Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline Read Online Free PDF

They’d won four regattas running.” Mouse was justifiably proud of his accomplishment. Starfishers were all but invincible at their own games.
    “I heard the talk. Congratulations.”
    Cassius was the Legion’s theoretical tactician as well as its second in command and its master’s confidant. Some said he knew more about the art of war than anyone living, Gneaus Storm and Richard Hawksblood notwithstanding. War College in Luna Command employed him occasionally, on a fee lecture basis, to chair seminars. Storm’s weakest campaigns had been fought when Cassius had been unable to assist him. Hawksblood had beaten their combined talents only once.
    A buzzer sounded. Cassius glanced at a winking light. “That’s your father. Let’s go.”
     
----

Ten: 3020 AD
    The Shadowline was Blackworld’s best-known natural feature. It was a four-thousand-kilometer-long fault in the planet’s Brightside crust, the sunward side of which had heaved itself up an average of two hundred meters above the burning plain. The rift wandered in a northwesterly direction. It cast a permanent wide band of shadow that Edgeward’s miners used as a sun-free highway to the riches of Brightside. By extending its miners’ scope of operations the Shadowline gave Edgeward a tremendous advantage over competitors.
    No one had ever tried reaching the Shadowline’s end. There was no need. Sufficient deposits lay within reach of the first few hundred kilometers of shade. The pragmatic miners shunned a risk that promised no reward but a sense of accomplishment.
    On Blackworld a man did not break trail unless forced by a pressing survival need.
    But that rickety little man called Frog, this time, was bound for the Shadowline’s end.
    Every tractor hog considered it. Every man at some time, off-handedly, contemplates suicide. Frog was no different. This was a way to make it into the histories. There were not many firsts to be claimed on Blackworld.
    Frog had been thinking about it for a long time. He usually sniggered at himself when he did. Only a fool would try it, and old Frog was no fool.
    Lately he had become all too aware of his age and mortality. He had begun to dwell on the fact that he had done nothing to scratch his immortality on the future. His passing would go virtually unnoticed. Few would mourn him.
    He knew only one way of life, hogging, and there was only one way for a tractor hog to achieve immortality. By ending the Shadowline.
    He still had not made up his mind. Not absolutely. The rational, experienced hog in him was fighting a vigorous rearguard action.
    Though Torquemada himself could not have pried the truth loose, Frog wanted to impress someone.
    Humanity in the whole meant nothing to Frog. He had been the butt of jests and cruelties and, worse, indifference all his life. People were irrelevant. There was only one person about whom he cared.
    He had an adopted daughter named Moira. She was a white girl-child he had found wandering Edgeward’s rudimentary spaceport. She had been abandoned by Sangaree slavers passing through hurriedly, hotly pursued by Navy and dumping evidence wherever they could. She had been about six, starving, and unable to cope with a non-slave environment. No one had cared. Not till the hard-shelled, bullheaded, misanthropic dwarf, Edgeward’s involuntary clown laureate, had happened along and been touched.
    Moira was not his first project. He was a sucker for strays.
    He had cut up a candyman pervert, then had taken her home, as frightened as a newly weaned kitten, to his tiny apartment-lair behind the water plant down in Edgeward’s Service Underground.
    The child complicated his life no end, but he had invested his secret self in her. Now, obsessed with his own mortality, he wanted to leave her with memories of a man who had amounted to more than megaliters of suit-sweat and a stubborn pride five times too big for his retarded growth.
    Frog wakened still unsure what he would do. The deepest route