But as she had already begun to suspect, the beacon wasn’t functioning. She looked thoughtfully at the control console. The quickest way to disable the beacon, and the simplest, required a screwdriver and three or four minutes with that console. Lift the top, giving access to the switches and their attached wiring. Then, depending on how obvious you wanted to be, clip or crosswire or remove this and that. She was not surprised to see a screwdriver loose on the “deck” of the pod.
And her first impulse would normally have been to check out the beacon, using that screwdriver to free the console top. After she’d picked up the envelope with Classified all over it. Her fingerprints, her body oils, would have been on the tool, the envelope, the console, even the switches underneath, obscuring the work of the person who’d put her here.
Sassinak took another long swallow of water, and rummaged in the med kit for a stimulant tab. This was no time to miss anything.
In the end, the med kit provided most of what she needed. Forceps, with which to lift the screwdriver and put it into a packet that had held headache pills. It occurred to her that while she was unconscious, her assailant might have pressed her fingers against the envelope, or the screwdriver, but she couldn’t do anything about that. She found the little pocket scanner that was supposed to be in every evac module, and shot a clip of the envelope as it lay on the console. When she had all the evidence secured, she suddenly wondered how that would help if she were in coldsleep when she was found. Suppose her assailant had confederates, who were supposed to pick her up? They could destroy her careful work, incriminate her even more. That gave her the jitters for awhile, and then she remembered Abe’s patient voice saying “What you can’t change, don’t cry over: put your energy where it works, Sass.”
Right now it had to go into prolonging her time before coldsleep.
Which meant, she remembered unhappily, no eating. Digestion used energy, which used oxygen. No exercise, for the same reason. Lie still, breathe slow, think peaceful thoughts. You might as well spend the time in coldsleep, she grumbled to herself, as try to act as if you were in coldsleep. But she took the time to clean herself up as well as she could, using the tiny mirror in the med kit. The slightly overlong hair could be tied back neatly, the stains wiped from her uniform. Then she lay down on the couch, pulled up the coverlet, and tried to relax.
She had not been hungry like this since her slave days. Her empty stomach growled, gurgled, and finally settled for sharp nagging pains. She chivvied her mind away from the food fantasies it wanted to indulge in, steering it into mathematics instead. Squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, visualizing curves from equations, and imagining how, with a shift in values, the curve would shift… as a loop of hose shifts with changing water pressure. Finally she slipped into a doze.
She woke in a foul mood, but more clear-headed than before. Elapsed time since ejection was now 25 hours, 16 minutes. Clearly the cruiser hadn’t stopped to look for her, or hadn’t been able to find her. She wondered if the Ssli could sense such a small distortion in the fields they touched. Or could the Wefts detect her, as a living being they’d known? But that was idle speculation. She gave her arm to the med kit’s blood sampler again; she remembered being told that each drug had a characteristic breakdown profile, and that serial blood tests could provide the best information on an unknown drug.
For a moment, the pod seemed to contract around her, crushing her to the couch. Had some unsuspected drive come on, to flatten her with acceleration? But no: the pods had the same artificial gravity as the cruiser itself, to protect injured occupants. She knew that; she knew the walls weren’t really closing in… but she suddenly understood just how Ensign Corfin might have felt. She couldn’t see out; she had no idea where she was or where she was going; she was trapped in a tiny box with no way out. Her breath came fast: too fast. She fought to slow it. So, this was claustrophobia. How interesting. It didn’t feel interesting; it felt terrible.
She had to do something. Squares and square roots seemed singularly impractical this time. Could she figure out a way to ensure that the evidence couldn’t be faked against her? Any worse than it already was, she reminded herself. That brought another chilling thought: maybe the cruiser hadn’t come looking for her because Commander Fargeon was already convinced she was an enemy agent and had absconded with the pod.
Her stomach growled again; she set herself to enter the first stages of control Abe had taught her. Hunger was just hunger; in this case, nothing to worry about. But she did need to worry about her career.
In the long, lonely, silent hours that followed, Sassinak spent much of her time in a near-trance, dozing. The rest she spent doing what she could to make tampering with the evidence as hard as possible. If the pod were picked up by enemies, with plenty of time at their disposal, none of her ploys would work… but if a Fleet vessel, her cruiser or another, came along, it would take more than a few minutes to undo what she’d done and rework it to incriminate her.
When the elapsed-time monitor read 100 hours, and the time to exhaustion of her air supply was less than five hours, she pulled out the instruction manual for the coldsleep cabinet. Evac pods had an automated system, but she didn’t trust it; what if the same person who had sabotaged the beacon had fiddled with the medications? She pushed aside the thought that sabotaging the entire coldsleep cabinet wouldn’t have been that hard. If it didn’t work, she’d never wake up, and that was that. But she had to try it, or die of oxygen starvation… and the films they’d been shown at the Academy had made it clear that oxygen starvation was not a pleasant way to go.
She filled the syringes carefully, checking and rechecking labels and dosages. With the mattress off the acceleration couch, she looked the cabinet over as well as she could. Ordinarily, cold sleep required only an enclosed space; she could go into it using the whole pod as the container. But for extra protection in the pods, the reinforced cabinet had been designed, and was strongly recommended. She looked into that blank, shiny interior, and shuddered.
First, the protocol said, program the automatic dispenser, and then have it start an IV. But she wasn’t doing that. Her way would mean getting into the cabinet, with the syringes in hand, giving herself the injections, pulling down the lid, turning the cylinder controls, and then… then, she hoped, just sleeping away whatever time it took before someone found her.
Nor could she wait until the last moment. Oxygen starvation would make her clumsy and slow, and she might make fatal mistakes. She set the medication alarm in the medkit for one hour before the deadline. The last minutes crept by. Sassinak looked around the pod interior, fighting to stay calm. She dared not put herself in trance, yet there was nothing to do to ease her tension. There was the tape she’d made, her log of this unplanned journey with all her surmises about cause and criminal. In the acceleration couch mattress was a handwritten log, in the hope that redundancy might help.
When the alarm sounded, she snatched the syringe and reached for the alarm release. But it didn’t work. Great, she thought, I’ll go into coldsleep with that horrible noise in my ears and have nightmares for years. Then she realized it wasn’t the same buzzer at all - in fact, it wasn’t time for the med-alarm - she had fifteen more minutes. She looked wildly around the pod, trying to figure it out, before her mind dredged up the right memory. Proximity alarm: some kind of large mass was nearby, and it might be a ship, and they might even have compatible communications gear.