Yet he’d paid a price for all this splendor, he reflected, thrashing the water with his feet like a little boy to work some of the cramps from his calves. It seemed unfair to be subject to things like cramps after all he’d been through in the past few months. On the other hand, he was still adjusting to the changes Dahak had wrought upon and within him … and if Dahak called them “minor” one more time, he intended to find out if Fleet Regs provided the equivalent of keelhauling a computer.

The life of a NASA command pilot was not a restful thing, but Dahak gave a whole new meaning to the word “strenuous.” A much younger Colin MacIntyre had thought Hell Week at Annapolis was bad, but then he’d gone on to Pensacola and known flight school was worst of all … until the competitive eliminations and training schedule of the Prometheus Mission. But all of that had proved the merest setting-up exercise for his training program as Dahak’s commander.

Nor was the strain decreased by the inevitable stumbling blocks. Dahak was a machine, when all was said, designed toward an end and shaped by his design. He was also, by dint of sheer length of existence and depth of knowledge, far more cosmopolitan (in the truest possible sense) than his “captain,” but he was still a machine.

It gave him a rather different perspective, and that could produce interesting results. For instance, it was axiomatic to Dahak that the Fourth Imperium was the preeminent font of all true authority, automatically superceding such primitive, ephemeral institutions as the United States of America.

But MacIntyre saw things a bit differently, and Dahak had been taken aback by his stubborn refusal to swear any oath that might conflict with his existing one as a naval officer in the service of the said United States.

In the end, he’d also seemed grudgingly pleased, as if it confirmed that MacIntyre was a man of honor, but that hadn’t kept him from setting out to change his mind. He’d pointed out that humanity’s duty to the Fourth Imperium predated its duty to any purely terrestrial authority—that the United States was, in effect, no more than a temporary governing body set up upon a desert island to regulate the affairs of a mere portion of a shipwrecked crew. He had waxed eloquent, almost poetic, but in vain; MacIntyre remained adamant.

They hammered out a compromise eventually, though Dahak accepted it only grudgingly. After his experience with the conflict between his own “Alpha Priority” orders, he was distinctly unhappy to have his new captain complete his oath “… insofar as obedience to Fleet Central and the Fourth Imperium requires no action or inaction harmful to the United States of America.” Still, if those were the only terms on which the ancient warship could get itself a captain, Dahak would accept them, albeit grumpily.

Yet it was only fair for Dahak to face a few surprises of his own. Though MacIntyre had recognized (however dimly) and dreaded the responsibility he’d been asked to assume, he hadn’t considered certain other aspects of what he was letting himself in for. Which was probably just as well, since he would have refused point-blank if he had considered them.

Like “biotechnic enhancement.” The term had bothered him from the start, for as a spacer he’d already endured more than his share of medical guinea pigdom, but the thought of an extended lifespan and enhanced strength had been seductive. Unfortunately, his quaint, twenty-first century notions of what the Fourth Imperium’s medical science could do had proven as outmoded as his idea of what a “ship” was.

His anxiety had become acute when he discovered he was expected to submit to a scalpel-wielding computer, especially after he found out just how radical the “harmless” process was. In effect, Dahak intended to take him apart for reassembly into a new, improved model that incorporated all the advantages of modern technology, and something deep inside had turned nearly hysterical at the notion of becoming, for all intents and purposes, a cyborg. It was as if he feared Doctor Jekyll might emerge as Mister Hyde, and he’d resisted with all the doggedness of sheer, howling terror, but Dahak had been patient. In fact, he’d been so elaborately patient he made MacIntyre feel like a bushman refusing to let the missionary capture his soul in his magic box.

That had been the turning point, he thought now—the point at which he’d truly begun to accept what was happening … and what his own part had to be. For he’d yielded to Dahak’s ministrations, though it had taken all his will power even after Dahak pointed out that he knew far more about human physiology than any Terran medical team and was far, far less likely to make a mistake.

MacIntyre had known all that, intellectually, yet he’d felt intensely anxious as he surrendered to the anesthesia, and he’d looked forward rather gloomily to a lengthy stay in bed. He’d been wrong about that part, for he was up and about again after mere days, diving head—first into a physical training program he’d discovered he needed surprisingly badly.

Yet he’d come close to never emerging at all, and that memory was still enough to break a cold sweat upon his brow. Not that he should have had any problems—or, at least, not such severe ones—if he’d thought things through. But he’d neither thought them through nor followed the implications of Dahak’s proposed changes to their logical conclusions, and the final results had been almost more appalling than delightful.

When he’d first reopened his eyes, his vision had seemed preternaturally keen, as if he could identify individual dust motes across a tennis court. And he very nearly could, for one of Dahak’s simpler alterations permitted him to adjust the focal length of his eyes, not to mention extending his visual range into both the infrared and ultraviolet ranges.

Then there was the “skeletal muscular enhancement.” He’d been primitive enough to feel an atavistic shiver at the thought that his bones would be reinforced with the same synthetic alloy from which Dahak was built, but the chill had become raw terror when he encountered the reality of the many “minor” changes the ship had wrought. His muscles now served primarily as actuators for micron-thin sheaths of synthetic tissue tougher than his Beagle and powerful enough to stress his new skeleton to its limit, and his circulatory and respiratory systems had undergone similar transformations. Even his skin had been altered, for it must become tough enough to endure the demands his new strength placed upon it. Yet for all that, his sense of touch—indeed, all his perceptions—had been boosted to excruciating sensitivity.

And all those improvements together had been too much. Dahak had crammed the changes at him too quickly, without any suspicion he was doing so, for neither the computer nor the human had realized the enormous gap between the things they took for granted.

For Dahak, the changes that terrified MacIntyre truly were “minor,” routine medical treatments, no more than the Fourth Imperium’s equivalent of a new recruit’s basic equipment. And because they were so routine—and, perhaps, because for all the power of his intellect Dahak was a machine, inherently susceptible to upgrading and with no experiential referent for “natural limitations”—he had never considered the enormous impact they would have on MacIntyre’s concept of himself.

It had been his own fault, too, MacIntyre reflected, leaning forward to massage the persistent cramp in his right calf. He’d been too impressed by Dahak’s enormous “lifespan” and his starkly incredible depth of knowledge to recognize his limits. Dahak had analyzed and pondered for fifty millennia. He could predict with frightening accuracy what groups of humans would do and had a grasp of the flow of history and a patience and inflexible determination that were, quite literally, inhuman, but for all that, he was a creature born of the purest of pure intellects.