Bloodhype (33 page)

Kitten and her hirsute merchant captain were off on some far island committing things of their own. The Tolian was happy for both. Now, if only one of his own kind and opposite sex were available to help him properly enjoy a few mild indiscretions. What he wouldn’t give for the sight of a well-combed tail! He sighed, then frowned. His superlative sight was supremely out of focus, but it reported enough to tell him he was among unfamiliar buildings. He’d apparently wandered far from the entertainment district and the full bars into a rundown section of ancient warehouses and storage sheds that might have been built when Repler was first colonized. Several bore condemned signs. One pathetically declared that a new pleasure-pier was to be constructed here. The jungle began a little distance away. He was on the far fringes of the city.

Well, fine! Hail the intrepid explorer! Now where were those damned supplies? He took the small container of powerful liquid from his belt and downed a sizable swallow. He, himself, would dedicate the new pier now and beat all the pompous, arrogant, frog-faced politicians to the privilege! He staggered towards the water, halted against a wooden wall when his balance threatened to horizontalize him.

A tall figure strode out from between two long, boarded-up warehouses. The face was hidden, but the rope-shape coiled around one shoulder moved slightly. Even in the dark and drunk, Porsupah couldn’t mistake it. He rubbed his eyes blearily, which only made things worse.

The figure halted at the edge of an ancient boat landing. It did something to a concealed mechanism. Porsupah giggled, burped violently. Apparently he went unnoticed.

A monstrous bulk heaved itself out of the sea close by the pilings. It blotted out much of the night sky. A few lights shone from the cylindrical nose. The faintest lavender iridescence was visible far far down the main body, hundreds of meters long.

A brighter rectangle of light appeared in one side of the vessel. A small platform floated out. It approached the pier, riding a barely audible basso hum. The tall human stepped onto the platform, standing behind a huge hairy alien Porsupah could not identify. The vehicle returned to the main ship the way it had come, the square of light disappearing behind it.

Porsupah staggered away from the wall and stumbled back in the direction he’d arrived from. Three days,
wasya,
three days! Long enough to start seeing things, hey? Want to fall out of a tree someday? KK-drive ships did not come within a thousand kilometers of planetary surfaces. The direst penalties would befall any who survived the cataclysm of their own making.

KK-drive super-battleships especially did not do this. They double-especially did not make secretive stops to take on board single apprentice sanitation engineers. No, no, down with the booze, already,
schuzz?

Wait a minute! Down with booze? What blasphemy was this? Sacrilege! And over a simple dream-dream?

The hell with it. Heading for brighter lights and a chaser, Porsupah broke into an uneven but rousingly risqué Tolian ballad.

Behind him, the great ship lifted silently toward the stars.

Alan Dean Foster
has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the
Star Wars
^®
novel
The Approaching Storm.
He is also the author of numerous nonfiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as the novelizations of several films, including
Star Wars,
the first three
Alien
films, and
Alien Nation.
His novel
Cyber Way
won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work to ever do so.

Foster’s love of the faraway and exotic has led him to travel extensively. He’s lived in Tahiti and French Polynesia, traveled to Europe, Asia, and throughout the Pacific, and has explored the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya. He has rappeled into New Mexico’s fabled Lechugilla Cave, eaten panfried pirhana (lots of bones, tastes a lot like trout) in Peru, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi’s Batoka Gorge, and driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia.

Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, reside in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miners’ brothel. He is presently at work on several new novels and media projects.

Visit the author at his Web site at
www.alandeanfoster.com
.

Books By Alan Dean Foster

The Black Hole

Cachalot

Dark Star

The Metrognome and Other Stories

Midworld

Nor Crystal Tears

Sentenced to Prism

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

Star Trek
^®
Logs One-Ten

Voyage to the City of the Dead

 . . . Who Needs Enemies?

With Friends Like These . . .

Mad Amos

Parallelites

THE ICERIGGER TRILOGY:

Icerigger

Mission to Moulokin

The Deluge Drivers

THE ADVENTURES OF FLINX OF THE COMMONWEALTH:

For Love of Mother-Not

The Tar-Aiym Krang

Orphan Star

The End of the Matter

Bloodhype

Flinx In Flux

Mid-Flinx

Reunion

THE DAMNED

Book One: A Call to Arms

Book Two: The False Mirror

Book Three: The Spoils of War

THE FOUNDING OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Phylogenesis

Dirge

Diuturnity’s Dawn

To learn more about other great ebook titles from Ballantine, please visit
www.randomhouse.com/BB/ebooks.htm
.

To enjoy other great science fiction and fantasy titles visit
www.delreydigital.com
.

For
Lynette Harrington
who lives around the corner

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1973 by Alan Dean Foster

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.

eISBN: 978-0-345-45454-6

v3.0