The thestrals were nothing if not impressive. The fuel and oxidizer transfers went without a hitch, then Star and Coils provided a couple of empty pallets- which had originally held space food- for movement of their supplies. All in all, they had their entire ship gutted and dismantled in a mere three weeks. Their reactor, after Coils had determined that it was incompatible with the First Light’s power grid because ship designers had dropped back compatibility for that model almost a hundred years before, had been transferred to her Reactor Recovery Bay for safe storage until it could be recycled.
Following that, the gravity had been set up to a half a gee, then gradually brought up to a full gee over the following week to help them all get used to it again. At the same time, they had finally opened the five stasis pods and transferred the soldiers inside to her medbay.
Finally, a week after that, Flight was alone on the bridge- Willow had gone to the mess hall to have lunch- when a sudden buzzer went off.
It only took her one glance to see what it was about.
Artillery inbound.
It even told her which direction to turn to avoid it most easily.
So she yanked on the helm, and shoved the throttle to maximum fully compensated thrust- which, according to the readout, was only a little more than she needed.
Three seconds later, a fresh chirp indicated that she had successfully avoided a sudden and none-too-pleasant death. She sighed, maintained her new heading for the moment, and flipped up a plastic cover at the very end of her panel to flatten the bright red button underneath.
Cold Coils was just snuggling back into her sheets, after a midnight potty break, when her eyes snapped open at the sudden thrumming of a cold Gravity Drive being forced to operate at high output. She sat up. “What’s going on?” she muttered, looking across the aisle as the irregular hum awoke Star as well. The sound of equipment getting abused like that would wake almost any engineer, after all.
Willowstone was having a good conversation with the thestrals in the dining hall. They were surprisingly friendly, she had found- just like any other pony, even. They were a remnant of the Midnight Navy, the navy of a tiny nation of thestrals that had once existed on a planetoid even smaller than Equineothame… before their homeworld had been blown to bits nearly five hundred years prior. Naturally, not a single pony was still alive from that time- ponies only lived to forty, after all.
All conversation came to a sudden halt when Night Skies, the Thestrals’ captain and engineer, suddenly stiffened.
Then she heard it too. The low, throbbing moan reverberating through the ship, that hadn’t been there just moments before. She didn’t recognize it right off, but that moan sent ice through her veins anyways.
“Something’s not right,” Skies muttered darkly, scowling.
Right at that moment, a sudden screaming, howling alarm blasted out of the intercom, echoing throughout the ship.
“GQ?” one of the thestral soldiers asked, alarmed.
Willow made a snap decision. She’d made quite a few of those during her brief stint as the ENS Everfree’s sole Tactical officer, and they’d all paid off, so she didn’t dare second-guess herself. “Shade, medbay,” she commanded. “Skies, Blacklight, Astral, you’re with me. The rest of you report to Engineering for Damage Control.”
Then she bolted from the room, abandoning her half-eaten salad.
The thestrals exploded into motion at the same moment- and, she knew, didn’t head straight for damage control. A couple of them did, but most of the group she’d assigned to it were soldiers. They knew that a ship’s Marines had exactly two duties in a naval battle: The first was to distribute the pressure suits, and the second was to report to Engineering for damage control. Her command had assigned them that role- the role they’d already had, aboard the Shadouette.
“I told you this wasn’t a civvy ship,” she heard Blacklight telling Astral Eye, as they brought up the rear.
Skies, being older and faster than Willow, caught up quickly. “Are you sure?” she asked.
Willow ignored the question.
Mere seconds later, the last door snapped open in front of her, and she burst onto the bridge. “What happened?” she asked.
“Near miss with artillery,” Flight answered quickly. “Range six light-minutes and closing fast.”
Willow turned to the thestrals, and started pointing them to consoles. “Blacklight, there, Astral, there, Skies, there.”
Flight glanced up briefly. “We’ll be counting on your experience, Skies,” she stated, studying her displays. “If something doesn’t feel right, say something. Willow is our tactical talent, but you’ve got the experience.”
Skies nodded darkly as she sat in what she recognized as the First Officer’s seat. “Yes, Captain.” She narrowed her eyes at the panel. “That’s at least three ships there,” she muttered. “Looks like a pirate formation, they probably have a lot of missiles. How are your defenses?”
Willow scowled at her panel. “We’re well past the PONR,” she muttered.
“We’re a glass cannon,” Flight answered. “Largely unarmored, but our artillery has a maximum effective range of five light-minutes.”
Skies looked up. “How fast?”
“One shot per minute each of four weapons,” Flight answered. “Lightspeed, untested.”
Skies looked down at the displays again. “If we don’t kill them with our opening salvo, we’re not likely to hit them until we reach point-blank. Even pirates know how to use anti-artillery doctrine.”
“Enemy ID-ed,” Willow called. “One superdreadnought, two heavy cruisers. Pirate flags.” She glanced up at Flight. “Artillery?”
Flight nodded, and pushed on the helm to line the bow up with the enemy. “I have it charging,” she answered.
“Four rounds?” Skies narrowed her eyes. “Ripple-fire two of them down the superdreadnought’s throat,” she ordered. “They should act like a drill. Split the other two against the other two ships.”
Willow glanced up at Flight, who nodded.
“These chickens are way too close together to polarize their hulls,” Blacklight observed calmly.
Skies raised an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s those idiots.” She sat back. “They’ll be so close together the destruction of the center vessel will inevitably cripple the other two, so it’s more efficient to concentrate fire on the superdreadnought. Don’t miss, though- they start dodging crazy once they know you’re shooting at them.”
Willow raised an eyebrow. “So, ripple-firing all four down the superdreadnought’s throat in five, mark?”
Skies nodded. “Yup. Anything left we should be able to erase with-!”
She broke off when the ship gave a tiny twitch, and the massive window across the front of the bridge suddenly turned pitch black. A quartet of miniature stars were still visible, though, blasting out from above and below and vanishing rapidly into the distance as the window returned to its prior transparency.
Flight scowled. “That looked a lot slower than lightspeed,” she muttered.
“That’s because we’re moving seventy-five percent as fast as they are,” Willow answered. “They’ll look like they’re moving about point one two cee relative to us. We’ll want to make a hard right five seconds before impa- There’s a fourth ship behind the superdreadnought, class unknown.”
Skies leaned forwards again. “You’re right. That’s…” She paused. “That’s a classic protective formation for these idiots,” she muttered. “That ship behind them will be either a civvy or a glass cannon.”
“It’s going to get hit by our arty if the first three rounds make a hole in the SD,” Flight observed.
“It will,” Willow agreed. “Unless they change course or something within the next three and a half minutes.”
“They’re idiots,” Skies answered calmly. “Most pirates won’t do anything except charge straight at us until we get within thirty light-seconds of them- unless we shoot artillery at them, but the Midnight Navy hasn’t had that for centuries.”
Flight glanced up. “Why the blind charge?”
She shrugged. “Because as hard as it is for the nations to find tactical talent, it’s even harder for pirates. They’ve got one tactician for every thousand ships or so.”
Flight raised an eyebrow. “And your fleet…?”
“The last of the Midnight Navy’s true tactical talent died off a hundred and fifty years ago,” Skies answered. “However, thestrals are natural predators, so we’re naturally tactically inclined- and not completely useless without a trained tactician.”
“I know I shouldn’t be calling an artillery duel boring,” Skies muttered, “but if anything was, that one definitely was.”
Flight nodded. After they had confirmed all their enemies defeated, they had gone even tighter into stealth and altered their course- and now, it was ‘evening’ aboard ship, and the engineers had just taken over for Flight and Willowstone. The thestrals had returned to the passenger sectors quickly, once the danger was past- so she had met them down in the mess hall, where she wanted some dinner. “Yeah. Bit stressful when it started, but after we dodged that first round…” She shrugged. “They just died. Even when one of the cruisers managed to survive the SD’s explosion and tried to flee.”
“Straight line flight,” Blacklight nodded. “One of the easiest ways to get suckered by artillery. Must not have realized that’s what we used.”
“Chickens indeed,” Flight agreed. “Had they varied their course, they might have gotten close enough to fire missiles against us.” She sighed, then turned to Skies. “Speaking of, I know a two-and-done artillery duel like that is kinda unorthodox, and very, very simple, but I like how quickly your ponies fell into place when I hit the GQ.”
Skies looked at her quizzically.
She smiled back. “I know the Shadouette wasn’t in a repairable state, but what do you say to joining the permanent crew of this ship?”
You do what you feel is right. I love how this story is going, but I never really thought of committing. I don't have much time to read so I usually don't comment. I did this time just to say their may be fue of us reading this but we can wait longer for new chapters.
11263902
Yeah... According to the statistics, each chapter lately has been getting around 75 views throughout the week. I don't know how many of those are from people viewing a chapter multiple times, and it's likely that some 3 or 4 of them are me... but a "view" only takes about 5 seconds to count, so there's no telling how many of them are false detections- including my own views- and how many aren't.
I mean, only 41 people are tracking this story... to the 350 and 106 of Accidental Invasion (just over a year old) and Gift of Divinity (went live- and got featured- 5 days ago).
Sad to hear you're dropping this. It's hard to find good, well-written sci-fi stuff.
Confirmation that there is no relativity in this universe. At these speeds, the Newtonian velocity subtraction formula, v1 - v2, gives a very different answer than the relativistic formula, (v1 - v2) / (1 - (v1 * v2)/(c*c))
But even in a Newtonian universe, wouldn't you expect the projectile's initial velocity to be based on the velocity of the ship that fired it?
I don't tend to comment on things much. I only comment when I feel I actually have something to say; maybe several things. (E.g. the relativistic observation above.)
But it's also true that I haven't been enjoying this story as much as I enjoyed JLMoO. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out why, though, so I unfortunately can't give any useful advice.
11264495
You would expect that, yes. They're in a Newtonian universe... with a fixed speed-of-light cap. Anything that tries to violate that speed of light, relative to nobody knows what (probably "the nearest celestial body" or some extrapolation from the same), will be violently decelerated... Unless it is using some sort of tech that allows it to violate that top speed. As such, even if her ship had been traveling at 0.95c, the weapon would still have only fired at 0.99c. In this case, since she was moving 0.75c, the actual relative difference was 0.24c, but thanks to the speed of light... I probably miscalculated- 0.12c relative appearance would've been if they were stationary with that actual difference. Since they were not stationary, the appearance was probably closer to the actual difference, since the relative speed of the light they're seeing from it is 1.75c, albeit still slower than it actually was.
Now, had she been traveling at 0.75c in reverse, the weapon would not have been traveling at a full 0.99c... probably closer to 0.55c, a whopping 1.3c relative, as it hit the maximum accelerative capacity of the weapon. I haven't actually defined that capacity, except that it's over 1c and less than 1.75c, so who knows.
As for standard artillery cannons, of the sort that were fired at her? Their accelerative capacity is around 0.9c, but the round- being designed to detonate on impact, before it can smash itself to bits- is a lot more sensitive to space dust & debris in between, so it has a maximum effective velocity of 0.8c... which is enough to afford its target a usable amount of time in which to detect and avoid it, even though it'll look- to their sensors- like it's travelling at a whopping 4c! ... Assuming they're stationary. The math is complicated enough I'm not going to calculate the actual apparent speed of the artillery rounds as they charged into their teeth at 0.75c- probably something like 16c, which would explain why she only had a few seconds warning... and indicate a very impressive sensor suite to have spotted and ID-ed the round fast enough to avoid it.
11264220
... Well-written sci-fi, huh?
My focus lately has been on Harry Potter crossovers (a lot more fantasy than sci-fi)... but thanks for the compliment. I also like sci-fi, even if it's also an easier category to walk into a corner (because you can't just say "magic" and introduce some new mechanic to explain it).
11264637
I mean, you sorta can with ponies in the mix. Magic to manipulate physics and whatnot, but... I see your point. Doing that kind of defeats the purpose - And yeah. You'd be surprised how often people resort to stupid tropes, or "magic" even in scifi stuff when ponies are involved. It actually gets rather frustrating.
I've definitely been reading most of your work. I've actually gone back and read a bunch of the older stuff too, even, so don't think it's just this that I've enjoyed. I tend to just not comment on stuff often.
11267077
No problem.
…. That would be why I like the humans-turned-into-ponies approach (The Equestrian Starliner, The Equine Starliner) or the magicless-ponies approach (Just Like Magic of Old, Starbound Flight) so much: It takes magic out of the equation.
The First Equestrian Starliner was an exception, with magic ponies and a godship.