Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin (16 page)

‘Yes,’ Ellie replied with a weak croak.

The woman knelt down beside Ellie with a creak of tight leather. Up close this woman’s face didn’t look quite so frightening. It softened still further as the faintest hint of a sympathetic smile crossed her glossy midnight lips.

‘Had a pretty nasty first day huh?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, fighting hard to keep a lid on the tears of frustration she wanted to spill.

The woman continued to study Ellie, her face was a model of sculpted porcelain, beautiful; the sort of face that could sell toothpaste or an energy drink, or in fact anything on the toob. It was a face, Ellie could imagine, that had probably never looked like hers did now - crumpled and blotched with anxiety and grief.

‘Let me help you,’ she said reaching out for what was left of Ellie’s possessions and wrapping them up in the tattered remnants of her shoulder bag. She held out a hand to Ellie.

Ellie glanced at it uncertainly. The woman, sighed impatiently, grasped Ellie’s upper arm and lifted her onto her feet with a surprising strength.

‘Come on limp-chick, I think you need a little bit of patching up.’

CHAPTER 21

Ellie stood in the doorway to the bar, unable to take a step forward.

‘It’s holo-décor floor girl, it’s not real,’ the woman laughed and shook her head, her glistening black bob waving gently like the wings of a bat.

Ellie stared at the flickering volcanic landscape below her. A cauldron of lava bubbled and spat hundreds of feet beneath them. The woman walked across to the bar, seemingly across an invisible force field and waved for Ellie to join her. Ellie took a tentative first step, her mind struggling to reassure her that the convincing illusion was nothing more than an effect projected against the floor. The second step was easier. Ellie caught up with the woman.

‘Totally drool, isn’t it?’ she said.

Ellie nodded. She looked around the bar. The woman had said it was called
Dantes
. The walls and low ceiling were flickering with the reflected fiery amber glow from the holographic projection beneath their feet. There were several small intimate booths around the walls. In the middle of Dante’s floor was a circular bar with a solitary barman standing idle in the middle.

Ellie watched with horror as a small table in one of the booths suddenly erupted into flames. Two men sitting at the table and arguing intensely about something, failed to even register the enormous jet of flames that billowed around their faces and then rose to the ceiling lazily as a small, livid mushroom cloud. From another booth a few seconds later a second jet of flames spurted from a table and drifted up to the ceiling where it discreetly faded out.

The woman watched with amusement at the expression of horror on Ellie’s face.

‘Relax. They’re just holos. Pretty tidy eh?’ she smiled.

Ellie nodded. ‘Totally…uh…
drool
.’

‘Listen, go find a quiet nook for us to sit in and I’ll bring you a little pick-me-up,’ the woman ordered.

Ellie didn’t feel like a drink, but she didn’t feel able to protest either. She nodded lethargically and headed towards a booth towards the back of the bar. She made her way across the glowing lava, staring down at the churning sea of magma, and wondering how merciful it might be if the glass floor beneath her opened up right now and dropped her into a lake of real lava.

She slumped down on a couch that curled around the little table. Both table and couch were flanked on either side by sturdy chrome poles that flickered with the distorted reflections of the churning lava and intermittent mushroom clouds of flames.

Despite the deep volcanic rumbling coming from the floor, and some gentle background music, the bar was a surprisingly soothing, almost restful place to be. It was empty, she noticed, except for the two men she’d seen engaged in a heated exchange in another booth. Given the crush outside on the street, she found that odd.

She watched the woman as she ordered some drinks from the barman. They seemed to be discussing something, and she saw the woman point her way. The barman turned to look at Ellie and then shook his head after he’d seen her. He handed the woman a couple of bottles and said something to her that clearly annoyed her. She replied with a hand gesture and walked over towards Ellie with two small, red bottles of drink.

She grabbed the chrome pole beside the couch and swung round gracefully on to the couch beside Ellie.

‘Why is it so empty?’ asked Ellie, seeking something to open a conversation with.

‘It’s not open yet is why. Doesn’t open until later in the evening.’

‘Oh,’ she replied, realizing there was no explanation forthcoming as to why they’d been let in.

The woman pushed one of the bottles across the table towards her. ‘Drink up, it’ll settle your nerves,’ she said.

Ellie looked up at the woman. ‘Thanks for…’

‘For what? Buying you a drink? Big deal…you just lost all your creds. I saw that druck rip you off girl. You did pretty good chasing him down and fighting to get your bag back. Plucky. You were pretty lucky though.’

‘Lucky?’

‘Yeah, he was thinking about doing you some serious hurt. I could see his hand going for something he was carrying. Maybe something pointy, or worse.’

Ellie felt a cold chill run over the backs of her arms. ‘But there were loads of people all around.’

‘You think that would make a difference? Not here I’m afraid.’

Ellie looked at the bottle in front of her. It was decorated with a red and yellow swoosh, a logo she was vaguely familiar with, perhaps an ad she’d seen on the toob.

‘It’s a Spartan. It’s good,’ said the woman.

Ellie took a sip of the ice cold drink, and immediately felt it chill her throat and warm her tummy an instant later. The woman took a swig of hers and then with no preamble at all, held her hand out across the table.

‘I’m Jez. And you are?’

‘Ellie.’

Ellie reached out and held her extended hand. Jez recoiled with embarrassment and shook her hand off. ‘What? Ew! No…no don’t
hold
my hand! Crud! Everyone will think we’re lebby-chiks. No like this…’

She held her hand out again and gestured for Ellie to do likewise. Jez then locked her thumb round Ellie’s and then waggled her fingers. Ellie copied her and the pair of hands locked together by thumbs looked like a bird flapping its wings.

It looked stupid to Ellie.

‘There you go,’ said Jez. ‘Pleased to meet you Ellie.’

Ellie offered a faltering, wary smile. Not entirely sure whether Jez wasn’t in some way softening her up for some cruel scam.

‘So, you’re what? Sixteen?…seventeen? You’ve left home, run away from some dull outpost somewhere on Harpers Reach to get to the big city. Am I right?’

‘All of it except I’m twenty, not sixteen.’

Jez’s eyes rounded. ‘You shizzling with me? Twenty?’

‘Yes. I know. I look younger. And I know sometimes people mistake me for a boy.’

Jez’s brow crumpled. ‘Sweet thing like you? Nah, you’re clearly a girl.’

‘Well that’s kind. I-’

‘So let me guess. You’ve seen images of New Haven all your life through the toob. It looks like a great place to live, full of exciting things happening…and you wanted some of that. How close am I?’

Ellie nodded once more. ‘That’s me, I’m afraid.’

‘And you came here thinking you’d find a job with no problem, somewhere nice to live and have a fine old time for a few years. Does that sum you up farm-girl?’

‘Mostly,’ she said, ‘but actually, one day, I want to get off Harpers Reach.’

The smile that had been slowly growing on Jez’s face vanished. She stared with an almost chilling absence of emotion at Ellie. The dark panda-like aura of eye shadow made her steel-grey eyes appear even wider.

‘
Leave
Harpers Reach?’ she whispered with a hint of incredulity in her voice as if the concept of such a thing had yet to be invented.

‘Yes,’ Ellie answered uncertainly. She took another slurp of her Spartan and immediately experienced the warmth spreading out from her stomach and up into her chest.

‘You mean that? Right? You really want to find a way off this mud ball?’

Ellie nodded. ‘I do. I’ve watched the interstellar ships come and go since I was a kid.’

‘
Leaving
Harpers Reach. That’s one hell of an
ask-you
young Ellie-from-the-wilderness. One hell of an ask.’

Jez impulsively grabbed Ellie’s hand and held it tightly in a way she had protested about and found so embarrassing only seconds earlier.

‘Oh Ellie, you crazy little frontier-puppy. There are so few people out there who have the gonads to say that – say they want to leave this world and explore the big ol’ black. They just can’t see there’s so much more to this…this…this dreg-hole than the crappy little cube they live in. Everyone in this little city is dead Allie, they just happen to still have a fregging pulse.’

‘It’s
Ellie
.’

Jez’s grip on her hand tightened. ‘I’ve finally found someone else who isn’t a walking corpse!
Find
!’

She took another big swig from her bottle and slammed it down on the table theatrically. ‘You know what? I want to get out of here too Ellie! That was the reason I came to this poisonous pustule of crudge in the first place. But for some stupid, crazy fregging reason I…I’m still here.’ Jez seemed to become distracted, as if she were sorting through some old memories. ‘I just seemed to have forgotten why I came here in the first place. This dreg-hole does that, you know. You’re working so fregging hard to keep from sliding under, you just forget everything else.’ Her eyes focused back on Ellie and all of a sudden, she grinned like a mischievous porcelain doll with a wonderfully wicked idea forming in her ceramic head.

‘You want to be cube-chicks?’

‘Cube-chicks?’

‘Yeah cube-chicks. Share a cube?’

Maybe it was the drink finding its way up through the bloodstream to her brain, but Ellie suddenly felt the first prickling of optimism. ‘I don’t have any creds, I…’

‘Oh, do shut your gaping food-sluice!’ she growled with a voice hoarse with excitement. ‘I’ll find you a job you limp-frimp, then you can pay half the rent with me.’

‘Uh, but we’re strangers and…’

‘Right. Fine. Let me fix that.’ Jez took a slug of her drink. ‘Here we go. I’m straight, I like going out and hitting the go-juice, I like men… I like men
a lot
, it can get kind of noisy in my cube. Hey, I watch the toob, sorry, but I like the quizzies, the gamer-shows and the sopa-drams. I like eating cruddy food from fast foodies, I’m untidy, messy, I swear a lot and I leave crud-loads of hair and gunk in the shower-trap, and if you ask me to clean up after me I’m likely to say ‘fregg off’. Okay? Now, I’m not a stranger any more.’

Ellie sprayed a mouthful of the frothy pink drink out though her nose on to the table as she snorted with laughter. Simultaneously, as if the table was sharing the joke, it erupted with a column of holographic fire that swirled and twisted around their heads and shoulders. Ellie jerked back in her seat and let out a yelp of surprise, spilling yet more of her drink over the table.

‘Was that spurt of Spartan a ‘yes’ Ellie-girl, eh? Say ‘yes’ you dippy-frontier-puppy!’ shouted Jez.

Ellie wiped the glutinous drink off her chin and nose with the back of her hand as Jez leant forward on her elbows, demanding an answer with an impish grin bathed in the flickering light of the flames that danced around her like a livid orange halo.

‘Cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks,’ she cajoled, her jaw working hard to keep repeating the tongue twisting mantra. ‘I can do this all night by the way. Cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks…’

Ellie could have cried, perhaps even screamed, for joy right then, right there.

‘Okay, okay!’ She grinned. ‘I’d like that. I’ll be your, uh….I’ll be a cube-chik!’

Jez reached across and punched her shoulder affectionately. ‘Excellent choice.’

CHAPTER 22

At that very moment, on the other side of Human Space, a high speed interstellar clipper had just picked up one very important passenger. An entire ship; the kind owned by or hired by trillionaires for journeys to the very edge of Human Space to witness exotic galactic phenomena or hunt the rarest of alien game, had been commissioned by the Administration at enormous cost to abandon its current grotesquely rich passengers on a remote refuelling station and divert across several solar systems to rendezvous with and pick up one of their very best ‘finger men’.

At that very moment; as Ellie Quin discovered salvation of a sort in the unlikely form of a six foot tall lap-dancer, this ‘finger man’ - Deacon - closed his eyes and eased back into the gel-seat ready for the nauseating sensation of the system-jump drive to fire up and kick in. The Administration had given him a brief, very much a to-the-point mission statement; to go through the possessions, the files, the scribblings of a certain Dr Edward Mason. Recently deceased. Apparently the old fool had quietly gone insane in recent years and decided to initiate a little unauthorized project. Nothing too fancy - just an attempt to orchestrate the complete annihilation of humanity.

They needed to find this ‘project’. If it was in fact already out there - out of the lab. And they had to find it fast.

Before it
activated
.

To be continued…

In

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ELLIE QUIN

(Book 2 in the Ellie Quin series)