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checked, and triple checked.
    Navigation had the course to the nearest of
the anomalies. This was defined by where it was detected, and where the Earth
currently was in its orbit of the sun.
    The Helm had the course from Navigation,
but it was just the last of a series of course changes needed, to get them away
from the construction platform, break orbit, and head out into space in the
correct direction.
    I could see James was a mixture of cool
professionalism, high anxiety about his role in the launch, and the excitement
of being a key player in the most important event since the Wright brothers
first flew.
    The checklists came to an end and the
political and military speeches began. I could see Richard internally cringing.
His eye was on the countdown clock. The bigwigs could say what they wanted, he
was launching on time, regardless of if he had to cut someone off in
mid-sentence. I knew he'd do it too.
    As the timer neared zero, he gave his
orders. The access gantries retracted. The docking clamps were released.
Station keeping thrusters held them in position. Checks and rechecks to make
sure nothing still connected Galactica to the construction platform. We were
clear to go.
    Right on zero, with the crew all looking at
him, he gave the most important order of any of their lives.
    "Launch."
    The engine section of Galactica exploded.
The force of it rippled up the ship, shattering the mid-section. The flight
pods were thrown clear, colliding with the construction platform and causing
its destruction as well.
    For a moment, those on the Bridge thought
the bulkheads would hold, and their part of the ship would survive, but the
thoughts lasted mere seconds.
    Thirty seconds after the launch order was
given, I was standing alone in space in the middle of a debris field.
     

Three
     
    "No!"
    I stood there in space for a moment,
completely shocked.
    Twelve materialized next to me.
    "Don’t say it," I said.
    "I wasn’t."
    "Yes you were."
    He looked at me, and it was obvious he'd
been about to.
    "Are you going to just stand here in
the debris?"
    "I'm planning a response."
    "Less planning, more action."
    "Thank you for the sage advice. Now
bugger off. I've got this."
    Twelve chuckled, while shaking his head.
And was gone.
    I wound back time slowly, to the moment
after the first explosion. I froze time there, and went in search of the blast
origin. It took me a while, but I found it in thruster control, just off the
main engine room.
    I wound time back again, milliseconds at a
time, until the explosion began. Curious, it was coming from an enclosed
module, like a black box. The command to fire thrusters went through it, and
came out the other side unchanged. I checked the specifications all the way
back, and there it was, included in the original designs. I poked my head
inside and examined the contents.
    It was a bomb. And a big one. Not a nuke,
but designed to be almost as powerful as a small nuke. It made sense though.
Conventional explosives could be masked. But masking a nuke was in itself
detectable.
    Who would design a thruster control with
its own bomb? Someone a lot cleverer than I'd been considering myself,
obviously.
    I wound back time again, following this
module back to when it was installed. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. I
checked it to see if it was always a bomb, and it was. It was delivered, it was
installed, and it was tested. It was on the spec, and it seemed to do its job,
although no-one quite seemed to know what its job was, or had any idea what
they were actually messing with.
    Time wound back further, now following the
module.
    And, there.
    The module had been switched in transit.
The two were identical on the outside. The original contained nothing but a
wire crossing the internal space.
    I marked that moment, but followed back the
original. A man assembled the box, with a wire in the middle of it from a
specification, without question. I followed the specification back to the
person who designed