Try to Persuade them 62%
It was absolute madness to Twilight. Everypony on her damn station seemed to want to get their friends back—despite all of them knowing how dire their situation was. We don’t have the medical personnel. We don’t have the drugs. They’re just asking for us to lose people.
But she hadn’t served for all her years as princess by mistreating those beneath her. There was really only one way to solve a personnel problem: talking to them.
So she called them in—the captains of each mining ship, after sending to each that she was going to hear their demands. It was about the kindest way she could possibly respond, even if what she wanted to do was break up the union and be damned what they said about it. Our entire universe is this ship. What do you ponies expect me to do?
The meeting was tense. Despite inviting only the captains, each one brought a pony or two. The toughest looking of their crews, though it was hard to seem tough when you didn’t have a mane and your skin was splotched with revival necrosis. Twilight didn’t mind—they could bring an army if they wanted, and it would be equally effective. Even if she wasn’t an Alicorn, she knew the station’s computer. Did they really expect to intimidate her?
After a brief welcome, she invited them to share their reasons—all of what she’d expected. They each had only loved one left in the world, they needed them back for morale reasons. They’d be better miners once she did what they wanted. It wasn’t much, really. Just two hundred doses of a drug they were currently making only ten of each day.
Then it was her turn. She showed them images from Proximus B, of the most horrific monsters they had faced. She couldn’t show them a vague hunger and a creeping disease, but she could show them simpler things, and distort the truth a little about how dangerous they might be to them out here in space.
“This is why we can’t wait,” she finished. “We can’t have your ships sitting docked while danger advances on us. We can’t leave until we have those supplies, or we’ll die in transit. You, and your families, as well as me and mine. We’ll all die together.
“But what I can offer you is this: I’ll put your families at the front of the civilian priority list. They will be the first to wake, as soon as we have essential crew to run the station.”
The captains confided with one another, whispering quietly from their end of the dusty map. It still showed ghostly flickers of Equestria, though they were faded and faint. More a memory than the real-time recreation it had once displayed. But you still had it waiting for me, Celestia. Did you know I’d survived, after all those years?
Do the Captains accept the deal? Yes.
“We want guarantees,” said one. Her name was Sturdy Harness, if Twilight remembered right. “Specifics, too. Your written contract specifying how many ponies you wake before our families.”
“Five hundred,” Twilight supplied, entirely by reflex. That was the size of the Canterlot’s standard crew shift. But plenty of those were bureaucrats, or police, or other things they probably didn’t need right now. She could tell from those glares it wasn’t going to get what she wanted.
“One hundred,” somepony else said. “We flew here with less.”
“Agreed.” Twilight stuck out her hoof. “One hundred maximum, before I wake your families. It might be sooner—but we have to repair Canterlot as fast as we’re waking ponies. I know you don’t want your loved ones living in squalor.”
“No,” Harness answered. “We just don’t want them frozen forever, while we grow old. We ain’t all immortal like you, princess.”
Not yet you’re not. We have the means now. Twilight wasn’t sure where that thought came from, but she shoved it back just as quickly. Their very limited sample size of that conversion process hadn’t exactly enjoyed it.
Less than an hour later, she had the contract signed. “We’re agreed,” Harness declared. “We go to work, and we have this to prove you’ll give us our ponies back. We have every reason to trust you, Princess. Don’t make us regret that.”
“You won’t,” she snapped. “Talk to Applejack, my chief engineer. See if she would ever let me lie. I keep my promises.”
They left. Within the day, she was looking at the retreating dots of their drives fading into the horizon. Together they would replenish the Canterlot’s supplies of everything they could find in orbit. There were still a few sticking points—nitrogen, primarily. Their population would be eternally fixed by the nitrogen they had to cycle through themselves and all their food. They were not likely to come upon much of the stuff in the interstellar gulf.
But that worry would have to fade, because she had her next set of priority reports to worry about. While mining went on, she’d have to dictate the Canterlot’s new production directives. Get them wrong, and she might very well be singing everypony’s death warrants.
It wasn't like ponies wouldn't do a little bit of everything. But what was her focus?
1. Prioritize clearing space for farming and biofabrication. More drugs, more food. No harvest grows in a day.
2. Prioritize repairing living space and morale. The shiprats have their fancy new section, but everypony else is squatting in ruins. We’ve got to fix this sooner or later.
3. Prioritize waking as many ponies as possible as fast as is safe. Many hooves make light work.
4. Prioritize repairs to old systems. If you don’t care for your home, what do you have? The void is only centimeters away, waiting to kill us. We shouldn’t help it.