Stretched diagonally across the hollow of the corridor, Orpicea flipped the comm panel open and unreeled a long black wire from a pouch in her suit. She jammed it sparking into the panel's innards and, snatching the receiver off its hook, barked: 'This is Captain Orpicea. Go ahead.' Lights blinked awake around her as they fed on the power she'd just mainlined into the ship.

'Captain. This is the mining port Myriad. We've got some debris on a collision vector . . .'

Static strangled his voice. Orpicea rapped the receiver on the safety rail then pressed it back to her ear. She turned gently in the air, listening. 'Ha . . . mm . . . eb . . .'

Tutting, she stabilised herself on the rail and poked a command into the comm. The corridor erupted with his voice. '—Accountable for endangering upwards of ten thousand civilian lives.'

Orpicea recoiled as if stung. 'Hold on there, Myriad, could you repeat? I didn't catch your—'

'Captain, if you do not respond within the next ten seconds you will be in violation of . . .'

Cursing under her breath she rattled another command into the panel. The Myriad comms officer continued listing the ways in which she was about to be completely fucked. Without waiting for him to finish, she called out: 'You hearing this, Myriad?'

'Acknowledged,' the speakers boomed. His voice would be transmitting across the whole deck, she was fairly sure, if not the entire ship; good thing nobody else was on board.

'Repeat your last, Myriad, we're having technical.' She crammed the receiver back on the handle and tugged herself along the safety rail.

'I am not interested in stalling tactics, Captain! Three hundred thousand tonnes of debris are on a collision course with this station. According to our ident pings, it is your debris.'

'Myriad,' said Orpicea, 'that's not debris. That's my ship.'

At this point the wire trailing from her suit went taut and jerked her off the safety rail. She spun in the air, swearing. Something fizzled angrily; she felt the wire go limp, and then the lights died.

In the belly of the fine mining barge Syrophoenician, the sudden decoupling of power from a wall-mounted comm panel in an Engineering maintenance corridor sent a shiver through the spaghetti of the vessel's electrical wiring and with a throat-clearing warble the proximity sensors, having been screaming into the mechanical equivalent of a pillow for the past day, finally received a confirmation from the ship's alarm system and every klaxon in every deck howled in terror for precisely half a second then fell silent. Crimson emergency lighting bloomed in the ship for a further ten seconds before it too, with an embarrassed splutter, faded to nothing.

After a pregnant moment in silence and darkness, Orpicea's helmet light guttered to life. She stopped flailing. By tilting her head about she was able to throw enough light around to get her bearings and, untangling herself from the web of wire bunching up around her, she twisted around, reached out and grasped a safety rail.

She threw herself down corridors, a whirlwind of obsenities. Theories bounced around in her head. For whatever reason, the ship hadn't warned her to begin deceleration. Maybe she hadn't set it somehow; no, that wasn't right, it'd be automatic, surely. Maybe she'd accidentally shut down whatever subroutine controlled that trigger in her rush to conserve power. Or maybe the system had simply hiccuped. The old girl, let's face it, had seen better days, and as it turned out running a mining barge designed for a crew of hundreds was harder than it looked.

Her visor peeled down as the airlock ran through its sequence. She'd have settled for a window, but structural weaknesses like that were frowned upon and the digital kind weren't much good without power.

Clipping herself to the safety rail she leapt. A horizon of grey-green metal spread out, paint peeling, surface scarred with micrometeor impacts and other spaceborne junk; in places whole sheets of metal were displaced or simply not there, exposing chunks of tarnished superstructure beneath.

The space station Myriad glinted ahead, a pale dot. She needed the visor's display to find it. It was getting visibly larger.

A quick mental calculation told her she had thirty minutes to wire the auxilary engine, spool it, and wrench her ship out of its course before it would be too late.

'Fuck,' she said.

Roughly thirty-three minutes later, Communications Specialist Hart, stationed aboard the mining port Myriad, detected an escape pod launch from the oncoming vessel and after a bit of shouting managed to put out a notice to authorities regarding one Captain Orpicea before three hundred thousand tonnes of derelict mining barge punched into the station and things got interesting.