He dreaded the next time he might be assigned to a repair crew with Olivarri. Following their encounter, he had buried himself in his work, running ever more in-depth and increasingly aggressive scans of the Mos Hadroch, trying to get some idea of its internal structure. And yet, despite all his efforts, it remained as frustratingly opaque as ever.

He thought frequently of Nancy, of drowning himself in the taut muscular curves of her body. The more rational part of him would then like to catalogue the risks inherent in their affair, or remind him of the impossibility of it continuing after their return home. To his eternal surprise and consternation, the thought of the relationship coming to an end left him desolate.

He was still sitting there brooding half an hour later when the Mjollnir ’s primary control systems and life-support suffered a catastrophic failure, and another, more urgent, alarm began to sound.

Dakota had picked a cabin located outside the centrifuge, having spent too many years working and living in zero-gee conditions to ever really be able to sleep comfortably in gravity, simulated or otherwise. She was still lying there awake when the alarm sounded.

She instantly sat up and locked into the data-space, only to find that large parts of it had gone offline. It was like walking into a deserted house and finding that most of the doors had been locked.

A moment later she felt Lamoureaux pinging her from within the centrifuge.

<Something bad’s happened,> he sent. <Most of the physical systems just shut down, from what I can tell. Life-support, fusion reactors, bays and fabricators – none of them are responding even to basic queries.>

Do we have any idea what’s going on?

<Not yet, but I’m heading back to the bridge. Lucas was there when I left, so maybe he’ll know something. >

To her considerable alarm, the lights suddenly flickered and went out. Emergency lighting kicked in a couple of seconds later, bathing her in a blood-red light. Some data trickled in from the exterior sensor arrays: nothing out of the ordinary was taking place outside the ship, which at least ruled out an external attack.

If we can’t get the life-support back online, we’re in deep shit, Ted. This is starting to look like—

<Sabotage. I know. But don’t jump to any conclusions just yet. This isn’t the kind of thing you can pull off by just crossing a few wires here or there. Shutting down systems like these one at a time is one thing. But all at once? That takes some serious skill.>

Dakota pulled herself over to the door of her cabin and pressed her palm against its access panel. Nothing happened. She slammed the flat of her hand against it, then remembered there was a manual override accessible through a side panel.