//------------------------------//
// Chapter 10: Missions 12, 13 and 14: Take Plenty of Photographs 
// Story: Changeling Space Program 
// by Kris Overstreet 
//------------------------------//

Jet Set groaned as the tranquilizing effects of changeling pod goo faded. He’d been dreaming of that time in Maneaco, when he and Upper Crust had taken a sailboat out into the bay and, on a whim, decided that they’d rather have dinner in St. Cropez’. It was one of his fondest memories: the smell of the salty spray in the wind, the delightful Prench haute cuisine, the way everypony’s eyes had been glued to their ship as it glided into port under his expert guidance(167). The dream had faded, but based on the pounding in his head, the withdrawal symptoms hadn’t. 

Neither had the remaining pod goo, bits of which clung to Jet Set’s clothes, mane and fur in irritating places. He tried to brush a bit of it off his ascot, and it came right off the silk without a stain. Unfortunately it remained stuck to his hoof, resisting all attempts to fling it away. 

“Owww…” Jet Set noticed for the first time his wife lying next to him on the floor. “Darling, please call room service and have them send up some aspirin,” she said, holding her badly-mussed mane in both hooves. “I have such a horrible headache.”

“The pain and nausea will go away in a few minutes,” a strange voice said. 

The two Canterlot ponies looked up, for a limited value of “up”, at a changeling guard. At least, presumably it was a guard, and a senior one as well. It wore a small skull-cap helmet and wore simple plate armor along its back. However, the fact that this particular changeling was actually fat- something neither unicorn thought was even possible- gave both serious cause to doubt their assumption.

“I’m Neighing Mantis,” the guard said, giving her proper name. In fact, for about half a year now the hive hadn’t called her anything other than Eggplant due to her recent weight gain. Even after weeks of forced dieting and even more thoroughly forced extraction of stored love, she remained well above the weight she’d been when assigned to guard the cocoon holding a certain blonde-maned pink pony for a week.(168) “I’m here to assist you in settling in as honorary astromare trainees at Horseton Space Center.”

“Horseton?” Jet Set sat up properly, noting for the first time that he wasn’t underground. The large room was definitely of pony construction, or at least pony design- square corners, brightly lit, and (aside from bits of goo and cocoon bits) sparkling clean. The couches, chairs and tables all screamed ultra-modern design. There was even (wonder of wonders) a large television set standing along one wall. This was far and away from the creepy, ill-lit caverns of the changeling hive. 

“Yes, sir,” Eggplant gestured to a hallway, where a group of changelings were wheeling in the Canterlot couple’s luggage on little dollies. “You’ve been treated to over a week in our comfortable hibernation cocoons awaiting the pleasure of our queen. Now that Mission Eleven is complete, we’re ready to offer you our best hospitality and to explain our plans for your upcoming rocket launch.”

“Capital,” Jet Set replied. “Do I take it that the queen is finally available for an appointment?”

“Er… almost,” Eggplant replied. “It would be best if I escorted you to the showers, then allowed you to select new clothes in the comfort of your quarters, and then, once you were fully presentable-“

“I appreciate the courtesy,” Jet Set said in a tone he thought was generous, “but under the circumstances I think it’s best that we see her right away.”

Eggplant sighed. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little while longer in any case, sir,” she said. “And since you have to wait, you might as well wait with clean fur and clothes, yes?”

“But (oh my head) why can’t we see her now?” Upper Crust whined. “We’ve paid good money for this-“

“The queen is currently unavoidably detained,” Eggplant interrupted hurriedly. “She regrets the delay and will see you very soon now, but… well… something came up while we were flying here from the hive…”



Footnote:

(167) Amazingly enough, Jet Set’s recollections are factually accurate, and not in any ironic way. Jet Set was a competent navigator and a better than average sailor, especially when you consider he was born and raised almost as far from any salt water as it is possible to get in Equestria. It just shows it actually is possible for someone to be an arrogant twit and not be a complete incompetent as well. It just isn’t the way you should bet. 

(168) Eggplant hadn’t found either of her recent guests nearly as nutritious as Cherry Berry. The test pilot’s obsession was richer than concentrated sugar, and the casual, shallow interests and affections of the Canterlot elite were bread and water by comparison. Still, they were each much better than Double Face, who loved absolutely nothing, not even himself much.




The leadership of, as of two days prior, the officially second-place space program in the world sat around the conference table looking glumly at one another.

“Are you sure there’s no way out of this?” Chrysalis asked.

“Every space program is going to have at least one representative there,” Cherry Berry said. “Even the yaks are sending Alexander Popoff and their lead astronaut Prince Fauntleroy. It would look really, really bad if we didn’t go.”

“And it’s not like Princess Twilight Sparkle is wrong,” Warner von Brawn added, shrugging his immense shoulders. The minotaur leaned back in his chair(169) and added, “Standardized EVA and rescue training will be invaluable for all space projects, including our own.”

“Plus Rarity will be providing all attendees with spacesuits on the new model,” Cherry added. “Which requires fittings. We might as well get them done now as later.”

“Spacesuits, by Faust!” Chrysalis groaned, slapping a hoof to her forehead. “I forgot! Our three unwanted guests are going to need them, too!” The others nodded. Obviously Jet Set, Upper Crust, and the jungle pony Hobble Jimenez had never been measured for pressure suits. 

“So, we take them along, too?” Cherry asked.

“And give those snobs the idea of demanding a refund and taking their business elsewhere?” Chrysalis asked. “Because if we take them for a week’s training at someone else’s space center, the first thing they’ll think is, why aren’t the people we paid for this doing the work? And remember, we can’t refund their money, because we don’t know how much it was in the first place!”

“So we don’t take ‘em,” Goddard the Griffon said testily. “We have someone take their measurements here and have Miss Rarity bring the finished product after the training is over. Non-issue.” The old griffon sat back in his own chair, folded his talons across his chest, and said, “But who does go? And who stays to babysit?”

“Dr. Goddard and I should not be on either list,” von Brawn interjected. “We’ve secured blueprints for the passenger cabin of a personal high-speed airship, and we think we’ve made design adjustments that will convert the design into a basic passenger cabin.”

“It’s a kludge,” Goddard grunted, “but what isn’t, around here? But both Warner and I need to supervise the construction in Appleoosa and the transport to the space center. If we leave as soon as this meeting is done, and nothing goes wrong, we can have a prototype here for a landing test in about a week.”

“Landing test?” Chrysalis asked. 

“Landing test. We don’t know how this thing will hold up to impact, and the simplest way to find out is to drop it on land. And the best way to drop it is to fly it.”

“Unfortunately,” von Brawn added, “George Bull and Marked Knee’s automated guidance system isn’t quite ready yet. So it will have to be a piloted atmospheric flight, possibly using a Flea-“

“NOT IT,” Cherry Berry and Chrysalis said in one breath.

Unperturbed, von Brawn continued, “Piloted by Dragonfly, then. Presuming success, we shall then build one or two new passenger cabins for our guests and give them their flights.”

Chrysalis turned to Occupant. “Speaking of that, are there any contracts to help pay for all of this?”

Occupant shook his head sadly. “Nopony’s offering money for anything except ground surveys,” he said. “It’s really bizarre. One’s even offering us seven thousand bits if we land a ship directly on the Appleoosan clock tower!”(170)

“Well, you know what to do with those,” Chrysalis sighed. “Tell your assistant to let us know if something new pops up.”

“Yes, my- wait, what?” Occupant blinked confusion. “My assistant? What about me?”

“You’re going with us,” Chrysalis said. “You’re on the flight roster. That means you get a space suit, and that means you’re going to Baltimare to train with the rest of us.”

“I’m on the bottom of the flight roster!” Occupant shouted. “I have so much that needs doing here! Take Lucky Cricket-“

“Thank you, I am,” Chrysalis replied dryly. “And you too. All five of us, which should probably make us the largest contingent of astromares at the meeting.”

“Showing off,” Cherry Berry chuckled. 

“And why shouldn’t we?” Chrysalis said. “No other space program has three pilots with space experience and five with experience in supersonic flight.”

“Lucky Cricket and Occupant didn’t fly faster than sound,” Cherry insisted. “Flying implies some measure of control. They were thrown.”

“So?” Occupant asked before Chrysalis could. “I still have the experience!”

“See?” Chrysalis asked, gesturing to Occupant.

“I don’t remember a bit of it,” Occupant continued, “but I have experience!”

Cherry Berry threw up her hooves. “Fine, fine,” she said. “We send everypony. But who does that leave to keep our guests busy while we’re gone?” She slammed her hooves on the table as emphasis as she added, “Or didn’t you notice that your plans take absolutely everypony with an ounce of authority away from the space center at once?”

“I have an idea about that…” Chrysalis said, smiling her #3 smile (I Have a Cunning Scheme).



Footnotes:

(169) von Brawn hadn’t broken a chair yet, but the creaking and snapping that came from each chair as he lounged in it made it seem inevitable. Various members of the space program regularly placed bets on whether a chair would fail with him on it, or whether a chair once sat in by him would fail the moment someone else sat in it. The most prominent such gambler was Goddard, who by all accounts was cleaning up on his bets.

(170) Based on the short but eventful history of Appleoosa, many unbiased observers concluded that someone or something really didn’t want the frontier town to have a clock tower. There had been the buffalo stampede, the out-of-control tornado, and the senile old knight-errant Don Rosinante. (To be honest, the last attacker only knocked a couple of bricks out of one corner before his donkey squire Hotay persuaded him that the “giant” had reformed and posed no further threat to pony or beast, but he was still part of the trend.)




Not too much later, in the largest room of the administration building (with the hasty addition of a throne), Queen Chrysalis and the rest of the CSP leadership, plus a few additional people, faced the two recently arrived Canterlot unicorns and Hobble Jimenez, who after six days of Heavy Frosting’s cooking was a little less scrawny but no less terrified. “Allow me to formally welcome all three of you to Horseton Space Center,” she said. “You will be glad to know that within three weeks all three of you will get to experience the wonders of space flight.”

“I should only hope so,” Jet Set sneered, “after what we paid-“

“Mr. Jet Set and Mrs. Upper Crust,” Chrysalis said, talking over the stallion’s mutters, “are noteworthy socialites and businessponies from Canterlot. Mr. Hobble Jimenez has been sent here by…” Chrysalis paused a moment to choose the right words before continuing, “…by his government to observe our space program first-hand and report his experiences. Together the three of you will become the first ever space tourists.”

Leaning forward on her throne, Chrysalis continued, “But before we give you your flights we have to be certain that you are physically and mentally prepared. Rocket launches are tough on the body, and without the same knowledge we astromares constantly study, you won’t have a full appreciation of what you’re experiencing.” Inspiration struck, and she added, “By way of comparison, consider what a tour of the Prench wine country would be like for a neophyte who’s never drunk anything more than plain grape juice.”

Sure enough, the metaphor hit its mark. Both Canterlot ponies recoiled in shock. “Such a waste!” Jet set exclaimed.

“Just so,” Chrysalis agreed(171). “And we feel that you wouldn’t get your money’s worth if we sent you up without at least a portion of that vital knowledge. After all, you paid enough for it.”

“’Ow much would i' cos’ for me to stay home?” Hobble asked, but he was ignored.

“So to make good the lack,” Chrysalis said, gesturing to three minotaurs standing in a row to her left, “for the next week we will leave you in the capable hooves of three of our leading scientists. The eldest, George Cowley, is a leader in aeronautical theory. He will oversee your flight training and simulations.”

“I thought I recognized him!” Jet Set exclaimed. “There’s a picture back home of you shaking hands with my father! Your work made commercial airship travel possible!”

Cowley, whose shaggy eyebrows had gone the same gray as his muzzle, waved away the acclaim. “A side matter, nothing more,” he said. “Heavier-than-air flight was always my true calling. Before long progress on that front will make airships obsolete except as a luxury experience.”

“Ahem. Moving on,” Chrysalis said, pointing to the middle-aged minotaur, somewhat more slight of build than von Brawn but still of minotaurine proportions, “George Bull is our chief mathematician and designer of the computers that calculate and predict our courses. He’s currently working on a fully automated system for artificial satellites and robot probes. He will oversee your education in spaceflight theory and terminology.”

“Enchante’,” George Bull said, bowing deeply. 

Upper Crust giggled. “You speak Prench?”

“I speak seven languages, including ancient Equine and Minotauran,” George Bull said. “And I hope, over the course of our time together, to have you speaking fluent Astronaut.”

“Isn’t it ‘astromare’?” Jet Set asked. 

“Either will do,” George Bull admitted, “but I prefer the term we created. It comes from two old Minotauran roots, meaning, ‘star mariner.’”

“And finally, we have the youngest member of our science team,” Chrysalis said, pointing to the third minotaur. This one was the skinniest of all four members of the original minotaur space program, but he was also the tallest and the most energetic. The stereotypical minotauran ebullience(172) von Brawn and the two Georges lacked, the fourth had in surplus. “Marked Knee is our electronics expert and is currently engaged in a joint project with the Yakyakistan space program to develop better communications and tracking systems for all our spacecraft. He will oversee your physical fitness and training.”

“To say nothing of your nutrition!!” Marked Knee shouted, grinning. “I’ve always said that a great mind must run on equally great fuel, but you need hard work to build up the proper appetite!! Starting tomorrow we’ll begin with a brisk run to Horseton and back- only thirty kilometers or so-“

“Ten miles each way,” Cherry Berry, who’d watched with amusement the whole time, translated.

“-and after that we should be ready for a nice light breakfast before the real workout begins!!” Marked Knee finished.

“Ah, pardon my presumption, Dr. Knee,” Jet Set said, “but we ponies have four legs,” he gestured at himself and the other two, “and you have only two. And yours are quite short at that.”

“Indeed!! My legs are indeed quite remarkably compact!! Well observed, sir!!” Marked Knee smiled without any hint of offense.

“My point is, if we are to go for a run… well,” Jet Set shuffled on his hooves, for once not wanting to give offense, even by accident. “Are you certain it’ll be fair, sir?”

“Perhaps not, sir!! The only way to know is to see firsthand!! But I think tomorrow morning one of us will be quite surprised!!” Still smiling the innocent, friendly, mildly deranged smile, he added, “Possibly even three of us!!”

“I don’ like surprises,” Jimenez moaned. “I never get the good kind.”

“In any event, I leave you in the care of these gentlebulls,” Chrysalis said, cutting short any more pointless chatter. “In addition to their training, over the next week you will be given full medical examinations by a pony specialist from Canterlot(173), measured for custom flight and pressure suits, and trained in the safety procedures we use at the Changeling Space Program. In eight days’ time we shall reconvene to watch the first short-range test flight of the passenger component which will carry you beyond the sky.”

Hobble Jimenez gave a heartfelt moan.

“Quit your whining,” Chrysalis said, welcoming tone gone for the moment. “You’re not going up on that flight.”

“Oh,” Jimenez said, straightening up a little. “Tha’s OK, then.”

“But I promise you fine stallions and mare,” Chrysalis said, returning to her friendly formal tone, “that three weeks from today we shall launch two flights, one carrying Mr. Jimenez, the other carrying Mr. Set and Mrs. Crust. Which should return you all to your homes in time for that honored and memorable Equestrian tradition…” Chrysalis paused, face going blank. “Um… er…” After a couple more moments of fumbling, she leaned over and hissed, “Hey, pony, what’s that stupid holiday thing you wanted to go back to Ponyville for?”

“The Running of the Leaves?” Cherry Berry asked dully, facehooving as she did so.

“The Running of the Leaves,” Chrysalis repeated as if she’d not even paused in her speech. “So, for the next three weeks, you are not merely our guests, but our colleagues. We look forward to working with you until, at the end, we can include you in the honorable fellowship of astromares.”

Eggplant, who had stood discreetly behind the three tourists, spoke up at this point. “Chef Frosting will be serving dinner in an hour. If you would like to freshen up beforehand?” With careful, polite, but inexorable persuasion, the rotund guard had the ponies out of the room and on their way back to the astronaut quarters in moments.

Once they had gone, Chrysalis left the throne, walking over to the minotaurs. “If you can actually teach those three anything at all, that’s fine,” she said, “but whatever else you do, keep them busy. Fill their days. Nightmare Night is in a few days, so that’ll be a useful distraction. Call in a couple of Dragonfly’s parachute workers and set them to work on costumes for our guests. But the important thing is, I don’t want them to have any opportunity or energy to start demanding they see me, or the pony, or anybody else.” She looked right at Marked Knee and added, “And I especially don’t want them to have a reason to demand to see me. Understood?”

“It couldn’t be clearer!!” Marked Knee shouted. 

Chrysalis paused for a moment, looking down at the lanky minotaur’s legs. “You have an almost pony-like name,” she said at last.

“It’s a pun, ma’am!!” Marked Knee explained. “My parents wanted to name me after great-grandfather Markus! But my family christens babies based on their most obvious physical trait!!”(174)

“But your knees are perfectly ordinary,” Chrysalis noted, as indeed they were- solid black from shorts to hooves. “I don’t see a mark at all!”

“It was in pencil, ma’am!”

Chrysalis gave the minotaur a long look, decided that further pursuit of the conversation would be fruitless, and said, “Dr. Bull, you’re in charge of the space program until we get back. We want a short-range test rocket for the new compartment to land on solid ground within a hundred kilometers of the base. And don’t let the tourists burn anything down until... I mean, even after I get back.”



Footnotes:

(171) Thankfully nopony brought up the fact that Chrysalis herself practically never ate or drank except to maintain a cover identity, and therefore had no palate at all. To cover this lack she had established a routine in her Cool Drink identity; at large public events, take a sip of whatever potable was being served at the soiree’ in question, spit it out, and angrily demand that the staff “take this swill away and bring out the good stuff.” Without fail something that tasted exactly the same to her but had a different label would be rushed out, and she would take a sip, and indicate her silent, begrudging acceptance that the inferior product was probably the best the plebes could procure. Thus far no butler or maitre d’hotel had dared to call her bluff by bringing out the kind of wine that comes in a box, and thus Cool Drink had a reputation, if not as a connoisseur, then as an aficionado of fine wines and liquors. 

(172) No apologies.

(173) Chrysalis had briefly considered using a changeling infiltrator and decided against it. For this she wanted to be certain, and it would be worth the massive amount of money it would cost to get a Saddle Row doctor out of Canterlot and down to the space center. Besides, the snobs would probably recognize Dr. Gingerbread House, whose reputation for horrible bedside manner was only surpassed for his reputation as a medical genius. Chrysalis had chosen him not for his skills, but because he was the easiest Canterlot physician to blackmail. One way or the other, he’d come.

(174) Were this one of the author’s less enlightened works, we would go into chapter and verse on the potential for abuse such a tradition would have. However, since this is a land of adorable pastel-colored ponies who solve difficult emotional conundrums in half an hour, we shall allow the readers to exercise their own imagination. Yes, you. Just try and stop yourself from thinking of things.




What with one thing and another, a week passed.

One thing:

“Oh, perk up, my friends!!” Marked Knee said cheerfully, jogging in a circle around the three staggering ponies. “It’s only another two miles back to the center!”

“How—how—how—“ Jet Set tried to swallow, but his dry mouth refused to cooperate. “How are you DOING this?”

“We have four legs to your two,” Upper Crust whined along with her husband. “How can you run us into the ground?”

“Ah, but you see!!” Marked Knee paused and looked down at the ponies, eager to educate. “Motion studies and chemical analysis has found that a bipedal stance, when compared to a quadrupedal stance in a creature of similar mass, is seventy-five percent more energy efficient!!(175) Which means you have to work four times as hard as I do for the same result!!” 

“I want…” Upper Crust gasped for breath. “I want… to check… that math!”

“I already check de math,” Hobble Jimenez gasped. “Eet adds up to one worn-out pony.”

“Check it again,” Jet Set moaned. “I make it two worn-out ponies.”

“Three,” Upper Crust agreed. 

An expression of contrition elbowed its way, awkwardly, onto Marked Knee’s face. “Possibly I have not thought this through sufficiently!! Sorry!!”

Hobble, without further comment, flopped forward into the dust. A moment later the Canterlot unicorns, equally silently, joined him.


Another thing:

“Upon attempting ingress or egress from the vehicle,” Cowley said, his voice almost a monotone, “an astronaut must first apply the tetro-hydraulic double dynamo reboostable booster, then activate the decompression activator, and finally engage the anti-magnetic ensconcing system.”

“And then you’re really up there!” Jet Set said eagerly.

“No,” Hobble muttered matter-of-factly, “tha’ jus’ opens the door.”

Three heads turned towards the native pony.

“Whas’ the matter?” Hobble asked. “I leesten. I pay attention, I learn t’ings. I’d learn a lot more if alla you din’ have such fonny accen’s.”

Yet another thing:

“Orbits are usually elliptical,” Bull said, describing the circle sketched around a picture of the planet on the chalkboard. “If you remember your school geometry, ellipses have two focal points. In an orbit, the body being orbited is one of the focal points. The closer the ship is to the body being orbited, the faster it must go to stay in orbit. The farther away the ship is, the slower it moves to remain in orbit.” Bull sketched a few lines on the diagram, creating a couple of slices of orbit on opposite sides of the planet. “Because of this, if you take the distance a ship in orbit travels in a certain period of time in two different parts of the orbit-“ he pointed to the two separate slices- “though the distance in the orbit is different, the area carved out in these triangles is exactly the same!”

“So what kind of orbit is the best orbit?” Jet Set asked.

“It depends on what you’re doing with it,” Bull said. He sketched two more circles around the planet, one almost circular, one very egg-shaped. “For staying in place or observing the planet, you want as close to a circular orbit as possible. That keeps your orbital speed nice and steady,” he said, pointing to the circular orbit. “But if you want to go someplace else, like the moon, then you need an orbit like this, a transfer orbit.” He drew half of a third circle, the curve rising away from the planet but never returning. “And a high enough transfer orbit will escape our world’s gravity altogether. Which, if we go to Bucephalous or other planets, will be how we do it.”

“Do you believe there’s life on Bucephalous, then, Dr. Bull?” Upper Crust asked.

The minotaur smiled. “Maybe if we get there on a Saturday night,” he said. “Myself, I’d bring a book.”

A thing of another kind:

Dr. Gingerbread House glared as only he could glare. The object of his glare paid no attention, writhing and moaning in dramatic, even melodramatic, fashion on the examination table. 

“Oh, Mr. Doctor!” Hobble Jimenez moaned. “I em in such a bad condition! It hurts it here!” He pressed a hoof to his left shoulder and groaned. “An’ it hurts it here!” He poked his stomach with the same hoof and moaned louder. “An’ it really hurts it all through here!” He poked his flank with the hoof and moaned his loudest moan yet. 

“Right,” Gingerbread House snapped. “Sit up and face the wall so I can examine your back.”

“Hokay,” Hobble said, sitting on the table facing the wall, his hind legs dangling over the edge, his forelegs steadying him on either side. 

House stood upright, folded his forelegs, and said, “Does it hurt when I touch you here?”

“Oooooooh!”

Not moving a muscle(176), House said, “How about here?”

“OoooOOOOoooh!!”

Still motionless, House said, “And down here?”

Hobble jumped off his rump like he’d been goosed. “Ohhh, OOOOOH, oooooogh,” he wailed piteously.

Dr. House looked at Marked Knee, who had remained silent throughout the examination, apparently out of embarrassment. “Chronic asymptomatic hypochondria, probably stress-induced,” he said. “I prescribe half a salt lick.”

Hobble swirled around and down, off the table and onto his hooves so fast Marked Knee checked the pony’s forehead for a horn. “Really?” the native asked.

“Not for you,” House growled. “For me.” He reached a hoof into the pocket of his lab coat, pulled out a little white cube of salt, and popped it into his mouth, crunching it loudly. “For you I prescribe acting lessons. Do I have to waste any more time with this clown?”

As Marked Knee silently opened the door and gestured the doctor out, Hobble called after them, “Wait, Doctor! I’m also got the dizzy spells! Whoooa… the room ees spinning! Everyt’ing ees getting dark! Doctor? Doctor?” After an obvious lack of any response, he shouted, “Leas’ jou coul’ gimme some of that salt, too!” After a moment’s consideration he added, “Or some cider. I wouldn’ min' some cider…”

A not quite unrelated thing:

George Cowley sat at a drafting table in the R&D main building, all by himself, and sketched. 

For months Cowley had been thinking about how to land a vehicle on the moon’s surface and raise it up again. For almost his entire lifetime he’d focused his mind on the riddles of heavier-than-air, magic-free flight. Now his mind was turned to flight in an environment without air. Space, as had been proven in flight, was an airless void. Nopony knew, not even Luna, if the moon had any air, but it was safer to presume it didn’t and plan accordingly. That made flight on the moon a true challenge- a question of thrust, momentum and control, control, control.

And upper most in Cowley’s mind was the practical concern: How can we test this without potentially stranding the pilot on the moon?

At this point, technically, he was supposed to be designing a rocket for a short-range atmospheric flight, the primary goal being to drop the new passenger cabin onto solid ground to see if it would hold up under a normal landing. But, of course, every mission, even an unimportant test flight like this one, needed secondary goals. The more results the program could wring out of each flight, the sooner they would land a ship on the moon- and that, after all, was what it was all about.

Cowley pushed aside his simple, straightforward single-stack design and pulled a new piece of paper to him. At the core he placed the capsule, passenger compartment and parachute. Terrier engines won’t produce enough lift in atmosphere to raise this stack, he thought, but if I put one Swivel under this stack the center of mass will be too high on landing- the ship will tip over. In pencil he sketched three fuel tanks and Swivel engines in a triangle around the core ship. 

Yes, he thought, and add a second parachute for the extra mass, just in case. This will make a workable test bed for moon landings, with enough power to operate on Equus. I still need to ask Goddard what the maximum impact velocity is-

The lab door slammed open. “No masquerade ball!” Jet Set cried, tossing his carefully-tailored ragged straw hat onto the floor. “Not even a charming rustic carnival! Just a bunch of hillbillies getting drunk and telling horrible stories!”

“And their liquor,” Upper Crust sighed, shuddering in horror at the memory, “has no bouquet at all. I wouldn’t use it to sterilize a wound!” She straightened her gingham dress fastidiously.

Cowley looked up from his sketches and stared at the ponies. “My goodness,” he said, “did none of you enjoy Nightmare Night?”

Marked Knee crowded the doorway behind the Canterlot unicorns. “Mr. Jimenez certainly did!!” he shouted. “Until the ghost stories began, after which I suspect his enjoyment somewhat declined!!” As the younger minotaur entered, Cowley noticed the litter he was dragging behind him, upon which the skinny earth pony, wearing a Buck Ranger style spacesuit, lay frozen in a state of catatonia, clutching a large bag of Nightmare Night candy to his barrel. 

“Oh, dear,” Cowley said, quite forgetting his drafting table. “Shall we go see what tidbits Heavy Frosting has in his pantry to soothe an evening of disappointments?”

“Capital idea!!” Marked Knee said. 

“We would have had some candy,” Jet Set added, “but every time we try to take it away from him, he clutches it tighter.”

Yet another thing, possibly not unrelated: 

“A trajectory which leaves the atmosphere, but comes back down to the surface, is called suborbital,” George Bull said, sketching the line on the chalkboard. “A full orbit goes all the way around the planet without touching the surface. We don’t count it as a proper orbit unless it stays outside the atmosphere for its entire track.”

“Why not?” Upper Crust asked.

“Air resistance,” Bull replied. “It slows you down. If you don’t have fuel to burn to recover your speed, you eventually fall back to the ground. But if you stay out of the atmosphere, you could potentially keep going around the planet forever.”

“Forever?” Hobble asked. “Never come back?”

“Potentially,” Bull said. “But once you ran out of food that wouldn’t be fun, so we’ll be sure to bring you back long before then.”

“Why no' save the troubles,” Hobble said pointedly, “an’ not sen’ me up at all?”

“Anyway,” Bull continued, ignoring Hobble’s remark, “the two really important parts of an orbit are the apoapsis and periapsis.” Using the chalk to indicate points on the circle, “The apoapsis is the point highest from the planet, and the periapsis is the point closest to the planet.” 

“Poppyapsis, berryapsis,” Upper Crust said, dismissing the words with a hoof. “How can you keep track of which is which?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Bull said, stepping away from the chalkboard, his hooves clicking merrily on the tile floor as he chanted:

When you’re flying in an orbit
When into space you’re hurled
You need to know your position
In relation to the world

The point of periapsis
Is when you’re closest to the ground
Opposite your apoapsis
As the world you go around

So you don’t get them confused
Here’s a handy trick I know
So you’ll know your altitude
As around the world you go!


Bull paused, then said in a slower chant:

Api is uppy
And peri is not.
Api is uppy
And peri is not. 

When you’re at your apoapsis
You’re as uppy as you go
When you’re at your periapsis
Then you’re very, very low- why?

The three ponies answered in chorus:

Because api is uppy and peri is not!

“Good!” Bull cheered, and then continued:

Now when you want to change your orbit 
You have to make an engine burn
But how can we tell the pilot
Which direction she should turn?
Space doesn’t have an up or down.
No north, south, east or west,
So we need some new directions-


Hobble raised his hoof and asked:

Will this be on th' tes'?

“Yes!” Bull insisted, and plunged on:

Going forward we call prograde
Making progress like a pro
The other way is retrograde
‘Cause looking backwards makes you slow
Radial runs from the center
Pointing up and out
Antiradial points inward

Jet Set chimed in:

As if there were any doubt!

Bull nodded, continuing:

The other two directions 
North and south from the equator
Are normal and antinormal
(Though we might change that later)

BUT!

Bull stopped the chant and added in normal tones, “It’s important to remember that radial, antiradial, normal and antinormal are determined by the orbit- so if the orbit isn’t the same as the equator, then normal isn’t quite the same as north.”

“So tha’s why jou use th' funny names instead?” Hobble asked. 

“Right! It’s all about accuracy and eliminating confusion!” Bull stretched, took a deep breath and chanted again:

SO-
Api is uppy
And peri is not!

The ponies replied:

Api is uppy
And peri is not!

Bull:

A pro goes forward
And retro looks back.

Ponies:

A pro goes forward
And retro looks back!

Bull: 

Radial goes out
Like a spoke upon a wheel
It’s normal to go north
And anti’s the other deal.

Ponies: 

Radial goes out
Like a spoke upon a wheel
It’s normal to go north-

Upper Crust:

You can’t tell me this is real!

Bull: 

Those are all the words you need
Now let’s use them all to make
A story of the space flight
That the three of you will take!

Hobble began: 

When th' rocke' launches
Over my sincere obyection
Th' ship accelerates
Inna radial direction!

Bull nodded:

But anything that goes straight up
Would come right straight back down
So we take a prograde angle
To make our flight path round!

Jet Set:

Each bit of rocket thrust makes
Our apoapsis rise
Until the peak of our trajectory 
Gets up beyond the skies!

Upper Crust

If from our pre-planned orbit
The flight should deviate
We fire normal or antinormal
To find the proper place!

Bull:

But keep mostly on the prograde 
Till periapsis does appear
And keep flying until that point is
Above the atmosphere

And then you’ll be in orbit
Flying round and round and round-

Hobble raised his hoof:

Tha’s all very well an’ good, sir,
But then how do we come down?

George Bull paused the chant, took a moment to consider the question carefully, and then said with feeling, “Carefully.” He then resumed the chant:

The heavier a rocket is
The more fuel it takes to fly
But fuel has weight, so we can’t take
A limitless supply

For slowing down we drag the ship
Through the upper air
So here’s how we can get you down
With a bit of care

We use the last bit of our fuel
To slow our orbit down
Which lowers periapsis
A bit closer to the ground

The ship drops into atmosphere
Air friction builds up heat
But the heat shield keeps you safe
So you don’t fry like griffon meat

The air pushes against the ship
And gradually slows it down
Until the parachute deploys
And floats you to the ground!

“See? Simple!” George Bull smiled. “And your pilots have each done this multiple times, so there’s no need to worry. Shall we finish the flight?”

Hobble sighed and chanted:

Api is uppy
An’ peri is not
But if jour peri’s in the airy
Then jour gonna get it hot

Jet Set continued:

So point the ship to retro
Get the shield in front of you

Upper Crust, dubiously:

Because flying backwards to the ground
Is the safest thing to do?

Jet Set overrode his wife’s doubt:

Watch the parachute come open
See it shape into a dome


Bull:

Then you’ll be as safe as houses!

Hobble:

I only wish I coul' go home!

Bull: 

Now you’ll know what the pilot’s saying
But in case you have forgot
Api is uppy
And peri-

The three ponies answered in conclusion:

-is NOT!

“And that,” Bull said, setting the chalk down, “concludes the lesson.”



Footnotes:

(175) Studies in at least one universe which, sadly, lacks pastel-colored, friendship-obsessed ponies strongly suggests that this is true. If true it would explain how a species of almost naked monkeys, with no claws, tiny teeth and soft, thin skin became the apex predator of the entire planet. Why it should be true in the ponies’ world, on the other hand, should probably just be written off as, “because magic.”

(176) Except his jaw. Nopony had ever successfully stilled Dr. House’s jaw, even on the several occasions some offended or annoyed patient had done something violent enough to require it to be wired shut.



At the end of the week the conference room was full once more. Chrysalis, Cherry Berry, Dragonfly and Occupant (177) had returned from Baltimare; von Brawn and Goddard had returned from Appleoosa with the prototype passenger module; and Bull and Cowley, having remained at the space center, gave their report on the tourists’ activities first.

“So,” Cowley concluded, “they’re all physically fit for flight, and without sticking them in simulators, we’ve made them as ready as we can for the mental side of things.”

“Excellent,” Chrysalis replied. “Good job. We’ll be around to keep them occupied from now until their flights.”

“Doctor Goddard, Doctor von Brawn,” Cherry Berry asked, “what have we got prepared for a passenger compartment?”

“The airship design worked better than expected, after a few minor tweaks,” von Brawn said. “We’ve reinforced the fuselage against impact and heat effects as strongly as we can.”

“The capsule’s more likely to fail than the passenger compartment,” Goddard added. “The prototype’s on a barge from Baltimare now and should arrive tomorrow, which lets us test-fly it day after tomorrow.”

“Sounds good!” Cherry Berry chirped, smiling broadly. “Have we got a rocket design ready for that test?”

George Cowley slid a piece of paper across the conference table to the three astromares. “This is what I was thinking of,” he said. “The same vehicle could be used both for the passenger compartment test and to attempt a soft landing under power, as we will need to do for a lunar landing.”

Cherry Berry’s smile vanished. She took a good look at the design drawing, one hoof tracing the three independent liquid-fuel rockets attached by trusses to the combined capsule and passenger compartment. “What is this?” she asked quietly.

“My next ride!” Dragonfly chirped, even more cheerful than Cherry had been moments before. 

“Think again,” Chrysalis growled. “If it scares Wondermare here, then nobody goes up in it.”

“It scares me, all right,” Cherry said. “Doctor, do you actually propose that the pilot land using Swivel engines as landing gear? Because if I’m reading this right, the passenger compartment doesn’t actually touch the ground.”

“Well, yes,” the elderly minotaur admitted. “My proposed flight plan is, a first landing under power, then a hard burn second launch to gain sufficient altitude for a parachute descent. The engines would be jettisoned after burnout, of course.”

Cherry Berry looked around the table. “Do we even know the impact tolerance for the Swivel engine system?” she asked. 

“Be right back,” Occupant said, sliding out of his chair and trotting out the door. 

“Where’s he going?” Chrysalis asked. 

“Probably to look it up,” Goddard grumbled. “Celestia knows I don’t remember. We know it can survive a splashdown at five and a half meters per second from Mission Five, but I can’t remember any more precise number.”

“Is it stronger than a capsule?” Cherry asked.

“Ha! Of course not!” Goddard made vague twisty-turny motions in the air with his talons. “The Swivel’s full of delicate plumbing and gimbals. They’d shear apart long before you’d put a dent in the tin cans you fly around in!”

“And in shearing apart,” von Brawn rumbled, “they would almost certainly release and ignite unburned fuel, leading to an explosion. Not, I fear, one of your better inspirations, Lord Cowley.”

“But it solves a problem we’re going to have to address soon,” Cowley insisted. “We need some means of practical training for a moon landing somewhere closer than the moon.”

“Not yet, we don’t,” Chrysalis insisted. “Right now we have one successful orbital flight in the bag. One. We still have a lot of work to do in orbit around Equus before we attempt the moon.”

“And this rig is lethally unsafe,” Cherry added. “The pilot would be relying entirely on main engine thrust and reaction wheels at low altitude, in atmosphere, under full gravity conditions. We might- MIGHT- make it work on the Moon. Without fine controls, no way it doesn’t kill somepony here on the ground.”

“Somepony might get killed if somepony is a pony,” Dragonfly insisted. “I’m a changeling. We’re tough! I could put that rocket down on a bit and give you change.”

“NO,” Cherry Berry and Chrysalis said in perfect unison. 

Dragonfly wilted in her chair. “Awww,” she pouted.

After a long glare at the third-tier pilot, Cherry turned her attention to George Cowley. “Doctor, one problem at a time,” she said. “We just want a rocket with only enough delta-V for a low atmospheric flight to the nearest solid, empty flat land. And then we’re going to drop the can and see-“

Everyone at the table stiffened as they heard the faint but unmistakable sound of an explosion through the administration building walls. 

“What was that?” Cherry asked.

“A rupture of the liquid fuel storage tanks?” von Brawn guessed, rising from his chair.

“An accident in Marked Knee’s lab?” George Bull suggested. “He’s been working hard on his new electronic calculating engine.”

“Electronics explode?” Chrysalis asked.

“This is a rocket flight center,” Goddard grumbled, rising to an arthritic hover over the table. “EVERYTHING explodes.”

Before anyone could get out the door to investigate, it opened to let Occupant back in. “The Swivel suffers catastrophic structural failure at seven point two meters per second,” he said. “Six point eight seems to be okay, though.”

A long pregnant silence ensued, followed by the collective sound of eight people inhaling and preparing to deliver a blistering rant. Chrysalis, having been less surprised than the others, beat the others to it by a split-second, asking, “Are you telling me you just dropped a perfectly good engine to see if it would explode?”

“Of course!” Occupant nodded. “Out on the launch pad, of course. Safety first! Lucky Cricket wanted to save effort by just doing it in the VAB, but I wouldn’t let him.”

“And what,” Chrysalis asked, “possessed you to think that was in any way a good idea??”

Occupant shrugged. “No other way of finding out, is there?”

This observation had the effect of silencing the queen, and therefore the entire room.

For about ten seconds.

Then Dragonfly said, “So, seven meters per second? That’s well within our parachute descent speeds! I could handle that-“

“I said NO,” Chrysalis said, and that ended the discussion.



Footnote:

(177) And also Lucky Cricket, but he wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to attend this meeting. He was in the worker quarters telling his fellow changelings about Cape Friendship’s EVA training setup, or as he called it, The Not As Much Fun As the Fun Machine But Still Kind of Neat Machine. 







The freshly erected grandstands stood next to the VAB, empty except for three ponies and one changeling queen. Off in the distance a stubby little rocket sat on the launchpad. Jet Set and Upper Crust looked at it through binoculars, while Hobble Jimenez, poor earth pony from south of the border that he was, settled for holding a hoof over his eyes and squinting.

“The rockets you will fly in,” Chrysalis said, “will be much larger. This one isn’t going anywhere near space today. If all goes well it will fly to the western edge of the Hayseed Swamps, where the Badlands begin, and parachute to the ground for a landing test of the new passenger compartment.”

“Why's tha' big tin can on top of the pointy bit?” Hobble asked. 

“That’s science equipment,” Chrysalis said. “We couldn’t find a paying contract for today’s flight, so we’re going to use it to collect data on the landing zone to compare with readings we’ve taken here at the space center. Since this is a short flight, the extra weight and blunt top shouldn’t affect things too much.”(178)

“Which part is the passenger compartment?” Upper Crust asked.

“The part with the large windows, I think, darling,” Jet Set said. “In fact, those appear to be the same windows they use in Duchess-class personal airships. Perfect for taking pictures through.”

“Precisely our idea,” Chrysalis said. “If you wish, we can have extra film ordered in for your cameras.”

Before the conversation could continue, the piercing wail of Fiddlewing’s warning rang across the space center. The changeling ground crew streaked away from the rocket, soaring over the heads of the four on the grandstands. As the horrible sound ceased and the last hovering changeling fled, Chrysalis said, “Any minute now. Mission Control is going through the final checklist before launch.”

“How long will that take?” Upper Crust asked.

“I just said,” Chrysalis said, having to work extra hard to keep a sneer or a whine out of her voice(179), “any minute now.”

“So, no time for somepony to fetch us some pop-“

Smoke appeared from the bottom of the distant rocket. Slowly it rose off the launchpad, flames flashing from the bottom of the stack, gaining speed with every moment. The unicorns watched with wonder, while Hobble lowered his head and put it under his crossed forelegs. 

“I say,” Jet Set asked, “isn’t it rather 	quiet for a-“

Now it was his turn to be interrupted, as the sound of the rocket motor, having taken ten seconds to cover the two miles between the pad and the grandstands, pounced on the ponies and, for quite some time, drowned out all possible speech. This didn’t stop the Canterlot couple from trying, as they shouted and pointed and gawked at the rocket as it turned in the air, flying directly overhead at a height of about a mile and soaring eastwards out of sight. 

“Well,” Chrysalis said once the slowly fading sound of the rocket dropped low enough for ordinary conversation to be heard, “that’s what a rocket launch looks like. Now let’s go to the astromare quarters and listen to the rest of the flight.” This was a deliberate redirection on the queen’s part; having seen just how chaotic Mission Control could be even under flight protocols, she didn’t want her tourists getting an eyeful of that.

Listening to the communications between Dragonfly and cap-comm Cherry Berry would be bad enough…



Footnotes:

(178) Besides, Dragonfly had been a bit sullen about what promised to be an unexciting flight. Putting a Science Jr. on top of the rocket stack, and thus giving the ship the aerodynamic profile of a brick covered in cane syrup, had cheered her up considerably. Which made Chrysalis nervous.

(179) Long experience helped keep Chrysalis from telling the Canterlot ponies precisely what she thought of them, but it required a constant effort. Sometimes more so than others, as for example when one of the unicorns asked a stupid question… and they tended to all be stupid, in Chrysalis’s estimation.







“Throttle back to forty percent thrust,” Dragonfly said, keeping one hoof firmly on the flight stick as the rocket bucked and shuddered in the heavy air. “Airspeed holding steady at two hundred forty-five meters per second, trajectory holding at two-seventy by sixty-five. Estimated fuel at twenty-five percent.”

Mission 12 flew like a flaming brick, but that suited Dragonfly fine. She liked flying a brick. Keeping a brick pointed where you wanted it to go was a challenge.

“Copy, Twelve,” Cherry Berry’s voice echoed in Dragonfly’s helmet. “Could you angle up a little bit? Your trajectory is looking short.”

“Twelve copies,” Dragonfly said, pulling the stick a little to the left. She hadn’t bothered rolling the ship, so she was more or less lying on her side in the harness straps of her flight couch, The rocket thrust was barely above one gee, not pushing her back in her seat enough to counter natural gravity. 

“The bullpen asks that you not decouple the engine for a while,” Cherry Berry added. “The extra mass and inertia will counter air resistance and keep you going longer.”

“Twelve copies,” Dragonfly said, and then added, “Coming up on engine burnout.” A few seconds later she was yanked forward in her straps as the thrust of the engines was replaced by the push of air that didn’t want to get out of the way. Fortunately it wasn’t as hard a shove as in previous missions. The flight had been kept subsonic for that exact reason.

Now Dragonfly rolled the ship just enough to let her see out the porthole. This was the tricky bit; she had to get to an open space, over the swamps and forest, that she could drop the ship into. And she had to spot it well ahead of time; by the time she decoupled the engines and popped the parachutes, anything underneath would be several miles behind her.

She glanced at her altimeter. “Altitude five kilometers and almost steady,” she reported. “I’m pretty much at the peak of my trajectory.”

“Noted, Twelve,” Cherry Berry said in a very uncertain-sounding tone.

“Horseton,” Dragonfly asked, “is there something wrong?”

“Affirmative, Twelve,” Cherry replied. “We’re not certain you’re going to make it across the Hayseed Swamps. We know you’re not going to come anywhere near the Badlands. The extra drag of the scientific equipment slowed you down a lot more than we’d anticipated.”

“So this flight is going to be an even shorter hop than we planned?”

“Afraid so, Twelve.” Dragonfly could almost taste(180) Cherry Berry’s anxiety. “You should probably be looking for a safe landing zone really, really hard.”

“Pffft. Easy!” Dragonfly said, tweaking the flight stick a little. “I could park this thing between two hay carts!”

“Please don’t,” Cherry Berry groaned.

Dragonfly turned her attention to the ground below. Most of what she saw blurring past was swamp and trees- no good, no good at all. Thankfully she was holding most of her momentum and altitude, but that wouldn’t last long- and in the meantime it was making it really hard to see what she was doing. Even two and half miles below, the ground was moving past very quickly. Too quickly.

“Preparing to decouple engine,” Dragonfly said, pulling the stick a bit to the left again. She couldn’t go full vertical- she’d stop cold if she did that- but she had to angle the ship to keep the engines from slamming into her from behind once they were detached. 

“Horseton copies,” Cherry Berry said.

Dragonfly hit the staging button. “Engines decoupled,” she said, noting that the jolt had slowed her descent just a tad. She nosed the ship back down, reducing her drag as much as she could. 

“We see the engine stage falling away behind you,” Cherry said. “Mission Twelve altitude thirty-eight hundred meters and falling.”

Dragonfly didn’t bother acknowledging. The ground was changing below her. The trees were growing taller and straighter, the foliage changing to a brighter green. She was actually seeing grass between the branches, or at least she presumed it was grass and not mud and brambles by the color. 




And then the trees opened up, and Dragonfly saw clear ground- well, mostly clear- beneath her. She pitched the ship up to look ahead, and saw low rolling hills, mostly open grassland, and the very distant red-and-black lines of the outer ridges of the Badlands.

“I’m above some grasslands now,” Dragonfly said. “Looks good for a landing zone. Deploying parachutes!” Her hoof slapped down on the staging button, and the capsule rocked as three parachute covers released. 

The ship slowed, but not quickly enough for Dragonfly’s taste. Maybe we ought to develop special parachutes, she thought, parachutes made to slow down enough so that the main parachutes can be deployed. I need to talk with Goddard about that, and maybe that old minotaur too. 





The parachutes pulled the capsule up, taking Dragonfly’s view of the ground away and replacing it with blue sky. “Parachutes deployed,” Dragonfly said. “Everything looking good.”

“We agree, Twelve,” Cherry Berry said. “Standing by for full deployment.”

Dragonfly slumped back in her spacesuit. The fun part was over. Now the capsule was, one way or the other, at the mercy of three pieces of fabric, all of which she’d designed herself, all of which she’d supervised the assembly and packing of back in Appleoosa. If they all failed, the rest of the flight, and her life, would be exciting but short, and she’d have nothing she could do about it. If all three worked, or two out of three, or possibly even only one, she’d hit the ground fairly hard but not painfully so- and, again, nothing she did could change that. 

Maybe, she thought, I should get Cherry Berry to give me lessons in flying that loud kite of hers. I never saw the point of it before, since anything it can do a pegasus or changeling can do better, but being able to steer a machine from takeoff to landing would be so much more fun than this…





The parachutes opened fully, and for a couple of seconds Dragonfly’s eyes bulged out as gravity pulled her back into her seat with fourteen times its normal force. The velocity readout on her console plummeted from one hundred fifty meters per second down to a staid, leisurely eight… seven… six point four… five point five meters per second.

Five and a half meters per second.

Twelve miles an hour.

I get bumped in the hallways harder than twelve miles an hour!

“Horseton,” she said, not bothering to disguise her disgust, “all three parachutes show green. Descent speed five point five meters per second. Altitude seven hundred sixty-four meters.”

“Horseton confirms, Twelve,” Cherry Berry said. 

“Five point five isn’t going to give us a valid impact test, Horseton.”

“Data is data, Twelve.”

“Well, we can get better data,” Dragonfly said, holding a hoof over the emergency release switches for the parachutes. “Detaching main parachute.”

“NO!!” Cherry Berry shouted, just as over forty miles away Dragonfly’s hoof came down on the switch.

For about three seconds after that, things became very interesting indeed inside the capsule. (181)







Footnotes:

(180) Only in the metaphorical sense. The changeling ability to sense emotions is very powerful magic, but not powerful enough to reach for miles and miles, except where Princess Cadance and/or the Crystal Heart are concerned. A changeling can close its eyes and point with perfect accuracy in the direction of the Crystal Empire from as much as two hundred miles away.

(181) For those who want to know what constitutes interesting in this context, it is best summed up as, “oh buck, oh buck, I’m going to die.”



Chrysalis’s mane stood on end. Her perforated wings spread in alarm. She leaned forward towards the comm relay speaker, ignoring the customary thud of Hobble Jimenez fainting. Only iron determination not to show weakness in front of the tourists stopped her from shouting at the speakers… and if either Cherry Berry or Dragonfly could have heard her without a microphone, she might have done so anyway. 

Cherry Berry’s voice- normally confident, cheerful, calm- now carried the ragged edge of terror. “Mission Twelve, comms check.” Pause. “Mission Twelve, this is Mission Control Horseton, please respond.”

“Horseton, Twelve,” Dragonfly’s voice replied grudgingly. “Descent speed now five point eight meters per second. I should have cut the lateral parachutes instead.”

A significant pause followed. 

“Twelve, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said, her voice not so much calmed as walking with extreme trepidation around the brink of a deep conversational chasm. “We show your ship’s attitude as stable two, repeat stable two.”

“Twelve confirms, Horseton.” Dragonfly’s annoyed tone didn’t budge an inch.

Cherry Berry’s voice, having run out of options, jumped off the cliff. “Dragonfly, you’re upside down and about to hit the ground nose-first in another five hundred thirty-five meters. You do realize this, right?”

“Relax, Horseton,” Dragonfly said. “My reaction wheels are fully functional. I should be able to swing the ship upright and use the wheels to maintain stable one attitude until landing.”

“Shouldn’t you get on that, then?” The pink pony, in free-fall down the abyss of conversation failure, was making rapid progress from frightened to annoyed.

“In a moment, Horseton,” Dragonfly said. “Doing this will suck down battery power like a heartbroken pony in a salt saloon. If I do it too soon I’ll run out of power, flip over again, and miss the impact test completely.”

“Four hundred fifty meters, Twelve.”

“All right, all right,” Dragonfly said. “Executing attitude correction.”

For several seconds the comm channel remained silent. "What's all that about?" Upper Crust asked.

"Dragonfly cut her main parachute," Chrysalis said. "The two remaining parachutes are mounted on the ship's sides. The ship is a little top-heavy, so without the main parachute it flipped over. Now Dragonfly's using the reaction wheels-"

“Twelve, Horseton,” Cherry Berry’s voice called out, “we show you at stable one and holding.”





“Affirmative, Horseton,” Dragonfly’s voice replied. “Battery drain is pretty steep, as expected, but I think it’ll just last until I hit ground. Three hundred fifty meters, by the way.”

“Horseton confirms,” Cherry said. 

“You know, this is more fun, landing this way,” Dragonfly’s voice said. “I’m actually getting to do something. This is more interesting. More exciting.”

“Exciting is not a word we really want to hear on this end, Twelve,” Cherry Berry said sternly.

“Yeah, I know,” Dragonfly grumbled.

As Chrysalis settled back on her haunches again, Upper Crust asked, “Miss Dragonfly isn’t going to be flying our trip, is she?”

“Of course not,” Chrysalis said. “You’re getting the boring one instead.”

“I like boring,” Upper Crust said quickly. “I really like boring. Boring is fashionable this season, isn’t it, dear?”

“Very true, my dear,” Jet Set said. “Boredom looks good on a pony. Myself,” he said with feeling, “I wouldn’t be caught dead without it.”




Mission Twelve hit the ground butt-first at twelve-and-loose-change miles per hour. The ground being slightly uneven, the ship wobbled and teetered slightly before settling back more or less upright. The lateral-mounted parachutes automatically detached and blew away on the breeze. 

“Mission Twelve landed and stable one,” Dragonfly reported. “SAS system shutdown with twelve percent battery charge remaining. Science Jr. package and goo canisters deployed.” 

“Horseton confirms, Twelve,” Cherry Berry said. “Recovery team will be at your site in about half an hour. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Negative, Horseton,” Dragonfly said. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

“You what?”

“Horseton, your comms discipline is strangely lacking today,” Dragonfly drawled. 

“Did we copy you correctly, you intend to go EVA, is that correct Twelve?”

“Affirmative, Horseton.”

“Twelve, there’s no ladder on the passenger compartment,” Cherry Berry said. “We haven’t figured out yet how to do that without compromising the pressure vessel.”

“I know that, Horseton,” Dragonfly said. “I’m on the design committee, remember? I spend three times as many days at Appleoosa as you do.”

“And how were you planning on getting back into the ship?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Horseton,” Dragonfly said sarcastically. “It’s not like I have wings or anything under this spacesuit- oh wait, I do have wings! How about that? I never noticed before!”

“We’d still rather you stayed put, Twelve.”

“Look, I have one experiment to perform not listed on the mission checklist,” Dragonfly insisted.

“Do tell.” Cherry Berry’s voice could have frozen cider in July.

“You ponies,” Dragonfly said, “when you climb a mountain or sail to a new island or things like that, you plant a flag. It’s a thing you do when you explore or adventure, right?”

“Some of us do that,” Cherry Berry admitted reluctantly. 

“Well, I made a flag,” Dragonfly said. “It's got a folding base and an extendable rod that should keep the flag out even in space. And I want to use it.”

“Fine, Twelve,” Cherry Berry said. “Just be careful not to knock over the ship as you get out, all right? We don’t want to invalidate our impact data after all this.”

“Hey,” Dragonfly said confidently, “it’s me.”






MISSION 12 REPORT

Mission summary: Test flight and landing properties of new passenger compartment; pick up scientific data

Pilot: Dragonfly

Flight duration:  6 min. 2 sec.

Contracts fulfilled: 0
Milestones: First flag planted

Conclusions from flight: Dragonfly needs a refresher course in caution.

MISSION ASSESSMENT: MEH


Jet Set poked his head through the opened hatchway of the prototype passenger pod. “You must be joking,” he said bluntly. “You can’t be intending to send us to space in this!”

Chrysalis poked her head through the hatch above Jet Set’s. “What’s wrong with it?” she asked. “Everything looks undamaged. The cabinets didn’t even open up.”

“The interior design is all wrong!” Jet Set insisted. He pointed to the padded drawers and cabinets that lined every surface except the deck and windows. “None of these are labeled! We need to be able to find things quickly- or to keep away from things we’re not meant to open! Labels. On. Everything. This is a basic passenger safety feature! It shouldn’t be difficult!”

“Er… this is a prototype?” Chrysalis said uncertainly. 

“And the seats!” Jet Set snapped, jabbing a hoof at the two comfortable, padded swivel chairs bolted to the deck. “You got these out of my company’s warehouses, I’m certain of it! These are the Executive Cushies we use for our personal airship line!”

“We bought them open and above board!” Chrysalis insisted. “We thought you’d want to be comfortable-“

“They don’t lock into place!” Jet Set said. “The fastest airships don’t get above forty knots! The instant your rocket moves or turns or does anything the passengers are going to spin like tops!” To demonstrate his point the unicorn swiped a seat with his hoof, sending it spinning like a gramophone turntable with an overwound spring. “We need secure seats, with straps, or else we’re going to be lining the walls of this can!”

“Look!” Chrysalis shouted, her patience for being ranted at exhausted. “This is the first time we’ve had more than one pony up in a ship! Do you think you can do better?”

“I know I can do better!” Jet Set said. “Let me talk to your designers- I know they began with my engineers’ designs, I can see the similarities. There are half a dozen other improvements we can make, and I can give orders to my Canterlot shipyards to have the improved cabins delivered within the week!”

And, exactly seven days later, two improved passenger cabins were indeed offloaded from barges at the Muck Lake quays. In the meantime, the crews trained. Hobble Jimenez learned the true terror of the centrifuge, while both Jet Set and Upper Crust enjoyed the experience. The tables were reversed in the Fun Machine, where a relaxed Hobble pointed out to the two disconcerted unicorns that free fall wasn’t what killed you: “It’s the stop at th’ end ‘at does it.” The tourists observed, and even participated a little in, the flight simulations. 

And then came the day before launch…

“Okay, here’s the bad news,” Occupant said, using his magic to pass around copies of the mission plans for every pony at the final briefing- himself, Chrysalis, Cherry Berry, Dragonfly, von Brawn, Goddard, and by courtesy the three tourists. “Aside from our passengers and the outstanding decoupler test, I wasn’t able to find any additional contracts for either mission. Nothing’s available except those survey missions that just won’t go away.” 

“Who keeps offering those?” Cherry Berry groaned. “I could do them in my biplane! What nutty pony would think you need a rocket for those?”

“I keep ignoring them, but they won’t go away,” Occupant said.

“Then start sending them away,” Chrysalis said. “Contact them personally and tell them the answer is no. No more in-flight surveys of Equus. Now or ever. Period.”

Occupant slumped. “That’ll make some ponies mad,” he said. “It might make it harder to get any contract at all.”

“A survey contract doesn’t count as a contract!” Chrysalis said. “Put out the word that we’re going to be a lot more choosy in contracts from now on. We’re only taking on jobs that get us closer to our goal of a moon landing. That tone of exclusivity will make us more attractive for the jobs we actually want.”

“You know,” Jet Set said wholly uninvited, “that’s a good point. The concept that one’s services are only available to the right ponies tends to drive up demand rather than drive it down, in my experience.”

Chrysalis took a deep breath(182) and asked, “What’s the good news, then?”

Occupant brought in a pair of very large cameras with a chest-harness. “The griffons have developed a camera they think will work in a total vacuum,” he said. “It was surprisingly easy to buy a couple of them along with the film they need.”

Goddard chuckled. “You don’t know my people well,” he said. “If you did, you wouldn’t be surprised at anything they’d agree to sell.”

Occupant shrugged. “Anyway, I figure we can sell the pictures to the newspapers and magazines, maybe make a calendar or art book or something for ourselves.” He held up one of the mission plan sheets, which had a crude drawing of Equus with two rings around it at right angles to one another. “Mission Thirteen goes into an elliptical orbit with a high apoapsis, takes photos of all of Equus, and completes the decoupler test. Mission Fourteen goes into a polar orbit, which will let it take pictures of various parts of the planet more closely. Mr. Jimenez goes on Mission Thirteen, since he only needs to go up and down; Mr. Set and Mrs. Crust go on Mission Fourteen, where they can see all the same places and take their own photos.”

“Wait a moment,” Upper Crust said. “We don’t have cameras like that.”

“You won’t need them,” Occupant said. “My queen and Miss Berry will use these cameras while spacewalking.”

“Spacewalking?” Jet Set asked.

“They’ll spend some time outside the ship,” Occupant said. “Taking pictures and recording observations of what they see.”

“Ou’side th’ ship?” Hobble gasped. “Jou mean, as in, not steering it?”

“I beg your pardon!” Jet Set shouted. 

The hubbub rapidly became a roar as seven different people talked and shouted over one another until, with a thunderous slam of palm onto table, Warner von Brawn restored silence. “My friends,” he said, “once you’re in orbit there is no steering, no flying, no action required. You will continue going the direction you’re going until you do something to change that. It’s not like pulling a cart or flying an airship. An unpiloted spaceship in a stable orbit simply cannot crash. Can NOT, ladies and gentlemen.”

The calm but firm voice of the minotaur scientist calmed the room somewhat. 

“And to make sure that ‘do something’ doesn’t happen by accident,” Goddard continued, “we’re going to lock the hatch between the passenger compartment and the command capsule. The passengers will not be able to access any, repeat ANY, flight controls during the mission. That should sharply reduce the chance of an unfortunate accident.”

“Besides,” Cherry Berry said, “you’re going to have the comfy seats. We pilots basically lie down on a big metal bench. You get upholstery.”

“One more thing,” Occupant said. “Because of the unusual orbits, there’s no way we can expect to land either mission anywhere close to the space center. That means, when we land, we’ll have to make arrangements for travel back to your homes. That could be from halfway around the world, which is why we’ll be sending out five recovery teams to speed up the process.

“That means we need you to pack all your belongings except for one spare set of clothing each, so we can ship it back to your homes.” Occupant waved a mission plan again. “We can’t afford the weight or space on the ship to pack any more personal items than that and your cameras, wallets, and jewelry.”

Hobble shrugged. “I come here wi' nothin’,” he said. “I can go back wi’ nothin’. So long as I go back.”

“Of course we will check said luggage for hitchhikers before launch,” Chrysalis said, giving a pointed glance at the scrawny earth pony.

“Jou can’ blame a pony for trying,” Hobble shrugged again.



Footnote:

(182) Not that she needed the air, but to prevent her from giving the preemptory order for the unicorn to be silent. She counted the hours until the flight was over and she would never have to lay eyes on these Tartarus-damned ponies ever again.




The Vehicle Assembly Building had never been so busy before. The rocket design for Mission Thirteen had been a tweak from Mission Eleven- adding a third Thumper solid fuel booster and a bit more fuel in the second stage for the extra delta-V required for a higher orbit. This made it the largest, heaviest, most complex rocket the Changeling Space Program had ever assembled yet.

And, since Mission Fourteen’s rocket was identical and would be launched as soon as Mission Thirteen achieved orbit, two rockets were being assembled at once.

Four ponies and one changeling in spacesuits, helmet visors open, stood and watched as dozens of changelings and ponies wrangled rocket parts using a combination of magic, winches, and jigs. Fuel lines were connected and sealed. Tanks were carefully welded together. Decouplers were carefully leveled and bolted into place. Giant solid rocket boosters, one after another, were carted in one at a time and carefully connected. 

And then two capsules, already attached to the passenger cabin expansions, were levitated onto the assembly building floor, set down in front of the astromares, their passengers, and their ground crew. “Mission Thirteen is on the right,” Lucky Cricket, supervising the assembly team, pointed to the capsule as two other changelings rolled a ladder up to its hatch. “Mr. Jimenez first, followed by Her Majesty Queen Pilot Chrysalis.” He pointed to the other and said, “Mission Fourteen is the other one. Mrs. Crust first, then Mr. Set, and finally Chief Pilot Cherry Berry.”

“Couldn’t we wait until the whole rocket is assembled?” Jet Set asked. “Why not have a boarding gantry on the launch pad, where we could board just before launch?”

Before either Chrysalis or Cherry Berry could provide a safe answer, Lucky Cricket chimed in, “Because we’d have to build a new one every time, and that gets expensive. The blast from a rocket launch is very destructive, and on some launches spent boosters fall on the space center grounds instead of in the ocean. That’s why the launchpad is two miles away from the rest of the space center. This is safer for everypony.”

There was a soft double clunk as Chrysalis’s and Cherry Berry’s jaws hit the bottom of their helmets in unison. 

“I see,” Jet Set said, unruffled. “Put that way, it makes perfect sense, so long as the rocket doesn’t fall on its way to the pad.”

“No danger of that,” Lucky Cricket said firmly. “We’ll be using three teams of fifty changelings(183) each in shifts to carry the assembled rocket to the pad. Forty could do it, but changing teams allows us to rest and recover. With that redundancy you’re safer than in your own airships, trust me.”

Jet Set smiled and nodded, fully satisfied, as did his wife. Even Hobble looked a little bit calmed… or, at least, his trembling grew a little less obvious. “So,” he says at last, “the one onna righ’, tha’s mine, jes?”

“That’s right.”

“Good. Please fe’ch me some paint anna small brush.” 

Lucky Cricket looked at Chrysalis, who shrugged and nodded. One of the ground crew brought out a can of red paint and the kind of brush used for detail work.

“'At’ll do nice,” Hobble said, putting the brush into the paint and carrying both to the top of the boarding ladder. There, on the front of the hatch, brush in his teeth, he carefully painted a series of bizarre, vaguely square designs, each looking like some jungle animal in horrible torment.

“What is that?” Jet Set asked, disgusted. 

“Eees th’ language of my peoples,” Hobble said around the paintbrush. 

“What does it say, then?”

“Eet say thees,” Hobble grunted, adding in much smaller Equestrian letters below the blocks of Mexicolt symbols: Do not be afraid. The beings inside are ponies and will not hurt you.

“There,” Hobble said, putting the brush back in the paint and carrying both back down the ladder. “I feel a bit better now.”

“Then are you ready to actually get in the thing?” Chrysalis asked.

“Do I have to?” Hobble whined.

In response Chrysalis used her magic to open the hatch, pick up Hobble, and stuff him inside.

“Jou coulda jus’ said yes,” Hobble’s voice echoed from inside the capsule.

“Make sure he gets to his proper chair and gets strapped in,” Chrysalis ordered, nodding two of the ground crew changelings up the boarding ladder. After a moment she looked at Lucky Cricket and added, “And paint the Equestrian part of that on the other ship. In fact, paint it on all our capsules from now on.”

“Yes, my queen!” Lucky Cricket said, picking up the paint can and brush and fluttering over to the Mission Fourteen capsule.

This taken care of, Chrysalis followed the ground crew up the boarding ladder. 



Footnote:

(183) There were some unicorns in each team as well, borrowed from the construction crews at double pay for the day. They could levitate things even better than changelings, and since all construction halted on launch days it was only efficient to make use of them. 




Two weeks before, the grandstands had been empty except for Chrysalis and the three space tourists. On this bright morning an observer might well have thought those four the only ponies in Equestria not in the stands, talking, laughing, gaping at anything and everything. Ships and barges filled Muck Lake, as lighters ferried passengers to the quay. Pegasi and griffons circled the buildings looking for a place to perch, while every wagon and carriage in Horseton ferried well-to-do ponies from the balloons and airships landing in a hastily cleared rice field. 

Vendors walked or hovered up and down the stands, Horseton hillbilly ponies hawking hot snack food on an unusually brisk late autumn morning for the Hayseed Swamps while changelings under Heavy Frosting’s supervision sold so-called “space food”(184)

Of the now seven companies broadcasting on the newfangled television sets, four had cameras live on the scene. Flim and Flam's barge sat offshore in the bay outside Muck Lake's mouth, while three other stations had erected temporary transmission towers behind Mission Control. A special press box had been erected on the roof of the VAB to allow cameraponies and presenters a direct and almost private look at the launchpad.

The world had come to watch the first paying customers(185) launched into space.





"And it looks like they've set the rocket down on the pad," Gerry Goodmane, the elegantly-coiffed star of the "Voice of Equestria" network, told his viewers. "Mission Thirteen is set to fly higher than any previous space mission, fifty thousand kilometers above the world's surface. The pilot, Chrysalis queen of the changelings, will then leave the craft for a spacewalk, while the passenger, Mr. Hobble Jimenez of the tribes of Nickeragua, will remain secure in the capsule."

Goodmane looked beside him at the elderly pony standing beside him. "Dr. Inexplorata, will Mr. Jimenez take the controls while Queen Chrysalis is outside the craft?"

"I rather doubt it," Ad Inexplorata said. "First because it is doubtful Mr. Jimenez has been trained enough to qualify as a pilot, and second because it won't be necessary. Once in orbit a ship will continue on its course unless something changes. So Mr. Jimenez won't be needed to keep the ship steady, but if he hit the wrong button, that might change."

"So," Goodmane said, "no time behind the stick for Hobble Jimenez?"

"Unlikely," Inexplorata said.

"What about during re-entry?" Goodmane said. "Would Jimenez take the stick then?"

"Certainly not," Inexplorata said. "It is barely possible that in three weeks' time Mr. Jimenez could be trusted to toy around a little bit while safely in orbit, but I doubt it. But re-entry is the most dangerous part of the mission. The ship must remain behind the heat shield at all times, and with an elongated craft like Mission Thirteen that requires precision flying. There is no way Queen Chrysalis would trust anyone but herself with that task."

"Of course, the one pony she might trust to do such a thing, CSP chief pilot Cherry Berry, is currently in the Mission Fourteen rocket in the building underneath our hooves," Goodmane said. "Remind our viewers of her mission, please, Doctor."

"Well, as I understand it," Inexplorata said grumpily(186), "Mission Fourteen will attempt a circumpolar orbit, a feat never before accomplished and only attempted by the Crystal Empire and Yakyakistan space programs due to their high latitude."

"The Crystal Empire's space program, of course, having just been merged with the Equestrian Space Agency," Goodmane interrupted.

"Well, yes," Inexplorata grunted, barely holding his temper. "If successful Mission Fourteen will offer passengers Jet Set and Upper Crust unprecedented views of the entire planet. The danger, however, is that the ship won't have enough velocity to achieve a polar orbit."

"And why is that?" Goodmane asked.

"As everyone who read Princess Twilight Sparkle's thesis knows," Inexplorata said, "although Equus's rotation requires Princess Celestia to keep it from coming to a halt, it does rotate at several hundred miles per hour. That means anything lifting off its surface is also going more or less eastward at considerable speed. All the successful orbital missions until now have launched due east to take advantage of this, because it saves fuel.

"But a circumpolar orbit goes directly north and south, which means the ship must not only burn enough fuel to achieve orbit without that initial boost, it must burn even more fuel to cancel out its eastern momentum. So a ship orbiting the poles uses a lot more fuel than a ship orbiting the equator."

"Do you think the rockets being used today will have enough fuel for these missions, Doctor?"

"Well, I-"

The changelings and unicorns who had carried the massive Mission Thirteen rocket to the pad two miles distant scattered. A moment later the sound of Fiddlewing's piercing wing-rubbing reached the press on top of the VAB, interrupting and drowning out Dr. Inexplorata's response.(187)

As soon as the horrible shriek ended, Goodmane said, "I'm sorry, Dr. Inexplorata, but that's the signal for launch. We'll listen to the mission control's final checklist while we wait for the launch."

The camerapony for Voice of Equestria shifted its view to the launchpad, and the pony controlling the sound equipment nodded to Goodmane and Inexplorata. "All right, we can talk for a little bit," Goodmane said quietly. 

"I thought we were going to listen to the mission control," Inexplorata complained.

"We couldn’t get a speaker up here, only a set of earphones," Goodmane shrugged. "But we have another camerapony and microphone in the press gallery at Mission Control, and Wiggle T. Plug there," he gestured to the pony at a bank of controls that looked like a cross between a sound board and a gemologist’s worktable, "is patching the sound into the broadcast over our view of the rocket."

"Oh." Inexplorata turned around to face the rocket. "So, how long does it take them to go through the checklist?"

Goodmane paused in tying a hairnet over his carefully brushed hair. "Not very long at all," he said. "You should probably brace yourself. The first time I was here I could hear the boom inside the Mission Control building."

A few seconds later, Dr. Inexplorata found out exactly what Goodmane meant.





Once the initial blast of wind had subsided and the ear-shattering noise of the launch had abated enough for any other sound to be heard, Dr. Inexplorata looked at Goodmane. The hairnet hadn’t helped at all. In fact, half of it had been pulled off, and the other half had bits of hair sprouting through the mesh like patches of grass a lawnmower had missed. 

Goodmane immediately noticed the expression on Inexplorata’s face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is it the mane? Someone give me a mirror, quick!” Without waiting for anyone else to do it, he plunged into the makeup kit kept discreetly below the view of the camera and hauled out a large hoof-mirror. One look at his reflection raised his voice two and a half octaves. “YE GADS!” he squeaked. “Brushies, brushies, quick quick quick!”

“Gerry,” the camera-pony said, “I won’t be able to keep the rocket in focus much longer. We need some face time.”

“We’ll go to the mission control camera!” Gerry grumbled, scrambling for various mane-care implements.

“No can do,” Wiggle T. Plug said. “We need a live shot of the next rocket coming out of the building.” As soon as he said the words, the roof of the VAB began to shake. “We need face time in thirty seconds, Gerry.”

“Okay! Okay! Okay.” Gerry took a couple of quick but deep breaths, letting his voice drop back down to its normal mellifluous tones. “Go to the Mission Control camera for a few seconds, focus the camera on the doc here, then bring picture and sound back here. Camera is either on the doctor or a rocket until I say otherwise. Got it?” As he gave orders, both hooves worked feverishly to gradually restore his manestyle.

“Yessir,” the camera-pony nodded, rolling his eyes at the pony working the broadcast controls. “Need to cut away pretty much now, guys.”

“Internal view of Mission Control in three, two…” A switch went click. “Refocus on Dr. Inexplorata… stand by, mikes will go live when I wave my hoof…” There was a tense few seconds as the rumbling of the VAB vehicle doors ceased and Wiggle’s hoof held in the air, while he listened to something on his headset(188).  Then the hoof came down and, simultaneously, another switch went click. 

Goodmane, still working his hair over with both hooves and four different implements, spoke instantly, as smoothly as if he were casually sipping a cup of tea. “Well, Dr. Inexplorata, that was certainly an impressive sight, wasn’t it?”

“It certainly was, Gerry,” Inexplorata said automatically. His stunned look was taken by thousands of television viewers as a result of the rocket launch. In reality his eyes were boggling behind his glasses at the sight the viewers would never see: an earth pony, without the benefit of any magic, juggling a mirror, two brushes, a comb, a pair of scissors, a jar of hair gel and a can of aerosol hair spray, putting all of them to good effect and still not being satisfied with the results. 

Wiggle and the camera pony didn’t bat an eye. They’d seen this before. They were professionals. They were veterans. They’d been working for VoE two entire months. That was a century in television-years.

And as the crew of Voice of Equestria shuffled video and audio and babbled meaningless drivel to cover their biggest star’s bad hair day, fifty changelings and unicorns began carefully, cautiously carrying the Mission Fourteen rocket out of the VAB on its slow, careful two-mile trip to the launchpad.



Footnotes:

(184) Which bore no resemblance whatever to the food actually being sent up into space. The rations in the capsule, despite Heavy Frosting’s best efforts, remained either paste in tubes or rehydrated slop that could be eaten through a straw. To make matters worse, something about zero-gravity reduced pony sensitivity to flavors, so even halfway-decent paste/slop on the ground became either bland or outright disgusting in space. After much discussion it had been decided to just tell the passengers up front that the meals were still in development and that they should probably have a filling breakfast before launch.

(185) Had they known Hobble Jimenez would do almost anything to avoid being launched into space, things might have been different. For one thing, there would have been some lively bidding by the wealthier ponies present to buy his flight seat from him.

(186) Dr. Ad Inexplorata was a professor at Celestia University, Manehattan, and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. He'd never so much as exchanged a single word with anyone at the Horseton Space Center before Voice of Equestria had hired him to be Goodmane's on-camera expert interviewee during the launch. His knowledge of CSP mission goals and intentions began and ended with a single-page flyer handed out by one of Occupant's assistants to all press members at dawn that morning. Goodmane had seen the same sheet and knew everything Inexplorata did on that subject, and Inexplorata wished he'd shut up about it and ask more interesting questions about space. He, quite literally, wasn't getting paid enough for this.

(187) Which was fortunate for him, because he hadn't a clue. A professor from Celestia University, Manehattan, couldn't just say, "Well, that big sucker looks big enough to me." That would be unscientific.

(188) Goodmane could have had a set of earphones too, but he’d refused to have anything that might damage his hairdo in the least way. 








"Boosters and first stage away," Chrysalis said, allowing herself a little sigh of relief as she said it. "And the flight is much smoother already. Why do the boosters keep putting me in a roll?" She didn't notice the pout in her voice as she added, "Solid rockets always behave for the pony."

“Stage separation and second stage ignition confirmed,” Dragonfly said over the comms. “It looked like you were having a little fun there for a minute, Thirteen.”

“Horseton, I could lecture you for a week on the joys of boredom,” Chrysalis grunted, easing the rocket’s nose further down as the acceleration really started to kick in. “In fact I seem to recall I did lecture you for a week on boredom.”

“How’s the passenger?” Dragonfly asked. “I bet he isn’t bored, is he?”

Chrysalis paused for a moment, forcing herself to listen to the noises she’d been ignoring practically since liftoff. “Do you remember, Horseton,” she said as she tuned the noises back out again, “whose idea it was to put a container of hard cider in the passenger compartment to keep the passenger calm?”

“I believe,” Dragonfly drawled, “that was a Royal Command, Thirteen. By your direct order.”

“I was afraid of that,” Chrysalis groaned. “Well, it was a bad idea. The passenger, by the sound of things, is on his third-” Her ears twitched as a new sound came through her helmet, followed by resumption of more than the same. “Correction, fourth air sickness bag. I thought we only packed two of the things, anyway.”

“Thirteen,” Dragonfly said, “the bullpen wants confirmation. Did you say the passenger is somehow managing to vomit while under two point four gees of acceleration?”

“Affirmative, Horseton,” Chrysalis said. “And when he’s not puking he’s whimpering.”

There was a prolonged pause. “Thirteen,” Dragonfly said slowly, “we just thought you’d like to know that we can hear the press corps laughing through the glass of the VIP gallery. And I can see Princess Twilight Sparkle holding her head in her wings.”

“Heh,” Chrysalis chuckled. “She’s probably jealous we beat her to another milestone. First barf in space.”(189)

“That might just be possible, Thirteen,” Dragonfly said slowly. “Your apoapsis has broken out of atmosphere, so we’d like you to shift your burn down to ninety by ninety and then terminate ascent burn, please.”

“Copy attitude ninety by ninety and then MECO, Horseton,” Chrysalis said, throttling back the rocket, using a little thrust to put the nose more or less on the horizon, and then cutting thrust completely. In a few seconds the rocket’s interior went from two and a half times normal gravity to zero. “MECO,” she reported. “Attitude holding steady on target.”

“Horseton confirms, Thirteen,” Dragonfly said. “Stand by for orbital insertion burn in approximately two minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Standing by, Horseton,” Chrysalis said. She paused as she noticed that, in addition to the roar of the engines being gone, so was the sound of equine regurgitation(190). “Mr. Jimenez?” she asked. “Is everything all right back there?” For several seconds there was no response. “Mr. Jimenez, could you say something?”

“Somet’ing,” a most miserable voice said in jagged rusty-razor tones of bitterness. 

“Are you feeling better now?” Chrysalis asked. “Everything A-OK?”

“No,” Hobble Jimenez groaned, “everyt’eeng’s still B-A-D. An’ it’s ‘bout to get W-O-R-S.”

“Really? How?” Chrysalis asked. “We did show you the bathroom facilities, right?”

“Ees like dis,” Hobble said, “my stomach wants to throw up some more… but it can’ figure out which way up is!”

Chrysalis sighed. “There’s a pouch with seltzer tablets inside the small compartment on the table,” she said. “You can use the cold-water tap to fill it after I finish the orbital burn.”

“‘At’s okay,” Hobble said. “It can wait. I don’ think my tummy wants any more visitors jus’ now.”

“Anyway, stay in your seat for now,” Chrysalis said. “I’m going to turn the engines back on again in a bit.” Or don’t, she didn’t say out loud. Don’t and see if I care. 

… all right, I care. I care that CSP will get a bad reputation for carelessness, and I care that your native friends might get annoyed and decide to attack the space center, but I don’t care about you in particular.

No, even that’s a lie. I really care about the minute I can hand you back to that chief of yours and I won’t ever have to listen to your whiny voice ever again. That I care about a lot. 

I wonder if the chief will mind how many pieces-

“Thirteen, Horseton.”

“Go ahead, Horseton,” Chrysalis said automatically, her grumpy fantasies instantly forgotten.

“Thirty seconds until burn. This will take all remaining fuel in second stage and a tiny fraction of third stage, we estimate. We ask full burn until second stage is empty, then twenty percent burn on third stage until mark.”

“Thirteen copies full burn to burnout second stage, twenty percent burn on third stage until mark,” Chrysalis replied. 

“Ten seconds to burn,” Dragonfly said.

“Brace yourself, Mr. Jimenez,” Chrysalis called back, “there’s going to be a little bump.”

“Four. Three. Two. One.”





Chrysalis re-ignited the second stage at full throttle, and gravity returned to the interior of the rocket with a vengeance. Almost a second later she heard a truly heroic retching sound, followed by the splat of something hitting the passenger compartment hatch. Impressive, she thought. I wonder if we could use Mr. Jimenez’s gut as a launch engine?

The stage burned through its remaining fuel as the velocity readout on Chrysalis’s console ticked ever higher. The retching, after that one last effort, had thankfully ceased, and for about a minute the ship rushed forwards in near-silence. Then the fuel and oxidizer tanks went dry, the engine burned out, and the ship was in free-fall again. 





The thump of the decoupler releasing the second stage echoed through the ship, loud in comparison to the otherwise silent ship. “What was that?” Hobble gasped in terror.

“Hold on, Mr. Jimenez,” Chrysalis said, “one more bump!” She activated the third stage, waiting a moment to be sure the motor had ignited properly before throttling it back to one-fifth power. The second stage would re-enter the outer atmosphere and, over the course of about twenty or so orbits, slow down until it eventually broke up and burned up into nothing… or so Chrysalis understood it, for what little she cared, as long as the bits weren’t landing in her mane. Her attention was on her earphones, waiting for the word to shut down engines. 

Finally Dragonfly’s voice came through, saying, “Five seconds, three, two- cutoff!”

Chrysalis’s suited hoof slapped the shutdown switch, and the ship was once more in free-fall. “MECO,” she said again. 

“MECO confirmed, Thirteen,” Dragonfly agreed. “We show you in an almost perfect circular orbit, inclination zero point two percent off the equator. Good flying, my queen.”

Chrysalis snorted. “No kissing up while on the clock, Horseton,” she said. 

“Understood, Thirteen,” Dragonfly said, obviously unchastened. “I have to focus on Mission Fourteen launch now, so please turn your microphone off except for emergency.”

“Copy that, Horseton,” Chrysalis said, “Mission Thirteen running silent and awaiting word of a successful launch for Mission Fourteen.” With that she hit the newly installed switch that disabled the outgoing sound on the telepresence spell that allowed Mission Control to see and hear the mission in flight. 

“You can relax now, Mr. Jimenez,” Chrysalis said. “The exciting part’s over for now.”

“I’m no’ gonna relax until I can feel the leaves under my hooves,” Hobble said firmly.

“What’s the matter?” Chrysalis asked, both exasperated and slightly amused. “We got you up safely. Don’t you have faith we’ll get you back down to earth too?”

“Oh, I have faith jou’ll gets me down to earth,” Hobble said. “Jus’ how deep into the earth, that I don’ have faith in.”



Footnotes:

(189) As dubious as such a first would be, Mission Thirteen wasn’t it. Gordon the Griffon, on his first suborbital space flight, had lost his lunch moments after entering free-fall. The griffons, lamentably, had not packed any air sickness bags for his flight, with the result that Rarity had been able to sell the griffons a brand-new spacesuit and helmet to replace the one Gordon had, well, soiled beyond reclamation. Since Gordon was the griffons’ only pilot, this had delayed the space program by weeks… and convincing Gordon to get back into the capsule took even longer. Thus far, however, the griffons (and Rarity) had kept the incident absolutely secret.

(190) Pedants from other worlds will insist that equines have a digestive tract that absolutely prevents any possibility of expelling the contents of the stomach via the mouth. Whatever might or might not be true about the equines or any other ungulate mammals on their own planet, the ponies of Equus can pay tribute to the porcelain god with the best of them. 








“Good heavens! What was that?” 

Mission Fourteen’s rocket had just given the passenger compartment a loud kick in the rear, practically the instant the overwhelming roar of the three solid fuel boosters and the single liquid-fueled steering engine had burned out. In the moment of relative quiet the explosive decoupling had startled Upper Crust, who sat in the rear seat and could only see the back of her husband’s chair. 

A second thump, this one more sustained, shoved the two passengers firmly in the back as the second stage engines kicked in. The engine roar was much quieter than the deafening blast of liftoff, low enough for Jet Set to reply without shouting very much, “Just staging, my dear. I don’t really think they made it clear how rough the ride was going to be.”

“Indeed not.” Upper Crust strained against double her natural weight and turned her microphone on. “Miss Berry,” she said, “perchance could you watch the bumps a bit, dear?”

“My sweet, perhaps now’s not a good time to bother the pilot, hm?” Jet Set shouted as gently as possible.

“Fourteen copies three-thirty by forty, stand by Horseton,” Cherry Berry’s voice replied. “Sorry, Mrs. Crust, but-”

“I keep telling you,” Upper Crust interrupted, “Mrs. Crust is my mother. Ms. Crust, please.”

“I’m sorry, but a rough ride is what a space flight is all about,” Cherry Berry continued. “It’s kind of more important that I keep the pointy end aimed at the sky right now and make sure nothing breaks.”

“But surely, dear, you could-”

“Stand by, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said, and then, “I’m sorry, but I really am quite busy right now and I need to be able to listen to what Mission Control is telling me. There’ll be lots of time to talk once this ship’s in orbit. Please be patient.” 

“Quite so,” Jet Set agreed, having turned his own microphone on. “Do turn your microphone off, dearest, it’ll be all right.”

With an annoyed snort Upper Crust did so, and Jet Set followed suit a moment later. “As much as we paid for this flight,” she said, “a moment of courteous attention seems the least she could do.” She gestured to the interior of the passenger cabin, adding, “Especially the extra money you spent in building this.”

The interior of the passenger compartment was now indistinguishable from the interior of a businesspony’s exclusive airship cabin, right down to the floor and the ceiling lights. Cushioned overhead compartments ran along either side of the walkway, and larger compartments ran along one side of the compartment opposite the two passenger seats. Only the seats themselves had been changed, with a much stronger deck mounting that could be locked into place or allowed to swivel up to one hundred eighty degrees with the simple pull or push of a lever. Of course they were locked in place now, during ascent, as the rocket picked up more and more acceleration, and thus more and more inertial forces shoved the passengers backwards, with every pound of fuel burned and blasted out the rocket bell.

The redesign had even included discreet pouches to insert labels into for each and every compartment, just as Jet Set had demanded. Unfortunately the changeling ground crew had been left to label them themselves, and most of the overhead bins had labels like: Things. Stuff. Items. Objects. Important Things. Not So Important Things. Refuse. Rubbish. Trash. And, the one that both amused and annoyed Jet Set the most, Objects d’Art.(191)

Fortunately there were a few usefully labeled compartments. The table between the two seats had several small compartments with labels like AIR SICK, FIRST AID, NAPKINS, HOT WATER, COLD WATER (these concealed two spigots connected by magic to water supplies on the ground- a duplicate of the system that supplied air to every space capsule Equus had launched to date) and UTENSILS(192). The largest compartment, the one next to the hatch leading into the command capsule, was labeled SNACKS, and presumably it held the flight rations for the voyage. 

But labels aside, Jet Set was proud of the elegant yet utilitarian design, tasteful white and steel trim from bow to stern, with four rounded windows(193), two to a side, to allow passengers a view of the world outside and, mostly, below. The initial cabin design was his company’s, the hull modifications designed by Warner von Brawn and Goddard the Griffon notwithstanding. He thought it only right and proper that all future production of the component return to the shipyard whence it came.

But further development… 

“About that dear,” Jet Set replied to his wife’s complaint, “I expect to make back every penny of it one way or another. We shan’t be the last tourists in space, for one thing.” He gathered his breath- the weight on his body, and the fact that he was on his back at all, made it difficult to breath properly- and added, “And for another, I’ve got some ideas that the research lab at that space facility would be perfectly suited to test.”

“What kind of ideas, darling?” Upper Crust asked. 

“You know our pilot has her own aeroplane?” Jet Set asked. “We built the controls for it- royal commission, a favor called in I understand. There are maybe a dozen other aeroplanes here and there across Equestria. They’re a novelty for ponies who want to fly like pegasi, but with more development the commercial potential is-”





“Oh look, dearest!” Upper Crust said, stretching a trembling hoof out the window. “It’s the moon! Do you remember the last time we saw the moon during the daytime?”

“Yes, dear,” Jet Set sighed, letting his thoughts on jet or rocket propelled aeroplanes fall aside. “As I recall, giant vines tried to devour most of central Equestria.”

“But this time it’s just that we’re higher than the moonset!” Upper Crust said. “Do you remember the lesson on the solar system Dr. Bull gave us? Princess Luna only gives the moon enough of a boost twice a day to move it past the horizon. But now we can see over the horizon, and there it is!”

Jet Set looked for himself. He had to admit it was a very impressive sight, both beautiful and viscerally disturbing. The moon and the sun just weren’t supposed to be visible at the same time. It went against every law of nature he’d grown up believing in. And yet… not only could he see the moon, but the sky above them was darkening almost to black, and he almost fancied he could make out a planet shining somewhere off there…

“Miss Berry?” Upper Crust had turned her microphone on again. “We can see the moon outside, just above the horizon! Can you see it? Lovely, isn’t it?”

When Cherry Berry responded, even Jet Set, who acted deliberately obtuse to plebian modes of politeness because a Society pony of Canterlot needed to keep up appearances, could hear the pink pilot’s teeth practically grinding. “I’m afraid my windows aren’t turned to the western horizon just now,” she said. “And I really don’t have time to look out them at the moment. The view is even better once we get out of the atmosphere. Please be patient and hold on to your observations until I can better appreciate them.”

Without turning his own mike back on, Jet Set said, “Microphone, dear. Politely.”

Upper Crust managed a half-hearted, “Very well, do carry on,” before switching off her mike again. 



Footnote:

(191) He’d peeked into it before he was strapped into his seat. It was empty.

(192) Plastic spoons for eating rehydrated meals out of pouches- a new experiment for Missions Thirteen and Fourteen. Nothing on the ship required a fork to eat. The only knife on the ship was in the tool box tucked beneath Cherry Berry’s crash bench, and she had no intention of letting the tourists know it existed unless unavoidable. 

(193) Round portholes had been the tradition in sailing ships for about a century and for airships since the beginning, at least along the lateral line of ships. In sailing ships this adaptation had been to strengthen the hull against flexing between waves. The adoption on airships was initially because the first airships were basically boats with a magically inflated balloon on top, but as the technology progressed it had been discovered that the same stresses on oceangoing ship hulls existed on hulls slicing through stiff winds or storms. Jet Set had had a long discussion with George Cowley about the tiny, trapezoidal windows of the Cherry’s Rocket Parts capsules, which yet remained to be settled.








“Passengers, please brace for acceleration in five… four… three… two… one!”

Cherry Berry ignited the second stage engine for the beginning of the orbital insertion burn. Three g’s of force shoved her back in her seat again, and guessing from the muffled complaints of her two passengers they felt it just as hard. “Burning three fifty-five mark ninety,” she said. “Fuel in stage at thirty percent and dropping.”

“Confirmed, Fourteen,” Dragonfly replied. “You could just burn prograde, you know. You’re close enough to a polar trajectory that you’re not going to miss anything.”

“I still show my prograde vector as nine degrees off course, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said. “I’m going to bring that in. I ought to have brought that in on the initial burn.”

“Fourteen, you’re fine,” Dragonfly groaned. “Just get that bird into a parking orbit.”

Cherry Berry didn’t listen. She wasn’t going to settle for “almost” a polar orbit. One fine day soon “almost” wouldn’t work. It was bad enough that landing their ships was pretty much like a blind unicorn playing darts. She wasn’t going to accept sloppiness on the ascent. Sloppiness could kill. 

“Ten percent fuel,” Dragonfly reported. 

“Roger ten percent,” Cherry Berry. “Mr. Set, Ms. Crust, I’m about to destage. There will be a few bumps, so sit tight.”

Thankfully, this time it was Jet Set and not Upper Crust who responded. “Very good, Miss Berry. We’re ready. Carry on.”

“Coming up on second stage burnout…” Almost the instant she said the word burnout, it happened. With a jerk the ship went from three g’s full throttle to free-fall. Two taps of the main staging button later, the empty stage was dropped and the third stage ignited, its smaller engine pushing forward at a much more modest 0.7 g. 





“Third stage ignition,” Cherry reported. “Burning three fifty-five mark ninety.”

“We confirm third stage ignition, Fourteen,” Dragonfly replied dutifully. “You’re only a couple degrees off the mark, you-”

“Excuse me, Miss Berry?” Upper Crust interrupted, loud enough to drown out Dragonfly’s raspy voice.(194) “It’s ever so much lighter now. Is it all right if we unbuckle these straps? They really do chafe.”

“PLEASE don’t do that,” Cherry Berry gasped. “Getting out of your seat now would be like falling flat on your back. You could be seriously injured. Please remain in your seat until orbital maneuvering is completed.”

“Fourteen, Thirteen,” a very smug voice broke into the channel. “Just wanted to say, at this point in time, here and now, that I Told You So.”

“Thirteen, please keep the channel clear,” Cherry Berry growled. “Horseton, have I got orbit yet?”

“Yes, Fourteen,” Dragonfly said. “In fact, we’d be glad if you shut down the engine any time now.”

“Stand by, Horseton.” Cherry Berry skewed the ship hard to port, thrusting due westward. Slowly the prograde marker on the nav-ball crawled the last degree to perfect true north. “Shutdown!” she said, cutting the throttle to zero and using the reaction wheels to reorient the ship along its prograde axis.

“Horseton confirms MECO,” Dragonfly said, relief obvious in her voice. “Fourteen, you’re currently at periapse with an orbital eccentricity of about thirty thousand kilometers.”

“Thirty thousand??” Cherry Berry grumbled. “Shoot! I know I can get a circular orbit! What’s my correction burn?”

“Negative, Fourteen,” Dragonfly said. “We show you at forty-five percent in your final fuel tank. The bullpen wants that fuel to stay there unless absolutely necessary.”

“But I can get this right!” Cherry Berry said. “With as much delta-V as this ship had, there’s no excuse-”

“Horseton, Thirteen,” Chrysalis’s still-smug voice cut in. “Am I go for transfer orbit burn?”

“Stand by, Thirteen,” Dragonfly said. “Fourteen, we currently have you in a good polar orbit, and we have Thirteen in a more or less equatorial orbit. Two ships in orbit at once. That’s a first. Accept it and go forward with the mission checklist.”





Cherry Berry slumped in her spacesuit. “Fourteen copies,” she said sullenly. “Preparing for EVA.”

“Horseton copies Fourteen preparing for EVA,” Dragonfly replied. “Thirteen, your transfer burn is twenty-seven seconds at full throttle on your prograde at your discretion.”

“Horseton, Fourteen,” Cherry Berry said, “just a reminder to the bullpen, we really need those trajectory maps and information up here in the capsule.”

“Acknowledged, Fourteen,” Dragonfly replied. “But believe me, we can see it on the screen here, and it’s beautiful.”

“I’ll bet,” Cherry Berry said. “Fourteen running silent pending EVA.” 

“Captain Berry,” Jet Set’s voice cut into the channel, “I presume we may remove the straps now?”

Cherry Berry took a deep, calming breath. “Yes, sir,” she said. “You’ll still want the straps if you wish to sit at your meal. The main entree for both of you is at the front of the food compartment. Do you remember the training for how to make them ready for eating?”

“Certainly, Captain,” Jet Set said agreeably. “Thank you, that will be all.”

Cherry Berry rolled her eyes in silence at this, and then rolled them again when she heard Upper Crust, also on the channel, ask, “Darling, aren’t you a bit too personal with the pilot? After all, she is a mere Ponyville pony.” 

“Dear, you don’t understand,” Jet Set said. “I sailed once with a champion racing yacht captain- this was before I met you, of course.” 

“She was a looker, wasn’t she?” Upper Crust asked, in what Cherry Berry presumed was a playful tone.

“Not a patch on you. Anyway, after a practice run I congratulated her on her skill, and she nearly bit my head off. She pointed out seven different errors she’d spotted that I’d been oblivious to- all her own. I’d made several myself, but she didn’t mention those until after she’d calmed down. She demanded perfection of herself. That kind of drive was what made her a champion. And I see that same drive in Miss Berry. I’d be proud to have her as one of my airship captains.”

“Darling, you know the unicorns who use our airship service would panic if they saw an earth pony at the controls.”

“True, true.” Cherry Berry thought Jet Set sounded honestly regretful. “But possibly that will change. And besides,” he added, “it’s not like a slow, stodgy airship can compete with outer space, is it?”

Cherry Berry released her straps and floated up to the little porthole. Below lay the planet Equus; the ship was flying well above Trottingham with the mountainous terrain of Rainbow Falls coming up beyond that. She could see the oranges and reds and greens of the forests and meadows below, while off to starboard lay the towers of Manehattan and the rolling blue oceans. 

No, she thought, nothing can compete with this.

She decided not to let the tourists know their microphones were still on.



Footnote:

(194) It had been decided that, since it was vital for the pilot to be able to hear both Mission Control and the passengers, that the controls for the telepresence spell would be set by default so that the pilot’s headset would carry both channels at the same time, but Mission Control and the passengers, to avoid confusion, couldn’t hear each other. The passengers had been instructed in the importance of comms discipline, but Upper Crust apparently hadn’t taken the idea on board of not being able to speak whenever she wanted.








Behind Chrysalis, something went thump. 

“Owwwww!” Hobble Jimenez had left his microphone on as well. “Jou coul’ have warn me jou were gonna do that!”

“Oops. Sorry.”

“Dat don’ soun' too sincere,” Jimenez grumbled. 

“Quit whining,” Chrysalis replied. “It’ll be over in another twenty-four seconds.”

“Twenny-four?” Jimenez asked. “Din’ jou say twenny-seven? Like twenny secon’s ago?”

“I’m using half thrust,” Chrysalis said. “Makes it easier for me to get a precision burn. Like… this!”

The engines cut off. A few seconds later, the unsecured load behind Chrysalis thumped against the forward end of the passenger compartment and complained, “Owwwww again!”

“More complaining?” Chrysalis asked. “Are you going to keep this up for the whole flight?”

“Depends,” Jimenez replied. “We got any cough drops on dis rocket?”

“You know,” Chrysalis said, “if you don’t like the driving, you can walk home. It’s a bit more than five thousand kilometers straight down.”

For about three seconds, silence.

“Five t’ousan’ kilometers.”

“Correct.”

“Straight down.”

“Indeed.”

“I’ll be good.”

“Thank you.”

Chrysalis had just released her seat straps when Hobble added, “So, when can we eat? I’m kinda hungry…”

If we ever do this again, Chrysalis fumed silently, the pony or Dragonfly gets to drive. I am not putting up with this again…





The tourists had their meals, which they reported as being distinctly more flavorful than most Canterlot restaurants but far below Prench cuisine standards(195). Chrysalis was firmly in her highly eccentric orbit which would take her up to the altitude required for the decoupler test contract.

And Cherry Berry was outside the hatch of the capsule, clinging on to the rails and steps with all four hooves, preparing herself. The EVA backpack had passed its checklist. She’d trained with every active and several inactive astronauts at Cape Friendship for a week, learning to use it. Now all she had to do was… well… do it.

Unfortunately every earth pony instinct that had ever failed to tell her, in the past, that all four hooves belonged on dirt now screamed at her to keep all four hooves on metal.

“Horseton, Fourteen,” Cherry Berry said. “I’m releasing the craft now.” Yeah. Saying that committed her. She had to do it, didn’t she?
Forehooves unwrapped from the rails. Rear hooves slid out of the boarding steps. The ship drifted slowly, slowly, slowly away.

“Activating thruster pack.” Cherry Berry put her forelegs in the proper position, and the control arms sprang forward to meet her hooves. The thrusters automatically fired for testing, then counter-fired to stabilize her again. “Thruster pack all green. I have control.”

“Horseton confirms thruster pack green,” Dragonfly said, “You are go for EVA maneuvers. Don’t forget about the camera.”

Cherry Berry looked down through the bowl of her helmet at the camera fastened to the front of her spacesuit. “Roger, Horseton,” she said. “See you after I take my stroll.”

The joysticks under either forehoof felt perfectly responsive to Cherry’s touch. A slight touch brought her right back to the hatch; a second touch backed her off again. A few more touches bumped her left, then right, then up, then down, all with perfect control. 

Gradually the fear of falling faded away. Something in the back of Cherry Berry’s mind said: The ship is staying put. The planet is staying put. I’m not falling. 

I’m not falling.

I’m FLYING.

The stress and tension of flying the rocket up and into orbit fell away, taking with it the fear and leaving behind sheer joy. With a series of giggles and cheers of delight Cherry Berry jetted herself around and around the stubby form of the orbiter, making laps with short, efficient burst of thruster propellant. She turned somersaults, pirouettes, and cartwheels. She pulled off about a hundred meters, aimed herself carefully, and buzzed the ship at a relative velocity of thirty meters per second. It wasn’t quite the same as flying like a pegasus, but it was the next best thing. In fact, it was better than the best dreams she’d ever had about flying(196).





“Thruster propellant level sixty percent,” Dragonfly’s voice cut in. 

That sobered Cherry up a little, but only a little. After acknowledging the message and bringing herself back to rest relative to the ship, she turned herself to face the planet below. 

Yes, she thought to herself, this is why I do it all. This is why I put up with Chrysalis. This is why I run myself ragged between Appleoosa and Horseton and who knows where else. This is why I’ve seen my friends less than seven days in the last eight moons. It was for this.

I’d forgotten. But I’ll never forget again. Not after this.

But even with this epiphany, even filled to overflowing with the sheer joy of flying without a machine(197), she had work to do. She took a few photos of the landscape below her (the lands east of the Crystal Empire, from the looks of it), then keyed on her space suit’s recorder and said, “Survey report, space above the Northern Mountains. It’s always incredible just how small everything is from up here. We ponies have such a small, comfortable existence, and seeing how it fits into the rest of creation makes me even more grateful for the cozy lives we all lead back at home…” 

Joy and professionalism wrestled with one another, and Joy quickly put Professionalism in a submission hold and forced it to tap out. “But I’m even more grateful that I’m FLYING!! WHEE! I really can’t say strongly enough how FREE I feel up here! I’m floating about ten meters from my ship, and with a touch of my thruster I can go kilometers in any direction and then come back! It’s everything I’ve ever wanted since I was a little filly too small to understand that I wouldn’t get wings when I was older. Well, now I’m older, and I’ve got wings made of hot and cold running SCIENCE!”

Just as she was about to switch the recording off, Cherry remembered what a survey was actually meant to do. “Oh, and by the way, the Northern Mountains have rocks and snow and stuff. Really rocky. And snowy. And stuffy.” There. Duty completed and recording logged, she turned her attention back to the ship. 

Through the windows Cherry saw Jet Set and Upper Crust still playing with their food(198). Struck by a whim, she gently brought herself up to the windows, releasing the controls and using her hooves to stop her momentum. She carefully tapped on the window, got their attention, and waved. 

Then she took a photo of their shocked, terrified expressions though the glass(199).







Footnotes:

(195) This mild praise surprised Cherry Berry, who had no experience with the overpriced flavorless offerings that far too many Canterlot restaurants had, until recently, passed off as high-class dining. The fact that Jet Set and Upper Crust found the effects of zero gravity on their mostly-liquid food more interesting than its flavor didn’t surprise Cherry Berry at all, which is why the food locker contained duplicate meals and an abundance of napkins.

(196) Except that there weren’t any cherries around. She’d have to go back inside the ship to have her cherries.

(197) Yes, the thruster pack and space suit were machines, but to Cherry’s mind, only very little ones.

(198) In free-fall it’s more difficult to NOT play with your food. Play is, after all, a form of learning, and in orbit you have to learn how to do all sorts of things all over again. However, few astronauts in any world have ever improvised a ping-pong game using spoons and an uneaten dumpling.

(199) Sadly, due to reflection of the sun’s glare off the extra-thick glass, it didn’t come out. The tourists’ photos from inside the ship, for the most part, ended up much better. 




While Mission Thirteen made its long climb up to the high point of its orbit, Mission Fourteen sped around and around the poles, with Cherry Berry popping out to spacewalk, take photos, and record observations(200), popping in just long enough to recharge the mana batteries in the thruster pack, then popping right back out again. While she was having fun in and out of her own ship, Chrysalis sat inside hers while Hobble Jimenez ate three whole meals and, to her great relief, kept them down this time. 

Finally, near the apex of her orbit, the examination of the decoupler completed and the report filed for the contract, Chrysalis took her own steps into the vacuum, less because of her mission tasks than out of a desperate need to escape the intermittent whining of her sole passenger. 

I know they’re ponies, she thought as she released the ship and activated her own thrusters, but they live outside of Equestria. Maybe Celestia won’t mind if I conquer them just a little bit? They brought it on themselves, for sticking me with the one pony in the whole world that makes the most grumpy donkey look cheerful.

But not Pinkie Pie cheerful. No donkey could ever be Pinkie Pie cheerful.

And yet, she thought as she allowed herself to drift slowly away from the ship, headset turned off completely, so long as I can’t hear him, I don’t mind. 





Chrysalis had the most peculiar feelings when she was in space with nothing much to do. She didn’t think ponies had those specific feelings. Ponies couldn’t sense love, compassion, welcome, all the delicious sugary warming emotions, except coming from themselves. For all her skill, Cherry Berry would never experience space flight the same way Chrysalis did.

For all the hostility of the environment around her, for all that removing her helmet would mean an instant of agony followed by an infinite number of instants of being dead… to Chrysalis it still felt like the entire cosmos, all the stars and planets, the Milky Way and the comets and, and, and, and the everything… was hugging her. 

Hugging her, and saying, Welcome home.(201)

Appropriately, she looked down at Equus on its night side, with a thin sunlit ring almost encircling the huge black mass. Lights sparkled here and there in the darkness- the cities of the eastern hemisphere, a few thunderstorms here and there, and one feral typhoon out in the Hindian Ocean. She took several photos, thinking to herself, Yes. This is exactly right. A thin skin of light concealing bottomless darkness. Why shouldn’t I conquer it all? Could I make it any worse?

The universe didn’t answer. It just hugged her and loved her, unconditionally, unthinkingly.

For several minutes Chrysalis just floated above the world, content to savor the peaceful experience. That peace was broken by the sun breaking the horizon, drowning out the little lights on the dark side of the planet and making Chrysalis squint even through her tinted helmet visor. Sighing, she took a few more photos of the orbital sunrise, then switched her comms back on. “Horseton, Thirteen,” she said. “I’ve got some good photos, and I’m returning to the spacecraft now.”

“Horseton copies termination of EVA,” Dragonfly said. “Be careful getting back in. We don’t want you to do a Dash, now do we?”

“If by we you mean you and your fellow subjects,” Chrysalis said dryly, “no, you really don’t.” She’d drifted some fifty meters away from the ship, but it was child’s play to line herself up with the ship and thrust. Gradually she drifted back in, forty meters, thirty meters, twenty. The hatch was a little out of her line, so she tapped the thrusters a bit to port. That sent her drifting slightly up and over the ship, so she corrected with a brief burst down. Then the ship seemed to be approaching a little too fast for comfort, so she made another correction.

And another, and another, and another. Each correction required another correction, and Chrysalis couldn’t quite recover the nice straight vector she’d begun with. Her flight path kept wobbling, wobbling, wobbling, and she couldn’t make it stop. 

The universe wasn’t hugging her anymore. The universe had turned its attention elsewhere, leaving her to choke down a rising sense of panic as, in her view, the ship kept bouncing back, forth, up, down, anyplace except dead in front of her.

But then there was the hatch right in front of her, and Chrysalis released the thruster controls and reached out for it with her forehooves. 

One hoof grabbed a rail. The other three didn’t. 

The universe did a somersault around the changeling queen. 

Panic took over. Hooves scrabbled, and when coherent thought resumed, Chrysalis was clinging with desperate strength by her forehooves to the very tops of the two rungs that ran on either side of the hatch. The rump of her suit was seated, rather infirmly, on the protective covering of the main parachute. 

Chrysalis took deep breaths, forcing herself to calm down, barely noticing the fleeting sensation that the universe had paused in whatever it was doing to give her an empathic pat on the head for encouragement before returning to its errands. 

Ha, she thought. Chrysalis 472, Certain Death still 0. Suck it, Pale Horse.

Negotiating the hatch was, as ever, an awkward business, and even more so in free-fall, but Chrysalis managed it. After repressurizing the command capsule, she raised the visor of her suit and said, “Horseton, Thirteen; back in the capsule and awaiting instructions.”

“Copy, Thirteen,” Dragonfly said. “We show your remaining fuel in stage at approximately seventy percent. Could you verify that?”

Chrysalis checked the readout. “Sixty-eight point two percent, Horseton. Why?”

“Well, the bullpen just pointed out that you only used about fifteen percent of your tank for your current orbit,” Dragonfly replied. “That means fifteen percent will put you back in a low circular orbit. So we’d like you to prepare for a burn at periapsis. That way you’ll be able to choose your own landing zone and come in a lot slower.”

“Sounds good to me, Horseton,” Chrysalis said. “I’ll pass on the word to our passenger.”

“Copy, Thirteen.”

“Mr. Jimenez!” Chrysalis shouted. 

“Jou called?” the whiny voice replied. 

“Let’s talk about our return to the ground.”

“Oh, yes, LET’S.” For a brief moment the whining tone, and indeed the accent as thick as cold molasses, was cut away by the sharp edge of raw anger. The moment passed almost instantly, as Hobble said in a more reasonable tone, “At’s my favori’ subjec'.”

“In a couple of hours we’re going to burn the engine to lower our orbit,” Chrysalis said. “That won’t be our re-entry burn. It’ll just slow us down a bit, so we won’t hit the atmosphere so hard.”

“Oh, don’ say hit,” Jimenez moaned.

Chrysalis rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll go down more slowly and carefully. Doesn’t that sound like a good thing?”

“When jou put i’ like that,” Jimenez replied, “soun’s real good. I’m all for it. The slower the better, I say.”

Thinking of previous flights, Chrysalis shut off her microphone and said, “You and me both, pony.”



Footnotes:

(200) About half of which were babble on the general theme of, “I’m FLYING! WOO-HOO!” Only, more verbose.

(201) The closest thing she’d ever experienced to it was in those bizarre dreams she had of the pink fluffy thing. Of course, she told absolutely no one about those dreams. Let her changelings have their Fun Machine; she was keeping the Fun Cave in her dreams entirely to herself.



Five hours had passed since the launch of Mission Fourteen. Mission Thirteen had just finished a perfect orbital transfer burn, putting it in a tight low orbit in preparation for re-entry. Cherry Berry was lounging against the inside of the capsule eating some cherries while, thanks to a bit of jiggery-pokery with the comms spell, the press back in Horseton was discussing the flight with Jet Set and Upper Crust.(202)

“I got the feeling,” Jet Set was saying, “that Princess Twilight Sparkle and the ESA didn’t… well, there was a strong feeling that this flight shouldn’t take place. And that’s understandable. This is the first space tourist flight, the first truly private flight, you see. And I admit I didn’t really understand just how dangerous an adventure this could be until after our training for this flight. I can easily understand why Princess Twilight didn’t want to take the risk.

“But right now, looking out the window, I can see the blackness of space. I can see Equus. I can see the curvature of Equus. And the sight is just spectacular. I don’t think I can ever replicate the feeling I have right now. And it’s well worth every bit I paid for the adventure.”

“Myself,” Upper Crust added, “I had no idea how comfortable space would be. I think, if more ponies know what I know, there would be a huge demand for private space flights.”

A tinny voice echoed over the comms, “What does it feel like, knowing that you’re the first space tourists?”

Jet Set laughed. “Who cares about that?” he asked.  "I just wanted to go. I thought it'd be chic. And I’m glad I did. The fact I was able to makes me one of the luckiest ponies in the world. Correction,” he added, looking back at his wife, “makes us two of the luckiest ponies in the world.”

“And I think that’ll do it, folks,” Cherry Berry heard Occupant’s voice, also tinny, on the channel. “We’re going to have to discuss the rest of our flights with the pilots now, so if you could all return to the press gallery? Thanks!”

Cherry Berry worked a few switches to restore the comms to their normal settings. “Horseton, Fourteen, comms check,” she said.

“Fourteen, Horseton,” Dragonfly said, much more clearly than the reporters’ voices had been. “We hear you just fine. How about you?”

“Sounds good to me,” Cherry said. “I could stay up here as long as there was food, but my passengers have plans for next week.”

“Horseton, Thirteen,” Chrysalis chimed in from her ship. “I’ve got a passenger who needs to be taken home, too. Let’s talk landing.”

“Roger, Thirteen, Fourteen,” Dragonfly said. “Thirteen, our best guess at bringing you down back at the space center requires a burn about forty minutes from now. Fourteen, we think that if we have you make re-entry burn now, that’ll bring you down somewhere near Haywaii.”

“Haywaii?” Cherry Berry gasped. “How near Haywaii?”

The shrug could be heard in Dragonfly’s voice. “George Bull is telling me the trajectory plotting system isn’t reliable in atmosphere. It can’t predict air resistance, and they’re still trying to figure that out. All I can say is, Haywaii’s the closest land to where you’d end up.”

“Understood, stand by,” Cherry said. “Well, Mr. Set, Ms. Crust, how does a Haywaii landing sound to you? Give or take a thousand miles, that is.”

“Haywaii would actually be rather convenient,” Jet Set said. “My airship line runs flights to and from Haywaii by way of Los Pegasus. It’d be a nice, short trip home.”

“Sounds good enough to me. No promises, though,” Cherry Berry added conscientiously. “Any landing zone we’ve hit in the past has been more luck than skill. All I can promise is a water landing.”

“Thank you for letting us know,” Jet Set said. “Will the food and water arrangements hold out if we end up on some unmapped desert island?”

“For a week, easy,” Cherry Berry replied. “For fresh water, indefinitely.”

“Then please proceed, captain.”

“Roger.” Cherry Berry settled back into her crash seat, strapped herself in, and said, “This is CSP Mission Fourteen. Passengers please strap in. Ten seconds to re-entry burn.”

“Horseton copies, Fourteen,” Dragonfly said. “Have fun!”

“Thirteen copies, Fourteen,” Chrysalis added. “We’ll be watching from up here. More or less.”

While the replies had been coming in, Cherry Berry had been reorienting the ship for its deorbit burn. “Burn in four, three, two, one!” She ignited the engine and brought the throttle up to fifty percent thrust. “Horseton, awaiting your mark for MECO,” she said. 

Two seconds later Dragonfly’s voice shouted, “MECO!”

Cherry Berry killed the engine. “We have MECO,” she said. “Preparing to jettison engines for re-entry.”

“Horseton copies decoupling engines, confirms MECO,” Dragonfly said. “For what it’s worth, the trajectory plot shows a periapsis of twenty-five kilometers over a point a couple hundred miles west of the westernmost Haywaiian island.”

“Understood, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said. “Passengers, brace for staging.” She brought the ship around ninety degrees to the vertical, the engines pointing at the planet below. A moment later she hit the staging button, and with a thump the last engine and fuel tank, mostly but not entirely depleted, fell away and vanished. This done, Cherry put the ship back on its backwards-facing attitude using the reaction wheels, laid back, and said, “Okay, folks, you have about ten minutes left if you want one last snack before re-entry. Don’t bother heating it up. It’s going to be a warm ride down.”







Footnote:

(202) The possibility of in-flight interviews with the paying space tourists had been mooted at leadership meetings days before launch and kept open pending an assessment of the mood of the Canterlot ponies mid-flight. They never even considered allowing the press to interview Hobble Jimenez. He was certain to say too much for anypony’s comfort.







Underneath the expanded capsule of Mission Fourteen, the snow and ice of the southern polar cap gleamed in the late-year sun. Around the capsule itself, on the other hand, flames already flickered around the ship as the upper atmosphere, unable to move out of the way of the speeding craft, simply got hammered into submission.

Cherry Berry focused on the navigation ball, keeping the ship absolutely centered on the retrograde marker, the three-barbed circle sitting just above the horizon. Behind her she could hear the sound of camera shutters clicking through the hatch to the passenger cabin. Jet Set and Upper Crust, even strapped in as they were, had refused to stow the cameras, and instead were taking a last few pictures out the windows. 

She hadn’t objected. She didn’t have time. Almost from the moment the capsule had touched the top of the atmosphere it had begun to wiggle, twisting and turning in inexplicable ways. At first the motion had been small and slow, requiring only a couple of corrections each minute. Now they required almost constant monitoring, hooves on the flight stick, nudging and twitching the cantankerous craft this way and that. 

And this is only the first bit of shock plasma, she thought to herself. We haven’t got anywhere near the thick air yet. 





“I say, captain?” Jet Set asked. “Could you roll ship just a bit? I just caught a glimpse of the moon near the horizon, and it’d be interesting to photograph it through the lights outside.”

“Kind of busy now, sir,” Cherry Berry ground out. “I can’t even see the moon from this-” She cut her speech off short as, compelled by the conversation to look out one of the tiny windows in the capsule, she saw something glitter where there absolutely, positively should not have been anything. 

It was too small to be the moon.

It was in the wrong place to be the jettisoned third stage.

It was too big- just barely too big- to be a planet. 

And although she couldn’t really see it as anything more than a bright bit of light, it had a distinctly… lumpy… look to it. 

“Horseton, Fourteen,” she ground out, returning her attention to keeping the ship tucked behind the heat shield at its base. “There’s an unidentified object in the sky to port of my trajectory. I'm certain it's not the third stage. Could you have someone investigate that, please?”

Two voices overlapped in Cherry Berry’s headphones: Dragonfly asking, “Can you get a picture of it, Fourteen?”; and Upper Crust saying, “I see it!” A couple of seconds later Cherry Berry heard several shutter clicks through the hatch.

“The tourists might have some shots,” Cherry answered. “My hooves are full right now- whoa!” The ship chose that moment to begin to roll, in the process sliding slightly out of retrograde. For a moment, before Cherry Berry brought the ship back on course, the heat alarm rang out. “Heat alarm, capsule,” she reported. “Alarm off.”

“Horseton copies heat alarm,” Dragonfly said. “What’s wrong?”

“The ship’s wiggling unpredictably,” Cherry Berry said. “Can’t spare attention to talk about it right now. We’ll discuss it-” The heat alarm went off again. “Heat alarm, capsule,” she said over the noise. “Rolling ship to compensate.” Ninety degrees of roll later, the alarm went out. 

For about fifteen seconds. 

“Heat alarm, capsule,” Cherry grunted. “Rolling ship.” 

“Captain, is everything all right?” Upper Crust asked. 

“Darling, please shush,” Jet Set said. 

“We know how to deal with this,” Cherry Berry replied. “Don’t worry.”

“See?” Jet Set asked. “Calm and collected. She’s got everything under-”

The alarm sounded again.

“Heat alarm, capsule. Rolling ship.” Cherry Berry ground her teeth, rolled the ship, coaxed it back on retrograde. 

The alarm went silent, then blared five seconds later. Roll, pitch, alarm off. 

Alarm on. Roll, pitch, alarm off. 

The force of deceleration began to kick in. The sounds of cameras clicking ceased. 

Another heat alarm. “Heat alarm, capsule. Rolling ship.” Cherry Berry rolled the ship again.

This time, instead of just rolling, the ship yawed. The building roar of hot air from outside became the scream of an angry primal god. The heat alarm doubled in intensity.

“Fourteen, Horseton, we read critical heat alarm, capsule and passenger compartment,” Dragonfly warned. “Please advise.”

Cherry didn’t respond. Her universe contracted itself to the navball. Ignore the glow coming through the windows. Ignore the klaxon that’s become a constant single note. Get the ship back on retrograde.

The ship yawed back, too far, passing the marker on the navball. Now the primal god hammered at the other side of the ship. A new alarm rang: the ship’s outer hull was beginning to deform from heat. 

No! Cherry thought to herself. Back on course! Carefully! 

The ship rocked back again, a little off center, then back on the beam with a last gentle adjustment. The hull alarm died, and a few moments later the heat alarm went from the critical buzz to the warning intermittent buzz. Cherry rolled the ship again, more carefully this time, and that went away as well.

For seven seconds. 

“Heat alarm, capsule. Rolling ship.” 

The ship rolled. The alarm went out.

This time it stayed out.





The flames around the ship faded and died. Twice the force of gravity now pushed on Cherry’s back. They weren’t totally out of danger, but the worst was over. Assuming the parachutes hadn’t been damaged by the rough ride down- and all three still showed amber ready-but-don’t-do-it lights- they would probably land safely. 

“Fourteen, Horseton, comms check.”

“Fourteen here,” Cherry said. “I had a busy couple of minutes, but I’m fine now. How do you read?”

“Well, Fourteen,” Dragonfly said slowly, “the bullpen really didn’t like that maneuver you pulled. You’re way low and way off course.”

“How far off course?” Cherry asked. 

“Our best plot now puts you down closer to Hosstralia than Haywaii,” Dragonfly said. “Way south and west of your planned course, and at least ten kilometers lower than you should be. We’re sending telegraphs to every country in the area, but you might have a long wait for a pickup.”

“Fourteen copies,” Cherry Berry said, very slowly. “Thirteen, do you copy?”

“I’m listening,” Chrysalis’s voice replied. 

“Okay, everypony,” Cherry Berry said. “My best guess, without seeing the trajectory plots- and I now insist we get something in these capsules that lets the pilot see those, darn it- I fired too hard on my re-entry burn and came in too low. Thirteen needs a higher trajectory for her re-entry. Everyone copy?”

“We copy, Fourteen,” Dragonfly said.

“Thirteen copies,” Chrysalis added. 

“All right,” Cherry Berry said. “Looks like I got away with this one… but now I have to explain to my passengers how their day in space just became a prolonged sea cruise.”





“Wave hello to Cherry Berry, Jimenez!” Chrysalis called back to her passenger. “She’s somewhere there below us!”

Only a muffled whimper came back from the passenger cabin(203).

“Suit yourself,” Chrysalis said, returning her full attention to flying the capsule. “Horseton, Thirteen. I don’t know what the pony was talking about. This flight down has been the smoothest one yet. I’m not feeling any wiggling or unexpected movement in the ship at all.”

“We copy, Thirteen,” Dragonfly said.

“I may be in the water, but I can still hear you,” Cherry Berry’s voice chimed in. 

“Can you see me?” Chrysalis asked. “Just look up for the ball of fire that flies better than you do.”

“Har de har har,” Cherry Berry replied. “No, Thirteen, negative on visual; I don’t know where to look, and even if I did I’m not going to waste battery power on the reaction wheels to roll the ship.”

“Thirteen is well downrange of Fourteen’s location by now anyway,” Dragonfly commented. “But if we’re being chatty on the air, I’m jealous of your flight, Fourteen. That sounded like fun.”

Choked spluttery sounds of impotent horse rage echoed over the channel. 

Chrysalis allowed herself a couple of deliberate laughs before saying, “In all honesty, this configuration does take some watching, but it’s no great matter for a skilled pilot. Why, I’m almost through descent and I’ve not had a single heat alarm.”

Braaaap, braaap, braaap, braap.

“Grrrr. Heat alarm, cockpit. Rolling to compensate,” Chrysalis muttered.

“Ha HA!” Cherry Berry called triumphantly over the comm.

“Oh, hush, you,” Chrysalis said. “It was only one-”

Braaaap, braaap, braaap, braap.

“Heat alarm, cockpit, rolling. Alarm off. Now as I was-”

Braaaap, braaap, braaap, braap.

“Oh, COME ON!!”

The heat alarm rang four more times in quick succession, then a fifth time after a pause, and then ceased. “Shock heating is easing up,” Chrysalis grumbled again. “Horseton, give me an update on my landing zone?”

“Er....” The trailing mutter was followed by a significant silent pause. 

“Horseton, this is your queen speaking,” Chrysalis growled. “Not to be too blunt, but I am running out of up to fall down from. Where am I landing?”

“I’m afraid you’re off course, too,” Dragonfly said. “You’re landing well southwest of the space center- maybe a couple hundred miles from us. It’ll be after dark local time before we can get a recovery team to you.”

“Southwest?” Chrysalis asked. “West I can understand, but how did I turn right on a ballistic re-entry trajectory?”

“And when you get that question answered,” Cherry Berry added from thousands of miles behind Chrysalis, “you can explain it to me, too.”

“I’ve got four minotaurs shrugging at me, Thirteen,” Dragonfly's voice replied. “For now, just do your best. Try to pop your chutes before you hit the mountains.”





Chrysalis rolled the capsule, looked out the porthole, and hissed something very vile in Old Changeling(204). She recognized those mountains all right. She’d seen the other side of them quite frequently… on the southern horizon from the hive. She was coming down in the very heart of the Forbidden Jungle itself- a place which was no real threat for a hive full of changelings, but which could make life all too interesting for a lone changeling, even a queen. 

Oh, and there was also the minor detail that the ship, dangling from three parachutes, would have to come down through dense forests. That could never possibly go wrong, now could it?

“Good news, Jimenez!” she shouted. “We’re going to be landing in your home town, looks like!”

“Really?” There was the faint sound of movement from the rear compartment, followed by the most heartrending whimper Chrysalis had ever heard in her life(205).

“I’m just saying,” the queen continued, rolling the ship and hoping to spot anything ahead of her that looked like a viable landing zone, “I might need to crash at your place overnight, that’s all.”

What had been the most heartrending whimper Chrysalis had ever heard yielded the title it held for only six seconds to a new world champion.

“You try to lighten the mood,” Chrysalis muttered, and then decided she was out of time. At thirty-eight hundred meters altitude she triggered the parachutes. 



Footnotes:

(203) At the first flicker of plasma visible through the windows Hobble Jimenez had leaned his head back in his chair and closed his eyes tight. Of course, Chrysalis had no way of knowing this, and she wouldn’t have cared anyway.

(204) “You offspring of contemptible food!” is the precise translation. The more colloquial translation, into Earth English at least, might be, "Son of a mare!" Or, possibly, some other female mammal.

(205) Hobble had opened his eyes, looked out the window at the trees, realized the window in question was aimed straight down, and clamped his eyes hard shut again. Again, Chrysalis didn’t know and wouldn’t have cared.



The tribe of the Nickeragua ponies were not completely ignorant of the outside world. There was trade and commerce, of a small but consistent sort, via the port town on the west coast run by the Acapolo ponies and via the occasional explorer. News reached them also from tribes closer to the shores of the Griffon Sea to the east. And, of course, there was their God-king and ruler, He Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken, He of the Five Hands, the Master of the Great Cats. But he was seldom around, and practically never in a chatty mood, so he didn’t really count as a news source.

The tribal ponies knew what tin cans looked like. They knew what umbrellas looked like. They’d taken a number of each off of explorers and tourists under various circumstances(206). 

They didn’t know what descending space capsules looked like, and so they gaped skywards at what appeared to be a gigantic tin can under three umbrellas floating deceptively slowly to the ground, right onto the center of the village. 

The ponies cleared the square as the can, as far as they could tell, fell from the heavens, striking the packed dirt of the village square with a hard thud. Latches clicked on the big metal thing, and the umbrella-things went flat and flopped onto the ground around it.

There were holy-rock symbols painted on the upper part of the ship- a bit burned, as if by a great flame, but still legible enough. Underneath was a smaller line of words in the tongue of civilization. Those few of the tribe who could read either read them. 

Do not be afraid. The beings inside are ponies and will not hurt you.

The warriors gathered around, spears and bows in hoof, ready to strike. The high priest himself, Calendar Wheel, emerged from the village temple and walked up to view the giant can from the sky. He too read the words, in both languages.

The conical part at the top of the can opened. Queen Chrysalis, her helmet removed, stuck her head out and looked around the half-frightened, half-hostile crowd of ponies. From one of the glass circles in the side of the can, an all too familiar face peered out in dread.

Calendar Wheel shook his head. “Is it not as the ancients have said?” he asked. “Truly, you cannot believe everything you read.”


MISSIONS 13/14 REPORT

Mission summary: Transport three tourists to space and return them safely; conduct EVAs in orbit; photograph and study Equus from low and high orbit; complete decoupler test

Pilots: (13) Queen Chrysalis, (14) Cherry Berry

Flight duration:  (13) 6 hrs. 17 min.; (14) 5 hrs. 31 min.

Contracts fulfilled: 3
Milestones: First CSP EVAs, first time with multiple flights in progress simultaneously

Conclusions from flight: Everything was perfectly successful except our aim. All mission goals completed- time for a nice long vacation.

MISSION ASSESSMENT: SUCCESSFUL, IF SOMEWHAT INACCURATE




Footnotes:

(206) To be fair, none of the Mexicolt tribes actually harmed their occasional Equestrian visitors, except for the occasional inconvenient hero or thief(207). As High Priest Calendar Wheel himself put it, “We give them a scare and a thrill, we take what we want, and we send them back. They tell the others what happens, and then the others want to see for themselves, and they come loaded down with more useful things. Civilization might be insane, but it’s a gift that keeps on giving.”

(207) The same word is used for both in the Mexicolt dialects.




Occupant sat at his desk, piled high with paperwork. Paperwork was hard, but it was satisfying. Reading words on paper, writing words on paper, made him feel important. He’d even made a point of never completing all the paperwork for a day, because something inside him said that a clean desk wasn’t an accomplishment; it was a sign that its owner couldn’t be trusted to do anything more. A pile of paper on a desk meant that ‘lings wanted and trusted the desk’s owner to do anything and everything.

It wasn’t a rational idea, but it made him happy, so he didn’t question it.

On this day Occupant was practically alone in the mission control building, and indeed the whole space center. With winter coming, even the mild winters of the Hayseed Swamps, there would be no rocket launches until springtime. Most (but not all) of the construction ponies were taking vacation for Winter Ramp-Up and Hearth’s Warming. Most of the changelings were taking out pocket money from the hive’s budget for their own tourist trips, enjoying a begrudging-tolerance the likes of which no changeling could remember. The Fun Machine, which normally required two minotaurs to clear of changelings and tourists long enough to do actual wind tunnel tests, was enjoying down time and overdue maintenance. 

Even the leaders of the space program were absent. Chrysalis had been rescued from what indeed was Hobble Jimenez’s home village, along with her camera and its film, the night of the landing(208), after which she returned to the hive to catch up on backlogged royal duties(209). Three days later Cherry Berry, Jet Set and Upper Crust arrived in Canterlot after being rescued about a hundred miles south of Port Maresby and taking steamship and airship flights halfway around the globe to return home. Cherry Berry had gone straight to Ponyville(210) after that, sending word that she’d be staying there right through the holiday before spending New Year’s Eve with family in Dodge Junction. 

So it was just Occupant, the guards, a small remaining crew of construction workers, tour guides, and maintenance workers, and Marked Knee, who claimed to be on the verge of breakthrough and refused to leave his work even though the other three minotaurs had taken ship for home days before. 

Occupant didn’t mind. The mail, telegrams, and even new-fangled telephone messages continued to come in. He had his work, he had his importance, and he had his mail-order catalogs, complete with a substantial bonus from the queen herself. He was content…

… except for the pile of mission contracts on offer, which he was going through one by one. More than half of them were for aerial survey missions. A couple were for combination aerial survey and landing missions, which after the last couple of flights was laughable. Most of the remainder were contracts to test various pieces of rocket equipment, either their own or other experimental designs, under conditions so impossible that even Occupant recognized the fact without consulting any of the scientists. 

The Changeling Space Program was currently without contracts. Although money had been coming in from various sources, they definitely didn’t have enough to just fly indefinitely. More money needed to come in for future flights, and none of the contracts on Occupant’s desk was in any way acceptable. Occupant foresaw major problems in the near future if he didn’t find something, anything, to change this. 

There was one contract for two more tourists- a couple of Manehattan society ponies- but Occupant was holding that as a last resort. The first experience with space tourists had been exhausting enough; noling was ready for a second tourist flight so soon after the first. He’d have to be certain, absolutely certain, there was nothing else that would bring in money before he presented that contract to his queen.

The door to Occupant’s office slammed open. A cool autumn breeze, so unusual for normally-roasting-and-humid Horseton, blasted in and scattered papers off Occupant’s desk. “SUCCESS!!!” the creature who’d opened the door shouted. “It passes every test with flying colors!! At last the great work of the Minotaur Rocket Project is ready for flight!!”

Occupant tried to grab at papers while he looked at the figure in the door. “Doctor Knee, what are you talking about?” he asked. 

“My Shotputnik!!” Marked Knee said enthusiastically, stepping inside the cluttered office and not bothering to shut the door behind him(211). “I have finally perfected a computer core capable of accepting commands from the surface and executing them in flight!! We can now fly a rocket without a pilot!! So many of our testing problems are now solved!!”

Occupant, having not many months before experienced supersonic flight without the benefit of a craft(212), didn’t see the advantage of this. “That’s nice, Dr. Knee,” he said noncommittally. “Could you close the door, please?”

“But don’t you see?!” Marked Knee asked, kicking the door shut behind him with one hoof. “With Shotputnik we can send up untested rockets without risking pilots!! We can learn whether or not a ship has the ability to return without potentially stranding people in space!!” Glancing around the floor, the tall minotaur snatched up a contract sheet and pressed it at Occupant’s face. “How else can we attempt a contract such as this one with our current rocket systems?”

Occupant pulled his head back far enough to look at the contract. It wasn’t an aerial survey. It wasn’t an equipment test. It was… 

It was… 

It was exactly the sort of thing Queen Chrysalis would love. 

“Dr. Knee,” he said quietly, using his magic to take the contract from the minotaur’s hand, “I think we need to send a message to the queen and to Miss Berry. Right now.”



Footnotes: 

(208) The Mission Thirteen spacecraft had to be left behind, as the tribal ponies insisted the “smoke chariot” be kept for their mysterious master to examine. It would turn up at the space center five weeks later, tied up in a giant Hearth's Warming ribbon and bow. Six months after that, Daring Do and the Captured Cosmonaut would make its hardcover debut on bookstore shelves throughout Equestria.

(209) And to give Elytron a tongue-lashing he would never forget. That was the single most important bit of royal duty, in fact.

(210) Three days early for the Running of the Leaves. 

(211) Not that he’d shut the first two doors he’d opened behind him either, hence the cold breeze now blowing through most of the office portion of the mission control building.

(212) Or a parachute. Or a helmet. Or a safe landing zone.