The reasons she listed off to Barrett were true, but they didn’t tell the whole story of what she was feeling. She did wish there was a bit more of Wolfe’s brazen independence in her, but there had to be some middle ground she could find. Being so openly disobedient was not only destructive to the Fleet but also set a bad example to the crew. He could get away with it because by the time he took command of the Ares he was already a legend. But wasn’t she as well? Many gave the nod to her when it came to the almost inevitable comparison between Captain Wolfe and Captain Wright, his former XO and protégé. She had led the Icarus on a single-ship slaughter of hundreds of Phage units while flying within their own formations, a feat not matched during the entire war.

“Captain, XO,” Commander Graham nodded to the pair as they walked in through the hatchway. “Would you like the long version or the short version?”

“Short first, then I’ll decide how much more detail I want at the moment,” Celesta said. Graham was a first rate engineer, but he could be incredibly long-winded when giving technical explanations.

“We can reintegrate the RDS pod into the MUX with our surge detection equipment in place to protect main bus integrity, and we even found a way to keep all the calibration settings from being lost during an event that shuts down the drive,” Graham said.

“A little more detail, if you please, Commander,” Celesta said.

“Tsuyo engineers had originally used a single, high-power tap to the pod in order to make it more of a self-contained, easily installed system.” Graham motioned for them to follow him. “The power regulation and distribution for the pod’s subsystems was handled internally. We’ve broken these out so that we can isolate the power input to the primary field generators and those will be the lines that we’ll run through the switching network.”

“What’s the advantage to this?” Barrett asked. Barrett’s background was in engineering, which was the main reason Celesta had brought him along. He would be able to see through Graham’s enthusiasm and also know if her chief engineer was skimping on some of the details in order to get the answer he wanted from his captain. She had taken the requisite technical courses during her time at the Academy, of course, but her specialization was military history and political science.

“Since we’re now able to keep the pod’s control systems powered up during an emergency disconnect, theoretically once power is restored to the field generators the RDS should come back up almost instantly on its original settings. This would eliminate the need for the reset and recalibration we’ve had to do every time the drive blew out a power junction.”

“Can this be done while we’re underway?” Celesta asked.