He studied his personal logs of the tests he had run on the artefact, and in them found inexplicable gaps. He was by nature a meticulous record-keeper, going so far as to date and time-stamp even his personal observations and thoughts on the tests he ran. But the more he dug, the more he discovered periods where the logs and his own memory now clearly disagreed. He found no records of certain procedures on days when he would have sworn that they had been carried out, but the more he tried to recall the specific details of what had taken place, the more his memory failed him.

Ty experienced a cold tightness in his chest when he discovered that these inexplicable blank spots displayed their greatest frequency around the time of Olivarri’s murder.

He sat for a long time, his right hand splayed on the surface of a greyed-out console, the data-ring on his index finger gleaming dully in the low light of the laboratory. Then he activated the console and, from the lab’s dedicated fabricator, ordered up a dozen micro-surveillance cameras with broad-spectrum capability. The request would be logged, and he might have difficulty explaining it if it was ever questioned, but that was another risk he was willing to take.

The cameras were manufactured within the hour, whereupon he spent the afternoon positioning the tiny devices in dark and secluded corners of the lab where he was sure they couldn’t be spotted at a casual glance.

A short time later, Ty found himself back out on the hull as part of another repair shift. He watched Corso drill a hole into the hull itself with a custom-made mechanism he had ordered up from the fabs. The frigate was bathed in the ruby light of dozens of young stars shrouded in nebulae that marked the nearest edge of the Perseus Arm. It was a tremendous spectacle but, after nearly twelve straight hours on EVA, nobody was in a mood for star-gazing.

Once the plate-like Meridian field-generator had been plugged into the hull, Corso stepped back, allowing Lamoureaux room. Ted squatted beside it, laying the flat of one gloved hand on its slightly convex surface. A moment later, a flickering dome of light flared into life around them, which had to be at least fifty metres across.

‘All right, I guess that’s the last one for today,’ Lamoureaux announced over the shared comms, fatigue reducing his voice to a dull monotone. The field shut off once more as he stood upright again.

‘How much longer before we get the last one into place?’ asked Corso.

‘If we can keep to our schedule, it’ll be another two days before the last of them is fitted to the hull,’ Lamoureaux replied. ‘With the spider-mechs doing a lot of the prep-work, we can speed things up, but we’re still going to have to spend some time calibrating them.’

‘And how long is that going to take?’