Fisher started his decoy code and left his cabin disguised, to Papa, as a scavenging fish.



Walking in a slow, circuitous manner, spiraling like a dragon around a magnetic field line, so as to not appear too inconsistent with his disguise, he made his way toward the missile hold. Electronically isolated until launch as per safety regulations, like a dragon in a star system two hundred fifty light years from Earth, the missiles had to be reprogrammed on the spot. Once launched into the disk, home of glorious life happily dancing in tune with its own flames, Papa would monitor the communication laser channels carefully and it would be a much harder trick than what he was pulling off now.



How could Fang do this thing? She was a cold-blooded killer, a degenerate soldier with a tiny little head as dense as the white dwarf that was SS Cygni's primary. He should have known right away, her hair so smooth, straight, shiny and short, a helmet...when a friend of the dragon would have long, wild tresses twisting in all directions, serpentine and rolling, plasma charged, shocking static.



No matter. When the missiles sank into the disk and vanished, completely unrecoverable, Fang would have no choice but to approach the dragons carefully, with the respect they deserved. Nuclear missiles would safely burn in the disk, making his sabotage more easily hidden. It would still be a dangerous game for him, but if the dragons won he would pay any cost.



Fisher arrested his steps. Too eager, too anomalous, and even the unconscious part of Papa would notice this strange fish out of water. Sweep left, eat the dust, sweep right, spiral around the field line. There would be no flash of death, no incinerating wall, for his dragons.



Maddeningly slow progress. The meeting could break up at any time and someone could walk by and simply acknowledge him, which would be enough to alert Papa. Who greets a fish crawling along the floor?



There would be other clues the longer he took, clues he could do nothing about. The Karamojo was a complex ship, but self-contained and perfectly understood within Papa's specially designed mind which viewed the ship as its own body. Just as the nanomeds in his own veins monitored his body's state, so did Papa monitor the ship. He referred to this monitoring as a 'built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.' Fisher's decoy code could mask his presence in terms of sight, sound, smell, but without the same perfect understanding of the integrated ship, his waste heat would boost temperatures, his footsteps would ignite vibrations throughout the diamond structure of the ship that was constantly monitored, and the biomass flux per ship section would fail to balance. His code was good, but not perfect.



He made the tube between rings and followed it, ever so slowly, past all the fore rings, toward the tapered rear of the ship. The missiles were kept there, in one of the holds, away from the inhabited portions of the ship.



Because of the taper down to the smaller rear bulb, the effective gravity increased as he climbed the slope. Because they had cut the wormdrive and their deceleration to arrive early, they rotated the ship around its central axis so that centrifugal forces now defined "down." Although portions of the ship could twist to accommodate the shift in the gravity vector, the ship rotated as a solid body. The rotation rate was set to provide one Earth gravity for the radius of the fore bulb, but accelerative force was inversely proportional to the radius. The taper made things spin fast, made them heavier.



He climbed up the white hill, his body spiraling as he went. One point one gravities, one point two, one point three gravities. A steep climb indeed. How would the extra weight slow a fish?



When he had nearly reached two gravities and the end of the tube where it gave way to the access to the dangerous-materials hold ring, he heard steps behind him from the tapering tube he had laboriously climbed.



Fisher let his spiraling steps twist, a serpentine neck would be better, to allow himself to see who it might be. A shape, distant, just a diffracted head bobbing upside down. Under magnification, the head was dark-skinned, either Stearn or Devereaux. The cadence suggested Stearn, as did the hard echoes of boots. Devereaux usually went barefoot, or in soft-soled sandals.

The tube was nearly three kilometers long, and slightly curved, so he had a chance. He was making little noise, and would not be easily noticeable unless Stearn scanned for him in the next minute, which was what it would take to make the ring.

Fisher didn't break his shuffle. He moved, slowly, listening to the steps that were at two or three times the frequency of his own. Discipline Fisher had, and focus, oh yes, focus. He watched the dragon's languid coils in his mind's eye, the creature in slow motion due to the physics of its own immense size, so too Fisher in slow motion via a sympathetic magic.



Hide in the photosphere, Fisher thought as he reached the corner, spiraled around it, now out of sight even if Stearn magnified his vision.



The steps continued, holding their pace. No evidence he'd been spotted. Fisher visited the rear holds sometimes, just as he visited all the ship. He did good work during walks, or his 'oblivious promenades,' as Atsuko had called them because of the way he'd walk into things. He could fake his way past Stearn, but Papa would notice the discrepancy of Stearn talking to a fish and unravel his plan at once. This plan Papa wouldn't be forced by privacy rules to keep from Fang.



Fisher continued his snaking, faux-dust-eating path, moving around the ring toward the missile hold.



The steps grew louder.



They needed him, didn't they? They'd see from his desperation, if he were caught, that they had made a serious mistake. The strength of his convictions would yet sway Fang, he was sure. Better, of course, to present the loss of the missiles as a fait accompli, with no recourse but a respectful approach to the dragon's disk. Yes, that would still be best, and that outcome was still possible.



Almost there! If the steps went the other way around the ring, he'd make it. What was the Jack doing back here anyway? Routine checks for Papa? Or could he be headed specifically for the missile hold under special orders? Would Fang think him possible of such sabotage? He didn't believe so, especially with Papa watching.



The door to the hold was before him, and would open for a cleaning fish working on a dirty footprint crossing the threshold. Three meters. Two. Fisher peered at the ivory iris as if it were a deuterium-rich path of accretion disk, food for a fusion-powered dragon.



The steps were coming his way around the ring.



Damn!



It was over. Stearn or Papa would figure out his subterfuge, alert Fang, who would make sure her precious missiles were ship-shape to murder dragons by the millions. Still, no reason to tip over his king before checkmate was truly inevitable. He held to course.



The steps were right behind him, ringing off the deck. He was surely in sight now.



"Hey, Fish," Stearn said as he walked past without breaking stride. The Jack soon vanished ahead around the curve of the ring.



Fisher said nothing, but glowed an extra rich, pea-green, the color of a flush in his current body. It was easy to ignore Stearn as a matter of course. It was his normal behavior, and Stearn hadn't paused for any acknowledgment. Could it be possible for Papa to misinterpret 'Fish?' Stearn was a screw-ball, and given to such things as talking to cleaning appliances, Fisher was sure...it was still possible to salvage the plan, wasn't it?



The dragon entered the hold to face its own death, and avert it.



The chamber was vast, holding rows of stacked missiles: sleek, black bullets in racks feeding slotted runways to channel the weapons into launch tubes. Inside the blackness slept fissionables and hydrogen isotopes, cool and currently impotent, destined to splash into the lake of fire that was SS Cygni's accretion disk. And burn up in their sleep, Fisher promised his brethren.



Fisher called to mind his mnemonic, fixed in place chemically with Forget-Me-Not rather than in his biochip where it could incriminate him, and began to manually reprogram the first missile. His hand danced like a programmed woodpecker over the control panel, punching home the new instructions. This missile would not murder a star dragon.



And when his task was completed neither would any of the other ninety-nine.