Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei wasn't sure that her navigator understood that. They'd lost the last of their gravity on the approach, when the acceleration of their ship slowed and the floor of the SZ Loyal Prince's crew quarters slid through a quarter turn to drop parallel to the keel rather than remain aligned with the engine.

The intention, of which the Beijing University of Astronautics had been very proud, was to replace the pseudo gravity of acceleration with resource-draining G-loops, positioned beneath the cabin floor and to be used on the last stages of the trip only.

Unfortunately the G-loops had never been fitted, largely because no one could get them to work, and by the time their inventor had confessed his error and suffered a punishment fit for the crime, the living quarters had been constructed to swing through a quarter turn once the ship's speed fell below a preset level, whether this made sense or not.

"The Doctor is dying."

Lan Kuei stared at the one remaining male crew member: That was how she thought of the boy, as her last remaining male crew member. There were regulations regarding the situation they were in but she'd already broken them. Standing orders stated that in the case of this kind of emergency the SZ Loyal Prince was to be put in stasis and the working crew must join the others in hibernation.

This would have been fine if most of her crew had not already been "sleeping" and her cargo deck stacked with frozen 'fugees who took what little power the generators still produced. Sometime soon, Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei would have to decide whether or not to turn off that power. Unless, of course, she did nothing and then time would take the decision for her.

"What do you want me to do?" The boy stood waiting for orders Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei no longer felt qualified to give.

She and Lieutenant Chuang Tzu had been lovers briefly and she'd found the boy surprisingly gentle. Lan Kuei wasn't used to her lovers being gentle. Usually men took one look at her huge breasts and buried themselves in fistfuls of flesh, twisting and kneading her skin.

The navigator had been different. Approaching each time as if it was the first and he'd never seen a woman naked before. All the same, fucking him had been a mistake. Something she'd never have done if the others hadn't already been dead.

"How close?"

For a moment Navigator Chuang Tzu thought his Colonel Commissar meant how close was the SZ Loyal Prince to the wall outside but then he realized that she was talking about the Doctor. "Minutes," he said, looking at a readout. "It may already be too late."

"Freeze her," Lan Kuei said.

"I'm not sure I know how."

The Colonel Commissar stifled a sigh. "Skip the preparation," she said. "Go straight to the freezing... That's an order," she added.

Chuang Tzu nodded gratefully. It was Lan Kuei's way of relieving him of responsibility for potentially killing someone he admired. Lan Kuei liked the Doctor too, in her way. Although their backgrounds were very different, Lan Kuei's as poor as Dr. Yuan's had been rich.

When Yuan volunteered for the mission her father had offered his newly graduated daughter her own house in Xicheng, one of the most fashionable districts of Beijing, if she withdrew her application. Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei's mother had asked how much of her bounty Lan Kuei intended to give the family and then nodded grudgingly when her daughter replied that she would give it all.

Lieutenant Commissar, Major Commissar and finally Colonel Commissar. Every time an officer refused to wake from cold sleep Lan Kuei found herself promoted. Now she could call herself Commissar General if she so wanted, but Lan Kuei didn't. She was bored with gluing new patches to her shoulder, particularly now there was only the boy to notice her new rank.

The freezing pods were three decks below the bridge and the Doctor was in her cabin on the deck above, which either meant Navigator Chuang had to manhandle an unconscious woman through eighteen hatches and along two kilometres of narrow corridor or else he could cheat.

Chuang Tzu decided to do it the quick way. Sometime during the first hundred years a bored engineer had thought ahead to life aboard the SZ Loyal Prince in zero gravity and decided to weld handles to all the walls in what he considered strategic positions.

These changes made so little impact on the fifty members of Engineer Li's shift that most of them never noticed; and the Commissar General only became involved twenty-three years later when Engineer Li woke for his next shift and decided to reprogram the spiders to repaint every wall a different colour.

He might even have got away with this if only his programming skills hadn't been so sloppy that the spiders ended up overpainting every surface, including all hazard signs and internal windows.

On file was Li's defence, still attached to his execution order. This stated that since up and down were abstract concepts in zero gee, the best way to adapt the human mind to cope with weightlessness was to paint each wall a different colour. So that instead of thinking up, down, left and right, the mind chose between red surface, green surface, blue and yellow.

Whatever, it worked.

Grabbing a wall handle, Lieutenant Chuang Tzu flipped open a ceramic grill and slid into an air vent, kicking off like a swimmer from the side of a pool. He handled himself well in zero gee, his racing turn against a far wall coming close to aerial ballet. Suicidal ballet, but ballet all the same.

Away from his Colonel Commissar, Chuang Tzu was different; more awake, less dreamy. Somehow just more competent. He had the Doctor on a length of monofilament behind him, her arms bound to her sides and her legs lashed together at the ankles so she wouldn't snag on her way through the shafts.

All went well, despite the speed at which Chuang raced along the air vent. And though he slowed into the final turn, his kick off was more flamboyant than ever and his exit through the vent so fast that he had to use his own body to cushion the Doctor's impact against a wall.

"What was that?"

"What was what... madame?" Chuang added the honorific as an afterthought. Conditioning overriding his desire to vomit.

"You gasped."

"I'm sorry. It was nothing." His comms link was open, something he should have realized and dealt with. Summoning the setting with the touch of his fingers, Chuang Tzu chose a level where the comms link registered as functioning but carried almost no signal.

There were a dozen red pods hungry and waiting. One for the Doctor, another for him, one for the Commissar Colonel and nine ever-empty pods for those vaporized while trying to repair the boosters. Tapping the nearest, Chuang watched it open, waiting while the semiAI ran a self test.

"Functioning," the pod announced as a glass square lit red. "Preparing for Koebe process." Slots opened on the inside of the pod to reveal simple claws; attached to those claws were clear tubes already filled with oily liquid. "Please enter phenotype."

"What?"

"Enter phenotype."

"Human," Chuang Tzu said. The animals were long since dead.

The glass square turned orange. "Enter seven-digit genotype," demanded the pod.

"Shit." Chuang Tzu ripped open the front of the Doctor's blue uniform, looking for dog tags. "I don't know it," he said. "It's not for me."

"Enter seven-digit genotype."

"You'll have to do without," Chuang Tzu told the machine.

The ceramic blade the Lieutenant produced from his pocket was strictly illegal. As compact and functional as befitted someone who'd grown up on a farm, but still illegal. Slicing the monofilament which bound Dr. Yuan's hands, he spun her round and sliced between her ankles.