Fisher bounded along concentrating on his course. He had a hundred questions to ask Papa about what had transpired with the dragon, what they had learned, but Fang had given him a task to do and he was going to complete it to the best of his ability. He could follow orders, he was sure, if he tried hard enough. He'd demonstrate his dedication by applying his famous obsession to the immediate task and any others she gave him, and if that didn't show her that he was on her side, nothing would.



Besides, he might get the opportunity to see the egg with his own eyes.



His streakers caught the rugling-denuded walls and propelled him headlong, perhaps too earnestly. Acceleration alarms blared again as they had moments earlier, and gravity tugged him into a new floor.



Fisher smiled. Looked like they were going to make it after all.



He skidded forward, elbows thrown before his face like a shield as he stumbled into a run just as he approached the T-junction leading to the staging zone where the others were.



A terrible clanking came from the adjacent corridor. Henderson's tumbling body followed, suddenly very close, very large, and very hard.



Fisher grimaced, preparing for impact.



The gravity shifted again, slowing both of them. Henderson's head was still very hard when Fisher struck it with his elbows. He howled with rattling pain; he had hit his funny bone. Some job he was doing for Fang. At least the gravity shift indicated they had some way to maneuver, some way to thrust away from the disk, at least for the time being.



"Are you all right?" Fisher asked Henderson, shaking out his arm as he carefully stood in the low, throbbing gravity.



"No," Henderson said.



Well, he was responsive enough. "Where's Stearn?"



"What about me?"



Fisher turned up the hallway. Stearn was crumpled in ball at the far end, below the port. "What about you?" Fisher said to Henderson, "I'll tell you what. You are going to help me with Stearn. Get up."



The Jack was flat on his back, but holding his head and at least moaning when Fisher reached him. "And to think, I used to intentionally hurt myself for the endorphin rush," Stearn said. His eyes were slightly crossed.



"Of course you did," Fisher said, losing interest. The Jack was woozy, but conscious. His internal biologicals would ensure he would be fine if he was functioning at all now. A mild concussion might be the worst of it, a hour and he'd be himself again although he seemed to have made it back to that extreme position already. He was Henderson's problem now -- another one of his problems anyway.



Fisher gazed through the port. The rails pulsed with power, accelerating charged buckshot to provide thrust for the Karamojo. Good. They weren't going to fall into the disk in the next few minutes. He squinted, pushing his vision, and made out their Faraday cage. The egg was in the cage.



Yes! They had done it then. That was it. Fang had stood her ground, and Papa had executed his program. True, they were limping, but a few repairs and they would be worming home.



They had won!



The com chimed. "We have a problem," Fang said. "A big problem."



Fisher shook his head. "What?"



Devereaux's voice came over. "Dragons are exploding in the secondary star, its upper atmosphere at any rate, heating it."



Why would they be doing that? "Enough to matter?" he asked.



"Yes, I'm afraid so. The atmosphere is bloating like a balloon, and the gaseous spillover across the Lagrangian point is sky rocketing. The accretion rate will explode, two orders of magnitude above nominal. This is going to drive the disk into outburst in no time, and not just any outburst. I'm putting my estimate of the mass transfer at five percent of a lunar mass before all is said and done."



Five percent of the moon's mass? That was unthinkable. That was nearly double the normal disk mass. He guessed dumping two caldrons of boiling oil into a full cauldron of boiling oil would be more than bad for anyone standing around watching. How many dragons were there? How much power could they unleash?



Perhaps this was something that would earn Biolathe a hefty profit, even considering five hundred years R and D by the time they returned.



Henderson, suddenly at Fisher's side and ignoring Stearn, said, "So we're leaving, right?"



Were they able? Fisher raised an eyebrow, blew out a mouthful of air, and asked, "Papa?"



"Raildrive operational, ninety-eight percent capacity. Wormdrive diagnostics indicate alignment failure."



Teasing out the singularities required nearly perfect alignment, at the micro-arcsecond scale. Without that alignment, you'd have nothing more than high-energy gamma rays streaming past each other. They wouldn't be going anywhere fast until the wormdrive was fixed.



"We can fix that later, right?" Henderson asked. "We can put some distance between us and this God-forsaken hell hole, this complete Ghenna, and conduct wormdrive repairs, at our leisure. We have the rail."



Stearn pinched the bridge of his nose, and blinked his eyes in an exaggerated fashion. They straightened, but then recrossed. Did he have to be goofing around even now? But the Jack spoke soberly: "Our reaction mass is limited, so our speed is limited. Sylvia explained it to me. That much mass spillover will lead to a nova. If the radiation doesn't fry us, the associated particle ejecta will be flying up our ass at ten thousand kilometers per second, bulk speed. The cosmic rays will be worse."



"What do you -- what do you mean?" Henderson asked.



"A nova," Stearn repeated, speaking slowly. "The semi-degenerate hydrogen on the surface of the white dwarf will heat up in a runaway reaction, igniting surface-wide fusion. It'll be like a living stellar core, and it'll blow away everything around it. The disk, the dragons, and us. Poof. We'll be a cinder."



"A nova?" Henderson said.



"No," said Fisher, not able to help himself. "It won't be a nova." He might as well let them think it would be a nova, for all that it mattered, but they were part of the team and deserved to know the facts. Besides, he understood that he was intellectually arrogant and could not miss the chance to put himself back into that perch. Might as well be honest with himself if no one else.



"Not a nova?" Henderson asked. He sounded hollow, but hopeful.



"Not a nova." Despite the seriousness of the situation, Fisher realized he was slipping into lecture mode. He could not stop the process, but that was fine; he somehow felt more in control being able to explain it. "The thermal runaway of a nova is the consequence of the semi-degenerate state of the material accumulating on the surface of the white dwarf." Henderson stared back with his blank metal mask and he decided it was best to assume silence here didn't indicate understanding. "Degenerate gas results from the Pauli Exclusion principle. All the electrons can't be pressed into the same quantum states -- that's forbidden -- and this provides pressure to resist the white dwarf's gravitational field. That material can then heat up without expanding or changing its pressure. It can get hot enough to drive nuclear fusion, which makes heat, which drives more fusion. Thermal runaway, and it all fuses essentially at once."



"It explodes," Stearn translated. Then speaking slowly, "It goes 'boom.'"



"Fisher said not a nova," Henderson insisted.



"Right. Gas accreted by the white dwarf doesn't become degenerate overnight. It's a slow process, taking thousands of years. Let's you build up a big bomb, which there isn't time for to happen now. That tidal wave of gas starting to make its way through the disk won't make a nova."



"So we're safe then." Metal creaked as Henderson smiled.



"No," said Fisher. "That tidal wave is still going to heat up and inflate the disk into a big donut, and finally make a hell of a splash when it reaches the primary. It won't be a nova, but no one is going to refer to this as a dwarf nova. That's for certain. Plasma and high-energy particles are going to spray all over the system. A lot of them."



There was no way they were going to outrun this outburst -- this dragon breath -- without wormdrive. He finished, "Going to spray all over us, too."