"All decks report ready for departure, Captain." Desai said from the pilot couch. To her right was a US Air Force captain who had been flying F-22s, he was probably a good guy and an outstanding pilot, and I needed to keep that in mind whenever I saw one of the new people aboard the Dutchman. People who hadn't been with UNEF, hadn't gone into space before, hadn't been at Camp Alpha or on Paradise, hadn't captured two enemy ships and raided a heavily-guarded asteroid base. They were good people. They weren't yet my people, and for them to be truly part of the team, they had to prove themselves. Not just to me, to the original merry band of pirates. And to Skippy. What I needed to do was be conscious not to let bias against the new people affect my actions; they had all earned the opportunity to be here.

The Dutchman was now packed with supplies for a long voyage, we had enough food for two and a half years. Everything, and everyone, had been ferried up from the surface in Thuranin dropships remotely piloted by Skippy. Except Desai, she had piloted her own dropship, I'd encouraged her to do that, to make a point that she was our chief pilot, and everyone else was a rookie.

From the surface. Dirtside. Already, I was thinking of Earth as just another planet, and not as home. Probably for the best, as I didn't realistically expect any of us to see the place again.

'All decks report ready'. That was another change from our carefree pirate days aboard the Dutchman. We now had procedures. And manuals, and checklists. We no longer simply relied on Skippy to handle everything behind the scenes. We humans were trying, perhaps not to understand how the ship worked, at least to understand how to make the ship do what we needed. If we were able to press buttons and program a jump, and the ship jumped roughly where we wanted it to, then even if we had no idea how jump technology worked, it was good enough. Skippy told me that humans being able to fly the ship without him, even in the most rudimentary fashion, bordered uncomfortably on humanity becoming a starfaring species. If we were a starfaring species, some feature in Skippy's programming was supposed to prevent him from interacting with us. It hadn't happened yet, and I was hoping that the definition of 'starfaring species' required us to understand the technology and build our own ships, which wasn't likely on my lifetime, according to Skippy.