Day of the Dragonstar by David Bischoff & Thomas F. Monteleone

Author:David Bischoff & Thomas F. Monteleone [Bischoff, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Event Horizon EBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CAPTAIN FRANCIS WELSH had been a Mission Command pilot in the IASA since the early days of lunar colonization. He had seen the face of the far side of the moon transformed by the hands of man, and at one time had played a large part in that transformation. But as he grew older, he found that the Deep-Space Division was planning to phase him out of the program, systematically replacing many of the older Mission Commanders with young, fuzzy-faced kids. Well, that was the way it always was, thought Welsh, but he didn’t let them put him out to pasture without a fight; he had, in effect, kept them from doing it by transferring to the Mining Division of Copernicus Operations. His many years of training and experience were just the ticket to get him a command on one of the big ore-processing ships. That had been more than four years back, and he’d been serving in that capacity ever since. It was all in what a guy got used to, he often thought, but what the hell. It sure beat going back down to Earth where things were as crowded and confusing as ever. “Screw those poor bastards,” Welsh often said. They didn’t know what they were missing out here.

The name of his ship was the Andromache, the first of its type to be outfitted with ram-impulse engines, which made it one of the fastest industrial-class ships in the IASA. It was a big ship, almost two hundred meters long, mostly superstructure and modular ore-holds. Those twenty ore-holds were actually miniature landing modules which could be detached from the main body of the ship and guided down to the lunar surface to be unloaded. Aft of the ore-holds were the crew quarters, the launch bays for the Snipes, and the Command Module. All the way at the rear lay the Lukodanyov engines which had revolutionized Deep-Space Operations and made asteroid mining a feasible, profitable endeavor. Captain Welsh loved his ship, even though it wasn’t much to look at and had none of the media-glamour attributed to the interplanetary exploration ships.

At the moment, he had the Andromache in a halo orbit above Ramadas Khan, the TWC lunar colony. Having recently transhipped ore and refueled at Copernicus Base, Captain Welsh was finishing up a routine delivery to the logistically helpless Third World colony. Since the Black and Arab Confederation had no ships capable of Deep-Space Operations, they had arranged through a series of treaties and agreements to be supplied by the IASA. Captain Welsh often wondered how those agreements must have stuck in the craws of TWC leaders, since the situation was a total reversal of the petroleum cartel dictating policy to the rest of the world during the Iast three decades of the previous century. Served the bastards right, thought Welsh. If they hadn’t been such sons-of-bitches about the energy-problems of the past, maybe they wouldn’t be getting screwed so badly by the IASA now. He wasn’t sure how

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