Lieutenant Neil Lamont, Astrogation Officer for WNS Pathfinder, seethed as he stepped to the hatch outside the XO's cabin. Less than three hours before, Lamont had been subjected to public humiliation for a trifling offense. Who cared if their course was off by a few thousandth of a degree? It wasn't as if they were in a shipping lane. It wasn't as if there was another ship within a light-decade.

But now he was going to do something about it.

He tapped on the hatch frame and waited for permission. Commander Edward Teach, the ship's Executive Officer, said, "Enter," concurrent with his unsealing the airtight door. The younger man did as he was directed, finding and occupying the only remaining seat. Lt. Commander Katherine Leung sat across the work table from the new arrival, her Asian features calm and self-possessed.

"Well, we've only got a couple of things I think we need to cover, so let's get right to it," Teach began once Lamont was seated.

"I hope one of those things is how we're going to eliminate Brighton," Lamont added hotly. Leung's calm expression died as she leaned back from the table and rolled her eyes.

"We can't do it that way, Neil. We've gone over this a hundred times. We can't kill anyone," Commander Teach said to the young astrogator. "We have to maintain the moral high ground."

This isn't about morality, Lamont thought. This is about you being too weak to do what is necessary. And it is necessary.

"We need to be sure that he can't stop us. Some of the crew will follow him. You've seen how some of them are with him. And Chowdhury scares me," Lamont said with a shiver. "If she thinks there is a chance to 'save' him she will move heaven and earth to do it. He needs to be beyond saving. All we need to do is make it look like an accident."

Leung shook her head, though whether that meant she disagreed with the lieutenant was not clear. Lamont thought that she did agree with him, but she had to be getting as tired of the argument as Lamont himself was. He and Teach had been having this same argument every day for the last three weeks, with only occasional injections from Leung. "Neil, we have made our plan. It is already in motion. We will have control of the ship the day after tomorrow. We set him down on A3 and that is the end of it. Most won't even know anything has happened," Teach added.

"You don't really believe that, do you? He hardly ever leaves the bridge now, so the bridge crew will know. They won't keep it quiet unless they are all gone, too," he said with a condescending sneer. Teach reacted immediately to the tone of his voice, stiffening his spine in his seat, though Lamont was unaware of his own offense.

Leung saw it, though, and stepped in to keep this meeting from turning into another shouting match. "Just tell me that you got the communication logs cleared of those incoming transmissions," she said. "If Brighton or Chowdhury see those, we're done for."

Teach cut in, his temper efficiently distracted by the new thread of discussion. "I don't know why they had to risk another communication at this late date. They didn't actually change our meeting, or give us anything new."

Leung fielded the question, grateful that it had worked, "They just wanted reassurance that we were still on schedule, I think."

"Yeah, they're clear," Lamont said, answering the original question, then seemed to hesitate. He peered up with his face turned half away. "I'm not sure that they're completely clean, though," he admitted in a near mumble and ran his fingers through his crew cut blond hair.

"What does that mean?" Teach exploded. So much for the best laid plans of mice and Chief Engineers, Leung thought.

"He caught me with a course correction while I was trying to clean the log, and I had to dump the whole thing. It's gone, but I don't know whether there are other traces."

"For crying out loud, Neil! You said that you could pull this off without a trace," Teach complained, jumping to his feet. His anger, never far from the surface, was again visible in his dark eyes.

"I sure didn't get any help from you up there, did I?" Lamont said, standing and leaning into Teach's glare. "You could have at least pulled his attention off of me for a few minutes. You know that those files can only be accessed from the bridge, so you also knew I had to be busy with them when he started shouting. This is just as much your fault as mine."

"That is enough!" Leung yelled, finally reaching her own breaking point. "The walls aren't that thick here. Keep it down. Do you want Chowdhury down here to see what's going on?"

The two men both stopped abruptly and turned to look at the door, expecting the armed Marine to enter at any moment.

"That is enough," she repeated in a quieter tone, once it was clear that the other two were going to be reasonable. "Sit down, both of you, and let's figure out where to go from here. It doesn't matter how we got here, let's deal with it."

"We can't kill anyone. Nobody," Teach repeated, as if he were unable to let go of his favorite dispute.

"That is a given," Leung said, still trying desperately to act as peacemaker. "But Neil is right, too. We need to find a way to neutralize him."

"And we already know the best way to do that," Lamont said with determination as he stood and left the compartment without warning.

Neil stormed down the mostly deserted corridor, headed aft. The few souls he passed braced to attention and saluted, but he ignored them. They knew better than to fail to salute just the same. He had made sure of that in the past, even if some of the other officers did not insist on that courtesy. He had never understood why they didn't. How could you maintain discipline if you did not remind those beneath you of the proper order of things?

Lamont passed out of the forward section of the ship into the boat bay, which also doubled as the storage area. All of the spare parts and nonperishable supplies were housed in the cargo holds that lined both walls. It was a hike of more than ninety meters to reach the hatch to Engineering. He slipped inside unobserved. Young was in charge of the section this watch, but he and the others on duty must be in some other area. It didn't surprise Neil at all. Engineering took up a third of the ship, though a good portion of that cubage was to house the actual drive emitters, and no human was going in there while the drive fields were active.

The room Lamont was headed for was just starboard of the hatch he had entered, and its back wall was the bulkhead that separated Engineering from the boat bay. Once inside and the hatch closed, he reached back and dogged the seal on the inside. The room itself was not large. A workbench occupied the entirety of the right wall. Since it was just after shift change, the tools were all organized and placed in their proper racks. He barely glanced that direction, though; his goal was a large cabinet in the back left corner.

He entered his bridge officer's code into the keypad, waited for the snikt of the lock disengaging, and then swung both doors wide. Each door held two different kinds of personal weapons along with the ammunition or power packs that fitted each. Pathfinder had four such small arms lockers in addition to the main armory in the security suite, but this one was the most isolated.

Lamont ignored the hand guns and reached into the cabinet itself, selecting several fist-sized objects from the bottom shelf. He could only fit four in his tunic pockets without allowing the top one to poke out, so he would need to make a number of trips to be thorough. That item collected, he walked across the room to the tool sets and grabbed one of the electrician's kits before heading back out, around the corner and back into the hangar.

No one was about, which suited Lamont perfectly. He went straight to the nearest of the life boats, pod nine, and opened his tool kit. He carefully unsealed the cover of the control pad and bridged two specific circuits. He opened the access door next, and made sure that the status indicator did not change. Had he not jumpered the control circuit first, a red light would have appeared at the Environmental station on the bridge, and someone would have been sent to investigate.

Once inside with the hatch closed, he realized that he had not thought everything through as well as he had believed. The current plan was to take Brighton off the ship, place him in a life pod, and drop him off on Antoc-A3. Once he was gone, Commander Teach would again be the captain, and they could work at their leisure to remove anyone who wouldn't go along with stealing the ship away from Warner and selling it to Forrest.

Now, Lamont was going to modify that plan by leaving a bomb on any pod that launched and setting it to go off after they were safely out of the system. Brighton, and anyone else they needed to kick off the ship, would then be unable to raise any kind of alarm, ever.

He suddenly realized, though, that there were two items he hadn't thought about. First, A3 was too close. Brighton would land there before Pathfinder was likely to jump out of the system. If the pod exploded before it reached the planet, Teach and Leung would know what he had done. If he set the bomb to go off after Pathfinder was gone, the pod would have landed, and would most likely be empty of its occupants.

The second problem was going to be with the bomb itself. If the device was going to have a long delay, likely seven or eight days to be on the safe side, it needed to be put somewhere that no one on the pods would notice it, or they could just disarm it.

He wasn't certain what to do about the second problem, but he did have an idea for the first. The guidance and propulsion systems in a life boat were rudimentary, to say the least. Once he had the mainframe access open and the diagnostic terminal connected, he opened the files containing the scanning and astrogation subroutines. He rewrote several of the database files so that it was no longer programmed to seek out the nearest habitable planet, but rather, based on his knowledge of this system, head on a course that would take it nowhere at all.

In order to make sure no one fixed his problem later, he wiped the databases completely, leaving only his course directives to guide the little ship. There was no way for anyone to scan or look up the configuration of the star system now. That information was gone. He copied his work to his personal pad to avoid having to repeat his work in the next lifeboat.

Satisfied, he looked about the cabin to find a place that would be sure not to be disturbed. He didn't have any luck with his search. The cabin was spartan in the extreme. Eight seats, four bunks, a computer interface, and a number of small bins containing everything from first aid to emergency rations made up the entirety of the interior. None of those places was likely to remain unchecked more than ten or fifteen minutes.

Well, if he couldn't put it anywhere inside the life boat…

He went back to the short space between the hatch to the boat bay and the hatch to the pod. He had to use another set of jumper clips to avoid detection before opening the refueling port. Lifeboats weren't big enough to use the massive matter conversion engines that a larger ship could accommodate, so they used chemical rockets instead.

Lamont had to twist into an awkward position to get a wrench on the bolt that held the cover in place. It was cold working in there, not from any leaking of the subzero liquid hydrogen, but from the proximity to space. There was only one seal keeping the air in, and it was not a perfect insulator. The ship's air, which maintained a livable temperature for the crew, did not circulate down into this workspace. His hands became numb and slow to respond before he got the small metal square free of its housing.

He should have thought of this to begin with, he realized. One timed charge here would be plenty to destroy the entire boat, once the fuel went up. He had been planning to use four charges each, to make sure the interior was opened to vacuum. This way was both easier and more certain.

He pulled out one of the charges and activated the timer. Now, what delay to allow for? If all went according to plan, Brighton would be placed in one of these pods in another thirty-five or forty hours. Teach and those with him would then need to remove anyone else that might prove a problem; say, another day or so for that. Prep for jump… Hmm, would Teach want to return to the jump point? Probably not. The system they were headed to was not linked to this JP anyway.

Well, it didn't matter, really. With the changes to the onboard computer, Brighton would stay on the boat until his life ended. Lamont programmed in the maximum delay, ten days, and stuck the explosive to the fuel port. Another twenty strenuous minutes had the cover back in place and all as it had been.

One down, eleven to go, Lamont thought. He moved back into the pod and knelt to collect the items he had used to sabotage the computer system and placed them in his tool kit.

Before the young man could react, the hatch slid silently closed and locked itself. Lamont raced toward the exit but was knocked to the floor by a hard shove from behind. There was a moment of weightlessness, then normal weight again. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pain where his face had struck the decking. The view out the hatch's port was of the ship he had spent close to two years living aboard, as it slowly diminished with increasing distance.