Curls of flame rose and rippled, dropped and dissipated, in a vast dance more regal and powerful than that of any sea Fang had before sailed upon. The swirling churning of the disk mixed with the waves bouncing back from the distant inner and outer edges making a choppy, uneven surface to the bowl of this sea. Spiral shock patterns would appear, persist, and vanish again all in less than an hour. Pillars of plasma twisted into the sky riding the magnetic fields twisting out of the `disk spots' before plummeting back into the maelstrom at some distant point.



Through this all soared the Karamojo, like some flea on a dog's hairy ass.



"Where have they all gone?" Fang said to no one in particular, although everyone else except for Henderson was on the bridge watching the panorama in projection around them.



"I was afraid of this," said Fisher. "They can dive deep where we can't follow. Without an easy way of driving them out again, we must hope they will surface."



"They'll have to, won't they?" asked Stearn. "Even I can stay in a hot tub only so long."



"Perhaps we could use our own lasers to raise the temperature locally," Devereaux suggested. "There must be some level they can't take. Or we can go into the inner disk regions, where the thickness and opacity drops, but the temperature rises."



"I think we may have to drop right to the surface and scrutinize an area closely, and then expand our search bit by bit," Fisher said.



"It's too huge!" Devereaux disagreed. "And we'll lose what little we can afford to ablation all too quickly. This isn't the ideal system to have to prospect for raw materials."



There followed a discussion of dragon thermodynamics, laser cooling, and disk opacities and Fang didn't care to pay attention to the technical details. Instead, hardly blinking, she watched the licks of flame as they broke open revealing the empty structures below. Papa's personality, while based on a human identity, nevertheless processed most tasks using brute force algorithms similar to those running his underlying autonomous routines. With enough speed you didn't have to be clever. While his image recognition algorithms excelled with well known environments like the ship and the faces of its crew, Papa searched for dragon sign bit by bit amidst the fiery caldron. A sharp-eyed human could sometimes still do a better job in an unknown environment, one of the justifications for their presence on board. Fang intended to take advantage of that slim advantage to make her mark on this mission. Or at least to smudge out the bad mark she already made.



She would not think of her moment of hesitation. She would not.



The conversation ebbed and flowed around her like waves. She was a rock. When the hours dragged on, she snorted an ampoule of Alert, and ordered her eyes to continue to dance. She didn't let herself think about what they would do if the dragons had no need to surface. The disk was so huge that she maintained her optimism. This place was not homogeneous; it had variations in elemental abundances, discontinuities in magnetic field and viscosity, all sorts of things that might constitute 'good' feeding and 'bad' feeding to a dragon. Or weather. Or something else completely alien to her.



"Where have they all gone?" she occasionally muttered until not even Papa responded. Stearn and Devereaux left for an hour, then returned, her hair damp as if from a shower, his hair covered by a Havana Marlins' baseball cap twisted sideways. After another hour, they left again. Fisher stayed with her the whole time, saying little, working at a console by the couchbeast. That made her feel good that he trusted her powers of perception, and that he wanted to stay close.



When she was a girl, she had Polaroid corneas that let her watch the sun's -- Tau Ceti's -- reflection in the dancing waters around the Pouting Archipelago where she grew up. On several occasions she watched them for hours, the sizzling light more living electricity than reflection. Below were the shallows and the deep, dim background supporting the electricity. She would watch until the patterns seemed sensible to her, until her mind reached a state in which she imagined how to reassemble the motions of the water into all the disturbances that had caused it, from the gravitational tug of the moons and sun, to the happy splashing of a newborn being carried by his mother from an exclusive birthing lagoon, to the ponderous undulations of a pack of trench-dwelling leviathans. All the information rested there in the superposition of the dancing waves, impossible to recover in a computational Hubble time, impossible to recover given the chaos living in such systems. But the girl Lena would watch until her mind twisted the electricity into shapes, things, scenes, that revealed something she believed to be True. Probably none of it had been real, but she fancied that it had trained her to assemble patterns better than that of the average person and perceptual tests that had landed her in the Captain's chair had confirmed her notion. She believed she had learned from the things she had seen, true or not.

Once in those waves she had seen the quiet struggle of a monkey bird caught in the stringy maw of a vampire weed, the bird bobbing on the surface, surprised as the seaweed tangled in its talons and began to sink, pulling it down to drown before being consumed. Just as the bird could not breathe, neither did Fang breathe, nor blink, and she stayed with the bird through the long minute to the end, finally gasping with release when the scene came to its inevitable conclusion and the fish's tendrils slid down the tiny throat to invade the flesh through the soft tissues of the alveoli. Her imagination, she was sure years later, but she could recall just how those last bubbles had rolled out of the monkey bird's mouth. Another time she had seen the kind face of a bearded man whose eyes twinkled like stars. It was a wise, living face that held all the secrets of the world, until suddenly he winked at her and vanished into a million streaks of light, nothing but the falling wave crests. A timeless instant of superposition there, gone in a flash. She remembered thinking, So that was God. He looks happy for being dead....

Only a few of the old religions had survived the biological revolutions of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries. Judaism crept along steady as ever, and many Buddhists saw little difference after the genetic age. Widespread Christian and Islam-based faiths had the most to lose, their threat of hell gone and their promise of heaven undermined: they fought like devils. First came the battles about changing the human genome, the "made in God's image" thing -- man turned out to be a better designer than God, finally, in the end. The religious leadership made their positions clear, and dug trenches that stalled many avenues of research for decades, or more. Off-world colonies, independent by virtue of distance, exploited the niche and flourished by peddling immortality. The next battle shattered faiths and toppled governments. When everyone stared into the abyss, few chose the promised afterlife to the demonstrable benefits of the immortality option. The faithful died out, recruiting fewer and fewer in subsequent generations. What organized religions remained were more philosophical and ethical systems than anything relying on the supernatural. Few doubted that man had become his own god. Still, there was questing for meaning, perhaps more desperately than ever, but tempered with the patience of an unending future stretching ahead. Fang's grandfather had led a quiet life of Taoism until the universe had swallowed him. She had seen the face in the waves after that, and had somehow felt less alone afterward, although now she discounted that she'd seen anything but the hallucination of a suggestible young mind.

The human mind found patterns in everything, faces in everything. It was a survival advantage selected for, even if it was not perfect. Better to jump at nothing sometimes than miss the one time something really was there. Surprising the shy and easily startled cats on board was a regular reminder of this trait.

Today something in her mind clicked as she watched the disk, the way that a ship schematic could sometimes appear an unintelligible tangle of colored vectors before crystallizing into a three-dimensional vessel full of balanced form and directed purpose.

"My god," she said. Dragons were everywhere.

They flitted deep in the disk, showing starry flashes of themselves, their laser signatures. The colors shifted hues for some unknown dragon reason, but she could follow them as part of a pattern. She made out individuals with more difficulty, but she could do it. They would fade deep below, but they would emerge high enough in the photosphere to flash every thirty seconds or so. Like a lights on a silvery Christmas tree, the dragons made the disk their own.

"What is it?" Fisher asked abruptly, his face before her face, breaking the spell.

Fang stood, gently pushing him out of her view. She looked around, blinking, trying to recapture that peculiar mental state she had achieved. Her head bobbed around, bird-like, as fear welled up her throat, fear that she had lost the vision.

But then the dragons' disk was there around her once more.

She smiled, holding her hands out as if to catch falling snow, and spun slowly. "I can see them, Samuel. The dragons. There are so many of them. So many. My god, it's full of dragons."

Fisher was silent for a moment, then he grunted. "I can't see them. How can you see them when I can't see them."

"Yes," Papa echoed. "My thoughts exactly."

To Fang it was like hunting the lion, seeing through the lion's eyes, feeling its hate. The dragons had heard the explosions, fled the shockwaves. They knew that something novel, something dangerous, had entered their world. They were in a tizzy.

"I see flashes in the fire," Fang explained. "Sparks if you will, except the sparks are not random. They're dragon sparks. You have to defocus, see as much of the disk at once as you can, and let your brain sort the signal from the noise."

Another pause, and then Fisher said, "I think all the Alert has got you hallucinating. Before we drag everyone back here, let's see if Papa can verify this."

Fang let her eyes dance over the disk, pleased at the way the patterns were taking root in her awareness, gaining complexity, richness. Why the patterns? Feeding? Territories? Or just a trick of the mind? She tried to find one string and follow it, like trying to listen to just one note from one clarinet in a thousand symphonies. What could she point out to Papa that he could follow? She shifted through the patterns, shifted from pattern to individual spark, as best she could, looking for something to point at. She was afraid that if Papa narrowed the display to a small area she would lose the spark without the reference of the pattern.

"We're sorry, daughter. We still don't see anything."

"They're all right there, damn it!" Fang reined in her voice to keep out the shriek of frustration. She recalled the few times she had been the first person she knew with a new body modification. The very few times. The only remarkable time, to her anyway, was during her teen-age experimental phase when she had done the daring thing, to her anyway, of adding fairy wings. They were fragile-looking, but tensile-steel strong, and what no one else knew looking at her was that she could feel distant lightning through their antenna action. Not the light flashes, but the distant radio bursts. She would stand on the beach and her playmates would grow bored with the waves and leave, but she'd stay to watch the beautiful, invisible storm reflected off the ionosphere that they could not see.

Sparks, so many sparks. Then, as she shifted to a string of dark olive -- although all were mere shades of fire, the dragon revealed itself to her, a bulb that didn't flash. A dark wiggling ball that bobbed in the curls. Fang locked on, twisted her body, and shot an a finger out, arrow straight. "There," she said. "Look there, Papa."

"We have it," Papa said.

"Where?" asked Fisher. "Where?"

The disk warped around them as the Karamojo's instruments focused on the area Fang had pointed out. After the image had been contrast-filtered, piped through a pseudo-color sieve, and sharpened with a pixon algorithm, the dragon flashed as clear and brilliant as a diamond. Papa added charts, scales, and explanatory captions in bright yellow type that stood out well against the reds of the disk and the greens and purples of the dragon. None of the colors were true, more like cartoons to draw out the subtle hues of a blazing white oven with too many photons of every energy.

"This dragon isn't like the one spotted by the probe, even allowing for the poor resolution, nor like the vast majority of the dragons we flushed from the disk," Fisher said after a long moment.

Fang was sure he was right, but she hadn't paid the kind of attention to them that Fisher had. She wasn't yet sure what he meant. "Take us closer," she ordered. "Maintain a position fifty kilometers up."

Her weight shifted with acceleration, and she absent-mindedly sat down in her fighting chair, which had noticed her mood and was now growling low and steady. The dragon image stayed in the same dimensions, filling an entire wall of the bridge, but the details sharpened as they approached, but only so far. The hot plasma made the dragon shimmer like a mirage, occasionally wrapping tongues around the creature as if tasting it.

As their orbit approached closer to the disk mid-plane, the gravity lessened. It remained high, however, only a twenty percent decrease; the disk flared to over a thousand kilometers thick at their current radial distance this far out from the primary.

From the scale Papa had superimposed, she deduced that the serpentine form was nearly two kilometers from tip to tail, but it rolled in and out of a tight corkscrew, making the length somewhat difficult to judge. The creature was segmented, but not with the anneliedian segments of earthworms and rattlesnake tails, but rather interlocking and subtley asymmetric S-shapes that stacked diagonally, allowing the smooth twists that appeared so unnatural to her. The segments changed color among different shades of green, bluer then redder, from tip to tail and back again. The 'head' and 'tail' were distinguishable. The head flared out into a great leviathan mouth, spiked with scintillating, spherically symmetric mustaches from which lightning arced back, swirling around the segments, back to the distant tail. And then, regarding the tail, she knew what it was that Fisher had immediately noted: the tail sported a round bulb, some dozen meters across.

The dragon was swimming rapidly upstream, keeping a fixed distance relative to the hotspot. Where was it going? Was it shedding its skin, that bulb at the end? A living seed, like the bulb of a plant the shape resembled? A feature of gender? Or was it merely a subspecies, a rattledragon?

"Papa, could you please ask the rest of the crew to join us?" Fang asked.

"We have already done so, daughter."

"Thank you."

She was going to do this right this time. No mistakes. She was captain, and didn't have anything to prove by wading in, guns ablaze, and bringing home the trophy. She realized that now, that she didn't have to do things Papa's way. Her way would yield the same end result, but she would use the finesse that was her strength. Act she would, but with forethought, forearmed with hard data. Fisher would approve, she was sure.

Fisher was talking to himself at the moment. "That rear appendage...maybe that is what keeps this one so near the surface, not diving so deep and vanishing like the others. What could its purpose be? If it limits the dragon's range, why have it? Certainly the creature must endure the dwarf novae, so under these quiescent conditions it ought to be cold, if anything. It's odd."

Fang's grandfather had told her stories of Chinese dragons that lived in the skies of Earth. They would play with a ball, or a pearl, that represented thunder, and this was what caused the rain to fall.

Stearn and Devereaux arrived on the bridge, hand in hand. Their hands dropped, forgotten, when they spied the dragon. Stearn jumped up and down -- still seeming too fast in the higher than normal gravity -- and crowed, "Yeah yeah yeah, we got one, we got one!" Devereaux was more subdued, but still managed to rapid-fire shoot a four or five highly technical questions at Fisher.

Fang tried to follow, but it was much more boring than the dragon. Still, her attention had wandered and the first tendrils of a headache told her how tired she was from the concerted effort of the previous hours. She secreted analgesic into her bloodstream -- that basic and useful a bodmod she did permit herself.

Loud, metallic footsteps rang in the corridor. Henderson? Where had he been, anyway? She hadn't seen him in hours.

A shiny bronze giant stepped onto the bridge, drawing even Fisher's attention. Henderson, if that really was him, now stood nearly three meters tall, head just below the ceiling, and appeared to be a perfectly proportioned statue with sculpted muscles and hard, fixed curls of hair. His face was a handsome mask, but without animation. An ostentatious metal penis hung down between his legs, unswinging despite its length. The knees and elbows bent as he walked, but maintained a firm metal cast. It was like watching mercury flow.

Henderson's head titled down to look upon the projected dragon. "So you found one." His lips barely moved, revealing only a hollow darkness from which issued a thunderous base.

"You know," Stearn said, "That is positively holy."

"Thank you," said the giant, "but please don't let me distract you."

"No problem," Devereaux said. "You're not quite ready for godhood."

Henderson said nothing, and showed no change of expression.

Fang had seen much more outrageous bodies. This one was tame, but still, she had to admit that Henderson had a presence. Not a captain's presence, mind you, but a presence nonetheless. She pulled herself straight up and squeezed the arms of the fighting chair. "Samuel, are you getting useful data from this vantage?"

"Yes," he said. "But the beast is quiescent, like the disk."

"In other words," Devereaux added with her head inclined toward Stearn, "we aren't learning anything new about its capabilities or limits."

"I followed," Stearn said.

They sat watching the dragon...graze. That was the word that came to Fang's mind: graze. How she could associate such a pastoral term with this inferno, she wasn't sure, but that was what the behavior felt like to her. It's the scale of the waves here, she thought. The rarefied plasma, the size, everything is in slow motion.

An hour passed.

The dragon continued its meanderings, paying the Karamojo little heed. En masse, the dragon's had seemed in a tizzy to her earlier. Had she been mistaken? This creature was far from tizzy state. Finally even Fisher seemed a bored. Still, Fang hesitated, remembering what had happened before. The others cast her occasional glances. They were wondering when she would give the word to do something, anything, she knew.

Fang caught Fisher in a glance and they locked eyes. His eyes were somehow wrong, like something furtive hid in the shadows within, and he broke off quickly. This was dragging on too long. He would have blown up at her if not for their recent reconciliation holding him back. She knew then that it was time for action. Careful action, but sure action.

"Mr. Stearn, I noticed in your report that all the shuttles had been refitted to meet Dr. Fisher's specifications. I believe it is time for a field test under full power."

"Captain?" Stearn asked.

"Papa has been playing some war games between the refitted shuttles and Fisher's dragon model. Have you seen anything here to change your plan of attack?"

"No, daughter. We ought to be able to bag this dragon in no time."

Fang looked to Fisher who solidly met her eyes this time, a tiny smile playing on his lips. He nodded, imperceptibly. Her face blazed suddenly, and her heartbeat thundered in her ears.

"Cast the nets," Fang ordered.

Chapter 12

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt. --Izaak Walton

Papa hears her say, "Cast the nets," noting the unintended pun as he does just that. Like adrenaline surging through his blood, his expert system neural nets multiply through downloads into the shuttles. Other aspects of himself launch the tiny armada. Twenty-five shuttles -- skiffs, he prefers -- drop from the Karamojo and fire braking thrusts to rendezvous with the disk surface smoothly and holding pattern.



The gravity at the disk surface is smaller but not negligible. Magnetic forces help buoy the skiffs from sinking into the superheated plasma that would eventually melt even their hardened structures. The hardening will hold at the surface for a time.



"Papa, can you pipe local sensor feeds from the shuttles into a comprehensible display for us?" Fang requests.



"Of course." Papa splits the image on the bridge's wrap around. The top retains their bird's eye view of the action unfolding, processed and enhanced for maximum contrast. The bottom section shows a similarly processed optical view from the central skiff located at the rear of a forward-facing vee pattern. Icons with flashing telemetry indicate the positions of the other skiffs along with miniature optical views from each. Upward beamed communication lasers provide Papa with all the data. Papa beams back updates to all the skiffs and coordinates their movements.



The twenty-five subnodes know where they are and know where the dragon awaits. The vee relaxes into a crescent that moves to encircle the beast. Papa instructs the skiffs to power up their currents and build the strength of their magnetic fields. Surface drag and other interactions with the disk cause the skiffs to develop sluggishness in excess of their predictions.



"Real thing is different than practice, isn't it big guy?" says Stearn.



The star dragon moves. There is a suddenness to its motions that indicates it recognizes something unusual in its immediate environment. The creature has not tried to move away from the approaching skiffs, rather it has begun to circle, rapidly. Increased Zeeman-splitting means increases in the magnetic field strength around it and Papa overlays a magnetogram in vivid purples on top of the optical scenes.



"Is it preparing to rocket?" asks Fisher. "We did not see any dragons start their rocketing before. Papa, watch for any kind of curling into the compact structure the rocketers had, OK?"



"Absolutely."



Fang says, "It doesn't look like it's trying to rocket. It just looks like it's throwing a fit of some sort."



The dragon swam in circles, twisting itself and its magnetic fields in veritable knots. The disk plasma churned, flowing angrily up and along the field lines. The dragon dives -- not completely nor deeply -- and comes back up with geysers of plasma. A firespout grows around the creature, a squall in the sea of fire to greet the approaching invaders.



"Increasing static leading to failure in local parity checks," Papa tells them. "The shuttles are assigning local communications to secondary status. We're running the show from up here and taking the time-lag hit."



"What's that?" Henderson asks.



Devereaux answers. "Can't beat Einstein. Light travel time between here and there builds in a lag that we can't beat. If we want the shuttles to act in a coordinated fashion they have to go through us. And we really need them to act in concert. No three shuttles alone can trap the dragon, and it's going to take more than four I'd bet."



"Oh come on," Stearn says, "we're not far away at all. The lag must be tiny."



"You want to play quick draw with me with an extra lag?" Devereaux challenges. "Especially if I can think faster than you to start with?"



"That true, Fish?" Stearn asks.



"Yes, I believe so. You see, I don't think they use blood or chemicals to mediate thought in any way and the current speeds must be significantly greater than human neurons use."



Papa says nothing here, knowing that his connections are also faster than human. His brains use four different technologies, with only his human personality relying on human neural structures. He also has access to Fisher's dragon models where the implications of the observed e-m field change timescale backs up Fisher's statement and moreover indicates quicker processes than than his own technologies.



The skiffs shoot forward into the maelstrom. The differential disk rotation makes it difficult for them to remain in position relative to one another, and the dragon-induced disturbance doesn't help. The central skiff image becomes impressive as the surface of the disk begins to rise into a towering funnel of fire. Glimpses of the dragon itself appear near the base.



"Thar she coils," says Stearn.



No one laughs. The business is serious, automated, and uncertain.



Waves akin to those of an Earthly sea emanate from the fire spout, which intermittently flares with light and heat released from magnetic reconnections. Energy is building there, but is it building faster than the net drawing close?



On the bottom display a clearer look. A great mass breaks from the choppy disk, rising in an arc. The segments slides forward as if the serpent is flying out of the disk. Plasma flows with it, only slowly trailing back along the disk fields, like water pouring unendingly from a high waterfall. The star dragon is a living Niagra. The coil then sinks, slowly, smoothly, its motions limited by its sheer scale. It is a great beast.



"The shuttles are nearly there," says Fang.



Indeed they bare down on the spot, adjusting their velocities and approach vectors in an ever increasing flood of communications to ensure that they are in the correct locations at the correct times with the correct fields. The outermost shuttles swing out and bolt ahead, extra chemical thrust launching them into space over the disk. They are the pincers and are responsible for closing the magnetic bottle.

On the bottom display there is no longer a distinct disk and a distinct sky. The dragon's corkscrews churn the local field lines into a froth and the plasma flies wildly along them. Visibilities diminish in nearly all wavebands, making sure dragon sightings increasingly rare despite the lessening distance. Does it work both ways? Is the dragon having difficulty spotting the skiffs? Will it dive out of sight an escape amidst the artificial storm it has created?

Papa maintains communications, adjusting the formation according to probabilities he is constantly updating on the fly. Already with new data he has busted Fisher's dragon model, slightly, and they are not yet fully engaged. But nearly...

"Casting the net," Papa informs Fang.

A moving electric charge induces a magnetic field. Electrically chanrged tend to move along magnetic field lines. Plasmas are seas of charged particles. This problem required an engineering approach rather than a closed-form analytical solution impossible to calculate on the fly, so redundancy and power were the order of the hour. The solution was brute force: create a dense assemblage of converging field lines with too much power for a charged dragon to break through -- field lines that could be manipulated into a moving cage.

The skiffs build the field around the dragon, struggling against the plasma that surges with them, dragging it with them rather than the other way around. The fields stretch, pull, jerk, sometimes recombining in energetic flashes, as the net is constructed. Like great invisble bungi cords they jerk back and forth, then reach deeper as the power cycles higher.

If they can box in the serpent first, they can pull in the far ends opposite the creature, drawing the net closed. Every spiraling course would draw it along the lines, into the denser parts of the net where the serpent would be tangled, constricted, and ultimately forced back. Trapped like a djinni in a bottle, the skiffs in locked formation can then tow their catch back to the safety of the Karamojo.

Such is the plan.

"There they go," says Stearn.

The generators are powering up to maximum and the fields are making headway deeper into the plasma of the disk under where the dragon continues its maelstrom.

The feed from shuttle seventeen, starboard of the primary view, suddenly changes. Papa shifts the display to that feed so they can see the action.

A great shaft pierces the black sky, loops, and dives back. The trilateral head of the dragon is clear as it splays open into three petals, each adorned with a sparkling iridescent jewel, each an eye. Lightning sprays from the mouth along fine extended whiskers arrayed like antennae. Magnetograms indicate the dragon has pulled fields along with it. As they watch the fields build, merge, and explode in recombination: lightning and thunder of the disk.

"What was that?" asks Henderson.

"The dragon is attacking the net, weakening critical points before they can tighten," Fisher replies.

Papa says nothing. It is a good hypothesis.

The view from shuttle seventeen rocks despite the anti-jitter algorithms. A firey tsunami has crashed into it -- the wake of the dragon's descent back into the disk. The machine is damaged and breaks out of the pattern to return to the Karamojo. Still, they have secured a close-up view of the beast from its triangular head to the glowing onion-shaped bulb on its trailing end.

"Hmm," says Fang. "It looks like that little maneuver has gotten it past the net region. It's in the clear for the moment."

"Just for the moment," responds Papa. The simulated dragons in practice had not gotten this far. So, a challenge. That was fine, this was now sport. Papa squirts an updated plan to his skiffs, ordering them to shift formation to cover the escape vector. "Here, look here!"

The view now comes from shuttle nineteen, again with a bobbing motion too quick and uneven to be automatically corrected. Papa says, "She's tangled in the field between nineteen and twenty one. Seven and eighteen are converging to strengthen the net. She won't have an easy dive this time."

"Good," says Fang.

The dance of the hunt is on. It is a fine feeling.

The dragon twists its course to head downstream, accelerating.

"Swim good and hard," says Fang. "Swim deep, swim, swim, and we'll still be here after you."

Before Fang even finishes speaking, the dragon turns abruptly to twist back upstream. Its own fields are high and it brings a wave before it, a spout to meet its pursuers.

"Reducing field strengths," says Papa.

"No," says Fang.

"We must," says Papa, "or else the plasma will be channeled into the shuttles and wipe them out."

Even so, the reduced field strength is too much, too late. The plasma does not break up into a spray as it approaches. It is tangled, frozen is the technical term, caught in the fields coming upon them as part of the dragon's wash. The shuttles cannot reduce power sufficiently fast. Induction resists.

The coverging field lines pull them together.

Papa has the electromagnetic fields and their time derivatives, the phase space of the serpent and the skiffs, and their projected evolution. He has commands to issue, and the lag time to their implementation. He has not time left to actually think about the optimal course of action and his subnodes' independent-action algorithms in practice appear inadequate. He sends them escape trajectories.

The magnetic wave crests, carrying its super-heated plasma. The converging shuttles shift powers to the icy cores of their superconducting shells that protect the sub-brains and repell external magnetic fields. Such a defensive posture is insufficient with the star dragon itself pushing the wave. Papa's bird's eye view picks out the beast surfing the plasma flowing down upong the shuttles. Skiff is indeed a better word, since it conveys smallness.

A radio burst erupts from the dragon. It is more powerful in the plane of the disk that upward toward the Karamojo. Stearn is looking in the right direction to see the signal on the monitor spike and says, "I think that's a roar of triumph."

Papa concurs and orders core dumps to be beamed out and in a cascading pattern outward from the dragon. The data will prove useful even if the skiffs do not escape.



"Look at that, will you?" Fisher says.



The dragon is riding its wave, a super heated bulge pushed along by the twisting magnetic fields. Of the four central shuttles, three are clearly out of the way. The fourth, shuttle nineteen, does indeed appear to be a skiff before a tidal wave of flame. The wave is not supersonic, and the shuttle rises with the approaching material. It moves, or tries to move, but the wave is directed and works against its best efforts.



The dragon's great trilateral heat splits its maw to swallow nineteen. The video feed surrounding the bottom half of the fly bridge shows the abyss of the beast's throat and those waving, charged antennae. The picture breaks up into static and Papa drops the top view to full screen so they can watch the shuttle vanish into the dragon and the dragon vanish with its wave.

There is one final radio burst as the disk's wicked differential rotation shears smooth the disturbance. The dragon reappears, far from the retreating shuttles, and resumes its business.