The Equestrian Starliner

by computerneek

Chapter 13

“High-speed methods were used for the bridge, as Command personnel are on the bridge. Other areas will be cleared by transporters as needed; otherwise, all areas will be cleared by more efficient physical and/or mechanical means.”

“Ahh.” She clambers up into her seat, turning around to sit in it proper. “Hmm… If everyone that comes aboard is going to be turned into a pony, we’re probably going to want to modify these seats to better accommodate our more equine forms.”

“Orders confirmed. Note: Four minutes ago, Space Lord Matthews requested a private video conference, with personal flag, at your next convenience. Would you like to take it now?”

“Huh? The simulation didn’t catch that?”

“Request was correctly anticipated in simulation earlier; in simulation, opportunity for video communication did not arise until after he placed a direct call. As such, the request was not mentioned.”

“Right. Then sure, I’ll take it- but, uh… Secure connection, and don’t filter my appearance… and when we start, replace my video stream with some image or another? I’d like to get him ready before I reveal… kinda like I did in the sim, actually.”

“Orders confirmed; placing private call, personal flag set. Ringtone confirmed.”

“Thanks. Next time, alert me of that kind of request as soon as you can, please.”

“Orders confir-.”

She blinks; at the very moment Athena cut off, the screen cleared, showing her father, sitting at his desk.

He raises an eyebrow, looking at his screen. “Oh?”

“Hi dad!” she calls out.

He blinks, and smiles. “Ahh, Skyla! Thanks for returning my call so quickly, though, uh… did I catch you at a bad time…?”

One of the displays around her command chair lights up, showing her outgoing feed: A navy blue screen, the ship’s logo occupying the center… and white text at the bottom. Commander Skyla Matthews is not presentable at this time. Please wait.

She lets out a small chuckle, and shakes her head. “No, you’re fine.”

He shrugs. “Oh well. So, while you take care of that bedhead of yours-!”

“Dad!”

He chuckles. “Oh please, even I get bed hair. Sometimes it’s bad enough I worry I’ll terrify your mother with it if I wake her up before I straighten it. So, how’s it been going up there? Nothing falling apart yet?”

“Yep, everything’s going fine. Bit quiet, actually.”

“Quiet?” he asks, an eyebrow rising incredulously.

It’s true- on a brand-new starship, ‘quiet’ is a term usually reserved for the other side of the airlock door for the first month or two, sometimes more. She nods. “Yep. Um, I’m going to have to ask you to swear to secrecy about that, though.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

She nods slowly. Not that he can see.

“Alright. Whatever it is, it’s safe with me.” He touches a few keys, then raises his eyebrows. “Aaaand, you’ve already got us on a secure channel. Good thinking.”

She chuckles. “Thanks. Anyways, to explain the quiet… It’s all pretty secret, so…”

“No problem.”

“Well… it’s all because of a… strange energy, residual from the testing cycle. It’s been on exponential decay ever since she got back, but you know what that means.”

“It’s not hurting you, is it?”

She shakes her head. “No, it’s not, as near as we can tell. Well, as near as Athena can tell.” She sighs. “The problem is… it’s not an inert energy, like the warp flux produced by a Distortion Drive. It behaves as such, and was believed to be such, until I came aboard.” She scowls at the control panels in front of her. “Heck, it might even still be an inert energy form, just one that we can interact with. When I stepped aboard, my body absorbed it, and… adapted. That’s why it’s so quiet up here- the same has happened- well, is happening- for the rest of the crew. They’re all still asleep, in the middle of the, um… adaptation process.”

“Hmmm,” me mutters, steepling his fingers on his chin. “What kind of… adaptation is it?”

“Well… aside from the, uh, difference in appearance, my body now makes more of it on its own, and…” She takes a deep breath, then chuckles. “And getting clean has become crazy easy.”

He raises his eyebrow. “Crazy easy?”

“Yep. All I have to do anymore is get wet… and shake it off. Just a gentle shake.”

He blinks. “That’s… strange.”

She nods. “You have no idea. I don’t even have to worry about shampoo- or scrubbing- anymore- this energy does it all for me!”

“Oh...kay. You mentioned a difference in appearance?”

“Yep. The whole rinse and shake dry thing works for my wings, too.”

“Your… Wings.”

She nods. “Yeah. I’m still trying to get used to them too.”

“So, it transformed you somehow? Did it turn you into a bird of some kind?”

She lets out a laugh. “Nah, pretty sure I’ve got too many limbs for that. I have confirmed my wings can hold me up, though… if only by falling into the swimming pool several dozen times before I figured out how to glide.” She shudders.

“So… you just, sprouted wings, or something?”

“Uh… not exactly. I’m… Well, I’m now a pegasus.” She touches the control panel, activating her video feed.

“A… pegasus…” He blinks, looking closer. “Looks more like a unicorn to me.”

She spreads her wings slightly, making them clearly visible. “A little bit of both, I guess. The horn came in later, though- not part of the adaptation… transformation process. Some strange issue with the transporters, I think.”

“The… transporters.”

“They’re like teleporters,” she states. “Only, apparently, they give you a horn as well.” She reaches up to touch hers with a hoof, and sighs. “In simulation, the horn gave me telekinetic and teleportation powers… In the real world, I’ve tried both, and neither worked.”

“And that’s not hurting you… how?”

She sighs. “That’s the confusing part. Remember what I said about getting wet and shaking dry?”

He nods. “Yes?”

“There are chemicals that can do that without this energy. There are no chemicals that can let me do… Uh…” She looks around. “Athena, I need an object. Doesn’t matter what.”

“Orders confirmed,” the ship answers instantly.

Her father watches patiently for about two seconds before it appears.

A momentary burst of white light, and the oxygen canister from a long-endurance space suit lands, upright, on the floor in front of her seat. She reaches down, lifting it with one hoof. “That can let me do this,” she states. “Flat hoof- no frog or whatever, like real horses- but I can still grab onto stuff as if I had fingers.” She pauses, glancing at the cylinder. “Though, I wouldn’t have been able to get my fingers around this before, either… Wait.” She looks closely at the pressure gauge at the top, then holds it at arms length- or forelegs length, depending- to swing it up and down a couple times.

She looks back at the screen, where her father has raised an eyebrow. “It’s a charged canister,” she states, before she returns it to the floor, once again right-side-up. “I… I guess it makes me stronger as well. There’s no way I could have swung forty kilos around like that before!”

“So, all in all… you can still do everything you could before, despite a slightly different appearance- plus some, from the wings, and whatever strength thing that is.” He tilts his head. “I wonder if that magic hoof-grab thing would work on the wall?”

“Uh…” She tilts her head slightly. “It did in simulation, but I haven’t tried it in the real world yet. Um…”

He shrugs. “Wanna try it now? Looks like there’s a wall behind you… and I’m a little curious, to be honest.”

She blinks. “Uh, sure, why not?” She hops off her command chair, trotting around to the wall in the back of the bridge, and closes her eyes. How did it work in the simulation, again?

She lets out a breath, draws in a new one. Easy: In the simulation, she’d felt her grip on the wall… and on the floor. Here, she doesn’t feel either one.

So she decides to try walking up the wall.

It works.

She doesn’t feel anything strange in the wall, like she did in the sim.

She pauses partway up, looking “up” at the screen. “It works,” she states. Then she jumps off the wall, twisting midair to land on the floor and trotting back to her chair.

“It does,” he observes. “Do you know if there’s some way to get that… extra ability, without the appearance change? Or to disguise the transformation as nothing at all?”

She shakes her head. “Athena can make me look human on a call, but when it comes to in-person, there’s about nothing we can do.

“Darn.”

“It’s no biggie,” she states. “Athena’s got so much junk piled into her we’ll figure something out.”

“Well, yes biggie- it means I can’t come get transformed and go back to work the next day.”

She lets out a snort. “The... process takes all day anyways.”

He sighs. “Well, you mentioned the junk piled into her- what kind of junk?”

“Well, she’s got artificial gravity, for one- and I’m fairly sure we’re not spinning or something. For two, when the last flight came aboard, I used some kind of neural interface equipment to remote-control a humanoid android and pretend to them I’m still human. For three, the transporters. Four… I don’t know yet.” She sighs… then blinks. “No, Four, whatever Athena used to know that I’m now forty-eight percent human, genetically. And flat nothing either bird or horse.” She smiles at the screen. “So, yes, we’ll find something… Wait. You want to be… transformed?”

He shrugs. “Sure, why not? I’ve always dreamed of flying without a plane or parachute- and besides, from what you’ve shown me, it’s really nothing but an upgrade we haven’t figured out yet. I can’t imagine who wouldn’t want that.”

“Oh, I can.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Oh? Who?”

“Most of the world. Remember when I mentioned the simulation earlier?”

“Yes, the one where the horn was useful?”

She chuckles. “Yes, that one. That was a full-service simulation I ran with Athena, covering the next few months. In the simulation, I figured out how to make a U-turn on a dime at just about mach one before this conversation, thanks to a simplified flight dynamic because we didn’t know enough about it. In the simulation, we revealed the whole transformation thing when the next flight comes aboard, in about… what, six hours?” She checks her display. “Six and a half. After that, the ship was placed on quarantine by the CDC. A couple months later, we were running out of food, water, and fuel with which to make it, so Command convinced us to go to the surface… took us hostage, tried to steal the ship. Sent assassins after the Space Police.” Sigh. “That’s when we stopped the sim.”

“... Okay.”

“And while the simulation confidence on the way this energy works has been going consistently down since we did it, how’s the simulation confidence on people’s reactions, Athena?”

“Simulation confidence on CDC and Black Fang reactions ninety-nine point nine eight percent. Updated simulations with new data on thaumic energy behaviors show little to no difference in attack timing, method, nor effectiveness, assuming revelation is made in similar manner and at similar time as in the original simulation.”

She blinks, and looks back at her dad. “So there you have it, why I want it kept secret.”

“... Ahh. And all these people that won’t know they’re being transformed until they are?”

She shrugs her wings. “They’ll have to live with it. We’ll find a way, at some point, to make us human again- but until then, we’re not really losing anything. Athena’s onboard manufacturing capability is more than enough to make us new EVA suits if we need ‘em- and even then, she’s got so many drones and small craft we probably won’t.”

“What about small craft maintenance?”

“Those drones. And, if we really want to do it ourselves, all her bays are pressurizable anyways.” She glances down at her hoof. “I don’t know if the magic grip thing will work through a suit, either.”

“... Alright.”

“My main concern is that, once we get this thing crewed and everyone becomes everypony, this thaumic energy has already shown a reduction in decay rate around me, in addition to my production. Thus, it’ll build up in here, unless we find a way to reabsorb it into the power grid- and I’d hate to find out what it’ll do when that happens.” Then she blinks. “Wait, you already know, right Athena?”

“Affirmative. Once shipboard densities reach a level approximately five thousand times greater than current maximum, thaumic energy will penetrate this vessel’s passive shielding and, through observed response to gravity, descend to Earth.”

“Meaning, once we get fully crewed and sit around long enough, we’ll start raining magic down on Earth… and everyone on the whole planet will eventually be transformed.”

“Affirmative.”

She looks back at the screen. “Which might be a good reason to make a voyage to the world this energy came from. She’s got a second and a half or so of sensor data from it- and even that is enough to decide they know more of how to use it than we do.” She smiles. “Who knows what they could teach us.”

He nods. “I’ll have to make sure you get that, too. Might want to hide at a good distance when you get there, though- maybe use some kind of passenger liner to get close. Wouldn’t want them to think you planned on attacking them.”

“... True. Athena, what can we do?”

“This vessel is equipped with cross-spectrum stealth and wide-area holographic disguise capabilities. This vessel can easily be disguised and used as a passenger vessel.”

He blinks. “Or, that works too, I suppose. Anyways- are they still stonewalling your crew?”

She shrugs her wings again. “A little. I just found crash test dummies all over the place, though- little call to the Commissions Branch, he authorized me to incinerate them and is going through the motions to both expedite crewing operations and to delay our first exercise.”

“All over the place?”

“Yep. Some fifty thousand of them- but Athena’s pretty good at moving them around, so it only took a minute to clear the bridge.”

Comments

[Booster Spice]

Dont like to dream? Here at Happy Real Life Simulations we can make your world come Real To You.

Now, we need to get the Space Lord on board. Anyone know if The Raccoons are still running the Rocket Racket?

[computerneek]

9454002
I have no idea how to respond to that.

[LostArchivist]

Nevermind my previous question. You answered it already.