Starlight filters weakly through the viewports as we spin slowly sunwards.
Another…whale? Are we calling them whales? These behemoth things made of liquid starlight are as little like whales as ponies are like mountains, but it’s the name Vapor seems to have fixed on. Another whale slides past, gracefully closes in on another spout of sunfire and drinks it down. Pulling the fire inside itself, flaring brighter and brighter until it finally levels out and goes after another strand. A trailing tendril swings in our direction, and the force of its passage is enough to set us spinning again. I flap steadily, ignoring the ache in my shoulder, and let my ship spiral around me.
Vapor flashes past my head four, five, six times, still glued to the console, trying desperately to decipher the undecipherable. To get the sensors back online, or the navigation, or even the lights, just something, anything to be less of a sitting duck bobbing towards an inevitable end.
It frustrates me, seeing her like that. So full of hope and blind optimism that she lets herself be spun like an earth pony in a barrel. Convinced that if she finds the right equation, the right reference in the ship’s archives, she can solve this.
“Aren’t you dizzy?” I snap at her as she zips by an eighth time.
“Hm?”
She isn’t listening to me. She never does. All those promises from the recruiter who was sent to convince me when I last said I was considering cycling out. Worthless. Your experience is so valuable to our mission, Captain Spitfire. We can’t lose you. You’re irreplaceable. Yeah, I sure feel it. Irreplaceable to my crew of one who wouldn’t notice if I dropped dead right now. But I fell for it – again. I stayed. I always do. What is there for me back on Equus? Skies I can’t fly in. Cloud cities I can’t live in. Friends who no longer know me.
My wing spasms and I drop awkwardly to the floor and join the same stupid spinning process Vapor is engaged in.
Another whale, another strange vibratory call that sends bone-deep tremors through the ship and us.
I’m angry – I’m so angry that I’m going to die here, a billion miles from Equus and Cloudsdale and the ‘Bolts HQ and everything that ever meant anything to me. My situation is more hopeless than it’s ever been, and I don’t know how to save the only squadmate left to me.
But there’s something tugging at the edges of my mind – a realization, almost. Something on the tip of my tongue, that I can’t quite yet see the shape of. All I can think of is the windigo, the braying laughter spraying me with shards of ice that cut my skin and drew blood.
I take a step forward, towards Vapor. “When I was younger, I was squadron commander of the ‘Bolts, right?”
Without looking up from her work, she nods. “I know.”
Not from me. I don’t talk about my glory days like some vets do; it just hurts too much. But I dip my chin in assent. “Well, one time we were on a mission outside of Equestria. Flying across this huge desert. It’s nighttime, and a snowstorm pops up. And not just any old snowstorm; a real Crystal Empire level whopper.”
“Right.” It’s wooden. Just enough feigned interest to be polite. All her attention still on feeling the ship – as though it’s a cloud, or a cyclone, or something that makes sense to pegasus magic. I’m irrelevant to her, and so is my story. But I flatten my ears and push on. Vapor Trail is not the first rookie I’ve wrangled. Not the first one to be certain the old-timers have nothing of value to teach her.
“We had no idea what was going on. We were scattered, panicked. Some of us were fighting. I was…” I wince, hesitate so long she actually glances up at me. I twitch my bad wing. “I was...injured.”
Suddenly, she’s paying attention. “The day you hurt your wing?”
She’s probed me about it over the years. A subtle question here, a little nudge there. Open up to me, Captain. Trust me. And I never have. Not until now.
“It was chaos,” I tell her. “We were frightened and confused, and we had no idea what was going on. It was like nature itself had turned on us. These huge forces that we couldn’t understand, out to get us.”
Now fully engaged, she sits up. Both her ears swiveled in my direction.
“But it turned out to be something quantifiable. A windigo. Feeding the stress between us, making us tense and angry. Using the discord to fuel the storm. It was...I was…” I shut my eyes and force myself on. “It took me hurting my wing to see it, but I understood. And once I knew what the windigo wanted, it was easy to beat it.”
She rubs uncomfortably behind her ear. “But that was on Equus. A windigo is...it’s real, Captain. We understand them.”
I shake my head. “We didn’t always.”
“What happened after your mission?”
I lower my gaze. That’s not the happy part of the story. I shrug my stupid right wing. “I got everyone out.”
Slowly, she nods. “But your…?” She doesn’t say the word wing, and suddenly I like her a little more than I did before.
“It was my last mission, yeah.” And it’s all as fresh as it was sixteen years ago: the humiliation, the pain. The failed rehab, the gradually dawning realization that there could be no going back. A grounded Wonderbolt. A flightless pegasus. The work of my life, ground into nothing in an instant. “But I saved them.”
That’s what I try to hold onto, through the sleepless nights and the useless stretching regimens to mend what can never be fixed. That’s what I remember when the concerned letters stopped coming, when the awkward visits dwindled into nothing. When even Blaze stopped coming to the family reunions, driven away by the bitter old drunk in the corner. When it came down to it, I saved my team.
“Focus,” I say to her sharply. “What do these things want? What do they feed on?”
A sharp inhalation. A wondering Oh. “It’s the solar cores. Maybe they can...smell them, I think. They’re feeding, and we’ve got concentrated solar mana in our holds. They’re hungry.”
I don’t argue. I think she’s right. But these things are circling us like koi carp around a mosquito, and knowing we’re full of their favourite food doesn’t do wonders for my nerves.
Suddenly the way forward is clear. The plan crystallizes in my mind like the ice on my feathers so long ago. “We need to jettison the cores.”
But Vapor gasps. “We can’t, Captain. The colonies – the ponies there need that fuel.”
“Agency standards mean all of them should have a year’s supply stockpiled.”
“But what if something’s gone wrong since last supply run? They could need–”
“Kid, either we dump the cores here to feed these guys, or they keep nudging till the whole ship falls apart, we die, and they eat the cores anyway.” I glare out through the viewscreen at the star-speckled beasts curving through the sky.
Her lower lip trembles. “I can’t fail my first mission.”
I put a wing on her shoulders. Pull her close to me, the way I once comforted Blaze when she was my nervous lil’ rookie. “Kiddo, we’re the only part of the mission that counts. We’ll get more solar cores out here for the colonies, do an express flight. But right now, we need to focus on saving each other.”
“O...okay,” Vapor says in a small voice, her wavy mane falling forward across her eyes. Then she steels herself. Nods again, more firmly this time. “Okay, Captain.”
And somehow, hearing that title again, I do feel a little more myself. The sort of captain I used to be – leading a living flock of flesh-and-blood ponies, not just steering a lifeless hunk of metal across space.
“Battle stations,” I bark out in my old ‘Bolts command voice, and Vapor scrambles to obey. My heart is pumping, the pulse echoing in my ears, and we both position our hooves over the controls. Two bodies, but a single organism. A team.
For the first time in a long time, I think I feel...real. I feel alive.