“Wait, there’s a janitor’s closet someplace?” Princess Twilight asks suddenly.
“Negative. All maintenance and cleaning operations are automated.”
“Huh? What if we wanted to clean something by hoof?” Applejack asks.
“Manual cleaning supplies can be manufactured on demand.”
“Hey, Athena?” Rarity asks, as they leave the medbay.
The response is a gentle chime.
She blinks. “Where will we sleep?”
“All crew quarters are above livable temperatures. Four suites available at acceptable temperatures in the Passenger Quarters.”
“Could you show us there?”
“Affirmative.”
“Greetings, Princess Midnight… Twilight…. Luna!”
Princess Midnight freezes, just like everypony else walking alongside her. She’s managed to avoid stumbling; she just has to think of it as walking on her hands and knees and suddenly, she is in no danger of falling down. She’s gotten that down pretty well; much longer and it’ll probably look just as natural as it is for her companions. “Greetings,” she states, assuming her regal stance.
“Rarity!” Princess Twilight calls, galloping forwards. “What happened?”
Fluttershy squeaks and disappears back around the corner as Rarity is assaulted.
Rarity fields Twilight’s rush, managing to stumble backwards and convert it into the hug it had been destined for. “Ooof- Oh, I just had a little mishap with the door earlier. And is it just me, or is it getting late?” She looks up past Twilight.
Princess Luna stifles a mighty yawn.
Twilight glances back, then up at the ceiling. “Athena, what time is it?”
“Seven Twelve AM, July Three, Year One Zero One Three, Canterlot Universal Time.”
“Wow… We’ve been up all night! But…” She looks back at Princess Midnight. “You haven’t, have you?”
Princess Midnight offers just long enough of a pause for two of the ponies left next to her- Applejack and Rainbow Dash, if she remembers correctly- to expose their teeth in enormous yawns before she shrugs. “I haven’t been up all night, no,” she disagrees. “But that’s only if you consider that I was living on a moon with a night almost seven hundred hours long… and that I left it only shortly before night ended.” She smiles. “In terms of the twenty-four-hour days we had on my homeworld, before they destroyed it, I’ve been up for almost a month and a half.” She chuckles at the expressions offered. “But, I fear, chemistry won’t keep me up much longer.” She turns her head to ‘hide’ a half-fake yawn.
Twilight blinks, before stifling one of her own… and turning back towards the white unicorn. “Uh, yes, it’s getting late,” she mumbles. “Did you have…?”
Rarity snorts, sweeping her dress dramatically around as she whirls to face the other way. “Of course I do. Follow me, dears.” She then leads the way back around the corner, where the yellow one joins them.
Princess Midnight spends only a second looking at the yellow one before connecting her to a name. She’d been informed of two that were missing- Rarity, and Fluttershy. She’d been informed, in a general manner, of what the two looked like- and this yellow pegasus definitely fits the description for Fluttershy. Who had been described as shy.
So she makes sure she doesn’t stare for too long.
Twilight lets out a yawn, and turns to Rarity. They’ve just given Princess Midnight the room Rarity had indicated; in Twilight’s own opinion, it’s more like a private apartment in, say, the Canterlot Castle than a room in a hotel. “So, where are we sleeping?” she asks.
Rarity points a hoof down the hallway. “The next three doors on the right,” she states. “The ones on the left are too hot.”
Seven ponies look at each other.
“We can work with that,” Twilight states.
Even as all eight of her passengers go to sleep, the ship’s master computers consider once again how best to accomplish their last instruction: “Save her and get us out of here!”
The first part is complete; the ‘her’ being referred to was Princess Midnight. The other part, ‘get us out of here’, processes as an order to go somewhere to avoid an undesirable situation at the present location… Just ‘somewhere’, nowhere in particular.
However, the Warp Drive is overheated, the Distortion Drive has melted, following its deactivation earlier, and the main engines don’t produce enough force to overcome the accelerative advantage the local enemy has. She would go for something more power-hungry, but even when she considers the residual thermal energy in her hull, she doesn’t have the fuel to sustain that kind of power usage long-term.
Thus, simply going somewhere is out of the question; the computer has decided the aversive situation is the ongoing attack by hostile craft. Since she has turned to flee towards the outer system, most of them are behind the ship; thus, their fire is falling on undamaged shields and armor plating, and getting absorbed at the cost of flat nothing in terms of damage. The few that get in front of her to shoot at her damaged forwards armor have quickly found out that she is, in fact, armed. Plasma turrets like the one used to protect Princess Midnight, for example, have no trouble piercing the Enemy’s shields and armor. The combat computers estimate a good chance this is because the enemy lacks both of the above; each shot is good for several dozen hostile ships.
Even those that it doesn’t damage directly will be indirectly heated by the blast; any heated in this manner will flee the blast, go ballistic, or there’s at least three that seemed to forget the controls existed and careen off to who knows where. One had slammed headlong into an asteroid; a second had been… dispersed by her navigational shields. This being one of the combat computer’s clues for the no-armor theory; much armor at all would have made them too tough for the navigational shields, as the weakest shields on the ship, to shred apart and deflect.
Of course, with her inertial compensator field running once again, her passengers haven’t felt a single one of the many hits she’s taken. But that’s not a problem; her master computers, operating under Protocols Sierra-Delta-Four and Charlie-Nine and under autonomous orders, can handle this situation without a problem.
After all, a deep subspace scan is revealing an inactive wormhole in the outer system. A quick, long-range sensor pulse reveals the wormhole leads to an unoccupied system; thus, it’s an acceptable destination. A high-energy N-space scan, at the expense of overheating Sensor Pod Zero Niner Three Seven, reveals the local enemy does not possess the technology to utilize a wormhole, active or not.
And, worst case scenario, her Wormhole Drive is capable of closing it permanently.
So this quickly becomes her destination. The reactionless gravity drive, as the most thermally efficient engine on the ship, will be her means.
The journey takes about three hours- during which the vessel almost reaches critical overheat from defensive weapons activity. The wormhole tunnel then presents itself to her- and the master computers manipulate the thermal distribution grid once again.
All the not-quite-overheated weapons are deactivated and overheated, being used as a heatsink. Thermal energy pours into the main engines, and her one operating fusion plant is shut down to also be used as a heatsink.
Then the Wormhole Drive comes on. It takes a small surge of power, eating up half of the functioning power reserves, to kick the thing off- before it finally comes to full power, locking onto the wormhole.
The Wormhole Drive is a very power-hungry system- and, when compounded with its enormous heat output and the complete impossibility of venting or radiating any heat during the jump, most would consider it a non-option. However, the master computers considered one factor most people wouldn’t have: The Wormhole Drive might be power-hungry, but it’s also capable of feeding off the wormhole itself for the duration of the jump, resulting in a net gain of power. The computer estimated that the four suites in the passenger quarters, alongside a couple passages, could be held at a survivable temperature after the jump, even in a worst-case-scenario event.
Thus, the wormhole was selected.
The Wormhole Drive feeds easily off of the wormhole as it pulls it open in front of the vessel, sucks her into it, and closes the door behind it. No hostiles made it in with her; even if they did, they lack the powerful Wormhole Drive, necessary to keep the walls of the spatial anomaly from collapsing in on the vessel. The jump lasts for almost two full minutes before she reaches the other end, opening the wormhole exit, slipping through it, and closing it behind her. The overheated Wormhole Drive then shuts down as the vessel once again performs the transition to Emergency Power, releasing both active protocols as the master computers register mission completion. On the very next processor clock cycle, however, the computers realize that the vessel is now critically overheated.
That is to say, with the total amount of thermal energy present in the hull, if distributed to an even temperature across all spaces, more than fifty percent of the vessel’s mass would be in a liquid or gaseous state. This is the preprogrammed point calculated to be the point at which the vessel simply must stop heating up else suffer catastrophic failure.
Thus, the command cores are locked down. Minor requests will still be satisfied; anything significant, including anything to do with moving the vessel, will fail.
The computer then computes the best possible course for cooling the vessel. If nothing is done, the vessel will fall into the local star in a matter of six days- projected to be before the Critical Overheat condition is released. Just a little horizontal acceleration, however, and the vessel can be propelled close enough to the gravity well of a local planet, positioned at the outer edge of the so-called ‘goldilocks zone’ for this system, to make orbiting procedures thermally cheap.
Finally, as this force is applied by the overheated gravity drive, the computer decides to allow one specific kind of movement order: Descent to the surface of the planet. The radiators will be slightly less effective in atmosphere- but the extreme hull heat will easily make up for that, conducting and convecting away from the vessel in such manner as is impossible in space.