any landing you can walk away from
Author's Note
Hey all. So this is basically a small piece of the first chapter of my new story I'm working on. its got a few sci-fi themes from a game called Star Citizen, and it takes place in the Equestria after the last episode. Yes, it is another romance flick with Celestia, but this time I'm gonna try to keep the story more focused on that relationship and make the character less edgy. Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress and not the final version. I hope to get the actual story posted up soon after I write a few more chapters and get them edited. Enjoy!
any landing you can walk away from
“Olisar control this Titan 729843, I am clear of the landing pad”
“Titan 729843, this is Olisar control. We confirm that you are clear of the pad, have a nice flight. Control out.”
With my departure confirmed, I opened up the throttle of the ship, bringing its speed to 1000 meters per second. A few seconds later, my ships automated alert system, aka bitching betty (even though Aegis uses a male voice for theirs), chimed in. “Attention, you have left an armistice zone, weapons and Quantum dive online.”
With the flick of a few switches, and a few taps on a screen later, I began to hear the familiar hum of my drive spooling up, and as it did, my HUD changed to display my drives spool percentage and calibration percentage. Once both reached 100, I pressed the button on my console, and with a flash, I jumped into quantum.
--
I was about 5 minutes into my quantum jump, just relaxing and taking in the sight of planets and stars flying by me, and the sound of music from Earth's past when my HUDs master alarm went off, snapping back to attention and scanning my displays, my ships audio alert system let me know what was wrong. “Warning, Quantum Drive unstable...Automated emergency stop failed, recommend immediate action.”
My left hand went to the quantum drive control panel, and I slammed the emergency stop button.
“Manual stop failure.”
“Oh you have got to be fucking kidding me.” I jumped up out of my seat and ran to the hab section, donning my under suit, helmet, and heavy exo armor, before running back to the pilots seat, getting back onto the controls just in time to see a bright light fill the cabin and blind me, but that’s not all folks.
“Warning, ship and suit CO2 scrubbing systems failure.”
“Oh, now you're just adding insult to injury.” And 30 seconds later, I blacked out.
--
When I came to, I immediately noticed two things, the first was the blue sky around me, and the second was the fact that my helmet was on the floor of the ship next to me. Looking around at the sky around me and I saw that my HUD had shut off, but it seemed that the auto stop had come back online, and a further look into the planet’s atmosphere composition also told me that my ship had also found a planet with a breathable atmosphere once my CO2 scrubbers died. Getting back into my seat, I re-initiated the HUD.
“Damage report.”
“Quantum drive:...Error, no drive found...
Engines:...Power fluctuating, landing recommended...
Communications:...Error, no arrays found...
Life support:...Warning, life support damaged, estimated failure in 01D:13H:20M:00.0S...
All other systems green...”
“Fuck…fine, looks like I’m landing.” I raised up my left arm and activated the display on my mobiglass, watching as it projected up a holographic display in front of me, showing the current time, any issues with my health, of which there were thankfully none, my heart rate, and the current level of gravity in the environment. “Analyze atmospheric composition and display current readings to my mobiglass.”
“Displaying…”
The holographic display in front of me changed, with the aforementioned windows decreasing in their size to allow for the newest window displaying the composition of the atmosphere outside my ship, as well as its overall quality/survivability, and what I saw astonished me. “Jesus, these readings are even purer than earth.” Seeing that I could definitely survive, I turned off the mobiglass’s holo-display, took my helmet off and disabled the ships life support, instead allowing for the planet’s atmosphere to provide me with the air that I needed. Seeing that I was no longer in any immediate danger, I turned back to my ships console, and brought up a display detailing the extent and location of the damage to my ship. Seeing that I was definitely going to need repairs to get it space worthy again, I decided that the best course of action would be to land and make repairs.
I began to slowly lower the ship down beneath the clouds, and what I saw astonished me. I was over an empty grass like area, similar to the fields in that were in the older European countries back on Earth, I could even see a small town in the distance off to my right, and some sort of structure on the side of a mountain about 20 klicks away. From the looks of it, the mountainside structure was probably some sort of landing zone or spaceport, so I adjusted my course accordingly, turning on my collision lights and setting my nav lights to pulse out an SOS. That way the ports ATC wouldn’t consider my hostile, and would hopefully signal back to me with a place where I could land. I stopped my descent once I thought I was level with the top structure, so about 1000 meters off the ground, and I continued towards the structure, which looked to be a five-minute flight away. “Come on, just last me another ten minutes without any issues.”
I have no idea why I went in that direction when there was a wide-open field just below me that I could land in and go to the town to call for some assistance, but I just felt drawn to that place. Anyway, I didn’t get too far before I saw something else that made me wonder if I was high or not, a fucking Pegasus, and not just a normal colored one, no, that would make too much sense. This one was fucking sky blue with a rainbow mane and tail, and it was flying right alongside me, trying to yell at me, I just shook my head, and tried to wave it away, but it didn’t leave, in fact, it was joined by a mix of white pegasi with blue manes and tails, but these ones were wearing fucking gold armor and had spears. “Why? Just fucking why!? Get away from this thing, or you’ll get hurt!”
Of course, my shouting didn’t do much of shit, except for maybe anger murphy’s law even more, because as if it was on fucking queue, the master alarm sounded, causing me to look down to the display as the ship’s betty began to call out the problem.
“Port thruster power low… Port thruster power low.”
A quick scan of the display panel confirmed that my left primary thruster was failing, and as if betty wasn’t enough, I was also greeted with the sound of a loud bang and the smell of smoke. Looking up to the rearview mirror on my cockpit, I could see the aforementioned thruster begin to spit it out like it was Winston Churchill. “Well fuck you very much too.” With the danger of total failure now increasing, and still no signal of any kind from ATC I made my decision. I was going to land, ATC and technicolor horses be damned. However, there was one small saving grace. With the castle-like structure, I was headed for was now within full view, and I had spotted my landing zone. There was a large plaza type area, definitely large enough for me to set down in…if it wasn’t half full of…other technicolor horses. “Right…freak out about horses later, land now.” My hands flew across my consoles, turning off my left thruster, and diverting the extra power to my RCS thrusters, and I quickly put my helmet back on, just in case the landing was a rough one. I looked to the creatures flying beside me, “Sorry about this, but I’ve got to get rid of you all somehow.” I turned a few knobs and set the volume on the outer speakers to max. “Now let’s just hope that this didn’t break as well.” I flicked a switch, and sound of Stranglehold by Ted Nugent Blasted out of the speakers, causing the pegasi around me to grab their ears, but more importantly, stop following me, allowing me some breathing room so slow and land safely…or at least that was the plan until another bang came to my ears followed by the warning system.
“Starboard engine, failure...Starboard engine, failure.”
“Fuck you.” My emergency training kicked in and I nosed my ship up a hair and diverted all remaining power to my RCS thrusters.
By this point, the crowd below had noticed me, if only because of the music at first, but when they saw the ship somewhat careening towards them, they all began to run away. Of course, I wasn’t really focused on this, but more on trying to make sure that I landed in the plaza instead of smashing into the mountain and keeping the torque in the rotors in the green. “Come on, Come on.” I said to no one in particular as I watched the edge of the plaza get closer and closer.
“Terrain…Terrain…Terrain”
“Shut the fuck up.” The ground and edge of the plaza kept getting closer and closer, I put my landing gear down, but by that point, I thought that the edge of the plaza was gonna tear the landing gear off. Then I felt the contact of my wheels on the ground. Once the ship skidded to a halt, I shut down everything, opened my rear door, got out of the ship, took my helmet off and just sat down on the ramp facing the crowd and taking in what just happened. I looked to the crowd of ponies now all staring at me and with a smile I said, “Please tell me someone got that on camera because I will NOT be doing it again.”
I was met by wild-eyed stares and many faces held a confused-but-worried look on them.
“Uhh…you all can understand me, right?”