I shook my head. "The densities are wrong. This is a different ball game, sWyman. That stuff's quagma."

The largest piece of quagma I'd had to work with before had been smaller than a proton. This was my field, brought within miraculous reach. I stammered observations--

Things started to happen.

The quagma thing veered out of orbit and shot towards us. I watched in disbelief. "It's not supposed to do that."

I felt a tingle as it hurtled past, mere yards from my window. It looked like a lump of cooling charcoal. Its gravity field slapped the pod as if it were a spinning top, and centripetal force threw me against the wall.

Clinging to the window frame I caught a glimpse of the quagma object whirling away from the pod and neatly returning to its orbit.

Then a shadow fell across the window.

"That's shot us full of all sorts of funny stuff," shouted sWyman. "Particles you wouldn't believe, radiation at all wavelengths--"

I didn't reply. There was a shape hovering out there, a night-dark bird with wings hundreds of miles across.

"Xeelee," I breathed. "That's what I saw in the ship swarm. The Xeelee are here. That's a nightfighter--"

sWyman roared in frustration.

The Xeelee let us have it. I saw the exterior of the window glow cherry-red; gobbets melted and flew away. The Xeelee dipped his wings, once; and he flew away.

Then the window opaqued.

Something hit my head in the whirling darkness. The noise, the burning smells, sWyman's yelled complaints -- it all faded away.

"...Damn those Xeelee. I should have known they can beat anything we've got. And of course they would police this lithium beacon. It wouldn't do to let us lesser types get our hands on stuff like this; oh no..."

I was drifting in a steamy darkness. There was a smell of smoke. I coughed, searched for a coffee globe. "At least the Xeelee attack stopped that damn rotation." sWyman shut up, as if cut off. "What's our status, sWyman?"

"Nothing that counts is working. Oh, there's enough to let us interpret the quagma encounter... But, Luce, the inseparability packet link is smashed. We can't talk to home." Cradling the cooling globe I probed at my feelings. There was despair, certainly; but over it all I felt an unbearable shame.

I'd let my life be stolen. And, in the end, it was for nothing.

sWyman hissed quietly.

"How's the life support, by the way?" I asked.

"What life support?"

I let the globe join the cabin's floating debris and felt my way to the opaqued window. It felt brittle, half-melted. It would stay opaqued forever, I realized.

"sWyman. Tell me what happened. When that quagma droplet lunged out of its orbit and sprayed us."