The ray was a translucent cloud a mansheight across. It was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into its sketch of a face. The fins were six wide, thin sheets spaced evenly around the body; the fins rippled as the ray moved, electron gas sparkling around their leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, and Thea could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray's cylindrical gut.

The ray came within a mansheight of her. It slowed. She held her breath and willed her limbs into stillness.

I might live through this yet...

Then -- with ghastly, heart-stopping slowness -- the ray swiveled its hexagon of eyes towards her, unmistakably locking onto her face.

She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn't struggle it would be quicker...

Then, he came.

There was a blue-white flash: a pillar of electron light that penetrated even her closed eyecups, and ripped through the encroaching silver-gray shadow of the ray.

She cried out. It was the first sound she had made since waking into this nightmare, she realized dully.

She opened her eyes. The ray had pulled away from her and was twisting in the air. The ray was being attacked, she saw, disbelieving: a bolt of electron light swept down through the Air and slanted into the ray's misty structure, leaving the broad fins in crudely torn shreds. The ray emitted a high, thin keening; it tried to twist its head around to tear into this light-demon--

No, Thea saw now; this was no bolt of light, no demon: this was a man, a man who had wrapped his arms around the thin torso of the ray and was squeezing it, crushing the life out of the creature even as she watched.

She hung in her cocoon, even her fear dissolving in wonder. It was a man, true, but like no man she'd seen before. Instead of ropes and ponchos of Air-pig leather, this stranger wore an enclosing suit of some supple, silver-black substance that crackled with electron gas as he moved. Even his head was enclosed, with a clear plate before his face. There was a blade -- a sword, of the same gleaming substance as the suit -- tucked into his belt.

The ray stopped struggling. Fragments of half-digested leaf matter spewed from its gaping mouth, and its eyestalks folded in towards the center of its face.

The man pushed the corpse away from him. For a moment his shoulders seemed to hunch, as if he were weary; with gloved hands he brushed at his suit, dislodging shreds of ray flesh which clung there.

Thea stared, still in her cocoon, unable to take her eyes from his shimmering movements.