Crust of a Dark Star

Avien Helm has completed arduous training with the mozepi. For nineteen Earth months, he has trained to be an interstellar pilot, and now he faces his final exam. He looks forward to leaving the quarrelsome alien star system, a melting pot of four feuding civilisations. Three of them are guided by the primal memes of the Megals, but there are a plethora of irreconcilably different interpretations. Their followers agree only in their disdain for the fourth local culture, which is genetically related to Earthlings and does not accept the teachings of the Megals as the only possible worldview.

Mutual animosity escalates when the mozepi faction “Too Long” plots an assassination. They use a forbidden weapon and blind some of the pilot trainees. The blackened eyes of those afflicted bear a ghostly resemblance to the crust of the dark star near which the ambush took place.

Avien was both lucky and unlucky. His interstellar flight to the Solar System is postponed indefinitely, leaving him stranded far from home, and on the damn wrong side of the conflict – in the mozepi army, which is wracked by power struggles and a revolt against the treaty signed with Earth.