Their Master's War Read Online Free PDF

Ashak-ai owned, and they considered themselve~ wealthy.
    If anything, the God resembled a giant platee. It was roughly the same flat disk shape as the spinning weapon, but where the platee was smooth except for the jagged cutting edges, the God was covered in all manner of blisters and irregularities. Long complex pylons extende from its outside edge, and lights burned on its dark, underside. Some shone steadily, while others pulsed in! swirling random rhythms. There were a multitude of. colors, and some of the beams looked as if they were; somehow more than light, as if they were solid.
    Harkaan was startled by the sound of impatient mounts; he felt as if he were being jerked out of a trance. The riders behind him were pressing forward. It wasmuchtoo late to turn back or bolt. He dug his heels into the sides of his mount and started down the track, down Into the Valley of the Gods. Three
    "Poor little bleeders."
    Topman Rance leaned back in the angle of two plasma ducts and braced his foot against a third, making himself as comfortable as possible. Over at the far end of Receiving Hold 3, the first of the new intake were starting to emerge from the lock that led to the sterile area. They looked like corpses in the blue light that spilled out from the lock, and they moved as if, to a man, they were demoralized and completely terrified. Arms were wrapped around chests and hands covered genitals, a few fingered their freshly shaved heads, and all peered uneasily into the shadows as if they expected some new awfulness to fall on them at any moment. Back in those shadows, Rance nodded. He liked them like that. Once the fight and the pride had been juiced out of them and they were about to jump out of their skins, they were also ready for him to rebuild them.
    Perhaps the most disturbing thing on any star vessel was the noise. It was never quiet. There was a constant dull cacophony of sighs and booms and deep metallic groans. Discharging energy snapped and crackled, and escaping gases whistled and shrilled. Water dripped, and

THEIR MASTER'S WAR
    totally unknown things grumbled and murmured. Those who spent their lives on starships never thought of them as cold machines. It was like being inside, even being a part of, a vast living organism. Receiving Hold 3 on its own was quite enough to awe any newcomer. It looked like a place where gods might dwell, a huge cathedral space enclosed in a frame of arching power conduits like giant pillars and the meshed complexity of the plasma transmission. It was a place of dark, menacing spaces and mysterious blackness. It was also big enough to accommodate a dropcraft or an e-vac. At the opposite end, the towering bulkhead doors opened directly onto the emptiness of space.
    "If those poor bastards knew that, they'd probably shit on the spot." Rance remembered the first time he'd seen empty space. It was a moment he'd never forget. He'd been almost as raw as these suckers.
    A plasma throwoff crackled and flowed down the wall. The whole intake cringed. Rance knew that it was almost time to show himself, but he held off for a few moments to give the debris in their minds a little longer to settle. As if it wasn't bad enough that they'd been ripped from their families, their culture, and their planet —from everything that might give them a familiar bearing—they'd also been given the datashot. The datashot may have been ultimately efficient, a complete education and military training in a single electric moment, but it was also ultimately cruel. Even the longtimers didn't like to talk about their moment of datashot. Men who'd spent a lifetime in combat and seen a dozen sets of friends killed, men who needed only the slightest of excuses to wade knee-deep in blood atrocity, still feared the memory of the datashot. All that one needed to know to be a ground trooper of the Therem Alliance was fused into the brain in a single jolting instant. The horror was a side
    effect of unimaginable pain. The