Eric Aichele yawned expansively. This time it was completely unintentional.

He was paired with the same two young ladies for this watch, but all three of them were more listless than the previous night. There was none of the casual conversation that they had enjoyed before. In fact, there was little more than the bare minimum speech required for completing their work. That was not so out of place for Amber Sullivan, but represented a drastic change for the garrulous Crystal Giannini.

When their shift ended, all three returned to Engineering to report on their work. None of them made an audible farewell, only an exchange of nods before heading to either the mess or straight to their bunks.

Aichele opted for food first, but simply grabbed three of the waiting sandwiches from the platter Green had prepared and began consuming them on his way back to his quarters.

Aichele found his quarters as he had left them. Exactly as he had left them, noting that none of his three telltales had been disturbed in his absence. One of these warning signs was electronic rather than physical, and it indicated that the surreptitious surveillance feeds still had not been activated back in the suite of rooms that had housed Pathfinder's security team.

Losing his former bunk in the security suite had turned out to be a step up for him. He and Burton had shared a common squad room which was designed for four occupants, but with little in the way of luxuries or privacy. With only a couple of dozen people on a ship that was originally designed to hold eighty or a hundred people, he now found himself quartered in a four-bunk room all his own. The community head was adjoining the bunk room and was just as private.

That was good, both for personal and professional reasons. It certainly made it possible to skulk around the ship without anyone being the wiser.

All three of the sandwiches were gone before Aichele had undressed, and he briefly considered going back for more. It was a brief thought because he immediately decided it was a good one, and he followed the thought to its conclusion. This time he grabbed water and two desserts as well. Both of those items could be stored for later, and he berated himself for not having a store of emergency supplies handy in case he needed to hide himself on the ship at some point.

With his caloric needs met by the five sandwiches plus one of the desserts, he peeled out of his work overalls, socks, shoes, and skivvies and bundled all of them into the chute. There was a clean set in the return slot, which he tossed on an empty bunk so the system wouldn't wake him when the fresh ones tried to return and found the opening blocked.

A piping hot shower relaxed him but the forty plus hours on his feet started gnawing at his consciousness before he was done. His body was exhausted, and his mind was not as clear as he needed it to be, so sleep was a necessity he could not postpone much longer. Still, he couldn't allow himself as much as he would like.

Since there was no alarm raised during his work shift, no one was looking for a saboteur yet. Once it was noticed, it would take almost no time to figure out that the damage had been done from the rear, and the logical leap from there would be that the air circulation system had been the means of approach.

Once that was known, it would no longer be safe to use that means of transport. Aichele could not afford to sit back and wait for the other side to catch on to what he was doing. He needed to take advantage of the free travel pass he currently enjoyed to cause as much damage as he could. He also needed to do things that would not be noticed immediately.

So, he had more plans for tonight. But not right away.

He climbed into his bunk and set his chrono to wake him in 34 minutes. Not all of the things taught in basic training are of the obvious "how to fight" sort. One of these was going to come in quite handy in the coming weeks, Eric predicted.

He mentally recited the poem he'd learned way back then, and had never heard anywhere else. The hypnotic programming activated and Eric Aichele fell immediately into REM sleep. Thirty-three minutes was the time Aichele's mind took to complete a full cycle, and the quiet chime from his wrist had no trouble bringing him back to full wakefulness.

He felt refreshed as he rose and pulled out his old Marine fatigues. He knew the feeling was deceptive and he couldn't fool his body indefinitely, but it was certainly better than having his mind and reflexes dulled by fatigue. And lying down to get a nice comfortable sleep while there was urgent work to do simply wasn't an option.

He checked the video bug one more time before standing on his bunk and launching back into the constrictive ducting. The expected claustrophobia attacked, and he threw it back and lashed it into its proper place before moving on. He headed the opposite direction from the last night's excursion, heading to port first.

He had a target in mind already, one which was both more conveniently located and should have been the first target on his list all along. His top priority had to be to keep Pathfinder out of the hands of whoever Teach was working for. In order for Teach and the other traitors to give the ship to anyone, they would have to jump it out of the Antoc system. No exit gate was in existence here, so no one would be coming here after it.

It followed, then, that the jump system should have been his first target. Especially since it would be a target not likely to show any damage until they were ready to try using it, and that might still be two or three weeks, at the current rate the repairs were being completed.

He still had to climb up and over the boat bay, but his destination was just behind the port stairwell at the front end of the engineering section's upper level. With his practice moving through the shafts and the shorter distance, it was only a little over an hour until he arrived, six hours before he had to report for duty again.

Eric dropped silently to the floor of the unoccupied jump engine control room. He went quickly to the door and tried it. Already locked.

Perfect.

He had no more primacord, so he did things the hard way, opening up the console and disconnecting crucial circuit pathways. A short here, a clipped wire there. Some were random, since he didn't have the schematics memorized, but others were very specific.

He took his time, working silently, and when he was done, there was no visible sign that anything had changed. He had even rewritten the internal programming so that running a system diagnostic, either remotely from the bridge or engineering control or locally from the machinery itself, would show that all systems were working to specification. No one was likely to notice anything was amiss until they tried to power up the jump engines themselves.

That completed, he headed back into the air vent and retraced his path to his quarters. The trick he had played on his body to make it believe it had slept more than it had began to come apart with the enormous strain of descending back down to the main level on the other side of the boat bay. He was again filthy, shaky, and sweating when he climbed back into his own room, but he still had over an hour to clean up and slip in another sleep cycle.

His last thought before reciting more poetry to himself was that he was going to be really short on sleep if no one caught on to what he was doing.

Another of life's mixed blessings, he drowsed.