Termination Shock

Every ship in Rainbow Dash's hastily assembled fleet had been disabled by whatever awesome cosmic forces Twilight had unleashed. It was only through some remarkable jury-rigging on behalf of the engineer Neutron Flux that she'd been able to re-establish contact with anyone at all. They'd resorted to manually signalling nearby vessels with the mercifully still functional running lights and Morse code. As the Victoryful was a tremendously large ship even by fleet standards, it gave them a lot of room to work with. However, even with the entire areas around the gaping maws of the assault cruiser docking bays flashing brightly like Hearth's Warming Eve decorations, it had taken too much time for the rest of the formation to catch on. Dash could only watch as several Rapid Response Auxiliaries that had hung back from the main control groups vanished in abrupt flashes of blue and white brilliance. She mentally tallied the losses. Sweet Succour and Safe Sanctuary were only small ships, but it added up to nearly three hundred ponies all in. Stupid, pointless deaths. Surely Twilight would have known the great length of the Spire would break. She had taken a rash, unconsidered action out of ancient sentimentality. Her earlier new-found reverence for the purple monarch was now tinged with uncertainty once more.

It was only then that Dash recalled that the Faithful Student was likely disabled in the same way as everyone else. They, however, had been accelerating through almost 10g at the point when the sensor feeds cut out. The deep space scout would now be careening toward the sun, its vector bent by gravity to send it rapidly out of system again. She tried not to think about what might have happened if the engines had held out longer than the inertial dampeners. Even the engineered genetics of that special crew couldn't take unprotected acceleration of such intensity without being converted into an awful multicoloured mist. Dash compartmentalised that thought and set it aside. They would need to get power and communications back before any kind of rescue could be considered.

Neutron Flux arrived on the command deck to no particular fanfare. Every hoof was now engaged in various activities at his behest, and with Sabre Rattle currently dosed up to the withers on various sedatives following her perplexing nervous breakdown Dash was only too happy to delegate general command to the chief engineer. It was a big technical problem, after all. They only had about another ten minutes before the deadly rain of carbon shards encountered the fleet proper. None of the crew batted an eyelid at this, adding to the growing concern as to the competency of her flagship's captain. “Ma'am, I think I've got a solution for you,” Flux said, his dark blue fur and mane covered in oil. Several ugly cuts scored the area around his simple triple star cutie mark.  He'd obviously been hard at work inside one of the big ship's many complex parts. And Dash still couldn't place him. The nagging feeling of familiarity just wouldn't go away. “I think we can save most of the fleet.”

“Yes? What do you suggest?”

“Most of the interior non-crewed spaces are kept at a vacuum to help with integrity, right? But that still leaves a whole mess of pressurised atmospheric areas. If we open all the pressure doors from C to Z deck, along with the port side docking bays that link to them, we've got ourselves a pretty mean, if short lived propulsion system.”

“Are you kidding? This boat is huge. It'd never move in time.”

“That's the other part of the plan. I want to do an EVA out to the port side and put holes in the propellant tanks for the emergency jink  systems. Just little ones mind. There's enough there in the way of gas to move the old mare in combination with the atmosphere dump.”

“What about the other ships in the fleet? The ones without the emergency gear?”

“They can do exactly the same thing but with their RCS tanks, or even the hydrogen fuel cells. We need to get the fleet up to speed as soon as possible. Do I have permission to proceed?”

Dash thought for a moment, staring into his muted green eyes. “Aright. Send the word out,” she said, finally.

“Make this happen. I don't want any more causalities.” Neutron Flux was already half-way out of the door, but then Dash suddenly remembered why she remembered him. “Wait a minute,” she called, grinning. Flux turned confused.

“I do know you. You're screwing one of my great-great-great-grand foals.” He laughed and nodded, giving Dash the slightest of winks.

“Ball Lightning is hardly a foal any more, Ma'am.” And with that he was really gone, chuckling to himself as he made his way back toward engineering.

“Colts these days!” she muttered, and went back to watching the star-scape through the curved observation port.

                                                                                   *

The Equestrian sky had shifted. It was glaringly obvious to someone like Twin Parallax, who had spent the better part of forty years secreted away inside an observatory. And none of his hundred metre telescopes were reporting in any more. They were all parked at la grange points or the surface of the moon, or were otherwise in orbit somewhere. He was now standing out on the big empty field of loose black boulders and other rubble that was home to the Marena Kia Multi-Spectrum Facility, trying to get an idea as to what was going on with that most ancient of tools; the Marque 1 Pony Eyeball.

It took him awhile to get it, and he kicked himself when he did. The star field corresponded to the other hemisphere. And it was distorted further somehow.  Stars occupied positions they weren't due to be in for tens of thousands of years. Other stars seemed to have regressed back along their orbits around the Galactic barycentre, defying the natural progression of linear time and gravity. Only a few of the familiar southern asterisms were left. Even they were crooked and bent out of shape. Parallax wasn't much for theoretical physics, but even as he applied some of the more blue sky ideas to the situation at hand, none made sense. His eyes were telling him causality had been violated. A lifetime of work told him that couldn't possibly be the case.

Parallax began to fish around in his brown mock leather saddlebags for his migraine pills. He could feel a fierce one coming on. How ponykind hadn't managed to solve the trifling problem of chronic headaches when they could now make a pony live forever was something that perpetually eluded him. They could visit those distant points of light in the sky he'd spent his days researching, but couldn't fix a simple skull ache. He ate four of the little blue pills and quickly replaced the plastic bottle. As he did he noticed the tethering device for his glasses was reporting a total loss of signal to both the planetary internet and national repeater feeds. That was seriously unusual. Nobody was ever out of range of the internet, especially not up here where the high-bandwidth nature of their endeavours meant heavy duty connectivity at all times.

He trotted back inside intending to find out what had gone on with the internet. Instead he found his unicorn colleagues, High Metallicity and Doppler Pulse, magically shifting an old optical telescope out of the basement storage area. It was a curious looking thing, and was at least two hundred years old judging by the fact it wasn't mounted on an ion rocket. Nopony used ground-side equipment any more. There were so many legacy orbitals that pretty much anypony could freely request time on them without hampering serious scientific research.

“Parallax, give us a hoof here would you?” Metallicity said, wincing at the effort of the telekinetic motion. “This thing weighs a ton.”

“You think it still works?” he asked, adding his impulse to that of the two ponies. Their expressions softened considerably.

“Of course it does. They built this one to last. The optics are tough as hell.”

“If you say so.”

“My dad built it,” Pulse added. “I guarantee it'll give us a decent view. And it's got no electronics integral to the design either, so it won't have been affected by whatever this disruption is.”

“Speaking of which, have either of you got any idea what's going on? I wasn't looking at the live news feeds.”

“I was watching the weather show,” Metallicity said. “It cut to an emergency report. There was a big bright light above the castle at Canterlot. The news ponies were all swarming the place trying to get a good look. Some kind of magic thing. Nopony knew what they were up to but it had to have been the last Princess with the level of power it was putting out.”

“You've seen the sky right? I've just been outside. It's all messed up.”

“What do you think we're getting this thing out for? We have to get eyes on. If we manage to get communications back the world will be clamouring for info, and we're best placed to provide that.” Parallax nodded. The MKMSF had the largest scientific x-band array on the planet, and the third most powerful net switch. The entire population of twelve and a half billion ponies could tune in and watch a high definition feed in as close to real time as the speed of light allowed and still they wouldn't lack for bandwidth.

There was no room inside the observatory itself to set up the old scope, so they took it outside and began to assemble its cradle on a relatively flat and regolith-free area a few hundred yards from the squat cluster of spherical buildings that made up the facility. It was certainly a comprehensive design, Parallax admitted. The functions usually performed by programmed plastic strands and mechanical actuators were here done by gears and cogs, their workings made out of tungsten annealed with brass and copper. Alignment arrows and knobs were made of gold or silver, and each bearing had a tiny ring of ruby or sapphire to mark it out. It was clearly more a labour of art and love than a truly practical telescope, though it seemed to work in that respect too. Once they'd constructed its base and mounted the tubular body into it, Parallax gazed down the eyepiece and tried to locate some guide stars to calibrate the machine. Pulse and Metallicity had been right. The optical properties were perfect even after two hundred years. It was just that the sky was so out of order that meant Parallax couldn't find a single recognisable star.

                                                                                              *

Parallax left his technical subordinates to continue their efforts and headed down the gentle incline toward the administration blocks and the more public areas of the facility. He passed through several big security gates bridging the gaps in the circular barbed wire fences and had to heft their solid mechanisms open with his magic. He began to pant and wheeze from the effort after the third one. It occurred to him how little he used his genetic rights for anything more than paperwork and making coffee. The administration block itself resembled a fungal growth of plastic and steel composites bulging out of the side of the massive museum annex that sat between the observatory and the access way for the long-dead volcanic caldera. Night staff were spilling out of it carrying emergency torches, looking like worried fireflies buzzing around a fantastical magic nest.

The museum held far more than the usual astronomical display pieces and fallen impactors. It was here, almost five hundred years ago now, that the Celestial Sisters had founded their Eternal Celebration of the Six, the immortal saviours of ponykind and still-living figureheads for the harmonious elements they represented. Most ponies couldn't name them, or speak in anything other than vague terms as to what they had done that deserved such praise. Science and technology had robbed them of the mythological wonderment previous generations felt on seeing the magic of friendship in action. Parallax had thought his way carefully around this conclusion. Regardless of how clearly magical theory could poke at the underpinnings of it all, he would never forget his heritage and their legacy.

He trotted in through the front entrance of the Eternal Celebration, carefully avoiding any of the panicked ponies outside. He had no meaningful explanations for them, and they likely had none for him given the still silent nature of external communications. The central hall that greeted him was dark, but emergency biolight cubes built into the walls and ceilings had begun to shine a soft blue light over the six primary exhibits. They cast an unsettling ambience on the whole show, with the darkness barely recessed into the deep shadows of the huge hall. He'd never seen it like this before. The thirty metre high ceilings seemed to press down in a far more unpleasant manner than usual. Parallax passed Fluttershy's Cottage, uprooted and held in a fine mesh of supportive wires and surrounded by non-functional holographic displays that would usually be showing scenes from her early life, the formative years and so on. The big mound of plastic-sealed dirt felt far less lively than it was supposed to. Holographic rabbits and tiny birds would swarm around it in mellifluous numbers, expanding about the exhibition space controlled by simple AI to amuse and enlighten visitors. Now that they weren't, it was as though the building had fallen into a deep coma.

Beyond the cottage there was a break in the Eternal Celebration where the other wings joined on to the main hall. Parallax headed down the right fork and into the mess of offices and workshop spaces hidden just behind the gift shop and café. An enormous amount of work, both pony-derived and automated, went into keeping the many ancient artefacts in good condition. He wandered past quiet ranks of vaguely oblong robots, their many tentacles of programmable plastic silent and packed away. From there it was only a short walk to the big vault-shaped garage buried just below the volcanic substrate of the caldera. It was packed with dozens of six-wheeled all terrain vehicles, With Celestia's Grace surely hanging over him, he discovered the simple electric engines they ran on worked just fine. He hopped in and booted up its controls. They were physical manipulators, built for the mostly-unicorn staff of the facility and used to negotiate the steep path down into the little support industry town thirty kilometres below the rim of caldera. Parallax eased the big rover out of the garage, up a steep volcanic glass ramp and headed out into the night.