The concept of a New Arnoon depended on the dragons. She needed their patternform technology. Their starship drive. Their information about stars and habitable planets across the galaxy. She had expected to spend months, if not years, at Aldebaran, learning new wonders, helping the Arnoon dragon grow and develop into its adult form. Now she might have only ninety minutes.
Yes, scattering the weapons in an attack formation was extremely tempting.
Instead she had a shower and dressed in clean clothes, a Z-B-issue sweatshirt and trousers belonging to some small crewman. With sleeves and trouser legs rolled up, she went through the bridge into the small senior officer lounge that she and Lawrence used as their canteen. He'd had his late-night snack again. As usual there were a couple of plastic cups on the central table, rings of tacky tea on the surface. Doughnuts and remnants of doughnuts on and around a plate—he only ever seemed to eat the bits with jam on them. A media card was showing the end of some play on a bare stage, the actors frozen as they took the curtain call.
If nothing else, the voyage reminded her of the time in the bungalow with Josep and Raymond. She told Prime to clear the mess and started rummaging through mealpacks as the lounge's domestic robot trundled over.
Lawrence came through a couple of minutes later, his hair damp from the shower. "Couldn't sleep," he confessed.
"Me too." She gave him his breakfast—bagels with scrambled egg and smoked salmon.
He tucked in appreciatively. "Thanks."
Denise sat opposite him, sipping her tea. "Any last-minute flashes of genius how to avoid a confrontation?"
"'Fraid not. Sorry."
"Me neither."
"It all boils down to the dragons themselves. We just don't know enough about them. I've been reviewing the memories our dragon has of past dragon star civilizations. There aren't many. We're limited to generalizations, and not too many of them. They just seem to passively suck up information and filter out the useful chunks for their descendants to inherit. That does seem to imply they're relatively benign."
"I hope so." She watched him shoveling down his food. "Aren't you even nervous?"
"No point. It won't do us any good."
"I was never nervous in Memu Bay."
"That's because you knew what you were doing. You were in control. Welcome to being on the receiving end."
"Do you really think they're benign?"
"Yes. But don't equate that to being on our side. If we ask for their help against others of our race, that will mean them getting involved in human affairs and politics. We would have to justify our appeal. That could well mean they judge us."
"Where do you come up with all this philosophy from? Are you some kind of secret xenopsychologist?"
He drank down the last of his orange juice and produced his broad, annoying grin. "One day, remind me to tell you how I used to waste away my childhood. You don't spend three years traveling with the Ultema without learning something about the alien perspective."
They went into the bridge for exodus. Prime spent two hours readying the fusion drive for ignition as soon as they were out of the wormhole. Console screens came on as Lawrence and Denise prioritized external sensor imagery.
"Are you receiving all this?" Lawrence asked the dragon. During the voyage they'd increased the bandwidth to the Xianti with several hundred fiberoptic cables, linking it directly to the Koribu's network.
"Yes, thank you," the dragon replied.
"Thirty seconds," Denise said.
Lawrence watched the displays as the energy inverter powered down. Half of the camera images lost the vague nothingness of the wormhole interior to a blank carmine glare. The other half showed stars gleaming bright against ordinary space. Radar found no solid object within five hundred kilometers. Prime brought more sensors online. Lawrence used his optronic membranes to receive the imagery, with Prime giving him a perspective from the front of the compression drive section.
Koribu had emerged forty million kilometers above Aldebaran's nebulous photosphere. To Lawrence it looked as though the starship were soaring across an ocean of featureless luminous red mist. The horizon was so distant it appeared to be above them. There was no discernible curvature. Star and space were two-dimensional absolutes.
Indigo symbols flowed across the image. Most of them concerned the Koribu's thermal profile. Infrared radiation from the star was soaking into the fuselage. Prime fired the secondary rocket engines, initiating a slow barbecue roll maneuver so that the heat was distributed evenly around the structure.
"Heat exchangers are coping for now," Denise said. "It's warmer than we were expecting, though. We might need to raise our orbit at some point."
"Radiation is strong, as well. Solar wind density is high. There's a lot of particle activity out there. That's going to do us more damage than the heat."
When he shifted his perspective to look back down along the fuselage he saw lines of pale violet light flicker and dance across struts and foil insulation. Metal components gleamed the brightest as the phosphorescent shimmer writhed across them. "Hey, we're picking up some version of Saint Elmo's fire."
"I hope our insulation's up to it"
"Me too. Okay, long-range radar is powering up." Six multiphase antennae were unfolding from their sheaths around the middle of the cargo section, flat ash-gray rectangles measuring twenty meters down their long edge. They flipped back parallel to the fuselage and began probing the chaotic climate boiling around the Koribu.
Prime overlaid their sweep across the visual imagery. A point of solid matter appeared forty-three thousand kilometers away, in an orbit two thousand kilometers lower than the Koribu's. Another one was detected fifty thousand kilometers away. A third was over seventy-two thousand kilometers distant. The radar's focus shifted to produce a higher resolution return of the first. It was twenty kilometers across, roughly circular, although the edges had broad, curving serrations, and it thickened considerably toward the center.
"More like a flower than a dragon," Lawrence murmured.