Chapter 1: The Azure

“Hey, Flight?”

Princess Short Flight looked up. “Yes, Sis?” Her older sister, Princess Little Bubble, was looking the happiest she’d been all week as she emerged from her sleeping cabin aboard the Azure.

No, Flight decided, she wasn’t. She knew her sister well, and recognized her telltales- her sister was hiding the pain.

“Can we go for a walk?” Bubble asked.

“Sure,” Flight answered instantly. Going for a walk had a slightly different meaning in the microgravity of the space station, but they both had their mag boots on, so actually walking was still an option. She eyed her sister worriedly. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Bubble’s cheerful attitude vanished in an instant. Her mane almost seemed to droop, despite the lack of gravity to make it droop. “It still hurts,” she answered softly. “Onion Tail. Petal Chaser. Puddle Jumper. Shining Moon.” She sighed. “All four… Dead. They were good ponies.” She looked up at Flight. “But now? Ponies need me. This world needs me- and if I stay holed up crying about just four casualties, I’m as good as dead myself.” She took a deep breath. “It’s… You can mourn those you have lost, but don’t dwell on them- the past is the past, and the most important thing of all is what we’re doing with the future.”

“And that’s… it?” Flight asked, tilting her head.

“It still hurts, don’t get me wrong,” Bubble told her. “But I’m never going to get anywhere if I let it get me down, so here I am, pushing through it… Making sure it doesn’t happen again.” She sighed as they walked up to the big window across the front of the antechamber. This particular wing of the Azure was really big on observation windows, and Flight had selected it for Bubble to stay in explicitly because it overlooked the dock her ship was being repaired at. “I wonder what the performance penalty would be for armoring those spokes? Or the price tag?”

Flight looked out the window as well. Their father, King High Cost, whom many of his subjects- including his own daughters- dubbed ‘The Expensive King’ behind his back, had ‘given’ Bubbles the largest yacht in space for her tenth birthday. It wasn’t a real gift- of course it wasn’t. Their father hadn’t yet spent even a single penny on either of them directly- they both knew he considered them to be ‘unnecessary expenses’.

But in that ‘gift’, their father had made it Bubble’s responsibility, rather than his own, to see to it that the ship was properly maintained, crewed as necessary, and available when he wanted it. In return, Bubble received the freedom to command the ship as she saw fit whenever he didn’t want its services.

The Flying Surface was quite a masterpiece. She was classified as a yacht, yet she was larger than many freighters and boasted the only full-size simulated gravity wheel currently in service, capable of spinning up to a full gee of apparent gravity. However, she wasn’t a very fast ship- her maximum acceleration under rocket thrust was just under half a gravity, and maximum acceleration under its wimpy little Gravity Drive was a mere two gravities, compared to the twenty pulled by all the other civvy ships around it. Still, though, Flight had the distinct impression Bubbles had deliberately gone beyond mere requirement when she’d requisitioned a thousand-pony crew for the thing. The two sisters had developed a bit of a habit of being as expensive for their poor, poor father’s gold-clad, money-filled swimming pools as possible, without being overt about it.

Flight’s eyes roamed over the gap in one of the spokes of the gravity wheel, which was standing still for the first time in years. Just over a week before, that wheel had been spinning as quickly as it usually did, when a small meteor had come speeding in on a very unfortunate trajectory. Flight had spoken with the Admirals; the Royal Equineothame Navy had been parked basically right next door and, while they had confirmed that their tactical experts- to a pony- believed the meteor couldn’t have been on a natural trajectory, they also had no idea when it had been steered, or where from.

The meteor had slammed into the very spoke of the gravity wheel that Bubble had been traversing at the time. Fortunately, it was just a little bit late; she had just barely made it through the hatch into the wheel proper when the meteor struck, so she was not explosively decompressed. The four chefs she’d passed on the way down, who had been climbing up to the central core to retrieve some ingredients from storage or something, had not. They had died in the incident, lost forever to the vacuum of space; despite happening in Low Equineothame Orbit and with cameras everywhere, they had been unable to find the bodies.

“That’s a good question,” she finally mumbled.

Bubble scowled. “Hangon.” She raised one hoof, twitching it to deploy the mini-binoculars embedded in her boot, and peered through them. “They promised me twenty-four-seven work parties on that, but nothing’s changed!” She flicked her hoof again, studied the tiny display on the boot, then tapped her earpiece once.

Flight knew her own boots had those same capabilities. It was a mag boot, H.A.N.D.S (Hoof Attached Natural Digit Systems), communicator, and multitool in one. However, unlike her sister, she wasn’t any good at operating any of the extra features. She could use the mag boots, and the Hands… but the communicator and multitool were beyond her skill level. She could get the communicator to activate, but she’d have to concentrate for each keypress, and she couldn’t get the multitool to emerge at all- yet her sister, who had ‘owned’ and lived on the Flying Surface for almost two years now, made it look easy.

“Hey Flower!” Bubble greeted, then winced. “Yes, I’m doing okay. Anyways, I’m looking at the ship, and I’ll be damned if I can see what they’ve been working on.” There was a second of silence, and Bubble’s expression hardened. “They haven’t? At all? Have they still been billing us?” She paused. “Thanks. I need to call Dad.” She flicked her hoof to hang up, and sighed. “A hundred and eighty seven hours billed for a hundred and sixty eight-hour week in which they sat around in the station bars, ignoring Flower’s attempts to get them off their asses.”

Flight nodded. “Sounds like a call to Dad to me,” she agreed, before tilting her head. “Who’s Flower?”

“Lightning Flower,” Bubble answered almost automatically, flicking her hoof for the comms again. “She’s my chief engineer.” She tapped her earpiece, and waited.

Flight knew what she was waiting for. First, her comms had to contact her ship, which would route the call to the station, which would then route it to the nearest ground station, and from there it would go to the palace, one ground station at a time. That took anywhere from a second to two seconds, even with modern electronics- then of course, their father was notoriously slow to pick up the phone.

Finally, he seemed to pick up.

“Hi Dad!” Bubble greeted, a grin on her face. It was an inside joke, between the two sisters. And an insult to their father’s face, which sounded like a mere greeting.

The thing was, their father, King High Cost, seemed to always be high on… something. Sometimes it was drugs, sometimes alcohol, and sometimes it was just from bedroom activities with their mother. As a result, they always greeted him with that spelling in mind, and as cheerfully as possible- turning it into a cheerful insult that always flew over his head.

The reason they deemed to insult him with his own first name was made evident by Bubble’s very next sentence.

“I. Am. Not. Little!” she half-roared.

Their father liked to call her ‘littles’ and Flight ‘shorty’- and neither of them liked those nicknames. Bubble was particularly touchy on the subject- without fail, the nickname brought out her ferocious temper.

“Dad,” Bubble half-growled, her tone suggesting that he was prattling on about something.

The silence drew on for several seconds after that before Bubble started yelling again.

“Your Highness, put the alcohol down! Ponies are stealing from you!”

Flight snickered at the pun that inevitably flew over their father’s head.

Bubble calmed her tone again. “The Flying Surface has been parked in the drydock awaiting major repairs after a meteor impact for, ahh,” she glanced at her hoof-display, “one hundred and sixty six hours. Not one yard pony has gone anywhere near it in all that time, yet they have billed us for one hundred and eighty seven and a half hours on three work parties!”

Flight looked out the window, and smiled. If there was one thing their father simply couldn’t stand, it was paying for something he didn’t receive. If the station personnel didn’t comply with his demands and actually perform the work they were billing him for, they would shortly have the entire navy to answer to.

“She’s crippled,” Bubble muttered softly. “The Gravity Wheel is imbalanced and structurally compromised.”

Flight snorted. He must’ve asked how badly the ship was damaged; he had a planned journey with it in hardly another week and a half, so evidently wanted to know if it was in fit shape to perform that journey to Earth and back. Flight knew, however, that with that one spoke broken, any acceleration beyond a quarter of a gee would strain the wheel too much and cause a lot more damage down the road… nevermind that with the ship’s center of mass no longer within the artificial gravity field produced by the Gravity Drive bands, it would be stupidly dangerous to use the said Gravity Drive at all, let alone for onboard gravity. That kind of thing happened when the drive was attached to the narrow cylinder that formed the central core of the ship, and the Simulated Gravity Wheel was the largest and heaviest part of the ship. Bubble’s pilot had limped it into the yard on maneuvering thrusters, using hardly a hundredth of a gee, all the while thanking Equus that their orbit was so close to that of the Azure.

Flight looked up at Bubble again, after the several seconds their father always took to accept a report that something was unusable. She knew what his next question was going to be.

“The Azure,” Bubble answered.

Finally, she flicked her hoof, and let out an exasperated sigh. “He’s giving them a call,” she muttered, “but he wants me to stay up here to keep tabs on their work. Like I need to bother with that, with somepony like Flower around, but…” She sighed. “Fifteen minutes ago, ASC told me the blueprints are ready for your ship, Flight. Somepony needs to approve them.”

Flight winced. She was only eight- but they both knew exactly what her father had been thinking when he’d gone to the Airbreathing Starship Company and asked for the biggest, gaudiest floating palace they could build. He was planning on giving it to Flight for her tenth birthday, in the same way he’d given the Flying Surface to Bubble. Neither of them were entirely sure what use he was going to have for a ‘palace’ that didn’t even have a gravity wheel, but they both knew he’d made some very strict demands for ballrooms and other luxury rooms Flight hated… even though ASC had warned him outright the ship would be more of a waste of parts than anything else.

“You want me to do that,” Flight muttered, then looked up at her sister. “Don’t you?”

Bubble sighed. “You’re going to have to. I won’t have time after they finish work up here.” She looked down. “On the other hoof, I can help from here. Probably take a while, but…” She shrugged.

Flight sighed. “Yeah… Might as well.”

“It’s going to take all day, so…”

Cold Coils knew that blueprint review was a long, arduous process with lots of questions. There was a reason it had been fobbed off onto her, after all. Not that it should have been, of course- she might’ve been an engineer, which was required for the pony helping the Princess review the blueprints, but she wasn’t one of the ones that had been working on the ship. She was a power systems engineer, even- she didn’t design spaces, or whatever else, she designed reactors and power banks!

Completely aside from how she was an intern.

As a matter of fact, she was a mere three days into her internship- and she was supposed to be here to learn how the reactors interacted with the rest of the systems, not to answer the Princess’ questions about a blueprint she’d never seen before!

It didn’t exactly help that the Airbreathing Starship Company had been surprised by which Princess arrived. They’d expected Princess Little Bubbles to arrive in person, inspect the blueprints, and be on her way out in less than two hours. Princess Bubbles might not have been an experienced engineer, but she was so inclined, with the result that she would have understood many of the systems on her own, without assistance.

Instead, though, they’d gotten Princess Short Flight, the younger of the two sisters. Princess Flight wasn’t yet legally adult, at only eight years of age… and she was most definitely not inclined to be an engineer. She’d heard rumors that the royal filly had talent in the simulators, but that wasn’t useful at all in blueprint review. Worse, every time Coils tackled a simulator, she crashed, no matter how many different autopilots were simulated. Once, she’d even managed to crash before the ship had even started moving! So, as one of the highest-scoring engineers but the flat-out worst-scoring pilots at school, she was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to draw connections between the two disciplines to help the Princess understand anything. If she remembered the leaks correctly- the Princess’s grades weren’t published- Princess Flight was basically her antithesis. She could fly inverted through an obstacle course… but absolutely sucked at telling what kind of wrench she was holding.

Coils took a deep breath before the door to the room the Princess was waiting in. For some reason, Princess Flight had requested they use the video conference room- and, since the ASC hadn’t had any conferences planned, they hadn’t objected to giving her the room for the day at all. She glanced sideways, at the large scroll held by her Bands, for Back-Attached Natural Digit System, a many-fingered machine that straddled her back like saddlebags and would hold anything she handed it with her Hands. It was the blueprint she was about to show the Princess- and she still didn’t have a clue what it looked like!

Finally, she raised her hoof, and knocked.

“Come in,” Princess Flight’s voice called.

So she pushed the door open… and froze, finding herself in the presence of both Princesses. Flight was seated at the head of the conference table, on her end of the room… and Princess Bubble was looking out of the conference screen at the opposite end of the room.

“Hi!” Bubble greeted cheerfully, waving a hoof- on which Coils instantly recognized the Mark Eight Multi-Purpose Mag Boot made by NuCoils, the company her mother owned.

She bowed. “Your Highnesses,” she greeted.

“You may rise,” Bubble told her. “And please save the Highnesses for our dad?”

Coils didn’t miss the conspiratorial glance between the two sisters, or the smile playing on Flight’s muzzle.

Perhaps the blueprint review wasn’t going to go as horribly as she had expected. From what she recalled, Flight might be able to run circles around Bubble in the simulator… but Bubble could actually fly.

Some of the time.

The blueprint review took much longer than Coils had expected, but thankfully, not because she had to explain engineering concepts to Princess Flight. Princess Bubble had been doing the review, and she actually understood the complicated technical terms that were used.

As expected, for many of their questions, she’d had to run out to the main engineering team and get the answer for them.

The big kicker was that it was, by far, the largest atmospheric craft she’d ever seen.

Neither Princess liked it, of course. When Bubble had calculated a few of its flight characteristics for her sister, Flight had promptly calculated, in her head, that its stall speed would be a whopping five hundred and twelve knots!

But… she hadn’t said that it couldn’t fly, and their father had been explicit that it had to be the biggest one that it was possible to make… so both Princesses had to concede that it fit the bill.

Finally, Flight, after a final nod from Bubble, pulled the big stamp and its ink pad towards her, fully nine hours after she’d first entered that room- a good two hours after Coils’ shift was supposed to end.

Then the disaster started.

Flight had only just barely picked up the stamp when a sudden, deep boom sounded from the conference display. Bubbles let out a frightened scream, and started looking around wildly. “What’s going on?” she demanded, looking at somepony they couldn’t see.

“I don’t know!” somepony cried distractedly… Then, two seconds later, “We’re-!”

The video froze for a second… then cut entirely, replaced by a simple message.

Connection Lost.

There was a couple of seconds of stunned silence before anypony moved. Flight’s Hands tapped through the comms menus on the control console with practiced ease. Coils watched as she queried the station, but got no response- then queried a nearby station for an optical view.

Coils gasped.

The great big record-breaking gravity wheel at the heart of the Flying Surface was gone. The remainder of the ship had been snapped like a twig, debris flying everywhere- and a large section of the station had been demolished around it.

The station had also apparently been broken in two by another explosion… Right about where the communications arrays would have been, Coils observed. However, it looked like the Observation and Command Blister at the top, where the Princess would have been, was still intact.

As they watched, a small ship hurtled in, fired missiles at the surviving segments of the Flying Surface, and stuck itself into the debris for what looked like a rescue attempt.

Flight sent the footage to the big screen, and continued tapping away at the communicator. Coils didn’t realize what she was doing until she heard a distant alarm sounding out of it.

“Princess,” it greeted.

“Admiral,” Flight answered. “Are you seeing this?”

“I am,” the Admiral answered- High Admiral Timber Wolf of the Royal Equineothame Navy, Coils realized. “We have standing orders from your father to ignore piracy going on around us, though.”

Flight raised an eyebrow. “I hear a GQ alarm.”

The Admiral nodded. “It’s going to be a decent drill,” she muttered darkly.

Flight sighed. “My sister may still be alive, in that observation blister.”

The Admiral scowled at her panels. “That changes things,” she decided.

“The Saddleberg is moving!” somepony cried.

The Admiral moved like lightning. “All ships, hold fire!” she commanded. “The Princess may have survived!”

“Uh… Admiral, message from the Crown. ‘Ignore the pirates’.”

“Does he know the Princess is there?” the Admiral asked promptly, while Flight’s Hands fairly flickered over her console again.

“What?” the communicator barked, so suddenly Coils jumped.

“Dad,” Flight began. “My sister is on that station.”

“So?” he asked.

“She might still be alive, and if she is, she is being foalnapped by pirates as we speak.”

“So?” he repeated.

“Can you let the Navy go after them?”

“Absolutely not,” he declared angrily. “Have you any idea how expensive naval operations are!?”

“My sister!” Flight cried. “Your daughter! And you won’t act to protect her because it’s too expensive?”

“That’s right,” he barked. “It’s far too expensive to do anything up there, you know that. Now quit bothering me about it!” His screen went dark.

Flight took a long, slow breath, and let it out.

“Well that was friendly,” the High Admiral muttered distractedly, studying her panels. “Saddleberg, Hold Your Fire,” she commanded. “You’ll kill the Princess.”

Coils looked up at the big screen again, and jumped again. There was a small warship visible now, charging towards the station and firing missiles at the pirate ship… which was, so far at least, picking them all off with its gatling turrets. The station wasn’t faring so well, though.

“Target the Saddleberg! Plasma, one round- fire!”

She looked up just in time for the attacking warship to be very suddenly shrouded in searing hot plasma. A missile it had just fired detonated almost instantly, probably from weapons cookoff, and the ship swerved off course, shedding debris as the engines faltered. A secondary explosion- probably a fuel-oxidizer mix this time- sent it spinning off the bottom of the screen.

Coils took a slow step backwards, unsure if she should leave the Princess to it for a few minutes, or if she should stick around.

Flight took a deep breath, and tore her eyes away from the blank display that had carried her father. “We’ll show you what’s expensive,” she hissed- then she glanced at Coils, reached out a hoof, and pushed the blueprint towards her. “Can we make this defend itself?” she asked. “We can forget his requirements- he’s never going to set hoof inside it- and make her as expensive as possible.”

Coils blinked, the blueprint running through her mind. In order to add combat capability, they’d have to redesign it from the ground up- which, if Flight was voiding her father’s requirements…

She scowled. If the requirements were void because he would never set hoof inside, it would still need to look like it met them from the outside. Which would be… difficult, in a combat ship.

No, wait, with the stipulation that it be expensive as possible… There were numerous suboptimal design decisions that were made explicitly because it cost too much any other way. She could think of at least twelve off the top of her head.

“You would make it a combat vessel,” she muttered softly.

Flight nodded silently. “Don’t tell Dad.”

Behind her, Coils saw the Admiral duck, then come back up with her sidearm to unleash a volley of bullets across her bridge. “POLARIZE THE HULL!” she roared, over the sound of damage alarms Coils had missed when she was analyzing the change in requirements.

A tiny and absolutely terrified voice answered a second later. “Hull polarizing,” it announced, in little more than a squeak.

Coils winced. If the REN Everfree was polarizing her hull from her parking orbit, that was going to do untold damage to basically everything near it… and the close-proximity hull polarization would cause every nearby combat ship that hadn’t already been set into combat mode to wake the GQ alarm and force the computer into emergency self-defense mode while it waited for its crew. In other words, the entire Fleet was very suddenly at war… with itself, it seemed. True to her expectations, the visual feed from the nearby station- still on the big screen- skewed suddenly, before being similarly suddenly distorted by the blasts from the station’s maneuvering and stationkeeping engines attempting to stabilize it.

“Return fire,” the Admiral hissed, glaring at her panels.

“It’s going to be expensive,” Coils muttered, even more softly than before.

Flight grinned maliciously. “That’s the point,” she told her.

She looked down at the blueprint. “... Alright. We’ll see what we can do.”

She turned and, quietly, left the room. As she did so, Flight turned back to the panel.

Once the door closed behind her, she took a deep breath, and let it out. She needed to find the engineers, and get them started on the Princess’ expensive project.

Chapter 2: The Expense

View Online

Coils knocked very gently on the door guarding the room the Princess was still in. She was exhausted- but she had managed to craft a first draft entirely on her own. All the other engineers had already gone home for the night when she’d started looking for them, and would start arriving for the morning in around fifteen minutes… But she had a draft she could show the Princess.

“Enter,” the Princess called, her voice sounding weary.

She entered… and froze. The conference room didn’t look too much like any conference room she knew of anymore. It felt more like… She wasn’t sure, but she got the idea that the new feel of the room wouldn’t have been out of place on a warship.

The lights had been turned down. The massive conference screen was displaying what looked like a tactical map of some sort, and each screen around Flight was showing something completely different. She’d moved the consoles from a number of other seats up to her, so as to have more screens available- and Coils spotted no less than three active comms connections amongst the screens she didn’t recognize. She recognized only one at first- Admiral Mantle Core, the commander of Equineothame’s network of surface-based orbital defense cannons. One of the others was wearing a Navy pressure suit with the helmet closed, the reason visible in the scorch marks on the wall behind her and on the side of her helmet, and the third was an unfamiliar mare in a large, empty room by herself, scrambling almost frantically around her panels.

She blinked. “Uh…” She muttered.

Flight looked up at her, bags beneath her eyes, and smiled painfully, almost victoriously. “The last shot was fired nearly fifteen minutes ago,” she told her. “We think it’s over, but haven’t finished making sure.” She sighed, eyes flicking briefly to the rolled-up blueprint in Coil’s Bands. “How’s it coming?”

“Kinda okay,” Coils admitted. “Everypony else had already gone home when I started looking, so…” She sighed. “I’m a power systems engineer, so I’m pretty certain I missed something, but I’ve got a preliminary sketch before everypony else starts coming in- and refining it- in fifteen minutes.”

Flight accepted the blueprint, flattened it on the table, and scowled at it. “Huh,” she muttered, eyes following the lines. “You’re right, something doesn’t look right. Not sure what, though.” Her eyes roamed the page for another few seconds. “But yeah, I think that’s exactly what I asked for, so…” She smiled up at Coils. “How long do you think you’ll need to refine it into a final product?”

Coils looked at it. “... I don’t know.”

She nodded. “Okay. Can we make sure it’s operable by bare hooves? We just lost far too many ships to pilots that couldn’t find their Hands in time.”

“You’re alive,” Flight observed, by way of a greeting. It was a few hours after the fight had concluded; Flight had traveled out to the Capital City Landing Pad to meet the injured spacers as they landed. Some of them were headed straight to the hospital- but some of them, including the High Admiral, merely needed to stay within the planetary gravity field for a few days while their bodies healed themselves. Admiral Mantle Core had also traveled out to meet them, and was standing next to her- and periodically casting glances at the two guards that had come with Flight. Thanks to her father’s stipulation, and her position as the Princess, she couldn’t go anywhere without protection… The only exception being on her own ship. Aboard the Space Station, and at the ASC, the guards protecting her and her sister had been able to do it from out of sight via surveillance systems and covering the exits. Out in the open, though… None of her guards liked it when she was out in the open like this.

The High Admiral grinned. One side of her face had been scorched by the two ton plasma bomb that had breached her bridge- and her suit hadn’t automatically sealed her helmet fast enough to protect her entirely. That side of her face was furless and very badly burned, with a couple of blisters, but the damage to her already artificial right eye had been repaired on orbit- or more accurately, she’d swapped the damaged cybernetic eyeball for her spare, which had remained miraculously undamaged in her quarters. “Of course I am,” she answered. “What were you expecting?” She sighed, and looked behind her. “I kinda wish I didn’t have to let go of Midshipfilly Willowstone, but after all that…” She sighed.

Flight winced. When a pony was ‘too young’ in the Navy, they were there in a training capacity- not unlike an internship. They would learn whatever they were studying with the Navy… then leave it again to continue their studies elsewhere or, in some cases, wait until they came of age to resume their tenure with the Navy. Once they were of age, they were a midshipmare, midshipstallion, or perhaps a higher rank, depending on their skill level- but before they were of age, it was always either midshipfilly or midshipcolt. “Willowstone?” she asked.

“My Tactical student,” the Admiral told her. “You might’ve heard her a few times- after I killed that piece of backstabbing trash masquerading as my Tactical officer, she was the sole Tactical officer on the Bridge.” She sighed. “Yes, I know, I should have sent her to her quarters, or gotten her a new mentor, but I was the only other tactically trained pony on the whole ship and my attention was needed elsewhere. That said, she’s a certifiable tactical genius. Completely knocked the socks off her previous scores, and I don’t think she realized exactly how well she was doing.” She glanced back at the shuttle. “She was hit by some shrapnel in the fight, and lost the use of her left foreleg- but I don’t think I’ve seen even a Marine take a hit with as little complaint as she did. She made sure her suit tourniquet had engaged properly… then kept fighting. I actually didn’t realize she was hurt until things started winding down half an hour later- but there’s no doubt in my mind she’s the reason we’re all alive today.”

“How’s her leg?” Flight asked.

She shook her head. “Total loss. We had to amputate it on orbit.” She sighed. “She’s going to be the youngest pony to ever go on medical leave from the Navy; all the other students across the Navy either survived unscathed or were killed outright.” She moved next to Flight, and looked up at the shuttle; a series of stretchers were being slowly removed from it, one by one. “She’s stable as-is, so she’ll be dismounting after they get the hospital cases out, but I want her dirtside until they can get her a good prosthetic.”

“Good thing my dad’s paying for it,” Flight smiled, holding out a hoof. “Tell the benefits manager she’s got my permission to seek the best one there is, to hay with the cost.”

The Admiral smiled as well, and bumped her hoof. “Yeah, good thing, and will do.” She sighed. “And…” She leaned in close, so nopony else could hear. “Whaddya say to taking her as your Tactical officer? She’ll come of age right about when they finish it- and after that, I want to bump her up to LC at least.”

Flight looked at her. “But does she want to?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding me? That filly loves space. She actually begged me for permission to stay aboard.”

Flight raised an eyebrow. “Despite not having slept for however long and having just been through one of the bloodiest battles in history?”

“Bloodiest-?” Admiral Mantle Core asked, surprised.

Flight nodded. “We did a final count after you left,” she told them. “Not counting the Azure… Seven space stations, seven thousand eight hundred ninety-three civilian vessels, three hundred eighteen warships, eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand two hundred sixteen civilians, and a hundred and eighteen thousand two hundred ninety-six Navy personnel.” She sighed. “And that’s not even counting the half or so of the civilian ships that we successfully diverted from the area, or the two hundred or so more that would’ve come floating in like sitting ducks if we’d let them approach the planet when they wanted to, or how all seven stations were successfully evacuated before they got too close, so no casualties there.” She looked up at the Admiral. “That’s over a million ponies dead in an evening… and their ruler doesn’t care.”

Admiral Mantle Core stared at her for a couple seconds. “How… How does he keep ponies from rebelling?”

She shrugged, looking back up at the shuttle, and what had to be one of the last stretchers being lifted slowly out of it. “He doesn’t,” she answered simply. “They don’t care about the death toll either, unless it involves them personally. But when I become Queen…” She trailed off for a second, thinking. “That’s going to be one of the first things I change about this country.”

“Wouldn’t your husband be the ruler?” High Admiral Timber Wolf asked.

She snorted. “He’ll either agree with me… or not exist.”

“And if your parents have a colt…?”

She grinned. “Dad thinks colts are evil.”

“Princess.” The aging stallion that opened the front door to the Airbreathing Starship Company’s main headquarters bowed so low he probably could’ve kissed the pavement without trying, and the tufts on the tips of his batlike ears went so low she probably could have stepped over his head without much difficulty.

Princess Short Flight sighed. She knew that staffing was a persistent problem around Equineothame; unfortunately, she’d become all too familiar with it ever since her sister’s death. She’d personally taken over Orbital Control’s staffing and scheduling departments- and in so doing, she’d already expanded the mere three controllers it’d had before to nearly twelve.

Well… she hadn’t yet. She’d hired fifteen- and the nine that hadn’t been fired yet were still in training, so there were still dangerously large gaps in the timetable that she just didn’t have the trained controllers to cover. And to top it off, one of those three was making noises about quitting in anger over her new attendance policies that actually punished failing to show up for a shift! Controller Clear Skies, the one that had helped her divert civilian traffic from the active warzone nearly two weeks before, had personally appeared before her to apologize for his prior dismal attendance record, and hadn’t missed a single day after the battle.

But she hadn’t expected ASC to hire a thestral. Thestrals were the killers of the night, never to be trusted with anything. He was, however, the first one she’d ever seen herself.

The bright blue hat perched atop his midnight blue mane- and the mop he’d left leaning against the wall next to the door- told her that he was merely a lowly janitor, and likely had no idea that she had been on her way. As a result, he obviously didn’t know what to tell her, and had settled for just bowing… and otherwise not doing anything. He didn’t rise, either.

“We’ll remove him at once, Princess,” one of her Guards began.

She held out a hoof to stop him. “Don’t waste your time,” she told him. She glanced past the janitor to the receptionist’s desk, but it was empty- right when it should have been full. Finally, she sighed, and looked down at the thestral. “Where’s the receptionist?” she asked him.

He glanced behind him as well, apparently confirming that the receptionist’s desk was, in fact, unoccupied. “My apologies, Princess,” he told her, in a firm, oddly assertive voice. “I don’t know.”

“Find her, please,” she told him. “Tell her the Princess is here.” She sighed; he still hadn’t risen. “You may rise.”

He lifted himself up from his bow, bowed his head again, and turned to go look for the receptionist. Flight almost instantly recognized the high, sharpened step of a pony used to walking in mag boots rather than gravity.

“Why is he walking like that?” the Guard Captain scowled, next to her.

She held out a hoof to silence him. “Don’t waste your energy,” she told him.

They then watched the thestral go up to one of the offices off the side of the entry, and look inside. “Uh, Boss?” he asked. “Where’s the receptionist?”

There was a moment of silence while his boss responded. Flight could hear the boredly dismissive tone of his voice, but couldn’t make out the words.

“The Princess asked me to tell her she’s here,” the thestral told his boss.

His boss’ voice gained a lot of volume, and some clarity as well- he’d evidently turned to the door. “Whaaat? Why didn’t you start with that? Wait, don’t answer that.” A large earth stallion poked his head out of the office door, spotted Flight standing in the main entrance, and emerged fully. “Return to your duties,” he commanded the thestral, as he trotted towards Flight. “Sorry about that,” he told her.

Flight shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him.

“I’m still sorry,” he told her defiantly. “Our receptionist- I still don’t know her name- is on leave for something. She was one of the many impacted by that fight a couple weeks ago. Just like the entirety of my janitorial staff.” He sighed. “I’m also hardly the maintenance manager, but may I show you to the cafeteria while I get the engineers you’re probably here to see?”

Flight smiled wryly at the cleverly constructed message that even he didn’t know why she was there, but he could guess. “Sure,” she told him- and, glancing back to make sure her guards understood what she was doing, she followed him into the building. “I knew the staffing problem was bad, especially with regards to smart ponies for engineering positions or the like, but I never thought that even ASC would have to start hiring thestrals.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Interestingly enough, around here, it’s all the smart pony positions that fill up first. I’d be in one of ‘em, but I like where I am- and nobody’s complained too loudly because they all like how well I get my job done. But when all my janitors suddenly went on leave for bereavement…” He sighed. “Fluffy Ears over there was the only applicant all week- and say what you will about thestrals, he’s a damn good janitor. I only hired him because this place was getting real nasty- but I can’t remember the last time I had somepony show up for all of his first three shifts, and he’s single-hoofedly outdone any three janitors I had before without even breaking a sweat.”

“Fluffy Ears?” she asked.

He shrugged. “That’s just what I call him. Don’t remember what his real name was. Ahh, here we are.” He pushed open a door into a small but empty cafeteria. “So, um, who were you here to see again?”

She smiled. “No idea,” she answered him. “Sent me a message last night that the blueprints for my ship are ready, but no instructions or names. Last time, the receptionist took care of it, but if she’s on leave…” She sighed.

He nodded. “Alright. I’ll see if I can find somepony.” He withdrew from the room.

It didn’t take long for the next pony to appear in the room. It was the same filly that had presented her father’s blueprints to her two weeks prior- and the filly looked like she’d seen better days.

“Princess?” she asked, looking around as she entered.

“What happened to you?” Flight asked, in answer.

The filly’s eyes snapped to her, and she blinked, looking confused by the question. “Wha-? What do you mean?” she asked.

“You were a lot happier last time I saw you.”

She flinched, and hung her head. “That… That fight.”

Flight winced. “I’m sorry.”

“My mom… was in space. She got thrown from the Ponykind when it was hit by a stray missile- the one before the one that killed it- but unlike everypony else, she was wearing her pressure suit; she’d been getting ready for a spacewalk.” She took a deep breath. “She survived. She drifted clear of the warzone, then the Missalius picked her up. She’s in the hospital right now, but she’ll recover.”

Flight nodded. The Missalius was a missile collier- one of the fleet support vessels that had scattered like flies in response to the Everfree’s polarized hull declaring it an active warzone, then stayed nearby to rescue as many stranded spacers as possible. “That’s good news,” she acknowledged. “Out of over a million ponies dead, she wasn’t one of them.”

The filly winced. “Your… Your sister.” Her voice hardened.

Flight winced as well, closing her eyes. “She’s dead. I know.”

She took a deep breath, and let it out. “... She might have survived.”

Flight looked up. “You’re serious.”

She nodded. “When I reviewed the footage… the damage to the Astra looked survivable for the control blister, where she would have been. The wreckage was later obliterated by stray missiles- but the pirate ship that destroyed the Flying Surface also stopped by the control blister to pull survivors from the wreckage.”

Flight’s ears went flat. “Pirates. Of course.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “When I told Admiral Mantle Core, she told me which pirates it was. So… we’ve been designing your ship with that in mind- and plenty of input from both Mantle Core and the High Admiral, who said she’d be returning to space… tomorrow, I think it was. In any case, she should be right about the perfect assault craft against those pirates.” She paused. “Um… Wrenches caught me in the passage, so I don’t have the blueprints. Want to come with me?”

“Sure,” she answered, rising from her seat. “Wrenches?”

She shrugged. “The maintenance manager. Nopony knows his real name, and he never wears his badge, so that’s what we call him. Anyways.” She led Flight out of the room, and down a passage. “When I say ‘perfect’ assault craft, I mean it even more literally than the Admirals know. I’ve been making a few calls these last couple weeks- and if you’re willing to commit her to a two year deep space mission sometime, I can make her even more so.”

“Even more so?” Flight asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. Given that commitment, she’ll be able to light off her Gravity Drive closer to the planet than anypony else, accelerate faster on it, and have a higher maximum top speed, making her- quite literally- the fastest ship in space. Stronger hull polarizers capable of tolerating a few hits from a laser and deflecting anything less than a cee-fractional missile- completely impervious to bullets, even at cee-fractional velocity. It’ll even attenuate artillery rounds strong enough to make anything less than a direct hit miss.” She turned through another door, where there were a few engineers working.

“Hey Coils,” somepony muttered, then glanced up. “Ahh, you’re showing it to the Princess?”

Coils nodded silently, as she tapped a couple keys on the printer, which promptly spat out a blueprint. She took the blueprint, rolled it up, gave it to her Bands, and stepped back out of the room.

“Coils?” Flight asked.

She nodded. “My name,” she answered. “Cold Coils. I usually go by Coils.”

“Ahh,” Flight muttered.

Coils nodded again, leading the way down the passage again. “Anyways, she’s got a very powerful point defense solution. Her decoy bays will take up to twelve of the latest model out there; it should be about five percent more effective than the old ones, which I hear were used to great effect in that battle. Nearly a hundred laser heads scattered across the hull should be able to pick off almost any missile headed towards you- then you’ve got eight fully gimballed turrets, tri-mounted with a plasma cannon, a multi-magazine gatling gun, and a pair of small missiles, up to one ton.” She opened a door into an empty conference room, led the way in, then flattened the blueprint down on the table. “Thirty missile tubes just forward of the ventral cargo bay, and she’ll take any missile the Navy can give her- even airbreathing missiles.”

Flight scanned the blueprint. “It’s a lot busier,” she observed.

“It is,” she agreed. “You might notice her fuel tanks are smaller- that was a compromise we had to make; else, this powerful of a warship would never be atmosphere-capable.” She sighed. “Considering the largest warship we could make atmosphere-capable was little larger than an assault shuttle, there wasn’t much we could do about that. She’s got the tanks to climb into orbit, ascend to standard Gravity Drive distance, and return to the surface twice over, rather than the standard ten times, between refuelings. As you may already be aware, any surface-capable craft is required, by law, to be able to ascend to its service distance, in this case Gravity Drive, and descend back to the surface ten times.”

She nodded. “Yeah. How’d you get around it?”

She smiled. “That law doesn’t specify how she gets there and back. That twice is rocket thrust from the runway, and circularizing in a parking orbit each time. But, we built her into an all-electric low-altitude hypersonic aircraft.”

“Aren’t those impossible?”

She smiled. “Only if cost is a problem. Thanks to the battlesteel construction, she’s a lot more durable than any unarmored ship has a right to be- and we’ve pushed that right to the limit with her airbreathing thrust. And of course, that’s another super-new tech contingent on the deep space mission.” She sighed. “In order to get her to Drive distance and back ten times on a single tank, you’d have to use airbreathing thrust to get as high and fast as possible, and pick the most efficient possible rocket ascent from that. Then you’d have to put your apoapsis at her Gravity Drive threshold, rather than the popular one, and use the Drive at that point to put your periapsis back into the atmosphere for a pure aerocapture and airbreathing return. But she can do that, so she meets the legal requirements.

“Once in space, she’s a bit smaller than a Frigate, but too big to be considered a corvette- and, as another contingent tech, she’s going to be the smallest ship in space to be equipped with an artillery cannon.”

Flight looked at her. “You’re kidding me,” she accused. Artillery cannons were massive, mass-intensive cannons that only superdreadnoughts were large enough to mount. They accelerated singular nuclear warheads to speeds of about point eight cee at the target- and burned so much power it took a superdreadnought’s bank of twelve reactors hours to charge it up for a single round.

She smiled. “I’m actually not. That said, it’ll be a different kind of artillery- and that tech isn’t actually done yet, so I don’t know if she’ll have it when we give her to you or not just yet. They’ll be plasma artillery, firing balls of condensed, hardened plasma at the enemy… and will be a lightspeed weapon. The three reactors at her heart are also a brand-new one, and will feed you the power of four of the current finest. They should enable you to unleash a round from each of four of these cannons twice a minute- though the current expected cycle time is closer to a minute and a half.” She touched the four cannons on the blueprint, long rails across the top and bottom of the ship, complete with doors to hide them behind.

Flight scowled. “Why is the Gravity Drive swimming in so much space?”

“Future-proofing,” Coils answered tersely. “With our butchering of the endurance requirements giving us space and the battlesteel construction reducing her mass by at least a thousand tons, we had tons of space- and mass- to spend on really whatever. You’ll notice she comes equipped with luxury features like a Reactor Recovery Drone, designed to recover a damaged reactor from a crashed vessel before it can melt down or otherwise endanger the environment, and the Energy Beam Relay up here. Her three reactors will be able to operate it continuously, but only at near full power, and you won’t have much power left over- so you might notice she’s got fully five reactor bays here, and we’ve filled one of them with power cells. You’ll have enough reserve depth to get from here to Earth and back without starting your reactors, and the solar paint to recharge from.”

“I’m not seeing any ballrooms, either,” Flight observed.

She chuckled. “If the King will never step aboard, he need never know and she only needs to look like she meets his requirements on the outside. Besides, that ventral bay is large enough to hold a cargo container remodeled to contain all his required rooms at minimum size, and so meet them anyways.” She sighed. “Anyways. You’ll notice she’s got a much larger Hydroponics section than the civvy design did, and a lot more atmo plants or the like- as a matter of fact, that civvy pattern had a life support capacity of eighty ponies… This baby can handle five hundred, though she’s only got berthing for three hundred.” She tapped a couple of small rooms in the middle of the ship; there was a number of bedrooms, and a couple of larger berthing rooms for multiple ponies at once. “You could use remodeled cargo containers in the bays to bring her up to five hundred- or even six, if you had additional enviro plants in them. Her hydroponics and waste processing will support that many.

“Now, as you may have noticed, her passages are a lot tighter than the civvy patterns you’re used to, and the doors a lot more frequent. Combat ships are like that- in the event of battle damage, you need to be able to seal off the damaged area quickly and lose as little air as possible. Every room on the ship is capable of functioning as an airlock, in case of battle damage- and she’ll have a lot of camouflaging so it should be possible for somepony to come aboard without realizing exactly what she is. Which…” She smiled. “Which lends itself to a certain set of secret passages. A lot of them are service passages, but a few of them are only ostensibly so- like this one, directly connecting the bridge and the Captain’s Quarters.”

“Fancy,” Flight observed.

She chuckled. “A little, yeah, but we had the space to play with, you know? Speaking of space to play with, in her broadside bays, we crammed six atmosphere-capable stealth assault shuttles and a pair of tugs as well.” She paused. “Okay. As noted earlier, she’s a pretty big ship. She’s actually about eight percent larger than the civvy design, thanks to the reduction in fuel requirements- and we could have made her another eighteen percent larger than even this, but then…” She sighed. “Not only would she be too big to dock directly to a supply ship rather than transferring via shuttles, but we were running out of ideas for things to cram into her extra spaces. You’ve already got the magazine capacity to salvo missiles for hours. Not to mention that too much bigger and her stealth systems won’t be able to completely hide her signature from enemy sensors at range. They’ll still see through her if you’re close enough, but she should be able to hide from them all the way into missile range, possibly even plasma range if you’re careful.

“Anyways, at this size, you’ll also get to enjoy a fully loaded thrust-to-weight ratio of nearly three on V-TOL, five on forward airbreathing thrust, and seven on rocket thrust.” She stopped, scanned the blueprint briefly with her eyes, and nodded. “I think that’s everything.”

Flight looked at it as well. It definitely looked a lot sleeker than the first sketch had- and, even, the ‘civvy design’. She smiled. “I’m curious what that wrongness in the sketch was?”

“Huh?” Coils asked, momentarily confused. “Oh, that. That one would have never flown- way too much mass, not enough fuel, and what’s more, aerodynamically unstable. We fixed all those problems with this.”

Flight reached out a hoof and touched one of two very long empty spaces behind the wings, almost like gashes in the side. “What’s this?”

“Her wings fold,” she answered. “They’re easily the most fragile part of the ship, though they should be able to handle up to ten gees of lift before failing, so we sought to protect them inside her hull whenever you’re not using them. You’ll notice there aren’t any cutouts for the engines either- those fold too, yet manage to be about three percent more powerful than the competition- another contingent tech. And if you manage to forget to deploy the wings on reentry, she’s also a floating body, and should be able to deploy them after reentry without issue- even at hypersonic velocity.”

She looked up. “You mentioned stealth earlier- is that also contingent?”

She nodded. “Yes, they are. You’ll be able to hide from even the Equineothame Navy at ranges of over five hundred kilometers- but only if you’re running ballistic. Any kind of active emissions, including rocket thrust, is going to significantly increase that range.”

“That’s knife range,” Flight told her. “Suicide range, actually.”

She nodded. “It is. As a matter of fact, your hull polarization will be passively detectible from up to six hundred kilometers because of the additional strength- and five hundred is the boundary for the effective deflection zone, where incoming projectiles are attenuated and, eventually, deflected.”

She scowled. “That’s a lot less than anything else in space.”

She nodded. “Yes. Her polarization field is actually about twelve times stronger than anything else, but it’s also not just a single field but several overlapping fields, which reduces the magnetic field size considerably. If you run it in ‘anti-stealth mode’, you’ll get a standard polarization field at full power, passively detectible from some fifty k-klicks, but it’ll reduce even artillery down to an easy point defense solution, and only the heaviest missiles with cee-fractional head starts will get anywhere near you. Do note that, in order to fire your plasma artillery, you will need to depolarize your hull- the field is powerful enough to destabilize that packet and reduce the effective range from about five light-minutes to three light-seconds. At the moment it’s not possible to fire it in-atmosphere without destroying your own ship, but they’re working on that.”

She nodded. “Alright. What’s the price tag?”

“Depends. It’s about three figures longer with the contingent techs- each of them is worth more, alone, than the entire non-contingent part of the ship. Which is already an order of magnitude higher than an average superdreadnought, thanks to the battlesteel construction.”

She snorted. “Think it’ll bankrupt Dad?”

She shook her head. “It’ll only be about ten percent of his estimated wealth… with the contingent techs.”

“Alright. Let’s show my dad that it’s less expensive to rescue his daughter, even if it costs half the Navy, than it is to force his other daughter to protect herself.” She smiled. “I’ll commit to that mission, and let’s build it.”

Chapter 3: Willowstone

View Online

Princess Short Flight didn’t like traveling through the city. She especially disliked traveling in the suburbs, and actively despised traveling through more rural areas around the city.

The problem was that, wherever she went, her Guards would follow. In the city, she would be followed by a mere two guards. There would be a secondary shell of guards set a street or two away from her, but they would be undercover, and identifying possible threats for the ones following her; they would easily disappear into the woodwork, and she hardly ever thought about them.

Whenever she hit the suburbs, all those same guards would be there as well- this time all armed with powerful rifles.

And if she ever saw fit to go out into areas where there even might be four trees placed closer than a hundred feet apart… Not only would all her Guards have powerful rifles, but there would be a minimum of four air superiority fighters swooping around overhead, making all sorts of noise.

She’d never gone near any forests with them; she’d read the policies. If she did, those forests would be flattened with missiles for ‘security considerations’ as she got close.

It was a good thing she knew a thing or two that they didn’t.

For example, her bedroom was at the heart of the Palace. They knew that- but they didn’t know that the air vent in it wasn’t just a little air vent. As a matter of fact, it connected directly to one of the main ventilation shafts through the Castle- much larger than required for her to slide through, with no tight corners or openings to reach it. All she had to do was lock the door and climb in. Since there was a small kitchenette and attached bathroom inside her room, even though nopony she’d ever asked could remember why it was there, they wouldn’t worry unless she missed an appointment or something.

She could then climb up the shaft about two floors, take the eastern branch, and crawl along it until it split into two little ones, one continuing forwards and one turning right. Neither of the little ones were of any use- but if she turned left at that point, she’d find herself facing a similarly outsized ventilation grille… this time facing the Palace air fighter bay.

Then of course, for some reason, her father liked hiring the stupidest guards he could find. It rather handily explained all the commotion when she went to rural areas- but it also explained why the air fighter bay was completely unmonitored, except for somepony that would make a single lap once every hour, on the hour.

So all she had to do was wait, behind that ventilation grille, for that single guard to make his lap and disappear… then slip out through the grate, close it behind her so they wouldn’t know how she got in, tip-hoof quickly to the smallest craft in the bay, climb inside, and start powering it up.

Unfortunately, the smaller ones were never the ‘ready’ ones- meaning she’d have to take almost fifty minutes powering up the electronics, and getting it ready… at which point that Guard would be getting ready to walk around again.

So she’d climb down into the footwell in front of the seat and duck her head. Once the lights dimmed again, she’d hop back up in the seat, log in to the craft so they’d know it was her rather than some random thief if they were to catch up in the air, start the engines, and order the bay doors open.

The bay doors opened quietly enough, and the engines on that small ‘skiff’-class fighter quiet enough in zero-thrust configuration, that nopony outside of the room would realize she’d ever entered until she was taking off.

So of course, that’s what she did. It was a couple weeks after she’d approved the blueprints for her new ship- and she’d spent the time since, and indeed the time before, exchanging letters with Jewel Tone, the mother of Willowstone, the filly that had served as the Admiral’s Tactical officer through the Equineothame Civil War, as it was being called. She had made plans with the mare for her to come visit their house.

Naturally, their house was about as rural as anypony could get. It was situated right in the middle of a dense forest- which meant that, if she ever approached it with her Guards, they would flatten it as a matter of course.

That was the point to stealing one of their fastest aircraft.

Once free of the Palace, she dove, riding full throttle as she skimmed the Palace walls. This was also the aircraft type she liked the most in the simulator- and after a dozen or so excursions like this, usually just seeking a peaceful flight someplace, she was one of the most skilled pilots on the entire planetoid.

She pulled up just in time, and skimmed the outer wall by a distance of six feet, throwing a couple loose bricks off the top of the wall with the blast from the engines. She’d been telling the maintenance crew those needed to be re-mortared every day for months, and this was why. One of them would have sailed through her parents’ bedroom window, crossed the room, and smashed the giant mirror over their dresser to bits while it embedded itself in the wall. The same window, absent the flying bricks, would effortlessly withstand the supersonic blast, despite the noise scaring her parents out of their minds.

So of course, maintaining a radar altitude of about twenty feet, she rocketed down the city streets at well over half the speed of sound, cornering as hard as the gee-frame in the craft would let her. Finally, after swooping under a small bridge with a clearance of about two feet between her craft and the tops of the ground vehicles driving underneath, she shot down the highway as it plunged into the woods. She followed the highway for about three minutes, before swerving suddenly off to the side, and dodging between a few trees. It was hard work, but she was completely confident in three things.

The first was that none of the Guards could do it- even the few that knew how to turn one of these things on.

The second was that they wouldn’t dare shoot into the forest when they didn’t know where she was.

And the third, they weren’t nearly smart enough to simply fly overhead and follow her that way.

As such, after a few miles of flying with a bank of at least forty-five degrees, she swooped out overtop a small dirt road through the woods with a full-on ninety-degree bank, climbed a few feet while inverted to avoid a camper van that was driving the other way, flipped the right way up, and followed the dirt road for several more miles. Eventually, the dirt road crossed a rural highway about two miles before her exit. She crossed that highway at about mach point eight; since the tiny little craft was a stealth fighter, traffic would hardly even notice the noise… so long as she was flying right-side-up. Which was easy, no matter how much she liked her inverted maneuvers.

Her exit was, of course, another series of gaps between trees in the woods.

So she wove through the woods again- and finally exceeded the ten-mile air search radius from the last place they could have known where she was, hardly a block away from the Palace. This time, her twisting route jumped up through a gap in the canopy presented by a small RV park.

As soon as she achieved the open sky, she went back to full speed, skimming treetops as she continued to rocket away from the Castle.

After that, it was about a fifteen minute flight before she pivoted over a quarry and finally set the cruise autopilot for hardly one thousand feet, still subsonic flight, and her destination.

This was the boring part of the flight, lasting nearly two hours- and they’d backplot any comms activity to find her.

But that was why she brought a good book.

Princess Flight looked up when her control panel chirped at her again, closing and stowing her book in a single motion. That chirp could be-

-No, it was just the two-minute warning for the autopilot expiration she’d set, not another close-proximity aircraft, such as the Guards that liked flying way too close to her for safety.

She smiled, checked the radar to make sure no Guards were in range, disconnected the autopilot, and started decelerating gently.

Finally, she swooped gently around a small property in the middle of the woods under the craft’s limited VTOL power, selected a spot, and set it down on the driveway. A couple of switches was all it took to cut the engines and set it into ‘standby’ mode, so it’d be quick to start when it came time for her to leave, before she climbed out of the cockpit, removed a few shreds of the front airbreathing engine covers from the leading edges of the intakes, and trotted up towards the front door. Those covers would have ‘popped’ inwards when she started the engines, just like the ones on the back would have blown clean off. The front ones were designed to split and ‘hang’ into the intake, but not reach far enough down to touch the engine itself… but they had never been designed for supersonic speeds. Fortunately, they were also designed to shred apart inside the engine without doing damage should they come loose, so no damage done.

She stopped in front of the door, glanced behind her to make sure there weren’t any Guards, raised her hoof, and knocked. Twice quickly, a slightly longer gap, then twice more.

She didn’t have to wait long before the door was opened.

She blinked. It was the receptionist from the Airbreathing Starship Company- the one she hadn’t seen when she’d gone in for blueprint review.

“Ahh, Princess,” the mare bowed, despite her lack of regalia; she’d left it in the plane.

“Uh, Hi,” she muttered uncertainly.

The mare took her cue and rose again. “I’m Jewel Tone,” she told Flight, “though you might know me as the receptionist at ASC.”

“I do,” Flight muttered. “I… I heard you were on leave after that battle. I hope everything’s going okay…?”

The mare winced. “My… My daughter, River Skip, died in the battle, when the Ostentatious was blown apart.” She closed her eyes for a second. “I… I can only thank you and the Navy again for saving my dear Willowstone.”

She bowed her head. “You’re welcome.”

“Anyways, come in, come in.” She held the door wide.

Flight entered and, after closing the door behind her, followed Jewel Tone into a living room of sorts- where Willowstone was sitting on the couch, propped up on one leg while the other just hung. “Hi,” Willowstone greeted.

“I’ll go get us some snacks, shall I?” Jewel Tone asked. Flight got the impression she was forcing herself to present her cheerful front, rather than letting her true self show. It was something she saw a lot, lately- and it broke her heart that ponies felt like they had to do that around her.

“Sure, thank you,” Flight answered, before turning to Willowstone. “Hello. How’re you holding up?”

Willow blinked, while her mother disappeared in the direction of what Flight assumed was the kitchen. “Uh- what?”

She shrugged. “When I told the High Admiral I was visiting today, she asked me to ask you how you were holding up,” she explained.

“You know the High Admiral?” Willowstone asked.

“I’m the Royal Princess,” she answered soberly.

“... But you’re green.”

She smiled; she got that a lot. Until she had died, Little Bubble had been the well-known Royal Princess… and whereas Flight’s fur was mint green, Bubble’s had been a brighter, sky blue; it was almost a miracle the two of them had colors as agreeable as they did, given their mother’s ugly yellow and father’s fiery red.

“My sister was blue,” Flight told her.

Willow scowled, then blinked. “Oh, so you’re the Little Princess, but after…” She paused. “... Sorry.”

Flight shook her head. “So how’re you holding up?”

She sighed, and looked at her limp left foreleg. “Eh,” she muttered. “The doc keeps telling me to exercise as much as I can, to help this cybernetic… thing learn how I tick faster, but…” She sighed, and leaned back on the couch, dragging the limp limb. “But what’s the use? Less than one out of a hundred midshipfillies ever return to space after hitting dirt, and all I’m really qualified for dirtside is a receptionist, and that-!” She sighed again. “That’s dull, boring work.”

Flight sighed, idly wondering what the filly’s mother thought of that statement. “It’s also less than one out of a hundred midshipfillies that hit dirt on medical leave from the Navy, with the Admiral talking about how much she wanted to jump her straight to Lieutenant Commander if only she were a bit older,” she told her. “About one out of two point six million, actually- I looked it up.”

She looked at her. “And what use is that?”

“Well… The reason ninety-nine percent of all midshipfillies never return to space is because they’re using the program as it was intended- to get a higher education in whatever field was their choosing. Tactical training is useful in a number of different places, such as Orbital Control and so on.

“And only one percent of them choose to take advantage of the fact that, unless you were court-martialed, you’ve got a free ticket back into the Navy when you come of age.”

Willow sighed. “Even with an injured leg?”

Flight smiled. “Yes, even with an injured leg. As a matter of fact, you’re technically still in the Navy, on medical leave and accruing injury pay, until you’re fully recovered.”

She looked up. “Accruing injury pay?” She scowled. “And wasn’t it unpaid?”

“Medical leave is not, by law,” Flight told her. “It’s only half pay, and from the midshipmare grade it’s really not much, but compounded with how they can’t actually pay it to you until you come of age, it means you’ll have a pretty significant birthday present.”

“I’m only nine next week,” Willow answered. “That’s a long way off.”

“So is any other job,” Flight sighed. “That said, if that cybernetic prosthetic is up to scratch in time, my ship will be ready for takeoff in about thirteen months.”

“... Your ship.”

She nodded. “Yeah. She’s going to be the biggest spaceplane in history- and a warship to boot. Just don’t tell my dad.”

There was a pause. “How is that important?”

“Well, any warship needs a tactical officer, and I happen to be in the same room as one of the best ones the Navy has seen in centuries right now- and what’s more, she’ll be of age just in time for said warship to start taking crew aboard.”

Chapter 4: The Great Space Factory

View Online

Flight sighed as she climbed back into her craft. The main purpose of the visit had been to help pull Willowstone back into the land of the living, and restore her drive to excel. That had taken a couple of hours- but she’d stayed longer. They had been happy to have her with them in their daily honoring of Willow’s dead sister.

As it turned out, River Skip had been the antithesis of both her mother and sister. Instead, she’d followed after her father, who had died years before when the singular reactor on his asteroid ore carrier had blown a bearing during the journey to Equineothame. The powerless ship had been moving at nearly zero point three cee- and when it had crossed the invisible Planetary Approach Threshold on a direct collision course, and failed to respond to hails… the Antikinetic Defense System, designed to render long-range cee-fractional kinetic attacks against the planet useless, had gone wholesale on his ship. His ship, which had long since become ice-cold and run out of oxygen. He, and the two other ponies on its crew, were already dead. The fragments, and the ore the ship was carrying, had rained down over the ocean side of the little planetoid.

Both River and her father, Hedge Whistle, had been almost eternally cheerful. Both of them had been, as Jewel Tone had put it, ‘ADHD maniacs’- but whereas Hedge had lost more jobs than either of his surviving family members could count, River had had promise. She might’ve been having fun at every turn, but not once in living memory had she ever failed to perform a task because of it. She and Willow had both inherited their mother’s solid determination and ability to focus on what was important when they needed to- and had both subsequently been outstanding tactical trainees.

Flight keyed the canopy closed- and, with just two more keypresses, the entire control panel came to life. She felt the familiar tremor as the engines spun up, and inspected her instrumentation while it did so.

Jewel and Willow still honored Hedge’s death each evening, by burning incense in a hole drilled in a chunk of asteroid ore, placed proudly upon the only surviving hull fragment of his ship- the one that had been blown clear of its collision course. For River… River hadn’t had the sort of death they could honor that way. Instead, since she had left a small bookcase full of spy adventure novels in her room, they had taken to reading a chapter out of one of them each night.

It had been a very solemn ceremony, almost, when Flight had joined them for it. When they had allowed her to look around River’s room, she’d recognized a lot of posters and books.

She heaved a sigh as she logged into the craft again and finally lifted off to head back to the Royal Palace. It had been a long day already, despite only being in the middle of the afternoon.

No sooner had she transitioned into forward flight and engaged the autopilot than the phone started ringing.

She sighed, and tapped it. “What?” she asked, rather more sharply than she had intended.

“Princess,” the stallion on the other side said, bowing deeply. His coat was a medium brownish-gray, which went oddly well with his pure black mane and tail.

She sighed. “What is it?” she snapped.

He winced but, unlike several ponies she could name, carried on immediately. His voice had a shaky quality to it, like he was afraid of her. “King High Cost has contracted us- the Great Space Factory- to build a new outsize yacht with a full-size gravity wheel,” he told her, eyes focused on something other than his screen. As he continued, the fear drained out of his voice, falling towards more of a calm narrating voice, and Flight got the distinct idea he was reading something pre-prepared. “We’ve just finished the planning, but the blueprints need approval, and…” He trailed off, and turned a page, before a revolted expression decorated his features.

Flight nodded. The GSF was the biggest starship manufacturer around Equineothame. They even shared the Navy-owned shipyard facilities- and in exchange, they maintained the yard facilities and were contracted to complete any work required on Navy vessels. They didn’t build anything surface-capable, but they could build just about anything else, provided one could get their hooves on the appropriate paperwork for the technologies required.

“His Drunkenness doesn’t care to do it himself,” Flight finished for him.

He flinched much more visibly at her derisive tone and, after looking between her and his notes, gave the smallest of nods.

She sighed. “They’re at the ground offices just outside the Palace City, right?”

He nodded much more strongly.

She nodded. “Alright, I’ll be there.” She looked at her navigation panel, punching in the quick search to update the autopilot. “About… two hours. That work?”

He looked back at his notes, turned three pages, and finally pushed them off his desk with an audible thunk. “Um-!” He paused, briefly, to think; his nervousness was really coming through now. “There won’t be much time for the review.”

She smiled. “How many figures does the price tag have on it?”

He blinked, then looked down at something. “... Thirteen,” he eventually said.

“Well that’s not nearly enough,” Flight muttered.

He stared at her.

She chuckled. “I’ll be there in a couple hours, so we can discuss exactly how we’re going to inflate the price.”

“Hello again.”

The brownish-gray unicorn, the same stallion as had phoned her before, winced. He had apparently been assigned to take care of the blueprint review- and she could smell his fear, so Flight wasn’t sure exactly how that was going to go down. “H…Hi,” he muttered slowly.

Flight nodded, then waited. She’d long since dealt with enough ponies that were utterly afraid of her authority to know that the best thing to do was to exercise her patience. She could see the blueprint in his Bands, so she knew exactly what he was going to do- that was, invite her into a conference room or wherever to review the blueprint. She did have to admit, though, it was the first time she’d encountered a unicorn that was so afraid of her; usually, it was the pegasi that her father shunned. He was, after all, a unicorn supremacist- even though Flight could definitively say that she wished she was a pegasus, because it’d be so much easier to move around in space if she had wings and lacked a horn to bang on things.

Speaking of her father, she’d spoken to him on the way over- and found out that he intended to give her both ships. After that, she’d given Cold Coils a call… and managed to get it authorized for some of those same new techs as her other new ship, given that she met a few conditions.

They looked at each other, her calmly and him fearfully, for several seconds before he spoke. “Uh,” he muttered. “Do you…?” He trailed off, uncertainty coloring his tone.

“Lead the way,” she told him.

He flinched, paused, then jerked into motion. “Right.”

Flight looked critically at the blueprints when he silently flattened them out on the conference table. It looked almost exactly like the Flying Surface had, just a few small weeks before.

She traced the edge of the massive gravity wheel with the tip of her hoof. “The Flying Surface was crippled when a probably-directed meteor struck one of the spokes of the Gravity Wheel,” she muttered softly. “Had she been under Gravity Drive, she would’ve been broken apart instantly by the imbalance. How is this protected against the same?”

The stallion- Shooting Star, according to his nametag- winced, looking at the blueprint. “If…” he muttered… then visibly shuddered. “It’s not.”

“Huh,” she muttered. “That definitely needs fixing. In the meantime, do you think we can arm and armor it, and perhaps dig into mil-spec drives and whatnot, while making it as big and expensive as possible?” She looked up at him. “I’d rather not make it a warship, but it’d be nice if it could at least defend itself if it got in a spot of trouble.” She looked back at the blueprints. “We’re going to want to give her fuel bunkers for ascent to Gravity Drive distance at least once, but I’m imagining her as more of a deep space vessel, primarily using her fuel stowage to refuel other vessels. Do you think that would work?”

“As big as possible…” he muttered, slowly, gazing at the blueprint. “If…” He paused. “Deep space only?” He seemed almost distracted by her specifications.

She nodded. “Ideally able to descend to lower orbit and return, but it only needs to do it once. And it doesn’t have to be fast.”

He rubbed his chin. “Hmm. The fuel required… But with…” He tilted his head. “I…” He took a deep breath. “I think we can do it.”

She nodded. “I’m also… curious,” she muttered, and pulled her tablet out of her saddlebags. A few quick taps on the controls was all it took to pull up the external dimensions and weights of the ship ASC was making for her. “Do you think you can work in a bay large enough to berth this in?”

He looked at them, then at the blueprint. “Easy,” he decided. “I… I assume you want…” He paused, as if deciding how to say it. “Compartmentalization and…?”

Flight tilted her head. “If you mean she needs to remain survivable even if she takes damage, then yes.” She glanced down at it. “And… I’ve been in contact with a few ponies that can get us some new, more advanced technologies to put on it. Think you can work those in?”

“Coils?” Flight asked in surprise, when she arrived at the Great Space Factory headquarters for blueprint review a month and a half later. “What are you doing here? I thought you were at ASC!”

Coils sighed. “Yeah, I was. My internship ran out, though. I hope that ship works out well for you.” She shrugged. “I got another internship here, to broaden my skills.”

“Internship?” Flight asked, while Coils started leading her to the conference room.

“Yup. I’m a power tech, so at ASC, I was learning how power systems are hardened against reentry and orbiting forces- that reactor won’t do you any good if it packs up halfway through your ascent into orbit, after all. Here, I’m studying how high power systems go together- how to properly manage gigavolt-range electrical systems with several sourcing reactors, how to build them such that they won’t fail under load, how to manage the immense surge loads of Dreadnought-scale Gravity Drives powering up.” She chuckled. “That’s easy, by the way.”

Flight raised her eyebrows. “So you’re a multidisciplinary power tech?”

Coils paused. “Uh… Yeah, I guess so.” She looked surprised.

Flight hesitated, undecided. She knew her sister had told her that a multidisciplinary technician was hit or miss, but very predictable. If they focused on different aspects of a field, such as power equipment, they were an ideal crew member. If they instead scattered their focus between multiple fields, they were somepony to shy away from- somepony to consider a last resort when it came to crew selection.

“Anyways,” Coils continued, knocking briefly on the conference room door before leading her in. “You came for blueprint review, didn’t you?”

Flight chuckled. “Alright. So how expensive did we make it?”

Coils laughed. “So expensive the ship ASC is making looks like a few pennies on the side of the road,” she answered, hopping up onto a chair and tapping the blueprints that had already been laid out on it.

Flight hopped up into her own seat, glanced at Shooting Star, the only other pony in the room, and back down at the blueprint. She raised her eyebrows. “It’s a lot bigger,” she observed.

Coils chuckled. “She is.” She glanced up. “This is Shooting Star, by the way. He’s the project lead, but he’s also not very good at talking to anypony he’s not familiar with, so I’m the spokespony today.”

Flight nodded her head respectfully to Star, whose expression flickered with worry until she looked away.

Coils looked down at the blueprint. “Of course, she’s actually a lot bigger than she looks. She measures about twelve times longer than the original Flying Surface, and several times larger on the other two dimensions as well. What’s more, you’ll notice there’s no massive Gravity Wheels sticking out of the ship.”

Flight nodded. “I do. Looks like there’s some kind of wheel inside?” She traced one with the tip of her hoof.

Coils nodded. “That’s one of your triple internal gravity wheels; there’s another at the other end of the ship, and a third in the middle.” She pointed them out. “They’ll each break the record, capable of spinning up to a full five gees at the edge with only half the spin rate the Flying Surface used- and as you can see, the entire volume of the wheel is living space, not just the outer edge.

“Now, under normal operation, the middle one will stand still while the front and rear spin in opposing directions. However, if you spin all three in the same direction without drive compensation, you can actually spin the rest of the ship up to one gee of apparent gravity as well. With that in mind, we designed the whole thing like it was one massive gravity wheel- so, that’s actually what you have. The three internal Gravity Wheels break the ship into quarters, and each quarter is actually its own separate gravity wheel, capable of spinning up to a whopping six gravities at the edge.”

Flight tilted her head. “Doesn’t the Gravity Drive not like spinning?”

“Normally,” Coils nodded, “it doesn’t. But Star here is some kind of wizard when it comes to drive systems, so not only did he double the advantage the new Drive tech will confer, but he managed to mount this ship with four completely separate Gravity Drive zones- one per hull section- which will interlock and support one another, even in the event of damage. The interference zones will provide a conveniently powerful gravitational distortion capable of, if all four drives are at maximum power, deflecting literally anything approaching the side of the vessel- even light itself.”

She nodded. “Meaning, in that configuration, she’s only vulnerable from the front and the rear?”

“Yup. However, in those aspects… See these tubes?” She tapped a series of tubes on each of the massive hull sections.

Flight scowled. “Looks like they’re set to have line of sight?”

Coils nodded again. “Yup. There’s twenty of them per hull segment, facing the near end of the ship.

“They’re artillery cannons.”

Flight looked up at her. “Artillery.”

She nodded. “Yes. And since you’ve got a bank of nearly five hundred reactors at the heart of the vessel, you should be able to bark thunder once per minute at maximum rate.”

“Or eighty times in one devastating salvo,” Flight muttered.

Coils nodded. “Or eighty times, forty forwards and forty rear. We’ve also wrapped her in so many capacitance coils you should be able to issue three such devastating salvos about thirty seconds apart before waiting for it to charge.

“But that said, even though she’s also got the missile throw weight of a superdreadnought squadron and the point defense of an entire task force, she’s very much a glass cannon. All battlesteel construction, military-grade security and compartmentalization, fuel stored as water to be electrolyzed when needed, and Cruiser-level armor- but with a target this big, even armor as thick as a superdreadnought is long won’t protect you very well.

“I understand you explicitly asked for it to be a ‘armed and armored civilian vessel’, though?”

Flight nodded. “I already have one combat ship.”

Coils nodded too. “Well. All these artillery cannons are camouflaged as hull decorations. She’s capable of polarizing her hull, but even with the new polarizers, she’s going to be a lot easier to hit than your ship- it’s a lot easier to make a direct hit on something this big. She’s got the passenger capacity to play arkship for a small world- and if you shut down the Gravity Wheels, her onboard gravity as produced by the Gravity Drive is formed to match the force from the Wheels, though at uniform strength- and whether they’re spinning or not, she’s going to have a cruise a bit lower than most warships, at eighty gees- but she should blow everything else out of the water, even your other ship, with a sprint of almost two hundred.”

She nodded. Gravity Drives were an interesting animal. The Cruise speed- forty gees for most civilian ships, and up to a hundred for Navy vessels- was for fully-compensated motion, allowing them to maintain normal gravity aboard ship. The so-called ‘dash’ speed- the flat-out top speed for most civilian ships at a mere fifty gees and up to one fifteen on a warship- was where the crew experienced three gees towards the back of the ship. The ‘sprint’ speed, with ten gees of apparent force, was exclusive to warships and usually topped out at a hundred and fifty.

“Alright,” Coils nodded, touching the blueprint with the tip of a hoof. “You’ll notice there’s a lot of these components in here?”

She nodded again. It looked like several bundles of pipes running the length of the ship, segmented between the gravity wheels.

“You have to shut all the gravity wheels down, and align them properly- which is automatic- but once you do, this part here-” she indicated a little ‘plug’ of some sort on the back of the ship- “comes out. With it, those cables, and the brackets stored in these two compartments here, you should be able to tow a medium-large habitable planet at about zero point zero two gees- or alter its spin by about a ten thousandth of an RPM per day- call it a week to give it a day-night cycle similar to ours.”

“You… You’re one-upping the Tow Boat,” Flight observed.

Coils nodded. “Oh yes. The Tow Boat could hardly manage a thousandth of a gee on the small planetoid that is Equineothame, and took about two years with its sister ship, the Spin Thruster, to produce the spin we enjoy today. They were destroyed long ago, but the whole point is that nobody knows about this.” She tapped the blueprints.

Flight nodded. “Alright. So what’s the price tag?”

“About fifteen hundred times your father’s remaining wealth,” Coils stated calmly.

Flight scowled. “Hmm. I’m not sure that even he can afford that.”

Coils chuckled. “Once you complete that mission, that won’t be a problem. There’s such a massive bounty on that mission it’ll cover about half the price on its own- and the actual mission itself should cover the rest quite handily.”

Flight looked at her. “What is this mission?”

Coils looked at her contemplatively for several seconds. “Can… Can you promise not to tell anypony about it? Not even your future crew, until you’re already on route?”

She looked back at Coils. “Alright, I can promise. Why?”

Coils took a deep breath, and let it out “Archive delta-seven-seven-one-one-seven-seven-delta,” she began.

“That’s malformed,” Flight observed instantly. It was- not only was it palindromic, but archive IDs were always two sets of a single letter followed by three numbers; the second letter was in the wrong spot.

“Just punch in the search,” Coils told her. “Trust me.”

Flight scowled, pulling out and placing her tablet on the conference table surface, then punched in the search. Exactly as expected, the malformed input error came up.

“Then archive three-niner-one-alpha-seven-two-six-charlie,” Coils continued calmly. “Then archive zulu-delta-charlie-four-alpha-bravo-indigo-six.” She sighed. “Then… Archive hotel-zero-niner-three-foxtrot-zero-zero-one.”

Flight scowled, punching in the three searches. The first two- as expected- produced malformed input errors… then the fourth should have come up dry. The Hotel Zero archival block was almost famously empty, containing only hotel-zero-zero-zero-alpha-zero-zero-zero, a small file container which carried the few surviving fragments of the ancient Distortion Drive blueprint.

It didn’t, though. When she submitted the final query, her entire tablet froze… then the screen went dark for a second. When it came back on, it had loaded an archive file, labeled The Dark Archive.

“What…?” she began.

“It’s a special sequence,” Coils explained. “The Dark Archive only exists if you use it.” She took a deep breath, and looked at the screen. “Two years ago. The Cassanova probe didn’t actually waste itself against a comet.” She paused. “Well, it did, but it sent this back before it died.”

She tapped the photo with the tip of her hoof. “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

“As near as anypony can tell,” Coils told her, “that ship is many thousands of years old… and equipped with a Distortion Drive. You can see the twin coiling of its Gravity Drive- a characteristic the Distortion Drive is known to have, and that’s useless to a standard Gravity Drive, even with Star’s ingenuity. The Royal Equineothame Engineering Society has been keeping it secret from the governments- all of them, not just Equineothame’s- in the hopes that it won’t get blown to Kingdom Come by some government that wants to keep others from getting at it before they can, while we hunt for somepony that can quietly scare together a ship capable enough and, eventually, retrieve it as inconspicuously as possible.”

She nodded slowly. “So my mission… is to go retrieve it,” she muttered softly.

Coils nodded. “Both ships- at both the ASC and GSF- have also been designed to accept any resultant technologies- including in power supply, though that’s a lot of guesswork. If we’re right, a year or two after you fetch the Enterprise, you’ll be in command of pony civilization’s first two hyperlight vessels.”

She nodded slowly. “And I’ll be running one of the biggest, most important power systems in the known galaxy, alongside some of the newest engines not yet in existence,” she observed. “I’m going to need a power tech on the crew- and somepony that’s good with engines.”

Chapter 5: First Flight

View Online

Princess Short Flight sighed as she finally threw the master simulator switch.

Then she let out a laugh.

It had been a long two years since she’d approved the larger ship- and she’d spent one and a half of them practically living in the simulator that ASC had cobbled together out of her new ship’s control consoles. Just a year before, she wouldn’t have known how to throw the master sim switch. During the interim, she’d temporarily mapped the digital switch to one of the buttons on her auxiliary control panel.

The first six months of simulator training had been fraught with confusion and malfunctions while the engineers figured out the code. Almost twenty times, when she had switched to the autopilot at hypersonic speed, it had pitched up- or down, a few times- too aggressively and snapped the wings off. It had been funny the first two times, but the rest were just bothersome.

The middle six months had been ironing out all the bugs and actually learning to fly it in a feature-complete simulator.

For the last six months, her simulator had been transplanted from the corner of an empty conference room into the ship’s actual cockpit, and she’d focused on a lot of the smaller maneuvers. Docking to larger ships, runway and VTOL landings without autopilot assistance- she’d crashed a lot when those came about, despite her practice with smaller ships. Atmospheric flight, orbital maneuvers…

And the final month had been deep space rendezvous and recovery, exactly what her planned first mission was. She’d created and used a custom little ‘boss program’ to keep the secret, so several times the mission had ended with the destruction of the ship she was recovering because she’d had to hide the screens at a critical point.

She touched a hoof against the VTOL engine controller, before throwing the power switch. The reactors were already running, having been started shortly after installation.

She could barely hear the low murmur of the VTOL engines spinning up- all eight of them. She’d just been cleared, by the ASC, to move the ship over to the main spaceport to take aboard her crew.

It was the ship’s first true flight.

She keyed the mic. “Tower, First Light requesting clearance for takeoff from ASC.”

Her first ever live ATC transmission. It should’ve felt momentus, like a major milestone…. But it didn’t.

“First Light, huh? What kinda name is- Oh. Princess. Um…. Yup, cleared to take off from ASC.”

She scowled at the controller’s grumpy tone, but didn’t say anything. At least she’d managed to get staff on the schedule at all hours of the day and night- but it was still hit or miss as to whether they would actually show up or not. Overall, she was lucky she had someone in the first place, and couldn’t afford to lose controllers for things like attitude.

She could hear the sudden thrumming from her VTOL engines almost the moment she pushed the button to expose them. A side panel informed her that the massive doors protecting all eight engines were opening in perfect sync.

She smiled, watching the readout. She technically had VTOL power available from the moment they started opening, but she wanted to wait until they were all the way open before applying power.

As she waited, her mind traveled back to the ship’s name, the First Light. She had named it herself about a week prior- when the engineers had called her in a panic. She chuckled; that had been an interesting scene to hear their side of.

“Hey, Princess?” Cold Coils still thought it was strange just how casually she often found herself speaking to the Princess, but now wasn’t the time.

“What’s wrong?” Princess Short Flight answered.

Coils flinched, trying to ignore the way the Princess’s voice was distorted. That meant she was using the comms in her bedroom, rather than somewhere else in- or out- of the palace. “W-Well, it’s come time to name your ship from ASC, so we contacted your father, like we’re supposed to. And he-!” She broke off, breathing hard.

“He wants to call it something stupid, doesn’t he?”

She nodded, and told her.

“He wants to call it the Expensive as $@&$!?” Flight screeched.

Coils winced. She’d known the King was cheap, but she had never realized just how cheap he was until the Princess’s microphone emitted a series of deafening pops and bangs as the Princess’s voice left its operating range. No wonder he had married a mare called Cheap Gold.

Flight let out a snort of laughter at the memory. It had been a good thing she had spent much of the last year coming up with names for both ships, so had one ready.

She then glanced sideways at the engineering panel again, and started increasing VTOL power. The thrumming outside fast became a roar before the ship slowly started to rise into the air. Her sensor panel informed her that the blast from her engines was being redirected back up towards it by the buildings around, and the heavy shutters over each window- meaning, she’d probably have to increase power to keep climbing clear of the rooftops.

Coils had been the one to call her because, after she had finished her schooling, Flight had offered her the position as the ship’s senior engineer, and she had accepted it. As a member of the crew, Coils was then allowed to be part of the production and everything, even without working for ASC.

She was just transitioning to forward flight for the ten-mile journey when her tactical panel chirped suddenly with a proximity alert.

She glanced at it, but it was only the Guard, crowding her too closely as usual.

Then, as she watched, one of them made the mistake of swooping directly underneath her starboard wing. Her ship didn’t really notice, except for the calm observations of its sensor arrays, but the same could not be said for the tiny fighter. It was only marginally larger than the ones she liked to use, as a missile-oriented air superiority fighter, but it still made a rather impressive fireball when it slammed into the ground a thousand feet below less than a second later.

Flight raised her eyebrow at the display. If she was being honest with herself, which she usually was, she had been surprised that it had withstood the forces exerted by the hypersonic blast from her VTOL engines- though utterly unsurprised that the pilot hadn’t survived the hundreds of gees placed on him.

She sighed. She knew that those fighters- and the ones she liked- were a leftover from her great grandfather’s rule, back when Equineothame was a military and industrial power, and that they were built to handle far more than their pilots could- but even so, surviving those forces, even if it didn’t survive the subsequent supersonic impact with the ground, was just plain impressive.

“And that’s not even full power,” Flight muttered, with a chuckle. She glanced in the direction of the engines- she still wasn’t sure how the engineers had managed to increase the air intake mass so much that they could actually produce so much thrust rather than just spinning in a vacuum, no matter how dense the atmosphere, but they had. When she had asked, Coils had told her it was a trade secret.

She sighed, and completed her transition to forward flight. Shooting Star had resigned from the GSC a couple months before in order to accept a position as chief engineer aboard the Dawnbreaker, the ship GSC was making her, and would be joining her and Coils for the mission. In theory, by the time they got back to Equineothame, they’d be ready to start actually building Distortion Drives, without needing to do any reverse engineering first.

The First Light sat on the Capital City Landing Pad for three full months. Flight didn’t leave it much; every time she did, the Guards went haywire, galloping across live sectors of the pad and other areas. At least once, a pair of guards had gotten cooked by the thruster flare from a landing orbital cargo rocket.

Those unponied rockets were used to lift equipment and supplies into low Equineothame orbit and back- so they were fueled on the ground, and ran entirely on rocket thrust, unlike the First Light’s full suite of airbreathing thrust, rocket thrust, and Gravity Drive. As far as Flight understood it, that let them vastly simplify its flight software, which consequently improved its reliability in adverse conditions- the conditions that other ships had pilots for. The things still didn’t know how to check for stray ponies on the landing pad, though- they simply assumed the pad was clear, once Orbital Control assigned them a slot. It was supposed to be clear, after all.

However, while Flight had not allowed anypony that wasn’t crew to come aboard, both Shooting Star and Cold Coils had joined her aboard just a couple hours after she had arrived, then Willowstone two days after that. They were, as she, getting used to living aboard a starship- and of course, training and learning to more efficiently use the ship’s systems. Flight joined them in that; she agreed with High Admiral Timber Wolf: There was simply no such thing as too much skill.

And she was getting better. Not just at operating the ship in simulators, of course, but also in moving pallets of goods throughout the ship, and managing the logistics of getting all of those goods into the ship in the first place. She got the standard full years’ worth of preserved space food for a full crew complement of a hundred ponies and passenger complement of two hundred ponies, alongside full hydroponics supplies. She even got several pallets of uranium fuel that the engineers emptied into the automatic fuel hoppers, so they could be sure they would have the fuel to run at capacity for decades to come… And, at least partly, just to spite her father. They all knew they wouldn’t need that much fuel, but uranium was expensive, and the ship supplies were billed to him.

Then of course, Flight had a conversation with her father’s accountant, Days A’Counting- a very interesting name, considering her job- and found out that she hated the King’s guts as well, no matter how richly he paid her. Which he didn’t- pay her richly, that was. He paid her little more than minimum wage, but had threatened to kill her if she ever left. He would’ve targeted her family, but she didn’t have any left.

So, she was papering over the cracks for Flight, hiding all the expenses from the King… with the promise of being protected from the King’s wrath as the Dawnbreaker’s Chief Logistics Officer, once the ship left the drydock. She even helped Flight acquire so many pallets of small missiles, all camouflaged as various shipboard supplies, that both missile bunkers were completely full and they had two entire storage rooms crammed full of pallets of quarter-ton missiles. She’d managed to get a few pallets of larger missiles aboard, camouflaged as mechanical supplies and spare parts and materials, but they’d had to keep them to a minimum- in addition to onboarding them at night- to keep it from looking suspicious. Still, though, they had six ten-kiloton nuclear warheads as their largest weapons aboard, and so many half- and full-ton chemical warheads that Flight was almost afraid to check the computer to see exactly how many there were, all stored securely in the missile bunkers. Only about a quarter of the quarter-ton bombs had fit in the bunkers after all the larger weapons.

And finally, Flight was forced to leave a pallet of missiles in the middle of the passage for a few minutes when her father called right in the middle of it.

“Hi Dad,” she greeted. Her greeting wasn’t nearly as cheerful as it had been a couple years before- any more, every time she said that, it brought her a pang of pain as she remembered her sister.

“Shorty,” he began.

Flight winced, again remembering her sister’s fiery temper, but didn’t argue.

“We’ll be taking a journey to Earth and back tomorrow afternoon,” he told her. “Be ready.”

“Uh- Your Highness,” she muttered. “About that. We haven’t yet confirmed that this ship is capable of such a flight. It’s not going to be possible to make such a journey with her tomorrow.”

He stared at her through the comms screen. Flight could almost see the gears turning under his thick skull. “Then what are you doing at the Capital City Landing Pad?”

“Testing the life support, getting hydroponics up and running so you don’t have to eat freeze-dried space food, and loading her up with all the appropriate supplies. Once we’re done, me and my skeleton crew will take her on a little cruise around the Sun to verify her space-worthiness. Once that’s done, she’ll be ready to take on the rest of her crew, and available for Royal duties, since we will then be sure she won’t kill you by accident.”

It was the exact excuse her sister had used to hold the Flying Surface in orbit for nearly six months when she’d gotten it, while she hunted up a decent crew and onboarded supplies. It was also the excuse her sister had used to take a month-long cruise with the Flying Surface even after that, before making it available to their father’s assignments.

It hurt Flight to remember her sister like that- but her father gobbled it up, hook, line, and sinker.

“Oh. Well let me know when you’re done.” He hung up on her.

Flight sighed. “And so the Stupid King falls for the same thing twice,” she muttered, before returning to her missile pallet.

They were planning to orbit in two weeks, and Flight hadn’t told Willowstone, but the plan was to go on the committed mission immediately. They were going to fake an electronics failure that would keep the Gravity Drive from turning off, conveniently launching them well past Equineothame and towards the asteroid belt.

Chapter 6: Detour

View Online

Flight looked up when the com chirped while she, Star, Coils, and Willowstone were eating breakfast. Their takeoff and departure had gone so well that not just the engineers but Willowstone and even Flight were wondering exactly when something was going to go wrong.

Coils looked up as well, while Flight pulled her datapad out to check the call. “Huh. It’s Dad,” she observed.

“He’s slow,” Willow observed. “We’re already almost a light-month from Equineothame- we’ll be out of comms range in a couple days at the most.” She let out a snort. “Not that you’ll manage any sort of two-way connection right now anyways.”

“Convenient,” Flight muttered. “Too convenient.” She scowled, and checked the message metadata. “Looks like… Yeah. Sent from his bedroom, bounced off three ground stations, hit Comsat One, and got blasted all around at maximum power. But still.” She tapped play.

It was, rather predictably, a low-quality audio message. Her father was never satisfied with anything less than high definition video- but she was at the edge of range, so her comms suite had only managed to decode the low-frequency audio layer anyways. She had received a few portions of the low-definition video layer, but without the whole thing, decryption was impossible.

“Shorty,” her father began. “I need that ship the day after tomorrow- get it down here and make it available immediately.”

The message ended, and the room went deathly silent for a couple seconds.

“Day after tomorrow?” Flight muttered, then chuckled. “More like last month. He’s going to be maaaad.” She giggled. “But when I tell him it was an electronics failure, and use that as an excuse to ground it for a year…” She shrugged. “He’ll gobble it right up, hook, line, and sinker.”

“If he’ll take an excuse like that so easily,” Willow muttered, “how has he been managing the country?”

Flight looked at her. “Hmm? He hasn’t been.”

“Then who has been?”

There was a pause.

“That’s…” Flight muttered. “That’s a very good question.”

“Is it possible they’ll catch up?” Willow asked.

“No,” Flight answered instantly. “We’re running at top speed- some… How fast was it?”

“Point seven five cee,” Coils muttered. “That gives us a seven percent advantage on the top speed of any other ship, at just point seven cee.”

Flight rubbed her chin. “If we assume someone was right behind us when we crossed point seven cee, and has continued to chase us at that speed…”

“We’ve been cruising for five weeks,” Willow noted. “Five percent of lightspeed for five weeks is well beyond sensor range, especially considering how we’re running under stealth. Any maneuvers we do out here will be completely invisible to anyone that was following us.”

Flight scowled. “How much of a head start would they have to have had to catch us?”

“Assuming somepony sent them a message from Equineothame as soon as we crossed point seven cee, and they were right about where we are now…” She paused. “We’d have had about three weeks and, oh, five days- call it twenty-six days- to gain distance on them, then they’d take nearly two and a half days to hit full speed. So call it…” She paused. “An eight-day head start. In that situation, we would pass them about a hundred and sixty days past that point- call it four light-months from Equineothame, in about five months. Past that point, it’s basically guaranteed that anybody that sees us out there will have no idea we ever crossed point seven cee.”

Flight looked at her. “Anybody that sees us out there?”

Willow shrugged. “Ships get lost to deep space all the time, usually from pirate action. They’re not always dead when they do- and there’s been a couple stories of people that got lost, but were lucky enough to have a lower flight speed and managed to survive long enough to drift back into the system after a dozen years or so.” She sighed. “That said, that’s about all we’re likely to encounter even this far- that and exploration probes. It’s basically guaranteed once we cross four light-months.” She looked up at Flight. “So… Why are we hightailing it away from civilization like we’ve lost helm control?”

Flight looked at Coils, who nodded, and took a deep breath. She hadn’t yet told Willowstone about the mission- and actually hadn’t thought about it for the last couple weeks, either. “Because…” She sighed. “Because we’re on a mission,” she told her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it earlier, but it’s in the contract stipulations.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Somewhere out there, at a solar altitude of about six light-months, there’s an ancient, derelict starship that we believe is equipped with a Distortion Drive.”

“We’re retrieving it,” Willow observed, then scowled. “Why the secrecy, though?”

“The Equineothame High Engineering Society has been keeping the Enterprise secret from the governments of the system- not just Equineothame’s- so nobody blows it up just so their competitors can’t get to it first.”

Willow narrowed her eyes. “The High Engineering Society?” she asked. “That’s famous across the Navy for dealing under the table?”

There was a pause.

“Uh…” Coils muttered.

Willow looked at Flight. “Did they give us this mission profile?”

“They did,” Flight observed. She tapped her tablet a few times, and pulled up the mission profile, and pushed it towards Willow.

Willow looked at it. “Hmm. It’s…” She traced it with her hoof. “No, that’s wrong. Hmm…” She scowled, her half-eaten salad lying forgotten. “This…” She looked up. “We’ll want to deviate from the profile,” she told her.

“Why?” Flight asked.

“Because with this shape? We can expect to run into pirates, or a Navy, or whatever else out there- and the Enterprise may or may not even exist. This looks like it was designed to make us vulnerable to a number of different kinds of attacks.”

Flight narrowed her eyes. “Of course,” she muttered. “What would you recommend?”

“First of all, this corner in three days. They’ve probably got a ship sitting at or near that point to confirm we make it, ID our ship, and whatever else. It’s also suspiciously close to this planetoid here.” She tapped the planetoid. “There could even be a fleet there, waiting to kill us.” She looked up. “I suggest we deviate immediately- and turn the opposite way, cut to Silent Running, and pretend like we’ve lost helm control. Then we coast for two weeks and make a plane change, to move perpendicular to the plane of the system- but not directly, of course. After that, we drift until we’re at least a light-month from the ecliptic, then head straight away from the star until we’re a good seven light-months out before scooping back in to approach the mission point at a crawl from out-system.”

“Won’t that mean we’re looking into the Sun?”

“At that distance, the Sun is little more than another star,” Willow told her. “We’ll also be approaching from an odd direction- and if we approach slowly with full passives, we’ll be able to spot any defenders and identify any weak points before we ever get anywhere near the PONR for missile range.”

Flight rubbed her chin. “Would a high-speed pass be better?”

“Not until we’ve identified the size of any encampments,” she told her. “A high-speed pass will vastly reduce the PONR range to the sides, but we have to know where they are or we’re just as likely to charge straight into their teeth.”

“That’ll significantly extend the mission time,” Coils muttered.

“It will,” Flight agreed, then looked up at Coils. “Was there any reason for this particular profile?”

“To lose any possible pursuit,” Coils muttered. “That’s what they told me.”

“And if it’s just to lose pursuit…” Flight sighed, glancing down. “You’re right. Especially given our speed advantage, we don’t need a complicated flight path to guarantee our pursuit gets lost. I could see a cargo ship using such a route to lose pursuit, but us?” She sighed again. “We’ve got ourselves a warship, and especially considering our speed advantage, I don’t see any reason we should use such a restricted profile when the goal is to lose pursuit.” She looked up at Willow. “Can you get the new profile on record after breakfast?”

“Sure,” Willow muttered, glancing sideways at her salad. She looked at the profile on the tablet in front of her for a few seconds, before looking up. “And actually, Coils, we’ll be getting there a couple weeks ahead of schedule. This profile has a lot of sharp curves in it- and those eat up tons of time. Completely aside from how we’ll be going a much more direct route.”

Hardly five minutes passed before Flight looked up again, while they were collecting dishes. “If the Engineering Society is suspect,” she muttered. “Coils, the fancy new engine techs came from the Society, didn’t they?”

Coils took a deep breath, and let it out again. “The ones installed on this ship did, yes. The GSF has a much more impressive security organ, so the Dawnbreaker’s tech is probably safe.”

“Meaning, we’re probably not the only ones with the speed advantage,” Flight scowled. “And since recon drones can already move faster than ships, it’s entirely possible we’re being followed, and not losing them with our speed.”

Willow winced. “Very possible,” she muttered. “Even…” She tapped the tablet, still lying on the table, a few times. “... Yeah. They must be getting sloppy. This signal decay was obviously faked- but I’m no expert, so I don’t know how close they actually were.”

“Meaning, there’s a closer station that bounced it, and deliberately left out or broke up the high-frequency portions,” Flight muttered.

She nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

“We need somepony on the bridge at all times,” Flight muttered. “That means we’re going to be sleeping in shifts.” She paused, and looked at Shooting Star. “Do you think you can get some extra juice out of our particle shields without going overboard?”

Coils nodded. “Depends on how much power you want to blow on it,” she muttered. “The Dawnbreaker pioneers the use of the Gravity Drive as a defensive system- and also as a particle deflector. The latter of the two is just software, and I know we brought the code with us. We should be able to get just past point nine cee, if you’re willing to burn most of our power on particle deflection.”

Flight looked at Willow. “Let’s do that, then. Count on there being someone chasing us, maybe using recon drones to track us so we can’t see them, then let’s go speeding away at point nine cee.” She looked at Coils. “Our pursuers won’t possibly be able to do that, will they?”

Coils shook her head. “We didn’t leave the code with them- right, Star?”

Star flinched- but he’d warmed up to the other two mares over the last few months. He was still nervous around them, but it was no longer debilitating. “No,” he answered. “The- The only copy is in my files.”

Flight nodded. “Good. Then we can run away.”

“What’s our worst-case time to get well and truly lost with that, Willow?” Flight asked.

She shrugged. “I’d have to check the computer, but I want to say it’s somewhere between a few days and a few months.”

Chapter 7: Rescue

View Online

Flight glanced sideways at the comms panel when it chirped.

The last few months had gone… Smoothly, overall. Their sudden change of course had prompted a lot of drive activity behind and ahead of them as well- but by exceeding the other ships’ top speeds, they’d managed to leave them behind without ever entering missile range. It had been fairly close, though, and Flight had guarded the hull polarizers for several minutes while a couple of unmarked battlecruisers fought to gain ground and, eventually, lost.

After the confirmation that they were being followed, they had maintained the raised maximum speed with periodic course changes for close to three months before reducing back down.

Finally, they had launched their own recon probes into formation around them, monitoring for anything that might be trying to tail them. Fortunately, the things had almost stupidly long design lifetimes- another remnant from her great grandfather’s time- so all they needed was charging every week or so, and they could stay on station for almost a full year before needing service.

And now, they were picking up a distress call.

She glanced quickly around her bridge, but she was the only one. As expected; Willow, who was on shift with her, was using the bathroom.

So she reached down and tapped a key. It was a plain text message.

Shadouette to anyone in range, we’ve lost Gravity Drive and are running out of food, is anyone out there?

A quick AI-powered analysis on the signal pattern suggested that they were still quite a ways away from her- and the signal had come from mostly straight ahead. She tapped a few keys, typing out a reply.

First Light to Shadouette, what’s your solar altitude?

She paused after typing it out, without sending it. That was always the first step in deep space rescue; a skilled astrogator could combine the directions the two signals had come from, their timestamps, and the ship’s solar altitude and solar delta to figure out what its course was, and so how best to intercept it. Willowstone’s discipline wasn’t astrogation, but Flight felt that she would be up to the task.

But, she wanted to check with her before breaking radio silence.

Right on time, the door hissed open, and Willow trotted in. “Hi,” she greeted calmly, moving towards her console. “Anything happen?”

“We picked up a distress call,” Flight told her. “They’re mostly ahead of us, but I don’t know how far or which way they’re moving.”

Willow tapped on her console for a few seconds. “Hmm. Doesn’t look like they’re anywhere close to us. Go ahead and ask for their solar altitude.”

“Alright.” Flight tapped the send key. “Message sent. I guess we’ll see where they’re at, if they answer us.”

About a week later, Flight reentered the bridge from a bathroom stop of her own to find Willow tapping away at her console. “Another sim?” she asked.

Willow shook her head. “Not when I’m alone on the bridge,” she told her calmly. “The Shadouette responded. They’re only moving at point three cee, to our point seven five, and their base course is fairly close to ours, about three light-days ahead. We can perform a rescue without losing too much of our time advantage on the mission.”

Flight trotted over to her panel to look at it as well. “Woah, they’re pretty eager for rescue, aren’t they?” She paused. “A ship small enough to fit in one of our bays without occupying the one we need for the Enterprise. They’ve got no tactical talent, but an engineer, a medic, a chef, an electronics specialist, an astrogator, and ten soldiers, of which five are injured and locked in stasis pods. All other crew were lost to battle damage or injuries, since they lack gravity. About two weeks of food remaining as they are.” She looked up at the windshield. “An electronics specialist, huh?”

Back in the day, her sister had always held an extremely high opinion of any pony that managed to earn the title of a ‘specialist’. “The difference between an engineer and an engineering specialist is that the second of the two is truly AMAZING at it,” Bubble had told her. “It takes a TON of study and work to get anywhere close to that level. If you ever get your hooves on one, don’t let them go unless you absolutely have to.”

“They’re all thestrals,” Willow noted.

“All thestrals?” Flight muttered, scanning the message again. “Yeah, they did mention that, didn’t they? Um…” She paused. “I don’t see why we can’t pick them up anyways. I’ve met a couple thestrals back in Equineothame, and they’re not all that bad. Actually, both of them were really amazing janitors with the gait of a spacemare.”

“You would make them janitors?” Willow asked.

“Well no,” Flight answered. “I imagine we can treat them as passengers- guests, if you will- for a while, and if we like them, maybe we can let them join us as crew. If we don’t, we can just keep them in that bay or something, feed them the rations they need, and dump them in Equineothame orbit or wherever with enough fuel to get to a station.”

“Huh,” Willow muttered, looking at her console.

The silence stretched on for several seconds.

“Alright,” Willow continued. “We can do that. It’s going to take us five or six days to make the rescue, and cost us about two on our profile.”

Flight looked at her console. “Alright, let’s do it.”

“First Light to Shadouette, do you copy?” Flight sighed after releasing the transmission key. This would be their first verbal contact- and, exactly as Willow had suggested, she was bouncing her signal off a recon drone for safety. It was far too easy to pretend to be something different over text communication- for example, she had made herself out to be a civilian vessel.

Which, the First Light technically was a civvy vessel- that was to say, it was under the command of a civilian. The ship itself was classified as a warship- the flagship, and only vessel, of a new class, the ‘Atmospheric Devastator’.

There was close to a minute of silence. Rather predictable, considering the ships were still a good eight light-seconds apart. It had been several hours since one of Willowstone’s recon drones had spotted what they were fairly sure was the Shadouette- and now, they had it on shipboard sensors.

“Shadouette to First Light, we copy,” somepony answered. They sounded stiff and formal, yet Flight also detected relief in the voice. “If you’re close enough for verbal contact, you probably have us on sensors?”

Flight raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Willow nodded, examining her panels. “Signal is coming from that ship alright. Looks like their comms suite was gutted during combat- they must have lost most or all of their long-range comms equipment. It looks like they’ve cobbled something together to connect a datapad to one of the surviving antennae- they’re lucky we got close enough to hear their text messages. Especially since they would’ve had to go on a spacewalk to be able to type a message or check for replies, unless they’ve relayed it to a tablet inside.” She paused. “The voice signal is coming straight from their bridge, I want to say they’re directly transmitting from a datapad. We’re not receiving it at the ship, only through the drones.”

Flight nodded. “And that’s with our high-power comms suite.” She depressed the key. “We have you on sensors, alright. What happened over there?” She released it. “How much weapons capability do they have left?”

“Just about none. I’m not seeing any weapons hardpoints, and it looks like their missile bunker was jettisoned- but they’ve got one surviving point defense cluster, looks like it only covers the forward firing arc. They also seem to have lost a lot of sensors- I want to say they’ve lost all aft sensors too. We could probably bump into them from behind, and they wouldn’t know until we made contact.” She paused. “Looks like their hull polarizers are shot as well, there’s lots of laser damage.”

The panel chirped. “We went after some pirates,” the mare on the other end muttered. “Killed a good number of them, but they had better equipment than expected, so we had to flee. They gave chase, and didn’t give up until they had crippled us. They even shot out our hydroponics.”

“Meaning you’re on bottled life support?” Flight asked.

“That won’t last forever,” Willow scowled.

They waited patiently.

“Uh- Yes,” the mare muttered. “Our CO2 scrubbers are still working, but we don’t have an oxygen renewal plant, so we’ve been burning our LOX for that. Still got way more than we need.”

Flight glanced at Willow. “Think they’re safe to rescue?”

“Looks like it,” Willow muttered. “We don’t know what the condition of their armory is, but their shipboard weapons and sensors have been gutted.” She paused, briefly, and continued. “And their engines. I think they still have some of their maneuvering thrust, but their main engines and Gravity Drive are all blown to bits.”

She nodded. “Alright, let’s pick them up.”

It took a very long time to close the last of the distance to the tiny warship.

Coils peered out the window, then back at her panel. “That thing’s not atmosphere-capable, and never was for that matter, but it’s just small enough to fit in one of our secondary bays.”

“First Light to Shadouette,” Flight transmitted. “Do you copy?”

“We copy, First Light,” the answer came. “Are you guys coming…?”

Flight smiled; they were coming up behind the tiny warship. “Yup, we’ve got you in sight. Think we’re close enough for a video connection?”

“Uhh… Sorry, we’ve actually lost all video comms facilities. Um… I don’t see you anywhe-!” There was a pause, before the mare’s voice came back, now flavored with awe and excitement. “Are you coming from behind us?”

Flight chuckled, glancing out the windshield as the nose of her ship came even with and passed the nose of theirs. “We are.” Right on schedule, the computer initiated the deceleration burn to bring them to a halt relative to one another, side-by-side.

“... Oh.”

“Welcome aboard the First Light,” Flight greeted, as the first few thestrals launched themselves down from the opened airlock. The Shadouette was safely inside her bay- but it was the opinion of not just Shadouette’s engineering survey but Star and Coils’ external inspections that the ship would likely suffer catastrophic structural failure if gravity was exerted on it, so she’d kept the gravity all the way down to a mere 0.01g- enough to make it difficult to get stuck floating in the air, but not enough to really damage anything.

The first one landed smoothly in her mag boots, and bowed. “Thank you for rescuing us,” she greeted. “I am Night Skies, Captain of the Shadouette… and the only surviving engineer of the same.” She looked to the side, as her crew landed in a row next to her. “This is our electronics specialist, Blacklight; our astrogator, Astral Eye; our medic, Mending Shade…”

Flight calmly allowed the formalism to wash over her, and paid close attention to their behaviors. Most of what she saw was relief- though at least some didn’t quite manage to hide their displeasure at being rescued by a non-thestral vessel. After all, just a few years before, the number of nations in which it was legal for thestrals to ascend into the cosmos, control a starship, or do basically anything else in space, had reached zero.

Nearly fifteen minutes later, once the formalities were all done and over with, Flight took a deep breath, and let it out. “Alright. I read your engineering report- you said you expect a catastrophic failure, up to and including a hydrogen explosion, should the vessel experience full gravity?”

“Yes, Captain,” Night Skies answered.

Flight scowled. She had introduced herself as the Captain of the First Light, but hadn’t told them that she was the crown princess of Equineothame. “Well. We’ve got a bunch of space in our tanks, so why don’t we transfer what we can and dump the rest overboard?” She looked up at her. “If at all possible, I’d like to be able to recycle or re-use every bit of it.” She looked back out at the ship. “Can I leave that to you guys to take care of?”

“You’re going to recycle it?” Astral Eye asked, looking up at it almost sadly.

Flight nodded. “Unfortunately, that’s all there is left. It would cost about five times as much to patch it up into passably functioning order than to just build a new one.” She sighed. “Nevermind that I don’t think I have the materials on board to do either of those, but still. Besides.” She grinned. “Impress me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter 8: Duel

View Online

The thestrals were nothing if not impressive. The fuel and oxidizer transfers went without a hitch, then Star and Coils provided a couple of empty pallets- which had originally held space food- for movement of their supplies. All in all, they had their entire ship gutted and dismantled in a mere three weeks. Their reactor, after Coils had determined that it was incompatible with the First Light’s power grid because ship designers had dropped back compatibility for that model almost a hundred years before, had been transferred to her Reactor Recovery Bay for safe storage until it could be recycled.

Following that, the gravity had been set up to a half a gee, then gradually brought up to a full gee over the following week to help them all get used to it again. At the same time, they had finally opened the five stasis pods and transferred the soldiers inside to her medbay.

Finally, a week after that, Flight was alone on the bridge- Willow had gone to the mess hall to have lunch- when a sudden buzzer went off.

It only took her one glance to see what it was about.

Artillery inbound.

It even told her which direction to turn to avoid it most easily.

So she yanked on the helm, and shoved the throttle to maximum fully compensated thrust- which, according to the readout, was only a little more than she needed.

Three seconds later, a fresh chirp indicated that she had successfully avoided a sudden and none-too-pleasant death. She sighed, maintained her new heading for the moment, and flipped up a plastic cover at the very end of her panel to flatten the bright red button underneath.

Cold Coils was just snuggling back into her sheets, after a midnight potty break, when her eyes snapped open at the sudden thrumming of a cold Gravity Drive being forced to operate at high output. She sat up. “What’s going on?” she muttered, looking across the aisle as the irregular hum awoke Star as well. The sound of equipment getting abused like that would wake almost any engineer, after all.

Willowstone was having a good conversation with the thestrals in the dining hall. They were surprisingly friendly, she had found- just like any other pony, even. They were a remnant of the Midnight Navy, the navy of a tiny nation of thestrals that had once existed on a planetoid even smaller than Equineothame… before their homeworld had been blown to bits nearly five hundred years prior. Naturally, not a single pony was still alive from that time- ponies only lived to forty, after all.

All conversation came to a sudden halt when Night Skies, the Thestrals’ captain and engineer, suddenly stiffened.

Then she heard it too. The low, throbbing moan reverberating through the ship, that hadn’t been there just moments before. She didn’t recognize it right off, but that moan sent ice through her veins anyways.

“Something’s not right,” Skies muttered darkly, scowling.

Right at that moment, a sudden screaming, howling alarm blasted out of the intercom, echoing throughout the ship.

“GQ?” one of the thestral soldiers asked, alarmed.

Willow made a snap decision. She’d made quite a few of those during her brief stint as the ENS Everfree’s sole Tactical officer, and they’d all paid off, so she didn’t dare second-guess herself. “Shade, medbay,” she commanded. “Skies, Blacklight, Astral, you’re with me. The rest of you report to Engineering for Damage Control.”

Then she bolted from the room, abandoning her half-eaten salad.

The thestrals exploded into motion at the same moment- and, she knew, didn’t head straight for damage control. A couple of them did, but most of the group she’d assigned to it were soldiers. They knew that a ship’s Marines had exactly two duties in a naval battle: The first was to distribute the pressure suits, and the second was to report to Engineering for damage control. Her command had assigned them that role- the role they’d already had, aboard the Shadouette.

“I told you this wasn’t a civvy ship,” she heard Blacklight telling Astral Eye, as they brought up the rear.

Skies, being older and faster than Willow, caught up quickly. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Willow ignored the question.

Mere seconds later, the last door snapped open in front of her, and she burst onto the bridge. “What happened?” she asked.

“Near miss with artillery,” Flight answered quickly. “Range six light-minutes and closing fast.”

Willow turned to the thestrals, and started pointing them to consoles. “Blacklight, there, Astral, there, Skies, there.”

Flight glanced up briefly. “We’ll be counting on your experience, Skies,” she stated, studying her displays. “If something doesn’t feel right, say something. Willow is our tactical talent, but you’ve got the experience.”

Skies nodded darkly as she sat in what she recognized as the First Officer’s seat. “Yes, Captain.” She narrowed her eyes at the panel. “That’s at least three ships there,” she muttered. “Looks like a pirate formation, they probably have a lot of missiles. How are your defenses?”

Willow scowled at her panel. “We’re well past the PONR,” she muttered.

“We’re a glass cannon,” Flight answered. “Largely unarmored, but our artillery has a maximum effective range of five light-minutes.”

Skies looked up. “How fast?”

“One shot per minute each of four weapons,” Flight answered. “Lightspeed, untested.”

Skies looked down at the displays again. “If we don’t kill them with our opening salvo, we’re not likely to hit them until we reach point-blank. Even pirates know how to use anti-artillery doctrine.”

“Enemy ID-ed,” Willow called. “One superdreadnought, two heavy cruisers. Pirate flags.” She glanced up at Flight. “Artillery?”

Flight nodded, and pushed on the helm to line the bow up with the enemy. “I have it charging,” she answered.

“Four rounds?” Skies narrowed her eyes. “Ripple-fire two of them down the superdreadnought’s throat,” she ordered. “They should act like a drill. Split the other two against the other two ships.”

Willow glanced up at Flight, who nodded.

“These chickens are way too close together to polarize their hulls,” Blacklight observed calmly.

Skies raised an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s those idiots.” She sat back. “They’ll be so close together the destruction of the center vessel will inevitably cripple the other two, so it’s more efficient to concentrate fire on the superdreadnought. Don’t miss, though- they start dodging crazy once they know you’re shooting at them.”

Willow raised an eyebrow. “So, ripple-firing all four down the superdreadnought’s throat in five, mark?”

Skies nodded. “Yup. Anything left we should be able to erase with-!”

She broke off when the ship gave a tiny twitch, and the massive window across the front of the bridge suddenly turned pitch black. A quartet of miniature stars were still visible, though, blasting out from above and below and vanishing rapidly into the distance as the window returned to its prior transparency.

Flight scowled. “That looked a lot slower than lightspeed,” she muttered.

“That’s because we’re moving seventy-five percent as fast as they are,” Willow answered. “They’ll look like they’re moving about point one two cee relative to us. We’ll want to make a hard right five seconds before impa- There’s a fourth ship behind the superdreadnought, class unknown.”

Skies leaned forwards again. “You’re right. That’s…” She paused. “That’s a classic protective formation for these idiots,” she muttered. “That ship behind them will be either a civvy or a glass cannon.”

“It’s going to get hit by our arty if the first three rounds make a hole in the SD,” Flight observed.

“It will,” Willow agreed. “Unless they change course or something within the next three and a half minutes.”

“They’re idiots,” Skies answered calmly. “Most pirates won’t do anything except charge straight at us until we get within thirty light-seconds of them- unless we shoot artillery at them, but the Midnight Navy hasn’t had that for centuries.”

Flight glanced up. “Why the blind charge?”

She shrugged. “Because as hard as it is for the nations to find tactical talent, it’s even harder for pirates. They’ve got one tactician for every thousand ships or so.”

Flight raised an eyebrow. “And your fleet…?”

“The last of the Midnight Navy’s true tactical talent died off a hundred and fifty years ago,” Skies answered. “However, thestrals are natural predators, so we’re naturally tactically inclined- and not completely useless without a trained tactician.”

“I know I shouldn’t be calling an artillery duel boring,” Skies muttered, “but if anything was, that one definitely was.”

Flight nodded. After they had confirmed all their enemies defeated, they had gone even tighter into stealth and altered their course- and now, it was ‘evening’ aboard ship, and the engineers had just taken over for Flight and Willowstone. The thestrals had returned to the passenger sectors quickly, once the danger was past- so she had met them down in the mess hall, where she wanted some dinner. “Yeah. Bit stressful when it started, but after we dodged that first round…” She shrugged. “They just died. Even when one of the cruisers managed to survive the SD’s explosion and tried to flee.”

“Straight line flight,” Blacklight nodded. “One of the easiest ways to get suckered by artillery. Must not have realized that’s what we used.”

“Chickens indeed,” Flight agreed. “Had they varied their course, they might have gotten close enough to fire missiles against us.” She sighed, then turned to Skies. “Speaking of, I know a two-and-done artillery duel like that is kinda unorthodox, and very, very simple, but I like how quickly your ponies fell into place when I hit the GQ.”

Skies looked at her quizzically.

She smiled back. “I know the Shadouette wasn’t in a repairable state, but what do you say to joining the permanent crew of this ship?”

Author's Notes:

Patreon, Discord.

As before, once next week's chapter is released, I'm probably going to be abandoning this story for a while again. The silence around each chapter release is just so discouraging.

And yes, I'm early today. This chapter won't go public on Patreon for another three hours or so... And nobody's going to comment on it, because nobody ever comments on any chapter on Patreon, but that's fine because I can see how much they like my works in the money they pay me... Because of that, I use the comments here to figure out which stories everybody likes.

This one's been flat zero for a while, probably just never got popular (that's what it looks like)... Accidental Invasion lost a lot of popularity some time ago, but there's still a fair few people enjoying it so I keep writing it. Just started Gift of Divinity, and people are loving it. Took about two days for it to pass this story in rating, views, bookshelves... everything, even comment count. Kinda predictable, given the acronym.

Chapter 9: Recovery

View Online

“Huh.”

Flight looked up at Willow’s utterance. “What is it?”

“Remember those idiots we dueled?” Willow asked, glancing up.

She nodded. “I do.”

“When I backplotted their base course, it seemed to be a pretty close match to a direct course to the Enterprise. Now that we’ve found it, and confirmed the presence of two pirate cruiser guards, I did it again- it was a direct course. The ship behind them was a freighter, apparently- and those idiots would have arrived about three days before us, on our original flight profile.”

Flight nodded. “Meaning, the mission would have been a failure,” she muttered. She sighed, gazing out the front window at the distant asteroids, amongst which her sensors told her the Enterprise could be found, with two pirate cruisers waiting to catch anything coming from in-system. “Good thing we deviated, then.” She sighed. “I’d rather not attack those two cruisers unless we have to- what are our options?” She glanced up at the rest of her bridge.

Skies studied her panel. “They’ve got line-of-sight to the Enterprise, but it doesn’t look like they’re too worried about asteroids drifting between it and them,” she observed. “We might be able to hide behind one and snap up the Enterprise while it’s hiding us.”

“There won’t be anything acceptably large passing by like that for a month or so,” Willow muttered. “Looks like one recently did exactly that, so now it’s moving in the wrong direction.” She glanced up. “If they’re not tracking the asteroids to be sure nobody moves them around, we could easily direct it over and use it.”

“The part I find interesting,” Blacklight said suddenly, “is that these are not the same pirates as we met earlier.” She tapped a couple of keys. “The flags are different- and I want to say those cruisers aren’t ordinary pirate cruisers.”

“Really…?” Willow asked, her Hands fluttering across her panel. “Oh wow, you’re right. But what the hay are two Equineothame Navy High Cost-class cruisers doing under a pirate flag?”

Flight let out a snort of laughter. “The High Cost class?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Willow nodded.

“You know about them?” Skies asked, raising an eyebrow.

She nodded. “Yes. King High Cost of Equineothame personally ordered the designers of that class to cut as many corners as possible to keep the price down.”

“Huh,” Willow blinked. “No wonder the Navy doesn’t use them. Maybe this is where they keep disappearing to?” She paused. “The sensor suite on it looks like it’s been upgraded.”

“Their comms security hasn’t,” Blacklight observed. “Just breached their comms. Sounds like one of them really wants to go home, and the other is reminding him to wait until the ‘Boss’ arrives tomorrow.”

“We don’t have much time,” Flight observed.

“Their electronic defenses are trash too,” Blacklight observed. “Well, unless I wanted to take control of something, everything is locked down there. But… Yeah, they’re not tracking the asteroids. We can safely move them around.”

“Alright,” Flight said, and took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

“All inside!” somepony cried.

Flight immediately punched the button to close the ventral cargo bay doors, and tapped the maneuvering thrusters. That call meant that everypony was back inside her ship proper, and she wasn’t going to lose anypony if she accelerated- and she already knew from her readouts that the Enterprise was securely locked in place by the docking clamps in her main cargo bay.

Finally, she touched the throttle back again, and brought her ship down to ‘land’ on the massive asteroid once again. They had pulled it off- they had seized the Enterprise while out of sight behind a drifting asteroid they’d directed past.

Silence held for several minutes.

“They haven’t noticed a thing,” Blacklight observed calmly.

“That must be their ‘boss’,” Willow observed.

Flight looked, and winced. “Yikes. Are they also Equineothame classes?” It was a good few hours after their operation had succeeded, and they were- slowly- accelerating away from the area, with a couple of recon drones trailing behind them.

“Uh… Yeah. None currently in service, though- either ancient mothballs or new designs ordered by King High Cost and never adopted. Still, though- twelve superdreadnoughts, twenty dreadnoughts, and about two hundred assorted smaller classes.”

“Range three light-seconds,” Skies observed. “We’re only barely outside their missile envelopes, but they’ve probably got thirty-two artillery cannons in there.”

“They’ve noticed Enterprise is missing,” Blacklight observed.

“Radar pulse!” Willow cried suddenly.

“Polarize!” Flight ordered, punching a button she’d pre-configured to instantly set the throttle up to maximum fully-compensated thrust.

“This’ll keep us out of LOS!” Astral Eye injected, tapping buttons at her own console.

It took Flight about three seconds to order her navigation computer to follow Astral’s twisting course along the asteroid field.

“Arty inbound!” Willow cried, then paused. “Six rounds deflected, twelve more missed.”

“They must be lacking any true tactical talent,” Skies observed. “Eighteen rounds fired while the ships were still turning, no time for proper aiming. Only one of those rounds would’ve passed within a kilometer of us if we hadn’t polarized the hull, and even then it wouldn’t have hit.”

“And now they’ve got only fourteen shots left,” Flight observed. “Unless they’ve upgraded their power grids quite significantly.” She sighed. “Had we been in the Dawnbreaker, we could’ve set her up on a lateral spin and given them a literal hail of artillery, but she’s not done yet.”

“That kind of tactic would be a very bad idea,” Willow observed. “You never want to get your ship into a spin on anything other than its own central axis- if you do that, you lose motive power and make all your point defense solutions that much more difficult.”

“Uh… Okay,” Flight observed. “So we wouldn’t.” She scowled. “If they fire any artillery that looks like it might hit, use anti-stealth mode for a few seconds.”

“Anti-stealth mode?” Skies asked.

“Our polarizers are ridiculously powerful,” Flight answered. “Anti-stealth is what the engineers called the most effective- and detectible- run mode, where even artillery becomes an easy point defense solution.”

Willow chuckled. “Eh, standard anti-artillery doctrine is working well right now. We’ve got a full second and a half after they fire to calculate its trajectory and intercept it- and now that we’ve got sensor lock on all of their artillery weapons, we can accurately predict when they will fire- I’ve never seen arty cannons as telegraphic as theirs, but I’ll take it.” She grinned. “And a missile can accelerate fast enough to cover multiple large ships from a single round in that time. Combine the three, and their shots are easy point defense solutions even without the polarization. That’s why nobody uses artillery at close range any more.”

“Except these idiots,” Flight observed. “What happens if the missile misses?”

“That’s why you launch multiple missiles for each incoming arty round, then back that up with energy fire if it gets close.” Willow grinned. “I’m eight for eight right now.” She glanced down. “With sixty missiles, so far.”

“You mean they’ve only got six left?”

“Three,” Willow corrected. “Three of them fired when they didn’t even have LOS. Oh, there goes the fourth one, wasting its shot against some innocent asteroids.” She sighed. “And… Artillery duel is over, unless we want to turn around to unleash a few of our own, or stick around for some other reason.”

“Let’s just get out of here,” Flight decided. “And I think we can also turn the engineers loose on the Enterprise.”

“Well,” Willow sighed. “Now that we’re well and truly lost once again, where do you want to go, Princess?”

Flight sighed. She and Willow had just started their shifts on the bridge a few minutes before; Willow had spent that time studying her panel. “Home. But in such a way that we’re not likely to be attacked out of the blue again. I don’t really care how long it takes, so long as we’re alive.” It didn’t exactly help that the entire crew had developed lasting headaches after visiting the Enterprise; Mending Shade, the Thestral medic, was no exception, and had no idea what was causing the headaches.

“Got it,” Willow nodded, and started tapping keys.

“Alright,” Willow announced. “I’ve got us a retirement vector.”

Flight looked up; it had been a little over an hour after she’d told Willow she wanted to go ‘home’. “Alrighty then,” she began. “Whatcha got?”

Willow sent it up to her panel as well. “We start out by continuing our current periodic evasive maneuvers for another couple weeks, then turn against the plane of the system, reduce speed, point ourselves back in-system, and allow ourselves to fall back in-system like a comet, under silent running rather than just stealth. We’ll also look like a derelict to anyone that sees us. I noticed this POI you have saved, and it shouldn’t be too hard to hit it on the way in.”

Flight blinked. “That POI is the base of the pirates that killed my sister,” she observed.

Willow looked up. “You mean the ones that got River killed?”

She nodded. “Yes, the ones that started that battle.”

“Okay then,” Willow muttered, studying her panel. She tapped a couple keys to throw a whole bunch of dots of light onto the screen, scattered about the asteroid belts, and to color-code the projected course by what looked like distance. “These are the locations of all the Equineothame-run long-range comms relay sats, and on the green parts of that course, we’ll be in range to hit one with an encrypted message for someone back home. If I…” She tapped a few more keys, and little time labels appeared at each point the path changed colors. “Aaand, that’s how long anypony on Equineothame will have after receiving it, if we transmit at those locations, before we arrive at that pirate base.” She paused, then clicked a few more buttons. “And how long they will have after receiving our message before they have to leave to meet us at the pirate base, at Navy peacetime speeds.”

Flight rubbed her chin with a hoof. “The first contact window is in a week and a half, it looks like,” she muttered, “and they’ll have quite a while to respond.”

“About two and a half months, yes,” Willow agreed. “You want to plan on that?”

“I think we’re going to want to talk to the crew first,” Flight muttered. “You’re absolutely right, I won’t be going in without Navy backup, but I also want to be sure the soldiers are ready and willing to infiltrate that base to recover any prisoners they might still have.” She took a deep breath. “In either case, I would be staying on the bridge to offer missile support, while the Navy provides artillery.”

“In that event, I’ll stay with you here,” Willow nodded. “I won’t do much but slow the soldiers down.”

“Uh, Admiral?”

High Admiral Timber Wolf looked up at the comms officer; they had just completed a full-vessel simulated exercise. “Yes?”

“We’ve just downloaded a long-range transmission from the Princess. It’s flagged as personal.”

“Personal?” she asked, tilting her head. “Huh. Forward it to my quarters, please.”

“Good evening, High Admiral.” Princess Flight was smiling at her from the front of an empty room that looked like the unholy offspring of an aircraft cockpit and a warship bridge. “I’m sorry it’s been so long, but when the engines went nuts on us on our testing voyage, the comms suite took the brunt of the damage. In any case, as you can probably tell, we got the comms running again, and the engines too- though only barely, so it’s still going to be quite a while before we get back home.”

She scowled as the Princess continued with her meaningless drivel, and looked down at her panel. Was the Princess really so starved of communication that she’d send her a message like this? No wonder it was flagged as personal! The text layer probably carried her expected course, so she could respond in kind without losing transmissions to signal decay.

As expected, it was encrypted- but it took her three tries to decrypt it.

It wasn’t any normal encryption that she might have expected. Rather, it was encrypted against her personal high security key, used for top-security messages from the Royal Family that only she could decrypt.

And it didn’t carry course information at all. The message was very short and to the point.

The Princess wanted an artillery squadron at a specific point in space and facing in a specific direction at a specific time. She checked her chrono, and the celestial map bolted to the wall, and nodded. She had about… Two, maybe three months before she would have to leave… if she used a straight-line path, which the secrecy of the message certainly suggested would be a bad idea.

She heaved a sigh, and looked up again as the Princess’ meaningless drivel came to an end, and playback finally finished. “You’ve gotten good at this, Princess,” she muttered, and leaned back. She had yet to replace Willowstone on her bridge, so the tactical station remained empty…

But she herself had once been an exemplary tactical officer. If over eighty percent of the Navy could get away without any tactical talent on their ships at all, she could make do with her own talents.

She leaned forwards again, slaved the tactical system to her panel, and started planning.

But how would she get them out? Wait, no, that was easy. The Princess had explicitly authorized a live-fire exercise. She would just… She smiled. She’d just ‘forget’ to drop target beacons, or even tell the beacon teams where they were supposed to be, and count on the Princess to provide targets when the time came.

There wasn’t any other reason for her to ask so specifically for artillery.

She rubbed her chin. She hadn’t put any limits on the exercise- and half the Fleet would be just as easy to hide in deep space as only a single squadron. So, if she picked her ships based on trustworthiness, then took as many as she could find… Yes, whatever the Princess needed artillery for, two and a half thousand such vessels should be more than enough. She’d have to be careful, though, to make sure that only the officers she trusted knew the true intent- not even the crews of their ships!

She looked down at her panel. With nearly five months to get to the target location, it wouldn’t be hard to subjugate the entire tactical network to her bridge console, and even use ships with un-trusted crews. That would let her avoid breaking up the Fleet in a strange way- and she could even spoof the Fleet’s navigation systems, so any traitors wouldn’t realize what they were doing until it was too late to send a warning.

She grinned. Thanks to the Princess’ official authorization, she could actually teach her people a thing or two without fighting a life-or-death battle with those that were supposed to be her allies!

Chapter 10: Pirates

View Online

Flight took a deep breath, and let it out. “Do we have confirmation of Fleet presence?” she asked.

“Affirmative,” Willow answered immediately. “According to our recon drone reports, a good hour out of date, there’s a stealthed Gravity Drive cluster signature about an hour and a half away and decelerating, though I can’t tell what the Admiral’s brought. By the time anything we send reaches them, they’ll be in position and getting bored.”

“Alright then,” she nodded. “Everypony ready?” She glanced down at her intercom display.

About a month ago, she had finally recovered from whatever weird sickness had plagued the ship from the Enterprise- and as near as anypony could tell, they had all become immune to it. She’d been the last, by a month or so.

Now, the First Light was under silent running, drifting towards the pirate base on a path that Willow and Skies had hashed out. They’d be entirely inside the base by the time anything had time to see them- and they’d identified a few sensor blindspots as well, which they were going to hide the ship in… Or missiles.

Her intercom was connected to one of her side bays, where the Thestral soldiers were. Sure, Flight was launching and hiding missiles so they could take out the pirates’ entire sensor network in one fell swoop, and both providing and calling down artillery support, but the entire plan hinged on the thestrals. They were going to infiltrate the base, locate any surviving captives from Equineothame or other nations, and rescue them, before blowing it all to Kingdom Come.

“Ready, Captain,” the General nodded.

“Ready,” Willow nodded. “Another minute or so, I want to say, and I’ll have our retirement vector too.”

“Alright then,” Flight muttered. “Let’s do this.”

River Skip sighed as she paused to look out the window on her way back to the command room from the armory. Tactical work at this pirate base rarely amounted to much- but she had no choice. If she didn’t work for them, they would kill her mother… and had already killed her sister. Ostensibly, at least- the squadron they’d sent to kill her sister had never reported back, despite having a capital ship at their disposal.

Perhaps her sister had been in a command position aboard the vessel, allowing her to repel their ridiculously stupid attacks with ease?

Once upon a time, she’d been a Tactical Midshipfilly aboard the Royal Equineothame Navy dreadnought Ostentatious… but that had ended fairly abruptly. Three years before, in the middle of a fight that she had never found out the cause of, having been off-duty at the time, she’d been thrown from the ship when an explosion peeled open her private quarters… then she’d had the privilege of watching the ENS Everfree, the flagship of the entire fleet, fire the broadside that completed the dreadnought’s destruction… and completely demolished two entire previously unharmed battlecruisers.

She’d continued to watch… and studied the massive superdreadnought’s actions, even as she drifted further and further away from the fight in her pressure suit. It was concentrating its fire on each enemy in turn- but only ever allocating just enough fire to completely obliterate its targets before moving on to the next. The massive warship had all its defenses thundering- even the polarization field that had killed three of her crewmates on the eave of the battle- so it had yet to take very many hits at all… though the rest of the Fleet was mobilizing, slowly, and battling against itself.

Then out of nowhere, a shuttle appeared, and picked her up. At first, she was relieved… then she’d realized that it was a pirate shuttle.

That shuttle had taken her to a nearby cruiser… that had taken her out here, where she’d learned about the true structure of the Equineothame government.

These pirates controlled the King. To an extent, at least; when they’d tried to manipulate him into giving them new ships, he’d given them cheap junk that they’d had to patch up and upgrade in several places before they were truly usable.

A couple months before, the task force sent to recover an ancient starship called the Enterprise had returned to report that it had been stolen out from under their noses by an unidentified starship that had casually swatted aside all their artillery and hightailed it out of there so quickly they’d been unable to pursue. They’d headed out just days after word of the Enterprise had finally reached them- apparently, they’d managed to broker a deal with the Equineothame High Engineering Society. They’d received all the data on the Enterprise… in exchange for not targeting their private vessels.

Pirates really did have no laws.

She paused in the middle of her habitual counting of all the flags she could see. She’d spotted an unmarred Equineothame flag, though partially obstructed behind the docking facility. Had they captured another civilian vessel?

She paused again, picking out the parts of the vessel that she could see. No… that was the largest aerodynamically-built ship she’d ever seen.

And there was only one aerodynamic vessel of that size ever built.

So what was the Equineothame Crown Princess doing in the middle of a pirate base? Had they stolen her ship as well?

She tapped a console next to the window, and checked the database. According to their database, which she had full read access to, there was nothing there.

So she headed instead for her private quarters.

Once there, she closed and locked the door, then logged into her terminal. The base was extremely lax; they liked to see her on the command deck, but she was allowed to check in and otherwise keep tabs on things from her quarters or wherever else.

It took her about twelve seconds to secure exclusive access to a laser com module on the main comms array, and point it at the unknown vessel… before she sent a quick message.

Hi. Are you here to rescue me?

About fifteen seconds later, the com head received a hit from a different direction- to establish an encrypted connection. She allowed it, hoping it wasn’t just more pirates.

Yes, we are. Where are you?

She paused, examining the message… and decided to answer a slightly different question.

I am the base tactical officer, she answered. I am being forced to work here so they won’t kill my mother.

The connection was silent for about two minutes… then one last message showed up, right before the connection cut off.

All base power, command, and comms facilities will be annihilated in 13.7 minutes. Get to the Armory and secure it. We will meet you there, and likely vent all air from it, shortly afterward.

She stared at the message for several seconds, then checked the time, logged out, and casually left her quarters to go inspect the armory. It was one of her assigned duties that she hadn’t discharged too recently- a convenient excuse to secure the armory, which almost never had anypony in it.

Though the word annihilated suggested there was more than just the Princess’s ship involved… nevermind the odd angle the connection had come from. She was probably bouncing it off of a recon drone or something.

Thirteen minutes of calm passed the base. River met a couple soldiers in the armory- then, after telling them it was part of her routine inspection, tested the automatic powered armor deployment system by putting some on herself.

About two seconds later, a deep rumble echoed throughout the base… and the lights went out.

River flipped up one of the weapons on her freshly stolen armor, and hosed down all three pirates left in the room. The maintenance tech in the corner was also a captive- and she turned to look at her. “Get something on,” she ordered her. “This room’s about to be open to space.”

No sooner had the young tech managed to seal the helmet on her unpowered armor, looking extremely confused- especially since River had sent high explosive grenades out into the passage whenever anypony got close- than the wall exploded in a shower of debris… and silence. Dust and smoke shot back out the hole as the debris fell to the ground, and eight ponies in full powered armor thundered into the room, an assault shuttle floating behind them. One trotted up, and tapped a comms ID card against both of their helmets. Almost immediately, the mare spoke. “You okay?” she asked, in an unfamiliar but harsh voice that told her of significant battlefield experience.

“Yeah,” River answered. “I’m their tac officer, this is a maintenance tech that was also captive.” She gestured towards the tech.

The mare nodded sharply, and turned to the tech. “Alright. How much combat experience do you have?”

The poor filly shivered and shook her head. “N-None, Ma’am.”

“Then get to the ship,” she commanded, and glanced back for one of her soldiers to help her out.

As she did so, River glanced behind her, at the assault shuttle… that was floating in the space that used to carry the Loyalist Berthing Area, where the truly loyal pirates had their bedrooms, with the stars visible behind it. The vertical stabilizer of the Princess’ ship was also visible through the opening.

The filly moved quickly towards the opening, clinging desperately to the ground with her mag boots.

River spotted a set of missiles suddenly blast away from the Princess’s ship.

“Alright,” the commander told her. “I’m Shadow, you’re Parrot. Channel five.”

She nodded, and switched to channel five.

“Alright, ponies,” Shadow commanded. “This is Parrot; she’s got inside knowledge.”

About five minutes later, when River glanced out a window as they proceeded rapidly towards the brig, the amount of destruction visible through it seemed enormous to her. All three superdreadnoughts at the base had been broken in half, the comms module had been blown to bits and cooked, and the entire power sector, including both the main base reactor and the backup batteries and reactor, was simply gone. She managed to avoid staring- but the soldiers noticed anyway.

“That’s what artillery does to unsuspecting structures,” Shadow informed her calmly.

“The comms section looked like plasma damage,” Willow observed.

“We used two different kinds of artillery,” Shadow informed her- then raised one hoof and went straight through the sealed door into the brig in a shower of broken steel. The rest of the squad was through a second later- and hardly two seconds after Shadow had entered, the rear guard had already thrown a plastic seal over the opening, preserving the pressure.

Two seconds later, the sound of gunfire went away, and the pirates’ prisoners were left staring at the heap of bodies against the wall in awe.

Willow wasn’t, but that was only because she’d seen that same brutal efficiency several times already.

She did, though, have to wonder where the Princess had found soldiers that were that good. It simply wasn’t possible to do in or near Equineothame- the pirates had seen to it that the Equineothame training programs had degraded to the point that their Marines were basically useless.

Then the brig airlock beeped and opened- to reveal the inside of the assault shuttle. The soldiers ripped bars off of cells and ordered the prisoners to board the shuttle- then a minute later, the shuttle was heading back for the ship again while they recovered their seal and continued through the wall towards their next target, the Shipyard Bay- where some less technically-inclined prisoners were being forced to help refit or construct new ships. The gargantuan bay could handle anything up to Cruisers.

“They’ve got some battery-operated turrets down there,” she informed them. “And they might have the ship stuff running too.”

For this one, they exploded out of the ceiling and smashed down right on top of the poor pirate ordering the ponies around. “Low pressure in here,” Shadow observed, even as her hole in the ceiling was sealed by one of her soldiers.

A row of shipboard bullets smashed into the wall over their heads. “Freeze, you scoundrels!” somepony cried. Sounded like the pirates’ second-in-command.

Shadow ignored him. “Hawk, strike.”

Almost instantly, the massive bay doors at the front exploded inwards in a massive fireball. The cruiser that had been being worked on, and had fired at them, was smashed through the back wall and crumpled by the force of the blast, sheathed in searing hot plasma and everything.

The destruction was absolute… and River was thankful that it looked like no prisoners were in the yard at the time- on break- and that they were wearing powered armor, and that the blast had happened so far away from them. Even with the atmosphere in the bay to attenuate the blast and the starship to deflect it, and the corner right behind them for the pressure to built against, anything else wouldn’t have survived- and she still got overheat warnings from her armor, with the sharp pain of sudden heat flowing through it to her body.

“That,” Shadow told her, “is what took out the comms.” Then she turned, and smashed through the wall again. “We’ve got seven minutes, move!”

Before River followed her, she caught a glimpse of the Princess’s ship almost perfectly nose-on to the bay, all the way on the far side of the asteroid cluster that held the pirate base.

A missile would have required two seconds to cross that gap.

Seven minutes later, River and the soldiers grabbed the last few prisoners and kicked off, launching themselves into space in the middle of the base.

“We’re all gonna die,” the filly River was holding cried. She was two years River’s senior, but had been one of their sex toys- and was wearing one of the many emergency vac suits the soldiers had brought, little more than airtight bags that were roughly pony shaped with helmets tacked on top.

Then the Princess’s ship came out of nowhere, moving sideways so it swallowed them up with one of its bays. River landed deftly in the full gee maintained by the ships’ Gravity Drive.

“Brace!” Shadow barked- and River did exactly that, instantly. She lowered her stance, tightened her grip on the poor filly-

Very suddenly, she knew what she was bracing for, as she felt the gut-wrenching force- and saw the overload warnings on her mag boots- of a warship jumping to maximum capable acceleration.

The pirate base, out the closing bay door, vanished from view in an instant while River and the soldiers fought against a full ten gravities apparent.

Fortunately, it didn’t last long, fading gradually down to nothing… then they were just standing once again.

At the same time, the big lights in the corners of the bay, indicating bay pressure, turned green- safe to remove helmets.

She reached up, and opened her helmet, breathing in her first breath of Equineothame air. She instantly smelled the sharp, cool crispness of freshly boiled LOX- the ship’s life support was overloaded. It also rather handily explained the pressurization speed of the bay.

Shadow followed suit, twitching her head sharply to command her suit to automatically retract her helmet- a feature that River’s didn’t have. “Thanks, Parrot,” she told her. “Thanks to you, we were able to hit not just all our known targets, but quite a few that we weren’t aware of.” She chuckled. “You’ve saved quite a few lives today.”

“I- I did?” she asked. The mare was a thestral- yet wearing Equineothame powered armor, and that skilled? Something odd was afoot.

One of the other soldiers- they were all opening their helmets, and all thestrals- stepped up, a tablet in her Hands. “You were right, General. We didn’t have time to use the shuttle again.”

Suddenly, a tone chimed on the intercom… then a young, female voice spoke out of it.

“Hello everypony, this is your Captain speaking,” it began. “We’ll be rendezvousing with the Navy in about two days, and until then I’m sorry to say we’re going to have to sleep in shifts or something and the air might get a bit stuffy- we’ve got way more ponies than this ship is made to handle right now. Buuuuut who wants to see what happened to that pirate base when we left?”

There was a pause.

“Why does she sound so giddy?” River asked.

“I bet this is why,” Shadow said, gesturing down at the tablet.

River looked as well- and the soldier tapped the play key.

It was a slow-motion video- and about a half a second after the ship had escaped the bounds of the pirate base, completely ignoring the several warships that were maneuvering against it, a wave of artillery rounds showed up to erase the entire base.

The PNV- Pirate Naval Vessel- Demolisher was the only one that saw the incoming artillery in time to do anything about them. The comms had already been shot off every ship, so the crew couldn’t send a transmission to any other bases or vessels- but they could defend themselves. They even successfully shot down four artillery rounds.

Unfortunately for the Demolisher, nearly thirty were on direct collision courses with the dreadnought, as nearly twenty thousand megaton-range nuclear warheads traveling at eighty percent of lightspeed slammed into the base as a single salvo.

There were no survivors.

About a month later, when the light from the explosion reached Equineothame, anypony that happened to look up that night- and quite a few that didn’t- noticed the sudden, temporary addition of a second, dimmer sun, gently illuminating the dead of night for almost a minute.

“Holy-!?” River began, then took a deep breath and let it out. “That’s quite a bit of artillery.” She looked up. “And, er, do I take it the operation is over?”

“Yup,” Shadow told her, and held out a hoof. “Shadow Flight.”

She accepted it- and though their powered armor meant that neither of them really felt the hoofshake, they still did one. “River Skip.” She sighed. “Before the pirates grabbed me, I was a Tactical midshipfilly.”

“Filly, huh? You look plenty old enough to me.”

She nodded. “Yeah, as of about two years ago.”

“That had to be a pretty big chunk of the Navy,” Princess Short Flight mused. “Pretty sure artillery doesn’t normally make explosions that big.”

“Pretty big, yeah,” Willowstone nodded, settling down with her in the mess hall for some dinner, only half an hour later. “That had to be at least five thousand rounds.”

“Five thousand?” Flight asked, tilting her head. “That’s a quarter of the Fleet.” She paused. “Well, I suppose it’s true I didn’t put any limits on it- and I know the Admiral would be happy to have an ‘exercise’ to put her people through. She could easily have brought an entire task force.”

The door opened. “Captain?”

“Yes?” Flight looked. It was General Shadow Flight, the highest-ranking soldier. A young mare was walking behind her, looking nervous.

“This is the mare that helped us from the base,” Shadow informed her. “She said she’d be happy to help us infiltrate further bases.”

“Nice,” Flight observed, and looked at Willow. “If the Admiral…?”

Willow, however, wasn’t paying attention. She’d abandoned her salad, and was trotting towards the young mare. “River,” she greeted. “You’re alive.”

The mare stared. “W-Willow,” she greeted, before stepping forward to meet Willow so they could hug each other. “You’re alive.”

Shadow blinked, looking somewhat confused.

Flight chuckled. “Looks like we’ve found your sister, then. Anyways, if the Admiral has brought so much of the Fleet, it might be worth our while to go raid another few pirate bases- especially if we’ve got inside info to work with.”

Shadow chuckled, and moved over to her own seat. “I know we’ll be all for it. We’ll want longer deadlines, though.”

“We should be able to park the Fleet presence a lot closer in next time,” Flight told her. “We’ll be able to order the arty within a minute or two of when it actually hits, so we won’t have to set ourselves a time limit like we did this time- we’ll be able to take the time we need, and still leave them in pieces when we bail.” She paused. “I know I’m going to want to talk to the Admiral and our tactical talent here,” she gestured towards Willow and River, “about possibly bringing a ship or two from the Fleet into the base with us, to help lighten the load in the naval battle that took place during your raid through the base.” She smiled.

Chapter 11: Allies

View Online

“Holy Hell,” High Admiral Timber Wolf said, staring at the summary Blacklight had prepared.

Flight chuckled. “That was our thought when we finally got a proper scan of your force,” she observed. “What did you do, bring the entire fleet?”

The High Admiral looked up. “Er… Yes, actually. There’s six ships left in Equineothame orbit- and by now, some new construction will be joining them as well.” She looked back down at the tablet. “But- But five thousand ponies?”

Flight nodded. “Yeah. Took our ten soldiers all of fifteen minutes to rescue them- had our shuttles running back and forth at full speed, and I even had to bring the First Light close enough for direct transfer a couple of times. Complicated by the naval battle, of course.” She chuckled. “Surprised even me, but our life support is overloaded by about an order of magnitude, so I’m glad we didn’t have to go all the way back to Equineothame to drop them off.”

The Admiral chuckled as a couple of junior officers guided a contingent of rescuees into the shuttle the Admiral had come in; it was going to be taking them over to a troop transport vessel with the life support to spare for them. “Yeah, probably a good thing. How much LOX you have left?”

“Quite a bit,” Flight chuckled, as she started leading the way to her bridge. “We burned more of it refueling the shuttles than we did making air, so we can do that again… though that battle was a bit of a tight gamble I’m not too keen to repeat.”

The Admiral chuckled. “And now that I know what we’re out here for, if you want to hit another one, we should be able to sneak the Fleet in quite a bit closer,” she told her. “Give them hell. Probably even slip a capital ship or two in with you, to help with that ‘naval battle’.” She chuckled. “My tac officer might only be two months on the post, but she said it looked like you hadn’t taken a single hit.”

Flight shrugged. “I have a good ship and a very good crew,” she told her. “Willowstone is some sort of goddess at the tac station, then Star is similar with engines, Coils managed to run our reactors at almost a hundred and twenty percent for the entire time, Blacklight is so good with electronic warfare that half the time, they were shooting our targets instead of their own…” She shrugged. “Still, though, we were pushing her to her limits. I think we fired almost two thousand missiles. Mostly little tiny ones, for antimissile defense, but a few punishers on the attack as well.” She grinned. “Then of course, we also recovered Willow’s sister… who happened to be serving as the pirates’ unwilling tac officer, so she knew just about everything there was to know about that base, making our campaign that much more effective.”

“You know, I’m kinda curious where you found Marines capable of raiding a pirate base and saving so many ponies so quickly.”

“In deep space,” she answered, and paused outside the bridge door. “Um, before we hit the bridge, you should probably know that a majority of them are actually thestrals. Turns out they’re amazing soldiers.”

She paused. “... Huh. So I take it you rescued a stranded thestral vessel?”

She nodded. “Yup. Happened to be a warship, so when we were later attacked, they just fell into place- and even in a short artillery duel, they were so efficient we made the arrangement permanent.” She tapped the door control, and led the way onto the bridge.

“Welcome back, Captain.” The speaker was a thestral, sitting in what the Admiral instantly recognized as the First Officer’s seat. The Captain’s chair, which seemed to be up by the front window instead of at the back of the Bridge, was empty.

“Captain, huh?” the Admiral said, glancing sideways at Flight.

Flight sighed. “Yeah. I haven’t, ahh, told them.”

A mare sitting at the electronics station looked over. “Told us what?”

She sighed again, and averted her eyes. “That I’m the Princess of Equineothame.”

There was silence for about three seconds.

Then Willow, sitting at the Tactical station with another filly about her age that wasn’t a thestral, raised a hoof into the air. “I knew that!” she cried.

A wave of laughter swept across the bridge.

“Probably a good thing you didn’t tell us right away,” the First Officer said, rising from her seat to trot over. “We’d probably have been struck with too much fear to be of any use- even if our lives were in danger.”

“I… I suppose,” Flight muttered. “Anyways, this is High Admiral Timber Wolf of the Royal Equinothame Navy- and Admiral, this is my First Officer, Night Skies; Astrogator, Astral Eye; Electronics Specialist, Blacklight; and the filly sitting next to Willow is her sister, River Skip.”

“Mom’s going to be so surprised,” Willow giggled.

Flight giggled as well. “Yes, I bet she will. Though, the Admiral apparently brought the entire Fleet, save only six ships, so we’ve got way more than enough firepower to go raid another few pirate bases. Whaddya say?”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Skies told her. “All the soldiers will be just as excited to kick ass as they were this time.”

“And chew bubble gum,” The Admiral chuckled.

“And chew bubble gum,” Skies agreed. “Especially in General Shadow Flight’s case.”

“But she’s all out of bubble gum,” Willow observed.

Another wave of laughter swept the bridge. Even the Admiral joined in.

“You’ve got a general?” Admiral Timber Wolf asked, glancing down at Flight.

Flight nodded. “Yeah, surprised me too. Skies here used to be an Admiral of the Midnight Navy before we picked her up.”

“Uh, the High Admiral of the Midnight Navy, actually,” Skies muttered, averting her eyes.

The windshield suddenly darkened and an image projected up onto it, showing a starmap with several bright dots. “The base we just hit was an auxiliary site,” Willow told the room. “Their main base is a light-month or so further from Equineothame, and houses several large warships- call it a small national Navy, if you will. Also, the Midnight Navy’s last remaining stronghold is on the way to the next satellite base; if we stop there, we could ally ourselves with their remainder, then start snapping up satellite bases and finally larger pirate bases one at a time with really no difficulty.”

Skies glanced over. “True,” she muttered. “Last I was there, there were about fifty ships in varying states of disrepair, and a thousand or so thestrals, eight hundred of whom were soldiers.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, our naval ratings seemed to die off the fastest.”

Flight looked up at Admiral Wolf. “How about it, Admiral?”

She rubbed her chin, thinking, then smiled. “Sounds like a plan, I think. Especially if you’re right and these pirates have been manipulating the Equineothame crown.” She paused. “Might cause a bit of trouble when we get back to Equineothame, though.”

Flight shrugged. “Oh well. Nobody’ll know if my hoof slips while I’m transitioning to VTOL to land at the Capital Landing Pad and happen to be facing the King’s bedroom, will they?”

“At that range, our artillery would have a flight time of roughly two percent of most sensors’ refresh rates- we’d be the only ship in the system that knew what had happened. They’ll think somepony hid a pile of heavy plasma bombs under his bed.”

Flight glanced up at the Admiral, as if to sound her out, then smiled back over to Willow. “Alright then. If Dad doesn’t cooperate when we get home, let’s plan on that.” She sighed. “He never cared for the people anyways.”

Princess Little Bubble might not have been an engineer before her capture, but the pirates had seen her engineering inclination and trained her into becoming one. She’d quickly been transferred to their main base, where she maintained the entire base.

Unfortunately for the pirates, for as much as she professed it, she wasn’t actually loyal to them. As such, when her specially-upgraded base sensor net picked up a signature that perfectly matched the Royal Equineothame Navy… it told her, but the base tac officer- who really was loyal to the pirates- didn’t see anything.

Bubbles then used her Chief Engineer trump card to enter the armory to install an upgraded comms module onto the powered armor… and started doing that to all of them.

Except, it wasn’t just a comms module. It was also a control module- so after the first few, one of them went ‘berserk’ and killed all the pirates in the room. Non-loyalists weren’t allowed in the armory at the main base.

Once she finished installing those units in every suit in the room, she used the facilities to put on the last one, linked to her sensor net, and checked on the Navy.

Twenty superdreadnoughts were sneaking in through one of her deliberate sensor “blindspots”, led by a small fleet of much smaller vessels- skirmishers, mostly, it looked like. One of them was large enough to be a corvette- maybe a bit bigger.

A moment later, she recognized that one. It wasn’t the same as the ship she’d approved with her sister, moments before her capture, but it did look very similar.

Then a sudden shockwave of artillery entered the base out of nowhere, and the entire power grid went down, alongside the entire superdreadnought squadron the pirates had in the base going up in smoke. Her sensor net went onto local emergency backup power- which was a phantom feature she hadn’t told the pirates about, so they only reported to her.

At about the same time, the superdreadnoughts shifted into a standard ‘wall of battle’ formation- a formation that maximized the firing arcs of each vessel, both offensive and defensive, and started salvoing missiles. All of the smaller ships suddenly became a hurricane of assault vessels, punching through all sorts of base walls as hundreds of soldiers, all in what her net reported was powered armor, smashed into the base.

She tapped a chin switch in hers, which ordered all of the suits under her command to flip their allegiance badges- another phantom feature- from the pirate flag to the Equineothame flag.

She’d become a combat systems engineer with a stealth specialization, after all.

Another chin switch triggered a number of heavy explosive charges she’d secreted about the base, blowing apart almost every area that non-loyal members weren’t allowed to go… Except the armory, that one would go off as soon as she was far enough away. That would cripple any of the pirates’ resistance- and open most of the spaces the loyalists would be in to space.

One of the Cruisers sitting in the drydock for her to upgrade suddenly unleashed a salvo of missiles from both sides, completely demolishing the drydock and both other ships in it, in response to the same switch. It was part of her escape plan… which would’ve taken her another couple years to ‘acquire’ more ships like that to be safe, but now was as good a time as any.

She then began smashing through the base herself.

Her first stop was a nearby storage room, where she collected a large number of emergency space suits and the same plastic seals the attacking soldiers were using, before she started charging through the rest of the base as well.

Three stops later, she had almost a thousand ex-prisoners with her when she froze, suddenly face-to-face with some of the attacking soldiers- they smashed into the area she was in right as she was getting the last few suited up.

There was a pause as their rear guard sealed their hole and looked at her.

“Are you here to save us?” she asked.

The silence held for about two seconds.

“Is everypony suited up?” the pony at the front, who had a General insignia on her chest, barked.

She glanced at her HUD. “Almost,” she reported.

The last pony sealed their helmet, and their suit checked out green.

“Yes,” she corrected herself.

During that same gap, the General tapped a comms ID card gently against the side of her helmet. Her HUD indicated successful download of a frequency and encryption.

“Go for rescue,” the General said, while looking slightly to the side- a transmission. Then she spoke, without transmitting. “I’m Shadow, you’re Parrot.”

Bubble switched comms- and heard the response, while nodding her acceptance of the temporary callsign.

“Roger, one moment.”

About a moment later, six huge spears suddenly protruded from the exterior wall behind the soldiers… then split into fingers and vomited rocket fire, ripping the entire wall clean off.

They were the so-called ‘Bunker Buster’ missiles, designed for the removal of walls that one wanted to fire shipboard weapons through.

Two seconds after they vanished from view, a massive warship- her sister’s ship, specifically- thundered to a stop next to the hole, with a bay door standing wide open. It looked like the ship was only a foot or two away from hitting the base.

“Have the rescuees board the ship, Parrot,” the General- Shadow- commanded her.

She nodded, and relayed the command to the emergency suits’ comms modules. “Get aboard the ship,” she commanded them. “Remain calm, you’ll be fine.”

“How’s your force?” Shadow asked her.

“Remote controlled with AI support,” she answered, “from my unit. It’s a comms module modification.”

“Do you have 3-D mapping?”

She nodded, and transmitted the map she had, with every location that non-loyals might be marked.

A second later, well over half of them were suddenly marked as cleared.

Then the last pony jumped over to the ship, which then started moving away.

“Let’s get moving, then,” Shadow commanded- and Bubble went with them when they smashed through a wall. “What’s your discipline?”

“Huh-?” she began- then paused, briefly. “Engineer,” she answered. “Combat systems. Specialized in stealth.”

Shadow grunted her acceptance as little markers started appearing on Bubble’s map to indicate what order which group should hit them in. Presumably, the ship was tied in not just to the comms but the mapping systems, so a tactical officer could guide them from the ship.

One thing she noticed, that seemed a little weird, was that the soldiers seemed to be able to use their armored wings to help guide themselves, even as they leaped through the vacuum of space.

One last shredded base later…

Princess Little Bubble took a deep breath when she finally set hoof aboard an Equineothame-flag vessel; the one she’d taken control of had been destroyed, though its sudden addition to the fight had confused the pirate vessels so much that the Navy’s point defense crews had gotten bored.

Then she looked behind her, as the last of her remote suits landed as well- in time to see the base suddenly vanishing into the distance with the speed of something falling behind a warship under Gravity Drive.

No wonder it had once again been her sister’s ship that stopped by for the soldiers.

Her attention was then drawn to the side, were there was a huge display set up on the side of the bay, showing a zoomed-in view of the pirate base. “Three!” an oddly familiar voice cried excitedly over the intercom. “Two! One!”

At the unvoiced zero, the whole base suddenly vanished in what looked like a small star.

“Aaand, the pirates are dead, courtesy of the Royal Equinothame Navy,” the voice laughed, while the bay door landed shut and started pressurizing. “We’ll be rendezvousing with the Navy in an hour or so, at which point we’ll need to transfer most of you off- we’re almost ridiculously overloading this little ship’s life support right now. Good thing we’ve got lots of LOX.”

She laughed- and when the lights indicated it was safe to remove her helmet, she did so- and exactly as expected, smelled the crisp coolness of freshly boiled LOX.

“Ahh, Miss Bubble?”

Little Bubble looked up. She’d been surprised to find out that all the soldiers she’d been working with were thestrals, but had decided to roll with it, so she’d been putting her stolen powered armor away in the ship’s armory, on extra racks that had been erected specifically for the stolen armor. “Yes?”

Shadow- or Shadow Flight- was smiling at her from the entrance. “The Captain would like to meet you,” she told her.

“Huh-?” she began, then stopped herself. “Oh. Sure. Show me the way?”

Shadow did exactly that. She led her through the densely overcrowded ship- it was not built in a way even loosely resembling that which she had approved with her sister- to a large room that had windows all across the front. She recognized it instantly as some sort of cross between a warship bridge and an aircraft cockpit.

“Captain,” Shadow greeted. “This is-!”

“Crown Princess Little Bubble, I know.” The voice came from the filly that had just vacated the Captain’s chair… her sister, Princess Short Flight. “You’re alive,” Flight observed, moments before trotting straight into her for a hug.

She stumbled back a couple steps from her sister’s unexpected strength. “You have wings,” she observed, returning the hug. “And yes, I’m alive.”

Flight chuckled softly. “Yes, I have wings.” Then they broke from their hug. “They grew in over the last year of antipiracy action,” she informed her. “Anyways, we’re about ready to head home, once we transfer the rescuees out- I wasn’t kidding, we’re like thirty times over life support capacity right now.” She paused. “How would you like to stay here with me, on the First Light?”

“The First Light, huh? She’s quite different from what I remember.”

Flight laughed- but there was a twinge of darkness to the sound. “After… After the pirates attacked the Flying Surface- lost with all hands, unless they grabbed any- I had the engineers redesign her into a warship. They did really well with that, too- she might be a glass cannon, but we managed to raid an entire pirate base when the rest of the Navy was a full light-hour away.”

Bubble froze for a second. “Y-You mean the whole ship can kick ass and chew bubblegum?”

“And I’m all outta bubblegum again,” Shadow observed.

Chapter 12: Castle Raid

View Online

“Good morning, Princess,” High Admiral Timber Wolf greeted from the communicator screen.

“Good morning,” Princess Short Flight answered calmly. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“If you mean that there are six hundred pirate cruisers in Equineothame orbit, yes,” the Admiral answered. “I was actually just having a discussion with the other Admirals about exactly how to deal with it.” She paused. “It looks like there’s a gap in their orbital pattern, creating a half-hour window in which a ship with as good of stealth as yours could sneak in every six and a half hours or so. I’d hate to send you and your sister into someplace that dangerous, though- do you have any shuttles or something with similar stealth capability?”

Flight shook her head. “Only the First Light. However, we do have magic, so between-!”

“You have what?” Timber Wolf asked.

Flight looked at her for a second. “Oh, right. There’s a few things we haven’t been telling you, Admiral, and I’m sorry about that.”

She sighed. “What is it?”

“You know about the Enterprise, right?”

She nodded. “Yes, that info had to be in every database we breached. I think the whole Fleet knows- but she disappeared before the pirates were able to recover her.”

“She disappeared because of us,” Flight told her simply. “The Enterprise is stored securely in our ventral cargo bay, and throughout this last year of antipiracy activity, they’ve successfully reverse-engineered her Distortion Drive to the point where the First Light is, as of about a week ago, a superluminal vessel.” She smiled. “Of course, the Drive wasn’t the only gift the Enterprise has- there’s magic floating around all throughout that ship. Not much- but enough that it’s made its mark on every one of my permanent crew, including myself and my sister, and we’ve regained our magic of old. Well, I say regained, but…” She shrugged. “You know what I mean.

“But anyways. You may have noticed I’ve been wearing a cloak, dress, or suit whenever we met, and never used the full-body camera viewpoint when we talked, right?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, now that you mention it.”

She chuckled. “That’s because I’ve been growing wings. In addition to my horn, yes- and yes, I can fly.” She paused. “According to the data we pulled from Enterprise’s surprisingly robust archival database, I’ve become an ‘Alicorn’... which makes me ridiculously more powerful than any other unicorn. And it’s true- our best estimate is that I could block an artillery barrage from the entire Fleet with a magical shield without straining myself. And since said shields don’t necessarily interfere with aerodynamic surfaces and whatever, it’ll be a piece of cake to guarantee that no matter how many missiles those idiots fire, we’ll make it to the surface alive and unharmed.”

“Ahh,” Wolf muttered softly. “What about your sister?”

“Her wings are only starting to grow in, and she’s also only just starting to get the hang of her magic, whereas I’ve had over a year to practice and study everything we found in the archives.” She scowled. “I’m still not as good as I want to be, but it’ll do.”

“And the other unicorns?”

“Still unicorns, me and Bubbles are the only Alicorns. Not sure why, but the archive suggests that royal status might be a part of it. But yeah, all the unicorns have the same magic, just… not as ridiculously overpowered. But anyways,” she nodded sharply, “we can get the First Light down risk-free. What do you want us to do once we get there?”

“Well,” Wolf nodded. “The orbital defenses are tough enough to give even the Fleet trouble, and I want to know if they’re under our control or the pirates’ before we let them figure out where we are.”

“Alright,” Flight nodded. “So once we’re down, we make contact with… Who would be best?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything in the military is likely to be monitored by the pirates, so… Maybe your father? I kinda don’t want to suggest talking to him, given… But still.”

Flight shrugged. “We’ll live. So, how long do we have before we’ll be descending?”

“About two weeks,” Wolf informed her. “I’ll send all the tactical data over, then leave it to you to decide exactly how.” She paused. “Though… Hmm. Does that magic have any way to communicate that they won’t intercept?”

Flight grinned. “Thanks to some very clever engineering by Shooting Star, all our recon drones communicate with the ship via thaumic entanglement rather than electromagnetic transmissions, for effectively unlimited range with total disrespect for the speed of light. Of course, we can still bounce transmissions off them- we’ll just use that to keep in contact with the Fleet.”

“Better than I was expecting,” Wolf nodded, then grinned. “Though I’m not sure what I was expecting- it’s magic, after all, isn’t it?”

Flight shrugged. “The archives call it magic, and don’t contain much in the way of how it works, but what is there suggests that the civilization that wrote it knew quite a bit about that. Even though ‘magic’ is a term used to describe that which you cannot understand, isn’t it?” She chuckled. “It’s got its own rules, and its own limits, but we don’t know them- only how to use it, and the limits of what we know how to do with it.”

“Aaaand, touchdown,” Flight announced, as the first waves touched the belly of her ship as it descended into them.

“Splashdown, more like,” River Skip observed.

“Same difference,” Flight grinned. “Anyways, let’s get fuel processing underway.”

Willowstone tapped a few keys. “Fuel processing started, full tanks in about… twenty-six and a half hours.”

“Alright then,” Flight nodded, going through the motions of shutting down the engines, though she left the wings extended for additional buoyancy and stability in the water, especially as the fuel tanks filled up. “It’s about time for me to be on my way.”

“Right about,” Willow sighed, looking up at her. “Be careful out there, okay, Princess?”

She smiled. “Don’t worry, I will be.”

Then she sighed. Willow was right- what she was about to do was very dangerous. She was going to take the stealth shuttle, alongside Bubbles, Shadow Flight, and a couple other soldiers, on a ‘quick’ jaunt across about two hundred miles of ocean to the Capital City, land it inside the Palace, and meet her father alone, face-to-face, protected only by her magic.

King High Cost glared at the computer console in front of him. Twelve years of those pirates’ terrorism had gone by- and they were far too coordinated to be real pirates, rather than an entire unknown nation of their own. Yet… what had come of it? Way back in the day, his daughters had still been babies when they’d shown up on his father’s dying day. His father had always been a brave, militaristic man; he made many contributions to the Navy and other fighting forces, despite his… lackadaisical allotment of forces that eventually let the pirates in. Unfortunately, one thing that the old King Large Spending had sucked at, was teaching his son how to resist persuasion. High Cost was far better than his father at allocating the forces at his disposal… but he’d never had the freedom to exercise them, as the pirate Queen Cheap Gold had… installed herself as his wife and threatened to kill his daughters if he didn’t do what she wanted.

It hadn’t stopped him from exercising his skills in other ways. Even under pirate supervision, the Royal Equineothame Navy grew explosively to the total of almost sixty thousand vessels, composed primarily out of superdreadnoughts with heavy artillery capability- though the infighting when Little Bubble was killed had reduced it to just thirty five thousand vessels with an even larger capital ship majority. He’d even been able to allocate his daughters, to an extent- as commanded, he’d carefully steered them into disliking him. However, he’d gone beyond those commands and steered them into actively despising him, and had been forced to conceal his shouts of glee when he’d realized they’d started trying to be as expensive as possible.

That had been good. It meant they had stopped following his orders, which included the ones he was required to give them from the pirates.

Well… had been required to give them. They’d both been killed a couple years before, before they’d been able to become the saviors he was hoping they would be for ponykind. They’d been close- when he’d had the First Light created, and ordered the sisters to be the ones to approve the blueprints… he had been hoping they would make something that only barely met his requirements, cost a boatload so he could justify reducing his contributions to the pirates’ coffers, and could help them maybe resist the pirates- maybe just get the elusive Enterprise out of space before the pirates reached it.

Nobody knew, but it had been his father that had discovered that ship, so far out there, three days before his death. The pirates had caught wind of it, and been pressuring him for info on it- but he refused to give them the info.

He’d been forced to. He’d bought the pirates off with tiny little tidbits for so long… then just before the First Light’s blueprint had come due for approval, they had decided he’d dallied too long with the final, crucial tidbit, and had his daughter, Little Bubble, assassinated. It didn’t matter that she and her half-sister Short Flight were both born to concubines that had been early casualties in the silent war with the pirates, nor that he’d never been married- they were still both his children.

Not too long after that, Princess Short Flight had approved the blueprints on her own, without her sister’s input- something which had surprised him.

Not nearly as much as the enormity of the price tag had surprised him, though. Perhaps his orders to leave the pirates had been too brusque, too sharp? He had wished, dearly wished he could send the entire Navy after the pirates, and blow them clear out of space… but with Cheap Gold pointing a gun at him from out of view of the comms camera, he couldn’t do that. Only issue an order that she’d despise and give her a reason that would encourage her to violate it.

She hadn’t violated it.

A year later, the First Light had been completed… and the pirates waited until after he’d given them that last snippet of info on the Enterprise in exchange for her life to tell him she’d already been killed. Then the news had come back that his info had been wrong- and they’d accepted his proof that it was the info he’d had.

So he’d started looking for other ways to resist… Only for, a year or so later, the entire Royal Equineothame Navy to suddenly and silently break orbit and disappear. Even the pirates hadn’t been able to find them, so had moved in to ‘protect’ the nation but actually to hang orbital bombardment over his head. Now… He’d given them everything, but things were starting to look uphill anyways.

Fortunately, their attention seemed to be elsewhere. Their bases, scattered across the cosmos as they were, seemed to be disappearing tracelessly, one after another. Even scout ships sent to the bases that had gone silent had come back telling that they couldn’t find them.

Then, a couple months ago… the final base had gone silent, at a range of almost two and a half light-months. The pirates were very agitated, and willing to take anything they could get- so printing the painfully-useless ship classes he’d ordered designed explicitly for that purpose was enough to keep them off his back. He could start planning, finding ways to resist them again. Even Cheap Gold didn’t spend much time in the palace anymore- she was much too busy managing the pirates’ ground base a few blocks away.

A sudden chime sounded from the door, and he winced. Speaking of Cheap Gold…

He glanced at the clock, and paused. It was far too early for her return. Unless she’d come rushing back for some reason?

Still, though. There was nobody else in the Castle to request an audience with him, and that chime didn’t go off when ponies from outside the Palace requested personal audiences with their King. He punched the admittance key, they leaned back to look around his screens at the door.

The door slid open to reveal…

Princess Short Flight was significantly older as she walked into his office than she had been when he’d last seen her. She was no longer a tiny filly, but was now a strong, growing teenager. She was wearing a long, mint-green cloak to match her coat, neatly hiding her body from view- though judging by the shape of the cloak, her body was much bulkier than it used to be, like she’d been doing a lot of bodybuilding. When her hooves peeked out through the gap in the front, he saw that she was wearing her mag boots- she must’ve just landed and rushed to the Palace to still be wearing ‘on-orbit equipment’ like that.

There was also an interesting flicker of golden light around her horn that he couldn’t remember ever being there before. Perhaps she’d gotten one of those holokits that children loved, to make it look like her horn was magical?

“You’re alive,” he greeted.

She smiled at him- an unexpected act but, given the cold in her eyes, it was clear her amusement wasn’t for his benefit. Too bad he’d had to alienate her like that. “I am,” she answered simply, then sighed. “And just like it, I’m not here to fight, or listen to whatever. There’s a bunch of pirates in orbit, and I need to know who controls the orbital defense network- us, or the pirates.”

He stared at her, even as the door closed behind her, for several seconds.

“... Us, technically,” he eventually said slowly. “But if we don’t do what they tell us to with it, they’ll blow us to Kingdom Come with those ships they have in orbit.”

Flight grinned, and turned her head slightly. “Admiral? It’s ours.”

He watched her in silence for a few seconds.

“Alright, we’ll be waiting,” Flight then spoke. “Flight out.” She reached up and tapped one hoof to her ear… and in the process, revealing that she wasn’t actually all that much more muscular than before, though there was some up-muscling. Was the bulk under her cloak a set of saddlebags or something? It didn’t look like a Bands, or Back Attached Natural Digit System.

She gazed back at him, a calm, calculating look on her face.

The silence held for almost a minute, before a sudden buzzer on the panel caught his attention.

He looked.

Artillery. The Defense Network was in panic mode in reaction to an enormous wave of artillery. A few rounds got picked off… then space burned, all around the planet.

He stared at it. It looked like… Yes. Every single pirate vessel in orbit, and nothing else, had been… eliminated by a wave of about five thousand artillery rounds coming from every direction.

He looked over at her again, still waiting calmly while all the buzzers died.

“I hope that wasn’t too expensive,” she told him, grinning mischievously.

“Five thousand artillery rounds?” he muttered, looking back at it. “That’s gotta be a part of the Navy.” He shrugged, then looked back at her. “But I’d pay anything to get those damn pirates off our backs. They’ve been killing and torturing us for twelve long years.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Twelve?”

He nodded. “You were about eighteen days old when it started,” he told her. “Damn monsters, threatening me with first yours and Bubble’s lives, then my own.” He sighed, staring at the floor. “And all so they could get their hooves on the intel my father obtained. If you have the power to kill them, then be my guest, even if it bankrupts the nation.”

“Done,” Flight answered calmly.

He looked up. “Done?” he questioned.

“Over the last year and a half, I and the Royal Equineothame Navy have… blitzed a couple dozen big pirate bases,” she informed him, grinning mischievously once again. “Now there’s only stragglers.”

He stared at her. “Thank you.” He looked at the floor again. “Flight…” he began, then paused. “No. Princess… May I hug you?”

It looked like Flight was taken aback by the question. “... What?” she asked, audibly confused.

He looked up at her. “May I hug you, Princess?”

“Uhh… Sure, I guess,” she muttered uneasily.

He noticed the bulk under her cloak shift a little- was it a weapon? He didn’t care. He wanted to hug his daughter for the first time since she was a newborn foal, even if it was the last thing he did. He walked forwards… and hugged her.

He didn’t die. The thing under her cloak moved again- it felt almost like it was alive. Did she have a foal of her own? No, she wasn’t old enough for that- and it was the wrong shape, anyways. Did she have a pet?

The door suddenly slid open of its own accord.

He looked- and so did Flight.

There was Cheap Gold… with a minigun in her hooves.

“Princess,” she greeted calmly. “You’re alive.” She raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

Starbound Flight

by computerneek

Chapter 1: The Azure

Chapter 2: The Expense

Chapter 3: Willowstone

Chapter 4: The Great Space Factory

Chapter 5: First Flight

Chapter 6: Detour

Chapter 7: Rescue

Chapter 8: Duel

Chapter 9: Recovery

Chapter 10: Pirates

Chapter 11: Allies

Chapter 12: Castle Raid