As the shuttles' blue vectors stitched their way across the display, Fang realized that she was holding her hand protectively against her abdomen. Irritated with her body's lack of discipline, she snapped her hands down against the armrests of her chairbeast. The chair grunted sharply in response.



She was nervous. They could afford no more mistakes here. But what could go wrong? This was what she was good at, what Papa was good at: moving around biologicals. This was merely an unusual cargo pick-up.



But it was more, too, she could not deny it. And that was why her own flesh struggled against her will. Its ancient instincts called for ready action, quick response to immediate physical stimuli. Her stomach twitched, and so her hands had moved protectively.



At least Henderson had settled down. He stood, shoulders slumped, in front of the path of the blue vectors where she could keep and eye on him. At the start of the mission, she would not have pegged him for being such a trouble maker. Stearn, maybe, but that boy had become a solid right hand under Devereaux's influence. Fisher was a whole different matter, an order of magnitude more complex.



How did she feel about him now? From co-worker to lover to adversary to...to what? She glanced at him now, feeling like a spy. His face glowed green above his black turtleneck, a small smile etched in place as he watched the operation unfold.



He was focused on appropriate matters, as she should be. Time enough to worry about where they stood on the long voyage home.



"Rendezvous in thirty seconds," Papa announced.



Fang's hand slipped along the armrest, squeaking loudly as the sweat-lubricated skin skidded across the leather. Fang dug her nails into the chair, eliciting and quickly stifling a squeak from the chair. No one seemed to notice.



"Patch in shuttle visuals," she ordered.



The bright fuzzy white disk and the blue vectors vanished, replaced with the sharp abstractness of a close-up view into the disk's plasma. Despite the algorithms Papa pumped the images through, it was difficult for Fang to make much sense of what she saw. Everything was apparent enough: it was an open furnace with a surface area more than a thousand times that of Earth. Sure, there existed hotter areas, cooler areas, places where the kinematics and magnetic fields tortured the gas, but it was all too extreme for her Earth-evolved perception. It was all a furnace to her.



The dragons undoubtedly saw more, and probably heard more, smelled more, tasted more. They were ideally suited for this environment. For all she knew, this corner of Hell was an idyllic glade, an oasis in the disk rich in some obscure element needed for dragon happiness. Any place breathed richly to its inhabitants; her grandfather had told her many stories about the colony ship he had ridden in his youth and about the twenty-five or thirty words they had used for the different clinks and clunks and other sounds the ship made, and which sounds meant potential danger and which were inconsequential.



As she completed this thought, they got their first good look at the dragon-free free-floating bulb.



It was no longer bulb-shaped, but now a perfectly spherical ball. At the wavelengths displayed, a composite image spanning ultraviolet through near infrared, which constituted "visual" to Papa's definition, the 'ball' was opaque and shiny. There was so much light of all wavelengths that it would appear an overwhelming white to the unaided eye, but Papa put appropriate stretches on the image, imposing a rainbow palate to distinguish subtleties of temperature and velocity. The globe was a middle green, with blue sparks crawling over its surface. Just an interaction between its own fields and the disks that allowed it to float in a cooler plasma, or an energy transfer?



"So," Fang asked, "what is it?"



"I have no idea," Fisher said. While Fang had been contemplating the ball, Fisher's small smile had blossomed into a face-wide grin. "Or a thousand equally unlikely ideas. Let's bring it back and find out which one is right."



"Papa?"



"Can do," he affirmed. "We can scoop a whole dragon. This pebble will be no trouble."



"Proceed."



Without warning, everything went white. Not blinding -- the display had limits as stringent as any eyemod -- but everything saturated despite Papa's image stretch. Henderson let loose a low shriek.



As colors bled back into the disk and ball image, Fang asked "What happened?"



"Some sort of pulse. Broad-band, high-energy, short duration, energies up to ten keV. But I've got the dragon debris safely in tow."



"Origin of the pulse?" Devereaux asked.



"The debris," said Papa. "The mechanism is less clear, but may be synchrotron radiation. It was not our shuttles. Not enough power. We're analyzing the time-dependent spectrum now and will be able to provide a better answer shortly."



"What a second," Fisher said. "Maybe I've been staring at this thing too long and still haven't fully caught up on my sleep, but could you show us the ball at the onset of the pulse, highest contrast between any wavebands?"



"Of course. Here is the ratio of X-ray to infrared."



The dancing plasma jerked, shifted hues, and froze into an instant. The ball was not opaque in this image. There was a dark, twisted shape. A convoluted, triple helix with annelid segments.



Papa said, "Our agent trailing the dragon reports a course reversal. The dragon is rising out of the disk and twisting itself to rocket. It's coming right back to us."

And then it became clear to Fang, the nature of the bulb-turned-ball: it was an egg.

And its mother was angry with them.

Part Four: Dragon Breath

Chapter 15

The naturalist must consider only one thing: what is the relation of this or that external reaction of the animal to the phenomenon of the external world? -- Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, from "Scientific Study of So-Called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals"

Sylvia Devereaux should have been more interested in the approaching star dragon, yet she had a difficult time focusing on the obvious. She always had. Subtle, beautiful solutions to intriguing puzzles were never found among the obvious. And on this voyage she had chosen to entice fresh, boyish and immature Phil into a relationship, bypassing the more obvious Henderson. In hindsight, that had been an excellent choice.

As was her wont, she let the others worry about the approaching dragon, the obvious problem at hand. She kept an eye on it, but she could not continuously focus on it.

Fisher might try to hit her if she interfered, and Captain Fang was a piece of work herself. A smart person never tried to get between dogs and food when they were eating. They taught kids that still, even the ones with the fluffy lap animals genetically modified to bark in melody that passed for dogs these days.



No, Sylvia was more interested in the receding dragons than in the solitary approaching beast. She had initialized a program when they had arrived at the system to identify 'dragon sign,' that shifting laser frequency that the dragons emitted. She still didn't know for sure what it was; probably it was an energy regulator as Fisher had theorized, or a by-product of some high-metabolic process. Whatever it was, her analysis program took in the data feed from the Karamojo's detectors and remote system monitors and searched for it.



Her mini-tank display showed the SS Cygni system and its disk suddenly littered with dragon signal, now that she knew how to filter for it and trace the frequency shifts. Tiny vectors exploded out like angry ants rising to defend a disturbed nest. A counter shimmered as the number grew from the thousands to tens of thousands and into the hundreds of thousands, with no sign of slowing.



How many dragons could a disk hide?



She watched for a few moments, trying to fathom the pattern of their movement. There was a pattern there...not apparent at first glance because of the combination of gravitational and viscous forces. The dragons were taking the quickest course toward the disk's hot spot. In some cases that meant drifting downstream, for a smaller number, tacking upstream. The dragons at both larger and smaller radii took more complicated courses, exploiting different physical effects, such as the Coriolis force and magnetic centrifugal force, to reach their objective. It would take the majority of dragons some hours to reach their goal.



What were they doing? And why now?



"Captain Fang," she said, "You ought to be aware of this."



Sylvia watched the pattern, mesmerized as she ran a projection forward with twisting spokes spiraling into a corkscrew focused on the hot spot. She blinked twice and raised her gaze when she realized that she had elicited no response.



Everyone else, rapt, watched a split image overlay projected around the bridge periphery. Shuttles raced, the star dragon rocketed, the Karamojo arced to intercept. The dragon ball, the dragon egg, the trophy for the winner.



Papa's voice whispered in her ear. "The gang is a bit distracted just now, Sylvia. Their minds weren't designed for parallel processing, especially when a survival threat presents itself. Why don't you tell us instead?"



Papa was calling the situation a survival threat? This was serious. It did sometimes pay dividends to focus on just the obvious.