Sparks in Cosmic Dust (15 page)

“Another.” She waited until their rotation reached vertical again before pointing out a rectangular depression in the rock. And a second, directly above. Clay’s breath hitched. Any sound now felt invasive, sacrilegious. This time, he gained a great view of the anomaly.

Arranged one on top of the other, the rectangles appeared to be open graves.

The fossilized alien skeletons inside defied easy description. Their humpbacked hexapod forms measured around four-and-a-half feet from flared head plate to hooked claws. Not hideous, more sad. Afflicted. Two thick arms cupped into their solid barrel torsos like ebony mug handles. Various-sized holes in the torso cylinder made him think more of a crustacean than anything else. A crustacean trying to evolve.

And there were more graves. Thousands, maybe
millions
more. Each column—the arrangement having been designed “upside down” from his perspective—appeared to bear its own unique engraving of pictorial symbols, located down the right hand edge of each grave. A family tree?

“You ever come across this before? Gravity shifting like this?” Lyssa constantly lifted her beam to its farthest extremity. Indeed, where was the ceiling?

“No. You?”

“Not without sucking down a line of Bolshoi brandies. Schedule me for some expensive therapy when we reach a hundred zee.”

“My treat,” he answered humorlessly.

It was hard to tell which way was up. Their slow, rising spin seemed variously like falling, being pulled, or rotating on the spot. Grim crimson bloomed in the blackness above. He poked Lyssa in the ribs.

“I see it,” she whispered. “We need to get hold of something…in case the gravity returns.”

Son of a bitch.
She had a point. They’d floated by scores of graves—well over a hundred feet from the ground as they knew it. If the gravity were to switch back on now? Game over. Thanks for splatting.

But how to move laterally through a vacuum? The graves might only be inches beyond their reach, but without thrust, an inch became an eon. Surely there was some way to…

Lyssa held out her water canteen, pointed it perpendicularly from the wall. She squeezed its neck, but instead of a jet, water eked out in shuddery globules.
Nice try, babe.
At least the theory made sense. Even a tiny amount of thrust might—

He pulled his mask off and flicked the two catches on either side to open its compartment. The operation was fiddly, and it meant letting go of Lyssa.

“What you doin’?” She blinded him with her lamp.

“You were onto something. Any pressure in your canteen leaked out the moment you unscrewed the cap, so it didn’t provide thrust, but—and this will take both of us—our compressed oxygen canisters might do the trick.”

“Eh? They’re tiny,” she said. “A Barbie doll’s fart would give more thrust. Any case, my canteen trick was a dumbass idea.”

He shook his head. “The gas in these is compressed. Soon as we open the valves, it’ll give us a nudge.”

“Okay, okay. This works, I’ll let you win for free.”

“Win what?”

“The game we started.”

“Nice.”

The crimson bloom was now an electric rose bush climbing the cemetery wall toward them. The light at its core blazed incandescently. Its limbs and veins spread like wire circuitry through the pitch, reaching, assimilating.

“’Kay. Ready.” He held his canister—two inches thick, about the length of his index finger—against his chest and readied his thumb and forefinger on the nozzle. The skewed name printed in white on the cylinder read
Ziegler-Levin.
An industry leader in spacesuits. Enough to boost his hopes a little.

“Ready.” Lyssa copied him.

“Right, on three. One, two,
three…
”

The quiet hisses overlapped, and they both let the oxygen vent. In moments, Clay’s bare left shoulder, then his butt, rubbed against something coarse. He closed the nozzle and shoved the canister into his utility belt. Feeling behind, his knuckles touched rock. He gripped a ridge and carefully eased himself round until he was face-to-face with an otherworldly skeleton.

“Lyssa?”

“Here.”

“You good?”

“Um, my tits are suckling an R.I.P. E.T. Apart from that, I’m dandy. Clay,
hold onto something.
”

His pulse leaped at the sudden onrushing of red tributaries as the entire chamber blazed. Too much all at once. The extraordinary dimensions he’d imagined in the darkness paled into insignificance. The tomb walls scaled hundreds of meters—the ceiling couldn’t be far off the height of the plateau itself. Vast, spiraling columns carved from the rock and ladders consisting of enormous decorative archways stood equidistantly around the hall, which stretched for two or three kilometers into the mountain and parallel to the shoreline, as far as Clay could see. Miles and miles. An indescribable architectural feat. All aglow.

Was this part of the giant power station Grace had hypothesized?

His balance began to wheel, silkily, even though he was still. At least, in the microcosm of Lyssa’s lamplight, he’d only had one wall and two limited dimensions to address. The pyro had just exploded that threadbare orientation. On such a scale, without gravity, seeing was far more disorienting than not seeing.

Millions of graves decorated the walls and columns and arches, arranged sequentially. Some lines—family trees?—were longer than others, some sections more elaborately designed. Renowned lineages? The grave-lines clearly started from the ceiling, as the variations in height always left gaps at the opposite end, or the floor, from Clay’s and Lyssa’s point of view. This suggested the hall itself was inverted, and visitors, builders, gravediggers likely entered it upside-down, from the top. Topsy-turvy. The history of a civilization carved head over heels into an impossible treasure trove. The pyro mother lode! Clay snatched another glimpse before the dizziness overwhelmed him, forced him to shut his eyes, and the precariousness of his cling over death wrenched him back to the problem at hand. What to do now? Wait until the gravity switched back on? What if it never did?

“Lyssa, any bright ideas?”

“Ideas, yes. Bright, no. Not that I’m too particular about where I get married, but an alien tomb isn’t quite the vision I knitted baby socks for.”

Somehow, Clay had a hard time picturing her plying needle and thread unless she used them to garrote someone, but in a situation like this, he couldn’t imagine anyone he’d rather have at his side.

Easing along the sarcophagi proved simpler than he’d expected. Whatever substance held the skeletons in place, it smelled a little like Coca-Cola and was hard as cement. Plenty to grip, to pull himself along on. Lyssa kept pace, and before long they found a steady rhythm, sailing over skeletons, flanked by channels of brilliant pyro.

Then she stopped, flattened herself against the rim of a grave, and played dead. “You were right,” she whispered. “They’re here.”

Beneath a jutting ledge, the last refuge of shade anywhere—the sun was directly overhead—Varinia removed the vat lids in preparation for the first pyro extraction of the day. Butterflies in her stomach anticipated the glorious sight of pyro pepper sinking to the bottom of vat three. Almost unbearable excitement. A day’s wage in every grain.

She spotted Solomon and Grace leading the donkeys and the roly-poly back from the sea. It reminded her she still owed the latter a huge thank you for saving her life. The roly-poly’s initiative in recruiting the donkeys for a beach rescue, over a mile away, had dumbfounded everyone.

“What’s the best way to thank him?” she asked Grace, motioning to their wheeling friend.

“Spend a bit of time with him. They like company.”

“That it? No treats or anything?”

“Oh, he’s been well-treated. I gave him an assortment of fruit and a bit of soup yesterday. He’s getting old, though. Can’t eat more than a few bites at a time. This’ll probably be his last trip.”

Watching the leathery creature unfurl its long, thin body to rear up like a friendly cobra beside her, its four sunken eyes distending from either side of its hooded head, Varinia’s heart melted. Such a quiet, solitary creature. He had spent a lifetime serving humans across the galaxy, probably to little reward, and now he was nearing retirement. But where were his kin, his family, to comfort him in old age, if that was what roly-polys did on their home world?

She stroked the top of his mouth, a smooth, gelatinous flap between his eyes. No response, but she hoped he liked the sensation.

“We’ll need to borrow him for a while. Solomon and I are going to fetch some more firewood from the forest.” Grace left and whistled for the creature to follow.

“You’ll be all right here on your own?” Solomon caressed Varinia’s upper arm with his fingertips.

“Sure.”

“You might like to know your black four-legged is loitering just outside the inlet,” he said. “Go say hello.”

She kicked into a sprint, then stopped, remembering her plan to lure Danai close with an armful of hay and an apple. She tripped over her feet while accelerating back to the food cache, and fell face-first into the sand. Solomon and Grace burst into exaggerated laughter, as though Varinia’s dive had provided the punch line to a private joke—a joke somehow connected to her wayward mare.

So they think this is all a big laugh. Assholes. See if they’re still laughing when I get to ride her in the surf every morning…and they get to watch.

“You should try a cattle prod instead!” Solomon yelled after her. “Otherwise you’ll be chasing shadows ’til supper.”

Whatever. What did he know? Arrogant brick-brawn, grid-licking, sleaze-heaving…cute-as-hell…tool-push. What did any of them know about looking after an animal that didn’t just haul things all day long? One that needed grooming, washing, shoeing, constant care and love, plenty of free time to graze and frolic. They knew how to herd and feed slave animals, enough to keep them alive for maximum productivity.

“Hey, feisty. Remember me?”

The mare bucked as Varinia approached with an outstretched handful of hay. Darting skittishly, almost dancing in defiance across the churned dry sand, Danai either wanted to play games or she was remonstrating.

Let’s see how hungry you really are.

Varinia sat cross-legged, set the bundle of hay on her lap and waited. When helping a damaged mind, patience and engendering trust were the two great ice-breakers, her mother had once told her. Somehow, even at that young age, Varinia had understood that her mother was speaking about people as well as animals. The advice had never escaped her.

But how long had it been since she’d last had a chance to nurture anything, or anyone?

“Easy, girl. That’s it. You’ve been shoved around and beaten all your life. Now you get to see what a beautiful thing you’ve been missing. Come on, easy as you like. You can trust me. Trust me, lovely Danai. Take the hay from my hands.” Slowly, Varinia lifted half the bundle on her flat palms and held it out. Careful not to make any sudden moves. “Here you go,” she whispered without flinching as the mare reared and neighed and began zigzagging back and forth, back and forth, ever watchful, ever mistrustful. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Cautious, wide-eyed approaches. Incremental. Head bowed. Nostrils flared. Wanting, learning to trust perhaps for the first time. A desire punctuated by wild and vicious aversions, as though her shadow was winning a tug of war with her warmer angels. Subtle and uncharted, the mind of a horse. A gentle field of intuitions. One had to tread lightly and know where. Not trample, not flatten with aggression.

“It’s all right. Hear my voice. Come as close as you like. That’s it. There’ll be no threats here, no reprisals. You don’t know where you are, probably never have, but it’s safe here and you can roam all you want. You like this food? There’s plenty more where it came from. I’ve left bits for you on the rocks ’til now, but it’s time for you to come in and make some new friends. Here you are, just one bite…from my hands…”

Only a few feet away now, the mare’s nasal breaths were audible and nostalgic, her protestations less harsh and less frequent. Hunger and trust were a potent combination. She was inches away now. Varinia softened her voice to her most maternal whisper, to coax and gladden, hoping for a miraculous meeting of Darwinian minds a thousand light-years—

A slight ground tremor gathered momentum and in moments grew to an angry rumble. Danai bolted. End of session. The donkeys’ brays and a clattering of pots drew Varinia’s attention back toward the campsite.

The vats…uncovered!

She dropped everything and raced to save the soropholic acid before it spilled. The rumbling increased as she neared the tents, and the mine entrance…

Oh God.

Had something horrific happened inside? While she’d idled, playing horse whisperer…had Clay and Lyssa…?

She shut her eyes bitterly and with both hands gripped the back of her head. A torrid dust cloud billowed out of the mine entrance, which could mean only one thing.

Every miner’s worst nightmare.

A cave-in.

Clay?
The idea of losing him hacked away at her heart. It was unendurable until she snatched up the nearest oxygen mask and, clamping it into place, braved the impenetrably thick, stifling dust. At the far end of the passageway, she stopped at a fallen boulder twice her size. She felt around its edges, but there was no way past. No way through. And worst of all…no cries for help from the other side.

A sickening caw hurtled round the massive tomb.

“Go! They’ve seen us.” Clay hooked his fingers over the grave’s base and heaved himself forward. The scurrying creatures, having fanned out from the center of the rose light, now about-turned and converged on him and Lyssa. The bastards’ pairs of clawed legs moved in sync, like a gallop, their long, muscular arms anchoring them with crazy agility. How could they move so fast through zero-g?

Lyssa kept an unswerving pace and focus right beside him, head bowed, holding to the line of graves that led directly to the aliens’ bright exit. Not far now. Twenty meters? But
Christ,
the things were heading them off.