The Constance had been running dark-cycle lighting for eleven days, which meant the hangar was lit like a bar at closing time and everybody had stopped commenting on it.

Jake was flat on his back under Fighter Six with a torque driver in his teeth and both arms buried to the elbow in an access port that had not been designed for arms. The port cover sat on his chest, warm, rising and falling with him. Somewhere above his sternum a coolant junction had developed a personality — a soft irregular tick, tick, tick-tick, that appeared only above forty percent load and vanished the instant a certified technician walked within six metres of it.

He'd reported it twice. Both times the diagnostic had come back green and the tech had looked at him the way techs look at pilots.

So now it was one in the morning by a clock nobody aboard actually observed, and Jake Morrison, thirty-two years old, holder of two commendations and a permanently damaged reputation, was doing unauthorised maintenance on a multi-billion-credit airframe with a flashlight held in place by his own knee.

Tick.

"Yeah," he said around the driver. "I heard you."

The junction did not respond. It had been doing this for nine days and had developed a rhythm of provocation that Jake found genuinely personal.

He got the shim seated, backed the torque off a quarter turn, and lay there a second in the warm dark of the airframe's belly with his hands full of somebody else's engineering. This was the part he liked. Not the flying — everyone assumed the flying, and the flying was fine, the flying was the easiest thing in his life — but this. A problem with edges. A thing that was either fixed or it wasn't, and would tell you which, honestly, immediately, without you having to ask.

Charlie's voice carried across the deck from two bays over, mid-sentence, mid-story, mid-something, pitched at whoever had made the mistake of being near him. Jake didn't catch the words. He caught the shape of them: build, build, build, punchline, and then Charlie's own laugh arriving half a second before anyone else's, the way it always did, because Charlie had never once in fifteen years been able to wait for his own joke to land.

Jake's hands stopped.

Just for a second. The driver hovering, the shim seated, the tick gone quiet.

Then he got the cover back on and slid out from under the fighter on his shoulder blades, and there were boots.

Boots he recognised. Standing about a metre from his head, angled like their owner had been there long enough to have watched a good portion of the preceding performance.

Jake looked up the length of them, took the torque driver out of his teeth, and produced the grin. It came easy. It always came easy. It was the single most reliable piece of equipment he owned.

"Okay," he said. "Before you say anything — this is not what it looks like."

He sat up, rolled his shoulders, wiped his palms down the front of coveralls that had stopped being olive some months ago.

"It's exactly what it looks like. But I want it noted that I asked twice through proper channels, and the proper channels told me the fighter was fine, and the fighter is not fine, and if that thing seizes at forty-two percent on a live burn then somebody's writing a very embarrassing letter to somebody's mother." He tossed the driver, caught it. "So really I'm doing admin. This is admin."

He glanced past them, at the empty deck, the racked hulls, the long throat of the hangar running back into the dark of a ship four thousand light years from anything that had ever been anyone's home.

"Also I couldn't sleep," he added, more quietly, and then looked briefly annoyed that he'd said it.

He stood. Retrieved the flashlight from where his knee had abandoned it. Put a hand flat on Fighter Six's flank, absently, the way other men pat a dog.

"You're up late too, though. So." The grin came back, crooked, deployed like cover fire. "Either you're here to write me up, or you're here for the same reason I am and neither of us is going to say what that is."