Read Shields Lady for Free Online Page A

workday for the past year. At times the task of saving the financial life of the Avylyn Clan had appeared hopeless. But now she knew she was well on the way to salvaging the Avylyns' fortunes and with them, her own. Sariana knew that her hopes of future success and her chances of returning to her homeland were inextricably tied to the Avylyns' success. She would do just about anything to ensure both. The thought of being stranded in the western provinces for the rest of her life was enough of a spur to make her take risks she would never have taken under normal circumstances.

                It even made her willing to deal with a Shield. Sariana stabbed the closure device on the desk and watched with morbid satisfaction as the financial papers sank instantly out of sight.
                The cleverly designed tables and desks in the Avylyn household were not the only interesting discoveries Sariana had made since her arrival in Serendipity. The people of the western continent were an inventive lot with a definite flair for the cunning and the bizarre. They loved gadgets.
                Her own people were a far more serious and sophisticated crowd, skilled in matters of business, finance, education and trade. Occasionally Sariana wondered if the people of the two continents had gone in opposite directions because of the different environments each group of colonists had faced or because of the arrangement of the social classes on board the original colony ships.
                It was never intended that the settlers on board The Serendipity and The Rendezvous be separated. The two ships were meant to land near each other. The resulting colony would thus have started out with a full compliment of all the social groups deemed necessary for survival and progress in the new world.
                At least, that was the original plan of the radical group of social philosophers who had set out to colonize the planet of Windarra a few hundred years before. Most of the clans of the various business and educational classes bad been on board The Rendezvous. Nearly all of the artistic, craft and design clans had boarded The Serendipity.

                Each ship had been given an equal share of representatives from the medical and social philosopher classes. The ships' officers and crew had formed a social class of their own. It had been decided that after the landing, the members of that particular class would be adopted into the clans of their choice. The theory was that they would no longer be needed as a separate and unique class. The star-ships were not designed to make a return trip to the home planets.

                Unfortunately, the original plans for the expedition were never realized. Shipboard emergencies had struck both colony ships almost simultaneously as they prepared to approach Windarra. Huge explosions of light and energy had nearly engulfed both.

                The starships bad managed to limp down through the atmosphere and each had made barely controlled crash landings, but those landings had been on separate continents. The communication facilities and a great deal of technology had been destroyed. Many lives were lost. Each group of colonists had assumed the other group had perished in the strange explosions.
                The colonists from each ship who had lived through the crash had been faced with the task of surviving without the assistance of the social classes that had been on board the other ship. The result had been

    some radical changes in the original plans of the philosophers, but the basic outlines of the class and clan system still held on both continents.

                Sariana had learned, however, that those outlines had held much more firmly in the eastern provinces. In the west the social structure had shifted and changed to a major extent. The lines between clans and classes were becoming quite