"Well, I... err..." Kumerian stammers, "of course I did, but should not the weapons be fixed first?"
        "We'll get to them," Major Kolmes says, "now take me there." Kolmes takes a moment to give instructions to one of his assistants before leaving the shuttle bay. The assistant begins taking a crowbar to a bulkhead, ignoring the sputtering Kumerian.
        Upon arriving at the lower compartment, the ESS crew begins opening hatches and peering into dark spaces. One of them summons Major Kolmes.

        "See that, Captain?" Major Kolmes asks. "You're missing two of the four bolts that hold the port engine to the ship! The D7 uses eight 12cm bolts on each engine, but the D6 uses only four larger 16cm bolts. Two of them sheered off during a high energy turn sometime and some idiot hammered in soft steel wedges to replace them and they didn't hold up to the stress." He turns and directs his crew to start cutting out the deformed steel shims prior to inserting new case-hardened bolts. "Now, Captain, let's go forward. I already know why your disruptors don't work."
        "Without checking?" Kumerian gasps.
        "I am ESS, Captain, not ESP," Major Kolmes laughs. "I have seen the same thing in three other ships, and I'll bet 20 stars against a rusty can of ghaa that the same thing happened here."
         They proceed to crawl along an access tunnel through the fuel tank until they reach the hatch to the disruptor compartment. The ESS crewmen swipe their code cards through the locks and open the hatches. One of them looks inside, and nods to Major Kolmes, who also looks into the compartment.
        "Yep, that's what happened," Kolmes says. "Did you ever look into this hatch, Captain?"
        "No...oo..." Kumerian answers. "It's a disruptor, so?"
        "It's the original Mark Six disruptor," Major Kolmes says, giving Kumerian a friendly slap to the side of his head.
        "But this ship has been refitted!" Kumerian insists. "It has the Mark Seven disruptors! The firing panels..."
        "Are the panels for a Mark Seven," Kolmes says. "Control panels are cheap. Disruptors are expensive. Somebody in the shipyard had the work order to replace the disruptors and the control panels, and only replaced the control panels. He then sold the disruptors to somebody, probably an Orion. So when you try to lock onto a target at, oh, say, range 290,000, the control panel locks on but the disruptors always miss. That's because a Mark Six disruptor bolt does not reach beyond 225,000! So you and every other captain who never bothers to actually look in the disruptor compartments just think his gunners cannot hit targets at long range and stops trying. So you fly your ship a little closer to the enemy, and pay the price in blood."
        "This is treason!" Kumerian blurts.
        "Worse than treason," Kolmes says, "it's theft of Imperial property, specifically, weapons! That makes it a Class Kham felony."
        "Is that a death penalty offense?" Kumerian asks.
        "Captain, every felony is a death penalty offense," Kolmes says. "Now, tell me about the phasers? Were those refitted?"
        "Ye....esss," Kumerian answers, "but we have test fired those and I have personally inspected the ring-laser gyros and they're phaser-1s, not the old phaser-2s."
        "And do the panels short out on repeated firings?" Kolmes asks with a knowing smile.
        "Sometimes," Kumerian answers.
        "Let's go look at the control panels," Kolmes says, leading the captain to a higher deck. His assistants quickly open up one of the phaser control panels.
        "See what they did?" Kolmes asks.
        "They removed the old panel and stuck in the new one," Kumerian answers with a shrug. "So?"
        "So?" Kolmes answers. "Really? You don't see it? They just cut the wires to the old panels and spliced in the new ones. The splices are wrapped in duct tape! Imperial regulations require that they run new wires all the way back to the master junction boxes for each compartment. And there's a reason for that! They overheat! Get it?" Kolmes gives Kumerian another friendly slap on the side of his head, then tells his assistants to rewire every phaser control panel on the ship, and to check the disruptor and drone panels. "Oh, fooey, just rewire them all!" Kolmes says. "Tractors, labs, transporters, replicators, everything!"
        The communicator on Kolmes' belt chirps and he answers it with a gruff "Kolmes!" He listens for a minute. "We're on our way," he says. "This way, Captain." He heads off to the turbolift, and when the doors reopen, they're at the shuttle bay where they started half an hour earlier.
        "What did you find, Konnie?" Kolmes asks. The assistant just waves her hand at the bulkhead, which she had stripped of its insulating panels. "Well, we've seen that before."

        "Is that the old duralum bulkhead?" Kumerian asks.
        "Yes, yes, it is, Captain," Kolmes says. "That was supposed to be replaced with plasteel, so that an exploding drone rack didn't chain react into the entire bay. Now, what the shipyard did was to just remove the old insulation, leave the duralum panel in place, cover it up with some cheap foam to make the thickness match, then put the insulation panels back into place. Without opening it up, you think you got the thicker plasteel bulkhead, because the wall is obviously three centimeters thicker, but you didn't get anything and somebody stole the Emperor's money."
        "An explosion waiting to happen," Kumerian says.
        "Right, and this is a big job. I need to call in a contractor, one the ESS owns, to fix this. Konnie, go ahead and get all of these panels stripped from all of the bulkheads, and order three new plasteel bulkheads. They should be here tomorrow."
        "Amazing," Kumerian sighs.
        "Don't worry, Captain," Kolmes says, "I said we'd do a real inspection and I said we'd make it right and I meant that."