title: Falling Star: Misadventures of White Star Line Ships
author: John P. Eaton
description: Great book covering the history and adventures of the famed White Star Line....of course, including the Titanic.
zlib_text: **Shipbreaker**
  
   **by Paul Di Filippo**
  
  "If this was what death was, somebody ought to care."
  
  — _Earthblood,_ by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown A craggy, jagged
  mountain fell slowly through the sky.
  
  Attended by a flock of Class D Hagfish pilot ships, their coruscant supportive
  fields overlapping the larger vessel, the dead hulk of another retired
  starliner descended toward the Shipbreakers' Yard on Asperna. Possessing no
  discernible symmetry, the machicolated and turreted starcraft was a
  conglomeration of protuberances and ports, pods and pavilions, so ugly it
  forced the viewer to concede new notions of beauty. Its space-pitted, many-
  textured surfaces bespoke millennia of interstellar service.
  
  Occulting Asperna's Least Sun, the dropping starliner robbed each individual
  in the crowd below of a single shadow. Mainly composed of ragged workers, the
  crowd featured an isolated knot of the Yard's management personnel. Apart from
  their finer clothing and lack of visible cruft, thes