A telescope-based survey was nowhere near as good as flying around looking at things, but early Bobs had done just exactly this, before SUDDAR got good enough to cover a significant portion of a system at a go. The first thing we noticed, something that we’d been too preoccupied to see up until now, was that this system was, well, not a system at all. It appeared to be a patch of empty space, except for an asteroid/space station and two wormholes.

  “No sun. No planets. No satellites that I can find.” I paused. “No asteroids, other than the one.”

  “Just two wormholes—the one we entered through and another one at, mmm, about a hundred klicks distance,” Dae said. “Remind you of something?”

  “Yep. A firewall. This is the DMZ,” I replied. “Which makes my earlier comment about border guards all the more apt. I wonder why the security?”

  “There doesn’t have to be a reason, Icky. Just an abundance of caution.”

  “Yeah, no. We’ve been breezing through gates up until now. Suddenly we have border security? I bet none of the other jumps from Hub Zero have firewalls.”

  “But why just here? We literally went through every wormhole gate at every other hub without seeing this.”

  “Center of the empire? They’re protecting their Trantor?”

  “Yeah, okay. Wait, no.” Dae’s voice took on an edge. “If this hub is all one single civilization, they’d only have one gate at the hub, and all the local gates would be on the other side of the firewall. No, they’re protecting this specific destination. And they might be protecting other destinations as well that we haven’t found yet. Maybe we just lucked out.”

  “Yeah, luck. That’s the word I’d use.”

  We sat in silence for several mils, each separately considering our fate and our options. The SUDDAR sweep had shown a bunch of docked sentry ships in the space station, so hitting our captors with a couple of surprise busters wasn’t going to resolve the problem. Or it would, but not in a way that we’d like.

  But there was something else …

  “Look at this.” I pointed to a spot in the holotank, which currently showed the area immediately around the station. There was a sentry ship hovering near something else.

  “Another prisoner?” Dae muttered. He pulled up the SUDDAR sweep we’d done and checked the data. “Definitely not the same construction as the sentries. In fact, closer to us in general design.” He zoomed in on the scan image. “Oh, hell.”

  “What?”

  “It’s dead. Looks like fusion-reactor powered. If it was held there long enough, it would have eventually run out of fuel for the reactor. Powered down and inert. How long do you suppose that took?”

  “Uh … ” I checked the archives. “Generally speaking, back when we used fusion, we could have kept the lights on for five to ten years on reserves if we were just sitting there.” I leaned forward to examine the image closely. “No indication of living space. So a totally automated ship. Maybe someone’s version of a Von Neumann probe.”

  “So I guess that answers the question of what’s going to happen to us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  Ready to Go

  Howard

  October 2342

  Trantor

  The dragon rotated in the video window. Well, the CAD image anyway. The real thing lay in a manny pod in orbit around Jabberwocky, courtesy of Mario and the autofactory he’d set up for us.

  Bridget was out on some errand that demanded her physical presence, so when the job-completion auto-alert had come in, I’d jumped in to take a peek.

  The dragon really defied easy categorization. It didn’t have feathers, it didn’t have fur, and whatever those were, they weren’t quite scales. I suppose a pangolin might come close, but the dragon’s scales weren’t nearly as tough as the Terran animal’s.

  The scales also grew thinner and longer on the wings, acting very much like feathers, which gave the dragons flight capabilities more like those of birds than bats, including the ability to soar and glide.

  I knew all this, of course, because Bridget couldn’t resist lecture mode if anyone around her held still long enough to listen. And I was always willing to listen to her.

  It did kind of look like a squirrel, though. Other than the large, clawed hind feet, it didn’t have the innate menace of a dragon. Eyes too big, fangs too small, mostly. Maybe a little like Toothless—the dragon in that animated movie. Also, no fire breath. It stood perhaps a little taller than a human on average, maybe six and half feet, but rangier, as befitted an animal that had to get airborne. The abnormally large chest housed both oversize lungs and huge pectoral muscles. There was also some weirdness about the metabolism, but I hadn’t paid close enough attention. A long tail completed the ensemble, finned or feathered at the end to help control flight attitude.

  At that moment, Bridget walked into the apartment. She was angry and did her best to slam the door both open and then closed, but the modern mechanism was deliberately resistant to that kind of abuse. The door braked and slowly hissed shut the last few inches.

  “Didn’t go well?” I asked, keeping my tone neutral.

  “Luddies,” she replied. “They’re trying to flood the Trantor city council with specious complaints and accusations about mostly ludicrous and irrelevant things. It’s an obvious desensitization tactic, but according to the rules, we have to evaluate each submission.”

  “You couldn’t have done this virtually?”

  “Again, rules. The complainant has the option to demand an in-person evaluation. It’s harassment, pure and simple.”

  “Hmm.” I frowned. There had to be a way to handle this. I backed out of my manny for a few mils and wrote a quick note to our lawyers. They were the best—and most expensive—legal firm in the UFS and, in my opinion, worth every penny. Or millipam, these days.

  But for now, best to distract her. “So our dragon mannies are done.” I gestured to the rotating image. “Dranny? Mangon?”

  “Oh, do not start. Let me see.” She nudged me out of the way as she sat. “Could you do martinis? I really need one right now. Make mine a double. No, a triple. No, just pour until the glass is full.”

  I smiled at her as I got up to play bartender. “What do you think of the finished model?”

  She halted the rotation, zoomed in and out a few times, and played with layer transparencies—showing first the skeletal structure, then circulatory system, then nervous system. Finally, she sat back and looked at me. “I approve. Let’s load them in a drone and do a test run.”

  I did a fist pump. Showtime!

  As with Eden, the home world of the Deltans, the dragon world had a lighter gravity—just under point-nine G—and a thicker atmosphere. Otherwise, something the size of a dragon could never have gotten off the ground.

  The dragons had some other advantages as well, such as hollow bones, a respiratory system very similar to Terran birds’, and an insanely high metabolism. We had engineered our drannies to adhere as closely as possible to the average dragon size and weight, but of course, we included plenty of reserve power and speed. Fair fights were for suckers.

  It took about a half hour to get the drannies down to Jabberwocky from the orbital autofactory. On receiving the alert from the drone, Bridget and I put our home mannies in their pods and transferred to the new drannies.

  I must have said something out loud, or perhaps Bridget had simply become that good at reading my mind, because I received a text from her just as I was initiating the transfer: You are NOT going to call them drannies!

  Yeah, we’ll see …

  I sat up in the cargo hold of the drone. Beside me, Bridget’s dranny was just sitting up as well. She made a grinding, coughing sound, and I looked at her in confusion, wondering if she was having a breakdown.

  “Turn on your auto-translator, Howard,” she said over the intercom.

  Oh. Uh, yeah. Quickly, I pulled up my head’s-up display and activated the onboard translation service. Long since perfected in its general design, the auto-translator converted my human words, expressions, and mannerisms to and from the local equivalents. Using the technology, we were able to fit right into dragon society without actually having to learn the local dialect. Behaviors were another thing, of course, but whoever was doing the xenopological analysis would give us a rundown. Hopefully soon, and hopefully we wouldn’t encounter any locals during this shakedown run.

  I commented as much to Bridget, and she replied, “We’ve put down a long distance from the nearest populated leviathan. Gandalf and company have told me they’re almost done with their survey. A couple of days to wrap up and then package up their results, and we’ll have it.”

  “And you couldn’t wait?”

  Bridget gave a shake that my auto-translator presented as an eye-roll equivalent and replied, “If we discover any issues with the drannies—I mean the dragon mannies—I’d like to have them fixed by the time we get the analysis. No point in wasting time.”

  “Or in resisting the inevitable. Drannies it is!” I crowed.

  Bridget shook herself again and opened the cargo door. Local air rushed into the lower pressure of the hold, and we endured a momentary buffeting. I squinted until my eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight coming in through the door, then stepped to the threshold and looked around. We were several hundred feet in the air, hovering over a small lake. It should have been a tranquil scene, except that the lake was roiling alarmingly in a couple of places, with steam or some sort of vapor bubbling up from the depths.

  Bridget followed my gaze. “That’s why there’s so much emphasis on aerial evolution on Jabberwocky, Howard. It’s a young planet and still very, very volcanically active. There’s a good chance those vapors are toxic.”

  “So no swimming, then.”

  “I’m sure there are lakes that are far safer. My IR vision says this one’s hot enough to kill an unwary bather.”

  “Too bad. That means no fish. I’d have liked to practice my lunch-acquisition skills.”

  Bridget gave me an approving look. “Well, you have been reading up.” She lifted one foot and flexed the claws experimentally. The dragon foot looked a lot like that of a raptor, with clawed toes projecting both forward and back. Long legs completed the package, allowing a dragon to swoop over a lake and nab fish on the fly. I had taken one look at the image of their favorite prey fish and dubbed them trout. Bridget, never having seen trout, had just shrugged.

  “No time like the present,” I said. I stepped forward and dove out the cargo door.

  Garfield had done a lot of the early work of rigging up flight reflexes when he was developing the manny called Rocky in its various iterations. Several hard landings had spurred him on to lick the problem, and now I was reaping the benefits. My wings stretched out on their own accord and caught the air, and my fall bent into a long, graceful up-curving arc. At the top, just before I ran out of momentum, I folded my wings, did a backflip, and went into free fall.

  I yelled, “Woo-hoooo!” and again caught air, bending my path into a corkscrew. Behind me, Bridget laughed. I could hear her wing beats over my own, a higher cadence as she worked to catch up.

  In seconds, we were over a bare stretch of dark rock and making use of the updraft to climb effortlessly. “This is even better than Quinlan swimming,” I exclaimed.

  “And hopefully it will end better,” Bridget replied. “Don’t break the dranny—how’s that sound?”

  “Yes, dear.” Somebody had apparently ratted me out.

  We soared in the updraft for several minutes, simply enjoying the sunlight, the cool air, and the view out to forever. But eventually, Bridget said, “I have to do at least a little work to justify this junket. Let’s land by that lake. I want to check the environmental analysis hardware.”

  The dragons were significantly bigger than Quinlans. Combined with continual improvements in miniaturization, we were able to build more features into this manny version. Of course, Bridget would want to test them.

  We landed on a rocky outcropping at the end of a small peninsula jutting into the lake. I had a moment of vertigo as I tried to overthink the maneuver, but the dranny firmware took over and brought me in picture-perfect.

  Dragons did a sort of birdlike squat instead of sitting, not really having the physiology to support a butt-first resting position. It was surprisingly comfortable and stable. I looked around, ostensibly standing guard while Bridget sniffed the air.

  “Very high CO2 here,” she said. “Not toxic as such, but a dragon would be panting, trying to get a breath.” She paused for a moment. “Which we aren’t doing. I’d better add a subroutine for that.”

  I nodded and idly dipped the tip of my tail into the water. Ouch, my dranny control system said, and pulled the tail out with a jerk. Ninety Celsius, it informed me. Burn level. It sounded peeved.

  Bridget gave me a small smile. “Giving it all for science.”

  I stood and stretched, one wing, then the other, one arm, then the other. “Want to race?”

  “Howard, please. That’s so immature,” she replied. Then took off without warning, beating for all she was worth on a southern heading.

  “That never gets old either,” I muttered, and took off after her.

  There was a certain amount of sexual dimorphism in the dragon physiology, with the males being bigger and more powerful but the females being more maneuverable. I knew that this figured into their mating rituals, but I hadn’t read far enough ahead to know exactly how. In any case, I was catching up, but slowly.

  “We should limit ourselves to dragon normal,” she called back to me.

  “Yeah, sure, I’m not falling for that one. Again.” With a few powerful wingbeats, I found myself above and slightly behind her. As I gazed down on her form, I suddenly had an idea of how those mating flights worked. “Bridge, do we have the dragon behavioral routines installed yet?”

  “Some of them. No cultural stuff yet, though. Why?”

  “I’m, uh, well, my dranny is, uh … ”

  “You like me?”

  “Yeah, like that. How accurate is the physiology?”

  “We could find out.”

  I eased down to glide just above her, and we found another updraft.

  Aerial sex. Highly recommended.

  We were doing a long loop, gradually working our way back to the location of the drone. One of the newly installed modules was an inertial guidance system that ensured we always knew where we were, which made dead-reckoning navigation a snap. I was admiring the view and wishing for a cigarette, or dragon equivalent, when Bridget said, “I think we’re being followed. No, make that chased.”

  I swiveled my head and looked back. The dragon neck wasn’t as long as that of its mythical namesake, but it was definitely better than a human’s for checking in all directions. In this case, it allowed me to get a good look at four dragons bearing down on us. They had a very definite aura of focus and determination. This wasn’t just a strangers passing in the night kind of thing.

  “They have sticks,” I said. “Spears, you think?”

  “Technology level is right. We should probably get away.”

  “There’s a plan.” I applied dranny-level power to my wingbeats, not enough to appear superhuman—er, dragon—but enough to ensure that our pursuers would tire before they could catch us. Bridget increased her cadence to match.

  It took a couple of minutes, but they finally veered off and headed for an updraft to rest. I glanced back with one eye to confirm, then said, “I thought this area was far from any floaters?”

  “It is,” Bridget replied. “We did a thorough survey. I’ve just requested a recheck, which should only take a few—and done. No floaters anywhere within twenty miles.” She paused for a moment. “Floaters? Howard, please don’t make that stick.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Bridge. Fair’s fair. You do the Latin names and I do the fun ones.”

  She sighed. “I suppose I should be thankful it’s not a pun. Or a potty reference.”

  I grinned in response but didn’t point out the actual double entendre. Beating a victory to death was never a good idea.

  We soon spotted the drone, which had dropped its camouflage when we got close. The cargo door opened, and I did an upward swoop that placed me at a dead stop right at the entrance. As I moved into the cargo bay, I heard Bridget land behind me.

  “So what have we learned today?” I said.

  “You are very bad at creating names for things. Dragon sex is fun. And they have patrols or something similar. That last one may be a worry. I’ll talk to Gandalf.”

  “I’ll come with,” I replied. “Maybe we can get in a round of D&D.”

  Chapter Thirty:

  Revisions

  Bob

  November 2342

  In Virt

  Ireceived an invitation from Theresa, promising a surprise of some sort. I’d have visited anyway, but now my curiosity was up. I knocked and was admitted into her VR in Quinlan form. Theresa was reclining on a chaise, with a bowl of squiz on a side table. She had settled on an open-concept shelter, as in no walls. Partly covered by a pergola, it was essentially a patio with some accessories. The weather was always warm and dry in VR, and anyway, Quinlans were furry, so most of the reasons for an enclosed domicile were moot.

  Even with the Bobs, it was more a matter of habit than any real necessity. And why not? Henry Roberts lived full-time on a boat, and I’d heard rumors of some other ex-humans who had taken up the Davy Crockett lifestyle full-time in VR.

  Theresa smiled at me, waiting. Obviously, I was supposed to figure out the punch line myself. I looked around, somewhat at a loss. The weather was nice; the foliage was foliage-like; little animals and Quinnish bugs buzzed around. The view was clear out to the horizon … the horizon.

  I did a slow three-sixty. “This is a planetary surface?”

  “Right the first time. I extracted some archival footage from Anec. This is Quin, before the—what did you call it?”

  “Jackpot. It’s an allusion to a famous and very popular author from when I was alive. It means when a whole bunch of crap hits at once and takes civilization down.”