"He looks at the relay readings," she said.

"What?" Cormus said.

"The starboard relay. He told me that it was hot the night he came down to engineering. That it was an old habit, looking after the systems." She examined the display on her scanner. "The new core noted it this morning from my personal log. But he had already noted it three days earlier and pointed it out to me as though it was insignificant." She paused. "It wasn't insignificant. He was watching the ship in a manner that didn't proclaim itself."

Cormus returned with an expression of confirmation as though something that he had previously suspected had been confirmed. "He watches everything," he said. "He simply doesn't show that he is watching. The obviousness comes with the jacket, the raktajino, and the demeanor. The real part is the watchfulness." He stood by the shuttle. "If he is checking your relay readings specifically then we are seeing the actual part of which was expected somewhere you weren't."

Mei-Lin watched him.

"That is also a perceptive read," she said.

"Yes," he said, not particularly full of himself, but simply stating that he had correctly analyzed the situation and acknowledged it. He stepped away from shuttle two and went back to the thruster assembly. "For what it is worth," he said, from behind shuttle two, "you seem to be someone whom it is worth being attentive to. Therefore it seems logical."

Mei-Lin looked at the conduit section on the workbench and the scanner readings and the specific quality of light entering through the cracked bay doors and realized that she had gone down to the shuttlebay to do a tolerance check on two EPS conduit sections she had obtained from a black market three days prior and somehow ended up in the most honest conversation she had had since the ladies mess hall last night.

She completed the tolerance check. All of the sections were well within specifications, better than within specifications, and she designated them and placed them aside for installation and entered a note in her maintenance log and then studied the note for a moment and thought about how the ship would read it.

"Cormus," she said.

"Yeah," he said, from behind the shuttle.

"The micro fracture in the port thruster housing. The bonding compound in engineering bay three, shelf two, second row, will seal it permanently instead of just slowing the progression. Much better than whatever you have in place now."

There was a pause. "How do you know what I have in place?"

"Because I counted every single inventory item stored in all of our caches upon this ship during the first three days I boarded," she said. "And what you have down there is a basic repair compound that will need application again in approximately six weeks. What I'm offering will endure indefinitely."

There was another pause. "I'll retrieve it when I finish this phase," he said. "Thank you."

"It is in your best interest," she said. "Shuttle Two is part of this ship and this ship is part of my job."

"Right," he said, and she heard the grin in it, even though she couldn't see his face, the unique aspect of someone who had been offered something useful disguised as something mundane and recognized both aspects of it simultaneously.

She retrieved her scanner and labeled conduit sections, and recorded the inventory location in her PADD, and went back to her work and the shuttle bay returned to its parallel working silence, each of us on opposite side of the bay with light streaming in through broken doors, and ship vibrating around us with its new vibration rate; knowing everything, yet saying little about most of it.

She believed that was probably correct.

She was attempting to learn it herself.