Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 124: Show Your Style

How do you describe something like my Dad’s collection of junk? It wasn’t a display. There wasn’t much of a theme to it. Piles of junk were sorted and re-sorted with some logic I couldn’t really follow. Back home I’d thought things were cluttered because we didn’t have that much space inside where things weren’t going to get damp from poorly-packed clouds or fall through the soft floors. On the ship he had a whole cargo bay and it was exactly the same as being back home, just on a larger scale.

His desk was covered in notebooks and scraps of paper. I flipped through them, looking for… something. I wasn’t sure what.

Found another slight variation today. Seemed identical at first until I put two bottles next to each other. I was shelving them together because I thought they were the same, but side-by-side it was obvious that the newer Sparkle-Cola bottle had much sharper details and a visible seam line on the glass where it had been molded. The bottle was produced by a completely different process to the older one! Very exciting.

My eye twitched at the note. I’d been looking for hours for something about Mom, or me, and I hadn’t found anything.

“Did I come at a bad time?” Quattro asked. She trotted towards me from the door, stopping to look at herself in a cracked vanity mirror on a shelf. She adjusted her sunglasses and nodded approvingly before approaching. I could tell she was deliberately taking her time in case I reacted poorly.

“No,” I admitted with a sigh.

She sat next to me and peered over my shoulder. “Anything interesting?”

I slammed the notebook I was reading closed and tossed it back on the desk. “I wish,” I groaned. “I thought Dad would have spent the last few years doing something that mattered, but all he did was take very meticulous notes about garbage!”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what real archaeology is,” Quattro noted.

I huffed and puffed and tried to argue against it. “I know it’s not all traps and ancient ruins like in those old serial novels.”

“But?”

“But I’ve been in plenty of ancient ruins and tripped a bunch of traps.” I shrugged.

“Can I be honest with you, Chamomile?” Quattro asked.

“That’s an excellent question. I’ve asked myself that, like, a lot. I don’t know, Quattro. Can you?”

“Very funny.” She took off her glasses and held them in her hooves, looking at the dark glass. “I think you want something from your father he can’t give you. You want him to be a secret genius who was working on something important.”

“There has to be a reason why Mom wanted him to help with the Exodus Blue. He knew more than he let on!”

“She wanted him there because she wanted somepony to do this.” Quattro tapped the notebooks. “She needed a pony to sort through the garbage and do the boring work. What happened? You got dragged along and finished a years-long project in a few days.”

“Yeah but…”

Quattro held up a hoof. “But nothing! His work would be really important in academia. I’m sure there are ponies who would absolutely love a complete history of…” she flipped through one of the books. “...Sparkle-Cola production during the war.”

“I’ve met ponies who would love it.”

“Great! We’ll donate all his notes to them.” Quattro said it sarcastically, but it wasn’t a bad idea. The college at Winterhoof probably would be the best place for the collection of what I was graciously calling artifacts. The critical difference between trash and valuable historical research was context, provided helpfully by tiny hoof-written cards.

I sighed. Quattro tapped me until I turned to look at her.

She smiled. “I get it. You want it to mean something because it’s his life’s work.”

“It did mean something. To him.” And not me. Not really. “Sorry. I guess I’ve been hiding down here from things.”

“You’re not the only one. Cube has been taking things out on the crew. I came down here to get you to talk to her.”

I tilted my head. “You can’t?”

Quattro shook her head. “Chamomile she’s a cybernetically and magically-enhanced super soldier with daddy issues.”

“So am I. So are you!”

“First, I’m a spy, not a soldier. And I don’t have daddy issues. Go hug her before she murders somepony.”

---

“What do you mean he abandoned ship?!” Cube demanded, screaming at the poor ensign who was trying to fix a pipe.

The uniformed pony cowered away from the floating cloud of tools in the air. They were increasingly moving in threatening and stabby ways. “I-I’m sorry, Ma’am! It’s not my fault! I stayed onboard to keep the ship running!”

I snatched a screwdriver out of the air just before it could do any harm. Cube and the Ensign looked at me in surprise.

“Hey,” I said, nodding to both of them. “I’m just gonna take my sister here for a walk. You can get back to what you were doing. Sorry about this!”

Cube glared at me and stomped off. I ran after her once I was sure nopony’s life was in danger.

“Half the crew left,” Cube spat. “Even though Polar Orbit told them to stay onboard no matter who won!”

“We should be thankful anypony stayed. We couldn’t run this ship with just six ponies.”

“I know that!” Cube shouted. “I know it, okay?!”

She stomped faster, making me jog to keep up with her. I let her steam in silence for a little while.

“I’ve known these ponies for years and they turned against me in a second because Cozy Glow called me a traitor,” she growled. “Even my own father wasn’t willing to stand up for me. Now he’s dead and I’m stuck proving them right and you know what, Chamomile? I don’t know what the right side is anymore!”

“If you want to leave, you can.”

She stopped in her tracks and looked at me with a sudden surge of pain and fear written wide across her expression.

“Leave?” she whispered.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean--” I sighed and reached for her, offering a hug. She almost took it, then shook her head and turned away. “I don’t want to force you to do anything. I know my plan is dangerous and stupid. I came up with it, so it couldn’t be anything safe or smart.”

“No kidding,” Cube said bitterly. “I’m not leaving. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

The intercom crackled. “Senior officers to the bridge.”

“There’s one place we can go,” I offered, patting her on the shoulder despite the refused hug. Cube gave me a tired look and rolled her eyes, trotting off and making me follow after her.

---

Captain Glint looked back at us when we walked onto the bridge. Most of the damage had already been repaired. The Juniper had a lot of spare parts onboard to keep her in tip-top shape. Burned carpet was repaired, blood had been scrubbed off the controls, and bodies had all been bagged.

The biggest sign of the fight we’d had were the steel hull panels fastened over half of the bridge windows where they’d been unable to fit replacements. The big panels probably needed a drydock to move into place safely.

Cube and I walked around the banks of controls to look outside. Captain Glint stood next to the helmspony. It was the best place to get a view of what was waiting for us.

“Match course and heading,” Captain Glint ordered.

“Yes, Ma’am,” the helmspony replied. “We’re steady alongside her.”

Outside the window, the city-sized Exodus ship loomed, moonlight tracing out the edges of equipment and armor panels layered on the outside of the flying wing. I could see only a few dim running lights, making it into a dark industrial landscape hovering in the sky.

“Quiet,” Quattro noted.

“Hail them,” Captain Glint said.

“No response, Ma’am.”

“Try again. If it doesn’t work, do whatever you can to get their attention. Flash our running lights. Fire a flare.” Captain Glint watched impatiently and looked at me. “Was it like this last time you were here?”

I shook my head. “No, but… it was like this the first time, when everypony was in stasis except a skeleton crew. They got woken up, but it’s possible Midnight had them go back under to wait for things to improve.”

“If it’s like the Exodus Red we can dock at the main bay at the rear of the ship,” Cube said.

“That system isn’t automatic,” the helmspony supplied. She winced at Cube’s return glare. “Sorry, Ma’am. I spoke out of turn.”

“Don’t apologize,” Captain Glint replied. “So if nopony is awake we can’t dock? That’s fine. I wouldn’t want to dock without knowing what’s going on over there.” She turned back to the window and tapped a hoof. “Chamomile, you know the ponies on board?”

“Sure,” I said. “They're really nice aside from the cult. Fun parties. Snappy dressers.”

“Perfect. You and Quattro will lead an away team. Get some engineers to go with you. You can make contact with whoever’s in charge and the engineers can get their docking systems online.”

“I can go too,” Cube said. Captain Glint held up a hoof.

“Wait. I want you to stay here.” Glint trotted back to the plush captain’s chair, but didn’t sit down on it. “I don’t know this ship. You do, and you know the crew. I need you here as my first officer.”

“First officer?” Cube repeated, almost whispering.

“You’re the best choice, and I’m sure the crew would agree. Unless you’d rather have me put Chamomile in charge?”

Cube paled and looked vaguely horrified, which I found slightly insulting. She shook her head.

“Good. Let’s hope this is just a case of us arriving while everypony is tucked away in bed.”

---

“I admit, I was nervous,” Quattro said, as we stepped off the Vertibuck. “I know it was only a two-minute hop, but you have a track record with these things.”

The team we’d come with consisted of the Vertibuck pilot, the ensign Cube had yelled at in the corridor, and one of the engineers who’d been off-duty. They’d all been promised hazard pay on top of overtime, so they weren’t complaining about moving their own equipment while Quattro and I stared into the darkness.

“I’m not going to correct you,” I said. I looked around the bay. There was no sign of anypony. “You know I actually got myself checked out for curses? I met a witch, so it seemed like an opportunity to see if I’d gotten anypony really angry.”

“What did she say?” Quattro asked.

“She told me I wasn’t cursed, I was more like a blunt object for curses to apply to other ponies.”

“Ah, so it was like a cloudball bat complaining about all those annoying balls that keep bumping into it.”

“Ma’am?” one of the engineers cleared her throat. “We need to get to work.”

“We’re just making sure the area is clear,” I said. “You might not know this, but standing out in the open and making a lot of noise is a good way to attract predators.”

“Do we want to attract predators, Ma’am?”

“If Midnight is around, she’s a very attractive predator,” I said. I’d been expecting something to lurch out of the dark and try to murder me by now. It was a little disappointing. “How do we access the equipment you need to get to?”

The engineer looked up. “This ship isn’t exactly like the Red. We’ll need to get to the control tower for the flight deck and start there.” She pointed out the armored windows. With the scale of the ship, it was as big as a building on its own.

“I had a guide last time I was onboard this ship,” I said. “I can get us to the trams, if that helps.”

“That’s fine, Ma’am. We’ll be able to peek at the map from there and plan a real route.”

I nodded. I was just smart enough to know that the best way to get things done was to delegate it to somepony who knew what they were doing. I took point, not sure what to expect. It really was quiet. The loudest sound was the rattling of fans in air vents and the occasional radroach that was more afraid of us than we were of them.

The tram station was just the way I remembered it. Creepy and dark with flickering lights everywhere that made every odd shape and corner into a hiding spot for an imaginary monster.

“When we get Destiny back, I need to ask her what she was thinking,” Quattro said. She couldn’t hide how uneasy she was. “This place is like a haunted house on Nightmare Night.”

“That’s deliberate,” I said. I tapped the controls for the tram, calling one to the station. “This ship was built for a bunch of Nightmare Moon cultists. The materials and designs are all their idea.”

“I think some of the skulls in the wall sconces are real,” the ensign whispered.

“Once we get the Juniper docked you can go back onboard,” I promised. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“You’re saying that like there are things that can happen to us!” the ensign squeaked.

“It’s an ancient ship that doesn’t get regular maintenance,” the engineer said firmly. “The most dangerous things here are the safety violations and we’re well-equipped to put them down. Shape up, Ensign. We’re professionals doing a simple job and getting triple pay for it.”

“Right, sir,” she said, saluting.

The station rattled and the tram howled in the way only a badly-maintained train can as it pulled up to the station, wind surging through the tunnel around it. Wide cargo doors squealed as they opened, revealing an interior that needed to ne hosed out. Dark stains marred the floor of the tram, some of them leading to drains set in the steel floor, the rest dried into a flaky mess that caked seams and low spots.

“Is this one of those dangerous safety violations?” the Vertibuck pilot asked when he looked over our shoulders.

The tram chimed with an incongruous happy bell. An automatic voice played on a clicking, hissing loop of old tape. “Next Stop: Control Tower.”

---

I swept DRACO’s barrel around, looking for anything unusual. The control tower was empty, but had room for what had to be a dozen ponies at radar stations and banks of terminals and radios. The rifle beeped.

“What was that?” the Ensign squeaked in alarm.

“It’s clear,” I told her. I leaned over, tilting so she could look at the screen. “See? Nothing detected, and there’s only one way in and out of this room.”

“Thank goodness,” the Ensign sighed, putting down her toolbox. It was considerably smaller than the one the senior engineer had brought. Her senior immediately stepped over to a bank of switches and started flipping dials and pressing buttons. A few lights overhead flickered on and one of the radios hissed, a soft voice playing.

“That’s the Juniper,” the Vertibuck pilot said. “I’d recognize our beautiful comms director’s voice anywhere. May I?”

“Let them know we’re safely in the tower,” the engineer replied. “Can’t guide them in yet. The ILS is offline. We’ll need to get the radar working.”

“Will do, chief.”

“Can we call the bridge from here?” I asked. I stepped over to the radio bank. The Ensign peered over and pointed at a button for the intercom. I nodded thanks to her and slipped a headset over my ears.

I pressed the button and winced at the sound of screaming and gurgling. I tore the headset off, and Quattro rushed over.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. Then she frowned and picked up the headset. “No, the speakers are bleeding. That’s not normal behavior for audio equipment.”

“The ship is slightly haunted and cursed,” I admitted.

“I should have asked for double hazard pay,” the engineer mumbled. She was neck-deep in one of the panels. “Let’s get the radar fixed so we can get out of here!”

Something slammed against the door. The Engineer jumped and smashed something with her forehead and swore, pulling herself out of the electronics and ducking behind a chair. Quattro looked at me and I nodded, approaching the door.

“What are you doing?’ the ensign asked.

“I’m going to answer the door,” I said with the kind of calm a pony only had if they’d never seen a horror movie before. There was another knock that stopped just as my hoof neared the control panel.

I hesitated for a moment, then pressed the button. The door slid open, and a dark terror flashed out of the darkness, faster than thought and moving like a shadow, the impossible speed and smoothness of something unreal.

It slammed into me with the intensity of a freight train powered by dark magic and bloody death.

“Chamomile!” Midnight Shadow Sun chirped. “I can’t believe it’s you!”

The batpony squeezed me with a big hug and then stepped back to slap my shoulder.

“Look at you! You’ve gone and gotten better wings! No offense to the rest of you, but feathers are impossible to keep clean once they’re covered in blood.”

“Thank buck,” I sighed. “Everypony, this is Midnight. She’s… in charge?” I guessed. The jet-black batpony nodded, and I continued. “We’re friends.”

“Just friends?” Midnight teased.

“Don’t do that to Chamomile, she’ll overheat,” Emerald Gleam said. She stepped out of the gloom and into the control tower. She looked better than she had the last time I’d seen her. Pale and sharper, her cheekbones more visible, but also a little more youthful. Traces of early wrinkles from frustration and long hours at work had washed away. “This is good. We weren’t sure who was going to show up.”

“I guess seeing the Juniper out there was a shock,” I agreed.

“You know, I was sure you were dead,” Quattro sighed. She looked Emma over. “Chamomile told me some of the basics. What’s it like?”

Emma shrugged. “You get used to it. Not being able to go out during the day is the only hard part.”

Quattro nodded. “They gave you a posthumous promotion and a medal, from what I understand. I wonder if they’d let you keep the higher pay rate if you went home?”

“Why don’t you ask for me, if they won’t shoot you on sight for being a traitor?”

“Oh, you heard about that?”

“The transmission from the fleet review went pretty far,” Emerald Gleam confirmed.

Quattro nodded. “Did I ever apologize to you?”

“For what?” Emma asked.

“I’m not sure. Let me know if you come up with something and I’ll do my best to be sorry about it and make it sound like it comes from a place of authenticity.”

Emma scoffed. “Nothing you do is authentic. I should have you thrown off the ship before you betray us!” She stormed over to Quattro and poked her in the chest. “How long do we have before you’re stabbing us in the back again?! I bet you’re pulling some kind of scam on poor Chamomile right now and she’s too trusting and stupid to see it!”

“Owch,” I mumbled.

“I’ve always tried to do the right thing,” Quattro countered.

“Prove it.”

“Fine, we’ll start at the top,” Quattro sighed. “So I met you all at the Exodus Blue prison camp-slash-aracheological site. I was there because I got myself arrested on purpose to see how Polar Orbit’s side project was going. He did it purely to try and get allies in the Enclave government by promising them tech and salvage, and it ended poorly.”

“It ended with ponies I’d worked with for years getting killed horribly,” Emma said.

“Like I said, poorly. You can’t blame me for that part, I was a bystander! Chamomile’s mom did all the damage. She even destroyed a ship on her way out. That got Polar Orbit motivated to fix his mistakes, and he followed her. We all ended up crossing paths at Chamomile’s hometown.”

“Where Mom went looking for me because she was confused and only remembered that I’d been there,” I said.

“Right,” Quattro confirmed. “And we went there because I wanted to drop you off somewhere safe without a lot of military ponies around and pick up the equipment I’d left there when I got myself arrested. Polar Orbit showed up on your mom’s trail and quarantined the place.”

Emma nodded. “We only got out because Chamomile’s dad--”

“We got out because I sent Polar Orbit a message to let us out,” Quattro admitted. “I let him take Chamomile’s dad off our hooves because I didn’t like him very much.”

“What about the whole thing with Captain Glint?” I asked. “You’re the reason we went to Thunderbolt Shores.”

“She’s a friend,” Quattro said with a mild shrug. “She has contacts everywhere. You’ll remember she knew Dashites, members of the military, merchants… There are a lot of ponies that need things done in the Enclave and want to avoid the government for one reason or another. It was a good way to keep my hoof on the pulse of the big picture.”

“Things blew up, we got separated, and by the time we caught up to each other, Cozy Glow had called you back in.” I was pretty sure about this part. Quattro confirmed it with a nod.

“Emma and I went our separate ways after you and Rain Shadow crashed through the cloud floor and took a long diversion to the surface. Really, I should be offended she didn’t ask me to come along with her to the military! She left me behind, and that really hurts.”

Emma growled. “I let you go even though you were a convicted criminal!”

“Girls, please, no fighting,” Midnight ordered. “Sorry. Emma gets a little emotional when she hasn’t had anything to drink.”

She pulled a plastic pouch out of her armor and put it in Emma’s mouth. Emma glared at her but obediently sucked on it, fangs piercing the packaging and a tiny trickle of blood escaping to run down the corner of her mouth.

“We should get back to business,” Midnight said. “How many marines did you bring?”

“Uh…” I blinked in confusion and looked at Quattro. “Marines?”

“To respond to the distress call,” Midnight prompted.

“What distress call?”

This time Midnight and Emerald shared a look.

“We’re here because we wanted to borrow your megaspell cathedral,” I specified. “We didn’t hear any distress call.”

“So you didn’t bring a strike force of elite soldiers?” Midnight asked, looking sheepish.

“Er…”

“It’s fine,” Emma sighed. “We can signal your ship and have them sent over. We’ll give you a briefing once they’re here.”

“What if the ship doesn’t have any marines?” I asked. “Because there’s a really good chance that maybe they’re fresh out.”

“How does a ship 'run out' of soldiers?” Emma asked.

Midnight facehoofed. “Chamomile…”

“You might as well explain how much trouble we’re in,” Quattro said. “This is starting to feel like old times! I missed this.”

Emerald Gleam sighed. “You remember how the black dragon melted its way through the bottom of the ship and escaped?”

I nodded. “Sure. Speaking of which, I found out where it went. You can consider that problem sorted out!”

Emma and Midnight looked at each other again with a growing look of understanding.

“How long ago?” Midnight asked after a long moment.

---

“It’s not my fault!” I protested.

“No, it’s your mom’s fault,” Emma agreed. “It sounds like whenever she got control of the black dragon, it reactivated the SIVA that got left behind.”

“I guess it makes sense,” I admitted. “Every bit of her is dangerous. There was this severed limb in a tomb and it turned itself into a monster even without a brain or organs or anything.”

The bowels of the Exodus Black were just as bad as I’d imagined. It was worse than a ghost ship. I’d been on a literal ghost ship and the ghosts were mostly just confused and didn’t quite know they were dead. They were sad places. This ship had been built by ponies who thought that the height of decor involved candles, skulls, and ornate murals of bloody rituals.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” Quattro sighed. She was getting twitchy. It belatedly occurred to me that she was the only one of us who couldn’t see in the dark, so it was twice as creepy for her.

“We need to use the megaspell cathedral,” I said. “And we’re going to do these ponies a favor and take care of the monster lurking around the ship.”

“Most of the vampires here aren’t really fighters,” Midnight explained. “They’re more like the old nobility.”

“But with centuries of experience and lore, right?” I asked.

“You’d think that,” Midnight sighed. “But they’re idiots. Not lovable ones like you, Chamomile. Frustrating ones. When they started getting horribly murdered they decided to sleep through it instead of, you know, solving the problem.”

“The worst part of becoming a vampire is knowing that in a few hundred years I’ll be as annoying as they are,” Emma said. “All of them just go on and on about shows and books and music that nopony else knows about! They have inside jokes that are older than entire civilizations and weren’t funny even when they were fresh!”

“That’s why I try and stay hip with the kids,” Midnight said sagely. “I’m super cool and I have swords, which are always cool.”

She drew her two short swords made of that strange glass-like material and spun them around dramatically before sheathing them again in her magic, neon-glowing armor.

“Midnight does give me some hope,” Emma agreed. “It could be much worse. I could be stuck with the mindset of a teenager who thinks red and black are the coolest colors and plays with knives constantly.”

“Owch,” Midnight hissed.

“Somepony’s got to keep you humble while most of your family is in stasis,” Emma said smugly.

I held up a hoof. “Stop. I felt something.”

My skin was crawling. Not literally, but I did check to make sure. SIVA could do weird things. We were getting close to our quarry. I followed the sensation around a corner and found a dripping hole in the ceiling, the edges of the metal deck plating turned into mush and grime by a combination of acid and micromachines.

“We’re close,” I said. I knelt down to look at the marks it had left on the deck.

“Chamomile,” Emma hissed.

I looked up.

It looked down at me with a mismatched collection of eyes. It was easily in the top ten most horrifying nameless things that I’d come face-to-face with. Half of a pony emerged from the top of an armor-plated ball with a fanged maw stretched across it, four spider-like legs emerging from the sides of the thing. It was almost entirely mouth, the steel teeth parting in a hungry growl to show crushing rollers and shredding blades.

The half-a-pony twitched, trying to focus on me. The more I looked at it, the less it looked like a real pony and the more it looked like something made in imitation of a pony’s form, a lure or mockery of our shape.

It sucked in a breath through the mouth wider than my whole body, tasting the air around me.

“It’s not attacking?” Quattro asked.

“Maybe it smells the Black Dragon on me?” I guessed. “I have most of the command codes. I might be able to tame it!”

“That seems like a terrible idea,” Emma whispered.

“It totally does,” Midnight agreed. “Go for it, Chamomile!”

“Okay,” I said. I carefully stepped closer, putting my hoof on the thing’s skin. Hull? Shell? It had so little actual biology that I wasn’t sure what to call it. The living metal felt like it was wet and crawling. It made me think of rotting bodies and worms and rusting steel all at the same time. I pushed, letting magic flow into it and trying to exert my will.

“Is it working?” Midnight asked.

“It’s not eating her yet,” Quattro commented quietly.

The monster’s mouth opened, and it roared and clamped down on my extended hoof, teeth scraping against my armor. I screamed.

“Never mind,’ Quattro corrected.

“Blast it!” Emma shouted. She and Quattro started firing, beams lashing against the monster. Steam and ichor exploded off the filthy steel armor. Quattro launched a rocket into its leg, shrapnel pelting me. The thing stumbled, taking me with it in the tight vice-like grip of its mouth.

“Get off me!” I yelled.

“Hold still!” Midnight appeared next to me, stabbing a blade into the thing’s jaws and using it like a crowbar, trying to free me. “Come on, Chamomile! Give me a hoof!”

“I’m already giving as many hooves as I can!”

The twisted pony-centaur head of the thing howled, a new vertical mouth opening across what should have been a ribcage. Ooze leaked from it, hissing with acidic potential against the deck where it dripped.

“Get back!” I shoved Midnight away. It was too late. The thing twisted, pipes opening and gurgling as pressure built up.

The air temperature dropped. Fog instantly formed, humidity crashing out of suspension and turning briefly into a cloud, then going even further and becoming frost. The creature slowed and stopped. White ice crystals formed across its body, and the machines that made it up slowed and stopped, gears and pistons sticking in place.

I yanked my hoof free, metal teeth turning brittle from the supercooling. I stumbled back, confused.

“Hmph.”

An old pony stepped around the frozen creature.

“I finally finish with the spell you need and what do I find? You’re already in trouble again,” Star Swirl said. “You’re the most irresponsible pony I know.”

“I didn’t… when did you get here?” I asked.

“Right in the nick of time,” Star Swirl said smugly. “As always. I was going to start preparing the megaspell, but instead I had to save your life.”

“Oh hey, I recognize you!” Midnight said. “You’re that annoying kid who wore those stupid hats!” She smiled. “Let’s finish dealing with this monster, then you can tell me more about this megaspell you want to cast with the help of a pony that tried to kill my whole family a few times.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

The gang's all here!

[FridayPie]

“You’re the best choice, and I’m sure the crew would agree. Unless you’d rather have me put Chamomile in charge?”

Of Security

"Blunt object" in some languages, e.g. Russian, sounds like an insult to intellegence.

[Reese]

Hm.
"“Right, sir,” she said, saluting."
So, I'd thought the engineer was a mare, and looking back, it seems ambiguous... but I'm still leaning that way.
"“Ma’am?” one of the engineers cleared her throat. “We need to get to work.”"
That line could refer to the pony previously identified as "one of the engineers who’d been off-duty", or it could refer to the ensign here acting as an engineer. However, the next few lines which appear to be from the same speaker at least seem to me like they're from the engineer who'd been off duty rather than the ensign?
So... I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, but I thought I'd comment on it in case it needed attention.
Ah, okay, and later on the engineer even more clearly appears to be identified as female:
"the engineer mumbled. She was neck-deep in one of the panels"

"that needed to ne hosed out"
"that needed to be hosed out"?

"the Ensign squeaked in alarm"
"the ensign squeaked in alarm"?

"the Ensign sighed"
"the ensign sighed"?

"The Ensign peered over"
"The ensign peered over"?

"The Engineer jumped and smashed"
"The engineer jumped and smashed"?

And a twist!
...In retrospect, not all that surprising a twist, but still! :D

Anyway, thanks for writing!