The dragon was an angry smear in the sky.
'I'll be glad,' said Angela, 'when we're out of here.'
There was a ring around the sun, and a thick haze over the plain. A half-moon had broken through in the southwest.
Fresh snow lay on the ground when Angela and Hutch came out of the dome, carrying their bags. There were a few flakes in the air. 'It's frustrating when you think about it,' said Angela. 'Cosmic event like this, and we have to go hide on the other side of the world.'
Hutch climbed into the shuttle. 'I suppose we could stay, if you insist,' she said.
'No. I didn't mean that.' Angela handed her bags through, took her place at the controls, and studied her checklist. 'But I wish we had a ship, so we could lay off somewhere and watch the fireworks.' Hutch activated the commlink, and picked up the feed from Ashley. The dragon blinked on. The view wasn't good now because the ship was very distant. And still retreating.
Angela thought the main body might be more than a million kilometers behind the forward spouts. Yet the mind still saw it as a thundercloud. An ominous thundercloud. Belching and roiling and flickering. But still only a thundercloud. She tried to imagine a similar visitation over the Temple of the Winds. What would a nontechnological race have made of this harpy? And she wondered about the Monument-Makers. Why had they sicked it on that unfortunate race? And left their final ironic taunt? Farewell and good fortune. Seek us by the light of the horgon's eye.
And, in that moment, she understood.
The comm panel blinked. 'Incoming,' said Angela.
David Emory's face blinked on. 'Hello, ground station,' he said. 'What's happening? Do you need help?'
Relief and pleasure swept through Hutch. 'David, hello. Where are you?' But he did not react. She watched and counted off the seconds while her signal traveled outward to him, and her newborn hope died. He was too far away.
Carson climbed through the hatch. 'I see the cavalry has arrived,' he said. 'Where are they?'
David broke into a wide smile. 'Hutch. It's good to see you. I'm on the Gary Knapp. What is that thing! What's going on?'
Hutch gave him a capsulized version.
'We'll get there as quickly as we can.'
'Stay clear,' she said. 'Stay clear until the dust settles.'
By mid-morning they were in the air.
They all watched the dragon: Emory on the Knapp, Janet and Drafts on Ashley, and Carson's group in the shuttle.
The pictures now were coming from the Knapp. They were clearer than anything they'd had before. Delta resembled a child's ball floating before a cosmic wall of black cloud.
They were about to be swallowed.
Enormous fountains of gas and vapor billowed away; vast explosions erupted in slow time, as if occurring in a different temporal mode. Fiery blossoms disconnected and drifted away. 'It's disintegrating,' Angela said. 'It's moving quite slowly now, and I'd guess it's thrown off seventy percent of its mass. It's coming here, but afterward it won't be going anywhere else.'
They'd left the plain and its mesas behind, and were gliding above a nitrogen swamp, bathed in the shifting light. Carson was in the right-hand seat. He kept making remarks like 'My God, I don't believe this,' and 'No wonder they all got religion.'
Gales battered the craft. Hutch, in back, wondered whether they'd be able to stay in the air. She watched the pictures coming in from Knapp. 'The gas giant's tearing it up,' she said, straining to make herself heard over the wind. 'If we're lucky, maybe there won't be any of it left when it gets here.'
'Forget that idea,' said Angela. She took a deep breath. 'It's a Chinese puzzle. Have you noticed anything odd?'
Carson studied the display. 'Have I noticed anything odd!' He stifled laughter.
She ignored the reaction. 'No quakes,' she said.
'I don't follow.'
But Hutch did. 'It's fifteen hours away. Does this place have plates?'
'Yes.'
She looked at Carson. 'A celestial body that close should be raising hell with local tectonics. Right?'
'That's right.' Angela poked her keyboard, asked for new data. 'If nothing else, we should be getting major tidal surges.' The swamp had given way to a mud-colored sea. Thick, slow waves rolled ashore. A few meters higher up, the rock was discolored. 'That would be high tide,' she said. 'This doesn't look like anything unusual.'
'What's the point?' asked Carson.
'The point is that these oceans, even these kinds of oceans, ought to be jumping out of their beds. Hold on.' She opened the Knapp channel, and asked David to get readings on the positions of the satellites. While she waited, she brought up the entire file on the gas giant and its family of moons. She established orbits, computed velocities, and calculated lunar positions.
When the ship began relaying its information, she checked her predictions.
Tau, the misshapen rock at the edge of the system, had strayed out of its orbit. But by only about four hundred kilometers. Negligible. Rho was two hundred kilometers in advance of her predicted position. Everything else, within tolerances, was correct.
The sun was rising again as the shuttle gained on it. They were moving out over a gasoline swamp. Behind them, the sky burned.
'It's not solid,' said Hutch.
'That's right,' Angela announced with finality. 'It's a dust cloud, after all. Has to be. There might be a solid core in there somewhere, but it must be small.'
'But a rock,' said Hutch, 'even a big rock, isn't going to hold that thing together.'
'That's right, Hutch. Find the glue and win yourself a Nobel.'
Sunday; 1146 hours.
The thing on the monitors seemed like a visitant out of the old tales. A messenger from the Almighty. Carson wondered what the skies had looked like over Egypt on the first Passover? What the weather report had been for Sodom? What they'd seen from the walls at Jericho?
Something deep in his instincts signaled the approach of the supernatural. Out here, pursued by an apparently angry cosmic anomaly, watching it close in, Carson was getting religion.
He made no effort to shrug the idea off; rather he aggressively entertained it, wondering where it might lead. Might beings with cosmic power actually exist? If they were confronting one here, it was manifesting a disquieting interest in the more primitive races. A stupid god, driven to destroy right angles. A thing dispensing serious trouble to those who defied the divine edict to build only in the round.
He scanned through the religious and romantic art of Nok and Quraqua, as recorded in Maggie's records, looking for correlations. He found some. Here was a cloud demon of terrifying similarity to the thing in the sky. And there, a dark god with red eyes and lunging talons emerging from a storm.
1411 hours.
Lightning flickered through the gasoline-drenched skies. Ethyl rain swept in torrents across the windscreen, and clung to the shuttle's wings. Angela would have gone higher, above the atmosphere, but the turbulence was strong, and intensifying. She was not certain she could make it safely back down when the time came.
It was, by turns, terrifying and ecstatic. The shuttle rolled and plunged. When she wasn't fighting for control of the vehicle, she was dreaming of glory. She would always be associated with this phenomenon. It might even one day carry her name: the Morgan. She liked the sound of it, rolled it around her tongue. Visualized future scholars addressing seminars: Several categories of Morgans are known to exist.
Well, maybe not.
Carson was imagining a wave of dragon clouds, perhaps thousands of light-years long, swirling out of the
