You shake your head and decide to keep the Red Angel PPCs as the weapons aboard the Ahywa Sofia. Replacing main battery weapons wholesale is not a trivial task despite the Star Empire's modular approach to the matter. It would add time to the duration you are stuck, parked at this desk, with the itch to get back into space growing ever stronger. You stretch to help reset your thoughts, drum your fingers on the table, and ponder what else you have to do before the date of the handover and acceptance trials.

Crew and officer assignment is well underway with personnel being assigned and transferring in from across the Star Empire. The roster available to you is full of 'pending' notations as Navy Office of Ship Manning bureaucrats search for and assign the various people needed. You hope that, like your last crew, they are all volunteers and not ex-Navy voluntolds transferring over to 'duck' a blackened service record. You also hope that the bureaucrats are wise enough not to select any body purists to serve alongside automatons.

That particular headache was supposed to be solved two and a half centuries ago when the Star Empire made it's policy of secular government official, including service to that government, and the worst of it has been drummed out of the various systems. But people and ideologies are harder to separate. The hatred for 'soulless machines' is steadily fading as more and more of the Star Empire lives aboard or in the shadow of sky cities which flatly require high degrees of automation to function. But it only takes one radicalized extremist to start problems. You resolve to make sure the automatons are included as crew in the (re)commissioning ceremony.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

You drum your fingers on your desk. Presuming that the shakedown cruise works as expected you have to wonder what your next mission will be. Previously all of your missions were 'second wave' deployments, confirming Warp Jump routes and scanning objects of interest. You could also seek out 'first wave' deployments, sent to warp jump into (somewhat unknown) systems and then work out the warp Jump routes available from that system. In essence to push the edges of the known map outwards. There is also the option for 'third wave' missions down on the surface of scanned worlds to get eyes (and scanners) onto the locations of interest and to bring back objects of scientific value.

You stand and make ready to head home for the day. The hour is late and you can ponder this decision over food and drink as well as you can an (almost) empty desk. Besides, you have time to wait now while your ship is handed over and your crew assembled.