Star Dancer

By Tom Olbert

In a dark future, the orbiting Mars Platforms are an independent space nation and open trading port where every vice known to man is legally practiced.

Sabine DeGuerra is a professional concubine with a long list of wealthy clients. A master of dance, mathematics and martial arts as well as sex, Sabine makes a comfortable livin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gypsy Shadow Publishing
• Release date: Nov 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781619506282

Tom Olbert

Tom Olbert lives in Cambridge, MA. His sci-fi and horror fiction has appeared in Lillicat Publisher's "Visions" series and in Mocha Memoirs Press anthologies "In The Bloodstream" and "An Improbable Truth: The Paranormal Adventures of Sherlock Holmes". Tom's full-length science fiction novel "Dissent: Book I in The Nexus" is now available from Phase5 Publishing.

Book preview

Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

About the Author

Star Dancer

by

Tom Olbert

All rights reserved

Copyright © October 14, 2019, Thomas Olbert

Cover Art Copyright © 2020, Charlotte Holley

Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

Lockhart, TX

www.gypsyshadow.com

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

ISBN: 978-1-61950-628-2

Published in the United States of America

First eBook Edition: August 10, 2020

Dedication

For my parents

Chapter 1

Sabine spun in a soundless black vacuum, her blood racing in zero gravity as her tether line was severed a hundred miles above the surface of Mars.

Her heart pounded, her breath fogging the glass of her oxygen helmet. She hurtled past the spheres and docking tubes of the space Platforms, against the burning orange curve of the planet below. She saw the sparkle of the sun rising over the horizon, glittering silver across the polar ice caps. The stars twinkled mockingly in the black void above, cold and distant. Come, lost little lamb… the voice of that sick bastard came scratching through her earphones. She looked up, seeing the rocket line he’d fired at her twisting, glittering in the weak sunlight, a silver strand. The freezing vapor of his rocket gun dissipated in a glimmer of frost, his free hand beckoning mockingly. She could almost see his cold eyes as she fell away from him. As she had in that moment, he’d sliced through her tether line with a vibro knife.

She saw the game, childish as it was. He wanted her to reach desperately, pleadingly for the line. He wanted to hold her life in his hands. To hear her beg, humbled. Fuck you, you little prick, she said defiantly as she seized the grapple-like head of the line, fighting to keep the edge of anger out of her voice, even as her heart slammed her chest.

You think this is a game, bitch? his gravelly voice spluttered out through clenched teeth. No one’s coming out to get you. Your life is mine, you hear me?

She heard his frustration in the quaver of his voice. She managed a smile, even through the fear, which was already becoming a rush. Good, she thought. Keep him angry, keep him off balance.

C’mere, bitch, he growled as he activated the pulley in the rocket gun. She saw the distance closing between them as the line was reeled in. He pulled the vibro knife from his belt pack, activated the blade and swept it threateningly back and forth, like a sickle.

You are boring me, you limp little freak, she taunted him, all the while calculating the angle of her trajectory relative to the upsweeping agro-sphere at the end of the revolving tube at the nearest Platform’s middle section. The timing had to be perfect. You can do this, she assured herself. Why not? She’d made a lucrative career by calculating the physical intricacies of sex in Zero-G. And her teachers in the finest schools from Luna to Venus had complimented her on her extraordinary mathematical aptitude. Numbers she could embrace; one more thing to take precious space away from feeling. Her thoughts raced even as another part of her mind calculated. The angle of trajectory against the speed of the rotation, the rate the line was retracting, the center of mass, the length of the tether at the right moment… Her breath accelerated as she tinkered with the electrical system in her suit, swearing under her breath as her gloved fingers clumsily struggled with two live contacts. Sweat beaded on her forehead as the last remaining seconds ticked off. Now.

She opened the valve on her suit’s recycling system and sparked the two contacts together, igniting the escaping flammable gas before it could freeze. The make-shift jet flared in the icy vacuum, knocking her aside. As she swung downward, the bastard at the opposite end of the tether of course swung upward, his counterweight giving her just enough kick to intercept the agro-sphere