In Enemy Hands by K.S. Augustin

by now, not only state the number of panels in her quarters, but also identify the position of each by their subtle differences. The corridors were wide but often populated with grim-faced men that Moon had no desire to brush past, much less enter into conversation with.
    The only other refuge she had—the small observation room she’d stumbled upon after that fateful meeting with Srin’s keeper—was denied to her, its transparent viewports shuttered. An identical thick metal plate also sealed the single port in her lab. More than the medium-security facility where she had been held, Moon felt like she was in a smooth, impermeable cage, unable to draw a clean breath or even envisage a way out. The only way she could keep her mind from baulking at the confinement, to keep herself distracted, was to spend most of her spare time working.
    But there were moments of introspection she could not avoid. Like now, late afternoon ship time, when she had called a rare but well-deserved day off and Srin was away doing whatever he did in his spare time when he wasn’t helping her or flirting with her.
    After her altercation with Savic, and her own cowardly musings, Moon made it a point to avoid any personal conversations with Srin, but the consequence of her decision was more painful than she could have imagined. Every two days he would greet her with friendly curiosity that soon segued into charming banter and, nine times out of ten, an invitation to dinner. Moon’s initial response was to get increasingly brusque with each rejection, until she realised that he had no idea he had already played this particular game several times over. It wasn’t his fault, yet she was punishing him for it. It made her feel terrible. The sooner she was through with her mission and divorced of him and his disturbing proximity, the better.
    At the same time she dreaded the ship’s approach to the Suzuki Mass. What if she was wrong? What if all her research came to nothing? What if there was some basic flaw in her reasoning that she couldn’t see? Would the Republic accuse her of sabotage?
    On the other hand, what if she was successful beyond her wildest imaginings? What if she could prove that she held the science to life, the secret to unlock and lay bare the field of stellar mechanics? That, too, held its own small terrors. She had fantasies of becoming the darling of the Science Directorate, of having teams of researchers working under her supervision. But during the meals she had with Drue, he had somehow intimated that success had its own problems, and that tempered her own enthusiasm.
    He had also hinted at the potential for misuse of such a powerful technology. But he never actually discussed it. Still, his subtle remarks were enough to kick start Moon’s already hair-trigger paranoia, amplified by the otherwise crushing schedule she kept.
    Surely the Republic saw that the benefits of successful stellar re-ignition greatly outweighed any other application? The Republic could be known throughout the galaxy as a midwife to life, rather than a harbinger of death. It could talk firmly about its more noble goals, rather than have its critics mutter darkly behind its back about shapeshifters, genocide and the hellhole planet of Bliss.
    But her reasoning was not as comforting as she expected. Moon got to her feet abruptly, tamping down a feeling of claustrophobia and walking over to the display panel on the wall of her cabin. With impatient fingers, she toggled through the usual variety of images, but none of them included a real-time view of what was outside. That was because they were now traversing hyperspace, that nebulous dimension outside normal space that folded distance and cut travel time into a fraction of what it would have been in normal space. Looking directly upon the chaotic nonsense of hyperspace had been known to send humans into madness.
    But that wasn’t the only danger. Although the Space Fleet vessels were the most