• Published 16th Dec 2019
  • 942 Views, 290 Comments

Just Like Magic of Old - computerneek



Magic is a thing of the distant past, but it changes Princess Short Flight's life forever after a run-in with orbiting procedures.

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Chapter 8 (Rewritten)

She was halfway through clambering into the escape pod when a sudden warning buzzer went off. She glanced at the screen- and let out a groan. The exterior hatch the pod would go through was jammed, rendering it useless.

She scrambled back out of the escape pod. The pirates must have welded the hatch- they did that, when they were after hostages.

She took a deep breath… then the gravity suddenly shifted.

She blinked. The engines had just cut off. Meaning, she’d just done that galloping in seven gees of horizontal force- and not even noticed it. She could have sworn she wasn’t anywhere near that strong.

She took another deep breath, a new plan forming in her mind. The controls will have locked themselves when she left the panel- and if she could simply not notice a seven gee field, a ten gee field shouldn’t be all that bad. And the only reason the main engines would have cut out on their own, would be an optimal departure trajectory.

Two hours. If she could hide for two hours, or otherwise stay aboard, the Gravity Drive would come on automatically- and a ten gee field was extremely dangerous to any that weren’t expecting it, as any fall would hurt just as much as a fall ten times as high in a one gee field.

Making the fall from one side of the airlock to the other potentially fatal.

That was her best bet.

She ran for her vacuum suit. She would wait on the outside of the ship if she had to.

… Though, she would want to make sure she was inside again before the Gravity Drive activated. The compensator field stopped at the edge of the hull- so if she was standing on the outside, she’d experience the full force of the acceleration- and she was not willing to test her grip on over a hundred gravities. If she happened to lose her grip, or not be strong enough, the ship would vanish into the distance in seconds. Or less.

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As soon as she got her vacuum suit on, she initiated a two hour timer on her HUD- and ran down the passage before slipping into one of the cargo lifts. The massive lifts, designed for lifting supply pallets while landed, were normally sealed against pony entry, except by the serviceways- but while under intruder alert, her ID chip would open anything as a hiding spot. To be fair, it’d open anything anytime, but during an intruder alert, there were no extra prompts to verify that she really wants to go there, the door just opened.

Once inside, she glanced ‘up’ and ‘down’. She’d only ever used one deck on her ship- never had any reason to use the others, and so never even gone there. She’d only ever used D Deck- the one the bridge is on, and the second ‘highest’ on her ship. She could go ‘up’, to E Deck- which, if she recalled correctly, was made almost exclusively for her hidden dorsal weapons, and the ponies to run them.

All three of the decks below her flight deck were for different purposes. Her reactors were on C Deck; she was aware that B Deck was filled mostly by the hydroponics facilities she didn’t use. The ‘ground deck’- properly termed A Deck- was mostly material storage, with some spaces set aside for the hidden ventral weapons.

She decided to go there. With that recent resupply, she should be able to hide behind something for hours- and everything down there was very firmly anchored in place, so the Gravity Drive wouldn't send anything sliding into her.

The cargo lift door slid open for her on the bottom as well, landing back shut behind her, and she ran into supply hold… Oh, three looked decent. During the resupply, they’d topped off all her supply holds, and this one…

She blinked. Hydroponics supplies.

She made sure the door was closed firmly, found herself a hiding spot a good ways away from the door, and finally connected to and logged into her ship through her suit. She updated the timer on her HUD to match the time-to-ignition her nav computer was giving her, and started checking through the various cameras and sensors, to track the intruders’ progress through her ship.

Then she waited, and watched.

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At T minus one minute, she ordered a Gravity Drive systems check, which came back green. Good, they didn’t cripple the Gravity Drive. She’d watched on internal sensors as they crippled all her thrusters, closing- and welding- all the valves from the fuel tanks. She’d have to set herself on a wide orbit out here, once she dumped them, and wait for a repair ship to rendezvous with her. It would likely be a lot easier to do that if she headed for Earth.

She waited. She had twenty hours of oxygen left in her long endurance suit’s tanks.

She counted the last few seconds down in her head… then nothing happened. Two seconds later, an error occurred- and she opened it up.

They didn’t cripple the Gravity Drive. They crippled the cover panels instead, effectively disabling the drive without damaging any of the drive components… or setting off any damage alerts.

She took a deep breath, forcing her fear back down. At that point, she has two options, and neither were very appealing. One, she could hide for the… She checked the nav computers. One day and nineteen hours, before she made atmospheric contact. Dangerous atmospheric contact, but it was just above the certain death threshold, so at least she wasn’t completely doomed. She should be able to fly it to the surface from here, assuming the pirates didn’t gas the ventilation system in the meantime- and assuming she got lucky, too.

Or two, she could fight them, and probably lose. Get taken hostage, possibly killed. And, if she won, she could then request assistance from another ship, probably not get it… and fly it to the surface from the bridge.

Suddenly, she heard the door into the supply hold slide open, and tensed her muscles, holding her breath. The lights also came on at the same time.

Silence held for about ten seconds before she heard a muffled grumbling, sounding distinctly like the pirate was wearing a helmet. “Ugh… Either she’s not here, or the gas isn’t working,” the pirate grumbled, before the door closed again… and the lights went out.

She breathed softly, carefully. The gas… They must have gassed the ventilation. Though with what, she wasn’t sure- all the gasses she knew of would have put her to sleep. She carefully, gently, touched the chin switch to cut all lights, even internal, on her suit- causing her HUD to disappear, along with all her controls and camera views. Especially if the pirate was suited as well, there was a distinct possibility he was trying to make her think he wasn’t there.

She waited.

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What felt like forever later, she felt her suit whuff taught- which, in her experience, only ever happened in airlocks.

She took a deep breath, closed the solar shield on her helmet, and activated her HUD once again.

A few sensor checks later, and she confirmed what she’d suspected. The pirates seemed to have gotten what they wanted, and or not gotten what they wanted, and so were letting the air out and cutting the power before they left. She rather suspected they thought she was hiding out somewhere with a pressure suit- but they wouldn’t have known know she had a long endurance pressure suit. Cutting the power like that, though… Especially once they drained her reserves, which she could see them preparing for, it wouldn’t be possible to power the reactors on again without an infusion of power from elsewhere- her suit battery wouldn’t be enough- or climbing inside the reactor itself to manually power it up.

Then of course, even once the reactor was set to ‘startup strength’, she’d have to wait about an hour for the reactor to heat up enough to start producing power once again. Unfortunately, starting the reactor at any higher setting could cause dangerous temperature and pressure imbalances that could severely damage the generation components… and the low, low heat output of an ‘offline’ reactor was so ridiculously low she couldn’t make power with it.

She watched as the pirates finished draining her reserves, and started leaving. The reactors hadn’t spun down yet, so even though the control rods were all the way in, they were charging the reserves right back up a little bit.

She could only stare at her feeds as the pirates finally opened all her radiators, setting them to maximum… and then waited, just inside her ship, for the power to run out before hopping back to theirs and drifting slowly away.

She watched them drift slowly away, then stop themselves- relative- with a short puff of thrust. She finally got her first clear view of their ship- and grinned to herself. She was right- that was no interplanetary-range ship. It was an orbital transfer shuttle- the kind that wasn’t designed to come out anywhere near this far. It wouldn’t have the fuel to decelerate back to orbital velocity once it got back down- and that would be in a perfect world, where it already had an orbital trajectory- instead of a sub-orbital one- and full tanks!

She double-checked all the internal sensors. They were slow to respond; the computer had gone into emergency power mode. But, they were still working. All the pirates had left- and as near as she could tell, they didn’t take anything. They didn’t even try hacking her computers, only… Yeah. Only searching for her.

She slowly walked her way out of the cargo bay. They were probably waiting for her to light up her long-range transmitter- the one that would penetrate her ship’s hull- and beg for help. She took a deep breath. They punctured her atmospheric oxygen tanks before they left, so the only atmospheric oxygen she had left is in her suit.

She sighed. At least they didn’t touch the oxidizer tanks, even to seal the valves like they did the fuel tanks. Meaning, she still had roughly two thousand tons of liquid oxygen on board… and the vaporization manifold, intended to be used in emergencies to convert liquid oxygen into gaseous atmospheric oxygen in the event the air tanks ran out, was unharmed. Add that the atmospheric nitrogen tanks, intended as a backup in case of a hull breach, were still both full and undamaged, and she had enough air to live for years- until long after her food supply ran out.

She made her way all the way up to her bedroom. Funny, the doors all seemed to have power, opening and closing for her automatically. Sure, they were slow, but they had power.

And the deck surface was getting ice cold under her hooves, even through her insulated suit.

… Right. That was why they opened her radiators like that- at that point… she checked the reactor temperatures. Yeah, they had been turned into ice cubes, effectively- and would take lots of hours to restart safely. She sighed into her visor, before sending herself drifting back out and down the passage, towards the bridge. When she got there, she found everything intact. Well… Her command chair had been taken, but that was it.

The control panels lit up as she walked up to them, still running in backup power mode, and she looked over them. What good could they do her, at that point?

The power control panel caught her attention.

She’d forgotten about the solar paint.

That would also explain how she still had power.

She reached a hoof up, and tapped the key to reset the radiator control system. Within seconds, the dim glow of the panels brightened to normal levels, even before the massive doors started closing. The radiator pumps had shut down.

Her next taps put all three reactors into ‘defrost mode’- a lower power setting than the startup setting, this one specifically used to defrost any frozen components. Each reactor would automatically go to startup strength as soon as positive flow was detected through the circuit, indicating that all the ice had been melted. She could expect them to stay in startup mode- after they finished defrosting- for about half an hour.

Then she glanced at the outside sensor view still showing on her suit’s HUD, powered on the ship gyroscopes, and launched herself down the passages, through the door onto E Deck, and right over to one of the dorsal turrets. She quickly locked herself into the control seat- the freezing control seat, but still- and ran a self-test.

All good. Power low, but all working.

She checked the turret’s position relative to their shuttle. As expected, they were just outside its firing range; they’d drifted down, relative to her ship, since they disconnected.

A little remote command to the gyroscopes fixed that, right at the same time as she struck the deploy key… and the massive turret, triple-mounted with a plasma cannon, two missiles, and a tri-barrel chaingun, burst suddenly and smoothly from its hiding place. The massive- and carefully hidden- door panels, thankfully, were not welded shut, allowing them to slide smoothly out of the way.

She focused on the targeting screen in front of her, took aim at the shuttle’s cockpit, and fired a few bullets into it, shattering the windows. She didn’t think she hit anypony; she didn’t see anypony in the cockpit, and no bodies flew out the new hole.

But she was, then, fairly certain nopony was about to light the thrusters and dodge any of her fire… so she switched weapons, and aimed a missile for their rear-mounted thrusters. She would have used the plasma cannon if she had the power to run the thing.

Bullseye. She even spotted the massive bloom as the blast penetrated their fuel and oxidizer tanks, demolishing a good quarter of their ship. She fired the other missile straight through the hole in their bridge windows, before switching weapons again and running a line of bullets down the middle of their single radiator.

Finally, she used her suit displays to query her navigation computer for the pirates’ estimated trajectory… and let out a breath. Their relative velocity was too high for even a SUT pack to overcome, thanks to the explosion- and of course, her nav computer instantly labeled their new trajectory a ‘suicide path’. They were set to crash into the planet in such a way that they couldn’t possibly survive reentry. Projected landing location… She winced. A craft that small would probably break up before it hit the castle, but a significant enough portion of it might reach the castle to knock the thing down.

She took a deep breath, folded the weapon, and climbed out of the control harness. She was shivering- but unfortunately, until her reactors heated up a bit, the tiny little heaters in her suit would have to suffice. Like any other interplanetary ship, her reactors were the only significant heat source aboard.

She returned to her main control panel, lifted her hooves off the floor while she waited for the ship to heat up, and remotely accessed her ship’s comms… to call her father’s steward, the pony who was the ‘boss’ of all the other family servants.

It took him a couple minutes to answer her call. “Yes, Princess?” He blinked; she was using the screen on her ship’s comms panel, but the audio feed from her suit… and he must have seen her helmet. “Uh- Did something happen?”

She nodded. “Pirates. I took care of them, and I’ll be landing at Control in a couple days- but do you think you can do a fire drill the day after tomorrow, at two-sixteen in the morning?”

He tilted his head. “Yeah, I think I can get away with it. Your dad’s going to hate me for it, but…”

She shrugged. “Honestly, that really doesn’t matter this time. I’ve crippled the pirate ship- and they’re on a course to hit the castle at about two twenty-six AM. Probably break up in the atmosphere first, but I’d still like to be sure nopony is in the danger zone.”

He blinked. “... Ahh. Then I guess it won’t be much of a drill, will it? I’ll alert the staff, and we’ll be ready.” He scowled. “Hmm, and I may want to adjust the timing of the exercise, to make sure everypony’s clear in time. That okay?”

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

Once he finally disconnected, she curled up in midair and went to sleep. She had a long time to wait before her reactors were warm enough for her to want to pressurize her ship- and she still had a good eighteen hours of air in her suit.

Author's Note:

Loading Author's Note... Failed: Too hungry.

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Edit after a meal: Oh, and she mentions that she has 2,000 tons of LOX aboard her ship? That's approximately three times the LOX payload of the Space Shuttle at launch (~700 tons). Assuming her fuel is liquid hydrogen, she will have about 500 tons of that, in tanks about 2.5 times the size. For comparison, a Boeing 747- a variant of which is the longest passenger aircraft ever built (the 747-8, specifically)- weighs about 250 tons empty, and up to 500 at takeoff.

That does have some implications on the size of her ship, doesn't it?

"Rewritten" 6/23/2020 for translation to past tense, and a little rewording for better flow.

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