Henderson squatted in his biolab before the mechanical core of the console tank -- all the biologicals in the room had been used -- and inspected his design one last time. He said, "Execute," and prepared to walk over to the empty diamond vat.



"Safety override engaged: insufficient discretionary biomass available. Program terminated," the computer said in an even gender-neutral voice; Henderson had disabled Papa's personality from his console.



"But I need it!"

"Override intact."

Couldn't this machine's fuzzy logic wrap itself around the idea that this lab was in a thin, shimmery bubble floating above God's own burning bush? Any breach of any system could kill instantly -- they'd exercised their redundancies. He had to have a more durable body. Evolution, which Henderson stole liberally from, often made a body capable of attracting mates also quite vulnerable. A brilliant peacock that could still avoid predators had to be top of the line.

But he was no longer employing that strategy. It was time to screw the looks and invest heavily in armor. Lots of armor.

Damn Fisher for talking him out of the little bio reserves they had available. The exobiologist had even wasted it on nothing more than cosmetic alterations.

Henderson stroked his chin. Where could he liberate more biomass from? He didn't need much. Certainly he could cannibalize non-essential organics like chairs, toilets, clothes, and the like. He could even make do without biologicals as long as he had the means to shape an exoskeleton. There was plenty of building material on-board. He would just have to fetch it himself.

He started for the door, but Captain Fang's voice stopped him.

"Mr. Henderson," she said. "Please join me on the bridge. My fighting chair needs adjustments but Papa cannot see anything wrong with it."

First Fisher, now Fang. He didn't like this hierarchy, but that was the way things would be for another half millennium. Slave, fix my skin, slave, fix my chair. Someday he would be the master of those around him.

Walking to the bridge, Henderson scanned the diamond ribs of the hallway, counted the fish crawling along the bony surfaces. He fancied himself a white blood cell in a giant vein with red blood cells, the fish. How many fish for a layer of skin that could block a rad per hour? Then again, perhaps passive shielding was a dangerous way to go with all the high energy particles in the environment -- they would decay in such skin and pass on a potentially even more deadly torrent of secondary particles. Fisher's body redesign suggested a way to build active shielding into a body, but it would not be nice to live with. Maybe he should go the opposite way, build maximum redundancy into a small body with a minimal cross section. It really depended on what the threats were. Should he design against radiation, temperature, or vacuum?

The valve -- portal -- onto the bridge opened to reveal Fang squatting unstably on the deck, two fingers providing a third point of kinetic support, as she squinted at the cushion fat of her chair. The chair was a monster, and would easily supply Henderson with all the biomass he needed. Maybe he could talk her out of it if it were sick....

Fang turned her skin-covered skull toward him and worked the jaw. She was making words, saying something. It was: "Don't just stand there. Lend a hand."

Henderson contracted and relaxed sets of muscles in his legs, leveraging the leg bones into steps. Fragile life, in a fragile eggshell, bobbing above an open flame. A frog in a pot of heating water. Instead of aiding in this endeavor, or developing a safer body, he should be finding a way to jump out, to force them to leave. Maybe he could engineer a minor crisis that would make them consume their remaining resources, and leave them no choice but to leave?



Why had he not realized the mortal danger this mission posed? More importantly, why had he not yet acted on that realization?



His jaw moved. His eardrums pushed the bones in his ear which turned into electrical signals his brain could interpret. He had said, "What is the nature of the problem?" The safe, hierarchical thing to say. Avoid the immediate reprimand, but remain at the risk of later death when the dragons pried open their shell.



"The fighting chair's growl normally massages my lower back quite effectively, but today it's just irritating me," Fang said.



Electrical activity in Henderson's brain opened the flow of information from his embedded biochip. In his mind's eye the chair's anatomy revealed itself in endlessly detailed cross-section. He pushed his hand under the chair's wide arm and plugged his finger into the diagnostic port located in its left armpit. More data danced into his head through the conduit running up his arm.



Please be sick, Henderson thought.



His jaw moved, his lungs exhaled, vocal chords tightened, and he said, "The chair looks healthy."



"See that, daughter?" Papa said. "What did we tell you?"



The captain twisted her facial muscles into a pattern that Henderson read as perplexity. She said, "Something's wrong with it. My back hurts."



Henderson unplugged his finger and bent close to increase his ability to see fine details on the chair's surface. The hide felt warm and springy when he touched it, and there was no discoloration. "Your chairbeast is healthy."



"See," said Papa. "Our own diagnostics are fine again."



Fang vibrated her lips, creating a humming sound, an indication of thoughtfulness.



Henderson shook his head, but stopped when he thought of his brain sloshing around in his skull. He needed some kind of drug to relieve himself of this morbid biomechanical perspective he'd developed. He said, "Perhaps the problem isn't your chairbeast at all, but you."



"Me?" A sharp edge lived in that syllable, a suspicion that he thought her fallible.



We're all machines and we can break, he thought. "We're human and we sometimes suffer injury," he said.



"I don't have time for an examination and I'm not letting you poke that finger of yours in me, understand?"



"Perfectly," he said. "I was simply suggesting you lift your uniform and let me inspect your back."



"It won't take too long?"



"Of course not."



"Fine," Fang said.



The captain turned away from Henderson, and raised her arms. Henderson watched her elbows wiggle from side to side, trying to understand how the motions moved her hands to undo the buttons on the uniform. The pull of the muscle on the strings of the tendons on the levers of the bones, dancing like the programmed needles of a tattoo machine he'd seen in a historical drama.



Finally she slipped her hands back and tugged her shirt free from her pants.



"Let me do that," he said. "You might strain a muscle and make it worse."



"I'm fine," she said, her voice distant and echoing off the walls of the bridge. Her hands lifted higher and at the same time crawled the white fabric into bunches revealing an expanse of white skin.



But not completely white. There were greenish-blue patches, six of them, three along each side. Fingers appeared to have broken the capillaries under skin, the hemorrhaging manifesting as bruises. On a finer scale there were tiny puncture marks. Insect stings? Impossible. Something more directed, certainly, right where the bruises were.



"Well, see anything?" Fang asked.



Too much, too much, Henderson thought. He thought about saying that everything looked normal, but Papa had certainly noticed and would speak up if he said nothing. He feared that anything he had to say would raise the tension on board and place his life more at risk. Still, the facts could not get him in trouble, could they? "You have -- " translate, he thought, "bruises."



"Bruises?" To his surprise and immense relief, Fang smiled. There was more in that smile than her normally cool professionalism would show, but in a flash it was gone. "Well, that explains things, doesn't it?"



"Your system will clear them up in a few hours, but there's something else -- "



"Thank you, Mr. Henderson. That will be all."



Henderson decided not to press it. The captain didn't seem to want his distractions, and in truth he didn't want her to be distracted.



He needed to do something, something other than ruminate on every bit of mechanics in the human body and the way they were machines that could fail. Drugs were the wrong way to go. He needed positive action.

Then he had it.

On the walk back to his lab, he took off his scale jacket and tied the arms to fashion a bag. Whenever he came across a fish swabbing the deck, he plucked it up and tossed it in.

Insufficient discretionary biomass, my ass, he thought. A little dust never killed anyone, not even on a spaceship.