Exchange

Things were tight when I first entered this crazy soup. Now things are so cramped that there's no possible way that I'd be able to move around the dimpled packet ahead of me, or the one behind me. Like I had to level out and put the edge of my ringlet through the gateway first, the dimpled packets are now travelling along flatly, as they bump along, top and bottom.

The confinement here is not horrible, since my ringlet is so tiny when compared to the dimple-pack, and scanning was about as bad as it had been before. Eight-Six-Eights abounded near the middle of my zone, but their concentration was lower near the outer containment mesh. With a quick swap here and there, I moved to inspect the mesh. On approach, I was surprised to catch a glimpse of an Eight-Six-Eight slipping through.

It took a bit longer to notice was the inflow of paired Eights. While scanning for an Eight-Six-Eight to track, I was tempted to run the swap drive to maintain position, and that's when I discovered the drift caused by attraction to the paired Eights. Eights which flow rapidly toward the nearby dimple pack, easily sliding past the One-Eight-Ones in the soup. Going with the flow was a treat, since it was so much easier to scan in the absence of those absorptive Eight-Six-Eights.