She opened her eyes as if the hitting of the door in her dream really woke her up. Blue screens and a red light flickered in front of her and after a moment of dizziness, she realised she was still on the ship. Drowsy and disorientated, Cerridwen looked around the cockpit, narrowing her eyes. The information appeared on one of the few working screens:

  ENGINES OF THE SPATIOTEMPORAL RING NUMBER 1, 3 HAD BROKEN DOWN.

  Cerridwen unfastened the belts and stood up. Holding on to the edge of the control panel, she pulled herself to the other side of the cockpit.

  She leaned above the screen taking care not to touch the dead Celestian. Cerridwen knew almost nothing about spaceships, but she guessed that the report about the damaged engines did not foreshadow anything good.

  Despite the overbearing helplessness, she contained the trembling of her hands enough to tap the right icons. She had come too far to lose the battle with the machine. The pain of her broken bones sobered her right up and forced her to think fast. She touched the middle of the screen and instead of the information about the damages, bars of data, which she could not understand, and a text popped up:

  Est. length of the flight in a spatiotemporal sphere: no record

  The nearest inhabited planet: no record

  The other objects within: no record

  Recommended solution [1]: repairing at least one engine of the ring

  Cerridwen read every line closely, but when she reached the last one, she abandoned all hope. She moved away from the desktop and flopped back on the backrest. She thought she’d escaped the worst danger and that she would be safe far away from the others. She stared through the illuminator, and her sight rested on the white specks leisurely drifting across the black mass.

  Cerridwen felt like a castaway left at the mercy of the hostile, wild island. Only silent space with no signs of civilisation surrounded her, and the thin walls of the forsaken and damaged cargo ship protected her from the freezing vacuum.

  She chose to wait until the rest of the ring engines cut out and the ship used up all its fuel. Later, the water and food supplies would run out, and in the end, the life support system would stop working. The temperature would then decrease, and the filter would not absorb the carbon dioxide anymore.

  At the very imagination of such a scenario, she felt a sharp shudder as icy as space behind the glass, but her survival instinct and the need to get revenge did not allow her to give up. She had a score to even.

  Cerridwen pushed off the seat and drifted towards the door. In the corridor, she looked around in search of anything that would help her survive. She found a hatch on the right wall which she had not noticed earlier. Then, she moved to the other side of the corridor and with a leaping momentum, she pushed against the door handle. She clenched her teeth as the door grated and withdrew. Grimacing due to pain, she sighed at her endeavour. She grabbed the wire hanging from the ceiling and climbed up into the room.

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  The store walls, from the floor to the ceiling, were laden with chests marked by various stickers. Cerridwen could distinguish only the most obvious ones, like a skull printed on the red background which marked the materials that should not be touched. She moved closer and wrenched the nearest chest out of the holder. For a while, she struggled with the locked cover and as she tore it off, wrapped in a yellowed towel, little containers with a brownish-red liquid fell out of it. The Celestian girl caught one of them and examined it. She did not find any information about its content, so she picked up the other bottles and put them in their place.

  She hitched the chest to the holder and took another one. A few plastic boxes filled with semi-transparent syringes containing a shiny substance were inside. Cerridwen brought one syringe out and turned it in her fingers when she spotted the content description written in tiny print. She found out that the liquid was used to stem haemorrhages. Just in case, she made a note of that detail.

  The Celestian girl scanned a few more chests and laid the ones with the most precious content near the door. Focusing on that activity let her forget about the pain of the strained hand and scraped, burned skin for some time. Only after an hour of work, the injuries became excruciating. The sound of her breath resembled the work of overloaded hydraulic pistons. Due to the dizziness caused by exhaustion, she could no longer concentrate on anything else other than thinking about the rest. She forced herself to check one more chest, promising herself that she would lie on the bed, as uncomfortable as an iron grate, right afterwards.

  Cerridwen took off the cover and tugged on a ruffled tangle of rubber-like materials. She dug into the pile of black boiler suits and on the bottom, she found respirators and magnetic crampons. She wore the crampons on the soles and fastened the magnetic bands above her knees due to which she could walk on the board instead of bruising against the walls or climbing up the wires and straining her hand. She cleaned up the items thrown around and left.

  On her way to the infirmary, she came across the floating, dead Nelphian. She mumbled with disgust and gave him a wide berth. She planned that her next action after getting up would be the removal of all the corpses.

  Despite the lack of gravity, the Celestian girl took her every step with effort as if she weighed three times more than in reality. Before she reached the hold converted into an infirmary, she struggled for a few seconds with a door that was stuck.

  The working kits still buzzed monotonously. A bright, white light glowed inside, creating the impression of the hospital sterility even though brown tracks of dried mud marked the way of the people unknown to Cerridwen. As she crossed the doorway, she jumped on the nearest bed and fastened the belts. She forgot the goggles, bandages and the hard mattress. She fell asleep almost immediately, and not even the nightmares haunted her.

  She spent every next hour on more or less relevant activities. The Celestian girl picked up the larger rubbish fragments that hindered her motion. Together with two corpses, she packed them in capacious, black sacks and attached them to the pipes at the end of the hall. She hoped that the plastic would remain leakproof. Then she raked the smaller hoards on the entire ship, hid the found items in the chests in the store and before she went to sleep again, she wiped the mud around her bed.

  Each of those activities gave her trouble and pain, but it was the only way to remain in her right mind. Cerridwen felt that she’d strained her hand and after the effort, something pressed and stung her chest. Then she lay down and did nothing except thinking about the recent incidents or the near future when all her supplies would run out.