Sparks in Cosmic Dust (19 page)

The storm clouds grew purple and more volatile. She could almost taste the electric charge. Time to quit. A swoop back toward the ever-so-faint flashes of mountains and coastline below gummed her with giddy excitement. As a girl, her favorite ride at the Martian Theme Park had been the mile-deep log flume into one of the great canyons. The sensation of falling and the huge controlled splash at the bottom remained unmatched…but easily simulated.

All right. No parachute. No holding back.
Lightning flashes emblazoned the shapes of enormous mountains onto her lidless vision. She recognized the intricate lines of architectural growth, like crusted plaque on the teeth of vast ridges, identifying the alien city. Along the coast, across the forest valley, a persistent fluorescent-green sliver intrigued her. Its glow wasn’t commensurate with the lightning flashes nor with the properties of running water she’d seen thus far on Zopyrus.

Now falling at the same speed as the raindrops around her—a track race of diamond bullets—she veered toward the glow. It led her to the nape of a gigantic gorge, hidden from the beach by a tall seaside crag. The course of a massive river fed into it. Hundreds of meters wide, this river appeared to wind around several mountains, finally emptying via a mind-boggling waterfall into the hidden gorge. Yet she hadn’t noticed the river itself from aloft. Its color was emerald like the sea and therefore dark at night. The waterfall, however, cascaded iridescently from neck to trough.

She had to investigate.

Glowing commas of mist gave her a strange but wonderful Halloween vibe as she sank into them. Her memory simulated the thunder of the falls and the slick, sweeping sensation of fine spray. She slid down into mirth and mist on the coattails of bona fide alien magic. An achingly familiar quality in the green light stirred and fed an insatiable craving like nothing she’d experienced out of body before. It was like the blissful promise of overdosing on chocolate…exponentially.

The cascade began to ease open, its watery curtains drawing apart to reveal slick honeycombed rock.
How?
Lime light wavered across it. Large, coiled slug creatures slashed their tails at the openness, as though threatened by its presence. Mesmerized, Varinia inched closer. The intensity of light at the edges of this fresh gap was far more brilliant than at any other place. But what was doing this? Why? Did it…sense her presence somehow?

Though invincibility always emboldened her during coining, this time an attraction far more potent, beyond rationale, inched her toward the mysterious force. There was nothing there physically, nothing visible, other than the luminous property of the waterfall. Yet neither was she there physically, visibly.

The watery sleeves that should have roared as she ventured between them trembled instead, a weird lolling ripple wavering them in slow motion. Varinia felt so charged, so alive, she wanted to burst, to spread the wings of her being to endless, undreamed heights. The light flittered white, then gold. It seemed to heave the waterfall outward on either side, as though on breasts of electric night air. The coiled creatures no longer lunged out but slithered away from the bare space.

Incredibly, letters began to appear in the rock…

…perfectly carved, in
English.

Hi Varinia

Nice surprise

I couldn’t sleep either

In an instant, the magical light flicked out and she sprang up in her sleeping bag, wide awake to the walls of a dark tent.

For the first time in a long time, Varinia couldn’t decide whether she’d astral-traveled or dreamed it. There’d always been real-world physics to ground her coining sojourns. What had just happened was not scientifically possible. Tons of water parted like the halves of a cotton shirt? An invisible alien scribe carving a message in her own language? She settled her rampant heartbeat with slow, measured breaths and the knowledge that REM sleep still had a thing or two to teach her about flights of fancy.
Christ alive.
A magic waterfall?

But it had seemed so
real.
Unimaginably real. Reality checks no longer worked for her during lucid dreaming. She’d been coining for so long, the physical logic required for distinguishing between waking reality and dream reality—flicking a light switch, counting her fingers, checking her reflection in a mirror—no longer applied. Coining had no physical dimension either, so how could she tell the difference between it and lucid dreaming? An expert had suggested reading small text, looking away, then re-reading it, and if it garbled after repeated views the participant was in a dream state. But so many of her relaxing coining experiences took place in remote locales, where text wasn’t at hand.

The one factor she used to distinguish between coining and dreaming was the sequential, linear nature of her out-of-body trips. Dreams tended to be fragmented, hopping around in time and space with no regard for logic. In coining, the experience was a smoothly tangential one—spatial order and geography were as sacrosanct as they were in reality.

She rubbed her face with trembling hands, then hugged her kneecaps. This latest flight had conformed in every way to coining. Every way but one. It had been
nuts.
Best not to dwell on it, then. She was paranoid enough already. Morning might put it in true perspective.

Sinking back into her sleeping bag, she dragged a spare blanket over her head and hid undercover like she used to as a little girl. Funny how that still worked.

She woke early morning to the noise of wind pummeling her tent. Outside, nothing in the campsite remained dry. The roly-poly’s shelter was nowhere to be seen, and the poor creature now nestled beside Grace’s tent. Most of the food crates, boxes and barrels lay strewn about, spilled or upended. The three chemical acid baths were now on their sides, emptied, their tripod stands legs-up in the sand. The donkeys huddled together against the far wall. Meanwhile, icy-looking breakers, given haircuts by a terrific wind, piled remorselessly ashore.

Already a miserable day.

Before breakfast, Grace belly-ached about the storm’s effect on the
Taras Bulba
’s camouflage. “If those bastards spot it, we’re finished.” After breakfast—a miserly bite of a biscuit was all Varinia could manage—Grace snapped at anyone who spoke of anything else but the ship. “Who gives a goddamn fucking snot about the donkeys?” she berated Clay. “We’re sitting ducks if anything’s happened to the
Taras.
”

“Take it easy,” he replied. “We’ll go and sort it first thing. Repair any damage if needs be. Don’t forget the storm clouds will have hidden us from prying satellites. We’re probably no worse off.”

“He’s right. That was a mean sonofabitch last night.” Varinia didn’t look him in the eye but felt the warmth of his attentions upon her. No question, out of the two men, her thoughts were bent on Clay every time. The one she knew practically nothing about but had conjectured a fascinating past for. How she longed to know more. Avoiding him was like ignoring the point of a compass while homesick in uncharted waters.

“Here’s what we’ll do.” Grace threw her empty cup of McCormick’s onto her tent porch, knocking over the stack of sand-crusted plates. “I need to be here in case those Christmas cads show up. I’ve dealt with their type before. That leaves two of you to make the trip to the
Taras.
Clay, you know the most about ships. In case it’s damaged, or the camouflage is ruined, you’re our best bet for finding a solution. And no offence, Solomon, but after last night there’ll be no more boys’ own bullshit. You’re staying here with me. Plus, you’re built like a demolition bot—plenty to dissuade any would-be attackers.

“So that’s that. Clay and Varinia, dress warm and try to stay incognito. Use the cliffs and trees for cover. Rifles and pistols are already loaded. If you do encounter any indigenous inland, fire only as a last resort. There’s something really odd about those amphibians you described—the old man’s journal insists the natives were friendly when he was here. We
have
to be missing a piece of the puzzle.” She blinked a bit of sand out of her eye. “Okay, you can go now.
Adios.
Don’t dally.”

Varinia raked up wet sand with her fingers, then brushed her hands on her khaki shorts. It shifted her into an earthy survivalist mind frame, a little familiarizing quirk she’d used on family camping trips. For today was going to be a long, hard slog in miserable weather, possibly dangerous, and she needed to summon all her tenacity.

“We don’t get a say in the matter?” Clay asked wryly.

“None.” Grace groaned to her feet and left abruptly, as usual. “Just be sure to bring back good news, boy scout.”

A cringe-worthy silence ended the meeting, after which they slumped away to their own tents. Varinia knew she’d hate this excursion if any of that tension followed them. Better to stay put and let Moody Boy stitch up the camouflage on his own. Yet accompanying him uninterrupted for half a day, something she hadn’t experienced on Zopyrus, might not be so unpleasant after all…

…if he didn’t still hate her guts after last night.

God! What’s wrong with me?

Solomon reckoned he knew loneliness pretty well by now. Self-reliance, with its long, labyrinthine passages of worldliness and alienation, had served him well enough over the years in deep space. He’d spent countless nights alone on dozens of remote worlds, barely talking to a soul for weeks on end. No harm done. In fact, he’d always liked his own company—at least the conversations were to his liking, no bullshit. And women? He’d had that to look forward to at the end of every contract. The bird of his choice, money no object. Maybe even a string of them.

But Zopyrus was different.
She
was different. In the past two weeks, he’d lost his familiarity with isolation, the sharpness of its claws, the weight of it bearing down on him after his brief stints in civilization.
Christ,
how it cut to see her leave.

He clasped his fingers together and bowed over them. Shut his eyes to the diffused morning light as it bled through the green tent fabric.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy
—

A rush of blood left a thumping pulse in his temples. He squeezed his palms together.
You dirty son of a bitch! I had everything I wanted right here. Whatever happened after we left, wherever we ended up, I’d have looked after her for the rest of my life. And you know it.
You
gave her to me, answered my prayers.
You
led us to this mountain of riches. We could have been happy. Everything I am and everything I know tells me we should be happy together.

So why,
why
doesn’t she love me? What did I do? When she was in prison, I broke her out. When she was in hiding, I watched her every step. We’ve shared each other in every way possible. I don’t understand,
can’t
understand why you’d lead us so far away from home, give us a tent together, show me the most amazing feeling in the universe, and then…just…cut us from each other like fucking paper dolls.

And that’s that? She goes her way, I go mine, and my broken piece-of-shit heart stays here? Is that it? I get a fortune, lose Varinia? Is that the way your diseased fucking mind works? ’Cause I tell you this—if I can’t have her,
no one
has her. Not that asshole grid-licker she’s with. Not any cockroach shack-sheik. I swear right now, either I leave Zopyrus with Varinia in my arms or I leave Zopyrus alone, with this fortune you’ve used to buy her away from me. On the memory of my father, Reverend Luke Bodine, I sweat that I’ll do…

Ah, shit. You son of a bitch! Who am I even talking to? You didn’t even step in to save your own Reverend. Jesus Christ. Dad never did anything against anyone and you left him to…No, this is between me and…whoever gets in my way from now on. This is
my
fortune. It’s gonna be the biggest goddamn lode you ever heard of.
That
I swear!

After a long, steeling breath, he opened his eyes and the bitterness left him. In its place, a revitalizing clarity washed through, gave him the shivers. It was gladdening, from deep inside. It told him what he had to do from now on.

Dig. Dig like he’d never dug before. To hell with everyone else.

For breakfast, mouthfuls of odorless vapor. For lunch, a smorgasbord served in blazing, acrid red. Solomon hardly broke for a rest during a full day’s work in the mine. Whenever he did, the point of his pickaxe was scorching to the touch. Sweat sponged from his slacks as he wrung them over the pool already formed on the ground where he worked. No one interrupted him—he hated them anyway.
Hated
them. In every spark from cosmic dust blazed the promise of riches, proof he was wresting a little control, power, a little
something
back from the universe that had sentenced him to oblivion.

By nighttime, he had enough pyro rocks to fill twenty trolleys. A hundred acid baths. Still hyper-alert, driven by that same clarity he’d enjoyed all day, he nonetheless felt hungry enough to eat a mule or two. He dropped his pick with a
clank
and tried to gather his breath. Several light, tickly coughs left his chest buzzing, his shoulders spastic. The steady diet of pyro fumes seemed to trickle out from every pore, as if life was overflowing, fizzing from inside.

It felt incredible.

The first step he took toward the exit collapsed from under him. Before he hit the floor, he chuckled through pricks of pins and needles all over.

“Hey, you might want to pace yourself.” Clay strode to catch up with Varinia’s no-shit march along the silty riverbank. She didn’t weigh much and made little impression in the mud, whereas his every step bogged him down. Before the storm, they’d always walked in the river, but the water was now waist-high and fast-moving. “Varinia?
Hey,
slow down.”

“What for? It’s not like you’re talking to me anymore.”

“Huh?”

She shook her head irritably. “See? You haven’t got a clue what I’m on about.”

“Um, I might if you let me in on it.”

“Forget it. You suck-baits are all the same.”

Psycho broad.
“What the hell’s eating your lunch? You’re the one who went all Greta Garbo on us last night. ‘I vant to be alone.’ Please. You might be able to fool smogged space haulers behind a pane of glass, but I’m not buying it. You don’t want to be special. You want to be like everyone else. I know. I’ve seen it.”

“Oh, yeah? And do your tea leaves wipe my ass as well? Why don’t you go—”

“Shut up and listen.” He grabbed her upper arms and spun her toward him, immediately hating himself. The skin around her eyes was punk and puffy. “I—I’m sorry.” He wanted to lean in and hold her tight, give her a shoulder to cry on, but another part of him wanted more and would take it if he wasn’t careful. Her natural scent, stronger than ever after days of hard work and little bathing, infused his sex and immediately stirred his cock. He leaned forward, hesitated, then pulled away.

Varinia’s half-pleading eyes narrowed. “See? You see? You really
do
hate me. So what’s the use?” She shoved him away, and he almost lost his footing on the slippery silt.

“Varinia, I—”

She cocked her arm, ready to slap him should he persist. Clay saw red but managed to hold it inside. A potent urge to overpower her, take away all her bullshit defenses,
show
her what she was too ridiculous to admit she wanted, strained his every muscle. But he held her gaze instead. Her quivering lips, fierce temper ready to spit, her white, untreated skin and all-natural curves poised irresistibly, tempted him so hard he couldn’t breathe.

He stepped in, caught her swing. She went to knee him in the balls but he was ready, blocking it with a swivel of his hips. Clay gritted his teeth. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulled her back into submission. Eyes darkened in the shade of overhead foliage, she gazed into him, teetering, expecting. Her full lips parted, releasing heavy, intoxicating breaths inches from his own mouth.

She remained stiff, unyielding in his arms. If he wanted her, he would have to take her. He followed the smooth whiteness of her neck down to her heaving breasts, then arched her further backward, exposing her even more. He leaned in and let go of her hair, instead using his full arm to cradle her shoulders. Kissing the side of her neck soaked electricity into him, and even more when her upper body writhed slowly, in rhythm with his passion. Her hands were now all over his shoulders and back, orchestrating desire straight to his cock. He kissed her lips, poured everything he’d been brewing these past few days into making Varinia want him. To his delight, she gave back tenfold, her nails clawing at his shirt insisting he take this as far and as deep as he possibly could.

“Clayton, take me.”

Oh God, yes
— He scooped her up and carried her a few meters behind the tree line to a field of tall damp grass. It was either that or the mud. The stalks gave easily under their weight, and no sooner did he set her down when she ripped his shirt over his head. Tracing her fingers over his many scars, she looked up at him and gasped.

“Poor baby. Let me help you forget.” She roved her hands across his abdominals. Pleasured his nipples with slow kisses and quick bites. Then with a rapacious curl of her lips, eyes locked on his, she undid his shorts and wrenched them to his ankles. He grunted, rolled his head back. She stroked his shaft, peeled back his foreskin and lapped at his pre-come, her tongue sending judders of alien delight right through him. Everything he was and had ever been bled to the tip of his cock as her moist, warm lips pursed around his frenulum…and began to move…in rhythm, insatiably.

He couldn’t contain himself any longer. Weeks of watching her stunning body from the sidelines, lying awake at night frustrated by the memory of her scent teasing him over a matter of inches whenever they’d been together in close proximity—now he could let it all out. He could have her any way he wanted. A million light-years from Earth, their sex would never be more primal, more human than here on Zopyrus, where no one could judge them.

He eased her free, and appetite dripped from her open, panting mouth with the ferocity of a ravenous tigress.
Oh my God. That’s gotta be the hottest
—

“I said
take me
.” She pulled him down by his hips. “Fuck me now. Fuck me insane.”

He knelt and kissed her again, cupping her waist with his hands. Then he slid the sides of her T-shirt up. She lifted her arms for him but the folds of fabric caught on her huge breasts. He threw her onto the flattened grass, slowly peeled the shirt up so that it covered her face but exposed the most mouthwatering natural tits he’d ever seen.

Arms caught above her head by the tight fabric, Varinia was powerless to resist even if she’d wanted to. Completely his. He handled both breasts at once, cupped them together. He sucked, bit at her nipples until they stood erect, tongued the areolae until they pebbled. All the while her slender body curled under him, and he enjoyed every groan of pleasure he elicited from her.

When he finally lifted the purple fabric free, her face was red and her hair a shock, some strands sticking to her hot face. The less glamorous she looked, the more primitive her attraction, the more he wanted to fuck her. She lay there, arms flat and outstretched like a crucifix, biting her lip in anticipation.

He licked his own lips and slid her slacks down below her knees…

It wasn’t just that he had a good body—trim and toned, as opposed to beefy—or that his ineffable magnetism reminded her of the well-bred and mysterious flop-port traders she’d crushed on back home as a teenager. Clay radiated something else, something nearer, more familiar, the fumes of an electric charge she craved more than breath itself.

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.”