//------------------------------// // The Final Frontier // Story: Friendship is Intergalactic // by Kaelzoroden //------------------------------// The wooden ship slid out of the shadow of the moon and caught the sun, becoming for a moment a blindingly bright spot of oak and gold across the dark colours of Equestrian space. Aboard the vessel, hooves pounded the floor of the bridge in a round of mutual applause. "We are clear of the moon's gravitational pull, lunar slingshot successful!" Slipstream leaned back in her chair, stretching as she relaxed for the first time in the past hour and a half. She was an accomplished pilot, but she'd never served on a ship as large or as powerful as the Arcanum. It wasn't some simple little spell-skiff that could skip across astral currents like a rock across a pond, and though its engine was theoretically the strongest and most advanced ever constructed by pony kind, it was by necessity untested. After all, with a shard of Celestia's sun itself in the heart of the machine, it would go off like a bomb if it was compromised. All the math checked out and it should work fine, but they were nonetheless under strict orders to not engage until they were well outside a safe perimeter from the moon base. That part, however, was out of Slipstream's hooves. It had been her job to make the ship dance, diving into the moon's pull just enough to accelerate it before lobbing it out into space. Whether the engine blew them all to kingdom come or not was something she'd just have to wait and see about, and until then there was, in her eyes, no point in worrying. She spun around in her chair and leaned backwards, her grey coat making her look almost like an extension of the steel-plated surface of her control console. With a confident grin, she looked to the concerned burgundy unicorn sitting in the centre of the room. "Subroutines should keep us on course from here, Captain. We should be passing into the safe zone in about fifteen minutes." The unicorn looked only marginally less stressed after that news. She sat silent for a minute before nodding. Leaning over, she tapped a crystal on the arm of the chair. "This is Quasar to Engineering. We have an estimated fifteen minutes before reaching testing distance, please have the main engine ready." She rolled her neck, feeling a pop. In sixteen minutes, if we're still all alive, I can relax. ------ "This is Engineering. We're doing some final diagnostics and calibrations, should be ready to go by then." The sand-coloured Earth pony that spoke into the crystal had a slight flanging tone to her voice, and she coughed into her foreleg as she tapped the comm crystal, closing the connection. Humming to herself, she trotted over to the thrumming pillar of metal that took up the bulk of the room. Her eyes began to glow a bright green as a hatch lifted up, glowing to match her eyes. Sticking her head inside, she double checked the alignment of the backup lenses and frowned slightly. Deciding that she could probably tweak it a bit more, she squinted at it, causing it to be enveloped in the same glow that surrounded her eyes. Just a half degree or so, that was all it needed... "Tymbal! I need you to take a look at this!" The shout caused her to jump, clonking her head on the panel above her and extinguishing her eyes, causing the panel to then swing down and smack her again. Rubbing the back of her head, she turned to face the pony who called her. "I was just taking some readings and..." he blinked at her. "Uh, boss? Your head okay? Your eyes are doing that thing again..." she stopped rubbing and stared at him, her formerly yellow eyes suddenly a mismatched set of blue and green. Scrunching up her face, she blinked. " Orange and grey." Blink. "Purple and red." Blink! "Two different shades of blue." BLINK! He smiled. "Yellow and yellow. Nailed it." She grinned at him, and with a last rub of the back of her head walked over to check his console. "Now like I was saying, I was taking some readings, and I wasn't sure about this so I wanted you to double check it. It looks to me like even for what it is the engine is running pretty hot-" he pointed to the temperature readout, which was well into the quadruple digits. "-and I just wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be a problem." Tymbal's eyes, never quite managing to stay on the exact same shade of yellow, ran over the numbers and the neighbouring dials and readouts. After a moment she took a calm breath and stepped back, smiling. "Inside the engine is a shard of the sun itself. The engine shell is tempered lunar steel, and that is sitting in an enormous vat of mercury to absorb the heat and burn it off as steam to power... well, the rest of the ship. The safe guidelines as to the operating heat are really not much more than highly educated guesses, so the fact that we're within ten percent of the safe zone is a pretty good sign. Fact is, we're probably going to be rewriting most of the manual on this thing as we go." Her eyes widened as she remembered to check a particularly quarrelsome set of timing belts on the second level. "Let me know if that number starts to climb or drop much, alright?" He nodded, and with a grin she turned and jumped, her insectile wings buzzing their way free of her illusion as she flew up to the second level, revealing some of her chitinous back in the process. ------ "This is Engineering to the Bridge, the main engine is ready for use." Quasar could feel how tense she was, and it really wasn't helping matters. Trying to calm herself down slightly, she started running through a mental checklist. All systems green? Check. Go-ahead from the most skilled thaumatechnician in the space corps? Check. Personal endorsement from three princesses? ...Conditional check, it was Princess Sparkle that had established the safe testing distance. Dry mouth? Check. The lives of everypony on board hanging in the balance? Check. Stress-induced need for a giant plate of greasy onion rings? Emphatic check. Gulping, she tapped the crystal. "Quasar to Engineering. Unlock the the light damper controls and engage the mass amplifier and primary inertial transmitters." She watched as half the screens on Slipstream's console, formerly dark, came to life. Never had the thin sapphire sheets of a terminal looked so threatening. Making a conscious effort to keep her breathing in check, she licked her dry lips and sat up straight. "Slipstream, take us out." ------ Within the pillar in Engineering, the massive tank of mercury roiled. Deep beneath the surface sat what appeared to the untrained eye to be a simple large sphere of hellishly superheated metal. In all honesty, it hardly looked like an engine at all. Inside the sphere, darkness currently reigned. The shard of the sun sat in a sea of enchantments, many of them related to the precise and exacting control and limitation of light. As Slipstream slid her hoof across a screen, the enchantments began to shift. The darkness inside the sphere began to abate ever so slightly, but only in a select region. As photons of light began to slip through the magical darkness, they passed through a thin field of incredibly dense magic. The field ramped the mass of the particles up by several magnitudes, resulting in them slamming against the shell of the engine with incredible force at the speed of light. The complex web of enchantments didn't stop there, however. As each heavy photon slammed into the shell of the engine, the force of the impact was spirited away and distributed across the hull of the entire ship. With a lurch that caused the entire crew to jump slightly, the ship began to move. As the moments ticked past, countless breaths were let out across the ship, and Quasar dared to let a cautious smile appear on her face. Slipstream glanced back over her shoulder. "Engine seems to be doing just fine, Captain. She's got a bit more kick than I expected, but she's handling nicely!" Silence held the bridge for a few seconds, before Quasar let out a relieved breath of laughter. This set off a chain that resulted in a growing crescendo of cheering across the bridge. ------ Belly stuffed with more onion rings than any doctor would probably recommend, Quasar trotted back towards the bridge. Hoof-biting panic put aside for the time, she settled back into her normal, much more relaxed and optimistic attitude, managing to catch herself before she put too much spring in her step. Cheer is all well and good, but I've got to act like a proper Captain here! She thought back to the daring exploits of the space explorers in the novels she used to read- always stoic, unwavering in the face of danger and calm and collected when the difficult decisions had to be made. I bet Captain Buckard wouldn't have been that stressed over the engine test. But then, I'm not Buckard, am? the corners of her lips turned up in a smile. After all, I'm not bald. Quasar had never really fitted her mental ideal of what a Captain was supposed to be. She couldn't cultivate the air of calm detachment that was the hallmark of Captains of space-opera, and she didn't have the rakish, lackadaisical charm of the smuggler Captains from the cheap paperbacks. To her chagrin, her normally energetic personality often caused her to be mistaken for a cheerleader while back on campus. Since joining the space program she'd made a focused effort to keep herself under check, resulting in mixed opinions and theories about her amongst the crew- ranging anywhere from multiple personalities to being a former theatre major. If she was going to be completely honest with herself, she wasn't exactly good at sticking to a single pattern of behaviour when she was trying to restrain herself. Licking the last bits of onion ring off her lips, she trotted back onto the bridge. “Slipstream, how are we doing? Getting the hang of the engine yet?” She settled back into her chair as she skimmed the logs. “Wait, these can't be our coordinates...” She looked up, puzzled, at a beaming Slipstream. “It says we're on the other side of the moon. There is no way we could have gone around it that quickly.” Slipstream was just this side of bouncing in her chair. “Correction Captain, there's no way any other ship could have gotten around it that quickly! And we didn't just go to the other side, either.” She paused, savouring Quasar's puzzled expression. “We went around it two and a half times. One of those was flying backwards.” Quasar's mouth opened and closed soundlessly for a few moments, trying to process how fast they would have had to be going. I only went down for a quick plate of onion rings, for pony's sake! Interrupting her lurching train of thought, her comm crystal lit up and Tymbal's voice came through. “Engine is holding up absolutely fine under stress testing, Captain! The mercury steam is absorbing much more radiated magic than we expected it to, so we're currently burning some of the surplus off as light and heat along some of the outer strips. Mana capacitors are all full and everything is about as far into the green as it can be! In the future, Quasar would vehemently deny that she giggled like an excited schoolfilly. Of course she hadn't been a hair's breadth away from clapping her hooves together either, and it was absurd to think otherwise. It was a few long moments before she trusted herself to speak without squeaking. Regaining some scraps of her composure, she sat straight. "Slipstream, do we have a flight path locked in towards our first goal?" "The anomaly? Yeah, though I think we're gonna get there way quicker than I first thought. Lemme just bring up a flight path..." Her hooves danced across the monitors, outstretched wings swiping along the touch-sensitive screens next to the ones her hooves worked at. A moment later, the large viewing pane taking up the majority of one wall shimmered, the view of space being replaced with a diagram showing an icon of their ship and a dotted line going off to a distant point. "Still don't know anything more about it than what we launched with, but we should be able to change that pretty quick. Considering how fast we were going without spatial compression, we're gonna be able to really haul flank out there when we give it everything. I lowballed the numbers when I was coming up with this flight path to start with, and considering that we actually way OVER-performed what was expected, I think we'll be able to reach it in a couple hours, tops." Quasar couldn't help herself. She got up, one hoof raised in the air. "Engineering, bring the spatial compressors to full power! All stations, standby for densespace entry!" She let her words hang in the air for a moment, enjoying the dramatic tension of the moment. "Slipstream, full speed ahead!" ------ Travelling via spatial compression was similar to walking into a "no shirt, no service" restaurant without any horseshoes, in that it completely violated the spirit of the rules, but there was not much anypony could do to stop it. Spatial compression didn't technically make things travel faster than the speed of light, it simply compacted space around the ship. The closest parallel to what was actually happening would be a sponge being squished flat before having a toy car driven over it- the toy car crosses the entire sponge in very short time, but it's not actually moving any faster from an objective standpoint. The Arcanum was simply doing that on a grand scale, moving 0.9 repeating times the speed of light and condensing space by a factor of ten. This was substantially faster than the estimated capabilities of the engine, and after a surprisingly brief period it began to slow, nearing its destination. Ahead of the ornate wooden vessel was an asteroid field, only dimly visible with the best telescopes from Equestria. Here though it stretched out, a floating mass of stones more vast than any ocean. Every so often an asteroid glinted, reflected light catching a vein of ore as the hulk of stone slowly rotated. "Well Captain, this is it. Readings show the anomaly is in there somewhere." As a test drive for the Arcanum, it had been sent to explore a puzzling discovery that was too distant to learn much more about. While optical telescopes said little about the faint smudge, mana-based telescopes were able to give more detailed but cryptic readings. Initial graphs of the mana patterns had been similar to those of asteroid fields, but they also implied that there was a large object inside that swirled the passing mana in the same way that a beehive would- not pulling on it in the ways that would imply any actual use of it, just the faint distortion and turbulence resulting from swirling through a structure riddled through with holes and openings. The academic consensus was that it was likely a small planetoid composed of porous rock, possibly lava that cooled in space. The fact was though that there was no way to be sure, and as such the little anomaly had become an ideal test run for the capabilities of the ship. "Slipstream, take us in slowly, I'd like to avoid any unnecessary collisions if possible. On that note..." Quasar tapped her crystal. "Engineering, please bring the secondary inertial transmitters and the punishment sphere online." A faint ripple, similar to a heat wave, passed over the viewing pane as the defensive inertial transmitter came online. Just like how inertia from the engine could be taken and spread over the hull for thrust, impacts on the hull could be taken and redirected to the large, heavy ball of solid metal deep in the belly of the ship. There was a limit to how much punishment it could absorb before shattering of course, but a few accidental knocks from some asteroids weren't going to scratch it up too badly. The ship began to pick its way between the drifting stones, smaller ones plinking harmlessly off the oak exterior. The engine allowed it to move side to side as easily as forward, resulting in it moving in seemingly erratic ways as it dodged the asteroids with all the skill of a dancer in slow motion. It was several long, tense minutes before one of the ponies at the sensor banks called out. "Captain, I think we're nearing it. The mana field is really distorted, but it should be just... around..." She wasn't the only one to lose her ability to speak for the moment, as the jaws of everyone on the bridge went slack. As a particularly large asteroid drifted slowly out from in front of the Arcanum, the anomaly was revealed. It was easily bigger than any of the asteroids, and composed entirely of metal. Vast disks rimmed with glowing lights connected at a strange angle to a central hub, like some manner of enormous propeller mounted on an axle. It had to be at least the size of Canterlot if not larger, quietly turning in place. After a moment of stunned silence the bridge erupted in activity, readings frantically being taken as Quasar had Engineering bring the stealth systems online. While Slipstream set their drift pattern to match that of the asteroids around them, the illusion systems sparked to life and disguised the ship as just another mass of drifting rock. "Alright! We need to know as much as we can about this thing as fast as we possibly can! What can you tell me so far?" Quasar tapped her hoof at a brisk pace, her mind going a mile a minute. Reports started coming in, some spoken, some showing up on various displays as raw data. Apparently it didn't interact with mana any more than inert metal, was mostly hollow, and as had been immediately obvious, was completely artificial. Spectrographic readings of the mana passing out of the object indicated a large amount of living matter inside- meaning a large population within it. Quasar slumped back in her chair. "So, first contact then. Alright then..." she rubbed her temples, too nervous to be excited, but too excited to be nervous. "Try hailing on all frequencies. I know it's a long shot with it reading as mana inert, but might as well be thorough. Take us out of stealth and approach ahead of the asteroids, we don't want them to think we're trying to be underhooved at all." The ship levelled out in relation to the object and dropped its illusions, moving forward just enough to stand out from the drifting asteroids but not far enough to be threatening. The bridge held its collective breath as hails were broadcast towards the object. "...That's all of them Captain, there doesn't seem to be a response." Quasar stared out the viewing pane, rolling the problem around in her head. They don't use mana, so how do we communicate? If we could get their attention it would at least be progress, but how? It's not like we can lean out a window and yell, or wave flags at- Her eyes lit up. "Engineering! Vent all the energy we can spare as light off the outer strips!" The ridges of inlaid gold and platinum along the exterior of the ship, while highly decorative, were for far more than just show. They began to glow as energy was poured into them, dimly at first but growing brighter by the second. When it seemed they couldn't get any brighter, there was a faint shockwave and the light seemed to ignite in a riotous burst of colour. No longer simply glowing, the light took on the appearance of an aurora, each strip of the ship sending off a differently coloured ray into the darkness. Blues, reds, greens and purples arced into the darkness, a drifting star of brilliant light against a backdrop of darkness and stone. The reaction from the hulking anomaly was fairly expedient. Quasar grinned as she watched a series of lights across the structure flash into different colours, the universal oranges and greens implying a level of high alert but not one of hostility. After a few moments of the extravagant lightshow, she sent the command to drop it down to a dim glow. No sense in wasting too much energy after all. After a few tense minutes of waiting, a small and decidedly inelegant vessel soared out of an opening. It turned and set a course towards the Arcanum at a decidedly nonthreatening speed. More than enough time for Quasar to get every station with a scanner running checks on the blocky looking ship. "Purely metal! Mostly hollow interior aside from the aft, density readings seem to imply heavy machinery making up the rear bulk!" "No mana signature! Light and movement seems to imply some sort of heat-based rear thrust, acting like a rear-mounted propeller!" "They're pulling up alongside! Velocity dropping, it looks like they're lining up a hatch on their ship with one of the ones on ours!" "They are blinking lights near the hatch! It... it looks like they're trying to invite us to dock with them?" Quasar smiled. Perhaps, just perhaps, life outside their own system shared some Equestrian sensibilities. "Open the hatch, extend the atmospheric shell over their hull and set up some planks or something! Let's meet the neighbours!"