The simulator dropped them into a Romulan corridor with the lights already failing. Reed got a second and a half to size up the four strangers the computer had thrown him in with before the first contact came around the far bend.

Team scenario, mixed specialists, nobody who'd worked together — the kind of shakeout drill the unit ran to see who moved well with people they didn't know. He put two rounds into the holographic Romulan at the end of the hall and slid to the wall to let the others sort themselves out. That was when he noticed the woman on point.

She read the corridor before she took a step. Her head tilted a fraction, like she was hearing something the rest of them couldn't, and then she called the split before he would have. Two left, two right. She set herself at the junction where the sightlines were worst, because that was where the thinking would have to happen. Trill, auburn hair pulled back tight, nothing wasted in how she held the weapon. She wasn't the biggest threat in the room, and she'd clearly built her whole position around knowing it — around being smart where she couldn't be fast.

Reed grinned behind the cover. He liked people who were good at this, and she was good in a way he didn't see often, the quiet kind that didn't need anyone watching. Auburn hair, green eyes, that unhurried economy in how she moved. He let himself feel the pull of it for a second. Then he got back to the drill. He wasn't dead.

"Second contact, your three," he called, already moving to cover the angle she couldn't. "Go. I've got the door. What do I call you?"

"Firefly." She was already moving. "You?"

"Nitro."

"Course it is." She dropped the two Romulans in the room he'd covered, clean. There was something dry in how she said it, like the name confirmed something she'd already guessed about him.

They took the next stretch of corridor together and found the rhythm fast — faster than two strangers had any right to. She called the angles and he covered them. He called the doors and she took the rooms. Halfway through, the sim threw a bad one at them: a hard room, two hostiles set back in cover, a third on a delay meant to catch whoever committed first. The computer wanted somebody to walk into it.

"Far room's a trap," Firefly said, flat, pressed to the wall beside the frame. "Two in the back, and it's holding something in reserve. It wants me to rush it."

"So don't." Nitro already had a breaching charge off his harness, thumbing it live, easy as a man buttering bread. "Give me the wall instead of the door. I'll make us a new one they're not looking at."

She looked at him for half a second, reworking her whole approach around what he'd just offered — and he watched her decide he was right. "Do it. I take the two in back the moment it blows. You take whatever the reserve is when it panics."

"Copy."

The charge went and the wall came in. They went through the hole he'd made instead of the door the sim had built its ambush around. She had the two in the back down before the smoke cleared; the third contact broke from cover, confused, hunting a doorway they'd never used, and Nitro put it down without hurry. The room went quiet. The sim logged it clean.

"Huh," she said, into the settling dust. Coming from her, it was most of the way to a compliment.

---

Jessica took the last of it on autopilot. Only afterward, in the quiet, did she spend any real attention on the man beside her.

He'd understood her on sight, which was rare. Most people saw the signals specialist, the small Trill woman, and slotted her somewhere safe and secondary — and then she'd spend the first ten minutes of an operation proving otherwise. He hadn't made her do that. He'd watched her set up, caught in one look what she was doing and why, and folded himself around it without being asked. And when the sim tried to force her hand, he hadn't told her to push through. He'd handed her a different door. That was, a little unfairly, the most attractive thing a man had done in front of her in longer than she cared to count.

So she looked at him properly — quick and complete, giving nothing back. Big through the shoulders, and light on his feet in a way big men usually weren't. Dark hair, a few days of stubble, a mouth that sat on the edge of a grin. He was grinning now, of course, the maniac. The ease in him read as real, not bravado; a man who simply wasn't worried. Her eyes went to his hands, still holding the weapon like it was nothing. She caught herself at it and shut it down with the efficiency she brought to anything inconvenient.