Rimrunners by C. J. Cherryh

zags going God knew how far back.
    Oh, shit! she thought. And Fitch shoved her inside, and shut the door.
    She searched beside it with her hands, found a number of switches. None of them
    worked. No com in here that she could feel. No power to anything, not even
    ventilation, so far as she could hear. The master switch had to be cut off from
    ops.
    She leaned back against the wall of lockers facing the entry, did a fast mental
    sort, in the total dark, what the orientation was, where the ship-axis was—
    What Fitch had said—a problem. She was a problem.
    Like Fitch was damn pissed about her, but Fitch didn't seem to be onto her as
    one of Mazian's. Fitch might not know anything beyond the fact of a new-hire the
    captain wanted hauled out of the station brig and dumped into a secure place
    aboard.
    Wolfe himself might not know.
    God, if, if there was any chance of getting out of here, if there was any chance
    a spook ship was that desperate for crew—
    She braced one boot tentatively against the door opposite to see if there was
    the right amount of room. Just about.
    After a long time she heard the take-hold.
    And there was no going back from here, live or die. She knew that, knew that
    better than the station lawyer could ever say it.
    You held on, that was all, just held on, braced the best way you could, fair
    chance—fair chance that son of a bitch had given her, the kind of a safe-hole
    you used if you got caught by a take-hold in a long corridor, narrow space, a
    place to wedge in: and after the shocks of Loki's oversized engines firing and
    after the slam of force that tried to float your kidneys through your stomach
    and a second one that bashed a sore skull against a metal locker, you just
    clenched your teeth and tried to stay braced and keep from slipping, because if
    you got pushed off center you could spend a real uncomfortable ride; and if you
    slipped off to the left you could fall a long, long way.
    And when Loki finally smoothed out into a steady one G plus push, you just lay
    on the face of the lockers that were going to be the deck for a while and kept
    your foot braced, in case, in case of God-knew-what.
    Eventually Fitch would get somebody down here. Eventually somebody would get
    around to it before the ship went jump. Somebody would get the drugs you had to
    have in hyperspace, without which you were good as dead.
    Without which you had no grip on where you were and you had no way back again,
    no way to process what the mind and the senses had no way to get hold of.
    It was one way to get rid of a problem. All it took was a little screw-up in
    orders. And there was no com in here.
    Somebody remember I'm down here, dammit!
    She risked her skull to try the switches again, overhead this time. Nothing. The
    acceleration dragged at her arms, made her dizzy, made her knees weak. She lay
    down and braced one foot up against the door again.
    Calm, she told herself. They'd get around to it. A ship heading for jump was
    damned busy, that was all. Matter of priorities. Somebody like Fitch didn't trek
    all the way up to station ops to get a skut out of the brig only to scramble her
    brain for good and all in some fucking official screw-up.
    Couldn't do that.
    God—get somebody down here!
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 7
    « ^ »
    She heard the latch give, and she moved, rolled across the uneven surface of the
    lockers and staggered for her knees as the hatch opened and light flooded in—a
    man was standing astride the doorway, which was the way the stowage was oriented
    since the sort-out, a pit of unguessed depth in its zigzag contours.
    It wasn't Fitch. "Up," the man said, and she pulled herself to her feet, tried
    to use the door-edges beside her for a ladder up to the deck level, but the
    edges were shallow and her own weight dragged at her.
    He reached down and grabbed her chained hands, she climbed and he pulled, and
    landed her over the rim onto the floor. She would have been happy just to lie
    there and breathe