Читать книгу Under the Ember Star - Charles Allen Gramlich - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

A Hot Time in Old Towne Tonight

Ginn Hollis slipped down the alley behind Red Jac’s Tavern #4, her right fist folded around the butt of her blaster. Her breathing was soft; her hunt-boots made no sound.

It was the last day of Night and the world was a dim, cold place. Ginn wore a heavy jacket and insulated BDUs against the chill, and light-lenses—which resembled a pair of green wraparound sunglasses but had the opposite effect—enhanced the near darkness for her. With the lenses activated, piles of trash formed shadows against a gray background while scuttling bugs left yellow and red streaks. She stepped over a silver ribbon of spreading vomit.

Her nostrils curled. The vomit was fresh, stinking.

Sage mead. It smelled foul even when unadulterated with stomach acids. But at least whoever had heaved up a night’s consumption was gone. Back inside the bar, she imagined.

Three rickety wooden steps took Ginn up to the rear door of Red Jac’s. She paused, drawing her blaster. In the near distance she detected the ever present hum of the space port, and half the ambient light that filtered into this back alley came from the glow there. Even closer, from within the much darker settlement called Old Towne that surrounded the bar, she heard harsh laughter and someone butchering a song; she heard a scream that cut off abruptly. At the tavern’s door she heard nothing. Yet the silence promised menace.

Leaning close to the door’s weathered boards, she whispered. “It’s Ginn.”

The menace coalesced into a sound then, a low, rumbling growl that ended in a faint huff of expelled air. Ginn’s hand found the door-latch, lifted it. She eased the door back. A shadowy bulk stalked toward her; the growl repeated. A pair of slanted eyes flared green under the enhancement from her lenses. She stood very still as the dagvyre sniffed her, relaxed as it whined and licked her hand. She scratched behind its horns.

“Good dog,” she murmured, though dagvyres were native to this world of Kelmer and only vaguely resembled the pets she’d known as a child on Earth.

This one was a guard beast, as many dagvyres were. Only, Ginn had taken time to get to know it, to give it something to kill the sand-fleas infesting it, to feed it over weeks as she fed it now with a chunk of dark-meat. And so, it did not consider her someone to guard against.

She strode past the animal and down a short hallway.

A locked storage room loomed on the right. A stench on the left marked the bathroom. In front of her stood the door to the main tavern area. It would be much brighter there than in this hallway, but her light-lenses would adjust automatically. She jerked open the door and stepped through.

A guard stood before her. Not a dagvyre. A man. A big one. He wasn’t as ready for trouble as Ginn was. In twin, fluid movements, she thrust the barrel of her blaster into his side and with her left hand plucked his weapon free of its holster.

“Wha—” he started to protest, and she slashed him over the head with his own gun. He went down, and though he wasn’t completely out there was no fight left in him.

The stocky bartender had some fight, some thought of it anyway. His hand streaked toward his cash register.

“Unh uh,” Ginn said, jabbing the killing end of her blaster in his direction.

The man froze, then slowly placed both hands on the scarred surface of the bar where she could see them.

“Smarter than you look,” Ginn said.

The bartender smiled faintly, though it didn’t extend to the flat, mud-brown of his eyes.

No customers sat at the bar itself and Ginn’s gaze had already taken in the tables beyond. Of the three individuals there, two were human and looked like orbit truckers long gone into their cups. Neither did more than blink at her owlishly.

The third being was an aborigine, a Kelmerian. This one was an employee of Red Jac’s, a fire-gyrl as they were called. Its thorn-thin body hid behind opaque silks, with padding beneath to hint at womanly curves. A mantilla covered the hairless, oval-shaped skull, but the revealed face—except for the lack of a nose—was fine and delicate and close to human, with the lush mouth and large, thickly lashed almond eyes that many men found sexually arousing. Those eyes were glazed now. Drugged. Ginn looked away.

“I’m here to take delivery,” Ginn said to the bartender, her voice suddenly rough.

The man frowned, as if he didn’t understand, and Ginn’s finger caressed lightly along the trigger of her blaster. The weapon’s barrel flared red and the man jerked as a tiny pulse of heat reached out and curled around him. He knew how easily that heat could be followed by flame.

“I understand,” Ginn said. “You want it to look good for your boss. But I know your boss and he’s going to be pissed anyway. So you might as well save yourself some pain.”

The man’s lips smacked dryly as he opened them, but he didn’t speak. His hand drifted again toward the register.

“Only the vial,” Ginn warned. “Leave the needler you’ve stashed in there alone.”

The man nodded, opened the register and slowly drew out a plastic sealed package about the size of a playing card. He slid it along the bar toward Ginn.

Ginn waited until the man reclosed the register, then tucked the guard’s blaster behind her belt and picked up the package to slip it inside her jacket and down the front of her tight black tee. She motioned with her own blaster for the bartender to lie on the floor beside the dazed guard. He obeyed.

“Taylesh,” Ginn said, using the native word for thanks.

She then took what looked like a small button out of one pocket of her BDUs and pressed the center of it with her thumb before laying it on the bar. A faint whine grew in the air. A grid of hair-thin green lines built itself around the two men on the floor.

“This goes boom,” she said for the men’s benefit. “Lay there for fifteen minutes and it’ll deactivate. If anyone touches it or you two get up before then, you won’t have to worry about your boss being pissed.”

She backed into the hallway, turned toward the exit while holstering her blaster. The dagvyre stood between 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.