Flight sighed as she climbed back into her craft. The main purpose of the visit had been to help pull Willowstone back into the land of the living, and restore her drive to excel. That had taken a couple of hours- but she’d stayed longer. They had been happy to have her with them in their daily honoring of Willow’s dead sister.
As it turned out, River Skip had been the antithesis of both her mother and sister. Instead, she’d followed after her father, who had died years before when the singular reactor on his asteroid ore carrier had blown a bearing during the journey to Equineothame. The powerless ship had been moving at nearly zero point three cee- and when it had crossed the invisible Planetary Approach Threshold on a direct collision course, and failed to respond to hails… the Antikinetic Defense System, designed to render long-range cee-fractional kinetic attacks against the planet useless, had gone wholesale on his ship. His ship, which had long since become ice-cold and run out of oxygen. He, and the two other ponies on its crew, were already dead. The fragments, and the ore the ship was carrying, had rained down over the ocean side of the little planetoid.
Both River and her father, Hedge Whistle, had been almost eternally cheerful. Both of them had been, as Jewel Tone had put it, ‘ADHD maniacs’- but whereas Hedge had lost more jobs than either of his surviving family members could count, River had had promise. She might’ve been having fun at every turn, but not once in living memory had she ever failed to perform a task because of it. She and Willow had both inherited their mother’s solid determination and ability to focus on what was important when they needed to- and had both subsequently been outstanding tactical trainees.
Flight keyed the canopy closed- and, with just two more keypresses, the entire control panel came to life. She felt the familiar tremor as the engines spun up, and inspected her instrumentation while it did so.
Jewel and Willow still honored Hedge’s death each evening, by burning incense in a hole drilled in a chunk of asteroid ore, placed proudly upon the only surviving hull fragment of his ship- the one that had been blown clear of its collision course. For River… River hadn’t had the sort of death they could honor that way. Instead, since she had left a small bookcase full of spy adventure novels in her room, they had taken to reading a chapter out of one of them each night.
It had been a very solemn ceremony, almost, when Flight had joined them for it. When they had allowed her to look around River’s room, she’d recognized a lot of posters and books.
She heaved a sigh as she logged into the craft again and finally lifted off to head back to the Royal Palace. It had been a long day already, despite only being in the middle of the afternoon.
No sooner had she transitioned into forward flight and engaged the autopilot than the phone started ringing.
She sighed, and tapped it. “What?” she asked, rather more sharply than she had intended.
“Princess,” the stallion on the other side said, bowing deeply. His coat was a medium brownish-gray, which went oddly well with his pure black mane and tail.
She sighed. “What is it?” she snapped.
He winced but, unlike several ponies she could name, carried on immediately. His voice had a shaky quality to it, like he was afraid of her. “King High Cost has contracted us- the Great Space Factory- to build a new outsize yacht with a full-size gravity wheel,” he told her, eyes focused on something other than his screen. As he continued, the fear drained out of his voice, falling towards more of a calm narrating voice, and Flight got the distinct idea he was reading something pre-prepared. “We’ve just finished the planning, but the blueprints need approval, and…” He trailed off, and turned a page, before a revolted expression decorated his features.
Flight nodded. The GSF was the biggest starship manufacturer around Equineothame. They even shared the Navy-owned shipyard facilities- and in exchange, they maintained the yard facilities and were contracted to complete any work required on Navy vessels. They didn’t build anything surface-capable, but they could build just about anything else, provided one could get their hooves on the appropriate paperwork for the technologies required.
“His Drunkenness doesn’t care to do it himself,” Flight finished for him.
He flinched much more visibly at her derisive tone and, after looking between her and his notes, gave the smallest of nods.
She sighed. “They’re at the ground offices just outside the Palace City, right?”
He nodded much more strongly.
She nodded. “Alright, I’ll be there.” She looked at her navigation panel, punching in the quick search to update the autopilot. “About… two hours. That work?”
He looked back at his notes, turned three pages, and finally pushed them off his desk with an audible thunk. “Um-!” He paused, briefly, to think; his nervousness was really coming through now. “There won’t be much time for the review.”
She smiled. “How many figures does the price tag have on it?”
He blinked, then looked down at something. “... Thirteen,” he eventually said.
“Well that’s not nearly enough,” Flight muttered.
He stared at her.
She chuckled. “I’ll be there in a couple hours, so we can discuss exactly how we’re going to inflate the price.”
“Hello again.”
The brownish-gray unicorn, the same stallion as had phoned her before, winced. He had apparently been assigned to take care of the blueprint review- and she could smell his fear, so Flight wasn’t sure exactly how that was going to go down. “H…Hi,” he muttered slowly.
Flight nodded, then waited. She’d long since dealt with enough ponies that were utterly afraid of her authority to know that the best thing to do was to exercise her patience. She could see the blueprint in his Bands, so she knew exactly what he was going to do- that was, invite her into a conference room or wherever to review the blueprint. She did have to admit, though, it was the first time she’d encountered a unicorn that was so afraid of her; usually, it was the pegasi that her father shunned. He was, after all, a unicorn supremacist- even though Flight could definitively say that she wished she was a pegasus, because it’d be so much easier to move around in space if she had wings and lacked a horn to bang on things.
Speaking of her father, she’d spoken to him on the way over- and found out that he intended to give her both ships. After that, she’d given Cold Coils a call… and managed to get it authorized for some of those same new techs as her other new ship, given that she met a few conditions.
They looked at each other, her calmly and him fearfully, for several seconds before he spoke. “Uh,” he muttered. “Do you…?” He trailed off, uncertainty coloring his tone.
“Lead the way,” she told him.
He flinched, paused, then jerked into motion. “Right.”
Flight looked critically at the blueprints when he silently flattened them out on the conference table. It looked almost exactly like the Flying Surface had, just a few small weeks before.
She traced the edge of the massive gravity wheel with the tip of her hoof. “The Flying Surface was crippled when a probably-directed meteor struck one of the spokes of the Gravity Wheel,” she muttered softly. “Had she been under Gravity Drive, she would’ve been broken apart instantly by the imbalance. How is this protected against the same?”
The stallion- Shooting Star, according to his nametag- winced, looking at the blueprint. “If…” he muttered… then visibly shuddered. “It’s not.”
“Huh,” she muttered. “That definitely needs fixing. In the meantime, do you think we can arm and armor it, and perhaps dig into mil-spec drives and whatnot, while making it as big and expensive as possible?” She looked up at him. “I’d rather not make it a warship, but it’d be nice if it could at least defend itself if it got in a spot of trouble.” She looked back at the blueprints. “We’re going to want to give her fuel bunkers for ascent to Gravity Drive distance at least once, but I’m imagining her as more of a deep space vessel, primarily using her fuel stowage to refuel other vessels. Do you think that would work?”
“As big as possible…” he muttered, slowly, gazing at the blueprint. “If…” He paused. “Deep space only?” He seemed almost distracted by her specifications.
She nodded. “Ideally able to descend to lower orbit and return, but it only needs to do it once. And it doesn’t have to be fast.”
He rubbed his chin. “Hmm. The fuel required… But with…” He tilted his head. “I…” He took a deep breath. “I think we can do it.”
She nodded. “I’m also… curious,” she muttered, and pulled her tablet out of her saddlebags. A few quick taps on the controls was all it took to pull up the external dimensions and weights of the ship ASC was making for her. “Do you think you can work in a bay large enough to berth this in?”
He looked at them, then at the blueprint. “Easy,” he decided. “I… I assume you want…” He paused, as if deciding how to say it. “Compartmentalization and…?”
Flight tilted her head. “If you mean she needs to remain survivable even if she takes damage, then yes.” She glanced down at it. “And… I’ve been in contact with a few ponies that can get us some new, more advanced technologies to put on it. Think you can work those in?”
“Coils?” Flight asked in surprise, when she arrived at the Great Space Factory headquarters for blueprint review a month and a half later. “What are you doing here? I thought you were at ASC!”
Coils sighed. “Yeah, I was. My internship ran out, though. I hope that ship works out well for you.” She shrugged. “I got another internship here, to broaden my skills.”
“Internship?” Flight asked, while Coils started leading her to the conference room.
“Yup. I’m a power tech, so at ASC, I was learning how power systems are hardened against reentry and orbiting forces- that reactor won’t do you any good if it packs up halfway through your ascent into orbit, after all. Here, I’m studying how high power systems go together- how to properly manage gigavolt-range electrical systems with several sourcing reactors, how to build them such that they won’t fail under load, how to manage the immense surge loads of Dreadnought-scale Gravity Drives powering up.” She chuckled. “That’s easy, by the way.”
Flight raised her eyebrows. “So you’re a multidisciplinary power tech?”
Coils paused. “Uh… Yeah, I guess so.” She looked surprised.
Flight hesitated, undecided. She knew her sister had told her that a multidisciplinary technician was hit or miss, but very predictable. If they focused on different aspects of a field, such as power equipment, they were an ideal crew member. If they instead scattered their focus between multiple fields, they were somepony to shy away from- somepony to consider a last resort when it came to crew selection.
“Anyways,” Coils continued, knocking briefly on the conference room door before leading her in. “You came for blueprint review, didn’t you?”
Flight chuckled. “Alright. So how expensive did we make it?”
Coils laughed. “So expensive the ship ASC is making looks like a few pennies on the side of the road,” she answered, hopping up onto a chair and tapping the blueprints that had already been laid out on it.
Flight hopped up into her own seat, glanced at Shooting Star, the only other pony in the room, and back down at the blueprint. She raised her eyebrows. “It’s a lot bigger,” she observed.
Coils chuckled. “She is.” She glanced up. “This is Shooting Star, by the way. He’s the project lead, but he’s also not very good at talking to anypony he’s not familiar with, so I’m the spokespony today.”
Flight nodded her head respectfully to Star, whose expression flickered with worry until she looked away.
Coils looked down at the blueprint. “Of course, she’s actually a lot bigger than she looks. She measures about twelve times longer than the original Flying Surface, and several times larger on the other two dimensions as well. What’s more, you’ll notice there’s no massive Gravity Wheels sticking out of the ship.”
Flight nodded. “I do. Looks like there’s some kind of wheel inside?” She traced one with the tip of her hoof.
Coils nodded. “That’s one of your triple internal gravity wheels; there’s another at the other end of the ship, and a third in the middle.” She pointed them out. “They’ll each break the record, capable of spinning up to a full five gees at the edge with only half the spin rate the Flying Surface used- and as you can see, the entire volume of the wheel is living space, not just the outer edge.
“Now, under normal operation, the middle one will stand still while the front and rear spin in opposing directions. However, if you spin all three in the same direction without drive compensation, you can actually spin the rest of the ship up to one gee of apparent gravity as well. With that in mind, we designed the whole thing like it was one massive gravity wheel- so, that’s actually what you have. The three internal Gravity Wheels break the ship into quarters, and each quarter is actually its own separate gravity wheel, capable of spinning up to a whopping six gravities at the edge.”
Flight tilted her head. “Doesn’t the Gravity Drive not like spinning?”
“Normally,” Coils nodded, “it doesn’t. But Star here is some kind of wizard when it comes to drive systems, so not only did he double the advantage the new Drive tech will confer, but he managed to mount this ship with four completely separate Gravity Drive zones- one per hull section- which will interlock and support one another, even in the event of damage. The interference zones will provide a conveniently powerful gravitational distortion capable of, if all four drives are at maximum power, deflecting literally anything approaching the side of the vessel- even light itself.”
She nodded. “Meaning, in that configuration, she’s only vulnerable from the front and the rear?”
“Yup. However, in those aspects… See these tubes?” She tapped a series of tubes on each of the massive hull sections.
Flight scowled. “Looks like they’re set to have line of sight?”
Coils nodded again. “Yup. There’s twenty of them per hull segment, facing the near end of the ship.
“They’re artillery cannons.”
Flight looked up at her. “Artillery.”
She nodded. “Yes. And since you’ve got a bank of nearly five hundred reactors at the heart of the vessel, you should be able to bark thunder once per minute at maximum rate.”
“Or eighty times in one devastating salvo,” Flight muttered.
Coils nodded. “Or eighty times, forty forwards and forty rear. We’ve also wrapped her in so many capacitance coils you should be able to issue three such devastating salvos about thirty seconds apart before waiting for it to charge.
“But that said, even though she’s also got the missile throw weight of a superdreadnought squadron and the point defense of an entire task force, she’s very much a glass cannon. All battlesteel construction, military-grade security and compartmentalization, fuel stored as water to be electrolyzed when needed, and Cruiser-level armor- but with a target this big, even armor as thick as a superdreadnought is long won’t protect you very well.
“I understand you explicitly asked for it to be a ‘armed and armored civilian vessel’, though?”
Flight nodded. “I already have one combat ship.”
Coils nodded too. “Well. All these artillery cannons are camouflaged as hull decorations. She’s capable of polarizing her hull, but even with the new polarizers, she’s going to be a lot easier to hit than your ship- it’s a lot easier to make a direct hit on something this big. She’s got the passenger capacity to play arkship for a small world- and if you shut down the Gravity Wheels, her onboard gravity as produced by the Gravity Drive is formed to match the force from the Wheels, though at uniform strength- and whether they’re spinning or not, she’s going to have a cruise a bit lower than most warships, at eighty gees- but she should blow everything else out of the water, even your other ship, with a sprint of almost two hundred.”
She nodded. Gravity Drives were an interesting animal. The Cruise speed- forty gees for most civilian ships, and up to a hundred for Navy vessels- was for fully-compensated motion, allowing them to maintain normal gravity aboard ship. The so-called ‘dash’ speed- the flat-out top speed for most civilian ships at a mere fifty gees and up to one fifteen on a warship- was where the crew experienced three gees towards the back of the ship. The ‘sprint’ speed, with ten gees of apparent force, was exclusive to warships and usually topped out at a hundred and fifty.
“Alright,” Coils nodded, touching the blueprint with the tip of a hoof. “You’ll notice there’s a lot of these components in here?”
She nodded again. It looked like several bundles of pipes running the length of the ship, segmented between the gravity wheels.
“You have to shut all the gravity wheels down, and align them properly- which is automatic- but once you do, this part here-” she indicated a little ‘plug’ of some sort on the back of the ship- “comes out. With it, those cables, and the brackets stored in these two compartments here, you should be able to tow a medium-large habitable planet at about zero point zero two gees- or alter its spin by about a ten thousandth of an RPM per day- call it a week to give it a day-night cycle similar to ours.”
“You… You’re one-upping the Tow Boat,” Flight observed.
Coils nodded. “Oh yes. The Tow Boat could hardly manage a thousandth of a gee on the small planetoid that is Equineothame, and took about two years with its sister ship, the Spin Thruster, to produce the spin we enjoy today. They were destroyed long ago, but the whole point is that nobody knows about this.” She tapped the blueprints.
Flight nodded. “Alright. So what’s the price tag?”
“About fifteen hundred times your father’s remaining wealth,” Coils stated calmly.
Flight scowled. “Hmm. I’m not sure that even he can afford that.”
Coils chuckled. “Once you complete that mission, that won’t be a problem. There’s such a massive bounty on that mission it’ll cover about half the price on its own- and the actual mission itself should cover the rest quite handily.”
Flight looked at her. “What is this mission?”
Coils looked at her contemplatively for several seconds. “Can… Can you promise not to tell anypony about it? Not even your future crew, until you’re already on route?”
She looked back at Coils. “Alright, I can promise. Why?”
Coils took a deep breath, and let it out “Archive delta-seven-seven-one-one-seven-seven-delta,” she began.
“That’s malformed,” Flight observed instantly. It was- not only was it palindromic, but archive IDs were always two sets of a single letter followed by three numbers; the second letter was in the wrong spot.
“Just punch in the search,” Coils told her. “Trust me.”
Flight scowled, pulling out and placing her tablet on the conference table surface, then punched in the search. Exactly as expected, the malformed input error came up.
“Then archive three-niner-one-alpha-seven-two-six-charlie,” Coils continued calmly. “Then archive zulu-delta-charlie-four-alpha-bravo-indigo-six.” She sighed. “Then… Archive hotel-zero-niner-three-foxtrot-zero-zero-one.”
Flight scowled, punching in the three searches. The first two- as expected- produced malformed input errors… then the fourth should have come up dry. The Hotel Zero archival block was almost famously empty, containing only hotel-zero-zero-zero-alpha-zero-zero-zero, a small file container which carried the few surviving fragments of the ancient Distortion Drive blueprint.
It didn’t, though. When she submitted the final query, her entire tablet froze… then the screen went dark for a second. When it came back on, it had loaded an archive file, labeled The Dark Archive.
“What…?” she began.
“It’s a special sequence,” Coils explained. “The Dark Archive only exists if you use it.” She took a deep breath, and looked at the screen. “Two years ago. The Cassanova probe didn’t actually waste itself against a comet.” She paused. “Well, it did, but it sent this back before it died.”
She tapped the photo with the tip of her hoof. “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
“As near as anypony can tell,” Coils told her, “that ship is many thousands of years old… and equipped with a Distortion Drive. You can see the twin coiling of its Gravity Drive- a characteristic the Distortion Drive is known to have, and that’s useless to a standard Gravity Drive, even with Star’s ingenuity. The Royal Equineothame Engineering Society has been keeping it secret from the governments- all of them, not just Equineothame’s- in the hopes that it won’t get blown to Kingdom Come by some government that wants to keep others from getting at it before they can, while we hunt for somepony that can quietly scare together a ship capable enough and, eventually, retrieve it as inconspicuously as possible.”
She nodded slowly. “So my mission… is to go retrieve it,” she muttered softly.
Coils nodded. “Both ships- at both the ASC and GSF- have also been designed to accept any resultant technologies- including in power supply, though that’s a lot of guesswork. If we’re right, a year or two after you fetch the Enterprise, you’ll be in command of pony civilization’s first two hyperlight vessels.”
She nodded slowly. “And I’ll be running one of the biggest, most important power systems in the known galaxy, alongside some of the newest engines not yet in existence,” she observed. “I’m going to need a power tech on the crew- and somepony that’s good with engines.”