Lt. Cmdr Thomas turned toward Astridh, considering her words. Suddenly, he felt ridiculous. No wonder Captain West hated sitting in this thing. He bloody well felt like Captain Kirk. He'd always hated that show. "I'll bring it up, but it's my understanding that these sheilds perform admirably against directed energy weapons." Captain West contacted him through the radio. He radioed back, "Thank you, Captain. They've all performed," he spared a glance at Logan's direction, "quite well. We'll be back upstairs in five minutes." Speaking to the crew again, he said, "All right, pack up. We're going back upstairs where we belong. You've got five minutes to be at your posts."

Creon thought about the Logan problem. Well, it wasn't a problem. Yet. He'd have to watch Logan closely. If Logan didn't adjust to being responsible for dozens of lives, then Creon would reccomend a visit to the ship's psychiatrist. If Logan still didn't adjust after that, well. They could find another pilot. It still wouldn't hurt to talk to him. Creon made a mental note to intercept Logan in the corridor before his next watch. A speech was forming in Creon's head.

[i]"I don't know, and I don't care about what you're used to, but on this ship, [/i]your[i] ship...."[/i]

[center]~o~0~o~[/center]

Dr. Ishpetyr stared at the readouts he was getting from the core. Something [i]was[/i] wrong. Not with the core itself, but with the interfacing and interpretation hardware that let Earth tech access it. The problem first made itself known in a small bug in the Asgard transportation sequence. It had to be something fairly obscure, however, as the other scientists had already triple checked the software for bugs. Again. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Victoria Petroikya was going through the entire crystal matrix, one crystal at a time. Quite a few parts of the operation were flying past Dr. Ishpetyr's head, but he didn't need to know how to fix the core; he just needed to know how to put the right people in the right places with the right data. Which was one of the reasons he'd assigned Dr. Petroikya to the crystals.

She was, Abel admitted, quite attractive. A fact that he was exploiting. As she (competently, of course) pored of the the knee-height crystals, several of the other researchers (all unmarried, but of course, competent) were practically falling over themselves to impress her. Two of the researchers were currently trying to outclass each other with their knowledge of quantum computing, just loudly enough for Victoria to hear. He estimated that they'd figure out the bug in three hours or less. The whole situation was rather amusing, to be frank.

"Dr. Ishpetyr, the 302s recovered a piece of the debris we've just flown through, if your department wants to have a look at it. It'll be waiting for you in rack 3 in the hangar."

Interesting.

Abel paused at the doorway before he left. He'd had a thought. "Victoria - you're in charge. Do try to fix it before we have to beam up something important." He thumbed his radio. "Dr. Ishpetyr to Bishop. Meet me in the hangar bay, please."