GlimStar 005 - Starling and Blunt Instruments
Previously: Starling finds a companion and unexpected wealth in the Unknown Zone. He joins forces with the mysterious computer, Glimmer. They seek out humans to trade with but are met with drawn swords.
Part 001 - Starling and the Unknown Zone
Part 004 - Glimmer and Starling and the Lay of the Land
The man's accent was unfamiliar, his tone unmistakeable. "Slowly," he said.
"What's going on? Are they threatening you? How many are there?" Glimmer's voice was frightened, curious. "Can you ask them a question for me?"
"Not now," he hissed, as he slowly lifted her sling over his head. He felt as if a strange energy were flowing through him, as if he had fallen so deep into sleep that he had woken up on the other side of the dream. The sun was on his bare head. His body was light.
He glanced at the ruffian with a pipe to the right, the one with a pistol to the left. He felt the heft of Glimmer's casing as he lowered the sling. With one smooth motion he swung her up into the chin of the first man, who dropped his pipe and stumbled backward. He turned and sunk her into the gut of the second, who crumpled.
"What are you doing? Stop it. STOP IT-"
The last man was shouting, advancing with his revolver leveled. Starling spun Glimmer's sling a few times and threw it.
Her voice cut off as the headset disconnected. The sling zipped across the garage, spun the man's hat without knocking it off his head, and punched through the opposite wall.
The ruffian dropped his revolver and gaped. Starling's triumphant grin wilted, his arm still outstretched. The men he'd thought he'd laid out were climbing to their feet.
The moment passed. It wasn't a dream anymore. He quivered from head to toe. Bile rose in his throat. He was so very thirsty.
He turned and ran, sprinted as hard as he could, and his leathery desert body took him farther than he expected but he ran out of breath so fast he was shocked, and the stitch in his side was a metallic shout of pain. He glanced back to see the man he'd missed with Glimmer chasing him, obviously no better an athlete than Starling, fortunately without the revolver.
He scrambled back into the hills by the ravine. Both of them had slowed to a gasping jog, but the ruffian was gaining distance on him. He spotted a hole just wide enough to crawl into and skidded to a halt, trying to think, hoping nothing lived inside, wishing he hadn't done what he'd just done.
He glanced back, then dived into the hole, pushed and crawled and dug as fast as he could, and he kicked at the hands tugging at his feet as the dirt tightened around his shoulders. The man was bellowing something, but the sound of his own breath overwhelmed Starling's hearing.
The tugging stopped. He felt a thump on his feet, then another, as his pursuer threw rocks down the tunnel, and he clenched his fists. Hot tears of frustration soaked the dirt around his face.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. He whispered it to Glimmer, and to the men he'd attacked, and to his last business partners, and every customer he'd ripped off, every councilman he'd paid off, and to his mother, over and over again in the total darkness, until the cold on his feet told him night had come.
He blinked, took a breath, and dragged himself backward. One of his hands closed on something round and smooth, a cluster of large pebbles, he thought, and he pulled them out with him as he squirmed free of the hole.
The night was bright again. The orange cloud now covered half the sky, and the stars seemed more dim than that morning.
He sat up outside the hole and coughed. The stones in his hand were a creamy white, as far as he could tell in the odd light. He stuffed them in his pocket with the marbles. He could barely make out the hole in the back of the garage. Stretching his aching, cramped muscles, he picked his way down the side of the dry river bed.
He took a sip from the muddy, slow-moving river, and followed it to the slope Glimmer would have bounced down, a rainy season bank of fist-sized stones. His coat had caught on a shrub, and he shivered as he tugged it on. Tenderly, quietly, he searched.
The cloud grew, the stars fled nearly to the eastern horizon, and shrank, and he searched, patience fortified by the memory of Glimmer's voice. Once he collapsed, of hunger and fatigue and despair, but no sleep, no darkness could come, not while he was so close.
If the ruffians had noticed him they had given no sign. He traced the line between the hole in the garage and the opposite bank again and again as the morning light chased the orange cloud ahead of the stars, until he spotted her casing between two smaller stones in the mud by the river, a spot surrounded by his footprints.
He clutched her to his chest and wept again. "I'll never abandon you," he said, though he knew he could never say it when she could hear. With trembling hands he replaced the lead of the headset.
"Sorry," he said. "Want to try somewhere else?"