Scrap the Weapons
Waking from stasis was a painful process. Twilight remembered the awful discomfort she’d felt after a few training freezes. But now it was real, and she had to watch chunks of her mane crumble away from her face into the water washed of her pod. Her veins burned, and she knew a slurry of chemistry and spells blasted her from the inside.
How long have we been moving?
As the light gradually came up in her tiny pod, she watched the water draining away carry an awful lot of purple fur.
The pod finally opened, coolant gasses hissing around her and filling the stasis bay with fog. Her eyes didn’t want to focus, and they couldn’t. Not for hours, if she remembered her last time well enough. Even so, she could make out a purple blob above her, with little bits of gleaming white reflecting the amber status lights.
“Twilight… Twilight, say something! You look… ugh. No offence.” His voice sounded deeper, and each word came haltingly. “Celestia don’t let her be burned.”
“I’m n-not,” she croaked, though after just waking up that would be hard to believe. Particularly for a dragon, whose physiology wouldn’t allow him to ever experience the sensation himself. She held up one of her legs, and lifting it felt like she was lifting up Equestria’s sun with the raw might of magic alone. “Think I’m not. Can take… a few hours. Do we have a few hours?”
“I, uh… I think so,” Spike said. “We aren’t… exploding or anything.”
“Great.” Twilight couldn’t get out of the cot under her own power—that meant they were accelerating. But none of the technical details mattered to Twilight right now. She was barely even aware of Spike’s claws wrapping her in a fluffy towel, then helping her into a wheelchair and rolling her out.
I’d be the first one up. None of my friends are awake yet. Even in her addled post-thaw state, Twilight was conscious of the disarray of the ship around her. Numerous wall panels had been opened, and in many cases it looked as though elements from within had been stripped and moved. A layer of thick marker covered many of the surfaces, along with notes scrawled in Spike’s dense printing. Screens were cracked, or hung loose from their mountings, with displays that occasionally flickered when she tried to look at them.
“Take these,” Spike whispered, holding a little cup right in front of her mouth. Thaw pills. They would help her body repair the damage it had suffered during her long freeze. Until her friends woke up, she would hold the record for the longest-frozen pony alive.
She swallowed, careful not to chew and taste the awful flavor of the drugs. A few felt hard against her teeth—the little enchanted crystals that were the thaumochemical portion. Outside her field, but just as important.
Spike took her to the habitation deck, which meant a difficult ramp engineward. “Tell me…” Twilight muttered, finding the words came a little more easily to her now. “Tell me we made it. You didn’t wake me up to… die in space.” Some part of her wanted to die, with the way her muscles throbbed and her head was splitting. I only need a week or two of rehab. It’ll pass.
“We made it,” Spike said. “I got you… maybe a little earlier than we planned… but not that much earlier. We’re in the Proximus system. There were… some complications…” his voice got high again for a few seconds, words tripping over themselves as he went through a long list of system failures and retrofits that would’ve been trying even for their chief engineer. But Twilight was in no place to understand them all, and so she just waved him away with one wing. It responded sluggishly, and the feathers had gone bone-white.
I bet I look like a lab specimen. Like I just came out of formaldehyde. That wasn’t entirely divorced from the truth. “Save all that,” Twilight said. “My brain isn’t… quite ready to cope with it all.”
The bedrooms on the Equinox were surprisingly spacious, not the tiny cabins she was used to from the ships that could do atmosphere and space-travel both. It was mass that was at a premium, and making a room just a little wider wasn’t so hard. But the sheets felt hard, and even moved onto the current “floor” the mattress felt lackluster against her back at best. But considering how sore she was, she probably would’ve been uncomfortable even on the softest Equestrian cloud.
There was a little window, and her eyes would focus enough to let her look out at the sky. Some primitive part of her expected they would already be in orbit of their destination—but no, they were still decelerating.
“There’s one thing that can’t wait,” Spike said, once he’d settled her into the bed, and replaced her damp towel with some dry quilts. Some of them had other names sewn into them—bedding meant for the other crew members.
“It’s important we get an answer now. We’ve been suffering a cascading series of system failures since…” and Spike devolved into technical terms that Twilight wasn’t able to understand.
But his voice came back into focus a few seconds later. “Cryogenics was one of the systems effected. I’m not sure how much you know about how it works…”
“They’re solid-state,” Twilight remembered. “Almost… immune to damage. Right?”
“Each pod is, yes,” Spike said. He sounded so mature, so confident at a time when Twilight was vulnerable. How much did you grow up? “The theory is, if anything goes wrong, we can let ponies sleep longer, make repairs, wake them up later. Well, before the biochem printer went down, I managed to make enough revitalizer for two ponies. You’re one… we only have enough for one more. I need you to decide who it is.”
- Rainbow Dash (Climatology, Military Trained)
- Fluttershy (Medicine, Linguist)
- Applejack (Engineering, Hydroponics)
- Pinkie Pie (Geology, Insight)
- Rarity (Physics, EVA Expert)
(Confidence 125 required)