Where Black Seas Lap the Shores of Dead Stars

by The Hat Man

7. The Bare Basics

It took a few months to disassemble the old shuttlecraft and move the necessary pieces to an unused silo. She needed pieces of the outer hull and the core components of the Hyperdrive engine primarily.

The colonists had rejected the idea of using a shuttlecraft to seek help due to the potential costs. A minimal crew would have needed food for the journey, for starters, and enough to last the few years to make it to Antigone. There was also the energy cost; the ship would have needed enough power to keep the air and water pure, and enough to keep the various systems happily humming along. And of course, there was the most important cost of all: thaumium.

Thaumium contained magic and made it usable by machines. If you needed something blasted or frozen or teleported or anything like that, you needed either a very talented unicorn or a thaumium-based device.

But for interstellar travel, you needed it for the Hyperdrive engine. The magical effect was necessary to bore a tunnel right through the laws of physics and travel the universe faster than the speed of light. Not only that, it suspended time dilation; without it, a 5-year mission for the voyagers would take nearly a century as far as those back on the planet were concerned.

Rosie knew the trip to Antigone was potentially a fool’s errand, which is why her actual trip would probably be much longer. If the colonists had tried this plan, they would have failed; they would have needed more power than they could muster to bring a shuttlecraft the distance she’d need to go.

The weight was the primary issue, she realized. Every single kilogram of excess weight would require more power and more thaumium, and those added even more weight. If something had gone wrong on Antigone, she’d need to go further to the next nearest world, Rex, or maybe even further.

Again, no pony could make such a trip under those circumstances. But a robot, on the other hoof…

No need for food. No need for water. No need for oxygen. No need for a backup crew.

She stood in the silo, watching as her modified maintenance drones carved the necessary pieces from the shuttlecraft and her new vessel took shape.

She considered the numbers. The weight. The power. The margin of error was tighter than she liked…

“It will not be enough,” she whispered. “It will still be too big, too heavy. If I am to go through with this, I must have the best possible chance of success. Even with the minimal space necessary to accommodate my body, the vessel will be too large. But how can I…?”

She paused. Thinking aloud was a habit she’d picked up from the colonists. What was weird was that sometimes it actually worked. And this was one of those times.

She raised a hoof, examining it.

She didn’t need food. She didn’t need water. She didn’t need oxygen.

And she didn’t need a body.

“Halt modifications,” she commanded the drones, and their busy humming immediately stopped. “Reconfigure the vessel according to the following specifications…”

Comments

[Ri2]

And so she sacrifices even herself