Other Books by this Author

By Todd McCaffrey
Published by Ballantine Books

DRAGONHOLDER
DRAGONSBLOOD
DRAGONHEART

By Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey

DRAGON’S KIN
DRAGON’S FIRE
DRAGON HARPER

Title Page

Dedication

This one is just for Ladybug.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No one truly labors alone, authors in particular, and I’d like to acknowledge those who helped bring this book to fruition.

First, of course, I’d like to say thanks to my mother, Anne McCaffrey, for continuing to allow me to play in her sandbox.

Second, I’d like to thank my marvelous first readers: Angelina Adams, Margaret Johnson, Susan Martin, and Pam Bennett-Skinner. Their comments allowed me to make this book much much better than it otherwise would have been.

Shelly Shapiro, editor par excellence at Del Rey did not shy from her role of demanding the very best I could give, and Martha Trachtenberg once more performed a marvelous job of copyediting. They are definitely a great team.

Judith Welsh, my editor at Transworld, once again provided her insights and support, working seamlessly with the editors at Del Rey to allow us to produce one consistent editorial voice.

And finally, I’d like to thank Don Maass, my agent and first-first reader.

Despite everyone’s efforts, there are probably some errors in this book—that’s just the nature of the beast. As the guy who ultimately determines what goes into the book, those errors are all mine.

For Readers New to Pern

FOR READERS NEW TO PERN

Thousands of years after man first developed interstellar travel, colonists from Earth, Tau Ceti III, and many other worlds settled upon Pern, the third planet of the star Rukbat in the Sagittarius sector.

They found Pern idyllic for their purposes: a pastoral world far off the standard trade routes and perfect for those recovering from the horrors of the Nathi Wars.

Led by the hero Admiral Paul Benden, and Governor Emily Boll of war-torn Tau Ceti, the colonists quickly abandoned their star-traveling technology in favor of a simpler life. For eight years—“Turns,” as they called them on Pern—the settlers spread and multiplied on Pern’s lush Southern Continent, unaware that a menace was fast approaching: the Red Star.

The Red Star, as the colonists came to call it, was actually a wandering planetoid that had been captured by Rukbat millennia before. It had a highly elliptical, cometary orbit, passing through the fringes of the system’s Oort Cloud before hurtling back inward toward the warmth of the sun, a cycle that took two hundred and fifty Turns.

For fifty of those Turns, the Red Star was visible in the night sky of Pern. Visible and deadly, for when the Red Star was close enough, as it was for those fifty long Turns, a space-traveling spore could cross the void from it to Pern. Once it entered the tenuous upper atmosphere, the spore would thin out into a long, narrow, streamer shape and float down to the ground below, as seemingly harmless “Threads.”