Sparks in Cosmic Dust (9 page)

“That you’re wanted in a bad way, and we need to leave right now.”

Shit. That’ll be Arch and his heavies. Not much time left.

The inner airlock doors were shut when they reached the loading bay. Three figures wearing spacesuits stood on the opposite side of the glass, waiting for the outer doors to close and the airlock to re-pressurize. Only three trolleys remained in the bay—one holding the pots, pans and camping gear, another stacked with freight cubes containing the animals Varinia had just bought, and the third, her last-minute equestrian purchase, of which her crewmates knew nothing. The corral guys had delivered right away, in under twenty minutes. Impressive.

“What’s in the big one?” Grace approached the cargo.

Varinia responded hurriedly, “A little something I bought to cheer myself up. Don’t worry, I didn’t use our clips, I used my own.”

“Yeah? Holding out on us, Dixie? I knew your man was lying when he said three thousand.”

“What of it?”

“Nothing. Like I told Clay, as long as you’ve bought a stake, you’ll have a cot on this ship. We’re partners from now until we return. All of us.”

The doors
whooshed
open and Solomon, Clay and Lyssa took their helmets off and puffed with exhaustion. It had been hot work in the suits—their brows glistened and Lyssa’s face was covered in pink and white splodges. Varinia started toward Solomon when a clear voice rang out behind her, from the alley she’d just taken. It made her jump.

“You ladies must be late for something. I fetched your boots for you, miss. Hope that’s okay.”

A youngish copper-haired man wore a sleeveless cotton shirt, a black kilt, and he held in his hand a white Panama hat. In his other hand, a portable ID scanner flashed red despite the man hiding its screen. Varinia could only discern the flash because it stood out on the brilliant white of his hat. An unfortunate combination…for him.

“You’ve done your good deed for the day,” Grace replied, “now sod off.”

“What are your names?” the man persisted.

“Two words strung together. Yours?”

“I’ll not ask again.”

“Much obliged. See ya.”

“Listen.” He placed his Panama askew on his copper curls. “This is nothing personal. If the broad in the hood will step forward, I’ll scan her face and that will be the end of it. You can go back to loading your ship.” He clicked his fingers and two more men, much broader and less formally dressed, strode out from the shadows. “I hate to insist.”

Varinia began to shake—the warmth of her disguise now simmered, and she didn’t know what to do. The urge to run and hide behind Solomon was strong. The need to stand her ground and save him from risking his life for her proved stronger. If this was her fate then she’d suffer it alone. No need for anyone to get killed over it. Arch would take her back to 100z and she’d be a prisoner there, a glam girl headlining his soirees, but at least she wouldn’t have anyone’s death on her conscience.

“What’s all this about?” Solomon shouted.

The copperhead glared at him. “Cool your heels, tool-push. This is between me and the broad.”

Oh, shit.
Suddenly, the last thing she wanted was to be parted from Solomon Bodine. He was the one person on Kappa Max she’d come to rely on, and he had such grand plans for them. The sweet fool. She glimpsed Grace’s hand inching over a bulge in her pocket.

“I’m not going anywhere.” Varinia plonked her fists on her hips.

“That sounded guilty right there.” The man started toward her. “I never said you’d be going anywhere. All I want is one harmless face scan, for my rec—”

A shocking
crunch
filled the bay with red. The man’s head exploded completely, bits and pieces of it showering twenty feet in every direction. Varinia spun away, shrinking. The sound of gun bolts threw her to the ground. Instinct. When she looked up, the other two strangers were also decapitated, their bodies and the surrounding floor also awash in blood.

“What the hell was that?” Grace circled the mess, pointing her weapon every which way. She’d already fired a couple of shots at the goons without hitting them—her bolts’ scorch marks decorated the alley wall.

But no one else had fired a shot. Solomon, Clay and Lyssa were unarmed, and Varinia couldn’t see another soul anywhere. Clay lifted her to her feet. Still shaking, she made her way over to the mare’s cubicle. Once the shock began to seep away, she thanked him and asked if he was okay.

“Am
I
okay? Come on, we need to get to the ship
now.
”

Lyssa tossed her a spacesuit and a helmet. First Clay, then Solomon helped her put them on. All the while she imagined a heavy, indefinable cloud following her every movement—invisible, portentous, it had already brought evil to the expedition and would do so again. It had no name, but it was from long ago. It was her curse.

Before she knew it, they were all outside performing low-g bounds over the gunmetal asteroid, the last three rickety trolleys in tow. Down a winding slope, adjacent to a sharp escarpment, stood Grace’s shuttle, the
Taras Bulba.
A rather inelegant, nose-heavy green-and-white design with clipped wings and massive faded-blue wheels that didn’t match in color or size, it nonetheless looked sturdy and far more spacious than Varinia had envisioned. Its tail ramp was already down, its cargo hold around half full with supplies.

They hustled aboard and she strapped herself into a passenger seat under the port cargo scaffold. The others disappeared into a corridor leading forward, and she found herself alone again—well, not completely, muffled brays and the panicked clatter of hooves emerged from the animals’ sealed cubicles as the ship’s engine powered up. A brief but violent oscillation shook the entire cargo bay, testing the ad-hoc hooks and tethers holding the mountain of items in place.

It had been such a long, arduous wait on Kappa Max, the last week or so now hit Varinia like a whiplash. This was the sting in the tail, then, a departure so hasty and improvised it barely registered until she looked out through a porthole window and saw the stars not only above her, but beneath her as well.

For the first time in over a year, she was in flight.

After unclipping her safety straps, she climbed out of her suit and dragged the sack containing all five of their sleeping bags over to the mare’s cubicle. Lying on the sack, she stared in through one of the window slits at her new friend. What would the poor mare be making of all this? Light-years from her home, heading in the wrong direction. At a time when people were migrating back toward the inner colonies, it seemed crazy to be blazing a trail to the unknown.

Varinia had never been as frightened in her life. Nor, she realized, as hopeful. This trip might be an interstellar shot in the dark, but at least it was tinged with opportunity. She shivered from the cold, curled into a ball, and tried to banish the last disturbing question from her thoughts.

What had happened to those men in the loading bay?

A subtle but seismic shift—the rug pulled from under a pleasant dream—wrenched Varinia awake to a hard bunk bed she’d never seen before. She slapped the sensor next to her porthole window. The old metal shutter opened slowly in a snail-shell spiral. What the hell? The
Taras Bulba
didn’t seem to be moving. The frozen fizz of stars in every direction suggested the engine had cut out. Was that what had woken her?

Why had they stopped? How had she got into bed? Where were the others?

The grated green floor was cold and dirty, too cold for her bare feet. Her cramped quarters—four double bunks and about ten square feet of standing room in the center—smelled of horse manure. The latter was delightfully nostalgic. She folded up two pillowcases and wrapped them around her feet, then made her way forward to the mess room. The grated floor groaned and warped under her first few steps, after which she felt lighter. The gravity seemed to weaken. Wonky light strips flickered on the low copper ceilings and walls. Oxidation had discolored much of the interior, and the resulting green copper tinge gave her the sensation of creeping through a dragon’s cave on loose scaffolding.

A surge of gravity pinned her to the floor. When she spied shadows waltzing up the wall ahead, the explanation dawned on her. The mess section was spinning. An emergency grav generator on old ships, it had to have kicked in when the main engine stopped. She stepped through the gravity brace and felt on
terra firma
again.

“Hey, look who’s up,” Solomon said upside down on the ceiling—at least, what
she
perceived as the ceiling. The mess section’s cylindrical curvature was surprisingly steep, and Varinia kept ducking and veering as she crept out across the room, wary of the bolted-down tables and chairs all around her and above her in this rickety old drum.

“What’s the deal? Why’ve we stopped?” she called up to Solomon and Lyssa seated at roughly ten-thirty from her current vector. They appeared to be playing cards and ignored her. Varinia needed to get out of this bugnuts narrow spin. It was messing with her head.

She reached the other side and leaned against the wall, heaved a sigh.

Lyssa put a finger to her mouth. “You might want to keep your voice down, princess. We’re being tracked. Seems our little escapade stirred a privateer into action.”

Varinia stood straight, nervously picked at her nails. “What privateer? Where? How did they—”

“Go see Grace.” The vamp cast her a flippant glance before resuming her card game. “She’ll give you the lowdown…hoe-down.”

Lyssa’s grim chuckle made Varinia tighten her fists and want to thump a little respect into the Goth bitch. So what if everyone now knew who and what she was, it didn’t call for personal insults.

“Take it easy. And don’t ever call her that in front of me.” Solomon gave Lyssa the stink eye.

“What? A hoe? Nah, I was speaking metamorphically.”

“I think you mean metaphorically,” Varinia corrected her with relish.

“La-di-dah.”

Solomon sprang up, thumped his cards down on his chair. “You know what? I’m going to see Grace as well. See what she has up her sleeve for these assholes following us.”

“Well, excuse
me.
” Lyssa folded her arms in a sulk.

“We’ll finish cards later.” He waited until the cylinder spun him to the ship’s horizontal, then he stepped onto the fuselage walkway beside Varinia. “Come on,” he whispered. “I’ve played enough cards to last me a lifetime. Besides, my luck peaked last week.”

He kissed her cheek, linked arms with her, and she felt grateful. Especially rugged today—he hadn’t shaved his stubble or parted his hair—Solomon was more handsome than ever. But hers was a curious reaction, gratitude, not reciprocation. What did that mean? He was being lovely and supportive—she ought to be aglow. Instead she merely felt obliged, in his debt. Was that understandable? After all, they were in strange surroundings, being tailed by a rogue ship. Hmm, she’d have to figure out her feelings later, in private.

The
Taras Bulba
’s console dashboard was much smaller and simpler than Varinia had imagined. Four feet by three, it was attached to the pilot’s chair and curved around Grace’s chest as she swiveled it to the starboard relay panel.

“He’s keeping his distance…like a tiger in the tall grass.” Grace tapped the rear scanner display with her fingernail. She linked two cables and undid two, like a switchboard operator at high speed. “I’ve dipped our wing and shut our starboard down completely. Now we’ll see what he’s made of.” She spat into the spittoon funnel on her armrest.

“Who is he?” Varinia asked.

Clay’s harsh voice rose from the shadowy corner of the cockpit behind her. “He’s from Kuiper Wells.” The light filament wasn’t working above him, and Varinia hadn’t realized he was there. “A privateer sent to monitor outbound craft,” he added.

Christ.
As if things couldn’t get any worse. Having a privateer on your tail was bad enough, but one licensed by the biggest, most ruthless interstellar conglomerate in history—Grace sure knew how to pick ’em. Kuiper didn’t just hold the monopoly on terraforming and mining out past 80z, it had joined forces with ISPA itself to create the largest military force ever assembled to govern all the known colonies. Not the best chaperone to have on an illegal treasure hunt.

“What makes you so sure it’s Kuiper Wells?” she asked.

“It’s a Stymphalian bird, rigged for combat. Smaller than ours but faster. Superior engine. Armor-plated shell, too, five times thicker than ours. A regular raider would have no compunction about swooping in to cripple us. This one’s hanging back, trying to conceal its pursuit. It was only luck that I spotted it in the corona of that eclipse a while back.”

“What’s the good news?”

“We think there are only two people on board.”

“How?”

“Grace jettisoned a mini-pod with a remote scanner feed,” he said. “We read the ship’s vitals when it overtook the pod. Two life forms for sure, lots of fuel, more or less empty cargo hold—it appears to be a long-range tracker.”

“Goddamn carrion.” Grace flipped the pursuing vessel the bird. “I’ve seen buzzards like these before. They track prospectors to their destinations, mark the whereabouts of any lucrative digs, then they either wait nearby or return later, when the treasure’s grown enough to make a raid worthwhile. First they create a diversion, maybe kill one or two of your party. In the confusion they sneak in, overwhelm your camp, and from then on, they be chief, you be fucked. I’ve lost two big psammeticum paydays and about eleven months to these bastards. Mark my words, it won’t happen again.”

“So how can we lose them?” Varinia didn’t even have an inkling.

“See that smashed planetoid…directly ahead?” Grace nodded to a partially eaten obsidian marble crossing the stars. Were it not that its surface reflected sunlight dazzlingly every ten seconds or so, due to its spin, the planetoid would be almost indistinguishable from the blackness of space. “In an hour or so we’ll enter its orbit. When we pass round the far side, our predator here is going to have to show his claws.”

“Why’s that? Won’t he just hang back in a bigger orbit and wait to see what we do?”

“Not after we tempt him with a warp jump. His AI computer will light up and bellow advice like the burning bush. He’ll follow us as soon as he reaches our vector.”

“Uh-huh.”
So far, so…not so good.

“In the meantime,” Grace went on, “we’ll have jumped
back
half that distance again, on the same warp path, used our regular engine to get clear of the trail, then jumped away on a completely different vector. I’ll repeat that maneuver just once more in a different system—we don’t want to run out of psammeticum for the journey home. And if the buzzard finds us after all that…well, you can cage me up and call me Fred, ’cause I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

Solomon clamped his huge hands on the back of her cushioned captain’s chair. “You’ve done that maneuver before, Grace?”

“No.”

“So how—”

“You’ll have to ask the creep behind me.” Grace jabbed her thumb over her shoulder at Clay. “He doesn’t say much, but you’d best listen when he does. Kind of like a fire alarm with an IQ. Blinker-fringe over there knows more about space flight than any tool-push I’ve ever flown with.”

“How about it, Clay?” Solomon turned his head, curious.

“I’ve seen it done is all,” came the somber reply. “The maneuver’s pretty much untraceable.”

Varinia still couldn’t make out more than a vague, incomplete figure in the dim light, leaning forward on his chair, knees tucked up to his chest, and the ubiquitous brown plastic bag that rarely seemed to leave his side. Clay was the last enigma of the group. She reckoned she had a measure of the others, but Clay hadn’t revealed a single telling fact about his past or his personality. He
seemed
level-headed, intelligent, in control, yet he’d wound up in that same suck-bait kip-hole on Kappa Max with the rest of them. Another exile with a secret to hide? A corporate criminal on the lam? Or just another unlucky child of the displaced generations, a nebula gypsy, educated but cursed by stellar geography—light-years away from any real civilization in which he could ply his intellect? Based on his knowledge of Kuiper Wells ships, he might even be ex-military, a pilot.

“Everyone stay clear of the mess room ’til we’ve finished our maneuver. It’s liable to phase in and out of gravity,” Grace said. “This thing’s stuck together with boot polish and harsh language.”

“How long will it take?” Solomon asked.

“About twenty minutes. When we’re done I’ll read you a bedtime story. It came with the map. I think you’ll find it rather…what’s the word…edifying. Drag Maleficent…Lyssa along as well. It concerns her, too.”

“It’s about Zopyrus, isn’t it,” Varinia said.

Grace didn’t reply, instead fiddled with the temperature controls while she began a tuneless hum. One of the controls intensified a neon light strip running around the walls in the rear half of the cockpit, illuminating Clay. Varinia met his penetrative stare for a few moments, then looked away self-consciously. Had he been watching her all along? His black bob hat tucked his spidery fringe from view, and it was the first time she’d seen his disarming brown eyes. Side by side, he was not as handsome as Solomon, and while not skinny, neither would his physique intimidate anyone. Clay seemed to have zero regard for his appearance—bearded face, loose-fitting turtleneck sweater, khaki shorts that didn’t go with anything—whereas Solomon always managed to look reasonably groomed and coordinated. But there was something excitingly ineffable about this stranger. Not any “bad boy” attraction—no, she’d never gone for that type and had long tired of its pretence on the other side of her glass in the Delfin. Maybe it was the way he kept himself to himself, not needing to project onto those around him, that made her want to snuggle up on a settee with him, listen to whatever intimate secrets he cared to share.

Sometime in her daydreams, perhaps, when Solomon and Lyssa weren’t around.

“On my mark…” A blob of old chewing gum, made supple again by the heated console, stuck to Clay’s palm as he gripped the monitor to keep it from shaking off its clamp. “Jesus, Grace. Is this heap even gonna survive a warp jump?”

The old woman shrugged, then spliced the intercom wire with another one wrapped in gunky insulation tape. An old Earth song with a lively tune blazed out of the speakers, filling the ship, no doubt making their friends groan in the cargo bay. “If we don’t make it, at least we’ll meet the devil on the dance floor.” She tapped the rhythm on her armrests. “Tom Jones at light speed. Nothing better.”

He shook his head, unconvinced. “All right, Grace. On my mark…three, two, one…
punch it.
”

They yanked the levers on the sides of their consoles simultaneously, like the one-arms on ancient fruit machines. The easy, tingly forward drift stretched his breath into an epic sigh. The cockpit blurred and darkened, and the song slowed until it became a distant, monotone ring in his ears. He pictured the homestead of his dreams—sun-bleached, isolated—and the expansive land he could wander for days without needing permission. Alien cattle grazed here and there, while a clean river cut through his acres and joined the foothills of a stupendous maintain range he could explore. Perhaps his future wife and children would want to join the expedition. They were all equally adventurous, loved getting their hands dirty. And maybe, just maybe they’d stumble on a rich trove of some priceless element in the rock. He could dig it from his own land, in his own good time, with no one looking over his shoulder…

“She’s a lady. Whoa, whoa, whoa, she’s a lady.”

The song lyrics wrenched him from his daydream, and he scrubbed his face until he was wide awake again. The nearest bodies on this far side of the warp jump belonged to a bright triple system. The plethora of planets indicated on his screen would keep the Kuiper trackers busy for weeks before they figured out they’d been duped. Grace looked at him and tapped the sides of her console, as if to say, “It’s all yours, cowboy.”

He sat upright in his chair, flipped the pilot switch to manual, then performed an about-turn with the joystick. After re-plotting the warp computer for a three-eighths burn back along the same vector, he and Grace repeated the procedure for light speed.

“
She’s a lady. Whoa, whoa, whoa, she’s a laaaaeeeeee…”

This time he woke from the hyper leap without dreaming. From out of nowhere, an absolute confidence in the expedition shot a giddy shiver through him. “All right, let’s see if they can track a whiff where there’s no stink.”

“In English?” Grace unplugged the music feed.

“We’ve double-backed over our own warp trail, so unless they’ve invented new equipment since I was—since a few years ago, they’ve no way of telling where we are.” He eyed the old woman, who merely blinked.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said. “Our secrets are our own on this trip.”

“Fair enough. Now all we need to do is drift clear of this path before they follow us.” He nudged the joystick several times to starboard, firing quick, low energy bursts that would be nigh untraceable even if the Kuiper ship found this exact zee quadrant.