The training assembly sat in the middle of the secured workroom looking considerably less threatening than the briefing suggested it ought to. Blackwatch technicians had built it specifically for the evaluation, combining replicated Romulan-style power architecture, communications hardware, and enough deliberately inconvenient engineering choices to make the problem believable without putting the Rubicon at risk. The instructions waiting beside it were sparse: identify the system, bring one designated subsystem online, and do so without activating anything else.

Reed stood over the assembly with one hand resting against the edge of the bench while Jessica worked from the opposite side. She had already positioned two passive receivers around the unit and was watching a third handheld display instead of the hardware itself. After tracing one of the internal power routes as far as the exposed housing allowed, Reed tapped a junction with one finger. "I can give you power without waking the whole thing. Probably." Jessica looked up from her display and let the word hang there for a second. "Probably is doing a lot of work in that sentence." Reed glanced back toward the assembly. "Certainty usually requires turning something on. You seem fairly committed to preventing that." Jessica shifted one of the passive receivers slightly and watched the display settle. "I'm committed to knowing what happens when you turn it on before you turn it on. If this thing announces itself the second you energize the wrong circuit, I'd rather find that out before you prove your engineering instincts correct."

Reed looked across the bench at her. "So this entire exercise is specifically designed to prevent an engineer from engineering." Jessica's attention returned to the receiver, though the faint amusement in her expression remained. "I think it's designed to see whether the engineer listens to the signals officer." Reed gave the assembly another look and decided that sounded suspiciously targeted, while Jessica observed that he had not even started yet and was already complaining about the evaluation. "I'm not complaining" Reed said. "I'm identifying institutional bias." Jessica almost answered, but something on the receiver caught her attention first.

Her fingers moved across the controls, narrowing the frequency window until a faint repeating pattern separated itself from the background noise. "Hold on. Don't touch anything." Reed stopped where he was and looked at her. "I haven't touched anything." Jessica kept working the controls. "You were about to." Reed stared across the bench at her. "You've known me for what, a few days?" She finally glanced up. "Long enough." He looked mildly offended by the confidence of that assessment, but Jessica turned the receiver toward him before he could make much of it. "It's transmitting."

The humor left Reed's expression as he leaned closer to the display without reaching toward the assembly. "The briefing says the primary system is cold." Jessica nodded while expanding the waveform. "It is." Reed studied the repeating pattern and frowned. "Then where is that coming from?" Jessica adjusted the receiver again. "Very low power, repeating interval, buried under the background. Something inside the rig is already awake." Reed looked from the signal to the training assembly. "Something they didn't bother mentioning." Jessica gave him a small look. "I suspect that may be the point of the test."

They turned back to the assembly and worked in relative silence for several minutes. Reed traced the physical pathways through the exposed housing while Jessica watched how the signal responded whenever he moved near a component. The casual way Reed carried himself changed once his hands entered the machinery. He checked each connection before disturbing it, stopped when the architecture stopped making sense, and whenever the circuitry crossed into Jessica's side of the problem, he asked before going farther. She noticed the difference. The man who seemed perfectly happy joking about turning things on became considerably more deliberate when there was an actual consequence attached.

Reed eventually indicated a narrow component buried between two larger regulators. "That line should be isolated from the main bus. If your signal is pulling power from anywhere in this section, that's the most likely feed." Jessica leaned closer to inspect it and asked whether he could disconnect it without energizing the rest of the system. "Yes" Reed said, then caught the look she gave him. "You wanted less probably." Jessica nodded once. "I did. Go slowly." He reached into the housing and began shifting the retaining mechanism while she focused on the receiver.

The waveform tightened almost immediately. "Stop." Jessica's hand closed around Reed's wrist at nearly the same moment she spoke, and he froze without hesitation. She remained focused on the receiver for another second before realizing she was still holding him. Reed's eyes dropped briefly toward her hand before returning to her face. "Something change?" Jessica released him and brought the receiver closer. "The center frequency tightened the moment you moved that component. Take it back a little." Reed moved it barely at all and waited. "There?" Jessica watched the transmission widen again. "Stop there. Now forward again, slower this time."