The plush ruglings muffled the echo of Fang's boots as she walked into the Hall of Trophies. The renewed hall with its lines of heads greeted her with growls, hoots, roars, trumpets, and more. The last time she had passed this way, just days ago, the hall had been quiet and empty. Papa (she judged Henderson next to useless at this point) had to be pushing the biosystems hard to have already restored the beasts. The Karamojo once again held reserves.

Fang slowed her steps, and wondered at the creatures for the first time in many months. She reached out to a rhinoceros and felt the rough, dry texture of its gray hide. The head grunted its programmed pleasure.

She moved along, regarding each of the trophy heads in turn. They were a sad, beautiful bunch. Not real trophies, she realized now. They were more a monument to engineering than to courage.

Fang caught her breath when she came to the male lion. Like the other endorphin-filled heads, he greeted her in his own way: a low, warm cough, then licked her proffered hand with his rough tongue and finally nuzzled her hand.

Fang paid the lion's actions little heed. She focused instead upon the patchwork of pink scars across the nose and between the eyes, right where she had shot Stearn's lion. Was that you, she mused. This was the sort of thing that Papa would do. But a quick inspection of the other animals she had hunted while on board the Karamojo, buffalo, tiger, showed the equivalent trophy heads to be as pristine as the newborns they were. So why the lion? What had been different about Stearn's lion?

Then she had it. The whole affair had been orchestrated, by Stearn to get her to unwind and perhaps even into bed (he would be foolish enough to try if given the chance), but Fisher had been involved too. He had likely planted the scenario for Stearn to find, directed him to select it somehow or be given it in response to a general request. The beaters and the lion...the nuclears and the dragons. The lion hadn't frightened her and she had shot it dead, effortlessly. How could Fisher have known that she was a crackshot when faced with mammalian eyes, that it was fathomless alien eyes that filled her soul with uncertainty and chaos? He couldn't have known; he hadn't spent enough time listening to her as wrapped up as he was with his dragon.

Papa would have known all this, and been under restrictions about telling her outright without cause. So the scar on the lion showed that this trophy had really been shot, that it had signified something.

Fang gave the lion a final pat on the nose and moved more briskly down the Hall of Trophies, her steps echoing along the long corridor. She paused again before the blue marlin hanging over the exit.

The fish, like the lion, was not as it had been before. It was darker, yet glowed with a blue-green shimmer when she bent her head to catch the light in just the right way. And its shape was different, fat and bottom heavy -- the tail, yet tapered to a long sinuous point toward the head. Then the nature of this chimera became clear to her. It was a marlin-dragon amalgamation, and pregnant to boot.

A dragon-fish trophy for her. Well, she deserved it, did she not?

She reached out to touch the happy, writhing thing, but Papa spoke before she could. "Fisher is waking."

She paused with her hand outstretched. She wasn't sure how to deal with Fisher, what he meant to her. What she meant to him. That he had survived was miraculous, a testament to his force of will as much as his redesigned body. He'd fully recover in days and then she'd have many months together with him on the trip back, and who knew what things would be like back on Earth when they returned. Perhaps they would be nothing but bugs to the half-millennium more advanced beings that they would find, and Fisher would be the last man in the galaxy for her. They might be stuck with each other forever.

"I'm -- " She pulled her hand back, suddenly chilled. "I'm coming."

She took a quick step from the hall and paused again. She took a long look at the full, bristling hall with all the heads doing their thing. Mindless, happy, and meaningless. Nothing to do with being a ship's captain at all she now realized. Nothing like ordering a crew member to his death, even if they'd gotten lucky and no one had died. She said, "Papa, could you dismantle the hall, please? Everything but the lion and the marlin. We've got an eternity to fill up the rest of the slots."

"Of course, daughter. We shall make note of their short happy lives."