 Adopting an agrarian lifestyle, the survivors of the original expedition create genetically-engineered 'dragons' from a native species of reptiles, and use them to fight back the encroaching thread.The Brain & Brawn Ship series comprises seven novels, only the first of which (a fix-up of five previously published stories) was written by McCaffrey alone.The stories in this series deal with the adventures of "shell-people" or "Brains", who as infants (due to illness or birth defects) have had to be hard-wired into a life-support system.