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“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.”

Jae-Sun listened carefully to the young man as he looked around, marveling at darkness that surrounded them. Tens of thousands of stars fought against the pitch black void, pinpricks of light shining in defiance of the eternal night.

At a distance of just over a light-year, the sun’s rays had lost most of their potency, making the asteroid appear bathed in dull starlight. Photon amplifiers in the spacesuit helmets compensated for the low light, but those areas in shade appeared pitch black.

Jae-Sun marveled at the stark contrast between the grubby asteroid and their crisp clean spacesuits. He replied to Lassiter, saying, “The majority of the science we’re doing out here is to try to catch one of these aliens. The placement of probes, the scanners and patrols, we’re looking for telltale signs.

“Oh, the official line is that we’re monitoring the stability of the cloud to keep long-cycle comets from threatening the inner system, but that’s just a cover. Sure, there’s the potential for mining vessels to disrupt orbits, but it’s a low risk and one that would take thousands, perhaps millions of years to form a credible threat.”

“But dragons?” Lassiter whispered softly.

Lassiter seemed unusually flustered. Jae-Sun realized he had his undivided attention. Central command might consider the existence of dragons classified, but Jae-Sun didn’t care. The ever changing whims of bureaucrats were an annoyance to the old man. He’d lived to see Homo sapiens escape the shackles of Earth and fight off the concept of death, extending human life by a factor of ten. As one of the theoretical physicists that made the space-time compression drive possible, he had a certain amount of latitude. Some called it irreverence.

“It’s not that much of a surprise when you think about it,” Jae-Sun said. “The Oort cloud is impossibly large. There’s more pre-organic matter here than there is in all the planets combined, but it is so broadly spread out that it appears insignificant. The Oort cloud drifts on the edge of interstellar space, held loosely in place by the weakened pull of the sun, over a light-year away.

“To us, the Oort cloud seems like a far-flung, desolate, rocky, icy shell surrounding the sun, an unlikely place to find life. But think about space as a biological environment. Stars are like tar pits, sucking in any creature that strays too close. But out here, we’re on the edge of the tidal zone. Out here, a nudge one way or the other can send you to the Oort Cloud of dozens of other stars with very little exertion.”

Lassiter asked, “And these dragons? They inhabit the Oort Cloud?”

“Yes. Although dragon isn’t the term I’d use,” Jae-Sun replied. “Dragon conjures up images of fire and damnation raining down from some dark, winged monster. No, I’d call them celestial cetaceans or migratory birds. If we’re going to use some kind of terrestrial analogy, we should make it one befitting their character.”

“Birds? Whales?” Lassiter asked.

“Yes. Both of them are renowned for their astonishing migrations, and from what I’ve observed these dragons, for lack of a better term, have a similar mode of being.”

“Are they intelligent?”

“I suspect they’re more intelligent than we believe.” Jae-Sun paused before adding, “They may be more intelligent than us.”

“Then why don’t they make contact with us?” Lassiter asked as the two astronauts slowed to barely fifty miles an hour and began skimming over the surface of the asteroid toward a predetermined waypoint. Due to the undulating nature of the asteroid, their altitude fluctuated anywhere from a few hundred feet to almost a thousand feet.