Log of the UNS Twilight Sparkle
25th May, 2481
Salamis
Blinking Lights rapped his knuckles nervously on the Admiral’s door. He’d never been allowed in here before.
“Come in,” came the reply, and the indicator turned green. Taking a quick breath to calm himself, he gestured the door open.
Fleet Admiral Sunset Shimmer was at her desk, reading crew reports. Behind, her desk was filled with star charts scrolling slowly past and across the wall.
“The Captain wanted you to know, the other ship changed course. They’ve slowed down, and if we–”
Without looking up, Sunset coughed pointedly.
“Er, sorry, ma’am. They’ve burned retrograde to bring them into an approach to Salamis, and if we’ve read their intentions correctly they’ll enter a stable orbit around Eritheia in 181 hours.”
“We'll make a sailor of you yet. Eritheia’s the fourth moon, right? Can we plot a matching course?”
“The astrogation team are on it right now. They want to avoid getting too close to Salamis’ north pole, they say its radiation levels are too high.”
“They’re probably right.” Sunset glanced away from her pad to look at the sailor. “Is there still no signal from the other ship?”
“None that we can decode through the interference, ma’am.”
“Well, keep trying. Is that everything, Ensign?”
Blinking Lights paused. “Um.”
“Yes?”
“May I... Permission to ask you a personal question, ma’am?”
Sunset frowned slightly as she put her pad down. “Go ahead, Blinking Lights. Shut the door though.”
He turned and waved his hand sideways to close the door. Turning back he said, “I was wondering why you keep that antique in your room, ma’am.”
Sunset turned to look at the mirror, itself locked in a reinforced glass case. The many broken shards of the mirror were suspended in the air in front of it, as if caught in the moment it shattered.
“It’s a reminder of an old friend,” she said. “Somepony I haven’t seen in a very long time.”
“It looks centuries old,” he said, walking over to it.
“It is. Older, probably. It was once part of the plinth of a statue that stood outside my own high school. Before that, who knows?” She saw confusion on the young sailor’s face. “That was long before holographic tagging was invented, you understand. So much information from that era is lost.”
Blinking Lights crouched down to look at the rotten rectangular object resting at the bottom of the case. It had a circular symbol on top, or once had. “What’s that?”
“It’s a book. No, really, that’s what books looked like when they were made of paper. Of course it used to be in much better condition, but years of love and worry have worn their way through it.”
“What's it about?”
“It was a journal that I shared with my mentor.”
“Really? It's… quite hard to imagine you having a mentor, ma'am. You've been with us for so long. At the academy they showed us some of the old 2D footage of you right there at the birth of the U.N.F.” Blinking Lights knew he shouldn't be talking so freely with the Admiral, but she had a disarming, amiable tone.
Sunset knelt beside him and touched her fingers to the glass. “I thought the same thing of my own mentor once. She was immortal, brilliant, flawless. But nobody's perfect.”
Sunset walked into the astrogation room, nursing a fresh cup of coffee. She gestured the door closed with a wave of her foot behind her, and casually dismissed the salutes.
“What’s new this morning, gentlemen?”
“No change in course since yesterday, ma’am,” replied Geodesic, bringing up a view with curved, coloured lines. “The alien craft is due to begin orbit insertion in 106 hours, with completion pegged for 4.5 hours after that.”
“Does that mean we know their course?”
“We've narrowed it down. Once we see exactly what orbit they settle into we can plot a course to match.”
Focal Length added, “Of course, they may not choose to burn the same way we do. It’ll be interesting to see how they do it.”
“Physics is the same the universe over,” said Sunset. “Magic aside, chances are she’ll have solved most things the same way I did.”
“Most likely, ma’am. Er... ‘she’?”
“The alien craft. Vessels are typically called ‘she’, are they not?” Sunset took a sip of her coffee.
“We do have a better picture of her, ma’am,” said Focal Length. “Resolved from the drones we launched yesterday, effective aperture 50 kilometres.” He brought up a still image of a spacecraft, slightly blurry, its bow pointing nearly towards them. “You can see her basic shape a lot clearer.”
“I can’t really tell the scale from this. How big is she?”
“About 1.3 kilometres long, and a similar wingspan. It’s longer than us, but about the same volume. Can’t speak for its mass yet. As we thought, there are manoeuvring thrusters here and here on the wingtips, presumably for reaction control.”
“And this protrusion at the front?” asked Sunset.
“That looks to be carrying instrumentation.”
Geodesic pulled up a spinning 3D interpretation of it. “I think it makes it look like a hummingbird.”
“It’s an elegant design, really, though it would never get through committee.”
“You never know,” said Geodesic. “It might, if there was a war. That has a tendency to make the stuffed shirts more willing to think outside the box.” He waved his hands in the shape of a dumpy rectangle, the basic design of all U.N.F. ships.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Sunset.
“Admiral on the bridge!”
“At ease, Captain,” said Sunset as she strode onto the upper bridge. “The Twilight Sparkle’s yours. I’m just along for the ride.” She took up station next to the Captain’s chair.
Captain Silent Running relaxed back in his chair. “Lieutenant, astrogation report.”
“Sir. Adjustments are complete, we’re lined up for the burn. In a little under 7 hours we’ll settle into a high orbit around Eritheia. Then we’ll start the manoeuvres to rendezvous with the alien craft, which will take about 18 hours.”
“How close can you get us, Lieutenant?” asked Sunset.
“The flight plan should take us to matching orbits approximately 5 kilometres apart. We can sidle closer if they seem friendly.”
Sunset whistled. “Not bad for a 40 light year journey.”
The Captain chuckled. “This ship’s not like the ones you used to fly.” He turned to his right. “Comms, how are the first contact protocols?”
“As ready as they’ve been for three hundred years, sir,” replied Handshake from the comms desk on the lower level. “We’re itching to finally try them out. I just hope they’re willing to talk, or that university education will have been wasted.”
“Don’t worry, they’re friendly,” said Sunset. “Or at least, they used to be.”
The Captain gave her a funny look. “I’m still amazed you were able to navigate us here to meet them. How did you do it?”
“I spent a lot of time looking at the stars, Captain,” replied Sunset, looking out at the broad panoply displayed across the curved walls, floor and ceiling. Nearly dead ahead, orbiting the gas giant Salamis and its moons that were only visible as tiny dots on the view, was a little labelled marker indicating the other craft’s position. It wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye until they were nearly alongside it.
Silent Running shook his head. “Cryptic as ever. That used to drive the whole crew nuts.”
A shout from the lower deck of the bridge drew their attention. Lieutenant Handshake called out, “Sir! We’ve got a laser signal!”
“What does it say?”
Handshake stood over his station, working frantically. “Looks to be a standard opening protocol bundle, sir. Pi, e, various constants. Looks like they use base 8. A basic alphabet run down, though of course we can’t see the glyphs yet. And a multi-format greeting. Honestly it’s a lot like ours. There's a raster after that...”
“What does the greeting say?” asked the Captain. “Can you translate it with what they've given us?”
Lieutenant Handshake scribbled across several displays simultaneously as he worked to interpret the alien data. Everyone on both bridge levels was turned in their seat, eager for an answer. “That’s the funny thing, sir. The greeting is in English, as well as their own language. It says they’re from the... Equestrian Union, gives the name of the ship, and then it says ‘May you live in harmony’. The identifier is...”
He stood up straight, looking in awe at the eternally young woman with the red and yellow hair.
“Go on, Lieutenant,” said the Captain.
“It says... the ship’s called the EQS Sunset Shimmer, sir.”