Star Dragon | Page 4

anticipate playing a significant role in this -- Earth's glorious future."
Fisher ignored the corporate hyperbole. The dragon mesmerized him. Tell me your secrets, Fisher thought. How can you be?
He was going to go. He knew it. He could do it. His primary thread of research concerned Cetan mollusk shell structures and was not exactly hot stuff. The previous interstellar trips had made him accustomed to an unsettled social life without long-term permanence, losing track of more family and friends each time. Nothing held him here. He was going to meet this creature on its home turf and look it in the eye, and then return to a new world. Maybe it would even be a glorious world. His stale tired universe shattered further with each passing second, and this magnificent dragon building a new celestial edifice from its shards. Gods, a real dragon . . .
Someone blocked his view. The captain, Fang.
Irritated, Fisher looked up at her, but said nothing in the face of her imposing glare.
After a moment of silence, Fang said, "Biolathe may think you're up to snuff, Dr. Fisher, but I like to take the measure of a man before welcoming him on board and trusting him on my ship."
"Call me Sam," Fisher replied, suddenly realizing he found her more than a little attractive. That was good. Not necessary, but good. "I can do anything I have to," Fisher replied.
"Anything, hmm?" A tiny smile lifted one corner of Fang's mouth. "But can you box?"
#
The taxi's bubble parted for Captain Lena Fang, flooding the vehicle's interior with warm air and cirrus-filtered sunlight. Her skin automatically darkened as she stepped outside, took a deep breath, and allowed the environment to seep into her pores. The beach awaited.
Hapuna was not the best beach in the Hawaiian Islands, nor the least crowded, but she liked its soft white sands just fine, and the ocean waves granted all beaches timelessness, which was what she truly craved. Time moved more slowly on Hawaii's Big Island than many places elsewhere on this old, overly civilized world. Pushing light speed the way she did, time moved more slowly for her, too. She sometimes felt like an island in a sea of time.
Hapuna Beach was a good place, and she always visited it when on Earth.
She slipped her flip-flops off when she hit the foamy waterline. She bent slowly to pick them up, stretching the backs of her calves and thighs, then turned right to walk north along the beach. Although she now wore a swimsuit as her uniform, she didn't care to swim. She hadn't for a long time.
Fang altered her leisurely pace to dodge jet-black children who flexed their bodies flat and surfed the low waves onto shore. One girl had large, saucer-shaped feet and wriggled her hips as she danced in, giggling; her hair stuck out in two very long spikes, probably helping her balance on the ungainly bodmod.
Finally, away from the noisier families, Fang tossed down her towel, then herself. When relaxing, she believed in keeping things simple. She lay back, her arms thrown out and palms down. She shivered as the sun pushed her into the sand. Communing with the mother planet she would leave again soon, she slept.
She dreamt of the tall, intense exobiologist who dressed in black and had told her he could box the ears off the stars themselves if only they had ears to box, and then there were antenna dishes on all the stars listening to the noisy children playing giddily on the shores of the Milky Way, and the stars sent a nasty, scolding beep beep beep to grab their attention . . .
"Daughter, are you there?"
Fang blinked awake in the late afternoon sun, grimaced, and tossed an arm over her eyes to block the glare. No second-lid lizard-eye mods on her body, just the standard retinal cell clock/phone. The purple after-image shrank, brightened, and resolved into a familiar face, with twinkling brown eyes set in a ruddy complexion chiseled with old-fashioned wrinkles, a bristling white beard, and thin hair over a weathered scalp. Fang had kept the personality overlay of the ship's brain from her first captaincy, a cantankerous piece of work modeled after the twentieth-century writer Hemingway, and had already installed him on the Karamojo. She would have preferred a wise Confucius, but that hadn't been available when she'd first gotten him, and he had grown to become part of her. "I'm here, Papa," she said.
"Well, good." The image receded a bit, and Fang saw that Papa wore his leather hunting vest and khaki pants. He was ready for action. "Had to cuff a few of these crummy fellows the company has working up here, but things are looking shipshape. What about Earthside? Catch any big fish?"
"Yes, I think so." She decided not