Kaylee’s Lament

Chapter Twenty

Kaylee hummed quietly to herself as she worked. She didn’t even realize she was doing it.

She had found the cabin’s light switch and had spent a good ten minutes silently going through Morgan’s cabin.

She wanted a shower more than ever, now.

But she found some useful things. A couple of tools, a utility knife, and, most importantly, a small .38 automatic in the top of his tiny closet. It had a half-full clip, and while she could tell it hadn’t been used in a while, it made her feel a lot less helpless. It might even be her ticket out of this pit.

She wasn’t just going to careen out of the room and attack the two spacers that had been left to guard her. Firstly, she was trying to avoid acts of obvious idiocy, and secondly the ching-wah tsao duh liou mahng had secured the door from the outside. Not a nice, easy to jimmy bolt, either, but a heavy, hard-to lift chunk of steel.

But she wasn’t powerless. There was no place in a spaceship anywhere where Kaylee was powerless, as long as she had her brains, her hands, and her trusty 10mm wrench. Because there was no room on any ship (save a specially designed brig, she supposed) where there wasn’t some access point to some critical system. Space was always too cramped in a spaceship, and designers used what space they had to make maintenance possible. Not easy, sometimes, but possible.

And seeing as how she was in the cabin right next to the bridge of this rust-pile, she had her pick of systems to monkey with. It didn’t take her a moment to open an access panel just behind Morgan’s greasy pillow where she found (to her distaste) a small selection of Morgan’s taste in visually depicted erotica. She also found two control junction boxes, a hydraulics line and a power line.

A thorough study of the panel gave her little to work with. She could partially disable one of the ship’s major systems by interfering here, but nothing they couldn’t easily and quickly repair. One of the junction boxes she wasn’t even s