No Agenda - Part 1

The message came through on her PADD while she was closing up the fabricator specs for the evening, short and to the point in the way Zedd tended to communicate when he was not performing anything for anyone.

*Dinner. 1900. Captain's mess. Wanted to go over the material specs you flagged. Bring your notes.*

Mei-Lin read it twice and then set her PADD down and looked at the fabricator housing for a moment and then picked the PADD back up and typed back *Confirmed* and went to get changed before she could spend any more time thinking about it than was reasonable.

She told herself it was a working dinner. He had said bring your notes. That was a working dinner. She brought her notes and also changed into something that was not coveralls which she told herself was simply a matter of basic courtesy and not anything else at all.

---

The captain's mess was smaller than the officers mess and considerably more private, a single table and four chairs and a viewport that framed New Ferenginar's slow turn below in a way that made the room feel like it was suspended above the planet rather than simply orbiting it. Zedd had set the lighting lower than standard which she noticed immediately and decided not to read anything into.

He was already there when she arrived, sitting at the table with two mugs of something steaming and a PADD open in front of him. He had changed out of his jacket into a dark shirt with the sleeves already rolled up, which she also noticed and also decided not to read anything into, and he looked up when she came in with the easy expression that was his default when he was not actively managing something.

"Sit down," he said. "Replicator did something approximating a decent steak. I went ahead and ordered for both of us. Hope that's alright."

"That's fine," she said, sitting down across from him. "What does approximating mean in practice?"

He considered the question seriously. "Probably better not to establish expectations going in. Let it surprise you."

She smiled and pulled her PADD out setting it on the table between them. He followed suit.

The food materialized and it was actually better than she had expected which she said and he looked unreasonably pleased about it in a way that she found more endearing than she was prepared for.

They worked through the material specs over the first part of the meal, trading notes back and forth across the table in a rhythm that felt natural in the way working with someone felt natural when they were actually engaged rather than just present. He asked good questions. That was the thing she had been reluctantly cataloguing about Zedd since she came aboard, he listened to the answers and then asked the next question based on what she had actually said rather than where he had decided the conversation was going beforehand. It made her feel like the things she was saying were landing somewhere rather than just filling space.

"The intermediate layer between the flex weave and the ceramic," she said, pulling up the composite specs on her PADD and turning it so he could see. "The thermal conductivity differential under sustained heat load will cause delamination over time without it. It's not a catastrophic failure mode but it'll degrade the protection rating faster than the design assumes and in a situation where someone is actually relying on that rating it matters."

Zedd leaned forward to look at the specs and was close enough that she was paying a frankly unreasonable amount of attention to the distance between his shoulder and the edge of the table. She kept her eyes on the PADD.

"How much does it add to the order?" he asked.

"Negligible cost. I can source it through the same contact you're using for the ceramic plating. One conversation, one order." She pulled the PADD back. "I can handle it if you want."

"Do it," he said. "And put yourself down for the commission on the sourcing. You found the problem and you found the fix."

She looked at him. That was not something most captains she had worked for would have thought to offer and the fact that he had said it without any particular ceremony, like it was simply the obvious thing, landed in a way she had not anticipated.

"You don't have to do that," she said.

"I know I don't have to," he said. "That's not why I'm doing it."

She held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at her PADD and made a note of it and told herself she was not going to make a thing of it even though something about it was making it very difficult not to.