Mei-Lin looked at him. "What kind of language."

"The kind I use when a port thruster assembly has a micro fracture and I have just put my hand in the wrong place," he said. "Nothing actionable. Just the natural response of someone having a bad morning."

She looked back at the scanner display. "I would not worry about it. The core is monitoring for operational relevance. I do not think your opinion of shuttle two's thruster assembly constitutes a security concern."

"That is reassuring," he said, in the tone of someone who was moderately but not entirely reassured.

He pushed off the workbench and went back toward shuttle two but not quite far enough to suggest he was done with the conversation, which she had noticed was a thing Cormus did when he had something he was working up to. He moved around things when he was thinking about whether to say something, using the physical activity as cover for the mental process.

She ran the second stage of the tolerance check and waited.

"So," he said, from the other side of shuttle two.

"So," she agreed.

"You and the captain." He said it the way he said most things he was not entirely sure about, with enough lightness in it that he could let it sit if she did not pick it up and enough directness that she would know he had meant to put it there.

Mei-Lin looked at the conduit segment on the workbench and ran the scanner over it one more time even though she had already gotten the reading she needed. "What about me and the captain."

"Nothing specific," he said. "Just a general observation that you and the captain have been spending time together and that the time you have been spending together has a particular quality to it." He appeared around the nose of the shuttle with the diagnostic tool and the expression of someone who was genuinely curious and was not going to pretend otherwise. "Is that an inaccurate observation."

"It is not inaccurate," she said.

He looked at her for a moment. "Okay," he said, which was the entirety of what he said, and went back to the thruster assembly.

She found that more disarming than a follow up question would have been. Cormus had a way of saying okay that left the door open without pushing it and she had not been prepared for the door to be left open because she had been prepared for the follow up question.

She looked at the conduit segment.

"It is early," she said, to the workbench rather than to him.

"I know," he said, from behind the shuttle.

"We have had some conversations. Spent some time. Nothing is defined." She picked up the scanner and set it back down. "It is just something that is present and neither of us is doing anything about it particularly quickly."

"That sounds like a reasonable way to handle it," Cormus said, with the sincerity of someone who meant it rather than someone who was being diplomatic.

"It is," she said. "I think." She paused. "He is not an easy person to read entirely. He is direct about some things and very private about others and the line between those two categories is not always where you expect it to be."

"That is accurate," Cormus said. "He told me the shuttlebay was not a consolation prize in about the same tone he would use to tell me the weather. Direct about something that mattered without making a ceremony of it." A pause. "I appreciated that."

Mei-Lin thought about that for a moment. It was consistent with what she knew of Zedd, the way he delivered significant things in ordinary registers and saved the ceremony for nothing. The relay readings. The captain's mess. The observation that she was good at what she did delivered as simply as if he were reading a diagnostic report. She found it considerably more affecting than she had been prepared for and she was still working out what to do about that.

"Can I ask you something," she said.

"Sure," Cormus said.

"What was your read of him. When you first came aboard. Before you had enough time to know him properly."

There was a pause on the other side of the shuttle that suggested Cormus was actually thinking about it rather than just answering. "Capable," he said finally. "Obviously capable in a way that did not need to be demonstrated. And private in the way you said, some things right on the surface and other things you could tell were there but were not going to come toward you, you were going to have to go toward them if you wanted them." Another pause. "I also thought he was someone who had been let down enough times that he was running a continuous background calculation on whether the people around him were worth the risk of not running that calculation."