A little over two hours had passed since the oath in Cargo Bay Two, long enough for the implant procedures to be completed, the initial medical observation period to pass, and the new members of Blackwatch to be given access to the decks that had been closed to them before that morning.

Marn had not gone back to his quarters.

Instead, he had made his way to Deck 19 and into the Blackwatch Operations Center, following the access indicators through a corridor that had been deliberately designed to feel separate from the rest of the ship. The difference was subtle, but obvious once he noticed it. There were fewer decorative touches, fewer open spaces, and more secured doors than a normal Starfleet deck required. The ship did not advertise what happened here. It simply made it clear that whatever did happen was meant to stay inside.

The recon suite occupied one side of the operations center, separated from the larger command displays by a partial divider and a row of consoles set into the wall. It was not a private office, and Marn would not have wanted one. From where he stood, he could see the central operational display, the mission planning tables, and the entrances that fed into the briefing rooms beyond. A recon specialist needed to understand more than terrain and approach routes. He needed to know where the information went once he had it.

He approached an unoccupied console and rested a hand against its edge while the system recognized his credentials. The display came to life in stages, first offering standard shipboard mapping and sensor functions, then expanding into secured Blackwatch directories that had not been available to him the day before.

Orbital maps. Terrain databases. Sensor overlays. Mission-recording storage. Drone integration. Planning tools that allowed a route to be built, tested, and torn apart without ever leaving the ship.

Marn studied the available options without touching anything else yet.

It was more capability than he had been accustomed to having in one place. On most assignments, recon meant working from whatever information had been gathered before the team was sent in, then adapting once the real situation proved different from the briefing. The suite would not eliminate that problem. No amount of hardware could guarantee that an enemy had not moved a patrol, changed a code, or decided to put a sentry somewhere inconvenient.

What it could do was reduce the number of unknowns before the team crossed the line.

That had value.

He opened a terrain-planning module and brought up a generic topographical map, then began moving through its functions one by one. Observation points, dead ground, approach routes, fields of view, likely choke points. The system allowed each to be layered over the next until the map started to resemble less of a landscape and more of a problem that could be solved.

A quiet alert appeared in the corner of the display, indicating that the console had linked successfully with the drone-control interface. Marn’s attention shifted toward it immediately.

That was better.

He spent the next several minutes reviewing the available controls, learning how the operations center would receive a drone’s feed, how it could mark locations for a team in the field, and how the information could be passed into a mission plan without relying on someone to translate it after the fact. It was efficient. Not perfect, but efficient enough that he could already see how it would change the way he worked.

Eventually he leaned back from the console and looked across the wider operations center again.

This was not just a place to prepare for missions. It was the place where Blackwatch decided what it knew, what it did not know, and how much risk it was willing to accept before asking people to walk into the dark.

Marn looked back to the recon display, his expression settling into something close to approval.

For the first time since coming aboard the Rubicon, the work ahead of him felt less abstract.