Porsupah staggered away from the wall and stumbled back in the direction he’d arrived from. Three days, wasya, three days! Long enough to start seeing things, hey? Want to fall out of a tree someday? KK-drive ships did not come within a thousand kilometers of planetary surfaces. The direst penalties would befall any who survived the cataclysm of their own making.

KK-drive super-battleships especially did not do this. They double-especially did not make secretive stops to take on board single apprentice sanitation engineers. No, no, down with the booze, already, schuzz?

Wait a minute! Down with booze? What blasphemy was this? Sacrilege! And over a simple dream-dream?

The hell with it. Heading for brighter lights and a chaser, Porsupah broke into an uneven but rousingly risqué Tolian ballad.

Behind him, the great ship lifted silently toward the stars.

About the Author

Alan Dean Foster has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the Star Wars® novel The Approaching Storm. He is also the author of numerous nonfiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as the novelizations of several films, including Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work to ever do so.

Foster’s love of the faraway and exotic has led him to travel extensively. He’s lived in Tahiti and French Polynesia, traveled to Europe, Asia, and throughout the Pacific, and has explored the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya. He has rappeled into New Mexico’s fabled Lechugilla Cave, eaten panfried pirhana (lots of bones, tastes a lot like trout) in Peru, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi’s Batoka Gorge, and driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia.

Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, reside in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miners’ brothel. He is presently at work on several new novels and media projects.

Books by Alan Dean Foster

Books By Alan Dean Foster

The Black Hole

Cachalot

Dark Star

The Metrognome and Other Stories

Midworld

Nor Crystal Tears

Sentenced to Prism

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

Star Trek® Logs One-Ten

Voyage to the City of the Dead

. . . Who Needs Enemies?

With Friends Like These . . .

Mad Amos

Parallelites

THE ICERIGGER TRILOGY:

Icerigger

Mission to Moulokin

The Deluge Drivers

THE ADVENTURES OF FLINX OF THE COMMONWEALTH:

For Love of Mother-Not

The Tar-Aiym Krang

Orphan Star

The End of the Matter

Bloodhype

Flinx In Flux

Mid-Flinx

Reunion

THE DAMNED

Book One: A Call to Arms

Book Two: The False Mirror

Book Three: The Spoils of War

THE FOUNDING OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Phylogenesis

Dirge

Diuturnity’s Dawn

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