Five hours later, she was on the ship’s perfunctory little engineering deck, sealing the hatch manually. Two of the EVA suits had given up what little they had to offer to make a tiny, sketchy tool kit. Doing anything with the controls had failed. So she could be a rat in a box, or she could take out the middleman. After all, the controls all connected to machinery, and the machinery – some of it – was where she could put her hands on it.

The space between the hulls was in vacuum, and she didn’t have any great faith that the outer hull was actually sealed. The one remaining suit held about five minutes’ worth of air without a bottle and she could set the radio to passive and pick up the faintest echo of her own voice making the false message with the residual charge in the wires. The lock that should have let her get into and out of the maintenance access had been hauled off as salvage, but she could turn the full engineering deck into a makeshift airlock. Close the hatch to the rest of the ship, force the access panel into the space between hulls. She budgeted two minutes to locate something useful – a power repeater she could sabotage to force the drive to shut down, the wiring for the comm system, an unsecured console that was talking to the computers – then two minutes to get back out. Thirty seconds to close and seal the maintenance panel and pop the engineering hatch. She’d lose a roomful of air every time, but she’d only lose a roomful.

She put on the helmet and checked the seals, then opened the access panel. It fought her at first, then gave all at once. She thought she felt a rush of escaping air go past her, but it was probably her imagination. Twenty seconds already gone. She crawled into the vacuum between the hulls. The darkness was so complete, it was like closing her eyes. She tapped the suit’s controls, but no beam of light came from them.

She backed out, closed the access panel, opened the hatch, and took off her helmet.

“Light,” she said to the empty space. “Going to need some light.”