Solana had been aboard the Rubicon for twenty-three minutes when she decided unpacking could wait.

Her quarters on deck eighteen were perfectly serviceable which was about as much enthusiasm as she could work up for them. A bed, a desk, storage, a small latrine, enough room to turn around without bruising something important. Someone had already delivered the rest of her gear ahead of her leaving two cases stacked neatly against the wall and her field medical pack sitting beside them like it was judging her for considering a quiet afternoon.

She stood in the middle of the compartment with one hand on her hip and looked from the cases to the pack. "No," she told it. The pack offered no argument.

Solana had spent enough time aboard starships to know how this went. You arrived, unpacked everything, figured out which drawer was going to stick for the next two years, arranged a handful of personal things so the room stopped looking like temporary housing, and then waited for someone to tell you where to be. It was sensible. Organized. Probably exactly what Starfleet expected. It also sounded painfully boring.

She picked up the medical pack instead.

Deck eighteen had been the one part of her assignment that hadn't required much explanation. Blackwatch personnel were quartered together which made sense given what they were expected to do and the hours they were likely to keep. The section of the deck she'd walked through on the way to her compartment had already felt slightly different from the rest of the ship. Less traffic, fewer people lingering in doorways, more equipment where ordinary crew spaces would have held decorative bulkheads or another replicator nobody needed.

She liked it immediately which probably said something about her.

Solana slung the pack over her shoulder and headed for Sickbay.

The Rubicon was new ground, but sickbay wasn't. Every ship arranged things differently, every Chief Medical Officer had some particular way they wanted supplies organized, and every medical department eventually developed its own collection of shortcuts that made perfect sense to the people who worked there and absolutely none to anyone else. The equipment changed. The layout changed. Patients, unfortunately, remained remarkably committed to finding creative ways to injure themselves.

That part she understood.

She found Sickbay without consulting the deck map more than once, which she decided was acceptable for a first attempt. The doors opened onto the familiar combination of clean surfaces, diagnostic displays and equipment that had been packed away with enough precision to reassure anyone who had never actually worked a trauma.

A corpsman looked up from a supply cart when she entered. "Can I help you?" he asked.

"Probably," Solana replied as she stepped inside and let the doors close behind her. "Solana. New nurse."

Recognition took a moment before his eyes dropped toward the medical pack on her shoulder. "Blackwatch?"

"That's what they keep telling me" she said.

He nodded toward the pack. "You know you don't need to bring your own kit into Sickbay."

"I know."

"Then why did you?"

Solana glanced down at it as though she had only just noticed it was there. "Separation anxiety."

The corpsman stared at her for a second and then gave a small laugh.

Good. At least somebody here had a pulse.

He pointed toward an open workstation. "Your access should already be active. Supply inventory is current as of this morning, but we're still waiting on two replacement vascular regenerators."

"Both?" Solana asked.

"One failed diagnostics. The other got damaged."

"How?"

There was a pause.

Solana smiled. "That's going to be a good story, isn't it?"

"Engineering dropped a crate on it" the corpsman told her.

She waited.

"That's the whole story."

Her expression fell slightly. "That's disappointing."

The corpsman shook his head and returned to what he was doing while Solana moved farther into Sickbay, letting her eyes work through the room. Beds. surgical access. emergency equipment. diagnostic stations. Where the trauma kits were stored. Which biobed gave the fastest line to the surgical bay. How much space there was between the primary treatment area and the doors.

She'd always done this without thinking. In an emergency, the room stopped being a room. It became distance, equipment, bodies and time. How long from the door to the nearest bed. How many steps to the crash cart. Whether someone could move a stretcher through that gap without catching it on something Starfleet had decided looked attractive.

Most of medicine happened after somebody else had already made a mistake. Field medicine just removed the walls.

That was one of the reasons she'd volunteered for Blackwatch in the first place.

Solana set her pack on the edge of an unused biobed and opened it. Everything inside was arranged exactly where she'd left it: cortical stimulator, dermal regenerator, vascular clamps, hyposprays, field diagnostic module, sealant, emergency pharmaceuticals and enough basic trauma equipment to keep someone alive until they reached people with larger machines.