Even as registers filled with binary encoding for the precise traumas inflicted upon the Karamojo, Papa translates the events into metaphor for his human persona. Under a blistering sun Papa's land rover barrels over the dry savanna grass, which slaps against the front bumper with the pock-a-pock sound of a machine gun. The dragon-headed rhinoceros pursues.

He hadn't been hunting the beast from the vehicle -- that would have been unsporting. But the shot had gone awry and the rhino had charged. He had just barely managed to leap into the driver's seat and coax the machine into life, accelerating ahead of a new charge now turned into heated pursuit.

Just when it seems that he would outdistance the beast, he spies a steep ravine and must slow and swerve. This impact isn't nearly as devastating as when the induced currents burned through Papa's body and brain on their initial contact with this species, but he still hits with a heavy thud.

The dented rover rocks as Papa spins the wheel of fortune, hoping the tires gain purchase pointed away from the ravine, away from the rhino. And then Fang gives him the order to run Fisher's program.



Action! Papa's arms dance like those of Kali, with perfect aim lobbing short-fused explosive darts into the chinks in the creature's armored hide. Thwack-thwack-thwack! One especially good toss lodges a dart in the neck seam where the sinuous dragon head attaches to the ponderous body.



Ker-BANG!



The charging rhino explodes into pieces, a grotesque shower of blood. The vehicle twists over into the ravine, tumbling, falling wild.

Metaphor breaks down.

Papa sheds his human senses and accepts the flood of raw data available to him.



Microseconds stretch to hours, and every moment is the now.

The star dragon is inside the Karamojo, inside its hollow interior, inside him. In thirty-two high-velocity pieces.

Fisher's program accessed the superconducting coils that control the ship's drive systems. Enormous power lay available there, the capacitors and batteries overfilled in this energy-rich locale. Corkscrewing fields had infiltrated the dragon's segments, and, like a million tiny invisible and irresistible crowbars, pried apart its structural integrity.



Whatever dragons are made of, which seems less and less likely to be any normal form of baryonic matter known to human science, the creature depends on electromagnetism for its locomotion. The current experiment suggests that the creature also depends on electromagnetism for its cohesion.



Score one for Dr. Fisher.



Papa catalogs the fragments and their trajectories. In the time he has available, he can only deflect a few. As for the high-pressure plasma that the dragon had confined within itself, its 'blood' he permits himself to think, there is nothing that he can do. It explodes throughout the Karamojo's interior, but quickly rarefies and does little damage.



One large segment of the dragon, the head, Papa deflects from an impact with the egg cage. Another segment he deflects from the now-reflective port behind which Stearn and Henderson watch. One small piece ricochets off a sturdy housing for one of the Higgs generators. The rest smash into different parts of the interior hull designed to withstand catastrophic stresses.



And bounce.



This dragon-stuff isn't deformable. It interacts electromagnetically with the ship, touching the ship in a conventional sense, but the pieces don't break up further or lose energy to the heat of deformation. They bounce. Papa measures and extrapolates the trajectories, modeling his options. His twentieth century memories, stealing an iota of his processing power, intrude with images of popcorn above a gas stovetop, pinballs exploding off bumpers, bingo balls rolling in their cage.



Papa spins up some flywheels, spins down others, uses the few thrusters oriented in useful directions, as he presses the ship to its operational ability in an attempt to minimize the dragon-segment impacts on potentially weak sections. He is forced to push the safety limits for the human passengers, but there is little choice and little time to consider. Despite his efforts, the Karamojo is too large, too slow, to do much but endure as the pieces rattle through its bowels, finally exiting the aft.



Papa restores his metaphor for the damage assessment, his human personality welcoming the relief from the tedious and never ending flood of data, the restoration of time.







Steam hisses from the crumpled hood, punctuated by metallic pings and the smell of burnt rubber. The windshield has shattered. Papa pulls out shards of glass from his face with callused fingers as he blinks away blood. Superficial wounds only to what he thinks of as himself, not a real physical body, and not nearly so bad as that plane crash that had left him with a limp, so long ago in Africa.

But what of their transportation?

Papa leans back to kick open the jammed driver-side door, hops onto the dead grass, and walks to the front. The hood sizzles, so he removes his shirt. Tearing the khaki into strips, he wraps his hands. Then he can hold on firmly enough to lift the twisted metal. Waiting for the steam to clear, bloody sweat runs into the corners of his eyes. Bloody, stinging hot.



"Getting damn warm." First he checks that his hair isn't on fire -- that happened during the second airplane crash. Hair fine, Papa cranes his neck to get a bearing on the sun.



It grows larger by the second.