Steve found the stricken ship as the squadron came into detector range and deployed. It was a superliner, one of Interstellar's finest. And as Steve came up to the _Lunalight_ the life-craft broke the spacelocks and streaked out and away. Once more the englobement of warping planes started; plate to plate they formed, jockeying to make their forward-flung planes of warp lie against one another, edge to edge so that the volume enclosed was contained without leak. Tractor ships hurtled up and latched onto the ship and started to bring it down in speed. But this was not the time; one of the plane ships faltered and the edge of its warp plane broke contact with its neighbor. The spacewarp fractured, and then with the enigmatic peculiarity of a collapsing warp, the volume began to drop back toward prime space from the center out. The warp generator itself, in the bowels of the ship, broke into prime space first. Matter, at a thousand times the velocity of light, dropping into a space where matter cannot exceed the velocity of light! Where the tiniest speck of matter will have infinite mass when the speck reaches the velocity of light. Where the time-field of the mass becomes zero as the velocity of light is reached. It was like a stellar nova. A searing intensity of energy trailed out behind the ship and left a streak a million miles long in a matter of microseconds. The ship itself collapsed over the trail of energy, and the whole exploded finally in a hundred-billion mile long course leaving the trailer of raw, unbound energy spread out for the span of a solar system. Then the trailer itself exploded, blowing streamers of torrential energy deep into space. Bits and shags of the blazing stuff flew away, great gouts, shapeless and viciously scintillating, roared along the ship's course. The tractors fled; the plane ships had been hurled back, away, and now were lost in the sky--far behind. They hurried to catch up, for they could hurl their planes of spacial warp against a flaming mass of raw energy and bat it aside like a ping-pong paddle slaps the ball aside. The swampers circled in and the cone projectors fenced with the darting spears of flaming power. It was Steve that remembered Sanaron. "Charlemagne!" he roared into his mike. "Who's calling?" "Hagen. Remember Sanaron." "Sanaron?" "Ten minutes back at full drive lies Sanaron!" "God!" And then, for the first time in the history of space, in the history of the Guardians, came the dreaded Black Alarm. * * * * *