‘Smith . . . got away,’ Saul managed.

Those were definitely not the words she wanted to hear. She stared at the blood plating the outside of his spacesuit, dried out and turned oak-brown by vacuum. ‘Where are you wounded?’

‘Side.’ He gestured with one blood-smeared glove.

Hannah peered at the mess of suit sealant that had boiled out of there. ‘Can you move?’ A weak shake of the head. ‘I’m going to need Braddock,’ she decided.

After a pause Saul replied, ‘He’s coming now.’

Braddock arrived in double-quick time, armed and looking for a fight, but as soon as he saw Saul, his face turned white. Was that because without Saul their chances of survival became precisely nil?

‘The prisoners?’ Hannah enquired.

‘I locked them in the toilet,’ Braddock told her.

‘Okay, help me.’

They carried Saul as carefully as possible through the door and into a surgery prep room.

‘Get his suit off,’ Hannah instructed, as she herself frantically began checking the cold stores and equipment cupboards ranged along one wall. It was good that the level of gravity lay as close to zero as made no difference, otherwise Braddock’s task would have been much more difficult. By the time she had found trauma dressings and a pair of scissors, Braddock had removed the spacesuit to expose the blood-soaked undersuit. Whilst he held Saul in place Hannah cut away the undersuit, and soon located the wound. She then affixed a trauma dressing, which quickly formed itself over the wound while infusing it with coagulants. After that they loaded Saul on to a special gurney which closed pads securely over his arms, legs and forehead, before rolling him through the clean lock leading into the operating theatre.

‘What about Smith?’ Braddock asked.

‘He got away,’ she replied bluntly, trying to stamp down on her fears. She just had to be pragmatic; no use wondering when Inspectorate enforcers would come piling in here to drag them away, no use thinking about what lay in store if Smith managed to get to them.

‘So we’re fucked,’ replied Braddock, equally blunt.

She quickly stripped off her spacesuit and undersuit, hardly noticing Braddock’s embarrassment as he turned away. She then propelled herself through into the surgeon’s lock, quickly donning surgeon’s whites and forgoing the decontamination process. Now in utterly familiar surroundings, she connected up a pressurized blood feed to her patient, before administering a general anaesthetic through it. While Saul was relaxing into unconsciousness, she began sifting through the tools she required, picking up a wound ring of the appropriate size.

‘We need him awake again as quickly as possible,’ warned Braddock, from the other side of the isolation window, having obviously located the intercom. ‘If Smith discovers he’s out of it, his people will be down on us in a second.’

‘No, really?’ said Hannah, sarcastically.