The atmosphere in View was tense when Mesonox and Glen boarded it again. The other crewmembers were talking, but in the clipped tones of “I don’t want to think about what’s going on” busywork. Mesonox couldn’t blame them; she felt the same way.
She busied herself with checking her suit. Any tears? (No, of course not, she hadn’t lost atmospheric pressure.) Possibly! She needed to go every square inch to be sure. Multiple times. Just in case. She’d already lost a computer; she couldn’t be too careful! She started looking closely at where the legs met the barrel. There was a lot of movement in those areas, so if any place developed a tear, it’d be-
“All hooves, report to the nav center.” Stella’s voice was dull over the intercom, but it still made Mesonox jump in surprise. “After-action report.”
Then, although the intercom clicked off, Mesonox still heard her curse.
When the crew gathered in the nav center, the atmosphere was even more tense, bordering on unbreathable. Mesonox’s ears were ringing as she waited for the right time to drop the bomb that she was the one responsible. But that time never came, because everyone was waiting for someone else to say something. Their breathing was loud. Mesonox twisted her hooves. Maybe she ought to just rip off the bandage now and-
Stella sighed. “What’s the damage, Queen?”
“The first impact was to our engines,” Gimbal said. Her voice was very nearly robotic. “While none of them are fully out of commission, two of them are damaged enough that I’ve shut them down just to be safe, and based on the readings I’m getting from another, it’ll operate at only half thrust capacity once we turn it on.”
A grunt from Stella.
“The impact itself rattled View in ways she wasn’t designed to move in. While it looks like there isn’t any damage that can’t be fixed with some fetlock grease, there’s… there’s a lot of damage like that. I’m… still compiling it.”
“Can View get us back to Crown?”
Gimbal bit her lip and folded her ears back.
“Queen.”
“…Debatably.”
“Debatab-” Stella clamped her eyes shut and ran a hoof down the bridge of her nose to the tip of her muzzle. Mesonox looked at her own hooves and fidgeted. She wasn’t sure whether Glen was calm or expressionless. Littora had it lucky; she looked serene, floating there weightlessly, even though she had worry all over her face.
“How is our return debatable?” Stella said, her eyes still closed.
“Wind hit us off-center. Our thrusters weren’t evenly damaged. Most of- Most the damage was along one side, so any thrust will leave us listing to one side instead of straight out.”
Any thrust. Including orbital transfer thrust. Just getting back home would be tricky with View constantly yawing around. Let alone pulling the ponderous bulk of a ship behind them.
“Our communications are still up, so we can call for help if we need to-”
“But that’d mean giving up the salvage,” cut in Stella.
Gimbal nodded.
“Salvage with money we need to fix View.”
Gimbal nodded.
“Okay. Okay. …I saw you firing our attitude thrusters a lot. Knight, is the reactor badly damaged?”
Littora shook her head. “Nuh. Na even a lickle. Wi put ih tru ’em paces, but ih cud hangle ih. Di load neva tuh laaj.”
“And Queen constantly firing the RCS-”
“Di main engines tek wul heap more powa,” Littora said flatly. “Di reacta de fine.”
“Okay.”
Silence fell like a dead bird. Mesonox fidgeted. Speak up now? Maybe. It was… kind of abrupt. Did that matter in a time like this? Was Stella going to say something else that she’d be interrupting? Stella was the captain; it was only right that she get a chance to speak. But if Mesonox kept yielding to her, she’d never get a chance to-
Stella took another deep breath. “Okay. Next order of business. What in Tartarus happened?”
“I don’t know, King. I didn’t get any warnings before-”
Mesonox cleared her throat loudly.
The attention of everyone in the room immediately shifted to her and she wanted nothing more than to sink into the floor and be forgotten. But that didn’t happen, so instead she said, in a small voice that was still as loud as she could manage, “I… I think it’s my fault.”
Silence. Mesonox’s face felt ready to burst into flame. Stella slumped and mumbled, “What’d you do?”
“I-” Mesonox swallowed and forced herself to keep her head up. “I was… giving the engine block a sweep when- when I saw these crystals attached to the engine framework. They weren’t-” She rustled her wings and forced herself to keep her head up. “I didn’t recognize them, but I didn’t think they’d do anything with the- reactor turned off, so I ignored them. And, and when I was looking at the RCS thrusters, I saw more of them and-” She shifted her weight around and forced herself to keep her head up. “I still didn’t say anything. I… don’t know what it was I did, but if- this has never happened before, then- maybe the- things that haven’t appeared on aetherships before did it.”
And that was it. Band-aid off. But she’d ripped it off before scabbing over, so now she was bleeding again. Stella’s ears were quivering and her jaw was tight as her body heaved; Mesonox felt like a cornered animal, ready to run the second she got a chance.
But the worst didn’t happen. Stella didn’t start screaming. She didn’t explode with anger. She didn’t hit anything. She just sort of… slumped defeatedly. Because what was the point in screaming, or exploding with anger, or hitting anything? Besides, she was an earth pony; she’d break anything she hit.
“So. To clarify,” Stella said tonelessly. “You saw a foreign object mounted on the engines and you didn’t say anything.”
“I took pictures and video. I was going to ask on the way back,” Mesonox said lamely.
“But they were on your computer, which got-”
“I also had external backups turned on,” Mesonox said defensively.
Stella’s expression subtly shifted, from despondent to surprised. “You did?”
“It’s… protocol, isn’t it?” Mesonox asked. “Look, I know you said it was redundant and I could ignore it, but I’m new and I have habits. Ma’am.”
Gimbal was already typing at her terminal. “And you had the video running since the start of the walk, right?” she asked quickly.
“No, I didn’t start recording until we went to Wind. But I’d just started on the engine block when-
“And it’s timestamped?”
Mesonox frowned. She was missing something. Maybe something big. “I don’t see why not. Why?”
“Because if it’s your fault and you were recording, we might be able to figure out what happened.”
Modern aetherships had a whole suite of tools that Queen never touched but was glad were sitting there. Trawling could be a complicated task and you never knew what issues the aether would throw at you, so ship designers packed their computers with just about every bit and byte of software they could think of. In this case, those bits and bytes were a synchronization program for various datastreams of extended duration and a one-hour rolling record of energy signatures.
As she worked, Queen explained to everyone what she was doing. “Okay, see, this-” She flicked up the timeline of a certain spectrogram into the hologram above the table. “-is the energy readout for Wind — you can see when the engines are warming up because it starts climbing — and… this-” Up went a plain video. “-is the rookie’s helmet cam.” A few button taps, and the two were lined up in time, down to the millisecond.
“Go to the start,” King said. “I want to see those crystals the rookie was talking about.”
“They’re-” The rookie coughed and raised her voice. “They’re about ten minutes in.” She seemed to be fighting to keep her head up. Queen couldn’t blame her.
Queen scrubbed through the video and quickly found the crystals in question, expanding the image hologram until everyone could see it easily. The rookie had gotten a pretty good view of them, given the cramped space they were in. They looked almost like batteries.
“Hmm.” King leaned in to get a better look. “I can’t say I’ve seen anything like that in spaceship engines…”
“See?” said the rookie.
King grunted. “Pawn, what’s the procedure for…” She waved a hoof at the image. “…something like this?”
Queen examined the crystals closely as she waited. They were… They looked just like crystals. Ordinary crystals. Shaped and carved, maybe, but otherwise quartz that could’ve come out of the ground. There weren’t even any runes in them. (Queen didn’t know anything about runes, but it would’ve given her a place to start.) If they did anything, she didn’t know enough about engines to say. Which one might consider troubling, since her job was using those engines to make multi-dozen-thousand ton hunks of metal and composite dance with miniscule precision. She wasn’t one of those ones, though.
“…Pawn?”
Right. King had asked Pawn a question. He was the smart one.
…And he wasn’t saying anything.
The smart one was quiet.
“…There isn’t one,” Pawn said. (The rookie’s ears twitched upwards.) “All the guides assume the type of the ship is known. There’s nothing about this. Which makes sense, since Wind is experimental.”
“Huh.” King tilted her head. “I… Hmm.”
Pawn glanced at the rookie. “What do you remember doing? Seeing the crystals, planting the pod, and moving on?”
“Y-yeah,” said the rookie.
“I would’ve done that,” Pawn said to King. “The rookie’s right, that shouldn’t have done anything. What triggered it? The aether? We’re not even sure it’s responsible just yet.”
King lifted a hoof declaratively and said, “…” Then she said, “You’re right. You’re right.” She sighed and ruffled her mane. “Let’s move on. I’m… Let’s keep moving.”
Queen scrubbed ahead some more. More crystals near the RCS thrusters, same design; she kept scrubbing. And there it was, the rookie attaching the drone pods to the hull. She looked at the spectrogram and started regular playback. At first, they just got noise. When she glanced at the video, the rookie was doing everything by the book.
Then they got some energy spikes on the spectrogram. Small ones, nothing major in themselves, but spikes where there hadn’t been any seconds earlier. Those spikes built and built and built. They passed the levels that would trigger alarms. Moments later, the call came through on the rookie’s feed: Queen telling the crew to abandon ship.
“See?” said the rookie quietly. “It was…”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Queen. “Assuming won’t get us anywhere.” Granted, she was leaning towards the rookie being indirectly involved somehow, but she didn’t want to say so without a few more checks. She marked the rookie’s pod connections on the timeline, just in case, then collapsed the spectrogram into a 2D graph with a time axis. The aggregate of the strange energies made a nice, smooth, easily-plottable curve.
A curve that only started being more than background noise moments after one of the rookie’s pod attachments.
“Told you.”
“The drone pods caused it?” Pawn asked. “They didn’t fire, did they?”
“No, look-” Queen expanded the spectrogram again. “These signatures don’t match anything like the pods. I don’t even think those come from engines.”
«That looks like a geothaumic reactor as it winds up,» Knight said. «But there’s no ‘geo’ to be thaumic to-»
“Ponies,” King said solidly. All speculation immediately ground to a halt. “Listen. We know that the rookie caused it-” (Off to the side, the rookie wilted slightly.) “-but for now, we need a new course of action. In… this.” She waved a hoof around. “I need some time to think. You’ll find me astern. If you have any suggestions, feel free to offer them.”
And without another word, she walked out of the nav center.
Queen, Pawn, and Knight all exchanged looks (the rookie became quite interested in the rivets in the deck). King didn’t get Moods like that. But she’d never had the trawler smashed up, either. Maybe it would pass.
Maybe it wouldn’t.
But either way, Queen couldn’t just sit around. She went back to the timeline. Whatever they were going to do, they needed all the information and data they could get.
Mesonox kept her head down. Everyone was staring at her. She knew it.
Except that when she looked up, they weren’t. They didn’t even seem to be that angry. Just devoted to whatever they were working on.
She looked down again. Explaining herself hadn’t made her feel better. And why should it? She’d still caused View to get smashed up, still wrecked her first shift, still-
She was spiraling. The more she dwelt on it, the more paralyzed she’d be. She needed something to do. “Hey, uh, Gimbal?” Mesonox asked quietly.
“Yeah?” Gimbal asked casually. She didn’t look away from her screen.
“Can you send me a copy of the- paired- thingies?” Mesonox’s tongue had betrayed her at exactly the wrong moment.
“Sure, here.” Gimbal tapped a few buttons and Mesonox’s terminal binged with the files. She opened them up; all synced and everything.
“Thanks,” Mesonox said. Her voice felt stilted, forced.
“Anytime,” Gimbal replied. Hers didn’t.
Mesonox hunched over her terminal and played the video. After a few moments, she realized it was more an excuse to do something than something she paid any attention to. It made her look like she was involved in problem-solving, just like everyone else, and all the while, she could continue with her spiral. It was easy. It let her feel guilty without needing to do anything about it.
Almost viciously, she scrubbed back to the thruster gems. She was not going to sit around and feel guilty. She was going to do something and feel guilty, darnit, even if it took memorizing the entire engine assembly.
But a visual alone wasn’t good when working with magic. Mesonox stared and stared and stared, but she couldn’t imagine what those gems did based entirely on sight. Engines rarely had arcanic components in them, given how the aether reacted to magic. She scrubbed forward, to where she attached the drone pod and it all started going to Tartarus. She still didn’t see much, but at least it was a change in scenery. Maybe there was something with how the pod connected to the hull, like-
The drone pod.
Mesonox found herself staring at the image as an idea took root in her head. There… could be a way to salvage this. A rather nutsy way, to be certain, but it was simple enough. They just needed to-
She blinked and shook her head. Assuming something was simple was what got her into this mess. She needed to take a step back and actually think it through. For all she knew, in ten minutes, she’d come to the realization that it was a terrible idea and she’d throw those thoughts away, never to be looked at again.
Ten minutes later, it still didn’t seem like a bad idea.
Ten more minutes later, it seemed like a pretty solid idea.
Mesonox rolled the thoughts back and forth in her head, but she couldn’t find any major problems besides the obvious. Maybe that was because she was still a rookie, but then she just needed to get another set of eyes on it. She got up out of her seat. Where was Stella?
Stella was in a large supply closet near the back of the ship. She was just sitting on the floor, surrounded by various crates and junk, eyes closed, calmly breathing in and out. Mesonox risked disturbing her by knocking on the door. “Um. Hey.”
“Mesonox,” Stella said, opening her eyes.
“Are you… doing okay?” Mesonox asked.
“I’m feeling the hum of the reactor.” Stella rubbed the floor beneath her hooves. “It’s calming.”
On an aethership, there were a lot of small things you learned to eventually filter out. The subtle thrum of View’s reactor had been one of them. Now, Mesonox forced herself to feel the floor beneath her hooves. The vibration wasn’t much — barely anything, really — but it was something smooth and constant. It was a little calming, yeah. Maybe Stella found it more calming; she was an earth pony, after all.
“I’m… I’m sorry about… Heavenly View,” Mesonox said. “I… I should’ve known to ask you about those crystals.” She braced herself for… She wasn’t sure what was coming, but she knew there’d be a lot of it.
But what came wasn’t nearly what she’d expected. “You know robots?” Stella said. “They’re always making new ones, down on the ground. By the time you’ve compiled every model, ten more have popped up, probably in each company. So they don’t teach repairbeasts about specific models. They teach them about the mechanics. Servos, solenoids, wiring, hydraulics… You always know what does what, but you never quite know what you’re going to be looking at until you’re looking at it.”
Mesonox stayed silent. Stella was going somewhere, so it was only polite to let her actually arrive there.
“But spaceships? Spaceship development’s been stalled for half a decade. So they’ve completed their collection. They know every make of every ship we’ll ever meet, so they compiled it all into a neat little booklet. They give the best instructions for each type. But they don’t give you the tools you need to think outside the box for something that isn’t one of those types. Your training was incomplete. I was trained before the cascade. I would’ve known what to do.”
Before Mesonox could react, Stella sighed. “That was what I told myself. But for the past few minutes, I’ve really been thinking about what I’d’ve done, and… I don’t think it would’ve made a difference in the end. If you’d called me over, I probably would’ve looked at it, said it’s above our pay grade, and told you to continue as normal. Because we’re not fixing ships, we’re towing them. And as much as I’d speculate on the crystals, I don’t think I ever would’ve guessed they’d activate the engines remotely. We don’t even know what triggered them beyond the drone pods.”
She looked Mesonox in the eyes, her ears slightly down. “So if I’m harsh to you over this, I apologize in advance. My brain wants someone to blame and it keeps telling me that you’re guilt-adjacent. But you’re not. You’re just the one who had the bad luck to be standing next to it when it all went down.”
“Um.” Mesonox swallowed. “Thanks.”
“And apology accepted.”
Stella closed her eyes and settled back in. Mesonox didn’t move. She opened her mouth, closed it again, pawed at the ground.
“Do you have something you want to say, Mesonox?” asked Stella. She didn’t sound angry or frustrated or even disappointed.
“Okay, so,” Mesonox suddenly heard herself saying, “View’s engines are damaged and we can’t really fly straight.”
She didn’t say anything, but Stella’s eyes shot open and her muscles tensed; she didn’t seem to notice.
Mesonox kept talking, lest she realize what she was saying. “And because we can’t fly straight, we can’t really drag Wind back to Lunar Crown.”
Stella nodded slowly. One of her ears twitched.
“Well, I was… thinking…” Mesonox somehow managed to keep looking at Stella in spite of her next words. “We can’t use Heavenly View to tow Solar Wind, but… what about using Solar Wind to tow Heavenly View?”
“Solar Wind?” asked Stella, her ears going up. “The ship spinning around like a top out there? The one that almost got you killed, almost destroyed Heavenly View? THAT Solar Wind? You want to use that to get home?”
“Well, if-” Mesonox bit her lip for a moment as reality threatened to intrude. She worked hard to ignore it “If- if we can get her under control, she- She survived the ablation cascade and the engines still run!”
It was barely even an idea, more of a framework for one. The beginning of one. She didn’t know the later steps. Maybe they could figure it out together. Maybe they’d crash and burn together.
“I don’t want to risk it,” Stella said.
“I know what the next step is! You haven’t even heard it yet!” protested Mesonox.
“Have you seen Wind? She’s a big ship. And right now, I don’t want to get close. Her tail and nose have a speed of something like forty miles an hour. If she hits you in the wrong way, you’re dead. This isn’t something you can- something where you can just wing it.”
“This isn’t- This isn’t winging it! It’s simple, it’s not that risky-”
“This is different from the simulations, if you-”
Someone cleared their throat. Mesonox jumped, Stella stopped talking. They both looked to the closet door. Glen was standing in the frame, looking sheepish. “You’re… kinda loud,” he said.
“We’ll keep it down,” Stella said, her voice already softer.
“You’re also kinda boneheaded. You asked for an idea, Mesonox came to you with one, and you’re shutting her down before you even know what it is.”
Mesonox’s heart fluttered. Maybe-
“Did you hear what she wants to do?” asked Stella.
“Fly Solar Wind back to Crown. It’s more than I’ve got.”
“And do you know how she intends to get a spinning hulk like that under control? The very first step?”
“No, but does that matter?”
Stella didn’t respond. She didn’t look away, either.
“Right now,” Glen said, “if we leave everything as is, this job is a bust. Not only will we not get any money from Wind, we’ll need more money to repair View. We could go bankrupt if we don’t get lucky. And that’s assuming we can even live this down on Lunar Crown. There hasn’t been an accident this bad in four years, so we’re going to be all that anyone’s talking about for… I dunno, moons. But if we can get Wind under control, maybe we can at least break even. It’s at least worth a brainstorm.”
Glen’s tone was weirdly muted, like he was going through the motions and reading from a script. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Mesonox; more like he was just saying things for Stella’s benefit. But Stella was nodding anyway.
Maybe it was something between them after years of working together; Glen wasn’t trying to convince her, just give her the time to calm down. After all, they’d just taken on a rookie, had a job go wrong in spectacular fashion, had the rookie admit it was probably her fault, and now the rookie was proposing something wild. It was practically a miracle Stella hadn’t just thrown up her hooves and ordered them all home already.
In even more of a miracle, Stella said, “Okay.” She looked Mesonox in the eye. “I reserve veto power. But I’ll hear you out. What are you planning?”
Mesonox took a deep breath. Why did people take a deep breath when psyching themselves up? It was like a swig of liquor, but without anything except for air. And yet, it worked. Mesonox took a deep breath and started explaining.