Odyssey pulled off her helmet and quickly tossed it aside. Before I even knew what was happening the girl had jumped across the cockpit, tackled me into a full-body hug, and kissed my visor in pure joy. I couldn’t help but laugh in sheer celebration. I was utterly elated! I had Victory facing the right way up now. I also had us on a safe path towards an orbital insertion point above this small deathtrap of a moon. The two of us were laughing and crying as waves of relief crashed over us. I motioned to pull off my own helmet but stalled when I suddenly noticed Odyssey’s kiss mark was at lip-level. When she noticed my intentions, The Princess practically ripped the thing off for me. Thankfully, when that barrier between us was cast aside, I was only assaulted with some friendly affectionate nuzzling. I really couldn’t complain too much about that.
“Woah! Easy, Odd!” I pleaded between spontaneous bursts of laughter.
“I can’t believe we did it! I can’t believe we’re alive!” I’d never heard her so happy! Her joy was infectious! The atmosphere in here was filling me with a certain uncharacteristic bravado that quickly started making choices on my behalf:
“Yeah! Those dumb assassins didn’t know who they’d be messing with!”
“Totally! We’re an unstoppable team! We can do anything!”
“Hell yeah! Nothing can stop us now, Odd!”
“We’re totally unbreakable!”
“Yeah! Absolutely undefeatable!”
“Champions of the Worlds!” The joy in the cabin was absolutely electric. Odyssey skipped to her chair and perched herself atop it as she excitedly checked the readout screens. A second later an audible ping from the ship’s computer marked the start of our data upload to The Radiant Hope. I spun the chair around and pulled up the terminal on my own screen. Logged in remotely like this, I could watch The Hope’s computer system send the data transmissions to Earth. Despite the hour plus transmission delay, the actual data connections were actually extremely fast. It only took a few seconds to send or receive hundreds of terabytes of data. The rest of the time was just spent waiting for the massive transmission to sail across the incredible vastness of space.
As such, we were only now getting a reply from home on our initial discoveries over Titan. Odyssey spotted the message on her own display first. Unfortunately she was too excited to do anything more than wildly gesture her forehoof at it. I giggled at her animated attempt to try and notify me of the message, before bringing it up on Victory’s speakers.
“Radiant Hope, this is Mission Control. If you haven’t committed to it already, we recommend immediate investigation of the unidentified signal source on Tethys. We’ve narrowed its origin down to a precise location. A safe approach is ready for your flight computer, should it still be needed.” They were very behind us. “That said, we urge caution. We’ve analyzed the burst pattern and have isolated a data transmission consistent with the probe communication structures of the previous Voyager mission. We recommend a flyover to visually confirm the probe’s presence before approaching the site. Military intelligence suggests this could be bait for some kind of trap.” I looked to Odyssey in shock and found her doing the same to me. They were a lot more caught up than either of us had expected. “As a temporary precaution, we’ve directed the mars orbital telescope array to keep an eye on you during this mission. If you already traveled to Tethys before receiving this transmission, then they should have been in position to watch your approach. Assuming that much, we’ll already be pouring over that data by the time you receive this communication.” Nevermind being caught up, these ponies might even be slightly ahead of us. “All of the major superpowers of Earth have denied interfering with the Voyager probe. That, of course, doesn’t discount the interference of rogue elements or non-state actors. Stay safe out there. Control out.”
I leaned back in my chair and thought over the implications of what I’d just heard. If Mars had been watching us since the burst signal, then they had seen everything that had just happened on Tethys. They weren’t quite caught up yet, the speed of light was only so fast, but they would inevitably be fully aware of the state of our mission. I looked at Odyssey and found her frowning at her own screen.
“A bit for your thoughts, Odd?”
“Just that they’re probably right. Some kind of rogue entity using magic to plan interference in our mission. They would’ve needed to start years back, before we ever launched. Admittedly, I’m not entirely sure what they could have been hoping to achieve. Also, it’d be a good idea to store our loose gear before it lands up crashing into us… again.”
I really didn’t want to dwell on my potential concussion right now. “You did make a valid point back there about them possibly being physically present.”
Odyssey waved her forehoof dismissively at that. “Nah, that was before it turned out to be a death trap.” The girl got up from her seat and stood in the wonky gravity of the ship’s current vector. I grabbed the controls and gently shifted the pitch angle to assist her. We weren’t quite into orbit yet. There was still a burn ahead of us and there was still some minor gravity to be felt from our current flight path. “I doubt anypony was physically there. They probably just rigged the ice to blow when the probe was moved.”
“I doubt it.” I turned in my seat to look at her.
The Princess had stopped in the middle of leaning down to pick up her discarded Helmet. She lifted her head and looked up at me with an eyebrow raised. “Dare I ask why?”
“It was a crater. That subsurface lake was likely a natural result of the impact from the meteor that exploded there thousands of years ago. You might have been able to guess it was there, but Voyager had never found any data to indicate there were significant liquid water deposits on Tethys. So who could’ve possibly planned for all that?”
“No idea.” She shrugged off the conversation before picking up her helmet in her teeth and trotting towards the hall just out of my vision. I decided to keep looking over the ship’s readouts just in case there was damage lingering from the incident on Tethys. I heard the helmet clatter to the floor a second later, dropped almost immediately upon some realization I wasn’t aware of. “You saved it?!”
What? “Yeah, I guess I saved all of us? You, me, the ship..”
“The Sounds of Earth!”
What. “The who of what where? Odyssey, I’m kind of busy with some calibrations.”
“The Golden Record, I didn’t realize you’d grabbed it!”
I spun my chair around to find Odyssey standing before the open doorway. She was staring at a large golden disc leaning against the wall inside. I had never seen it before. “What is that?”
She turned towards me, surprised. “You don’t know?” I shook my head. “It’s called The Sounds of Earth. It’s a record containing a message for the creatures of the stars.” I supposed it wasn’t getting delivered now. That sad thought was interrupted by Odyssey’s visible confusion. “What, did you just grab it because it looked important?”
“Odyssey, I just got hit in the head! I could potentially have some kind of memory loss but I don’t remember grabbing any discs.”
The girl reached out with her magic and floated the delicate thing over to herself.
“You don’t remember anything? It had to have been you, it’s got your spit all over it. Between the two of us, you’re more likely to carry things the Earth Pony way.” I frowned at her, in clear disapproval. “What?” I pointed a forehoof at the helmet she had been carrying in her own mouth a moment before. She looked down at it, noting her spit on it. “I… don’t typically do that.” I had little doubt that she believed that. The girl levitated the helmet as well, bringing it alongside the disc in the air. “I know it wasn’t me, so it had to have been you.”
“Odyssey, you just removed my helmet.” She looked up from the two objects and turned her head to look at me. We stared at each other for a short while, failing to connect any dots at all. She looked back to the disc, then back to me. I slowly shrugged my shoulders and started shaking my head. Odyssey glanced back and forth between the object and myself a few times before suddenly growing visibly distressed.
“Did… Did I get hit in the head too?”
“Odyssey, you removed your helmet to try and kiss me. Don’t you remember?”
The flush of crimson on her cheeks said that she did. “Well, we must have had our helmets off at some point! Unless this isn’t… uh…” She stared at the disc again, both of us did. I had to admit, that liquid did not have the evident viscosity of water. “Were… were we submerged in a giant mouth? Was that not actually water?”
I turned back towards the ship’s displayed readouts to double check my own sanity and found the situation largely unchanged. “Organic material wouldn’t have been cleanly flash-boiled in a vacuum to clear the engine flooding.”
“The flood alarm is just for back pressure against the tank’s valve. Something being present isn’t a problem. It just can’t be pushing harder than the tank’s initial outlet pressure.”
I looked up from my screens and turned back towards the obvious engineer with a blank expression.“Uh, can I get that in normal pony speak?”
“Those were perfectly normal words!”
“Look, it’s a body of water under some ice. It’s not a stomach. It could have maybe had some organic materials in it. However, we’d need to go back with our other shuttle to do any meaningful science there, and I would rather not waste the fuel with Titan still on the table. Titan has entire, verifiable oceans. If you’re actually interested in the weird liquid on the disc you took-”
“It’s a record.”
“Disc, record, whatever-”
“Why did I have to be the one to take it? I don’t remember doing that!”
“You were levitating the entire probe! …Twice! Maybe you just brought it along subconsciously or something.”
“Magic isn’t subconscious, Jupe! It’s deliberate.”
“Fine. Then go deliberately put your mystery liquid in one of our sample containers and we’ll have the lab equipment analyze it when we get back to The Hope. For now, Victory’s sensor suites were recording absolutely everything going on. We’ll have more than enough data to figure out the rest of the details later. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“But.”
“And hurry up! We’ve only got a few minutes before the window on our orbital insertion burn and we need all of this loose equipment properly stowed before then.” I really didn’t want to get hit another time. I felt alright but, with head injuries that unfortunately didn’t count for much. The brain didn’t actually feel pain, so for all I knew I was slowly bleeding to death inside my skull.
“Alright, fine. I’ll go stow it in the stowage closet with everything else.”
“Not the helmets, though. We need those.”
“Right.” She dropped her own on the spot and walked towards the hall to go store her disc and the mystery liquid that was all over it. I spun the chair around to read my vessel’s instruments. I was still watching The Radiant Hope’s data on the terminal when I heard Odyssey scream and stumble over behind me.
I rolled my eyes. “What is it now?” Then I swiveled my chair around to see what could have happened. I saw Odyssey backing up from the doorway in a panic. Initially I didn’t have the faintest clue as to why. Then I saw it, and everything suddenly made perfect sense.
There was another pony standing in the hallway. Presumably, Odyssey had discovered it when she had opened the stowage room door. It wasn’t wearing one of our space suits. It had an orange one of its own design. It was crude, basic, lacking in some of the simple design considerations that our own design teams had agonized over. A yellow painted helmet with a simple incandescent lamp hid its owner’s face behind a wall of darkness. It was similar to our own in that regard, but there was a distinctly different and off-putting feel to this intruder.
“Odyssey, I think that’s the trap layer that recovered your disc.” I had already forgotten that she had called the thing a record, and Odyssey forgot to correct me.
“I think you might be right.” The girl continued to back her way into the room until her hind hoof hit her discarded helmet and she froze in place. She quickly glanced back to check on what had impeded her retreat only for her ears to fold back against her head as she realized she’d looked away from the intruder. She turned back around in time to see the pony had advanced on her by a few steps. “Stop!” The mare commanded with a shout of authority that was only minimally compromised by the way she was shaking in fear. The intruder pony stopped advancing, then tilted its head at The Princess in a gesture I assumed to be an expression of curiosity. It wasn’t armed, at least not obviously. I also doubted, from the shape, that a horn could fit under its helmet like it could with ours. Admittedly, I was a bit lost on what might have been its intention here. Though, it might have been wrong to fully assume it had any at this stage.
A muffled, foreign accent spoke through the helmet. “Children?” It questioned ominously as Odyssey and I gave each other worried and serious glances. The intruder pony slowly reached up with one of their forehooves to touch their own helmet. I didn’t figure out why until I heard the sudden hiss of the released internal pressure. They sat down on their haunches and reached up with their other forehoof to assist in slowly sliding off their helmet. The theatrics of this obvious villain had me terrified! They were doubtlessly seconds from completely hijacking our entire ship! The purpose of this nefarious scheme was beyond me, but I was hoping to at least relish in the solace of this individual’s revealed identity before we all died.
The intruder removed its helmet and placed it on the floor. Their face revealed, they decided simply to stare at us. Odyssey and I stared back, utterly dumbfounded. The reveal hadn’t made any portion of their identity any more clear. In fact, it had revealed a strange looking, fish-like Earth Pony with a smile made of sharp teeth! What form of sorcery was this?! We had never even seen a pony like this before in our lives. They looked, perplexingly enough, a lot like a shark.
The pony spoke again, unmuffled this time. “Hello.”
Odyssey glanced at me, but I didn’t return the look. I only noticed her worried expression flash in my direction in my peripheral vision, as I was busy staring slack-jawed at the menacing looking creature. Odyssey cautiously provided a response. “H-Hello?”
Its whole head turned at once, its full attention snapping to her. “H-Hello?” It mimicked exactly, down to the precise stutter. It tilted its head gently as it said this, as if it didn’t fully understand. “H-Hello, children.”
The intruder stood up, and Odyssey visibly tensed as it started to approach her. I felt compelled by a sudden and primal need to act, but I didn’t have the smallest hope of a plan to go off of. The ship had a weapon system for deflecting the path of converging asteroids, but it wasn’t like we had an armory packed with knives and guns in here. I think we might have had a shovel in one of the stowage bins. Odyssey glanced back at me, as if reading my mind. “Wait! Let it do what it wants!” I watched in horror for what it might do to her, feeling helpless!
Odyssey watched in tense fear as the creature slowly walked right up to her. It closed the little bit of difference between them and… kissed her? Odyssey’s eyes expressed distress and panic as the strange male creature started sucking on her face. My thoughts quickly shot down a dark path, and I found myself wondering if Victory didn’t have a hidden self-destruct feature. I really didn’t want to see this go any further. Thankfully, I wouldn’t need to. The creature suddenly pulled away from Odyssey. It backed off, leaving her spitting and coughing as I quickly found some words to offer my friend.
“Odyssey, are you alright?!”
“Blech! It’s handsome but it tastes like fish!” The girl sounded surprisingly alright for the horror she had just endured.
“What else should I taste like?” We both stopped everything and blinked. Those incredibly fluent words hadn’t come from either of us. We both slowly turned to look at the shark pony. “Yes, hello! Sorry about the communication breakdown but your record didn’t contain much information about your language. I didn’t know you were stuttering. I thought you were correcting me.” We stared at him in silence. He sounded like a native Canterlot speaker, like some noble pony. Seconds ago he sounded nothing like that. “Hello from the children of planet Earth. You’re the children, correct?” We didn’t respond. His upbeat and happy attitude was met with a solid wall of dumbfounded silence. “Your greeting. It was on the platter. You call it a, um, record I believe?” Odyssey slowly turned to stare at me, I returned her stare, neither of us had any idea what to say or do. We were well out of our depth. “You’re both explorers. You’re from Earth, correct?”
“Hit him.” I ordered from out of nowhere.
The stallion barely managed a confused “What?!” before Odyssey had slapped a hoof across his face and knocked him to the floor.
Odyssey was strapped in and our new “friend” was tied up in paracord and strapped against a wall with ratcheting cargo tie down straps. The Princess turned to me as I finished typing some commands into the computer.
“We’re taking our friend back to The Hope, right?”
“Of course we are.”
“What? No! You have to listen to me!” The creature uselessly pleaded with us. “What I’m saying is true! I’m a prince and I need your help to stop The Conglomerate! They’re the ones trying to destroy us both! They’re your real enemy!”
I rolled my eyes, this was the fifth time I’d heard him say that. “Everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. All of these recordings are going straight home in real-time. The whole world gets to see you tied up, loser.”
Odyssey stared down into her lap. “I feel like my trust was violated.”
The shark sounded panicked. “I had no such intention! What is with you two? I think we’ve had a misunderstanding here! If you’d just allow me to explain myself!”
“Shut up.” I commanded, annoyed. “Burn to The Radiant Hope in twenty seconds. Nineteen..”
“No!”
“Eighteen.”
“You can’t-”
“Sixteen.”
“I’m trying to help you!”
“Fourteen!”
Odyssey looked up from her lap and spotted something outside of the viewscreen.
“Wait, what’s that?”
“What’s what?” I asked as I glanced at our radar. I didn’t see anything special. There was another one of those rogue rocks we had been spotting all throughout the system, nothing else. “Just more rocks on the scanner.”
Odyssey’s eyes widened, “No, it’s heading towards The Hope!”
Without looking up I turned to the hope’s terminal display and pulled up its defensive system diagnostic page. The Hope’s radar was indeed picking up a rapidly approaching object. Its defensive system appeared to have already taken aim with the Tempest’s automated guns. It was trying to intercept the object in the same way it had stopped three others in our absence. “It’s nothing, the automated defenses will deflect or destroy it.”
“That’s a missile not a rock!” Our prisoner stated. “And I’m a space alien!”
I was just about done with him. “None of that is possible! You’re a pony, shut up!”
Odyssey sounded concerned “What if it actually is a missile?”
“Then our systems were originally designed for missile defense and will do their jobs just fine, as you well know. But that’s completely impossible! We’re millions of kilometers away from any missile launch platform! That’s a fact!”
A brilliant light filled the view screen. Odyssey and I looked away for a moment before looking back to a gigantic fireball. I slammed the cancel button on the scheduled burn and watched, in rising terror, as the Hope’s communication feed went dead. Behind me, the stallion sighed in deeply tired defeat. “Well, do you believe me now?”