A New Beginning

Posted on Thu Jul 25th, 2019 @ 11:36pm by Captain Nathan Hunt

Mission: Shadows of Weimar
Location: Altair VI (9 hours behind ship time)
Timeline: Mission Day 1, 1000hrs

Captain Nathan Hunt sat in a lawn chair, gazing up at the night sky. It was a perfectly clear, balmy night on Altair VI, and the stars above were perfectly visible in the quiet countryside he had driven out to on his rental hover bike. The stars always seemed to have a greater sense of wonder to him when planetside; on a starship, he often found they were taken for granted, but there was something about looking up at them from the ground that never failed to bring back the bogey hood wonder he remembered as a child. Out here, where there was no light pollution, reminded him of times on Mantinea in his former life as a rural lawkeeper, when he’d been out on the hunt for some criminal hiding out in the roughs and needed to camp out under the stars.

He wasn’t to have the chance to admire the view for long. Today he was to take command of his new ship, the USS Mercury. A Galaxy class vessel built with all the modern conveniences a starship could want, and able to carry hundreds more people than the last ship he had commanded, the USS Meitan, an Excelsior refitted many times over its decades-long service, and finally decommissioned a few short months ago. The Mercury had been assigned to ship construction supplies to a Cardassian colony that was still struggling to rebuild itself following the Dominion War, and Altair VI happened to be the planet from which said supplies would be collected. While Starfleet had finished commissioning his new ship and pulling his crew together - he’d had input while planetside on who his senior staff would be - Hunt had been organising the supplies with the locals, and had them all created up in a warehouse ready to be beamed straight to the ship’s cargo bays.

Nate held his monocular to his eye and focussed in on the small star that had just appeared in the sky above him. The small device’s lenses were augmented with digital optics, and he was able to make out the silhouette of a starship approaching orbit, though even on maximum magnification it was still very small to his eye. He didn’t catch site of the shuttle craft it had launched until it was approaching the atmosphere itself. He tracked it as it glowed briefly in the friction of the upper atmosphere, before banking and heading for his position.

“Shuttlecraft Aurora to Captain Hunt,” came the voice over his comm badge. “We are on approach to your location for pickup.”

“I see you Aurora,” Nate responded, lowering his monocular and tapping the badge. “Ready to go as soon as you get here.”

“Confirmed Captain, we’ll be with you in 2 minutes.”

Nate stood and folded his chair, stowing it in his rented bike before triggering the homing beacon on the vehicle. After he left the rental company would collect the craft and the other supplies he had rented for the night. His belongings were with the first batch of supplies that the Mercury would be beaming up, and so all he had to board the shuttle with was his monocular, which he returned to its case.

“Well, time for a new adventure,” he mused to himself, as the shuttlecraft came to a gentle landing a few feet in front of him, it’s entry hatch opening. “Let’s make it a good one.”