Book 3 - Star's End Read Free

derelict tumbling along in their midst,
guarded by their shell of fire. One by one, the five great ships
rolled to present their heaviest weapons outward from a common
center.
     
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Two: 3049 AD
The Contemporary Scene
    A ship came into being slightly below the surface of a dust lake
rilling a crater on a nameless moon circling a world far in toward
the center of the galaxy. The most centerward world of Ulant lay a
thousand light years rimward. No human being had traveled this
part of space before.
    Astronomers on the primary, had they been watching, would have
been astonished by the geyser which exploded from the
crater’s flat dust face.
    No astronomers were watching. They, like soldiers, wives,
derelicts, and children . . . like everyone who
lived on that world, were engaged in a death struggle so demanding
they had ceased caring whether their satellite existed.
    The ship that bobbed to the dust’s surface looked like a
giant doughnut with a beer can shoved through the hole and held in
place by thin straws. One tall vane, like a shark’s fin, rose
from the torus, leaning away from the cylinder. A globe surmounted
it.
    The whole vessel was dead black. Not even a hull number broke
its lack of color.
    It was a tiny ship. The beer can was just sixty meters tall. The
outer diameter of the doughnut barely spanned sixty-five meters.
The curves of the vessel were broken only by a handful of antennae,
two missile launch bays, and the snouts of laser and graser
batteries. She was a deadly little beast, designed solely to
kill.
    She was a museum piece. Literally. And the nastiest little shark
of a warship ever conceived by the mind of Man.
    She was a Climber left over from the Ulantonid War. She had been
dragged from the War Museum at Luna Command and reactivated
especially for this mission.
    She was the first Climber to space since the war’s most
desperate days—because Climbers were almost as deadly to
their crews as to the enemies they stalked. Only the absolute
imperative of racial survival would see them used in combat
again.
    Luna Command had that much heart. The Climber Fleets had been
too destructive of the minds and bodies of their crews.
    The little ambushers had changed the course of the Ulantonid
War. And had filled the sanitariums of Confederation with walking
wounded, the few survivors of service within their sanity-devouring
fields of concealment.
    The Climber generated a field in her torus which drove her into
a dimension beyond hyper-space, called Null, where she remained
virtually undetectable till she returned to Hyper or Norm to
attack.
    Climbers in schools had destroyed whole Ulantonid fleets.
    This Climber had the most remarkable crew of any Navy had ever
spaced.
    Her Ship’s Commander was Manfred, Fleet Admiral Graf von
Staufenberg, First Deputy Chief of Staff of Confederation Navy. He
had seen Climber duty toward the end of the war. The ship’s
First Watch Officer was Melene Telle-eych Cath, Defender Prime of
Ulant, or Minister of Defense. Her Operations Officer was
Ulant’s Principal Peacemaker, or Chief of the General Staff,
Turone Wahl-chyst Forse. Her Gunnery Officer and his leading mates
were Star Lords of the Toke. One was the Star Lord who commanded
Confederation’s Marine Toke Legion. The others ranked him in
the Caste of Warriors.
    There was no man or woman aboard, of any of five races, who
ranked below the equivalent of Admiral or General, and none of them
were not decision-makers.
    A well-placed missile could have crippled the defenses of
humanity and all its neighbors.
    Admiral Wildblood, the lady who directed Navy’s Bureau of
Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Beckhart, who ran her department of
dirty tricks, had two of the more menial assignments in Operations.
One watched the hyper detection gear, the other the passive radar
scans.
    Star Lords and all, they slept in hammocks slung from the
Climber’s central structural member, or “keel.”
They shared the one toilet and