A Home in the Black

by FuzzyVeeVee

Loose Ends Part 1: That Fragile Bubble of Joy

That Fragile Bubble of Joy

* * *

Port Medusa's elevator system had never been quiet. Even long ago when the orbital station had first been built, the hydraulics and gears had hissed and clanked. The decades since had added a wavering clack of metal on the tension-brakes as it moved past each deck, shaking the platform. While a reminder of the enormous redundancies built into its system, the noise made conversation difficult, if not impossible, for those on board.

Sometimes, Volatility Smile wondered if that had been deliberately left unsolved, given the elevator went all the way to the office of Director Sweet Alyssum and emerged directly into the ‘Mistress of Medusa's’ reception. Denying an incoming party the opportunity to easily communicate in the last minutes before a meeting would throw a spanner in anyone’s plans. In all, a brutally subtle way to kill off last minute pep-talks for a trade agreement, contract negotiation or diplomatic petition. The sheer slyness of it would have made her smile, were it not preventing her from expressing her displeasure at that very moment.

Frowning, Smile waited impatiently for the elevator to return her and Hair Trigger to the small-ship docking level. Finally, it stopped. The heavy doors hissed. With a grinding of metal on metal, the cramped elevator opened up to return them to the musty, rowdy noise of a station's main thoroughfare. Metallic clanking was replaced by eager hubbub as heavy suit-clad spacers and armoured mercenaries filed past, heading to and fro between the docks, bar, or the assorted vendor outlets scattered around the ring-shaped deck. Floor plating clattered, drones whirred, maintenance teams’ welders crackled from behind wall panels. To Smile’s ears it was the sound of the Periphery: the expanse of chaotic opportunity.

Now, finally, she could raise her voice.

“Stars above, Hair Trigger! What was that in there? You took the local system job? I told you before that the other one was better!”

The small unicorn trotted out beside her, removing her hat to run a hoof through her matted mane. A few days within Medusa's near-windowless metal corridors and static-laden air was enough to frazzle anyone. She inhaled through her nose and slid the hat back on. Her voice was clipped and steady. “Because it's the best for us right now, Smile.”

Volatility Smile made a short, bemused laugh, if anything just to try and cut herself off from snapping out an angry remark. “This one is lower pay, it's in this system, doesn't even need Claudia because it's so small, and it’s from a client who doesn't have any follow on work. This is a waste of our time and docking fee. What are you thinking?”

Hair Trigger started trotting forward, idly moving to the fruit stall by the elevator. She sighed, and Smile felt a flare of annoyance at the Captain's dismissal of the issue, before the unicorn suddenly snapped around, eyebrows arched and temper flaring.

“Because,” replied Trigger, drawing glances from passing merchants, “there's more to it than just the business! The crew needs a rest. In fact, YOU need a rest! When did you last take a day off that I didn't order you to?”

Volatility Smile thought for a moment, keeping her face still in the dull light. It seemed to deaden the glint of her body, making her crystal glow more an expression of irritation than of grace. She felt envious, sometimes, of the minotaur ability to stand up with hands on hips to project the correct aura of being so perturbed.

“There was that time I slept in for two hours.”

Trigger rolled her eyes. “And you worked through your breaks to make up for it. The breaks I tell everyone that they can take whenever they want so long as the work's done?”

“A good schedule is a good discipline,” Smile countered. “But that's nitpicking and sniping at points. Trigger, this job's a quarter of the income of the other, and Claudia's not going to pay herself off. You want to be in debt to a crime lord your whole prime? This would set us back by two weeks’ worth of work!”

Hair Trigger just groaned and began walking again, toward Crazy D's restaurant. Weaving between the sweaty, oil-stained crowds in the windowless corridor, she spoke over her shoulder. “Look, we've just come back from over a month in space seeing things I used to think were just spacer-tales! Kerf - who is injured I might add - is even worse than you for not taking a break and I can't get him to just admit it. Eleven's been cooped up inside Claudia the whole time without a chance to feel free, and if Tami doesn't get a chance to buy some new canvases then I'm worried she'll start painting the hull or even us next.”

Smile caught up with her, and found the unicorn looking up to see eye to eye. She had a hard look, and Smile felt a hoof clap her upper leg. The small unicorn gave a mirthless, tired grin. “Take some time. You're more high strung than usual. We just need a shuttle to deliver the goods. I'll take Tami, the two of us will pop over, make the trade, and be back before the night cycle.”

“High strung!?” Smile expostulated, her voice rising in pitch. She could see Tami and Eleven ahead, sitting on stools beside Crazy D's food bar, just shy of Medusa's marketplace outside the hangar. The hippogriff, blissfully enjoying some time dockside, was pointing at the new sheen-black multiband on Eleven’s foreleg. Verbena Mint was hustled in from the other side, both her and Tami directing the confused bright pink unicorn through something on the device. Between excited shouts and points, the three of them were sharing one of D's ever esoteric meals. With Eleven’s cybernetic spine hidden below one of Verbena’s spare denim jackets, the trio seemed nothing more than a group of hyperactive besties in the bustling marketplace of metal and rust.

At the sight of the three of them briefly glancing up from behind the meaty scented steam billowing out the eatery, both the crystal pony and unicorn took a second to stare at one another and let their heated discussion simmer down a touch. Smile groaned and rubbed her forehead.

“See? Headache,” Trigger said, then forced out a grin, pointing up at Smile's face. “Take a couple days. Do what you feel you need to. Hell, go on a holiday somewhere if you want. Tam and I have this. It's just a shuttle. We'll get another job after it.”

The crystal pony sniffed sharply in return, but she just saw Trigger wink at her.

“Or take the time to send a letter to wherever it is Whis-”

“Enough!” Smile sighed sharply, unamused by Trigger's humour, and waved a hoof. “All right, all right, fine! What's done is done now; I doubt Alyssum likes her crews coming back to change their minds anyway. I'll see what the NLR has, if I can find anywhere these days. It'll get me out of space for a while at least.”

She almost added 'away from you' for the headache remark, but bit it back.

“But you should consult me on these things, rather than just...I don't know, deciding in the spur of the moment and going over my head?”

If Hair Trigger saw the bait she didn't rise to it, just shrugging and turning away. But her cheeky grin turned to a grumpy droop at her humour failing to calm Claudia's de-facto second-in-command and she felt her voice still raise all the same. “Whatever! It's settled, Smile! We get an easy, low end, bill-covering job and we all get a chance to reset our batteries a bit. You look out for the balance books, I'll look out for the crew.”

“Are you implying I don't care abo-”

“You know what I meant!”

“Sometimes I'm not sure!” Smile felt a rush of anger well up. “Do you want to explain i-”

She stopped short as the frantic talk of the younger members of the crew quietened down for a moment. Both glared at one another, realising they might be overheard.

“Ah, no no no! See it's not 'just my space life!' It's one word!” Verbena pointed at Eleven's screen. “See? Like those other tags!”

“But they're four words!” The pink unicorn jabbed her own hoof at it, the multiband moving around almost too frantically for the others to follow. “See? Just and my and space and life! Four words! There! Are! Four! Words!”

“But not here!” Tami added with a squeaky giggle, catching Eleven's hoof and deleting the spaces with a series of taps. “And add a hashtag before it!”

“WHY? It serves no purpose!”

“It lets people hunt the tags...” Verbena spoke in a deadpan tone as though speaking to an out of touch parent. “How else are you going to get seen?”

Eleven bit her lip, raising one eyebrow high. A drink floated to her mouth and she took a loud suck on the straw to calm down. “I can't get seen! I can't even share this publicly, you know that, Tami.”

The hippogriff threw an arm around Eleven's shoulders, jostling her with a sly wink. “But someday you might! And you can share it on Claudia's internal network with us anyway. Then we can see it!”

“But we're all here already!”

“Exactly, say cheese!”

Tami pushed out Eleven's hoof, and Smile couldn't help but feel a requirement to cool her jets in front of the mirth and utter exasperation of the innocent young unicorn. The two young mares squished Eleven's head between the two of their own, Tami pulling a giant, cheesy smile while holding a drink in shot. Eleven's expression was akin to a rabbit stuck in headlights with squished cheeks. Finally, she made a haphazard grin and depressed the multiband’s photo icon with her magic.

Smile's bemusement quickly evaporated into a disgruntled sigh at noticing Verbena was adding a duck face to it. She rolled her eyes at the flash of light capturing the image.

“Kids these days...” muttered Smile, before turning back, eye to eye with Trigger. There was an unspoken line: Not in front of the others. Separate now. Drop it. Smile did just that, turning away toward the ship.

Behind her, she heard Hair Trigger lean on one of the stools. After a moment, Trigger reached out to give Tami a small clap on the thigh.

“Ah!? Oh! Captain! Hi! We were just-”

“Teaching Elly essential survival lessons. I saw. Nice work.” She winked at the very perplexed looking Eleven. “Now, get that flight-head of yours on, Tam, and get down to the docks. We've got a quick job to do, you and I.”

* * *

Hair Trigger couldn't deny it. She enjoyed the docking bay of Port Medusa.

Its cavernous open space offered a relief from the stuffy corridors of Medusa's inner deck areas for one, and there was always the view into space through the atmospheric fields covering the enormous gaps where ships would enter and exit. The distant rock fields of Saphiban II’s rings drifted smoothly in their colossal dance around the gas giant, the yellow sun visible in the far distant void. There were the heavy, satisfying sounds of ships and crews, a familiar and homely ambience of engine test cycles winding up and down, crude swearing that you could always learn a new word from, and garbled (often nearly unintelligible) PA announcements of arrivals and departures.

But more than that there was one critical feature she would rarely admit out loud. This was this very hangar where she had first met Claudia. Her ship. Her captaincy. She found that thought a touch too self-important to say it aloud to any of the others, but it had been here where she'd finally looked up at a vessel and thought 'that's mine'.

It was here she'd 'made it', and become a Captain. With a capital 'C'. The very thing she'd left the home fleet to prove she could do. Now, she could see the crew hustling around that same ship, loading crates of cargo from a trolley onto a small shuttle sitting in the larger vessel's shadow.

Her crew.

On her orders.

What a feeling.

Unwilling to simply stand and observe, she closed the docking slot control panel in front of the vessel, having registered the docking fee for an extended stay, and trotted back over toward them. The shuttle was a common Confederacy model, like many in the Periphery. Small, flat angled, gun-metal grey, with two rearward nozzles either side of a two-door hatch to its small cargo section. In all it was barely larger than a planetside van. A half faded symbol of a rocket moving between two asteroids was marred on the side of the angled fuselage, denoting its old life as a mining operation transport. That had been obvious anyway. The dents in its thicker frame sections made that all too clear.

Through the smaller crew hatch in the side, she could see Smile was still fuming as she uploaded the job location from her multiband to the shuttle's systems, sitting in one of the two seats up front. The interior was oddly small for something designed by a majority minotaur civilization, likely an export model for other races. Just a cockpit and tiny living area for short trips.

Trigger gave the crystal pony a wide berth.

She glanced at the inventory. Around eight crates of assorted vacuum sealed 'fresh' fruits, tinned Zebrahan curry, delicate treats and a single crate of rather intriguing looking NLR-originated 'Moonrise' rum. A specialist delivery for a wealthy client, it seemed. Someone who wanted the good things in life, no matter the origin or distance.

Around the back of the shuttle Tami and, surprisingly, Eleven were bringing most of the cargo over from the trolley. The former was stumbling and working a small push-loader to carry one of the awkwardly-shaped boxes, the latter was casually floating twice that much behind her with magic. Eleven worked with a playful skip and dance, following the marking lines of the dock floor with precision steps to some silent beat, and stacked the crates in a triangle. Then in a rectangle. Then in a triangle again, before huffing once a breathless Tami brought one more over to the pile and dropped it 'wherever'. The magical prodigy simply relit her horn, having to start the shape all anew, much to the hippogriff's exasperated stare.

The sight brought a smile to Hair Trigger's face. No need for words. No need to interrupt the antics. Loud and proud as she often was, Trigger well knew the value of just letting a moment be.

There was, however, a different sight that she saw around the far side of the shuttle, one hunched into one of the engine panels. A big calico griffon was pulling an engine nozzle apart, giving each nut, bolt, wire and component a forensic level of examination. A polishing kit hung off his bandoleer-style work belt, along with the looped end of a manual he'd acquired from somewhere. Probably his own esoteric collection.

Hair Trigger knew that level of detail in his actions though. Triple checking instead of ‘merely’ double checking. It meant something was worrying him. Briefly she considered the ongoing frustration of the recent injuries to his back. She could still see the protective dressings around his midsection, but something in her gut told her this wasn’t the problem. Stepping over the fuel line for the ship that was siphoning a measure from Claudia, she approached from the side, deliberately knocking her hoof on a loose floor panel to make a sound before nearing. “Hey Kerf, a'ight?”

The griffon turned over a heat shield in his claws, gently scratching the lathed ring around it to identify any abnormalities. “Just a check up, Cap'n.”

Hair Trigger raised an eyebrow but lowered her voice, sitting down beside him and taking a brief glance for herself. “I saw you check that same part before I went to the little filly's room ten minutes ago.” She paused. “What's wrong?”

Slowly, the huge claws reinserted the piece into the spill duct, twisting it one quarter around to lock it in place, before taking up a wrench to start screwing it in again. His beak opened, shaped ready to say it was nothing, but Hair Trigger raised a hoof to make him hesitate. At the sight of it, the galaxy's poorest liar sat back. “Just lately, Cap'n. A lot's happened. When stuff happens, I just feel like doin' stuff. Er, does that make sense?”

Hair Trigger nodded gently. She could hear Tami squealing with laughter about something on the other side of the ship, then Eleven joining in, but she kept her eyes on Kerfuffle. “Sure does, big guy. All the stuff with Eleven, your sister's operation, your OWN operation on your back, Sidewinder...”

“-an' I just feel like a lot of it weren’t needing a mechanic when it mattered, much as I was willin’.”

Trigger could hear the reluctance in his words. Kerfuffle was rarely in a visibly low mood, too modest to even want to be a hassle for anyone else. Hair Trigger had started to spot when he was overworking.

“And you feel like you've just gotta do what you can while you can. To keep us safe? Giving her a once over?”

Kerfuffle hesitated, then sort of nodded, then thought about it again. “Not quite, Cap'n. The shuttle's fine, nuthin' wrong with her. But I always feel better knowing an' it lets me feel like I'm not just an idle griffon for y'all.” He scratched the side of his head, and stood back up after refitting the piece into the nozzle of the engine. “Also, I got both of you some food from the marketplace earlier.”

Hair Trigger actually leaned back a little, surprised. “Well aren't you just-”

“An' I got a medical kit too from Claudia.”

“Well-”

Kerfuffle kept scratching, looking away. “And from how it looks, she'll pull to the right if you use both engines at equal measure so I left a sheet for Miss Tami on it to-”

“Hey!”

He stopped, looking down as Hair Trigger lightly knocked his forearm with her hoof. She had a small smile. In the few seconds silence, the ribcage-shuddering rumble of an Avalonian ship powering up its engines sent a stiff breeze between them that carried small rags and bits of dust whirling in the hangar. Hair Trigger didn't take her eyes off him. “Listen. You've done good, Kerf. Okay?”

Slowly, he nodded. “I jus' wanna make sure I've done all I can and-”

“You do.” Hair Trigger interrupted him again, before straightening up her hat. “Eleven's doing good, hell almost too good. Your sister's on the mend. Sidewinder's not gonna bother us right now. It's all good, right? There's never a time you're not useful.”

“Well...”

Hair Trigger smirked and angled her head forward to cut off whatever his exception might be. “All. Good. Relax.”

Kerfuffle sat back, then gently nodded. “All good, Cap'n. Taking that's an order?”

“Damn sure is. Now c'mon, help the rest out with the cargo.”

“Aye, Cap'n.”

They turned away, and Trigger moved back around the shuttle, pausing briefly near Eleven. She watched Kerf gently move over and wordlessly grab Tami around the midsection, lifting her up to let her stack the last crate on the top of the pile. The young pilot giggled as she got it up there, patting one of Kerf's hands with hers afterwards.

Smiling, Trigger leaned over to Eleven, feeding a hoof around her shoulders.

“Hey, Elly?”

“Uh?”

“Keep an eye on Kerf, will you? He's worrying.”

Eleven looked at the griffon, then at Trigger, then back at Kerfuffle, then back again. She blinked once, then twice, then nodded happily. “I can do that! Easy! He said he'd show me something cool on the station. I doubt it's a sub-millimeter interferometer so I have no idea what it might be! So I was going to go see whatever it is with him!”

“Good girl.” Trigger ruffled her mane, making Eleven yelp and wiggle her head away. Trigger could only guess what 'cool thing' meant, but Tami had been trying to teach him to make puns so the ice cream vendor did come to mind. Either way, she knew she could trust Kerfuffle to keep Eleven safe.

Slowly, Trigger took a long breath as Smile emerged from the shuttle and Kerfuffle sealed the cargo door. Just like that, with the shuttle empty for them and all cargo loaded, it was time. Marching forward, she clapped her hooves on either side of the nearest, comfiest hippogriff, looking around over her shoulder.

“Well, let's get to it then. Tam?”

Tami yelped and looked up from setting the hatch lock with a broad grin, leaning back into Trigger. “Wha! Captain?”

She giggled, and Hair Trigger nodded to the crew hatch.

“Mount up!”

* * *

The interior of the shuttle was small and spartan - cramped, but workable. Two seats with well worn black fabric either side of a twin sided touchscreen control console marked the 'cockpit'. Behind them was a thin, open space that extended back to the internal hatch to the cargo compartment, making the whole thing like a small 'T' shape with the wider cockpit up front. Altogether, the entire crew section was only about twelve feet long. The narrow living space behind the seats was lined on one side with interior controls for environmental systems and on the other bore a small set of locked compartments. The drawers and pull-out duckets held food, magazines, and other odds and ends a small shuttle crew might need. Just enough for a few hours in the void, but stacked high with more brought from Claudia via caring griffon express. A liquid-heating boiling vessel and water outlet studded the wall above a fold-out surface for food prep. Behind them were two benches, one either side of the walk-space, barely three feet apart. A few blankets were set on each, folded in the way only Kerfuffle ever did. There were even some magazines.

'Astronomy of the Thousand Year Future Theory', and 'Magic Lessons: How to Impress!'

The first made Tami giggle to see, a common theory discussed galaxy wide as to why so much seems to happen in thousand year increments. The second however made the hippogriff burst out laughing while Hair Trigger knocked a hoof into her own face at the title. Kerfuffle was always so considerate, even if that consideration led him to take things at face value. Tami stepped inside and chucked herself into the pilot's chair with a delighted little squeal. Two individual grips extended from either side of the control panel, moulded for hands rather than hooves.

“Oooh, twin-hand controls! Not gotten to use these in a while!”

She fed a hand into each of them, giving a little tug back with one to hear the satisfying whirr of a nozzle moving on the outside of the hull. Then the other, then both, twisting them around and around with a happy giggle. Satisfied, she reached out and turned over the auxiliary docking power to full ignition with the customary 'big-clacky' Confederate line of switches. A brief shudder pulsed through below her as the shuttle powered up, a growing whine following it.

“Now be good, you all!”

She heard Hair Trigger shout at the others behind her at the hatch. Tami leaned back and over, frantically waving through the closing metal.

“Bye!” That was Eleven, waving back.

“Take care, Cap'n! And you Miss!” Kerfuffle was pensive, offering a smaller one, until a pink telekinetic field grabbed his arm and swung it more rapidly for him.

There was no other voice. Beside them both, Smile just nodded, and Tami felt a pang of awkwardness. Smile and the Captain hadn't been seeing eye to eye. Not one bit. Sure they'd tried to hide it, and Tami appreciated that, but she wasn't blind.

Hair Trigger waved, then clanked the hatch shut. Twisting the vacuum-lock, she dusted off her hooves and leaped over to land in the chair beside Tami.

“Right then! Door's up, cargo's in, crew's fed and watered. Guess we'll get underway, shall we?”

Tami laughed lightly and grabbed the comms handset from the ceiling. “Aye, Captain! I'll make the departure call to control then.”

Hair Trigger just grinned. “Maybe it'll be the cute one who answers.”

Tami felt herself stiffen, and she shot the grinning Hair Trigger a look as she started talking. “Medusa control, Pad Three, shuttle associated to Pioneer class 'Claudia' ready to depart in a cross-dock departure, confirm?” She took her thumb off the button and groaned. “Captain there are a dozen controllers working in Medusa so I don't think-”

A youthful, sing-songing flighty accent replied. “Barriers up! Claudia's shuttle all good to go. That you Tami? Have fun!”

Tami could feel Hair Trigger's grin boring its way into her skull. With a shaking hand, she raised the link. “Y-yes... Uh, thank you!” She hooked it back onto its handle, and grabbed the controls as the great doors ahead of them began to open. Barriers descended, blocking hoof traffic between the pad and the door. She muttered from the corner of her mouth. “Not a word, Captain.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“It was statistically unlikely!”

“I didn't say anything!”

“I just like his accent, okay!? It's cute!”

“See, now YOU are saying things!” Trigger cackled, making Tami simply blush, groan, and inch the shuttle forward.

A feeling of weightlessness kicked in for a second as they rose from the hangar floor. Vector engines small enough to be safely operated at lift-power indoors blew up a halo of thin dust, before the clumsy, non-aerodynamic craft inched forward, passing through the shimmering shield to enter the void. The sound of the engines suddenly vanished, dropping to the internal vibration and hum only. Internal lights sprung on automatically as the ambient light dropped and the black filled the broad, curved window. Neon beacons flickered around the shuttle in the dock, directing them to head out and then 'up' to pass away from the cargo freighter 'highways' at a slow speed. They passed by glowing advertisements on the station's hull, lines of waiting vessels in holding patterns, and even a few bits of debris being scooped up by bulky exosuits. Medusa was an old station and, while strong and enduring, occasionally some half-forgotten part of the massive structure would let off a small chunk of metal or sealant foam that would need collected by the ever vigilant custodian spacewalkers.

Slowly, Tami felt her eyes adjust, widening out as the low-light gave way to the colours of the black itself. The faint blue of the gas giant that Medusa orbited. The faint, drifting clouds in the far distance left behind by Medusa's orbit. The subtle hues of each star. The red-silver ore-heavy rocks that occasionally drifted into view from the planet's rings.

Who ever said space was empty and dull? She would never get tired of a launch.

Never.

Hair Trigger was watching her, and Tami felt her cheeks burn as she noticed it. It was a familiar thing; she knew her Captain loved seeing her happy to be out here, and she equally knew that her face made all sorts of silly expressions of awe when 'in the moment'. 'Spacedreaming', her father had jokingly called it. Trigger even used the term once herself.

Briefly, Tami had a moment of mixed endearment and terror. Had Trigger and her father been communicating?

“So, how long?” Trigger asked, leaning back in the chair and resting her hindhooves up on the side panel.

“Should be an eight hour round trip, Captain. Four there, four back, plus delivery time. We're just meeting them on the other side of Saphiban II.” Tami clicked the map screen hanging between them to show the orbital path away from Medusa. The client was just passing through, and clearly wanted to avoid the docking fee at Medusa to get what they wanted. Small shuttle deliveries were common for that. Indeed, she could see four others heading the same way ahead of her right then on the local area scanner, close to leaving Medusa's flight control zone.

Hair Trigger smiled, clearly beginning to relax for the first time that morning as the quietness of the shuttle took over, leaving both of them alone. “Well, just some good quality time then, huh?”

“Captain?” Tami looked around.

“Y'know?” Trigger shrugged. “Like on Claudia's bridge when it's just us? The chats. The jokes. The stories. Our little special times. Only this time no-one just turning up to interrupt. Just you and me. Eight hours to kill.”

Tami thought through it as she took the shuttle on a new heading, angling it down to move around the passing of a colossal fuel-tanker, almost skimming its bulbous, yellow-striped underside at a sub-hundred meter distance. The Captain was right. Some of her best memories had been simply sitting on Claudia's bridge, manually flying, while Hair Trigger was there to talk to. They were times of simple comfort and fun, both at her pace and her captain's in equal measure: just the two of them in the quiet of space.

All the same, some expected, almost traditional banter had to be said. She giggled and gave a modest beam of a smile. “Sooo, does this mean I'm getting teased for eight hours then, Captain?”

Trigger leaned back, staring out at the tanker they were passing, but one eye made a slow wink. “Oh, you will not be disappointed, Tam. That's for sure.”

The pair shared a gentle, familiar smile, a quiet moment, until Tami saw a red flickering illuminating the side of Hair Trigger’s face. Blinking, she barely turned her head before a bright red master alarm in the middle of her console activated and a buzzer cut in with violent, startling volume. Tami shrieked, shocked more by the sound than anything else as her entire control panel lit up. She glanced up, terrified she'd come near to a collision, but the tanker was even further away than before.

“The hell is going on?” Hair Trigger yanked her hooves back down, looking over the console. The communication channels came alight, voices all talking over one another. Control, cute accent included, frantically became unintelligible as dockmasters and ship captains shouted wild, panicked demands for answers. Tami scanned the alert code, and her eyes went wide.

“It's not a collision alert. It's...oh. Oh no. It's ionizing radiation outside the hull, it must mean-AH!”

Even as she spoke, there was an incandescent surge of light from outside the window. To the bow of the supertanker, an enormous, crackling line of white, burning magic was forming, less than half a kilometer from Medusa's superstructure and their own shuttle. Finally, one voice broke through, rough and hollering from the tanker itself.

“M-space rift! RIFT!” a panicked stallion shrieked. “Our FTL's overloaded and self activated! We can't stop it! Helm, full reverse burn! Now, helm!”

The arcs of light ripped apart, reality peeling apart like giant eye opening, taller than it was wide. The tear in space was bursting at the seams, forming a rift into the incandescent, shifting colours of the Æther. The tanker was burning its retrothrusters, and Tami felt the controls bite as the mighty engines buckled and shook their little shuttle. She struggled with shaking hands to keep it steady, but the ethereal rip in space-time only kept growing and growing, the instability of its pull heaving the shuttle up like an aircraft hitting turbulence. Its luminescent effulgence lit up Port Medusa as ships and shuttles scattered in all directions. Tami could swear she saw individuals fleeing from the station's observation windows, before the light became too blinding and she squinted to barely even see her controls, let alone anything outside.

“Tami!” Hair Trigger yelled in shock, staring at it in horror. “Get us out of here! Move! Anywhere!”

Tami couldn't even read the dials. She threw the controls forward and slammed the engines to full on muscle memory alone. Forced back into her seat, she tried to turn at full-burn, but the shifting, blazing colours were so intense, filling the window. Filling the shuttle itself. No matter where she turned her eyes, it was like staring into the sun. Even when she looked away, after-images danced painfully across her vision, making it hard to determine speed, or direction, or anything.

There was a vicious slam and the shuttle rocked, redirecting violently enough to throw them against the consoles with a dull clang to their starboard. She screamed. She'd impacted on the side of the tanker. Proximity alarms bared over the master. Then another one she didn't recognise. The rift was arching over and around, casting claw-like strands of burning light over the tanker's hull. She could feel its tug on the shuttle, like the dread hollowness of an event horizon gripping them, pulling them, draining their velocity. Hull segments were being torn off the tanker’s surface. She could see antennas and dishes being stripped and pulled into the opening maw.

“Tami!”

She tried again, feeling her teeth grit hard, and hit the engines to-

“TAMI!”

The engines overheated - a stall coughed through them. Then they went dead.

The shuttle was grabbed. Its velocity gauge spun out of control, and Tami's stomach lurched as the shuttle turned end over end. Light poured in through the window, and she screamed helplessly. Blues, greens, reds flared and chaotically danced in a brightness that no manned shuttle was designed to witness as the rift expanded to its full. The scanner died. The pilot-aid died. The controls yanked away from her hands, and she felt her whole body being stretched. Stretched further than it feasibly could. She felt sickness, dizziness, a migraine, all at once in a few mere seconds.

The last thing she felt was being grabbed from the side and roughly dragged down to the floor, before the whole shuttle turned over and over on its axis, tossed like a fishing boat in a hurricane before a great wave.

* * *

Klaxons from forty years of refits and replacements angrily competed for audio dominance all across Port Medusa. Every compartment Kerfuffle bounded through had its own horrific wail, or a different-coloured rotating light above the doorway. He had Eleven's hoof tight in his grip, resulting in her awkwardly bouncing on three legs behind him. It stung him to drag her so harshly, but he wasn't going to leave her alone in this.

Crowds of spacers, mercenaries, station workers and merchants collided with security drones and dockworkers coming the other way. The crush swelled around the elevator compartment as dozens of creatures hit the call button again and again despite the security chief, Gerhard, pushing and shouting at them that it was offline. A minotaur rammed past, knocking even Kerfuffle's heavy frame back into Eleven and three others. He felt a panic rise as he almost lost grip of her, and dug in hard to the pile to roughly drag her out from underneath the fallen ponies and sling her over his back.

“Sorry, Miss! Get up safe!”

Eleven didn't reply, she just stared around with wide, scared eyes as she gripped his neck tightly and leaned her head on the back of his own. He could feel her shaking. He was shaking. Everything was shaking. The floor broke the trend and shuddered with a ripple of impact. The walls creaked as the station settled again. Using his bulk, Kerfuffle elbowed his way through the swarm around the elevator, pushing further in until he could see the arrivals hall on the opposite side of the station’s ringed level. Here there was more space, with creatures clustered in small groups around the edges or near their departure lines. Some swerved around him as he ran on all fours toward the grand screen mounted by the reception, the one he knew was linked to an exterior camera.

The moment he saw it, he felt his gut twist and all his worries grip hold.

On the flickering screen, half of a supertanker rested against Medusa's buckled hull. It had drifted out of control, catching between several of the station's lower levels and heavy frames after impact, like the Iron Jellyfish had caught its greatest prey within its tendrils. The front half of it, mercifully the part he knew was usually devoid of any crew, was simply gone. The ship had been sheared in half - bisected along a laser-fine line - letting cargo containers, globs of fuel and loose components drift out of the glowing white-hot gaps into space. Silent lightning danced between fragments of molten metal floating past defused generators. Beyond it, just in front of the cut section, he could see an unnatural shimmering of reality still fading out, sparkling among the debris like an organic firework. The aftermath of an M-Space rift having opened and closed.

And of the shuttle bearing two of his closest friends, there was no sign.

* * *

Her head hurt.

Everything else did too, but her head had managed to identify the fact a lot faster and thus claimed more of the sympathy.

Unfortunately, for its trouble, it also earned itself the brunt of her telling it to shut up and let her open her eyes. There was darkness. Darkness and confusion. For a moment she even forgot who she was until the feeling of her soul being turned inside out, folded up and given a good ironing eased off enough to let her think clearly again. It was like waking up from a dream and experiencing the vague, stuffy-headed murkiness between reality and fantasy.

For her efforts, though, it wasn't her will that got her to finally open her eyes. Rather, it was the sensation of being grabbed and shaken in a panic, and the barrage of a muffled voice. Colours stung her retinas as she blinked, and saw cream and orange looking at her. Another blink informed her that the colours were actually looking down at her. Claws gripped her head and shoulder, and big blue eyes fearfully stared.

“-ain!”

Hair Trigger screwed up her eyes again and forced her back to work, trying to move toward those eyes.

“Captain!”

And then, in a rush, clarity returned to her senses like a cold shower after last calls. Gasping, she swore colourfully and loudly to the cosmos at large, knowing it wouldn't care if she used a curse as a noun, adjective, and verb in the same sentence. The shrill wailing of an alarm hit her first, like needles in her ear. There was a loud hissing behind it, like air being sucked through a straw. Every ten seconds or so a blinding ball of light passed from left to right behind the hippogriff. Groggily, she fixated on Tami and yanked herself up.

“What's... What the fu-”

She held her own skull still before it could flop over on a weary neck, holding herself steady. Eventually she went through the process of shaking her head, heavily regretting doing so, and then electing to just stay still instead. Blinking rapidly, she began to see the shuttle properly. The light was a white sun 0 a giant, burning snowball passing by the front window on the shuttle’s drifting spins.

And beside that, a terrified, panting hippogriff frantically trying to unpack a hull-sealant kit with hands so shaky that she couldn't get the safety catch off. The sight, and the hissing, stirred Hair Trigger's confused brain enough to finally shake the cobwebs and act on instinct.

“Here!” She reached forward, grabbed the pack from the scared pilot, and ripped the lock off of it. Two canisters of self-sealing foam tumbled out, and she tossed one to Tami. Trigger spun and stumbled across fallen racks of cutlery and drink packets, looking for the source of the hiss, tracing her hoof around bulkhead joins and seals. Every spacer knew the routine: seal the hull before even thinking about what's happening. Feeling a flow of air against her fetlock, Trigger bit her lip hard and let the sharp pain focus her mind on the job. Leaning close, she saw the hairline fracture between the door and the main fuselage and rammed the nozzle of the device into the gap. Depressing the top squirted a thick, creamy foam into it, one that within seconds was forming into the consistency of a firm putty, and within a minute would turn to a resin-like solid. Behind her, she could hear Tami doing the same somewhere else. Neither spoke. Neither even looked. Immediate response drills took over. As casually as they lived on Claudia, these things were ingrained in every spacer.

Only after the worrying slurp of air finally fizzled out did Trigger reach over and viciously punch the offending alarm button to shut it up, and finally turn to the window to get a good look at what was happening.

“Finally! Damn thing!” she barked, seething, direly wanting five minutes alone with that tanker's captain and a heavy pipe, lubricant optional. “What were those plank-stupid bastards even thinking trying to-”

What she saw, however, was not the horror she expected.

The shuttle was spinning on its vertical axis, tilted at a gradually widening angle. Every few passes, the sun she could see winding by was moving further and further to starboard by miniscule amounts. But other than that?

Nothing.

There was no Medusa. No Saphiban. No supertanker or wreckage or fire.

They were simply in space.

She reached over and briefly touched the flight controls. With a small hum, a thruster on the outside squirted and the spin began to arrest itself, eventually stabilising the vessel a little more to put less force on the fractured hull. Moments later, the panel glared red, and announced the fuel lines were shot. Trigger swore as the thruster died; arresting most of the spin's momentum must have just used whatever was left in the line.

It didn't make sense. Amidst her headache, she thought of what happened. There had been an M-space rift. A malfunctioning hyperdrive on the tanker. They'd been yanked into it. But shuttles couldn't do FTL speeds - not this model at least. It made no sense.

“Tami? Tami, please tell me you know what the hell just happened?” She spoke up, turning.

What she saw behind her made her regret the firm tone.

The hippogriff was sitting on the floor, holding the empty sealant can to her chest, hyperventilating and quaking in delayed shock. Staring at the messy seal she'd made, she just turned the can over and over, fidgeting and sniffing.

“Tam?” Hair Trigger approached gently, sitting down just in front of her, reaching out to place a hoof on the side of the pilot's neck, and the second gently taking the can from her. “Tam? Breathe...”

“Cap-Cap-Capt-tain it's-”

“We're alive. We're unhurt. You're okay. Breathe, girl. Not your fault. Now, slowly. In?” She kept Tami's eyes fixed on her own with her hoof, turning Tami's head to see Trigger herself breath in deeply. With shaking gulps, Tami tried to copy her, and Trigger gently let it out. “Out.”

For the next few minutes, she sat there with her pilot. In contact. Trigger rested her hoof on Tami's blouse, helping steady her chest with slow, directed breaths. Eventually, they fell from multiple hundred a minute, to deep -albeit shaky- sucks of air. Tami nodded in a rapid little burst, holding onto Trigger's hooded top with tight claws. The hippogriff was sweating in worry, and Trigger could understand why. The same questions would be biting at her too. Just what happened back there? Where were they? But such questions were secondary to curbing the panic in her hooves right now. Once Tami was breathing in a way that wouldn't knock her out in a few minutes, Trigger gently pulled her in, giving a soft hug.

“S-Sorry, Captain...”

Hair Trigger patted her on the back, then let go gently and slowly. “Nothing to be sorry for. Far as I see it, whatever you did may have just saved our lives. What... What DID happen?”

Tami rubbed her eyes, staring at the window with worry. “It wasn't me, Captain. I...” She tensed up again, fear choking her. “I think we got skiffed.”

Trigger's brow furrowed. “We got what?”

“Skiffed.” Tami repeated the word and gulped deeply, her voice strained. She shakily got up and moved to the shuttle controls. After a moment to settle her own racing heart, Hair Trigger followed, sitting on her own side to watch the hippogriff pulling up the local scanner to send out a ping. For a few moments the user interface before her warbled with faint spheres moving out on the 3D plane of the surrounding area, but then it bleeped and returned nothing. Nothing but the sun, fragments of minerals, gas and celestial whispers. The sort of dead and silent environment one would see in deep space. Tami leaned back and whined, covering her face with her hands.

“S-Skiffed. It's an old term, b-back when M-space transitions for faster than light travel were still being rediscovered after the Wyrm Wars. The ships couldn't safely go deep into M-space, so they'd just sort of... sort of push into a rift a little, and then immediately try to exit. They'd use the brief surge of magic contained in there to eject them out the other side instantaneously, before they'd even really realised they were inside, rather than travel in it for hours. Much shorter range, but safer until better hyperdrives were developed. It's like skimming a stone over water, just magic, not water.”

Hair Trigger was far too sore and had too much tension in her headache to think too much on the science. As far as she knew you hit certain buttons, checked certain numbers, and then the ship did something insane. Like a farmchild learning their dad's tractor.

“But we don't have a hyperdrive on the shuttle.”

Tami took a sharp breath, looking at the mostly dead panel’s readout of the ship as lacking propulsion, lacking full comms, and lacking longer range scanning.

“Don't need it to skim. R-Remember when Claudia jumped without meaning to in the Countess' dock? How the crates got dragged along with us? S-Same idea. Just this was a malfunction. Whatever else got thrown in with us is probably spread like shrapnel all across whatever system we're in.”

Trigger felt a cold spike run through her veins at one of those terms. “Whatever system?”

The hippogriff turned, and her face was ashen.

“That sun?” Tami pointed, before it lazily rolled out of sight again. Her voice was strained. “It's not Saphiban's. In fact it's not a settled star-system at all. Not even a planetary body...”

She gulped, a whimper of growing, insidious fear in her voice.

“We're stranded in one th-that no-one uses...”

* * *

The crowds were insistent and rowdy. All across multiple levels of Port Medusa, there was shouting, demands, begs and questions. Smile hadn't seen anything like it since the trading floors back home, and this reminded her of those first days as an intern first witnessing the chaos of a stock market floor.

It was everything she could do to maintain composure and not become like those holding up interstellar passports or contracts and screaming with vitriol, demanding to be heard. Ships had been damaged or left stricken, requiring rescue after the rift's collapse had sent them spiralling off into the void. Three hundred thousand tonnes of goods had gone missing. The infirmaries were packed with casualties from collisions, vacuum exposure or even just getting trampled in the panic. A thousand jobs needed done to keep Medusa running. A rumour had raced around that the main power was nearly cut at one point. Smile didn't believe it - Kerfuffle had made it clear that wasn't possible with a single point of failure - but it only took enough people to think it to drive pregnant impatience into a needy frenzy.

But it wasn't any of that which made it hard for her. It was the news the engineer had brought back. Trigger and Tami's shuttle was missing, and the terrified gutshot she’d felt from that threatened every minute to overwhelm her into joining the cacophony of voices about her.

She couldn't give over to those worries. Not yet. She didn't have the facts.

And so the desperate search for information had brought her to be among the sweaty, heaving crowds of frightened creatures all queuing at the incident response centre that Gerhard had set up in a disused hangar to handle the sheer volume of petitions and requests.

She could hear each of the eight tables of security and dock control officers arguing with those screaming at them, and it made her want to scream back. They were arguing over a ton of wood going missing. Or a crate of toys. She gritted her teeth at how petty it had sounded through the hours she'd waited to hear about actual lives at stake.

The officer at the table she reached, a dark blue pegasus, had three portable computers running and even two headsets that he was alternating between regularly. He looked up, tired and weary.

“Nature of issue?”

Smile bit back the litany of complaints she'd mustered over the past hours. “Missing persons. A shuttle's disappeared and-”

“Party to Space Jammers Incorporated?”

Smile felt her heart beat quicker, leaning her hooves on the shaky table, unable to hide the eagerness. “Yes, that's it!”

He nodded curtly, emotionless after such a long day. “We know about it. We saw it disappear from local scans during the incident.”

Smile gulped, feeling hooves tugging at her from behind as impatient business-owners and families urged her to work faster. She ignored them. “...and?”

“No flight recorder signal for that vessel has been detected around the tanker, and we keep a record of any departing. So our working theory is that they've been skiffed. Jumped with the rift when it took the bow of the tanker.”

Eleven had theorised that in an effort to try and calm Smile and Kerfuffle from their worst fears. Now, it hardly felt much better. she felt her voice become terse. “You're saying they've been shot somewhere else? Alone? In just an orbital shuttle? Where!?”

The pegasus was already looking behind her, pausing to listen to one headset. “We don't know yet. Priority is being given to the ones devastated around the station to prevent further collisions from them orbiting around back into the station, and to locating the-”

“There are lives at stake, sir!” She bit in deep with the last word, articulating it in that age-old implication of 'you stupid idiot', her stance bearing over him. Security guards looked up at her from behind. “It's a short range shuttle! They're not intended to travel outwith a few hours!”

“And we'll get to tracking where it went, Miss. We have ships in immediate danger that need us now too. Please, we have a lot of others to see, we are aware of your-”

Smile wasn't listening. She had already turned sharply, having spotted a familiar face pushing his way through the heaving bay with a weary strength.

“Gerhard!” she shouted, elbowing her way through a couple of suited deer, hoping her working relationship with the griffon might get some pull. “Gerhard, we-”

The security chief’s claws came up, and he held a microbead in his ear for a moment, listening to some report. After a moment he nodded, muttered something and helped pull her out the side of the crowd.

“The shuttle?” he asked, and she nodded. He shook his head. “We don't know, but Medusa can track these things. Sort of. Did they have food? Supplies?”

“Yes, and yes,” she said, already knowing where this was going. “The cargo had food anyway.”

“Then give it time for their distress beacon to make it here - they take time even within a system - and we'll shoot you the coordinates. You can head out to pick them up yourself. Probably faster.”

“It's a local shuttle, Gerhard. Its beacon won't reach here.”

The griffon gave a genuine look of regret. “It'll hit a navigation probe. They're scattered all over these days; they all relay signals now. It's standard on all new ones.”

She sighed. “Not a lot of reassurance.”

“Sorry, I-shit...”

He didn't even say goodbye, instead hustling away to leap toward a scuffle developing, trying to shove two ponies apart.

Smile knew he was leaving the 'if' in there unspoken as to the beacon reaching anything and narrowed her eyes, feeling her impatience hardly settle.

* * *

“No, no, no, noooo no...”

Tami rocked in the pilot's chair, talons clawing at her own mane and cheeks. This was a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare.

Stranded. They couldn't be stranded. It was every pilot's worst terror. To be left out in the middle of nowhere with no means to rescue themselves. To be left alone in the dark. Helpless. She felt cold. She felt sick. She felt like she was sweating profusely under her clothing. She had a headache from frantic worry over what to do, caught between silence and screaming like a paradox of indecision. She would close her eyes, expect to wake, then open them and find it was real again.

Then Hair Trigger was grabbing her hands, holding them away from leaving small lines on her face. “It'll be okay-”

No it won't!" she screamed abruptly, the pitch burning her throat and making the unicorn recoil. She jerked, but Trigger held her wrists tightly. “It's deep space! Routes don't go by here! W-We're alone! In a shuttle! No FTL! The odds a-are-are it's not-it's not!”

“Tam!”

The sudden, firm crack of her captain's voice made her gasp and open her eyes again. She saw the small unicorn staring intently at her. Trigger wasn't smiling - instead she had a disciplined, well-meaning intensity to her stare that stamped out the panic with a word. After a moment, she continued in a softer, but entirely serious tone.

“You've checked the shuttle's diagnostic, yes?”

Tami sniffed, but nodded.

Hair Trigger nodded back slowly. “Do we have oxygen production?”

“Y-Yes.” Tami’s voice was meek.

“Is the hull sealed?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have water purification?”

“Yes...”

“Do we have food?”

She nodded, then felt Hair Trigger shake her wrist, looking for a response. “Yes! A-and in the cargo.”

“Do we have a homing beacon?”

Tami didn't doubt that Trigger well knew it was called a distress beacon. Her captain was avoiding certain terms for her benefit. Slowly she nodded, and then witnessed Hair Trigger's firm face turn to a softer smile, her grip loosening as she defeated the panic one point at a time. Her voice was suddenly very gentle.

“We have air, food, water, a secure shuttle, and a way to contact others, Tami. We're okay. Just got to sit tight for a bit, okay?”

She gulped, hiccuped and nodded, trying to resist any more tears. “Yes, Captain.”

Slowly, Trigger rotated the pilot's chair back to face the console. “It'll be like a little holiday, okay? Just you and I for a bit. Time to catch up. Just like we planned. Now, how about you hit the button that'll bring Claudia right to us, okay? Nice and easy, do what you gotta.”

In the quiet of the shuttle, Hair Trigger's voice was all Tami had to focus on. There was nothing else. Only the stars outside. The dull gunmetal of the bulkheads. The blinking amber lights across the console. It left her mind able to pick out every word and the reassurance they carried. Slowly, she reached out to the touchscreen before her and backed out of the navigation and diagnostic procedures.

“That's it.”

She felt Hair Trigger's hoof rubbing her shoulder and habitually leaned in, pressing her cheek down on it. Her heart was still thumping. Her lungs were burning from breathing so hard. Her head still throbbed as she drew up the emergency response panel, entered the confirmation password, and began scrolling through for the correct function.

And try as she might, she couldn't stop thinking about what might happen. Air and sustenance were fine, but the shuttle couldn't stay warm forever without its main propulsion. Small shuttles like these relied on their main drives for electrical power. After that it was just whatever was left in the batteries. Logic and the type of star ahead of them told her that they couldn't have jumped more than a day's travel from Medusa, and that the battery would last for much longer than that, but it was still an outcome that left her scared.

“Captain, the batte-”

“Doesn't matter. We'll be long gone home by then. Just focus, Tam. Focus.”

“But-" she started, worries bubbling up; what if the signal's frequency messed up if the equipment was out of date, or if solar winds interfered, or if a thousand other unlikely things got in the way.

Trigger cut her off. “Just relax, Tam. Work on what you can. Is it hard to do?”

Tami keyed the distress beacon, attaching a readout of the ship's current status and location to it, and began typing a brief summary of the current situation, known surrounding celestial objects, and their health. She'd had to type them a thousand times before even being permitted into a training shuttle at the academy.

“N-No. It's like muscle memory.”

She felt Hair Trigger move and paused to look at her. The unicorn pulled herself into the co-pilot chair and sat back with her hooves up again. She looked so relaxed, so utterly together, that it made Tami feel a brief sting of shame. How did Hair Trigger do it? How did she always push back the fears and the worries? She couldn't be ignoring them. Tami felt like she couldn't sit still at all, squirming in place, and yet the unicorn beside her was still as a day at the beach. She was so lost in thought, she almost missed what was said to her.

“Talk about something, then?”

“Huh?” Tami looked back up at Trigger's eyes, her talons tip-tapping away with heavy clacks on the decades old keyboard below the more modern refitted touchscreen, only to see her captain shrug.

“If you don't need to focus on that, then focus on something else. Tell me a story or something.” Trigger spoke with a gentle grin. “We'll be here a while after all. Hey, what about that boy you used to know? The one in training? Old flame? What was he? Unicorn?”

Gulping, the hippogriff turned back to the screen, looking over the paragraph she'd written, and began filling in the various drop-downs and checklists that any search-and-rescue would want to know. “Vantage? Uh, Vantage Vair. He was a pegasus, actually. Really? Him?”

“Mhm,” came the encouraging sound from beside her, followed up by a twirl of a hoof, an unspoken 'go on'.

Tami thought back. It wasn't an era she often went to these days. Months in space had been slowly teaching her to not linger like she used to. It was a work in progress to get by it, and coming to accept that it would take a long, long time of gradual self-care had been a hard but ultimately worthwhile lesson. But that said, Vantage wasn't one of the bad memories. He predated the awful period she'd been trapped planetside.

It was ridiculous. Trapped in the middle of nowhere, and the first thing Hair Trigger was asking about was a stallion? Of all the subjects? Now?! But all the same, Tami felt a compulsion to trust her captain’s tactics. She took a gentle, wavering breath.

“He, uh, he and I met in Basic Flight. He'd come from another continent so we didn't really notice each other. But when we both scored the top two scores in the initial few months, weeeeeell, that's when we got paired up a lot, sooo...”

Hair Trigger raised an eyebrow. “Who got higher?” Then her smirk turned into an outright laugh at seeing Tami's cheeks turn bashfully red with awkward modesty. “That's my girl. So, paired up? That when you two got close?”

The blush warmed Tami's cheeks, and she felt it only grow stronger. Gradually, the shuttle and the shock began to fade from her mind as she focused on remembering instead. Remembering others, to feel like they weren't just alone. She shook her head. “We were just friends. At first.”

“Well, duh, I meant-”

“I know, I know!” Tami cut in, then actually found herself laughing at the brief, friendly touchiness. An impossible, stupid laugh now of all times. “It kinda surprised me, really! When we realised it? The first time I messed up bad, he had succeeded at the same flight pattern perfectly. But he left the presentation for him getting a perfect score to come find me because he'd noticed I wasn't there. I just remember hearing my bunk room's door open, and he came right in. And the next thing I knew there was a foreleg around me, and feathers wiping the tears from my cheeks.”

She keyed the final declaration on the distress beacon, checked each safety confirmation, and saw the plastic topped switch spring open on the control panel to her side. With a sharp crunch, she broke the seal and depressed it. With a two stage tick and a high pitched electronic tone, the console displayed the words 'BEACON ACTIVE'. The application closed, leaving a bar on the side of her display denoting its status.

“From then on we just started to share things with each other. Talk openly. I spoke about my own problems because, well, even then I was pretty anxious. 'Skittish' is how my dad put it once. The worries every time a trial came up, or I floundered.” Tami smiled fondly, leaning back in the seat and staring out at the twinkling stars. “But I was surprised when he opened up too. He'd been made fun of too, y'know? It seemed so stupid to me! He's this tall, good looking pegasus of grey and navy blue with all the confidence in the world, what would he have to be made fun of?”

Hair Trigger just took off her hat, dusting it off in a hoof while she listened, and Tami saw the unicorn's cheeks push up briefly. “You'd be surprised what supposedly confident ponies feel inside sometimes, Tam.”

Tammani heard the words, but her mouth was already moving. “It was because he was actually an utterly giant nerd about astronomy! And I know that sounds odd at a ship piloting academy, but I mean he'd talk anyone's ear off about it for hours if he could until they were sick of it and he'd been holding it all in to not annoy people. But-”

“-you're someone who never gets tired of that. Of course!” Hair Trigger finished for her. “On account of being a giant supernova level nerd about it yourself.”

“Exactly!” she shouted, then paused. “Wait-Captain!” Tami sat right up with her exclamation, looking over just as Trigger doubled over in the co-pilot position with a cackling giggle. She leaned over and punched the unicorn on the shoulder, managing to get away with only a slight wince and an 'ouch'. She met Trigger's eyebrow waggle with a jokingly angry face, before cracking up. Trigger got up and moved back into the living area of the shuttle behind them, digging out something to eat from their packs.

Mere minutes since the skiff, and she was setting out eating like they were camping. Tami could scarcely believe it. With a gentle breath, Tami continued. “So yeah, we got closer... Real close. We started sneaking out after hours on camp to watch the stars and-ack!”

A package of nuts hit her in the face, making her yelp.

“And act like a couple adorable geeks.” Trigger winked, pouring a measure of water into the tupperware cups from the small vessel on the inside of the hull. “That when he made a move?”

Blushing, Tami lowered the packet and nodded. “We'd done it so many times. It was routine. But one night it just... I don't know what was different. There wasn't a shooting star; in fact it was cloudier than normal. There hadn't been any event that day. Just... Just suddenly he had his wing around me, and he looked down a-and then before I knew it his lips were...”

Trigger smiled as she moved from starboard to port in the cramped space of the shuttle, trying to locate some juice packets to flavour their drinks, hopping up on the bench side to reach the top cupboard. She made a little kiss in the air. “Aww, first time little tender lip pecks. Always a good memory.”

Tami just felt a squeeze on her heart, and a warmth on her cheeks. She shuffled awkwardly, winding her claws through her mane. “A-actually I panicked at thinking I was being too hesitant so I sorta, well... dove on him hard enough to bowl him off his hooves.”

There was silence, and Hair Trigger turned to look at her with wide, surprised eyes. Then the unicorn just burst into deafening laughter, sitting down and clonking her head off the side of the heating unit. It did nothing to reduce the explosion of mirth.

“He never let me forget that one,” Tami muttered to herself, hiding her face behind a wing as Trigger only laughed and laughed. She remembered the moment. The surprised squawk from him as they'd tumbled onto the decking together was one of the things she'd never admit still giggling about. She peeked from between her feathers, seeing her captain still spluttering and heaving for breath, and rolled her eyes. “Captain...”

“Snrk! Pffhahaha! Sorry that's just... Oh I wish I coulda' seen that! That's priceless, Tam! Oh he'll not forget!”

Tammani hoped not. A selfish wish maybe, but she still found herself thinking back to Vantage with fondness. After all, they hadn't broken up as such. Life had just taken them apart without any formal conclusion. He had gone to the League Navy's Officer School, while she'd taken the VIP Pilot Academy. There was no way they could have kept in contact, especially with the bleeding edge acceptance position he'd gotten from the navy. He would be off on classified missions or something worthy of the piloting skill she knew he had, likely impossible to contact.

She had tried. Occasionally.

Hair Trigger gave her a gentle shove, pushing through the thin gap between the seats to come back to the front and put the small snack together on the top of the controls’ housing. Tami frowned, the casualness crushing her reverie. “Captain! The job offer said no food up front!”

“Call the space police.” Trigger shrugged dismissively and chuckled again as she tossed a hoof-full of almonds in her mouth. “What a memory. It's good that it's, well, good!”

“Yeah, yeah... I'm sad about it sometimes, how we had to split up when we still liked each other. But really, it's... It's nice. That night on the decking. Or breaking records together. Or that final exam in the shuttle where we got paired up for the expedition test. Three days of just flying together from system to system...”

Tami took a long breath, allowing herself an open smile. She felt a lot calmer now. Given something else to fret over, something else to talk about. She looked down at the console and saw the distress beacon fully active. It was done. The process was complete.

Hair Trigger had kept her from panic by distracting her. She knew that, but she felt little shame. The terror was gnawing away at the edges still, insidious, searching for a way to come back to the fore. The worries about the battery. About distance. About everything. She turned to her captain, intent on thanking her, or hugging her to keep herself from thinking about it.

Instead she saw one of those trademark cheeky grins. Slowly, one of those blue eyelids winked, then waggled. “That time in the shuttle with Vantage, huh?”

Tami gulped. She knew where this was going. She cursed the one and half ciders plus one shot that had gotten her tipsy enough some weeks ago to let that story slip. That it was during the nights aboard that shuttle she and Vantage had gotten, well, 'close' for the first time. “Uh… huh?”

“Well, come on.” Hair Trigger leaned over, smile spreading wide. “Just us two mares here, Tam. Am I gonna hear the adorable touches of a more detailed 'first timer' story this time?”

The young pilot audibly gulped, shrinking back, before nervously laughing and shaking her hands. “What!? N-no, wait, people d-don't just... People don't tell all about their, uh, that!” She blinked. “Do they?”

Hair Trigger, seemingly content with the reaction, just chuckled, patted Tami's forearm, and leaned back to her own seat, taking a deep drink from the cup. “Nah, nah. It's fine. It's fine.”

Tami breathed a sigh of relief.

“I'll just talk about mine then.”

Tami gasped loudly and her eyes bolted wide open, her wings fluffing up in shock. She stared over the cockpit. “You cannot be serious. You are not!”

Hair Trigger didn't even seem to hear her. She rested the cup on her belly between both forehooves and sighed deeply, before raising one hoof as though to begin a speech, declaring loud and proud to the cosmos around their lonely little shuttle.

“So! I remember it started when both of them dragged my grinning, inexperienced ass into that room with a big black bed...”

Tami's jaw slowly dropped, and stayed open through many, many slow spins of the shuttle.

* * *

Kerfuffle watched Smile pace back and forth in Claudia's common room. The crystal pony kept staring at her multiband, grimacing, and then only accelerating. Kerfuffle didn't know much about what often went on in her mind, but even he knew that she rarely let her mane get as bedraggled as it was. Most of the day spent queuing in a stuffy, crowded hangar had left her ruffled and untidy. Her coat had even lost most of that radiant sheen she was so proud of. And much as Kerfuffle knew it was impossible, he couldn’t help but feel she’d put a trench in the floor if she kept pacing like this. He put down the welding torch he was idly taking apart at the room's circular table and sat up.

“Miss Alyssum'll get back to us, Mrs Smiles. She will.”

The crystal pony spun her head, making her foulard whip up and spin a quarter way around her neck. “Not quick enough! Do they just expect us to sit? To not know? So that we're forced to contact the Director's half-sister just to try and get anything done? It’s not like Whisper or Tundra are close by, even if they had some means to… Urgh!”

He grimaced at the intensity in her eyes. The same worries were deep in Kerfuffle's mind as well. Already Claudia felt eerily quiet with just the three of them, lacking her captain and pilot. More so with Eleven busy in the cargo hold, separate from them. However he just didn't show it the same way Smile did. Instead, before him sat a dozen tools that needed maintenance, but had just been too low priority to bother with normally. Now his hands felt endlessly idle, no matter what he was doing.

He looked down sadly, and saw her face soften.

“Oh Kerfuffle, I'm sorry. It's not you.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead, tightening the material around her neck again. “I just wish there was more we could do other than just wait! I'd have thought we'd have some standing maybe by now... Oh, they must be terrified out there. Poor Tami's going to be in a horrid state.”

The big griffon quietly picked up the torch again and tweaked the nozzle when Smile spoke; each part being laid down gently, like he might disturb this strangely silent version of Claudia if it clinked on the table. “Don't worry.”

He tried to push his face to look positive and heartfelt.

“I'm sure the Cap'n's doin' her best to keep her smiling.”

* * *

Tami sat aghast with wide, still eyes, her mouth hanging open, quiet as the void. Then she blinked and leaned forward slightly, face a mask of shock.

“So? Did he put them on!?”

Hair Trigger grinned and sipped her steaming coffee. “Oh? Getting invested now are we Tam?”

“Sh-shut up! You started this!”

* * *

It was some time before Smile's multiband pinged. She glanced at it and took a sharp breath, then launched out of her chair to gallop into the cargo hold, almost toppling it in the process. Smile barrelled through the hanging laundry between the crane and ladders and skidded to a halt. Whipcord muscles drove her to reach out and pull the rear hatch embedded in the large cargo door open with a heavy slam.

As the thicker, cooler air of the hangar rushed into Claudia's hold, she found herself staring at Verbena Mint waiting for her, barely having closed her mailing app. The green-maned teenage mare blinked in shock.

“Woah, you move qui-wha!”

Smile grabbed her by the foreleg, tugged her inside and closed the door with a kick of her hindleg. Across the bay, Kerfuffle and Eleven peeked curiously out from the common room, their faces masked with concern. Smile took a second to control her breathing and backed off a touch. “Sorry, lots on my mind.”

Verbena reasserted her pop-rock logo emblazoned top with a pat of her hooves. She looked worried herself, with heavy bags under her eyes. “No, no, I get it. I do. It's my friend out there too, Smile.”

Volatility Smile couldn't help her impatience. It had been almost a day. Stranded safely, or unsafely, it didn't matter. Getting them back did and she was already feeling the weight of responsibility resting heavy on her now Trigger wasn't there. Briefly, she caught a glimpse of what the captain must have felt so many times, and quashed it. That thinking was pointless right now.

“Well? Did you get to speak to her?”

Verbena held up her hooves, as though asking for a bit of time and space. She looked around, sucked her lip, and sighed. “I got to speak to her, but she's got a thousand things on her plate right now. I've never heard her snap at me like that before! Apparently some rivals are using this to make a move on her outskirts of power or something. Shares falling, ships needed to police the scattered cargo still drifting off? That kind of thing? Buncha hashtag-boring hashtag-whocares compared to this stuff but, well, you know my sis'.” She shook her head with a frown. “The best I could get was her agreeing to meet you tomorrow and- I'm sorry!”

Smile had already spun away to groan in a direction that wasn't right in Verbena's face. She held up a hoof, waggling it in an unspoken apology, then shook her head and followed it up. “Not you. Not you. Thanks...”

Behind her, across the hangar, Kerfuffle just sighed, deflating like a balloon. His shoulders tensed, then sank. Slowly, he let go of the door and wandered back to his tools at the table again.

From the doorway he’d just left, a pair of lilac eyes stared at him with quiet concern. Her pink hoof held her blue tail tightly to her chest. Eleven frowned at seeing the griffon like this, feeling helpless. His skills weren't relevant to solving this problem, and it was quietly hurting him.

She didn't like that.

Slowly, her tongue poked out one side of her mouth, and ran along between her lips like the progress bar on a supercomputer's algorithm computation window.

Then, once it reached the far side, her eyes lit up and she ducked away, cantering toward Claudia’s rear hatch.

* * *

Tami felt strange.

She'd just woken up a few hours ago, after tiredness had finally made her aware she needed sleep. Out in the black, and having forgotten to set a timer on their multibands, it was about the closest way to tell. After some time of Tami learning things about her captain that would make her blush for years, and a thorough lesson in stain removal from said stories, they had finally retired back to use the padded benches on either side as beds.

Now though, as they sat quietly in their second 'day' of being adrift, there was a confusing, conflicting tangle of feelings inside her. She'd whined the moment she woke up, having hoped she'd be back in her hammock and could have a good hug with someone else to forget a bad dream. But it was all too real, and Tami was far too well-versed in the realities of space survival to mistake the situation for anything other than one of extreme danger.

Yet seconds later, a mug of hot caramel-smelling tea had been pressed into her hands before the dread could take hold, stifling the reaction before it began with not just the warmth of the drink but also the warmer comfort of being with someone she trusted.

She looked up at her captain. Hair Trigger was using the boiling vessel to make another batch of hot water for the dry-food packets, her back to the hippogriff. She'd been trying to make it feel like a little 'you and I' time. A holiday. A time to 'chill’, kick back and just bounce playful nothings off one another as though it was all an unexpected mental health break. She'd never let silence reign for long in the shuttle, always coming up with something to say, or pushing Tami to talk, or going on a long ramble about something.

'How do you do it?' she wondered.

“How do I do what?”

Hair Trigger's head turned, one eye peering back at her, and Tami jolted a little after realising she'd spoken aloud without meaning to. Her eyes popped fully open, and she sucked at her bottom lip. “How do you stay so, y'know, grounded? Not just here. I mean in general.”

“Grounded? Pssh.” Hair Trigger blew a short raspberry, leaving the water to heat. Putting down a small dishcloth, she hopped onto the bench serving as her bed, directly across from Tami's. “Never been planetside for that long.”

“You know what I mean, Captain!” Tami smirked as she protested. “Like, how you're always able to compartmentalise stuff? About being open, or putting worries aside?”

“If you mean how I learned that? I dunno.” She upturned her bottom lip, spreading her forelegs with a dismissive motion. “Maybe it's not just one thing. Maybe it's growing up how I did. Lotta' brothers all wanting to prank and tease the only sister. You gotta let it slide eventually.”

Her voice was oddly wistful. Tami wondered if she was missing them. But Trigger just smiled again. “Maybe just find ways to shove it all out rather than letting it boil up.”

Tami paused, then arched her back with a long squeeze of her hands above her head. She felt a little crick of a twisted back from sleeping on the thin bench and lay back again, wriggling and settling. She stared briefly at the storage compartments above her, a thought bouncing around her head like a rapid squash ball, finally reaching her mouth to emerge as an impulsive question. “You think that's where your temper comes from?”

A twitch in her heart made her tense up as she said it. It was a bit of an accusation, but adrift a million miles from any other living soul, she felt she could quietly ask. Right then, there hardly seemed to be any reason to not be open.

She saw the unicorn pause and think. For a solid minute, there was nothing but the gentle whistle of the water and the soft hum of the ship's life support systems as they drifted on through the darkness. After waking up, they'd lowered the lights until the interior of the shuttle was hued a cosy amber, and hadn't bothered putting them back up to full since. Eventually, Trigger took off her hat and ran a hoof through her uncombed mane. Neither of them had such an item with them.

“Yeah that's...” Trigger paused, and Tami thought she saw her shuffle uncomfortably for a moment. “I think it was my mother that said that worries were just frustration and anger that didn't have a fitting target yet. Doesn't make much sense but that's what she said unless you know her, er, methodology of command. So... Maybe? I guess? Better out than in either way, I say.”

Tami winked. “Even if it got you beat up by those pirates once?”

Trigger's laugh surprised her, and yet made her jump as it filled the small, cramped space around them. “Even if it got a whole bunch to gang up on me once. Hey, I might have been KO'ed for the day, but at least I can be happy I got to tell that smug little brat-bat what someone really needed to tell her all her life.”

That was it, Tami noted. That change in perspective. The silver lining about a bad event. She wondered how that mentality might have changed things in the past. How it might have helped her.

There was another pause. They smiled at one another, until eventually Tami felt a rise in wistfulness. She lay back again and sighed. “I wish I could be more outspoken sometimes.” She lazily let her eyes slide over to look at the unicorn, her voice quiet with honest wanting. “Like you. Say what I mean and not worry. I just overthink everything about how someone might react, or how they might misinterpret it, or if it'll mean a confrontation. It's like I self-analyse everything I say before I say it - overdo it. Anxiety just takes hold and sometimes it's just so much, even over something small and dumb, like that time I didn't answer when you all asked me to pick a movie.”

The shuttle lit up. Briefly, the craft's gentle spin made the sun pass by the window once again. Hair Trigger's face brightened up, then was cast into shadow, before returning to the low light again from the ship's LED panels running the edges of the ceiling. The shift revealed a contended, happy smirk.

“Far as I see it, Tam? All that thinking’s why you sometimes see things I don't, y'know? To look at the little details that might matter in how others see something. Hey, remember when we got Whisper back? I don't think anyone else thought for a moment about how the room we put her in was all bare metal like that container they were keeping her in.”

Tami let her eyes drop, nibbling at the corner of her lips. There was a rustle of clothing and she felt a hoof nudge her shoulder.

“You did though. And you made it colourful. Because you worried the right way. You think in ways others don't, and I don't mind saying I wished I'd thought of that at the time. I don't think there's any sane person out there doesn't look at someone else and feel a bit envious in a way about something or other.”

The memories weren't good ones, and Tami's stomach twisted to even think about that day they'd pulled Whisper from that interrogation cell. Away from Cascavel. But she saw what Trigger meant. She knew it was correct. But even the correct answer she knew from hard experience wasn't always what was needed. Sometimes the mind just rebelled. It would listen to the right answer said with care and meaning, and yet still somehow respond with a stubborn feeling of 'that's not the answer', even if it patently was.

Tami wound a feather over and under the claws on one hand awkwardly. “I know, Captain. I know. It's just...”

This was something she found hard to admit. Hard to talk about. But somehow, this distant isolation was gently eroding her apprehensions about speaking out loud. She looked up and felt herself trembling, a fear of killing the moment making her hesitate, until she pushed her lips to move.

“I sometimes wonder how much of it is just me, and is just my personality and is natural and that'd be fine. But then I wonder how much of it is cos of... Cos I'm- Uh... Y'know? That I got…”

There was a second’s hesitation, then she gently tapped her head, looking away in shame. “A problem, you know?”

Tami took a sharp little breath, feeling her mouth running away from her. “Cos of the crash. Or maybe even it was there before it. I don't know. Just sometimes when it's quiet, I'll wonder how many of my faults or my flaws are only because of that. Wonder if I'm really the version of me I coulda' been if...if...if I wasn't...”

She paused again, trailing off.

There was a silence. She didn't know what else to say.

And then she heard Hair Trigger get up. After a few seconds, Tami felt the unicorn sit beside her, hip to hip, and wrap a hoof around her shoulders, pressing comfortingly down on her fluffy wings to stop them fidgeting around. The foreleg squeezed her opposite shoulder in little kneading circles, and pulled her in against Trigger's side. Tami leaned her cheek on Hair Trigger's shoulder, feeling it squish a little, and closed her eyes.

The voice was quiet, warm and gentle. A far cry from the grumpy, abrasive unicorn most saw. “You are the Tami we know.” The hoof slid up and stroked her mane gently, running between the thick, heavy strands. “And that's all that matters. Because that's the one we want.”

Tami felt the urge to sniffle and sob as a wash of warm, thankful affirmation flowed through her sometimes uncertain feelings. But instead, she was surprised to feel a content smile creep across her face instead of tears. “Thanks, Captain.”

Minutes passed, and Tami just enjoyed feeling the accepting proximity and the relaxing stroke of her mane. She could have fallen asleep again right then and there, but she felt a shift and peeked up to see Trigger's mischievous grin.

“Now, I'm glad you're smiling Tam. Because I have an idea for tonight that I wouldn't responsibly offer if you were going into it sad.”

Tami blinked. “R-really?”

“How long has it been since we shared a drink?”

Tami's heart skipped a beat. “You didn't.”

“We've got a crate of luxury high-end rum in the shuttle, Tam.”

“That's for the delivery!” she protested, half laughing and half bewildered.

Hair Trigger made a 'psssht' sound through her teeth. “Like that matters. Emergency supply for morale!”

She got up and walked under the crossbar of the shuttle's framework to reach the inner door. With a heave, Trigger yanked it open, reached within to dig under a palette's canvas, and drew out a dark brown glass bottle emblazoned with a golden trim and a dark blue flourish of a painted shape under a thistle-topped cork. It floated over to Tami's lap in the unicorn's telekinesis, and she could see the liquid inside shifting. The bottle was crafted to make it look like the rum within was the ocean below the painted blue crescent moon.

The label marked it as rather strong.

Tami gulped. “I'd ask if you were serious but-”

“But it's me.” Trigger winked, trotting back over to the front console to check the beacon status, and then winked a second time over her shoulder as she returned to the boiling food, the steam whistling and rising out of the dry bags in the pot. Sweet potato stew and custard sponge, by the digital lettering on them. “After dinner, after you've got some food in you, because I am nothing if not a responsible captain that has never done anything rash, we'll see how you feel about being a little more outspoken for a while. If you really wanna try it.”

Tami felt her heart clench. But she looked to the 'acquired' bottle and then up at her captain.

She couldn't hide a little grin from creaking into being.

* * *

Raw Deal had a rather good deal in life at the moment.

As the owner of one of Medusa's ship sales outlets - complete with parts vendoring - the accident naturally meant good business. A lot of those who'd gotten caught, hit, damaged or otherwise didn't keep insurance or company replacements out here in the Periphery, and over the past couple days he'd seen a rather nice bump in his savings toward that long-wanted early retirement.

His office was set at the entrance to one of the busier frigate-scale hangars; half a dozen docking bays containing hulls awaiting sale were dotted around vessels visiting the station, with several piles of components and hull fragments scattered around the edges.Some of it was marked as sales only, some of it was nearly useless or in surplus and just waiting for someone to take it and rid his life of it. He enjoyed being so close to it all. Among the echoing noise and the strident bellowing. It was the ambiance of good business, and he felt he had a good reputation for fairness with the regulars. From rogue traders to grim hunters, everyone knew that if you wanted good parts, you came to the batpony at the docks. You couldn't scam that sort of advantage among the distrustful captains of the galaxy's wild frontier.

As such, he was quite content to sit reading a newspaper with his hooves up, not needing to keep too much of an eye out for a while. Right then, the business was all coming to him - no need to spot anyone. He could afford to ease his jets for a while and was doing just that.

“Excuse me? Hi there!”

He heard a bright, young voice. Lowering his paper, Raw Deal saw a garishly pink unicorn with her forelegs crossed over on his reception desk, settled below an excited smile and wide, eager eyes. He blinked for a moment, then raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, Trigger's new crew member, right? Can I help you?”

The young mare nodded a few times too many, then pointed a foreleg out at something behind him. “Can I have that, please?”

Raw hesitated for a moment, then willed his relaxed muscles into action to turn awkwardly in his chair, following the animatedly shaking hoof. Behind him, just by the dock's edge, was the fuselage of a long range exploration frigate they'd dragged in from the accident site, one still awaiting classification and pricing after being written off.

“Now what do you want wi-oh. Oh, I see. I see now.”

He smiled. Below the vessel was a pile of scrap pieces he didn't even bother charging for. Mostly bent hull plates, burnt out electronics, and tangled wiring that would cost more in time to figure out than it would to just buy new. The whole magnificent pile had a 'Just take stuff!' sign hanging on it. You couldn't build that junk into anything useful if you tried.

Raw Deal looked back at the pony, shrugged, and raised his newspaper again. “Knock yourself out, kid.”

“Thank you!”

The young unicorn skipped past him and away towards the pile, gracefully hopping over fuel lines and between containers. Raw looked back to his paper, momentarily amused at the sight of her enthusiasm. Trigger had probably given her some little learning project that needed some scrap metal. He did hope the captain made it back; she was a good customer after all and-

A horrendous, keening, shrieking howl like some demonic industrial saw erupted from behind him, making his spine lock up and hit teeth painfully grit. Repeated flashes of vivid lilac light illuminated his whole office like a single-colour rave, and a violent ripping of metal drowned out the ambience of the entire hangar for a few seconds before it all suddenly ceased.

After a moment, Raw turned, his posture not changing a single inch as his chair rotated. Warily peeking over the top of his newspaper, he saw an innocently smiling unicorn prancing her way back down the hangar toward Claudia, a little pulled trailer holding a complete interstellar FTL computer and sensor array that must have weighed six times her own weight.

Then he turned his head, and saw the entire nose-cone of the exploration frigate behind his surplus pile had been torn open like one of the great dragons of old had sunk its claws into it. Four inch thick hull was curled like tinfoil. The edges glowed white hot, dripping molten metal onto the pile below, where it sparked and cracked and lit tiny flames on the rubber.

His newspaper continued its slow motion toward his thighs. Then, with utmost care, he folded it and neatly placed it on his desk.

Silently, Raw Deal reached for one of his drawers and withdrew the small box of his recently changed migraine medicine, deciding that maybe he ought to read the leaflet’s small print after all.

* * *

Of all the sounds to inhabit a desolate area of empty space, hysterical, clumsy laughter would not often be expected. But in the deep quiet, one shuttle was the exception. Its innards were warm and reeked of strong drink. An oasis of scarce care against the ruthless void that surrounded it.

“And then! And then! My brother fell right into the coolant refuse! The coolant! Refuse!”

Hair Trigger's voice was slurred, thoroughly casual, and tinged with a needy insistence for its every word to be understood. She leaned toward Tami, smiling as the hippogriff burst into snorting giggles. They swayed together, shoulder to shoulder, a mostly empty bottle squeezed between their thighs. The bench hadn't lasted long. The soft seated layer had been pulled onto the floor in the middle of the shuttle. A den, Tami had proclaimed it.

Both were more than a smidgen bedraggled. Trigger's hat lay up on the pilot control panel somewhere, and Tami had long since ditched her overalls, simply relaxing in her blouse and leggings.

“HAH! Haha! Coolant!” Tami squeaked, her voice pitching up as the alcohol raced through her system. “Oh! Oh and-and-”

The young pilot was having trouble staying upright. Her wings were extended behind her, balancing her against the side of the benches. A lightweight at the best of times, a quarter bottle of hard rum had hit her like a burning meteor.

“-and there was this one earth pony at the Academy! He threw up in his helmet when we were-!” She paused to laugh, burying her face into Trigger's shoulder as over a minute of uncontrolled giggles and snorting at the silly memory overtook her.

“You okay?! You okay?” the unicorn spluttered, prodding her, but the story was long gone to the giggles, and the hippogriff was far past telling it. Hair Trigger just took another rich, burning drink from the plastic cup. “Tam?”

After a few more moments, Tami sniffed and inhaled deeply, looking back up. Her smile looked like it was having trouble keeping both sides at the same level. Her eyelids hung low, not fully retracting. Her cheeks were flushed with alcoholic warmth. She gently took a breath. “I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm-”

And then the giggles started all over again. She slid down, until almost lying flat. Trigger's magic grabbed her friend's cup to keep it from spilling, and she had to put her own down to keep her own chortle at the pilot's antics from upsetting it. A more experienced drinker, she felt the warm buzz of a good time, and the loosening of all the worries mounting into a smooth, easy slur of 'yeah yeah I'm okay'.

Then suddenly Tami looked back at Trigger, almost upside down from lying flat. “Hey! Captain?”

“Tam?”

The hippogriff sat back up, leaning against the bench. She began taking a deep drink from her cup, not even noticing Trigger's magic gently pulling it back down after a moment to keep her from overdoing it. She didn't give an answer until after the fiery liquid had slid down her throat again. She gasped and unexpectedly burped, covering her mouth with a blush. Trigger just rolled her eyes. “What were you gonna say?”

Tami nodded vigorously, circling a hand again and again as she thought. Then eventually she reached it. “What's it like, y'know? Bein' you? Being all confident and stuff? It must be fun!”

“Hell yeah it is!” Hair Trigger wasn't shy about it. “I can say what I want! S'like if I ever wonder, should I? Then the answer is yes! S'just how I roll.” She spoke proudly and beat a hoof off her chest. “Captain's gotta be decisive, right?”

Tami sat up, swaying side to side. They both drank again, and she dropped back alongside Trigger again. “I wish I could be more like that. Assersisitive.”

“Assertive.”

She hiccuped. “That too! Cos', I've only been assertive a few times! And every time was really fun!” Tami stood up proudly, despite having just sat down. One wing rested over her heart, and an arm held her drink up into the air. “Like when Midnight was lying on top of me, and I decided-” Her voice took on a loud, shouting tone. “No! I, Tammani, will not be the nervous one this time! So I rolled over!”

“Atta' girl!”

“And I pinned him right below me!”

Hair Trigger made a light 'whoo' sound, circling a hoof as the thoroughly drunk hippogriff sloshed her drink to the side, spilling a few drops, before downing the remainder of the cup.

“And the look on his face when I sat on his hips and let me-my-this! This mane fall around his face and looked him in the eye and put his hoof-” She flushed, and then clapped her flank. “-right on my big soft butt!”

Hair Trigger burst into laughter. The sight of Tami, of all people, speaking proudly on that was just too rich. “You know your best assets, Tam!”

“Damn... right!” she breathed, almost exhausted. “But y'know? It felt good! Cos! Cos I’d been confident! Cos I'd been in charge for a few seconds, and I did it! Me! And he liked it! And I felt so good! Wait, I already said that-”

Her captain raised her drink. “Say it again!”

Tami clumsily hopped in a circle, cramped in the shuttle. “It. Felt. Good!” Stumbling, she almost fell, until telekinetic magic gave her a little shove on the shoulder to stay up. “And so did he!” she finished, a blushing giggle coming over her.

“Your little date went well, Tam. What'd I tell you?” Hair Trigger winked, watching Tami pouring another drink for them both. “Just go there, be yourself, and you'd both get on just as well as you had before. Nothing to worry about! You've got it in you. To just do it! Right?”

Dropping heavily onto her rump, Tami stared into her drink. Then she smiled, looked up, and leaned in, a surprisingly cheeky grin on her face. “Hey, Captain?”

“Hmm?”

Tami drunkenly tried to keep an embarrassed laugh in, blurting out the words. “I totally wiggled my butt at him too when we walked over to the sofa.”

There was a pause

And then the pair of them burst into a fit of laughter.

And before either realised, Tami had dropped down and leaned her back on her captain's side again to support herself. Then, after a moment, Tami felt an insane urge. A burning courage deep down that had been uncapped, like a preserved, building explosion of hot willpower that raced through her. Logic said it was simply having drunk forty percent volume rum, but logic had long left the shuttle amid the exultations of joy and the release of stress. There was no-one here. No-one but the captain she trusted she could say anything to. The one she trusted she could be brave in front of.

“But that wasn't my only one though! After I put his hoof there-”

And then it emerged. Simple at first, blushing from the words. But the mirth and comfort of her captain laughing with her, not at her, spurred her vocabulary like a starship going from turbine to rocket power, and soon she was telling the story of overcoming her nerves about getting intimately close to someone again, and saying things she never dreamed of saying out loud to anyone. Many times they paused, they drank, and Hair Trigger would make a joke about something. Then they would laugh. Other times Trigger would wink and offer Tami some advice, often with crude hoof gestures. But sometimes, sometimes the unicorn would just go wide-eyed, hearing entirely another side of the outwardly skittish hippogriff.

“You did NOT say that to him when he-”

“I swear I did! I couldn't look him in the eye for five whole minutes after it!”

“That-” Hair Trigger paused, then yanked Tami's head in, playfully headlocking her and ruffling her mane with the other hoof as the hippogriff squealed and struggled, “-is the most adorable thing I've heard in years! And using your claws to pin his hooves down when you kissed him? Oh, that's my girl, Tami! He'll be thinking of that one for a while.”

“Yeah, but I left a mark with a claw, I didn't mean to!”

“Pssh, it'll heal.”

“On his desk...”

Hair Trigger's eyebrows shot up, a new mental image of the sweet and shy pilot shooting through her head for a moment and almost short circuiting her brain. “Another little idea you'd always been too nervous to admit?”

There was a bashful squeak from amidst the headlock, and she let Tami free. A red dwarf of a face upon her, Tami huddled and giggled under her breath. “I was so embarrassed.”

“But you were being confident!” Hair Trigger countered, but then took a quieter tone. Her face softened, even if she felt the alcohol making some of it droop a little. “It is in there, I'm seeing it now.”

Tami's expression went through a few stages. From shivery embarrassment, to bashful pride, through to a quiet pondering. Then eventually, she curled her lips inwards and shrugged lightly. “That's just ‘cos I'm incredibly drunk and probably not going to remember any of this, Captain! ‘Cos, see, this is what I feel a lot of people don't get about me.”

She held the drink idle, looking up past Hair Trigger toward the glass of the cockpit. Out there, the bright sun was on another travel past as the craft's spin endlessly continued in the vacuum. The stars seemed brighter than ever, prickling her inebriated vision. Hair Trigger was silent, and eventually Tami drew in a breath that felt like it lasted a day.

“It is in there. The sense of humour. The teases. The wishes.” She shrugged. “The libido too, I guess. But it's just all - it's all buried. Layers and layers and layers-and-layersandlayers of worry an-and anshxiety and hesitation. Maybe ‘cos I'm a little messed up in my head sometimes-”

A hoof laid itself on her claw and she looked up, smiling gently. Hair Trigger had never once let that sort of self deprecating insult go without response, even if just a reminder via touch.

“-but it is there. A-And sometimes, I'll see people look at the way you tease me, Captain. The way you ask me rude questions, the way you make me blush and prank me and not let up on stuff. An' pull me into conversations a-about boys a-an' silly shtuff. And I can see it, sometimes they think you're just going at it a bit far or too much on the sensitive little hippogriff they see who ish all fragile and weak.”

Tami gulped, staring into her rum before taking a slow, quaking sip. There was a change in her tone. A shuffle away from the extravagant outburst of drink-fuelled silliness. Though she slurred, though she wavered, her words were soaked in the bravery of the burning liquid enough to speak with absolute honesty.

“What I think they all miss is that I think I enjoy staying around you because of that! Because of what you're like, Captain. Because I often can't bring myself to make those jokes, even if I want to. Or be a tease, even if I should be. Or start the sort of banter you do, even if they want it too. And it's stifling, sometimes, social times full of missed chances and regrets. I just keep it all buried out of nerves s-someone'll laugh at me for sayin' it! But when I'm around you I...”

She trailed off, then finally looked at her captain eye to eye.

“I feel like I get to quietly have that side of me out in the open without saying anything myself, sort of vicarious humour? Via proxy? Via you! And you start it, and you include me. And even if I turn red as a cherry and worry or get embarrassed, hours later I'll always feel happy and have a quiet giggle to myself because it lets me feel like I'm part of it like anyone else. A-And recently? I'm finding those giggles start to take a shorter time to get to.”

She rubbed the back of her palm against an eye, wiping away a dampness. In front of her, Hair Trigger herself looked caught between choking up, and a warm pride. To break the ice, she leaned over and poured another drink, her telekinesis stuttering and shaky from the bottle's effects. An urge to grab the adorable girl ran through her, but she resisted it for the moment and clinked their cups.

“You know? It'sa...” Trigger flubbed her words. “Is-it's not just all that. It's not just you likin' my naughty jokes and gossip. Y'know that, right? This is all just... Just fuff. Faff! There's more to it that you're makin' us all proud with every day. It's like when you grabbed the controls from me, and you actually ordered me to keep up with you on the bridge when we were escaping the Crystal Heart. Or when you told off Whisper fer-for! For not listening to Kerfuffle once. An' when you made a Hearthswarmin' on your own initiative without worrin' we'd laugh.”

Tami's face flushed. Hair Trigger only laid it on further.

“You got it in you, Tam. An' if the best I can do as your captain is make you able to pull it out when you gotta? Be it with flying Claudia, or dealing with stuff, or stallions, or anything in life, then I know I'm doin' pretty well. Now...gerroverhere. Captain needs a hug, and only one hippogriff's squeezable enough to do the job!”

There was a laugh that came from somewhere deep down. An unbalanced, wobbly laugh that matched the way the outer edges of her vision were starting to blur. “Aye-” She hiccuped and missed her forehead with a wing-salute. “-aye, Captain!”

She shuffled over, and after a few seconds of mistaken fumbling with imprecise, sloppy movements, Tami drove her head into her captain's neck and got a good, tight long-needed squeeze around her waist. She returned it, arms and wings both. A relieved, post-soul-searching embrace in a fashion only the closest of friends could.

Until Tami hiccuped again, and their snorts of amusement saw them let go.

Alone, in growing danger the longer they waited, it was the most comfort the pair could seek - to look away from the creeping, deep black surrounding their tiny metal compartment. In the brief silence, Hair Trigger saw Tami looking out that window. Nothing unusual, she knew. Tami stargazed like socialites screengazed; it was her default idle state.

But this time, she saw something in the hippogriff's eyes. A slight intimidation. A shaking of the pupils as their situation threatened to creep into this bubble of joy.

Hair Trigger knew how alcohol went. She knew how it made emotions flow back and forth like an uncaring pendulum. She acted fast, blurting out the first question that came to mind.

“Hey Tam? Ever tried kissing another mare?”

Tami blinked, then looked around quickly, mouth open, cheeks red. “Wh-what?”

Trigger almost laughed on the spot. Not fifteen minutes ago they had talked openly of intimacy, and even still, that silly birdmare got flustered. Tami, she figured, would always be Tami, and Trigger would never want any different. “Well?”

Tami took a gulp of rum and swallowed hard. Coughing, she sat up and batted Trigger's thigh with a wing. It had zero impact. “You mean apart from you? From last Heartswarming?”

The spluttering raspberry of a laugh from the unicorn’s mouth almost sprayed her drink. She'd somehow forgotten that when she asked. “Apart from me and my silly pranks, yes. Just curious.”

Claws drummed around a cup from both sides, and Hair Trigger could already see Tami biting her lip, looking to the side. She could almost hear the gears in the hippogriff's head turning while figuring out how to word something. She grinned. “That'd be a yes then, huh?”

Tami gulped, then made a little nod. “Yeeeeah...”

'Good,' thought Trigger through the haze of her growing drunken tiredness. It was something else to keep her focused on, keep that shell of distraction from terror strong for a little longer. “So is this another side of you that you've been nervous of too?”

Shaking her head, Tami actually lifted a hand, waving. “Oh? Oh no! No, no, not like that. It was back at basic flight! A bunch of us, Vantage and the others, we had a game of truth or dare and, well, you know how they go.”

“Don't I just.” Trigger drank deeply from her cup, until it suddenly became empty again. How did that happen so quickly?

Tami continued. “And someone dared me and Chilli Rice to kiss, so, uh, we did?”

“Aaand?”

And there was that blush. That good old reliable blush Trigger knew. Tami laughed it off. “It was nice! I mean, it was a kiss and, like, well... Captain just becosh-be-because! Because I'm drunk doesn't mean I don't know you're wondering if she and I-!”

She hiccuped and shrugged lightly, then shook her head.

“No, no. Never. I'm attracted to stallions, but it's just... I'm... Well, I'm comfortable being close to anyone. If -uh- if you get what I mean? It’s-” She paused, and there was a large yawn. A typical, wide mouthed, wing stretching yawn. Tami looked like she was wavering. “-what I mean? Y'know, stuff...”

Gently, she bobbed side to side, and then dropped down heavily against Hair Trigger again, her head resting on the captain's shoulder. Eyes closed. Truth be told, Trigger was feeling her own sleepiness creep in. She looked down at her own shoulder, and saw Tami staring back up at her.

There was a long pause.

Hair Trigger smiled.

Tami smiled back.

Then gingerly, a word emerged. “Captain?”

“Tam?”

“You're the best captain I ever had.”

That good old line. Hair Trigger just smiled and winked. “Only captain you've ever had, Tam.”

“Shtill the best...” She smiled warmly, leaning her head fully and tiredly against the unicorn. “You always make me feel so wanted to be aroun'an-an my life got a whole lot better when I foun' you and Claudia.”

Trigger reached out and folded Tami's flopping, uncombed mane back from her eyes, hooking it behind an ear. “Captain's duty, Tam. Issa'n old tradition.”

Another long pause, until Tami gently leaned in. “Captain?”

Trigger blinked, seeing Tami's eyes half close. She felt Tami's hand slide over her leg.

And grab something.

After a moment, Tami lifted what she'd grasped up, and the unicorn blinked at seeing Tami holding up the empty bottle that had been sitting between them. “Bottle's empty,” said Tami, sitting back again with a thump. “And I think I might be drunk, Captain.”

The silence was devastated by Hair Trigger's laugh, shattered into a million pieces. She firmly clapped Tami's thigh and forced herself up. Reaching across the shuttle, she acquired a bottle of water from the top of the cabinet and poured some of it into Tami's cup. “Then get a couple of these down you, and then it's time for you to get to sleep.”

“Aww...” Tami whined, letting the cool liquid go down in soft sips. “Was nice talking.”

“Well then, I've got a whiskey you can try back in my quarters on Claudia. We'll share it once we're there.”

Tami briefly looked up, and Trigger hoped the reference to home hadn't stirred worries, but instead the hippogriff just smiled and nodded. Making sure she had her water, multiple thereof even, Hair Trigger looked at the mess of a couple blankets and the long, rectangular seating cushions sitting on the floor. Neither of them could be bothered to replace it all, and soon after finishing her drink Tami dropped down onto it. The hippogriff lay on her belly diagonally across the gap between the benches, head flumped into a pillow. Within seconds, Trigger couldn't tell if she was already asleep or not, and wasn't going to dare shift her to one side.

Sometimes, Hair Trigger reflected on meeting her back when. She knew she’d done a lot for Tami. Had helped her since. She'd wanted to.

What she sometimes didn't say as much was what Tami had done for her.

Smiling, content in knowing for herself what that was, Hair Trigger stumbled over to the cockpit and hit the shuttle lights. They dimmed down, leaving the interior in pitch darkness. Unsteadily, she felt her way back past the chairs, vaguely aimed for her sleeping space. Her hip smacked the drawers and she almost tripped on the blankets. Finally, gratefully dropping down on her side, she let her cheek rest against her soft, cushy pillow, and sighed deeply, muscles relaxing.

A small giggling in the dark made one of her eyes open.

“Snrk! Hehe, Captain?”

“Mm? Tami?”

“I don't think that's your pillow.”

Hair Trigger sat up for a moment.

And then tiredly dropped right back down in the same place.

“It is now, Tam. It is now.”

* * *

A pair of hooves rested over one another, and gently descended upon the polished sheen surface of the desk. The motion was dignified and well-practiced, arriving on the varnished top without any excessive force or hesitancy. Yet this was a masterful example of such a movement, for Sweet Alyssum's hooves, despite the care, made an audible click on contact - a sound that would momentarily prick the ears of anyone that heard it. It was a simple, effortless motion to take the reins of any conversation. To disrupt someone's speaking in order to let her move into the silence without having to vocally interrupt.

Smile felt both impressed and inwardly disgusted that she'd fallen for it, her urging pausing for that half second that the station's director needed to swiftly move in like a gleaming rapier penetrating a guard.

“I understand your concern, Volatility Smile. But I have had a dozen captains and crew arrive in my office over the past hours, and all of them bring the same story. Drones, cargo, stranded crew? You are not the only ship to have lost something.” Sweet Alyssum wasn't smiling as she spoke, her sculpted, hard face holding an incisive look that ever-so-politely implied: 'I haven't slept in two days dealing with this; do not push me now, you little shit'.

The look matched the white-maned mare's surroundings. Alyssum's office was awkwardly shaped. No walls met at right angles, and few areas bore the same decoration twice. Majestic tapestries from various civilisations hung over sheet metal, and rugs so thick that Smile felt like her hooves couldn't remain straight on the floor overlapped in a fractal patterned collage of antiquated style. Even the desk's shining mahogany didn't match the glass and silver metal dining table crammed in the not overly spacious compartment she had chosen as her office. The only things that matched aesthetically with the rest of Medusa were the three uniformed griffons flanking them in heavy vests: Gerhard and two of the larger members of the security team. All armed. All wary. All watching Smile and Kerfuffle. She was glad that the griffon was with her, but Alyssum's office - normally a place Smile where enjoyed contesting her business smarts against the director’s - now felt like a challenge she could do without.

Feeling her brow narrow, Smile kept her composure. She would have much preferred to be sitting down, given Alyssum was. Standing before a desk felt like a plea, and that wasn't a feeling she enjoyed. “Director, the others are known beacons that Medusa is tracking. Nothing harder than drifting outside or in the same system. The issue at hoof here is that your own staff have yet to identify Captain Trigger's shuttle's beacon. That means they're in a different system. If you could ask your staff to use Medusa's sensor logs and the tanker's archive to trace where that rift might have sent the objects that got thrown through-”

“-then they would be busy doing that, and not doing what I have ordered them to, Miss Smile.” Sweet Alyssum didn't raise her voice, but the tone brokered little chance to reply. “Tracing an unintended M-Space rift needs a number of things. Most of all, time and numbers. Medusa's sensor array team would need to be dedicated to it for an hour, and not tracking the hundred and one things I need them to do right now.”

“An hour is-” Kerfuffle began.

“And even if!” Alyssum's voice rose briefly, the 'if' landing like a polite whipcrack. “Even if I were to do that, it would require multiple ships dispatched to act as relays to triangulate the route from Medusa it took, two per system within range! With how many systems surround us, that could be at least a dozen ships. A dozen ships that I need saving other crews and retrieving cargo worth over a trillion credits before any scavengers slide in. That's multiple days’ worth of work, if not more, to organise and carry out.”

Out the corner of her eye, Volatility Smile saw Kerfuffle bristle. The griffon had been getting quietly antsy, and this ongoing delay with nothing but worries for their friends was eroding even his normally immovable mountain of patience.

Slowly, he took in a breath. “The shuttle-”

Smile openly sighed at Sweet Alyssum's answer and trotted forward, placing a hoof on the other side of Alyssum's desk, leaning her head in a little. The director didn't react, her eyes didn't even blink to look at the touch. “Director Alyssum, that shuttle, in a best case scenario, may only have a few days of battery left. If it takes that long to track, then-”

“Then I am wholly aware of that, Volatility Smile.” Alyssum was terse, standing up sharply. “So if you would let us do our jobs, we can get to that one faster.”

There was another shift beside Smile. Kerfuffle leaned in, bringing his head lower. “And how fast will that be, Mi-?”

Alyssum cut him off. “Once higher priorities are dealt with for the station's security. This is the Periphery! Not a law-drowned imperial hub. The black will pounce on this station's assets if we do not resolve this.”

“Higher?! Higher pri-” Smile had to stop herself. She was livid. And she could feel Kerfuffle sharing the sensation, but this was going nowhere. Slowly, she drew air in through her nose, her hoof fixing her tie. “Hair Trigger and Tami have been part of doing a lot for you, Director.”

It was a poor angle and she knew it, but this was a stone wall. True to her hunch, Alyssum's brow hardened and the director shook her head. “They, and you for that matter, still owe me your debt for the vessel, Volatility Smile.”

“Then you'd lose that income; we can't function without them.”

A last ditch gasp of negotiating, and one that she knew was pointless right away. It wouldn't have worked even on a rookie. Alyssum raised an eyebrow, almost insulted. “Your debt pales compared to what I stand to lose if I don't secure Port Medusa. Now, I have much to do. Gerhard will keep you updated if we find anything.”

The older griffon moved forward, his body language speaking a polite but firm 'time to get out'.

But behind her, Smile already heard Alyssum's enormously heavy office door - more of an airlock - slam open and then shut with a deafening bang, punctuated by the startled shriek of the receptionist as Kerfuffle stormed out.

Volatility Smile gulped quietly, with a sudden and jarring feeling that the most intimidating source of anger in the room hadn't been the one behind the desk.

* * *

Tami's head hurt.

Her throat too.

In a monstrous trifecta, so did her eyes. All three locations wore a throbbing clench of dull pain that faded and returned every few seconds, almost enough to make her appreciate the deathly silence of a shuttle stuck in the middle of nowhere.

It wasn't the worst hangover she'd ever had. She could blame Verbena for most of those. But she still slumped in the pilot's chair with a weary, sunken face, claws lazily dancing across the (lowered brightness) controls. Hair Trigger was still asleep behind her, but Tami always found it difficult to go back to bed in the morning, even with nothing else to do. Instead she'd crawled up here to nurse her head and spend the last hour cringing and biting down on her knuckles at vague memories of things she'd said out loud to the captain the night before.

Now, sitting in silence, Tami ran a diagnostic on the shuttle's systems. She hadn't thought about it; doing that sort of thing was just a natural instinct for her, one of her core duties back on Claudia. Even if she knew all it would say is the engines were still inoperable, and the comms were still inoperable, and a dozen other things she wished she had were all broken, it was just habit. She'd contemplated what might possibly be fixed, but none of it was possible. Circuits had burnt out, engine housings had been bent, and the software in the nav-computer had been so corrupted she couldn't even launch the startup screen.

She winced. 'Back on Claudia'. That little thought made her long for the safety of the larger ship. For the feeling of reliability. For the company. With a sinking feeling, she wondered if she'd ever get to see the vessel again. See Kerfuffle or Smile or-

Tami shook her head vigorously, then groaned as her hangover reminded her not to. Those thoughts were driving a merciless set of barbed talons around her heart to grip and drag her down. That years-old enemy that would flow under her skin and seep into her brain to make her think ill of everything. Gently but firmly, she forced herself to focus on the same routine of checking the systems, her hands gripping three switches to test each external light. They all worked. Then on to the oxygen systems, and then a dozen more pointless checks to occupy her mind.

And yet, it wouldn't leave. Try as she might, the prickly sting of worry wouldn't stop prodding at her will from the edges of her thoughts. Fear. It was fear. And it was getting stronger. Every minute, every hour without some sign or hope, it grew in strength, making the shuttle feel smaller. Making the void outside feel larger. Suddenly she wished Hair Trigger were awake, but a sharp grip of anxiety bit back the urge to actually get up and wake someone else from the fragile relief that was sleep back into this nightmare. 'That would be selfish', it told her. And so she sat in silence, struggling to fight ‘it’ alone.

Oxygen wasn't a problem. The water electrolysis process was functioning and showed no signs of wear. The water itself was in fine quantity, and the condensation filters were working. The small reactor below their hooves showed no signs of becoming unstable.

Briefly, Tami curled up on the chair, rocking gently and hugging her wings around herself. There wasn't much else to do. She didn't even have any sketchbooks with her, and they were keeping their multibands turned off as much as possible to conserve power. All she could do was stare out at the stars she so loved and try not to let them feel foreboding. There were thousands. While they called it the 'black', out here it never truly was, and Tami sought refuge in the colour. The passionate red haze twinkling with its tens of thousands of years old light. The faint blue she could swear was out there that maybe meant the NLR was nearby. The yellow-white glow even when the nearest star wasn't in view.

Maliciously though, every one of them only spoke of despairing distance. Briefly, she shivered. It was getting chilly, she knew, but it wasn't just down to the temperature.

Then, she blinked. 'Getting?' Since when should she had felt it getting-

Suddenly, with a panicked urge, she reached for the systems diagnostics again and drew up the temperature management panel. She switched to a graph of the last few hours. She read it. And then, refusing to accept it, she read it again. It hadn't changed.

What had been a steady horizontal line had suddenly dipped sharply.

That dark grip on her heart turned to ice.

And squeezed.

* * *

Hair Trigger was still woozy, but her ears picked out the worried groan. The sounds of distress. Momentarily, her brain wanted her to mutter out something about it being fine to be embarrassed the morning after, but the follow up whine of genuine fear set a red alert running through to her eyes, forcing them to open.

Fluffy-headed, tiredness cramming her head like stale pudding, Trigger pulled her aching, body up long before she even knew what she was looking at. Briefly, she wondered why it felt cooler than last night, despite the blanket.

“No! No-no-nooo don't do that! Don't!”

Blinking sharply, she heard Tami's voice. High-pitched. Worried. With a groan, she dragged herself over to the pilot's chair.

“Tamphi?” she muttered, before things dropped into sharp clarity and she saw Tami's horrified face.

“Captain? You're-Look! It's-it's-” she shouted, and in a hurried voice, outlined the problem. “I-I don't know why! Something's broken! The power's in the battery but something's failed somewhere! The life support temperature control's broken, it-it-it can't retain heat!”

The bright touchscreen burned Trigger's eyes, but she could see the graph. In the last few hours, the temperature had fallen from about twenty-two Celsius to sixteen, just below the minimum living standard of any ship, and it seemed to be trending downwards. She carefully kept her face still. She'd expected some level of reduction; these shuttles weren't intended for this and they’d patched a few holes, but even her surface level knowledge of these things knew the decline shouldn't have been this sharp.

“Can we fix it?” she muttered, looking around her, but Tami only shook her head, her big eyes fearful.

“The s-system's intact. It must be something exposed on the outer hull freezing up. Maybe the heat sinks got locked on full open so they aren’t retaining any more.”

This was bad. She knew it was bad, and there was no doubt Tami would know it too. Loss of heat would only continue in space. Hair Trigger had heard the stories amidst her family about crews dying to cold exposure before starvation or asphyxiation. Never in her life had she imagined she might face the same horror those others did. Worse, in a situation like this. After robots, space-battles, possessed magic users and crime syndicates, this? This was what did it?

Hair Trigger fought the hardest battle of the whole excursion to not swear and rant profusely at the sheer unfairness of it all. She couldn't show the sinking dread that swamped her heart in front of the hippogriff. She couldn't. The revulsion at the thought of panicking the pilot any more gave her the strength to force it down again and take a slow breath.

“We've got blankets, and we've got time.” The words were stoic and firm, but it was all she could manage. “The beacon's out there. Just- Just sit tight.”

Tami held her hands to her forehead and Trigger softly turned the chair away from the panel displaying nothing but ill portents. She ruffled Tami's mane gently. “Hey, Tam? It'll be fine, okay?”

She felt like she was lying, but forced herself to believe she wasn't.

Tami nodded gently. “Aye, Captain. I-I just need to think about other things?”

“Good girl. That's it.”

Sniffling, Tami opened her eyes at last. “Like, um, once my dog Orbit did this really stupid thing...”

Now that was something Hair Trigger could cling to. Reaching past the turn off the offending diagnostic, she dropped into the co-pilot chair and gently floated a blanket up from the floor for each of them. “Tell me all about it.”

Yet as she listened, and smiled, Trigger was mentally bracing herself for the survival stage. The comfortable portion of just staying distracted was over.

Now, she knew, was when it got tough.

* * *

“Soldering iron!”

Kerfuffle absent-mindedly reached behind his toolkit and retrieved Tami's soldering iron from the rug of various tools. He handed it off to his side, feeling lilac magic lift it. It floated away into a large tent within Claudia's cargo hold.

He never took his eyes off of the ramp out to the hangar. Every few minutes, groups trotted or flew by. Hangar teams or other ship crews. And every time, he hoped one of them would bear a uniform and come rushing up to them.

They never did.

“Voltage gauge!”

His hands moved. A tool was lifted. It floated away into the tent.

Days now. Days of worry. Days of constantly being told to wait. Or to leave it to ‘them’. He had barely slept, and the reason felt as frustrating as this entire situation.

Simply put: he felt useless.

There was no mechanical challenge here. There was nothing he could grunt hard and lift up. There was no harm he could put himself in the way of. With Claudia idle under Port Medusa’s traffic lockdown he hadn't even had a lot of work to do. And yet if he ever went to bed or tried to work on another ship in the hangar it only stung with guilt, like he was working on something that wasn't the real problem.

The problem he couldn't do anything to solve, no matter how many times he broke it down into its abstract parts and put it back together.

“Arcano-wrench!”

Mrs Smiles hadn't been on Claudia much. She'd spent her days petitioning and queuing for updates. Trying to get any search and rescue groups on the line. She'd even tried the refuelling charities, hoping one of them could be fooled into sending ships to nearby systems just in case. She'd been busy.

“Arcano-wrench?”

Eleven had whatever inventive new project she was working on now. She rarely spoke about what they were while working, however animatedly excited she was about chasing down parts. Probably just to keep herself busy as much as Smile. Kerfuffle never felt like he could do that though. Not now. It was like a short circuit and it tore at him, looping around in pointless circles until it blew up inside and the problem had only gone back to square one and started hurting all over again. It reminded him uncomfortably of his sister Galena, and how he'd felt utterly helpless to do anything to stop her waning health while back home in Labyrinth. Even then he had at least known he could leave to find money for her. But for this new problem, no solution yet seemed apparent.

“Arcano-” There was a pause, a ruffle of a tent door, and then Eleven's bright eyes peered around into Kerfuffle's vision. “Kiffle?”

He blinked, startled, looking at the unicorn peering into his line of sight from the side, her body stretched around. She didn't look annoyed, just concerned. He slowly reached out for the tool. “Sorry, Miss.”

Eleven just put her hoof on his wrist, holding it down and stopping him. “You're hurting.”

She said it so simply, so crystal clear, that he couldn't muster even the energy to dare try to deny it. He nodded. “Yes, Miss. Tami and the Cap'n are all alone. An' I can't help them...”

The young unicorn frowned and nodded. “I know it's tough, Kiffle!

He was surprised to feel her shuffle forward and hop up onto her hindlegs to press against his chest, hooves spreading wide to hug, unable to get around him. A gentle warmth attempted comfort, and he rested an arm around her small shoulders. She said something, but it came out muffled. Shaking her head, making him feel the heavy fluff about his body wriggle, she looked up and tried again. “We'll get them! I know we will!”

Try as he might, Kerfuffle hesitant to agree. Eleven's fairy-tale princess innocence approach to some things could be refreshing and enheartening, but right now the situation just felt so barren. So harshly mundane in the realities of space travel gone wrong. But his momentary silence led to Eleven backing off a little, slapping one hoof into the other loudly and then swinging her foreleg up like a circus ringmaster. “And we'll find them with this!”

Behind her, the canvas tent billowed open in her magic, revealing the prize within. The light from the hold's LED boards washed inwards, illuminating a mess of components around an old starship nose-cone's innards. Kerfuffle raised his eyebrows, looking up. Wires were arranged in a chaotic mess, wrapped about the antenna that all ships used to transmit a rift-opening signal, and yet the more he looked there was an order to them, in colour if not in position. A pattern. A plan. Attached to it was a bridge's FTL computer and what looked like the transmit-receive array for a radar.

He took a sharp breath. He'd thought she had just been killing time. But this? His beak began to open, her beaming pride cutting through the murky waters of anxiety. “Miss, what is...” He got up, staring at it, as Eleven bounded over and hurried around it. She pointed out bit after bit.

“So see I had this, so I attached it to the mana-sucker! Which is what I called it because I don't know what you all call it! I can just see what it's meant to do! And then it goes to the vortex-accumulator, and then to the red-thingy before coming back to the hoofie-tappy-pad, which is a better name because you don't use 'keys' in this model anyway, and it's not a board!”

She paused, coming to a halt, and then hugged her own invention, rubbing her cheek on a circuit panel. “It's an M-Space Rift Tracker! I'm gonna figure out where they went even if those caveponies they call experts here can't figure it out even with a hundred of them and a dozen ships! Who needs triangulation when you can just ask the rift itself? They're very polite if you give them a little jolt of arcane energy! It's not ready yet, but I can do it! It's just all in the math and magic!”

Wiggling her forelegs, she mimicked 'math' and 'magic' colliding together with a sharp bonk of hooves, before dropping them down again.

Kerfuffle just stared. Then, he gently reached out, and clasped his large hand around her foreleg. “You're gonna save ‘em, Miss?”

“I am,” she stated definitively. “If... If everything I worked out works. Which it usually does! But this is sort of a new area of things. I'm not sure what else it might need to function... But-but I'm sure I can solve them! It's just a minimalist piece of inter-dimensional magic analysis, how hard could it be?”

Kerfuffle knew the answer: hard. Very hard. But if there was anyone he trusted to somehow pull it off, it was Eleven and her supercomputer of a brain. The young mare was a naturally born genius. That and her talent for magic were why Sidewinder had wanted her so badly for their horrific ends. If she believed in it, then so did he.

Her hoof raised up onto the wrist of his clasping hand. Her energy subsided, and there was truth in her words. “I'm going to try, Kiffle. I just hope I'm not too late.”

“Let me know if there's anything I can do? I'm...” He almost complained aloud to her, but solid belief in not burdening her in her moment of inventiveness pushed him not to. It wouldn't be right to complain about his feelings right then. He shook his head. “Sorry, just thinkin' about them.”

“I know, Kiffle,” she said quietly. “I know. I can't imagine how scary it must be. If I think of anything, I'll let you know.”

He let Eleven return to her work and resumed sitting by her tent, otherwise alone in the empty cargo hold, staring out the open hatch. Staring into the hangar. Through the hangar. Into the shimmering shield protecting them from the vacuum across the bay.

Staring into the stars.

Somewhere out there.

He refused to believe they weren’t waiting for them somewhere, yet clenched his fists, momentarily feeling a pang of worry about what would still happen if they were too late. It felt unsettlingly familiar - knowing that someone he cared about was in danger from a problem he could never solve. Eleven had given him some hope, the bright spark that she was. But even so, he worried idle and felt a groaning pit in his stomach - one that he recognised but rarely identified out loud.

It was frustration: a deep anger with no direction.

Without meaning to, he tried to imagine Claudia without them. Without seeing that smile, or hearing those jokes he didn't always get.

He couldn't.

* * *

Two blankets. There were two blankets.

Two blankets, two pillows, and whatever cushioning they could pull off the chairs in the cockpit.

Hair Trigger looked around her, clicking her tongue. The crates didn't have any padding; they were held in racks. There wasn't any fabric lining to the shuttle's inner housing. She shivered, then mentally kicked herself to stop doing that. Not yet.

Still, that was all they had.

She'd torn the cushions from the piloting seats and now sat on the floor using what was left of the breach sealant to repair them into a makeshift blanket. She wished she had the energy to be angry - the energy to rant and rave and somehow force the universe to change - but mental exhaustion was setting in. She'd been born on a starship. She hadn't even touched a planet until she already knew how to trot and speak. But the growing cold and claustrophobia were assaulting even her, and things were only getting worse.

Six hours ago, the lights had begun to dim. An hour after that a warning had flickered up, announcing that their boiling vessel was no longer operable. The thought of a warm drink to sustain them had since died. Various screens had flickered out ever since then. Every so often she would see one blink out as circuit boards and wires nearer the outside of the hull froze. The temperature continued to drop. Trigger felt her body shivering gently, a dry chill sitting idle in the static, quiet environment. Not dangerous - not yet.

Any of the quick-tempered rage she might usually have felt began to drift away, left only with a growing worry as the void sought to worm its way into their little shelter. What had once felt a cosy little time to be close to Tami and wait for rescue was rapidly changed. What had to be days had now passed with only the slow, creeping approach of an end they were powerless to prevent. Two? Three? It was hard to tell, but at her best estimate, they were closer to the end than they were to the start if no-one came.

Tami was sitting wrapped in a blanket between the chairs in the now barren cockpit, staring out at the stars. She could see the hippogriff's hands shaking as she wrung them over and over. It wasn't just the cold, that she knew, even if it was getting bitter.

“See anything nice out there, Tam?”

There was a brief pause, then finally a small inhalation. “Just a pretty blue one out there somewhere, Captain,” Tami replied, her voice hollow and quiet.

“You do love your stars, don't you?” Hair Trigger tried to hope her reflection in the glass let Tami see her smile. Pointless chatter was still chatter.

She didn't turn around. “Love a whole lot of things, Captain.”

'Questions. Keep questions going,' she told herself. 'Jokes or teases, hell flirt with her if you have to, just keep her thinking on that and not the nightmare we're in!'

“Well, that we know, huh? Can never walk onto that bridge without finding something pretty there, eh? Even if it's just you.”

The hippogriff just stared out into the dark, trembling and clicking her talons against one another anxiously. She made a gentle sound, like a tiny laugh. Trigger could sense the blush. “Like the stars, yeah. Always wanted to reach them. Be up here. Find all I imagined.”

“Mhm.” Hair Trigger picked up the sealant and went back to work. “Funny that. You say 'up here' a lot. Not 'out here'. Like it's always an escape from the ground for you, huh?”

“It's what it feels like, Captain. Spent so long looking up, it's hard to see it as anything else now.”

Hair Trigger sucked in the cold air and chuckled lightly.

Tami's head turned. “What was that, Captain?”

“Oh, nothing, you'd blush.”

Tami cocked her head. “What? Captain! Tell me!”

Hair Trigger felt her body heave and shudder as she finished her work, reaching for the other blanket. “Of all the crew, you call me 'captain' so much more in every sentence. I bet you'd call me that no matter what now. Like if you spoke at my wedding.”

Tami blinked. “You're...you're getting-to Tundra!?”

“No no! Well, not yet.” She winked slyly. “Just, can you imagine it? A speech saying 'To the Captain and Tundra', ‘cos you always call me it. Always that.”

“Because you are!” Tami gasped, and hugged her blanket tight.

“Do you even call me just that in your diary?”

“Yes!”

“Wow.”

Tami shook her body. “Wow, what? What would have made me blush?”

Hair Trigger winked at her. “You know my kind of humour. Imagine what kind of situation I found it funny to imagine you still insistently calling me 'Captain' in.”

The utter silence of the shuttle reigned for a moment as those big blue eyes stared back at the unicorn, and briefly she wondered if she'd left it too open, or pushed too far. But then she saw the blush forming, and then a claw slapping into her own head. Hair Trigger cackled, using her magic to ruffle Tami's huge mane.

“Caaaptaaaain...”

“Yeah I figure it would sound like that.”

“A-HEY!” She laughed. She actually laughed, and Hair Trigger felt a surge of victory in her chest. Every laugh mattered. Every few minutes she kept Tami smiling. Every little longer she protected her from the dread. Tami pushed her fringe back, biting her lip. “It's because it's what I saw all my dad's old crew doing to him when they visited, really. Even decades after he retired, they still called him that. Because they respected him that much.” She flushed, shuffling awkwardly, but her face was earnest. “It's because I feel that too. Because I've seen captains and I've seen captains, Captain.” She paused, thinking that sentence over. “What I mean is, I've seen ones that just have a rank, and ones who embody the word as I grew up hearing what it meant. Looking out for the crew, directing us, keeping us safe. You do that. So, well, it feels right, y'know? To call you it.”

Hair Trigger looked into that innocently earnest face and felt her heart swell, almost as much as it had the very first time. The first time anyone had ever called her that word properly. That had been Tami as well. She shifted, feeling oddly on the spot, masking it as moving her backside off of a cold spot between the cushions.

“H-Hey, Captain?” Tami's stuttering voice interrupted her thoughts, the cold making her pause.

“Yeah?”

“Why is your humour all s-so, y'know? Naughty?” Tami chirped up, losing volume toward the end, but with curiosity in her eyes.

'Good,' thought Trigger, 'she's thinking of something else.' She lay back against the steel hull and shrugged. “Had a lot of brothers but no sisters; a lot of those brothers were teenagers when I was growing up. Bunch of young horny stallions all cooped up in spaceships making jokes. Guess I got it from them. As for why?”

She thought about it for a moment. It wasn't that she didn't realise she had a 'rep' for it, and defaulted to it when needing to quip. It was just a thing she’d never bothered seeing as out of the ordinary. It was certainly par the course back home. She bobbed her head side to side as though uncertain. “Never was one to care much for 'keeping up appearances'. Guess I just get a kick out of getting to see the reaction from people as much as the gag itself. Low hanging fruit can still taste as good as any other after all.”

Tami nodded slowly. “I suppose...”

“That make sense?”

“Mhm.”

Hair Trigger paused, sucked her lip, then pressed further. Her voice drifted, her tongue catching the chill, but she asked it lightly. Quietly. “Tell me the truth, Tami. I know what you said when we were drinking but, have I ever made you uncomfortable with it?”

The pilot's eyes opened wider, then blinked. She looked away, and Hair Trigger could tell there was some soul-searching going on. That worried her. Any hesitation felt concerning. But eventually, the hippogriff shook her head rather definitively.

“No. Embarrassed, sure. Silly, definitely. But not uncomfortable. If anything, when you started doing it, I thought it meant that you respected me and thought I could take it on the chin. Like you had faith I'd be okay, because y-you didn't do it to people even I could see wouldn't be comfortable with it.”

Trigger nodded firmly. “Good. Cos' that's what it is.”

She smiled, and saw Tami return a tired one. There was a twist in her gut at the sight. Tami's smiles were something she always liked finding each day. A burst of joy. But this one was fading. Weaker. Smaller.

Then, as she worried, and tried to muster up her best tease to make Tami crack up, there was a loud electronic chime, three high-pitched warning notes. The sharp but heavy groan of electronics shutting down shot through the shuttle. The internal lights snapped off, plunging both of them into darkness.

The panel alarm was followed by a loud, terrified shriek, and she saw Tami cover her head, silhouetted against the faint texture of the stars. Trigger's own spine felt frozen solid, stuck in place as everything disappeared. No light. No heating.

“C-Captain?”

“I'm here, Tam. I'm here.” Hair Trigger could feel the words bite as she said them. 'Here' was the last place she wanted to be.

“I'm scared...”

“Don't- don't let it in, okay? Just keep saying what you were saying. Stuff you love, right? Can you do that for me?” She paused and heard no reply. “Can you?”

A tiny voice. “Yes, Captain.”

Trigger breathed in hard through her nostrils, wishing she could will her body into motion. But much as she wanted to deny it, the shock had rattled her. “G-Good, what else?”

“There's... There's fancy treats.”

“Good, what kind?”

“C-Cinnamon?”

There was a sudden silence from the hippogriff. Hair Trigger almost pushed her with another prompt, and picked up a blanket to hoof it over. But as she did, she heard Tami sniffle before she could say anything.

“S-Sorry, Captain.”

Gently, Hair Trigger laid down the blanket. “It's okay, Tam. It's scary, I know...”

Then suddenly, to her surprise, Tami shook her head harshly.

“I-It's not that! It's not! I-I'm fine! I just... I miss Orbit, Captain.” Her voice was dull.

“Been a while since you came onto Claudia, yeah.” Hair Trigger redirected the timescale, toying with a cup in her hooves, but the tone in Tami's voice made her pause, looking over at the young pilot.

Tami seemed not to hear her. “I miss him and his big goofy smile with his tongue out. And I miss my hammock. I miss Claudia. And my parents. And Kiffie. And Smile.” She took a loud breath, but her voice was dull and monotone. “And Whisper, and Tundra, and Eleven, and Vebs... A-and my orange chocolate cookies I hid below the bridge panels...”

Hair Trigger saw her look up, again staring out at the slowly spinning coloured stars, their glow lighting up her worn down face. She spoke again, almost bored sounding, but her voice began to pick up slightly in pace.

“I love all of them! And the magic we see when we go through a rift. And-And the nebula in the NLR! A-A-And piloting the Regulus, I-I-I...”

“Tami.” Hair Trigger got up. Her voice was gentle.

Tami's pitch rose up. Rapid. Barely breathing between sentences. “I always wanted to do it again! P-Properly this time! And take it through Saphiban's rings! And to go visit Equestria itself with M-Midnight like he said! Or see Zebraha at last! And I can't wait t-to see Eleven free of all this o-or go to a rave with Whisper!”

“Tami...”

There was a high strung half-laugh half-splutter from the shaking pilot. “And I'm going to book a romantic dinner for you and Tundra w-without you both knowing till you're there and-and-we'll pay off Claudia and we'll finally be able to just live free with our home. Haha! Hahaaa! And it'll be great, Captain! It'll b-b-b-be great and I d-don't have to worry! I'm not scared because it'll be fine! I'm not scared! I'm not-”

She paused. Then suddenly, her laugh turned to a panting, hyperventilating struggle. She began convulsing, chest rising and falling with a shaking, forced humour. Light from the sun glittered off a dampness on her cheeks, as the laugh sharply broke into heaving, choking sobs, and heavy tears began streaming from her eyes. Her voice cracked, breaking into hysterical panic.

“I’m not-I-I don't want to die!”

Held back for days, finally brought to the surface by the sudden darkness, her growing fear of the inevitable broke through the fragile barriers of her composure and began to overwhelm her. She held her head, wailing and rocking, hitting a falsetto pitch of terror.

“I don't want to die yet! Not freezing to- Not out here not like this! I don't want-I don't want to! I DON'T!”

And there was nothing. Nothing in the galaxy. No power, no evil, that could have stopped Hair Trigger crossing those few feet to grab the terrified, wailing hippogriff into a tight embrace, holding Tami closely against her chest to sway and stroke for as long as it might take.

* * *

“Hit it, Kiffle!”

Eleven's voice was barely audible over the whine of a portable generator echoing inside Claudia's cargo hold. Thick cables reinforced by brass rings jumped and sparked as Kerfuffle slammed the generator's 'input' lever up to allow power to flow into a strange contraption.

It looked like a Heartswarming tree, made up of a starship's rift-navigating antenna turned to face the ceiling, mounted on the swash plate of two linked sensor arrays. Two FTL computers were hooked up to it, mounted either side of the deliriously grinning pink unicorn, a set of borrowed welding goggles over her eyes.

As she watched, the antenna sparked at its tip, and flashed. White tendrils of magical energy began flowing around it in small spirals, attracted to the numerous pointed ends of the antenna like a magnetic field over some arcane piece of modern art. Rubbing her hooves, she closed her eyes and focused, her horn lighting up in a blazing glow, pouring her own magical energies into it. Supercharging it. Conducting her own knowledge of magical rifts to refine the power stored in it, until she was sure it was right.

“Smile!” She shouted the name, and behind her, Volatility Smile leaned in to click the connection to the computers on.

The theory was simple. The antenna on a ship helped navigate into a rift. Thus it had to be able to detect them. The sensor array could extrapolate complex data. 'Sensor fusion', she had called it. With some adjustments, the belief was that the antenna could detect the rift they wanted, and the sensor array combined with Eleven's own knowledge of arcane tears in reality could perhaps determine its exit point.

Opening her eyes, seeing the computers light up with lines of data, Eleven grinned. “It's-”

The magic began to waver. The bands of glowing power wobbled, and then snapped. Dispersing with a pop of overpressure that had all three holding their ears, the power within the machine cycled down.

Smile looked up. Kerfuffle stared awkwardly at the floor.

“-not working.” Eleven finished, then sighed.

“Well, let's try again! Don't worry, this isn't simple.” Smile rubbed the unicorn’s back. “So how do we-”

The unicorn shook her head. “No, no, you don't get it!” She pointed up at the antenna. It was still glowing faintly. “It needs time to discharge properly, or it'll be useless to try again. Maybe even melt it!”

Kerfuffle let go of the generator and stared at the strange dancing light remaining like an aura around the antenna itself. “How long?”

Eleven shrugged. “It's overcharged. Maybe... a day?”

All three of them paused. There was an uncomfortable silence. Kerfuffle felt impatience broil up inside. Delays. Always delays. The technology required to build this hadn't involved him at all. It had been areas he didn't know, short of some heavy lifting. Now it had failed, and he didn't know how to solve this either. It felt selfish in a strange way, he was happy that there was a plan at all, but every natural instinct said to do something more himself and not leave it to others to strain at alone, and yet nothing felt like enough. He tensed, and felt surprised at having to manually control his voice for the first time in a long while to not let others hear the mounting annoyance.

“Anything I can do to shorten it, Miss? Coolant? Get a fan on it?”

The unicorn leaned her head back, staring idly at the ceiling. “It'd save nothing. Inconsequential. Heat retains no portion of the mana to- Hey! Where are you going? Kiffle?”

Kerfuffle had started climbing the ladder up to the main street, toward engineering. He felt appalled at himself for just walking away from them - Eleven in particular - but an uncomfortable, impulsive resentment was swelling up inside and he wanted it nowhere near the others.

'Something to do,' he kept thinking. 'Something to help.'

Nothing.

* * *

The shuttle was quiet.

Hair Trigger sat by herself at the front, watching the last remaining diagnostic panel gradually tick down the temperature and routinely update that there had been no response to their distress beacon.

It had taken a difficult quarter of an hour for Tami's panic attack to subside. She'd exhausted herself to the point that it had become impossible to keep it up, or do much of anything. Gently, Trigger had encouraged her to drink some sugary juice and eat a little energy bar to quell the shock, then laid her down on one of the benches to rest, wrapped tightly in a blanket. She could see Tami still resting now behind her, facing the hull, just a bundle of fabric and pillows.

Hair Trigger had tried to sleep too, but it hadn't come. Instead she had dragged her own blanket up to the cockpit, and sat with a quarter-hoof of rum to quietly sip at. Not even enough to get a light buzz, but it gave her something to take momentary relief in. A burn to focus on away from the shivering cold beginning to overtake their metal coffin.

That was what it felt like now. An inert metal container whose temperature was slowly ticking down past eight degrees Celsius. She'd been in lower, but prolonged exposure was a slow-moving enemy. Already it felt like the cold was seeping into her bones. Into her head. She gulped a portion of rum. Even a successful rescue probably meant enduring an onset of hypothermia. It was a sobering thought.

Shivering, she clutched the blanket closer, wishing it felt warmer.

The truth was, however, that even focusing on the cold helped her not focus on the worse feeling lurking at the back of her mind: guilt.

It was illogical. She knew it was. This was not her fault, but she couldn't stop thinking about if she'd gone with Smile's idea instead. They'd have been back in the station by now. They wouldn’t be out here, freezing to-

She shook her head, not wanting to finish that thought.

It was upsetting. The last thing she remembered of Smile had been them arguing. 'What a way to part ways,' she thought, 'after having been through so much together. A stupid argument, then this.'

That same thought spread further out, winding through everything that mattered left behind. Not seeing Kerfuffle happy at his cured sister. Eleven was still without the peace she wanted. Whisper still needed them around, Trigger knew it. No chance to see Tundra, to give that big fluffy goofball one last squeeze. No chance to go back to her family since leaving to find her own ship, to show them what she'd done. So much left incomplete, undone by a freak accident.

Tensing up, feeling her teeth grind and grit, Hair Trigger harshly blew cold air out her nose, trying to push it all back. Whisper had talked about it once. The 'will to live' being a conscious mental attribute to surviving. She couldn't give in to those thoughts yet. Not yet. Better to sleep, kill them off with a bit of unconsciousness.

Knocking back the remainder of her small glass, she willed her trembling limbs into operation and got up to go back to her own bench. Walking through the cool air of the shuttle though, she paused, her eyes darting down to the figure opposite.

Deep in her own blanket, seemingly asleep, Tami was shivering far more than before, limbs clutched tight. Softly, she whimpered. Awake? A nightmare?

For a moment, Hair Trigger stood still in the gap between the two benches, feeling the cold seeping in after moving. There wasn't much thought. Certainly no debate. With a single motion, she draped her own blanket over the quivering pilot. Softly, she pushed Tami inwards on the bench a little, freeing up some room.

“Cap...tain?” The voice was quiet and sleepy.

“Shh, just rest. I'm here,” she soothed, and clambered onto the bench to pull herself in under the blankets with the hippogriff. Hugging her chest up to Tami's back and wrapping her limbs around, she snuggled up tightly, feeling Tami's softer, fluffy body flex under her grip and pressure. She was cold, but there was some warmth still, and Trigger held on tight to offer some of her own, leaning her cheek in against Tami's neck.

After a moment, she felt a shaking hand grip her foreleg, clawtips pricking her fetlock. They held tight.

“-nk you...” The tiny, worried and dozy voice muttered, before she felt Tami shift, turning a little until they could both pull in close to one another under the blankets.

And around them, the shuttle spun.

And the temperature continued to fall.

* * *

There was a sharp crack, and in a blinding flash of light, the antenna's energies shattered into the ether.

“Urgh! Come ON!” Eleven spun and bucked a leg backward, knocking a bucket across the floor of the hold. She grabbed the computer screen, screwing up her face in annoyance, like she blamed it for offending her. “What is WRONG? It should work! It should! The maths are right!”

Beside her, Volatility Smile gently laid her hooves on the unicorn's shoulders. Disappointment gripped her stomach too, but the sight of Eleven of all ponies getting angry gave her pause.

“Something must be going wrong-”

“I know!” Eleven snapped, not directly at her. She threw both forelegs up, as though challenging the glowing antenna to a fight. “But I can't tell till I activate it each time! That's... That's another day a-and-and they're...”

She slumped down, holding her head. Smile gently rubbed her shoulders, watching Kerfuffle move in to disconnect the contraption's power with a defeated, neutral look on his face. “Think, sweetie. There's got to be something. If all the calculations are correct, and I trust you on that, then there's something else interfering.”

Face hidden behind her hooves, Eleven went quiet and still.

“Miss?” Kerfuffle settled down near the control panel, leaning his head down to her.

The unicorn started whispering gently. Drifting, complex words. Slowly, she closed her eyes and moved her hooves to her own ears, blocking out all sound and sight. Her mouth kept moving, rapidly, talking like a speed-reader, skipping over crucial sentence structure in her own little world.

“Detection-aura-means-coordinated-signal-in-flux-too-abstract-formula-never-no-overload-power-to-simplify-it's-wait-wait-combine-add-up-likely-numbers...”

Then her eyes jolted open.

“Options. It's options!”

Sitting down, Kerfuffle tilted his head. “What do you mean, Miss? Options, like, settings? Preferences?”

She shook her head, then got up and started pacing in a circle around the machine. “No! NO! Dirty! Errors! Uh-uh, see? Erasing! That's it! People keep opening rifts here every day since it happened, so they must have been gradually corrupting any lingering rift radiation to detect! It's trying to track ALL of them! And even if it could filter out the tanker’s big one, its signal trace is flooded with all the others that are too similar or in the same area!”

Smile looked up at the glowing poles, and twisted her mouth. “Like other hoofprints going over a trail you're tracking, right. Million credit question, Eleven. Does that mean it's impossible?”

There was a pause, and Smile felt impatience rise.

“Eleven?”

The young genius breathed deeply, then shook her head. “No! No it's possible, but all the data here is as confused and blind as most unicorns seem to be! I'd need the clean telemetry recorded from the incident itself, or it's not doable!”

Kerfuffle looked from Eleven to Smile, clearly finding this beyond his ken. He was looking antsy, Smile thought, obviously feeling helpless, and she didn't know the solution to that. “Port Medusa's sensor suite - Alyssum must have it on record. It was just the ships she said would take too long, but-”

“Forgot those idiots in their 'ships'!” Eleven retorted, stamping a hoof. “They couldn't track their own hooves! If I had that data that's all I'd need-”

“Then you could... Okay! Okay!” Smile was already bringing up her multiband, keying into Medusa’s administration wing. She scanned the available appointments for the director, or even just for Gerhard, and bit back a curse.

Kerfuffle stepped over, looking above Smile's head to see the screen. “How long? The Cap'n and Miss Tami are-”

“I know!” she snapped, and instead logged in via the market wing, trying to craft a high priority (and completely fake) trade request to try and get the attention of the automated priority process to connect to Alyssum. It was unavailable. She swiped that away and tried a direct call to the receptionist. It didn't even get forwarded.

“Damn it! It's-”

She felt a huge set of claws land on her shoulder and firmly turn her to look at a stern, shockingly serious face. Kerfuffle's eyes were narrow, his normally neutral blankness replaced by a burning, frustrated intensity.

“How. Long?”

Smile sighed. “Two days for the next appointment. I could try going up to her reception and-”

Kerfuffle listened to her. All this time, he had been as patient as he could be. He had mighty reserves of tolerance. He always had been that way. But helplessness, and having been reduced to sitting and watching as day after day was being added to the 'just wait' counter had been wearing away at it. All the while, two of his closest companions were under dire threat.

And even he had his limits.

Limits that had just been crossed.

The massive griffon suddenly stood up, embodying his full size. No slouch. No passive hunch to be on a level with others. He towered above the crystal pony and the unicorn with broad shoulders and enormous wings that snapped back with a whip-crack of air about his heavy, broad body.

“Kiffle?” Eleven sat open mouthed, meekly shrinking down. “Kiffle, wh-what are you planning to-”

“We're meetin' her,” he said, his voice brimming with certainty. “Now.”

He turned and, heedless of the pain of his injuries, surged out of Claudia's hold with a blast of air from his wings to do the one thing he now felt he could to help them.

* * *

The reception outside Sweet Alyssum's office was crowded. Creatures of all shapes and sizes had filled the waiting seats lining the thin corridor between the elevator and the reception desk. The lush statues and hanging frames of art that so set it apart from Medusa's hard steel aesthetic were obscured behind spacers, traders, mechanics, search and rescue captains, enforcers and more. One ancient security drone was frantically doing its best to ensure they were all obeying noise laws from ten years ago, much to the consternation of the overworked receptionist. Moreso her two griffon security guards, who kept finding their own shouts triggering the bot again and again as well.

But behind this chaos, the elevator rumbled open and an enormous fluffy shape strode out of it.

Shouted requests turned to cries of annoyance as huge hands pushed them aside, lest the strong shoulders knock them over. Kerfuffle didn't stop once. He drove through them at a ceaseless pace like a frontier train's snow-plough. One minotaur turned, snarling, and shoved back.

“Hey, wait your-”

There was a rush of motion that belied the normally gentle griffon, as he launched forward and grabbed. A moment later, the minotaur found himself hurled back onto the laps of four surprised zebras. Kerfuffle turned, stepped over a small deer, and kept clambering forward, his eyes locked on the Director’s door.

“We need to see her! Now!” he barked. A tone of voice so unheard from him.

The two security guards launched forward, barring him with their bodies. “Appointments only! There's a lot to-”

They didn't get further. Barriers. Delays. Anything that got in his way was just an obstacle. Armour and batons or not, he launched into them, shoving them and trying to muscle his way past. They grabbed, they tussled, and both got around his arms with professional skill.

“Back off! You can't just-HEY!”

He threw himself to one side, grabbing a guard's bandoleer strap and yanking him down, dropping his weight to throw the guard off their paws, and shoved him into the wall. The other got around behind him and he felt the baton clatter into his scarred back. Kerfuffle’s cry of pain quickly turned into a snarl, and he flung his wings in their face before lashing out behind him with a wild swing. His fist impacted on kevlar, but the strike threw the guard back with a gasping wheeze of a solar plexus being struck. Diving forward, he rushed for the door, only for the first guard to drive into him from behind. Then the second. A third came running out the side corridor at the frantic receptionist's screaming. Two spacers joined in. A dog pile started, trying to stop the enormous griffon from throwing his weight around.

“Get off! We can't wait any longer! They can't wait! I ain't lettin' em-”

“Sir! Stop or we'll use tasers! Cease!”

One reached for his holster, and Kerfuffle didn't hesitate. With one heavy motion, he flung his fist out and crunched it into the guard's face. Anger burned within. They'd become adversaries, trying to hold the crew back from saving Trigger and Tami. Fists that had learned their craft in Labyrinth's rough underhalls reluctantly lashed out to clear some room. Grabbing one spacer, he drove them into the guards like a projectile. A taser dart snap-banged into the ceiling as the shooter was bowled over. He heaved the heavy door open. Halfway through, a baton slammed onto his wrist, then another behind his knee. He dropped, grunted and struck backward, grabbing a leg. He didn't know whose it was, but he dragged them from their hooves anyway. Again and again the batons slammed down, until he drove the door back in the way of most of them like a shield and fell through the gap, still brawling and grappling with the last two. Screams and cries filled the air behind them as he landed on soft carpet, and looked up.

The livid face of the station's director stared down at him, but the guard swinging a baton didn't stop. It cracked into his head with a dizzying thud, and he felt forced to fight back. He rolled with two of Sweet Alyssum’s guards right in front of her, hurling one across the room such that they nearly crushed her glass table. The other toppled a wooden cabinet. Talons grasped at him, and he heard Gerhard's voice screaming.

“Kerfuffle! Stop this! You'll-AUGH!”

The mechanic muscled the older griffon down and shoved him away.

Standing up, he advanced on her -and met two rifle barrels pointed up at him, either side of Alyssum's head. He stopped dead, panting hard, staring at her eye to eye. He saw a trigger start to depress and sucked in his breath.

Sweet Alyssum’s hoof gently reached out, lowering the barrel. “Hold on, Reginald.” The voice was crisp and calm, but her face was firm and lethal. “Out of everyone I expected to ever try this sort of stunt, you weren't one of them. You better have an explanation to justify me not throwing you in the brig for a month.”

“We can-hah-save them!” he said breathlessly. Behind him, he could hear Smile and Eleven hurrying through the crowd that was peering through the door, but he kept his focus on her. “An' you wouldn't see us for the one thing we need in time! The sen-”

“I am aware, Smile already said. But that is no reason for you to come-”

“That was then, Miss! Beggin' your pardon but that ain't the case now! Not at all! Miss Eleven figured out how; we need just the data from your own sensors and we can do it! We can! We can!” He paused, panting, settling. “We can.”

There was a lethal silence. All eyes not on the battered, adrenaline-fuelled griffon were on Alyssum. She was known for her discipline, for not taking unruly acts well. She simply stared at him, then at Smile behind him. Then at the pink unicorn beside them. Only then did Kerfuffle notice Verbena was present, having been beside her half-sister's desk. The young earth pony looked stressed out, her eyes swollen, even sweating. Perhaps petitioning on their behalf? He didn't know. After a moment, the director put her hooves down on the desk. There was a firm knock.

“My father once told me of a griffon who did much of what you did in this very same office, Kerfuffle.” She spoke with authority and strictness. “Brutishly forcing his way in to make a statement when he had not been welcomed. My father was somewhat impressed. Impressed enough to grant the griffon’s request, with caveats. I always thought it a dangerously submissive move to capitulate to such a gesture.”

The hooves raised, crossing to rest over one another, her chin likewise rising. Her eyes were hard and piercing, directed more to the others outside who had suddenly become witness to this.

“I pride myself on knowing creatures who come through my station. Moreso those who work for me. And I know you, Kerfuffle. I know your attitude, and it's not this. You did find a way, didn't you?”

Chest rising and falling, he nodded once. Sweet Alyssum sat back. “Then you'll have your permission, but unlike my father, simply being impressed isn't enough. I give you this on the condition that I take possession of whatever it is you've created immediately afterwards. Such a device, I presume it is, could prove useful to me. Those are the only terms you'll get.”

“That'll do, Miss.” There wasn't a single ounce of hesitation in his voice.

“Director will suffice. Now get out of my sight. And the rest of you?”

She peered around him at the gaggle of spacers.

“Sit down and wait.”

There was a hustle of a dozen creatures all mutually deciding on the best bets for their current dealings. Within moments, a much more organised reception was settled behind him, and the door closed. Eleven shifted up, shivering as she clasped her forelegs around Kerfuffle's arm. Smile put a hoof on his shoulder. Before them, Alyssum keyed something into her personal terminal and nodded.

“Single use access. Tomorrow only. Take it or leave it.”

“We'll take it.” Smile nodded, her hoof gently rubbing Kerfuffle's back.

“I wasn't asking you,” Alyssum retorted, eyes fixed on the griffon.

Slowly, Kerfuffle nodded. “That'll do. Miss.”

There was a brief furrowing of her brow, before she waved her hoof in dismissal.

“Get out.”

They didn't need telling. Both Smile and Eleven moved to the door, Kerfuffle only after a second or two. Quickly, Verbena rushed out behind them after giving her half-sister a small smile.

Half a minute later, as they rode the elevator down together, Kerfuffle sat down against its rear wall and held his head with shaking talons.

Another ten seconds later, there was a soft pushing against him, and his eyes opened just in time to see a light blue mane atop a pink body burrow its way in below his arms to tightly hug him.

“Sorry...if'n I scared any of you,” he mumbled, bashful.

“You were amazing,” Eleven replied. “We got it. Tomorrow, we save them.”

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow.

So long as it wasn't too late.

* * *

How much time had passed, Hair Trigger didn't know.

To check her multiband would have meant moving her foreleg. And right then, she wanted to do nothing but keep it tightly held around the form lying against her in the silent, freezing darkness.

Tami had been quiet for some time, just dozing in Trigger's embrace. Sometimes she would wake, and Hair Trigger would hear the fearful whimpers and feel muscles tense up as the pilot's consciousness returned to this place, but Trigger would always be there to squeeze tighter and rub up her back until the panic eased away again.

Hair Trigger stared blankly at the ceiling of the shuttle, half sat up, unable to sleep herself. She was shivering too much. Her ears felt prickly, and the cold was starting to work its way into her bones like icy vines creeping up an old building's wall. Her breath was misting. Every minute was a longing for something fiercely warm. Even the hippogriff’s body heat felt weaker and any extremities not in contact were cool to the touch until they were rubbed or squeezed between them.

If the time here had given Hair Trigger time to do one thing, it was reflect. She wasn't the sort to normally do that. There was always something to do. Some duty to perform, major or minor. Some issues needing thought. Someone needing a talk. And even if there was none of that, there was the future to be concerned about. The next job. How to help Eleven, or Whisper. What to do after Claudia was finally paid off. Now though, there was none of that. Nothing needing done, and no future assured. And it gave her time to think back on some things.

Her thoughts drifted to all of those in mind. Had she done enough for Kerfuffle? Why hadn't that big overly modest griffon just told her about his sister at the start? Moreso, what now? She didn't want to think about him having to work under another captain who might not see his value past the quiet aloofness the way she did.

The thought of her last interaction with Smile being them throwing barbs still stung. They'd traded them occasionally, but it had never been for long. She'd seen Smile's caring side. She'd likely land on her hooves. Somewhere. Somehow. With a new partner? Whisper? Probably. The thought of what they'd get up to together with no oversight terrified her.

But of Eleven and Whisper, there was just an odd sense of disappointment that gripped her as much as the cold did. That made her clench and shake and hold Tami tighter to steady herself as her breathing grew short and cut at her throat with icy air. Had she done enough for them in the time she had? She worried the answer was no.

And what of her promise to go and see Jelly Biscuit again?

And being able to return to her family. With her ship. Her crew. Her captaincy.

But past that, she couldn't avoid the one magic nerd in the room: Tundra. Her mind had been almost avoiding him, afraid that the memories of warmth, love and pleasure with him close by her would feel too painful and fruitlessly desired while freezing and alone. Weeks. Weeks at most she'd been around him, if that. Their relationship was still fledgling in its growth, and knowing that it might just stop because of one stupid accident?

That hurt.

Staggering her breathing, feeling the sting flowing through every gap in the blankets like a chill wind, she burrowed in again and squeezed tight into Tami to try and bury the negativity. Anger tried to burn to kill it off. It was her stable method. Get mad. Rage. Quash the emotions trying to harm the will to live. But it felt like trying to spark embers on a camp-fire in the midst of a roaring blizzard.

Slowing her breathing, she refocused and looked down on what she actually had with her. She wasn't alone.

She held Tami's upper body to her chest, the hippogriff stretched out beside her. Tami's head was cradled in Trigger's elbow, the join between their undersides keeping the remaining body heat close from face to tangled hindlegs. The unicorn could see Tami's face half hidden beneath that huge, thick mane. That heart shaped face with those rounded cheeks. She didn't deserve this.

Teeth chattering, Hair Trigger stared at her, and gently shifted to move that mane away from tickling Tami's lips. Squeezing the young pilot's cushy frame in, Trigger let her mind wander a little, taking comfort with the almost intimate physical contact and warmth to try and distract from the pain of the cold. The squeeze of their thighs. The rub of chest to chest. A cheek rubbing into her neck. The weight of the hippogriff pressing on her.

But it was fading. Their warmth was dying out as the empty black insidiously wormed its way in. But even so, the contact helped. The mutual tenderness gave her something worth staying awake to feel. It also made her smirk, as she realised she'd shamelessly thought about this before.

She knew the crew had long seen it. She even knew Tami herself had probably guessed it, and Trigger had been quietly relieved when the hippogriff hadn't once ceased to show the same affection, trust and closeness she always had after doubtless figuring it out.

Sometimes she wondered if her instincts were right that there was some in return too.

Once upon a time, before they'd both found some other form of relationship, Trigger knew she'd been tempted to ask. Hell, a part of Hair Trigger's brain that was 'open' about things more than most still got curious now and again about 'what if?'. She'd not deny that. Strength or flaw, it was there.

Now, here, on the edge of possibly the end, she didn't see any need to pretend otherwise, and let her mind think it freely for a few minutes. Just enough distraction. Enough pleasant thought to steal some comfort for herself away from the brooding terror.

She delicately brushed her hoof through Tami's mane. Just once every few seconds. Drowsily, gingerly, feeling her eyes being weighed on at last. The edges of her vision grew blurry, like frost growing on a misty glass pane. The hippogriff whined in her sleep, and Hair Trigger reached around, tenderly holding the back of her head to support her.

Time felt so slow. It creaked by. Inconsistent. Sometimes faster. Sometimes slower. Her eyes opened and closed. She didn't know if it had been instant or not. The stars gave no answers. The cold was so insidious she couldn't even tell when it got worse now.

Even with someone to clutch onto, it simply felt endless. A feeling she knew. A feeling she remembered. A feeling that still sometimes slid in like an unwelcome guest.

* * *

She had become lost already, and she now didn't know where to go.

The filly wandered without knowing where her wandering was even taking her. It was wandering that had got her into this dread, and yet more wandering wasn't helping her escape it. Tears flowing over tiny cheeks, sniffling and hiccuping, she held her plush dragon toy to her breast in a faint telekinetic glow, casting a sickly green hue around her. It was enough to illuminate the barest fraction of the monolithic metal jungle that was the primary hold. The largest space within the gargantuan cargo vessel she knew as birthplace and home, the size of a colony, a small town. Amplified by the shadows, the hold’s labyrinthian depths left her as but a speck in the darkness of a singularity.

Corrugated containers large enough to hold a small vehicle were stacked either side, so high that they loomed like skyscrapers streaked with acidic stains and discoloured bulkheads. They stretched up so high that they departed her light, their peaks unseen and their sheer walls brooding with cold, straight angles. The gaps between them were like dingy, cramped streets, streets made of diamond plate and rough-cut recycled steel that rattled and sheared off rust below her when she moved.

Hours. She'd been stuck wandering through the black depths for hours. The absolute scale of the hold created a strange climate of its own, haunting her with uneasy winds and areas of sticky condensation. She no longer knew which way was the front. No longer knew which way the ship was travelling. Where the port or starboard were. Turning and going back might be taking her deeper into the multiple kilometre long nightmare.

It had started as an adventure for the filly. An escapist fantasy to get away from the crew decks full of colts screaming and tussling and fighting. A chance to put eight decks of solid steel between her and them. It had been exciting. An excuse to pack up a recycled water bottle, a packet of rainbow sweets, her planetside jacket, and bring her dragon toy on her back as a companion. A reason to smile and imagine all the cool things she would discover.

At first it had been entrancing. Finding all the colours of identically shaped containers, each with their own bright logos that she imagined were guides to some hidden treasure. Running amok, heedlessly laughing and chasing her imagined trail, she had descended floor after floor down mesh gantries and catwalks into the barren darkness. Thrilling. Daring.

Forgetting the way home.

Sniffing back a runny nose from several bouts of wailing and crying out for someone to hear her, Short Fuse meekly stumbled on through the endless maze. She'd wanted to leave long ago. Her belly cramped with hunger and her hooves were sore with every hard impact. Sometimes it felt like her legs had to struggle to lift before they would slam down hard. Other times she felt like she could bounce. Gravity differed. It was scary in its dreamlike inconsistency. Other times there would be a blast of stinging warm wind, or she'd feel bitter mist flow past her. Her parents had told her the hold worked differently to other areas because of its size. It had sounded amazing.

It was anything but that now. Now, she was worried no-one would ever find her again.

Stopping at a cross, Short Fuse looked left and right. To her right there was a thick wall of darkness past an overhanging line of stacked muddy-red girders. She could see a lashed-down industrial forklift. Momentarily she considered honking its horn to attract someone, but its cab was sealed with thick armoured shields. To the front was only the endless trudge, the common containers everyone used, stacked high in absolute patterns.

To the left, however, she saw something.

The building-sized stack of containers tapered off and the inconsistent floor changed to a singular sheet of riveted steel squares. Tiny hooves wandering, Short Fuse stepped onto it, peering at a vague shape beyond it, looming with high walls and a mighty gate. Like a citadel, a castle from old Equestrian books. Floating her toy ahead, using her magic as a light, she saw chicken wire and a padlock up ahead.

Shivering, whimpering, she saw something else above it. A cylinder with a glittering eye that moved back and forward in a slow, deliberate motion. A camera? A sign rested below it, one she tried her best to read.

'Tobacco Storage'

She felt something crawling up her back and spun on the spot. Behind her, the darkness seemed to stretch out for her. Without the light of the toy, she backed away toward the seeking eye and suddenly ran toward it for help. Grabbing the floating dragon, she fled with scampering gallops before it, and began leaping in place.

“Hey! Hey! Help! Please help! Someone see! Someone! Please! PLEASE!” Her squeaky voice, thick and choked by bouts of crying, made her splutter and cough.

The eye of the camera stopped as it saw her moving, then a red light began to blink. On. Off. On. Off.

Short Fuse froze and sniffed deeply.

On.

Off.

A deafening klaxon erupted from either side of her. Sudden, violently loud, filling the dead silence and making her shriek. She hunched down, hooves over her ears, and screamed. It kept repeating, harsh and sudden, rising, never falling. Howling, tears in her eyes, she turned and fled in terror, back into the maze again. The sound didn't follow, but echoed in ghostly, ethereal wails between the mass of containers and the distant, unfindable hull. She turned corners, like it could chase her, sprinting, falling, sprinting, until finally she tripped, and fell against a vat of some goopy liquid, hunching up in the oily grease of the underbelly, trying to hide from it all to cry.

And the alarm she had triggered kept wailing, somewhere back there. Endless, haunting.

It wasn't-

* * *

-stopping!

Hair Trigger jerked sharply, snorting and feeling a spasm rock through her body. Then another. And another. Rapid. Violent. Making her muscles cramp and twist and feel out of control.

The alarm hadn't stopped. It had just changed. From a howling siren to an incisive digital beep in half second pulses that thudded into her numb head.

She realised it wasn't spasms. It was shaking. Terrible, uncontrollable shaking. Her eyes felt welded shut, her body prickly and numb. Gurning, twisting her burning facial features around, she felt her eyes crack open to a dark haze of glinting metal and barbed cold. It was all blurry, as eyes half locked shut and weighed down by crystals of ice pulled painfully open. Through the hazy mess, she saw a white mist emerge from her own panting mouth, lit up by a star's light. The ringed shapes of the shuttle’s bulkheads gradually came to clarity. Everything felt lazy and inconsistent. They shone like a reflective film, and Short Fu-

Hair Trigger shook her head. Aggressive, snorting angrily. Her stiff neck protested. She told it to shut up. She hadn't used that name since she left. Pressing her face into her foreleg, she tried to dull out the hammer blows of the high-pitched alarm before finally looking up again.

The sunspots of light on the deck, walls, and ceiling, they weren't the material reflecting.

They were ice.

A thin, frosty layer of ice was starting to form from condensation. And as she moved, the deathly chill arrived, piercing the numbness. She grasped down around the still and cold form of Tami with a sharp gasp. Never. Never in her life had she been this cold. Never had she held on to someone who felt this barren of heat. The blankets felt stiff and angular, frozen in place.

How long had she lain unconscious? How long had they let the cold seep in more and more? Part of her rebelled; why did she have to wake up now? To go through the freezing all over again, and worse?

She shifted and forced her limbs to operate. Wobbling, she laid Tami down and stumbled to the cockpit, slamming a hoof on the one remaining screen to disable the alarm, noting the grim text.

'WARNING: TEMPERATURE CRITICAL – LETHAL EXPOSURE IMMINENT'

Briefly, she looked out the misted window. Beyond it, nothing had changed. The white star burned still, somehow feeling like it was the source of this white death. The thought was illogical and senseless to apply malice to it, but lacking anything else solid to point at she couldn’t help see it as mocking them with its presence.

Shaking like a slums addict, Hair Trigger turned and shuffled back to the bench. Her head ached. She couldn't think. Was it better to sleep? Try and be comfortable? Or stay awake? Stay willing? She couldn't rationalise. Logic was being shaken out of her. Every breath felt like polar water down her throat. Her vision wasn't clearing. Falling, she dropped by the bench and held onto the still shape still in the blanket.

“...Tam...?” she breathed, barely a formed word. “Tam?” Her hooves rustled, rubbing and pushing the hippogriff. Fear gripped her at the lack of response, before she felt Tami shaking under her hoof. She could see wings rustling in the icy shuttle. Then slowly, an eye creaked open, frozen tears staining Tami's cheek.

She didn't speak. She just opened her mouth, then closed it, looking dizzy and confused. Her fluffy coat was speckled with twinkling shards of moisture.

“Jus'... Jus' hold on, Tam...” Trigger unsteadily clambered back onto the bench, pulling Tami's upper half onto her lap and wrapping her forelegs around the pilot. “K-Keep looking u-up at me. Eyes open.”

“Tired, C-Cap...tain...”

“I know.” Trigger gripped their bodies together, feeling the frigid, bitter absence of heat. Hair Trigger almost felt ready to drift off herself, but fought it back.

She could feel Tami settling, and saw her eyes starting to close. Summoning more energy than she could spare, she urged her body to jostle Tami about. She reached out, forcing her weak legs to rub and try to work some warmth into the pilot's body, rubbing her back under the blouse between the wings, or around her waist or shoulders. “H-Hey! Hey, th-that's an order, Tam.”

The eyes creaked open again. Barely. They fluttered.

Her pupils were very small, not focusing at all.

Hair Trigger felt a sinking dread take hold, an outcome she couldn't bear to think about seeing happen, and kept gently shaking, rubbing, speaking. Anything it took.

Anything to not leave someone scared and alone in the dark the way she'd once been.

* * *

“No! No, no, nooooo!”

Eleven’s wail of frustration was matched by the tears streaming down her cheeks as the antenna glowed, shuddered, and then sparked. She dropped the portable terminal, hooves hunching around her head as the magic bands began to fade once again. “H-How could it not work!? It doesn't make-no!”

Medusa's sensor operations deck differed from much of the station. Quiet, dark, with windows taller than a minotaur's height lining the curved wall that overlooked the satellite arrays atop the station's superstructure. Inside were several rows of high-end computing stations, each row elevated above the other like a lecture hall. Most bore orange holographic displays, but some bucked the trend with the occasional dark blue, green, and even one that seemed to shift colours every few seconds. The desk surfaces and tops were covered in coffee mugs, toys, and a veritable legion of post-it notes. Whiteboards littered the space around the edges, crammed in against the walls beside blinking server banks with duty rotas, frequency changes, and to Smile's surprise, insecure passwords written in scrawled marker pen. At once bleeding edge, and yet clearly somewhere its workers had nested in and personalised for their clique-inducing, sometimes elitist skillset.

Eleven's tracking machine had been rather clumsily carted up, and it felt quite out of place. Its presence seemed to perplex many of the small shut-in types that populated the intensely code-heavy job of operating a station's detection suite. They sat behind the deep orange glows of their workstations, peering between holographic displays of the surrounding system at the group occupying the viewing area near the records server. Volatility Smile could see a disproportionate amount of glasses on their bewildered faces at the arcane machine and its escorting security detail. Verbena’s presence clearly confused them - even more so when she'd done the database search on their servers herself.

Beside Smile, Kerfuffle wrapped a wing around the distraught unicorn, but Smile could see his head sink with disappointment. Eleven had staked a lot on her theory. And given her gift, they'd all wanted to believe it was certain, like many things she did always seemed to be.

She felt her own heart crushed. Perhaps this one had just been beyond her.

This had been what they'd wanted, a chance to finally set up with Medusa's sensor suite and its archives. To give Eleven all the data she needed to configure the rift tracker and find where the ship had sent everything. That was all she'd said she needed. The recorded data on the tanker's rift.

Slowly, Smile sat down on one of the wheeled chairs. Habitually she wondered what they'd missed. A fruitless thought, perhaps. She was no unicorn, let alone an expert on the astrophysics of the magic realm, but it was hard not to.

Kerfuffle's arms joined the wings and muffled Eleven's worries to a dull sound under the feathers and fluff. “S'not your fault, Miss,” he whispered, “wasn't ever certain, I think...”

A silence fell over the suite. Even those not involved quietened.

Smile got up again, suddenly restless, and trotted to the cool window. She'd been trying to ignore this possible outcome. Trying to see that there was a path. Believe in it. Now though, staring at the open void, she realised she'd have to come to accept that it may be the way it was. She closed her eyes and rested her sparkling forehead upon the glass, casting a shifting, glinting reflection back upon herself.

Behind her, Kerfuffle stared at the machine's antenna and wrapped his arms around Eleven. He stood still, feeling he had to be still. A bulwark for her now. Inside, though, past the short term guilt of having let his impatience grip him, even knowing it was the right thing, he couldn't help but feel he'd still let the Captain and Tami down.

It wasn't. He hadn't. He knew it. But it was there.

All because of one machine he couldn't work on not doing what he knew Eleven had told it to. Machines didn't do bad things, they just did what they did. If one didn't work, it usually meant it had been treated wrong, but he knew in his heart that wasn't Eleven's way. She wouldn't make those mistakes when she cared that much. And he trusted her. It formed a conflict. His trust in Eleven, against his trust in the inviolable consistency of inanimate operations.

The clash of ideals wasn't even a battle. It was a massacre. And it all came down in favour of the pink huddle sniffling into his chest.

His eyes narrowed at the unusual antenna and its connected appliances. He stared at it. Stared hard. Burrowed his train of thought into it. 'Why won't you work for her?' he quietly asked in his mind. 'Why won't you do the thing she's askin' so politely for?'

He had half a mind to grab it. Strip the whole thing down. Check every component. Spend seventy two hours awake doing it. Find the fault. But it'd be too late, and he barely knew how this unusual thing worked. He needed it to work now. Not later. Now. For her. For their friends. And for the first time in his life, he let displeasure turn his expression. An accusation. A torrent of utter blame, putting every bit of responsibility on that thing. Disappointment was written all over his face, directed toward that rickety, impolite contraption. It had let him down - it had let everyone down - and he blamed it for that.

Then, under his intense stare, there was a flicker.

Something between the strands of thin metal on the antenna: a faint glow. It had always done that when it had overloaded, glowed like a decoration for hours. But this wasn't the same. It was still running up and down in gentle currents, almost invisibly. A faint charge that hadn't dissipated.

“Miss? Uh, miss?” he spoke, opening his wings and turning Eleven's head back toward it. “I think somethin's different...”

Eleven's bleary eyes were bubbling with dampness, and she vigorously wiped them before peering at the contraption again. Then, she squeaked. Leaning forward, her horn glowed momentarily, and was followed by a high pitched gasp.

“Kiffle... It retained an activated charge! That means...”

She flew off of him, a pink blur. Smile sharply turned. Verbena blinked in confusion. A dozen glassy-eyed controllers meerkated over their desks as Eleven's hooves became a whirlwind of motion on the keyboard of the attached workstation. The rapid clack of heavy keys being enthusiastically slammed filled the room, and she looked up with a shock.

“It was shorting out because it was getting overloaded without knowing what to look for...” Eleven breathed the words more than spoke them. She got up and ran to Kerfuffle. “Shorting out!” She ran to Smile. “Given a proper signal it doesn't short out!” Turning, she almost gracefully bounded over the floor's many wires to Verbena and grabbed the shocked little earth pony by the shoulders. “That means we can try again! I can refine it! I can do it without waiting a day this time! I can-”

Behind her, a large griffon - the security escort - narrowed his eyes and stood up. “Now, you were given one go at this, weren't you? It took-”

A hoof grabbed his beak. Suddenly he found himself staring down at someone entirely different. He'd expected Kerfuffle to swell up and make a point; he'd been prepared for that. Instead, a glittering hoof dragged his gaze to see the sharpest, most severe face he'd ever witnessed on a pony. A crystal pony often seemed alluring, full of sparkle and light, but here her face only promised one thing: 'I am correct here'. Volatility Smile gave him a look of complete affront. A stare to wither the hearts of duty managers the galaxy over.

“I believe she gave us two chances. Sir.” Her voice held a lethal edge. That last word, separated for emphasis with the promise of verbal confrontation to come could have floundered many people's defences alone.

He clicked his beak shut, then opened it. “Look, I'm sure-”

“This is one of her ships we’re looking for. This is a machine she wants working. Do I have to march us both down so we can both tell her why it's being delayed? Why you didn't read your assignment report? She DID specify.”

Sweating, the griffon quickly gathered his priorities. Annoy the director in her office by bothering her with a mistake, or simply report that it took longer than expected?

“Shall we?” Smile let go of him and began to march for the door. He quickly felt his heart clench.

“No! No, two will be fine! Just get the thing ready!”

Smile lived up to her name. A creeping, self-assured 'thank you for understanding who is the one in the right here' smile of confidence.

Behind her, Eleven was oddly still. Normally one to be hyperactive and in motion even when working, she was focused. Quiet. Numbers flickered on the screen faster than Smile could follow. Silent, long minutes ensued in the dark control centre before finally, a hoof slapped a button on the sensor-panel housing. The antenna began to light up again. Magic bands leapt and curled. They danced, following the rods of metal and leaping from one to one.

And then cut.

After a few seconds of silence, they suddenly returned in a cascading glow of colour. The modules on the sensor housing gleamed in the reflected light. The antennas themselves fiercely burned like thick, shaped lasers, strobe-lighting the entire room. Ponies and griffons and zebras yelped and backed away from the unstable, unconstrained reaction of the machine as much as they did from the manically smiling and heavily breathing unicorn right beside it.

Then finally it shut off, leaving Eleven panting beside it like a B-movie’s crazed scientist. The computer screen lit up in orange text upon a black background. Numbers. Just numbers. Eleven brought up the multiband Tami had given her and plugged it in, hitting the commands to transfer data before standing up. She took a long breath, her voice simple and plain, suddenly exhausted.

“I have it.”

Five seconds. Five seconds’ pause of disbelief was all it took, before Kerfuffle, Smile, Eleven, and Verbena turned and ran for the elevators, hitting the key for the hangar deck. Within minutes they were sprinting over the decking toward Claudia. Smile paused to start the undocking sequence from the terminal at the end of their landing area. Kerfuffle flew ahead, carrying Eleven, enduring the pain in his back. He swarmed up the ladders to initiate the reactor core while Eleven headed for the bridge. Untrained perhaps, but she grasped at the FTL panel, parsed it, learned it, then began to enter the formula by hoof. Less than a minute later, Claudia's power core started to hum into a crash-start behind her. Smile leapt into Tami's seat and started preparing for undocking.

The dull rumbling turned to a great roar as the core ignited. Kerfuffle felt the engineering compartment shake around him, and patted the side of the reactor’s housing at hearing Claudia rush so diligently to operational power. Squirting steam wheezed from the hull's outlets, and vector engines rotated with a hiss of hydraulics. Turbines wound up. The floor shook with the promise of action at last. Of a chance come true.

“Not done this in far too long...” Smile muttered. Below them, Claudia's engines began to lift her off the deck, hanging in the air. Hangar crew reacted with shock at the unexpected departure. Their comm-set suddenly barked, a harsh voice biting out at them.

“Pioneer class, name 'Claudia' you are not cleared for-”

Smile was already readying her greatest bullshitting skills.

She was moments too late to speak, for another hoof grabbed the PA above her.

“You get that door open this instant you slacking oaf or so help me I will have WORDS with you the moment I get back to this station! Do you hear me? Do you? Do you need to remember which family owns this station? Owns your job? Do your kids on the crew decks need daddy to explain why he isn't bringing home food this week? Get. That. Door. Open. Or. I. Will-”

“Y-Yes, Ma'am!” the panicked voice responded, and slowly the doors began to pull open again, letting Claudia drop out into the black and immediately turn to set a course for safe FTL distance.

Between Smile and Eleven, Verbena gently replaced the handset, breathing out, looking at the shocked awe on their faces. She shrugged.

“Talent runs in the blood, what can I say?”

* * *

“I n-never did get to t-tell you what it was you did for me, d-did I?”

Hair Trigger whispered the words, rocking gently back and forth in the now sub-zero environment. Her teeth were chattering with small, hyperventilated breaths.

“W-Well...”

She couldn't feel her forelegs tighten around Tami. She was losing feeling. She only knew she willed herself to, and saw the crinkle of the blanket as it moved.

“I d-didn't know what k-kind of captain I'd b-be, y'know?”

She'd been talking for what felt like hours. Trying to give them both something to hold onto. Some sound. Something that wasn't a cold, empty void to fall into. She sniffed, hissed in pain at the prickling deadness in her limbs, and ruffled around to stir and rub the hippogriff as vigorously as she could. Tami's nostrils still moved. Her eyes sometimes slid a fraction open. The poor thing was exhausted, frozen, and confused from hypothermia.

She wasn't the only one.

“I wanted t-to be a good one b-but you never know. Y-you all g-gave me the chance to be a good one. B-but I think it's y-you who...”

She breathed in deeply, crunching her eyes closed. They felt like they'd stick. The air had a mist to it. She wondered if a seal had broken. Condensation was forming on every surface as the temperature continued to plummet. She wiped Tami's mane away from her face, hearing a gentle, fearful murmur.

“...who let me not b-be an angry one t-to anyone. I w-was a lot less-ngh! A lot less controlled before y-you came along, Tam.”

Briefly, after she spoke, Hair Trigger felt her chest tighten. Her eyes felt heavy. Multiple times she'd drifted off, before sharply awakening as something inside kicked and screamed that it wasn't time yet. Startling, snorting, she shook her head.

“Th-Thank you for that.”

There was a brief glimmer of an eye opening below her. Tami's body shifted ever so slightly, then dropped, like it couldn't muster the energy. One claw flopped in an attempt to reach, and her mouth lightly breathed something as it fell against Trigger's chest.

“Best...”

Then, the arm fell limp, the eye flickering, then closing. Her shivers began to slacken off. Hair Trigger stared, eyes widening. A sinking feeling welled up, and she forced her lazy, clumsy hooves to reach, to grasp.

“No, no... Don't you dare!”

She held Tami up, panic rising, pulling her mouth close to her cheek. There was a sharp relief as she felt breathing. But it was fragile, much lower than it had been. And fading.

“Don't you dare!” she repeated, her voice pitching up, and she gently jerked the hippogriff in her forelegs, stroking her mane over and over, speaking into her ear. “You stay right here! With me! Captain's orders! You hear me, Tam? You hear me?”

There wasn't a reply.

“TAM!”

* * *

Claudia roared through M-space with a heedless force. It wasn’t subtle or smooth, more like a cannonball out a barrel than a precision slide through the aether. Smile hadn't dared think about the damage it might be doing to simply select the highest possible speed, but the transition had been violent and jarring. Her stomach felt sick. Her head hurt, even hours after they'd departed.

She stared at Eleven; the unicorn was sitting in Trigger's seat, staring at the screens with rapt attention.

“How long?”

Eleven stared wordlessly at the FTL monitor, then looked up, frowning.

“HOW LONG!?”

* * *

Time felt as infinite as the void. But in the endless cycle of the shuttle's spinning, every second mattered to Hair Trigger.

Hooves pawing over Tami, trying to force any amount of warmth she could in, she rubbed her back, her hands, her arms, her sides. She hugged her close. She wrapped her. But the effort was exhausting, and the wrath against the galaxy driving her limbs slowly started to die off against all her efforts.

“Tami, please...” she whispered, reduced to holding her as tightly as she had for days now. Burying her face in that thick mane. “We'll... We'll...”

She barely knew what to say they'd do now. It was becoming clear that no-one was coming, even to her. Fighting down a whine of frustration, she leaned in and kissed the hippogriff's forehead again.

“You've gotta keep going. You can, girl. You can. You've done it before.”

A tight squeeze passed into a shuddering cough. Her own vision was fading. Her own sleepiness was setting in. She wouldn't last much longer either. She-

Trigger snapped awake again. Nothing was different, other than the light. Minutes? Hours? She didn't know.

Her vision swayed and distorted. Shapes were fuzzy-edged. She could swear she heard roaring water. Her heart felt too slow to work. Tami was very still, the barest pulse against Trigger's hoof. One slowing down. Minute by minute ticking toward this all being over.

“Don't you leave me alone, you hear me?”

She didn't even know if she'd said the words or not. It sounded totally unlike how she thought she sounded.

“Don't leave me alone here...”

Curling over, feeling the moisture, the cold, and the dark, she pushed her lips through Tami's mane and just held them against her head, panting and shivering, until she again felt a jump. An unconscious hiccup of dozy uncertainty.

Hair Trigger turned to cast one more hateful glare at that sun. It had taken on an antagonistic persona to her. A source of heat that refused to come and save them.

A colossal eye stared back.

She paused, wondering if she'd taken on delusions now. Or another dream. The white sun was bisected lengthways by a black shape, making its white sphere look like an eyeball.

That same shape turned, spinning, and expanded, covering stars, lights on its surface sharply activating, illuminating the shuttle.

Her mouth opened.

* * *

“We've got them! We've got them!”

Ahead of Claudia's approach, Smile could see the hull-lamps illuminating the frosted, misted out window. “It's... Oh stars, they've lost at least some life support!”

Smile screamed the words into the PA, struggling to angle Claudia in to bring the derelict shuttle in alongside the larger cargo vessel's airlocks. Leaving the autopilot to match the slow spin, she dragged up the full details from the sensors. She'd been right. Behind her, she heard rushing and clanging from downstairs, and hollered down the main street. “Temperature is below zero in there! We're going to have casual-”

She couldn't bear the word.

“Patch! Get down there! Now!”

“Affirmative!”

The drone buzzed by the bridge, heading downstairs. Rotors whining, it flew past Verbena grabbing every blanket and sheet she could from the crew’s rooms, dragging them into the cargo hold. In there, Kerfuffle was pulling the modular medical trauma table out from its container against the wall. He looked pale. His claws were shaking. Beside him, Eleven was watching through the airlock's internal camera on a small screen, bouncing from hoof to hoof.

“Almost... Almost...”

Smile's voice echoed from above them as the ship clanged and shook with a somewhat blunt and untidy docking procedure. “There! We're on! Get them out of there! I'm on my way!”

Every second was long. Every moment this close, mere feet away, felt dreadful. Kerfuffle didn't know what they'd find in there. An image entered his head, and he didn't like it.

He grabbed the airlock handle.

* * *

Trigger dragged herself across the floor. She felt the rocking slam of something docking against them, and then heard hissing. Pressurisation. The star's light had been cut out, and she felt her way to the airlock, fighting to undo the locks from the inside, lean her weight on the bar and drop her body, pushing with all her might.

Behind her, she saw Tami lying limp.

“They're here. I see them! Tam! Just... Just hold on...”

No reply.

“Hold on!”

* * *

Eleven and Kerfuffle heaved the airlock's handle, dragging it down together. They'd waited for the minimum safe pressure. The door, reluctant to be opened early, was stiff and moved roughly. Soon, Verbena's hooves joined them. And in a clattering of hooves, so did Smile's.

Behind them, Patch activated the trauma bed's life support machine. “Hypothermia likely based on sensor data. Preparing measures.”

With a vicious hiss, the airlock came ajar and jerked open. Something freezing cold slammed out of it and into Smile's chest. It made her cry out and fall back under it onto the deck with a heavy slap of her body.

Getting her breath back, shivering, Smile looked down her fallen body, and gasped.

It had been the change in pressure, an icy burst of wind erupting into their bay.

And beyond that, through the door, with a confused, aghast Kerfuffle staring around the frame, an empty shuttle.

Smile's mouth dropped. “What...”

* * *

Eight hours earlier.

The door sprung open outwards with a heavy clang, louder than anything she had heard in days. Propelled by the change in pressure, Hair Trigger stumbled and fell forward onto a hard deck. Her chin jarred. She felt stinging heat. Her ears popped. Coughing, choking, limp and weak, she rolled onto her back and stared upwards.

A face stared back down at her, backlit by unfamiliar running lights, one that quickly came into clarity, bearing a pleased smugness.

“Hello again, Captain,” purred Asset Margin.

* * *

To be continued...

* * *

Comments

[WanderingPony]

A lack of death is a hoard of possibilities

[Mix-up]

Great chapter, it was great seeing a real story with that setting, I loved Three's antics and his emotionally stunted unshakable self confidence somehow actually is capable of caring of someone else other then him, I wonder if there is a link to eleven in some way? Hope to see more of that stuff again in the future.

[Steakthedog]

I wonder how much cargo space Claudia has. And if I could squeeze a CPLT-H2 in there. Or any ‘Mech. Or just MBT’s. Or ammo. Or other war making supplies.

[FuzzyVeeVee]

10757194
Checking in with Goat (the arbitrator of all things world design in the game) he confirms you could probably fit a Catapult in deconstructed.

He also notes he "sees what you did there" choosing the Periphery variant.

[FuzzyVeeVee]

10757335
Can confirm that Kerf is the best of boys and a big fluffy cuddlepost for much of the crew.

Glad to hear you're continuing to enjoy! Moreso that you're checking out the summaries. Snipe will be glad to hear that from his efforts writing them.

[Steakthedog]

10759354
I prefer the K2 but that one might be hard to get. ‘cus, ya know, it’s a house design.

[Steakthedog]

10759465
House Kurita specifically.

[TheFrozenWarrior]

10944866
Wdym?

[RoboRed]

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatthefuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I was not expecting that. I was expecting this to go somewhat along the lines of Shuttlepod One, with maybe part two dealing with some sort of trauma in the aftermath. Asset Margin showing up again at zero hour was the last thing I was expecting. Holy shit.

Other stuffs:

• Excellent chapter.
• Huh...so Hair Trigger and Tundra fell for each other at some point? Yet another thing for me to catch up on the game story docs, I guess.
• Yeah...apart from fire, dying out in the cold black void of space - definitely up top there on ways I don't want to go out. Not that I expect the latter to be a possibility within my lifetime, anyways.

[FuzzyVeeVee]

11571958
Shuttlepod One was the direct inspiration for this, I'm glad someone noticed that!

Always nice to catch off guard. I'm working on the future part of this too after the released ones so, hopefully it won't be toooo long after you finish. I'd say its maybe 10-15% done.