It was a good refit. It had happened a few years ago, but the previous captain, a fastidious Benzite with excellent taste in all things aesthetic, had ensured that it wasn’t simply a pop-open-the-bulkheads-and-change-the-relays job. As Mount Shasta bolted across space to attempt to rescue a seemingly adrift, primitive spacecraft, Captain Abigail Ralin found herself entranced by the ship’s subtle pleasantries of interior design. A little reverie in the finer things of the galaxy was something Abigail strongly believed in, practiced, and promoted. In this moment, perhaps the first quiet one since she took command days ago, she reveled in it.

On the far side of the ready room, the spruce-green wall was inlaid with a two-by-three meter stone relief depicting the real Mount Shasta, on Earth. It was somewhere in northern California, she thought. I should go there some time. The carving was made by an Andorian master, and carved from a very fine, creamy white stone with thin veins of cobalt blue marbling.

But she knew that visit to California wouldn’t be any time soon. The mission was just beginning, and the variables were many and most challenging. Deneb was in bad shape, and the Mount Shasta, at least this iteration of it, was untested. The crew was young, new. That meant fresh, brimming with enthusiasm and quick with new ideas and novel solutions to exactly the kind of thorny problems Starfleet specialized in. After all, that’s why they were here. That’s why, after a highly successful career in the Merchant Service, Abigail resigned her commission and transferred her spacefaring ratings to Starfleet, enrolling in the Academy. She was still young at the time. Her rise in the Merchant fleet was exceptionally fast, and she was among the youngest captains in the service’s century and a half. A sinecure in a luxurious office in Alpha Centauri was all but guaranteed. But there was no fun in that, and while Alpha Centauri could be a lovely place to live, Abigail certainly wasn’t ready to stop trying new things. That was the key to finding those little things to revel in. She had been young then. She was still young now.

A young, thrown-together crew also had the potential for problems. Timid crew could miss opportunities or possible fixes. They could fail to coalesce, never develop esprit de corps. She recalled a story she had read about an expedition to summit Mount Shasta in the Victorian era. The famed naturalist John Muir survived seventeen hours on the mountain, trapped between a lava pool and a sudden, howling snowstorm. He had argued to continue the trek when the storm hit. Had he persuaded them, his companions would have died along with him. But he trusted them, and did not want to unnecessarily risk their lives. They survived due to good instincts, some training, and some luck, but most of all, they survived because of trust.

So much for a nice, relaxing respite, she thought. The desk comm chirped.

“Captain?” Her yeoman’s voice.

“Go ahead.”

“I have that data you requested.”

“Bring it in, please.”

After the yeoman dropped the PADDs on her desk and the door swished shut, Abigail’s eyes lingered on the mountain for a moment, and the galaxy was still.