Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 122: Gin and Money

I shoved seasoned potatoes in sauce into my mouth. The half-rancid oil they were dripping was practically blistering hot. It was still worth it. They were crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, spiced just enough to leave a touch of lingering heat and douse that heat with the white garlic sauce drizzled on them by the deft hoof of the street vendor’s art.

“I’ll say one thing for this town, it’s got the best food stalls,” Cube said. She had her own snack, ears of corn sliced up into long ribs and cooked on an open flame before being doused in a sweet sauce sprinkled with something green to make it fancy.

“After watching Chamomile eat ancient ration bars on the airbus for days, I thought we could use some real food before we got to the Raven’s Nest,” Quattro said. She only had a drink, some kind of smoothie made from leftover bits of fruit processed so finely that they went all the way around the bend and turned from trash into food.

I blushed at that. “Those ration bars are an important part of my history and I wanted to make sure they were still okay.”

Cube made a face. “They were rancid.”

“But technically still edible!”

“That’s why Star Swirl really left. He got too disgusted watching you eat.”

“No, he left because he had more important things to do,” I retorted. “And he’d want me to remind everypony that everything he does is more important, and he’s very annoyed he has to deal with other ponies’ problems.”

“Geniuses like Star Swirl and myself don’t have time for social junk,” Cube said primly. “We have to be the adults in the room everywhere we go. Speaking of which, are you sure you can manage that armor without…?”

I was wearing the Exodus Armor, mostly. I had to leave the plates over my fetlocks off for practical claw-related reasons, and I stopped wearing the helmet after it made me depressed enough that I’d rather get shot in the head. I could live without the HUD.

I held up a hoof and with a tiny bit of will and magic, summoned something out of the armor’s vector trap, the extradimensional storage space it used in place of saddlebags. A plastic hula mare appeared in my hoof, the spring in her waist letting the little statuette bob and dance. “I think I can manage.”

“What’s that thing for?” Cube asked, looking at the plastic bauble suspiciously.

I smiled serenely, tapping it to let the hula mare dance. “Art doesn’t need to be for anything.”

She rolled her eyes. “Can we please go talk to your mercenary friends? I don’t like being here. I know Cozy Glow has eyes in the city.”

“She won’t be stupid enough to attack here,” Quattro noted. She motioned towards the distant drydocks. They were a flurry of activity visible even from here. I could see bright sparks from welding torches and Vertibucks being used to move sections of hull plating. “Ever since the disaster at the Naval Review, every open berth has been filled with ships needing repair and refitting.”

“...Maybe we could…” I mumbled, thinking.

Cube looked at the docks, then back to me. “No!”

“No? No to what?”

“You were thinking about trying to steal a warship!”

I swallowed and looked off to the side, trying to seem innocent and disinterested in that very cool and valid idea. “I might not have been.”

“Those ships are under repair. Even if we had a small army to take the docks over and then crew the thing, we’d need to let the workers finish putting it back together.” Quattro shrugged. “I considered it too. You can run them with a skeleton crew, but not if you don’t know what you’re doing and none of us know how to get the Arcana Reactor up to speed to get the storm engines working.”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“Besides, we’ve got a better plan that relies on the most important and powerful force in Equestria.”

“Friendship?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

---

“We’re not friends,” Captain Glint said. She paused, then held up a hoof. “No, I misspoke. Chamomile, you’re a decent pony.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Quattro, you’ve betrayed everypony and everything you’ve ever met,” Captain Glint said. The mare glared at him across the CIC display table, daring her to say something. “I saw the announcement from Cozy Glow. You’re one of her very best friends, as I recall, so it’s not surprising that you betrayed her, too.”

Cube snickered until Captain Glint turned her gaze onto her and stopped my little sister’s amusement with cold anger.

“And you’re one of her killers. I had friends who volunteered for the space program Klein Bottle was putting together and I am aware of what happened to them. By all rights, the only reason I should have let either of you onto this ship is so I can get you close enough to strangle you myself!”

She slammed her hooves into the table, making all of us jump.

“Whatever insane scheme you’re up to now, I don’t want to be a part of it! I don’t even want to know what it is! I’m sure you can make it sound reasonable and heroic because you’re damned good at lying and manipulating ponies.”

“Excuse me,” Cube interrupted. I could sense her growing annoyance and anger. Quattro was quietly taking a majority of the yelling and nodding along with what I was sure was feigned contriteness, shielding Cube and letting her build up a head of steam to plunge forward before Captain Glint could get her ire properly on target. “We’re not here to ask for a favor as friends. We’re here to hire you as clients.”

Captain Glint took a deep breath and sat down. “I trust you as clients almost as far as I can throw the Raven’s Nest.”

Cube motioned to me, and I pulled some of her luggage out of my vector trap. As the only one of us with a way to carry her crates without needing a sky chariot or the liberal application of telekinesis and headache medication, I’d been volunteered as a porter. Even so, what she’d asked me to carry was straining the amount the vector trap could manage.

She put the extraordinarily heavy case on the table between us, having to be very careful so she didn’t damage the display. Cube popped the seals and opened the lid, letting Captain Glint look at the contents.

“That’s why we’re paying you well enough that you won’t need to trust us,” Cube explained. Inside the case were neatly stacked and arranged gold bars. It was an embarrassing amount of wealth.

“If I was a smart pony this much money would be a warning sign that would make me just walk away,” Captain Glint sighed.

“Smart ponies still have bills to pay,” Quattro noted. “Besides, we’re not asking you for anything really dangerous. We need long-range transport, with a whip that can loiter a little. Chamomile knows the general area where we need to go, but we might have to hunt around a little.”

I nodded. “The place we need to go is a moving target and it’s been a while since I was there. It’ll be hard to miss once we see it, but I’d be worried about a Vertibuck running out of fuel or having to pull a skywagon that distance.”

“The gold bars are very persuasive,” Captain Glint admitted. She closed the case and pulled it to her side of the table before putting it on the deck next to her. “Let’s get Doktor and Para Medic in here and we’ll discuss the details.”

---

“So the short version is we’re here,” I pointed to the spot on the map. “And we need to get all the way over here and start looking around for the Exodus Black. It won’t be as easy to spot as it used to be.”

“Ah yes, a problem for ponies thinking with their eyes!” Herr Doktor tapped her snout. “I studied the recordings from the naval review, and I have seen how large an Exodus-class vessel is! There are dozens of ways for us to find them. Have no fear!”

“The bigger problem is this,” Captain Glint said. The map was half-covered in a red blob. “The Enclave has declared this entire zone an exclusionary area. No pony in, no pony out.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s what they arrested me for.”

“Good, that saves some time,” Glint said. “Our options are to go around the no-fly zone or through it.”

“Around it will make the trip three or four times longer,” Quattro said. “It might even be less safe.”

“Explain,” Glint said.

Quattro motioned to the line separating the red area on the CIC display. “We know that past this line, there aren’t going to be any significant Enclave forces. A few lances of scouts in power armor hunkering down as spies, but definitely not warships. Cozy Glow has only one major asset in this whole area, and the chances of us running into it are slim.”

“Slim but not zero,” Cube countered. “The Exodus Red has really good sensors. I know. I was using them to make those orbital strikes count. It can spot something the size of this boat from hundreds of miles out, and since there really aren’t any other Enclave forces in the area, it means we’re the most interesting thing around.”

“We could run the Corridor,” Para Medic suggested.

“The Corridor?” I asked.

She nodded. “It’s where the trade winds flow through.” She got up and pointed them out on the map. They looked like rivers cut through the structure of the clouds. “Back before the war they carried rain and warm weather to the northern parts of Equestria. Now… well, I guess they still do, but because of the SPP towers here and here--”

She highlighted them.

“--it gets funneled into a faster, tighter stream. They were probably planning on doing something with it before they were forced to close the sky.”

“It would be perfect for power generation,” Herr Doktor noted. “Imagine it, a turbine powered by the trade winds, providing endless energy for ponies!”

“Wouldn’t doing something like that cause massive side effects?” I asked.

“That is possibly why they did not finish it,” Doktor admitted.

“Storms get into the Corridor and the SPP towers rip them apart,” Captain Glint said. “It turns the whole area into fast-moving gusts, mist, and rapid temperature changes. It’s a giant pile of wind shear.”

“I’ve flown in worse,” I said.

“I have it on good authority you’ve also died several times. Most of us only have the luxury of dying once.”

“Look on the bright side,” Quattro said. “They’d have to be crazy to follow us.”

---

“It’s going to take a little while for them to get the ship ready to undock and leave,” Para Medic said. She’d pulled me into the cargo bay-slash-medical bay to examine my body, and unfortunately not in a sexy way. “Until then I want to get a look at you.”

“I’m fine,” I promised her. “I’m in way better shape than I was.”

She held my wing at the tip, stretching it out so she could look at the full span and checked all of the joints. There were a lot of them. “I don’t think this happens to ponies when they’re in good shape.”

“I already got a full checkup from ponies in my last, uh, port of call,” I said. “They were really more mechanical engineers than they were doctors, but that’s probably more appropriate for me anyway.”

“So what did they find? If I have to put you back together I don’t want surprises.” She let go of my wing and stepped back, obviously fretting.

“It seems like most of my body was, uh, disassembled. I’m making that sound worse than it is. You’re thinking dismemberment. That happened a little too but this was after. It wasn’t being torn apart, it was only being eaten and digested.”

“That’s worse instead of better!”

“I’m not good at telling stories. Maybe eaten is the wrong metaphor? Then again I was in its belly…” I wasn’t making things better. “Think of it more in machine terms, okay? Imagine you have an old skywagon, and it’s banged up and broken down. It’s still working because you keep bodging it together with repair work, and you’ve been replacing parts one at a time when you can, but you have to fly it every single day so you can’t do anything major.”

“And this skywagon is your body?”

“Yeah, so picture it with cool decals but also it’s on fire and it gets shot at regularly so you have to patch holes in the sides. Then one day, your skywagon crashes in a junkyard. It seems bad because you crashed and your skywagon was already on fire and now it’s in pieces, but what you find is that there are so many parts lying around that you can not only fix your wagon, you can get rid of some of the bodges you made over the years and even make some upgrades! You’re out of commission for a little while, but when you finally roll out of that junkyard, your wagon is better than brand new because you were able to keep all the little things that made it yours and were comfortable and customized.”

I was pretty pleased with that analogy. It was pretty close to being how it really went down, except in my case it was more like the wagon got stolen and the dragon mafia fixed it up for themselves before I got it back. And my mom was in the dragon mafia, which is a real thing that exists.

“I hate your analogy,” Para Medic said.

“What?” I blinked. Maybe I should have told her the whole dragon mafia version. “Why?”

“Because in your story, is it really still you-- I mean, is it really still your wagon at the end?”

I sighed and gave her a sad smile. “You know, that’s a good question. The wagon’s not as important as the pony driving it. That’s sort of a metaphor for the soul. And the good news is, I’m absolutely sure I still have a soul and that it’s mine!”

“Oh! That’s… something?”

I nodded. “It’s enough. Actually, it makes me worry more about you.” I reached out to poke her with my wing.

Para Medic flinched. “You’re worried about me?”

“You don’t have your soul nailed down by creepy pre-war tech! One bullet in the wrong place and, poof! You’re gone!”

“That’s true for everypony, Chamomile.”

“Yeah, but I’ve gotten increasingly aware that it’s a design flaw.”

---

Getting underway took a lot longer than I thought it would. It wasn’t only about detaching safely from Thunderbolt Shores’ complicated docks, it was also a matter of getting provisions, paying outstanding fees, waiting for the local weather’s equivalent of high tide, and making backup plans for when things inevitably went wrong.

We were delayed by days, and so I was antsy when we finally cast off and started flying in a way we hoped seemed casual. The Captain finally put me on deck and put me to work, ordering me to watch for trouble and report it before doing anything else.

“See anything yet, DRACO?” I asked. The computer-assisted rifle had more brainpower and better optics than anypony or anything else on the boat, so my job was really to sit and act as a spotter for my own gun.

He answered in the negative with an emoji of a pony shrugging.

“It’s nice having you back, buddy,” I said. I patted the side of the gun’s case, near the bulky box of electronics that made up its brain. “Don’t tell anypony this, but my aim is still terrible. If we see anything further out than rock-throwing distance, I’ll need your help.”

It offered an emoji of a salute, then flashed through a few others on its scope. It was a lot easier to understand than it used to be. Even the beeps and static were starting to make some kind of sense. It was a little like a language I was almost fluent in.

“We’ll get Destiny back,” I promised. “That’s a big part of the plan.”

The gun made a forlorn beeping sound.

“Don’t say that,” I scoffed. “I know she’s okay! She probably misses you even more than she misses me. And I’m not going to any more fancy dress parties without an anti-materiel rifle at my side, trust me. Biggest mistake of my life.”

DRACO sounded an affirmative.

“Most ponies who sit around taking to their guns get a psychological evaluation,” Quattro noted, as she dropped down out of nowhere. I’d known she was there, but it would have been rude to say it.

“Most ponies who wear sunglasses inside are colts who think it makes them look mysterious,” I retorted.

“We’re outside,” Quattro pointed out.

“So? Are you going to take them off when we go belowdecks?”

“Of course not, I want to look mysterious and cool,” she said. She sat next to me at the ship’s railing, looking out over the sea of clouds. “Anything interesting out here?”

I shrugged. “If there was, I’d be reporting it,”

She nodded. “You’re doing pretty well with the armor. I was worried you’d have trouble without Destiny helping you. I know she was controlling most of the functions.”

“There were some things that were tough without magic,” I confirmed. “When I first put this suit on, it would have been dead weight without her help, but the software’s good enough now that it does the basic stuff on its own and I picked up the slack on my end and learned enough magic to do the rest.”

Quattro nodded. “Good. I have a feeling things are going to go sideways and I want you at a hundred percent when it does.”

“I hope you don’t think Captain Glint is going to betray us.”

“No, of course not. She’s a good pony. A good pony with a fortune in gold that she deserves to live long enough to spend. She’s one of the ponies I consider too good of a friend to betray. Like you.”

“I distinctly remember this thing with Cozy Glow…”

“The one where she tried to have you murdered and I used a spark grenade to save your life, personally dragged you to safety, and nursed you back to health?”

I tilted my head in concession. “You got me there. It’s just a sour memory overall.”

“Being stabbed through the heart makes for a better romantic exaggeration of loss than a literal event.” Quattro leaned against the railing. She was quiet for a moment. “I’ll make it up to you. I have no idea how, but I’ll figure it out.”

DRACO beeped. Quattro looked at me. I looked at the small screen on the rifle. It was picking up something big and getting closer. I squinted at the screen. Even at maximum zoom, it was little more than a blurry shape on the horizon. An alert popped up.

“We’re being painted by radar,” Quattro said, reading over my shoulder. “They definitely see us.”

“I knew it was going too well…”

---

“We’re on the far side of the informal neutral zone,” Captain Glint said. She moved the token representing us to where we were on the map. “The ship coming after us is here.” She placed a second token further out into the red side of the sky.

“So much for it being a nice friendly Enclave patrol,” Quattro sighed. “If it was the military we could have come up with a sob story about navigational problems and asked for an escort into town.”

“It’s the Juniper,” Cube said with absolute assurance. She picked up the token and spun it in her magic. “I can feel it.” She slammed it back down.

“That makes sense,” I agreed. “The Exodus Red is too and too high-profile. If it was getting close to the border we’d be seeing all kinds of activity on the Enclave side.”

“And Cozy Glow has been using Polar Orbit’s ship as a scout and workhorse for years,” Quattro added. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. How did they find us?”

“Bad luck?” I suggested.

“Too much of a coincidence. There’s a lot of sky.” Quattro tapped her chin. “We didn’t file this in our flight plan, so it couldn’t be a spy at the port authority.”

“And I didn’t tell you, so you couldn’t have warned them,” Captain Glint added.

“That does explain why the map has us a hundred miles off-course from when you were discussing it with me in the room,” Quattro nodded. “Good thinking.”

“There were no transmissions,” Herr Doktor noted. “We have been under silent running conditions since we left Thunderbolt Shores’ controlled airspace.”

“No intentional transmissions,” Cube mumbled. Her eyes widened. “Buck! Where’s that crate full of gold?”

“You’re not getting a refund,” Captain Glint noted. She pointed to where it had been stowed in the corner.

“Daddy shoved that into my hooves on the way out and called it a retirement fund. It’s the only part of my luggage I didn’t pack myself!” Cube ran over and pulled it open, tossing gold bars to the deck until she got to the bottom of the hard-sided case. A moment later, and she tore out the foam lining to reveal a flat panel of tightly-packed wires and electronics.

“Oh! Let me see!” Herr Doktor slipped in to look. “This is very interesting work. They managed to fit most of a transistor radio into the structure of the case! The antenna is here, running all the way around the outside in a loop. There are miniaturized spark batteries powering it for short, timed burst transmissions.”

“A tracking device,” Quattro groaned.

“It’s not my fault!” Cube protested. “I didn’t know!”

“Hey, this means I didn’t betray anypony!” Quattro said brightly. “I’m feeling pretty good about this.”

“What kind of weapons do we have?” I asked. “I know we can’t outrun them, right? This boat uses a gas envelope. It’s slower than the Juniper. That means we’ll have to fight.”

“I sure hope not,” Para Medic said. “I like having a medbay full of supplies. I hate having to use them, because it means somepony got hurt.”

“The Raven’s Nest might as well be unarmed against a ship like that,” Captain Glint said. “We have some lasers we can mount on the railing, but those are for repelling boarders, not making attack runs on a warship.”

“The Juniper has two plasma lances and a dozen laser batteries,” Cube said, kicking a gold bar out of the way while she stormed back up to the map. “She can blow this tub out of the sky.”

“The Corridor is between us,” I noted. “We’re closer to it than we are to the Juniper.”

“Right,” Captain Glint said. “We’re making a run for it. Para Medic, give me a course and heading directly for the Juniper. I want them to think we’re going to ram them!”

“You think Polar Orbit will blink and get out of the way?” I asked.

“No,” Captain Glint said. “I think he might stop and watch. If we go any other direction he’ll want to chase us. At the last minute, we’ll bank into the Corridor and try to lose him in the turbulence.”

“Let’s throw that bucking tracker off the side of the ship,” I said.

Quattro grabbed my shoulder. “Wait. Leave it. He doesn’t know we found it. We might be able to use that.”

“Use it how?” I asked.

Quattro shrugged mildly. “We’ll have to get creative. It’s not like it’s hurting anything right now when he can look right at us.”

“Everypony get on whatever armor you’ve got and get to battle stations!” Captain Glint ordered. “Shrapnel kills more ponies in a ship-to-ship fight than anything else! Herr Doktor, give me everything the engines can get! You three get on deck and be ready to repel boarders!”

“Yes ma’am!” I saluted.

“I should have asked for more money,” Captain Glint sighed.

“More than a bunch of gold bars?”

“The suitcase full of gold bars is what got us into this mess. Go get ready to murder somepony.”

---

“I swear I didn’t know,” Cube said again. The Juniper was looming larger. I could make out the sweep of her triangular body from here, like a soaring eagle with its wings spread, two storm engines forward and one in the rear for balance, the bridge hanging off the front and shaped like an armored beak.

“I believe you,” I assured her.

“Though if you did want us captured, delivering us right to your own father’s doorstep in an unarmed, barely-armored airship three centuries past its prime would be a really good way to do it,” Quattro said. She adjusted her gold-plated power armor. “I’m joking, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Cube replied, her tone acidic.

“How long before we’re in range?” I asked. DRACO beeped, providing an answer. It was a rapidly decreasing number that was going to reach zero way before we reached safety.

“I can’t believe he used me as bait,” Cube grumbled.

“I can’t believe Captain Glint was optimistic enough to think they’d board us.”

Quattro patted me on the back. “At least if he knows Cube is here he won’t--”

“Duck!” Cube shouted. I pulled Quattro down to the deck. Bolts of plasma shot past the deck, half the length of the ship away. Even at that distance, there was a thundercrack and a wash of warmth from superheated air.

“He’s a terrible parent!” Quattro yelled, shouting over the ringing in my ears.

“Hang on!” Captain Glint said over the deck speakers. “Brace for evasive maneuvers!”

The ship banked and dove hard down and right towards the flow of the Corridor. Shots from the Juniper narrowly missed the gas envelope hanging above us. Too narrowly. The rigging above us blackened in the wash of heat and caught on fire.

“Good thing we’re already going down instead of up,” Quattro said. She grabbed a bucket. “We need to put that out!”

She ship twisted, and she slipped, almost dropping the water. Cube caught it and her, levitating both of them.

“I got the fire,” I said, leaning over the side. Having my body remodeled had given me one or two neat tricks. Now, I admit that it didn’t sound like a mighty roar, and was a little more like coughing up a hairball, but I still fired my cool breath weapon at the spreading flames, spitting a burst of glue balls at it and smothering them with flame-retardant foam.

I nodded at my work, satisfied.

“Gross,” Cube said, very judgmentally for somepony who’d just been saved.

“I could breathe fire instead, do you think that would have helped?”

“Can you actually breathe fire?” Quattro asked.

“No, but I was trying to make a reference to fighting fire with fire and… it would be cooler to breathe fire,” I mumbled that last part.

Scattered laser fire came down around us, clipping across the Raven’s Nest just as the darker, fast-moving clouds of the Corridor rose up to meet us. The wash of weather tingled on my body. Being out in the open with pegasus magic, it was less like being thrown into a riptide and more like being tossed onto a conveyor belt of quicksand that could almost support your weight.

Quattro was holding onto the railing for support. Gusts of wind hit us from every direction.

“There’s no eye of the storm here!” Quattro shouted. She kept her wings tucked tight, adjusting her grip to avoid being flung away. Cube could stand on the deck and watch us with mild amusement.

“You’re wrecking the floor,” she pointed out. I looked down at my hooves. The lightning claws sheathed in my legs had deployed like talons and sank into the armored surface.

“Instinct, sorry!” I yelled back to my sister. I would have retracted them if I wasn’t being buffeted by wind moving faster than I could fly.

The hatch to the deck below was forced open, Cube helping open it without comment. Captain Glint stepped out on deck, wearing power armor that was so heavily customized I couldn’t even guess at the provenance. It was cloud-camouflage white, with flattened, curving panels and heavy wing armor.

“That last barrage of laser blasts put too many holes in us,” Captain Glint said. “The damage control patches inside the envelope turned it into a slow leak instead of a fast one, but in these conditions the wind is squeezing the lift gas out of us.”

“What are our options?”

Glint sighed. “Herr Doktor is packing her most important gear. Para Medic is filling her saddlebags.”

“You want to abandon ship?” Quattro asked.

Captain Glint walked up to Quattro like the deck wasn’t trying to toss us aside and we weren’t literally in the middle of a storm. She grabbed the smaller mare by the collar and pulled her away from the railing so she could properly glare at her.

“A captain doesn’t abandon ship,” Glint growled. “Go below decks. Get the gold bars and the case they came in.”

She tossed Quattro towards the open hatch, giving her a solid push to keep her from having time to complain. Once Quattro had scrambled out of the wind, Glint looked at me and Cube.

“You two! I want you ready for what comes next.”

“And that is?” Cube asked.

“Like I told her, a captain doesn’t abandon ship. Once she comes back, we’re starting our attack run. I want everypony ready to fight.”

“With what?” Cube scoffed. “This ship is unarmed!”

“Hoof-to-hoof,” Captain Glint specified. “We aren’t fast enough to run. We can’t loiter long enough to hide with that leak. Our only option is to attack, and the only way we can do that is a boarding action!”

She drew a long sword and stabbed it into the deck, leaning on it for support when another gust hit us.

“If the Juniper is that much better of a ship, then we’ll take her for ourselves!”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Oh boy, I hope Chamomile doesn't annihilate them too utterly.

[Just a tree]

Yar har, prepare to be boarded!

[Gabriel Miranda]

Oh my gosh, I love this story, I've been waiting all week for the new chapter, I love how everyone is written, lovely chapter, my friend!

[FridayPie]

“Yeah, but I’ve gotten increasingly aware that it’s a design flaw.”

Ok, now Chamomile also becomes a part of Cult Mechanicus.

Paradigm shift from all those new parts?

[Reese]

"The mare glared at him across the CIC display table, daring her to say something."
"The mare glared at her across the CIC display table, daring her to say something."?

"with a whip that can loiter a little"
"with a ship that can loiter a little"?

"Most ponies who sit around taking to their guns get"
"Most ponies who sit around talking to their guns get"?

"is too and too high-profile"
"is too big and too high-profile"?

"Herr Doktor, give me everything the engines can get!"
"Herr Doktor, give me everything the engines can give!"?

"She ship twisted, and she slipped"
"The ship twisted, and she slipped"?

Thanks for writing!