Cassandra Pucci lost her guidance systems on the far side of the Rough Rocks.

It was Patrol's fault, of course. Most everything was. Cass wasted some of her precious oxygen and a few choice Romani words to give her opinion of the Patrol. She wasn't even smuggling this time, but they fired on her anyway, the bastards.

The greatest indignity was that they left her for dead. With limited fuel and burnt out guidance systems (damn lucky shot for a meat-fingered Patroler), she might as well be dead already. Two days worth of oxygen wasn't worth a whole hell of a lot when she didn't know where she was or how to head home.

Cass screwed the top off her guidance control panel and laughed. Home. Where was home anyway for a half-Gipsy half-American cargo shuttler who hadn't been to Earth in a decade? She wouldn't know what to do if she walked out under a wide blue sky and the frying sun after so much time in airlocked space. So home was right here, in her ship, but it would get pretty inhospitable pretty damn soon.

A tendril of smoke came from a sparking wire that Cass snuffed with her fingers. She'd covered the laser hole in her aft bulkheads with enough plaster to build half a shuttle. The repressurizer worked perfectly, and even though she was down to one engine, she had enough fuel to go halfway across the solar system. But without guidance she might as well pick up a divining rod and head the nose of her shuttle the way of the metaphysical tug.

Cass slammed the guidance panel back into place and glanced around the cockpit for ideas. The emergency alert systems informed her that her back-up navigation panel was out of service. Of course Cass knew that already. She'd diverted the power from most of her back-up systems to increase maneuverability for her smuggling run through Wild Rocks. Damn damn damn. At the time she figured she didn't need back up. Usually you didn't get more than one chance, in space.

Panic wouldn't help. Cass swallowed her fear and tried to think. Her father was a pilot, a good one, until he was shot down by raiders in '53. One of her first memories was sitting in his lap as he showed her the controls of his shuttle. When he came home from trips he brought her moon rocks and told her about the adventures of the war in Space.

"Keep your wits, Cass. It just takes a split second to lose it out there."

Cass had two days to lose it.

She looked out of her small starboard window. A few asteroids tumbled lazily by, and she caught a glimpse of the sun.

This far out it was just half again as bright as any other star. She could head towards it, but that wouldn't do much good either. Her chances of hitting Earth were one and a thousand, less for meeting up with Mars.

Her father told her stories how sailors navigated by the stars. Easy enough on the ocean, but a hell of a lot harder in space with one tiny window and six cardinal directions.

Her mother used to sing a song to the moon, in Romani, to help Cass get to bed at night when Father was away. Cass hummed the song now and looked vainly for the moon. Back on Mars you could see the bright crescent light of Earth and the smaller moon keeping it company.

Cass couldn't sing the words of the song. She didn't know much Romani, and the stars in the window blurred with her tears.

She wondered if she should kill herself quickly or wait for the carbon dioxide to build up and put her to sleep. Her father died quickly, her mother slowly, in her sleep.

It wouldn't be so bad to die as she lived, alone with her ship. Here in her home she could never be lost.