First Command - Torchship Captain Quest

You thanked him and stepped out, being quickly redirected to the passenger area of the transport. You grabbed a window seat and pulled out your tablet, retrieving the schematics and browsing through quickly to get the highlights. It was a pure combat machine, no mistaking it, with a quartet of retractable large laser turrets ringing the habitation sphere, supported by two sandblaster turrets on the fore. There was an entire secondary hull dedicated to an expanded probe bay, and a ring opposite for a corvette. Surprisingly, it wasn't visibly armoured, but perhaps that was the point.

The transport departed in quick order, and about an hour later, there was a shudder through the ship as it reattached its main engines, and the slight lurch in your inner ear that told you the engines were firing. A screen on the wall showed the trajectories around Earth's orbit,

Absent-mindedly, you glanced out the window, and got a surprisingly good view of humanity's homeworld. It was a beautiful, shiny blue-green pearl marbled with white, the lit side gleaming with light reflected off the ocean. You could see cities dotting the dark side as tight glowing clumps, surrounded by the inky blackness of reclaimed wilderness. What looked like stars danced around it, ships decelerating into orbit before shedding their engines, or dropping out of FTL in little flashes.

You'd never been, and honestly could never imagine going. You'd thus far managed to avoid ever setting foot on an actual planet in your life, your duties had never made it necessary and you'd never volunteered. The idea was mildly terrifying; you didn't like the idea of going anywhere where you couldn't see the walls. I still think you're being a bit silly about it, but I'll admit to a similar agoraphobic dread.

Outside, the planet slid away and disappeared as the ship flipped over for its deceleration burn.

You kept reading through the manual, digging into the boring technical specs about the computer system (standard), the reactor (standard, albeit with hardened radiators), the stores (deeply expanded), and various other details. There was only one dedicated habitation deck, with other rooms scattered throughout the ship wherever there was room. They typically avoided that to encourage the use of communal spaces, but there were evidently other priorities here.

You were just reading through the documentation for the modular weapon system and procedure for swapping them out when the stars span again outside your window. You were on final approach, presumably to the spaceport that would take you to your ship. Or so you thought, before you checked the transit screen again and saw that you'd be transferring directly to Yeager-1.

You looked around the transport, and realised for the first time in the entire trip that it was empty. It was just you. They were flying this route just for you.

You felt vaguely guilty about that.

As the screen zoomed in a third time to show the final approach on RCS, you climbed the spiral staircase up to the transfer deck and switched off the gravity, pushing off toward the cupola in the ceiling. Ahead Luna, with a twinkling constellation of space stations connected by elevators to the surface below. It was all so far away you couldn't make it out as anything other than long lines of dull red and a strange shadow, occluding the lights of Armstrong City below. The second-biggest space construction in human history after the Martian solar reflector and it looked like a toy.

With startling speed, though, the Luna Yards started to resolve, looming larger and larger in the viewport as you were pressed gently against the glass by the RCS thrusters braking. The red lines resolved as the massive banks of radiators cooling the working machinery, the dark shadow as the huge gantries, scaffolds, and blocking working components of forges and factories lines that stretched out for kilometres in all directions. The entire station seemed to dance, both from huge moving parts as asteroids were fed into one end and ships came out the other, but also from the massive spheres of gases and vapourized metal being unleashed by the endless work.

The Luna Yards were the biggest shipbuilding facility in known space, the massive facilities that had once been necessary to produce the hundreds of thousands of ships a year needed to sustain an interplanetary civilization at slower-than-light speeds. Nobody else in the galaxy had ever needed such an absurd thing, and it was the reason that a little species on two planets had fought an empire with two thousand and kicked its ass. You read once that at the height of its operation during the war, it was supposedly producing ships faster than the birthrate of fifteen billion human beings could make crews for them. That didn't sound right, but you had vivid memories of looking out the windows of L5 and seeing the glow of 0g crucibles and radiator sails with the naked eye.

The yards grew to take up the entire viewport, then individual modules became visible, and finally, dwarfed by it all, there was Yeager-1. It was a stubby, mean little thing, with its spherical nose, four engine nacelles with two embedded in the ring pylons, four stubby radiators emerging behind them in a cruxiform. It still had it engines on because they'd never been fired; now was the only time it would ever be safe to venture on EVA behind the glowing red warning lights capping the nacelles. Once the engines fired, the entire assembly would quickly be rendered so radioactive it could only be approached from the front.

It shifted in your view as the ship lined up until you were nose to nose, the ship still growing larger and larger, but more slowly now. You pushed back down to the floor and locked your boots in place, watching the little distance counter beside the airlock count down the metres until contact. There was a gentle shudder through the ship, and the light above the cupola turned green before the doors opened, an orange-clad cosmonaut on the other side reaching out.

The first sensation your new ship brought with it was a faint odor of burnt steak.

"Ooh, new ship smell," you muttered. Something about vacuum made metals smell like that.

"Yeah, it was pressurised this morning. I swear, some of the welds are still cooling," the man said, and you pushed off to take his hand and enter your new ship. "Vehicle Commander Smith, uhhh-?"

"That's us," you confirmed. "Datoka's up front, she/her."

"Right, yeah, no, I read your file, I know the thing," he said. He was a fellow spacer, tall and lanky and stretched out, but one you suspected was from much further afield than L5. Maybe Titan, Sagan Station way out at the edge of the system. He was young, maybe early twenties, with the phenotypical ambiguity typical of multigenerational spacers, albeit with prominent African heritage. "Right, Specialist Nyiko Shilubana-Bolonkin, I'm an engineering junior, we're just getting her prepped." Yeah, that was a spacer name alright, and the awkwardness you'd expect from somebody who'd grown up interacting with maybe a dozen other people tops.

"Hey, it's alright Nyiko, it's genuinely weird," you assured him. "We're a plural system; two people, one brain. Totally normal, like three percent of the population. I'm usually up front, but if you're worried about getting us mixed up, trust me, you'll know Monty when you hear him, okay?"

"Right, yeah. No, it's cool," he stammered. "Uh, right, it's just me and three of the engineering crew right now, I can, uh, show you around but I've not seen most of it yet either."

"Where were you posted before this, the Academy?" you asked, as you reoriented yourself for the very narrow forward docking room and clicked onto the floor.

"Uh, no, I did remote, uh, remote classes, tested in for my Certs. I mean, I uh, I grew up on um… you know the, uh, Saturn?"

He talked very prominently with his hands, a common thing for people who grew up in environmental suits, to show others they were talking.

"Yeah, I've heard of it," you confirmed with a smile.

"Sorry, yeah, the rings, my family lives on one of the drone stations moving, you know, water ice and stuff. I already had most of the basics, you know?"

"Yeah, I can imagine, job like that. I'm from L5, I never had to do any of that," you said. "So, uh, any idea where the rest of the crew is?"

"Oh, yeah, wait," he said, pulling out his tablet and clicking on it frantically. "I got a link to the roster, they're pulling this together in a bit of a hurry. From what I heard, program got frozen and then reapproved, so they had to get a whole new batch of cosmos. Wild, huh?"

You pulled it up and looked it over. Forty-two crew, that was a lot for a ship this size.

"Yeah, looks like they want us to get going before somebody changes their mind again. Uh… do you know where the commander's office is?"

Nyiko paused, moving his hands as if tracing an invisible map of the ship.

"Yyyyes! Deck 5, Port-Outward, behind the secondary sensor wiring, connected to your quarters. You have your own quarters, by the way, but I think they're tiny because it looks like a closet on the schematics."

"Hey, you should see the apartment I grew up in," you assured him, and he laughed.

"Oh, I can imagine. I'm still getting used to sleeping in gravity. Do you still velcro yourself in, you know, just in case? Is that weird?"

"... L5 has gravity. One-third where I was living," you said. "I wouldn't know."

"... Right. Yeah. You got all kinds of paperwork to do, I imagine, so, uh, I'm going to go back to work and pretend I didn't say that. Okay?"

"It's cool, Nyiko," you assured him. "We still sleep with a little stuffed bunny, so velcro sounds totally reasonable."

He looked very relieved at that, and disappeared down the moonchute as you made your way down to the office. Personally, I thought that went well. And good job with the bunny story, dude clearly needed that win. See, you can use humour to defuse situations. I'm so proud.

… Mr. Hoppity is a very serious subject matter, you thought.

In any case, you really did have a lot of paperwork ahead, even if it didn't actually involve any real paper. Though this was probably more my wheelhouse, mind if I take over? I'll get the crew manifest sorted out and catch you up, okay?

---