Marn had been aboard the Rubicon for less than ten minutes before he stopped believing most of what his transfer orders had said about the ship.

The paperwork called her a patrol cruiser assigned to border operations, which was probably true in the narrowest possible sense. Starfleet could make almost anything true if the wording was broad enough. What interested him more was what nobody had bothered putting on the page instead.

He came through the airlock with a duffel over one shoulder and followed the directions toward the quartermaster, paying more attention to the ship itself rather than to the route. It was habit, mostly. New ground was still ground, whether it had dirt underfoot or deck plating, and the first few minutes usually told you more than people realized.

The corridors were busy without feeling crowded. That wasn't unusual. The people in them however were. He passed two officers who carried themselves like security but weren't wearing security colors. One looked at him long enough to register a new face, then immediately went back to what she was doing. The second did almost the same thing a few meters later. Neither stared, neither asked a question, and neither gave him the curious once over that people usually gave a transfer arriving with a bag over his shoulder. That could have meant nothing by itself. Two people doing it in the same corridor made it much less likely.

He noticed an armory access point farther down the passage that caught his attention next. The hatch itself looked ordinary enough until he noticed the access control panel beside it. It as more restrictive than they needed to be for anything a patrol ship was expected to carry, unless someone aboard had a very different definition of patrol than the people writing the fleet summaries. Marn kept walking.

No unit patches either. That was harder to miss once he started looking for them. A few departmental insignia, standard Starfleet identifiers, names where names were supposed to be, but nothing advertising whatever group half these people seemed to belong to. He filed that away along with everything else.

By the time he reached the quartermaster's station, his official assignment made a little more sense. They hadn't transferred a reconnaissance specialist three sectors over because somebody suddenly needed another set of eyes on routine border patrols. He had known that much when the orders came through. The rest of the ship was simply confirming what he already surmised. Whatever the Rubicon actually was going to be doing, somebody preferred not to advertise it. That suited him jsut fine.

The Chief behind the quartermaster's counter was Bolian, broad through the shoulders and already halfway through whatever shift had convinced him that all newly arriving personnel were basically forms with legs. He held out a hand without looking up.

"Orders."

Marn handed over the transfer padd and set his duffel beside his boot.

The Chief scrolled through it. "Trosk. Reconnaissance specialist."

"Marn is fine."

That got no response.

"Transferred from the Ardent," the Chief continued. "Petty Officer Second Class. Anything they forgot to put in here that I'm going to find irritating later?"

Marn considered the question for a moment. "Probably."

The Bolian finally looked up. Marn met his eyes. "I have a bad habit of telling people when I think they're wrong."

There was a short silence while the Chief decided what to do with that. "You expecting that to be a problem here?"

"I usually don't know until someone is wrong."

The Bolian stared at him another second, then gave a quiet grunt that might have been amusement and might just as easily have been fatigue. "Deck eighteen. Your compartment assignment's already in the system. Locker, bunk, storage allotment. You lose any of it, and supply will pretend none of it ever existed."

"Understood."

"You have forty-eight hours before you're expected fully integrated with your section."

Marn picked up the duffel.

The Chief glanced at the padd again. "Recon, huh?"

Marn paused. "That's what they tell me."

This time the Bolian did smile, although only barely. "You're going to be popular."

"I've survived fine without it." He left before the Chief could decide whether to keep talking.

Deck eighteen told the young man a little more. Not enough to settle the question completely but enough that the vague shape he'd been building since the airlock started filling itself in. The traffic was lighter down here, the people more familiar with one another, and there was a difference in the way they moved. Nobody seemed hurried, but nobody drifted either. Conversations were short. Doors stayed closed. Equipment lockers appeared in places where crew accommodations usually got another lounge or storage alcove.

Marn found his assigned compartment, stepped inside, and immediately ignored the duffel. It could wait. He sat on the edge of the bunk instead and let the door close behind him.