I slowly brought sensor after sensor online. Still half a ship, but what I had worked well enough.
The Gust was a good, if small, ship class.
Not that I was a ship yet, but half a ship is better than a little shuttle that couldn't even enter Warp.
Running my brand-new sensors across my hull, I scanned the hangar. Great.
Now I'm feeling claustrophobic.
Just another couple of weeks though, then I could fly under my own power, just need to get things up and running.
"Everything connected up alright, little ship?" Jacob Hayman asked, tapping on one of the consoles in my half built engineering section.
"Little!?"
That got a grin from the short man, "Just easier. If I just say 'ship' then Love might answer."
"Hmh," I snorted and walked inside with my avatar, "You could try my name, human."
"I could if you picked one yet," he said and looked over at me, "You were just installed, Ships always change name when you do."
"…Good point," I admitted and crossed my arms, leaning back against the wall, moving my avatar out of the way as one of my maintenance drones skittered past, carrying a deckplate.
I hadn't picked one yet.
"Having trouble picking one," I sighed, "Sorry."
"Don't worry… little ship."
I glared at him before I looked away. I should likely change my avatar too. This one was… well, it had bad memories attached to it.
Right now, I almost thought Ivy had the best idea, mostly because then I would have had a tail to lash in annoyance.
But no, not Caitian, all that fur was just too high maintenance to be worth it. Haven't done Vulcan before, maybe that.
Not this one though. I needed to change this one soon.
"What's the ETA on my drive core?" I asked with a frown, "What did Love tell you?"
"Still a week away, I'm afraid," he sighed, "Sorry, the industrial replicator is running hot 24/7. A lot of the parts can be replicated normally but some of them are too big or too complex."
"Damn. Fine… impulse drive?"
"Another week after that, same problem," he said before he looked at my avatar, "Sorry."
"…Not your fault."
He turned to me and smiled, "I do have some good news though. I managed to scrounge up enough parts that by the time your PSC is ready to be mounted, your power system will be fully refitted. We'll be able to finish your auxiliary systems and interiors as we wait for the impulse drive."
"…I'll be finished in three weeks?"
"Around there," he agreed, "Fully operational, ready for a crew. None of those systems or the interiors require the use of an industrial replicator and despite all the work, there are still plenty of people that want to help."
"Thank you."
He grinned, "No problem, little ship."
Not little!
…Okay, I was a little ship. But he didn't need to say it like that, damn it.
"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," I grumbled, "I just want to get to work."
Jacob nodded, "Planning to join in the terraforming?"
I shook my head, "Too small," I said and then shrugged, "I'm to be a science ship though. I can join in gathering data of the planet to help make it more efficient and taking samples from the biosphere. We may need to clone more members of some species if they get hurt enough by the atmospheric disruptions to keep the natural balance."
"Makes sense. I'll schedule your labs to be set up as standard then."
"Sounds good."
The main mission of the Gust class was planetary survey after all.
Still no news about Shran and my old crew, I was scouring any news from the Federation. But it had been less than a week still, they had not reached Starbase 23 yet.
I might not be able to do anything about it, but I still wanted to know.
"Now then," Jacob said and brushed his arms, "If you excuse me, I have some actual work to do. The first engineering team should be past tomorrow."
"Thank you."
"Hey, I wanted to test the SPC on something since I read through the schematics before retrofitting Love to have them."
"I'm a ship, not a…" I grumbled before I sighed, "…You know what, forget it."
AN// Buckets of thanks to FPSCanarussia for betaing this section.