Termination Shock

From her vantage point on the command deck of the Victoryful At Something, Rainbow Dash had a perfect view of the unfolding conflagration. It had begun as a winking point of light piercing the cloud base, which the enhanced reality view told her was localised just above the Castle near the bottom of the Spire. Then the radiation sensors had all gone off, shrieking alerts that the surface was under attack with high yield fusion bombs. They were easily confused by magic, but it still added to the generally worried air on deck. Officers drifted around her as fast as they could in the microgravity, mostly assisted by tiny manoeuvring packs. It was always possible to tell who was experienced and who wasn't; those with the longest time in space could get around just using their wings and nothing more.

Captain Sabre Rattle, her coat a mute tangerine, appeared out of an access tube, eliciting a spray of clumsy salutes. She returned them smartly and joined her CO in watching the event on the big holographs. “Commander, I don't mean to second guess the Princess, but are you sure she knows what she's doing?” Dash frowned and gave Rattle a glance intended to reprimand. It fell short of the mark. She had never been so unsure of her friend, let alone of her ruler. “The Princess wouldn't try if she didn't think it was the right thing to do.” It felt hollow, but now of all times she had to maintain at least a fascia of control. Rattle made a non-committal noise and gave the slightest of shrugs. If this had been Celestia, Dash would have chewed the Captain out, publicly too. But of all the things Twilight was, she wasn't Celestia. “Control groups Asp, Boa and Cobra report ready status,” Rattle said, changing the subject. “Some of the Captains are still half-asleep, but we've got good function across the mustered fleet.” Dash nodded approvingly. “Good. Where's the Faithful Student?” Rattle made a subtle movement of her right foreleg and the appropriate tactical data appeared. The view shifted from the surface away into space. “About ten minutes out. She'll intersect the fire zones of Asp first. Then Cobra. Boa is in stand-off position with heavy weapons online in case Asp and Cobra can't stop her.” Rattle bit her bottom lip thoughtfully. “Ma'am, are we really going to splash Faithful Student?”

Before Dash could reply, the simulated glow of starlight coming from the display rose sharply, casting hard shadows across the command deck. Sensor readouts and camera displays on the ground began to fail, some briefly showing garbled or off the scale metrics before vanishing wholesale from the network. The telemetry downlink reported station loss, and as it did the many satellite constellations all went dark in one go. Then, as though a deadly poison was spreading through their information bloodstream, cameras and sensors mounted on Dash's own flagship died away, finally reducing the data flow to the command centre to zero. “Sweet Celestia,” Rattle whispered. “What in the name of Tartarus just happened?” Rainbow Dash said nothing, but began to manipulate the neutered display. It was barely reporting its own active status. All of the internal and trans-ship links that held the fleet together were gone too, and that made no sense whatsoever. They operated with hard lines and triple redundancy, laser, maser and radio.

The officers and ensigns on deck were all watching her with terrified faces. Their Captain had been knocked for six. If their overall commander lost it too, it might turn into a situation even she couldn't recover. It was bad form for her to directly command Rattle's crew, but she was still staring into the static. A thousand years of experience kicked in. “Get the shutters open,” she said, radiating calm. “We're flying blind here.” The spell broke and several of the ensigns threw themselves at the task with over-enthusiastic puffs of their manoeuvring packs. Dash subconsciously reviewed the other ponies around her, searching for the right one. “Maudlin Breeze?”she asked. A pale blue stallion nodded. He was the Engineering Officer, technically a part of their division but stationed on the command deck for quick reference. “ I need you to go find the Senior Engineer. Who is that?” He gulped. “M-ma'am, it's Neutron Flux Ma'am!” The name rang a bell that Dash couldn't quite place. It felt as though it should mean something to her. Breeze vanished into the strange gloom. The emergency lighting hadn't come on. In fact, the only thing that seemed as though it had any power was the featureless holograph.

The bridge shutters finally began to move upwards, retracting to show a true, unfiltered view of space beyond. Rainbow Dash didn't quite understand what she was looking at. At first she thought that perhaps the ship had been spun out of its original azimuth, as she had positioned the nose pointing downward toward Equestria. Then the reality dawned on her. Twilight had done it. She'd really done it. Dash immediately felt terrible for the doubt she'd felt. The Princess had been elevated to status for a reason after all.  Something caught the raw sunlight, a spray of glittering objects tumbling gently. Without any sort of reference it was hard to tell what was going on, but as she watched it revealed itself. The Spire of Harmony's end point, High Side, had broken off from the massive pillar below it. The resulting stress had apparently shattered nearly thirty thousand kilometres of carbon nano-tube into an expanding field, moving slowly toward them.

Adrenaline spiked and Dash's heart began to hammer. Even if her flagship had been fully operational, it wouldn't survive the impacts of thousands of razor sharp objects at orbital speed. As though to confirm her fears, the flat, lenticular shape of High Side was suddenly struck by an outrider of the cloud, shining as bright as a star for a moment as the carbon hail hit home. Huge spears of white and mauve plasma stabbed through its superstructure. Dash knew she was watching thousands dying in the heat and explosive decompression that would follow. She knew many more would follow if she didn't act.

                                                                                           *

Nitrogen Fixer trotted out onto the warm cobbles of his veranda, greeting the dawn that had risen a few hours earlier over Sumner, Esterházy’s equatorial continent. He stretched himself out, easing the sleep out of his evergreen body and idly considering the view down toward Mistime. The little town was just visible behind the slowly rolling vineyards, a growth of black and white silicone composite structures still awaiting the construction of more permanent buildings. It hardly seemed necessary. They had survived the ten years since the end of the war and the founding of Mistime just fine, weathering the harsh winter storms and baking summers with equal ease. The house he lived in with his young family was partially built of it, though the decent income he made now the first harvest was finally producing good wine had meant numerous ironbrick and programmed plastic extensions.

“Good morning dear,” his wife murmured, nuzzling him from behind and resting her head under his chin. Even though she had snuck up on him, he was used to it after the two years of their marriage. That was Pure Grace's way, after all. Light and airy, with a soft spoken manner only the unlucky mistook for meekness. She smelled of freshly cut grass and hay juice, a product of the breakfast she'd been making for their daughter. “Don't forget to pick up the new generator parts from Grey's after you drop Gauge Boson off at school.” Fixer responded by gently nibbling her ear.

Though he did most of the heavy labour at the vineyard, it was Grace who was the mastermind behind its operation. Without her the business wouldn't have lasted past its first season, especially with all the technical problems they'd run into. Out on the frontier of pony occupied space, it was hard to find engineers, let alone many spare parts. He adored his wife for that ability. Sometimes he swore that was the only reason he'd married her; because she'd rewritten his operating system. As much as he was skilled in negotiating the complex supply contracts needed to sell their wine, he'd never felt very welcome in the local community. His wife, on the other hoof, spoke their Sumnerian dialect perfectly, understood their strange humour, spent time with their children and seemed to enjoy it all to boot. The fact that she was also the only pony within fifty miles who could fix their farm equipment probably helped too.

After they'd finished eating, Fixer packed Boson into the car and headed off toward the school in Mistime. It was a big electric vehicle, with space for five ponies standing inside. As was usual with almost all technology designed for the masses, it was controlled through gestures. He didn't have to actually drive unless he wanted to though. And it was far safer to let the computer handle things automatically. Once they'd cleared the packed earth track leading away from the farm buildings, they picked up the main road into town. It was wide enough for four cars, and made out of prefabricated slabs of plastic joined together like a train track. Big native tiapine trees lined the road, interspersed with younger ponyoak trees here and there. Rod-like insects flitted between them, pursued by little frills of feathers and beaks that were called squidbirds, but which were actually more closely related to Equestrian fungus and moss than any sort of avian or cephalopod species.

Mistime had been busy for hours, and was bustling with ponies and even the occasional gryphon marching stoically along the town's one central street. Shops sold all manner of things, but the biggest sellers were music and computer games, or books, all trading hands rapidly carried on little rectangles of plastic or crystal. There wasn't a big enough settlement on the planet yet to warrant much in the way of big franchises or an ansible link to a big planet, so the demand for news and entertainment was high. Already Boson was chattering merrily away about which she wanted for her next birthday, or good test result. It wasn't until he pulled up outside the small, two story school house in the middle of town and waved her goodbye did he have his thoughts to himself again.

As he commanded the car to reverse out and head to its next destination, there was a huge double thunderclap. A sonic boom characteristic of a space-plane coming in to land. It shook the vehicle on its suspension and shuddered through the pit of his stomach. Fixer threw the door open and stared up. There weren't any ships due at their makeshift grass airstrip for another week. Everyone in town knew the schedule like the back of their hands. They were all looking up too. In the skies overhead, a brilliant deep purple object was coming in fast.