The SS Cygni probe sent back hours of video, captured by the Biolathe AI, but only a few minutes mattered--the four minutes that showed a creature made of fire, living , moving, dancing in the plasma fire of the double star's accretion disk. A dragon made of star stuff, so alien that only a human expedition to observe and perhaps capture it, could truly understand them.

It's a perilous journey into the future, however, for SS Cygni is 245 light- years from Earth, and even though only two years' subjective time will pass on board the Karamojo, the crew will return to an Earth where five hundred years have passed. Captain Lena Fang doesn't care--she has made her life on her ship, where her best friend is the ship's AI. Samuel Fisher, the contract exobiologist,doesn't care, either. He is making the voyage of a lifetime and in the small world of the Karamojo he will have to live with the consequences of his obsessive quest for knowledge. The rest of the small crew--Axel Henderson, the biosystems engineer; Sylvia Devereaux, the beautiful physical sciences expert; and Phil Stearn, the ship's jack-of-all-trades--have their own reasons for saying good-bye to everyone they have ever known. As the Biolathe AI said, uncertain five hundred- year round trips don't attract the most stable personalities, but somehow they'll have to learn to get along with each other, if they're to catch their dragon and come home again.

For at the end of the journey is the star dragon--a creature of fire with a nuclear furnace for heart. The crew of the Karamojo--human and AI alike--will risk everything to capture it, and it will take all their technology, all their skill, and more courage than they knew they had, to come home alive.

Mike Brotherton grew up in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He earned a Ph. D. in astronomy in 1996 from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in observational studies of quasars. After research positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory, he assumed a faculty position at the University of Wyoming in 2002. He is the author of nearly fifty scientific articles in refereed journals and regularly uses the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wyoming Infrared Observatory, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico in the course of his research.

He is a graduate of the Clarion West writing workshop and a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. His short stories have appeared in anthologies including In the Shadow of the Wall, and to magazines such as Tales of the Unanticipated and Talebones. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with his wife, Leah Cutter, also a novelist, and his fierce cat, Sita.