Under the Ember Star. Charles Allen Gramlich

      “Red Jac’s men—”

      “Red Jac’s men were after you. I knew it as soon as I saw them. A pulse cannon!” She shook her head. “Not for me. Jac’s gonna want me alive. Gonna want back what I took from him. Has to be you they wanna ash.”

      The being shuddered, plucked helplessly at its gore-smeared robes.

      “I’ll pay,” it said finally. “For today. Also to hire you. If you will take the work.”

      Ginn smiled. “I want another apple, too,” she added.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Under the Ember Star

      From behind a jumble of boulders, Ginn watched the hovercar’s dust recede at high speed across the flat and almost featureless pan of the Karst Desert. If Red Jac’s men pursued, and she imagined they would, they’d almost certainly follow the fleeing car by its dust plume. Too late would they discover that the car’s only passengers were already dead.

      She turned then and threaded her way among the boulders toward the main wall of the vast escarpment that bordered this western edge of the desert. Overhead in a sky the color of muscadine grapes, the ember sun burned dim and dusky but seemed to provide no heat. She glanced up at it. Her light-lenses darkened to compensate for the glare, though not nearly as much as they would have on Earth.

      Gateeri. The Ember Star.

      Ginn knew the Kelmerian sun’s official name. But no one ever called it that. The ember star was a dying red dwarf. Half a million years ago, long before humans had taken to space, Gateeri had provided enough light and heat to nourish a rich biosphere on Kelmer, its second planet. It had nourished a sentient species as well, a species that developed a worldwide civilization. Then, over a period of some hundred thousand years, Gateeri started to fail. The Kelmerian civilization collapsed into savagery. Life itself began to struggle. Until someone from outside intervened.

      Ginn glanced away from the ember star, to the north and then the south. Not far above the horizon in each of those directions hung a brilliant whirl of luminosity that put Gateeri to shame. Humans generally called them the “Collectors.” Many natives called them Gods, and believed that because they rotated in opposite directions that one represented the male energy and the other the female.

      They were really machines, giant, quantum machines. Built by a race that far outstripped humanity in technology, they looked like massive, glowing hurricanes in orbit above the planet. Between them, they gathered the weak radiation of the ember star, gathered it, focused it, fed it in wide swathes onto the surface of the planet below. Without them, Kelmer would have long since become a frozen, lifeless world, as sections called the Silent Zones already had. Because of the Collectors, the Kelmerian Days were about as bright as a heavily clouded afternoon on Earth. And large areas of the planet’s surface were still habitable, with normal Day-time temps ranging from twenty below to twenty above zero Celsius.

      Certainly not for the first time, Ginn wondered about the race that created the Collectors. And why they’d done it. It wasn’t the Kelmerians. Because of their metal poor world, Kelmer’s natives had built a technology based almost exclusively on wood and stone. They’d never achieved space flight, never even mastered powered vehicles. The plentiful ruins dotting the planet proved that.

      So why had some alien race decided to save life on Kelmer? Had they planned to colonize and aborted that plan? Were they just good Samaritans? Or had there been some other reason?

      The mystery of the Collectors had called Ginn’s physicist father to Kelmer some thirteen standard years ago. The Collectors themselves were protected by force fields no human technology could pierce, so Jake Hollis had ranged Kelmer’s surface in hopes of picking up clues to their origins. That search finally killed him, leaving his fourteen-year-old daughter alone.

      Ginn looked away from the sky and down to the umber dirt. She rubbed her eyes under her lenses and spat a heatless curse that combined the words of her old world and her new. Then she stalked on, coming out of the field of boulders and entering one of the many wind-scoured caves that honeycombed the Karst escarpment. Her companion, her fellow escapee, squatted quietly there, looking up when she entered. The blood of dead men had finally dried on its robes.

      She tossed two nearly full canteens, a med kit and another hand blaster down beside the being. She’d appropriated a wicked looking SSK subsonic knife for herself from the hovercar, and the insulated jacket one corpse had worn. It was only lightly singed and stained around the collar.

      “I set the car on autopilot after I stripped it,” Ginn said. “Flat as the desert is, she might run five hundred miles before something goes wrong.”

      The being nodded. “A wise strategy.”

      “Did you contact your people?”

      “I activated my signal. They will find us. They are nomads. As I’m sure you expected. Yet it may be some hours before they arrive. In the Day they will have to move quietly to avoid telltale dust.”

      “Good thing Red Jac’s men don’t have flyers.”

      “Are you sure they do not?”

      Ginn shrugged. “Earth’s navy controls Kelmer. They keep an eye on the nomads from orbit and they’ve got plenty of firepower. They don’t allow unauthorized air travel. I suppose Jac could have bribed somebody but I doubt he’d risk a flyer on anything but the rarest emergency. He isn’t stupid enough to beg attention from the military.”

      The other nodded again. It picked up the extra blaster, held it as if it weren’t quite sure what the weapon was for.

      “Look,” Ginn said. “At least tell me your name. I’m tired of calling you ‘hey’.”

      Beneath its veil, the entity’s mouth twitched in what might have been a brief, faint smile. Or might have been something else entirely.

      “I am Duash-tei-tei-varzan alh Corovaneen,” it said. “My human...acquaintances generally call me ‘Duash’.”

      “Acquaintances? Don’t you have any friends?”

      “You know as well as I that humans and ‘Kelms’ are never truly friends.”

      “‘Kelms’ is not necessarily an insult,” Ginn said. “I don’t use it that way. And appropriating the term for yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you are what you claim. Native robes have served to confuse before. Maybe you should show your new employee your face. Get everything into the open, so to speak.”

      There followed a long silence, but just when Ginn began to think Duash would refuse, the being reached up and withdrew some of the pins holding its veil in place. It tugged gently, and the cloth came loose at one side and slithered to the shoulder.

      Ginn didn’t gasp but she came close. The face was more human than any Kelmerian she’d ever seen, but it wasn’t completely human. The gray eyes were almost unheard of, and the mouth was smaller than the Kelm norm. There was a chin, which natives lacked. She even glimpsed teeth behind the parted lips where Kelmerians carried only rough cartilage. But the nose! There was no nose, and no scars to suggest that one had been removed. Kelmerians lacked noses, though many wore prosthetics when dealing with humans.

      “What are you?” Ginn blurted.

      “I am that which they say cannot exist.”

      “And that would be?”

      “A hybrid. My ‘mother’ was Kelmerian. My ‘father,’ human.”

      “Impossible,” Ginn protested.

      Duash shrugged thin shoulders. “As I said. That which cannot exist.”

      “Evolution doesn’t work that way,” Ginn argued. “For one, Kelmerians don’t possess DNA. There’s no genetic compatibility between our races.”

      Duash shrugged again. “You tell me nothing I have not known before. Yet,” it gestured at its own body, “I am.”