Ship-night came, and still they continued to work.

Uniformed crew brought the doctor mug after mug of what Kira assumed was coffee, and as the night wore on, she saw him toss back several pills. StimWare or some other form of sleep-replacement meds.

Kira was increasingly tired herself. “Mind giving me some?” she said, gesturing toward the doctor.

Carr shook his head. “It’ll mess with your brain chemistry.”

“So will sleep deprivation.”

That gave him a moment’s pause, but then the doctor just shook his head again and returned his attention to the instrument panels in front of him.

“Bastard,” Kira muttered.

Acids and bases had no effect on the xeno. Electrical charges passed harmlessly across the skin of the organism (it seemed to form a natural Faraday cage). When Carr raised the voltage, there was an actinic flash at the end of the S-PAC and the arm flew back as if it had been thrown. As the smell of ozone filled the air, Kira saw that the S-PAC’s manipulators had fused together and were glowing red hot.

The doctor paced about the observation bay, tugging at the corner of his mustache with what looked like painful force. His cheeks were red, and he seemed angry, dangerously so.

Then he stopped.

A moment later, there was a clatter as something dropped into the delivery box outside the cell. Curious, Kira opened it and found a pair of dark glasses: eye protection against lasers.

A worm of unease twisted inside her.

“Put them on,” said Carr. “Left arm out.”

Kira obeyed, but slowly. The glasses gave the cell a yellowish cast.

The manipulator mounted on the end of the undamaged S-PAC flowered open to reveal a small, glossy lens. Kira’s unease sharpened, but she held her position. If there was any chance of getting rid of the thing, she’d take it, no matter how much it hurt. Otherwise she knew she’d end up spending the rest of her life stuck in quarantine.

The S-PAC positioned itself above and just to the left of her forearm. With a snap, a purplish-blue beam shot from the lens to a point on the deck near her feet. Flecks of dust gleamed and glittered in the bar of collated light, and the grating below began to glow cherry red.

Moving sideways, the robot brought the beam into contact with her forearm.

Kira tensed.

There was a brief flash, and a wisp of smoke curled upward, and then … and then to her astonishment, the laser beam curved around her arm, like water flowing around a stone. Once past her arm, the laser regained its geometric precision and continued straight down to the deck, where it traced a ruddy line across the grating.

The robot never paused its sideways slide. At a certain point, the laser flipped sides and arced around the inside of her forearm.

Kira felt no heat; it was as if the laser didn’t exist.

What the xeno was doing wasn’t impossible. It was just very difficult. Plenty of materials could bend light. They were used in numerous applications. The invisibility cloak she and her friends had played with when they were kids was a perfect example. However, to detect the exact wavelength of the laser and then manufacture a coating that could redirect it, and all in a tiny fraction of a second, was no mean feat. Not even the League’s most advanced assemblers could pull that off.