He watched the ship's deliberate approach, mentally running through the list of available equipment. But there was really only one possibility, and he knew it. He needed propulsion; ergo, he needed to throw something overboard.

It took longer than he'd expected to get to the oxygen tank release valve on the far side of the narrow equipment bay, and the alien ship was looming large in the viewport by the time he was finally ready. Mentally crossing his fingers, he tweaked the valve release open.

The hiss was loud in the enclosed space of the pod—as loud, he thought with a macabre shiver, as the hiss of gas in one of those death cells the Commonwealth was forever lodging strong protests about with the Bhurtist governments. It wasn't an irrelevant comparison, either: with the pod's oxygen reserve spewing into space, his life was now solely dependent on the uninterrupted functioning of his dioxide/oxygen converter. If it flicked out on him—and they did so with depressing regularity—he would have only as long as it took the air in the pod to get stale to get it running again.

But so far the plan was working. He was drifting through the wreckage now, slowly but steadily, moving roughly crosswise to the alien ship's approach vector toward the area where the watchships would be if they hadn't already meshed out. Now if he could just make it outside the cone of whatever focused sensor beams the aliens were using...

Concentrating on the first ship, he never even saw the second ship's approach. Not until the blue light abruptly flared around him.

"Keller? You still there?"

With an effort Lieutenant Dana Keller pulled her eyes away from the distant flickering of laser light and keyed her comm laser. "I'm here, Beddini," she said. "What do you think? We seen enough?"