Nightsword A Starshield Novel

His Name Was L'Zari. He gripped the thrumming stay line, his youthful hands white, drained of blood in his fear and desperation. A snarling wind whipped his hair about his face, belying the fact that he was inside the protective dome of the ship. How could a wind blow inside the protective dome of the ship. How, indeed, he thought savagely, could anything that he had experienced over the last few weeks have been real. His legs were braced against the grandyard boom some thirty feet above the deck. L'Zari had inconspicuously slipped both feet underneath the stay cables running the top length of the massive yard, despite the warnings of other spacers that he might just lose a foot that way. The youth had gone beyond caring as he clung high in the rigging of the starship. He knew little of the trade, in any event which, he suspected, was hanging here in the midst of a quantum gale. All about him, up ratlines and occasionally across the backyards, the spacers moved nimbly from task to task as they were called out from the deck below them. L'Zari knew there were watching him with great amusement of their own superiority here in the rigging. They meant to teach him his place. He already knew his place, he thought grimly and he fervently hoped that it was a place back down there on the deck swinging far below him. At least there you don't have quite so far to fall, he thought angrily to himself. At least there you had a much better chance of actually hitting the deck instead of missing it altogether and falling into stars. The stars. He looked up the mast toward those same romantic stars that had called him here or so he had fancied in his imagination that they had done. They were there: so many and so bright. There were far more than one might except here among the brilliantly-lit dust clouds surrounding the ship. Toward the rim such clouds would have obscured most of the stellar bodies beyond, limiting one's view to a few stars and the great nebulae that hung in interstellar space. Not there. Here the ship rushed upward along the Maelstrom Wall, that vicious curtain of quantum fury at the very edge of the galactic core. Here the stars were so thickly clustered that it was difficult to avoid that even when boring down a tunnel through the nebular mass itself. The ship to which he clung so desperately was rushing upward through just such a cavernous drift in the Wall. the Knight Fortune a ludicrous name, chosen by an apparent idiot, L'Zari thought was of Aendorian design, or at least had been crafted on that world after the manner of the core explorers. Her shape was generally spherical, compressed somewhat along her vertical axis so that her cross section suggested something of an oval. The hull forming the bowl like bottom of the ship swept upward into three great, curving prows that arched over the main deck until they nearly touched the mast. The ancient Aendorian totemic forms and symbols covered the hull itself, which if the legends were true, would have been frown to this exact shape by the mystic artists of that world. The main deck was cradled within the triple fingers of those prows with access to the several decks below and the massive cargo hold. Running through it all was the drive-tree the core of the ship. It began beneath the center of the hull with the massive kneelbob another foolish spacer name, L'Zari thought. He couldn't see it now but had gotten a good look at its brilliant brass finish, tooled down to a spike, when the ship had been careened on E'knar a few weeks ago. The kneelob alone was nearly four times his own height. The mast extended upward from the bob, through the center of the intervening decks, and past the clear bubble of atmosphere into the vacuum of space itself. Along the mast were mounted several booms. Lanyards to each from the deck below repositioned them as the prevailing quantum weather dictated. It was this massive comWeis, Margaret is the author of 'Nightsword A Starshield Novel', published 1995 under ISBN 9780345471697 and ISBN 0345471695.