Which meant she was probably in one of the personnel pods, which meant she had seen the control panels before. She didn’t want to push any of the flat buttons. They were all critical; one of them, she remembered, was the airlock main control.
She had drifted closer to the control panel; her knee bumped something with an edge (the desks below or the storage shelf above? It didn’t really matter) and she felt cautiously around with her foot until she was sure she had the foot hooked under that edge. She felt carefully with both hands until she had the little metal tip of a toggle pinched in either hand. Now she was anchored, if she didn’t lose her grip. Her feet defined “down” for the moment. She let the other foot wave slowly until her toes found the same edge and crawled under it. Both feet hooked in . . . now she could release one hand and feel around in a more organized way.
Out to the right . . . the switches ended in a smooth cool surface. That made sense with her memories. Carefully, forcing herself not to rush and break loose, she moved her right hand back, caught hold of the toggle, and slid her left hand across the switches there.
Should she push this switch? Any switch? Panic shook her again, as if some great beast had its jaws around her chest. Think. What would happen if she didn’t? She’d be here, naked in the dark, until she died, and she would have no idea when that might be. Was that what she wanted? No.
The first switch she pushed produced no detectable change. Nor did the second. She hesitated before pushing another. If the electrical system was off, none of the switches would do anything. But if the electrical system was off, the air wouldn’t be circulating, and that tiny draft on the small of her back suggested that it was, though perhaps on a standby system.
Where had the electrical system controls been? On the left-hand side of the consoles . . . if she was right-side up. Now she could think of that, and how to tell. Below the consoles a kneehole space accommodated the person working them; above was the storage shelf with netting. Her toes wiggled down, and found themselves snagged in something tangled. Netting, she hoped. That meant—her mind struggled. It was surprisingly hard to think upside down in the dark . . . the lower left console would now be . . . up here. She felt over it, slowly. The main lighting control should be about halfway up—perhaps this big rocker switch? She pushed it.
Light stabbed at her; she squinted. She was indeed upside down; her stomach lurched, and she fought back the nausea. It wasn’t really upside down, not in zero G, just relatively upside down. That thought didn’t help. Move slowly, Ginese had told her repeatedly. Now, as she tried to turn her head and look across the tiny compartment, one foot came unhooked and she lost her grip on the toggle. Don’t panic, Ginese always said. Just drift, if you have to . . . she drifted, held by her right toes clenched on the shelf’s retracted netting. Light was definitely better. She could put up a hand to fend off the stool that tumbled slowly before her (was that what she’d kicked before?) and she could see that what she’d first felt was indeed a length of tubing, perhaps two or three meters of it. She had no idea what it was for.
After a long struggle, she finally twisted and coiled herself into an “upright” position, with her feet under the consoles. With a firm grip on the edge, she rested and tried to think more clearly. She was, as she’d thought, naked. She saw no sign of a spacesuit, but across the compartment were personnel lockers. Perhaps in there she could find something. Meanwhile . . . with the lights on, she could identify most of the switches. She pushed displays on and the smooth screens to either side of the consoles lit up. For a moment they blurred into fuzzy rainbows as tears rose, but she blinked hard. She could cry later, if she had to. For now, first things first. Air: she had air, more than a hundred hours at present usage. She had electrical power keeping the internal temperature high enough for survival—calories, in that limited sense. Water? She found none listed, but that didn’t mean much; she might find juice in one of the lockers.
Slowly, carefully, she worked her way around checking the lockers. Two plastic flasks with zero G nipples full of clear liquid—the first she tried gave her a fiery drop of the same stuff drunk at the party. She grimaced and pinched the nipple shut. The other was water, pleasantly cool. The next locker was half full of concentrate bars, sticky-taped to the racks. Better and better: food as well as water. Brun alternated sips of water with bites of concentrate.
She still didn’t know why she was in a pod in zero G. Was it someone’s idea of a joke? A political move, an attempt to use her as a pawn in play against her father, or Heris?
“I don’t think so,” muttered Brun. She felt much better even without clothes on, now that a bar of concentrate was doing its work in her belly. She looked at the exterior scans again. The miners had explained their reference system; she could locate Xavier, Oreson, Blueyes, Zadoc. Rock-blips were supposed to be one color, and ship-blips another, which meant—if she was right about it—that there were a lot of ships out there. One of them would be the Sweet Delight, and one would be Vigilance, with Koutsoudas on scan. Somebody should be able to see the pod—if they bothered to look, with the battle over. And there were lots of little blips going by, some of them marked by the scans as thermally active. Thermally active rocks? Brun frowned. Weren’t thermally active rocks found in volcanoes? She’d never heard of volcanoes on anything smaller than a planet.
Ahead, a drift of blips slid across the screen, thickening. She was moving too fast, she realized, relative to those rocks. Pods were tough, but not that tough. It took her a few moments to locate the thruster controls, and confirm the full fuel tanks. Then she began maneuvering, using short bursts, as she remembered someone telling her, trying to work away from the thickest clumps of blips.
“She’s what!” Heris struggled to keep her voice under control. Faroe looked miserable enough, and he wasn’t the one who’d done it.
“She volunteered to go talk to the miners aboard the ore-hauler, to convince them to go back into hiding. I was going to pick her up before our final jump out. When we—you—won, I sent word . . . and apparently they had this party.”
Heris could imagine. An ore-hauler full of drunken miners who had just learned that they weren’t going to commit suicide by attacking warships with pods . . . they’d have been crazy to start with, and the party hadn’t helped.
“—And apparently she passed out, and someone threw up on her, and they cleaned her up and put her in a pod to sleep it off, only someone hit the jettison control by mistake hours later—”
And now Brun was out there in a little personnel pod, unconscious or sicker than sin if she was awake, in space thoroughly contaminated with spent weapons from days of fighting.
“Why didn’t they go after her?” Heris asked.
“They said that whoever hit the jettison control was so drunk he didn’t realize he’d done it—they only realized the pod was gone when they went to give her some clean clothes.”