This Alien Shore Read Online Free PDF

shape and proportion that she half-expected to see it quiver, gathering up the essence of the surrounding darkness to spurt it out for propulsion. Behind that flowed the body of the ship proper: first the stocky core that housed its command center, then strands of domiciles and storage pods and vast curving boulevards where all manners of human intercourse might take place. They twined about each other in loose spirals, the space about and between them webbed with transport tubes and flyways and delicate crystalline spheres that glittered as her pod flew past them. All in all it seemed more like some vast, eerie creature dredged up from the bottom of Earth’s ocean than a man-made transport vessel, and she found herself holding her breath as her pod drew closer to it, half expecting it to shiver to life as she watched.
    She could see glittering spires now, studding the outer surface of one of the spiraling tendrils. On another were a series of domes, brightly colored, and flyways whose clear walls glittered with light. Closer in to the main body of the ship, where the tendrils merged, was a section of squatter, more prosaic structures, hi-G designs that reminded her of pictures she had seen of Earth’s surface. Was this where passengers stayed who feared the infinite emptiness of space, so that they could barricade themselves in stocky constructions reminiscent of their homeland and ignore the glorious open vista beyond? As a child of the habitats she had no such fear, and for a brief moment she wondered what a person who did was even doing in space. But the lure of Guild space was not to be denied. Once a person had traveled to the nearest ainniq, he would have access to all the stations of the up-and-out, nearly fifty thousand by current count. Factories and habitats and merchant rings and mansion spheres scattered throughout space with neither star nor planet to mark their position, gathered about the nodes where the ainniq intersected so that the outpilots could find them. Who wouldn’t brave their deepest fears to gain access to that universe?
    I’ll be there soon, she thought in wonder. I’ll be part of that system. She pressed her face to the tiny window, trying to see beyond the bulk of the metroliner, to the vast dark reaches beyond. Could she see the ainniq from here, if she tried hard enough? They said it was all but invisible until you were right on top of it, but she tried anyway. She knew where it was from her outspace lessons, and she located the stars that bordered it, but between them all she saw was the endless blackness of normal space. Maybe when they were closer, she thought. Maybe she could see it then, if she looked right.
    With a lurch the pod dropped suddenly downward, a direction that hadn’t even existed mere moments before. She grabbed a restraining strap quickly enough to keep herself from slamming into the padded interior of the pod. She could feel the great ship’s G-field taking hold now, and her stomach lurched as it struggled to adjust. No doubt there would have been a gentler approach available when Earth’s emigrants first came here, a fine gradation of gravities designed to ease the transition for dirt born travelers, but by now the costly docking mechanisms would have been shut down for the journey. She caught sight of a new dome outside the window—this one filled with a vast, madly twisted tree—as she grabbed for the pod’s small headset, which had been knocked from its pad by the jolt. She caught it and stuffed it hurredly into its slideaway. She had finally used it to read her tutor’s chip, memorizing the information it scrolled across her field of vision. Now, as she hurriedly packed away those few items which were still free in the pod, she ran the details of the identity he had created through her head over and over again, trying to become comfortable with them. Her tutor hadn’t warned her about presentation, but she sensed that