Heavenly View

by Rambling Writer


3 - Salvage Ops

The helmets were probably not designed for batponies, Mesonox told herself yet again. For the most part, this was no problem whatsoever. Batponies and regular ponies were like 98% percent identical in the general cranial area, and another 1.5% made no difference for helmets. Unfortunately, the remaining 0.5%, she really liked, and it was that remainder that was causing the problem.

Her adorable little ear tufts were itching like mad.

The ear parts of the helmet were designed to fit snugly around the ear, to allow for better conduction of sound from the aether and better mobility. This was less of a problem than Mesonox had expected; the majority of her ear wasn’t uncomfortable in the slightest. But the tips. Sweet Luna, those tips. Batponies had extra little sticky-outy bits of fur on the tips, and Mesonox loved hers. But now, those bits were stuffed into the helmet very uncomfortably and Mesonox had to resist the urge to rub them; she already knew from experience it wouldn’t work. She could shave them off later, get herself some more room, but they were just too cute.

Keep ear tufts or have a nice, snug, comfortable helmet? Decisions, decisions.

To be made later. Right now, she had to work, and first-job jitters were running through her body like crazy. Her vacsuit was on and she was standing in the airlock with Stella and Glen and after all the time she’d spent building herself up, she was sweating. She tried to hide it from herself by adjusting the fit on her magboots again. (The boots weren’t really magnetic — their enchantments meant they adhered to ships even though aethercraft hulls hadn’t used any metal, let alone ferrous metal, since before they’d been invented — but the name was catchy.)

“Hey, rookie,” said Stella. “You okay in there?” Mesonox heard the words twice: once through her radio, once through the aether-atmosphere mix that was rapidly becoming pure aether.

“Yes’m,” Mesonox said quickly. “Just a little nervous.” She swallowed. “Double-checked suit for leaks, fetlock computer up and connected, spare on standby, atmosphere levels good, strainer ready, grapple primed…” Was that everything? Seemed like it. “That’s all good, so I don’t have much else to do until…” She jerked her head towards the airlock.

“Compose a space song,” said Glen.

“What?”

“Space songs,” Glen said seriously. “Write a song about space, and if you ever get nervous, just start singing it. Even if it doesn’t connect you to the heartsong, it’ll distract you from, y’know, space and bring you back to the here and now. You don’t even need to write it all yourself — just crib from another tune if that’s easier.” Glen cleared his throat and warbled, “Soooomewheeeere out in the aether waaaay uuuup hiiiigh… Theeeere’s aaaa ship that I’m scrapping as space debris flies byyyy…

Mesonox winced; she would’ve wiggled a hoof in her ear if not for her helmet. “Your voice sounds terrible.”

Glen shrugged. “I’m smart, not euphonious. Seriously, it works. Mute your comms if you don’t want anypony else hearing.”

“Or critiquing you,” said Stella, smirking at Glen. “And if Pawn takes a few extra seconds to respond, you’ll know he’s turning the mic back on.”

Well… really, it wasn’t the worst idea. Mesonox didn’t have a great singing voice, but it was at least better than Glen’s (she told herself). Worth a shot. She picked a song from one of her favorite diamond dog artists and began mixing up the words. I’m a gaaaarbagemaaaare… drifting in the sky-

Finally, the light above the exterior door clicked from red to green and it pulled open with a hissing of pistons. Mesonox pushed the song into the back of her head and turned to the airlock. Her legs were actually shaking in her suit, but she realized it was from excitement. She was really doing this. Once the door was fully open, she stepped forward and took a look at her first real wreck.

For how little maneuvering time she’d spent, Gimbal had brought them in impressively close to Solar Wind; the ship hung in the aether a scant twenty-five in front of them. She was big, almost twice the size of View, somehow bulky and sleek at the same time. Yet Mesonox couldn’t hold back a slight sympathetic wince at the damage done to her hull; even in the best cases, smooth lines and curves were broken up by holes and ugly scarring, while in the worst, entire hull sections were missing. A closer look at those blueprints Gimbal had would eventually be in order to better appreciate her beauty.

Stella and Glen stepped out of View and performed the ninety-degree spin onto the plane of the hull with a casual ease. Mesonox performed it with a practiced but inexperienced ease, her movements just a bit too tight to be natural. At least she didn’t stumble, even as her stomach performed a somersault from leaving View’s artificial gravity. That had always been the rough part in training, moving from a one-g field to a zero-g field with no change in acceleration; physics didn’t work that way outside of magic and her instincts rebelled.

But training had suppressed those particular instincts and she made it out with no problems. She took a few steps, just in case; the magboots sticking to View’s hull made them feel oddly sticky and heavy, but she was used to that. No problems.

Stella was squinting “up” at Wind. “A bit worse than I was expecting,” she said, “but not terrible. It looks like hull damage, mostly; the frame should still be intact.”

“Want me to pop in and give her a closer look?” asked Glen.

“Not yet. She’s still relatively whole,” said Stella. “You’d spend less time in her than you would getting over there and coming back. We should get to flyswatting first.”

“Copy that.” Glen saluted, even though he didn’t too, and trotted towards View’s bow in that peculiar suction-y gait from magboots that trawlers called “magtrotting”. Stella pulled out her strainer and nodded and nodded at Mesonox. She didn’t need to say anything else; Mesnox just nodded back and trotted to the stern, only briefly sparing a glance outward, to the space between View and Wind.

Swarming around View like a second shell, caught in the arcanogravity well of her dust filters, were hundreds upon hundreds of tiny little bits and bobs of trash, jagged and irregular shreds of metal and composite and plastic and Twilight knew what else. View had picked up probably four or five such pieces every mile (you traveled lots of miles very quickly in the aether). Salvage crews were known for retrieving the larger ships, but clearing microdebris like this was just as important, probably moreso.

Once close to the stern, Mesonox reared so she could get a closer look at them outside the simulations. They were such small things, but anything could be dangerous when traveling at high speeds — and in low Equus orbit, everything was traveling at high speeds. (It was kind of what made it orbit.) All it took was one screw intersecting with a satellite’s orbit in exactly the wrong way at exactly the wrong time, and suddenly that satellite was shedding an ever-expanding cloud of high-speed debris in unpredictable directions that could intersect with other satellites’ orbits in exactly the wrong ways at exactly the wrong times and… Well. That was the cascade, right there. For all Mesonox knew, she wouldn’t have a job if not for one screw.

Considering the damage it’d done, fuck that one screw.

Time to spite some trash. Mesonox unclipped her strainer from her suit and unfolded it to be a good three yards squared. She squinted at the mesh for any obvious holes — of course there weren’t, she’d checked it far more thoroughly just yesterday — and began moving it through the debris field. Aether wasn’t empty space, but as a near-superfluid, it was empty for all practical drag-related reasons. As a result, what would catch air like a parachute on Equus didn’t have any resistance whatsoever in the aether. The result would’ve been uncanny if not for Mesonox’s training.

And so, Mesonox performed one of the sacred rites of her profession, a role of utmost importance: picking up junk with a net. Basically, the kind of thing she did at the community pool to pick up a few extra bits during the summer while in high school. But in spaaaaaaaace! Being in space automatically made it neat.

Bit by bit, step by awkward-magbooted-step, Mesonox strode across View’s hull, catching debris in the strainer. She had to work a bit to make sure she took the most efficient path, but that had been part of her training and was easy-peasy. Once the net was close to full, she tapped a button on the handle; the sides of the mesh’s hook moved together to close it up and prevent any debris from escaping.

The universe slowly spun towards her as she traipsed to the other side of View, like the ship was an axle for everything. She tapped a button built into the hull and a set of doors slid open right in front of her. Mesonox dumped her trash inside, adding to the small pile that had already been left by Stella and Glen, artificial gravity holding it in place. Formally the Space Refuse Bay, jargonically a dumpster, it’d hold all the microdebris they collected until they returned to Crown, where it could be disposed of or recycled properly.

Mesonox returned to her section of the hull, ready to start again. This was the way it’d go for a while: back and forth and back and forth, capturing microdebris until the space within View’s dust filters was clear to RASA’s specifications. Boring. Of course, this was just the setup. The teaser. Mindless necessities that had to be taken care of before they got to the real juicy work, the stuff she’d signed up for. (Mesonox glanced at Wind. Still there.)

Still, there was a question nagging at her. Mesonox tapped a few buttons on her fetlock computer so she was talking to the whole crew. “Hey, quick question,” she said as she started another debris sweep. “How come the dust filters don’t automatically pull microdebris into the dumpsters? It’d save us a lot of work.”

Almost immediately, Littora spoke up. “Eh complicated,” she said. “Deh a… lots ah tings… Di aetah…” Her voice trailed off. Mesonox could hear her clicking her tongue.

Short version, it’s a lot easier on the reactor,” said Glen. His voice wasn’t directly audible from the other side of View. “It’s… uh…” His voice dropped, like he was muttering to himself. “Stars blast it, how do I put it…

Di dust filtahs… Dem… interact wid di aetah,” said Littora. Mesonox could almost see her frowning as she tried to put a complicated idea into words. “Dem keep tings eena place. An… a move dem… Eh wul heap hardah.

Mesonox prayed she was parsing Littora correctly as she asked, “Why’s moving them so much harder?” Inside her suit, her tail twitched slightly in apprehension.

Aetheric interactions,” Glen said, his voice somewhat distant. “The aether interacts with the magic that creates the dust filters, and kinda… amplifies it. Same reaction that causes an aether high if you breathe it. And we can… make small gravity wells to catch debris with the right frequencies, but making those wells MOVE is something else entirely.

Eh wud mash up di reactah. Lakka swimming at ah constant speed tru ah storm.

Like swimming at a constant speed through a storm. That was an image. Mesonox put a few thoughts together, scooped at a particularly large chunk of plastic, and- “So it might work, but… the… constantly changing power requirements would burn out the reactor?”

Yes and… no,” Glen said. “That’s most of it, but not all of it.

Yuh know di Flood Effec?” Littora cut in.

“Nope.”

Silence. Interjecting for the first time in their conversation, Stella chuckled and said, “Do you want to?

Mesonox’s mesh was full again, she closed it up. “It’s one way to pass the time. Why not?”

Alrighty then,” Glen said, his grin audible. “As magic travels through the aether, it…


Queen sat back in her chair, listening to the aethernauts chatter about aether stuff, eyes flicking over the various displays she had up. Monitoring the various energy levels around the ships was boring, but even half a decade on, you never knew; some half-dead but still-active reactor could be winding down on the last shards of its mana crystals, only for some aethernaut to connect or cut the wrong wires and trigger a runaway meltdown or activate the engines or make the gravity fields malfunction or what have you. That hadn’t happened yet — to Heavenly View, to any other crews — but the simulations still said it was theoretically possible, and Queen wasn’t going to take any chances.

The only energy signatures reading on the scopes were the usual: the adherence spells in the magboots and the technically-levitation of the dust filters. Wind was dead in the water, nothing showing in her at all. To be expected, but a ship with no energy signatures was like an equine body without a heartbeat. Shame.

Queen’s eyes flicked to the Microdebris Density reading. Thanks to the rookie, it was clicking down faster than usual. Not by a huge amount, but once the rookie had done a few jobs, it’d be a lot bigger. All the simulations in the world (or out of the world) couldn’t prepare you for the real thing.

The aethernauts talked and time ticked away. Queen didn’t say anything; she had nothing to say. Her stomach did, though, and it growled. Maybe she could use some synthcocoa.

She glanced at the clock. Not yet, though. Not yet.


It wasn’t the microgravity that was making Mesonox’s head spin. Littora and Glen kept trading on explanations for why debris retrieval couldn’t be done automatically by the filters, and after a while, they seemed to be vibing so much they’d probably forgotten about her entirely. She didn’t mind, though; she kept listening as they talked, not even trying to interrupt. She picked up bits and pieces of aetherphysics, much of it flying so far above her head it was on the other side of the sun, but some of it understandable.

“-thanks to Neighton’s third law, we can’t even be sure we wouldn’t be moving the ship instead!” said Glen, close enough that they didn’t need the radios. “Which would, admittedly, be kinda neat if the ship could take it.”

If,” Littora enunciated.

“I mean, yeah, that’s a pretty big ‘if’-” Glen dumped another pile of microdebris into the dumpster. “-but it would be neat, right?”

…Yeh.

“Right.” Glen glanced at Mesonox. “Right?”

“Right,” confirmed Mesonox. “Even if it’s just a more complicated Alcroupierre drive.” She’d been able to follow that much, at least.

Or so she thought; Glen shook his head. “Alcroupierre drives warp space so the ship technically isn’t moving within her bubble. This would pull the ship through space by dragging on space itself like… wheels or treads. No spacetime warping, actual movement, no FTL.”

“Okay. Neat in concept, less neat in implementation.”

“Making it an engineer’s wet dream.” (Littora snickered on the other end of the radio and Mesonox wasn’t sure Glen recognized his accidental pun.)

Stella interrupted. “The outside is looking pretty dusted, Queen. What’s it look like on your end?”

Gimme a sec…” said Gimbal. Literally a second later, she said, “Oh, we’re VERY in the range. Not sure we’ve been this clean before.

“Relatively or absolutely?” Stella asked, restowing her strainer.

Both. We should’ve hired another pony a long time ago!

“Told you.” Stella turned to Mesonox and Glen. “You heard her, we’re done here. Strainers away-” (Mesonox’s was already folded back up and clamped back on her suit. Stupid protocol.) “-and we’ll transfer to Solar Wind. One at a time, since it’s the rookie’s first real jump.”

Mesonox nodded. She felt ready, but you couldn’t be too careful in space.

Looking up at Wind, Stella crouched, wiggled her rump, and jumped straight away from the hull, disengaging her magboots perfectly. She casually rotated as she drifted towards Wind and alighted on her smoothly, like she was a pegasus coming in for an easy landing. (Restricted within her suit, Mesonox’s wings twitched.)

“That’s how you know she’s the captain,” said Glen. “Make me an alicorn and let me work for centuries, and I still wouldn’t be able to do it that gracefully. Observe.” He crouched and jumped as well, but far more clunkily; he didn’t get his magboots off properly, meaning his flight was slow and his rotation quick rather than the other way around. He wasn’t even going the right direction, his travel vector taking him off into space. But he seemed ready for that; as he spun, he pointed his leg-mounted grapple at Wind and fired. It suckered itself to the hull right next to Stella, as if he’d shot it from a casual standing position rather than tumbling tail-over-teakettle in zero-g. He reeled himself in and looked up at Mesonox. “Don’t worry about looking nice,” he said cheerfully. “You can’t possibly be worse than THAT.

Actually, you can,” piped up Gimbal. “That’s after Pawn’s done well over a dozen trawling missions. You should’ve seen what he was like BEFORE then!

Don’t listen to Queen, rookie,” said Glen. “That’s inaccurate.

Correct,” said Stella. “Pawn hasn’t improved at all.

Exactly! Listen to King, Queen.

Mesonox grinned slightly. She’d been decent at (simulated) unpowered ship transfer. And the dusting going well had boosted her spirits. She could do this.

She crouched, wiggled her hooves, and jumped. In the split second before she would’ve left the ground on Equus, she angled her hooves just so. It pulled her boots from the hull’s surface right before momentum carried her away from View. End result: a smooth drift towards Wind. Nice.

Too smooth, technically; she’d extended all four legs at the rate, meaning she wasn’t rotating. She always forgot that. She needed to turn around if she didn’t want to land on her back, but that was simple. Twisting her shoulders one way and her rump the other (to preserve angular momentum), Mesonox managed to awkwardly face Wind. She reached out a hoof and the magboot stuck to the hull as she made contact. Properly anchored, she got back into a more comfortable position. First space jump: not quite nailed, but pretty darn close. She didn’t even need to use her grapple.

Stella nodded at Mesonox. “Nice one. Now spread out and do an integrity check. I’ll take the nose. Rookie, you take the stern. Pawn, see if you can find a way inside to check if there are any bodies.”

Stella’s voice remained level for the last command, but Mesonox’s heart twinged. It was easy to forget, but a lot of people — equine and otherwise — had died in their ships during the cascade. There were horror stories of salvage crews finding bodies ripped to shreds by high-speed debris, near-perfectly preserved even years later. The thought of crawling around in a dead ship looking for corpses made her stomach churn. (Admittedly, she could do body checks if she had to. She just really didn’t want to.) But Glen didn’t seem too perturbed. Or maybe he was just better at hiding it. He simply said, “Copy that,” and set off along the hull.

“And, rookie?” said Stella. “Keep up the good work.” Without another word, she headed forward, towards Wind’s nose.

A personal compliment right from the boss herself. Mesonox would’ve been walking on air as she moseyed over to the engines, but walking on aether was even better.