Lindsy had been awake before the ship's morning cycle engaged.

She had lain in the dark of Zedd's quarters for a few minutes listening to the ship breathe around her and thinking about nothing in particular, which was unusual for her. She was generally a person who woke up already thinking about something. This morning she had simply been present in the warmth of the room with the star charts she could not see and the viewport showing the first shift in New Ferenginar's orbital light and she had let that be enough for a little while before she got up.

She had found her clothes and her bare feet and had gone back to her own quarters on Deck 3 while the ship was still quiet, not because she was uncomfortable with where she had been but because she had things to do and because she was the kind of person who showed up for her shift in her own clothes and with her own preparation done and she was not going to stop being that person because of what the previous evening had been.

By 0730 she was at the helm running the morning diagnostic sequence and the ship was coming alive around her and she had entered a set of preliminary route calculations for the Gatrao transit that she wanted to have ready before they moved out of orbit. By 0755 she had a message on her PADD from Zedd that said simply:

*Ready room. 0800.*

She handed the helm to the secondary station monitor and went.

---

The ready room was off the bridge, small and functional in the way of rooms that were used for working rather than impressing anyone. Zedd was already there when she came in, sitting behind the desk with a mug of raktajino and the particular focused quality he had when he had been thinking about something for a while and had arrived at a conclusion. He looked up when she came through the door and something in his expression was the easy version, the one she had seen last night, before it settled back into the professional register that they were both going to be operating in this morning.

She sat down across from him and put her PADD on the desk and waited.

"I want to talk about your role on this ship," he said.

She had not been expecting that specifically. "Alright," she said.

"You are my helmsman and my astrometrics officer and both of those things are real and neither of them is changing." He turned his mug in his hands. "I also want you in a third role. Command liaison." He pushed a PADD across the desk toward her.

She picked it up and read the brief role description he had put together. Junior command function. Supporting CO and XO in command side dealings. Handling follow up with client aides, brokers, technicians, data representatives. Clarifying technical details, verifying route and cargo and token requirements, recording proposed terms, relaying questions back to command before anything was committed. She read it twice before she set the PADD down.

"You want someone between you and the first conversation who knows how to read the technical side of what is being offered and can tell you whether it holds up before you commit to anything," she said.

"Yes," he said. "Someone who can sit across from a broker's representative and understand what they are actually saying versus what they are presenting themselves as saying. Someone who knows the difference between a route that works and a route that looks like it works." He looked at her. "You read navigational data the way most people read basic text. You also read people accurately and quickly and you know when numbers are being shaped to tell a particular story." He paused. "Those things together are what I need in this role."

She thought about it for a moment, which was how long it actually took her to think about it. "I can do that," she said. "I want to be clear about the boundary though. I relay, clarify, and record. I do not negotiate final terms or commit the ship to anything."

"That is the role," he said. "Exactly."

"Then yes," she said.

He nodded. "There is one more thing." He pulled up something on his console and turned it toward her. "The quarters next to Tiraa's on Deck 2. They are yours if you want them."

She looked at the deck layout on the display. Deck 2 quarters, command adjacent, considerably more private than the shared arrangement on Deck 3. She thought about Deck 3 and about her half of the shared room and about the roommate she was going to have arriving at some point and about the way Deck 2 felt different from the rest of the ship in the small ways that proximity to the bridge and the ready room and the captain's quarters made things feel different.

"That is a significant upgrade," she said.

"The role warrants it," he said. "And practically speaking I need my command liaison close to the bridge rather than two decks down."

She looked at him and he looked back and neither of them said anything about the other practical consideration that both of them were aware of and that neither of them was going to put into a ready room conversation at 0800 on a Tuesday.

"I will move my things today," she said.

"Good." He picked up his raktajino. "The Gatrao transit. Where are we."

She pulled up the route calculations on her PADD and turned it toward him and they spent the next twenty minutes in the clean professional space of two people doing their jobs well together and she thought that this was the other thing last night had confirmed, that the professional version of them was not damaged by the personal version and that the two things were going to be able to exist alongside each other without either one compromising the other.

That had not been a certainty going in.

It was a certainty now.

When she stood to go back to the helm he stood as well and walked her to the door the way he occasionally walked people to doors when the conversation had been something and he did not want to end it at the desk. He stopped in the doorway with his arms crossed and looked at her in the corridor with the easy expression that lived underneath the captain one.

"Lindsy," he said.

She looked at him.

"Good morning," he said, which covered considerably more ground than the two words usually covered and both of them knew it.

"Good morning," she said back, and went to the helm and pulled up the Gatrao route calculations and started working and thought that she had navigated a great many things in her career and that very few of them had started as well as this one.