Sparks in Cosmic Dust

by Robert Appleton

  “I once knew a stud looked just like that,” a raspy voice called from the next aisle, several feet opposite.

  Against her better judgment, Varinia spun to see who it was. An elderly woman glared back, her hawk eyes glistening with the amber from a nearby drum fire. She was lying on her side, wrapped in a Cody’s blanket and a few of her own besides. Her worn cream rucksack on the floor bulged, looked easily as big as her, and had more color.

  “What was that? The drawing?” Varinia asked her, ignoring Solomon’s elbow in her side.

  The old woman stopped turning away, rested her glare on Varinia once again. “I said I once knew a stud looked just like that. He asked me to marry him, so I put him out to grass.”

  Varinia faked a quick grin. To her surprise, the old woman sat up, cocked her head to one side as if studying the woman inside the urchin. It made Varinia shudder. She poked Solomon’s arm, whispered, “God, I think she knows me.”

  “Who?”

  “That old woman. Say something to her.”

  By the time he leaned over, the woman was snug in bed again, facing the other way, busy talking with another couple, a pale, not unattractive man, early thirties, with longish black hair and a voluptuous, even younger woman who looked like the worst sort of vamp.

  “Just ignore her.” Solomon dragged their beds together, then spread his blanket. “Now don’t worry about anything. I’m a light sleeper, and we’ll keep the carriers between us, right here.” He tapped his knuckles on the plastic bed rims.

  “We’ll be fine.” She turned back to the conversation across the aisle. Words like gold, capital and farther into space piqued her curiosity. The old woman seemed to be doing most of the talking between coughs, her sharp-tongued rasp drawing snickers from the other couple.

  “Yeah, you might not think it to look at me but I’ve dug pretty much everywhere anyone’s raised a flag or a beer out here. Course, it’s tough luck when you pick your way to a fortune only for some high-falutin’ satellite to give your position away. The trick isn’t in the finding and the getting of it—it’s in the hiding and the getting away with it. Prospectors have to be sly, they need a flair for misdirection. Being handy with a gun doesn’t hurt either. I’ve lost more goods to ambush parties than a virgin eel has wet dreams. Trust me, it might be an adventure at the start, but by the end of month one you’re at each others’ throats, and if you hurdle the first quarter, God help you when the pile gets too big to camouflage. Every suck-bait down to their G-strings becomes Sherlock Holmes—suspecting every shape in the sky, figuring out new places or new ways to hide their earnings. It all takes its toll.

  “Then we’re talking alien atmospheres, unpredictable weather, different lengths of day and night. Either no sex or grudge sex for half a year, maybe more. A married couple might sound like a good idea—you know, for stability—but I’ve never yet known one that came out smelling of roses. It’s the gold, the lust in the luster. You get funny ideas when your mind’s bent on the swing of your pick. It’s addictive, like the turn of a card, only a thousand times more potent because there’s no banker or croupier or casino fat-cat between your axe and the honey pot. The harder you work, the richer you get. Catnip for any living thing with a pulse, I’m telling you. Wild dogs couldn’t drag you away from a rich vein of psammeticum. I can vouch for that.”

  “Sounds like you struck it rich, old timer.” The young vamp’s eyes glittered wider than the elderly woman’s. “What are you doing in here with the rest of us, a grid-licker?”

  “Good question. But that’s my story, Maleficent. You go fuck up your own life, come tell me about it someday. Looks of it, you’ve already hit the ground running.”

  “Easy.” The girl chuckled. “We were just curious, that’s all. Some gobshites in here the other night were talking about deep-space prospecting, a snatch and grab before they’re forced to up sticks for good.”

  “Hmm, they might strike. Can’t blame them for trying. I’d go in a second if a spot opened up. Three or four semi-gobshites with a time limit…dig like blazes and bounce back to port…could do well. And if they augured in, least they’d be doing it on their own terms, not waiting for ISPA to whisper the big adios.”

  Picturing Solomon swinging a pick, and the piles of gold mounting all around them, pricked Varinia’s sluggish mind into gear. “How much would they need?” She slapped a hand over her mouth and couldn’t believe she’d said that out loud.

  “You again?” The old woman sprang up, reached to the floor at the head of her bed and retrieved a flask. She looked at Varinia before pouring her a cup of something black and tepid. “Here. Get some McCormick’s down you.” She handed the cup over and then took a swig directly from the flask. “How much would they need? Depends on how far they’re going. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Ha. That’s exactly what my two friends here keep saying. Don’t stand on ceremony, chick. Speak your mind, by all means.”

  Solomon leaned over Varinia’s shoulder, draped a blanket over her. “What are you folks selling?”

  “The stuff that sells itself, sunshine.” The old woman belched into the side of her fist. “Where are you two headed?”

  “We’re still figuring that out.” Solomon kept the conversation light, and Varinia appreciated his tact. There was something infectious about the old woman’s honesty. Her prospecting stories, doom-laden though they were, smacked of reality and enthusiasm, a difficult combination to achieve in this grim day and age.

  “Grace Peters.” The old woman approached them with a canny smirk and shook their hands. Then she pointed behind her. “This is Clay and…what was your name, Maleficent? Lemon? Liffy?”

  “Lyssa.”

  “Sorry, chick. Lyssa.”

  Varinia didn’t want to come across as too ingratiating. After all, she didn’t know anything about them. “I’m Dixie. This is Solomon.”

  “So you’re interested in prospecting, eh?” Grace tested all four of them at once, rubbing her neck. “But you’re reluctant to reveal too much about yourselves? You each have a little something stashed away, only it isn’t enough to make a hundred zee, and you’re intrigued by the verisimilitude in my yarn-spinning?”

  “Say what?” Lyssa frowned.

  “Verisimilitude—reality in the details.” Clay’s long yawn reminded Varinia how long she’d gone without sleep—almost two days.

  “Uh-huh.” Grace swigged a last mouthful of McCormick’s from her flask and then poured the slimy residue onto the floor. “Okay, y’all, how about a quick once-around before I waste any more breath. Who’s of a mind to go digging for a fortune before the boom falls?” She held up the middle three fingers of her right hand, boy scout style. “I’m in. It’ll be dangerous, but what worthwhile adventure isn’t? Two more of you would be do-able. Three’s company. The four of you together would be best. I can’t promise you we’ll strike it rich, but let’s just say I’ve got rather more than an inkling. Who’s interested?”

  The dark duo across, egged on by Lyssa’s vociferous whisperings, soon assented. “Sniff the gold dust out, we’re there,” the girl said with an arrogance that made Clay roll his eyes.

  He pointed his thumb at her. “What she said.”

  All gazes turned to Varinia and Solomon.

  “Count us in.” Solomon gripped her shoulders.

  What? “But—” Varinia’s protest relented when he pressed a finger to her lips. What was he thinking? Signing them up for a wild-goose chase with Ma Peters and the two Goths? What a great way to waste the tips she’d earned this year.

  “Okey-cokey.” Rubbing her veined, bony hands together, Grace shot them each a kind of neglectful maternal look, as though she’d hatched a plan to palm her kids off onto a babysitter for the weekend and was thrilled about getting some hot nookie instead. The idea turned Varinia’s stomach. “I’ll need you all to drag your cots together,” the old-timer said. “What I have to say is for your ears only. Come on, come on. Don’t be sh
y. I don’t bite on a first date. That’s it. Close as you can.

  “Lyssa, Clay, Dixie, Solomon. You all have trustworthy faces, did anyone ever tell you? No? Good, ’cause I’m full of shit. But that’s all right. The main thing to remember in prospecting is you’re not supposed to trust the folks you’re digging with. They’re not supposed to trust you. Not really. Because trust, like all valuable commodities, is bought and leased on the day you ship out.

  “Let me explain. Say you go off rigging derricks on a new moon. The money is great, but the other tool-pushers are complete suck-baits and you get paid every day on the job rather than when you make it back to civilization. Tricky. You’re trusting your life every day, teetering a hundred feet up, when you don’t know how competent those other guys are. You have to find a hiding place for your clips, but you know for a fact most of these border riggers have serious criminal records. Let me ask you—what’s keeping you aloft on that derrick instead of guarding your clips every hour of the day?”

  “Your contract,” Solomon replied confidently. “You do what you signed on for because you want the whole wages.”

  “True. But I can sum it up in one word, sunshine. Greed. You stay up there, trusting your colleagues’ handiwork, because you’re a greedy son of a bitch who’s taken a job without knowing who the fuck you’re really working with. You’re fairly sure no one will steal your clips because you’re all on a fucking moon with nowhere to go, and if word got out, the thief would be strung up by his scrotum. Greed keeps everyone working and everyone happy. Greed sits on trust’s face and doesn’t let up ’til it’s time to skedaddle.”

  “What a load of crap,” Varinia butted in, a little annoyed at the old woman’s gleeful nihilism. “You need some real trust, or else it’ll be a free-for-all on the shuttle home.”

  “Agreed. No expedition lasts purely on greed. What about friendships formed along the way?” Clay’s furrowed brow beneath his untidy, too-long fringe restored a smidgeon of Varinia’s faith in humanity. At least she wasn’t the only one who saw through Grace Peters’s misanthropy.

  Lyssa clasped her hand over Clay’s—perhaps to make it clear to other interested female parties that he was hers. “I think we come to trust some of those we work with. Greed might keep everyone working, but you can kiss my ass, old timer, if you think I’d ever give up my friendship—” she dealt Clay a slow-motion fist to the chin, “—for a few sacks of rocks.”

  “Trust. I vote trust,” Solomon joked. “Boo sucks to greed. Long live solidarity. Sorry, Grace.”

  “So be it, chicks. Let’s hope you can teach me a thing or two. Now—” after checking all around them for eavesdroppers—twice, three times—the old woman plunged a bony hand inside her jumper and retrieved a plastic medicine bottle hanging on a necklace against her bosom, “—I trust you can all keep a secret.”

  The others affirmed with wide eyes reflecting the glow of drum-fire embers, while Varinia offered an enthusiastic nod. She had to hand it to the old woman. For all her cynicism, she commanded a measure of wonder, not least by her disarming charisma, the product of curdled charm and a prickly-but-fun sense of absurdity. She was the unsavory aunt whom everyone else avoided but you secretly loved hanging out with.

  “In this bottle is a microdot containing two sets of coordinates.” She closed her fist around it. “The first is the location of Zopyrus, the biggest of four moons around a planet several light-years from here. It’s too far for the regular snatch-and-grab ops. It has been surveyed by satellite—I checked—but the mineral results came back negative. Here’s the good part. As any good prospector knows, you can’t scout properly from the air—surface terrain can be a sly old devil.” She tapped the bottle, lowered her voice to a whisper. “The second map shows the location of a rather special pyrofluvium mine on Zopyrus. Its mountain range consists of several layers, the topmost being corborilium, which plays havoc with standard aerial sensors. So no one else knows about this. It was given to me a while back by a very sick man, a grid-licker just like us, so you can guess his prospecting tale didn’t have a Disney ending.”

  “What’s so special about a pyrofluvium mine?” Lyssa asked. “That stuff’s ten-a-clip in any decent hospital.”

  “You’re thinking of pyrofluvial, the sedative solution that utilizes impure forms of the mineral. I’m talking the absolute purest element—pyrofluvium—tons of it in one place. There’s—”

  “They’re the same thing,” the vamp interrupted.

  “No, no they’re not. I was the resident doctor at Pont de Rêves for eight years. Graduated cum laude at the ISPA Academy. What science qualifications have you got?”

  “A thorough and versatile knowledge of blood-letting.” With a glint in her eye, Lyssa slashed her index finger across her throat. “Does that count?”

  “Yes. Admirable. Don’t ever tell me my business again.”

  Solomon piped up, “You were the Selene doctor? At the actual Selene Pageant?”

  Grace gave a resigned nod. “Uh-huh. Eight years of mollycoddling prima Godivas. Trust me, the job’s not as glamorous as it sounds. I was fired when one of the girls accused me of slander. Her billionaire daddy even filed suit, insisted his daughter had always been prone to indigestion and wasn’t sick.”

  “What was really wrong with her?” Lyssa asked.

  “She was pregnant with daddy’s triplets.”

  The others laughed blackly, but Varinia cringed. She’d felt that Grace had recognized her right away when they’d first spoken. Had she? Could she? Varinia certainly didn’t remember her at Pont de Rêves, and she’d been through all the official pageant checkups and screenings. Maybe the old woman had already been fired by that time. But even so…it was too close for comfort.

  “Pyrofluvium is the stuff they use in energy research, isn’t it?” Clay asked. “Cutting-edge propulsion?”

  Grace clicked her fingers during an emphatic hand swipe. “That’s the juice. You’ve just moved to the top of the class, Clay pigeon. ISPA doesn’t advertise the fact, but it’s seriously enamored with this stuff. Word has it pyro even supersedes psammeticum in anti-matter propulsion. In other words, this shit is going to be the shit for generations to come. The pure element is worth billions a ton because it’s so rare. Like snagging a virgin past a hundred zee. That’s one of the reasons they’re shrinking the border—the toffs at ISPA don’t want prospectors and shack-sheiks gaining a stranglehold on the supply of this stuff. They want to do the finding and the shipping themselves.

  “And before any of you have a brain fart, my maps are encrypted, so robbing me won’t do you any good. I’ll key the coordinates into the ship’s navi-computer once we’re en route, and I’ll set us down on Zopyrus. Remember, I’m your guarantor. Respect that and we’ve every chance of crossing the zee line in ten months with an absolute fortune.”

  “Why’s it have to be ten months?” Lyssa queried.

  “’Cause that’s when my buyer packs up and retires across the zee border. And trust me, there’s no one else out here will know how to shift pyrofluvium, not in the quantities I’m hoping for.

  “Now, down to clips,” the old woman added. “I’ve got a little over four thousand stashed away. Based on the fact that you’re: a) not dumb, b) still listening, and c) still here on Kappa Max, I have to assume that each couple can put up a similar amount. Am I right?”

  No response.

  Grace rolled her eyes. “Come on, people. I’m laying all my cards on the table. A good start would be for everyone to ante up and hold nothing back. Begin as you mean to go on. If you don’t take the risk, you won’t make the gain. Yadda-yadda. Lyssa?”

  The vamp stopped chewing her lip long enough to answer, “Three plus change.”

  “Good. Solomon?”

  “Three.”

  Smart lad. Matching the other couple’s stake while keeping plenty in reserve. Varinia wanted to kiss him for being a loyal card player…and for being smoking hot to boot.

  “Okey-cokey,
that’s ten. At least.” Grace winked at Varinia, her wrinkled old face sly and all-seeing. “Enough to get us where we need to go. We’ll have to be frugal, though. Now go talk it over while I get some kip. An old bird needs her nest time. Tomorrow, we start buying supplies.”

  “Um, what about a ship?” Clay caught Grace before she laid her head on the pillow. “Where do we get a ship for under ten—?”

  “Let me worry about that.” The old woman winked at their skeptical glares through the gloom. “Let’s just say I’ve been waiting for this opportunity for some time. And the previous candidates have been, shall we say, less forthcoming.” She sank, snuggled under her blankets. “But we’ll be fine. Just dream of piles of glittering pyrofluvium growing bigger and bigger…and bigger.”

  After dragging their two beds back to their original spots behind the pillar, Solomon said, “I would’ve talked it over with you first but…I think we need this. If you want out, though, we don’t have to—”

  “No, you did good. It’s either take this trip or keep our heads down in here indefinitely. I don’t fancy our chances of lasting ’til the evacuation, do you? No, this is a stroke of luck. Grace is a tough old bird. We’ll be fine.” She treated him to a grateful kiss. A strange bristling sensation in the pit of her stomach distracted her, drew her free.

  “Lovely,” came Solomon’s verdict, but she was already looking in the opposite direction, to where the unusual sensation seemed to be tugging her. Across the aisle to the new couple, about whom she and Solomon ought to know more. The girl was a feisty vamp, sure. But what about him? Clay. The enigmatic partner who, she had to admit, intrigued her more than a little.