"Then talk to me now about explosions," Nimec said. "What do you think made the LH2 pressure drop? And if it occurred in Engine Number Three, why are there fused cooling ducts in Number One? How could the identical problem simultaneously occur in at least two of the three separate engines?"

Jeremy looked to Annie, still hesitant. He was waiting to see how much she wanted to share, and would say nothing more without her okay. Nimec decided he liked him a little better for it.

"The other night I came here after everyone else was gone, just to do some thinking," Annie offered at length. "I'd had a tough day wrestling with the press and needed to get my head straight...." She trailed off a moment, then shook her head. "But that doesn't matter. What does matter is I stayed a long time. Much longer than I expected, in fact. Walking around, looking over the pieces of wreckage we'd started to assemble. When I saw this engine, I noticed that the internal damage seemed far greater than the damage to the exterior of the housing. And started ask to ask myself the same things you just asked Jeremy." She paused again, exhaled. "I've requested assistance from the Forensic Science Center in San Francisco. It's at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I don't know whether you're familiar with them--"

"They did evidence analysis on the Unabomber case, the Times Square and World Trade Center bombings in New York, probably hundreds of other investigations," Nimec said. "UpLink's had a relationship with them for years, and I've worked with them personally. The LLNL's the best group of crime detection and national security experts in the business."

She nodded. "They're sending a team of analysts with an ion-store/time-of-flight mass spectrometry instrument."

"Which means you're looking for residual by-products of a blasting material," he said. "IS/TOF-MS allows the trace-particles analysis to be done right here in this building ... avoids deterioration that can take place by transporting the sample to a lab."

"Yes."

Nimec mulled that over for a while.

"In acts of sabotage, you have to work quickly and on the sly and that's how errors are sometimes made," he said. "If you're good at destruction, you know that the way to take the possibility of a foul-up into account ... to anticipate and keep it from happening ... is to be redundant. Get your hands into three engines, though all you need is one to go bad. If I'm reading you right, then whatever made Engine Three--and maybe Engine Two--overheat was supposed to have done the same with Engine One, but didn't. Or at least not to the extent intended."

"That's a reasonable explanation, yes, if we assume a deliberate and successful effort was made to destroy Orion." Annie breathed. "We'll see what the mass spectrometry and FSC analysts give us. Meanwhile, Jeremy believes it likely there was such an effort."

"More than likely," Jeremy said. "I'd bet anything on it."