Sparks in Cosmic Dust (13 page)

Day 2, C0—Zero credits’ worth of pyrofluvium

“No sprinter ever won a marathon. It’s about stamina and tactics.” Grace demonstrated the correct grip on the pick handle, and the downward arc required when swinging it in a confined space. “Use the tool’s weight. Don’t be afraid to work to its momentum. Remember, the most vital resource you have is your energy. Economize.” She waited until Varinia had her own pick cocked over her shoulder. “Now swing like a divorcee at a bachelor party.”

Varinia let rip with a venomous blow. The pick head hit sweetly on the spot she’d aimed for. It shot a dull shockwave through her. A blazing red shard fizzed, zigzagged through the air, missed her leg by millimeters. When she checked the rock, it had only been scratched. She scowled at Grace.

“’Til you’ve built your strength, try chipping at the edges.” Varinia missed the wall completely with her next two efforts and struck Grace’s pick midswing with another. “Easy, chick. Why not give yourself some room. We don’t want to be diggin’ graves on day one.”

“’Kay.”

After five minutes’ pinpoint picking, Varinia boasted a handful of rock shards. She showed them to Grace, who nodded and produced her own metal bucket full. “Right, here’s your homework,” the doctor said. “Follow me.”

Their helmet lamps roved over puddles and slick moss on the passage’s lower rock. In these first fifty feet, pyrofluvium was scarce. The previous miners had exhausted a rich vein, and they must have calculated the mountain held vast deposits deeper in. They had dug their way into a cavern, where Lyssa, Solomon and Clay now worked. Grace promised to introduce it to Varinia shortly, after she’d taught her what she referred to as “Pyro Extraction 101.”

Outside, three chemical vats, each about three feet high and less than two in diameter, stood on foldout but sturdy metal tripods against the cliff wall. Grace removed her oxygen mask. Varinia copied.

“First, place the rock gently into the solution.” Grace demonstrated. “It’s water mixed with concentrated soropholic acid, so try not to splash any on you. It might take a minute or so, but the rock crust should break up and disintegrate, leaving a cloudy solution. Like so.” She pointed at three or four small, conker-shaped crimson globs floating on the surface. “You’ll notice the pyro shells not only have a low density, they don’t react with the diluted acid. That’s important. If you were to use pure soropholic acid right away, the pyro shells would dissolve along with the rock and you’d have a hard time filtering out the real pyrofluvium. So, next, use the fifty-centimeter tongs to lift the pyro shells out…and drop them into vat number two.”

“Undiluted acid?” Varinia stepped aside.

“Correct. The shell should quickly dissolve, leaving a viscous crimson layer.” Grace ran her tongs through the dark syrupy substance. “The stuff we want is inside the gunk. Only it’s practically the same color. Like dandruff in suntan cream. Separating it requires a delicate, hi-tech operation with a string of multi-syllabic chemical words.” Varinia blinked at her. “Hmm, let me try and translate into lay terms.” The old woman thought for a moment and then snorted. “It’s something like—” she skimmed the gunk from the surface with a suction syringe, emptied it onto a fine sieve to drain the excess acid, then tipped the sludge into the third vat, “—like picking your nose and flicking it into water.”

“Nice.”

“And that’s that. The third vat is full of cool water. When pyrofluvium contracts, it becomes heavy. So all you need to do is stir the gunk thoroughly, to loosen the fine pyro grains and let them sink to the bottom. The other stuff will float back to the surface if you leave it. Just let the pyro build on the bottom ’til the end of the day and leave it for me. Believe me, you don’t want to screw up the final gathering. I’ve seen throats cut in sleeping bags for less. Different minerals, but the stakes are the same no matter what you’re mining. Watching your day’s labor spill into the sand because some careless prick…that’s like someone cutting a steak from your stomach. No, I’ll extract it.”

“Agreed.” Varinia didn’t feel like being burned at the stake, as a steak, for having butterfingers.

“Well there it is. Pyrofluvium.” Grace’s hawk eyes gleamed as she beheld the first red specks settling like pepper on the bottom of the third transparent container.

It occurred to Varinia how much rock was disintegrating in the initial water-acid solution, and how quickly it would overflow. “How often do we empty the first bath?”

“Spill some into our spare vat whenever it nears the brim. Most of the rock particles will gather again on the bottom, so you won’t have to empty it until the solution’s nearly gone anyway. The second bath…we can’t afford to empty very often. It’s pure acid, and we only have a finite amount. Plus we shouldn’t need to change that out. All we’re doing is skimming gloop off the surface. We’ll just put the lid on every night and use it indefinitely.”

“Doesn’t sound ideal.”

“That’s our motto out here, chick. Nothing is ideal. We’re rude, crude and up to our necks in it. If Kuiper Wells dug here, they’d use psammeticum burrowers and Titan trucks, maybe even giant vacuum tubes to suck the debris directly into industrial tanks full of soropholic acid. Then they’d erect a lab onsite purely for refining pyro, to give her that fiery luminosity. All we’re doing is tickling her out. Some other asshole will need to light her fire.”

“I tell you what—
that
can be our motto right there.”

Grace laughed and ruffled her hair. More than ever, Varinia realized how much she liked the old-timer. For all her irreverence and dislike for authority, Dr. Grace Peters was a wonderful teacher, and probably more maternal than she knew. Up to now, at least.

“Okay, graduation’s over.” She handed Varinia her pickaxe, and they put their oxygen masks back on. “You’ve been dying for a dig? Now you dig for a living.”

Night-time arrived earlier than on the previous day. Varinia could barely walk upright—her lower back and shoulders were jelly after eight hours of digging, hauling rocks, guiding fully-laden trolleys from the cavern to the vats, and packing fresh containers of seawater—very low salt content—onto the donkeys. She sliced an apple in two and threw the halves to the mouth of the inlet. Danai wasn’t there, but her hoof prints had multiplied during the day. No doubt she’d return.

“It’s not that I don’t trust anyone…” Solomon slurped down the rest of his mug of coffee.

“It’s just that you’d rather look after your own interests,” Grace finished. “That’s fair enough. Anyone else?”

Varinia’s every muscle ached as she sat on the blanket beside Solomon. “What are we talking about?” She ladled piping hot baked beans onto her plate, then slapped a steaming slice of roast beef steeped in gravy on top. It smelled glorious, like the Sunday roasts her mother used to make. In truth, she’d have eaten anything put in front of her.

“Your man, Long John Silver here, is after splitting the proceeds up as we go—each looks after his own,” Clay explained. “Recipe for trouble if you ask me.”

Solomon scoffed and cast his male colleague a suspicious glance across the two camping stoves smoking abundantly. Had something overcooked?

“Christ.” Lyssa saw to the biscuits she’d let blacken to crisps on the grill beneath.

“Why not leave all the pyro in one place?” Varinia asked Solomon. “I don’t know a thing about prospecting, but isn’t this supposed to be a team effort?” She regretted the question as soon as she’d asked it. Poor Solomon started gibbering to himself, as though the world was conspiring against him, and he refused to look anyone in the eye.

“I don’t mind either way—pool or split,” Grace said.

Clay shook his head emphatically. “Splitting doesn’t make sense. We’ve got enough on our plates without worrying about who gets what.”

“Then there’s the whole trust issue.” Grace rose to her knees, threw away the remnants of her McCormick’s onto the sand. In her black bandana, and with her wrinkled, sun-kissed complexion, she even looked a little pirate-ish. “You’ll each have to find a hiding place, away from everyone else. Every night you’ll have to check it, add to it, ensure no one else knows its whereabouts. Anyone ventures near it and you’ll be on tenterhooks. You might follow them to make sure. If anyone sees you following, behaving strangely, they might get suspicious, they might even figure out where your stash is. Watching your goods, watching your back while watching your goods, pretending not to watch your back while pretending not to watch your goods, perhaps using that experience to spy on others, figure out where they keep their treasure—that’s a busy schedule when you’re mining fulltime. And while you’re digging, who might be prowling around outside, scouring the area for buried treasure? Who can you trust? Why should they trust you? Are two or more in cahoots against you, selling you short every night? All eyes are then on the third vat. Is anyone pilfering a spoonful when the others aren’t watching? Is the one in charge of weighing and doling out the pyro at the end of the day really to be trusted? When everyone hides his or her goods, how can you truly know how much everyone has? And if someone should find a bag or two missing from his stash, who can he accuse? How can he find the thief?”

“Only a thief at heart would dream all that up.” Solomon shifted position, inching away from everyone.

“Oh no, chick. Not a thief. A witness to thievery. I’ve dug pretty much anywhere a flag or a beer’s been raised out here, and I know what selfishness breeds. But you guys go ahead and prove me wrong. There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. If you want to go that way, fair enough. I guess I’d just as soon not be responsible for the whole shebang.”

“Keep it all in one place, I say.” Clay draped his arm over Lyssa’s shoulders. The vamp had been quiet all evening and remained inscrutable.

“I’m for dividing it up as we go.” Solomon nursed the black pyro scorch marks on his huge bare arms.

“Me too.” Varinia voted without any real conviction. She felt sure Grace’s dark auguries would never apply to her and sweet Solomon. No, they’d simply find a hiding place somewhere, perhaps in another cave, and one of them could keep a lookout while the other saw to the stash. Easy. No cause for paranoia.

“When you put it
that
way,” Lyssa spoke up, “I don’t want anyone else being responsible for my profits either. I vote we split it.”

Clay let go of her, scrutinized each of them in turn. “All right, but we start right now. Grace?”

“Fine by me. I’ll get the scales.”

No one uttered a word while the old woman walked away. Varinia hoped that wasn’t a sign of things to come.

Day 23, C31,500,000

About a hundred meters up, Solomon tugged at the spiraling sapphire vine to test its strength. It seemed taut beneath the outer layer of mush. Quite tough. He, Varinia and Clay had chosen the driest-looking creeper for their ascent to the plateau, away from the drainage holes, but even this was damp, slick and extremely hazardous to climb. The higher they went, the more the blue vines seemed to perspire. As Solomon gained a hold of one above his head, he wrung a shower of clear liquid that tasted like marzipan on his lips.

He reached through a knot of limbs, stuck another cam into the rock. He threaded his rope through it and switched the cam’s failsafe on. After they’d finished, he could use his remote to unlock all the cams and make them retract and spring free from the rock, thus saving many of them for reuse. On Zopyrus, they couldn’t afford to waste anything. Except a little energy for recreation now and then. Varinia had harped on about this sojourn to the plateau all the previous week. She’d even convinced that weirdo dark horse, Clay, to leave Lyssa for the afternoon to accompany them.

What was it with him? He rarely shared a friendly word with Varinia, but even that was more than he shared with anyone else. The guy was all fringe and mystery. What did Lyssa see in him? A badass brassy babe like that spreading rug for a Goth paper boy? Solomon peered below. Christ, the creep had even brought his brown bag up
here.
What the hell was in it? Spare diapers? Granny’s knitted jumper she’d given him for Christmas?

“What’s the holdup?” he called down to the two of them resting very close together on the same makeshift vine seat. Varinia had climbed brilliantly up until now, but she appeared to be nursing her ankle. And that little bastard was massaging it for her! “You okay?”

A scouring wind shook the entire towering plant. The limbs squeaked together like wet rubber, and a heavy downpour cascaded through the spiral, soaking him. Outside, the weather was fine. He slicked his hair back with the marzipan juice and watched Varinia shake droplets off her tank top. From up here, he had a fantastic view of her mouthwatering breasts. But so did Clay. She was now climbing in the equivalent of a wet T-shirt, and her nipples left little to the imagination when poking against that particular fabric. Jealousy squeezed his fists, tightened around his lungs—he struggled to breathe. An absolute curdling of the entire expedition now seemed inescapable. Beyond his control.

For Christ’s sake, get a grip. She’s right there. You slept with her last night and you’ll be sleeping with her tonight. She won’t look twice at an asshole like that. But why does she have to go around dressed that way? She’s not on Kappa Max now…little tramp.

The urge to bleed the life out of something intensified his grip on the spine of the helix, pulling him sideways.
Idiot.
It almost lost him his footing. This was no time for embarrassing himself, not with his lover and his rival watching.

Yes. Rival. He admitted it. Clay was obviously smarter than him, and Solomon had seen girls falling for these dark, mysterious types before. Falling? The word intensified. What if Varinia
did
fall for this guy? He shuddered. They’d keep it a secret, they’d have to. Any time they were together…No, he’d keep an eye on them both. Falling? He was leading the climb, the most dangerous role. What if he
did
fall? It would…

“I’m okay. Solomon, we’re okay. Climb on, hon.” Varinia’s familiar call netted his paranoid funk, and he shook his head to dispel the dark thoughts he’d been inventing for weeks now. Toxic thoughts. Ever since he’d woken in the
Taras Bulba
’s cargo hold and felt Grace’s kind hands rubbing soothing aftersun cream on his sore skin.
The murder. The frantic burial
. The life-or-death secret he daren’t reveal to anyone.

He rechecked his harness, resumed his ascent. Aggressive holds from now on. Fewer cams. He wanted the climb to be over so he didn’t have to spend so much time in his own head. The headaches came and went. Never bad but always pinpoint, right on the epicenter of his secret.

“Don’t try to interact with anything indigenous and intelligent,” Grace had warned them. “Either come get me or leave them be. The old man never found out what happened to the last of his colleagues. But he did say the aliens he traded with were…touchy.” Hmm, and what would they be if they ever discovered the body buried near the glade? Touchy—with teeth and claws? At least, if he kept it to himself, Grace and the others had plausible deniability. He’d hidden the grave well.

But what if it rained and the loose mud washed away? What if the aliens had highly attuned powers of smell and found the grave? What if they knew each others’ whereabouts at all times through some collective ESP coordination? What if one of them had
seen
the murder? The others were all away on some great menstrual migration and the informant was simply biding his time, waiting for their return? What if they were observing him right now? His every move scrutinized, studied in preparation for an attack?

His heart thumped to a wild, primitive rhythm.

Or was it all simply Zopyrus—something in the air, in the heat, in the shocking red pyro sparks and their stealth vapors? Might he just have to acclimate to this alien world and calm the fuck down?

He glimpsed the top of the wall less than twenty meters above. The straight carved edge relaxed him a little. It whispered of order and civilization. In the helix of this helter-skelter plant he was locked in his own chaos. Up there he could get a grip. Perspective.

Before he knew it he was heaving himself onto a smooth stone ledge. Beige and translucent. Like no rock he’d ever seen before. He scanned the misty plateau, and there, just as Varinia had observed, stood a stupendous alien city carved from the mountainside.

Breathless, he spun to call down to the others. His wet boots slipped on the smooth surface.

He plummeted over the edge.

“Heads up, Varinia!” Clay watched the trajectory of Solomon’s fall and made ready to leap out of the way. Solomon snagged a vine instead. It softened his fall but wrenched apart with a loud pop and unraveled a quick three meters. It then sprang to life in a violent whipping motion that stopped the fall dead with a curling
crack.
Solomon clung to the vine, survived the electrical shock wave that seemed to zap through the entire plant. He soon let go of the exposed end, and hurled expletives at its angry electrical snaps as he grasped another, unbroken, limb. The creeper’s defense mechanism was a nasty but effective measure. They all climbed gently from then on.

“You okay?” Clay asked. Solomon managed a shaky salute. “That was some stunt, brother.”

“Solomon?
Solomon,
” Varinia cried.

Clay stepped aside—there was no arguing the lady’s resolve. Despite her sore ankle, Varinia bullied up past him—“Excuse me, mind out”—unclipped the rope from her harness, and climbed freely until she reached her man. She touched her forehead on his, then reassured him with tender kisses. The roughneck was a lucky son of a bitch. Firstly, he had no injury after a dicey fall. Secondly, he had the high-altitude passion of a perfect woman. The kind of woman men killed for in any colony. A woman Clay was finding harder and harder to stay away from.

“What happened on the summit?” he called up to break the mood. Varinia might be out of bounds for him, but he didn’t have to watch a brick-brawn grope her all day either.

“Slippery stone,” Solomon replied. “Watch it up there. The view’s amazing.”

He wasn’t wrong. Clay unclipped the rope from his harness and tied one end to the sapphire creeper. The plant was embedded in a crack running lengthways across the translucent plateau, but this was the only visible flaw in the seamless surface. He crept forward, a few degrees awry from his colleagues’ direction—spectacular views ought to be savored alone when seen for the first time—and let the immensity of this alien architecture shrink him to awesome insignificance.

The buildings loomed, so massive, their beige and creamy coloring so uniform, he couldn’t tell if the city had been hewn from the mountains or the mountains had sprouted from the city. Nor could he tell how far the plateau stretched—perhaps the entire breadth of the ocean? Gusts nudged archipelagos of sand this way and that over the tabletop surface. No other sign of life. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that this place wasn’t entirely deserted. In his journal, the old man had described the indigenous aliens as “touchy” and “reclusive,” two things that echoed through this well-preserved and isolated habitat.

Rather than physically explore the monuments, would it be wiser to just observe from a distance? They couldn’t examine much of it anyway. He reckoned it would take a faculty of archaeologists many generations to fully investigate this momentous find.

“Clay, don’t wander too far,” came a sweet call from his left. An abrupt tug from Solomon shook loose Varinia’s frown. She offered Clay a warm smile instead.

He bowed theatrically in reply, subsuming his jealousy with a flush of genuine affection. A grin he couldn’t hide. Solomon saw it and glared. That silent reaction proved more disquieting than Lyssa’s blatant outrage in the forest that first day. But
Christ,
what was he to do? He’d shared a real moment with Varinia on the vine, when he’d nursed her sore ankle. Or maybe it was just him going soft at the knees. The more he thought about it, the more he regretted his decision to go prospecting at all. A few days in and already his heart felt rent apart. Lyssa on the rocks, on gritty terra firma, or Varinia in the clouds, in secret? Ten months of this? He sank into a deep sigh and sauntered on.

The translucent floor wasn’t beige anymore. It had deepened to a reddish-brown, and Clay swore the entire plateau pulsed every so often, lighter and darker, but he couldn’t catch it in the act. Curious, he bent low and pressed his flat palm against the stone. A little warmer than before, approaching hot.

He scanned the city again, focusing on the nearest structure, a rightward-curving sequence of lopsided arches joined together by a flat, snakelike spine at the apex. Its rear two arches were each missing a right leg. The area behind also appeared oddly incomplete. Corners shaved off buildings and denuded lower walls stood out in an otherwise perfectly preserved stone megalopolis. He squinted to discern an army of tiny scurrying creatures fleeing that particular area. He sidestepped, cocked his head until a clear, deliberate path through the monuments opened up. Whatever force had wrought this hole through the city, Clay didn’t like being on the line of its trajectory, or in the center of conspiring coincidences. The floor changing color
just
when he approached, or the creatures flitting at the
precise
moment he crossed this path.

Bullshit.

He snatched his Ares T-11 handgun from its holster, keeping it pointed at the floor. The last thing he wanted was to fire accidentally into an alien habitat. He yelled, “Hey!” at the top of his voice. Varinia and Solomon were almost at a gap in the first array of stone structures shaped like alien pictographs, some sort of indecipherable lettering fifty meters high. The two of them resembled punctuation marks creeping into place. He shouted again and waved his arms.

Varinia turned, dragged Solomon with her. Clay beckoned them toward him while he jogged off the path of destruction. A queasy sensation—mounting dread before a top-brass drill inspection—forced him to swallow. More than intuition. A palpable, throat-constricting surge. Exterior, all around him. Nothing he could touch.

He shivered and wriggled the rucksack from his back. With fumbling fingers he ripped the brown plastic bag open and began to unmagno the shrink carrier. He checked himself. If he spilled the carrier’s contents, there’d be no turning back. Not ever. He’d be exposing his new friends to his oldest and deadliest secrets. The last vestige of Ladon he’d saved for the direst possible moment. Life or death.

He daren’t unleash it yet.

Before the others reached halfway, the golden-brown floor blazed bright yellow. His white fingertips trembled, ready to rip the carrier apart. An audible
fizz,
now a sibilant spit and crackle, turned the yellow brighter still. A flood of sunlight.
There.
From the path of destruction, a red glow rose and sparked like the slow-motion impact of a giant pick on pyro.

“Clay, what’s happening?” He couldn’t see her through the blinding yellow but Varinia sounded close.
Shit.
Now he definitely couldn’t open the carrier. She was within range.

When the light’s intensity grew too bright he shut his eyes and crouched, shielding his face. The hisses and crackles died away. A strange calm enveloped him, and he imagined himself inside an oyster of warm buttercup syrup. The taste was right there, a tongue’s reach away. He licked his lips.

A blast of molten air hurled him off his feet and forever backward, higher, faster, positive-g’ing him into the sun itself at perihelion. He couldn’t hear his own scream or feel anything but a drawn-out scalding over his entire body. The pain reminded him he was still alive, reminded him he should have died long ago. His choice. His curse. A flaming streak through nowhere with nothing and no one to guide him. The yellow bled darkly. It opened up beneath him like the lips of a black abyss. The heat subsided, then tingled. Still he couldn’t breathe but his stomach elasticized familiarly—upward, not downward.

He opened his eyes, snatched a breath and instinctively held it.

Thump.
He hit water. Right side, foot and elbow first into the ocean. The impact knocked the wind out of him. The carrier shot out of his grasp as he went under. Stinging all over, he fought back to the surface and lunged for the carrier before the tide got hold of it. He coughed, held the buoyant bag close to his chest for use as a flotation device. Good thing, too, as he quickly realized his right leg had no strength. He tried to wriggle into a makeshift stroke—using his left leg and his right arm for propulsion—but threw up instead. His calls for help spluttered into bitter coughs. Blurry vision robbed him of any sense of geography. Where was the goddamn shore? How far had he been thrown? Was Varinia okay?