She shifted in and out of consciousness for a day. Her eyes would flicker open, she would feel her broken bones, know that blood still covered her form, then she would slip back into nothingness.
But every time she fluttered her eyes open, she felt stronger, and her attention lasted.
She was healing. The power reflecting off the core was sustaining her, repairing the enormous damage she had wrought upon her form, and re-energizing her all-but-gone energy stores.
Ideally she would have liked to push herself right into the core. To have found some way to access it.
The energies would not have ripped her apart. Unlike the robot and the winds and everything else on Orion Minor, the core would have helped, not tried to kill her.
She, of course, had not been able to access it though. She was in a service duct close enough that the energy still reached her, but actually plunging into the core would probably have kicked so many safety protocols that she would have been instantly discovered.
Which was a fact that was slowly dawning on Alice as she came around again.
She had not been discovered. She was still lying in exactly the same position.
No one had found her. She had not been dragged away.
Fixing her attention on the top of the service duct again, she watched the rippling light that pushed its way through the core beyond.
There was probably ten meters of reinforced hull between her and the core, and yet that incredible energy field still impregnated into the metal, shifting out as far as it could.
Alice had been forced to break through almost 15 security fields to get this far into the service duct and this close to the engine.
She could see one of them now as she lolled her head to the other side. It flickered a bright blue.
She stared at it with dull eyes and an attention that was drawn thin by fatigue.
She could feel unconsciousness claiming her again. This time she didn't fight it. She smiled up at the ceiling. The glow of the omidium core shifting over and encasing the tunnel, she let it do its magic.
She took whatever energy she could, and Alice healed.