I spent two long years on a bleak world circling a cold sun on the edge of the Halcyon Drift. I was lucky. There was air, and water, and the local vegetation was digestible enough to keep me alive—just. I was also unlucky. My ship was smashed and my partner was dead and even with a bleep sending out a perpetual cry for help the situation had a hint of the hopeless about it. Those two years did me more harm than the half-a-lifetime I had spent in space. A spaceman’s expectancy of life is not so grand that two years can go missing and not matter.
I had little to occupy my time on the rock except survival and standing up the cross on Lapthorn’s grave every time the wind blew it down—which was often. I had memories, but I’m not a man to derive much warmth from memories, and they were more like ghosts that haunted me.
Ultimately, the wind began to talk to me. I listened. I was picked up by a ramrod which was searching for the legendary Lost Star and had homed in on the wrong bleep. The wind still talked to me—I had picked up a parasite, and acquired a companion for all time. I didn’t like him (I thought of it as ‘him’). He took some getting used to.
I felt bad enough after two years on the rock (I called it Lapthorn’s Grave) but the Caradoc Company, who owned the ramrod which lifted me, were intent on making things worse. They claimed a salvage fee. The court sided with them, and before I knew where I was I’d been dumped on Earth with a debt of twenty thousand hanging over the rest of my life like the Sword of Damocles. It’s a hard life.
I went to look up some people. The man who’d taught me to fly was dead. All that remained of my distant past was an empty workshop and Herault’s grandson. Lapthorn’s family were alive and well and interested, but I wanted nothing to do with them. I’d had my fill of ghosts and I wanted to forget poor Lapthorn. Even that was not to be. I had to get work, and the only work that was offered to me was a job flying the Hooded Swan for a New Alexandrian scientist/politician named Titus Charlot. The job was worth twenty thousand over two years but the contract I signed virtually sold my soul to Charlot. Charlot figured himself as puppet-master to the galaxy—alien races as welt as human. I didn’t see it that way, and neither did the galaxy. I knew as soon as I saw him that I was in for a rough spell.
The Swan was a great ship—the best—but her crew was makeshift. In the beginning she had a good engineer in Rothgar, but he soon figured out what was what and quit like a sensible man. The ones who stayed were all people I’d rather not have had around. Nick delArco was the captain—he’d built the ship and he was a very pleasant and gentle man, but he wasn’t competent to take charge of a perambulator. Eve Lapthorn was reserve pilot. Johnny Socoro—Herault’s grandson—was reserve engineer, and he got quick promotion, which made him big-headed as well as hot-headed.
Job number one was a crazy jaunt in pursuit of the good old legendary Lost Star bleep. It was a fashionable way of committing suicide just then. We won the race for our little-loved but much-respected owner, but nobody reaped much of a harvest from the affair. People got killed, including a friend of mine named Alachakh. People do get killed, I know, but I’m not a violent man and I don’t like to be around when it happens. The better I got to know Charlot the better I understood the fact that I was liable to be around when some more people got killed. The Companies, including Caradoc, were expanding at a phenomenal rate, and the commercial subjugation of the galaxy was well under way. New Alexandria and New Rome were the only forces trying to keep the lid on, and I was just one of the recruits to their cause. I didn’t know how long the balance of power would stay balanced, but I knew I didn’t want to be around when it tipped. Trouble and strife were on the way, and I didn’t like the prospect of being a pawn in the game.
I handled the Lost Star affair brilliantly. But that was only the beginning.