//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2: Deviations 
// Story: Victory: Premonitions 
// by Amazing Mr. X 
//------------------------------//

A metallic clang under our seats marked the separation of Victory’s docking collar from The Radiant Hope. With a hiss of the ship's maneuvering thrusters, we started drifting away on a course that Mission Control had already transmitted to our shuttle’s flight computer. Odyssey had taken the co-pilot’s chair beside me. Even though the navigation system would be performing the orbital maneuvers, I would technically be the pilot during the course of this mission. The alicorn beside me refused to leave me alone with my thoughts.
“First mare to fly over Titan?” The Princess offered this gentle consolation against my wishes, and I wasn’t afraid to voice as much.
“I hate when these schedules get rearranged. We’re too far from home to be inviting mistakes with sudden, rash changes to our carefully laid plans.”
I was venting, I knew I was venting, Odyssey knew that I was venting too. I felt her eyes on me for a moment or two before they drifted back to the ship’s display panels. I knew the look she was giving me without even seeing it. I’d watched her give it to me once before, when I was pushed off of the active crew list for Jupiter. She was sad for me. She desperately wanted to try and console me.
“Jupe, Titan was always a possible swap for the first visit. We’ve planned for this.”
“Not in Victory we haven’t. This was supposed to be a Tempest visit.”
“It’s just a flyover. We’ll come back with Tempest for the real deal.”
“It’s a waste of our limited fuel reserves, especially if we need to land.”
“What could we possibly see on the radio telescope that would compel us to land and investigate? It'll be pointed at Saturn regardless, we’re just visiting.” She had a point, though I was loath to admit how boring that point would ultimately make this little detour. Titan was a lifeless ball of rock, ice, water, and snow. There wasn’t anything down on the surface of that moon that could ever produce the sheer energy required to overcome the radio output of Saturn itself. Not that we were likely to even see something down there with the telescope pointed the other way around. Maybe this really was just a small detour, something that wouldn’t ultimately change very much about the overall layout of the mission. It was a possibility worth considering, at least a little bit, even if it didn’t make the delayed landings sting any less.
“Remember when I was a kid, Odd?” I asked, trying to switch gears.
“We didn’t know each other back then.”
“I meant in general.”
“Sure, I was barely running my own little optics company in those days.”
“The scientists used to speculate about Titan. Weren’t you one of them?”
“Sometimes it felt like I was the only one. All of the big money was in the war. Even I had to take those contracts to make it. Nopony dared dream about funding missions like this. It took a huge amount of work just to get a little probe out here, and it didn’t do much more than beam some grainy pictures back at us.”
“It had some instruments.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” She sounded dejected, and that had me confused.
“Unfortunately?”
“Of course. How do you think it felt? I had all of those beautiful dreams about Titan. Imagine it! A moon bigger than the planet Mercury, with liquid oceans of salt water, and a significant nitrogen atmosphere ripe for terraforming! It could have been our stepping stone to the stars! Instead, it was a poisonous ice ball covered in clouds and seas of Methane and Ethane. It’s just as hard to make Titan our stepping stone as it is to terraform Venus and its runaway greenhouse effect. Ganymede, Mars, those landed up being the smarter choices. That’s why we went to the Jovian system first. It’s all because of my little Voyager.”
“Didn’t they care about the subsurface oceans? Didn’t that give anyone pause?”
“No. We didn’t learn about that until we were halfway to Io. One of the math boys figured it out based on anomalies in the data from the probe’s magnetometer, but it’s only a theory. That would have been exciting to test at least, with the core drill, but just doing a flyby...”
“Sucks?” I offered.
“Sucks.” She agreed.







The thick, burnt orange cloud cover of Titan’s Nitrogen and Methane atmosphere stretched out beneath us in all directions. We had inserted ourselves into a nearly polar, Saturn-synchronous, orbit. As we sat there, we were going over the data that the radio telescope had gathered from our first three revolutions. We weren’t the only ones, either. Our data-link with The Radiant Hope was beaming our measurements back to Earth just as we were making them. There, teams of uniquely specialized scientists would be collectively making much more headway with this data than the two of us ever could on our own. Were the transmission delay not just over an hour in each direction, we wouldn’t have tried competing with them at all. As it was we were both well out of our depth here. Neither of us were experts in this particular field. Even still, we couldn’t ignore the possibility that we might discover something so incredibly obvious that even the two of us would know we had to investigate it immediately.
That was part of the reason I was so mad in the first place. Sure, an early trip to Titan was always in the cards. However, with the radio telescope pointed firmly at Saturn itself, any sudden discoveries would require us to expend mountains of fuel crossing half of the Saturnian System just to investigate things further. Every burn we committed to beyond this single extra visit was another place we couldn’t go, another part of the mission we couldn’t do. Fuel was a precious commodity. Chasing ghosts on the radio waves was a quick and easy way to send us home with no actual landings to show for our efforts. Odyssey was slightly too proud to openly complain about it, but she wasn’t any happier about the possibility. The Princess had been robbed of her dreams by this ice ball once before. Here, it might just become a second time.
Still, we wouldn’t exactly be good scientists if we picked and chose our experiments based solely on the outcomes that we liked. This mission was more important than the two of us and our insignificant problems. Countless individuals back home were watching and waiting. Out here, we were their only eyes, ears, and hooves. So it was that we donned our headphones, poured over ever-expanding waveforms on our displays, grit our teeth, and decided to bear the brutal work like true professionals. There were ponies, griffons, hippogriffs, sea ponies, horses, donkeys, caribou, zebras, and multitudes of other creatures that were all depending on us. We couldn’t let them down. Even if it absolutely killed us on the inside, we couldn’t let them down.
A burst of static exploded through my earphones, forcing me to rip them off in shock. Odyssey threw hers against the impenetrable diamond-glass of Victory’s viewport. They floated there in silence as the two of us blinked in shock, staring down at our screens. We slowly turned to look at each other. The ringing was slowly fading from our ears. Neither of us knew what to make of what had just happened, but we could see the evidence of the burst clearly on our faces. It was just like the burst we heard before, on The Radiant Hope. This time we had sampled it directly instead of catching its reflection. Odyssey stared at me, her expression slowly turning from shock to apologetic sadness. It took me a few more seconds than it should before my confusion melted to a sudden wave of dread and understanding. I was the first one to say it.
“We need to go check this out.”
“I’m sorry, Jupiter.”
“We’re heading back towards Saturn.”
“And that means...”
“We need to use more fuel. We just lost out on our pass of Phoebe.”
It was starting. Titan was rifling through our pockets, robbing us of our dreams.







Odyssey performed the necessary math to pinpoint the source of the repeating static burst. To our shock, the reflected radio signal hadn’t actually originated from Saturn after all. The transmission had instead originated from a twenty kilometer area on the surface of the moon Tethys. This moon currently orbited Saturn just ahead of Mimas and just behind Titan. The source of the burst was located on the face of the moon directly opposite from The Radiant Hope. This posed an immediate and serious problem for us, which had prompted a significant discussion on how to proceed. We had a duty to the creatures of Earth to investigate findings of this magnitude. We were both sure of that. However, landing in a location without line-of-sight to The Hope meant we couldn’t call on anyone for help and support. That also meant we couldn’t share the real-time data collected from our sensors as we approached the burst’s source. We weren’t supposed to be doing anything like that outside of extraordinary mission-critical circumstances.
“Jupe, we can’t just ignore something like this. It’s too important.”
“I agree, but we can’t cut off our own communications to do it.”
“What about the cubesats? We’ve got three of them, we could use one as an antenna.”
“Fuel, Odd, it’s all about the fuel.”
“It’s just a few kilograms of payload each.”
“We have to burn back to The Radiant to pick them up. That’s the Iapetus pass, Odyssey! Every ton of fuel is...” I trailed off, realizing the numbers were potentially much worse than I was about to claim. Time was a factor in the alignment of these things. These three moons were sure to slip out of the nice triangular formation they were currently orbiting in.
“I know, I do, but isn’t this more important? Jupe, what if there’s something out there?” I turned away from her. I was trying my hardest to play devil’s advocate, in favor of preserving the mission as planned. I knew instinctively that Odyssey was already being exceptionally cautious in her analysis but, this decision couldn’t just be down to one of us. Too much of the mission was at stake.
“What if it’s nothing.” Odyssey just looked at me, blankly, as if she couldn’t quite follow. “What if it’s an error in the math and just some Gamma Ray Burst from way out in space?”
“Then we waste the fuel on a good hunch but, Jupe, it repeats. Not exactly quickly, either. The previous burst was yesterday.”
“Well, what if it’s something perfectly natural like an explosion?” That sure took Odyssey by surprise.
“A repeating explosion?!”
“Sure. It’s mostly water ice. We’ve speculated Tethys could be cryovolcanic in the past. One of its active spots might be producing enough energy to produce radio waves.”
“Like a bomb?”
“A bomb’s just a high enough concentration of energy in a short enough period of time.”
“But repeating? Wouldn’t such a surface feature destroy itself over time? Or, for that matter, right away?”
“It could. Such a feature could also destroy us right along with it. With the coms down, nopony would ever know. They’d find The Hope floating abandoned one day, without the slightest trace of us to be found.”
“They’d potentially see the cubesat.”
“Only if we expend the extra fuel to retrieve and place one. That might only give them an entire moon as a clue. The surface of Tethys is cratered for a reason, Odyssey. It could be as simple as meteroties of frozen methane exploding when they hit the surface.”
She frowned at that, in deep thought, “It really could be as simple as a meteor shower, couldn’t it? Hold on. What if we sent a probe?”
My eyes nearly bulged out of my head! “You mean the landing probe? The one that’s supposed to tell us whether our proposed landing zones are safe? If we lose one of those we’re effectively down an entire shuttle! They wouldn’t be able to attempt remote rescue in an emergency anymore. We’d be sacrificing every possible landing if we still wanted to follow procedure.”
Odyssey hung her head low, looking defeated, she was clearly out of good suggestions. Between the two of us, there were a few moments of simple silence as we strained ourselves to consider our options. I briefly wished there was a higher power that I could ask for help.
“I’m right here.” The Princess suddenly started, unprompted.
“Huh?” She looked to me with newfound confidence as I fought off my own confusion.
“We’re here, both of us. We’re both right here at the cusp of discovery. Something we couldn’t have planned for, something new that we couldn’t have ever even known about, is practically right next to us. The grand explorers of ages past risked their lives for the discoveries that we now take for granted. Imagine where we’d be if they had stopped to ask if everything they did was absolutely safe!”
She turned and tapped her only forehoof on an open spot on the ship’s console, emphasizing the ship as she started overflowing with enthusiastic energy.
“I worked on these space planes. I watched whole teams of crystal ponies pour thousands of hours of work into fluid simulations for flights in highly variable atmospheres. I watched crash tests on bundles of individual components, and simulated full-scale accidents at all manner of velocities. They designed a tough customer. This is a ship that could be bundled up and sent all the way to Saturn with absolute and unwavering confidence!” I considered the monumental feat of engineering that both Victory and Tempest ultimately were. These space planes were truly impressive vehicles. They were packed with the results of centuries of careful research into arcane science and engineering. They weren’t the most uncommon vehicles in the modern day, either. We had roughly twenty of them floating around The Terran System at any given moment, but they were no less impressive for their obscene reliability and unmatched track-record.
“And you, Jupiter.”
That broke me from my contemplation, causing me to stare vacantly at the alicorn. “Me?”
“Yes! You’re amazing! I’ve seen you log hundreds of hours of simulator time, flying these shuttles under all kinds of adverse conditions! You’ve been training yourself, as hard as you can, to be ready for anything! And you know what? I think you are.” I blushed a bit at that, feeling a burst of pride at the praise. I wasn’t sure that I deserved it, but Odyssey sure seemed impressed.
“So, yeah. Could it be a volcano made of diamonds, spewing antimatter?”
“No. That’s impossible.”
“Exactly! Whatever is down there, it could only realistically surprise us so much! With us being as prepared as we are? With these tools? With your talent? It’d be a waste not to press the opportunity to our advantage and go take a look!”
“I…” was practically at a loss for words, “think we should risk it. You’re right. Any plausible surface activity wouldn’t be that great of a risk. Besides, you’re good at improvising. If we get into trouble, I’m sure you’ll be able to think of something.”
“Then we’re in agreement?”
“I think we are!”
“Then let’s go make history!”







We took Victory in with its nose facing backwards. A brief burn of our main engines against our momentum slowed us down. The computer killed the landing burn with incredibly precise timing. That left us in a near hover over one of the many ancient craters littering the barren surface of Tethys. Odyssey hit the console toggle to deploy the vessel’s landing legs. I used the ship’s maneuvering thrusters to gently guide us down through the moon’s extremely light gravity. A pleasant thud marked the moment our ship made contact with the ground. Victory slowly settled into the millennia of dust and dirt covering the Saturnian Moon’s cratered surface. We were down deep in the leveled basin of the crater. Our ship had landed facing both our destination and the way which we had come. It was still possible to see the orange ball of Titan sitting up in the sky, through the viewport, but neither of us were looking at it.
Instead the both of us were staring at the object we had identified upon our approach. It was something that had filled us with mixed feelings of confusion and disappointment. Some of that disappointment was alleviated now. Sure, landing meant we had wasted quite a lot of fuel for less than we had hoped. However, that took nothing away from the fact that we had indeed successfully landed on one of Saturn’s moons. It struck me that it looked much like our own, though that was despite a vastly different chemical composition that was largely water ice.
Odyssey unbuckled herself from her seat and tried to stand. For her efforts, the alicorn soon found herself rebounding off of the ceiling. I winced as she struggled to stop from bouncing off of the floor as well. Even after months in space, we were still much too strong for our own good on Tethys. She looked at me as I gingerly released my restraints and practically slid out of my chair. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but I decided to make a certain call ahead of time.
“The maneuvering packs, just in case.” Odyssey nodded in agreement as we turned to head for the back rooms. We would need to change from our lighter flight suits into our heavier space suits before heading out of the airlock. Hopefully that would add enough mass to help us with walking. We had quite the little trek in front of us, but it wouldn’t have been safe to park the ship all that close to where we were headed.







Odyssey gave her levitation gem one final look before velcroing the amulet down to the front of her space suit. I gave the straps of my maneuvering pack one final visual check just to be safe. We gave each other complete visual inspections. We followed the checklists and made sure that our suits were mirror images of each other before turning to the airlock one final time. This was it. I looked intently at Odyssey, whose eyes were so focused on the hatch that I felt like they could burn a hole clean through it. I offered her a small distraction from her thoughts, in the form of some simple conversation.
“First mare on Tethys. That’s not so bad.” That seemed to rip her free from her quiet introspection.
“Did you prepare a speech?”
“Twelve of them.” That got a chuckle out of her. I liked that. She was better when she wasn’t so intensely serious.
“I’m sure you’ll do great, Jupe. Lead the way.” She brought down her sun reflector to match my own, hiding her face from me. I nodded to her and tapped the airlock control. The sound of rushing air filled the room before fading into a gentle hiss. After another minute, it was gone. All I could hear were the sounds of my own breathing. I looked at Odyssey one final time before toggling the door control. The hatch slowly lifted, revealing the landing, and the stairs extended further beyond. I quickly toggled an option to fold the stairs into ramp mode, hoping they’d prove easier for my companion to navigate. We made our way forward, onto the landing, and gazed with wonder at the ground stretched out before us. After a precious few moments, I began descending the ramp. I opened my mouth to begin my speech. It was just in time to see Odyssey tumble past me with all of the grace and majesty of a bag filled with cement.