"Welcome onboard, my name is Stardust and I will be your transport today. The trip to the city of Kulas will take approximately thirty minutes. If anyone wishes for refreshments, there is a drinks replicator on the port bulkhead. In the unlikely event of an emergency, please remain in your seats for emergency beam-out. If anyone has any questions, I'm more than willing to answer them all. We will be lifting off in five minutes."
WIth that I turned off the speaker, watching everybody getting comfortable in their seats. Forty people in total, ten rows of four people each. From Andorians visiting home to Starfleet personnel being transferred to somewhere else and families heading down for a day trip to visit the Andorian ice city.
My new loadout was for passenger transport, not comfort. Economy class if you will. But that fit me just fine, I was completely not in the mood to act as a luxury transport.
Especially as the first forty four trips I'm scheduled to do were down to the surface of the planet and will be in emergency beamout range in case something happened.
Then I had some trips around the system, ferrying people further out.
But the majority of the trips were just down to the surface of the world below. Down. Up. Down. Up. One circuit every hour and a half.
"Nervous?" I asked Sophia, looking at her with my avatar. She was seated in one of the chairs on my small 'crew section', the doors sealed from the passengers.
She looked up from her sensor readings and turned her chair to look at me, "I think that should be my line."
I crossed my legs and nodded slightly, "I… a bit," I admitted and shrugged, "But this is literally a job they used to give to Starfleet Cadets in their final year. It's hard to be too nervous when it's something so easy that students could do it without supervision."
Sophia smiled, "You'll do fine."
"I know," I admitted, "We literally flew between systems on our own in that racing hull. If I could handle that, I can handle small interplanetary hops."
"This is still the most people you have ever had onboard since you were rescued."
I nodded, "I know. Which is why I'm nervous."
But in reality, nothing really could happen. And even if something went catastrophically wrong, for the next four days I'd be in transporter range of both the planet and the GSV.
"Thanks again for coming along for the first couple of trips," I said as I got my flightpath from Addy and lifted off as the landing clamps let go. At the same time I turned on the screens on the walls of the passenger compartment to allow everybody to see outside. It makes people more comfortable to be able to see where they were going.
Smallcraft didn't have windows though, same as Warships, they were weak points and we needed as many advantages as we could get. So we used screens instead for the comfort of our crews and passengers.
Slipping out of Addy's hangar bay, I scanned space all around. I wasn't exactly alone out there, there were tons of smallcraft around, moving to and from the GSV, everything from small personal shuttles to cargo transports. Most wasn't even from Addy, but instead local spacecraft.
I slowly moved away from her, following my designated flightpath.
Even ignoring the small swarm of ships around her, Andorias skies were busy. They had one of the Federation's main starbases after all, being one of the Federation founding members.
I could see him from where I was, sitting in orbit around Andoria. He was an old style of Starbase with that classic 'mushroom' shape, but even at this distance I could see that he had been significantly upgraded from my time. For one thing, he had a second, 'mushroom top' ontop of the old one and larger as well.
Starting to move along the orbit around the planet towards Andoria propper, I could count dozens of propper Starships. Only one being a class I recognized from my time.
A solitary Sovereign class ship making her way in from the outer system, heading towards the Starbase. The vast majority of large ships were Island classes, something that had only been a couple of during my time.
"Ever been to Andoria before?" I asked as I flew down a bit closer to the icy rings of the main planet, rolling to match their orientation. Might as well give the passengers as good of a view as I could. At the moment they seemed to be enjoying themselves. Most of the kids were staring at the screens and the starfleet people seemed to be trying to get some sleep or were tapping away at PADDs.
Sophia frowned and then nodded, "Only once. When I was an Ensign aboard the USS Voyager we stopped by the system once, but there weren't any shoreleave. We didn't even go to Andoria orbit, we were delivering some equipment to one of the bases out in the Oort cloud and then we continued on to Vulcan. So not really. You?"
"Couple of times," I said and shrugged, "But that was a long time ago. It's going to be fun to see again and see how things have changed."
Hopefully without anti-Ai protesters this time around.
"Going to drop your avatar off at the surface?" Sophia asked with a smile, "take in the sights?"
"Thinking about it."
"Go for it, you don't need your avatar here for this," she said.
"You're here, wouldn't be fair to leave with my avatar," I told her, "Especially when you're here to keep me company for this."
"Don't worry about that, you're not your avatar," Sophia said with a smile, "It's just one of your ways to interact with us Organics. Remember, people nowadays grew up with you guys. I grew up with you guys, we know how things works."
"I know, I know," I said and crossed my eyes, "Just feels rude of me."
She grinned and leaned back in her chair, "Hey, if you worry about it, how about you use some of the time and scout out a nice restaurant for me when I get off. Besides, I brought a book."
"Okay, deal."
The homeworld of the Andorians started to get closer, the icy moon shining in the bright sunlight like a jewel.
I was doing this. For real, I was… handling this.
I had dozens of people onboard and I wasn't panicking. Nothing was going wrong. I.. I could do this. I wasn't panicking.
This was real. Nothing dangerous, just… moving from A to B. But with real people onboard.
I was really doing this.
There would be a long time before I was ready to handle anything serious, I knew that…
But for the first time since I got shot up…
...As the first wisps of the thin upper atmosphere of Andoria licked past my shields, I felt that everything might work out okay in the end.
AN// And I think that's enough torturing a poor starship for now. On saturday we'll torture a poor pony instead in the continuation of the
New Beginnings. (MLP) series. If you haven't read it, you want to start there or you will be very confused.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it.