He ran through the weapons check and the phaser arrays that scanned as Type-VI from the outside produced Type-VIII output readings on the internal display and he sat back and looked at that for a moment and thought about the difference between what a vessel said it was and what it actually was and about how much work had gone into making those two things diverge in ways that were impossible to prove from the outside.
He requested departure clearance from the Dutchman's docking system, which acknowledged with the new computer core's clean voice, and ran the final pre-flight checks and then eased the Reach out of the shuttlebay with the particular delicacy he brought to moving anything out of a bay for the first time, slow and precise and with a feel for where the edges were before he committed to the opening.
She cleared the bay doors and New Ferenginar opened up in front of him, the planet filling the lower half of the cockpit viewport and the orbital traffic moving in its slow patterns around the docking rings and Berth 47-A and the Dutchman sitting where she always sat, solid and slightly rough around the edges and entirely his in the way that ships became yours when you were responsible for flying them.
He pushed the Reach to full impulse.
She moved differently from the shuttles. That was the first and most important thing and he wanted to feel it before he thought about anything else. She was heavier than a Type-11, more substantial in the way she responded to the controls, with a half second lag in the lateral response that was not a deficiency but a characteristic. He made three full orbital passes around New Ferenginar at increasing speeds, feeling how she sat in the turns, how she corrected when he applied thrust at an angle, how the impulse engines distributed the load across the frame at full power versus three-quarter.
She was good. Not fast in the way the shuttles were fast but steady in a way the shuttles were not, the kind of steadiness that came from a vessel that had been asked to do difficult things repeatedly and had learned to absorb the difficulty rather than fight it. The Type-11s were responsive and nimble and he loved flying them. The Reach was something else. The Reach was built for situations where nimble was not going to be enough.
He toggled the stealth suite to GREY and felt the bafflers engage, a subtle change in the ship's sound profile as the EM counter-field came up and the micro-fusion generators took the load and the impulse signature dropped to something considerably quieter than it had been. He ran two more orbital passes in GREY and checked the sensor return on his own display and the Reach was reading as something small and irregular and not particularly interesting which was exactly what GREY was supposed to produce.
He thought about toggling to DARK and decided against it. DARK capped him at one quarter impulse and he was not finished feeling out the full impulse response and there was no operational reason to run dark in orbit of New Ferenginar today. He filed it for a proper test in a more appropriate environment and toggled back to HOT and let the ship be loud for a moment and ran a final full power burn toward the outer orbital marker and then brought her back around toward the Dutchman.
On the approach he thought about what he had just spent an hour learning. The transponder drawer with its twelve identities. The scatter field running off dedicated generators that the main power plant never touched. The hidden hold with its sensor dampened cavities. The no-log transporter. The Type-VIII arrays hiding inside Type-VI housings. Most modifications addressed one problem. A faster engine, a stronger shield, a hold that scanned clean. This vessel had been built around a dozen problems that had not happened yet and every one of them had an answer already installed in the hull. Whoever had built this had not been optimistic about the situations the Reach was going to find herself in and had been entirely right to be pessimistic.
He brought the Reach back through the bay doors with the same precision he had used going out, slow and deliberate and feeling the edges, and settled her into her cradle and ran the post-flight sequence and sat in the cockpit after the systems had powered down.
She was not what she said she was and she was very good at not being it. He sat in the quiet cockpit with the shuttlebay around him and thought about the transponder drawer under the console and the twelve identities sitting in it waiting to be used and about what it meant to fly a vessel that had that many answers ready before the questions had been asked. It was the kind of ship that assumed the worst and prepared accordingly and he found that considerably more reassuring than the alternative.
He picked up his diagnostic tool and started his post-flight notes and thought that the Dutchman had just gotten considerably more capable than she had been this morning and that the Reach was a significant part of why.