Henderson sank deeply down into the velvety chairbeast, relishing the sensation against his bare skin, sipped from his glass of Merlot, and listened to Mozart's The Magic Flute. Opposite his chairbeast and along the far side of his biolab squatted his homunculi colony. Inside the diamond enclosure existed an entire self-contained colony of tiny people, a replica of the twenty-third century Charon Station. They lacked complex speech and higher reasoning, of course -- their brains weren't nearly large enough -- but they were nevertheless perfectly proportioned human beings a mere twenty centimeters tall. There were ninety-nine very attractive women and one male, Henderson's genetic kin. All the women were pregnant with his homunculi.



Henderson activated his picture tank, which was slaved to surveillance devices inside the colony. He sipped his wine, eased his seat back further, and watched tiny Henderson cast his shadow into the darkened bedroom of a large-breasted blonde the equivalent of eight months pregnant....



Squinting, he beckoned his deep thoughts hither and meditated upon the purposes of life.



"Mr. Henderson," Papa's voice interrupted.



"What is it?"



"Mr. Stearn does not talk to fish. Prepare a tranquilizer dart for our exobiologist and hustle up to the missile hold."



"A tranquilizer? For Fisher?" What was going on?



"Do it now. This is an order from Fang."



Henderson sighed, downed his wine, and stood up. "Right."



More work, and more than a minor inconvenience having to adjust for Fisher's current biology. The possibility of a major inconvenience loomed depending on how this played out.



He would be very upset if this mission went wrong and threatened his long-term plans.



He met up with Fang in the tube toward the aft holds. She nodded impatiently as she took the dart gun from Henderson and together they hiked up the tube.



"What's happening?" Henderson asked.



"Fisher," she said. "Stearn talked to a fish, and then Papa noticed it diligently cleaning the dust from all the missiles, in order. Then he noticed a virus in his autonomous perceptive circuits."



"Enough said."



The Jack waited for them at the ring entrance. "Missile hold," he said.



"Of course," said Fang.



She was so fast through the hold door, she had to step over the irising membranes to avoid tripping. "Fisher," she called. "Your game is up."



Six rows down a black bullet reflected green darkly. From that direction issued a strangled cry filled with bile and a touch of rolling thunder, a sound like nothing Henderson had ever before heard. The closest to that cry had been when he'd troubleshooted a problem with a biovat on a fast cruiser to Phaelendra. They had been growing a clever design for a creature, a sort of giant armored frog, intended to ameliorate the problem of the spiny viseroths preying on livestock. Only the growth kept going wrong, a corrupted gene sequence, resulting in something severely asymmetric that would die from heart failure when it croaked forth its deformed pain.



Finally the sputtering, rolling cry faded into a low moan, then silence.



Henderson swallowed, and glanced at Stearn who stared ahead with wide eyes, stark white flashing against his ebon skin.



"Come out now, or I'll have to take you down. I am armed," Fang called, a vein throbbing near her blonde temple. It was an ugly feature in an otherwise handsome face, and if she'd come in for half an hour, Henderson was sure he could fix it.



Fang lightly licked her lips while they waited another ten seconds.



Shuffling steps, the green glow intensified, and Fisher staggered around the end of a black bullet. His upper lip was lifted into an ugly sneer, as if pulled by an invisible marionette string, and his salmon-colored eyes, normally recessed and glassy, floated like burning coals in the nimbus of green. He thrust forward his arms, hands up, twisted into claws. He leaned toward them and took a strange semi-circular step.



"You'll calm down now, Dr. Fisher," Fang said. "If you're to have any more involvement on this mission, you will cooperate immediately."



Tears streamed down Fisher's cheeks, making the light underneath sparkle. "You're all murderers!" he shouted, pointing at them now with both hands.



Fang lifted the tranquilizer gun. "Will you cooperate, Dr. Fisher?"



"Of course I will! What choice do I have?"



Fang maintained her implacable gaze upon Fisher and said in a quiet tone, "Mr. Stearn, please begin checking the missiles and restore their programming."



"Aye aye, Captain."



"We can handle things from here, Mr. Henderson. Thank you for your assistance."

"You're welcome." Henderson smiled. His share of a mission bonus would be all the larger now -- surely Fisher would get docked. Perhaps he could afford his own full-sized colony when they returned. Probably not in the solar system, but someplace not so many light years from Earth. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have some important experiments back in the lab to monitor."

Chapter 8

"There she blows! there! there! she blows!" -- Tashtego in Hermann Melville's Moby Dick

The view, splashed in floor-ceiling-wall wrap-around throughout the fly bridge, was not disappointing, and Fang could not keep herself from gasping audibly.



Planets all had a sameness to their appearance that was grand, but familiar. From rocky planetoids to atmospheric cauldrons, planetary globes were still spherical. You looked out, or down rather, at a surface receding away. The mind chose a natural scale and perceived the same sort of thing, no matter what the true scale; instruments were generally required to know what you were looking at.



SS Cygni's accretion disk was different. It flared out toward larger radii, making a shallow bowl with the opposite curvature to that of planets. The Karamojo now slid into that bowl, ass-end first, the down-sized singularities of the reactivated wormdrive currently matching the vertical component of the white dwarf's pull, some two times Earth gravity at their position nearly ten thousand kilometers above the disk mid-plane. That was still several thousand kilometers above the disk's ill-defined surface. The disk's own gravity was feeble compared to that of the few percent of the tangential primary gravity they experienced maintaining their orbit's altitude above the disk. They would use reaction mass to adjust worm thrust against that pull, riding the high gravity, and maintain a powered halo orbit with a period eighty minutes long above the surface of the disk; they could not survive a freefall orbit which would have to pass through the disk's midplane and the hot, dense plasma there. Two gravities would not be so bad for a few weeks, especially as they'd been adapting their bodies, building muscle, to be ready. Fang herself had noticed that her new stockiness slowed her in the ring, but the extra bulk let her hit harder.

When it came time to cage a dragon, they would collapse the singularities and magnetically spin around the disk's own field to point the Karamojo's maw and trap toward the targeted beast using its own electromagnetic fields.

The bowl was bright white, cut down by the display automatics well enough to discern some hues, from the violet tinge at the center of the bowl where the plasma accreted directly onto the primary surface, to the red of the disk's outer edge, which was a close temperature match to the secondary type-K dwarf star. The exception to this was the inferno where the accretion stream spilled out of the secondary's gravitational influence and twisted back around to crash into the disk orbiting the white dwarf. That maelstrom, long ago inadequately coined the 'hot spot,' shared the core's violet tinge. Prominences curled up waving like dancing fingers, tracing magnetic field lines, and looped back down into the stately chaos.



"This," Fang proclaimed, "this is a sea worth sailing."



The Karamojo finished matching velocities with the outer edge of the disk -- a mere six hundred kilometers per second. Gas closer to the white dwarf rotated much faster, giving the illusion of a giant fire whirlpool, which was not far from wrong; the white dwarf's surface was the 'drain,' where hydrogen would pile up atop the degenerate matter, waiting until the pressure crept up, and the temperature crept up. Eventually runaway fusion would result in a nova, perhaps a hundred thousand years hence, flash burning the gas into helium and blowing the disk away into interstellar space.



The ship had to maintain some distance from the disk's photosphere -- the self-repairing high-albedo nanoskin could only process energy so quickly, even though it used multiple technologies to shed heat. Too close and the skin would begin to ablate away with a rapidly deteriorating efficiency. A ship as vast as the Karamojo held large mass reserves, but the disk's fire could char those in an instant without careful attention.



"Where are the missiles?" Fisher asked Fang.



Fang blinked, tearing her gaze and thoughts away from the magnificent vista, brought back to her surroundings by the mutineer, Fisher. Had she really loved him? Being honest with herself, she admitted that she thought she had. And now? She looked at him, at his green face and into his pink eyes -- he wasn't looking at this incredible place they had traveled so far to reach, but at her, his enemy whom he would not even thank for not throwing him into the brig. This Fisher was a hateful alien, not the man she'd taught to box, the man she'd let inside her sanctum, inside her. Now that he'd been caught, with no other option but to go along with the current plan of attack, he was on their side, right?



Still, she would not permit Papa to respond to Fisher except in the most rudimentary ways.



She could not help but think of him as a dragon in their midst, a snake in the grass. Here be dragons, she thought, like on the ancient maps. "Papa," Fang said, "Please display missile vectors."



Fifty black lines appeared on the disk upstream from the Karamojo. Half their arsenel, a conservative effort. The vectors described a funnel, with each terminating at different points with a time given in red numbers, the pattern designed to drive the star dragons from deeper, hotter locations in the disk toward the rim where the ship waited. The operation would take nearly an hour, with bombs going off at different times and places. Their detonations intended to catch as big a piece of disk as they could, but with a surface area nearly a thousand times that of Earth, that was little more than a tiny fraction of a percent of the total. They would do what they could and hope for the best.



Fisher swept his gaze along the vectors. To Devereaux he said, "Have you seen anything?"



Of course she hadn't; she would have said something. Fisher appeared a serene alien full of privileged knowledge, but the question betrayed his anxiety. After being his lover, Fang thought she should be able to read him better -- this moment of lucidity was the exception in recent weeks. Her ability to read him might be essential in the coming days.



Devereaux leaned back from her console. "No signal, at least not at the laser wavelengths we saw before. We are on the tail-end of an outburst, which is not a typical time. I'm looking for other lines, but either every dragon is on a different frequency, they're down deep in the disk, or they're not here."



"Anything else anomalous?" Fisher persisted. "Any sign of anything else that might be alive?"



"Nothing," said Devereaux. "But we'll have a better idea when the latest shuttle returns a scoop sample."



Fisher turned to Fang, "You will let us analyze the sample before you start bombing the enemy, won't you, Captain?"



"For you, Dr. Fisher, of course." She didn't like the sarcasm that the remark implied. It was unprofessional, but it had slipped out. Tough. Perhaps she too was nervous.



He didn't look any happier after her reassurance.



"This place rules," Stearn said. "I feel like a god."



Fang only half-agreed. This was magnificent, being here, but the disk was so unimaginably huge, it was more than a little intimidating. This was infinitely vaster than any planet. The Karamojo might be better christened the Tiny Debris, a piece of cork being sucked into Charbydis. That would make the accretion stream and its hot spot the Scylla -- they would have to watch that each eighty minutes -- the orbital period at their radius near the disk's periphery. But this was her chance, finally, to be a real captain and operate in a unique environment with unique objectives.



Henderson cleared his throat. He was frowning as he said, "There's something we never discussed out loud during our planning sessions."



"What's that?" Fisher asked, an edge in his voice.



"What if, as Sylvia hypothesized, there are no longer any dragons here?"



No one answered. The disk blazed away, full of light and mystery.