Sparks in Cosmic Dust (26 page)

Varinia’s boots weren’t designed for running but she daren’t stop to take them off. The retorts from Clay’s rifle shots had ceased, so he was now limping unarmed. She holstered her pistol to remove her mack. From out of nowhere, a rogue wave swept her off her feet and almost into a litter of sharp rocks. Unperturbed, she got up and waded on through the wash. The sun began its dip into the horizon, but it would take another quarter hour or so to fully submerge. They had to be on familiar ground by then if they wanted to find the
Taras
—the forest was a bitch to negotiate in the daytime, let alone at night.

Danai galloped by, splashing seawater all over Varinia. The poor mare bucked in circles in the surf, and seemed caught in two minds—avoid the horde chasing Clay, or flee from whatever had spooked her from the opposite direction.

Varinia spun to see. Several muscular black limbs snatched at her.
Another
horde of the monsters was emerging from the sea on her section of the beach. She veered away and outran them, but only just. Her cumbersome boots and tired legs wouldn’t keep up a sprint for long. And there were more beasts—
hundreds
of them—dashing out of the surf ahead of her.

She was trapped.

“Danai!” The mare reared again and again, fending off the monstrosities with her front legs. The crustaceans hesitated, unsure what to make of her. Varinia seized the confusion and ran over. “Danai, it’s me. Remember me?” The panicked horse spied Varinia from the corner of her eye, back-stepped a few strides toward her, and Varinia scrabbled onto her back.

Incensed, the horde shrieked from all sides and rushed in, ready to leap razor-legs first. “Eat this.” Varinia drew her sidearm, flicked the safety off, and blasted the nearest assailant. Danai immediately bucked over the smashed corpse, the only gap in the vicious circle. Staying low, knees tucked in, Varinia gripped the horse’s mane with one hand while blasting away at anything that threatened. They broke through unscathed, and she thanked God for the empty beach ahead.

But more aliens were filing out of the surf ahead—so many she couldn’t imagine an end to them. Slick, dark shells and thrashing limbs, myriad crab legs scurrying so fast it seemed as though the waves themselves were bursting to crustacean life through some alien necromancy.

She dug her heels into Danai’s sides. The mare kicked from a gallop into a full sprint, and the wind raked Varinia’s hair into a stream behind her. Dozens of crustaceans lunged, missed. They shrieked and cawed, fell away, but more and more fizzed from the water. The latest reached over twelve feet in height—hideous leviathans that trampled their smaller brethren and shook the beach. They reached frightening speeds, swerving ever toward the horse like haywire heavy machinery. Pistol shots made no impact on them. Varinia gritted her teeth. She kept low and in rhythm with Danai’s sinuous motion. “Come on, sweetheart, faster, faster. Fly, damn it. Go.
Faster.
”

She dug her heels in once more. The mare really started to motor. Her legs tore at the beach in blistering sync. Wild, electrifying speeds the juggernauts couldn’t touch. By the time she reached the forest, the entire army had fallen behind. Varinia sat up and glanced ahead. Poor Clay was almost at the edge of the forest, another minute or so. And Danai still blazed apart from her pursuers, outpacing even their cacophony. The mare had to be an Arabian, her ancestors most likely the legendary racers famed throughout ancient Earth. Varinia had never experienced horsepower like this.

A roar overhead, getting lower, louder—
way too loud
—spooked Danai almost to a halt. She buckarooed, but Varinia held firmly to her mane and kept her posture tight but supple, riding the violent thrusts. The Kuiper raider swooped so low it whipped up a sandstorm.

God, it’s finally spotted us.

Danai sped off again, but this couldn’t end well. Not now. From either end of the beach, monstrous hordes, from above, a swift warship with devastating firepower. One blast and it would all be over.
Think, think.
The forest, yes…but if she disappeared into there, the Kuiper ship would know where to wait for an ambush, as soon as the
Taras
took off. And Clay might not make it in time.

She scanned the trees for a miracle. Something. Anything. But no, it was up to her. For chrissakes, how many times had her ass been saved in the past weeks? Wasn’t it about time she did something? Instead of bitching about her abilities, that they’d been the bane of her life, to blame for all the shit she was in, was it not better to use those abilities?

Was she not a cutting-edge babe, a badass fuse of evolution waiting to explode? A coiner, for fuck’s sake?

Ah, hell. It’s time.

Recalling what Clay had said about his breakthroughs—that every coiner had the ability to achieve them—she closed her eyes. The Kuiper bird thundered from behind for another low pass. Sinking into Danai’s muscles, she prayed the mare would keep that sprint and that rhythm. Then, like she’d done hundreds of times before in her premier cube at the Delfin, Varinia Wilcox blanked her mind and drifted free, a smaller bubble subliming from a larger one. Unseeing yet seeing. Out of body.

She hovered over a sleeping woman upon a black horse and silently kept pace. Higher, smoother. In ether flight. A vast, heavy darkness sucked her in through holographic metal teeth. It moved quicker than she did, so she sped up, fixed on its gray angles and edges—in the cramped cockpit. Grungy metal chairs hung on gimbals from the ceiling. The pilots smoked cigarettes. She had moments before the ship banked or changed altitude.

There.
The man on the right controlled the joystick. It was faded green and had a spine of several orange buttons. His grip on it appeared adamantine.

Varinia glimpsed Clay limping for his life below. Out of time. She hurled herself at the joystick, imagined herself ripping it sideways off its fucking gimbals. The jolt in her mind shocked her like nothing ever had during coining. It was real, electrical, physical. The pilot lunged forward, trying to correct the sudden swerve but it was too late. The vessel hurtled upside down into the cliff wall and exploded on impact.

Death wrenched her to life on the back of her galloping mare. Breathless, she clasped a hand over her heart and tried to still the shock. Hellfire from the exploded ship rained down on the army chasing Clay. He glanced back, then waved his arms at Varinia at the mouth of the forest river. The flaming wreckage blocked his pursuers for now, but they could easily wade around.

“Whoa, girl, whoa.” She yanked back on Danai’s mane. No dice. The petrified mare slowed as she approached Clay, but she wasn’t going to stop.

“Take my hand, jump up. We’ve no choice!” she yelled.

Black with dust, probably from the mine—so Solomon
had
tried to seal him in—Clay readied himself on the raised river bank. As Danai turned upstream, he leaped onto her haunches and scrabbled up so that he draped over her on his stomach. Danai neighed, bucked, tried to spin him off, but Varinia lent her arm for support and he struggled upright, finally shuffling behind her, his hands tight around her waist.

“Gotcha,” she shot back, ready to let her tear ducts burst with relief.

“Don’t let go. I’ve never been on one of these before.”

Varinia unleashed a silent scream. What she’d just done was impossible and barely real. But at the least, at the
very
least, it had given them a fighting chance in their race against time.

How long would Solomon wait to take off? How soon could they reach the
Taras?

Against the knee-deep flow, the mare fought her way tirelessly upstream.

Any more of this and Solomon’s head would burst. For what seemed hours, he’d struggled with stubborn mules, his inadequate pace, maintaining his cover under the border of riverside trees whenever the Kuiper raider flew overhead. He had his prize, upward of two hundred million clips. He had mastered his innate Catholic squeamishness—all three double-crossers would trouble him no more. What he needed now was release from this fucking moon. To put the whole thing behind him, this burden that weighed more than all the goddamn mule loads put together.

The pyro was worth it. Whatever happened after Zopyrus, wherever he wound up, he’d at least be rich enough to bribe these memories into oblivion, build a new home far, far away. This was all a necessary evil. The unfortunate means to an end. If he hadn’t taken action,
he’d
be the one sinking face-down in a rancid bog.
He’d
be the one entombed with the surplus perishables, sealed forever with the vapor of incalculable riches to taunt him.

Brother, it was the only way. You had to do it.

But what about Varinia’s solution last night? Couldn’t he have tied her, Clay and the old woman up and marched them to the
Taras,
secured them safely inside, possibly dumped them on a jerkwater worldlet on the way home? Risky, yes, but it would have been more humane than—

Too risky. They’d have figured a way out of their shackles, those back-stabbing fucks.

But was it necessary to
kill
Clay and Grace like that? Mightn’t he have sneaked away on his own, made straight for the shuttle without having to murder anyone? They hadn’t exactly been watching him after his flare-up with the doc.

You bet your ass they were watching—those gutter snakes. They were too smart and too dangerous to leave alive, and they’d have slithered after me, guns blazing, soon as I’d made a move.

“Thank you, God.”

He glimpsed the rounded hulk nose high up through a morass of fronds to his left. The
Taras Bulba.
Patient, unseen. His entire upper body inflated through a juddery, gluttonous breath that, right then, was worth more than all the pyrofluvium on his mule train.

“Hee-yah, hee-yah,” he urged the lead beast, but again it resisted.
Stubborn shit.
He yanked its tether. When that didn’t work, he wriggled his mack off and whipped the donkey with it, again and again until the animal obeyed.
Christ,
after all he’d been through and the lollygagging sons of bitches wanted to scupper his departure now, right at the end. One more wrong move and he’d execute the lot of them, load the supplies himself.

The lead mule brayed, yanked its tether, but he was at the cargo bay now. The massive magno-hinges squealed as the ramp lowered, and he chewed his lip until he tasted blood, then spat it on the dark, squidgy ground. The donkeys trotted inside the ship without encouragement. Their hooves’
clang, clang, clang
on the cargo bay floor struck him as delightfully familiar. Worth a giddy sigh of relief. A crossing of the threshold. Back from alien nature, under man’s control again.

Good God, I’ve done it.

Just the small matter of unhooking the camouflage net, and he could take off. Watching Grace in the pilot’s seat had taught him more than enough to fly this bird. The
Taras
really wasn’t much different than the short-range shuttles he’d taxied surface-to-orbit umpteen times on his various contracts. He’d never used psammeticum warp before, but the ship’s computer could probably walk him through it.

A tin-house cacophony erupted from the cargo bay when he reached the centrifugal mess room. What now? He hurled an angry fist at the bulkhead,
whumping
the thin panel. Those troublesome sons of bitches might have to eat a bullet after all. He made straight for a rifle packed on the nearest beast. Fuckers had been warned.

He let go of the bundle and back-stepped away. On forbidden ground. In front of…ghosts?

But how?

There in the middle of the glade stood Grace, caked with mud, at the head of an army of forest aliens. Hundreds, thousands in a semi-circle around the ship’s rear. At her side stood the roly-poly. Hell, the
one
thing he’d overlooked. It had to have hidden somewhere, waited for him to leave, and then pulled Grace out of the bog.

Shit. Outwitted by a doughnut.

No use crying about it now. He had the weapons, damn it, and he was the one inside. All he had to do was hold them off long enough to close the cargo ramp. He raised his hands in surrender. Easy steps. Measured breaths, grinding against his chaotic pulse.

Grace turned and motioned to the alien horde. Several of them approached, carrying something he couldn’t quite see. The doctor stepped aside and bowed while they passed…

What the hell?

Then Grace glanced up at him, pointing two fingers at her eyes, as if to say, “I’m watching you” or—and his heart froze at the notion—“I
saw
you!”

The creatures set a twisted, emaciated form on the ground, and he knew instantly what they’d brought.

The emissary he’d murdered on day one. The creature he’d buried, hoping no one would ever find out.

But they had found out. And Grace—Grace had seen him do it.

He bolted for the ramp lock on the rear panel but they were already inside. Dozens of them wailing, hooting, hell-bent on taking him. He lurched for the lead mule, for the rifle on its back. The animal panicked and kicked out with its hind legs, one hoof catching him square in the kneecap.
Uh.
He dropped instantly, blacked out a heartbeat.

Then the creatures were all over him, stabbing, ripping, gouging as though he were the last morsel of food on Zopyrus. He screamed but their appetites were loudest, until he saw red for the last time.

“Where the hell have you two been?” From the
Taras
’s roof, Grace cut the last of the camouflage netting free, then slid down the retractable maintenance ladder. “
Minutes
. You had minutes left. Sundown has come and gone. What the hell possessed you?”

Clay dismounted, landing on his sore ankle. That bit of rocky debris from his coining blast had smashed his foot all right. But he’d made it. They’d made it…somehow. “What are you talking about? Where’s that fucking traitor?”

“Around. He’s not coming with us.”

“Explain. I owe that crazy bastard a bullet.”

“You’re too late.” The old doctor helped him limp into the cargo bay, the floor of which was smeared red, then she fetched an apple from her rucksack, luring the tired mare inside. Varinia rode Danai up the ramp, the
clank, clank
of her hooves reinforcing Clay’s sense of finality in the escape. When they were all inside, Grace raised the ramp and sealed the pressurized shutters.

“You two weren’t out chasing the horse?” she said. “I should’ve known.”

“Known what? That he injected me with something, sealed me in the goddamn mine? That he tricked Varinia into meeting me miles up the beach? Where is that double-crossing—”

“He’s dead. Shredded. The forest creatures got him for what he did to their emissary that first day. Walk with me.” She led Clay by the arm while Varinia tempted the mare inside its freight cube. “You weren’t here. But I saw it, I saw the whole thing. The alien surprised Solomon on the edge of the woods, probably scared itself more than it scared him. But our boy scout reacted by swinging his axe—cleaved the poor creature’s skull. He didn’t know I’d seen it and I never let on that I had. He buried the corpse, then collapsed with exhaustion. Afterward, he acted like nothing had happened. But I could tell it was eating away at him. If you ask me, that’s what primed his paranoia.”

“And you told the forest aliens about the murder? Showed them the grave?”

Grace powered up the
Taras,
slumped into her pilot’s seat ready for liftoff. “Only after he tried to kill me.”

Clay gazed at her, shaking his head. He knew that statement shouldn’t surprise him, given Solomon’s murderous plot, but something about killing an old woman…just…made his blood boil.

“Quicksand,” she said. “We’ll have to swap survival stories later, I’m afraid.” Leaping forward out of her seat, she planted her palms on the dash and scanned the dark forest ahead. “Hey, did you see that?”

“What?” No headlights allowed. Nothing that would give themselves away to orbiting craft.

“A fast-moving…something.
There.
” She thrust a bony finger at one o’clock. “Behind the buttress roots. Scrambling over now.”

Clay saw it. “Go.”

“It followed you?”

“It and its whole goddamn race.”

“From the sea?” Grace hit the toggle for silent hover, then positioned one hand on the pitch control. With her other, she eased back on the joystick, jerking it in tiny increments to give the fore and aft thrusters a chance to balance themselves after months of entropy. Slowly, the
Taras
lifted over the forest roof. A breathless stealth departure.

“I see what you mean. You must have really pissed them off.” Over a thousand feet up, she nodded at the mass of trees swaying this way and that, and the irrepressible black virus swarming in from the ocean. It decimated all in its path.

“And look!” Clay spotted an equal and opposite reaction from the across the glade. The entire inner forest stirred. In moments, on the spot where the
Taras Bulba
had stood, two armies met on a frightening scale. Not since his days in the Condor Corps had he witnessed such reckless slaughter from a bird’s eye view. “A civil war. We caused a civil war.”

“No, that Kuiper raider, remember? It shot back at the city’s energy beams, probably smashed up the works. Those aquatic bastards probably blamed it on their forest enemies. And there they go.” She strapped herself in. “Zopyrus in Babylon after all. Hey, best fetch Varinia. Entering the atmosphere was rough, saying sayonara won’t be a picnic either.”

“Copy that.”

On his way out of the cockpit, Grace shouted, “Sunshine, I’m glad you made it.”

“Yeah.”

“One more thing—you forgot to ask.”

“Huh?”

“The pyro. You forgot to ask about the pyro.”

“What about the pyro?” He crept in, dreading bad news.

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yeah?”

“After all we’ve been through and all.”

“
Uh-huh?
”

“Remember I mentioned quicksand?”

Oh my fucking God, no.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’ve got to be shitting me!”

“Really sorry. There’s always a next time.”

“
Next
time?” That miserable old…Oh, Christ, no. Not after all that work. Months and months of backbreaking work. Lost at the bottom of some goddamn swamp…

“Yeah. There’ll always be another dig, sunshine. This time, you’ll just have to settle for eighty million apiece.”

“Eighty mill—”
Huh? What?

“Yeah, like I said, that quicksand was a bitch. It almost lost you everything.”

Clay clamped a hand over his thumping heart and collapsed against the door frame.

“You look a little pale,” she said. “Not the fever, I hope.”

“Not funny, Grace.
Definitely
not funny.”

As he left, her grim chuckle struck him as the sickest, most oddly comforting sound he’d ever heard.