Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 106: White Bird

“Gantry retracting,” an automated voice called out. Alarms blared. Klein Bottle checked the hatch for a third time, then the straps holding me into the central chair, then gave me a very stern look.

“You are a big, heavy idiot,” Klein said. “We need to keep you centered so the auto-balancers don’t have to strain too much.”

I swallowed and nodded. “I’ll stay still.”

“Good.”

“I have to use the bathroom,” I whispered.

“Hold it in!” Klein snapped. She got into her seat again and adjusted her straps. She’d been bouncing around the capsule, trying to get it ready. Mostly it involved fretting and making sure all the toggles were set to automatic.

The automated voice chimed in again. “Draining refueling lines-- manually aborted. Proceeding to next stage. Advancing to go.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Four must be pushing the launch as fast as possible,” Klein said. “If those lines aren’t drained this whole place is going to go up in a fireball when we launch!”

“We’re going to explode?!”

“We’ll be fine. This launch base will be trashed.”

“We have to stop her,” I said. “Help me with this thing!”

Klein looked at me sharply. “Stay still! She’ll be fine.” She didn’t sound like she meant it. I knew it barely mattered anyway. Four was as good as dead either way. Fast or slow was the only question. “The control room has armored glass. If she wants to escape she can.”

I had no way of knowing if that was true. I nodded anyway because I wanted it to be the truth.

“Entering final countdown. All personnel to stations,” the voice chimed. “Ten. Nine.”

“This is such a bad idea,” Klein Bottle whined.

“Eight, seven.“

“You’re a rocket expert, we’ll be fine,” I said.

“Six, five, main engine ignition.”

The entire rocket started rattling under us, vibrating and straining. Smoke rose up around us.

“I’m going to space riding with Equestria’s worst disaster!” Klein yelled.

“Yeah! That’s the spirit!” I cheered along with her.

“Two, one. Liftoff.”

The entire rocket dropped just a tiny bit. I felt it in my sensitive pegasus guts, that tiny little dip as the load holding us up went from the gantry holding us up to the plume of fire under our tails. Just for one fraction of a second I thought we were going to keep falling, but that massive pressure reversed that fall, then slowly started to climb with the loudest sound anypony has ever heard.

“We’re away!” Klein shouted. “Oh buck, we’re away!”

“Good luck,” Four whispered. I think. I might have imagined it, because at the same time she spoke, fire exploded around us, the entire launch building filling with hot oxygen-fueled fire, burning fuel cracked out of the clouds themselves. It overtook the windows, and I thought despite Klein’s assurances we were going to burn.

The fire turned to smoke and clear air. We outsped the billowing flames. The roar around us was a terrible deafening sound. The weight of the world pressed into my chest, shoving me into the chair.

“We’re supersonic! Automatic guidance is working,” Klein called out.

“Are we tilting over?!” I asked, starting to feel my inner ear complaining.

“Orbit is about speed, not height! I’ve explained this before! We’re going in an arc. About to hit Max Q! If something’s going to go wrong--”

The rocket shivered, but no alarms blared, a yellow light on the terminal screens turning green.

“It would have been then,” Klein said. “We’ll be hitting our first staging point in a few seconds!”

“Do we have to do anything?”

“Absolutely not! Even if everything turns red, you sit there and be quiet!”

“MECO,” the automatic voice added. “Main engine throttling down.”

There was a huge mechanical klunk, and the pressure on my chest increased, our acceleration hitting even harder.

“Second stage engine at full,” the voice said cheerfully.

“The bathroom thing isn’t a problem anymore,” I squeaked.

Klein rolled her eyes. “First stage dropped off! We’re fine! That was supposed to happen! Remember, rockets drop their tails to escape gravity! Like lizards!”

The gravity turn continued, the world dropping away from us. I watched the sky turn from blue to black. Even though it was the middle of the day, the stars came out.

“And… engines off…” Klein said. She was watching the display in front of her intently. The pressure released. I felt myself start to float, my mane moving like I was underwater. “Orbit looks good. I think… holy buck, Chamomile. We’re in space!”

“We’re in space,” I repeated. The world was black and silent outside the window. I heard tiny tics and pings from hot metal turning cold. We drifted to the side with a short burst of gas.

“It’s adjusting our trajectory,” Klein said. “Launch plus eight minutes thirty seconds, we’re in orbit. Next thing scheduled is a burn to match speeds with the pre-programmed destination.”

“And that’s the station Cozy Glow controls?” I asked.

“I sure as buck hope so,” Klein said. “I don’t want to die up here floating around waiting for somepony to save me.”

“I’m sure it’ll be there,” I said. I could tell she was barely hanging onto her fears. I hadn’t even noticed how anxious she was. I couldn’t blame her. I was terrified. I was sure everything was going to go wrong. Every single thing I’d ever ridden on had exploded or caught on fire or crashed or worse. This was absolutely not the time to mention that to Klein Bottle. “They wouldn’t have sent ponies up in this thing with nowhere to go.”

She nodded to herself and relaxed a little. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. There has to be something up here. And if not…” she flipped through the menus. “Thank goodness. There’s an emergency abort. I think we can at least de-orbit if we need to. Buck knows where we’d end up but even the ocean is better than space.”

“...How do you even land a rocket from space?” I asked. I’d never thought about it before. It seemed important now that we were up here.

“There are a couple different ways.” Klein sat back, trying to relax. The zero-G actually made that a little harder. Every motion tried to kick us out of our seats. No wonder the straps were so extensive. “This looks like it’s set up for parachutes and lithobraking.”

“...Parachutes I understand.”

“Lithobraking means you hit the ground and that stops you. After the parachutes slow you down enough to make that something you can survive. Equestria mostly did ocean landings but… with no fleet to get you back, that’s actually more dangerous. They were only good because you didn’t have to worry about hitting anything important anyway.”

“Not much left down there to worry about,” I admitted. We sat in silence for a moment. “So… what do we do now?”

“Nothing. We wait for the flight computer to get to the right orbit. Then it autodocks with the station. That’s what it means when it says it’s all automatic.”

“Seems sort of… more advanced than I remember,” I said.

“When the war started, rocket technology all went to the military. They had years to come up with things civilians never saw, and then with the Exodus Red… they might have more rocket ponies there, all ready to try out ideas they never had a chance to test before.”

“Ideas they could build on an unlimited budget thanks to SIVA,” I continued the thought. My eyes strayed to the panels and handles around the ship. Something caught my eye. I reached for it.

“I wonder if Luna loved or hated the idea of weapons in space,” Klein mused. “She must have had strong opinions either way. Would she want ponies to feel protected by the might of the stars, or would she hate the night being feared-- what are you doing?”

I paused. I was chewing. “Nothing,” I said through a full mouth.

“Are you eating a snack?!” Klein admonished.

“I found a drawer with rations,” I admitted.

“...What kind?” she asked, trying to look around me.

“They’re those kind of protein and fruit bars,” I said, taking one out and offering it to her. “These are actually fresh!”

“Blackberry-acai-chia,” she said, reading the label. “I have no idea what any of those words mean.”

I shrugged. “They taste good.”

She opened the wrapper and took a bite, her eyes lighting up. I knew what she was feeling. The bars had a weird sweet, tangy taste and a gritty, stretchy texture. They were about as processed as food coil be, a paste formed into a stiff bar, but it wasn’t messy or crumbly.

“A snack isn’t a bad idea,” she decided, once she knew she liked them. “Are there any other flavors?”

---

It’s funny, but even being in space got boring once it stopped being overwhelming. We both took turns being awed at seeing the entire world in the viewport, Equestria and Zebrica and everything else, just sitting there, most of Equestria hidden behind clouds. From here we couldn’t see the ruins or the burns. It was just a world, rotating under us. A world without borders, so small in the universe, that kind of thing.

It got old. It was really impressive but also we were going towards uncertain death and trying to stop the collapse of civilization. That was a little hard to ignore.

“So when you do get there, what’s your plan?” Klein asked.

“Take over the space station,” I said. “Maybe we can find a way to sabotage it, just throw it into the sun or something.”

“That’s actually really hard to do-- no, don’t give me that look. I’m sure we could sabotage it. There are just difficulties with sun launches.”

“Okay, if you say so.” I shrugged. “Anyway, we just sabotage it, then go home.”

“I’m surprised you don’t want to use it.”

“Use it?” I asked.

“Think about it,” Klein said. “Right now Cozy Glow is on the verge of taking over the Enclave without a fight just because she controls that station. If you take it over, you can do anything with it.”

I shook my head. “Not anything. All I can do is hurt ponies.”

“Sometimes that’s enough, when you get to choose which ponies get hurt. Imagine putting a few orbital strikes in the right place, taking out the corrupt politicians without fighting past an entire army of innocent ponies…”

“I’m not a good enough pony to do that,” I said quietly. “I don’t think I could pick and choose the right ponies to live and die. I’d make mistakes. I’ve already made too many mistakes.”

I looked out the window. I knew we had to be getting close but I couldn’t see anything in the sea of stars.

“I never wanted to kill ponies. I don’t even know when I stopped trying to not kill them. It’s like part of me got eaten away, and it included the part that really felt bad about all the blood on my hooves. Maybe that’s what Four felt. Her soul being nibbled away…”

“By augmentations?” Klein shook her head. “That’s silly.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I sighed. It was probably stupid. Something to worry about as part of a nightmare, not real life. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d met ponies even worse off than I was - Raven and Destiny were easy examples - and they were fine.

“So what about the ponies onboard? I’m pretty sure this was a crew relief mission. Swapping a few ponies out and letting them go home.”

“We… fight them?” I said, feeling confused.

“With what?” Klein asked.

I paused. I had my knife. It was inside my space suit. If I tried to take it out, I’d have a bad day. I hadn’t brought any guns. The power sword was back on Equestria, if it was even safe to take into space.

“I’ll punch them in the snout to establish dominance,” I decided. “Then order them to abandon ship.”

I wasn’t going to have to kill anypony this time. I was sure of it.

A chime went off.

“What’s that mean?” I asked. Klein turned to the console, searching it for answers.

“We’re getting close. It locked onto the docking beacon for the space station.” She took a deep breath. “What are the chances they haven’t heard about what’s going on and think this is a normal mission?”

“I have no idea. I’d say zero, but…” I rubbed my chin. “With the launch pad destroyed, it’s possible word didn’t get out about the launch. Four was distracting everypony with the Grandus, remember? The radios they had wouldn’t go far.”

“Not zero,” she mumbled, nodding. “Okay. Get strapped in.”

Before I went back to my seat I peeked outside. I wanted to get a look at the station.

“Are you sure we’re getting close?” I asked. “I don’t see anything.”

“Space is big. It’s still a hundred miles away.”

---

I’m not going to pretend I know anything about how spaceships work. Klein did. Or at least she made me feel better while the automatic controls, which were smarter than either of us, did things that shook the capsule and made scary sounds and occasionally let puffs of gas go past the window.

The details escape me but apparently docking in orbit is less like flying from one cloud to another and more like shooting one bullet out of the air with another, and doing it really gently so you didn’t break anything. Then there was something about how changing speed also changed our altitude and… it was a lot of math. I could probably do the math part if I knew where to even start, but it was a word problem and those were just the worst. Who even buys a hundred bananas at the store?

“Here we go,” Klein mumbled. “Final sequence.”

On the terminal screens in front of us I could see a display of what was going on around us. On the left screen, the capsule was drawn like a cartoon in green on black, updating twice a second and pulsing as it approached a green shape like a wheel. On the right side was something that took longer for me to interpret.

There were four boxes, showing red X’s in each of them. Lines connected to them, flickering on the display. One of them turned into a green O, then another.

“We’re almost aligned,” Klein said. “This might be, uh, rough. Put on your helmet.”

“Why rough?” I asked, puling the helmet on. There hadn’t been much point before now. If something went wrong we were dead either way. It was steel, glass, and plastic, somewhere between a fish bowl and a motorcycle helmet.

“They probably expect a professional to massage it into place gently,” Klein explained. “We’re just trying to stay out of the--”

The capsule jerked slightly. The display with four boxes went red, then green again. She quickly sealed her helmet tight, and I did the same.

“Out of the way,” she said. This time I heard her voice over the radio, echoing in the helmet.

I swallowed. “I’d rather be in the way. Or inside. Inside is good.”

There was a big bump like a Vertibuck hitting the landing pad too hard. The ship floated back away from the station on the left display. A moment later the right screen went all green, then we were pushed forward again, and there was an instant of clanging and slipping. I could feel it in my teeth and my hooves. It was the feeling of two things being forced together when they didn’t quite align, a square peg pounded into a square hole until the impact twisted it in just the right way to slip inside.

The capsule shuddered. Everything calmed down.

A pony appeared on the screens, a cartoon mare giving us a big smile for a moment before flashing away.

“Now what?” I asked.

Klein Bottle was silent for a long moment.

“I have no idea,” she admitted. “There has to be a hatch control somewhere.”

“This one?” I asked, reaching for a big red handle.

“No! That’s the-- Chamomile that’s the way we came in! It’s open to space!”

“I don’t see another door!” I protested.

“It should be at the front of the capsule,” Klein said. “Which means…”

She looked at the screens in front of us and experimentally tugged on them. After a few moments, she found a latch and unhooked it, then another, then she swung the entire console out of the way.

On the wall ahead of us was a circular hatch.

“I think that’s it,” she said. “You go first.”

“Oh, right,” I said. She didn’t need to explain why. If something was going to go wrong, it was better that it happened to me. Not just because ethically I deserved bad things to happen to me, but because I was way more likely to survive them than Klein. No offense to her, but she was tiny and fluffy and fragile and looked more like a stuffed toy than a real pony.

I unstrapped myself and pushed off the chair, floating to the hatch. Thankfully it wasn’t hard to understand. There was a silver and red wheel in the center, and when I twisted it, it moved with a satisfying, solid clunk. A physical indicator on the door went from white to red, which I assume meant it was unlocked.

I pulled, and the hatch came loose with a hiss. It had some kind of complex two-part hinge that took it completely out of the way, leaving the passage free. It was going to be tight for me, like squeezing through an underwater cave. I tucked my wings and wiggled into the exposed hole, the lack of gravity helping me just as much as it was disorienting me.

I didn’t know what to expect on the other side. Guards with guns at the ready? A deathtrap? The void of space?

Now that I’d thought about the void of space it was hard not to think about it. A mare only has to drown once to swear off a lack of oxygen for the rest of her life.

I emerged out of the hatch into a slightly larger room. Sealed corridors went in both directions, with the hatch in the floor of the x-shaped intersection. It was like standing in the center of a compass. Through windows in the hatches on each corridor, I could see there were handles in the corridors, rows of them like ladders.

Nopony was there to greet us. I floated a little closer to one of the hatches, and felt something pull at me. A gentle tug, like the lightest gravity.

“Woah!” I wasn’t expecting it. I fell the rest of the way like a floating leaf, landing on the hatch. Nothing exploded, but I could feel that slight pull holding me in place. I could easily push off and ignore it, and I did experimentally. The floor actually seemed to move under me when I did, turning and twisting.

“It’s rotating,” Klein explained from behind me. “The station has a kind of artificial gravity. I’ve heard the theory. It’s sort of like… if you hold a string with a weight on it above your head and twirl it, you can feel the force pulling it to the side.”

“That’s neat,” I said. I settled myself down.

“There’s air in here,” Klein said. “I think we’re okay.”

She unsealed her helmet and took a breath, recoiling a little.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It smells like gym socks,” she said.

I took off my helmet. She was right. We’d been breathing bottled, pure air for a couple hours. The air on the station wasn’t quite as pure.

“Still not bad for two centuries old air filters,” I said.

“Must be the same kind they use in Stables. Designed to last basically forever.” Klein looked around, picked a hatch, and tested it. “Locked.”

I checked the next one. There was a wheel-lock just like the capsule. I stopped before even trying it. The lights in this particular direction were flickering, and I could see a big hole right through it.

“Not this way either,” I told her.

“Here,” Klein said. She looked up at me. I kicked off and hopped over to her. We both looked down the corridor. Maybe access tunnel was the right word. The lock showed a green light. “I think this is the only way we can go. The last one’s welded shut.”

“Maybe there was an air leak,” I suggested.

“It does look like some kind of repair job,” Klein agreed. “Stand to the side so you don’t fall in.”

She opened the hatch, grunting and struggling with the mass and pushing it aside. I stepped past her. There wasn’t enough room for flying down that tight passage, but that’s why there was a ladder. I took my time and climbed down. It was in almost perfect condition, barely used in centuries.

A second hatch was at the far end, I hopped off the end of the ladder and looked through. There was no sign of ponies through the window, but there was brushed steel and smooth white paint.

I lifted the hatch up and out of the way and peeked my head through, half-expecting to catch a bullet or a laser to the face. Instead, there was almost total silence, the white noise of fans cut through with an occasional birdlike tweet or chirp from computerized panels in the walls. No screaming, no gunshots.

“Looks clear,” I said, dropping down the rest of the way. Gravity increased quickly, and I hit the floor harder than I expected, the sound a boom that reverberated louder than our docking sequence.

I winced, but nothing bad happened. Standing there felt weird. Not just because I was in space and knew it, but because the floor curved away in both directions like I was at the bottom of a valley.

Klein fluttered down next to me and made a much softer landing.

“Is anypony here?” she asked. “Where are they?”

“It can’t be completely automated, right?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t have been about to send up a crew capsule if that was the case,” Klein said. She moved a little, trying to stay behind me. “Hey, look!”

I turned to see what she was pointing at. There were bunks built into the wall a little uphill. They looked like the berths in the lower decks of cloudships, sort of shelves for ponies to rest on. There were only four of them, and they all looked recently used.

“Okay, so somepony is here,” I said, picking up a wrinkled Enclave uniform shirt. “This didn’t get here before the war.”

“No,” Klein agreed.

“Let’s try this way first.” I tossed the shirt aside.

“Can’t we just wait for them to walk in here? I mean, they sleep here, right?” Klein asked.

I shook my head. “No. They have to know somepony docked. They’re also gonna find out something’s wrong sooner or later. I don’t want to give them a chance to shove us out an airlock. We might have suits but I donno if we could get back in.”

Klein swallowed and nodded. As we walked, we kept being at the bottom of the world. Every step was uphill, in both directions. It was really weird to feel under my hooves. We passed a chessboard halfway through a game, a crate of rations and supplies. A small bathroom.

It ended in a hatch, welded shut. Extra shielding had been put up around it.

“Reactor room,” I read above the door. “Maybe it wasn’t an air leak they were worried about. And there was a hole in the station in the other direction.”

“They must be in the locked section,” Klein said. “Maybe they do already know something’s wrong.”

I nodded. “Okay. Let’s figure this out. Five-minute break?”

We spent a moment getting cleaned up and getting a drink of water. I was in the middle of putting my now-clean spacesuit back on when I started to get a bad idea. A bad idea that just might work.

“If we can’t go through the door, we can go around it,” I said slowly.

“No.” Klein whined. “Chamomile--”

“We go through the damaged section. There has to be a manual override for the hatches.”

“Do you know how many ponies have ever successfully done a spacewalk?” Klein asked.

“No idea,” I admitted. “Secret space program, right? Maybe it’s easy. We have to do something or else we might as well give up and go home.”

---

“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” I asked. The suit radio crackled.

“If there’s something wrong with the airlock you’ll need a friendly pony on the inside to let you back in,” Klein reminded me. She waved through the small porthole in the door.

“You assume something’s going to go wrong.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m absolutely sure something will go wrong. That’s why I’m keeping my helmet on.”

I couldn’t deny that the odds were on her side. The outer door of the airlock had clearly been used for this purpose before - one of the panels next to it was left open and revealed the manual release for the door. It was a big fold-out crank left ready to use, friendly and easy to use and painted in bright colors to help a dumb pony who might be stuck in an airlock figure out how to save their own life.

As a dumb pony who had to save her own life pretty often, I appreciated the effort. I turned the handle, and the door levered open, the air rushing out in a torrent. There had to be a safer way to do this, probably some checklist about draining air slowly and safely, only opening the door after the airlock was depressurized, that kind of thing.

None of it mattered, because I was in open space with only a thin suit and a glass helmet between me and the void.

I stepped out into the destroyed section of the station. I could hear my hoofsteps, but everything else was silent. I thought it would be like being underwater, but I was wrong.

“Okay, I just have to walk to the other side,” I whispered to myself. This section was some kind of storage. There were small crates stacked up on the curved floor, sized just right to go through the narrow passages Some of them had been opened, revealing packaged spare parts, new circuit boards, rations, water. Everything ponies might need.

And then I found the hole.

“I guess this is why there’s no air,” I said. There was something as long as I was jammed into the hull. I tilted my head, trying to figure out what it was.

“What did you find?” Klein asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s some kind of… thing? It’s got big black wings and an antenna. It must be a satellite.”

“That makes sense. There are only so many useful orbits, and two centuries with nopony keeping all the junk up here from smashing together.”

“I guess so,” I said. I kicked it lightly, but it was wedged tight in there. The edges felt welded together where the metal had bent and twisted. “That’s not coming out. No wonder they didn’t fix--”

I caught movement in the corner of my vision. I ducked behind the satellite.

“Somepony else is in here,” I whispered. Why was I whispering? I could scream and nopony would be able to hear it.

“Punch them!” Klein yelled. It was a really good suggestion. I jumped over a rack of crates towards--

I stopped myself in midair. Tried to stop myself. Wings don’t work in a vacuum! That’s not true, they do work to throw off your center of balance and make you bounce into the wall then fall and slide along the floor because gravity is being provided by spinning instead of mass and-- the point is I fell like an idiot and had a new world record for clumsiest landing of all time.

“What’s wrong? I heard a crash!” I heard Klein starting to panic.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t a pony. It’s just some kind of cargo robot.”

I sighed and stood up, looking at it. It reminded me of a hundred old ads from the pre-war days, a multi-limbed hovering octopus, this one painted white and chrome.

“I think it’s a Mr. Handy,” I said. “You know, I bet that’s why this place is still up here. These things can do basic maintenance.”

One eyestalk turned to me and flashed several times.

“It’s trying to talk,” I said. “Sorry buddy, I can’t hear you. We’re in a vacuum.”

It twisted around, a different mechanical tentacle pointing at me. The eye flashed again.

“They wouldn’t put a gun on a space robot, would they?”

It fired. A laser hit my chest. I yelped. A warning went off in my ears. There was an air leak, probably from the hole. The hole in my spacesuit. I grabbed the robot before it could fire again, using the tentacle to swing it around like a club and smashing it into the wall. The central sphere exploded, sparks and shrapnel flying everywhere. I smooshed a hoof into my chest, trying to slow the air leak.

“Buck, buck, buck,” I swore, pulling open crates and looking for something.

“Are you dead?” Klein asked. “You have to tell me if you’re dying!”

“I’ll be fine! I just have to-- aha!”

I found the most powerful tool in the universe. Something that could solve almost every problem. Klein probably would have disagreed with me about how suitable it was, but it was about to save my life.

I slapped strips of duct tape over the burn and the warning tapered off, the air leak sealed.

“Okay, not dying,” I sighed.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” a new voice said. I looked around. It had come over the radio, so it took me a moment to spot him, even with the pony waving to me from the end of the cargo bay. He held a slick-looking plasma rifle at the ready. “There’s plenty of time for dying. Let’s go inside and talk.”

Comments

[Reese]

"processed as food coil be, a paste"
"processed as food could be, a paste"?

"I asked, puling the helmet on"
"I asked, pulling the helmet on"?

"which I assume meant it was unlocked"
"which I assumed meant it was unlocked"?

"A second hatch was at the far end, I hopped off the end"
"A second hatch was at the far end; I hopped off the end"?

"to go through the narrow passages Some of"
"to go through the narrow passages. Some of"?