Why was it, Cormac wondered, that doctors so relished telling you exactly what they were doing?

The welder droned and there were horrible sucking sounds in his chest. The tugging felt like what an errant child feels when its mother pulls on its coat.

'There, all done,' said Mika after what seemed an age. 'I've put a couple of analgesic tabs in, and they'll dissolve over the next few days. There might be the odd twinge, but you'll be all right now.' Behind her he saw the tubes of the remote lung clear of blood and felt the small tugs as she detached each of them. He did not get time to feel any lack of oxygen, for she reached immediately for the back of his neck. Feeling returned suddenly. There was no fading in, no pins and needles; his body just turned back on. He took a gasping breath and the sound of his heart was a sudden thunder.

'You are all right,' she said, even in this circumstance not prepared to ask a question. Cormac sat upright and looked down at his chest. It was flawless. Cell-welding left no scars, at least not on the body. He nodded to her. She smiled briefly at him, then turned to Cam.

'It's not pain and it's not physical function,' she said, resuming a conversation they had been having as Cormac had come in.

Carn opened and closed his silvered hand. 'I've lost PU contact. All I get is normal sensation.'

Cormac glanced at him. So that's what his hand was. The necessity of using separate instruments on the artefact must have been annoying for him, all for the sake of a glove. Cormac swung his legs over and stood up. He took up his shirt from where he had tossed it, and pulled it on. He could see that he was now completely dismissed from Mika's attention, and that she was totally focused on Carn. He left her to attend to him.

The drop-shafts were still out of commission, but that was not too much of a problem aboard a ship. It merely meant there was no irised field to drag him to his destination. He had to step into the shaft, where he became weightless, and shove off the inspection ladders in the direction he wanted to go. The trick, as with all weightless manoeuvring, was not to get up too much speed. Soon he stopped himself at the required level and headed for the recreation room, which had now become the centre of operations. He passed through corridors where robot welders were at work, and other areas where technicians had stripped panels away from the walls and were swearing in their own particular jargon. In some areas the gravity was somewhat changeable, which was more worrying than it being completely out. A fluctuating gravplate could quite easily smear a person across the floor. When he arrived in the recreation room he found only Thorn and Chaline. Chaline was watching a tablescreen. It showed a scene across the hull of Hubris. The ship was crawling with robots like cockroaches. Thorn was sprawled asleep on a couch, a flask lying on its side on the table next to him, with a half-full glass of Scotch next to it.

'How are things going?' Cormac asked Chaline.

Still watching the screen she said, 'Seventy hours and we should be fully secure. Hubris won't be able to go supralight until we get a new engine housing from Minostra. The ramfields are down.'

Cormac nodded, then said, 'I walked over some fluctuating grav out there.'

Chaline did not look round. 'No, you didn't. You walked over gravplates with a fluctuating power source. We had a little bit of a panic with one of the generators and had to shut it down.'

Cormac decided to ask no more concerning the damage. The list would just go on and on.

'Hubris, what's the situation with Dragon?' he asked as he walked over to the catering unit.

'Dragon is in orbit seven hundred kilometres ahead of us. There is some activity on its surface,' the ship replied.

At the catering unit Cormac said simply, 'Coffee,' as the machine now recognized his voice and would provide it exactly how he liked. He inspected the cup of white sludge it had provided, then fully keyed in his request. Another one to add to Chaline's list. When he finally got the drink he was after, he returned to Chal-ine's table and sat down.

'Right, tell me, what's the activity?'

The screen changed to show Dragon, and Chaline looked at Cormac in annoyance. He shrugged apologetically, then returned his attention to the screen. Ripples were travelling all round the surface of the alien.

Hubris said, 'One hour ago there was an energy emission directed away from the Andellan system. It was full-spectrum lased light. The reading was in the giga-joule range. If the same pattern is being followed this time round, another emission will occur in fifty-four minutes. I am moving the ship to the other side of the planet, and have left just one observer probe.'

At that particular moment Cormac felt he would rather be on the other side of the galaxy. Was Dragon getting ready to destroy them? If it was they were in serious trouble.

'Anything else?'

'I am also picking up emissions across all spectrums. Some of them have some internal logic and mathematical coherency, but I have not as yet been able to translate. These emissions are directionless.'

'OK,' said Cormac, and the screen flicked back to the scene Chaline had been observing. He studied her and noted how she was deliberately keeping her face free of expression.

'All yours,' he said with a smile.

'Thank you so much,' she said, then pushed her chair back and stood up. 'Unfortunately some of us have work to do.'

Cormac made a gesture of appeasement, but Chaline walked away. He couldn't decide if she was angry or amused. Involvement, he thought, trying not to feel guilty. He sat there sipping for the next few minutes, then called up again the scene from the probe.

Dragon was rippling even faster now, and its spherical shape was being distorted.

'Hubris, are you sure we're safe here?' he asked.

The AI's reply was succinct. 'No.'

The fifty-four-minute mark passed. Sixty minutes was reached, sixty-five… The flash momentarily blacked out the picture from the probe. When it came back, Dragon was spherical again, the ripples moving across its surface just as Cormac had first witnessed.

'Hubris, where did that one go?'

'The planet's surface. Imaging in… the probe has it.'

The picture showed a spreading black cloud with hellish red fires at the centre of it.

'That was Mount Prometheus,' said Hubris.

Cormac shook his head in amazement. Enoida Deacon would not be displaced from her niche in the history books, but what the hell was Dragon doing?

'I have picked up something from Dragon. It's in all human languages.'

'Let's hear the English version then.'

Dragon's voice boomed from the speakers. 'Escaped! Escaped! Criminal! Bastard! Damn! Fuck! Fuckit!'

Cormac sat there with his mouth open. So that was what Dragon was doing - it was having a tantrum.