In the silence of a metal corpse, something shifted.
Solid veins of dead conduits and frozen pipes snaked through the exposed and broken skin of the once-great giant. A great jagged gash in the skin was all that remained of the beating heart of the machine, and miles of cables spooled out and intertwined, trailing behind the main body, like torn shreds of gutted entrails floating silently alongside the carcass.
Fragments of shattered glass and metal, as numerous as the stars, sparkled and twirled lazily as they hung, slowly drifting away from the main body of the wreck, and coatings of frost clung randomly within the dead beast where its fluids had flash-frozen in the vacuum, shining bright on its skin like fresh bruises.. Frozen, thinning, and ever-expanding clouds of gas vented in thin seams from the massive leviathan, surrounding it even as they dissipated, giving it a serene, almost ghostly quality.
The destroyed hulk was the remains of the Equestrian Colony Ship Hyperion, and the many miles of the vessel lay shattered and drifting through the immensely dense ice asteroid ring of a serene blue gas giant. The harsh white light of a nearby star burned every exterior surface with harsh radiation, while in the shadow of the planet, flesh-searing cold crept through any material caught in it for too long.
Deep in the dark and unpowered recesses of the interstellar tomb, something moved.
A bulkhead, frozen shut, suddenly cracked open, releasing a hiss of icy air from beyond. A long jagged spar of a structural beam stuck through the slim crack, a soft magenta glow enveloping it.
Scarlet Moon, the unicorn mare to which the magic aura belonged, panted with exertion and applied more telekinetic pressure, trying to force the bulkhead open further.
The pony had several jumpsuits on in an attempt to stave off her frigid surroundings, with an insulated spacesuit over top of it all. She didn’t wear the helmet – limited oxygen canisters made it impractical and even dangerous at times for a pony to fully seal themselves in a spacesuit when moving around the still-pressurized sections of the colony ship. In place of a helmet, her magenta eyes peeked through the wrapping of hats and industrial tarps that covered her head.
Giving a final grunt of effort, Scarlet pushed on her makeshift prybar with all her might, and even added her own weight to that of her magic, being rewarded with the door budging open another two hoofspans.
Eyeing the narrow opening, she pulled out her metal beam and tried to squeeze through; a slow, painful process that ended up bruising her flank as she finally popped free into the other room.
Using her prybar to hook herself on the edge of the door and pull herself back down to the ground in the zero-gravity environment, Scarlet looked around at her prize.
She was in one of the colony ship’s pre-fab storage bays. The dark, cavernous gloom soared away from her, and dark shapes slowly came into focus. With power all but nonexistent in this section of the space vessel, none of the lights came on at her presence, and only the single, small beam of light from her torch was there to illuminate her immediate surroundings.
Her insulated hooffalls were muffled against the decking as she slowly floated down the hallways between unloaded supply racks and prefabricated colony buildings, her body occasionally twisting and shifting to land on a surface to pause for a look, or else turn and propel her deeper. The buildings, power generators, materials, and supplies in this room would be enough to support the survival and development of a planetary base that could sustain up to a thousand ponies. The Hyperion, being made of state-of-the-art technology and engineering, and the largest class of colony ship ever to leave Equestria behind, had seven hundred such storage bays; more than enough for the half a million colonists that it carried. Even with the best blending of magic and technology and the first large-production line of “Blast Drives” created by Clover the Clever and Blast Powder, the journey to new star systems would take months, and the automatic systems of the ship would be needed to determine if any of the possible planets on their routes would be suitable to sustain pony life.
Thus, the half million volunteer colonists had bravely embarked upon the Hyperion and rode out the trip in stasis capsules; another marvelous invention that would keep its inhabitant magically alive in a comatose-like state so as not to use precious resources through the journey; it also helped prevent everypony from dying of old age before the ship reached its destination.
Scarlet Moon, however, now had none of that comfort.
She was a dietitian, and knew nothing of how any of the magical, mechanical, or technical systems of the ship itself worked, and only had a limited knowledge of how to set up the colony base structures. Whatever had happened to the Hyperion, that had caused it to break apart above the isolated gas giant, had shorted out the power on her stasis capsule, along with so many others.
Scarlet’s capsule had had enough power when the ship died that it activated its emergency wakeup procedure and she had been ejected, coughing, dizzy, and confused, as warning lights strobed and sirens blared. On that first day, it had taken her hours before she could stand without attempting to vomit, and nearly a full day before she had made her way to one of the Hyperion’s many mess halls to eat and drink.
Looking back, she had probably been one of the lucky ones.
When the ship wrenched itself apart, many ponies had simply died, their capsules no longer keeping them alive as they failed, and thousands of ponies froze to death in their sleep. Many awoke to find that their emergency wakeup procedures had activated, but other mechanisms had failed, and their capsule was still trapped deep within a storage stack, surrounded by other sleeping ponies and asphyxiated cadavers.
On the third day, the backup power generators had failed, forcing everything into the dark of nighttime. All the emergency lights had turned off, what little life support remained in her section of the mighty vessel ceased permanently, and all the system controls slaved to the central power grid–that is, any non-portable electronic or magitech device–went cold and died, and she had nearly gotten stuck in the nearby galley until she found the manual emergency override.
On her fourth day, Scarlet had managed to breach the buckled doors of the capsule storage room next to hers, and found several ponies at the front of the cryo-storage-stack dead within their capsules, bloody smears along the inside of the glass as they had tried to break free from the reinforced pods. The colony’s life-preserving technology had become a gruesome tomb.
Fortunately, stasis capsules had an internal power supply in case of just such a disaster, and despite the gruesome end of so many ponies, most of them remained undamaged during the catastrophe. Scarlet’s own sister, Blue Moon, nestled in the capsule next to hers, was still alive and well, unconscious to all the goings-on of the universe around her. The few times Scarlet had managed to see through an exterior porthole or a viewing window to the dark space around the vessel, she had even seen the occasional capsule floating through the void, its indicator lights still showing a bright green and its inhabitant still miraculously alive.
On the sixth day she had begun to shiver, as the heat from the ship had finally bled away into space with no reactors or heaters to keep the interior warm, and Scarlet had started to panic. In a fit of fear and rage against the unfairness of the universe she had wrenched her now-trusty metal spar out of the wall with her telekinesis and forced her way into a storage locker, finding the clothing and spacesuit she was now bundled up in.
Scarlet had calmed down a bit after that, but the unsettling silence had started to creep up on her.
She was trapped in the midsection of the vessel, on the bottommost deck where the colony supplies and launch bays were situated, but many of the hatches to other parts of the ship had become blocked, or the corridors beyond had been breached and were open to vacuum. In the first ten days of her imprisonment, she had explored nearly every accessible room, and had come to a very disturbing conclusion.
Out of the three thousand capsules in her cordoned off part of the starship, she was the only soul who had woken up and was still alive.
Many of her fellow colonists still slumbered peacefully, unaware that they would never reach their destination; one of the dozen hoof-picked planets that were likely candidates for sustaining life. But Scarlet? She was alone.
Floating along the aisles of equipment bay #83, Scarlet mulled over her choices and her experiences over the last fifteen days. She had all the rehydratable food and water in the mess hall, and sealable sample bags she was using as toilets. Her personal datapad was intact, and she had spent her nights crying over pictures and videos of her and her sister in order to fall asleep. Every day she woke up colder than the last, and pulled on more jumpsuits to keep warm. She had raided an emergency locker on her eighth day and found the torch she was now using, as well as an emergency heater and a small block of batteries to power both.
She was down to her last battery for her torch, but when it died she could at least use her magic to make a light again. If she didn’t find any more batteries or a way to restore her stasis capsule to working order, then when the space heater died… she didn’t want to think too much about that kind of future.
The thought of anything but the slim chance of restoring her stasis pod to working order and surviving next to her sister weren’t things she dwelt on lightly, though whenever she had moments where her mind could wander, like now as she wandered the dark maze of quiet machinery and stacked building materials, the dreaded fear returned.
She hadn’t died, but so far, she was only staving off the inevitable. How long had they been gone? How close were they to their destination–any destination? The ship was supposed to go from star system to star system, checking each planet for viability, and only waking the crew and colonists once the computer had decided that terraforming and base building was possible. How many star systems had they passed through? Had they even reached the first? Was the Hyperion all the way out at the farthest reaches of the galaxy?
Scarlet had no way to tell.
Even her datapad, which normally displayed the date, still showed as being 17 days after she had boarded the Hyperion; but it had been turned off for the voyage, and there was no local network to connect to in order to update the date and time.
For all she knew, something had gone catastrophically wrong mere moments after the first jump, and the date was accurate. In that case, they would probably be relatively close to Equus, though the bright white star and deep blue of the planet she had glimpsed outside looked nothing like any planet in the Solaria system.
If the ship had been destroyed near the tail end of its trip… she could be hundreds of light years away from home, and they might have been away from Equus for decades or centuries.
Scarlet shivered, though this time it had nothing to do with the cold. Turning her attention back to the task at hoof, she continued pushing off of surfaces and gently floating up and down the aisles of cold machinery, scanning the rows for what she needed.
Well, she looked for what she hoped she needed. Truthfully, she had little in the way of planning on how to save herself beyond the vaguest ideas. She was relatively sure there was something that would get the job done.
The muffled sounds of her movement bounced around the dark space as she continued pulling herself along corners and container edges. She dared not give herself too much hope, and instead focused her mind on the fact that of course what she needed would be here because of course it would be needed in the colony anyway, so of course the ship would have been prepared. She didn’t allow herself to think of whether or not anything useful to her current situation would even be stored near her stasis storage room.
Spying a storage container stacked higher up, she clipped her torch to her jacket, steadied herself and began climbing, pausing every other step to reposition herself and get a proper foothold–Scarlet didn’t want to go floating off into the empty space of the cavernous hold. It would take her precious time to find her way back to this point, or even the entrance she came in through. Finally hooking a foreleg around one of the ladder rungs on the container, she slowly swung herself around until she was in front of the latch.
It was locked.
Gritting her teeth, the unicorn gave a grunt of frustration and lit her horn, pulling out her makeshift crowbar. She didn’t have enough time to go searching through dying directories for the right keylace or bracelet band, so instead she leveled out the steel beam and jammed it between the lock and latch. The lock, like the door she had forced open earlier, was frozen solid and didn’t want to budge, but Scarlet still had some mana left and applied it, yanking the metal back and forth in her magical grip.
Bracing her rear legs in a nook between the container and the next, she placed her front legs on the metal spar and with the combination of the last of her magical strength, and her shivering muscles, she finally hit the lock with enough force to snap it. Unfortunately, at the same time, her makeshift crowbar had had enough stress and bent nearly ninety degrees in the same moment, causing her to lose her grip, and her balance.
Tumbling away from the stacked storage containers into the open space of the hangar-like room, Scarlet tried to see where she was going, and glimpsed the wall of a prefabricated structure moments before she thudded into it.
She didn’t hit it especially hard or fast, but she glanced against something long and metal with the flat of her back. The shock of it stole her breath away and filled her ribs with the sudden unexpected warmth of pain. Shaking off the temporary sting, she twisted around and saw she was once again very slowly drifting away from the building she had just hit, towards the open space above. Shaking her body this way and that, she managed to turn herself enough to reach out with a hoof and hook herself around what she had hit, which she now realized was the caged housing of a comms dish. Turning back, the light from her torched danced and zigged around the packed crates and walls, before she saw the slowly spinning spar of her crowbar, and the now cracked-open shipping container next to it.
Knowing that she couldn’t afford to be reckless this time, and still too magically exhausted to catch herself with her telekinesis if she failed, Scarlet carefully lined herself up and softly pushed off towards her target. After a few tense moments, she neared the other tower of equipment and containers and reached out a hoof, catching herself on the edge of the door.
Hauling herself inside, she breathed a sigh of relief and smiled as she looked up and down the stacked rows of energy generators. Each machine was individually packaged in small, cushioned cases, and was about the size of a mini fridge. Personal generators such as the ones in front of Scarlet, had nearly a dozen universal hookups, and could be used to power everything from a portable stove to a stationary bubble shield, or even be used to recharge a unicorn’s personal magic reserves, though at significant drainage of the generator’s magic-condensing crystals.
Despite her magical exhaustion, Scarlet’s need for the generators was more typical. Quickly pushing herself over to the nearest stack and activating the skid lift it sat on, she checked the power; thankfully, the cold had only partially drained the batteries of the skid, and it powered up cheerfully after a worryingly long boot-up time. The clear plastic straps looped around the machinery kept it from floating away from the platform and she now only had the issue of trying to move several hundred kilograms in vacuum. She had to make sure she got the skid moving in the right direction, as without gravity for the skid’s auto-levitation spell to push against, it would become almost impossible to redirect if she had to turn it; not to mention that the materials were heavy enough to crush her to a pulp if she tried to stop it head-on.
The day had been long, and one of many, but each day she had achieved something since she had started out with a goal in mind. She paused, hanging over the lip of the container, watching her breath fog in the dark, empty space of the cavernous storage hold.
Maybe that was enough for one day? With the door forced open, and the generators found, she could always come back after some sleep with some mana recharged and use her own levitation magic to direct the skid’s movement much more safely.
The chill in the air bit at her teeth with every intake of breath, and she was reminded of how far gone her dwindling supplies were. She didn’t have the energy at this point to stop what she was doing here and go looking for a container with more batteries, and she didn’t have any way to tie down the skid or mark it in such a way that it would stand out in the gloom of the huge room. If she left it now, who knew how long it would take her to find it again.
***
The trek back through the collapsed, frozen hallways and half-forced-open bulkheads was slow and arduous, and Scarlet completed it almost entirely in the dark. Not wanting to use up what little power she had left in her torch, and far too magically exhausted to light so much as a single spark from her horn, she had navigated mostly by touch, and what little light from the stars outside filtered through the occasional ice-encrusted viewing windows.
She had made the journey several times over the last few days, getting further and further each time, so that also had helped with her sense of direction, but now without her torch to rely on except in very short flashes that nearly blinded her, the overall trip back to the stasis chamber she had originally woken up in had left her trembling with exhaustion and seeing shapes swimming before her eyes.
Crawling up to the faint, blinking green light of her sister’s still-active stasis pod and depositing herself into a small tent she had made from emergency space suits, Scarlet collapsed inside on a floor made up of dehydrated meals and torn-up tarps; anything that would insulate from the freezing cold of the grated metal floor. She reached out blindly, fumbling in the direction of where she was sure her heater was, before her hoof bumped against the solid machine, and she hit the on switch. The heating coil in the center of the cylindrical device slowly sprang to life, heating up with a very dark red before gradually warming to a bright and cheerful orange that spread just enough light to see the inside of her tent with. As she shivered in the cold and waited for the heater to do its job and push away the killer chill, she checked the power display on the side in the faint orange glow and sighed.
Just over one-third charge left. It wouldn’t quite last her a full night’s sleep, and so she’d wake up shivering… if she woke up at all. Sighing and turning down the power on the heater, she forced herself to open a packet of water and a dehydrated food pack. If tonight was her last night of warmth, she’d either have to find a way to re-engage her stasis pod by tomorrow night, or new power packs for the heater. Or maybe she’d be able to hook up one of the generators to her little heater, and then she could keep the space warm all day while she worked the problem.
Either way though, tomorrow was her deadline to get things working, so she needed to eat and drink while there was still something left to eat and drink. And if she didn’t get things hooked up and working by tomorrow, well she’d freeze to death the next time she went to sleep, and that would be that.
Author's Note
Boom! Here we are with my second short story in what I'm calling the blastverse, though this one takes place long, long before the fic Flowers Drifting on a Solar Wind. I have more partially written, but life has been super busy for me for the last couple years and my writing has unfortunately been going very slowly, but I'm planning on releasing more in the next few months, so stay tuned! (Maybe harass me in the comments a bit if you want me to write faster 
)
