Still nude, Fisher barreled down the cabin ring corridor moaning, rushing nowhere.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! Everything had gone so wrong. It had been a wrong -- more than a wrong, a sin -- to risk the dragon by entering a relationship with the captain of the ship. Wrong, to think he had any life beyond this mission. Wrong to think of anything but the dragon since the Karamojo had left Earth orbit. Everything so very wrong.

Fisher passed through the Hall of Trophies, abruptly stopping his headlong rush to roar at a lion head. The animal wrinkled its nose, but didn't roar back. Fisher smacked it on its nose, hard. The lion roared then, a sound that carries for miles on the savanna on Earth. Fisher roared with the lion, his voice becoming the lion's voice, asserting his dominion over the ship, over the mission. The roar died, then its echoes died, and the other animals' excited calls reverberated through the corridor.

There would be no more mistakes.

Atsuko had warned him not to forget people this time, but that advice had been dreadfully wrong as well. The real wrong had been forgetting the dragon, his one and only reason for being on this ship, for throwing away his life in the present to travel five hundred years into an unknown future. With this kind of sacrifice, there was no excuse for losing his focus, no excuse for forsaking his purpose. Until the mission was over, the dragon was his master. Nay, his god. Fang had not yet seen obsession. He'd show her obsession!

Filled with renewed purpose and a plan to right the great Bible of wrongs had written for him, Fisher resumed his rush and headed toward Henderson's biolab.

Henderson was not happy to see him, especially after he'd explained what he wanted. "What? Again? I just did Stearn."

"And now you'll do me," Fisher said. "That's your job, isn't it?"

Henderson sighed loudly. "Fine. No one needs anything more than a hair retarder in months and now two major bodmods in the same day! Ironic."

"Whatever you say," Fisher agreed. He'd already stopped listening to Henderson at 'Fine.' He went to the workstation and started bringing up menus and rifling through them at top speed.

"Don't you want me to do that?" Henderson asked. "Aren't you afraid of making yourself a Mongloid?"

No, he didn't and he wasn't. Fisher knew exactly what he wanted to do for this bodmod and it was something he dare not trust to someone else. He knew Henderson was competent with mammalian biological structure, but this would be far from standard. "I'm doing the design myself."

"Don't say I didn't offer." Henderson paused for a moment then added, "Can I offer you something to wear? A robe, perhaps?"

Fisher grunted and didn't care if Henderson took the sound as assent or not. His mind had already turned to the task at hand.

"Hmm, all right then," Henderson said. "I'll prep the bath then."

Fisher knew that a star dragon possessed strong electromagnetic fields that facilitated their movements in the magnetic field of the accretion disk. That pattern of motion suggested a circulatory system of charged fluid that would be useful for energy transfer as well as transportation. The creatures had to shed heat, however, if not from inefficient energy transfer then from what they absorbed from their immediate environment. He'd figured out that one too, now, with the laser cooling. Those two interwoven systems then were the key to the new body he would create for himself, and not all that difficult to implement he realized after a quick survey of available bodmods. It was the current levels and combination of mods that would pose problems and that took him an extra half hour to solve to his satisfaction (and an extra ten minutes to meet the safety diagnostics' satisfaction that required extra electrical shielding for his nervous system).

The thought of powering his body with magnetically confined fusion flashed to mind, but even he had to admit that would be too much if it were even available.

When he was finished, a glowing green man floated in the workstation's picture tank, rotating to display the final product from all angles. He would require some special nutritional supplements, but nothing too onerous...but then again nothing would be too onerous for him at this stage in his dedication to his goals.

"Glow in the dark skin?" Henderson asked, failing to startle him.

Fisher just snorted back. "Hardly. I'm ready for the bath, Henderson."

"Affirmative, Fisher.

Fisher rose, ignoring the cramps in his sore back; he realized he'd batted the chairbeast to immobility without thinking about it. He also realized that he should have fixed his back since he was going to the trouble of a major bodmod, but he'd forgotten about it. Fixing his back wasn't important enough to further delay him.

The nutrient bath squatted in an adjacent, tall-ceilinged chamber surrounded by organo-electronic systems. Fisher stepped up the ladder to the top of the diamond rim. The fluid within bubbled darkly like a stew, a modern witch's cauldron.

Fisher did not hesitate at the rim the way most people did. He rotated smoothly at the top and let his feet slip into the warm bath and immediately let go so his entire body could follow. Unlike most people, he did not hesitate to suck the oxygenated fluid into his mouth and lungs. There was no sense to hesitation and a baser instinct overrode what he considered obsolete instincts against drowning. His alveoli switched into more efficient oxygen extraction with his very next heartbeat.

In the warm, wet darkness thousands of viruses invaded his system. These were the agents of gene therapy that would inject themselves into his cells, dismantle his DNA at the introns, and insert or replace certain sequences that would govern the cellular operation of his new systems. More sophisticated nanomachinery would reconstruct the macrobiology into the forms he had selected. Still other devices, more sophisticated than viruses and more versatile than the machinery rebuilding his tissues, would isolate and protect his brain functions. Numbness struck his extremities and he knew that these were working. A warmth more vital than that of the bath grew within him: waste heat from the tiny machines and cellular changes. He was now trapped in his own morphing body several hours until the modifications would be complete.

Fisher had not programmed any stim entertainment for the procedure. His eyes stared unseeing into the black brew. His mind's eye saw only glowing green dragons above a blazing disk of fire.

Yes, he thought as his limbs went rigid and a slow burn filled his body, he'd show Fang obsession all right.

Part Two: Here Be Dragons

Chapter 6

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein







Devereaux walked steadily down the corridor toward Fisher's cabin, her speed balanced between urgency and yes, she freely admitted to herself, apprehension bordering on fear. When she had brought her latest disk predictions to Captain Fang, how was she to know that the result would be an immediate decision to deactivate wormdrive, canceling the full program of deceleration, in order to arrive early?

Fisher would be furious at not being notified earlier, but he would be even more furious if not notified now. Worse, he had instructed Papa not to disturb him short of decompression, so seeing him in person was the only way to inform him.

Devereaux wished she hadn't said as much to Captain Fang, who had told her to go ahead and tell him in person.

Devereaux didn't want to see Fisher furious. Not now, after what he had made of himself these last few long months. Why wouldn't the man see reason anymore? What had happened between him and the captain that was this awful? Normally solving such a puzzle would have held boundless interest for her, but now....

Her hand shook as she was reaching for the chime. Before she could ring it, Fisher's door irised open spilling white light, dry heat, and crackling noise into the corridor. Startled, Devereaux jumped away, bringing her hand, fingers spread, to her chest. It was like standing before an open kiln.

"I felt the fields shift," Fisher said.

She would have been startled even if he hadn't opened his door unexpectedly -- Fisher's current appearance never failed startled her. Most immediately noticeable was the green glow that exuded from his rough, dry skin, then the lack of any hair including eyebrows (which had Fisher explained were not needed for a body that no longer sweated), and finally the tiny salmon-pink eyes set deep within epicanthic folds of skin. His unvarying dress was now also quite different. Gone were the black duradenim and the characteristic but ugly streakers. Now he wore a sheer gray bodysuit stitched with concentric golden fibers of unclear purpose. The creases were ninety degrees out of phase with those of the captain's, tracing his outline like an aura.

And his cabin...Devereaux, spared a second to look beyond the exobiologist before answering him. Inside, fires roared and danced in the bottom half of the room, making for an overwhelming cacophony to the senses. The fire stopped abruptly about a meter from the door. In the months since turnaround, Devereaux had never seen anything but fire in the room, and had no idea of how Fisher lived inside, let alone worked.

"I felt the fields shift," Fisher repeated.

"How could you? I mean, yes, Fang's preparing to shut down the wormdrive."

Fisher pushed past Devereaux, and she felt static raise the hair on her arms, and even the tangles of the hair on her head.

She turned and tried to keep up with his pace.



"Papa," Fisher ordered, "Give me a line to Fang."



"We're sorry," came Papa's voice, "The captain is busy and asked not to be disturbed. Is this a decompression emergency?"



Without breaking his stride, Fisher dismissed Papa's stonewall with a wave of his arm. To Devereaux he said, "Brief me."

Devereaux, jogging to keep up, said in a bumpy, breathless voice, "Like I told Fang, for our approach as scheduled, SS Cygni would be entering outburst. It made sense to advance arrival twenty days, ninety-nine percent confidence interval on the outburst ignition. So Fang's advancing the schedule. We'll compute a new, faster course, overshoot the system with some residual velocity, and let its gravity help pull us back. Get a good look on the way past and obtain a second-opinion on the probe results."

"Anything new from the probe? She's not still planning to fire missiles, is she?" he hissed.

This continuing argument had turned the dragon meetings into an entrenched battleground. The vague guidelines of the Biolathe prospectus provided great latitude and an ambiguous mandate for either Fisher or Fang to wrest from the document. When it had appeared probable they might overshoot the disk because of the outburst timing, as they were now planning, Fang had seized the opportunity to suggest launching the missiles early. The missiles could be sent on a slower approach, and could be made to drive a dragon toward the ship, which would now be coming about from the far side of the system. Devereaux herself admired the elegant solution, minimizing resource consumption and time, the play of the related differential equations against the extreme boundary conditions of the disk. Fisher, of course, protested at every meeting. A classic case of irresistible force and immovable object.

"Nothing from the probe, but the range isn't yet optimal and the noise is large. I'm not sure about the missiles but -- "

He increased his pace through a ring shift without pausing to listen to her, and surged into the bridge ring. Just before they reached the portal to the fly bridge, Fisher stumbled. Arms outstretched, he skidded to a stop on his chest.

As Devereaux bent to help him up, Papa's voice announced, "Please secure your loose items and yourselves. Wormdrive shutting down. End of full gravity in thirty seconds."

"I'm fine," Fisher said, pushing her away with a mild shock. "I'm simply very sensitive to magnetic fields now, and these rings are not as well shielded, at least to our internal fields, as I would prefer."

"I see," she said, frowning as Fisher went right on by her and headed into the fly bridge.

Just as Devereaux rounded the entrance, Fang said, "Take your seats, people."

Devereaux did as she was told, taking the opportunity to push past Fisher for a change, and slid onto the accommodating couchbeast. She was breathing heavily.

Fisher stood his ground, about two meters directly in front of where Fang sat, and made no motion toward the couch. What was he trying to prove?

"Sit down, Doctor Fisher," Fang said.

"I prefer to stand," he replied.

"Fine," said Fang.

The volume of Papa's countdown increased as he approached zero. The gravity oscillated. Fisher's glow intensified. Then Devereaux's stomach did a mean flip-flop as gravity failed. "Wormdrive deactivated," Papa announced.

Fisher drifted upward slowly off the floor. Fang lifted her head to follow Fisher's trajectory.

No one said anything for a few moments, a strange anticlimax to the preceding rush. Or rather, no climax at all yet. That was the problem.

"You're welcome, daughter," Papa said.

Fang blinked. "Sorry. Thank you, Papa."

Devereaux sneezed. Then twice more. She often sneezed at the onset of freefall, when the dust and lint was able to escape the nooks and crannies it found for itself, and before the filters and fish could remove the extra irritants from the air. No one said anything right away, and she hoped that her sneezes had broken the dark mood that had been brewing.

"So what's it going to be now?" Fisher asked, his face drifting toward the captain's. The tension recrystallized, like a supersaturated solution being prodded.

Before his glare, Captain Fang calmly turned her gaze toward Devereaux. Her expression, as usual, was inscrutable. "What is your current opinion on the matter, Sylvia?"

"We might learn something during the flyby -- our instruments are far superior to the probe's. The numbers and distribution of dragons in the disk is still mostly guesswork. My model still indicates that the next outburst will hold off at least two weeks."

"Thank you," Fang said. She turned back to Fisher. Their noses were scant centimeters apart. Somehow Fisher hadn't bumped into her, and now in fact seemed to hover, somehow holding his position. Magnetically? It was possible.

Fang addressed Fisher, "Shall we consider this while Papa is computing our options, and look at SS Cygni for ourselves?"

"Fine," Fisher said, and managed to spin in place, orienting himself to look on the wall screen.

"Bring it up, Papa."

The system materialized, real colors, almost real-time -- only a few hours light delay now. Tilted at nearly a thirty degree angle to their approach vector, the disk blazed away, essentially pure white to the eye over its entire surface, with only a hint of violet. Nestled right up against the disk with its sparkling heart, the larger secondary star throbbed, a cooler cosmic ember within which hydrogen still burned. Sparking serpentine tendrils twisted between the disk and the secondary, prominences tracing the magnetic flux tubes connecting the two photospheres. Motion was visible to the eye. The outer disk velocities were about six hundred kilometers per second -- not a relativistic speed, but respectable, letting the gas orbit over the course of a couple hours. The velocities at the inner edge of the disk, on the other hand, were more than respectable. It was all simple dynamics, and the gas rotated in the disk differentially, following Keplerian orbits such that the centrifugal force of the angular momentum balanced gravitational pull, and at the inner edge the velocities were over six thousand kilometers per second. That meant that the gas spiraling into the primary star did so making roughly an orbit every few seconds.

The white dwarf massed twenty percent greater than solar, while the larger but less dense secondary was a mere seventy percent solar. The sum was more than Chandrasekhar's limit of 1.44 solar masses, the mass above which degenerate electron pressure could not resist gravitational collapse. The process by which mass was transferred from the secondary to the primary was distressingly complicated since there also existed several processes by which the primary itself lost mass. During many epochs nova explosions, winds, and other cosmic belches tended to leave the white dwarf with less mass than when it started. Still, Devereaux's best evolutionary models indicated the system would, billions of years in the future, explode in a certain rare type of supernovae.

Devereaux shifted her gaze from SS Cygni to Fisher and Fang. Fisher had rotated around Fang so they were nearly side by side, together staring at the binary system. Fisher glowed a bright green. The shimmer made him appear agitated; perhaps appropriately so. Fang's light olive complexion reflected his light, her face expressionless, placidly regarding their destination. Their faces so close together, with such a contrast, reminded Devereaux of a binary star. But which was the primary, and which was the secondary? Which was consuming the other? It had already seemed that their relationship had resulted in a supernova, but perhaps that was merely the outburst of a dwarf nova, with the real fireworks still to come.

Devereaux didn't want to be around if those two got into it the way they were capable of doing.

Casting away these dangerous thoughts, she caught Phil's eye. He winked at her, and, suddenly grinning, she winked back. Much of her apprehension evaporated, just like that.

"Course calculated and maneuver options placed in command buffer," Papa announced. "What is your desire, daughter?"

Indeed, thought Devereaux. She would have to say something, do something, if Captain Fang insisted on launching the missiles now. It didn't make sense to do anything like that until they had a better look, sifted through the probe data, gave the place an examination with their own instruments. Committing them to something at this stage would be ludicrous, driven by emotional factors and not by logic. They had plenty of time between outbursts, and could always retreat to a safe distance and orbit through another dwarf nova if forced to. They had enough ablation mass and fuel for the raildrive for that. She would follow the reasonable course, Devereaux believed: Fang was a professional first and Devereaux trusted her to do the right thing

"Papa -- " began Fang.

"Activate wormdrive," Fisher broke in.

"Belay that!" Fang cried, showing the most emotion on her face -- in this case a snarl -- that Devereaux could recall. Not even during the dragon meetings had Fang burst out like that.

"Of course, daughter."

"Leave the bridge, Dr. Fisher," Fang said, her face a smooth mask once again.

Sweat trickled coolly up Devereaux's temple. She flicked her head slightly, sending the sweat floating off in a ball.

A hint of ozone tinged the air -- from Fisher? If he was emitting ionizing radiation, she'd --

Fisher said, "Fine," and spun away and glided out the door without touching any surfaces. It was spooky, like he was a green ghost. If he had screamed, he would have made a fine banshee.

After he had gone, Fang said, "Alter course, please. Take us by SS Cygni as outlined in the primary command buffer."

So, no missiles. Thankfully sensible.

"Yes, daughter."

Suddenly Devereaux fell sideways, but the gentle tug from the chemical maneuvering thrusters lasted only a moment. Just a nudge to put them on a course to skim by the disk, timed to thread the Karamojo between the two stars.

She hoped there was a similar course between Fisher and Fang that would bring success. Was there some way to nudge the mission's course through their dangerous orbit?