IT TOOK HIM A GOOD THIRTY MICROTS TO NOTICE the two glowing eyestalks of a battered DRD staring at him from a vent in his cell.

The DRD from Elack.

Crais suddenly saw a chance, slim, but there.

"DRD of Elack," he called it. "I need your help."

The little machine chirped and he took that as an acknowledgement.

"You must disable the Peacekeepers on this vessel, so that I may escape, in the most expedient way possible. Do not damage the ship beyond usefulness if you can avoid it. Can you do that?"

The DRD chirped and slid away. He had no idea if the DRD could actually do anything. There were twenty troopers on this ship, a formal Retrieval Squad. They were not to be taken lightly by any means.

A quarter-arn went by and nothing happened.

Another quarter-arn and Crais was beginning to believe that the DRD would fail or already had when he felt the air pressure in his cell suddenly tighten on his skin, saw a red light flash on the console that controlled this set of cells. Crais felt the whole ship seeming to slide to one side, then stabilize. Lights went out and he knew they were off all over the ship.

It was abruptly silent.

Worse than the dark, however, was the sudden realization that the air in the cell was becoming rapidly thinner. Crais was gasping when the lights suddenly came back on, and his cell door opened without warning. He gasped, started to see spots forming in his eyes from lack of oxygen and was wavering when the air returned in a gush. He caught himself, sucking in great gulps of air like a fish out of water.

He regained his senses, stepped out of his cell, listened intently. Across the way, the door to the cells opened, stayed open. If he expected anyone to enter, he was disappointed. He left the cells, made his way cautiously to where he knew Muukarhi would be.

He did not get far before he found the first Peacekeeper corpse. And then another, and another. He checked them, discovered they had all died the same way – suffocation.

He made it to the ship's command and discovered the same thing – all dead of suffocation. Sitting calmly on a console was Elack's DRD. It chirped when it saw him. Beside it, Muukarhi smiled up at him.

"There you are," she said in way of greeting. "I was trying to figure out this comm system."

"What happened – do you know?" he asked, starting to suspect the DRD may have taken him more literally than it should have – not that he was complaining.

Muukarhi shook her head.

"I was in my 'cabin' when the power abruptly went out. I think this DRD had something to do with it."

"Yes, it came to my cell. I asked it to do what it could to help me escape. I think it may have taken me at my word."

Muukarhi nodded.

"According to the computer's log – this DRD sent the ship into something the computer calls a 'Level Delka Purge Cycle'?" She glanced back at him, and he thought a moment, nodded.

"Effective." He stepped forward, shoved the pilot's body from her chair, sat. "The DRD made the computer believe that the ship had been contaminated with radioactive chemicals. It then vented the entire ship to space."

Muukarhi looked faintly horrified.

"You told it to do that?"

Crais shook his head.

"Not at all. I told it only to disable them, not kill. It apparently took the most expedient way it could compute."

"That would explain why we almost suffocated." Muukarhi said, sitting in the co-pilot's chair. "But not the power outage."

"The Purge Cycle is an emergency option." Crais told her, trying to re-familiarize himself with the ship controls. It had been a long time since he'd done any hands-on flying. "The DRD diverted power to our locales in an attempt to preserve the oxygen in those places and the computer dealt with it as enemy interference."

"And shut the power off." She finished to his nod.

"Fortunately, however, not until after it began to replenish the atmosphere."

Crais remembered enough, he figured, to restart the ship. He activated the pilot's interface and found it locked. He sighed. Of course it was locked. As long as it was, they were going nowhere. It would not unlock without either a command code or a biological scan, and none of the commandos on this ship wore any rank. He rose, realizing that it would be grim work indeed in gathering all the corpses on this ship and trying their palm and retina scans in turn on the controls. No wonder Muukarhi didn't like Peacekeepers, he mused, grimly bemused. They made everything much more difficult than it needed to be.

He turned to Muukarhi to tell her what they had to do when he was distracted by her shout and discovered that they weren't the only ones to escape suffocation when he was suddenly charged by a large shape that crashed out of nowhere.