1 - Miles Above it All
When she’d turned the gravity off in her bunk, Mesonox had expected it to be a zero-G wonderland. No achy back, no tossing and turning, just floating calmly in “bed”, with no pressure anywhere. Bliss.
But while that wasn’t wrong, it left out some important pieces of information. Zero-G meant if Mesonox ever started moving, she wouldn’t stop. She might’ve had no pressure on her body, but within the tight confines of her bunk, a few bad twitches pushed against the walls and sent her bouncing around like an extremely slow pinball. She also missed the weight of the sheets on her; they weren’t especially good sheets, but the little bit of pressure they exerted on her had been surprisingly calming.
As she drifted toward the foot of the bed, eyes shut, Mesonox weighed her options for what felt like the tenth time: a zero-G bed, where she kept sloshing around like fruit in a can, or a one-G one, where she was sometimes uncomfortable? They were pretty close; she could probably stay in one some sleep cycles and one some others. It’d certainly-
“Hey. Rookie.”
Mesonox cracked open an eye. An earth pony, leaner than the tribe’s usual, was pulling her bunk curtains aside just a little to stick her head in. Of course, as captain, Stellar Ride had that right. “We got a job. You awake?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Mesonox quickly. “Just power-napping.”
“Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?”
“Try five.”
Stella smiled. “Then get ready.”
As Stella pulled her head out, Mesonox yelled, “And could you turn on the gravity in here?” Stella didn’t respond, but a second later, Mesonox felt the familiar pull of downward acceleration at 9.8 m/s2 and dropped onto her bed. She reached out around the curtain, feeling around on her bunkside table for- There they were.
Upside of being a batpony: you could see really well in the dark. Downside: you were almost blinded in normal light. Upside: you had an excuse to walk around with nifty sunglasses on all the time. Mesonox hooked a hoof around hers and put them on. Amber-tinted wraparounds. They kept the color in her eyes.
Twisting around in what ought to have been far too small a space to allow it, Mesonox worked her rear hooves around the edge of the curtain. She smoothly unfolded herself, opening up her bunk and sliding out of it in one motion. Absolutely pointless and utterly inefficient, but Mesonox thought it looked cool.
Of course, it might’ve been better if anypony was looking at her. Gimbal and Littora were in Heavenly View, as usual, while Stella and Green Glen were talking about something, probably the trawling form, on the other side of the crew’s shared bedroom. Oh, well. She still liked doing it. Mesonox tilted an ear towards the pair as she began pulling on her work uniform’s undersuit.
“-not that big,” Glen was saying, “but it has a very eccentric orbit. Distribution thinks it might’ve been in a shipyard during the cascade and knocked into its current orbit when the debris hit.”
“Yeowch,” said Stella. “Can you imagine? Equus suffering an ablation cascade just days after your brand-new ship finishes construction? I’d probably give up shipbuilding altogether. Any idea on what the salvage profit’ll be?”
“They’re guessing thirty thousand, absolute minimum, if we’re very unlucky.”
Chewing on her gummy vitamins for the “day”, Mesonox tilted both ears towards the pair. Training had been vague on costs and profits, probably deliberately so, and she wanted to know whether that was good money or bad money.
“Hmm. Not the greatest, but it’ll still get us to the next job at worst. Well, hooves crossed, I guess.”
So thirty thousand was halfway-decent money. Good to know, Mesonox thought as she chugged down an energy drink (she wanted the caffeine and coffee was too bitter).
“Oh, and Starfall’s the one giving assignments at the moment. Want me to-?”
“Please. Anything to skip the orbital summary. It’s in the writeup anyway, so why do they keep giving us the data?”
“Completeness. I asked. Anyway, see you at View.” Then Glen’s horn sparked and he vanished in a haze of teleportation.
Mesonox coughed on her drink. You couldn’t teleport up here, it was impossible. How did-
Stella turned to Mesonox, unperturbed by the casual breaking of the laws of magic she’d just seen. She raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. You are fast.”
Swallowing the last dregs of the energy drink, Mesonox nodded. “See? Told you.” She grinned and smashed the can against her head. Instead of crumpling, though, the can just gave her a headache and nearly dislodged her glasses. As non-aetheric stars swam in her vision, she shook her head and sheepishly tossed the can towards the recycler. “Ow.”
“Protip,” said Stella. “Crumple the can a little before you hit yourself on the head. It’ll give it a seam to collapse on.”
“How do you know that?”
“Experience.” Stella clicked her tongue and nodded at the door from the living quarters. “Come on. View’s waiting.”
The east leg was two stories of metal and doors to crew quarters, plus a recreation area on the end. It wasn’t busy at the moment, just a few small clusters of ponies milling about. Stella turned with a purpose, striding towards the Hub with the calm confidence of somepony who’d done it a million times before. Even without her body language, she looked like she belonged in space, with a deep purple coat and her mane and tail rumpled in just the right ways for suit-wearing. Mesonox was left following in her shadow.
Mesonox nervously ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling her fangs. She’d had other jobs before, mostly in construction, but this was the one she’d been working towards, her first “real” job. And it was in space. Father had warned her that going straight into debris trawling without any other background in aetherwork would be nerve-wracking and overwhelming. She should’ve listened; he was a retired trawler and the reason she wanted to become one in the first place, after all. And only now was she realizing just how little she truly knew about space.
Still. She’d done great in the simulations. She knew her pre-cascade aetherships front to back to top to bottom to side to side. She’d almost aced the written exam. And a crew had even snatched her up on the spot once she put her application out. She wasn’t feeling her best, but she was still feeling alright.
Her anxiety ebbed with every step. Slowly, but noticeably. She could do this. Stella seemed nice and understanding enough, at least, and she was captain of the crew. That was something.
As their hooves clicked and clinked across the steel floor, Mesonox thought back to Glen. How had he done that? It looked like Stella had known, so… Mesonox trotted a little to get next to her and cleared her throat. “Uh, ma’am?”
Stella smirked subtly. “You do know you can stop ‘ma’am’ing me, right?”
“Sorry. Habit.”
“You can do it if you want, you just don’t need to.”
“Right. Okay.” Mesonox coughed. “Anyway, isn’t teleporting in space impossible? How did Glen, y’know, poof?”
“Technically, we’re not in space. We’re in Lunar Crown. And that-” Stella chuckled. “-is where things get interesting. So, why is teleporting in space impossible?”
Why was she asking this? This was the sort of thing every aethernaut knew. “The high aether concentration interferes with most magic, including teleportation. Any attempt at it will result in the teleportation energy stream losing cohesion and the teleporter getting smeared across spacetime.”
Stella waved around herself. “And what sort of atmosphere are we in now?”
“Uh… oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, trace gases, that sort of thing. A little bit of aether to let magic work, I think, um, one-point-two-one percent? Just over the percentage on Equus, to make magic easier.”
Stella raised an eyebrow. “So?”
In spite of how much she wanted to, Mesonox didn’t groan. Bad thing to do in front of the captain. “Well, yeah, he can teleport in a straight line, but not from the east leg to the north leg. There’s aether in the way and it’d disrupt the magic.”
“But we can walk from here to there,” said Stella. “Why shouldn’t we be able to teleport, too?” For somepony who was supposed to be explaining things, she sounded a lot like a little kid constantly asking, But why?
“Because we go to the Hub,” Mesonox said, on the verge of sighing, “before we-” Hold on. That might actually work. “He… he teleports to the Hub first, doesn’t he? He zigzags.”
Stella grinned and nodded. “Precisely. You can teleport between any leg and the Hub, so when he needs to go from one leg to another, he just pops from one leg to the Hub, then from the Hub to the other leg. Not efficient on the ground, but the only way to do it up here.”
“Oh.” Mesonox folded her ears back and stared at the floor. She should’ve known that. Sheesh; a few minutes into her first shift and she was already looking stupid in front of the captain.
“Hey, don’t be like that.”
Mesonox looked up; Stella was smiling at her. “Huh?” asked Mesonox.
“I know that look,” Stella said. “Seven years ago, I had that look on my first day. It’s like you’re diving into a pool, after you’ve left the board but before you hit the water, and suddenly you’re regretting jumping in the first place, right?” She chuckled. “Trust me, things get much easier once you hit the water.”
“You’re sure?” Mesonox rustled her wings and willed herself to keep looking at Stella.
Stella nodded. “Positive. You just need some experience to base it on before the nerves go away. It’s like swimming in the ocean: you stick a hoof in and it’s freezing, but once you’re all wet, you get used to the cold.”
Mesonox hadn’t gone swimming in the ocean — she lived too far away from it for that — but she’d gone swimming in Lake Michicant and figured that qualified; she knew that experience of COLD! giving way to This isn’t so bad. Still- “But you’ve been debris trawling since the cascade.”
“Since before the cascade, actually,” Stella said. And before Mesonox could tell Stella how much better that wasn’t, she continued, “When debris wasn’t a problem in the slightest, before trawlers were in high demand. My job was a lot less risky than yours and I still felt the same way.”
Easy for her to say. She’d lived through worse things. Still, Stella’s voice was too… easy for the sentiment to not be genuine. Taking a deep breath and rustling her wings, Mesonox said, “O-okay.”
“You’ll do fine. I’ve got a good feeling about you.”
In Gimbal’s mind, haptic-feedback spells for holograms were among the greatest inventions of the past millennium. Touchscreens and regular holographic interfaces were nice and all, but she preferred the pressure, that little “click”, that told her she’d pushed a button without her needing to look. But using buttons and switches for controlling an aethership meant so many of those buttons were used for just one very specific thing; an awful lot of the control panel wasn’t being used at any one time. Even though Gimbal liked buttons more than touchscreens, she admitted touchscreens tended to be more space-efficient. (Another pilot pointed out that she could always use voice control, with its audio feedback. Being a tactful purist, Gimbal had told her to engage in reproductive congress with herself. Verbatim.)
Then she found out about haptic-feedback holographic interfaces, and she was over the moon (not yet literally, sadly). She could get the same snap from holograms as she could from buttons, even fine-tuning it for each simulated button. She could configure her interface however she saw fit, even adding in macros that she couldn’t with buttons. She could avoid having large amounts of unused space on the console. Even better, it didn’t preclude having manual control; if Gimbal ever wanted to go back to the Good Old Ways, she just needed to turn the holograms off. After Stella had been doubtful, Gimbal had splurged with her own money to upgrade her interface. She never regretted it.
And as she sat in her seat, performing preflight checkups on DT Heavenly View, she reflected that another advantage was the capability to blow up displays as large as she wanted. It certainly made her versions of checkups a lot easier. She tapped the intercom to the engine room. “Littora?”
The intercom crackled. Again, Gimbal told herself that it didn’t need to be replaced. “Yah?”
“I’m ensuring the engines are still properly coupled, so don’t be surprised if you see a few power spikes.”
Littora snorted. “Wah mek yuh aawez du dem ting di haad way?” Gimbal had worked on Heavenly View long enough to understand Littora’s patois easily: «What makes you always do things the hard way?»
“It’s effective,” protested Gimbal. “It’s easy and shallow, or hard and deep. I prefer deep, so I go with hard.”
Gimbal suspected that if she’d gotten visual intercoms, she’d see Littora rolling her eyes. «Hard and deep. Yeah.»
“Yes indeed. I like it very hard and very deep,” Gimbal replied, struggling to not laugh. “Now shush. Working.” She flicked through several displays before finding the two she wanted: one measuring the inductance between the thaumatic core and the engine lines and one measuring the voltage in the engine lines. She turned on the ion engines, just a teeny bit; their output was currently so low, they couldn’t even push a paper across the room. But it was enough for Gimbal. “So, honey?” she asked as she watched the inductance readout slide up. “How’re you feeling? Still good?”
The needle ticked up, slowed, stopped. After a few seconds of the needle staying completely still, Gimbal nodded. “So far, so good. Voltage…” She glanced at that readout. It was just as still. “Just as good. Let’s take a closer look.” She zoomed in on the “screens” to find the inductance needle jiggling slightly in place, the changes too small to be seen further away. The voltage needle was still stationary. “Right. Good. Within the expected range. Now…” She pushed a little bit more power into the engines.
The voltage needle promptly climbed up a few more notches. A moment later, the inductance jiggling abruptly jumped in frequency before slowly settling back down. “Ooo, you’re responsive today,” whispered Gimbal. “Very nice, very nice. Any stationary-state increases in frequency negligible, voltage climb as expected. Finally…” She cut all power to the engines.
Immediately, the voltage bottomed out and the inductance jiggling slowed, followed by the needle gradually dropping back down to zero. “And nice and smooth on the discharge,” said Gimbal. “You’re gonna do well today, aren’t you?” She reached around her hologram to stroke the control panel itself. “Yes, you are.” She went back to the intercom. “Checkups’re done,” she said to Littora as she flicked the maintenance screens away. “The coupling’s still solid.”
«No botheration here, too,» Littora responded. «I’m going easy.»
“Perfect. Do you know when Glen’s getting-”
Something popped in the hallway behind her.
“Never mind, he’s here.”
A few seconds later, she heard Glen walk up. “Hey. Everything alright in here?”
“Yep.” Gimbal swung her chair around to talk face-to-face. In spite of the depth of his voice, Glen was a little short, although he made up for it in muscle (even though you didn’t need muscle in zero-G). “You’re early. Stella and Mesonox haven’t even gotten here yet.”
Glen shrugged. “Starfall was the administrator at the time.”
“Good timing.”
“Yeah. I’ve already uploaded the mission through the nav center. And, Gimbal, we need t-”
“Good,” Gimbal said quickly, pivoting her chair back around. “Now if you’ll ju-”
“Gimbal.” A haze of magic seized the chair and spun it back around. Glen was looking at her disapprovingly. “I know you don’t think we need to upgrade anything, but at the very least, that computer-”
Gimbal sighed. “It still works, doesn’t it?”
“It technically works the same way duct tape can technically plug a hole in the hull. Gimbal, the hunk of crystals and semiconductors in there was outdated two years ago. Even if the parts still work on a software level, they’ll start breaking down any day now. I honestly think I saw a few hologram glitches last week. Hologram glitches.”
“Sure,” Gimbal said, rolling her eyes. Why bother replacing it? It still worked. They could run it until it died, not run it until the next slightly shinier thing came along. So the newer models were a few petaflops faster, big deal. That wasn’t a speed increase of even ten percent. By gum, she was going to squeeze every single scrap of work out of every single scrap of machinery that she could. “While I’m on my shopping spree, anything else you want me to pick up?”
It’d been sarcastic, and Glen had obviously known that, but Gimbal still groaned inside when he scratched his head. “The batteries in the vacsuits could use some replacing, they’re not holding a charge as long.” (They still last longer than seven hours, fumed Gimbal.) “The communications suite might need some of the wiring redone.” (It’s still got a phenomenal bitrate, complained Gimbal.) “The galley needs to be restocked with post-job victory snacks.” (You’re just saying that because you’re the ONE PONY on the ship who doesn’t like granola, groused Gimbal.) “The-”
Gimbal rolled her eyes again. “Fine. Make a list.” Then she looked Glen straight in the eye. “No, seriously, make a list. We’re not rolling in bits at the moment and we need to prioritize.”
“Got a pen?”
Yes, the picture window facing the spaceport was impractical. Yes, it required a bit of upkeep for no gain. Yes, the entire station was in danger if it failed (hence the impermeable shield generators and fast-closing shutters outside the quartz glass). Yes, Mesonox agreed with the rumors that it’d only been installed for photo ops.
But the view from it was so dang cool.
Whenever she had the time, Mesonox had gone there every day since she’d first come on Lunar Crown to just look and occasionally watch ships come and go: supplies, other trawling teams, rich people who wanted to visit a space station, recycling crews who handled the junk brought back by trawlers, the works. The south leg and its bays stretched off for what felt like miles, many of them boasting ships. They ranged from sleek, straight-off-the-line surveyors to ancient masses that’d been built up over the years with their own useful customizations and useless (but neato) paint jobs. The half-chunky, half-sleek shape of View wasn’t in sight — she was too far down for Mesonox to make out — but that didn’t really matter. So many ships. So little ti-
Cough. “Any day now, rookie.”
Mesonox reluctantly tore herself away from the window. Later, she told herself. Later. She flexed her wings to try to regain a tiny bit of dignity and set off down the concourse after Stella. Other crews were running, walking, flying, and riding moving sidewalks up and down the terminal. It was hard to tell whether or not they were on the job or not; it wasn’t uncommon for crews to sleep on their ships, so-
“Bay number?” Stella asked suddenly.
“B6,” said Mesonox answered. She’d gotten used to Stella’s pop quizzes ever since she was hired and she was as prepared as she could get.
“Lead the way.”
Mesonox immediately turned right, taking the first levitation lift to the second floor of the docks. She trotted down the hall, passing B4, B5… B6, in big, bold letters. She held up her right fetlock, and the security chip built into her uniform, to the scanner next to the door. With a bee-beep, her credentials were accepted, and the door hissed open, revealing the crew conduit beyond.
Mesonox had barely set foot inside when Stella asked, “Make of View?”
“Rockhoof-class debris trawler,” replied Mesonox. “One of the older models, but very reliable. Chosen because it’s the aethernautical equivalent of the Tokara Haylux: you could drop a building on it and it’d still run.”
“And Gimbal says if it runs, it’s healthy,” muttered Stella. “Good pilot. Good mechanic. Not so good at reassuring ponies that that sound isn’t anything to worry about.”
But Mesonox was barely listening as she not-quite-cantered down the conduit to Heavenly View. She’d been in it several times before, but… aethership. And now, not just any aethership, but the one she was working from. It was like her brief stint as her high school’s librarian: the second she started working there, the place she’d been into and out of so many times without a thought suddenly became special, something of hers (that she had to share). As she passed through the airlock into the hold, she glanced at the line of vacsuit lockers, lingering on the one stamped Mesonox. It was stupid, but she couldn’t help but grin.
The airlock hissed shut as Stella stepped over the threshold. Mesonox guessed from the look on her face that she was ready with another question- “And, finally, our noms de cosmos?”
Mesonox resisted the urge to roll her eyes. What was wrong with “reporting names”? Maybe the same thing that meant Stella had all of their names be chess-based. “You’re King, because you’re the head of all this. Gimbal’s Queen, because she’s the most powerful, at least when flying View. Littora’s Knight, because she doesn’t move like anyone else. And Glen’s Pawn, because he really wanted that name for some reason, even though you said he ought to be Bishop because he was creative and solved problems in unexpected ways.”
“And you’re…?”
“The rookie, because I haven’t earned my reporting name yet.”
Stella smiled slightly, and Mesonox held herself just a little bit higher. Stella pressed a button on the intercom, and when she spoke, her voice had gained an extra layer of firmness. “All hooves, this is King. The rookie’s with me. Check in.”
The speaker crackled. Crackled. Mesonox wondered just how old it was. “Queen, checking in.”
“Pawn, checking in.”
“Knight, checking inna.”
“Check-ins confirmed,” said Stella. “All hooves, report to the nav center and look alive. We’ve got trash to collect.”
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Well isn't this interesting? Always good to see something in this early-spaceflight genre, rather rare it is.
Looking forward to seeing how this goes.
The sleeping bit bugs me a bit as she seems to be having more issues with sleeping in space than people that already sleep in space with less options.
Sleeping bags, tie downs, velcro?
They even have the awesome artificial gravity which they can turn on and off.
If they can turn it on and off why not run it at a different setting?
They could set it at like 1-10% gravity and get most of the relaxing quality without the floating about bit.
If you wanted weighted sheets you could get really heavy weighted sheets that would be normal at your prefered gravity setting.
Assuming weight isn't cost prohibitive to get into space in your verse anyway.
11262001
Was thinking about the sleeping bag myself. I suppose one answer might be that pegasai/thestrals just really hate being tied down/confined, and so that option might trigger the claustrophobia?
As to the gravity, it's probably SMR, or Stupid Magic Rules (technical term) mandating that there's either gravity or there isn't. Think about early air conditioning technology used in movie theatres, people would go at the height of summer in their t-shirts or whatever, but bring winter coats because the cooling systems couldn't be made warmer than like 40 degrees or summat.
Fascinating setting. I haven't seen too many works of fiction with a concept like this.
Eagerly awaiting to see where this goes.
Now this kind of setting from you? It's a fic all-too perfect for my tastes. Looking forward to this a great deal.
Have you ever seen the anime Planetes? It's some of the best hard sci-fi I've ever seen.
You and your space stories. Last one was pretty sick; I'll keep an eye on this one, too.
11262148
That is an amazing bit of history I had not heard! What decade(s) was/were that?
11262469
Unfortunately I can't remember where I originally read it, but I can tell you that the technology got its start in the mid 1920's and Mr. Carrier the inventor picked the theater industry as the first group to pitch his invention to.
Yeeesss, more ponies in space.
Quartz glass wouldn't be my first choice for a window in space; it's transparent to hard UV. < <;
11262298
I was just thinking "Ponytes", myself.
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this!
A little pedantic but this isn't strictly true. Things that are hard to move in gravity will be equally or more difficult, and probably more dangerous, to move in microgravity. They've still got the same mass and momentum's a pain. Hauling crates and turning wrenches will be roughly as physically intensive. Using a spacesuit, depending on it's design, will likely be very difficult and exhausting to use. So being physically fit is of great utility. Of course tech and magic could make all of this irrelevant. If all your crates haul themselves, there are no wrenches to turn, and drones do all the hazardous work physical capabilities become far less important.
Though this could be a neat little detail indicating Glen is one of a few or the only terrestrially born and raised crew members. Maybe he isn't all that short or muscular, but just seems like it relative to all the spacers since he grew up down a gravity well.
Anyways, pretty interesting start to a story. Looking forward to see were this leads.
Oh, I like this. This is the kind of sci-fi I can appreciate, where the lens starts close and gradually pulls back to give the broader context. And I’ll always applaud stories that can stand up with a cast of engaging original characters while still delivering a story that feels grounded in the source material. I’ll be watching with interest!
Soundtrack for the story.
11265047
Yes! I certainly agree there.
(For future SIG: in the event that the video gets Memory Hole'd by Youtube, the video is the Hardspace: Shipbreaker OST)
Coheed and Cambria's The Hollow would also fit for that initial preparation and suiting up bit before they deploy
For the unenlightened:
11262148
It'd be very energy expensive, but technically you could compensate by blasting a bit of heat into the chilled room.