Behind Istara, Basavi pulled off her headset. The short curls on her forehead were damp with sweat, though the room wasn’t warm. “We’re out of distortion range, sir,” she said to Surit. Her gaze skittered around Tennal then landed squarely on his face. “Your trajectory was right, Halkana. Thank you.”

“Yeah, if you could not do it in interpretive dance next time,” Istara said. “I know you know how to quote a relative trajectory. I taught you bloody yesterday.”

“I don’t teach well,” Tennal said automatically. He was distracted by the noise of the alarms, which hadn’t stopped, and a ringing noise from whatever he had just done. He had gotten things from Surit’s mind when it had touched his. Tennal ran his tongue across the back of his teeth as if it had left a taste he could investigate. Surit stored all his surface thoughts neatly, like each one was in a filing tray. Above a driving obsession about something unrelated, Surit was preoccupied with a series of neatly filed concerns about safety failures. “Suri—Lieutenant, what’s going on?”

Surit’s hands were smudged with antistatic oil, and there was a smear of oil on his forehead where he’d wiped it. Tennal belatedly connected safety failures to the blaring alarms. “You’ve been out for an hour,” Surit said tiredly. “We’re safe, but we nearly lost one of our drives. Yes, I’m coming,” he added, to a mechanic who had just tumbled into the ops room and was urgently trying to get his attention. “Check that the code patch uploaded.”

Tennal was thrown. “Are we in danger?” He reconsidered and changed it to “Are we still in danger?”

“We should pull through, if we can find the last coolant leaks,” Surit said. “It’s going to take hardware parts and a code push from the rest of the fleet to patch us up. The shuttle’s diagnostic alerts were lying to the mechanics. There was something wrong with the safety system.”

Tennal hadn’t seen that particular tension around his eyes before. Surit, who had spent the past two days diligently checking every comma of the shuttle’s documents, had been lied to by his own safety system. Tennal reached out instinctively to read him, and for his pains, he just got Surit’s closed-off walls and a sudden stabbing headache that meant he’d massively overstretched his reading abilities. He gave a blasé smile to hide it. “And you’ve got that in hand?”

“Not yet,” Surit said, with the calm focus of a laser beam. “But right now, you’re going to rest. I’m going to find out why our ship was falling apart.”