Reed had discovered that there were two kinds of unpacking. There was the normal kind, where clothing went into drawers, boots found somewhere under the bed, personal effects made their way onto shelves, and eventually a set of quarters that started to look like someone actually lived there. Then there was his kind which so far had involved opening three different containers, putting away almost nothing, and somehow ending up with the important things spread across the floor.

He sat cross-legged beside one of the storage crates he had finally bothered opening, surrounded by the accumulated remains of several postings. A battered ball from an old team had already found a place against one wall, a pair of training shoes had been kicked beneath the desk with enough confidence that they were probably going to live there permanently, and a handful of small keepsakes had made it onto the shelf above his bed without any real organization beyond the fact that he'd looked at each one and decided he wasn't ready to throw it away.

The clothing could wait.

What currently held his attention was the hard sided Blackwatch training case sitting open in front of him. Inside were several inert demolition simulants, built to match the handling characteristics of the equipment he would actually use in the field without requiring him to keep live charges sitting beside his bed. Reed was fairly certain even Blackwatch had paperwork for that, and he had no intention of finding out how much.

He picked up the first training block without looking at its identification strip and let the weight settle into his palm. It was light enough that he knew the general class immediately, but he still turned it once in his hand, paying attention to balance rather than simply mass.

Interior access.

That was how he had started thinking about them instead of trying to reduce everything to numbers. doors, partitions, reinforced structures, exterior plating. Categories tied to purpose, not formulas.

He already knew the technical side. He knew how different materials behaved, how structural members changed a problem, and how quickly a straightforward breach could become something much worse when somebody forgot to check what was on the other side. That part could be taught in a classroom.

What he wanted now was instinct.

Reed set the first simulator beside his knee and reached back into the case, this time closing his eyes before his fingers found the next one. It settled differently, enough heavier that his wrist registered the change before his brain finished naming it.

Partition.

He pictured one of the training spaces rather than his quarters, mentally filling in the sort of problem the simulator represented. Composite construction, internal framing, something Blackwatch might need through quickly without turning half the compartment into debris. The goal was never simply to make something disappear. Anyone could imagine that part. The actual skill was getting exactly the opening you needed while disturbing as little as possible around it.

That was what people tended to miss when they thought about demolition work.

Everyone remembered the explosion.

The real work happened before it.

Reed rolled the block once in his palm before setting it down and selecting another. This one carried more authority in the hand, not dramatically, but enough that someone who worked with the equipment regularly should know the difference.

Reinforced structure.

That category always made him slow down mentally. Starship construction had a way of punishing assumptions, because a wall was rarely just a wall. There could be power distribution behind it, environmental systems, data trunks, coolant lines or structural reinforcement that wasn't obvious from the surface. The difference between good engineering and a very bad afternoon often came down to whether somebody had remembered to look before deciding where to cut.

Reed opened his eyes and studied the training block for a moment.

Blowing something up was easy.

Knowing what not to damage was the real job.

He set it aside and reached for another. The next simulator was unmistakable the moment it came off the foam lining, its balance and general heft belonging to a different class of problem altogether.

Hull.

Even as a training category, the word carried more weight than the block itself.

Doors were obstacles. Interior walls were obstacles. The hull was the thing keeping everyone inside the ship alive.

There were circumstances where Blackwatch might have to force a way through external plating or reinforced structural material, but those were the situations where improvisation stopped being clever. Reed wanted his hands to recognize that distinction before his eyes ever found a label.

Poor visibility happened. Smoke happened. Equipment got dropped, markings got obscured, people grabbed the wrong thing because the correct thing happened to be sitting six centimeters to the left. Human beings had an impressive ability to turn simple situations complicated when enough pressure was applied.