Maze recognized the dream at once. She had dreamt it many times before. It didn’t occur to her clouded mind that a dream meant that something was wrong on the ship. She shouldn’t be dreaming. Her subconscious, oblivious, carried her through the familiar waters of her own thoughts.
The dream was almost always the same. It would start with her outside, staring at a darkened Equestrian sky, filled with beautiful, sparkling stars and the brightest, fullest moon you could ever imagine. On her solitary hill there wasn’t a sound to be heard, or a pony to be seen. This dream was not special- all the familiar elements were there, like props and a script for a play, all awaiting their director.
The cream-colored unicorn filled her lungs with a deep breath, and lit her horn with a magic that warmed her body from hooves to tail. Sometimes, in this dream, she would close her eyes as she played out the familiar story. This time, though, she left them open. She wanted to see what she accomplished.
Concentrating on the horizon line, Maze directed her infinite magic towards the celestial object she wished to control. It was there, as always, waiting for her; warm and radiant, and just out of sight. Breathing out her lungful of air, the unicorn gently brought the sun upwards at a slow crawl, past the horizon, bathing the countryside in a brilliant golden glow that cast the valleys between the hills in a deep shadow. As she brought the ball higher into the sky, she felt her hooves being lifted off the ground by an invisible force, as if she had grown wings. The higher the sun went, the higher she was lifted off the hill, until she was suspended many dozens of feet in the air, as if she were staring eye to eye with the beauty she had brought to the world.
Maze beamed warmly as the sun lit her face with an equal energy. She greeted it with her smile, as if she expected it to smile back.
***
The dream ended there, as it always had.
Instead of waking up to her home in Canterlot, however, Maze’s eyes snapped open to the inside of a glass tube, her hooves suspended out above her, held by small clamps.
It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the artificial lights that flooded the room. A soft pinging alarm was playing in the background, which she ignored for the moment. Maze swallowed and took her first breath in what felt like years; which, ironically, wasn’t far from the truth. Her mouth tasted strange- like chemicals and stale air. The vapors around her were warm and somewhat damp. Out of pure habit, she closed her eyes again and did some quick mental arithmetic to make sure she was all there. The integral of a function is the sum of the area of an infinitely increasing number of geometric shapes superimposed under the function. That sounded right to her. Then again, if she had indeed suffered brain damage, she certainly wouldn’t be aware of it.
“Alpha waves detected,” a soft artificial voice said, echoing in Maze’s glass chamber and interrupting her thoughts. “Are you awake, doctor?”
Maze’s first word came out as nothing more than a squeak. She cleared her throat, willing her vocal chords to contract. “I’m awake, M.A.R.E,” she confirmed hoarsely.
At these words, the clamps holding her hooves in the air opened and retracted, and her limbs slumped against her stomach. She blinked another few times as the familiar weight of her own body returned to her. She swallowed and took one more deep breath of the damp cryogenic air around her, savoring it for as long as possible. She hated this part. “You can open the doors now, M.A.R.E,” she mumbled reluctantly. “I think I’m alive.”
The sections of glass above her slowly retracted into the sides of her tube, flooding her chamber with a cold draft of canned oxygen. Maze coughed uncontrollably for a few moments. “Life signs are confirmed, doctor,” the computer chirped when she was done.
“It was a joke,” the unicorn quipped out of habit, wiping the tears from her eyes and rolling herself forward so that she was sitting down on her hind hooves, her head just poking out from the top of the chamber. She smacked her lips. What she was feeling wasn’t unlike the feeling of awaking unexpectedly from an exceptionally good nap. She looked around the room that she had entered… was it two or three years ago? She couldn’t remember right now. Everything looked vaguely familiar and completely alien at the same time. Part of this stemmed from the fact that her eyes refused to focus and she was essentially blind. She was used to this part at least- once the chemicals were out of her system she was sure she’d be able to think straight.
Maze looked to her left, and then to her right, at the two identical cryogenic tubes next to her that held her only two shipmates. Theirs were also in a state of slow unthawing, though the ice-encrusted glass sections indicated theirs were slightly behind her cycle. She only looked as long as was necessary- seeing a half-frozen pony wasn’t something she particularly enjoyed, even if all she could see were blobs.
“Doctor, if you are conscious, I have awoken you and the crew ahead of schedule because there is a mechanical malfunction with the spacecraft that requires your attention,” the artificial voice piped up.
Suddenly the alarm and the interrupted dream came into sharp focus again in Maze’s mind. Her heart dropped into her stomach, but she tried to remain calm. It wasn’t hard, since her head was still spinning. She forced herself to concentrate. “What happened? Are we still on course?” she asked the air.
“Affirmative,” the computer confirmed in its never-ceasing matter-of-fact tone. “However, there is a serious failure with the deceleration thrusters that requires manual repair. The details are on the monitor.”
Maze swallowed. She didn’t need details. The deceleration thrusters were an essential part of the spacecraft and their mission. Without them, they couldn’t stop when they reached their destination- a Class A star- and would shoot right past it. Worse, they might hit it. “What about the automated repair systems? Are they online?”
“Negative,” the computer repeated. “That subsystem suffered a catastrophic failure three weeks, one day ago.
“How long until we’re supposed to reach the star?” Maze asked.
“Two weeks, two days, and six hours,” the computer responded.
Maze did the math through the fog in her head. The timing between the failures of both systems explained why they weren’t given much warning. They were only being thawed slightly ahead of schedule, though. That was plenty of time to figure out what was wrong and fix it. The unicorn started to relax a little bit, but she was no starship engineer. She would need help. “What about my crew?” she asked, motioning towards the other tubes, forgetting for a moment that the computer could not see her.
“Captain Rook and Chief Forte are undergoing purging. I awoke you first to assist them. Their tasks are scheduled to be completed in about two hours.”
Maze nodded, again, to nopony in particular. That was standard procedure for the ship’s doctor. She gave up on sitting up and slumped back into her tube’s cushion, watching the stars that exploded in front of her eyes. This was certainly a setback, but it was nothing that they couldn’t fix. This was far too important for them not to. They had come this far; failure, as the saying went, was not an option.
The alarm was the only sound on the ship that kept her company while she waited to be reunited with the only two ponies besides herself in the solar system.
The crew eventually decided that a meal was the first order of business once they were all awake. They had of course tried to look at the computer’s messages about the thruster problem, but found that one of the basic facts of cryogenic unfreezing was keeping them from understanding it fully: disorientation. None of the three were overly worried, despite the seriousness of the problem. They were all professionals; they could handle some repair work.
Maze picked at the food on her plate. It wasn’t anything special: a few rehydrated blocks that she guessed was made of wheat loaf, and some potatoes with gravy. The ship’s menu didn’t allow for much in the way of comfort food, but she didn’t think that she would have cared after cryostasis. She usually didn’t. Now she just felt sick. She reasoned it must be a side effect of being woken off-schedule. She had one thing to be thankful for- at least her eyes had regained their ability to focus.
“Staring at it won’t turn it into chocolate, doctor,” Rook said around a mouthful of potatoes. The brown earth pony didn’t seem to be sharing her nausea as he hungrily dug into his own portion.
“I thought we had some of that,” Maze responded.
Rook swallowed. “Afraid not,” he said, gathering more food on his fork, which was attached to his hoof by a small fastener. Maze knew she had to get something of nutritional value inside her, so she did her best to channel her captain’s appetite. She lifted her own hoof-attached fork and looked at her food threateningly, but all it did was make her head spin. She pursed her lips in defeat and looked over to the only other pony in the room, who had also not touched her plate and was looking at it with a look of distrust similar to her own.
“Forte, do you want this?” Maze asked the orange pegasus, pushing her own plate slightly away from her. The science chief looked up in surprise, as if she had been in deep thought and had forgotten she wasn’t the only one in the room. She looked rather pale.
“Oh, no, no,” she said, shaking her head and talking slightly to Maze’s left. “Maybe later,” she qualified. Maze noticed the pegasus’ eyes were still foggy, as they had been upon Maze’s examination when she had woken from the cryo tube.
“Can you see yet?” the unicorn asked. Forte looked downward slightly, as if she were embarrassed at the question.
“No,” she murmured.
“That should clear up in a few hours,” Maze offered helpfully.
“You said that two hours ago,” the pegasus refuted with a tinge of worry to her voice.
“You two really got the short end of the stick this time,” Rook noted around whatever happened to be in his mouth. He swallowed again. “Don’t worry, chief, you’ll be fine. Maze can see now, she can fix you up.”
“I’d really rather be able to fix whatever’s wrong with the ship,” Forte said, the undercurrent of anxiety in her voice rising slightly. “I need my eyes.”
“It doesn’t sound like such an overwhelming problem to me,” Maze said, repeating the crew’s previous conclusion.
“Small problems have a tendency to turn into big ones when you’re not looking,” Forte countered.
“Dwelling on it will only make you feel worse. We have plenty of time. You should try to eat something, it’ll help,” Maze said with the most comforting voice she could manage. After a moment of silence and a deep breath, Forte looked back down at where she assumed her plate was and made a face, but picked up her fork and took one experimental bite. Satisfied, Maze turned back to her own plate and did the same, finding her food a little more palatable this time. The crew ate quietly for a few minutes, the gentle hum of the spacecraft’s computers and the sound of the air circulators lending a soothing ambiance to their meal. The sustenance in her stomach raised Maze’s spirits somewhat, and some of the color returned to Forte’s face. After they were finished, the unicorn turned to Rook and asked the question that she was sure was on everypony’s mind.
“How’s the princess?” she asked.
In response, Rook waved his fork once in a gesture that feigned indication that Maze had reminded him of something very important. He swiveled his chair and pushed a hoof into a panel on the wall, revealing a digital screen from a sunken port. The screen lit up to display the computer’s diagnosis of the thruster problem, which included lots of angry-looking red arrows, but Rook dismissed it with a wave.
“M.A.R.E, when was the last log transmission?” he asked.
“One moment,” the computer responded. A hushed second passed. “The last transmission from Ambassador Sparkle was one month, three days ago.” At that, the screen was populated with the text of the log entry, which Rook skimmed briefly. Forte and Maze waited for his response, both not able to read the tiny text from that distance.
Rook clicked his tongue in satisfaction. “Still doing as wonderfully as ever,” the earth pony confirmed. “And by that, I mean she’s not bid farewell to her mortal coil just yet.” He turned around to face his shipmates. “Looks like we’re still employed,” he finished.
Maze sighed, relieved. “Thank the stars for that,” she said. Forte merely fluffed her wings and nodded sagely, remaining silent. “What about the other ships, have they sent anything?” Maze prodded.
Rook turned back to the screen and flipped through the received entries by hoof, scrolling down pages and pages of maintenance and status reports. After a minute of this, he shook his head. “Nothing from any of the teams in the last year or so,” he said without a hint of worry in his voice. Maze frowned.
“That doesn’t bother you?” she asked. Rook shrugged and turned back to her.
“Not really. Sending a message to us from Equestria is one thing, but sending one from one moving spacecraft to another is a whole different hoofball game,” he explained calmly. “They might not be awake yet, their antennae may be malfunctioning- it could be anything.”
“But malfunctions on all of the other ships?” Forte piped up. Rook put on a disarming smile to the science chief as he flipped the screen back into its recessed position.
“It’s really not a big deal- I’ve seen this happen between ships before. There’s not a thing to worry about, I promise,” he said. “And even if there is something wrong, there’s nothing we can do about it from here.” The explanation seemed to calm Forte somewhat, but Maze still had her doubts. Rook was right, though; they couldn’t afford to worry about it right this instant. Their priority was to make sure their particular ship was able to do its job. There would be time to worry about the others after they were finished. After all, only one ship had to make it. The pegasus next to her yawned.
“In that case, I need a nap,” she said, sounding a bit more chipper. She turned to Maze’s general direction. “If I still can’t see my own hooves when I’m up, one of you is going to have to help me fix the ship,” she said.
Rook laughed. “A nap? Didn’t you just wake up?”
“I can’t help it if your wheat loaf puts ponies to sleep,” Forte countered lightly. The three ponies laughed at that, breaking the tension in the room that they hadn’t even noticed was there.
After the three agreed to reconvene in a few hours when they were fully awake, Maze went off on her own to stretch her legs. The ship wasn’t very large, but there were a few precious private areas to it, one of which she headed to straight away. As she opened the hatch and entered the cramped cargo hold, she half expected their precious payload to be gone, or on fire, or broken in two. It wasn’t, of course- it was exactly where they had loaded it when they launched from Equestrian orbit. Still, a little paranoia never hurt anypony. Probably.
She gazed at the now familiar machine that she had created. It was rather simple on the outside: a sleek, flattened metal cylinder with a rounded head, with no ornamentation except the engine bell in the back and the stabilizing fins, a leftover from the missile’s original habitat where atmosphere was plentiful. She had opted to keep them when it was being designed. It raised a few eyebrows, but she liked the way they looked; they reminded her of a pegasus’ wings.
It was still a little strange to think that such a relatively simple thing was going to bring magic back to Equestria. And her.
That’s the best solution for anything, though, isn’t it? Simple and clean.
“Checking on the baby, doctor?” a voice came from behind her. Maze turned to see Rook standing at the hatchway.
“Paternal instincts,” she teased.
Rook nodded as if he understood what she meant. He probably did. The earth pony walked up beside her and looked at the missile for himself. A silent minute was shared between them as they both looked at the reason why they were here in the first place.
“So that’s it,” Rook said matter-of-factly.
“That’s it,” Maze said with a hint of pride in her voice.
“How does it work?” he asked.
“Magic,” Maze said ironically. Rook smirked at the joke. Maze elaborated: “It was the simplest solution we could come up with- if you inject enough elemental iron into the core of a star, it detonates in minutes because the fusion reaction breaks down. So the only thing that casing is hiding is a chemical cannon and a cooking skillet.”
“So it’s fire-and-forget?”
“Essentially.”
“Elegant. And then all your problems will be over,” Rook said.
“Our problems, captain.”
“I’ve never had much use for magic, doctor,” he said casually. “It doesn’t much matter to me whether we have a shiny new alicorn ruler or not hiding in this star we’re barreling towards. This is your crusade, not mine.”
Maze gave him a sidelong look. “Why did you volunteer, then?”
Rook paused and looked at the floor as if he was unsure of how to answer. “We’ve all got our reasons, doctor.”
“That’s pretty cryptic,” Maze noted.
“I’m a cryptic kind of pony,” he responded. “I’m here of my own free will, trust me.”
“And yet you couldn’t bother to pack any good food,” Maze smirked.
“My certification says pilot, not chef.”
A minute more of stillness passed between the two ponies as they stared at the missile. Rook broke the silence once more.
“How much magic can you still do?”
Maze considered the question. She hadn’t tried to use her magic in a long while. Once Princess Celestia had fallen ill and the ability for unicorns on Equestria to use their magic had become an odd occurrence at best, she had stopped trying. Still, she wanted to satisfy her curiosity and answer Rook’s question at the same time. She looked around the hold, spotted the button that controlled the cargo hold viewport, closed her eyes, and reached inwards for whatever magic she had. It took several seconds for her to find any, but when she did, she directed it outwards, through her horn, at the button. She pushed the magic as hard as she could for as long as she could, but felt nothing happen. She opened her eyes, and her heart sunk. The viewport was still closed. Rook glanced at her with a neutral look.
“Apparently not very much,” she said dejectedly.
Rook shrugged and remained silent.
Both ponies went back to looking at the missile in front of them. Maze had designed it, and this expedition, to bring a ruler and magic back to Equestria- that was clear to everyone, but she had her own reasons, and she was sure those reasons were not solely hers, but the reasons of every unicorn. The dream that she had had before waking up in that cryo tube flashed back before her eyes, and she again felt that wonderful warmth in her body that left her every time the dream ended.
She didn’t want to have that dream ever again. She wanted it to be real.
“But we’re here to change that. I hope we can,” she said.
Forte awoke some hours later. It didn’t take a thorough examination from Maze to determine that she was still blind. This clearly distressed the science chief, but she was still eager to begin the repairs. The two mares gathered the requisite supplies from the cargo hold and crawled through the maintenance tunnels towards the junction the computer directed them towards. It wasn’t an overly tight fit, but the two had some trouble maneuvering through the passage and getting set up. Finally, though, With Maze’s guidance, they were ready to begin.
“Of all the systems to futz out on us…” Forte muttered when they had reached the junction. “It had to be the Celestia-damned decel-thrusters.”
Maze shrugged, putting down the saddlebag full of tools with a metallic clank. “Neighphy’s Law seems to work quite well outside Equestria.”
“Tell him he wasn’t invited. Find the panel labeled Charlie-Seven,” Forte recited from memory.
“Is that C-7?” Maze asked, unsure.
Forte ruffled her wings and Maze almost heard her sigh in her head. “Yes. C-7.”
Maze found the panel and lifted the metal cover from its holster, revealing the innards of the ship. Immediately the smell of burnt plastic and smoke overtook the two ponies. Forte coughed.
“That smells pleasant. What does it look like?” she asked.
Maze peered through the residual smoke at the mess of wires and tubes underneath. There were scorch marks and bits of wire and metal fragments scattered throughout the junction. Many of the wires and a good portion of the tubes were severed completely, their contents frozen to the metal walls. It wasn’t immediately clear to Maze what had broken- only that it looked very hard to fix.
“A mess,” Maze admitted. “There are fragments everywhere. Lots of this stuff needs to be replaced.”
“What do you mean?” Forte asked. “What does it look like exactly?”
“Like a bomb was set off in here,” Maze said without thinking. The impact of her statement took a moment to register with the two mares.
“Maze,” Forte started calmly, “can you see a single point of failure?”
The unicorn peered once again at the catastrophe before her. The scorch marks did indeed seem to come from a place underneath the wires and tubes, but not from anything in particular. Her heart sunk.
“No.”
“We need to tell the captain,” Forte said. “Right now.”
