“Trid, you wouldn’t happen to know why a few of my teams are telling me computers seem to be running slow across the ship, would you?”

A slow in draw of breath as she turned around let Trid disengage from her work briefly. Matt Lake was standing there, a step down, arms folded over the railing that led down to the helm and her usual ops station. No one was at Engineering and she wanted the extra screens to help with her task, so she’d simply moved to the better station.

She blinked a few times, replaying Matt’s question, then smiled. “Oh yeah, that’s me.”

“Okay,” the science officer asked, putting on his friendly smile. “Couldn’t free up some resources to stop complaints, could you?”

Ever since she’d come aboard Republic she’d never had an unpleasant conversation with the chief science officer. She couldn’t even recall a time she’d ever heard him raise his voice. Or swear. A positive, happy individual who seemed content to smile at all the universe threw at him and just keep ongoing.

It was an infuriatingly infectious positive outlook she’d seen him artfully deploy a few times to resolve crew tensions. Or a shield he wielded when he dove on a diplomatic landmine a few weeks back for the captain by engaging a Betazoid merchant in conversation, dragging the man’s attention away with seemingly genuine interest in ‘exploratory trade missions’.

And it also made it difficult to deny him when he made such polite and friendly requests.

“Got any experts on Nausicaan encryption protocols in the Science department?” The question was rhetorical; they both knew the answer. “I’m trying to brute force the copy of raider’s nav and comm records we took and I can either take my time or just make a bunch of people annoyed at slow processes.”

“And the captain did say ‘anything and anyone you need, make it happen’,” Matt said, echoing Captain MacIntyre’s words. “I’ll let you get on it with it then.”

“Thanks.”

They’d both turned away from each other, but she’d barely had a chance to look over the array of decryption attempts before her when Matt returned. “You’re running this on the main computer, right?”

“Both cores,” she answered. “Parallel processes. I do know how to throw all the processing power I can at a problem.”

“Just a thought,” he said, which was enough to get her to spin around and face him again. “What about the engineering computer core?”

“We’re kind of at warp right now,” she answered, a jutting out of chin at the viewscreen showing the swirling stream of starlight and matter as it interacted with the superluminal warp bubble.

“Yeah, but they have a lot of spare processing power, just like we normally do.”

She studied Matt for a second, not getting what he was driving at. She was to deep into her current problem she couldn’t quiet see what he was getting at.

And he finally understood that himself. “Would it all go faster if you could convince Commander Malcolm to give you access and some processing allocation?”

“It’ll always go faster with more processing power,” she answered. Then felt the circuit switch in her head as her own brain caught up. “Prophets! I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’ve just gotten used to thinking of Engineering as its own little fiefdom. But you’re the chief operations officer. You can just allocate the processing power. I would suggest you ask first, before brow beating Evan.”

“Easier to build a bridge versus starting a fight?”

“Maybe not easier, but it’s polite. And shows the captain you made an attempt at least.”

She’d spent only a few minutes contemplating between the two options before she’d left the bridge, heading straight for Engineering. If she was going to be polite, she might as well do it in person as well then versus over a comm channel.

“What?” Lieutenant Commander Evan Malcolm’s reputation for bluntness was well deserved. He hadn’t even looked up from his computer, ensconced in his office as he was when she’d walked in.

“I need to reallocate processing power from the engineering computer core.” If he could be blunt, so could she. She could just sound nicer while doing it. Less irritated for sure. “To speed up the decryption of the Nausicaan data that you recovered.”

“I recovered?” he asked, looking up from his computer. Then he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms as he recognised who he was talking to. “Don’t you mean Commander Sadovu?”

“As I understand it, she just seized the ship. You recovered the encrypted logs, so credit is due where credit is due.”

“So, you read my report then?” he asked.

“No, I spoke with the Commander a few hours ago and she said you recovered the data.”

Evan’s irritation flickered briefly. “She did, did she? What’s her game?” he asked quickly.

“Her game?”

“Yeah, her game. What is the so-called former pirate actually trying to do here?”

“Umm, she’s always been Starfleet,” Trid found herself parroting the lie Starfleet had given her as the story to give to those who didn’t need to know the actual story.

“Uh huh.”

“Look, Commander, I don’t want to get involved in your personal conspiracy theory against Commander Sadovu. I want to crack open the Nausicaan data you recovered so we can go where we need to go and not have to conduct a full sweep of the Archanis Nebula and miss our quarry most likely. I need all the computer power I can get, so can I please reallocate processing power from the engineering core?”

He snorted. “If I say no, you’ll just do it anyway. So sure, go ahead.” He snorted again. “Thanks for asking first, I guess.”

She watched him return to his work, putting her out of his mind immediately. She couldn’t help but shake her head at him before she left.

“Don’t take it to personal,” Michelle Jamieson, the assistant chief engineer, said after the door to Malcolm’s office closed. “He’s angry because his primary reason for being angry is singing his praises right now.”

She blinked at Michelle a few times. “He’s angry because the Commander is crediting him for work he actually did?”

“And apparently writing a glowing crew report she’s going to file with the captain soon.” Michelle shrugged with a smile. “Matt called while you were in there, said something about needing engineering compute power.”

“That’s the one.”

“Want a hand making sure we’ve got what we need and some proper safety margins?” Michelle asked.

“Couldn’t hurt to have an expert’s opinion. Let’s do this.”