“Nothing,” she said. “Displaying empty; acting empty.”

“Think think think,” she heard Miz mutter. She suspected he hadn’t meant her to hear that, or had simply been unaware he was speaking. Suddenly she wanted to hold him, and started to cry again. She did it quietly, so he wouldn’t hear.

“This might sound mad,” he said. “But I could use my laser; hit you in the right place, get some reaction that way…”

“It does sound mad,” she said.

“There’s got to be something!” She could hear the desperation in his voice.

“Hey,” she said. “Want to hear another crazy idea?”

“Anything.”

“Crash-land on the Ghost.”

“What?”

“Cruise in and crash-land, like a plane.”

“You haven’t got any wings!”

“I’ve got a shape that looks vaguely aerodynamic; bit like the end of a spiked gun. And there’s the snow-fields.”

“What?”

“The snow-fields,” she said. “They’re hundreds of metres deep on the Ghost, in places; lo-grav. And there’s air.”

“Pretty thin air.”

“Getting thinner all the time,” she agreed. “Unbreathable in another thousand years; crap terraforming… but it’s there.”

“But how you going to fly?”

“Oh, I can’t,” she said, taking another look round the ship’s systems from the highest level. What a total fucking mess. If this was a simulation, she’d be clicking out now and hitting Replay to go back to just before it had all gone so horribly wrong, and try again.

“It was just an idea,” she told him. “I used to wake up in the night and try to think up ways out of horrible situations to get me back to sleep, and one idea I had was using the Ghost’s snow-fields to crash-land on.” She sighed. “But I always imagined I’d have some control as I went in.”

She shook her head at the unsaveable mess around her and swooped back into close-range nav view. “I think I’m dead, Miz.” She listened to her own voice, and was amazed at how cool she sounded. Physically brave.

“Forget it. I’ll run that idea of the crash-land past the machine; see what it thinks.”

“Aw, don’t spoil my fun,” she said. “I never even ran it through mine…”

“Fucking hell,” she heard him say after a while. “My machine’s as crazy as you.”

“It says it’ll work?”

“Um, three-quarters empty mass… drag… need details of the snow compression, depth it becomes ice… depends on the angle… no; the machine’s not quite as crazy as you. And you’d need some fine-tuning, in-atmosphere, at the start anyway…”

“Run an insertion past the machine anyway,” she said.

“Running it.”

“At least it’d be spectacular,” she said. “Burning up in the atmosphere or slamming into the snow. Better than hazing out from oxygen starvation.”

“Don’t talk like that!… Shit, there must be something…”

She had remembered some time ago what the secret was. “Hey,” she said gently. “Miz?”

“What?”

“Pick a number between one and two.”

“What?”

“Pick a whole number between one and two. Please.”

“Oh… one,” he said. She smiled sadly. “Well?” he said.

He said it the way he had when she’d got him to toss the coin outside the Bistro Onomatopoeia, a week earlier.

She shook her head, even though it hurt and he couldn’t see.

“Nothing,” she said. “Tell you later.” She shifted back to the doc, down into the external read-outs. Cabin cold, external air poor and pressure falling. Aggregate radiation dosage… Oh, well. She felt herself shrug and grimaced as her left arm protested. She was going to die, anyway; she wouldn’t live long enough to experience the radiation sickness. And I’d have made a lousy mother anyway, she told herself.

She kept wanting to press Replay, to snap out of this disastrous simulation and start again, or just break the link and go for a drink with the guys. It didn’t feel right that she was trapped in this situation as firmly as she was trapped in the seat, pinned there by the weight of circumstance and chance.

At first, when she’d joined up, she’d thought she could never be one of the dead ones. She told herself they must have made a mistake, and she just wasn’t going to.

Later she’d started to get scared sometimes, when pilots she’d thought even better than she had died. Had she been wrong about how good they were, or wrong about skill saving you every time? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe luck did come into it. And that made it frightening, because nobody knew how to train for that. You carried a lucky tooth or a special letter or always made sure you were last out of the mess; she’d known people who did that sort of thing… A lot of them were dead, too.

“Look,” Miz said, “I’m still catching up with you; I’ll match velocities. I’ll get over to you. It can’t take-”

“Miz,” she said, quieting him. “No.” She let out a long, ragged sigh. “I’m trapped in here. I’d have to be cut out.”

“Oh, shit,” he groaned.

The way he said it, she knew he was talking about something else. “What?” she said.

“You don’t need that much to take you into the Ghost’s atmosphere at the right angle,” he said. “Just a nudge; a few seconds’ burst… Hey!” His voice brightened again. “I’ll nudge you! I’ll just fly alongside and-”

“Forget it; you’ll just break your own ship…”

“Look, if we can’t think of anything-”

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

She reached into the ship’s plumbing, found no read-out for the relevant section of pipe, but the record of valves shut…

“Hey,” she said. “You know I put the thrust the wrong way at first; made the spin worse?”

“Yeah?”

“I got confused because before that I tried sending the water round the loop against the spin.”

“So?”

“So there might be water in the closed section of loop.”

“Isn’t it showing?”

“No read-out.”

“Shit,” he said. “There might be some in there.”

“Yes, and it might be frozen,” she said, shifting into the ship’s patchy temperature map.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll run it through…” His voice went away. She was left alone for a few moments.

She’d always expected to be re-living her life at this point, but it didn’t seem to be happening. She felt cold and battered and tired. This combat flying lark was supposed to have been just a little exotic incident in her life, something to tell people about when she was old. It had never been meant to get this important, never been planned to be this crucial and ghastly and hopeless. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be the end of everything. It couldn’t all just end, could it?

Yes it could, she thought. Somehow she’d never really thought about it before, but yes; of course it could. She didn’t just accept it now; she knew it now. What a time to learn that particular lesson.

“Yeah!” Miz hollered. “If it’s there, there’s enough!”

“Well,” she said. “We won’t know until we try.”

“But you’ve got reaction mass!” he yelled. “You can do it!”

“Two minutes ago you were telling me I was crazy to even think about this; now suddenly it’s a great idea.”

“It’s a chance, kid,” he said, quieter. There was something else in his voice, too; the equivalent of one arm holding some surprise behind his back, and a sly smile on his face.

“And?” she said.

“I just ran a routine for your in-atmosphere control.”

“Using your astonishing powers of laser control, you will fashion a pair of crude but serviceable wings from-”

“Quiet, smart-ass; dig down to the clip’s non-mil suite.”

“Pardon? Oh all right.” She shifted down the systems root to the clipper’s full display. What was this heap of civilian shit meant to do? Was he just trying to distract her?

“See the gyros?”

“Gyros? No.”

“Labelled FTU1 and 2; Fine Trimming Units.”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, the bow cluster, anyway. Shit, I thought those were stripped when these boats were militarised.”