She did not ask to be untied although that was what she desperately wanted—needed. Her right shoulder must have been bruised by her fall into the cabin, and all the muscles were spasming.

“Don’t think I’ll untie you,” Avril warned, and contemptuously she pushed Sallah across the cabin. Grabbing a handhold, she corrected Sallah’s spin to a painful halt against the command console. “Look!”

Sallah did, though hanging slightly upside down was not the best position for the job. She had to think carefully, for Avril had piloted shuttles and knew something of their systems. But the Mariposa, though small, was designed to traverse interplanetary distances, dock with a variety of stations or other craft, and had the sophisticated controls to perform a considerable variety of maneuvers in space and on a planetary surface. Sallah dared to hope that much of its instrumentation would be unfamiliar to Avril.

“To find out what this ship just did,” she instructed, “hit the return button on the bottom tier of the greens. No, the port side.”

Avril jerked at Sallah, tweaking strained arm and back muscles and jamming Sallah’s head against the viewscope. Sallah’s long hair was freed completely from its pins and flowed over her face.

“Don’t get cute!” Avril snapped, her finger hovering on the appropriate button. “This one?”

Sallah nodded, floating away again. Avril punched the button with one hand and hauled her back into position with the other. Then she caught the handhold to keep herself in place. Every action has a reaction, Sallah thought, trying to clear her head of pain and confusion.

The monitor came up with a preflight instruction plan.

“The Mariposa was programmed to dock here on the Yoko.” It was nice to know where she was, Sallah reflected. “Once you hit the power, you couldn’t alter its course.”

“Well,” Avril said, her tone altering considerably. “I wanted to come here first anyhow. I just wanted to come on my own.” Sallah, hair falling over her face, felt a lessening of the tension that emanated from the woman. Some of the beauty returned to a face no longer contorted with frustration. “I don’t need you hanging about, then.” Avril reached up and gave Sallah’s body a calculated shove that sent her to the opposite end of the cabin, to bump harmlessly against the other wall and then hover there. “Well, I’ll just get to work.”

How long Sallah was suspended in that fashion she did not know. She managed to tilt her head and get her hair to float away from her eyes, but she did not dare to move much—action produced reaction, and she did not wish to draw attention to herself. She ached all over, but the pain in her foot was almost unbearable.

A tirade of malevolent and resentful oaths spun from Avril’s lips. “None of the programs run, of all the frigging luck. Nothing runs!”