In her quarters, Devereaux and Stearn sat cross-legged on plush ruglings simulating forest loam. It was dusk, and a campfire burned between them. Over its crackling came the twitterings of birds and insects. Devereaux counted the missing pieces that gave away the puzzle of the artificiality: the lack of heat and smoke from the never-dying fire, the leak of April Scent from her bedbeast currently disguised as a pile of colorful autumn leaves, the misalignment of the stars (which were right for North America, but not at dusk in autumn), the --



"We going to do this, or what?" asked Stearn.



He was bent over the fire and its light reflected golden off his broad forehead. His eyes bore straight into hers, and their brown depths conveyed soulfulness. Where had he gotten that? His boy's twinkle had metamorphisized sometime recently. Had he discovered the seriousness of games at last? Or was she simply seeing in him what he tried so hard to deny?



"Yes, we're going to do it right now. You'll feed us the real-time disk as instructed, Papa?"



Papa's voice broke the night, sending a few leaves fluttering down. "Of course we will. Our reactions are much faster than yours, so we don't know why you think -- "

"Thank you, Papa," Devereaux said. While Fisher had spent months simulating a star dragon, Devereaux had spent months simulating SS Cygni. She had also invested some effort in building a virtual environment and artificial senses to experience it with. She and Fisher had no idea if her senses had any analog in a star dragon, but they constituted ways of judging the immediate environmental parameters directly and it seemed a natural expectation the dragon could do as much. Much of science, as in art, was simply finding the clearest way of seeing a new thing so as to understand it best.

She would not trust the day to the simple video games she and Stearn had already tried. Expecting Papa to develop a perfect hunting strategy based only on his own survival algorithms and limited data had been wildly optimistic. This thing they were doing was hard, and certainly that meant intelligence and a more worthwhile mission, didn't it? Intelligence was an advantageous trait in an organism in order to help it find food, or to help it avoid being food. The star dragon was demonstrating an ability to avoid being their food, in effect. There was nothing here to eat them in this naked ecosystem (nothing they had yet seen anyway, she was forced to qualify), and they appeared to consist of elements available in the plasma, so why intelligence? How could intelligence come about, even granting that the disk would present many challenges to survival?

Well, it was time to improve their own intelligence.

Devereaux picked up the visor-shaped interface from her lap. It was a black semi-circle studded with warm and glistening circuitry, the veins throbbing slightly, and clawed feet that were the direct link. It was a crude thing by the standards of the time, but Devereaux was a problem solver. She didn't polish things up and make them look nice. She touched the ends to her temples while resting the center on the bridge of her nose, squeezed the feet, and winced as the needles sank into her flesh.

Tinkling bells assaulted her, and the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of her own blood grew into a gale swirling the white snow of static into drifts before her. The snow faded to black, and the bells and blood diminished in volume and became impossible silence.

With this kind of lousy entry, her interface skills would never get her a job with Stearn's preferred stim supplier.

Her skin prickled, stretched, and coiled. Opposite the icy blue sky swelled light and heat to define 'down.' She swam in a cool wind, curling around a bright green line that kept her from falling. Deep, ringing sounds echoed back and forth on their passage through the disk. She sorted through them, identifying the major low chord of the accretion stream impacting the hotspot half a disk away and the minor high notes of instability-driven flickering.

She slid off her green wire in favor of another, tasting the sweetness of deuterium there (they'd assumed fusion-powered creatures would have a taste for heavy hydrogen isotopes). She spent several minutes reacquainting herself with her body until her thoughts directly became action, until this body was her body.

Too soon, the wire vibrated. All the green wires vibrated. She felt the invaders out there just as when she'd been a girl she could feel her docelot Gordian prowling around her bedbeast early in the morning. No problem -- she'd just dive down into the muggy glow and escape them.

Then she fully appreciated the bulb on her tail, which floated like an over-inflated balloon on a golden chain. Bloated, sluggish, she knew she ought to be able move better than this! She sashayed her dragon ass around, but there was no better way to move with that thing there. Fisher would have gotten the characteristics of the thing right for this model or it would not be so debilitating. Why would a dragon have such an awkward thing? A warning, like a rattlesnake? Could it be used as a capacitor, a battery to power...what? That wouldn't make sense if the dragons could ignite fusion within their coils. It was so awkward. Why would...

But the invaders drew near, six of them. No, there was a seventh held back. No doubt Papa and Stearn thought it beyond her range (did this simulation have that close to right???) and would drive her that way with the others. So she immediately headed right for it.

She could move faster than the shuttles, even without rocketing and even with the damn bulb dragging behind, but she couldn't dive to escape and couldn't simply fly indefinitely away from them. Presumably the real star dragon couldn't, and the point of this exercise was the endgame that would follow such a chase even if they could.

She barreled head-on toward the lagging intruder, blitzing past the forward guard. Their fields were far from a net and she squirted through with little deviation from her course. As she bore down on the straggler, she watched it grow into a frizzy green mess resembling a sick bush, and then it was past, its 'leaves' rustling in her wake.

What now? she thought. She had just shown Papa and Stearn that a forewarned dragon could disrupt a prematurely cast net. They knew that. They'd have to take a step back in the puzzle, put a few pieces together in advance, and begin the interlock from a larger distance. She swirled about to meet the new challenge they'd throw at her shortly.

In the low-frequency background rumble of the impact stream, a high-pitched thud resounded like a peal of distant thunder. That high a tone would not be a deep pressure wave, one of the drivers of the disk viscosity that moved plasma in toward the white dwarf. But what else carried that much power for her to hear it this way? Could it be the echo of their missiles? No, those were long damped. Sounds like this didn't just erupt through the disk. Maybe there was an instability growing in the secondary she hadn't been aware of? That thud had to signal something.

And those few moments of distraction were enough as pairs of the intruders approached from the compass points.

She corkscrewed down, building up buoyant forces, then sprang up at high velocity, angling toward a break between two pairs. As she approached, the pairs split and she found the green lines being drawn together. As their density increased, her progress slowed, then reversed. She bounced.

The other intruders had come about and tied the magnetic bag from the back side. She oscillated back and forth, trapped as long as she kept her currents and rode the lines.

"Okay, you got me," Devereaux said aloud with her human mouth, the words tasting bland. Simulating dragon senses had to be done with analogs to human perception, but the multitude of potentially critical information required doubling and tripling of sensory input, giving the world a richness she appreciated all the more for talking. "Let's try that again and see if I can't find a way to wiggle out."

"You can try," Stearn's voice echoed to her distantly, heavy and out of place, reminding her of that odd noise.

The disk was such a complicated system that to expect it to not have even more inexplicable creaks and groans than a space craft was unrealistic.

Still, as they started another trial, the memory of that thud bothered her. The thud hadn't been real, measured, and piped to her dragon-altered simsenses. She shook it off and concentrated on the next game.

She heard another deep, distant thud, but didn't let it distract her further. They would not catch her so easily the next time. And they didn't.

Chapter 13

What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera. –Aldous Huxley

Fang's eyes flashed open on darkness. Even before she had checked her eye clock, she had swung her torso upright and slid her feet off the edge of the bed.

She had slept over six hours!

The lights brightened in response to her movements and she leaned over to tug on her boots. With her optimized metabolism she normally slept four hours in every twenty-four, but this was not a normal time. "What's happening, Papa?"

Certainly he would have awoken her if there had been a change in their status, right? Unless Fisher had done something tricky again. She still didn't quite trust him, even though he'd given her the most terrific back rub.…

"We're pacing the beast. It's swimming merrily along, waiting to be hooked."

Fang stood, ignored the slight head rush, and stepped out the irising portal toward the fly bridge. "Where is everyone? What are they doing?"

"We're playing dragon tiddly-winks with Stearn and Devereaux in her quarters, and the kids aren't bad at the game, have to admit. Or maybe we're not as recovered as we'd like to think. Henderson's in his lab, moping as usual. Fisher is swilling coffee and fiddling around with his models, adding bells and whistles as we feed him more data. Damn good enough already, in our opinion. He's on the bridge now."

Well, no catastrophes, but she still felt uncertain about Fisher. He hadn't rested. He'd gone right back to work. Wasn't that reasonable for the workaholic? He was on her side now, right? They were working together, right?

Despite the physical glow of well being his touch had engendered in her, she doubted. Better to have him there, with her, under her scrutiny. On the bridge as well as in the bedroom. She shook her head to clear away the dark thoughts.

Feeling utterly good and clear-headed, if a bit rushed, Fang swept onto the fly bridge. "Let's get this hunt moving," she called out.

Fisher glanced up from his console, the green glare of a wire-mesh model floating in his console casting his face as a ghoulish mask. He nodded and turned away without a word, or a smile, and became reabsorbed in the arcanna of his science.

Some welcome, she thought. She popped herself down on her fighting chair without grace, and the beast let out an involuntary squeal. She gently massaged its arms until it quieted. "Papa, get Stearn and Devereaux up here."

"Yes, daughter. Mr. Henderson as well?"

"Did I ask for Henderson?" Fang snapped.

Smartly, Papa didn't answer.

Fang contented herself with watching the dragon, the prize that would legitimize her as a Captain for all time...or at least another few millennia, she hoped. Then there would be some other chore to save her, and so on, and so on. It was a big galaxy. There had to be enough things to do to justify her existence, did there not?

The dragon was doing the same stuff, old already, and she became distracted. The bridge was a mess she noticed. Bits of dirt, dust, and sweat coated many surfaces. The ruglings were anemic. She only saw two fish in the whole room, hardly sufficient to consume the debris where so many people were spending so much time.

The Karamojo was not ship-shape, and that made her uneasy.

When Stearn and Devereaux arrived, unabashedly holding hands in an uncomfortably intimate fashion in which only their index fingers were hooked, Fang asked them point blank if they could do better than Papa.

"Absolutely," Stearn said. "We've got creativity, the edge of life, the will to survive."

Fang ignored the Jack and stared at Devereaux. The other woman's eyes were a steady, serene brown as rich and deep as a tub of coffee. She shrugged a shoulder, the one farthest from Stearn. "Well, Papa's better trained now, I would say. We'll never match his reaction times."

"How long do we have until the next outburst?" Fang asked Devereaux.

Devereaux said, "Papa, give me COUNTDOWN from my monitoring program, plus the one-sigma uncertainty."

"Nineteen days, plus or minus a day and a half."

Devereaux's eyebrows crawled together in a deliberate manner that bothered Fang more than the way she held hands with Stearn.

"That sounds like plenty of time. Is something wrong?" Fang asked.

"Maybe." Devereaux cast off Stearn's grasp and sat down on the couchbeast. She bent over, rested her elbows on her knees, and peered into the display tank as she interfaced with the console, her fingers flying with commands. She said, "That's rather quicker than the last time I checked. And the uncertainty is too large. Something is going on."

Devereaux was sometimes too much a scientist for Fang's taste. As a captain, she only wanted to know what was necessary to get the job done. "But nineteen days means we needn't rush here. That's what I'm getting at."

Devereaux said nothing, but her eyes flickered back and forth as fast as her fingers.

Something suddenly touched Fang's hand, and she jerked it away, startled.

"Sorry," Fisher whispered, his voice close to her ear.

She felt his touch on her hand again. She made a fist and lifted her arms to her chest. Too late for him to make up now -- he had had his chance when she stepped onto the fly bridge. She was Captain, and the game was afoot. Time to be professional.

"What's the big deal?" asked Stearn. "The system is hard to predict, you said."

Devereaux's fingers kept moving. "Not this hard. We're right on top of it and can monitor the accretion rate and the viscosity as a function of position, pipe it all straight into the model. Something is happening in the disk to alter the viscosity, maybe via the magnetic fields, or something is happening in the secondary to increase the inflow to the disk."

"Is the viscosity that important?" Fang asked.

Fisher answered. "All important. The effective friction in the plasma is what moves angular momentum outward and matter sinks in toward the white dwarf. With low viscosity, everything piles up in the disk's outer edge and nothing moves. With high viscosity, which can be induced through dynamo-driven waves or thermal instabilities when too much gas amasses, everything starts flowing through to the primary and the disk gets hot and expands. That's an outburst for you. Boom, we're toast."

Fang knew this much, at least in these general terms, but still failed to appreciate why Devereaux was so excited. "So? We have nineteen days."

"That's a moving target," Devereaux answered. "Something is being introduced outside the parameters of the model I assembled. I made a very good model, I'll have you know. This will take some time to figure out."

Fang took a deep breath. Suddenly this seemed more like a science expedition than a safari. Well, there was glory in science expeditions, too. Of a mediocre sort.

"Excuse me," Papa said in uncharacteristically polite fashion.

"Yes, Papa?" Fang said, curious about what could be so unclear as to warrant uncertainty in bringing it before the human minds on board.

"There are these signals. Mostly low-frequency radio, but a few other parts of the power spectrum are correlated in time. They seem to be omnipresent background noise, perhaps some accretion fluctuation -- we've been registering them since we arrived in system."

"So why bring them up?" Fang asked.

"First, I'm no longer sure they are mere noise. Second, we're picking up high-energy spikes, X-rays and even energies into the gamma regime, following the most complex, extended bursts."

"Where are they coming from?" Devereaux asked.

"That's the strange part," Papa confessed. "Most of the high-energy processes should occur near the primary where the accreting gas crashes into the white dwarf's surface, but these come from the direction of the secondary. Every twenty minutes or so, but that's only an average rate, and it too is accelerating."

Another mystery? Or another aspect of one of the mysteries already in their catalog? They didn't need mysteries. All they needed was to scoop up a dragon and keep it alive, or whatever it was -- animate anyway, for the journey back to Earth. Hell, a dead dragon was probably good enough. Point A to point B and back again. Collect the admiration of trillions for fifteen seconds of fame. It would be enough to remain Important. Would it be enough to remain Captain another millennia?

"Feed me the data," Devereaux asked Papa.

"Of course," he said gruffly, "but we've run all the standard decoding algorithms and the like. If someone is talking, it isn't in a way we understand."

"We understand gamma rays," came a deep voice from behind. "Their ionizing touch can unravel our DNA faster than our self-repairing systems can put it back together."

Fang half-turned and saw Henderson, hunched over and looming in the portal like the Angel of Death come to claim his due. She wanted to say 'Fuck off,' but just turned away from him. Perhaps she should have given herself more sleep, even though the six hours seemed a luxury. It was difficult to keep her thoughts appropriately professional, and it was vital for her to do so now.

To Devereaux she said, "So is this important to us?"

Fisher answered. "Look to the dragon. If the dragon reacts, it matters to us. If not..."

As bidden, Fang looked to the dragon. The garish pseudo-colors of the displays made it seem some green grass snake twisting on the coals of a barbecue pit, writhing in agony. She looked beyond that image, beyond the immensity of the disk. Did it swim more...intently? Did it seem aware of the radio noise and the gamma bursts? Did it seem aware of the Karamojo?

No. It twisted on. Staring at the thing for too long, Fang finally looked away, down to the white lapel of her uniform (the fiery disk burned everywhere else). The reverse image formed, and it was a bloody snake sliding over a green field. Her grandfather's fireside stories rose up to her unbidden, like smoke through time. What was the relevance of Chinese folklore here at SS Cygni? Nevertheless, it came back to her. Red and green were complementary colors, primary life colors, and possessed even greater power in combination. And there was a vast difference between snakes and dragons. Snakes were one of the five noxious creatures, clever but treacherous, associated with male virility except when they had triangular heads -- then they were female symbols. In many of the stories the snakes could be coerced into handing over gifts of pearls, but such bargaining was not without great risk.

"Hey hey hey," Stearn said.

Fang blinked and returned her attention to the dragon. Instead of its steady, placid progress toward Dragon Nirvana or whatever place it worked towards, the creature was bucking up and down, splashing plasma like water in a bathtub. The scale of the beast made this a slow motion wonder, but the violence in its motions was undeniable.

Shit, she thought.

Fisher stepped toward the display, holding his arms out in supplication. The projection obscured his hands at the wrists, and it appeared that his arms grew into the dragon. "It's okay, we're coming for you."

Things were happening. Too slow before, for too long, but now too fast. Not fast enough. Did they have nineteen days? It suddenly seemed like nineteen seconds. "Do you think it will dive?" she said aloud to no one in particular.

Fisher answered, "Yes," at the same time Devereaux said "No." Papa offered no opinion at all, which was probably the most telling.

Fisher spun toward her, pulling his hands from the dragon. The projection trailed off his fingers as if her had plunged his arms into the real creature and then withdrawn them, sticky with life. "We have a plan of action, a distracted dragon, and an unknown physical phenomenon -- still distant for the moment. I'm willing to take a good gamble on this individual specimen. Devereaux will agree that the uncertainty in the disk's behavior makes it safer to act now rather than later. Am I right?"

Fang, feeling played, turned to Devereaux. She stared back for a long moment then nodded.

"Papa?" Fang asked. It was more than prudent to ask his opinion in this circumstance. While he was too gung-ho in many instances, and shaken by his recent trauma, his basic programming remained more than sound.

"Let's bag a dragon," he replied.

"Bring us closer and launch shuttles when optimal. I assume you've incorporated the results of your strategy sessions with Stearn and Devereaux?"

"Of course," Papa said.

The dragon swelled before them as the Karamojo reduced its thrust and descended. Papa changed the display mode to deep immersion so that space and the disk surrounded them, and they lost sight of even their own bodies. The dragon's trilateral head wagged erratically. Glowing plasma leaked from its gaping mouth making Fang think of a swamp sucker draining land for colonists.

Tracers of electric blue mapped the course of the released shuttles, soldiers in their army. Two of them shimmered as they dove into the photosphere and were lost on visual, but still tracked on radio frequencies. Two others shot overhead, bouncing in a high arc. The rest swirled toward the dragon.

The dragon paid the robots no heed. Its head maintained a constant orientation with respect to the Karamojo, but its body careened wildly as it jerked itself back and forth out of the disk riding a spurting tower of plasma.

"Can it reach us here?" Henderson asked.

"Of course it can if it rockets," Papa said. "Without rocketing..."

"It can also reach us, just not quite as fast," Devereaux said. "There's a strong poloidal magnetic field that goes right out, and shifting into that field it can sling itself out like a bead on a wire. Centrifugal force will accelerate it to..."

"Keplerian velocities. At this radius that's nearly a thousand kilometers per second," Papa said. "But it is the differential velocity relative to us that is important. Given our projected trajectory -- "

"It could reach us in about three minutes, if we let it," Fisher said. "I don't know why it hasn't tried to rocket away. It must be that ball on the end. If it prevents rocketing, it must serve some important function. Or we have a mutant, which seems doubtful. I wonder what that ball is?"

The blue tracers twisted, drawing elaborate orchid leaves as they converged.

The dragon ignored them and continued its collision course toward the Karamojo. Details sharpened as the distance decreased. Textures rippled into visibility: a mottled striation of greens in the annelid segments, facets in the trilateral chameleon eyes.

As usual, Fang could not help but focus on the eyes, her bane it seemed. She and Papa had spent long hours talking about the look of eyes, and not just the eyes of leviathans. Papa knew that a person's character and intent could be read in unmodded eyes and a surprising variety of designed eyes. He knew this not from his own experience, but from the false experience that had been fed into his own character as a function of building aspects of his original Hemingway-esque personality. He didn't understand it. Evolution selected for humans who could best evaluate the actions of their fellows, refining the ability to read nuances of stance, expression, and behavior. Hard-wired pattern recognition of the most essential kind, and so hard to duplicate in neural networks at the level of discerning masked intent.

"Oh god!" Henderson shouted, a dull ringing sound like a giant bell being dropped to the floor. "That's a bomb! A bomb! Its shed its rocket engine into a bomb and its going to kill us!"

"I seriously doubt -- " Fisher started, but then settled into a silence. He finally said, "Hmm, you could be right. We'll find out soon enough."

"Ooh, I know it's a bomb."

Could Henderson be right? It didn't seem very likely that Henderson's fears would be a perfect match to reality. But his guess struck her as more likely than what had been proposed so far. Perhaps they should retreat, investigate further. They had nineteen days, give or take.

Fisher said, "Shift the display to higher energies. Hard X-rays, ten to twenty keV range."

Fang stopped a frown from reaching her face as the resolution of the dragon dropped, sharp edges dissolving into hazy blobs. The creature's eyes liquefied from hard reptilian to spectral, matching the new skeletal body. At these energies a few photons leaked through the beast, although its biology seemed immune from the effects of ionization.

"Yes, something dark in the ball, absorbing." Fisher spoke low, more to himself than to his crewmates. "Could be heavy fissionables for a trigger, collected over years, but if the dragon can generate fusion via magnetic confinement and laser bombardment, why would it need a trigger? And the shape seems less than optimal. No, upon reflection, I seriously doubt that it is a bomb. There are a hundred more likely explanations."

But he had started with 'Could be,' and 'could be' was enough for her. Perhaps some dragons had started to grow them after the nuclear detonations in the disk for their protection. They had time to find out for sure without having the thing explode in their face. The dragon was already uncomfortably close, and drawing closer every second as the disk's rotation helped whip it out. "Pull back, Papa. Return the shuttles, too."

Her weight increased with the push of acceleration as they lifted away.

"Smart move," Henderson said.

"No," said Fisher. "We need to take the dragon now and determine the nature of the phenomenon. Much easier to study in our hold. We need the time in system with it."

"Things are going on we don't understand," Devereaux said. "Patience solves many puzzles. We should be prudent and wait."

"No," said Fisher. "We should be bold. We can understand it if we move now."

Papa had shifted the display back to lower frequencies and an extended dynamic range for better detail, all the while maintaining the image scale. Still, the image blurred and the three eyes merged into a cyclopean worm.

"Come now," Fisher said. "Let's go back in."

Stearn made a small grunt and nod, but when Devereaux glanced his way he nibbled his lip and didn't say anything.

Fisher said, "You're with me, right Papa?"

"We think we can bag the dragon, but we'll follow the captain's orders."

"You hear that, Captain Fang? Papa thinks we can take the dragon, and he's smarter than you." Fisher paused for breath and amended, "Than us, I mean."

"Papa is no better than his input data -- your data," Devereaux interjected, stepping between Fisher and Fang. "In fact, he's probably worse at imagining the outcomes of unique situations with unknown parameters."

"And you can do better?" Fisher challenged, looking over Devereaux's dreadlocks straight at Fang. He was daring her.

I'm responsible, Fang thought. When we get back, my future will be determined by my performance here, and I already have one black eye. No more hasty mistakes.

Fang met Fisher's stare with all the coolness she could muster, and said nothing, letting her order stand.

The dragon twisted back on itself and fell toward the disk. That strange ball wiggled behind, taunting them. That was fine. They'd return soon enough.

"Shuttles returning," Papa said. Indeed, the blue web was knitting itself out of existence.

"No," Fisher said. "Send them back out. We've worked it all out while you were sleeping. The dragon is within reach."

"No," said Fang. "Maintain distance, Papa."

"Yes," said Henderson.

Fang stood up from her chair, noticing that suddenly her feet felt sweaty in her boots. She stepped toward Devereaux's console and said, "Let's take a closer look at that encounter."

Fisher said, "No," yet again.

Fang spared him half a glance and found herself at the receiving end of an animalistic glare she'd only glimpsed in Fisher in the boxing ring. What had got him so worked up? First he didn't want to swoop in like thunder because of too many unknowns, and now he was balking when she chose the cautious route. "Am I going to have a problem with you?" Her question had two levels of meaning and she hoped he understood that.

"Your instincts the first time weren't very good," Fisher answered evenly. "Why not try it my way this time?"

He was being clumsy in his baiting. She knew that she had some issues to deal with after the first encounter, but being a coward was not one of them. "Maybe you should get some rest, Sam. When was the last time you slept?"

"Ninety-six hours," Papa answered.

Fang rolled her eyes toward the ceiling -- Papa was everywhere and nowhere, but his voice always came from above it seemed, like a god or a malicious sprite. "Good grief. Why haven't you slept?"

"My decisions are not under consideration here," Fisher said, ignoring Papa. "I have no real authority, do I? Science leader is a worthless title without a specimen, isn't it? I'm boxed out of the game. Well, Biolathe will side with me when we return empty handed. Not that it'll matter. We'll be ruined."

"Not true!" Henderson broke in. "The only mistake an immortal need avoid is death!"

Devereaux and Stearn turned their heads toward the giant. Fang did as well, but only after Fisher did first.

Fang said, "This kind of crazy argument only reinforces my opinion that we need to go slowly here, take some rest -- everyone -- and clear out our systems. Get some better notion about this strange dragon before we move in, or find another one. But we need to get ourselves ready first of all."

This made her think of something that usually only came to her in dreamy states between sleeping and waking. Henderson's recent...madness...was reflected in his form. Which came first, she didn't know. Stearn, on the other hand, had settled down into an effective relationship and shipboard role after adopting a more human body. Everyone had assured her for centuries that AI-validated body mods were perfectly safe. Still, she was distrustful. Fisher had been level-headed like herself at the start of their mission. He'd really only gone off the deep end (not counting the precipitating argument of the first fight they'd had) when he'd turned himself into the human-dragon hybrid. He appeared back to normal now, but she worried.

How had he kept himself going for three days straight? He had his coffee, true, but did he have a hidden bodmod? The reason most people carried drugs like Alert, Forget-Me-Not, and their like rather than installing a gland was the danger of abuse. Forget-Me-Not had obvious dangers. When first introduced, it had seemed natural to trigger automatically the drug's release when the user's attention level climbed above a threshold; people want to remember things they are paying attention to, or at least trying to pay attention to. People pay attention like no other time when their own lives are in danger, or the lives of those they care for. People with the Forget-Me-Not gland who witnessed terrible events often gave into depression and shock before the memory-eating snakes could be administered.

The sovereignty of the individual over the individual's own body was one social rule to emerge and take root during the Genetic Age.

She might have to pull rank.

She said, "Henderson, could you please take Dr. Fisher to the biolab, give him a quick check-up, and then make sure he gets some rest?"

Henderson's huge head creaked up and down.

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," Fisher said, shaking his head.

Fang tried to muster some feelings of love and compassion for him, but the best she could do at the moment was a flicker of admiration for his fingers. She'd like him a lot more after he had rested. "Go," she said, pointing.

Fisher turned to the exit, thankfully, and she hoarded a little hope for their future like a dragon hoards a jewel.