I’m shaken awake, and not at all in the usual way.
My mother always said that the only thing about me that wasn’t wispy and willowy and bendable as a breeze was how I sleep, which is like a rock. Captain Spitfire says it's more like a brick: one soaring through a window, heedless of the shards of glass flying free in my wake.
“Single-minded focus,” Professor Rider had remarked once, marveling and dubious at once, during one of my many lab classes back at the Academy.
I barely heard him then. The words slice through my mind with crystal cut clarity now.
My eyes snap open, but the shaking never eases. Where I expect to see Captain Spitfire’s scowling face glaring down at me, I see only the wobbly ceiling of the ship. It wasn’t her hoof on my withers that pried me from sleep.
I sit up too fast, but I’m a pegasus, and a Wonderbolt at that. The day my vision goes black at the edges from something so small is the day I retire. I’m on the ground, in the main thoroughfare up to the bridge, and not in my bed, as I’d expected. The white lights embedded in the ceiling flicker above me as the shuddering ground trembles back into pseudo-stillness. I wince, bring a hoof to my temple and ow, how did I–?!
Ran into the wall, I realize dully, eying the dent in the pearly white paneling at exactly eye level and in exactly the shape of my skull. Still, no blood at least, just a wicked shiner by the feel of it. Was it called that, on your face, or was that just on the eyes?
I take a deep breath in and attempt to recalibrate.
Not dizzy, probably not concussed. No weird colors at least. Still, I feel...odd. Woozy? Nauseous. Sick in a way that I haven’t been since I was a filly. The sensation is familiar and also...not. A thrumming drumbeat inside of me. Like the way you can feel lightning dance across your feathers before it strikes, feel a sonic rainboom before you can hear it.
And then I hear it with my ears in addition to my soul.
A great, rending groan shudders through the ship, the metal squealing in duress as the wave passes through it and me. Something primal and wild and utterly unordered snarls to life inside me, an instinct so old it needs no name, a fear so quick and bright that its purpose could only ever be to keep stupid ponies like me, far beyond their ken, alive.
“Captain!” I shoot up into the air with a cry, the pain in my head forgotten. “Captain!”
The Wanderer isn’t a large ship—shrinking magic for cargo removes the need for a massive storage hull, and semi-autonomous piloting for distance makes it unnecessary to have a full crew complement, even on long delivery missions like these. But the corridor to the bridge, just wide enough to fit two ponies, has never felt so long as it does in this moment. I arc my wings back at a perfect forty-five degree angle and push myself into a tight spin, my eyes locked on the heavy metal doors at the end of the hall.
Thankfully, the ship is smart enough that, even trembling on their invisible tracks, they open with a great whoosh before I can slam my head into them, too. I skid to a halt in midair, no clouds to break my landing, and toss my gaze around wildly, barely pausing to shield my eyes against the immense brightness bleeding in through the spaceshield viewfinder and flooding the bridge. “Captain!”
“I’m right here, rookie,” Captain Spitfire grunts, and so she is, sprawled on the floor but slowly levering herself upright. My eyes linger on her wing, the bad one, as she pulls it free from under her own weight.
“Rookie?” My voice is high and shrill and thin to my own ears, gone numb from the low, droning cry still rumbling through the ship. “No, wait, that doesn’t matter, Captain, what is–!”
“Buck if I know, Ensign!” Spitfire cries. With a flap of her wings, she’s airborne, moving to hover before the glass and peering out into the bright blue-white outside it. The deep, resonant cry slowly abates, drifting into a silence that punches through me with its stagnant volume. “Assess the situation.”
The bridge is a mess, and it’s with a sudden jolt that I realize the ship is tilting listlessly towards its side, the wall slowly becoming the relative floor. Pegasi aren’t as sensitive to gravity’s pull as other ponies, not once properly trained, at least. But I hadn’t even noticed, the sound of that moaning call had filled my mind utterly. I slam my eyes shut, reaching for the Wanderer’s magical core, trying to sync the mana flowing within with my own, to assess—
“I said assess, Ensign Trail!” the captain roared, and my eyes snap back open, startled. “With your eyes, your ears, your wings, your bucking hooves—!”
With deft movements, I move to hover before the window with the captain.
“A star,” I breathe.
The captain’s glower deepens.
“A–a white dwarf? No, a blue dwarf,” I amend.
“Classification ain’t exactly the name of the game here, rookie.”
“You said assess!” I cry, plaintive and foalish. My lips press together into a line, and I try again, more evenly. “You said to ‘assess’, Captain.”
“That I did,” Spitfire chuckles darkly. She looks strange in the starlight, I realize, her sunshine fur so pale and sickly and wrong. Washed out. Has she always looked so tired? “Let’s…focus. The problem is out there.”
“But...not the star?” I press closer to the glass. Under ordinary circumstances, squinting directly into a star would be an incredibly stupid move. But the ship runs on solar energy; it was built to withstand stars, whether it be their eons or their fires. The Wonderbolts were just the rare few who got to experience it up close.
“Not the star,” the captain confirms, but her mouth is still pursed in dissatisfaction. “I saw…” she cuts herself off. Shakes her head. “Anyhow, near as I can tell, stars don’t let loose predatory hunting calls.”
“H-hunting calls?” But even as I stammered it out, I knew it was true. That instinct deep inside me that had sent me careening out of my quarters and towards the closest thing I had to safety clicked into place. Predator. “But...surely not. There’s no sound in space,” I say instead, faintly.
“Think you and I both know that’s not exactly true.” Captain Spitfire flicks an ear, and then cranes her neck down and around, trying to peer outside, but upwards. “Damn it, I can’t see anything out of this blasted glass.”
“It isn’t–” I cut myself off. Whether or not the spaceshield is ‘glass’ or not isn’t actually important. “The sensor array–” I realize.
“Shot to hell by whatever sonic wave rocked through us the first time.” Captain Spitfire grimaces. “I already checked. But not a bad line of thinking,” she admits grudgingly.
“Then…” We lapse into silence. The star’s glow was like a television screen. Blue-white and wakeful. I could almost hear the static coming off it.
And then a massive form scraped its way past the viewport, blotting out the light completely.
“Wha–” I wheeze.
Massive. A massive, massive object—no. A massive creature moves past, sending the ship rocking in its wake. The lights around us flicker, valiantly trying to stay alight as the ship sways, but they ultimately fail, and the pale emergency lighting gutters on. But the darkness inside the ship is nothing compared to the creature outside. My breath catches in my chest as I watch it meander forward.
Its body is huge and fathomless and spun from void itself, so black and lightless that it almost hurts to look at, my eyes itching to look away as my brain fights itself over whether it’s better to perceive death, to stare is in the face, or to never see it coming and look away.
But on the edges of that titanic void…a dotted outline, delicate and gossamer as silk. Pinpricks of light that detail one massive, sweeping tail, a dozen flipper-like appendages set below a gaping maw topped with uncountable, barnacle-like eyes that glow with an eerie inner light.
“A star beast,” Spitfire breathes. And she’s right, I think, or close enough. My throat is tight as I swallow past the lump that’s formed. Ursa Majors are big, sure, but they’re big on a pony scale.
It takes everything in me not to call it a monster.
This thing sashaying through space as if the ether were no more than the calmest tide, this…lifeform, is massive on a planetary scale. My brain fills with a buzzing noise as I consider its size, its magnitude and majesty, its pure gloaming horror.
“But what is it doing here, of all places?” I murmur back. “This star...it’s in the middle of a solar flare, isn’t it?” I had reviewed the star map and our planned route, of course. The path we take is the captain’s purview, but I’ve always preferred to know our heading.
“It is,” Spitfire answers grimly as the creature finally moves fully past. We squint into the returned brightness. “Look.”
A great gout of plasma lashes out from the star, a long string of sinuous, sapphire light. The creature moves towards it as if bewitched, opening that massive black hole of a mouth, and we watch as the creature sucks the starlight down. It turns towards the next ejection before the first has even dissipated, but the first trails in the creature’s wake as if magnetized. Again and again, a solar flare casts a line and is sucked up into the creature’s waiting, preternatural blackness almost as soon as it forms. We watch in a quiet sort of horror as the monster, a creature born of void and starlight in equal measure, gradually brightens. New pinpricks of light dot its surface, and the eldritch glow in its multitudinous eyes brighten from milky dimness to a bright, misty white.
“I think it’s...feeding.”
Captain Spitfire nods. “It–”
Her words are cut off as another terrifying groan rips through the ship, sending us shaking and shuddering once more. We both pitch forward, covering our ears with our hooves (and outright folding them down in my case), but it is of little use. It’s a magical sound, or near enough to approximate magic; a hunting call meant to find prey and maybe even stick it in place, or at least to communicate its location to others in the vicinity. Air is of little consequence to a sound that transcends physicalities and is heard with the mind, with the soul.
“We need to get out of here!” Spitfire shouts above the din.
“But how–?”
The Wanderer, usually so solid underhoof, careens sharply, as we’re knocked into a looping spin. I drop my hooves from my ears in surprise. The captain’s sharp inhalation drags my gaze back.
“There’s more.” I see her lips mouth the words more than I hear them. But she’s right. Another massive form moves past us, this one smaller than the last but even closer. And then a third one off in the distance, swooping to suck up its own noodle of sunfire, and another beyond it still. An entire pod of eerie behemoths. “Celestia almighty–”
“Space whales,” I breathe. My exhalation fogs up the glass.
“We need to get out of here,” Spitfire finally says again, grimly.
My head nods, but I can’t tear my gaze away from the feeding frenzy below. It’s bewitching and haunting in equal measure.
“Snap out of it, Ensign!”
I flinch and straighten, snatching my eyes away to meet the captain’s. “Yes, m’am!”
“So. Let’s get out of here.” In a single beat, she’s settled back in the Captain’s Chair, her wings flared out behind her.
“Um. Captain?” I hesitate. “What are you doing?”
“I’m flying us–oh.” She blinks in muzzy surprise, and then it’s right back to her usual dark glower. “Right.” Spitfire casts a disparaging eye over the control panel at the front of the bridge, crystalline and utterly opaque in both color and use—to the captain, at least. “Stupid unicorn ships…” she mutters, beating her wings once again and settling her hooves against the panel.
I watch the captain for a few heartbeats, and then a few moments, and then what has to be at least five full minutes. She flares her wings—searching, I know, for the old Pegasus-class grips, even if unintentionally. But they aren’t there and they never will be again. Making the stars accessible to all of ponykind was just one of the goals of the Harmony-class ships. The days of pegasi having sole claim to the sky are…
Well.
“So.” I clear my throat. “Are we…?”
“Blast it all to hell,” the captain cries, throwing her hooves off the control panel. “I can’t fly this thing with the sensor array down.”
“Oh.”
“There we are, another Vapor Trail oh,” the captain gripes, spinning to glare me down, her hoof jabbing towards me with each word. “Oh, your Captain is a useless sack of pony feathers that can’t even fly these forsaken sky buckets! Oh, we’ll be trapped forever because of her! Oh, we’ll never make it home!”
I open my mouth to answer, but...no. No, maybe not. Not yet.
Captain Spitfire carries on in that vein for a while, ranting and raving interspersed with the occasional mind-rending call from beyond the ship’s fragile walls. After what had definitely been at least five minutes, the captain starts winding down. I seize my opportunity.
“Captain?”
“What?”
“Permission to speak freely?”
“Oh for b–granted, Ensign.”
“The space whales’ calls are increasing, and getting closer.” A pause. “I think we are drifting further into their midsts.” Another pause. “Perhaps...I should fly the ship?”
Spitfire glares. She glowers and grimaces and grunts.
I shudder as she levels that look on me.
“Go right on ahead, Ensign.” She flaps her way back to the Captain’s Chair, her earlier alacrity already forgotten as she settles heavily against the cushions. “Be my guest. You should feel empowered to get us the hay out of here.”
I swallow. “Yes, m’am.”
The flight panel is faceted and cool beneath my hooves, just like every other panel on the ship. My eyes flutter shut, searching...but it takes longer, this time, to find the ship’s core, for all around me when I close my eyes is mist.
Fear, I realize. Clouding my senses with its sticky fog. It’s been so long since I’ve been afraid, really, truly afraid, I realize. On the heels of that thought is the vast gratitude for that truth. How many ponies can say the same for themselves? That their every day is a boundary to press, a joy to behold, a wonder to find, an adventure waiting to be explored?
I am so very lucky to be able to do the work I do.
The thought sparks warm inside me, and I reach again, seeking the river of power coursing through the Wanderer. And there it is, below me, thin and thready and dim in the dark, paler and weaker than I’ve ever seen it, but still there.
I slow my breaths, match the thrumming drum of mana in my own body with the ship’s. It’s the same magic that gives pegasi their flight, and similar enough to the magic earth ponies pull between their hooves and the ground, or that the unicorns pluck and weave with their horns. We aren’t so different, really.
Other ponies piloting the stars has always been inevitable.
But piloting is another thing entirely than flying.
Flight is the purview of pegasi, and of pegasus magic alone.
My eyes snap open, and the world around me resolves into sharp clarity. It’s harder, without the sensor array, to know exact numbers and positions, so approximations will have to do. I decide on what direction is north and I spread out my senses, perceiving with everything the ship and I have to offer: three whales due west, two to the northeast, and an uncountably ‘more’ approaching from the encroaching darkness beyond the flaring star’s light. I unfurl my wings, the primary feathers twitching as I breathe and the ship breathes and my oh my it is exhilarating to fly again.
I bank us smoothly to the right, barely noting the captain’s gasp of surprise as we arc away from the star, away from the feeding whales, back to the relative safety of the dark causeway—
The ship shudders around us, harder than ever before, loose on the hinges like baby teeth waiting to come free. I tug away from the magnet-like force trying to pull us back.
“Rookie–” Spitfire stands.
“I can do this,” I say firmly.
I tug us upward, away from that tractor-like force pulling us back, and for a shining moment, we’re free, cresting above the clouds to see the sun, feel the coolest, purest breeze on our faces once again.
And then we’re knocked flying, circling and whirling back the way we came in an uncontrolled spin.
“Oh no.” I reel from the surprise of being pushed around so easily. The ghost of pain dances up my legs and across my wings, but no, it isn’t real, I remind myself, just an impression from the ship, not mine to feel.
All around me the ship plunges into darkness, even the emergency lighting snuffed into nothingness with only the star to see by. I crane my neck around.
“I can do this,” I insist to Captain Spitfire with a confidence I don’t really feel.
She watches me, her face utterly devoid of emotion in the stark light. I hate it.
“I can,” I say again, and maybe this time I’ll believe it, maybe this time I’ll do it. What comes first, I wonder, as I sync my breaths to the ship’s. The belief or the success?
And so I try. Again and again and again and again, sweat tracking down my back and soaking my fur as I try every maneuver, every flight pattern, every single trick in the book that I’ve learned and several I’ve only read about.
Slingshotting off the star’s gravitational field: failure.
Diamond roll: failure.
Rider Loop: failure.
Crying in frustration: …technically also a failure.
With each attempt, the mana core of the ship fades. The whales take a little more notice of us, their vast heads swinging to track our progress. Circling closer each time we slow to a standstill. And with each failure, my own heart gets a little closer to breaking.
“That’s enough, Vapor,” Spitfire says behind me. Quiet. Grim.
“No,” I refuse. “I can do this.”
“We’re dead in the water.” A pause. “Engine’s dead. We’ve gotta take a break to recharge the core at the very least.” Another pause. “And maybe us, too.”
“I can do this, I-I swear I can do this, Captain–”
“Under normal circumstances, I’d believe it. But this…” She moved to peer out the viewfinder at the dizzying frenzy of void and starlight dancing outside that I could sense and feel more than I could see as we slowly spun. “This one, I’m not so sure about.”
“I am a Wonderbolt and I will get us out of here.” I grit my teeth and I lower my head, press my hooves all the more firmly into the control panel, flare my wings all the wider.
Because that’s what ‘Bolts do.
I have never felt less like one in my life.