Starbase 234 kept its personnel offices warm enough to grow plants in, and someone in this one had taken that as permission. Seravin counted eleven of them along the windowsill while the lieutenant behind the desk read his orders for the second time. He had read them four times himself on the transport out, and they had not improved.

"Chief th'Ishren. Tactical specialist." The lieutenant scrolled. "You were requested by name."

"I was told that."

"It doesn't happen much with backfills." The young man glanced up, then back to the PADD. "The Rubicon lost a few people this week. Transfers out. You're one of the replacements."

"How many is a few?"

"Enough that I've processed more paperwork for that ship in three days than the last three months." The lieutenant tapped the display and handed it back. "She's at the main docking ring, upper berth four. They're expecting you. Is there anything you need from us before you go?"

Seravin thought about the question honestly, the way he thought about most questions. The orders gave him a ship, a department and a reporting time. They did not say why a refitted Excelsior on border patrol had needed to replace a block of her crew in the middle of a week, or why the people leaving had needed help packing.

"No, sir. Thank you."

He picked up his duffel and his gear case and went out into the corridor, where the air was a little cooler and he could think.

The docking ring was a long walk from the personnel section, and he took the slow way, down through the commercial level where the windows looked out on the berths. He had made a habit of that years ago aboard the Brannock: see the ship from the outside before you ever step through her airlock. Most people only ever saw a ship from the inside, which meant they only ever saw what she wanted them to see.

The Rubicon sat in her berth the way old ships did, comfortable and a little proud. Her lines were unmistakably Excelsior, long and lean, and he had read enough about her refit to know she had spent six months in dry dock coming out of it. What he had not expected was what he saw as he walked the length of the windows. Her sensor arrays had been reworked along the primary hull, and not modestly. There were fittings along the ventral side he could not name at all, and a cluster of new housings near her secondary hull that a patrol cruiser had no obvious reason to carry. She did not look like a ship that had been refitted to fight. She looked like a ship that had been refitted to listen.

Interesting.

His antennae had drifted forward on their own. He brought them back and kept walking.

He was nearly to the berth when the lift doors ahead of him opened and a young Andorian woman stepped out, wearing an ensign's pip and carrying a duffel twice the size of his. She had the look of someone who had been carrying it farther than she meant to. When she saw him, she stopped. It was not unusual for two Andorians to notice each other on a starbase this far from home. It was unusual for one of them to look as if she had been caught.

"You're going aboard." It was not a question. Her eyes had already gone to the berth number on his PADD.

"I am. Chief Petty Officer Seravin th'Ishren."

She hesitated, then gave her own name quietly, and the clan was one he knew from the southern tunnels of Laibok. Under any other circumstances they would have spent the next ten minutes discovering which cousins they had in common. She did not seem to want to.

"Were you aboard long?" he asked.

"Long enough." She shifted the strap of the duffel on her shoulder. Her antennae had pulled back slightly, the way his own did when he had decided not to say something and was holding the decision in place. "It's a good ship. The people are good. It just wasn't for me."

He waited. In his experience the second thing people said was usually the true one, if you gave them room for it.

She did not take the room. "They'll explain it. They're honest about it. I'll give them that."

"Explain what?"

For a moment he thought she might answer. Then she shook her head, not unkindly, and moved past him toward the transport lounge.

"Good luck, Chief."

He watched her go until the corridor turned and took her out of sight. A ship with new ears, a block of her crew walking off in the same week, and a young woman who would not say why she had left, only that whoever had told her had been honest about it. None of those things meant much on its own. Together, they were the beginning of a plan he did not have yet.