==Late November/Early December 2420, USS Artemis Shuttlebay==
Benjamin was tired. He was frustrated. And he was ready to take it out on someone.
The problem, of course, was that he was a senior officer, and generally a nice person. He wanted to just hit something, or yell at someone, and work out some of his frustrations about the slipstream problems, but he just couldn't bring himself to do it. After all, it wasn't anyone else's fault that the Slipstream cores were only barely functioning, and that their fuel supply was so dangerously low that they couldn't really utilize them if they still wanted to go home ever.
And it's not your fault either, he tried to remind himself, just as Nathan and Cera both had tried to tell him. But he wasn't feeling it. He had been in conferences with the engineers on the other five ships of the flotilla for days, and there simply wasn't anything to be done about it. They didn't have the raw materials to make more benamite crystals, and none of the surveys they had access to had been looking for the right minerals in the nearby systems. They would have to find it on their own, and given how rare it was even in Federation space the likelihood of their finding any was remote, at best.
So Benjamin had come down to the shuttlebay, and the work areas there. Normally he'd try to work on a new project - either a new weapon for someone, maybe, or even a new model to build and paint - but he was too keyed up. Anything that delicate or cerebral was just going to frustrate him more, and could even scuttle whatever he was working on. But working on refurbishing a shuttle, that could be good.
The two runabouts, Hippolytus and Orion, were practically new and had rolled off the line mere months before Artemis launched. However, that had still been over a year ago, and they were due for a service and rebuild. Vollik, the chief engineer on the Scott, and offered to have his expansive engineering staff handle the problem for them, but Benjamin had declined. "Better to keep my crew up-to-date on their specs," he'd said, and refused to state that the Artemis' shuttle chief, Lieutenant McKenzie, scared the willies out of him.
And it seemed that the idea had borne fruit - getting elbow-deep in a shuttle sounded therapeutic right now. He'd checked the schedule, and no one was working in here at the moment. He had a while to himself. He sighed and smiled, walking across the hangar on deck 7, steps echoing through the large chamber. Maybe I should turn on some music, he thought, but couldn't decide on what to start before he heard a tool clatter to the deck from over near the runabouts he was heading to.
"Hello?" he called, and kept walking. Maybe someone else from his staff had had a similar idea, he considered, though he had most of them busy with any number of other tasks. "Nobody should be in here," he said, "unless they're working in teams." He recognized the hypocrisy - he was going to do the work alone, as well - but he still had a job to do, keeping his people safe, and so he harped on those kinds of things.
He still hadn't heard a response as he got to the front of the far runabout and rounded the corner. "Did you hear me?" he said, noticing the culprit laying on a board underneath the runabout's nose compartment, working on the underside access ports. He set a foot on the board and slid them out. "You've got to have a partner if you're going to be working in here, particularly off-shift."
==Tag... but who??==