Part 3: Flashing Your Moon
“According to our readings, you still haven't fully repaired the station, repair squads. Is there a problem?” NASA 2 inquired. “We're also reading that the reactor cooling units took some additional damage from a recent surface impact shortly after your landing. Any idea what have caused the damage?”
Higgins face-palmed from the orbiting star ship's cockpit. Yeah, he knew, alright.
“Affirmative, HQ. Team three had some...technical difficulties with their flight controls and crashed and burned instead of landing.” He sent the reply and waited impatiently for their transmission to arrive and for HQ to send them a new message. It arrived two minutes later.
“Are you on the transport ship, Higgins?”
“Yes, ma'm.”
“Why have you returned to the ship?” Robert sighed. They'll never believe this.
“We encountered something we did not expect and the majority of our teams panicked. Rather than have the non-pilots try flying the Landers back themselves and maroon us here we pilots felt it prudent to do the flying ourselves.”
“A problem? What kind of problem?” Here it goes...
Before he could tell them what they'd all seen in scientific detail, a green-striped robot clanked in and stole the headset from him.
“It was an ale-ee-n! There wuz an ale-ee-n horse on da moon!”
“...” Higgins glared daggers the robot.
“Give that back, you moron!” Robert Higgins yelled at the robot. “And put that thing away! The robots are for vacuum-assignments only!”
“You can make like a vacuum and suck me!” the Green shot back. “I will take credit for finding the ale-ee-n, since my team found it first!
“You're also the dumshits that crashed your Lander and got your equipment stranded on the moon when we scattered! Give me the headset back!”
At the Green's continual refusal, Robert tried another tactic and pressed the send button instead. Two minutes of him smirking and the Green asking why he was smilING later, Greeny was told he was fired for destruction and misplacement of company equipment from neglect, and if he wanted his job back he'd have to pay for the equipment first as was company policy. Green crushed the headset in a fist and glared at Robert, who pressed a manual deactivation button for all nearby robots (nearby being within the confines of the ship).
Searching about for a second headset, Robert took one from the co-pilots seat and plugged it into the pilot's headset outlet.
“Sorry about that, but he's been dealt with. In all honesty, though, we did indeed find an alien that resembled a black horse.” He sent the message and waited.
“Do you have proof of this?” HQ sounded skeptical, not that he held it against them. If he hadn't seen it he'd not have believed it either.
“It's in our robot's visual records. Give me a few minutes, and I'll send it to you.”
After sending the visual data from several of the robots Higgins settled in his seat to wait while HQ viewed it. An hour later he was contacted again by a rather excited man.
“Was it friendly?”
“That would depend on your definition of 'friendly.' At the very least it understood us and communicated with us.”
“Did it want anything?”
“It wanted us to take it to the nearby planet.”
“Did it say why?”
“It claimed it was a 'queen of the night'. Maybe she's the head of some magical religious sect or something and a ritual went wrong; who knows? The point is, she knows we have a way to get to the planet and she wants us to take her there.”
“But you don't have any Planet Landers. How would you get to the planet?”
“Escape pods.”
“Hmm, that could work as long as you landed in the ocean or some place with soft dirt...”
The next time someone spoke on the other end, it was the woman again. She said that speculation on aliens that could survive in vacuum could wait.
“If you don't fix that cooling unit before the next sunrise on the continent below you the reactor is going to have a meltdown, which could make the facility explode and level a good portion of the moon's surface! Alien or no alien, you've got to fix it before then!”
“When is the next sunrise?”
“Less than an hour!”
Though the teams were not very happy about it, there was little else they could do, and quickly returned to the control cubicles with no complaining from team 4, and loads of complaining from teams 1 and 3. In the end, though, the Lunar Landers were on their way back to the moon's surface, and the three abandoned robots already on the surface were up and moving again.
With the fourth and second site already repaired to full capacity, the teams made their way to the remaining sites of one and three. Part of site one had been repaired due to the efforts of the white-striped member of team one, but the majority of it was still in a state of disrepair, with the cooling unit not even having been touched as well as the solar panels, which powered everything in the area of the facility below them.
Once again, the two Landers touched down, and once again, White one was stuck with the stooges, minus Green, who'd been fired and whose robot was still with the other two members from the crashed lander that had survived. White had gone with another lander team and had escaped with them on his own. Red and Yellow, after 'logging in' made their way back to their site on foot. Even on foot they arrived back on site faster than the Lander did.
“So if duh base explodes does that mean we've made a Death Star?” asked Blue.
“No, it means we're all fired and the people in the base are dead!” White replied, angry over still being stuck with a bunch of chuckle-heads.
“Why don't we just evacuate them instead?” Yellow asked while carrying a tool box to a solar panel relay to repair the panel.
“Because even though they'd live we'd still get fired. It might not be as big a deal to you gaming-neanderthals, but I rather like having a steady source of income!”
“I am not ape-man I am a row-bot!”
“Know what?” White threw down his screwdriver, which made a small cloud of moon dust rise from the surface. “Screw you people, I'm going to help site three!”
The remainder of team one watched him go, and then looked at one another, and then at the lunar vehicles.
“Drag race?”
– – – – –
Nightmare Moon had eventually given up on trying to get them to open the doors, and instead sat down to wait. They could not communicate with their people to request help, and they could not take off safely as long as she could hop right back onto it, which meant they were stuck unless they agreed to do as she commanded, and unlike them, she could wait forever for them to open the door. Not that she wanted to, but until she'd worked away enough at Celestia's barrier she could not force it open, and she had no idea how to make the craft function besides.
Eventually though, she grew impatient and decided to cease interfering with their communications and again waited. Chances were, if they found that they could communicate with their people again without her telling them, they would think that she had forgotten that they could or that it had simply been a problem with their form of magic. If this became the case, she could eavesdrop on them and perhaps find another way. Sure enough, several minutes after she removed her interference, they sent a message to the others of their kind asking if 'they could hear them'.
“O M G are you all alright? We thought you had died!”
“We are fine, but the ale ee n horse-thing is keeping us from leavING! When we tried to take off it somehow latched onto the Lander and we became too heavy to lift off again. Did you all make it out okay?”
“Affirmative, but I have some very bad news. AccordING to HQ, the base on the moon is goING to go into meltdown in less than one hour unless we can fix the coolING unit that the one id-ee-it team crashed into as well as the rest of the equipment to get it the energy it needs to run better. Will the space horse let you out?”
“Probably, but whether it will let us in again is another story.”
“Right now we just need to get this base fixed. It can have the Lander if it wants; if we don't fix this, it won't matter very much. HQ warned that if the base goes, it could deface a good part of this moon. If that happens, we're all goING to the planet, and not in a good way.”
“Understood. MovING out.”
Nightmare Moon did not know what a 'meltdown' was, but did not much care either. Once she was inside the Lander they could not make her leave, and if they failed to stop the meltdown, she'd be going to the planet anyway (though she suspected from the 'not in a good way' part that it would be about as pleasant a trip back to the planet as it had been being launched from the planet in the Moon Cannon Celestia had built for just such an occasion as exile to the moon. Why would she have something like that, anyway? No matter. When I return, I shall use it to fire her to the sun! She made a crazy-person face and cackled manically. Or she would have if there had been any oxygen or perhaps helium on the moon, but if there had been helium she would have sounded hilarious rather than creepy. As it was, she just looked silly, and upon realizing this, ceased trying to laugh in vacuum.
A metal wheel on the outside of the ship spun around twice and then a round door on the lander opened and several robots came out of it. Nightmare Moon watched them exit, doing nothing, and the robots looked at her.
“Nice space horse...nice....niii-ice....” A yellow one said, holding up its hands in a placating gesture. Nightmare Moon rolled her eyes. What am I, an animal?
“Dude, either she'll attack us or she won't. CallING her nice won't change anythING, Stop wastING time.” The one that had willed her to be a 'nice space horse' grumbled, but did as it was told and took the tool box offered to it by the last robot to disembark from the Lander. As one group they made their way off into the lunar wastes toward what Nightmare Moon presumed to be the still-damaged equipment. Drawn by curiosity, she felt compelled to follow them, and reasoned that now that she new where this lander was, she could return to it at any time and arrive before the others when they were finished.
– – – – –
“Alright this area is done. On to the next!” Team four's team leader declared, and they began packing up their things onto the lunar vehicles and boarded them. Unfortunately there was only 'seating' for two on each vehicle, and they had six members, so the two pilots of the Landers elected to stay behind and keep the Lunar Landers ready for when they got back, be it for emergency escape or for simple mission completion.
The trip was relatively uneventful except when they allowed for a temporary lack of discipline to use a lunar hill as a ramp. The low gravity gave them more 'air time' than they'd expected, and due to a lack of thinking before they acted one of the vehicles crashed into the other and the one that 'flew' tipped over in midair and fell over.
The driver and passenger, feeling like idiots, got off their vehicle and tried to right it, and the second vehicle stopped as well to help. Fortunately being robots and not flesh-and-blood astronauts they were plenty-strong enough together to right the vehicle, and after a brief repremanding they continued on to the next site. By the time they'd arrived however that site was finished being repaired as well and their numbers swelled to eight as they once more headed out. Team Four had to stop briefly to recharge their batteries, but Team Three elected to go on ahead without them.
“We will see U there.”
Robert nodded in approval. Good to know that even with all the complaining, immaturity, and the 'wow' over the alien they still can take a dire situation seriously. If only he knew what was to follow upon Team Three's meeting up with Team One...
Team Three dove across the wasteland playing 'Ultimate Showdown' on their robot's third communication frequency. Really they weren't supposed to have saved any music files to the company robots, but it was rare that anyone used frequency three because it was rumored to be cursed, not that any of them actually believed it.
“Did anybody actually make a live-action or CGI music video out of this song?”
“No. Sad, am I right?”
“We should totally do it when we get back. I will be Chuck Norris.”
“No, the only one that can play Chuck is Chuck. Any other would be a joke.”
A blip on their map came up and the two slowed down to a stop to see what it was. It turned out to be White One.
“Wut R U doING out here?” Red Three asked White One. “Where is yer team?”
“My 'team' as you call them are being stupid, lazy-” He added several more insulting-yet-accurate descriptive words to his rant, and then got on with it. “and are horsING around instead of repairING the area we've been assigned to, so I'm going to Site Three to help there.” White One looked them over. “Hey, you guys are Team Three. What R U doing out here?”
“Site 3 is done beING fixed. Team 4 is rechargING their batteries, but will be comING soon. How much is done?”
“Not much. I fixed the Solar Panels the first time we were here and started working on- is that music I'm hearING?” White had only just noticed the music in the background, and had his robot possessed an actual face, he would have sported a frown.
“Music? I hear no music.” Red lied. “U must be imaginING things!”
“Maybe it is the curse!” Yellow three suggested, adding a deadpan laugh that sounded as if each 'ha' was from an individual sentence.
“Curse. Right. Any chance you guys could give me a lift?”
“No we are all full. Ask team-”
“Attention, guys! Whatever you're doING, drop it and listen up!” Another featureless voice crackled loudly over their channel as well as every other channel (although White and Team three had no way of knowing that since they were only on one channel) to ensure the message got across. “We've only got thirty five minutes until the reactor blows and we get a free ride across the galaxy on a nuclear energy wave mixed with moon rocks and base slag, so we need to speed things up, okay? Now, is there any place that hasn't been fixed up yet?”
Indeed there was one place that was not, as White 1 already knew, and Team 3 soon saw.
White 1 decided that rather than put up with his idiot-team again, he'd head over to the lunar base itself and see if he could stop the over-heat from the inside, or at least slow it down. In the meantime he tasked Team 3 with doing the job he knew that his own team was not. For the moment, though, they watched the ridiculous spectacle of them conducting their own version of a demolition derby around that site they'd been tasked with repairing and were neglecting.
“Drive responsibly! Drink, don't drive!” Blue said as the front of his vehicle 'smashed' into the side of the other
“No, it's don't drinak and drive!” Blue's driving buddy, Yellow One 'corrected'
“What is a drinak? I think you meant (apostrophe) drink (apostrophe).” Pink 1 re-correted Yellow's correction.
“Cactus Cactus Cactus! Cactus Juice is good for you! I'll drink some if you do too!” Red 1 rhymed, his robot attached to the second vehicle which Pink 1 was also attached to.
“Alright, Dr. Seuss.” Pink agreed.
“Hush, Shakespear!” Yellow scolded at the same time that Pink spoke.
“Who is Shakespear?” Pink asked.
“Shakespear is the original Doctor Seuss, but his stories made more sense and it took four days to read his stuff.”
“They came from...behind!” Blue 1 quoted from a truly ancient movie that had been filmed a long time ago in a solar system far, far away.
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Gay joke!” Red 1 commented.
“We hit you from the side not-”
Team 3 looked at one another, checked the time they had left, and decided that they had just enough to organize one actual race now that they had four vehicles before they'd need to seriously get to repairing the equipment.
– – – – –
White 1, had he been on the moon in the flesh and not the steel, copper, and other metals and plastics would have trembled in hot anger. He'd gotten away from one team of dummies to find out that there was, in fact, no one living on the base at all. Instead, it was being run by a staff of robots. Meaning, money costs and the ruination of a project that took over a decade to set up aside, there was nothing here to really save. What made it worse was that the majority of them, much like his original 'team' spent more time gaming and goofing off than anything else. To a point he supposed that he could understand that given that the automated tech on the moon base did most of the observation work for them, and they were only present to relay the abnormalities in the day-to-day activities to HQ, but even so, he had at least expected a little bit of professionalism.
Instead, he was reminded of the time when he was forced to babysit all eight of his younger cousins at the same time back on Silax 3 (a space station) and was, for the most part, ignored. Eventually he resorted to asking the computer for directions to the internal reactor cooling room, and the AI directed him to the elevator where he pushed a button and waited for the proper floor.
“Sling us a web- you're the Spiderman! Oh-ho-ho sling us a web...tonight!” Came a song over the elevator speaker. White looked at the speaker in amusement and chuckled.
“Thank you God, it's not playing Friday.” Finally, there had been something humorous about this trip. “May the classics never die!” Ding!
Having arrived at his destination, White stepped out of the elevator and into a room that had multiple vents in the walls for letting heat out into the vacuum that was the moon's 'atmosphere'. Unfortunately even the moon's night-cycle was not enough to cool the reactor, and the reactor was actually hundreds of feet underground to protect it from the occasional meteor shower (as was the observation station, though it was not nearly as deep) which meant the heat had to travel up the shafts they'd cut into the rock before it could exit into the sky above. Heat-wise, it would have been much more efficient to have built it on the surface so the heat could escape more easily, but for reasons already stated it would have been unwise.
White made his way to a console at the other end of the room that stood before a large glass tank that held a light -blue liquid inside it. The liquid was boiling- a bad sign. Up in the spaceship in orbit around the moon White 1 frowned, and back on the moon and in the cooling room he looked down from the tank and observed the console's readings. From what he could tell, the reactor was close to going critical, but he still had somewhere around twenty minutes before it would.
First he checked the emergency coolant reserves. Spent. Not good. White looked up at the tank again. Even as he watched its levels were steadily dropping towards a red line halfway down the tank. All that we've got left is in that tank! In truth the coolant was only used when there was something wrong with the surface coolers, which assisted in venting the heat from the the shafts, but when they malfunctioned (which was over a week ago) the liquid coolant was 'injected' into the system. Now it was almost gone. Still, there might be something I can do to slow it...
Putting his mind to his task, White began checking the system for an alternative and found one several minutes later: the station's AC system. Why HQ had installed an AC unit when no one alive was on the base and it was cold by default on the moon he had no idea, and at the moment did not care.
White commanded the AI to turn on the AC unit and seal all other vents that led to the facility rooms except for the room he stood in now. It would have very little effect due to the fact that the room was in a permanent state of vacuum, but heat rose and cool sank which might still affect the room, and every second the AC bought was a second more of time they had to repair the surface units.
Feeling accomplished, White sat his robot down on the stone floor and waited.
– – – – –
“WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU MORONS DOING?!” Robert screamed (to the best of his robot's ability) at teams One and Three. “ARE YOU TRYING TO GET US FIRED?!”
Really it was a shame that Robert, Sally and their teams had arrived when they did because Team Three was winning the race they'd set up, which they complained about, but at the moment Robert was in no mood to debate the value of the first Luna NASCAR Grande Pre.
“We've got fifteen minutes until we blast a new crater the size of Texas into the face of this moon, and you guys are having a race!”
“So the moon will blow us?” asked one of the moron-squad as he detached from his Lunar Vehicle and joined the other racers standing by the race track's starting point. Robert saw what they were doing and strode over to him and ripped out his control antenna. Instantly the robot went into convulsions and then fell over. The others stared at Robert and took a step back.
“Anyone else wanna try tellING me a sex joke?” He (would have) growled. He got many shakes of the head in return. “Then get to work on that cooling unit!!!”
To Robert's relief they did in fact finish repairing the cooling unit and got it running to full capacity before they ran out of time, and then set to work doing the rest of the job that Team 1 had neglected. It would take another minute or two before it began to have an effect on the reactor, but finally, it seemed that things were looking up...
– – – – –
“Hmm? Hey guys, why is the AC turned on?” One of the Observation team members asked, turning his head away from the thermostat. There was certainly no reason for it to be on, as they one: were not there in the flesh, and two: it was already way below zero in every room in the facility save for two.
“Beats me. Personally, I think its a little cold in here; I'm feeling it even from where our actual bodies are.”
“Well, it doesn't help that our actual bodies are on the other side of the moon and the life support in that chamber is bare minimal. Speaking of which, I need to pee. I'll be back.”
“Wait.”
“Hmm?”
“Turn off the AC before you go and see if you can get the heater to reach to the control chamber before you do. I'll need to go soon too, and I'd rather not freeze my feet to the floor like last time. Oh, and password-lock it so that nobody starts fooling around with it again.”
“Sure thing!” The robot in front of the thermostat adjusted the little switch, and then 'logged out' of his machine.
Shortly after, warning sirens began screaming in the facility as the Air-Conditioning machine began heating the cooling chamber and nowhere else.
Meanwhile, on the planet below the moon, a certain dreaming Gray Pegasus with a blond mane and tail muttered a single sentence and then rolled over onto her back, still asleep.
“I just don't know what went wrong!”
– – – – –
“What?!” Robert exclaimed in horror and confusion as the readings of the facility on his arm informed him that a meltdown was imminent. “But we fixed everythING! And White told me that he'd found a way to slow the meltdown! What happened?!”
“Someone set up us the bomb!” All of Team 1 replied at the same time.
– – – – –
“Computer! Turn the cold air back on! Hurry!”
“Please State Password To Access Temperature Conditioning Controls.”
“Password?! There's no password!”
“Access Denied.”
“I Hate Computers!” White declared, slamming his fists on the console, denting it and accidentally crushing and jamming the button to emergency-drain the cooling liquid from the vat, which gushed out all over the floor and control console and himself. “Shit!”
“Access Denied.”
– – – – –
Down on the planet below (once again) Twilight Sparkle gazed up at the moon from her bed, trying to drown out the racket from the party that the Pink pony had thrown in her library. Earlier she'd seen the four stars that, as prophesied in her book had closed around the moon, and she looked on with a mild feeling of dread in her heart. No one had listened to her, not even her teacher, the princess and sister to the Mare In The Moon, and now it just might be too late to stop what was coming.
She was startled out of her worries when her little baby-Dragon assistant Spike barged into her room wearing a lampshade and told her in an eager voice that it was time to go watch the princess raise the sun.
Sighing, Twilight rolled out of her covers and followed him and the many ponies that had attended Pinkie's surprise party to the town hall, where the mayor gave a speech concerning Princess Celestia's choosing of their town to raise the sun on the longest day of the year this time around. While she did Twilight gazed worriedly up at the moon and witnessed a bright flash of light that swept away the Mare In The Moon crater formation. This enhanced her worry, but a nudge from Spike drew her attention back and she tried to listen again.
– – – – –
Nightmare Moon stuck her head outside of the lander and looked on in astonishment at the glowing mushroom-shaped cloud that expanded up from one of the places that the golems had been working at. Near the base of the cloud was a blinding light, followed shortly after by what looked like a gray sandstorm headed her way. It was not until the ground began to tremble and then outright shake as the 'storm' came closer that she realized that it was not a lunar sandstorm, but rather a blast wave, and she quickly ducked her head back into the lander and slammed the door and ran to the controls, flipping one switch or lever after the other and pressing random buttons. How do you make this thing f-
“YaaaAAAAAAH!” She (would have) screamed as the blast wave hit her and knocked it off the surface of the planet, partially crushing it and sending her and it tumbling and rolling along with several pieces of lunar base equipment, the partially-melted upper torso of one of the robot mechanics (who was yelling 'Wheeeeeee!' as he flew), and several large chunks of rock.
Nightmare Moon literally bounced and careened off the walls of the lander, scraping her horn quite painfully on a number of sharp edges, and nearly broke a few bones in the process. After the fourth horn-scrape however, Nightmare realized that it looked different and examined it as best she could whilst still being thrown around. She narrowed her eyes at a slight discoloration and then tried to use magic and found it to be much stronger than normal. You've got to be kidding. All Celestia did was put a coat of rubber cement on my horn!? That's it?! Nightmare Moon seethed with rage at knowing that her freedom from the moon could have been achieved centuries ago if she'd only known that it was a simple insulator that had prevented her from using her magic.
Quickly she scraped the rest of it off with a hoof and the walls of her transport and cast a teleportation spell to what had once been her home to plan for her take-over.
Meanwhile, the remains of the Lander and the spinning robot and the several larger rocks rained down on Equestria in several different locations, one of which being the side of Celestia's head while she was flying to Ponyville, which knocked her out cold and made her fall to the ground with a growing bump on her head.
This was why none of Twilight's later-sent letters for assistance were answered.
Another place some of the debris landed was in the back yard of a particular sea-foam green Unicorn who had been sleeping. This piece of debris was the upper-half of the robot, which was now even more damaged than it had been before, but one hand and the speaker was still functional. When the Unicorn woke up and finished screaming over the huge crater behind her house she discovered the nearly-destroyed robot, which struck up a conversation with her. After an hour or so of this she decided she wanted to meet the builders of this fascinating creation and began trying to set up a communication device her yard at the robot's instruction.