Chapter 91
Seal the hull breaches 54%
Twilight rested on a medical bay cot. She couldn’t have said how long she slept, only that her body was barely working as it was and if she didn’t sleep, she would’ve died instead.
Twilight heals all bashing damage and all damage incurred by exhaustion.
Waking up surrounded by her unconscious friends and coworkers certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience, but at least she woke up. The air was still flowing. Cozy Glow had failed in her work.
She ate emergency rations beside Sunset Shimmer. Fluttershy hadn’t left her patients and didn’t seem terribly interested in breakfast.
“We’re not leaving until we patch up the ship,” she said, over the fresh bar of pressed oats. This was one of the new ones they’d made on Proximus B, rather than the ancient ones sealed away in reflective silvery packaging for an unknown number of years. The taste was earthy and fresh under her tongue, a reminder of what she’d left behind. And why she needed to fight so hard to get her friends back.
“It’s not rational,” Sunset said, in that infuriating ‘I know better than you’ tone she’d had since she was Celestia’s other apprentice. Her older, smarter, better in every way apprentice. The one who had set out to become an Alicorn and had a real chance of achieving it. “Your stowaway might’ve been clever with her hooves, but she wasn’t an engineer. All eight critical structural junctures are perfectly sound. So long as we don’t go near any atmosphere or a radiation belt, we can fly just like this. We’ll get those holes patched long before we get to C.”
Twilight could imagine Spike’s eyes watching from behind her shoulder. There were dozens of cameras in this medical bay, and they’d all be pointed at her right now. “Maybe if the Equinox was just a ship, we could do that. But I know you’ve been hearing that voice in your head. That’s one of my crew, or he was.”
Sunset’s expression grew uncomfortable. Twilight recognized this too—she was in territory she didn’t understand. Sunset reached to one side, scratching at the junction between her shriveled torso and one of her other implant legs. By weight, she was 80% mechanical herself, at least.
Twilight seized on her silence. “Spike gave his life for this mission. He’s the reason Cozy didn’t destroy the Equinox completely. Now, for reasons outside his control, he’s almost become the Equinox. He feels its pain. We can’t fly without repairing him first, and that’s my final decision.”
Sunset opened her mouth, and Twilight spread both wings, silencing her. “I’m still the captain of this ship, Sunset. I’m entirely in command of this mission. I respect what you know, and everything you’ve accomplished. But you won’t be taking over this position or ordering me to do anything. Are we clear?”
Sunset nodded curtly. “I think we’re clear, Twilight. I can see you haven’t changed. And neither have I. The difference is, I was there when Equestria needed me, and you were lost in space.”
Twilight winced, but she couldn’t let it bite her. She hadn’t had any power in her confinement here. If she’d been able to be in Equestria when everything happened, she would’ve done it in an instant. “Why don’t you tell me all about it while we work?” she asked, tossing the empty wrapper into disposal. “You fixed the air recycler; I assume you know how to weld emergency plates?”
Sunset didn’t argue further. Half an hour later and both of them were in internal no-ox suits—thin plastic versions of the EVA suits, without any of the insulation against heat or radiation. Well, Twilight was, anyway. Sunset had Rarity’s EVA training, and all she brought was a little backpack with an air cylinder and her concentration to hold a spell.
“I’ve designed a plan to seal my internal space as rapidly as possible,” Spike said over the radio, the instant they’d dressed and prepared. “The docking ring has the worst damage by far—I think Cozy forgot about Unicorn teleportation and thought that would making boarding and disembarking impossible. If you seal it off, I’m only detecting five other breaches we need to deal with. Unfortunately there are others, others we’ll only know about once we seal the big ones and we can start depressurizing. But smaller holes will be easier to patch.”
They set to work. There was plenty of emergency plate in the cargo bay, enough to patch far more of the Equinox’s external spaces than just the holes Cozy’s explosives had made.
“So tell us, what happened to Equestria?” Twilight asked, once they were working. Not together—Twilight didn’t really want to work alongside a pony like Sunset. But if she’d been trusted enough to be made captain, she could trust her welds.
Sunset didn’t answer for a long time. “Well first there’s your mission. While you flew off to Proximus, the Mercury Forge finally became a thing, building ships got way easier after that, which is bucking fortunate considering what came next.”
Twilight waited with bated breath, her torch hovering in the air in front of her, unused. “Which was…”
Are ponies immune? No. Resistant? No.
“Darkness,” Sunset Whispered. “Worse than anything you fought. Worse than nightmare moon, worse than… well, you get the idea. Really, you should be thanking ponies like me who lived out in the rim, because if it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be any Equestria. Every rebel and refugee and outcast who wanted their own rock instead of living by your rules, we started dying. But only on one side of the system. Not all at once—it got the young and old first, and the weak. But it spread, a creeping, invisible death.”
Twilight remembered I҉͢ŅS̡͞Í͟Ǵ̕̕͝H̸̢̀T́҉̷͞. She had seen this darkness, spreading across the stars. It might’ve been the thing the Signalers wanted to warn them about in the first place. But hadn’t that one been faster? Maybe the signalers were stronger than ponies. There could’ve been a wake through the thaumic field. Or maybe she was completely wrong.
“We had some, uh… some conflicting translations of the signal figured out by then. But the only translation that gave us any hope was the warning. The signalers weren’t threatening us, they knew something was coming, and they were calling us here to offer help. Your mission was dead by then, long failed. We didn’t know if it was safe. But we didn’t have another choice. My ship—we were sent ahead. Proximus was directly away from the danger, that couldn’t be a coincidence.”
“Ahead of what?” Twilight asked weakly, slumping to the floor and dropping her torch. As though leaving her family behind hadn’t been bad enough, now Equestria itself was dead? Why even keep working. “We can’t evacuate the system. If something is killing everypony, and we can’t stop it… they must’ve all died.”
“Well… I don’t know,” Sunset admitted. “I know there were ambitious plans, based on some of the latest advances in cryonics and thaumic fusion. But they were just plans, and I was preparing for my own mission. We had a traitor on board—” she trailed off. “But that isn’t important. I was going through your logs—you really should’ve protected some of this, by the way—you found my locational transponder. That device I was carrying, that was how I was meant to find the Equestrian expedition, if it arrived. The entangled spells can only be cast the once, and then they collapse. But it’s fine you used it, because it’s in system! They made it—straight to the most resource-rich part of the system! That’s why we need to go there now!”
Twilight could set a course when they finished patching the Equinox’s holes, or…
1. Wake up her crew first, somehow.
2. Gather anything left behind on Proximus B first. (note, most resources have been ferried by regular supply shipments. Only camp infrastructure and the Equinox’s land defenses remain)
3. Go as soon as the hull is repaired.
(Certainty 205 required)
Stats
Page generated in 0.053 seconds
Total duration
673 users online
1,013,471 hits today, 2,280,440 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
That last option deeply concerns me...
I think the formatting is borked.
Also that last option is... concerning. Does that mean Sunset is lying, or is the Hunger trying to splinter her and Twilight. Maybe Twilight can use her new unhappy mind read powers?
Let's set a course for Proximus C first, and try to wake the rest of the crew en route.
Can someone please explain me Sunset's mission?
I had re-read it serveral times already but I still don't get it.
Equestria discovered the danger after Twilight has launched, and send Sunset to Proximus to do something? And somehow Sunset arrived much earlier than Twilight (even before Twilight had lauched!).
Sunset had carried some kind of transponder which is designed to find some Equestrian Expedition; an expedition wich made it to Proximus C somehow without anyone noticing...
I'm very confused right now.
I voted to wake her friends first.
I suspect we might need the stange device from the planet to do so; which means we can't leave earlier.
Also, more hooves helping to fix the ship.
I agree with Marker. Set course for Proximus C, and wake up the crew while we're traveling. I vote Proximus C.
9670952
Way finding for a colonyfleet. I think.
Rolling for insanity....
...3...
S͓̙̗̬̣̎̏̄̋͛ͅH̓͑̂̓͗͌E̬̩͔͕͐͂̔̇̀ͭ ̫̙̲̝̳͖̰I͇̙̗̠ͦ͌̉S͓͎̉ ̴̲̣̜͌ͅL̓̎̉̾͋҉̦͚̰̥͇͔̲Y̛̖̠͔͎͉͖̠̏ͩ̓Ỉ̼̮̞̤ͧͪͩͩ͐͌Ṋ͔̗̎ͪͤͮ̃̽͘G̡̘͓̰͓͈̰̈́̆̾͑̃!̯̙͈̙̩͉͊͛̂͗͆
Well if its that important, you should have said in the first place! Set course for Proxima C.
It takes, what, a couple of weeks to get there? Plenty of time to wake the rest of the crew.
Welp. Looks like I know what I'm gonna sink the next few weeks of my life into.
It's time for the vr chat arc we need to get in there and sort out the drones from the crew and get the crew safe
Hmm. All things considered, trying to wake up the crew en route seems like the best option. Though... yeah, that's a grim picture Sunset's painting. If she is telling the truth, it's all a fairly moot point... as far as they know. There could be factors at work neither knows about. We'll see in time.
9670952
There's definitely some kind of time screwiness involved. We don't know precisely how long Spike napped during the initial transit from an outside reference frame.
I would say getting to the ship of refugees is important. But so is having a full crew to assist in saving all those ponies. We'll probably have to come back to this planet eventually, it seems like the story is keeping it all in this system.
But still a problem concerns me. If the Signalers worked out a way of not being eaten. Then where are the robotic survivors? It occurs to me even if the Signalers might have found a way of being unpalatable to the Hunger, it still probably didn't save them. I imagine the nano-transformation isn't a fix per-say, but a part of it and incomplete.
That all being said. I'll vote on getting Twilight's crew back. Sometimes when it comes to these choices, we shouldn't expect side projects unless specifically mentioned in the choice. So I'm not expecting to try to wake the crew while on route to be an option in this case. Better to have the crew when we get there, then not have them and rush to a situation when we'll need them and not have them.
Wake the crew. We need the manpower (well, marepower) as well as the expertise of the full crew to make this as smooth a repair job as possible before moving at all. We also should probably salvage what we can of our base. Those resources will more than likely be life savers.
Let's get the crew back up, yeah? Critical repairs are done, but we should restore the crew before we go any further. More ideas, more options.
9670952
Well Sunset and her crew got to Proximus way before Twilight because somehow the Equinox took 400 years to get there when it should have taken 40. There was some time distortion when they entered the system
Good job, Spike. You're the best dragon ship we could ask for.
Neat.
Crap.
I feel like the most critical time limit we may still be working under is probably rescuing the crew, so I say we attempt to address that first.
9670918
Hunger... or insight?
Think you want “repressurizing”
I vote wake the crew. We’ve been burned enough times by false or misleading information that it’d be ridiculous to face this without a full company.
Awaken the crew first, then get the weapons before deciding to go to C. Because even kf sunset is telling the truth, this isnt the kind of shit you go off and do half cocked. You want a full and fully armed crew because if the way this story has been going is an indicator, shit is going to go south fast
She’s a liar, calling it. She’s way to excited to be going their for minerals. The rest of her crew disappeared...it’s more likely something destroyed them there
9670952
It sounds like Equestria developed some sort of FTL drive in the interval between Twilight's mission launching and Sunset's mission launching *and* there's been some sort of timey-wimey business; Sunset's mission didn't launch until after Twilight was deemed lost in space (due to lack of communications, with the signal cut off that we voted to not do shit about), yet arrived first by hundreds of years.
(I say it's both because while Sunset doesn't appear to have realized just how long she was in stasis, she clearly *isn't* surprised that her mission arrived before Twilight's "lost" expedition.)
Either that or Sunset is from an alternate universe where Twilight's mission just flat out failed, but Sunset is *assuming* the Twilight she met is her universe's copy. After all, at this point we have no backstory for Sunset in this universe, and canon Sunset hasn't even returned to Equestria versus EqG. They definitely need to compare notes on time and stuff.
If ponies are already on "the most resource-rich part of the system", why haven't they made contact? Rushing over to an oddly-silent area with minimal resources yourself is asking for trouble. And the fact that sunset is refusing to explain why it is so imperative to get there ASAP is troubling. Much like Node, actually.
Option 5: Twilight uses her mind reading powers to see if sunset is lying to her.