She barely took in what he was saying, but a cold sense of fear was creeping into her mind—not from the danger to her and the Brin 2, but what he was saying about Earth and the colonies. A war? Impossible. Not even the NUNs…But it was true there had been some incidents—assassinations, riots, bombs. The whole of Europa Base had been compromised. The NUNs were spitting into the inevitable storm of manifest destiny, though. She had always believed that. Such outbursts represented the last throes of humanity’s under-evolvers.

She was now heading the other way, distancing herself from the engine core as though the Brin had enough space within it for her to escape the coming blast. She was utterly rational, however. She knew exactly where she was going.

Ahead of her was the circular portal to the Sentry Pod. Only on seeing it did she realize that some part of her mind—the part she always relied on to finesse the more complex calculations—had already fully understood the current situation and discerned the one slim-but-possible way out.

This was where Sering was supposed to be. This was the slow boat to the future that he—in a sane timeline—would have been piloting. Now she ordered the door to open, relieved to discover that this—the one piece of equipment that was actually his particular business—seemed to have remained free of Sering’s meddling.

The first explosion came, and she thought it was the last one. The Brin creaked and lurched around her, but the engine core remained stable—as evidenced by the fact that she herself had not been disintegrated. She tuned back into the wild whirl of frantic messaging between the crew. Sering had rigged the escape pods. He didn’t want anyone avoiding the fate he had decreed for himself. Had he somehow forgotten the Sentry Pod?

The detonating pods would push the Brin 2 out of position, drifting either towards the planet or off into space. She had to get clear.

The door opened at her command, and she had the Sentry hub run a diagnostic on the release mechanism. There was so little space inside, just the cold-sleep coffin—don’t think of it as a coffin!—and the termini of its associated systems.

The hub was querying her—she was not the right person, nor was she wearing the proper gear for prolonged cold sleep. But I don’t intend to be here for centuries, just long enough to ride it out. She swiftly overrode its quibbles, and by that time the diagnostics had pinpointed Sering’s tampering, or rather identified, by process of elimination, those parts of the release process that he had erased from its direct notice.

Sounds from outside suggested that the best course of action was to order the door closed, and then lock the systems so that nobody from outside could intrude on her.