Astronauts embark on journey across the stars to make first contact with an alien beyond human comprehension. The SS Cygni probe transmitted video, captured by the Biolathe AI, showing 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 get along with each other, if they're to catch their dragon—a creature of fire with a nuclear furnace for a heart—and come home alive.
