"We're under attack!" warned one of the felisians, staring in wide eyed horror at the display in front of him. "Four missiles, closing fast!"

     "Can we outrun them?" asked Tager Yee, moving to join him and looking over his shoulder at the display.

     "Not a chance. Even if we had full power, which we don't. Impact in five minutes."

     “We can teleport to the module in the ring where the silver ships were,” suggested Saturn. “You can repair one of them and we can set off again.”

     “We’ll just be attacked again the moment we set out,” replied the Commander. "All that work, and we're right back where we started! We'll have to teleport back to the planet surface."

     "Maybe not," said the elderly wizard, however. "Did you see where the missiles came from?"

     "That complex there," said the junior felisian.

     Saturn, joined by a curious Thomas, looked into the display and saw a magnified image of the ring. In the centre, surrounded by yellow crosshairs, was a habitation block larger than any of the others around it. It had to be half a mile across, with a conical central section surrounded by branching arms at the end of which brilliant points of light burned. It looked more alive than anything else they'd seen on or near the planet since they'd arrived.

     "Maybe we can teleport there instead," suggested Thomas. "If there're any survivors of this world's original civilisation, that's where they'll be. We can go there, reason with them..."

     "What if they're not feeling reasonable?" asked Matthew, staring up at him from below.

     "Then we can still teleport out. I'll teleport us all there, and Saturn can teleport us back to the planet surface if they're hostile. Teleporting so many people with one spell'll be tricky, but I think we can do it..." He glanced at Saturn, who nodded thoughtfully.

     "We'd be teleporting blind again," pointed out Matthew, however. "I now have first hand experience of how dangerous that is."

     Thomas nodded. "We've got a couple of minutes, we'll use that time to familiarise ourselves as much as possible with that structure. We've all still got our Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing, haven't we?" He looked around the upright oval chamber and saw the Tharians feeling around in their clothing and nodding, while one of the felisians opened a hatch to check that there were spacesuits in there.

     "We'll teleport to just outside the hull and disintegrate our way in," Thomas added. You've still got your wand of disintegration, Saturn?"

     The elder wizard nodded, looking annoyed at how his junior was taking charge but helpless to stop it. The Gown lad had hit upon a good plan, that was the really annoying thing.

     "Can you give me a better look at that thing?" Thomas asked the felisian.

     "I think so. The controls are a little different from what I'm used to, and there's a whole bank of controls I've never seen before..."

     The Commander came over to have a look and they discussed it for a moment while the Tharians fretted over the passing time and the approaching missiles. "Let's try this," suggested Tager Yee, touching a control. "If it doesn't work..."

     As soon as the control activated, though, the ship went dark and every display died, leaving it as dead and lifeless as when they'd first found it, three weeks before. "Spit!" cursed Tager Yee as Thomas and Saturn both hurriedly cast light spells. The two balls of light lit a scene of controlled confusion as one felisian searched for the hatch containing the power distribution node and another fetched a replacement. "What a time for this to happen!" cried Murrla as he removed the old node and pressed the new one in. "How long 'til impact? Have we got time?"

     The ship's power came back on, but the illumination was dull compared to what it had been and some of the newly restored displays flickered erratically. The gravity was weak as well, barely more than on the surface of Kronos. Thomas knew that the feeling of weight on this ship was caused by acceleration, rather than being an intrinsic field such as possessed by the Jules Verne. The low gravity meant that the ship was barely under thrust.

     "We're low on power," said Murrla, staring at his readouts in confusion. "Something's drained most of our power!"

     "Never mind that," snapped Tager Yee. "How close are the missiles? How long to impact?"

     "They're close! Really close! Ten seconds! No, wait! They're no longer coming straight for us! They're going to miss!"

     "What?" cried the commander in surprise, but then they could see for themselves as four tiny points of light became visible in the window screen. The screen that gave a realistic idea of what they would see if the hull were transparent. Thomas remembered the first attack, remembered how the missile had seemed to remain motionless as it grew, signifying that it was headed straight for them. This time, though, all four missiles were drifting, moving visibly against the background stars, and then they became blurred streaks as they flashed past, none of them coming closer than a hundred yards. Passengers and crew stared in amazement at each other, unable to believe the narrowness of their escape.

     "What happened?" demanded Tager Yee. "Report, someone!"

     "Commander!" cried the felisian Thomas had been talking to just before the power failure. The wizard felt guilty and ashamed that he didn't know his name, he'd never really spoken to him before, and had never thought to ask. "Look!"

     The felisian indicated the screen containing the image of the habitat they'd been about to teleport to. Something had happened to it. A huge hole had appeared in the central conical section, the edges of which still glowed yellow hot. Sparks of discharging energy lit up the interior. The whole display was still overlaid by the yellow crosshairs, reminding Thomas of the view down the length of a loaded crossbow.

     "Er," he began, aware of the huge, idiotic grin spreading across his face. "I think we shot it."

     "With what?" demanded Tager Yee impatiently. "These ships aren't armed..." He fell silent as realisation dawned on him.

     "Your other ships might not have been armed," said Saturn, climbing up to take over and brushing Thomas out of the way. "But it seems this one is. We have been most fortunate." He studied the displays as if he could read every symbol, as if he'd been in charge all along.

     "That would explain the power drain," said Murrla, and then everyone was laughing at once, laughing in pure gratitude and relief. Laughing in sheer delight at being alive. Thomas grabbed Murrla and hugged him hard, the felisian grinning nervously at his laughing shipmates, and Matthew pounded Timothy on the back nearly hard enough to dislodge him from his perch. Even Saturn's hard, thin mouth twitched in a ghost of a smile, although he would never allow himself a moment of full camaraderie with mundanes. Even now his first concern was to emphasise his aloofness and superiority, which he accomplished with a display of solid, emotional control.

     "So, does that mean we're safe now?" asked Roj Villa from his seat at the very base of the upright ship. "Was there only one of those things?"

     The suggestion silenced everyone as they realised the infantryman was right, and the felisians searched the displays. "No sign of any other activity," said a ginger haired felisian a moment later. "The first attack came very quickly, which, hopefully, means..."

     "It means nothing," said Tager Yee. "Keep a close eye on the scanners. Bhoyse, get us to the portal. Full speed!"

     "Full speed isn't much, I'm afraid," said another felisian. "We're almost dry. I'm not even sure we can reach orbit." He touched one control after another and the lights dimmed even more. The gravity increased a little, indicating they'd increased thrust a fraction, but it was still paltry compared to what they were used to.

     "Can we land?" asked the Commander.

     "Not a chance," replied Murrla. "We'd crash. I think I might be able to achieve a low orbit, and perhaps nudge us into the ring. If we can find another silver ship, we can fuel up."

     Tager Yee nodded. "Do your best," he said. "In the meantime," he added, turning to the wizards, "I would be grateful if you would be ready to teleport us back to the surface, if necessary."

     Thomas and Saturn nodded and gathered the others around them, forming rings of linked hands.

     Murrla calculated that the ship was currently on a course that would crash them back on the planet's surface after half an orbit, but when they reached maximum altitude he applied maximum thrust for a few minutes, so that they instead only grazed the atmosphere when they swooped back down twenty minutes later. Thirty minutes after that, when they were again at maximum altitude, he fired the engines again to further circularise the orbit, and over the next day and a half they gradually nudged the silver ship up to the inner edge of the artificial ring. By then, though, their power reserves were almost totally exhausted and they had nothing left to navigate with. They could only drift among the linked-together habitation modules, using what tiny residue of power they had left to avoid collisions.

     The ship was safe, though. They could safely leave it for a few hours, and Saturn teleported a few felisians back to the planet's surface to find another fuel cell. When they brought it back on board, Thomas found that it looked even worse up close than it had from a distance. It looked as though it were composed of a mass of silvery, squirming maggots, all clustered together in a cylindrical mass and emitting a thrumming drone that set his teeth on edge and made him feel physically nauseous. He steadfastly refused the suggestion of the chuckling felisians to touch it, but when Matthew did so he said it felt solid, that its maggoty appearance was just some kind of illusion.

     "I don't care what it is," said Thomas firmly. "I don't like it!"

      Fitting it in the silver ship's fuel compartment meant opening the hatch and losing all the ship's air, then pushing the fuel cell out into space and navigating it carefully to the hatch in the hull. The old cell was pulled out and discarded and Thomas, watching in the window screen, saw what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary cylinder of metal, solid and inert. The spacesuited felisians, tied to ropes to stop them drifting away and getting lost, then wrestled the new cell in place, and as it slid into its alcove the lights inside the ship flared back to full power, accompanied by a cheer from everyone inside, inaudible in the vacuum.

     The engineering team filed back inside, the hatch was closed, and Tager Yee activated the controls to repressurise the ship. "We're still low on power," he said, studying a readout. "These old cells have leaked over the centuries, but we can get you home now. We'll arrange for another ship to meet us in your universe with a fresh fuel cell. Then we'll really see what this ship can do."

     "And now you don't have to fear attack any more, you can come back and salvage all the other abandoned ships in the ring," said Thomas, imagining the delight of the felisian elders when they learned of this unexpected windfall. "With a fleet of that size to guard your world, you need never fear the Masters again."

     "We'd simply be advertising that we have something worth stealing," said the commander, however. "It'll be up to the elders what we do with those ships. They're more likely to order them stripped of their useful components and permanently disabled, so no-one else can use them."

     "I still don't understand why they were just abandoned here," said Matthew. "What happened to their original crews?"

     "Killed by their enemies, perhaps," suggested Thomas. "They may have a weapon that kills the Masters themselves but leaves their ships intact, like one of our death spells, or skydeath. They may have intended to collect them, but were struck down themselves before they were able to. We still don't know what happened to this world's original civilisation. Maybe their fates are linked."

     "The answer will not be found by idle speculation," said Saturn. "Maybe one day a team of sages and diviners will come here to study the problem, like the ones we left on Veglia. Until then, I suggest we get under way. I, for one, am anxious to get home."

     "We all are," said Tager Yee, and he gave the order.