Devereaux walked into the observation blister. There were no artificial lights, but her robed form cast a shadow up from the transparent diamond floor as she cleared the entranceway. The light came from the Doppler-boosted and blueshifted long-wavelength radiation in the Galactic plane toward SS Cygni, including blueshifted cosmic microwave background: a tight knot of points amidst a diffuse glow. Elsewhere through the diamond the sky showed pure jet black, the stars erased by their velocity, except for directly aft, above her head, where the sun was still visible, its X-ray corona redshifted to optical wavelengths and amplified by the shape and gain of the blister.



Only their origin and their destination remained part of the visible universe.



A few more weeks and they would collapse the singularity pair, then reignite them in reverse, and begin to decelerate. Earth was mere months in the past now, but already irreversibly half a millennia gone. This step felt right to her. It was time to start her march toward the end of time and see the marvels along the way.



Devereaux loosened her robe, discarded it, and stretched out on the floor, her head in a bubble in the blister designed for just such viewing. The diamond felt cool against her smooth tummy and breasts. The universe rushed at her at essentially lightspeed, but it really didn't appear much more interesting than a tight knot of lights, a very bright star cluster. There was no sensation of speed.



Finally bored, Devereaux asked Papa to project a console off the bubble so she could work on the data and maybe get some more reliable estimates on the dragon density. The disk was big, and finding a dragon would not be easy. If they flew close enough for the best resolution, still limited by diffraction to a few tenths of an arcsecond at optical wavelengths, they would only be able to see a small part of the disk. Flying higher with a larger field of view, dragons would blend into the turbulent plasma.



She had to admit that given only a week to work with, assuming a single visit between outbursts, Fang's violent ideas made some sense. The shockwave from a nuclear explosion would not only stun dragons at some distance (she had to believe they were stunnable), but it would also clear away swaths from the rarefied disk leaving holes like pepperoni on pizza. She smiled and got down to work.



With red and green vectors spiraling before her, models of dragon distributions through the disk based on spectral analyses of the green -- now blueshifted into the X-ray -- emission-line profile, she heard someone's slippered feet padding along the hallway behind her. She dimmed her console. "Phil?"



The footsteps stopped. After a minute came a voice. "Henderson."



Devereaux considered grabbing her robe, but she was too relaxed where she was.



"Mind if I join you, madam?" he asked.



She said, "Not at all. The universe is big enough to share, but just barely at the moment."



He kneeled onto the diamond and laid at her side. "Yes, I see. I've never been on a trip this fast. What's our beta?"



Beta was the fraction of light speed. "Very close to one. Gamma, the relativistic factor, is more useful in our case. I don't know the exact number, but it is something over a thousand."



Henderson let go a long, low whistle.



Devereaux had never actually known anyone who did that outside of a stimshow. It took too much forethought to whistle in such a manner, at least without a bodmod, to make it a spontaneous sound of awe. "Don't be so impressed. We're a big ship on a long trip, and Biolathe doesn't want to wait forever for a return on their investment. I understand there are some political and military craft that make us look slow."



They lay together in the darkness for a time, looking at the small universe. Devereaux was getting bored again, and was about ready to go to her cabin so she could get some work done, when Henderson asked, "So how is he?"



She decided to be obtuse; they didn't know each other well enough to pretend intimacy. "Who?"



"The Jack."



"Phil is fine."



"I mean, he pulled a fast one on me." She could hear the self-deprecating but insincere smile in his words, reminding her of his premeditated whistle. "The captain obviously had eyes for Fisher since day one, but you, you struck me as someone looking for something a bit more sophisticated than a trendy boy."



"He's more complex than you give him credit for. And sweet and thoughtful beats sophisticated every time with me." Where was he going? Was this a round-about way of building up to a pass?



He forced a laugh. "I would not underestimate sophistication. Sex is in the mind, for the most part. Would you not agree?"



Of course she agreed. She gave him a grudging, "Uh huh. I suppose." Time to head things off if he were thinking of making a pass. There was a long way yet to go on this trip, and the prevention of something ugly here could be priceless. "But I've heard things about you biosystems guys. Saw a few research surveys. The 'career choice for the arrested adolescent' was how I think they put it, more interested in playing with mindless toys than real people."



There was an awkward silence. The survey she had read, and laughed over with Phil when he had pointed it out to her, had concerned sexual preferences on a profession by profession basis.



Finally Henderson found his voice and his words rushed out too fast. "Mindless isn't attractive, not in the long term. While humankind evolved certain mental organs that find physical health sexually attractive, those same mental organs select for intelligent mates that can raise successful children. Whether we want children or not. Try as we might, those mental organs are very difficult to excise from the human mind."



"Your point?"



"I might be a little tired of toys," he said with a small, bitter laugh.



Devereaux shivered, suddenly cold. The survey had apparently held at least some nugget of truth. "Why are you telling me this now?"



His voice floated through the darkness, sounding ancient and distant. "Because even the self-involved, and I understand that is what I am, get lonely. Of the four other people that my external universe has shrunk to, you're the only one I want to talk with. Fisher and Fang are wrapped up in each other and their own little self-destructive obsessions, and regarding Stearn, frankly I value his sweetness and thoughtfulness not at all."



"Why don't you try it sometime?"



"Please. Let us not get petty."



More footsteps in the hallway. The ruffle of feathers. Phil!



Henderson rose. "I dislike crowds in which I am in the minority. Good day, madam."



Devereaux was silent as Henderson left. It could have been him this trip, she admitted. If Stearn hadn't been interested her, or hadn't been on the trip, or had been a woman, she could have had a relationship with Henderson. A relationship doomed to fail, she was sure.

When Stearn arrived a moment later she whispered to him, "Just hold me, Phil, and don't say anything flip."

She was grateful when he did as she requested without frivolity. The boy was learning, thankfully, because she really wanted a man just then.

Chapter 5

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight. -- Marcus Aurelius







Fang strode onto the fly bridge, pleased at the authority ringing from her boots as she crossed the bone-tiled floor. The ruglings were absent as she had directed and it pleased her. Everyone else was already present, just as they had been for launch, and they turned their heads toward her as she entered. She flashed them a calculated smile as she sat down on her fighting chair, relishing the croaking squeak emitted by the sweaty leather.



One of the fears that Fang had harbored for the last few hundred years, Earth time, was that Captains would be done away with. Entire human crews, in fact. She would return from a run to Epsilon Eridani or Tau Ceti to discover that the already semi-redundant crew on corporate ships had been replaced entirely by AIs, robots, and bioservants. Most of the flight time there was nothing to do. Papa kept the charged singularity pair separated and their acceleration pointed toward a rendezvous with SS Cygni, kept the oscillating ship charge balanced to maintain a smooth one gee, and kept the course clear of obstacles with a combination of ionizing laser fire and external electromagnetic fields. If anything went wrong, only a machine could compensate quickly enough to avert disaster, if at all; a human, even a dangerously mindmoded human, had no chance. Still, the human animal was a versatile animal. Human creativity and intuition continued to solve problems, some pattern recognition, situations with incomplete data -- fewer and fewer compared to artificial minds, she granted -- but enough to make them valuable. There were always situations with incomplete data.



Humans had fought for centuries now to stay involved, and continued to find ways to do it, although marginalization approached on multiple asymptotes.



On a normal assignment, Fang could expect to oversee the ship through three stages: launch, turn-around, and arrival. In principle, these were dangerous times because the wormdrive with its deadly singularities were either being activated or deactivated. A large electromagnetic pulse could disrupt electronic part's of the ship brain, requiring intervention. There had been more than one accident in mankind's past, which was the reason why Higgs generators were no longer used for launches from planetary surfaces. Calling someone a loose hole was a serious insult on Earth and most colonies. On a normal assignment, these three stages would be the only opportunities to test a human captain in the field, the only opportunities to fail, or to achieve glory. In practice, the chances of anything happening were miniscule.



Because of the nature of this mission, and the vast array of unknowns, Fang would have final say in many matters when they reached SS Cygni, many chances for failure, but also many chances for real glory. Plenty more anyway than during the course of standard ship operations...she hoped.



Like everything in her life, Fang nevertheless took the current maneuver seriously. "Amass forward nanoskin," she ordered. Their forward field would be in flux when they brought the singularities together, and a relativistic dust speck might impact with devastating results if they weren't prepared. The nanoskin, primarily designed for reflecting and re-radiating photons near a hot photosphere, could also serve effectively as a shock-absorbing and self-repairing ablation shield.



"Done," replied Papa some twenty seconds later.



Fang tugged her uniform sleeves even straighter than they already were. "Everyone secure themselves."



After she saw that everyone's furniture beasts, which had their own attachments to the ship, had grasped their charges, Fang buckled herself down with her own harness which outwardly resembled an ancient seat belt that the real Papa would have been familiar with. She liked the click of metal on metal. She fished an ampoule of On-The-Edge from her pocket and snorted it. "Charge singularities and initialize biseed collapse."



Fang ran Papa through the rest of the drill, watching the tangled field lines dance in her picture tank as the singularities were slowly brought together electrically to recollapse into the quantum foam from whence they came. The gravity waxed and waned, until it finally vanished along with the biseed. The ship rotated, nanoskin bulge, radars, and lasers rotating oppositely, keeping their path safe.



At almost the very instant Fang was about to order the wormdrive reactivated, Fisher said, "I've thought of a way to modify the -- "



"Quiet!" Fang barked. Why did he always have to be so damn obsessed?



Fisher mouthed, "I'm sorry," toward her, but his lips were difficult to read through the heavy scowl.



She hadn't meant to snap at him. This was routine, wasn't it? She made a mental note to make it up to him later, and resumed the maneuver.



A few minutes later they were again under gravity, bouncing against a new, oppositely directed hole pair and decelerating toward SS Cygni, shedding their tremendous kinetic energy.



Smooth sailing here on in, thought Fang, not looking at Fisher.