//------------------------------//
// Chapter 15: Mission 22: We'd Be Happy With Any Data at All, Really 
// Story: Changeling Space Program 
// by Kris Overstreet 
//------------------------------//

Seventeen days had passed since the immense, complex multi-stack Mission R4 had launched from Horseton and climbed into space through a massive ball of fire. Now the tiny remnant of that mission- the expanded capsule and the data container box- screamed through the upper atmosphere of Equus in another, totally different ball of fire.

That ball of fire happened to be on the other side of the planet from Equestria. That didn’t stop tens of thousands of space tourists flocking into Horseton anyway, eager to watch via telepresence the return(374) of the first spacecraft to touch, if briefly, the surface of another world.

And with the tourists and the self-important dignitaries(375) there also came the press, all of them demanding an exclusive interview with the pony due to go up in another couple of weeks. That annoyed the pony in question, who wanted nothing more than to get back into the simulators and practice for said launch... and wanted nothing less than to tell another woolly-headed reporter(376) for the ninety-second time her answer to the question, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll die out there in space?”(377)

Ironically, Cherry Berry discovered that the best way to be safe from any one reporter was to be in the largest group of them possible at once. Under normal circumstances the reporters would do anything in their power short of actionable assault to prevent their rivals from asking the great question that would deliver the all-important Scoop to the lucky questioner. But if that failed, Cherry could always pretend that the shouting from the reporters was too loud for her to make out any actual questions. 

And, of course, if the crowd of reporters was stuffed into a balcony row above you and separated by a hoofrail, and further prevented from shouting questions at you by flight control rules, so much the better still.

Thus Cherry Berry stood at the back of Horseton Space Center’s mission control room, watching along with fifty reporters and cameraponies and thirty-one VIPs plus Queen Chrysalis while the controllers monitored the fiery descent of Mission R4. 

“Steady on course for target periapsis altitude,” Warner von Brawn said from the bullpen. “No temperature alarms at this time.”

“How’s the apoapsis?” Occupant asked from his spot at the flight director’s station.

“Falling steadily,” von Brawn said. “Not as quickly as I’d prefer, though. We’re keeping an eye on it.”

The minotaurs had known when planning the mission that the Mission R4 capsule would return to Equus faster than any artificial object had ever traveled before- much faster than any prior capsule returning from space. The remaining fuel in the ascent tank after leaving Minmus hadn’t been enough for a fully powered deceleration into low Equus orbit, and so there had been no choice but to come straight down from Minmus. No abort, no second chances- nothing but a computer, a series of radio relays, a remote pilot, and an ablative heat shield stood between Mission R4 and destruction.

Knowing this in advance, the bulls had settled on a target altitude for descent, well within the atmosphere but nowhere near as deep as prior missions. If the trajectory ran too deep, the heating from atmospheric compression would overwhelm the ablative heat shield and destroy the probe. If the trajectory was too shallow, the ship would pass through the upper atmosphere and back out into space on a week-long orbit which might even hit the moon on its way back out. Indeed, if the angle of descent was really shallow, the ship would be bounced out by air resistance and sent flying on a totally unpredictable trajectory, possibly even out of Equus space entirely.

The bulls knew all of this, but they didn't really know where the altitude ought to be. They were guessing- they called it other things, but Cherry knew it was just guessing. Even after twenty-five launches, their collective understanding of the dynamics of the upper atmosphere qualified as next to nonexistent, as their consistent failure to accurately predict splashdown points of re-entering vehicles made clear. They'd even admit it themselves if pressed; this was one field of rocket science where Twilight Sparkle's operation outclassed CSP completely.

Cherry Berry watched every moment closely because, in a matter of weeks, the fireball in the sky would be her. If Mission R4 got it wrong, well, they lost a Probodobodyne and a capsule and most of the scientific data gathered from Minmus. But if Mission 22 missed its target coming home, Cherry Berry would be incinerated, crushed, or sent on a week-long round trip out beyond the moon’s orbit, with no food left in the ship. Any of those outcomes, of course, meant a Bad Day. 

Cherry Berry did not intend to have a Bad Day, and the next step on her road to Not Bad Day Having was Mission R4’s safe landing and recovery. That meant the bulls had to guess right.

“Coming up on predicted periapsis,” old George Cowley called up. “Of course we’ll come a bit below that, since we still don’t have good enough data to predict atmospheric forces on trajectory. But it should have dropped a lot lower already.”

Cherry Berry looked at the velocity reading on the telepresence projection. Mission R4 had been in atmosphere, technically, for four minutes already. But even with air resistance slowing it down, the ship was still going much faster than the next fastest mission, the one she’d flown with Princess Luna as passenger. 

“Descent rate just dropped below one hundred meters per second,” Cowley added. “Apoapsis five hundred thousand kilometers and falling.”

“That’s not fast enough,” Dragonfly muttered. “Ship stable on retrograde. Battery consumption zero point zero one percent per second.” 

Cherry Berry nodded. That was actually better than it sounded, since the electrical flow readout couldn’t go below 0.01%. The system probably drew less power than even that. That gave the ship plenty of time either to land or to get around the nighttime side of Equus and back into the sun, where its solar panels could recharge the electrical batteries.

“Ship still descending at about fifty meters per second,” Cowley said. “Decelerating steadily.”

“No heat warnings,” von Brawn called out. “All systems nominal.”

“Periapsis!” Cowley wheezed. “Ship is now gaining altitude, repeat gaining altitude! Apoapsis prediction at three hundred ninety thousand kilometers and falling.”

A bit of muttering came out of the observation gallery. Cherry ignored it. The ship going back up wasn’t a failure, not yet. The ship’s velocity, and the resulting predicted apoapsis, that was the important factor. And so far, that sounded almost on schedule. Three hundred ninety thousand kilometers- two hundred fifty thousand miles- was roughly the distance to the moon, which meant, worst case scenario at this point, an orbit of less than six days. The important thing was, that was now the only Bad Day on the table. The ship obviously hadn’t skipped off the atmosphere. It wasn’t going to burn up either- not with the heat shield functioning as intended and the ship continuing to decelerate. 

“Continuing very slow ascent,” Cowley said. “Ship continuing to slow. Predicted apoapsis below two hundred fifty thousand kilometers.”

On the telepresence screen the fireball and shock wave continued unabated, unchanged so far as the outside observer could tell. But the numbers next to the display told a different story. The ship flew only a little faster than an ordinary orbital flight now, and its speed continued to decay more and more. The display flicked over to the map readout; where the ship’s trajectory had once looked like a rubber band at maximum stretch, it now looked like a goose egg- shrinking down to a duck’s egg, and from there to a chicken egg. 

“That bird’s coming down,” she said, and then jumped at the racket of camera shutters clicking and flash bulbs going poof. She didn’t know it yet, but That Bird’s Coming Down would be the headline of two of Equestria’s major newspapers... and, thanks to microphones in the gallery, a sound clip on absolutely every television newscast covering the event.

But if she didn’t know, she also didn’t care. Once she’d recovered herself, she walked over to the control room doors and left, not looking back. She’d seen the important part- important from the viewpoint of Mission 22, that is. She didn’t care about the parachutes opening or the actual final spot of splashdown(378). Mission R4 had survived and come down at the target altitude... and Mission 22, which would be virtually identical to R4 on reentry, would do the same. 

So, that question was answered. Now Cherry needed to get back to work making sure Mission 22 got far enough in its flight to have that safe landing.




Footnotes:
 
(374) Or destruction. There is some cross-grained bit of most intelligent minds that, when watching a dangerous endeavor in progress, anticipates its failure as much as its success, if not more so. Or to put it another way: even if nobody wants a train wreck to happen, almost everybody wants to be there to see it when it happens.

(375) And a couple of actually important dignitaries, though their presence must be considered coincidence rather than by design.

(376) Since there are no sheep in the Equestrian press, this epithet, otherwise to be deplored, may be safely used.

(377) This is a question asked by reporters of astronauts in every universe that experiences a space race. The astronauts never give an honest answer, and the reporters don’t expect an honest answer, but they keep asking it. Possibly, if the Dumb Question Constant of the Multiverse were more closely studied, we would have a better understanding of how reality is structured than we do now.

(378) The South  Luna Sea, well east of Hosstralia. Recovery teams had been stationed from Braylon all the way to Farthest Reaches southwest of the Forbidden Jungles, just in case. But the recovery ship had been stationed off the Adequate Barrier Reef, because Lucky Cricket had drawn that station out of a hat, and Chrysalis knew when to back a winner.




“Twilight Sparkle announced a launch date for their pink monster,” Chrysalis said.

Cherry didn’t look up from her work. Horseton’s Summer Sun Celebration festival had ended with the dawn; daylight this far south was too hot to allow for much in the way of festivities. And since the changelings were only interested in the holiday as a source of either food or souvenirs, it hadn’t taken much persuading on Cherry’s part to get the simulators up and running again. So, as she asked, “When?” she continued flipping switches back to their launch settings inside the test capsule. 

“Two weeks from now,” Chrysalis said. “Four days after your launch. She said it would be a simple orbital mission to test the launch and landing systems.”

“How are they getting the ship up?” Click... click... click.

“The princess had this huge orange fuel tank built,” Chrysalis said. “I don’t know how she did it, but she actually managed to make that ship of hers even uglier to look at. Anyway, the fuel tank pumps fuel to the ship’s onboard engines. That, plus eight of our Thumper solid fuel boosters, are supposed to get that thing into orbit.”

“What do the bulls and Goddard think about it?” Click... click... click.

“I haven’t asked them yet. But if Miss Smarty Goody-Two-Shoes Twilight Sparkle thinks it’ll get to orbit, I suspect it’ll get there somehow or other.” Chrysalis frowned at that thought. “I don’t know why it is things always work out for you ponies, somehow or other.”

“The magic of Harmony,” Cherry muttered. Click. “You ought to give it a try.” Click, click, clack. “Done. Do you want the next session?”

“Some creatures strive for perfection, pony,” Chrysalis replied smugly. “But some of us were merely born that way. Take all the time you need.”

“Says the pony who isn’t going,” Cherry muttered.

“Pony?” Chrysalis asked. “Now what have I done to deserve such a terrible insult as that?”

“I don’t know,” Cherry replied. “Maybe you should ask your lawyer for the current list? Occupant, I’m ready on this end!”

“Not so fast, Occupant!” Chrysalis glared her subject into immobility, then poked her head into the capsule. “Don’t you have anything to say about the launch date?”

“Not really,” Cherry said. “Who’s going up?”

“Rainbow Dash and the pretty princess herself,” Chrysalis said. “Sparkle hasn’t even trained as an astronaut, and she’s going up! If she wants to be a tourist, she should buy a ticket!”

“I don’t think she’s going as a tourist,” Cherry said, strapping herself back into the test capsule’s flight couch. “I think she’s going as a last-resort escape system.”

Chrysalis froze. “Yessss,” she said quietly. “Rainbow Dash is too valuable to sacrifice on an untested ship... yes, I can just about see it... I wonder-”

“Don’t even think about sending a sabotage team to Cape Friendship,” Cherry said. 

“And how will you ever know if I did, pony?”

“In order for it to work, you’ll have to send changelings from the space program. Changelings who know what to break and how. I know pretty much all of them, Chrysalis. And from me they keep no secrets.”(379)

“They would if I ordered them to.”

“They’d try to if you ordered them to.” Cherry gave the straps one good tightening yank and concluded, “Do you really think they’d succeed?”

Chrysalis grumbled, “I was just saying it was an idea,” and pulled her head out of the capsule. 

The hatch shut with a slightly unnecessary bang.




Footnote:

(379) Cherry had been around the changelings at the space center long enough to figure out she didn’t actually need to question them about anything. When they thought they were among their own kind, changelings gossipped. Changelings didn’t chew the fat, they masticated the adipose tissue. And after more than a year of being not just a constant presence but a person of some authority within the program if not the actual hive, Cherry Berry had been mentally filed by the space program changelings as “one of us.” As a result, Cherry Berry had had a lot of practice in forgetting a lot of things she never wanted to know.




“Hey, look! It’s Cherry Berry!”

Cherry groaned. With the run-up to her launch, Horseton had flooded with space tourists, beyond the ability of the changelings to keep corralled in the guided tours.(380) She couldn’t walk between buildings in the space center anymore without at least two interruptions to sign autographs. But, since she thought of herself as a polite pony, she smiled, signed the autograph books, posed for the photos(381), and then politely excused herself.

But no sooner had she gotten free of one family than-

“Hey! Oooh! Excuse me! Excuse me!”

Two grown stallions galloped up to her. One was wearing the adult-sized Cherry Berry Brand Aviatrix Helmet (with Flight Goggles!) and a T-shirt saying I Rode the Fun Machine. The other stallion mainly wore a face that spoke eloquently of the depths of his embarrassment that he knew the first stallion.

“Excuse me, miss,” the stallion with the helmet said. “We’re looking for Cherry Berry! We heard she was here today! Could you tell us where she is?”

The other stallion groaned, reached up a forehoof, and slapped the first stallion in the back of the head.

“Owww!” The first stallion looked at the second. “What was that for?”

The second stallion stabbed a silent hoof at Cherry.

“Oooooooh,” the first stallion said. “You’re right.” Looking back at Cherry, he said, “I totally apologize. I forgot my manners. Would you please tell us where we may find Cherry Berry?”

Stallion Number Two groaned a little louder and administered a slightly harder wake-up tap to the back of Stallion Number One’s head.

“OWWW! Hey, I apologized!” Stallion Number One moaned. “Whaddya trying to do, mess up my helmet?”

Stallion Number Two gave Cherry a perfect See What I Have to Put Up With look, then reared up, lifted the cheap souvenir hat off his friend’s head, and plopped it on top of Cherry’s head. 

Somewhere in Stallion Number One’s head, the penny dropped.(382) “Oooooooooh,” he said, “you mean she really is-”

“Just get your stupid autograph,” Number Two grumbled, “and leave the poor mare alone.” Then in a kinder voice he added to Cherry, “Sorry about this. Good luck on your mission.”

Cherry Berry smiled politely, signed the autograph, posed for the cheap disposable Breezie(TM) (383) camera, and tried to make progress once more towards her destination, the astronaut center kitchens where the mission meals were to be prepared. 

She hadn’t got far before encountering something that looked like a changeling had got into a fight with a paint mixer and lost. In fact, as she looked more closely, paint was still dripping off the poor thing.

The colors weren’t bad, as colors went. The changeling had at least tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the turquoise of his mane-ridge, tail and wing-covers separate from the calming peach tone he’d chosen for his body in general. Had he had the foresight to apply the turquoise first and wait until it dried before attempting the peach, it might have worked. Instead, the colors were running together in rivulets that ran down the bug-pony’s body, defining every curve (Cherry was disturbed to notice) of his body and draining (even more disturbingly) into his leg-holes.

“Hi, Miss Cherry!” the changeling said cheerfully. “What do you think?”

“About what?” Cherry asked, hoping and praying against all expectation that she could avoid the obvious conversation to come.

“About the new me!” the changeling said, gesturing to himself. “Sclerite gave me the idea. She thinks the tourists will be less spooked and more likely to give us love if we look like ponies too!” He grinned ever wider, and Cherry squirmed as little runnels of paint dripped down his fangs and into his mouth. “I picked the colors myself! The blue stuff matches my eyes!”

“Um, they’re very nice colors,” Cherry said, the only polite and truthful thing she could say. “But, um, could I just ask you one teensy, weensy little question?”

“You wanna know where I got the paint?” the changeling asked. “Well, they’re having a sale at the general store in Horseton, so-”

“Nooooo,” Cherry said. “I was just wondering if you’d run this little idea by your queen first.”

“Nope! I wanted it to be a surprise!” The changeling actually looked proud. “I figure I might get a promotion out of this! Oh, and Sclerite too, just to be-”

Cherry’s restraint snapped. She grabbed the sticky changeling’s shoulders with her forehooves and shook hard enough to send paint drops flying. “ARE YOU SUICIDAL??” she asked. 

“Hey! HEY!” The changeling managed to get loose from Cherry’s grip(384). “What do you mean by suicidal?” Confusion turned to worry. “You mean you think the queen won’t like it?”

No, Cherry thought, I mean she’ll think you stepped out of the nightmare she described to me once, in detail, and pound you into paste in a fit of panic. But I can’t tell you that, because I promised not to tell anypony else... “It’s always a bad idea to surprise Chrysalis,” she said instead. “You’ve known her longer than I have, you should know that.”

“You spend more time around her than I do,” the changeling pointed out.

“Well,” Cherry said, “for now, let’s go wash off that paint-”

“Shan’t,” the changeling said flatly. “I like my new look. It feels like this is who I am under the chitin. And besides, it matches the wings. Look!” The changeling opened his wings, which Cherry noticed didn’t have a single hole in them(385). And they glittered almost as much as Luna’s star-filled ethereal mane.

Cherry rolled her eyes. Maybe not suicidal, she thought, but suicidally stupid. “Look,” she said, “you’re a changeling. A shape-shifter. Why didn’t you just shape-shift into a pony, if you want ponies to be calm around you?”

“I’m tired of hiding who I am,” the changeling whined. “I mean yeah, the first time you go on an infiltration mission is really exciting, and there’s this thrill about fooling ponies and maybe getting caught...” He sighed and finished, “But it gets old, you know? And being scary isn’t as much fun as the queen makes it seem like.” 

“Okay, fine,” Cherry said. “But you need to let Chrysalis know about your idea before you show her the new, the new... I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Lepid, Miss Cherry.”

“Lepid. Nice name.” Cherry took a deep breath. “Lepid, there will come a day before too long when anypony, or anyling, can show to the world who they really are, without fear. Within reason, I mean.” To be perfectly honest, she was quite happy with Chrysalis not showing the world who she really was. Fake Chrysalis was much nicer to be around, and Real Genuine Authentic Brutal and Possibly Genocidal Dictator Chrysalis... well, Cherry hoped that Chrysalis would be very afraid of showing her true self in public. “And if you want to live to see that nice and happy day, you’ll come with me right now to the infirmary so they can get that paint off of you before your queen sees it and murders you. I’m not fooling about this, Lepid.”

“You really think-”

“Without even pausing to think about it,” Cherry said. “And you know as well as I do she wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep over it.”

“Awww... okay.” The defeated changeling hung his head. “I guess it’s just as well. My tummy’s been aching ever since this morning.”

Cherry watched more runny paint run into the changeling’s mouth as he talked. “Um,” she said, “did you make sure the paint you bought is non-toxic?”

The changeling looked at Cherry in confusion. “Would ponies really sell toxic paint?” he asked. "I mean, what would happen if somebody just happened to come by and take a bite of some pony's house?"

“Right,” Cherry sighed. She wasn’t getting to the kitchen until after lunch. “Come on. To the infirmary. You have a date with some paint remover... and a stomach pump.”

"It just seems irresponsible, is all I'm saying," Lepid muttered as Cherry began dragging him off.




Footnotes:

(380) The large numbers were helped along in no small part by the simple fact that most of Equestria had no idea just how hot Horseton really was in summertime. The owners of both Horseton’s brand-new hotels, the old tavern and inn in the original village, and the changelings who rented out the unoccupied astromare quarters for special guests had no inclination whatever to pass on this information... at least not until the nonrefundable charges were in the bank, in the safe, under the mattress, or buried in a mayonnaise jar out back midway between two cypress trees.

(381) Cherry still didn’t quite know how she felt about the cheap little fake aviator helmets with goggles the gift shop had begun selling to the foals and fillies who visited. Four times she’d marched into the shop to demand they be taken off the shelves as having nothing to do with actual space flight, and four times she’d been silenced by the young ponies eagerly trying them on and making woosh woosh flying noises. After the fourth time, when one of the fillies was a pegasus- trotting along the floor on her hind legs, spreading her forelegs like wings, and going whoosh whoosh along with the other kids- she’d given up. But she still wanted to say something every time she posed alongside a grown pony wearing the things...

(382) If you choose to imagine that the metaphorical penny inside Stallion One’s skull did not plunk so much as clang sonorously in the silence of the otherwise vast and empty space behind his eyes, the author will not try to convince you otherwise.

(383) Because Equus hasn’t got any brownies.(386)

(384) Hooves are not renowned for their gripping power, and the changeling was still covered with runny paint, so this wasn’t especially difficult.

(385) They did, on the other hoof, have quite a lot of paint splotches and streaks on them, even though the changeling’s elytra had scraped most of the loose paint off.

(386) So far as anypony knows, anyway. Not of the elfin variety. There are plenty of the baked-goods kind to be found.




“What do you mean, my menu is all wrong?” Heavy Frosting asked, a very dangerous tone to his voice.

“I mean, look,” Cherry said, pointing at item after item. “This doesn’t have any cherries in it. And neither does this, or this, or this!”

“That’s right,” Heavy Frosting said. “That’s because of a mysterious little thing I like to call ‘variety’. I’m putting together meals for twenty days. You’re going to be shut up in that capsule for at least fifteen. You’re going to need variety in your meals or you’re going to snap.”

“I need cherries in my meals or I’m going to snap,” Cherry insisted. “And don’t tell me you can’t get them. Cherries are in season in every orchard that grows them across Equestria!”

“But you’re going to get tired of eating nothing but cherries after two straight weeks!” Heavy Frosting insisted. 

“I’m willing to risk that,” Cherry said. “Hasn’t happened yet, though.”





“I confess,” Rarity said, looking every bit as uncomfortable as Cherry Berry felt, “that I wish I could find some more... er... dignified way of doing this.”

The two of them stared at the newest edition of the spacesuit undergarment, which... well... left one critical thing to be desired. (387)

“And as inelegant as the solution is,” the white unicorn continued, “please bear in mind it is the best I can do while juggling the requirements involved. After all, the suit has to be chafe-proof, easily donned and removed in a tiny space, has to assist in temperature regulation-”

“Yes, I know all that,” Cherry said. “But it’s still a full-body diaper, isn’t it?”

“Well... there are inserts...” Rarity’s face curled up in a truly epic combination of disgust and regret. “Although the smell in the capsule will be... unfortunate... unless you find some way to discard-”

“Diapers.”

“And, of course, there is the toilet in your capsule seat,” Rarity continued.

“You mean the plastic resealable bag with germicide held under the seat?” Cherry asked. “Yes, I’m aware of it. I’m very aware of it. You could even say I’m outright fascinated by it, and wondering how the buck I’m going to-”

“Language, dear.”

“Sorry, Rarity.” Cherry pointed to the undergarment again. “But still. Diapers.”

“And sanitary wipes,” Rarity pointed out. “The lining of the undergarment is very easily wiped clean for-”

“Diapers!!”

Rarity gave up. “Yes, diapers,” she admitted. “I’m very sorry.”





“We shall endeavor to achieve an encounter which carries the craft over one of the poles,” von Brawn said, pointing to the design drawn on the whiteboard. “A polar orbit gives us the best chance for completing the temperature scan contract on this mission. The danger lies in this massif here.” He pointed at one of the images taken by Mission R4. “This rises almost seven thousand meters above the level of the ice plains. A low orbital pass as might be required for the temperature scans risks an impact. You’ll have to be aware of that at all times.”

Cherry gripped her pencil tighter in her teeth and made a note. “Uh-huh,” she grunted.

“Of course, if the burn goes poorly and a polar orbital insertion becomes unworkable,” von Brawn continued, “we shall simply launch into a polar orbit after landing. We would prefer not to do that, however, because it would complicate the return to Equus, requiring multiple burns to achieve atmospheric interface.”

Translated: it’d be a lot harder to get home. Cherry made another note.

“You’ll be provided with surface sample kits,” von Brawn went on. “Ideally you’ll land on one of the ice plains near the coastline, so we want surface samples from both of those points. More samples would be better, if it’s not too dangerous. We may even consider hopping the ship for this purpose, if you feel up to the challenge.”

Cherry let the pencil drop out of her teeth. “Sounds like my kind of fun,” she said. 

Translated: it sounds absolutely suicidal, but it’s a kind of flying absolutely nopony else has done before. Therefore I am SO there.





“Wow, it really doesn’t take much thrust to stay up,” Cherry said from inside the simulator.

“I know, right?” Dragonfly commented from outside. “There’s next to no gravity there, apparently. I wouldn’t like to try to hover forever up there, but there’s a lot of leeway if things go wrong.”

“Like with Mission R4?” Cherry asked. “Two thousand and descending at forty meters per second.”

“I could have fixed that if it wasn’t for the time lag,” Dragonfly said. “Are you sure you’re gonna clear that ridge?”

“Hm? Oh, hang on...” Cherry tweaked the controls, and in the circuits of the simulation computer a phantom spacecraft tipped a bit more vertically for a few moments. “That should be enough.”

“Hm, yeah,” Dragonfly said, looking at the readouts. “But it pushed you beyond your landing zone. You’ll need to brake a bit more.”

“I’ll make it work,” Cherry said. 

Outside the capsule, Dragonfly looked at Occupant, who shook his head and pushed a switch on the simulator’s master console.

Inside the capsule, the simulation entered the interesting bit.




Footnote:

(387) Technically two things: Number One and Number Two.


 





Outside, two miles west of her, tens of thousands of beings- ponies, changelings, dragons, griffons, minotaurs, and other creatures- had gathered in the heat of a Horseton summer afternoon to watch her launch. Outside technicians topped off her fuel tanks, performed the final checks on her ship- the fully charged batteries, the gimbals of the various engines, the landing gear of the landing stage, the scientific equipment, and the Probodobodyne core which could, in an emergency, take over for her. Outside reporters scribbled down quotes for newspapers, television faces blathered about the painfully obvious, and photographers used up enough film to make a couple of Applewood movies.

But inside the little capsule at the top of the enormous stack it was just Cherry, with a couple of tiny windows, a control panel full of switches and buttons and readouts, and Chrysalis’s voice in her earphones. She could hear the fans of her spacesuit as they cycled air in and out. She could feel the faint creaking of the ship, which reminded her with every little flutter of wind that the success or failure of her mission depended on whether or not a lot of changelings kept their minds on their welding and riveting despite all the many distractions changelings(388) were subject to.

The launch window for Minmus opened at sunset- meaning that launching earlier in the day would force Cherry to wait in orbit while Minmus trundled around Equus until her rocket and the little false-star were lined up for the planned course. There was some fudge factor afterwards, but launching as soon as the window opened gave you more time to fix problems if and when they cropped up. The days when CSP could just say “go” and launch a rocket were ending, and the days of precision launch timing and orderly countdowns had arrived to take their place. 

Cherry wasn’t sure what she thought of that. On the one hoof, anything that increased her chances of still eating cherries when she was older than Granny Smith had her approval. But on the other hoof, part of the freedom of flying was the idea that you were free to fly whenever you wanted- just take off and go. She’d miss that, at least where it came to rockets.

The final two minutes of the countdown began, and Cherry got to work performing the final tests. She responded to each of Chrysalis’s call-outs for tests and readings. She heard Fiddlewing’s get-clear shriek at the one-minute mark, as the ground crew cleared out from the pad at top speed. She heard the pumps for the first stage engines, far below her, start up, churning, pressurizing the fuel lines in final preparation for launch.

She set the throttle to ninety-two percent. At that setting, held steady, the liquid rockets would burn out at the same time as the four solid fuel boosters. She activated SAS, shifted in her flight couch the tiny bit her straps would allow, and listened as the count trailed down from ten, to five, and then to one.

Her hoof struck the staging button exactly on zero. 





In the first days of the program, a launch combined the heavy pressure of Faust’s own hoof with the vibration of a shake mixer. The vibration had remained, but not the absurd acceleration forces. Cherry felt only twice as heavy as normal as Mission 22’s altimeter began ticking up, as the engines struggled to lift the enormous mass of the spaceship into the air. This left her more than able to appreciate the ungodly noise of the engines behind her, only partially muffled by the same headphones that allowed Chrysalis at the capcom station to talk to her.

She reported her actions- tipping down fifteen degrees from vertical, aiming just above the due east line on the nav-ball, at ten seconds into flight. The ship responded smoothly despite the vibrations of the rockets, fully under her control, just as in every simulation. Of course, she thought to herself, the fun stuff begins with the second stage, doesn’t it?

By thirty seconds into the flight she was already flying faster than the speed of sound. The ship rammed its way through air that didn’t want to move aside, the resistance rising with the square of velocity- or was it the cube? Cherry could never remember- until, at a certain point, the ship would meet that magical point known as max-Q, where atmospheric density and velocity combined to exert the most stress the ship would ever encounter in the entire mission.

And by chance, or lax planning, or the simple hodgepodge design of Mission 22, max-Q came almost exactly at the moment Stage 1 burned out. 

There had been options, of course: the bugs had finally been worked out of the next, larger generation of rocket engines, which were now in full production in Appleoosa. Mission 22 could have been flown with a single stack of engines and tanks instead of the bundle of explosive sticks Cherry was guiding into the skies. But that would have been an untested design, and Mission R4 had proven this design viable, with a few tweaks. Better to use a known and tested design than to risk the mission- than to risk Cherry’s life- on a new one.





At ninety-seven seconds into flight, right on time, the first stage burned out, liquid and solid fuel systems alike. Cherry held the ship’s nose steady, directly into the prograde circle on the nav-ball, and hit the staging button within half a second of burnout. The stage decouplers fired, and simultaneously the second stage engines lit, pushing the ship through max-Q and away from the disintegrating first stage, whose components tumbled, collided, and exploded well away from the still-rising ship.

Cautiously- very, very cautiously- Cherry began pushing down the ball again towards a more horizontal course. She still owed Dragonfly an apology: the second stage of this design wanted to tumble and spiral out of the sky at low altitude, no matter who was at the stick. It took a skilled pilot to make this design work, and after hundreds of hours in the simulator, and especially now as she felt the ship through her hooves, she’d realized Dragonfly was a pretty darn skilled pilot, after all. 

Even now, even with design tweaks to better balance the ship and keep it from constantly tipping northwards during flight, the ship still wiggled in flight. Part of that was due to the ship being underpowered early in its flight; thirty seconds after staging the ship pulled only 1.5g of acceleration, though that was rising quickly as the ship burned through the fuel in its outer stacks. Without the same firm push of the first stage, the ship’s nose seemed to want to go north, south, up, down- anyplace except where Cherry wanted it to go. The SAS system kept things manageable, but Cherry didn’t want to think about what it would be like to try to fly the ship up without the stability assist.

And yet... despite her best efforts, the ship’s twitches added up to a gradual southern drift. The mission profile called for a trajectory a bit north of due east, to match Minmus’s orbital plane. She pushed the ship’s nose northward, well above the target, to correct, relaxing slightly as the ship’s wiggling diminished with the thinning air outside. 

“Twenty-two, Horseton, stand by for SECO.”

Crud. That was too soon. SECO- Second-stage Engine Cut Off- at this point meant the ship’s apoapsis was at or near the target altitude for parking orbit, on a steeper than planned trajectory. Her course was still too southerly. That meant a fuel-expensive double correction on the orbital insertion burn, eating into the fuel safety margin. Granted, there ought to be plenty of fuel and to spare for the mission, but... 

“SECO.”

Cherry shut down the throttle and called back, “Engine shutdown, we have SECO.”

“SECO confirmed, Twenty-two. Current apoapsis projected in two minutes thirty-seven seconds. Orbital insertion in two minutes mark.”

“Twenty-two copies, Horseton.”

Mission Twenty-Two coasted upwards through the wispy upper atmosphere, bound for space. Its sole occupant relaxed, considering the situation. There had been a goof-up, and it was minor. There was more than enough delta-V in the mission budget to correct it. The worst part of the flight was over, and the obligatory buck-up was behind her. 

It looked like it would be a good flight.







Footnote:

(388) And, to be fair, ponies too. But particularly changelings.







Chrysalis pretended not to see the denizens of the bullpen going quietly nuts. 

Cherry Berry- miss perfect pilot, miss can’t miss, miss steel-eyed missile mare- had screwed up. As they watched and waited, she was in the process of badly over-correcting her trajectory, tilting the final orbit well above what was desired for a shot at Minmus. It wasn’t a disaster- just something that required the minotaur eggheads to completely recalculate the burns for Minmus insertion now that the old plans were totally useless. 

They’d asked her to tell the pony to stop the burn and readjust. Chrysalis had refused. She’d learned to tell the difference between the pony pretending to be calm and the pony actually relaxed. Right now she was in her happy place, and considering she’d be up in space for two weeks to come, Chrysalis wanted her kept in her happy place. If that meant burning a little unnecessary fuel, fine by her. Occupant had had the good sense not to try to override her. She’d let him be in charge just as long as he did what she wanted him to do, and he knew it.

Finally, she heard the pony’s squeaky voice: “Shutdown! Horseton, we have orbit, repeat we have orbit.”

Chrysalis double-checked the projection on the wall. “Orbit confirmed, Twenty-two,” she drawled. “Good work.” And, indeed, it was a very good orbit- even Chrysalis had to admit it. Apoapsis and periapsis were within a kilometer of one another- an almost perfectly circular orbit. The fact that it was eleven degrees more inclined than it ought to have been was, to be frank, a minor detail.

But now it was time to deliver the bad news, wrapped in as much sugar as she could manage... and a changeling queen knew how to ladle on the sugar when desired. “Unfortunately I’m afraid you’ve overshot the target orbital inclination a bit,” she continued. “But Trajectory tells me that actually works out to our advantage, since it makes a polar orbital insertion over Minmus much easier.”

She noticed George Bull’s head pop up from the huddle, staring at her with betrayal written all over his face. She switched off her microphone long enough to say, “Make it work!” before switching it back on and continuing, “We’ll have two burns calculated for you in a couple of minutes. Stand by, Twenty-two.”

“Copy, Horseton. Twenty-two standing by.”

Chrysalis switched the mike off again and said, “All right, geniuses. Make it happen.”

“Do you realize you’re asking us to rewrite the laws of motion- of physics itself- for your convenience?” George Bull asked. “Just so Miss Berry won’t feel bad?”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking,” Chrysalis replied coolly. “You get paid the big bucks to work miracles. Well, now it’s miracle time. Get cracking.”

“Well...” von Brawn rumbled from his station. “We’d have to go on this orbit- no parking orbit for final testing- but bringing down the orbital inclination will also get us extra velocity... we’ll have to use the same delta-V for the trans-Minmus injection, but... Dr. Bull, come here and check my calculations.”

The other minotaurs- George Bull, George Cowley, and Marked Knee- gathered around their leader. “It looks correct,” George Bull said cautiously.

“I shall test it immediately!!” Marked Knee said, jotting down some numbers and then rushing back to his trajectory calculation computer. 

“Well?” Chrysalis asked.

“If this checks out,” von Brawn said, “the new intercept for Minmus will take a faster trajectory. We’ll have to burn a bit more juice to slow down, but it looks like we’ll shave a whole day or more off the outbound leg.”

“It eats most of the delta-V we saved from not having a satellite on board this trip,” George Bull grumbled. “The second landing is looking a bit iffy after this. We’ll have to see how the orbital insertion burn goes.”

“If we have the fuel to do it, let’s do it,” Chrysalis insisted. “One day less in space is one day sooner she comes home, right?” And, she thought to herself, one day sooner we drop this stupid side-issue and focus on the real job. One day closer to my hooves touching the moon.

“Um, yeah,” Occupant said quietly. “Sounds good to me, too. How soon can we have the burn procedure?”

“The first burn is straightforward,” von Brawn said. “We can send her that now. The second burn... we have twenty-eight minutes before that, and we want to use all of that double-checking it.”

“Fine-tuning, too,” George Bull said. “The closer the ship comes to Minmus the better. Less fuel used in lowering the orbit.”

“Okay,” Occupant said. “My queen-”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Chrysalis said testily. “Von Brawn, give me that burn info.”









The sun came up over the rim of Equus. 

By now Horseton, below and behind her, lay in darkness, the princesses of sun and moon having done their jobs to keep Equus’s orbital system semi-stable. Below and ahead of her lay the Fillypine island chain. And above Cherry Berry lay the rest of creation, and in a few short minutes she would be headed for it.

“Okay, Twenty-Two, we’ve confirmed a good correction burn,” Chrysalis said. “We’re feeding your navball the target now for the trans-Minmus insertion burn. This one will require a burn to burnout of the central second stage, which should take two minutes thirteen seconds, followed by a full burn of the landing stage for thirty-one seconds.”

“Burn to empty on second stage, thirty-one seconds on landing stage,” Cherry repeated. She punched keys on the number pad, entering the times into the ship’s computer.(389)

“After that we’ll burn at minimum throttle to adjust trajectory to bring you as close to Minmus as possible,” Chrysalis continued. “That’ll mostly be due anti-normal, with a couple of antiradial bursts to keep the trajectory from drifting too far left or right.”

“Roger that, Horseton,” Cherry said. “How long until TMI?”

Chrysalis’s voice muttered softly over the connection, something about a year and a half ago.

“Say again, Horseton, I didn’t copy that,” Cherry said. 

“Trans-Minmus injection burn in six minutes thirty seconds mark,” Chrysalis said, a bit more clearly. 

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry said. She looked back out the window, as the ship passed over the terminator and the surface of Equus lit up in its blues and greens and browns and whites below her. Six minutes, she thought, until I kiss that goodbye.

“Twenty-Two, Horseton,” Chrysalis’s voice said again after a moment.

“Go ahead, Horseton,” Cherry replied.

“What’s it like up there? We still have a lot of people watching down here who’d like to hear about it.”

Cherry forced herself to smile. Her face, she knew, was being projected on the wall of Mission Control and on a series of giant screens around Horseton Space Center for those who came out to view the launch. They’d all know at once if she showed exactly how much she didn’t want to do public relations babbling with an important burn minutes away. “Well, it’s space,” she said, frantically thinking of anything to say- anything safe, that was. “It feels like I’m flying under my own power, floating without a care.” Her smile became a little more genuine as she added, “Makes me feel hungry.”

“You can have supper after the burn,” Chrysalis said. “How’s the ship performing?”

“Pretty good, with the lower stages mostly gone,” Cherry replied, not thinking anymore about putting on a show for the people below. “It’ll probably fly beautifully once I ditch the second stage. At least, I’m counting on it.”

After a pause, Chrysalis asked, “Did you bring a good book? You’re going to be up there for a while, you know.”

“Actually, I left some good books with you,” Cherry said. “If I brought books up, they’d take up space and cost me delta-V. But if you read to me, I can enjoy the books without having them up here, right?”

This time the pause before Chrysalis spoke became very significant. “I believe you forgot to brief us on that one, Twenty-two,” the changeling queen at capcom said in a quiet voice. 

“Oops,” Cherry said. “Well, I’m sure you can find somepony to do it. Get Tymbal, he’s got a good voice. And it’s not like he can keep saying, ‘This is Mission Control Horseton’ for fifteen days.”

"I can too." Tymbal's voice, full of pout, echoed over the comms channel.

“We’ll take it under advisement, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Two minutes to TMI burn.”

“Copy, Horseton.” There. PR over, back to work. Cherry checked the target marker, lit up in dark blue on the light-blue navball, and carefully steered the ship on its reaction wheels until it appeared in the center of the ball. “Standing by for ignition call,” she said.

“Ninety seconds,” Chrysalis said, and then, “Sixty seconds,” and then, “Thirty seconds.” At fifteen seconds she began counting down, and when the queen said, “Ignition,” Cherry’s hoof was already on the throttle.

The sole remaining engine of the second stage (the other two having been dumped during orbital insertion when their tanks ran dry) came to life, and Cherry felt the rocket push against her back like the gentle guiding hoof of Faust. This is it, she thought. I’m really on my way. 
 
Fifteen days of flying in space. Most of it just flying, with nothing to do. 
 
If it wasn’t so dangerous, I’d call this the best vacation ever.

The rocket burned on and on and on, steadily accelerating the much reduced ship until, with a sputter, it died, out of fuel. One more explosive collar fired, and with a push of a button the two descent engines came to life, pushing the ship even faster towards the blackness of space. Equus slipped out of view of the little window above Cherry’s head, leaving only the sun and the stars. 

And then, at precisely thirty-one seconds, Cherry shut down the engine. “Shutdown!” she reported. 

“Good burn, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis reported. “We currently show you flying more or less over Minmus’s north pole at an altitude of one thousand kilometers a little more than five days from now.”

A few more tiny bursts of fuel brought that down from one thousand kilometers to a mere hundred kilometers. Then Cherry Berry deployed the landing gear, turned the ship so that a solar panel faced the sun directly, and relaxed. 

Minmus or bust, she thought.







Footnote:

(389) Since the burn would be manual, the computer would have nothing to do with it beyond displaying a countdown clock to engine shutdown. Cherry only used the keypad because she still had her spacesuit helmet on, which meant she couldn’t grip a pencil in her teeth to write anything down.




On thousands of television screens across Equestria, the faces of mature-looking stallions and mares solemnly looked out at the viewers and read the news. Each of them had a short news item about Mission 22, so interchangeable that they might as well have read from the same script. The version watched in the astromare recreation room at Horseton Space Center went something like this:

“All systems are go for astronaut Cherry Berry as Changeling Space Program Mission Twenty-Two continues speeding on its way towards the mysterious star known as Minmus. Mission planners expect a round trip of between fifteen and eighteen days, during which Cherry will spend virtually all her time in a space barely larger than the lower bunk of a foal’s bunk beds. With the orbital insertion burn four days away, Cherry has nothing to do except watch and wait. Leading Equestrian psychologists expressed concern that such monotonous conditions in such a cramped space could drive ponies mad. We shall watch and wait to see what happens.”

Chrysalis, remembering that television report, snorted into her microphone. She wasn’t worried about the pony going nuts. She was worried about going nuts herself. There were four astronauts taking turns in six-hour shifts at the capcom station- herself on the evening shift from six until midnight, Gordon the Griffon from midnight to six, Dragonfly from six to noon, and Fireball the dragon from noon to six. And yet, for whatever reason, Cherry Berry insisted that Chrysalis be the one to read from the book of the day. 

“Centerton was one of the many small towns that dotted the northeastern plains of Equestria. It had a drugstore and a movie theater and a school, all of which were mentioned proudly on the sign next to the road that led into town. It also had a Cheap Clover, whose name was not on the sign, but he didn’t mind that.”

And for whatever reason, the pony had chosen what looked like a filly’s library of fifty-year-old tripe.(390)

Somehow Chrysalis got through the sickly-sweet story(391) and the one after that before Cherry Berry declared a meal break. “This food pack says ‘Market Garden Salad Vinagrette’. There isn’t a water nozzle on it, so I guess I eat it as is.”

“Bon appetit, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said, only partly successful at concealing her absolute disinterest. 

The sounds of a food pack rustling echoed in the queen’s ears as, on the mission control screen, Cherry Berry stuffed her face into the pack. After a number of pleased sounds, she removed the pack to say, “Wow, this is good! A great mix of sweet and sour! Sweet cherries, sour shallots, lettuce and spinach, walnuts and bleu cheese! It’s really good!” She returned to her meal, pausing only a moment to add, “A bit heavy on the vinegar, though.”(392)

“I’ll pass that along,” Chrysalis lied. 





“... and the Masked Matter-horn, the actual and genuine Masked Matter-horn, actually said, ‘OUCH!’”

“Hahahaha!” Cherry Berry giggled on the other end of the telepresence spell. “Who wouldn’t say ouch if they were dumped onto a barbed-wire fence?”

“Oh, I could make a list,” Chrysalis grumbled. “Feeling hungry yet, or do I need to finish the story?”

“Finish the story!” Cherry Berry said. “It’s nearly done anyway, right?”

Thankfully it was, with only two pages to go, without even a friendly skunk to relieve the sickly-sweetness of it all. 

“Okay, lunch time!” Cherry declared.

“Lunch?” Chrysalis asked. “Isn’t it dinner? The sun’s down here, remember.”

“I know. But remember what the bulls said? My orbital insertion burn will be more or less right as the mission clock begins Day Six, right? So I’m trying to reset my sleep cycle so I get up about an hour or two before sunset your time, so I’ll have the full day to work with, alert and ready!”

“Lucky you, Twenty-two.” Chrysalis had to deal with the press and officials, plus the occasional hive emergency, during daylight hours. She was beginning to feel the effects of losing a couple hours of sleep each night. “So, since you’ll tell me even if I don’t ask, what’s the meal of the day?”

“Ooh! It’s kirin cooking! I didn’t know Heavy Frosting knew kirin recipies! Tofu and noodles with edamame and cherries! I’ll just add water and let this warm up...”

Note to myself, Chrysalis thought. Find out when Carapace ever met a kirin that talked, never mind a kirin chef. I know I declared the kirin off limits!(393)





“... the rain came down on the roof of the old cattle-car, but none of it came inside. The fillies gathered around one another, dry and safe, listening to the tapping of the raindrops on the old wood above.

“‘I have an idea,’ said Sassafras. ‘We don’t have to run any farther than this. We can live right here, in this cattle-car.’

“‘What?’ said Bendy. ‘We can’t live here! What if a train comes through? We’d be smashed to bits!’

“‘Did you see the tracks?’ said big sister Handy Honey. ‘They’re all covered with rust, and they end just past this car. And there’s weeds growing up between the ties. This is an abandoned track. Trains don’t come here anymore.’”

A sniffle came from the telepresence spell. “I always feel so sorry for the Cattle-car Fillies,” Cherry Berry said. “The first book is such a sweet and sad story. I’m glad it has a happy ending.”

“If you know how it ends,” Chrysalis asked, “why are you making me read this to you? Why don’t you get a book you haven’t read?”

“Well, because if I haven’t read it yet, how would I know if I liked it?” Cherry replied. “I know I like all those books. I grew up with those books! They’re old and dear friends to me!”

Chrysalis debated the merits of getting a book of matches and holding Cherry’s old and dear friends hostage until the pilot gave in and chose a book that didn’t give changelings diabetes. 

“How about you take a break?” Cherry asked. “I’m kinda hungry, and it’s about time for my breakfast. Cherry and peach dumplings with cream gravy!”

“How many ways can you put cherries into meal packs anyway?” Chrysalis asked.

“Dunno,” Cherry said as she began rehydrating the meal pack. “But these two weeks we’re gonna find out how many ways Heavy Frosting uses.”

“Gee. How wonderful.” Chrysalis had burned out her ability to suppress her sarcasm. “I can hardly wait to learn.”



Footnotes:

(390) The Equestrian Educational Association wishes to remind the reader that the opinion held by Queen Chrysalis of such classic works as Centerton Tails of Cheap Clover, the Cattle-Car Fillies, and the collected works of Cleverly Clearly is that of an evil fiend who is a stranger to pony culture and who does not appreciate heartwarming, life-affirming classic educational reading. They ask that you not judge these works by the opinion of a tyrant, and moreover a tyrant addicted to smutty, written-by-the-dozens potboiler romance trash novels. So there.(394)

(391) Mostly by imagining an enormous variety of methods for revenge she could use on Cherry Berry once she was safely back on Equus. However, she did dog-ear the page in which Cheap Clover’s skunk friend gave both barrels to the prize thieves for later re-reading enjoyment, so it wasn’t a total waste of her time.

(392) Vinegar as an ingredient tends to enhance and amplify certain flavors in food. It’s a common sauce ingredient, most notably in that universal insult to chefs everywhere, ketchup. It’s also the base for Roamaine and vinagrette salad dressing. The chef, Heavy Frosting, overused it a bit because of prior space flights demonstrating that free-fall somehow numbs the taste buds, making it impossible to detect subtle flavoring. The salad dressing, in this case, was about as subtle as Pinkie Pie asking somepony’s date of birth.

(393) A meal of kirin emotions gives new and medically critical meaning to the word “heartburn”.

(394) The author of this work wishes to remind the reader that the opinion held by the Equestrian Educational Association of Queen Chrysalis’s reading habits is elitist and juvenile. This opinion is not made less elitist by the fact that it is more or less accurate.




“Fuel lines disconnect.”

“Confirm fuel lines disconnect.”

“Launch time T minus sixty seconds an’ countin’... mark. Begin control test sequence.”

Cherry Berry leaned back in her little capsule, wearing nothing but the headset from her spacesuit, and listened to the voices of Equestria Space Agency through the headphones. She’d asked for the launch of ESA Flight Eleven to be relayed up to her from the ground. Ever since the first time she’d seen Twilight Sparkle’s prototype spaceship, she’d wanted to see it fly. Now, of course, she was almost a million kilometers away, but thanks to the wonders of modern magic, she could at least listen.

“Control test sequence complete, all go.”

“Confirm all go, Eleven. Thirty seconds to launch.”

Cherry envisioned the ship in her mind, based on the model she’d seen of the proposed launch stack. The big, heavy resuable orbiter stood on its butt, its three main engines held off the surface of the launchpad by the eight Thumper solid fuel boosters attached to it. Clipped to its ventral surface stood a gigantic orange fuel tank, which weighed vastly more than the ship itself when full. The SRBs would burn for one hundred seconds, providing enough vertical thrust for a brief suborbital space flight even if the liquid fuel engines never fired. Those engines would be just strong enough for control authority during the solid rocket burn; after they burned out, they would fire for another seven minutes, give or take, until the giant tank was empty. After that the empty tank would be tossed away, and the orbiter would use maneuvering thrusters and a small reserve fuel supply in the ship to achieve orbit, de-orbit, and do a very little bit of steering on the way back down.

A perfect mission would end with the orbiter landing on Cape Friendship’s wide, well-paved runway- a targeted landing of the kind Changeling Space Program still couldn’t achieve(395). If they were off course, though, the ship carried a dozen of the new T-35 parachutes, big and strong enough to allow a splashdown or even possibly a land touchdown if necessary. Cherry thought the whole exercise excessively ambitious, but if Twilight Sparkle and her friends pulled it off, it would be a milestone right up there with Cherry’s current flight.

“Ten... nine... eight... seven... main engine start...”

Cherry spun a little forward, not really able to sit up properly in free-fall. Here it came... 

“... four... three... two... clamps release... and liftoff!” Cherry’s hooves grabbed for the armrests of her flight couch as Applejack’s voice continued, “Liftoff of Amicitas on Equestria Space Agency Flight Eleven, an’ th’ clock is runnin’!”

“Roll program initiated,” Rainbow Dash reported. Cherry imagined the tapered-cigar ship and its cluster of boosters surrounding its giant fuel tank rising on a plume of smoke and flame over the shoreline of Horseshoe Bay, slowly tilting on its side and rolling over so the orbiter rested above the fuel tank. 

“Confirm roll, Amicitas. We read you two kilometers up and three downrange.”

“Throttling back for max Q.”

“Confirm throttle at seventy-two percent.”

Cherry sat, or rather floated, and waited, intensely anxious.

“Mock One.”

“Cape confirms Mock One. Go at throttle up.”

“Amicitas copies go at throttle up.”

A new voice broke in: Cherry recognized Spike, Twilight’s little dragon helper. “ESA spaceship Amicitas is sixty seconds into its maiden flight, all systems running normally. In about thirty seconds the solid fuel boosters will burn out and separate, leaving the orbiter and its main fuel tank to continue burning for orbit.”

Applejack again: “Stand by for SRB separation.”

Rainbow Dash: “Roger, Cape... burnout... and separation!”

Applejack again: “Confirm separation. Nice an’ clean.”

“At two minutes into flight, Amicitas is thirty-three kilometers high and forty kilometers downrange, traveling at almost ten times the speed of sound,” Spike reported. “All three main engines are firing at full throttle, draining two and a half tons of fuel every second. When the burn is complete, Amicitas will be traveling about five miles every second. At this time the ship is beginning to nose down for orbital insertion. All systems are go, trajectory is optimal.”

“Two engines to orbit,” Applejack said.

“Copy two engines to orbit,” Rainbow Dash said.

“That call only means that, if the orbiter loses one of its engines now, a longer burn on the remaining two engines will be enough to get it into orbit,” Spike said quickly. “All three engines are still burning and will continue to burn until MECO in approximately another five minutes.”

Cherry relaxed. Things could still go wrong, but the things most likely to go wrong hadn’t. Amicitas hadn’t had to deal with a debris cloud of smashed boosters as R4 had done. The giant fuel tank hadn’t ruptured or leaked, and it didn’t seem likely that it would. The couplings, the control systems, the computers were all doing their jobs. She leaned back again as Spike’s voice lulled her almost to sleep(396).

She came almost awake again when she heard Applejack’s voice again. “One engine to orbit.”

“Copy one engine to orbit.”

“Estimate thirty seconds to MECO.”

MECO: main engine cut-off. That meant Amicitas would be in orbit, or just shy of it, since the plan was for the huge fuel tank to fall back into atmosphere and burn up.

“Standing by for MECO.”

Cherry listened carefully. She had no worries about the safety of her two Ponyville friends, not at this point. But she had something in mind, and she wanted to know the proper timing for it.

“MECO!”

“Confirm MECO, Amicitas. Go for fuel tank jettison.”

“Fuel tank jettison.”

“Confirm fuel tank jettison. Go for switch to internal tanks.”

“Switching main engines to internal tanks.”

“We read good switchover, Amicitas. Seventeen minutes, forty seconds to final orbital insertion burn. Twenty seconds on maneuvering thrusters only. No need, repeat, no need for main engines.”

“Oh, yeah! Out-standing!” Rainbow Dash couldn’t be calm and professional forever, of course.

“Thanks, everypony.” For the first time during the launch, Twilight Sparkle’s voice echoed over the connection. “We’ve just taken the next great step forward in space exploration.”

There. That was Cherry’s cue. “ESA-11, this is CSP-22,” she said.

“Er... go ahead, CSP-22,” Applejack said, a little cautiously.

Here goes. “On behalf of the ponies and other creatures of the Changeling Space Program,” she said, “CSP-22 offers our congratulations to the Equestrian Space Agency, and we wish Amicitas further success in the remainder of its current missions and all its missions to come. I only hope I get my own chance to ride in that ship someday.”

“Um... thanks, Cherry- I mean Twenty-Two,” Applejack said.

“Yes, thanks,” Twilight said. “And from Amicitas, we wish you luck tomorrow with your orbital insertion burn around Minmus.”

“Thanks very much, Amicitas,” Cherry said. “Good luck, and I’ll be listening to the rest of your flight. CSP-22 out.”

There was a brief burst of static on the magical audio signal, and then Chrysalis’s voice, dripping the special kind of aural honey she reserved for the moments she was furious but couldn’t show it openly, said, “Twenty-two, prepare for remedial training in comms discipline when you get home.”

“Horseton, I feel exactly as ashamed as I ought to,” Cherry replied. “In the meantime, how about my bedtime story?”

“We’re going to begin tonight with...” Chrysalis’s voice took on a tone of undisguised loathing. “The Cattle-Car Fillies and the Silo Mystery, Chapter Seven.” 

Cherry smirked as she leaned back. To tell the truth, she’d outgrown the Cattle-Car fillies years and years before, but she still enjoyed the series and its four sweet, lovable, and courageous main characters (five if you counted the dog). 

And she enjoyed how the books annoyed Chrysalis even more.



Footnotes:

(395) To be blunt, CSP had all it could do to land on the correct planet, never mind the correct land mass or body of water. 

(396) Because of the sunset launch of CSP-22 and the sunrise launch of ESA-11, the launch was happening at the end of Cherry’s mission day, and it was almost bedtime from her perspective.








Back on Equus, while Cherry slept, Rainbow Dash successfully landed Amicitas again(397). The instant after the post-landing interview ended, every reporter and camerapony in the greater Baltimare area jumped onto every airship, sky chariot, and pegasus-towed cloud available and rushed south to Horseton. 

Now Cherry was awake, suited up again, and ready for orbital maneuvers, fully aware that the eyes of the world were on her, and not metaphorically. Through the tiny nosecone window she glimpsed something large, shadowy, and lumpy- the dark side of Minmus. 

She'd seen Minmus earlier. She’d gone on EVA before her rest period to take preliminary photos, to conduct certain experiments with the scientific equipment, and (to be honest) to get a little bit of elbow room. Being in a space suit floating in space was, in some small way, less claustrophobic than being out of the suit inside the Mark 1 capsule. 

But then it had been tiny. Now it was... 

... well, for a planet it was tiny, but for a thing she was flying towards it loomed like a shadowy corn puff the size of all Equestria(398).

This is real, she thought. I’m actually going to another world. It feels like I’ve left Equus altogether. That’s... really weird.

But she didn’t have time right that moment for self-contemplation. The initial orbital insertion burn was coming up in not that many minutes, and she needed to focus on stopping the ship. 

“Horseton, Twenty-two,” Cherry called out. “Coming up on ten minutes to orbital burn. Preparing to adjust attitude for burn, over.”

“We copy, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied from a million kilometers away. “Go for attitude adjustment.”

Cherry smirked. “Oooh,” she growled, “I’m an evil queen and everything makes me grumpy. Grr. Grr. I’m mean and nasty and definitely don’t read trashy romance novels and I puke up any food except vanilla cupcakes. Grr, grr, grumble mumble.”

After barely a pause, Chrysalis’s voice drawled back, “Twenty-two, we show negative, repeat no joy on attitude adjustment. We read you as still being a geeky pink pony, negative on future world conquest and subjugation of the masses, over.” Not only was she not angry, but she sounded quite amused. 

Darn. “Request permission for second attempt. I’m quite sure I could conquer some pukwudgies.”

“That’s a negative, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis drawled. “Our readings here show pukwudgies not at all impressed. Confidence of future attempts being successful is zero, repeat zero percent. By the way, burn in eight minutes, forty-five seconds mark.”

“Twenty-two copies negative on attitude adjustment,” Cherry said. “What did I do wrong?”

“You just weren’t born to it, Twenty-two. Not everyone is born to greatness like I am.”

Cherry snorted. “All right, fun over. Turning the ship now.”

“Horseton copies.”

For most of the trip out to Minmus Cherry had aimed the ship directly at the sun. This allowed the two solar panels, fitted on either side of the capsule, to both catch the light and keep the electric batteries topped off. Also, this kept the ship pointed more or less at Minmus... which meant, now, that a retrograde orbital insertion burn meant turning the ship’s nose away from both the sun and Minmus. 

The obvious consequence of this hadn’t occurred to Cherry, or anyone else, until she completed the tumble-over on reaction wheels and steadied the ship again. “Maneuver complete, ready for burn,” she said... and then noticed the electrical charge readout ticking down. “Horseton, I’m showing zero charge on the solar panels. Am I reading this right, over?”

A pause- a more significant pause than the brief pause Chrysalis had used to decide on her reaction to Cherry’s teasing. “Um, yeah. That’s affirmative, Twenty-two,” the changeling queen’s voice said, each word coming out slowly. “We, um, we don’t think that’ll affect the ship making the burn.”

“Well, what’s causing it?” Cherry asked. “I’m not in Minmus’s shadow, am I?”

Another pause. “No, you’re in your own shadow,” Chrysalis said at length. “Von Brawn tells me that the landing stage is blocking all sunlight to the solar panels. You’ll need to flip the ship back over again once the burn is complete.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Cherry Berry grumbled. “Can’t we put those panels somewhere where the rest of the ship won’t be in the way? Tell somepony to get on that, will you?”

“We’ll see what we can do, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Five minutes to orbital burn.”

Cherry acknowledged the time stamp, checked the burn duration notes on her scratch pad, and waited.

Five minutes and one short burn later, the lander was in an orbit roughly one hundred kilometers above Minmus. Two burns after that, the orbit had dropped to an apoapsis of ten kilometers by a periapsis of nine point seven kilometers. The first burn roused cheers and celebration on Equus, but Cherry heard none of it. Instead she focused on her job, performing the genuinely more dangerous second and third burns with no real fanfare. 

Then, with the ship parked as low as it was safe to go without a pilot constantly on the controls, the sciencing began.




Footnote:

(397) Almost perfectly. A little bit of thrust from the engines had been necessary to get the ship on line for the runway, but it got there as designed, wheels down and rolling on the first pass. The emergency parachutes remained undeployed. 

(398) It was actually smaller than that, in diameter at least. In terms of surface area, though, it probably dwarfed the land region where Celestia’s rule held sway.







Day Six of Mission Twenty-two began with another cherry-laden meal(399), followed by an EVA for more science experiments. This all went by routine, and two hours after waking up Cherry was back in the ship and ready for the main part of the day’s activities: temperature scans. 

The Royal Astronomical Society had commissioned CSP to perform temperature scans at various points near Minmus... and at one particular point on the surface, a highland region well away from the frozen lake beds where they’d intended to land. The procedure was risky, but at the moment the ship had enough fuel- in theory- for lots of orbital maneuvering, an attempt at landing with possible abort, and a second landing on the lakes. But the in-flight temperature scans had to be made and reported before landing, and those would take quite a lot of orbits...

... and, in a couple of cases, suborbital flights. Two of the five scans required altitudes lower than the highest point on Minmus’s surface, which meant as soon as the temperature scan was done Cherry would have to boost right back into a higher orbit to avoid a crash.

Cherry felt the sides of her mouth trying to touch her ears. She couldn’t stop grinning. I’m flying in the skies of a whole other world!! she thought to herself. I’m buzzing a planet!

Okay, not so much a planet. But it’s big and round, so it’s close enough!!

“OK, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis’s voice called out, “the second temperature scan is coming up on this orbit on the dark side of Minmus. We want you to skim the surface at fifty-one hundred meters altitude or less. Navigation data is being relayed to your nav-ball now.”

“Roger.” The first scan, a high-altitude scan, had been cleared not long after entering low orbit the previous day. “Calculating my burn now.”

After Dragonfly’s flight, Cherry had insisted on training in the use of the new on-board trajectory computer. After sim after sim wrestling with the tiny screen and the unintuitive controls, she’d been grateful for the practice, and never more so than now. On the screen she saw a little gray circle meant to be Minmus, a little glowing hoop which was her orbit, one bright pip for her current position, and a little circle indicating the target zone. That, plus a bunch of numbers which made sense to computers but not to her, was all she had to go with- that and gut instinct.(400)

Okay. So, I have to guess right about thrust and vector one-quarter of the planet away, then make any corrections while I’m in the shadow of the moon and can’t see anything, and hope I got it right, or else the last thing I’ll ever hear will be a cross between crunch and pop. 

No pressure. Literally, if I buck this up.

“Horseton, this is Twenty-two,” she said. “Going manual for suborbital flight, repeat going for suborbital flight.”

“Horseton copies. Good luck, Twenty-two.”

Cherry turned the ship, clamped her eyes on the trajectory readout, and gave the ship three seconds of ten percent thrust. The trajectory dipped, and a new marker popped up showing a new periapsis not far beyond the target zone. Four point seven kilometers. And- yes- fully above the surface, at least on this orbit. Good. 

“Okay, Horseton, burn complete, and my trajectory looks good,” Cherry said. 

“We confirm, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “We’ll keep you posted.”

Cherry relaxed in her harness and watched her altimeter counting the meters down as the ship descended. The ship had two altimeters: the orbital one, which calculated from sea level(401), and the surface altimeter, in the form of a dial gauge that twitched up and down as the rolling, uneven surface of Minmus passed below. 

That twitching gave her pause for thought. At the moment she flew above a hilly area like the hills that forced Mission R4 to leave after the briefest of touchdowns. Judging by the wild swings of the surface altimeter, some of those hills and valleys were radical enough that, here on the dark side of Minmus, she wouldn’t have any warning whatever if and when the ground reached up to swat her out of the sky. 

Don’t think about that. The computer says you’re clear. Focus on the other altimeter.

So Cherry did, as it counted down, nice and steady: fifty-seven hundred meters, fifty-six hundred meters, fifty-five hundred meters, and so on. In what seemed like no time at all it dropped below fifty-one hundred meters, just as a yellow light came on on the controls. 

“You’re entering the target zone now, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis called. “Check the thermometer.”

Cherry flipped the switch for the thermometer, then a second switch for the radio transmitter. “Sending readings now,” she said. 

Ten seconds later, the amber light turned red.

“Um, no joy on the scan, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Cycle the switches and let’s try that again.”

“No joy?” Cherry stifled any further words, reached down, and turned the thermometer and transmitter off, then back on again. The light went back to yellow. “How about now?”

“Hmm... no, it still shows negative,” Chrysalis said. A moment later, the light on Cherry’s controls turned red again. “No time for a third attempt. Get back to safe orbit and we might come back to that one later in the flight.”

Cherry grit her teeth and said, “Copy, Horseton.” A brief burst of power directly radial- that is, up and away from the surface below- would keep her away from any hidden hills the computer might not know about. Then, once she was up again, she could make a proper maneuvering burn to regain a mostly-circular eight-kilometer orbit. Easy-peasy, no problem.

But... 

As Cherry tilted the ship for the altitude-raising burn, she asked, “Horseton, I was at the right altitude and on the right spot. The thermometer and transmitter both work, right? So what’s wrong?”

“We don’t know, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “We got your signal just fine, but our computer rejected it. We’re working the problem now. For now, focus on the next temperature scan zone. It’s a high-altitude scan about three orbits from now on the light side of Minmus. That one should be simple.”

“Good.” Cherry finished putting the ship in place, goosed the engines for just a second, and then began working on a second burn in a few minutes to re-circularize her orbit. She hadn’t crashed. She’d flown the ship without incident. And that didn’t count, because she was leaving a mission goal behind her, unfinished, that she darn well ought to have had.

After the second burn, she decided to have lunch. It, of course, contained cherries.

Cherry Berry didn’t taste it.







Footnotes:

(399) Although the meal was very interesting to Cherry Berry and certain members of her family, it wasn’t interesting to anybody else. So we’re not telling you what it was, all right?(402)

(400) Needless to say, Cherry Berry knew better than to trust her gut instinct on this matter. It was the gut instinct of a naturally land-bound creature. It knew nothing of thrust-to-weight ratios, advanced calculus, or fuel consumption rates. Mostly it knew that it liked cherries and wanted some more, and while Cherry had no problem with that as such, it didn't help with calculating orbital burns.

(401) In the case of Minmus, from the surface of the frozen lakes. 

(402) All right, all right. It was tart cherry oatmeal with walnuts. And yes, she loved it.







“... that’s affirmative, Twenty-two, we show green on the temperature scan, repeat green. Good work.”

Cherry Berry snorted as she hung in her flight couch straps. Somewhere below her was the daylight side of Minmus- not that she could see it, since neither of her tiny windows pointed towards the ground. Since her ship was coasting along well above the surface, with no danger of crash and no need for maneuver, all she’d had to do was ride along and wait until the computer told her she was flying through the target zone. Fresh-picked cherries required more effort than that test. 

But at least she knew now that the test system worked. 

“Okay, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis’s voice continued, “there’s one more in-flight temperature scan to go. It’s coming up on the dark side of Minmus this orbit. The target altitude is below forty-nine hundred meters. That’s below safety limits, so be careful. We’re uploading targeting info to your computer now.”

“Okay, Horseton,” Cherry replied, reaching forward to key the trajectory computer back on. There was the zone, slowly creeping towards her current orbital trajectory on Minmus’s night side, well down on the moonlet’s southern hemisphere. A quick burn right now would probably be the best choice to get the target altitude, she thought, and so a quick flip of the ship later she gave the landing engines a couple of short, soft bursts. 

And then a couple more.

And then... Oops.

Cherry had miscalculated just a little. Yes, after the burn she now had a trajectory to come in below the ceiling for the requested temperature scan. The problem was, that same trajectory would bring her up close and personal with the floor, i. e. the frozen surface of Minmus, about three minutes later, not far from the south pole. 

The Cherry Berry who lived in Ponyville took one look at the trajectory line, which came to a clear and broad break at a certain point on the line-drawn circle on the screen, and wanted to run and scream in total panic. But here and now, with flight controls at her hooftips and plenty of air(403) between her and the ground at the moment, the Cherry Berry who flew got the overriding vote. That Cherry stopped, and studied the trajectory, and thought.

Okay, so it’s a suborbital trajectory. That’s fine. Do I have time to do something about it after the temperature scan?

Three minutes, give or take. Yes, that’s plenty of time. 

So, this is not really a problem, is it? Treat it just like the last low-altitude test. Nothing has changed.

“Twenty-two, Horseton,” Chrysalis called through Cherry’s headset. “We show you on a suborbital trajectory after that burn, over.”

“Affirmative, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said. “I’m on top of it.”

Significant pause. “We copy, Twenty-two,” the voice came at last. “Twelve minutes until target zone.”

“Roger, Horseton.”

And that, so far as Cherry was concerned, was that, aside from a moment of irritation that Chrysalis had called her attention to potential messy death a million miles from home just as she’d got the little screaming panicky voice in the back of her head muzzled. 

Fortunately, she had ten minutes to suppress her Ponyville moment(404) and get her head together. She did this by doing a mental checklist of all the readouts: altitude from zero fifty-five hundred meters and falling, altitude from surface wobbling up and down like a drunken breezie, battery showing two hundred forty-four and dropping slowly, landing stage tanks at about forty-eight percent each, view outside the hatch pitch black. Trajectory map showing directly on course for a pass through the target area marked on the map. By the time she’d checked everything, her pulse rate had dropped, and the desire to run in circles and scream for someone to save her had mostly gone away.

And- she checked the map again- she still had nine minutes to lie back and remind herself that, since she was now suborbital, she was technically flying in an alien sky again. 

The only flaw was- darn it!- she didn’t quite have enough time to dig out one of the cherry snack packs to celebrate.



Footnotes:

(403) Strictly in the metaphorical sense. Minmus had no atmosphere worth speaking of, and rolling down the window to enjoy the breeze would have been a most foolish thing to do at that point. But in the sense of, “Am I going to hit anything solid in the next five seconds?”, Cherry’s mental point was valid enough.

(404) “Ponyville moment” is Cherry Berry’s term for the urge towards mindless panic regardless of whether or not panic is either justified or helpful. The name derives from the fact that Cherry calls Ponyville home, and also from the fact that the citizens of Ponyville have had so much practice panicking at anything between Tirek’s invasion and a stampede of cute adorable bunnies that they have raised panic into a high art form. Indeed, in their secret heart of hearts, a good many Ponyville ponies secretly enjoy those moments when they can demonstrate their well-practiced craft, and those ponies consider the property destruction and risk of life a small price to pay in the name of Art.




“Twenty-two, this is Horseton,” Chrysalis said into the microphone. Midnight had come and gone, and there was a bed calling her name two buildings over(405). “That little burst of power has you good for one clean orbit.” Just barely; at one point the ship would clear a highland by only four hundred meters. “We recommend one more burn at apoapsis to raise orbit to a minimum of six thousand meters, and then free time for the remainder of your flight day.”

“Twenty-two copies.” On the telepresence screen, the helmeted face of Cherry Berry smiled, still wide awake and ready to fly. “Just give me a minute to recharge the batteries. I just crossed back into daylight.”

“Roger. Also, there’s one more high-altitude temperature scan which will happen after the overnight team comes on.” The overnight team consisted of old George Cowley in the bullpen, Gordon the Griffon at capcomm, and Dragonfly- Dragonfly, of all bugs!- as acting flight director. Not Chrysalis’s first choice, but it had been either her or Leonid the Yak, and Chrysalis would rather have dragged Carapace out of the kitchen and stuck him with the headset than put a yak in charge of not smashing things up. “You’ll get the target data on your computer before the handover.”

“Okay, Horseton,” Cherry said, her face frozen in concentration as she twitched the controls. “There, okay. I show apoapsis in fourteen minutes. Confirm?”

Chrysalis caught the tired nod from von Brawn. “We confirm, Twenty-two,” she said. 





And then she noticed something else on the big telepresence screen- on the projection of the landing ship, floating above the surface, with the glittery snowy slopes of Minmus speeding along underneath it.

There was a tiny black dot keeping pace with the ship. 

“Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said carefully, “please give us current altimeter from surface reading.”

“Altimeter from surface reading approximately four hundred forty meters,” Cherry said promptly. “You said that was safe, right?”

“Yeeeeeeessss,” Chrysalis said, not the sinister hissing yes she preferred but the uncertain, worried one she would have squelched if she wasn’t so tired. “It’s just that we can see your shadow below you. On the ground.”

“Really? Wish I could see it.” Cherry made a face in her little corner of the projection. “But I don’t think it’s worth flipping the ship over for it.”

“Well, just keep an eye on the altimeter until you make your next orbital burn, okay?” Chrysalis asked. “All of us down here will sleep better for it.”

“Aww. It’s nice to know you care, Your Highness.”

Chrysalis choked down the hisses and snarls that wanted to come out. “You-you- you just bring my ship back here in the designed number of pieces, understand?” she barked. “I don’t want to have to waste two weeks going up there to rescue you if you screw up!”

“I like you too, Horseton,” Cherry said. The projection showed a big, toothy grin on the wall. 

Chrysalis wanted to throw a brick through it. A big brick.




Footnote:

(405) And also the newest masterwork from Ruffly Crinoline, Paperwork Passions, about an attractive young mare who lusted for a study certified public accountant while the humble but diligent Department of Wagon Vehicles worker attempted to prove his own love. Forty-pound triple-layer dresses were somehow involved, including the removal thereof. Chrysalis was looking forward to threatening with death the first changeling who caught her reading it.




Time passed. Mission Twenty-two made several more loops around the bedazzling pale sphere far, far above Equus. On Equus the sun was raised(406) and set(407). 

And then the silence of space was broken by a squeaky voice: “Horseton, Twenty-two, comms check.”

“We read you, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied. “Good morning, and you’re go for a landing today. Stand by for some housekeeping details.”

“Good to hear, Horseton.” Cherry Berry fumbled around the cabin for the notepad and wax pencil. “Ready.”

Separated by a million kilometers, Chrysalis and Cherry exchanged a checklist’s worth of little chores- trash and waste disposal, ship maintenance checks, final procedures before the landing began. “And finally,” Chrysalis said, “if there’s fuel left in the landing stage, we want you to go for a second landing in different terrain. After the second landing, you come home. We’ve decided to send a robot for the temperature scan that got missed.”

“Did you figure out what went wrong with that?” Cherry asked. 

“Transcription error,” Chrysalis said. “The mission specs, and the computer program provided, had the temperature scan down as above the target altitude. The protocols we wrote up for you, and for us here in mission control, listed it as below target altitude. It’ll take a couple of days for another try in your current orbit, and we don’t want to mess with that or leave you there that long. So we’ll send a robot. This is your third day up there. It’s going to be a longer trip back than you had going. We want you down as soon as possible, Twenty-two. Understood?”

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry said. “Scrub on further in-flight temperature scans. What about the surface scan?”

“That’s still on. The landing site for the temperature scan comes up tomorrow morning our time- about dinner time on the mission clock. So we want to attempt that first.”

“Really? I thought the plan was to take the safe landing zone first, on the lake.”

“We changed our minds. We figure if you have to abort the first landing, there will still be fuel for a second one. If you abort the second one- or if you have to make a second pass at it- you might not have fuel to get home afterwards. So you’re going to the south polar highlands first.”

“Okay, Twenty-two copies.”

“I want- we want to make this clear, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said firmly. “If something goes wrong, even a little, you abort. We don’t want you to put the second landing at risk.”

“No problem, Horseton,” Cherry said. “I know what to do.”

A prolonged silence crossed between the worlds. 

“Okay, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said at last. “You have free time until 1430 mission clock. At that point we go through the final descent checklist.” Pause. “Good luck, Twenty-two.”

“Roger, Horseton, and thanks.”

A little metal can connected to three bombs floated around a gigantic ball of ice, again and again, high above a distant blue planet the size of a hackberry.




Footnotes:

(406) Again, strictly from the perspective of ponies standing on the surface. What really happened was that an alicorn’s magic held the planet and everything on it and nudged its rotation a little bit. This required less magic than actually moving a class G0 star, but it still qualified as a major miracle. Other species thought the fact that ponies took this miracle for granted twice a day said all any other species ever needed to know about ponies.

(407) The same as above, except that whereas most ponies regard footnote #406 with reluctance and a mug of something caffeinated, most ponies greet this footnote with celebration and relief, and occasionally a nice garden wine.







At Mission Elapsed Time 158:42 on the capsule’s clock, Cherry Berry fired the engines- not a short burst like her prior orbital adjustments, but a long, full-throttle burn. Below her- almost, but not quite, directly below- lay the target landing zone, where the Royal Astronomical Society had requested surface readings for whatever reason. The highlands of Minmus rolled up and down- not with the suddenness of the areas immediately next to the frozen lakes, but a more gentle gradient that, Faust willing, would allow a relatively level landing.

In fact, Cherry noted as she looked out the hatch porthole at the surface below, the surface looked pretty flat from up here. Flat, and glittery, sparkling all sorts of colors here on the daylight side, colors that blurred together into the general aqua-gray that one saw from farther away. 

But she could only look for a second- just long enough to verify that the terrain was safe for landing. Cherry committed her glance to memory, then turned her attention back to her instruments, which she would need for the rest of the landing. The ship would land in the same position it launched in, which meant Cherry would be lying on her back in the flight couch... in a position where she couldn’t possibly see the ground beneath her. That meant relying on three instruments: the speed indicator(408), the altimeter from surface, and the nav-ball and its indications of ship orientation, prograde and retrograde vectors, and angle of attack.

The speed indicator whirred down closer and closer to zero. The idea, in theory, was to bring the ship to a complete stop in relation to Minmus’s surface, currently fourteen hundred meters below. This would allow a vertical drop that would allow a controlled level landing, In practice, Cherry wanted to allow a little bit of drift, since she’d have to use the engines to slow the final part of the descent anyway. That last burn would let her kill any remaining lateral motion and, at the same time, keep Minmus’s weak gravity from hauling her down too quickly and smashing the spindly little landing legs(409).





“Horseton, Twenty-two,” she said, shutting down the engines and returning momentarily to free-fall, “deorbit burn complete, entering landing phase. Please confirm proper landing zone.”

“Stand by, Twenty-two.”

Cherry’s ears would have flipped backwards in annoyance if they hadn’t been covered by her spacesuit headset. “Horseton, be advised that gravity has something to say about my ability to ‘stand by.’ Am I in the right place, affirmative or negative?”

“Negative,” Chrysalis’s voice grumbled. “We’re trying to figure out why. Do the best you can with your on-board systems.”

“Negative??” Cherry checked the plot on her trajectory indicator. “Horseton, the map says I’m right on the money! How small is this zone I’m supposed to hit?”

“We’re working the problem, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Do what you can with your computer, but don’t risk the landing over it. If it feels unsafe, abort.”

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry grumbled back. “One thousand meters and descending, mark.” She looked closer at the trajectory plot. The screen was tiny, and it showed only thin and kind of wobbly lines and two markers practically on top of one another. But... maybe she was a little west of the zone? “Adjusting descent.” She tipped the ship a bit, fired the engines for a few seconds, noting her descent speed slowing even as her retrograde vector momentarily vanished from the top of the nav-ball. “Eight hundred meters and descending at twenty meters per second and accelerating. Descent stage fuel at thirty-seven percent.”

“We copy, Twenty-two.”

Cherry found the retrograde marker on the ball, reoriented the ship until it lined up with the top of the ball, and waited for a little while. The speed readout slowly ticked upwards, as the marker crawled very slowly up the nav-ball. Finally, at five hundred meters, Cherry kicked the engines back on, wiggling the ship a little to kill the lateral momentum again. “Horseton, if I’m not in the zone now, something’s way wrong. I’m committing to landing, and if it works, fine. If not, we’ll send a probe.”

“We don’t get it either,” Chrysalis admitted. “We show you as go for landing. Be sure to null out your lateral way before landing.”

“Roger.” Cherry kept the engines firing, just above their lowest setting, which gradually decelerated the ship. “Three hundred meters and falling at fifteen meters per second,” she reported. 





“Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied, in a tone of voice that suggested that the speaker thought the listener had missed the previous statement, “we’re still showing a bit of lateral drift. A lot of lateral drift, in fact.”

“Throttling up,” Cherry said. “Two hundred meters and falling at eight meters per second. Retrograde vector’s on top of the ball, Horseton.”

A long silent pause, in which Cherry imagined she could hear echoes of voices other than Chrysalis’s over the comms channel. Then the changeling queen’s voice came through, sharp and clipped: “Confirm nav-ball set to surface mode, repeat confirm nav-ball set to surface! Over!”

Cherry checked her altitude- one hundred fourteen meters, three and a half meters per second descent speed- and then she saw it.

The speed indicator said: Orbital - 3.5 m/s.

The nav-ball and its built-in computer had different functions for orbital, surface flight, and target modes. Part of the checklist immediately prior to the descent burn had been to switch the ball to surface mode- but either she’d hit the wrong switch or, somehow, the computer had switched the nav-ball back on its own. (Which was entirely possible, since the system was built to auto-switch in Equus’s upper atmosphere, during launch and re-entry.)

Cherry hit the switch, and her eyes widened with shock as the speed indicator went from Orbital - 3.3 m/s to Surface - 23.8 m/s. At the same time, the retrograde marker flashed from the top of the ball to the far left-hand side of it.

Mission 22 wasn’t slowly dropping to the surface. It was skimming just barely above the surface- the surface Cherry couldn’t see beneath her- at over fifty miles an hour, as fast as the Friendship Express on the flat land between Ponyville and the base of Mt. Canter.(410) At this speed, if the ship so much as touched a rock sticking above ground level, it would rip itself to shreds in the resulting crash. 





“Abort, abort, abort!” Cherry shouted, goosing the throttle to full for one second of direct vertical thrust. The retrograde marker vanished, and the prograde marker appeared not far from the top of the ball. 

For a moment, part of Cherry prepared to go into full Ponyville Moment mode. 

And then the pilot in her said: Okay, we were waved off the runway and we’re circling around. How can we stick the landing this time?

First thing first: kill that lateral motion. Now that the nav-ball and speed indicator were in the correct mode, this was a simple enough matter, and a little soft burn of the descent engines put the prograde marker at the top of the ball. A few moments later, it flickered off the ball, replaced by the retrograde marker. She was falling again. 

Second: reconfirm safe landing zone. Cherry tipped the ship over again so she could see out the hatch window. Glittering green-gray snow filled the tiny porthole. She saw no shadows to speak of, no rocks, nothing that showed anything other than a safe landing area. 

Third: the wheels go towards the ground. Or the legs, in this case. Having seen what she needed to see, Cherry righted the craft, ticking the engines back on to slow her second descent. The retrograde marker stayed on the point of the ball.

Fourth: report in. “Horseton, Twenty-two,” Cherry said, “I’ve evaluated the problem and taken corrective action. Fuel at twenty-two percent, altitude three hundred fifty meters and descending at five point four meters per second. Zero lateral way, repeat zero lateral way.”

“We confirm, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Are you sure you want to make a second attempt? We still have the fuel for a landing at the lakes.”

“But I’m here, now,” Cherry replied. “Three hundred meters and descending. It’ll only take a little more fuel to put the bird down.”

“All right, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied. “Just be careful. We’re seeing some steep hills on the horizon.”

“Looked flat from in here,” Cherry said. 

“Just be careful.” Pause. “I want that ship back, you know.”

“Two hundred meters. Slowing down a little.”

Cherry kept glancing between the altimeter and the speed indicator. Coming down too slowly meant wasted fuel, but any landing faster than five meters per second risked breaking the landing legs. So she watched the fuel levels drop on the indicator, watched the altimeter sink below one hundred meters, then fifty meters. 

“Twenty-two, Horseton,” Chrysalis’s voice broke into her concentration. “We’re seeing a bit of a slope beneath you.”

“Roger.” Cherry barely gave the information a thought. She had to concentrate on the speed, keeping the retrograde vector on top of the ball, dropping the ship between three and four meters per second, preparing to kill the engines when she felt the ship make contact. 

Twenty... ten... five-

Contact. 

The ship settled a bit forwards, and the sun flashed across the hatch window.

“Touchdown,” Cherry declared. “Engine shutdown.”

The engines shut off. 

And then, very, very slowly, the tipping motion continued. 

And continued.

And kept right on continuing.

Mission Twenty-two flopped onto its belly, rocking a little bit, and then settling to rest on the side of a very steep hill in the Minmus midlands. 

Cherry, now seated upright instead of on her back, waited for all movement to stop completely. She made a quick check of the instruments, saw no indication of a hull breach or any significant damage to the engines, batteries or fuel tanks, and breathed a sigh of relief. The good news was, she still had a fully functional ship.

The bad news was, the ship was not only on its side, its nose now pointed downslope- a position rocket ships are generally not designed to launch from.

“Horseton, this is Mission Twenty-two,” Cherry said. “One pony, down safe. But I think we can skip the stay-no stay checklist...”







Footnotes:

(408) Calculated based on radio pings from the orbiting R4 communications relay satellite. The older version of the system had calculated speed from Horseton  Space Center, but that was now five light-seconds away and, moreover, on the other side of Minmus, and thus not available. The computer instructions that allowed this to work were among George Bull’s most complex work yet, since they relied partly on continual radar of the surface and radio signals from a constantly moving object overhead. The system took over half of the capsule’s tiny computing machine’s runtime by itself, and most of the rest of its runtime now consisted of communicating this data with the trajectory calculation computer and the backup Probodobodyne autopilot in the compartment just beneath the capsule. 

(409) And, more important, the rest of the ship as well, including its lone crewpony.

(410) Also (and this number was more relevant to Cherry at the moment) only a touch slower than the required takeoff speed for her biplane. Had she had wheels under her and some practical way of seeing where she was going, she wouldn’t have worried. The fact that she was landing on legs, blind, with only instruments to guide her, rendered the analogy worthless for purposes of not scattering her internal organs across another world in the upcoming five seconds, and so she stuck with the train comparison.


 





On Mission Control’s telepresence screen, a giant image of Cherry Berry planting the changeling flag on the surface of Minmus gave the VIPs and press in the gallery something to talk about and take photos of. Despite the crash (411) Cherry had been sent out to perform the various scientific experiments and the flag-planting ceremony because... well, why not? The ship and its equipment were there and working fine, and (by a stroke of luck) it had landed hatch side up, so there wasn’t any reason why that part of the mission shouldn’t go ahead. 

The question now was, as the controllers huddling around the bullpen knew, whether or not there would be any mission after that.

The slope had been a lot steeper even than the control crew had thought when they saw it on the screen. Even so, based on their experience with Mission R4, the reaction wheels ought to have been enough to keep the ship, if not upright, at least standing. The tipping point (literally) came when two of the six landing legs- the two facing downslope, and thus taking almost all the weight of the ship- had retracted under the strain. The ship had tipped faster than the automatic systems could compensate, with the result that it now lay on the alien snow like a dead fish.

“So, they’re broken, then,” Chrysalis said, stating the fact. 

“Not necessarily,” von Brawn rumbled. “Those two legs are retracted, but they’re not visibly broken. Nor do they read as broken on our telemetry.”

“Which might just mean our telemetry is broken, too,” Goddard the Griffon snapped.

“Well, we could ask Cherry to look and see if they look broken,” Occupant said. “I mean, they look fine from here, but maybe she’d see something up close? And if she doesn’t, then maybe that means they’re safe to use?”

“We’d have to re-extend them,” von Brawn said. “And that’s something I don’t recommend with tons of metal sitting on top of them.”

“All right,” Chrysalis said. She walked back to the capcom station in the back row of desks, levitated her headset back onto her head, and said, “Twenty-two, Horseton. Before you begin the flight tests on the suit thruster system, we’d like you to do a visual inspection of the two collapsed landing legs, over.”

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry said. “And while I’m on, for the record, the surface lighting here really fooled me. The snow crystals here reflect sunlight everywhere- scatter it. It’s really disorienting. That plus the low gravity fooled me into thinking this area was flat and level. It really isn’t. If I’d seen it from this angle, I’d never have attempted a landing.”

“We’re going to have to think about that for the moon landing,” Chrysalis replied. “The moon’s gravity is a good bit greater than Minmus’s. If something like this happened there, it wouldn’t be a soft flop-over.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, too. We can’t send a robot lander here. The same thing will happen to it. We need to land something with wheels someplace safe, something that can drive itself up here. More work for Goddard and Dr. von Brawn.”

“One thing at a time, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Let’s get you down from there first.” 

On the telepresence screen, Cherry wobbled and hopped her way back to the stricken ship. “I don’t see anything obviously wrong with this landing leg,” she said, stooping down so she could see under the port landing engine. “Can’t really tell for sure from this angle, but nothing seems to be actually bent or anything.”

After a look at the other side returned the same non-result, Chrysalis ordered Cherry to take her thruster systems for a flight, took off her headset, and returned to the huddle. “Well?” she asked. “Clear as mud, isn’t it?”

“Indeed so,” von Brawn said. “Even if the legs can be extended, we won’t know if they’ll hold weight unless we try them again. That means another landing.”

“Okay. What about another landing? Is there enough fuel left?”

“Barely,” Goddard said. “We’ll have to dip into the return stage supply. I’d say hang it and bring her home, except that we’ll have to go back again to get a successful landing. That is the whole point of this exercise- getting practice at landing something someplace without a parachute.”

“This assumes that we can launch from this position in the first place,” von Brawn said. “If our planned procedure fails, then we’re going to have to send a rescue mission, and we’ll have twelve days to get it there. Five days at most for assembly, testing and simulations.”

And that, Chrysalis knew, was cutting corners too much.(412) “The only way that works is if I fly it myself,” she said. “I’m the only one who’s had sim time on this flight besides the pony. Which means we’ll need a ship that seats two.”

von Brawn shrugged. “Add tourist cabin, subtract science equipment,” he said. “It’ll be a wash in terms of weight.”

“Nah,” Goddard said, shaking his head. “We’re finally getting the next generation engines off the production line, and we have the prototype three-crew capsule ready to fly. We build a new ship from scratch and throw away the plans for the bundle of sticks design.”

“But we don’t know how the new systems will perform in flight yet,” von Brawn protested. “Do we really want to have the testing flight be a rescue mission involving both our lead pilots?”

“Um, excuse me.” Occupant finally spoke up. “But shouldn’t we see if we can get Twenty-two flying again first? I think the plan’s a good one, based on what we saw with R4.” When Chrysalis turned her head to look at him, he added, “Of course, I could be wrong, my queen.”

“Occupant.”

“Yes, my queen?”

“You have my permission to quit being a total welcome mat for five minutes and be in charge of this room like you’re supposed to be,” Chrysalis said.

“Oh. Um... Well...” Occupant looked around the others, and then said, “Well, Miss Cherry’s done with everything except the thruster pack test. We might as well get her off the surface now. Besides, she’s been up for sixteen hours now. She’ll be getting tired, and she’ll have to land the ship again or commit to returning home before she can rest, unless we leave her there overnight.”

von Brawn shook his head. “Inadvisable,” he said. “The solar panels are only picking up a trickle of energy at this angle. If we wait overnight, the batteries will drain and she really will be stranded.”

“Okay, then,” Occupant said, sounding a little more decisive. “Let’s get Miss Cherry back in the ship and see about getting her in the air, okay?”




Footnote:

(411) Even if it’s a ludicrously slow crash, even if nothing actually breaks, if it ends with your vehicle in a position neither you nor its designers ever intended it should assume, it’s still a crash. 

(412) Believe it or not, there are actually safety margins beyond which even the Changeling Space Program will not push... mostly, anyway.




“Okay,” Cherry said, strapping herself into the flight couch as the cabin repressurized, “I’m back in the capsule and strapping in. What’s the plan?”

After a moment of dead air, Chrysalis’s voice echoed in her headset. “You remember how R4 was able to stay upright despite never having all its feet on the ground?”

“Yeah,” Cherry said. “The reaction wheels. It would’ve fallen over if Dragonfly had turned off the stability assist.”

“Precisely. We want you to activate SAS and pull back on the stick. We think the reaction wheels on full spin will put enough torque on the ship to lift it upright in Minmus’s low gravity. If that doesn’t work, we want you to start the engines on lowest power and try to get the nose up on engine gimbal. If you get the ship up even a little bit, blast for space as soon as you think you can clear the ground. Copy that, Twenty-two?”

Cherry considered this for a moment. “Horseton, did the scientists suggest this plan?”

Chrysalis’s voice lost a good bit of its professional poise. “As a matter of fact, yes, they did, Twenty-two. What makes you think otherwise?”

“Because this plan ranks right up there with the lawn chair on the trash can full of fireworks,” Cherry replied without hesitation. “I mean, how happy would you be if you were sitting where I am now?”(413)

“Twenty-two, your options are this procedure or sitting tight where you are for twelve days while we throw together a rescue mission to come get you,” Chrysalis growled. “Which do you prefer? Over!”

Cherry Berry considered the options. Well... the ship barely bounced when it flopped over... and I didn’t see any damage when I was outside... but would that remain the case if I try to launch with the ship’s nose pointing downslope?

But... no, no buts. I still have a fully functional ship under me. If I didn’t at least try to get home under my own power, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

“Okay, let’s do this, then,” she finally said. “I’d have to unsuit to use a pencil, so let’s just use your checklist there, okay?”

“That’s better,” Chrysalis said, and then her voice was all calm, professional astromare again. “First, consumables status.”

“Descent stage tanks show eighteen percent full,” Cherry reported. “Return stage full and untouched. Batteries read two-twenty-four and falling at zero point zero two per second. Negligible flow from solar panels. Do you want a count of my food packs?”

“Negative. Next, order all landing gear to retract to stowed position, over.”

“Retract landing gear, roger.” Cherry reached up and flipped a switch. A soft clanking echoed through the capsule, and the ship shifted slightly as its center of balance altered. “Gear retracted.”

“Confirm gear retracted,” Chrysalis said. “Activate SAS and reaction wheels.”

Cherry flipped a couple more switches. Behind her the soft sound of the reaction wheels rose to life. “SAS engaged.”

“Confirm SAS setting to maintain attitude.”

“SAS to maintain attitude, confirm.”

“Do NOT, repeat, do NOT activate engines,” Chrysalis said, “but set throttle to three percent.”

“Throttle to three percent, roger.” Cherry adjusted the throttle carefully. 

“All right,” Chrysalis said. “In your own time, you are to attempt to right the ship on reaction wheel power, or failing that on main engine power. If you get the ship upright, you are to throttle up and attempt liftoff. If you can’t get nose up with ten percent thrust, or if the ship slide on the ground faster than eight meters per second, you are to shutdown and await rescue. Copy?”

“Twenty-two copies attempt righting ship on reaction wheels, then on main engines. Shut down if no result at ten percent thrust or if ship slides on the ground at eight meters per second. Over.”

“Okay, Twenty-two, you are go for attempted liftoff.”

“Right,” Cherry muttered. She took a deep breath, then grit her teeth and pulled the control stick towards herself with both forehooves. Behind her the reaction wheels whined to life, the high-pitched down echoing through her suit helmet. 





And, after the briefest hesitation, the light and shadow from the overhead sun began to shift. Through the tiny forward porthole she saw the surface of Minmus fall out of view. Slowly- with the kind of slowness Cherry associated with ponies trying to pick out produce in Ponyville’s farmer’s market(414), the ship was indeed righting itself. 

She relaxed her grip on the stick to reach one hoof over to the throttle. That proved a minor mistake, as the nose, now well off the surface, stopped rising and began dropping again. She pulled back hard again, held her breath until the ship stopped falling and began rising again, and waited until it was about twenty degrees off the vertical. Then, as quickly as she could, she reset the throttle to fifteen percent and ignited the engines. 

She felt the rumble of the engines through the ship, felt their force gently caress her back through the flight couch and spacesuit backpack. She watched the altimeter counting up, noticed the prograde marker appearing on the navball, let out her held breath as the airspeed indicator ratcheted up. 

And then, after only a few seconds of thrust, she cut the engines and let the ship coast upward on a ballistic trajectory. “Twenty-two is flying,” she said. “Requesting orders. Where do I go next, over?”

“That depends, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied immediately. “We want you to redeploy the landing gear.”

“Okay.” So, she thought, the second landing isn’t off yet. Just as well I didn’t throttle up and head for home right off. She reached up, flipped the switch, and listened as the landing gear clanked open and then locked back into place. “Landing gear deployed, confirm.”





“Please confirm six green lights on landing gear.”

Cherry checked the indicators, then the flight computer. “Six green lights, no damage error messages, over,” she reported. 

“We confirm, Twenty-two. Stand by.” 

There followed a long pause, during which Cherry watched the airspeed drop and the altimeter’s rise slow. Minmus’s feeble gravity was catching up with her, and before long she’d have to fire the engines again. After what she thought was enough time(415) she said, “Horseton, Twenty-two, requesting trajectory guidance, over.”

“Stand by, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said shortly, and another few seconds passed. Then, finally, she said, “Twenty-two, come around to due north and fly overland to a frozen lake bed some two hundred kilometers away. You are go, repeat go, for second landing. We want you to land as close to the shoreline as you feel is safe, over.”

“Twenty-two copies, Horseton.” Cherry brought the ship’s nose around and down and then, careful to keep a bit of vertical angle in her trajectory, opened the throttle. 

We got away with it.

If they ever make a statue of me once I get home, I want that carved in the pedestal.



Footnotes:

(413) This argument won no sympathy from Chrysalis, who believed (a) she never would have got herself in that predicament in the first place, (b) the question was irrelevant because she wasn’t there, and (c) if Cherry Berry wanted down from Minmus this was the only plan that might do it short of a rescue mission. The fact that (d) the very notion of doing herself what she’d just ordered Cherry to do sent a momentary shudder of raw terror down her spine meant absolutely nothing, really.

(414) Another pony might have mentioned glaciers, especially considering the location. But Cherry Berry had a peeve about picky ponies who wanted to select a single perfectly fresh cherry (or other, less worthy, fruit) and buy only that. Cherry herself loved almost all cherries equally, wasn’t all that picky, and had had to bite her lip many times to avoid hissing, “Grab and move,” or, “Get outta the line,” at the ponies in front of her. 

(415) Only about sixteen actual seconds, according to the flight log, but the passage of time to a pony suspended in the nonexistent air over a desolate snowball a million kilometers from home, kept in that position only by momentum and happy thoughts, bears no resemblance to the passage of time recorded on a piece of paper.








“Descent stage at five percent,” Cherry Berry’s voice echoed through Mission Control. “Lateral speed at sixty meters per second and falling.”

“Twenty-two, remember,” Chrysalis said at a frantic wave from Goddard’s talon, “we want this landing to touch down at below three meters per second. Below three meters, do you copy?”

“Twenty-two copies. Landing stage burnout.” Short pause, and then Cherry continued, “Return engine activated. And shutdown. Lateral speed at five meters per second. Altitude fourteen hundred meters and fall... and descending.”

“A reminder, Twenty-two. You are to abort landing and enter orbit if fuel hits fifty percent in the return stage.” That took care of another frantic wave, this one from Marked Knee in the bullpen.

“I remember, Horseton,” Cherry’s voice replied. “That’s why I shut down the engine. The closer I am to hover thrust, the more I’m wasting fuel, right? If I wait until the last moment and then brake all at once, I use the least fuel possible. Isn’t that right?”

Chrysalis looked down in the bullpen and saw four minotaurs and a griffon each make a different gesture of helplessness. Yes, that’s true, but...! “The thing is...” Chrysalis stopped and made herself do it properly. “Twenty-two, please be advised that if you get it wrong, you’re committing suicide.” 

Gasps erupted from the observation gallery. Drat. Shouldn’t have gone there, not in public. Some newspaper pony or, worse yet, television talking head just got a quote to use to attack CSP as too risky, too eager to risk a pony life for changeling glory. But... nothing to be done about that now.

“Then I better not get it wrong, huh? One thousand meters and descending.”

Chrysalis looked at the estimated air velocity. Weak though Minmus’s gravity was, any rate of acceleration, left unchecked, just kept on building up more and more speed. Mission 22 wasn’t dropping like a brick, exactly, but it certainly wasn’t a feather either. “You’re really picking up speed there, Twenty-two,” she said.

“I’m watching it,” Cherry replied. “Looks like five hundred meters is the sweet spot.”

Chrysalis looked at the bulls, who had gathered around their blinky-light calculating machine. None of them was looking at her now. None of them had a signal for her, not the slightest bit of guidance. Even Goddard had his beak in, rather than looking at her or Occupant.

And time for countervailing advice ran out, much quicker than Chrysalis liked. 

“Throttle to full... ignition!” 

Chrysalis watched the telepresence projection, holding her breath as the single remaining functional engine did its feeble best to bring the falling ship to a stop before the ice did. The airspeed indicator fell, numbers ticking down not remotely fast enough for the changeling queen’s liking. Despite her strongest silent orders for them to slow down faster, they ignored her supreme authority and ticked down on their own timetable. 

And the altimeter ticked down... four hundred... three hundred... two hundred fifty... two hundred... one hundred seventy.. 

“Throttling back.”

At ninety meters the descent speed indicator hit three meters per second. Gingerly, cautiously, it drifted down to two point five, then ticked back up to three, then down to two point seven. 

“Fifty meters.”

Chrysalis knew she should be talking, should be saying something, ought at least to be calling back information to the pony. But words wouldn’t come. After the first botched landing, after that ridiculous suicide burn, the power of speech had stepped out for coffee and cupcakes(416). 

“Twenty meters.”

The airspeed indicator trickled down a little more, wavering between one point five and two meters per second. Then it dripped again as Cherry let it slow to one point two meters per second. The retrograde marker, dead on top of the navball on the telepresence projection, flickered in and out.

“Contact! Shutdown!”

On the projection screen the lander stood on a perfectly level plain of crystalline ice. All six feet stood firmly on the surface, with no sign of a wobble or collapse.

“SAS off. Backup systems off. Cockpit secure.”

Chrysalis slowly, carefully released her lungful of air, careful not to breathe into the headset microphone. “Twenty-two,” she said, cautiously testing her vocal cords, “we copy you down.”

“Affirmative, Horseton,” the pony’s voice squeaked back at her. “How about we go down that stay / no stay checklist this time?”

Chrysalis considered this a moment. “Well,” she finally said, “just because you asked.”





Footnote:

(416) Cupcakes were on the very, very short list of foods that Chrysalis ate willingly. One cupcake almost perfectly equaled the actual capacity of her stomach. Most cupcakes were baked with love and lusted after by ponies, especially juvenile ponies with their intense emotions, and thus provided nourishment on more than one level. And even if Chrysalis hadn’t liked them, she’d have learned to like them anyway, because ponies got intensely suspicious of any pony who, for any reason whatever, didn’t like cupcakes. Ponies would forgive kicking a dog(417) before they’d forgive snubbing a cupcake.

(417) Which Chrysalis had done, in various disguises, on multiple occasions. It just felt so satisfying to see the innocent betrayal on those canine faces...





Cherry zipped along above Minmus’s frozen surface at a brisk twenty meters per second, her shadow trailing after her some ten ponylengths below her. She hadn’t slept in twenty-two hours, but she didn’t feel even the slightest bit tired or drowsy- not with her heart fluttering in her chest and her smile threatening to unzip the top of her head from the rest of her body.

Spacewalking with the thruster pack in orbit was one thing. But this? Flying not that far above a solid ground with the same jetpack? Flying at a speed about as fast as the average pony could gallop? This was flying, the real and true thing, or as close as Cherry could ever expect to get.

If and when she got to the moon, she’d get to do this again. It’d be a bit more difficult- according to the boffins, the expected surface gravity on the moon would be a little more than three times the gravity here on Minmus. The suit thrusters could handle that, if she didn’t have a big lunch, but she’d be down-thrusting almost constantly to maintain altitude. Something to bear in mind when the time came for training and simulations on moon-walking. 

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. She had to tap the downward-facing thrusters every two seconds or so for a burst to keep her more or less at altitude. Aside from that, she would coast forward indefinitely, there being no air to slow her down. Turning... well, she could apply lateral thrust to change her trajectory, but actually changing which direction she faced required a brief shutdown of manual control, which would mean she’d begin dropping out of the sky. She wouldn’t drop fast- not at first- but she was at that magic altitude where she wouldn’t have enough time to correct before hitting the ground at fifteen meters per second forward and maybe five or six meters per second down. She hadn’t done the math, but she could figure it wouldn’t be a fun experience.

Time to start slowing down, then, before she tested the limits of her suit's durability by whacking it with a moon.

Ahead of her the coastline of the frozen lake slid towards her, then underneath her. She’d reached her destination- a second source of material samples from Minmus’s surface, to be bagged and brought back to Equus for analysis. She’d already taken samples from around the ship, while she was running the last of the on-board experiments and transferring the data and samples from them into the capsule for the trip home. 

“Okay,” she said aloud for the benefit of Mission Control back home, “I’m above the target area. Reversing thrust.” She popped the downward thrusters an extra hard burst, sending herself up and giving herself the time and altitude she needed to fire the forward thrusters and brake herself(418). The first braking burst brought her down to nine meters per second. A quick altitude-maintaining puff later, she braked again, slowing herself down to six meters per second. After another downward thrust, she braked hard, letting herself begin to fall as her trajectory on the suit’s mini-navball shifted to the vertical. 

A couple more puffs later, she was more or less stationary. Satisfied, she let herself fall, keeping the drop below one and a half meters per second. Even so, it still felt like she’d jumped off a wall when she hit the ground, and the slope beneath her hind hooves almost caused her to flop over backwards. 

One thing astromare training does, it gets you used to walking on hind hooves, she thought to herself. Since her mouth was sealed in her helmet(419), any interactions she had with the world outside her suit had to be done with her forehooves, which meant she couldn’t waste them by just standing around on them. It had taken a lot of practice(420) to learn how to open a bag, scoop a pristine surface sample into it, and seal the bag using only hooves clad inside spacesuit booties, but now, as Cherry took the samples in just a couple of minutes, it had been worth every hour of fumbling and flopping over back home.

“Okay, samples secured,” she said. “I’m getting ready to return to the ship now.” 





With the bags secured to her belt, Cherry, still on her hind hooves, paused a moment to look back the way she’d come. A tiny, tiny fleck of metal in the distance was bracketed on the inside of her helmet, along with a second bracket for the flag she’d planted on site. Beneath both brackets read the distance: 1.2 kilometers. 

The ship was almost on the horizon, and yet it stood not quite a mile away. 

Huh. That’s kinda strange, Cherry thought, and filed the thought for later. She wasn’t sleepy at the moment, but she expected she’d be out like a light once she got on the flight couch for her sleep period. It had been a very long day, and she still had one bit of fancy flying to do. 

She activated the suit thruster pack, sent herself up into the airless air, and fired hard for the ship. This time, with the confidence of experience and the urgency of an experienced pilot well into sleep deficit, she allowed her speed to get up to twenty-five meters per second. To compensate she drifted higher into the air (421) to give herself plenty of room to fall when she slammed on the brakes.





In a little more than a minute she did just that, having covered the return trip in less than a third the time she’d taken on her more cautious outbound hop. There was the ship ahead of her and below here, and there came the forward thrusters, pushing her back like an insistent bouncer at a Manehattan dance club. Slowed, she puffed herself back up to altitude, let herself drift closer to the ship, and then braked again. She drifted again, giving the down thrusters occasional bursts to take herself a little higher, as she drifted just past the ship.

Then she tweaked the controls to face backwards, and the automatic stability system took control of the thrusters to turn her whole suit around, letting her begin to drop in the process. It took a good three seconds before the system shut down and restored manual control, but that was fine by her; she still had plenty of space between her and the surface below...

... the surface she didn’t intend to touch again. There in front of her, and below, was the hatch, with its ladder made of giant staples sticking out below it. She let herself drop, tapping the control sticks to nudge the thrusters forward, then left, then a touch to the right, all the while letting herself drop at a very slow, careful, and semi-steady rate. 

“Twenty-two, comms check,” Chrysalis’s voice echoed in her headset. 

“Stand by,” she replied automatically. She couldn’t spare the attention now. What she was trying was tricky enough in orbit. In a hover above the surface, with the target totally stationary, there was even less margin for error. Right... down... level off... left... back off... too much back off, forward again... a little right... level off... easy... easy...

The rungs came within reach. Cherry stretched a hind hoof forward first, then grabbed with both forehooves as her hind hoof found purchase on the ladder. The thruster pack controls slid back and up into the suit backpack, and the thrusters shut down, and Cherry felt the meager weight provided by Minmus gravity on her limbs as she hung just below the ship’s hatch, a good five ponylengths above the surface.

She could have just jumped up from the surface- the ship had been designed with that expectation- but she had more fun this way. 

But fun time was over. Time to go inside, stow the samples, repressurize the capsule, shuck her suit, and get some sleep before she headed for home.

After all, it had been a very, very long Mission Day 7.



Footnotes:

(418) Without breaking herself.

(419) And a good thing too, or else the phrase “scenery that takes your breath away” would have had a much more grim implication.

(420) And some very special and cleverly designed bags, designed by Twilight Sparkle specifically for the purpose.

(421) Not at all difficult. The suit thrusters didn’t throttle- they were either on or off. That made actual hovering or proper level altitude impossible- thus the occasional burst of thrust instead of steady firing. As Cherry discovered in her first surface test, the instinct to fire those thrusters the instant she started falling meant that she spent more time going up than coming down. Thus, the longer she flew, the higher she got, bit by bit, until she noticed the trend and forced herself to lose a little bit of altitude to compensate. 





“Okay,” Chrysalis said, cuddling her third coffee cup of the morning close to her body as she leaned over the CAPCOM station in the pre-dawn hour at Horseton.(422) “Twenty-two, ready for final pre-launch checklist.”

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry’s voice replied. She’d got seven hours of sleep in and then had lectured the graveyard shift of controllers about the desirability of launching while the ship was still in sunlight. The main control team had been awakened(423), and gradually, groggily, procedures were getting run through. It was almost enough to make Twilight Sparkle’s maniacal obsession with checklists seem worthwhile.

“Engine status?”

“Fuel pumps show ready, throttle at zero, fuel at seventy-eight percent in return stage.”

“Battery status?”

“Full charge.”

“Landing stage decouplers?”

“Readouts show ready, pyros armed.”

“Atmosphere?”

“Thirteen point nine and steady. No leaks.”

“Flight suit?”

“On, sealed, activated, no leaks.”

“Straps?”

“Secure.”

“Controls?”

“Target computer aiming sixty by ninety. SAS active.”

“Samples and science data?”

“All samples and other impedimenta secured.”

“Reaction wheels?”

“Responsive.”

“Engine gimbal?”

“Green light on gimbal test.”

“Anypony need to go potty?”

A long moment of silence, followed by Cherry Berry’s annoyed voice. “That wasn’t funny.”

“That’s what you think,” Chrysalis gloated(424). “Stand by, Twenty-two.” She looked up at the flight controller’s station, waiting for the final go-no go call.

Occupant, lying limply over the podium, snored into the microphone.

Chrysalis carefully muted her own microphone, then bellowed, “OCCUPANT, WAKE UP YOU IDIOT!”

“Bwah!” Occupant leaned up, blinking, head turning this way and that. “She never got past me! Eyes weren’t closed for a second!” 

“ARE WE GO FOR LAUNCH, YOU IMBECILE?”

“Oh. Oh? Oh. Are we doing that? Oh.” Occupant calmed down, rubbing more sleep out of his eyes, then looked around. “Guys, do we need to go down the list, or can we just say okay?”

There was a quiet chorus along the lines of “no problem, we’re go.”

“Good. My queen, tell Miss Berry she’s go for launch. Please.”

“Thank y- don’t put your head back down!!” Chrysalis barked as Occupant was on the point of going back to sleep. Shaking her head at the injustice of the world(425), she unmuted her microphone. “Twenty-two, you are go for orbit between ten kilometers and fifty kilometers. We’ll have instructions for your trans-Equus insertion burn once you secure from orbit. Launch in your own time, and safe flying.”

“Twenty-two copies, Horseton. Stand by.” 

For several seconds, the ship projected on Mission Control’s wall did nothing. Then, with a suddenness that surprised Chrysalis, it leaped off the ground on a single, tiny, almost invisible flame. 

“Jettisoning landing stage!”





The two outboard engines, fuel tanks empty, science equipment used and now useless, and landing legs no longer necessary, popped off the central engine and fell away from the accelerating ship.

“Fifty meters per second and throttling up,” Cherry reported. “Tilting down to sixty by ninety.”

Much lighter, clear of the surface, and pointed downrange, the stub left of Mission Twenty-two really began to pick up speed, the surface of Minmus spinning away in the projection to be replaced by the blackness of space. 

“Flight, Trajectory.”

Occupant yawned. “Go, Trajectory,” he mumbled, reaching for his own cup of coffee.

“Flight, we’re working on a trajectory to get Cherry back as soon as possible,” George Bull said. “The lowest delta-V return would take Twenty-two about nine days to return. If Twenty-two’s fuel is sufficient-”

“Shutdown!” Cherry reported. “Apoapsis at seventeen thousand meters. Will complete orbital insertion in... eight minutes... mark.”

“Roger, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said.

“If Twenty-two’s fuel is sufficient,” George Bull resumed, “we want to put her on as close to a direct-abort trajectory as possible. We figure we can speed up her return trip by two days.”

“Wait a minute,” Chrysalis said. “Why does it take so long for her to come back?”

“Because we burned a lot of unnecessary delta-V to get her to Minmus quicker,” Bull replied. “And we had to shed a lot of it to get into Minmus orbit. If we’d got a better alignment on Minmus’s orbital plane, we could have saved fuel at the cost of a longer trip. But since we still have bonus fuel, after a fashion, we want to repeat it on the way back.”

“While leaving a small reserve for course corrections on the way back,” von Brawn said. “We want to be very careful how she re-enters the atmosphere.”

“Explain,” Chrysalis said, finishing her cup of coffee and then, after a moment, deciding not to throw the empty cup at Occupant’s nodding head.

“With the direct abort,” von Brawn said, “the Mission 22 capsule will hit Equus’s atmosphere going even faster than Mission R4. There’s a very real danger that too steep an angle will cause it to burn up or even crush before it reaches the ground. And too shallow an angle would cause it to just skip off and away on a new trajectory.” He swooped one massive hand across his body to demonstrate. “We want an altitude that is less deep than prior re-entries, but still deep enough to slow the ship enough to ensure a splashdown.”

“I think I got it,” Occupant said, yawning. “How high?”

“We aren’t sure,” von Brawn admitted. “Even with Lord Cowley’s best equations, our computers still don’t have a grasp on atmospheric effects on our ships and their trajectories. To be safe, we’re going to aim for ten kilometers higher than Mission R4’s orbital return.”

“That high?” Chrysalis asked. 

“It’s still too deep in atmosphere for anything to remain in orbit,” von Brawn said. 

“We’re betting it’ll be enough,” Bull added. “It’s certainly a steep enough angle to avoid a skip-off. Worst case, it takes a second orbit to complete aerobraking sufficient to land.”

“It still seems... a lot high to me,” Occupant said, yawning. “After all, R4 nearly didn’t come down. But you’re the scientists. You know better than I do. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll go with. Let’s get to work on the problem so we can send Miss Berry the procedure as quick as possible.”

“And somebody get us more coffee,” Chrysalis added. 

Outside the building, Celestia’s sun chose that moment to leap above the horizon.



Footnotes:

(422) If a ling had told Chrysalis two years prior that she would not only learn to like coffee but come to regard it as an indispensable requirement for sustained life, she would have ordered that ling podded for the good of the hive. But that had been before the space race.

(423) In Chrysalis’s case, with great but insufficient caution. The second messenger who came to wake her had the intelligence to bring fresh coffee with him. The first messenger was paying the price for his lack of wisdom by spending some time in that pod Chrysalis kept in the throne room closet.

(424) She wouldn’t be gloating in about half an hour, when coffee cup number three caught up with numbers one and two and issued their joint demand for immediate egress.

(425) Two specific injustices at the moment: first, that she was saddled with subordinates like Occupant, and second, that Occupant represented someone in the top quarter of her hive if ranked by intelligence. It. Just. Was. Not. Fair.




Seven days passed, in various ways.

For example: 

“... I just want to make the point: this is Mission Day Twelve, this is my thirty-fifth consecutive cherry-based meal in flight, and for everypony at home who keeps asking: still not sick of cherries. I am, however, VERY glad I dumped all the stored, er, potty, on the second landing site on Minmus. In fact, I might just take a spacewalk later and dump what’s built up since out into space. It’ll burn up on re-entry, nice and hygenic.”

The next day’s headline worldwide: HORSEAPPLES! SPACE PONY BOMBARDS EQUUS WITH POOP.

Another example:

“... I played along as long as I could stand it, Twenty-two, and I have had enough. I cannot stand to read or listen to one more word of the alleged literature you selected for this trip. Today’s audiobook will be Saddle For Less by Daring Decolletage.”

“By who, Horseton?”

“You heard me, Twenty-two.”

“I hope you cleared the press gallery, that’s all I’ll say about this.”

“Good. Chapter One. Golden Heart adjusted the neckline of her dress, flashing her chest at the stallions who walked by. The ruffles of her petticoats swished as she walked, giving bystanders the impression that a flash of her cutie mark, or something even more shocking, might happen at any moment. Some days she felt ashamed at how low she had sunk, but on other days, days like today, she felt like any corner- the next corner- might hold the stallion who would carry her away from Fillydelphia and all its broken dreams...”

“The Cattle-car Fillies wouldn’t end up like that, is all I’m saying.”

“How many ‘all I’m sayings’ do you have to say, Twenty-two?”

“How many pages in that Decolletage rag?”

“Grrr... But the next corner held nothing but a lampost, currently unoccupied. So she stopped there, leaning against it and putting a hoof on her hip, advertising to the world that, though the City of Sisterly Love might not have any true love left, it had something you could pretend was love, and  you could rent it by the hour...”

“You really read this? I mean, for fun?”

“If you want cute puppy dogs and precocious children, next time take your library with you in the ship.”

And also:

“I’ve been thinking, Horseton,” Cherry Berry said. 

“About getting back in the ship, I hope?” Chrysalis replied through the headset.

Cherry Berry gave the suit thruster controls a little nudge, turning to face the moon, a distant half-lit shape in the solid black of space. “About the first landing back on Minmus,” she said. “Also about Dragonfly’s experience on Mission Twenty-one.”

“What about them, Twenty-two?”

“Well,” Cherry drawled, giving her controls another nudge(426), “imagine if we had little thrusters like on this suit, but on the ship. It would make it a lot easier to get a precise rendezvous with another ship. It would have been a lot more certain than using the reaction wheels to get off the ground. And they’d be less dangerous than using the main engine for every single maneuver.”

“The bird and the bulls have already been working on that,” Chrysalis said. “Like I told you two days ago.”

“Oh.” Cherry sighed. “Sorry. I forgot. I just get so bored waiting to do something, you know?”

“You only remind us five or six times a day,” Chrysalis said. “The good news is, tomorrow is re-entry. You definitely won’t be bored then.”

“Guess not,” Cherry replied.

“By the way, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis added, “we just had a reporter here ask if your boredom includes cherries yet. Fourteen days of cherries, after all.”

That question again. “I’ve spent over twenty years eating cherries at every meal I could get them,” Cherry replied. “Tell the reporter if she’s waiting for me to get tired of Nature’s perfect food, she’s got a very long wait.”

In these ways and others the days passed, and then came Mission Day 15, and re-entry. The last trickle of fuel was burned in a final braking thrust, and then the final engine was decoupled, plunging by itself into the soup at a speed just barely short of Equus escape velocity. The capsule, with the service compartments that held the backup probe pilot and those experiments that couldn’t be stored in the capsule, followed after, quickly compressing the air before it into a gigantic shockwave of plasma.





Cherry, secure in her spacesuit and strapped tightly to the flight couch, watched the glow through the windows, grit her teeth at every shudder and rattle of the ship as it plowed through the highest layers of the atmosphere. The ship wasn’t going in very deep, but its path took it through the soup for almost a perfect half-circuit of the world before shooting back out into space. If the bulls’ calculations were correct, this would be enough to slow the ship down so that it would remain in atmosphere, complete the circuit, and come down almost on top of Horseton Space Center, where a specially trained nighttime recovery crew waited.

That was the story the bulls, through Chrysalis, told her... but as Cherry watched the velocity and altitude readouts on her controls, the instruments told her an entirely different one. As periapsis approached, the orbital velocity readout showed her speed far in excess of low-orbit velocity- and still going up.(427) Her projected periapsis should have dropped deeper into the atmosphere as she slowed down, but it had barely budged. Her apoapsis continued to drop like a brick- the air had some effect- but as she looked, it still seemed closer to the one-million-kilometer mark of Minmus’s orbit than to, well, zero.

And the most telling thing, at least to Cherry’s mind, lay in the altimeter’s rate-of-climb readout; it showed her descending at less than ten meters per second. I’m not getting much deeper, she thought. And that means I’m not getting much slower much faster. 

But remember, Mission R4 hit periapsis, started going back up, and stayed in atmosphere. 

Yeah. And I’m going a lot faster than R4, and my periapsis is a lot higher.

Cherry took another look at the instruments: orbital velocity still creeping up, rate of descent down to about five meters per second, ablator level estimated at above 90%. 

This bird, Cherry thought, is not coming down. 

And almost as she thought it, the rate of climb gauge slipped past the zero mark and back into positive territory. “Periapsis,” she called out automatically. 

“Confirm periapsis,” Chrysalis’s voice echoed. 

Now her orbital speed did begin dropping on the gauge, and at a reasonable fast clip- at least, if the number being whittled down hadn’t been so enormous. She brought up the trajectory computer and watched for a few moments as the projected apoapsis dropped below six hundred thousand kilometers. At this point, Cherry thought, R4’s projected apoapsis was less than half that. 

“Horseton, Twenty-two,” she said aloud.

“Go, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied. 

“I think it’s pretty obvious I’m going around for a second pass whether I like it or not,” Cherry continued. “What I’d like to know now is, why didn’t this work first try, and what can we do to get it right on the second try.”

The pause that followed went past significant, blew through Awkward Junction at speed, and went straight to Oh Buck Land. “Twenty-two, we’re going to have to get back to you on that,” Chrysalis said when she finally spoke. “In the meantime, the bullpen suggests that, once the plasma ball dissipates, you maneuver to turn the ship sideways to increase your air resistance while you’re still in the upper atmosphere.”

The shaking and rattling of her capsule had already diminished quite a bit, and the plasma flames on the other side of the hatch window didn’t seem quite so bright. “Copy, Horseton,” Cherry said. “But I do expect a full explanation once I’m out of the soup.”

“Roger, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis replied. “In the meantime, for today’s book reading, how do you feel about The Hamster and the Helicopter?”

Cherry blinked. That was her very favorite book by Cleverly Clearly, and she had to bite her lip to stop herself from saying so on a live mike(428). Instead she said, “Run out of sock-and-saddle stories down there?”

“Eh,” Chrysalis drawled, putting on her most unconcerned voice(429), “you read one bodice-ripper, you’ve read them all. They’re all basically the same book anyway.”

Cherry filed a half-dozen comebacks and settled for, “If you say so, Horseton.”

After a bit of silence, during which the ship continued to climb and the plasma continued to fade, Chrysalis asked, “By the way, Twenty-two, have you decided what you’re going to have for breakfast?”

“Not really,” Cherry said. “I don’t have much of an appetite.”



Footnote:

(426) Just because. Cherry’s spacewalks had become a daily thing on the long descent to Equus, partly because she never got tired of the immediacy of flight, and partly because she was entirely tired of being in that tiny stinky capsule. She’d just tootle around within a kilometer or so of the ship until her thruster charge began getting low or Chrysalis began reminding her of the hazards of micrometeors, whichever came first. 

(427) An orbiting body’s velocity varies from point to point in its orbit. A ship at apoapsis is travelling slower than at periapsis. As a ship rises from periapsis, gravity slows it down; as it drops from apoapsis, gravity speeds it up. This effect continues even if the periapsis is in atmosphere, with deceleration from air resistance subtracted from acceleration from gravity. In Cherry’s case, this subtraction problem ended with a positive number, meaning she wasn’t slowing down.

(428) A gesture which, thanks to reporters and the telepresence screen, was relayed all over the world. But since the reporters all thought it was due to a tricky moment of suborbital piloting, nobody paid it any attention except Chrysalis, who regarded it as a sight she’d longed to see for many moons... just not right this moment.

(429) Which unsettled Cherry a little more, because she knew after a year and a half that if Chrysalis sounded unconcerned but wasn’t actively gloating, the changeling queen was seriously worried.




Twenty-nine hours later, Mission 22 soared back out of Equus’s atmosphere into space, its projected apoapsis only a little lower than that of the previous day.

“Okay, solar cells pointed back into the sun,” Cherry reported, having had her ship sideways as long as she dared on the outbound leg of the aerobraking pass. “And now I’m gonna insist on some straight answers, guys. How many passes is it gonna take for me to actually come down?”

Pause. “The bulls say seven, maybe eight passes,” Chrysalis replied at length. “Five days.”

“Remind them I have four, repeat, four days of food left on board,” Cherry said. “Also, the computer estimates my heat shield is just under seventy percent ablator remaining. Does that match up with what you show?”

“That’s affirmative, Twenty-two.”

“I thought so. That means I used up a bit more ablator this pass. I’ll probably use even more every pass that comes. That means I’ll be down to bare metal long before seven or eight passes from now.”

“WHAT DO-“ The burst of honest rage and frustration rattled Cherry’s headset. Then, after a couple of loud breaths over the audio channel, Chrysalis began again, all professional once more. “We’ve been working the problem on this end, Twenty-two, and we don’t see any better option short of sending a rescue mission. And the problem with a rescue mission is that getting a rendezvous with you with your periapsis in atmosphere puts the rescue ship at risk. It’d be razor-tight.”

“Horseton, you’ve got a room full of geniuses down there,” Cherry said, allowing herself to sound about one-tenth as tart as she felt. “Are you honestly saying you can’t think of any way to get me down faster?”

“Twenty-two, you have no fuel and no engines remaining,” Chrysalis replied. “If you know a way to maneuver the ship without engines, kindly enlighten us.”

“I’ve got my suit thrusters,” Cherry said.

“Does your suit have a heat shield or a parachute?” Chrysalis asked. “Without both of those you’re not coming home, Twenty-two. That’s what the ship is for. So since you can’t exactly push it home, your suit thrusters aren’t much good right now.”

“Why not?” Cherry asked.

“Bwa-pfwuh... Twenty-two, last message not understood,” Chrysalis said, from the sound of things working hard to stifle another outburst of rage. “Please elaborate.”

“My suit thrusters recharge,” Cherry said. “And the ship has a backup probe core to hold it steady when I’m outside. And my apoapsis is still pretty high, which means even if I only get a few meters of delta-V, that’ll have a huge difference on my periapsis.” A minute before she hadn’t seriously thought it possible, but as she spoke every detail of the plan fell into place like it were the most obvious thing in the world(430). “So all I have to do is point the nose of the ship in the direction I want to thrust, get out, maneuver around to the heat shield, and push on the middle of it until you say to stop.”

“Twenty-two, that’s totally... er... stand by, Twenty-two.” 

The channel went dead for almost a minute, during which Cherry considered which of her dwindling number of meals she should open next. If I had any sense, she thought, I’d skip another meal and save it while I waited for a rescue mission. 

But I’m not in the same situation as Gordo, Fauntleroy or Fireball. I have no engines, but other than that my ship’s fully operational. And eventually I would come down, on my current orbit. I’d probably even live to see that. The problem is that I likely wouldn’t live to see the actual landing. 

And as long as I can come down under my own power, that’s what I’m going to do.

“Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said at length, “the bulls calculate that using eighty percent of your pack’s thruster power on your next apoapsis, and another forty percent on the one following, will be enough to get your periapsis high enough for you to await rescue.”

“No, Horseton,” Cherry put in before Chrysalis could go any farther. “Tell them to calculate the other way. I still have a parachute and a functional heat shield. A rescue would be a waste of resources.”

Several heavy breaths in her earphones told her Chrysalis was now holding on to her temper by the tips of her fangs. “Twenty-two,” she said at last, “while that may be true, the bulls tell me that doing that will pretty much make it impossible for your to achieve orbit again after your next pass. If it doesn’t work...”

“I trust this ship,” Cherry said bluntly. “It got me to Minmus, off Minmus after falling over, and this far home. It’s survived two passes through the soup with no difficulty. And I’m bringing her down. This pass, Horseton.”

Pause. Then, of all things, a soft chuckle. “We read you, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “We’ll give you the word half an hour before your apoapsis. That’s about nine and a half hours from now, by the way.”

“I’ll be counting the seconds, Horseton,” Cherry said.



Footnote:

(430) Or, in this case, off of it.







The heat shield floated there in front of Cherry, half in the shadow of the remaining stub of her ship. She’d expected the scorching, the streaks of residue that wrapped around the edges and ran partway up the science service compartment. She hadn’t expected the bubbling, the lumps, the chunks. 

The whole principle behind the heat shield lay in its substance boiling away under the intense heat and pressure of hypercompressed atmosphere. In the act of burning off, the ablator- one of a hundred and one useful substances which could be puked up by an inventive changeling- carried away the heat energy which otherwise would have been transferred to the metal hull of the ship, melting through it and leading to disaster. The ablator was applied in layer after layer to prevent cracks from forming and going straight through to the heat shield’s base, but those layers apparently didn’t burn off quite as evenly as everypony had thought. 

But it was either push here, or push on the parachute housing, and of the two Cherry would much rather bump into this. There was a small chance that the capsule’s internal cooling system could keep up if something happened to the shield. There had been close calls before, when heat alarms had warned of hull temperatures close to the melting point of the metal, and the ships had come through. But mess up the parachute deployment system even a little... 

... and it wouldn’t matter whether or not the ship survived the fireball. 

So. Here she was, suddenly feeling very silly indeed. The ship- the capsule and add-ons, really- weighed about four tons. Her thruster pack had been rated to deal with a total load of about four hundred pounds, maximum. The idea that what she was about to do would have any meaningful effect- well, it felt like Celestia had offered to let her raise the sun one morning using nothing but a fishing pole. 

But maybe if you set the hook in the right place, a fishing pole can do amazing things, she told herself. 

She nudged her controls slightly. “I’m in place,” she said. “How long until apoapsis?”

“Less than a minute,” Chrysalis replied. “The bulls say to start the push in your own time.”

“Copy, Horseton. Proceeding.” Cherry took a deep breath, then nudged the controls forward.

Her spacesuit hadn’t been built for what she was about to do. She couldn’t use her forehooves to push, because she needed them on the controls for the thrusters to work at all. Using her rear hooves would throw her out of balance and likely send her spinning off the ship. That meant all the force of the thrusters would have to be transmitted through the control arms under her forelegs. They’d been built to be sturdy, yes, but they’d been built to be lightweight most of all. Nopony, not even Twilight Sparkle, had ever thought to test them pushed up against a wall at full burn. 

So she let the suit drift gently forward, the control arm tips touching the unevenly burned surface of the heat shield. They bumped and bounced her backwards, forcing her to give the thrusters another forward burst. Then they made contact again, and before she rebounded again she pushed the forward thrust stick as hard forward as it would go.

And, as the suit rocked and bobbed against the rounded base of her ship, she kept her hoof pushed forwards, using her other hoof for tiny adjustments, using her own body weight within her spacesuit for more. She swung her rear hooves forward to stop the rocking on the arms- rocking would dig them in, make holes in the heat shield that might not be survivable. And, of course, any thrust off the direct line forward was wasted effort, wasted energy... and above all, wasted time.

Forward. Forward. Forward. 
 
Come on, slow me down, darn it.
 
Slow me the buck DOWN.

Her spacewalks before, and her suit flight above the frozen lake on Minmus, had been mostly smooth and easy to control. This was anything but. The suit didn’t like what it was being made to do, and it tried to rock left and right, up and down, anything except staying still. If it hadn’t been for the Probodobodyne computer and the ship’s SAS keeping the ship steady as a rock, Cherry didn’t know whether she’d come down in Equestria or on Bucephalous. 

More thrust. Still thrusting. All the thrust.
 
Is this working? I can’t tell. The suit doesn’t give me a periapsis readout, only a speed, and I don’t remember what the speed was when I-

“Shutdown, Twenty-two, shutdown!”

Cherry’s hoof lifted off the thruster control. She drifted back away from the ship, as the control arms automatically folded up back into the suit backpack. “Shutdown!” she called out. “What’s my status, Horseton?”

“Roughly speaking,” Chrysalis said, “you’re at the periapsis Mission R4 used on its return. We show you at forty-one percent energy remaining in suit thrusters, please confirm.”

Forty-one percent? Then I didn’t need a full burn? She checked her readouts and replied, “Affirmative, Horseton, four one percent.”

“Okay then, Twenty-two,” Chrysalis said. “Get back in the capsule, eat, and get some sleep. You have atmospheric interface in less than eight hours, and we want you rested for the ride home.”





On the telepresence projection, Mission Twenty-two soared outbound once more, containing one truly annoyed pink earth pony, at least if the clipped responses and minimal speech coming from her meant anything. 

But whatever the pony was feeling, Chrysalis felt that much with a zero behind it. “Would somebody like to tell me,” she asked the room in general once her headset was turned off, “why it is I shouldn’t take that useless blinky-light thing in the corner and throw it into the nearest volcano? It’s only a few hundred miles away, by the way. No trouble for me at all, which is more than I can say for four scientists who can’t figure out how to calculate air resistance properly!!”

“We’re doing the best we can, Your Majesty,” von Brawn rumbled, unruffled. “We’re still learning about the upper atmosphere-”

“Kindly explain to me, then,” Chrysalis interrupted, “why Twilight Sparkle can predict air resistance accurately enough to bring a spacecraft in for a runway landing at her own space center, while we’re lucky to find the right OCEAN!” 

“My queen-” Occupant began, then flinched as Chrysalis turned her glare on him.

“I am TALKING HERE!” the queen shouted.

“Um, actually you’re shouting, my queen,” Occupant said. 

Chrysalis took a deep breath. “Thank you, Occupant, I stand corrected.” Another deep breath. “As I was saying... I AM SHOUTING HERE!!” 

Occupant ducked behind the flight controller console, barely peeking over it. “Yes, ma’am,” he squeaked, “but I just want to point out that Miss Cherry almost came down this time, and in another hour or so she really will be coming down, and we need to be ready.” He allowed himself to rise a little higher and added, “And, well, technically, my queen, you did put me in charge, so, um... I need my capcom to get her mind back on the mission. Please. If you don’t mind, my queen.”

Chrysalis found herself caught between two incompatible desires. There was the desire to decapitate the insubordinate drone and suck its guts out(431). But, at the same time, there was the sudden desire to sing and dance around the room to celebrate the moment that a changeling demonstrated initiative, composure, and competence all at the same time, a thing which didn’t happen nearly often enough. (432)

As much fun as either option seemed, though, she’d have to pass on both. She took a deep breath, copied the in-out motion with her hoof she’d seen the Purple Princess of Neuroses do once or twice(433), and said, “Roger, Flight. And well stated.” She gave the bullpen another glance and added, “We will discuss this again later.” 

That done, she nodded to Tymbal, the voice of Mission Control, who raised the shutters on the observers’ gallery again and reactivated the intercoms. The press was there- and so also, for the third day straight, were Twilight Sparkle and all her little rainbow-smitey friends, plus Starlight Glimmer and a couple of others Chrysalis wasn’t on name terms with.

Who is that one with the eyebrows and the terrible glasses?

Whatever. They didn’t hear my tantrum. 

Probably.

Anyway, now to pretend we knew what we were doing all along. Again.

Someone put a piece of paper in front of Tymbal, and the deep-voiced changeling read it once more. “On Mission Day Eighteen, mission time 0130, 1942 hours Horseton local time, Mission Twenty-two has completed its third and final aerobraking maneuver. The capsule containing Changeling Space Program chief astromare Cherry Berry will reach an apoapsis of five hundred ten kilometers and re-enter Equus atmosphere less than an hour from now, with a current splashdown point estimated somewhere in the eastern Celestial Ocean. All ship systems are currently fully functional, and no difficulty is anticipated on final descent. This is the voice of Mission Control, Horseton.”

Sounds convincing, Chrysalis thought as she turned her headset back on and prepared to brief the pony on what was to come.

I only hope it’s true.



Footnotes:

(431) Oh, she’d spit them out immediately. Her tiny stomach capacity aside, Chrysalis found changeling guts repulsive to the taste. 

(432) Chrysalis never considered that the rarity of the instance might be due in part to the non-zero frequency of changelings getting their heads cut off and their guts sucked out. That sort of thing tends to dampen initiative.

(433) If she’d known where Twilight Sparkle got that routine from, Chrysalis would never have even considered adopting that particular method of calming herself. She would even have seriously considered amputating the limb forever soiled from imitating Princess Perfecter-Than-Thou. She wouldn’t have actually done it... but she would have considered it for quite some time indeed.







For the fourth and quite definitely final time, Mission Twenty-two blazed across the night skies of Equus, headed for a landing somewhere, somehow. 

The only question was: in how many pieces?

Cherry had had a whole hour to look at the computer’s estimate of the remaining ablator layer on the heat shield: twenty-eight percent. The previous pass through the atmosphere, which had bottomed out a good five kilometers higher than Mission R4’s lowest pass- stupid, stupid rocket geniuses!- had taken out forty percent of the total starting ablative layers. How much of that was due to the much deeper, hotter pass through atmosphere, and how much to damage caused by the push, neither she nor the boffins on the ground knew. They might never know. 

If the heat shield plays out while I’m still at hypersonic speeds, I certainly won’t ever know.

But, of course, there wasn’t any alternative now. There was no question of a second get-out-and-push maneuver, not this close to Equus. And anyway, Cherry now suspected that the whole thread the bulls had followed had been a mistake. The trick wasn’t to come down slowly, it was to come down- and slow down- as quickly as possible, to limit the amount of time the heat shield was forced to do its work. And once she got back on the ground, she’d share that hard-won wisdom with the bulls. 

Besides, Cherry still liked her odds. The ship still had control, thanks to the reaction wheels. She had mostly full batteries, thanks to the still-functional solar panels. And if the heat shield was thin, it was still working... and this time, she was coming in barely faster than an ordinary orbital flight would. 

This time, she thought, the bird is coming down. Safely.

She watched the computer readouts as the ship rattled and shuddered around her, as the speed dropped, as the gee forces pushed her harder and harder into the flight couch. After two weeks of weightlessness and near-weightlessness, the feeling of three times normal gravity came as a rude surprise... and as the ship began to really dig into the atmosphere, that pressure began to increase. 

The capsule shook like a washing machine. Plasma streaked by the tiny windows, as the computer estimate of ablator remaining ticked down, faster and faster. The vector readouts on the SAS system twitched back and forth, the most minute of adjustments, but far better than anything Cherry could have done by hoof. The ship stayed safe and secure within its shockwave cone, plunging into the middle atmosphere, turning speed into heat.

And then, less heat. And less. The pressure began to let up on Cherry. Below her, out of her vision, Horseton sped past, as watchers below caught the last flickers of plasma glowing around the ship before the vapor trail vanished among the clouds and stars of Luna’s nighttime skies.





But even now, Cherry didn’t relax. The worst was over. The computer estimated that a sliver of heat shield remained(434), unburned, despite all the abuse. She still had enough altitude and forward momentum to get her velocity down below the speed of sound. But the remaining two hundred and sixty meters per second or so of speed had to be countered by parachute... and that parachute had been on ice for two and a half weeks. 

It was probably fine. R4’s parachute had been fine. But it wasn’t guaranteed. 

Of course, if the parachute didn’t slow her down, the planet would slow her down but good about thirty seconds later, so it wasn’t like there was any point in worrying. 

The air-speed velocity readout ticked down rapidly into the triple digits, then slowed as it dropped below five hundred meters per second. The parachute indicator light went amber at four hundred meters per second, but Cherry wasn’t in any hurry. Green would do.





At two hundred ninety meters per second the light went green, and Cherry hit the staging switch for the final time in the mission. She felt the jolt of the explosive hatch release, the shudder in the ship as first the drogue and then the main chute deployed, pulling hard back on the capsule even without fully opening just yet. 

And then flame, as bright as the plasma from the re-entry fireball, flickered past the hatch window. Cherry found it a struggle to crane her head to look as, in the flickering light of its own nostrils, a large reptilian head peered back through the thick glass. Then it was gone again, and not a moment too soon, for about two seconds later, as the ship passed below one kilometer above sea level, the parachute’s choke cords released, and the canopy billowed open, slowing the capsule down in one final six-G jerk of deceleration. 

And then, as the ship drifted down at a safe six point five meters per second, the head with its pilot-light nostrils reappeared. Something thumped against the side of the ship- two solid, slow whump, whumps. 

“Twenty-two, Horseton,” Chrysalis’s voice came back. “We have word from Dragonlord Ember that her rescue team has sighted you and is in close escort. Our own retrieval team is thirty minutes out and closing.”

“Roger, Horseton,” Cherry said. letting her spacesuit helmet fall back onto the flight couch. It was done. It was over. She could relax and let other ponies (or whatever) take it from here. 

The ocean slammed into the bottom of Cherry’s capsule like a runaway wagon, but the capsule had been designed to withstand it. The little ship wobbled and rocked before settling into a float in the calm waters. 

“Horseton, this is Mission Twenty-two reporting splashdown. Craft is stable one, repeat stable one.” Cherry Berry paused for a moment’s thought, then added, “Beginning spacecraft closeout at this time. Bearing souvenirs from Luna’s stars, and proving that ponykind can travel safely to other worlds, this is Changeling Space Program Mission Twenty-two, signing off.”

And that was it. She’d proven that a pony could go to a moon.

Now it was time to send a pony to THE moon.






MISSION 22 REPORT


Mission summary: Land on Minmus: conduct temperature scans on and near Minmus: gather surface samples and other scientific data from Minmus: return safely to Equus

Pilot: Cherry Berry (backup: Probodobodyne Mk. 2 probe core)

Flight duration:  17 days, 2 hours, 55 minutes

Contracts fulfilled:  1

Milestones: First EVA on Minmus; first flag on Minmus

Conclusions from flight: There’s a little unfinished business, but it could have been worse. We’re ready now: time for the main event!


MISSION ASSESSMENT: SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH




Footnote:

(434) The computer turned out to be optimistic. When the capsule of Mission 22 was recovered, the recovery team found the metal plate of the heat shield exposed in most places, with only the tiniest traces of ablative material remaining. Cherry Berry never asked why, the day she was released from the infirmary, sixteen changelings wearing those stupid fake aviator helmets lined up and gave her one of the snappiest salutes she’d ever seen. She figured it was because she’d just been to Minmus. But in truth the changelings showed their respect for a pony who’d come closer to a personal interview with the Pale Horse than even the most suicidally stupid drone in the hive and came out intact. Changelings admired that sort of unthinking courage; it was why they still followed Chrysalis.