Nate Brooks stiffly climbed down the ladder from the shuttle. He was one of a few cleared to begin inspections. The clearances had three parts. The first was a paper verification of the person’s clearance. The second was a check of recent activities. The third was to determine the person was not in the Enterprise ECS bays in the last six weeks. With Nate the latter was easy. Three months ago he was assigned to the work on Discovery.  For four weeks he was working on refitting its systems. He was not in the Enterprise hanger during this time. As he was leaving from the cape on his motorcycle after leaving Discovery for the last time he was run off the road. He would have started work on Enterprise the next day. He spent three weeks in the hospital, three in therapy and two at home recovering. He was scheduled to return in two days to prepare Enterprise for its next launch. When they needed someone to begin the inspection Nate could easily be cleared. So could Andrew Donalds who was waiting at the bottom of the ladder. He left the cape six weeks ago to work with several suppliers. His tour was cut short two days ago.

Andrew and Nate began the inspection about ten AM. Neither of them were ever to be alone. Nobody was really trusted.

As Nate got to the bottom of the ladder he motioned to a table. “Let’s go over there and sit down. The legs still hurt.”

“Sure. Let’s take a load off. Is this your first day back?”

“Yes.”

“It’s got to be tough, the hospital, the therapy.”

“It beats dying. I came close, very close.”

“Did they get the guy who hit you?”

“No. They probably never will. Let’s look at the video.” Both men were wearing what looked like a miners’ helmet with a light. A cable connected it to a fanny pack. It was a light with a video camera that fed a recorder in the pack.

They sat down and plugged a cable between the packs and another cable between their laptop computers. A special directive had forbidden the use of the wireless communications.  The reason was security.  They could view the video from both cameras, snap frames, annotate them and produce reports.

They worked for half an hour. Finally Nate asked. “What is your assessment?”