It only took a minute to float down to the troop bay with only the odd hop here and there. I’ll admit I was kind of looking forward to getting a chance to do something seriously, but still goof off a bit. Everything had been so serious since we arrived after all.

Rose already had the two frames getting everything prepared for when we finished with our little field trip. Drifting into the room, I disabled the safeties and hit the button to open the boarding hatch in the bottom of the bay. Normally, a siren would sound, but since the room is depressurized, I just got a yellow strobe flashing for a moment or two before the hatch retracted into the hull. Not too far below was my target, the rocky surface of a virgin celestial body.

Looking along the inset panels dotting the ceiling of the bay, I finally found the one I was searching for. Set directly above the hatch was a reel gun. Great for boarding or descending from the ship in a hurry, it would shoot a detachable cable for quite some distance. Thankfully they were designed to fire through the exact center of the hatch, so you wouldn't be riding the line and getting smashed into stuff.

My lovely AI was already a few steps ahead of me though. While I was looking for the controls, Rose was giggling into my headset. Turning to face the airlock, I could see her grinning through the armorplas window and pointing. It was then that I realized that she’d fired the cable already. Mentally shrugging, I just grabbed mesh pouch out of a bin and strapped it to my hip.

With a sigh, and a bit of hidden excitement, I reached up to grab the ascent/descent unit attached to the cable. These were always fun, but they tended to leave you a bit sore. After a moment’s pause to wave at the assembled guests watching from behind armor plating, I tapped the activation stud on the unit. A heartbeat later I was out of the ship with nothing but free space and rock ahead of me.

A second or two later, my feet slammed into the dust and rock covered surface. If there were air, it would have made one hell of a noise. Unfortunately, this just left me hearing myself grunt from a rougher than expected landing. I wish I could say it was something spectacular, but being the first man on a stereotypical moon had less magic to it than I thought there would be. With an internal shrug, I set to work.

“That’s one small step for me, and one weird gift of moon rocks for horse kind.”

Yup. Walking around on a moon and looking for “neat” rocks to put in a sack is pretty damn boring. Thankfully I was only going to grab a couple. At least that was the plan before everything went to hell and alarms started sounding in my helmet. Before I could say anything, Rose was already on the radio.

“Uh, Princess Aine just disappeared.”

…

“What the fuck do you mean she “disappeared?!”

“She said something I couldn’t translate to Boann and the guards, then disappeared in a flash. They don’t seem to concerned, but what the hell?! One sec…”

Through all this, I was slowly making my way back to the cable. If she died or something, it was our ass on the line after all.

“Got her. She's on the surface about 100m from you on heading 173 and moving our way. From the speed, it doesn’t look like she’s panicking, but it might be O2 deprivation. Use your backup O2 on her if you need to.”

Mentally saying ‘fuck it’ I triggered the thrusters built into my armor and watched the rocks blur a bit as I accelerated toward the rim of the crater. Just as I neared the rim, a shimmering bubble crested the edge to reveal a grinning Princess Aine. Her horn was lit up and throwing harsh light in all directions, creating strange dancing shadows outside the weirdly flexing ball of energy around her. Somehow or another she’d pulled a set of saddlebags out of nowhere and they seemed to be full of...stuff. Hell if I knew what. I was more interested in how it looked like she was talking.

Cutting throttle, I slowly drifted toward the shimmering energy that surrounded the Princess. After tentatively poking the weird surface with a finger to no ill effect, I gently pushed into the field.

“...APPRECIATED! WE HAVE LONG WANTED TO SURVEY OUR SURFACE THROUGH THE EYES OF OUR AVATAR!”

Yup. Pain. Somehow or another the damned Princess managed to hold air inside the bubble, yet was yelling at a million and a half decibels. My ears are probably fucking bleeding.

It was a long and awkward walk back to the Corvus. Apparently they had crazy horse magic that could create semi-permeable force fields. That was something that human scientists had no idea how to do on a small scale and was usually reserved for air barriers on capital ships.

Looking up at the cable to the troop bay, I realized that I had zero idea how to get the Princess back into the ship without decompressing everyone else. Somehow ‘accidentally’ killing your guests is kinda bad, so using the airlock is a no go. I doubted hooves could hold onto a braided steel cable as well.

Thankfully, that problem solved itself as the bubble around Princess Aine lit up like the heart of a star, then she was gone. And a heartbeat later, screaming came over the camera feed. Princess Boann and the guards were on the deck clutching their heads with blood trickling from their ears.

“What the absolute fuck?! Is everyone okay?”

Apparently, I had missed the air pressure drop when Aine “teleported” out. I’m calling it that, because it seems to fit. Fuck if I know. Anyhow, Rose immediately pumped backup air into the airlock to balance it out. Turns out that the Princess had pulled the air out with her for the “bubble.” When she teleported back in, all that air was brought back in as well. So the room pressure spiked rather painfully for the biological folks in the airlock.

Thankfully and weirdly enough, it turns out that the ponies know honest to god healing magic. I have no idea if it’ll work for serious stuff, but for ruptured ear drums, they were back on their feet… er… hooves inside a few minutes. After everyone was confirmed alive, I made sure to pass the rocks through the decon lock so the ponies could get their treat. They seemed to want to continue with the trip, no matter how things had gone so far.

So, Rose had taken the helm and piloted us to the first coordinates. The ponies seemed enraptured as the now retracted satellite was bodily thrown out the boarding hatch below the ship. Apparently there were some gasps as the ponies watched it correct the tumble through space before activating. There was a bit of a look of recognition once the unit had fully unfolded. Somehow I don’t think they had the slightest idea what the hell they grabbed until seeing this all happen.

The second launch went smoothly with no hiccups. It was when we were deploying the final one and linking them to the sensor grid that things got weird. Through the focused sensors, Rose had found a faint sensor trace in the distance. The Quantum Drive was already primed by the time I reached the cockpit. At the tap of a button, streaming light filled the windows.

A couple seconds later, we were looking at a shape tumbling through deep space. It was completely and utterly wrecked to where sensors had no idea what to make of it. The only choice was to close the distance and hope. Being proactive, all shields were up and turrets deployed as the shape neared. Little glimmers of light were our only hint as to what it was.

“Okay, this is getting stupid. If the sensors can’t figure it out, we’ll just have to use the lights. Once we’re close, light it up with everything we’ve got.”

A soft ‘affirmative’ was all I got from the evil redhead, who was currently occupied dealing with sensor data, our guests, and god knows how many other things. But, at a hundred meters distance, five high powered spotlights burst to life to reveal our object. It looked vaguely familiar, if you could call a lump of metal that looked melted like candle wax “familiar.”

After rotating for a few more seconds, I saw something that gave me pause and also told me exactly what we were dealing with. Emblazoned across a clean panel was a symbol of a winged sword. It was a ship. And as the rotation continued to reveal a conning tower, it wasn’t anywhere near a complete one. The slow rotation continued to reveal scorched paint that said something I hadn't expected to see again, United Terran Navy.

“Um… you might want to tell our guests that this might take a bit…” Next Chapter: 22. Alone in the dark <unedited> Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 19 Minutes