Chapter 1: The Vastness of Space
Visiting damaged ships always made Steelwing feel depressed. It brought home in an intimate and immediate fashion how dangerous space travel really was. This wasn’t helped by the fact that all ships looked so damn similar; the monochrome corridor she was currently trotting down could have easily been on her own ship... well, apart from the lack of all environmental magic, light and the gaping holes in the floor and ceiling that is.
The ship was in bad shape: wires and little bits of debris were scattered everywhere, the entire structure was peppered with holes of varying sizes, the atmosphere had vented, light’s were dead and only emergency power was online. All told, it was shocking anypony had survived whatever had caused it.
Steelwing absentmindedly glided over the latest hole to appear in her path, ignoring the baleful orange glow coming up from the bottom of it. In her mind she wasn’t on the beaten-up old wreck she was currently on, she was elsewhere. Other times, other places, different ships, but the same sense of sadness and loss. Some old friends had been claimed by space in accidents such as this, and it was difficult not to see their faces in the shadows.
Steelwing absentmindedly glided over the latest hole in her path, ignoring the baleful orange glow coming up from the bottom of it. In her mind she wasn’t on the Everfree, she was elsewhere. Other times, other places, different ships, but the same sense of sadness and loss. Some old friends had been claimed by space in accidents such as this, and it was difficult not to see their faces in the shadows.
She stared, unseeing, at the buckled and dented floor further down the corridor. The ghostly outline of a unicorn was staring silently back at her. Giving a flick of his mane he snorted and shook his head, then vanished. The sound of laughter echoed in her ears, the sound of happier times.
A single tear started to roll down her cheek but she shook it away, leaving the single pearl of moisture rolling in her wake. She opened her eyes again, it was not the time for these sorts of memories, the situation was precarious enough as it was without her being distracted.
By this time she had flown quite a way down the corridor, the booster module attached to her back flared with a blue light as she landed gracefully back on the floor. Furling her wings, she started scanning the right wall for a door into the room that had been marked as unclassified on their maps. Spotting the opening elicited a relieved sigh from her, backtracking would have been a pain in the flank.
Trotting over, she fired a string of commands at her sensor module, telling it to do a full scan of the room up ahead. The little black block–which was currently one link in a chain around her neck–glowed a slight green as it booted up and processed the commands. Reaching the door Steelwing just sat on her flank on the floor waiting, within a few seconds a blue beam shot straight out of the module and curved into the doorway, a soft glow suffusing the room and spilling out into the corridor.
She only saw this out of the corner of her eye as she was busy staring at her hooves, with occasional twitches as her eyes tried to seek out the light and then were forced to return to their original position. The last time her curiosity had got the better of her and she had peeked inside a room she had regretted it. In fact, after that little incident she had gagged her curiosity, shoved it in a sack and threw it down a nearby hole before placing a large boulder on top.
To keep herself distracted she started trying to configure her little medical module to recognize boredom as a serious illness, so next time she was in a mind-numbingly dull meeting she could excuse herself for purely medical reasons and have the documents to prove it. Actually using it in a real meeting would be inexcusable, but a small smile crept onto her face at the reactions it would get if she did.
The giggling fit brought on by these mental images was interrupted as a little ping sounded in her ear signalling the sensor module had finished. A few seconds later the blue line disappeared and the corridor returned to its previous shadowy state. This went mostly ignored though because Steelwing’s vision was obscured by a scrolling list of all the items the scan had identified. After a few seconds it was obvious that the room was just recreational and had nothing of any interest or value; the only things listed were chairs, tables, a singular potted plant and a huge range of entertainment equipment.
Grumbling to herself, she archived the list and sent it to her mapping module for integration. All rooms that had the similar profiles as the one she had just scanned would now be labelled correctly as recreation, hopefully avoiding more wasted time.
She set off again, her heart feeling a little lighter. The oppressive atmosphere of this place had started to wear her down. Considering what had happened it was a miracle there was actually anything left of the ship at all, let alone survivors to send a distress beacon.
They had picked up the signal a few systems over and all it had said was that the Everfree had suffered from warp core troubles. Upon their arrival that had proven to be one of biggest understatements in recent memory. The wedge-shaped ship they had found was a state, peppered with holes of all sizes, next to no magical auras being generated, no atmosphere and only the bridge showing any signs of life. After a bit of hacking by Sandy they had managed to extract enough information from the disparate systems to get a general idea of what had happened.
The core had somehow become warped, distorted, and had started to absorb all magical energy in its vicinity. All this had gone unnoticed until the crystal had reached its limits and the excess energy had only one escape vector, straight through the ponies and structure of the Everfree. Somehow the pilot had managed to erect a containment shield around the core mere seconds after the change was noted but the damage had already been done, a good third of the ship had been destroyed, magical systems were failing left, right and center and primary power was offline. The ship had a backup generator but it only had connections to the bridge and main computer, not to general systems like lighting or environmental.
Those that weren't instantly vaporized by the initial magic barrage came face-to-face with what it was like to be exposed to a vacuum without any protection, and shining a light–both literally and figuratively-on the results had not been pleasant. Luckily she hadn’t had anything to eat for lunch today.
Using a wing to deflect a chair that was slowly tumbling towards her, Steelwing quickly brought up a map of the ship to remind herself of the route she needed to take. A simple diagram of blue lines with her current position a yellow blip appeared in front of her. It looked like she was wandering through the crews quarters, explaining the lack of any interesting rooms ,- and that she needed to traverse 3 more corridors before getting to the room marked as memory storage.
Doing a few mental calculations, she estimated it would take about 15 minutes to get there and back. Acceptable all things considered. The core may be contained, but the longer they stayed here, the more likely that status quo would change.
If there was a god of fate he certainly possessed a wicked sense of irony, as no sooner had the thought crossed her mind that the ship rumbled under her hooves.
Steelwing quickly opened up a connection to the Impetuous, which was currently holding position very close to the hull of the derelict ship.
“Velocity, is the core still stable?”
An icon of a little orange pegasus appeared in the top-right of her vision.
“I believe so… yeah, still is. Why?” she asked.
“Just had a bit of a rumble over here, thought something may be happ—”
The floor shifted again, this time with enough force to throw her into the nearby wall. Quickly pushing off with a hoof and righting herself, she did a once-over to make sure her overskin was fine. The black material was pretty impervious to most things, but considering it regulated air, heat, and generally kept her alive, checking it had become second habit. She couldn't see any damage luckily.
“It feels like the ship is starting to come apart, you absolutely sure nothings happening?” Steelwing said worriedly.
Velocity’s voice was grave, “The shield is stable but scanners just registered a shift in the structure, could be unstable magic, delayed explosion or simply the ship coming apart at the seams... hard to tell without more data. No matter the reason though, you need to hurry the hay up, if anything interrupts the power to that containment shield…”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. It was pretty easy to work out what their fates would be if that happened.
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
A grim look settled on Steelwing’s face as she closed the connection. Playtime was over. Setting the sensor module to auto-scan everything in the local vicinity she sprinted down the corridor.
--
After an uneventful run, Steelwing was coming up to the last turn before entering the final corridor and took the corner a little too quickly, almost ending up meeting the wall face-first. Mentally face-hoofing herself for her own stupidity, she bounced off the floor, turning so she was facing the correct way and started to descend. Her hooves were a blur before she even touched the floor and a second later she was already halfway down the corridor. In the pure exhilaration of sprinting as fast as she could her perception wasn’t what is usually was, so it took her a few seconds to realize that something had moved in the gloom up ahead. Slowing down slightly, she squinted a little trying to bring the object into focus. A small black box was seated on the roof up ahead, slowly turning.
Wait, is that–
A cylindrical barrel extended from the side currently facing her and a green light appeared in the top right corner. The light turned red.
A scream burst from Steelwing’s mouth as she activated her shield module a split second before the first salvo hit. The impact of the shots sent her sprawling, the force of it detaching her hooves from the floor so she floated slowly back down the corridor in a daze.
There was a fog over her mind stopping her from thinking straight. Why had the turret stopped firing? As befuddled thought processes started to clear, she realized that she was suffering from shock and that she only had a few seconds to act. Muttering a blessing to Luna, she loaded up a close-combat personality from her archive just as the turrets muzzle flashed again and more magic ripped down the corridor towards her.
As the combat program took hold all the terror and shock drained away. She felt nothing, her mind clearing as she dispassionately stared down the magic heading straight at her. Making a decision, she sent a command to her booster module to halt the spin she had picked up, then to shoot her straight down. Landing splay-hoofed on the floor she crouched low, letting the second salvo of magic shoot by harmlessly overhead.
A sneer appeared on Steelwing’s face. Why in Equestria was she having trouble with this, a standard-issue turret was about as dangerous as the common cold.
Well, may as well make this quick.
Bounding from her spot on the floor to a position on the left wall she paused for a second, mentally counting, then jumped to the opposite wall. A burst of magic had just scorched the point on the floor where she had originally been standing, a few seconds later another burst hit the left wall. She nodded to herself, a 2 second delay on retargeting a moving object meant the turrets systems were damaged pretty seriously.
Quickly rolling back to the floor before the turret managed to re-target her, she started galloping down the corridor, bouncing between random segments of wall, ceiling and floor to throw off its targeting matrix. Because of the speed she was moving the turret simply couldn't keep up. Every shot was always a few steps behind Steelwing. The corridor looked more like a crazed light show than a barrage of deadly magic with the intent to killl.
Closing in on the turret, she bounced off the right wall and landed on to the ceiling, intending to charge straight at it. Setting her shield to full power caused a small icon to flash in the top left-hand corner of her vision warning of burnout in 40 seconds. She ignored it.
Wings spread to their full extent, she activated her wing-blades, which caused the leading edge of both wings to glow a dark crimson. The glow illuminated Steelwing’s face, her red eyes half-lidded and staring intently at her target, mouth twisted into a scowl.
The shield held, all the shots simply reflecting off the shiny purple sheen that wrapped itself around her. Drawing level with the turret she brought her right wing down, running it across the ceiling and severed the entire block from its placement, a quick flex of the wing afterwards sent the now inert turret tumbling back down the corridor.
Slowing down, she hopped off the ceiling, performed a quick mid-air twist and landed hooves-first on the floor again. She deactivated the shield and glanced over her shoulder, the turret itself was nowhere to be seen; just a hole in the ceiling with severed wires poking out of it to give tell to its existence.
Too easy.
The combat personality deactivated and all the emotions of the last few minutes that it had been suppressing came back in a rush–all the terror, shock and exhilaration hit Steelwing like a wall of feelings. She gasped and almost collapsed, only just catching herself by replanting all her hooves on the floor. Her entire body was shaking, a combination of the adrenaline, sheer terror and surprise at being alive.
Velocity’s voice sounded in her ear. “Steel’, you OK? Your medical readouts suffered some pretty huge spikes just then.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just had a little run-in with a security system that wasn’t happy to see me.”
Most research ships she knew didn’t come equipped with auto-turrets, the scientists and academics would go nova about the budget for the ship being wasted on, as they would call it, useless garbage.
“Tell Starbound to keep an eye out. Having a turret here makes me wonder what in Equestria they had on this ship to warrant it.”
“Sure, will pass the message on. He’s almost at the bridge now actually. If you hurry up we can be out of here in 15 minutes and get back to doing something profitable.”
Steelwing cringed at that one. Velocity could be a little mercenary at times. They were here to save lives–didn’t that mean anything?
She decided to keep quiet.
“Well I’m almost at the central memory store so I shouldn't be that long, but we still have to get any survivors back to a planet, maybe even one of the primaries if any are seriously injured and local med facilities can’t deal with it.”
After a few seconds Velocity couldn't hold back any longer and laughed.
“Don’t worry Steel’ I was kidding. I’m not so heartless to rescue a batch of terrified and worn out ponies then demand a fee for saving them.”
Then she continued in a sly tone of voice, “But when they are less terrified and worn out, I’m sure they will be feeling very generous to their saviours!”.
Steelwing had to suppress a snort and rolled her eyes.
She cut the communication and gingerly started walking forward, seeing if her muscles would actually obey her commands now, and becoming more confident after a few hesitant steps she broke into a trot. There were still residual thoughts from the combat personality floating around: combat tactics, the 9 best ways to knock a pony out and body pressure points. Thinking about the memories suddenly brought on a slew of rather more violent images. She shuddered.
Only a few more minutes of this.Keep it together…
Any sort of personality modifier program was dangerous in her eyes, no matter how much the marketeers banged on about how they were “perfectly safe” and “don’t change the underlying pony”. After every use the thoughts and feelings of your alter-ego seemed to stick around for a bit, and the more frequently you used it the more comfortable those thoughts and feelings became.
There were whispers of ponies who had started using the modifiers far more than what was recommended and starting to actually take on the mannerisms and traits of the pseudo-personality. They essentially became a new pony, a mixture of both good and bad traits from both personalities. While she disagreed, she could, sadly, see why some resorted to it. Some ponies wished more than anything to be somepony–anypony–else.
Lost in her thoughts she didn’t notice the door floating in the middle of the corridor until she walked straight into it. Jerking back and holding a hoof to her muzzle, she glared at the offending object which was now slowly drifting away. After a few seconds of wiggling her nose to make sure nothing was too damaged, she shined her light ahead intending to spare her muzzle any more injuries and froze.
The remains of 5 mecha-pony sentinels were arrayed in a loose semicircle facing an open doorway on the left side of the corridor. Three looked to have been ripped to shreds, barely recognizable from a pile of scrap, and the other two were still standing but had deep dents in both head and chest.
Creeping forward, she shined a light on the nearest mostly-intact sentinel. The pony-shaped mech was slightly crouched down, hooves planted on the floor in a firing position, its mouth fixed in a grimace under the helmet with the heavy scatter laser on its side pointing at the door. The mech’s entire body had been reinforced with additional armor plating that looked very similar to a conventional armour set, and it glinted as Steelwing slowly ran a hoof over it. The armour was crystite, infused crystal shards were smelted into the metal to give additional protection and whatever other benefits the spells provided. The stuff was insanely expensive to create and it raised more questions about what was going on here if all 5 mechs were equipped with it.
After further inspection it seemed that the blows to the mech’s body had hit the central cortex and the matrix that held the controlling personality, which rendered the mech immobile and effectively dead after the second hit.
With her examination completed, she quietly tip-hoofed around the corpse of the mech–silently noting that it had another scatter laser linked on its opposite side–and quickly looked over the other remains, each one had exactly the same equipment.
Well, looks like I now know what the turret was here for, but anything capable of taking down 5 sentinels with this sort of firepower is something I don’t want to meet.
Her gaze was drawn to the doorway. The entire wall surrounding it was peppered with scorch marks and deep gouges were torn into the doorway itself, like something with claws had tried to use it for leverage, repeatedly. Whatever came out of that room had fought straight through enough firepower to level a small building, destroyed 5 heavy mechs and then walked away alive, or at least she had to assume as such considering the lack of a corpse.
“Vel’, start scanning this ship for lifesigns and let me know if anything shows up that isn’t me, Starbound or the ponies he’s picking up. Also light a fire under his tail, he needs to get out of here.”
“Will do. Do I want to know the details?” she asked, sounding concerned.
“Better not, but getting out of here as fast as possible just became even more of a priority.”
Managing to barely keep her fear under control she stopped at the last of the dismantled mechs and quickly scooped up 3 loose plates of crystite armour and threw them in her saddlebag, all the while trying to convince herself she was not busy stripping a corpse. Finishing up she turned tail and fled down the corridor.
At the speed Steelwing was going it only took a short while to reach the room that the map stated was memory storage. Sliding to a stop in front of the doorway she stood there panting for a few seconds letting her heart settle. Shaking herself and trying unsuccessfully to quash the overwhelming unease she felt, she trotted through the door.
Considering what she had seen so far she was expecting the memory storage system to be impressive, either using new technology or simply the scale of it, as the Everfree would have certainly had a lot of data to store. So many different alternatives had run through her mind in the short terror-filled run to get here that the reality of it was quite shocking.
The room was totally empty, the only thing of note being that it was domed where ship rooms were normally square.
She opened up a connection to the Impetuous again.
“Velocity, are you absolutely one hundred percent sure that this was memory crystal storage? There’s nothing here!”
“Yep, I had Sandy obtain this map from their central systems. No way it could be fake.” she said cheerily.
Well Steelwing certainly wasn’t feeling cheerful about this whole debacle. She sat her flank on the floor just inside of the room, casting her mind back trying to think if she had heard about any sort of new memory storage system being developed from her mentors, newsfeeds, friends… Nothing came to mind.
Next she used the sensor module to scan the room. It only had one object listed - a pegasus who was currently sitting by the door and otherwise the room was dead of all magic and technological emanations of any kinds.
Shrugging to herself, she got off the floor and started wandering around room scrutinizing the walls trying to find a hidden button, terminal, anything at all that could point towards memory crystals. After doing a full circuit and her frustration mounting, she stomped to the middle of the room and stared upwards, trying to see if the domed ceiling would reveal anything.
She saw nothing and was about to verbally abuse Velocity for leading her on a wild goose chase when a glint of white appeared in the corner of her eye–surprising enough considering her light was directed upwards, so whatever it was, was also emitting its own light. She swung her head around to get a better look and froze.
A white line was rippling outwards towards the wall and picking up speed even as she stood staring, before she could move a muscle the line hit the outer wall and stuck there for a few seconds before slowly contracting back towards her… and taking the floor with it. Steelwing started to dive towards the door before jerking to a halt a second later. The door was closed and she saw no way of opening it from this side. The usual access hoofpad was missing.
Backing towards the center of the room again she stared in horror at the encroaching line and the blackness it was leaving behind. She couldn't describe what she was seeing. It wasn’t simply black. the closest analogy she could come up with was like staring into a black hole: a total absence of everything. The line was gathering speed, slowly closing in on her. She squeaked and jumped off the floor. If this was some elaborate trap then she was already as good as dead, but there was still a small chance that this could actually be memory storage.
She scrunched her eyes shut as the last bit of metal floor was swallowed up and the circle contracted into nothing below her. Seconds passed and nothing horrible happened, so she let out the breath she had been holding and opened one eye tentatively.
The nothingness below her had been replaced by something far less frightening but equally as difficult to comprehend. The entire floor was a window into a black void that held thousands of blue memory crystals suspended in a loose square-shaped pattern, each one a fixed distance from the next on every axis. The most shocking part was that she could not see a bottom to either the space or the crystals, they both simply continued as far as the eye could see.
She opened her other eye, and let out a sigh. It looks like she found the memory storage after all, and what a system it was. A smile spread across Steelwing’s face as she stared, enraptured, into the crystal-filled void. She floated there for a good few minutes, not seeing anything else while she attempted to take it all in, visualizing how such a system could even work and the opportunities and consequences of it.
“Steelwing? You there?”, Velocity’s worried voice broke through her trance.
Quickly shaking herself all over she refocused on the task at hoof. How long had she been out?
“Yeah, sorry. Found the memory crystals, going to grab them and get back. Won’t be long” she said a little distractedly.
“Well OK…”
Velocity didn’t sound convinced.
Steelwing gingerly landed, letting out another sigh of relief when her hooves didn’t instantly disappear through the floor, but that relief was short-lived as green text popped into her vision without warning.
User access accepted. Login successful.
Wha–
Access local or global data storage?
Her left eye twitched slightly. This wasn’t good. Any system which could connect to a Techlink interface without permission was not only unheard of, but also amazingly dangerous. Add to the fact that being recognized meant all her activities and movements would be recorded and logged for later analysis. Definitely not good. In fact a word didn’t actually spring to mind to truly encompass how not good this was.
Having no clue how to enter the selection she wanted, she cautiously fired off a command with no target to see what would happen. Normally nothing would happen as a Techlink needs some sort of technological target to send the command too, but considering this system automatically connected to her and not the other way around...
Steelwing wasn’t that surprised when a circle appeared around the local option and her vision filled with a standard file system navigation screen. If anything she was relieved that it had worked and she could finish up and get out, she just selected everything and sent a command to copy it all.
As she was turning her head to grab a crystal for the copy process, a flash of blue caught her eye from below. Staring back at the floor, she saw a blue crystal breaking away from its position and rising towards her. She simply sat there with a perplexed look on her face as the crystal rocketed upwards, heading straight for her. Just as Steelwing was about to leap out of the way as she thought a collision was imminent, the crystal slowed down, glowed a faint purple and then slid through the floor, coming to a stop just in front of her muzzle.
Giving a shrug, she snagged the crystal in her mouth, slipped it into her saddlebag and turned towards the door intending to get the hay out, enough time had been wasted already. She knew the door was still closed, but her ability to predict anything with this system was next to nothing. May as well take life as it came and if the door was still closed by the time she got there then it was time for plan B.
As she trotted over to the door the floor started to slowly fade back to its previous metallic silver, the void full of crystals slowly slipping from view. By the time she reached the threshold of the room it looked plain and boring again, and the door was wide open. Steelwing looked over her shoulder wistfully. What she had just seen was astonishing, she would have happily sat there for hours examining such a system. She sighed for what couldn't be and headed out.
Well, time to leave.
