She floated in the middle of it all, taking stock.

“Fucking hell,” she said. “What a mess.”

“What?” Miz said in her ears.

“Got status,” she said, looking round. The ship was a wreck. “Good fucking grief.” What to do first?

“Reduce spin or you’ll black out again,” Miz said urgently.

“Oh, yes,” she said. The spin was insane; she looked to the main tanks, but they were empty. The bow thrusts had some water left. She woke the motor up, swung it to operating temperature and pushed the fuel through. Nothing happened.

Why wasn’t the burn working?

Spinning too much. Wrong route. She closed off one valve, opened another; water hit the reaction chamber and plasma went bursting out from the ship’s nose. Miz was shouting something but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. The weight got worse and the roaring came back and became a noise like darkness.

She felt something snap.

Wrong way! she thought, vectoring the thrust right round.

The worst of the weight lifted slowly; the roaring went back to what it had been before and then gradually faded. Her body started to lift in the seat, pulling out of the squashed, crumpled attitude it had taken up. Give it ten more seconds. She opened her eyes. The inside of the face plate was smeared with blood. She closed her eyes, sought out the suit-view in the lid-screen display and shifted down into it.

The emergency controls gleamed in the back-up lighting. No holos. The flattie status screens were blown or pulsing red.

She turned her head to the left.

The port instrument bulkhead had come to pay her couch a visit. It felt like the port-rear ceiling had had the same idea. That was what was stopping her head from going right back; probably what had nearly ripped her helmet off, too. Her seat had been half-torn from its mountings by the impact, which had caught her left arm between the bulkhead and the armrest.

She stared. Could that really be her arm disappearing into all that mangled-up shit? She ignored the memory of the pain and pulled hard.

It was as though she’d slammed an axe into herself. Her head jerked around inside the helmet; she fought the scream but it forced its way out of her throat anyway.

She blinked tears away. Her arm remained pinned.

So much for that idea.

She moved her head. Looked like her right arm wasn’t in terribly good shape any more, either. She tried to move it but it wouldn’t cooperate. Numb. “Be like that, then,” she muttered, trying to sound unconcerned.

Physically brave, she told herself. Physically brave. That was the one accurate phrase she remembered from when she’d hacked into her service file (though it had been embedded amongst a load of nonsense about her being impatient and arrogant; how dare they?). Physically brave. Remember that.

She shifted out of helmet-view. The ship’s bow tank drained, the pipes emptied and the motor cut out. She reached to the main tanks, but of course there was nothing there. The back-up tanks were dry too. The ship was still spinning, but only once every eight seconds.

“You did it!” Miz shouted. Broadcasting on radio; the comm laser was dead.

She attempted to sort some sense out of the nav gear’s gibberish and tried the ship’s external sensors, but they came up fuzz-grey. The back-ups were out, too, apart from one non-holo camera in the bow, fixed staring straight ahead. All it showed were lots of nebulae, a glimpse of a white disc ahead with a reddish-golden disc behind it, then nebulae again, then the white-disc/red-gold disc combination again, and so on.

“Where the hell am I?” she said.

“Can’t read you,” Miz said. “Open a data channel.”

“Only got input,” she said. “It’s open.”

“Shit,” he said. “Okay, here’s what I have.”

The nav gear started acting sensibly again. She was still on the Outside of Nachtel’s Ghost, about a quarter second Inwards from the engagement position, tumbling and twisting towards the moon.

“Right,” she said. “Just let me get my bearings here…”

The external view she had now-flagged as thousand magnification-showed a wrecked excise clipper spinning slowly in front of her, its black hull flayed and pitted, its rear end gone, ruptured plates fluting tumorously from the craft’s waist to shred away to nothing from about three-quarters of the way back, ending in a glinting mess of shining metal.

There was something biological, even sexual about the ruined ship, its matt-black skin like dull clothes ripped apart to reveal the flesh beneath, exposed and open. She’d never seen a ship so badly damaged.

She thought, Poor fucker; lift that driver’s chow-bucket off its hook and send it back to Stores… then realised that this was the view from Miz’s ship; he was following her, and what she was looking at was her own craft. She was the unfortunate pilot she’d been consigning to oblivion.

She selected trajectory forecast while she looked at the doc window. The medical unit seemed to have given up on her. Then she remembered where the doc’s tubes plugged into her. She shifted back to helmet-view, staring at where her left forearm disappeared between the bulging instrument bulkhead and the seat armrest; the gap was about three centimetres. Hmm, she thought.

She shifted back to nav; she was heading straight for Nachtel’s Ghost. The icy little world was still nearly a tenth of a light-second away and it would take her the best part of an hour to get there, but she was going to go right down the throat of the gravity well. Even if she could miss Nachtel’s Ghost she’d be pointing at Nachtel itself, with no way to miss it; seen from its barely habitable moon, the gas giant filled half the sky. She’d have to sling-shot.

Instinctively, she reached again for the main tanks.

“Shit,” she said.

She glanced at the group-status holo which had been part of the squirt Miz had sent. “Miz!” she shouted. “The others!”

“Vleit and Frot are dead,” Miz said quickly. “Zef’s chasing Cara but getting no reply. Kid, there’s nothing you can-”

“You’ve got damage, too!” she said.

“Yeah, some laser-work from the cruiser and ice abrasion from that water-screen you left behind when you got zapped-”

“Miz,” she whispered, “are-?”

“I’m sure, Sharrow,” Miz said, his voice thick. “Dead and gone. Probably never knew what hit them.”

“How did they do this to us?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Miz said wearily. “Cenuij wants to call War Crime on that engagement; says nobody reacts that fast and there must have been an AI in charge; I think we just got out-lucked. Cruiser took some damage and flared home; now forget about the engagement! Have you any reaction mass? We have to get you into orbit around the Ghost.”

She’d shifted into life support. “No point,” she said. “The recycler’s wrecked and I’m losing gas; I’ve enough to breathe for about… two hours, then that’s it.”

“That suit or cabin?”

“Suit. Cabin’s got less; pressure leak.”

“Shit,” Miz said. She could almost hear him thinking. “The doc,” he said. “It could floor your metabolism and-”

“The doc,” she said, “is fucked.”

“Damn,” he said. It was such a mild curse she almost laughed. “Could you bail out?” he asked her. “I could match with you; you could zap across… or I could get over to you…”

“I don’t think there’s quite the time,” she said. She glanced into suit-view and looked briefly at her one trapped and one… broken? dislocated? arm. “There might be other problems with that approach, anyhow.”

“What about reaction mass?”

She glanced around. “Nothing.”

“Come on! There must be something! Check!”

She initiated a checking routine, and looked carefully at each tank glyph in turn. The check routine said zero everywhere and staying that way. Her own senses told her the same thing. She tried blipping the feed from each tank in turn, just in case there was water there and it was a sensor or display fault.