My breath came raw and ragged and my lungs burned from the strain. Even with the artificial gravity on board, my muscles had atrophied. Months of working on small bits of weather equipment and spending my free time in the library or the game rooms had done nothing for my strength. We had all laughed when we watched others go to the gym, thinking it was the most superficial, arrogant thing a pony could do, especially in space aboard a science vessel. Now my flimsy legs begged for me to stop.
Whatever strength I had built back in Equestria was long gone. I had run laps, done wing pushups; I had done the lot. After getting on board, I had done nothing. The manual for ship-bound life had recommended exercise several times a week, but I had ignored it. In short, I had been stupid. Despite my feeble muscles, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t even slow down. I had to make it to an escape pod.
The further I ran down the corridors, the worse the lighting became. Some lights flickered while others were out altogether. The only stable light was the trail of red on the floor that I had been following for a long time. For how long, I didn’t know anymore. There were no clocks on this part of the ship with which to track my progress. I found myself in new corridors, new territory. There wasn’t much of anything. I was careening down unknown hallways in a part of the ship I had never been to. My hours of exploration after boarding was now useless, just like my previous exercise.
While I was weak, the running was clearing my head. The sleepiness was gone, though the face of Sugar Song, the mare from my dream, the most beautiful mare on weather team, and the mare I had been crushing on the entire voyage, lingered in my mind. The fear that had been clouding my thoughts since the outset was no longer a detriment. It was starting to focus my thoughts, shifting towards calculated resolve.
The doors here were no longer marked like all the ones I had seen in my prior exploration, and there were no washrooms. I didn’t stop to check, but I figured that these rooms were not living quarters. Without prompting, my mind came up with two options for what was behind the doors: storage, which was boring, or a top-secret project which the crew was not supposed to know about. Like the box I had seen earlier...
It had been during my previous exploration. I had wandered through the living decks on the ship, finding housing, the canteen, game rooms, libraries, and gyms. When I had discovered the labs for the scientists, I had taken a longer look at the weather teams’ lab, since it would be where I would spend most of my time. Though all of the weather gear had been present and labeled, there had also been a box that hadn’t been labeled. It had been smaller than the others, maybe a meter high, and had seemed out of place. Its colour and structure were different from the other boxes, but I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. I just assumed it had been put in our lab on accident. But now I was thinking something else.
The shadows thrown by the flimsy lighting became monsters, and I couldn’t help but think of the box being part of some sinister project. It was a stupid idea, but fear does weird things to a pony. While I thought of secrets, I found myself looking over my shoulder every few seconds to make sure I was alone. I didn’t know what I would do if I was not.
I rounded another corner, sliding into the opposite wall before coming to a dead stop when I saw what was ahead.
My voice was a raspy whisper, “…. Oh, shit.”
In front of me was a wall. No turns, no doors, nothing. The lights ran along the floor and stopped. They had brought me to a dead end.
“Oh, shit shit shit shit shit,” I pranced in place on the tips of my hooves, my muscles protesting. Then panic overwhelmed me and I stopped my prancing. My mind went thoughtless and blank, my muscles relaxed, and I stared slack-jawed at the end of the lights. They cast a light red glow on the bottom of the wall. I was muttering the same swear over and over under my breath. This could not be happening.
There was a sudden flash of insight, logic momentarily breaking through the blank panic. Turn around. Run. I turned around. I ran back the way I had come. Again, I ignored all the unlabeled doors, this time not even giving a second thought as to what lay behind them. Once I was moving again, logic returned to the back of my mind and panic resumed its place at the forefront. At least I had a plan now: find some different coloured lights.
In my initial rush, I hadn’t paid any attention to how far I had run by myself with only the red lights as guidance. It could have be ten kilometers for all I knew. Right then, though, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except to get to keep moving. With all this backtracking, I’d be lucky to find a single pod.
Though the plan remained, panic had returned in full force. It was a shapeless, blind terror shooting adrenaline into my exhausted muscles. I knew that I could keep going as long as I could find the other lights. As long as I made it in time, there was nothing to stop—
Then the panic found something to hold onto, something to give it form: Sugar Song. Fuck. Not content, the panic grasped on to even more: The weather team who were also following the red lights. Double fuck. I slowed to a quick walk, the lights still flickering, casting my mutated shadow in all directions. As I got closer to the living quarters of the ship, I could smell burning metal. Was it Sugar song’s room? No. That’s stupid. Logic stepped back in: If I can’t save myself, I can’t save anypony else. I had to keep moving.
Back at speed, I ran for what felt like hours through the strange hallways, again trusting the red lights to lead me somewhere even though they had lied to me before. It wasn’t until I was within the familiar living quarters that I found the blue lights. The overhead lights no longer flickered, but the smell of smoke was stronger than ever.
Finding the other set of lights gave me hope and the hope became my fuel. The adrenaline had worn off, but having found the blue lights, there was a chance, however small, of getting out.
Crowded when I had left, the corridors were now empty. To be in the main body of the ship without others was unnerving. Months of constant close-quarters living with hundreds of other ponies had redefined what I thought of as personal space, and the constant echo of voices in the halls had become comforting. Running through them now, silent and empty put me on edge. I realized that even the overhead speakers and alarm had fallen silent. The only sound was the rhythmic clop of my hooves on the textured steel floor.
The blue lights followed a path through more familiar territory. It ran along B-level, the second of the living levels, up two floors to level 1 and through a narrow gap between two debriefing rooms. I had never seen the gap between the rooms before, and I could have sworn that that space was too narrow for a passageway. It was barely a pony-width. I squeezed through, barely slowing.
This narrow path wasn’t lit as well as the main corridors. I trusted that there was nothing on the floor to trip me up and followed it around a few turns before it led up a staircase to level 2 where it exited between two labs. The lights on the floor went right and I followed, knowing that this was the way to the escape pods.
The initial chaos had caught me off guard, and I had followed the red lights into unknown territory even though, on some level, I knew full well where the escape pods were. Now, my head clearer, I remembered my previous exploration and the lights became superfluous. I hoped against hope that there was a pod left. An optimistic part of me hoped for two. If there were, I would be able to go check for the rest of the weather team in the red-lit hallways.
I rounded the last corner and saw the escape pod bay. There was one left and it was full. Even from a distance I could see that the doors were closing. Puffs of steam or smoke came from the floor and ceiling as they slid shut. I could see the wide eyes of the ponies aboard when they saw me; being in the last pod, they were supposed to be the last ones off.
Halfway to the pods, my legs finally gave out. My speed caused me to stumble, nearly falling. It took several stumbling steps to regain my balance, but with my speed gone, I could only limp toward the door. I kept telling my legs to sprint like they had never sprinted before, but they refused. Dropping my head to look at the floor, I grimaced. I wasn’t close enough. At this pace there was no way I would make it.
Bringing my head back up, I looked up into the bright red eyes of an earth stallion. His voice was barely above a whisper, “Oh, sweet Celestia.” I tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but no words came out, just a strained wheeze.
A moment later I reached the door and finally, mercifully, came to a halt. The gap in the door was far too small to try to squeeze through. I collapsed to the floor and closed my eyes for a second. When they opened, I was looking through a sliver of a gap at a pair of pink hooves. I followed them up to the face of a unicorn mare, her fur matted with tears from her bright purple eyes. Her mouth opened, “I’m so sor--" she was cut when the door shut. From the floor, I could hear the locks in the door finalizing. They were painfully slow.
A moment passed before I forced myself up on trembling legs and looked through the port-hole at the ponies inside. They shouldn’t have installed windows on the escape-pod door. Nopony would want to look back on those they were leaving behind. It was so obvious now, but in the plans, there weren’t any others left.
Yet here I was, looking into the circular room. Every one of the ten seats was taken. I met the eyes of the pink mare again, and I could see her mouthing I am so sorry. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks, dripping off the bottom of her jaw. The slow locking mechanisms continued.
I met the eyes of each of the occupants. Each set was wide and wet. These were good ponies, I thought. The pink mare wasn’t the only one to apologize. I gave them all a small smile when I heard the locking mechanisms stop. I met the purple eyes again, for a final time, saying out loud, “It’s not your fault,” and put my hoof to the window. The pink mare lifted her own, reaching to meet mine.
The rockets fired, and the escape pod was gone with the bright flash of fire in a vacuum. I was blinded, and slid back to the floor. So this was it; I was going to die here. The air wrenched from my chest, eliciting pain in my throat and a raspy, hoarse gasp. Tears began to flow down my own cheeks as panic and logic both left me, and all that was left was sorrow. “Fuck,” I managed to say. A few more breaths and I managed to say it again. Then again. I took a deep breath, and let it out a feral scream that ripped at my vocal chords. I screamed as loud and as long as I could before coming to a violent, coughing end.
The scream echoed through the corridors until it was too far away to hear. I continued to cough, each more violent than the last until it felt like I was retching up my lungs. I must have coughed for a solid minute before stopping, a coppery taste in my mouth. The onboard rules of cleanliness meant nothing now, so I spit on the floor. A thick red paste. Blood.
I immediately had another coughing fit followed by another spit onto the floor, this time a lighter red. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. It was the same silver as all the rest of the surfaces in the ship. I closed my eyes, tears stinging as they slipped through my eyelids. My painful breathing became lighter as I lied motionless. My chest rose and fell in rhythm; the cold of the steel floor giving me chills through my fur. I felt like giving up.
No.
I opened my eyes, my breath catching in my throat.
No. I was not going to die in this place.
My subconscious was right: I was not going to die in this place. I rolled over to get to my hooves. They were shakier than ever. Forcing myself to stand, I was surprised that they held me at all. I was tired, my legs felt like a combination of jell-o and cement. My throat burned with every breath, regardless of its depth, and I coughed more blood onto the floor. I had already given all I had; anything more would put me far into the red. But I wasn’t going to die here. Not as a quitter at least. Swearing under my breath, I began to move again.
It was slow movement, and at first I didn’t know where I was moving to. It was just movement for the sake of itself; movement to remind me that I was alive and that I was going to continue to be alive until life was wrenched from my beaten, bloody, cold, dead hooves. There were no useful thoughts as I moved, just observations until I came to an obstacle. Stairs. I was reminded of the foal’s tale of King Sombra and his stairs. Sombra would be proud, I thought.
A wry smile crossed my muzzle and I let out a humourless laugh. It hurt. “Ah, Celestia dammit,” I wheezed. In my state, I would never make it up a single stair, much less a set. If I were a unicorn, maybe I could levitate myself up. If the halls were wider, I could fly myself up them, but as it stood, I was stuck. Then I had an idea.
Bracing my wings against the walls of the narrow corridors, I hoisted my body into the air. My wings did all of the work, lifting me while my legs flailed for the next stair. Only when they found purchase did I release the tension on the walls and move to do it again. It was slow work. My inactivity on board extended to my wings, and from this effort, they began to tire like the rest of me.
Arriving at the top of the stairs, I discovered there was a door. I should have seen it from the bottom, but I hadn’t been paying attention. I prayed to Celestia that it be unlocked, and my prayers were heard; the door swung open without a sound and I stepped into the empty control room.
Captain Ferrochrome, our shiny-hooved, mustachioed unicorn of a captain, should have been there. If not him, at least somepony should have been there, but it was completely empty. Surely they hadn’t abandoned ship, right? But then, if that pod earlier had been the last one, they wouldn’t have known there was still somepony else aboard. Then again, any good captain would be the last to leave his distressed ship, and most would gladly go down with it. So if that pod with the pink mare had been the last, where was the captain?
Somehow these thoughts eclipsed what should have been more immediate: Fire. Almost every piece of equipment was on fire, and those that weren’t were sparking. Many of the tables were broken around the legs and had either fallen over or were on the verge of doing so. The large wooden captain’s wheel, the centerpiece of the control room, was detached from its stand and was lying, twisted and broken, several meters away. It looked to be made out of solid oak and must have weighed over a fifty kilos.
The painting of Celestia and Luna that had once adorned the back wall of the room was now face-down on the floor. I felt the urge to lift it up, to retain the honor of our matriarchs, but I knew that I could barely even keep myself upright.
The larger front window that functioned as one wall of the command room had a web of cracks spreading outwards from an initial point near the center. Cracking these windows would have required an enormous force; they were designed to keep out all the force of the rest of the universe. Come to think of it, the force needed to move the captain’s wheel was impressive enough. Surely no pony could do that kind of damage. At least not alone.
Looking around the destroyed room, I could not figure out why I had let my body lead me here. There was nothing around that could help. Bits of broken metal and plastic littered the floor and the heat from the small fires made the room feel like an overzealous sauna. Smoke filled the upper half of the room, making it hard to breath. My already raw lungs objected, causing me to cough some more.
Maybe I had gone in search of the captain or somepony in charge, I honestly didn’t know, but there I was, exhausted, on the verge of collapse, probably about to die. What had my subconscious wanted, a pleasant conversation?
I let out a sad laugh. It echoed differently in this room than the rest of the ship. The echo reached my ears, sounding tinny and small. This only made me laugh harder, and I fell hard to the floor, my laugh getting knocked out of me in a wheeze. The sad laughter faded and all I felt was sad. The fires crackled. At least here, on the floor, the air was still mostly clear.
My previous motivation was gone; I was going to die here. For real this time. At least it was someplace other than outside the escape pods. I had somewhat come through on my promise. Now, though, I really was going to give up. My eyelids were heavy, and they began to drift shut. They were about to close for what would have been the last time when I noticed something on the far end of the room that I hadn’t seen through the smoke. Lying on the floor probably 10 meters away, it looked to me like an escape pod interface, except without a door for a pod itself. Still, I had to go check it out, even though my body didn’t want to move ever again. I tried to stand, but my legs would no longer respond at all. My attempts at standing resulted in a weak spasm of movement, pushing bits of twisted metal into my flesh. I was not going to die here, on this part of the floor, but I would be okay with dying over there.
I began pulling myself across the floor using my wings. It was hard, slow work as my feathers provided less friction against the floor than my hooves. I moved in the straightest line possible, over more twisted, broken metal. The sharp pains gave me small bursts of adrenaline, enough to keep my wings pulling. When I dragged myself in front of the window, I could hear the hiss of air leaking out of the room. Soon, if the designers had had any kind of foresight, some sort of fail-safe would isolate the control deck from the rest of the ship.
I could feel the blood leaking out of the many small wounds on my torso and hindquarters when I reached the opposite side of the room and clawed up to the interface. I got as upright as I could, folding my hind legs underneath me before resting my weight on them for support. They twisted in an unnatural way, but the pain was dull and meaningless; I was tall enough now to look at the interface.
There was a pod. It was here. I could use it. “No way,” I breathed, causing myself to cough up more blood. The pod in the control room, unlike the others, didn’t have a window to see the occupants. In fact, there was no way to see it from outside at all. The door was integrated into the wall. The captain and the other higher-ups hadn’t used it, so here it was, in all its executively-furnished glory. But was I really going to take the captain’s escape pod? The captain, who was so much more important than I? I chuckled painfully. Celestia damn right I was.
The commands for this interface were different than the others. It took a bit of guesswork, but after prodding my hoof at the screen for a while, the door began to hiss open and they were the slowest automated doors in history. I wanted nothing more than to get inside that pod and close them again, and as soon as the gap was wide enough for me to squeeze my body through, I made good on the first part. Pulling myself onto the seat in front of the interface inside the escape pod, I looked through the commands until I found the one for closing the doors and pressed it harder than I thought I could. The door continued to open.
I was too tired to swear, and too tired to even be surprised; I just looked dumbly at the interface and poked the command again and again while the door continued to open behind me. Even though it wasn’t working, I sat and poked at the door close command every two or three seconds for the entire duration of the doors opening. Only when they were fully opened did they begin to close. Laughing hurt, but I did it anyway; what a stupid design. On the plus side, the door close command did indeed work. The door began sliding shut, and I finally allowed myself the hope that had been threatening to overwhelm me since I saw the exterior interface.
I looked through the slowly narrowing gap, not feeling the sadness the others had when they saw me, but instead an immense, all-enveloping joy: I wasn’t going to die here. For the first time since the alarm, the laughter came easily, though still painful, and I allowed it. No longer under stress, and with the door closing at a glacial pace, I peered out of the pod and examined the room more closely.
A lot of the equipment, including the wheel, looked like deliberate damage. Only the controls were damaged. The surrounding floor and walls, though covered in pieces of broken equipment, were otherwise unharmed. The only damage out of place was the crack in the window that was hissing louder as the vacuum of space pulled on it. There was also a vent ripped from the wall on the far side where I came in.
Below the vent was some kind of liquid. It looked black, or maybe brown, and went from just below the vent to just below one of the flaming control tables. There were shards of porcelain or something, the remains of a mug, lying near it. Somepony must have spilled it in the rush to escape. Still, this did not explain the other damage in the room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement.
My attention focused on the corner of the room that was formed by the window, where I saw a small, fleshy looking thing. It looked like a frog of some kind. Instead of hopping or walking on all fours like a normal frog, though, it seemed to flip over itself to move. This did not surprise me; nothing surprised me. What I did find interesting, though, was that it looked like whatever it was, it was coming towards me. Not roughly towards me, but directly, as if the escape pod was its goal as well. Though I was usually in favour of kindness to all animals, I made no effort to stop the doors from closing.
Whatever the thing was, it was slow. Before I could be sure of its intentions and before it was close enough for me to get a good look, the door shut and the locking mechanisms began their slow movement into position.
I slid off the seat and onto the floor, finally allowing myself to fully relax. My legs ached worse than they ever had before and my lungs threatened to rip my throat out with every breath, but I was alive. I had been misled, had abandoned all hope, and had thought that I had heard the last pony voices I ever would, but I hadn’t.
The chances of getting to this pod, much less of it still being here, must have been almost zero. I don’t know how long it took me to move around after I watched the pink mare apologize, but it had to have been over 15 minutes. Before that I had been running around for who knows how long, probably around 20 minutes to half an hour. In that span of time, the captain should have been able to get out. Hell, I should have been able to get out, and I would have if it hadn’t been for the stupid red lights.
My heart, which had been racing since I stepped out of my room less than an hour earlier, began to slow. My eyes drifted shut, and I could feel a smile playing on the corners of my mouth. The mechanical rhythm of the locks were the only sound other than my ragged breathing and slowing heartbeat as I lay on the floor, again feeling the cold of the steel.
There was no chill, merely assurance that I was in an escape pod and was about to get out with my life only just intact. I let out a light laugh, little more than a sigh, which caused only minimum harshness on my throat. My consciousness started to slip, and I made no attempt to retain it. If I had made it this far, I could allow myself this luxury. I didn’t even feel the escape pod launch.
What few possessions I was allowed on board amounted to a small toiletry kit with toothpaste and a toothbrush, a signed picture from the Wonderbolts, and an old second-place trophy from the Best Young Flier competition. I could have been disappointed with this showing, but the winner had performed only the second recorded sonic Rainboom It was like losing a tree look-a-like contest to a tree.
Once I was settled in my room, which was a small square about two meters a side with a bed taking up one half, I took a quick tour around the immediate area in the ship. I met up with my friend from the transport shuttle, Star Charmer, a pretty, mint-green unicorn with a vibrant pink mane that fell haphazardly over her dark green eyes, and we explored together. Star Charmer was the most extroverted pony I had yet encountered, and she had so many questions. A fair few of them had to do with my colour scheme, which, despite her doubts, was natural; deep black with a brilliant white mane and tail that were blinding in sunlight. If that weren't enough, my eyes were a radioactive pink. I had never been an inconspicuous pony.
As we wandered, I learned that she was part of the physics department, another one of the groups that was stationed in the science wing of the ship. Her cutie mark, which I hadn’t seen earlier, was that of a collection of stars. She assured me that it was a real, though obscure, constellation that was only visible from the land of Equestria and not in other territories. I took her word for it. She told me that, in school, she had become fascinated with astronomy, and then, after getting her cutie mark, decided on physics. Because of her connection with stars, she kept mostly to astrophysics, which was why she was on board with us. We talked about her history while we walked until she asked me the inevitable: What was the deal with my cutie mark?
It was a pegasus silhouette from the head to just behind the wings, where it dissolved into curved lines. Being the same colour as my mane, it stood out. I always thought of it as a pegasus being pulled apart by the speed of her travel.
“That’s a bit macabre, isn’t it?” she asked after my explanation.
“Maybe a little bit. But the curvature behind the pegasus follows the Fibonacci spiral, so that’s interesting,” I replied. It was true, too. I had always liked math, and that liking had led me to chaos and weather, which was how I got on the science part of the vessel. Star Charmer thought about my comment for a while, before asking what the allure of space was for a Pegasus.
“Well, the main draw for me was zero-gravity,” I told her, “but they seem to have a gravity spell or something going on. Other than that, I wanted to go try to explore new places and go further than any other pegasus. Plus, any team of explorers needs a weather crew, right? Somepony’s got to see if the weather is habitable.”
“I suppose,” she said, “but wouldn’t anypony be able to figure that out once they landed?”
“Don’t rain on my parade,” I said, feigning sadness.
Her laugh was charming, light and musical. “Fine, fine! I’m sure you do other important stuff too!”
“We do! It’s my job to see if the weather can be controlled like it is in Equestria, you know?”
“Ah, yes. That actually is important.” She gave me a weird, cute look, making me smile, before continuing, “And a pegasus would be the best to do that, wouldn’t they? Still, I didn’t see any pegasi when I was in training for this.” She gestured to the ship around us.
“Ah, yeah, probably not. We have our own space-training programme in Cloudsdale.”
“You’re from Cloudsdale? Neat! I’ve always wanted to go there, but I can’t walk on clouds,” she paused, a small frown on her face, before continuing in a happier tone, “I trained in Manehatten, but I’m originally from Ponyville. Have you ever been to Ponyville?”
“I’ve helped with winter wrap-up a couple times, yeah.”
Throughout this conversation, we had wandered a good portion of the science wing: three lower levels for barracks, food, and leisure, a level above them for research and labs, a floor above that with debriefing rooms of some sort, and the top floor was the control deck, where all the high-ranking officers were stationed. The control room had five doors to it, each one of them leading to one of the five wings of the ship: Science, Magic, Colonization, Maintenance, and Communications.
I woke up shivering. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. Opening my eyes and taking a look around, I remembered: the escape pod. The cold was from the floor.
A heavy ache had set into my legs, and my body was stiff from lying so long in the same position. My wing muscles were also sore, though not as sore as my legs, and I could feel the pattern of the steel imprinted on my face. Groaning, I forced myself to a sitting position. It caused me to cough a bit, but there was no blood. An improvement, but the embers from the previous fire still glowed in my chest. My eyelids were heavy and my head was muddled; I felt like I was coming down off of something. Probably the adrenaline.
Pulling myself onto one of the seats, I took stock of my situation, starting with my own body: I was extremely sore throughout. My wing muscles, which had never been sore before, were sore. Muscles that I didn’t even know I had were sore.
My back legs were in worse shape than everything else since I had used them as a stool of sorts when activating the escape pod. They still worked, though, and there was no serious damage.
The wounds I had sustained while dragging myself across the floor were many, but most were minor. There were a hoofful that went deeper than a mere flesh wound, and my coat was matted with blood around them. Taking a closer look, I could see that they also weren’t serious enough to warrant medical attention. A couple weeks and they would be gone, leaving at most a small scar.
Next, I examined my location: I was onboard the captains’ escape pod. From what I had seen of the pods for the rest of the population, this was quite an improvement. All of the seats were covered in soft, synthetic leather where the others had been raw steel. Like the command deck where the pod had been from, the light was softer and the walls less metallic than the regular pods.
Aside from that and the lack of a door window, the rest of the pod was the same as the others. There were ten seats in here, just as there were in the other pods, and they were oriented in a circle. The seats were designed to be sat in facing towards the center or away from it, depending on what you were doing. If you were facing away, you would be at a terminal with an assortment of buttons. This terminal ran uninterrupted around the pod, the only gap being for the door. In the front of the pod, above the buttons and monitors, was a window about a meter high and a meter wide that followed the curvature of the pod. Through it, I could see the black abyss of space. Upon closer inspection, the window turned out to be a monitor connected to an external camera. A real window would have been a structural weakness.
The cabin was lit by a light fixture in the ceiling that was made of four of the same lights used in the hallways back on the ship. The buttons and screens produced their own lights as well. I could not immediately find a way to turn any of them off, so I instead focused on some of the readings that the monitor below the ‘window’ was showing.
A quick look around the interface told me more than I thought it would. Life support was stable and, with the oxygen recycling systems, there was enough air to sustain 10 adult ponies for a three-week stay on board. The food and water would last equally long. Since I was the only one in this pod and would only be using one tenth of the resources, I figured I would be able to survive for ten times as long: 30 weeks. A daunting task.
I also found that the destination for the pod was not, as I had assumed, Equestria, but instead 51 Pegasi b, the planet our ship had originally been going to anyway. Considering the length of time on board the big ship had been close to seven months when the alarm went off, I wouldn’t need the 30 weeks of provisions. By the pod’s calculations, I would be arriving at 51 Pegasi b in just over four weeks.
Those seven months of travel had been aboard the vessel EAD Celestia 1. The EAD stood for ‘Equestrian Aeronautics Department,’ and was often removed from the front of the ship’s name in conversation.
Celestia 1 was the largest space-faring vessel that had ever been built. Its purpose had been to shuttle several thousand ponies across vast interstellar distances in relative comfort and speed. The propulsion system was an experimental, theoretically safe mechanism that bent space around the ship, allowing for shorter-than-straight-line travel. It had a technical name, but we all knew it as the Warp Drive.
Life on board had been easy, though I had not been very subtle. Being the only pegasus on Celestia 1 had been conspicuous enough, but it had become even more so when I had been late to the first dinner. Being late drew attention to me, and being the only pegasus, everypony was already aware of who I was. Trying to blend in at all failed anyway because of my unusual colour scheme. All of this combined to make me a very obvious presence.
The reason behind my being the only representative of my species was because of pegasi’s natural predisposition to flight, so we were usually uninterested in space. I was weird, though; I liked flying high. Being higher than all the other pegasi and seeing our land from ever higher vantage points excited me. Ever since I was a foal, I had found joy in flying as high as I could. Most pegasi outgrow this game at a young age, but I never did. As I became older and stronger, I was able to fly higher and higher, even to where I see the curvature of the planet. Even from only 15 or 20 kilometers up, I knew that we lived on a small planet and there was much to be explored beyond it. The other pegasi didn’t agree.
So it was that when the earth ponies and unicorns began attempts at flight, the pegasi were uninterested. They remained uninterested for a long time, largely ignoring the efforts of our ground-based brothers and sisters, and sometimes actively opposing their flight on a political basis. This did nothing to deter the EAD, which began flying higher and higher until one day they could out-fly even me, with my years of experience with extreme heights. Not long after, they made it beyond our atmosphere, and only then did the pegasi decide to join them.
When I signed up for the space academy, I was the only one from Cloudsdale. Even though pegasi were now assisting, it was only a novelty. There was still a general dislike of ground ponies being able to outdo pegasi on their own turf. I thought that was a stupid stance to take and trained as hard as I could so I could get onto Celestia 1 to see what there was to be seen.
Celestia 1 was a colonization and science vessel, designed to sit in orbit around a planet and send crews to the surface from a safe distance. The calculations all said that 51 Pegasi b fell in the habitable zone of a star, but you never know until you check it out, right?
And so it was that I had lived in space, aboard Celestia 1, for about seven months. Over that time, I had met a number of ponies. One of which, Sugar Song, I fell in love with. She was a shy white earth pony with blue and light blue mane and tail. Her colour was not extraordinary, but her eyes were. They were gold. Not just a bright, reflective yellow, but actually gold, like ingots had been melted to rings and set into her eyes.
She was on the weather team, and, including me, it was an 11-pony crew, the smallest crew on board. Since we were all socially inept, we kept largely to ourselves; working, eating, and relaxing as a team. After a while, we became like a big awkward dysfunctional family. In fact, the only other ponies I met outside of the weather crew were the captain, Captain Ferrochrome, who had hooves reminiscent of chrome, and Star Charmer.
I didn’t spend more than five minutes with the captain, but I did spend time with Star Charmer and the 11 ponies from the weather team. I came to love them all over seven months.
I stopped reminiscing and went back to checking status updates from the pod computer and found some information on Celestia 1 at the time of my departure: Four of the five gravity spells, one in each wing of the ship, were still functional. The non-functional spell was in the colonization wing. The life support systems everywhere had been damaged, and they were, at the time, functioning at about 1/3 capacity. Stats also showed that 92% of the total population had been evacuated, 8% having been killed in the initial accident before the alarm was sent out.
The damage reports from all five of the wings on the ship showed that the most of it had been in colonization. That must have been where the incident had originated. As I began to get a feel for the controls and buttons, I tried to find the exact cause of the alarm, but there was no information on it.
The last bit of info I got was that, at the time of the accident, Celestia 1 had been in its deceleration phase, so it had changed from using the warp drive to normal rocket thrusters. This had allowed for easier departure of the escape pods. With ejection at speeds below relativistic there was little to no relative time travel. A relieved sigh escaped me as I sat back on one of the seats, almost falling out because of the lack of a seat-back. I looked around; I needed to find out what I would do with my time for the next four weeks.
First, I stretched. I knew that my muscles would be sore for four or five days after the amount of running I had done, and stretching might shorten the recovery time. My legs were tighter than I could ever remember them being, so I couldn’t stretch very far. I then poked around some of the cabinets and compartments to see what I had as entertainment. I found ten novels and dehydrated food. There were ten space suits as well with official-looking emblems on them that were all designed for unicorns. There was no instruction manual of any kind for the escape pod’s interface, which was just as well; it seemed to have a good idea of what it was doing.
After messing around for a bit, I noticed something that I should have noticed right away: there was gravity. There must have been a gravity spell similar to the ones on Celestia 1 installed. Being the captain’s pod and all, that was easy to believe. I wondered if the other pods had gravity. If not, the other passengers would have been in for a surprise after they got shot out into space.
Then it hit me: the last pod. My legs, which had been supporting me thus far, gave out, and I fell back to the cold floor. The weather team... I thought. I had been lucky to get to a pod at all, and had been too impatient to wait. The entire weather team had been assigned to the red emergency lights, so I could only assume that the others had been led, as I had, to the dead end. But I hadn’t seen them while I had been running around. Had they been behind me? Ahead of me? I could only speculate. If they had been ahead of me, why didn’t I see them when I was initially following the lights? Did they duck into one of those side-rooms that I had ignored? Would the whole weather crew fit in one? And what if they had been behind? I hadn’t seen them when I was running back either, so if they were, they must have been far behind.
Even with all of my running, I had been too late to get to the last regular pod of the science wing. That meant that the rest of the weather team had almost certainly missed the pods as well. Then again, it had taken me at least 15 minutes to get from the normal escape pod area, up one flight of stairs, and to this pod, so surely they would have been able to catch up to me.
Right?
But what if they had been given different colours? What if I had been lied to from the beginning and somepony somewhere was trying to get rid of me in particular? I was the only pegasus, after all, very conspicuous. But no, that didn’t make any sense. There was a need for pegasi on 51 Pegasi b. Killing me and only me would have been irresponsible. Irresponsible and, if the lights were installed for only one pony, expensive.
So the weather team had been either long before me or long after me. The former seemed unlikely because I had gotten out of my room quick. The latter was equally unlikely because of the time it took me to wander the ship. It became even more unlikely, remembering how my scream had echoed through the halls. Surely they would have heard it if they had been around.
I tried to relax and convince myself that the rest of the weather crew had been ahead of me and had escaped, but I couldn’t; I was still troubled by the way my lights had dead-ended, so the others must have reached the same place as I had. Where were they now? Was there a way to check?
There must be a radio around here somewhere, I thought. No ship would be complete without a way to communicate. I had to find one and get in touch with some other survivors.
First, I looked within the interface. I still wasn’t an expert with the buttons and switches, but I pressed and pulled them all. For each there was some sort of signal from the monitor, but there was no radio. The closest thing I could find was the distress signal from Celestia 1: Emergency. Escape Pods Released. Request Immediate Recovery. The signal also broadcasted the locations of all the escape pods, but no way to contact them.
So the main ship had sent a distress call, and there were tracking devices on all the escape pods so survivors could be found. We were a long ways from home though, at least a hundred light years, so there was no telling how long it would take for the message to get to Equestria. If the engineers had been clever, there would be some kind of advanced transmitter that worked similarly to the warp drive, allowing for the message to travel faster than light via a loophole in physics.
I gave up on the electronics and went to searching the cupboards with vigor. Throwing the books and the food to the floor and searching deeper inside, I found a piece of paper with instructions on how to play music in the pod, as well as a small, ground-based radio antenna and accompanying electronics. The hopes that this initially harbored were dashed when I found that this radio could only be used planet-side. Why that was the case, I wasn’t sure, but I condemned it as a stupid idea and bucked the thing across the pod. There was no way to talk to the other escape pods.
I was back on the floor, leaning against the seats, when the tears began. At first, they were few as I thought only of my own loneliness for the next four weeks. I had some music though, I thought, so I should be alright…
But then I thought of the weather team again, which brought on real tears. Tears of loss. I had only known them for seven months, but I had come to like my weather family, maybe even love a few of them, and I had abandoned them all. In my weakened mental state, the thought that they were still on board became the truth, and I was devastated.
The tears came and I could feel them rolling down my face. My body heaved with the sobs, my breath ragged across my already ravaged vocal chords. I doubled over on the floor, my forehead touching the cool steel, and thought about how I would never see Sugar Song again. I would never see anypony ever again. My violent heaves crippled me. I lay, clutching at my stomach, my body convulsing on the floor with wretched, painful sobs while a shallow pool of tears formed below my head. I began dry-heaving with every exhale, my throat threatening to rip open. I thought only of how I could have saved them; I could have tried, but I hadn't.
I laid in a fetal position on the floor until I exhausted my tears. Even with my dry eyes, my body continued to wrench violently. After a long while, I stopped heaving; I couldn’t cry anymore. I remained on the floor, though, my eyes closed, and tried not to think of the friends I had abandoned. I found it impossible. Eventually, I fell asleep.
I spent the following four weeks in a similar state. My emotions bounced between the joy of saving myself to the guilt of leaving ponies behind. Most nights, I cried myself to sleep while listening to the default music in the pod. With nopony to talk to, my emotions festered inside me. I tried talking out loud to myself, but it did nothing but make me sadder. Hearing my own voice in the stillness of the escape pod was eerie as well and I stopped after trying it twice.
The music did little to help. The stereo onboard was of mediocre quality, with only about a thousand songs to choose from. None of them were anything that interested me, and must have been the top one thousand at one point. Not only were they not my taste, but about half of them were sad songs, which did nothing for my emotional state.
My sadness was occasionally broken by bouts of semi-productivity. I stretched whenever I wasn’t eating sleeping or reading, and the soreness in my legs was gone after the first week. The novels I had cast aside turned out to all be Daring Do books. Not usually a fan, I only read them due to loneliness and boredom. I had plenty of time, and ended up reading them all more than once. They turned out to be pretty good.
I also made an effort to understand all the buttons and dials that were present in the pod. I had pushed them all before, but I did it a second time, this time paying attention to the results. Fortunately, none of them linked to self-destruct; most of them being for navigating the screen’s interface or adjusting survival systems, and some told me information about the pod and the ship that it had ejected from. Among the buttons there were controls for the overhead lights and a button for dispensing water, as well as a button that opened a hatch I hadn’t seen that led to a small toilet and sink.
The life-support systems on board told me that the water was recycled. Though I initially found it repulsive that I was, in effect, drinking my own urine, I got over it in about two days and began drinking the recycled water without a thought. The water, combined with the dried food, allowed me to eat four to five meals a day. I ate out of boredom and sadness. No matter what I did to distract myself, the thought of the weather team being left on the ship was a constant presence.
The routine of eating, stretching, reading, and sleeping became monotonous immediately. I longed for something else to do, but there was nothing. I tried to entertain myself with what was on board, and, being by myself, I exhausted the possibilities in less than three days. After a while, I lost track of time. I stopped looking at the onboard trip computer and spent more and more time staring at the screen that functioned as the window.
Unlike the view from Celestia 1 at the beginning of the voyage, which had filled me with a sense of awe and made me feel small and insignifigant when there was a much larger universe to worry about, the view from the escape pod was less inspiring. Instead of being able to look back on my home and think about my size in the grand scheme of things, I just watched distant bits of light sit stationary against the black velvet of space. The view rarely changed. Sometimes there would be a new star, or one that I had seen earlier would wink out, but it was otherwise constant.
I was lonely, bored, and sad aboard the escape pod. The weeks felt like years. With each passing day I spent more time eating and gazing into space. I even began to lose sleep in favor of looking into the abyss.
It was during one of these periods that I noticed that one of the bits of light started getting bigger. Setting aside my food, which I had been nibbling at for hours, I straightened, my attention engaged for the first time since searching for the radio, and examined the screen closer. The point of light was definitely growing.
Something new was happening. The novelty gave me energy, and I began doing things; things that were not on my regular daily schedule. I checked the trip counter for the first time in a while and found that I was within a day of 51 Pegasi b. The last of the boredom and sadness were sucked out of me as I realized that the growing point of light out my window was the star that at the center of the system. In less than 24 hours I would be on the ground of a planet, able to set up my ground-based radio and call for help.
For 18 hours I sat looking at the screen-window and watching the speck of light grow. After a while I could make out dark spots moving on its surface; the computer informed me that they were planets passing in front of the star. One of them was where I would be landing soon, but I couldn’t tell which one it was. The computer on the escape pod would guide me.
I soon figured out which planet I was to land on. It was the only one that was always in front of the star. It looked to me to be about the size of home, but, since I didn’t really have any points of reference, I couldn't be sure. The pod was approaching from the night-side of the planet, so I couldn’t tell what kind of terrain I would be landing on. My newfound excitement made me giddy as the pod approached the planet. I lost track of time.
I was startled when a siren chirped. Memories of the alarm flashed through my mind before I remembered where I was and what I was doing. A look at the interface told me that I had just entered final approach to 51 Pegasi b. Like navigation, landing was an automated task, so I could continue to stare with wonder at the approaching planet.
Excited tension in my body grew as the planet on the screen did. Every few minutes, an alarm would sound, signaling a distance or time from impact. I would glance at the screen before returning to stare out the window.
The planet was soon taking up my entire field of view, but the only landmarks I could make out were the lines that defined where continents ended and oceans began. The pod began to shudder. It was barely noticeable at first, growing, like my tension, with the proximity of the planet. I guessed that this meant entry into the outer atmosphere. Less than a second later, the screen informed me that my assumption was correct. I forced my eyes away from the window-screen and watched the air-pressure gauge.
During my stay on the pod, I had read into the parachute deployment mechanism, and now I was watching it in action: 100. 200. 300. The numbers began climbing towards 2000, the number at which the parachutes would deploy. Any earlier and they would burn up, it had said. The numbers increased by tens, but the computer gave me no units of measure. I watched as the gauge climbed past 1000 air-pressure units. The turbulence increased. The lack of seatbelts forced me to clamp myself to the seat with my hooves.
There was a violent increase in turbulence. It was a shock, not incremental like it had been since it had started, and a second later it was gone.
I stared for a moment. “Oh no,” I whimpered. I knew what had happened before the screen lit up with a warning. I closed my eyes, praying my initial guess was wrong. I had to be wrong. I looked at the screen.
Parachute Failure, it read, Deploying Secondary Parachute. My heart leapt at that, only to be let down when I saw that the numbers were at 1650, still too low for successful parachute deployment.
There was another sudden shudder of the cabin as the secondary parachute deployed, burned up, and was gone. The slow increase in turbulence continued alongside the numbers. I rested my forehead on the panel right before another alarm went off, alerting me to the failure of the second parachute.
I didn’t know if the systems had read the numbers wrong or if the wiring had been damaged, but it didn’t matter. Instead of dying on Celestia 1, I was going to die on some planet hundreds of light-years from home in a giant fireball. There was no secret escape pod this time. My forelegs became weak, and, no longer able to hold myself to the seat, the turbulence shook me to the floor where I laid down again, like I had so often for a month, but instead of sleep, this time it was to wait. My vision vibrated. The interior of the pod became a violent, off-white blur. All my joy was gone and I could only think of those I had left behind. I couldn’t even try to go back. Like them, I was to die a long ways from home, alone and scared.
The tears that fell down my cheeks were familiar; I had shed so many for so long that I barely felt them. I sobbed silently, my breast heaving with each breath. I thought again of the weather team. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Author's Note
It's been a long time coming. University has started up again, so progress is slow.
