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Orbital maneuvers without the calm if squeaky voice of a pink earth pony in one’s ears were tricker than Dragonfly had expected. 

The burns she’d made trying to get and then refine an intercept with the dragon ship seemed to multiply like… like… something that had a lot of little somethings in a hurry. (326) A long burn to allow Fireball’s ship to catch up had, somehow, taken CSP-21 out of the right orbital plane. Correcting the orbital plane had taken the periapses of her ship and Fireball’s out of line. Attempts to realign those periapses had pushed apart the expected rendezvous. And so on, and so on, and so on. 

The one good thing about all of this was, for all the burns she was making, she wasn’t using much fuel. The Terrier was efficient, but the truth was, it only took a few tens of meters per second in orbital velocity to make course corrections. The burns were brief- only a few seconds each, apart from the first. She’d still have half of the big tank left when she got close to Fireball. 

Which, as it happened, was about to happen. According to the trajectory computer, the two ships had drawn within two and a half kilometers of one another, closing fast, with a closest separation of 1.3 kilometers. 

“Dragon vessel XL-3, this is Changeling Space Program Mission Twenty-one,” Dragonfly said. “Do you copy, over?”

No response.

“Dragon vessel XL-3, this is Changeling Space Program Mission Twenty-one, do you copy, over?”

This time there was a voice, a gruff, growly, gravelly voice. “Yeah, I hear you,” it grunted. “Where are you?”

“About…” Dragonfly checked the distance-to-target readout. “Twenty-one hundred meters and closing. You ready for a little walk?”

“Just a sec, I got your friends in my other ear,” Fireball grumbled. 

“My friends?” Dragonfly asked. 

“Horseton Mission Control,” Fireball clarified. “I’ve been talking to them since they lost communications with you. They say you’re coming in too hot and need to match speeds with me. Right now.”

“Really?” Dragonfly looked at her readouts. Yes, her relative speed was a bit on the high side, but not that far off. “Are you sure that’s what they said?”

“They’re still saying it,” Fireball grumbled. “Shouting it, now.”

Assuming Fireball was listening to Cherry Berry, if she was shouting over the comms, that made it serious. “Okay, tell them I’m braking now.” Dragonfly flipped the rescue ship to full retrograde attitude and threw the throttle to full, braking the orbiting vessel as hard as she could.

Which, she recognized almost instantly, wasn’t hard enough. Not even close. She was going a couple hundred meters per second faster than Fireball’s wreck, but the efficient little Terrier was only slowing her at a couple of meters per second. 

“Oh, boy,” she muttered. “Fireball, I think I screwed up.”

“Big surprise,” Fireball grumbled. “Lemme guess, no rescue this orbit.”

“I’ll fix it,” Dragonfly insisted as the rescue ship blew past closest approach. “I’ll be back soon, don’t worry. In the meantime, tell the bossmare that my ship took a hit from Gordo’s pod. Hit the lower section adapter, remember that. The comms crystal mount was loose, and the jolt broke the crystal against the console interior. I can’t fix it, but everything else on the ship works. Got that?”

“Lower section adapter, got it,” Fireball said. “How long until you get back?”

“I’ll work it out!” Dragonfly said. “I’ll get back to you soon! Don’t worry! Sit tight!”

“Where am…” Fireball’s voice broke up and went silent as the two ships drew apart beyond the suit-to-suit communicators’ range. 

Roadapples, Dragonfly thought as the engine continued to fire, as the relative velocity between the ship and its target crept lower and lower on the readout. By the time it bottomed out at five meters per second, the two ships were over five kilometers apart. 

Roadapples, she thought again. Great steaming piles of roadapples. What now?

Now I work the problem. Just like in the sims. This is just another test. 

The fact that I never once did this in the sims has nothing to do with it.

Dragonfly reached over to the trajectory computer and began punching numbers. After a couple of minutes, she had a solution: a burn that would bring the two ships back within about a kilometer of each other. The burn would have to take place in the shadow of Equus, out of the sunlight, as would the rendezvous, but that didn’t seem like a big problem. The suit navigation systems could pick up the target ship even in the dark. 

She tried to tweak the numbers, to get the ships closer- and for certain she wouldn’t wait so long next time to match speeds. But whatever she did, one kilometer appeared to be as close as she could get. Well, that was close enough; she could make a more careful approach when the time came. 

Nodding her head decisively, she began orienting her ship for the new intercept burn. As she ship rotated, she caught a glimpse, just for a moment, of the sun setting behind the enormous curve of Equus. 

Footnote:

(326) Dragonfly was in training to be a rocket scientist, of sorts. She was not now, nor would she ever be, a comparative biologist. 

The first burn had gone smoothly. Only after it was complete, and Dragonfly saw the projected new orbit, did she realize it had gone smoothly to Tartarus.

The rescue ship and Fireball’s derelict would come within about a kilometer of each other- she’d got that much right. The problem came about fifteen minutes later, when the projected orbit would dip back into atmosphere- well into atmosphere, deep enough to de-orbit. And even if, by some miracle, the air had zero effect on the craft, the orbit that climbed back out into space wouldn’t intercept Fireball’s ship within hundreds of kilometers. 

Obviously that wouldn’t do. She began working out a correction burn, as close to the intercept as- no. She’d been mistaken about her braking burn before. It would be better to postpone the intercept and just focus on staying in orbit. The sooner she made her correction burn, the better. It took about a minute to work out a decent correction which would get her an 800-meter intercept back on the day side of Equus and keep her ship up out of the soup. 

She checked over the burn requirements- nothing huge, just a ten-second nudge to both raise the periapsis and lower the apoapsis- and began turning the ship.

Halfway through the turn, the reaction wheels powered down, and the computer screens went dark. 

Dragonfly had the sudden sensation that a hole just like the ones in her hooves had opened up in her belly. Frantically she switched breakers off and on, wiggled the stick experimentally, even tried throttling up the engine. No response. Nothing. 

Only then did she see, on the magic-powered readouts around the still-functional nav-ball, on the consumables readout: Battery power 0%.

Craaaaap.

Dragonfly tried to lean back on the flight couch to think(327). The closest approach lay in the shadow of the planet, but she thought- thought- the ship would come back into the sun before she hit atmosphere. There might be time for a correction burn. But by that time the second intercept would be over… and after this mishap, she didn’t have any confidence that she could work out a third. 

Also, she was getting tired. She’d been awake, except for a brief catnap, for about twenty hours. She knew just enough to know her judgment wasn’t at its peak(328). That would only get worse. And without updates on Fireball’s status, she couldn’t tell if it was safe to leave him another eight hours. 

So… the question was… how much velocity could a space suit pack make up in ten minutes?

Footnotes:

(327) In free-fall it is very nearly impossible to slouch in a chair without straps to hold you into your slouch. If you flounce onto a flight couch, you will find yourself rebounding right back off it again, thanks to Newton’s laws of motion. Space psychologists have never found an adequate substitute for an easy chair in space.

(328) And she was intelligent enough- just- to admit that her judgment, even at its peak, wasn’t ideal. She might not have been the one who came up with the Mk. 0 cardboard-box capsule, but she’d gone along with it at the time...

“... this is CSP-21, do you read?”

Fireball twitched. He’d been about to go to sleep. In the forty minutes since he’d last heard the changeling’s voice, after passing on the message to Horseton, his comms had been left blissfully clear, giving him time to be bored again. “Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Ready for another try?”

“Shut up and listen,” Dragonfly said. “I’m going to be within a kilometer of you in about five minutes. In twenty minutes I’m going to be in the atmosphere. I have zero electricity and can’t turn or fire engines until we get back in sunlight, and that’s after closest approach. I have no idea if I’m gonna be able to get this close to you again. If you’re coming, now’s the time.”

Fireball got the picture first time. “Long distance spacewalk?” he asked. “Is that the deal?”

“That’s the deal,” Dragonfly agreed. 

Another voice broke in: “XL-3, Horseton, what’s that about a long distance spacewalk?”

“What’s our relative velocity?” Fireball asked, ignoring the pony on the planet below.

“Thirty-nine meters per second and dropping,” Dragonfly said. “I don’t know where that will bottom out at. My computers are down except for the nav-ball.”

“Thirty-nine, huh? Can do.” Fireball suppressed a snort as he reached for his helmet. Based on training and the EVAs done by Cherry Berry, Chrysalis, and Rainbow Dash, the space suit thrusters could match thirty-nine meters per second with ease. If necessary they could probably match five times that much, if you didn’t worry about stupid things like safety margins. 

Besides, his safety margin in this tin can was about used up. Fireball felt better about his space suit getting to another ship than hanging around in this one until a changeling found enough brain cells to get here again. 

“Horseton, XL-3,” he said as he finished sealing his helmet on. “I’m going for a walk. Tell Ember I’ll see her on the ground.”

Ignoring the protests, ignoring the safety protocols, he pushed over to the passenger can’s latch, not bothering with depressurization, and just opened up the door. In an instant he was flying one direction and the remains of his former ship the other. That suited him fine; get the dead pod out of the way while he maneuvered. 

It took only a moment for the dragon to stabilize himself. It took but another moment to find the rescue ship on the nav-ball and target it. According to the ball, it was growing closer pretty quickly, which suited Fireball just fine. He just had to make sure he was in its way as it came past. 

In training Fireball had been anxious about learning how to fly EVAs. Once he’d picked up the trick, though, it was dead simple- much simpler than piloting a rocket launch, which had all sorts of potential for disaster. Up here in orbit there were only two dangers; drifting too low and ending up in atmosphere, and running out of power for the thrusters. 

The batteries in the suit collected just enough magic power to run the comms and nav-ball; recharging could only happen with the system shut down, on board a ship ideally. Maybe future suits would get better batteries, but for now there was a definite limit to thruster power, a limit you had to remember.

But the thing is, you only needed thruster power to change direction and speed. You could coast forever. And at the speed CSP-21 was approaching, there wasn’t any need to try to get there faster. 

It was just so very, very simple. No worries at all.

Fireball fired one long burn to bring his course almost, but not quite, directly towards the rescue ship(329). Once he got within five hundred meters, he fired a second time, bringing his relative velocity down to ten meters per second. At two hundred meters he fired again, reducing relative speed to five meters per second; he followed this up with several short bursts of thruster to put him back on course. 

By one hundred meters away he could make out the rescue ship. He slowed to two meters per second, not wanting to go kersplat against the hull like, many months before, he’d gone kersplat inside his capsule against the side of a mountain.(330) “Okay, I’m here,” Fireball said. “Tell me where to come in.”

“There’s ladders leading to the hatch on the fattest part of the ship,” Dragonfly said. “The sooner you get on board the better. I’m beginning to get sunlight on the solar panels again, but I can’t turn the ship to boost back to orbit until you’re inside.”

“Okay, I see them.” And Fireball did; now that he was close, they were pretty obvious. “I’ll be at the hatch in about thirty seconds.”

“Good. We’ve already depressurized the cabin, and Fauntleroy and Gordon are waiting inside.”

“Sounds like a party,” Fireball muttered. 

“Sure is.”

“I hate parties.”

“Well, you didn’t have to RSVP, you know,” Dragonfly said. 

“I hate burning up on re-entry a lot more,” Fireball said. “Stand by, I’m coming in.”

Two minutes later, as the drained electrical batteries of CSP-21 sucked up power from the solar panels, the ship turned with its tail pointed directly at the planet, fired its engines, and clawed away from the perils of an uncontrolled, unplanned re-entry.

Changeling, yak, griffon and dragon were safe, for the moment, and all together in a functional space craft. 

Now: how to get home again?

Footnote:

(329) This is what is known as a “useful lie”. Fireball, in an absolute sense, was not flying directly towards Dragonfly’s ship. The two were orbiting (well, almost orbiting) Equus on a convergent course, moving in a direction almost directly behind where Fireball was facing at this time. But from the limited frame of view of Fireball and his destination, he was moving towards it. It’s sort of like thinking that, when you’re in an upward bound elevator, you are standing still while the building is being lowered around you. The important thing is, Fireball was getting closer to safety, and he knew how to control his path to make sure he got there. Objective facts would only get in the way.

(330) Fireball didn’t pause to wonder how he allowed himself to be put into a position to risk his life, as he was doing at that moment, for a second time. First, such woolgathering as that at this particular moment would have meant screwing up the spacewalk, and he was not going to let that happen. Second, he actually felt safer floating outside in his spacesuit than he’d felt at any point since Ember had informed him of Mission XL-3. Realization of just how bucked he might have been would only come later, after reflection (and a couple of news interviews).