The bridge was not supposed to have anyone on it at 2300.

Zedd knew this because he had set the watch rotation himself and the 2200 to 0600 slot was covered by the automated monitoring systems and the new core which was considerably more capable of flagging anomalies than any single crew member sitting in the dark and which did not need sleep. The bridge at this hour was supposed to be empty and quiet and doing its job without human assistance.

Lindsy was at the helm.

She had not heard him come in which told him she had been at it long enough that her situational awareness had narrowed to whatever was on the display in front of her, which for Lindsy was a significant narrowing because her situational awareness was normally one of the broadest he had encountered in anyone. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at her before he said anything.

She was in her off duty clothes, the soft practical ones she wore when she had not planned to be somewhere and had ended up there anyway, and her hair was loose and she had a mug on the console beside her that had clearly been there long enough to be cold and that she had stopped noticing. The display in front of her was the Gatrao route, the layered chart version she had been building since the token purchase, and she was running something through the calculation interface with the focused intensity of someone who had found a problem and was not going to stop until she had found the answer to it.

He crossed the bridge and sat down in the captain's chair and looked at the display from there.

"What did you find," he said.

She did not startle, which meant she had registered him coming in and had simply not stopped what she was doing. "The nebula transit," she said. "The route I built assumes our sensor suite can maintain adequate resolution through the interference band. At standard range it cannot. The Nebula's interference profile degrades our sensor resolution by approximately sixty percent at the depth we need to transit and the standard navigation workaround, slowing to one quarter impulse and running incremental scans, adds significant time and leaves us effectively blind between scan intervals." She pulled up a secondary calculation. "I have been building an alternative approach vector that skirts the densest part of the interference band. It gives us better sensor coverage throughout but adds about two hours to the transit time."

He looked at the secondary route. "Two hours is acceptable if it means we are not flying blind through a nebula with no idea what is on the other side of each scan interval."

"That is my read," she said. "I wanted to verify the calculation before I brought it to you."

"How long have you been up here."

She glanced at the chrono on the console and something moved in her expression that was slightly sheepish which was not an expression he had seen on her before and which he filed alongside everything else he had been filing about her since the Rusty Lobe Cantina. "Since 1930," she said.

He looked at her. "It is 2300."

"I know."

"You have been sitting at the helm for three and a half hours running route calculations on your off duty time to plan for the departure."

"The calculation needed doing," she said, in the tone of someone who genuinely did not understand why this required explanation.

He looked at her for a moment and then at the display and then back at her. "Is the calculation done."

She looked at the secondary route and made two small adjustments and ran the final verification and looked at the result. "Yes," she said.

"Then save it and get off the bridge," he said.

She saved it. She did not immediately get off the bridge. She was looking at the route with the expression of someone who had just finished something and was not quite ready to stop looking at it.

"Lindsy."

"I am going," she said, and started closing the displays down with the methodical sequence of someone who needed to close things down in the right order or it would bother them later. She picked up the cold mug and looked at it and set it back down because there was nothing to be done about it at this point.

She stood up and he stood up and they were on the bridge together in the dim evening lighting with the departure route saved and New Ferenginar in the viewport and the ship quiet around them and she looked at him with the expression that was the real version of her, the one without the composure layered over it.

"I do not always know when to stop," she said.