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other bio-plastic on the ship they had degraded, died, and were quite brittle.
    ‘Multi-core fibre-optic,’ Gillian replied by way of confirmation. ‘You don’t have a port for connecting one somewhere?’
    ‘Where would she imagine it was hidden?’ Al asked. Gillian raised an eyebrow at Aneka’s smirk.
    ‘Al wants to know where you think they hid one. I think I’ve just got the wireless networking.’
    ‘Technically,’ Al said, ‘there is a hard-link port near the base of your skull. It’s covered and left over from when the original frame was being programmed. Your mind and my software were uploaded through it. You’d need surgery to get to it now. It was never meant to be used after your skin was put on.’
    ‘I think we’ll stick with just the wireless idea.’
    Gillian was looking upward. ‘Aneka, do you think you could open that panel up there?’
    The panel in question was big, taking up a two-metre-diameter portion of the ceiling. Aneka doubted she could have managed it alone under normal conditions, but with the zero gravity… ‘I’ll give it a go,’ she said, pushing upward. Locking her boots to the ceiling, she examined one of the locking bolts and then pulled a universal driver from her belt. The head of the little motorised device locked into the slot in the bolt, an odd, eight-pointed star design, and soon the bolt was being twisted out of its hole. She glanced around the circular hatchway. ‘This is going to take a short while. They really didn’t want this opened that easily.’
    It took about thirty minutes to go around the entire hatch and then to prise the plate free and move it away from the hole it left in the ceiling. Thankfully there was no sign of any form of bug-eyed monster, or even a dead Xinti, in the space above. Instead there were large racks of computer equipment, silent and inactive, arranged in a circle around the access port.
    ‘That’s the primary computer system,’ Gillian said. ‘That’s what we need to get powered up so that we can access its memory. You see that large, sort of crystalline section?’ Aneka turned and saw what she meant; taking up about a quarter of the space was a block of semi-transparent material which refracted light oddly. ‘Holographic memory of some sort. We should get Abraham down here to look at it, and we need a full lidar map and any other sensor analysis we can before the power comes on.’
    ‘Well,’ Aneka said, ‘I can tell you what I see, and it looks like the whole thing is dead. There are no emissions beyond normal thermal. That memory block does some really odd things to the light moving through it, but it’s basically inert.’
    Gillian gave a nod. ‘Gilroy to Drake. Could you get us a lidar drone up to the flight deck, Drake? We want the computer core scanned.’
    ‘Shannon’s on it,’ Drake’s voice replied over the comm units.
    ‘I’ll be right down,’ Wallace added.
    Gillian smirked at Aneka and Ella. ‘What a surprise,’ she said.
    ~~~
    ‘It looks like there was a power surge when the reactor failed,’ Monkey told the rest of the team at the evening food and discussion gathering. ‘We’ve laid cables through to the main power converters and spliced them in, but we’re having to go through and check the conduits out of the reactor room one by one. Then we’re having to rig bypasses for the damaged sections with modern components.’
    ‘It’s taking longer than we thought,’ Delta added to emphasise the point.
    ‘Well,’ Gillian said, ‘we’re about done with our survey. Aneka can help you two tomorrow while Ella and I start working on the samples and such in the labs.’ She looked around. ‘Aneka missing her meal again?’
    ‘She said she had something to take care of,’ Ella replied. ‘I’ll let her know the change of assignment when I see her later.’
    ‘Hmm, I wonder what she’s up to this time. She’s already fixed my son’s love life.’
    Both Monkey and Delta went scarlet, but