Star Dragon | Page 8

it out and I don't want to wait."
"I see," said Fisher.
"Okay," Stearn said, winging himself a bit closer to the port. "Why you going?"
"To look a star dragon eye to eye. To find out if it even has an eye, for that matter," Fisher answered evenly and without hesitation.
Boring. "It's just another weird alien critter, in a universe of weird alien critters. It isn't going to be smart like us. No aliens have been so far. So what's the point?"
Fisher shrugged. "Look there. I see the ship."
Outside the port the ship hung in space, a silvery-white whale of a ship. Blazing silvery white, with an almost perfect albedo that reflected all incoming radiation. Stearn thought it looked big, even though sizes were difficult to judge in orbit. He'd done plenty of training for his position as ship's Jack of All Trades, human back-up for the occasions when the ship's automatic systems couldn't get at something, but all his shipboard time had been on tiny scooters on in-system runs, and a few tours on short-haul freighters. Nothing at all like this ship and its state-of-the-art biosystems.
Stearn always made a point of having fun, and although he rarely admitted it to his club-hopping buddies, high-tech spaceships were a lot of fun. He had fun studying them, working on them, and he hadn't gotten this berth by chance. This ship was just plain cool.
The front section of the Karamojo was an enormous torus, five kilometers in diameter, which would house the normal matter singularity, a black hole with more than a billionth the mass of Earth. Wasn't that just huge? The aft singularity, the white hole, would be housed in the tapered end, a smaller torus, some five kilometers behind. The net creation energy of the pair was barely above zero. Once created, separated, and aligned in the "Push Me Pull You" configuration, off they would shoot at 10g, starting a galaxy-spanning chase. The ship would fall after the holes, oscillate actually, bouncing along with the pair in smooth freefall. Almost. Electric charges placed on the singularities gave the ship something to hold onto -- electromagnetic friction balanced against the freefall to provide some gravity near one g on most of the toroidal decks. And they could spin the whole thing, too, for stability and gravity when not under the wormdrive.
Bouncing along like it did ahead of the hole pair made Stearn think of sex, the big white ship sliding back and forth along the holes' axis. But he liked its cleverness as well: the charges also produced an electric field allowing active shielding from charged particles while in transit. Funneled into the bowl of the fore bulb, the maw as it was called, the black hole would then feed, providing power through a miniature accretion disk similar to the one in SS Cygni.
"Pretty awesome, isn't it?" Stearn asked.
"I guess so," said Fisher. "Where does the name 'Karamojo' come from?"
"I don't know. Didn't give it much thought. I mean, we're not called the U.S.S. Constipation, so I didn't worry about it. Ask Captain."
Silence ensued, with no laugh to his joke, and dragged on. This Fisher guy wasn't much fun. Stearn decided to mess with him. "So this is going to be a long trip, you know?"
"I know."
"I mean, bit more than a year out and more than a year back. A person won't want to stick to stims, you know? Sometimes a person wants that human contact, skin on skin. Like that. Now me, I'm pretty easy to get along with. It's all just skin. No big deal. If it feels good, do it. That's what I say."
Fisher stared coldly at Stearn. "I'm here to study the dragon, and that's what I'll worry about first."
Stearn smiled. "Sure thing, Fish. I respect that. But I bet Captain Fang will probably want you to entertain her. I saw the way she looked at you at the briefing."
Fisher raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything.
"Now, I haven't shipped out with Fang before, but there's talk in the corporate fleets. She's one of the real old-timers, three-hundred-years old or something they say. Don't know what time-frame, but plenty old. Still into chain of command and protocol, thinks sleeping with crew is inappropriate. It's silly for her to be like that, don't you think? What with super-fast autobrains running the ship for the most part. The only real crew under her is Henderson and myself. Devereaux's job description doesn't fall under ship operations, but from what I hear, Fang isn't a dyke. Ergo, she'll grab you. Be pretty discrete, maybe, but grab you she will. What do you think of that?"
"I think the captain's business is none of your business."
Stearn laughed. "On a ship with an all-seeing intelligence and five people cooped up together for two years, no