Ladies First

Mei-Lin had pulled the fabricator specs up before breakfast and had the first batch of components queued and running by the time Lindsy appeared in the engineering bay doorway with two mugs of tea and the expression of someone who had been told to show up and was not entirely sure what she was showing up for.

"You said 0800," Lindsy said.

"I said 0800 because I wanted the fabricator warmed up and the material tolerances verified before we started taking measurements," Mei-Lin said without looking up from the console. "Which I have done. So we're ready." She looked up. "Is one of those for me?"

Lindsy handed over the mug and looked around the engineering bay with the particular attention she brought to spaces she had not spent much time in. It was organized in a way that reflected Mei-Lin's specific logic, not visually tidy in any conventional sense but arranged according to a system that clearly made sense to the person who worked in it, everything within reach of where it needed to be reached from, nothing wasted.

"How long will it take?" Lindsy asked.

"For the measurements, twenty minutes. For the fabricator to run the components, a few hours. We can leave it running and come back." Mei-Lin pulled up the configuration interface on the secondary console and turned it toward her. "I need you to stand on the sensor plate and hold still while it maps you. Then we go through the configuration options and you tell me what you want built into yours beyond the standard spec."

Lindsy set her mug down and stepped onto the sensor plate without ceremony. "What are the options?"

"Standard light configuration gives you full range of motion and basic environmental sealing. I'm adding an intermediate thermal layer between the flex weave and the ceramic on all of them because the standard spec has a delamination issue under sustained heat that nobody caught in the original design." The suit schematic appeared above the table, giving them a hologram to look at. "For yours specifically I want to talk about the visor suite. The navigational sensor integration we discussed in the meeting, I can build the attachment architecture directly into the helmet rather than having it as an add on. Cleaner, more reliable, less to go wrong in the field."

Lindsy studied the schematic. "Do it," she said. "What else?"

"EVA thruster placement. Standard puts them at the hip and shoulder. For someone who needs to navigate in zero G with precision rather than just propel themselves from point A to point B I'd shift the hip thrusters to the lower back and add a secondary pair at the ankles. More control over orientation."

Lindsy looked at her. "You thought about this before I got here."

"I think about everything before people get here," Mei-Lin said. "It's faster that way." She pulled up the measurement interface. "Hold still."

The sensor swept Lindsy from head to foot in a slow pass of amber light, building a three dimensional map that populated in real time on the console display. Mei-Lin watched the numbers come up and made two adjustments to the shoulder geometry and one to the collar height without explaining why and Lindsy watched her do it with the focused attention she brought to watching anyone who clearly knew what they were doing.

"Done," Mei-Lin said. "Step off."

Lindsy stepped off the sensor plate and picked up her tea and looked at the schematic with her own configuration mapped into it now, the adjusted thruster placement and the integrated visor suite and the thermal layer showing as a distinct band between the outer and inner layers of the suit.

"It looks good" she said.

"That's because it's right," Mei-Lin said, with the confidence of someone who had already run the tolerances three times and was not saying it for reassurance. She loaded the configuration into the fabricator queue and set it running and the machine began its low steady work in the background, methodical and unhurried.

Mei-Lin stepped onto the sensor plate herself and pulled up her own configuration on the handheld display and ran through it while the sensor swept her, making adjustments as it went with the ease of someone configuring something they had already thought through completely.

"Tool attachment points on the inner forearm," she said, half to herself. "Extended reach on the left side for the plasma torch housing. Thermal rating on the palm surfaces up to six hundred degrees." She made a note. "The ceramic on the torso needs the higher grade plating, not because I'm expecting to get shot, but because the environments I work in have pressure differentials that standard plating doesn't account for."

"You've been thinking about this for a while," Lindsy said.

"Since before Zedd showed us the blueprints," Mei-Lin said. "I had a suit on my last posting that failed a pressure seal in a Jefferies tube at exactly the wrong moment. Nobody got hurt but it was close enough that I've been thinking about suit design ever since." She stepped off the plate and loaded her configuration. "I'm not building this because I want to go into dangerous situations. I'm building it because if I end up in one I want to come out."

Lindsy looked at her for a moment. "That's a reasonable position."

"It's the only position that makes sense," Mei-Lin said. She picked up her tea and looked at the fabricator running its first batch in the background. "Yours will be done by mid afternoon. Mine an hour after that."

"And T'Vara's?"

Mei-Lin was quiet for a second. "When she's ready," she said simply and left it there and Lindsy left it there too and they stood in the engineering bay with the fabricator running between them and the ship humming around them and neither of them felt the need to fill the rest of the silence.