Short Flight takes a deep breath, sitting on the bridge again. Yesterday, it had taken almost a full hour for everypony to wake up- during which the ship killed nearly thirty percent of its velocity relative to the planet. Now, the recon drone she’d launched is fast approaching the planet, and everypony has had a full day to acquaint themselves with their new abilities.
All of the thestrals, and the pegasus Cold Coils, can fly- though the thestrals wobble a lot, and sometimes crash into the ceiling, because they’re used to “flying” in point-zero-five-gee shipboard environments. As for Coils, she’s just as capable of flying as Flight herself: Her wings give her lift, but she can’t control it, so she always crashes into something- usually the floor- with not insignificant velocity. So she, like Flight had been shortly after her wings reached full size, is covered in bruises.
Coils had come up with the rather unusual suggestion of installing a couple of mesh grates in the central cargo elevator shaft and ducting the vertical atmospheric engines to the top and bottom when in folded position, effectively converting it into a vertical wind tunnel. Her sketch had involved rather generic retraction systems to allow it to retain its purpose as an elevator shaft when not in use as a wind tunnel, but she hasn’t refined the design yet, so it hasn’t been built. Coils had promised that such a tunnel would be immensely useful for learning to glide in a full gravity… then, eventually, to fly.
Shooting Star, on the other hoof, had only barely managed to make his dropped Hands twitch with his horn, otherwise just showering sparks and getting a hornache.
She opens the feed from the drone on her panel, as she knows several of her bridge crew have done as well. At least a dozen ponies not on her bridge are watching too- like Coils, Star, and all of the ‘marines’ left over from the Shadouette.
Lunar Wing lets out a low gasp as it races past twenty k-klicks of altitude at point one six cee.
Flight looks sharply up at her. “What is it?”
“It’s-! … Hm. Good thing it’s not under power. Looks like there’s some kind of Gravity Drive field surrounding the planet, to a depth of about twenty k-klicks. Nothing we can’t work through, but any significant use of the Drive- beyond, say, two gees, or so- will be detectable.” Pause. “Looks like there’s a similar field around the local moon… and a beam of sorts, fifty k-klicks or so across, from center to center.”
She nods. “That would explain why that moon isn’t orbiting like a normal moon. But that also suggests they’ve got some extreme Gravity Drive tech- I want the hull fully polarized whenever possible. She glances to the side. “Turn up the reactors as high as you need to to support that and still allow maximum Gravity Drive activity out of current generation.”
“What about stealth?” Night Skies asks.
She scowls. “I wish. But if they’ve got the power to hold a moon like that, chances are we’ve already been spotted. I want to maintain our stealth as much as possible- including not using the Gravity Drive for anything but internal gravity and inertial compensators anywhere near that zone- but I don’t want to be caught with cold reactors… again. And hull polarization isn’t passively detectable from afar.”
“... True.”
“Alright then.” She glances at her panel, raises an eyebrow, and looks up at Wing; the drone has already passed three fifty k-klicks, the distance between the planet and the moon, on the way out. “Start the recall,” she orders. “Have it start by just killing velocity.” She looks over at Astral. “Can you build it a return profile that’ll put it in a similar high orbit to ours, without ever running the Gravity Drive within twenty k-klicks of any of the interference zones? Don’t worry about a rendezvous right now.”
Six seconds pass.
“Ahh… Looks like it’ll take about two weeks, after we orbit, to be on a similar orbit.”
She nods. “That’ll work. Depending on what it saw, we might go to meet it before leaving, or be on the surface by the time it gets there.” She looks over to Wing. “So, what did it see?”
Wing switches the feed going to everypony- including itself- to the recording. “This data is about three hours out of date… Mind, it was when we got it, but still- that kinda happens when it’s three light-hours away.” She zooms in on the planet during the approach phase, and scowls. “Why does cee-fractional imagery always have to be so blurry…? Uhh, I don’t know about you, but that looks like a really nice continent. Um… Huh, that’s some strange cloud formations…” A little more zooming. “That- That’s not possible!”
“Magic,” Astral declares. “It has to be magic, if it’s letting them build that out of clouds.”
Flight stares at the unmistakable shape of an airborne, floorless sports stadium made out of clouds. On the side of something that looks vaguely like civilization… and is also made of clouds.
“That has got to be magic,” Flight mutters. “Any signs of surface-based civilization?”
Skies lets out a snort of laughter.
“As opposed to cloud-based? Let’s see…” She squints at her panel. “Funny, that looks almost like some kind of hybrid city. It’s mostly made of clouds, but I’m seeing the colors of artificial building materials- matches painted wood and glass- and the shapes of high-rise structures.” More panning. “That looks like some kind of farming town… Hang on.” Some vicious panning. “That’s definitely a road of some kind- and I want to say it’s a rail road.” She zooms out a bit. “... And there’s a mountain settlement, seeing a lot of gleam from… matches marble. Looks like a very fancy place.”
“So,” Flight begins. “Assuming these are all part of the same nation, which one do you think would be the capital- and where the greatest, ah, mages would gather?”
Wing scowls. “... Hm. I think the mountain place could be the capital- there’s certainly enough marble, that seems to be in high demand for palaces and government structures no matter where you go- but the mages and engineers…” She pans some more. “... Huh, that looks almost like Manehattan City, just a bit… shorter. That might be it for the engineers- gotta have a thriving port there, surrounded on almost all sides by water like that- but mages…” She scowls, panning around. “There looks to be a few more farming settlements. I’m going to say we don’t know enough, just yet, about what a mage would need to be able to predict them. It’s certainly possible they would tend to gravitate to the capital, for proximity to the royals and ‘upper class’ housing, but that’s all conjecture.”
“... Alright. Any suggestion that it’s ponies living in these areas, or is cee-fractional too blurry for that?”
“Hmm… No, I’m not seeing anything. Um… Oh, there’s something. There’s a volcanic land on the other side of that ocean- looks to be inhabited by some kind of large, largely nomadic lizard, but I’m seeing signs of civilization. Like, that looks like a diving board into a lava pool.”
“Largely nomadic?” Flight asks, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah. No sign of permanent homes or other trappings of what we call civilization, and the signs I’m seeing of civilized items are scattered pretty wide.”
She scowls. “Hmm… Considering the lava diving board, let’s just assume they’re some kind of fireproof lizard for now- like dragons, maybe. I want to say they look too big for the high-rise and stuff we found on the main continent, though.”
“Yeah… Must be a diverse planet.”
“Alright then. Let’s plan on dropping down someplace around the main continent once we reach orbit… assuming it is a pony civilization down there, and that we find clear signs of heavier-than-air craft, spacegoing or not. Lacking signs of such, we can splash down in the ocean nearby and walk onto the beach someplace to meet as… uh, travelers, from someplace. If not ponies…” She shrugs. “We decide then.” She looks at the Astrogation section. “Astral, if we were to run the Gravity Drive right at the current detectability but supplement it with the main engines at full power, both accelerate and decelerate, how much sooner could we hit our high orbit?”
“Uhh,” Skies mutters uncertainly.
It takes Astral less than a second to get the numbers. “Several days,” she answers. “Orbital insertion could be completed in about… twenty-six hours, to our current niner point six two days. And that’s including a short period of zero Gravity Drive power, within twenty k-klicks of the interference zone- not that it’d be providing much at that point anyways, at about a tenth of a gee.”
She nods once. “How much extra fuel would we burn?”
“About twenty tons- about three percent of available fuel, allowing for return to Equineothame.”
She blinks. “What-? How full are the tanks?”
“Ninety-nine point three seven percent,” Skies answers promptly. “It was point three eight percent when we left Equineothame.”
She scowls. “Alright, send it to me, we’ll make it so. And…” She scowls. “Hmm. The reserves hold enough to light off the Distortion Drive. If anything comes for us on the way, we might want to power it on and rabbit back home.” She glances sideways at Skies. “And if we do go down, we’ll probably want to make a quick stop by the ocean to refuel either way, just in case.”
“Alright then, how is it looking?” Short asks. “There ponies down there, or no?”
Lunar Wing glances up from her perusal of live video data; it’s about twenty-four hours after her decision. “Yep, they’re ponies. And they speak English, by the way. I think I found an interesting pedal-powered helicopter for one, but that’s the only heavier-than-air craft I’ve spotted. Everything else is hot air balloons, blimps… or pegasi pulling wagons. How they’re keeping them from falling, I have no idea.” A glance. “And it looks like the mountain town is the Capitol; massive castle with guards surrounding it, complete with a guard barracks and several other government buildings, plus several noble estates. The guards are using swords and spears, though, so…”
She nods. “Let’s try not to give them a reason to find out about our armor. Or weapons, for that matter. Anything else of note?”
“I’ve spotted steam power, looks to be just the train, though. I think they use magic for all the day-to-day tasks we use electricity for. So…” Wing shrugs. “Our ship would probably scare them out of their wits, and I’m not all that interested in finding out how effective the hull plating is against magic just yet, either.”
“Hmm…” She smiles. “Astral? Can you get us an adjusted course, to drop us down directly over that big ocean between the pony mainland and the dragon-occupied region?” She glances at Wing.
Wing nods. “I’ve spotted seagoing ships at the northern end, and in both other oceans bordering our ponyland, but everything between the ponies and the dragons hugs the pony coast pretty well.”
“Got it,” Astral states.
She smiles, and sets in the course Astral just sent her. “Here we come, Equestria.”