//------------------------------//
// Chapter 12 
// Story: Just Like Magic of Old 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

As it turns out, Shooting Star specializes in motive systems- so, after showing him around the damaged parts of the ship, she’d taken him back to the room she’d left Skies studying the logs in.  When she returned with Star, Skies told her that the events the logs indicated were impossible- but had obviously happened anyways.
She grins cheerfully, trotting over to the ‘collaboration table’, as she calls it.  It’s basically a pretty ordinary table…  with a touch screen built into the top surface.  She’s not sure exactly what purpose it was supposed to serve, but it works well for multiple ponies to work together on something.  She doesn’t miss how Star smiles briefly at Skies’ friendly greeting.
“Speaking of the impossible,” she begins, tapping the surface with a hoof to attract the computer’s attention to her ID chip, “I’ve got a little project you might like to try.”
Skies smiles, glancing back at Star- and Star’s eyebrows, allowing for a small delay for analysis, rise interestedly.  He’d taken to Skies almost like a fish to water, she thinks; they always seemed to be very efficient together, yet she hasn’t seen any kind of ‘couple’ dynamic between them.  That kind of thing is always readily visible, whether it’s allowed to get in the way of their work- a certain couple she’d fired last time she was on the surface comes to mind- or not.  Speaking of that couple, as she recalls, they’d tried to file lawsuits against her, claiming discrimination- but her father had had them categorically thrown out…  and fined them for slandering the name of the royal family.
“Project?” Star asks.
She nods.  “Yeah.  During my…  free time aboard ship, I’ve been doing a lot of nosing around on various blueprints.  I’m no engineer- my parents still won’t let me go to Pony State- but the simulators insist that each of the fifteen or so blueprints I’ve come up with would work, in some way or another, and not blow up the ship.  However…  some of them are as big as this entire ship, and according to the simulations, all of them demand way more power than even a Distortion-ready superdreadnought has.”  She pauses, looking up at them.  “I will, however, need you to swear to absolute secrecy.  What I’m about to show you never leaves this ship, until and unless I tell you otherwise.”
They both nod their agreement, so she makes a couple taps, and scatters a few files across the digital surface:  The blueprints she’d found for the various Distortion Drives.  She had actually run them through the simulators, and not one of them had a low enough projected power requirement to even contemplate installation in any modern ship.  She’d had these duplicate files amended with the simulation notes scrawled in the corners, away from all of the parts.
“Perhaps you two, with your actual engineering experience, can figure out what makes each of them do what the simulation says it does, and put it all together into something that does everything and doesn’t demand as much power?”  She smiles.  “And, if we can figure out how to make it all work perfectly with low enough power demand, even build it…  as part of the refit.  And see what happens.”
Exactly as she had expected, both of them take on instant excited expressions.  The entire country of Equineothame is dedicated to being the first to build a working Distortion Drive- but with the economy in shambles, actual engineering progress towards that end is almost entirely limited to imagination.  The only reason Equineothame still has enough money to stay afloat is because of her parents’ aggressive technological acquisition from other places, often by illicit means- which has allowed the nation’s engineers to invent quite a few technologies by combining techs from multiple other nations.  The Gravity Drive was one of them- and the massive, high-efficiency engines on the back of almost every ship in space these days is another.
Because of that, having the Princess present them with an opportunity not just to explore theoretically functional Distortion Drive designs, but to design and build a working one, would be a dream-come-true for any engineer.  Even Earth, which has the largest, most stable scientific community out of all the nations, hasn’t been able to come up with even a single theoretically functional pattern.  All the ‘Distortion Drive’ units they’ve built have been test pieces the scientists knew would blow up, but that they thought they could learn from how they blew up.
Oh, and the half-dozen that were put together explicitly to appease their superiors…  and blow up as thoroughly as possible in the process.  Her parents had managed to steal the interesting data acquired from some of those, and even destroy it at its source- and now, the Equineothame-based company NuCoils Engineering has been analyzing that data over and over, and tell her father they think they’re close to a major discovery.  They were acquired some six months ago by a foreigner, a few months before they came out with a brand-new, high-efficiency nuclear reactor with almost six times the power output of the prior ‘best in class’.
As far as she’s concerned, NuCoils is lucky it was acquired- the infusion of capital from the new private owner that also happens to own most of the power plants back on Earth had been enough to keep them afloat through development- and now, hardly a month after the unveiling, their new reactors are massively profitable.  She’s contemplating replacing her ship’s reactors with them- or, if she gets lucky and Cold Coils comes back and happens to be familiar with their technology, she did discover what looks like a partial blueprint for some kind of fusion reactor amongst the acquired files.
She smiles as she watches the two engineers fawning over the blueprints for a few minutes, and pointing out different parts of each one to each other, and speaking in engineering terms.
Then Skies suddenly looks up at her.  “Oh, sorry Princess.  We, ah…  forgot you were here, for a second.  Um…”
She waves it off.  “No worries.  I was mostly just doodling when I made them anyways, so I’m kinda curious how they work as well.”  She smiles.  “So carry on.  No time limit.”
“What-!?” Rather than returning to her work as she’d expected, Skies stands straight up, even taking a step back from it.  “But- But what about Orbital Control?”
She blinks.  “Uh…  True.  I forgot about that…”  She rubs her chin.  “Hmm.  Well, with those interviews coming up, and assuming they’re all thestrals, I should be able to hire a decent number of night controllers…  which would, especially considering I rather suspect they’ve all got previous engineering experience of one sort or another, make it not just possible but absolutely no problem for you to transfer to this full time.”  She glances at Star.  “You could do that now, if you wanted to.  It’s a lot easier to find dayshift controllers- and engineers- than nightshift.”
At that very moment, a sudden buzzer sounds from the table- and a warning message appears in front of her.  Both engineers shift stance; it’s very rare for a parked ship to have an alarm going off.
She glances down at it, and strikes the key to open her remote controls.  “Proximity alarm?” she mutters, peering at the sensor data.  Sure enough, there’s another ship, on a collision course- and judging by the sensor readings, it’s sustained heavy damage, made a powered descent, and appears to be losing power.  Not surprising, what with the nuclear radiation leaking out the side- it’s probably taken reactor damage.
She taps into the controls, and orders the hull polarized.  All three of her reactors, held at ‘idle’ production, immediately start spinning up to support the sudden demand, while her reserves operate the things.  That should help deflect the incoming ship away from hers, and prevent a collision…  even if it will have a tendency of causing damage to nearby landed ships, and otherwise repelling anything metallic from the ground around her.
Then she deploys the energy beam relay, just in front of her main cargo bay, and aims it at the incoming ship.  Her ship isn’t designed to provide power itself; the relay is primarily designed to relay power provided from elsewhere.  However, she has enough power aboard to operate the thing, and deliver at least basic operating power.
The incoming ship’s aerodynamic control surfaces unfreeze suddenly after a few seconds, suggesting the computers controlling them finished rebooting- just seconds before it slams headfirst into the magnetic field produced by her polarized plating…  and the forces thrust it violently upwards.
As she watches its trajectory curve clear of a collision course with almost six gees of acceleration, Flight blinks.  That’s not a small ship- it’s big enough it almost certainly has its own hydroponics facilities aboard.  Had she polarized the hull plating when the pirates attacked her, their all-metal inter-ship transfer shuttle would have been subject to a whopping fifteen gees of force directly away from her ship…  and whatever they used to attach their ship to hers would have been blown apart by the forces.
She winces at the thought, watching the incoming ship arc gracelessly overtop of hers, clearing her energy relay by a matter of inches and passing right overtop of it; it promptly loses lock, lacking the fast tracking and free gimballing of the weapon turrets.  Had she done that, Cold Coils would certainly have been killed.
The incoming ship then wobbles in near-horizontal flight, struggling to stabilize itself.  She thinks she sees landing gear coming out the bottom of it, about a half-second before it crashes into and slides across the landing pad.  Her energy relay had locked on again about two seconds before impact.
She touches into her comms, and contacts local emergency services to report the crash- and the detected radiation leak.
The two engineers, having watched the entire thing, stare.
“You have an energy beam relay on this thing?” Skies asks.
“We’re a lot closer than the emergency services,” Star states firmly.  “We can provide emergency assistance before the fire trucks.”
Flight glances up at him, then looks back down.  There’s almost half a kilometer between her ship and the newly wrecked craft; it must’ve gotten its wheels out somewhat, but lost its brakes, forcing the pilots to use reverse thrust out of the maneuvering thrusters to stop the ship short of a collision.  And it’ll take time to run half a kilometer.
And her reactors are still spinning up, though they’re about to start reducing back to idle to slowly recharge her reserves.
She punches a few keys, and her ship’s massive wings start deploying, the reactors resuming their spin up to full power.  She orders autopilot to move her ship right up close to the crashed ship on VTOL, then hold the atmospherics at idle.
Then she looks up at the engineers, who are looking uncertainly at her.
“I have an armory,” she states.  “Let’s get some powered armor, and rescue those ponies.”
Then she takes off for the same.  Powered armor takes thirty seconds or so to climb in or out of- but it’ll take almost a full minute for her engines to spin up to speed and lift her ship into the air.