Log of the U.N.S. Twilight Sparkle
Blinking Lights rapped his knuckles nervously on the Admiral’s door. He’d never been allowed in here before.
“Come in,” came the reply, and the indicator turned green. Taking a quick breath to calm himself, he gestured the door open.
Fleet Admiral Sunset Shimmer was at her desk, reading crew reports. Behind, her desk was filled with star charts scrolling slowly past and across the wall.
“The Captain wanted you to know, the other ship changed course. They’ve slowed down, and if we–”
Without looking up, Sunset coughed pointedly.
“Er, sorry, ma’am. They’ve burned retrograde to bring them into an approach to Salamis, and if we’ve read their intentions correctly they’ll enter a stable orbit around Eritheia in 181 hours.”
“We'll make a sailor of you yet. Eritheia’s the fourth moon, right? Can we plot a matching course?”
“The astrogation team are on it right now. They want to avoid getting too close to Salamis’ north pole, they say its radiation levels are too high.”
“They’re probably right.” Sunset glanced away from her pad to look at the sailor. “Is there still no signal from the other ship?”
“None that we can decode through the interference, ma’am.”
“Well, keep trying. Is that everything, Ensign?”
Blinking Lights paused. “Um.”
“Yes?”
“May I... Permission to ask you a personal question, ma’am?”
Sunset frowned slightly as she put her pad down. “Go ahead, Blinking Lights. Shut the door though.”
He turned and waved his hand sideways to close the door. Turning back he said, “I was wondering why you keep that antique in your room, ma’am.”
Sunset turned to look at the mirror, itself locked in a reinforced glass case. The many broken shards of the mirror were suspended in the air in front of it, as if caught in the moment it shattered.
“It’s a reminder of an old friend,” she said. “Somepony I haven’t seen in a very long time.”
“It looks centuries old,” he said, walking over to it.
“It is. Older, probably. It was once part of the plinth of a statue that stood outside my own high school. Before that, who knows?” She saw confusion on the young sailor’s face. “That was long before holographic tagging was invented, you understand. So much information from that era is lost.”
Blinking Lights crouched down to look at the rotten rectangular object resting at the bottom of the case. It had a circular symbol on top, or once had. “What’s that?”
“It’s a book. No, really, that’s what books looked like when they were made of paper. Of course it used to be in much better condition, but years of love and worry have worn their way through it.”
“What's it about?”
“It was a journal that I shared with my mentor.”
“Really? It's… quite hard to imagine you having a mentor, ma'am. You've been with us for so long. At the academy they showed us some of the old 2D footage of you right there at the birth of the U.N.F.” Blinking Lights knew he shouldn't be talking so freely with the Admiral, but she had a disarming, amiable tone.
Sunset knelt beside him and touched her fingers to the glass. “I thought the same thing of my own mentor once. She was immortal, brilliant, flawless. But nobody's perfect.”
Sunset walked into the astrogation room, nursing a fresh cup of coffee. She gestured the door closed with a wave of her foot behind her, and casually dismissed the salutes.
“What’s new this morning, gentlemen?”
“No change in course since yesterday, ma’am,” replied Geodesic, bringing up a view with curved, coloured lines. “The alien craft is due to begin orbit insertion in 106 hours, with completion pegged for 4.5 hours after that.”
“Does that mean we know their course?”
“We've narrowed it down. Once we see exactly what orbit they settle into we can plot a course to match.”
Focal Length added, “Of course, they may not choose to burn the same way we do. It’ll be interesting to see how they do it.”
“Physics is the same the universe over,” said Sunset. “Magic aside, chances are she’ll have solved most things the same way I did.”
“Most likely, ma’am. Er... ‘she’?”
“The alien craft. Vessels are typically called ‘she’, are they not?” Sunset took a sip of her coffee.
“We do have a better picture of her, ma’am,” said Focal Length. “Resolved from the drones we launched yesterday, effective aperture 50 kilometres.” He brought up a still image of a spacecraft, slightly blurry, its bow pointing nearly towards them. “You can see her basic shape a lot clearer.”
“I can’t really tell the scale from this. How big is she?”
“About 1.3 kilometres long, and a similar wingspan. It’s longer than us, but about the same volume. Can’t speak for its mass yet. As we thought, there are manoeuvring thrusters here and here on the wingtips, presumably for reaction control.”
“And this protrusion at the front?” asked Sunset.
“That looks to be carrying instrumentation.”
Geodesic pulled up a spinning 3D interpretation of it. “I think it makes it look like a hummingbird.”
“It’s an elegant design, really, though it would never get through committee.”
“You never know,” said Geodesic. “It might, if there was a war. That has a tendency to make the stuffed shirts more willing to think outside the box.” He waved his hands in the shape of a dumpy rectangle, the basic design of all U.N.F. ships.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Sunset.
“Admiral on the bridge!”
“At ease, Captain,” said Sunset as she strode onto the upper bridge. “The Twilight Sparkle’s yours. I’m just along for the ride.” She took up station next to the Captain’s chair.
Captain Silent Running relaxed back in his chair. “Lieutenant, astrogation report.”
“Sir. Adjustments are complete, we’re lined up for the burn. In a little under 7 hours we’ll settle into a high orbit around Eritheia. Then we’ll start the manoeuvres to rendezvous with the alien craft, which will take about 18 hours.”
“How close can you get us, Lieutenant?” asked Sunset.
“The flight plan should take us to matching orbits approximately 5 kilometres apart. We can sidle closer if they seem friendly.”
Sunset whistled. “Not bad for a 40 light year journey.”
The Captain chuckled. “This ship’s not like the ones you used to fly.” He turned to his right. “Comms, how are the first contact protocols?”
“As ready as they’ve been for three hundred years, sir,” replied Handshake from the comms desk on the lower level. “We’re itching to finally try them out. I just hope they’re willing to talk, or that university education will have been wasted.”
“Don’t worry, they’re friendly,” said Sunset. “Or at least, they used to be.”
The Captain gave her a funny look. “I’m still amazed you were able to navigate us here to meet them. How did you do it?”
“I spent a lot of time looking at the stars, Captain,” replied Sunset, looking out at the broad panoply displayed across the curved walls, floor and ceiling. Nearly dead ahead, orbiting the gas giant Salamis and its moons that were only visible as tiny dots on the view, was a little labelled marker indicating the other craft’s position. It wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye until they were nearly alongside it.
Silent Running shook his head. “Cryptic as ever. That used to drive the whole crew nuts.”
A shout from the lower deck of the bridge drew their attention. Lieutenant Handshake called out, “Sir! We’ve got a laser signal!”
“What does it say?”
Handshake stood over his station, working frantically. “Looks to be a standard opening protocol bundle, sir. Pi, e, various constants. Looks like they use base 8. A basic alphabet run down, though of course we can’t see the glyphs yet. And a multi-format greeting. Honestly it’s a lot like ours. There's a raster after that...”
“What does the greeting say?” asked the Captain. “Can you translate it with what they've given us?”
Lieutenant Handshake scribbled across several displays simultaneously as he worked to interpret the alien data. Everyone on both bridge levels was turned in their seat, eager for an answer. “That’s the funny thing, sir. The greeting is in English, as well as their own language. It says they’re from the... Equestrian Union, gives the name of the ship, and then it says ‘May you live in harmony’. The identifier is...”
He stood up straight, looking in awe at the eternally young woman with the red and yellow hair.
“Go on, Lieutenant,” said the Captain.
“It says... the ship’s called the E.Q.S. Sunset Shimmer, sir.”
Fate of the U.N.S. Moondancer (1)
Sunset Shimmer drifted. There wasn’t much else to do.
If she had a radio, then she could talk to the crew of the U.N.S. Moondancer – what was left of them – and coordinate a rescue. As it was, all she could do was wave her hands and hope somebody on the ship could see her.
If she had thrusters, or even just a bag of air, then she could adjust her trajectory to intersect the Moondancer.
If she had a computer, she could do the calculations to work out what trajectory she’d need to adjust to in the first place.
If she had a telescope she could at least see where the damned Moondancer was now.
If she had a spacesuit then she wouldn’t have this damned headache, she wouldn’t be boiling hot on one side and blistering cold on the other, her lungs wouldn’t ache from the lack of air, her mouth wouldn’t be cracked and dry from the lack of saliva, her stomach wouldn’t ache from the lack of acid, or of the food she’d vomited up, she wouldn’t feel like she was constantly on the verge of a nosebleed, her veins wouldn’t be bulging from her skin, and the blood pumping through her brain with every pulse wouldn’t be so damned loud.
What she had was herself. Her uniform, what was left of it, minus most of the spacesuit. An antique pen, that she kept in her pocket.
On one level, she knew that she was blessed to be immortal. No other person or creature could hope to survive the vacuum of space. Despite the discomfort, she was in no immediate danger. She would simply drift out here forever. Blessed. Right.
As she slowly turned, her face pointed again towards the star. Epsilon Eridani, one of the nearest stars to Sol with its own planets. It was just ten little light years from Earth. Sixty trillion miles. That was nothing, really, in the scheme of things. The universe was far, far bigger than that. Even compared to the local star cluster, that was no distance at all.
But it was also more than twice as far as any human vessel had ever travelled before. The Moondancer’s mission was groundbreaking – meaning there was no rescue on its way, no backup. This far from home, U.N. Fleet ships had to be their own backup, which is why they had so many redundant systems. Eventually, perhaps, the U.N.F. would raise the funds and political will to design, build and launch another expedition to this system. Though depending on the fate the first one, that could take decades. And the chance of some future expedition even finding her when they got here? Slim. She was a single tiny dot lost in a void that made all the oceans of Earth look small.
She turned her face away from the star, tired of the harsh glare. To her other side – down, presumably, though that was a matter of perspective – was Diana, this system’s largest planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Sol’s Jupiter. It certainly looked big from here. She didn’t know how her immortality would stack up against the heat of a star, or the crushing pressure at the heart of a gas giant, and she wasn’t planning to find out.
She was in a high orbit around Diana. So was the Moondancer, somewhere, though she had no way to see it. It would take her months to circle round the planet, and the ship a similar time. The chances of them running into each other by chance were… so low as to be not worth measuring. Some part of those months she would be behind the planet, shielded from the heat of the sun. She was not looking forward to that. Even her current hot-cold rotation was better than the weeks of unflinching cold she’d be trapped in as she sailed behind such a massive sunshade.
Of course, eventually she might hit one of the dozen or so icy moons. That would be interesting.
Diana also had an eccentric orbit. That meant that one end of its six-year-long orbit was closer to the star than the other, and therefore also a little hotter. It would take Sunset a few years to fully experience that effect, as she was dragged along with it. It would probably be beautiful, in an abstract way.
As she turned again, she caught sight of a glint of something. She squinted, shielding her eyes with one hand, trying to identify it. It certainly wasn’t the Moondancer, of that she was certain, but it could have been some of the equipment from the same airlock she’d been in.
The inner door slammed shut with a solid thud, followed by the the noise of internal bolts screwing into place, locking it shut. “Inner door locked,” said Starfinder though the intercom.
There was no actual window through to the control room, but the semblance of one was provided by a screen on one curved wall that showed Starfinder sitting at his desk, keeping an eye on various controls and readouts. He could see them in the same way.
“Confirmed,” said Sunset Shimmer. She shifted the bag on her shoulder.
“We’re ready,” said Solar Flare.
“Final check of suit integrity,” said Starfinder.
Sunset checked the equipment readout on her wrist. “Looking good here,” she said.
“All clear,” said Solar Flare.
Starfinder gave her a thumbs up. “Decompressing in three, two, one,” she said, followed by the hiss of air being pumped out of the airlock.
“Wait!” called Solar Flare, looking at the instrument panel. “I see a red light!”
“Shit!” shouted Starfinder.
They were interrupted by a brief, loud crunch of impact, a rush of air and then silence as the contents of the airlock were ripped out into space.
Sunset didn’t know what had caused the fault. Before she had time to ask, explosive decompression had forced her, Solar Flare and all their equipment out all at once. It had torn her space suit to shreds, smashed her helmet, sent her careening through space. It had nearly ripped her own arm off, though that had healed over the subsequent painful half hour, leaving her a little light-headed from the lack of blood. That too would pass.
They had been scattered in all directions, but it was possible one of the other objects had ended up on a similar path to her own. As it turned, Sunset caught an irregular flickering. Whatever it was, it probably had more technology than she did, and so represented her best hope of getting out of here. She needed a way to reach it.
The first step was to stop her turn. She needed to get her bearings without being constantly disoriented. Controlling your movement in microgravity was something they taught at the U.N.F. Academy, and Sunset took the classes again every few decades to make sure she didn’t become a fossil. She’d never expected to do it in the vacuum of space, where you’d normally have thrusters available, but the technique was the same.
Physics does not like an object to change its angular momentum, but there are ways around that. A ballerina is able to make her turn faster by bringing her arms and legs in, or slower by sticking them out. A cat uses the same effect to land on its feet by twisting its flexible back, letting the front and back turn separately. Sunset simply needed to mimic the motions of a cat. She pulled her arms in close to her body, stuck her legs out at an angle and twisted her torso, then pulled her legs into a crouch and stuck her arms out while she untwisted. She was no cat; her efforts provided only pantry effect. Her muscles burned at the sudden large motion so soon after losing blood, and there was an insistent ache in her left shoulder where it had been nearly ripped out. After a few tries and adjustments, she corrected her motion until it was relatively stable.
Next she needed a way to propel herself. There was nothing to push against, of course, no ground, no air, no water. She had no breath left to blow. The only way to push herself was with an equal and opposite force. In theory she could have used her own blood as propellent, but she had no knife with which to cut herself, and even if she had it would be terribly imprecise, more likely to go wrong than not.
She took the pen out of her pocket. She took it with her on every mission. It had once been used to write the words, “Dear Princess Celestia,” but the metal tip was rusty now, useless for anything. There was no ink, of course, and if there had been it would have evaporated into space. It could do her just one last favour. Checking over her shoulder to make sure of her direction to the object, she threw the pen forwards as hard as she could.
The pen didn’t weigh very much, compared to a human being, so while it sailed away at high speed, the difference it made to Sunset’s own momentum was barely a crawl in comparison. She tried hard not to feel insulted as she watched it disappear. It was also hard to get any idea of speed without something to measure it against.
Looking over her shoulder again, she confirmed she was moving slowly closer. Wriggling herself around in another series of cat-like twists, she faced the object. As she slowly approached, she was finally able to identify it.
It was Solar Flare.
She was dead, of course. Her helmet was missing, as was her left leg. The blood had quickly drained from her body through the wound, leaving her skin pale. The water in her tears had all evaporated into space, leaving just a faint crust of salt on her face.
Solar Flare was tumbling backwards, most likely propelled by the blood pouring from her leg. Sunset approached slowly, unable to control her movement, until finally she passed close enough to grab her suit and hold on. Now they were both spinning but more slowly, and she had to hold on.
Clambering up to Solar Flare’s face, Sunset mouthed, “I’m sorry.” No sound came out, of course. The movement made her lips crack, but they healed up straight away.
Aside from the missing leg and helmet, most of Solar Flare’s spacesuit was intact. Sunset twisted round to access the controls on the suit’s wrist. There were a dozen flashing red warnings that she dismissed. She paged through to navigation.
According to the readout, the U.N.S. Moondancer was a hundred and thirteen kilometers away, and that distance was increasing with every second, but it wasn’t accelerating. Not as bad as she’d feared, then. At least it wasn't a moving target. It was, roughly speaking, down – which is to say, towards the planet – but even knowing that she still couldn’t see it with her own eyes. A helmet would have augmented her view with helpful labels, but neither of them had one. She tried to contact the ship, and got nothing, not even a ping. Most likely the spacesuit’s radio was damaged, and that was buried among the many warnings.
She checked the suit’s propellant levels, and found they were good. She tried a very quick burst from each of the suit’s thrusters, holding on tight to make sure she wasn’t dislodged. All but two of them were functional. She told the suit to compensate for that, then nudged gently with the thrusters one way then another until the two of them had stopped turning and were pointed at the Moondancer. Checking the direction one more time, she burned the thrusters to accelerate. After confirming that the motion was correct, she ramped the thrusters up to high. After a few seconds, their motion relative to the Moondancer settled then began to drop.
This was good. She was going in the right direction now. It would only take her a few days to reach the ship at this speed, and that E.T.A. was dropping every second. Of course, when she arrived she’d have the opposite problem: slowing down. She didn’t particularly feel like hitting the hull like a meteor, so she made sure to stop burning when there was still enough propellent left to reverse her motion, and coast the rest of the way. She cut when the needle hit 55%, checked the E.T.A. again and found it had dropped to just under nine hours. Much more reasonable.
Nine hours coasting through space, watching the ship get slowly bigger. Just herself, her thoughts, and the dead body of a friend she was clinging to.
As long as the Moondancer didn’t move in the next nine hours. Then she’d be screwed.
“Hi!”
The girl jumped. Or rather, flinched, leg go of the hand-hold, pulled her arms and legs in and started spinning away. She waggled her hand at the hand-hold, trying to catch it again, but found her body moved back as she thrust her arm forwards, making the wall seem to dodge her grasp.
Sunset offered the girl her hand. She took it, and Sunset pulled her back upright. “You need to be careful of hand-holds. Don’t let go. Without them you won’t be able to move.”
“Thanks.” She took a moment to catch her breath. “Um, I guess you’ve done this before, then?”
“A little,” confirmed Sunset. “And it was quite a long time ago, so I’m fairly rusty.”
The girl furrowed her brow. “How come? Did you grow up on one of the stations?” Given the high cost of lifting mass into orbit, even now, it was rare to meet somebody who’d lived in space.
The instructor called out, “Okay, everybody, we’ll leave the plating on for five more minutes before giving you a break. Remember to stay in control of your turning. Use the hand-holds, keep your speed low, and use the absolute minimum of force. And try to avoid the patch of vomit over there,” he said, indicating the corner where one boy’s breakfast had been deposited. The other students variously shuddered, laughed or making puking noises. “All right, all right, settle down. It always happens to somebody in the first class. You get over it.”
The girl prodded her feet downwards, as if trying to touch the bottom of a swimming pool. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to this,” she confessed quietly.
“You will, I promise. Everyone does, eventually.” She let go and floated to the opposite wall, grabbing a hand-hold to steady herself. “Now push yourself gently towards me.”
The girl nodded and shoved on hand against the wall, sending her hurtling head-first into Sunset Shimmer’s arms. She’d been expecting that though, and caught her. “Use a little less than that, I think.”
“Sorry,” said the girl, looking up at her. “I didn’t think it would be so much.”
“It’s okay, just keep the movement small and controlled, keep a level head and push away gently.” She guided the girl’s hands back to the hand-hold, then swapped walls again. “Okay, come to me.” The girl pushed off again, much more gently and sailed across the gap to grasp Sunset’s outstretched hand. “There, much better.”
“I was still turning,” she said. “Like I was falling over. How do I stop that?”
“You need to push from lower down, near your centre of mass. Like this,” she said, lowering her hand to stomach level and giving the wall a gentle nudge, sending her smoothly over to the other wall. “Now you.”
The girl mimicked her motion, sliding her hand down the wall to stomach level before tapping it into the wall. She moved across the gap at a reasonable speed, and daintily took Sunset’s hand at the other side. Her hair floated around her like a halo, and she had a big grin on her face.
“Thank you!” she said breathlessly, gripping Sunset’s fingers with her own.
“Nothing to it,” replied Sunset with a smile.
“Oh, I didn’t catch your name earlier. I’m Solar Flare.”
“Sunset Shimmer.”
“Oh, were you named after the Admiral?”
Sunset chuckled. “Something like that.”
She’d miscalculated. As the spacesuit’s propellant level approached zero, the pressure dropped, reducing the force of the thrusters. That meant she needed to fire the thrusters for longer to achieve the same effect. There were systems to compensate for that by adding pressure, but they weren’t perfect. This was never normally supposed to happen.
She'd intended to cancel most of her motion as she approached, the coast slowly for the last few hundred metres. Instead she was pushing the thrusters as hard as she could, and hoping it would be enough to prevent her colliding with the hull. She would not have the freedom to manoeuvre around the outside of the ship by thrusters.
Now they were close enough to see it, the Moondancer itself was clearly turning. This was not a good sign. The crew would correct that straight away if they could. The burst dorsal airlock slowly passed by beneath them, giving her a view of the damage. But that would not be her way in.
Ships of the U.N.F. are built around redundancy. They have multiple of everything, separated into isolated sections. The Moondancer had two bridges, a dozen engines, three F.T.L. field generators, twelve fuel tanks, eight water tanks, nineteen life support systems and four external airlocks. When the nearest help is sixty trillion kilometres away, you bring your own reinforcements.
Sunset wanted to reach the ventral airlock, on the opposite side of the ship from the damage. That had the most chance of escaping whatever had damaged the ship. Their relative motion had slowed enough to avoid an outright collision, but Sunset would still hit the ship faster than she preferred. On this course they would simply bounce off the hull. Instead she needed to reach one of the ladders that wrapped around the outside of the ship.
So she leapt. A dramatic leap of faith, made less cinematic by the fact that it took half a minute to reach her destination. She grasped hold of the handle on the side of the ship and held on tight as her body whipped past, fighting her own relative momentum.
The metal hull was cold to the touch, in the way that space isn't. Space isn’t actually cold, because it’s so empty. There’s nothing for the heat to transfer to. But the surface of the ship was cold, and Sunset could feel the chill creeping up her arm as she held on. She wished she at least had some gloves.
Once her motion had settled down, she started slowly climbing the ladder, hand over hand with her legs sticking out into the void. It was slow movement. The slow turn of the ship leant her a centripetal force that wanted to cast her back into space, and she knew if she let go for even a moment she’d be lost.
Eventually she reached the ventral airlock. Waving her hand over the controls, she briefly panicked when they took several seconds to flicker into life. She tried the buzzer first, but there was no response. That meant there was nobody manning the airlock controls. There was no fingerprint sensor on the outside, of course, and the camera didn’t recognise her. The system wasn’t made to expect somebody to approach the door without a spacesuit. She had to tap in a depressingly long sequence of passcodes to persuade the airlock of who she was, then give it the override code to open up.
There were a few seconds while the attachments holding the door shut were unscrewed. She’d have been able to hear them, if she could hear anything beyond the regular thud of her own heartbeat. Once that was done, the two sides of the outer door slid slowly open.
Inside it was dark. That wasn’t a good sign.
