New Threads - Part 1

Zedd had called it a crew meeting which on the Dutchman meant everyone drifted into the mess hall at their own pace over the course of about ten minutes and found a spot and waited to find out what it was about. Cormus arrived first and got himself a coffee and sat backwards on a chair with his arms folded over the back of it. Lindsy came in with her PADD already in hand and took the seat nearest the viewport out of what had clearly become habit. Mei-Lin came in from the direction of engineering with grease on her left forearm that she had made a cursory attempt to wipe off and T'Vara came in last, sat down at the end of the table, and folded her hands in front of her with the particular stillness of someone prepared to observe whatever was about to happen.

Mei-Lin took the seat across from Cormus and set her PADD down and told herself very firmly that she was not going to spend this meeting thinking about last night in engineering. She had work to do and a crew meeting to pay attention to and the fact that she had lain awake for an embarrassing amount of time after getting back to her quarters was nobody's business but her own.

Zedd was already at the head of the table when they filtered in, a data rod in one hand and a mug of raktajino in the other, and he waited until everyone had settled before he set both down and pulled up a holographic display from the emitter built into the table surface.

What appeared above the table was a rotating schematic of a form fitting suit of armor, segmented and articulated, with tool attachment points along the forearms and a sealed helmet configuration that integrated with the suit rather than sitting on top of it.

Cormus tilted his head and looked at it from his side of the table. "What's the profile on the shoulder assembly?"

"We'll get there," Zedd said. "Let me finish."

Cormus sat back and drank his coffee.

"I've had these blueprints for a while," Zedd continued. "Personal combat and environmental suits, custom fabricated. The engineering fabricators on board can handle the full component set without any issue. We run the measurements in the morning and have a pair of completed suits by afternoon. Materials are within what we can source locally without attracting attention." He rotated the schematic. "The design has three configurations. Light, for general away work and close environments. Medium, which adds ceramic plating and micro shielding for situations that are likely to get unfriendly. And the EVA variant which is rated for vacuum and short zero G bursts with thruster integration."

Lindsy was leaning forward slightly, studying the schematic with the focused expression she brought to navigational problems. "How long per pair of suits on the fabricators?"

"Half a day give or take," Zedd said. "The fabricators run on their own power supply so there is no scheduling conflict with anything else on the ship. We feed them the measurements, load the blueprints, and let them work while we get on with everything else."

Mei-Lin nodded at that in the way of someone who had already been thinking about the fabrication process and had just had her assessment confirmed. She was good at this part, the practical part, the part where she could think about materials and tolerances and heat distribution instead of the fact that his hand had closed over hers last night for approximately three seconds and she had apparently decided that was a significant enough event to lie awake thinking about.

"The tool attachment points on the forearms," she said. "Are those configurable or fixed positions?"

"Configurable," Zedd said. "You tell the system what you want to carry and it builds the attachment architecture around that."

He was looking at her the same way he had been looking at her last night when she had told him to get some sleep and he had gone and then come back to tell her about the starboard relay and she had been thinking about that part specifically since approximately 0200 hours.

She nodded slowly and made a note on her PADD. "I want to talk about the material specs for the plating before we finalize. Some of what I work around generates heat that standard ceramic does not handle well."

"Put it on the list," Zedd said. "That is exactly the kind of thing I want worked out before fabrication starts rather than after."

She wrote it down and did not look up and reminded herself that she was a professional who had worked alongside capable people her entire career without developing inconvenient feelings about any of them and that this was going to be exactly the same situation and she was going to be absolutely fine.