Farah found Miko in Engineering, three decks down, bent over a console that was showing her something she didn’t like.
“The cloak analysis,” he said.
She didn’t look up.
“You’re in the wrong section.
Cloak analysis is restricted to senior staff and people who sign things in triplicate.”
“I need to know if there’s a way to verify Federation restraint that the Iskari can check themselves.
Something technical.
Something they’d believe because they can prove it’s true.”
Miko’s hands went still.
She looked at him, then at the console, then back.
“You want me to tell you how to give away a Federation advantage to a species we’ve known for six days.”
“I want you to tell me if there’s a truth in those logs that could answer both sides at once.”
She studied him for three seconds, the way an engineer studies a load-bearing joint, then pulled up a secondary screen.
“Sit.
Don’t touch anything.
And if anyone asks, you were here to requisition a maintenance schedule.”
The primary display was dense with intercept data, the Iskari cloak rendered as probability curves and scattered EM echoes.
Miko worked through it without commentary, pulling files, overlaying patterns, her mouth a thin line.
Farah watched the data resolve and said nothing.
After two minutes she stopped.
“There.”
The screen showed a narrow band of subspace bleed, faint and intermittent, threading through the cloak signature like a crack in glass.
“The cloak isn’t perfect,” Miko said.
“It’s close.
But every third cycle there’s a microsecond window where the subspace field destabilizes.
If you knew exactly where to look and exactly when, you could track them.”
“Can we?”
“We did.
Forty minutes ago.
Data ran the analysis and logged it.
Hasn’t briefed anyone yet because it’s the kind of thing you don’t say out loud until you know what you’re going to do with it.”
Farah leaned forward.
The flaw was there, legible and reproducible, a gap the Iskari didn’t know they had.
If the Federation wanted to track every cloaked ship in the system, this was the key.
And if the Federation told the Iskari the key existed and promised not to use it
“That’s your proof,” Miko said quietly.
“We tell them we found the flaw.
We tell them we’re logging it as classified and not exploiting it.
It’s a vulnerability we’re choosing not to press.”
“They’d have to believe we’re not lying about the logs.”
“Data’s signature is on the analysis.
If they trust anything, they’ll trust that.”
Farah pulled the file onto his padd and scanned it once the technical summary, the timestamp, the clean trail of access.
Exactly what he needed: a concession the Iskari could check themselves, against their own sensors, and know wasn’t a lie.
The weight arrived a half-second later.
“If we offer this,” he said, “someone has to carry it.
The captain makes the final call, but the proposal has to come from someone on record.
Contact division.
Maybe a science officer.”
Miko’s expression didn’t change.
“Or the engineer who found it.”
“No.”
“Farah”
“You found a flaw in an alien cloak during a first-contact crisis and your first instinct was to figure out how to use it as a peace offering.
That’s the kind of competence that gets you noticed, and not the way you want.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“You’re trying to protect me.”
“I’m trying to keep your name off the part where we tell a wary alien fleet exactly how we could track them if we wanted to.”
“By putting whose name on it instead?”
He didn’t answer.
The console beeped softly, a maintenance alert cycling through on automatic.
Miko dismissed it without looking.
“There’s a liaison officer,” Farah said.
“Sub-Lieutenant.
She’s been coordinating the contact protocols, has the standing to propose something like this.
If it comes from her, it’s a bridge officer making a tactical recommendation.
If it comes from you, it’s a junior engineer handing the enemy our advantage.”
Miko leaned back against the console.
“You’ve already picked who’s going to stand in the fire.”
“I’m trying to make sure it’s not you.”
“That’s not the same thing as making sure it’s no one.”
He looked at the data, the flaw rendered in clean amber lines, and knew plainly, without needing a name for the knowing that she was right.
Deciding who could afford to bear the cost and who couldn’t.
The steer wearing a coat that looked like care.
“The liaison has the rank,” he said.
“The proposal fits her role.
And she’s good enough to carry it.”
“You know her that well?”
“Well enough.”
Miko was quiet.
Then: “When you say ‘keep my name off it,’ what you mean is ‘I’ve already decided whose name goes on instead and I’m not asking them first.'”
Farah met her eyes.
“I mean I’m trying to keep you out of a fight you didn’t volunteer for.”
“And her?”
“She volunteered the day she put on the uniform.”
It was true and it was also not the whole truth, and Miko heard both.
She pushed off the console, pulled the analysis file back to her station, and locked it.
“I’m sending this to Data with a note that it’s raw analysis, needs senior review before distribution.
If someone wants to turn it into a proposal, that’s their call.
My name stays in the metadata as the engineer who ran the scan, because that’s just true, and if that costs me I’ll deal with it.”
“Miko”
“You don’t get to protect me from my own work, Farah.
I found it.
I’m telling you what it means.
What you do with that is on you, but I’m not pretending I wasn’t here.”
She was right, and he had no answer that wasn’t smaller than the thing she’d just said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t.” She turned back to the console, pulled up a maintenance log that had nothing to do with cloaks or concessions.
“Just make it count.”
Farah left Engineering with the file on his padd, the solution clean and terrible, and the certainty that the next step would cost someone who hadn’t agreed to the bill.
The liaison’s name was already in his head.
Sub-Lieutenant Kaine, coordinator, competent, positioned exactly right to carry a proposal like this without it looking like a junior officer’s wild idea.
Route the concept through her.
Frame it as a bridge-level recommendation.
Let her present it as her own reasoning and never know the shape had come from someone else the steer so quiet this time he’d nearly missed it happening in his own head.
He walked toward the turbolift, the file weighing nothing in his hand, and the old discipline the one that said understanding someone’s position well enough meant you were responsible for moving them into the right one woke like a reflex he’d spent two years trying to kill.
The hallway was empty.
His pulse stayed steady.
And the plan to keep Miko safe by spending someone else sharpened in his head like a proof he’d already written and couldn’t unwrite.