Chapter 33. False Start
"Berry and I are heading back to the others to fill them on what we've found," Crimson said.
"I hope they aren't too disappointed," I said.
"Why would they be?" Berry asked.
Finding a bottle full of bones was not going to be among my greatest memories, but I doubted I would ever forget it. Bottle? Who was I kidding? Habitat Ten was a damn big bottle, despite it only being one twentieth of the diameter of Habitat Eleven. And by considering that as a potential new home, we were going in the wrong direction. Ultimately, I wanted to get out of Habitat Eleven, not go even deeper into the nested spheres. So what was outside Habitat Eleven? Was it Habitat Twelve? Were we inside Habitat Twelve? Was Habitat Twelve inside Habitat Thirteen? I certainly hoped not. Logic and what facts I had gathered so far also suggested that outside Habitat Eleven was... well, it was more than nothing, even if we were passing through the nothingness at the moment. Whatever the case, I figured a tank full of the skeletons of its murdered residents would be unappealing to the sexless as a future home.
After Crimson and Berry had left us, Brainstorm, Stormie, Cacha and myself had begun a search for more habitats disguised as liquefied-gas tanks. It made sense that the most likely locations for other hidden habitats were the tanks nearest the suspension platform, the highest, and thus closest to the exits around the girth of Habitat Eleven.
As searches went, it was a complete failure, not that any of us minded. Fortunately, I did not have to cut my way into the control rooms of the other tanks. Each of the other three tanks at this level had proved to contain what they advertised: liquefied-gas. Two had been for liquid nitrogen, and one for liquid oxygen. The doors to their control rooms opened when one of us offered a hoof to their scanners. The monitor panels for each all displayed the correct information. The cable and pipe ports at the top of the tanks were smaller and of different configuration to that of Habitat Ten; there were no nutrient lines. There were also no magic displays. The most telling difference between the tank containing Habitat Ten and the others was the lack of any door or lid; there was no obvious way to get into the tanks themselves.
There were more tanks down below, but the mile-long descents amplified by the gentle gradient of the ramps had discouraged us from going further as a group. Neither Stormie or Brainstorm had the physique or inclination to be runners like Cacha and I.
"Do you have everything you need?" Brainstorm asked.
"I have my food generators, and enough water, with recycling taken into account," I said.
"What about you, Cacha?" Stormie asked.
"In my saddle bags, of course," she answered. "This all may be new to you, but I've lived down here for years. I don't need reminding!"
"Sorry. I seem to be becoming motherly."
"You are the herd's head mare after all. At least you are a nice head mare," Cacha said.
"Head mare?" Stormie asked.
"You are the oldest, and you are the stallion's first... whatever you were at the time... so yeah. Head mare." Cacha said. "Aneki is more like an adopted daughter, and I haven't even been properly inducted yet."
"I'm happy to help you with that any time you are ready," Brainstorm said, smiling.
"Of that I am well aware!" Cacha smirked, giving him a wink.
Farewells exchanged, Cacha and I set off at a gentle gallop. We didn't want to get too enthusiastic, lest the downward gradient push us beyond our ability to stop. When we eventually arrived at the next level down, we galloped through the labyrinth of catwalks to each of the four large tanks,where we went through the procedure of checking each again. First, we checked the tank under Habitat Ten, and the one nearest to it, then, once again, we had to run around to the two tanks over the other side of the core. The balance of Habitat Eleven was obviously under consideration with how they were spaced. That run, alone, had taken half a day. After that it was another long ramp down to the next level of tanks, so we set off in that direction after some rest and relaxation.
I couldn't say I minded all this running in the slightest. Instead of the hazards of walls, stairways, and other ponies, the catwalks presented their own set of challenges. Sudden turns, missing safety rails, the occasional protrusion or low pipe to duck under, and the darkness that enveloped it all. Sometimes the few lamps that were down here were more hindrance than help, glaring in our sensitive eyes, forcing us to navigate by silhouette and shadow, instead of the grayscale of our enhanced vision. Nonetheless, it all added to the thrill. The only thing I really missed was fighting against the fatigue of my own body, pushing it, striving for it to be better; the hellite body already had that covered.
Reaching the next ring of tanks, I discovered another habitat-wide platform of sorts. Cacha pointed out the notable features as we travelled across it. In some ways, it was similar to the suspension platform, to which it was directly linked by towering, gusseted ribs. It was quite thick too, several stories thick at least, and the cutouts through it were significantly larger, so much so, that from above, the hexagonal pattern wasn't obvious due to it being largely obscured by other structural elements and equipment. I expected the access to the tops of the next group of tanks would be from catwalks below this platform.
Coming to the ramp through the platform, I noticed the catwalks didn't need to form spirals to pass through its depth either, the giant, hexagonal openings being more than ample for the ramps to pass through unhindered, even with the ramp hugging the wall of the opening. Admittedly, it was steeper, at a gradient of one in four, than the ramp between levels had been.
Nonetheless, at the point the ramp reached halfway down the thickness of the platform, it leveled out, widening to the left. The right part of this platform was unremarkable, and soon angled down again, the ramp returning to its original width. In the widened area to the left, however, was a hole, almost to the full width the of the extension, where the slope continued down, right through the thickness of the ramp itself. Had it been directly in line with the main part of the ramp, it would have been so easy to accidentally fall through, to one's death.
Of note was that the hole had reflective strips outlining it quite clearly. Just the light thrown from our eyes was enough to make the edges glow brightly in the gloom.
"Bizarre, isn't it?" Cacha said.
"Do you know what it is for?" I asked.
"Maybe, but do you?" she said, smirking.
"Oh, so this is one of those odd things you'd like me to figure out for myself?"
"It is."
"Okay. Give me a little time to think it over."
"You may notice more clues if you look around."
I nodded, walked to the edge of the expanded ramp, and slowly scanned the area. It wasn't easy to see far in the darkness with just the light from my eyes, but over the other side of the hexagonal opening, stray light from a distant lamp illuminated the top of a ladder. I rummaged in my saddle bag, retrieving my trusty (and repaired) flashlight, directing its beam across the gap. That helped immensely.
At its top, the distant ladder had hoof rails that extended above the top of the platform, then curled over to join the floor, much like many other ladders I had seen. What was weird was that it terminated at its other end in a similar manner, but this time upside-down, against the bottom of the platform, which was, for all intents and purposes, a ceiling. The ladder, in effect, went from the upper surface to the lower surface of the platform. Climbing down that ladder would result in you falling off the bottom, unless you suddenly worked out how to fall up, so you could stick to the underside of the platform.
What was that saying? Something about when all other possibilities are ruled out, the remaining one, however improbable, must be the truth. Hmm, while it didn't make any sense, if that really was the case, that would mean that gravity reversed direction half way through this platform.
Could this be where the Habitat's gravity was actually generated?
If it was, there would be a null point half way through the thickness of this platform, where the gravity reversed direction, and this flat section of catwalk marked that point. While I was still being pulled down at the moment, if I stepped through that hole, I would be safe, because the moment I passed through it, I would be getting pulled upwards.
I glanced across at Cacha, and could see she was watching me intently, her stance one of readiness. Nope, climbing through that hole wasn't going to happen. Cacha looked as if she was ready to tackle me if I tried. There was a better way to test the theory. All I had to do was continue to walk down the main part of the ramp. If I was right, I simply wouldn't be able to go down any further. Instead, I would find myself floating when my center of mass reached the null point. I trotted a few steps in that direction, finding myself descending normally. I went a few more paces and nothing changed; down was still down. I glanced at Cacha again, and could see that while she was still watching me, she was much more relaxed.
"You didn't think I would jump through that hole, did you?" I asked.
"No, but I couldn't be sure."
Okay, so, if my theories had any merit, the gravity generator wasn't working at the moment. Yet that was a contingency that had been planned for, in that the ramp continued to be navigable beyond this point without passing through it. There was the other side of the ramp for when gravity from another force, such as acceleration or an external source, was affecting the whole habitat, and for when the gravity generator was running, there was that hole so you could get safely through the ramp, onto its other side, and continue, this time climbing up against the gravitational pull originating at the center of the platform.
If that really was the case, there would be safety rails for the other side of the ramp as well. Going to the edge, I pushed my head through the gap between the verticals, and stared down. Yes, there they were, safety rails for the other side of the ramp.
I trotted back up past the horizontal section, then pushed my head through the gap between the verticals again, this time finding there were no safety rails for the other side of the ramp. I had to be right. Gravity above this platform was always down as I knew it. Below this point, it could be in either direction, depending upon if gravity was being generated by whatever it was that this platform housed, or by something else that affected the whole of the habitat.
"Well?" Cacha asked.
"Gravity is generated right here, when there is no other source. When there is another source, it is turned off. There is currently another source."
Cacha nodded. "Interesting, interesting."
"Am I right?"
"I don't know," she said, "but I don't want to pollute your mind with my theories yet."
"It also means two other things," I said. "It means that either the habitat is currently accelerating, or that it is sitting on something with a gravitation pull of its own."
"And the second thing?" Cacha asked.
"There are no more hidden habitats below this point."
"Huh? Why do you say that?"
"Simple. Can you imagine trying to live in a place where up and down swapped with each other? Imagine if we were all to suddenly be attracted upwards, right now. The fatalities would be huge. The structures that rely on gravity to keep them where they are would fail. I am sure that would be the case, up in the life support chamber. The buildings of H'ven would all rip from their foundations, falling, and smashing together in what was formerly the sky-dome. It would be a total catastrophe. In fact, I don't think I would really want to go beyond this point, unless I had wings I could use in an emergency, in case the direction of gravity did change while I was down there."
"You have a good point," Cacha agreed. "And, back to your first point: you think we are either accelerating, or parked on something with its own gravitational field, right?"
"That's right, and either we have a very smooth propulsion system, and a flawless change between acceleration and coasting with artificial gravity activated, or we are stationary with respect to whatever we are sitting on. In my lifetime, I have never so much as felt a shake or judder in the gravitational field. There has never been a sudden spate of cracks appearing, or I would have either seen them, or been taught about them, and if we had been accelerating that entire time, the speed we would be traveling at now would be unimaginable, if not completely unattainable."
"Why?"
"We can't accelerate forever! Even if we only accelerated at one G for ten years straight, at the sorts of speed we would achieve, even hitting a single, stationary dust particle would release enough energy to vaporize this entire habitat! And then, if we really are traveling between two locations, we would need to slow down at some point. We would need to rotate the whole habitat, then use the deceleration to provide gravity. I don't recall any evidence of that sort of reversal occurring either."
"We have no memories of gravity changing during our exile down here. Could that have happened when ponies last lived down in the underlevels, back before the buildings up above were completed?" Cacha asked. "What if they were in fact rebuilding the city after the damage caused by such a reversal?"
"No, I don't think that would have caused much damage. The artificial gravity could have been used while they rotated the habitat. Hmm... I think they would have accelerated for only a short time, then switched to the artificial gravity, allowing the habitat to simply coast through the nothingness. Now I think about it, we would not have even noticed the habitat rotating if the artificial gravity was the only source of gravity at the time. The speed of the rotation could be so slow as to be imperceptible. It wouldn't have mattered if it took centuries. All it had to do then, would be to decelerate when it was getting near to its destination."
"So we would accelerate for a few years after leaving wherever we first came from, coast for thousands of years, slowly rotating end for end, then decelerate when we arrived?"
"Something like that, yes."
"So that could mean we are decelerating now?"
"Or that we are already there," I said. "Let's go take a look at these engines."
To describe the engines would be difficult. They were so large it was impossible to take them all in at once, and even the parts we could see were covers, pipes and ancillary equipment. Whatever was going on inside them was well hidden.
"Have you ever been inside the engines, Cacha?" I asked, wondering about repairs and maintenance.
"Are you kidding? We have to patch up the external systems on occasion, but nopony has ever gone inside. I'm pretty sure you would die if you tried."
"So, how do you know their condition then?"
"We don't, but they must be okay, because they still work. Perhaps there is some sort of automated or magical repair system in place."
"Let's hope so. Are there any monitor panels around?"
"There are a few crude ones. You won't learn much from them."
"Show me, please."
As requested, Cacha guided me along the catwalk that ringed the engines, to the nearest monitor panel. That made the engines sound small, didn't it? They weren't. The engines themselves must have been a mile in diameter, by the time one accounted for all of the pipes, wires and the massive support frames. And there were the fuel tanks and the thrusters themselves. At least half of the volume of the lower levels of Habitat Eleven must have been devoted to power generation and propulsion.
The display on the monitor panel was very basic, showing the current output of the engines, which was just under ten percent of the maximum indicated, and a crude systems display, with each subsystem marked with a green indicator. The entire of Habitat Eleven only needed ten percent of the output of the engines? Wow, that was some serious reserve power. It must have been needed to accelerate and decelerate the incredible mass of the Habitat, no, more than that; it must have been required to break away from the gravity of the place we left. Now, all that was expected of the engines was to power the life support systems. It was no surprise that it was still happily ticking away after all of these years; it was rarely ever stressed!
Other than that, there wasn't much that could be gleaned from the basic display. I was about to turn away from it when I saw it was also equipped with a magic-responsive buttons like the panel in the Habitat Ten port. I reached out with my magic, and tapped it, activating the advanced diagnostics display. Now, that was more like what I wanted. Being a unicorn, I had a real advantage over other Hellites. While the other Hellites were limited to guessing what was going on with these engines, clued in by little green or red lamps, I could simply read the magical display to see exactly what was happening.
I spent the next hour or two transfixed by the information available to me. Unlike up in the life support chamber, with its lost history, I had access to records going back centuries; twenty three of them to be exact. Unfortunately, the data was limited to the engines, and didn't cover social history. This data had been recorded from when Habitat Eleven's engines first came online, making them twenty three centuries old. Whether they were started before the completion of the habitat or not, I didn't know, but at least it gave me a reference. Three to five hundred years had passed before the city of H'ven was habitable, and the ponies moved into it from the underlevels.
Of interest from a technical aspect was that the engines themselves produced absolutely no thrust. They merely produced power. Fuel went in, heat came out. The heat was used directly to warm the life support chamber. It was also fed into a set of secondary systems that converted heat into electricity. Electricity was then used to generate thrust by accelerating the engine's toxic waste-products along the length of the thrust tubes, and ultimately, out into the nothingness below the habitat.
That was the theory, anyway. As I had already discovered, the gravity generator was powered down. So were the thrusters. All waste materials from the engines were being stored in the emptied fuel tanks, pending a time where thrust would be needed.
"We won't be moving into any of the fuel tanks, Cacha," I said. "None of them are empty."
"What? But the engines must have used some of the fuel."
"Indeed, they have. According to this, they've already consumed over ninety percent of it. The resultant waste products were then returned to the tanks."
"Over ninety percent?" Cacha gasped.
"H'ven is dying, Cacha. We both already knew that. The only difference is we are now aware of how long we have left. Maybe a couple hundred years at most."
"Have you worked out how long it will take until we arrive at our destination? Or, perhaps, are we already there, and just unaware of it?"
I shook my head. "It's a lot worse than that, Cacha. The expended fuel was meant to be used as the thrust mass, and indications are that it is all still on board. I also have graphs of the engine's output going back twenty-three centuries. During that entire time, the output from engines has been more or less the same, apart from a few peaks marked as tests."
"That means..." Cacha raised her eyebrows, a concerned expression forming on her face.
"That's right. Habitat Eleven never began its journey. Whatever we were trying to get away from could well be waiting for us outside, and with the fuel almost gone, we will have to go out and face it within the next few generations. You and I will probably live to see it first hoof."
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Pssh. Need some more pragmatism.
No playing in the zero-G spot? Awww
That means they're not travelling through space?
What if this supposed spaceship never took off in the first place? It's worth considering...
Ooh. An exact dating of H'ven? Nice!
Well. That can't have been healthy for whatever place they blasted off from
See! I knew it was worth considering!
Come now. It's been twenty three centuries. That's not too likely.
5204451
It depends on what they were running from really, What if the sun was turning red giant, and was scorching the shit out of everything outside of H'ven?
~Crystalline Electrostatic~
Nice thing is that there is an external gravity... otherwise, 2300 years through nothing with steady velocity, waiting to find land...
But, they could be on a strange springboard trying to be a planet... Or on the world's border with parallax gravity pulling... Or surrounded by goo in another, bigger gravity field...
5204451
Something scared a species enough for it to hide itself in an impenetrable ball and try to flee its planet. I doubt they were running from a minor problem like Discord, or other things easily solved by the Mane Six or their successors.
So they have 250 years to get the guns back online, seems doable. The blind xenophobia does make more sense as it would have hit at a point where they were starting to wonder if they would ever leave the ship.
Too bad they didn't seal up some of the lower levels earlier or they might have been able to make their third millennia in there.
5204565
I dunno. Short of the sun going nova, I think a couple of millennia might be enough for the planet to recover anyway.
And if the sun had gone nova, I don't think even the impenetrable ball would've survived anyway, unless it had taken off
5204908 And if it DID survive, the force would probably have sent it flying.
Well great, evidence of an external gravitational field means they're not in space anymore, so they must have made it to their destination!
Wait...
Well, fuck.
I just finished reading the story up to this point. It took only around 8 hours.
I went in having only half read the description, the first few words (for whatever reason) making me think this would be a Little Prince mlp thing. Somewhere along the way fingers were introduced, and I seriously wanted to say 'eeenope', but ended up reading more.
And down, down, deeper and deeper the rabbit hole goes. I love how the scope of this story expands and becomes grander, fuller, more epic with each passing chapter. This is some quality story-telling folks, a well built world that is hard to come by on this site. Why the hell does this have so few likes and reads?
Seriously, I can't wait where this will go. How much grander, how much deeper it will go.
No pressure though
Well that just upped the stakes.
Wow. That last paragraph... that's possibly the grimmest development yet in this story. Lesson: ponies are actually kind of terrible at giga-scale engineering projects, despite their extreme technical competence in small-scale stuff like nanotech and the recyclers. Maybe they need the princesses around to keep things moving along properly.
Reminds me of what my family used to call "fan syndrome", though, where everyone at the table is hot and so someone goes to get a fan, but after doing so they neglect to turn it on.
Nice chapter, the ending is reminding me why I was (and still is) so exited about this story in the first place.
What puzzles me, though, when (and how) did Sent, who grew in society, which is stagnating scientifically, and holds little interest in what lies beyond, became so knowing and proficient in space flights and gravity-related stuff? It doesn't look like it featured in average H'ven school. While Aneki is a smart girl, she still need some base to be able to come to such conclusions.
5209567 Aneki is a structural engineer. Gravitational stresses were part of her training. As such she is versed in that subject. As for space flight, she is merely extrapolating from her physics lessons. She doesn't "know" space flight. She's working out her ideas on the fly, based on her training.
Awww, sweet Stormie. Weird family dynamics they have, but it all sees necessary. Aneki's "adopted daughter" status doesn't really mean she won't ever mate with Brainstorm.
What is in the core? It is obviously massive.
I don't quite see what is going on here, does the ladder go through a solid object they can see outside of this hole or does it connect to flat piece? I am imagining the hole from the ramp looks out into a large, empty space that has a ladder somewhere in it.
Was the above ground city there when the Brainstorms were locked away? Cause that would have been 1100 years after the engines came online.
Somepony must have known this. Is this thing hidden away within a mountain or something, the world having forgotten about it?
Using some ratios. I predict that if the habitat continues to consume fuel at the average it did for the last 2300 years, they have about 255 years left before they need to fill up.
6376481
The core is the area occupied by the engines.
The "platform" has lots of very large hexagonal holes in it. When I say large, we are talking something like the size of a city block. The girls are over one side of the hole. This ladder is on the other side of the same hole.
The above ground city was there by then, but the underlevels, while mostly unused, had not been totally abandoned. Besides, a weapons facility is better off away from the population, thus their choice of location.
Something like that, but Aneki is allowing for the additional draw of Habitat Ten coming back online, as well as allowing a safety margin.
Hmmm. I want to believe that habitat 11 is the moon, but I could be wrong. Anyhoo. Love it
Habitat Eleven never began its journey...
What if Habitat Eleven is an experiment...
I remember this being a concept in another story- Taklamakan, by Bruce Sterling. Spoilers, of course! There were three "spaceships", in an area within the Taklamakan desert- that's right, China. One had been burned down from the inside, so we didn't get to explore it. However, the other two had their own interesting cultures- One containing a majority peasant class, the other more like a giant bazaar.
6988411
Well, Fallout already played around with that concept.
Wooooooow what a great escape guys truly an efficient use of resources