Felicity had never made a high-gravity launch before.
Equestrian ships just didn’t work that way—with control of gravity and mastery of acceleration, it was easy to keep the passengers of a ship comfortable all the way outwell.
The Varch’nai had no such technology—or maybe they did, and they just didn’t care to use it. Why bother, when the real bodies of every crewman were secured in stasis, and their puppeted remotes could just be insulated from the sensory impact of acceleration until it was over.
So it was that Felicity was smashed down into her crash-couch, surrounded by insulating foam and pulsing fluid, with a needle jabbing her full of drugs every few minutes. Maybe climbing into a pod for the trip up would’ve been a better idea after all.
Poor Delta did even worse than she did, eyes wide with wordless agony. She had barely even known gravity in her whole existence, and now she got her first real look at its true hostility. Even Manny had to suffer through it, on the couch just beside Felicity. Maybe he had the magic to suppress it, but he didn’t bother. Could an AI even experience discomfort?
It was less than an hour, but the launch felt like an eternity. Still, it couldn’t last forever, and eventually the pressure eased. The foam released her, and Felicity’s restraints unclasped. She pushed herself free of the couch, opening her wings to drift in micrograv. She barely needed to flap them, the occasional twitch was enough to glide her over to Delta’s couch. She stopped just beside her, one hoof on her shoulder.
“How are you feeling? Still with us?”
Her eyes were open, so she was still conscious anyway. Her mouth opened and closed several times, like a fish taken from the water. Finally she managed to speak. “What torture was… what did we do?”
Felicity nodded. “Yeah, that’s not my favorite way to travel.” She reached down and released Delta’s restraints with a click. She kept one hoof nearby to catch her shoulder, so she wouldn’t start drifting. “Come and see.”
The pony flopped in her seat. All the lessons she’d painstakingly learned were rendered useless all over again. But Felicity expected that, and flew her across the room to the single narrow window.
It wasn’t much, a single slit near the docking port. But the planet was visible outside, a misty white marble with little patches of purple. Whatever tricks the planet had once played on the probe Harmony sent, it wasn’t working anymore. Or maybe it just didn’t work on actual eyes. Either way, she saw none of the green surface, or the huge cities below. This was the planet’s true face—pale oceans, with little island patches covered in hostile growth.
“Oh,” Delta whispered. She trailed off, pressing one hoof to the glass. “That’s home down there. We… we’re flying.”
Felicity giggled. It was probably just a side-effect of her reduced age. “I said so many different… yeah. We’re going to the sky-temple. Where else would we be?”
Delta had no answer to that, just stared up against the glass, as the planet below began to grow distant.
“We should transition to the cryogenic tank,” Manny said, appearing just beside them. “There will be an adjustment period, Felicity. This mission has proven itself an incredible accelerant to your complexity—but your neuroplasticity is finite.”
“You don’t need to convince me, Manny. If we don’t get Delta back soon, she’s going to wither away. Show me the way.”
He did. He didn’t help her carry Delta there, with the magic to move them effortlessly through the ship’s interior. At least they didn’t have far to go, before they reached a makeshift internal airlock. There was another door on the other side, with glass iced over with cold.
"Don't plants need a liquid medium?" she asked, touching one hoof against the empty floor. "There's nothing here. No tanks or... anything, really. Just the door."
"They're considerably more tolerant of cryogenic temperatures than you are, which is the problem. I've instructed the technician to reduce the temperature at the very moment I cast the spell. The room will then flood with cryogenic fluid."
Bright lights came on overhead. Not exactly like the grow-lights she had seen so often in the plant-cities, but the purpose was obvious.
"It will be good to be normal again," Delta whispered. "This has been a time of so much confusion and discomfort. I need things to make sense."
"Are you ready?" Manny asked. "We don't have a lot of time to prepare. But if you need a few minutes, we can wait. There is ample magic aboard this ship to supply an indefinite delay. Our arrival time is less so, however. There is significant risk the custodian ship attempts to destroy us."
Felicity opened her wings one final time, landing delicately in the center of the room. Easier said than done in zero gravity, but she was an expert. She was supposed to be an Alicorn for the entire mission, after all. Strange how different things had gone.
We still made first contact. We learned about an alien species. If I can rescue the crew, that's all that matters.
Felicity wasn't an Alicorn right now, so she had no actual involvement in the spell. Instead she held her breath, waiting a few agonizing seconds before sensing anything. Would she even realize when it happened?
She felt a sudden explosion of cold air, blasting over her and filling the room. She gritted her teeth, holding still while the air billowed. Liquid flooded in, boiling away into a frosty cloud of unbreathable air. Unbreathable for lungs, anyway.
Good thing she didn’t have them anymore.
There was no gravity here, but that didn't mean no force. The far wall abruptly became the floor as they hit a hard-burn going the other direction, dispelling any illusion she had that she was still a pony. There were no proper legs, no wings, just a cluster of thicker and thinner strands with nothing to differentiate them.
Felicity's vision expanded to all directions. Strange that it felt like a familiar return to what was natural, instead of something new and strange. She remembered!
The liquid continued to fill around her, insulating her from the further impact of gravity. She stretched out a little in the not-water, bracing two limbs against the wall for stability.
She expected two others floating in the water with her. But when her senses finally returned, and the airlock filled all the way to the ceiling, she realized those vines belonged to only one.
Delta looked different than she remembered. Her leaves weren't wilted and yellowing near the edges, but bright green just like Felicity's, with more numerous, sturdy vines. Like she'd regenerated, somehow. Maybe she had. "What did I... did you..."
She zipped through the water in a sudden, energetic circle, trailing limbs like a squid. "Where is all this energy? I feel so alive! Centuries gone, so healed, so fresh!"
The sensation wasn't so different for Felicity. With the light returned, her strength came back too, her energy. She did feel healthy and awake. Alertness came from the lights overhead, not some careful balance of rest and diet and exercise. It was simpler that way.
"You look good!" she exclaimed. Not that there were any physical sounds involved in the process. But her understanding of the language remained. She had not been robbed of her years of painful learning. "I didn't expect anything to change. Where are you, Manny?"
"An additional body would be redundant," said a voice. This was also familiar to her, since she had lived with the implants for her entire life. "Concealing my presence offers significant advantages. It may also help keep you alive if they destroy your body. It will depend on the method they use."
"Who speaks?" Delta stopped swimming in the center of the airlock, her body spreading out. Not a gesture exactly, but maximizing surface area like that often indicated confusion. It meant the plant wanted as many eyes as possible on the problem. "I scent their words on the water, but I do not see them."
"Welcome to the Harmony," Manny said, without hesitation. "The universe is vast, and scarce in one resource only: minds. Your value is too great to permit the slow destruction of entropy."
Shock filled the water around her, along with fear. Her leaves curled near the edges. It took Felicity enough of her concentration just to keep her mind focused. With such a pleasant temperature, and the bright lights overhead, it would be so easy to lose focus and let time blur past.
Amazing just how different the water felt when time wasn't moving at the human speed. Instead of steady pressure in one direction, she felt a sloshing current back and forth, churning the water. Dull sounds reverberated through the water, occasionally bringing with them mechanical thunks, or grinding sounds. Were they fighting?
"What does this mean?" Delta asked. "Tea, can you explain? Have I returned to myself, or not?"
"Manny says you're better than before. It gave you... the same things we all have where I come from. That's probably why you're feeling so healthy. When we make bodies for exploration, we build them strong."
The airlock door began to grind open, its mechanisms hissing and sliding under the strange conditions. It clearly wasn't built to be used in a strange fluid atmosphere.
"I speak only to you," Harmony said. "I am not certain we wish to share this information. Your friend is untrained in either negotiation or espionage, and would likely reveal it at her first opportunity."
Felicity waited, pretending to be interested in moving over to the slowly opening airlock. But she said nothing—any enhancements made to Delta would probably mean allowing her to hear as well as smell.
"Many Harmony systems rely on thaumic integration of the tissues. As we previously observed, this species reacts positively to magical exposure, so intensely that I had to deaden your senses to keep you functional. Implanting a miniaturized thaumic reactor resulted in a significantly healthier specimen. I believe I have isolated the cause."
Felicity didn't need Harmony to tell her. This had been her entire mission for multiple human lifetimes—she couldn't just forget. "The system-wide trap! It's a thaumic field-suppressor!"
Her previous suspicions were correct, because Delta stopped floating motionless, and drifted down towards Felicity. "You said something? What is a... those words are so strange."
"The effect is greatly reduced on-planet. But without a conversion system like Harmony, the energy would be extremely diffuse, and not require much suppression to be completely annulled. It seems inevitable that the local species was created to serve a magical species. Suppressing that part of their biology has serious negative side-effects."
Felicity nodded, though she had no head to do it with. She surged through the open doorway into the hallway beyond. It was far too big, like a cavern of metal and stripped instruments.
Someone had built a control-panel here, along with an insulated screen and camera. She recognized the face on that screen, though she was so lost in her own thoughts she barely even saw.
"The returning crew of the custodian ship... they were so yellow and wilted, like they were dying. That was from being closer to the traps, wasn't it? They're poisoning themselves!"
What was it that separated the growing things along the sea from the ones that acted like ordinary creatures? The answer was so obvious.
Magic.
Delta wasn't privy to all those thoughts, of course. She followed, her own energy somewhat tempered compared to earlier. "They make... a brave sacrifice for service to our great Goddess. In time, they all wither. But what does that have to do with me?"
"I am figuring that out," Felicity said. "It means something important."
Another voice echoed through the water—literally in this case, not just an odor. She perceived it strangely stretched, higher pitched then it should be. Manny made her able to understand.
"Not sure how much longer I can hold this together!" Escape Gear said. "Last stop! If you're going to save our friends, this is the place!"