Tonight's live-writing: more CSP (Patreon)

What I wrote tonight:

Three very busy days passed. More changelings came in to Horseton than could be accounted for by the pre-invasion duty roster, until it was discovered that a number of the new arrivals were infiltrators reporting in. Cherry Berry kept some as a guard for Chrysalis, put others to work mending the damage done to the space center during the invasion, and sent the bulk of the rest back to the Badlands with the admonition that no, she did not want to hear their reports, and the queen would be up, around, and disenpetrified very, very soon. (317)

There were other things that filled Cherry’s every waking moment. Reporters kept turning up, asking for interviews; after the second such interview running aground on a question about whether Cherry would take the opportunity to drop Chrysalis from a high place and see if she made more pieces than the Storm King, she banned freelancers from the space center. Round-the-clock manufacturing at Appleoosa had to be arranged for, followed by three special trains and a number of barges to get the new components to Horseton. Occupant had to be persuaded, almost on an hourly basis, that he did have permission to sign things again(318). Steel, cement, chemicals had to be ordered and paid for, mostly on credit(319). 

And, three or four times each day, Cherry had to spend half an hour on the telepresence tracking down Twilight Sparkle to request some princessly cutting of red tape, when some bureaucrat somewhere insisted that, no matter how urgent the need, procedures must be followed, even if it took three weeks to process the forms.(320) 

By the third day Cherry was thinking at least once every ten minutes: how does Chrysalis manage all of this and train for spaceflight, too?(321)

But if she was worn ragged, so was Dragonfly, who had spent the waking portions of two and a half days practically sealed in the simulator. The first two designs had proven lethally unstable and prone to breaking up (322) mid-launch, due to the long, spindly shape of the boosters and the immense size and weight of the orbital stage. Eventually Goddard had been called in to consult, and the result had been several struts tacked on to the design, with mounting points equipped with tiny explosive charges that would fire along with the appropriate stage decouplers. 

This, plus every single control fin in storage, produced a ship that could just about make it to orbit. The rest of the simulations had been focused on making sure it did that, with as much fuel remaining in its immense final stage as possible. Sim after sim after sim, Dragonfly repeated the launch over and over, until finally Cherry had physically pulled the changeling pilot out of the sim capsule and forced her to go to bed.

And then time for sims ran out, and as the real, non-simulated ship took shape in the Vehicle Assembly Building, a worn-looking Cherry and Dragonfly joined von Brawn and George Cowley for the final mission briefing. 

“Here are the three wrecked ships,” von Brawn said, pointing to a telepresence projection showing three cartoon capsules in a ring around Equus. “Fortunately for us, the ships are practically sharing a single orbit- a very low Equus orbit.” Pointing to each in turn, he said, “Fauntleroy- Gordon- and Fireball. Fauntleroy launched last, but he had so much trouble achieving an equatorial orbit that the other two ships almost caught up to his.”

“We intend to launch tomorrow in a prime position to intercept Fauntleroy’s craft almost immediately,” Cowley said. “Ideally only a small correction burn will be required to make rendezvous. Once that is done and Fauntleroy is on board, Dragonfly will boost into a more elliptical orbit- but not too great of one.” Using a pointer, the elderly minotaur described an arc outside the orbit shared by the three wrecks. “We don’t want to go too fast or slow- the less difference between our craft’s speed and theirs, the less braking will be required to match speeds again.”

“So rather than go for a rendezvous in a single orbit, we will wait two, three, or four orbits- but not more than that- for the target to catch up with our ship,” von Brawn said. “Then we can make a final adjustment, get the rendezvous, and rescue Gordon. We repeat the process for the third target, and then we de-orbit and come home as close to the space center as possible.”

“But it must be a water landing,” Cowley insisted wheezily. “The Hitchhiker component hasn’t been impact-tested, and we don’t know what the capsule and adapter on top of it will do to its durability. We’ll have five parachutes on the assembly, but the difference between water and land might be the difference between alive and dead. There must be no chance of a touchdown on land, understood?”

“No water,” Dragonfly muttered, yawning. “Got it. Right.”

“One other thing,” von Brawn said. “Even with the rationing, the stranded pilots will eat their last rations the day after tomorrow. We’re packing plenty more food on this ship just in case, but time is an issue. We can’t spend forever waiting for a perfect alignment on each rescue attempt. That’s why we’re sending up the huge tank of fuel in the first place, after all- to ensure there’s enough to get this done and done quickly. Ideally the flight should be over in twenty-four hours.”

“Sure,” Dragonfly grumbled. “No pressure at all.”

“Don’t worry,” Cherry said. “I’ll be on capcom for the whole mission, and you’ll have all of us down here talking you through everything. Just fire the engines when and where we tell you, and everything will be fine.”

“Just what everyone wanted,” Dragonfly said. “Wagon-bed drivers.(323)  

Footnotes:

(317) Cherry Berry didn’t know whether hearing someone describe criminal activities made you an accessory under the law, and she didn’t want to find out. 

(318) Because, under Equestrian law, Cherry didn’t have power of attorney over the changeling hive’s business dealings. As it turned out, Occupant was the only person who could sign anything more legally binding than a receipt.

(319) One short year before, any changeling asking for credit would be laughed out of town before it was brought back into town so it could be run out again on a rail. Times change.

(320) It’s probably for the best that Cherry Berry never learned how Chrysalis handled this problem as a matter of routine: (a) do what you want and let the pencil-pushers try to stop her if they dared; (b) if they dared, replace them with an infiltrator; (c) if impersonating them proves impractical, find a bit of quick blackmail to stop the problem; (d)  if they’re too clean to blackmail, lawyer up, file bureaucratic counter-claims, and forge ahead while they’re drenched in paperwork. By Chryssy’s own standards, each step in the procedure represented an escalation in evil.

(321) As might be apparent by now, she didn’t. The benefits of being an evil changeling tyrant included the ability to scare away anyone who didn’t have legitimate business, the ability to delegate to underlings one didn’t much like, and the instinctual guile and malice to ensure that annoying obstacles ceased to annoy in short order. Had Chrysalis been given a detailed list of all Cherry’s difficulties during this period, she would have been wondered why the pink pony had wasted so much time on unimportant things when she could have had plenty of time for lounging on the throne, eating tiny bits of chocolate, and reading bad adventure novels.

(322) Or as von Brawn called it, “rapid unplanned disassembly.”

(323) The ponies having never seen the need for automobiles beyond sports and entertainment, the concept of a “back seat driver” has not yet occurred to them. But the pony in the bed of a wagon who continually complains about how the steerspony is handling the reins or how the pull team is running, that pony is familiar to practically every pony… and everyone who impersonates ponies.

Dragonfly sat in the capsule the next day, running down pre-flight checklists as the countdown clock for this mission ticked down towards zero. She’d been there for over an hour since the rocket was cautiously carried out to the pad, wobbling under the efforts of almost a hundred changelings to carry it without breaking something. If something went wrong with the systems, it would be almost ninety minutes longer before they could make a second attempt, since their launch had to be timed to bring the new ship as close as possible to the lead wreck above. 

While she automatically rattled off one system check after another over the comms to Mission Control, Dragonfly ran through what they’d learned in the simulation. Max Q will kill this ship on a whim, she thought. A slow, almost vertical ascent through the dense upper atmosphere, then a very gradual turn down the ball as the air thins out. And keep burning all the way to space, because this fat-flanked piece of junk is so heavy that it needs every bit of delta-V I can squeeze out of her.

The checklist ran out. The fuel lines were detached. The internal ship power activated, batteries recharging from two little solar panels mounted midway between the capsule and the Hitchhiker compartment. Seconds ticked by, called out in a calm, professional voice by the blonde-maned earth pony who, Dragonfly admitted to herself, probably should have been in the capsule instead. 

But I had to have one more flight, she thought. One more dance with the Pale Mare. And orbit. 

The seconds ran out, and on the count of zero Dragonfly hit the staging button, activating the two SRBs and the three Swivel liquid-fuel engines. 

With a speed best described as deliberate, Mission Twenty-One lifted off the launchpad.

“What is this?” Dragonfly shouted, mike still live. “This is like riding in an elevator! Where are the G’s?”

“You’re going the same speed you did in the sims,” Cherry Berry replied. “It’s a heavy, underpowered ship. And we don’t want you going fast right now anyway.”

“Roger,” Dragonfly grunted. “Easing her over to ten by ninety. Some excitement this is.”

“I’m sure the three people listening in to this in orbit are a lot excited,” Cherry replied. “Now focus on the job, okay?”

“Copy, Control,” Dragonfly said. “Holding her steady at ten by ninety, awaiting SRB burnout.”

The solid rocket boosters burned out just after the ship reached the speed of sound. Dragonfly decoupled them and looked at the altimeter; still too low to turn down the ball. “Control,” she said, “we’re burning a lot of fuel to be this low and slow.”

“We noticed,” Cherry’s voice came back. “You’ll have to use some of the final stage to get to orbit. And the fuel levels in the liquid-fuel boosters is dropping fast. Time to pitch down while you have the control authority of all three engines.”

“Copy.” Dragonfly began pitching over to the east… and found herself holding the stick hard over. “I’m not getting much of a rate on this turn,” she said. “Thing doesn’t want to go over, even with the fins.”

“Keep trying,” Cherry said.

“What else am I going to do?” the changeling pilot grumbled, watching her instruments as the nav-ball slowly, slowly rotated over past twenty, past thirty, to forty degrees off the vertical. 

And then the boosters, having pumped their excess fuel and oxidizer over to the central stack, ran dry. For a moment, as Dragonfly hit the staging button to dump the dead weight, the ship actually slowed down. Then, for a few seconds, the rocket’s velocity held steady, before glacially accelerating once more. 

“Control,” Dragonfly said, “are you sure this thing can make orbit?”

“What’s the matter?” Cherry fired back from the ground. “This flight too exciting for you?”

After that Dragonfly restricted herself to altitude and speed checks. The altitude climbed respectably, the ship’s early vertical momentum carrying it out of Equus’s atmosphere. The ship picked up more and more speed, but not enough for her comfort. She kept pushing the stick over until, finally, the ship’s prograde vector touched the horizon line. “Attitude ninety by ninety,” she reported. “How long until apoapsis?”

“About two minutes,” Cherry’s voice responded. “Keep firing.”

Dragonfly looked at the fuel, at her velocity. The central booster was about to go dry, and her velocity wasn’t even close to orbital yet. The sims, she thought, were hopelessly optimistic. “Stand by for MECO and second stage ignition,” she reported. 

“Control copies, Twenty-One,” Cherry said. “Ninety seconds to apoapsis. Welcome to space, by the way.”

“I noticed,” Dragonfly muttered. The noise of the main engine ceased. “MECO, staging now,” she reported. With two slaps of the staging button the last of the boosters fell away from the lozenge-shaped ship and the small Terrier engine lit, not so much pushing the ship forward as nudging it. 

Is the throttle set to full? Dragonfly thought.

Unfortunately, yes.

“Sixty seconds to apoapsis.”

“Come on, you big fat…” Dragonfly began easing the nose back up, trying to push the trajectory outwards. In an ideal universe, if you want to raise your periapsis, the most efficient point in the orbit to do so is at apoapsis. That point was coming up fast, and Mission Twenty-one’s periapsis was still buried inside Equus… which meant it was time to prolong her stay at the apoapsis as long as possible. That meant thrusting more vertically, which would raise the apoapsis and at the same time push it a little farther into the future of her current trajectory.

“Thirty seconds to apoapsis.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t working for beans this time. The Terrier engine was just too weak. Given enough time, of course, it would achieve orbital velocity… but Dragonfly’s time was measured in altitude, and it was about-

“Apoapsis in five, four, three, two, one, mark.”

-to run out.

Dragonfly yanked the ship hard up, putting the craft at a forty-five degree angle to the horizon. The maneuver was wasteful like a rich Manehattan kid who’d just blown his day’s allowance at the candy store, but it was Dragonfly’s last chance to salvage the mission. The top of the atmosphere was only a short way below her, and once the ship fell back into the soup the Terrier wouldn’t be able to climb out again. 

Faster!

Dragonfly reached over to key up the new trajectory map display, the newest feature of the control system. Her trajectory lit up on the little screen, showing the high point of her trajectory behind her. 

Faster!!

The screen flickered as the computer recalculated the projection, and flicker by flicker the peak of the curve began to catch up with the ship. Meanwhile, the bottom of the arc expanded, leaving the dark circle of the projected planet, forming an almost-orbit. 

FASTER!!!

Mission Twenty-One clawed its way slowly, wastefully, away from the border between air and space. It ceased falling and began rising once more, as the indicator marking apoapsis overlapped the ship. 

Relieved, Dragonfly began nosing the ship back down, engine sputtering on as she completed the orbital burn. The moment the projection showed a periapsis above atmosphere, she said, “Main engine shutdown!” and pulled the throttle to zero. 

“Mission Control copies shutdown,” Cherry said. “With the underperformance of the ship, we show you considerably behind the first target. Stand by for orbital correction burn instructions to match up your apoapsis with their periapsis. With your lower periapsis, you should catch back up to them in a few orbits.”

Dragonfly looked at the fuel readout. One-third of the fuel in the big fat heavy useless fuel tank was gone already. “Standing by, control,” she answered glumly.

Well, she thought, the good news is, I’m in orbit. Yay me.

But will it do anyling else any good?