Victory: Premonitions

Chapters

Chapter 1: Arrivals
Chapter 2: Deviations
Chapter 3: Sources
Chapter 4: Encounters
Chapter 5: Exchanges
Chapter 6: Premonitions

Chapter 1: Arrivals

Above my head, the lights of The Radiant Hope flickered softly to life. I looked on from within my sleeping bag, pinned to the wall in a tunnel made of equipment panels and hoof holds, as the space was slowly illuminated with the simulated starshine of my distant home. It took me a few moments to place the fact that it was already morning, and that things were still a little blurry. I focused softly on a panel label across from me and blinked the sleep from my eyes until it was clear.

“Equipment Storage” I softly read to myself as the letters turned sharp. There was a number at the end, but I skipped over the seven and turned my focus towards freeing myself from the confines of the sleeping bag. Click. Click. Click. The zipper cover flap was secured with a series of locking press studs not unlike those on a winter coat. It was a necessary precaution in a place like this, as was pinning the whole thing to the wall by three separate bungee cord attachment points.

I slipped the zipper down and softly kicked myself free of the bag. I reached out and stopped myself from hitting the panel of the storage locker with a forehoof. I let my joints bend to slowly bleed the inertia of the kick, but still rebounded with enough force to repel from the wall. Air resistance stopped me dead, floating dead-center between all four walls of the hall. Perfect! I got in my morning stretches as my mane went everywhere. Even while tightly bound in hair bands, my mane and tail wanted to go wild in microgravity. Typical.

I heard a distinctly metallic clatter in the distance and immediately realized that the thought of significant distance was something of an amusing oxymoron given the situation.

“Odyssey, are you alright?” I asked, a small smile forming on my lips as the girl’s loud sigh of self-disapproval echoed in my direction. I opened a sealed duffle bag under my sleeping accommodations. I was bracing myself with my hind hooves on the hold points on the walls as I dug for my working gear. I put on a shirt as the girl explained herself from around a corner.

“Sorry, Jupe! I didn’t mean to wake you. I was trying to prep the inductors and I got the contents of container locker fourteen everywhere again. It’s a bit of a debris field up here right now.”

“Don’t worry, Odyssey, I was just waking up anyway.” I took on an inquisitive tone. “Were you trying to cook again?” That got an immediate and frustrated reply from the girl.

“I know I’m not any good at it, but if I don’t try to get better then I’ll never be good at anything!” I almost wanted to laugh at that one.

“I really don’t think that’s true, Princess.” I made sure to place extra emphasis on her title. The clattering temporarily stopped as the irony hit her.

“Yeah, I guess.” I suppressed the smallest of giggles before heading down the hall with a quick kick against the hold rails. I was floating down a tunnel, one I had been through many times. Halfway down its length I crossed the central junction point. I looked up to see a three-legged alicorn struggling to get a door to shut on a storage locker that was desperate to spill its haphazardly secured contents into our living compartment. I knew from experience that the girl’s frustrated expression meant she likely wouldn’t be receptive to help at the moment, even if she might still need it.

I continued drifting down the length of the tunnel and slowed myself to a stop before a glass cupola that capped the end of its length. Here, I started taking in the incredible view. The massive, nearly unending gas clouds of Saturn swirled out before us in seemingly all directions. It was impossible to accurately convey just how truly massive this planet was, or how utterly insignificant it made you feel.

“Today’s the day we perform our aerobrake through Saturn’s exosphere, right?”

“As if you don’t already know!” She replied between struggling grunts, before a slamming sound and a sigh of relief indicated success in her task. Door closed.

“Ever been this close to your Cutie Mark before?” I asked, full-well knowing the answer.

“Only on the trip to Jupiter but Saturn was still just a bright dot in the sky, even with the conjunction. It’s really something, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer her, at least not right away. It was true that I had never seen a sight quite like it before, nopony had, but I had other things on my mind. The timetable of our mission was spectacularly aggressive. Supplies were tight, fuel was tight, windows to our landing zones were tighter. I would have been lying if I said it wasn’t bothering me. Still, I was less concerned with the timing than I was amazed that the teams back home had figured out all of this math years before our mission had even departed.

“Jupiter? Jupiter Rising? Hello? Are you there?” Where would I have gone in a place like this? Sometimes The Princess struck me as a tad on the silly side.

“I’m here. I’m just thinking to myself.”

“About Mimas?”

“I can’t even see it out of this window.”

“What, then?”

“Just the mission.” I wasn’t trying to be dismissive, so I headed off a reply with a question of my own.

“Princess?”

“Yes, Jupe?”

“Why do you go on these missions? Why not send somepony else?” She laughed, I could hear her chuckle from down in the cupola.

“Seriously? Why would I skip out on something like this? Just look at it!”

“Well, isn’t it dangerous? You’re Immortal, right? What if you get.. Stuck?”

“Jupe, I could get stuck falling into an unmarked cave back home. I can’t let the fear of what might go wrong keep me from the things that might go right.”

“But the other Princesses don’t exactly do things like this.”

“If they want to miss out on history being made, that’s their choice.” She had a point, I wasn’t about to miss out on an opportunity like this either. We were the first explorers to the Saturnian System and nothing could take that away from us now. I felt she probably had more to say than that, something in her words came across as a dodge, but I was a Planetary Scientist and decidedly not fit to play a Psychologist or a Theologian. If she had her own private reasons for doing this, that was fine by me, we all did deep down.

I paid some small attention to a few rocks shining in the distance as they meandered by. Even this far in from the rings we were still seeing them from time to time, moving in their erratic, unpredictable orbits as they wandered their way along. Some of those rocks were like us, distant explorers trapped by gravity after meandering here from across the vastness of space. We were among good company here, among friends.

“Jupe! I hope you’re excited for Oatmeal, because it’s ready!”

The Radiant Hope was more of a space station than a proper ship. It was a series of connected modules originally assembled high above The Earth. It was designed to sit in orbit around Mimas and provide a base of operations as smaller shuttlecraft took us to the other moons. Saturn itself had no meaningful ground to it. There was, doubtlessly, a solid core buried deep within the planet’s swirling gas clouds. However, I doubted any pony would ever walk upon its surface. The pressures and intensities of the atmosphere at those levels made the prospect similar to swimming through a tsunami under the deepest ocean ever explored. Sure, it was technically gas, but it was only an atmosphere by the strictest technical definition. In comparison, tornadoes were less fearsome.

We had two shuttles designed to ferry us from Mimas, both early flying-wing space planes donated by The Crystal Empire. The shuttlecraft Tempest’s Fate and Victory Everlasting flanked the tube of command modules on either side. They were mounted at docking collars at the center of the stack. The two vessels combined to act as our primary forward and reverse thrusters for The Radiant Hope. It didn’t take much of a burn from their engines to drop our station into its parking orbit. From here, the real mission would begin.

“Odyssey, are you ready at the antenna controls?”

“Ready, Jupe. How is our power system doing?” The Radiant Hope was cozy enough that we could have had this conversation with our outside voices. Still, it was a decent opportunity to test our close range radios in the field and we weren’t going to pass up the chance to work out any kinks.

“Looks like the solar panels pack and unpack themselves just fine. We didn’t lose any in the aerobrake, and all of their power buses are showing their expected current. Batteries are all charged up now, we should have plenty of power to deploy the antenna.”

“Alright, I’m deploying it now.”

I heard, rather than saw, the massive folded dish on the front end of the station begin to move as its electric motors whirred to life. The giant antenna was folded like an umbrella along the body of our ship, and would be deployed specifically to provide a data connection for our instruments to the scientists back on Earth. We’d achieve this, entertainingly enough, by using the atmosphere of Saturn itself as an antenna. As long as the listening stations of Earth were roughly on the opposite side of Saturn from us, they’d receive a much clearer signal than we ever could possibly send with a direct line of sight. That was what Odyssey had hoped for, at least.

“We’re deployed, Jupe! Looks like we’re sending our data!” I breathed a sigh of relief as I watched the power systems hold steady under the ramped up load. I had no idea if they could hear us out there, but at least we were theoretically sending them all of our data. Suddenly a burst of static over my radio pulled me away from my thoughts.

“Odyssey, did you hear that?”

“Yeah. Some kind of interference, I don’t know what it is.” This was closer to my area of expertise than Odyssey’s. I didn’t know much about radios, but I knew plenty about planets. I already had some answers that I suspected were probably correct as to the origins of the static. I pointed some of our instruments at Saturn, just to be sure, and carefully looked over the data. It was too late to catch the source of the burst, but we’d easily pick up any further irregularities.

“Look at the radiation readings. They’re variable.”

The difference between a gas giant and a star boiled down to little more than a difference of mass. Give a planet enough mass and the atoms at its core start undergoing atomic fusion, just like the sun. Conversely, take away enough mass and a sun simply stops burning. Saturn wasn’t anywhere near dense enough to be its own star, but it was plenty big enough to produce massive amounts of heat and ionizing radiation. The storms weren’t just raging deep through the clouds of Saturn’s atmosphere, they were invisibly swarming all around us. It was far from deadly to us, it wouldn’t even be dangerous to us during our stay, but it would wreak havoc with our sensitive communications gear.

Once Odyssey and I had figured that out, we set about making critical adjustments to our communications equipment, hardening them against the invisible storm. After many hours, we felt like we were that much closer to being truly ready for tomorrow. Years ago, in the Jovian System, Odyssey had been the first mare to walk on the surface of Ganymede. Tomorrow, she’d be the first to walk on the surface of Saturn’s own Mimas. I couldn’t say I wasn’t envious of her for that. As we both climbed into our sleeping bags, getting ready for some much needed rest, I finally thought to comment out loud.

“First mare on Ganymede, and now first mare on Mimas.” She looked a little embarrassed to hear that, and as I stared at her flushed cheeks I couldn’t help but wonder why she ever would.

“Yeah, well, you know how it goes.” I absolutely did not.

“How was it?”

“How was what?”

“Ganymede.”

“It’s a nice place. Probably looks a lot like Mimas, honestly.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m a Planetary Scientist, Odyssey, I’ve seen the data. I know what that moon looks like. What I haven’t seen is you gloating about it.”

She looked at me suddenly, taken aback.“Gloating? Why would I do that?”

“Really? All of this pushing to be first to historic events and you expect me to believe you can be that humble about it?” She looked back to her sleeping bag, looking a bit more tired than before I had asked. I wasn’t sure if I had cornered her on something intentionally or not, but I wasn’t prepared for what she was about to admit.

“I was supposed to be third. I fell down the stairs.”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it! The sheer idea of somepony tumbling down a stairway and crashing head-first into the history books was just funny to me. If anyone else had done it, anyone at all, I’d have laughed at it too. Unfortunately I hadn’t just burst out laughing at anypony, I realized far too late that I was laughing at a pony that happened to be missing a leg.

“Yeah, everypony else thought it was funny too.” She didn’t sound like she thought it was funny herself, and that silenced my own chuckles. I forced a cough and quickly apologized, feeling ashamed of myself.

“I’m sorry.”

She gave me a weary smile and shrugged it off. “Nah, it’s fine. It was a classic pratfall, that’s good comedy.”

“But..” A million different thoughts tried to leave my mouth all at once, jammed up in my throat, and forced me into silence.

“But what?” I didn’t know what to say. The quiet grew awkward as Odyssey stared at me. “I know I only have three legs, I can count, but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh at me for tripping like you would with anypony else.”

“Isn’t it in poor taste, considering how you’re imparied?”

“Impaired?!” She feigned offense with a growing smile. “Come on, when have you seen me struggle to get around?”

“All the time.” The answer came out naturally, instantly, it pushed the smile right off of Odyssey’s face and left her staring blankly at me.

“I’d be plenty klutzy even if I had four legs, Jupe. You’ve seen me trip with the prosthetics. Other ponies run marathons in those.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just trying not to offend.” She shook her head softly.

“If you don’t want to offend me, then just treat me like everypony else.”

“I suppose that makes sense.” She nudged me gently with her forehoof, physically coaxing a better mood out of me.

“Of course it does! Now, be honest with me, you want to be the first mare on Mimas, don’t you?” I held back my gut-instinct response for only a moment before deciding to chance it.

“Well, you be honest with me, does it matter who’s supposed to go first if you just pratfall down the stairs again?” Odyssey laughed! The girl gave an honest, good natured, laugh. I found it proved to be quite infectious, in fact.

“You could always try to run faster than I can fall!”

“I suppose I could sprint for it!”

“Sounds like a plan to me!” The both of us laughed. It was a reasonably serious conversation and I had no doubt that Odyssey had meant every word of her offer. Life was full of serious moments, but it felt right to inject some levity into our mission. The eyes of history were upon us, we were embarking upon an adventure that we couldn’t have possibly begun to understand the significance of. In those minutes, we could have never known how badly we had needed that brief reprieve.

“Radiant Hope, this is Mission Control. Your data is coming through just fine. Keep your transmission schedule in-line with the timetable, there shouldn’t be a need for any immediate changes. We’ve analyzed the data from that signal burst you experienced earlier, and we’ve found a minor anomaly. It could just be that a signal from the far side of Saturn bounced off of Titan’s atmosphere but it’s too significant of an occurrence for us not to investigate it first. We’ve updated the relevant burn information for an immediate transit to Titan. Take Victory for this trip, its radio telescope should be useful for measuring the atmosphere’s interactions with Saturn’s radio-spectrum radiation. We’ll need measurements from both space and the air.

I know that both of you were excited to go to Mimas but it’ll have to wait. This won’t be as glamorous as the intended first Titan trip and, without Tempest’s ground-penetrating radar, core drilling equipment, and micro submarines, it may not prove as fruitful as the original trip was intended to be. However, we always knew we’d have to adjust to conditions in the field and we can’t let the opportunity pass. I’m sure you’ll make us proud. Control out.”

Author's Note

I changed the title of this chapter from "Echoes" to "Arrivals" after fleshing out a more appropriate naming convention for the later chapters. I hope you like this chapter but, regardless of if you do or don't, I hope you consider leaving a comment and sharing your thoughts on it! There should be 6 chapters overall, and I'll be posting them up fairly regularly over the coming days.

Chapter 2: Deviations

A metallic clang under our seats marked the separation of Victory’s docking collar from The Radiant Hope. With a hiss of the ship's maneuvering thrusters, we started drifting away on a course that Mission Control had already transmitted to our shuttle’s flight computer. Odyssey had taken the co-pilot’s chair beside me. Even though the navigation system would be performing the orbital maneuvers, I would technically be the pilot during the course of this mission. The alicorn beside me refused to leave me alone with my thoughts.

“First mare to fly over Titan?” The Princess offered this gentle consolation against my wishes, and I wasn’t afraid to voice as much.

“I hate when these schedules get rearranged. We’re too far from home to be inviting mistakes with sudden, rash changes to our carefully laid plans.”

I was venting, I knew I was venting, Odyssey knew that I was venting too. I felt her eyes on me for a moment or two before they drifted back to the ship’s display panels. I knew the look she was giving me without even seeing it. I’d watched her give it to me once before, when I was pushed off of the active crew list for Jupiter. She was sad for me. She desperately wanted to try and console me.

“Jupe, Titan was always a possible swap for the first visit. We’ve planned for this.”

“Not in Victory we haven’t. This was supposed to be a Tempest visit.”

“It’s just a flyover. We’ll come back with Tempest for the real deal.”

“It’s a waste of our limited fuel reserves, especially if we need to land.”

“What could we possibly see on the radio telescope that would compel us to land and investigate? It'll be pointed at Saturn regardless, we’re just visiting.” She had a point, though I was loath to admit how boring that point would ultimately make this little detour. Titan was a lifeless ball of rock, ice, water, and snow. There wasn’t anything down on the surface of that moon that could ever produce the sheer energy required to overcome the radio output of Saturn itself. Not that we were likely to even see something down there with the telescope pointed the other way around. Maybe this really was just a small detour, something that wouldn’t ultimately change very much about the overall layout of the mission. It was a possibility worth considering, at least a little bit, even if it didn’t make the delayed landings sting any less.

“Remember when I was a kid, Odd?” I asked, trying to switch gears.

“We didn’t know each other back then.”

“I meant in general.”

“Sure, I was barely running my own little optics company in those days.”

“The scientists used to speculate about Titan. Weren’t you one of them?”

“Sometimes it felt like I was the only one. All of the big money was in the war. Even I had to take those contracts to make it. Nopony dared dream about funding missions like this. It took a huge amount of work just to get a little probe out here, and it didn’t do much more than beam some grainy pictures back at us.”

“It had some instruments.”

“Unfortunately, yes.” She sounded dejected, and that had me confused.

“Unfortunately?”

“Of course. How do you think it felt? I had all of those beautiful dreams about Titan. Imagine it! A moon bigger than the planet Mercury, with liquid oceans of salt water, and a significant nitrogen atmosphere ripe for terraforming! It could have been our stepping stone to the stars! Instead, it was a poisonous ice ball covered in clouds and seas of Methane and Ethane. It’s just as hard to make Titan our stepping stone as it is to terraform Venus and its runaway greenhouse effect. Ganymede, Mars, those landed up being the smarter choices. That’s why we went to the Jovian system first. It’s all because of my little Voyager.”

“Didn’t they care about the subsurface oceans? Didn’t that give anyone pause?”

“No. We didn’t learn about that until we were halfway to Io. One of the math boys figured it out based on anomalies in the data from the probe’s magnetometer, but it’s only a theory. That would have been exciting to test at least, with the core drill, but just doing a flyby...”

“Sucks?” I offered.

“Sucks.” She agreed.

The thick, burnt orange cloud cover of Titan’s Nitrogen and Methane atmosphere stretched out beneath us in all directions. We had inserted ourselves into a nearly polar, Saturn-synchronous, orbit. As we sat there, we were going over the data that the radio telescope had gathered from our first three revolutions. We weren’t the only ones, either. Our data-link with The Radiant Hope was beaming our measurements back to Earth just as we were making them. There, teams of uniquely specialized scientists would be collectively making much more headway with this data than the two of us ever could on our own. Were the transmission delay not just over an hour in each direction, we wouldn’t have tried competing with them at all. As it was we were both well out of our depth here. Neither of us were experts in this particular field. Even still, we couldn’t ignore the possibility that we might discover something so incredibly obvious that even the two of us would know we had to investigate it immediately.

That was part of the reason I was so mad in the first place. Sure, an early trip to Titan was always in the cards. However, with the radio telescope pointed firmly at Saturn itself, any sudden discoveries would require us to expend mountains of fuel crossing half of the Saturnian System just to investigate things further. Every burn we committed to beyond this single extra visit was another place we couldn’t go, another part of the mission we couldn’t do. Fuel was a precious commodity. Chasing ghosts on the radio waves was a quick and easy way to send us home with no actual landings to show for our efforts. Odyssey was slightly too proud to openly complain about it, but she wasn’t any happier about the possibility. The Princess had been robbed of her dreams by this ice ball once before. Here, it might just become a second time.

Still, we wouldn’t exactly be good scientists if we picked and chose our experiments based solely on the outcomes that we liked. This mission was more important than the two of us and our insignificant problems. Countless individuals back home were watching and waiting. Out here, we were their only eyes, ears, and hooves. So it was that we donned our headphones, poured over ever-expanding waveforms on our displays, grit our teeth, and decided to bear the brutal work like true professionals. There were ponies, griffons, hippogriffs, sea ponies, horses, donkeys, caribou, zebras, and multitudes of other creatures that were all depending on us. We couldn’t let them down. Even if it absolutely killed us on the inside, we couldn’t let them down.

A burst of static exploded through my earphones, forcing me to rip them off in shock. Odyssey threw hers against the impenetrable diamond-glass of Victory’s viewport. They floated there in silence as the two of us blinked in shock, staring down at our screens. We slowly turned to look at each other. The ringing was slowly fading from our ears. Neither of us knew what to make of what had just happened, but we could see the evidence of the burst clearly on our faces. It was just like the burst we heard before, on The Radiant Hope. This time we had sampled it directly instead of catching its reflection. Odyssey stared at me, her expression slowly turning from shock to apologetic sadness. It took me a few more seconds than it should before my confusion melted to a sudden wave of dread and understanding. I was the first one to say it.

“We need to go check this out.”

“I’m sorry, Jupiter.”

“We’re heading back towards Saturn.”

“And that means...”

“We need to use more fuel. We just lost out on our pass of Phoebe.”

It was starting. Titan was rifling through our pockets, robbing us of our dreams.

Odyssey performed the necessary math to pinpoint the source of the repeating static burst. To our shock, the reflected radio signal hadn’t actually originated from Saturn after all. The transmission had instead originated from a twenty kilometer area on the surface of the moon Tethys. This moon currently orbited Saturn just ahead of Mimas and just behind Titan. The source of the burst was located on the face of the moon directly opposite from The Radiant Hope. This posed an immediate and serious problem for us, which had prompted a significant discussion on how to proceed. We had a duty to the creatures of Earth to investigate findings of this magnitude. We were both sure of that. However, landing in a location without line-of-sight to The Hope meant we couldn’t call on anyone for help and support. That also meant we couldn’t share the real-time data collected from our sensors as we approached the burst’s source. We weren’t supposed to be doing anything like that outside of extraordinary mission-critical circumstances.

“Jupe, we can’t just ignore something like this. It’s too important.”

“I agree, but we can’t cut off our own communications to do it.”

“What about the cubesats? We’ve got three of them, we could use one as an antenna.”

“Fuel, Odd, it’s all about the fuel.”

“It’s just a few kilograms of payload each.”

“We have to burn back to The Radiant to pick them up. That’s the Iapetus pass, Odyssey! Every ton of fuel is...” I trailed off, realizing the numbers were potentially much worse than I was about to claim. Time was a factor in the alignment of these things. These three moons were sure to slip out of the nice triangular formation they were currently orbiting in.

“I know, I do, but isn’t this more important? Jupe, what if there’s something out there?” I turned away from her. I was trying my hardest to play devil’s advocate, in favor of preserving the mission as planned. I knew instinctively that Odyssey was already being exceptionally cautious in her analysis but, this decision couldn’t just be down to one of us. Too much of the mission was at stake.

“What if it’s nothing.” Odyssey just looked at me, blankly, as if she couldn’t quite follow. “What if it’s an error in the math and just some Gamma Ray Burst from way out in space?”

“Then we waste the fuel on a good hunch but, Jupe, it repeats. Not exactly quickly, either. The previous burst was yesterday.”

“Well, what if it’s something perfectly natural like an explosion?” That sure took Odyssey by surprise.

“A repeating explosion?!”

“Sure. It’s mostly water ice. We’ve speculated Tethys could be cryovolcanic in the past. One of its active spots might be producing enough energy to produce radio waves.”

“Like a bomb?”

“A bomb’s just a high enough concentration of energy in a short enough period of time.”

“But repeating? Wouldn’t such a surface feature destroy itself over time? Or, for that matter, right away?”

“It could. Such a feature could also destroy us right along with it. With the coms down, nopony would ever know. They’d find The Hope floating abandoned one day, without the slightest trace of us to be found.”

“They’d potentially see the cubesat.”

“Only if we expend the extra fuel to retrieve and place one. That might only give them an entire moon as a clue. The surface of Tethys is cratered for a reason, Odyssey. It could be as simple as meteroties of frozen methane exploding when they hit the surface.”

She frowned at that, in deep thought, “It really could be as simple as a meteor shower, couldn’t it? Hold on. What if we sent a probe?”

My eyes nearly bulged out of my head! “You mean the landing probe? The one that’s supposed to tell us whether our proposed landing zones are safe? If we lose one of those we’re effectively down an entire shuttle! They wouldn’t be able to attempt remote rescue in an emergency anymore. We’d be sacrificing every possible landing if we still wanted to follow procedure.”

Odyssey hung her head low, looking defeated, she was clearly out of good suggestions. Between the two of us, there were a few moments of simple silence as we strained ourselves to consider our options. I briefly wished there was a higher power that I could ask for help.

“I’m right here.” The Princess suddenly started, unprompted.

“Huh?” She looked to me with newfound confidence as I fought off my own confusion.

“We’re here, both of us. We’re both right here at the cusp of discovery. Something we couldn’t have planned for, something new that we couldn’t have ever even known about, is practically right next to us. The grand explorers of ages past risked their lives for the discoveries that we now take for granted. Imagine where we’d be if they had stopped to ask if everything they did was absolutely safe!”

She turned and tapped her only forehoof on an open spot on the ship’s console, emphasizing the ship as she started overflowing with enthusiastic energy.

“I worked on these space planes. I watched whole teams of crystal ponies pour thousands of hours of work into fluid simulations for flights in highly variable atmospheres. I watched crash tests on bundles of individual components, and simulated full-scale accidents at all manner of velocities. They designed a tough customer. This is a ship that could be bundled up and sent all the way to Saturn with absolute and unwavering confidence!” I considered the monumental feat of engineering that both Victory and Tempest ultimately were. These space planes were truly impressive vehicles. They were packed with the results of centuries of careful research into arcane science and engineering. They weren’t the most uncommon vehicles in the modern day, either. We had roughly twenty of them floating around The Terran System at any given moment, but they were no less impressive for their obscene reliability and unmatched track-record.

“And you, Jupiter.”

That broke me from my contemplation, causing me to stare vacantly at the alicorn. “Me?”

“Yes! You’re amazing! I’ve seen you log hundreds of hours of simulator time, flying these shuttles under all kinds of adverse conditions! You’ve been training yourself, as hard as you can, to be ready for anything! And you know what? I think you are.” I blushed a bit at that, feeling a burst of pride at the praise. I wasn’t sure that I deserved it, but Odyssey sure seemed impressed.

“So, yeah. Could it be a volcano made of diamonds, spewing antimatter?”

“No. That’s impossible.”

“Exactly! Whatever is down there, it could only realistically surprise us so much! With us being as prepared as we are? With these tools? With your talent? It’d be a waste not to press the opportunity to our advantage and go take a look!”

“I…” was practically at a loss for words, “think we should risk it. You’re right. Any plausible surface activity wouldn’t be that great of a risk. Besides, you’re good at improvising. If we get into trouble, I’m sure you’ll be able to think of something.”

“Then we’re in agreement?”

“I think we are!”

“Then let’s go make history!”

We took Victory in with its nose facing backwards. A brief burn of our main engines against our momentum slowed us down. The computer killed the landing burn with incredibly precise timing. That left us in a near hover over one of the many ancient craters littering the barren surface of Tethys. Odyssey hit the console toggle to deploy the vessel’s landing legs. I used the ship’s maneuvering thrusters to gently guide us down through the moon’s extremely light gravity. A pleasant thud marked the moment our ship made contact with the ground. Victory slowly settled into the millennia of dust and dirt covering the Saturnian Moon’s cratered surface. We were down deep in the leveled basin of the crater. Our ship had landed facing both our destination and the way which we had come. It was still possible to see the orange ball of Titan sitting up in the sky, through the viewport, but neither of us were looking at it.

Instead the both of us were staring at the object we had identified upon our approach. It was something that had filled us with mixed feelings of confusion and disappointment. Some of that disappointment was alleviated now. Sure, landing meant we had wasted quite a lot of fuel for less than we had hoped. However, that took nothing away from the fact that we had indeed successfully landed on one of Saturn’s moons. It struck me that it looked much like our own, though that was despite a vastly different chemical composition that was largely water ice.

Odyssey unbuckled herself from her seat and tried to stand. For her efforts, the alicorn soon found herself rebounding off of the ceiling. I winced as she struggled to stop from bouncing off of the floor as well. Even after months in space, we were still much too strong for our own good on Tethys. She looked at me as I gingerly released my restraints and practically slid out of my chair. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but I decided to make a certain call ahead of time.

“The maneuvering packs, just in case.” Odyssey nodded in agreement as we turned to head for the back rooms. We would need to change from our lighter flight suits into our heavier space suits before heading out of the airlock. Hopefully that would add enough mass to help us with walking. We had quite the little trek in front of us, but it wouldn’t have been safe to park the ship all that close to where we were headed.

Odyssey gave her levitation gem one final look before velcroing the amulet down to the front of her space suit. I gave the straps of my maneuvering pack one final visual check just to be safe. We gave each other complete visual inspections. We followed the checklists and made sure that our suits were mirror images of each other before turning to the airlock one final time. This was it. I looked intently at Odyssey, whose eyes were so focused on the hatch that I felt like they could burn a hole clean through it. I offered her a small distraction from her thoughts, in the form of some simple conversation.

“First mare on Tethys. That’s not so bad.” That seemed to rip her free from her quiet introspection.

“Did you prepare a speech?”

“Twelve of them.” That got a chuckle out of her. I liked that. She was better when she wasn’t so intensely serious.

“I’m sure you’ll do great, Jupe. Lead the way.” She brought down her sun reflector to match my own, hiding her face from me. I nodded to her and tapped the airlock control. The sound of rushing air filled the room before fading into a gentle hiss. After another minute, it was gone. All I could hear were the sounds of my own breathing. I looked at Odyssey one final time before toggling the door control. The hatch slowly lifted, revealing the landing, and the stairs extended further beyond. I quickly toggled an option to fold the stairs into ramp mode, hoping they’d prove easier for my companion to navigate. We made our way forward, onto the landing, and gazed with wonder at the ground stretched out before us. After a precious few moments, I began descending the ramp. I opened my mouth to begin my speech. It was just in time to see Odyssey tumble past me with all of the grace and majesty of a bag filled with cement.

Author's Note

I spent a lot of time editing Chapter 2 before this story's first chapter was even in a ready state to post. This was largely because Chapter 2 introduced the first real technical discussion (at the time) and I wanted to expend the effort to ensure they were neither too explanatory for believable conversations nor running the risk of becoming truly meaningless technobabble. After significant research, this chapter struck a balance that I used as a template for scientific discussions across the rest of the story. Whenever possible, real-world science is used as a foundation for everything that's discussed.

Chapter 3: Sources

I sprinted down the ramp with every ounce of strength I had inside, diving for the ground as if my life depended on it. I slid straight into the icey dust, digging a small trench in the shavings as something hard landed on top of me with a prominent thud. I looked up, cautiously, slowly trailing my eyes up to the icey dirt piled against my visor. I stared at it in muted shock as the ringing of adrenaline slowly dissipated in my ears. It took a few seconds to register that the glass wasn’t cracked. That brought a smile to my face, I was alive! I was horrifically stupid, but I was alive!

Odyssey sounded panicked when I heard her voice come up over the radio. “Are you alright Jupiter?!”

I started laughing. It might have confused the heck out of my companion, but I couldn’t help but feel an unrelenting surge of joy as I realized just how horribly wrong that descent from the ramp had gone. Historical events like this were often remembered as sobering and serious occasions marked by powerful words. As it turned out, actually going through one was just a combination of trying to fight back vomit and the unrelenting forces of chaos that were dead-set on robbing you blind. Despite it all, I had still managed it, I was the first Mare to set a hoof on a moon of Saturn. I had made history, silently, in the company of a good friend. It was these little moments that made it all worth it.

We dusted each other off and gave our gear another brief visual inspection. Thankfully the fall had been gentle enough to avoid damaging our equipment. I gave a small, tasteful speech to mark the occasion to a grand audience of just one other mare. I had even impressed myself with my own ability to entirely improvise around that historic prat-fall of ours. Unfortunately, nopony else would hear our broadcast until we had launched our ship and reestablished radio communications with The Radiant Hope. For now, we were entirely on our own.

Odyssey and I turned to face our current goal, an object we had spotted upon our initial approach to Tethys. The sight of it had confused us both but there was something profoundly personal about its presence that had been written all over The Princess’s hidden face. I took charge, starting ahead, my companion following behind. We weren’t all that close to the thing. It took a few minutes of gently skipping across the foriegn lunar landscape before we made it to the object. A cursory visual inspection indeed revealed exactly what we had suspected it would be from afar. Odyssey raised her voice at the thing, sounding particularly angry at it.

“How on Earth could it have gotten here?”

“Aerobraking?”

She turned her head towards me, and I could feel her disapproving glare through the inky black of her one-way protective visor. “That’s impossible. This is impossible. None of this is a natural, probable, or mathematical occurrence.”

That very thought had never quite escaped me. I imagined it was precisely that which the two of us had been so confused about from the start. We were staring at a space probe. The word “Voyager” was printed plainly on its side, implying it was the very probe that Odyssey had helped to launch over a decade ago. That object had entered the Saturnian System going faster than we had. That had been more than fast enough to completely destroy it, especially if it had hit any object in the system without slowing down first. The strangest part was that the original probe had never been on a vector to impact anything, even with generous margins of error taken into account. I only had one possible explanation for this turn of events in the probe’s life.

“Odyssey, somepony must have placed this here.”

A sudden burst of static rang loudly over our headsets and cut off her reply, utterly drowning out her transmission with its raw power. I saw the mare encase the entire machine in her mighty magic and lift the whole of the space probe off of the ground in mere seconds. The static instantly faded into a clear and irregular beeping tone. It was a data transmission immediately familiar to anyone that had worked with the probes of the space program. It was a simple computerized transmission, trying to phone home. Odyssey had a little more to say about it.

“The static was a ground loop. None of this equipment was designed to transmit while being grounded like this. It was playing havoc with the amplifiers.” I could barely hear her say any of that through the radio feed. Lifting the probe had removed the static, but it hadn’t done anything to change the volume level. The broadcast was obscenely powerful, having been designed to reach the distant blue dot of Earth. It left my ears ringing! Luckily, the bursts of digital signaling ended only a moment or so later.

“It’s still trying to communicate with Earth.” I observed, sadly.

“Wouldn’t you?” I glanced at her, confused. “It looks fairly intact considering it somehow arrested an impossible amount of momentum with only its tiny ion thruster… without us ever telling it to. It’s almost like we’re supposed to believe it has a mind of its own.”

Odyssey’s words sent a chill down my spine, one colder than space itself! It hadn’t just been sitting here all this time, the probe was bait! We had walked right into some kind of trap. I resisted the urge to look around for an obvious attacker. If they were indeed violent, it said a lot that they hadn’t struck us yet. I didn’t want to tip them off with any sudden movements, nor be overly cautious either.

“They can’t hear us,” I posited directly, “our transmissions are too weak. They’d have to be physically present to pick them up now. They must have expected us to be more cautious and establish direct communication for a landing, like procedures would normally call for.”

“Jupe, there’s nothing saying they aren’t actually here.”

That sent another chill down my spine. I instinctively tried to oppose the thought, offering counter-suggestions that felt logical to me. “They’d need a suit, and a vehicle.”

“You mean a shield and a teleport spell?”

“That’s impossible, the distance is too vast. It’d take too much magic to teleport here, it’d take too much time.”

“Jupiter, they’re not doing anything remotely with a two and a half hour delay.” I froze, realizing that she was right. She gestured with her head towards the sky before leaving me with a simple question: “What don’t you see up there?”

I didn’t need to look. “Earth. They couldn’t even be using lasers. We’re totally occluded. What about magic?”

“I like to think I’d be able to feel that but, that’s just a hope. Either way there’d be a significant delay. Magical energies can only travel at light speed or slower.”

I looked up at the floating probe, utterly unsure of myself. “What do we do?”

“The better question is; what can they do and what should we be doing about it?”

“Well, they could kill us.”

“Why wait this long?” She was right, they’d already lost the element of surprise. If they were smart enough to do all of this, then they would have expected us to figure out that something was wrong by now.

“They could trap us? Hold us hostage, for a ransom?”

“How?”

“By…”

We turned to look at each other, having had the same thought at the same moment, and spoke in near unison.

“Stealing the ship.”

I turned to sprint for it, without thinking, but the alicorn grabbed me in her magical telekinesis before I could run off.

“No! It could be sabotaged!” The probe fell to the ground behind us. Odyssey had completely lost her grasp of it when she had reached out to stop me with her mind. The thing crumpled immediately, almost completely silently. The excessively muffled sound of twisting steel made it to our ears through simple conduction with the ground. Odyssey cringed, then stumbled in place as the ground shook. The horrifically loud sound of cracking ice filled our ears. In an instant the world went eerily silent as the ground dropped out from underneath me. The landscape in front of me began to fracture and shift before my eyes.

I was freed from my immobilized state as Odyssey’s concentration suddenly and completely failed. I dropped directly into a hellish, ear-shattering earthquake! I stumbled around in time to see the other girl practically falling over on her three legs. I rushed to her side and tried to help steady her. It was quickly becoming clear that staying here was a pointlessly dangerous endeavor. Around us, jets of frigid steam were shooting up between the cracks. Subterranean water deposits were flash-boiling from the sudden drop to vacuum pressure. They weren’t threatening to burn us, but these violent pressure releases could easily send us flying hundreds of meters! That was assuming the flying debris ice didn’t bludgeon or concuss us as the frozen surface violently exploded out of the way.

I thought better of trying to communicate any of this to Odyssey and simply slammed a forehoof against her backside. An instinct took over in her and she reared up before trying her best to run forward. She did a remarkably okay job of it, proving that balance was easier when half of your step time was spent falling far through the air. I did my best to follow behind her. I was trying to focus through my labored and panicked breathing as I watched massive cracks advance out through the ice in all directions. They were spreading out from under us as the ancient crater basin started to fracture apart. Every second in the air was narrated with unsettling silence. Every moment a hoof was pressed to the ground was overwhelmed by the panic of cracking, groaning, and distant boiling.

It didn’t occur to me until we were halfway to Victory that this moon might have contained significant pockets of subsurface liquid water under its craters. I didn’t have the time to once again lament bringing the least appropriate of our two space planes. I was too busy watching in horror as Victory began listing at an increasingly worrying angle relative to everything around it. Angrily boiling water lapped at one of the edges of the ice sheet the craft was perched upon. The whole ship looked like it was mere minutes away from sliding into a rapidly boiling underground lake.

I watched the listing grow worse as I slowly grew closer. I watched as Odyssey waited with impressive patience for her pilot to arrive at the top of the ramp. I stood in horrified panic as we waited for the airlock to cycle. Neither of us bothered with procedure, properly stowing equipment, or changing back into our flight suits. I threw off my manuerving pack, galloped down an increasingly sideways hallway, and jumped for the pilot’s chair with the unwavering confidence of the pegasus pony I knew I wasn’t. I got there just in time to watch the viewscreen plow directly into the water. I slammed the power toggles out of standby mode and watched as every single system’s alarm began to panic in unison. The ship’s Master Alarm was blaring, the maneuvering controls were unresponsive, every engine was reporting as being hopelessly flooded, and the new direction of gravity had me falling out of my chair! The last thing I remembered was my face rushing towards the inside of my helmet as it cracked itself against Victory’s viewscreen.

I woke up in a daze. I had no idea how much time had passed, but I supposed it must have been very little. I had fainted, not concussed myself, at least that was the hope I chose to live with. The viewport certainly didn’t have any better news for me. The water outside was so dark that it was impossible to tell just how far down it truly went. My better logic quickly fought off a primal fear that we’d fall into the center of the moon and be crushed by the pressure of an impossible sea. Tethys didn’t have significant subsurface oceans, it couldn’t, none of the data from that cursed probe indicated that it ever could.

I tried to spin around in place but found my efforts hampered by something heavy. I turned my head to see my own maneuvering pack resting on top of me. It was an incredible distance from where I had just remembered dropping it. A concussion promptly landed up a serious consideration once again, not that either of us had the medical skills and equipment to deal with that possibility. I did my best to shove aside the increasingly horrifying realization that I was a dead mare walking, even if the two of us somehow made it out of this mess. If I had a serious head injury I could be fine for minutes, hours, or days before suddenly and unceremoniously dropping dead where I stood. Celestia above, was this really my fate just because we hadn’t bothered to properly return our gear to stowage?

“We.”

The realization that I had momentarily forgotten about Odyssey ripped me from my introspection, and my eyes immediately scanned the cockpit for any sign of her. I spotted The Princess clearly rooted to the cockpit floor. She was braced in-place before the open doorway to the hall, standing on what was now the wall. Through the darkened shield of her visor multiple layers of magical glow were illuminating her face. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut in concentration. It was in this moment that I had two immediate thoughts:

Firstly: I was incredibly envious of a pegasi’s natural ability to outright defy gravity by continuing to stand on what was now a wall. I’d seen this casually achieved a couple of times in my life and it never ceased to fill me with jealousy.
Secondly: Unless my inner ears were terribly injured, I realized we weren’t actually sinking. There wasn’t any sensation of rising or falling to be had, we were completely neutrally buoyant.

Odyssey cried out in pain as the ship groaned under the stress. The mental anguish of levitating in this situation was evidently much greater than holding the probe aloft had been. The girl quickly called out to me in desperation, breaking me free of my silence.

“Jupiter! Please!”

“I’m here! On the canopy glass!” I replied.

“I can’t lift us. The ice closed over top of us.”

My eyes widened as I realized the implications behind Odyssey’s words. Our vessel was entirely submerged within a subsurface lake, underneath thick sheets of ancient ice. There wasn’t any way I could have ever imagined this mission turning out so bleak before now, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that. We needed a plan. Even if it had no hope of actually working, we still had to at least try to make it out of here alive. I threw the heavy maneuvering pack off of me, tossing it aside so that I could sit upright. Then I finally thought to ask an obvious question.

“What’s your magic doing?”

“Hopefully it’s keeping us from sinking!”

I suddenly doubted that was actually true, and started quickly going through some math in my head. Memories of a younger and less informed me, protesting the “lies” of The Sun Princess came to mind. Ponies claiming to carry impossible amounts of mass in their magical grasp had never sat particularly right with me, especially in those days. However, life had since taught me that some ponies did actually possess those rare talents.

“Let go!” I ordered, watching her eyes shoot open in stunned shock.

“Are you suicidal?! I can feel the forces acting on us!”

“It’s buoyancy. It’s pushing us up, not down.”

She stared at me with a confused look that said several thousand hours of her own engineering expertise couldn’t see how I’d be right, but she didn’t question it any further. The glow faded and the ship lurched as it ripped free of her invisible hold and surged upright. A horrific crunching sound and a violent lurch indicated an impact. The ship hit the ice flow at an odd angle before leveling out and slamming flat against the ice sheet. I went flying, the world going blurry as the wind was knocked out of me. Though, this time, I managed not to pass out completely. We were floating, for sure. Our entire ship was exactly upside-down under the ice flow. I shakily stood on the former ceiling of the ship and looked up at Odyssey, who was occupying her same spot on the new ceiling. Her pegasus powers now had her fully defying physics, and I was only growing more jealous of her for it.

“Jupe… how?”

“Gravity factors into the buoyancy formula, this isn’t Earth.”

She looked stunned, “But, how did you know that was water out there?”

It was my turn to look stunned. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the lake could have been composed of an entirely different substance. The thought hadn’t even entered my mind!

“I, um… didn’t.” Odyssey looked away from me, frightened. I was mortified. “But there’s no time for that. We need a plan!” She turned her head back towards me, frowning in disapproval as I fidgeted in embarrassment. After a few seconds, I relented. “I’m sorry, Odyssey.”

She shrugged. “Shit happens.” She squinted towards the former floor beneath her. “Lucky for us, I think we’re still under that capsized ice sheet.”

“Can you flip it, Odd?”

“Not a chance, not on my own. Magic’s not as easy as it looks.”

Something about the way she phrased that stuck in my mind. “On your own?” Suddenly, an idea formed in my head, one altogether too glorious not to work. “What about with help?”

“Jupiter, you’re an Earth Pony.”

“Not from me! From Voyager!” Odyssey clenched her eyes shut and did some quick math.

“Leverage? To flip the ice?”

“Or at least start it moving!”

She smiled at that. “Now that’s what I call a plan!”

Odyssey’s magic lifted me to the pilot’s chair and I quickly strapped myself in. I was still upside-down but, if we were lucky, we’d be upright before all of the blood was finished rushing to my head. The Princess concentrated hard, picking up the distant probe in her remote grasp and lifting it over to the other end of the ice sheet above us. The plan was easy enough to grasp, it was easier to push down on a see-saw than up. With the weight of Voyager on one side, the buoyancy of Victory might just be enough to encourage the ice sheet to flip.

The Princess slammed the probe down on the sheet with impressive force, the ice sheet actually moved, and the buoyant Victory pushed up to the water’s surface. The water that had invaded every orifice of our ship immediately began to boil away. Warning indicators slowly started to blink off as the flooding boiled to steam and dissipated into vacuum. I slammed down the landing gear lever to max and listened as the hydraulic legs started pushing on the ice with immense force! Odyssey practically cried out in excitement!

“It’s going! It’s actually going!”

I slammed back the landing gear lever and watched as the crumpled form of Voyager slowly sank in front of me. Better it than us, but I couldn’t help but feel that something of incredible historic significance had been forever lost. The swinging ice came around under us and scooped us up, for a few precious seconds we were on the ground again! I was sweating bullets as I watched the last of the flood warnings fade away. When the master alarm finally silenced itself, I slammed the maneuvering controls and let the ship’s thrusters shoot us off into the airless sky of Tethys. We had escaped!

Author's Note

I got my first actual feedback after Chapter 2 released and, as a result, I've spent a lot of time carefully editing this chapter to reduce run-on sentences. Behind the scenes, I've recently finished Chapter 6 and am now turning my attention towards revisions and edits. I may go back now and rework some of Chapters 1 and 2 to increase their readability, if there's time. Overall, though, I'm really enjoying how this story has gone! I hope you've been enjoying it too!

Chapter 4: Encounters

Odyssey pulled off her helmet and quickly tossed it aside. Before I even knew what was happening the girl had jumped across the cockpit, tackled me into a full-body hug, and kissed my visor in pure joy. I couldn’t help but laugh in sheer celebration. I was utterly elated! I had Victory facing the right way up now. I also had us on a safe path towards an orbital insertion point above this small deathtrap of a moon. The two of us were laughing and crying as waves of relief crashed over us. I motioned to pull off my own helmet but stalled when I suddenly noticed Odyssey’s kiss mark was at lip-level. When she noticed my intentions, The Princess practically ripped the thing off for me. Thankfully, when that barrier between us was cast aside, I was only assaulted with some friendly affectionate nuzzling. I really couldn’t complain too much about that.

“Woah! Easy, Odd!” I pleaded between spontaneous bursts of laughter.

“I can’t believe we did it! I can’t believe we’re alive!” I’d never heard her so happy! Her joy was infectious! The atmosphere in here was filling me with a certain uncharacteristic bravado that quickly started making choices on my behalf:

“Yeah! Those dumb assassins didn’t know who they’d be messing with!”

“Totally! We’re an unstoppable team! We can do anything!”

“Hell yeah! Nothing can stop us now, Odd!”

“We’re totally unbreakable!”

“Yeah! Absolutely undefeatable!”

“Champions of the Worlds!” The joy in the cabin was absolutely electric. Odyssey skipped to her chair and perched herself atop it as she excitedly checked the readout screens. A second later an audible ping from the ship’s computer marked the start of our data upload to The Radiant Hope. I spun the chair around and pulled up the terminal on my own screen. Logged in remotely like this, I could watch The Hope’s computer system send the data transmissions to Earth. Despite the hour plus transmission delay, the actual data connections were actually extremely fast. It only took a few seconds to send or receive hundreds of terabytes of data. The rest of the time was just spent waiting for the massive transmission to sail across the incredible vastness of space.

As such, we were only now getting a reply from home on our initial discoveries over Titan. Odyssey spotted the message on her own display first. Unfortunately she was too excited to do anything more than wildly gesture her forehoof at it. I giggled at her animated attempt to try and notify me of the message, before bringing it up on Victory’s speakers.

“Radiant Hope, this is Mission Control. If you haven’t committed to it already, we recommend immediate investigation of the unidentified signal source on Tethys. We’ve narrowed its origin down to a precise location. A safe approach is ready for your flight computer, should it still be needed.” They were very behind us. “That said, we urge caution. We’ve analyzed the burst pattern and have isolated a data transmission consistent with the probe communication structures of the previous Voyager mission. We recommend a flyover to visually confirm the probe’s presence before approaching the site. Military intelligence suggests this could be bait for some kind of trap.” I looked to Odyssey in shock and found her doing the same to me. They were a lot more caught up than either of us had expected. “As a temporary precaution, we’ve directed the mars orbital telescope array to keep an eye on you during this mission. If you already traveled to Tethys before receiving this transmission, then they should have been in position to watch your approach. Assuming that much, we’ll already be pouring over that data by the time you receive this communication.” Nevermind being caught up, these ponies might even be slightly ahead of us. “All of the major superpowers of Earth have denied interfering with the Voyager probe. That, of course, doesn’t discount the interference of rogue elements or non-state actors. Stay safe out there. Control out.”

I leaned back in my chair and thought over the implications of what I’d just heard. If Mars had been watching us since the burst signal, then they had seen everything that had just happened on Tethys. They weren’t quite caught up yet, the speed of light was only so fast, but they would inevitably be fully aware of the state of our mission. I looked at Odyssey and found her frowning at her own screen.

“A bit for your thoughts, Odd?”

“Just that they’re probably right. Some kind of rogue entity using magic to plan interference in our mission. They would’ve needed to start years back, before we ever launched. Admittedly, I’m not entirely sure what they could have been hoping to achieve. Also, it’d be a good idea to store our loose gear before it lands up crashing into us… again.”

I really didn’t want to dwell on my potential concussion right now. “You did make a valid point back there about them possibly being physically present.”

Odyssey waved her forehoof dismissively at that. “Nah, that was before it turned out to be a death trap.” The girl got up from her seat and stood in the wonky gravity of the ship’s current vector. I grabbed the controls and gently shifted the pitch angle to assist her. We weren’t quite into orbit yet. There was still a burn ahead of us and there was still some minor gravity to be felt from our current flight path. “I doubt anypony was physically there. They probably just rigged the ice to blow when the probe was moved.”

“I doubt it.” I turned in my seat to look at her.

The Princess had stopped in the middle of leaning down to pick up her discarded Helmet. She lifted her head and looked up at me with an eyebrow raised. “Dare I ask why?”

“It was a crater. That subsurface lake was likely a natural result of the impact from the meteor that exploded there thousands of years ago. You might have been able to guess it was there, but Voyager had never found any data to indicate there were significant liquid water deposits on Tethys. So who could’ve possibly planned for all that?”

“No idea.” She shrugged off the conversation before picking up her helmet in her teeth and trotting towards the hall just out of my vision. I decided to keep looking over the ship’s readouts just in case there was damage lingering from the incident on Tethys. I heard the helmet clatter to the floor a second later, dropped almost immediately upon some realization I wasn’t aware of. “You saved it?!”

What? “Yeah, I guess I saved all of us? You, me, the ship..”

“The Sounds of Earth!”

What.“The who of what where? Odyssey, I’m kind of busy with some calibrations.”

“The Golden Record, I didn’t realize you’d grabbed it!”

I spun my chair around to find Odyssey standing before the open doorway. She was staring at a large golden disc leaning against the wall inside. I had never seen it before. “What is that?”

She turned towards me, surprised. “You don’t know?” I shook my head. “It’s called The Sounds of Earth. It’s a record containing a message for the creatures of the stars.” I supposed it wasn’t getting delivered now. That sad thought was interrupted by Odyssey’s visible confusion. “What, did you just grab it because it looked important?”

“Odyssey, I just got hit in the head! I could potentially have some kind of memory loss but I don’t remember grabbing any discs.”

The girl reached out with her magic and floated the delicate thing over to herself.

“You don’t remember anything? It had to have been you, it’s got your spit all over it. Between the two of us, you’re more likely to carry things the Earth Pony way.” I frowned at her, in clear disapproval. “What?” I pointed a forehoof at the helmet she had been carrying in her own mouth a moment before. She looked down at it, noting her spit on it. “I… don’t typically do that.” I had little doubt that she believed that. The girl levitated the helmet as well, bringing it alongside the disc in the air. “I know it wasn’t me, so it had to have been you.”

“Odyssey, you just removed my helmet.” She looked up from the two objects and turned her head to look at me. We stared at each other for a short while, failing to connect any dots at all. She looked back to the disc, then back to me. I slowly shrugged my shoulders and started shaking my head. Odyssey glanced back and forth between the object and myself a few times before suddenly growing visibly distressed.

“Did… Did I get hit in the head too?”

“Odyssey, you removed your helmet to try and kiss me. Don’t you remember?”

The flush of crimson on her cheeks said that she did. “Well, we must have had our helmets off at some point! Unless this isn’t… uh…” She stared at the disc again, both of us did. I had to admit, that liquid did not have the evident viscosity of water. “Were… were we submerged in a giant mouth? Was that not actually water?”

I turned back towards the ship’s displayed readouts to double check my own sanity and found the situation largely unchanged. “Organic material wouldn’t have been cleanly flash-boiled in a vacuum to clear the engine flooding.”

“The flood alarm is just for back pressure against the tank’s valve. Something being present isn’t a problem. It just can’t be pushing harder than the tank’s initial outlet pressure.”

I looked up from my screens and turned back towards the obvious engineer with a blank expression.“Uh, can I get that in normal pony speak?”

“Those were perfectly normal words!”

“Look, it’s a body of water under some ice. It’s not a stomach. It could have maybe had some organic materials in it. However, we’d need to go back with our other shuttle to do any meaningful science there, and I would rather not waste the fuel with Titan still on the table. Titan has entire, verifiable oceans. If you’re actually interested in the weird liquid on the disc you took-”

“It’s a record.”

“Disc, record, whatever-”

“Why did I have to be the one to take it? I don’t remember doing that!”

“You were levitating the entire probe! …Twice! Maybe you just brought it along subconsciously or something.”

“Magic isn’t subconscious, Jupe! It’s deliberate.”

“Fine. Then go deliberately put your mystery liquid in one of our sample containers and we’ll have the lab equipment analyze it when we get back to The Hope. For now, Victory’s sensor suites were recording absolutely everything going on. We’ll have more than enough data to figure out the rest of the details later. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“But.”

“And hurry up! We’ve only got a few minutes before the window on our orbital insertion burn and we need all of this loose equipment properly stowed before then.” I really didn’t want to get hit another time. I felt alright but, with head injuries that unfortunately didn’t count for much. The brain didn’t actually feel pain, so for all I knew I was slowly bleeding to death inside my skull.

“Alright, fine. I’ll go stow it in the stowage closet with everything else.”

“Not the helmets, though. We need those.”

“Right.” She dropped her own on the spot and walked towards the hall to go store her disc and the mystery liquid that was all over it. I spun the chair around to read my vessel’s instruments. I was still watching The Radiant Hope’s data on the terminal when I heard Odyssey scream and stumble over behind me.

I rolled my eyes. “What is it now?” Then I swiveled my chair around to see what could have happened. I saw Odyssey backing up from the doorway in a panic. Initially I didn’t have the faintest clue as to why. Then I saw it, and everything suddenly made perfect sense.

There was another pony standing in the hallway. Presumably, Odyssey had discovered it when she had opened the stowage room door. It wasn’t wearing one of our space suits. It had an orange one of its own design. It was crude, basic, lacking in some of the simple design considerations that our own design teams had agonized over. A yellow painted helmet with a simple incandescent lamp hid its owner’s face behind a wall of darkness. It was similar to our own in that regard, but there was a distinctly different and off-putting feel to this intruder.

“Odyssey, I think that’s the trap layer that recovered your disc.” I had already forgotten that she had called the thing a record, and Odyssey forgot to correct me.

“I think you might be right.” The girl continued to back her way into the room until her hind hoof hit her discarded helmet and she froze in place. She quickly glanced back to check on what had impeded her retreat only for her ears to fold back against her head as she realized she’d looked away from the intruder. She turned back around in time to see the pony had advanced on her by a few steps. “Stop!” The mare commanded with a shout of authority that was only minimally compromised by the way she was shaking in fear. The intruder pony stopped advancing, then tilted its head at The Princess in a gesture I assumed to be an expression of curiosity. It wasn’t armed, at least not obviously. I also doubted, from the shape, that a horn could fit under its helmet like it could with ours. Admittedly, I was a bit lost on what might have been its intention here. Though, it might have been wrong to fully assume it had any at this stage.

A muffled, foreign accent spoke through the helmet. “Children?” It questioned ominously as Odyssey and I gave each other worried and serious glances. The intruder pony slowly reached up with one of their forehooves to touch their own helmet. I didn’t figure out why until I heard the sudden hiss of the released internal pressure. They sat down on their haunches and reached up with their other forehoof to assist in slowly sliding off their helmet. The theatrics of this obvious villain had me terrified! They were doubtlessly seconds from completely hijacking our entire ship! The purpose of this nefarious scheme was beyond me, but I was hoping to at least relish in the solace of this individual’s revealed identity before we all died.

The intruder removed its helmet and placed it on the floor. Their face revealed, they decided simply to stare at us. Odyssey and I stared back, utterly dumbfounded. The reveal hadn’t made any portion of their identity any more clear. In fact, it had revealed a strange looking, fish-like Earth Pony with a smile made of sharp teeth! What form of sorcery was this?! We had never even seen a pony like this before in our lives. They looked, perplexingly enough, a lot like a shark.

The pony spoke again, unmuffled this time. “Hello.”

Odyssey glanced at me, but I didn’t return the look. I only noticed her worried expression flash in my direction in my peripheral vision, as I was busy staring slack-jawed at the menacing looking creature. Odyssey cautiously provided a response. “H-Hello?”

Its whole head turned at once, its full attention snapping to her. “H-Hello?” It mimicked exactly, down to the precise stutter. It tilted its head gently as it said this, as if it didn’t fully understand. “H-Hello, children.”

The intruder stood up, and Odyssey visibly tensed as it started to approach her. I felt compelled by a sudden and primal need to act, but I didn’t have the smallest hope of a plan to go off of. The ship had a weapon system for deflecting the path of converging asteroids, but it wasn’t like we had an armory packed with knives and guns in here. I think we might have had a shovel in one of the stowage bins. Odyssey glanced back at me, as if reading my mind. “Wait! Let it do what it wants!” I watched in horror for what it might do to her, feeling helpless!

Odyssey watched in tense fear as the creature slowly walked right up to her. It closed the little bit of difference between them and… kissed her? Odyssey’s eyes expressed distress and panic as the strange male creature started sucking on her face. My thoughts quickly shot down a dark path, and I found myself wondering if Victory didn’t have a hidden self-destruct feature. I really didn’t want to see this go any further. Thankfully, I wouldn’t need to. The creature suddenly pulled away from Odyssey. It backed off, leaving her spitting and coughing as I quickly found some words to offer my friend.

“Odyssey, are you alright?!”

“Blech! It’s handsome but it tastes like fish!” The girl sounded surprisingly alright for the horror she had just endured.

“What else should I taste like?” We both stopped everything and blinked. Those incredibly fluent words hadn’t come from either of us. We both slowly turned to look at the shark pony. “Yes, hello! Sorry about the communication breakdown but your record didn’t contain much information about your language. I didn’t know you were stuttering. I thought you were correcting me.” We stared at him in silence. He sounded like a native Canterlot speaker, like some noble pony. Seconds ago he sounded nothing like that. “Hello from the children of planet Earth. You’re the children, correct?” We didn’t respond. His upbeat and happy attitude was met with a solid wall of dumbfounded silence. “Your greeting. It was on the platter. You call it a, um, record I believe?” Odyssey slowly turned to stare at me, I returned her stare, neither of us had any idea what to say or do. We were well out of our depth. “You’re both explorers. You’re from Earth, correct?”

“Hit him.” I ordered from out of nowhere.

The stallion barely managed a confused “What?!” before Odyssey had slapped a hoof across his face and knocked him to the floor.

Odyssey was strapped in and our new “friend” was tied up in paracord and strapped against a wall with ratcheting cargo tie down straps. The Princess turned to me as I finished typing some commands into the computer.

“We’re taking our friend back to The Hope, right?”

“Of course we are.”

“What? No! You have to listen to me!” The creature uselessly pleaded with us. “What I’m saying is true! I’m a prince and I need your help to stop The Conglomerate! They’re the ones trying to destroy us both! They’re your real enemy!”

I rolled my eyes, this was the fifth time I’d heard him say that. “Everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. All of these recordings are going straight home in real-time. The whole world gets to see you tied up, loser.”

Odyssey stared down into her lap. “I feel like my trust was violated.”

The shark sounded panicked. “I had no such intention! What is with you two? I think we’ve had a misunderstanding here! If you’d just allow me to explain myself!”

“Shut up.” I commanded, annoyed. “Burn to The Radiant Hope in twenty seconds. Nineteen..”

“No!”

“Eighteen.”

“You can’t-”

“Sixteen.”

“I’m trying to help you!”

“Fourteen!”

Odyssey looked up from her lap and spotted something outside of the viewscreen.

“Wait, what’s that?”

“What’s what?” I asked as I glanced at our radar. I didn’t see anything special. There was another one of those rogue rocks we had been spotting all throughout the system, nothing else. “Just more rocks on the scanner.”

Odyssey’s eyes widened, “No, it’s heading towards The Hope!”

Without looking up I turned to the hope’s terminal display and pulled up its defensive system diagnostic page. The Hope’s radar was indeed picking up a rapidly approaching object. Its defensive system appeared to have already taken aim with the Tempest’s automated guns. It was trying to intercept the object in the same way it had stopped three others in our absence. “It’s nothing, the automated defenses will deflect or destroy it.”

“That’s a missile not a rock!” Our prisoner stated. “And I’m a space alien!”

I was just about done with him. “None of that is possible! You’re a pony, shut up!”

Odyssey sounded concerned “What if it actually is a missile?”

“Then our systems were originally designed for missile defense and will do their jobs just fine, as you well know. But that’s completely impossible! We’re millions of kilometers away from any missile launch platform! That’s a fact!”

A brilliant light filled the view screen. Odyssey and I looked away for a moment before looking back to a gigantic fireball. I slammed the cancel button on the scheduled burn and watched, in rising terror, as the Hope’s communication feed went dead. Behind me, the stallion sighed in deeply tired defeat. “Well, do you believe me now?”

Author's Note

This chapter saw the most change in its overall length during editing. At one point it was halfway down seven pages! The final version is roughly six. I feel like, overall, nothing significant was changed aside from its readability. I did make some specific changes to Odyssey's interpretation of the encounter to signal her approval for what was about to happen. I did this to try and avoid having to use the non-consensual warning tag, which definitely doesn't fit with the overall vibe of the story. Most of the encounter itself remains unchanged because of this, though some of the final dialogue was changed as a result.

I really like how this one came out! Only two more to go!

Chapter 5: Exchanges

We untied the shark pony. I fully expected him to pull something, but it didn’t really matter anymore. For all we knew, The Radiant Hope was currently a glowing ball of rapidly dispersing plasma. That meant we had no food, no water, and no way of getting home. We were floating around some large ice balls orbiting a gas giant, hopelessly stranded in space. The dire nature of the situation was slowly becoming all too clear to us. We didn’t have a reason to pretend we had hope.

“Thank you.” The stallion stated as he stood, before turning to Odyssey. “And I’m sorry, miss.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.” Odyssey sounded as dejected as I felt inside.

He looked a little taken aback. “No, I mean it! I had no idea your culture didn’t have an equivalent to the practice of word sharing!”

“It’s fine. She’s fine.” Good goddesses, I sounded worse than Odyssey!

The stallion looked between us with a frown.”What is with you ponies? Don’t tell me you’ve already given up!” He stared at me in obvious disapproval as I stared back in hopeless silence. We turned away from him in silence, the two of us quite dejected. “Look, I get it. It was wrong of me to involve you and your people in this. It was our problem, not yours.” We said nothing. The two of us were still trying not to process the immense gravity of our situation. “Titan is an inhabited planet.”

I interjected. “Titan’s just a moon.” I trotted towards the ship controls and toggled one of the displays, pulling up some basic information on Titan as we understood it. “It’s a ball of ice with maybe some water underneath. Its surface temperature is low enough to freeze our blood to our bones.”

He trotted up to me, not at all happy with my outlook on the place. “What was your name, miss? We haven’t been properly introduced.”

“Jupiter Rising.”

“Miss Rising, it occurs to me that our peoples have a very different definition of the word Moon. Titan is my home. It’s a beautiful, rich world. There are oceans, seas, land, and air.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s all under the ice. If you land in the right spot, you can follow the caves down inside the outer crust. There you can find all of the food and water and shelter you’d ever need. It’s even as warm down there as it is in here.” I looked over his shoulder and called out to my friend.

“Odyssey.”

The girl trotted over and I pushed the stallion aside to meet her. The Princess started first. “I mean, obviously the biggest concern is fuel. We might have to shed some mass to get there again.”

I looked down at my hooves. “If we dump anything now we’re never getting it back.”

“We don’t have much choice, Jupe.”

I looked up at her, hoping for guidance. “Is it worth it, Odd?”

She bit her bottom lip and glanced over at Titan on the little display. “..the ice shelf is a little on the thick side, there could potentially be some of the things he’s saying down there. It’s not completely impossible. If you’re looking for an opinion?” I nodded. “Well… I say we do it.”

We compared our list of scouted landing zones against the stallion’s recollection of the terrain. The Shark Pony had recommended several possible options. A cursory inspection of the options suggested they were all equally hard to get to. I picked one at random. We dumped nearly everything we had out of the airlock. We even unbolted most of the interior panels for the ship internals, leaving the ship’s delicate systems exposed. Odyssey tried her best to guess at the math. We were relatively confident about our chances, but the odds were not exactly in our favor. The stallion sat in Odyssey’s lap. He was looking worriedly between the exposed wire runs from the various component bays all around us. We had him tied down with the paracord from before. Now it was just up to me to aerobrake our way across Titan’s exosphere, by hoof.

“Is all of this really necessary?” The stallion asked of the shaking, exposed ship internals.

“Maybe.” Odyssey replied.

I rolled my eyes at him. “Does he ever stop complaining?”

“Who? Me? My name’s not He.”

I was doing something too important to glare at him. “How does that language sharing garbage work that you’ve got no concept of pronouns? He is a pronoun. He is going to the store. I want to go with him. I don’t want him to go by himself.”

“Oh, those are pronouns?”

“Yes! What do you think a pronoun is?”

“Xe.”

“What?”

“Xe is a pronoun. Xe is going to the store. I want to go with Xem. I don’t want Xem to go by Xemself.”

I turned away from the viewscreen for only a moment, against my better judgement, and looked to Odyssey in a state of absolute confusion. The girl shrugged her shoulders before replying. “I don’t know. I think they’re gender neutral pronouns? High society girls have to know this kind of stuff. You never know when it’ll prove useful.”

The Shark Pony looked up at Odyssey, curiously. “What is a gender and what makes it neutral?”

It took every ounce of selfcontrol I had not to stare at him in dumb shock. “Don’t you know what sex is?” I shouted in the vain hope that he’d suddenly admit to remembering.

He flushed pink. “How is that appropriate?! The act or the biology?!”

Odyssey sighed and answered him. “The biology. Sex is your biology, Gender is how you identify with it.”

“I’m not sure I follow. Can I have an example?”

“Well, my sex is female and my gender is.. female.” I carefully noted that uncertain pause, but I wasn't sure what to make of it. The stallion just stared up at Odyssey, blankly. There was no spark of comprehension to be had.

“Am I to believe that, potentially, one could have a different combination of those things? Like, for instance, a female sex and a male gender?”

Odyssey nodded softly against the turbulence of the ship. “That’s right.”

The stallion stared ahead for a time before replying. “I don’t think we have anything like that, no. My people have a sex, of course, but we don’t identify anything else based off of that.”

Odyssey looked down at him curiously. “You don’t have feelings about your sex? Or a relationship with the roles society expects of you based on it? Really? Nothing at all?”

He gave a shrug of his own. “I don’t think anyone expects anything out of you based on your sex alone, aside from the expected biological functions of course. Others just expect you to be you. There doesn't need to be a label or a category for that, just your name.”

I was marginally impressed with this rejection of Equestrian Ideologies, and I let him know as much. “You know, I think you’d really like it back in my country. The Crystal Empire is totally like that. Labels? Who needs them! Just be you! Do whatever you like!”

His ears perked up at that. “Oh, so you also have a gender neutral pronoun? Is it a different one?”

“Yes! It’s them. They and them. I don’t know how you skipped over some of the most common words in our language and went straight for Xe and Xem.”

I heard him cough from across the cockpit, clearly offended. “Those are plural pronouns.”

I winced at that, unsure what I did wrong. “Sorry?”

He replied with a tone that implied he was speaking out of a desire to teach rather than scold. “It’s fine, you couldn’t have known. It’s extremely important to our people not to conflate the many with the one. Self identity is crucial to our understanding of our inner self versus the school.”

“Oh. Crucial, huh?” I barely understood what I had done, but I felt bad.

“Yes. Among my people, it’s rude to refer to any one individual in a plural sense. It is usually seen as a direct denial of their self identity and their contribution to the whole.”

I felt dirty for saying it now. “My bad. Sorry, I didn't know.”

“It’s alright, Jupiter. I suppose this is how you feel about this Gender concept, Odyssey?”

The Princess sounded a touch embarrassed. “Well, I guess some ponies do, yes.”

“Then I shall make a conscious effort not to incorrectly identify your gender.”

“That’s noble of you!” Odyssey sounded proud, if a little out of her element.

“...and I shall attempt to learn these… not-neutral pronouns. To assist in this.”

Odyssey chuckled awkwardly. “Thank you! I appreciate it!”

“Excellent! Jupiter should also work on that with me, since Xe ..er, I mean He claimed to have a similar problem with X-is.. His people.” Odyssey broke out laughing. I could feel myself turning bright red.

I lost track of the conversation after we had fully entered Titan’s atmosphere. I was too busy trying to figure out how the principles of lift worked in an atmosphere that, I was beginning to realize, the simulators back home hadn’t correctly modeled. I couldn’t expend the energy nor the focus to try to hear the other’s conversation over the rushing winds battering our vessel’s hull. The incessant pounding of my racing heart screaming in my ears wasn’t helping anything either. I did glance over from time to time just to make sure they were both okay. It seemed like the discussion had kept going in my absence. The two even seemed to be growing friendly with each other. That was a heartwarming thing to think about. If we really did have to live here for the rest of our lives, at least the company could be pleasant.

The ship violently shook as we passed through a cloud of condensed gases which was much more solid than it had first appeared. I was instantly much more aware that “the rest of our lives” might not be very long at all. The ship bounced hard as I tried to sweep in for a landing. The ground effect was much stronger than I had ever anticipated and our flying wing was generating more lift than I knew what to do with. Against my better judgement, and my deeper hopes, I had to risk a suicide burn with the manuerving thrusters. With the fuel tanks nearly dry, I pointed the nose of the ship straight-down towards the landing zone and braced for the engines to arrest our momentum at the last possible second. I heard the engines burst out a roar of thunder as I counted my last moments. We slammed down hard on the landing gear, but the computer had managed to keep us alive.

I pat myself down with my forehooves, just to make sure I was still in one completely functional piece. “I… think we made it.”

Odyssey and I were in the process of exchanging our suits from the Tethys debacle with a spare set that was yet to see serious action. We were preparing to disembark into the frozen landscape outside of the ship. From there, we’d follow our new friend out into the world that awaited beyond. I passed a radio communicator to our new acquaintance. He accepted it with the same level of awkwardness I expected from a child that had never seen an earpiece before.

“What do I do with this?”

“You put it on your ear, like mine.” I wiggled my ear to emphasize the one I was wearing. “That’s how Odyssey and I communicate with our helmets on.”

“We usually use our lamps.” That seemed smart. Photons were certainly cheap and reliable. Behind him, Odyssey was struggling to perform her own suit swap with just her three hooves. She hadn’t exactly resolved to ask for help yet, so I let her be for now. “How do these work? Ear flips?”

“Yeah, that’s how you activate them. Then you just speak.” Simple, intuitive, and easy.

“Speak?”

“Yeah, they’re radios. You just talk into it.”

“What’s a radio?”

I stared at him in sudden shock. “Seriously?!” He nodded, gravely. “Please tell me you’re just some uneducated rebel that doesn’t really know how anything in the world works.”

“I am Prince Razorfin, of the High Tail Herd, ruler over all The School.”

“Oh.” So much for that. I had immediate concerns over the implications of this.

“I am indeed educated, of course. Only the wise can wield the power to rule.”

“Uh… sure, okay.” I didn’t believe him. If such a pleasant hope were true, surely a brilliant mare like Odyssey would rule Equestria. Instead we had a mare that couldn’t hold a candle to Odd’s intellect, much less the sun. Behind him, the three-legged alicorn fell over onto the floor with a yelp and immediately became entangled in her replacement suit. My opinion did not change.

“I’ve got a ten year degree in Mechanical Engineering.” And then there was that! I tried to not let my culture shock over the existence of a decade-long degree program be the first thing out of my mouth.

“Oh! N-No wonder you and Odyssey were getting along so well! She’s an engineer too! Though that’s a long time to spend in school.”

“It’s the minimum.”

“Oh.” My previous concerns were doubled.

“What about you, Juptier? Is there more to your name?”

“I’m Jupiter Rising. I’m just an Earth Pony Mare and a Planetary Scientist.” I didn’t usually feel out of my depth around Odyssey. The addition of another self-proclaimed royal, however, was starting to make me feel uncomfortably self-conscious over my lack of titles.

“Do you have any nicknames?”

“Sure! Friends call me Jupiter or Jupe.”

“And are you also educated, Jupe?”

“Of course! Only the brightest minds could qualify for a mission like ours!” He gave a soft smirk, and I almost immediately saw the crippling irony in what I had just said. “I’ve got a Phd in Geophysics. It’s an 8 year program.” He shivered when he heard this, as if his sensibilities were offended.

“Oh, is 8 years the minimum on Earth?”

“For what I’m doing, it’s the maximum.” He stared at me in disbelief, and I felt as though my perfect marks somehow wouldn’t improve how he obviously felt about me. I could hardly connect to him or his disc, but at least he and Odyssey were friends. That was something.

I turned around at the bottom of the ramp and watched Odyssey fidget awkwardly at the top. The Prince hopped from the ramp’s edge to the soil beside me and spun around to see the girl struggling with the decision to proceed. The Princess took a half step forward before hesitating and speaking up. “Hold on, I’ve got an idea, let me try something.” Those sounded an awful lot like infamous last words to me but, who was I to judge? The engineer at the top of the ramp carefully aligned herself, took a few steps back, then attempted a running jump down the ramp. That would have been impressive, had it worked the way she had imagined it. As it happened, Odyssey’s butt collided with the ship above her. She accidentally somersaulted backwards down the ramp in an impressively awkward set of desperate motions that left the rest of us backing away. The alicorn skidded on one hoof, practically tripped over herself, and barely managed a shaky landing on all three legs. I sighed in relief. Odyssey stood a little taller for her success. The Prince didn’t comment.

I turned back towards our ship once more. That reliable workhorse was standing tall in the bottom of a narrow valley. It was surrounded by jagged mountains of ice, ancient glaciers, and soft hills of Titan’s frozen dirt. The thing looked surprisingly out of place where it was. It didn’t belong. It was almost as if it had been inexplicably dropped there by the will of some divine power. The words Victory Everlasting were still emblazoned on the side of the craft. They were written in giant, luminous letters. The name was clearly visible in Titan’s burnt orange sunlight. Seeing it like this, I couldn’t help but reflect on the gleaming little space plane one final time.

“I guess you really will be Everlasting, won’t you?” Apparently, our new friend’s radio was working. That little comment attracted his attention.

“What was that?” The Prince trotted up beside me. I didn't mind explaining myself to him.

“See those words on the side? That’s the shuttle’s name.” He looked over at it.

“Victory Everlasting?” Apparently he could read our language as well.

“That’s right. I landed her with the fuel tanks practically dry. We were burning more engine than fuel on the way down. There’s no more flight left in her, not unless you can bring a whole spaceport’s worth of facilities here for a refit. Even if they strip her for what she’s worth, that unibody crystal airframe will never rust away. She’s just going to sit there now, gathering dirt and dust, forever.” He nodded at that.

“Everlasting.”

“Yeah, like a monument. Forever and always.” He placed a hoof on my shoulder.

“May it stand in memoriam to events worth remembering.” That sentiment had me misty-eyed. I could hear Odyssey sniffling over the radio channel. I almost didn’t know what to say. Well, almost.

“Thank you.” His hoof dropped back to the ground.

“Goodbye, Victory.” It was just a shuttlecraft but, after everything we’d been through, it was like leaving behind an old friend. “Goodbye and good luck.” We turned away for the last time. The Prince led us on. Odyssey had been waiting for us.

Author's Note

This chapter was actually the last one to be completed. That was largely due to the two ending sections, which were at risk of being cut for length. The contest has a limit of 20k words. I knew this cap was flexible going in, but I really wanted to stick to it. Most of what was written here was at risk but, thankfully, all of it landed up making it in.

I had to consult a host of online sources, including an old friend of mine, to ensure I was being respectful towards the more sensitive topics in this chapter. Hopefully what I've written here doesn't offend anyone. The idea of a cultural exchange like this is the main reason this story shifted from a Mature rating to Teen.

Originally, these aliens were meant to be a more ominous force. They were functioning largely like classic monsters. ( Like the movie Aliens. ) Fortunately, I realized that the initial shock of an alien encounter would inevitably give way to a desire for understanding. It's easy enough to use this as bait to lure curious protagonists to their doom. However, the thought of a genuine exchange of ideas was vastly more interesting to me. A lot of science fiction works do this, often on grandiose scales. ( Like the movie Arrival. ) However, I wanted to do something much more intimate, personal, and relatable. To that end, I couldn't think of anything more simple, straight-forward, and appropriate than the common pronoun.

Chapter 6: Premonitions

I liked him well enough, but I didn’t trust our new friend one bit. I was only paying attention to the loosest details of his story. Unfortunately, those rough details didn’t add up to a situation that made sense. Something called The Conglomerate was attacking us of their own volition. Their actions were seemingly against the will of the aristocracy in charge. It wasn’t completely impossible, none of it was. However, not having an understanding of radio waves was a detail that felt spurious. After all, it was a radio signal that had lured us to Tethys in the first place.

Odyssey walked quietly beside me as the stallion led us directly into a cave. We stopped at a wall of ice and he turned to explain himself with a smile. “Generations of daring adventurers, shrewd business mares, and bold space pirates have used tunnels just like this to escape to the stars.” I looked to Odyssey, who was utterly impossible to read behind her sun visor. “I suppose this will be a fine way to sneak us inside.” He spun around and started looking up and down the wall. “Assuming the switch is easily found.” I could hazard a guess at the potential scope of his civilization from the fact that he hadn’t inquired about any specific landing zones. The only questions on my mind were how advanced they really were, and what they were going to do with us when we got down there.

“Fascinating.” We both looked at Odyssey as she suddenly spoke up. “Uh, I mean, the implication about generations. I know the math says that space travel would be significantly easier to achieve in lower gravity environments, but to see the implications of that is interesting. To think, generations of space pirates operating on little more than steam-power.” The inference of steam power was nothing short of brilliant, but it’s what came next that left me speechless.

“Oh, I know this must all look simple to ponies like yourselves. Especially if you have the means to come all this way.” The Princess wordlessly stepped forward and pressed her forehoof on part of the rock face. The hidden control gently gave way. A sliding door fell from the wall to reveal a circular brass elevator with clear glass walls. It was surrounded by perfectly carved ice and rock. “Oh! You found it! Excellent!” He skipped ahead of us to board the contraption. Odyssey followed swiftly behind as I stood rooted in place and stared on in dumb shock. I had known that my alicorn companion was smart, but her skill in speechcraft left me breathless. In an instant we went from completely blind to knowing exactly what we were dealing with. His entire civilization relied on steam energy! Considering what we went through on Tethys, it made sense. Locals would, doubtlessly, witness similar flash-boiling events. They’d inevitably take a practical interest in the properties of water under various temperatures and pressures.

“Jupe? Are you coming?”

“Oh, right!”

We passed through ice, nearly a kilometer of it. After that, our small car plunged deep into a dark and murky ocean. I wasn’t entirely sure at this point whether this thing was a true elevator or a tracked submarine. Given the circumstances, I was much more willing to believe one of those options over the other.

“Jupiter, are you on this channel?”

“Yes, Odyssey. I’m on the secondary channel. I swapped over.” I sounded out of breath. The girl clearly noticed that from the sudden change in her tone.

“Are you okay?” I answered her with some fear in my voice.

“I didn’t know you could manipulate a pony like that, Odd.”

Her words practically shrugged it off. “I grew up in The Court of Canterlot. Manipulation and intrigue are a part of who I am. If I didn’t have the skill for it, I wouldn’t have made it this far.”

“Is there anything else I don’t know about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“That pause, back on the ship. The gender thing.”

“Oh. Yeah, the gender thing.”

“Interesting to spend months really close to somepony and not hear a peep about that.” I sounded more offended than I had intended. Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure that feeling that way was wrong. It had helped to keep things simple between us during the long journey to Saturn. It made living life easy, but I hadn’t wanted that simplicity at the expense of honesty.

“It’s not like that.” I didn’t want to accuse her of lying, I just wanted to understand.

“What’s it like, then?”

She sighed and took a moment to collect her thoughts before trying to explain. “You asked me why I went on adventures like this before, back on The Hope. Do you remember that?”

“I remember not getting a real answer.”

“I did it to run away.” My eyes slowly shifted to the sight of the mare’s helmet. “The High Courts make demands of you. It’s not enough just to keep up appearances. You have to invent a perfect image of yourself and wear it on a moment’s notice. It’s like a mask.”

“Do I know the real Odyssey or the mask?”

“You know me, the real me. I’m the mare you spent months talking to and confiding in.”

“Then why the pause?”

“Because… all of the pomp and the circumstance, the labels, the expectations, none of it means anything to me. I don’t care, not about any of it. All that matters to me is helping people to learn and explore, and I couldn’t do that sitting in a castle back home. I couldn’t do that agonizing over what the colors of my party dress might imply. I couldn’t do that fearing the complex social implications of the angles I levitate my silverware at. I was paralized by the toxic rumor mill of the rich and the well off. Everything I tell anyone back home is a well constructed front, even if it’s true. It's all because those rumors make it back to the creatures that invest in my business, fund my experiments, and excuse my accidents. I tell them the story that’s palatable, the one they want to hear.” I wasn’t sure I could endure much more of this. It was insane!

“Odyssey, you’re already perfect. You’re a Princess!”

“That’s why I’m out here, Jupe. Out here I can be a Princess around a pony that honestly believes that title means something special. I’m not just a social tool to be manipulated and used. Out here I’m free to be whoever I want and need to be.”

“...and you don’t trust that stallion to know the real you, do you?”

“I told him the story he wanted to hear, even if it was true. I was just rusty at telling it.”

“So the truth is, what? That you aren’t interested in the truth?”

“Is that so hard to believe? I’m complicated. Figuring me out is a stressful chore. If I have to choose between doing that and running off to Saturn with my friend Jupiter, I’ll do the running every time. Living in space is all trigonometry, geometry, and other pleasant mathematical problems. It’s all logical and straight-forward. I don’t have to answer for why I’m not married yet, or why I get caught kissing mares while I insist I want to date a stallion. I can just do as I please, in the way that I please. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to justify it. I don’t even have to explain it. Out here, I can just live. The only pony here to judge me for that is a mare that I really don’t mind sharing every day with.” I recalled the kiss-mark on my previous helmet.

“As friends, of course.”

“If I hit on you intentionally, you have my permission to slap me.”

“...and if it’s an accident?” Realizing she was probably owed a few slaps, Odyssey changed the subject.

“Uh… well, what about you? Did you come all this way to run away too?”

“Sure. I ran away from my mom, the stallion I crushed on through school, and some of the things I said about Princess Celestia.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing I still believe now. The usual pseudo-intellectual drivel about how one pony couldn’t possibly lift something as massive as the sun. That was back when I thought being non-religious was somehow countercultural.”

“So, what do you think now?”

“That science only has the answers to questions we know how to ask. That magic is just another form of energy that adheres to a rigid set of rules. That nopony knows everything under the sun and the ones that claim otherwise know less than most. Oh, and that new discoveries are often made by running over the same tired old ground with an outsider’s eye.”

“It sounds like you’ve grown a lot more wise.”

“I learned a lot of hard lessons very publicly. They were situations that upset friends, family, and the ponies I cared about. I might be wiser for it, but I’m hardly the pinnacle of friendship that is said to be the model Equestrian Citizen. I survived by walking away.” I heard the stallion chuckle in reply on our radio channel, and both The Princess and I slowly turned to look at him.

“Oh, you didn’t think that conversation was private, did you? After the ice field and the missile strike? Isn’t it a bit premature to start claiming that you’ve survived?”

The submarine clicked into place and the doors slid open. Odyssey and I exited into an icy chamber deep under the oceans of Titan. A half dozen shark ponies stood guard. They were eyeing us nervously. The Prince exited behind us, discarded his helmet, and eyed us with similar nervousness. That was the same look we had gotten from the general populace when passing through the submerged streets of the cities above. We had tried removing our helmets to put them at ease, but putting a face to ourselves didn’t seem to help. They were all terrified of us. It didn’t exactly take a genius to imagine why, but that entire chain of thought evaporated the second we entered that chamber. I was fixated on what was in front of us. The both of us were stunned by the completely otherworldly sight of it. I couldn’t help but to beg my friend to describe it.

“Odyssey, what in the world are we looking at?” My fellow mare willingly approached the object. This visibly surprised the other shark ponies standing around us, who were staring on in shock. Maybe they expected us to be more intimidated by it. If so, then they had a lot to learn about ponies with a love for science. “It looks almost like the event horizon of a black hole but, that’s completely impossible.”

“I don’t think your intuition is totally wrong, Jupiter.” Odyssey sat on her haunches and reached out a forehoof to touch the impossible surface of the object. From the way that her hoof appeared to hover through the impossible black sphere, it didn’t seem to have any surface at all. She withdrew the hoof and pondered the sight of the intact appendage curiously. “Space is definitely bending here, like it would from gravity.” Something clicked for me in what she was saying. “Should I break out a pencil and a sheet of paper?” I smiled.

“As long as you don’t fold it and jam a hole through it.” She turned her head to me, a curious brow raised.

“You don’t care for the classic demonstration?”

“I prefer to draw a little line on either end and bend the sheet around until they touch.”

She blinked at that before softly rising from the floor. “That’d make a tunnel out of the sheet, right?”

“It does.”

“You’re right. That’s a lot better.” The Prince cleared his throat loudly at us. He had evidently experienced enough of our technical banter. For now, we let him speak.

“This is The Rift. It’s an anomaly at the bottom of the sea. It’s older than the whole of recorded history. We’re going to use it to dispose of you.” My response sounded appropriately offended.

“You mean you’re going to toss us in because you’ve got no idea what it is?!” He sounded equally offended in return.

“It’s The Rift. Anything that gets tossed inside never comes out.”

Odyssey sighed. “You can’t blame them, Jupiter, they don’t have the magic to know better. They’re not unicorns, they’d never be able to see the spell for the magic it is.”

“Odyssey, I’m an Earth Pony.”

“Granted, but you’ve got me for stuff like this. I can just tell you it’s a form of unicorn magic. I suspect it’s the result of some ancient, long-forgotten spell. These shark ponies have magical enzymes in their saliva that let them pick-up languages in an instant, but that’s all of the magic that they have.” The Prince looked taken aback by that appraisal of their abilities.

“How do you know that?” I laughed at his objection and explained it to him.

“The disk from Voyager,” Odyssey coughed.

“It’s a record.” I ignored her.

“It was covered in a liquid when we found it. The first words you spoke to us were from the greetings held in its grooves.” He looked equally surprised and offended by this.

“That doesn’t tell you anything about the limits of our abilities.”

“Sure it does.” The other shark ponies gave each other doubtful looks. They weren’t participating in the conversation but they sure seemed to understand it. “You found the probe because of its radio signal. You used that signal as a trap. You didn’t personally know our language, but a fluent speaker would have been immediately suspicious. With that disc, the right pony would look like they’d just learned about us on the spot. You kissed Odyssey to gather up the rest of our language, though you still didn’t know anything about Gender.”

“That could have been a lie, like the radio waves.”

“Yeah, except this one wasn’t clever. You genuinely didn’t know, so it’s reasonable to conclude that your spit only attaches foreign words to familiar concepts. It doesn’t pick up anything you don’t already know.” He didn’t look impressed.

“Is that all?” Odyssey certainly didn’t think so, and she said as much.

“Well, there was the missile as well. You’ve learned a lot from analyzing our radio and television transmissions about the arcane sciences. Although, it’s not enough to implement the magic required to get the same result. You lack the physiology to do that much. It’s the only good explanation. It was impressively close for a duplicate. I’ll grant you that but, it was far removed from the magical super weapons that dominated The Cold War back on Earth.” The Prince flinched at the mention of The Cold War, and I suddenly spoke up as everything fell into place.

“Goddesses…” Both he and Odyssey looked at me. “You’re genuinely afraid of us, aren’t you?” The Prince barked a laugh.

“Of course I am, you stupid girl. The most powerful nations on your planet nearly vaporized each other! And over, what else but, the resources you came here to find! I need to protect us all from your insatiable greed and lust for conflict. The experts have made that very clear to me.”

“But that war never happened. Sure, there was fighting and a lot of creatures died, but that was nothing compared to what was feared. That final, brutal exchange never took place! We made peace!”

“Only because you lacked the resources to continue the fight amongst yourselves. Were it not for a total economic collapse, nothing would have stopped that inevitable exchange. You only feign cooperation now so that you can carry your fight into the stars and lash out against more powerful foes. That’s why you brought your warships here.”

“Warships?!”

“You deny that your space planes were made for war? You deny that they have weapons?”

“A lot of our technologies were invented during times of hardship, but our mission is peaceful. We’re a scientific expedition, nothing more.”

“You’re a scouting party! You're fulfilling the needs of your superiors and nothing more. Your shuttle is adorned with the name Victory: Everlasting. If your mission is one of peace then explain that!”

“The only everlasting victory is peace.” His mouth dropped open and hung there. Mine would have too if I had the time to be impressed with myself. “And my superior is Odyssey, The Princess of Discovery.” I turned and pointed a forhoof right at her. “I answer to her and nopony else.” The stallion clenched his jaw shut, looking unimpressed. Of course he had a counter for that.

“She’s just a Chief Executive Officer at some telescope company.” I slammed my raised hoof to my chest.

“Not to me! She’s a pony with tender dreams and higher ambitions. She isn't afraid to do whatever it might take to bring The Magic of Knowledge to all of the creatures of the world.”

“Even you.” What? The Prince and I both turned our attention to a very appreciative looking Odyssey. Was she crying? The stallion didn’t seem to care much.

“What do you mean by that?” The Princess gently explained.

“The Rift, as you call it, is a wormhole. It was generated from a magic spell that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Its power is imbued, as an enchantment, in a gemstone on the other side. It’s a pathway between two points in space. It’s a hole punctured through the folded sheet of paper that is our physical reality. In three dimensions, a circular hole like that would be a sphere. This isn’t an anomaly or an accident. It was deliberately placed here. It predates recorded history because, in its own way, it is recorded history. It's the only remaining record of how your ancestors got here. It’s all that remains of the cataclysm on the other side that made you flee.”

“That’s preposterous!” The stallion shouted, before I gently tried to explain.

“Didn’t you think it was odd that aliens on another world were equines just like you? When I first saw you standing in our ship, hidden in the suit, I could tell from your overall shape that you had to be from Earth. It never even occurred to me that you could have been from another world.”

“Then you lack imagination! Stop wasting our time! We’re throwing you in The Rift and ending this once and for all. With two of their astronauts dead and their ship so obviously vaporized, the creatures of your planet will never expend the effort to darken our doors again.”

Odyssey laughed. “I’ll do you, ONE BETTER.”

The booming echoes of the infamous Royal Canterlot Voice slammed through the hall of The Rift with monumental energy. At times like this, I wondered if Odyssey wasn’t just a little bit more than Celestia’s adopted niece. Her spirit rivaled the legends of Princess Luna! My friend turned towards the portal, horn alight, eyes blazing solid white with sheer magic.

“I’LL WILLINGLY ENTER YOUR RIFT!” Her horn flared with the glow of intense magical energies as she reached out across the span of space with a power that could move entire suns. “AFTER I FIX IT, WE SHALL BOTH DEPART!” The darkness beyond the portal shifted. Rock and magma and tunnels and caves shot past our view on the other side. The sphere remained stationary in the room as The Princess rapidly moved the anchor on the other side. The helpless prince could only cry out in terror.

“What are you doing?!”

I stepped out of the sphere and onto the streets outside of Canterlot. I was on Earth. Odyssey was in front of me. We were surrounded by utterly dumbfounded royal guards. You could now see either end of the wormhole clearly through the other. A primitive, uncut gemstone of Celestite was hovering nearby under its own power. Odyssey could barely stop staring at it. She used a great deal of willpower to look at me as she spoke.

“I didn’t move it far, just three hundred kilometers or so.” That was awfully close to an inland city like Canterlot.

“It wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean?”

“I think it used to be.” Odyssey looked past me and gasped in shock. “No, wait, stop!” She tried to take a step forward and tripped over herself. I spun around to see what had her worried and accidentally sidestepped catching her fall. The Prince of The Shark Ponies had a hammer raised. He was about to strike at the fragile gemstone that powered The Rift!

“Prince Razorfin, you can’t!” I pleaded as Odyssey stood up beside me.

“Why the hell not?!” He demanded.

“Because it could doom your people.” We both looked to Odyssey for an explanation as she continued to speak in a calm and serious tone. “You were right to fear us. Our people haven’t learned the right lessons. We really are just exploring together as a veiled means towards a greedy end.”

“Then why should I trust you?”

“Because we’ve already started our expansion across the solar system. Even without Saturn, we’ll inevitably develop a more capable civilization than you could ever hope to stand against. We’ll outstrip you, we’ll strangle you, and your society will strain beyond its breaking points and collapse. You could fight us for a long time, but not forever. We’ll win.” Was that supposed to make him feel better? He looked terrified! I was hardly a master of diplomacy, but I was seriously hoping Odyssey had a point to make. “Unless.”

“Unless what?!”

“We work together to find another way.”

“Like?”

“The Rift.” He grew a perplexed expression. “We just traveled across dozens of light-minutes of space in an instant! The Rift’s magic was unknown to us before today. If we can copy this forgotten arcane technology, if we replicate it? Instead of fighting each other over the limited resources in our own small solar system, we can send out ships to place anchors like this across the stars. Even at a fraction of the speed of light, we’ll have access to hundreds of other worlds in a matter of decades. All of them could be connected through a network of wormholes just like The Rift.

The universe is infinite! Its resources are boundless, but we need breakthroughs like this in order to get to them. Otherwise, journeys between star systems will take generations, and things will never change.” I turned from Odyssey to look at the stallion. He considered these words for a few moments more, but I could tell from the look in his eyes that he’d already made his choice. He lifted the hammer back a short distance, and let it drop from his mouth. It clattered to the cobblestones below and sat in silence beneath the unbroken ancient gemstone floating above.

Author's Note

There's that final chapter down! That was right up against that 20K word limit for the contest at 19,997 total words! Wow! If you've made it this far, I'd like to thank you for sticking with it to the end. As an extension of my personal gratitude, I'd like to make a small announcement here: The Victory Universe will return in the upcoming story Victory: Rising. Also, I've got two more projects in the works. Keep an eye on my blog posts for those announcements.

I had a lot of fun writing this! I can feel the rust really coming off now. Expect a lot more from me in the future. I've got huge plans on this site. Thanks again, and I hope you'll follow me for future stories in this and other universes!