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// Chapter 3: Sources 
// Story: Victory: Premonitions 
// by Amazing Mr. X 
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I sprinted down the ramp with every ounce of strength I had inside, diving for the ground as if my life depended on it. I slid straight into the icey dust, digging a small trench in the shavings as something hard landed on top of me with a prominent thud. I looked up, cautiously, slowly trailing my eyes up to the icey dirt piled against my visor. I stared at it in muted shock as the ringing of adrenaline slowly dissipated in my ears. It took a few seconds to register that the glass wasn’t cracked. That brought a smile to my face, I was alive! I was horrifically stupid, but I was alive!
Odyssey sounded panicked when I heard her voice come up over the radio. “Are you alright Jupiter?!”
I started laughing. It might have confused the heck out of my companion, but I couldn’t help but feel an unrelenting surge of joy as I realized just how horribly wrong that descent from the ramp had gone. Historical events like this were often remembered as sobering and serious occasions marked by powerful words. As it turned out, actually going through one was just a combination of trying to fight back vomit and the unrelenting forces of chaos that were dead-set on robbing you blind. Despite it all, I had still managed it, I was the first Mare to set a hoof on a moon of Saturn. I had made history, silently, in the company of a good friend. It was these little moments that made it all worth it.







We dusted each other off and gave our gear another brief visual inspection. Thankfully the fall had been gentle enough to avoid damaging our equipment. I gave a small, tasteful speech to mark the occasion to a grand audience of just one other mare. I had even impressed myself with my own ability to entirely improvise around that historic prat-fall of ours. Unfortunately, nopony else would hear our broadcast until we had launched our ship and reestablished radio communications with The Radiant Hope. For now, we were entirely on our own.
Odyssey and I turned to face our current goal, an object we had spotted upon our initial approach to Tethys. The sight of it had confused us both but there was something profoundly personal about its presence that had been written all over The Princess’s hidden face. I took charge, starting ahead, my companion following behind. We weren’t all that close to the thing. It took a few minutes of gently skipping across the foriegn lunar landscape before we made it to the object. A cursory visual inspection indeed revealed exactly what we had suspected it would be from afar. Odyssey raised her voice at the thing, sounding particularly angry at it.
“How on Earth could it have gotten here?”
“Aerobraking?”
She turned her head towards me, and I could feel her disapproving glare through the inky black of her one-way protective visor. “That’s impossible. This is impossible. None of this is a natural, probable, or mathematical occurrence.”
That very thought had never quite escaped me. I imagined it was precisely that which the two of us had been so confused about from the start. We were staring at a space probe. The word “Voyager” was printed plainly on its side, implying it was the very probe that Odyssey had helped to launch over a decade ago. That object had entered the Saturnian System going faster than we had. That had been more than fast enough to completely destroy it, especially if it had hit any object in the system without slowing down first. The strangest part was that the original probe had never been on a vector to impact anything, even with generous margins of error taken into account. I only had one possible explanation for this turn of events in the probe’s life.
“Odyssey, somepony must have placed this here.”
A sudden burst of static rang loudly over our headsets and cut off her reply, utterly drowning out her transmission with its raw power. I saw the mare encase the entire machine in her mighty magic and lift the whole of the space probe off of the ground in mere seconds. The static instantly faded into a clear and irregular beeping tone. It was a data transmission immediately familiar to anyone that had worked with the probes of the space program. It was a simple computerized transmission, trying to phone home. Odyssey had a little more to say about it.
“The static was a ground loop. None of this equipment was designed to transmit while being grounded like this. It was playing havoc with the amplifiers.” I could barely hear her say any of that through the radio feed. Lifting the probe had removed the static, but it hadn’t done anything to change the volume level. The broadcast was obscenely powerful, having been designed to reach the distant blue dot of Earth. It left my ears ringing! Luckily, the bursts of digital signaling ended only a moment or so later.
“It’s still trying to communicate with Earth.” I observed, sadly.
“Wouldn’t you?” I glanced at her, confused. “It looks fairly intact considering it somehow arrested an impossible amount of momentum with only its tiny ion thruster… without us ever telling it to. It’s almost like we’re supposed to believe it has a mind of its own.” 
Odyssey’s words sent a chill down my spine, one colder than space itself! It hadn’t just been sitting here all this time, the probe was bait! We had walked right into some kind of trap. I resisted the urge to look around for an obvious attacker. If they were indeed violent, it said a lot that they hadn’t struck us yet. I didn’t want to tip them off with any sudden movements, nor be overly cautious either.
“They can’t hear us,” I posited directly, “our transmissions are too weak. They’d have to be physically present to pick them up now. They must have expected us to be more cautious and establish direct communication for a landing, like procedures would normally call for.”
“Jupe, there’s nothing saying they aren’t actually here.” 
That sent another chill down my spine. I instinctively tried to oppose the thought, offering counter-suggestions that felt logical to me. “They’d need a suit, and a vehicle.”
“You mean a shield and a teleport spell?”
“That’s impossible, the distance is too vast. It’d take too much magic to teleport here, it’d take too much time.”
“Jupiter, they’re not doing anything remotely with a two and a half hour delay.” I froze, realizing that she was right. She gestured with her head towards the sky before leaving me with a simple question: “What don’t you see up there?”
I didn’t need to look. “Earth. They couldn’t even be using lasers. We’re totally occluded. What about magic?”
“I like to think I’d be able to feel that but, that’s just a hope. Either way there’d be a significant delay. Magical energies can only travel at light speed or slower.” 
I looked up at the floating probe, utterly unsure of myself. “What do we do?”
“The better question is; what can they do and what should we be doing about it?”
“Well, they could kill us.”
“Why wait this long?” She was right, they’d already lost the element of surprise. If they were smart enough to do all of this, then they would have expected us to figure out that something was wrong by now.
“They could trap us? Hold us hostage, for a ransom?”
“How?”
“By…”
We turned to look at each other, having had the same thought at the same moment, and spoke in near unison.
“Stealing the ship.”
I turned to sprint for it, without thinking, but the alicorn grabbed me in her magical telekinesis before I could run off.
“No! It could be sabotaged!” The probe fell to the ground behind us. Odyssey had completely lost her grasp of it when she had reached out to stop me with her mind. The thing crumpled immediately, almost completely silently. The excessively muffled sound of twisting steel made it to our ears through simple conduction with the ground. Odyssey cringed, then stumbled in place as the ground shook. The horrifically loud sound of cracking ice filled our ears. In an instant the world went eerily silent as the ground dropped out from underneath me. The landscape in front of me began to fracture and shift before my eyes.
I was freed from my immobilized state as Odyssey’s concentration suddenly and completely failed. I dropped directly into a hellish, ear-shattering earthquake! I stumbled around in time to see the other girl practically falling over on her three legs. I rushed to her side and tried to help steady her. It was quickly becoming clear that staying here was a pointlessly dangerous endeavor. Around us, jets of frigid steam were shooting up between the cracks. Subterranean water deposits were flash-boiling from the sudden drop to vacuum pressure. They weren’t threatening to burn us, but these violent pressure releases could easily send us flying hundreds of meters! That was assuming the flying debris ice didn’t bludgeon or concuss us as the frozen surface violently exploded out of the way.
I thought better of trying to communicate any of this to Odyssey and simply slammed a forehoof against her backside. An instinct took over in her and she reared up before trying her best to run forward. She did a remarkably okay job of it, proving that balance was easier when half of your step time was spent falling far through the air. I did my best to follow behind her. I was trying to focus through my labored and panicked breathing as I watched massive cracks advance out through the ice in all directions. They were spreading out from under us as the ancient crater basin started to fracture apart. Every second in the air was narrated with unsettling silence. Every moment a hoof was pressed to the ground was overwhelmed by the panic of cracking, groaning, and distant boiling.
It didn’t occur to me until we were halfway to Victory that this moon might have contained significant pockets of subsurface liquid water under its craters. I didn’t have the time to once again lament bringing the least appropriate of our two space planes. I was too busy watching in horror as Victory began listing at an increasingly worrying angle relative to everything around it. Angrily boiling water lapped at one of the edges of the ice sheet the craft was perched upon. The whole ship looked like it was mere minutes away from sliding into a rapidly boiling underground lake. 
I watched the listing grow worse as I slowly grew closer. I watched as Odyssey waited with impressive patience for her pilot to arrive at the top of the ramp. I stood in horrified panic as we waited for the airlock to cycle. Neither of us bothered with procedure, properly stowing equipment, or changing back into our flight suits. I threw off my manuerving pack, galloped down an increasingly sideways hallway, and jumped for the pilot’s chair with the unwavering confidence of the pegasus pony I knew I wasn’t. I got there just in time to watch the viewscreen plow directly into the water. I slammed the power toggles out of standby mode and watched as every single system’s alarm began to panic in unison. The ship’s Master Alarm was blaring, the maneuvering controls were unresponsive, every engine was reporting as being hopelessly flooded, and the new direction of gravity had me falling out of my chair! The last thing I remembered was my face rushing towards the inside of my helmet as it cracked itself against Victory’s viewscreen.







I woke up in a daze. I had no idea how much time had passed, but I supposed it must have been very little. I had fainted, not concussed myself, at least that was the hope I chose to live with. The viewport certainly didn’t have any better news for me. The water outside was so dark that it was impossible to tell just how far down it truly went. My better logic quickly fought off a primal fear that we’d fall into the center of the moon and be crushed by the pressure of an impossible sea. Tethys didn’t have significant subsurface oceans, it couldn’t, none of the data from that cursed probe indicated that it ever could.
I tried to spin around in place but found my efforts hampered by something heavy. I turned my head to see my own maneuvering pack resting on top of me. It was an incredible distance from where I had just remembered dropping it. A concussion promptly landed up a serious consideration once again, not that either of us had the medical skills and equipment to deal with that possibility. I did my best to shove aside the increasingly horrifying realization that I was a dead mare walking, even if the two of us somehow made it out of this mess. If I had a serious head injury I could be fine for minutes, hours, or days before suddenly and unceremoniously dropping dead where I stood. Celestia above, was this really my fate just because we hadn’t bothered to properly return our gear to stowage?
“We.”
The realization that I had momentarily forgotten about Odyssey ripped me from my introspection, and my eyes immediately scanned the cockpit for any sign of her. I spotted The Princess clearly rooted to the cockpit floor. She was braced in-place before the open doorway to the hall, standing on what was now the wall. Through the darkened shield of her visor multiple layers of magical glow were illuminating her face. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut in concentration. It was in this moment that I had two immediate thoughts:



Firstly: I was incredibly envious of a pegasi’s natural ability to outright defy gravity by continuing to stand on what was now a wall. I’d seen this casually achieved a couple of times in my life and it never ceased to fill me with jealousy.




Secondly: Unless my inner ears were terribly injured, I realized we weren’t actually sinking. There wasn’t any sensation of rising or falling to be had, we were completely neutrally buoyant.


Odyssey cried out in pain as the ship groaned under the stress. The mental anguish of levitating in this situation was evidently much greater than holding the probe aloft had been. The girl quickly called out to me in desperation, breaking me free of my silence. 
“Jupiter! Please!”
“I’m here! On the canopy glass!” I replied.
“I can’t lift us. The ice closed over top of us.”
My eyes widened as I realized the implications behind Odyssey’s words. Our vessel was entirely submerged within a subsurface lake, underneath thick sheets of ancient ice. There wasn’t any way I could have ever imagined this mission turning out so bleak before now, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that. We needed a plan. Even if it had no hope of actually working, we still had to at least try to make it out of here alive. I threw the heavy maneuvering pack off of me, tossing it aside so that I could sit upright. Then I finally thought to ask an obvious question.
“What’s your magic doing?”
“Hopefully it’s keeping us from sinking!”
I suddenly doubted that was actually true, and started quickly going through some math in my head. Memories of a younger and less informed me, protesting the “lies” of The Sun Princess came to mind. Ponies claiming to carry impossible amounts of mass in their magical grasp had never sat particularly right with me, especially in those days. However, life had since taught me that some ponies did actually possess those rare talents.
“Let go!” I ordered, watching her eyes shoot open in stunned shock.
“Are you suicidal?! I can feel the forces acting on us!”
“It’s buoyancy. It’s pushing us up, not down.”
She stared at me with a confused look that said several thousand hours of her own engineering expertise couldn’t see how I’d be right, but she didn’t question it any further. The glow faded and the ship lurched as it ripped free of her invisible hold and surged upright. A horrific crunching sound and a violent lurch indicated an impact. The ship hit the ice flow at an odd angle before leveling out and slamming flat against the ice sheet. I went flying, the world going blurry as the wind was knocked out of me. Though, this time, I managed not to pass out completely. We were floating, for sure. Our entire ship was exactly upside-down under the ice flow. I shakily stood on the former ceiling of the ship and looked up at Odyssey, who was occupying her same spot on the new ceiling. Her pegasus powers now had her fully defying physics, and I was only growing more jealous of her for it.
“Jupe… how?”
“Gravity factors into the buoyancy formula, this isn’t Earth.”
She looked stunned, “But, how did you know that was water out there?”
It was my turn to look stunned. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the lake could have been composed of an entirely different substance. The thought hadn’t even entered my mind!
“I, um… didn’t.” Odyssey looked away from me, frightened. I was mortified. “But there’s no time for that. We need a plan!” She turned her head back towards me, frowning in disapproval as I fidgeted in embarrassment. After a few seconds, I relented. “I’m sorry, Odyssey.”
She shrugged. “Shit happens.” She squinted towards the former floor beneath her. “Lucky for us, I think we’re still under that capsized ice sheet.”
“Can you flip it, Odd?”
“Not a chance, not on my own. Magic’s not as easy as it looks.”
Something about the way she phrased that stuck in my mind. “On your own?” Suddenly, an idea formed in my head, one altogether too glorious not to work. “What about with help?”
“Jupiter, you’re an Earth Pony.”
“Not from me! From Voyager!” Odyssey clenched her eyes shut and did some quick math. 
“Leverage? To flip the ice?”
“Or at least start it moving!” 
She smiled at that. “Now that’s what I call a plan!”
Odyssey’s magic lifted me to the pilot’s chair and I quickly strapped myself in. I was still upside-down but, if we were lucky, we’d be upright before all of the blood was finished rushing to my head. The Princess concentrated hard, picking up the distant probe in her remote grasp and lifting it over to the other end of the ice sheet above us. The plan was easy enough to grasp, it was easier to push down on a see-saw than up. With the weight of Voyager on one side, the buoyancy of Victory might just be enough to encourage the ice sheet to flip.
The Princess slammed the probe down on the sheet with impressive force, the ice sheet actually moved, and the buoyant Victory pushed up to the water’s surface. The water that had invaded every orifice of our ship immediately began to boil away. Warning indicators slowly started to blink off as the flooding boiled to steam and dissipated into vacuum. I slammed down the landing gear lever to max and listened as the hydraulic legs started pushing on the ice with immense force! Odyssey practically cried out in excitement!
“It’s going! It’s actually going!”
I slammed back the landing gear lever and watched as the crumpled form of Voyager slowly sank in front of me. Better it than us, but I couldn’t help but feel that something of incredible historic significance had been forever lost. The swinging ice came around under us and scooped us up, for a few precious seconds we were on the ground again! I was sweating bullets as I watched the last of the flood warnings fade away. When the master alarm finally silenced itself, I slammed the maneuvering controls and let the ship’s thrusters shoot us off into the airless sky of Tethys. We had escaped!