Because things were definitely not right. She could not seem to find a reason why the microwave net was down. Why all the emergency communications systems were inoperable. It was like they had been sabotaged. The Neptune module was supplied with air and power, had food and water for another month…but was essentially cut off. Now why was that?

Maybe she didn’t want to know.

And the thing was, she did not really trust herself to figure such things out.

Her brain was not operating at peak efficiency. She was making mistakes. And she had been ever since losing contact with Bell and Murphy. That had been the time for action. The time to switch to full-blown survival mode and get out. But what did she do? After losing contact with Bell and Murphy, she lost contact with the LSB, then she just sat at the console in the control room and…waited. Waking. Sleeping. But never leaving. For eight hours she had done that. Then she took a few Darvocet and laid down in her bunk.

But why?

Why had she done that?

She knew protocol, she understood procedure. You didn’t make it in the DSU if you didn’t. But for two days she had done nothing but sleep and eat, lost in some fugue. And the more she thought about it, the more she began to wonder if that fugue was not artificial and she had been placed in it by some external agency that did not want her to leave.

It was only since waking a few hours ago that her head seemed to be working.

What the hell had happened?

What if the escape pods had not been fired by the bogies, but by her? Panicking now, uncertain of what was real and what was not, she brought up the screen for the the escape pods. They had ascended at 11:23 p.m. last night. She had no memory of where she had been or what she had been doing. She began to wonder if maybe while she thought she had been in some mindless fugue, she had actually been sabotaging her own survival.

Was that possible?

She knew it was. The bogies could make you see things that were not there. They could make you do things and believe things that were wholly erroneous. And she did not doubt that they could easily manipulate your mind in other ways, too.

To hell with it…what did it matter?

She was getting out of here.