“Seriously, how did we get here?”
“Well, first there was a light, then there was the word, then there was…”
“Less theology, more current affairs.”
“Okay, short version? We missed our target.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You know we have to hit a star to come to a stop from being in Tunnel Drive, right?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s not exactly accurate. We just need to hit a sufficiently large enough gravitational mass. Stars are easy, because they’re huge targets. You can see them a long way away, they move in a predictable way, that sort of thing.”
“Go on…”
“So, we were slightly off target and missed the star we were aiming at.”
“How do you miss a star?”
“It’s a small target when you aim at fifteen light-years or so, with fifteen years worth of light lag.”
“So what did we hit?”
“We hit a very large gas giant, which was literally a pure stroke of luck, who knows how long we’d have been under drive otherwise…”
“So, once again for the back seats, where are we?”
“Haven’t a clue. We’re off the charts. I’m running a skywatch program now and…ah.”
“I don’t like the sound of that ‘ah,’ what was that ‘ah’?”
“Good news is that we’ll able to get home soon. Bad news? We’ve got two cruisers incoming and they look to be Equestrian.”
“Well, damn.”
“That’s about what I said. They’re hailing us, do we respond?”
“I’ll respond. Something about being the ship’s captain, that sort of thing.”
Equestriaverse 