Hooded Swan

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-utopian worlds, like New Alexandria, to vermin-infested slums, like Old Earth, starship pilots have become the great romantic heroes of the day. When Star-Pilot Grainger is rescued from a shipwreck, he finds himself pressed into reluctant service to fly the Hooded Swan, the prototype of a new kind of interstellar ship. He's also picked up an alien parasite that's determined to share his brain....

The atmosphere of Mormyr is so dense and turbulent that the surface is unreachable by any conventional means - which apparently made it the ideal place for the enigmatic Gallacellans to abandon a spaceship in the distant past. Now they want it back, and have approached Titus Charlot to enlist his help. Grainger believes the task is much too dangerous, but the Hooded Swan must answer a mayday call, which turns out to be a trap set by a madman who wants to salvage the abandoned ship-and will stop at nothing to achieve that end.

Having finally escaped from his contract with Titus Charlot, Grainger finds that freedom is not as easy or rewarding as he'd hoped. The Caradoc Company is anxious to take him back into its employ in order to pick his brains-by any means necessary-to extract everything that he knows about his former employer. But Charlot has other plans, and Grainger suddenly finds himself back on the Hooded Swan, leading an expedition into the bizarre Nightingale Nebula to rescue the Swan's sister ship.