Hull plate 8-92-K: lustreless grey, a few scratches where tools and careless gauntlets had caught it, red stripe codes designating its manufacturing batch and CAB permitted usage, reactive indicator tabs to measure radiation and vacuum ablation still a healthy green; exactly the same as all the other hexagonal plates protecting the delicate systems of the Villeneuve's Revenge from direct exposure to space.  Except it was leaking a minute level of electromagnetic activity.  That was what the first scanner pad indicated.  Erick hurriedly applied the second over the centre of the source.  The sensor block confirmed a radiation emission point.  Density analysis detailed the size of the entombed unit, and a rough outline of its larger components.

"I got it, Captain," Erick datavised.  "They incorporated it in a hull plate.  It's small, electron compressed deuterium tritium core, I think; maybe point two of a kiloton blast."

"You're sure?"

Erick was too tired to be angry.  This was his ninth search, and they were all imposing far too much stress on his convalescent body.  When he finished each ten-hour session spent snaking through the starship's innards he had to go straight on bridge duty to maintain the illusion of normal shipboard routine for Kingsley Pryor and the eight rover reporters they were carrying.  On top of that the Organization had played dirty.  Just as he knew they would.

"I'm sure."

"Thank the blessed saints.  Finally!  Now we can escape these devils.  You can deactivate it, can't you, mon enfant?"

"I think the best idea would be to detach the plate and use the X-ray lasers to vaporise it as soon as it's clear"

"Bravo.  How long will it take?"

"As long as it does.  I'm not about to rush."

"Of course."

"Are there any reasonable jump coordinates in this orbit?"

"Some.  I will begin plotting them."

Erick slowly swept the rest of the little cavity for any further incongruous processors.  Opposite the hull plate was a spiral of ribbed piping, resembling a tightly coiled dragon's tail, which led to a heat exchange pump.  He had emerged at its rim, wedged between the curving titanium and a cluster of football-sized cryogenic nitrogen tanks which pressurized the vernier rockets.  A small, cramped space, but one providing a hundred crannies and half-hidden curves.  It took him half an hour to sweep it properly, forcing himself to be methodical.  Not easy with an armed mini-nuke eighty centimetres from his skull, its timer counting down.

When he was satisfied there were no booby alarms secreted in the cavity, he squirmed around to face the hull and eased himself further out of the crawlway like paste from a tube.

Normally, a starship's hull plates were detached from the outside, with the seam rivets and load pins easily accessible.  This was a lot more difficult.  The arcane procedure for an internal jettison ran through Erick's neural nanonics, an operation which must surely have been dreamed up by committees of civil servant lawyers on permanent lunch breaks and with no knowledge of astroengineering.  It was highly tempting just to shove a fission blade into the silicon and saw  around the mini-nuke in a wide circle.  Instead he datavised the flight computer to switch off the sector's Molecular binding force generator, then applied the anti-torque screwdriver to the first feed coupling.  It might have been imagination, but he thought his new AT arm was slower than the other.  The nutrient reserves were almost depleted.  His thoughts were too cluttered to really bother about it.