“You’re probably right. Hell, I’ve been here less than a week, so I wouldn’t want to push too hard. We talked about getting together over a drink. Just casual. Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. I felt like I should ask you, you know? I didn’t realize you two roomed together. Alright, let’s get back to the task at hand,” Morgan said.

“Now we’re set up to get the new crystals in place. They have to seated one at a time. Use the isodyne coupler to hold them in place once they’re in the frame. Here’s the first one,” Avery said as he handed the first crystal to Mei-Lin.

Mei-Lin took the crystal from him carefully, feeling the weight of it in her gloved hand, lighter than she expected for something that was about to become the beating heart of the ship's propulsion system. She turned it once to check the orientation against the frame alignment and then guided it into position with the deliberate steadiness of someone who had decided before she started that her hands were not going to shake.

The isodyne coupler clicked into place and she held the crystal steady against the frame and checked the seating angle against the alignment guide on her PADD with her free hand. It was within tolerance. She adjusted two degrees clockwise anyway because within tolerance and optimal were different things and she knew which one she wanted. "First one is seated," she said, stepping back slightly so Avery could verify the positioning before she released the coupler. "Check my angle before I lock it. I want a second opinion on this one."

Morgan eyeballed the crystal mounted in the articulation frame. “Looks good, Mei-Lin. Once we get the second crystal in there, we’ll see how the tolerances are. As you know, those tolerances have to be met to regulate the reaction inside the chamber. Go for it, partner. I’m here if you need me, but you seem to have a handle on it. Can’t wait to see what the core can do.”

She took the second crystal from the case with the same care she had given the first one, turning it in her gloved hand to check the lattice orientation before she brought it anywhere near the frame. The first crystal was seated and locked and the alignment readings on her PADD were clean and she was not going to rush the second one just because the first had gone well. That was the kind of thinking that produced mistakes in the final stage of a job that had been clean up to that point.

She guided it into the frame slowly, feeling for the resistance that indicated proper seating contact, and found it at the correct depth and angle without needing to adjust. The isodyne coupler locked and she held it steady and checked the tolerance reading on the display.

The number that came back made her go still for a moment.

She checked it again.

"Avery," she said, without looking up from the display. "The tolerance between the two crystals is coming in at point zero three microns. I want you to verify that independently before I call it." She stepped back from the housing and gestured toward the display, keeping her voice even and professional in the way she kept her voice even when something had happened that she was not sure yet whether to be pleased about or concerned by. "That is either very good or I am reading it wrong and I would rather know which one before we proceed."

Avery took hold of what would be closest to a non-Starfleet issue engineering tricorder. He confirmed Mei-Lin’s readings. “Well, it is at the upper limit. I’d like to get it down below 0.3 microns. Better to be safe than sorry. Last thing we need is for the warp core to go offline in the middle of nowhere. Hand me that attenuator, will you? We’ll get this buttoned up faster than you can say “dilithium matrix “.

She handed him the attenuator without hesitation and stepped back to the display while he worked, pulling up the full tolerance matrix and running a pre-ignition diagnostic on the plasma injector timing alongside it. The new core had flagged a point three degree adjustment recommendation that morning and she wanted it confirmed and corrected before they brought anything online. Efficiency gains from the new crystals would be partially offset by mistimed injectors and she had not spent three days sourcing and prepping and installing these crystals to leave anything on the table at the final step.

The injector data came back exactly as the core had indicated. She made the manual adjustment, cross referenced it against the baseline she had established on her first day aboard, and ran the projected efficiency calculation at the corrected setting.

Ninety seven point one percent.

She looked at that number for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

She had come aboard a ship running at somewhere below optimal on patched systems with worn crystals and a computer core missing half of what it should have been catching and she had spent ten days doing what she always did, following the whole line, fixing things properly rather than adequately, not because anyone was watching but because that was the only way she knew how to work. The number on the display was not a surprise. It was the result of ten days of decisions that each seemed small at the time and had accumulated into this.

She saved the reading to her maintenance log and flagged it against the original baseline so the comparison was documented and moved back to the core housing to wait for Avery to finish with the attenuator.

They were ready.

Morgan aimed the attenuator at the point where the mounted crystals sat closest together without touching. He checked his reading on the tricorder. “0.26 microns. That’s more like it. We have a little wiggle room. Before we fire up the core, how are the injectors and reaction chamber? All nominal?”