1-1-19 session: CSP (Patreon)

 Next session 1-3 (Thursday), 7 PM. In the meantime, here's what I did tonight.

“Well, of course I knew about it,” Cherry Berry said from the telepresence projection. “One of the reasons we’re backed up here in Appleoosa is the huge order Twilight Sparkle put in for boosters. And for next-generation fuel tanks.”

“And you accepted those orders?” Chrysalis asked, outraged. The enemy was going to get ahead of them. She, Chrysalis, was going to be second to the moon, at best. And the pony in front of her(347) was working to make it possible!

“Well, yes,” Cherry Berry said. “The whole notion behind spinning off this factory into its own company kind of requires that we sell to anypony who has money. And yes, that includes Twilight Sparkle, who might I add I regard as a personal friend, even if she did reject me as a pilot.” The pink pony glared right back at Chrysalis. “So yes, I sold her a wagonload of rocket parts. Now ask me if I’m worried about that.”

“You ought to be,” Chrysalis growled. “Considering my opinion of subordinates who betray my trust, you ought to be very worried indeed.”

“Pfft.” Cherry Berry waved a hoof at this. “I’m not worried, because you shouldn’t be worried,” she said. “Remember when we had EVA training at Cape Friendship? Remember the big pink thing sitting out on the runway?”

Chrysalis gagged. “That pink monstrosity? I only wish I could forget it!” She blinked, then added, “Wait a moment. You mean she intends to take that to the moon?”

“Not at one shot,” Cherry said. “I don’t know if it can even make orbit, even with all the boosters Twilight can wrap around it. It’s a pretty thing, but if it weighs an ounce it weighs fifty tons- five times what Dragonfly’s ship weighed. They’re not getting that to the moon any time soon.”

“How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure,” Cherry said. “Twilight’s given up on a pure magic-thruster approach. What she’s working on now is a reusable ship that can land like a pegasus- or like my biplane, to be more exact.” She made a swooping motion with her forehoof. “So she’s replaced the magic boosters with standard rocket engines and retooled our second-gen fuel tanks to supply fuel and oxidizer to those. That, plus a lot of smaller boosters- and I mean a LOT of boosters- will get it to orbit. There’s a little fuel for orbital maneuvers, but that’s all.”

“That’s all,” Chrysalis said flatly. “Didn’t one of the bulls tell me that orbit is halfway to anyplace else?”

“Yeah. But it’ll take as much lift as those boosters to get that fat, heavy ship out to the moon, down, up, and back again,” Cherry said. “And that’s assuming there’s a long, flat spot on the Moon for that thing to set down. It can’t do a vertical landing.” She shook her head. “No, Chrysalis, Twilight Sparkle is not going to beat you to the moon. We still have time to do it the right way- and the safe way.”

“You’d better be right, pony,” Chrysalis muttered. 

“Look, I have more important things to worry about,” Cherry said. “I’ve got to get our boosters built, too. I have to shake some Science Jrs. out of Twilight. And once R4 launches, I begin training for the follow-up, which is going to have me in a capsule for fifteen days. Fifteen days in a can, Chrysalis. Fifteen days where the only cherries I get are freeze-dried. I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Fifteen days?” Chrysalis asked. “What do you mean, fifteen days?”

“Minmus is something like three times as far away from Equus as the moon,” Cherry said. “That was as close as Luna could bring it. It takes time to fly out that far, and more time to fly back, and if something goes wrong, I never come back. So yeah, compared to that, I don’t worry much about you, all right?”

Chrysalis snorted, but the pony had made her point. Even she couldn’t think of a more horrible fate than drifting off into the unknown, beyond rescue, never to return… 

“So if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do,” Cherry said, and without asking leave, she cut the connection. The wall of Chrysalis’s office went blank. 

Chrysalis considered doing something about it- calling her back to correct her gross lack of respect, sending a couple of guards to make that displeasure a little more plain, or just sending her a small basket of rotted cherries- but decided against it. She wasn’t angry about Cherry cutting her off, not half as much as she was angry that the pony was probably right on every point. Twilight Sparkle probably was wasting time and money on a fool’s errand- and putting more money in her pockets in the process. Cherry Berry really did have more important things to do that comfort her nerves, hard as that was to admit. 

Everybody had important things to do… except the queen. 

Footnote:

(347) - Technically the pony hundreds of miles away, but Chrysalis was looking her in the eyes through the power of technomancy, and she wasn’t inclined to be rational just that moment.

Two guards looked up at the top of the #2 liquid oxygen storage tank.

“I don’t care what you say,” one said to the other, “I’m not going to be the one to tell the queen she has to come down from there.”

“Well, someling has to,” the other guard said. “It’s not safe up there.”

They stood and stared as Chrysalis, reclined on a large folding lawn chair, turned the page of her current trashy novel. The late spring sun beat down on the space center, bringing temperatures more suited to summer throughout most of the rest of Equestria, and the area immediately around the oxygen tanks was the coolest outdoor space on the space center grounds(348). The queen wasn’t the first changeling or pony to seek comfort there, but she was the first the guards couldn’t shoo off.

“She doesn’t really seem like she’s having much fun,” the first guard said. Indeed, Chrysalis and flipped the same page back and forth four times already, and her casual reclining pose had shifted subtly five times in as many minutes. They couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but the rest of her body language looked really tense, at least by changeling standards.

“Doesn’t she have something to do?” the second guard said. 

“Maybe she’s showing us queens don’t have to do things,” the first guard said. “One of those object lesson things.”

“You think?” the second guard asked. “I like it a lot better than the last time she tried to teach me a lesson.” He shook his head and added, “I don’t think this works quite as well as hauling a loaded pod around the mesa for a hundred circuits, though.”

“You two idiots realize I can hear every word you say, right?” 

The guards looked back up. In the moment their attention had wavered, the queen had lowered her book, pulled her sunglasses down her muzzle, and glared down from the oxygen tank at them. 

“Um, your maj- my- ma’am- um, Queen Chrysalis, ma’am,” the first guard said, “are you aware that the tank you’re lying on is full of oxygen kept at over three thousand pounds of pressure per square inch?”

“Really?” Chrysalis asked. “What’s that in Prench?”(349)

“Oh for…” The second guard tossed his snazzy peaked cap down onto the concrete. “My queen, I most respectfully request you come down from there at once!”

Chrysalis made a show of considering the request, make a soft tsk sound, and then said, “Oh, very well then. It is only proper for a queen to grant a reasonable request from her loyal and obedient subjects.”(350) She jumped off the tank and walked away, book and beach chair floating behind her in her magic.

Although she made a show of being nonchalant and unruffled, inside Chrysalis seethed. While it was quite true a queen labored only when the queen wished to labor, the fact was, right this moment, she wished to labor quite a bit… and couldn’t. The pony, curse her, had even caught up on the personnel report backlogs, the most boring chore the space center had to offer. (Elytron had achieved the same feat, but only by throwing out or failing to collect any and all reports due. Chrysalis suspect that would come back to bite her in the flank at some point.)

On the way back to the administration building she spotted Dragonfly galloping towards her. Dared she hope… was she, Chrysalis the almighty ruler of the changeling nation, needed? Had some emergency arisen which would allow her to demonstrate her superiority before her subjects?

“Well, hello there, Dragonfly,” Chrysalis said, and then trailed off… because Dragonfly wasn’t slowing down.

“Oh, hi, my queen,” Dragonfly said, almost casually. “Excuse me, gotta go use the telepresence and hit up Pinkie Pie for help. R4’s robot brain just slammed the ship into Minmus at about eighty meters per second in the sims, and I got no idea why! Marked Knee’s checking the circuitry, but I need help with the software. ‘Scuse me!”

“Wait a minute.” The phrase came out of her mouth not as the command it ought to have been, not even the polite suggestion it would have been coming from the pony. It was nothing more than a startled reaction to being blown off by, calculated disobedience aside, one of her more loyal subjects. To make matters worse, in order to keep talking to Dragonfly, Chrysalis had to walk- almost run- in pace with her towards the admin building. “Don’t you tell the robot probes what to do? I thought it was like a remote control or something!”

“Can’t do it this mission,” Dragonfly said, not breaking stride. “It takes light five seconds to get from Equus to Minmus. In five seconds anything can happen. So the probe has to be able to handle the landing all by itself. And that’s the single hardest thing about this whole mission!”

Very nearly- very, very nearly- Chrysalis offered to help. She only avoided the unforgivable gaffe because she had no clue, not one, what she could do to help. The bulls, Dragonfly, and that insane baker were the only people who knew how the insides of a robot brain actually worked. She certainly didn’t.

But she hadn’t the morale left to assert herself. Yes, she ought to demand proper respect due a queen. She ought to demand that Dragonfly ask permission to use her telepresence, which was in her throne room for her convenience and not so drones could go chatting with the enem… with their colleagues in other space programs. But all she said- all she felt like saying- was, “I see. Carry on, then.” 

She stopped, and Dragonfly kept going. 

I used to be a queen, Chrysalis thought. Buck it, I still am a queen. 

There has got to be something useful I can do around here… something suitably royal, befitting my talents and training…

Footnotes:

(348) Liquid hydrogen is not kept stored long-term due to the intense energy cost of keeping it cold and compressed enough to remain liquid. There’s also the danger involved. Someone once said life will find a way; when it comes to tanks, hydrogen will find a way out. Thus, any H2 desired for rocket fuel would be cooled and compressed only a couple of days prior to a launch, not stored on an ongoing basis. Other fuels tended to be preferable, anyway.

(349) The pony equivalent of the metric system was an invention of the short-lived Prench Republic, which rebelled against the rule of Princess Celestia in 789 CR under the battle cry, “Let Someone Else Eat Cake!” Celestia reponded with a shrug and gracious wishes good luck, raising no armies whatever to restore her rule (which was eventually restored under the face-saving guise of “Protector of the Republic” in 802 CR). As a result the Fancy ponies have long, romantic songs about the valiant civilian lack of armies of Prance and the battles gloriously not fought at Mustango and Hossterlitz. Nopony sings songs about making every measurement a multiple of ten of some other measurement, even though this affected the history of Equus quite a bit more than anything else the Prench did (or didn’t). The global scientific community uses Fancy measurements because the non-pony races refuse to use the royal system of Equestria and couldn’t agree on any of their own systems.

(350) The dangerous part of that statement, as both guards were painfully aware, was that the word “reasonable” was defined by the queen and the queen alone… and subject to re-definition without notice.

“Fifteen seconds to orbital adjustment burn.”

Chrysalis sat at the capcomm position, hooves on the controls for Mission R2. Some pony astronomer had wanted observations from a different angle and had thrown a few thousand bits at CSP to shift R2 into a slightly different orbit using some of the fuel remaining in its tanks. The procedure would require two burns, both very minor. There was no press in the VIP deck, nobody in the grandstands outside. Mission Control was deserted except for Occupant, Chrysalis, and George Bull, the only three controllers who could be spared for such a minor activity. 

“Standing by, flight,” Chrysalis replied, looking at the controls. It took three seconds for orders from those controls to reach Mission R2, be acknowledged, and for the results to show up on the consoles. As Dragonfly had very nearly said, anything could happen in three seconds…

… but it wouldn’t. This wasn’t a landing. Mission R2 was in a high orbit around the moon, about to be boosted into a slightly higher orbit on a different orbital plane. The probe had already been oriented into position for the burn, and all Chrysalis had to do was throttle up to ten percent for six seconds, then shut down the motor. Things might go wrong, but very few of them would kill the probe. Most of them would just require a correction burn. 

“Burn in three, two, one…”

“Engine to ten percent,” Chrysalis reported obediently. 

“Shutdown in three, two, one-”

“Shutdown.” 

And a few seconds later George Bull reported, “Successful burn. Go for second burn as calculated in one hour and fifty-four minutes.”

“Wonderful,” Chrysalis grumbled. “Shall I go fetch a book while we wait?”

“Oh, there’s no need for you to wait around here, my queen!” Occupant said eagerly. “We know you must have so many very important things to be doing! I’ll send a messenger for you in ninety minutes, if that’s all right with you?”

So many very important things to do. 

Bah. Even the reporters don’t have any questions for me right now.

“Yes, that will be fine,” she said aloud, taking off her superfluous headset. 

She’d just got outside the Mission Control doors when Gordon the Griffon ran up to her. “Excuse me, Chrysalis,” he said, “but I was wondering if I could talk with you a bit.”

On the one hoof, part of Chrysalis was livid that this griffon- not merely a subordinate but a junior pilot- referred to her so casually. But on the other hoof, it was something to do. “Be my guest,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, it’s about Mission 22,” Gordon said. “Are we really sending Cherry up in just a capsule? Because I spent eight days in a passenger pod, with more than twice the internal space of the capsule, and I was feeling plenty cramped by the time that was done, lemme tell ya.”

“An… interesting point.” Chrysalis had put countless ponies and other creatures in enclosures smaller even than the capsule, but she’d never spent more than half a day in one. She’d never really considered issues of… elbow room. “Have you discussed this with Cherry Berry?”

Gordon shrugged. “The bossmare says, ‘We fly the mission with what we have.’ And that’s all she says.”

The part of Chrysalis that had been angry at Gordon’s casual approach flared up. Bossmare, is it? Well… well, yes, I gave the pony total control of the space agency, but… bossmare??

But the rest of her thought: This is an Important Thing. It might even be a Command Decision. Worth looking into. “Very well,” she said. “I know Cherry’s not looking forward to the experience.”

“Or you,” Gordon said. “You’re the backup pilot for Mission 22, after all.”

Well… um.

Come to think of it, Chrysalis couldn’t remember a day in the past fourteen months, the entire time she’d known that chirpy naive pest of a pink pony, when Cherry had been sick. Not one day. But it could happen… and you just couldn’t send an astronaut up on a fifteen day flight if she was sick, could you?

Which would mean she, Chrysalis, the taller, longer-limbed astromare, would be crammed into that capsule for fifteen days instead of Cherry. 

The prospect appalled her. 

“Let’s have a talk with our chief pilot,” she said, and led Gordon to the administration building.

“No way.” 

Chrysalis and Gordon gaped at the pink pony. “Excuse me,” Chrysalis said quietly, “but when I said, ‘we’re using the passenger pod on the Minmus flight,’ I didn’t intend that as a suggestion.”

“No, I understood you,” Cherry said. “And I said: no way.” From the projection screen, she glared down at Chrysalis(351). “If we take the passenger capsule on Mission 22, we also have to put it on Mission R4, because the whole point of R4 is that it’s a dress rehearsal. If R4 works, we use the same hardware on Mission 22. And a passenger capsule adds too much weight and height to a mission that’s already got too many unknowns in it!”

“I refuse to possibly take your place and fly fifteen days in a ship so small that it practically counts as a piece of clothing!” Chrysalis snapped back. 

“You know, we have extra pilots now,” Cherry said. “You don’t have to be my backup pilot anymore. You could assign Gordon, or Leonid, or Fireball.”

“Pleeeeeease not me,” Gordon muttered.

“What you fly, I fly,” Chrysalis said. “That was the deal we made, remember?”

“Oh, don’t get up on your dignity at me!” Cherry snapped back. “You wanted to go to the moon. Not Minmus. By the time we go to the moon you’ll have a bigger capsule to fly in, with plenty of room. But adding a passenger cabin adds weight and reduces delta-V, and if I’m going to Minmus I want every bit of delta-V I can take with me. If it’s a choice between more fuel and a comfy cabin, I’ll bucking well be uncomfortable!” Cherry folded her forehooves and finished, “Because you recover from being uncomfortable a lot quicker than you recover from being lost in space!”

“Huh,” Gordon muttered. “She’s got a point there.”

Chrysalis ground her fangs in frustration. The pony wasn’t supposed to have a good point. She was supposed to argue and then back down in the face of her superior intelligence. 

Buck it, she wasn’t supposed to be right!!

The pony in the projection sighed. “Look,” Cherry said, “aren’t you supposed to be negotiating peace with Celestia or something? Why don’t you go do that until R4 launches? Because once R4 launches, you’re going to be just as busy as I am, just in case you really do have to spend fifteen days in the sardine can.” (352)

“In other words,” Chrysalis said, “you want me to quit taking it out on you and start taking it out on Sunbutt.”

“I didn’t say that,” Cherry said. 

“Maybe not,” Gordon muttered, “but we heard you thinking it loud and clear.”

Footnote:

(351) A situation Chrysalis would order fixed immediately after the call. She might not have anything worth doing at the moment in space flight, but she still had the royal authority to summon a technician, darn it.

(352) Canned sardines are a delicacy among certain pegasi, caught and packaged by coastal pony families. It’s very much an acquired taste, but it’s just common enough that “packed like sardines” is a phrase in Equestria just as it is in other worlds.