When she awakens from her slumber, it’s not to the alarm she’d set for when the reactors are hot enough for her to start pressurizing- and heating- the ship. Instead, she’s gotten a second intruder alert through her suit; her ship is operating in airless mode. This one isn’t triggered by an attack on a door- but rather, by a foreign signal detected from inside the ship. She glances at the trace on her HUD, and identifies it. It’s a weak comms signal, coming from somewhere in Hydroponics Four… and it’s weak enough it wouldn’t penetrate the walls, it looks like.
She listens to the transmission. A filly, it sounds like, around her own age. And terrified. “H-Hello? C-Can a-anyo-one h-hear m-me?” She can almost hear the shivering as well.
She reaches her hooves out to the floor… to find that she’s drifted away from the floor while she slept, so she’s now drifting about in the middle of the bridge. She snorts derisively and settles for remoting her way into the controls again. It takes her a few seconds after that to access the cameras- if there’s one thing she remembers from the ‘how to handle alarms’ textbook the military uses, it’s to never trust a comms signal to be what it sounds like. It’s too easy to fake it.
“H-Hello? I-I’m r-run-ning o-out of a-air!”
She finally gets into the cameras, and gets a view of the room. There’s a pressure-suited pegasus floating in the middle of the room, with legs- and wings- flailing. She estimates the proportions… Yes, that looks to be about her age.
She activates her comms, relaying it through her ship’s internal comms. “Hello?” she asks. “Who is this?”
The flailing limbs on the camera freeze instantly… and she’s able to pick out more details about the suit, now that it’s not twisting around. Hmm, that’s a regular pressure suit… She checks her own oxygen levels. Assuming it was donned shortly before the ship was depressurized, it’d have about a half an hour of air left in it, assuming an average consumption rate.
“I-I’m c-cold,” the filly states. “C-cold c-coils. C-Can y-you h-help m-me?”
She scowls, remotely activating her gyroscopes once again. They’ll only take a couple seconds to spin up this time; the power reserves have enough in them the vessel isn’t running in emergency power mode, even though the reactors haven’t started generating yet. “Sure,” she answers. “Before I start moving things around, though, I need to know- how familiar are you with that suit?”
“I-I’ve n-never u-used it be-efore.”
She scowls. “How about moving around in zero gravity?”
“N-never been in s-space.”
She winces. “Alright. How much air do you have?”
“F-Fifteen m-minutes.” She can tell the filly is concentrating on speaking clearly. The filly’s gradual spin, in her drift, puts her facing the camera- and she sees in the faceplate. The poor filly is absolutely terrified, and definitely shivering. She spots the emergency power HUD warning without having to ask about it; very few other HUD objects are bright red, and her cameras have good resolution anyways.
She pulls up a blueprint of the ship, then feeds a tiny input into the gyros- changing Coils’ drift to very suddenly carry her towards the floor. “Alright- you should be drifting to the floor. Your mag boots should stick to it, as long as you don’t push off too hard.”
“B-But the mag b-boots take power!”
“Only for a strong hold. They also have permanent magnets in them for exactly this situation. I need you to land on the floor, then carefully walk your way towards the door.” The gyro activity also happens to put her at close proximity to the ceiling; she reaches a hoof out above her head, grabs the ceiling, and flips herself down onto her hooves.
Coils lands on the floor- and flinches away from it, only barely coming back into contact in time to avoid drifting away. “It’s c-cold!”
“I know,” she scowls. “There should be a power socket by the door you can plug into. That’ll get your suit’s heaters back on, and let you charge your power cells a bit.”
“B-But o-oxygen!”
“Yeah, I know. Power is more important at the moment- the oxygen is coming, it’ll just take a few minutes. But it won’t help you much if you freeze to death first- because it’ll be cold oxygen.” She stops the spin and, leaving the gyros idle, kicks off from the ceiling to send herself drifting down the passages, towards that hydroponics bay. She’s debating which would be better- use the first ergs of waste heat coming out of the reactors to pressurize a room… or to charge a suit oxygen tank. She won’t be needing it- she’s still got twelve hours of air. But Coils probably will need one or the other.
It takes her about two minutes to reach the hydroponics bay- about the same time as it took Coils to walk her way up by the door. She cuts the camera feed as she opens the door- and Coils lets out a yelp of surprise, nearly overwhelming the magnets in her boots.
“Hey, hey, calmly,” she mutters into the comms. “I’m here to help.” She steps into the room, pointing a hoof. “The power socket’s right here- you know how to plug in, or no?” She shivers involuntarily; the walls are inordinately cold… and now that she’s close enough to read Coils’ HUD backwards, she sees her suit temp is way cold. Definitely going to be recharging oxygen bottles, not pressurizing rooms; Coils needs to warm up fast, and the fastest way to do that is with her suit heaters in vacuum. The cold air she can generate and pump in will be at about minus a hundred and fifty Celsius- and no suit heater can keep up with that. It should be able to make do with an oxygen bottle at that temperature, if only because it would have a lot less mass to warm up.
As it turns out, though, Coils doesn’t know where the recharging cable on her suit is. So Flight quickly locates it, pulling it out and plugging it in.
“Alright then,” she mutters, looking up at Coils. “We’ll let that charge for a minute or two, then head for the suit bay to recharge your oxygen tanks as well. That work?”
“Wh-Why?” Coils asks.
She sighs. “Because you need the warmth. Worst case scenario, I’ll have the oxygen available to pressurize almost any room before your tanks run dry. I’d rather not, though, because you almost certainly won’t be able to stay warm in that air- and if we instead recharge your oxygen tanks, you’ll have another six hours or so of air… and no particular reason to stay in constant contact with the cold plating, so you’ll also be warm before I’m able to start pumping warm air around.”
Almost a full hour later, Coils seems to have warmed up some. They’re both in the suit bay, where Coils has been plugged into the wall all along, running her heaters on maximum. Flight herself has been meditating while she drifts.
“U-Um,” Coils begins, stuttering with nervousness rather than cold. “Are- Are we going to be okay?”
Flight smiles at her, reaching out to the wall of the small room and running the mag lock in her hoof on maximum power for a moment to accelerate herself towards it. “Yeah, we’ll be fine. You worried about something?”
“Y-Yeah. Those pirates… wouldn’t they have crippled this ship?”
She nods. “Yeah. Did a pretty good job of it, too, but we’re on a suborbital trajectory- another day or so- and they didn’t touch any of the aerodynamic controls… or atmospheric engines. I checked.”
“But- But power! Don’t those need power? Won’t they have shut the reactors down, and drained the reserves?”
She nods. “They did. But they didn’t realize that this ship has solar paint. Ten minutes after they left, I had all three reactors going into defrost.” She scowls. “They’re still there. The computer’s estimating they’ll be finishing startup right about the time we hit the atmosphere- and by then, even defrost strength will have produced enough heat to pressurize- and warm- the entire ship.” She takes a deep breath, and asks the question that’s been bugging her all along. “So… how did you get aboard?”
Coils blinks, and hangs her head- a distinctly different effect when floating in zero gravity. “It… It was the pirates.” She moves her head as if tossing her mane, blinks, and shakes herself out. “I’m… I’m from Earth. My parents took me along for their trip to Equineothame this time around; Mom owns an interplanetary tech company, and so needed to make a visit to a local facility. I was playing with my dad in zero gravity when the pirates came, and…” She shudders, attempts to wipe the tears out of her eyes, and only succeeds on banging on her faceplate. She steels her voice. “Dad rushed me to the suit bay. Helped me get into this suit.
“Then the pirates burst through the door. He fought them, tried to buy me time to reach the escape pod.” She repeats the eye-wipe attempt, and glares briefly at her suited foreleg. “They shot him. I- I couldn’t even get started by the time they caught me.” She looks up at Short Flight. “I didn’t want to die… so I didn’t fight. They took me into their ship, and destroyed my parents’ ship. They ran it out of power… then deorbited and abandoned it, moved to a big one they saw. Last I remember, they were complaining about not finding somepony, before one put a cloth over my muzzle, and… and I blacked out.” She shudders, looking down at her foreleg again. “I… I don’t know how my helmet got closed.”
Flight nods. “Probably the automatic,” she mutters. “You were wearing it, so when the external pressure dropped below point eight atmospheres, it automatically sealed and switched to internal life support.” She nods. “That would be when they vented the atmosphere.” She sighs. “Your suit fully charged? I’d like to see if we can reach your mom, tell her what’s going on.”
Coils shakes her head. “You won’t be able to reach her.”
She tilts her head. “Oh? Why not?”
“Because she’ll be at the company for a couple days- and her secretary will be screening her calls.”
She nods. “Ahh. I’m sure the secretary would let us through- or have her call us back- if we explained.”
“Maybe,” Coils scowls. Then she tilts her head. “Why… Why does your suit look… different?”
“Ah… That’s because mine’s a long-endurance suit, yours isn’t. So while yours can carry up to six hours of air at a time, mine can do twenty-two.” She glances at her oxygen readouts. “Got about eleven hours left in the tanks, but I should be able to start pressurizing the ship without freezing us both in about two.” She then winces as a sharp pain invades both her sides- but she’s gotten used to those spikes, by now. It’ll only be a little more blood, nothing significant. And, she’s willing to bet, her medical computers would simply say ‘normal’ again.
Coils notices. “Are- Are you okay? You’re not running out of power, are you?”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m fine. Just a little pain on my sides, probably bled a little too. No idea what it is, but the medical computers keep calling it ‘normal’.” She scowls. “I’ll probably want to make a habit of wearing dresses in public for the foreseeable future- I don’t want to scare anyone with random blood spots in my fur…”
“That… That sounds familiar,” Coils mutters. “I- I was a late bloomer… they knew I was a pegasus when I was born because I had a mid shoulder, but the wings themselves didn’t grow in until just a couple years ago.” She flaps her wings fruitlessly. “That… That happened when they grew in. Bled a few times, itched a few more… and then that was done, and I had wings. Tiny little wings. They’ve grown since, but…”
She stares at her. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
She gets a strained, but genuine, smile in return. “I think?”
She blinks. “I… Honestly, I don’t even know what’s possible anymore.”
Coils tilts her head. “What…?”
“Well, I’m a unicorn.”
Coils blinks, eyes zeroing in on her forehead. “... Oh. I didn’t notice.”
She lets out a snort of laughter. “But impossible stuff has been happening around here anyways, soo…”
“Impossible stuff…?”
She looks at her seriously. “Please don’t tell anyone. I don’t want ponies thinking it’s magic and trying to dissect me or something.”
“Dis-!? Er, your secret’s safe with me.”