The conversation came back to him as the alarm sounded in his pod. Red light dominated the control board and most of the warning lights were flashing yellow. “Frigging engineers,” he muttered. He heard a control jet fire uselessly somewhere in behind him. The chunk of asteroid he was stuck to was too big and the jets too small to have an appreciable effect on velocity. The spin was too much.

He hadn’t seen the giant rock until it was too late. How such a large body had escaped his notice was a mystery, but the second he saw it he had mumbled an escape pattern. The computer had instead launched straight into the asteroid. The peaked edge that had struck the visplate had pierced right through it. The nanobots that maintained hull integrity had built a seal microseconds later, but in this case, that had merely attached the pod to the asteroid more completely.

Now he was stuck in the rock’s spin. The movement made him sick, and he threw up in his suit. The sound activated a motor somewhere in the vehicle.