Endangered Ch. 10

"Holy cow, you got it!" Her exclamation drew his attention away from the shivering of his recovering body. "Look! It's the goodwill disk and the Apollo One patches."

"Is that good?" he wondered at the little black disk lined with silver that she'd shaken into the folds of her jacket. It didn't seem so extraordinary, neither did the colourful fabric patches that landed beside them.

"Show some respect," She scowled at his lack of reverence and shook the satchel out. "If I'm right, this will get your attention."

Something bright and reflective fell out.

"That's more like it," the dragon bent his nose to sniff at the golden, prickly looking replica of a leafy stick. A few military medals lay beside it, and he peered at her for clarification.

"It's supposed to be an olive branch," she shook her head at his cocked expression. "You know, a peace symbol?"

"Well, the craftsmanship leaves a bit wanting, don't you think? What about these?"

"The medals of two heroic cosmonauts, given to the crew of Apollo 11 by their families. Komarov and Gagarin, I think. They would have loved to make it here," her admiration was evident as she straightened the gold and red medal ribbons into a neat row and placed the patches beside them. Fallen heroes of two great nations, their spirits rested here together, united by their courage and a fierce dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration.

"Shouldn't we leave them here then?" he asked.

"No. They're our proof. I think they'd be happy to contribute to what we're doing. Besides, we can always return them, can't we?" Hailey folded her jacket around the items that held more than a little significance for her and bundled them into her backpack, along with the dirty satchel in which they'd lain. "Okay, we'd better move off a little way if you still want to try this."

He did. After a brief rendezvous with their reserve supply of air, they did just that.

Chris floated them upward a few hundred feet and used his dragon's flight magic almost exclusively to soar slowly across the battered landscape. With the orb slaved to maintain its position around him, it was easy to pretend that it wasn't there. Hailey took little encouragement to climb aboard his back and participate in the illusion of flight, calling out objects of interest to circle or skim low over. It was exhilarating, and they both enjoyed a half hour of joyful bonding in the fulfilment of her fantasy.

She could have happily stayed with him like that forever. Astride the base of his sinuous neck, anything seemed possible as they floated effortlessly past ancient volcanoes and across the darkened sea of long-cooled molten rock. Given time, she would have loved to sail her dragon to the craters of the south pole and search for frozen water, trapped there in the eternal darkness. It would have to wait for another day. She leaned forward to kiss his resplendent purple scales and cement the moment in her memory with his spicy, smoky, cinnamon-infused scent.

She'd easily recognised the Sea of Tranquility and used it to guide them to the Apollo Eleven landing site. They soared northward after their departure, skirting the timeworn, irregular mountains that pronounced the edge of the lunar highlands. She marvelled at the satellite's violent geographic history, and the absence of atmosphere, water, and life to sooth the scars.

At her direction, they set down again at the edge of a vast crater bowl near the side of the mountains. She could clearly make out the base of those boulder-strewn slopes. The jagged ridgelines towered some miles above them.

Out on the mare plane below, she wondered at the parallel lines of rilles, skunked inward by some ancient seismic event. Amongst those massive, uniform formations she spotted an irregular, gouge-like disturbance in the plain. It was a feature scientists were still trying to explain back home. Some claimed the last throes of volcanism formed them before the mantle cooled, others said it was impossible. Here she was, looking at it from not much more than sixty miles away.

Turning to peek over the smooth lip of the crater, she recoiled at the complete darkness of the shadow reaching out across the hollow's smoothed floor. It looked intent on swallowing the uprising of defiant rock at the centre of the old impact site.

Distance was so deceiving up here without trees or grass or anything to take as reference. Rocks and boulders were almost useless. Her eyes tried to tell her that a brief scramble down the dark slope and an enjoyable bound across a mile or so would put her at the base of that cute geographic formation well before the shadow arrived.

The reality was that she would probably tumble for an hour down the crater's bowl, cartwheeling uncontrollably across several kilometres of deceptively steep, rock-strewn slope. If she did manage to get to the bottom unharmed, a trek of more than a day would await her to reach the mountain at the crater's locus.

From up here, what looked like tiny pebbles strewn about on that flat plane below were no doubt the few dark boulders much larger than she. False interpretation of her senses in the alien, low gravity environment would be far too easy.

Even with the best space suit, she would exhaust herself and perish trying to struggle back up to the crater's edge. The fine lunar dust would sink and slip treacherously beneath her feet. She would mire, or tumble back down to the flat to die of thirst or more likely suffocation. She shuddered at the thought and squeezed the dragon close.

"What's wrong?" he asked, low and comforting as he raked a pickup-sized black orb back and forth across the Moon's reflective grey sands.

"Nothing, just thinking up worst case scenarios for fun."

"That's my brilliant, freaky little bison," he chuckled, disregarding his efforts in order to distract her with hot snuffles and a few affectionate, reptilian licks. "That incredible mind of yours is easily as sexy as the rest of you, but try turning it to something brighter. For instance, remember that you're the first woman on the Moon."

She batted his pestering pink organ away playfully and hugged his broad, adder-like snout.

"I'm not really on the Moon. I'm in a bubble. Thank you though."

"A technicality, and I'll fight anyone who tries to deny you the honour." His chivalry was somewhat ruined by his draconic affection, rubbing his nostrils over the denim hiding her ripening womanhood. He just couldn't get enough of her small, bronzed body.

"Best boyfriend in the solar system," she sighed happily, scratching behind the curve of his mighty jaw.

"Mhhhrrrmmmbbb," he almost nickered in pleasure, his hind legs twitching in reflex as she discovered a dragon soft spot. "Wait. The solar system? That's a downgrade."

"Take me to dinner and to bed on the international space station like you promised, and I'll consider you for a promotion," she teased impishly before patting his huge head and sitting back. "Okay, back to work big guy. That hydrogen isn't going to fuse by itself."

"Tell that to the Sun," he quipped, stumping her as he resummoned his concentration.

"But that's..."

"Nope, gotcha."

"Shut up!" she giggled. "I suppose that's what I get for helping you learn all that stuff."

This initial collection of material was easy compared to the painstaking preparation of the protective shell they occupied. All he had to do was gobble up moon dust, then provide heat and pressure until the sturdy silicate regolith began to melt and dissociate into atoms. The plan was for him to then spew everything except hydrogen back out onto the airless rock.

However, it turned out the Moon's soil was remarkably hydrogen poor. It also required far more magic than he would have liked to heat the resistant stuff. Ratcheting down the dimensions of the orb to compress the substrate only helped so much. He suspected this was because it was already so cold and stable in the form of his starting material.

Before he was ready to begin venting the first waste elements, he'd cursed himself for not merely dragging a fifty-gallon drum of water along for the ride from Earth. Deuterium would have been nice, but it almost seemed too easy to test his abilities on the dream fusion fuel. They were here for the holy grail, to steal the Sun's fire.

When he thought the contents of the orb were good and molten, he altered the orb's barrier to allow oxygen out. It escaped as a rush of superheated gas, barely visible to his eyes more from the heat it carried than any property of the element. Afterwards came the metals and other elements, glowing plumes of molten iron, silicon, calcium, and magnesium. He didn't need to do it one by one that way, but it was fun. After seeing the first long, brilliant streak shoot off under pressure in the low gravity to lie gleaming and cooling on the barren soil, he was hooked. The phallic comparison brought a stupid, toothy grin to his face.

In the end, he was left with a pitiful amount of what was supposed to be the most abundant element in the universe, and he was forced to repeat the process. Hailey argued that they didn't need much for a test run, but he wanted to be confident that his magic was up to the task of containing a reaction that was worth the effort of harvesting.

The slope near the crater's lip was littered with brilliant metallic trails and splatters when he was finally ready to start. Hailey hoped that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter wouldn't be able to resolve the strange details of the reflective surface he'd created, but there was a real risk that its instruments might pick up the release of so much free oxygen.

There was no guidebook they could consult on starting up a tiny star, and this was undoubtedly the only shot they would get today. But based on what she knew of the conditions required for fusion, and what she'd seen of Chris' abilities, Hailey gave him the best advice she could. They discussed at length the steps he would have to monitor and the conditions he would need to maintain. She couldn't help pointing out that a healthy dose of her Muons might simply start the reaction right there and then if he hadn't somehow decided it was 'cheating.'

The ten or so kilograms of hydrogen he'd collected had been allowed to cool to remove any final impurities. Ready to begin, he let the impenetrable black bubble expand a to a size only slightly smaller than that of their own, and started to pour in energy.

The little atom-duets of hydrogen gas vibrated angrily, crashing into each other and rebounding off the walls of their prison. Faster and faster they careened as the temperature inside skyrocketed at the expense of the dragon's vast magic. Before long, the molecules had too much energy to remain paired, breaking into single atoms of protium.

Battling through substantial drain on his reserves, Chris continued his magical barrage, imparting as much kinetic energy as he could to everything inside that zone in the Ether. His senses were focused entirely on that region now, and he felt the abstract tipping point when electron and proton began to dissociate. He had his plasma, his ion soup, and that was the first vital step.

Where the first few atoms went, the teeming multitude soon followed like bleating sheep. It was a fitting analogy actually, those proton sheep shedding their electron fleece en masse in the dragon's flames.

He switched focus from heating to compressing. With all his might, he forced that controlled zone of Ether to shrink. Inside, zillions of zipping charged particles screamed their protest, fighting back against his containment. He'd given them energy, and now they used it to push against his slowly restricting cage.

His mastery of the Ether was not so easily challenged though. He snarled, frightening Hailey from her awestruck observation of the steadily shrinking black sphere. She patted his trembling flank reassuringly, but he didn't respond, too focused on exerting his will. The orb, once big enough to engulf a small cottage, now dwindled to the size of a medicine ball and showed no sign of stopping. There was nothing diminished about the contents though, they were just forced to occupy less space, to become incredibly dense.

Those unimaginably small particles hated to come near one another, but before long, they had no choice. They were going so fast now, and there was so little room to slide by each other with their naturally repulsive forces. In the end, it was just a game of numbers.

Colliding head-on, proton struck proton in a subatomic thunderclap of minuscule proportion but momentous import. A diproton staggered away, limping and shivering and finally breaking back into two protons. Nothing of true import had happened yet, protons don't really get along after all, so it was no wonder they didn't stay stuck together that often. Chris was still waiting, but now, the same collision was starting to occur many millions of times per second. The more it happened, the higher his chances of success, so he shrank the orb further, approaching the size of a baseball.

Eventually, one drunken diproton jumped the queue by a billion odd years. This time, something new and very improbable happened deep, deep inside one of the conjoined protons. An elementary particle, a quark, changed allegiances.

He saw it. No, he more felt it abstractly. They probably defied direct observation after all. Still, it was what he'd been struggling to experience, to capture.

In that momentous fraction of an instant, a positron was born. Infant antimatter, squalling, red-faced, and ready to blow the world to hell.

Inside the now two-inch span of cosmos he owned, he worked his magic. It had happened once; therefore, it could happen again. He coaxed with his powerful intention, whispering to the other quarks that such a thing might not be so bad. Very gently, he stacked the deck so that the odds of such a fundamentally improbable thing occurring again shifted just a whisker to the favourable.

Even in the moment of that first positron's creation, the tiny speck of positive antimatter annihilated. It was the antithesis of electrons, and it was in a target rich environment.

From the resulting miniature explosion, two burly photons scattered, the nasty looking sort you'd cross the street to avoid. They fled away from the scene, leaving the surviving proton to clutch the husk of its erstwhile partner.

The proton soon realised that something had changed. Its buddy seemed different, no longer a hyped up asshole like itself, and they would get along just fine. But sadly, it was not to be. Holding that brand spanking neutron close, the isotope deuterium had only a few seconds left.

Another lone proton crashed in from the side, sparking an explosion of released atomic binding energy far greater than even the positron had managed with its own destruction. Chris' probing magic sensed helium-3, and he'd officially made a star.

Chris drew his awareness back slowly as the interior of the orb flickered like a hesitant lightbulb in his mind's eye. Still deathly black on the outside, the churning purple he'd just started getting used to in the Ether pulsed with new, white-hot brilliance.

He thought those atoms trapped inside had been fast, hot, and angry before, but he'd had no idea. More diprotons began to decay, unleashing heat, gamma photons, and occasionally something more exotic. More deuterium formed, and in turn fused into helium-3, releasing an incredible amount of heat. The resulting rise in temperature forced the swirling star-stew inside his orb to burn even faster.

The light bulb flicked on, shedding a blinding, but distinctly lifeless radiance. It drowned out all trace of the purple from his orb, almost blinding him to its presence. It painfully saturated his very magical senses and bathed the already barren Ether in pure, hot, dead, light.

Grinning as toothily as a mad shark, his awareness crashed back into his tired body with a draconian trill of victory.

The reaction wasn't complete yet. In the Sun, it might take several centuries for that helium-3 to become helium-4 but he'd overcome the true hurdle and proven the efficacy of his magic.

"You did it?!" Hailey launched high into their low-pressure oxygen, rejoicing with the dragon.

"We did it, Hailey!" The dragon laughed deep and joyous, catching her playfully in his paws. She joined his laughter as he coiled his body into a dragon cocoon around her. "It was so subtle, but I felt the up-quark change into a down. It's incredible, I never would have thought something so tiny could do something so huge. Heck, I never would have understood what a quark is without your help."

"I'm still not entirely sure either of us understands that model," she teased good-naturedly. Almost skipping in her excitement, she set upon his exposed, creamy belly for a vigorous petting. "You must have felt something you recognised or understood in there if you made it work. Chris this is huge, just think about it! I've been doing some research, and I might have found the perfect place for our anti-desertification idea."

"Hold your horses my high-spirited heifer," he laughed at her enthusiasm, nudging at her to continue his reward. He was definitely going to spend more time as a dragon if he could get pampered like this.

"Ha! I'm jumping a few steps, aren't I?"

"Maybe one or two. We've got to harness the reaction first, and I can't believe how much energy is in those little bastards," he admitted. "At least now that the parameters on that orb are set, it's no hassle to maintain."

"It looked tough when you started shrinking the volume. It must be close to the density of the sun's core in there you know."

"Really?" He swivelled his neck to regard the two-inch onyx orb hovering out above the lunar dust. Against the background of space, it was near impossible to spot. It didn't seem probable that he could achieve that sort of compaction.

"I did the math," she confirmed and clambered up onto her his back once again. "I don't mean to ruin the party. But if it's working, we should get home before people start worrying."

"Okay, let me just... oh crap."

"What?!" her tone sobered instantly. After one close call that day the last thing they needed was a problem now.

He ran his senses toward the orb but had to shy away from the nuclear fire within. The energy bottled inside had increased by several orders of magnitude.

"I didn't think about what happens to all that energy if its kept bottled up." The dragon's tail flicked nervously around their orb as he considered his rebellious creation. "Not even the Sun does that."

"No, it certainly doesn't, but stay calm," she spoke, keeping her voice level and petting his neck as she tried to think through to a solution. "I should have thought of this. In the generation scenarios, we were planning on harvesting at least heat and neutrons. Has it really become such a problem in a few minutes?"

"Well, it's painful to even glance at magically. We should definitely do something before it gets worse. I'll try turning the quark balance in the protons back to normal, okay?"

"Do it. No more new fuel will at least slow it down," Hailey nodded gravely. They could salvage the situation, and if anything, this upset just proved that his incredible orbs could withstand almost anything. If they were trying to build a fusion power plant, they would let some of that heat and radiation escape to be collected rather than cook off like a pressure furnace.

Chris had to grope blindly in the Ether for his orb. His purple energy was utterly invisible, washed out by the barrage of so many high energy particles trapped in a tight space. He bumped into by accident, catching a clumsy, tenuous grip.