Stella Cetaceae

by Novelle Tale

Chapter 6 – Saved

Suddenly, my heart is pounding again. Not with fear this time, but with purpose. We have a plan. And a plan means a chance.

“The cores will resize to normal as soon as they pass through the airlock,” I explain nervously. “A distraction.” A tasty, tasty distraction. Maybe. Hopefully.

Captain Spitfire nods next to me, brow furrowed in concentration. I think she knows I’m losing it. For once in our working relationship, she’s letting me talk out my process.

That alone drums up my anxiety another notch.

“The ship is surrounded by a membrane that maintains our internal atmosphere, but the shielding won’t protect us from the whales.” I swallow, hard. “I’ll get our own core back online, and you’ll put your many and varied experiences to excellent use to fly us out of here. We’ll have seconds to jump the engine, and even less to get away.”

“Correct and correct.”

We lapse into heavy, frenetic silence.

“...What if we die?” I whisper.

“We’re not bucking dying out here.” She snorts, the hot air steaming the control panel. “Now tell me how to fly this thing.”

“It’s just like when the nav and sensor systems are online, but, um. Harder?” I search for a good metaphor, but I’m grasping at straws. That Captain Spitfire didn’t really ascribe to my ‘woo woo outlook’ wasn’t exactly a secret.

“Mm, tell me something I’m not familiar with,” she mutters her bad wing twitching.

“Have you ever meditated before?” I try.

Spitfire actually looks away from the control panel arrayed before us to stare at me, utterly appalled. “I cannot think of a single thing that I would like to do less, Ensign.”

“Well,” I giggle only a little crazily. “I think you’re about to have a crash course in it.”

Emphasis on the crash, Spitfire’s baleful eyes say. “On with it then. Time’s ticking.”

And it was, I knew, it is. But we would only have one shot at this harebrained scheme, one chance. I knew, deep in my soul, that taking the time to calm down was the only option.

Because I am the only one who can lead us in this. And so I do.

“Steady your breathing,” I hear my voice say, the sound low and warm and a little fuzzy in my ears. “Bring your heart back to baseline. Close your eyes.”

Captain Spitfire shifts a little beside me. Her hooves are on the controls alongside mine, and on the edge of my perception, past the ship and the whales and the star beyond, I can feel the thrum of her magical core: glowing embers in contrast to the cloudy breeze of my own.

I pause. It’s just been so long since I’ve flown with another pony. I had forgotten the effervescent joy of working together with another towards a common goal.

“Reach out for the ship, with your mind, with your magic,” I murmur, and everything else falls away. We are suspended in the darkness, a fire waiting to spark and a gale waiting to gust. The ship’s mana network unfurls below us, pale and ghostly as a dried out river bed.

“Is that…?” Spitfire breathes.

I nod, once, and with our slow magical enmeshing with the ship, I know she feels the specter of it. “Reach for it,” I encourage. “The same way you reach for the wind with your feathers, the same way you pull moisture into the shape of a cloud. You already know how to mold it, what you want it to do.”

“Fly.” A single, soft syllable.

“Fly,” I agree.

Feathers twitching, I press my hooves into the crystalline interface beneath them, and I open the hatch.

The cores tumble free just as intended, bright and golden as they wind past us in the dark. In half a heartbeat, my eyes are open, and I look out the viewfinder to confirm what I felt more than I saw. The cores are rolling out from under us and trailing sunward, each one golden and precious and rare even in the star’s lapis light.

Another cry rends through the ship, and I wince, my grip on our quiescence stumbling.

“Buck, buck, buck,” I mutter, even though I know I don’t have time for curse words, let alone panic. My eyes slam back shut, and it’s easier now to see the tracery of the ship beneath us once more.

“Breathe,” the captain intones beside me, calm as I’ve ever heard her.

“I-I can’t—”

“You’re named for wind. If there’s a single thing you can do, Ensign…” Her forced calmitude removes some of the usual sting from her words. “So do it.”

She’s right of course. She usually is.

In the span of one breath and the next, I spread my wings. I grab hold of the pool of magic welling deep in my chest in one, and the dried out husk of the ship in another. And then I pull, crashing the two together.

A smarter pony, or perhaps one with more time, would have opened their core slowly, fed the ship morsels of mana bit by bit until it sparked to life. We don’t have that luxury.

Explosions of light dance before my mind’s eye and I stagger, falling half limp against my control panel—no, the ship’s control panel. Magic flows out of me, through hooves into crystal into magical lattice and wiring, and it takes my breath away to feel it leave even as I feel it return through the ship’s senses. Powerful, thaumaturgic pulsations stronger than any heartbeat drum to life all around us.

“Focus, Vapor.” Spitfire’s voice cuts through the fog, sharp as ever. But it’s warmer, too, because I can feel it now: her relief and regret, pain and resentment, fear and heartbreak. What comes out as anger is so much more complex than I ever really, truly realized. “Focus, and fly us home.”

She’s right. If there’s one thing we were made to do, it’s fly.

And then we’re soaring, arcing widely upwards and away, away, away, flying at last, loose and fast and free as we were always meant to, a streak of warming flame through the night. It courses through us, through me, a fierce longing and deep satisfaction as fathomless as the whales themselves. Our joy–no, the Wanderer’s joy, no, wait— the captain’s joy at finally rocketing through the air once again, stars whipping past us in streaks of light.
Deep within us, a thought. A small thing, barely a seed, but wondering. Considering what mysteries each of those streaking stars contain.

“It…did we do it?” I groan as my focus wanes. Sagging again, this time fully boneless, against the controls as our conjoined consciousness recedes, the magic inside me guttering out as the tide ebbs. I glance up, with my eyes instead of my mind, and there’s the captain, smirking proudly ahead as we fly away from danger, space whales be damned.

The eldritch calls behind us shrink to nothing as she pilots us carefully into warp and then steps back from the controls, the tension in her limbs easing. Adrenaline floods my system, as if to replace my lost mana. I spring upright.

“We did it!” I cry, and this time I mean it. “We did it, we did it, we did it!” I punch the air and spin towards her, ready for a high five or a hug or—

Captain Spitfire smiles, but it seems like a reflex. Her eyes are shadowed.

The joy begins to ebb away. “What’s wrong, Captain?”

“You did it.” She spreads her empty hooves, looks down at them. “What use was I?”

I open my mouth, ready to tell her that it was her who flew us out of there, almost, her experience and my half-baked guidance…but platitudes aren’t what she needs to hear. “You were the captain,” I say softly, fully honest now. “I was…I went to pieces. You were the commanding officer, and you fixed me.”

And I fixed Wandy. The three of us together are unbeatable.

“It’s like you said.” Carefully, I reach out and put a hoof on her withers. “We saved each other.”

She smiles weakly. “Thanks, kid. But…I think I need to think about retiring. What kind of a captain can’t fly her own ship?”

My heart pulses in sympathy, and I don’t think I’m imagining the way Wanderer’s lights seem to dim as well. “But. I’d miss you so much.”

Her smile widens. Becomes a grin. “Well, I think I know who I’m going to recommend as my replacement.”

Dumbfounded, I stare at her. “Really?”

She chuckles. “I can’t think of a single pony who’d do better.”

“If — if you do retire, Captain,” I say hesitantly, “You’re brilliant at motivational speaking. At making ponies into a team. You should go back to Wonderbolts HQ. You should be a professor.”

For a long time, she looks at me. Her eyes are glittering too brightly. “You really think they’d have me back? With…this?” She flexes her injured wing.

I don’t mention that the pegasus flight division of the ‘Bolts is now mostly an anachronism, a display team for fairs and special occasions. Ceremonial. I don’t mention that ponies and creatures from all tribes and species can join the spaceflight training program. It’s not the time.

Instead, I nod. “I think you have exactly the skills our trainers need.”

She exhales. “Well, it might not be the stupidest idea you ever had, kid.”

She turns back to the spaceshield, and the two of us watch the stars in companionable silence. We’re going home. In two weeks we’ll be close enough to the first relay station to radio home and let them know what happened. Taking the direct route back, we’ll be home in less than four months. On Equus, picking up more solar cores to head back to the colonies we missed this time around, and — and I could be the one in that seat. Captain Vapor Trail. Maybe they’ll let me choose my own crew. I can already imagine the look on Sky Stinger’s face when he has to salute me.

Outside, the stars slide past. Pale pinpricks of silver, tiny stitches on the tapestry of the universe. Each one flaring bright white at the edges of our view before vanishing into the distance behind us.

A smile spreads over my face.

Author's Note:

A sincere & special thank you to Shaslan for co-authoringco-piloting this little exploration of SF and mentorship with me! I'm so lucky to have a friend like you, Shas, and especially one so willing to dive feet first into such a fun project, ready and willing to make it truly shine.

Thank you for reading! 🐋⭐

Comments

[darkcyan]

Ahh, this was lovely! I really enjoyed how Vapor and Spitfire played off each other in this fic; how clearly distinct their POVs were and the deft way y'all mixed their existing canonical personalities with enough additional history of how they got from ~canon to here and layered in their own unique perspectives on how to interact with the spaceship-magic of the scifi aspects -- one of the things I love about AUs, especially, is seeing not just the canonical versions of the ponies, but also how they interact with the non-canonical aspects of the setup, and how it changes them and their outlook in return, and y'all nailed that.

(Also everything about the crystal-tree-space garbage ship was great and I would totally read another 20k words of Vapor nerding out about it. :D Especially since I'm pretty sure I caught the hint of a spark of possible sentience right there near the end, and exploring that would be a whole additional layer of fun and cool.) It's a bit bittersweet that Spitfire doesn't ever learn to properly 'fly' it the way Vapor does, because it feels like she would enjoy it -- but it also feels right, and I like that she is at least starting to find her path again, even if it's not the path she would have wanted in the past.

Anyway, not saying this needs a sequel, because I think it stands on its own quite well. But if y'all ever did write a sequel, I'd totally read it. :D

[Immortalmagi]

What a great story! I really enjoyed reading it. The two povs do feel very different, and I think you can really feel Spitfire's bitterness compared to Vapor's enthusiasm.

I really thought Spitfire was going to fly the ship at the end. It seemed like she did for a bit but then she was sad that she hadn't. It would have been nice for her to get a new way of flying. But going back to the academy seems right for her.

I think Vapor's happiness even with the difficulties just makes this story seem so hopeful!