Hello, Beautiful

Posted on Sun Jul 2, 2023 @ 1:05pm by Captain Jason Faulkner
Edited on on Mon Jul 3, 2023 @ 1:59pm

903 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Shakedown
Location: USS Challenger, Main Shuttle Bay
Timeline: MD 1, 0900

"You're going to want to take your eyes off that manual."

With a small start, Jason Faulkner looked up from the pad he was reading. Outside the shuttle's viewports, the Tycho City Repair & Refit Docks were coming into view, rapidly turning from a blur into the skeletal frames of the individual slips. A cloud of shuttles, tugs, and cargo haulers buzzed about them.

"Sorry, ma'am, just trying to catch up on reading I should have started months ago," Jason said.

"You don't need to over explain yourself to me. You're a starship captain. Be bold, be brave, apologize for nothing." The slightest hint of a smile suggested that his companion, Commodore Nash zh'Athanon, was just ribbing him. The Andorian zhen was about ten years his senior, her icy-white hair just starting to turn actual gray. He had served as one of her senior officers and then XO through the war, before leaving for first a staff position and then a stint as commander of a destroyer.

"Sounds like a good way to get my ears cut off after offending someone."

She shrugged. "So keep your bodyguard handy."

"Starfleet doesn't issue those."

"I suppose you'll need to keep up your sprinting practice." zh'Athanon pointed out the shuttle's window. "There we go. Slip three, at the far end."

Jason leaned forward to get a good look. There amidst the frames was the tall, sleek form of a Constitution-class starship, with the registry NCC-1715 blazed across her hull.

"Hello, old friend," he said. It had been years since he left, but it felt like yesterday.

"Enjoy how clean and shiny she looks, it's only downhill from here."

"Stop trying to spoil this, ma'am." Jason looked over the ship with a critical eye. She was mostly the same as when he'd departed almost six years earlier, save that it was, indeed, a lot more shiny and had fewer burns and scars from disruptor hits. The nacelle end caps had lost the static discharge spires, the deflector had a subtly sharper curve to the dish, the aft phasers had moved a bit; in substance, though, there were no serious changes. "I'm glad to see they didn't put in an undercut like they did while refitting the Block Ones."

The commodore chuckled. "I'm sure you are. You need a lot of room for your knick-knacks."

"I'm serious. Better atmosphere flight handling comes up too infrequently to justify cutting crew quarters space in half without reducing the crew requirements. There's bound to be morale impacts."

"Far be it for me to argue with my statistician." The shuttle began a slow loop around the ship. After a minute of silence, zh'Athanon said, "You seem nervous, number one."

"That obvious?" Jason asked, now worried that he was showing too much on his face.

"To me. I would have thought you'd be excited."

"I am! But Nash, when I got word I was being given another space assignment, I was expecting a science ship, maybe a deep-space listening post or a research station. Not a Connie attached to Exploration Command."

zh'Athanon nodded. "It's a big step. A lot of responsibility for a man who just wants to watch his screens and listen to alien communications."

"My ambitions are slightly larger than that these days."

"You did well on the Blackbird. Finding that Orion slave runner in the Belka-V gas giant, dealing with that entire mess on Caldonia - you impressed a lot of people at Starfleet Command with what you could do with just a Wasp. Handing you a cruiser was the natural next step, especially with your scientific credentials. We need more than just tactical geniuses on these ships if we're going to keep Starfleet the way it's supposed to be."

"Caldonia was a lucky guess."

"Half of being a starship captain is taking dire situations and turning them into ones where a lucky guess will get you success." The shuttle slid through the atmospheric shield on the shuttlebay and settled to the deck. As she shut down the craft, zh'Athanon turned to him. "Be confident in yourself, and more importantly be confident in front of your crew, and I promise you'll do fine."

Jason stood up, tugging his shirt into place and taking a deep breath. He put on what he thought of as his captain's face, a slight 'I know something you don't" smile. "Yes, ma'am."

"And more importantly, go out there and do something impressive. Chris Pike's already talking about how wonderful Kirk and Enterprise did on that stupid galactic barrier probe. Someone needs to remind him that ships other than his can work wonders."

"Jim's a walking stack of encyclopedias. I'm not worried about him showing me up." Admittedly, Kirk was also several years his junior, but as competition went Jason was more concerned about Captain T'Larel on Intrepid.

"Says the walking sensor array." The shuttle door hissed open. "Go on, get out there."

Jason nodded, stepped out, and immediately floated away. He spun in mid-air a meter from the door. "I see the gravity net is being serviced."

"Oh dear, I forgot," za'Athanon said, stepping out and walking across the bay. A glance at her boots showed that she was wearing low-profile magnetic clip-on soles.

Jason sighed, spread his arms to adjust his rate of spin, and at the right moment kicked out against the shuttle's hull, sending him coasting along behind her towards the nearest door.

 

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