Chapter One
Somewhere in the glowing tawny night, they waited.
Amber was safe enough here until sunrise when the air would turn black and the stars come out.
Calyptra was a fucked up world for sure. The days looked like nights as they looked from space: the sun amid stars. The nights glowed like the heart of a sandstorm. Orange and yellow air moved overhead; deep red lines wriggled and flickered horizon to horizon. As the sun rose, all of it would evanesce; gasses and particulate matter would be drawn into natural vents in the earth like tornadoes in reverse.
Surface features were obscured. Amber’s meagre camp hid among thin spidery trees that grew along the ridge on which she stood. To either side below, grey leaved scrub forced its tortured way up through soil the colour of beach sand. At about twenty yards, details began to blur. At forty, there was only the burning, blowing air.
Looking up, Amber could see further. She looked East—well, the direction the sun had risen anyway. Five miles distant, on a ridge much higher up, was what she was sure was an artificial structure.
Despite the detail obscuring distance, the edifice reminded Amber of castles out of the stories of her childhood. She remembered with a shudder that some of those tales had included the undead. This place just squeezed terrifying thoughts from her brain. The asthmatic wind did nothing to improve matters.
Which observation brought Amber back to her predicament. Something had been hunting her for the last few days. She had dismissed the signs of predation on the small fauna she had occasionally spotted. At first.
The kills became more frequent the further she travelled. They also became fresher. Scat too large to belong to the victims she’d encountered began to appear regularly, too. Then there were the tracks.
Though not a tracker, Amber had some experience in various wildernesses; enough, at least, to conclude that she was keeping distant company with warm-blooded hexapods with three foot strides. The sizes of the clusters of paw prints meant they were likely pack hunters.
Amber had yet to spot a single one of them.
She had seen no large animals that could serve as a steady food source for whatever predators there surely were. Amber didn’t relish becoming something’s meal; not that kind of meal, anyway.
Lust briefly surfaced as she tried to recall the last time she’d had a righteous pounding. The feeling didn’t last, though.
Whatever these things were, they only hunted during the night, which gave her a bit of an advantage. Amber suspected she could see better in the glowing dark than the native life could.
She also managed to find a way to keep them at bay. Fire was too hard to maintain but the hunters apparently didn’t care for the smell of her perfume.
Amber had hauled cases of it for barter on Glyph. Though she’d had to abandon most of it with the wreck of her ship, she had brought several bottles of the eye-stingingly powerful stuff with her once she realized that none of the native species of animal could stand to be near it.
Merely sprinkling it generously in a circle around the tent she slept in every night did wonders for her peace of mind, though she didn’t much care for the odour, either. A mental shrug. Better than a bloody death in her sleep.
Travel by day was easy, but strange. The sky was black and frosted with stars. The sun was small and white and too bright to look at directly. Everything was brightly lit, the shadows of trees and scrub sharp-edged. It was warm, the air mostly still. Amber kept thinking it should be freezing cold.
⁂
After spraying the sickening perfume around the camp and setting up electronic wards, Amber crawled into her tent and lay, fully clothed atop the foam mattress, trying to let go of her waking mind. When she finally managed it, her unconscious had a tale to tell about cadaverous naked ghosts stealing the breath from her lungs on a world suddenly devoid of air, as animals howled like the damned in the distant hills.
