"Will hook readers of outer space encounters"
The crew of the Karamojo has been selected to make the
perilous journey to the binary star system Cygni
approximately 250 light years away. Their mission is to
capture and return with a star dragon, a strange unusual
essence that is allegedly some form of stellar plasma held
together by magnetic fields. No nonsense Captain Lena Fang heads the quest. She only
lets her hair down when no one except the Hemingway
artificial intelligence can see her. Even when she shares
sex with a crew member she remains in charge. Exobiology
expert Dr. Samuel Fisher uses his sexual encounters with
Lena to improve his standing at the cost of morale.
Meanwhile crazy Biosystems engineer Axelrod Henderson
plans to discharge a virus that will impregnate every
female on Earth with his offspring. With a crew in
discord, they reach SS Cygni only to find the intelligent
star dragons are capable, sly, and tricky. Mike Brotherton provides readers with powerful alien-
creatures tale that will hook readers of outer space
encounters. The story line makes the Star Dragons seem
real and somehow turns the subplot containing biomods that
alter human bodies into bizarre life forms into what feels
like yesterday's science. Though the Karamojo crew seems
two dimensional, fans will value this trek to a truly
realistic alien race. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted October 19, 2003
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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.
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