He disconnected from the port and let the overlay fade.

"It is fast," he said.

"How fast," Mei-Lin said.

"Faster than anything I have used direct interface on outside of a Starfleet installation," he said. "The handshake was immediate. No lag anywhere in the diagnostic overlay." He looked at the core housing. "She sourced something that should not be available through the channels she was using."

Mei-Lin was quiet for a moment, which meant she was thinking about something she had not decided whether to say. "Does that concern you," she said finally.

"Yes," he said. "And no." He looked at the wall display where the initialization data was still building its picture of the ship in real time. "Whatever her reasons for bringing something this good aboard, the ship benefits from it and the crew benefits from it and right now that is the calculation that matters."

Mei-Lin accepted that with the practical honesty she applied to most things and went back to the initialization checklist on her PADD.

"Hello," Zedd said, to the core, which was still not the most technically sophisticated first interaction but felt like the right one.

"Captain Sykes," the core said. "I have your biometric profile from the transferred data. I am also reading Senior Engineering Officer Zhao in engineering bay. Good afternoon."

Mei-Lin raised an eyebrow and looked at Zedd.

"Good afternoon," Zedd said. "Run a full systems diagnostic. I want to know what you see."

"Running." A pause of approximately four seconds which for a bio-neural processing cluster was a long time, which meant it was being thorough rather than fast. "Diagnostic complete. Warp core is operating at ninety four point three percent efficiency following recent crystal installation. Recommended adjustment to plasma injector timing would bring this to ninety seven point one percent. EPS relay on secondary port grid is showing micro fracture repair from approximately forty eight hours ago, seal integrity at ninety nine point four percent, no further action required. Sensor arrays are fully online. Navigation systems are integrated and showing improvement in processing response time of approximately sixty three percent over previous baseline. Tactical systems are online. Life support nominal across all decks." Another brief pause. "I am also noting that the starboard relay has been running at approximately point three degrees above baseline for the past forty hours. Engineering Officer Zhao has this flagged in her personal maintenance log."

Mei-Lin looked at the display. "It found the starboard relay."

"You flagged it," Zedd said.

"I flagged it in my personal maintenance log," she said. "Not in the ship's system." She looked at the core housing. "It read my PADD log."

"I have read access to all authorized crew PADDs as part of the ship systems integration protocol," the core said. "Engineering Officer Zhao's maintenance logs are part of the ship's operational record. I apologize if this was unexpected."

"It was not unexpected," Mei-Lin said carefully. "What is your recommendation on the starboard relay."

"Replacement of the secondary feed conduit within the next seventy two hours would prevent the variance from developing into a more significant issue. The component is available in engineering stores, bay three, shelf four. Installation time approximately forty minutes."

Zedd looked at Mei-Lin and she looked at him and they had the particular expression of two people who had just understood that the ship they were running was going to be a fundamentally different experience from the ship they had been running twenty minutes ago.

"What is the current status of all ship systems," Zedd said.

"All primary systems nominal. Secondary power distribution is running at ninety one percent efficiency, two percent improvement over the previous core's baseline. Environmental systems are stable across all decks with one minor variance on Deck 3 that I have already corrected. Navigational array is calibrated and integrated. Tactical systems are standing by. The fabricators on Deck 4 are running a maintenance cycle that was scheduled by Engineering Officer Zhao for 1400 hours." A brief pause. "I should note that the ship's sensor net is currently detecting a vessel of Ferengi registry in the adjacent berth that has been conducting what appear to be low intensity scans of the Dutchman for the past six hours. The previous core was not processing the scans as significant. I am flagging them for your awareness."

Zedd looked at the display. "Can you identify the scan type."

"Passive commercial sensor sweep consistent with pre-purchase assessment protocols. The vessel appears to be evaluating the Dutchman's systems profile rather than gathering tactical intelligence. I assess this as a commercial interest rather than a security threat but will continue monitoring and alert you if the scan type changes."

Mei-Lin was looking at the display with the expression she wore when something had just become considerably more interesting than she had expected. "It caught something the old core was ignoring for six hours," she said quietly.

"Yes," Zedd said.

"That is going to change how we operate."

"Yes," he said again. "It is."

The Dutchman hummed around them with the new frequency of a ship that was paying attention in ways it had not been paying attention before and Zedd stood in his engineering bay with the dataport still warm at the base of his neck from the interface connection and thought about Tiraa and what she had brought aboard and what it was going to mean for this crew to operate on a ship that was this aware of its own environment.

He was not sure yet whether aware was the right word for what this ship was becoming.

He was fairly sure the word was something more than that and that he was going to find out what it was one diagnostic at a time.

"Good work," he said, to Mei-Lin and to the ship simultaneously, which felt like the right way to handle it.

"Thank you Captain," the core said, which was not something he had expected it to say and which he was going to need to think about.

He picked up the installation checklist and made his final notes and did not examine too closely the fact that the ship had just thanked him for a compliment he had not been sure he was directing at it.

The Dutchman knew the difference.

That was either very reassuring or something else entirely.

Probably both.