He took off his mask to untwist one of the straps digging into the base of his skull. It was stuffy in the mine—much warmer than usual. Hard to breathe. He reaffixed his mask, then slammed his pick into the wall of a stubborn nook. Fizz, crack! Pyro sparks jetted all about him, lighting the cave like a shuttle flare. He shielded his eyes but not quick enough to prevent the obligatory splodges-in-a-Petri-dish from slivering over his vision for the next few minutes.
His next strike excited a similar overreaction from the pyro. Clay tinted his visor for protection. Much softer on his vision. Tougher to see the contours in the rock, though. He spun the lamp lens one full turn, doubling its brightness. In the meantime, Lyssa had almost filled half her quota, while he’d bagged only a handful of rocks. He’d never live it down. Either the rock in this section of the cave crumbled easily or she was using goddamn explosives. No one could dig that fast.
Fuck this. His next dozen swings devoured an entire two-by-eight-foot seam, equaling roughly an hour’s work through regular rock. No question—this was softer, more like his namesake than the dense corborilium they’d picked at before. He turned to tell her when she yelled, “Ante up, rock boy. Shirt off, if you please.” Preening herself while sitting on his near-empty half of the trolley, Lyssa wolf-whistled. “Lucky for me you suck at mining.”
He sighed, set his helmet and mask down, then his backpack, and unmagnoed the front of his shirt. The tart vapor stung his eyes, so he shut them and blindly peeled his soaked shirt from his shoulders.
“Slowly,” came the command. “You’ve toned up, gorgeous. I’m liking.”
The temptress! Lyssa’s mental undressing of him wedged his cock against the seam of his fly, almost prizing the fabric apart. What he wouldn’t give to have her finish what he’d started, wrench his shorts down and feed his cock, first with her moist lips, then with her slick, spread-eagled pussy. The spicy taste of pyro vapor excited his nostrils and tongue, but he couldn’t open his eyes. They smarted whenever he tried.
Lyssa cleared her throat. “Um, I said slow, not stop.”
“My eyes sting. I can’t see.” He pulled his shirt off and tried to rub the vinegar from his eyes. No use.
“Just a sec.” A gentle clink followed by the sound of suction suggested Lyssa had dropped her pick and removed her own mask. “Wow, me too. Ah. Clay?”
“You all right?”
“No. The air’s clogged with vapor,” she said. “Okay, masks back on. Damn, that stings.”
“Tell me about it.” He reached down for his mask, missed it. His foot caught one of the loose rocks and he stumbled. After skidding on the pick handle, hearing the scrape of metal on stone, he flinched away from an intense heat. Something had burned into his leg. A spark?
Fizzzzzzzzzzzz…crack! Crack! Fizzzzzzzzzzzzz!
The heat mushroomed, drove him back. He fell onto the rocks and smashed his elbow. Pain flared, splintered, then vanished under fury. He wasn’t going out like this—blind and on his knees. He scrabbled through the rubble for his mask, found his backpack instead. Put that on. Luckily, the mask lay underneath it. He planted it over his head and didn’t bother adjusting the straps. Still he couldn’t open his eyes to more than an oily squint, but that was enough.
The pyro veins had ignited, and were burning like a web of fuses—deeper and deeper into the wall between Lyssa and himself.
“Christ, the whole goddamn mine’s gonna blow!” He vaulted over the trolley but misjudged the distance. He slid sideways and scraped the same elbow. Pain lanced through him. Lyssa was still struggling with her mask. He got to his feet and yanked her by the arm, toward the exit.
A shock of rock and thunder bore down all around them. Hot air and hurtful pellets blasted them from every angle. Clay grabbed Lyssa by the waist, flung her back toward the trolley, away from the collapsing roof—an entire section of the mine roared down, piled in moments. Unimaginable weight. Dust. A melee of red sparks.
He screamed for Lyssa to make for a gap in the wall, but his words were lost in the thunder. The blast had ripped a deep scar in the rock. He shoved her into it and flung himself after her. Fizz! Crack! Lyssa didn’t stop when he expected, and the momentum careered him forward off his feet. She helped him up. Though his eyes weren’t stinging anymore, the gap they staggered through was so dense with oily red vapor, he couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.
The scar branched right, widened considerably. The avalanche continued behind. Smoke and dust and the irascible fizz of pyro spat about his heels. Soon the red faded and the only light came from Lyssa’s helmet. The ground no longer shook. When Lyssa turned, the full dimensions of the gap they’d fled through towered above even the mine’s ceiling. The explosion must have ripped a hole through the wall of a higher chamber—its debris of massive rocks strewn about this larger inner sanctum dwarfed those of collapsed Stonehenge on Earth. How high was this hollow?
“Look up for me,” he said.
Startling scale. Her torch beam couldn’t penetrate high enough into the smoky darkness to discern a ceiling at all. Primal awe roused every hair on his body. The notion of shrinking into insignificance inside a mountain of unquantifiable scale—an alien mountain—lashed him to the spot.
She coughed, then prodded him to life again. “Best keep our bearings,” she said. “Left leads to the sea. We need to hang on to that, however long it takes. Clay, what the fuck just happened?”
He shook his head, adjusting the latex rim of her mask to ensure it was airtight. What had happened? From slipping on his pick to barely escaping a complete cave-in did not subscribe to cause and effect. What was so special about that particular section of the mine to give it softer rock, more volatile and flammable pyro, such potent fumes? Perhaps the answer lay on this side of the wall.
He veered her right. “Stay close to the wall. Keep a sharp eye.”
“No need.” Lyssa stopped and pinned him to her side. “Up ahead. In the wall. I can see two tall, no, short and—” she cocked her head, “—upside down?” Her edgy words had him scanning the torchlit contours too quickly. He was sure he must be missing something. “There, genius.” With a gloved hand she spun his head toward a barely sunken rectangle in the rock.
“Damn, you’ve got cracking night vision,” he said. “But what’s upside down?”
“Let’s see.”
Midstep, his stomach torqued. The ground seemed to give way beneath their feet. He grabbed hold of Lyssa’s arm and they toppled together…
…and hit the floor gently…
…as if they’d tripped over something that wasn’t there.
What the hell? The uneven ground remained unbroken, only…their boots were suspended in midair. He shared her perplexed scowl. His hands and stomach now lifted free from the floor without effort. Flying? Clay pushed up off the ground, but while the momentum righted him, he couldn’t stop. Soon he was wheeling in a backward spin, scrabbling for something to grip.
Lyssa caught him, slowed his spin, and they wheeled together, higher and higher up the wall, not quite in arm’s reach of it.
“Clay?”
“Zero-g,” he said. Banal. The frayed end of an inkling.
“No shit. How’s that possible? Gravity one second, then the next…”
“Don’t know. Hold on.”
She remained calm and observant, ever roving her lamplight up ahead of their rise. He’d admired that about her ever since their first double-crossing raid on one of those odious Kappa bookies. Lyssa Foaloak didn’t capsize under pressure. It wasn’t in her DNA. How many men could say that about their women?
“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, ge
latinous 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.
Sparks in Cosmic Dust Page 15
