//------------------------------// // Ch 3.18 Day Trip Into Orbit // Story: Our Girl Scootaloo 3 of 3 // by Cozy Mark IV //------------------------------// Our Girl Scootaloo Part 3 of 3 by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release Chapter Three point Eighteen: Day Trip into Orbit Since their arrival they had all heard about how Scootaloo's research participation had turned the world of medicine upside-down, and with Celestia's DNA sequences and the translation of the 'language of magic' now in hand a new revolution was brewing behind laboratory doors around the world. After the work Rainbow had put in for NASA, a number of important people made some calls, and one of the commercial companies that was now in the Low Earth Orbit tourism business soon made them an offer that was too good to pass up. Scootaloo, her family, Agent Tyler, Agent Glover, and Twilight knew what to expect, but out of a sense of shared mischief, they had intentionally been light on the details they provided to the others who only knew they were trying out a new method of travel to distant lands. The flight to the spaceport was straightforward enough but for the fidgeting of the Pegasi who felt the slightest of tingles in their wings. Under normal conditions, the EMFR drive spread out over such a large area that the local effect was only enough to scramble compass needles, but the effect could be perceived by another, similar drive. In Equestria, a tingling in the wings usually meant you were in Cloudsdale, surrounded by the familiar feeling of hundreds of other Pegasi, but now as they approached the spaceport, Rainbow was surprised to felt the familiar tingle. “Where did you say we were going again?” Scootaloo grinned. “We're going sightseeing in a new flying machine; see, look out the window.” As their plane came in for landing they all looked out at the strange sight before them. Instead of a rocket launch pad or a runway there were several towers, all of them nearly fifty stories tall and constructed of a visible steel framework. The walls, or perhaps 'baffling' would be a more accurate term, were at best a crude windguard, but the important part seemed to be on top. The tops of the towers looked like a boat dock, and while some were empty, several were swarming with activity as crews loaded cargo and performed maintenance on the... well, they were strangely squidlike, but seemed like ships, these things that occupied the docks. While the tops of the crafts varied considerably in design and shape, all of them trailed long black metallic tendrils behind and beneath them, stretching nearly all the way to the ground like some enormous mechanical jellyfish. “What in Equestria are those things?” Rainbow asked as the plane sunk lower and the tops of the towers were lost from sight above them. Twilight deadpanned “You didn't look up that video I told you to did you? You know, 'All Alone in the Night - Time-lapse footage of the Earth'?” Rainbow shook her head sheepishly and Twilight sighed. “Those are what we'll be riding on. They fly the same way we do, but they're built for heavy lifting, and they can go really, really high. Those long things trailing out underneath are the way they dump heat from the power plant – see? If you look carefully you can see the heat ripples coming off them from the hot air.” “Looks like somepony has been studying hard these past few days.” Scootaloo complemented. “I knew you were a quick learner, but we only glanced over this stuff. You went back and learned all about these on your own?” “Of course!” Twilight laughed as she began to chatter away, lecturing on the subject at hand. “We don't have anything like this back home, well, I mean we fly the same way, but we never knew it was anything special! You humans actually figured out how it works, though even after reading the explanation for the physics of it, I still don't really understand it myself.” She frowned, irritable at a subject so difficult she couldn't wrap her head around it. “Anyway, they figured it out somehow, and then it was just a matter of coming up with a power source. Humans have access to nuclear power, so that solved that problem. Each one of those ships has an on board fission reactor that splits uranium to make heat to boil water to spin a turbine and generate the power needed to run the EMFR drive. Of course all that steam has to be cooled back down, and run back through, so they need a cooling system that works in a vacuum, and that was no easy task. That's what the long cooling fins are for. They're hanging down right now, but after we take off and get higher, and the air thins out they'll curl up and out like a huge bush, and by the time we get halfway up they'll be glowing almost red hot as they dump all the waste heat.” Even Celestia looked a bit mystified but before they could get into too many questions they arrived at the unloading terminal and were all herded out of the plane and down the corridor. After a few more twists and turns they came upon an elevator leading up the tower to a private birth on the orbital ship. It took several loads to get everyone on board, but as Celestia and Twilight stepped out of the elevator they both paused to take it all in. Spread out before them was an enormous bubble dome of clear plastic big enough to fit an entire four story building. Most of the floor was covered in soft Velcro and there were patches of the white material dotting the insides of the dome in several places. Through the dome wall they could see several even larger domes spread out over the surface of the enormous ship, and many were crowded with people in brightly colored shirts sporting cameras and sunglasses. The inside of the room was occupied by a modest snack bar, a very large room clearly marked as the bathroom, several racks of sporting equipment and a pool under some kind of pipe/ball sculpture in which Pinkie was already amusing herself, playing with Sophie Belle and Chaya. A chime sounded twice.“Attention passengers: Departure in two minutes. Our climb today will take approximately three hours.” As the ship vibrated slightly and pulled out of the dock, the dome darkened and the ponies and humans amused themselves with the kick balls, the food and the pool. “All right everyone, just kick back and relax, this is going to take a while.” … Applejack noticed it first. She had been sitting and talking at the snack bar about gardening with Kevin and the prospects of getting Zap Apples to grow on earth when she tossed an apple in the air, reached out to catch it and missed. She held her hoof out for a moment gripping empty air, then looked up just in time to be hit in the muzzle as the apple fell leisurely back to the ground. She picked the apple back up, looked at it suspiciously and tossed it back into the air, watching it carefully this time. The apple flew almost twice as high as she expected, and fell much more slowly, finally arriving back in her hoof three seconds later. She looked across at Kevin in confusion and got a knowing smile in return. “Okay, I’ll bite.” She responded slowly. “What did you do to the apple?” Scootaloo flew over and landed beside them, a look of poorly feigned innocence on her face. “Is something wrong?” Applejack just stared at her with a flat look and Scootaloo’s expression of ‘who me?’ gradually cracked as she smiled, then broke down in laughter. The others turned to look at them with expressions ranging between confusion and smug grins, and Scootaloo was grinning too as she called out to Pinkie and the kids who were still splashing in the pool. “Sophie Belle? Chaya? You can fly now.” There was yell of glee as the two foals burst from the pool, wings buzzing frantically as they took to the air in a shower of water. That got Celestia’s attention. “What is happening? How can they fly now when before..?” Scootaloo and her family all gathered around as she smiled warmly at them all. “Despite everything that has gone wrong, we all are very grateful that you came came looking for me. This is one of the ways we have of saying thank you. You are about to see something no pony has seen in a very long time.” The interior lighting dimmed out and the dome which had been dark across its entire circumference slowly lightened to transparency. There were a few gasps, but aside from that, the only sound in the entire room came from the buzzing of wings and yells of joy as the foals looped and played overhead. The ship had already cleared the atmosphere, and was accelerating just enough to tilt a few degrees forward allowing a view of the world below. The sky was lit by bright stars beyond count and below them the darkened earth was illuminated in patches of light where cities straddled the sea and made the coastlines visible. They all stared as the world rotated slowly below them. Finally David broke the silence. “What you are seeing, the very fact that we are here at all, is all thanks to Scootaloo's arrival in our world. The colonies on Mars and the outer planets, the orbital cities, all of this is only possible because of her. In a few more years, once we have pored over all the data you have given us we can expect even more wonders like this, and that is above and beyond all the lives she has already saved through advances in medical technology.” “I know you have heard a lot of this before, but we wanted to take you up here today and show you first hand what your participation has done. Your help has mattered, probably more than you know. “My goodness!” Rarity gasped in awe. “Whoa...” Rainbow mumbled, actually falling silent for the first time in hours. “I can see your house from up here!” Pinkie grinned. Kevin put a hand on the moist fur of her withers and smiled. “Um, actually, that's the wrong part of the globe. See, there is the horn of Africa, Egypt, and up there you can make out the outline of Italy. All of this is many thousands of miles from our house.” Rainbow's silence hadn't lasted long. “The view up here is incredible, but why can't I fly this high? I can't even get as high as that jet from a few days ago.” Twilight put on her best lecturing voice and began answering with all the pent up speeches she had been saving. “Well, we made it out of the breathable atmosphere in just a few minutes, so with nothing to breathe, you couldn't keep flying no matter how hard you tried. See that blue/green haze out on the horizon? That's the atmosphere way down there below us.” “But... If there is no air outside...” Fluttershy was beginning to look very nervous. “We brought our own air.” Twilight answered. “This is a spaceship, one built for tourists like us, that's why they put in this dome; so we could all enjoy the view. There hasn't been any air outside the dome for hours now.” “So... What would happen if I tried to fly out there right now?” “You'd die stupid.” “What?! Why?” “What normally happens if you put your head underwater for a long time genius?” “Oh... But there isn't any water out there!” Dashie face hoofed with an audible 'clunk' of hoof on head. “Ow! What did you do that for?” Twilight jumped back in. “That question gets asked often enough they actually do have a way to show you if you want to try it. There's a special airlock out there that will let you go outside for about sixty seconds if you really want to, but it's not a fun experience for most ponies. If you have a cold, or other ear blockage it can be like going into a long dive where your ears will pop painfully, only in this case you can blow out your eardrum altogether. They can fix it with minor surgery, but until then you'd be deaf, and it would be very painful.” “That sounds dangerous.” Celestia interjected. “Why is such a thing allowed?” Twilight's smile grew even larger as she turned to teach her mentor. “Well, we are high above the upper boundaries of earth nations, so we technically fall under the laws and regulations of the orbital cities. They take the view that you can do just about whatever you want, provided it doesn't harm others, so if you want to do something dangerous to yourself, that's your affair, but it also means you can't come crying to them if something bad happens.” “Yeah, it's still kind of the Wild West up here.” Scootaloo added. “Well I want to try it. I've never had problems with my ears popping, and I bet I can breathe just fine out there.” “Oh good lord.” “What? You don't have the guts?” Rainbows head turned to look at Twilight with that mixed expression she got when the two disagreed. “Aside from the ears, this is safe, right?” Twilight looked a bit concerned. “Well... There have been a few accidents. Some humans have died, but it's usually those who are overweight or in poor physical condition.” “Well I'm in great shape. Lets do this!” “Fine. But you're taking over for this, cloud herder.” Rainbows cross-eyed look vanished and she straitened up visibly. Agent Tyler was smiling mischievously as she pressed a button on the wall to call one of the attendants. “Okay, let’s go with that. Just remember not to look at the sun. Out here you can blind yourself in seconds.” Two tour guides brought out the harness and after some fiddling, managed to make it more or less fit her as a third guide presented her a waiver to sign. With the formalities out of the way, they led her to the airlock on the side of the room and went over the check list one more time. “Okay, Ms. Rainbow, why don't you repeat back to me what you need to do.” Rainbow replied in a bored voice. “When the light goes red the air is going to rush out the door. I have to keep my mouth open and let the air escape my lungs, and when the doors open I will get to fly to the end of this rope and look around for a few seconds before you pull me back in.” “Okay, just step in here, and when you are ready, press the big red button.” The others looked on with some concern as Rainbow stepped into the airlock, and the guides secured her tether to the winch in the wall. They stepped out, closed the hatch, and everyone watched through the video monitor and through the dome as Rainbow pressed the button. There was a loud rushing of air for a few short seconds, and a cloud of white smoke seemed to blast from the outer door just below the edge of the dome. Rainbow took it like a trooper and when the doors opened a moment later she galloped out on her own and reached the end of the tether in seconds as she looked around the outside of the ship. The feeling was very strange; she couldn't feel anything touching her, yet her right flank in the sun was already getting very hot, while the rest of her felt... well, muffled. The view was spectacular, clearer then the clearest spring mountain day, and she could easily pick out tiny details on the ship hundreds of feet away, but the really odd thing though was the silence. It wasn't just quiet, it was as though sound had broken, and as she looked around and listened, she could actually hear the beating of her own heart. She was already starting to feel faint, and she tried to breathe, but the guides had been quite specific on that subject, and try as she might, she couldn't catch her breath. She tried to walk the short distance back to the airlock, but she was already swaying badly, and she blacked out and collapsed a few feet shy of the door. There were gasps of shock from the other ponies, but the tour guides didn't even blink, they just hit the button to drag her in by the winch attached to her harness, closed the outer door and filled the airlock. “Don't worry, most of them pass out before they can get back.” One of them consoled the group. “We can't actually tell how much oxygen is in our blood; all the systems that tell us when we need to breathe are tied to our levels of CO2, or what we breathe out. In the vacuum you can breathe out CO2 just fine, so you don't feel the need to breathe. Most of our tough guy astronauts don't even get as much warning as she did before they black out.” The inner door opened and the guides swarmed in, performed a quick check of her vitals as best they could on a pony, and gave her a lungful of an oxygen/CO2 mix that made her body gasp for breath as her internal CO2 levels rapidly rose and forced her to start breathing again. Her eyes fluttered open to see her friends gathered around her. “I'm... I'm okay... Really...” She gasped as she continued to breathe deeply. “Yeah, cloud herder here will be fine, just give her a minute to recover.” There were a few chuckles at this and a lot of relieved looks, but Applejack still wore a frown. “Scoot, I get that we're flying really high, but you never did explain what you did to this here apple.” One of the guides looked at Scootaloo in consternation. “You didn't tell them we were going into orbit?” “Oh, some of us knew.” Twilight replied. “How long is it until we arrive?” “Well, this is the last half hour of the trip, most of our output is going into horizontal speed instead of vertical climb, so the gravity will start to drop away quickly now.” “You done broke the gravity?!” Applejack asked in alarm. Kevin spoke up. “Not exactly. Haven't you noticed that you feel a bit lighter on your feet? And that Sophie Belle and Chaya can fly now?” Most of the ponies looked like they were trying to figure out if they should be worried or not. “It's not just the apple. The ship is picking up speed, and in a few minutes we'll enter low earth orbit. Orbit means that when you turn off all the power sources you just fall endlessly towards the earth, but you never get there.” “Ahem.” Rarity cleared her throat. “It may have been a while since my school years,” She paused and quickly added “Well, not that long of course, but I still don't see how something could fall and not hit the ground.” “That's a very good question Rarity!” Twilight answered with what Scootaloo had come to think of as her 'teacher smile'. “You see, when you drop something, gravity pulls it straight down, and it hits the ground in moments. But what if you throw something? It still drops, but it also travels horizontally as it falls.” “So what? No matter how hard you throw something, it always falls down again. Ow!” Rainbow added as one of her own hooves smacked her on the nose. “Well yes, but that's only because we can't throw very hard. You all know the world is round; what would happen if you threw something so hard that for every foot if fell down, it traveled so far horizontally that the ground underneath it dropped away a foot?” Pinkie answered from the back. “The thing you threw would fall, but never hit the ground! That is so neat!” She paused in mid bounce. “But, if that's true, then who threw the moon?” If possible, Twilight's grin grew larger. “See me after class and I'll explain. But at any rate, we have been going higher and faster for almost three hours now, and we are about to reach orbit too!” “You mean... we are going to be trapped up here forever like the moon?!” Fluttershy half squeaked. Twilight laughed and hugged Fluttershy. “No silly, we have engines, we can come down whenever we like, but we do get to fall for a few hours.” And with that she jumped as high as she could, which turned out to be almost six feet. “Whoo-hoo! Come on girls, last one in the pool is a rotten egg!” As the ship eased into orbit over the next ten minutes, the force of gravity became weaker and weaker until everyone else joined Sophie Belle and Chaya flying around the dome. The foals may have gotten a head start, but the others turned out to enjoy the weightlessness just as much, and Pinkie Pie soon invented a game she called 'pony pinball' and had foals, humans and even the princess bouncing around the dome and laughing. Best of all, only a few of them needed paper bags before they adjusted, and soon even Fluttershy lost her green look and joined the rest of them. The pool had lifted out of its bed, and the strange spherical pipe sculpture turned out to be an elaborate air blower system that held the water more or less in place in one enormous droplet twenty feet across. As they frolicked in the three dimensional pool, Pinkie dug out some special scoops and sent them flying for others to grab. “Hey Twilight, what are these fo-” Rainbows question was cut off as a ball of water caught her full in the face leaving her sputtering as a nebula of tiny droplets exploded from her head. “Waterball fight!” Pinkie yelled. Those nearby paused to look at her and she shrugged. “Snowball, waterball, what’s the difference?” Before letting fly again, this time catching Rarity in the flank. “Oh!” She squealed as the water exploded around her, some of it clinging to her coat like a sponge. She turned and fixed Pinkie with a playfully evil grin as her horn glowed. “It. Is. On!” “Ha! You don’t have a water ball thrower! You ca-” Pinky was interrupted as a magically lobbed water ball the size of a beach ball hit her from above, fully submerging her for a moment before she emerged sputtering, and with a shake of her head began throwing pieces the ball at Rarity and anyone else who got within range. Inside of ten minutes everypony was soaked to the skin, feathers, or coat as the case might be, and as the bizarre three dimensional war waged on to the sound of laughing voices, Scootaloo and Twilight retired behind the snack bar and pulled down the screen to keep out errant shots. It was in the middle of all this that Twilight shook her head, and as her bangs floated around her head, Scootaloo saw it; The telltale shaved spot with a half dollar sized bandage on her temple. “Hey Twilight, I'm glad to see you decided to join the rest of us cyborgs.” Scootaloo smiled. “Oh! Uh, yeah...” Twilight rubbed the back of her head selfconsciously. “The more I used your internet, the more uses I had for it, and eventually, the appeal of the chip won out.” She looked sheepish as she asked. “You won't tell the others yet will you?” She grinned. “I won't, but I think they'll figure it out in time. Is it up and running yet?” “Not yet. They said it may take a few days to get the first signals, and then it should slowly come online over a couple weeks.” Twilight actually pranced in place with excitement, slowly drifting away from the floor as she sang; “I'm going to have a library in my head!” Scootaloo just shook her head and smiled. 'Some ponies.'