Zedd had not planned it as anything in particular. He had been doing a walkthrough of the lower decks and ended up at the shuttlebay and noticed that the bay doors were cracked open for the ventilation cycle and that the view from the deck edge was better than anything the mess hall viewport offered and he had sent Mei-Lin a message that said simply *Deck 4, shuttlebay, bring something to drink* and left it at that.

She showed up with two mugs of tea without being asked which he noted without saying anything about it and they found a spot near the open bay doors where they could sit on a equipment crate with their backs against the hull and the view opening out in front of them, New Ferenginar turning slowly below, marsh clouds catching the orbital light in long smears of green and gold. The sound of the ship was different here, more present, the hum of the engines and the creak of the hull doing what hulls did in the temperature differential of orbital space.

Cormus's Type 11s sat in their cradles behind them, quiet and smelling of recent maintenance work. The bay had a particular quality at this hour, lived in and purposeful without being busy, the kind of space that felt like the real interior of a ship rather than the parts that were meant to be seen.

They sat for a while without saying much and it was not uncomfortable. That was something he had noticed about her early on, she did not perform conversation. She either had something to say or she did not and the silence between those two states had a quality to it that most people could not manage.

"How did the crystals go," she said eventually. "You were gone longer than I expected."

"Crystals are sorted," he said. "You'll have them in the morning."

She looked at him. "And the core upgrade you mentioned. Did anything come of that."

He turned his mug in his hands. "Possibly," he said. "I ran into someone while I was down there. Had an interesting conversation. Things may be in motion on that front but it is early and I do not want to get ahead of it."

Mei-Lin looked at him for a moment with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to push further on something. She decided not to. "Okay," she said simply and looked back at the planet.

He appreciated that about her. She read the edges of a conversation accurately and did not crowd them.

"I will tell you more when there is more to tell," he said, which was as much as he was willing to give and she seemed to understand that.

"Fair enough," she said.

They sat with that for a moment and the planet kept turning below and the orbital traffic moved in its slow patterns and neither of them was in any particular hurry to fill the space with anything.

"Tell me something I don't know about you," he said.

She looked mildly surprised at the pivot. "That came from nowhere."

"It came from not wanting to talk about ship business all evening," he said. "Humor me."

She considered it looking at the planet rather than at him. "I had a cat on Mars when I was twelve," she said. "His name was Circuit because he kept sitting on my father's work and shorting things out."

Zedd laughed at that. "That is a genuinely good name for a cat."

"He was a terrible cat," she said. "Completely unrepentant about the damage." She paused. "I have not had anything to take care of since then. It is a longer gap than I usually think about."

He looked at her. There was something in the way she said it that was not quite sad but was close enough to it that he did not push further and she seemed to register that he had not pushed and something in her posture settled slightly.

"Your turn," she said.

"I can actually cook," he said. "Not replicate. Actually make food from ingredients."

She turned to look at him properly. "You're serious."

"My mother was insistent about it. She said any person who could not feed themselves was at the mercy of whoever could." He shrugged. "I thought it was a strange thing to be insistent about. She was right though. She usually was."

Mei-Lin smiled at that, the genuine unhurried one. "What do you make."

"Depends on what is available. On Epsilon Prime the list was not long. I got good at doing interesting things with very limited options." He picked up his mug. "The Rigellian stew Lindsy made was better than anything I could produce but I would not admit that to her directly."

Mei-Lin laughed. "She would file that away and use it somehow."

"Exactly," he said. "Some information is too dangerous to share freely."

The conversation drifted after that, no agenda, no particular direction, just two people finding out what the other one was made of in the unhurried way that only happened when neither of them had anywhere else they needed to be. She told him about a freighter run through the Antican frontier that had gone sideways in three separate ways on the same day and he told her about the first ship he had worked on after leaving Epsilon Prime, a bulk freighter that should have been decommissioned two years before he set foot on it, and they discovered a shared irritation about engineers who documented problems without fixing them that turned into a longer conversation than either of them had planned for.

At some point she had shifted slightly on the crate so she was facing him more than the open bay doors and he had done the same without noticing exactly when it happened and the distance between them was closer than when they had sat down and neither of them had moved to create it consciously.

A piece of orbital debris drifted slowly across the view below them, tumbling end over end and catching the light from New Ferenginar in brief flashes, and they both watched it for a moment without saying anything.

"I should check on the secondary relay before the end of the night cycle," she said eventually, in the tone of someone who had just remembered something real and was mildly annoyed at the reminder.

"Probably," he agreed, in the tone of someone who was not going to be the one to end the conversation first.

She looked at him for a moment with the expression he had seen before and had not entirely catalogued yet, something thinking about something and deciding not to say it out loud. Then she stood and picked up her mug and looked at the planet one more time.

"This is a good spot," she said.

"It is," he agreed.

She headed back into the ship and he stayed where he was with the bay doors open and the planet turning below and the Type 11s quiet in their cradles behind him and thought that the evening had gone the way evenings went when you were not trying to make them into anything and they became something anyway without asking your permission first.

He finished his tea and did not think too specifically about the distance between where they had ended up sitting and where they had started.

Not too specifically.