//------------------------------// // 0000 // Story: Cypress Zero // by Odd_Sarge //------------------------------// “What a mess our lives turned out to be. It was at its best when you and I were only three. We can start with all the things that turn us out. And we can go right down the list and throw them out. Can we sta-start over? Can we sta-start over?” Click. “...It’s over. It’s over...” The unicorn’s soft coo echoed about the hull. Her lonely berth only added to the mood left in the atmosphere by the recorded song. Letting it go, the bulky, hoofheld audio player floated off, untethered. It had hardly left the bedspread alcove before the charging station began to pull on it with its imbued spell. The mare squeezed her eyes shut. She sucked in through tight lips. “C’mon, filly... you can do this. Up.” Nodding her head to the invisible tempo, she drew in one more breath, and physically reached for the harness keeping her in bed. She slipped the bed-belts back into their slots, and pushed gently off the wall, brushing against the poster of a classic starship. As her hoof departed, the faded dent in the poster deepened just a hair more. “Up.” She didn’t see her way through the cabin so much as she felt her way through: the filtered beams of sunlight warmed her coat as she glided in zero-gravity. Her mane brushed up against the ceiling, and her hooves reached down for nothing. Carefully, and methodically, she stretched her legs out, until she was splayed like a pony caught mid-jump. Her hooves wound around familiar steel rungs. She allowed herself a smile. “Up.” She kept her eyes shut as she ascended the cramped access corridor: her back brushed against the wall with each pull, and her barrel brushed against some of the ladder’s rungs when she neglected to keep her grip. It only took one mistake to break her pace, but she managed it all the way to the top. The hatch above her hissed, and she opened her eyes. Cool air poured in as she climbed up and out. The rungs carried on past the door, but she chose not to grab them. Lighting her horn, four metal circlets wrapped just above her fetlocks glowed an electric blue. She touched a foreleg to the floor: her mane fell. She followed with her second foreleg, and ‘pulled’ on the floor as she brought her hindlegs down: her tail fell limp. Tentatively, she lifted a hoof. Her mane stayed motionless. She sighed, and began her walk. The metal floor panels in the red-lit space cranked with each hoofstep. It was an awful, grating noise, but she didn’t have to put up with it for much longer: the door at the end of the maintenance hallway opened outward. She ducked her head, careful to manage her horn, and stepped out. The octagonal hub room had two additional corridors: the sign above the left-most wall would lead her to the docking module, a place she hadn’t seen in weeks; the sign on the right led to the support module, which she’d entered just yesterday in order to fix a power cable leading out to the exterior catwalk of the refinery array. The opposite side of the room featured open panels, with a full view of the gas giant. With her geostationary orbit, she could rest assured that it wouldn’t change, unless things went horribly wrong. But that’s why she was here. Settling, the comm officer lit her horn, and felt her way through the controls with her magic. The circular-shaped desk came with a swivel chair, but with her ethereal touch managing the routine diagnostics, she was free to keep her hooves on the main telecommunications panel in front of her: manual transmission. Under her hoof, the tactile button felt right. “Station ID, Motherlode RF-1. Good morning, tenders. Cypress time is zero, zero, zero, zero.” Her eyes scanned the display briefly, but she already knew she was right. “All ships, comms up.” The first crackle took a long moment. “Delta-4, seeing all green. Morning, sweets. Skipping the paste today, are we?” She rolled her eyes at the voice of the old stallion. “Delta-4, affirm. All green.” “I know it is.” He laughed. “Be advised, 6 is gonna be late. He pulled an all-nighter on the skimmers, so don’t fret too bad.” “Acknowledged. Clear comms.” “Sure thing, sweets.” She paused transmitting just long enough to laugh. While the fuel-tenders were practically safe given their line of work on the frontier, the corporation could just as easily shuttle out somepony else if she didn’t adhere to protocol. That didn’t mean she couldn’t feel jealous about their job security. One-by-one, she ran down the list of the ponies in her care. Some were just waking, others off to ‘rest’ in the beds of their little work-ships, and the rest caught at the start of their corporate-scheduled break; those who made their own schedules had been weeded out long before her time. Three shifts. Twelve greens. Twelve ponies to keep her company. A good day. But something was wrong. The timing felt off. But she’d stuck her pace just right, hadn’t she? She checked again. 00:00 She gave it a double-take. She wasn’t that fast. 00:00 “Huh. Haven’t seen that before.” She wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t the first time the computer had failed to properly synchronize with Cypress; with pioneer-age technology like this at her hooves, it was bound to have connectivity issues. Her horn shined a little brighter, and a terminal above the panel to her right flashed from black to green: the network diodes grumbled as they were forced to repeat the same task they’d just completed. 00:00 Frowning, she reached to transmit. “...All ships, comms up.” She was met by silence. 00:00 She tore her eyes away from her comm panel, and looked around. Had she missed something, despite her practice? 00:00 No, it was Cypress Station that was reading wrong. Everything was correctly tuned on her end. “What the hay is going on?” Again, she transmitted. “All ships, report in.” Silence. 00:00 “This is Motherlode RF-1. Fuel-tenders, get up on comms, and report in.” 00:00 She stood from her desk, horn dropping in an instant. She stood so fast that her mane and tail shot up toward the low ceiling, but she stayed grounded. Stepping out of the nook, she trudged over to one of the large windows. Squinting, she surveyed the world outside. They were hard to see, but the nav-lights of the fuel-tenders waved back. She stomped back to the comm station. 00:00 The comm officer was young, but not inexperienced. Settling again, she leaned back in her chair, looking over everything she had. “Comms were just up... Station’s not responding. No local connections. No external connections. System-wide blackout?” Her horn lit across one panel in particular. It was perched behind all the other panels, but just close enough for her magic to reach. Holding a hoof to the transmit button, she closed her eyes. With her magic, she felt along the panel’s interface: the knobs of the radio clicked and buzzed, and the speakers crackled to the call of the void. It was unlikely anypony in the fuel-tender fleet would hear her, even if it was emergency equipment, but she knew who would. When she found it, the telltale ‘ping, ping, ping’ of the emergency frequency was a second of relief. “This is fuel refinery Motherlode RF-1, requesting Concord assistance. Connections to FTL-relays are absent. Local outage. Possibly system-wide. Cannot attempt repair alone. Message repeats.” She looked at the clock display. [ INIT. DIAGNOSTICS ] 00:00 For a moment, the only sound on the radio was the steady blink of the emergency frequency’s pings. With one last flick of her magic, she let the radio loose, and from the waves on the monitoring side of the panel, she knew her message was going through. Comforted, she took the time to calm herself. And then a black hiss enveloped the room. She screamed, horn lighting to swing the radio off. She stumbled back, staring at the panel as the previous blast of white-noise continued to ring in her ears. The panel was fine, but what had just come out of it? [ ... ] 00:00 The comm officer took a step back, glancing at the support module door. “I...” How could she even fix something like that? It was... A speck on the corner of her vision caused her to tense up. The white-pressed insignia of the Concord vessel outside her observation window shone on her. She couldn’t feel it, but as the thrusters of the starship burned away, her hooves shook. The fighter maneuvered to face the fuel refinery, with hardpoints deployed. [ NO SIGNAL ] 00:01