Heavenly View

by Rambling Writer

Rating: teen
Tags: Drama, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Original Character, Science Fiction
Length: 27957

It's a tough job, clearing up orbital debris, but somepony's gotta do it.

Five years ago, a disaster left low-Equus orbits swamped with orbital debris. The husks of dead ships careened through the aether, threatening any that might try to leave the planet. But now, it’s under control. Debris trawlers roam the skies, picking up those husks and carefully gathering smaller shards. Thanks to their efforts, bit by bit, space is becoming usable again.

Mesonox is a newbie on one of those trawling crews, recently hired to fly on DT Heavenly View. She’s aced the sims. She knows her ships. She knows her tools. She knows her techniques. And her crew just got assigned to grab a typical wreck. It’s a straightforward job: clean up the small debris, get the large debris under control to haul back to the scrapyard. The perfect task for a rookie like her.

Time to get to work.

Published 2022-06-04 14:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2024-02-27 17:16:42 UTC

1 - Miles Above it All

When she’d turned the gravity off in her bunk, Mesonox had expected it to be a zero-G wonderland. No achy back, no tossing and turning, just floating calmly in “bed”, with no pressure anywhere. Bliss.

But while that wasn’t wrong, it left out some important pieces of information. Zero-G meant if Mesonox ever started moving, she wouldn’t stop. She might’ve had no pressure on her body, but within the tight confines of her bunk, a few bad twitches pushed against the walls and sent her bouncing around like an extremely slow pinball. She also missed the weight of the sheets on her; they weren’t especially good sheets, but the little bit of pressure they exerted on her had been surprisingly calming.

As she drifted toward the foot of the bed, eyes shut, Mesonox weighed her options for what felt like the tenth time: a zero-G bed, where she kept sloshing around like fruit in a can, or a one-G one, where she was sometimes uncomfortable? They were pretty close; she could probably stay in one some sleep cycles and one some others. It’d certainly-

“Hey. Rookie.”

Mesonox cracked open an eye. An earth pony, leaner than the tribe’s usual, was pulling her bunk curtains aside just a little to stick her head in. Of course, as captain, Stellar Ride had that right. “We got a job. You awake?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Mesonox quickly. “Just power-napping.”

“Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?”

“Try five.”

Stella smiled. “Then get ready.”

As Stella pulled her head out, Mesonox yelled, “And could you turn on the gravity in here?” Stella didn’t respond, but a second later, Mesonox felt the familiar pull of downward acceleration at 9.8 m/s2 and dropped onto her bed. She reached out around the curtain, feeling around on her bunkside table for- There they were.

Upside of being a batpony: you could see really well in the dark. Downside: you were almost blinded in normal light. Upside: you had an excuse to walk around with nifty sunglasses on all the time. Mesonox hooked a hoof around hers and put them on. Amber-tinted wraparounds. They kept the color in her eyes.

Twisting around in what ought to have been far too small a space to allow it, Mesonox worked her rear hooves around the edge of the curtain. She smoothly unfolded herself, opening up her bunk and sliding out of it in one motion. Absolutely pointless and utterly inefficient, but Mesonox thought it looked cool.

Of course, it might’ve been better if anypony was looking at her. Gimbal and Littora were in Heavenly View, as usual, while Stella and Green Glen were talking about something, probably the trawling form, on the other side of the crew’s shared bedroom. Oh, well. She still liked doing it. Mesonox tilted an ear towards the pair as she began pulling on her work uniform’s undersuit.

“-not that big,” Glen was saying, “but it has a very eccentric orbit. Distribution thinks it might’ve been in a shipyard during the cascade and knocked into its current orbit when the debris hit.”

“Yeowch,” said Stella. “Can you imagine? Equus suffering an ablation cascade just days after your brand-new ship finishes construction? I’d probably give up shipbuilding altogether. Any idea on what the salvage profit’ll be?”

“They’re guessing thirty thousand, absolute minimum, if we’re very unlucky.”

Chewing on her gummy vitamins for the “day”, Mesonox tilted both ears towards the pair. Training had been vague on costs and profits, probably deliberately so, and she wanted to know whether that was good money or bad money.

“Hmm. Not the greatest, but it’ll still get us to the next job at worst. Well, hooves crossed, I guess.”

So thirty thousand was halfway-decent money. Good to know, Mesonox thought as she chugged down an energy drink (she wanted the caffeine and coffee was too bitter).

“Oh, and Starfall’s the one giving assignments at the moment. Want me to-?”

“Please. Anything to skip the orbital summary. It’s in the writeup anyway, so why do they keep giving us the data?”

“Completeness. I asked. Anyway, see you at View.” Then Glen’s horn sparked and he vanished in a haze of teleportation.

Mesonox coughed on her drink. You couldn’t teleport up here, it was impossible. How did-

Stella turned to Mesonox, unperturbed by the casual breaking of the laws of magic she’d just seen. She raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. You are fast.”

Swallowing the last dregs of the energy drink, Mesonox nodded. “See? Told you.” She grinned and smashed the can against her head. Instead of crumpling, though, the can just gave her a headache and nearly dislodged her glasses. As non-aetheric stars swam in her vision, she shook her head and sheepishly tossed the can towards the recycler. “Ow.”

“Protip,” said Stella. “Crumple the can a little before you hit yourself on the head. It’ll give it a seam to collapse on.”

“How do you know that?”

“Experience.” Stella clicked her tongue and nodded at the door from the living quarters. “Come on. View’s waiting.”

The east leg was two stories of metal and doors to crew quarters, plus a recreation area on the end. It wasn’t busy at the moment, just a few small clusters of ponies milling about. Stella turned with a purpose, striding towards the Hub with the calm confidence of somepony who’d done it a million times before. Even without her body language, she looked like she belonged in space, with a deep purple coat and her mane and tail rumpled in just the right ways for suit-wearing. Mesonox was left following in her shadow.

Mesonox nervously ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling her fangs. She’d had other jobs before, mostly in construction, but this was the one she’d been working towards, her first “real” job. And it was in space. Father had warned her that going straight into debris trawling without any other background in aetherwork would be nerve-wracking and overwhelming. She should’ve listened; he was a retired trawler and the reason she wanted to become one in the first place, after all. And only now was she realizing just how little she truly knew about space.

Still. She’d done great in the simulations. She knew her pre-cascade aetherships front to back to top to bottom to side to side. She’d almost aced the written exam. And a crew had even snatched her up on the spot once she put her application out. She wasn’t feeling her best, but she was still feeling alright.

Her anxiety ebbed with every step. Slowly, but noticeably. She could do this. Stella seemed nice and understanding enough, at least, and she was captain of the crew. That was something.

As their hooves clicked and clinked across the steel floor, Mesonox thought back to Glen. How had he done that? It looked like Stella had known, so… Mesonox trotted a little to get next to her and cleared her throat. “Uh, ma’am?”

Stella smirked subtly. “You do know you can stop ‘ma’am’ing me, right?”

“Sorry. Habit.”

“You can do it if you want, you just don’t need to.”

“Right. Okay.” Mesonox coughed. “Anyway, isn’t teleporting in space impossible? How did Glen, y’know, poof?”

“Technically, we’re not in space. We’re in Lunar Crown. And that-” Stella chuckled. “-is where things get interesting. So, why is teleporting in space impossible?”

Why was she asking this? This was the sort of thing every aethernaut knew. “The high aether concentration interferes with most magic, including teleportation. Any attempt at it will result in the teleportation energy stream losing cohesion and the teleporter getting smeared across spacetime.”

Stella waved around herself. “And what sort of atmosphere are we in now?”

“Uh… oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, trace gases, that sort of thing. A little bit of aether to let magic work, I think, um, one-point-two-one percent? Just over the percentage on Equus, to make magic easier.”

Stella raised an eyebrow. “So?”

In spite of how much she wanted to, Mesonox didn’t groan. Bad thing to do in front of the captain. “Well, yeah, he can teleport in a straight line, but not from the east leg to the north leg. There’s aether in the way and it’d disrupt the magic.”

“But we can walk from here to there,” said Stella. “Why shouldn’t we be able to teleport, too?” For somepony who was supposed to be explaining things, she sounded a lot like a little kid constantly asking, But why?

“Because we go to the Hub,” Mesonox said, on the verge of sighing, “before we-” Hold on. That might actually work. “He… he teleports to the Hub first, doesn’t he? He zigzags.”

Stella grinned and nodded. “Precisely. You can teleport between any leg and the Hub, so when he needs to go from one leg to another, he just pops from one leg to the Hub, then from the Hub to the other leg. Not efficient on the ground, but the only way to do it up here.”

“Oh.” Mesonox folded her ears back and stared at the floor. She should’ve known that. Sheesh; a few minutes into her first shift and she was already looking stupid in front of the captain.

“Hey, don’t be like that.”

Mesonox looked up; Stella was smiling at her. “Huh?” asked Mesonox.

“I know that look,” Stella said. “Seven years ago, I had that look on my first day. It’s like you’re diving into a pool, after you’ve left the board but before you hit the water, and suddenly you’re regretting jumping in the first place, right?” She chuckled. “Trust me, things get much easier once you hit the water.”

“You’re sure?” Mesonox rustled her wings and willed herself to keep looking at Stella.

Stella nodded. “Positive. You just need some experience to base it on before the nerves go away. It’s like swimming in the ocean: you stick a hoof in and it’s freezing, but once you’re all wet, you get used to the cold.”

Mesonox hadn’t gone swimming in the ocean — she lived too far away from it for that — but she’d gone swimming in Lake Michicant and figured that qualified; she knew that experience of COLD! giving way to This isn’t so bad. Still- “But you’ve been debris trawling since the cascade.”

“Since before the cascade, actually,” Stella said. And before Mesonox could tell Stella how much better that wasn’t, she continued, “When debris wasn’t a problem in the slightest, before trawlers were in high demand. My job was a lot less risky than yours and I still felt the same way.”

Easy for her to say. She’d lived through worse things. Still, Stella’s voice was too… easy for the sentiment to not be genuine. Taking a deep breath and rustling her wings, Mesonox said, “O-okay.”

“You’ll do fine. I’ve got a good feeling about you.”

In Gimbal’s mind, haptic-feedback spells for holograms were among the greatest inventions of the past millennium. Touchscreens and regular holographic interfaces were nice and all, but she preferred the pressure, that little “click”, that told her she’d pushed a button without her needing to look. But using buttons and switches for controlling an aethership meant so many of those buttons were used for just one very specific thing; an awful lot of the control panel wasn’t being used at any one time. Even though Gimbal liked buttons more than touchscreens, she admitted touchscreens tended to be more space-efficient. (Another pilot pointed out that she could always use voice control, with its audio feedback. Being a tactful purist, Gimbal had told her to engage in reproductive congress with herself. Verbatim.)

Then she found out about haptic-feedback holographic interfaces, and she was over the moon (not yet literally, sadly). She could get the same snap from holograms as she could from buttons, even fine-tuning it for each simulated button. She could configure her interface however she saw fit, even adding in macros that she couldn’t with buttons. She could avoid having large amounts of unused space on the console. Even better, it didn’t preclude having manual control; if Gimbal ever wanted to go back to the Good Old Ways, she just needed to turn the holograms off. After Stella had been doubtful, Gimbal had splurged with her own money to upgrade her interface. She never regretted it.

And as she sat in her seat, performing preflight checkups on DT Heavenly View, she reflected that another advantage was the capability to blow up displays as large as she wanted. It certainly made her versions of checkups a lot easier. She tapped the intercom to the engine room. “Littora?”

The intercom crackled. Again, Gimbal told herself that it didn’t need to be replaced. “Yah?”

“I’m ensuring the engines are still properly coupled, so don’t be surprised if you see a few power spikes.”

Littora snorted. “Wah mek yuh aawez du dem ting di haad way?” Gimbal had worked on Heavenly View long enough to understand Littora’s patois easily: «What makes you always do things the hard way?»

“It’s effective,” protested Gimbal. “It’s easy and shallow, or hard and deep. I prefer deep, so I go with hard.”

Gimbal suspected that if she’d gotten visual intercoms, she’d see Littora rolling her eyes. «Hard and deep. Yeah.»

“Yes indeed. I like it very hard and very deep,” Gimbal replied, struggling to not laugh. “Now shush. Working.” She flicked through several displays before finding the two she wanted: one measuring the inductance between the thaumatic core and the engine lines and one measuring the voltage in the engine lines. She turned on the ion engines, just a teeny bit; their output was currently so low, they couldn’t even push a paper across the room. But it was enough for Gimbal. “So, honey?” she asked as she watched the inductance readout slide up. “How’re you feeling? Still good?”

The needle ticked up, slowed, stopped. After a few seconds of the needle staying completely still, Gimbal nodded. “So far, so good. Voltage…” She glanced at that readout. It was just as still. “Just as good. Let’s take a closer look.” She zoomed in on the “screens” to find the inductance needle jiggling slightly in place, the changes too small to be seen further away. The voltage needle was still stationary. “Right. Good. Within the expected range. Now…” She pushed a little bit more power into the engines.

The voltage needle promptly climbed up a few more notches. A moment later, the inductance jiggling abruptly jumped in frequency before slowly settling back down. “Ooo, you’re responsive today,” whispered Gimbal. “Very nice, very nice. Any stationary-state increases in frequency negligible, voltage climb as expected. Finally…” She cut all power to the engines.

Immediately, the voltage bottomed out and the inductance jiggling slowed, followed by the needle gradually dropping back down to zero. “And nice and smooth on the discharge,” said Gimbal. “You’re gonna do well today, aren’t you?” She reached around her hologram to stroke the control panel itself. “Yes, you are.” She went back to the intercom. “Checkups’re done,” she said to Littora as she flicked the maintenance screens away. “The coupling’s still solid.”

«No botheration here, too,» Littora responded. «I’m going easy.»

“Perfect. Do you know when Glen’s getting-”

Something popped in the hallway behind her.

“Never mind, he’s here.”

A few seconds later, she heard Glen walk up. “Hey. Everything alright in here?”

“Yep.” Gimbal swung her chair around to talk face-to-face. In spite of the depth of his voice, Glen was a little short, although he made up for it in muscle (even though you didn’t need muscle in zero-G). “You’re early. Stella and Mesonox haven’t even gotten here yet.”

Glen shrugged. “Starfall was the administrator at the time.”

“Good timing.”

“Yeah. I’ve already uploaded the mission through the nav center. And, Gimbal, we need t-”

“Good,” Gimbal said quickly, pivoting her chair back around. “Now if you’ll ju-”

“Gimbal.” A haze of magic seized the chair and spun it back around. Glen was looking at her disapprovingly. “I know you don’t think we need to upgrade anything, but at the very least, that computer-”

Gimbal sighed. “It still works, doesn’t it?”

“It technically works the same way duct tape can technically plug a hole in the hull. Gimbal, the hunk of crystals and semiconductors in there was outdated two years ago. Even if the parts still work on a software level, they’ll start breaking down any day now. I honestly think I saw a few hologram glitches last week. Hologram glitches.”

“Sure,” Gimbal said, rolling her eyes. Why bother replacing it? It still worked. They could run it until it died, not run it until the next slightly shinier thing came along. So the newer models were a few petaflops faster, big deal. That wasn’t a speed increase of even ten percent. By gum, she was going to squeeze every single scrap of work out of every single scrap of machinery that she could. “While I’m on my shopping spree, anything else you want me to pick up?”

It’d been sarcastic, and Glen had obviously known that, but Gimbal still groaned inside when he scratched his head. “The batteries in the vacsuits could use some replacing, they’re not holding a charge as long.” (They still last longer than seven hours, fumed Gimbal.) “The communications suite might need some of the wiring redone.” (It’s still got a phenomenal bitrate, complained Gimbal.) “The galley needs to be restocked with post-job victory snacks.” (You’re just saying that because you’re the ONE PONY on the ship who doesn’t like granola, groused Gimbal.) “The-”

Gimbal rolled her eyes again. “Fine. Make a list.” Then she looked Glen straight in the eye. “No, seriously, make a list. We’re not rolling in bits at the moment and we need to prioritize.”

“Got a pen?”

Yes, the picture window facing the spaceport was impractical. Yes, it required a bit of upkeep for no gain. Yes, the entire station was in danger if it failed (hence the impermeable shield generators and fast-closing shutters outside the quartz glass). Yes, Mesonox agreed with the rumors that it’d only been installed for photo ops.

But the view from it was so dang cool.

Whenever she had the time, Mesonox had gone there every day since she’d first come on Lunar Crown to just look and occasionally watch ships come and go: supplies, other trawling teams, rich people who wanted to visit a space station, recycling crews who handled the junk brought back by trawlers, the works. The south leg and its bays stretched off for what felt like miles, many of them boasting ships. They ranged from sleek, straight-off-the-line surveyors to ancient masses that’d been built up over the years with their own useful customizations and useless (but neato) paint jobs. The half-chunky, half-sleek shape of View wasn’t in sight — she was too far down for Mesonox to make out — but that didn’t really matter. So many ships. So little ti-

Cough. “Any day now, rookie.”

Mesonox reluctantly tore herself away from the window. Later, she told herself. Later. She flexed her wings to try to regain a tiny bit of dignity and set off down the concourse after Stella. Other crews were running, walking, flying, and riding moving sidewalks up and down the terminal. It was hard to tell whether or not they were on the job or not; it wasn’t uncommon for crews to sleep on their ships, so-

“Bay number?” Stella asked suddenly.

“B6,” said Mesonox answered. She’d gotten used to Stella’s pop quizzes ever since she was hired and she was as prepared as she could get.

“Lead the way.”

Mesonox immediately turned right, taking the first levitation lift to the second floor of the docks. She trotted down the hall, passing B4, B5… B6, in big, bold letters. She held up her right fetlock, and the security chip built into her uniform, to the scanner next to the door. With a bee-beep, her credentials were accepted, and the door hissed open, revealing the crew conduit beyond.

Mesonox had barely set foot inside when Stella asked, “Make of View?”

“Rockhoof-class debris trawler,” replied Mesonox. “One of the older models, but very reliable. Chosen because it’s the aethernautical equivalent of the Tokara Haylux: you could drop a building on it and it’d still run.”

“And Gimbal says if it runs, it’s healthy,” muttered Stella. “Good pilot. Good mechanic. Not so good at reassuring ponies that that sound isn’t anything to worry about.”

But Mesonox was barely listening as she not-quite-cantered down the conduit to Heavenly View. She’d been in it several times before, but… aethership. And now, not just any aethership, but the one she was working from. It was like her brief stint as her high school’s librarian: the second she started working there, the place she’d been into and out of so many times without a thought suddenly became special, something of hers (that she had to share). As she passed through the airlock into the hold, she glanced at the line of vacsuit lockers, lingering on the one stamped Mesonox. It was stupid, but she couldn’t help but grin.

The airlock hissed shut as Stella stepped over the threshold. Mesonox guessed from the look on her face that she was ready with another question- “And, finally, our noms de cosmos?”

Mesonox resisted the urge to roll her eyes. What was wrong with “reporting names”? Maybe the same thing that meant Stella had all of their names be chess-based. “You’re King, because you’re the head of all this. Gimbal’s Queen, because she’s the most powerful, at least when flying View. Littora’s Knight, because she doesn’t move like anyone else. And Glen’s Pawn, because he really wanted that name for some reason, even though you said he ought to be Bishop because he was creative and solved problems in unexpected ways.”

“And you’re…?”

“The rookie, because I haven’t earned my reporting name yet.”

Stella smiled slightly, and Mesonox held herself just a little bit higher. Stella pressed a button on the intercom, and when she spoke, her voice had gained an extra layer of firmness. “All hooves, this is King. The rookie’s with me. Check in.”

The speaker crackled. Crackled. Mesonox wondered just how old it was. “Queen, checking in.”

“Pawn, checking in.”

“Knight, checking inna.”

“Check-ins confirmed,” said Stella. “All hooves, report to the nav center and look alive. We’ve got trash to collect.”

3 - Salvage Ops

The helmets were probably not designed for batponies, Mesonox told herself yet again. For the most part, this was no problem whatsoever. Batponies and regular ponies were like 98% percent identical in the general cranial area, and another 1.5% made no difference for helmets. Unfortunately, the remaining 0.5%, she really liked, and it was that remainder that was causing the problem.

Her adorable little ear tufts were itching like mad.

The ear parts of the helmet were designed to fit snugly around the ear, to allow for better conduction of sound from the aether and better mobility. This was less of a problem than Mesonox had expected; the majority of her ear wasn’t uncomfortable in the slightest. But the tips. Sweet Luna, those tips. Batponies had extra little sticky-outy bits of fur on the tips, and Mesonox loved hers. But now, those bits were stuffed into the helmet very uncomfortably and Mesonox had to resist the urge to rub them; she already knew from experience it wouldn’t work. She could shave them off later, get herself some more room, but they were just too cute.

Keep ear tufts or have a nice, snug, comfortable helmet? Decisions, decisions.

To be made later. Right now, she had to work, and first-job jitters were running through her body like crazy. Her vacsuit was on and she was standing in the airlock with Stella and Glen and after all the time she’d spent building herself up, she was sweating. She tried to hide it from herself by adjusting the fit on her magboots again. (The boots weren’t really magnetic — their enchantments meant they adhered to ships even though aethercraft hulls hadn’t used any metal, let alone ferrous metal, since before they’d been invented — but the name was catchy.)

“Hey, rookie,” said Stella. “You okay in there?” Mesonox heard the words twice: once through her radio, once through the aether-atmosphere mix that was rapidly becoming pure aether.

“Yes’m,” Mesonox said quickly. “Just a little nervous.” She swallowed. “Double-checked suit for leaks, fetlock computer up and connected, spare on standby, atmosphere levels good, strainer ready, grapple primed…” Was that everything? Seemed like it. “That’s all good, so I don’t have much else to do until…” She jerked her head towards the airlock.

“Compose a space song,” said Glen.

“What?”

“Space songs,” Glen said seriously. “Write a song about space, and if you ever get nervous, just start singing it. Even if it doesn’t connect you to the heartsong, it’ll distract you from, y’know, space and bring you back to the here and now. You don’t even need to write it all yourself — just crib from another tune if that’s easier.” Glen cleared his throat and warbled, “Soooomewheeeere out in the aether waaaay uuuup hiiiigh… Theeeere’s aaaa ship that I’m scrapping as space debris flies byyyy…”

Mesonox winced; she would’ve wiggled a hoof in her ear if not for her helmet. “Your voice sounds terrible.”

Glen shrugged. “I’m smart, not euphonious. Seriously, it works. Mute your comms if you don’t want anypony else hearing.”

“Or critiquing you,” said Stella, smirking at Glen. “And if Pawn takes a few extra seconds to respond, you’ll know he’s turning the mic back on.”

Well… really, it wasn’t the worst idea. Mesonox didn’t have a great singing voice, but it was at least better than Glen’s (she told herself). Worth a shot. She picked a song from one of her favorite diamond dog artists and began mixing up the words. I’m a gaaaarbagemaaaare… drifting in the sky-

Finally, the light above the exterior door clicked from red to green and it pulled open with a hissing of pistons. Mesonox pushed the song into the back of her head and turned to the airlock. Her legs were actually shaking in her suit, but she realized it was from excitement. She was really doing this. Once the door was fully open, she stepped forward and took a look at her first real wreck.

For how little maneuvering time she’d spent, Gimbal had brought them in impressively close to Solar Wind; the ship hung in the aether a scant twenty-five in front of them. She was big, almost twice the size of View, somehow bulky and sleek at the same time. Yet Mesonox couldn’t hold back a slight sympathetic wince at the damage done to her hull; even in the best cases, smooth lines and curves were broken up by holes and ugly scarring, while in the worst, entire hull sections were missing. A closer look at those blueprints Gimbal had would eventually be in order to better appreciate her beauty.

Stella and Glen stepped out of View and performed the ninety-degree spin onto the plane of the hull with a casual ease. Mesonox performed it with a practiced but inexperienced ease, her movements just a bit too tight to be natural. At least she didn’t stumble, even as her stomach performed a somersault from leaving View’s artificial gravity. That had always been the rough part in training, moving from a one-g field to a zero-g field with no change in acceleration; physics didn’t work that way outside of magic and her instincts rebelled.

But training had suppressed those particular instincts and she made it out with no problems. She took a few steps, just in case; the magboots sticking to View’s hull made them feel oddly sticky and heavy, but she was used to that. No problems.

Stella was squinting “up” at Wind. “A bit worse than I was expecting,” she said, “but not terrible. It looks like hull damage, mostly; the frame should still be intact.”

“Want me to pop in and give her a closer look?” asked Glen.

“Not yet. She’s still relatively whole,” said Stella. “You’d spend less time in her than you would getting over there and coming back. We should get to flyswatting first.”

“Copy that.” Glen saluted, even though he didn’t too, and trotted towards View’s bow in that peculiar suction-y gait from magboots that trawlers called “magtrotting”. Stella pulled out her strainer and nodded and nodded at Mesonox. She didn’t need to say anything else; Mesnox just nodded back and trotted to the stern, only briefly sparing a glance outward, to the space between View and Wind.

Swarming around View like a second shell, caught in the arcanogravity well of her dust filters, were hundreds upon hundreds of tiny little bits and bobs of trash, jagged and irregular shreds of metal and composite and plastic and Twilight knew what else. View had picked up probably four or five such pieces every mile (you traveled lots of miles very quickly in the aether). Salvage crews were known for retrieving the larger ships, but clearing microdebris like this was just as important, probably moreso.

Once close to the stern, Mesonox reared so she could get a closer look at them outside the simulations. They were such small things, but anything could be dangerous when traveling at high speeds — and in low Equus orbit, everything was traveling at high speeds. (It was kind of what made it orbit.) All it took was one screw intersecting with a satellite’s orbit in exactly the wrong way at exactly the wrong time, and suddenly that satellite was shedding an ever-expanding cloud of high-speed debris in unpredictable directions that could intersect with other satellites’ orbits in exactly the wrong ways at exactly the wrong times and… Well. That was the cascade, right there. For all Mesonox knew, she wouldn’t have a job if not for one screw.

Considering the damage it’d done, fuck that one screw.

Time to spite some trash. Mesonox unclipped her strainer from her suit and unfolded it to be a good three yards squared. She squinted at the mesh for any obvious holes — of course there weren’t, she’d checked it far more thoroughly just yesterday — and began moving it through the debris field. Aether wasn’t empty space, but as a near-superfluid, it was empty for all practical drag-related reasons. As a result, what would catch air like a parachute on Equus didn’t have any resistance whatsoever in the aether. The result would’ve been uncanny if not for Mesonox’s training.

And so, Mesonox performed one of the sacred rites of her profession, a role of utmost importance: picking up junk with a net. Basically, the kind of thing she did at the community pool to pick up a few extra bits during the summer while in high school. But in spaaaaaaaace! Being in space automatically made it neat.

Bit by bit, step by awkward-magbooted-step, Mesonox strode across View’s hull, catching debris in the strainer. She had to work a bit to make sure she took the most efficient path, but that had been part of her training and was easy-peasy. Once the net was close to full, she tapped a button on the handle; the sides of the mesh’s hook moved together to close it up and prevent any debris from escaping.

The universe slowly spun towards her as she traipsed to the other side of View, like the ship was an axle for everything. She tapped a button built into the hull and a set of doors slid open right in front of her. Mesonox dumped her trash inside, adding to the small pile that had already been left by Stella and Glen, artificial gravity holding it in place. Formally the Space Refuse Bay, jargonically a dumpster, it’d hold all the microdebris they collected until they returned to Crown, where it could be disposed of or recycled properly.

Mesonox returned to her section of the hull, ready to start again. This was the way it’d go for a while: back and forth and back and forth, capturing microdebris until the space within View’s dust filters was clear to RASA’s specifications. Boring. Of course, this was just the setup. The teaser. Mindless necessities that had to be taken care of before they got to the real juicy work, the stuff she’d signed up for. (Mesonox glanced at Wind. Still there.)

Still, there was a question nagging at her. Mesonox tapped a few buttons on her fetlock computer so she was talking to the whole crew. “Hey, quick question,” she said as she started another debris sweep. “How come the dust filters don’t automatically pull microdebris into the dumpsters? It’d save us a lot of work.”

Almost immediately, Littora spoke up. “Eh complicated,” she said. “Deh a… lots ah tings… Di aetah…” Her voice trailed off. Mesonox could hear her clicking her tongue.

“Short version, it’s a lot easier on the reactor,” said Glen. His voice wasn’t directly audible from the other side of View. “It’s… uh…” His voice dropped, like he was muttering to himself. “Stars blast it, how do I put it…”

“Di dust filtahs… Dem… interact wid di aetah,” said Littora. Mesonox could almost see her frowning as she tried to put a complicated idea into words. “Dem keep tings eena place. An… a move dem… Eh wul heap hardah.”

Mesonox prayed she was parsing Littora correctly as she asked, “Why’s moving them so much harder?” Inside her suit, her tail twitched slightly in apprehension.

“Aetheric interactions,” Glen said, his voice somewhat distant. “The aether interacts with the magic that creates the dust filters, and kinda… amplifies it. Same reaction that causes an aether high if you breathe it. And we can… make small gravity wells to catch debris with the right frequencies, but making those wells MOVE is something else entirely.”

“Eh wud mash up di reactah. Lakka swimming at ah constant speed tru ah storm.”

Like swimming at a constant speed through a storm. That was an image. Mesonox put a few thoughts together, scooped at a particularly large chunk of plastic, and- “So it might work, but… the… constantly changing power requirements would burn out the reactor?”

“Yes and… no,” Glen said. “That’s most of it, but not all of it.”

“Yuh know di Flood Effec?” Littora cut in.

“Nope.”

Silence. Interjecting for the first time in their conversation, Stella chuckled and said, “Do you want to?”

Mesonox’s mesh was full again, she closed it up. “It’s one way to pass the time. Why not?”

“Alrighty then,” Glen said, his grin audible. “As magic travels through the aether, it…”

Queen sat back in her chair, listening to the aethernauts chatter about aether stuff, eyes flicking over the various displays she had up. Monitoring the various energy levels around the ships was boring, but even half a decade on, you never knew; some half-dead but still-active reactor could be winding down on the last shards of its mana crystals, only for some aethernaut to connect or cut the wrong wires and trigger a runaway meltdown or activate the engines or make the gravity fields malfunction or what have you. That hadn’t happened yet — to Heavenly View, to any other crews — but the simulations still said it was theoretically possible, and Queen wasn’t going to take any chances.

The only energy signatures reading on the scopes were the usual: the adherence spells in the magboots and the technically-levitation of the dust filters. Wind was dead in the water, nothing showing in her at all. To be expected, but a ship with no energy signatures was like an equine body without a heartbeat. Shame.

Queen’s eyes flicked to the Microdebris Density reading. Thanks to the rookie, it was clicking down faster than usual. Not by a huge amount, but once the rookie had done a few jobs, it’d be a lot bigger. All the simulations in the world (or out of the world) couldn’t prepare you for the real thing.

The aethernauts talked and time ticked away. Queen didn’t say anything; she had nothing to say. Her stomach did, though, and it growled. Maybe she could use some synthcocoa.

She glanced at the clock. Not yet, though. Not yet.

It wasn’t the microgravity that was making Mesonox’s head spin. Littora and Glen kept trading on explanations for why debris retrieval couldn’t be done automatically by the filters, and after a while, they seemed to be vibing so much they’d probably forgotten about her entirely. She didn’t mind, though; she kept listening as they talked, not even trying to interrupt. She picked up bits and pieces of aetherphysics, much of it flying so far above her head it was on the other side of the sun, but some of it understandable.

“-thanks to Neighton’s third law, we can’t even be sure we wouldn’t be moving the ship instead!” said Glen, close enough that they didn’t need the radios. “Which would, admittedly, be kinda neat if the ship could take it.”

“If,” Littora enunciated.

“I mean, yeah, that’s a pretty big ‘if’-” Glen dumped another pile of microdebris into the dumpster. “-but it would be neat, right?”

“…Yeh.”

“Right.” Glen glanced at Mesonox. “Right?”

“Right,” confirmed Mesonox. “Even if it’s just a more complicated Alcroupierre drive.” She’d been able to follow that much, at least.

Or so she thought; Glen shook his head. “Alcroupierre drives warp space so the ship technically isn’t moving within her bubble. This would pull the ship through space by dragging on space itself like… wheels or treads. No spacetime warping, actual movement, no FTL.”

“Okay. Neat in concept, less neat in implementation.”

“Making it an engineer’s wet dream.” (Littora snickered on the other end of the radio and Mesonox wasn’t sure Glen recognized his accidental pun.)

Stella interrupted. “The outside is looking pretty dusted, Queen. What’s it look like on your end?”

“Gimme a sec…” said Gimbal. Literally a second later, she said, “Oh, we’re VERY in the range. Not sure we’ve been this clean before.”

“Relatively or absolutely?” Stella asked, restowing her strainer.

“Both. We should’ve hired another pony a long time ago!”

“Told you.” Stella turned to Mesonox and Glen. “You heard her, we’re done here. Strainers away-” (Mesonox’s was already folded back up and clamped back on her suit. Stupid protocol.) “-and we’ll transfer to Solar Wind. One at a time, since it’s the rookie’s first real jump.”

Mesonox nodded. She felt ready, but you couldn’t be too careful in space.

Looking up at Wind, Stella crouched, wiggled her rump, and jumped straight away from the hull, disengaging her magboots perfectly. She casually rotated as she drifted towards Wind and alighted on her smoothly, like she was a pegasus coming in for an easy landing. (Restricted within her suit, Mesonox’s wings twitched.)

“That’s how you know she’s the captain,” said Glen. “Make me an alicorn and let me work for centuries, and I still wouldn’t be able to do it that gracefully. Observe.” He crouched and jumped as well, but far more clunkily; he didn’t get his magboots off properly, meaning his flight was slow and his rotation quick rather than the other way around. He wasn’t even going the right direction, his travel vector taking him off into space. But he seemed ready for that; as he spun, he pointed his leg-mounted grapple at Wind and fired. It suckered itself to the hull right next to Stella, as if he’d shot it from a casual standing position rather than tumbling tail-over-teakettle in zero-g. He reeled himself in and looked up at Mesonox. “Don’t worry about looking nice,” he said cheerfully. “You can’t possibly be worse than THAT.”

“Actually, you can,” piped up Gimbal. “That’s after Pawn’s done well over a dozen trawling missions. You should’ve seen what he was like BEFORE then!”

“Don’t listen to Queen, rookie,” said Glen. “That’s inaccurate.”

“Correct,” said Stella. “Pawn hasn’t improved at all.”

“Exactly! Listen to King, Queen.”

Mesonox grinned slightly. She’d been decent at (simulated) unpowered ship transfer. And the dusting going well had boosted her spirits. She could do this.

She crouched, wiggled her hooves, and jumped. In the split second before she would’ve left the ground on Equus, she angled her hooves just so. It pulled her boots from the hull’s surface right before momentum carried her away from View. End result: a smooth drift towards Wind. Nice.

Too smooth, technically; she’d extended all four legs at the rate, meaning she wasn’t rotating. She always forgot that. She needed to turn around if she didn’t want to land on her back, but that was simple. Twisting her shoulders one way and her rump the other (to preserve angular momentum), Mesonox managed to awkwardly face Wind. She reached out a hoof and the magboot stuck to the hull as she made contact. Properly anchored, she got back into a more comfortable position. First space jump: not quite nailed, but pretty darn close. She didn’t even need to use her grapple.

Stella nodded at Mesonox. “Nice one. Now spread out and do an integrity check. I’ll take the nose. Rookie, you take the stern. Pawn, see if you can find a way inside to check if there are any bodies.”

Stella’s voice remained level for the last command, but Mesonox’s heart twinged. It was easy to forget, but a lot of people — equine and otherwise — had died in their ships during the cascade. There were horror stories of salvage crews finding bodies ripped to shreds by high-speed debris, near-perfectly preserved even years later. The thought of crawling around in a dead ship looking for corpses made her stomach churn. (Admittedly, she could do body checks if she had to. She just really didn’t want to.) But Glen didn’t seem too perturbed. Or maybe he was just better at hiding it. He simply said, “Copy that,” and set off along the hull.

“And, rookie?” said Stella. “Keep up the good work.” Without another word, she headed forward, towards Wind’s nose.

A personal compliment right from the boss herself. Mesonox would’ve been walking on air as she moseyed over to the engines, but walking on aether was even better.

4 - Impulse

During the early days of post-cascade salvage, back when the sheer density of debris meant you were risking death just by being in the wrong orbit, ponies didn’t worry that much about the integrity of the hulks they picked up. A wreckage was a wreckage, right? Just slap a few tow cables on it and you were good to go.

But while that was true for the vast majority of the wrecks, you could never be sure just by looking at it. If high-speed debris had punched through it in exactly the wrong way, it could do serious damage to the integrity of the infrastructure. Once, while a trawling crew was on approach to Regal Harmonics, the ship they’d picked up had broken clean in half, the untethered part drifting straight towards the habitat leg of the station. Thankfully, emergency crews got it under control before it could do any damage, but it resulted in a serious re-evaluation of trawling procedures. Now, several years and safety regulations later, you needed to fully secure your salvages rather than just hooking some tow cables to them and gunning it for the spacedocks.

Step one was simple: go over the wreck and see if anything major was broken, and if so, how badly. At least, it sounded simple, until you got to asking what the hay “anything major” meant. Then you looked at “how badly” and asked what that meant. Then you realized it changed from ship to ship to ship, and that was where most ponies gave up. Trawlers had to know a lot of ships and about ship design in order to pinpoint the right stress points, the parts that could be blown away and still not leave the ship at risk of breaking apart, what damage was catastrophic and what didn’t need a second glance.

Mesonox knew her ships. For instance, since Solar Wind had an engine block based on a Firefly shuttle, the framework around that engine block would be heavily reinforced with plenty of redundancies. That made the lookover perfect for a rookie to take on; the infrastructure was relatively simple with lots of backups, so either Solar Wind was definitely going to break apart there or definitely not going to break apart there.

Still, Mesonox refused to take that ease for granted. She walked to Wind’s stern, carefully examining the hull along the way, stopping to test for loose hull plating whenever she moved from one plate to the next. Most hull plates didn’t have the mass to do serious damage, but keeping them secured looked nicer. In spite of the plethora of holes she passed, everything was down tight.

Abruptly, her radio crackled. “Found- an airlock,” grunted Glen. “Power- wasn’t working- so- I’m opening it- manually.”

“Need any help, Pawn?” asked Stella. “I can send the rookie over to-”

“Nah.” Glen grunted again, more loudly, and something groaned at the other end of the line. “Just got it open,” he panted.“Didn’t feel like that wheel’d been used much.”

“Copy that. Keep us posted.”

“Will do, King. Out.”

Mesonox felt her wings tense up inside her spacesuit. There was always the chance, no matter how small, that some ship they’d be pulling back to Lunar Crown in the future was going to be full of dead bodies caught in the cascade. Maybe she’d be the one examining the inside to find them. Just the thought of that was… ugh.

She distracted herself by swinging herself fully onto the engine block. Holes littered the hull like drops from a light rainstorm, usually only an inch or so across, sometimes several feet. She wasn’t sure whether this was usual, so she tapped a few buttons on her fetlock computer to turn on a camera and start recording her work. She could ask Stella about it later.

That set, she crouched down to take a closer look at the holes. Nothing out of the ordinary on the smaller holes, and when she shone a light in, the insides looked fine — relatively speaking and as far as she could see, anyway. She hadn’t expected anything different (small holes meant small debris meant small chances for damage), but she wanted to be thorough. The larger holes, though, needed more work. When she got to one of those, Mesonox did a slow circle around it, carefully examining the walls from every angle. If they were large enough, she stuck her head in to get an even better look. The bigger the hole, the bigger the risk of some important strut getting sliced in two and impacting Solar Wind’s integrity.

Astonishingly, the engines themselves had seemingly escaped the worst of the damage. There were a few punctures in the thruster grids, but when Mesonox had been expecting them to be just about shredded, it was barely anything. She didn’t even see any major holes through them. Near them, sure, but not through. Reaching one of those near holes, Mesonox wormed her head in to examine the damage.

Not much of a change from what she’d seen in the other holes. More wiring, some tubing, anything that had lain in the way of the debris neatly annihilated. No major breakages. The biggest difference was in the hole itself; rather than being straight, this one curved, just a tiny little bit. When Mesonox examined the curve more closely, she found some sort of composite plating that didn’t look too different from hull plating. Extra protection for the engines, maybe? They still didn’t know what Wind had been testing.

But even with the curve, the debris had still torn through the plating; at those speeds, nothing could help that much. She shined her light into the hole, onto the engine itself. She had to be thorough, although she was only expecting more of the-

Huh.

Mesonox frowned at one part of the engine. An arc of three rows of strange gemlike cylinders, each about two inches long and less than an inch in diameter, decorated it, glinting oddly in the light. Slim wires coiled around each individual cylinder, looking like solenoids. From the way the rows curled along the thruster housing, each one formed a complete ring around the thruster (assuming none of the circles had been damaged).

Engines didn’t have those. Gems were almost entirely used for magic and engines didn’t have much use for magic. Spells were used during their construction for things like fortifying their strength or increasing wire conductivity, but full-blown arcane artifice like this just didn’t happen. How would it even work? The gems were unprotected, so at the slightest leak of aether, any magic risked going out of control if not carefully focused. Was that what the wires were for? Or maybe… Mesonox squinted at one of the gems, but she couldn’t make out any runes carved into its surface (not that she knew anything about runes, anyway). Hmm. Weird. Especially galling since it meant her studies of engines were useless here.

Ah, well. Mesonox tapped a button on her fetlock computer several times, snapping some pictures of the gems. (Quartz, maybe? They seemed to hold onto the glow as the flash died.) Solar Wind was dead and ultimately the property of the Equestrian government. The precise workings of her engines weren’t part of Mesonox’s job, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to be curious, just that she wasn’t allowed to waste time thinking about them on the clock. She’d ask Glen about them once Solar Wind was secured and View was taking her back to Lunar Crown. Maybe Littora, too. And, what the hay, she’d run it by Stella and Gimbal as well. The more, the merrier.

That was the only thing off Mesonox could see, so she pulled her head back out. Out of curiosity, she examined the area around the engine. Nothing out of place… except for a few strange vents that deliberately opened up that inside chamber to the aether. She took a few pictures and filed them away to speculate on later.

A few more hole pokings, and Mesonox was surprised to see that she’d gone over almost the whole engine block. Just to be sure, she did a circuit of the area, confirming that she remembered everything. Yes, she did. Easy. A bit dull, but easy. Her suit kept her wings by her sides, but she still flexed them with self-satisfaction as she flicked on her radio. “Stella? Um, King?” she said. “I’ve finished with the engines. No structural problems at all.”

“Nice job, rookie,” Stella replied. “Have you checked around the RCS thrusters?”

Mesonox immediately turned bright red. “Not yet,” she said. Honesty poked at her and she reluctantly added, “I… forgot.”

“Then get to it and let this remind you next time,” said Stella. She didn’t sound accusative or disappointed, more… advisory. Like forgetting it once was no big deal, but don’t let it become a habit.

Swallow. “Will do.” Mesonox began magtrotting towards Wind’s edge.

“You still there, Pawn?” Stella asked. “Is no news good news, or did you die terribly?”

“Died terribly,” Glen replied. “Luckily, somepony from the Necromancy Corps was hanging around and brought me back to life as thanks for finally picking her up. Anyway, it’s good news no news: I’m not seeing any bodies. Inside’s been ripped up by debris, but it’s all spaceship insides, not sophont insides.” A pause. “Hay, I’m pretty sure they left the lights off.”

“You can tell without power?” Mesonox asked. “Were the light switches still analog?” It wasn’t standard procedure on prototype ships, but only in the sense that it wasn’t official, yet everyone did it anyway. Computerized switches meant more coding meant more chances for bugs, and when you were working on a brand-new ship, the last thing you wanted was to try to turn on the lights in Corridor C and accidentally fire up Engine Block C because of some bad coding. If you believed the tales, it’d even happened once, in some disastrous test that got hushed up. (In spite of her best efforts, Mesonox couldn’t find any hard facts to confirm that little astral legend, but it kept popping up, and switches on prototype ships stayed analog, Just In Case. Just because the sailors now journeyed through aether rather than over water didn’t make them any less superstitious.) If the switches were analog, very little real testing had occurred, if any.

“Yep. The one I’m looking at is, anyway. Can’t see any labels on it, but it’s down — I know we’re in space, shutup — which I’m guessing means ‘Off’.”

“It probably wasn’t long before they were going to start testing her,” said Stella. “Then, well, the cascade happened.”

Glen snorted. “Hah. Can you imagine? ‘Hey, boss, we’re not going to be able to test our fancy new spaceship today, because, uh, SPACE IS CLOSED. Yes, all of it.’”

Mesonox chuckled. “‘Also,’” she added, “‘we kinda lost the ship when space was closed, soooo…’”

“Bad day all around,” said Glen. “I swear to Twilight, insurance in those days must’ve been a nightmare.”

“It still is,” said Stella. “I hear there are still scams going around about ponies claiming their ships or satellites were caught in the debris and definitely not banged up beforehoof.”

Stella’s and Glen’s conversation was like a balm on Mesonox’s mind as she worked through the tedium of investigating still more holes, this time on Wind’s sides. For the most part, it was the same as the engine block, with lots of holes but little structural damage. At one point, she poked her head around in one of the holes near an RCS thruster and spotted some more of those solenoidical gems. Hmm. Strange. She snapped a few more pictures and shrugged it off.

Other than that, there wasn’t much to talk about around the sides. Much like the engine block, it was largely intact. She let her mind drift back to the conversation, actually listening to it rather than merely perceiving it.

“-like those old Zebrabwean princess scams,” Glen was saying. (Mesonox only had a vague idea of how he’d gotten there.) “Try it enough times and someone’s gonna bite.”

“I guess,” Stella said skeptically. “But you’d think insurance companies would be more-”

Mesonox cleared her throat. “I’ve finished with Wind’s aft half, King. No problems whatsoever.”

“Good, good. Same for her front half. She’s riddled with holes, but everything’s secure.”

“While we’re on the subject,” said Glen, “nothing’s wrong in here, either. No bodies, no dangerous cargo, no loose fuel rods, nothing. I’m leaving.”

“Perfect. Queen-”

“I hear you,” said Gimbal.“Moving into position for the tethers.” With just a few deft maneuvering bursts, Heavenly View neatly slid around and pivoted until her main engines were pointing at Solar Wind. Several more small bursts took her a little further from Wind. “There we go. Aiming the tethers as we speak. I see you, King, and you, rookie.” (Mesonox gave View and Gimbal a smile and a wave.) “Pawn, let me know when you’re out.”

It was only a moment of waiting before, “Just got out.” Mesonox glanced down the hull and spotted Glen, halfway between the bow and the stern, waving at View so Gimbal could see him. “Fire when ready.”

“Alrighty, then, computer says you’re all out of the way… Firing the upper tethers in 3, 2, 1-” From three modules on the upper half of the ship, three thick cables began drifting lazily towards Wind, given a light nudge by their magnetic coil launchers. Mesonox readied her grapple, just in case Gimbal had misaimed.

But given Gimbal’s experience, it was no surprise that she hadn’t. Mesonox didn’t even need to move and the cable softly hit just a few feet from her. She snatched the clamp at the end and placed it flush against Wind’s surface. It immediately adhered to the hull, thanks to a not-magnetic enchantment that was basically a scaled-up version of the ones in her magboots. Synching her fetlock computer with the clamp’s internal systems, she ran a few diagnostics. Once they were done, she sounded off, following Stella’s and Glen’s examples.

They repeated the dance on the lower half of the ship with just as much ease and soon all six cables were secured. Mesonox grinned to herself; this was easy. She imagined Gimbal had the same expression; her voice was light and breathy, almost a laugh, as she said, “And there we go. Textbook.”

Even Stella sounded happy as she said, “Copy that.”

“Opening the pod bay doors so you can strap some engines onto this bad girl and we can get home.” Mesonox heard a rumble through the aether and watched as a large bay on Heavenly View’s top opened up. “Just FYI, I’m going to step away to get a drink. Don’t call me ’til I’m back.”

“Could you repeat that?” said Glen. He snickered at the lack of response.

The aethernauts didn’t jump when they returned to View; they just pulled themselves along the cables. Inside the bay were several chunky crates, almost big enough to hold a pony; the ponies undid the magnetic clamps on three of them delicately massaged them out of the bay. The crates were massive — as in, even in zero-G, they had a lot of mass and inertia. It was a little bit of a juggling act to get them back over to Wind, but between the three of them and some creative grapple use, they managed. Mesonox took her crate to her tethers and opened it up.

The contents, drone pods, were one final safety precaution, a way for dragged ships to fight against inertia without friction. The pods were to be placed all around Wind’s hull, so that as View traveled back, bursts of thrust from the pods could keep the two ships in line along the same vector of travel, even as View made course corrections. Salvage was easier when the ship you were salvaging wasn’t swinging around like a flail.

Mesonox pulled the first pod from her crate, basically a slim, three-foot-long engine with a computer and a rope attached, and set about adhering it to the hull. It wasn’t that different from clamping the tethers to Wind, really, although there was an extra step of checking their connections to View’s computer. But that was easy, almost entirely automated. Then she had to connect the pod to the tether (you couldn’t have more space debris flying around if the adhesion failed), which required nothing more than a heavy-duty carabiner. Mesonox was done in about a minute and already moving to the next one. Once they were all in place, all that was left to do was to tow Wind back to Crown.

“Just FYI, I’m going to step away to get a drink,” said Queen. “Don’t call me ’til I’m back.” Without waiting for a response, she stood up and strode back to the galley. She promptly beelined to the coffee machine, dumped in some water without adding any coffee, and turned it on. Quickest way to heat up a little bit of water on View.

As the coffee maker warmed up (har har), Queen took a quick detour to an intercom. “Hey, Knight? You down there?”

The intercom crackled. «Sure. You need something?»

“With the rookie, we’ll be spending less time idling out here, right?”

«Hopefully, yeah.»

“Out of curiosity, how much fuel would we be saving, if any? A lot, a little, none at all…?”

«Hmm. That’s hard to say.» Knight smacked her lips. «Pretty low. Most of the reactor’s energy goes into the engines, but if I had to guess… No more than five percent. We’ll need to do more salvages and run some numbers to be sure.»

About what Queen had expected. Ah, well. You couldn’t have everything. “Still, time saved is time saved, right? They’re almost done already.”

«They are?» Knight whistle-clicked. «Nice.»

“Yeah, Wind wasn’t banged up too bad, so between that and another set of hooves, we’ve only got like ten minutes before she’s secure.”

«Ha! Remind me to thank the rookie for her help.»

“Knight, remember to thank the rookie for her help.”

«I will drown you.»

Queen laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind. Say, I’m in the galley right now; need me to bring you something?”

«Nah. I’ve got some seaweed down here. But thanks for the offer.»

Queen had never really been sure of how Knight kept the reactor clean when she was eating seaweed down there. (Not even seaweed bars, actual seaweed.) But it was clean, and that was really all that mattered. “Anytime.”

The coffee machine dinged. Queen poured herself a mug of not-quite boiling water, then stirred in a mix of synthcocoa. Once it had settled down, she sniffed her mug and smiled at the aroma. Synthcocoa wasn’t quite as rich as the real thing, but it succeeded in one important way: unlike regular cocoa, you could buy it cheaply in bulk up on Lunar Crown. Space travel had progressed that the present cost wasn’t nearly as expensive as the “ten thousand bits per pound of payload” it’d once been, but you still couldn’t just fling things up willy-nilly. Synthcocoa was a good enough substitute, especially for the price.

She took a sip, savored the way her tongue was almost scalded, and headed back for the cockpit. Technically speaking, leaving the cockpit while salvage was in progress was against regulations, but everypony else had it in the bag. At this stage of the process, there wasn’t much that could happen. Hay, with the help of the rookie, they might even be done by now. There weren’t any alarms screaming, at any rate.

Well, there was one.

Bing.

A quiet one.

Bing.

What was that? She knew the sound, but she couldn’t place a specific alert to it. She’d never heard it while trawling, that was for certain.

Bing.

Something in her head clicked. It was an… energy notification. Yeah, that was it. The computer had detected an uptick in energy signatures. Probably just from the tethers or pods.

Bing.

…But she’d never heard it before because the scanners were designed to filter out readings from-

Dropping her mug, Queen bolted for the cockpit.

Just over halfway done, on Wind’s far side, Mesonox was whistling to herself as she connected the next pod. She knew she was lagging behind Stella and Glen a little, but she had an excuse. For a first day, this was going splendidly. In fact, it was almost a disappointment; what if it only got worse from here because this job was so good? But she brushed it off; things could get quite a bit worse and she’d still be fine.

She squinted at the fuel readings on her pod. It was full, of course, but it got her thinking. “Stella? Glen? Have you ever run out of fuel for these? They’re kinda small.”

“Nah,” said Glen. “Crystalline thaumatic storage is really efficient, and it’s not like they’re powering much, anyway. The typical burn from one of those is only two or three seconds, so, erg-wise, that’s only-”

Suddenly, Gimbal’s voice broke in through the radio. “Everyone, whatever you’re doing, drop it and get back to View NOW,” she said, nearly panicking. The thrumming of a holographic-haptic keyboard buzzed through the speaker; Gimbal was pressing a lot of buttons very fast. “We just picked up some strange energy readings and I have NO idea what’s up with them. Knight, get to your terminal ASAP.”

Mesonox paused, one hoof still on the pod. Her training was nearly reflexive and made her want to finish checking the diagnostics, but when you heard a voice like that… She began hobbling across Wind’s hull, leaving the drone pods behind, wishing magboots weren’t so awkward.

On another end of the line, Stella said something uncouth, then, “Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know, they’re inside Wind- Knight, where are you?”

“Mi yah,” said Littora. “Mi a luk at eh now.”

Mesonox’s ears twitched as she heard one quiet clang through the aether, then another. Stella and Glen reaching View? Hopefully. She still didn’t have a good angle to jump. She hobbled along.

Littora spoke up again. “Mi, mi tink mi hav ih. Ih… luk lakka…”

Silence. Stella cleared her throat. “Knight?”

“DI ENGINE A BUSS!” Littora shrieked.“GIT OUTTA DEH!”

Mesonox didn’t understand the first sentence, but tone alone was enough to convey its meaning. She fully got the second one. And like a neat little bow on the whole shebang, the spaceship that was supposed to be dead twitched beneath her.

For the briefest of instants, she froze; none of her training had ever covered anything like this. Then pure flight instinct took over and she did her best to run in an environment that hated running. She felt like she was re-entering the tiniest of gravity fields as Wind’s speed slowly inched upwards. Bad bad bad. Dead ships didn’t accelerate.

Heavenly View was right in front of her. Stella and Glen had already made the jump. Mesonox took a few quick breaths to psych herself up, then jumped. Fortunately, her aim was true and she was heading straight for-

Something flared behind her as Gimbal yelled, “MOTHER OF-”

A wall slammed into her back with the force of a freight train and sent her spinning. Before she could even register it, she’d smashed into View hard enough to hear something break. She’d bounced away before she could secure her magboots and she kept on spinning.

For a few seconds, nothing more happened. Mesonox panted in her helmet, which suddenly felt very small. View and Wind kept passing in and out of her vision, somehow tangled up together, twisting and yanking on each other in strange ways. And they were getting smaller.

“No!” she screamed. She reached out in front of her, the only direction that was consistent as the two vessels swung into and out of view. With each pass, they shrank. “No, help! Help! SOMEPONY HELP ME!”

But nopony came, and all Mesonox could do was scream as she drifted away from the only solid objects for miles.

5 - Falling Leaf

Agnosipanophobia, the “fear of not knowing which way is up”, is perhaps a phobia unique to pegasi and unusually pervasive. The name is a slight misnomer; it refers specifically to a fear of a disruption of flight, such as a flat spin or a graveyard spiral, that makes it hard to tell where the horizon is due to rapid rotation, and so makes it hard to visually know up and down. Generally speaking, if you’re so disoriented during your flight that you can’t tell which way is up, you’re going to be hitting the ground very very hard very very soon.

As Mesonox spun over and over, the stars whirled around and Equus whizzed past again and again; unable to orient herself, agnosipanophobia set in and panic overtook her. Her every instinct screamed that she was going to hit the ground and die soon. Her heart was running a mile a minute and she couldn’t get her breathing under control. Centrifugal force was pushing all the blood to her head. She screamed, flailed her hooves, beat her wi-

Her wings strained against her suit and yanked Mesonox back to space. She was not in the air. She was not going to hit the ground soon. In fact, she wasn’t going to be hitting anything, ever. (Joy.) She was still alive, so her suit hadn’t been breached. She was as safe as she could hope for the time being.

Okay. Deep breath. Okay. Deep breath. Okay. Deep breath. Okay. The stars kept spinning around and around, but the panic receded. Deep breath. Okay. Deep breath. Okay.

I can get through this.

First order: Where was she? They’d never be able to find her if she couldn’t tell them where to look. (Also, stupid Gimbal for not springing for the suits with tracking.) As her breathing and her heart slowed, Mesonox looked at her HUD and got her coordinates.

Except her HUD wasn’t there. The inside of her helmet was blank.

Mesonox started hyperventilating again and her ears rang. Nothing in her training covered this. Stella had said it was good for every-

Stellar Ride. She’d know what to do. Or somepony on the other end of the comms. Mesonox swallowed, trying to wet her throat. “Uh, uh, Stella? Um, King?” she said. “This, this is the rookie. I, I’m okay, but my HUD’s down and I don’t know my position. What should I do? Over.” She waited for a response. And waited. And waited.

And waited.

“Uh, King? Do you copy? Over.”

The world turned end over end over end. No answer.

“Queen? Pawn? Does anypony read?”

Static. They weren’t saying anything.

In fact, they hadn’t said anything since the collision.

“Alright, uh, guys, this is the rookie. I’m…” What was the term? It wasn’t fair that she needed to use it on her first job. “…I’m transmitting in the, in the blind, I’m off-structure and drifting, and I can’t see my HUD. I’m okay, though, and I think my suit’s intact. I’m gonna try to see what the problem is. Somehow.”

Her hooves were buzzing. Mesonox closed her eyes, desperately trying to ignore the spinning backdrop of stars for just a second, to get some stability. It didn’t work; the sun was part of that backdrop and her eyelids brightened and dimmed as it moved across her field of vision. It was nearly worse than actually seeing it. Mesonox opened her eyes, breathed again, and began examining herself.

She saw it immediately. The computer on her fetlock had been smashed to pieces when she’d been hurled against View. The casing was twisted and the screen was cracked, leaving the terminal unrecognizable. A few bare wires trailed electricity, ordinary current whipped into harmless arcane lightning by the aether. It’d be hard to fix back down on Equus. In space, thrown about by centrifugal force with limited tools? Impossible. She was effectively stranded, unable to talk to anypony and them unable to find her.

But a small part of Mesonox was relieved. Early computers hadn’t reacted well with the aether, so they’d been made hot-swappable with spacesuit systems. If a critical component ever crapped out, an aethernaut could simply remove the old system and stick in a spare. By the time that hurdle had been cleared, tradition had formed, and so aethernauts always carried a backup terminal or two, Just in Case. Mesonox had one in one of her pouches. Switching this would be easy; she just needed to push in on the tabs-

The tab snapped off beneath her hoof.

She didn’t notice as it spun off into space; she was staring at the terminal in shock. It was like her mind had shorted. That was how you got the computer out. If she couldn’t get the computer out, she couldn’t get the new one in. And if she couldn’t get the new one in…

She had nothing.

Her breathing began inching back towards hyperventilation. Her helmet threw her warm, used air back in her face. It barely registered. It didn’t matter. She was going to-

She surprised herself when she grabbed her helmet and forcefully slammed her head against the side of the interior. Or tried to; the helmet moved with her neck and the inside was semi-cushioned, so the impact was light. A thought whizzed through Mesonox’s head of how inept that looked and the absurdity of it arguably did more to jar her out of her panic than actual pain would have.

Stop. Breathe. Think.

She stared out at space. Her visuals told her she was spinning around and around and around, yet none of her other senses agreed with that. She ought to be nauseated, puking her guts out all over the inside of her suit, but that’d never been a problem for her. She hadn’t even needed to train it out; as with most pegasi, keeping down her lunch came naturally.

Not this. She hadn’t even trained for this.

But she could think.

Mesonox let herself slow, examining her computer. She poked and prodded; it wiggled, but her blunt hoof couldn’t do much to work it out. Even if she were a unicorn, she couldn’t do much, not with the aether interfering with whatever magic she’d have. She needed something slimmer, something dexterous.

She ran her tongue across her teeth and swallowed. There was… one way. Dangerous. Risky. She’d only have one shot at it. If it went wrong, she’d be dead in moments.

Better that than starving to death in the void, she supposed.

Another swallow. “O-okay. King. Queen. This is the rookie in the blind. My, my fetlock computer got smashed, but, but I’ve still got my spare, so I think I can replace it. But I’m going to need to open my visor so I can get a good grip on the frame with my teeth, it’s kinda lodged in there. Oh, and, uh, Queen? This is your fault for not getting those flexihel-”

Mesonox cut herself off. If Heavenly View was listening to those words and she died trying to get the computer in, Gimbal would be devastated. “Um, scratch that. Queen, this, this isn’t your fault. Sorry. Bad joke. Wasn’t thinking. So, u-uh… Wish me luck, guys. Out.”

She began taking deep breaths, trying to fill her body with as much oxygen as possible. No way of knowing how long it would take. After several cycles, she put her hoof on the visor release lever. She pressed.

“What in Tartarus am I doing?” she sobbed. She closed her throat and popped her visor open.

Unexpected benefits of lowered inertial damping: you could use your inner ear rather than sensors to tell you how quickly the ship was rotating. This was a plus when every sensor was screaming a different warning at you.

“-Wind’s thrust is still climbing, can’t see why, View’s engines are still stable, no hull breach-”

The second Solar Wind had impacted Heavenly View, Queen had stomped on a pedal, disabling the holographic interface. Now, her hooves were dancing across the physical dashboard with more grace than a ballet dancer and more speed than an Equestria Games sprinter. Muscle memory and physical objects worked wonders when the world was falling apart around you.

“-only a few red lights yet, lots of yellow ones, getting worse-”

Knight was giving her reactor updates across the intercom, but Queen didn’t hear the words, just that everything was okay on her end. Queen was rattling off constant notifications about everything that seemed to matter (which was everything). The news report was almost subconscious, a reflex. All of her conscious attention was devoted to keeping View from spinning even more out of control.

“-Wind’s only getting lateral thrust from the stern, no bowwise momentum, trying to compensate-”

The portside of Solar Wind’s stern had smashed directly against Heavenly View’s engine block and done so surprisingly hard. The impulse had knocked View askew and sent her yawing as Wind continued to thrust. Then the tethers that bound Wind to View yanked the latter back like a pendulum, even as she swung across another axis. Half of Queen’s work was devoted to doing her best to keep that pendulum’s swing as small as possible. She kept alternating between topside and keel thrusters, fighting against physics and her undulating sense of balance.

“-high tension in the tethers, stress on the frame, constant oscillating motion-”

But the most she could manage was to slow the rate at which things were deteriorating. Every swing was a little bit further from the middle. Wind kept hitting View’s engine block, over and over and over. Waves reverberated throughout View’s frame, getting larger every time. And there was a twist developing in the two ships’ motion, one that was only going to get worse.

Screw it. Balefire option it was. “-situation uncontrollable, I’m detaching the tethers-”

Several buttons were punched in a blur. One to release the clamps and guidance drones from Wind and let her spin freely. And another to slam View to one side and get her out of Wind’s way.

The quick burst of attitude thrusters was jerky, but it ended with View being as calm and free of accelerative motion as you’d normally expect. Queen spared herself a moment to breathe, then quickly looked at the readings coming from Wind. She winced; Wind was in a flat spin, rotating at around once every six seconds. Good luck tethering that. Unless they had a miracle, there was a good chance this job was shot.

But she was alive and View was intact. She could focus on the positives for now. Then she looked at the warning lights all around her console and the positives began dribbling away. Some of the engines were okay, but more hadn’t survived Wind’s impact fully intact. Some were registering lower power draws and a few were absolutely nonfunctional. They could get back to Lunar Crown, but it’d be a limp back. And the cost of repairs… yeesh.

And what had caused Wind’s thrusters to start up in the first place? She’d never heard of anything like that. Queen looked at her other readouts-

-and frowned. Whatever energy had been propelling Wind was gone. Was it? The screens were digital and not analog, but they were still physical, so tradition made her tap them. No change. She turned on enough of the holographic interface to run a deeper scan on Wind. No energy detected and its rotation wasn’t accelerating.

She’d run an analysis later. Now… She opened a line on the intercom. “Knight? I had to detach the tethers.”

«I heard you say,» Knight responded. She sounded breathless, but unhurt. «Did it go that bad?»

Queen winced at herself. “Yeah,” she said. “Bad.” Maybe, she heard herself say, maybe, if she’d tried a bit harder to get it under control- “How’re you doing?”

«Everything’s a mess down here, but I’m fine. Still running diagnostics on the reactor, but I don’t think anything broke. I’ll let you know.»

That was something. Not much. But something. “Okay. Good. Checking on the rest of the crew. Out.”

Checking on the rest of the crew. The words had come as easily as the ability to actually do it hadn’t. Queen had never lost a crewmember in her career — never even had one badly hurt — and the thought of having it happen now, because of a freak accident, made her squirm so much even her last meal wanted out. She hadn’t been able to track the crew once they were thrown away. There was no training for that. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. So what was the procedure?

…Check their life signs. Their suits had sensors in them to track their most basic vitals. Queen knew she’d never actually used them, but they were there. She even remembered the macro she’d used to store them, just in case. After bringing her holograms back up and going into her macro list, she reached out for the correct-

…They’d be okay.

She reached out-

…They had to be.

She reached out-

Right?

She… reached…

She set her jaw and stabbed the icon before she could second-guess herself again.

Three entries: King, Pawn, and the rookie. King first. Queen couldn’t even bear to look at the other ones. Heart rate: elevated, but not dangerously so. Okay. Promising. At some point in her reflex dance, Queen had shut down all out-of-ship communications. She couldn’t remember doing it. Concentration, maybe. She opened a channel. “King, this is Queen,” she said. “We’re doing damage reports here in View. How about you?” She nearly, almost reflexively made a Still alive? joke before it withered in her throat.

Nothing came back from the other end of the line for several seconds, the crackle of dead air — don’t think of it like that — filling the cockpit.

Then nothing continued coming back.

“King?” asked Queen. “Do you copy?”

Static.

“Stella?” asked Gimbal. “D-do you hear me?”

Static.

Gimbal blinked twice and wiped down her eyes. Then Queen took a deep breath and continued on. She could break down later. Pawn: more elevated heart rate, even more so than King. Not great, but acceptable, given the circumstances. Channel open. “Pawn?” she asked.

She couldn’t even get another word in before Pawn’s voice cut through the digital haze. “I’m here, Knight.” His voice was pained, but not forced.

A particularly large knot immediately came undone in Queen’s chest and she let out a sigh of relief. “We’re doing damage reports here in View. How about you?”

“I ache like Tartarus, but nothing’s broken or dislocated. Bodywise or suitwise.”

Another knot. “Where are you?”

A chuckle that had more levity in it than hurt. “On the outside of the hull, believe it or not. These magboots are strong. My joints’re gonna hate me tomorrow, though.” A low grunt. “And that’s compared to now. Yikes.”

“…Wow. That’s-”

“Have you tried contacting King yet?” Queen’s stomach only managed half a somersault before Pawn continued, “Because her comms’re down. I think something got loose in the impact. I’m looking at her right now and my radio can’t reach her. We’re heading for the airlock. Yell so they can hear, King.”

A soft but clearly screamed voice filtered through the speaker. “I’m okay!” It was a miracle it could be heard at all, after passing through two helmets, the aether, and the mic.

Queen allowed herself a grin. “Good. Good.” Now for the rookie. She looked at the last entry-

-and saw nothing.

The rookie’s suit wasn’t saying anything.

Something got stuck in Queen’s throat. Losing King or Pawn would’ve been bad, but at least understandable. They’d been doing this job for a long time. You almost expected them to die eventually. But the rookie was- Mesonox was new at this. It was her first sunblasted day, for Celestia’s sake! It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even her fault, just a freak accident they still had to find the cause of.

Swallow. “Uh, Pawn?”

“Talk to me.”

“The rookie’s gone.”

The silence began to stretch.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“King and I are almost at the airlock. We can talk face-to-face soon.”

“Mmhmm.”

But she couldn’t dwell. Gimbal closed Mesonox’s entry, closed her eyes, and took a long, steadying breath. Then Queen opened her eyes and started flitting through damage reports.

There wasn’t any wind. In spite of being only slightly under half an atmosphere of pressure, nearly comparable to the tops of some mountains, the superfluidity of aether meant Mesonox felt no drag. She might’ve preferred it. At least it would be something she could feel.

Somehow managing to keep her throat sealed, Mesonox tore into the remains of her computer with her mouth. Sharp plastic and metal jabbed her muzzle, drawing blood, as she yanked dead fragments out of their frame and tossed them away. She cringed at creating yet more space debris, but it couldn’t be helped. She poked her teeth into places and manipulated things in ways a single hoof could never reach, and thank goodness for that, because she’d be screwed otherwise.

All the while, she kept her throat shut like her life depended on it. Because it did.

Aether was a gas, technically, and physically, it was about as inert as nitrogen. But you did not breathe it. Because metaphysically, it was a medium for magic. If you breathed in too much, it would react with the magic in your body and spirit. It would consume you like fire consumed confetti and you’d be on too much of a high to care about stopping it. And in pure aether, “too much” was “the slightest breath”.

It was a bizarre feeling, keeping your throat shut like you were performing some full-body physical exertion while using only your mouth. Mesonox tried not to think about it. If she did, she might forget to keep holding her breath.

Mesonox dug. She recognized some of the pieces as she threw them away. A green stick of RAM, the glittering shards of the CPU, wires connecting everything together. It was all in her way and she tossed it aside all the same. Silicon and plastic felt odd as she moved them around with her teeth, tasted odd when they bumped against her tongue, poked into the insides of her cheeks in uniquely not-exactly-painful ways. Bit by bit, her computer’s frame emptied out.

The aching started in her throat after several moments. It wasn’t even an ache, really, more of an urge. She was a physical creature. She needed — needed — to breathe. Her body was trying to tell her that not breathing was wrong, and she really ought to get a move on and start breathing again. But bodies were stupid; she couldn’t tell hers that breathing at this particular moment was a really bad idea.

She was fighting hard to keep her throat sealed when she ripped the old terminal’s connector out from the frame. What was left behind was a plain socket, a bit battered, but still capable of taking a computer (hopefully). Mesonox dug through one of the pouches on her suit for that computer. She cradled it carefully as she pulled it out, keeping centrifugal force from hurling it out of her grip. Not an easy task when all of her instincts were telling her to ignore that and breathe, but she managed to get it to the frame and insert it-

Something didn’t feel right. The tabs weren’t clicking. Mesonox swore internally, blinked eyes that were much too dry, and did her best to slow down in spite of her increasingly-scratchy throat and examine-

It was backwards. She’d put in the stupid computer the wrong way around. Wishing she could swallow the gunk that had once been saliva in her mouth, Mesonox pulled it back out, flipped it around, and slapped it back in. It felt much better this time around and she hadn’t even taken her hoof off before the screen lit up, the miracle of CSDs letting it start nearly faster than the speed of thought. Okay. Okay, good. She frantically popped her visor back in place, and immediately, a red caution light blocked out her view and screamed in her face:

WARNING! AETHER CONCENTRATION ABOVE 80%!
INHALATION WILL BE FATAL!
PURGING…

Mesonox wanted to scream. Her lungs were already burning. If she hadn’t been a pegasus (variant), she’d never make it to a safe concentration of aether. She’d be pushing the envelope already. She might as well scream; she’d die a lot more quickly from aether inflammation than self-suffocation.

She only managed to stay silent because the warning light meant her HUD was back up.

An ominous hiss with heartening implications echoed through her helmet and she felt air currents as her suit set to work purging the aether from her atmosphere. In the bottom right corner of her helmet, a little counter began ticking down. As Mesonox’s vision began swimming, she silently urged, pleaded the counter to go faster.

Her HUD flickered.

WARNING! AETHER CONCENTRATION ABOVE 50%!
INHALATION WILL BE FATAL!
PURGING…

Better, but it was hard to think that with her heart pounding in her ears, so hard she could barely think at all. All she needed was one breath. Just one. Maybe, if she just held on a little more…

Flicker.

WARNING! AETHER CONCENTRATION ABOVE 40%!
INHALATION MAY BE FATAL!
PURGING…

Good enough. Mesonox released her breath and gasped once.

The oxygen that flooded her system was like the sweetest wine she’d ever tasted. And yet, the aether was sweeter still. She’d never breathed in aether before and had never imagined it could feel this good. Mesonox imagined this was what a drug high felt like: everything was just mellow and didn’t matter. She was floating on top of the world, after all. She could intensify the feeling; all she had to do was take another breath.

She didn’t take another breath, no matter how much the feeling tugged at her. She kept telling herself the feeling was just a side effect of her own magic and the aether’s reacting in her brain, and getting more of it into her body would start off a more intense reaction that… Yeesh. Mesonox still didn’t want to remember that part of her training.

It was hard to claim that was the truth when the lie felt so damn good.

Flicker.

CAUTION! AETHER CONCENTRATION ABOVE 25%!
INHALATION MAY BE HARMFUL!
PURGING…

Mesonox kept her mouth shut. The bubbly feeling began bubbling away as the reaction ran its course. Her mind cleared. Her lungs still ached, but she could hold on until-

CAUTION. AETHER CONCENTRATION ABOVE 10%.
INHALATION IS SAFE, BUT YOUR SUIT MAY HAVE A RUPTURE.
FOR YOUR CONTINUED SAFETY, COMPLETE YOUR EVA AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND RUN A CHECKUP ON YOUR SUIT.
PURGING…

The message froze for several seconds, flashed once, then shrank to a corner of her HUD as the aether concentration continued to drop. Mesonox promptly took deep, gulping breaths to clear her head. No aether high. Perfect. She had her coordinates, she had navigation, she had her suit functionality up, she was all set.

With step one.

Swallowing, Mesonox said, “Uh, Queen. This is the rookie. I’m transmitting in the blind, off-structure, and drifting. But I’ve repaired my- My computer was brok-”

“SWEET TWILIGHT!” Gimbal shrieked.

Mesonox flinched at the static-filled yell. But before she could react, Gimbal coughed. “S-sorry,” she muttered. “You were…”

“My fetlock computer got smashed,” Mesonox said. Just the voice of another pony was like a balm to her mind. “I wasn’t getting anything from you and I don’t think you were getting anything from me.” How did she sound so calm?

“Um. No.” Gimbal’s voice seemed to slip at something before she pulled it back to stoic professionalism. “What’s, what’s your status?”

“I’m fine. Just off-structure. I had to replace my computer and got a little banged up.” Mesonox regretted the last phrase almost immediately; how would Gimbal take it?

“How did- Never mind.” (Well enough.) “Do you have your coordinates?”

“I think so. Gimme a sec…” Mesonox searched through her HUD and rattled off the relevant set of numbers.

The tacking of physical buttons being hit sounded through their audio link. Had View been damaged. “Okay…” murmured Gimbal, “let’s- There you are. We can pick you up, but I’ll need to talk with King. Just sit tight.”

“What else can I do?” Why did the joke come so easily after she’d nearly died?

“Think about your place in the universe?”

Mesonox recited her coordinates again.

Gimbal actually laughed. It wasn’t forced, either. Tired, but not forced. “Well, think about that. We’ll get to you. Out.”

Her voice only shook a little as Mesonox said, “Out.”

The comms clicked off and she was alone again.

View gave her updates. Everyone else was okay. View was intact. She could still move. They weren’t doomed. Glen was suiting up in an EVA system to get her. The words ran straight through Mesonox’s head without leaving much of a trace. Because alone, she could stew.

She’d seen those weird crystals on the engines. Those plain, obviously unimportant crystals that she’d told herself didn’t do much but were still in a critical place. Wind had been an experimental ship. Experimental in the engines? Maybe. So what if she’d ignored something critical? Should she have gone to Stella and let her know what she’d seen? Almost definitely. And because of that, now View was wrecked. How badly? Enough. It was her fault.

She’d settled into a rut before she’d even gotten started. Assumed everything would always be just as she expected it. She- Sweet Twilight, what had she been thinking? She saw something that had never come up in all of her training, and her first response was to just ignore it? What if it had been even more dangerous? Did she think that she knew best? What could go wrong with getting a second opinion?

She knew the next step. The only logical one. She had to tell Stella and everyone else what she’d neglected to do. And then, if she was lucky, she’d get to keep her job. If she wasn’t, good-bye career. Trawler crews talked and word spread faster than light up here. If she was fired for this sort of negligence — on her first day, no less — no other crew would touch her. But maybe she’d get lucky and-

Glen’s voice suddenly cut through the miasma of her thoughts. “I see you, rookie. Gimme a sec.”

Mesonox didn’t bother looking. It was hard to get a good look at anything when she was still spinning around. She thought she was ready, but she still twitched in shock when something grabbed her and she was suddenly looking Glen in the eye through the visor of his own helmet. They were still both spinning, but more slowly.

“Hey, there, rookie,” he said, grinning. “You’re gonna be alright.”

Upon hearing somepony’s actual voice and not just a digital reproduction, Mesonox suddenly felt very tired. She was going to be okay. She smiled weakly at him and nodded. “I’m gonna be alright.”

Glen’s hooves twitched inside their boots; the two’s spin slowed to the sound of soft bursts of air. Mesonox registered that he was wearing a light exoskeleton. An EVA maneuvering unit, just in case there were pieces of debris outside the reach of their strainers. Or anypony got thrown off-structure.

Their spin came to a complete stop. Glen quickly slapped a carabiner “View’s waiting for us,” he said, pointing at an unusually bright star. “Let’s get home.”

And face the music. Great. Mesonox stayed quiet as the jets fired up.

6 - Debris

The atmosphere in View was tense when Mesonox and Glen boarded it again. The other crewmembers were talking, but in the clipped tones of “I don’t want to think about what’s going on” busywork. Mesonox couldn’t blame them; she felt the same way.

She busied herself with checking her suit. Any tears? (No, of course not, she hadn’t lost atmospheric pressure.) Possibly! She needed to go every square inch to be sure. Multiple times. Just in case. She’d already lost a computer; she couldn’t be too careful! She started looking closely at where the legs met the barrel. There was a lot of movement in those areas, so if any place developed a tear, it’d be-

“All hooves, report to the nav center.” Stella’s voice was dull over the intercom, but it still made Mesonox jump in surprise. “After-action report.”

Then, although the intercom clicked off, Mesonox still heard her curse.

When the crew gathered in the nav center, the atmosphere was even more tense, bordering on unbreathable. Mesonox’s ears were ringing as she waited for the right time to drop the bomb that she was the one responsible. But that time never came, because everyone was waiting for someone else to say something. Their breathing was loud. Mesonox twisted her hooves. Maybe she ought to just rip off the bandage now and-

Stella sighed. “What’s the damage, Queen?”

“The first impact was to our engines,” Gimbal said. Her voice was very nearly robotic. “While none of them are fully out of commission, two of them are damaged enough that I’ve shut them down just to be safe, and based on the readings I’m getting from another, it’ll operate at only half thrust capacity once we turn it on.”

A grunt from Stella.

“The impact itself rattled View in ways she wasn’t designed to move in. While it looks like there isn’t any damage that can’t be fixed with some fetlock grease, there’s… there’s a lot of damage like that. I’m… still compiling it.”

“Can View get us back to Crown?”

Gimbal bit her lip and folded her ears back.

“Queen.”

“…Debatably.”

“Debatab-” Stella clamped her eyes shut and ran a hoof down the bridge of her nose to the tip of her muzzle. Mesonox looked at her own hooves and fidgeted. She wasn’t sure whether Glen was calm or expressionless. Littora had it lucky; she looked serene, floating there weightlessly, even though she had worry all over her face.

“How is our return debatable?” Stella said, her eyes still closed.

“Wind hit us off-center. Our thrusters weren’t evenly damaged. Most of- Most the damage was along one side, so any thrust will leave us listing to one side instead of straight out.”

Any thrust. Including orbital transfer thrust. Just getting back home would be tricky with View constantly yawing around. Let alone pulling the ponderous bulk of a ship behind them.

“Our communications are still up, so we can call for help if we need to-”

“But that’d mean giving up the salvage,” cut in Stella.

Gimbal nodded.

“Salvage with money we need to fix View.”

Gimbal nodded.

“Okay. Okay. …I saw you firing our attitude thrusters a lot. Knight, is the reactor badly damaged?”

Littora shook her head. “Nuh. Na even a lickle. Wi put ih tru ’em paces, but ih cud hangle ih. Di load neva tuh laaj.”

“And Queen constantly firing the RCS-”

“Di main engines tek wul heap more powa,” Littora said flatly. “Di reacta de fine.”

“Okay.”

Silence fell like a dead bird. Mesonox fidgeted. Speak up now? Maybe. It was… kind of abrupt. Did that matter in a time like this? Was Stella going to say something else that she’d be interrupting? Stella was the captain; it was only right that she get a chance to speak. But if Mesonox kept yielding to her, she’d never get a chance to-

Stella took another deep breath. “Okay. Next order of business. What in Tartarus happened?”

“I don’t know, King. I didn’t get any warnings before-”

Mesonox cleared her throat loudly.

The attention of everyone in the room immediately shifted to her and she wanted nothing more than to sink into the floor and be forgotten. But that didn’t happen, so instead she said, in a small voice that was still as loud as she could manage, “I… I think it’s my fault.”

Silence. Mesonox’s face felt ready to burst into flame. Stella slumped and mumbled, “What’d you do?”

“I-” Mesonox swallowed and forced herself to keep her head up. “I was… giving the engine block a sweep when- when I saw these crystals attached to the engine framework. They weren’t-” She rustled her wings and forced herself to keep her head up. “I didn’t recognize them, but I didn’t think they’d do anything with the- reactor turned off, so I ignored them. And, and when I was looking at the RCS thrusters, I saw more of them and-” She shifted her weight around and forced herself to keep her head up. “I still didn’t say anything. I… don’t know what it was I did, but if- this has never happened before, then- maybe the- things that haven’t appeared on aetherships before did it.”

And that was it. Band-aid off. But she’d ripped it off before scabbing over, so now she was bleeding again. Stella’s ears were quivering and her jaw was tight as her body heaved; Mesonox felt like a cornered animal, ready to run the second she got a chance.

But the worst didn’t happen. Stella didn’t start screaming. She didn’t explode with anger. She didn’t hit anything. She just sort of… slumped defeatedly. Because what was the point in screaming, or exploding with anger, or hitting anything? Besides, she was an earth pony; she’d break anything she hit.

“So. To clarify,” Stella said tonelessly. “You saw a foreign object mounted on the engines and you didn’t say anything.”

“I took pictures and video. I was going to ask on the way back,” Mesonox said lamely.

“But they were on your computer, which got-”

“I also had external backups turned on,” Mesonox said defensively.

Stella’s expression subtly shifted, from despondent to surprised. “You did?”

“It’s… protocol, isn’t it?” Mesonox asked. “Look, I know you said it was redundant and I could ignore it, but I’m new and I have habits. Ma’am.”

Gimbal was already typing at her terminal. “And you had the video running since the start of the walk, right?” she asked quickly.

“No, I didn’t start recording until we went to Wind. But I’d just started on the engine block when-

“And it’s timestamped?”

Mesonox frowned. She was missing something. Maybe something big. “I don’t see why not. Why?”

“Because if it’s your fault and you were recording, we might be able to figure out what happened.”

Modern aetherships had a whole suite of tools that Queen never touched but was glad were sitting there. Trawling could be a complicated task and you never knew what issues the aether would throw at you, so ship designers packed their computers with just about every bit and byte of software they could think of. In this case, those bits and bytes were a synchronization program for various datastreams of extended duration and a one-hour rolling record of energy signatures.

As she worked, Queen explained to everyone what she was doing. “Okay, see, this-” She flicked up the timeline of a certain spectrogram into the hologram above the table. “-is the energy readout for Wind — you can see when the engines are warming up because it starts climbing — and… this-” Up went a plain video. “-is the rookie’s helmet cam.” A few button taps, and the two were lined up in time, down to the millisecond.

“Go to the start,” King said. “I want to see those crystals the rookie was talking about.”

“They’re-” The rookie coughed and raised her voice. “They’re about ten minutes in.” She seemed to be fighting to keep her head up. Queen couldn’t blame her.

Queen scrubbed through the video and quickly found the crystals in question, expanding the image hologram until everyone could see it easily. The rookie had gotten a pretty good view of them, given the cramped space they were in. They looked almost like batteries.

“Hmm.” King leaned in to get a better look. “I can’t say I’ve seen anything like that in spaceship engines…”

“See?” said the rookie.

King grunted. “Pawn, what’s the procedure for…” She waved a hoof at the image. “…something like this?”

Queen examined the crystals closely as she waited. They were… They looked just like crystals. Ordinary crystals. Shaped and carved, maybe, but otherwise quartz that could’ve come out of the ground. There weren’t even any runes in them. (Queen didn’t know anything about runes, but it would’ve given her a place to start.) If they did anything, she didn’t know enough about engines to say. Which one might consider troubling, since her job was using those engines to make multi-dozen-thousand ton hunks of metal and composite dance with miniscule precision. She wasn’t one of those ones, though.

“…Pawn?”

Right. King had asked Pawn a question. He was the smart one.

…And he wasn’t saying anything.

The smart one was quiet.

“…There isn’t one,” Pawn said. (The rookie’s ears twitched upwards.) “All the guides assume the type of the ship is known. There’s nothing about this. Which makes sense, since Wind is experimental.”

“Huh.” King tilted her head. “I… Hmm.”

Pawn glanced at the rookie. “What do you remember doing? Seeing the crystals, planting the pod, and moving on?”

“Y-yeah,” said the rookie.

“I would’ve done that,” Pawn said to King. “The rookie’s right, that shouldn’t have done anything. What triggered it? The aether? We’re not even sure it’s responsible just yet.”

King lifted a hoof declaratively and said, “…” Then she said, “You’re right. You’re right.” She sighed and ruffled her mane. “Let’s move on. I’m… Let’s keep moving.”

Queen scrubbed ahead some more. More crystals near the RCS thrusters, same design; she kept scrubbing. And there it was, the rookie attaching the drone pods to the hull. She looked at the spectrogram and started regular playback. At first, they just got noise. When she glanced at the video, the rookie was doing everything by the book.

Then they got some energy spikes on the spectrogram. Small ones, nothing major in themselves, but spikes where there hadn’t been any seconds earlier. Those spikes built and built and built. They passed the levels that would trigger alarms. Moments later, the call came through on the rookie’s feed: Queen telling the crew to abandon ship.

“See?” said the rookie quietly. “It was…”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Queen. “Assuming won’t get us anywhere.” Granted, she was leaning towards the rookie being indirectly involved somehow, but she didn’t want to say so without a few more checks. She marked the rookie’s pod connections on the timeline, just in case, then collapsed the spectrogram into a 2D graph with a time axis. The aggregate of the strange energies made a nice, smooth, easily-plottable curve.

A curve that only started being more than background noise moments after one of the rookie’s pod attachments.

“Told you.”

“The drone pods caused it?” Pawn asked. “They didn’t fire, did they?”

“No, look-” Queen expanded the spectrogram again. “These signatures don’t match anything like the pods. I don’t even think those come from engines.”

«That looks like a geothaumic reactor as it winds up,» Knight said. «But there’s no ‘geo’ to be thaumic to-»

“Ponies,” King said solidly. All speculation immediately ground to a halt. “Listen. We know that the rookie caused it-” (Off to the side, the rookie wilted slightly.) “-but for now, we need a new course of action. In… this.” She waved a hoof around. “I need some time to think. You’ll find me astern. If you have any suggestions, feel free to offer them.”

And without another word, she walked out of the nav center.

Queen, Pawn, and Knight all exchanged looks (the rookie became quite interested in the rivets in the deck). King didn’t get Moods like that. But she’d never had the trawler smashed up, either. Maybe it would pass.

Maybe it wouldn’t.

But either way, Queen couldn’t just sit around. She went back to the timeline. Whatever they were going to do, they needed all the information and data they could get.

Mesonox kept her head down. Everyone was staring at her. She knew it.

Except that when she looked up, they weren’t. They didn’t even seem to be that angry. Just devoted to whatever they were working on.

She looked down again. Explaining herself hadn’t made her feel better. And why should it? She’d still caused View to get smashed up, still wrecked her first shift, still-

She was spiraling. The more she dwelt on it, the more paralyzed she’d be. She needed something to do. “Hey, uh, Gimbal?” Mesonox asked quietly.

“Yeah?” Gimbal asked casually. She didn’t look away from her screen.

“Can you send me a copy of the- paired- thingies?” Mesonox’s tongue had betrayed her at exactly the wrong moment.

“Sure, here.” Gimbal tapped a few buttons and Mesonox’s terminal binged with the files. She opened them up; all synced and everything.

“Thanks,” Mesonox said. Her voice felt stilted, forced.

“Anytime,” Gimbal replied. Hers didn’t.

Mesonox hunched over her terminal and played the video. After a few moments, she realized it was more an excuse to do something than something she paid any attention to. It made her look like she was involved in problem-solving, just like everyone else, and all the while, she could continue with her spiral. It was easy. It let her feel guilty without needing to do anything about it.

Almost viciously, she scrubbed back to the thruster gems. She was not going to sit around and feel guilty. She was going to do something and feel guilty, darnit, even if it took memorizing the entire engine assembly.

But a visual alone wasn’t good when working with magic. Mesonox stared and stared and stared, but she couldn’t imagine what those gems did based entirely on sight. Engines rarely had arcanic components in them, given how the aether reacted to magic. She scrubbed forward, to where she attached the drone pod and it all started going to Tartarus. She still didn’t see much, but at least it was a change in scenery. Maybe there was something with how the pod connected to the hull, like-

The drone pod.

Mesonox found herself staring at the image as an idea took root in her head. There… could be a way to salvage this. A rather nutsy way, to be certain, but it was simple enough. They just needed to-

She blinked and shook her head. Assuming something was simple was what got her into this mess. She needed to take a step back and actually think it through. For all she knew, in ten minutes, she’d come to the realization that it was a terrible idea and she’d throw those thoughts away, never to be looked at again.

Ten minutes later, it still didn’t seem like a bad idea.

Ten more minutes later, it seemed like a pretty solid idea.

Mesonox rolled the thoughts back and forth in her head, but she couldn’t find any major problems besides the obvious. Maybe that was because she was still a rookie, but then she just needed to get another set of eyes on it. She got up out of her seat. Where was Stella?

Stella was in a large supply closet near the back of the ship. She was just sitting on the floor, surrounded by various crates and junk, eyes closed, calmly breathing in and out. Mesonox risked disturbing her by knocking on the door. “Um. Hey.”

“Mesonox,” Stella said, opening her eyes.

“Are you… doing okay?” Mesonox asked.

“I’m feeling the hum of the reactor.” Stella rubbed the floor beneath her hooves. “It’s calming.”

On an aethership, there were a lot of small things you learned to eventually filter out. The subtle thrum of View’s reactor had been one of them. Now, Mesonox forced herself to feel the floor beneath her hooves. The vibration wasn’t much — barely anything, really — but it was something smooth and constant. It was a little calming, yeah. Maybe Stella found it more calming; she was an earth pony, after all.

“I’m… I’m sorry about… Heavenly View,” Mesonox said. “I… I should’ve known to ask you about those crystals.” She braced herself for… She wasn’t sure what was coming, but she knew there’d be a lot of it.

But what came wasn’t nearly what she’d expected. “You know robots?” Stella said. “They’re always making new ones, down on the ground. By the time you’ve compiled every model, ten more have popped up, probably in each company. So they don’t teach repairbeasts about specific models. They teach them about the mechanics. Servos, solenoids, wiring, hydraulics… You always know what does what, but you never quite know what you’re going to be looking at until you’re looking at it.”

Mesonox stayed silent. Stella was going somewhere, so it was only polite to let her actually arrive there.

“But spaceships? Spaceship development’s been stalled for half a decade. So they’ve completed their collection. They know every make of every ship we’ll ever meet, so they compiled it all into a neat little booklet. They give the best instructions for each type. But they don’t give you the tools you need to think outside the box for something that isn’t one of those types. Your training was incomplete. I was trained before the cascade. I would’ve known what to do.”

Before Mesonox could react, Stella sighed. “That was what I told myself. But for the past few minutes, I’ve really been thinking about what I’d’ve done, and… I don’t think it would’ve made a difference in the end. If you’d called me over, I probably would’ve looked at it, said it’s above our pay grade, and told you to continue as normal. Because we’re not fixing ships, we’re towing them. And as much as I’d speculate on the crystals, I don’t think I ever would’ve guessed they’d activate the engines remotely. We don’t even know what triggered them beyond the drone pods.”

She looked Mesonox in the eyes, her ears slightly down. “So if I’m harsh to you over this, I apologize in advance. My brain wants someone to blame and it keeps telling me that you’re guilt-adjacent. But you’re not. You’re just the one who had the bad luck to be standing next to it when it all went down.”

“Um.” Mesonox swallowed. “Thanks.”

“And apology accepted.”

Stella closed her eyes and settled back in. Mesonox didn’t move. She opened her mouth, closed it again, pawed at the ground.

“Do you have something you want to say, Mesonox?” asked Stella. She didn’t sound angry or frustrated or even disappointed.

“Okay, so,” Mesonox suddenly heard herself saying, “View’s engines are damaged and we can’t really fly straight.”

She didn’t say anything, but Stella’s eyes shot open and her muscles tensed; she didn’t seem to notice.

Mesonox kept talking, lest she realize what she was saying. “And because we can’t fly straight, we can’t really drag Wind back to Lunar Crown.”

Stella nodded slowly. One of her ears twitched.

“Well, I was… thinking…” Mesonox somehow managed to keep looking at Stella in spite of her next words. “We can’t use Heavenly View to tow Solar Wind, but… what about using Solar Wind to tow Heavenly View?”

“Solar Wind?” asked Stella, her ears going up. “The ship spinning around like a top out there? The one that almost got you killed, almost destroyed Heavenly View? THAT Solar Wind? You want to use that to get home?”

“Well, if-” Mesonox bit her lip for a moment as reality threatened to intrude. She worked hard to ignore it “If- if we can get her under control, she- She survived the ablation cascade and the engines still run!”

It was barely even an idea, more of a framework for one. The beginning of one. She didn’t know the later steps. Maybe they could figure it out together. Maybe they’d crash and burn together.

“I don’t want to risk it,” Stella said.

“I know what the next step is! You haven’t even heard it yet!” protested Mesonox.

“Have you seen Wind? She’s a big ship. And right now, I don’t want to get close. Her tail and nose have a speed of something like forty miles an hour. If she hits you in the wrong way, you’re dead. This isn’t something you can- something where you can just wing it.”

“This isn’t- This isn’t winging it! It’s simple, it’s not that risky-”

“This is different from the simulations, if you-”

Someone cleared their throat. Mesonox jumped, Stella stopped talking. They both looked to the closet door. Glen was standing in the frame, looking sheepish. “You’re… kinda loud,” he said.

“We’ll keep it down,” Stella said, her voice already softer.

“You’re also kinda boneheaded. You asked for an idea, Mesonox came to you with one, and you’re shutting her down before you even know what it is.”

Mesonox’s heart fluttered. Maybe-

“Did you hear what she wants to do?” asked Stella.

“Fly Solar Wind back to Crown. It’s more than I’ve got.”

“And do you know how she intends to get a spinning hulk like that under control? The very first step?”

“No, but does that matter?”

Stella didn’t respond. She didn’t look away, either.

“Right now,” Glen said, “if we leave everything as is, this job is a bust. Not only will we not get any money from Wind, we’ll need more money to repair View. We could go bankrupt if we don’t get lucky. And that’s assuming we can even live this down on Lunar Crown. There hasn’t been an accident this bad in four years, so we’re going to be all that anyone’s talking about for… I dunno, moons. But if we can get Wind under control, maybe we can at least break even. It’s at least worth a brainstorm.”

Glen’s tone was weirdly muted, like he was going through the motions and reading from a script. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Mesonox; more like he was just saying things for Stella’s benefit. But Stella was nodding anyway.

Maybe it was something between them after years of working together; Glen wasn’t trying to convince her, just give her the time to calm down. After all, they’d just taken on a rookie, had a job go wrong in spectacular fashion, had the rookie admit it was probably her fault, and now the rookie was proposing something wild. It was practically a miracle Stella hadn’t just thrown up her hooves and ordered them all home already.

In even more of a miracle, Stella said, “Okay.” She looked Mesonox in the eye. “I reserve veto power. But I’ll hear you out. What are you planning?”

Mesonox took a deep breath. Why did people take a deep breath when psyching themselves up? It was like a swig of liquor, but without anything except for air. And yet, it worked. Mesonox took a deep breath and started explaining.

7 - Angular Velocity

It was to be expected, given the precision needed for docking with space stations, but Mesonox was still dumbfounded by how close Gimbal could get to a thing with a ship as large as Heavenly View. She was as big as a house, yet the only reason Gimbal had stopped her a few yards away from Solar Wind rather than a few inches was for safety reasons.

Mesonox was standing in the airlock, looking right at the center of Wind’s rotation. It was where she was moving the slowest. Not even walking speed. The hull plating in front of her just sort of rotated lazily. It wasn’t very fast… right here. But once she got further out… Mesonox swallowed.

“Are you sure about this, rookie?” Stella asked over her headset. “We can send-”

“I’m sure, I’m sure,” Mesonox said quickly. “It’s for the best that it’s me. None of you have felt gravity like this or climbed like this before.” Of course, there was another reason: I feel responsible for this, so I’m the one that needs to fix it. That reason’s validity was suspect, but it was what she felt.

“Copy that,” Stella said in a voice that made it obvious she knew of the second reason. But she didn’t press. Maybe she understood. Maybe she just thought this would go smoothly enough for skill to not matter. (Which would’ve been reassuring if Mesonox hadn’t tried to avoid thinking about it so she wouldn’t tempt fate.)

Mesonox swallowed again and adjusted the drone pod strapped across her back. She eyed the point of Wind’s hull where there was no lateral movement, only rotational. “Alright,” she said. “Here I go.” And before she could stop herself, she jumped out of the airlock.

Wind loomed before her. In the half-second before hitting, she extended her front legs and absorbed the worst of the impact. Her magboots adhered easily and she was promptly yanked into a spin along with Wind’s rotation. She’d been expecting it, but the transition was still disorienting. She blinked, pulled and smacked her rear legs against the hull, and waited for her frame of reference to catch up. “I’m on,” she gasped into her mic. “Waiting for my head to stop spinning.”

“But I thought we WANTED your head spinning,” said Glen guilelessly. “The rest of you’s spinning, so if your head isn’t-”

“Shut up, Pawn,” said Gimbal.

“Waiting for my head to stop spinning in relation to the rest of me,” Mesonox said, grinning. “Which it has, because otherwise I couldn’t roll my eyes at you.”

Glen sucked in a breath, staticky over the connection. “Ooo. Tough crowd.”

“Changing position,” Mesonox said. She craned her neck to look to one side. Centrifugal force was weird. If she stayed here and detached, she’d just “fall” parallel to the direction Wind was spinning. If she went this way, Wind would rotate away from her if she detached. But if she went that way, she’d wind up rolling along Wind’s hull as the ship accelerated into her. So that way it was; it’d make standing easier. Mesonox took a deep breath and began awkwardly walking along the hull.

Magboots were trivial to use in zero-g, but because of her rotation, Wind technically wasn’t a zero-g environment. “Down” was parallel to the surface Mesonox was standing on and that did weird things to her instincts. When she put a leg back down and her magboot suckered itself to the plating, a large part of her wanted to look for something, anything to hold on to, like she was climbing a mountain face. But this close to the center, perceived g-force was small and her magboots were strong, so she didn’t slip. She just needed to take it slow.

She edged around until she was on the side of Wind that she wanted to be. She looked “down”; the hull was sheer. She smacked the end of her grapple on the hull and began sort-of rappelling down the side. As she got further and further away from the center, her perceived gravity grew. It was a strange feeling, being that aware of getting heavier. It was like something strange was going on in her ears.

When she was about halfway down, she stopped spooling out. This ought to be enough. For now, it’d have to be; angular velocity meant she was hitting 1.5 g’s and her blood was pooling in her feet. Clearing her throat, Mesonox said, “Gimbal? I’m secure. No problems detected with the grapple or my magboots.” Wait, there weren’t any problems with the grapple, were there? She hastily tapped her buttons on her fetlock computer. “Let me know when you want me to attach the booster.” The diagnostics came back positive: no problems detected in the grapple.

“Alright, gimme a sec… Confirmed, rotation of Wind is currently… 9.63 rotations per minute, or one rotation every 6.23 seconds… Data recording starting… now. You are clear to attach, rookie.”

“Roger.” Mesonox risked detaching her front hooves from the hull. The grapple wavered slightly as she bounced on the end of its tension, but it held. Slowly, carefully, she pulled the pod from over her shoulder and placed it against the hull. A few quick button presses and readouts confirmed that the pod was as close to Wind’s centerline as she could make it. “Centered. Adhering in 3… 2… 1…” She hit the button, suckering the pod hard to Wind.

Nothing happened.

“We are… reading NO anomalous energy signatures at this time… stand by.”

After a minute, nothing continued to happen.

Mesonox had reattached her front magboots to Wind to take some of the strain off the grapple, just in case. No slippage there. The feeling of hanging from the hull was, if anything, stranger than zero-g. She’d trained in zero-g plenty of times. But clinging to a sheer plane by only not-magnetism in a centrifugally-gravitational environment? That was something else.

“Still no anomalous energy signatures. Stand by.”

And nothing still continued to happen.

There was something of a stereotype about batponies hanging from ceilings. As far as stereotypes went, it was incredibly benign, but Mesonox had always been confused by it because she was still a pony, and she still had hooves. The same blunt hooves as every other tribe of pony. And yet, here she was, dangling from the smooth, smooth side of a spinning aethership like it was the easiest thing in the world. Funny how things turned out.

“Still no energy. Rookie, you are cleared to begin thrust.”

“Copy that.” Finally. Mesonox flipped open the cover to the pod and keyed in some commands. “Starting with thrust at five percent of maximum. Commencing… now.” Boop.

The tiny little engine at the end of the pod immediately began glowing as its drive engaged. If Mesonox placed her hoof in front of it, it’d be like getting sprayed by a weak industrial firehose: maybe nothing would get damaged, but it could still hurt.

“No anomalous energy… Twilight, ‘anomalous’ barely sounds like a word anymore…”

“When did it before?” asked Mesonox. “Listen to it. Anomalous.”

“You need to say the word before it gets semantically satiated,” said Glen.

“Se-what?”

“Semantic satiationnnnnn. It’s when you say a word so much that it, well, it stops sounding a word. Word word word word word word word-”

“That sounds like a griffon meal,” said Gimbal.

“That’s ‘wurst’ you’re thinking of. Spelled W-U-R-S-T.”

“You’re the worst,” Mesonox said, grinning.

“Nah, griffons wouldn’t like him,” said Gimbal. “Too stringy.”

“That doesn’t matter, wurst is ground meat-”

“Ground?!” yelped Mesonox. “Like- mashed? That’s disgusting! Why would-”

“Whoa, hold up,” said Gimbal. Her voice had a serious tone that made everypony else shut up. “Still no anomalous energy… but a rotation every 9.61 seconds.” She laughed the humorless but happy laugh of released tension. “It’s slowing.”

Mesonox went limp inside her suit, giggling quietly. You could argue that she wasn’t responsible for the crash, since she couldn’t have known. She had a hard time convincing herself of that. But she was definitely responsible for making it recoverable.

Gimbal was still talking. “No yaw… And no roll. We’re not making things worse in another direction.”

The giggle bubbled over again. Mesonox didn’t want to jinx it, but when it was going this smoothly, it was hard to not think that it was going well. Even if it was right at the start.

“You’re good for keeping watch on the pod?”

Even with a ship as big and inertial as Wind, small changes could eventually lead to big effects. If worse came to worst, they might need to make a quick change to the pod’s position. And Mesonox was already down at the pod, so… (That was what she told herself, anyway. From the looks the other aethernauts gave her, they probably thought it was self-flagellation. They were probably right.) “For now. I’ll let you know if we need to tap out.”

“Please. We don’t want to lose you because you thought you had something to prove.” The connection clicked off.

And so, with the universe spinning around her, Mesonox waited.

Queen had a problem. Maybe it was a sapience problem, but she felt like it was a “her” problem. That problem kept her glued to her screen. Namely, she liked to watch numbers change. The drone pod’s propulsion was being kept low, so it wouldn’t go out of control quickly, but that meant the change they wanted was also coming slowly. Queen knew she ought to step away, let the aethernauts handle it all, but then the rate of Wind’s rotation ticked down another 0.01 degrees per second, and holy cannoli that was the coolest thing ever. Queen’s focus was renewed and her attention went back to the screen and then nothing happened for another minute or so and just as her attention was flagging again, tick.

But watched pots and all that. Queen was acutely aware of just how long it was taking, how much longer it felt, and the knowledge that the time would pass much more quickly if she left and did something else. But just as she thought of doing that, tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Still no yaw. Still no roll. The rookie probably didn’t need any supervision, and Queen could go and do something else- tick.

Tick.

Tick.

“Queen? How’s it going?”

That gave Queen the will she needed to turn away from the screen. She spun her chair around to look at King. Fifteen minutes ago, King had seemed smaller and older in her worry. Now, she was holding her head higher and the thud of her hooves was more confident than weighty. Even if it wasn’t all the way there just yet.

“Slowly, but safely,” said Queen. She resisted the urge to look back at the screen. “We haven’t had any problems so far. Rotation slowing as expected. Everything’s quiet.”

King tilted her head. “Quiet quiet, or…?”

“Quiet quiet. No anomalous readings at all.”

“And how’s the rookie?”

Queen opened her mouth, but Pawn yelled down the hall, a laugh not quite in his voice, “She’s hanging in there!”

King rolled her eyes, but Queen shrugged helplessly. “Well, she is. She’s ironing her first-day jitters out like anypony else and I’ve got nothing she’s doing wrong.”

“Good,” King said, nodding. Her jaw twitched in a way like she wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything. Eventually, she said, “Let me know if something goes wrong.” She turned to head back to the hold.

Queen paused for a moment, then said, “Are you doing okay? Not as Queen to King. As Gimbal to Stella.”

King stopped. She turned back around. When she spoke again, her voice was tight. “The… rookie is doing okay, right?”

“Right.” Stella spun back to the console, managed to ignore the tick, and opened a connection to Mesonox. “Rookie? Just checking in. How’re you doing?”

“I’m doing fine,” said Mesonox. Her voice didn’t sound the least bit strained. “I’ll need to do some exercise once I get back into normal gravity, though. I swear I can feel my legs growing from the blood collecting in them.”

“Stressed at all?”

“Eh… kinda, not really. Mostly bored. I should’ve loaded some audiobooks onto my computer.”

“Good. Keep us posted.” And Gimbal flicked the intercom back off. She raised an eyebrow at King.

King was silent for another moment. Then Stella said, “If we don’t do this right, we might need to split.”

Gimbal blinked and sat up straighter in her chair. “What?”

“If we don’t get the payment for dragging in that salvage-”

“I know, but… that’s what you’re worried about?”

“Gimbal. Queen Gimbal. I’ve liked working with everyone on Heavenly View. You’re a hecking good pilot and you know how to speak the truth, even if you are a cheapskate.”

Gimbal frowned in anger and raised a hoof declaratively. “…Yeah…” she admitted.

“And you know Glen and Littora. And the rookie- Mesonox… Did you read her application? She just… loved the idea of working in space. I would’ve loved to get to know her more than just one job.”

Gimbal nodded. Mesonox had been one of those ponies to come up to the cockpit to watch the approach to the wreck. Not many people did that.

“And besides. I know I haven’t been groundside in a year-”

“As an earth pony.”

Stella snorted. “Earth pony on the earth or not, I’m still an Equestrian. Land of friendship and harmony. And splitting the crew of Heavenly View up just because of some freak accident feels wrong.”

“…We can still be friends in different jobs, you dingbat.”

Another snort. “Tell that to my mind. It’s sure not listening to me.”

“I knew you didn’t like sitting still, but I never knew it could be this bad.”

“There’s a reason I could never be a trawler pilot. Too much waiting for the debris to get cleared up.”

Funny, that was one of Gimbal’s favorite parts of the job: just sitting back and watching trawlers swing themselves around the ships. (Only as part of relaxation after the actual piloting to get there, though.) Seeing skilled ponies be skilled was a treat in itself. “Need some busywork? I might be able to talk Littora into breaking something.”

“No you couldn’t!” Glen called down the hall.

“Oh, for Twilight’s sake, I’m not that bad,” Stella scoffed. “I’m just restless and overthinking. We didn’t have an accident bad enough to force us to call for evac, so I’m trying to focus on that. But until I can get back out and into Solar Wind…” She shrugged helplessly.

“I could make up some roadapples to get Mesonox back in here and you out there to replace her,” said Gimbal.

“Thanks, but no thanks. I’d just be hanging off the hull, not actually doing anything. It wouldn’t work.” Stella leaned to one side to look at Gimbal’s readouts. Gimbal forced herself to not look as well. After a moment, Stella said, “Even once we get that under control, we’ll need to repair it.”

Gimbal waved a hoof dismissively. “Between Littora and Glen, we’ll make it work. And maybe Mesonox will have some ideas, too.”

“Yeah. She seems bright.” Stella coughed, and when she spoke again, her voice was a bit more formal. “Let me know if anything changes.”

“Will do.”

Gimbal and Stella nodded at each other. Then King left the cockpit as Queen turned back to the consoles.

Minute by minute, bit by bit, Solar Wind slowed.

Mesonox had deliberately turned off her chronometer. It’d make the slowdown feel longer than it really was. The constantly-shifting shadows moving across Wind’s hull had become predictable, almost a timepiece of their own. She managed to avoid counting them. Too much.

Wind twirled. Mesonox wondered if she could feel herself getting lighter if she paid attention. But that would involve finding out how quickly Wind was slowing, and that would involve looking at her watch again, so she discarded that idea. Still an interesting one, though.

Wind twirled. Mesonox watched the sun spin around. Did alicorns need to brace against anything when they moved the sun? What could they possibly brace against? She’d have to ask Glen about levitation and Neighton’s Second Law. …No, Third Law. The Second Law was about force and acceleration, the Third was about equal and opposite reactions.

Wind twirled. Mesonox again wished she’d downloaded some audiobooks. At some point, her helmet’s intercom clicked on. “Hey, uh, rookie?” asked Gimbal. “Can you send your accelerometer data our way?”

“Sure, just give me a sec.”

It took more than a sec, actually. Mesonox had never used her accelerometer for anything — it was basically a widget installed to make any given model of fetlock computer the complete package — and navigating the menus to find it took some time. But she managed and soon her computer was speaking to View’s. “There you go. Something wrong?”

“Nah, not at all,” Gimbal replied. “Just… let me… Okay, your g’s are still about 1.3… Are you feeling tired? Woozy?”

“Nope.” Sore, definitely. Beyond sore, maybe. But not tired.

“Alright. We still don’t have any significant yaw or roll, so what do you think about sticking more pods on?”

Mesonox blinked. They’d considered placing additional pods along Wind’s length if she wasn’t slowing quickly enough, but only after… an hour or so. Something like that. Had she really been hanging off the hull that long? “We ought to be safe.”

“Alright, good. Just FYI, King’s gonna jump over and put some pods on the other side.”

Mesonox’s ears twitched. Stella? Really? Well, if she wanted to. She was the captain, after all. “Does she want my help putting them on?”

“Uh…” Mesonox heard indistinct conversation over the connection before Gimbal came back. “Sure, just in case.”

“Alright. I’ll meet her there.” Mesonox began spooling in her grappler and she climbed up, slightly faster than it, just so she could get used to actual walking again. Her gravity transition was less surreal this time around now that she knew what she’d be feeling, even in the opposite direction. Once she detached her grappler, she easily pulled herself around Wind, her stomach flipping as she crossed the axis of rotation.

Stella, carrying several pods, had already jumped over and attached her grapple, but she was still very close to Wind’s center. She kept glancing down to the outer edge of the ring, moving down one foot, and spending another minute glancing down. As Mesonox got closer, she heard Stella grumbling frantically under her breath. Mesonox crept over. “Problems, ma’am?” she asked, keeping any laughs from her voice.

“This doesn’t feel right,” said Stella. Before Mesonox’s blood could freeze in overthought panic, Stella continued, “I feel like I’m climbing a wall and there’s no hoofholds.”

“C’mon. We don’t need them.” Mesonox pulled all but one of her magboots from the hull and dangled from the last one. The centrifugal g’s were still light enough that even that one grip was much more than enough to keep her from falling.

“I know. But that’s not what it feels like.” Stella took another step.

Mesonox smacked her grapple on the hull and bounded down several yards so she could look Stella right in the eye. “You’ve never been on a wreck that’s spinning like this?”

“Not this fast. That’s what’s throwing me off. This fast means more g’s.” Stella took another step. “If it’s this fast, it usually goes to more advanced crews.”

Part of Mesonox wanted to spend at least a minute unpacking that last part. Instead, she said, “It’s easier if you don’t go down headfirst. If you also use your grapple, it’ll be more like you’re rappelling down a rock face.”

“I was never one for rappelling.” But when Stella turned around and started inching down backwards, she was able to move two steps at a time rather than one. Then three.

Mesonox couldn’t hold back a sigh. “Give me one of the pods,” she said, holding out a hoof. “I’ll put it on myself.”

If acting like that was insubordinate, Stella didn’t say anything. She just passed one of the pods over. Mesonox stuck her head through the strap and bounded down Wind, way towards the end. Once she was at about the same position as the first pod, she said, “Queen, I’m placing another pod. Are you monitoring?”

“Huh. Already?” asked Gimbal. “Did you take one of King’s?”

“She was moving too slow. You know kings; they can only move one space at a time.”

Gimbal giggled across the radio. So did Stella. “Roger that, rookie. Monitoring you now.”

“Roger.” Mesonox ran through the procedures again and placed the pod against the hull. “Centered. Adhering in 3… 2… 1…” She hit the button, suckering the pod hard to-

“Waitaminutestop.”

Without thinking, Mesonox detached the pod from the hull again. She didn’t even need to hear the tone of Gimbal’s voice to jump into this state of mind. It was almost certainly the strange energies Gimbal had seen earlier, possibly caused by the pod. Awkwardly keeping it close with one leg, she began punching in the controls to-

“Hold on stop again. Just stay there.”

Mesonox bit her tongue. Stay here? With unknown energies building up beneath her? One of her hooves twitched as she wanted to reach for her fetlock computer. She almost wanted to bolt anyway. But she-

“Okay, you’re safe,” said Gimbal. Her voice sounded a bit strange, like she was thinking about something else and wanted to get back to that as soon as possible. “We were detecting some anomalous energies, but they’re gone now.”

“You’re sure?” Mesonox asked, looking down at her hooves. Suddenly, the hull that was meant to withstand atmospheric re-entry didn’t seem all that strong.

“Positive. It started growing slowly when you turned the pod and dropped like a rock when you turned it off. …It didn’t even alter Wind’s trajectory at all.”

“This isn’t going to blow up beneath me, is it? Should, should I move?” Mesonox instinctively moved in a way that would’ve been shifting her weight if done on Equus.

“…Nah, the readings are back to normal. So hold off on putting the pod back on, but just staying there is fine.”

Stella’s voice came in over the line. “Did you see what sort of energies they were?”

“Not on the screens I had up, but View’s sensor suite was recording, so I can just bring those up.”

A pause on the line. Not quite silence; Mesonox could hear Gimbal making little sounds with her mouth as she probably flicked through menus and readouts. She didn’t move, just in case. Part of her still felt like the hull would erupt beneath her. (Next to her?) A very small part, true, but a part nonetheless. Her stomach was still bubbling with-

“Oh, wow,” said Gimbal. Her voice wasn’t horrified; more that of someone who’s just discovered something very interesting. “Wow. This is… Wow. Pawn and Knight will be DYING to see this…”

“Something wrong?” Stella asked.

“Not really,” Gimbal said. “But these readings are… complicated. I can’t make heads or tails of them. OI! PAWN!”

Mesonox winced at the feedback and instinctively clapped her hooves to her ears; they bounced off the helmet. Above, Stella flinched; her scowl was visible even through the helmet. After a moment, she heard Glen say, “Say it louder, I don’t think they heard you in Zebrabwe-”

“Take a look at this,” Stella said.

Silence. Then, in a voice normally reserved for viewing centerfolds, Glen murmured, “Oh, my, my…”

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s like the anomalous energies that we first detected right before the crash,” said Stella. “What do you think?”

“I think that we’ve got some testing to do,” said Glen. “Get Wind’s rotational velocity down so we can work without having to make like mountain goats. And then… We’ll see.”

Mesonox looked up at Stella. Stella looked back down at her. And through the faceplates, Mesonox saw Stella quirk a smile. Mesonox smiled back. She reeled herself up a few yards and started the routine of placing a pod again. No strange readings this time; onto the hull it went.

They weren’t out of the woods yet, but they had a path. Baby steps.

2 - The Currents of the Aether

Landpony-seapony relations had been steadily increasing for decades, thanks to advances in science and magic that had made it easier and easier for each to coexist in the other’s environment, but it was during the Space Age that they truly began to thrive.

Training in zero gravity often had lots of problems for landponies. They simply weren’t used to being able to travel freely along all three dimensions and kept forgetting to go up or down at the right times. Pegasi fared better, naturally, but it was still a common sight for pegasus trainees to enter zero-G for the first time, instinctively start flapping their wings to stop themselves from “falling”, and faceplant into the bulkhead. And then there were the little habits ingrained from living in an environment with gravity. In particular, putting down things. You put an object down on Equus, it stayed down. You put an object down in space, it might drift away in a few seconds if your acceleration and its weren’t the same. Easily the most difficult part of training a landpony aethernaut was drilling into their heads that, in space, down does not exist.

Seaponies, on the other hoof, simply scratched their heads and wondered why this was even a problem. That was pretty darn close to how it worked underwater, after all.

Under the sea, seaponies could go up and down with no problem without worrying about falling. They couldn’t set aside tools without worrying about getting them swept away by currents. They simply lacked a downwards way of thinking; the sole reason “down” held any meaning to them was because that was where the bottom of the sea was. Before space travel or gravity-canceling spells were cheap, landpony aethernauts trained for zero-G underwater. But some small-time employee at the Royal Aethernautics Administration soon realized that seaponies did that literally all the time. A few invented life support systems, a few quick adjustments to already-existing ones, and within the year, Hippocampus Fuscus was up in space, working like the best of them in spite of much less training.

So Mesonox wasn’t particularly surprised by the seapony floating in mid-air in the nav center. Seapony spacemares — aethernauts or mechanics or whatever else involved working in space — while not particularly common, weren’t a rare sight. Littora was their engineer and reactor technician and could drift around the engine bay with a staggering degree of precision, not even mentioning her mechanical and electrical skills. When it came to life support, she wasn’t that different from a landpony. All she really needed was a charm to ignore the gravity spells and a specialized bunk to keep her moist when required, both of which were decently cheap (relatively speaking), and another charm to increase the viscosity of the air around her to help her “swim” better, which was really cheap (absolutely speaking).

The nav center was larger than it looked. Five ponies were clustered around the holotable, yet they all had plenty of room. Space-expansion magic wasn’t supposed to be used on aetherships, so Mesonox wondered if ship designers were just really good at packing infrastructure in tight spaces.

“Alright,” said Glen, bringing up a hologram of the ship. “This is our target, HMAS Solar Wind. She’s an-”

“Hold up,” Stella said, raising a hoof. “Hate to put you on the spot, rookie, but…” She waved at the hologram. “What class of ship is this?”

Huh? All the other questions weren’t enough? Well, okay. “Sure,” Mesonox said, “I can do that.” She examined the ship’s profile and immediately knew she couldn’t do that; the ship was strange, unfamiliar to her. She recognized some parts, but it was like bits and pieces of several other ships had been cobbled together to form her. She couldn’t tell what this thing was. But as her confidence slipped away and several awkwardly quiet moments passed, Mesonox knew she’d have to say something. “Um, w-well, I… I actually don’t know, to be honest. The bridge is- It’s obviously based on the classic Celestia design, because, um, why fix what isn’t broke?” She laughed nervously. “If that’s the remains of the communications array, then it’s a derivative of the Dragonfire comm satellites. And the engine block is clearly based on the Firefly shuttles’ assembly, only immensely scaled up.” Oh, quit stalling. “But…” She swallowed. “What specific make she is, I, I don’t know.” She almost grinned, then folded her ears back.

To her surprise, Stella grinned slightly at her and nodded, just a little. “Well, Pawn?” Stella asked. “What is her class?”

“Experimental.”

Mesonox’s ears went right back up. “…Come again?”

“Experimental,” repeated Glen. “Solar Wind was an experimental ship, the only one in her class. The first prototype, to be precise. Most of the information on her — including what she was a prototype for — still isn’t publicly available, since she had yet to run her first tests when the cascade hit. What I do know is that disgruntled technicians sometimes called her Celestia’s Farts.”

Mesonox’s next question made her wonder if she’d been watching too many conspiracy thrillers while on Crown. “We’re not going to be breaking any laws and hunted down by the Court to keep us quiet, are we?”

“Hardly. She wasn’t classified, the info just never got into public channels. I mean…” Glen tapped a few times at his control panel. The hologram faded out and the surface of the table lit up with a small article from a science news netsite about the upcoming launch of a new prototype aethercraft called Solar Wind. Mesonox glanced at the date. Almost seven years ago. “This took maybe thirty seconds of searching,” said Glen, waving his hoof over it. “Hardly top secret. I put in an FOIA request with the Court, but that’ll still take a moon or so.”

He flicked the article away and brought the schematics back up. “Unfortunately, we don’t know much about her. We have a vague estimation of post-cascade mass and size, but that’s it. Still, based on the official values, View can easily handle the edge cases and still have lots of power to spare.”

Stella leaned in a little to examine the ship more thoroughly. “These are blueprints, right? Or do we know what the ship looks like now?”

“Blueprints,” said Glen. “She’s in a very eccentric orbit — details already sent to Queen — so Starfall thinks she might’ve been docked, taken the brunt of the cascade during the early days, and gotten pushed into her current orbit by brute force.” He shrugged. “But we’re still unsure, although preliminary scans indicate she’s largely in one piece.”

“Hmm.” Stella batted at the hologram, slowly spinning it around. “Kind of a strange hull shape, but we can make do. We’re all set on the technical side, Knight?”

“Di reacta ah fine an ave whole heap fuel,” said Littora. “Di teda dem a gud, too, nice an strong.” Mesonox didn’t want to sound tribalist, but she had trouble deciphering Littora’s speech at times. Language had never been a strong suit of hers and she’d only barely passed first-year Zebran years ago. She hoped actually working now would give her some more experience. This sentence, at least, was easy to decipher: The reactor is fine and has lots of fuel. The tethers are good, too, nice and strong.

Stella nodded. “Good. Good. Queen, what’s our ETA if we leave thirty minutes from now?”

“Just under three hours from launch,” said Gimbal. “We can get it down to two if we burn fuel, but I’m assuming you don’t want to.”

“I’d rather not. We’re a bit low on funds and I don’t want to dip any more than we have to.”

“Gotcha. Regular burn only, three hours.”

“Any other questions?” Everypony murmured in the negative. “Then let’s get going.”

Gimbal saluted and trotted to the cockpit. Littora “swam” towards the back of the ship. Stella and Glen simply took seats in the nav center, Glen moving his chair up to the holotable. Mesonox settled into her own chair, her left wing twitching. And now came the waiting.

Glen pulled out a canister of pretzel sticks from somewhere beneath the holotable. “Why do we always get granola for snacks?” he asked. “It’s too crunchy.” He grabbed a pretzel with his mouth and held it there like a cigar.

“And pretzels aren’t?” asked Stella.

“Pretzels are large and not smooth,” said Glen. “With granola, I feel like I’m eating sandstone pebbles. It’s weird.” He chewed on the end of the pretzel.

“If you care so much, you can get your own dang snacks.”

“And I do!” Glen waved the tin at Stella. “But it’s annoying to have to keep picking them up.”

Mesonox couldn’t help herself. “Wuss. It’s granola. Who couldn’t love oats, nuts, and honey?”

“Me.” Glen faux-scowled at Stella and chewed on the pretzel some more.

The intercom crackled. “We’ve got clearance to fly already, everypony,” said Gimbal.“Lucky break in traffic. I know it’s sudden, but wanna leave now, King? It’ll cut our ETA down to two hours.”

“Do it,” said Stella. “Anything to save time.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thought you might say that. Airlock sealed… Crew conduit retracted… Dust mags up… Detaching from Crown in 3… 2… 1…”

Mesonox jumped a little at the slight tug of acceleration as View disengaged from Crown. She quickly hooked her front hooves around the legrests in case things went sour, but nothing happened. Stella and Glen didn’t look concerned, either, even as they leaned into the acceleration. Mesonox coughed. “Um, Stella?” she asked quietly. “Are… the ID fields-”

“Oh! Sorry,” said Stella. “Forgot to mention: Gimbal doesn’t like full inertial dampening. There’s nothing wrong with the ship.”

“Ah.” Mesonox let go of her chair. No, the acceleration wasn’t bad at all. But, still… “What’s she got against it? Doesn’t she want a smooth ride? I mean-”

Stella held up a hoof to stop Mesonox and bumped a button on the intercom. “Gimbal, go on your inertial dampening rant.”

The intercom crackled. “Okay, first of all, it’s not inertial DAMPENING, it’s inertial NEGATION.”

Stella grinned in a “sorry” sort of way and stuffed her hooves into her ears.

“Second, complete inertial negation takes half the fun out of flying an aethership like View. Without inertial negation, you might as well just be sitting at home. SOME of it’s good, even necessary — we’d all be dead from strokes in a few minutes without it — but I like to feel how View responds to everything. It’s a kind of feedback you can’t get from sensors. And, well, it’s more fun. You get to feel-”

Gimbal kept going on, her voice very slowly getting louder. Mesonox resisted the urge to plug her own ears; she already knew that Gimbal was one of those ponies with regards to inertial dampening — inertial negation — but after she’d personally asked Gimbal about it, simply shutting her out would be rude and horrifically insensitive.

“-takes skill to bank a ship in a superfluid like the aether, so why not let the passengers feel it? I’m not going to give anybody whiplash because-”

Against her own will, Mesonox began tuning Gimbal out. She tried to listen, she really did, but this simply didn’t interest her. She was an aethernaut, not a pilot, and (she expected that) inertia only concerned her when she had to stop herself from slamming into aethership hulls or spinning out into space. And as Gimbal began slipping into more technical terms, like “thaumatic Hays decoupling”, it was that much harder to care.

Mesonox finally perked up when Gimbal said, “In short: with complete ID, you’re flying to get from point A to point B. With lessened ID, you’re flying to FLY.”

“I see,” said Mesonox, who didn’t.

After a second, Gimbal chuckled. “…You stopped listening a few seconds in, didn’t you?”

Mesonox’s face turned bright red, which was impressive, considering her dark gray coat. “No! I-”

Gimbal laughed again. “Don’t worry about it. It’s a niche interest, I know, and nerd rage just isn’t as fun if you don’t know what the nerd is talking about.”

“Hem. Sorry.” In spite of the lack of video screens, Mesonox turned away from the intercom, rubbing her neck.

“Apology accepted, and you’re forgiven. Out.”

The second the intercom went silent, Glen leaned back in his chair. “So. Two hours to contact. Who wants to play a game of Mao?”

Mesonox’s ears twitched forward. “What’s Mao?”

“It’s not that fun with only three people is what it is,” said Stella. “Pass.”

Glen wrinkled his nose at her, then turned back to Mesonox. “Then how about quarto?”

“What’s quarto?”

“Don’t worry, it’s easy to learn.” Glen tapped some buttons, and a board and several game pieces flickered into existence on the holotable. “There are sixteen pieces…”

Mesonox looked between the quarto board and the available pieces. She couldn’t pick a tall piece, Glen could put it there… She couldn’t pick a round piece, Glen could put it there or there… So of the short square pieces, which ones would screw Glen over more? She needed to destroy him, after the way he’d won the last few games.

As she thought, she asked, “Hey, Glen? If you don’t mind me asking, how does a pony who can teleport end up as a salvage trawler?”

Stella’s ear twitched towards them, but she didn’t say anything or look up from her ereader. Glen just shrugged. “I’m a prodigy who’s not prodigious enough to be the type of prodigy he wants to be.”

Mesonox blinked and turned that sentence over in her head. After a moment of thought, she tried, “You’re smart, but not smart enough to…” What would be peak intelligence? “…go into cutting-edge research.”

Stella grinned slightly as Glen nodded. “Close enough. I’m good with old, well-trodden spells like teleportation, even if they’re advanced. Less so with new, untested magic. I like reading from a dozen different sources before I try it, and that’s hard to do when something’s so new there’s only two or three sources for it on all of Equus.”

Mesonox nodded. She knew the feeling of being not quite good enough to follow through on her dreams. Piloting an aethership would’ve been so freaking cool… But she’d seen the results of her driver’s tests, and being given control of something even bigger and heavier… wasn’t the best idea. Being a trawler was a close second, though, so she was still happy.

“Picked up a bachelor’s in physics in college, but my plans to follow through on that washed out,” continued Glen. “Wandered through a job fair at college, noticed a booth for debris trawling, thought it sounded interesting and useful, and you probably know the rest. It’s really not much of a story. I just didn’t take the expected path in life.”

“But you still keep up-to-date with the cutting edge, right?” asked Mesonox. “Subscriptions to Scientific Equestrian and Popular Arcanics and all that?”

“Heh. You think I stop at reading ezines? I tinker in my spare-”

“You call what you do tinkering?” piped up Stella. “You could probably be our reactor technician if Littora ever quits.”

“Hey, Rockhoof-class reactors are no more advanced than they need to be and I’ve read the manual header to footer five times.”

“And that’s full readthroughs,” Stella added to Mesonox. “He’s not counting when he skims back to read the chapters he likes.”

“Most of those, I don’t like,” Glen said. He stated it plainly, without a hint of defensiveness in his voice. “I need to study them, just in case.”

“Only most, though.”

“Right. Some I do like. So if you ever need some mechanics tips, I’m available.”

“Thanks.” Couldn’t hurt. Mesonox knew her orthodox techniques forward and backward every which way along all six degrees of freedom, but knowing some unorthodox ones was always useful.

Still her turn in quarto, though. Which piece to pick. Which piece-

The intercom crackled. “Coming into visual range on Wind in a few minutes. If you want to take a look before suiting up, feel free to come to the cockpit.”

Already? Or had they been playing for that long? Either way, Mesonox scurried to the cockpit almost immediately, sparing only a “gimmeasec” for Glen. Cheesy and not-so-cheesy sci-fi movies always had aetherships with big windows, which were naturally a structural risk in the real world. But trying to view space solely through instruments was a bit of a downer, so for the moment, cockpits still had windows with a good view.

Luckily, the cockpit wasn’t all that cramped, in spite of a lot of the space being taken up by Gimbal’s chair and control console. Or at least, Mesonox could get a good view in spite of those. She leaned around Gimbal’s shoulder.

Gimbal, in turn, leaned aside to give her a little more space. It was easy for her; where Stella was lean for an earth pony, Gimbal was slim to the point that a unicorn might tell her to put on some muscle. “Hey, rookie.”

Once upon a time, Mesonox would’ve felt a tiny twinge of reflexive annoyance at not being addressed by her name. After hearing it from Stella more times than she could count, it barely registered anymore. She was slightly surprised at it being used before they actually got to the wreckage, but only slightly. “Hey, Gimbal. Are Stella and Glen not interested?”

“Oh, I’m sure they were, once upon a time,” said Gimbal, “but somehow, they’ve managed to allow themselves to be bored by space.”

“That’s more impossible than Discord.”

Gimbal chuckled and turned back to the viewport. “We should be coming up on Wind in a few minutes.”

When she looked out, Mesonox couldn’t see anything but the starfield, the moon above them, and Equus below them. She wasn’t surprised at the lack of ships; in space, if you could see another ship and you weren’t trying to dock with it, something was seriously wrong. Mesonox squinted out at the stars, trying to find Solar Wind. One of them was twinkling a little, distrac-

They were outside the atmosphere. Starlight didn’t twinkle up here. Mesonox turned her full attention to the “twinkling” star. It was definitely flickering oh-so-slightly in a way other stars weren’t. Then another star started twinkling, then the first one stopped… “Over there,” said Mesonox, pointing. “See?”

“That’d match our approach vector,” Gimbal said as she turned, “but I’ll be darned if I can see anything. Then again, earth pony, pegasus, yeah.” She shrugged. “If you can see her, I’ll buy you dinner once we get back.”

Another star started flickering. “It might just be a debris field around her,” said Mesonox. “I can’t make out any shapes yet.”

“Well, you shouldn’t’ve said that. If it’s not Wind, I won’t owe you dinner.”

“Hey, I could still be right.”

“We’ll see.”

One hundred and thirteen seconds later, Mesonox was smugly moseying back to the hold with an IOU folded neatly in her pocket.

Queen grinned a little as the rookie sidled away. Oh, the vigor of youth, may it cling to her forever. Especially with those eyes. She’d heard that pegasi had good eyesight, but still. Dang. If the rookie kept that sort of perception up, it’d practically be a waste to keep her on trawling. But if trawling was what she wanted to do, Queen wouldn’t stop her.

Queen ran another scan, just to fill up the time, and her view of Solar Wind came into slightly sharper focus. It was a doozy, alright. There was a positively huge hole punched right through the hull, one so big Queen had never seen the likes of it before. Most of the remaining damage, all the smaller holes and impact scarring and missing bits and bobs, was to be expected, though. Honestly, Wind looked surprisingly intact. With some tinkering , she might still be flyable, if only technically.

With most of her attention already flipping between her instruments and the windscreen, Queen devoted what little remaining attention she dared to her scans. Slight rotational velocity, nothing too major. With the right equipment, the rookie could handle that on her own, if she needed to. The impact craters were more prevalent on one side of Wind than on the other. So if she got hit while traveling along one vector (or facing along it), started tumbling, kept getting hit… Yeah, that would work.

She took another look at the biggest hole. It seemed awfully close to the rear of Wind. Maybe close to the reactor? Queen didn’t know much about reactors. Maybe not. She didn’t remember where the reactor had been on the plans she’d received. Time to call in an expert. She keyed on the intercom. “Knight? How’re things down there?”

«Everything’s criss. What do you need me for?»

“Hypothetical question. Suppose a reactor got breached. What would happen?”

Knight snorted. «If it’s bad enough to mash up a reactor, you’ve got bigger things to worry about. Staying on the reactor…» The sounds of her breathing came through as static. Maybe they did need to get the intercoms replaced. «It depends,» she said eventually. «Can you be more specific?»

“Scans of Wind are looking pretty bad, and I’m just wondering if something happened to the reactor. Sending-”

But Knight’s laugh cut her off. «If something happened to Wind’s reactor in the cascade, we wouldn’t be picking her up. You know the reaction behind an aether high, right?»

“Sort of.” Not really. Queen didn’t like to think about that happening; aether highs always sounded like a terrible way to die. “The mana channels in the brain react with the aether and get inflamed, right?” She would’ve crossed her wings if she were a pegasus.

«Close enough. If a ship’s reactor were breached, you’d see something similar as the aether interacted with the reactor. But on a much bigger scale.» There was a slight clicking sound; seaponies couldn’t whistle, so that was their equivalent. «Short version, Solar Wind wouldn’t be Solar Wind anymore, just dust in the… solar wind, pun not intended.»

But if Wind had been resting in a spacedock- “Even with the reactor turned off?”

Knight’s snort was even more staticy than her breathing had been. «Obviously. The aether’s reacting with the unbound magic in the fuel, and the fuel’s magic whether or not the reactor’s running.»

“Mmhmm. Got it.” Queen took another look at the scan, rotated it around a little. Yeah, it wasn’t that hard to think that whatever had punctured the hull had managed to miss the reactor. The angle was about right. “While I’ve got you, is that last repair job holding up?”

«Ooooooh, yeah.» Queen could practically hear Knight grinning. «Those GX-36 linkages for the engines are humming like a DREAM. Pure ASMR.»

“You’ve got a princess’s approval on that dream thing?”

«Considering two nights ago, I do, actually. Even besides that, they were incredibly easy to set up and connect, and none of the watchdog programs I’ve set up to monitor them have given me a peep. You could probably run the entire output of the Hoofer Dam through this and not get any temperature rise.»

“Perfect.” That refurbishment had been both very needed and rather expensive. If View wasn’t in tip-top condition after that, well, Queen would have words with someone. (She didn’t know who, but she’d find out.) “Let me know if there’s anything else we need to pick up.”

«Just ask Pawn.»

“Ha ha.”

«Seriously. He knows the rest of View better than me. You just listen to me more because I’m not as annoying.»

“You only ask for thaumic linkages!”

«Thaumic linkages are half my work. His half is bigger and has smaller pieces.»

“Yours are more important.”

«Not when you put it all together.»

Queen briefly muted the mic to sigh. Not at Knight, at herself. View was still getting old, after all, and stinginess wouldn’t save money if something broke in exactly the wrong way and the repairs cost more than the parts. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

«Suuuuuure you will, Queen Cheapskate.»

Rolling her eyes, Queen cut the connection. She looked between View’s cockpit and her instruments one last time. Wind was close enough, so she began keying on the fine maneuvering systems.

Simple logic said it was impossible, but Queen sometimes imagined she could feel the maneuvering systems come to life around her. Verneigher engines charging, reaction wheels warming up… It was like the entire craft was getting ready to spring into action. (Of course, reaction wheels “warming up” was proof enough that she wasn’t really feeling anything, since they started running before View even left Lunar Crown, but that was boring.) Electricity and thaumic energy hummed through their conductors around her, and with that energy, Queen would make a multi-dozen-thousand-ton array of composites and metal do a dance with a precision of inches.

As you do. Every time you fly out. Because that was what pilots did. Queen wasn’t sure anypony truly appreciated what pilots did, but she didn’t care. Being able to do that was reward enough, and then some. Appreciation from her crewmates was a bonus.

As she readied View for positioning and velocity matching, Queen keyed on the intercom again. “Alright, ponies, we’re on our final approach vector. Standard procedure for cleanup. Suit up and get ready to do some dusting.”