<b>02 - Secrets</b><br/><i> two days later, mid-afternoon</i><br/><br/>The steady blinking of a green LED on her machinery did nothing to wake the young woman, neither did the incessant beeping coming from another device,  one of several scattered across the coffee table where she’d been working, or the couch she’d been using more as a backrest from her present position on the floor. Her head rested on one of her arms, hair fanned out around her instead of bound up in the tight braid she’d usually kept it in while traveling, covering most of her face. Aside from the whirr of the fans keeping her computers cool, the only sound in the room was the steady and rhythmic breathing of a person deeply asleep, despite the contorted position she’d worked herself into as she dozed off, her body finally too exhausted to continue the harsh pace she’d set herself going at.<br/><br/>When she’d woken up, after the dinner with the officers, Tahlia had indeed sought out the captain, and he’d assigned several people to help her remove all of the computers and equipment from the pod. Thanking them for their help, she’d set herself up a bit of a command center, disconnected from the main ships computers, as she’d even taken the pod’s secondary power supply to keep them running. She had enough juice for at least a week of hard computing before she’d need to recharge anything, and considering everything that she was working on, the last thing she wanted to do was give her data a chance to fall into the wrong hands. The suspicions of the Master-at-arms had not been lost on her. It had looked like a hit. An assassination.<br/><br/>As was common for Tahlia Fae, lunch that first day had passed her by, snacking as she usually did on what remained of her bag of nuts and dried fruits she always had on hand when she was working. There was so much information to sift through that most of her time had been spent organizing it, and by the time she was to a point where she could begin her work in ernest, it had been well past dinner. Though she should have stopped there, the woman had figured setting up a few processes to run while she slept wouldn’t hurt anyone, and before she knew it, even more time had been lost, her head lobbing off to one side as her eyes closed in protest.