Verdant Song

by Mixolydian Grey

In the Shadow of Verdence, pt. V

Holly wasn’t sure how long she had been laying there, curled up on the floor somewhere in the engineering crew quarters. It could have been hours, but more likely just minutes.

Whatever stimulant she’d been injected with still tingled in her veins, keeping her heart rate a few dozen beats per minute faster than it otherwise would have been.

At some point, the fake gravity tapered off and vanished. Then she felt the magnetic fields shift. A second one materialized, centered not far from her, and then expanded to an area larger than the ship. After reaching its fullest extent, it intensified, as if she had been staring at a full moon that suddenly flared into a midday sun. She felt a pressure on her horn until she had readjusted to the new fields.

The ship was warping. But to where? Who was piloting it?

The griffons had gone to the bridge. Whatever was happening couldn’t have been planned. At least… not planned by them.

But as far as she had gathered from brief moments of consciousness, the other hostages were the only surviving crew. There weren’t any ponies running around that might save them. Were the griffons fighting each other? Or were the hostages wrong, and someone actually had survived and avoided them long enough to set the ship on a course for somewhere?

That griffon… the reddish brown… his silhouette had been like a shadow in a dream. He didn't know what was going on. He said the others had rushed for the bridge. They hadn't planned it. But had he even been real, or was he just some figment of an exhausted imagination? Now she was alone in silence, thoughts remaining without an answer.

She opened her eyes and looked around. It was still dark. Nothing had changed there. But maybe, with the Alcubierre drive online…

Closing her eyes again, she took a deep breath and focused. She felt her heartbeat pounding like she’d just sprinted, even though she had been lying still for a while. Most of the sweat in her fur had dried, except for some patches still damp that tingled in the cool air.

The stimulant was still there, and the magic inhibitors as well… a stiffness in her mind, like limbs fallen asleep from pinched blood flow.

But even through the inhibitors, she also felt the new electromagnetic field, the ship’s own sort of heartbeat. The ebb and flow brushed against her horn just like the magnetosphere of Equus.

She probed the currents, listening for vibrations in the visible light spectrum. Ripples radiated outward where she touched the fields, but she struggled to grab hold of any of them. She pushed slightly, bending the field around her horn.

For a minute, she just held the fields there, slightly warped. She felt and listened more carefully, trying to find that one vibration, the resonant frequency of her magic… a mint green, same as her eyes.

It helped to visualize how the waves sat in the electromagnetic spectrum when she had first learned. A set of training wheels, really. She had always struggled with magic. It took years to become proficient with the basics: light and motion. Motion of metallic objects, anyway. The gene for gravitational telekinesis didn’t run in her family. The gene for unicorns didn’t even run in her family. She would forever be stuck with only electromagnetic manipulations, but right now, she struggled to manage even that much.

It was right there — roughly five hundred and sixty terahertz, plus harmonic frequencies — all of the energy she needed was vibrating in the air around her. All she needed to do was grab ahold of it.

Finding herself unnecessarily tense, she took a deep breath, relaxed, and closed her grip.

A faint light pressed on her eyelids. She opened them to find a feeble mint-green glow enveloping her horn. It barely lit more than a few meters of the surrounding area, but it was better than nothing.

She tried leaning into it a bit more, squeezing tighter to gather more of the energy, but couldn’t intensify the light. It would have to do. There was no way in Tartarus she’d manage telekinesis or anything more elaborate for now.

Photokinesis always had been the simplest of spells. Once the fields were properly placed, the photons just streamed out without much effort. All of the energy was there already.

The griffons were gone. The area around her was silent, though that wasn't much comfort, seeing as the griffons were usually quite stealthy.

Had the ship’s movement had drawn all of the griffons away, or did some remain?

She gently pushed against the nearest flat surface, picking a direction at random and just coasting that way. She needed to move, even though she wasn’t sure where. Everything looked the same. But at least it was quiet.

When she came to a corner, she dulled the light, peeked around, then once satisfied that there was no one there, she let the light back to its full but weak strength and proceeded onward.

Hydroponics was a good idea. She could hide in a hydroponics bay somewhere. Some were still functional. They’d have necessities for survival.

But then what?

Her hoof grazed a wall and scraped off particles of what seemed like dirt. She sucked in a breath, realizing that it probably wasn’t. No dirt on the ship. Plenty of hunts, though…

Those griffons could come back and kill her at any moment. Food supplies weren’t the highest priority at the moment.

She didn’t have any weapons, and she doubted that she would be able to find any. The only weapons on the ship had been locked up in an armory which the griffons had apparently gotten to. They didn’t use them for hunting, but they had rifles and guns and other weaponry that must have come from there. The armory was probably empty, leaving only improvised options, which she probably couldn’t find, create, or use effectively.

The markings on the walls gave a vague sense of direction, which would have been helpful if she could decide which direction to take.

One of the habitats might be safer in the long term, but that would mean getting closer to the axis first. And if the griffons hadn’t gone too far, she’d run into them. Heading deeper into engineering would get her away from the hunting party, but then she’d be right where they would expect to find her.

But maybe she was wrong about the survivors. She couldn’t think of a good reason for the griffons to move the ship. It was in the middle of nowhere. Any other destinations would be equally remote, or they would be back at Equus. And if the griffons arrived at Equus, they’d probably just be shot down. And they knew that.

Unless they planned to use the hostages as… hostages. Their ransom: pardons for their crimes.

In that case, at least they wouldn’t kill her… right away…

But if there were others out there, other ponies who might be able to help, and might be able to use her help… she had to find them. Or at least find out if they were out there.

She decided on the habitats, turning around and following the arrows back to the central axis. Engineering was too damaged. It would be too hard to find a computer system with recordings or surveillance.

As she pushed herself up through the decks, she slowed her progress, listening more and more carefully.

Maybe it was her heightened awareness, or maybe there was something out there. Either way, she started hearing things she hadn’t heard a few decks down. Tiny, faint scrapes and taps, so far and so quiet it was hard to pinpoint the location.

She dimmed her light, peering around a corner. It was too dark to see the end. She listened. There was a series of taps, from the end of the hallway coming towards her with frightening speed.

She involuntarily pulled back around the corner and sucked in a breath, extinguishing her light completely.

Holding her breath, she listened. Her ears rang in the silence, straining so hard to hear sounds that they created their own.

Griffons don’t hesitate, she remembered one of the ponies saying. If there was a griffon right there that had seen her, he would have struck already.

She brought up her light again, finding the vibrations more easily this time, but still unable to make it much brighter.

What scared her the most was that a griffon could be that quiet if he wanted to.

And he would have seen her… her light would’ve been unmistakable to avian vision. And even disregarding their vision, her magic—

She instantly dropped the spell. Celestia, what was I thinking!? They could feel the ripples when she used magic!

But even as she nearly broke down into tears over her own mistake, she did realize something of comfort. She was even more sure that there weren’t any griffons around… The ripples may not reach more than a dozen meters or so in any direction, but they would alert anyone that felt them.

With a sniffle, she wiped away a tear and continued on, in the darkness this time. Slowly, carefully, she listened as intently as she could and used the faint emergency lights to guide herself.

By the Diarchs, that was stupid. That kind of carelessness would get her killed. She took a shaky breath.

It was a mistake. It hadn’t cost her. She wouldn’t make it again.

There were noises up ahead. She held still, listening. It was probably just more tapping… the debris on the walls. She squinted into the darkness, seeing some kind of motion up ahead.

A griffon silhouette passed in front of one of the emergency lights.

She flinched, almost shrieked. It was all she could do to avoid making some kind of noise.

The shadow hadn’t been her imagination. She’d been dealing with her imagination for hours… the little motions in peripheral vision, the incorrect recognition of inanimate objects as ponies or griffons. She knew what her imagination looked and felt like, and that hadn’t been it.

He hadn’t seen her. He couldn’t have. Otherwise, he’d have come at her. He went across the hallway, perpendicular to her intended direction.

He might have been after her. Might have been there for some other reason. But just as quickly as he had appeared, he vanished, and was now nearby and dead silent.

Holly almost held her breath. There was a griffon right up ahead. She couldn’t just sneak past him.

She turned halfway, looking behind. A lot of these hallways connected in many places. He could end up behind her.

Down the hall where she first saw the silhouette, to the side where the griffon had gone, she heard the subtle rush of wings flapping a few times, then going quiet.

Very gently, she put a hoof on the nearest railing and leaned herself to the side, gaining a slightly better angle to look down the path the griffon had taken. She pulled herself forward, moving as slowly as possible to avoid making any sound. She kept careful control of her breathing.

The griffon wasn’t far beyond that intersection. He was there, hanging still in the air, barely visible in the dim light.

He’s listening, she realized, resisting the urge to suck in a breath.

With a gentle push, she guided herself back the way she’d come. There might be a small room or something she could hide in.

Her pulse thudded in her ears, defeating any attempts to listen for more wing movements.

She didn’t need to listen, though. He followed.

The griffon moved back to float in the air just in front of the light that had given her the first glimpse of him. He stared at her. His beak parted slightly.

A spear rose up from the shadows as he shifted his grip and raised it to throw.

Silence didn’t matter anymore. She gave a short cry and flailed her hooves for any solid surface. One of them contacted, and she flew off, retreating in the opposite direction.

She reached out with her magic and pulled a light source together. It was a little stronger than before. The panic strangely helped her focus on it. She focused it into more of a beam, directed ahead.

At every opportunity, she turned a corner. She didn’t hear him. She could only look. Sometimes he was there, rounding the corner behind her, following with spear at the ready, and sometimes he wasn’t there. Not seeing him was scarier.

A light shone up ahead. Something still functional. A small machine room of some sort. And if it wasn’t too damaged, the door…

She threw herself inside and slammed her hoof on the door control. It slid shut, and she pushed it again, more carefully, locking it.

Not wasting any time, she moved further into the room. There were consoles and screens. Some kind of docking coordination system from when the ship was being assembled. It had started from engineering. That meant that she was near one of the aft cargo bays.

She stopped for a moment, putting a hoof on the back of a chair. It spun around. The seat was covered in dried blood. There was more under the desk. She looked away.

“Diarchs,” she whispered to herself, choking out the word past a lump in her throat. Her vision blurred with tears.

They treated ponies like animals, like the non-sentient seals they hunted out on the ice plains or the dumb beasts in the mountains. It was like they didn’t even notice that their prey would bleed and scream. They didn’t even notice that the ponies would beg for mercy.

It was a cruelty that defied logic. She could keep asking how? but there was no answer. And it shouldn’t be a surprise. There were other examples throughout history. This kind of thing just kept happening over and over, and now she was witnessing it first hand.

A small part of her almost wanted to go back and open the door just to be done with it all. To get it over with quickly. Probably less painful that way.

She cried.

By the time she recovered and regained the ability to put coherent thought together, the fur on her face was soaked with tears. Her eyes were sore and a pressure pressed behind her eyes.

The door thudded. She turned. Another thud — not a mistake. He knew where she was and he was trying to get in.

“No,” she muttered to herself. Thud. She screamed it, “No!”

It wasn’t a strong door. This wasn’t an airlock. It moved a few inches, and then talons reached around the edge and forced it open all the way.

His stare was harsh in its emptiness. There was nothing there. His eyes were just sensors for locating prey. If he squinted, it was because of the sudden change in light. She knew that begging was pointless.

He had his spear in hand again, and raised it over his shoulder to throw. As his hand shot it forward, Holly reached out into the magnetic fields around them.

Luna save me. It wasn’t metallic. It was plastic or fiberglass or something she couldn’t grab.

The spear left his hand, crossing the distance in a fraction of a second.

Holly squeezed her eyes shut and reached out for something, anything. Something metal shot out of the corner of the room and intercepted the spear, snapping it in half and sending little shards across the room like shrapnel.

She opened her eyes and stared, hardly able to breathe.

The griffon was still in the doorway, his claws raised to attack. He hadn’t lunged right away… maybe he was assessing her abilities.

Holly grabbed the metal again, and brought it in front of her. It was a solid metal wrench. She hadn’t realized how heavy it was just moments ago. It wavered as she nearly lost her grip on it.

She tried to make that waver look like a gesture. “Go!” she shouted. “Get out of here!”

His eyes continued to scan her. He was as frightened as he was merciful.

The wrench was heavy. Telekinesis was nothing like photokinesis. This took conscious effort, and she was tired. If he came at her, she might not be able to swing it with any real force.

And he could probably feel her loose grip on it in the electromagnetic fields. He wouldn’t be fooled.

For a minute, they just stared at each other. Then, he lunged.

She shoved the wrench with her magic, but it hardly budged. She couldn’t move it with telekinesis.

So she grabbed it with her teeth.

The ceiling was low enough that she could reach out a hoof and kick it. She ducked underneath his claws and swung.

Without the benefit of friction or gravity, she changed her own momentum as much as the wrench’s, not delivering a very powerful swing. But the griffon had his own momentum to add, and for an instant, kinematics worked in her favor.

There was a crunch and a grunt. Broken ribs, temporary diaphragmatic paralysis.

The wrench would slow her down too much. She had to trust that the blow would be sufficient to buy her time. She let go of it and pushed off the floor, sailing through the open doorway.

She fled again, slower. She was tired. She couldn’t keep this up for very long. There had to be a place to hide somewhere, someplace close that he couldn’t get into.

Every hallway looked like a possibility, but none of them looked like good ones. Too many of the doors were already sealed shut, and she did not have time to open them.

Her eyes caught a shadow — another griffon. Her breath caught in her throat. She tried to reach out with her magic again, hoping to find something else she might be able to throw. There wasn't anything. Nothing to throw, no energy left to run.

But this one flinched when he saw her. While the other had assessed momentum and calculated an attack vector, this one remained in place, one hand holding a railing, the other… empty. No weapon.

“Holly,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. He wasn’t shouting. “Solstice sent me.”

“Solstice?” He was alive. And he knew where she was. She barely managed to grab hold of a railing and stop herself before slamming into the wall.

“Yes, him. You’ve met.”

She kept her distance, holding place on the wall at the top and center of a T-shaped hallway. He didn’t move, remaining in the side passage.

His eyes examined her as she did the same to him. This new griffon looked just like the rest. His feathers were varying shades of gray, wreathed in shadows as he held himself out of the light. The eyes glinted. He had yellow irises like a cat or a hawk or a wolf or any number of other carnivores that came to mind.

And he just hung there, waiting. Griffons don’t hesitate, she recalled again. She wanted to believe him. She wanted more than anything to be able to put her faith in something that promised to protect her.

“You have ten seconds to prove that Solstice sent you,” she whispered, glancing back towards that little docking control room she’d left behind. She had heard a good deal about a few of Solstice’s griffon coworkers. If it was a griffon Solstice knew, she might recognize the name and remember Solstice mentioning him.

He rolled his eyes and faintly growled in annoyance.

Is that Lennox?

He reached into a vest pocket and pulled out a watch. No — not just any watch. There was no doubt.

Gryphus is the god of pragmatism, she remembered Solstice joking. Griffons didn’t carry analog watches. And they wouldn’t go through the trouble of stealing Solstice’s to try and catch her; they would just catch her. They didn’t need deception.

“Are you Lennox?” she asked.

“Unfortunately. Is this sufficient?” he gave the watch a gentle shake, then put it back in his vest. “Because we really need to leave here right now.”

“You’re bigger, though,” she said.

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The one who was chasing me. He’s small. And he may have some broken ribs.”

“You only met one of them? That explains how you survived.” He shook his head. “No, no, there’s more than one down here.”

“Chasing me?”

He glanced down the hallways. “Among other things.”

That’s what he meant. An unfortunate time to be Lennox. “Diarchs,” Holly whispered.

“How’s your magic?”

“I can move things, but… I can’t fight them.”

“Great. Reach into this bulkhead right here,” he said, tapping the wall. “There’s a wire with electric current. Sever it.”

“Okay,” she said. She listened to the fields. There was a buzzing, the electrical current. She grabbed the wire in her magic. It wasn’t a very big wire. She should have been able to snap it. “I can’t… What is it?”

“Lights. Never mind. Come on.” He didn’t hesitate. He just took off and she struggled to keep up.

Lennox was silent for a while as they put some distance between themselves and the advancing griffons.

He wouldn’t have waited if he wanted to slit my throat, she reminded herself. He would have just done it right away. He couldn’t be working for them, because he wouldn’t do something so inefficient if he was.

Then a hand was on the back of her neck. She gave a short shriek.

“Shh!” Lennox hissed.

“I’m sorry…”

“Apologies are noise,” he whispered, right in her ear. “Listen.”

There were thumps nearby. Talking.

Lennox shoved her toward the nearest open doorway in a direction away from the griffons. They both ducked inside, tucked themselves into the corner. Lennox had a knife in hand.

They waited until the talking they heard in the distance faded away, until the area was silent.

Lennox leaned out into the hallway and glanced around. It seemed clear.

“Where are we going?” Holly asked. “Where’s Solstice?”

He gestured. “One thing at a time. Habitat E. That way.”

— — —

They had been traveling in silence for some time, finding a way to the central axis that didn’t involve running a griffon blockade. The cramped passages of engineering gave way to the equally cramped passages around the axis. Except now, instead of twisting around at right angles, they twisted around to fill a cylindrical shell.

There wasn’t much farther to go, and it seemed that they had avoided the griffons entirely. It was dead silent, except for the distant humming rumbling of the motors that spun the habitats.

She couldn’t stand it any longer. She needed to talk to someone just so she wouldn’t go insane… a distraction or something.

“How’d you do it?” Holly asked, keeping close behind him so she could whisper almost inaudibly and still talk.

“What?” Lennox briefly glanced back at her.

“How did you move the ship?”

“With the engines.” Lennox quickened his pace, flapping his wings. Holly struggled to keep up.

“Please explain to me how you and my brother were able to repair the ship, noting how you compensated for the lack of ponypower and other abnormal challenges.” She gasped for breath.

“There were others,” he said.

“Who?”

He slowed down enough to read the label on a door as they passed it. Still on the central axis, not quite to the habitat, yet.

“Some crew,” he said, mumbling no louder than the sound of hand and hoof on the railings. “They were killed.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Solstice and I finished without them. We set the ship on course. Everything vital is sealed off. The griffons can’t really stop it. Anything else?”

“Can you tell me what you’re planning next?” Holly asked.

“Save the hostages.”

“Is that what Solstice is doing?”

“No.”

Holly frowned. “Where is he?”

“The highest deck of the command module,” Lennox mumbled, sounding slightly more irate. Though, that was perhaps the default state for him, given what Holly had seen so far.

“Is that where we’re going?” she asked.

“No.”

“Where are we going?”

“I already told you. Habitat E.” He grumbled something under his breath. “Are you done making noise?”

“Are you done dodging my questions?”

He was silent.

She wasn’t even quite sure she could trust him. But he had the watch, and he fit the little pieces of information Solstice had given her about him. He wasn’t allied with the other griffons, and he probably wasn’t trying to harm her.

Even so, the old ‘enemy of my enemy’ phrase had never seemed a complete truth. Maybe he wasn’t outright harming her, but he could still have some kind of nefarious intent, and his refusal to answer basic questions was starting to make her nervous.

“Hey,” she said, letting her voice rise in volume. She reached out a hoof and grabbed a railing, holding herself in place. The momentum swung her around in a little arc, but she moved back and positioned herself in the middle of the narrow hallway.

He stopped as well. He didn’t turn around or look; he just kept staring ahead. His wings shuffled slightly, then settled against his back. The angle and the darkness obscured his face. “Yes?” The tone was irritated.

“I’m not sure I trust you.”

He exhaled sharply in a rough approximation of a chuckle. “Thanks for sharing.”

“Just where are we going?”

“I already told you. Habitat E. Emscon. The lower decks.”

His fingers impatiently shifted their grip on the railing. Fingers without claws? she noted.

“Can the interrogation wait until then?” he asked, turning his head just enough so that she caught the glinting of his eyes, and those yellow irises…

“You don’t seem to have any trouble giving stupid answers to my questions right now. Why not the real ones?”

“Stupid answers don’t take effort. I’d rather devote my attention to staying alive,” Lennox said. “If that’s alright with you.”

She grit her teeth. “I’m not moving from this spot until you tell me where my brother is, where we are going, and what we’re going to do next.”

He took a deep, slow breath, making an effort to relax and failing. She could see the tension in his back, at the base of his wings and in his shoulders. “I can keep moving either way,” he said. “It’s your choice whether to follow me and enjoy my protection or take your chances.”

“But you won’t.” She glared at the back of his head. “You came to get me for some reason. Obviously you want me for something. You’re not just going to leave me twenty minutes after you find me.”

“Perhaps I have changed my mind.” His wings shuffled again, uncomfortably twitching before nestling themselves back into place. He spoke softer, with a carefully restrained irritation. “Solstice’s current location is the command module’s highest deck. Our current destination is habitat E’s lowest deck. Our next action is undecided at this time, but will work towards the goal of saving the hostages.”

“Why aren’t we—”

“No more questions right now. We’re going to Emscon right now. You can ask questions when we’re away from immediate danger.”

He started moving again, not even waiting for her reply. She clenched her jaw and followed.

“Is Solstice in danger?” she couldn’t help but ask.

He inhaled a deep breath that hissed past his beak, then muttered something under his breath.

“What was that?” she asked. “Was that a prayer or something?”

“To Gryphus.” He said, irritation in his voice like a mad dog on the edge of its chain, just barely held back. “For patience.”

“Oh, is he the god of patience? Let me know when you’re done, because I’d like a word with him as well.”

Lennox stopped suddenly, spinning around and facing her for the first time since they met. His eyes burned with little fires, his brow pulled into a scowl.

For a moment before he spoke, she feared that he might strike her.

“Listen to me,” he said, voice low and harsh. “I promised your brother that I would keep you safe. There is no logical reason for me to do this; I won’t gain anything from it. It’s purely for his benefit.

“I have almost died numerous times thus far to keep that promise. This task is already difficult enough. Stop doing everything in your power to make it worse.”

She had lost sight of the danger, hadn’t she?

It was already certain that he wasn’t intending to kill her, or he would have done so already. It was also certain that he was working against the other griffons, and he was allied with Solstice in some capacity. Maybe he was a bit shifty, but without him, she’d still be lost on engineering. Maybe she could have run for a while, avoided the hunters, but she couldn’t defend herself for the full twelve hours.

He turned and took off again, and she had to pull herself along on the railings as fast as she could manage, just to keep up.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Shh.”

— — —

It was always a bit strange moving from the zero-g axis onto the rotating habitat modules. At the top of the habitats, there wasn’t much centrifugal inertia to provide the artificial gravity, but one could faintly detect the spinning. Descending through the habitat always caused a very mild dizziness if you went too quickly. It had something to do with the coriolis effect. Holly wasn’t well read on the details; she just remembered the important parts that were relevant. The gravity increased as she and Lennox descended through the decks, heading away from the axis, and once they settled on a single deck for a few minutes, the dizziness went away.

So this was their hideout. Emscon was the electronics and satellite habitat, intended to construct artificial satellites for communication and navigation before deorbiting and joining the settlement, where it would continue to function as a control station. It was almost useless while they were in transit, since the fabricators had been almost completely depleted to repair the ship.

Lennox led her through the area, making sparse comments about things to be aware of. One of the hydroponics bays still functioned; there was food in there. There was a nearby lounge which provided a suitable sleeping area, and was preferable to travelling down a few more decks to the crew quarters.

He noted the security measures he and Solstice had implemented. There were cameras and motion sensors everywhere, and they didn’t miss anything. There were numerous routes to escape though or places to hide in if the griffons came after them. Weapons were lacking, but improvisation helped with that. Several hallways made for convenient traps if airlocks were opened.

It seemed that he had things under control enough that he could afford to answer some questions. After she had something to eat from hydroponics, she decided it would be a good time to accost him.

“Hey,” she said, startling him from whatever he was doing on the computers.

He flinched, then sighed and rubbed his forehead.

“We’re safe now, right?” She took a few steps closer. “Safe enough?”

“If this is your idea of safe, I’m curious as to how much it takes to genuinely frighten you.” He glanced at the computer screen, then sighed and reclined in his seat. “If you’re here to ask questions, ask.”

She found a seat of her own at a comfortable distance. It wasn’t until she sat down that she realized just how much her legs ached, just how tired she was. Now that she had satisfied her hunger, she wanted to sleep. But these questions needed answering.

“I remember the asteroid,” she said. “I remember the missiles we fired to destroy it, and the superheated dust cloud we hit. I remember losing four habitats, but everyone was evacuated to the emergency shelters before the impact. A few days passed… there was a bunch of arguing… Some griffon wanted to run an investigation to look for a saboteur, because it couldn’t have been an accident.”

“Kelantos.”

“Huh?”

“That’s his name,” Lennox said. “Kelantos is the griffon who started the mutiny.”

“Anyway, I remember him arguing with the captain,” she continued. “I guess he was still upset that the ship was captained by a pony. And I remember that the pony and griffon engineers refused to work together. At some point, a riot started, and I hid in my quarters. I don’t remember how long it was, but eventually, the griffons came around, and…” She swallowed. Her throat was tightening up, she couldn’t speak clearly. Her mind replayed the scene in vivid detail. “I was… captured.”

They were both silent for a while as Holly tried to regain her composure.

Lennox broke the silence. “That wasn’t a question.”

She gave a faint smile. That sounded like something Solstice would say. Though, Solstice would have meant it as a joke.

“I don’t remember much after that,” Holly said. “I woke up two or three times with some other ponies that had been captured by the griffons. We were allowed to eat a little bit. They kept giving us some kind of drugs to put us in comas.”

“Thiopental. Ketamine. Propofol.”

“Are those the names of the griffons who did it?”

Lennox snorted. “No, those are the names of the drugs they used. Some of them, anyway. I’m not sure what the exact combination is.”

“Well, my question is… what happened after that? How long was I held hostage?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s been roughly six months since the accident with the asteroid.”

“What?” she asked in disbelief.

“After that one riot started on the engineering module, two days passed. Kelantos and some other griffons forced their way into the briefing room and demanded that the captain take a certain course of action. She refused, and he started to leave. One of the other griffons got into a fight with a security guard, things spiralled out of control, and the griffons took over the ship within a few hours. You were captured at some point during that.”

Holly shrank into the seat as she listened. It was just… horrible. Everything had spiraled out of control. It was supposed to be a mission of peace. “Was it about the conflicts on Equus?” she asked.

“No, as far as I can tell,” he said. “It was disagreement over the captain’s decisions, frustration with the situation, and just… tension and pressure that reached a breaking point.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Most of the crew were killed. About thirty griffons ran around the ship like savages, and about fifty ponies were captured at the start. There are probably only about twenty ponies left at this point. Twenty two griffons, last I checked.”

“You haven’t mentioned Solstice,” Holly said.

“Solstice and I were working on the engines when no one else would. When the riots started, we hid and waited. There’s not much to tell about that.”

“You two repaired the engines. That’s worth mentioning.”

He rolled his eyes. “No, we didn’t. We finished the job that the entire engineering crew started. It would have taken the whole crew a month, but with the food supplies and the escalating conflict, progress slowed to nothing.”

“Still,” Holly said. “You accomplished a lot.”

“Not enough,” he mumbled, turning back to the computer and giving it his full attention again.

She waited for him to say more, but no other words came. She wanted to ask about Solstice again, but… he seemed like he wanted to be left alone and she didn’t want to bother him if he was working on something important.

Emscon had its own answers to tell her. Wandering around gave her glimpses of the accident… the ponies here had evacuated to the command module and come back after the impact.

Emscon told her of the efforts to repair the ship. There were fabricators still running, half formed computer chips and other parts for engineering still sitting on glowing glass trays, the printing arms hovering above them like hungry statues frozen in stone, waiting for more material to work with.

There were questions that the cold metal couldn't tell her, though. But… they could wait. Not that they weren't important…. She wanted to know where Solstice was. But she also didn't want to upset the only griffon she'd met in the last six months who hadn't tried to kill her.

Six months. Such a long time to be asleep, adrift. A half a year… So much could have changed…. By this point, the Song would have only just gotten through the initial establishment of the colony. They probably wouldn't have even gotten word back to Equus yet.

It was so strange, being cut off from the world for so long. Once they broke from Celeste and lost radio contact with Equus, it was like nothing she'd ever been through before. Even lost at sea on Equus, you could contact somepony somewhere. Satellites dotted the sky at dawn, like little stars that peeked above the horizon, moved to the other side, and dipped down again in a matter of minutes. She had never been so out of touch with home.

But now there was this. Not only had she been cut off from Equus, but now the crew, the passengers… the only friends she had known for the last three— no… Nine? Had it been nine months? Asleep for six… Lennox and Solstice had been at this for six months?

Lennox hadn’t mentioned Solstice much. But if she was being entirely fair, Lennox didn’t mention anything much, unless she went through a lot of effort to draw out the answer. She wanted to believe that he told the truth, that he wasn’t hiding anything. It was concerning.

Especially considering the number of ponies that had died… Diarchs, please let him be okay… If he made it through the earlier fighting, he probably knew how to hide and stay safe. He was probably working on something on the command module. Maybe that’s why Lennox was on the computers. They could be working together on something involving ship systems, but Solstice needed to be on the command module to have access to the computer hardware.

He was probably lonely. She was.

As her walk led her into an observation lounge and the only comfortable furniture within decks, she felt everything rushing up on her at once.

She remembered faces… during the rioting…. A handful of them had died, then. Most probably died after her capture. Six months. She didn't know how often the griffons hunted or when she had been awoken. Three times she was awoken and ate with the other hostages, each time fewer of them were present.

Most of them, she didn't know. Her only friends had been killed in the accident or at the start of the riots. She cried then. She cried now, throwing herself onto the couch and sobbing into the cushions.

She had never been this alone. But she was too tired to act at the moment, and more than anything, she just wanted to cry herself to sleep. As soon as she woke up, she would go find Solstice. She didn't care if he was on the other side of the ship.

Comments

[Mixolydian Grey]

6037769 You're way too sweet. <3

[Mixolydian Grey]

6037888 It's also possible that overediting resulted in prose that doesn't flow because it's been nitpicked to death. Hopefully this isn't an issue beyond the first handful of chapters. I felt like it flowed better once all that business on the bridge was dealt with and the plot moved on to the issues that occur in transit.

[Mixolydian Grey]

6037942 No. Oops. Google Docs is dumb.

Edit: Fixed! Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

[Mixolydian Grey]

6038017 :D

What was off about the prose? Did it seem clunky/choppy/artificial/forced? One thing that sorta happened in the workflow was that I kept thinking of all these little things I wanted to add, but I couldn't just have them appear out of nowhere, so I had to go back and mention them. This led to a lot of surgical insertions of a sentence or two in previous chapters, whereas most of the later chapters were written stream of consciousness and then only edited a little bit.

P.S. I promise I won't rewrite it again, no matter what you say.

[Axan Zenith]

6038049

Hm. Artificial might be a good word for it. Stiff, maybe? I remember what I liked about the beginning of the original draft was how it thunks you down into this really natural scene with Lennox and Solstice working on the door, and slipped in the setting and exposition bit by bit as they work. It was an excellent hook. This one still gets the point across, but does it a little more bluntly, flat out telling you a lot of the major backstory bits.

That being said, everything after that bit in this new draft is fantastic. Eagerly awaiting more.

[Mixolydian Grey]

6040667 Thanks for taking the time to respond to my comment. The issue of (how much/when) backstory is revealed could be a subjective matter of taste. I'm not quite sure which I prefer, myself. Glad you like the rest, though!

6040949

6041581 I accidentally had a bunch of paragraphs centered, but it's fixed now. As for slow, painful deaths... Stay tuned. Also, thanks for reading!

[Walabio]

I hope that you should finish the story soon. I really like this.