//------------------------------// // Chapter 8 // Story: Voyage of the Equinox // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Tell him, then bring him along 63% “Spike, wake up.” She pushed him gently, but firm enough that he wouldn’t have a choice. It took a little more effort than it might’ve when he was younger. But he was no baby dragon anymore, not small enough to push around whenever she wanted. There was still something cute about the way he curled up, even if he didn’t use the bed, just slept on the floor in a corner. I wonder if that’s what happened because you grew up without any pony role models. Too bad you could’ve have been frozen with the rest of us. Spike looked weary, his eyes drooping. “Twilight? I thought you were gonna… give me a week.” Twilight passed him a levitating cup of tea. It had been brewed with her day’s ration, far hotter than she could’ve drunk. But to a dragon the closer to boiling the better. Spike took it, swallowed, and looked a bit better. “We’ve discovered something… very serious, Spike. It didn’t feel right to deal with it without involving you.” “Serious?” He sat up in bed, running one claw through the purple ridges on his head. “Something worse than our leaking engines? Did I somehow… pump carbon monoxide into the vents? Or… maybe an alien ship is outside trying to talk to us?” “No, neither.” Twilight pulled over a chair, sitting down and facing him. She explained what they’d discovered as quickly as she could, and finished with. “Whoever did this has put our landing in jeopardy. You know as well as I do that we don’t have the supplies to fly back to Equestria right now. We were expecting to make friends here, and use what they could give us to make the trip. Or, worst case, wait another few decades for Equestrian ships with better drives to catch up. But now we’ve lost our deployable cryo pods… and probably a lot of other things. I haven’t had time to catalog it all yet.” “It wasn’t me, Twi. You know I’d… I’d never do any of that! Why would I hide in a cargo bay when I have a nice bedroom right here? Why would I… piss in a bucket when we have toilets?” “I know,” Twilight answered, though she wasn’t convinced either way yet. But there was no reason to make Spike think that she didn’t agree. “But at the same time, we have a problem. We have to figure out how you didn’t notice someone living with you on the Equinox for… I don’t know, months? Maybe years? I’m sure we could calculate from the volume of the…” she shook her head. “Missing rations.” “That’s easy,” Spike flipped out of bed, rising to his claws. “You said it was all in the cargo bay? Twi, when would I go in there? That’s landing supplies. I only ever visited Cargo 3—that’s where the spare parts are. Two is a different hallway.” “You never inspected, even once? Didn’t check to see if things might’ve shifted during the turnover, or…” Spike shook his head. “Never. The turnover was… pretty long into the trip, Captain. I was getting… I wasn’t doing great by then, okay? Messages from Equestria took years by then. I thought about waking you up almost every day… but that would’ve meant years you wouldn’t get back. You don’t have as many to spare as I do. The others even less. And… don’t forget I’m a dragon. When things got really bad, I would just sleep. I can do it for months at a time if I bring the temperature down slow and carefully enough. If I was older, I could sleep for a lot longer. But even six months and I feel pretty cranky when I get up.” Twilight nodded. She still didn’t know if she’d inherited Celestia’s immortality, or whether her new elevation was basically cosmetic. It might be many years still before she knew the answer, thanks to Spike’s generosity. “You know there are logs I can check, right? I’m not saying this to disbelieve you, Spike. But the computer will know if you ever went in.” Spike shrugged, though he winced a little as she said it. “If you don’t believe me… you can look. But I promise you’re not going to find anything in there, Twi. The only storage I ever went into is three. Now… didn’t you say there was another reason for waking me up?” “Yes,” Twilight rose as well. She wasn’t convinced yet—wouldn’t be until she dug through the logs and checked for herself, and that would take hours of moving reels around. But it was at least reasonable. “Because if it wasn’t you who was moving things around… it was somepony else. Lander is still green, and so is the escape pod. You know what that means?” “They’re still here?” She nodded. “Do you have a weapon?” Spike shook his head. “I, uh… used to walk around with one of those riot sticks, just to have something for my claws. But after a while the trip started to…” he looked away. “I didn’t even want a knife in my toolkit sometimes. But I can get something out of—” “No.” Twilight pulled him close, wrapping her wings around him in a hug. She could hear the pain in Spike’s voice, the sincerity. If Spike was lying to her, then he had used his years alone to become remarkably good at manipulating ponies. Somehow, she didn’t think that was possible. “I’m sorry, Spike. I don’t really think it was you. I’m just doing my job. All Equestria’s counting on us.” “I know,” Spike said, wiping tears away from his face with the back of one claw. “I know.” They stayed that way for a few more seconds until Spike finally shifted uncomfortably and let go. Twilight nodded towards the door. “Well then… let’s find our stowaway.”