Under the Ember Star. Charles Allen Gramlich
her and the outside and she patted it once and started around it. It moved with a low growl to block her way. She paused. The beast looked at her, then toward the door again as if it heard a sound she could not. Dagvyres were smart; no one knew quite how smart. Was this one sending her a message? If so, it got through.
Damn!
There was no time for this. Quickly, she moved back down the hall and turned left into the single small bathroom. She almost wished her lenses didn’t work quite so well. The fetor was bad enough, but to be able to see the spattered sources of the stench made her glad her stomach was empty.
Although the tavern itself had been set up inside an aboriginal building of stone, this back area had been constructed later, of desert burr-wood, and wasn’t nearly as sturdy. She could escape it. She hoped.
To the right of the disgusting toilet was a small window, far too small to climb through. But the wall beneath the window was so thin her lenses detected a sheen of light bleeding through seams in the wood. She drew her blaster, thumbed the selector to wide beam. She fired, held the trigger down for just a moment.
The flaring red-orange beam hissed like a griddle spattered with water, and a large oval of wood ignited with a crackle, then disintegrated into fiery ash. Ginn ducked and plunged through the hole, left hand covering her mouth and nose to avoid breathing embers. She landed in a crouch on hard packed dirt. For a moment, she hesitated.
From the alley out back of Red Jac’s, where the dagvyre had seemingly warned her of an ambush, a shout arose. And another. Two enemies at least. They would have heard her blaster. They’d be coming.
She could fight, Ginn thought. She wanted to fight. Then her mind centered on the vial she’d tucked inside her shirt. Her left hand reached to press against it, like a talisman between her breasts. She couldn’t risk it being damaged.
She holstered her blaster, lunged up from her crouch into a run for home.
CHAPTER TWO
The Apple and the Worm
Ginn’s mouth tasted foul. She tried to spit, found she had no saliva. Then she tried opening her eyes. One worked. A moment’s rubbing got the other open too. Her head ached. Even the dim purplish sun coming through the skylight above was too bright, and the fact it was morning told her she’d slept a long time. She’d gone to Red Jac’s almost fifteen standard hours before the Ember Star was due to rise out of Night for its own fourteen day reign.
Sitting up, she thrust blonde hair back from her face, let her bleary gaze take in her surroundings. She was at home, in her own bed. She’d managed to get off her lenses, jacket, boots, and blasters, but little else.
Terror stabbed at her then. The vial!
She spun around in her tangled sheets. There. Open on the bedside table. The packet.
She grabbed it up, breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the vial and syringe still intact inside. Greenish liquid moved viscously within, but not as much as when she’d opened the packet hours before.
“Four more doses,” she muttered to herself. “Just four.”
She started to return the packet to the table, thought better of it. She peeled off her sweat-stiffened black t-shirt and tossed it on the floor, then removed the vial from its packaging and used a strip of dura-tape to fix it to her chest over her sternum.
Rising on unsteady legs, she made her way to the bathroom, had a morning pee and considered brushing her teeth. Even the thought made the bile rise and she spat it yellow into the sink. She rinsed her mouth, swallowed a cupped handful of water. Her stomach growled but there’d be no eating just yet.
Stepping free of the bathroom again, she pulled on a looser t-shirt, also black, and then gathered her holstered blaster from the floor and strapped it around her waist. Long habit bade her put on her light-lenses too. The BDUs were military surplus and were serviceable for a while yet. She sat on the edge of the bed to work boots onto her feet.
This apartment had once been the manager’s second story office in a factory that produced hovercycles. The factory had closed; the manager had gone. Ginn had moved in. She had two rooms, three if you counted the tiny bathroom. There was a bigger main office and a smaller storeroom that she’d converted into her bedroom with scavenged materials. There was no running water, no electricity. She’d rigged a small recycler tank on the roof to provide water for the sink and toilet. She used her light-lenses if she needed to see in the dark. And no one knew where she lived.
“Are you awake at the last?” a voice called from what served as her front room.
On Kelmer, you didn’t freeze if you wanted to live. The blaster filled Ginn’s hand as she spun her bedside table to the floor and dropped behind it. The tabletop was thin burr-wood, but for just such an occasion as this she’d plated the underside with leftover plastisteel from the factory below. Even a blaster wouldn’t cut it easily.
“There is no need for weapons,” the voice from the other room called again. “I mean no harm to you. If I had, I would not have awaited your awakening.”
The voice carried no accent, which she’d normally take to mean ‘human.’ But the tones were too soft, too lyrical, and impossible to type as either male or female. Maybe it wasn’t human. But its logic was still unassailable. In her hurry to get the vial home, Ginn must have failed to take her usual precautions. She’d left her perimeter open and someone had walked through.
She didn’t move.
“I have brought kaftee,” the voice added. “I imagined you could use a cup.”
Ginn cursed under her breath. She’d been stupid. Coming to her feet, she holstered her own blaster but plucked up the one she’d taken last Night from Red Jac’s guard. She stepped cautiously through into the outer room.
A being muffled in aboriginal robes sat at one side of the office desk, which Ginn had pushed into the middle of the room and used as a dining table. A turban concealed the being’s head. Its face was veiled, its two hands gloved. Ginn catalogued the fine weave of the dark purple robes, the thin threads of copper-like native metal twined through the fabric so that it draped artfully. The metal alone told her that her visitor had wealth. Metal was scarce on Kelmer. Local metal at least.
“I don’t remember inviting you home so I’m gonna need to know who the hell you are,” Ginn said. She waggled the blaster back and forth in her hand.
“I will be glad to tell you. First, will you not have a bit of kaftee?”
A gloved hand gestured to a tall, black plastic mug sitting in the middle of the desk, then pushed it a few inches closer to Ginn. The drink was capped but Ginn still smelled the deliciously potent aroma from it. She swallowed saliva that burst across her tongue but made no move to touch the mug.
Her visitor sighed, popped the lid off the mug and lifted it in both hands to its mouth. It took a long sip directly through its veil, leaving behind a thin wet line and a hint of foam on the soft material. Once again the mug was placed before Ginn. This time she picked it up, in her left hand, and held it a moment.
“Doesn’t mean much if you’ve already taken the antidote,” Ginn commented.
“Considering the vivum you have so recently consumed, I do not believe you need worry anyway.”
Ginn’s poker face was solidly in place. She betrayed nothing, but her mind filed away one more question about this being. Who was it? What was it? How had it found her? How did it know about the vivum? Most importantly, what did it want from her?
Sitting down on her side of the desk, Ginn took a long swallow of the kaftee. It tasted like faintly bitter molasses laced with creamed butter, chocolate, and caffeine. Kaftee was a native drink, made from the seed pods of a desert plant, but the name came from Earth. The first humans to taste it claimed it reminded them of coffee and tea together. Ginn didn’t agree. She also didn’t care. The stuff was incredibly good, and rich with nutrients. And, like coffee, it had a stimulating effect on the nervous system. Right