Following behind him was a stocky man of medium height who was in his mid-forties; he wore a lab coat, the name 'J. Cowan' embroidered onto the breast pocket. Cowan walked with a mild limp and was slightly shorter than the Colonel.

No sooner had they entered the room than everyone seated at the table got to their feet. Half the room stood at attention, and the rest stood casually, differentiating the civilian workers and their military counterparts. A faint nod of the Colonel's head was all they needed to sit down and return to work.

Fitch took out a pair of glasses, slipped them on, and quickly scanned the clipboard he held. “Okay, tell me what went wrong with those two systems,” he demanded. Again requesting the information he had asked for over the intercom when his team had been suited up in the chamber.

After a brief pause, a short-haired Asian man in a lab coat spoke up, a slight quiver in his voice when he spoke. “Sir, I've been reviewing the data from Capsule Ten. Sometime last year an unexpected hardware failure occurred in the primary cooling system. Three seconds after the failure, the backup system engaged. Since then it has been running without a problem. Just to remind everyone, there is also a third tier in this system, an auxiliary cooling system that comes online if the two other systems failed. This auxiliary system has never engaged and appears to be completely functional. It looks like the built-in fault tolerance worked exactly as we had hoped.”

“No, Lieutenant,” Cowan snapped, “that isn't how we had hoped it would work. That primary cooling system was supposed to be able to operate, unsupervised for twenty years. Now you're telling me that it only lasted four years into this five-year test.”

Colonel Fitch nodded in agreement.

The Lieutenant opened his mouth to respond but seeing the look on his superiors' faces, decided against it.

“Now will someone tell me what killed Miller?” the Colonel demanded. There was more frustration in his voice than anger.