Fang's stomach churned as the first missile plowed into the disk. It would be a minute before the missile exploded at the mid-plane and its effects would become evident at the surface.

"I maintain that you've overestimated how fast a star dragon can move," Fisher said, continuing with his litany of objections that had been streaming forth since he'd returned to the bridge sans evidence for life in the disk. No star plankton or star rabbits to worry about, which suited Fang fine.

"My estimates are based on your models, Dr. Fisher. Are they wrong?" she challenged.

"Of course they are! That snippet of data from the probe told us almost nothing. If my models were perfect, we'd be able to build a dragon ourselves and skip this trip."

Fang shrugged.

"The disk environment must be as varied to its inhabitants as those of terrestrial life forms. Parts of Earth's oceans are oxygen-poor and lifeless. We could be fishing in the equivalent of a desert. We did that with the first Jupiter probe."

When Fang refused to engage him, Fisher tacked. "Look, I thought we agreed that the lack of a supporting ecosystem would be evidence for intelligent creation. Someone goes to all the trouble of making these star dragons, then we come along and start blowing them up. That someone is going to be mad, don't you think?"

"Then let them show up and tell us. That'd be a mission to be on, but I doubt that's going to happen." She really didn't worry about an abstract boogie man too much. Give her something tangible to tilt with. An empty disk was no cause for alarm. "What's done is done, Dr. Fisher. The missiles are exploding as we speak. I suggest you sit back and enjoy the show."



Fisher blazed green and thankfully said nothing.



"There," Stearn said, almost launching himself as he stood to point at the black vectors. "There she blows!"



"Magnify," said Fisher, whipping around.



"Magnify," repeated Fang, so that Papa would do as requested.



There was the sensation of movement at great velocity as the entire bowl of fire warped through the bridge, making the barely perceptible shadows shift and grow like hidden secrets worried about too much -- except for Fisher, whose glow helped wipe out shadows, making his secrets somehow seem even more hidden.



Before them the disk blossomed into a spreading ring containing alabaster flame at millions of degrees Kelvin. The shockwave plowed through the surrounding cooler plasma, heating, engulfing, roaring. The disk burned into purity, erasing all the details of its former motion. The central region of the explosion erupted like a spouting volcano, lifting many kilometers of gas above the bowled surface. The differential orbital accelerations were already shredding the perfect circle of destruction into a twisted, splayed half-spiral, just as their three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation had predicted.

"Now that," Fang said, "is a beater."

"Are we really safe from that?" Henderson asked, hands clasped tightly in his lap.

Papa answered, "Yes, mostly by keeping our distance. Our incident flux is well within tolerances."

"It's beautiful," Devereaux said, her voice barely audible. "If anyone is watching closely, it's going to give them some strange spectra to decipher."

"It's the most disgusting thing I ever saw," Fisher said.

Everyone ignored Fisher and watched the developing explosion.

With any luck, the dragons had registered the photon and particle burst with their specialized senses -- whatever they were -- and would be fleeing the shockwave. Over the next few hours, the other missiles would explode, channeling the dragons right to the Karamojo. With any luck.

Fang licked her lips.

A few minutes later Stearn jumped again, pointing. "Number two!"

And they all watched again, dumbfounded, at the destructive power of mankind's technology. In the face of the natural splendor of SS Cygni and its accretion disk these explosions were only magnified in their brilliance. This was an awesome experience to preside over.

The oddest thing was watching all this raw energy with the counter-point of excruciating silence. Maybe they should have some music, something ancient and elemental. Maybe Pradhan's Cosmic Continuum, or Stravinsky's Firebird, something. Maybe she should let Henderson select something -- he knew classical music. But that thought faded quickly as she became lost again in the view, the silence somehow majestically fitting after all. No music could match this, no sound, that incidental effect of air molecules crashing together. What was that compared to the raw energy dancing in this amphitheater of fire?

"You're killing them," muttered Fisher, voice cracking, breaking that silence.

Fang shouted, "If this is so painful, why don't you just leave the bridge?"

"I want to be here to count the bodies."

"Sylvia," Fang asked in a conversational tone, "Do you see any bodies yet?"

"Uh, right. I'll check." Devereaux bent to her console and started whispering instructions to Papa.

"Number three!"

Stearn kept an enthusiastic count through the first dozen, but Fang amazed herself by becoming bored. Maybe she could fit into jaded Earth culture better than she thought. It was a spectacle, but not interactive. The missiles reached their objectives and exploded. There wasn't anything to do but watch. She needed to find the thread of nervous tension she'd held in her stomach at the start of this endeavor. The dragons would come, just as the lion had. When you look nature in the eye and pull the trigger, you are alive. They were now pulling the trigger. That was what she was in this for, being alive and vital, being involved in the universe. These explosions were preliminary to the real action likely to come soon.



"I might have something," Devereaux announced, looking up for the first time in the past half hour.



Fisher beat Fang to Devereaux's console. "What is it?" he asked.



"Understand," Devereaux began, "The background is quite high and the laws of physics are the same here as they are on Earth. Noise goes as the square root of the counts, so until they're well resolved real signals are easily swamped in the background of an environment like this."



"What is it?" Fang asked, disliking repeating Fisher again, but she was starting to get the scent of her quarry and didn't care to hear all of Devereaux's qualifiers. This was one lion that she wanted to be sure to see before it was on top of her.



"Here," said Devereaux, pointing to a spike in a spectrum she had displayed. It was a little higher than some other spikes, but didn't appear special in any way. "I've been running a filter looking for blueshifting emission lines correlated with missile explosions. Taking the distribution of data over several explosions, and running another cross-correlation in the frequency domain, then shifting and stacking, I was able to pick out this. Run it in the time domain, Papa."



A graph popped up, intensity versus velocity, showing one sharp line against a jagged continuous signal. As they watched, the line intensified and moved toward negative velocities -- blueshifts -- toward the Karamojo. At kilometers per second.



"That's it for sure," said Fisher, beaming green light onto the rim of the console's picture tank.



"You're always sure, aren't you, Fisher," Fang said.



"I'm only ever as sure as you are, Captain."



Ignoring them both, Devereaux went on, "I ought to be able to estimate the dragon density from this, if that's them. Add some finer spatial filtering. The velocities seem really high though. I still have a lot of guesswork to give you a number. It'll take me a little time. We might just be better off with empirical calibration when the final array of explosions drive them out of the disk."



Enough qualifications! This was a hunt, not a science project. "As long as we get just one," Fang said, "This mission will be a success."



"The operation was a success, but the patient died," quipped Fisher.



"How's that?" Fang asked, knowing better, but settling into a bit of their old repartee.



"Old medical saying, pre-nanotech. It means you're too focused on succeeding with your little task to worry about the big picture."



"Oh will you please just shut up for once?" She managed to keep her voice even and face impassive. She was not sure how.



"Fine," he answered, that tone of smug righteousness grating in her ear.



Fang said, "Find out what you can, Sylvia," and stalked back to her fighting chair to watch the bomb bursts continue. She had to get in the right mind frame...the lion is out there, hiding in the grass.



She rubbed her damp palms against the hide of her chairbeast, puta-pop-pop-pop, as her skin stuck and slid and stuck and slid on the leathery surface. She bent her head slightly down and inhaled deeply, catching her own not unpleasant scent. She smiled, slightly, and began a series of isometric exercises. She would be ready when the time came.



She was about to discover what it truly meant to be Captain.



She could hardly wait.



When the series of programmed explosions was nearly finished and the dragons had to arrive soon, very soon, Fang asked, "Any progress, Sylvia?"



Without looking up, Fisher managed to cut off Devereaux and answered, "It's really a snake in the grass. The signals vary in a most interesting manner, which I think might be camouflage against the disk. Why they should be hiding, I don't know, but it certainly seems that way. I speculate that there's a electrically transparent shell tuned to their -- "



"There she blows!" shouted Stearn, thankfully ending the lecture early. "I mean it this time!"



Fang followed Stearn's pointing, but saw nothing right away that made sense. The explosion was spectacular, more so than the others as it was closer, but there was something different, a strange swirling rainbow riding the edge of the shockwave. "Papa?"



"Working on it, daughter," came the reassuring older voice.



"Is this it?" Fang asked.



"Yes!" Fisher's turn to shout.



Papa said, "Individual entities now visible, approaching at high velocity. Three thousand kilometers and closing."



"Match velocities and spin this ship into capture position!" Fang shrieked, suddenly standing.



"Collapsing singularities, boosting."



"Captain! Look at it, Captain!" Stearn, shouting.



"Oh my goodness." Said Sylvia.



"That can't be right." Henderson said.



"Yes!" shouted Fisher again, pumping his fists as the gravity first faded, then dumped him unceremoniously on his butt as the rail drive came on-line.



Fang's own butt suddenly smashed into her groaning chairbeast as she gawked at something she hadn't imagined. So many, so fast...



"Visual tracking on herd forerunners," announced Papa. "More than ten thousand head."



No stately lion pride, but a great fucking snake nest. All over the walls, the ceiling the floor, flying toward the Karamojo. She couldn't focus on any one of them at first. It was all a twisted prismatic mess of wheels and coils and fire and lightning. She thought of the bucket of worms her grandfather had kept on the junk, that bucket her cousin had once turned over her head, now blazing over her and no one to punch out this time but herself.



Fisher staggered up, arms outstretched, laughing. "My dragons!"



Fang blinked, shaking away the feeling of sinking into the swarm -- a better term than herd -- and pushed away her concerns and attempted to study the lead dragons. Coils of different colors, but always blazing white at their core, hypnotizing. She blinked again to break the spell. That pulsing scarlet one, there, she concentrated...a spiral coil flashing with arcs of lightning, brilliant even against the fire it wrapped around, corkscrewing toward them. Some kind of thrust? Current in the coils, fusion in the core?



"They're rockets!" Fisher shouted.



"How big? How soon?" Fang asked.



Scales popped up, and a clock with digits running down from sixty-two. "I measure lengths ranging from five hundred meters to ten kilometers, relative velocities coming down to under ten thousand kilometers per hour. Calculating electromagnetic fields."



"Get us in position! Charge the cage!" Fang ordered.



Papa maintained the dragon's size on the displays, but let the details sharpen as the distance closed and their imaging resolution improved. Filters began to enhance contrast. Textures materialized in the solid monochromatic colors, an intertwined fibrous texture infinitely structured. The bodies resembled less and less indistinct coiled tubes and more and more pieces of something alive with sections and varying shape and distinct features.



They had heads.



Deep in her gut, that surprised Fang. She had known abstractly that the lump on one end of the star dragon in the Prospector video was probably a head, but the resolution had been too poor to show fine detail. Certainly they would have an intake for their fuel, food, whatever, and certainly they would have sensory organs to navigate through their environment.



Worse, they had eyes.



Great multi-faceted multi-hued domes adorned the head, three each, one hundred twenty degrees separating them, twisting independently, but somehow each seemingly focused on her, with the emotionless reptilian feel of chameleon eyes. The rest of the creature faded from her awareness except for those flashing, rotating eyes around the core of fire....



And she flashed back....



Trailing salty white foam, the leviathan's stalked eyes broke the water. Perched atop the creature's ocean-supported bulk, Lena had never thought their appearance threatening when she had seen them in a picture tank. Like the shark, the smaller Earth predator that the instructive module had compared the leviathan to, the predators shared doll eyes, round and dull and dead -- eyes for an eating machine that did what it did without passion, but with efficiency. The leviathan's eyes to Lena held an ineffable quality, some sort of alien wisdom.



Her grandfather tread the water placidly with the sure movements of his morning Tai Chi, knowing what approached, knowing that he could not reach the junk quickly enough, and knowing if he tried the junk might well capsize and send her into the water with him. Into the water with those eyes and the creature they belonged to.



"Come in to the water, Lena," the hungry mind behind the eyes seemed to say. "I will eat you...if not today, then someday. I am patient. I am inexorable."



For the first time in decades, in her mind's eye, she watched the way her grandfather took one last breath and instinctively brought his splayed hands out of the water to protect his head as the gaping maw surrounded his thin body, the way the water drained through the jaws triple-slotted lips that rose a full three meters above the waterline, the way that water sounded dripping and splashing, and the sour smell of fear that came not from her grandfather but from her own young body.



A full three minutes after the water had smoothed to its customary shallow chop driven by that day's slight breeze, Lena sank to her knees to crawl the three meters across the hand-polished deck to the radio to call for help.







To her Earth-evolved perception, the dragon eyes more resembled inorganic machinery than anything living. This horde's visionary machinery catalogued the strange, cool, white apparition before them. No hate there, not like the lion's, no passion. This was an implacable enemy -- an army of enemies -- preparing to stampede over anything in their flight.



"You have come into the fire, Lena," the eternal mind behind the eyes told her. "Today we will swallow you. We are inexorable. We are here. Today."



 Fang bit her bottom lip, hard, to keep a moan from escaping her. Her chest tightened, and her collar felt like hands around her throat. An analytic, detached part of her mind noted that those things we experience as children mark us forever no matter how long we live, how much we learn, part of our hearts never grow up. She had thought of this event recently, had tried to bring it up with Sam, because she had something to work out that the star dragon had resuscitated.



The analytic part of her mind didn't have complete control, but it drove a wedge into her locked mind and expanded her world to contain more than eyes.



Fisher stood before her, his lips moving. What was he saying? She could not understand, and shifted her gaze from his green lips to his pink eyes. Not lifeless, but blazing...



She would not tolerate inaction from herself.



The dragons were all about her, their eyes huge, their approach fixed and unwavering. What was the magnification? How long until they reached the Karamojo? Fang glanced at the figures and was dismayed. They were close! The fields were charged, the orientation was good. "That one, Papa!" she yelled, pointing an approaching dragon with a promising trajectory. "Cage that one!"



The Karamojo lurched, maneuvering thrusts pushing them into position. The bubble housing the bridge moved to compensate for the rotations, but the normal forces were still mighty.



The dragon twisted, coils splitting to squirt nuclear fire.



"Match it!" screamed Fang.



A giant hand smashed against her. Her fighting chair ballooned to cushion the shifts. She struggled to keep her head where she could see the action. These high velocities were amazing, a dogfight with an alien. It could not go on more than a few seconds. "Take it in! Be ready for -- "



 "Field derivatives are too high," Papa interrupted. "Taking evasive action."



"Don't you dare!" Fang counter ordered. "Hold the line!"



"Sorry, daughter."



There was a flare as the dragon's rocket exploded across their maw, jerking the creature out of its path. The Karamojo rocked, creating a slalom run in Fang's stomach. Lights flickered, flashed. She heard the crackling of arcing somewhere on the bridge and smelled ozone.



The world shifted as the dragons blazed by the bridge and the deck rolled. The short hairs on the back of her neck tingled. She pitched forward, sliding from the arms of her chair into Fisher's couch.



She clawed her way up his slick jumpsuit. He smelled of something burned.



The dragons continued to flash by, some huge in their proximity.



The ship continued to rock.



What had gone wrong? Had Papa really taken control from her? "Papa?" Fang called, disgusted at the whine in her voice.



The lighting, mostly coming from the surrounding external displays, changed tints as the ship rocked again and again. Lightning sparkled and strobed all around.



All this with silence from the dragons.



Papa groaned, a deep resonant tone, which cut off after less than a second. A voice that superficially sounded like Papa, but was somehow lacking, said, "The Karamojo has experienced extensive system failures. Taking inventory and troubleshooting."



"Papa!" Fang shouted. Taken control from her? It was smoky, hard to breathe.

Someone -- Henderson -- clamped something around her bicep. It pinched her painfully.

She pushed to her knees against the hands on her arm and shoulders. One final dragon brushed past, a ghost vanishing into the sky.

The gravity increased with a teeth-rattling vibration, and abruptly ceased.

She tumbled up, out, away from the deck, tangled with Henderson. "What's happening Papa?"

The calm and somehow lifeless Papa voice said, "Drive systems damaged. Hull integrity compromised. Two rings breached, now sealed, six..."

The list went on, rapid-fire, for nearly thirty seconds.

How could this happen? She said to Henderson, "What did you do to me?"

He kept his eyes down on the autodoc on her arm and blue veins stood out in his neck. "Minor anxiety attack. You over-rode your own systems. I'm medicating now."

"Anxiety attack!" Fisher's angry voice, behind her, somewhere.

His voice faded and she heard Devereaux whispering.

"Minor," said Henderson, "but requiring attention."

Fang closed her eyes, hoping Fisher would continue. She had failed. She deserved every word.

"Daughter?" Papa's true voice sliced into her consciousness. "Help me."

Yes, their ship, her ship, the Karamojo, Papa, needed her. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. Whether it was the drugs or something else, it didn't matter. She was the captain again in her heart, and there was work to be done. There was no one else to do it and he'd have to get by one such as herself. "I'm here, Papa. We'll fix you."

"We'd better do it fast," Stearn said. "We're falling into the disk."

Chapter 9

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. -- Henry David Thoreau

Everywhere there are walls: walls of riveted steel plates, walls of red bricks, walls of frosty white ice, walls of barbed wire. Tricks of his shattered mind, designed to ground Papa's point of focus with a solid challenge, meant to be more reassuring than the loss of an eye or paralysis of a hand might be to a corporeal human.



Papa races throughout himself, around a ring and into a wall of static, down a power conduit leading to the Higgs generators and into a mirrored wall, and, the scariest, into a data processing bank and into another wall, this one of stone covered with thick ivy smelling of honeysuckle. Like a human mind he is patterned upon, he can accept the loss of a replaceable body part, but his processing banks...therein rests the connections to his identity.



Throughout the ship, his body, himself, he moans. The moans echo into parts of himself he cannot reach.



His human personality, faced with the despairing prospect of brain damage and perhaps senility and impairment, would finish the job and make certain to destroy his ego totally. A gun, a shotgun shell, a brain. As a constructed intelligence, such a thing is impossible, and he fears a subtle madness not prevented by his cerebral architecture that will result in a debilitating feedback loop.



He craves action. He craves repair...or oblivion. He craves wholeness of one kind or another.



His automatics are already at work; and there is little his personality can help with. Like reflexes, his automatics have their own independent error-checked data caches acting as ganglia to provide immediate and accurate information. Accessing these caches himself would be frustratingly slow. He must focus his self-awareness on its designated interface: the human crew.



He flies, and finds the Jack still on the bridge, floating in freefall. His brow knit in concentration, indicator lights reflecting from the sweaty skin of his cheeks and forehead, the end of his pink tongue slipping from his parted lips, as he reads the diagnostics panel on a piece of equipment that Papa cannot recognize. "You're a good boy," Papa tells the Jack.



The Jack's eyes flick up. "Papa? How you doing, old man?"



"We're as strong as an ox," Papa boasts, something he has said many times to indicate a robust state, but his programming forces him to qualify his statement. "The parts we can feel. We're sure you'll have everything fixed up in no time, won't you?"



The Jack grins, teeth flashing like diamonds in the coal of his face. "We had better." His eyes flick back to the panel as he taps a keypad on a hand-held troubleshooting unit spliced into the ailing equipment.



They should have been sufficiently shielded from induced currents, but no Faraday cage is perfect. Could it really have been that large a flux? A random impact with a dragon's field should not have resulted in this -- but they had not forseen rocketing and that must surely have a different field arrangement. "What are you doing?" Papa asks.



He realizes his mistake as the Jack's grin twists into a frown. It's bad then, what's got him. Perhaps revealing the fullness of his ignorance would aid the young man in his repairs, but his personality isn't bound to such an embarrassment. Perhaps the level of his ignorance would frighten the Jack, make him make a mistake. Let him question the automatics, if he would.



Papa flees.



The mind, the mind, he thinks. Cogito ergo sum. My personality, me, is whole. Isn't it? We are separated from my body and senses. The Jack works on the body and the links to the body. The biotech, Henderson, he will be working on the organic minds that process sensory input, that contain memory and kinesthetic knowledge.



Papa's perspective rattles around the ring, bouncing off a wall and taking a circuitous route to the biolab, which abuts the brain banks.



"Mr. Henderson," Papa shouts. "How are we doing?"



Henderson has half his body behind a panel floating on a chain in the microgravity, but the muscle pattern of a full body startle reflex is evident. The lights in the biolab are low, a terrarium empty, and everything silent save for the whooshing of Papa's breath through the still-operational atmospheric scrubbers. Nevertheless, the biotech says something that Papa cannot make out.



Papa replays the sounds through a set of filters and identifying algorithms. The biotech had said, "Piles of poop, hold it together, Axel. It's just the local ghost."



"We heard that," Papa says, dismayed at how much it comes out sounding like a child's triumphant discovery. A regression to the scatological is unexpected from Henderson's polished public side, so perhaps things are very bad. Maybe he should --



"Fine," Henderson says. "You can crawl in here with me and give me some help."



Papa would very much prefer a stiff drink, a double, with effects he could simulate, but he shifts his focus forward. For a moment he is gripped by the powerful sensation that he is falling, that he is a ghost, and will fall through the ship itself into the hell that crackles beyond. A human thought -- he believes. A good sign. Then his perspective is beside Henderson, seeing what Henderson is seeing, and little more. The high-energy bands are inaccessible -- something has burned those eyes out -- while the mid-infrared bands show little but Henderson's reflected heat. At visible wavelengths, he sees something that he cannot comprehend, and for a moment is caught in deja vu to when he could not assist the Jack mere moments earlier. But it isn't that he lacks the information to identify what he sees. It is that his personality maintains the ability to deny what he sees.



The black carbon residue of burned organics tells him that induced currents have cooked this part of his brain.



"What do you make of this?" asks Henderson. "Have the stem cells germinated properly? Are getting their full dose of accelerant?"



"We -- " Papa begins, unable to go on. There is pink growth along the nerve channels connecting the parallel bins, and the stem cells are dividing according to spec, fed with a rich nutrient bath provided by the adjacent lab's biomass reserve. Still -- he does not need to watch anyone poking around in his necrotic flesh. He flees, leaving the expert systems to provide information to the biotech.



Bewildered, Papa spins into the observatory bay where Fisher and Devereaux are fitting mobiles with specialized tools for...for...for something. His mind, gone!



"Did you see what I saw?" Fisher asks Devereaux, eyes unblinking as his hands move automatically along the tool fitting flush against a mobile's wrist. "Rockets! The dragons transformed their bodies into fusion rockets to keep ahead of the shockwave. They're not just photovores, and they don't just coast along the magnetic field lines. This is simply amazing. You saw it, right?"



"Right, but -- "



"This is unique. I don't know what it all means yet, but it means something. How do you think such a thing could evolve? Oh, this is remarkable," Fisher says, still unblinking.



"What are you two doing?" Papa asks. He only wants information, but this request comes out gruff, accusatory.



Devereaux jumps sending her into a slight spin, but Fisher neither blinks nor ceases his finger dance across the mobile fittings.

"The rail is out of commission, and probably the Higgs generators, too. The automatic systems are not responding, so we're sending mobiles to effect repairs." Devereaux removes an aluminum canister from a storage locker and begins to spray a white coating onto the mobiles' wrinkled gray skin. What is that for? Protection from the disk's radiation? Must be. Such an odd assortment of information his personality has lost access to...certainly he will recover it soon. Certainly.

"That's good," says Papa after a moment watching the pair work.



"Papa, pull up my latest dragon model and give me a projection on the hull over here," Fisher requests. "I've got a lot of modifications to make."



That he can do, although it is irritating to have full access to Fisher's files and yet be cut off from so much of himself. He links the local display to the model in Fisher's subnode. "Here it is, Dr. Fisher. Can I do anything else to assist you?"



Devereaux pauses midstream of her oral programming of the remote and tilts her chin in a way Papa has identified with mild surprise at an inconsistent piece of data. Did he say something out of character? Is his mind that gone? He studies Fisher, but the exobiologist does and says nothing, already focused on the serpentine model form tangled in a mess of field vectors.



Devereaux spares a glance and sighs at Fisher, who has stopped his mobile preparation, before resuming her instructions, which makes Papa think instead of react. Fisher should be working on the mobile, working to repair the Karamojo. Why didn't he realize that? Fisher should not be playing with his models now. There is work to be done.



Papa freezes Fisher's model mid-twist. "We're falling into the disk. Get to the job at hand and save the toys for later."



"Hey! This is a monkey job," Fisher says patting the mobile on its shoulder. "I should be updating my model, redesigning our dragon cage, that sort of thing. Not simple repairs."



"Shut up and get back to work," Devereaux says. "Survival comes first. We're falling into the disk. It'll kill us fast."



"The nanoskin is working to spec. The radiation pressure is slowing us, as is the particle flux of the disk wind. And there are chemical rockets for emergencies."

"The radiation, the wind, in this gravity they'll only add seconds. That's all. And the rockets won't give us much more than minutes."

Papa knows she's right.

"This is stupid that we're in this situation at all," Fisher says, rubbing his neck with the palm of one hand. "Fang screwed up. We should be on our way home by now."

Papa thinks, putting some of his available discretionary computation processors on synthesizing the new dragon data with Fisher's model and their cage. "We weren't ready to capture a dragon, given what we now know. There was little Captain Fang could have done."



"She could have cleared us out of the way!" Fisher is shaking his fists with his words, making his entire body move in counterpoint in the microgravity of the near free fall. Their efforts are not slowing their fall much. "She could have approached slowly, carefully, and not driven tens of thousands of dragons down our throat!"



"Get to work," growls Devereaux.



Fisher pulls his fists back to his body, turns away from his model, and resumes his checks of the mobile tools. "Ship's status, Papa."



Papa reaches for those data, but finds over half the sockets empty. Wasn't it all just there? From his manufactured memories of having a human body, the ones he still has access to, he thinks it is like having a tooth pulled and temporarily forgetting about the bloody hole. He had started to feel useful. Rather than confess his ignorance, he activates an expert system to answer and scurries away. He is tiring of running away.



Then he is in Fang's dim cabin. No exterior waves, no music. The sole light source comes from the desk surface, over which a human silhouette floats. Stuffed animals also populate the room, casting eerie shadows as they mill about in a semblance of Brownian motion. "Captain Fang?"



Temperature ripples across her face, first hot, then cold. "Not daughter?"



"Of course, daughter," he says, wondering about his slip. His confusion is profound. He can show it to her and her alone. "What are you doing?"



"What do you think, Papa? I'm trying to save us. Why aren't you helping me?" Her face flares with heat, her own dwarf nova. The infrared is working here at least.



Now he looks for the first time at the workspace on the desk: the picture tank has become a diorama showing their dilemma in miniature. The Karamojo falls ever closer to the swirling accretion disk. In seconds the ship is swallowed in fire. It does not come out the other side.



"The time compression isn't large," he notes. They have minutes, not hours. They are Icarus, flown too close to the sun, doomed to sink into the sea. No slow orbital decay, no time for repairs. "What shall we do?"



Fang answers, distantly, as much to herself as to him it seems. "Wormdrive is unavailable. The ship's nanoskin is already reflecting all it can. We have reaction mass, but no raildrive to launch it. That leaves the back-up chemicals, but the rockets' delta vee is too small to lift us away from the disk for long. I'm saving them right now, but will have to fire them in a few minutes."



Papa feels shame flood through himself. She better knows their state than does he. "What of adding to our current velocity? What of punching through the disk fast?" He is cut off from his own mind and cannot evaluate the idea as accurately as the model the captain is running.



"I thought of that," she says. We'd be through the disk in a few minutes, but still too long. The density is too high for our skin. Too much drag, too much heating. Wait."



She taps in a few changes and subvocalizes other commands. The miniature Karamojo returns to a point above the disk, a fraction closer than at the start of the last scene Papa saw in the diorama. This time the ship jerks, its ass pulled forward as if by a string, and then starts edging toward the perimeter of the disk.



"Yes," says Papa. "We can add to our orbital component, push the apogee outside the outer disk. That would give us more time."



Even as he says this, the problem with this new plan appears. The miniature Karamojo misses the flared disk edge, skimming through the diffuse atmosphere, and plows into the accretion stream from the secondary star. Once again, the ship does not emerge.



"Bad timing on this orbit," she evaluates coldly.



There must be something they can do. It does not seem the time to die well. They have barely begun here.



It brings up another false memory of being a human on Earth, camping in the woods. Papa remembers bending over to pick up a stone to skip across the river and noticing a group of tadpoles in the shallow water. A fish slid up and took one of the tadpoles, and was gone with the flip of a tail and gulp of a mouth. The prey moved from egg to tadpole to lunch in mere days. What was the purpose in that?



"Skipping stones across the river," he says aloud, making his intended metaphor live. Too obvious and trite for his namesake, but the best he can do under the circumstances.



"What do you mean?" says Fang, staring at the perpetually dying starship.



Maybe he does mean something. He has a subconscious, designed to aid him with non-linear problem solving. Maybe it has. "Use the rockets to slow our orbit."



Fang considers this. "Oh, I see! Perhaps..."



The miniature Karamojo is jerked backwards this time, as if catching on a snag in a stream. The orbital energy reduced, the ship moves inward toward the hotter and denser regions of the disk. But the disk is also flared, and these inward regions are thinner and their surfaces at a lower altitude, giving them more time to fall.



More importantly, these inward regions obey the laws of Newton and Kepler, and orbit the white dwarf more rapidly. The six hundred kilometer per second velocity at the edge of the disk means nothing to them, for the ship matches it. Falling at the outer edge is like falling into a placid pool. Now, as the miniature ship moves in to smaller radii, the velocity differential grows. This time, when the tiny ship hits the disk, rounded rings down, it hits a fast-moving stream and does not sink.



It bounces.



The orbit decays a bit more with the energy lost, their apogee not quite so close to the disk edge. The conditions are harsher, hotter, and more difficult for the nanoskin to resist. The ship bounces again on the second impact after it again falls parabolically to the surface of the lake of fire. And on the third. Just before the fourth bounce, when their orbit has decayed and brought them a third of the way inwards toward the white dwarf, the tiny Karamojo gives up the ghost, evaporating in short order as the hull blackens and burns.



"Damn," says Fang. "That's a good trick. Gives us nearly an hour to get things fixed. What's the impulse, I wonder."



Papa patches into her model as some of his network comes back on-line, like some idea on the tip of his tongue suddenly coming to him. He calculates the number. "Low. Under twenty gees."



"We can take it," says Fang. "We'll have to."



They spend a few precious moments more optimizing their burns, and then Fang sends Papa out to alert the crew.



He is happy to have this task to occupy his noisy thoughts. He can focus on it when he runs into the mucking walls.