Livewriting: more Changeling Space Program (Patreon)

Here's today's writing...

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Dragonfly asked, standing directly in Cherry Berry’s path.(312). 

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about stuff,” Cherry replied. “As soon as Dr. von Brawn gets back, we’re going into conference on a rocket design for this mission.”

“This is more important.” Dragonfly pointed to a small, as yet untenanted office just down the R&D building hallway. “In private, please?”

Snorting- as if she didn’t have eighteen other jobs on her hooves!- Cherry allowed herself to be led into the office, which had become a large storage closet with a desk inconveniently placed in the middle of it. But there was space for two pony-like creatures to stand and a door that closed, and that was apparently what Dragonfly desired. (313) “All right, what?” she asked the moment the door latch clicked.

“Let me fly the mission,” Dragonfly said, coming straight to the point.

Cherry gawked at the changeling. “I’m sorry, what??” she asked. “You want me to let you fly a mission with three other ponies’- well, people’s lives at stake?”

“Yes, exactly!” Dragonfly said. “Now I know you might have some problems-”

“Problems??” Cherry asked. “I’m not the one who has problems! The dragons aren’t happy about Twilight not leading the mission herself, you know! Nor the griffons! And especially not the yaks! If they find out a changeling is flying the mission, they’ll go roadapples all over us! And that will be peanuts, peanuts I tell you, compared to what Chrysalis will do when she finds out we disobeyed her direct and unambiguous orders to keep you grounded!”

Dragonfly sighed. “That’s why I’m asking you, now,” she said. “We both know that, given the queen’s wishes, I’d never see the inside of a capsule again. That might change, but when? But right now she’s out of circulation. This is probably my last chance to fly a rocket ever again, as a pilot. And I’ve never yet had an orbital flight. I want that before I move on to whatever else I do next.”

Cherry snorted again. “This isn’t about you,” she said quietly. “This is about three astronauts in very deep trouble. It’s going to take the best we have to get them down safely, and we only get one try at it. Are you gonna tell me, with a straight face- no, let me rephrase that. Can you say, without lying or misleading in any way, that you are the best pilot for the job?”

“The best available one? Yes,” Dragonfly said simply. 

“I said no lies,” Cherry replied. 

“It’s not a lie!” Dragonfly insisted. “Look, Rainbow Dash is off doing Elements-of-Harmony stuff. She’s not available. Ditto Cadance. No one else has more than two flights experience, and no one else has any familiarity with our space program and facilities. I’m the best candidate out of the astronauts from every service who are available. Plain, honest fact.”(314)

Cherry pondered this for a moment. “Okay, so Rainbow Dash is out,” she agreed. “But I am not out. Do you really think you’re a better pilot than me?”

“No,” Dragonfly admitted. “But I’m counting on two things to change your mind.”

“Really? Okay, what?”

“First....”  Somehow Dragonfly contrived to turn featureless glowing bug eyes into the most soulful, doleful, heartbreaking puppy dog eyes Cherry had ever seen, without any actual shapeshifting or changeling magic. “Because if I never get an orbital mission I’ll be awful saaaaaad… and that’s a thing you ponies care about…”

Despite the last eight words of distilled cynicism, Cherry felt herself moved… but not dislodged. “And second?”

Sighing, Dragonfly dropped the poor-pitiable-me act and looked the senior pilot straight on. “Second, you may be a better pilot than me… but ask yourself if either Occupant or me is the better substitute hive queen.”

“What?!”

“How many changelings have bothered you about routine stuff today?” Dragonfly asked. “And how many of them came to you after Occupant told them to do something? Lots, and lots. I know- I’ve been watching and listening.” She took a step closer to the pony and whispered so that her already buzzy voice became almost indistinguishable from insect noises. “Right now the hive doesn’t have a leader. And a changeling hive must have a leader. A clear, undisputed, unquestioned leader. Without a leader we don’t get along. We really don’t.”

Cherry gave some thought to this. There were honest friendships among certain changelings, she knew. She also knew that every changeling thought ninety-nine percent of their fellow changelings were complete idiots (315) and held them in contempt. And, above all, she’d seen how, at least in the short term, changelings without orders to the contrary would follow practically anybody with a loud voice and a clear sense of knowing what they were doing. “Good point,” she said. “But how’s that relevant?”

“It’s relevant because, right now, you are leading the changelings!” Dragonfly insisted. “At least the ones here at the space center. The main hive has a viceroy for now, although Elytron mostly gets obeyed only because he’s loud. Pharynx would be a much better pick… but anyway, you have to be here to run things. And do you really think you’re going to have time to train for a mission in three days while keeping everything organized and, at the same time, keeping a bunch of nervous, distracted changelings on their jobs?”

This gave Cherry another pause for thought. She’d known that was part of the deal, but she’d thought there wasn’t any choice except for her to do it all. She had to be the boss and the pilot and, yes, the queen pro tem, because if she didn’t three people would die in orbit. But if Dragonfly… well, Dragonfly would certainly be able to put her full attention on the problem, no question of that… 

… but when Chrysalis found out, there would be Tartarus to pay…

Sensing indecision, Dragonfly asked, “Would it help if I gave you the cute sad eyes again?”

Cherry snorted and pronounced a very filthy Zebrican word (316). “All right, you’re in,” she said. “But I still need you to sit in on the rocket design conference.”

“Woo-hoo!!” Dragonfly took flight, making rapid spins around the cluttered enclosed space of the office-turned-closet.

As bits of discarded equipment and junk fell here and there around her, Cherry Berry roared, “Get out of here before I change my mind!!”

Footnotes:

(312) As had the forty-eight other changelings who had asked to speak with her in the two hours since Twilight Sparkle had left to seek out the remaining trouble in Equestria and do friendship to it. It hadn’t taken the changelings, as a group, any time at all to figure out that the only way to get Cherry’s attention was to prevent her from doing anything else. This had annoyed the pilot to the point that she’d decided that interloper number fifty would go on their way with ringing ear-fins and a somewhat expanded vocabulary. Dragonfly didn’t know how lucky she was.

(313) It’s astonishing how many cultures fail to appreciate that privacy when working is good for everybody and not just for those with the most power and fewest duties.

(314) The phrase “plain honest fact”, coming out of a changeling’s mouth, almost universally fails to inspire trust, even among other changelings.

(315) This estimate put them, according to some outside observers, within one percent of accuracy.

(316) You don’t need to know the word. This is an uplifting, highly educational history of a critical moment in space history, and as such not a fit place for potty language. Take your goddamn curiosity elsewhere.

“And that was all it took?” Chrysalis asked. 

“Look, not all of us were born to be queens,” Cherry Berry replied. “And nopony made me princess of the universe. I just fly your ships. But somepony had to hold things together while you were napping, and Dragonfly was right. I couldn’t do that and fly that mission at the same time!”

“Did you try… no, I don’t suppose you could have threatened grievous bodily harm credibly,” Chrysalis mused. “And I don’t think uncertain retribution threefold would be taken all that seriously if you were-”

“Look, would you like to know about the mission or not?”

“Not particularly,” Chrysalis admitted. “Dragonfly went up and came back down without making any major blunders.” She paused, then added, “You did say she got a Manehattan tickertape parade, or something like that?”

“Getting one. Today. In about an hour, I think.” Cherry Berry looked at the clock on the infirmary room wall. “Yes, about that.”

“Then she didn’t screw up. That’s all I…” Chrysalis trailed off, considering. “Honored by the dragons?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Honored by the yaks?? The yaks, the most ungrateful species on the planet besides my own noble lineage?”

“I thought you didn’t care.”

“I lied,” Chrysalis said, sitting up a little straighter in her bed. “Let’s have the rest of the story.”

“Okay, here’s the problem,” Cherry Berry said, looking at the beings gathered around the conference table- Dragonfly, von Brawn, Lucky Cricket, Plastron, and Occupant. “One pilot goes up. That pilot meets one, two, three orbiting vessels and retrieves their pilots. Four people come down. How can we build a vessel that will do that using what we can get here in two days’ time?”

“I can tell you one thing we cannot do,” von Brawn said at once. “Sticking two passenger compartments in-line behind a capsule is out. On re-entry such a craft will invert, come down nose-first, and kill all passengers. The aerodynamics and the relative weight of capsule and passenger cabins make that inevitable.”

“Maybe we could rehabilitate Capsule One,” Dragonfly suggested. “It looks nice as a historical exhibit at the entrance to the space center, but it’s still a perfectly good spaceship. That would give us four capsules, right?”

“A chain of four capsules would be even more aerodynamically unstable,” von Brawn said, shaking his head. “Re-entry in such a craft would be suicide.”

“Not if you send the capsules down one at a time,” Dragonfly said. “Make the command capsule the bottom one in the stack. Give it plenty of orbital maneuvering fuel. Each rescued astronaut gets in an empty capsule as far from the engine as possible. As each capsule is filled, the command pilot slows down the craft until it’s on a re-entry trajectory, then decouples the top capsule. The rescued pilot flies their own re-entry, while the rescue ship boosts back into a stable orbit before they hit atmosphere.”

“Hey, that might actually work,” Occupant said. 

“Now I know it’s a bad idea,” Lucky Cricket muttered. 

Von Brawn shook his head again. “No, I think not,” he said. “Such a plan adds more complications to an already complex flight plan. We’ll need several orbital adjustment burns as it is. Let’s not add more until we absolutely must.”

Dragonfly threw up her forehooves. “Well, then you tell me where we’re going to get passenger space for four!” she snapped. “Maybe two capsules and a passenger compartment?” She considered this. “No, the pilot would have to go EVA to let the last passenger in. There’s a risk of the ship going into a tumble. That’s bad.”

“I’d certainly say so,” Cherry Berry agreed in a drawl dry enough for Chrysalis.

“Well, there is one other thing,” Occupant said cautiously. “Jet Set sent us a prototype four-pony cabin- he calls it the ‘Hitchhiker’- just before the Storm King’s invasion. It was on the barge that the queen was waiting for.” His face wrinkled in doubt as he added, “But it’s sized to the diameter of our next-generation rocket systems, including the three-crew capsule. It’s way too big for our existing tanks or engines.”

“Can we bodge it to fit?” Cherry asked. “Make, I dunno, adapters or something?”

“Hmmmm… possibly,” von Brawn rumbled. “We have one prototype fuel tank of the same gauge, so that might be useful as an orbital stage fuel tank. But we’ll also need a heat shield of that diameter, and that we don’t have.”

“That’s easy-peasy to fix!” Dragonfly insisted. “Make that the top priority at Appleoosa and we’ll have a heat shield of the right size here in time for vehicle assembly, no problem!”

“And we have plenty of decouplers of that size,” Occupant said. “OMB sent us the new models weeks ago for testing.”

“True,” von Brawn said. “But it would still be a massive vessel to be sent up on a small rocket. We would need more booster rockets than we’ve ever used before. And extreme caution would be required during ascent to prevent such a slender rocket from snapping in half under the gravitational and aerodynamic forces involved.”

“We have two of the big SRB’s in stock at the moment, fueled and ready to go,” Plastron reported. “But we have plenty of T-400 fuel tanks and Swivel engines. We could build liquid rocket boosters.”

“Hm… yes,” von Brawn admitted. “Perhaps we could link the liquid boosters to the central stack so that the fuel tanks all acted as a single unit… no, better yet,” he continued, “have the boosters pump fuel into the central stack. All the Swivels could fire at launch to steer while the solid rockets fire, and then once the booster tanks were empty, they could be decoupled while the central motor continued to boost on a full tank.” He nodded to himself. “I suspect the ascent would be slow, especially early on, but considering the instability of the design, that is a feature and not a defect… hm…”

“But will it work?” Cherry asked, putting the stress on the central point. 

“Hmmm… well, we can simulate it…” von Brawn said. “We would need the final design, properly weighted, for wind tunnel tests and for calculations in the sim-”

“You’ve got two hours,” Cherry said bluntly. “Two hours and five minutes from now I want Dragonfly in the simulator. If she can get the thing to orbit two times out of three, then that’s the plan.”