Everypony lets out a sudden gasp as the ship practically explodes into motion. The windshield polarizes, but bright, glowing stars still come into being and flash past, racing to somewhere behind the ship.
“What the-!?” Lunar Wing gasps.
“It- It works!” Night Skies screams excitedly.
Flight waits just long enough for her rapidly climbing acceleration readout to top a thousand gees, a mere two seconds. “Depolarize the hull!” she orders.
“D-Depolarizing,” Wing answers, hitting the switch. “I… Something seems to be messing with the sensors, Princess. I’ve lost the pirates.”
Flight ignores her for five more seconds, before finally letting out a sigh and leaning back in her seat, a smile on her face. The reserves had just stabilized, at very nearly depleted, and started charging again. “Whew, that was close!” She grins at a very confused Wing. “Go ahead and stand us down to normal running; I doubt we’ll need any of our weapons until we go back below the speed of light.”
Then she pauses, smiling cheerfully at her entire bridge crew.
“Did- Did you just say…” Blacklight eventually begins, brushing her highly unusual acid green mane out of her eyes with one hoof.
“That we’re going faster than light?” Astral Eye, her five-year-old astrogator that would have been too young to be allowed on a starship command deck if she weren’t so amazingly talented at celestial navigation, finishes excitedly.
She nods. “Yes, yes I did. And we are.” She looks down at her console again. “Eight point six cee and climbing. Looks like it’s going to stabilize at about nine.” She looks up again, grinning like a loon. “And that’s minimum power.”
“We… We did it,” Wing mutters. “We… We finally finished the Distortion Drive!”
Flight smiles, and uses her horn-aura- which she and most of her crew have been very tempted to call magic, but nopony knows what it really is- to lift her necklace from the pouch on her pressure suit… and slip it over her neck, allowing the ancient gemstone to slide down inside her suit, against her chest. “Let’s go find Equestria.” She takes the helm, and smoothly steers the ship until the gemstone is pointing her dead ahead, after which she increases throttle smoothly, guiding the ship up to about a thousand times lightspeed.
Well… the computer is taking it there. It might take a while. She looks up, at the comm link to Star. “Star? Seems the hard limit on fully-compensated Distortion Drive acceleration is about thirty point six million gravities. Do you think we can improve that any?”
He shrugs. “Honestly, one second to break the speed of light seems like plenty to me. But no, I can’t think of any way to improve it, right off. Maybe… Maybe once we develop more capable manufacturing facilities, but…” He shrugs.
She shrugs as well. “Eh.” She strikes the all hands key, and waits for the chime to sound through the ship. “Alright ladies and gentlecolts, we have officially done it. One one three cee and climbing, under Distortion Drive, and headed for Equestria. I hope. Let’s celebrate the First Light!”
“Aaaand… There, hundred cee,” Flight mutters, watching the numbers on her panel. They’re still a long ways out from the point the gemstone is pointing at- but it feels closer, almost in-system… and spotting anything with a smaller gravity well than a star is hard to detect in time to stop very far above three hundred cee or so. Dodging around such objects is easier- the computer responds automatically to those, and she can even maintain maximum velocity while she dodges around planets. She looks up. “Where are we at now?”
Astral Eye blinks. “Ahh… Looks like we’re about thirty light-hours from the local Goldilocks Zone, and we’re on a mostly tangential trajectory to it. Ahh… One planet, right in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, about half a degree off dead ahead. Looks like it also has a moon.”
Flight scowls. “Hmm… Think you can get me an intercept? Assume the Distortion Drive leaves us at point five cee when we transition to Gravity Drive, then five hundred gees on the Gravity Drive.”
“Roger.” Two taps later, and the filly already has the projected profile calculated out, and sent up to her panel.
She glances at it; it’s set to have her decelerate into a low orbit. “Got it, making it so,” she smiles. “Let’s find out where we are.” She glances towards Wing, while waiting for the invisible point in space where she’ll start slowing down again.
“I’m not seeing any ships,” Wing mutters. “Nor emissions from such. But those are probably being hidden by the Drive anyways.”
Flight shrugs. “Yeah, I suppose. But, space is all clear up ahead?”
“Yep! … Wait, getting a strange signal on the gravimetrics.”
She winces; that’s the sensor used to detect another ship running under Gravity Drive. “Is it dangerous?”
“I can’t tell. There’s too much interference from the Drive, but I don’t think it’s a military-grade drive.”
She pauses for a second, and nods. “Ahh.” Right, the main difference between a ‘military grade’ Gravity Drive, like the one she’d had before the refit, and regular ‘civilian grade’ drives, is that the military ones can hit a hundred gees cruise, and one fifty sprint… and civilian grade drives can hit forty cruise, and fifty sprint. Her upgraded drive, though, tested at 653.21g cruise, and a whopping 813.7g sprint.
Which reminds her of another difference: Standards. On a civvy drive, ‘sprint’ is the point where internal forces from acceleration hit three gees. On a military drive, that limit is ten gees. Her upgraded drive had been held to the military standards when finding her sprint point.
“Where is it?”
“I can’t tell exactly- it seems to be near the planet. We should still have plenty of space to avoid when we transition to Gravity Drive, even if that occurs at point seven three cee.”
Flight nods; Wing just named the maximum safe velocity for her ship, beyond which it wouldn’t be able to protect itself from space dust and other similar debris. “Alright.” She turns to Astral Eye. “Can we adjust the trajectory, to hold the Gravity Drive below the threshold where it might be detected- assume twice the sensitivity of our sensors?”
“Ahh…” A few taps. “We can do that, but if we emerge at point five cee, we’ll go whizzing past the planet at about point one five cee, and have to come back to it.”
She nods. “That’ll have to be good enough- and we’ll have to revisit these trajectories after we emerge anyways, so…” She scowls. “Let’s adjust our Distortion trajectory to keep us above High Orbit, no collision, if we were to cut all thrust immediately upon emerging?”
“Got it.” Two or three taps.
She makes the miniscule adjustment to the ship’s heading.
Dropping back to regular, Gravity Drive velocities is exactly as rough as expected. Decelerative force apparent peaks at five and a half gees before the fully cutting out. Then, as the Distortion Drive spins down, everypony except flight gasps… and collapses, instantly unconscious.
Flight takes a deep breath, tempted to go right back into Distortion power. She glances quickly at her panel, checks sensors… Coasting through space at about point one six cee, noncollision vector.
She sets the ship into silent running… but keeps the reactors running just high enough to run the Gravity Drive to full power out of current generation.
Then she opens up the ship sensors and starts searching for whatever knocked out her crew.
She’s at it for all of six seconds when Astral Eye lets out a brief scream and bolts upright. “What-!”
She looks up. “What happened?” she asks.
“I- I don’t know. Some- Something hurt, a lot. Felt like somepony stabbed me in the chest, with- with-!”
“With a hot reactor fuel rod?” she offers.
“Y-Yeah! That! Only, it was… worse.” She scowls. “And now it’s gone.” She turns to her panel.
Flight scowls at her panel. “Can you get us a minimum-detectability capture to a very high orbit?”
“Can do, Princess.” Just a couple taps, and it’s done. “Hmm… Looks like…” More taps. “Yeah, we can be even less detectable by pulling a gravity assist off of that moon. Which is not moving like a properly orbiting moon should.”
Flight blinks. “... True. Let’s avoid the moon. Shoot for… oh, fifty k-klicks from the surface.”
A couple more taps. “Got it.”
She locks in the course, and the Gravity Drive starts decelerating.
She takes a deep breath, and lets it go. “Okay.” A pause, and she looks at Astral. “It was a spike of pain in your chest?”
Astral nods. “Yeah. I think the rest of me hurt as well- particularly my wings- at the same time, but it’s all gone.”
Scowl. “Hmm… Try flapping them.”
“What? It’s not going to-!” She cuts off suddenly when she flaps her wings sharply… and goes flying from her seat, to land on her back on the floor behind it two seconds later. “... Uh… Never done that in one gee before.”
“Huh… because that about describes the pain I had before I got my… horn powers.” Her com chirps suddenly, and she blinks at it. “… Oh, intercom.” From Engineering… She accepts it, and Star’s face shows up.
“Uh, Hi Princess. Everypony down here, uh, passed out, when we went sublight.”
She nods. “I noticed, the bridge crew- save myself- did as well. Lemme guess, vague pain throughout your body, burning pain in your horn, and felt like somepony stabbed you in the heart with a half-molten fuel rod?”
He blinks, and stares at her. “H-How…?” he slowly mutters.
She shrugs. “Same pains I had before my horn powers came. Remember my Hands-less Hands? Try it!” That’s what they’d come to call her ability to grip things with her hooves, as if wearing Hands.
Two seconds later, he’s holding one of his Hands with the other hoof, in range of the pickup, and staring at it.
She looks up, across her bridge. “This means we’ve found the source of those powers. And if my guess is anywhere close to accurate, that’s Equestria… and the magic of the ancients. I didn’t pass out, probably because I already have those powers… Then Astral woke first, then you… when you two are the youngest two crewmembers. Well… except Coils, I suppose. Is she awake?”
He nods, shaking himself out. “Y-yeah. She woke first.”
“... Huh. Maybe it takes longer on older ponies…?” She shrugs, and taps a little on her panel, launching a recon drone forwards… and sending its link to Astral. “Astral, can you get this drone a ballistic trajectory that’ll take it through low orbit and fling it back out into space? I’ll have it come back under power and rejoin us later, so I’d like to minimize the amount of time it’ll need to rendezvous with us once we reach our orbit- assuming it doesn’t start decelerating until we’re in stable orbit.”
“Got it!” Astral Eye states eagerly, before tickering away at her panel. It takes her about six seconds before the drone finishes adjusting its trajectory with its mere one forty gee Gravity Drive… and goes silent. “If we wait to recall it until we hit orbit, it won’t have the power left to return to us at full power, so estimate three months. We can knock a lot of time off of that by recalling it sooner- and if we recall it before it gets more than about thirty kilo-klicks from the surface, it should be able to make a capture… to an orbit with a period of about two days, from which it can set itself up a rendezvous, estimate four days total.”
She scowls. “Hmm. We’ll see what it sees, then potentially recall it early. Worst case scenario, if we go to the surface before it gets back, it can wait up here in orbit to provide eyes in the sky. Geosynchronous orbit, in particular, over wherever we are.” She tilts her head. “Come to think of it, it might not be that bad of an idea to do that anyways, even if it does get back before we head down.”