Dr. Kate paused. The ship had been fairly quiet so far. After the launch (routine, as she'd expected), she'd taken care of a trivial problem in the tertiary missile fire control system that was causing it to read "ready" when neither it nor the crew were ready to launch. The system was one of a handful that she'd thoughtfully selected months ago as needing to be overhauled to meet with "advanced weapons systems protocols". The dozen-odd systems were strategically scattered over the ship so that her presence going or coming from virtually anywhere would be almost unquestioned. It wasn't that she was the only one capable of understanding the systems after she'd introduced dozens of changes to both the procedures and hardware. In fact, she'd made a point of ensuring that the actual firing sequence was almost identical to the originals. But it was significantly easier for the crew to just call her up for simple maintainence tasks, rather than have to deal with the small beaureucracy of red tape that she'd added.

But something about her entire not-quite-kosher scheme of getting on board the [i]Langford[/i] bothered her. Or perhaps it was just how quiet the ship had been so far. More likely, however, was that she was hesitating before she started her backup plan. Yes, she'd managed to board the ship. Yes, they would, sooner or later, come into contact with the Lucian Alliance. However, if she hadn't ascended or crafted an extraplanar weapons platform by then, she needed a backup plan. Atomic devices were remarkably simple, when it came right down to it. All she had to do was walk into the ship's lab and start creating one, under the guise of analyzing some obscure weapons system.

Having identified the source of her hesitation, she smiled and shook it off. Quietly creating a neutron bomb. What an idiotic thing to worry about. Confidently, she opened the door to the ship's lab, noting the two people already present.

"Pardon me," she said, stepping around the man. She plopped her stack of books down on a corner bench - might as well keep reading about ascension while she was here - and got to work on creating schematics.