//------------------------------//
// Race Against Time 
// Story: Friendship One 
// by BRBrony9 
//------------------------------//

Another six months passed before the Griffons made any formal protest over the alleged construction of a battle station, something which they possessed no proof of. The protest, lodged directly with Canterlot via a telephone link, did not go through the media in the usual way. That meant that Celestia's explanation remained out of public knowledge. For the King's ears only.

She explained that, as only seven years now remained until catastrophe, work was proceeding according to plan on a solution to the issue, and, as she had explained before, Griffonia was most welcome to join with Equestria in providing funding, equipment and personnel to help combat the issue and save their race.

The King demanded proof of what they were building up there, and Celestia granted his request by permitting two members of the Griffonian Missile Corps, mid-ranking but trusted intelligence officers, to be trained as Equinauts and launched into orbit to observe for themselves, up close. They were the first Griffon military members to go to space, though several Griffons living as civilian scientists and engineers in Equestria had, in previous years, been permitted to take a ride and spend a couple of weeks aboard one of the three orbital stations, nicknamed Earth, Pegasus and Unicorn.

The destination of these two intelligence officers, however, was somewhere altogether different. 

Blasting off from New Zebrica, the shuttle carried them, two Equestrian Air & Space Corps pilots, and three unicorn science specialists into orbit, on an unusual trajectory, the same trajectory that the Griffon over-the-horizon radars had been able to track and which had piqued their curiosity, heading west with the planetary rotation for fuel efficiency, but staying around the equator rather than pitching to the north or south as flights to the space stations, the moon, or for satellite deployment would often do. The launches from Ponyburg airbase headed to the same general area of space, on a southwesterly trajectory. The two launch sites were clearly related, pursuing the same goal.

Only once they reached orbit could the Griffons see for certain what that goal appeared to be. They peered from the viewports of the shuttle with undisguised curiosity and amazement, for what they were seeing was no space station. It was a vast orbital construction project, like a skyscraper laid on its side, hurtling at seventeen thousand miles per hour through the void two hundred miles above Equis, all scaffolding and pipes and bundles of wires hanging loosely, suspended in the sky.

Upon approaching closer, more details revealed themselves to the eager and confused eyes of the Griffons. It was a true building site, some kind of armature suspended within a metallic grid, like the skeleton of a skyscraper before the outer walls are installed, but with another, smaller skeleton ensconced within it, like a baby in the pouch of one of the marsupials from the southern deserts. Flickering purple lights marked locations where arc-welding was taking place, bonding metal to metal in the pursuit of some unknown goal. A hub of some sort, a bunch of connected modules that looked like any of the other space stations, floated at one end of the great construct, a command centre, presumably, for the whole operation. That was where the shuttle was heading, to a docking port at the end of one spoke, a long cylindrical module with an airlock.

Once aboard, the Griffons were given a short briefing on the particulars of the project, everything that Celestia and the military brass had permitted them to know, enough to inform their king of the basics without revealing too many details. The next day, they were allowed to go on a spacewalk of sorts, riding a small three-pony platform at the end of a robotic arm attached to the station, usually used for cargo deliveries from automated capsules sent up from the planet. The platform carried them close to the patchwork grid of scaffolding, great aluminium girders forming a framework to which Equinauts could attach themselves while working on various aspects of the construction. More welding was going on on the inner frame, suspended by cables and carbon nanotube struts, allowing precision work on all sides of the project. From here, they could notice, there was another small station at the other end of the mile-long structure. That was what all those launches were about, then- building two entirely new space stations and then constructing this- thing- in between them.

And what was this thing?

Their report to the King the following weekend detailed everything they knew, everything they had been told, and everything they could glean from their close encounter. It was, they surmised, entirely true what Celestia had told him. They were trying to build salvation out of carbon fibre, tungsten and aluminium.




Project Rebirth was a grand design to solve an impossible problem. The gamma ray burst was going to wipe out all life on the planet in seven years. Celestia and Luna doubted they could stop it. The scientists knew that science could not stop it. Weapons could not stop it. Ingenuity could not stop it, nor shield the planet from its deadly rays, unless magic could leap to their salvation.

If it could not, then magic would need to be the saviour of ponykind in a different way- by carrying a torch for the entire species into the future, to safe harbour among the stars. Project Rebirth was an interstellar ark, a colony ship that would transport the few lucky chosen survivors of Equis to another place, a far away planet that they could one day call home, where a new Equestria might be formed under the light of a distant star.

Or it would be, if they could build it in time.

Such a vast construction project had scarcely been attempted on the ground before, let alone in outer space. The ship would have to be bigger than any skyscraper, longer than any ocean-going oil tanker or supercarrier. It would have to be a city in the sky, a self-contained ecosystem for however long it would take them to reach another planet capable of supporting life.

That was why the idea had immediately been dismissed by much of the scientific community (those few who knew of its existence, at least). Vague concepts for such things had been drawn up before by theoretical scientists, but most such plans that were more than a mere outline came, paradoxically, not from scientists but from filmmakers and authors of hard science fiction novels, who needed a setting for their 'lone Equinaut wakes up from cold sleep, has alien company' or 'pony-in-a-bottle goes slowly mad from being trapped aboard ship' kinds of stories. The idea of a colony ship was a fascinating one, mostly used in fiction as a kind of analogy to early Equestrian settlers making first contact with other species, such as the Griffons, or sailors discovering distant islands or visiting the poles. Most of those stories were about discovery, about pushing the frontiers of science and equine endurance.

Project Rebirth was about survival.

With current technology, it was essentially impossible for such a scheme to actually work, so distant were even the closest potentially inhabitable planets. The only two ways for a crew to reach one alive were to enact some kind of cryogenic deep-freeze using extremely expensive and unreliable 'stasis pods,' the kind which rich ponies could pay to have their almost-dead bodies entombed in in the hope of future science being able to cure their cancer or dementia, or to use the concept of a 'generation ship,' where the crew would live out their lives on board, give birth to foals, raise them to be the new crew, and so on until the ship arrived.

Both methods would take centuries, if not more, to get anywhere, because the main limitation was speed and propulsion. As the Director of ESEA had explained to the Princess, even ion engines, nuclear pulse propulsion or interstellar hydrogen ramjets, the most advanced designs that could conceivably be built with current technology, would fall far short. It would take a long, long time to drive to the stars with them, and in parallel with that, the technology simply did not exist to build a ship that could transport enough ponies and equipment, and keep them alive, for the length of time required. Ships aged; seals wore out, metal (on the pressurized, oxygenated interior, at least) would corrode, wires would fray, pipes would leak. Micrometeorite impacts could damage the ship from the outside, too. If spare parts for life support- oxygen production plants, carbon dioxide scrubbers, wastewater recycling systems- ran out, everypony would die. If they ran out of fuel, everypony would die. If they ran out of food, or could not produce enough, everypony would die. If they were not adequately shielded against cosmic radiation, everypony would die. If they were too slow to outrun the gamma ray burst, everypony would die.

In short, it did not leave many realistic scenarios where Project Rebirth carried anything to the stars except a giant metallic coffin containing the last pathetic remnants of a once-proud species. That was why, at Celestia's direction, the ESEA had begun research into magic-powered spaceflight with the shuttle tests. Every possible option had to be investigated, and fast. It had taken six months to attempt simple proof-of-concept tests with high-altitude rocket planes within the atmosphere, assign a shuttle, and assemble and train an all-unicorn crew. 

Even before that concept was proven, Project Rebirth itself had begun, with the first flights into orbit carrying modules for the two base-stations that now lay at either end of the huge armature. Time was critical, and the ESEA had the theoretical plans for a working interstellar spaceship- so long as it did not have to support life for millennia, but merely for days, weeks, months, or even a few decades. To build such a ship would take a vast amount of resources, hence the sudden and rapid buying-up of strategic metals, minerals, fuels and equipment by the Equestrian government. It would also take time. Nothing on such a scale had been attempted before. Even the lunar base and the three space stations that already existed would be dwarfed by the complexity and size of this task, but the ponies of the ESEA and the Air & Space Corps jumped to it with a will. 

They, like most ponies working on the project, had not been told the truth. They knew they were building a particularly large spaceship, but not the purpose behind it. It was disguised as a mission to carry ponies out of the solar system for the first time, for the sake of exploration and nothing more. They had a base on the moon- this was the next logical step, to go beyond the heliopause of Celestia's sun and bravely turn their faces outward, to look across the ether and to go boldly and bravely into the darkness, just as those explorers who had crossed the seas centuries ago had done.

Once the Griffon King had decided once and for all to have nothing to do with Celestia's delusions, having read and digested the report from his officers, that was how it was explained to the public, and to the amateur astronomical community who had been eagerly feeding the message boards and chatrooms with their backyard telescopic observations for the last two years. Not a battle station, not a covert military platform or orbital missile base, but a colony ship. Fascinating! When Celestia gave the speech announcing the mission, the message boards were filled with a different chatter. A few ponies had predicted it was something of that nature, but the skeletal scaffolding which surrounded the ship had been deliberately obscured with reflective aluminium foil on its underside, to limit how much could be seen of the construction from the ground. This had, naturally, been one of the things which had fuelled the speculation about its covert, black-ops nature in the first place, and its removal once the nature of the work was revealed delighted observers on Equis, who could now watch with great scientific curiosity how the construction of this huge ship was progressing. 

The chatter now turned from what was being built, to where was it going to go, how long would it take, and how do I sign up to ride on it? A lot of hopeful ponies now pictured themselves as being among the gallant crew, conveniently ignoring that it had been announced as a joint ESEA-military venture and no mention of civilian colonists had been made in Celestia's announcement. That did not stop ponies dreaming, however. Travelling to distant stars had ignited the imaginations of generations of young foals, and now those dreams seemed closer than ever before.

If those ponies knew the true reason the ship was being assembled, those dreams would have turned to nightmares.