"So what's going to happen, Papa?" Fang asked, sinking down into her fighting chair. On the fly bridge wall before her glowed a brilliant azure sky, darkening to midnight at the apex. Behind her churned the furnace of SS Cygni's disk, ready to boil over. Inside her an icy chilliness wrapped itself around her spine and filled her with a sharp force.



"We must warn you that our predictive power in this situation is limited. Our disk model uses a quasi-linear viscosity parameterization that does not extrapolate well into the impending regime of extreme mass transfer."

Fang scowled. "I'm not Devereaux. Give it to me in your own terms."

He switched to his gruff, less formal tone. His Papa voice. "We don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be a hell of a thing. A haymaker flying toward our glass jaw."

Devereaux said, "Why are the dragons are doing this? They're acting like lemmings, blowing themselves up in a mass suicide. What's the evolutionary benefit?"

"I don't care," said Fang. "We live and there's time to figure out why later."

"Ye-yeah, I suppose so," Devereaux said quietly.

"We need wormdrive then," Fang reasoned. "Papa, how soon can you restore wormdrive capacity?"

"Five or six hours. Maybe faster if we loosen tolerances."

Five or six hours? "Why so long?" Fang shot back.

"It's a mechanical problem on the interior, the alignment of a Higgs generator, and there's no software fix. We have no actuator that can adjust for the problem, and we've sure tried. Physics is physics. We have to grow some specialized mobiles from scratch with whatever we can scrounge. There's no other way around it."

"There is one way." Fang noticed that her command mask had twisted into a scowl. She permitted the scowl to remain. Attitude and appearance weren't going to solve this problem. "We'll have to send one of us outside to fix the problem manually. It is the Jack's job to back up Papa's systems when they fail."

"Not Phil," Devereaux whispered, a soft empty sound full of understanding.

Despite the Karamojo's protective fields, the space suit, and the radiation drugs, as the disk flared through outburst into super outburst, the environment within the hollow interior of the ship would make the inside of a microwave oven look like a lukewarm bath. It was a death sentence.

"It's the Jack's job," Fang repeated. "He's the one who knows how to fix the problem, who's trained to fix such problems. We must count on Stearn to save the mission. To save us." She was sorry for how official and pompous she sounded.

"Shit," Devereaux said.

"Papa, put me through to the Jack." She proceeded immediately without waiting for confirmation. "Mr. Stearn, one of the Higgs generators needs to be aligned by hand."

"Yes, Captain," Stearn replied very quickly. Did he understand what she was asking?

"We need you to go outside and do it now, or we will not escape the burst."

"Can do, Captain."

"Papa will brief you as you suit up." Acid burned in the back of Fang's throat, making her swallow before she could continue. "Good luck, Mr. Stearn."

"Won't need it, Captain. I'm on the job."

There was something more she needed to say, she realized. Another dimension to command just as important as the damn awful one she had just assumed. She lifted her fingers to her lips to signal to Papa to shush the relay. She turned to Devereaux. "Run down there now, Sylvia, because he's got to go out as soon as possible."

Fang bit down on her lip then to prevent it from quivering as the other woman nodded and ran off the bridge. Had she really wanted this responsibility? Is this what she had worried would be taken from her someday? Would that really be so terrible? She remembered being a little girl on the junk, calling for help on the radio, surviving, while her grandfather sank with the leviathan into the ocean below. It was more difficult to be a survivor than people would believe. She had done what was necessary no matter how guilty she felt. No matter how any of them felt. Phil Stearn would now have to do what was necessary.

Alone on the bridge, having almost certainly sent a man to his death, she realized that this was what it really meant to be Captain.