With a nod and a worried look, Gefel from swing shift sat at the adjacent com station. Within a minute, Largo from night shift was to my left, taking a data station from one of the protocol nerds. Two more minutes and Midshipman Hurald was on the other side of the bridge hammering out code, not a true carto, but a recreational coder who filled in at times.

Separately, I found each of them rather annoying, tiresome, or just weird. At that moment, our collective coding struggling against a wave of error logs and malware, I loved them like family.

Somehow out of the pyrotechnic chaos, a pattern emerged, one of which I wasn’t fully aware at first. Subconscious recognition became gestalt ideation became gut-based hunch.

“I know where he is,” I muttered, more to myself, an expression of honest surprise.

“Whazzat, carto?”

“I know…” A panel exploded cutting me off.

The fire extinguished, the query came again, “You were saying?”

“The saboteur, I know where he is.” The bridge seemed oddly quiet.