"Recon."

"That explains quite a bit."

Marn looked at her for a moment. "I assumed it would."

"That wasn't entirely what I meant."

"I know" he said before returning to his meal.

Jessica let the silence sit rather than forcing another exchange out of him. She was beginning to understand that Marn didn't regard pauses as problems requiring repair, which already placed him above a depressing percentage of Starfleet.

"I'm signals" she said after a while.

"I know."

Her eyebrows rose again, and this time Marn explained before she had to ask. Her name and specialty had been on the personnel update: CWO3 Jessica Merida, SIGINT, now assigned to Bulwark.

"As of this morning" Jessica said.

"Vigil yesterday."

She set the spoon down. "You really do read everything."

"Personnel changes involving my own team seemed worth the effort."

Her reassignment had been straightforward enough. Vigil had one distribution of specialists, Bulwark needed another, and somebody farther up the chain had decided her particular skill set made more sense there. Jessica hadn't objected. The work was the work, and she'd never been especially sentimental about organizational charts, but it was still her first morning looking at Bulwark from the inside.

"You've been on Bulwark since you arrived?"

"Four days."

Jessica picked up her cup. "So you're practically senior staff."

Marn kept a straight face. "I'll try not to let the authority change me."

She smiled into the coffee, and Marn waited until she'd taken another drink before adding that her reassignment made sense.

"You have a habit of saying that immediately before something I'm going to have to ask you to explain."

"The team has recon now. It has signals. Those overlap."

"They complement each other."

"Close enough" Marn said, with just enough amusement to make it clear he knew there was a distinction and had decided not to care about it.

Jessica didn't give him the argument. Marn continued instead, explaining that he could tell her where someone had gone, what route made sense and where they should be watching from, while she could tell him what they were saying while they did it. A transmission could narrow his search, and the absence of one where there should have been traffic could be just as useful.

There was nothing grand about the explanation. He wasn't trying to sell her on the reassignment or impress her with how well they were going to work together. He was simply describing the relationship between their specialties as he saw it.

Jessica had to admit the logic was sound. Signals intelligence and reconnaissance were both ways of taking incomplete information and turning it into something useful before it stopped being useful.

"Provided you don't decide you've already worked everything out before I get there."

Marn considered that. "If I've already worked it out, I'll tell you."

Jessica gave him a look. "That's exactly what concerns me."

That earned another small smile, and they returned to lunch without needing to fill the next few minutes with conversation.

Jessica found herself studying him more closely after that. Petty Officer Second Class wasn't especially senior, yet there was none of the performance she'd seen from younger enlisted personnel trying to convince officers they belonged in the room. Marn had noticed her warrant insignia immediately, understood what it meant, and then continued behaving exactly as he had before.

There was a difference between ignoring rank and not being intimidated by it. Jessica knew it well. She'd spent too many years enlisted before taking the warrant track not to.

Marn glanced up from his tray. "You were enlisted."

Jessica slowly lowered her spoon. "You're making a lot of assumptions about someone you met fifteen minutes ago."

"That one isn't much of an assumption."

The lack of challenge in his voice somehow made it more irritating. Jessica leaned back slightly and told him to explain.

"You noticed my rate when you walked over, but it didn't change how you approached me" Marn said. "Most commissioned officers either become more formal when they see enlisted insignia or deliberately less formal because they want everyone to know rank doesn't bother them. You did neither. You answered Petty Officer because I called you Chief, and then we stopped using titles."

Jessica studied him. She didn't particularly enjoy being read, partly because she was usually the one doing it, but one part of the explanation caught her attention.

"You said commissioned officers."

"You're not one" Marn said, and Jessica gave him a knowing look.

"Warrant officer."

"Exactly."

She nodded slowly. "Different disease."

That finally earned an unmistakable smile. Jessica let him enjoy it for a second before adding, "You're also very comfortable telling a Chief Warrant Officer what she's thinking."

Marn seemed entirely unconcerned. "If I'm wrong, you'll tell me."

"Another assumption."

He regarded her for a moment with the expression of someone actually considering the odds. "Probably eighty-five percent."