Blue Crystals

The crystals were exactly what she had specified and she had known they would be before she opened the case because Zedd had told her they checked out and Zedd did not say things checked out when they did not. But she ran the scanner over them anyway because that was how she did things and because the warp core was not something she was willing to take on faith regardless of who had verified the sourcing.

She had cleared the main engineering workbench and laid out everything she needed before the case arrived, calibration tools, the crystal housing assembly, the alignment guides, the molecular bonding compound that needed to cure at exactly the right temperature for the installation to hold under sustained warp load. It was organized in the order she would use it which was not the order most engineering manuals suggested but was the order that made sense to her after years of doing this kind of work in conditions that did not always allow for the manual's preferred sequence.

The scanner results came back clean on both crystals. Grade four, matched pair, resonance frequency within the tolerance window she had specified in the inquiry. She set the scanner down and picked up the first crystal and turned it slowly in the light, checking the lattice structure visually the way she always did after the scanner confirmed what it confirmed. The scanner told you the numbers. Your eyes told you whether the numbers were telling the whole story.

The lattice was clean. No micro fractures, no inclusions, no stress patterns that would accelerate degradation under the kind of load the Dutchman's core had been running at. She set it back in the case and checked the second one and found the same.

She pulled up the warp core diagnostic on the wall display and ran through the installation sequence in her head for the third time that morning. Not because she did not know it but because knowing it and having it fresh in sequence in your mind before you started were different things and the difference mattered when you were working on something that powered the entire ship.

The existing crystals were worn down to about sixty two percent of their rated efficiency which explained the variance readings she had been seeing since she came aboard and which explained why the core hesitated under load in the particular way it had been hesitating. New crystals at full efficiency would not solve every problem the core had but it would solve the most immediate one and give her a cleaner baseline to work from when she addressed the rest.

She pulled a second stool up to the workbench and set out a second set of tools alongside her own and went back to her pre-installation checks. Avery would be down shortly and she wanted everything ready before he arrived. There was a particular satisfaction in handing someone a workspace that was already organized and thought through, it said something about how you operated without requiring you to explain it and she had always preferred to let the work speak first.

The core hummed steadily behind her, patient and waiting, the way ships waited when they knew something was about to change.

She picked up the calibration tool and got to work.