//------------------------------//
// Chapter 8:  Drills 
// Story: The Equine Starliner 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

“Two,” Captain River Song sighed.
Kalya looked up, at the bicycle lamp she’d set next to the control panel for the massive power plant, with the light rope strung around the plant, all blinking away merrily.  It was a fire drill- and she had selected this location explicitly because the duty watch for this reactor room had a habit of slacking off.
Yet, two whole minutes into the drill, and nopony had shown up to even shut the plant down- it was still, just like all nine others in the room, running at almost ninety percent of maximum power in ‘reverse generation burn’.
She sighed.  “I’m starting to hope there’s automatic firefighting capabilities in here,” Kayla muttered.
Finally, the door opened, and somepony charged in, wearing an oxygen mask and holding an extinguisher.  Kayla glanced at the tablet in her hooves- it was a power tech from a nearby reactor room.
The mare stopped once she had entered the room, and looked around, apparently confused.  It didn’t last long, though- after a moment, she seemed to spot the false fire…  then darted instead to the side, where the room extinguishers were hanging neatly in a row.  There, she flicked up a plastic shield and put her hoof on the power plant emergency stop button for a second.  Finally, she looked up at the plants, withdrew her hoof, and bolted forwards to mime using her extinguisher.  As she did so, she barked into the communicator built into her oxygen mask.
“Fire uncontrolled, reactor room four-seven, source unknown!”
Kayla smiled.  The mare was acknowledging that, at this point, the room would likely already be shrouded in smoke, making it difficult to see through it- especially with the power plants still guarding their miniature stars which, in a smoky environment, would mask the fire very handily.  Kayla noticed, in the readout on her tablet, that every plant in the room had gone into automatic shutdown when her hoof had been detected on the emergency stop button, even though she hadn’t pushed it.
Roughly fifteen seconds passed in relative calm, before the power tech threw down her unspent extinguisher, turned straight around, and galloped over to the door- where other, unused extinguishers were hung neatly on the wall.  She seized one and returned with the fresh extinguisher to resume miming using it.
This continued for what seemed like forever before, right around the four minute mark, the mares that were supposed to have been working there stumbled in.  About two thirds of them appeared to be drunk.
Kayla facehooved when they plucked all the remaining extinguishers off the wall, tested them on each other, and then wandered in the wrong direction with them, effectively playing with the extinguishers.
Very suddenly, the amount of light in the room went down.  A quick glance up the room indicated why- the power plants were no longer guarding miniature stars, and had started spinning down.
At the same time, another tech from reactor room four eight galloped in with another extinguisher to relieve the first mare.
“Plants off!” the first mare announced to her comms.  “Fire on Fusion four-seven-dash-three!”
Kayla nodded.  With the massive power plants shutting down, the glow of the fire would be more visible through the smoke, which wouldn’t have quite reached complete obstruction of view.  Plus, the fading glow of the plants could easily have been used, in combination with familiarity with the layout of the room, to identify which plant the fire was nearest to.
Then a third tech from the other room galloped in, just seconds after the second, holding one extinguisher in one forehoof and carrying two more on her back.
Finally, right about the five minute mark, three mares in the full firefighting gear stepped into the room.  Commander Cannon, the first of the three, stopped to look briefly around the room.
“Where is the hose?” she barked.
“Hose here!” somepony called, from out the still-open door.
“So how bad’s the damage?” Captain River Song asked Kayla, as they watched the bridge officer commanding the firefighting party moving into the room with the firehose.
Kayla looked down at her tablet, and tapped the ‘results’ tab- which hadn’t been there before.  “Total loss,” she answered.  “Fusion containment failure.”
River winced.  “Yikes.”
Kayla nodded.  “Forty thousand tons of atmosphere, ten reactors, and a good-sized segment of our hull blown apart and ejected, forty-seven compartments open to space with almost three thousand casualties and nine hundred dead, thirty two lost to space.  And that’s the optimistic estimate, assuming the automatic shutdown interlocks worked so we only had one runaway.”
She winced again.  “What’s the pessimistic one?”
She scrolled to the side.  “Um…  Total loss with all hands.  If all ten reactors in this room are running at high load when one suffers containment failure, none of the shutdown interlocks manage to stop a reactor before it is destroyed by another explosion, and the reactor ejection system fails to vent the plasma overboard by blowing holes in the hull and jettisoning some intervening compartments, the reactor rooms are close enough to each other- and enough of them are running right now- to blow the whole ship apart.”  She sighed.  “I know who I’m yelling at tonight.”
“On the other hoof,” River noted, “Ensign Hot Fire over there demonstrated exactly what those idiots should have done.”
Kayla nodded, glancing up at the first mare that had galloped in.  “And she did it well enough I want to say the LT over there actually did some localized fire drills.  Maybe we can use them to help train the rest?”
She nodded.  “Possible, yes.”  She glanced up at the fire crew.  “I’m more disappointed about how the fire crew needed a bridge officer to get them moving.”
“And Commander Cannon at that,” Kayla sighed.  “She’s consistently had the highest performance rating in every single exercise we’ve done yet, even including myself.”






Three Days Earlier, in Fusion Four Eight…






“Alright, ponies,” Lieutenant Hard Line, the officer in charge of the room, announced.  Only a few ponies looked.  She scowled, then filled her lungs.  “Attention!”
There was a sudden scrambling as ponies turned to pay attention, and lined up in front of their duty stations.
“That’s more like it!” she barked.  “In a minute, we will be doing a fire drill.  This time, our target is not speed, but to learn how to properly respond to a fire in our reactor room.”  She scanned across the gathered ponies.  “Does anypony know the proper procedures?”  She scanned down the line.
Ensign Hot Fire, the tech assigned to Reactor Four, and the one mare on the entire shift that Hard Line had caught working during her resting shift, was the only one that raised a hoof.
She picked somepony else on purpose.  “Ensign…  Cold Iron!”
The ensign, the tech assigned to Reactor Seven, blinked.  “Uh…  Get an extinguisher and call it out?”
Hard Line sighed.  The ensign wasn’t wrong, per se, but she also wasn’t right.  She was missing something- a very crucial first step.  She turned.  “Ensign Hot Fire?”
The ensign bowed her head.  “When preparing for a reactor room fire drill, it is ideal to idle the reactors ahead of time- the emergency stop can do heavy damage to the equipment, so we don’t want to use it if it’s not a real emergency, and an idle reactor reaches the ‘safe’ point- where the E-stop is disarmed- in about seven seconds, or five seconds after flame disappearance.  Once the drill starts, we still go for the emergency stop button, located under a shield by the extinguishers- but only touch the button in a drill, versus pressing it in a real emergency.  This orders all reactors in the room into standard shutdown, versus the instantaneous- and very damaging- emergency stop.”  She bowed her head again and took a fresh breath.  “Once the stop is actuated, runaway reactors will be either physically impossible or immediately apparent- and in the lack of one, we can continue with standard shipboard firefighting techniques.  A real emergency stop also electrically isolates each reactor, but will not defeat the on-mount batteries.”
Hard Line stared at her for a second.  She hadn’t known half of that- which sounded very ship-specific.  “Where did you learn that?”
“It’s in the vessel safety manual stored in paperback form under every control console and in electronic form within the console itself, chapter forty two, reactor room emergencies.”





Kayla stepped quietly into Fusion Four Seven once again.  It was almost two full days since the disastrous fire drill, and crew attendance had improved in here- however, she and Captain Turning Wrench, the head of the entire Engineering department and the mare she had entered with, had been getting automated ‘dangerous behavior’ warnings for this room twice that day already.
She immediately saw the problem.
The techs had cobbled together some kind of basketball hoop against one wall, and had smuggled in a real basketball, which they were playing with.
With a backdrop of the massive, open-air reactors with their whirling components just waiting to get smashed into by a heavy basketball.
Then the door opened behind her, and when she glanced back, it was Corporal Bringing Thunder with a column of her marines.
Thunder sighed, then glanced to the side.  “Snipe the ball,” she ordered, quietly.
The soldier she’d ordered selected a cartridge from her belt and loaded her weapon.
“Go touch the e-stop button,” Kayla muttered to Turning Wrench, “but don’t push it.”
Captain Wrench nodded sharply and moved quickly- but quietly- towards the fire extinguishers.
Before she could reach them, though, one of the rogue techs spotted them.  “C-Captain!” she cried.
Another one caught the ball, glanced towards the door, and then flung the ball aside.  It looked like she was trying to hide it behind the reactors.
Unfortunately, her aim was off, and it sailed straight into the heart of the first reactor in the row.
And, of course, the whirling thing slammed into it with an echoing bang.
The bang wasn’t just from that collision, though.  The ball managed to survive to be launched almost directly at Kayla, missing her by mere inches- but that reactor component didn’t.  Whatever it was, it broke.  For a mere fraction of a second, which Kayla attributed to the adrenaline flooding her system from the moment she’d realized where the ball was going, that whirling thing had nearly stopped…  and that particular arm of it was noticeably bent to the side.  As it did so, the control panel at the foot of that reactor turned blood red- and the miniature star at its heart seemed to tilt…  towards the rogue techs.
Then, right as the star started expanding towards them, something shot straight into it from the rest of the reactor, from both above and below, converting most of it into a block of ice.
Some escaped even that strange ice explosion, though, and escaped the bounds of the reactor, blasting out across the rogue techs.  As it did so, Kalya noticed all nine of the other reactors also becoming instant blocks of ice.
Next, while the techs were recovering from the wave of fire and the immediately following icy shockwave, there was a sharp cracking noise as the bent arm thing broke completely off of the reactor, and fell down on top of them.
And finally, the melodic, infinitely calm AI voice came on the overhead.
“Fusion contained,” it announced.  “Reactor Ejection System disarmed.”
Corporal Thunder took a deep breath, then let it out.  “Orders, Captain?”  Kayla could tell she was holding herself back.
One glance behind her told the story.  The ball that had missed her had struck one of the marines on the back of the head- that mare was lying, unconscious, on the floor.
She took her own deep breath, and let it out.  “Take them to the brig,” she ordered.  “Every last one.”





“Haven’t even had her for a whole month, yet already destroying her,” the yard manager sighed, looking out the window at the massive starliner berthed externally to the Fleet station in Earth orbit, which also served as their orbiting shipyard.
“To be fair,” Kayla grumbled, “it wasn’t me that blew it up.”
He nodded, then plucked his tablet from its magnetic microgravity holder.  The station didn’t have onboard gravity, after all.  “No worries,” he informed her.  “Happens about one out of every ten times they crew a new vessel with mostly half pay or new recruits.  Some idiots manage to find their way aboard, do something stupid, and break it.”  He shrugged.  “And actually, you’re lucky if you managed to keep it down to only one casualty.  They usually manage to kill someone, and there have been a couple of ships that were lost with all hands because of it.”
She sighed.  “That was almost us,” she stated.  “It was only thanks to the safety interlocks that the reactors stopped fast enough to prevent a major explosion- and even then, they almost weren’t fast enough.”
He shook his head.  “But at least they worked, didn’t they?”  He sighed.  “I should have a survey crew ready within the hour, see what it’s going to take.”
She looked at him.  “You’re aware that anyone that steps aboard is going to become an anypony, right?”
He winced.  “Right, yes.  I’ll…  do what I can, then.”





When Kayla returned to her ship, she went straight to the damaged reactor room.  It was mere hours after the ‘accident’; thanks to budgetary constraints, new ship construction was painfully slow…  which left a lot of yard capacity sitting idle for things like repairs.  It hadn’t exactly hurt that she had been in standard Earth orbit, and not far from the station, when it had happened.
When she stepped in, she froze, and scanned down the line of moving reactors.  None of them were blocks of ice any more, but every single one of them was moving intermittently, doing something- even the one with the missing arm.
She trotted up to the control panel to look at it.
According to the panel, the thing was going through a ‘post emergency shutdown damage review’.  It had already determined that one ‘containment field projector’ was damaged, and apparently also found damage to the track that they spun around on, plus a few other damages likely induced by the thermal shock of turning a miniature star into a block of ice.





“...  Wow.”
Kayla raised an eyebrow at the survey team lead.  It had taken them less than an hour to come aboard and make their way to the reactor room.  “So what’s it going to take?” she asked.  The reactors had stopped moving just seconds before they entered.
The stallion looked up at the damaged reactor again.  “Well…  I…  According to everything I know, this machine is physically impossible- yet here it is.”  He sighed.  “Meaning, we simply can’t fix it.  We can replace it, but while this thing uses a lot of fairly small parts, we won’t be able to just carry in a new reactor- we’d have to cut a hole somewhere.”
“Could we disarm the reactor ejection system and just remove those panels?”
He blinked.  “Wait, she has an ejection system?  There’s compartments all around us!”
She nodded.  “She’s apparently designed to eject some passenger compartments, possibly with passengers, in order to get a runaway reactor overboard- and reduce the damage.”
“...  Ahh,” he muttered.  Then he walked over to the reactor panel, which was displaying a list of damages.  “Then, what’s the line voltage on these things?”
Kayla shrugged.  “My chief engineer said the reactors- and the entire electrical grid- runs on a variable voltage…  with all superconductive cabling.  She said we’re running at about four hundred gigavolts right now.”
“Giga-!?” he gasped.  “Er…  Yeah, there’s not going to be anything we can replace it with, either.  Best we can do is megavolts- you’d have to shut them down to go to higher voltage, at which point…”  He trailed off, staring at the panel, then sighed.  “At which point just one of these things in another room would outperform something like fifty of what we could put in here.”
Very suddenly, reactor number six emitted a couple of clunks and started moving intermittently again.
Kayla looked.
The yard stallion made his way over to peer at the control panel.  “...  Huh,” he muttered.  “Looks like most of these reactors were damaged by the sudden shutdown, but this one remains in operable condition.  It’s running a pre-ignition self-test.”





Finally, the survey crew left.  Kayla pressed her head against the wall of the empty room, and groaned.  “Athena, why do you have to be so unique?” she asked exasperatedly.
“This vessel was designed and constructed as an experimental prototype vessel.  This vessel is capable of self-maintenance; the reactors in this room are scheduled for automated repairs in four point six days.”
Her head snapped up, once she realized what she had just heard.  “Wait, you can talk?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then…”  She tilted her head, and asked about the biggest mystery about the vessel.  “Are you a warship?”
“This vessel was planned to serve as either a civilian exploration vessel or as a museum piece upon return from testing, assuming this vessel was not blown apart by testing exercises.  However, this vessel does meet the requirements to be classified as a superdreadnought-class warship.”
She closed her eyes.  “So in other words, nothing definitive, but you sure look like one.”
“The definitive answer would be no, this vessel is not classified as a warship, despite meeting and exceeding the requirements.”
She sighed.  “Then what are you classified as?”
“This vessel was registered and commissioned into naval service as a passenger liner.”