//------------------------------//
// Chapter 14 
// Story: Just Like Magic of Old 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

By the time Short Flight returns to her medbay, where the entire crew of the crashed ship had remained either to receive treatment or to treat the injured, the autopilot has already swung the ship back around on VTOL power and landed back where she’d parked it originally.
She’s wearing her dress again; the exoskeleton had rather conveniently hidden her fledgling wings during the rescue, but it won’t now.  “Okay,” she mutters.  “Everypony okay?”  She glances sideways at a heavily bandaged thestral in one of her high-tech medical beds.  “Er, at least stabilized?”
The medic looks up from where he’s bandaging the Captain’s foreleg.  “Uh…  Yeah.  Everypony stabilized, and…”  He glances at the equipment surrounding him.  “I must say, this is a pretty well-equipped medbay.  Though, uh…  it seems to be lacking in crew.  They on holiday, or…?”
She shakes her head.  “No.  This is my ship- I’m the only crewmember.”
The captain blinks, staring at her.  “What-?”
She shrugs.  “But hey, it works.”  She glances around the room.  “So, I have to ask…  what put you in, ahh…”  She glances up.  “That position?”
She gives an awkward chuckle.  “Well, funny story.  You probably-  A-Admiral!”  She practically leaps out of the bed to snap a salute, ignoring the medic’s attempt to affix a bandage to a small cut on her wing.
She turns to look at what he’s looking at- but the only thing she finds is Night Skies…  who snorts and rolls her eyes before speaking.  “Cut it out,” she orders.  “I haven’t been an admiral in years.”
“You were an admiral?” Flight asks.
She nods sadly.  “Yeah…  High Admiral Night Skies of the Shadowfleet, at time of, ah, involuntary dissolution.”
She tilts her head.  “Involuntary?”
Another nod.  “Yeah.  The Equineothame Fleet attacked our base on your moon, captured everypony there.  They then stripped us of our equipment and dumped us, individually, at random points in Equineothame.  Only the ships that weren’t at base at the time escaped the destruction.”  She sighs.  “Fortunately, we knew it was going to happen sometime, even if the attack- and who it was from- surprised us.  So, all the ships not at base, went into hiding- and everypony that was captured knew the information they’d need to reset their lives.  By now, we’ve mostly regrouped, and found ourselves employment in this city; I was one of the last, using my savings to go to school.”  She scowls.  “Then your father had to implement his blasted Thestral Tax, and I suddenly couldn’t afford the final semester.”
She nods slowly.  “...  Okay.”
Skies takes a deep breath.  “Captain Lunar Wing here, with her Shadouette, was one of the few to escape, and take on a ‘mercenary’ role, quote unquote.  When the pirates attacked you a few nights ago, I alerted the remnants of the fleet of the pirate activity being ignored by the Equineothame fleet- and used the Orbital Control satellites to identify the pirates for them.  I…  To be entirely honest, last I heard, Shadouette was boarding a suspected pirate freighter?”  She looks forwards towards the Captain.
Lunar Wing cringes.  “Sorry…  The freighter was a hit, seemed to be used by the pirates as a local base of operations; we flagged it for another ship to investigate when we penetrated their internal comms…  and discovered that they were about to send a ship back to their main base.  We flew silent, and followed that ship; we discovered their base, and only barely escaped alive.  The reactor- and gravity drive- managed to last long enough to get us into the atmosphere, and I hoped it would last long enough to get us on the ground.”  She snorts.  “Would have, had that stupid power surge in the upper atmosphere not pulled the control rods out and fried the controllers!”  She sighs, looking towards Flight.  “So, thanks for…  whatever you did, that let us avoid a more instantly lethal crash and burn.”
“You’re welcome,” Flight nods her head.
“So…  what next?” Wing asks, looking up at Skies.
Skies scowls.  “Well…  getting any of you back into space to help out on one of the other ships is going to be impossible, so-!”  She breaks off when Flight snorts.
“My dad might not like thestrals,” she states derisively, “but you’re still ponies to me.  We get this ship back in one piece, and you watch me.  I’ll get you into space, toot sweet.”  One of the more annoying laws her father had come up with was the one banning any Thestral from boarding anything destined for a location beyond the edge of the atmosphere, locally owned or not.
“And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about our Princess,” Star says suddenly, trotting up next to her, “it’s that if she says something, she means it.”
“Uh…  Okay,” Skies blinks.
Wing blinks.  “...  Alright then, you’ve got yourself a work crew.  Most of us have had experience patching up various small damages at some point or another- or otherwise maintaining that rust bucket of ours.”
She nods slowly.  “I can see how that would be useful,” she muses.  “Especially when we get around to the refit I want to get done at the same time.”
Wing’s jaw drops.  Skies simply chuckles.





“...  Huh, that looks…  inefficient.  If we were to instead use standard Gravity Drive tech, we could get over six times the output for the same power requirement,” Star scowls.
“Wait, don’t throw it out just yet,” Skies mutters.  “It might be inefficient, but it works near the planetary surface.  Looks like this little part here.  And if we use these superconductor conduits in a Gravity Drive module, we could probably boost the output by another couple orders of magnitude.  It’d increase the startup power cost by a factor of about one point four, and time by almost six, but...”
“Maybe.  Work in that planetary part here and here, and make the superconductors thick enough to stand up to normal operating power levels without superconduction, we can probably give it a half-second startup time for a peak of…  thirty gees.  Give it five seconds to spin up, and it’ll output…  one forty, at maximum operating power of a current system.  But feed it a few gigajoules of ‘startup’ cost, even while in operation- pushing it to about six point four times startup cost- and we can rip off close to half a million gees.”
“Hmm…  We wouldn’t be able to maintain a standard gravity aboard ship anywhere above five hundred gees, though, or a survivable force when accelerating over six hundred…  Oh, but replace these wedge coils with that, and we should be able to get a Distortion Drive to operate at about six times the power cost of a standard Gravity Drive for the same size vessel.”
Flight’s eyes flick between blueprints, failing dismally at following the two engineers’ lines of thought.  It’s all strange squiggles to her.
“True,” Star continues on.  “And if we dual-mount the coils with smaller superconductors, we can get a five gee instantaneous, hundred gee standard, and eight hundred sprint, with gravity threshold at about six fifty…  and a much smaller startup cost, about twice the modern one.  That’ll give her six fifty gees on Gravity Drive, then…  Oh, however fast, on Distortion Drive.”  He gestures at Skies’ blueprint.  “Further multicoiling might allow us to make a missile with nuclear-range payload capable of hundred, twelve hundred, and sixty thousand gee accelerations, by startup investment.  But we can worry about that later.”
A sudden chime draws the attention of all three ponies to the panel in front of Flight, before the engineers get straight back to their discussion.
Flight, however, makes a couple more taps.  “Coils is here,” she mutters, before hopping down from the warped airlock shield- the one that would have prevented the massive gash in the side of her ship- that she’s been using as a stool and trotting for the door.  It’d been an approach chime- the starship equivalent of a doorbell.  She only knows who it is, of course, because the ship computers had detected Coils’ new ID chip at the same time.
She grins to herself as she navigates the passages.  When she’d had her medical computers install that chip in Coils’ foreleg, she hadn’t even thought of that effect.  The filly hadn’t had one already, and such a chip allowed her to instantly authenticate her way through the doors in her ship, rather than manually punching her admittance code into each door panel.





“Hey Coils,” she greets cheerfully, as soon as the airlock door slides open.  Coils’ ID chip would’ve let her open the door herself, as she’d been expecting her and so hadn’t removed the filly’s authorization- but it would seem she didn’t want to do that.
The reason is pretty evident:  There’s a grown mare standing next to her on the boarding ramp…  with a distinct resemblance between the two.
The mare starts talking.
“Greetings.  My name is Glowing Coals, and I wanted to express my gratitude to you for saving my daughter.”  Coils rolls her eyes where her mom can’t see, while Coals goes on about how to ‘properly express her gratitude’.
Then, a fire truck blazes suddenly across the bottom of the ramp, siren blazing, making all three jump.
Flight sticks her head out to see where it’s going…  it’s headed for the still smoking wreckage of the Shadouette.  All the flames seem to have gone out by now.  “What in the world?” Flight demands.  “Are those-!?”
Another truck blazes past, headed to the same place.  She checks the clock on one of the panels inside the airlock, then checks up on the status of her own call to emergency services…
From four hours ago.
“Ah, something must’ve caught fire?” Glowing Coals mutters, staring at the wreckage in alarm- like she’d only just noticed it.
“I called them four hours ago!” Flight snarls, before marching down the ramp and heading towards the wreckage herself.  “I’ll be right back.”
Ten minutes later, when she reaches the wreckage, another six fire engines have arrived.
“What’s the call number?” she demands of the first pony she sees.
He recites the call number she’s been using to track her call.
“I placed that call four hours ago,” she snarls.
He blinks.  “So?”





On the other side of the city, a flock of crows takes fright.