Magical sails 53%
Twilight didn’t know what to do. There was probably some easy option, something just out of reach for her. But whatever that option was, she didn’t know it. They couldn’t just build them both—they didn’t have the manpower to split between two options that way. Whenever the engineers were working, other aspects of the ship were abandoned. And if her spellcasters were building sails, they weren’t repairing damaged thaumic systems.
“We’re going with your design, Starlight,” Twilight declared, after considering silently for a few minutes. “I agree there’s more risk to it, Node. But we don’t know how much time we have left. It might seem strange to rely on magic for something this important, but… ponies have always relied on magic to survive. Our air-shield is magic, our gravity is magic. Our sails can be magic as well.”
Node sighed, slumping back in her seat. She steepled the fingers of one hand together. Even on a flat, alien face, Twilight could see her disappointment. You seemed determined to avoid mechanical conversion, captain. But the longer you continue with rash decisions like this, the more inevitable that becomes. Machines can survive Hunger’s rot. Ut when you make that transition, you will sacrifice your magic as well.”
“Many of us are… unwilling to ever make that sacrifice,” Starlight stepped down, flipping off the projector. “Look at Sunset. She’s half machine already, but the other half would mean giving up her magic. I don’t blame her for refusing.”
“Feel free to consult me throughout the project,” Twilight said, doing her best to head off another argument. “I’m a few decades behind your understanding of theoretical magic, but… I was right there before I left. And I could use something to work on.”
It was another project, another split for her crew. But the more ponies woke up, the less Twilight became the captain of one ship. She was the princess of a civilization—the last lifeboat in a tumultuous sea. So maybe they’d never made it back to Equestria—Equestria had come to them.
Twilight did work with the sail team over the next month, getting regular update from the other crew sections. Everything from the establishment of a proper education system along the shiprats to updates on mining yields—all of it was on her desk. That wasn’t to say there were no issues during construction—but every challenge they faced was of the common magical variety. There was no refuge for Equestria now, no choice but to keep pushing through.
Twilight watched the wings first extended about a month after construction began, using the observation deck high in the palace’s tower. Very few sections of the castle hadn’t been crammed full of caskets like everywhere else on the station, but this was somewhere. Princess Luna had kept telescopes here long ago, observing the stars during the era before spaceflight. Twilight could still make out the pattern of the constellations stenciled into the stone.
She had to look away, from those patterns of stars no pony would see repeated the same way. And if we become vagabonds like the other ships in the flotilla, then the idea of a constellation won’t make any sense. What is it like to be a transient species?
Through the glass, Twilight watched with her senior officers as a veil of shimmering wings appeared in the void above Canterlot. Or below, depending on the perspective. They were transparent even now, the magic equivalent of metal foil. No terribly large amount of force would press against any one part, but collectively they could accelerate the entire station at incredible speed.
“We’ve run simulations of the magical supports and the pressure they place on the station,” Starlight explained, gesturing towards the ceiling. “Spike agrees we’re well within stress tolerances. The compressive force will be evenly applied, as though the station was orbiting a planet again.”
“Until your magic fails, and the highway turns us to ash,” Node said flatly. “Or we just stop accelerating and shoot off into space. I suppose it depends on what the highway happens to be doing at the time. I’m not terribly fond of either option.”
“That will not happen,” Starlight said, gritting her teeth together. “We depend on a dozen different systems to keep us alive. We have heating and air processing and hydroponics, and plenty of others. All take active effort to maintain. These sails will be just another system, maintained by unicorns. We’re not worried, are we princess?”
Apple Bloom wasn’t a senior officer, or anything close to one. But she was Node’s assistant now, and that meant she had a place in the cramped observatory. “It does mean we’re locking ourselves into organics for the foreseeable future,” she said. “Since metal folks like me won’t be able to keep the sail going.”
“Of course we are. The princess planned on that to begin with. If we were going to change everypony, we wouldn’t be in a rush.”
Nopony in the room quite looked happy with that pronouncement, but Fluttershy was the first to break the silence. “I was hoping we could speak about that, captain. We’re seeing… the early signs of death rot in some of the oldest, weakest ponies on board. It’s effecting our shiprats quite a bit, but they’re not the only ponies suffering. We might want to think of using the highway soon, before ponies start dying.”
The excitement of the successful test faded, and her friends fell silent again. Several set glasses of bubbling drinks back down, waiting for her response. “Has anypony died yet?”
Fluttershy shook her head. “I have a few ponies in their beds. Sunset Shimmer, a few older scientists and maybe a dozen of the shiprats. But the number is going up every day, and those ponies aren’t getting any better. We’ll start losing them soon.”
“There are some other, uh…” Applejack began, her voice becoming more confident as she spoke. “Some other things we could do to improve our odds, if we didn’t want to throw the accelerator on right away.”
Twilight had at least one idea of a way to treat the sick, even if she knew they wouldn’t like it.
1. Gather the miners and leave now. It’s only going to get worse. Ponies getting sick is only the harbinger of something much worse.
2. Expand Canterlot. Right now most of the station is packed full of caskets. When those ponies wake up, they’ll need somewhere to live. Otherwise, we’ll be the stewards of the dead for the rest of time.
3. Focus all resources on mining. We can build while we move, but we need raw materials. Stockpile vast supplies of metal, water, and other essentials, we can push them along in front of us while we travel.
4. Spike’s long observations with the Canterlot sensors have detected something interesting: Signaler derelicts. Instead of building more station, they could tow over quite a few of those, and make a sister station for the Canterlot out of their remains.