Relax and heal 73%
A week went by on the surface of Proximus B. At first Twilight did her best to keep up with every member of the crew, since they spent most of their time arranging the fields and planting all the seeds they’d brought. It was nowhere near to the entire stockpile, but it would keep them fed for months if the crop came in. Not to mention enough Geneseed to wake the rest of the crew.
The alien soil had a strange smell to it, like every scoop had been ground with nuts and ash. But the soil-safety tests kept coming back positive. Even more, nopony came down with mysterious illnesses.
Of course, that didn’t change anything about the illnesses they already had.
“I’m positive,” Fluttershy declared, on the evening of the third day. “You’re showing pneumonia-like symptoms, Applejack. You’ve been working too hard.”
“I don’t got…” she started coughing, and a mouthful of greenish slime came up into the cloth Fluttershy held in front of her face. “A choice. Pinkie only knows how’ta grow rocks. That ain’t what we need right now.”
“You did a great job getting everything in the ground,” Fluttershy said. “Now you’re going to have to count on your friends for a bit. It’s an order—mandatory bedrest, sixteen hours a day.” She glanced over her shoulder at Twilight, who had just emerged from outside, with mud caked up her hooves almost all the way to her knees. It was dirty, smelly work. But Proximus B’s soil wasn’t unpleasant, exactly. “Her health could be in very serious risk if she keeps going like this captain. If she doesn’t listen, I recommend she goes into the ice until we can return to the Equinox.”
Not a casual recommendation. Putting a sick pony in cryo involved the risk of further complications, and meant another six months before they could be frozen again. “Noted. I agree, Fluttershy. You have my permission. If she forces us.”
“I won’t,” Applejack hung her head. “But… I want one walk…” she coughed again, and they waited patiently for her to finish. This time she reached down, taking a puff from a plastic inhaler, and her breath cleared much faster. “One walk to the fields each morning. To tell you all what to do. Give me that, and I’ll… stay in bed the rest of the time.”
“You can have one trip to the field,” Fluttershy corrected. “You can use a wheelchair. That somepony else will push.”
Applejack grumbled, but she didn’t have the leverage to argue. And besides, she was sick. The right pressure, and she was soon spending most of her time asleep, waking only when her breathing got too hard or her fever too hot.
Please Celestia, don’t let me get that. I don’t want to be in bed for weeks.
Beyond the farm, Twilight gave no assignments, only the restriction to go nowhere near the building and no more than a kilometer from the Prospector at any time. That didn’t mean they didn’t find interesting things to do.
Fluttershy built a little animal hutch and enclosure, entirely from sticks and rope, and set it up near the field. For all the time she spent gathering insects that she could dissect and study, she treated the more complex life with her usual care.
They weren’t rabbits, exactly, not like any she’d ever seen before. If anything, she felt a little sorry for them—their proportions looked like something painful, with swollen bellies and three sets of limbs instead of two. It spoke to the lack of predators in the tiny patch of life that they could survive, with as slow as they moved.
But most interesting to Twilight was Pinkie’s discovery, made after the first green shoots of their crop had started to rise from the tilled soil. She called over the radio, late into the afternoon. “Twilight! Hey, Twilight!”
Twilight had been reading then—one of the many books sent to the Equinox before contact with Equus was broken. She gently returned the portal screen to its holster on the wall, careful not to damage the delicate ribbon cable on the back. “Yes?”
“There’s something here, Twilight. Something that… I don’t really understand.”
“Dangerous?” Twilight was already rising, heading for the door. She snuck past Applejack’s bunk, but there was little chance of rousing the prospector over her own snores. The airlock wasn’t serving as an airlock much anymore, and where the hooks had once held biohazard suits they now held tools. Twilight grabbed her own belt off the hook, and settled it onto place. The radio went into its designated place, even as she selected an earpiece from a plastic box, then waited patiently for the pneumatic door to hiss open.
“No,” Pinkie replied, her tone certain. “Not to us.”
“Where are you?”
Twilight followed Pinkie’s directions, and soon enough she was approaching the place her Geologist had been spending most of her time. Here was a fairly orderly excavation into rocky soil, complete with lines of twine marking the place Pinkie had been digging, and a stolen utility stepladder to get down the four or so feet into the dirt.
There was a large pile of refuse on the soil—mostly bits of semiprecious stones Pinkie had found, nothing that interesting.
“What is it?” Twilight asked, leaning down over the edge. There was barely enough space for two ponies at the bottom. Pinkie was there, hunched over a bit of metal.
“Look.”
Twilight climbed down after her, squeezing in alongside Pinkie and bending down. There was shadow at the bottom of the hole, but Pinkie’s headlamp was enough.
The length of metal was bent and twisted, with a melted section on one side and a jagged, broken bolt protruding. Pinkie had exposed a rectangle of metal, where text was printed in block Ponish letters.
RES Solstice
Gantry Section 109-A4-Blue
Arduus ad Solem
1. Begin a full-scale excavation with every healthy pony’s resources. There’s no ship by that name. This can’t be here, this can’t be here, this can’t be here…
2. Bury it, never speak of it again. This can’t be here, this can’t be here, this can’t be here, this can’t be here…
3. Explore the structure. We shouldn’t be struggling for scraps when a source of information is so close.
(Confidence 200 Required)