Chapter One

She dreamed she flew through space, and the stars hated her. The very stars through which she cruised seemed to taunt her, red giants and white dwarves equally cold in the silent starscape.

O be a Fine Girl and Give us a Kill! You are our demon princess, blippie. Yo are the missionary of gloom, our emissary to life with this message. Though of star-stuff you are made, O life, to star-stuff you will return, and we shall mock your silent grave with our eternal furnaces.

She seemed imprisoned within this grim galaxy—no, not the Milky Way with its serene and graceful spirals like a dancing starfish, but a squat, stunted clustering of trillions of stars like some deep-sea creature, scuttling its phosphorescent way in the darkness. She rode her blip-ship—her new one, the XT Mark Nine—within this maze of baleful jewels, for once tripping over stellar gravity wells rather than skating them. Feeling pain from the radiation all about her compact ship, rather than thriving on the energies moving through space like invisible rainbows.

Her connections—the biotech jacks connecting her neural centers and her cybernetic components with the complex but dumb mechanical beast she flew—seemed to itch, and she could not scratch!

The stars, planets, asteroids, and all their attendant interstellar debris seemed to chuckle with one icy voice at the dilemma of this intruder within their midst.

Her sensors, previously displaying a complete holographic reading upon her environs, suddenly shut off, replaced with a skewed two-dimensional view of this dream-corner of the universe, like an old-time movie screen showing those antique "flicks" which Cal would dredge up from forgotten basement archives. On that screen she could not close her eyes to, came a series of snapshot images, spearing her brain with vivid pain:

—identity melding with a Conglomerate on the planet Walthor …

—the instant of panic and unsureness at the Starbow's attack upon the Ezekiel, fearing she would never see Cal again ….

On and on these images paraded, a scrapbook of sensations that had led her here to this dark galaxy, this dark dream ….

Look upon your kindred, the stars seemed to say. This is the heritage of life—and the only meaning granted by those who have spawned you is to serve them by killing and killing ….

No! cried Laura. I serve them no more! I am not their pawn! I have thrown my lot in with another cause.

But the dark stars simply laughed.

Don't you remember Laura Shemzak? You are our Angel of Death.

No! Laura thought, foreseeing the inevitable image that would come to her. No, I can't take it … not again!

But follow it did, relentlessly, and a moving image too—slow motion: Cal's young face, smiling before her; then the, sudden compulsion, the lifting of her gun, the pulling of the trigger, the expression on Cal's face just before he died—

No! she screamed, flailing at the image. No! she yelled at these dark, alien stars. Suddenly the wires within the snug cockpit drifted up like weightless snakes. They began coiling about her neck … coiling and constricting and strangling.

And the stars seemed to laugh, and they said. This is not yet the worst, Laura Shemzak. You shall later curse us for not killing you now!

Laura Shemzak awoke, sweating.

Her sheets were kicked and sprawled all about her, and she clutched her pillow desperately. Her hair was matted to her face by the sweat, the silken pajamas issued her by the Starbow commissary clinging all over her well-muscled body.

—Cal, her brother, being sucked aboard a Jaxdron ship on Mulliphen even as she was doing the Federation's dirty work ….

What a dream, she thought. She hadn't had a doozie like that one since she received her cybernetic implants over four years ago. She lay on the mattressed bunk of her compartment aboard the pirate/mercenary ship Starbow, feeling again the stark sense of aloneness and despair that had flooded her in that first terrible week of operations funded by the Federation: alone, unloved, comfort behind her and nothing but a dreadful unknown in the future, waiting for her like a cowled creature, face hidden.

Like then, she wanted to vomit, but she did not. Like then, she wished she was dead—but she hung on to survival. When her trials had registered years ago on esoteric medical vu-screens, they had rushed her to another room, and biochemical and biotechnical analyses were taken. She had sweated then, too, almost sweated away her very life it seemed, amidst the worried murmurs of the doctors.

And finally, as she lay in her room, her body seemingly nothing but newly bonded rearrangements of stitches and tissue—impregnated now with all manner of alien machinery and nano laced circuitry—they had come to her and said take this, it will make you feel better. Take it sparingly, for you will not need it often, but you will need it regularly to quell this experience when it arises.

They showed Laura Shemzak how to take the drug, and it seemed very simple. They had issued her a supply, along with painkillers, and it had simply seemed a part of being a blip-ship pilot.

She went and poured herself a glass of water, shuddering as the cool stuff slid down her throat, still feeling the despair encircling her in a swaddling of nothingness. Every cell in her body seemed to call out in need.

How odd, she thought with what rationality remained to her. I only took the drug just before this whole affair began. Generally, it lasted much longer.

She put the water glass down, sat unsteadily in a chair, pulled the right silk pants leg up from shin to knee and waited a moment for her hands to stop shaking. Then she struggled to remember the code. What the hell was wrong with her, anyway? Had all this Starbow business devastated her brain so much?

Then it came to her. She tapped her fingernails on the appropriate pressure spots, in the necessary order. A small servomotor hummed faintly, and a section of skin opened up to reveal a small compartment. She pulled Out a small plastic bag holding about three grams of blue powder.

Zernin.

It was fortunate that the organic nature of the substance blended with the rest of her, or Dr. Mish would surely have spotted the narcotic. And even pi-mercs might not approve.

But she needed it, she thought. She deserved it. It gave her just the right edge necessary for blip-ship piloting. It made her cells resonate with just the right notes to blend in with the songs of interstellar space. She was no addict, she reminded herself. How could you be an addict if you take only a very tiny bit perhaps once in a standard month? It was a necessary thing for blip-ship pilots, the Federation scientists had discovered. And so, they had given it to her, and it had kept her going, this wonderful substance.

As carefully as she could, she measured out a fraction of the powder then put the rest away, noting to herself that she couldn't risk going through another examination with Dr. Mish while carrying the bag. She would have to hide it somewhere.

The biotechs had designed the dispenser for this drug into her cybernetic system; it was usually very simple to take her allotted amount, tap open another cavity in her abdomen, then slip the blue powder into a receptacle which in turn would slowly dispense it into her system at the appropriate times. But this time her unsteadiness made the process difficult. All the frenetic activity of late—the chases, the terrors, the emotional drain—must have stepped up the need for the stuff. And she'd forgotten, what with all the excitement, that she needed a refill.

Finally the cavity was open, the dispenser unsnapped.

Shivering a bit, she lifted the paper, creased in the center, tapped the drug into place, and closed herself up. By the time she had her main supply secreted back in her calf, the drug was already kicking in. She leaned back in the chair, feeling the tension ebb away like an angry tide falling back into a calm sea. Things are not so bad after all, she thought.

She now felt peaceful and serene, yet magnificently alert on that private beach of hers, the zephyrs of the universe sweetly sighing her name, all its smells just for her. She yearned once more for the excitement of sailing the starlanes in her blip-ship, but knew that lying by this inner sea of hers would be enough for now.

And the stars above this tuneful surf inside a spaceship … those stars were laughing again.

Only this time, Laura Shemzak laughed with them.