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  "Definitely somebody in there now. Indicating growth since the last time I scanned it. I'd say on the level of a Human baby about four luns before birth. Neurons firing, gathering up information, programming its nervous system, and paying attention to what's going on outside."

  "Outside the box?" Genys considered sending for Security, just in case. She shook her head and silently asked the whole process to just do what needed doing and finish already.

  All the indicator lights shone green. The door of the chamber hissed slightly and M'kar tapped it to make it open. She took a deep breath and reached in to pick up the box. Genys almost told her to wait, to put on some gloves for protection, but hadn't she carried that box all the way back to the ship, tucked inside her tunic, without any harm?

  They settled in an unused room down the corridor. M'kar set the box down on the long table in the center that could function as worktable, examination table, or even an operation platform. She wiped her hands on her uniform shirt, then pressed with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, giving equal pressure on all four sides of the lid. It popped off with a soft scraping sound. She put the lid down, took a deep breath, then glanced at Genys. From the bad experiences of others, she knew to keep the entire length of the table between her and the box. M'kar leaned over and looked inside.

  "It's an egg." A twitch of her mouth. "Still. Thank you, Enlo."

  Genys barely kept from asking, "Are you sure?" She stepped up and looked in. The egg was about the size of both her hands cupped together, mottled in different shades of brown and gold and hints of green, on a silvery-creamy background.

  "Don't suppose you know what's inside?" She flinched when M'kar reached in and poked the blunt end of the egg with her fingertip. Genys thought the shell dented a little.

  "Here there be dragons."

  "Are you --" Genys stopped just short of clamping both hands over her mouth.

  "Sure?"

  "I was going to say ‘crazy,’ and move on from there."

  "Actually, it's called a drac. About this big." She moved her hands apart. Less than a meter didn't look too bad to Genys. Then again, who knew how big a dragon, or drac, or whever it was called, could grow?

  "We are in so much trouble."

  "You don't know where the Corona is, do you?"

  "No idea. Get to work on decrypting that data wafer. Any chance they were going to take that thing to the … no, why would you leave instructions to get it to the Academy if they were going to do it?" Genys sat back, crossing her arms. "What else haven't you told me?"

  Among her many talents that weren't in the official record, M'kar had an incredible gift for mimicry and a sharp memory. She related most of the conversation she had with Dulit, including her former classmate's expressions, the way he moved, the changes in his voice. Genys flinched when M'kar described how the drac had teleported in. She tried to remember if there had been any flurry of movement, something odd in the video record of the confrontation outside the Corona's docking airlock. The image had been too far away, and she guessed the creature was small enough that it hadn't set off any security sensors. She would have to speak with Wexel about fine-tuning his equipment, if a miniature dragon could suddenly teleport into his station and not set off alarms.

  "Oh, hickets," she growled, interrupting the narration. M'kar paused, looking not at all upset at being interrupted. Genys reported the cuts and burns the Gleaners had suffered when they encountered the Corona's crew. "Why didn't they say anything, if they ran afoul of dragons?"

  "Greed. They want to get at the dracs, steal them, whatever, and then make a huge profit. The problem is, from a few things Dulit said … dracs form an attachment. And just how do you steal and hold onto something that can teleport, as well as express its fury at being kidnapped?" She smirked. "I would love to see what the Corona's dracs did to those Gleaners."

  "I'll copy you the report." Genys wished she could laugh and find humor in all this like M'kar did. Maybe later. "Go on." A few sentences later, she laughed. "He named it Poki? After the children's vid character?"

  From that point, the conversation went downhill. Knowing that Gleaners and Ankuar and maybe even Hivers were interested in the Corona and its living cargo just upped the complications and stress factor and danger. The discovery of a new Chute cubed the problems. Now the factors involved travel and possible strategic maneuvers if the Human worlds that wanted to ensure they were the only "true" Humans in the universe declared war. She had to agree with the captain of the Corona. Ensuring the safety of the dracs' world and making sure no one had backtracked them to the Chute was higher priority than getting the dracs to the Academy.

  "Why exactly did Dulit entrust the egg to you, and why specifically did you want everything to go to Le'anka, to your Master and his son?"

  M'kar ran her fingertips over the curve of the egg, just visible inside the ti box. Then without taking her gaze off it, she opened up her other hand, palm up, showing the infrenx tattoo.

  "I'm lost."

  "Thyal is confined to his bed, most of the time, with robotic assistance. He's worked himself up to being able to spend an hour a day in a hover chair, to get him out of the house, into the fresh air and sunlight. The dracs mentally bond with Humans. If I could send him a friend and playmate, someone who could go out and explore for him, maybe he can borrow the drac's eyes, it can fetch things for him." She sighed and closed her eyes. "I know I'm being maudlin. I just woke up from hibernation and a near-fatal encounter with forced matrimony. Slack the ropes."

  "I completely understand," Genys said, raising both hands in a sign of peace.

  For a moment, M'kar frowned at her as if she didn't know what her captain was talking about. Then she flushed and shook her head. "I need to get to work decrypting that wafer. Somewhere in there is enough data to determine the gestation time for drac eggs, and how mature this one is, so I know how much time we have."

  "Conceivably, a drac could bond with … anyone?"

  "Just what this misfit crew of ours needs. A dragon." She gathered the ti box into the crook of her arm and fit the lid on it.

  "No, thanks."

  "This one belongs to Thyal. No matter what, it's going to Thyal."

  ~~~~~~

  Genys already knew what she had to do, but she conferred with Veylen, Tahl and Taggert, her most senior officers, just to make it official. Not because she had any doubts about her judgment. The involvement of Gleaners and Ankuar showing too much interest in the Corona. The possible discovery of a new Chute and all the diplomatic, trade, and security issues it would raise. Plus the discovery of a semi-sentient species on the other end of that Chute. All of that turned the Corona's stuation into a matter for the Alliance Congress and the Fleet and the Academy. Genys sent the contents of the data wafer by compressed communication burst to every authority and superior who might have some kind of claim or interest or responsibility in the matter. Let them put their own specialists to work on understanding dracs once they decrypted the Corona's logs and files. She calculated maybe two days, maximum, before searching for the Corona would become a high priority matter for the Fleet.

  After three duty shifts, the Defender's decryption team had made slow progress. They couldn't even identify which files to focus on first, to find the location of the Chute or have any clue to the course the Corona would have taken on leaving Sheffroab Station. After the fourth shift worked on the files, the chilling theory was that they could decrypt every file, every line of data, and find no direct reference to the ship's movements for the last three Standard years. General consensus, after the fifth shift, was that when the captain and crew discovered the attempts to access their records, all the location data and star charts had been deliberately erased. The best plan they could come up with was to glean through the data in other departments' records to piece together the ship's path.

  Fleet Command confirmed the analysis, and then requested the Defender's team continue to work on the puzzle, even as it was officially han
ded over to specialists.

  No one asked for the egg, because Genys chose to "forget" that little detail in her reports. Until the drac hatched, she considered the egg a personal matter between M'kar and Dulit. Captain Shryne got away with much bigger "ommissions" in her ship's records, not immediately reporting details to Fleet Command because she judged there was a higher good involved. So Genys figured she could finagle some breathing room and time to figure things out for M'kar and her classmates. Besides, they had a safety net with Master Reydon, head of the Academy, father of the injured man who would benefit from the drac's assistance and companionship when it hatched.

  Other ships were assigned to search for signs of the Corona's presence, as the survey ship's path was recreated, moving backwards from its approach to Sheffroab Station. The upgrades and refit of the Defender progressed faster than anticipated, even though it felt like it took twice as long as it should have. Not until her ship passed all the tests and officially launched and returned to duty rotation, did Genys finally feel like she fit in her new command chair, new uniform, and new rank. It helped that no one was muttering, "Nanny ship," where she could hear.

  Funny, how the Defender felt different, once they had left Sheffroab and returned to their assigned territory. Just because she had moved two meters over from her executive officer's station to the command chair? Genys wriggled a little further back in the cushion and hoped no one noticed. If they did, it wouldn't matter. The crew of the Defender had become a family through the dangers they had faced, the losses and damage and the exhilaration of the discoveries they had brought back to the Alliance.

  The Defender had to be enough psychologists and counselors to talk sense into the new members of the crew who felt the least bit nervous with a new captain, despite the long paragraphs in her record verifying she had earned this promotion. No one had the psionic strength to read her mind and see that she felt like a fraud. At least, Genys hoped not.

  I'm definitely losing it, still arguing with myself and all the indiferps who might have protested my promotion. It's not like I'm the youngest captain in Alliance Fleet history.

  "Captain?"

  "Taggert?" Genys turned to the head of the Gate team, grateful he had yanked her out of her thoughts. Never smart to second guess Fleet.

  "We're getting something coming from those planet readings Norgon caught a glimpse of before he went off shift." Taggert wrinkled his nose, making Genys think once again of a rabbit.

  Granted, an ebony-skinned rabbit, two-plus meters tall. Not for the first time, she wondered if Taggert got teased for his dimples and twitchy nose, or if anyone in his class at the Academy even noticed. Those features hung above eye level of the average scientist, and Gate researchers were notorious for tunnel vision.

  "You're just jealous," Treinna commented from her seat at the auxiliary science station on the second of the four levels of the bridge.

  She fluttered her eyelashes at Taggert. Briefly, he glared at her. No one could be angry long when Treinna teased them. Besides, his wife was Treinna's partner in the ship's Brain Blast tournaments, and together with Jasper, the four were unofficial social life coordinators. They were part of what made the Defender a family.

  "I just wish someone would figure out, and then explain to me how someone can lose an entire planetary system between one breath and the next." His nose twitched once more before his scowl relaxed into his usual eager, can-I-go-dirtside-now-captain-can-I-can-I-huh-can-I grin.

  "What kind of readings?" Genys asked, before Taggert slid into his standard plaint: Norgon always managed to fall into a crater filled with shards and come out clutching the only worthwhile artifact on the entire planet.

  Norgon would always be a very junior lieutenant, even when the gray streaks at his temples turned stark white and spread across his entire head. He utterly lacked ambition or understanding of protocol, while being terminally accident-prone. Several other captains had gotten rid of him as quickly as they could. Hollis had almost booted Norgon before his transfer orders had finished loading, just for the man's reputation as a power sink. He was legendary for killing delicate, experimental equipment just by stepping into the same room. However, Hollis had given the bumbling, goodhearted planetary scientist a chance. Genys liked Norgon, and not just because on his first extended mission he had turned into a good luck charm. His presence shattered the monotony that threatened long missions. Something interesting always happened when he was involved.

  "What kind of readings?" she asked again, when Taggert was slow to respond.

  Then she looked at the Gate team head and her heart skipped a few beats. Taggert only hesitated when about to report something potentially big.

  Big ... as in finding another hibernating Gate? That would be a commendation and a bright mark on the record of every member of the Defender's crew.

  Bigger ... as in a Gate giving off a higher-than-normal level of energy, perhaps hinting that it was, if not awake, perhaps ready to awaken with the right input or signals?

  "What have we got out there?" she said, pitching her voice softer. No need to alert the entire bridge crew. Not yet, anyway.

  "The stellar dust is thickening." He glanced down at the tablet clutched in both hands. That should have been Genys' first clue. "Enough to let us backtrack the solar wind currents to the source."

  "What's in the dust?" Treinna asked, startling them both by appearing on the edge of the command chair platform. She rested her hands on the curve of the three-part console that circled the command chair and leaned forward. Her narrow face brightened and she fluttered her lashes at Taggert again. "Fewmets?"

  Genys snorted. The last dramatic production staged by the ship's children had been about a team of dragon hunters. Their favorite word in the entire script had been "fewmets," shouted with glee or horror or despair. For nearly a lun afterwards, all anyone had to do was mutter "fewmets" to get people laughing. The sensor teams had been teased that they should stop looking for energy readings indicating the presence of a Gate -- or Enlo forbid, the fragments of one -- and search for fewmets.

  Only four people on board knew about the drac egg. The idea of finding real fewmets would lose much of its humor, if anyone knew a live dragon, even if miniature, could appear on board.

  "Actually." Taggert swallowed. A crooked grin took one corner of his mouth. "Lots of organic matter. Not enough to indicate a cosmic event, like a planet being struck by a meteor shower, but ... well, a ship dragging massive amounts of organic matter out of the atmosphere."

  "Uh huh."

  For two seconds, she thought about the slow progress of tracking the Corona. Then two seconds more, she thought about the time they would waste, waiting for Fleet to respond to this report. They didn't need permission to do their duty, and she certainly didn't need a mild rebuke from the next commander up the chain of command, for asking permission to put aside the search for the Corona, even if only temporarily. As soon as they knew what they had found, or the trail led into another ship's assigned patrol area, they would turn it over to that other ship, and return to hunting the Corona.

  "Give the word, Mr. Taggert."

  "Yes, Captain." His grin relaxed and spread across his whole mouth. "Helm, coordinates are uploading now." He tapped the upper right corner of his tablet. "Planet ho."

  "Planet ho," the helm officer echoed, igniting a chain reaction of smiles and alert postures across the bridge.

  "Let's find us some fewmets," Genys muttered, exchanging grins with Treinna.

  ~~~~~~

  When her shift ended, Genys headed for the rec deck to burn off the tension that had slowly built over the last four hours of absolutely nothing. She knew better than to expect ship's sensors to pick up anything other than the trail of organic matter meandering through the stellar dust. Taggert and his best people were still on duty, even though their shifts had ended hours before Genys' had. Gate teams in alert phase had mandatory half-shifts to conserve energy and alertness. Genys believed that rule
had come about because some scientists whined about not having a chance to be on duty, glued to the screens, when something truly amazing showed up. She knew better than to insist that the scientist half of her ship's complement abide by such arbitrary, legalistic things as shift schedules. The crew of the Defender had been through enough that she knew who to trust to act responsibly and go off-duty before they made a big, stupid, sometimes life-threatening mistake.

  It was hard enough for her to leave the bridge in the hands of the next shift. She wasn't about to inflict the mental agony on Taggert and his team. Exercise should help her loosen up enough to sleep.

  "Aunt Genys!" and similar cries in pre-adolescent voices greeted her just after she stepped through the main hatch of the rec deck. Genys looked around, expecting to be knocked over in a stampede of most of the ship's pre-cadets.

  "Up here!" Tress Lore squealed, accompanied by giggles from her playmates.

  Genys looked up and grinned to see a half-dozen little girls and two boys she didn't immediately recognize, spinning and bouncing off the walls in the zero-G compartment that filled the upper half of the rec deck. She waved and they waved back, snatching at each other's arms and legs to change their angles and speeds as they bounced back and forth. Despite knowing better, she still winced when two girls bounced against the transparent plate between zero-G and the normal gravity compartment. If Tress and her mischief-making friends were playing in zero-G, Genys knew where Treinna and the other mothers would be. She turned to the right, heading for one of the small pseudo-gardens that created a touch of planetary living on the rec deck. The walls were trellises that supported ivy and other winding plants. Tables and chairs scattered about provided comfortable seating for parents watching their children at play in the zero-G compartment over their heads, or for watching zero-ball games.

  Treinna waved when Genys stepped through the entryway into the garden and took a deep breath of the sweet-spicy plant-scented air. The air always felt and tasted better here in the rec deck, thanks to the green growing things. Genys waved to Treinna and gestured at the dispenser cabinet painted with jungle scenes.