Equus
“—so production is 12% short of where they were supposed to be by this cycle—“
As his adjutant droned on about the present state of Mothership construction, Shining Armor found his attention constantly drifting towards the clock mounted high up on the wall directly behind his aide. In his head, he compared it to the timetable he had memorized months ago for the imminent shuttle docking. They should have just entered the approach pattern; another fifteen minutes to dock, then two for post-docking checks and transferring her…
“—since the system is automated, we are not sure that allocating additional ponypower will do much to help—“
He grimaced. For all that he had spent the last two decades of his life in space, away from all of his family, the next seventeen minutes promised to be the longest waiting period he had endured in…quite a long while.
“—could jeopardize launch schedule significantly. At this late date—“
“Captain Triplicate,” Shining Armor interrupted. The captain peered through his thick glasses at his commander, sheaves of paper and tablet computer momentarily left hanging, forgotten, in his green magical aura.
“Sir?” he responded.
“While Production’s shortfall is a serious problem, the admirals are more concerned with Fleet Command and seeing whether she can live up to her promises at the moment. Right now, my concern is to ensure that she is safely transferred to the bridge, whereas even if we discovered how to solve Production’s issues right this instant, it will take days or weeks to actually fix them. If we might review possible remedies later…?”
As oblivious as Triplicate Forms might sometimes be, even he wasn’t blind enough not to see what Shining Armor was trying to tell him. “Ah. Yes, sir. Perhaps…” he waggled his head, consulting an internal calendar. “Today, at fifteen fifteen? As I recall, you have nothing scheduled for then.”
Shining Armor nodded. “Fifteen fifteen it is, then. See you then, captain.”
Realizing he was dismissed, Triplicate Forms quickly gathered up his notes and slid them into the saddlebags draped across his back, then rapidly trotted across the gleaming white composite deck plating and out of Arrival Control, leaving Shining Armor and a bored clerk alone to wait out the remaining—he checked the clock again—thirteen minutes until his sister arrived. As the clock ticked away, Shining couldn’t keep his hooves still. He checked, then rechecked his uniform, adjusting it so that the toughest petty officer in the fleet would have congratulated him on the sheer pinnacle of perfection he had achieved. He examined his hooves in minutest detail, seeking out any imperfection. He reviewed, then reviewed again the exact schedule he had planned out for Twilight’s arrival. If he stopped, he might start thinking about his relationship with his sister. And if he did that, then he might start wondering what effect twenty years in space and twenty-five years in the military might have had on that relationship. And if he did that, then he, the newest commodore in the Equestrian Space Forces and the Commanding Officer of Mothership Assembly might just turn tail and flee rather than confront her.
Well, he might, but only if he allowed himself to take the first step, of wondering. So he made sure his uniform would pass the strictest inspection, rubbed his hooves on the deck to wipe out the slightest scuff or mark, reviewed his schedule, even, when his imagination finally failed him, counted his breaths as if he was a hermit perched upon a mountaintop. Behind the desk, the intake clerk slouched, completely uninterested in Shining Armor’s anxieties or his methods of relieving them. Unlike Shining Armor, restrained by his sense of propriety and position in the fleet, the civilian clerk had long since resorted to the ubiquitous phone as a distraction during the long wait for the shuttle.
Shining Armor’s perpetual motion only stopped when the sound of docking latches engaging and hatches mating echoed through the chamber. Taking a deep breath, he turned to face the docking tunnel as the cacophonic clanging of the docking mechanism reverberated through the reception hall. A moment passed, then another, then a blur of purple flew out, smashing into him and wrapping itself around his chest. After a moment during which he seriously feared for his ribcage, the purple blob spoke.
“Shiney!”
“Twily!”
Out of the corner of one of his eyes, he saw the shuttle attendant flash a quick salute before turning back into the cabin. After the too-tight hug, Shining pulled back from his sister. He had seen what had been done to her, of course, on video calls home, but seeing your sister’s transformation into a cyborg on a screen and experiencing it at first hoof were completely different. Black lumps of plastic, metal, and microcircuitry jutted out of her skin and coat at dozens of points, concentrated largely along her spine and around her horn, with several much larger ports along her barrel. Her mane had long since been shaved away and her tail cut back to the dock to allow unhindered surgical access. Patches of distinctly lighter coat were present around the most recent surgical sites, although the older implants were snugly embedded in her coat, almost as if they were meant to be there.
Whatever his feelings about what she had done to herself, though, he was counting on her to do everything she said she could. Everypony was counting on her. So, instead of attempting a futile last-ditch effort at talking her out of becoming the core of the Mothership, or even trying to talk her into waiting a few days before integrating, he simply said, “You need to register with the clerk over there,” and led her towards the desk, where the clerk sat slumped in her chair. Once they reached her desk, she reluctantly put down her phone and pulled herself upright, positioning her hooves over her keyboard. Looking Twilight in the eye, she asked “Name?”
“Twilight Sparkle”
“Date of birth?”
“July 7th, 1131”
Shining slowly tuned out of the exchange between the clerk and Twilight. Even if was the same procedure that every other pony boarding the Mothership had to go through, it seemed vaguely ridiculous; after all, she was going to become, quite literally, part of the ship. There was no need to take into account her boardings or departures, no worries that she might stow away somehow. Nevertheless, it was procedure, and it was, in no small part, his job to uphold procedure.
Distracted, he didn’t break out of his reverie until Twilight wrapped her hooves around him again. He returned a brief but potent squeeze before asking, “I take it you’re done?”
“Yep!” she smiled. “Dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s”.
“To the bridge then,” he said.
“To the bridge,” she agreed, and followed him as he stepped out of Arrival Control.
---
“--so then she said, ‘Ensign, is that a--’, and he said, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and she said ‘Well, Ensign, would you mind explaining where it came from?’
“Now, at this point he knows he’s in deep trouble no matter what he does, so he decides that he might as well go out in a blaze of glory. So he says, ‘Yes ma’am, I would mind explaining where it came from.’
“Well, the good captain did not expect that from a wet-behind-the-ears ensign, I can tell you that! She had this kind of blue coat, see, so her face turned this purplish color as she got more and more angry at him. Given how quiet it was in that room, we could hear her teeth grinding together, too. I think most of us were wondering how long it would take for her to lose it.
“Fortunately--or unfortunately, I’m still not quite sure which--she had the good sense not to explode in front of a roomful of junior officers. She just said, in this low, quiet, but utterly dangerous voice, ‘Ensign, I expect you in my office the moment this meeting is adjourned.’
“He just said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
“Well, he didn’t take it off for the next week. We never did learn the details what happened between them, though.”
Shining chuckled a little more at the thought of it. That had been a good prank.
His sister just smiled, a little wanly, as if she understood how funny it was but didn’t quite have the energy to work herself up to laughter.
“So that was probably the most interesting thing that’s happened the whole time since I came up here,” he offered after they had walked along in silence for a few moments. “But you! Presidents and chancellors and princesses and kings! You have to have more interesting stories than I do, Twily.”
Twilight smiled a little more, but rather with the air of somepony feeling obliged to smile than somepony genuinely flattered by the compliment.
“No...no,” she responded after a brief silence. “None of that was nearly as exciting or interesting as, well, this,” she waved her hoof around. “You’ve told me a lot about what’s happened, but not much about what it’s like.” He must have looked confused, because a moment later she clarified, “What it’s like being in space. Being on the Mothership. Being in charge of building it. All of those, maybe. You know how much I wanted to go into space when I was a little filly,” she reminded him.
He smiled as he remembered. “Yes ma’am Spacepony Twilight ma’am!”
For the first time since she had arrived, she laughed, a rich, genuine sound that lost little from bouncing off the white composite paneling of the brightly-lit corridor they were walking down. She shoved him, just a little, still laughing as she did. “Shiiiny,” she whined.
“Yes, Spacepony?” he replied, struggling to keep a straight face.
She shoved him again, a little harder. “You know what you did,” she accused him.
“You laughed, though,” he observed.
“Even so,” she said, then paused for a moment before adding, “You still haven’t answered my question.”
He thought for a moment. “Well...”
---
As they finally approached the doors to the bridge, both Shining and Twilight paused.
“So…” Shining was the first to break the silence. Before he could say or do anything else, Twilight again leapt up to give him a tight hug, face buried in his shoulder. He wrapped her in his own forelegs, trying to hold on even though he knew he couldn’t.
“I love you, big brother,” she said into his ear.
There was really only one reply for that. “I love you too.”
For what seemed like an eternity, they simply held onto each other, unwilling to stop. Finally, Shining let go. Twilight reluctantly followed. Together, they stepped up to the bridge’s doors and pushed them open.
Within, the dozen ponies of the integration team were already waiting. Half wore the light green bands of medical, the other half the gold of engineering. Behind them, the doors to the innermost sanctum of the bridge were already open, the dark, metallic, machinery-filled room behind a stark contrast to the clean, smooth white composite of the antechamber they were standing in.
No words needed to be said. The integration team led Twilight into the sanctum and positioned her on a broad raised dais in its center. Then, they began the lengthy process of connecting her to the Mothership’s computer systems. Each port connecting to her nervous system was checked, rechecked, and hooked up to its appropriate wire.
Shining just watched. Technically, he had no further role here. He had delivered Fleet Command to the bridge, and now it was the Chief Surgeon’s duty to see her sucessfully integrated. But he’d be damned if he didn’t at least watch as his sister was--executed.
The systems that would allow her to eat, drink, and eliminate waste while embedded in the bridge were attached to their corresponding implants. During the whole process, little more than whispers passed among the crew and between them and Twilight, simple commands such as “try to raise your left front leg” or “try to wiggle your tail” to verify proper functioning. Finally, the technicians left the dais, and up from it came a smooth, transparent tube, which quickly raised itself to the ceiling, sealing Twilight within.
It was as if they had just strapped her down for the needle, he supposed. Just one more step, and she’d be the ship, forevermore.
Now sealed, the chamber began to flood with a transparent liquid, the breathing fluid that would be used to provide Twilight with oxygen during the voyage. Calmly, Twilight waited with her eyes closed as it topped her fetlocks…her knees…her withers…finally, the top of her head.
It was funny, how his terrors graded themselves to attack weakest to strongest. First, it was hearing of her project. Then, it was waiting for her arrival. At last, it was actually watching.
After a moment of hesitation, bubbles flooded from her mouth and nose as she began to breathe the liquid. Finally, the entire chamber filled and she floated freely within it, suspended within by an explosion of wires and tubes. The doors to the inner bridge snapped shut and sealed with a burst of light.
A sexless voice sprang to life over the antechamber’s loudspeakers. “Beginning integration of subject Twilight Sparkle…in progress…in progress…complete.”
For a brief instant, there was silence. Then, in a moment which Shining could never decide was heart-wrenching or heart-warming, the voice was replaced by his sister’s. “Fleet Command is online and waiting for orders.”
---
The visitor looked more than a little lost down in the boiler room of the Mothership’s life support department. Her immaculate uniform, forelegs banded with blue stripes marking her as a member of the science department, was clearly out of place among the pounding, clanking, dirty machinery and squishy, squelching, filthy biology that kept fifty thousand ponies alive. Applejack caught a sight of the visitor and sighed. Another pony with no business here? Somehow, every day more ponies wandered down into the life support department, hopelessly lost. She didn’t know how; it wasn’t exactly easy to find life support even if you were looking for it. Nevertheless, anypony who got that lost needed help, whether or not she was a little tired of giving it.
“Hello, sugarcube,” she addressed the newcomer as she drew nearer to the butterscotch yellow pegasus mare. “A little lost, am ah right?”
The newcomer seemed to retreat in on herself as she noticed the chief approaching. She softly answered “Um, yes. This isn’t the science wing...”
Applejack laughed at the mare’s statement of the obvious. “No it ain’t, sugarcube, this is almost the other side of the ship! This here is Life Support. Ah’m Applejack, Chief of Life Support Operations.” She stood a little taller, a little prouder at that statement of her title. And why shouldn’t she? The Apples didn’t have fancy connections or political might. There hadn’t been any backdoor deals pushing her up the ranks. No, she had earned her place aboard with raw talent and hard work, and she wouldn’t ever forget it.
The subtleties of her stance were totally lost on her visitor, who wailed, “Oh no, there’s a biology team meeting in ten minutes! How am I ever going to get there in time?”
Applejack’s heart melted at the sight of the mare’s quiet breakdown. “Hey, it ain’t that bad. Here, ah’ll take you to the G-14 transit tube. You can get a direct shot to the science wing from there, it won’t take more than five minutes to get over there.”
The mare looked up at Applejack. “Really?’
Applejack smiled and offered a hoof to her. “Sure as mah name’s Applejack.” She explained even as the two mares set off at a brisk canter, Applejack leading the way: “The G-14 provides service to the engineering, production, and science facilities, but not the dormitory levels. Hardly anypony uses it to move around, so there’s never any jamming or congestion.” Halfway to their destination, she suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was helping out. “Ya know, ah don’t think ah caught your name earlier...?”
“Oh, I’m Fluttershy. I’m in the Biology Department,” the yellow mare replied.
“And what do you do in the Biology Department, Fluttershy?” Applejack asked, more than a little curious about what the ponies outside of engineering actually did on a day-to-day basis. Between how busy life support had been for the past month or two as new ponies had flooded aboard, and the lack of social options aboard, she’d hardly met anypony outside of the department.
“Well, mostly we’re there to research any xenobiological—I’m sorry, I mean alien life forms we come across,” she explained as they neared the transit tube. “We also have a secondary job of looking at ways to improve the efficiency of the on-board biological systems, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with. My specialty is zoology, I work with birds and mammals and insects and, well, with all the cute little critters out there.” As she said that last part, her voice softened and her face split itself with a quiet but satisfied smile.
“Huh,” Applejack said. “That sure sounds interestin’. A lot more than mah job, at least. Most interestin’ thing happens to us is when the sewage system backs up...” Applejack shuddered at the memory.
“Don’t sell yourself short!” Fluttershy interrupted. “Managing the bioreactors themselves is a complicated optimization problem, to say nothing of coupling them to the inorganic processing systems! When you add in managing industrial waste flows and dealing with external contamination, you probably have the most dynamic job on the ship!”
Applejack just stared at the pegasus as if she had suddenly grown a second head for a moment. Nervously, Fluttershy added, “um, but whatever you think is fine, I guess.”
After a few moments of uncontrolled laughter, Applejack managed to get enough control of herself to begin speaking again. “Sounds like we both think everypony else’s job’s got to be more interestin’ than ours,” she chuckled. “Ah don’t suppose you’d be up for swappin’ ‘war stories’? Pretty much everypony ah know on board’s an engineer themselves, so ah don’t get much of a chance to share.”
“I…suppose,” Fluttershy said.
“Well then! How about we meet for lunch on a regular basis? Say, every Tuesday and Thursday, maybe? Ah eat from noon to one, most days, in the engineering mess.”
“I...guess that would work,” Fluttershy said after a moment of thought.
“Well, that’s settled, then,” Applejack said, slowing to a casual trot. “And here’s the transit tube. G-14, as ah said. Now, git to your meeting, and remember, next Tuesday!”
---
Rainbow Dash grunted as another hard burn pushed her fighter out of harm’s way. Undeterred by the failure of her latest trick, she followed up the random walk thrust by feinting a turn to the left, then applying retro thrust, hoping to use her sudden slowdown to turn the tables and force her opponent into her gunsights.
Unfortunately, her pursuer hadn’t been fooled by the feint. As her retros lit up, so too did her opponent’s, in nearly perfect synchronization. Before she could exploit Rainbow’s momentary straight path, another random walk burn spoiled her aim, but Rainbow couldn’t expect to dodge her forever. Since her enemy had converted their indecisive head-on encounter into a chase, Rainbow had only been narrowly able to keep her from achieving victory. For every tactic and trick Rainbow could dream up, her foe seemed to know and be able to instantly apply the perfect counter.
Although…there was one trick she hadn’t tried to use yet. In a sudden burst of drive plasma from her maneuvering jets, her fighter swung around, swinging 180 degrees in less than a second, lining her crosshairs up directly over her pursuer’s spacecraft. Before the surprised pegasus could react, she fired, an invisible burst of laser light reaching out through her gun barrel and connecting her with her opponent’s fighter for just a moment.
The kill counter hovering in the upper right corner of her vision ticked over once. It now read
RD: 9
LD: 8
A moment later, the clock just above the kill counter rolled over. It was 16:30, time for them to return to the Mothership. As the two pilots guided their fighters into the approach pattern quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of extraneous chatter, Rainbow struggled against her euphoria. Given that Lightning was one of the best and most aggressive dogfighters in the squadron, matching her, let alone beating her (if, Rainbow chose to forget, by a narrow margin) was no mean feat. A year ago she would have been--she had been--creamed, and it wasn’t until recently that she could even have considered actually matching her. Once they entered the approach pattern, she relaxed as control of the ship switched over to Docking Control. It still bothered her to not have control over her ship, but there was nothing she could do about it. Under the command of Docking Control, her scout slipped quickly through the armada of support craft maneuvering around the Mothership and within its hangar bays to her squadron’s docking sleeves.
As the docking clamps fixed themselves to her fighter’s hull, the webbing holding her in her ejection seat unraveled itself, leaving her sitting in her g-suit, floating in the omnipresent breathing liquid as she waited for the techs to come and help her out. With little else to do, she looked around the cockpit, a mass of gleaming displays interrupted only by the control panels and joysticks down by her forelegs. A machine built to fly, and nothing but; it was...beautiful. A light from above interrupted her reverie. She could feel hooves grasping her suit, hear the grunting as a pair of the ground team pulled her out of the cockpit, finally see her ship’s docking sleeve as the techs allowed her to slump onto the grating of its access arms. It wasn’t much to write home about, little more than a cramped, pressurized space filled with the equipment needed to maintain a ship after its flight.
After a moment, she got to her hooves, ignoring the familiar but still unpleasant sensation of floating within the suit without actually touching anything. As the techs began to plug in the ship’s power and data cables, she squished her way over to the wall across from the fighter, picked out one of the hoses attached to it, and plugged it into a port on her suit’s back. Immediately, the whine of pumps that had been in the background since she had suited up hours earlier took on a new and decidedly louder tone. As the level of the breathing liquid dropped past her muzzle, she began to hack and cough, spitting up large amounts of the stuff every time she tried to take a breath. This was by far the least pleasant part of being a pilot, the post-flight fight to return to breathing air instead of some goop an egghead in some lab had created to keep you from being squished during hard maneuvers.
As the level dropped further, below her withers, she could hear the pumps start to suck air. She rolled onto her back and stuck her legs straight up into the air, allowing the last of the stuff to pool around the vacuum line and be sucked out of her suit. As the pumps again hit air, she reached up and flipped a switch, turning the pumps off, then reached down and pulled open a zipper reaching from her throat to her crotch, yanking her suit open in the process. She burst out of the deflated suit, pulling her helmet off in one smooth motion, then shaking out her mane, coat, and wings to relieve the feeling of being trapped in one position for hours.
As she began to bunch up the flight suit, one of the techs brought a towel out and began rubbing the remaining bits of liquid out of her coat and wings. The other one who had helped her out brought a mug of coffee over to warm her up. Three sugars and only the tiniest dash of milk. She didn’t even have to ask anymore. “Thanks,” she croaked out of abused vocal cords.
“No problem,” the tech who had brought it over said. He then began to inspect the outside of her scout, checking to see if she had damaged it in any way during today’s flight. She just sipped her coffee as he began to carefully go over every square inch of the hull, quietly patching any micrometeoroid holes he found. A few other ground team members arrived while she was waiting and began their own work in keeping her ship in shape. She just watched as they quietly went about their business.
A few sips later, and the tech with the towel had worked all the gunk out of her coat and mane. She stood, spreading her wings wide and confirming that nothing was stuck to them, either, before hobbling off three-legged down the corridor and away from the hangar bay, still carrying her coffee mug, her flight suit draped across her back and her helmet caught on one of her wingtips. She quickly gulped down the rest of her now only warm coffee before reaching her squadron’s ready room. Lightning was already there, downing her own cup of coffee at the sole table. Rainbow brushed past her and carefully slid her mug into the nook marked with her name and cutie mark, then turned and walked to the wall of lockers, opening up hers with a brief glance at and a touch of her hoof to the lock, then stuffing her flight suit and helmet inside.
Famished from their flight, she pulled one of the frozen meals left in the squadron freezer out and popped it in the microwave, remembering--this time--to leave some money in the tip jar for replacing it. As Rainbow waited for the microwave to finish, Lightning gulped down the last of her coffee. She cleared her throat, once, then began to speak in a low, calm tone, still looking at the table.
“That move you pulled out there? It was reckless. Crazy, even. In a real fight, your shots might not have taken me out. I might have been able to return fire--and you had put yourself right in my gunsights.”
Rainbow had turned around to face her flight leader as Lightning had started speaking. Under the impact of her words, she started to tremble, her ears pulling back as she absorbed their meaning. Lightning neither knew nor cared about Rainbow’s shaking, eyes still fixed on her empty mug.
“Even granting success, we were so close together, had I been anypony else I might not have reacted in time. I might have jinked the wrong way. We might have collided--and then we would both be dead.
“A move like that...that took guts.”
Rainbow froze, looking at Lightning dumbly.
Her face sported a feral, dangerous smile as she looked up, directly into her subordinate’s eyes. “I like that! I like that a lot! You’re never going to be a decent pilot without guts, kid. Never.”
Throughout her body, Rainbow felt muscles she didn’t even know she had release. In as steady a voice as she could muster, she replied, “Thank you, ma’am”
Lightning’s smile softened slightly. “And that’s why I’m making you my permanent wingpony. We’re gonna go far, kid.”
Rainbow stood ramrod straight as she answered “Yes, ma’am”.
---
Rarity popped out of the lift tube a mere ten minutes before her shift started, in a dreadful state. When she had woken up less than half an hour before her shift started--her alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and though she wasn’t sure why, she had her suspicions--she had been forced to forgo most of her morning routine. Her mane, coat, and tail were not in a state fit to be seen, and she had barely had time to swing by the dorm cafeteria and grab a few pastries—she knew they were bad for her figure, but she just hadn’t had time, and if nothing else they were filling—before jumping in the transit tube. As usual, it had been a slow, frustrating journey, as all of the ponies about to go on shift and all the ponies going off of shift had conspired to make the pod she had been riding stop at virtually every level between the dorms and Prototyping.
Trotting quickly but elegantly down the hall, she quickly reached the entrance to Prototyping. A brief wave of her access badge past the card reader later, and she was inside the hall’s antechamber, grabbing her protective goggles and smock and fastening them around her body with her magic almost as soon as she stepped through the door. Mane and tail nets followed; she could just see what could happen if a bit of them got into the machines, and shuddered a little at the very thought. As the final step, she floated her earplugs over from the shelf and carefully inserted them into each ear. Now properly equipped, she stepped through the door on the other side of the chamber from where she entered.
What she saw was bedlam. Pegasi soared through the air over the grid of machine tools and 3D printers, carrying tiny parts from where they had been made to where they were supposed to be, while even through her earplugs she could hear the whine of printers laying down stunningly complex patterns of plastics, metals, and more, the cacophony of cutting tools and presses and grinders shaping exotic alloys of nickel, titanium, and other, even rarer metals, and even the shouts of workers trying to communicate over the clamor of the machines.
Instantly, she relegated her bed mane, her atrocious coat, even her terrible breakfast to the back of her mind. Even if, to a casual observer, Prototyping was a mass of chaos masquerading as a manufacturing facility, to her it was home. And like any home, if you knew where to look, there were always pockets of order in even the most disorganized areas. Case in point, the shift bosses’ office.
Carefully dodging couriers, operators, or any of the other ponies on the floor, Rarity made her way to the office, just to the left of the entrance. As she stepped in, the noise of the floor followed her, alerting her shift chief, Hard Nails, to her entrance. He started talking before she could breathe a word, pausing briefly as she pulled the door shut and removed her earplugs before restarting.
“Ah, Rarity. I’ll get down to the brass tacks: the last batch of plasma injectors was rejected by Development.”
Rarity winced. That hadn’t been one of her jobs, but she knew Daisy Heart had burnt herself out over the last week working on those. She sympathized with whoever...
Oh.
Wait.
Before she could say a word, Hard Nails was already speaking again.
“You’re the best, Rarity, which is why I’m giving you this job. If anypony out there can get these things to where Development wants them, it’s you. And if you can’t, then we can tell them it can’t be done.”
As much as she felt flattered by his compliments, she was perfectly aware of why he was buttering her up. She had to admit, it was working a little. She certainly felt slightly more enthusiastic about what she was about to do than she had when she had figured out what it was. That didn’t mean she was quite to the point of being joyful about it, though.
“It is what I do,” she admitted.
Hard Nails continued, “I’ve already forwarded the files to your account.”
Rarity nodded, turned, exited his office, and briskly trotted over to the nearest 3D printer not in use. Ignoring, for the moment, the machine, she logged into the attached computer and immediately pulled up the engineering files, which as promised were already in her account. She grimaced as she carefully looked over Development’s blueprints. The specifications were almost impossible, requiring extremely tight tolerances, absurdly low weight, and impossibly high strength to meet Development’s performance requirements for Object Hammer. It was going to be a struggle to get everything just right for them. Really, the only redeeming characteristic of this job was that she would only have to do it once, whether she succeeded or failed.
She sighed and went to work.
---
Rarity stepped out of Prototyping utterly exhausted. She had nearly forgotten to take off her mane and tail nets before leaving; only the timely intervention of Sapphire Dreams had prevented her from embarrassing herself. Despite all that, though, it had been a better day than she had expected that morning. No, she hadn’t managed to pull a full set of plasma injectors out of her--well. But after looking at the plans, discussing the problem with Daisy Heart over lunch (the poor mare had been completely sympathetic), and carrying out a few experiments, she thought she could see a way forwards to Development’s specifications. Something for tomorrow, at any rate.
As usual, it was a fight to get on and then, once they reached the dormitory levels, off the transit pods. Fortunately, with a few well-placed nudges and a keen eye for gaps in the crowd, she was able to slip through easily enough and out into the dormitory levels. As she passed through the common area her room shared with five others, she noted with some relief that it was completely empty; she was tired, and wanted to have a chance to rest and rejuvenate herself before socializing or, really, doing anything. She just wanted to curl up and read a nice book, or maybe take a nap. Under the circumstances, actually, a nap sounded like a particularly exquisite sort of pleasure...
Unfortunately for her, what she saw when she finally fumbled the lock on her room’s door open and pushed inside dispelled any notion that she might be able to have a nap anytime soon. For a brief moment, she wondered if some genetic abomination had made its way out of the science labs and taken up residence in her room, filling it with a multicolored mass of hair, mane, and hooves. Then, a pink pony-shaped blob began to wriggle its way out of the mass and she realized that no, Pinkie had just convinced her other roommates to play a game of Twister. Or Surprise had. Or Pinkie and Surprise had together. She really couldn’t say which scenario was most likely.
Now Pinkie was bouncing up to her with her usual energy. Before Rarity could react, the pink pony was in front of her, staring into her eyes with undisguised glee.
“Hey Rarity! Do you want to play--” Pinkie was cut off as Rarity stuck her front hoof in her mouth. For a few moments, she continued to try to speak, but then stopped to allow Rarity to speak her piece in silence.
“Hello, Pinkie. I’m sorry, but I’m really very tired right now and would like to rest. Perhaps some other day?” Slowly, she removed her hoof from Pinkie’s mouth, shuddering slightly at the saliva glistening on it as she did so. Once her hoof was safely back on the floor, the party pony started to speak up again.
“Ah, but Rarity—“
“Very tired, Pinkie. But if it’s any consolation, I did enjoy your pastries this morning, though. Did I taste a little dash of pineapple in them, by chance? I would never have guessed that that filling would go so well with coconut, of all things...”
“Yep!” Pinkie beamed. “When I woke up this morning I was having a dream about pineapples, and I went ‘hmmm’ and when we started baking up this morning’s breakfast I went ‘ehhhh’ and I had an idea and I’m glad you liked it!” Rarity didn’t understand how Pinkie could fit a smile of that size on her face, but at least she had been distracted from the subject of sucking Rarity into her games. Behind her, Surprise and Dream Charmer had untangled themselves, apparently losing interest in Twister after Pinkie had forfeited the match to talk to Rarity.
Rarity managed a weak chuckle of her own. “Well, I’m glad I liked it too! But I really am very tired...”
“Ok, Rarity! Some other time then!” Somehow, Pinkie managed to turn completely around in place before bouncing the two or three steps to where Surprise and Dream Charmer had started chatting. Freed of any responsibilities to her roommates, Rarity quickly walked over to her bunk before Pinkie could change her mind. Before pulling open the capsule’s hatch, Rarity gently pulled her service uniform off, taking care to preserve the starching even as she pulled her phone out of one of the thing’s innumerable pockets. She floated the uniform over to their shared closet, hanging it up so that it wouldn’t wrinkle before tomorrow. That little chore taken care of, she pulled the hatch to her bunk open and slid into bed with a quiet sigh of relief, happy to be off her hooves and lying down. Briefly, she closed her eyes, enjoying the relaxation of just lying there, with no duties to perform or tasks to complete.
Brief reverie over, she opened her eyes again. With a flare of magic, she closed the capsule door and slid the privacy curtain over it, ensuring that most, though unfortunately by no means all of the sound and light from her roommates would be blocked off. That done, she scooched back, positioning herself to have a clear line of sight on the display protruding out of the top of the capsule, then pulled her pillows from the head end under her back, to support her while she watched a little bit of television. Her phone, enveloped in a baby-blue magical glow, floated its way over to the television, where it found a convenient place to dock in the display’s base. Rarity flicked through the resulting menus until she found what she was looking for. Rocket Stallions.
She would, of course, be the first to admit that it was a completely unrealistic depiction of what life in space was actually like. The improbably large number of attractive stallions and (despite the title) mares, consumed by their personal lives, and only incidentally focused on the mission, did not line up with what she had experienced aboard the Mothership. Nor did the technology match anything that actually existed, and as for the underlying missions the spaceship was supposedly carrying out, well, she doubted the Mothership would meet quite so many stunningly gorgeous aliens with a striking resemblance to ponies in makeup, perfectly positioned to inject some drama into the Relationship of the Week. Nevertheless, she enjoyed the show, for reasons beyond her rational mind. Right now, she was working through the second series, which had been aired some time ago but which she hadn’t purchased for herself until recently. Despite knowing everything that was going to happen from the original airing, she found herself quickly sucked into the drama of the show.
Several episodes later, she slowly blinked at the screen as the end credits rolled, yawning deeply as she tried to process what had just happened. “How could Shimmering Skies be planning on cheating on Rainy Days with that alien hussy?,” she muttered before coming to her senses. Reaching up to pinch herself awake, she corrected herself, “No, I’ve seen this before. He’s not, he’s aware she’s trying to seduce him and trying to get her in a compromising position to find out why. Skies/Days is probably the most stable relationship in the show! That’s it, I think”--she yawned again--”it’s time for bed.” Clicking off the display just as the next episode’s intro credits began to roll, she laid back and closed her eyes, quickly drifting off to sleep.
---
“Fighter--”
BANG BANG BANG went a nail gun in the background.
“--I SAID,” Shining Armor shouted over the din of construction, “Fighter Director, get a flight of scouts out to that asteroid cluster.”
Shining slumped back in his chair and massaged his temples, not bothering to check whether the director had actually received his orders. He was tempted to throw the construction workers littering the backup Operations Center out of the room, but the Mothership was only a month away from launch and the room was still half-complete. As it was, many of his staff had to pretend they had consoles to work at and communications channels to talk on, the titanic main display wrapping around the forward half of the room hadn’t even been installed, limiting their ability to monitor the ship’s systems, and even his own command console was only half-finished, a mere simulacrum of the final product. Only the holodisplay filling the center of the room was anywhere close to what the design said should be installed. And the primary center was even worse, with barely any hardware installed yet. Both would be done by the launch, true, but they were cutting it awfully fine.
After just a moment of thought, he sprang back to work. “Fleet Command,” he said, employing one of the few operational comm links, “what’s the status of the hyperdrive self-test?”
“Still running, Shiny,” Twilight chirped, rather too cheerfully for Shining’s liking. He suspected that over the past five months “Cadance” (as his sister insisted on calling the AI she had designed into the Direct Neural Interface System) had somehow warped his sister’s mind. It was slightly more comforting than the thought that she was taking to being hooked up to a city-sized starship the way she had to magic, once upon a time. “Drive capacitors at 19% charge, conventional drives online, all other systems fully operational.”
“Right. Let me know the results of the self-test as soon as it’s completed, Fleet Command.” He snapped to the circuit connecting him with his department chiefs before she could make her usual complaints about his formality. “Any problems to report?” he asked.
As his staff heads began reporting back, mostly to assure him that aside from the hyperdrive failure there were no issues of note, Shining leaned back and took stock. So far, Operations Team White was acquitting itself well enough, even if it was a simulation. Just like the previous simulations they had run through aboard the Scaffold, they had quickly clicked together into a smoothly functioning partnership, efficiently passing information from one to another and noting problems even without his direct intervention. Even if you could never quite tell until real problems actually cropped up, he thought he could count on them in the crunch.
But real problems were still more than a month away from happening. In the here and now, what mattered was how they were going to deal with the simulation. The difficulty was that the hyperdrive could never be fully trusted after such an error, especially since the self-checks prior to the jump had all been fine. There was no guarantee that the drive would manifest the same error twice; next time, it might underjump, leaving them hundreds of light years from Equus, or catastrophically fail midway through the hyperspace transition, leaving them permanently trapped between real and hyperspace.
And yet, and yet...building a new hyperdrive was not really an option. Production, of course, had brought it up in the initial command consultation just after they realized they were overjumping, but only as a pro forma suggestion. Everypony had known that, between the burial of the hyperdrive deep within the hull and its use of rare materials nearly unavailable in the Equus system, building a new drive was simply not practical.
The holoprojector in the center of the room merely emphasized their situation: nothing at all within half a million miles but the tiny clump of asteroids a pair of scouts were now bound to, and little enough farther away. They weren’t going to find the needed materials here, either. Well, there really was only one thing to do--
Alarms began going off all over the Operations Center. Shining grimaced. Of course there would be something else. Twilight cut into the comms loop before he could do anything.
“Picking up a hyperspace signature at short range. One-oh-seven degrees polar, two-six three azimuthal.”
Shining watched as an alien ship, much smaller than the Mothership, emerged from hyperspace less than a thousand miles away. Twilight started speaking again as it cleared the hyperspace transition.
“Hull sensors are picking up light from that ship. They may be trying to communicate, but there’s some kind of complex encoding, I can’t understand it.”
“Xenocontact,” he said.
“On it,” Derpy replied, already coordinating the delivery of the first contact package with Twilight.
“Fighter Director, launch all available fighters and form a screen. Fleet Command, recall the scouts from the asteroid field,” he added once he was satisfied the usual first contact communications were being taken care of.
“Aye aye, sir” came a chorus of voices from the link.
As the Equestrian fighters began to file out of the Mothership and assume formation between the Mothership and the alien ship, Twilight suddenly came onto the Ops Center comm link again.
“Picking up another hyperspace signature, very close to the first. There are subtle differences...”
As the newcomer emerged from hyperspace, the “subtle differences” quickly became obvious. The ship was nearly twice the size of the other, and where the first had been all smooth curves of metal, composite, and plastic, not unlike a more elegant version of the Equestrian vessels, the new vessel was a jagged mess of metallic spires and protrusions, like a spacefaring sea urchin. As the hyperspace transition closed, it immediately began maneuvering towards the other, less than a hundred miles away, which lit up its own drives in response.
“Wait...wait, I think they’re firing at each other!” Twilight excitedly added.
The holotank zoomed in on the alien ships. Besides the ships themselves, there were small objects darting between them, leaping out of the hull of each ship to zoom away towards the other. So far, none of them had hit, vanishing from the display in brief bursts of light before they could reach the other ship. Despite their seeming inability to hit each other, though, the rate of fire only increased, each side hoping to overwhelm the other’s defenses.
Twilight continued, “I’m picking up signals from the other ship, too. They seem to be using a similar encoding system, so I’m forwarding the first contact package to them. The first ship doesn’t seem to have noticed our signals, though. At least, their signals are still showing the same encoding as before.”
Shining keyed in a private voice loop. “Xenocontact, Tactical?”
The former spoke up immediately. “Given that we know nothing about either side, their capabilities, what empires are behind them, or even how to talk to them, we can’t get involved. It would be irresponsible to inadvertently ally with the losing power in a galactic war.”
Cloud Kicker didn’t spare a moment, “We may not know anything about them, but they’re fighting right in front of us. That makes us involved whether we like it or not. And how long until one of them decides we might break for the other--and decides to get in their strike first?”
Derpy shot back, “And? The fighters intercept their missiles. We attack the ones who attacked us. When they’re defeated, we talk to the other one--without making any commitments, since we were attacked first.”
As their leaders debated the correct strategy to take, the Equestrian fighters were cautiously nearing the combatants, positioning themselves to quickly intercept any missiles they might throw towards the Mothership while attempting to avoid provocations. Suddenly, the icons for several of the fighters nearest the second alien ship began blinking.
“Gold Squadron is reporting being fired on by the alien ship,” Twilight reported. “Only superficial armor damage so far.” On the holodisplay, the icon for the second alien ship changed color to red.
“All ships, attack bogey #2,” Shining ordered. “Keep away from bogey #1”.
As Fleet Command passed the word on to the fighter squadrons, they began to swarm like hungry flies around a wounded animal. The scouts, which had been closest to the enemy ship, pressed their attacks, breaking off to return to the Mothership as they were damaged. Although their pinpricks were doing little to the enemy ship, behind them the bulk of the Equestrian fighter forces were closing into firing range unmolested by the enemy’s defenses.
As they finally came into range, a wave of more than 90 missiles rippled away from the approaching fighters, screaming away from their launchers at bone-crushingly high accelerations. Using targeting data from the scouts, they homed in on the enemy ship like a hungry pack of wolves scenting injured prey. With this new threat approaching from the rear and the first ship still trying to strike from the fore, the aliens were caught in a bind; turn to expose their point defenses to the missiles, and risk being overwhelmed by their original foe, or hazard all on their limited ability to deflect the new challenger’s blows?
As they hesitated, the missiles came nearer and nearer, pressing through a hail of defensive fire. Fifty miles. Twenty. Ten. Five. A bare dozen had closed the distance...but it was enough.
As one, they burst into the brilliant radiance of nuclear fusion. On the holodisplay, ruler-straight and pencil-thin lines of nuclear fire burst out from the missiles to spear through the enemy ship in a dozen places around the stern. Pierced through and through again, the alien ship shuddered, debris flying outwards from where the blasts had lanced through antennae or outer hull plating. As its drive stuttered from the impact, another cluster of missiles from the first alien ship swooped in, detonating themselves in tight bursts against the enemy’s bow. Pummeled from both sides, the ship began to break apart, its protrusions snapping off and drifting away, and its atmosphere venting in hundreds of places. The first alien ship oriented itself to cancel its velocity relative to the Mothership--
--and the lights of the Operations Room brightened while the holodisplay faded to a blank, nearly invisible sphere hanging in midair. Shining Armor stood up and stretched while around him the rest of his team followed suit, even as the voice of the simulation supervisor came onto the intercoms. “Sorry guys, I know you were all looking forwards to the multi-hour lesson in decoding alien first contact packages.” Shining cracked a smile, while even Derpy only pouted at the news for a moment before laughing along with everypony else. “But,” the SimSup continued, “Team Red is on in fifteen. Post-sim review in the main briefing room in thirty minutes, see you all there.”
---
Pinkie’s eyes swept over her kitchen, bustling with cooks, stewards, and servers rushing to and fro, watching ovens, or mixing ingredients. As she trotted (some ponies would say skipped, but what did they know?) along the aisles, watching for anything anypony needed help with, she was disappointed that nopony did (after all, she hadn’t organized a musical number in...four, five months? Can’t let those skills get rusty)
Suddenly, she stopped. Was that...an ear flop? And a tail twitch!? She needed to--! As she was knocked to the ground by somepony from behind, her hat wobbled dangerously but stayed on her head, although at a newly jaunty angle. Before anypony could say a word, she had already popped into the air and turned completely around to directly face down her attacker.
“Sorry boss,” the dark blue pegasus apologized, fluttering his wings nervously. “Spring Roll wanted these yesterday,” he added, hefting the tubs of lotus seed paste he was hauling before darting through the crowded aisles towards the main kitchen before Pinkie could respond. She just shook her head and pushed her hat back to its proper angle.
Before she could continue her rounds, she heard a mare weakly asking “Er, Pinkie...Pinkie, you said you wanted to see this...”
Pinkie turned and gasped, so long and loud that some of the newer staff turned to see if something was wrong. Before her, on a silver platter held in the light green magic field of her cake master was a 1/21120th scale rendition of the Mothership, wobbling slightly at the edges where Sweet Tooth’s magic was patchy and weak.
“Yes, that’s it! That’s exactly it!” Pinkie exclaimed. She had had this VISION weeks ago, and to see it finally realized...!
“Oh, good,” said Sweet Tooth, her voice wobbling almost as much as her legs. “I’ll just take it to the cart, then.” As she turned to gently walk the cake over to the dessert cart, she found a pink foreleg wrapping itself around her, followed moments later by the chef herself.
“Don’t worry!” she smiled at her. “I can do it!” Before Sweet Tooth could object, Pinkie slipped both of her forehooves under the tray and, carefully balancing herself on her rear legs, began walking it over towards the dessert cart. Treating it with all the care and respect such a monumental achievement (and cake) deserved, she gently slipped the tray onto the cart, where it instantly dwarfed the other treats she had prepared for the party later. Majestically ruling over them all, it sat silently in the center of the cart.
---
“Alright, Mothership! We’re going to launch tomorrow, and are you excited or are you EXCITED!?” shouted the pink earth pony up on stage.
In response, the crowd of ponies packed into the mess hall roared. Grinning so wide her face looked as if it were about to split in two, the mare continued, “And there’s only one way to celebrate an occasion so momentous, so important: With a PARTY!”
The crowd roared again in delight. “Alright then!” she somehow grinned even wider. “Give it up for the Mothership’s very own DJ-Pon3, on the records,” a white unicorn wearing purple-pink shades seated behind a massive turntable waved, eliciting another roar of appreciation, “and remember, the drinks are FREE, tonight only! Have fun, everypony!”
A staccato electronic beat erupted from the loudspeakers as the earth pony finished her sentence. A few ponies drifted out of the crowd over to the bar, but most gathered up, quickly beginning to dance to the DJ’s music. For once, they had no responsibilities and no cares, and they intended to take full advantage of the fact.
In the midst of it all, Fluttershy cowered. Surrounded by ponies laughing, dancing, carrying on shouted conversations, bathed in loud dance music, her heart started racing, her eyes flicking over possible escape routes, her ears folding back against her skull. She just couldn’t take it, she needed to get away, to flee from it all! But she was trapped, surrounding by ponies pressing their bodies together in dance. After a moment of panic, she remembered that she was not limited to the ground and sprang into the air. Although a few pegasi were taking advantage of their flying abilities to dance in the air, most of the crowd was earth ponies and unicorns, so the skies were largely empty. Safely out of the crowd, Fluttershy turned to spot a more permanent refuge. She spotted the tables which had been pushed out of the center of the mess hall to create an impromptu dance floor, and winged her way over to them, sitting down at one in the very corner of the room. Although she couldn’t flee the noise, she was at least out of the mass of ponies, giving her enough room to calm down and steady her heart rate. After a few minutes, she noticed a familiar blonde mane weaving its way through the crowd towards her. As it emerged from the crowd, she saw that it was attached to an equally familiar orange pony, who beelined for her table as soon as she saw her.
As Applejack got close, she asked, in a relatively quiet voice, “Are y’all alright, sugarcube?”
Fluttershy shook her head. “It’s too loud, and there are too many ponies,” she confessed in a quavering voice, barely audible over the noise of the crowd and the music.
Applejack looked pained at the fact. “Ah shouldn’t have been so hard on you to come, sugarcube. Ah’m sorry. If you want to, we could leave, do something somewhere quieter.”
Fluttershy shook her head, pink mane whipping across her face. “No, no that’s all right. I’m sorry. You should go have fun.”
“Nah, nah, if you’re not having fun ah’m not having fun neither,” the engineer said. “Even if you don’t feel up to dancing, we could still talk. How does that sound?”
“…Nice. It sounds…nice.”
“Well, ah guess ah’ll start us off. So, th’ other day…”
Fluttershy let her attention drift as Applejack began to tell an anecdote about something that had happened in the life support department recently. She made sure to pay enough attention to nod when the narrative demanded nodding, and shake her head when it demanded shaking, and gasp when it demanded gasping, but other than that she focused on the ponies in the room. A few had drifted over to the bar, and a few others to the tables like Applejack and herself, but most of the partiers were still dancing, showing no signs of slowing down despite a few songs having been run through since the party had started. She wondered what they were like inside. All of them were stronger and better than she was, she thought. They wouldn’t panic at being on a dance floor. They probably had lots of friends, marefriends and coltfriends, even. They--
“Hey, sugarcube.”
Fluttershy immediately refocused her attention on Applejack. “Did I drift off? I’m sorry.” she apologized while blushing from embarrassment.
“Well, yeah, you sort of spaced out on me there, but ah don’t mind. What’s on your mind?” Applejack smiled at her.
Fluttershy didn’t think before blurting out the first thing that came to mind—something that had been bothering her since the party had started. “Why do we have a DJ on board? I mean, it seems kind of…”
“Who, Vinyl? Oh, she’s an engineer from the drives section. DJing is just her hobby. You know how it is, you gotta have one or you’re gonna go mad.”
“I suppose,” Fluttershy uncertainly replied. Before she could say anything else, one of the pegasi hovering above the dance floor darted over towards them, leaving a rainbow trail in her wake. Applejack groaned a little at the sight. “Sorry for what’s about to happen, sugarcube,” she apologized to Fluttershy.
“Why? What’s—“ but Fluttershy never got to finish her sentence, as the sky-blue intruder with the rainbow mane started talking as soon as she put hoof to floor.
“Hey, Applejack! I see you’ve been picking up the hot mares, leave some for the rest of us why don’t you?”
Applejack’s face lit up redder than a Red Delicious as she tried to form a response, any response to the totally unexpected accusation, while Fluttershy tried to hide behind her mane and the table. The mare ignored both of them, forging onwards too quickly for the beleaguered mares to respond.
“Great party, isn’t it? But all of Pinkie’s parties are great…” she trailed off for a moment before popping back up. “Well, it’s been nice seeing you, Applejack, and whoever your date is! That stallion over by the bar’s been giving me hot looks all night, I think I know what I’m doing tonight!” With that, the mare dashed away, leaving Applejack and Fluttershy in her wake. Fluttershy was the first to speak up after she left.
“You…know her?” she asked Applejack.
“Well…” the mare reached up to scratch at her head, “Yeah, ah suppose ah do. She’s family, technically speaking. Something like my fourth cousin three times removed by adoption. Ah guess ah’ve met her a few times at family receptions. Ya know how it is. ‘Behind every great farmer there’s a great pegasus’ Well, the Apples, we’re all farmers. But ah can’t say ah really know her, ya know?” Applejack descended into a stage-whisper, “She’s an arrogant boastful show-off who loves tweaking every pony around her and who’s latched onto me since she met me because ‘we’re both Apples’. But don’t tell her ah said that, alright?”
“Okay,” Fluttershy nodded. “I won’t.” Fluttershy paused. “Who is she?”
Applejack laughed. “Ah suppose she talked so fast we never got around to introductions. She goes by ‘Rainbow Dash’. She’s a pilot in the scout wing.”
“Oh, okay,” Fluttershy responded. “Um, what were we doing?”
“You were asking why we had a DJ, best as ah can recall,” Applejack answered. Neither of them quite knew what to follow that up with. Applejack turned towards the dance floor, eyes following a few particularly attractive stallions as they cavorted with the other ponies present. Fluttershy just stared at the table, looking at the patterns in its plastic surface, occasionally looking up to follow Applejack’s gaze. After a few minutes of silence, she finally spoke up.
“I’m sorry, Applejack. You should be dancing out there. All I’m doing is keeping you from having fun. I’ll just go now.” The yellow pegasus made to get up and leave the mess, but her journey was abruptly stopped as Applejack grabbed her tail. Once Fluttershy turned about to face her, she spat the tail out and began speaking her own piece.
“No, sugarcube, ah should be apologizing to you. Ah knew from what you had told me that you don’t like this sort of thing, and yet ah dragged you along anyhow. What kind of a friend am ah, that ah would do that? Not a very good one, ah would say. Ah won’t keep you here, but ah’ll make it up to you sometime, ah promise.”
“Oh…okay,” Fluttershy agreed. She felt like she ought to say something more, but nothing came to mind. After a few seconds of struggling to come up with something, she gave up and left the party. Behind her, Applejack was already gravitating towards the dance floor.
--
As Vinyl’s music cranked up, Pinkie had to suppress the urge to jump off the stage and join the mass of ponies who were already starting to dance. It wasn’t that she thought it wouldn’t be fun (it would be!) or that she couldn’t for some reason (she could!), it was just that she needed to make sure everypony else was having a good time first. After all, what was the point of a party if the partiers weren’t having fun?
A brief scan of the crowd reassured her that everypony seemed to be fine. (There was that one yellow pegasus in a corner, but maybe she just liked corners? Pinkie made a note to check up on her later) More importantly, there were the ponies already clustering around the bar. In Pinkie’s long experience, the barflies usually needed more cheering up than anypony else, and she fully intended to make sure the last night before launch was memorable and fun for everypony.
That decided, Pinkie leaped off of the stage and into the crowd, landing in a hole briefly opened by the mass of dancers. She wove her way through, seeing gaps almost before they opened, moving her body in time with the beat, as if she were some kind of manifestation of the party itself. As she moved through the dance floor, she caught a glimpse of white coat and purple mane. Rarity! It wouldn’t hurt to go see her, would it? (No, it wouldn’t, she assured herself). Slipping through the crowd, she popped up practically next to her.
“Hi, Rarity!”
“Hello, Pinkie!” Rarity replied, raising her voice against the music and in surprise at her roommate’s sudden appearance. Pinkie spun into her dance as if the whole thing was part of some giant clockwork mechanism, displacing Rarity’s previous partner, who found himself suddenly paired with an entirely different mare.
“Are you having fun?” Pinkie asked as she swayed along with the nonplussed unicorn.
“I--yes, I am, but--”
--but Pinkie had slipped away into a narrow gap next to Rarity, still seeking the edge.
By the time she reached it, her mane was extra-poofy, which had always been a good sign. A sign of what, exactly, seemed to vary, but it was always good. She looked over at the corner where that pegasus had been earlier, but it was empty. (Oh well) Turning back towards the bar, she noted a particularly dejected-looking pegasus mare nursing a glass of something (she couldn’t see what, whoever she was was practically hiding it from the outside world)at one end. Pinkie made a beeline for her and plopped on to the next barstool. Turning towards her new neighbor, she grinned almost as widely as she could and said,
“Hi, I’m Pinkie!”
“Oh, hi Pinkie,” the mare mumbled into her glass. “Great party.”
“Thanks! I try!” she bubbled in response. Suddenly growing serious (well, as serious as she could muster), she continued, “And what’s got your smile upside-down?”
Even as she asked, something about the mare’s chromatic mane and tail was tingling at the edge of her memory. She couldn’t quite pin it down...(Had she seen her before?) Suddenly, it clicked. Before she could quite stop herself, and long before the mare could have answered, Pinkie blurted out, “Hey, I know you! You’re the one who did the sonic rainboom!...Rainbow Dash!”
Instantly, the mare shifted from being dejected and listless to being visibly self-confident and assured as she leaned towards Pinkie. “Yeah, I get that sometimes,” she said, tone confiding and confident. “But only because it’s true! The one and only.”
“That was really neat!” Pinkie said over the party’s background. Waving her hoof at the three multicolored balloons on her flank, she added, “And I think it got me these!”
“Really?” Rainbow asked, curiosity tingeing her voice.
“Really!” Pinkie responded. “See,a long, long time ago, I lived on a rock farm with my mom and dad. And we--my sisters and my mom and my dad and me--we just worked all day long, every day. We did our duty. But that didn’t leave any time for anything else. And...and I love my family, I love my parents and my sisters, but...” she paused before continuing onwards.
“But one day, I saw a rainbow filling the sky and blowing away the clouds that were always there. And it...it just...it filled me up with warmth and happiness and...and I knew, I just knew that that needed to be shared...not just with everypony, but everything everywhere...” She shook her head and continued, “So I threw my parents and my sisters a party the next day, and then I got my cutie mark! But...the rock farm was pretty close to where you did the rainboom. And it was the same day that you did it...”
“Oh,” Rainbow said. “Ummmm...” she added after a moment’s pause, one forehoof reaching around to paw at the back of her neck, her face hovering between self-congratulations and a desperate desire to leave the conversation. After a long hesitation, she finally finally decided on self-congratulations, saying “That’s...great! Yeah, awesome,” although with strangely little conviction.
Pinkie chose to overlook that, cheerily responding “Yep!” After another moment of silence, punctuated by Vinyl Scratch’s music and the sound of hundreds of ponies dancing and partying in the background, she pushed again. “So, Rainbow Dash, what do yooou do here?”
“Oh, me?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard. Pinkie nodded. “Oh, I’m a scout pilot.”
“What’s that like?” Pinkie asked.
“Well...”
---
This is Fleet Command. Reporting Mothership pre-launch status:
Fleet Command...online.
Life support...online.
Main reactors...online.
Primary drives...online.
Hyperdrive...online.
Sensors...online.
Navigation...online.
Mining...online.
Production...online.
Cryogenic bays, sections A-J...online.
Sections K-T...online.
Scaffold Control, Mothership pre-launch checklist complete. Requesting permission for launch.
Roger, Scaffold Control. Release Control, release on my mark...mark.
Release confirmed. Thrust at 1%...5%...10%. Holding. The Mothership has cleared the Scaffold. We are away.
Hyperdrive is powered up and ready to initiate. Scaffold Control, Fleet Command requests permission to begin hyperdrive test.
Roger, Scaffold Control. Good luck, everypony. Beginning hyperspace transition on my mark...mark.