Extra-Vehicular Activity

by alamais

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You blink, and shake your head, wondering what kind of questionably legal magi-memetic hooks the PSA must put in those videos to make the memory so clear.

"Yeah, right," you mutter. "I’ll just call up my local Accord officer, no biggie."

Pulling up the alert details, you feel your heart skip a beat. 'Hybrid exotic matter vacuum chamber detected. Emissions consistent with 0.92 kg antimatter ±13%.' Despite the video memory being so vivid, you know more about antimatter from random chats with Twilight and Pinkie. Enough to understand that the aliens that built this ring could now be considered certifiably insane by any known civilization.

You don't know nearly enough to speculate what kind of experiments they might have been doing that required so much of the stuff, but there's no question now as to how the ring still has power, no matter how long it's been here, abandoned.

It takes some 'totally kinda mostly almost sorta legal' override fiddling that Pinkie taught you, but you manage to get the alert to go away. You also get a target icon added to your overlay. You take a deep breath. Cable. You're here for cable. Just don't poke the antimatter, and it'll all be okay.

You pass back through the melted door, into a downright cavernous space. The ceiling is high, at least twelve meters. No labs here, no rooms, not even separate equipment storage that you can see—just in-place tech, most of it still active. The antimatter containment is right near the center: a featureless black cylinder that your overlay is warning you not to let pregnant mares within three meters of. There are other cylinders around the room, some of them with tiny wires running around the surface, some of them complex messes of pipe, others looking more like crystal formations you'd see in the Empire.

Wandering around the periphery of the chamber, you decide it's a very good thing Twilight isn't here, and she should not be told about this, nor allowed to come here. She'd never leave.

That crystal formation looks like it's melting, the drops flowing downwards from some pillars, but upwards from others, slowly building new formations on the opposing sides. It's beautiful, but for some reason you have the feeling that it's watching you, so you stay clear.

You pass by an innocuous-looking device, but as you close to within two meters, you feel something ripple over your body. It feels like every atom in you is about to go its own way, like you're falling, then rising, then going sideways, and then all at the same time. You blindly stagger away, shaking. Your overlay belatedly pops up, 'Unstable gravitational lensing array. Avoidance recommended.' "Yeah, thanks," you gasp out.

Recovering, you move on. Before you know it, you're almost at the far side of the room. You're looking warily at a clear tank filled with bubbling fluid. Floating in the fluid is a chunk of meat with wires and tubes piercing it from all sides. The meat is slowly pulsating. The tank is slightly elevated, and so it's while you're looking up at the poor blob of flesh that you notice something out of place.

Up till now, the ceiling, floor, and walls in this station had appeared seamless. Even wires and pipes seem to blend right in, almost as if this station had been carved from a single piece of…whatever it's made out of, or poured into a mold. But from here, looking upwards, you can see a slight break in the material of the ceiling, the straight line standing out on a ship full of organic curves. It's a bit closer to the center than you'd like, but you flit your way up to the ceiling.

It looks like, here, the plating was cut, in a square. There are camouflaged bolts—invisible from afar, but one of them wasn't tightened quite enough, leaving the tiny little dip you saw from the floor. You set your hoof grips onto the ceiling, pull out your toolkit, and have the panel off in a moment, hanging precariously from a single bolt you didn't quite unscrew all the way. A peek inside isn't very enlightening, and you briefly ponder the open door that leads to the other half of the ring, but decide this is at least worth checking out first. You climb on in.

You immediately regret this decision. No matter how spotless the working areas of this station might be, this service area is much like any other: dusty, dark, and smelling a little of mildew from the humidity. You pop a couple of flares off, revealing a twisty little maze of passages, all alike.

The panel opened into a small junction, giving you four directions in which to travel. You pick a direction that keeps you at roughly the same distance from the center of the chamber below, turn your flashlight on, and start moving.

You haven't gone five meters before you find a way upward, and you take it, feeling like a stereotypical pegasus. There's a very light breeze blowing through this run, and it's refreshingly free of that spidery smell. You take a nice breath, then move on. In a couple of places there appears to be damage—nothing significant, just like someone larger and heavier than you was moving through here, and carelessly banged into stuff.

You've gone up another two levels and maybe 15 lateral meters before you see it—a cable! It's thin, but long, running off into the distance in both directions. It looks…newer than the other equipment you've seen in this ship—whereas nearly everything else has looked like an integral part, this was added on, attached with some frankly flimsy looking brackets. You keep a damper on your excitement, and give it a scan…'Live wire, unknown quicksilver alloy, 0.72 GA, 0.1 VDC, exceeds specification'.

You don't dance, but you can't hold in a little squee. You just have to disconnect it, and you can get the heck out of here! Easy peasy.