Fisher awoke to peaceful silence. He sat on his couchbeast, eased back, his hands in his lap loosely clutching a notepad. Around him the disk burned, but the display was for ship's night, set so low, so red, that it was more like being curled up at the edge of a campfire. More reassuring than the daytime display of the star dragon: an ant under the malevolent scrutiny of a child's magnifying glass on a sunny day.



He blinked to clear his eyes. The last entry on the notepad read, "The skin is mightier than the banana." He had to shake his head and smile. Not the first time he'd worked himself past the point of sensibility. He decided taking breaks was more than reasonable, and would apologize to Fang again at the next opportunity. He turned off the notepad and set it aside.



Nearby, under a blanket of linked ruglings, she lay stretched out on her monstrous chair. Both snored softly.



No one else was on the bridge, except Papa, of course, who didn't really count.



Instead of bolting up and resuming his work (something about plasma transport between the singularity and the on-board dragon environment, if he remembered correctly), Fisher considered his emotional state. This was not something he normally allowed time for, but this moment of profound peace he was experiencing was equally rare in his life.



Everything felt easier now that he had set aside his independence and chose to be part of the team. He called it 'independence,' but he had no illusions about the words that Fang and his crew mates might use instead. But the truth was simple: he was not out here alone. For the entire trip, at least since that first awful fight with Fang, he had believed that he had to solve every problem, force everyone to accept his point of view, and take on the dragons by himself.



That he now believed that he didn't have to do it alone was a most novel concept for Dr. Samuel Fisher.



Fisher allowed himself an additional moment communing with the peace, resisting the urge to think of anything in particular. The illicit sensation was as rich and decadent as eating chocolate mousse without adjusting your metabolism appropriately.

Finally he sat up, gave his muscles a quick stretch that audibly popped a few joints, and shuffled out of the bridge and down to the galley. He picked up a fish omelet and a bulb of coffee, but paused in the portal. He went back, grabbed seconds of the omelet and coffee, and only then returned to the bridge.

Fang was sitting up, blinking, when he returned. Her hair was perfect and uniform wrinkle free, of course. On the bridge it would be no less, even if she allowed herself catnaps.

"Here," he said, handing her the breakfast.

She stared at it as if she didn't know what it was. "For me?"

"Who else?" Fisher winked.

Fang accepted the omelet and coffee. She tentatively bit into omelet, its hard pureclean surface melting with application of her saliva. "Thank you," she said after washing down the mouthful with the coffee. "But don't think I'm not watching you."

"No, really, it's okay. I'm fully one hundred percent with you, with the crew, on this now. I'm sorry I was such a pain for everyone. It's quite liberating, giving up the constant fighting. You have no idea what a toll it was exacting." Fisher realized that his head was nodding as he spoke, and stopped the motion. He had come a long way, but he didn't want to look like a lap dog.

She didn't say anything right away, as if she were thinking about the best way to contradict him. Finally she said, "You are a real piece of work, Dr. Fisher. Someday you will have to learn how to do things in moderation, or someone or something will kill you. I will keep watching."

"Of course," he agreed. "I would too, in your place, but it won't be necessary. You'll see."

"And perhaps you will see what that level of responsibility entails. I'm not sure you yet appreciate what it means to be part of a team."

Just then something caught Fisher's eye. "The dragon...look!"

The creature spun madly, half-hidden through waves of shimmering plasma kicked up by its antics. Some of its motions had been frenetic while hounded by the Karamojo, but this was an order of magnitude greater. And then Fisher realized something he should have noted immediately: the star dragon was moving against the magnetic field lines, rather than along them, as had been its wont. That took real energy without charging down. "Hey -- "

There was a flash, white-washing the displays.

"Sorry about that," Papa said. "Caught us by surprise."

"A mini-flare," Fisher said. "The dragon is still charged, pushing and dragging the magnetic field. A lot of energy stored in there, released when the lines reconnected."

"But why release it?" Fang asked. "That wasn't enough to hurt us."

"Maybe it has to learn that," Fisher suggested.

Images burned back into existence, caught with streaks here and there where saturation hadn't yet been fully cleared.

The dragon had vanished.

"Shit," Fang hissed through clenched teeth.

"We've got it," Papa said. "But the dragon has dove deep, and is moving downstream at a higher velocity than we've seen since the rocket swarm."

"Follow it!" Fang ordered.

The shifting gravity confirmed the abrupt course change.

But something didn't feel right to Fisher. Something must have precipitated this new behavior. He had a hunch. "No, wait. Stop!"

Fang jerked her head around and he thought the icy blast shooting from her flared nostrils would freeze him to the deck. "Already you show your colors. So much for your ability to be a team player."

"Being on the team doesn't mean agreeing with every off-the-cuff order you issue, does it?"

She needed his input in this uncertain situation, and she let the ice melt. "State your objection."

"We're faster than the dragon. We just need to know where it is. We can do that with a spy shuttle if it stays at altitude and at a smaller radius. Send that to look after the dragon. I'd like to figure out why the creature lit out like that before we blindly follow. Maybe something spooked it. Something equally as interesting as our dragon."

She said nothing for a long moment. Kilometers were piling up between them and the place where the dragon had gone berserk. Diffusion and turbulence could hide the clue all too quickly. "You may have a point. Papa, launch a spy shuttle as Sam suggested."

"Aye aye," Papa said.

"And take us back to where the dragon flared," Fisher prodded.

Fang nodded. Gravity shifted again.

The bridge portal irised open. Devereaux and Stearn wobbled on deck.

"What's the game, mates?" Stearn asked. "Could have given us more warning about the maneuvers."

"We felt the course change," Devereaux explained.

Fisher filled them in. "Maybe the environment deteriorated, the feeding got too thin, I don't know. There's nothing apparent to me about this location in the disk that should vary so quickly. Can you look into that, Sylvia?"

"Of course," she said. "Phil can help."

They arrived back where the dragon had blasted off. It looked like every place else: a tenuous patch of hot magnetized plasma tens of thousands of kilometers deep.

"What are we looking for?" Fang asked.

"Anything," Fisher said. "Abundance anomalies, field anomalies...I don't really know any better than you. I just don't think we should go off half-cocked chasing the dragon. Besides, if it has gone deep now, and stays deep, we're going to be hard pressed to go after it, aren't we?"

Devereaux said, "I'm reading normal parameters. Everything is within three sigma of normal for the disk at this stage of its cycle."

"Shall we resume the hunt?" Papa asked.

Fisher had to agree that there seemed no reason to stay, but something nagged at him he could not quite catch. No time to dwell on it. Now they were two steps further removed from when they had the golden opportunity to capture the dragon. With this new, difficult behavior to contend with, Fang was never going to act.

He took a deep breath. She would act, he told himself, when the time was right. He had to trust her, and help bring about that right time any way he could.

Fisher shrugged, then had an idea.

"Papa," Fang said. "Can you pipe in an image of the fleeing dragon from the spy?"

"Of course, but the image quality is poor. We get the best results for an infrared composite."

"Fine," barked Fang.

The displays crackled, reformed, and there was a dark streak amidst boiling fluid.

"Can you clean that up?" Fang asked.

"It's as clean as it's going to get, daughter, unless we start compromising the data integrity with some gullible algorithms."

Fisher squinted his eyes and tilted his head from side to side. It was a mess, but then he noticed something. Or thought he did. "Papa, what's the probability that the dragon image we're watching has no bulb?"

"Integrating," Papa said, testing the hypothesis versus the sum of the data that the spy had collected so far. "Eighty-three percent...and rising."

"I don't understand," said Stearn. "We're following a different dragon?"

"We have the right dragon," Papa insisted.

"Maybe the bulb made the flare?" Devereaux asked.

"It was a bomb, wasn't it? Did it hopelessly irradiate us?" Henderson said from the bridge portal. He was getting more than a little spooky sneaking up like that and making his pronouncements of doom with that deep reverberating voice.

Fisher would ask Fang to deal with that later. More important things to deal with now.

"No, I don't think it was a bomb," Fisher said. "The flare was weaker than its own rocket. It was something else."

"A distraction?" Stearn asked. "A sleight of hand to allow it to escape from a predator, the way an octopus will squirt a cloud of ink?"

"Maybe," Fisher said. "That could be it. That would be interesting, implying that the dragons prey on each other."

"Or have other predators," Fang said. "Perhaps we're not the first ship to explore SS Cygni."

"Ridiculous," Fisher said. "They wouldn't be able to evolve a strategy to deal with ships capable of interstellar travel. That would mean..." and he paused, lost in a sudden train of thought. There was energy here, and somehow these creatures had come into being. Why not super-accelerated evolution? Why think only in terms of long-term generational turn-over. Certainly DNA was not running the selfish genes in this system. Why not a different mechanism? A better mechanism, much much faster. "That would mean my expertise isn't as useful as I would have thought."

"What's this?" challenged Stearn. "An admission of fallibility?"

Fisher said nothing, but let himself smile. He would get his chance to show that he was with them, one of them, and was now sharing his thoughts rather than hoarding them like a dragon hoarding treasure.

"There!" proclaimed Fang with as much excitement as she ever showed in public. She stood up, pointing. The display focused where she pointed.

"You should really let us find things once in a while, daughter," Papa said, although the tone of his voice masterfully portrayed pride rather than pout. "We are supposed to be good at that."

"You're great at it when you know what you're looking for, Papa."

"What is it?" Stearn said.

But the image was zoomed, centered, sharpened, and highlighted by the time Stearn voice had faded from the bridge and the entire crew tried to understand the significance of what lay before them.

The bulb, presumably wrapped in a complex arrangement of electromagnetic fields, bobbed alone upon the sea of fire.

Henderson lumbered forward, the ruglings doing little to muffle the metallic echoes of his steps. His huge hand closed around Fang's shoulder and he spun her about to face him. "Get us out of here now! The flare was setting the fuse for the bomb. The dragon lit out to escape the blast! Don't you see, it's a trap!"

Henderson's great fingers crushed into Fang's white uniform.

Fisher took a half step toward the pair, intending to help Fang. Upon a second of reflection, he concluded that the best way to help Fang was to let her handle Henderson her own way. He had no doubt that she could, and he was not disappointed.

Fang ducked out and twisted beneath the giant. Lightning fast in the high gravity, Henderson tumbled forward as if some invisible force pulled on his outstretched arms, and Fang appeared on top. As his elbows buckled as he caught himself, Fang looped her own arms through their crook. The sound of groaning metal echoed loudly.

"I am sick of this kind of behavior from you people," Fang said quietly as she pressed her knee into the small of Henderson's back. "I am not taking any more from any of you. You want a piece of me, save it for the ring."

Fisher recalled why he had found her so attractive in the first place. Henderson's body redesign was surely for strength and durability, but too bad for him his metamorphosis was only physical. Physical redesign would never let a person escape the limitations of their own personality and will. Case in point. Here was a captain capable of decisive, sure action. Now if she could only do the same in the face of an alien challenge....

"The bomb," Henderson whimpered.

"I hereby decree that the dragon bulb isn't a bomb. Satisfied Mr. Henderson?" Fang asked.

"We're not military. You can't just -- " he gasped. The sound of metal groaning came again.

Over two hundred light years from Earth, Henderson's objection didn't matter the tiniest bit.

It didn't surprise Fisher at all that Henderson took the situation so seriously. In the face of too little data, the mind would often grasp hold of an unlikely idea and hold to it dearly. It was both a strength and a weakness. More a strength as nature had selected for the trait in man. Undoubtedly such faith in an unfounded idea permitted people to operate in the face of ignorance, a truly natural state, and, moreover, to begin cataloging characteristics of a phenomenon in a context. That was how progress was made, even if begrudging progress spanning generations. A human mind, even enhanced, could grasp only so many items at once, and when dealing with small number statistics, finding any pattern at all could mean better chances at survival. Machines like Papa failed to make these sometimes useful, but often absurd leaps.

Here it was a weakness, Fisher hoped, held in check by rationality and Fang's firm grip. Just another odd notion based on too little information and made into a religion. A Roswell, a face on Mars, string cosmology, a unified field theory.

Still, what was the bulb? In the face of Henderson's obsession with dangerous possibilities was Fisher's new egalitarian perspective, and every thought sprouted equally viable alternatives. It was a rattlesnake's rattle, the remnants of an old skin shed in preparation for the upcoming outburst. It was a lizard's fat tail, a storage vessel for excess energy discarded when pursued by an aggressive predator. It was a peacock's plumage, an anti-evolutionary sexual display all the more effective for its uselessness. It was a petrified dinosaur dung, an infinitely precious star turd chock full of metabolic information and exobiological clues to the creature that had excreted the thing. It was a buoy and transmitter, an alien tag that permitted some long departed research team, much like their own, to follow the progress of a long-lived star dragon.

Whatever it was, they would exploit it and help make the mission a success.

Fisher looked to Fang and her passive but rock-solid expression as she held Henderson in place.

That bulb could be the key and they should pick it up, he willed. Do the right thing Lena. Don't listen to Henderson's fears.

"Papa," Fang said softly. "Please prepare two shuttles to scoop up that alien debris."

"At once, Captain!"

"Not a good idea," Henderson said, then groaned.

"It's an excellent idea," Fisher said. "About time we had something tangible to study."

"Absolutely," Devereaux said.

Stearn said nothing, but grinned broadly.

"Shuttles reconfigured for new objective," Papa announced shortly. "Launching."

The deck shifted the tiniest amount as the shuttles detached from their interior berths and squirted from the Karamojo on their new mission. The fact that Fisher could feel the launch didn't bode well. Papa was the brain behind a smart ship, so finely tuned and fast that the change in momentum from two shuttles should have been more easily matched and canceled. Their resources were running low.

"It does not matter," Fisher muttered. "Everything that came before does not matter. What matters is what is happening now."

And as his muttering faded, silence filled the bridge.

But it was anything but peaceful.