The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

burned from the white-knuckle grip and I felt dizzy from the drop. “Gretch, you're beautiful!”
    She snuffled, forced a path through tall brush and plodded to a stream where she plunged her muzzle and slurped water, snails and mud.
    I let out a long breath and wiped an arm across my forehead, then noticed a boy sitting on a log, dangling a pied pipehook into the stream. Beside him was a pail of water with fish. His freckled face was tilted up at me, pink mouth open, eyes round, looking like a hooked fish himself. Grunithes are rare and I guess he'd never seen a flying reptile. Funny, ancient Japanese sci-fi disks were all the rage with juvies.
    “Hi,” I said and blinked to focus. It was good to be alive, aware of my own heavy breathing, the blood pounding in my head, the dizziness. “Catch anything?”
    The line slipped from his loose fingers and the pipehook drifted downstream, whistling now to alert its owner.
    “Hey, your line!”
    He held the dead-fish look while I dismounted, slid to my feet, and then my knees. I pressed my temples as the trees, the boy, the stream, Gretch, the police manta that had just bounced down to the gravel road, all appeared to do a slow spin.
    The officer who strode toward me with his stingler unholstered, batteries charged, I'm sure, seemed to be moving sideways as well. “What the hell!” he exclaimed. “We thought you were some kind of a man-eating flying dinosaur. Don't you know the air space over Leone is restricted? We almost shot you down!”
    “There are no dinosaurs on Tartarus,” I told him, squeezed my eyes shut and lowered my head to my knees.
You dumbshit spiker!
I mentally added, and waited for the world to return to normal.
    Maybe someday it will.
    As I passed a utility pole on the outskirts of Cape Leone, I swung my arm and slammed the transmitter into it. It bounced off. I glanced over my shoulder. The manta still hovered there, insurance that I'd find my way to police headquarters. I felt like a rat in a maze.
    I kept walking.
Play it by ear for now, Rammis.
But I gave in to a sullen mood as I led Gretch alongside the newly paved road.
    The fenced spaceport was to our right. Gretch bolted when a private ship leaped into the sky.
    “It's OK, girl, it's only technology.”
    They had added two new launching pads, I noticed as I patted her neck. She crowded against me and stepped on my foot. I strangled a curse and pulled my foot from under her broad paw.
    Red dust swirled beneath the lifting ship and smeared the north view of mesas where four of the Institute's site buildings are located.
    I watched robots finish unloading a round three-legged cargo pod from some orbiting factory or freighter. Boxes of materials, processed from a metal-rich asteroid belt, were packed on board a hauler marked Leone Electronics, a manufacturing plant that supplied hi-tech component parts to the Science Institute. As I paused to watch, the robots reversed the procedure and began loading crates from the hauler aboard the pod.
    I gripped the chain link fence and studied the pod.
    They finished quickly, closed the ship's hatch and rolled away. The drone pod lifted and blazed upward to rendezvous with the mother ship and continue its deliveries to other Terran and alien worlds. Probably Earth, too.
    Sure, Earth too. Without the transmitter I might have stood a chance of stowing away on some pod.
    “Damn you, Hallarin. You too, Cole.”
    The spiker tapped the manta's siren, a signal for me to keep moving.
    “Fuck you too. C'mon, Gretch!”
    Leone had grown, and seemed to be enjoying an exuberant adolescence. My uneasiness grew in proportion to the density of things as Gretch and I walked into the quickening beat of this human and alien hive. Specialized robot construction workers, mostly ant-shaped models, crawled over the skeletal beginnings of new buildings. The noise was distracting. The smells, alien.
    South of the road we walked, the Styx River meandered through town. Narctressus and