Voyage of the Equinox

by Starscribe


Chapter 31

connect it without giving it mainframe access 74%

It was hardly the time to be worrying about Spike’s project. With Pinkie Pie’s revival, Twilight barely had the time or the energy for what would come next. But with as invested as Spike was into the project, some part of her worried that if she didn’t throw it out an airlock or help him soon, she would wake up one morning with the reactor shut down and the computer monopolized by another alien.

“Okay, Spike,” She swallowed, trying to keep her face neutral. “I’m going to work on it—I’m not just plugging in that thing this time. I’m going to do it safely. But while I work, I want you to start compiling a full report on Proximus B. Before I plug in that thing, you are going to give me a presentation. I want slides, I want lists, I want pictures. Understand?”

“Sure.” He pushed the cart towards her, with its retrofitted probe as cargo. “Just… gimmie a minute to say hi to Pinkie first.”

Needless to say, he wouldn’t get it. Down in the mainframe, Twilight got hourly reports from Fluttershy, at her own insistence. The doctor didn’t seem to recognize Pinkie’s condition as anything more than the damage of her poor freezing. Twilight would correct that impression if Pinkie didn’t improve.

The Equinox would not be “happy” running without its archive, but it wouldn’t actually stop anything. Of course, it wouldn’t ever boot again without the drives to load its OS into operating memory, but… that was a bridge they could come to another time.

If nothing else, Twilight could relax while doing some familiar work. Building a makeshift mainframe out of their archival racks and a single portable computer. She half expected the thing to implode when she tried to turn it on, but… apparently the portable computers were hardier than that. Its little screen glowed, then sat almost blank for over an hour as it indexed all the new space. Only when it was finished did she finally wheel over the probe and get a good look.

At a glance she could see Spike had scrapped all its internals, emptying out the transmitters and receivers and using only the basic shell. Well… the shell and the RTG. It hadn’t been plugged into anything, so she could only assume. “Can’t be much of a computer with just seventy watts, can you?” It didn’t respond, yet the screen kept flashing. I wonder if we can figure out how to copy those. That text is so much clearer than our screens.

Was it wrong of her to get distracted in her work? Maybe she ought to be moping around angry after what had happened to Pinkie. But instead she worked harder, gritting her teeth and not even stopping to eat.

She wanted to open the probe and see what was inside, but a glance showed her Spike had welded everything back together again, making that difficult. It did have a standard data port—the sort that was as wide as a hoof and lined with exactly 36 wires. Good thing their portable computer accepted the standard inputs. “I hope you’re friendly, whatever you are.” There was a good chance that nothing would happen—they were working with alien machinery, which might be fundamentally impossible for ponies to build. Like the Equinox’s drive? That didn’t slow us down.

The laptop screen flashed once, then went out. Every drive Twilight had connected suddenly lit up, with the sound of spinning disks filling the room over the cooling fans.

Decompression in progress” said both screens in unison. “Estimated time of completion, 31 hours.” She waited a moment, wondering if maybe alien computers were as good at predicting times as Equestrian ones—but nothing changed, and eventually she just sighed.

She managed to tie everything down before she left—now that they were in orbit, any illusion of gravity was broken for everypony but her. And Rarity, assuming her brain didn’t get roasted on the way over too.

“How’d it go?” Applejack asked from behind her. She’d come in quietly enough that Twilight jumped, and without her concentration she immediately started drifting towards the ceiling.

“With the machine, or Pinkie Pie?”

“I just saw Pinkie,” Applejack muttered. “We always knew she was a little, uh… on the funny side. But I never thought…”

“Me neither,” Twilight winced, staring out the distant window. It was too much to hope the planet would be there—this window was pointed out at the night, and the same almost-identical stars that had followed them here.

“She’s tougher than she looks,” Applejack promised. “She’ll pull through. We’ve got good medicine, the best doctor we could hope for.”

“You’re just trying to stop me from feeling guilty. About… keeping her.”

“Sure,” Applejack didn’t hesitate. “But it’s the truth too. A lie wouldn’t help, because sooner or later you always get to the end. Can’t talk your way out of an empty fuel tank, or no more water in the electrolyzer. Best to face it while yer still breathin’, I reckon.”

“Guess so.” Twilight sighed. “Spike’s, uh… thing… will take another two days to do what it’s doing. But so far it looks like the Equinox is still running okay. Unless you came down here to report on alarms that haven’t gone off properly or something.”

“Nope,” Applejack smiled slightly, pointed towards the lift. “I just thought you ought to take a look at where we are. Came all this way, and you’ve been all cooped up down here since we got into orbit.”

“Sure.” Twilight followed her to the lift, then let her gravity fade as they started to rise. All the way up, past fabrication and the farm and medical and even past the crew deck. All the way to the top—the eye.

They stepped out, and Twilight didn’t even have to wander over towards the telescopes, or any of the computers. Spike was hard at work, surrounded by stacks of papers—she ignored him. This was one of the largest windows on the Equinox, a massive single dome of transparent crystal made for this precise purpose.

Proximus B wasn’t just a planet, it was a city, on a scale Twilight had neither seen nor imagined. The entire surface she could see was covered in reflective skin, with a few prominent spires and domes visible even from here.

A gigantic ring wrapped around the center of the planet, many times thicker than their entire ship. Faint lights glowed from all around it, faint lines of active machinery that would’ve dwarfed Canterlot station a hundred times over. And from nowhere else. The distant city below, despite its massive size, didn’t have so much as a single signal beacon.