Another little gift for those readers who keep asking what happened to Cathrine...
"Cathrine let out her pent up breath. Aside from the sound of her panting, the small closed space of the crash pod was dead silent. _Ah! The crash pod has sealed..._ Her thoughts formed slowly in the gray mental fog. That meant... something, something important...
A stinging sensation grew on the right side of her head and something wet trickled down the scalp over her right ear. She reached up, joggling something large and round in her lap. Her fingers came away from her head damp and slightly sticky.
Small squares of dim light appeared in a scattered arc before her like a well-ordered constellation. A small fan clicked on and Cathrine took a deep breath. "That's right," she blinked at the scattered lights of her control panels, "I'm in a crash pod. I was in the High Victory's Command and Control room."
Slumped against the right side of the pod, she sat up and the weight shifted in her lap again. She looked down. Appearing almost gray in the dim light, her fingers had left two streaks of blood smeared across the white plastic of her crash helmet. She turned it. A quarter of it had been sheared off in a smooth straight line running in an upward arc from the bottom front left corner, over the top, then plunging down to the bottom right back side where the base of her skull would be if she were wearing it. "