Star Dragon - Tapa blanda

The SS Cygni probe sent back hours of video, captured by the Biolathe Al, but only a few minutes mattered - the few 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 an expedition to observe, and perhaps capture, can truly understand it. But it's a one-way journey into the future, for SS Cygni is 250 light years from Earth, and even though only two years' subjective time will pass on board the Karamojo, the crew will return to a world where five hundred years have passed. Captain Lena Fang does not care - she has made her life on her ship. But Samuel Fisher, the contract exobiologist, is making the voyage of a life-time. The rest of the small crew have their own reasons for saying goodbye to everyone they have ever known. At the end of the journey is the star dragon - a creature of fire with a nuclear furnace for a heart. They will risk everything to capture, and it will take all their technology, all their skill, and all their courage 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.