A tall figure strode out from between two long, boarded-up warehouses. The face was hidden, but the rope-shape coiled around one shoulder moved slightly. Even in the dark and drunk, Porsupah couldn’t mistake it. He rubbed his eyes blearily, which only made things worse.

The figure halted at the edge of an ancient boat landing. It did something to a concealed mechanism. Porsupah giggled, burped violently. Apparently he went unnoticed.

A monstrous bulk heaved itself out of the sea close by the pilings. It blotted out much of the night sky. A few lights shone from the cylindrical nose. The faintest lavender iridescence was visible far far down the main body, hundreds of meters long.

A brighter rectangle of light appeared in one side of the vessel. A small platform floated out. It approached the pier, riding a barely audible basso hum. The tall human stepped onto the platform, standing behind a huge hairy alien Porsupah could not identify. The vehicle returned to the main ship the way it had come, the square of light disappearing behind it.

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.