She muttered resentfully to herself, compromising between bile and naval propriety by cursing too softly for anyone else to hear. What the hell was Harrington’s problem?! If she were only willing to give Engineering two or three days, they could design a conversion set the maintenance and repair servomechs could turn out by the gross. As it was, laying out the design and troubleshooting the servomech software would take longer than building the goddamned things by hand! The captain didn’t have to drive them this hard—and it wasn’t fair for her to take out her own frustration with Young (whatever that was about!) on them.

She stopped swearing and looked around a bit guiltily. It hadn’t exactly been fair of them to take out their resentment over the Fleet maneuvers on the captain, either, she supposed. And, she admitted unwillingly, she’d been as bad as the rest of them when it came to dragging around afterward—especially after she learned about their transfer to Basilisk Station. But still…

She flopped back in her chair and made herself draw a deep breath. All right. Fair or unfair didn’t really come into it just now. She had a problem. She could either screen the captain and tell her she couldn’t make her deadline (and that thought wasn’t at all attractive), or she could decide that she was chief engineer aboard this bucket of bolts and figure out how to solve it.

She swiveled the chair to face her terminal and began tapping keys. Okay. They couldn’t make it if they built the beacon bodies entirely from scratch, and they didn’t have time to design a new one, but… suppose they used the targeting bus from a Mark Fifty missile? If they yanked the warhead and sidewall penaids, they could jigger the sensor heads and astro packs into the empty spots—

No, wait! If they pulled the penaids, they should be able to convert the terminal guidance units from the same missiles into astro packs! That would save components all down the line, and the guidance units would just have to go into storage if they didn’t use them. The bus thrusters wouldn’t have anywhere near the endurance of a standard beacon kit, but they had power to burn, and the platforms only had to do their job for a couple of months. They weren’t going to be moving around, so they wouldn’t really need tons of endurance, either, now would they? And if she used standard components, she could use her missile maintenance mechs to do two-thirds of the work in a quarter of the time without any reprogramming at all!

Now, let’s see… If she sectioned the bus off here to clear the passive receptor arrays, then took out this panel to mate the signal booster with the main ECM emitter, then she could…

Lieutenant Commander Santos’s fingers flew over her console with gathering speed, and a whole new sensor platform took shape on her display.

“Captain Harrington?”

Honor raised her eyes from the message board in her lap. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Rafael Cardones, Venizelos’s assistant and now Fearless’s acting Tactical Officer, stood at her elbow, his painfully young face anxious.