“Look at this input capacitor,” Sonya muttered. She and Tev were back in the Dancing Star’s engine room, examining more of its equipment, and the more she saw the more impressed she became. “It’s got a cascading valve structure—brilliant design. How much would you say this could take before overloading, Tev? Twelve gigawatts?”

He stepped over to examine it, then nodded. “Twelve-point-one, possibly twelve-point-two. Impressive design.”

She gestured around them. “And this is just one of fifty like it. That’s over six hundred gigawatts this ship can absorb at once. Amazing. Most cities can’t accommodate that much energy!” She ran one finger lightly over the capacitor. “This ship could have slingshotted through the supernova instead of around it.”

Tev glanced at his tricorder. “Yes, it could have. Within the corona, certainly—it would have been able to absorb more energy that way, and still been far enough from the core to escape.”

She nodded, thinking that one over. A ship that literally dove into a supernova for energy and acceleration! Amazing! The more she saw of this ship, the more it impressed her.

Another thought occurred to her, then. Salek’s report hadn’t mentioned the capacitors at all, or estimated the ship’s absorption rate. He had noted that it used stellar energy for fuel, of course, but had suggested a more passive approach. Still, Salek’s main concern hadn’t been the ship’s operating specs, just what it was doing there and how to get rid of it quickly.

As they continued their investigation, Sonya let herself wonder about the Vulcan she had replaced. She had never met Salek, of course, but she had read his files and his record, and had heard stories about him from Fabian, Carol, Pattie, and of course Tev’s predecessor, Kieran Duffy. Salek had been a good commander, and his handling of the situation at Randall V had been exemplary, sacrificing himself to save everyone else.

Instinctively, she thought, Just like Kieran did at Galvan. She banished that thought quickly.

But Sonya found herself wondering about how Salek’s mind had worked, particularly as an engineer.

She thought back over the re-creation she’d watched about the original encounter with the Dancing Star. Salek and Fabian had examined the engine room, just as she and Tev were doing now. He’d announced that Carol had been right about the ship running on solar energy, and had then told Kieran that he thought the crew had been killed by an internal energy release. But how had he known that so quickly?

“Fabian,” she called out, tapping her combadge. His reply came immediately.

“What’s up, Commander?”

“You were here with Salek during that first sweep of the engine room, right?”

“Yeah, he and I went that way and Duff and Pattie went forward, to the bridge.”

“How did he figure out the ship’s system so quickly? In the re-creation it seemed like he knew almost immediately how it worked.”

“Well, that’s just the way Salek was,” Fabian replied. “Actually, Carol had already suggested that it was solar-powered, so he was already thinking that way.”

“So he’d made up his mind beforehand?”

“No, but he had a theory already. Duff told me once that that’s how Salek worked. He’d come up with a theory to fit the situation, and then see if it held up. Every time he got new data, he’d plug it into the theory. If it broke, he’d come up with a new theory. If it almost fit, he’d figure out where to bend the theory so they matched. And if everything fit: voilà!”

Tev nodded. “A sensible approach.”

Sonya nodded as well. “So he always had a theory, for every situation?”

“Not instantly, no,” Fabian replied. “He’d listen to the initial data. Then he’d come up with a theory based on that, and he’d test it as he went.”

“Okay, thanks.” Sonya thought about that. It did make sense. It was inductive reasoning, she realized. Salek had formed theories and then tested them against the data to see if they held true. A good, solid method, and excellent for an engineer. Any time he had to create an item, he could figure out what the device had to do and then break that down into specifics. If the first method he thought of wouldn’t do the trick he’d try a different one until he found a method that would provide the necessary results.

That just wasn’t how she thought, was all. She had a tendency to wait until she’d gathered all the data she could possibly get, and then try to piece together a theory from that. Deductive reasoning—from small to large, rather than the other way around. Her way didn’t work as well for straight engineering—she got hung up on details too easily, and if she missed even one element she couldn’t see the bigger picture, like trying to build a puzzle whose image you didn’t know beforehand, while missing some of the pieces. But it was a perfect fit for most S.C.E. missions, because they involved reverse-engineering instead. And by not jumping to conclusions, by waiting until she had all the data, Sonya could be sure that she had everything necessary to reach the right conclusion.

Which gave her the advantage here, she realized. The problem with inductive reasoning was that, if all the data fit your established hypothesis, you assumed it was right—if you had already decided that the hole was square, and all the pieces fit through that hole, you would believe that the square was the answer. But if you looked at all the pieces first, and saw that they were all triangles, you’d know that the correct answer was the triangle. The square was the wrong answer because it didn’t match, but it seemed to work because none of the triangles were too big to fit through it. So Salek’s theory had seemed right because nothing had contradicted it, but he hadn’t had all the facts beforehand. If he had been completely right the Dancing Star would not be active again, and they wouldn’t be here. They had more facts now, more to work with, and were more likely to come up with the real answer, especially if they let the details form the answer rather than the other way around.

Hindsight, Sonya thought ruefully. Looking back now, they could see the things that the team had missed the first time around, and where they’d gone wrong. She just hoped that catching those past errors would let them find the real solution and make the right decision this time. It was unlikely that they’d get a third try at it.