Magic is a thing of the distant past, but it changes Princess Short Flight's life forever after a run-in with orbiting procedures.
On a world where magic exists only in the distant past, a young unicorn Princess is utterly convinced she won't live to see the day when it is rediscovered. Thus, she doesn't know what to think when, after a particularly nasty run-in with orbiting procedures, it changes her life forever.
Updates Mondays, if ready. Or, on Patreon, when ready.
And last but not least, many thanks to Shooting Star for graciously permitting me to use his OC, and to Gerandakis for the editing assist!
Rewrite/translation to past tense started 6/21/2020 and subsequently stagnated. There's a few changes to the wording, so it flows better, but all the same events are taking place in all the same places, and all the same words are being said. I'd recommend a re-read for the details being added, but it's not necessary.
Princess Short Flight looked fearfully at her navigation panels after her exclamation to Orbital Control. It was true- she was eight, so she didn’t know anything she ought to have known before being allowed to fly a starship any kind of distance. Things like how to understand the various orbital codes, or the math required to get the ship into one of those orbits.
She had, at least, read the ship user’s manual before she got behind the helm. So at least she knew how to alter her heading and vector. And what all the various alarms meant- thus, how she knew it was telling her she was on a dangerous suborbital trajectory. The annoying buzzer wouldn’t turn off until she adjusted her orbit to either encounter the atmosphere at a safe velocity… or stay out of it entirely.
Only thing was, she didn’t know which way to burn in order to make that happen.
And while she knew Orbital Control was trying to help her, she also knew she had a matter of about twenty minutes before she hit the atmosphere.
And she had no idea what the words Orbital Control used to tell her which way to burn meant. It had been an angle she understood- but it had been an angle between ‘retrograde’ and ‘antiradial’, reference points she most certainly did not understand.
“Alright,” the controller working with her transmitted. It sounded like she was speaking through gritted teeth, yet forcing herself to stay professional. “Can you burn three hundred to antiradial in ninety-three seconds, mark?”
Funny, that was a smaller number than the angled burn… though there was a much shorter time to execution. Fortunately, she knew enough of their standard communication practices- her ‘burn three hundred’ meant to burn three hundred meters per second. Since her ship had just over twelve hundred meters per second remaining, she was pretty sure the ship could do that; if she really pushed it, she could make any heading change in forty seconds or less.
If only she knew which way ‘antiradial’ was.
She engaged her transmitter again. “Um… Which way is that?”
There was a pause. “You… don’t know what ‘antiradial’ is?”
She shook her head, even though the controller wouldn’t see it. “I do not.”
“You know how your orbit is roughly elliptical around the planet? Antiradial is perpendicular to that path, facing out, away from the planet.”
She took a few seconds to think about it. “So, I’ll be facing away from the planet, but at a ninety degree angle from my vector?”
“Yes!” The controller sounded exasperated.
She started to reach for the controls- it’d take about thirty-five seconds to make that turn, and she had forty to the burn- then, very suddenly, the proximity alarm went off. She let out a yelp, abandoning the helm to examine the maneuvering display. There shouldn’t be anything that close!
But there was. Dead ahead, about three seconds from impact on her current course. And it was enormous.
She stared at the display for a second, then closed her eyes. She could only pray that heaven existed, and that she was not doomed to hell for failing her parents.
A second later, the buzzer died.
She waited a couple seconds, before opening her eyes to peer out the windshield. Nothing. She peered at her maneuvering display- also nothing. “What in the world…?” She raised one hoof to rub her horn, which had started itching for some reason. Then she glanced back down at the time readout. “Musta been a sensor ghost, I guess.” She scowled at the timer; she was too late to make the turn before the burn. She reached for the radio again, and depressed the key. “Um… Which way was retrograde?”
“Retrograde is the opposite of your current vector,” the controller stated. “And if you’re going to do that burn instead, it’s in seventy-three seconds.”
She read back the notes she’d made earlier on the burn, after setting the timer again.
“Ahh, readback is correct. You doing it, or…?” The controller sounded exasperated, but tired… and a lot less angry than before. Disappointed, maybe?
She pulled on the levers, beginning the required heading change. “Yeah. Thirty seconds I’ll be on heading, then wait… thirty-eight seconds, I think, to burn in sixty-two from now, mark?”
“Ahh, that’s sixty-one from your mark.”
“Sixty-one, roger.” She deducted a second from the timer and guided her ship onto the required heading. She then spent several seconds fine-tuning the angle and programming the burn, then waited the twenty or so seconds left before the burn… and struck the ignite key. Fortunately, while the computer might not understand ‘retrograde’ and ‘antiradial’, it did understand four hundred and someodd meters per second, and had no qualms with using its advanced processors to make the burn extremely precise.
She waited until the computer completed the burn, flattening her ears against the angry yelling she knew her parents were producing way back in their module. The traffic controller hadn’t figured out what she could understand until after it was too late for a standard, low-gee burn, so she’d had to go full power- and her parents will have been blasted into their couch by an apparent seven gees. Besides, she had a developing headache- and since the crash warning buzzer had finally quit, she could relax… some. “Alright,” she called in. “I’m now in a stable orbit… Do I need to adjust it any, or…?”
“Ahh… yes, unfortunately. I’m going to need you to burn six five to antinormal, centered in three-seven-two seconds, mark.”
She sets the timer. “Uh… Okay. Which way is antinormal?”
“Imagine you were standing on the planet directly under your ship, facing prograde- that’s forwards, to match your vector. Antinormal would then be to your right.”
She looked at her maneuvering display. “So… perpendicular to the plane of my orbit… and mostly south?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, manipulating the helm to point the ship. Her parents’ module was in her central cargo bay, at the center of mass, so they didn’t care how much she spun the thing around. She then keyed in the burn order to the computer. “Alright then. That was six five to antinormal, centered in three-three-one seconds, mark?”
“Readback and time is correct.”
“Can I do it at half a meter per second squared?”
“Affirmative.”
“Roger. Initiating one-three-zero second burn, total six-five to antinormal, in two-five-seven seconds… Mark.”
“Correct.”
She took a deep breath, and let it out. “Alright. I’ll call in again when the burn is complete?”
“Ahh, negative, actually. When the burn is complete, you’ll be in your designated orbital slot- I believe I gave you the information earlier?”
She read it back from a sidebar on her maneuvering display.
“Readback is correct. Is your ship equipped with an orbital verification system?”
“Ahh… Yes, it is.” It was equipped with quite a lot more than that- everything except something that understood what retrograde, antiradial, and antinormal were… but most of that was top secret.
“Roger. Once the burn completes, if verification comes back positive, signal done with engines. If not, call me up again and we’ll figure out what adjustments to make.”
“Understood.” She let out a final sigh, and watched the time to execution display tick down. This time, she’d had plenty of time to set the computer up to initiate the burn on its own as well.
A sudden banging sounded on the hatch. She glanced at the door control system, before punching the intercom key. She really didn’t want to deal with her mother and her growing headache at the same time, but she didn’t have much of a choice.
Her mother scowled out of her screen, before repositioning herself to look at her screen- and, with it, the camera- better. “Short Flight!” she barked.
She sighed at the screen. “Yes, Mother?”
“Why in the world didn’t you warn us you were going to burn hard?”
“It was either that, or crash into the planet,” she answered carefully. “I didn’t think any extra warnings were needed, since you knew I was going to be making burns.”
Her mother practically exploded with fury. “You should have warned us you were making a fifty-gee burn! Your father chipped his horn! You should- What-!”
Saved by the bell, Short Flight sighed internally, watching her mother throw her hooves at the handholds. Unfortunately, the mare wasn’t wearing her H.A.N.D.S., so she only managed to push herself away from them… before falling, kinda slowly, back away from the screen and out of sight. Flight turned forward, cutting the connection and turning to watch the maneuvering display. The computer had started the burn on schedule, conveniently saving her from finding out whatever gruesome thing her parents had been doing in their module. There was a reason she’d wanted to use her ship for this operation, rather than her parents’ ship- and it wasn’t just that she was low on fuel. No- on her ship, she could tell them to do their… thing in their module, and nowhere else. And, unlike anywhere else, they’d actually listen.
She was heartily tired of their mess being… everywhere.
On the surface of a planet, where there’s gravity, they were not bad about it- and they did their adult things on their bed… then have the maids change the sheets three times a day. To her knowledge, the maids didn’t complain because they were paid not to complain.
She wasn’t, though. In space, her parents got worse. They did it everywhere… then didn’t even bother going to the bathroom when they needed to go, either. Which meant that their ships all stank to high heaven, and the few times she’d flown in them, she’d often had to wipe something disgusting off the control panels before she could read it.
On her ship… Well, their module wasn’t technically even part of it. No, that thing was just a remodeled cargo container, held in place by the cargo clamps in her cargo bay. There wasn’t even an airlock between it and her ship- instead, the bay was pressurized. Their bedroom was part of the same module- and when that trip is finally complete, cleaning her entire ship of all of their gunk would be as simple as opening the cargo bay doors, releasing the docking clamps, and asking for a tug to tow the module away. Her parents were strictly forbidden from doing any of that outside of their module, or emerging from it when not clean- so they almost never emerged from it, even to reach an external airlock. After all, she could just depressurize and open that cargo bay and let them use the external airlock on their module. If they needed a small craft, they could hire a local one, not use one of the ones she had in some of her other bays.
Of course, the main reason she’d actually wanted to fly this mission at all, let alone use her own ship for it, was that her ship was running low on fuel. And now, with just over seven hundred meters per second of fuel remaining, it didn’t have the fuel to return home. Which meant, since her parents would pay any price to get home, she could tank up on their dime, and not have to spend her scanty allowance on fuel.
Well… her scanty allowance, plus the rather significant stash of funds hidden in the bank account Admiral Mantle Core had helped her set up, that she’d earned by offering to use her ship to move stuff around the fleet back home. Hardly nothing in fuel cost, as she spent most of those trips drifting from one ship to another. They even paid her handsomely for the time she’d had to spend away from her parents, and she’d got a huge amount of practice with docking maneuvers, along with some less significant practice with the rest of her computer support. She’d never told anyone that she enjoyed the time away from her parents as well.
By the time the burn finally completed, her headache had grown very painful. She rubbed the side of her head long enough to see the green checkmark of the orbital verification system coming back positive, before going through her well-practiced motions of signalling done with engines… and locking out the controls. A quick glance at the life support readout indicated that her mother had scrambled back into their module and sealed the door, so she locked the inner cargo bay doors and partially depressurized the bay- their door was large and opened inwards- before scrambling out of her chair and kicking off the control panel, launching herself straight towards the door into her private chambers. If she was honest with herself, she was lucky her parents let her buy this ship- and didn’t care what she did with it.
She slipped through the hatch, closed it behind her, and launched herself for her bed. As usual, her Hands had no difficulty catching the straps that keep her in bed in zero gravity, so she crawled into bed swiftly. Once in, with the straps adjusted, she reached up to lock her Hands into their charging frames, and started rubbing her horn gently. It almost felt like something was trying to expand inside her horn- but that couldn’t be. There were only blood lines, nerves, and a bit of useless vestigial biology.
It didn’t take her long before she fell into the peaceful embrace of sleep.
Short flight awakened quickly to the buzzing of her communicator. She spent a second glaring at the wall in front of her before turning herself over under the elastic straps keeping her in bed, to face the bedside communications panel. As she went, she decided that if it was anything less than important, it’d have to slide; she must have caught a cold or something. Maybe the flu? But why would it be showing then, over three days since the airlock doors were last opened?
In any case, no matter the cause, she felt terrible. Her entire body felt warm, yet it still seemed to want the warmth of her covers- she was not sweating. And that was not counting the splitting headache, or the piercing burn in her horn. She glared at the comms panel until her eyes came into focus.
Oh. It was her dad. And there was only one reason he’d be calling her: To tell her what to do next. It sorta made sense, even- he was the King of her nation. She sighed, and hit the answer key. “Hi.” He got mad every time she answered and didn’t say anything, but at least he didn’t care what she did say to indicate she’s listening.
“Short Flight,” he greeted stiffly. She was pretty sure he’d only ever seen her as a resource- and she already knew she was an ‘oops child’. “We’ll be waiting in orbit for three days before we head home.”
She nodded. “Alright. While we’re here, we’re going to have to get some fuel.”
“Fuel?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
She nodded again, not that he’ll see; she’d accepted his call audio only. “Yeah. We don’t have enough to get home right now.”
“Uh…”
She tapped a few keys on the comms panel with her hoof. “Looks like I can have a supply ship rendezvous with us the day after tomorrow, a day before… whatever we’re waiting for.”
He blinked, the nervous uncertainty vanishing quickly. “Yeah, that’ll work. We’ll be ready.” He disconnected.
She sighed, and hit the key to finish submitting the reprovisioning request. She’d known the news she was low on fuel would make him nervous; midspace refueling of anything surface-capable was vanishingly rare where she came from, around the one little planetoid he controls. As a result, he’d expected she’d have to descend to the planetary surface to refuel- and her parents’ cargo module was upside-down relative to her ship… which would put them on the ceiling if she had to deorbit. Fortunately for both her and them, not just refuelling but resupplying ships in space, no matter their capability, was the norm here in orbit of Earth, the birthplace of pony civilization.
She closed her eyes, and went back to sleep. She was still tired.
--------
When Short Flight next awakened to the buzzing of the communicator, she still hurt, but it was different. The headache had faded mostly, and her horn no longer hurt- instead, it felt… Empty, somehow. She wasn’t sure how else to describe it.
Her body was still oddly hot, and she was still feeling sick. What’s more, her hooves now burned like she’d dipped them in her ship’s fission reactor core!
Oh, and she was hungry.
Fortunately, she was still facing the communicator, so she didn’t need to move anything but her eyes to read the name.
It was the supply ship she’d ordered two nights ago, notifying her that it was on final approach and expected to be in her orbit with her in about half an hour.
She blinked at it. Had she really slept for nearly thirty-six hours? She checked the clock; yes, yes she had. She sighed, and reached up to engage one of her Hands.
When the thing clamped onto her hoof, though, it hurt. She cried out in pain, promptly locking it right back into its charging frame, and curled up under the covers, cradling that hoof.
She stayed like that for only about ten minutes, before uncurling and moving to release herself from bed. She could do that without her Hands; as a matter of fact, she’d even docked to other ships without her Hands before. It was a bit of a pain to get around without them, but what did she care? The things were normally uncomfortable- and right then, downright torturous… and she only needed them for fine manipulation of small objects. She could just as easily wrap her fetlocks around the helm; one of the reasons her main consoles were so expensive is that she designed the custom control panels for use with Hands… or with straight hooves.
It was still easier with Hands, but she’d practiced with just her hooves- because it’s not unheardof for a Hands- Hoof Attached Natural Digit System- to fail… or run out of battery. To her knowledge, only one interplanetary-ranged ship had ever crashed because of such a failure- but it did happen, and she herself had had her Hands fail twice that she could remember. She hadn’t been behind a control panel either time, but still.
The pressure on her hoof, when she pressed the release, hurt. Not nearly as bad as the Hands device did, though- and she thanked Equus- the deity of her entire civilization, not just the nation- that she was not planetside. If the spring-loaded release button hurt that much, just standing in gravity would be inequine torture. Oh- and it was oppressively cold outside of her blankets.
She slipped out of bed, and sent herself drifting towards the door. As expected, the pressure on her hooves to accelerate and decelerate herself hurt- but not nearly as much as standing would. Catching the grab bars to stop herself, or hold herself to a wall, was difficult without Hands- but she could do it. It hurt even more, given that she had to basically clamp her hooves on the bar, but she didn’t have to squeeze all that hard, so long as nothing tried to pull her away from the wall.
Once in the bridge, she floated over to her seat, pulled herself into it, and then strapped herself in with her teeth, using her fetlocks to bring the straps into range. She shivered as she unlocked the ship controls… then paused, looking at the environmental section.
After a moment’s deliberation, she pushed the ‘temperature up’ button for the Bridge zone a few times, and grinned to herself. She may not have been able to bring her blankets to the bridge with her- but she could duct just a little bit of her ship’s reactor core’s waste heat into her bridge, rather than to the radiators outside. She didn’t need blankets to stay warm on her own ship.
Then she turned to the intercom panel, and struck the All Hands key. Her parents’ module was tied to the intercom system by the same cable that provided it with power, so her parents would hear her wherever they happened to be. She glanced at the comms panel while she waited for the All Hands chime to finish. “We’ll be docking with the supply ship in about fifteen minutes,” she announced. “Expect short, low-gee burns in varying directions.” She punched the end key, then leaned back in her seat, shivering.
She glanced sideways at the enviro panel, and increased the temperature a few more times.
She waited those fifteen minutes, until the supply ship got close to their final burn, before unlocking the maneuvering controls- and signalling maneuvering thrust ready.
She didn’t make any burns, though- rather, she made another announcement on the All Hands network, so when her parents later (inevitably) complained about floating in the middle of the room for half an hour before reaching something they could grab onto, she could tell them they had been warned, and should have known to hold on.
She then waited for their ship to signal done with engines, and their comms officer- unlike her, they had a full crew over there- to indicate where she should dock, after which she locked it into her maneuvering display and initiated the approach. Her ship did have some size to it, but it was still the smaller vessel. She’d had so much practice doing this with inexperienced spacers back home that it was almost ridiculously easy.
It took her only a few minutes to ease her ship up alongside the massive supply vessel. Larger ships than hers wouldn’t be able to dock directly; they’d have to keep sending cargo shuttles back and forth, as the potential for major damage to one or both ships from a collision after an ill-timed docking burn would be too great. Smaller ships than hers might have fit inside their gargantuan bay, where they could also give the ship a quick external inspection, and alert her of anything that might be ready to go wrong.
But not hers. Her sleek craft fit snugly between the supply ship’s massive, hammerheaded ends for a lock-to-lock meeting- and massed just low enough to be allowed to do that. She did find it amusing that space-only ships often took hammerheaded shapes with a bulge at the middle, so as to give it a large amount of surface area for forward and reverse thrusters… and reduce its moment of inertia, reducing the amount of effort that must be spent by gyroscopes or maneuvering thrusters to reorient the vessel. They were also excessively expensive, and had so much computer support it was almost difficult to crash them, even if one tried.
Her ship was different. As an atmosphere-capable craft, it had shrouds and blast doors over the maneuvering thrusters, all the main vacuum engines concentrated on its back, and folded wings and atmospheric thrusters.
Finally, her docking port locked onto theirs, and she cut her maneuvering thrusters with the two ships locked together. She then locked out the engine controls once again, and signaled done with engines, before unbuckling herself and making her way carefully out to the airlock she’d just docked with.
Finally, she reached it, checked the pressure seals, and opened the door. The supply crew was very considerate- even though they could have opened the door from outside, as she didn’t lock it, they chose to wait for her.
“Ahh,” the pegasus stallion waiting patiently on the other side muttered. “Is miss Short Flight around?”
She let out a small sigh. “That’s me.”
He blinked. “Okay then. I have to say, that was a pretty impressive docking job- we didn’t even notice until the pressure had already equalized.” Then he scowled. “Did… Did you forget your Hands, or something?”
She ignored the compliment- she got it a lot- and shook her head. “Bad hoofache this morning, so those things hurt right now.”
He winced. “I feel ya. So, what’re we supplying?”
She gestured to the whole ship with a hoof. “Everything, please. My parents will pay for it all, so long as you don’t tell them what all I’m getting.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She shrugged. “They’re the King and Queen of Equineothame. Cargo Seven on the intercom… and you do not want to actually go there, believe me.”
He nodded. “Alright. Do you mind if we check the current states of your stores before we start, then?”
She shrugged again. “Sure.” She grinned. “And once you do that, add a bit of food to the list, because I’m really hungry right now.”
He chuckled, making a few taps on his tablet with his Hands, before spreading his wings to move himself out of the airlock, and position himself in the entryway next to her, out of the way of the other pegasi coming to see what they could fit in her ship.
She wished she was a pegasus- but no, she had to be born a unicorn, like both her parents. Pegasus wings might not produce enough lift for them to fly- but in microgravity, it didn’t take much at all to move them around- freeing both forehooves for carrying or manipulating, since they didn’t need to worry about the handholds.
“So,” he began. “You’re the fabled Princess Flight of Equineothame?”
She blinked. “Wait. I’m fabled?”
He nodded. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, numerous analysts- both in our company and outside- suspect that Princess Flight is the only reason Equineothame still exists, with how unwilling the rulers are to invest in any cargo-moving equipment, especially for their Fleet.”
She snorted. “I wouldn’t be surprised. But fabled?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Some of the crazier rumors suggest you could even fly without Hands! Imagine that!” He chuckled.
She grinned. “Well… I can. Had to get custom consoles, but it’s not that hard.” She shuddered. “I’ve heard too many stories of failed Hands to trust them so completely.”
“Anyways…” He looked down at his tablet. “Uh… They’re telling me your reactor core is depleted?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Has been for a few years, too- but the thing still outputs enough power to keep everything on… Well, at least as much as I use on. So I haven’t really bothered with a resupply. I think she’s still running on the fuel she had when I bought her.” She tapped a hoof- very carefully, and lightly at that, since it still hurt- against her chin. She had her hind hooves pinching the handhold lightly. Then she smiled at him. “If you want to fill the hopper first, the refueling system should have refreshed the reactor core by the time you’re done with everything else- and freed up… Oh, I think that thing holds eighty kilos in the chamber at once.” She snorts. “And that’s only one of three!”
He raises his eyebrow, then taps the tablet a couple times before speaking. “I take it she was designed to accept a Distortion Drive, whenever those get worked out?”
She nodded. “Yeah.” She shrugged. “You know what, my dad’s paying for it, so let’s fuel all of them, all the way.” She smiled at him again. “And top off the hopper.”
He chuckled. “You know that’s expensive, right?”
She shrugged again- she sure was doing that a lot. “Yeah. I also know my dad’s got trillions just sitting around, because he doesn’t like spending it. Might as well find some way to put it back into the economy.”
He snorted. “Alrighty.”
She smiled, looking forwards, at where the other pegasi were starting to bring past large, heavy pallets of supplies. “I wonder how long it’ll be before they figure out the Distortion Drive?”
He smiled too. “Well, that first one’s going to your kitchen, if you want to go eat.” He looked at her very seriously. “Just try and stay out of the pallets’ paths. Without Hands or wings, you won’t be able to get out of the way very fast if something malfunctions.”
She looked at him. “Does that happen a lot?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Just about anything except the reactor fuel carriers are susceptible to failure. For a resupply of this size, I’d expect at least three equipment malfunctions to occur.” He sighed. “They would be about half as frequent, but that brand doesn’t fail passively.”
She shuddered. “Yeah.” By that, he informed her that when something failed, it basically just shut down and stopped doing. Like good Hands, whose fingers were spring-loaded to retract upon failure- and programmed to retract themselves (and self-disable) should the springs ever fail. The ones that don’t fail passively… depending on the failure, those could end up sending pallets soaring down passages at a dead gallop- and she’d heard many stories of ponies that got killed in the following impacts… and a few ships that had to be evacuated because it’d punctured a hole in an exterior wall. A drifting pallet could still be dangerous- but they were a lot easier to avoid, and never intentionally given enough momentum to do any significant damage to the ship.
For the third time in a row, Short Flight awakened to the buzzing of her communicator. This time, though, she was forced to resist the urge to whimper in pain; her hooves hurt a lot more than they did the day before. Her entire body did, in fact- though at least it wasn’t as bad. It did mean that the pressure applied by the bed straps was nigh unto torture, though.
As such, even though it hurt a lot to press the release keys on the buckles, she released herself from bed before she even tried to read the message that was sent to her.
Then she groaned. It was her father, informing her they’d be ready to break orbit in half an hour.
She carefully, and very gently, operated the voice compose feature of her communicator, to inform her parents that she would be ready.
At least the straps on her command chair weren’t spring-loaded like the ones on her bed, so they wouldn’t exacerbate the pain.
Then she stopped, and looked up at the blanket, slowly drifting away from her.
Then down, at her hooves.
Then up again, at the door. “What the hay…?”
She was standing, completely unrestrained, in zero gravity. And not floating away from the mattress she was standing on.
She took an experimental step forward, before sending herself drifting towards the door.
A whimper nearly escaped her lips when she landed on the wall next to the control panel, straddling the handhold.
The handhold she didn’t need anymore, because her hooves seemed perfectly fine with sticking to the wall unaided. It only hurt a tiny bit to stand in place like that- and as she stepped carefully to the panel and opened the door, before walking through it, she thanked Equus she’s in a zero-gravity environment.
She walked across the floor to her command chair, for the simple reason that it hurt less than catching herself from drifting across the room. Even if she knew it should be impossible. She carefully placed herself into her seat, then buckled up. Each buckle hurt to push into place, but they didn’t put any pressure on her after that- and she chose to ignore the way the buckles seemed to stick to her flat hooves when she wanted them to, letting her manipulate them as if with Hands.
She waited patiently, in her command chair, for her parents to be done with… whatever they were doing here in Earth orbit. She didn’t know what it was; she only knew they had a scrambled, encrypted comms signal coming out of their module.
Her computer had successfully ID-ed their scramble code, though- and if she wanted it to, it’d also go straight through their encryption- at least partly because it probably already knows the encryption, having been programmed with the entire security database back home, which included all the encryption keys they liked using.
She didn’t bother, though. She may not have known exactly what they’re doing, but she knew generally what they were doing- they were contacting the scouts and informants on the surface here. Not as any sort of plan to overtake the nation, but in an effort to be the first to design a functional Distortion Drive… and, eventually, discover magic.
As for herself, she didn’t think they’d be successful. Ponies had been trying to do that very thing for thousands of years- and the only thing they’d managed to do with any experimental ‘distortion drive’ was to destroy their ships.
She sighed, looking sideways at the environmental panel and increasing the temperature slightly.
Any more, she didn’t get why everypony was so focused on the Distortion Drive. Why not develop their own technology?
It wasn’t that she didn’t know why, though. That was easy enough for anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of pony civilization. Simple, really.
The thing was, many thousands of years ago, ponies weren’t… ponies. Nopony had been able to date any of the records accurately enough to say anything more precise than ‘over ten thousand years’- but they were still largely indisputable. Back in that time, civilization walked on two legs, and manipulated the world with two arms… and biological hands after which the more modern Hands devices were modeled.
This ancient civilization grew, and built… and traveled the stars. They built a Distortion Drive, capable of propelling their ships beyond the speed of light, and traveled further.
Then, on their travels, they encountered Equestria. And with it they found magic that turned them into ponies. But they weren’t the ponies of today- no, these ponies had magic. Pegasi that could fly, unicorns that could do any kind of magic. Earth ponies that… all records to that end were lost, unfortunately.
Those ponies came back home. Civilization was transformed, became ponies. Anyone the magic touched, became one with it.
Then they invented transporters. That’s what they were called in the history books.
These transporters were a way for any pony, not just specially trained unicorns, to teleport around.
But the transporters were something else, something their designers never saw coming.
Ponies that went through the transporters… were damaged. Their magic was damaged. Not gone, though- and it was damaged in a way they couldn’t detect, at the time.
That damage was contagious. It only took a matter of months before every pony was afflicted by it, even the ones that didn’t use the transporters.
But from that point forward, no foal would be born with magic, ever again.
All the remote colonies returned to Earth, once the problem was realized. All the greatest spellsmiths and engineers worked on the problem- but to no avail. When the last of the final generation of magic died out, no solution was in sight.
Civilization floundered. The remaining ponies had been forced to leave assisted living, to try and live on their own, years beforehand. Had they not… civilization would have ended.
While the technology still functioned, ponies did their best. The population dwindled in that unkind age, and all of the survivors focused on finding a way- any way- for any other than the very skilled to survive.
Eventually, they found it. The last dregs of technology were only barely still functional when the first Hands device was produced. It was clumsy, and mechanical, based on the position of the hoof. But it did its job. Ponies could work once again.
It didn’t take long after that for powered Hands to appear- and, finally, be mass-produced. Technology slowly grew back. Unfortunately, most of the databanks left by their magic-wielding ancestors had been damaged, wiped, or lost. Technology backslid so far that it took nearly a thousand years for ponies to develop spacefaring technology once again.
But that gets to the part she just didn’t get. A partial blueprint of the Distortion Drive had survived on a damaged archive chip- and was then stored everywhere. It was fascinating to consider- but the fragments that survived were most decidedly not the entire thing. Her estimate was that, even if she applied rotational symmetry to the little bits that survived- there was enough to suggest that- right around two percent of the overall blueprint still existed. She idly punched the search into her database display. For some reason, ever since they built the powerful Gravity Drive modern ships use to maneuver in deep space- it didn’t work too close to a natural gravity well, those overloaded it- everypony had been dead-set on building the Distortion Drive. Not one wanted to design their own- they wanted to rebuild the one her ancestors left behind.
She paused, staring at the database screen. Her search for ‘Distortion Drive’, one she’d made many times in the past, should have been coming up with exactly three results: The partial blueprint, the tale of what it was used for, and her unpublished dissertation of why ponies needed to quit focusing on it. However, the list of files it found this time went right off the bottom of the screen. She lifted a hoof, pointing it at the screen, and read a few filenames to herself aloud.
“Distortion Drive Type One, Version One. Distortion Drive Type One, Version Two. Distortion Drive Type One, Version Two, Management Software. Distortion Drive Type One, Version Two, Small Craft Edition.”
She blinked a couple of times, listening to her own words, and looked at the file paths. Where were these files?
“A-Acquired?” she stuttered, upon finding the folder name in the path. The folder intended to carry any and all files that had been acquired during a successful Electronic Warfare campaign. The thing was, though, she’d never performed any such campaign. She checked the capture timestamp on each file- the time at which it was downloaded- and looked up her system logs, starting several minutes prior. “... Oh. This would have been during the approach procedure… but why did it-!?”
There it was. She’d expected to see the proximity alert coding- but this most definitely wasn’t what she expected.
Firewall penetration detected from unknown source.
Something had hacked her ship. Something had attacked her with electronic warfare systems. And her very, very expensive electronic warfare suite had been insufficient to stop it.
She continued down the logs.
Outside penetration accessing live sensor data. CAUTION: False detections or non-detections may occur!
ALERT: Collision course! Time to impact, 5s. WARNING: False Detection Likely!
She grit her teeth, and snarled at the log. So that had been a false detection? Someone deliberately made her think she was about to crash?
… She stopped herself. As annoying as that was, it had also let her reach her parking orbit much sooner. That burn to antiradial would have left her on an elliptical orbit, and would have needed lots of extra burns to get her back to her designated orbital slot. And, she wouldn’t have been able to go to bed nearly as soon as she had!
She smiles. So, that was what attack it was. She reads on.
Counterattack successful: No resistance detected. WARNING: No access points detected in foreign control program! Acquiring database.
She nodded slowly. So that would be it. No access points meant it hadn’t been able to take control of anything, suggesting a very robust computer system with powerful passive defenses on the other side… but it had been able to access the database, and had initiated a full download.
She abandoned the logs, turning back to the search results, and opened a random file.
She instantly recognized a few parts of the blueprint file that came up.
The complete blueprint, with Distortion Drive Type I, Version 2 written in the corner.
She stared at her screen.
Where did that come from? Who, that had these files sitting around in their database, had attacked her? More importantly, how could her computer have not even realized it was being attacked until after the enemy had penetrated its defenses, then made a successful counterattack? Her attacker must have had a very powerful Electronic Warfare system- and either forgotten to install or switched off all the active defenses. Which was stupid. Were they trying to give her these files?
And where did they get- she checked another file, to find a different, but also complete, blueprint for a distortion drive- all these blueprints?
Her comms panel suddenly chirped. She started, turning back to it, and punched the accept key- before flinching back at the jarring force to her hoof. She managed to keep anything from escaping her lips, though.
It was her father, starting without preamble- not even waiting for her to say anything. Possibly because she’d answered it from the bridge. “Alright shorty, we’re ready to go.”
She nodded. “Understood.” And cut the signal.
She took a deep breath.
“Short Flight to Orbital Control.”
Silence.
“Short Flight to Orbital Control, do you copy?”
More silence.
“Short Flight to Orbital Control, are you there?”
Finally, a voice came back.
“Sorry, kid, but Control hasn’t been responding at all for the last five hours or so. Nightshift probably didn’t bother showing up… again. What’re you looking to do?”
She blinked. That was… rather careless. Though, if she really thought about it, the same thing would happen over in Equineothame all the time if she didn’t hound them for it. “Departure.”
“Ahh… Well, I don’t know how it might differ elsewhere, but standard procedure for departing without Control is to signal departure, burn one to antiradial, wait six hundred seconds, and make your escape burn to prograde.”
She nodded. “Alright, thank you.”
Her intercom chirped. She punched the accept key.
Her mother barked out of it instantly. “Why aren’t we moving?”
She sighed, striking a few keys to signal departure. “Because Orbital Control went on holiday. I’ll be making a short, low-gee burn, then waiting ten minutes for the escape burn.”
Her mother scowled. “Make it quick. These straps aren’t the most comfortable.”
She managed to contain a snort, and nodded, after which her mother cut the connection.
They had the standard ‘high-comfort, spring-loaded’ passenger seats in their module- the cheap ones, of course, with overtightened springs on the straps- that hurt even without whatever it was that was happening to her body. She’d been a little more spendy for her command chair, but her mother didn’t need to know that.
She took the helm in her hooves- funny, it behaved as if she were wearing her Hands- and reoriented the ship, before ordering a one second burn out of her computer, for one meter per second squared. She waited for the burn to finish- it hurt, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle- before aligning it with her orbit once again, and watching the timer tick slowly down… painfully slowly. At the unvoiced zero, she slammed the throttle to maximum, hardly flinching at the spike of pain in her hoof.
Then the engines light, and she let out a cry of pain as just shy of seven gees slammed her suddenly against her command chair.
Hardly a few seconds later, she let out a piercing scream as something pierced her chest with excruciating pain. She didn’t think there was anything actually piercing it, but it felt like somepony had stabbed her with a red-hot fuel rod straight out of her ship’s reactor core.
She nearly passed out, but managed to hold onto her consciousness. The massive thrusters would automatically shut down once she has an optimal departure trajectory- and as soon as she gets a safe distance from the planet, the ship will- also automatically- transition to the Gravity Drive. Which she did not want to do at full throttle.
While her ship was operating under Gravity Drive, its Drive could generate a shipboard gravity field… which she had disabled, in part because she hadn’t had the power to spare on the way in; before the resupply, she’d run the Gravity Drive almost entirely on stored power, and very nearly run out before she’d transitioned back to the main thrusters. In any case, it was also capable of behaving as an inertial compensator- and accelerating the ship at up to a hundred and fifty gees. Above a hundred, though, it couldn’t fully compensate for the acceleration- twenty percent of acceleration beyond that point would be felt by the passengers. As such, at full throttle, she’d experience a wealthy ten gees towards the back of her ship.
She didn’t think she could survive that right now- and knew her parents would get hurt when the ship suddenly started accelerating again, with absolutely no warning.
Short Flight only barely managed to keep herself conscious through the entirety of the burn- and when the automatic main engine shutdown occurred, she breathed a sigh of relief. It was no longer plowing her against her seat- and torturing her entire body in the process. She reached forwards, and pulled the throttle down to zero.
Finally, she went through the motions of locking out the controls before she allowed herself to relax, and drift towards the inviting clutches of unconsciousness. It’d be close to two hours before her ship would be far enough from the planet to light off the gravity drive- and according to her computer, almost two full days after that before she would reenter the danger zone on a ballistic trajectory.
Then, just as suddenly as it had come, her chest pain went away, and she suddenly found herself so full of energy she couldn’t possibly go to sleep. As a matter of fact, it reminded her of her early youth, before she’d grown up enough to care about other ponies.
But her body pain, and the same in her hooves, hadn’t gone away yet, so she only sighed and relaxed in place, waiting for the gravity drive activation point.
Short Flight took a very deep breath, and started off the final burn of the journey. It had been about a forty hour trip- and, fortunately, the pain in her hooves and body had gone down to more manageable levels when she’d slept through much of the acceleration and deceleration phases; she’d stretched the journey out just right to give her those extended naps by setting the gravity drive to only eighty gees, or so.
And now, she was finally done. Rather fortunately, her computers were more than willing to anticipate orbits- so setting herself up to rendezvous with the fleet had been easy. Well… maybe not easy, but definitely simple. She’d really only had to set herself up with a circular orbit out where her Gravity Drive would have maximal effect, then pick the right time to decelerate such that she’d be able to decelerate into the same orbit as the Fleet right about the time they were in the same spot. Well… mostly the same orbit; she’d stopped just outside their orbit… though close enough for her to use only small little puffs on her maneuvering thrusters to get back into line with the rest.
And now, this final burn of the journey wasn’t even technically part of the journey. No- she’d already opened the cargo bay, and maneuvered her parents’ cargo module into a lock-to-lock meeting with their space station- and now, while they busy themselves with transferring to the surface-to-space shuttle that’s docked at another point on the station, she’d released the docking clamps in her cargo bay, and was accelerating away from the module. Not much, of course- only a meter per second or so. But enough to put space between her ship and her parents’ mess.
Once clear of the station, she closed her hangar doors, made a few more puffs on her maneuvering thrusters to get herself into a steady orbital position, signaled done with engines, and locked out the engines. She didn’t leave the control panel, though; instead, she logged into the planetary command net and issued the nightshift traffic controller his first official warning for skimping on his work. And called a few dayshift controllers until she found one that was willing to come in six hours early.
She made a little tick mark on that employee record; that was the… She counted the marks. That was the thirteenth time that young Shooting Star had covered for an absent overnight controller in the three months since she’d hired him straight out of college- even though he was not actually a controller. No, he was an Emergency Engineer- the engineering corps she’d hired to help reduce the number of explode-o-ships in orbit.
Which she needed because she seemed to be the only non-commercial spacecraft pilot to be willing to actually read the instruction manual; her awareness campaign the year before had had no effect near Earth, and even less here. So, since her parents gave her Orbital Control after her efforts to reduce absenteeism had reduced ship-to-ship collisions by almost thirty percent, she’d followed Earth’s example and hired a force of engineers. As a result, so long as she was present to keep the night crew on task, midspace accidents only happened about once a month here- which was better than the almost daily occurrence in Earth orbit. Sure, Earth dealt with about three times as many ships- but that hadn’t stopped her. Her goal was to reduce ship-to-ship collisions to an annual issue… or even rarer, if she could.
Regardless, Star definitely deserved a commendation. And… She checked his date of hire against her shipboard clock, which she’d already synchronized with the local clocks. Yes, the day before had finished off his third month of employment- which means he was finally eligible for commendations. She’d have to see about descending to the surface tomorrow- the pain throughout her entire body had been fading a little at the end of her journey- to deliver his commendation in person.
She then sighed to herself. She really hoped it wouldn’t go to his head, and that he kept it up. If he does, at six months, she’ll be able to promote him- and start working more directly with him, find out if she can trust him with something a little more… She pulled up the complete Distortion Drive blueprint on her database display again. Maybe, in a year, she might be able to build the thing. And then give him credit for the discovery, because she’d get the stagefright something fierce. It was bad enough she was a princess that had been known around a few small circles to help move cargo between ships; she didn’t think she could handle going down in history as the one to have worked out the Distortion Drive.
She glanced down the staff list again… Looked like one of her dayshift engineers quit while she was out. Again. Said in his exit interview that he studied to design and build, not to talk to spacers.
She let out a deep sigh, and punched the shortcut to update the job posting. Once upon a time, she’d tried hiring the average pony and teaching them about the job, as they do on Earth- but she doesn’t have the programs they have, so that had exploded in her face. Almost quite literally- she’d had to fire one mare because she’d gotten it into her head that any heat was bad, even living temperatures! A few spacers had been subject to minor cases of frostbite, and many more had been lucky that ponies had fur coats, but she’d caught it before it became irreparable.
For that reason, while one of her Emergency Engineers- the one that had been around the longest, but wasn’t all that great at showing up on time- used to be an Emergency Engineer at Earth, all the rest had engineering degrees.
Employee retention had suffered for it, though. Thanks to Orbital Control being on her parents’ finances (and their being happy with how she’s created the safest place in space), she paid them as well as any other engineering outfit might pay them- but they lasted, on average, about two months… and always complained that they didn’t get to turn wrenches. Which was in the job description, so they shouldn’t have been surprised.
She tilted her head at the computer screen. Yes, Star was probably going to last a lot longer; after all, through his first month- and probationary period- working for her, he’d studied up on the controller’s jobs while he waited for either his panel or a controller to indicate something for him to do. Which certainly suggested he planned on keeping the job for the long run.
She then spent about twenty minutes sorting through all her email, before switching over to check what applications she’d received since she left.
Almost immediately, she let out a derisive snort. She’d had two applications for the overnight controller job- and one of them, Broken Orbit, was fired from the same not two weeks ago, for failing to show up for his scheduled shifts. She declined that application out of hoof, before looking at the other.
If she was sure of one thing about Night Skies, it was that the filly made extensive use of various career services available at the Pony State University, where she double-majored in Engineering and Law. She raised an unsurprised eyebrow, idly wondering what the filly thought was going to happen and how it differed from what had happened, and scanned down the rest. No work history; this must be her first job. However, she was quite active at college; she had apparently been part of no less than six clubs, and even president of one of them, despite never graduating.
She shrugged. Why not? Night shift had been chronically understaffed, and even then only by ponies that couldn’t be bothered to show up at all, let alone on time. Besides, with a name like Night Skies, the evidently ambitious filly very well could be partially nocturnal already.
She was about to flag it for more attention tomorrow- it was right about midnight, local time- when she noticed the note that Night Skies put in the ‘additional info’ box. Apparently, the best time to contact the girl was at night.
She shrugged, glanced at the phone number, and turned to tap it into her communications panel.
It rang three times before somepony answered.
“What?” She sounded depressed.
She flinched. Hopefully, it was just a passing hardship that had her in a temporary bad mood; she’d hate to have to interview somepony who’d given up on life and was only applying because she was supposed to. She’d done that before. She took a deep breath, before launching into her standard spiel for first contact with new applicants. “Hello, this is Princess Short Flight. May I speak to Night Skies?”
The gasp was- as always- audible. Most ponies assumed she had a hiring manager to do it for her- but when she’d tried that, the understaffing problems had been even worse. So everypony was always surprised when she called them herself. “Um- Yes Princess, that’d be me?” There was also an edge of worry in Skies’ voice. She was, after all, the Princess.
Good thing she knew how to defuse that pretty quickly. “Hi, I was calling in reference to your application to Orbital Control?” The sigh of relief was usually audible, but not this time. “Specifically, I wanted to see about scheduling an interview for the position of Overnight Controller, if you’re interested.”
“Y-Yes, I’m interested.” She raised her eyebrow again; it sounded formulaic, practiced. The filly had definitely made extensive use of Pony State’s career services. Had she been job-hunting unsuccessfully for a long duration, or otherwise expected difficulty in landing a job? “I will be available to interview at your earliest convenience.”
The first and the last parts of the filly’s statement- ‘yes’ and ‘your earliest convenience’- were the only truly important parts at the moment, and she grinned at the panel. Time to find out how literal that ‘earliest convenience’ was.
“How’s… Tomorrow, two PM, at the control tower?” That’d give her plenty of time to mete out the coachings due two of the dayshift controllers before the interview; she was pretty sure they were stallion and wife, and they were both regularly late. She’d give Shooting Star his commendation after the interview; that’d be a good note to end her day on- and Star’s, for that matter.
“Ah… Yep, that works for me. Tomorrow, two PM, at the control tower.”
She smiled- Skies would fit right in. “Readback is correct, I’ll see you then.”
“R-Roger.”
She hung up, and let out a breath. The coming interview could easily go either way- the filly sounded depressed, but there had been a noticeable difference from the moment she’d mentioned why she was calling. It could well have been clinical depression… or it could also have been brought about by difficulties finding a job. Most ponies didn’t hire for the middle of the night- and those that did, were usually in the space industry… which was very hard to get into without a college degree or two. With only one exception: Night shift at Orbital Control.
No new applications had come in for her standing Emergency Engineer openings, though, so she finally logged off, climbed out of her seat, and walked back to her kitchen. She still had no clue how she was doing that in zero gravity.
By the time she hit the bridge the following morning, Short Flight was feeling lucky. Her body still stung a little, but it didn’t mind pressure once again- and that was all of the strange pain still in effect.
“Short Flight to Orbital Control.”
And of course, Control responded immediately. “Short Flight, proceed.”
As she spoke, she went through the motions of unlocking her engine controls… and signalling her intentions to other vessels in her area. “Can I get a reentry clearance to the main landing pad?”
“Ahh… From standard Fleet orbit two, is that?”
She glanced at the sidebar on her navigation display to double-check. “Yeah.”
“Roger. Hmm… Reentry burn strength?”
A check on the engine displays this time. “One point two three.” She didn’t particularly want to turn her ship around to use the main engines for the reentry burn; the maneuvering thrusters would be more than enough for that.
“Alright then. Reentry burn is eight-three in two-six seconds, mark.”
“Burn eight-three retrograde in two-three seconds, mark,” she read back.
“Readback is correct.”
Reentry and landing went smoothly. It rather helped that her computer knew perfectly well how to fly in-atmosphere on its own; she even switched it into hover mode for a VTOL landing. All the airbreathing engines on it were electric, so it didn’t even burn any of her fuel!
She took a deep breath, and pushed the button to activate the program she’d set before she left the bridge. Her entire ship immediately went into full systems lockdown, all three reactors effectively shutting down. The inner airlock door closed and sealed behind her, before the outer airlock door opened in front of her. It would require her ID to release that lock, or to open anything other than this one exterior door.
She stepped out onto the boarding ramp that also extended at the same time, and took another deep breath. This was her first time breathing planetary air in about six months, and she planned to enjoy it.
Those plans broke apart in mere moments, though, when her deep breath- intended to savor the fresh air- ended abruptly in a hacking cough. She’d forgotten about pollution.
“Ugh,” she groaned, coming back up from it, and looking towards the control tower… and the Guards galloping across the pad to meet her. She really wished she didn’t need those to keep her safe on the surface. She trotted down the ramp to meet them at the bottom, the airlock door closing tight behind her.
“Princess, Ma’am!” the Guards greeted her, saluting in perfect sync.
She bowed her head. “Thank you. I’m just headed to the control tower, and plan to be headed for space again by tonight.” She knew they didn’t like having to guard her either; there was almost always someone trying to do her in, and they keep expecting her to act like the filly she is.
“Understood, Princess!” They saluted again, before falling into formation behind her as she headed for the tower at a brisk trot. She was wearing her Hands, even though she hadn’t used them yet that day. It was just so much easier to use the strange new Hands-like effect on her hooves- but she didn’t particularly want to tell the world about it yet, though, so she’d actually use her Hands in public.
The receptionist and other office staff on the ground floor greeted her cordially, but when she ascended to the Control Deck, her good mood went right out the window.
There was that couple she’d anticipated coaching today… making out in front of their beeping comms panels.
She heaved a sigh, and trotted over to an empty panel next to the third controller on duty today. It was a normal slow day, so three should have been enough… assuming those two actually did their jobs.
She tapped the panel, waking it directly into admin mode, thanks to the ID chip embedded in her leg, and quickly popped open the time logs. “How long have they been at it?” she asked the startled controller, gesturing towards the two.
The mare- who, unlike those two, had come in on time today- jumped, almost as if struck, and glanced at them. “Um… An hour, I think…?”
She glanced at the logs again. “Well, they showed up about an hour ago.” Which would have been about half an hour late. She heaved a sigh, and abandoned the panel; it locked itself again as soon as she turned away. She stepped a little closer to them, in the middle of the room. “You two!” she barked.
They paused to look at her, then resumed, ignoring her.
“You two!” she repeated.
They hardly twitched, and continued ignoring her.
She tried calling them by name. “Bright Sunlight! Broad Daylight!”
They glanced briefly at her, before giving her the silent treatment again.
She looked wonderingly towards the dark-furred stallion in the room, who she rather suspected was Shooting Star- he was also on duty today. Unlike them, she’d never had an opportunity to meet him before now. “How thick can they get?” she muttered.
He shrugged nervously back at her.
She looked back at them, shaking her head. “Sergeant! Slap them!”
The senior of the two guards trotted over from the door and, balancing briefly on his rear hooves, slapped both of them at once, before coming back down to all four hooves. “Your Princess wants your attention,” he informed them sternly, when they whirled back to face him, before drawing back to take his station behind Short Flight.
They snorted at her. “And what’s she going to do?”
She closed her eyes briefly, taking a deep breath, and let it out, eyes open. She could almost feel the Sergeant inflating with rage.
She opened her mouth first. “You’re fired,” she informed them. “Now, get out of my tower.”
They snorted indignantly at her. “You can’t do that.”
She put out a hoof to stop the Sergeant. Then she walked calmly right up to them… and rose up to slap them both across the muzzle with her Hands, rather than hooves. Both Hands drew blood- and both earth ponies were thrown to the ground by the blow. Funny, she had never been that strong… and she should have been thrown as well, but she hardly felt it. She rather hoped she hadn’t damaged her Hands too badly. “I’m the Princess,” she yelled. “I can do whatever I bucking want to! Now, GET OUT!” Her last two words echoed through the room, as if she’d bellowed them into a megaphone.
Both of them scrambled to their hooves and fled in the direction of the door. She watched them go- and crash into the door. She then snorted derisively while they tried to push the door open; they seemed to have forgotten it was a pull door. Finally, they pulled the door open and scrambled through it.
She waited until the door landed closed again, before taking a deep breath and smiling around at everypony left in the room. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I could yell that loud. Carry on.” She trotted to the nearest unoccupied control panel, being one of the ones that had just been vacated; they’d automatically logged out when they fled. She officially fired the two, resulting in a very sudden increase in comms activity for the one remaining controller, and started running down the list of off-duty dayshift controllers.
She had a lot of dayshift controllers; she needed a lot for a busy day. Fortunately, those were pretty easy to find. Finding one that was willing to come in on their day off, however… She sighed, and hit the speed-dial for the first one. Her Hands were still functioning, fortunately- but they were noticeably bent. She didn’t miss when the stallion, completely without prompting, switched his panel to Backup Mode and started accepting regular traffic control calls in the gaps between his Emergency Engineer duties. She glanced at the sidebar on her admin screen- yep, that was Shooting Star. Something else to commend him on that night.
Eventually, she found one pony, and one pony only, that was willing to come in to help on his day off. He’d demanded that he be paid for it; she’d immediately reminded him that he was full time and paid by the hour, so he’d automatically get paid time and a half for it. He’d been humbled by the reminder, and possibly her irritated tone, and hadn’t pressed for more. She let out a sigh, and looked out across the room. The Sergeant had returned to his place next to the door. “I really am sorry about that,” she muttered, as both engineer and controller worked frantically to keep up. “Controller High Trajectory should be here to help in about fifteen minutes.”
Then she turned back to her panel, and started calling evening shift controllers to see if there was one willing to come in early. She had even more evening shift controllers than dayshift, even though they were harder to find; she needed more during the evening shift, on average. Not one of the ones scheduled for today wanted to come in early. By the time she switched to calling the ones not scheduled for today, to see if they wanted to come in for a dayshift today, High Trajectory had already arrived- and as a result, the frantic rush had abated.
She eventually found somepony, and breathed a sigh as she finally turned away from the panel. It was about half past one- giving her a mere half an hour to prepare for Night Skies’ interview. She’d anticipated having a few hours to prep herself, to go in with a positive attitude. She made her way out of the room, trotting out to the breakroom, where she got a hot chocolate from the machine and tried to relax.
Break time ended way too soon, though. It still felt like she’d only just arrived when her earpiece chirped to indicate the desk receptionist was calling her.
She heaved a sigh, reaching up to tap it with a hoof. She didn’t trust her damaged Hand not to accidentally spear her ear right then. “Short Flight,” she greeted.
“Uh, Hi,” her receptionist responded. For some reason, the mare always got really flustered anytime she talked to her, but was simultaneously really good with anypony else. “Night Skies is here for an interview.”
She glanced up at the clock, and suppressed a chuckle. The filly was five minutes early- which she was not surprised by, given how much assistance she’d obviously gotten from Pony State’s career services. “Alright. Gimme a couple minutes, then send her in.”
As soon as her receptionist disconnected, she chugged the remainder of her drink, discarded the styrofoam cup, and trotted out towards her office, where the interview would be taking place. On her way, she glanced out the window in the door to the lobby, but she didn’t notice anypony new; they must have been waiting on one of the benches not visible from there.
Finally, once she got into her office, she activated her control panels, logging in instantly once again, and sent a note to the receptionist that she’s ready, before taking a deep breath. “Come on. You can do this. Be happy.”
She was still performing breathing exercises when a soft knock sounded against her door. She looked up, releasing her most recent deep breath. “Come in.”
The receptionist then opened the door. “P-Princess Short Flight,” she greeted, before gesturing somepony into view. “Night Skies.”
Short Flight very nearly blinked. Even before the filly finished entering her office, looking very much like she expected to be told to go back where she came from, she knew she was almost certainly going to hire her.
Night Skies… was a thestral. Less than one in a thousand ponies are born thestrals, and the ancient legends put them up to having the same abilities as regular pegasi. They’d often been ridiculed and discriminated against for their leathery wings. But there was one piece of their ancient history that they had held onto, against all odds: They were, by nature, nocturnal. That normally made it even harder for them to find employment, as they tended to have difficulty staying awake through a normal day or evening shift.
But that was a feather in her cap here, where she was being hired for the night shift. Besides, Short Flight never believed in discrimination of any sort, even if her father believed that thestrals were perfectly okay to be discriminated against.
She smiled at Night Skies, her mood taking off at the prospect of having a night shift controller that might actually show up on time. “Nice to meet you, Night Skies,” she greeted, offering a hoof in greeting. “Sorry about the timing, I didn’t realize you were…” She left the rest unsaid.
Skies blushed, and shuffled nervously forwards to shake her hoof. “Oh, it- it’s no problem,” she muttered.
She noticed that the filly quite visibly averted her gaze when she said it. Unless she missed her guess, it was unintentional- the filly was a bad liar, and didn’t realize it.
She wasn’t worried about that, though. Courtesy required her to wave it off, whether it was true or not. “Alright then,” she smiled. “I was looking over your resume last night, and I noticed you double-majored in Engineering and Law at Pony State. It’s a rare pony indeed that can graduate with that kind of workload- but I’m curious how it went over for you?”
“Oh, I, uh,” Skies muttered confusedly, evidently not having expected the question. “Um, I… I would have had to be an idiot to try completing such a program in just four years, so I targeted five. Thestrals don’t need as much sleep as other ponies, so I was able to schedule myself a few naps and get away with thirty credits per semester. Then I… ran out of money, hardly one semester before graduation.”
She nodded. “Happens to the best of us, unfortunately.” She tapped her controls a couple times, trading shamelessly on her authority as a Princess to pull up the filly’s education records… and blinked. “Looks like you finished all of the work for a plain Engineering major- straight A student, too… they’ll probably give you a diploma for that if you merely ask.” She chuckled good-naturedly. A college diploma was one of the things that could help a thestral overcome the rampant racism against them.
Night Skies blinked, jaw hanging open- until she seemed to realize what she was doing, and snapped her jaw shut. “Oh, um… I- I didn’t-!”
Short Flight smiled at her. “Hey, that’s not a problem. Pulling off an ambitious double-major like that is one of the very few ways for thestrals to secure themselves a future in this modern world.” She glanced at the screen. “And most recruiters don’t have access to that… but I’m the princess.” She smiled at the filly’s suddenly worried expression. “Hey, that’s not a problem.” She pulled up the application again. “It says here you applied to become a night controller?”
“Uh- Yeah.” Skies sounded borderline terrified, like this is normally the part where she got turned down.
She looked back at the education readouts. “It’d seem a waste of that raw ability, though. Whaddya say to the overnight Emergency Engineer, with the controller training on the side, whenever I can get the idiots currently on night shift to actually show up?”
“What-!” She seemed alarmed, and confused. “But- But I don’t-!”
“Have an engineering degree?” she finished for her, to a nod. She shrugged. “We both know you have the education and ability, piece of paper or not. The only question left, really, is if you want it.” She glanced at the education readout. “Hay, I’ll even throw in some tuition ‘assistance’ so you can finish that degree if you want to.”
“Ahh… Um…”
“You know, if you don’t want it, you don’t have to.”
“Er…” Skies seemed to be waiting for dismissal. Which she probably got a lot; most ponies would have looked at that incomplete double major and instantly classed her as an overly ambitious moron, even before they found out about her breed.
She sighed, and made a few taps on her control panel. Then she turned to her printer, and removed the documents it just spat out, to lay them in front of Skies, who had been backing away slowly. “How about that?”
Night Skies dropped her jaw, staring at the documents- all three of which were job offers. One for the controller position she’d applied to, one for the engineering one she was offering, and one for just the engineering one, with no additional controller training and duties.
Then, she passed out, and collapsed on the floor.
Short Flight sighed, and punched the button to summon the receptionist. It took her about fifteen seconds to show. “Hi,” she greeted. “Could you take Night Skies back to the lobby, please? And when she wakes up, these are for her.” She pushed the offers forwards a little bit with a hoof.
She then waited for the receptionist to comply, and for the door to land closed, before she let out a sigh, cleared Skies’ info from her displays, and sent Shooting Star a request to come see her when he was next available. Skies was one of those ponies, who had enormous difficulty in finding a job. However, her difficulties arose from her race, rather than her ability.
She leaned back in her seat, idly calling up Star’s employee record with one hoof while the other called for one of her parents’ maids to bring her fresh Hands from the castle.
Then, as his record reflected a logoff event, she leaned forwards suddenly, examining the details- and called up Skies’ information once again, looking between the two.
By the time the knock sounded on her door, she was leaning back in her seat again, a grin decorating her features. “Come in,” she called jovially, sitting up straight again- and glancing at the messaging sidebar; her receptionist just sent her a message. She scanned it real quick while Star slowly opened the door and slid inside; it would seem Skies awoke in a panic and, after being presented the offers by the receptionist, had signed the one for both positions, the one she’d been offering… and had asked to be allowed to deliver them in person. She tapped the ‘in a minute’ quick-reply key, and smiled back up at Star. This was definitely a good note to end on.
Star paused nervously at a respectful distance from her desk.
“Good afternoon, Shooting Star,” she greeted, bowing her head briefly.
He bowed outright. “Princess,” he began. “G-Good afternoon.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please don’t feel like you need to bow to me. I’m not my dad.”
“Uh…” He rose uncertainly, eyes darting to and fro.
“In any case, I called you in here for a reason, and you can probably guess what it is?” She smiled at him.
“Uh…” If there was one thing she didn’t like about him, it was how uncertain- and nervous- he was around people he didn’t know like the back of his hoof, like her. He seemed to be able to work with spacers pretty well- even amongst the unprofessional spacers, communication tended to stick to the same patterns. Add that he’d been able to work with the more professional ones an order of magnitude or more faster than the unprofessionals from the start, and had been getting faster and steadier as he built experience, and she was starting to wonder if it was uncertainty about how she might react that slowed him down so much… and, probably, made him so nervous.
She waited patiently for him to finish thinking; that seemed to work best, with him.
Eventually, he managed to find his voice. “Is… Am I underperforming?”
She promptly bit back a snort of laughter- that wouldn’t be helpful. “No, no, not that. Actually, it’s quite the opposite- you’re doing really well.”
He blinked a couple times. “What-? But- But I’m- I’m the slowest engineer, and-!”
She stopped him with a raised hoof. “And you’ve been working for me for three months, Star. All the others would have quit by now, but instead, you studied up on the traffic controllers- then came in early to cover for nightshift idiots that elected not to show up for some reason or another no less than thirteen times.” She smiled at him. “I’m sure the paycheck looks nice from all that, but nopony else has cared enough to put in more than a few hours of overtime a month!
“Really. I mean yeah, you’re the third-slowest engineer, and second-slowest controller. But neither of those matter, because unlike them, you’re here when I need you!” She shrugged. “And besides, you’ve been getting faster- and the quality of your work is through the roof.”
Finally, she paused, smiling patiently while he worked on recovering from the shock. His jaw was hanging.
It took him nearly a full minute before he closed his jaw and spoke up again. “S-So… Y-You like what…?”
She nodded. “Absolutely! Keep up the good work!” She grinned. “Oh, and there’s one thing I wanted to offer you.” She tried steepling the fingers on her Hands, but sparks flew from the one on her right hoof and its fingers snapped back into their retracted positions. She shrugged, stripped it off, and dropped it on the corner of her desk; Star simply flinched at the sudden failure. She then steepled her hooves to rest her chin on while she watched him expectantly.
It took him several seconds to mull it over. “To offer…?”
She smiled, and nodded. “Yep! I happen to be hiring a new night engineer today- first of those I’ve been able to find in months- that is also interested in being a controller, like you. How would you like to help train her?”
She waited for another long pause. “S-She’d be on a different shift,” he eventually muttered, looking confused.
She nodded. “Yeah. To manage that, you’d just come in a couple hours early a few times a week, until she’s fully trained up.”
Her panel beeped suddenly as soon as she finished talking; she gave him a smile, before glancing down at the receptionist’s message while he thought. Ahh, the maid with her Hands had arrived. She smiled gently, and typed in a quick response. Send Skies in with her.
Almost as soon as she finished, Star spoke up. “I-I’ll do it,” he stated. He still sounded nervous, but the hint of steely determination that had been what convinced her to hire him in the first place was back in his voice. That determination quickly left again, but she’d learned he was a stallion of his word- especially when he said it like that. “How will I recognize her?”
She smiled. “Oh, I don’t think you’ll have any particular difficulty there.” Right on time, a knock sounded on the door. “Come in.”
The maid opened the door, entering first and using the side of the room to approach the side of her desk. Night Skies entered after her, looking a lot happier than earlier, but no less nervous.
Skies glanced worriedly at Star, and made her way carefully up to the desk to deposit her signed document on it. “D-Does this mean…?”
She accepted her new Hands from the maid, before taking the document to glance down it, making sure it was what she thought it was. It was. She smiled up at the filly. “That you have a job? Yes, yes it does.” She took a stamp from the side of her desk, stamped the document, and switched to a pen to sign under the stamp, before looking up at her again. “And now it’s official.” She looked at Star, who had been watching the proceedings contemplatively, and filled her lungs to speak.
Skies beat her to it, leaning right overtop the desk to hug her. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”
She pat the mare with one hoof, before gently peeling her off of her. “You’re very welcome.” She gestured towards Star. “I’d like you to meet Shooting Star; he’ll be helping out with your controller training. Star, meet Night Skies.”
Skies, excitement clearly boiling over, greeted Star cheerfully and offered him a hoof to shake.
“Bay open, standing by to release clamps,” Short Flight stated calmly into her comms. It had been a while since she went to the surface- almost a full month, in fact. She’d returned to space with pain building in her horn again, and spent another three days in bed. The burn didn’t fill her entire body that time, so the sheets didn’t hurt. She’d known it was ending when something stabbed her chest with searing pain again… then it had gone away.
The week after that had the pain localized on her sides, rather than her horn.
And the two weeks since, her sides have gotten itchy a few times, but she’d otherwise had no unexplained pain. So she got back to work last week, moving stuff around the fleet- and by Equus did they need her help. This was the thirtieth container she’s moved in a mere eight days- vastly different from the normal two or three containers every couple days. She glanced at her display, her ship floating just outside the massive superdreadnought’s cargo bay, and waited patiently for their suited midshipponies to get in position to transfer the container. Rather unfortunately, neither ship was equipped with cargo moving equipment.
But that was no biggie- this was how all of her deliveries went, as none of the Fleet was equipped with cargo equipment. She giggled to herself as their method of transferring containers before she started doing this comes to mind: One ship would shift orbits to the other, and point the cargo bay involved at the other’s cargo bay… then, with large numbers of midshipponies wearing Sustained Use Thruster Packs, they’d slowly shepherd the container through space between the ships. The two ships could almost never get anywhere near as close as she can, as that’d violate the safety zones on their thrusters, and someone would have bills to pay and explanations to make.
Whereas her ship, by her design, had multiple sizes of maneuvering thrusters- and a mass far lower than most the rest of the fleet, allowing her to snuggle it up close enough that the cargo bays nearly touch. That was plenty close enough for the midshipponies to use tethered SUT packs- so, no risk of losing anypony… and of course, they could use the tethers to pull the container back to the ship at a very controlled rate. That way, there was also no danger of repeating many of the major accidents that had happened during what they liked to call ‘space ball’- when somepony’s SUT pack ran out on the deceleration phase, and they couldn’t get a fresh one out in time to keep it from crashing into the back of the cargo bay.
Her comms panel chirped suddenly- intercom, from Cargo Seven, the bay she used for all the transfers… and the one her parents’ module had been in during her trip to Earth. The one she had outfitted with massive cargo clamps a couple years ago. It was one of the midshipponies. “Alright, all locked and ready.”
She smiled. “Alright. Releasing now.” She tapped the key to retract the clamps. This was always an easy stage, for her- pickup and dropoff. It was all up to the ponies in her cargo bay to move the container- she simply parked her ship and locked or unlocked the clamps and door. The transit stage was the one that took more of her attention- the one where she was positioning her ship so precisely against the other ship, or maneuvering through the midst of the fleet.
She let out a sigh, briefly climbing out of her seat to stretch herself out on the floor, before turning to her other panels to check up on Orbital Control. It had gotten even harder to find nightshift controllers, ever since it got out that she hired a thestral. On the other hoof, even before Night Skies finished her training and started her Controller duties as well, nighttime violations went down by over ninety percent- because nopony seemed to want to arrive or depart at a time when a thestral would be guiding them. The filly went about her duties with a certain skill and energy that, in her opinion, exemplified why ponies should not discriminate.
And, while she hadn’t had to call Star in for the night nearly as often as before, she had noticed a sudden upwards jump in his still slow but steadily climbing efficiency… which coincided rather nicely with the commendation. Must be the nervousness that’s slowing him down. Does he not like ponies or something?
The comms chirped again. “All clear. Good evening, Princess.”
“Good evening to you too,” she smiled, tapping the key to close the cargo doors while also thrusting directly away from the superdreadnought.
Two months after her trip to the surface. Her sides had bled- only little bits- twice, and she was pretty sure her sides weren’t supposed to feel like that. They didn’t hurt, though, so she hadn’t really considered going to the doctor. Her parents didn’t like it when she racked up unnecessary medical bills- and besides, her medical computer said “Normal” every time she got nervous and scanned herself in the infirmary.
It had taken her almost two full weeks to catch up with the Fleet’s cargo-moving needs- and once she did, she was once again spending long hours in space, often studying something or another.
Not today, though. Yesterday, like she did every day, she downloaded a full list of new applications submitted. Broken Orbit had submitted another application; he’d done that every day for the last two months. One other pony had applied to an evening controller position, which she wasn’t hiring for, so she’d checked it for red flags- it passed- and dropped it in the database with a timestamp, in case she needed one later.
And no less than six ponies had applied for overnight controller positions. It was not uncommon for her to get a lot of applications, and throw them all out with red flags, though- so she’d examined them. Two of them were circus clowns; the one time she’d hired a clown, she’d had six accidents in one day and fired the stallion, so she’d had to decline those two. The third had put ‘accomplished thief’ in his employment history. She’d laughed at that, idly wondering who he thought would hire him. She’d even written him a custom refusal letter, rather than letting it send the default one, and advised him that it might be a little easier to find legal employment if he doesn’t put theft on his resume.
The last three, though, had looked good. With names like Moon Wing, Dark Lands, and Shadow Flight, combined with a total lack of education or employment history, plus notes of being best contacted at night, she rather suspected the three of them were thestrals. So she’d called all three, and set up interviews. Unlike Night Skies’ interview, though, they won’t be in person. They’ll be remote- and since all three had asked for early morning interview times today, with Skies on duty last night and Star one of five today, they should even be able to interview from the control room- and let her make use of the video system without interfering with anypony’s job!
Her panel chirped suddenly, and she glanced up at it. It looked like Shadow Flight just went through the automated check-in by the front desk. She glanced at the clock… Yes, that was about right. She had five minutes to her scheduled interview time- and the front desk attendant won’t go on duty for another hour or so. A sudden shift on the staff list then caught her attention- Oh, it looked like Star just entered the building, too. Five minutes early, as she’d come to expect from him… She checked the clock again. Dayshift didn’t start for another hour.
A couple taps answer her question instantly- he’d taken a ‘voluntary extra time’ hour at the start of his shift, to help cover the morning rush… and smooth over the transition from nightshift to dayshift. She tapped in a command to the computer.
She had only to wait a couple minutes before it signaled ready- and she touched the key to open the channel. “Good morning from space,” she began, mood inflating instantly. She was right- the filly was a thestral. Skies must have spread the word.
“H-Hi,” Shadow greeted her. “It’s nice to, um, see you.” Her ears were flat to her head, and she looked worried, but she was powering through it.
She smiled softly… then paused when she noticed a vibration in her ship. “Nice to meet you too,” she muttered, before tapping a different screen. “Sorry, thought I felt something…” She tilted her head. Nopony should be docking, but it was showing that someone just docked on one of her main side-mounted docking ports.
She checked down the lists… Yes, all the airlock doors were sealed.
Then, very suddenly, that airlock entered lockdown and blew the lock ring, which the other ship should have locked onto; one of the security lines inside that door had been cut.
Pirates.
She sucked in a breath. “Ahh…” She looked over at Shadow. “I’m going to have to call you back later.”
Then the intruder alert went off, sounding throughout the entire ship. That’d be when the second security line was broken, indicating that blowing the lock ring wasn’t enough to get them away.
One tap cut the interview call short, and she unlocked her engine controls. She felt the familiar vibration of the gyroscope calibration- and immediately got a readout of the estimated mass of the attached vessel. It was… that could only be an inter-ship shuttle. No interplanetary range, no surface capability. They had another ship around.
She tapped on the main engines, put her hoof on the throttle, and looked out her windshield. “Let’s see how you like seven gees, suckers.” She thrust it to maximum power, pivoting slightly around their ship to give her open space to fly into. Then she slams the gyro into maximum roll as she goes, spinning on her central axis- and giving them an apparent force away from her airlock, as high as two gees, given the location of the lock.
After a minute, a sudden buzzer informs her she was unsuccessful- so she abandoned the control panel. She had a little time before they finished cutting through that door- then even more time before they made it through the interior door of the same airlock, and she had an escape pod. And unlike her parents’ military, it was one of the more expensive but surface-capable escape pods, one that would be capable of getting her to Orbital Control from her ship’s current trajectory.
She was halfway through clambering into the escape pod when a sudden warning buzzer went off. She glanced at the screen- and let out a groan. The exterior hatch the pod would go through was jammed, rendering it useless.
She scrambled back out of the escape pod. The pirates must have welded the hatch- they did that, when they were after hostages.
She took a deep breath… then the gravity suddenly shifted.
She blinked. The engines had just cut off. Meaning, she’d just done that galloping in seven gees of horizontal force- and not even noticed it. She could have sworn she wasn’t anywhere near that strong.
She took another deep breath, a new plan forming in her mind. The controls will have locked themselves when she left the panel- and if she could simply not notice a seven gee field, a ten gee field shouldn’t be all that bad. And the only reason the main engines would have cut out on their own, would be an optimal departure trajectory.
Two hours. If she could hide for two hours, or otherwise stay aboard, the Gravity Drive would come on automatically- and a ten gee field was extremely dangerous to any that weren’t expecting it, as any fall would hurt just as much as a fall ten times as high in a one gee field.
Making the fall from one side of the airlock to the other potentially fatal.
That was her best bet.
She ran for her vacuum suit. She would wait on the outside of the ship if she had to.
… Though, she would want to make sure she was inside again before the Gravity Drive activated. The compensator field stopped at the edge of the hull- so if she was standing on the outside, she’d experience the full force of the acceleration- and she was not willing to test her grip on over a hundred gravities. If she happened to lose her grip, or not be strong enough, the ship would vanish into the distance in seconds. Or less.
--------
As soon as she got her vacuum suit on, she initiated a two hour timer on her HUD- and ran down the passage before slipping into one of the cargo lifts. The massive lifts, designed for lifting supply pallets while landed, were normally sealed against pony entry, except by the serviceways- but while under intruder alert, her ID chip would open anything as a hiding spot. To be fair, it’d open anything anytime, but during an intruder alert, there were no extra prompts to verify that she really wants to go there, the door just opened.
Once inside, she glanced ‘up’ and ‘down’. She’d only ever used one deck on her ship- never had any reason to use the others, and so never even gone there. She’d only ever used D Deck- the one the bridge is on, and the second ‘highest’ on her ship. She could go ‘up’, to E Deck- which, if she recalled correctly, was made almost exclusively for her hidden dorsal weapons, and the ponies to run them.
All three of the decks below her flight deck were for different purposes. Her reactors were on C Deck; she was aware that B Deck was filled mostly by the hydroponics facilities she didn’t use. The ‘ground deck’- properly termed A Deck- was mostly material storage, with some spaces set aside for the hidden ventral weapons.
She decided to go there. With that recent resupply, she should be able to hide behind something for hours- and everything down there was very firmly anchored in place, so the Gravity Drive wouldn't send anything sliding into her.
The cargo lift door slid open for her on the bottom as well, landing back shut behind her, and she ran into supply hold… Oh, three looked decent. During the resupply, they’d topped off all her supply holds, and this one…
She blinked. Hydroponics supplies.
She made sure the door was closed firmly, found herself a hiding spot a good ways away from the door, and finally connected to and logged into her ship through her suit. She updated the timer on her HUD to match the time-to-ignition her nav computer was giving her, and started checking through the various cameras and sensors, to track the intruders’ progress through her ship.
Then she waited, and watched.
--------
At T minus one minute, she ordered a Gravity Drive systems check, which came back green. Good, they didn’t cripple the Gravity Drive. She’d watched on internal sensors as they crippled all her thrusters, closing- and welding- all the valves from the fuel tanks. She’d have to set herself on a wide orbit out here, once she dumped them, and wait for a repair ship to rendezvous with her. It would likely be a lot easier to do that if she headed for Earth.
She waited. She had twenty hours of oxygen left in her long endurance suit’s tanks.
She counted the last few seconds down in her head… then nothing happened. Two seconds later, an error occurred- and she opened it up.
They didn’t cripple the Gravity Drive. They crippled the cover panels instead, effectively disabling the drive without damaging any of the drive components… or setting off any damage alerts.
She took a deep breath, forcing her fear back down. At that point, she has two options, and neither were very appealing. One, she could hide for the… She checked the nav computers. One day and nineteen hours, before she made atmospheric contact. Dangerous atmospheric contact, but it was just above the certain death threshold, so at least she wasn’t completely doomed. She should be able to fly it to the surface from here, assuming the pirates didn’t gas the ventilation system in the meantime- and assuming she got lucky, too.
Or two, she could fight them, and probably lose. Get taken hostage, possibly killed. And, if she won, she could then request assistance from another ship, probably not get it… and fly it to the surface from the bridge.
Suddenly, she heard the door into the supply hold slide open, and tensed her muscles, holding her breath. The lights also came on at the same time.
Silence held for about ten seconds before she heard a muffled grumbling, sounding distinctly like the pirate was wearing a helmet. “Ugh… Either she’s not here, or the gas isn’t working,” the pirate grumbled, before the door closed again… and the lights went out.
She breathed softly, carefully. The gas… They must have gassed the ventilation. Though with what, she wasn’t sure- all the gasses she knew of would have put her to sleep. She carefully, gently, touched the chin switch to cut all lights, even internal, on her suit- causing her HUD to disappear, along with all her controls and camera views. Especially if the pirate was suited as well, there was a distinct possibility he was trying to make her think he wasn’t there.
She waited.
--------
What felt like forever later, she felt her suit whuff taught- which, in her experience, only ever happened in airlocks.
She took a deep breath, closed the solar shield on her helmet, and activated her HUD once again.
A few sensor checks later, and she confirmed what she’d suspected. The pirates seemed to have gotten what they wanted, and or not gotten what they wanted, and so were letting the air out and cutting the power before they left. She rather suspected they thought she was hiding out somewhere with a pressure suit- but they wouldn’t have known know she had a long endurance pressure suit. Cutting the power like that, though… Especially once they drained her reserves, which she could see them preparing for, it wouldn’t be possible to power the reactors on again without an infusion of power from elsewhere- her suit battery wouldn’t be enough- or climbing inside the reactor itself to manually power it up.
Then of course, even once the reactor was set to ‘startup strength’, she’d have to wait about an hour for the reactor to heat up enough to start producing power once again. Unfortunately, starting the reactor at any higher setting could cause dangerous temperature and pressure imbalances that could severely damage the generation components… and the low, low heat output of an ‘offline’ reactor was so ridiculously low she couldn’t make power with it.
She watched as the pirates finished draining her reserves, and started leaving. The reactors hadn’t spun down yet, so even though the control rods were all the way in, they were charging the reserves right back up a little bit.
She could only stare at her feeds as the pirates finally opened all her radiators, setting them to maximum… and then waited, just inside her ship, for the power to run out before hopping back to theirs and drifting slowly away.
She watched them drift slowly away, then stop themselves- relative- with a short puff of thrust. She finally got her first clear view of their ship- and grinned to herself. She was right- that was no interplanetary-range ship. It was an orbital transfer shuttle- the kind that wasn’t designed to come out anywhere near this far. It wouldn’t have the fuel to decelerate back to orbital velocity once it got back down- and that would be in a perfect world, where it already had an orbital trajectory- instead of a sub-orbital one- and full tanks!
She double-checked all the internal sensors. They were slow to respond; the computer had gone into emergency power mode. But, they were still working. All the pirates had left- and as near as she could tell, they didn’t take anything. They didn’t even try hacking her computers, only… Yeah. Only searching for her.
She slowly walked her way out of the cargo bay. They were probably waiting for her to light up her long-range transmitter- the one that would penetrate her ship’s hull- and beg for help. She took a deep breath. They punctured her atmospheric oxygen tanks before they left, so the only atmospheric oxygen she had left is in her suit.
She sighed. At least they didn’t touch the oxidizer tanks, even to seal the valves like they did the fuel tanks. Meaning, she still had roughly two thousand tons of liquid oxygen on board… and the vaporization manifold, intended to be used in emergencies to convert liquid oxygen into gaseous atmospheric oxygen in the event the air tanks ran out, was unharmed. Add that the atmospheric nitrogen tanks, intended as a backup in case of a hull breach, were still both full and undamaged, and she had enough air to live for years- until long after her food supply ran out.
She made her way all the way up to her bedroom. Funny, the doors all seemed to have power, opening and closing for her automatically. Sure, they were slow, but they had power.
And the deck surface was getting ice cold under her hooves, even through her insulated suit.
… Right. That was why they opened her radiators like that- at that point… she checked the reactor temperatures. Yeah, they had been turned into ice cubes, effectively- and would take lots of hours to restart safely. She sighed into her visor, before sending herself drifting back out and down the passage, towards the bridge. When she got there, she found everything intact. Well… Her command chair had been taken, but that was it.
The control panels lit up as she walked up to them, still running in backup power mode, and she looked over them. What good could they do her, at that point?
The power control panel caught her attention.
She’d forgotten about the solar paint.
That would also explain how she still had power.
She reached a hoof up, and tapped the key to reset the radiator control system. Within seconds, the dim glow of the panels brightened to normal levels, even before the massive doors started closing. The radiator pumps had shut down.
Her next taps put all three reactors into ‘defrost mode’- a lower power setting than the startup setting, this one specifically used to defrost any frozen components. Each reactor would automatically go to startup strength as soon as positive flow was detected through the circuit, indicating that all the ice had been melted. She could expect them to stay in startup mode- after they finished defrosting- for about half an hour.
Then she glanced at the outside sensor view still showing on her suit’s HUD, powered on the ship gyroscopes, and launched herself down the passages, through the door onto E Deck, and right over to one of the dorsal turrets. She quickly locked herself into the control seat- the freezing control seat, but still- and ran a self-test.
All good. Power low, but all working.
She checked the turret’s position relative to their shuttle. As expected, they were just outside its firing range; they’d drifted down, relative to her ship, since they disconnected.
A little remote command to the gyroscopes fixed that, right at the same time as she struck the deploy key… and the massive turret, triple-mounted with a plasma cannon, two missiles, and a tri-barrel chaingun, burst suddenly and smoothly from its hiding place. The massive- and carefully hidden- door panels, thankfully, were not welded shut, allowing them to slide smoothly out of the way.
She focused on the targeting screen in front of her, took aim at the shuttle’s cockpit, and fired a few bullets into it, shattering the windows. She didn’t think she hit anypony; she didn’t see anypony in the cockpit, and no bodies flew out the new hole.
But she was, then, fairly certain nopony was about to light the thrusters and dodge any of her fire… so she switched weapons, and aimed a missile for their rear-mounted thrusters. She would have used the plasma cannon if she had the power to run the thing.
Bullseye. She even spotted the massive bloom as the blast penetrated their fuel and oxidizer tanks, demolishing a good quarter of their ship. She fired the other missile straight through the hole in their bridge windows, before switching weapons again and running a line of bullets down the middle of their single radiator.
Finally, she used her suit displays to query her navigation computer for the pirates’ estimated trajectory… and let out a breath. Their relative velocity was too high for even a SUT pack to overcome, thanks to the explosion- and of course, her nav computer instantly labeled their new trajectory a ‘suicide path’. They were set to crash into the planet in such a way that they couldn’t possibly survive reentry. Projected landing location… She winced. A craft that small would probably break up before it hit the castle, but a significant enough portion of it might reach the castle to knock the thing down.
She took a deep breath, folded the weapon, and climbed out of the control harness. She was shivering- but unfortunately, until her reactors heated up a bit, the tiny little heaters in her suit would have to suffice. Like any other interplanetary ship, her reactors were the only significant heat source aboard.
She returned to her main control panel, lifted her hooves off the floor while she waited for the ship to heat up, and remotely accessed her ship’s comms… to call her father’s steward, the pony who was the ‘boss’ of all the other family servants.
It took him a couple minutes to answer her call. “Yes, Princess?” He blinked; she was using the screen on her ship’s comms panel, but the audio feed from her suit… and he must have seen her helmet. “Uh- Did something happen?”
She nodded. “Pirates. I took care of them, and I’ll be landing at Control in a couple days- but do you think you can do a fire drill the day after tomorrow, at two-sixteen in the morning?”
He tilted his head. “Yeah, I think I can get away with it. Your dad’s going to hate me for it, but…”
She shrugged. “Honestly, that really doesn’t matter this time. I’ve crippled the pirate ship- and they’re on a course to hit the castle at about two twenty-six AM. Probably break up in the atmosphere first, but I’d still like to be sure nopony is in the danger zone.”
He blinked. “... Ahh. Then I guess it won’t be much of a drill, will it? I’ll alert the staff, and we’ll be ready.” He scowled. “Hmm, and I may want to adjust the timing of the exercise, to make sure everypony’s clear in time. That okay?”
She nodded. “Absolutely.”
Once he finally disconnected, she curled up in midair and went to sleep. She had a long time to wait before her reactors were warm enough for her to want to pressurize her ship- and she still had a good eighteen hours of air in her suit.
When she awakens from her slumber, it’s not to the alarm she’d set for when the reactors are hot enough for her to start pressurizing- and heating- the ship. Instead, she’s gotten a second intruder alert through her suit; her ship is operating in airless mode. This one isn’t triggered by an attack on a door- but rather, by a foreign signal detected from inside the ship. She glances at the trace on her HUD, and identifies it. It’s a weak comms signal, coming from somewhere in Hydroponics Four… and it’s weak enough it wouldn’t penetrate the walls, it looks like.
She listens to the transmission. A filly, it sounds like, around her own age. And terrified. “H-Hello? C-Can a-anyo-one h-hear m-me?” She can almost hear the shivering as well.
She reaches her hooves out to the floor… to find that she’s drifted away from the floor while she slept, so she’s now drifting about in the middle of the bridge. She snorts derisively and settles for remoting her way into the controls again. It takes her a few seconds after that to access the cameras- if there’s one thing she remembers from the ‘how to handle alarms’ textbook the military uses, it’s to never trust a comms signal to be what it sounds like. It’s too easy to fake it.
“H-Hello? I-I’m r-run-ning o-out of a-air!”
She finally gets into the cameras, and gets a view of the room. There’s a pressure-suited pegasus floating in the middle of the room, with legs- and wings- flailing. She estimates the proportions… Yes, that looks to be about her age.
She activates her comms, relaying it through her ship’s internal comms. “Hello?” she asks. “Who is this?”
The flailing limbs on the camera freeze instantly… and she’s able to pick out more details about the suit, now that it’s not twisting around. Hmm, that’s a regular pressure suit… She checks her own oxygen levels. Assuming it was donned shortly before the ship was depressurized, it’d have about a half an hour of air left in it, assuming an average consumption rate.
“I-I’m c-cold,” the filly states. “C-cold c-coils. C-Can y-you h-help m-me?”
She scowls, remotely activating her gyroscopes once again. They’ll only take a couple seconds to spin up this time; the power reserves have enough in them the vessel isn’t running in emergency power mode, even though the reactors haven’t started generating yet. “Sure,” she answers. “Before I start moving things around, though, I need to know- how familiar are you with that suit?”
“I-I’ve n-never u-used it be-efore.”
She scowls. “How about moving around in zero gravity?”
“N-never been in s-space.”
She winces. “Alright. How much air do you have?”
“F-Fifteen m-minutes.” She can tell the filly is concentrating on speaking clearly. The filly’s gradual spin, in her drift, puts her facing the camera- and she sees in the faceplate. The poor filly is absolutely terrified, and definitely shivering. She spots the emergency power HUD warning without having to ask about it; very few other HUD objects are bright red, and her cameras have good resolution anyways.
She pulls up a blueprint of the ship, then feeds a tiny input into the gyros- changing Coils’ drift to very suddenly carry her towards the floor. “Alright- you should be drifting to the floor. Your mag boots should stick to it, as long as you don’t push off too hard.”
“B-But the mag b-boots take power!”
“Only for a strong hold. They also have permanent magnets in them for exactly this situation. I need you to land on the floor, then carefully walk your way towards the door.” The gyro activity also happens to put her at close proximity to the ceiling; she reaches a hoof out above her head, grabs the ceiling, and flips herself down onto her hooves.
Coils lands on the floor- and flinches away from it, only barely coming back into contact in time to avoid drifting away. “It’s c-cold!”
“I know,” she scowls. “There should be a power socket by the door you can plug into. That’ll get your suit’s heaters back on, and let you charge your power cells a bit.”
“B-But o-oxygen!”
“Yeah, I know. Power is more important at the moment- the oxygen is coming, it’ll just take a few minutes. But it won’t help you much if you freeze to death first- because it’ll be cold oxygen.” She stops the spin and, leaving the gyros idle, kicks off from the ceiling to send herself drifting down the passages, towards that hydroponics bay. She’s debating which would be better- use the first ergs of waste heat coming out of the reactors to pressurize a room… or to charge a suit oxygen tank. She won’t be needing it- she’s still got twelve hours of air. But Coils probably will need one or the other.
It takes her about two minutes to reach the hydroponics bay- about the same time as it took Coils to walk her way up by the door. She cuts the camera feed as she opens the door- and Coils lets out a yelp of surprise, nearly overwhelming the magnets in her boots.
“Hey, hey, calmly,” she mutters into the comms. “I’m here to help.” She steps into the room, pointing a hoof. “The power socket’s right here- you know how to plug in, or no?” She shivers involuntarily; the walls are inordinately cold… and now that she’s close enough to read Coils’ HUD backwards, she sees her suit temp is way cold. Definitely going to be recharging oxygen bottles, not pressurizing rooms; Coils needs to warm up fast, and the fastest way to do that is with her suit heaters in vacuum. The cold air she can generate and pump in will be at about minus a hundred and fifty Celsius- and no suit heater can keep up with that. It should be able to make do with an oxygen bottle at that temperature, if only because it would have a lot less mass to warm up.
As it turns out, though, Coils doesn’t know where the recharging cable on her suit is. So Flight quickly locates it, pulling it out and plugging it in.
“Alright then,” she mutters, looking up at Coils. “We’ll let that charge for a minute or two, then head for the suit bay to recharge your oxygen tanks as well. That work?”
“Wh-Why?” Coils asks.
She sighs. “Because you need the warmth. Worst case scenario, I’ll have the oxygen available to pressurize almost any room before your tanks run dry. I’d rather not, though, because you almost certainly won’t be able to stay warm in that air- and if we instead recharge your oxygen tanks, you’ll have another six hours or so of air… and no particular reason to stay in constant contact with the cold plating, so you’ll also be warm before I’m able to start pumping warm air around.”
Almost a full hour later, Coils seems to have warmed up some. They’re both in the suit bay, where Coils has been plugged into the wall all along, running her heaters on maximum. Flight herself has been meditating while she drifts.
“U-Um,” Coils begins, stuttering with nervousness rather than cold. “Are- Are we going to be okay?”
Flight smiles at her, reaching out to the wall of the small room and running the mag lock in her hoof on maximum power for a moment to accelerate herself towards it. “Yeah, we’ll be fine. You worried about something?”
“Y-Yeah. Those pirates… wouldn’t they have crippled this ship?”
She nods. “Yeah. Did a pretty good job of it, too, but we’re on a suborbital trajectory- another day or so- and they didn’t touch any of the aerodynamic controls… or atmospheric engines. I checked.”
“But- But power! Don’t those need power? Won’t they have shut the reactors down, and drained the reserves?”
She nods. “They did. But they didn’t realize that this ship has solar paint. Ten minutes after they left, I had all three reactors going into defrost.” She scowls. “They’re still there. The computer’s estimating they’ll be finishing startup right about the time we hit the atmosphere- and by then, even defrost strength will have produced enough heat to pressurize- and warm- the entire ship.” She takes a deep breath, and asks the question that’s been bugging her all along. “So… how did you get aboard?”
Coils blinks, and hangs her head- a distinctly different effect when floating in zero gravity. “It… It was the pirates.” She moves her head as if tossing her mane, blinks, and shakes herself out. “I’m… I’m from Earth. My parents took me along for their trip to Equineothame this time around; Mom owns an interplanetary tech company, and so needed to make a visit to a local facility. I was playing with my dad in zero gravity when the pirates came, and…” She shudders, attempts to wipe the tears out of her eyes, and only succeeds on banging on her faceplate. She steels her voice. “Dad rushed me to the suit bay. Helped me get into this suit.
“Then the pirates burst through the door. He fought them, tried to buy me time to reach the escape pod.” She repeats the eye-wipe attempt, and glares briefly at her suited foreleg. “They shot him. I- I couldn’t even get started by the time they caught me.” She looks up at Short Flight. “I didn’t want to die… so I didn’t fight. They took me into their ship, and destroyed my parents’ ship. They ran it out of power… then deorbited and abandoned it, moved to a big one they saw. Last I remember, they were complaining about not finding somepony, before one put a cloth over my muzzle, and… and I blacked out.” She shudders, looking down at her foreleg again. “I… I don’t know how my helmet got closed.”
Flight nods. “Probably the automatic,” she mutters. “You were wearing it, so when the external pressure dropped below point eight atmospheres, it automatically sealed and switched to internal life support.” She nods. “That would be when they vented the atmosphere.” She sighs. “Your suit fully charged? I’d like to see if we can reach your mom, tell her what’s going on.”
Coils shakes her head. “You won’t be able to reach her.”
She tilts her head. “Oh? Why not?”
“Because she’ll be at the company for a couple days- and her secretary will be screening her calls.”
She nods. “Ahh. I’m sure the secretary would let us through- or have her call us back- if we explained.”
“Maybe,” Coils scowls. Then she tilts her head. “Why… Why does your suit look… different?”
“Ah… That’s because mine’s a long-endurance suit, yours isn’t. So while yours can carry up to six hours of air at a time, mine can do twenty-two.” She glances at her oxygen readouts. “Got about eleven hours left in the tanks, but I should be able to start pressurizing the ship without freezing us both in about two.” She then winces as a sharp pain invades both her sides- but she’s gotten used to those spikes, by now. It’ll only be a little more blood, nothing significant. And, she’s willing to bet, her medical computers would simply say ‘normal’ again.
Coils notices. “Are- Are you okay? You’re not running out of power, are you?”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m fine. Just a little pain on my sides, probably bled a little too. No idea what it is, but the medical computers keep calling it ‘normal’.” She scowls. “I’ll probably want to make a habit of wearing dresses in public for the foreseeable future- I don’t want to scare anyone with random blood spots in my fur…”
“That… That sounds familiar,” Coils mutters. “I- I was a late bloomer… they knew I was a pegasus when I was born because I had a mid shoulder, but the wings themselves didn’t grow in until just a couple years ago.” She flaps her wings fruitlessly. “That… That happened when they grew in. Bled a few times, itched a few more… and then that was done, and I had wings. Tiny little wings. They’ve grown since, but…”
She stares at her. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
She gets a strained, but genuine, smile in return. “I think?”
She blinks. “I… Honestly, I don’t even know what’s possible anymore.”
Coils tilts her head. “What…?”
“Well, I’m a unicorn.”
Coils blinks, eyes zeroing in on her forehead. “... Oh. I didn’t notice.”
She lets out a snort of laughter. “But impossible stuff has been happening around here anyways, soo…”
“Impossible stuff…?”
She looks at her seriously. “Please don’t tell anyone. I don’t want ponies thinking it’s magic and trying to dissect me or something.”
A day or so later, when her ship first touches the upper atmosphere, they’re both wearing their pressure suits again; she does not expect the hull to remain airtight through this dangerous of a reentry, and it’s entirely possible they may have to use their suit parachutes to survive themselves. Cold Coils has strapped herself into her seat, using the Hands built into her suit; unlike Flight, her hooves don’t seem to want to stick to things.
She has her ship carefully aligned with her trajectory, despite how much of her precious power that burned. The first of the three reactors finished defrosting twenty minutes ago- meaning, for the first ten minutes of her descent, she’s running on stored power alone. Once it does come alive, she should be able to maintain a relatively low-altitude flight- but not a hover… and she was able to verify, the pirates busted their way into her gear wells and deflated her tires. Which means she’ll have to use the landing legs instead- and those can’t be used with anything that isn’t VTOL.
She pulls on the helm slightly, one hoof hovering over the gyro governor switch. The gyros themselves are at idle, a small power drain- but she has them switched out, so they’re not being used for helm control. She’s going to do as much of the descent profile as she can with the aerodynamic controls. And, of course, use atmospheric contact to level off as quickly as she can, before focusing on losing speed rather than altitude. Even if she manages to lose all her speed, down to safe velocities, the moment she hits low enough altitude to hold a glide at such speeds, she’ll still have a good fifteen minutes of glide time- and by then, she will have had her atmospheric engines running for at least five minutes.
The ship twitches. Gravity seems to shift slightly.
She takes a deep breath. That’s the atmosphere, pushing on the belly of her ship.
She scowls at the screen, and adjusts the rudders to keep her on course. Something seems to be applying more drag on the left side of her ship.
Something then vibrates violently, and nearly robs her of her control. It might have actually done that, had she not kicked the gyros back in and used them to overcome the twisting force. Something is definitely dragging on the left side of her ship- the one the pirates attacked from.
She sucks in a sudden breath, right before another blast rocks her ship, this one throwing her away from her control panel. That door! She’d never sealed it!
She makes a grab for the helm, but it’s way out of reach, and she’s falling away from it. She wills it to shift, to force her ship back onto the appropriate heading; autopilot doesn’t work for unpowered reentry, and she won’t be able to reach the helm in time.
Then… it moves, and the ship shudders as it twists back on course. She slams into the back panel, horn tingling for some reason, and gallops back up the floor to the panel.
As she gets there, she notices something.
She’s galloping on all four hooves… yet she’s also holding the helm firmly.
And while the helm is inexplicably surrounded by a strange, golden aura… so is her horn.
She braces herself against the panel with her hooves and concentrates on making things happen with her horn rather than her hooves. She’s certain she couldn’t do this before- but now isn’t the time to worry about that.
Then another alarm goes off, and her blood runs cold.
She doesn’t need to look at the panel. Yes, she should have sealed that door. She really should have sealed that door; if she had, she might have survived.
That’s the predemolition alarm, to indicate that total destruction of the vessel has become certain. It exists primarily for the cases when a landing or atmospheric escape is impossible due to multiple equipment failure, to give the crew sufficient warning to bail and parachute to safety.
Then she glances at her controls, most of them glowing oddly golden, takes a deep breath, points her horn at the windshield, and screams at the universe. She concentrates on making it down safe- on protecting her ship. Her horn burns, the aura on it expanding and glowing brighter.
The twisting slowly abates, and becomes easier to control.
Then the predemolition alarm shuts off.
She can still land safely.
She doesn’t let up.
She takes a very deep breath and finally allows herself to relax when the second reactor- which had gone into startup almost five minutes after the first- finally starts generating power, while she’s still on approach to Orbital Control no less. She’s already diverted to autopilot control- and thanks to that second reactor, should be able to land on autopilot, as well. Sure, it’ll take some five minutes or so to spin up to full power, but it doesn’t need to hit more than about thirty percent power for VTOL operation. And, in about two minutes, the third and final reactor aboard her ship will start generating power. Meaning, she should have enough power for careful VTOL in a minute and a half- then for maximum aerodynamic thrust in about eight.
And that’s just live production. Her reserves are charging even now. Her reserves, which had been at a measly two percent- solar is not the fastest way to charge any ship- when she hit the atmosphere, had come within a hair’s breadth of running out. Fortunately, that first reactor had started producing power just barely in time to keep her aerodynamic controls working properly… after which she’d promptly restarted the gyroscopes to stabilize her ship even further, and ordered the atmospheric engines to start spinning up.
She taps into her internal comms, reaching out to Coils in one of the passenger bays. “Okay, we’re in stable flight now. Reactors online and everything- at this point, autopilot will get us down safe and sound.”
“... Okay, thank you,” Coils mutters.
Her comms panel chirps suddenly. She glances at it, snorts, and punches accept. She’d tried connecting to Orbital Control on the way in- but it would seem the pirates took out her radio transceivers… but either couldn’t find or didn’t target her comms transceivers. Meaning, she could call her parents’ staff and vice versa, but she couldn’t call in to Orbital Control the way she’s supposed to. She’d gotten around it by requesting an audio-only comms channel with Orbital Control.
Her father’s steward looks out of the screen at her. “Short Flight!” he yelps, almost panicking. “I- We evacuated the building, and your parents said they were coming- but they haven’t shown! I- And-!” She sees him glance up, and looks up herself. She can see the castle in the distance… and she can also see the plume of fire that is the remnants of the pirate ship coming straight down at it.
“I see it,” she mutters.
She watches it hit the castle.
“I…” the steward begins fearfully.
“Calmly, please. It doesn’t look like their bedroom took much damage, and I’m in-atmosphere nearby. I’ll take a peek under VTOL power, see if they’re okay.”
It takes her only about five minutes to fly to the castle and transition to VTOL. She loses a little height, peering out her windshield and straight in the open wall of her parents’ bedroom, where both of them are still staring open-mouthed at the opening. She sighs, and taps the key for the external PA system. “Maybe you’ll listen next time I order an unscheduled drill,” she grumbles into the mic, before re-engaging autopilot to complete the journey to Orbital Control. The VTOL engines go instantly to full power to rise over the castle- but there’s enough power in the reserves, so they don’t instantly starve themselves.
She can let the fire department rescue them, now that she can calm ponies’ worries that they might have been killed.
Almost twenty minutes later, the external airlock door slides open in front of her and Cold Coils, neither wearing their pressure suits. They’d shed those while it flew; she’d then donned one of her dresses… and battered her regalia rather badly, after trying to put it on. She’s grown quite a bit since she last used it, so it no longer fits. Especially now that she’s grown a mid shoulder and tiny, newborn wings.
Now, though, the ship’s been on the ground for a scant twenty seconds; this lock is right up near the bridge, though on the same side as the one the pirates attacked. She grins as they step out onto the ramp; she can even hear the engines still spinning down! She looks to the side, towards the massive wings she’d unfolded shortly before hitting the atmosphere, and the similarly massive engines attached underneath them, fans still spinning. For safety reasons, they can’t be folded until they reach a full stop.
Then she looks up, above the wing, at the airlock the pirates had attacked, and blinks. “... Woah.”
The side of her ship seems to have been ripped open by the atmosphere, casting black burn marks all the way down the side… and creating a hole at least six meters across.
Coils looks. “... Wow.”
“What the-!?”
Short Flight starts at the sudden scream, whirling to face. It’s…
It’s Night Skies, at almost noon, long after her shift ended. Running behind her is Shooting Star, who is off duty today.
“What?” she asks.
“How-!?” Skies begins, before stopping to take a deep breath. Star nearly runs into her from behind, scrambling to the side just in time and looking up… to gasp himself.
“N-No offense,” Skies tries again, “but how in the world did you get that thing down in one piece!?”
She looks at the scar, and back at Skies, and shrugs. “I flew it,” she states.
Star scowls at the side of the ship while Skies continues. “But that kind of scarring would only happen at hypersonic velocity in the upper atmosphere. And once it started, you’d have less than a minute to live before the ship was ripped apart.”
She shrugs. “Oh well. I mean…” She looks back at it. “It is repairable, right?”
Right at that very moment, the engines emit distinctive clunks as the shafts lock in place, before they start drawing back into their storage positions inside the wings.
“W-Well,” Skies mutters. “It’s clearly still working, and that seems to be the majority of the damage, so…” She looks at Star.
Star blinks back at Skies, before looking at the ship contemplatively. The wings are mostly folded by the time he speaks up again. “It’ll probably cost a pretty penny to put back together, but it takes a lot more than that to total a ship this big,” he mutters.
She looks back at it. “Hmm… Depending on how far in the damage goes, this might even be a good time to refit it, too,” she mutters.
Skies’ eyebrows fly upwards. “Refit? Hmm…” She scowls at the damage again. “Yeah… Depending on where the damage is, you might be able to blast two asteroids with one missile…”
The corner of her mouth twitches in a smile. Of course Skies would use the asteroids-and-missile variant of the phrase; she’s a thestral, and the most common version of the phrase anymore is to ‘kill two thestrals with one stone’. Once upon a time, it was to ‘kill two birds with one stone’- but then somepony likened pegasi to birds, and it was changed… to the discriminatory disaster it is now. She vastly prefers the asteroids-and-missile variant herself.
“Wow… Princess, do you know just how close you came to becoming a fireball in the sky?”
Princess Short Flight looks at the blast marks Night Skies is looking at, on one of the interior walls. The wall opposite was torn to shreds, and the wall behind that is the exterior wall that was breached. “I think so,” she mutters, looking back at her. “I mean, the predemolition alarm did go off for a few seconds.
Skies snorts. “Not surprised. Princess, on the other side of this wall- of which more than half has been burned away by reentry forces- is your reactor core. Had whatever save you pulled off been just a half a second later, that thing would’ve turned you into an instant fireball.”
She blinks. “... Oh.”
It’s the evening after she landed safely; Skies is aboard because she’d volunteered to help with the refit during her off duty hours. Star volunteered too- but he’s on duty right now, so he hasn’t had a chance to look over the ship yet. Even Coils had volunteered, when she realized what they were volunteering for, before taking a taxi to wherever her mother is. She’s pretty sure the little pegasus doesn’t know she’s a princess.
Just like neither Skies nor Star know she’s growing wings; she’s wearing her dress again. Fortunately, her quarters aboard ship hadn’t been damaged at all- so she spent the night in it, while her parents had to go find some hotel or another.
She’d looked up Coils’ qualifications last night. The filly isn’t native to Equineothame, so she hadn’t had nearly the access she had to Skies’ records- but from what she’d found in the public records back on Earth, the filly made Dean’s List at a small but famous engineering school. She didn’t graduate from it but, judging by the number of appearances she’s made on the dean’s list, she has to be in her senior year… at the best power systems engineering school in the entire system.
It still feels wrong to her, to have somepony graduate one of the finest higher education institutions there are before they even turn ten- but with average life expectancy at about forty years, it’s the mark of somepony preparing for a successful future.
She scowls at the burned wall. She might not have gone to school like that- her parents insist upon not exposing her to ‘those unruly crowds’ until she’s ten- but she’s pretty sure nuclear reactors don’t fireball… at all.
“Wait… reactors explode?”
“Mm? Oh, right. The reactor would have gone into meltdown- and even assuming the rest of the airframe held together long enough, the resulting corium- especially when mixed with the contents of your fuel hoppers- would’ve melted right through your ship. And with this being the core of your ship…” She trots a couple meters down the passage, and points at a colored stripe. “This is the front of your emergency fuel tank. You can probably guess what happens when the wind lobs several hundred kilos of radioactive lava right into the middle of it.”
She looks at the walls, then at the floor; there’s a few meters of unblocked wall, and she knows the fuel tanks aren’t right up next to the reactors explicitly because the reactors can get mighty hot. “Wouldn’t it go down?”
“Straight into the ammo bunker for your dorsal weapons.” Shrug. “Well okay, through about half a meter of ventilation and service runs first, but still. Drop several hundred kilos of radioactive lava on a pile of possibly-nuclear missiles…”
“What-!?” The weapons are untouched- she checked yesterday. She shouldn’t have any way of knowing the ship’s armed! “How- How do you know-!?”
“That it’s armed?” Skies smiles. “I won’t tell anyone, Princess- but a little tip? There’s more to a weapons system than just the hardpoints.” She trots over to the gash in the wall once again, and points at a somewhat rectangular hole near the floor, at the back of it. “Any guess what this is?”
She takes a peek into it- and spies the bright red warning stripes of the atmospheric blast doors, used to contain escaping atmosphere. The rails along the inside of the hole seem fairly undamaged, further down. “Some kind of accessway? Not for ponies, though…” She scowls. What solid materials would be transferred here?
“This is a missile transfer tube, between the upper and lower bunkers. Looks like one that would be rated for nuclear munitions, too- which means there’s almost certainly four of them. This one, one on the other side of your fuel hopper here, and two more further forwards.” She taps a hoof on the carved wall. “Possibly more, depending on just how big your bunkers- and weapons- are.”
She scowls, looking up at the matching hole up above. “Why would there be bunkerage here, though? There aren’t any guns in the middle of the ship!”
“That’s an easy one. It’s a combat vessel. And do you know what combat vessels do?”
“Uhh… blow stuff up? Sure got the pirates good.”
Skies snorts. “Well, that too. But combat vessels often take damage in the course of battle. Each gun has an on-mount bunker for just this reason- in case the transfer tubes, of which there are probably redundancies, are breached. But that on-mount bunker is small, just in case the weapon itself is destroyed- the amount of ammunition lost is then kept to a minimum.
“So most of your ammunition is stored here, at the heart of your ship- where the other critical systems that really can’t be lost are located. And of course, just in case it does get hit, you have two ammo bunkers- one above your reactors, one below. That way, even if most of your guns are wiped out, the last few still have access to all of your ammunition.” She takes a deep breath, peering out the massive hole in the wall. “And, considering we’re at the bottom of the gash, I’d wager to guess your upper bunker was automatically jettisoned. That would also explain the massive explosion we detected behind you on the way down.”
She blinks. “Explosion?”
Nod. “Yeah. You were moving at mach twenty-six, though, so you probably didn’t even notice it.”
“Then… Why would it have jettisoned? Isn’t that a huge waste of ammo?”
She laughs. “If it has been jettisoned, it was done because not jettisoning it would have exposed missiles to atmospheric stresses- and blown your ship to bits. And this ship looks like one of the ones designed to survive atmospheric reentry with a damaged hull- meaning, there was probably a blast door you could have closed over the airlock to prevent the entire disaster. And that a different reentry profile would have averted it as well.” A snort. “And that, since the computer probably knew where the damage was, it automatically transferred your munitions to the lower bunker.”
She blinks. “There wouldn’t be space. I never filled them, but I know my parents filled it over half full when they bought it.”
Skies looks at the floor. “Which means your lower bunker is probably chock full… of all of your biggest munitions, because it’s easier to throw smaller munitions to a safe distance.”
She nods slowly. “Ahh… Do they teach all the engineers like that, or…?”
Skies blinks. “O-Oh, sorry. No, I… I didn’t want to mention it for Orbital Control, but…” She takes a deep breath. “I specialize in weapons systems.” She even closes her eyes, as if waiting to be told off.
Flight sighs. Even here, inside her ship, isn’t as free as she wishes it was. Ponies think most thestrals are useless as anything other than trash collectors… and that any thestral with knowledge or interest in weapons needs to be hunted. Fortunately, hunting ponies- no matter the breed- is illegal in every nation in the entire star system, and nopony has bothered to add an exception to those laws.
“Hey,” she mutters. “Don’t be down about it. What do I care if you have bat wings and pointy teeth? You’re a pony that’s willing to show up on time on a regular basis! You’d be amazed how hard it is to find even one of those!” She takes a deep breath, and grins. “And, come to think of it… You might have noticed that thestral I was interviewing when the pirates attacked?”
Skies jolts, almost as if struck. “Th-th- You mean Shadow Flight?”
She nods. “Yeah, that’s her. She’s one of three potential new night controllers- and she actually has a military service record, if you dig deep enough. She’s Commodore Shadow Flight, of the Shadowfleet.” She shrugs. “I looked it up while I was drifting back towards the planet- it’s a shame they dissolved. And don’t tell her, but unless she gives me a red flag in her rescheduled interview tomorrow, I plan on hiring her. A flag officer’s skillset is exactly what I need in that position- and the fact that she’s a thestral simply means she’s more likely to actually show up.”
Flight stares at her.
“What? Just because my dad is a Unicorn supremacist doesn’t mean I participate in that discrimination at all.” She looks at the wall in front of her. “Besides, it’s the pegasi- and, to a lesser extent, thestrals- that are actually superior. I mean, you’ve got extra limbs, which are very useful in space. Even earth ponies are better off- all we unicorns have is an extra bone spear sticking out of our foreheads to run into things!”
“And Unicorn magic, whenever we build a working Distortion Drive and find Equestria.”
She cringes, getting a momentary flashback to reentry. Her horn had that aura around it- was that unicorn magic? Are unicorns actually superior to the other races?
Or is she even still a unicorn, with wings growing on her sides? And hooves strong enough to not just bend but effortlessly crumple the steel her regalia is made from?
She shudders. “Uh… Maybe? But unicorns aren’t the only ones missing magic, remember that.” She scowls. “And speaking of the Distortion Drive, if either you or Star happens to be good with engines and custom fabrication, I’ve got a little project for us to try.”
Skies blinks. “What-? You’ve been working on it?”
She nods. “Yeah. I think I’ve managed to design a few that won’t blow the ship to bits, but I’m not certain with that- and besides, I don’t even begin to have the skill to actually build the things.” A chime suddenly sounds from the control panel strapped to her foreleg, and she glances at it. “Oh, and it would seem Star has arrived, too.”
As it turns out, Shooting Star specializes in motive systems- so, after showing him around the damaged parts of the ship, she’d taken him back to the room she’d left Skies studying the logs in. When she returned with Star, Skies told her that the events the logs indicated were impossible- but had obviously happened anyways.
She grins cheerfully, trotting over to the ‘collaboration table’, as she calls it. It’s basically a pretty ordinary table… with a touch screen built into the top surface. She’s not sure exactly what purpose it was supposed to serve, but it works well for multiple ponies to work together on something. She doesn’t miss how Star smiles briefly at Skies’ friendly greeting.
“Speaking of the impossible,” she begins, tapping the surface with a hoof to attract the computer’s attention to her ID chip, “I’ve got a little project you might like to try.”
Skies smiles, glancing back at Star- and Star’s eyebrows, allowing for a small delay for analysis, rise interestedly. He’d taken to Skies almost like a fish to water, she thinks; they always seemed to be very efficient together, yet she hasn’t seen any kind of ‘couple’ dynamic between them. That kind of thing is always readily visible, whether it’s allowed to get in the way of their work- a certain couple she’d fired last time she was on the surface comes to mind- or not. Speaking of that couple, as she recalls, they’d tried to file lawsuits against her, claiming discrimination- but her father had had them categorically thrown out… and fined them for slandering the name of the royal family.
“Project?” Star asks.
She nods. “Yeah. During my… free time aboard ship, I’ve been doing a lot of nosing around on various blueprints. I’m no engineer- my parents still won’t let me go to Pony State- but the simulators insist that each of the fifteen or so blueprints I’ve come up with would work, in some way or another, and not blow up the ship. However… some of them are as big as this entire ship, and according to the simulations, all of them demand way more power than even a Distortion-ready superdreadnought has.” She pauses, looking up at them. “I will, however, need you to swear to absolute secrecy. What I’m about to show you never leaves this ship, until and unless I tell you otherwise.”
They both nod their agreement, so she makes a couple taps, and scatters a few files across the digital surface: The blueprints she’d found for the various Distortion Drives. She had actually run them through the simulators, and not one of them had a low enough projected power requirement to even contemplate installation in any modern ship. She’d had these duplicate files amended with the simulation notes scrawled in the corners, away from all of the parts.
“Perhaps you two, with your actual engineering experience, can figure out what makes each of them do what the simulation says it does, and put it all together into something that does everything and doesn’t demand as much power?” She smiles. “And, if we can figure out how to make it all work perfectly with low enough power demand, even build it… as part of the refit. And see what happens.”
Exactly as she had expected, both of them take on instant excited expressions. The entire country of Equineothame is dedicated to being the first to build a working Distortion Drive- but with the economy in shambles, actual engineering progress towards that end is almost entirely limited to imagination. The only reason Equineothame still has enough money to stay afloat is because of her parents’ aggressive technological acquisition from other places, often by illicit means- which has allowed the nation’s engineers to invent quite a few technologies by combining techs from multiple other nations. The Gravity Drive was one of them- and the massive, high-efficiency engines on the back of almost every ship in space these days is another.
Because of that, having the Princess present them with an opportunity not just to explore theoretically functional Distortion Drive designs, but to design and build a working one, would be a dream-come-true for any engineer. Even Earth, which has the largest, most stable scientific community out of all the nations, hasn’t been able to come up with even a single theoretically functional pattern. All the ‘Distortion Drive’ units they’ve built have been test pieces the scientists knew would blow up, but that they thought they could learn from how they blew up.
Oh, and the half-dozen that were put together explicitly to appease their superiors… and blow up as thoroughly as possible in the process. Her parents had managed to steal the interesting data acquired from some of those, and even destroy it at its source- and now, the Equineothame-based company NuCoils Engineering has been analyzing that data over and over, and tell her father they think they’re close to a major discovery. They were acquired some six months ago by a foreigner, a few months before they came out with a brand-new, high-efficiency nuclear reactor with almost six times the power output of the prior ‘best in class’.
As far as she’s concerned, NuCoils is lucky it was acquired- the infusion of capital from the new private owner that also happens to own most of the power plants back on Earth had been enough to keep them afloat through development- and now, hardly a month after the unveiling, their new reactors are massively profitable. She’s contemplating replacing her ship’s reactors with them- or, if she gets lucky and Cold Coils comes back and happens to be familiar with their technology, she did discover what looks like a partial blueprint for some kind of fusion reactor amongst the acquired files.
She smiles as she watches the two engineers fawning over the blueprints for a few minutes, and pointing out different parts of each one to each other, and speaking in engineering terms.
Then Skies suddenly looks up at her. “Oh, sorry Princess. We, ah… forgot you were here, for a second. Um…”
She waves it off. “No worries. I was mostly just doodling when I made them anyways, so I’m kinda curious how they work as well.” She smiles. “So carry on. No time limit.”
“What-!?” Rather than returning to her work as she’d expected, Skies stands straight up, even taking a step back from it. “But- But what about Orbital Control?”
She blinks. “Uh… True. I forgot about that…” She rubs her chin. “Hmm. Well, with those interviews coming up, and assuming they’re all thestrals, I should be able to hire a decent number of night controllers… which would, especially considering I rather suspect they’ve all got previous engineering experience of one sort or another, make it not just possible but absolutely no problem for you to transfer to this full time.” She glances at Star. “You could do that now, if you wanted to. It’s a lot easier to find dayshift controllers- and engineers- than nightshift.”
At that very moment, a sudden buzzer sounds from the table- and a warning message appears in front of her. Both engineers shift stance; it’s very rare for a parked ship to have an alarm going off.
She glances down at it, and strikes the key to open her remote controls. “Proximity alarm?” she mutters, peering at the sensor data. Sure enough, there’s another ship, on a collision course- and judging by the sensor readings, it’s sustained heavy damage, made a powered descent, and appears to be losing power. Not surprising, what with the nuclear radiation leaking out the side- it’s probably taken reactor damage.
She taps into the controls, and orders the hull polarized. All three of her reactors, held at ‘idle’ production, immediately start spinning up to support the sudden demand, while her reserves operate the things. That should help deflect the incoming ship away from hers, and prevent a collision… even if it will have a tendency of causing damage to nearby landed ships, and otherwise repelling anything metallic from the ground around her.
Then she deploys the energy beam relay, just in front of her main cargo bay, and aims it at the incoming ship. Her ship isn’t designed to provide power itself; the relay is primarily designed to relay power provided from elsewhere. However, she has enough power aboard to operate the thing, and deliver at least basic operating power.
The incoming ship’s aerodynamic control surfaces unfreeze suddenly after a few seconds, suggesting the computers controlling them finished rebooting- just seconds before it slams headfirst into the magnetic field produced by her polarized plating… and the forces thrust it violently upwards.
As she watches its trajectory curve clear of a collision course with almost six gees of acceleration, Flight blinks. That’s not a small ship- it’s big enough it almost certainly has its own hydroponics facilities aboard. Had she polarized the hull plating when the pirates attacked her, their all-metal inter-ship transfer shuttle would have been subject to a whopping fifteen gees of force directly away from her ship… and whatever they used to attach their ship to hers would have been blown apart by the forces.
She winces at the thought, watching the incoming ship arc gracelessly overtop of hers, clearing her energy relay by a matter of inches and passing right overtop of it; it promptly loses lock, lacking the fast tracking and free gimballing of the weapon turrets. Had she done that, Cold Coils would certainly have been killed.
The incoming ship then wobbles in near-horizontal flight, struggling to stabilize itself. She thinks she sees landing gear coming out the bottom of it, about a half-second before it crashes into and slides across the landing pad. Her energy relay had locked on again about two seconds before impact.
She touches into her comms, and contacts local emergency services to report the crash- and the detected radiation leak.
The two engineers, having watched the entire thing, stare.
“You have an energy beam relay on this thing?” Skies asks.
“We’re a lot closer than the emergency services,” Star states firmly. “We can provide emergency assistance before the fire trucks.”
Flight glances up at him, then looks back down. There’s almost half a kilometer between her ship and the newly wrecked craft; it must’ve gotten its wheels out somewhat, but lost its brakes, forcing the pilots to use reverse thrust out of the maneuvering thrusters to stop the ship short of a collision. And it’ll take time to run half a kilometer.
And her reactors are still spinning up, though they’re about to start reducing back to idle to slowly recharge her reserves.
She punches a few keys, and her ship’s massive wings start deploying, the reactors resuming their spin up to full power. She orders autopilot to move her ship right up close to the crashed ship on VTOL, then hold the atmospherics at idle.
Then she looks up at the engineers, who are looking uncertainly at her.
“I have an armory,” she states. “Let’s get some powered armor, and rescue those ponies.”
Then she takes off for the same. Powered armor takes thirty seconds or so to climb in or out of- but it’ll take almost a full minute for her engines to spin up to speed and lift her ship into the air.
By the time she and her two engineers reach the front airlock, the autopilot is just setting her ship down. She isn’t wearing full powered armor; unfortunately, she isn’t big enough for the pressure-tight powered armor to fit her. She was able to adjust a powered exoskeleton to fit, though, so she’s wearing that. The engineers, though, are wearing full powered armor- and will be able to enter into otherwise toxic or contaminated portions of the crashed ship.
All three of them charge down the boarding ramp, make a ninety degree pivot at the bottom, and thunder over to the crashed vessel. A quick glance at her HUD- thank Equus even the exoskeletons have Heads Up Displays built in- informs her that the fire department has only just acknowledged her call, and started rallying their firefighters.
They enter by use of the armor’s jump assist. Flight doesn’t jump quite high enough- but she’d managed to land hooves-first on the outside hull just below the massive gash they’d picked as their entry point, and so scrambles in without issue.
“Orbital Control First Responders,” Skies hollers on her external speakers, echoing through the ship. “Any survivors?”
Then the lights come on, and the alarms come with them. Her energy beam relay- which had to fold while her ship was in motion- must have finished unfolding and locked on again.
A quick glance at her HUD indicates that she can keep up this level of energy expenditure for about fifteen minutes before her reserves run out and the relay will have to shut down.
No response comes back to Skies’ yell.
She spots a control panel, gallops to it, while the two engineers move to the door and work to force it. She taps it, lets it see her ID chip. Most Equineothame-produced ships will let her in to at least a limited degree with that- but this one simply gives her an unauthorized error. She glances around the rest of the panel… No luck, she’ll have to log in to access any function, even intercom. Somepony must have put the thing on lockdown.
A few presses on the control panel on her foreleg changes that, though, as her ship’s Electronic Warfare suite goes on the offensive- in rescue mode. Both the engineers gasp when their HUDs also indicate the electronic campaign and its progress.
Then it finishes, and breaks straight through the lockdown. The blast door they had two inches open is promptly overridden, and slides open the rest of the way on its own.
The two engineers ignore it, looking at each other.
“Reactor,” Star declares.
Skies nods briefly. “Bridge.”
They both promptly bolt off, through the freshly opened passage.
Flight, seeing the same warning signals on the EW Results display, runs for the door as well.
Their reactor’s containment vessel has been breached. It’s running low on coolant- but fortunately, it’s not below the critical level. All the overflow tanks are empty; they must have already pumped in all the extra coolant stored for this exact situation, and lost it somehow.
And of course, the reactor control systems are fried- it’s a runaway reactor. Estimated meltdown cutoff, the point where a meltdown can no longer be prevented, in about sixty seconds. Star is going for that- probably going to take advantage of the radiation shielding and strength assist in his armor to force the control rods down, take the reactor ‘offline’ enough to cool passively.
Internal sensors are also indicating multiple fires, and screams, on the bridge. That’d be where Skies is going.
She takes herself down to their infirmary, where there are a large number of lifesigns.
After all, there’s another rather significant fire in the hydroponics bay- and not far from it, a ruptured fuel line. It won’t be long before the whole ship goes up in flames. The reactor core should withstand a simple hydrogen explosion from that angle, but it’s likely to be the only part that does. And even then, it’s possible it’ll fracture apart.
As she goes, she remotely triggers the Abandon Ship alarm; none of the bridge consoles are responding to the ship’s internal data network at all, so nopony on the bridge will be able to.
As she runs, she uses her strange horn-aura thing to punch in a few commands; both the engineers have gone out of sight by now, headed in their own directions. Over on her ship, a large door- thank Equus the pirates hadn’t welded it shut- slides open, and her Reactor Recovery Drone launches from it. It’s a battery-operated drone designed to extract an intact reactor core from a crashed vessel before anything else on the ship can blow it apart and contaminate the area with radioactive material. What’s more, it’s even equipped with internal radiation shielding and a small coolant tank, in case it’s a damaged reactor core it’s recovering!
Even further, all of the ship above their reactor is empty- there used to be an ammo bunker there, but it was jettisoned at some point; there’s a few holes in the surrounding materials, suggesting somepony hit the area with bullets or missiles. That means the recovery drone won’t need to cut through anything dangerous to reach the reactor core.
She orders it to engage the reactor core, but wait the containment step- where it pulls the core into the drone- until Star gives it the resume command. Which, she knows, results in a display to that effect appearing on Star’s HUD. She doesn’t want it ripping out that core until Star is clear of it. Even if Star is unsuccessful in keeping it away from the meltdown cutoff, so long as he gets the control rods in before they fracture too badly, the drone should be able to drag it back to her ship’s Reactor Recovery Bay before it actually starts melting down- and there, a special, anti-meltdown coolant would be pumped into it… and the heat rapidly dumped into her way overpowered radiator system. In theory, even if it’s almost to meltdown when it gets there, her ship should be able to keep it from actually melting down. The rules governing meltdown cutoffs are different in a recovery bay.
Doors snap open and blast doors grind open in front of her as she charges her way down to the infirmary. Internal sensors are indicating a couple lifesigns near the back of the ship as well- in what she thinks is a small armory. However, they’re moving around, don’t seem injured… and seem to be headed towards the reactor as well. Star can work with them, once he plants the reactor control rods and gets the drone to pull it out.
She’s about halfway to the infirmary when a thought crosses her mind- and she quickly pops open the visuals in the area. Most of the cameras are damaged- but she spots what looks like two scratched and dented suits of unpowered armor galloping down the passage. She cuts the visual feed and accesses her way into the ship’s internal comms… Yes, those two unpowered suits are the only slightly more expensive ones with HUD displays and internal comms. She reads their frequencies from their ship’s comms, then tells her own ship’s comms to reach out to them directly.
The response is instant.
“Identify!” one barks.
“Send help!” the other pleads.
“I’m Princess Short Flight,” she transmits to them. “I and two engineers from Orbital Control are aboard to help.” She sends the request, to let them tie into the information network- and give them access to the status of their own ship. “You have a fuel leak and a fire in Hydroponics, but the fire suppression system is toast and it’s too much for a hoofheld device, so we’re evacuating your ship.”
“What-!” the first begins.
She cuts her off, speaking firmly. “Your reactor core is thirty seconds from meltdown cutoff, but I’ve got a recovery drone on the way.” As she speaks, the recovery drone reports in range to begin cutting through the top of the ship to reach the reactor core. Simultaneously, Star reaches the core in question, operates the manual override on the access hatch, and bolts in to start forcing control rods.
They link into her information network one at a time, the less snappy one first, just in time for the drone to finish penetrating the outer hull and lower itself rapidly through a Gravity Drive service passage, down to the only remaining deck between it and the reactor core. At least their fuel hopper is empty.
Then the snappy one- whose equipment, upon link-up, identified her as Dark Snap- then speaks into the comms, sounding a little resigned. “We’re coming to the medbay.”
Then the medbay doors snap open in front of her. The only pony standing in the entire room- thestral, looks like a medic- jumps in alarm.
“How is everypony?” she demands authoritatively.
He seems to calm his alarm, and resumes his work. “The crash hurt a lot of ponies, but nopony’s critical. I think.”
She nods briefly. “Good, we need them out of here.”
He actually looks at her. “What-!? Wait, who-?” His alarm returns.
“Princess Short Flight, working with Orbital Control as a first responder,” she answers him quickly. “There’s a fuel leak and a fire in hydroponics, this-!”
The ship rocks suddenly, and several warnings blaze across her HUD- mostly from their ship, but a couple close-proximity blast warnings from hers.
“Gah! There it goes- now the fuel tank is burning. Only a matter of time before the whole ship blows apart.” The little symbol on her display suddenly blinks- the Recovery Drone completed its post-detonation analysis, having frozen in the middle of extending its arms around the reactor core, and determined that it remains undamaged. As she’d expect; it’s designed to survive almost anything the core it’s retrieving can survive. The core temperature also seems to be stabilizing somewhat- Star’s efforts look to be paying off, buying more time at the very least.
The medic scrambles back up from the floor, glancing around at everypony. “But where-!? Are the ambulance here?”
She shakes her head. “They haven’t even reached the station yet, the slowpokes. We’ll have to transfer them to my ship- I have a bigger medbay. I’ll have to shut off the Energy Beam Relay to move it closer for transfer, though.”
He blinks. “We’ll lose power.”
She nods. “Your reserves should last about fifteen seconds after the disconnection- I should be able to link it again fifteen seconds after power loss.”
“Got it,” he states, and bolts to the side to seize a portable stretcher.
Then Skies reaches the bridge, right about the same time the recovery drone finishes locking onto the reactor and goes to standby to await Star’s command.
Skies immediately gets on the comms. “Five stretchers to the bridge!” she barks.
“We’ll get them,” Dark Snap answers.
Skies isn’t finished, though. “Princess, we’ll need your medbay! Two of them are critical!”
“Roger,” she answers instantly, before looking up at the medic. “You’re needed on the bridge,” she states. “Five disabled, two critical. Somepony will follow you with any more stretchers you need.”
The medic nods, stacks two folded stretchers on top of the one he’d just set up, then shoves it out the door and towards the bridge.
Flight immediately gets on the radio. “Medic on the way with three stretchers.” As she speaks, the recovery drone reports it’s linked itself to the local power network- so she activates the order sequence she’d made for her ship earlier, to move it to line it up airlock-to-airlock for personnel transfer.
“Get a stretcher on wheels and put another on it,” Dark Snap barks. “Shadow Drop, you take it to the bridge and see them safely out, then come back to help us in the medbay.”
Flight winces at the order, but complies- and, since everypony left in here seems to be unconscious, her horn sports its golden aura again for a second, setting up the stretchers for delivery to the bridge… and setting up a couple dozen more stretchers, for the other patients already in the room. She doesn’t want to use the strange ability on other ponies unless she absolutely has to; she doesn’t know how dangerous that might or might not be.
Then she bolts forwards, and starts working to move ponies onto stretchers as quickly as possible- while also hurting them as little as possible.
A few seconds later, the two probably-soldiers charge in with their unpowered armor- and she notices that, like all of the patients, they seem to be thestrals. One of them promptly seizes the two stretchers and rushes back out towards the bridge.
“Princess,” the other greets stiffly.
“The fuel tank is still on fire,” she answers. Then she gets a signal from her ship- move complete, boarding ramp extending towards an external airlock, identified by the crashed ship’s computers. She goes live on the comms. “Rear right airlock,” she barks. “Use the rear right airlock for transfer.”
“What-?” Dark Snap asks, not over the comms. “Why that one?”
She doesn’t bother using the strength assist in her exoskeleton, hoisting a very bandaged thestral onto a stretcher with minimal difficulty, as she answers. “Because that’s where my ship just linked.” She leaps over to the next bed, and starts hoisting the next injured spacer- this one bandaged for what she suspects is at least half a dozen broken bones- onto a stretcher.
Then Star clears the reactor core- which, she’s pretty sure, just barely avoided the meltdown cutoff- and announces clear, causing the recovery drone to immediately start retracting, yanking the core outside of the ship to fly back to hers.
Of course, Skies gets back to her ship first. As soon as they do so, even while she loads yet another thestral onto another stretcher, she pulls up a few of her ship’s internal sensors- and spots the stretchers. Skies, the medic, and Shadow Drop are all pulling stretchers; there’s also two other thestrals- probably from the bridge- pushing the last two stretchers and ignoring the blood spots on their coats.
She does some quick math, and goes on her comms. “Have the medic stay to tend to the injured, warn him to expect heavy acceleration- possibly even a close-proximity explosion- as soon as we finish transferring. Everypony else, return to help; we should be able to get everypony with only two trips.”
Then her ship informs her that their reactor core is safely inside the recovery bay- and has been stabilized, though the radiators are running at maximum to cool it down. At about the same time, Star thunders into the medbay, and immediately sets about transferring thestrals.
She was right, they only needed two trips. The moment the last pony gets back onto her ship, she orders the autopilot to take off and depart at speed. The airlock door snaps shut behind her, and gravity shifts suddenly- but everypony was ready for it and she, Star, and Skies are all completely unaffected by it. She then helps move the last few stretchers to her medbay, keeping an eye on her HUD.
Then she sees it. A sheet of flame coming out that hole. “Brace!” she yells, into her comms as well. The medic is wearing a comms headset from her medbay, so he’ll hear it too.
Then the ship they’d just evacuated becomes an instant fireball. The blast hits her ship- but her computers knew it was coming, so the blast only got to see the heat shields and the engines. The ship vibrates as one of the atmospheric engines takes a hit, and goes into shutdown. She scans her HUD nervously for about three seconds, at which time the blast dissipates… and the computer decides it’s safe to reopen the hatches protecting the VTOL engines. She’d only lost one of her four forward atmospherics to Foreign Object Damage, and those engines are completely unnecessary for VTOL operation.
Then she lets out a breath, and goes on the comms for the last time. “Alright everypony, we’re home safe. The danger’s past.”
One of the two from the bridge, that she rather suspects is the captain, takes a deep breath. “Well,” she mutters, “the immediate danger is, at least. Pretty sure blowing up a reactor core isn’t safe on the long term either.”
She smiles back at her. “Your reactor core’s in my recovery bay, and it’s already been stabilized. You won’t need to worry about that.”
“What-? But-! But nopony had time to get it out!”
She shrugs. “No pony, but my Reactor Recovery Drone had plenty of time.”
The captain blinks a few times. “... Oh.”
She smiles at her again, before resuming on her path back to the medbay with the stretcher. She’s not surprised the mare is so surprised- Reactor Recovery Drones are pretty rare, and very expensive. They can still avert disasters, though- the reason she saw fit to install one two years ago.
By the time Short Flight returns to her medbay, where the entire crew of the crashed ship had remained either to receive treatment or to treat the injured, the autopilot has already swung the ship back around on VTOL power and landed back where she’d parked it originally.
She’s wearing her dress again; the exoskeleton had rather conveniently hidden her fledgling wings during the rescue, but it won’t now. “Okay,” she mutters. “Everypony okay?” She glances sideways at a heavily bandaged thestral in one of her high-tech medical beds. “Er, at least stabilized?”
The medic looks up from where he’s bandaging the Captain’s foreleg. “Uh… Yeah. Everypony stabilized, and…” He glances at the equipment surrounding him. “I must say, this is a pretty well-equipped medbay. Though, uh… it seems to be lacking in crew. They on holiday, or…?”
She shakes her head. “No. This is my ship- I’m the only crewmember.”
The captain blinks, staring at her. “What-?”
She shrugs. “But hey, it works.” She glances around the room. “So, I have to ask… what put you in, ahh…” She glances up. “That position?”
She gives an awkward chuckle. “Well, funny story. You probably- A-Admiral!” She practically leaps out of the bed to snap a salute, ignoring the medic’s attempt to affix a bandage to a small cut on her wing.
She turns to look at what he’s looking at- but the only thing she finds is Night Skies… who snorts and rolls her eyes before speaking. “Cut it out,” she orders. “I haven’t been an admiral in years.”
“You were an admiral?” Flight asks.
She nods sadly. “Yeah… High Admiral Night Skies of the Shadowfleet, at time of, ah, involuntary dissolution.”
She tilts her head. “Involuntary?”
Another nod. “Yeah. The Equineothame Fleet attacked our base on your moon, captured everypony there. They then stripped us of our equipment and dumped us, individually, at random points in Equineothame. Only the ships that weren’t at base at the time escaped the destruction.” She sighs. “Fortunately, we knew it was going to happen sometime, even if the attack- and who it was from- surprised us. So, all the ships not at base, went into hiding- and everypony that was captured knew the information they’d need to reset their lives. By now, we’ve mostly regrouped, and found ourselves employment in this city; I was one of the last, using my savings to go to school.” She scowls. “Then your father had to implement his blasted Thestral Tax, and I suddenly couldn’t afford the final semester.”
She nods slowly. “... Okay.”
Skies takes a deep breath. “Captain Lunar Wing here, with her Shadouette, was one of the few to escape, and take on a ‘mercenary’ role, quote unquote. When the pirates attacked you a few nights ago, I alerted the remnants of the fleet of the pirate activity being ignored by the Equineothame fleet- and used the Orbital Control satellites to identify the pirates for them. I… To be entirely honest, last I heard, Shadouette was boarding a suspected pirate freighter?” She looks forwards towards the Captain.
Lunar Wing cringes. “Sorry… The freighter was a hit, seemed to be used by the pirates as a local base of operations; we flagged it for another ship to investigate when we penetrated their internal comms… and discovered that they were about to send a ship back to their main base. We flew silent, and followed that ship; we discovered their base, and only barely escaped alive. The reactor- and gravity drive- managed to last long enough to get us into the atmosphere, and I hoped it would last long enough to get us on the ground.” She snorts. “Would have, had that stupid power surge in the upper atmosphere not pulled the control rods out and fried the controllers!” She sighs, looking towards Flight. “So, thanks for… whatever you did, that let us avoid a more instantly lethal crash and burn.”
“You’re welcome,” Flight nods her head.
“So… what next?” Wing asks, looking up at Skies.
Skies scowls. “Well… getting any of you back into space to help out on one of the other ships is going to be impossible, so-!” She breaks off when Flight snorts.
“My dad might not like thestrals,” she states derisively, “but you’re still ponies to me. We get this ship back in one piece, and you watch me. I’ll get you into space, toot sweet.” One of the more annoying laws her father had come up with was the one banning any Thestral from boarding anything destined for a location beyond the edge of the atmosphere, locally owned or not.
“And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about our Princess,” Star says suddenly, trotting up next to her, “it’s that if she says something, she means it.”
“Uh… Okay,” Skies blinks.
Wing blinks. “... Alright then, you’ve got yourself a work crew. Most of us have had experience patching up various small damages at some point or another- or otherwise maintaining that rust bucket of ours.”
She nods slowly. “I can see how that would be useful,” she muses. “Especially when we get around to the refit I want to get done at the same time.”
Wing’s jaw drops. Skies simply chuckles.
“... Huh, that looks… inefficient. If we were to instead use standard Gravity Drive tech, we could get over six times the output for the same power requirement,” Star scowls.
“Wait, don’t throw it out just yet,” Skies mutters. “It might be inefficient, but it works near the planetary surface. Looks like this little part here. And if we use these superconductor conduits in a Gravity Drive module, we could probably boost the output by another couple orders of magnitude. It’d increase the startup power cost by a factor of about one point four, and time by almost six, but...”
“Maybe. Work in that planetary part here and here, and make the superconductors thick enough to stand up to normal operating power levels without superconduction, we can probably give it a half-second startup time for a peak of… thirty gees. Give it five seconds to spin up, and it’ll output… one forty, at maximum operating power of a current system. But feed it a few gigajoules of ‘startup’ cost, even while in operation- pushing it to about six point four times startup cost- and we can rip off close to half a million gees.”
“Hmm… We wouldn’t be able to maintain a standard gravity aboard ship anywhere above five hundred gees, though, or a survivable force when accelerating over six hundred… Oh, but replace these wedge coils with that, and we should be able to get a Distortion Drive to operate at about six times the power cost of a standard Gravity Drive for the same size vessel.”
Flight’s eyes flick between blueprints, failing dismally at following the two engineers’ lines of thought. It’s all strange squiggles to her.
“True,” Star continues on. “And if we dual-mount the coils with smaller superconductors, we can get a five gee instantaneous, hundred gee standard, and eight hundred sprint, with gravity threshold at about six fifty… and a much smaller startup cost, about twice the modern one. That’ll give her six fifty gees on Gravity Drive, then… Oh, however fast, on Distortion Drive.” He gestures at Skies’ blueprint. “Further multicoiling might allow us to make a missile with nuclear-range payload capable of hundred, twelve hundred, and sixty thousand gee accelerations, by startup investment. But we can worry about that later.”
A sudden chime draws the attention of all three ponies to the panel in front of Flight, before the engineers get straight back to their discussion.
Flight, however, makes a couple more taps. “Coils is here,” she mutters, before hopping down from the warped airlock shield- the one that would have prevented the massive gash in the side of her ship- that she’s been using as a stool and trotting for the door. It’d been an approach chime- the starship equivalent of a doorbell. She only knows who it is, of course, because the ship computers had detected Coils’ new ID chip at the same time.
She grins to herself as she navigates the passages. When she’d had her medical computers install that chip in Coils’ foreleg, she hadn’t even thought of that effect. The filly hadn’t had one already, and such a chip allowed her to instantly authenticate her way through the doors in her ship, rather than manually punching her admittance code into each door panel.
“Hey Coils,” she greets cheerfully, as soon as the airlock door slides open. Coils’ ID chip would’ve let her open the door herself, as she’d been expecting her and so hadn’t removed the filly’s authorization- but it would seem she didn’t want to do that.
The reason is pretty evident: There’s a grown mare standing next to her on the boarding ramp… with a distinct resemblance between the two.
The mare starts talking.
“Greetings. My name is Glowing Coals, and I wanted to express my gratitude to you for saving my daughter.” Coils rolls her eyes where her mom can’t see, while Coals goes on about how to ‘properly express her gratitude’.
Then, a fire truck blazes suddenly across the bottom of the ramp, siren blazing, making all three jump.
Flight sticks her head out to see where it’s going… it’s headed for the still smoking wreckage of the Shadouette. All the flames seem to have gone out by now. “What in the world?” Flight demands. “Are those-!?”
Another truck blazes past, headed to the same place. She checks the clock on one of the panels inside the airlock, then checks up on the status of her own call to emergency services…
From four hours ago.
“Ah, something must’ve caught fire?” Glowing Coals mutters, staring at the wreckage in alarm- like she’d only just noticed it.
“I called them four hours ago!” Flight snarls, before marching down the ramp and heading towards the wreckage herself. “I’ll be right back.”
Ten minutes later, when she reaches the wreckage, another six fire engines have arrived.
“What’s the call number?” she demands of the first pony she sees.
He recites the call number she’s been using to track her call.
“I placed that call four hours ago,” she snarls.
He blinks. “So?”
On the other side of the city, a flock of crows takes fright.
“Y-You’re scary, you know that?” Cold Coils mutters, staring at Short Flight in shock.
Flight blushes, averting her gaze. “Yeah… I do know, actually. I just hope they don’t start talking about it.”
Glowing Coals lifts a hoof slightly, as if she wants to point. “You’re… You’re Princess Short Flight.”
She sighs, and nods. “Yep, that’s me. You’d be amazed how many idiots I run into.”
“Y-Y-You’re the Princess!?” Coils asks in alarm.
She nods. “Yeah, yeah. But let’s not worry about that right now, shall we?” She gestures behind her. “Let the idiots learn to behave, and the properly behaved citizens-” she gestures forwards, at Coils and her mom- “carry on with their business without worrying about me.”
“Ahh…” Glowing Coals mutters confusedly, before looking up at the chastised fireponies. “Did you say… that ship had a reactor?”
She nods. “Yeah. I managed to pull it free before the explosion- thank Equus for Reactor Recovery Drones- so there’s no radiation hazard.”
“And… it was leaking?”
She nods. “Yeah. Almost melted down, too- but I managed to save it. According to my computers, it’s salvageable.”
“What-?”
She nods. “Yeah. It’s in my Reactor Recovery Bay right now, fully stabilized.” She casts a glare back at the fire department. “And something tells me that if I give it to them, it’ll melt down before it reaches a recovery plant, even though one of the Orbital Control engineers that boarded with me was able to force all the control rods back in before the meltdown cutoff.” She scowls. “I heard the controllers were fried by a power surge.”
“... Right. Um, shall I have my company- NuCoils- send a team to bring it in for salvaging?”
She blinks. “Wait, you’re with NuCoils?”
“Ahh, I own NuCoils, though I suppose that counts.”
“Awesome, then yes please. Um…” She looks up at her ship, unsure of whether she should tell the mare the Shadouette was crewed by thestrals. The discrimination against them isn’t as bad back on Earth, but not by much.
“We’ll send the money- and receipt- from the salvage to you, so you can forward it on to whoever it should be headed to?”
She blinks. “Uh, yeah, that works. Hmm…” She looks back at Glowing Coals. “Those… new reactors NuCoils is making. How quickly can they defrost…?”
“Ahh… Thirty-two hours, about three hours shorter than the industry leader.”
“Any way to shorten that? Three days ago, I had some pirates turn my reactors into ice cubes, and they came off of defrost right about as I hit the upper atmosphere yesterday- another five seconds and I would’ve lost my aerodynamic controls at a critical point in reentry.”
“There really isn’t any way to accelerate the defrost, I’m afraid- except activating it sooner, I guess…” She scowls. “Wait, how did you have power…?”
“Solar paint,” she answers promptly. “It was a powered defrost. Can the reactors be designed to allow an extra infusion of power to defrost them faster?”
Coals tilts her head. “I… I’d have to ask the engineers, but I don’t think it’ll be all that hard.”
“Easy,” Cold Coils injects. “Just install heating coils around the coolant lines and turbine chamber. Unpowered defrost time might go up by an hour or so, but powered defrost could get the thing going safely to startup strength in half an hour- when there’s still ice in the reactor chamber!” She scowls. “We could probably also offer it as a modification to most existing reactors, though none of them would be able to perform a powered defrost nearly as quickly, even after upgrade. Call it… between two and twelve hours, depending on the reactor.
“And if we install a small battery bank into the reactor, which would never discharge into the ship reserves and be recharged as first priority, we could even allow it to make a powered defrost in a zero-power situation. And implement a powered startup at normal operating strengths too, call it five minutes from start to power.”
Flight blinks. “Huh. That’d make them pretty pirate-resistant, wouldn’t it? I mean, the deorbit burns pirates use are only just enough to down the ship- meaning, any survivors would have a good two hours at least to restore power. Then, that barely-deorbit trajectory the pirates use is an easy- though tedious- unpowered reentry profile. And that’s not counting that most autopilots can do that gentle a profile completely unassisted!”
Coils blinks, while Coals stares. “True!” She swipes a tablet out of her saddlebags with one Hands, and starts typing away.
“So… what was that all about?” Flight asks Coils, as soon as the airlock door closes behind them. Coals is headed off someplace, to do her own thing.
Coils looks at her. “What-? You don’t-?”
She shrugs. “I think it started as some kind of ‘thank you’, then the fire trucks came, I woke up everypony’s neighbors, and it all got very confusing after that.”
“... Oh. Um, yeah. She approves of my wanting to help restore your ship- both before and after she realized you’re the Princess… Which…?”
She sighs. “Yes, I’m the Princess. And I wish ponies would quit talking about it quite like that- makes me sound like some kind of… deity or something.”
“...Sorry! Um… She approves of it… though any more, she tells me to make my own decisions more often than not.” She scowls briefly. “She came along today, because she wanted to give her thanks face-to-face. Then the fire trucks came, that happened, and you gave me an idea for NuCoils’ reactors. Which I sent to their engineers, because that little of a modification will be easy for them to figure out, and I wanted to help you put your ship back together. So, um… how bad is the damage?”
She grins. “The damage is pretty bad- come see.”
She leads Coils up to C Deck, and straight to where the massive gash is.
“... Wow. I… I daresay we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Coils mutters, staring up at the damage.
“Actually,” Flight smiles. “Night Skies tells me my reactors are behind this wall.” She taps the cratered wall.
Coils turns to it, looks up and down the passage, and blinks. “... True.” She points at a little mark visible on the surviving wall. “That there is one of the cut zones to reach the things for servicing.” She tilts her head. “... Which means, if you want to wait a week or two to patch this hole, we can replace all three reactors with minimal effort.”
She grins. “About that, there’s something I’d like to show you.”
“Hmm?”
“Yeah. C’mon.”
This time, she leads her all the way back to where Star and Skies are still working on the Distortion Drive. Judging by the terms they’re using, they’re into the details phase- and their chatter attracts Coils’ attention instantly.
“Are- Are you making a Distortion Drive?” Coils asks, just as much to Flight as to the other two engineers.
“Yep!” Flight cheers. “And there’s something a little different that you might be particularly good at.” She trots up to the table, opposite Star and Skies once again… and opens the partial fusion plant blueprint. “As near as I can tell, this seems to be a partial blueprint for a fusion reactor, rather than our fission reactors.” She doesn’t miss Star abandoning his prior work and stepping around to look at it as well. “It came from the same place as the power-hungry Distortion Drive blueprints they’re playing with, so…” She shrugs. “Think you can make it into something that might work?”
It takes Coils about six seconds to duplicate the file and add a number of elements to her duplicate- which, Flight notices, had been downloaded directly from her personal library back home. “Hmm…” She scowls at it a little. “Well, I want to say it’s not impossible. But even if we do end up building this thing, she’s going to take a lot of power to start up- and it’s not going to be something I’d feel safe trusting a battery bank for, no matter how big. The critical failure on this will make nukes look small.”
She scowls. “Would it be something two of those NuCoils reactors would be able to do?”
A snort. “Yeah, easy. Probably get away with just the three archaic things you have, for that matter- though, you would need all three. In exchange, this thing would burn… probably hydrogen, and not all that much of it, for… What?” She looks up at Star. “Fifty gigawatts?”
“We can do better than that,” he mumbles. “Whoever gave these blueprints to our Princess hasn’t a clue how our Gravity Drive works. These… what, containment field projectors? They look to work similar to the drivers in a lot of those Distortion Drives; if we replace that with the upgraded Gravity Drive tech we just came up with, we can probably reduce containment power cost by a factor of about ten… and boost maximum ‘chamber’ temperature and pressure by close to a thousand times. This thing stands a chance of generating enough to run even the most power-hungry of those old Distortion Drive blueprints all on its own.”
“Wow,” Flight mutters. “How big would it be?”
“Uh… This would be on a scale similar to modern nuclear reactors. And unlike those old things, it looks like this stuff should scale fairly easily anyways.”
“Awesome,” Flight smiles. “Then when NuCoils finishes that reactor with powered defrost and startup, we’ll install two of them, and one of these.”
“Uh,” Coils mutters. “That’s… assuming it comes to fruition, right?”
She smiles. “Of course. It’s not like I want to star in Equineothame’s biggest tragedy.”
“Alright,” Princess Short Flight mutters, taking a deep breath, in her new command chair. “Everypony ready?”
It’s been almost a full year since her fateful encounter with the pirates, and her ship has become almost unrecognizable. Sure, the cargo holds are all still there, and even the clamps in the main bay- and the ship even still has the same general shape.
But nearly everything else had been redone, as part of her ‘refit’.
The entire ship is now loaded with all the latest and greatest technology in existence- including multiple pieces nopony outside her ship knows exists, like the strange new fission-fusion plant, Gravity Drive, and Distortion Drive the engineers had come up with. They’d even been able to rig up an inertial compensator slash gravity generator that would work while running on reaction thrusters!
In the process, she’d had to yell at a dozen different production companies, three of which she had to repeat face-to-face and at ‘volume eleven’ as she’s come to call it, for not allowing thestrals to pick up her parts- even when they had documentation. Fortunately, NuCoils had not been one of them, though both of the factories located on either side of theirs had.
Now, her ship is finally fully supplied, and fully ready for space. The thestrals had even gone to the effort to get her hydroponics up and running- so, especially with that gravity generator making it easy, her ship is now a self-contained ecosystem, requiring only electricity to last for a very, very long time… with good food the whole way, not the dehydrated ‘space food’ she’s used to!
And of course, she’s been wearing her dresses the whole time. Her wings have grown to full size, but nopony outside her ship knows. She’s let the engineers and, eventually, the rest of the thestrals, find out, as she’s grown to trust them. She isn’t wearing a dress right now- nor her Hands. She hasn’t worn those aboard her ship in weeks, even if nopony else has been able to grip anything without them. She’s not sure what the difference is.
She gets back a series of yesses, and takes a deep breath. “Alright.” She switches her computers into flight mode with one hoof, while the other depresses the radio transmission key. The thestrals and engineers- who have fast become her crew- insisted that she have this opportunity to fly her ship herself one last time, before they pitch in to play the part of a crew. Because, of course, none of them have experience with a ship of her class. “First Light to Orbital Control.”
One thing that has gotten better over the last year, is employee retention at Orbital Control. Turnover is still pretty high, but any more, she has no difficulty keeping the place fully staffed, day and night. She’s even managed to hire successful hiring managers!
“First Light, Proceed.”
“First Light, requesting atmospheric departure to standard Fleet orbit two.” There’s only one thing she doesn’t have fully stocked on her ship- and that’s ammunition. Especially where she plans on going with her maiden voyage, she’ll need some… and the Fleet remains the best place to get it.
“Departure burn strength?”
She looks at her sidebar. “Eh.” She depresses the key again. “Five zero flat.” Fifty meters per second, or about five point one gees, should be more than sufficient to put her in orbit… without showing off the theoretical fifty-gee acceleration her new, Skies-Star-and-Coils-invented fusion thrusters can offer her.
“Understood, stand by.”
“Standing by.” Must be one of the new controllers, that haven’t gotten into the swing of things far enough to anticipate her requests- and have all the computations ready as soon as the values are provided. She looks up at her crew, and smiles.
She can only barely feel the tiny vibrations in the hull of her ship as her ventral cargo airlock, positioned at the very bottom of the cargo elevator she’d used when the pirates attacked, locks onto the enormous Fleet missile collier.
“Docked and locked,” she smiles.
“Wow, you’re good,” Lunar Wing, ex-captain of the Shadouette and now her tactical officer, mutters. “That was about the vibration I’d expect in a superdreadnought when a shuttle docks to it.”
She grins. “I aim to please,” she chuckles. Then she looks up. “Alright, disabling gravity in three, two, one!” She strikes the key on the unvoiced zero, and the gravitational pull towards her deck plates gradually lessens to nothing. She looks sideways at Night Skies, her First Officer, and Shooting Star, her chief engineer, the latter of which is on the bridge- instead of down in engineering- because there isn’t much to do down there right now. Cold Coils is leading the party down at the airlock, to head off any ‘thestrals aren’t allowed to have that paperwork’ issues. “I love that gravity generator you came up with.”
“I noticed you didn’t use it for the ascent,” Star comments.
She nods. “Yeah. Wanted to see how your nuclear thrusters worked- and they’re nice. Way more responsive, and easier to fine-tune, than traditional thrusters.”
He claps a hoof with Skies in a move that is still called a ‘high five’, despite Hands having anywhere from two to ten fingers, and the many thousands of years since the ancients had five to a hand. It might stem from how the most common Hands still have five fingers in the same locations as the ancients had biological fingers, but that doesn’t explain why that move- which is always performed with all fingers retracted- is still named as if done with an open Hands.
She leans back in her seat. “And when we finish here, I’ll test out your Gravity Drive on something more than gravity generation, and we’ll go after those pirates.” She looks off into the distance. “Then after that, Distortion Drive.” She scowls.
For some reason nopony could figure out, ever since she first ‘levitated’ her heirloom necklace over her neck with her strange horn-aura, everypony it touches- including herself- gets the urge to travel in about the same direction… for as long as they’re touching it. No matter when, no matter where. It seems to always be pointing at the same constellation; the best hopeful guess going around is that it’s pointing at Equestria.
She’s wearing it right now.
Her intercom panel beeps. She taps the accept key.
Cold Coils looks out of it, looking panicked “Princess! Come down here, quick! They’re trying to seize the ‘thestral-owned vessel’!”
She snarls in response. “On my way.” She looks up at Skies. “If I don’t report back in ten minutes, send the troops in after me. Colliers never have truly lethal sidearms aboard, nor anything better than unpowered armor.” Then she leaps from her seat, directing herself to the door and down the passages as quickly as she can. As she goes, she spots Skies keying in a shortcut to her intercom.
“How’s the seizure of that Thestral vessel going?” a Commander asks, looking at his Lieutenant Commander exec.
“It should be-!”
“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?”
Both stallions scream in fright, but they can’t hear their own thoughts over the Princess’s yell, echoing throughout the ship.
“...THESE THESTRALS WENT AFTER THE PIRATES YOU IGNORED…”
“Ahh… Do… Do you think we should help the Missalius pacify the Princess… or help the Princess berate them?” a Lieutenant Commander, in the command chair of a Corvette-class warship that also happens to be resupplying, mutters to his exec.
His exec, a Lieutenant, shugs her wings. “Personally, I’d rather wait for her to stop yelling before we come closer at all. Then whatever it takes to make her less likely to start yelling again- which would probably be to help her berate them.”
“...been nothing but helpful! They’re ponies too, just like you and me, and…”
Admiral Mantle Core speaks up first, voicing the thoughts of every admiral in the conference room for the first time since the strange noise had penetrated the bulkheads.
“By Equus does that filly have lungs!”
“How…” High Admiral Timber Wolf looks towards the lowest-ranking admiral present. “Who is she angry at? And how loud is it where she is?”
Vice Admiral Night Mare blinks, before scrambling to open a channel with her panel, out to the massive superdreadnought’s bridge. The High Admiral had seen fit to grace her ship with the Meeting of the Admirals this month. She quickly reaches her tactical officer. “Can you hear the Princess yelling?” she begins.
“Loud and clear, Ma’am.”
“Do we know who she’s angry at, and how loud she’s yelling- and if not, can we find out?”
“Ahh… About that. However she’s yelling, it’s not just sound. There’s forty kilometers of vacuum between us and her ship.”
Every admiral in the room speaks simultaneously. “What.”
The tactical officer smiles briefly. “She’s… Yeah, it would seem she’s docked to the Missalius for resupply. And, judging by the yelling, they thought they’d imprison her crew.”
“Something tells me,” High Admiral Timber Wolf mutters, “she’ll get them back.”
“Ahh… Do we know why they tried that?”
“Judging by the yelling, I’d say she’s put together a crew from somepony that’s discriminated against- like the Thestrals.” She scowls. “Actually, probably thestrals. I’ve heard of several instances of her yelling at various ground facilities this last year for refusing to serve the thestrals she authorized to retrieve parts for her ship. Three of them, I understand, involved her physical presence… and had impressive noise levels.”
“Alright,” Timber Wolf states. “From now on, neither us nor any ship in the Fleet will discriminate against any pony, Thestral or not. As the Princess says, they’re ponies too.” She sighs. “And anypony caught discriminating will be punished as if they had been discriminating against a Unicorn. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not give her reason to yell at me like that.” She looks towards Vice Admiral Night Mare, and the still-open comms channel. “Let’s also get ahold of the Missalius as soon as they start responding again- I’m sure they’ll have some shock to deal with- and have them give her everything she wants, free of charge. As an apology.” A pause. “And the next time we see pirate activity, let’s go after them, to hay with the cost.”
Orbital Controller Long Flight looks up, after going off duty some fifteen minutes late; one of the night controllers had called ahead to report that an accident was going to make her late, so he’d volunteered to stay on until she arrived. There’s a fairly indistinct yelling coming from the sky- and while he can’t tell what’s being said, he does recognize the voice.
Then he looks down at his wife, who had gone off duty on schedule- none of the nightshift engineers had been delayed- and waited for him in the lobby. They speak in tandem.
“Should be, Princess. We’re talking about a group of asteroids tethered together, you can’t exactly mount engines on that.”
Short Flight nods sharply, muscles just as tense as the rest of her crew. Lunar Wing, her tactical officer and former captain of the Shadouette, had decrypted the archived database that had been acquired as part of the rescue of the Shadouette. In it, they’d found the coordinates at which they’d found the pirate haven a year prior- and now, they’re in hot pursuit. Well… as hot a pursuit as silent running can be. At the moment, the ship is drifting towards the spotted pirate haven, under zero acceleration.
“Got them,” Wing reports, sending a sensor feed to one of the many screens in front of Flight.
At a glance, it appears to be a perfectly ordinary group of asteroids- but, not only are asteroids not usually this close together, but the sensors are picking up disguised weapon mounts on the outside surfaces. She scowls. “I could have sworn there weren’t this many turrets when you came here.”
Wing nods grimly. “They must have upgraded. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the first ship to escape their little hideout in a long time- they probably didn’t like that. Especially with how hard we hit them.”
Night Skies taps on her console a few times. “We have a fix on their ships yet?”
“Ahh… some of them. One dreadnought on the far side; more presently, there’s three battleships, three- no four- heavy cruisers, and… two light cruisers. That one looks like a captured freighter.” She glances up at them. “Last time we were here, most of their ships were docked on the inside, where we’ll have to actually enter the place to see them. On the other hoof, nothing they have will be able to catch up if we decide to rabbit.”
“How about us? Have we been spotted?” Flight asks.
“Doesn’t look like it, but our present trajectory will put us right through the middle of their main search zones. And… yeah. Given how much I’m seeing out here, I’d hesitate to go in without backup, even with a ship as well-armed as yours.” She scowls at her console. “When we were on the way out, they had a few ships pop up out of nowhere around the base. I’m not seeing any, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
“Hmm,” Flight mutters. “So… What if we just make some noise out here and rabbit it?”
“We could probably do that. Radar contact out here is getting pretty close to detection val-!” A buzzer interrupts her. “Lidar hit, we’re seen!”
“Combat Alert!” Flight snaps immediately- and all three reactors at the heart of her ship, two of NuCoils’ finest and the last the strange fruit of the engineers’ labors, start their spin-up to full combat power. Silent Running also runs them as low as possible, to minimize radiator emissions. A glance at the battle board at one far end of her wide console shows almost every single department flashing from ‘standby’ to ‘ready’ as a unit. All the rest- like Medical- were already ready.
“Wait the hull polarization until they start shooting,” Short orders, “And open long-range energy fire! Let’s see how many of these bastards we can catch with their hulls unpolarized, then get out of here before they can localize us!”
Flight grins. Most plasma cannons, such as the ones mounted on all eight of her turreted weapons, are useless against a polarized hull. They usually work by rapidly heating the targeted vessel with superheated plasma against the hull, though exposed equipment- such as turret mounts, or a gravity drive that’s at least halfway through its maintenance cycle- can get shorted out and destroyed by it directly.
The massive, spinal artillery cannons her engineers had come up with, however, are a little different. Loaded with inductance coils and even a fusion chamber at the back, they launch a ball of what they called ‘solidified plasma’- which made no sense to her- at the enemy. A ball that would punch through most hull polarization, requiring a maximum polarization to destabilize them before impact- and even then, still expose the target to large quantities of superheated plasma. Should that ball make contact with the enemy vessel, though, her engineers assure her that anything smaller than a heavy cruiser would suffer crippling damage- and, possibly, blow apart.
Her ship isn’t big enough to mount regular artillery cannons, which launch nuclear munitions at the enemy with cee-fractional velocity; no, only superdreadnoughts can mount those.
“Good choice,” Skies nods- while also looking interestedly at the artillery readouts on her panel. This will be the first time the things see use, after all; they hadn’t been able to figure a way to test them on anything but deep space without doing a lot of damage to something. “We’ll probably want to keep our distance, too.”
Flight taps a couple keys, and the ship vibrates slightly around them. The Gravity Drive increases power a touch, to pull three gees- and her nuclear maneuvering thrusters (thinking about those things always manages to crack her up) providing another two. “There… I want to wait until we’re charging again before I increase power any further, if I can get away with it.” She gestures with one hoof towards the power readouts on her panel; the massive artillery cannons are drawing mostly from the reserves, and it’ll be a few minutes before the reactors spin up high enough to support them out of current generation. One of the problems with getting caught in silent running.
“Stealth is nominal,” Wing announces suddenly- another drain on the reserves, but one that’ll make it painfully difficult for the enemy to localize her for effective return fire. “Decoys primed.” Fortunately, the decoys- powered by a miniature energy beam emitter and tethered to the mothership by the Gravity Drive- won’t actually burn power until they’re launched. “Ballistic munitions incoming- impact thirty-seven seconds, mark. Polarizing hull in thirty-three. Artillery nominal in six.”
Flight grins. A strongly polarized hull will deflect most attacks, such that only a direct hit will penetrate to the hull. And of course, simple ballistic projectiles- like bullets- will never get through a polarization field, unless fired from a ship that already has a very significant closing velocity.
Six seconds pass in relative silence.
“Firing artillery… now,” Wing snaps, and the ship twitches. The windshield polarizes instantly as what looks like four miniature stars- spread in a square, two above and two below- rocket out at the enemy. “Impact in two, one.”
Flight watches as all four energy artillery rounds slam into the unprotected side of the pirates’ dreadnought… then, hardly a second later, a secondary explosion splits the thing in half.
“Nice,” Skies grins predatorily. “Musta hit some of their nuclear munitions.” She scowls at her display. “But we do need to work on that sixty-second cycle time.”
“Stagger the artillery,” Flight orders. “One round every fifteen seconds. That should give us plenty of time to pick a new target for the next round if we reach annihilation- minimize wasted ammunition.” She scowls. “Not that it’s very limited to begin with, is it?” She glances at Skies.
Skies shakes her head. “We’ve got the fuel to fire that thing… fifty thousand times, at least. But that’ll also allow us to maximize the effectiveness of our fire, both before and after they get around to polarizing their hulls.”
“Vessels on approach!” Wing announces. “Two- no, three- on thruster power, detecting significant Grav Flux! Resetting artillery target priorities.”
Flight grins. Grav Flux, a byproduct of the startup of a Gravity Drive in need of servicing… and vulnerable to plasma fire. She glances at her console. “We’re accelerating away at five gees- they’ll think we’re civvies fleeing on maximum emergency thrust.” She scowls. “Until they figure out where the artillery is coming from.” She glances at her panel, then at Skies. “Would it be worthwhile to artificially generate Grav Flux?”
“To convince them we’re behind on our maintenance schedule?” Skies mutters, scowling at her panels. “... Probably not. It’d give us an advantage, certainly, but it’d burn way too much power. Our drive shouldn’t start making flux on its own unless we run it way past replacement, soo…”
Flight scowls. Grav Flux is, on a drive that generates it naturally, wasted energy- an extra startup cost. Conversely, the newer the drive, and less likely it is to generate the stuff on its own, the more power it takes to artificially generate Grav Flux. Most brand-new drives can’t generate it at all for at least a month, no matter how hard the skipper tries- but military drives are designed to be capable of it from day one, for the tactical advantage a well-powered ship can acquire by pretending to be undermaintained.
“Approaching vessels exiting asteroid shadows in one… Huh. Two missile frigates, and one… That is a lot of point defence for one ship, I doubt we can saturate it.”
Flight scowls. So much for the dozen missile launchers they’d installed on the top and bottom of her ship, and the hundreds of ‘swarmer’ missiles she’d acquired, specifically designed to saturate point defense solutions. “How might our point defense stand against the missile boats?”
“... Eh. I wouldn’t trust the computer to get them all, but we’ve got enough point defense turrets, in theory.”
She nods. “Alert all turret operators for point defense duty, then.”
“Roger. Yeah, we’ll handle those, no problem. Probably cost a lot of ammunition, though.”
Nod. “Targeting priority on the point defense ship, fire as many arty rounds as you need. Then we can take the other two with missiles.” She looks up at Skies. “If there’s one thing I’d like to avoid, it’s energy range.”
Skies nods. “Definitely- we don’t have the armor to stand up to any of that.”
“I wonder why they put so much point defense on one ship?” Flight asks.
On her comms panel, Star answers. “Probably means those rust buckets can’t take much of a hit, they think they’re playing it safe.”
She snorts. “And painting a target on their weakness while they’re at it.”
A buzzer at Wing’s panel. “What- Enemy behind us, energy range! Burning to emerge from cover!”
“Polarize the hull!” Flight snaps. “Missiles! Time to artillery!”
“Artillery ready in two-three seconds!”
“Rear enemy generating Grav Flux!”
“Rear turrets, plasma! Fire as it appears!” She looks at Skies. “Suggestions?”
Skies scowls at her panel. “I… I have a bad feeling about this. We need to get out of here.”
“Energy fire incoming from rear,” Wing barks, “near miss! Enemy point defense sufficient- plasma contact! … Enemy experiencing weapons cookoff.”
Flight watches on her panel as the ship attacking from behind is ripped apart by internal explosions. Then she heaves a sigh. “Their hull was unpolarized,” she states.
“Enemy hull polarization detected forward! Missile trace- Multiple missile trace! There must be two more pairs of missile boats we haven’t seen!”
She looks at the power readout… and winces. “Make this the final artillery volley, and make it count,” she orders. “We need the power for the engines.” They’ve already burned through so much power that, if she were to boost the Gravity Drive to full power now, they’d run out of power almost three full minutes before the reactors spin up high enough. Cutting the artillery out of the loop should reduce that to only a minute or so. “Star! Standby to initiate Distortion Drive cooldown on my Drive command!” Said ‘cooldown’ being to prime the superconductors, readying the thing for duty.
“Roger,” Star responds, before scrambling around his panel. “Standing by!”
“Enemy comms penetrated!” Blacklight, at the Electronics console, announces. “Two- no, three- dreadnoughts inbound around their base!” He hesitates briefly. “The trailing one has malfunctioning hull polarizers!”
“Spotted!” Wing announces. A seconds’ pause, then- “Artillery nominal!” The windshield blacks out, a single sun-like object flashing downrange. Three more seconds pass, through which the windshield fades back to transparent. “Forward missile boats exposed to missile fire, engaging!”
“Where are the other two groups?” Flight barks, completely ignoring how one of the distant ships visible through the windshield is now in fragments.
“I don’t know!”
“Target the dreadnoughts! Blacklight, info?”
“They’re still spinning up their reactors,” Blacklight states. “They’re waiting hull polarization until they get halfway through missile range- or we start shooting at them.”
She nods. “Spread the artillery fire, simultaneous!” As she does so, she twists the ship to face them, following the instructions Wing sent up to her panel. Thank Equus that, like traditional artillery, the engineers’ energy artillery also has a ridiculously long range.
The windshield blacks out.
The wait is almost six seconds this time.
“Hits confirmed!” Blacklight barks, even as Wing reports the arrival of the first wave of enemy missiles. “Two- no, three- dreadnoughts disabled! Two bridge hits, one reactor!”
“Deploying decoys!” Wing announces, as the first few missiles start getting into energy point defense range.
“Caution rear!” Blacklight announces. “Enemy is attempting an ambush!”
Flight curses under her breath, glaring at the power readouts. “Aww, hay with it.” She glances up, and yells, pulling wildly on the gyro controls. “Brace for acceleration!” She waits two seconds, and slams the main engines to maximum power.
The boot of the gods promptly slams into her back, as the ship accelerates at a full fifty gravities… with an apparent eight gees shipboard, since she didn’t increase power to the gravity drive. Then she carefully taps up the power on the Gravity Drive, until it just barely cancels out the inside acceleration, and watches the power readouts. Three, two, one… “Drive!”
“Distortion Drive cooldown initiated!” Star returns immediately. “Nominal in five-five seconds!”
“Missile contact on forward missile boats!” Wing announces. “Hits confirmed!”
“One- no, two enemy vessels crippled!” Blacklight announces, scrambling about her panel.
“Enemy missile net penetrated!” Blacklight calls. “Redesignating acquired missiles. Missile boats localized… and acquired!”
“Fire control merged!” Wing barks. “Firing on fighters!”
Flight blinks. “How long will that last?”
“Not long,” Skies answers. “But we should be able to steal a couple more salvoes before the pirates figure out what’s going on and force their systems into manual. Their fire will also desynchronize when they do that- be easier for us to kill.” She grins. “And if she’s managed that, you’ve got some impressive electronic warfare equipment. We’ve never been able to do that before.”
“I know I do,” Flight nods sharply, and looks at her panel. “How long to power exhaustion?”
“Ahh…” Skies looks at her own panel. “three-five seconds, mark.”
She winces. “Distortion nominal in two-five. Assuming all else is cut, how long can we run it?”
Skies winces. “Six seconds, or so.”
Flight’s turn to wince again. “We’ll just have to hope five seconds is enough to give us a rabitting trajectory.” The engineers had managed to build her Distortion Drive such that it would take significantly less power than the Gravity Drive.
She looks up. “Enemy launchers on manual!” Blacklight announces. “Enemy missile net rebuilt on new encryption!”
“Battleship detected on right!” Wing calls. A second passes. “Optimal escape trajectory marked!”
Flight glances down at her panel, and adjusts her ship’s heading to match. Assuming the Distortion Drive gives her enormous accelerations, as is expected of it, her ship should approximately match that trajectory on the way out.
“Last decoy!” Wing announces- indicating that the last decoy they have aboard ship is getting deployed.
Flight blinks- she’s managed to go through six of her eight decoys, and simultaneously keep anything from hitting her ship! “Retract decoys on my mark!” She’d rather not leave any behind if she can help it.
She watches the time-to-distortion display tick down. And…
“Mark!”
“Decoys retracting! Enemy fire inbound!” A pause. “Decoys lande-!”
The Distortion Drive ready light comes on, and Flight’s hoof- already resting on the start button- depresses it.
Everypony lets out a sudden gasp as the ship practically explodes into motion. The windshield polarizes, but bright, glowing stars still come into being and flash past, racing to somewhere behind the ship.
“What the-!?” Lunar Wing gasps.
“It- It works!” Night Skies screams excitedly.
Flight waits just long enough for her rapidly climbing acceleration readout to top a thousand gees, a mere two seconds. “Depolarize the hull!” she orders.
“D-Depolarizing,” Wing answers, hitting the switch. “I… Something seems to be messing with the sensors, Princess. I’ve lost the pirates.”
Flight ignores her for five more seconds, before finally letting out a sigh and leaning back in her seat, a smile on her face. The reserves had just stabilized, at very nearly depleted, and started charging again. “Whew, that was close!” She grins at a very confused Wing. “Go ahead and stand us down to normal running; I doubt we’ll need any of our weapons until we go back below the speed of light.”
Then she pauses, smiling cheerfully at her entire bridge crew.
“Did- Did you just say…” Blacklight eventually begins, brushing her highly unusual acid green mane out of her eyes with one hoof.
“That we’re going faster than light?” Astral Eye, her five-year-old astrogator that would have been too young to be allowed on a starship command deck if she weren’t so amazingly talented at celestial navigation, finishes excitedly.
She nods. “Yes, yes I did. And we are.” She looks down at her console again. “Eight point six cee and climbing. Looks like it’s going to stabilize at about nine.” She looks up again, grinning like a loon. “And that’s minimum power.”
“We… We did it,” Wing mutters. “We… We finally finished the Distortion Drive!”
Flight smiles, and uses her horn-aura- which she and most of her crew have been very tempted to call magic, but nopony knows what it really is- to lift her necklace from the pouch on her pressure suit… and slip it over her neck, allowing the ancient gemstone to slide down inside her suit, against her chest. “Let’s go find Equestria.” She takes the helm, and smoothly steers the ship until the gemstone is pointing her dead ahead, after which she increases throttle smoothly, guiding the ship up to about a thousand times lightspeed.
Well… the computer is taking it there. It might take a while. She looks up, at the comm link to Star. “Star? Seems the hard limit on fully-compensated Distortion Drive acceleration is about thirty point six million gravities. Do you think we can improve that any?”
He shrugs. “Honestly, one second to break the speed of light seems like plenty to me. But no, I can’t think of any way to improve it, right off. Maybe… Maybe once we develop more capable manufacturing facilities, but…” He shrugs.
She shrugs as well. “Eh.” She strikes the all hands key, and waits for the chime to sound through the ship. “Alright ladies and gentlecolts, we have officially done it. One one three cee and climbing, under Distortion Drive, and headed for Equestria. I hope. Let’s celebrate the First Light!”
“Aaaand… There, hundred cee,” Flight mutters, watching the numbers on her panel. They’re still a long ways out from the point the gemstone is pointing at- but it feels closer, almost in-system… and spotting anything with a smaller gravity well than a star is hard to detect in time to stop very far above three hundred cee or so. Dodging around such objects is easier- the computer responds automatically to those, and she can even maintain maximum velocity while she dodges around planets. She looks up. “Where are we at now?”
Astral Eye blinks. “Ahh… Looks like we’re about thirty light-hours from the local Goldilocks Zone, and we’re on a mostly tangential trajectory to it. Ahh… One planet, right in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, about half a degree off dead ahead. Looks like it also has a moon.”
Flight scowls. “Hmm… Think you can get me an intercept? Assume the Distortion Drive leaves us at point five cee when we transition to Gravity Drive, then five hundred gees on the Gravity Drive.”
“Roger.” Two taps later, and the filly already has the projected profile calculated out, and sent up to her panel.
She glances at it; it’s set to have her decelerate into a low orbit. “Got it, making it so,” she smiles. “Let’s find out where we are.” She glances towards Wing, while waiting for the invisible point in space where she’ll start slowing down again.
“I’m not seeing any ships,” Wing mutters. “Nor emissions from such. But those are probably being hidden by the Drive anyways.”
Flight shrugs. “Yeah, I suppose. But, space is all clear up ahead?”
“Yep! … Wait, getting a strange signal on the gravimetrics.”
She winces; that’s the sensor used to detect another ship running under Gravity Drive. “Is it dangerous?”
“I can’t tell. There’s too much interference from the Drive, but I don’t think it’s a military-grade drive.”
She pauses for a second, and nods. “Ahh.” Right, the main difference between a ‘military grade’ Gravity Drive, like the one she’d had before the refit, and regular ‘civilian grade’ drives, is that the military ones can hit a hundred gees cruise, and one fifty sprint… and civilian grade drives can hit forty cruise, and fifty sprint. Her upgraded drive, though, tested at 653.21g cruise, and a whopping 813.7g sprint.
Which reminds her of another difference: Standards. On a civvy drive, ‘sprint’ is the point where internal forces from acceleration hit three gees. On a military drive, that limit is ten gees. Her upgraded drive had been held to the military standards when finding her sprint point.
“Where is it?”
“I can’t tell exactly- it seems to be near the planet. We should still have plenty of space to avoid when we transition to Gravity Drive, even if that occurs at point seven three cee.”
Flight nods; Wing just named the maximum safe velocity for her ship, beyond which it wouldn’t be able to protect itself from space dust and other similar debris. “Alright.” She turns to Astral Eye. “Can we adjust the trajectory, to hold the Gravity Drive below the threshold where it might be detected- assume twice the sensitivity of our sensors?”
“Ahh…” A few taps. “We can do that, but if we emerge at point five cee, we’ll go whizzing past the planet at about point one five cee, and have to come back to it.”
She nods. “That’ll have to be good enough- and we’ll have to revisit these trajectories after we emerge anyways, so…” She scowls. “Let’s adjust our Distortion trajectory to keep us above High Orbit, no collision, if we were to cut all thrust immediately upon emerging?”
“Got it.” Two or three taps.
She makes the miniscule adjustment to the ship’s heading.
Dropping back to regular, Gravity Drive velocities is exactly as rough as expected. Decelerative force apparent peaks at five and a half gees before the fully cutting out. Then, as the Distortion Drive spins down, everypony except flight gasps… and collapses, instantly unconscious.
Flight takes a deep breath, tempted to go right back into Distortion power. She glances quickly at her panel, checks sensors… Coasting through space at about point one six cee, noncollision vector.
She sets the ship into silent running… but keeps the reactors running just high enough to run the Gravity Drive to full power out of current generation.
Then she opens up the ship sensors and starts searching for whatever knocked out her crew.
She’s at it for all of six seconds when Astral Eye lets out a brief scream and bolts upright. “What-!”
She looks up. “What happened?” she asks.
“I- I don’t know. Some- Something hurt, a lot. Felt like somepony stabbed me in the chest, with- with-!”
“With a hot reactor fuel rod?” she offers.
“Y-Yeah! That! Only, it was… worse.” She scowls. “And now it’s gone.” She turns to her panel.
Flight scowls at her panel. “Can you get us a minimum-detectability capture to a very high orbit?”
“Can do, Princess.” Just a couple taps, and it’s done. “Hmm… Looks like…” More taps. “Yeah, we can be even less detectable by pulling a gravity assist off of that moon. Which is not moving like a properly orbiting moon should.”
Flight blinks. “... True. Let’s avoid the moon. Shoot for… oh, fifty k-klicks from the surface.”
A couple more taps. “Got it.”
She locks in the course, and the Gravity Drive starts decelerating.
She takes a deep breath, and lets it go. “Okay.” A pause, and she looks at Astral. “It was a spike of pain in your chest?”
Astral nods. “Yeah. I think the rest of me hurt as well- particularly my wings- at the same time, but it’s all gone.”
Scowl. “Hmm… Try flapping them.”
“What? It’s not going to-!” She cuts off suddenly when she flaps her wings sharply… and goes flying from her seat, to land on her back on the floor behind it two seconds later. “... Uh… Never done that in one gee before.”
“Huh… because that about describes the pain I had before I got my… horn powers.” Her com chirps suddenly, and she blinks at it. “… Oh, intercom.” From Engineering… She accepts it, and Star’s face shows up.
“Uh, Hi Princess. Everypony down here, uh, passed out, when we went sublight.”
She nods. “I noticed, the bridge crew- save myself- did as well. Lemme guess, vague pain throughout your body, burning pain in your horn, and felt like somepony stabbed you in the heart with a half-molten fuel rod?”
He blinks, and stares at her. “H-How…?” he slowly mutters.
She shrugs. “Same pains I had before my horn powers came. Remember my Hands-less Hands? Try it!” That’s what they’d come to call her ability to grip things with her hooves, as if wearing Hands.
Two seconds later, he’s holding one of his Hands with the other hoof, in range of the pickup, and staring at it.
She looks up, across her bridge. “This means we’ve found the source of those powers. And if my guess is anywhere close to accurate, that’s Equestria… and the magic of the ancients. I didn’t pass out, probably because I already have those powers… Then Astral woke first, then you… when you two are the youngest two crewmembers. Well… except Coils, I suppose. Is she awake?”
He nods, shaking himself out. “Y-yeah. She woke first.”
“... Huh. Maybe it takes longer on older ponies…?” She shrugs, and taps a little on her panel, launching a recon drone forwards… and sending its link to Astral. “Astral, can you get this drone a ballistic trajectory that’ll take it through low orbit and fling it back out into space? I’ll have it come back under power and rejoin us later, so I’d like to minimize the amount of time it’ll need to rendezvous with us once we reach our orbit- assuming it doesn’t start decelerating until we’re in stable orbit.”
“Got it!” Astral Eye states eagerly, before tickering away at her panel. It takes her about six seconds before the drone finishes adjusting its trajectory with its mere one forty gee Gravity Drive… and goes silent. “If we wait to recall it until we hit orbit, it won’t have the power left to return to us at full power, so estimate three months. We can knock a lot of time off of that by recalling it sooner- and if we recall it before it gets more than about thirty kilo-klicks from the surface, it should be able to make a capture… to an orbit with a period of about two days, from which it can set itself up a rendezvous, estimate four days total.”
She scowls. “Hmm. We’ll see what it sees, then potentially recall it early. Worst case scenario, if we go to the surface before it gets back, it can wait up here in orbit to provide eyes in the sky. Geosynchronous orbit, in particular, over wherever we are.” She tilts her head. “Come to think of it, it might not be that bad of an idea to do that anyways, even if it does get back before we head down.”
Short Flight takes a deep breath, sitting on the bridge again. Yesterday, it had taken almost a full hour for everypony to wake up- during which the ship killed nearly thirty percent of its velocity relative to the planet. Now, the recon drone she’d launched is fast approaching the planet, and everypony has had a full day to acquaint themselves with their new abilities.
All of the thestrals, and the pegasus Cold Coils, can fly- though the thestrals wobble a lot, and sometimes crash into the ceiling, because they’re used to “flying” in point-zero-five-gee shipboard environments. As for Coils, she’s just as capable of flying as Flight herself: Her wings give her lift, but she can’t control it, so she always crashes into something- usually the floor- with not insignificant velocity. So she, like Flight had been shortly after her wings reached full size, is covered in bruises.
Coils had come up with the rather unusual suggestion of installing a couple of mesh grates in the central cargo elevator shaft and ducting the vertical atmospheric engines to the top and bottom when in folded position, effectively converting it into a vertical wind tunnel. Her sketch had involved rather generic retraction systems to allow it to retain its purpose as an elevator shaft when not in use as a wind tunnel, but she hasn’t refined the design yet, so it hasn’t been built. Coils had promised that such a tunnel would be immensely useful for learning to glide in a full gravity… then, eventually, to fly.
Shooting Star, on the other hoof, had only barely managed to make his dropped Hands twitch with his horn, otherwise just showering sparks and getting a hornache.
She opens the feed from the drone on her panel, as she knows several of her bridge crew have done as well. At least a dozen ponies not on her bridge are watching too- like Coils, Star, and all of the ‘marines’ left over from the Shadouette.
Lunar Wing lets out a low gasp as it races past twenty k-klicks of altitude at point one six cee.
Flight looks sharply up at her. “What is it?”
“It’s-! … Hm. Good thing it’s not under power. Looks like there’s some kind of Gravity Drive field surrounding the planet, to a depth of about twenty k-klicks. Nothing we can’t work through, but any significant use of the Drive- beyond, say, two gees, or so- will be detectable.” Pause. “Looks like there’s a similar field around the local moon… and a beam of sorts, fifty k-klicks or so across, from center to center.”
She nods. “That would explain why that moon isn’t orbiting like a normal moon. But that also suggests they’ve got some extreme Gravity Drive tech- I want the hull fully polarized whenever possible. She glances to the side. “Turn up the reactors as high as you need to to support that and still allow maximum Gravity Drive activity out of current generation.”
“What about stealth?” Night Skies asks.
She scowls. “I wish. But if they’ve got the power to hold a moon like that, chances are we’ve already been spotted. I want to maintain our stealth as much as possible- including not using the Gravity Drive for anything but internal gravity and inertial compensators anywhere near that zone- but I don’t want to be caught with cold reactors… again. And hull polarization isn’t passively detectable from afar.”
“... True.”
“Alright then.” She glances at her panel, raises an eyebrow, and looks up at Wing; the drone has already passed three fifty k-klicks, the distance between the planet and the moon, on the way out. “Start the recall,” she orders. “Have it start by just killing velocity.” She looks over at Astral. “Can you build it a return profile that’ll put it in a similar high orbit to ours, without ever running the Gravity Drive within twenty k-klicks of any of the interference zones? Don’t worry about a rendezvous right now.”
Six seconds pass.
“Ahh… Looks like it’ll take about two weeks, after we orbit, to be on a similar orbit.”
She nods. “That’ll work. Depending on what it saw, we might go to meet it before leaving, or be on the surface by the time it gets there.” She looks over to Wing. “So, what did it see?”
Wing switches the feed going to everypony- including itself- to the recording. “This data is about three hours out of date… Mind, it was when we got it, but still- that kinda happens when it’s three light-hours away.” She zooms in on the planet during the approach phase, and scowls. “Why does cee-fractional imagery always have to be so blurry…? Uhh, I don’t know about you, but that looks like a really nice continent. Um… Huh, that’s some strange cloud formations…” A little more zooming. “That- That’s not possible!”
“Magic,” Astral declares. “It has to be magic, if it’s letting them build that out of clouds.”
Flight stares at the unmistakable shape of an airborne, floorless sports stadium made out of clouds. On the side of something that looks vaguely like civilization… and is also made of clouds.
“That has got to be magic,” Flight mutters. “Any signs of surface-based civilization?”
Skies lets out a snort of laughter.
“As opposed to cloud-based? Let’s see…” She squints at her panel. “Funny, that looks almost like some kind of hybrid city. It’s mostly made of clouds, but I’m seeing the colors of artificial building materials- matches painted wood and glass- and the shapes of high-rise structures.” More panning. “That looks like some kind of farming town… Hang on.” Some vicious panning. “That’s definitely a road of some kind- and I want to say it’s a rail road.” She zooms out a bit. “... And there’s a mountain settlement, seeing a lot of gleam from… matches marble. Looks like a very fancy place.”
“So,” Flight begins. “Assuming these are all part of the same nation, which one do you think would be the capital- and where the greatest, ah, mages would gather?”
Wing scowls. “... Hm. I think the mountain place could be the capital- there’s certainly enough marble, that seems to be in high demand for palaces and government structures no matter where you go- but the mages and engineers…” She pans some more. “... Huh, that looks almost like Manehattan City, just a bit… shorter. That might be it for the engineers- gotta have a thriving port there, surrounded on almost all sides by water like that- but mages…” She scowls, panning around. “There looks to be a few more farming settlements. I’m going to say we don’t know enough, just yet, about what a mage would need to be able to predict them. It’s certainly possible they would tend to gravitate to the capital, for proximity to the royals and ‘upper class’ housing, but that’s all conjecture.”
“... Alright. Any suggestion that it’s ponies living in these areas, or is cee-fractional too blurry for that?”
“Hmm… No, I’m not seeing anything. Um… Oh, there’s something. There’s a volcanic land on the other side of that ocean- looks to be inhabited by some kind of large, largely nomadic lizard, but I’m seeing signs of civilization. Like, that looks like a diving board into a lava pool.”
“Largely nomadic?” Flight asks, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah. No sign of permanent homes or other trappings of what we call civilization, and the signs I’m seeing of civilized items are scattered pretty wide.”
She scowls. “Hmm… Considering the lava diving board, let’s just assume they’re some kind of fireproof lizard for now- like dragons, maybe. I want to say they look too big for the high-rise and stuff we found on the main continent, though.”
“Yeah… Must be a diverse planet.”
“Alright then. Let’s plan on dropping down someplace around the main continent once we reach orbit… assuming it is a pony civilization down there, and that we find clear signs of heavier-than-air craft, spacegoing or not. Lacking signs of such, we can splash down in the ocean nearby and walk onto the beach someplace to meet as… uh, travelers, from someplace. If not ponies…” She shrugs. “We decide then.” She looks at the Astrogation section. “Astral, if we were to run the Gravity Drive right at the current detectability but supplement it with the main engines at full power, both accelerate and decelerate, how much sooner could we hit our high orbit?”
“Uhh,” Skies mutters uncertainly.
It takes Astral less than a second to get the numbers. “Several days,” she answers. “Orbital insertion could be completed in about… twenty-six hours, to our current niner point six two days. And that’s including a short period of zero Gravity Drive power, within twenty k-klicks of the interference zone- not that it’d be providing much at that point anyways, at about a tenth of a gee.”
She nods once. “How much extra fuel would we burn?”
“About twenty tons- about three percent of available fuel, allowing for return to Equineothame.”
She blinks. “What-? How full are the tanks?”
“Ninety-nine point three seven percent,” Skies answers promptly. “It was point three eight percent when we left Equineothame.”
She scowls. “Alright, send it to me, we’ll make it so. And…” She scowls. “Hmm. The reserves hold enough to light off the Distortion Drive. If anything comes for us on the way, we might want to power it on and rabbit back home.” She glances sideways at Skies. “And if we do go down, we’ll probably want to make a quick stop by the ocean to refuel either way, just in case.”
“Alright then, how is it looking?” Short asks. “There ponies down there, or no?”
Lunar Wing glances up from her perusal of live video data; it’s about twenty-four hours after her decision. “Yep, they’re ponies. And they speak English, by the way. I think I found an interesting pedal-powered helicopter for one, but that’s the only heavier-than-air craft I’ve spotted. Everything else is hot air balloons, blimps… or pegasi pulling wagons. How they’re keeping them from falling, I have no idea.” A glance. “And it looks like the mountain town is the Capitol; massive castle with guards surrounding it, complete with a guard barracks and several other government buildings, plus several noble estates. The guards are using swords and spears, though, so…”
She nods. “Let’s try not to give them a reason to find out about our armor. Or weapons, for that matter. Anything else of note?”
“I’ve spotted steam power, looks to be just the train, though. I think they use magic for all the day-to-day tasks we use electricity for. So…” Wing shrugs. “Our ship would probably scare them out of their wits, and I’m not all that interested in finding out how effective the hull plating is against magic just yet, either.”
“Hmm…” She smiles. “Astral? Can you get us an adjusted course, to drop us down directly over that big ocean between the pony mainland and the dragon-occupied region?” She glances at Wing.
Wing nods. “I’ve spotted seagoing ships at the northern end, and in both other oceans bordering our ponyland, but everything between the ponies and the dragons hugs the pony coast pretty well.”
“Got it,” Astral states.
She smiles, and sets in the course Astral just sent her. “Here we come, Equestria.”
“...Hang on,” Lunar Wing mutters, squinting at her panel.
Flight looks up at her. “What is it?” They’d descended successfully down into the ocean; it’s now been about a day and a half since the splashdown, almost three full days since her decision to land. She’s swimming the ship towards the shore- and about three hours away from the subsurface parking location they’d selected on the way down.
Wing glances up. “I’ve been looking over the footage we captured on the way in, and I haven’t seen a single thestral. And, there seems to be a much higher proportion of adults to youth than anywhere we’re aware of.”
She scowls. “They must have longer lifespans. Maybe it’s the magic? In any case, that kinda takes out all our options, doesn’t it? Most of the crew is thestrals.”
Night Skies nods. “And the rest below age ten.” She looks over at Wing. “Any suggestion at what age a local is considered an adult?”
Wing scowls. “Haven’t seen anything definite, but I’ve found what looks like a higher education institution up in that mountain city- and several smaller schools scattered across the nation, one or more per town. They seem to be attended by anything from foals- age five or six- to mid-teens. So, if I had to guess… Fifteen, twenty?”
“Great,” Flight grumbles, and looks sideways at Skies. “I think we might want to build Coils’ wind tunnel- and make sure we all know how to fly before we go exploring. It’d be good to actually have the abilities ponies will assume we have. We can keep the stuff they won’t assume hidden, just in case.”
“Soo… now what?” Flight asks. It’s been a few weeks since the “landing”; the recon probe she’d launched has been in geosynchronous orbit for a few days, and confirmed Wing’s observations. The wind tunnel had been a soaring success, and everypony had learned to fly- though while the thestrals adjusted fairly quickly to their flight power, and thus didn’t crash more than once or twice across the bunch of them, nopony acquired more bruises than Flight herself. Coils had, rather fortunately in Flight’s opinion, already been able to flap her wings in time with each other.
So some of the thestrals had come out to the village they’d parked near… only for all the locals to scream and vanish into their homes or other structures. The recon drone had spotted an armored pegasus flying away from town at the same time, in the direction of that mountain town.
Now, everypony came with- after some judicious use of makeup and, in Flight’s case, a dress, to hide all the bruises. And… ponies still vanished into their homes. They’d walked to the middle of town, and paused to look around. Star and Coils had tried knocking on a few doors, but only managed to make screaming houses.
Skies looks around the town square, and the abandoned market stalls. “I don’t know. At this rate, they might be less frightened if we came in powered armor with the ship floating overhead.”
Flight blinks a couple of times. “I… Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Incoming,” Wing announces, pointing up into the sky.
Flight follows her hoof, recognizing the twitch left over from the mare’s habits of using Hands, to find… it looks like a large, dark blue version of herself, with both wings and horn. And… Yes, that looks like a crown as well. She scowls. “Princess or queen?”
“She matches one of the two we’ve seen on murals, and the auditory arrays haven’t ever heard the term ‘queen’, only ‘princess’, so…” Wing shrugs. “Looks to be one of a diarchy, though what they call her I’m not sure.”
Flight blinks, as the incoming pony comes near. “Wait. You mean to tell me that the common pony screams and hides in fear around here, so they send in a member of the royal family…” She looks up at the incoming pony, who is very definitely within earshot by now. “With no guards?”
The incoming royal snorts, marching industriously forwards after her touchdown. “We need no guards,” she declares… and her horn glows briefly, launching all the thestrals out to sea in but a moment.
Flight immediately crouches down, spreading her wings to cover the other two. Her dress rips clean in half in the process, but at this point, she doesn’t care. “Don’t touch them,” she orders.
The royal, however, stares at her for two seconds… before her horn starts glowing briefly. Her blue aura appears around Flight as well… then both ponies vanish into thin air.
Princess Luna could hardly believe what had happened. She’d gotten word early this morning that some strange, pony-like creatures had been sighted in that coastal town, looking around… and everypony wanted to know if she thought they were safe. They’d been described as ‘creatures of the night’, so she’d come.
They’d been there in force… with three foals. A dark grey-brown unicorn colt, a blonde-maned, grey pegasus filly, and a blue-and-white-maned, mint green unicorn filly with a dress. The pegasus had been very visibly favoring one leg, and the creatures had looked more monster than pony, so she’d banished them from the town.
The unicorn filly- who had greeted her by asking after her guards, not something an undistressed pony usually does- had responded by spreading the wings that were hidden under her dress, splitting the dress in half in the same motion… and revealing extensive bruising.
She hadn’t heard the filly’s words while she stared in shock; she had not expected to find a filly princess. Realizing that, and knowing just how dangerous an angry, despairing, injured, or otherwise distressed Alicorn can be, she’d then taken the filly back to Canterlot Castle in a single teleport… and, immediately upon arrival, used a quick cleaning charm to clean any open wounds the filly might still have.
She’d been wholly unprepared for the result. As it turns out, the filly’s coat had been dyed, hiding even more extensive bruising all over.
She can’t stop herself. She grabs the poor filly up in a hug, holding her tight. “Oh, you poor thing,” she begins. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure-!”
With a bang and a momentary glow of gold, she suddenly finds the filly forced out of her grip- and herself flying rapidly backwards through the air, straight into her drawing desk, which fractures apart.
It takes her a couple of seconds to recover- and mourn the loss of the drawing desk- before she realizes what the filly is doing, having fallen back to the floor.
She’s gasping for air.
She nearly facehooves; she’d been crushing the poor filly to death in an effort to comfort her.
Which was, almost certainly, not the most comforting thing she could have done.
Princess Short Flight scowls at the wall across the room, sitting defiantly in the middle of the floor. The royal mare had attacked her, multiple times- and so, she’d fought back. By now, she’s fairly sure the mare is trying to pamper her… and failing dismally. Not only is the mare not listening to a word she says, but she seems to think she’ll be interested in baby toys.
Now, after a good few hours of varied combat, capture, and evasion, she’s run out of ideas… and so she’s allowing the mare to drive that scratchy brush violently through her mane while she searches for an opening that might afford her an escape.
She scans the carnage for a second. Nearly everything in the room had been destroyed during the fight. Two desks have been reduced to splinters, one that she never got a good look at until after it died, and one a worktable with important-looking documents littering it. The massive chandelier had been reduced to very tiny fragments all over the bed, which had then been… popped, for lack of a better term, when a solid kick had sent the mare into it so hard it’s now about six inches long. Naturally, broken glass had gone everywhere after that. Both nightstands had been demolished; one still vaguely recognizable and on the other side of the room from the bed, having been thrown as ammunition, and the other embedded in the ceiling from when she’d hidden under it.
The bathroom door, and surrounding wall, had been shattered by multiple hits, of both physical and magical sorts; all of the porcelain inside is in fragments, and only a frantic valve turn by the mare had kept the thing from flooding the entire castle. During that valve turn, she’d nearly gotten away, through the balcony doors that landed somewhere in the gardens below. Six bookshelves have been reduced to cinders; three more to splinters, when used as clubs. The books, to pulp.
The closet door is lying flat on the floor, snapped clean in two; the mare had retrieved some baby supplies from it early on, before getting kicked- baby bed wrapped around her barrel- straight back into it for some rather loud crashing. That’d been the first near-escape, which had been foiled by some kind of magic wards on the main exit doors.
Even the ceiling has taken its fair share of hits. There’s fragments of marble everywhere, and at least one cake- she’s not entirely sure where they came from, but they’d afforded her another near-escape, this time through one of the new windows- had hit the ceiling so hard it’s still up there.
Oh, and there’s at least six new windows, two of which are larger than the balcony doorway itself. And, the mare now has more bruises than she does, though she’s acquired a few new ones of her own as well. The fancy armor that had been proudly displayed on a stand in the corner is now all over the floor, crumpled like tinfoil and shredded apart, the gemstones embedded in it all blown to smithereens. There’s even a couple rings the mare had used to block her from using her horn- but when she’d pushed hard enough with her mind, those rings had exploded as well- and violently, at that. The first one had disoriented the mare long enough she actually made it outside before the mare caught her and dragged her back in.
Very suddenly, a potential opportunity presents itself… though, she’s pretty sure it’ll only be an opportunity if she pretends to have fully calmed down.
A voice is drifting in from outside, and seems to be catching the mare’s attention- reminding her of something important, it would seem. If she’s lucky, she’ll be able to convince the mare that she’ll stay… then that something important takes her attention far enough away for long enough for her to escape.
By her luck, it does. All she had to do was to slump down on the floor, completely ignoring the debris, when the mare told her to stay… and the mare turned her back on her, walking out onto the balcony.
She waits hardly two seconds, before she takes to the air- thank Equus she’d devoted so much time to her wind tunnel- and flies quickly to one of the new windows. A quick peek out shows the mare, standing on the balcony, and horn glowing. She can feel the energy flowing from her… and estimates where she can go without getting caught.
Unfortunately, almost everything on this side of the structure- looks like some kind of castle or palace- is out, as she’d either draw attention with the noise of her wings… or take too long to get away, with the direct result that she’d be almost certain to be caught.
There’s one exception, and one exception only, that she can see. Not far away, there’s another balcony, with another wings-and-horn mare, horn glowing in time with the first, though this one is white, with a much brighter colored, also strangely waving, mane.
A second balcony, with doors hanging wide open.
She takes a deep breath, and launches herself for it, flapping her wings in the open only once and coasting the rest of the way in, against the very rapid sunset. Another reason she can’t just hide somewhere- her bright colors will make her easy to find in the darkness.
In this room, she finds another bedroom, and winces internally, glancing at the door… sealed tight. Probably with a similar magic thingy as the first mare had.
So, thankful for the soft carpet in here muting the sound of her hooves, she darts under the bed, and hides as far under it as possible. She’ll wait here until tomorrow, then make her escape either through the main door or through the balcony door… while causing as little damage as possible. According to the photos and recordings Lunar Wing had been able to scavenge these last couple weeks, this white pony is the other diarch of the nation, and she’d rather not involve her in the disaster if at all possible.
She takes a deep breath, recalling the planning meeting she’d had with everypony before they headed out. When it was just the thestrals, they hadn’t had a ‘regrouping location’; instead, Wing had tracked them with the drone, allowing rescue teams to be sent wherever. This time, nopony is left aboard ship to keep it tracking them- so they’d planned for what would happen if anypony got separated… and lost. They’d pointed out the mountain town, and a rather sizable settlement just down the mountain from it, almost directly south.
If anypony is lost, they’ll make their way to that settlement as quickly as possible, to await rescue… or to board a train to the town the ship is just off of. The mountain is pretty visible, really no matter where on the continent one is, so the nearest settlement clearly visible from the foothills of the mountain had been selected. Unfortunately, though, they hadn’t been able to ascertain the name of the local village yet, so that’s as far as she can go without recognizing a spot on a map- which she finds very unlikely- or meeting some of her crew.
She scowls to herself. Even if she’s successful now, and makes it to that town, what will keep the dark diarch from just dragging her right back?
She doesn’t know. Maybe she’ll give up. The only things she hasn’t tried yet would be Volume Eleven, though she doesn’t particularly want to terrorize the town… and directly attacking the darker diarch. She doesn’t want to do that unless she absolutely has to- as much as the mare’s attacking her is technically an act of war, she’s willing to ignore it… and doesn’t want to commit an act of war against a nation that may or may not be willing to ignore it. She’d probably be able to pass it off as self-defense, but outside of an Equineothame court, which will swallow anything she says hook, line, and sinker, she’s not certain.
Finally, the sky darkens unnaturally fast- which makes sense to her; according to Astral Eye, the planet’s rotation is obviously actively controlled, rather than natural. Compounding that with how Lunar Wing told her how these two seemed to be known for making the sun and moon raise and lower, and she- like the rest of her crew- rather suspect these two are the reason the planetary system behaves as oddly as it does.
She watches the gold-covered white hooves pace their way in from the balcony, listening to the sounds of a clearly exhausted pony. Gold horseshoes, and other pieces of fairly simple regalia, get discarded onto the floor, before the bed shakes from a pony landing on it.
She waits. Anytime now, the other diarch will finish searching her room for her, and start making a lot of noise- probably all around the place, including in here.
It takes almost fifteen minutes before she hears anything. An explosion of noise comes from outside, as if someone had switched on a speaker system.
The mare on the bed, having already fallen asleep, snorts, but doesn’t seem to wake.
She waits. The noise outside moves around, changes form… repeatedly. But it doesn’t come inside.
She allows herself to doze off a few times, albeit rather frequently awoken by fresh bursts of noise outside, and at least three times by shifting and grumbling on the bed above her. It would seem the white diarch doesn’t like the yelling either, but also isn’t being awoken completely.
Morning seems to take forever to come, but come it does. The white diarch grumbles irritably when an alarm clock goes off somewhere, before ambling out of bed to start getting ready.
Flight takes a deep breath. It’s now the day after she escaped- hopefully, the dark diarch will either have given up… or stopped combing the area for her. Today, she’ll try to get outside, figure out where the mare took her- and, hopefully, locate and set out towards that gathering town- or the mountain. Maybe, if she’s lucky, even find something to eat on her way out.
The white diarch has an… interesting morning routine. She starts by ambling over to her dresser, and brushing her mane, tail, and coat. Then, she does some strange magical exercises in the air; one seems to be based around some kind of tug-of-war with herself, while the other is clearly combat oriented, with shields and bolts of magic.
Then she dons the armor from the stand in the corner, and practices a few martial combat techniques, before repeating her magical exercises- and adding a few with the physical weapons on the armor.
Then she removes the armor, returning it to its stand, and dons the regalia she’d discarded the night before, and repeats the magical exercises again.
Then, she draws some kind of treadmill out of a cabinet, and runs on it for fifteen minutes, before putting it away and heading outside to raise the sun. Finally, after raising the Sun, she simply crosses her room, leaving the balcony doors wide open, and heads out through the main entrance, which she does not leave open.
Flight takes a deep breath, and waits five minutes or so before moving to the balcony door, and peering out of it. The coast seems clear.
She points her ears carefully… She can hear the noise of the dark diarch somewhere on the other side of the structure.
She’s safe to go.
She slips outside, and launches herself upwards, against the side of the structure, searching for a nook to hide in. It seems like some kind of castle, so she quickly finds one- and hides under the stairs on what appears to be a two-level balcony off a library.
From this vantage point, she scans the terrain beyond the structure. It would seem the dark diarch took her to a mountain settlement- possibly, even, the same mountain they’d used as a reference for finding that gathering town.
Should make that part easy.
She scans the terrain beyond the mountain; rather helps that this structure is right up by the edge, too. She spots no less than three towns, though- and without seeing the mountain itself, she’s not sure which one is the gathering town.
And of course, the dark diarch’s noise is coming- she’d probably be caught if she tried flying out to get such a reference.
She settles down to wait. Maybe tonight. She knows about what the angle should be between her ship and the gathering town, from the perspective of the mountain- and the recon drone is in geosynchronous orbit almost directly above her ship. Once the mountain faces away from the Sun again, she should be able to spot it in the sky, and use it as a reference to identify the gathering town.
Night seems to take forever to fall. She rather suspects it’s at least in part because she was so nearly spotted, by golden-armored guards close to a hundred times and the dark diarch herself almost a dozen times. The one guard that she had been in plain view of had turned his head to glare at the open sky, complaining to himself about a ‘Princess Luna’ going crazy, at the perfect time to have missed her completely.
She waits what must have been ten minutes after nightfall, before creeping slowly forwards to scan the skies, searching for the gleam of the recon drone.
It takes her a long time to find it. It’s not quite the brightest star- but it is the only one that isn’t moving… and so, the one that’s not moving with the rest.
She follows an imaginary line down from it to the horizon, then draws an imaginary line between that and herself. She then pivots that line, on herself, by an approximate angle, and follows it out again.
She finds it. A town she hadn’t spotted earlier, since it’s not visible from the back of her hiding spot. A town on the edge of a forest, with multiple train lines coming together at it. A town with a single fluffy white structure floating just overtop of it. A town with a lake next to it, and an apple orchard thrice the size of the entire rest of the town off one side.
She takes a deep breath, memorizes the direction, and withdraws back into her hiding spot. The dark diarch is still storming about the structure. More of it sounds like it’s in the distance, but she keeps coming back erratically. She hunkers down for the night, and allows herself to doze off. Hopefully, by morning, the dark diarch stops searching- or passes out from the effort. As near as she can tell, the dark diarch has been at it continuously for twenty-four hours now- and, presumably, was awake for at least twelve hours before that.
It’s another rough night.
When morning finally comes, Flight awakens with the sun again. Even as she does so, she knows she’ll be fighting sleep deprivation for the latter half of the day, possibly even sooner- but with how much more active the guards are during the day, she can’t afford to be caught snoozing. She does not want to be forced to go Volume Eleven on that poor diarch.
She watches, and she waits.
It’s been a couple of hours, judging by the angle of the shadows the staircase is casting, when something happens.
The dark diarch’s noise suddenly cuts off, at the structure. It’s continued to come and go randomly.
She tenses. Had she been found? She looks around. No, nopony. Not even the Guards are in sight. Had the diarch fallen asleep?
Very suddenly, her questions are answered as a veritable explosion of noise comes from below.
“YOU KEPT THE CITY UP ALL NIGHT LAST NIGHT, AND THE CASTLE THE NIGHT BEFORE!”
It sounds like the other diarch has had enough, and is going Volume Eleven for her. She scowls briefly- it’s not nearly as loud as her Volume Eleven. Perhaps the diarch didn’t think she’d need to yell quite so loudly, and knows how to control it?
In any case, her opportunity has come. Everypony in the entire castle will be distracted by the noise.
She bolts out of her hiding spot, leaps over the railing, and drives her wings as hard as she can, aiming for the open sky. As she goes, the Volume Eleven behind her seems to slow down, redshifting deeper and deeper… until it leaves her range of hearing. Then it returns, starting way deep, and blueshifting back again- but this time speaking backwards- and continuing to blueshift into higher pitch until it cuts off with the suddenness of an axe, at the beginning she’d heard before she’d left.
She grins. This’ll be quite the story to tell the thestrals- not many ponies can go supersonic without a ship or other aircraft. She estimates she hit at least mach three point five before passing the beginning of the Volume Eleven. She glances back towards the castle, hoping no guards are following her.
… None are, but it won’t be much of a challenge. At right about the point she went supersonic, there’s a massive, expanding ring of blue and white energy, to match her mane and tail- and she’s leaving a matching contrail behind her as well.
She switches to a glide, allowing the air to slow her down… and the moment her tail stops leaving that contrail, she dives at least half a mile, before resuming her glide towards that town.
It takes her a few hours to reach the gathering town; by the time she arrives, it’s already late afternoon, getting into the evening. Thankfully, she could glide almost the entire distance, even after her half-mile dive, so it had taken minimal effort.
She skirts overtop a couple of rooftops, before picking an alleyway to drop down in, and landing rather clumsily. Assuming Wing was right and she’s a middle-school-age filly on this planet, her first order of business will be to find an orphanage that’s willing to provide her with food and shelter and not ask too many questions. She can stay there until her crew arrives… though, depending on how long that takes, she might have to find a way to not get adopted.
She pauses briefly, tilting her head. What if she told them she’d gotten separated from her family a few days ago, while they were traveling- and didn’t know where they went? She scowls. No, that kind of report would almost certainly draw the attention of the dark Diarch, forcing her to Volume Eleven on the mare… and, possibly, use her magic directly. She’s been avoiding using it on anypony, unsure if it would be safe or not.
She takes a deep breath, glancing both ways down the alley, checking for any ponies.
She crawls carefully to one end, peering out. Left, right… and left again.
“All clear,” the startlingly pink pony peering around the corner with her from right next to her states quietly.
“Gah!” She recoils away from the mare, straight into the brick wall on her right. No horn, no wings- earth pony. So how’d she appear out of nowhere? Why is she wearing a camouflage hat?
The mare lowers the binoculars she’d been holding up to her eyes. “You hiding from somepo-!” She then lets out a titanic gasp, leaping into the air and keeping her head in exactly the same spot, before vanishing in a blur of pink.
Flight took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. That pink mare had probably been a hallucination… though why she would have hallucinated something quite so pink, let alone using binoculars and wearing a camouflage hat, she had no clue.
She checked if the coast was clear once again. Left, right… left. All clear.
She checked back down the alley, just to be sure, before glancing up and down the street again and heading out, in the direction of the main road. The main thing she was watching for was any potentially hostile ponies- the ones that might want to attack or otherwise harm her.
The next thing she was looking for, is clues as to exactly what local age bracket she fit in.
Not that she expected to find any.
She followed the side street up to the main road through town, and looked both ways down the main road. There were a few ponies walking up and down it, but not too many.
She took a deep breath, emerged from hiding, and stepped out onto the main road, walking down it in the direction of the town square. Hopefully, somepony would willingly offer her a clue on what she should be looking for. Alternatively, if one of her crew happened to be in town, that would solve everything.
She reached the square without issue… or event. Several ponies passed her on the way, but not one stopped to say anything to her- suggesting one of two things.
One, that ponies her age were normally allowed to walk through town on their own.
Or two, that nopony cared.
She wasn’t sure which one it was. Everypony around here was bigger than her- that she’d seen, at least. All at a fully mature size… which was, back in Equineothame, normally reserved for those ponies with only a few years left to live. It was almost like they had… frozen their aging processes.
She paused at the edge of the town square, scanning the businesses around. There were no orphanages visible- and she was also unable to identify a hotel or job board.
Then, she spotted something. It was a large tree with a door in it, and a picture of an open book on the sign out front. She could just make out the words, above and below the book, identifying it as the Golden Oaks Public Library… and making her instantly thankful that for all that had changed in the thousands of years since Equestria was lost, the language did not diverge.
She took a deep breath, and headed for it. If nothing else, the librarian should know where to point her.
Inside, though, she didn’t find what she was looking for. There was a rather hastily-erected sign standing in the middle of the room, to instruct anypony seeking the librarian to go to the Carousel Boutique and ask for Spike. Fortunately, on the bottom of the sign, there were instructions for how to reach the boutique.
She heaved a sigh, turned around, and headed back out of the building.
The instructions turned out to be fairly easy to follow. The Carousel Boutique didn’t look much like a normal business to her- but it had the sign out front, and the door was unlocked, so she pushed it open and entered, looking around.
On the inside, the boutique looked exactly like she might expect any other boutique of its shape to look like, with various ponyquins bearing various garments, scattered across the room. In the back, she spotted a sewing machine, with a white unicorn mare working it with her light blue magic aura. Perhaps the largest difference she noticed, between this place and any comparable Equineothame boutique, was that all the ponyquins were the same size… and the dresses on them were fancier, with more care put into their creation.
… And more gemstones. Either this was a very expensive place to get clothes, or gemstones were relatively common.
The mare at the machine finished with her seam, unfolded the dress, put it on a ponyquin, and started talking before she turned to face her. “Welcome to the Carousel Boutique, where every garm-!” She cut off with the suddenness of an axe when she spotted her. “Oh my Celestia, what happened to you!?” As she spoke, she bolted forwards to look her over more closely.
“I, ahh, crash landed on a dusty road,” she invented nervously. “Multiple times. Um… I’m looking for Spike?”
The mare took a step back, staring alarmedly at her. “... Oh.” Then she turned her head. “Hey Spikey-wikey!”
A male voice trailed out from the backroom. “Coming!”
While she waited for him to show, she inconspicuously took a deep breath, and let it out. As near as she could tell, nopony had rushed off to tell the dark diarch about her; she prayed that nopony would.
The mare didn’t wait for Spike. “Did- Did you not think to clean yourself up?”
“Uh- I’m planning to. But first things are first.”
Right at that moment, a purple… something walked in from the backroom. It looked like a green-spined bipedal purple lizard of some sort. It opened its mouth… and spoke, in the same voice that had responded when the mare called for Spike- albeit sounding more than a little starstruck. “Yes, Rarity?” He even bowed to her, drawing a small snicker from Flight.
She noticed that it made the mare- Rarity?- smile as well.
“Is- Spike?” Flight asked. Unless she missed her guess, this unfamiliar purple creature was Spike… and, apparently, considered part of society- suggesting the thestrals probably wouldn’t be discriminated against here… if ponies knew what they were, at least.
The lizard looked at her almost reluctantly. “Hmm…? Wait.” He looked at her more fully, actually distracted from the mare. “Why do you look like a young Lyra… with wings?”
She blinked. “Like who?”
He shook his head. “Nevermind. So what brings you to…” His eyes widened visibly. “What happened to you?”
“You only just noticed?” Rarity asked him incredulously.
“I, ahh, crash-landed on a dusty road,” she repeated, before he could respond. “Multiple times. Um…” She glanced in the direction of the library. “You’re the librarian, right?”
Spike scratched the back of his head with one claw. “Ahh, well, no, actually, Twilight’s… away. But I am the librarian’s assistant. What did you need?”
She nodded slowly. “... Ahh. I’m…” She took a deep breath. “I’m actually looking for food, water, and shelter, for while I wait for my crew to come find me. I can work for… all of the above.”
“Uh-!” Spike began, before Rarity cut him off.
“You mean you got lost and crashed on that dusty road?” she almost screamed.
“Yeah… Good thing we agreed ahead of time to meet in this town if we got separated.”
The mare promptly wrapped her in a hug, drawing a startled squeak from her. “Oh, you poor thing! Tell you what, why don’t you stay here, in my spare bedroom, while you wait? And we can get started by getting you all cleaned up, can’t we?”
“Uh,” she mumbled. “Maybe? I mean…” She looked towards Spike.
Spike scratched the back of his head again. “Aside from that, there is an orphanage in town, but they’ve already got too many foals and not enough staff as it is.”
She scowled, and looked up at Rarity. Apparently, she did fall into the younger bracket. “You do know I don’t have anything to offer in return, other than work, right?”
Rarity gasped theatrically. “In return? Why would I ask for payment? No, no! I insist you don’t pay for it!”
She blinked. “... Okay, I suppose that works, if…” She took a deep breath. “Any rules I should be aware of?”
“Just one: Do not, under any circumstances, allow Sweetie Belle- my younger sister, who also lives with me- to cook or help you in the kitchen.”
Flight blinked. “... Okay, I can live with that.”
“Alright then, to the spa!” Rarity announced.
“Uh, please don’t make a special trip for me,” she asked. “I’ll be fine with just a bath.”
Rarity smiled. “Oh, nonsense! I was going to go to the spa already!”
“... If you say so.” She shrugged her wings, and stepped out from in front of the door. “Lead the way.”
The journey to the spa was, thankfully in Flight’s opinion, uneventful. Rarity kept mumbling to herself, but nopony stopped to stare, nopony ran away, nopony stopped to ask about her. A few ponies waved to Rarity as she passed, but they didn’t involve themselves. She thought she saw at least three of them doing double-takes.
Finally, they reached the spa. Flight hoped they had something for her bruises- either to remove them completely, or to mask them. She didn’t particularly want to look like somepony had used her for a hoofball for the rest of her stay in this town.
The spa seemed to be staffed by two mares- two mares that, in fact, looked like pallet swapped versions of each other. “Ahh, Rarity,” one of them greeted. “The usual?”
“Yes, please,” Rarity answered. “Plus one- this little lady had a… rather unfortunate crash earlier.” She gestured towards Flight- then looked down at her. “And so you know, these are Aloe and Lotus.” She gestured towards them in turn. “They always do a really good job- you can count on them.”
The one she’d called Aloe smiled lightly, though she couldn’t hide the wince when she looked at her properly. She must have looked really bad. “And that goes double for a Princess,” she stated.
Flight rolled her eyes, and waved a hoof. “Don’t worry about that, please.” She did wonder how the mare knew she was a princess- but that was a question for another time.
“Prin-cess?” Rarity gasped, looking down at her. “Oh- Oh My!”
Lotus stepped forwards, and gestured down the hallway. “This way please, Princess- we’ll get you cleaned right up.” She glanced up at Rarity, who was busy swooning. “Don’t mind Rarity- she must’ve been distracted by the bruises.”
“I don’t mind it,” she answered. “Honestly, I prefer it when ponies don’t go out of their way to show deference.” She shrugged her wings. “I mean, I’m a pony too, right?”
Lotus nodded softly. “We show everyone a good amount of deference here; ponies like to feel important. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure what we’d do if you’d asked for more.” She chuckled. “Anyways, we’d best get started by washing off all the dirt and grime. Do you have a preference for baths or showers?”
She shook her head. “I’m used to showers, but I’ll take whatever.”
Flight was only just beginning to enjoy the spa visit when Lotus seemed to notice something. “Ahh, Princess?” She sounded distinctly uncertain.
“Mm?” she answered. She had, about a minute before, climbed onto the massage table next to the one Rarity was on.
“You… You have been eating healthy, right?”
She blinked. “I normally do,” she muttered. “Why?”
“Well-!” Lotus began, but Rarity cut her off.
“Normally?” She sounded mildly alarmed.
She nodded lightly. “I… haven’t had anything to eat since I, ahh, got lost.”
Rarity seemed to be stunned into silence by that.
Not Lotus, though. When she spoke, she did so haltingly; it sounded like she had been shocked, and was dreading the answer to her question.
“How… How long ago did you… get lost?”
“Eh,” she muttered, thinking back. “It was… about three days ago.”
“And… what about… water?”
“That’s been…” She paused. “I’d say hard to find, but that’s a bit of an understatement.”
“You- You mean- you haven’t had any food or water for three days?” Lotus asked. She still sounded like she dreaded the answer, but her tone had picked up a note of urgency.
“Yeah, right about.” Then she looked sideways, at where both Aloe and Rarity were staring at her, their jaws hanging. “What?”
“Three days…?” Lotus muttered. “P-Princess, you need to eat something,” she stated. “Probably the only reason you’re still alive right now is that you’re an Alicorn. Anypony else would be already dead.”
“Okay,” she muttered.
“No, Princess, it’s not okay,” Lotus retorted. “You need to eat something, and you need to eat it now. Your life is at stake if you don’t. I’m putting this visit on hold for you- you head for Sugarcube Corner or something. I’m sure Pinkie Pie will be willing to feed you without any questions… or payment.”
She tilted her head, climbing off the table. “Pinkie Pie? Who’s that?”
Lotus looked at her. “Ahh… she’s a very pink pony that works the counter at Sugarcube Corner. Are you sure you haven’t met her…?”
She put a hoof to her chin. “She… doesn’t happen to wear a camouflage hat and use binoculars to look around corners, does she?”
“... Sometimes. Why?”
“Huh. So what’s it mean when she makes a really big gasp and disappears?” It seemed like the perfect opportunity to understand what the pink mare had done in that alleyway.
Aloe, Lotus, and Rarity all facehooved.
“She will definitely be willing to serve you,” Lotus said decisively. “And you don’t want to keep her waiting.”
She didn’t miss Aloe looking at Rarity. “Shall we put your visit on hold too?”
Flight scowled, while Rarity nodded. “Why would she be waiting?”
“Because… You’ll see.”
“C’mon, D- er, Princess,” Rarity pleaded, leading the way towards the exit. “You do not want to miss it.”
“But-!”
“No buts,” Rarity declared. “We can come back here tomorrow.”
She scowled, and followed. “Alright then.” She hoped Rarity wouldn’t turn out to be like a lesser version of the dark diarch.
She had worried that Rarity was dragging her to Sugarcube Corner because she was trying to decide for her what was good for her.
She needn’t have worried.
From the moment she stepped in the door, the pink pony was back. So was a large amount of confetti, a bunch of streamers, a great big banner with ‘Welcome to Ponyville’ written across it in large letters, and no less than three towering cakes.
“Welcome to Ponyville!” Pinkie announced. “And Welcome to your Welcome to Ponyville Part- Wait, you’re a Princess? Ohno!” She promptly vanished. Three short burps, in quick succession, disappeared all three cakes, before a pink blur blazing around the room replaced all three with much bigger, fancier cakes, and completely redid the decorations in about seven seconds. Finally, a red carpet unrolled to a stop at Flight’s hooves, and Pinkie landed next to it with a bow. “Welcome to your Welcome to Ponyville Party, Princess!”
Flight just stared, for several seconds, before she shook herself. Her horn magic most definitely did not make her better than anypony else, if an earth pony could do that.
Then, she sighed, and looked at Pinkie. “Please don’t worry about that,” she asked. “I’d much prefer it if ponies would treat me like they would anypony else.”
Pinkie looked up at her, seeming shocked, with tears beginning to appear in her eyes.
She smiled. “But thank you anyways. You didn’t know that, and this does look fit for a Princess. So, um…” She looked around. “I’ll have to admit, this is the first true party I’ve, well, ever been to. Lead the way?”
Pinkie looked like she might explode with the excitement.
As it turned out, the party was so much more than Flight thought it ever could be. Pinkie had shown her to dozens of different party activities she could participate in, offered her enough cake to build a pony, and showed her around the refreshments. Flight politely declined to participate in many of the activities, telling Pinkie that she was still exhausted from her long journey- and so would be content to sit and watch, and let other ponies enjoy those activities.
So it was that, somewhere around half an hour later, she was to be found lounging at a table near the refreshments, watching everypony else enjoy what was ostensibly her party and sipping on a mug of apple cider- her favorite out of the refreshments provided.
“Good evening, Princess,” a carmel-colored stallion asked, seating himself at the same table with his own refreshment. “I hope you’re well?”
One eyebrow raised marginally- from his tone, he almost sounded like her medic. “Certainly better than I was this morning,” she answered softly. One of the strangest things she’d noticed about the Equestrian ponies was that all the older ones seemed to have images on their flanks. Plenty of other ponies her size didn’t have those images, though, so she didn’t stand out- and she hadn’t seen what his was before he sat down. She did wonder what they meant, if anything.
“I noticed you don’t seem to be… well, eating very much?”
She nodded. “I haven’t eaten in three days,” she answered. “If I eat too much right now, it’ll just come back up again.” She shuddered. “And I don’t want to do that.”
He nodded. “A wise choice. May I ask what happened?”
She looked at him. “How do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Well, if you haven’t eaten for three days, and have quite so many bruises… though most of them look like old bruises from here, soo…”
She blinked. “... Oh. Um… I learned to fly. That… that made most of the bruises.” She grinned.
He nodded. “I take it you weren’t born an Alicorn?”
She shook her head. “Unicorn. But I learned to fly- then, that became very, very important.” She shuddered. “I… got separated from my crew. Speaking of which, if you see any dark-furred ponies with catlike eyes, bat wings, and sharp teeth, let me know, because that’s probably them.” She paused, looking at him.
He scowled. “I… can’t say that’s familiar. Would they be a fourth tribe, or…?”
She nodded. “Yes- they’re Thestrals. Pretty similar to pegasi, and nocturnal.”
“Huh. Learning something new every day, I suppose.”
She grinned. “I guess.”
“Anyways, what happened when you got separated?”
“Well, I… spent half the day fighting your dark Diarch, then all the time since hiding from her. Then I got here, and… everything has been getting rather rapidly better since.”
“ ‘Dark Diarch’?” he asked. “You… You’ve never heard of Princess Luna?”
“Princess Luna?” she asked. “No, I don’t think so. So, what’s her lighter-colored sister called?”
“Ahh… that’d be Princess Celestia. You must be from pretty far away if you’ve never heard of Princesses Celestia and Luna.”
She grinned. “Well, I’m from so far away that if you take however far away you think I’m from, then multiply it by the largest number you can think of, you’ll probably still come up short.”
“Really?” he asked. “I know some pretty faraway places.”
She nodded.
“And some pretty big numbers.”
She shrugged. “Big enough and far enough to multiply to make the distance that light would travel in a dozen years?”
“Uhh… Isn’t light instant?”
She grinned. “It’s not- it’s just fast enough it looks instant at a planetary scale. If…” She looked up. “Yeah. If the light were to make a curved trajectory just outside the planetary atmosphere- which it never would, but if it did- it’d take something like a tenth of a second to wrap around the entire planet, and get back to where it started.”
“... Wow. How long of a walk would that be?”
She let out a snort of laughter. “If it were physically possible to walk it, very long.”
“Ahh,” he muttered. “Um… Do you mind if I take a look at some of those bruises?”
She raised an eyebrow at him for a second, evaluating him, then shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
By late the following morning, Princess Short Flight looked the part once again, even though she was still malnourished and had no regalia. The caramel stallion at the party had used a healing spell to make her bruises fade to almost nothing- and, after a rather large breakfast Rarity had prepared, they’d gone back to the spa… and Aloe and Lotus were both very good at their jobs. She’d left the spa feeling better than she’d felt in months, possibly even years.
Then Rarity had taken her back to her boutique, and gifted her a dress that she’d custom-made for her in fifteen minutes. Flight still had no idea how Rarity managed to design and make the dress in that short of a time, especially after the first three designs had been thrown out because she’d requested it not look explicitly royal. That’d been the only limit she’d placed on the mare’s creativity, though- and judging by Rarity’s reaction when she’d made the request, it’d been received more as a release than as a limit. The mare apparently had a certain distaste for royal-looking clothing, making it particularly difficult for her to design. Flight hadn’t asked about that distaste, but she rather suspected she’d had an… unfortunate run-in with royalty as well.
“Alright then,” Rarity finally nodded, apparently satisfied, as she paced around Flight, who was standing in the Boutique, wearing the new dress. It was a very nice dress, and fit her far better than any of her Equineothame-sourced dresses. “That’s done. Now, just because you’re a Princess in a foreign land is no reason to let your education slide, is it?”
“Agreed,” Short Flight answered, wondering what kinds of educational programs she could get through here that her parents would never approve of.
Rarity nodded. “So I was thinking, perhaps you should go to school with Sweetie tomorrow?”
“Um,” she muttered, raising a hoof to stop her. “Maybe, maybe not. I’m already aware the educational system here is very different from the one where I’m from, and I know the history won’t match, so… perhaps a placement test would be in order, to minimize repeated work?”
Rarity blinked. “Hmm, yes, definitely. And if that’s the case, we should probably go see Cheerilee about it today.”
She blinked. “Okay. So… I don’t know. Lead the way?”
Ms. Cheerilee was a very friendly mare, though she seemed more than a little disbelieving. “H-Hold on,” she muttered. “You’re… You’re asking me to administer you a placement test?”
Flight nodded. “Uh, yes. I’m not from around here, and already know the education system is very different from where I’m from, but I don’t want to let my studies fall slack while I’m away. Is that something you can help with?”
Ms. Cheerilee blinked a couple of times. “S-Sure,” she stuttered. “It’s just… usually, the Princesses teach any new Princesses what they need to know, so…”
She shrugged. “They’re not here, I am,” she stated. “And I’m not from Equestria, soo…”
“... Alright. Um… How do you… er…”
“Just treat me like you would any other filly my age,” she stated.
It took almost two hours, but it turned out that she actually knew more than Ms. Cheerilee- who was the local schoolteacher- on some subjects, like math, and was well ahead of her age in just about everything else… except history, of course. As it had turned out, she had been wise to engage in so much self-study during her long hours in orbit so long ago.
And of course, after she recited about thirty years of Equineothame’s history, Ms. Cheerilee had decided to declare her proficient- as far as she could teach her, at least- in that as well… which left nothing but green checkmarks on the list.
“Well, I don’t think there’s anything I can teach you,” Ms. Cheerilee said. “And, with the possible exception of History, you’re well ahead of your age on just about everything.”
She tilted her head. “Even magic?”
She nodded. “And flying. Most unicorn foals your age can’t do anything with their horns, except produce sparks- and most pegasus foals your age can’t hover, fly for more than a few seconds, or glide very far at all without crashing.”
She blinked. “Huh.”
Cheerilee shrugged. “And if you’re wondering about your earth magic, that doesn’t really have anything to learn at your age- but you’re managing it very well anyways.”
“Earth magic…?” she wondered aloud. “And I am?”
“Uh… yes? I mean… it’s primarily physical strength, at your age.”
“... Oh.” She looked at her hoof. “I… guess.” Then she tilted her head. “What would walking on walls count as?”
She smiled, and chuckled. “That falls under Pegasus magic- and it’s a rare pegasus indeed that can do it reliably, even fully grown.”
“Huh,” she muttered. “So… Would I be correct to assume you wouldn’t be able to teach me unicorn magic?”
Ms. Cheerilee let out a good-natured snort of laughter. “Yes, that would be entirely correct. I think the best local authority on that would be Twilight Sparkle; she lives in the library, but has been out of town recently, doing nopony knows what- even Spike, her assistant.”
She scowled. “What about further away?”
She shrugged. “If you were a little older, I’d suggest Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, in Canterlot. You’d probably be a natural.”
She winced. “I guess it’ll have to be Twilight. Unless… is there someone else in town? That isn’t, ahh, away all the time?”
“Well… The only other pony in town that went to Celestia’s School would be Lyra Heartstrings. Which… You’ll almost certainly want to play that meeting carefully- you do look like her.” She tapped her chin with a hoof. “And if you do your studying in the library, Twilight can help out whenever she’s around.”
“What the-?”
Flight looked up at the door. “Hi.” There was a purple unicorn standing in the door and staring at her- specifically, one that fit Lyra’s and Rarity’s descriptions of Twilight Sparkle. “Lyra’s in the kitchen if you’re looking for her, and I haven’t seen Twilight around yet.”
The mare stepped in, closed the door firmly behind her, and turned to face her again. “But- But who are you? How did you become an Alicorn? Why haven’t I heard-!”
“Hey Twilight,” Lyra interrupted, sticking her head into the room. “Why don’t you come join me in the kitchen, so I can explain things before you drive Princess Short Flight to insanity with the same set of questions she’s been answering at least three times daily since she got here?”
“I think the record is twelve times just yesterday,” Flight mused. “And two of those were to the same pony, to boot.”
“What-!?”
She shrugged. “To be fair, I didn’t actually answer most of them, just sent them to the bulletin board outside the Town Hall where they put the notice I made, but still.”
Twilight’s head snapped back and forth a few times. “What-! But-!”
“I’ve got a copy of it in here, Twilight,” Lyra stated, sounding bored. “Quit panicking and get in here- once everything’s explained, there’s something I need your help with.”
“What-? Er-!” Her mane started flaking apart, giving her a much more wild look.
Flight trotted over to Twilight, and casually stuffed a hoof in her mouth to stop the sporadic orations Twilight had started. “Spike said to tell you to take deep breaths,” she stated, and removed the hoof.
Twilight took two massive, deep breaths, her mane regaining some of its cohesion, and walked woodenly into the kitchen to talk to Lyra. As for Flight, she returned to her study of the magic textbook Lyra had given her. The notice on that bulletin board carried short answers for all three of Twilight’s questions, and her description of the thestrals… and subsequent request to be informed when they arrived.
“Hey Twilight?” she asked. Rarity- and Lyra- had been right; Twilight was much more able to keep up with her learning pace. For some reason, the study rate that was considered ‘medium-slow’ back in Equineothame was considered ‘crazy fast’ in Equestria. “What’s this?” She lifted a scroll in her magic, from where it had been resting in front of the case of gemstones that Lyra had called the ‘Elements of Harmony’.
“That?” Twilight asked, trotting over to look at it. “I don’t…”
“That’s the letter Celestia sent you last month,” Spike supplied, from the top of a ladder. He’d been kept very busy pulling books out and putting them away, between Flight’s rapid magic training and Twilight’s mysterious research project. “If I remember right, it has a partial spell of Starswirl’s that she wanted you to finish.”
Twilight gasped. “What-!” Then she unrolled the scroll quickly, scanned it, and scowled. “... Huh.” She then read the spell out loud, horn glowing.
“Uh,” Flight began. “That didn’t sound right- no rhyme, for one. You sure that was a good idea?”
Twilight glanced up at her horn, tilted her head, and blinked. “... On second thought, no, it was probably a bad idea. But at least we should have a clue what it did…?”
She shook her head. “Nope. I only saw the Elements of Harmony sparkle a bit, and reposition themselves.”
“... Huh,” Twilight muttered.
Princess Short Flight sighed into her hoof. “You mean to tell me,” she began. “You scrambled your friends’ Cutie Marks, cleaned up your own mess… and got wings for your trouble?”
Twilight nodded, before touching the brand-new appendages once again. “It feels weird… But it means I can show you what I’ve been working on much sooner than I thought! Oh, we’ll learn so much!”
Less than ten minutes later, the newly-winged Twilight teleported both herself and Princess Short Flight clear across the continent.
Lyra sighed. “Come back safe, please. I don’t fancy explaining to your crew that you died on a scientific expedition before they could get here.”
Princess Flight stumbled in the snow when Twilight’s teleport fairly stuttered to a halt.
Her first thought was that it wasn’t right. She’d read about that teleportation spell and, though she hadn’t understood it well enough to attempt it herself, she’d understood it plenty well enough to know that it shouldn’t have stuttered.
Next to her, Twilight let out a gasp of pain, and collapsed. “Ow…” she moaned.
Flight took one glance around, before lighting her own horn with a shield spell. The teleport had left them both in a pool of warmth… in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Her first priority was to keep the heat in.
As she did that, she checked on her magic reserves. She’d fed Twilight for the teleport; they had agreed that, if something were to happen as soon as they arrived, Twilight’s experience would be more important.
… Not that it seemed to be helping very much. With her shield up and doubled for thermal insulation, she turned to Twilight. “Twilight? You okay?”
“Ow,” Twilight complained slowly, rubbing her horn. “That… That was a terrible idea. I… I should’ve broken it up into two separate jumps. I…”
Flight blinked; that’s what she’d expected Twilight to do. “So because the power cost scales with the cube of the distance…” She sighed. “That would explain why it took so much magic. You… you didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”
“I think I did,” Twilight moaned. “Burned my horn. You must be powerful.”
She winced. “Um…” She looked around.
That looked useful. Visible, behind a dozen or so Wendigoes, was the ice-encrusted form of a large, surface-capable starship. It was smaller than hers, and didn’t look like it could tolerate nearly as violent of a reentry. It did look like it had wings, though, so atmospheric flights shouldn’t be an issue. Assuming she could get it off the ground in the first place, of course.
She nodded slowly. It most certainly wasn’t on, but the Wendigoes were eating through her shield- and she was fairly sure they wouldn’t get through the alloy. Once aboard, she could see about how functional it was after however long it had been sitting there- which was actually a hope, because even from this far away, a quick magical pulse told the tale of a whisper of magic surrounding it.
Preservation magic.
She’d have to shatter that spell to get aboard… but the alloy should be able to stand up on its own for a week or two, if that magic had done its job.
She touched Twilight’s hoof. “Twilight? Do you think you can manage another teleport, about forty meters, through some ice and metal?”
“What-! Why?”
“It won’t be long before the Wendigos get through my shield.”
Twilight scrambled to her hooves, looking wildly around. “What-! Oh no. We’re doomed.”
“Twilight!” Flight barked, and used her magic to rotate Twilight to face the ship, and force her to look at it. “Can you get us inside that, with an air bubble, or not?”
Twilight stared for a second. “We found it,” she muttered.
“Twilight!” She contemplated going to Volume Eleven, but didn’t.
She jumped, as if struck. “Gah! Um, why an air bubble?”
“I’ll explain later- can you do it?”
Twilight flinched. “I can do it.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and lit her horn, visibly suppressing a flinch from the pain.
Flight quickly crushed the preservation spell, tied herself into Twilight’s teleportation, and provided the steering component of the matrix through her own horn. The corner of Twilight’s mouth twitched in a thankful smile as her efforts reduced the strain on the older alicorn’s injured horn.
Then, they both vanished into thin air again.
There was no stutter in the teleport this time. It was still only her second time teleporting, though, so Flight still stumbled when they appeared, and looked around, horn aglow with a few various scanning spells.
“Owowowowow,” Twilight complained, rubbing her still-glowing horn with one hoof.
“... Like I thought,” Flight muttered. Then she glanced at Twilight. “I got the bubble now, thank you.”
Twilight’s horn stopped glowing immediately, and Twilight sat down heavily. “Ow… So… why the bubble?”
“Sorry for feeding the Wendigoes a little there,” Flight muttered. “It was either that, or let them reach us. As it was, another three seconds or so and they would’ve broken through my shield.” She shuddered, and took a deep breath. “So in here was the obvious choice. If the Wendigoes can get through the alloy, we’re done for really no matter what we do- but if they can’t, we’re safe, for now.” She looked both ways down the passage they’d appeared in. “When I saw this ship, I noticed it had a preservation spell on it. Which I shattered- but that means that, long ago, somepony put this thing into storage.
“And if they put it into storage properly, they almost certainly cycled the atmosphere out for something inert- and completely unbreathable. I would’ve expected it to leak out over the thousands of years it’s been, but the air in here- outside of our bubble- is still one full atmosphere of chemically pure argon, so that preservation spell must’ve done its job well.”
“Argon?” Twilight asked.
Flight blinked at her. “... Right, Equestria doesn’t have the Periodic Table. It’s a non-breathable inert gas. They fill starships with it when they put them in storage because it’s hard to remove all the air on the surface of a planet, and oxygen- the part of the air we need- is bad for the materials, over time. By filling it with argon, the ship can last dozens of times longer than it would otherwise.” She took a deep breath. “And it looks like, between the argon and the preservation spell, this thing is still in good condition. You’ll want to heal up your horn before teleporting again, but that’ll take weeks- and we might be able to fly this thing out of here anyways.”
“... Oh. What about food? We didn’t… bring any.”
“We’ll have to check the kitchen, if it has one, and possibly look into foraging around outside. Via teleportation I’m afraid, pretty sure the airlocks are all covered in ice.” She paused. “Here, I’d like to make the bubble a standing spell, let us go different ways without suffocating. Sound good?”
Twilight nodded. “It’d also mean you wouldn’t have to worry about it all the time.”
She nodded. “That too. Okay then, here goes.”
Close to six hours later, Twilight stepped into the room Flight was working in. “Hey.”
Flight glanced up at her. “Hey. You doing okay?”
Twilight nodded. “Been using a warmth spell. My horn regenerated enough for that, but I’m needing more and more power.”
Flight nodded. “Yeah. The Wendigos have figured out where we are, and are trying to freeze us to death, I think. They’ve gotten the wind up to almost a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, and down to about minus a hundred Celsius. They don’t seem to have gotten any lower, but that’s still going to chill us in here pretty quickly- the ambient temperature of this ship was about minus ten Celsius.”
Twilight tilted her head. “What are you doing…?”
Flight tapped a button on the panel in front of her. “Seeing if I can turn it on,” she stated. She gestured up at the massive machine the panel was on the side of. “This is the ship’s power source- a machine called a ‘nuclear reactor’. If I can turn it on, it is also the ship’s main source of heat.” She sighed. “I’ve already verified it’s in working order, and that the fuel is still viable- even checked that it wasn’t frozen. The issue now is that if I power it on, it’ll melt down fairly quickly- there’s nowhere for the heat to go, since the external radiators are all frozen.”
Twilight stepped up next to Flight, gazing across the glowing panels in wonder. “So… how does it have power?”
“I’m spinning the turbine manually right now. Not a lot- just enough to run the computers.” She looked up. “And… There, that should do it. By the time that door needs to be opened, it will have been defrosted by the radiator.” She reached up a hoof, held it over the panel, and closed her eyes, concentrating for a second. The low humming coming from the massive machine increased.
“What are you doing?” Twilight asked.
“Spinning it faster,” she answered, then touched the button. A sudden, much louder whine came from the machine, then stopped; Flight recognized it as the control rod motors running cold. “Giving it the power it needs to turn on.” She indicated a meter on the display. “Tell me when that hits two hundred degrees, please.”
Twilight looked at it. “It says minus twelve,” she muttered. “And it’s not moving.”
“It’ll start climbing in a second,” Flight stated- right on time for it to become a negative eleven. “There it is. That’s the reactor core temperature.”
“And two hundred is operating temperature?” Twilight asked.
“Uh- no, actually,” she answered. “Two hundred is well below operating temperature. But that’s when it’ll be hot enough to produce enough power for me to start the life support- and render our air bubbles moot.”
“... Okay.” Twilight muttered confusedly, and looked up at the machine. “What’s that humming?”
“The turbine,” she answered. “It’s still way cold, so the bearings are humming. I don’t want to increase the power in the core any further until the turbine has a chance to warm up.”
Then Twilight tilted her head. “And isn’t minus eleven- no, ten- too low? Won’t it be frozen as well?”
She shook her head. “Nah. The coolant it has in it is antifreeze coolant- good to minus fifty. And according to the computer, this thing is certified for powered startup as low as minus thirty. Only reason the radiators were frozen is because they were at minus seventy. Little heating spell and they’re only minus thirty now.” She tapped the bottom of the panel. “Once this gets over about a hundred, it’ll start sending heat to the rest of the ship.”
Almost two hours later, shortly after the temperature meter finally resumed its slow climb after stopping at a hundred for over an hour, Flight’s horn stopped glowing, and she sat down, letting out a sigh. “Whew. That was a pain.”
Twilight blinked. “It hasn’t hit two hundred yet.”
She nodded. “I know. But it started heating the water for the turbine from the moment it hit a hundred- and right about when it passed a hundred is when it started producing steam pressure to drive the turbine itself. Now, it’s producing enough to be self-sustaining.” She sighed. “Still want to wait before increasing power or activating life support, though.”
Twilight twitched. “And are you sure that power wasn’t better spent on a warmth spell?”
She nodded; the argon in the room outside their air bubbles was down to minus twenty. “Any power spent on a warmth spell is lost for good. It’s critical right now- so thank you for yours- but there’s no long-term benefit. Now that this thing’s on, once it heats up a bit more, I can increase power… and start fighting off the Wendigos. According to this computer, when running at normal operating temperature and power, this thing produces enough heat to maintain normal temperatures inside at up to minus twenty outside.”
“But you said it’s minus a hundred outside.”
She nodded. “And if we concentrate the heat output to the inner spaces, we can probably give ourselves heatstroke if we want to. As it is, I estimate we can keep the inner spaces at normal temperatures, and the outer ones just above freezing, and still have some heat left over to defrost the engines and the like, see if it’s going to be possible to fly this thing.”
Almost two full weeks passed relatively peacefully. Twilight spent most of her time resting, sometimes doodling on something, trying to heal up her horn. Flight spent much of each day digging through the computers and managing the ship’s systems; it took her only a single day to get the atmosphere all throughout the ship cycled out for a breathable atmosphere, and that in the core sector- including the reactor room- heated to normal temperatures. The end of the second day had seen the interior temperatures hitting the numbers she’d told Twilight about- and she’d been working on defrosting the outside ever since.
It was rather fortunate that the shipboard kitchen had been well-stocked in preserved space food. Twilight despised it, as did Flight- but it was food, and it was enough to keep them alive. Water was fairly easy to harvest from the ice outside.
Finally, on the thirteenth day, Flight stepped onto the bridge for only the second time. Being on the extreme front of the craft, like her ship’s bridge, she couldn’t heat it to the same temperatures as the inner sectors of the ship; the Wendigos made sure of that. She trotted up to the panels, glancing around at them as she lit her horn with a warmth spell.
It took her about a minute to make her way to the helm, and wake it up. It didn’t recognize her ID chip- but none of the consoles did, because they didn’t have the transponders to see it. Fortunately, it was a very trusting civilian design, so she didn’t need to authenticate herself.
She tapped a couple of controls. She’d run these same self-tests the first time she’d visited the bridge two days prior.
They all came back green.
She checked the instrumentation… All green.
Then she touched a couple keys, and pushed the throttle up until the main forward atmospheric engines started spinning. She let them spin for a few seconds, then pushed the throttle up to de-icing strength. She then remoted her way into the reactor and set it to full power- it didn’t have the same automatic adjustment system her ship did.
Finally, that done, she adjusted the life support to use some of the additional heat from the reactor to heat the entire ship to normal temperatures… and switched her heating spell into a remote blasting spell, with which she started blowing ice away from the ship.
Ten seconds later, she touched the key to run the VTOL engines up to full speed and open the hatches, even though the blades were held flat.
Exactly as expected, the Wendigos went crazy. They knew something was happening.
Then the one thing she was worried about happened: A Wendigo got sucked into one of the engines.
The engine didn’t even stutter. The engine temperature dropped significantly for a couple seconds, but that was about it. No impact was detected.
She breathed a sigh. The Wendigoes were clearly gaseous beasts- she had been right to set the life support to a fully self-contained atmosphere. That meant there was limited oxygen aboard… but it also meant the Wendigoes couldn’t get in.
The engines built up to de-icing speed, and then stayed there, littering her panels with vibration warnings. The entire ship vibrated from the engines- and each time a hunk of ice would break free of the blades and vanish out the back of the engine, one of those warnings would disappear.
Then the door opened, and Twilight rushed in. “Princess! It’s shaking!”
She glanced up. “I know. I’m de-icing the engines.”
Then Twilight glanced out the windshield, and gasped. “The Wendigos-! I can teleport us out of the storm- that’ll have to be-!”
“Stop,” Flight ordered.
She flinched. “What?”
“Go ahead and teleport yourself,” Flight told her. “But don’t take me. I’ll have this thing in the air in about five minutes. If you’re willing to wait another day or so, I can fly this thing all the way to Ponyville.”
Twilight winced. “But the Wendigoes-!”
“Pose no threat. A few of them have been sucked through the engines already.” She looked out the windshield in time to see another one get too close to the intake, make a valiant attempt to escape, and vanish into the engine. Then she shrugged. “Though, I suppose they’re technically EDFs, not engines, per se, but everypony calls them that.”
“EDF?”
“Electric Ducted Fan. It’s…” She sighed. “I’ll dig up the blueprints for you once we’re in stable flight, and explain it then. For now, I’m a bit distracted.”
As expected, the Wendigos did not want to let her leave- but they couldn’t directly restore the ice. They could bring in a snowstorm, but she was kicking up enough of a maelstrom with the engines that nothing could stick to the ship.
So they brought in every Wendigo for what had to be a hundred miles, and chilled the air outside to very near absolute zero.
They very nearly were able to force Flight from the bridge- but the nuclear reactor at the ship’s core was powerful enough, combined with Flight’s warmth spells, to keep her from freezing behind the consoles.
Then she took off on VTOL power, and powered the forward engines once again. The Wendigoes battled to send her tumbling out of the sky- but, especially once the ship had built a hundred kilometers an hour or so of forward velocity, they didn’t stand a chance.
She quickly accelerated the ship to forward flight, allowing the VTOL engines to be closed- and leaving the Wendigos long behind. Once the Wendigos fell behind, the ship was only plowing through minus fifty degree air, which the reactor could keep up with on its own. She and Twilight stayed strapped into their seats on the bridge for another several minutes anyways, until they climbed out the top of the storm, into the thinner- and much less turbulent- upper atmosphere.
Then, Flight was the first to leave her seat, after setting the autopilot. “Hokay, that was a pain,” she stated.
“What-!” Twilight gasped. “Aren’t you still flying it?”
She blinked. “No, actually. I turned on the autopilot- it’s flying itself right now. According to the navigation system, we’ve got about a twenty-two hour layover before we reach Ponyville, and it’s going to fly itself for the entire time.”
“But-! But-!” Twilight looked between Flight and the helm.
“It’s high technology,” Flight stated. “My ship could make a suborbital hop and land in Ponyville, all on its own. This thing doesn’t have either suborbital or landing autopilots, so we’ll have to make do with the standard aircraft autopilot and a manual landing. At least it does have VTOL power, so it won’t be hard.”
“V-TOL?” Twilight repeated.
“Vertical Take Off and Landing. Means, it’s capable of hovering, and moving straight up and down in the air, including for takeoff and landing. Much easier than attempting a runway landing in a civilization that doesn’t have any runways.”
“Huh. Twilight? You might want to come look at this.”
Twilight trotted up as Flight tickered away at the controls. “What?” She looked at the control console. “What am I looking at?”
Flight gestured out the windshield. “Not here, there. Ponyville.” Then she opened the hatches for the spinning VTOL engines, and switched the main engines to reverse thrust to kill her approach velocity for a VTOL landing.
Twilight looked, and gasped. “What the-?”
Flight knew what she was looking at. Even from this far away, she recognized the two Diarchs, walking through the middle of the town, side-by-side. There were ponies on either side.
And the part that Flight found most interesting, was that there was a large, VTOL parking spot painted on the grass just outside of town, almost perfectly matching the spots on the landing apron at Orbital Control back in Equineothame. It even had size codings on it- and it was much smaller than would be needed for her ship… though only slightly larger, she estimated, than would be necessary for the ship she and Twilight had found. She started swinging it around for a landing, already knowing what to expect when she opened the door.
Her crew had obviously seen it with the recon drone, realized who was flying it, and prepared. They were waiting for her.
“P-Princess!” Twilight half-yelped. “And…” She scowled. “What’s all that paint…?”
“Somepony is expecting us,” Flight stated. “All that paint on the grass is a parking space… for this ship, so that’s where I’m landing.”
“But… But who…?”
“I’d bet it was my crew, but it wouldn’t be fair to anyone that took it.”
“You mean…” Twilight muttered.
“That they’ve arrived, and I’m no longer stranded? Yep.” Right about at that moment, the ship entered hover, and she powered the forward engines off entirely. She rotated the ship and drifted it over to the landing spot.
Twilight wouldn’t stop prancing nervously in place all the way down. The prancing intensified when Flight deployed the landing gear- and when the wheels first touched down, Twilight squeaked and wrapped herself around a chair.
Flight found it highly amusing, as she flattened the pitch of the VTOL rotors and finally started shutting everything down.
“Alright then, Twilight. To the airlock!” She paused, tilted her head, and peeled Twilight off the seat back. “We’re landed, Twilight. Solid ground now, not flying.”
Twilight had, after all, been absolutely terrified that the ship would randomly fall out of the sky during just about any phase of the flight, whenever she thought about it. Flight was pretty sure Twilight was so worried because of how old the thing was.
By the time Princess Flight opened the massive boarding door- for some reason, it had a really big door into the main passenger bay, which suggested to Flight it could do double duty as a light cargo hauler- the external sensors, accessed via just about any control panel she could find, indicated that ponies were gathering in front of the ship, staring at it. The massive engines hadn’t yet finished spinning down; they had much heavier flywheels than the turbines on her ship, and lacked the electric regenerative braking that hers had.
The massive, bottom-hinged and hydraulically operated door finally touched down on the grass. Flight grinned at the long row of staring ponies, and paced forwards, Twilight next to her. “Guess what,” she called. “We found out what Twilight’s been researching!” She pointed up at it with a wing.
A cream-colored earth mare- no, that was Bonbon, Lyra’s marefriend that Flight had only met once- stepped forward from the crowd. “Princesses Flight,” she greeted, “Twilight. Welcome back.”
Then a cloaked pony trotted past the row, apparently not in awe at the ship. “Nice entrance.” Flight immediately recognized Night Skies’ voice.
Twilight flinched, wings spreading slightly as her stance changed. “Who are you?”
“She’s my first officer,” Flight answered amusedly, before turning to Skies. “Where’re the rest?”
“The troopers are taking the shuttle back to the ship right now. Which, by the way, that town is called Southstock.”
She blinked. “Right, we did get that stealth shuttle before we left, didn’t we?” Then she tilted her head. “And that would’ve been nice to know. About how long of a train ride is it?”
“It’d be about a two day journey, including overnight. Mighty expensive, to boot.”
She sighed. “So, ponies still scream in fright when they see you, do they?”
Skies shook her head. “No, actually- the ponies of Ponyville are very… accepting. We’ve gotten some strange looks, but that’s about it. Your poster probably helped with that.”
“... Ahh. So why the hood?”
“To avoid offending the local Night Princess over there,” she answered, gesturing to where Princesses Celestia and Luna were reaching the back of the gathered crowd, both with expressions of curiosity. “We had a… performance with her in Canterlot just last week.”
Flight looked over at Princess Luna, then back at Skies. “She captured and tortured me all day long,” she stated. “Then I escaped while she did her thing with the Moon, and it took three days to get away to somewhere I wouldn’t be dragged back. She can deal.”
Skies shrugged. “Alright then.” She lifted one hoof, and flicked the hood back.
Princess Luna let out an echoing scream, then vanished with a puff of dust. Princess Celestia startled, jumping away from her sister, then looking wildly between where Luna had gone, and towards the ship, as if trying to understand.
Flight blinked. “... Wow. I take it she didn’t want to talk?”
“Yeah. She did not want to talk. Star made some pretty good enchantments that subjugated her in her own bedroom, and only Astral Eye appeared to her. Used the Official Equineothame High-Stakes Interrogation Device as intended, and it still took her three hours to crack.”
Flight winced; the ‘interrogation’ device named had been produced at her father’s orders, and was more of a torture device. After about half an hour, its intended use case reached lethal torture, that could kill out of pure pain overload. “She stood up to it pretty well.”
“She looked like most ponies do after twenty minutes on the thing from the moment we activated the first step, so…” She shrugged. “We think she’s not used to pain- and that her magic protected her from the overload.”
“Ahh. So… one thing I’ve been wondering about. What’s my local age?”
“That? Oh.” Skies grinned. “Turns out Equestrian years are almost exactly twice as long as Equineothame years, with a proportionately hotter star. So, in Equestrian years, tomorrow’s your fifth birthday.”
She blinked. “Really?” Then she rubbed her chin with one hoof. “Does Pinkie Pie know?”
The mare in question stuck her head out from under the massive boarding ramp. “Do I know what?”
“... I guess not. Thought you might like to know that tomorrow is apparently my birthday.”
Pinkie vanished with a trail of “Yesyesyesyesyes…” fading into the distance.
“Are you sure you wanted to tell her that?” Skies asked.
She shrugged. “What? I’m sure her parties are fun. I couldn’t really participate in the first one she threw for me, because I was still recovering from starvation.” She glanced back up into the ship. “Hmm… Is Blacklight available?”
“Ahh, yes, she should be.”
“Think we can turn her loose on the computers on this thing?” she asked, gesturing back towards it. “It was in storage under a few layers of ice, with a preservation spell.”
Skies nodded. “Making it an ancient relic, and a clue to the ancient history of both our civilizations. Yep.” She glanced back towards where she’d come, where a row of cloaked ponies stood. “Blacklight, you’re up,” she announced. “And we’re okay to lose the hoods.”
Blacklight flicked her hood back, and trotted forwards, removing something- Flight recognized it as a portable control conduit, probably tied to the First Light’s Electronic Warfare suite- from a saddlebag. “Alright, ancient history, here I come,” she stated.
Twilight gasped, staring at Blacklight’s mane. “What- Wow. That’s… a very unusual mane color.”
Blacklight laughed. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“Oh?” Flight asked.
Blacklight paused at the bottom of the ramp, grinning. “It’s bioluminescent,” she stated simply. “Ultraviolet. And I can control it.”
She blinked. “Meaning, your mane literally is a blacklight.”
She nodded. “Which is my name, too. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Very interesting, yeah. Anyways, you were going to see what you can learn from this thing, right?”
Another nod. “I figure I’ll start by downloading the database, then go about setting something up to give the common Equestrian access to the information, not just us.”
“Just don’t break anything. This thing is a museum piece.”
“Nice. What’s the power source?”
“Nuclear. Just one reactor, outputs about six times that of NuCoils’ latest, but it’s also some thirty times the size. And, it’s not capable of a passive start, and lacks automatic power adjustment.” She glanced in. “It’d be about the only thing I left on.”
“What’s the fuel state?” It was Cold Coils, trotting up. She was wearing a cloak as well- and had her hood down all along.
“Pretty good, actually- was showing ninety-five percent, once I turned it on. Probably the cold shutdown and preservation spells that let it last so long.”
“Nice,” Coils nodded. “You know how much it needed?”
She shrugged her wings. “I ran it at about thirty percent to make the heat necessary to defrost the thing in minus a hundred degree stormy weather,” she answered. “But to actually power the thing, the computer told me it only needed to run at about ten percent to sustain atmospheric operations, including V-TOL. It’d have to go up to about ninety-five, according to the same computers, to operate the Distortion Drive.”
“What? This has one too?”
She nodded. “Yep. Tops out at a hundred cee, though.” She glanced at Twilight. “Meaning, it’d be about a five month round trip to Equineothame. My ship can do that in two weeks.”
“Distortion?” Star asked, also walking up, though slower. “Does it have suborbital?”
Flight shrugged her wings again. “Yeah, it does. But it’s all out of hydrazine.”
“H-HYDRAZINE?” Star yelled, in shock. Then he flinched. “S-Sorry.”
She waved it off; the last time any hydrazine-based liquid-fueled engine had been used anywhere near Equineothame, or any other planet in that system, had been well over a hundred years ago. Hydrogen hadn’t been nearly as efficient as the ones Equineothame had produced since, but it had still been the go-to fuel for generations. “That’s about what my first reaction was when it said it had hydrazine tanks too,” Flight answered. “I looked for hydrogen tanks, but it doesn’t have any. And at least they’re empty. Same for the dinitrogen tetroxide tanks.”
“What’s… hydrazine?” Twilight asked.
“A very, very dangerous fuel,” Flight answered promptly. “It’s incredibly toxic, very messy, and pollutes the air like crazy. About the only benefit it has is that it will ignite on contact with its oxidizer, making engine design simpler… which, in practice, means hydrazine-fueled ships explode more often.” She took a deep breath. “Just about every ship built in the last two hundred years or so has burned hydrogen fuel instead- much, much safer, and the exhaust is pure water, so it’s much less harmful when we burn it in the atmosphere. It’s also lighter, and more efficient.”
“And that… dinitrig- dinitoug-”
“Dinitrogen tetroxide. That’s its oxidizer, which is similarly toxic and messy.” She glanced back at it. “This thing is never going to orbit again, until and unless I get some engineers in here to convert it to hydrogen.” She shrugged. “Hydrogen’s easier to make anyways.”
“Wouldn’t be very long-ranged on thrusters,” Skies mused. “It’d probably have to refuel every other time it was deorbited, or so. Then again, it’s probably not worth the refit- be easier to just build a new one.”
“Sooo,” Princess Celestia muttered uncertainly, looking between Flight and Skies. Flight had just introduced her crew to the Equestrian Diarch. “Is there… any particular reason why my sister, ahh…” She looked up towards the distant city on the mountainside, and her horn glowed slightly, before she let out a light, amused chuckle. “Why my sister is hiding under the bed right now?” She turned back to Flight.
Flight blinked. “Wow. That’s… She must be quite used to feeling in control or something.”
Celestia’s expression hardened. “What happened?”
“Well…” Flight looked at Skies, then back at Celestia. “How about we start at the beginning, then?” Celestia nodded stiffly, but Flight saw the signs of annoyed royalty. “Which would be… when your sister attacked my crew, throwing them overseas unprotected and with excessive force, then promptly foalnapped and attacked me.”
“And?” Celestia asked- demanded, more like.
She shrugged her wings. “Well, as the reigning Royal Princess of Equineothame,” she began, watching the look of horror crossing Celestia’s face, “I’d be willing to forgive that particular act of war, if you’re willing to, in turn, forgive any and all actions taken by my crew in their effort to locate and rescue me.” She looked at Skies. “I mean, you didn’t hurt anypony, right?”
Skies shook her head. “No, Princess. Princess Luna was the only one we had to use force with- the rest either cowered in fear after a glimpse- mostly the guards, that was disturbing- or thought we were guards, and so complied unquestioningly. The palace chef was a notable exception- he commented on not seeing our kind before, and asked if we had any specific dietary requirements he should know about. We’re pretty sure he thought we were palace guests.
“Anyways. In regards to what you’d be forgiving…” She tilted her head, looking up into the sky. “There’s the obvious, interrogating your sister with force- no lasting harm done, we were able to confirm. And we would have used a less painful interrogation method, but after she incinerated- and pranced on- the cardboard cutouts of us that we put in random hallways…” She shrugged her wings. “We didn’t see any other choice.”
“So that’s where those piles of ash came from,” Celestia muttered.
“Then there’s about a dozen counts of impersonating the Royal Guard and entering the Castle without permission, if the latter is against your laws.” She scowled. “Not that anypony even tried to stop us, so you might want to have a look at your guards, but still. Anyways, your Guard Captain is at least better than the rest. We didn’t show ourselves to him in the flesh- considered it too much of a risk, as he was the only one that responded to the cutouts with suspicion rather than fear or ignorance. Fortunately, he was pretty easy to avoid, once we acquired the Guard schedules- and actually delayed our interrogation by an entire day, by staying a bit late that day.”
“Anyways,” Flight interrupted. “Do we have an agreement?”
Celestia nodded. “Yes, yes, I believe we do. Your people’s trespass will be forgiven in full.” She sighed. “Not that anypony knew it’d ever happened, but still.”
“Very well,” Flight nodded. “I’ll forgive her trespass as well. So then, that means…” She trailed off, looking across her crew. “... Yeah. That means we’re once again the peaceful visitors from outer space that we meant to be from the beginning.” She shrugged her wings. “So, um…” She scowled. “How would a member of royalty from a heretofore unheard-of nation initiate diplomatic contact?”
“You don’t know…?” Celestia blinked.
She rolled her eyes. “And I’m apparently turning five tomorrow, in your years. Honestly, I haven’t really gone through any of the ‘how to Diplomat’ lessons. I mean, that’s what we have diplomats for.” She shrugged. “Speaking of which, if you want to send some back to Equineothame with me, I’ve got the space on my ship to carry a couple hundred of ‘em.”
“So…” Twilight began, looking around. “Where is it?”
Flight looked at her, and raised an eyebrow. They were stepping off the train in Southstock, on the way back to her ship. It’d been a full week since she’d landed that discovered ship near Ponyville- and Twilight was the only ambassador Princess Celestia was sending back with her.
During the time since, Blacklight and the engineers had given it a thorough examination- and Cold Coils herself reduced the reactor to what was basically ‘idle’. It would run the electronics, but really nothing else- and since she’d locked its main controls out, and crafted a set of secondary controls that couldn’t be used to do anything but shut it down, that was it. She’d then explained to Flight that it was stable, and safe, even at higher power levels- but it didn’t have nearly as many safeties, or as many cutouts, as any Equineothame-produced reactor.
“If every ship in Equineothame space was equipped with one of these, well over ninety percent of ‘em would’ve melted down,” she’d announced.
When Shooting Star had inspected the Distortion Drive on it, he’d declared that the tolerances- the margin between minimum operating power and overload power, where the thing would blow apart- were too small, at only five percent. The Gravity Drive on it was better- but since he recognized the design as one of the early Gravity Drive models used before Equineothame even existed, that had an annoying tendency to surge and explode mid-flight, killing all on board, that was out too. Then he’d inspected the thrusters- and informed her that, had she fired them, a good eighty percent of the cones would’ve shattered, and she’d likely have fireballed.
Then he’d inspected the atmospheric thrusters- and pointed out that some of the vibration she’d felt wasn’t because of ice… it was because some of the blades had let go, so the rotors were imbalanced. Given the badly rusted state of the rotors, he told her he was surprised they’d lasted through the flight she’d pushed them through. Flight had later spotted him explaining the various engines, how they worked, and what he was looking for in his inspection, to Twilight.
But all of that had paled next to Night Skies’ assessment. She’d inspected the thing’s structural components- and had closed her analysis by delivering a couple carefully-placed kicks to make the entire right wing fall off.
“The core structure remains intact, albeit with thin enough components it’d never pass an inspection,” she’d said, “but you’re lucky the extremities- like the wings and tail fins- didn’t fall off while you were in the air. And even if you had had the fuel to go suborbital, the heat shield is toast.”
The final nail in the coffin had been Blacklight’s to pound in. She’d analyzed the system’s software- and announced that there were almost no safeties in the software either, meaning that there were any number of control combinations that would cause major problems- and a distinct lack of warnings. As a result, she’d actually wiped the flight computer and physically disconnected the bridge controls.
Unfortunately, in order to pass any kind of safety inspection, that ship wouldn’t just have to be refit, but rebuilt from the ground up.
“You know,” Flight muttered, “if it was that easy to spot, don’t you think it would’ve made the news by now?”
That didn’t stop Twilight. “But it might not have gotten to the main publications yet,” she stated.
She raised an eyebrow. “In two and a half weeks?”
“... True.”
Then she grinned. “Go ahead and look for it, then,” she instructed. “See if you can find it.” She glanced at Skies. “Admittedly, I’m curious exactly how well our hiding spot will hold up against somepony that’s actually looking for it.”
Twilight grinned. “Oh, I’ll find it.” She leaped into the air, and shot into the sky.
“I’m betting she won’t,” Skies muttered.
“Me too, actually,” Star nodded. “She’s smart, but I don’t think she knows what she’s looking for.” He looked at Flight. “And of course, the active camouflage is on.”
Flight let out a snort of laughter; active camouflage was pretty useless when a ship was in motion- but it took a pretty close search to discover a landed ship with active camouflage enabled. Add in the natural camouflage of its position, some fifteen feet below the waves, and it would be next to impossible to find it, even if she knew exactly what she was looking for, and where. “Alright then,” she chuckled. “Let’s give her a clue, and walk to it.”
Fifteen minutes later, Twilight fluttered down to land next to Flight, with the thestrals, with a puzzled expression.
“Something wrong?” Flight asked.
“I can’t… find it,” Twilight stated. Then she glanced at the cliff that Flight and her crew had been waiting at for the last five minutes. “And if you’re planning on diving from here, I can’t recommend it- it’s not very deep.” She paused, looking between Star, Flight, and Skies, who were snickering into their hooves. “... What?”
“Oh,” Flight chuckled. “Only that you found it… but didn’t realize that you found it.” She stepped up to the edge of the cliff. “Open the lock.”
Twilight stepped up next to her. “What are you-!?” She cut herself off with a gasp.
It looked like a door had just opened on the seafloor, exposing a lit metal interior.
Flight grinned up at Twilight. “Because there it is.”
“But it’s… so small,” Twilight muttered.
Star laughed. “Oh no, that’s just the airlock- the entrance. The whole ship is much bigger. I can show you around, once we’re aboard.”
“Yep,” Flight chuckled. “My ship can carry about the same number of ponies as that old thing we found can… with one major difference: She can carry them… indefinitely. Full life support suite, including fresh food. But anyways, want to jump in with me?”
“Won’t we, you know, drown?” Twilight asked.
Flight actually giggled.
“Ah, no,” Star chuckled. “As soon as we’re inside, the outer door on that airlock will close, then we’ll pump the water overboard, and open the inner door, all high and dry.”
“C’mon in,” Flight cheered, and leaped off the edge, using her wings to propel herself straight down into the waves.
It took her mere seconds to reach and enter the airlock, before she turned to look back up, out towards the rest. Twilight and Star jumped together, then the thestrals followed like dark missiles.
Once everypony was inside the airlock, Flight touched a key on the panel, and the doors slid shut, before the water drained out.
Once Twilight scrambled to her hooves, having been the only pony to land on her side instead of her hooves, she looked at the door. “What-! Wow. You must have a powerful gravity manipulation spell in here.”
Star chuckled. “Actually, there’s no magic involved. The shipboard gravity is one of the effects of our powerful Gravity Drive.”
Flight shook all the water off, before trotting through the inside airlock door. “Well, Twilight. Welcome aboard the First Light.”
It wasn’t long before Twilight had been introduced to everypony, and Flight led her onto the bridge.
The first words out of Twilight’s mouth were “Why are there fish out the windows? And why are they swimming up and down?”
Flight giggled. “Because we’re underwater,” she stated. “And sideways.” She hopped up onto her seat, and struck a few switches- unlocking her controls. “Alright. We ready to get underway?”
A series of yesses came back, so she tapped a few more controls. “Alright. Disengaging tractors, moving away from the cliff face.”
The fish visible out the window seemed to slide downwards a little, before they turned and darted away in all directions.
Silence held for a few minutes.
“Alright, flattened out,” Flight stated. “Deploying wings.” A few more taps.
Another minute.
Flight tilted her head, then looked at Twilight. “Shall we terrorize some locals?”
“What? How?”
“By coming straight up out of the water here, instead of swimming out to sea before we emerge.”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “They won’t be terrorized,” she stated. “They’ll just think it’s a little weird. Go ahead and take off here.”
“Alright then,” Flight shrugged. “Operation ‘terrorize the locals’ is a go.”
Wing chuckled. “Sensors standing by,” she stated. “Should be able to get some good pictures.”
“Aaaand, VTOL engaged, surfacing for water takeoff. Um… There, facing Southstock, too.” She tapped a few keys. “Deploying forward atmospherics. Breaking surface… Now.”
“Disengaging active camouflage,” Wing announced.
Finally, the water level fell down across the windshield.
The wings hadn’t even reached the water’s surface when the screaming started. By the time the belly of the ship cleared the waves, the town was once again a ghost town.
Flight sighed, started the forward engines, and swept the ship around to fly out to sea, to make orbit. She tapped a few keys, and set the orbiting autopilot for a five hundred kilometer equatorial orbit. “... There. Astral, can you get the recon drone a rendezvous?”
Astral Eye tapped her panels. “Aaand… Got it. Closest approach half a kilometer, if there’s no turbulence.”
Flight smiled; it was impressively difficult to get a rendezvous with something that was coming out of the atmosphere, simply because the atmosphere itself was unpredictable, and could force the ascending vessel to alter its trajectory just a little bit, resulting in a slightly different timing. This was, of course, unless it was a targeted ascent, such that the ascending vessel was climbing to a specific orbit- but the autopilot didn’t support that.
“Recon drone?” Twilight asked.
Flight shrugged. “Yep. We didn’t know what to expect, so we left one in orbit when we went down. As a matter of fact, it’s because of it that they knew where we were so long before we arrived in Ponyville.”
“Hey Twilight,” Princess Short Flight greeted, as Princess Twilight returned to the bridge, some time after they had transitioned back to the Gravity Drive from the Distortion Drive, once again in Equineothame space. “You doing okay?”
Twilight nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, we won’t need to do that again until we’re headed to Equestria.” Twilight had not taken to the various gee forces very well. They’d done a little bit of training for Twilight, simulating the deceleration in the wind tunnel (where she also learned to fly on the way over), and she had lost her lunch five times out of ten takes.
“Adjust to two-one-three gees in two-six seconds,” Astral Eye announced. “Mark.”
“Two one three gee deceleration in two-zero seconds,” Flight repeated, “Mark.” It was the second time Astral Eye had revised the approach deceleration, since Flight was flying by hoof, rather than having the computer nail all the timings for her.
Eye let out a small giggle. “Readback is correct.” Then she looked at Lunar Wing. “Did I do that right?” She’d asked for the challenge, and was using it as a chance to learn how to properly communicate the vectors.
Flight chuckled. “Exactly right, Astral.” She heaved a sigh. “Alright then, time to call home.” She touched the button on her control panel, to go live on the radio. “First Light to Equineothame Orbital Control.”
“We’re about six light-seconds out right now,” Astral muttered. “Minimum twelve seconds transmission lag, round-trip.”
Flight nodded. “Thank you.”
“That’s a long way,” Twilight muttered softly.
Star, trotting up next to her, nodded.
Then the answer came back, and played out of Flight’s panel.
“First Light, Proceed.”
“First Light, reporting inbound to Equatorial Approach Orbit two-seven-six-four, arrival in two-one-point-two minutes,” Flight announced back. Every other time she’d tried to radio in to announce her approach to controlled space, she’d been met with silence- but not today. It seemed that Orbital Control finally had the personnel and equipment to monitor- and control- the entirety of the planet’s controlled space… which had never been true before, even shortly before she’d left. There was only so much the equipment could do.
Twelve seconds passed in silence.
“Inbound to Approach Orbit two-seven-six-four, understood. Caution adjacent filled orbit to prograde.”
Flight raised an eyebrow, and glanced at Wing.
“Filled, eh?” Wing muttered, tapping her controls. “Passives indicating a small ship. Not sure if I want to go active, though- hangon… Yep, that’s an IFF transponder read. Approach Orbit two-seven-six-five is filled by the REN Canterlot. Tactical database update is still in progress, though, so no data.”
“A new ship?” Flight asked, while Twilight baulked at the name of the Royal Equineothame Navy vessel. “Did somepony attack or something?”
Wing shrugged. “No idea. Um… There, download complete. The Canterlot… Commissioned two weeks ago, but she’s already seen action five times, only three of which were since she was put on picket duty?”
Flight tilted her head. “Really?”
Blacklight looked up. “Database analyzed,” she stated. “Looks like three ships were lost since we left, but the Fleet is almost fifty percent larger than it was, by mass- mostly in lighter ships, so there’s a two hundred percent increase in hulls. Meanwhile, there have been zero accidents in Equineothame space- and recent mission logs indicate that the local pirate presence has been eradicated. I’ve also found twelve records of Fleet assaults on pirate strongholds, and twenty-two Fleet combat exercises.”
Flight raised her eyebrows. “Sounds expensive. How’d they get Dad to sign off on that?”
“They didn’t,” Wing announced. “There’s an All Ships order from High Admiral Timber Wolf, dated about six hours after we broke Equineothame Low Orbit, for the Fleet to do what was necessary to discharge their responsibilities, and I quote, ‘to hay with the cost’. There’s another order, about two hours after we went superluminal, for the Fleet to ignore all cost objections from the King, and I quote, ‘for the Princess’.”
“... You mean to tell me,” Flight began, “that the Fleet has been technically rogue since we left, in their effort to do what they’re supposed to do?”
“The orders certainly suggest that.”
“And the mission logs coincide,” Blacklight stated. “Looks like two of the three lost vessels were actually insubordinate vessels that defied their superior officers, and forced the rest of the Fleet to shoot them out of space.” She then blinked, and let out a snort of laughter. “The first of those two was Minotaur, a Battlecruiser that was crippled by the Everfree herself after she attacked and destroyed the Saddleberg, a light cruiser that was making a customs inspection. The other of those two was the Centaur, a Dreadnaught, and was destroyed by Task Force Two- forty capital ships- when she intentionally interfered with antipiracy operations. All three ships were defeated with minimal losses- if only because the Minotaur was engaged by the Everfree before she could inflict significant structural damage to the Saddleberg.”
“The High Admiral has been doing her job,” Flight nodded approvingly. “I approve. How many officers had to be removed?”
“Um… Looks like they’ve had a total of four hundred starship commanders- ranked anywhere from Lieutenant to Commodore- refuse to perform assigned duties, requiring removal and court-martial for failure to comply. Soonest one is scheduled for next week.” She scowled. “... And a few of the files on the officers that replaced them use… vague language…” Then she blinked. “Hangon. Last week, REN Manehattan got a new commander after her previous one was removed for noncompliance, and her new commander- Lieutenant Commander Dusk Shot- is one of the ones with vague language.” She looked up at Night Skies.
Skies nodded. “Captain Dusk Shot was a good one. I would’ve given her a starship, but we didn’t have any left by the time she was ready.”
“Uh, Princess?” Wing stated, looking up. “Laser comms signal from High Admiral Timber Wolf on the Everfree, relayed through the Canterlot. Requesting video, encrypted.”
Flight tilted her head. “... Huh.” She glanced at Twilight, who shook herself out and straightened up. “Onscreen.”
Wing nodded, and tapped a single key. The holographic display on the inside of the windshield activated, blacking out the windshield, to display a countdown- three, two, one.
When it hit zero, it displayed a simple message. Transmitting, waiting for incoming signal.
“High Admiral,” Flight nodded respectfully. “We’ve just been browsing the tactical database, and I must say, I approve.” She then went silent and watched the screen patiently.
About twenty seconds after it started transmitting, the picture appeared, and the High Admiral was visible, on the command chair of her flag bridge. Flight instantly noticed that the High Admiral’s tactical officer was a thestral- specifically, Shadow Flight, one of the first thestrals she’d hired at Orbital Control. Shadow also had the shoulder flashings of a full Commander on her naval uniform.
Then, High Admiral Timber Wolf spoke. “Welcome home, Princess. In your browsing, you might have noticed some new officers with vague details- that’s because they’re thestrals, which makes their presence aboard our ships technically illegal. I assume you’re okay with that, given the number of the same present on your bridge?”
She smiled, and nodded. “Yes, it’s completely okay. I’ll have to admit, though, I’m curious how you’ve been getting them into space.”
The wait was twenty seconds, before the High Admiral winced, and spoke again. “Very carefully. A couple of them were able to get to space on civilian vessels by disguising themselves, but we’ve had to cram most of them into the closets on our crew exchange shuttles- including Shadow Flight here.” She gestured to the mare in question, who smiled out of the display. “It hasn’t been easy to keep them beneath the notice of the King and Queen- and add that only a small portion of the Fleet is cleared to know we’re taking them aboard, and it’s an even bigger challenge. We haven’t been able to get nearly as many of them up here as I’d like.”
She tilted her head. “You mean to tell me, that the Fleet has been going rogue in order to take aboard illegal officers and perform illegal operations throughout space, including but not limited to customs and antipiracy patrols?”
The High Admiral really winced that time. “Ahh, yes, I do, actually. We thought it the best choice of action, after you yelled at the Missalius loud enough for us to hear it through forty kilometers of vacuum.” Twilight gasped, and turned to stare at Flight, but the High Admiral wasn’t done talking. “We’ve expanded the fleet significantly; all the smaller vessels have been getting finished first, but the first few new dreadnoughts should be coming out soon. With them, we’ve eliminated piracy in Equineothame space- we’re now the safest place in space in more ways than one. We’ve captured about four trillion in contraband- and we’ve gotten word of representatives from Earth arriving at Equineothame in a few hours, to ask us to come take care of their piracy problem. I’m currently on return, with fifty capital ships, from taking a pirate haven in the Asteroid Belt. They’re starting to come out and surrender when they first realize we’re there- Equineothame has fast become recognized as a military power.”
Flight nodded. “I approve, keep at it.”
“Four trillion in…?” Twilight asked.
Flight nodded. “Not surprised,” she told Twilight. “Before I left, there were dozens of ships every day that would refuse to even send cargo manifests- which is grounds for boarding, by Equineothame law. Which wasn’t enforced… until it was. Anyways.” She looked back up at High Admiral Timber Wolf. “If you have any remaining ground-bound Thestral officers gather by Orbital Control, I plan on stopping by the surface sometime soon; this is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria.” She gestured to Twilight. “I should be able to fit about thirteen hundred of them aboard, as long as you’ve got a ship in orbit for me to take them to. Up to three eighty indefinitely.”
Timber Wolf smiled at Twilight’s question. “Alright, we can do that. There’s about three hundred of them right now- and your sister is due to be born in about three days, too.” She took a deep breath. “The docs told us they told your parents they couldn’t tell the tribe on the ultrasound- but they told us directly they’re pretty sure she’s a thestral.”
Flight blinked. “... I wasn’t aware I was going to have a sister. But yeah, I probably want to be there for that, don’t I?”
Timber Wolf nodded. “They’ve also requested the presence of the senior naval officers, for the usual fanfare, so I’ll be there too.” She grinned. “Admiral Midnight Sparkle won’t be, though.” All the thestrals gave snorts of laughter, but Timber Wolf wasn’t finished speaking. “Not only is she a thestral- ex Vice Admiral of the Shadowfleet- but she’s also raiding Equinose with most of our capital ships.”
It was Flight’s turn to let out a snort of laughter. Equinose was a small but powerful nation, based on one of the inhospitable outer planets that hadn’t been towed into the ‘goldilocks zone’ like Equineothame had been, that actively supported piracy. As such, they had no official navy- but whenever they were in trouble, thousands of pirates would turn up very quickly to fend off whatever was attacking. “Nice. Speaking of which, how’s the tow boat?”
Timber Wolf raised an eyebrow. “The Tow Boat? We gave her an inspection two weeks ago, actually. Needs new Gravity Drive coils, but otherwise serviceable. You got a moon that needs moving or something?”
She smiled. “Actually, yes. Something happened on Equestria long ago, which left their Moon on a suborbital trajectory. Princess Luna uses her powerful magic to keep it at bay, but it’s a huge drain on her.”
“You-!” Twilight began. “You have a ship that can move moons?”
Flight nodded. “Yep. The Tow Boat was made- and first used- to move Equineothame into a stable, livable orbit, and fine-tune the spin. Took about a century, pretty sure it hasn’t been used since. We should be able to use it to put Luna’s Moon on a stable orbit as well- we’ll just have to fit it with a Distortion Drive. Which, if it needs new Gravity Drive coils, now would be a great time to install that.” She tilted her head. “We’ll also want to make sure the power systems can support the new drives.” Then she blinked. “And if Celestia wants, we could probably use it- and its sister- to stabilize and fine-tune Equestria’s spin as well, free both Sisters from their celestial duties. We could even adjust the axial tilt if you want, make the seasons drive themselves. Take a lot of magic to avoid any significant damage to the planetary civilization, but I’m sure it’s nothing that you and Star couldn’t handle.” She smiled up at Timber Wolf, ignoring Twilight’s blush.
After the delay, Timber Wolf grinned. “Shall we make a rendezvous before we return to LEO, then?”
Flight shrugged. “Why not? I can even play ferry for you and the other senior officers if you like, provided you’re willing to spend a few days on the surface.”
“Aaaand, reentry,” Flight announced, as the altimeter crossed the atmospheric line. She wasn’t far enough down- yet- for any aerodynamic reentry effects, but the ship was no longer considered ‘in space’.
“And you’ve still got onboard gravity,” High Admiral Timber Wolf mused. The Admirals had all come aboard and, after a brief period of unconsciousness, they were riding down to the surface with her, while their ships- and crews- moved to Standard Fleet Orbit Two.
During the coast down from Approach Orbit to the atmosphere’s edge, Skies had shown them around the ship- and described some of the upgrades they had done to it. They’d been understandably amazed by the abilities described- then they, and Twilight, had joined Flight on the bridge for the descent.
“Yup,” Flight nodded. “We had onboard gravity while parked on a vertical cliff face under the sea in Equestria.”
The admirals chuckled. “An… unconventional parking location,” Mantle Core noted, “but I daresay fuel and oxygen weren’t a problem.”
Then the reentry forces started to hit, and the flames started to appear.
And Twilight started becoming very nervous. Eventually, she spoke up. “U-Um, isn’t that fire?”
“Plasma, actually,” Vice Admiral Night Mare- who looked almost exactly like Nightmare Moon, just without the magic mane or horn- answered her. “And it’s normal. Princess Flight’s ship is equipped with a heat shield, which allows it to survive that plasma- and the enormous forces creating it- without issue. There’s no other way to reach the surface from orbit.”
“But- but-!” Twilight began. “But we could teleport!”
Admiral Mantle Core- who looked about as much like a manticore as a pony could, complete with wings- spoke this time. “I’m sure we could,” she stated. “But remember, this is a civilization that hasn’t had any way to teleport for thousands of years, but we’ve still got starships.” She glanced sideways at Flight. “Well, a starship, at least. The rest of the Fleet technically qualifies, but only Flight’s ship can get places with any kind of speed, at the moment.”
“That’s something we’re going to have to fix,” Flight muttered, tapping the keys to deploy the atmospheric engines; the last traces of the plasma were disappearing, so it was safe to do that. Then she glanced up at High Admiral Timber Wolf, who had the colors of a timberwolf. The resemblance truly was uncanny. “Military first, I think. We need to be sure our warships can protect our civvies.”
The High Admiral chuckled. “Though it means I’ll have to send everything in for refit… again.” She glanced sideways at Flight. “It’s been pretty easy to find work crews, so we’ve gotten about forty percent of our ships refit with the latest technology by now, with fully thirty percent down for refit right now, on top of new construction.” Then she tapped her chin with a hoof. “Hmm, if it doesn’t take too much, we can probably have all the existing construction and refits adjusted for it.”
Flight engaged the autopilot, and turned fully away from the controls; the computer would put the ship down exactly where she’d been told to put it. It’d even automatically coordinate with air traffic control, like most autopilots, so she didn’t need to worry about it at all. “I don’t think it’d be too much… Is it?” She looked at Skies.
Skies shrugged. “We dual-mounted it with our Gravity Drive, increasing footprint for that and requiring heavier cables to be run, but that’s about the limit of the structural adjustments. Worth note it also requires the presence of plasma behind the vessel to kick off- a plasma exhaust should be enough. We got that from our thrusters.
“Then there’s the part where it draws about six times as much as a Gravity Drive for the same size vessel.”
Timber Wolf shrugged as well. “Shouldn’t be an issue. We’ve been installing NuCoils’ powered start reactors in place of the old ones, so just about every ship- including new construction- is overpowered by a factor of about ten times.”
Flight nodded. “So, bit bigger power runs, and a touch of structural adjustment by the grav coils. Speaking of which, we can also upgrade those grav coils while we’re at it, to more approximate the ones we made for my ship.” She paused, glanced at the panel, and struck a switch. “Which I forgot to turn off, actually. That’d theoretically allow them to descend to the surface, or be built in surface-based hangars and flown to space. They wouldn’t be capable of unpowered reentry, nor of a typical reentry, but…” She shrugged her wings. “You could conceivably hide them undersea if you needed to, and didn’t expect to need them very quickly.”
“Um,” Twilight muttered. “Aren’t you still, um, flying?”
She smiled. “Nope, the autopilot’s got it from here. I don’t have very much experience with aerodynamic flight, so right now, it’s better than I am.”
“And this ship’s a lot bigger than anything any of us have ever flown,” Skies nodded. “Nevermind the extremely limited aerodynamic flight experience of any thestral, right now.”
Twilight tilted her head. “Why?”
“Because we’re discriminated against,” Wing answered. “The Shadouette- my ship, crashed and destroyed almost a year and a half ago- was the most recent Thestral-flown vessel to enter any atmosphere. After all, there’s no atmosphere in this system where it’s legal for a thestral to depart the atmosphere, and nopony wants a thestral to fly their plane.”
Flight sighed. “To the point where… You know that saying, Twilight, about busting two clouds with one kick?”
Twilight nodded curiously. “Yeah?”
“In Equineothame, it most often goes, ‘to kill two thestrals with one stone’.”
Twilight’s jaw dropped.
Flight nodded. “I prefer the newer- and not as popular, yet- variant of blasting two asteroids with one missile.”
“... Oh,” Twilight muttered. “I… I’m not sure I’m the right pony to have…”
Flight shrugged. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. Before long, you’ll probably be the best thing that’s ever happened to this place.”
“You already are,” Timber Wolf told Flight. “And you’ve set such a high bar it’s going to be hard for Princess Sparkle to surpass it.” She grinned at Twilight. “Hard, but not impossible.”
Twilight tilted her head. “What did Princess Flight do to… if I may ask?”
Flight shrugged. “Go ahead. I’ll admit, I’m curious as well.”
Timber Wolf grinned. “Well, it actually started about a year and a half ago, right about when the Shadouette crashed. Princess Flight took on the entire crew of the Shadouette- all thestrals- as a both flight and work crew for her ship.
“And whenever someone resisted, and prevented her authorized crew members from doing their duties, she yelled at them. You could usually hear her yelling from the other side of the city, so it didn’t take long for many ponies to fear her. As a direct result, ponies started pushing themselves to do things they thought she would like- such as showing up on time for their duty shifts at Orbital Control.” She sighed. “Yes, really. Then, when she took her crew of thestrals up to the Fleet missile collier Missalius, then yelled at them for opposing her Thestral crew so loud they heard it on the surface…
“Well, by that time, many ponies were already afraid of crossing their Princess- and that was the first time she’d snapped at the armed forces, and so the point when ‘many’ became ‘most’. It became clear that nopony was immune… except maybe her parents, the King and Queen- but while there’s been some lively debate on that topic, the general consensus is to assume that even they aren’t immune.”
Flight giggled. “Probably accurate, too.”
Timber Wolf smiled. “Because of that, ponies have been working hard, trying to not just avoid crossing her, but to impress her. I’ll be the first to admit, the Navy has not been exempt from that- which has resulted in new waves of military spending… which were immediately followed by an economic explosion.” She looked at Flight. “Thus, in the time that you’ve been gone, our military strength has increased by over fifteen hundred percent in personnel- we’re no longer chronically undercrewed- and Equineothame has become an even bigger economic power than it is a military power. I think the boost there is in the realm of hundred thousands of percent, to the point where we’ve once again surpassed Earth- the birthplace of our civilization- by about double.”
“I bet Dad’s excited,” Flight grinned.
She rolled her eyes. “He isn’t,” she stated. “He wants that money in his Treasury, rather than in the economy.” She sighed. “He’s been demanding we stop spending… at all, including on wages, even though I’m pretty sure it’s our spending that’s making it possible for the economy to keep rolling like this.” Then she tapped her chin with a hoof. “And come to think of it, a few days ago, I heard word of a group of scientists on the surface finally having the resources to start doing experiments towards the Distortion Drive.”
It took about fifteen minutes for the autopilot to guide them down to a safe landing, then it was another fifteen minute bus ride to the hospital. When Twilight asked why they didn’t walk, Flight told her it would take hours to walk that distance… and the reason she didn’t just park the ship a bit closer was because it was already as close as it was safe to land it. She did, after all, have a reserved parking spot right up next to the control tower, despite the relative enormity of her ship to anything else that might be landing at Orbital Control. Besides, she didn’t want anything to spoil the dress Rarity had given her, which she’d elected to wear to the coming event.
Finally, she led Twilight and the Admirals into the hospital, and trotted up to the front desk.
The receptionist looked up, then blinked. “Oh. Welcome back, Princess. Um…” She looked across Twilight and the Admirals.
Flight smiled; the filly couldn’t have been much older than Astral Eye, and she could tell that Twilight was trying not to say anything. “Hi. We’re here to meet my parents, as they requested, to ‘honor’ my new sister?” She resisted the urge to make air quotes.
“Um…” The filly scrambled through. “I… I only have record of such a request for the Admirals?”
Flight nodded. “As expected- I don’t think they know I’m even in-system yet.” She gestured towards Twilight. “And this is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, who has asked to be allowed to bring magic to the new Princess.” She glanced briefly at Twilight- who, she saw, was trying to look like it wasn’t news to her.
She rather expected that the receptionist saw through it, but she was the Princess. “... Alright,” the filly muttered, shaking herself out after a few seconds of staring. “I… Okay. Um…” She checked her computer. “Okay. They’ll be in waiting room four soon.” She tapped a couple keys, then indicated a door. “Through there, should be the fourth door on the right.”
“Alright, thank you,” Flight nodded, and led the way.
As soon as the hallway door closed behind them, Twilight stepped up next to Flight. “What do you mean, bring magic to her?” she asked, confused.
Flight shrugged. “Well, this is an entire civilization of ponies that has been living without magic since time immemorial. That’s why she was using those mechanical fingers on her forelegs- they’re called Hands, by the way. Hoof Attached Natural Digit Systems.” She glanced back, briefly. “That’s also why she’s so young. Ponies die at forty around here- and with the relative length of our years, that’d be twenty in Equestria. Most ponies around here are expecting their first foal by the time they’re the Crusaders’ age.” She shrugged. “A few of them are already parents by that age, and there’s also a few that haven’t settled down yet, but most of them… are either pregnant, or married to somepony that’s pregnant.”
“How… How old were your parents?” Twilight asked.
“My parents?” Flight raised her eyebrows. “Mom was pregnant almost before her cycle started. By the time she was Scootaloo’s age, I was three. … Equineothame years, that is, so one and a half of your years.” She scowled. “I was also an oops child. They hadn’t wanted a foal at the time, but thought her cycle hadn’t started yet.” She sighed. “Anyways.” She pushed the door open, and stepped in.
They had hardly been waiting for a full minute before a nurse stepped in, looking nervous. Flight recognized her instantly as the nurse that had come with the doctor she’d called aboard her ship to inspect the medbay after the repairs. She and the doctor- both mares- had spoken to her about the potential legal problems with having a Thestral-crewed spacecraft on Equineothame’s surface, but otherwise been very friendly, and spoken peacefully and professionally to the thestrals in question. They’d even educated her medic on some new practices, and voluntarily come back three times a week for a month to help bring Mending Shade’s skills up to date.
Then, Nurse Sweetheart spotted Flight, and her relief was evident. “Oh, Princess. Thank Equus you’re here.” She took a deep, calming breath. “Your… Your parents should be here in a couple minutes- but you should probably know, we’ve already confirmed your new sister… is a thestral. We’ll be bringing her out to your parents here, so please be ready to-!” She cut herself off, glancing towards the door, and back at Flight. “I mean, you know them.”
When Flight’s mom, Cheap Gold, stepped into the room with a glass of whiskey in one Hands, the first words out of her mouth were in a derisive tone. “What is that purple pony doing in here?”
Twilight opened her mouth to speak, looking offended- but Flight held up a hoof to silence her, and stepped forward. “Mom,” she began.
Predictably, her mom ignored her, and started ranting about strange ponies being let into her meeting room.
“Mom,” she repeated.
Again, Gold ignored her. This time, she noticed that Twilight was an Alicorn, and started whining about pony half-breeds.
Flight grinned at that. She had no idea. “Mom,” she repeated again.
This went on for a few minutes, before Flight’s father, King High Cost, stepped into the room- and as he always did, ignored anypony he considered beneath his notice… which meant Twilight. He did, however, get Cheap Gold to stop whining about her, if only by passing between Gold and Twilight.
“Ahh, Flight,” he muttered. “I heard you left a couple months ago. I didn’t realize you were back.”
She nodded. “Yep, I got back just in time to see my new sister.” Then she leaned slightly to the side, to look at her mother. “And Mom, did you know, the mare you’ve been insulting for the past five minutes is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria?”
“Well why didn’t you say so?”
She gave her mom a level-lidded look, ignoring her father’s raised eyebrows. “I tried, but your invective was continuous.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and turned back to her father. “... Yes, I went to Equestria.” She glanced at Twilight. “Princess Twilight, meet King High Cost, of Equineothame.” She gestured between the two.
“Ahh,” he muttered, before looking up at Twilight. “Well, Welcome to Equineothame, Princess. This… isn’t exactly the venue I would have chosen to meet a member of foreign royalty, but I suppose it works. And don’t mind my wife, she’s a bit… vocal.”
“And by that, you mean she’s a diplomatic disaster waiting to happen,” Flight scowled.
He tilted his head, and nodded.
Cheap Gold scowled, and moved to one of the couches with her whiskey.
“Anyways,” Flight stated, deliberately changing the topic. “I must have missed the announcement?”
He nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he answered her. “We never made any major announcement.” He sighed. “It’s… we didn’t intend to have another foal, either.” He shrugged. “But it happened, so here we are.”
Flight gave him another level-lidded look. “You mean my sister is also an oops child.”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“Are you ever going to have a foal you intended to have?”
He shrugged. “At this point, probably not. Had we never had you, though, we would’ve. Probably…” He tapped his chin with one hoof. “A year or two ago.” Then he let out a snort. “Though, the nation might then have collapsed around us without your support, wouldn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, it might have.”
“Speaking of which,” he began, an edge of irritation entering his tone. “You don’t happen to have told the Navy to go on a spending spree, do you?”
“Ah, no, I didn’t,” she stated. “But I do know why. And it’s a good thing- their spending spree has already boosted the economy by dozens of times. Equineothame is once again an economic power- and for as long as we remain one, the nation- and, by extension, the Royal Vault- will keep getting richer.” She shrugged her wings. “Besides, we need the military strength, not just to end piracy- which they’ve gotten really good at- but to protect us against any invaders, now that we have a working Distortion Drive.”
“We do?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yep. I traveled to Equestria, and back, with one. About nineteen and a half lightyears.”
Then he tilted his head. “And why do you have wings…?”
“Oh, that?” She glanced back at her wings. “I got an upgrade.”
“An… upgrade.”
“Yep! With wings and Equestrian magic, I can fly.”
“... Okay.”
Then the doctor stepped in, carrying a bundle of blankets. He, also, relaxed noticeably when he spotted Flight, though neither High Cost nor Cheap Gold were looking. He headed for Cheap Gold. “Congratulations,” he began, drawing the attention of everypony else in the room.
Gold put her whiskey down on the table next to her. “About time.”
Doctor Horse winced. “Congratulations on your new daughter,” he continued, handing her the bundle of blankets.
“Oooh, I’ve always wanted a dark daughter,” Gold commented, accepting the blankets.
“... She’s a thestral.”
There was a second of silence, before Gold rose the baby over her head, and threw her down on the floor. “I don’t want a thestral!” she declared.
Then she, like everypony else in the room, actually looked at the baby… and stared.
The little bundle of blankets had stopped cold just inches away from the floor, surrounded in a golden aura. It then floated through the air, and landed in High Admiral Timber Wolf’s hastily outstretched forelegs, before the aura vanished.
Flight released her levitation, then stepped forwards. She hopped into the air, and rose herself to her mother’s height, to see her eye-to-eye. Then she took a deep breath.
The whiskey glass on the table exploded.
High Admiral Timber Wolf gasped as, less than a second before the Princess started yelling, their entire group- which included both King High Cost and the doctor, the latter of which had backed quickly away when it became evident Flight was angry- was covered in a purple dome. As a result, inside the dome, it wasn’t much louder than a conversational tone.
“Hurk,” Twilight muttered, horn shining bright, matching the barrier. “Sh-She’s powerful.” She stopped to take a breath. “This is… This is the most I can do.”
Timber Wolf nodded, gently rocking the baby the Princess had apparently given her with the levitation she’d never shown them. “Good timing, thank you.”
“Uhh,” the King muttered. “Is…?” he raised a hoof to poke at the barrier.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Admiral Mantle Core warned him. “Even if Twilight’s barrier is permeable, the last time Princess Flight yelled like that, she yelled through forty kilometers of vacuum- and anypony caught within normal shouting range was knocked silly.”
Vice Admiral Night Mare tilted her head, looking up at the ceiling. “I wonder how impossibly far she’s yelling this time?”
“...your own daughter, just because she’s a thestral!”
“Uh, Space Lord?”
Space Lord Hard Stomp, of the Earthen Space Force, flinched at the sudden interruption to the stunned silence that had penetrated the Pit, their main surface command room, ever since the strange noise made its way in. “Uh, yes, um, Commodore?”
Commodore Sharp Ears bowed her head. “I’ve… figured out what it is, I think. Princess Short Flight of Equineothame seems to be yelling at her mother in a hospital on Equineothame’s surface.”
“Impossible,” Hard Stomp answered. “We’re a light-hour away!”
She flinched, and shrugged her wings. “I’ve got reads on forty orbiting satellites, and it all triangulates to be coming from the general hospital nearest the Equineothame Castle. Near as I can tell, the yell is also traveling at about a hundred million cee.” She looked at her panel for a second. “And yes, I also know we’re on the side of Earth that’s facing away from Equineothame.”
Princess Luna suddenly froze at the dinner table. “Somepony just tried to kill their own foal,” she stated icily.
Princess Celestia nodded stiffly, only her thousands of years of experience keeping her burning fury in check. “I know.” She looked up, in the direction the Royal Canterlot Voice magic was coming from, too weak to be detected by anything other than an alicorn.
Princess Cadence appeared out of thin air, wearing her full, brand-new armor, and brandishing the accompanying sword, startling all present, Princesses and Guards alike. “Somepony just tried to kill their own foal out of hate,” she declared. “And I can’t find them.”
Princess Celestia looked up again. “It’s a long way away.”
Cadence looked, snarled, and vanished in a second bright flash of light.
“Wait a minute,” Prince Shining Armor, who had been visiting Canterlot with his wife and headed down to breakfast while she slept in, stated. “When did Cady learn to teleport?”
When Flight finished yelling, it took a Cheap Gold a mere two seconds to recover before she started talking again- during which something moved in the unoccupied half of the room, but nopony paid it any attention.
“How dare you!” she snapped. “Destroy the thing at once! No thestral has a right to even be born! You’re a-!”
But what she was, they would never find out. Queen, couch, and wall all disappeared with the same echoing boom and blur of pink.
Then a heavily jeweled and glowing sword followed, shortly before Twilight, who had finally reached her breaking point, charged forwards and out the hole in a flash.
Flight and the Admirals galloped forwards immediately, to see what was happening; Flight’s father, High Cost, simply stood, too stunned to move.
“Hi, this is Fast Talk coming to you live on-scene with Bleeding Edge News. And yes, I’m standing in front of a hospital. Inside this hospital, the Queen will be giving birth to a new Princess today- Hold on.” She touched her earpiece for a second. “Correction, the Queen just gave birth to a new Princess. Not only that, but-!”
Behind Fast Talk, a couple of the hospital windows exploded as Princess Short Flight’s voice blasted out. Fast Talk startled, but caught herself, and straightened up to wait patiently, smiling softly at the camera, and wincing with each shouted sentence echoing out from the hospital. A message appeared briefly on the screen- ‘We would go to commercial, but nopony would hear it’.
Then, the Princess finished yelling. The silence held for about two seconds before Fast Talk spoke.
“It would appear she’s finished yelling,” she began. “Princess Short Flight has come with the Admirals to meet the new foal, and-!”
A different kind of explosion happened behind Fast Talk this time- something yellow was blasted straight through the hospital wall, right between the two busted windows, and tumbled to a halt on the grass. Fast talk jumped much further, almost clear out of the frame, before she recovered. A blur of pink followed it out and curved upwards before drawing to a halt- and resolving itself into a winged-and-horned, fully grown mare… who was wearing an impressive piece of jeweled armor, and received a massive blade in her Hands-less hooves, that was floating in a pink aura to match that over her horn.
“I’ll teach you to kill your own foal,” the strange mare thundered, before bringing the blade smashing down on the yellow thing. “Just because of her tribe!” Then she drew the blade back out and practically skittered to the side.
The reason was immediately apparent, as a purple, unarmored mare- who also had wings and horn- leaped into the air behind her. “And I’ve had enough of your discrimination!” she declared. The purple mare didn’t have a sword.
She also didn’t need one.
She simply pointed her glowing horn… and a wave of energy shot out of it, at the reddened remains of the yellow thing, which instantly vanished in a cloud of dust from what had to be the equivalent of a head-on starship collision.
Then there was a thundering boom and flash of light as the cloud of dust ignited, startling both flying mares. Finally, a hydrogen leak alarm went off in the distance.
Fast Talk stared for about two seconds, before turning back to the camera, and clearing her throat, looking shocked- and living up to her name. “And has brought at least one Equestrian Princess with her, after she visited Equestria with her new Distortion-equipped ship.” She glanced towards the scene behind her, where both flying mares were descending to the ground, looking surprised, but satisfied. “Er… Lemme figure out what’s going on, and we’ll be back after a commercial break.”
Then, Fast Talk turned to trot towards the landing mares- and, just before the scene cut to an advertisement for NuCoils High-Output, Powered Start Fission Reactors, Princess Short Flight could be seen trotting out through the hole in the hospital wall, wearing a dress that outshone any other on the planet.
“Sooo,” Flight began, trotting out to where her mother had just been stomped into a freshly-ignited hydrogen mains leak.
“S-Sorry about-!” Twilight began- then blinked, and turned to look at the pink alicorn that had first appeared. “Wait a minute. Cadence? When did you get here?”
Cadence, who had started looking around, looking distinctly worried, stopped, and looked at Twilight. “I… I don’t know. One moment, I was with Celestia and Luna, hearing about her crimes… next moment, I was in the room, and she was ordering other ponies to repeat them.”
Twilight blinked. “... Oh. Rage-fueled teleport. Those things can be dangerous.”
Flight stepped closer, and muttered quietly. “Do you mean to tell me you just teleported nineteen and a half lightyears to avenge a single case of discrimination?”
“Uh-!” Cadence began, glancing at Twilight. “Yes, I guess? I mean, that’s pretty serious, right?”
Flight laughed. “Oh, that’s nothing. There’s thousands of cases every day, on this planet alone. Though, after that display, on- unless I miss my guess- live television, there’s going to be a lot less of them.” She gestured towards the royal blue filly, not much older than Flight herself, trotting towards them, away from the TV broadcast camera mounted on a tripod. There were no other ponies in sight.
The filly trotted up. “Uh- Hi, if…?”
Flight nodded.
She took a deep breath. “Okay. Um, Hi, I’m Fast Talk, with Ben- er-!”
Flight nodded. “Good for you. I assume you were covering the story about my new sister and all?”
“Uh- yeah. And your return, with…” She looked at Twilight and Cadence. “Is that… two Equestrian Princesses, or…?”
“Yep! Meet Princess Twilight Sparkle, and Princess… is it just Cadence, or…?” She looked at Cadence.
“Ahh,” Cadence muttered. “It’s technically ‘Mi Amore Cadenza’.” She wrinkled her nose. “I know, my parents had great taste in names. I much prefer just Cadence.”
Flight nodded. “So, Princess Cadence. And both of Equestria, yes.” She glanced at the camera. “How long do you have?”
“Ah-!” Fast Talk glanced back at the camera. “We just went on commercial break, so I should have at least a few minutes. I’m sure Long Interlude, back at the station, can keep our viewers distracted longer, if needed.”
“Ahh. Is… Is there anyone else with your crew, or…?”
She shook her head. “Just me. We’ve only got a few ponies left- nopony wants to work at something like a news station. We’re lucky we can still cover everything with one-pony ‘crews’... working regular overtime.”
“What.” Twilight spoke almost woodenly.
Flight held up a hoof to stop her. “Yeah, that’s definitely gonna be a problem.” She tilted her head. “I mean, Ben is my preferred news station, sooo… I wonder how many applications a Princess’ Recommendation would get you?”
She eeked, almost exactly like Fluttershy, and started stammering.
Flight shrugged her wings. “Anyways, I suppose we should be ready when they finish the commercials, shouldn’t we?”
“Uh, Princess? You might want to come look at this.”
Flight looked over towards the hospital; it was Vice Admiral Night Mare, looking uncertain. “Alright,” she called back. Then she glanced at Fast Talk. “That… doesn’t bode well. I wonder what happened.”
“Um,” Fast Talk muttered, and spoke quickly. “Can I follow you, or ?”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t sound like good news- depending on what it is, you might want to wait outside.”
She eeked again. “I’ll… Er, I’ll wait outside, then.” She glanced at Twilight and Cadence. “... Er, do you mind if I get an interview with…?”
Flight shrugged. “Fine by me, if they don’t mind. Don’t do it live, though, we might need to interrupt it on a moment’s notice.” She trotted back towards the hospital.
When she reached the opening in the wall, she stopped. “What… happened?”
Admiral Mantle Core, holding her father’s severed head, looked up. “He said ‘signal lost’,” she stated. “Thought his cybernetic enhancements might’ve been acting up, so I popped open the service plate on the back of his neck… and according to Doctor Horse, he was already dead when he walked in the building today, because so much of his brain is missing, carved out to make room for some kind of tech gismo. Already pulled that out.” She pointed at some metal stuff sitting next to her father’s body, on the floor. There was, interestingly enough, no blood. She took a deep breath. “Do you think the pink pony- with that sword- can come back, and cleave his head in two? The doc’ll be able to give us a better idea of exactly when he died… and the cause of death.”
Flight nodded slowly. “Have you checked the cybernetic logs?”
She shook her head. “I’m no good with electronics.”
“Alright.” She tapped her earpiece.
Night Skies answered promptly. “Yes, Princess?”
“Send Blacklight out here with a console, please. And charge the capacitors- I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
There was a second of silence. “On her way, with the shuttle. Also priming our VTOL and Gravity Drive. Anything else?”
She scowled. “Not yet.” She deactivated her transmitter, and looked back out the hole. “Princess Cadence,” she called.
Cadence looked up at her, from where she was talking to Fast Talk.
She gestured for her to come.
Cadence nodded, and turned back to Fast Talk- though Flight could tell, through her body language, that she would be coming.
“Blacklight?” High Admiral Timber Wolf asked, still holding Flight’s new sister. “Who…?”
“She was on my bridge,” Flight answered. “Thestral, green mane. Electronic warfare specialist.”
Vice Admiral Night Mare nodded sharply. “That’ll do it.” She glanced at the electronics. “I’ve done some electronics, but this is well beyond me.”
Then Cadence stepped into the room. “Okay, um,” she began. “You called?”
Flight looked up at her. “Yes. Can you cut my dad’s head in half, for the doctor?”
She didn’t move for three entire seconds. “You want me to what!?”
“He’s already dead,” she stated. “And he was already dead when he walked in this morning. The Doc wants to cut his head open, because that’ll make it much easier to tell both how he was killed, and when.”
Cadence took a deep breath, and unsheathed her sword once again, from the scabbard attached to the side of her armor. “Alright.”
“Here, I’ll hold it for you.” Flight took her father’s head in her magic, and held it clear of everything else in the room.
It was almost ten minutes later when the sound of Twilight’s fast-paced conversation with Fast Talk was drowned out by the wind- and finally, the noise of a high-output low-noise atmospheric engine.
Flight had hardly looked up at the opening, when Blacklight glided in, landing just inside; the shuttle, judging by the noise of its engines, hadn’t even touched down yet. “Alright,” Blacklight began, sweeping her remote control tether out of her saddlebags. “What seems to be the problem?”
Flight pointed a hoof at the electronics lying on the floor next to her father’s decapitated but bloodless body.
She looked, and sighed. “Yeah, that would do it. That doesn’t look like any set of cybernetics I’ve ever seen- and no cybernetic device should cut off the blood flow.” She trotted over, slipping an adapter and a cable from her other saddlebag, plugged them in, and started tapping away at her tether. “So, what happened to him?”
“Somepony carved his brain out,” Flight answered. “He was dead before he walked into the building today, and Doc Horse can’t tell how long. That stuff was in its place.”
She nodded. “Yeah… Mm, not getting anything on the standard cybernetic control panel. Let’s see what a chip access routine gives me.” She made a few more taps. “Bingo. Nine months, four days, three hours, twelve minutes, fifteen seconds… Mark, since this stuff was activated.” She paused for a second. “Though it’s been relying on a nearby relay to link to ‘the network’- and judging by the other data in here, my bet is that the relay was in your mother, possibly even controlled by her.”
“That was… fast,” Admiral Mantle Core mutters.
Flight nodded. “Like I said, she’s an expert. And she’s working with top-level equipment- that control tether is linked to my ship’s triple-A-plus-rated, twin redundant electronic warfare suite.” That was about the highest rating available for any electronic warfare suite, which put her systems on par with most superdreadnoughts… and unlike most systems, redundant electronic warfare systems weren’t truly redundant. They could operate independently, true- but when both were present, they operated in cooperative mode, giving them a couple dozen times the effectiveness of the individual systems- thanks to a far faster data link between the two than between any two ships running their electronic warfare in cooperative mode. She took a deep breath. “Void anything my dad has said within the last twelve months- we now know he was compromised. And…” She looked towards the hole in the wall. “Can I help you, Twilight?”
Twilight, looking curiously in the hole, shrugged her wings. “Well, they called you in here, then you called Cadence, then Blacklight showed up…” She trailed off. “So, what happened?”
“I’m the only surviving member of the royal family,” she answered simply.
Twilight blinked. “... Right, that was your mom, wasn’t it?”
Flight nodded. “We have reason to believe she may have already been dead anyways.”
“... What.”
“Dad- who walked into the room first- is confirmed dead at least nine months ago.”
Twilight stared. “Has…” She winced. “Has your nation figured out necromancy or something?”
She shook her head. “No. His body was being remote controlled- you could call him a zombie, but he wasn’t really.”
Fast Talk stepped into view. “Do I… Do I even want to look?”
“Depends,” Flight stated. “Do you have cybernetics?”
The filly nodded nervously. “I do. Why…?”
Flight glanced at Blacklight, who trotted up, flicked open the cybernetic service port hidden under the filly’s name, and plugged into it.
Fast Talk eeked again. “What the-!?” she began.
“Somepony’s mounted an extra software package in here- it’s recording everything you do, building a profile. Give it… Three days, and it’ll probably take control.”
Fast Talk shied away from her. “What- what do you mean!?”
Flight pointed a hoof towards her father’s body. The admirals stepped out of the way, revealing it.
Talk squeaked, eyes wide. “What-!”
“He was killed nine months ago,” Flight stated. “Somepony carved out his brain to enhance his cybernetic package. And it would seem you’re next.”
Her jaw dropped. “But… But I…”
“We can still save you,” Flight informed her. “Like Blacklight said. Three days.” She glanced up at the doctor. “Right?”
He nodded. “Cybernetic manufacturers don’t want ponies to know, but they’re completely removable. Takes about fifteen minutes, though the recovery can last for a couple of hours.”
Silence held for about three seconds.
Admiral Mantle Core looked at Cadence. “Princess, with all due respect, I noticed your form with your blade was a little bit lacking. Would you like some pointers?”
“Hi, this is Fast Talk coming to you live with Bleeding Edge News.” The news anchor in question wasn’t speaking nearly as quickly as she normally did, and was wavering just a little bit. None of the viewers noticed, though, since their Princess was standing next to her, wearing an amazing dress- and a grim expression. Few viewers noticed that the Princess also now had wings. “It took a while, but we were able to confirm…”
She started to fall over, into the Princess- but Princess Short Flight was watching her. The Princess’s horn glowed suddenly golden, and a shroud of golden energy arrested Fast Talk’s fall, bringing her back upright.
“Woah… Thanks, Princess. Er, to confirm, that we just witnessed the defeat of the Queen by the hooves of the Equestrian Princesses. Additionally… Woah…” She blinked blearily, wobbling far enough it was clear the Princess was the only reason she wasn’t falling.
Flight’s golden aura took the microphone from her, then Flight set her down on the ground, and looked at the camera. “My apologies for that,” she informed the viewers. “As she was saying, we have also been able to confirm that at least one, and probably both, of my parents were killed and replaced over nine months ago.”
When Short Flight stepped around the corner of the hospital, to where Admiral Mantle Core was teaching Princess Cadence some introductory swordcraft, it was to find the two facing each other in the middle of a small field of craters.
“Alright,” Mantle Core told Cadence. “Ready to try it for real?”
Cadence nodded, stepped back, and took her stance with her blade. “Ready.”
Mantle Core nodded, stepping back and raising her blade.
Then the two flashed towards each other, and their blades sang out several times before they separated.
Finally, they bowed, sheathed their blades, and turned to Flight, as one.
“Yes, Princess?” Mantle Core asked.
Twilight, who had walked around the corner with Flight, snapped her jaw shut. “How-!?”
Flight looked at her. “When ponies die at twenty, you learn how to teach fast,” she informed her. “Admiral Mantle Core happens to be a fencing master, and I’d guess that Princess Cadence found a pretty good incentive to learn.”
“Twenty?” Mantle Core asked.
Flight nodded. “Equestrian years. I’m curious where the craters are from?”
Cadence blushed, and nervously rubbed one cheek with a hoof. “Oh, heh heh…”
Mantle Core smiled. “I opened by having her come at me like I was making off with her foal,” she stated. “She had a lot of power, but very little accuracy and the technique of a cavepony.”
Cadence grinned abashedly.
“But nopony’s making off with her foal now, are they?”
She shrugged. “Depends. I’d say she’s now about a one point five on the skill scale.”
Blacklight, on Flight’s other side, let out a snort. “There isn’t a single pony in Equestria- that we encountered, at least- that’ll take a foal from her, then. Our estimates for most of the Royal Guard were about zero point one- and their Captain, Shining Armor, was the best we saw- at about zero point six.”
Princess Cadence blushed and stood up straight, looking pleased with herself.
Flight tilted her head. “I wonder how the other Princesses rate?”
She shook her head. “We didn’t get the opportunity to evaluate them.”
Mantle Core scowled. “Sounds like we should send a fencing instructor back with our diplomats, doesn’t it?”
Flight shrugged. “Certainly sounds like we could, yes. To me, though, it sounds like I already have one.” She looked at Blacklight.
“Don’t look at me,” Blacklight answered. “I’m only at twelve thousand. Night Skies is the one that’s knocking on the door to seven digits.”
“Twelve-!?” Mantle Core blurted out. Then she let out a sigh. “And here I thought I was one of the finest.”
“Hey, you are one of the finest,” Flight answered her promptly.
“But I’m only at eighty-nine hundred,” she stated. “I can’t even compare.”
Then Flight looked at Blacklight. “Come to think of it, how’d she even get to six digits? I thought nine thousand was the limit.”
She shrugged. “We trained with Pinkie Pie.”
Twilight scowled. “But she doesn’t use swords…?”
“Anyways,” Flight interrupted, deciding it wasn’t the time to learn exactly how the thestrals had learned swordcraft under the mare for whom the laws of physics were optional. “According to Skies, we’ve got about five minutes before those diplomats from Earth get here in their limousine.”
“Spendy,” Mantle Core noted.
Flight shook her head. Limousines were one of the most expensive modes of travel in Equineothame; even suborbital jumps were cheaper. “Showoffs. Anyway, I figure you Admirals should probably be there for it too. You know, since they’re asking for military assistance and all.”
Nineteen and a half lightyears away, six and three quarters of a hair about halfway up the inside of Pinkie’s left ear twitched, and one of them quivered. She let out a gasp. “Somepony is talking favorably about me to two- no, three- Princesses and… Huh, I wonder who that means. Apparently, I’m a good… teacher? But I haven’t taught anypony anything for years! … Right?” She scowled at the cake she was baking for Bonbon, as her earth pony magic urged it to cook inside the compressed time she had created with the same earth pony magic, and tilted her head. “Right?”
Short Flight very nearly slept through the hours-long proposal the Earth diplomats had prepared. She kept her appearance professional, though- exactly like any ruler should in that situation. It didn’t stop her from mentally raising her eyebrows at the proposed compensation.
She could even see Twilight, who was watching from the sidelines, raising an eyebrow when they talked of paying four million credits per pirate cruiser captured.
Finally, they finished talking.
“I don’t see why I should send my ships to Earth space,” Flight began.
“Think of the safety,” the lead diplomat began. “The freedom of trade, the-!”
“The price of the warships it will cost to do that,” Twilight barked. “Or the ponies to crew them. Four million won’t be nearly enough.”
“Besides, completely aside from that,” Flight interjected, “those pirates are in your space. If you want them out, you have a bigger navy than I do, and I expect you to use it before you ask for mine.”
“Well,” Admiral Mantle Core muttered, as she and Flight watched the diplomats return. “I’d say I’d worry they might attack us for that, but by the time they manage to mobilize enough of their Navy to do that, we’ll have the bigger Navy. And we already have the more experienced one, to boot.”
Flight shrugged. “And if they do, they miss out on the Distortion Drive for a dozen years.” She turned to Twilight. “So, how do you know how much a starship costs…?”
Twilight shook her head. “I don’t. But I could tell they were trying to slight you on it.”
Flight nodded. “Yeah, me too. He’d have to increase that offer by at least a thousand times before I’d be willing to even consider it.” She sighed. “Anyways, wherever Princess Cadence has gone, it’s time to get her home.”
“You will not depart with thestrals aboard!”
Flight raised an eyebrow. They were back on her ship, and had just taken off, with traffic control clearance, when the Queen’s Own Air Regiment had surrounded her ship and demanded she stop, brandishing their gatling turrets at her.
“I am the Queen now,” she transmitted to them. “And you will stand down.”
“We operate under the Queen and only the Queen, and you are not the Queen! You will land your vessel immediately for examination!”
Flight sighed, then looked at Night Skies. “What would you recommend?”
“GD nominal,” Lunar Wing announced, from her tactical console.
Blacklight leaned back in her seat. “These idiots don’t have any shielding whatsoever,” she announced. “Analog controls, though.”
“Switching drive schemes,” Flight announced, striking the keys. Immediately, the Gravity Drive took over holding the ship airborne, while the atmospheric engines wound down and started the retraction process. She’d already powered down the forward engines earlier, so it only took a couple of seconds before the wings started folding. She glanced up at Blacklight. “Analog controls?”
She nodded. “Means I can’t take control of them. Also means they have no active stabilization, though.”
“Meaning, if we make the air a little bumpier, they could easily lose control?”
“Uh, yes. They’re all equipped with parachutes.”
“Alright.” She smiled nastily at the three of them visible out her windshield.
“Polarize the hull.”
“What?” Cadence asked. She, like Twilight and the Admirals, was on the bridge to watch the launch- and had up to that point remained quiet. She sounded very confused.
“Polarizing the hull,” Wing announced, and struck the switch.
The effect was instantaneous. ‘Queens Own’ quadcopters went flying in every direction, often tumbling through the air as the massive magnetic force placed on their ships screwed with their aerodynamics. They recovered, though, and reformed their ring somewhat significantly further out.
“You dare polarize your hull!” their shout came in, over the receivers. “Depolarize it at once, or we will have no choice but to shoot you!”
Wing let out a snort of laughter.
“Uh, isn’t that…?” Cadence began.
“Hull polarization is our main shield,” Flight informed her. “With the hull polarized, they can shoot at us all they like with those gatling guns and they won’t even scratch the paint.” She switched on the transmitter. “Go right on ahead,” she ordered them, and turned it off again. “The part I’m most amused by is that firing directly into a hull polarization field like they’re talking about is suicidal- there’s a better-than-even chance the bullets will be deflected right back at them.”
“Orbital Control to the First Light, is something going on, over?”
She chuckled. “First Light to Control, yep, the Queen’s Own decided they wanted to pick a fight with a warship, over.”
The orbital controller actually laughed as well. “With the Queen’s warship, to boot. Well, you’ve got about thirty seconds before you’ll need a fresh clearance… Mark, over.”
Flight nodded. “Roger that, over.”
“They’re shooting alright,” Wing announced. “Looks like they’re aiming for our Gravity Drive coils, so they’re managing not to shoot themselves.”
“Eh,” Flight muttered, before kicking the Gravity Drive to full power and swinging the ship around at maximum fully-compensated acceleration. She made a quick sweep around the line of errant atmospheric gunships, knocking them all out of control, before she snapped across the sonic barrier- which they couldn’t even approach- and returned to the orbiting autopilot control. “We won’t be back for quite a while, I expect.”