Phil Stearn's calves quivered, tense, over feet raised up on tiptoe. He could simply not remain seated, so he got up and paced back and forth before the displays.

Pure juice. The unfolding events were pure juice.

No matter how good the simulation, in the back of your mind you always knew it was a game. Not real. This was fucking real, and somehow that made a difference. It was the same adrenaline surge as a good game, the same electrical storm in his brain, but the knowledge that the stakes were higher than breaking a record or winning a bet made it much more sweet.

He had risked his life before, but despite the stakes, it hadn't been real either. He had skydived through herds of balloons in the skies of Jupiter (easy if the landing glove deploys properly, which it does at better than 99.9 percent probability), free climbed Olympus Mons (not as hard as he had thought it would be, using a goatman bodmod), walked alone across Mercury's Chao Meng Fu crater (cold, boring, and polluted with all the vacuum-preserved tracks of previous hikers). All the challenges of the modern world were artificial, taken by choice, voluntarily. Robots or biological mobiles did anything truly dangerous in the 'real universe.'

But now they were engaged in a real life conflict of survival in an alien system with a creature so different they didn't even know what it thought, let alone its capabilities. It didn't even matter that he was not a major player here. He was part of the team, and either they all won or they all lost. Homo sapiens versus Stella draconis. And he was Homo sapiens just as much as any of the rest.

"Sit down, Stearn," Fang ordered. "We're going to burn some reaction mass."

Stearn skipped back to the couchbeast, sat down on his hands, and squirmed with anticipation.