Adam and Keryn exchanged glances. “So what now?” he asked.
“Now, I think it’s about time you bought me a drink, honey,” she said with a sickly sweetness. They stepped away from the booth and began heading up the street.
“What about my money?” the merchant yelled behind them.
Adam glanced over his shoulder. “We changed our minds about that too!”
CHAPTER 5:
Keryn and Adam slipped into the Black Void, allowing the door to stay open only briefly in order to minimize the amount of bright light that flooded into the dark bar. Their silhouettes were gone from the doorway before most patrons registered that the door had been opened.
Thick, acrid smoke hung like curtains within the Black Void and a mixture of voices and languages overwhelmed the senses. The center of the room housed an assortment of tables and stools, some crafted to support the physiology of the more rare races. A large crescent bar dominated the back wall, with an assortment of alcoholic beverages as wide-ranging as the clientele of the Void. Keryn and Adam, however, pushed their way through the crowd and found seats in the booths that lined both side walls. The tall backs of the benches and taller dividing walls allowed privacy while also minimizing background noise enough that they could hold a conversation. The benches were as much a statement of life in Miller’s Glen as the armed bodyguards that lined the street. The tall backs had been built to allow privacy from prying eyes and probing intrusions during immoral practices and illegal transactions, allowing dark dealings to take place in so public an arena.
Keryn felt uncomfortable as she took her seat. Adam had taken the seat facing the bar itself, while she had been forced to sit across from him with a view only of the front door. While both observation views were necessary for their mission, Keryn felt exposed and vulnerable without being able to see who was approaching the table from behind her. Reaching beneath the table, she unlatched the locking mechanism that held her sidearm in its holster. She felt a momentary relief knowing that she could now easily draw her pistol, should the need arise.
“Do you see him?” Keryn asked, cursing herself again for placing herself with no observation of the bar. Judging from Adam’s narrowed eyes, he had already spotted Cardax among the crowd.
“He’s at the bar, along with a couple of his crew,” Adam replied.
Cardax’s large Oterian body dominated the area around the bar. His size was eclipsed only by the amount of noise he made while barking orders to both his cohorts and the patrons of the bar who, unfortunately for them, sat too close. Even from where they sat, his loud voice carried through the thick air and din of conversations.
“What the hell are you looking at, dog?” Cardax yelled at one of the drunkards who only barely held himself steady on a stool at the bar. Swinging his massive arm, Cardax lifted the man from the barstool, watching as he crashed limply into one of the nearby tables. His guffaws carried across the room, accompanied by the prodded laughter of those in his proximity.
In the ensuing silence, a woman approached the table. Keryn tensed at her approach, unaware of her presence until she appeared suddenly at her side. Haggard and worn, the older woman, frocked in a dirty dress whose color matched the dark wood of the Void, exuded a sense of misery and apathy.
“What can I get you?” she asked brusquely, her thin patience already worn from the long day’s work.
“What do you have on tap?” Adam asked nonchalantly. The woman glowered at him with undisguised hatred.
“We’ll have two of whatever is on tap,” Keryn quickly interceded. The quicker the woman left, the less attention would be drawn to the booth in which they found themselves hiding.
“Coming right up.” Turning, the woman walked away in disgust.
“A friendly bunch, here,” Adam said drolly.
“Focus less on your drink,” Keryn warned, “and more on Cardax. Is he still up front?”
Adam glanced past her shoulder to the front of the bar. Cardax’s large frame still dominated the area as he broke into another story of his pirating adventures. He seemed at ease in the bar, as though he were a frequent customer. Even the bartender seemed to cater to the massive smuggler. His minions, however, responded robotically to the Oterian’s moods. When he laughed, they laughed in response. When he grew angry, they flashed steely eyes around the room and rested their hands on the butt of their pistols. They were clearly less his friends, and more his bodyguards.
“He’s still there, but I’m getting concerned about the growth of his following,” Adam remarked. “It seems that he has an ever expanding legion of peons and pissants. If we get spotted here, we may be in for more of a fight than what we bargained for.”
“Then keep your head down and try not to be seen,” she advised. She wanted to crane her head around the side of the booth and observe the action for herself. Instead, she began mentally marking her avenues of assault, in case a gunfight was unavoidable. With a limited view of the bar, however, she returned to her role of watching the door. After a few minutes of watching, one Avalon was all that entered, his wings ragged and his clothes dirty. He walked past all the tables and took a spot on the opposite end of the bar from Cardax. If this was to be her reconnaissance duty for the night, it would be a long night indeed.
“The waitress is coming back,” Adam warned, mere moments before the older woman reappeared with two metal mugs in her hand. She gracelessly dropped the mugs on the table, sloshing pungent brown liquor onto the table. Adam handed her a five-piece note and shooed her on her way.
Leaning forward, Adam sniffed his mug. “This smells awful!” he exclaimed, his nose twitching as though he were fighting off the urge to sneeze. “This is exactly why you should always give me a chance to find out our options before ordering a drink. I don’t know if this is Lithid Uapa or a Yulon home brew, though I believe that both of them are capable of melting through the hull of a ship,” he muttered to himself.
Keryn didn’t seem to hear his complaints. She looked into her own glass and immediately recoiled as something sinister surfaced in the liquid. “I’m not sure what this is,” she began, “but there is no way in the known universe that you are going to get me to drink this.”
Laughing, Adam shrugged. “We can always take it home with us and use it to clean our weapon parts.”
“My weapon hasn’t even done anything bad enough to deserve treatment like this,” she said, horrified. “I mean, there’s actually something floating in my drink.”
Adam raised his eyebrow in curiosity. He reached across, grabbing her glass and tilting it toward him, spilling a little more of the liquor onto the table. It quickly congealed into a sticky mess.
“I’m at a loss. I have no idea what this is,” he said as he let go of her glass and pulled his arm back across the table. As he did, his elbow nudged his own mug, which went spiraling off the side of the table and struck the ground, dumping out its contents onto the boot of a passing patron.
“Hey,” the patron yelled, “watch what the hell you’re doing! Do you know who I am?”
Adam reached down to pick up his mug. “I’m really sorry, it was an accident.” He looked up at the plump Terran as he retrieved his fallen glass. “Maybe I can give you some money for new…”
Both Adam and the Terran paused in mid sentence. Adam immediately recognized the Terran, though last time they had seen each other, the Terran had been firing a pistol at him while covering Cardax’s escape from Pteraxis.
“You!” the Terran hissed, flinging back his coat and reaching for the pistol strapped to his leg.
Adam reached for the rifle under his coat, but couldn’t maneuver the long weapon while leaning over out of the booth. He lunged backward in an attempt to bring the rifle to bear, but found himself, instead, staring down the barrel of the Terran’s loaded handgun. Stuck in the narrow booth with no hope of getting to his rifle, Adam squeezed his eyes shut and awaiting the gunshot. The gunshot reverberated in the confines of the booth and Adam jerked involuntarily. Moments later, however, he realized that he hadn’t been shot and quickly opened one eye.