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Lassiter continued to accelerate, taking them up to a sustained one gravity, allowing them to cross the four hundred miles to the tiny, distant asteroid in less than seven minutes. Jae-Sun’s suit was in buddy-mode, matching the flight commands issued by Lassiter.

Jae-Sun felt some grit in the corner of his eyes. He should have cleared it out before the space walk. He closed his eyes for a moment, pinching his eyelids tight and then slowly releasing. While his eyes were closed, flashes of blue and white sparkled on the inside of his eyelids, appearing fleetingly, shining briefly like diamonds. It was Cherenkov radiation, the effect of cosmic rays passing clear through his skull and exiting out through his eyeballs. Astronauts had seen this phenomena for hundreds of years, ever since the first Apollo missions. Nothing short of the shielding on the Excelsior could prevent it. He opened his eyes, and for a second, it looked as though there were blue flashes in the distance.

“Are you OK, sir?”

“I’m fine,” Jae-Sun replied.

It took several minutes, but as the asteroid began to loom larger in front of them, the commander reversed their thrust and where once Jae-Sun felt flung toward the asteroid he now felt as though he were diving through water, being held back by some invisible current dragging on his body. Commander Lassiter decelerated as smoothly as he’d taken off from the Excelsior.

Looking back, Jae-Sun couldn’t make out the exploration vessel against the pitch-black of space. At this distance, she was invisible to the naked eye. A soft yellow light pulsed on his heads-up display, artificially marking the distant ship.

OA-5772 was fifty seven miles long, twenty miles wide, and was shaped like a peanut. She was one of over five hundred thousand celestial objects being tracked in the Oort cloud. The asteroid had a rotation period of four hours, turning lazily before a sun so distant that it looked like Mars or Jupiter from Earth, blending in with the other nearby stars.

“Why this asteroid, sir?” Lassiter asked.

Jae-Sun decided Lassiter deserved to know, but before answering, he asked, “Are we transmitting to the Excelsior?”

“No sir. We’re on local coms only at this distance. I can align a directional transmission if you want.”

“No, no,” Jae-Sun replied. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Is it true, sir? Are you hunting a dragon?”

“How long have you been out here in the deep?” Jae-Sun asked, not intentionally ignoring Lassiter, but wanting to understand a little about the man from a personal perspective.

“Fourteen years, sir. Eight spent in transit, two on station and four on the Excelsior.”

“What brings you to the deep?”

“I want to get a place on Enceladus,” Lassiter replied.

“You like working with bugs?” Jae-Sun asked. “There’s nothing down there but microbes.”

“My wife, well, my girlfriend, my fiancée. She’s a biologist.”

“You’re a long way from Enceladus, son.”

“I know,” Lassiter replied as the asteroid grew in size before them, slowly filling the view in their faceplates. “But I figure it’s worth doing my time out here. The pay is good. It should set me up for a couple of centuries in the inner system.”

“Enceladus is an icy wasteland,” Jae-Sun said, probing. “You’re not tempted by Mars or Titan? They’ve got some serious terraforming going on in those provinces. You could buy yourself a nice view of the space elevator disappearing above Olympus Mons, or get an apartment overlooking the atriums in Valles Marineris. I guess you like Saturn, huh?”

“Saturn’s beautiful,” Lassiter replied. “But not as beautiful as my Peg.”

Jae-Sun laughed softly in reply.

“So,” Lassiter asked again as the craters and mounds on the asteroid came into view. “Are the rumors true? Are there really dragons in the deep?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve seen them?” Lassiter asked.

“No. Not with my own eyes, but I’ve been tracking gamma ray bursts out here in the Oort Cloud for almost two hundred years, narrowing down the possibilities.

“At first, I didn’t believe the old spacer stories. No one did. But after eliminating all the other possibilities, the only possibility that remains is the presence of extraterrestrials skirting the edge of our solar system.”

“So now you believe?” Lassiter asked.

“It’s not so much a question of belief. It’s about accepting the evidence,” Jae-Sun replied. “Science is the realization that natural phenomena have an explanation independent of beliefs and opinions.”

“But dragons?” Lassiter asked ironically, his skepticism clear in his voice.

“What do you know about them?” Jae-Sun asked, watching as the rugged terrain of the asteroid slowly began to reveal its torrid, chaotic past. Boulders the size of an apartment came into view, casting long shadows over the dusty surface of the asteroid.

“Just rumors,” Lassiter replied. “I didn’t think they were real. They just seem like the stuff of myth and legend.”