Becca rubbed her eyes, clutched her coffee, and stared at her half-eaten bagel as though it were a life preserver. She could use a life preserver: she was drowning in data. In this case, no news was bad news. She was no closer to figuring out why the reactor had shut itself down than she’d been twenty hours earlier. Looking around the conference room, she could see that everyone else looked as bad as she felt. No consolation that. Everyone there—Fang-Castro, Crow, Greenberg, a couple of code jockeys, and Darlington, the ever-present videographer, recording the conference for posterity. Self-consciously, she brushed her fingers over her hair. She was still getting used to having it cropped really close, but with the three-minute shower limit it seemed the most practical thing to do. The blond buzz cut she saw in the mirror each morning still startled her. If the marines took short and fat women . . . heh . . . she yawned: it had been another all-nighter, running on coffee and stims.
