Shades of Green - Part 5

Zedd took the chair at the head of the table without making a ceremony of it, the way he did most things, and set his PADD flat on the surface in front of him. He looked at Tiraa for a moment and then at Rallid, giving the room a beat to settle before he started.

"The Dutchman is operational and the crew is coming together faster than I had any right to expect," he said. "Contracts are moving and our route structure is already being refined by Lindsy." He leaned forward slightly, forearms on the table, hands loose. "Tiraa comes aboard as XO. That's established. What I want today is to make sure she has the full picture of where we stand so we're not wasting time getting her up to speed once we're underway." He glanced at Mei-Lin and gave her a small nod.

Mei-Lin pulled her PADD up and directed it at Tiraa without preamble. "The Dutchman is in good shape for a ten year old vessel. Hull integrity is sitting where I want it, structural frame is clean, and the systems I've been monitoring since we came aboard are behaving consistently. The new warp crystals are prepped and ready for installation, which opens up considerably more of what we can ask of her at high warp. Computer core is mid-upgrade and once that's finished it improves response times across navigation, tactical, and internal systems in ways that build on each other." She set the PADD down. "Defensively she's somewhat lean. Built as a patrol vessel, not a combat ship, and there's a ceiling on what we can ask of her in a serious engagement. Fast and sound and about to get better on two fronts." She looked at Tiraa evenly. "Anything you want to know about her that isn't in that summary, ask me directly. I'd rather you know the real picture going in."

Tiraa both read over the PADD in front of her and listened to Mei-Lin simultaneously without any apparent trouble. The other woman was efficient and obviously good at her job, so Tiraa was mildly surprised that she wasn’t the chief engineer of this vessel. She allowed Mei-Lin to finish and a quiet to come over the room, and then she turned to look at Zedd squarely in his eyes.

“Did you buy this ship from a Ferengi?”

"A Ferengi dealer on New Ferenginar," Zedd said, with the particular tone of someone acknowledging the accuracy of a thing they found mildly embarrassing in retrospect. "A dealer named Zorol. Though the ship herself had a life before that, she came through his lot as a Saber class refit, former patrol vessel, and he had done exactly nothing to her beyond listing her." He leaned back slightly in his chair. "The haggling took half an hour. We went back and forth the way you do with Ferengi, each of us pretending the other had the better end of it." The corner of his mouth moved just enough to count. "She was worth more than he let on and we both knew it. We called it commerce and moved on."

Tiraa’s eyes lingered for just a moment, and then she glanced up at Rallid who was looking down at her already. There was something unspoken that passed between them, and then Tiraa looked at Zedd again. “Then you’re going to need to remove the tracking and scanning devices that were inevitably placed on this ship. Bring them to me, and I will pay a visit to Zorol before we leave.”

Zedd looked at Mei-Lin and she was already ahead of him.

"We found them during the initial structural sweep," she said, without particular drama about it, the way she talked about most things that had a straightforward answer. "Passive trackers in six locations throughout the hull, two scanning arrays tucked into the sensor housing where they would blend with the existing equipment, a data relay near the secondary comm panel that was pinging on a frequency we almost missed, a microtransmitter embedded in the warp core housing, two more in the jefferies tube junctions on decks three and five, and what looked like a modified environmental sensor in the captain's quarters that was doing considerably more than monitoring air quality." She set her PADD on the table with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been thorough and knew it. "Everything is pulled and contained. Cargo bay two, sealed crate, nothing transmitting." She looked at Tiraa with the even attention she gave people who asked the right questions. "I was going to recommend we space them once we cleared New Ferenginar but I'll defer to you on that if you have a better use for them."

She may have been young but she definitely paid attention in her courses at the academy. While not having much in the way of gut intuition yet, the woman knew how to read and measure specs accordingly and was religious about addressing anything even slightly out of tolerance.