his scrutiny, and for an unknown duration. He’d only warped the temporal ether on such a scale once before, to escape Ladon, and he’d fled long before its effect had worn off. It had been localized but unstoppable. A slowing down of time so powerful that a single coin toss within could outlast the orbital cycle of a moon without, or a heartbeat endure the rising of the tide.

He rose, alert, as if from a fitful sleep. What should have been vengeance merely simmered, controlled, in the pit of his being. He looked across the beach, surveying the hundred or so monsters that stood between Lyssa and freedom, then to the headland beyond, a recognizable marker on the way to the campsite. He’d only need a moment to wreak havoc.

But,
by God,
he had a lot of havoc to wreak.

“W-where am I?” Lyssa groaned at every step. Blood seeped from several wounds in her side, and at least three ribs were broken. Despite gritting his teeth, Clay didn’t know how much longer she could stand being carried, or how much farther he could carry her. “What happened?” She glanced behind them, her glazed eyes pouring over the site of an apocalyptic massacre—hundreds of decapitated alien corpses left in their wake. “How—”

She shivered and cried out, clutching her side.

“Hold on, Lyssa. For me.” His legs started to buckle but he staggered on, supporting her firmly in his arms.
Christ,
where had all his strength gone? He’d felt fine during the still-life slaughter. Now, a strange surplus gravity seemed to press on him. It wearied his every muscle and labored each breath. Lyssa shuddered again, cried out even louder.

“Put me down. You have to put me down,” she said.

“I’m not leaving you.” But he obeyed, setting her on the soft wet sand by an ocean pool. “We’ll just rest for a minute.
Whew,
how about that for a detour, huh? From playing striptease in the mine to
that.
I wonder if it counts as hazard pay?”

“Clay.” With trembling fingers she caressed his hand outstretched on the sand. “Clay, what happened?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“Why didn’t we get married?”

“Not yet, sweetheart. It’s…on our to-do list. Soon as we reach a hundred zee, we’ll bring some poor planet to a stand-still, throw the biggest goddamn reception you ever heard of.”

Her eyes seared wide, focused on the dark rock at her feet while she fought several horrific shudders. Pale as chalk, she settled back and tilted her tired face toward him. “You know, I’ve never had a party.”

“What about birthdays?” he asked.

“Born nebula, remember? I never got to blow out a candle. Only wished. But hey, at least one came…true.”

He stroked her palm, intermingled their fingers. A sudden gust raked sand across the beach, but the rocks shielded her.

“Clay, why didn’t you love me?”

“I—I did. I do.”

He squeezed her hand and looked away. It was all he could do to hold the bitter tears at bay.

“Clay, you need to leave me. They might come back.”

“Not for a while. I doubt it. We scared them off good.”

Another painful convulsion and her color seemed to drain completely away. She’d lost so much blood. Her raspy breaths grew to gasps.

“What can I do?” he pleaded, a grim and unsupportable failure crushing his heart.
He’d
let this happen.
He
hadn’t acted quickly enough when the bastards had first attacked.

“You can go back to camp.” Her loudest whisper shuddered between snatched breaths. “You can…still make our fortune. Clay?”

“I’m here.”

“Remember me?”

With that she turned her head slowly from him, not enough to hide the tears streaking through dried alien blood over her cheek.

Farewells? Absolutes? Clay didn’t know how to face either, and he wasn’t about to sit back and accept them here. Not while he had a quark of energy left in his body and the camp was within walking distance. Somehow, he was going to return…with help.

With the doc!

“All right, Lyssa, you have to lie still. We can’t move you. I’ve got a plan, but it all depends on you hanging on ’til I get back. Grace is the Selene doctor, and she’ll know how to fix you, I guarantee it. She
has
to know.”

Succumbing to an uncontrollable shiver, she managed a faint reply. “Promise?”

“I swear on my life. Whatever happens, I’m coming back for you.”

No answer. Only quiet, private sobs, and the briefest of nods, inscrutable against the soft sand. Was she assenting for his benefit? Or giving a final gesture of her desire to let go?

Clay squeezed a fistful of sand, then wrought the idea of losing her into the most iron-willed effort of his life. So tired, his limbs so bruised and aching, he could barely stand. But stand he did, and with every step the distance lessened by half, and his resolve intensified tenfold, until he was walking through fire and the sparks in his vision wheeled across the pale Zopyrus sky.

Red sparks.

Pyrofluvium everywhere.

The darkest nightfall he’d encountered on Zopyrus almost lost Clay his homecoming. There were no lights in the camp, the fire had long since died, and the high cliffs smothered the inlet in shadow. Immense storm clouds over the horizon hid all three sister moons, so that Blue Bitch, the large gas giant casting a dim aqua glow and occasional lightning flashes, provided Zopyrus’s only illumination.

He crawled on, using his sore elbows and forearms as he slid through the cool sand, his semi-delirious brain magno-locked into finding Grace. The only thing he knew for certain was that he could not stop. Ever.

Prickly grass tickled his wrist. But he was still on the beach, well before the forest. It had to be…
hay
…for Varinia’s four-legged. At the mouth of the inlet? “Help.”

Too exhausted to utter more than a sore whisper, he pulled himself across the recently churned sand to the nearest recognizable object—the roly-poly’s shelter. He struggled to his knees, reached up to tug the canopy…

He collapsed, bringing the shelter down on top of him.

Then he blacked out.

Morning.

“Can’t be far now.” Biting his lip, Clay sat up in the levitation couch inside the roly-poly’s wheel. It was the first time he’d experienced this mode of travel, and it soothed his sore body like a warm bath. But this was no time to rest. Lyssa lay somewhere out here, exactly how far he couldn’t remember. His crawl back to camp had lasted a lifetime.

Pans clattered against four RAF-AO rifles on the back of the donkey trotting ahead. Grace jogged alongside, amazingly fit and spry for a woman of her age. In her belt, a powerful sidearm and plenty of ammunition. Solomon carried her emergency first-aid case under one arm, a fold-up stretcher under his other, while beautiful Varinia kept pace with a couple of blankets slung over her shoulder and two Ares T-11 pistols tucked into her belt.

Yet the grim, unspeakable reality Clay sensed they shared—Lyssa’s severe wounds, her weakened condition when he’d left her, and the amount of time that had elapsed—was not
his
reality. Lyssa Foaloak was a fighter. She’d braved impossible odds to save his life, and there was no way she’d give up on him.

He remembered there being more sand between the cliff and the sea.

“Move faster,” he tried to shout. The words caught in his flaky throat and he coughed.

The convoy stopped dead. He couldn’t see why—the donkey obscured his view of the beach ahead. His efforts to roll out of the invisible couch met with compensatory swivels from the roly-poly, as though it knew he had to stay still.

“Damn you, stupid beast. Grace, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

Her solemn, sun-kissed face and small hawk eyes faced him for a moment, and he feared the worst. Then she led the donkey to one side, giving him a clear view of what she’d discovered.

Lyssa?

His heart fisted. A cold pang shivered him back to absolute reality.

Fifty yards ahead, the beach ended. It didn’t resume. Clay recognized the cliff overhang high above, over two hundred yards away, from which Lyssa had leaped into the sea. The entire site of slaughter, as well as her final resting place, was now underwater.

Wiped clean by the rising tide.

She was gone.

Without a body to inter, and with neither he nor Lyssa being religious, Clay decided against holding any kind of funeral service for her. Instead, he replayed every surreal moment they’d shared together over the past few months, from her double-crossing introduction to her bittersweet final words. But why
hadn’t
he loved her? It hadn’t occurred to him until she’d said it, matter-of-factly, right at the end. Maybe if they’d reached a 100z like she’d wished, and they’d settled down somewhere, raised a family…

What if…?
A powerful, fruitless question. Not one to ponder while he was groggy on antibiotics and still getting to grips with the shock of losing her. But would he,
could he,
ever get to grips with it? What closure could there be when a close friend and lover ended up MIA?

A day’s rest for all seemed a more fitting gesture of respect. During that time he slept fitfully on a bed of blankets Varinia laid out for him in the shade outside his tent, the ocean view a constant, aching reminder of the fate of his erstwhile fiancée—the bravest woman he’d ever known.

He slept on and off for several more days while he recovered his strength and fought off an unknown infection. Grace changed his bandages and cleaned his wounds periodically—umpteen of the gashes in his legs and his left side and shoulders would leave permanent scars, she told him.

One night, after their prospecting work was completed, the others brought their suppers and made a miniature campfire at the foot of his bed.

“How’d you guys do? Rich split?” he asked.

“We did okay.” Varinia offered him a plate of beans and a biscuit, but not being hungry he palmed it aside.

“Just a bite? For me?” she pleaded.

Feeling so weak and tender under her comely maternal glow left him little option. He spooned up a mouthful of piping hot beans—juicy, the first real food he’d had since his ordeal. He nibbled the raisin-and-sultana biscuit, then washed it down with a sip of her watered-down Bolshoi brandy. But still he couldn’t get rid of that taste of acrid, crustacean salt. It hung over his tongue like a stalactite dipping into his saliva, tainting every swallow.

“Grace says we have some decisions to make, brother,” Solomon said, scrutinizing him as always.

“More like a group appraisal.” Grace plonked herself down beside Clay and chewed her syntho-meat with gusto. “We’re two months in. We’ve suffered an irreplaceable loss. Pound for pound, Lyssa was by far the best digger here. But we’re also way, way ahead of my estimates.”

“How much?” Solomon asked.

“Coming up to roughly a hundred-and-ten million clips. That’s three million
per day
right now.” She turned to Clay. “Whatever you did to collapse half the mine like that, these new fallen rocks are bursting with pyro. Hardly any corborilium. Refining takes half as long and we get three times the output. At this rate, we’re looking at a payday of over nine hundred million, possibly a billion. That’s
if
we decide to stay that long.”

“If? I’d dig twenty years on my own for that kind of payout.” After wolfing down the last of his beans, Solomon leaped to his feet and, high on life and good fortune, scooped Varinia up in his arms. She gave a surprised girly squeal, hiccupped, then laughed.

Clay rolled his eyes wryly as he sat up, trying his best to share the merriment. In the flickering sapphire firelight, Varinia’s long, bare legs were sleek perfection, her exposed neck as she dipped backward a thing of indescribable beauty. She met his stare and seemed to instantly ignite from within, a change only he seemed privy to.

Dazzling.

His heavy pulse struck in the bases of his hands supporting him upright, and echoed through his fingertips. A jaded flak-jacket he hadn’t realized he wore, buried under weathered and laser-scarred skin, began to slip. In its place, an impish pubescence bucked against disapproving glares from Grace and Solomon. But Varinia appeared equally rapt, her slight, insecure smile every bit as wondrous as he felt.

Be mine. Forget everything else.

The moment lingered past all excuse or prudence. Even when Solomon lowered her onto the sand and stood, legs astride, arms folded, towering over them, their gaze didn’t break. Despite the side-effects of Grace’s antibiotics rolling pinecones behind his eyes, Clay could not look away from Varinia. The compulsion was strange, an insanely defiant, semi-conscious fervor he knew he should
not
be indulging. He’d hate himself later, for Lyssa’s sake. But he’d also endured so much, compromised for so long, the urge to claim what his heart truly desired had uncorked when he’d least expected it.

First the ether warp, now this…

He looked away.

His secrets were practically spilling out of him.

“As I was saying…” Grace cleared her throat, attempting to dispel the tension, “…a billion is tempting, mighty tempting, but we have other factors to consider.”

Solomon kicked a boot load of sand onto the fire before crouching at an appreciable distance from Varinia, his massive shoulders hunched like a brooding dragon’s. That Clay couldn’t see the big man’s eyes anymore—Solomon was silhouetted in front of the fire—suggested this was no time to belabor the obvious rancor between them. If there had to be a confrontation over this, it would be in private, and not in the grip of intoxicants. Tomorrow, as much or as little would be read from the incident as sober minds could prevail upon. Until then, he’d keep himself to himself.

He was used to that.

“Soon as we’re done, you all need to go sleep it off. Bunch of fucking high-schoolers,” Grace snapped. “Sort this shit out before I split you all up and exile one of you to the donkey pen.”

No reply.

“All right, then. We have a decision to make. Stay or go. With all that’s happened—an unstable pyro mine, killer amphibians making themselves known, a mystery craft in orbit, and losing Lyssa—we’re on borrowed time. The longer we stay, the more likely our operation will go belly-up and us with it. And I don’t have to tell you, over twenty-five million apiece is enough to start afresh anywhere inside a hundred zee. We could pack up and leave tomorrow, no regrets.

“Except one.” She licked the bean juice from around the rim of her plate, something she also habitually did after finishing soup. “We’ll always wish we’d stayed a bit longer, seen this thing through. Years from now, when you’re settled somewhere, tucking your kids into bed, begrudgingly coughing up taxes to ISPA, what’s gonna be your abiding memory of leaving Zopyrus? The satisfaction of scratching the surface, making a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it snatch op to the tune of solid millions? Or leaving behind the biggest pyro lode ever discovered by man because you chose to play it safe?”

Clay shuffled position under his blanket. Grace was right. On both counts. Leaving now was the smart thing to do, but not without its own cost—the nagging, festering kind that never left a person. Insidious regret.

“Jeez, Grace. When you say it like
that?
” Varinia’s inappropriate attempt at sarcasm only beckoned a searing glare from the good doctor.

“Let’s look at the threats one at a time,” Grace said, bunching her knees up under her chin, “then take a vote. Okay?” She didn’t wait for a consensus. “Solomon, you’ve done the most work inside the mine since its collapse. What’s your appraisal?”

“It’s sealed itself off. That collapse brought down half the ceiling, and all we’re doing is breaking up the fallen rocks. Some of them are as big as sky-cabs, but they’re bone dry. That place ain’t gonna collapse again, at least not in the way he said it did.”

Aimed half-accusingly at him, the word
he
rang through Clay as his codename had when read from the roll-call by his smarmy CO on Ladon, singling him out as guinea pig for the day’s new experimental testing. He shivered and tugged the blanket up to his chest. “It was a section of damp rock,” he said defensively. “The pyro sparked like fireworks every time we struck. But if these new boulders are bone dry, no reason it
should
happen again.”

“That’s what I said.” Solomon scowled.

“Yeah. So you did. Hoorah—”

Grace once again interrupted. “Then we’re sorted on that count. I’d say it’s easy pickings for a while. Now…what about our rogue voyeur? Has anyone seen the orbiting craft lately?”

The others shrugged.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Clay argued. “Maybe it’s shifted orbit and passes over us in daytime. Or maybe it’s spotted us and has returned the information to whoever sent it. If that’s the case, we should get the hell off Zopyrus immediately. Not that we haven’t been walking that tightrope ever since we clocked the satellite. I mean, if you ask me, this whole trip was a last-ditch Cydonia hand anyway.” He glanced at Varinia, but her gaze was fixed on the fire. “We’re living life out on a limb. No use crying when the limb jives.”

“So you’re saying we should pack up and go home?” Grace asked.

“No, I’m saying we should finish what we’ve started. Or at least give it a few more weeks. And if we run into any more trouble…well, we didn’t bring target rifles to hang over our mantel.”

Solomon interlocked his fingers, as though in prayer, and gave several deliberate nods behind them. “Dig as long as we can,” he agreed. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime shot. No regrets.”

“Fair enough.” Grace got to her feet and brushed the sand from her legs. “I’m with you blokes, of course. This was always gonna be my swansong, so I don’t mind rolling the dice a few more times. And I bet I can outshoot you any day, Clay, baby. Just sayin’.”

“I’m sure.” He yawned.

“And what about you, Varinia?” Grace turned sharply toward the young glamour girl.

“You want to know if I can shoot?”

“I want to know if you’re willing to shoot dice, here, with us…for however long it takes.”

“And if I’m not?”

Grace scoffed. “Good point. You’re outvoted anyway, chick. But you know what—you’ve got the biggest decision to make of any of us.”

“I have?”

“Uh-huh.” The old woman trudged away into the darkness, back to her tent, without another word.

No explanation was needed.

Clay engaged Solomon’s muscular silhouette with a proud gaze but couldn’t tell if the big man reciprocated. It had been a strange supper, brief and epic. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so open in a group like this. It had to be the antibiotics.
Had
to be.

But they didn’t account for everything he was experiencing right now.

Varinia took delicate sips of her brandy while offering him and Solomon insufficient, periodic glances through the campfire’s cool heat. The breeze shifted direction, tossing sparks one way, then switched back, shooting them the other.

Sooner or later, someone was bound to get burned.