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Synopsis

The SS Cygni probe sent back hours of video, captured by the Biolathe AI, but only a few minutes mattered--the four minutes that showed a creature made of fire, living , moving, dancing in the plasma fire of the double star's accretion disk. A dragon made of star stuff, so alien that only a human expedition to observe and perhaps capture it, could truly understand them.

It's a perilous journey into the future, however, for SS Cygni is 245 light-years from Earth, and even though only two years' subjective time will pass on board the Karamojo, the crew will return to an Earth where five hundred years have passed. Captain Lena Fang doesn't care -- she has made her life on her ship, where her best friend is the ship's AI. Samuel Fisher, the contract exobiologist,doesn't care, either. He is making the voyage of a lifetime and in the small world of the Karamojo he will have to live with the consequences of his obsessive quest for knowledge. The rest of the small crew -- Axel Henderson, the biosystems engineer Sylvia Devereaux, the beautiful physical sciences expert and Phil Stearn, the ship's jack-of-all-trades -- have their own reasons for saying good-bye to everyone they have ever known. As the Biolathe AI said, uncertain five hundred- year round trips don't attract the most stable personalities, but somehow they'll have to learn to get along with each other, if they're to catch their dragon and come home again.

For at the end of the journey is the star dragon--a creature of fire with a nuclear furnace for heart. The crew of the Karamojo -- human and AI alike -- will risk everything to capture it, and it will take all their technology, all their skill, and more courage than they knew they had, to come home alive.

Excerpt

ONE

A journey of a thousand miles
must begin with a single step.
- CHINESE PROVERB

Unlike most first-lime visitors entering the world headquarters of Biolathe, Inc., Dr. Samuel Fisher didn't pause at the moist, cloying air that moved across the building's threshold like breath. If anything, his pace increased; he threw His shoulders forward and his streaker-clad feet rushed as if to prevent a fall, sinking into the plush rose ruglings with each step. Unlike the sunlit diamond and gold, seemingly mandatory in corporate buildings, this lobby throbbed pink and organic. The entire building was alive. Despite the omnipresence of biotechnology, walking inside it rather than sitting on it still made most hesitate.

Not Fisher - he was in the middle of five major projects. He didn't believe his life would be as transformed by the upcoming presentation as the Biolathe agent had hinted. He charged ahead, glancing about the nearly empty lobby for signs to guide him. What was this? He'd been here six seconds already! There was never enough time to waste any of it. He decided there was one thing he would hesitate over in the future: being talked into a physical meeting.

In the middle of the cavernous chamber Fisher stopped abruptly, brought up short by a bipedal mobile with wrinkled gray skin attached to the wall by a pulsing umbilical. Fisher said, "Excuse me."

"No excuses needed, Dr. Fisher." The biped had no openings, no visible external sensory organs, and nothing at all resembling a head. Raw biomass, quickly shaped, without even a mouth. The words emanated from the ceiling, its surface a taut drum able to focus sound anywhere. The entire building was alive. "I am a mobile of our brain, here to escort you to your meeting."

"Fine. Lead on."

The mobile moved toward the rear of the lobby to a tunnel, reversing its motion without turning around. No one-way joints, Fisher noticed, a more versatile design than most. The umbilical showed no slack, but grew or tightened as the distance to the malleable wall varied.

Fisher followed, buoyed up and forward by the plum-colored ruglings underfoot in the same direction as his steps. More good design in the carpeting, he noted. A lot of rugling lines didn't do anything but let themselves get walked on.

"Coffee?" asked the beamed voice.

"Please."

Without breaking stride, the mobile pushed an arm back out of the formless trunk. The end of the appendage coalesced into a round shape that darkened, grew shimmery hard, then rolled down into a groove that formed before it.

Fisher caught the bulb and lifted it to his lips as they walked. The bulb opened into a bony, ceramic cup. He drank, grimacing, as they entered a circular hallway. Instant. Ah, well, not great but his usual. He efficiently drained the bulb.

"In here, please." The mobile gestured with the coffee-delivering appendage, which then receded and melted back into its body.

Fisher stepped past the mobile into a circular room lit with blue-green tinged bioluminescence that made him feel as if he were underwater. A ring of five chairbeasts surrounded a picture tank squatting at the room's focus. People sat in the chairbeasts, two women and two men.

One of the women rose as he approached the vacant chair-beast. She was as tall as Fisher, just shy of two meters, and her white uniform showed no creases from sitting, although the crisp material appeared to be neither high-tech like his own duradenim nor alive like Rhynoskin. Her short blond hair was similarly crisp, as perfect as a helmet. She offered a long-boned hand to shake.

"Captain Lena Fang, corporate fleet," she said, words clipped, gripping firmly with rough fingers. Her almond-shaped eyes bore steadily ahead.

"Fisher," he replied, his eyes sliding past her gaze onto her thin, fluted lips, which reminded him of a recurve bow. A vivid image sprang into his mind: barbed orders flying from her mouth like arrows. He wondered if her striking appearance resulted from bodmods, or, as suggested by her name, the unusual ethnic mixing that often occurred on colony worlds. The cause didn't much matter; she was striking. "Sam Fisher."

"Fisher. Right. This is Henderson, biosystems," she said, nodding toward a bulky, classically handsome man with a big cleft chin, who gripped the lapels of his stylish green-scale coat, "Devereaux, physical sciences," a brown woman with curves, dreads, and fleshy lips who sat as serenely as Buddha, "and Stearn, our Jack of All Trades," a purple-colored man with a faddish wasp waist who flapped his ear wings at hearing his name. "My crew. But we still need an exobiology specialist with your track record for creative thought."

"Is that what this is about, Biolathe?" Fisher said, letting irritation seep into his voice. "I told you I have a long-term contract with Whimsey. Why didn't you tell me you wanted someone to go out-system?"

The voice of the Biolathe brain came warm and resonant from the ceiling, focused on Fisher. "We didn't want to bias you against our venture. We believe you'll be interested. Please, if you would, be seated for our presentation."

In his century of life, Fisher had been outside the solar system on three expeditions. Relativity made it a total of seventy years of Earth time lost in the process. He'd danced with star wisps while the radiation of Sirius B tanned his face, floated in the powerful tug of more than one gas giant chasing balloonoids, and swum with the stellated molluskites of Apollonia. After those wonders, nothing he could think of would be enticing enough to make him endure the culture shocks of returning to the rapidly changing Earth. Biolathe had to anticipate his hesitation. Corporate brains were smart, and this one had certainly done its research before contacting him. The proposal had to be good.

"Okay." The vacant chairbeast scuttled into optimal position as he sat. The superlative biotech in the rest of the building suggested that he guard himself against getting too comfortable in the chair-beast. It usually took a chairbeast a few days to grow into an owner's shape and preferences for temperature and vibration, but Fisher didn't want to risk even a fraction of that level of relaxation. He held himself upright on the beast and intended to bolt the moment he could dismiss Biolathe's pitch.

The bioluminescence faded. Twin glows kindled within the picture tank: a ruddy, distended blob floated in space feeding a brighter swirling disk of plasma that brightened to a burning pinprick of hell at its core. The blob was stretched out toward the disk into a teardrop, and the tip of that teardrop was pulled like taffy around the differentially spinning whirlpool of fire. Fisher realized he was looking at a binary star system locked in a gravitational dance. The larger but fainter blob was the secondary star, a relatively normal star like the sun despite the way its dance partner had twisted it. That pinprick, that was the deceptively diminutive primary star - a white dwarf the size of Earth and the mass of the sun, formed of condensed degenerate matter. This had to be a late stage in the pair's evolution, the primary having already shucked the husk of its outer envelope, no longer burning hydrogen and essentially dead as stars go.

Not exactly dead, Fisher surmised. More undead than dead. It burned on still as it stole fuel from its younger, bloated mate. He imagined a starving space vampire at the center of that swirling disk, sucking down a giant teardrop of blood that was the universe itself gashed open.

"The classic dwarf nova system, SS Cygni," announced the brain as the stars orbited in the tank.

Fisher wiggled on his chairbeast, refusing to lean back into the creature despite the minor aches in a back he was always too busy to get redesigned. The physical irritation faded with stone-still incredulity as his encyclopedic database inserted the basic characteristics of SS Cygni into his awareness. The distance couldn't be correct. "Two hundred and forty-five light-years? You're joking!"

"We don't joke," reassured the voice in a flat tone that was not at all reassuring. "Please allow us to continue. The data you are watching came from a Prospector-class deep-space probe launched in the late twenty-first century. We acquired proprietary rights from a subsidiary who realized our likely interest. Instrumentation on the tiny probe was primitive, but proximity more than compensates."

Fisher did the math. The fastest human-supporting ships would only take months of onboard time to reach SS Cygni, but the special relativity that made such a trip possible also cursed it. Five hundred years would pass on Earth. There was no way around it. Two hundred forty-five years times two for a round-trip time estimate, and the fact that the probe had been launched five hundred years ago drove home those laws of physics. Would a corporation really make a five-hundred-year investment? Who would go on such a trip?

Many people, he realized, but certainly not him. It would be like suiciding to gamble on an afterlife. A one-way trip into an unknown future with no guarantees about anything. People might not even exist when they returned, or at least not in a form he would recognize.

"Magnifying," announced the brain. The image in the tank ballooned, centered just off the hot spot where the secondary star's accretion stream splashed into the disk. Accretion disk, his database labeled it, the way station for gas sucked off the secondary before it shed enough angular momentum to reach the blazing dwarf. Spiral waves of fire churned across the surface of the flared disk, and magnetic instabilities erupted like...

Copyright © 2003 by Mike Brotherton

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