Mei-Lin was quiet for a moment.

"That is a perceptive read," she said.

"I am better at reading people than I look," Cormus said, which she suspected was entirely true and which he had probably been using to his advantage since he was old enough to realize it was a skill.

She picked up the second conduit segment and started the tolerance check on it and thought about what Cormus had said and about the background calculation and whether she was running her own version of it about Zedd and whether she already knew the answer to that question without needing to examine it too carefully.

She suspected she did.

"He checks the relay readings," she said.

"What?" Cormus said.

"The starboard relay. He mentioned it was running warm the night he came down to engineering. Said it was an old habit, keeping an eye on the systems." She looked at the scanner display. "The new core flagged it this morning from my personal log. But he had already noticed it three days ago and mentioned it to me like it was incidental." She paused. "It was not incidental. He was paying attention to the ship in a way that did not announce itself."

Cormus appeared around the nose of the shuttle again with the expression of someone who had just had something confirmed that he had suspected. "He pays attention to everything," he said. "He just does not make it obvious that he is paying attention. The obvious part is the jacket and the raktajino and the attitude. The actual part is the attention." He leaned against the shuttle. "If he is paying attention to your relay readings specifically that is the actual part showing up somewhere you were not expecting it."

Mei-Lin looked at him.

"That is also a perceptive read," she said.

"I know," he said, without any particular ego in it, just the statement of someone who had assessed a situation accurately and was acknowledging it. He pushed off the shuttle and went back to the thruster assembly. "For what it's worth," he said, from behind shuttle two, "you seem like someone who is worth paying attention to. So it makes sense."

Mei-Lin looked at the conduit segment on the workbench and the scanner readings and the particular quality of the light coming through the cracked bay doors and thought that she had come down to the shuttlebay to run a tolerance check on EPS conduit segments she had picked up in a shadow market three days ago and had somehow ended up in the most honest conversation she had had since the ladies mess hall the other night.

She finished the tolerance check. Both segments were within spec, better than within spec, and she labeled them and set them aside for installation and made a note in her maintenance log and then looked at the note for a moment and thought about the fact that the ship would read it.

"Cormus," she said.

"Yeah," he said, from behind the shuttle.

"The micro fracture in the port thruster housing. The bonding compound in engineering bay three, shelf two, second row, will seal it permanently rather than just slowing the propagation. Better than whatever you have down there."

A pause. "How do you know what I have down there."

"Because I inventoried every supply cache on this ship in the first three days I was aboard," she said. "And what you have down there is a standard repair compound that is going to need reapplication in about six weeks. What I am telling you about will hold indefinitely."

Another pause. "I'll come get it when I am done with this stage," he said. "Thank you."

"It is in your interest," she said. "Shuttle two is part of this ship and this ship is part of my job."

"Right," he said, and she could hear the smile in it even without seeing his face, the particular quality of someone who had been given something useful dressed as something practical and had recognized both layers of it simultaneously.

She picked up her scanner and her labeled conduit segments and made a note of the supply location in her PADD and went back to her work and the shuttlebay settled back into its parallel working silence, the two of them on opposite sides of the bay with the light coming in through the cracked doors and the ship humming around them with its new frequency, aware of everything, saying nothing about most of it.

She thought that was probably the right approach.

She was trying to learn it herself.