The Sheriff of Yrnameer Read Online Free Page B

your—
    “It’s three forty-seven a.m., if you need to know. I’m not boring you, am I?”
    “No sir, officer.”
    “Keeping you from something?”
    “No.”
    “Goooooood!
We’ve really just started!”
    There was a quiz. Cole failed it. There was some review. Another twenty-two precious minutes disappeared forever.
    “Well, look at the time,” said the patbot finally, and it pressed a ticket into Cole’s hand, then zoomed away, humming to itself.
    Cole looked at the ticket. Two New Dollars.
    He gave a strangled scream and tried futilely to tear up the ticket, then crumpled it into a ball. It popped back into shape. Payper.
    “Ticket destruction is a crime,” said the ticket in a pleasant female voice. “Please cease and desist from—”
    He threw it to the pavement and stomped on it.
    Siren.
    “Now, now, now. No use trying to tear
that
. Surely you know about the structural characteristics of Payper. No? Well …”
    The time was three hours until dawn. The club was called Magma. There were small dim lights here and there, but most of the illumination came from the floor, or rather through the floor, the heat-shielded glass the only thing separating the customers from the languidly churning molten rock a few meters beneath their feet.
    The ride down had taken a while, Cole chewing his nails impatiently, his already unsteady stomach rising into his throat as the lift plunged toward the planet’s core. Layers of bars and clubs whipped by as Cole descended, visible through the transparent walls of the elevator.
    The lift paused at a few of the levels as club-goers climbed on and off, ready to party after sitting in cubicles and generating capital for hours or days or weeks, depending on their species and the substances they were being fed. Cole heard snippets of jazz and karaoke and the hideous screeching sounds that the Hmok liked.
    His right eye had finally closed. Now it was swollen shut. Unlike the businessfolk, none of the club-goers paid him any mind. He was far from the strangest creature on the lift.
    Cole wove his way through the lounge area of Magma, the music an unobtrusive bossa nova. Then he crossed the invisible auditory barrier at the edge of the dance floor, and the music changed instantly to an insistent, deafening beat. He dodged flailing limbs and wings and fins and membranous appendages, his single working eye making it hard to judge distances.
    Underneath him the magma swirled and flowed, and he thought fleetingly about the owner’s first effort, Lava, where the contractorshad specced out the wrong type of glass. On opening night, just as the revelry was reaching its peak, the glass disintegrated and the partyers suddenly became particles. Despite that fact—or perhaps because of it—Magma was even more popular than the first club.
    He checked his watch again. The lecture from the second patbot had cost him another forty-five minutes. Still enough time left, if barely.
    He was approaching the circular bar in the center of the club, searching for her, holding his breath. And there she was: Samantha. Everything would be all right now.
    “Samantha,” he said hoarsely, lurching toward her as happily as anyone could lurch, and she was coming toward him, her beauty even more enhanced by the gentle orange glow from the floor.
    “Samantha,” he repeated. “Oh, Samantha.”
    “Cole,” she replied. “Cole.”
    Then they both said “I’m so glad to see you” at the same time, and then they were embracing each other and talking at once, the words pouring out of them, saying thank God, thank God, and how much and how deeply they loved and needed each other and would never be apart again, not even for a moment, and it was wonderful and heavenly until Cole started to realize that he was the one doing most of the embracing, while Samantha was more sort of standing there, her arms at her sides, and what she was saying was less focused on the I Love You part and more dominated by phrases