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starship’s dual warp core, bathed in the glow of the matter-antimatter stream as it pulsed at idle. He had his hands on his hips, his narrow chin jutting forward, and he was blocking the path of a group of other Starfleet officers and noncoms, all in engineering coveralls.
    The new arrivals were an overhaul crew from McKinley Station, and some of them were guiding antigravity trolleys loaded with components and equipment cases. The officer at the focus of Ra-Havreii’s invective was a lieutenant commander, a Deltan, and his face was tight with annoyance. “Sir, if you will just—”
    â€œJust what?” Ra-Havreii snapped. “Just let you start banging on things like a troupe of primates? I know every bolt and weld in this ship, lad, and if you think for one second I am going to let some greasy-fingered yard-bound stranger poke and prod my vessel, you’re gravely mistaken.”
    Tuvok’s arrival caught the gaze of Ensign Crandall, one of Ra-Havreii’s staff, and he rolled his eyes in a silent plea for help. “Chief Engineer,” Tuvok began, stopping the other officer before he could continue his tirade, “why are you obstructing these people in their duties?”
    Ra-Havreii rounded on him, brandishing a padd. “Have you seen this? Have you?” Tuvok barely got a look at the screen before the engineer waved it away. “The captain gets a promotion and the first thing he does is have the ship dismantled? I always thought those stories were a joke, but it seems it is true; the moment any officer in Starfleet gets kicked up to the admiralty they automatically become unbalanced!”
    â€œOrdering an overhaul of the Titan is in no way a sign of impaired judgment,” Tuvok replied coolly. “In point of fact, Doctor, one might argue that it is your present behavior that is indicative of such a bias.”
    â€œMy point exactly,” muttered the Deltan, earning him a sharp look from the chief engineer. “We’re not here to dismantle anything, Commander. Admiral Riker ordered us to expedite a number of hardware and repair requests in Titan ’s maintenance queue, and so we have. We’re here to help.” He gestured around.
    It was evident that Titan ’s engine room was more sparsely populated than usual; in fact, like much of the ship, crew numbers had already thinned considerably thanks to a generous shore leave schedule posted by Commander Vale. Tuvok declined the offer to partake in any planetside liberty. His wife, T’Pel, was on Titan and he had no emotional need to “stretch his legs,” as Vale had put it. The same did not seem so for many of the other crewmembers, however. The Vulcan noted that a significant proportion of the ship’s complementhad either elected to visit or otherwise communicate with their family units in the days after the assassination on Deep Space 9. The reflection of an emotional need, he surmised, to reinforce the connection with loved ones in the face of a greater crisis.
    â€œI don’t know you,” Ra-Havreii was saying to the Deltan. “And any one of my team can tell you, people I don’t know don’t get to touch my engines.”
    â€œHe is pretty anal about it,” offered Crandall wearily, and Ra-Havreii shot him an acidic glare.
    â€œI’m not being obstructive,” the engineer insisted, “just careful .”
    The Deltan threw up his hands. “Fine, sir. We’ll just leave these components here on the deck. You can have your own people fit them and take twice as long about it, while we put our feet up and drink raktajino back on the station.”
    But Tuvok noted that Ra-Havreii had stopped listening to the junior officer after he said the word “components.” He pushed past him to the nearest antigrav and peered at one of the new modules. “This is one of the new covariant field modulator pods. The Type Seventeen. I requested one of