Chapter 1: Arrivals
Above my head, the lights of The Radiant Hope flickered softly to life. I looked on from within my sleeping bag, pinned to the wall in a tunnel made of equipment panels and hoof holds, as the space was slowly illuminated with the simulated starshine of my distant home. It took me a few moments to place the fact that it was already morning, and that things were still a little blurry. I focused softly on a panel label across from me and blinked the sleep from my eyes until it was clear.
“Equipment Storage” I softly read to myself as the letters turned sharp. There was a number at the end, but I skipped over the seven and turned my focus towards freeing myself from the confines of the sleeping bag. Click. Click. Click. The zipper cover flap was secured with a series of locking press studs not unlike those on a winter coat. It was a necessary precaution in a place like this, as was pinning the whole thing to the wall by three separate bungee cord attachment points.
I slipped the zipper down and softly kicked myself free of the bag. I reached out and stopped myself from hitting the panel of the storage locker with a forehoof. I let my joints bend to slowly bleed the inertia of the kick, but still rebounded with enough force to repel from the wall. Air resistance stopped me dead, floating dead-center between all four walls of the hall. Perfect! I got in my morning stretches as my mane went everywhere. Even while tightly bound in hair bands, my mane and tail wanted to go wild in microgravity. Typical.
I heard a distinctly metallic clatter in the distance and immediately realized that the thought of significant distance was something of an amusing oxymoron given the situation.
“Odyssey, are you alright?” I asked, a small smile forming on my lips as the girl’s loud sigh of self-disapproval echoed in my direction. I opened a sealed duffle bag under my sleeping accommodations. I was bracing myself with my hind hooves on the hold points on the walls as I dug for my working gear. I put on a shirt as the girl explained herself from around a corner.
“Sorry, Jupe! I didn’t mean to wake you. I was trying to prep the inductors and I got the contents of container locker fourteen everywhere again. It’s a bit of a debris field up here right now.”
“Don’t worry, Odyssey, I was just waking up anyway.” I took on an inquisitive tone. “Were you trying to cook again?” That got an immediate and frustrated reply from the girl.
“I know I’m not any good at it, but if I don’t try to get better then I’ll never be good at anything!” I almost wanted to laugh at that one.
“I really don’t think that’s true, Princess.” I made sure to place extra emphasis on her title. The clattering temporarily stopped as the irony hit her.
“Yeah, I guess.” I suppressed the smallest of giggles before heading down the hall with a quick kick against the hold rails. I was floating down a tunnel, one I had been through many times. Halfway down its length I crossed the central junction point. I looked up to see a three-legged alicorn struggling to get a door to shut on a storage locker that was desperate to spill its haphazardly secured contents into our living compartment. I knew from experience that the girl’s frustrated expression meant she likely wouldn’t be receptive to help at the moment, even if she might still need it.
I continued drifting down the length of the tunnel and slowed myself to a stop before a glass cupola that capped the end of its length. Here, I started taking in the incredible view. The massive, nearly unending gas clouds of Saturn swirled out before us in seemingly all directions. It was impossible to accurately convey just how truly massive this planet was, or how utterly insignificant it made you feel.
“Today’s the day we perform our aerobrake through Saturn’s exosphere, right?”
“As if you don’t already know!” She replied between struggling grunts, before a slamming sound and a sigh of relief indicated success in her task. Door closed.
“Ever been this close to your Cutie Mark before?” I asked, full-well knowing the answer.
“Only on the trip to Jupiter but Saturn was still just a bright dot in the sky, even with the conjunction. It’s really something, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer her, at least not right away. It was true that I had never seen a sight quite like it before, nopony had, but I had other things on my mind. The timetable of our mission was spectacularly aggressive. Supplies were tight, fuel was tight, windows to our landing zones were tighter. I would have been lying if I said it wasn’t bothering me. Still, I was less concerned with the timing than I was amazed that the teams back home had figured out all of this math years before our mission had even departed.
“Jupiter? Jupiter Rising? Hello? Are you there?” Where would I have gone in a place like this? Sometimes The Princess struck me as a tad on the silly side.
“I’m here. I’m just thinking to myself.”
“About Mimas?”
“I can’t even see it out of this window.”
“What, then?”
“Just the mission.” I wasn’t trying to be dismissive, so I headed off a reply with a question of my own.
“Princess?”
“Yes, Jupe?”
“Why do you go on these missions? Why not send somepony else?” She laughed, I could hear her chuckle from down in the cupola.
“Seriously? Why would I skip out on something like this? Just look at it!”
“Well, isn’t it dangerous? You’re Immortal, right? What if you get.. Stuck?”
“Jupe, I could get stuck falling into an unmarked cave back home. I can’t let the fear of what might go wrong keep me from the things that might go right.”
“But the other Princesses don’t exactly do things like this.”
“If they want to miss out on history being made, that’s their choice.” She had a point, I wasn’t about to miss out on an opportunity like this either. We were the first explorers to the Saturnian System and nothing could take that away from us now. I felt she probably had more to say than that, something in her words came across as a dodge, but I was a Planetary Scientist and decidedly not fit to play a Psychologist or a Theologian. If she had her own private reasons for doing this, that was fine by me, we all did deep down.
I paid some small attention to a few rocks shining in the distance as they meandered by. Even this far in from the rings we were still seeing them from time to time, moving in their erratic, unpredictable orbits as they wandered their way along. Some of those rocks were like us, distant explorers trapped by gravity after meandering here from across the vastness of space. We were among good company here, among friends.
“Jupe! I hope you’re excited for Oatmeal, because it’s ready!”
The Radiant Hope was more of a space station than a proper ship. It was a series of connected modules originally assembled high above The Earth. It was designed to sit in orbit around Mimas and provide a base of operations as smaller shuttlecraft took us to the other moons. Saturn itself had no meaningful ground to it. There was, doubtlessly, a solid core buried deep within the planet’s swirling gas clouds. However, I doubted any pony would ever walk upon its surface. The pressures and intensities of the atmosphere at those levels made the prospect similar to swimming through a tsunami under the deepest ocean ever explored. Sure, it was technically gas, but it was only an atmosphere by the strictest technical definition. In comparison, tornadoes were less fearsome.
We had two shuttles designed to ferry us from Mimas, both early flying-wing space planes donated by The Crystal Empire. The shuttlecraft Tempest’s Fate and Victory Everlasting flanked the tube of command modules on either side. They were mounted at docking collars at the center of the stack. The two vessels combined to act as our primary forward and reverse thrusters for The Radiant Hope. It didn’t take much of a burn from their engines to drop our station into its parking orbit. From here, the real mission would begin.
“Odyssey, are you ready at the antenna controls?”
“Ready, Jupe. How is our power system doing?” The Radiant Hope was cozy enough that we could have had this conversation with our outside voices. Still, it was a decent opportunity to test our close range radios in the field and we weren’t going to pass up the chance to work out any kinks.
“Looks like the solar panels pack and unpack themselves just fine. We didn’t lose any in the aerobrake, and all of their power buses are showing their expected current. Batteries are all charged up now, we should have plenty of power to deploy the antenna.”
“Alright, I’m deploying it now.”
I heard, rather than saw, the massive folded dish on the front end of the station begin to move as its electric motors whirred to life. The giant antenna was folded like an umbrella along the body of our ship, and would be deployed specifically to provide a data connection for our instruments to the scientists back on Earth. We’d achieve this, entertainingly enough, by using the atmosphere of Saturn itself as an antenna. As long as the listening stations of Earth were roughly on the opposite side of Saturn from us, they’d receive a much clearer signal than we ever could possibly send with a direct line of sight. That was what Odyssey had hoped for, at least.
“We’re deployed, Jupe! Looks like we’re sending our data!” I breathed a sigh of relief as I watched the power systems hold steady under the ramped up load. I had no idea if they could hear us out there, but at least we were theoretically sending them all of our data. Suddenly a burst of static over my radio pulled me away from my thoughts.
“Odyssey, did you hear that?”
“Yeah. Some kind of interference, I don’t know what it is.” This was closer to my area of expertise than Odyssey’s. I didn’t know much about radios, but I knew plenty about planets. I already had some answers that I suspected were probably correct as to the origins of the static. I pointed some of our instruments at Saturn, just to be sure, and carefully looked over the data. It was too late to catch the source of the burst, but we’d easily pick up any further irregularities.
“Look at the radiation readings. They’re variable.”
The difference between a gas giant and a star boiled down to little more than a difference of mass. Give a planet enough mass and the atoms at its core start undergoing atomic fusion, just like the sun. Conversely, take away enough mass and a sun simply stops burning. Saturn wasn’t anywhere near dense enough to be its own star, but it was plenty big enough to produce massive amounts of heat and ionizing radiation. The storms weren’t just raging deep through the clouds of Saturn’s atmosphere, they were invisibly swarming all around us. It was far from deadly to us, it wouldn’t even be dangerous to us during our stay, but it would wreak havoc with our sensitive communications gear.
Once Odyssey and I had figured that out, we set about making critical adjustments to our communications equipment, hardening them against the invisible storm. After many hours, we felt like we were that much closer to being truly ready for tomorrow. Years ago, in the Jovian System, Odyssey had been the first mare to walk on the surface of Ganymede. Tomorrow, she’d be the first to walk on the surface of Saturn’s own Mimas. I couldn’t say I wasn’t envious of her for that. As we both climbed into our sleeping bags, getting ready for some much needed rest, I finally thought to comment out loud.
“First mare on Ganymede, and now first mare on Mimas.” She looked a little embarrassed to hear that, and as I stared at her flushed cheeks I couldn’t help but wonder why she ever would.
“Yeah, well, you know how it goes.” I absolutely did not.
“How was it?”
“How was what?”
“Ganymede.”
“It’s a nice place. Probably looks a lot like Mimas, honestly.”
“No, I don’t mean it like that.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m a Planetary Scientist, Odyssey, I’ve seen the data. I know what that moon looks like. What I haven’t seen is you gloating about it.”
She looked at me suddenly, taken aback.“Gloating? Why would I do that?”
“Really? All of this pushing to be first to historic events and you expect me to believe you can be that humble about it?” She looked back to her sleeping bag, looking a bit more tired than before I had asked. I wasn’t sure if I had cornered her on something intentionally or not, but I wasn’t prepared for what she was about to admit.
“I was supposed to be third. I fell down the stairs.”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it! The sheer idea of somepony tumbling down a stairway and crashing head-first into the history books was just funny to me. If anyone else had done it, anyone at all, I’d have laughed at it too. Unfortunately I hadn’t just burst out laughing at anypony, I realized far too late that I was laughing at a pony that happened to be missing a leg.
“Yeah, everypony else thought it was funny too.” She didn’t sound like she thought it was funny herself, and that silenced my own chuckles. I forced a cough and quickly apologized, feeling ashamed of myself.
“I’m sorry.”
She gave me a weary smile and shrugged it off. “Nah, it’s fine. It was a classic pratfall, that’s good comedy.”
“But..” A million different thoughts tried to leave my mouth all at once, jammed up in my throat, and forced me into silence.
“But what?” I didn’t know what to say. The quiet grew awkward as Odyssey stared at me. “I know I only have three legs, I can count, but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh at me for tripping like you would with anypony else.”
“Isn’t it in poor taste, considering how you’re imparied?”
“Impaired?!” She feigned offense with a growing smile. “Come on, when have you seen me struggle to get around?”
“All the time.” The answer came out naturally, instantly, it pushed the smile right off of Odyssey’s face and left her staring blankly at me.
“I’d be plenty klutzy even if I had four legs, Jupe. You’ve seen me trip with the prosthetics. Other ponies run marathons in those.”
“I’m sorry, I’m just trying not to offend.” She shook her head softly.
“If you don’t want to offend me, then just treat me like everypony else.”
“I suppose that makes sense.” She nudged me gently with her forehoof, physically coaxing a better mood out of me.
“Of course it does! Now, be honest with me, you want to be the first mare on Mimas, don’t you?” I held back my gut-instinct response for only a moment before deciding to chance it.
“Well, you be honest with me, does it matter who’s supposed to go first if you just pratfall down the stairs again?” Odyssey laughed! The girl gave an honest, good natured, laugh. I found it proved to be quite infectious, in fact.
“You could always try to run faster than I can fall!”
“I suppose I could sprint for it!”
“Sounds like a plan to me!” The both of us laughed. It was a reasonably serious conversation and I had no doubt that Odyssey had meant every word of her offer. Life was full of serious moments, but it felt right to inject some levity into our mission. The eyes of history were upon us, we were embarking upon an adventure that we couldn’t have possibly begun to understand the significance of. In those minutes, we could have never known how badly we had needed that brief reprieve.
“Radiant Hope, this is Mission Control. Your data is coming through just fine. Keep your transmission schedule in-line with the timetable, there shouldn’t be a need for any immediate changes. We’ve analyzed the data from that signal burst you experienced earlier, and we’ve found a minor anomaly. It could just be that a signal from the far side of Saturn bounced off of Titan’s atmosphere but it’s too significant of an occurrence for us not to investigate it first. We’ve updated the relevant burn information for an immediate transit to Titan. Take Victory for this trip, its radio telescope should be useful for measuring the atmosphere’s interactions with Saturn’s radio-spectrum radiation. We’ll need measurements from both space and the air.
I know that both of you were excited to go to Mimas but it’ll have to wait. This won’t be as glamorous as the intended first Titan trip and, without Tempest’s ground-penetrating radar, core drilling equipment, and micro submarines, it may not prove as fruitful as the original trip was intended to be. However, we always knew we’d have to adjust to conditions in the field and we can’t let the opportunity pass. I’m sure you’ll make us proud. Control out.”
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ooh, really love the implications that "Theologian" has here. right up my alley!
it really is! great bit of a mundane accident causing an unexpected result, giving this world and its happenings a more realistic feel.
a great start! Odyssey definitely has the feel of a canon Princess, with all of the weight of being an immortal magical goddess-queen while still very much able to participate in adventures at the frontiers of Equestria as a down-to-earth equal to her colleagues. and the setup of what i take to be the mystery central to the story, the unexpected signals from Titan, being glossed over by the main characters, who come into the story with their own goals and expectations. hitting that home with the message from Mission Control was a great touch.