It had only been a scant few months since T’Pree found herself aboard the Starbase Bravo, home of the infamous Fourth Fleet. She had ingratiated herself with other fellow Cadets that had been, fortunate or unfortunate for some, assigned to the same posting and assignments. In fact almost the entirety of her graduating class had been assigned out here to the frontier of Federation-controlled space. Within days they had been orientated with it’s ameneties, luxuries, duty roster, quarters, and who their immediate supervisor would be for the next couple of rotations through. She’d half-expected to be placed in Operations where she could have a more hands-on experience with handling the day to day of station activity; interacting with the myriad of species that made up the United Federation of Planets.Instead she had been placed in a follow and observe curriculum, attached to the hip to junior command staff, sitting through and taking notes as they held daily meetings of station wellbeing, improvements, degradation of systems that needed repairs, delegations from the colony on Mellstoxx III, handling the arrangements needed for said delegations, so on and so forth. This went on for some time until it was made known why she was seperated alongside a select few others. 

They were being taught the fundamentals of what it meant to be in command of hundreds of personnel responsible for keeping the starbase intact and running. Mistakes made need not be rectified immediately but learned from. To take the initiative and follow through with proper reasoning and logic. To know the difference between leading and dictating. Eventually there developed a core of a dozen cadets with T’Pree naturally taking charge of their day to day schedules, shift rotations, and roster. It had become such a well-run machine amongst the gears of Starbase Bravo that when the Vulcan was told she would finish off the remainder of her time as a Cadet on one final command cruise with her in charge, well, it was only logical. What she thought would become her permanant duty station had instead become just an orientation to decide the crew complement of a new ship undergoing refit. 

The USS Solvang, a California-class configured for Command. Registry NCC-12101, a relatively recent ship that had been going through it’s checks since it’s arrival in spacedock. It was undergoing it’s final systems checks and here T’Pree stood, watching as worker drones and shuttlecraft flitted around it’s hull. If she looked close enough she could even see the specks of people dotted around it pulling apart panels to look through the internals. No longer just a Cadet she wore a fresh uniform, the only difference being a red outline coming down from a collar sporting a black pip with a gold outline. The precipice between student and becoming a genuine officer of the Federation. 

It went to show how desperate times were if even she was being sent out with command of a ship. Granted, it would be operating within friendly space so even in the event something happened she wouldn’t have to deal with it alone. Those sorts of missions were best left to ships of the line like the Enterprise, Titan, and Persephone. Just another couple of days until final refits would be completed. Then would follow crew embarkment, a full systems shakedown, and what every cadet in the command team were looking forward to. 

Their maiden voyage.