Chapter 6: Pirates
“Medical… every last one?”
The mare that had led the second wave of crew out of their shuttle- Surgeon Commander Fast Stitch- nodded to Kayla. “Save only the shuttle pilot, yes. I understand they sent us up as the second wave so that we could deal with any issues that might arise from the transformation.” She glanced down at herself. “Though to be fair, I’m not so sure we’ll be able to deal with any such for quite a while, just because…” She sighed. “It’s going to be fun, running some examinations, from which to fabricate fake ponies to practice operations on. I hope you’ve got the facilities to do that?”
Kayla shrugged. “Captain Turning Wrench- head of engineering- found something that she said looks like it might be part of a larger manufacturing system in one of the reactor rooms, but other than that, I haven’t heard anything.”
“The reactor room?”
She nodded. “She also said it was a strange place for that kind of equipment- but that wouldn’t be the first peculiarity we’ve found about this ship.”
She raised an eyebrow.
Kayla smiled. “Well, aside from the gravity you’ve probably already noticed, and the transformation, she doesn’t use hydroponics, but standard farms. None of the higher-ups seemed to realize that, but it was apparently in the reports, so we got the proper resources for those farms despite constantly calling them hydroponics.” She scowled. “And wouldn’t the reports from Commissioner West have been enough for the anatomy…?”
She shrugged. “He’s a single pony- specifically, a single earth pony. Even without the earth, pegasus, and unicorn… races, one pony would never be enough to represent an entire species- no, we need several… and preferably not of only one sex, either.”
She sighed. “Well, to my knowledge, we don’t have a single stallion aboard yet…”
Surgeon Commander Stitch also sighed. “That’ll make it easier to build a profile of a mare’s anatomy, but mean that if a stallion comes aboard and gets hurt, there may be very little we can do. Speaking of which, the medical team alone should have enough unicorns for that purpose, but we won’t have enough earth ponies, let alone pegasi.”
She scowled. “Yeah, it is interesting how so many of the medical staff are unicorns, isn’t it? Aside from you, we’ve only really got senior officers aboard, so we don’t have very many earth ponies or pegasi. Perhaps the next waves will carry more…?”
“Come to think of it, can pegasi fly?”
“Um, presumably. I mean, we’ve got plenty of lift- despite how small our wings are- but nopony has yet figured out how to control it and actually stay in the air. Well, without turning off the gravity, at least. And even then.”
“So how- Wow, that’s bright.”
Captain Turning Wrench looked up at Kayla’s comment. “They all lit off about five minutes ago,” she informed her. “Warning buzzers and everything. They’ve gone into something called a ‘reverse generation burn’.”
She scowled, looking between the massive power plants and the head of her engineering department. “That sounds… wrong, somehow.” The massive power plants were whirring, a point of fire concentrated right at the very center, with no apparent material to keep the miniature star from escaping.
She shrugged. “That’s what I thought too- but when I looked into what it meant…” She shrugged. “Honestly, I can’t think of anything else to describe it- apparently, it’s converting excess electrical energy into viable fuel.”
“With every reactor in this room?”
She nodded.
“Where are we getting the power to do that from?”
“Good question.”
Lieutenant Commander Quick Thought needed only about five minutes, her Captain waiting behind her, to get the answer she was looking for out of the computers. “... Huh. It looks like each of those bays Chef Knife planted on her own have actually been harvested once every hour or two since planting- and that the earth pony ‘make plants grow’ ability doesn’t just accelerate growth, but it does so by creating matter. It would seem the ingredient stores have been filled up beyond what we could reasonably be expected to use, so the ship has automatically begun burning up some of the excess, converting it into fuel.” She looked up. “She’s taking advantage of the creation of mass to resupply herself. Like-!” She looked back down, tapped a key. “Yup. We’ve already got two more warheads than we had when we climbed aboard, yet none have been supplied.”
“We’re… growing weapons and fuel, then?” Kayla asked.
She nodded. “It certainly seems like it. And Chef Knife is spending her free time planting the rest of the bays by hoof, one by one, so it’ll probably only increase. At the moment, that matter reprocessing thing appears to be running at less than one percent of capacity- I wonder how long it’ll be before we have it running at capacity?”
“This is the Captain,” Kayla said, answering a comms call from the medbay, where she had been helping her hospital crew settle in.
Commander Loose Cannon, her tactical officer, looked back out of the screen. “Captain,” she greeted. “I’m on the bridge, and it looks like there are some pirates coming for us.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course, now they want our ship.”
“Looks like a Cruiser-scale vessel, has not responded to ID queries.”
She sighed. “I’ll be right up.”
She terminated the call and, with one last look at the medical staff, she took off for the nearest lift. The doctors she’d been working with moments before had waved her on, even though there wouldn’t be much that she could do to protect the ship. She knew her entire bridge crew would already be gathering on the bridge; she had planned an exercise for as soon as she finished getting the medical staff settled in.
It took her only a couple minutes to reach the bridge.
“Captain is on the bridge,” somepony announced- who, Kayla didn’t really care.
Captain River Song, her exec, looked up. “It seems the automatic has been sending them collision and unauthorized approach warnings,” she informed her. “It actually just escalated to demanding a full reversal as well, rather than a course change.”
“And the pirates?”
“We think it’s a Black Fang cruiser,” she answered.
Suddenly, at her console, Commander Cannon gasped. “What- The approach warning just triggered a targeting radar pulse. Confirmed, enemy is a Crusher-class Black Fang battlecruiser. Looks like the final warning has been transmitted, too.”
“Final warning?” Kayla asked.
She nodded.
“Play it for us,” she ordered. “Well… if you can.”
She tapped a key. “Ahh… Oh. Playing back, Now!”
The same voice as had guided her in rang out of the bridge speakers. It still exuded that calm, but it also had a hard, almost dangerous, edge to it.
“Unregistered Vessel, this is your final warning. Approach to this vessel has not been authorized. Reverse your course immediately, or this vessel will engage hostile.”
Silence held for almost a full second.
“Did the automatic just threaten to open fire?” Kayla asked.
“... Yeah,” Commander Cannon muttered. “And… Confirmed, we have a shooting solution- fire control is online.”
Kayla scowled. On any ship she had ever been on, in order for fire control to be online, someone would’ve had to have inspected various runs, and several switches thrown throughout the ship. Not to mention, someone would’ve had to inspect the weapons- and only the ones that had cleared such an inspection would be allowed to fire.
Yet, judging by how the tactical officer hadn’t touched any controls before announcing the shooting solution, fire control had come online entirely on its own.
“What about their fire control?” Kayla asked.
“Uh… Yep, they’ve got us dialed in too. The computer is assigning their weapons a near-zero threat value, though. Um… Oh, that’s it. They’ve got basically only missiles, and point defense is online.”
Kayla nodded slowly. “I suppose they’re already within point defense range, aren’t they?”
She nodded as well. “Meaning we can pick off their missiles as soon as they’re fired. The same is also true in reve-WOAH!”
Outside, the hostile battlecruiser had, despite several warnings and active fire control emissions, crossed an invisible line in space that it had been expressly forbidden to cross without even attempting to alter its course.
The sensors mounted on the Athena obediently noted that fact- and then the shipboard AI ordered a weak point selected and fired upon.
The tactical computers responded to the demand with a second pulse of high-energy radar- and, when they received the requested hull map from the radar analyzers, they picked some of the thickest armor available and selected a weapon for which even that much armor still constituted a ‘weak point’. Finally, with its target selection reviewed and approved by the master AI, it sent targeting information to the selected weapon.
The ship’s energy weapons had been discounted as useless by every single military person that looked at them- but not a single one had realized that the dual barrel plasma turret that had been selected outmassed most fully-loaded cargo shuttles by many times- and also outmassed some of the lightest destroyers all on its own. The weapon powered on almost instantly, and swiveled around as quickly as if it had weighed only a couple of pounds.
Finally, the on-mount sensors locked onto the target, the quantum link to the multilayered energy targeting system at the heart of the vessel was established, the inertial compensator field was deployed, and only one of the two massive barrels was discharged, hardly a second after the line had been crossed.
The kickback from the blast caused the discharging barrel to lurch backwards by almost five feet, before it was thrusted back forwards to enable the turret to reach its maximum sustained fire rate of over two hundred rounds per minute- even though only one round had been authorized. Even with how massive the ship was, the inertial compensators still made a miniscule push on everything shipboard in order to prevent any perceived vibration aboard ship- and the engines immediately kicked in with the automatic stationkeeping function.
The incoming battlecruiser, one of the largest and heaviest vessels classified as a Battlecruiser, didn’t see the lightspeed weapon until after it struck. Its computers had guessed that it was coming, after every sensor pointed at the larger ship had been fried by the preceding radar pulse- and any of its crew capable of the same amount of reasoning within a single second might’ve guessed it too, but been unable to react in time. The massive bolt of plasma slammed into its port forward corner and exploded.
Armor peeled apart. Missiles, fuel bunkers, and reactors alike were shattered by the blast, consuming fully one quarter of the hostile vessel’s mass.
That battlecruiser, unfortunately, didn’t have any inertial compensators. Its entire crew died instantly- and it was only thanks to its designers overbuilding its structural components that the rest of the frame didn’t crumple under the force.
Moments after the blast dissipated, fuel spilling in from other breached bunkers mixed with leaking atmospheric air and encountered molten red hot metal at the fringes, resulting in a secondary explosion that rocked it again, sending it into an uncontrollable spin and pushing it just slow enough in the orbit that, on the suddenly unattended bridge, suborbital trajectory alarms went off, in addition to just about every damage alarm on the ship.
It would slam into the atmosphere, and fall to the surface, in less than an hour.
It was no longer overtaking the larger warship in its orbit.
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Athena's never been one for subtlety, has she?
Cant fire a Spinal cannon that close to an occupied planet, would sterilise that half of the surface and case intresting deformations on the other side.
Firing At the planet would punch straight through and cause all sorts of caldera collapse catastrophe effects.
I think Athena was slightly annoyed.
I think the Navy just found out how powerful those energy weapons are, and just how advance the ship really is. Those pirates never stood a chance.
Let the pirates board, to make more ponies.
10720274
She hasn't, has she?
10720392
Fun fact: That was one of her smaller ship-to-ship weapons.
And she technically can fire the spinal Starshot cannons near a colonized planet- it doesn't matter that the ball of plasma is so large the FTL drive is required to counter the kickback if it's moving at transluminal velocity. Just... pray it's not shooting something anywhere near the planet. They call it a Starshot cannon for a reason.
10720480
Oh yes. But, their main worry was that the energy weapons they had might be nice and effective... but were very short-ranged. And that which has a dismally short range is nearly useless in most space combat, since all the enemy has to do is keep the range open.
How about firing two more times? It should pretty much evaporate the remaining debrees. Or not?
10950617
It would, yes. The AI didn't see any reason to do that, apparently- perhaps it would break up completely in the atmosphere, fall overseas... or the software just wasn't programmed with that in mind?