(Transient Quarters, Ceres Station)

Seamus was conflicted. Not to mention a little tired of the emotional rollercoaster, although it certainly seemed like it might be on an uphill run at the moment.

Losing the Jolene was a major blow. In the last few years he'd touched every system on the old girl, rebuilt some of them, maintained the rest. He damned near knew every circuit by name. Now it felt like he should be mourning the dead.

He'd still been trying to deal with that loss when the Company decided they didn't want to retain a crew who'd lost a ship, regardless of the fact that the crew hadn't done a damned thing wrong. They'd done everything they could - more than could be reasonably expected really - but that didn't matter to shareholders or board members. Apparently Above and Beyond wasn't listed in the Company's accounting codes.

Then, just when it looked like the universe was intent on mining some new strata below rock bottom, a lifeline suddenly dropped out of the sky. And what a lifeline. A new ship, new tech, new and exciting opportunities.

If he were a more pessimistic sort of guy, Seamus thought he might start thinking things like "too good to be true" or something about catches.

"Sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?"

OK, so Erica was pessimist enough for the both of them. That's why they worked so well together. That and he could fit in places the stocky Io-born woman would never be able to reach.

"Sorry Miss Douglas," replied Doctor Eastman, "I'm not sure there is one. Things might be a little stressful while we shake down the ship, and I imagine you'll be very busy for a while. Will that do?"

The Doc was charming when he wanted to be, and he clearly had a handle on people. Not a trait one necessarily associated with science types. Before this trip the only scientists Seamus had met had seemed a lot less socially aware and tended much more towards arrogant than assured.

"We've never been afraid of a little work, Doc. But you're building a ship and you don't even have your engineering crew picked out? That's a little odd if you don't mind me saying so."

"Not at all Mister Henderson. The ship design is a minor modification, and we had expected to need a few months of testing before the new drive was to be installed. Our recent... adventure has brought our timing forward a little."

Seamus was well aware of the problems that "minor modifications" could cause, but equally aware that people like the Doc were far too likely to be oblivious. Exactly the sort of situation that needed people like Erica and himself.

A less charitable person might be starting to question the providence of the situation... so before Erica could do just that Seamus responded.

"Let's skip the fact that you should have had your engineers involved in the original design. You need us now, that's for sure."

Of course it wasn't completely his decision. He turned to the Captain.

"It's up to you Captain, but I'm for it."

Technically once the notice came through it was every sophont for themselves, but who wanted to break in a whole new crew? Sticking together made sense, at least until something happened to change that.

The Captain was clearly considering the offer but had opened it up for discussion amongst the crew rather than making a unilateral decision. So far there hadn't been any real objections.

"Anyone else?" Captain Corwin briefly scanned the rest of the crew, finally resting on the slight frown Seamus could see hanging on Paul Desmond's face. "Paul?"

"It's a bit rushed, Captain. It sounds good, but I'm going to want to read the fine print before we sign."

The Doctor laughed at that, clearly pleased. "Mister Desmond, if you didn't read the fine print I wouldn't let you sign. In fact I suggest you get a good employment lawyer. If you've never worked for a research company before it just wouldn't be fair to you otherwise."

It took a couple of days for the Company to officially notify them of the pending termination of their contract. By then the crew had decided to accept Doctor Eastman's offer of employment and the Captain had hired an employment lawyer to conduct the negotiations.

In the meantime, Erica and Seamus had arranged to inspect the new ship as "consulting engineers." Even that had taken half a day to arrange since the inevitable NDA contract had to be vetted and signed. Apparently because research companies have a deep and abiding passion for bureaucracy.

Eventually the pair of engineers were admitted to the shipyard to conduct a first review. They spent some time with the yard's engineers and operators, all of whom had feedback on the design and construction. The foreman of the job - an older woman with her head shaved to reveal a set of rigger's implants - was happy to open up over coffee.

"Look, kid. I don't know who designed these mods, but they're shit."

Sadly, Seamus had to agree. Not with the 'kid' crack, but it looked like...

"They grabbed a standard design and just moved some stuff around to make room for their toys."

Yeah, like that. Damnit, people really needed to stop speaking his thoughts before he had even finished them.

"How bad is it going to be to fix it? How far along are you?"

"Most of the way. I've held off on a few of the stupider bits, so we've got some wiggle room. What did you have in mind?"

Seamus moved to sit at a workstation, transferred the design to it and got to work.

Designing a ship turned out to be a lot of fun.

(Charis Research Group offices, Ceres Station)

"They want to do what?"

In over thirty years Ted had faced this kind of situation numerous times. You didn't get far in science - any real science - without learning a lot about internal politics. That didn't make it more palatable, but it did help him keep a calm demeanour.

"It's a minor re-design Richard, nothing major. Apparently the yard manager has been trying to point out some of the issues in the design since we started work on the ship."

"The architect who designed the ship came highly recommended."

Oh, an architect. Presumably a cheap architect, although people tended to pay a lot more for work by a suitably impressive title. From what Mister Henderson had said the design was not only poorly done but was almost entirely based on a commonly available ship model. And Director Simms had probably signed off on it personally.

"Well apparently he didn't do a very good job. Our new engineers have been over it with the yard manager and they've come up with some changes that should improve the situation." He held up a hand to forestall the Director's objections. "The extra costs are minor, and much less than the re-design would have been after the fact. The original wouldn't have worked with the new field generators anyway. Now we'll have room for them."

That helped drain most of the outrage from the Director's expression.

"Fine. What about this crew then? How are the negotiations going?"

Nobody died yet, at least. Ted thought to himself.

"Well enough. Once HR met with their lawyer it all got very cordial. Honestly, do they all have to be such vampires?"

"Ian is just doing his job. You know how it is."

"Indeed." From Ted's experience that meant a lot of suffering and occasional litigation. And that was just the hiring process. "However, the negotiations appear to be going well. They're a good crew, they're worth the effort. Much moreso than whatever group of individuals we would have gotten otherwise."

"So you've said. Apparently the engineer know what he's doing at least."

"They both do. A lot of the re-design work was completed by Miss Douglas." After challenging one of the engineers to a drinking contest, apparently. Interesting woman, that one.

(Transient Accommodations, Ceres Station)

Corwin was reading the contract's fine print. Again. Fortunately it had all been annotated by the employment lawyer they'd hired, so it wasn't as hard a task as it could have been. There had already been several changes to remove particularly nasty little time bombs from it.

The door chimed, giving him a good excuse to put the damned contract down for the moment. When he opened the door, he found Paul waiting outside, face locked down in that way he had when something was wrong.

"Come in, Paul. Have a seat."

"Thanks Captain. I have some... interesting news."

Paul's words were harmless enough, but the tapping of hand against thigh signalled something much more to Corwin. Company Code, designed to allow them to hold secret conversations in public or when they might be observed. Must be something serious to make Paul resort to a covert communication method that neither of them were particularly fluent in.

For the next few minutes they chatted about a few things, none of them important or particularly new. The important part of the conversation was non-verbal and discrete. Since neither Paul nor Corwin had practiced much the method it took a while, but by the time Paul got up to leave Corwin had gotten the message.

Paul had found something while trying to recover anything that could be salvaged from the damaged storage locker and done some investigation. He needed someone with more engineering knowledge to confirm his suspicions, but it looked very much like a bomb had gone off in the locker.

Roses for Jolene had been sabotaged. They were never supposed to make it to Ceres.

"Thanks for visiting Paul. I needed a break from all this contract stuff. Would you do me a favour and see how Seamus is getting on?"

Paul probably didn't need to be told to keep Erica away from this.

Still, it never hurt to be clear:

"Sure thing Boss."

(Shipyard, Ceres Station)

Seamus was enjoying himself immensely. Working on the ship with Janice Gordon was a whole new experience. Not only did she have the best toys, but she'd been doing interesting things in engineering before Seamus' parents had even met. After their first round of changes had been authorized by the Company, they'd gone on to make a few more alterations.

Seamus had spent a few hours with the Doctors discussing the details and had come up with a whole slew of alterations - mostly minor ones, but they added up. Janice had taken one look at his ideas and called him a few rather unflattering names, then sat down at her workstation and fixed them.

"Look, kid," she'd said after a few minutes pulling out his changes, "you can't just run a power conduit through the frame like that. What happens when this doohickey farts and pulls a couple megawatts? You ever hear of inductive heating? You're gonna warp the whole left quadrant of the forward frame a handful of microns, then you lose the rigidity of the whole nose section."

OK, yeah, when she put it like that... it was pretty obvious.

"So we cage it. Put some SC shielding along that section. That solves the heating, right?"

"Yeah... or you could just pull your head out of your ass and do it right."

Janice had a real caustic way of pointing out Seamus' shortfalls in the designs. He wondered if she was some sort of advance warning on how Erica might go. Maybe if Erica spent the next thirty years refining her bitch act?

Meanwhile Janice was re-routing the proposed conduit through one of the backup life support ducts.

"This duct is mostly plastic with a little metal around the junctions and supports. We insulate those and switch out the duct material for a high temperature silicon polymer, no problem. Better yet," she pulled the whole duct system out and started running it again, swapping the path with Seamus' suggested power conduit route. "There. Backup LS flow will be down a couple points, but now we have room for a central 'tronics crawlway."

Maybe somebody from the crew had been talking to Janice, or maybe she just had lots of experience with crawling through a ship. Probably the latter, actually. Nobody on the crew came in here. Erica was busy wrestling components with the construction engineers and nobody else had any reason to come down.

Whatever the case, it was a good idea. They spent a few more minutes working on the other changes before Janice was happy with it all. They were still wrangling over internal access to the field generator ("doohickey" according to Janice) bays when Paul Desmond walked in.

(Dry Dock #3, Ceres Shipyard)

Paul hung back and watched as Seamus inspected the storage locker. The few undamaged articles had been removed leaving a depressingly large collection of damaged and destroyed items. Since the dock itself was away from the rotating sections of the station there was none of the centripetal acceleration the rest of Ceres used for gravity, leaving the debris to float nearly motionless in the vacuum.

They'd had to suit up to examine the site, but that worked out better for their chances of secrecy. Paul had even managed to get Seamus to run a thin communications tether between the suits so they could talk with zero emissions.

"Yeah, definitely an internal explosion." Seamus had reached that conclusion even before breaking out his scanners. "No idea what was supposed to be in that space, but from the residuals I'd say it had a few grams of antimatter." He swept an arm towards the destroyed bulkhead. "Obviously placed where it could do the most damage."

"OK, so someone got in and planted an AM charge."

"Maybe. Maybe not. Not a lot of evidence left in here to go by, but it could have been delivered a number of ways. If it was me? I'd have a crawler drone with an AM pack. Get it on board, work through the ducts until it was in position then wait for the signal."

Basically untraceable then. Wonderful.

"However they did it, they knew what to hit. Back of that panel - what's left of that panel - was one of the main power distribution junctions. It's a design flaw I've been working on for a while now."

"What kind of flaw?"

"Original design? That junction supplies primary power to the AM containment field. Damage that junction just right - about the way it is right now - and you get a hell of a pulse through the containment field coils. Containment fails, shooting about fifty kilos of pure AM into the reactor housing. And good night sweet prince."

So not just an inconvenient extra bit of damage then. This was a solid shot at not just killing them but scattering the ship over a sizeable portion of the solar system.

"Yeah, I'd say that was a pretty serious oversight in the design. Now explain why it didn't happen that way."

Seamus chuckled a bit at that. "Remember all that extra time I've been spending 'fiddling around' in the reactor bay the last few stops? I finally figured a way to reconfigure the power distribution to the AM storage fields."

Paul remembered. He'd been giving Seamus a hard time about it for a couple of months because it had eaten into his other duties. Erica had taken up the slack mostly, with a few minor exceptions.

"Fine, fine. I'll stop bitching about the coffee machine. Just don't let Erica near it again."

"Don't worry Paul. New ship, new kitchen gadgets. Gotta love that new appliance smell."

Of course Paul was worried, and he could hear the stress underlying Seamus's banter. Suddenly Paul wasn't so keen to make light of things.

"I'm going to keep worrying, Seamus. It's what I do when someone is trying to kill me."

"If it helps, it probably wasn't personal."

"How do you figure?" Paul was pretty quick on the uptake, but Seamus had clearly figured something out that Paul hadn't arrived at yet.

"We're boring. Stevedores, truck drivers. Delivery boys and girls." Seamus turned to look Paul in the eye, expression bleak. "We just happened to be carrying something worth killing over."

If he wasn't wearing a pressure suit he'd face-palm. It had felt personal, so he'd let his attention be captured by the personal aspect. Of course the crew weren't worth this kind of effort.

Funny how that didn't make it feel any better.

"Yeah, sucks to feel like a background character in a murder mystery doesn't it." Seamus stowed the scanner and moved towards the hatchway. "Don't worry though. I'm not going to make sure nothing like this happens to our new ride."