Day of the Dragonstar Read Online Free PDF Page A

— they know I’m good. But you! You ain’t been space-boomin’ for more than a year or so.”
    Melendez smiled. “I learn fast, I guess.” He did not really feel like talking to his partner, especially when he was in one of his argumentative, aggressive moods. Peter Melendez did share O’Hara’s apprehension concerning the mission, but he did not want to talk about it. They would know what they were looking for soon enough. He stared through the forward port into the endless velvet night.
    Neither man spoke for several minutes. There was tension in the atmosphere of the small ship’s cabin, but Melendez was able to ignore it by directing his thoughts outward, to the possible reasons for the recon mission. It was possible that the brass had picked up a TWC ship in the vicinity. Was it armed? Disabled? Maybe no one knew what it was doing out here. The thought was troubling. The Third World countries were not very advanced in space technology. Indeed, the only thing they had actually accomplished was a lunar settlement. Aside from the two IASA moonbase installations — Copemicus Base and Tsiolkovskii Base, both staffed by the combined space agencies of North America, Europe, and the Soviet Union, there were two other permanent colonies: a fledgling enterprise recently established by the Chinese —D ua Ho Chang, and an older installation erected by the Third World Confederation — tagged the TWC. That base was called Ramadas Khan and it was the final glorious breath of the TWC, having been built soon after the close of the twentieth century, when the emerging African nations and the Arab political estates were at the peak of their power. Within the intervening quarter-century, however, after the oil-depletion leverage of the Third World had been exhausted with the extinction of petroleum, the TWC became a second-rate political influence in global affairs. Since that time, the TWC had clung to their moonbase, recognizing it as a final vestige of their past glory, even though they were partially dependent on the lASA for logistical and technological support.
    If it was a TWC ship, though, why were they sending out a Snipe? wondered Melendez. Tensions between the IASA nations and the TWC persisted, to say the least. In fact, there was an unspoken tradition of hostility, and several “incidents” within the past decade could have easily escalated into direct military confrontation, had not the diplomats of the involved countries been quick to ameliorate the disputes. True, the world did not hang in such precarious balance as in the previous century. But the utopian vision of political and economic harmony among nations was still quite distant.
    As far as Melendez knew, though, the TWC just didn’t have the hardware to get out here. Their Deep-Space vessels were obsolete and their telemetry equipment was ten years behind state-of-the-art.
    So what was it they were going after?
    Melendez’s thoughts kept tumbling over and over, and he wanted to verbalize them, but talking to O’Hara was not fruitful, to say the least. The man did his job, and that was all.
    Checking his watch, Melendez realized that they were within fifteen minutes of ETA with the object. He stared absently through the port, into the bottomless pit of stars, remembering how it had been when he’d first ventured into space. He had since overcome those early feelings of fear and insignificance but there remained a sincere respect and a sense of wonder about the universe. Melendez felt that he truly appreciated the vastness of the galaxy, the implications of the hundreds of millions of suns which burned in the darkest of nights. Here he was, a speck of bone and blood, a smear of chemicals crawling across this immense canvas. A cold, insensitive place, it made you appreciate the only true warmth in the universe for human beings — the warmth of other human beings.
    Something flickered on his long-range scanner displays. The instruments were picking up an