The computer core on the Dutchman occupied a dedicated alcove off the main engineering bay, a cylindrical housing about two meters tall and one meter across that hummed with the particular frequency of a system that was working harder than it was designed to work. Zedd had known since he bought the ship that the core was the limiting factor on most of what he wanted the Dutchman to be capable of. The navigational processing lag that Lindsy had flagged in her first week, the sensor integration delays that had been showing up in the diagnostic logs, the way the tactical systems hesitated a half second longer than they should when asked to do two things at once, all of it traced back to a processing architecture that had been state of the art in 2371 and was now simply old.

Tiraa had come through faster than he had expected.

He had not asked too many questions about where the unit came from and she had not offered too many answers and that was the arrangement he had agreed to when he brought her aboard and he was going to honor it. What mattered was what was sitting in the center of the engineering bay in its transport housing, a matte black cylinder roughly the same dimensions as the existing core but with a density to it that suggested considerably more was happening inside. The specs Tiraa had forwarded were exceptional. A bio-neural processing cluster integrated with a standard isolinear backup architecture, adaptive learning capability, full sensor suite integration across all arrays simultaneously, and a ship systems management layer that could monitor and adjust everything from life support to weapons power distribution without waiting for a crew member to notice something needed adjusting.

It also had a voice interface that was considerably more sophisticated than the standard computer response system the Dutchman currently ran. He was reserving judgment on that until he heard it.

Mei-Lin had been looking at the transport housing for twenty minutes with the expression she wore when she was building a complete picture before she started working.

"Walk me through the installation sequence," she said, without looking away from the housing.

"Core transfer first," Zedd said, pulling up the technical schematic on the wall display. "We move the existing system data to the backup isolinear banks before we touch the hardware. Everything the ship knows about herself goes into storage and stays there until the new core is initialized and we can verify the transfer is clean."

"How long does that take."

"Forty minutes give or take. The backup banks on this ship are older than the core so we run the transfer at sixty percent capacity to avoid a data integrity issue."

Mei-Lin looked at him. "You have done this before."

"Once," he said. "On a ship considerably less cooperative than this one. That experience is why we are doing the transfer at sixty percent."

She accepted that and went back to the housing. "The bio-neural cluster. I have worked around bio-neural systems before but never installed one. They are more sensitive to the initialization sequence than standard isolinear architecture. If the environmental conditions in the core alcove are not within spec when we bring it online the cluster degrades and you do not get a second chance at a clean initialization."

"What do you need."

She was already moving to the environmental control panel on the far wall. "Temperature in the alcove needs to be between eighteen and twenty two degrees Celsius and stable, no variance, for the entire initialization window. Humidity below forty percent. And I want the power feed to the alcove isolated from the rest of the engineering grid for the duration so we are not dealing with fluctuation from other systems drawing off the same line." She pulled up the readings on the panel and looked at them. "Temperature is currently twenty four. Humidity is forty three."

"How long to bring it into spec."

"Thirty minutes if I adjust the environmental controls now." She made the adjustments with the focused efficiency of someone who had already worked out the sequence before she got to the panel. "We can run the data transfer while we wait for the environment to stabilize. That keeps us on timeline."

Zedd nodded and moved to the existing core housing and began the data transfer initialization. The process was straightforward, pull everything the current system held about the Dutchman's operational history, navigational logs, systems baselines, crew access protocols, the accumulated record of every decision the ship had made since she was commissioned, and move it into the backup banks where it would sit safely until the new core was ready to receive it.

The transfer progress bar appeared on the wall display and began its slow crawl.