I was ten minutes early and the previous shift was still there, but Pippin was not.

  “Hi, Engineer Dough,” I said.

  “Herman,” she turned and nodded at me, then returned to her work.

  I sat down and just started reading through manuals on ship functions. I was interested in just how the engines worked. My engineering knowledge was at a high school science level.

  A few minutes later, Pippin and Third Mate Flax entered the compartment. “Ah, Greenie. Third Mate Flax has a job for you.”

  “Yes, Third?”

  “Pippin was telling me how fond of spacewalks you are. I want you to come with me to process the dragon head.”

  “Um. Okay…, Third.”

  “Let’s suit up.” I followed Flax to the issue room. “This is going to take a while, so you should put on the sanitation accessory.” He pointed to a cabinet on one side of the compartment. I opened it to find multiple sizes of puffy underwear with tubes hanging on hooks.

  “How long?”

  “Your entire shift. Probably longer. Haven’t you used one before?”

  “My experience with spacesuits has always been of the ‘go before you go’ type. They really stressed the importance of not having an accident in one of the school’s suits.”

  “It’s nothing to be concerned about. If the need arises, let go and the suit will handle it.”

  I took my size and looked at it dubiously. I would clearly have to take off my underwear to put this on. I turned around to see the third mate had removed his ship suit from his upper body so it was hanging from his waist. He was leanly muscled with a broad depilated chest.

  “You’re undressing here?” I asked.

  “Where else?” He walked over to stand right in front of me. My eyes were just at the level of his strong chin. He grabbed a pair of sanitation shorts for himself. “Skin is skin. We all have it.” He smiled as I blushed red. “I take it Bedford is a very conservative colony.”

  “Apparently.”

  “You’re out in the big, bad universe now.” He paused, smiling, then pointed to a hatch to the left of the storage cabinet. “Through that hatch is a spare parts compartment. Feel free to change in there.”

  “Do you want to use the room first?”

  “I’m not the one with the hangup about an exposed epidermis.” I started towards the room. “Wait, Herman,” he called out to me.

  I turned to face him and he reached down and took the sanitation accessory I was holding from my hand and hung it back up. He then handed me a different one.

  “You may have found the other one too roomy in the front.”

  “What do you mean?” Was he mocking me?

  “I mean, that unless I’m gravely mistaken, you need the model with female human plumbing.”

  “Oh, yes. I do.” I looked at the shorts again and they were clearly labeled with for the human race and female gender. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime.” He began to remove the rest of his ship suit and I fled into the adjacent room.”

  I quickly removed my underwear, put on the sanitation accessory, and then my spacesuits. The suit was designed to automatically detect and connect to the shorts. I went out into the main issue room and Third Officer Flax was already in his suit. It had his rank insignia and also seemed to be a bit newer, not that mine was in bad shape. I put on a helmet and ran a system check to make sure everything was fully fueled and charged.

  “Ready to go, Herman?”

  “Yes, Third.”

  We proceeded to the airlock, cycled through it, and were soon out on the upper hull of the ship. This time, when I looked up, I saw sparkling lights pressing close to the ship like the stars were spots of light that stayed the same size as they approached but were shooting at us violently and en masse. I felt an urge to duck even though they were never reaching the ship.

  “Never been outside while a Broglie drive is engaged before, have you?”

  “Never been on a spaceship before at all. I’ve seen this effect represented in videos, but this is beautiful and terrifying like they could never capture.”

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  “It will still look like this when we’re done, so come along.” I brought my attention away from the sky and tried to focus on the enormous mass strapped to the ring of the ship in a fullerene mesh web.

  “This dragon head is about a kilometer long. We are going to extract the igniter, the brain oil, and the focal crystals.”

  “Why didn’t we do that with the rest of the body, Third?”

  “We didn’t want to explode and die.”

  “Oh.”

  “Drones have been working to fully drain every drop of oil from the head. We’ll use laser cutters to get the parts we want out. If there were still blood in the system the lasers might ignite it.”

  “I see.”

  “We’ll go in through the eyes and harvest the crystals first.” He engaged thrusters and lifted up from the hull. I disengaged my magnetic boots and followed. A swarm of drones accompanied us.

  Although a kilometer long, the height of the dragon’s head at its highest point was only about two hundred meters and the height of the rostrum only a hundred. The creature’s mouth was strapped closed, not that it presented any danger at the moment. Some of its teeth protruded out and over the lower jaw. It did not have nostrils, but above the mouth was a horn type of structure. From the tip of the nose horn to the eyes was about three hundred or so meters. The eyes themselves were about fifty meters in diameter with a clear multifaceted surface like large cut diamonds. I remembered the orange glow behind them when we battled the creature, but now they were blank and lifeless. Above the eyes at the top of the skull was an elaborate light blue crest with a taller central section and two extrusions on either side that gave the impression almost of a crown made of coral. It extended down the sides of the head where ears would have been if space dragons had ears.

  “Ever thought you’d be this close to a dragon’s head?”

  “No, never.”

  “I once saw a terrestrial dragon. There’s a colony called New Terra where they are trying to recreate Earth as it was before the Industrial Revolution, so they’ve populated it with every species they could, even dragons. Puny things compared to this.”

  “Have you heard the theory that space dragons and terrestrial dragons may both be aliens?”

  “How so? They’re called terrestrial dragons for a reason; they’re from Earth..”

  “There’s no fossil record of them evolving on Earth and all Earth life is carbon based. They think some smaller space dragons adapted to live on our origin planet and shrunk down over time according to Foster’s Rule.”

  “Then shouldn’t there be thousands of planets with dragons?”

  “Maybe there are. Or other attempted adaptations were unsuccessful. They also can’t eliminate the possibility that magic was involved.”

  “As interesting as that might be, we have work to do. Follow me.”

  Flax led the way in closer to the head in between the eyes and then to the inner corner of the right eye.

  “Watch what I do closely, Herman.” Flax activated the laser cutter of his suit and began tunneling behind the dragon’s eye. “Notice this clear pliant material on my left? Don’t cut into that. It’s essentially the dragon’s retina. What we want to do is keep to the blue gray flesh until we find the optic connector.” The tunnel he was cutting was about two meters in diameter. I looked behind me and the opening seemed to be slowly closing but maybe that was just the effect of the entrance getting further away.

  “See this darker blue we’re hitting now? This is the muscle that connects the head to the eye.” He started cutting in long strokes up and down as he moved forward until he came through to the lighter blue gray again. “Now the eye can be removed. Here’s the command.” He sent the instructions to my CCP and I stored the sequence. “Go on.”

  “Okay.” It seemed he wanted me to give the word, so I transmitted the command to the drones that had accompanied us and watched through one of their optical sensors as it, along with dozens of others, fired pitons trailing fullerene cables into the eye. They all began to pull.

  “Let’s help out,” Flax said and began using his thrusters to push against the back of the eye. I followed suit and after a few moments of struggle, the eye popped out of its socket to drift away over the snout. The drones scattered in different directions to stop the movement of the eye. Flax steered himself out towards the edge of the back of the eye with me following. “See that jagged edge of clear material I said acted like the retina?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to follow that all the way around so we can separate the retina from the eye crystal. I’ll go deasil and you go widdershins.” I had to look that up in my CCP. He was going around to the right and I was to go around to the left. “We’ll meet on the other side.”

  I hadn’t used a laser cutter before, but the controls were intuitive. Once I thought it active, I could turn the laser on and off with a hand gesture. Flax sent me the settings and I began to cut in the opposite direction from where he started. I only made it about thirty percent of the way around before I met up with him again, but it was my first time.

  “Now we peel the retina off the eye.” He jetted down to the eye and spun himself around so his feet were pressed against it. He then reached under the retina and pulled it way from the back of the eye. I went down and started doing the same to help. The retina was a rubbery viscous material about a meter thick. Even though we were in free fall, the act of separating the eye from the retina soon began to tire me. I pushed through as best I could, but Flax was making a lot more progress.

  When we had about a third of the retina separated, Flax was able to get down to the dark blue connective tissue and sever where it connected the retina to the eye. Before too long we managed to completely detach the retina. Flax had the drones start moving the eye out into space and then detach to let it fly off. He gestured for me to come join him and we went towards the center of the retina where he pointed out a depression about five meters across. Using a laser scalpel, he cut into the retina and peeled back some transparent material to reveal a large beautiful pink crystal.

  “These are dragon fovea crystals. The set of them are worth nearly as much as the oil we harvested from the body.” I could see hundreds of other colorful spots under the transparent membrane, which must be additional colors of crystal. Flax then cut into another area outside of the indentation and pulled out a silvery gray crystal. “These are typical dragon eye crystals. They’re valuable too, but not so much that we can’t just let the drones harvest them.” He used his laser cutter to remove the pocket of colored crystals and placed it into a transport drone to return to the ship.

  “Let’s go get the other eye.” We repeated the process of cutting into the dragon, popping out the eye and removing the retina. He had me do most of the work this time with an occasional word of guidance. It wasn’t too difficult as long as I didn’t think too much about what I was doing. Once the fovea crystals were packed into a drone and heading for the cargo bay, Flax said, “Now the ignitor.”