The shuttlebay had a particular quality in the mid afternoon that Mei-Lin had come to appreciate in the week she had been aboard. The main bay doors were cracked for the ventilation cycle and the light that came through was different from the recycled air lighting in the rest of the ship, cooler and more honest, the kind of light that made things look like what they actually were rather than what the internal systems wanted them to look like.

She had come down to check the EPS conduit segments she had flagged in the shadow market three days ago, the ones with the tolerance variance that would work for a Saber class refit running on patched systems. They had made it back to the ship in the bottom of her carry bag and she had not had time to look at them properly until now with the crystal installation done and the computer core settled into its new home and the engineering bay finally quiet enough to think.

She had the first segment laid out on the maintenance workbench along the starboard wall and was running a full tolerance check when she heard the familiar sound of someone moving around the Type 11 on the other side of the bay.

Cormus had been in the shuttlebay since approximately 1400 by her estimate. She could tell by the way the tools were arranged near shuttle two, the particular organized disorder of someone who had started a job with a plan and had been revising the plan as they went. She had not announced herself when she came in and he had not acknowledged her and they had been working on opposite sides of the bay in the easy parallel silence of two people who had figured out early that they did not need to perform sociability at each other every time they were in the same room.

It lasted about forty minutes.

"These conduit segments," she said, not loudly, just enough to carry across the bay. "The ones I picked up in the shadow market. The tolerance variance on the primary is tighter than I expected for salvage."

She heard him move around the front of the shuttle and a moment later he appeared at the edge of the maintenance workbench with a diagnostic tool in one hand and a smear of something dark on his forearm that suggested shuttle two had been less cooperative than he had planned for.

He looked at the segment on the workbench and then at the readings on her scanner display. "Where did you find them."

"Second row of the first warehouse. Vendor had them labeled wrong, grade marking was off by two classifications. Either he did not know what he had or he was hoping nobody would look closely enough to notice."

Cormus picked up the segment and turned it over in his hands with the instinctive assessment of someone who had spent enough time around small craft to know what good components felt like before the scanner confirmed it. "These are not salvage."

"No," she agreed. "They are not."

"Where do they come from then."

"I have three theories and I am not confident enough in any of them to say." She took the segment back and set it down and ran the next stage of the tolerance check. "What are you doing to shuttle two."

"Port thruster assembly has a micro fracture in the housing that the diagnostic flagged this morning. Not critical but it is going to affect precision maneuvering in close quarters if I leave it." He leaned against the workbench and looked at her scanner readings with the focused interest of someone who genuinely liked understanding how things worked even when the things were not directly his concern. "The crystal installation went well this morning?"

"It went well," she said. "The new core is something else."

"I felt it come online," he said. "From here. The whole ship shifted frequency." He paused. "Is that normal for a bio-neural system."

"Apparently," she said. "I had not installed one before. The shift is the adaptive layer initializing. It is reading the ship and learning it." She looked at the scanner display. "It already found the starboard relay variance I had in my personal maintenance log."

Cormus stared at her. "It read your personal log."

"It has read access to all authorized crew PADDs as part of the ship systems integration protocol," she said, in the tone of someone who had spent the last three hours processing that information and had arrived at a functional acceptance of it. "That is what it told me when I asked."

Cormus was quiet for a moment. "So it knows everything that is in my maintenance log for the shuttlebay."

"Presumably."

"Including the notes I made about shuttle two last week that used some language I would not necessarily want repeated on the bridge."