They did not pause once they had the materials at the bottom of the hold. After John had resealed the hold from prying eyes, they cracked open the crates and began stacking the big super-conducting armor plates ready to carry them to the six main missile silos. From the bottom of the hold, a long, spinal corridor could be accessed through thick, steel doors that ran almost the length of the ship. It was through this strictly controlled access way that the ship’s vast arsenal passed outward from the loading bays, moved on pulleys that hung from railings running along the roof of the dark hallway.

“Can I suggest,” said John, being careful not appear patronizing, “that you let me carry all the plates to the various silos while you start removing the bolts on the nose cones of the forward SLAMs. I’ll hack each of the access hatches and disable the cameras and then we should be able to move about pretty much un-noticed down here.”

Ship Launched Anti-ballistic Missiles, or SLAMs, had to be one of the greatest military acronyms ever coined. But Jack was not thinking of such things as he looked at the Agent. Jack had been a college football player before he had become a pilot, and he had never experienced the sense of being utterly outclassed by someone, physically. It was not a pleasant sensation, but nor was it a particularly useful one either, he thought as he set such considerations aside. Jack knew that his strength was like a child’s when compared to the Agent in front of him and he was not too proud to admit that his time was better spent wielding a power driver than trying to maneuver the huge boxes around the ship.

Jack nodded his agreement to the plan, unable to come up with much more enthusiasm than that, and with that John picked up one of the six huge stacks he had piled up and turned the corridor that led aft. They walked off, stepping through several bulkheads where the corridor could be sealed in case of a breach. Three times John had to put the stack down to type in a complex code into another armored door, red lights spinning ominously above his head as he hacked the system and temporarily disabled the ship’s advanced security. Once they were completely done, he would check one last time that their movements had been completely removed from the records and then he would send his programs to hibernation once more, leaving no evidence that either Jack or John had ever been in the weapons hold.