//------------------------------//
// Chapter 1:  The Azure 
// Story: Starbound Flight 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

“Hey, Flight?”
Princess Short Flight looked up.  “Yes, Sis?”  Her older sister, Princess Little Bubble, was looking the happiest she’d been all week as she emerged from her sleeping cabin aboard the Azure.
No, Flight decided, she wasn’t.  She knew her sister well, and recognized her telltales- her sister was hiding the pain.
“Can we go for a walk?” Bubble asked.
“Sure,” Flight answered instantly.  Going for a walk had a slightly different meaning in the microgravity of the space station, but they both had their mag boots on, so actually walking was still an option.  She eyed her sister worriedly.  “Are you okay?” she asked.
Bubble’s cheerful attitude vanished in an instant.  Her mane almost seemed to droop, despite the lack of gravity to make it droop.  “It still hurts,” she answered softly.  “Onion Tail.  Petal Chaser.  Puddle Jumper.  Shining Moon.”  She sighed.  “All four…  Dead.  They were good ponies.”  She looked up at Flight.  “But now?  Ponies need me.  This world needs me- and if I stay holed up crying about just four casualties, I’m as good as dead myself.”  She took a deep breath.  “It’s…  You can mourn those you have lost, but don’t dwell on them- the past is the past, and the most important thing of all is what we’re doing with the future.”
“And that’s…  it?” Flight asked, tilting her head.
“It still hurts, don’t get me wrong,” Bubble told her.  “But I’m never going to get anywhere if I let it get me down, so here I am, pushing through it…  Making sure it doesn’t happen again.”  She sighed as they walked up to the big window across the front of the antechamber.  This particular wing of the Azure was really big on observation windows, and Flight had selected it for Bubble to stay in explicitly because it overlooked the dock her ship was being repaired at.  “I wonder what the performance penalty would be for armoring those spokes?  Or the price tag?”
Flight looked out the window as well.  Their father, King High Cost, whom many of his subjects- including his own daughters- dubbed ‘The Expensive King’ behind his back, had ‘given’ Bubbles the largest yacht in space for her tenth birthday.  It wasn’t a real gift- of course it wasn’t.  Their father hadn’t yet spent even a single penny on either of them directly- they both knew he considered them to be ‘unnecessary expenses’.
But in that ‘gift’, their father had made it Bubble’s responsibility, rather than his own, to see to it that the ship was properly maintained, crewed as necessary, and available when he wanted it.  In return, Bubble received the freedom to command the ship as she saw fit whenever he didn’t want its services.
The Flying Surface was quite a masterpiece.  She was classified as a yacht, yet she was larger than many freighters and boasted the only full-size simulated gravity wheel currently in service, capable of spinning up to a full gee of apparent gravity.  However, she wasn’t a very fast ship- her maximum acceleration under rocket thrust was just under half a gravity, and maximum acceleration under its wimpy little Gravity Drive was a mere two gravities, compared to the twenty pulled by all the other civvy ships around it.  Still, though, Flight had the distinct impression Bubbles had deliberately gone beyond mere requirement when she’d requisitioned a thousand-pony crew for the thing.  The two sisters had developed a bit of a habit of being as expensive for their poor, poor father’s gold-clad, money-filled swimming pools as possible, without being overt about it.
Flight’s eyes roamed over the gap in one of the spokes of the gravity wheel, which was standing still for the first time in years.  Just over a week before, that wheel had been spinning as quickly as it usually did, when a small meteor had come speeding in on a very unfortunate trajectory.  Flight had spoken with the Admirals; the Royal Equineothame Navy had been parked basically right next door and, while they had confirmed that their tactical experts- to a pony- believed the meteor couldn’t have been on a natural trajectory, they also had no idea when it had been steered, or where from.
The meteor had slammed into the very spoke of the gravity wheel that Bubble had been traversing at the time.  Fortunately, it was just a little bit late; she had just barely made it through the hatch into the wheel proper when the meteor struck, so she was not explosively decompressed.  The four chefs she’d passed on the way down, who had been climbing up to the central core to retrieve some ingredients from storage or something, had not.  They had died in the incident, lost forever to the vacuum of space; despite happening in Low Equineothame Orbit and with cameras everywhere, they had been unable to find the bodies.
“That’s a good question,” she finally mumbled.
Bubble scowled.  “Hangon.”  She raised one hoof, twitching it to deploy the mini-binoculars embedded in her boot, and peered through them.  “They promised me twenty-four-seven work parties on that, but nothing’s changed!”  She flicked her hoof again, studied the tiny display on the boot, then tapped her earpiece once.
Flight knew her own boots had those same capabilities.  It was a mag boot, H.A.N.D.S (Hoof Attached Natural Digit Systems), communicator, and multitool in one.  However, unlike her sister, she wasn’t any good at operating any of the extra features.  She could use the mag boots, and the Hands…  but the communicator and multitool were beyond her skill level.  She could get the communicator to activate, but she’d have to concentrate for each keypress, and she couldn’t get the multitool to emerge at all- yet her sister, who had ‘owned’ and lived on the Flying Surface for almost two years now, made it look easy.
“Hey Flower!” Bubble greeted, then winced.  “Yes, I’m doing okay.  Anyways, I’m looking at the ship, and I’ll be damned if I can see what they’ve been working on.”  There was a second of silence, and Bubble’s expression hardened.  “They haven’t?  At all?  Have they still been billing us?”  She paused.  “Thanks.  I need to call Dad.”  She flicked her hoof to hang up, and sighed.  “A hundred and eighty seven hours billed for a hundred and sixty eight-hour week in which they sat around in the station bars, ignoring Flower’s attempts to get them off their asses.”
Flight nodded.  “Sounds like a call to Dad to me,” she agreed, before tilting her head.  “Who’s Flower?”
“Lightning Flower,” Bubble answered almost automatically, flicking her hoof for the comms again.  “She’s my chief engineer.”  She tapped her earpiece, and waited.
Flight knew what she was waiting for.  First, her comms had to contact her ship, which would route the call to the station, which would then route it to the nearest ground station, and from there it would go to the palace, one ground station at a time.  That took anywhere from a second to two seconds, even with modern electronics- then of course, their father was notoriously slow to pick up the phone.
Finally, he seemed to pick up.
“Hi Dad!” Bubble greeted, a grin on her face.  It was an inside joke, between the two sisters.  And an insult to their father’s face, which sounded like a mere greeting.
The thing was, their father, King High Cost, seemed to always be high on…  something.  Sometimes it was drugs, sometimes alcohol, and sometimes it was just from bedroom activities with their mother.  As a result, they always greeted him with that spelling in mind, and as cheerfully as possible- turning it into a cheerful insult that always flew over his head.
The reason they deemed to insult him with his own first name was made evident by Bubble’s very next sentence.
“I.  Am.  Not.  Little!” she half-roared.
Their father liked to call her ‘littles’ and Flight ‘shorty’- and neither of them liked those nicknames.  Bubble was particularly touchy on the subject- without fail, the nickname brought out her ferocious temper.
“Dad,” Bubble half-growled, her tone suggesting that he was prattling on about something.
The silence drew on for several seconds after that before Bubble started yelling again.
“Your Highness, put the alcohol down!  Ponies are stealing from you!”
Flight snickered at the pun that inevitably flew over their father’s head.
Bubble calmed her tone again.  “The Flying Surface has been parked in the drydock awaiting major repairs after a meteor impact for, ahh,” she glanced at her hoof-display, “one hundred and sixty six hours.  Not one yard pony has gone anywhere near it in all that time, yet they have billed us for one hundred and eighty seven and a half hours on three work parties!”
Flight looked out the window, and smiled.  If there was one thing their father simply couldn’t stand, it was paying for something he didn’t receive.  If the station personnel didn’t comply with his demands and actually perform the work they were billing him for, they would shortly have the entire navy to answer to.
“She’s crippled,” Bubble muttered softly.  “The Gravity Wheel is imbalanced and structurally compromised.”
Flight snorted.  He must’ve asked how badly the ship was damaged; he had a planned journey with it in hardly another week and a half, so evidently wanted to know if it was in fit shape to perform that journey to Earth and back.  Flight knew, however, that with that one spoke broken, any acceleration beyond a quarter of a gee would strain the wheel too much and cause a lot more damage down the road…  nevermind that with the ship’s center of mass no longer within the artificial gravity field produced by the Gravity Drive bands, it would be stupidly dangerous to use the said Gravity Drive at all, let alone for onboard gravity.  That kind of thing happened when the drive was attached to the narrow cylinder that formed the central core of the ship, and the Simulated Gravity Wheel was the largest and heaviest part of the ship.  Bubble’s pilot had limped it into the yard on maneuvering thrusters, using hardly a hundredth of a gee, all the while thanking Equus that their orbit was so close to that of the Azure.
Flight looked up at Bubble again, after the several seconds their father always took to accept a report that something was unusable.  She knew what his next question was going to be.
“The Azure,” Bubble answered.
Finally, she flicked her hoof, and let out an exasperated sigh.  “He’s giving them a call,” she muttered, “but he wants me to stay up here to keep tabs on their work.  Like I need to bother with that, with somepony like Flower around, but…”  She sighed.  “Fifteen minutes ago, ASC told me the blueprints are ready for your ship, Flight.  Somepony needs to approve them.”
Flight winced.  She was only eight- but they both knew exactly what her father had been thinking when he’d gone to the Airbreathing Starship Company and asked for the biggest, gaudiest floating palace they could build.  He was planning on giving it to Flight for her tenth birthday, in the same way he’d given the Flying Surface to Bubble.  Neither of them were entirely sure what use he was going to have for a ‘palace’ that didn’t even have a gravity wheel, but they both knew he’d made some very strict demands for ballrooms and other luxury rooms Flight hated…  even though ASC had warned him outright the ship would be more of a waste of parts than anything else.
“You want me to do that,” Flight muttered, then looked up at her sister.  “Don’t you?”
Bubble sighed.  “You’re going to have to.  I won’t have time after they finish work up here.”  She looked down.  “On the other hoof, I can help from here.  Probably take a while, but…”  She shrugged.
Flight sighed.  “Yeah…  Might as well.”
“It’s going to take all day, so…”





Cold Coils knew that blueprint review was a long, arduous process with lots of questions.  There was a reason it had been fobbed off onto her, after all.  Not that it should have been, of course- she might’ve been an engineer, which was required for the pony helping the Princess review the blueprints, but she wasn’t one of the ones that had been working on the ship.  She was a power systems engineer, even- she didn’t design spaces, or whatever else, she designed reactors and power banks!
Completely aside from how she was an intern.
As a matter of fact, she was a mere three days into her internship- and she was supposed to be here to learn how the reactors interacted with the rest of the systems, not to answer the Princess’ questions about a blueprint she’d never seen before!
It didn’t exactly help that the Airbreathing Starship Company had been surprised by which Princess arrived.  They’d expected Princess Little Bubbles to arrive in person, inspect the blueprints, and be on her way out in less than two hours.  Princess Bubbles might not have been an experienced engineer, but she was so inclined, with the result that she would have understood many of the systems on her own, without assistance.
Instead, though, they’d gotten Princess Short Flight, the younger of the two sisters.  Princess Flight wasn’t yet legally adult, at only eight years of age…  and she was most definitely not inclined to be an engineer.  She’d heard rumors that the royal filly had talent in the simulators, but that wasn’t useful at all in blueprint review.  Worse, every time Coils tackled a simulator, she crashed, no matter how many different autopilots were simulated.  Once, she’d even managed to crash before the ship had even started moving!  So, as one of the highest-scoring engineers but the flat-out worst-scoring pilots at school, she was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to draw connections between the two disciplines to help the Princess understand anything.  If she remembered the leaks correctly- the Princess’s grades weren’t published- Princess Flight was basically her antithesis.  She could fly inverted through an obstacle course…  but absolutely sucked at telling what kind of wrench she was holding.
Coils took a deep breath before the door to the room the Princess was waiting in.  For some reason, Princess Flight had requested they use the video conference room- and, since the ASC hadn’t had any conferences planned, they hadn’t objected to giving her the room for the day at all.  She glanced sideways, at the large scroll held by her Bands, for Back-Attached Natural Digit System, a many-fingered machine that straddled her back like saddlebags and would hold anything she handed it with her Hands.  It was the blueprint she was about to show the Princess- and she still didn’t have a clue what it looked like!
Finally, she raised her hoof, and knocked.
“Come in,” Princess Flight’s voice called.
So she pushed the door open…  and froze, finding herself in the presence of both Princesses.  Flight was seated at the head of the conference table, on her end of the room…  and Princess Bubble was looking out of the conference screen at the opposite end of the room.
“Hi!” Bubble greeted cheerfully, waving a hoof- on which Coils instantly recognized the Mark Eight Multi-Purpose Mag Boot made by NuCoils, the company her mother owned.
She bowed.  “Your Highnesses,” she greeted.
“You may rise,” Bubble told her.  “And please save the Highnesses for our dad?”
Coils didn’t miss the conspiratorial glance between the two sisters, or the smile playing on Flight’s muzzle.
Perhaps the blueprint review wasn’t going to go as horribly as she had expected.  From what she recalled, Flight might be able to run circles around Bubble in the simulator…  but Bubble could actually fly.
Some of the time.





The blueprint review took much longer than Coils had expected, but thankfully, not because she had to explain engineering concepts to Princess Flight.  Princess Bubble had been doing the review, and she actually understood the complicated technical terms that were used.
As expected, for many of their questions, she’d had to run out to the main engineering team and get the answer for them.
The big kicker was that it was, by far, the largest atmospheric craft she’d ever seen.
Neither Princess liked it, of course.  When Bubble had calculated a few of its flight characteristics for her sister, Flight had promptly calculated, in her head, that its stall speed would be a whopping five hundred and twelve knots!
But…  she hadn’t said that it couldn’t fly, and their father had been explicit that it had to be the biggest one that it was possible to make…  so both Princesses had to concede that it fit the bill.
Finally, Flight, after a final nod from Bubble, pulled the big stamp and its ink pad towards her, fully nine hours after she’d first entered that room- a good two hours after Coils’ shift was supposed to end.
Then the disaster started.
Flight had only just barely picked up the stamp when a sudden, deep boom sounded from the conference display.  Bubbles let out a frightened scream, and started looking around wildly.  “What’s going on?” she demanded, looking at somepony they couldn’t see.
“I don’t know!” somepony cried distractedly…  Then, two seconds later, “We’re-!”
The video froze for a second…  then cut entirely, replaced by a simple message.
Connection Lost.
There was a couple of seconds of stunned silence before anypony moved.  Flight’s Hands tapped through the comms menus on the control console with practiced ease.  Coils watched as she queried the station, but got no response- then queried a nearby station for an optical view.
Coils gasped.
The great big record-breaking gravity wheel at the heart of the Flying Surface was gone.  The remainder of the ship had been snapped like a twig, debris flying everywhere- and a large section of the station had been demolished around it.
The station had also apparently been broken in two by another explosion…  Right about where the communications arrays would have been, Coils observed.  However, it looked like the Observation and Command Blister at the top, where the Princess would have been, was still intact.
As they watched, a small ship hurtled in, fired missiles at the surviving segments of the Flying Surface, and stuck itself into the debris for what looked like a rescue attempt.
Flight sent the footage to the big screen, and continued tapping away at the communicator.  Coils didn’t realize what she was doing until she heard a distant alarm sounding out of it.
“Princess,” it greeted.
“Admiral,” Flight answered.  “Are you seeing this?”
“I am,” the Admiral answered- High Admiral Timber Wolf of the Royal Equineothame Navy, Coils realized.  “We have standing orders from your father to ignore piracy going on around us, though.”
Flight raised an eyebrow.  “I hear a GQ alarm.”
The Admiral nodded.  “It’s going to be a decent drill,” she muttered darkly.
Flight sighed.  “My sister may still be alive, in that observation blister.”
The Admiral scowled at her panels.  “That changes things,” she decided.
“The Saddleberg is moving!” somepony cried.
The Admiral moved like lightning.  “All ships, hold fire!” she commanded.  “The Princess may have survived!”
“Uh…  Admiral, message from the Crown.  ‘Ignore the pirates’.”
“Does he know the Princess is there?” the Admiral asked promptly, while Flight’s Hands fairly flickered over her console again.
“What?” the communicator barked, so suddenly Coils jumped.
“Dad,” Flight began.  “My sister is on that station.”
“So?” he asked.
“She might still be alive, and if she is, she is being foalnapped by pirates as we speak.”
“So?” he repeated.
“Can you let the Navy go after them?”
“Absolutely not,” he declared angrily.  “Have you any idea how expensive naval operations are!?”
“My sister!” Flight cried.  “Your daughter!  And you won’t act to protect her because it’s too expensive?”
“That’s right,” he barked.  “It’s far too expensive to do anything up there, you know that.  Now quit bothering me about it!”  His screen went dark.
Flight took a long, slow breath, and let it out.
“Well that was friendly,” the High Admiral muttered distractedly, studying her panels.  “Saddleberg, Hold Your Fire,” she commanded.  “You’ll kill the Princess.”
Coils looked up at the big screen again, and jumped again.  There was a small warship visible now, charging towards the station and firing missiles at the pirate ship…  which was, so far at least, picking them all off with its gatling turrets.  The station wasn’t faring so well, though.
“Target the Saddleberg!  Plasma, one round- fire!”
She looked up just in time for the attacking warship to be very suddenly shrouded in searing hot plasma.  A missile it had just fired detonated almost instantly, probably from weapons cookoff, and the ship swerved off course, shedding debris as the engines faltered.  A secondary explosion- probably a fuel-oxidizer mix this time- sent it spinning off the bottom of the screen.
Coils took a slow step backwards, unsure if she should leave the Princess to it for a few minutes, or if she should stick around.
Flight took a deep breath, and tore her eyes away from the blank display that had carried her father.  “We’ll show you what’s expensive,” she hissed- then she glanced at Coils, reached out a hoof, and pushed the blueprint towards her.  “Can we make this defend itself?” she asked.  “We can forget his requirements- he’s never going to set hoof inside it- and make her as expensive as possible.”
Coils blinked, the blueprint running through her mind.  In order to add combat capability, they’d have to redesign it from the ground up- which, if Flight was voiding her father’s requirements…
She scowled.  If the requirements were void because he would never set hoof inside, it would still need to look like it met them from the outside.  Which would be…  difficult, in a combat ship.
No, wait, with the stipulation that it be expensive as possible…  There were numerous suboptimal design decisions that were made explicitly because it cost too much any other way.  She could think of at least twelve off the top of her head.
“You would make it a combat vessel,” she muttered softly.
Flight nodded silently.  “Don’t tell Dad.”
Behind her, Coils saw the Admiral duck, then come back up with her sidearm to unleash a volley of bullets across her bridge.  “POLARIZE THE HULL!” she roared, over the sound of damage alarms Coils had missed when she was analyzing the change in requirements.
A tiny and absolutely terrified voice answered a second later.  “Hull polarizing,” it announced, in little more than a squeak.
Coils winced.  If the REN Everfree was polarizing her hull from her parking orbit, that was going to do untold damage to basically everything near it…  and the close-proximity hull polarization would cause every nearby combat ship that hadn’t already been set into combat mode to wake the GQ alarm and force the computer into emergency self-defense mode while it waited for its crew.  In other words, the entire Fleet was very suddenly at war…  with itself, it seemed.  True to her expectations, the visual feed from the nearby station- still on the big screen- skewed suddenly, before being similarly suddenly distorted by the blasts from the station’s maneuvering and stationkeeping engines attempting to stabilize it.
“Return fire,” the Admiral hissed, glaring at her panels.
“It’s going to be expensive,” Coils muttered, even more softly than before.
Flight grinned maliciously.  “That’s the point,” she told her.
She looked down at the blueprint.  “... Alright.  We’ll see what we can do.”
She turned and, quietly, left the room.  As she did so, Flight turned back to the panel.
Once the door closed behind her, she took a deep breath, and let it out.  She needed to find the engineers, and get them started on the Princess’ expensive project.