Cormus had been circling the runabout for twenty minutes before he actually got in it.

That was not like him. He was not generally a person who circled things. He was the kind of person who got in and figured out the rest from the inside. But the Orvana's Reach had a quality to it that made him want to look at it properly before he committed to the cockpit and he was giving it that respect without examining too closely why.

She was a Danube class on the outside. That was the first thing and the last thing that was straightforward about her. The hull had the right lines, the right proportions, the right general silhouette for a class he had flown twice before in his Starfleet enlisted period and recognized the way you recognized something you had spent time inside. But the details were wrong in ways that took a moment to identify. The hull coating had a quality to it that standard Danube class hulls did not have, a slightly different way of catching the shuttlebay lighting that was subtle enough to miss if you were not paying attention and specific enough to mean something if you were. The nacelle pylons had flush mounted housings that the spec sheet did not mention. The aft section sat fractionally lower than it should for the declared cargo configuration which meant the hold was carrying more than it was supposed to or the floor had been rebuilt to carry something the manifest was not going to mention. Probably both.

He had flown enough vessels that hid things to know that the ones that did it well were worth trusting and the ones that did it badly got you boarded at best and killed at worst. The Reach was doing it well.

He ran his hand along the port side hull near the nacelle pylon and felt the texture of the coating under his fingers, different from standard hull plating in a way that was hard to describe but immediately identifiable once you had your hand on it. He had heard about hull polymer stealth coatings, everyone who had spent time on the frontier had heard about them, but he had never put his hand on one before and he stood there for a moment longer than he needed to just noting what it felt like.

Then he went in.

The cockpit was four stations in the declared configuration and three in the actual one, the science console replaced with a tactical setup that was cleaner and more integrated than he had expected for a modification job. The modification work was not the kind that came from someone who wanted a faster ship or a tougher one. It was the kind that came from someone who had already been in the situations the ship was being built to survive and had come out the other side with a very specific list of what they were never going to be without again.

The Conn station was his and he sat down in it and looked at what he was working with.

The controls were familiar in the way that all Danube class controls were familiar, the basic architecture the same across every variant he had ever seen, but there were additions layered into the standard interface that were not standard. The false transponder selector was the most obvious once he knew to look for it, a biometric drawer beneath the console that clicked open when he pressed his thumb to it and revealed a rotating registry interface with twelve options and a simple selector and a confirm function. He read through the registry list once. Mining claim runner. Small family operation. Survey vessel. Station auxiliary for when things were tightest. Twelve different versions of what this ship was willing to say it was depending on who was asking and what the situation required. He closed the drawer and did not touch the selector because he was taking the Reach out for a systems check and not for an operation and there was no reason to cycle the transponder today.

The stealth suite mode selector was integrated into the engineering panel and he leaned over to look at it without leaving the Conn station, three positions marked DARK, GREY, and HOT with a physical toggle rather than a soft control which he understood immediately. You did not want a soft control for this. You wanted something you could find by feel in the dark at one quarter impulse with someone running a sensor sweep that you needed to not see you.

He settled into the Conn station and ran the pre-flight sequence.

She came alive in layers rather than all at once, the power plant spinning up with a smoothness that the standard Danube class did not produce, the micro-fusion generators coming online with a secondary hum that was distinct from the main power plant and that sat just below the threshold of something you would notice if you were not listening for it. The scatter field emitters registered on the systems display as a fourth power source that the declared configuration did not account for and he looked at it for a moment and noted that anyone doing a casual inspection of the power readings would see something odd and would have to decide whether it was worth pursuing. Most people would not pursue it. That was probably the point.