“And I didn’t bring anything to deal with that, [i]idiot[/i]! What irony that I suggested Alpha do this exact same thing to Du-Vos!” She mentally kicked herself, about to go down a deck to access the device when she noticed a small box with a red light on it. A commercially available motion sensor. And it knew she was there, just not moving fast enough to trigger it. Good thing it was a civilian device that required line of sight to work and not a detector ripped out from a mine, else she would’ve triggered it when she walked into the room. “Someone check if there aren’t any more. This is going to be a chore, but I think it can be done. [i]Very slowly[/i]. It’s a shaped charge used by combat engineering teams to disable hijacked ships without being detected or risking firing upon them, I’ve worked with these in the past. If I die, don’t bother sending word back home, my old lady and I aren’t on talking terms.”

Usually, these bombs were placed on the outside and the vacuum of space made it quite safe to be in close proximity when one detonated. Here, however, it was in a room pressurized to 1 atmosphere, bringing several unknowns into the mix. One thing was for sure, if shit met the fan, the overpressure in the room would at the very least lay her out and most definitely ruin her eardrums, but it was much more likely it would simply kill her like an oversized grenade, and that’s not to mention how much debris it would kick back her way. In light of all that, she decided to keep the suit on to try to lessen the effects should she fuck up as she inched closer to the thing, silently cursing the damaged neural pathways in her cheek that made the corner of her mouth twitch like a methhead a week after his last dose. At least there was the small comfort in knowing the Moray used regular Terran atmosphere instead of a low-pressure pure oxygen breathing mix, thus significantly lowering fire hazards.

Finally reaching the cursed device, the first thing Astrid did was slowly grab a roll of vac tape from her utility belt and secure the sensor to the bomb’s casing. If she died because she [i]moved the motion sensor[/i], which it would interpret as motion in its surroundings, she wouldn’t be able to look the other engineer’s souls in Hell in the eye. Next she retrieved an allen wrench from the toolbox attached to her suit and painfully slowly undid the two screws holding the cover panel in place, carefully setting them aside. She knew the damn thing was tamper-proof with redundancies, so cutting the connection between anything and the primer was out of the question. But in the bottom-left corner, there was a flat panel, about the size of a human palm, with two wires marked ‘+’ and ‘-’ connecting it to the circuit board. It was a lithium-air battery, and the sole source of power for the charge. At least under normal circumstances. This thing was clearly modified, and a second battery connected in parallel to this one was just the kind of thing she’d do if she wanted to fuck with an EOD technician’s day.

Whichever of Du-Vos lackeys set it up probably didn’t give half of a shit because after five minutes of slowly checking the bomb and its surroundings while giving muted reports to the rest of Beta so they knew she was still alive, Astrid found nothing. She sure was thankful the suit came equipped with laryngophones that could pick up subvocalization and thus she didn’t even have to move her mouth to communicate. Deciding it was safe to end the problem, Astrid hooked her finger behind the battery on the side with the pins and pulled it upwards out of the casing, depriving the det pack of power. Indicator lights went off, the engine was undamaged and she was still breathing. “Faust here. Bomb disabled. Unless it has friends around, we’re good to go on my end.” She reported back to Beta team and Cake. “Damn it, I quit combat engineering to get away from this shit.”