Where the Heart Is

Chapters

Prologue
Equus
Outskirts
Equus
In Transit
Report on the Biological Characteristics of a Newly Discovered Xenospecies
Deep Space: Part I

Prologue

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors came to this planet. Using mighty technologies and awesome magics, they bent it to their will, transforming and molding it as they would. The air was pure; the animals, docile; the seas, a glistening blue expanse. It was a paradise.

Five thousand years ago, war came. We don’t know who it was fought against, or why; we only know that it destroyed their Eden. What life wasn’t blasted apart by the power of the weapons deployed against our world, enough to shatter continents and rearrange seas, died in frozen cold from the choking, opaque dust filling the skies.

But our ancestors had planned ahead. Shelters, strong enough to survive even weapons that could change the face of the planet itself, kept millions alive. Other, subtler technologies and magics went to work once the dust began to settle, revitalizing the air, reintroducing life, damping down the cauldrons of volcanic activity, restoring the world to habitability.

But these technologies had their limitations. When our ancestors emerged from their shelters, they found not the paradise they were promised, but a harsh and barren world. Jungles, forests, and grasslands which had teemed with life all too eager to please its masters were now plagued by horrors and monstrosities which ignored every plea made by ponykind, even as they feasted on it. Lands where crops had covered the earth and mines had extracted vast mineral wealth now lay under miles of saltwater. Seas where fish had swarmed now rose above the waves, high, dry, and infertile.Tensions between the survivors over access to the remaining resources of the planet grew, and a second war was fought. This time, there were no shelters to save the population from the brutality of battle, no machines and magics to try to clean up afterwards. This time, civilization ended.

But not ponykind. Though reduced to primitive savagery, we remembered, in legends and tales, the heights from which we had fallen, and we yearned to return to them. It was not easy--nothing worthwhile ever is--but eventually we did. Eventually we once again sailed the seas, we once again hurtled through the air--of course, the pegasi had never stopped--and, at long last, on pillars of fire we ascended to the very heavens, journeying into space.

At home, we were making our own discoveries. For so long, our past had been a mystery. There were tales and legends, true, but before a few thousand years ago, even the most diligent archeologist had to admit there was nothing. Then we discovered one of the shelters, deep underwater, still functioning after thousands of years. Within, we found more than just the remains of millenia-dead ponies. We found ourselves. In the genetic code of our long-dead relatives. In the reams of documents preserved in the dry, dead atmosphere. Eventually, in data baked into ancient computer circuits. It was a long and painstaking process, but we learned we were not indigenous to this planet. We learned that we had a home--a homeworld--out there, among the stars.

We learned we could get there, if we tried.

That was the most unexpected discovery of them all. A device--a hyperspace core--deep within the core of the facility. Something with the power to move things. Thousands of light-years, in mere days. We researched, we copied, we thought. We decided.

We were going to return to our homeworld.

Every mind, every effort was put behind the great project. A vast colony ship, able to cross thousands of light years and reconnoiter new worlds, was designed and began to be built. Hundreds of thousands volunteered to spend years frozen, in hibernation, waiting to cross the void of space to a new planet. New industries and technologies were created, and old ones reworked.

Sacrifices were made, too. Those working on the project spent years, decades in space, away from their homes, sacrificing their family for the sake of the project. Millions lived and died never knowing whether their effort had, ultimately, made any difference--never knowing whether the grand project succeeded or failed. But among these sacrifices, there was one pony who undoubtedly did the most--who put her life entirely at the service of the cause. The young unicorn scientist Twilight Sparkle had herself permanently integrated into the ship as its living, breathing, thinking core.

She is now Fleet Command.

Equus

“—so production is 12% short of where they were supposed to be by this cycle—“

As his adjutant droned on about the present state of Mothership construction, Shining Armor found his attention constantly drifting towards the clock mounted high up on the wall directly behind his aide. In his head, he compared it to the timetable he had memorized months ago for the imminent shuttle docking. They should have just entered the approach pattern; another fifteen minutes to dock, then two for post-docking checks and transferring her…

“—since the system is automated, we are not sure that allocating additional ponypower will do much to help—“

He grimaced. For all that he had spent the last two decades of his life in space, away from all of his family, the next seventeen minutes promised to be the longest waiting period he had endured in…quite a long while.

“—could jeopardize launch schedule significantly. At this late date—“

“Captain Triplicate,” Shining Armor interrupted. The captain peered through his thick glasses at his commander, sheaves of paper and tablet computer momentarily left hanging, forgotten, in his green magical aura.

“Sir?” he responded.

“While Production’s shortfall is a serious problem, the admirals are more concerned with Fleet Command and seeing whether she can live up to her promises at the moment. Right now, my concern is to ensure that she is safely transferred to the bridge, whereas even if we discovered how to solve Production’s issues right this instant, it will take days or weeks to actually fix them. If we might review possible remedies later…?”

As oblivious as Triplicate Forms might sometimes be, even he wasn’t blind enough not to see what Shining Armor was trying to tell him. “Ah. Yes, sir. Perhaps…” he waggled his head, consulting an internal calendar. “Today, at fifteen fifteen? As I recall, you have nothing scheduled for then.”

Shining Armor nodded. “Fifteen fifteen it is, then. See you then, captain.”

Realizing he was dismissed, Triplicate Forms quickly gathered up his notes and slid them into the saddlebags draped across his back, then rapidly trotted across the gleaming white composite deck plating and out of Arrival Control, leaving Shining Armor and a bored clerk alone to wait out the remaining—he checked the clock again—thirteen minutes until his sister arrived. As the clock ticked away, Shining couldn’t keep his hooves still. He checked, then rechecked his uniform, adjusting it so that the toughest petty officer in the fleet would have congratulated him on the sheer pinnacle of perfection he had achieved. He examined his hooves in minutest detail, seeking out any imperfection. He reviewed, then reviewed again the exact schedule he had planned out for Twilight’s arrival. If he stopped, he might start thinking about his relationship with his sister. And if he did that, then he might start wondering what effect twenty years in space and twenty-five years in the military might have had on that relationship. And if he did that, then he, the newest commodore in the Equestrian Space Forces and the Commanding Officer of Mothership Assembly might just turn tail and flee rather than confront her.

Well, he might, but only if he allowed himself to take the first step, of wondering. So he made sure his uniform would pass the strictest inspection, rubbed his hooves on the deck to wipe out the slightest scuff or mark, reviewed his schedule, even, when his imagination finally failed him, counted his breaths as if he was a hermit perched upon a mountaintop. Behind the desk, the intake clerk slouched, completely uninterested in Shining Armor’s anxieties or his methods of relieving them. Unlike Shining Armor, restrained by his sense of propriety and position in the fleet, the civilian clerk had long since resorted to the ubiquitous phone as a distraction during the long wait for the shuttle.

Shining Armor’s perpetual motion only stopped when the sound of docking latches engaging and hatches mating echoed through the chamber. Taking a deep breath, he turned to face the docking tunnel as the cacophonic clanging of the docking mechanism reverberated through the reception hall. A moment passed, then another, then a blur of purple flew out, smashing into him and wrapping itself around his chest. After a moment during which he seriously feared for his ribcage, the purple blob spoke.

“Shiney!”

“Twily!”

Out of the corner of one of his eyes, he saw the shuttle attendant flash a quick salute before turning back into the cabin. After the too-tight hug, Shining pulled back from his sister. He had seen what had been done to her, of course, on video calls home, but seeing your sister’s transformation into a cyborg on a screen and experiencing it at first hoof were completely different. Black lumps of plastic, metal, and microcircuitry jutted out of her skin and coat at dozens of points, concentrated largely along her spine and around her horn, with several much larger ports along her barrel. Her mane had long since been shaved away and her tail cut back to the dock to allow unhindered surgical access. Patches of distinctly lighter coat were present around the most recent surgical sites, although the older implants were snugly embedded in her coat, almost as if they were meant to be there.

Whatever his feelings about what she had done to herself, though, he was counting on her to do everything she said she could. Everypony was counting on her. So, instead of attempting a futile last-ditch effort at talking her out of becoming the core of the Mothership, or even trying to talk her into waiting a few days before integrating, he simply said, “You need to register with the clerk over there,” and led her towards the desk, where the clerk sat slumped in her chair. Once they reached her desk, she reluctantly put down her phone and pulled herself upright, positioning her hooves over her keyboard. Looking Twilight in the eye, she asked “Name?”

“Twilight Sparkle”

“Date of birth?”

“July 7th, 1131”

Shining slowly tuned out of the exchange between the clerk and Twilight. Even if was the same procedure that every other pony boarding the Mothership had to go through, it seemed vaguely ridiculous; after all, she was going to become, quite literally, part of the ship. There was no need to take into account her boardings or departures, no worries that she might stow away somehow. Nevertheless, it was procedure, and it was, in no small part, his job to uphold procedure.

Distracted, he didn’t break out of his reverie until Twilight wrapped her hooves around him again. He returned a brief but potent squeeze before asking, “I take it you’re done?”

“Yep!” she smiled. “Dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s”.

“To the bridge then,” he said.

“To the bridge,” she agreed, and followed him as he stepped out of Arrival Control.

“--so then she said, ‘Ensign, is that a--’, and he said, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and she said ‘Well, Ensign, would you mind explaining where it came from?’

“Now, at this point he knows he’s in deep trouble no matter what he does, so he decides that he might as well go out in a blaze of glory. So he says, ‘Yes ma’am, I would mind explaining where it came from.’

“Well, the good captain did not expect that from a wet-behind-the-ears ensign, I can tell you that! She had this kind of blue coat, see, so her face turned this purplish color as she got more and more angry at him. Given how quiet it was in that room, we could hear her teeth grinding together, too. I think most of us were wondering how long it would take for her to lose it.

“Fortunately--or unfortunately, I’m still not quite sure which--she had the good sense not to explode in front of a roomful of junior officers. She just said, in this low, quiet, but utterly dangerous voice, ‘Ensign, I expect you in my office the moment this meeting is adjourned.’

“He just said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

“Well, he didn’t take it off for the next week. We never did learn the details what happened between them, though.”

Shining chuckled a little more at the thought of it. That had been a good prank.

His sister just smiled, a little wanly, as if she understood how funny it was but didn’t quite have the energy to work herself up to laughter.

“So that was probably the most interesting thing that’s happened the whole time since I came up here,” he offered after they had walked along in silence for a few moments. “But you! Presidents and chancellors and princesses and kings! You have to have more interesting stories than I do, Twily.”

Twilight smiled a little more, but rather with the air of somepony feeling obliged to smile than somepony genuinely flattered by the compliment.

“No...no,” she responded after a brief silence. “None of that was nearly as exciting or interesting as, well, this,” she waved her hoof around. “You’ve told me a lot about what’s happened, but not much about what it’s like.” He must have looked confused, because a moment later she clarified, “What it’s like being in space. Being on the Mothership. Being in charge of building it. All of those, maybe. You know how much I wanted to go into space when I was a little filly,” she reminded him.

He smiled as he remembered. “Yes ma’am Spacepony Twilight ma’am!”

For the first time since she had arrived, she laughed, a rich, genuine sound that lost little from bouncing off the white composite paneling of the brightly-lit corridor they were walking down. She shoved him, just a little, still laughing as she did. “Shiiiny,” she whined.

“Yes, Spacepony?” he replied, struggling to keep a straight face.

She shoved him again, a little harder. “You know what you did,” she accused him.

“You laughed, though,” he observed.

“Even so,” she said, then paused for a moment before adding, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

He thought for a moment. “Well...”

As they finally approached the doors to the bridge, both Shining and Twilight paused.

“So…” Shining was the first to break the silence. Before he could say or do anything else, Twilight again leapt up to give him a tight hug, face buried in his shoulder. He wrapped her in his own forelegs, trying to hold on even though he knew he couldn’t.

“I love you, big brother,” she said into his ear.

There was really only one reply for that. “I love you too.”

For what seemed like an eternity, they simply held onto each other, unwilling to stop. Finally, Shining let go. Twilight reluctantly followed. Together, they stepped up to the bridge’s doors and pushed them open.

Within, the dozen ponies of the integration team were already waiting. Half wore the light green bands of medical, the other half the gold of engineering. Behind them, the doors to the innermost sanctum of the bridge were already open, the dark, metallic, machinery-filled room behind a stark contrast to the clean, smooth white composite of the antechamber they were standing in.

No words needed to be said. The integration team led Twilight into the sanctum and positioned her on a broad raised dais in its center. Then, they began the lengthy process of connecting her to the Mothership’s computer systems. Each port connecting to her nervous system was checked, rechecked, and hooked up to its appropriate wire.

Shining just watched. Technically, he had no further role here. He had delivered Fleet Command to the bridge, and now it was the Chief Surgeon’s duty to see her sucessfully integrated. But he’d be damned if he didn’t at least watch as his sister was--executed.

The systems that would allow her to eat, drink, and eliminate waste while embedded in the bridge were attached to their corresponding implants. During the whole process, little more than whispers passed among the crew and between them and Twilight, simple commands such as “try to raise your left front leg” or “try to wiggle your tail” to verify proper functioning. Finally, the technicians left the dais, and up from it came a smooth, transparent tube, which quickly raised itself to the ceiling, sealing Twilight within.

It was as if they had just strapped her down for the needle, he supposed. Just one more step, and she’d be the ship, forevermore.

Now sealed, the chamber began to flood with a transparent liquid, the breathing fluid that would be used to provide Twilight with oxygen during the voyage. Calmly, Twilight waited with her eyes closed as it topped her fetlocks…her knees…her withers…finally, the top of her head.

It was funny, how his terrors graded themselves to attack weakest to strongest. First, it was hearing of her project. Then, it was waiting for her arrival. At last, it was actually watching.

After a moment of hesitation, bubbles flooded from her mouth and nose as she began to breathe the liquid. Finally, the entire chamber filled and she floated freely within it, suspended within by an explosion of wires and tubes. The doors to the inner bridge snapped shut and sealed with a burst of light.

A sexless voice sprang to life over the antechamber’s loudspeakers. “Beginning integration of subject Twilight Sparkle…in progress…in progress…complete.”

For a brief instant, there was silence. Then, in a moment which Shining could never decide was heart-wrenching or heart-warming, the voice was replaced by his sister’s. “Fleet Command is online and waiting for orders.”

The visitor looked more than a little lost down in the boiler room of the Mothership’s life support department. Her immaculate uniform, forelegs banded with blue stripes marking her as a member of the science department, was clearly out of place among the pounding, clanking, dirty machinery and squishy, squelching, filthy biology that kept fifty thousand ponies alive. Applejack caught a sight of the visitor and sighed. Another pony with no business here? Somehow, every day more ponies wandered down into the life support department, hopelessly lost. She didn’t know how; it wasn’t exactly easy to find life support even if you were looking for it. Nevertheless, anypony who got that lost needed help, whether or not she was a little tired of giving it.

“Hello, sugarcube,” she addressed the newcomer as she drew nearer to the butterscotch yellow pegasus mare. “A little lost, am ah right?”

The newcomer seemed to retreat in on herself as she noticed the chief approaching. She softly answered “Um, yes. This isn’t the science wing...”

Applejack laughed at the mare’s statement of the obvious. “No it ain’t, sugarcube, this is almost the other side of the ship! This here is Life Support. Ah’m Applejack, Chief of Life Support Operations.” She stood a little taller, a little prouder at that statement of her title. And why shouldn’t she? The Apples didn’t have fancy connections or political might. There hadn’t been any backdoor deals pushing her up the ranks. No, she had earned her place aboard with raw talent and hard work, and she wouldn’t ever forget it.

The subtleties of her stance were totally lost on her visitor, who wailed, “Oh no, there’s a biology team meeting in ten minutes! How am I ever going to get there in time?”

Applejack’s heart melted at the sight of the mare’s quiet breakdown. “Hey, it ain’t that bad. Here, ah’ll take you to the G-14 transit tube. You can get a direct shot to the science wing from there, it won’t take more than five minutes to get over there.”

The mare looked up at Applejack. “Really?’

Applejack smiled and offered a hoof to her. “Sure as mah name’s Applejack.” She explained even as the two mares set off at a brisk canter, Applejack leading the way: “The G-14 provides service to the engineering, production, and science facilities, but not the dormitory levels. Hardly anypony uses it to move around, so there’s never any jamming or congestion.” Halfway to their destination, she suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was helping out. “Ya know, ah don’t think ah caught your name earlier...?”

“Oh, I’m Fluttershy. I’m in the Biology Department,” the yellow mare replied.

“And what do you do in the Biology Department, Fluttershy?” Applejack asked, more than a little curious about what the ponies outside of engineering actually did on a day-to-day basis. Between how busy life support had been for the past month or two as new ponies had flooded aboard, and the lack of social options aboard, she’d hardly met anypony outside of the department.

“Well, mostly we’re there to research any xenobiological—I’m sorry, I mean alien life forms we come across,” she explained as they neared the transit tube. “We also have a secondary job of looking at ways to improve the efficiency of the on-board biological systems, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with. My specialty is zoology, I work with birds and mammals and insects and, well, with all the cute little critters out there.” As she said that last part, her voice softened and her face split itself with a quiet but satisfied smile.

“Huh,” Applejack said. “That sure sounds interestin’. A lot more than mah job, at least. Most interestin’ thing happens to us is when the sewage system backs up...” Applejack shuddered at the memory.

“Don’t sell yourself short!” Fluttershy interrupted. “Managing the bioreactors themselves is a complicated optimization problem, to say nothing of coupling them to the inorganic processing systems! When you add in managing industrial waste flows and dealing with external contamination, you probably have the most dynamic job on the ship!”

Applejack just stared at the pegasus as if she had suddenly grown a second head for a moment. Nervously, Fluttershy added, “um, but whatever you think is fine, I guess.”

After a few moments of uncontrolled laughter, Applejack managed to get enough control of herself to begin speaking again. “Sounds like we both think everypony else’s job’s got to be more interestin’ than ours,” she chuckled. “Ah don’t suppose you’d be up for swappin’ ‘war stories’? Pretty much everypony ah know on board’s an engineer themselves, so ah don’t get much of a chance to share.”

“I…suppose,” Fluttershy said.

“Well then! How about we meet for lunch on a regular basis? Say, every Tuesday and Thursday, maybe? Ah eat from noon to one, most days, in the engineering mess.”

“I...guess that would work,” Fluttershy said after a moment of thought.

“Well, that’s settled, then,” Applejack said, slowing to a casual trot. “And here’s the transit tube. G-14, as ah said. Now, git to your meeting, and remember, next Tuesday!”

Rainbow Dash grunted as another hard burn pushed her fighter out of harm’s way. Undeterred by the failure of her latest trick, she followed up the random walk thrust by feinting a turn to the left, then applying retro thrust, hoping to use her sudden slowdown to turn the tables and force her opponent into her gunsights.

Unfortunately, her pursuer hadn’t been fooled by the feint. As her retros lit up, so too did her opponent’s, in nearly perfect synchronization. Before she could exploit Rainbow’s momentary straight path, another random walk burn spoiled her aim, but Rainbow couldn’t expect to dodge her forever. Since her enemy had converted their indecisive head-on encounter into a chase, Rainbow had only been narrowly able to keep her from achieving victory. For every tactic and trick Rainbow could dream up, her foe seemed to know and be able to instantly apply the perfect counter.

Although…there was one trick she hadn’t tried to use yet. In a sudden burst of drive plasma from her maneuvering jets, her fighter swung around, swinging 180 degrees in less than a second, lining her crosshairs up directly over her pursuer’s spacecraft. Before the surprised pegasus could react, she fired, an invisible burst of laser light reaching out through her gun barrel and connecting her with her opponent’s fighter for just a moment.

The kill counter hovering in the upper right corner of her vision ticked over once. It now read

RD: 9

LD: 8
A moment later, the clock just above the kill counter rolled over. It was 16:30, time for them to return to the Mothership. As the two pilots guided their fighters into the approach pattern quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of extraneous chatter, Rainbow struggled against her euphoria. Given that Lightning was one of the best and most aggressive dogfighters in the squadron, matching her, let alone beating her (if, Rainbow chose to forget, by a narrow margin) was no mean feat. A year ago she would have been--she had been--creamed, and it wasn’t until recently that she could even have considered actually matching her. Once they entered the approach pattern, she relaxed as control of the ship switched over to Docking Control. It still bothered her to not have control over her ship, but there was nothing she could do about it. Under the command of Docking Control, her scout slipped quickly through the armada of support craft maneuvering around the Mothership and within its hangar bays to her squadron’s docking sleeves.

As the docking clamps fixed themselves to her fighter’s hull, the webbing holding her in her ejection seat unraveled itself, leaving her sitting in her g-suit, floating in the omnipresent breathing liquid as she waited for the techs to come and help her out. With little else to do, she looked around the cockpit, a mass of gleaming displays interrupted only by the control panels and joysticks down by her forelegs. A machine built to fly, and nothing but; it was...beautiful. A light from above interrupted her reverie. She could feel hooves grasping her suit, hear the grunting as a pair of the ground team pulled her out of the cockpit, finally see her ship’s docking sleeve as the techs allowed her to slump onto the grating of its access arms. It wasn’t much to write home about, little more than a cramped, pressurized space filled with the equipment needed to maintain a ship after its flight.

After a moment, she got to her hooves, ignoring the familiar but still unpleasant sensation of floating within the suit without actually touching anything. As the techs began to plug in the ship’s power and data cables, she squished her way over to the wall across from the fighter, picked out one of the hoses attached to it, and plugged it into a port on her suit’s back. Immediately, the whine of pumps that had been in the background since she had suited up hours earlier took on a new and decidedly louder tone. As the level of the breathing liquid dropped past her muzzle, she began to hack and cough, spitting up large amounts of the stuff every time she tried to take a breath. This was by far the least pleasant part of being a pilot, the post-flight fight to return to breathing air instead of some goop an egghead in some lab had created to keep you from being squished during hard maneuvers.

As the level dropped further, below her withers, she could hear the pumps start to suck air. She rolled onto her back and stuck her legs straight up into the air, allowing the last of the stuff to pool around the vacuum line and be sucked out of her suit. As the pumps again hit air, she reached up and flipped a switch, turning the pumps off, then reached down and pulled open a zipper reaching from her throat to her crotch, yanking her suit open in the process. She burst out of the deflated suit, pulling her helmet off in one smooth motion, then shaking out her mane, coat, and wings to relieve the feeling of being trapped in one position for hours.

As she began to bunch up the flight suit, one of the techs brought a towel out and began rubbing the remaining bits of liquid out of her coat and wings. The other one who had helped her out brought a mug of coffee over to warm her up. Three sugars and only the tiniest dash of milk. She didn’t even have to ask anymore. “Thanks,” she croaked out of abused vocal cords.

“No problem,” the tech who had brought it over said. He then began to inspect the outside of her scout, checking to see if she had damaged it in any way during today’s flight. She just sipped her coffee as he began to carefully go over every square inch of the hull, quietly patching any micrometeoroid holes he found. A few other ground team members arrived while she was waiting and began their own work in keeping her ship in shape. She just watched as they quietly went about their business.

A few sips later, and the tech with the towel had worked all the gunk out of her coat and mane. She stood, spreading her wings wide and confirming that nothing was stuck to them, either, before hobbling off three-legged down the corridor and away from the hangar bay, still carrying her coffee mug, her flight suit draped across her back and her helmet caught on one of her wingtips. She quickly gulped down the rest of her now only warm coffee before reaching her squadron’s ready room. Lightning was already there, downing her own cup of coffee at the sole table. Rainbow brushed past her and carefully slid her mug into the nook marked with her name and cutie mark, then turned and walked to the wall of lockers, opening up hers with a brief glance at and a touch of her hoof to the lock, then stuffing her flight suit and helmet inside.

Famished from their flight, she pulled one of the frozen meals left in the squadron freezer out and popped it in the microwave, remembering--this time--to leave some money in the tip jar for replacing it. As Rainbow waited for the microwave to finish, Lightning gulped down the last of her coffee. She cleared her throat, once, then began to speak in a low, calm tone, still looking at the table.

“That move you pulled out there? It was reckless. Crazy, even. In a real fight, your shots might not have taken me out. I might have been able to return fire--and you had put yourself right in my gunsights.”

Rainbow had turned around to face her flight leader as Lightning had started speaking. Under the impact of her words, she started to tremble, her ears pulling back as she absorbed their meaning. Lightning neither knew nor cared about Rainbow’s shaking, eyes still fixed on her empty mug.

“Even granting success, we were so close together, had I been anypony else I might not have reacted in time. I might have jinked the wrong way. We might have collided--and then we would both be dead.

“A move like that...that took guts.”

Rainbow froze, looking at Lightning dumbly.

Her face sported a feral, dangerous smile as she looked up, directly into her subordinate’s eyes. “I like that! I like that a lot! You’re never going to be a decent pilot without guts, kid. Never.”

Throughout her body, Rainbow felt muscles she didn’t even know she had release. In as steady a voice as she could muster, she replied, “Thank you, ma’am”

Lightning’s smile softened slightly. “And that’s why I’m making you my permanent wingpony. We’re gonna go far, kid.”

Rainbow stood ramrod straight as she answered “Yes, ma’am”.

Rarity popped out of the lift tube a mere ten minutes before her shift started, in a dreadful state. When she had woken up less than half an hour before her shift started--her alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and though she wasn’t sure why, she had her suspicions--she had been forced to forgo most of her morning routine. Her mane, coat, and tail were not in a state fit to be seen, and she had barely had time to swing by the dorm cafeteria and grab a few pastries—she knew they were bad for her figure, but she just hadn’t had time, and if nothing else they were filling—before jumping in the transit tube. As usual, it had been a slow, frustrating journey, as all of the ponies about to go on shift and all the ponies going off of shift had conspired to make the pod she had been riding stop at virtually every level between the dorms and Prototyping.

Trotting quickly but elegantly down the hall, she quickly reached the entrance to Prototyping. A brief wave of her access badge past the card reader later, and she was inside the hall’s antechamber, grabbing her protective goggles and smock and fastening them around her body with her magic almost as soon as she stepped through the door. Mane and tail nets followed; she could just see what could happen if a bit of them got into the machines, and shuddered a little at the very thought. As the final step, she floated her earplugs over from the shelf and carefully inserted them into each ear. Now properly equipped, she stepped through the door on the other side of the chamber from where she entered.

What she saw was bedlam. Pegasi soared through the air over the grid of machine tools and 3D printers, carrying tiny parts from where they had been made to where they were supposed to be, while even through her earplugs she could hear the whine of printers laying down stunningly complex patterns of plastics, metals, and more, the cacophony of cutting tools and presses and grinders shaping exotic alloys of nickel, titanium, and other, even rarer metals, and even the shouts of workers trying to communicate over the clamor of the machines.

Instantly, she relegated her bed mane, her atrocious coat, even her terrible breakfast to the back of her mind. Even if, to a casual observer, Prototyping was a mass of chaos masquerading as a manufacturing facility, to her it was home. And like any home, if you knew where to look, there were always pockets of order in even the most disorganized areas. Case in point, the shift bosses’ office.

Carefully dodging couriers, operators, or any of the other ponies on the floor, Rarity made her way to the office, just to the left of the entrance. As she stepped in, the noise of the floor followed her, alerting her shift chief, Hard Nails, to her entrance. He started talking before she could breathe a word, pausing briefly as she pulled the door shut and removed her earplugs before restarting.

“Ah, Rarity. I’ll get down to the brass tacks: the last batch of plasma injectors was rejected by Development.”

Rarity winced. That hadn’t been one of her jobs, but she knew Daisy Heart had burnt herself out over the last week working on those. She sympathized with whoever...

Oh.

Wait.

Before she could say a word, Hard Nails was already speaking again.

“You’re the best, Rarity, which is why I’m giving you this job. If anypony out there can get these things to where Development wants them, it’s you. And if you can’t, then we can tell them it can’t be done.”

As much as she felt flattered by his compliments, she was perfectly aware of why he was buttering her up. She had to admit, it was working a little. She certainly felt slightly more enthusiastic about what she was about to do than she had when she had figured out what it was. That didn’t mean she was quite to the point of being joyful about it, though.

“It is what I do,” she admitted.

Hard Nails continued, “I’ve already forwarded the files to your account.”

Rarity nodded, turned, exited his office, and briskly trotted over to the nearest 3D printer not in use. Ignoring, for the moment, the machine, she logged into the attached computer and immediately pulled up the engineering files, which as promised were already in her account. She grimaced as she carefully looked over Development’s blueprints. The specifications were almost impossible, requiring extremely tight tolerances, absurdly low weight, and impossibly high strength to meet Development’s performance requirements for Object Hammer. It was going to be a struggle to get everything just right for them. Really, the only redeeming characteristic of this job was that she would only have to do it once, whether she succeeded or failed.

She sighed and went to work.

Rarity stepped out of Prototyping utterly exhausted. She had nearly forgotten to take off her mane and tail nets before leaving; only the timely intervention of Sapphire Dreams had prevented her from embarrassing herself. Despite all that, though, it had been a better day than she had expected that morning. No, she hadn’t managed to pull a full set of plasma injectors out of her--well. But after looking at the plans, discussing the problem with Daisy Heart over lunch (the poor mare had been completely sympathetic), and carrying out a few experiments, she thought she could see a way forwards to Development’s specifications. Something for tomorrow, at any rate.

As usual, it was a fight to get on and then, once they reached the dormitory levels, off the transit pods. Fortunately, with a few well-placed nudges and a keen eye for gaps in the crowd, she was able to slip through easily enough and out into the dormitory levels. As she passed through the common area her room shared with five others, she noted with some relief that it was completely empty; she was tired, and wanted to have a chance to rest and rejuvenate herself before socializing or, really, doing anything. She just wanted to curl up and read a nice book, or maybe take a nap. Under the circumstances, actually, a nap sounded like a particularly exquisite sort of pleasure...

Unfortunately for her, what she saw when she finally fumbled the lock on her room’s door open and pushed inside dispelled any notion that she might be able to have a nap anytime soon. For a brief moment, she wondered if some genetic abomination had made its way out of the science labs and taken up residence in her room, filling it with a multicolored mass of hair, mane, and hooves. Then, a pink pony-shaped blob began to wriggle its way out of the mass and she realized that no, Pinkie had just convinced her other roommates to play a game of Twister. Or Surprise had. Or Pinkie and Surprise had together. She really couldn’t say which scenario was most likely.

Now Pinkie was bouncing up to her with her usual energy. Before Rarity could react, the pink pony was in front of her, staring into her eyes with undisguised glee.

“Hey Rarity! Do you want to play--” Pinkie was cut off as Rarity stuck her front hoof in her mouth. For a few moments, she continued to try to speak, but then stopped to allow Rarity to speak her piece in silence.

“Hello, Pinkie. I’m sorry, but I’m really very tired right now and would like to rest. Perhaps some other day?” Slowly, she removed her hoof from Pinkie’s mouth, shuddering slightly at the saliva glistening on it as she did so. Once her hoof was safely back on the floor, the party pony started to speak up again.

“Ah, but Rarity—“

“Very tired, Pinkie. But if it’s any consolation, I did enjoy your pastries this morning, though. Did I taste a little dash of pineapple in them, by chance? I would never have guessed that that filling would go so well with coconut, of all things...”

“Yep!” Pinkie beamed. “When I woke up this morning I was having a dream about pineapples, and I went ‘hmmm’ and when we started baking up this morning’s breakfast I went ‘ehhhh’ and I had an idea and I’m glad you liked it!” Rarity didn’t understand how Pinkie could fit a smile of that size on her face, but at least she had been distracted from the subject of sucking Rarity into her games. Behind her, Surprise and Dream Charmer had untangled themselves, apparently losing interest in Twister after Pinkie had forfeited the match to talk to Rarity.

Rarity managed a weak chuckle of her own. “Well, I’m glad I liked it too! But I really am very tired...”

“Ok, Rarity! Some other time then!” Somehow, Pinkie managed to turn completely around in place before bouncing the two or three steps to where Surprise and Dream Charmer had started chatting. Freed of any responsibilities to her roommates, Rarity quickly walked over to her bunk before Pinkie could change her mind. Before pulling open the capsule’s hatch, Rarity gently pulled her service uniform off, taking care to preserve the starching even as she pulled her phone out of one of the thing’s innumerable pockets. She floated the uniform over to their shared closet, hanging it up so that it wouldn’t wrinkle before tomorrow. That little chore taken care of, she pulled the hatch to her bunk open and slid into bed with a quiet sigh of relief, happy to be off her hooves and lying down. Briefly, she closed her eyes, enjoying the relaxation of just lying there, with no duties to perform or tasks to complete.

Brief reverie over, she opened her eyes again. With a flare of magic, she closed the capsule door and slid the privacy curtain over it, ensuring that most, though unfortunately by no means all of the sound and light from her roommates would be blocked off. That done, she scooched back, positioning herself to have a clear line of sight on the display protruding out of the top of the capsule, then pulled her pillows from the head end under her back, to support her while she watched a little bit of television. Her phone, enveloped in a baby-blue magical glow, floated its way over to the television, where it found a convenient place to dock in the display’s base. Rarity flicked through the resulting menus until she found what she was looking for. Rocket Stallions.

She would, of course, be the first to admit that it was a completely unrealistic depiction of what life in space was actually like. The improbably large number of attractive stallions and (despite the title) mares, consumed by their personal lives, and only incidentally focused on the mission, did not line up with what she had experienced aboard the Mothership. Nor did the technology match anything that actually existed, and as for the underlying missions the spaceship was supposedly carrying out, well, she doubted the Mothership would meet quite so many stunningly gorgeous aliens with a striking resemblance to ponies in makeup, perfectly positioned to inject some drama into the Relationship of the Week. Nevertheless, she enjoyed the show, for reasons beyond her rational mind. Right now, she was working through the second series, which had been aired some time ago but which she hadn’t purchased for herself until recently. Despite knowing everything that was going to happen from the original airing, she found herself quickly sucked into the drama of the show.

Several episodes later, she slowly blinked at the screen as the end credits rolled, yawning deeply as she tried to process what had just happened. “How could Shimmering Skies be planning on cheating on Rainy Days with that alien hussy?,” she muttered before coming to her senses. Reaching up to pinch herself awake, she corrected herself, “No, I’ve seen this before. He’s not, he’s aware she’s trying to seduce him and trying to get her in a compromising position to find out why. Skies/Days is probably the most stable relationship in the show! That’s it, I think”--she yawned again--”it’s time for bed.” Clicking off the display just as the next episode’s intro credits began to roll, she laid back and closed her eyes, quickly drifting off to sleep.

“Fighter--”

BANG BANG BANG went a nail gun in the background.

“--I SAID,” Shining Armor shouted over the din of construction, “Fighter Director, get a flight of scouts out to that asteroid cluster.”

Shining slumped back in his chair and massaged his temples, not bothering to check whether the director had actually received his orders. He was tempted to throw the construction workers littering the backup Operations Center out of the room, but the Mothership was only a month away from launch and the room was still half-complete. As it was, many of his staff had to pretend they had consoles to work at and communications channels to talk on, the titanic main display wrapping around the forward half of the room hadn’t even been installed, limiting their ability to monitor the ship’s systems, and even his own command console was only half-finished, a mere simulacrum of the final product. Only the holodisplay filling the center of the room was anywhere close to what the design said should be installed. And the primary center was even worse, with barely any hardware installed yet. Both would be done by the launch, true, but they were cutting it awfully fine.

After just a moment of thought, he sprang back to work. “Fleet Command,” he said, employing one of the few operational comm links, “what’s the status of the hyperdrive self-test?”

“Still running, Shiny,” Twilight chirped, rather too cheerfully for Shining’s liking. He suspected that over the past five months “Cadance” (as his sister insisted on calling the AI she had designed into the Direct Neural Interface System) had somehow warped his sister’s mind. It was slightly more comforting than the thought that she was taking to being hooked up to a city-sized starship the way she had to magic, once upon a time. “Drive capacitors at 19% charge, conventional drives online, all other systems fully operational.”

“Right. Let me know the results of the self-test as soon as it’s completed, Fleet Command.” He snapped to the circuit connecting him with his department chiefs before she could make her usual complaints about his formality. “Any problems to report?” he asked.

As his staff heads began reporting back, mostly to assure him that aside from the hyperdrive failure there were no issues of note, Shining leaned back and took stock. So far, Operations Team White was acquitting itself well enough, even if it was a simulation. Just like the previous simulations they had run through aboard the Scaffold, they had quickly clicked together into a smoothly functioning partnership, efficiently passing information from one to another and noting problems even without his direct intervention. Even if you could never quite tell until real problems actually cropped up, he thought he could count on them in the crunch.

But real problems were still more than a month away from happening. In the here and now, what mattered was how they were going to deal with the simulation. The difficulty was that the hyperdrive could never be fully trusted after such an error, especially since the self-checks prior to the jump had all been fine. There was no guarantee that the drive would manifest the same error twice; next time, it might underjump, leaving them hundreds of light years from Equus, or catastrophically fail midway through the hyperspace transition, leaving them permanently trapped between real and hyperspace.

And yet, and yet...building a new hyperdrive was not really an option. Production, of course, had brought it up in the initial command consultation just after they realized they were overjumping, but only as a pro forma suggestion. Everypony had known that, between the burial of the hyperdrive deep within the hull and its use of rare materials nearly unavailable in the Equus system, building a new drive was simply not practical.

The holoprojector in the center of the room merely emphasized their situation: nothing at all within half a million miles but the tiny clump of asteroids a pair of scouts were now bound to, and little enough farther away. They weren’t going to find the needed materials here, either. Well, there really was only one thing to do--

Alarms began going off all over the Operations Center. Shining grimaced. Of course there would be something else. Twilight cut into the comms loop before he could do anything.

“Picking up a hyperspace signature at short range. One-oh-seven degrees polar, two-six three azimuthal.”

Shining watched as an alien ship, much smaller than the Mothership, emerged from hyperspace less than a thousand miles away. Twilight started speaking again as it cleared the hyperspace transition.

“Hull sensors are picking up light from that ship. They may be trying to communicate, but there’s some kind of complex encoding, I can’t understand it.”

“Xenocontact,” he said.

“On it,” Derpy replied, already coordinating the delivery of the first contact package with Twilight.

“Fighter Director, launch all available fighters and form a screen. Fleet Command, recall the scouts from the asteroid field,” he added once he was satisfied the usual first contact communications were being taken care of.

“Aye aye, sir” came a chorus of voices from the link.

As the Equestrian fighters began to file out of the Mothership and assume formation between the Mothership and the alien ship, Twilight suddenly came onto the Ops Center comm link again.

“Picking up another hyperspace signature, very close to the first. There are subtle differences...”

As the newcomer emerged from hyperspace, the “subtle differences” quickly became obvious. The ship was nearly twice the size of the other, and where the first had been all smooth curves of metal, composite, and plastic, not unlike a more elegant version of the Equestrian vessels, the new vessel was a jagged mess of metallic spires and protrusions, like a spacefaring sea urchin. As the hyperspace transition closed, it immediately began maneuvering towards the other, less than a hundred miles away, which lit up its own drives in response.

“Wait...wait, I think they’re firing at each other!” Twilight excitedly added.

The holotank zoomed in on the alien ships. Besides the ships themselves, there were small objects darting between them, leaping out of the hull of each ship to zoom away towards the other. So far, none of them had hit, vanishing from the display in brief bursts of light before they could reach the other ship. Despite their seeming inability to hit each other, though, the rate of fire only increased, each side hoping to overwhelm the other’s defenses.

Twilight continued, “I’m picking up signals from the other ship, too. They seem to be using a similar encoding system, so I’m forwarding the first contact package to them. The first ship doesn’t seem to have noticed our signals, though. At least, their signals are still showing the same encoding as before.”

Shining keyed in a private voice loop. “Xenocontact, Tactical?”

The former spoke up immediately. “Given that we know nothing about either side, their capabilities, what empires are behind them, or even how to talk to them, we can’t get involved. It would be irresponsible to inadvertently ally with the losing power in a galactic war.”

Cloud Kicker didn’t spare a moment, “We may not know anything about them, but they’re fighting right in front of us. That makes us involved whether we like it or not. And how long until one of them decides we might break for the other--and decides to get in their strike first?”

Derpy shot back, “And? The fighters intercept their missiles. We attack the ones who attacked us. When they’re defeated, we talk to the other one--without making any commitments, since we were attacked first.”

As their leaders debated the correct strategy to take, the Equestrian fighters were cautiously nearing the combatants, positioning themselves to quickly intercept any missiles they might throw towards the Mothership while attempting to avoid provocations. Suddenly, the icons for several of the fighters nearest the second alien ship began blinking.

“Gold Squadron is reporting being fired on by the alien ship,” Twilight reported. “Only superficial armor damage so far.” On the holodisplay, the icon for the second alien ship changed color to red.

“All ships, attack bogey #2,” Shining ordered. “Keep away from bogey #1”.

As Fleet Command passed the word on to the fighter squadrons, they began to swarm like hungry flies around a wounded animal. The scouts, which had been closest to the enemy ship, pressed their attacks, breaking off to return to the Mothership as they were damaged. Although their pinpricks were doing little to the enemy ship, behind them the bulk of the Equestrian fighter forces were closing into firing range unmolested by the enemy’s defenses.

As they finally came into range, a wave of more than 90 missiles rippled away from the approaching fighters, screaming away from their launchers at bone-crushingly high accelerations. Using targeting data from the scouts, they homed in on the enemy ship like a hungry pack of wolves scenting injured prey. With this new threat approaching from the rear and the first ship still trying to strike from the fore, the aliens were caught in a bind; turn to expose their point defenses to the missiles, and risk being overwhelmed by their original foe, or hazard all on their limited ability to deflect the new challenger’s blows?

As they hesitated, the missiles came nearer and nearer, pressing through a hail of defensive fire. Fifty miles. Twenty. Ten. Five. A bare dozen had closed the distance...but it was enough.

As one, they burst into the brilliant radiance of nuclear fusion. On the holodisplay, ruler-straight and pencil-thin lines of nuclear fire burst out from the missiles to spear through the enemy ship in a dozen places around the stern. Pierced through and through again, the alien ship shuddered, debris flying outwards from where the blasts had lanced through antennae or outer hull plating. As its drive stuttered from the impact, another cluster of missiles from the first alien ship swooped in, detonating themselves in tight bursts against the enemy’s bow. Pummeled from both sides, the ship began to break apart, its protrusions snapping off and drifting away, and its atmosphere venting in hundreds of places. The first alien ship oriented itself to cancel its velocity relative to the Mothership--

--and the lights of the Operations Room brightened while the holodisplay faded to a blank, nearly invisible sphere hanging in midair. Shining Armor stood up and stretched while around him the rest of his team followed suit, even as the voice of the simulation supervisor came onto the intercoms. “Sorry guys, I know you were all looking forwards to the multi-hour lesson in decoding alien first contact packages.” Shining cracked a smile, while even Derpy only pouted at the news for a moment before laughing along with everypony else. “But,” the SimSup continued, “Team Red is on in fifteen. Post-sim review in the main briefing room in thirty minutes, see you all there.”

Pinkie’s eyes swept over her kitchen, bustling with cooks, stewards, and servers rushing to and fro, watching ovens, or mixing ingredients. As she trotted (some ponies would say skipped, but what did they know?) along the aisles, watching for anything anypony needed help with, she was disappointed that nopony did (after all, she hadn’t organized a musical number in...four, five months? Can’t let those skills get rusty)

Suddenly, she stopped. Was that...an ear flop? And a tail twitch!? She needed to--! As she was knocked to the ground by somepony from behind, her hat wobbled dangerously but stayed on her head, although at a newly jaunty angle. Before anypony could say a word, she had already popped into the air and turned completely around to directly face down her attacker.

“Sorry boss,” the dark blue pegasus apologized, fluttering his wings nervously. “Spring Roll wanted these yesterday,” he added, hefting the tubs of lotus seed paste he was hauling before darting through the crowded aisles towards the main kitchen before Pinkie could respond. She just shook her head and pushed her hat back to its proper angle.

Before she could continue her rounds, she heard a mare weakly asking “Er, Pinkie...Pinkie, you said you wanted to see this...”

Pinkie turned and gasped, so long and loud that some of the newer staff turned to see if something was wrong. Before her, on a silver platter held in the light green magic field of her cake master was a 1/21120th scale rendition of the Mothership, wobbling slightly at the edges where Sweet Tooth’s magic was patchy and weak.

“Yes, that’s it! That’s exactly it!” Pinkie exclaimed. She had had this VISION weeks ago, and to see it finally realized...!

“Oh, good,” said Sweet Tooth, her voice wobbling almost as much as her legs. “I’ll just take it to the cart, then.” As she turned to gently walk the cake over to the dessert cart, she found a pink foreleg wrapping itself around her, followed moments later by the chef herself.

“Don’t worry!” she smiled at her. “I can do it!” Before Sweet Tooth could object, Pinkie slipped both of her forehooves under the tray and, carefully balancing herself on her rear legs, began walking it over towards the dessert cart. Treating it with all the care and respect such a monumental achievement (and cake) deserved, she gently slipped the tray onto the cart, where it instantly dwarfed the other treats she had prepared for the party later. Majestically ruling over them all, it sat silently in the center of the cart.

“Alright, Mothership! We’re going to launch tomorrow, and are you excited or are you EXCITED!?” shouted the pink earth pony up on stage.

In response, the crowd of ponies packed into the mess hall roared. Grinning so wide her face looked as if it were about to split in two, the mare continued, “And there’s only one way to celebrate an occasion so momentous, so important: With a PARTY!”

The crowd roared again in delight. “Alright then!” she somehow grinned even wider. “Give it up for the Mothership’s very own DJ-Pon3, on the records,” a white unicorn wearing purple-pink shades seated behind a massive turntable waved, eliciting another roar of appreciation, “and remember, the drinks are FREE, tonight only! Have fun, everypony!”

A staccato electronic beat erupted from the loudspeakers as the earth pony finished her sentence. A few ponies drifted out of the crowd over to the bar, but most gathered up, quickly beginning to dance to the DJ’s music. For once, they had no responsibilities and no cares, and they intended to take full advantage of the fact.

In the midst of it all, Fluttershy cowered. Surrounded by ponies laughing, dancing, carrying on shouted conversations, bathed in loud dance music, her heart started racing, her eyes flicking over possible escape routes, her ears folding back against her skull. She just couldn’t take it, she needed to get away, to flee from it all! But she was trapped, surrounding by ponies pressing their bodies together in dance. After a moment of panic, she remembered that she was not limited to the ground and sprang into the air. Although a few pegasi were taking advantage of their flying abilities to dance in the air, most of the crowd was earth ponies and unicorns, so the skies were largely empty. Safely out of the crowd, Fluttershy turned to spot a more permanent refuge. She spotted the tables which had been pushed out of the center of the mess hall to create an impromptu dance floor, and winged her way over to them, sitting down at one in the very corner of the room. Although she couldn’t flee the noise, she was at least out of the mass of ponies, giving her enough room to calm down and steady her heart rate. After a few minutes, she noticed a familiar blonde mane weaving its way through the crowd towards her. As it emerged from the crowd, she saw that it was attached to an equally familiar orange pony, who beelined for her table as soon as she saw her.

As Applejack got close, she asked, in a relatively quiet voice, “Are y’all alright, sugarcube?”

Fluttershy shook her head. “It’s too loud, and there are too many ponies,” she confessed in a quavering voice, barely audible over the noise of the crowd and the music.

Applejack looked pained at the fact. “Ah shouldn’t have been so hard on you to come, sugarcube. Ah’m sorry. If you want to, we could leave, do something somewhere quieter.”

Fluttershy shook her head, pink mane whipping across her face. “No, no that’s all right. I’m sorry. You should go have fun.”

“Nah, nah, if you’re not having fun ah’m not having fun neither,” the engineer said. “Even if you don’t feel up to dancing, we could still talk. How does that sound?”

“…Nice. It sounds…nice.”

“Well, ah guess ah’ll start us off. So, th’ other day…”

Fluttershy let her attention drift as Applejack began to tell an anecdote about something that had happened in the life support department recently. She made sure to pay enough attention to nod when the narrative demanded nodding, and shake her head when it demanded shaking, and gasp when it demanded gasping, but other than that she focused on the ponies in the room. A few had drifted over to the bar, and a few others to the tables like Applejack and herself, but most of the partiers were still dancing, showing no signs of slowing down despite a few songs having been run through since the party had started. She wondered what they were like inside. All of them were stronger and better than she was, she thought. They wouldn’t panic at being on a dance floor. They probably had lots of friends, marefriends and coltfriends, even. They--

“Hey, sugarcube.”

Fluttershy immediately refocused her attention on Applejack. “Did I drift off? I’m sorry.” she apologized while blushing from embarrassment.

“Well, yeah, you sort of spaced out on me there, but ah don’t mind. What’s on your mind?” Applejack smiled at her.

Fluttershy didn’t think before blurting out the first thing that came to mind—something that had been bothering her since the party had started. “Why do we have a DJ on board? I mean, it seems kind of…”

“Who, Vinyl? Oh, she’s an engineer from the drives section. DJing is just her hobby. You know how it is, you gotta have one or you’re gonna go mad.”

“I suppose,” Fluttershy uncertainly replied. Before she could say anything else, one of the pegasi hovering above the dance floor darted over towards them, leaving a rainbow trail in her wake. Applejack groaned a little at the sight. “Sorry for what’s about to happen, sugarcube,” she apologized to Fluttershy.

“Why? What’s—“ but Fluttershy never got to finish her sentence, as the sky-blue intruder with the rainbow mane started talking as soon as she put hoof to floor.

“Hey, Applejack! I see you’ve been picking up the hot mares, leave some for the rest of us why don’t you?”

Applejack’s face lit up redder than a Red Delicious as she tried to form a response, any response to the totally unexpected accusation, while Fluttershy tried to hide behind her mane and the table. The mare ignored both of them, forging onwards too quickly for the beleaguered mares to respond.

“Great party, isn’t it? But all of Pinkie’s parties are great…” she trailed off for a moment before popping back up. “Well, it’s been nice seeing you, Applejack, and whoever your date is! That stallion over by the bar’s been giving me hot looks all night, I think I know what I’m doing tonight!” With that, the mare dashed away, leaving Applejack and Fluttershy in her wake. Fluttershy was the first to speak up after she left.

“You…know her?” she asked Applejack.

“Well…” the mare reached up to scratch at her head, “Yeah, ah suppose ah do. She’s family, technically speaking. Something like my fourth cousin three times removed by adoption. Ah guess ah’ve met her a few times at family receptions. Ya know how it is. ‘Behind every great farmer there’s a great pegasus’ Well, the Apples, we’re all farmers. But ah can’t say ah really know her, ya know?” Applejack descended into a stage-whisper, “She’s an arrogant boastful show-off who loves tweaking every pony around her and who’s latched onto me since she met me because ‘we’re both Apples’. But don’t tell her ah said that, alright?”

“Okay,” Fluttershy nodded. “I won’t.” Fluttershy paused. “Who is she?”

Applejack laughed. “Ah suppose she talked so fast we never got around to introductions. She goes by ‘Rainbow Dash’. She’s a pilot in the scout wing.”

“Oh, okay,” Fluttershy responded. “Um, what were we doing?”

“You were asking why we had a DJ, best as ah can recall,” Applejack answered. Neither of them quite knew what to follow that up with. Applejack turned towards the dance floor, eyes following a few particularly attractive stallions as they cavorted with the other ponies present. Fluttershy just stared at the table, looking at the patterns in its plastic surface, occasionally looking up to follow Applejack’s gaze. After a few minutes of silence, she finally spoke up.

“I’m sorry, Applejack. You should be dancing out there. All I’m doing is keeping you from having fun. I’ll just go now.” The yellow pegasus made to get up and leave the mess, but her journey was abruptly stopped as Applejack grabbed her tail. Once Fluttershy turned about to face her, she spat the tail out and began speaking her own piece.

“No, sugarcube, ah should be apologizing to you. Ah knew from what you had told me that you don’t like this sort of thing, and yet ah dragged you along anyhow. What kind of a friend am ah, that ah would do that? Not a very good one, ah would say. Ah won’t keep you here, but ah’ll make it up to you sometime, ah promise.”

“Oh…okay,” Fluttershy agreed. She felt like she ought to say something more, but nothing came to mind. After a few seconds of struggling to come up with something, she gave up and left the party. Behind her, Applejack was already gravitating towards the dance floor.

As Vinyl’s music cranked up, Pinkie had to suppress the urge to jump off the stage and join the mass of ponies who were already starting to dance. It wasn’t that she thought it wouldn’t be fun (it would be!) or that she couldn’t for some reason (she could!), it was just that she needed to make sure everypony else was having a good time first. After all, what was the point of a party if the partiers weren’t having fun?

A brief scan of the crowd reassured her that everypony seemed to be fine. (There was that one yellow pegasus in a corner, but maybe she just liked corners? Pinkie made a note to check up on her later) More importantly, there were the ponies already clustering around the bar. In Pinkie’s long experience, the barflies usually needed more cheering up than anypony else, and she fully intended to make sure the last night before launch was memorable and fun for everypony.

That decided, Pinkie leaped off of the stage and into the crowd, landing in a hole briefly opened by the mass of dancers. She wove her way through, seeing gaps almost before they opened, moving her body in time with the beat, as if she were some kind of manifestation of the party itself. As she moved through the dance floor, she caught a glimpse of white coat and purple mane. Rarity! It wouldn’t hurt to go see her, would it? (No, it wouldn’t, she assured herself). Slipping through the crowd, she popped up practically next to her.

“Hi, Rarity!”

“Hello, Pinkie!” Rarity replied, raising her voice against the music and in surprise at her roommate’s sudden appearance. Pinkie spun into her dance as if the whole thing was part of some giant clockwork mechanism, displacing Rarity’s previous partner, who found himself suddenly paired with an entirely different mare.

“Are you having fun?” Pinkie asked as she swayed along with the nonplussed unicorn.

“I--yes, I am, but--”

--but Pinkie had slipped away into a narrow gap next to Rarity, still seeking the edge.

By the time she reached it, her mane was extra-poofy, which had always been a good sign. A sign of what, exactly, seemed to vary, but it was always good. She looked over at the corner where that pegasus had been earlier, but it was empty. (Oh well) Turning back towards the bar, she noted a particularly dejected-looking pegasus mare nursing a glass of something (she couldn’t see what, whoever she was was practically hiding it from the outside world)at one end. Pinkie made a beeline for her and plopped on to the next barstool. Turning towards her new neighbor, she grinned almost as widely as she could and said,

“Hi, I’m Pinkie!”

“Oh, hi Pinkie,” the mare mumbled into her glass. “Great party.”

“Thanks! I try!” she bubbled in response. Suddenly growing serious (well, as serious as she could muster), she continued, “And what’s got your smile upside-down?”

Even as she asked, something about the mare’s chromatic mane and tail was tingling at the edge of her memory. She couldn’t quite pin it down...(Had she seen her before?) Suddenly, it clicked. Before she could quite stop herself, and long before the mare could have answered, Pinkie blurted out, “Hey, I know you! You’re the one who did the sonic rainboom!...Rainbow Dash!”

Instantly, the mare shifted from being dejected and listless to being visibly self-confident and assured as she leaned towards Pinkie. “Yeah, I get that sometimes,” she said, tone confiding and confident. “But only because it’s true! The one and only.”

“That was really neat!” Pinkie said over the party’s background. Waving her hoof at the three multicolored balloons on her flank, she added, “And I think it got me these!”

“Really?” Rainbow asked, curiosity tingeing her voice.

“Really!” Pinkie responded. “See,a long, long time ago, I lived on a rock farm with my mom and dad. And we--my sisters and my mom and my dad and me--we just worked all day long, every day. We did our duty. But that didn’t leave any time for anything else. And...and I love my family, I love my parents and my sisters, but...” she paused before continuing onwards.

“But one day, I saw a rainbow filling the sky and blowing away the clouds that were always there. And it...it just...it filled me up with warmth and happiness and...and I knew, I just knew that that needed to be shared...not just with everypony, but everything everywhere...” She shook her head and continued, “So I threw my parents and my sisters a party the next day, and then I got my cutie mark! But...the rock farm was pretty close to where you did the rainboom. And it was the same day that you did it...”

“Oh,” Rainbow said. “Ummmm...” she added after a moment’s pause, one forehoof reaching around to paw at the back of her neck, her face hovering between self-congratulations and a desperate desire to leave the conversation. After a long hesitation, she finally finally decided on self-congratulations, saying “That’s...great! Yeah, awesome,” although with strangely little conviction.

Pinkie chose to overlook that, cheerily responding “Yep!” After another moment of silence, punctuated by Vinyl Scratch’s music and the sound of hundreds of ponies dancing and partying in the background, she pushed again. “So, Rainbow Dash, what do yooou do here?”

“Oh, me?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard. Pinkie nodded. “Oh, I’m a scout pilot.”

“What’s that like?” Pinkie asked.

“Well...”

This is Fleet Command. Reporting Mothership pre-launch status:

Fleet Command...online.

Life support...online.

Main reactors...online.

Primary drives...online.

Hyperdrive...online.

Sensors...online.

Navigation...online.

Mining...online.

Production...online.

Cryogenic bays, sections A-J...online.

Sections K-T...online.

Scaffold Control, Mothership pre-launch checklist complete. Requesting permission for launch.

Roger, Scaffold Control. Release Control, release on my mark...mark.

Release confirmed. Thrust at 1%...5%...10%. Holding. The Mothership has cleared the Scaffold. We are away.

Hyperdrive is powered up and ready to initiate. Scaffold Control, Fleet Command requests permission to begin hyperdrive test.

Roger, Scaffold Control. Good luck, everypony. Beginning hyperspace transition on my mark...mark.

Outskirts

Equus Outskirts

“Exiting hyperspace”.

Shining exhaled. He hadn’t even had to hold his breath, as quick as it had been. That moment behind him, all that was left was to rendezvous and dock--

“Wait,” Twilight said. “Stellar positions indicate we are approximately 30,000 miles off of expected target...scanning...wait,” she said again, this time in a considerably less collected tone of voice. “I’m seeing several objects in the expected position of the Infinity. Some of them look like...they’re venting atmosphere? None of them have the right thermal profiles.”

Shining frowned. Had the Infinity hit a lonely chunk of ice, here in the outer system? It seemed unlikely...

Before he could finish that thought, Twilight jumped in again. “Picking up two hot objects at oh-one-seven degrees polar, three-one-nine degrees azimuth. Wait, they’re thrusting. High power...picking up very strong five-eleven line gamma radiation! They’re using antimatter!”

“Xenocontact?” Shining asked. To be in a first contact situation on the maiden voyage...!

Before Derpy could say a word, Twilight interrupted. “Pinging lidar...they’re 57,000 miles off our bow. Coming onto intercept trajectory. Multiple objects separating from them! Smaller objects are thrusting, using antimatter too...accelerations in excess of one gee. Ah...ah...intercept in fifty minutes.”

“Xenocontact, first contact protocols. Target the big ships. Operations Director, scramble all available fighters,” Shining ordered in a tone of voice which entirely belied his uncertainty and doubt. “Do not let them reach the Mothership.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Fleet Command, take us to General Quarters”.

"Gold 13, report engine status--"

"Gold 9, sensors are green, I say again green--"

"Section 2, weapons cold, I said weapons cold Five!"

If the shrill warbling whistle of the General Quarters hadn't shocked Rainbow from the drowsy lethargy the launch ceremony had put her in, the eruption of activity on her squadron's comms as their fighters undocked and began to file out of the hanger certainly would have. As her fighter slid out from its berth and into space under Hanger Control, she frantically scanned through her ship’s displays, trying to bring herself up to speed in record time.

"Gold Squadron," Spitfire's voice sliced into the chatter, "battle formation echo, all sections on section leaders. Uh..."

As Gold Squadron paraded out of the Mothership's hangar, Rainbow's slid into position a dozen or two miles behind Lightning Dust's fighter, in the perfect position to support her section leader without sacrificing her own maneuverability.

"situation is: unknowns, possibly hostile inbound, about an hour away. We're going to intercept them before they can reach the Mothership. Weapons fire not yet authorized.”

The shock of the siren was so great that Rarity almost jumped into the air. Almost. She did drop her fork, the utensil clattering unheard to the floor when her telekinetic grip slackened.

All around her, she dimly perceived the others who had come to watch the launch jumping to their hooves, in a few cases mouths moving, whatever noises they were making unheard amid the clamor of the General Quarters alarm.

Just a few seconds after it started, the siren abruptly stopped. A female voice followed the alarm over the ship’s speakers. Rarity quickly recognized Fleet Command from the launch ceremony she had been watching on the televisions in the cafeteria less than a minute earlier.

“General Quarters. General Quarters. All crew, report to duty stations. All crew, report to duty stations.”

She tried to remember what she was supposed to do in the event of a General Quarters, then nearly laughed. Report immediately to nearest emergency shelter. Well, here she was!

What was next...? Follow orders of shelter supervisor. Well, that varied based on shelter and time—although she could have named, in order, the supervisors for Prototyping’s shelter, she wasn’t sure who—

Almost as soon as she thought it, a certain cotton-candy voice cut through the fog of conversation that had begun to grow. “Hi everypony! As the senior chef on duty, I’m going to be your emergency shelter supervisor this morning!” Pinkie was waving excitedly from the not-yet-dismantled stage she had used the previous night.

Rarity groaned.

“I don’t care! Get sectors 52 and 53 locked down! Right now!” Applejack snapped into her communications headset. Before the team leader could respond, she reached out to her expansive console and flicked over to another of the channels screaming for her input.

A moment of listening later, and she was back to barking orders. “Look, ah get that everypony wants to take care of their problems before they get to shelter, but there ain't time for that! They need to get there now! Send sweep teams if you have tah, but make sure they get to cover ASAP!”

Gripping the mess of fish in her teeth, Fluttershy lifted herself into the air, ascending until she was skimming the lab's ceiling. She came to a halt above the largest aquarium in a room filled with them, a titanic construction occupying most of the back wall. Slowly, to avoid dropping the fish, she descended onto the aquarium's roof, stepping lightly to an access hatch on one side. Setting the fish down, she pulled it open, then turned to pick the fish back up before dropping them in, one by one.

The fish slipped quietly into the water, where their bodies slowly drifted downwards. In the center of the tank, just at the edge of the descending plume of food, a squid, about twelve inches long, was waiting. As she saw what was coming for her, her mantle began to rapidly flash different colors, conveying a clear message to the Yellow One above about what she thought of her diet.

"Now, now Ms. Squidley, I know you like anchovies, but you know they give you terrible indigestion," Fluttershy chided the complaining squid. "These are a nutritionally balanced, healthy meal for you, and I've tried to pick tastier fish than before. Won't you give them a try?"

Reluctantly, the squid waved out her tentacles, snagging one of the carcasses as they drifted downwards and bringing it to her beak, where she began to tear into it, ripping off chunks of flesh to swallow greedily. Slowly and begrudgingly, her mantle again began to change color.

Fluttershy smiled. "Well, I'm very glad you think--"

Knock knock

Fluttershy settled to the ground, turning as she descended to face the door. Before she could quite work out what was going on, the door sprang open, a tight cluster of three ponies in body-enveloping pressure suits forcing their way into the lab.

"Um...hello?" she said.

"Um, Doctor, uh...?" their leader stumbled.

"Fluttershy," she supplied.

"There's been a General Quarters issued and you're to report to emergency shelters immediately," he continued. "Surely you heard it?" he added, confusion evident.

She frowned. There had been an alarm a minute or two ago, but she had assumed it was part of the test. "Um...maybe?" she offered.

"Anyway, you need to get to the shelters ASAP," the leader finished. Without another word, he and his squad turned and began trotting down the corridor, away from the aquatic habitat.

Fluttershy turned her head to look back over her shoulder. Ms. Squidley was quickly devouring the fish carcasses, and she had already finished feeding most of the other creatures in the lab. The few who hadn't been would hardly die if their next feeding was delayed a few hours. Nodding to herself, she stepped out of the lab, carefully closing and locking the door, then rapidly trotted away towards the shelter.

Rarity winced. That joke had fallen so flat it had been almost painful. She couldn’t hear anypony else laughing, either, although she could hear whispers passing through the small clusters that had grown up around the stage.

“What’s going on?” “Do you know what’s happening?” “I heard there was a fire!” “A fire!?—”

What was going on? Was something wrong with the ship? And out here—!

She forced herself to stop and breathe. Panicking would help nopony, least of all herself.

She nodded, feeling herself coming back into balance. Yes, panicking was pointless. She glanced around herself again, gauging the crowd’s mood. Like herself a few moments earlier, they seemed on the verge of rash action. There was nothing to it: Pinkie needed help.

There were few ponies around the front, and Rarity was easily able to slink up to the stage. A few hooves away, she took a running leap, hanging herself from the stage’s edge for a moment before Pinkie reached down and helped her up.

Pinkie started saying something about her, but Rarity tuned it out as she looked over the crowd from her new vantage point. Even the slightest glance was enough to show that as she feared they were paying no attention to Pinkie’s antics, or her speeches. She leaned over towards the party pony and whispered in her ear, “Pinkie, this isn’t working”.

“I know that,” she hissed back, and Rarity could see a few hairs springing out of place in her mane. “But I have to try.”

“Well...if we did something else like...hmm...ideeea~!”

Shining Armor watched as Derpy and her team frantically cycled through their library of first contact messages, desperate to find something, anything, that could elicit a response from the aliens.

“Sir, alien thermal output and drive plume size has just made a major jump,” his sensors officer interrupted.

“They went from two to twenty gee at the same time. Looks like they were holding back,” Twilight concurred. “That’s better than anything we have but the Arrows. Time to Mothership is now sixteen minutes. Current time to intercept for Gold Squadron, fifteen minutes.”

At that, Tactical jumped in. “If what Sensors and Command are seeing is right, Commodore,” Cloud Kicker said, “Green and Black won’t be able to make intercept if the bogeys do any evasive maneuvers. Not if they have any reasonable mass ratio.”

“Sir, Gold Squadron is nearing the edge of the exclusion zone. Go for throttle up?” the fighter director added to an already overloaded conversation.

“Of course,” Shining ordered. “Gold is go for maximum thrust. Tactical, on Green and Black--”

“Yes?” Cloud Kicker asked.

“If the bogeys launch missiles--”

“I agree, sir,” she interrupted. “They still have a role to play, even if they don’t need to be charging out there for a probably futile intercept of the busses or fighters or whatever.”

“Thank you, Tactical,” Shining replied. “Fighter Director, Green and Black are not, again not authorized for maximum thrust at this time. They are to proceed forwards into the missile intercept region, but slowly, Green ahead. Maximum intercept area, commander.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Shining Armor was studying the strategic plot again, watching his fighters and the alien spacecraft continued their slow crawl towards one another. Derpy’s team was still transmitting, but at this point it was time to face facts: the aliens weren’t interested in talking.

He opened a channel to Derpy and Cloud Kicker. “Xenocontact, Tactical: Should we go weapons-free?” he asked as soon as it turned green.

Cloud Kicker responded in an instant. “Yes, sir. All the evidence we have is that they’re hostiles, and could cause major damage to the Mothership.”

It took much, much longer for Derpy to reply. When she did, it was with a haggard, beaten-down voice. “I have to agree with Tactical. They have not responded to our hails and with the destruction of the Infinity...”

Shining keyed over to the the fighter director and Twilight. Without preamble, he announced “All ships are free to fire at will. Fleet Command, uplink targeting and intercept data.”

Rainbow watched the aberrant constellation slowly crawl towards her. In her helmet’s display, she could see the alien ships blazing away in the infrared, diamond-like points of light trailing vast streamers of exhaust as they raced towards their meeting in—she glanced at the timer—five minutes.

She was no stranger to boredom punctuated by explosions; but this was different than what she had experienced in SFTC or flight school. There was a tight little knot wrapping itself up in her stomach, growing by the minute, but she distracted herself, mentally reviewing her fighter’s start-up checklist, the engine settings, the position of every single one of the ship’s controls. Because if she thought about that little knot...

Apparently, somepony else was having trouble too, because before she could finish that thought Lightning had keyed in to her ship, on a private channel. “Lieutenant,” she said, without preamble. “Just remember: Do your job and you’ll be fine.”

Rainbow sighed, as much as she could while immersed in g-protection fluid and accelerating twenty times harder than her body was ever meant to. She was thinking far too much with all this sitting around and waiting. Evidently, it was getting to her superior officers, too.

Spitfire interrupted. “Gold Squadron,” she began. “ROE update: fire at will. Targeting data and intercept trajectories are being uploaded...now.”

The sparkling points of light ahead suddenly changed color, from a brilliant blue-white to a startlingly bright red, standing out against the black background of space. A tight yellow box surrounded her target a moment later. Moments later, her computer added an overlay of white arrows and diagrams, showing the exact moves she should take for optimal positioning.

Rainbow gripped the control sticks and began steering her fighter onto its course. She tried to think about something--anything--else, but again and again her thoughts kept returning to that little knot in her stomach--well, not so little anymore. She knew exactly what it signified, and hated it. Fear--it just wasn’t--well, wasn’t her. And for all that she wished she could share in her superior’s self-confident bravado--and for all that she would never have publicly displayed anything else--she couldn’t lie to herself. Not for very long, anyways. She--

A loud buzzer sounded in her ear. Startled, she saw that she had drifted slightly off course. More importantly, there were no longer five minutes to intercept, but a bare sixty seconds, ticking downwards as she watched. Gently, she put her fighter back on course. Thirty seconds. Fifteen seconds. Five seconds. Zero--

Fifty impactors zipped down the fighter’s gun, accelerated to a speed more than six miles per second greater than the already incredible velocity Rainbow had built up over the past eleven minutes.

Each of them, as they emerged from the gun’s barrel, was spinning—just a little, nothing like a rifle bullet back on Equus—scanning a well-defined region of the space ahead of them, where the fire-control systems had computed the enemy fighter would be. Even as blind as they were compared to the fighter that had spat them out, its exhaust stood out in the infrared like a fire in the night, utterly distinct from the speckled backdrop of stars and galaxies behind it. As each of the impactors detected it, they ignited the rockets they carried in their bellies and aimed themselves for a point a few hundred miles ahead.

A second passed. The enemy fighter had spotted the stream of rocket plumes heading in its general direction almost as soon as they ignited, and more distantly hundreds of others as the Equestrian fighters opened fire. For a few dozen milliseconds, its onboard computer systems tracked the kinetics, long enough to determine where they were going--and where they had come from. In a gout of antimatter-hot plasma, the alien fighter slewed and spat a potent response to Rainbow’s attack, then slid as it began evasive maneuvers.

Rainbow’s impactors noted the sudden change in the enemy’s drive profile immediately. The barest instant later and they were already following, frantically changing their own thrust vectors as the enemy fighter jerked and skidded unpredictably across the sky. As time flew by in intervals of a half-dozen milliseconds, more and more of Rainbow’s kinetics were forced to concede that they would not be able to make the intercept, redirecting their thrust to blow them impotently out of the battlespace. In a hundred thousand years, perhaps, they would return and threaten some other ship; but for today, they had been harmlessly spent.

Three seconds after they were fired, only fifteen of the original fifty were still tracking.

A second later, seven of those remained on course.

After five seconds, just three were still on course for the alien fighter when...

They hit.

As the moment of intercept approached, the background hum of the operations room died away as operators less concerned with feeding information back and forth between the Mothership’s nerve center and its subsidiary departments and operational divisions than with the impending outcome of the battle neglected their consoles to watch the slow approach of the two clouds of fighters towards each other. A hiss of sucked in breaths marked contact--followed by the slower sound of exhalation as the two groups passed through each other, neither vanishing from the display.

Shining Armor was not immune to the psychic pull of the room’s mood, but unlike most of the room he did not turn away after it was clear that neither side had been destroyed to return to a previously neglected task.

Instead, he simply asked a question, eyes never leaving the display. “Tactical, results?”

“One second, sir,” Cloud Kicker said as the information popped up on her screen. “Four down for us. For them...six. Wait,”

“--they’re breaking contact,” Shining Armor could hear Sensors saying, confusion evident.

On the holodisplay the projected tracks for the alien fighters were diverging, flowering outward from the ruler-straight trajectory they had been following since their launch. While before they would have eventually run into the Mothership itself, now they would--provided they continued thrusting--now they would fly around it.

“I’m picking up...something,” Twilight interrupted while everypony was trying to interpret the new alien formation. “It’s like a very diffuse cloud, traveling along their former trajectory, straight towards us...I can only see it on radar...It’s kinetics! They fired at us before breaking contact!”

“Makes sense,” Cloud Kicker said. “They couldn’t have had any goal besides destroying us.”

“What about reconnoitering us?” Twilight sharply responded. “I’ve been looking at the information from the intercept; those kinetics won’t do more than scratch our paint. But if those fighters are scouts, like ours...”

“...then they were--will be,” Shining Armor corrected himself, “in a position where they can observe the effects of their weapons on our armor and gather data on it.”

“Exactly,” Twilight said. “But that information would be useless if they didn’t have heavier units around somewhere. They can’t have expected to destroy us by themselves.”

Shining looked down at his console, then back up. “How long until we can reach the Infinity, Fleet Command?”

“About ten hours at maximum thrust. If we use the conventional drives.”

What--no. No, he was going to head this off at the pass. “You can’t be seriously suggesting jumping to the wreckage! Not when our last jump was 30,000 miles off target!”

Twilight was entirely unperturbed by his outburst. “It’s the only way,” she began. “We will have to spend nearly half a day reaching the wreckage, and who knows how long searching it. Meanwhile, the heavy units associated with the force we just drove off might attack, more confident now that they’ve tested our strength. Or maybe they’ll bypass us and head directly for an unprepared Equus. It will waste time, and time,” she relentlessly pressed forward, “is the one thing we don’t have. I have recalibrated the drives,” she confidently added. “We will not be off-target.”

“Tactical?”

“...she makes good points, sir. Tactical must agree with her assessment. I am in favor of the jump.”

“Drives?”

“Fleet Command has adjusted hyperdrive calibration settings. We’re looking at...wait, ah, we believe that they will lead to significantly increased precision in exit location.”

“Operations Director, how long to recover all launched fighters? And can Gold Squadron make a rendezvous at the Infinity?”

“It will take several minutes, sir. It will be squeezing things very, very tight to wait for recovery with those kinetics inbound. And yes, although it will take some time for them to make it.”

“What if Green and Black squadrons proceed at best speed to the Infinity?” Shining asked.

“That will take more than twenty minutes for Green Squadron and almost thirty for Black Squadron,” he replied. “However, it will take only ninety seconds to recover just Red Squadron, in that case.”

“Do it,” he heard himself say. “Fleet Command--”

“I will, Shiney, don’t worry. Just let me work.”

“Core capacitors charged. Coordinates locked. Navigation set. Hyperspace jump on my mark...three, two, one, mark--”

As smoothly and quickly as she had entered hyperspace, the Mothership withdrew, some thirty thousand miles away from where she had started.

Twilight was the first to react. “Calibrating current position...we are eighteen point seven miles off of the Infinity’s remains,” she concluded, the faintest trace of smugness in her voice.

“Thank you, Fleet Command,” Shining acknowledged. “Operations Director, are the ship’s SAR teams ready?”

“Getting there sir, but not yet. They were--”

“That’s fine, Ops. Tell them we’re bringing everypony home. And have you alerted the salvage crews?”

“Yes sir, they’re reporting to their ships now.”

“Good. Make sure they’re coordinated with the SAR operations. They’re to keep an eye out for the Infinity’s computer systems; we need to know exactly--”

“Sir,” Cloud Kicker interrupted, drawing his attention away from the minutiae of the salvage operations. “The alien fighters--” He looked at the holodisplay. As before, the projected trajectories of the aliens were curving and bending away from where they had been. Now, instead of flowering outward to encompass the Mothership and her fleet, they were bending back inward and shortening, signifying a reduction in speed.

Before they could work out what was going on, Twilight added “Picking up hyperspace signatures...they’re coming from the initial hot sources.” The two objects vanished from their position trailing well behind their brood of fighters only to emerge moments later thousands of miles downrange, beyond where the Mothership had been a few minutes earlier.

“Extending time projection,” Twilight said. Suddenly, the projected trajectories snapped forwards, extending several times in quick succession. Moments later, what they had been wondering about moments earlier was abundantly clear: the trajectories all intercepted each other at the same point--where the two vessels that had just hyperspaced were.

“They’re leaving,” Shining Armor said.

“It will be some time before they can make rendezvous and dock,” Cloud Kicker noted. “We’ll have a float after that if they decide to bring in their heavies--if they have heavies,” she added, glancing at the ceiling for a moment. “I’m still not convinced this isn’t somepony biting off more than they can chew. Raiders or pirates or something of that nature.”

“Opinion noted, Tactical, but save it for the after-action report.”

“Sir,” she turned away.

As the cherry-red earth pony stallion’s performance came to an end, Rarity plastered on her best glassy smile and started her own part of the routine. “Well, that was fascinating, but I think--”

“You know, there’s a lot more where that came from! I could--”

“No dear, that’s quite alright,” Rarity emphasized, hitching her smile one notch higher in the process. “Pinkie!” she called out before he could object. “Who’s next?”

“Hmmmm...you!” the pink pony said, leveling her forehoof at one of the members of the impromptu audience they had pulled over from the knots of ponies who had been worrying themselves to death in the cafeteria. Rarity scanned the crowd for a moment, looking for any signs of an incipient panic. Fortunately, most of them seemed to be concentrating on their fellow crewponies making fools of themselves rather than worrying about whether the Mothership was about to explode, allowing a little bit more of the tension that had been warping her gut and making her feel rather...unpleasant for the past few minutes to let go of itself and fade away.

“Rarity, you’re up!” Pinkie whispered to her, and her attention snapped back to the matter at hoof. She considered the pony before her: pegasus, female. Pink coat, somehow perhaps more than even Pinkie’s, but with a terrifically clashing pumpkin orange mane and tail, together with light green eyes.

Just as she opened her mouth, Rarity spoke. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Oh, um, I’m Fusion Flame,” she started awkwardly, gesturing to her cutie mark: a deuteron and a triton merging in a flash into a helium and a neutron. “Um, I work in Engineering, the drive design department.”

“Alright, and is there anything you particularly like to do other than that? Singing, dancing? Maybe you have some interesting--”

Before Rarity could finish trying to draw Fusion Flame out, the loudspeakers clicked on with a piercing two-tone whistle, followed quickly by Fleet Command’s voice: “Attention all crew, attention all crew: General Quarters is lifted, I say again General Quarters is lifted. Resume normal duty.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Search and Rescue teams report to Hangar Bay Twelve-C. Salvage crews report to Hangar Bay Fourteen-D. I say again, Search and Rescue teams report to Hangar Bay Twelve-C, salvage crews to Fourteen-D.”

As abruptly as it had started, the announcement ended, leaving Rarity hanging mid-sentence. She smiled broadly at Fusion Flame. “I suppose you just earned a stay of execution, dear,” she joked. More slowly and nervously, Fusion smiled back before turning and hopping down off of the stage, quickly returning to the clique she had come from.

“Thank you so much for helping out Rarity!” Pinkie bounded up to her, unconstrained grin punctuating her words. “At first it was just going so...badly,” she frowned, hair drooping around her face, before perking back up as she continued, “but then you came in and everything was fine!” Before Rarity could react, Pinkie threw her hooves around the machinist, pulling her into a tight hug, adding “Thank you!”

Rarity squeezed her friend right back, “It was no trouble at all, dear. Anything for a friend. Now,” she said, pulling out of the hug, “how about we go back to eating, hmmm?”

Fluttershy peeked around the doorframe. Nopony in sight. Quietly, she gave a small exhalation of relief and walked in, muffling the sound of her hoofsteps so that they could barely be heard even by her.

Once she was in the center of the room, surrounded by cages, she began by simply saying “Hello, everyone...” Before she could go farther, she was interrupted by a wave of sound, synthesized from the chittering of a hundred hundred rats all trying to speak at once.

“Oh dear. Nopony told you?”

As before, the room filled with sound as the animals replied.

“Oh, um, well, that was a General Quarters. It means something was wrong--I’m sorry, I don’t know what--so they needed to tell everypony in a hurry. And then everypony had to leave to get to someplace it’s safer.”

Not paying any attention to the response, she sighed and dug the tip of her hoof into the ground, not daring to look up at all those she had let down. “I’m sorry for not telling you earlier. It was thoughtless of me. Can you forgive me?”

Fluttershy smiled as they responded, a smile that grew broader and broader as she processed what they were saying. When they finally fell quiet, she replied,

“Oh, um, thank you very much!”

“Fluttershy?”

“Eeep!”

From her position upside down on the floor, Fluttershy could see who had just spoken: a brown-coated, blue-maned stallion. She couldn’t see his cutie mark from where she was, but she knew it would be a lattice of DNA strands, woven in a cat cradle; it was only Gene Seed, her geneticist. She sighed.

“Um. Was I interrupting something?” he asked, looking curiously around the room while she pulled herself to her feet.

“No!” she answered, rather too quickly. “Um, no, just checking on the rats after the General Quarters, can’t be too careful, um...” she elaborated.

He fixed her with a look for a moment. “Well, if you say so,” he said, breaking eye contact. “You do remember there’s supposed to be a team lead meeting in five minutes, right?”

She gasped.

“I take it the answer is no, then,” he dryly responded. “Go on, I’ll check the other subjects,” he said a moment later as she stood there, frozen. At the sound of his voice, she came to life, springing out the door.

A moment later, she poked her head back around the frame. “Thank you!” she said before running off again.

Applejack was worried.

Rationally, she knew that nopony at home could even know about this little fight yet; that even if she had never left home, she couldn’t and wouldn’t have done anything that could make them safer. But irrationally...

She knew why, of course; ever since college she had found the minutiae of creating and operating life support systems intoxicating, and when you’re asked--asked!--to put a passion like that at the service of the greatest project in history...how could anypony have said no?

Still, compared to leaving her family behind...

“Ma’am?”

Her attention snapped back to the cramped conference room she and a half-dozen other ponies were crammed into, more specifically to the blue-coated, golden-maned unicorn standing, pointer floating half-forgotten beside him, at the front of the room. On the screen next to him was some bullet-pointed list of excuses for the sloppy performance of the Bioregenerative group earlier in the morning; she must have tuned out at some point, because none of it seemed familiar to her, except for the sour stink of deflection.

If she was being entirely honest with herself--and she at least tried to be--she was doing a lousy job today. Too focused on irrelevancies, she chided herself. Focus on what’s at hoof.

What was at hoof was a mess. Everypony was trying to blame everypony else for everything that had gone wrong earlier in the morning, and Applejack was getting very tired of it. Who had screwed up, if anypony, was irrelevant; what mattered was getting it right next time. Maybe she needed to make that more clear.

“Now, ah know y’all did your best earlier,” she started. Before her subordinates could plaster their feelings on their faces, she stomped her hoof down on the tabletop, ensuring everypony’s attention was firmly on her. “But that wasn’t nearly good enough! It took us six minutes--six minutes!--to get the whole ship locked down. Sure, that’s a heck of a lot better than any city on Equus could do. Sure, that was more than enough time--this time. But what about next time?

“Ah mean, we ran into aliens--hostile aliens--just on the edge of our own system. When we actually leave it...who knows what we’ll find? I’d put money, good money, on us finding more aliens who don’t like us too much. And when we run into them, maybe next time they’ll be five minutes away. Four. Maybe less. Next time, we could lose ponies because we didn’t lock down fast enough.

“So once we get back to Equus, we’re going to be running a lot more drills, practicing to do it faster.” She raised her hoof to forestall the inevitable protests. “Ah know, ah know drills disrupt y’all’s day-to-day work. Ah know they, well, they suck. But they’re the only way we can get better. And we gotta do better. Next time we have to do something like this, ah want it done not in six minutes, but ninety seconds. Y’all clear?” She looked at everypony else at the table. Slowly, one by one, they locked eyes with her and nodded. “Good. Now, if y’all will excuse me, ah need to actually write this up for the colts upstairs...”

“See, Lieutenant,” Lightning Dust expounded between slurping down strands of her fettucine al pesto, “it’s like this: if they hadn’t screwed up, the others would still be here, eating with us. They did, so they aren’t.”

Rainbow ignored her mentor’s words, instead forking another bite of the microwaved vegetable lasagna sitting on the plate before her into her mouth. As her commander continued to lecture on how nopony could possibly have died without making a mistake somewhere, Rainbow continued eating, allowing Lightning’s words to flow over her like the wind past her wings, without her mind engaging with them. She could see where they were really coming from.

Fear.

She knew the look in Lightning’s eyes; it was one she had worn herself all too often, even if she did her best to make out otherwise in front of, well, everypony. Lightning was just plain scared, but couldn’t admit it. Too much of her self-image was wrapped up in not admitting it, in being fearless. If she couldn’t admit she was afraid, though, maybe she could convince herself that she wasn’t, or at least shouldn’t be. If ponies only died because of screw-ups, well, as the great Lightning Dust she wouldn’t screw up, therefore she wouldn’t die, no?

It was all too familiar a line of thought to Rainbow, sitting there listening to Lightning carrying on. She hoped her superior would break herself out of that line of thought sooner rather than later. Rainbow had nearly killed herself more than once trying to rationalize away her fears; she hoped that if things came to that this time, it would end with somepony being only almost killed.

Abruptly, a loud screech echoed from Rainbow’s plate. She looked down, only to see her lasagna gone and her fork trying to murder the plate it had been sitting on. She couldn’t even remember how it tasted.

Abruptly, she looked up at Lighting chewing away on the other side of the table. “Permission to speak, ma’am?”

“Of course,” Lightning answered her, waving her free hoof dismissively.

“I, um, need to stretch my legs,” she half-lied, the tingle in her hooves justification enough to escape the conversation.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Rainbow answered, stepping away with her plate and utensils for the disposal station. As she stepped into the hall just outside of the mess, she saw Spitfire emerge from one of the lounges

Rainbow slowed to a stop just in front of the Captain, puzzled by her behavior.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” she said, without an ounce of emotion touching her voice or face.

“What? Why...I mean, what are you congratulating me for?” Rainbow asked, confused.

“You are the first pilot in Space Force history to score a combat kill,” Spitfire said. “By half a millisecond, according to Fleet. I think...” her face scrunched up in thought “the first pony to have killed anypony in battle in...a hundred years? Was that when the Onion War ended? Or was it a hundred and ten?...Anyways,” she said, mind and gaze snapping back to the present, “there you have it. Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Rainbow caught herself a moment later, saluting her captain.

"Core is secure"

Shining Armor blinked, lifting his muzzle out of the mass of paperwork overflowing his desk. Around him, the Operations Center quietly hummed away, coordinating the salvage operations. No alarm there. With nothing for him to do, he sank back into his paperwork...

Only to bolt back up once the words penetrated his head. The Infinity's computer core! After the salvage crews had verified its location and (relatively) intact status, it had been nearly three hours of slicing into the ship and clearing debris before the entire room and its computer systems could be removed for later forensic analysis. With no way to know which of the thousands of storage clusters the crucial black-box data was residing on, they couldn't be any more selective. It had been a peculiar mix of utterly terrifying and absolutely boring waiting for the salvage crews to finish their work. On the one hoof, there was the spine-tingling threat of further aliens showing up, especially once their frigates had, as Twilight predicted, hyperspaced away beyond the Mothership's sensor range, while on the other there had been absolutely nothing for him to do (besides paperwork) once the initial orders had been given. Twilight was managing the salvage operation with her unparalleled ability to constantly monitor and update the plan of operations, and anything he could do would just get in the way.

All this flashed through Shining's mind in an instant, and was compressed down into two words: "Status, Command?"

"The core's out, but it still needs to be secured for transport back to the Scaffold. Thirty minutes for that, I think. And the bodies..."

"Half of them are already on board?"

"Yes, and the rest should be in the mortuary within the hour. Shiney, I..."

"Don't," he interrupted her. "They left knowing they might not survive. They died for Equus."

“Hyperspace core charged. Coordinates for the Scaffold set. Engaging hyperdrive on my mark...mark.”

Equus

NB: You may enjoy listening to this while reading.

Equus

"Exiting hyperspace. Polling EPS...no signal. Wait..."

At first, he didn't recognize the...thing Twilight was displaying on the holoprojector in the center of the room. It was a gibbous ball, huge splotches of blackened, charred crust decorating it, fringed by patches of glowing orange and yellow or vast areas of white. Most of the surface was an ugly grey-blue-green color, like a sea on a stormy day, but here and there, between the veins of light and expanse of blue-grey there were areas of a brownish-orange color. In the black crescent sliced out of one side of the sphere, only the veins of light could be seen, winding across the surface like an angry cancer. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

Except...There were certain similarities...that boundary between brown and blue, he had seen that before, hadn't he? Only, then it was the boundary between the Great Desert, the largest expanse of barren land on the planet, and the Walking Sea, the heart of equine civilization, one of the greatest shorelines in the world. Yes, he was sure that was it. He had only seen it a thousand times while working on the Mothership's construction.

Other points of similarity began to intrude into his consciousness. Here a stretch of coast that should have been lined with rainforest and fringed by coral reefs, not titanic clouds of steam; there, a bay, at whose head should have been a vast river and a great city, not a charred, barren expanse of land. That dark crescent, it matched where night should have been, but there were no city lights illuminating the night, only those awful lines of fire.

"Dear Sisters," he whispered. "it's Equus."

Dimly, Shining could hear the sounds of his command staff falling to pieces. Ahead of him, Derpy had collapsed, weeping, on her console, a tiny pool of tears already forming beneath her seat. Next to her, Cloud Kicker was rigid as a pole, staring fixedly at the holodisplay.

"Luna, Mother of Mercy, forgive them their sins. May your intercession speed them to the eternal beyond, and may they know everlasting peace in your loving bosom. Amen."

Twilight's voice, barely more than a whisper in his ear, shocked him out of his mental collapse. "Twi...Command, what...I mean, do you--"

"It was a diversion." Twilight interrupted, her voice solid ice. "No...a rearguard. They were to prevent anypony from escaping while the main force struck Equus. And we fell for it, hook, line, and sinker."

"But, but...what do we do now, Twilight?"

"I...don't know." She hesitated for a moment. "Wait. I am detecting multiple hyperspace signatures opening up nearby. They are consistent with the signatures we detected near the Infinity."

A rainbow streak zoomed down the main corridor towards Gold Squadron's hanger bay. Up ahead, she spotted a familiar turquoise-yellow blur, moving nearly as fast as her. A slight adjustment of course later, and she was running alongside Lightning as the two of them made their way at top speed to their fighters.

"Commander!" she panted, breathing hard, "What is going on?"

"I don't know, Rainbow!" Lighting all but shouted back. "Command told us we needed to scramble five minutes ago, that's it!"

"I am picking up seven distinct signatures at one-nine-three miles, oh-eight-six degrees polar and two-six-seven degrees azimuth," Twilight continued. "Two of them exactly match the signatures of the ships we encountered near the Infinity."

The image of Equus dissolved, replaced by a tactical display of the space for two hundred miles in all direction. "Behind" the Mothership, the wreckage of the Scaffold trailed for nearly a hundred miles, twisted girders, blown-out life support modules, and bullet-riddled manufacturing units filling space. A tight cluster of seven red dots appeared at the edge of the screen, on almost the same plane as the Mothership and the Scaffold's wreckage and very nearly directly port of the Mothership.

"I am scrambling fighters and putting the ship on General Quarters," Twilight finished.

"Commodore?"

Shining's head snapped up as Cloud Kicker's voice hit his ear. The pegasus had recovered from her earlier shock, at least enough to be hunched over her console instead of frozen stiff.

"Yes, Commander?" he asked by way of response.

"Reporting for duty, sir."

Shining nodded. "Thank you, Tactical. Let’s get to work."

"Okay ponies, we're on Code Black--full military lockdown! All DC teams to surface zones in all areas!" Applejack shouted into her headset, the panic infecting Fleet Command's voice spreading to her. Sitting back, she watched as her ponies scrambled to make it happen, and wondered.

After all, they were supposed to be in orbit around Equus, weren't they? Why would Fleet Command order a lockdown there? Surely it was the safest place they could be? The more she turned her orders around in her mind, the less Applejack liked them. And if there were enemies out there, and now enemies here...

"Vessels are exiting hyperspace...mark. Seven vessels have emerged from hyperspace, presumed hostile."

"Two match the support vessels we saw near the Infinity," Twilight added a moment later. "They and a third vessel are launching fighters. 18, 36, 54...mark, I count 54, five-four fighters launched."

She paused. "Something's different this time," she noted. "I'm picking up a huge amount of radio chatter and several active radars. Before, they were absolutely silent aside from their infrared emissions."

"Maybe it's the number of ships?" Cloud Kicker suggested. "Could be they've outstripped the capacity of their laser transceivers."

"If they use communications lasers," Shining noted. "Ops, how long until the fighters are formed up?"

"Weren't on alert when we got back, sir, so it'll be a few minutes."

"We do not have that much time," Twilight said. "They are currently forming up, but they would be able to reach us within a few minutes at most if they pressed an attack."

"Ops, those fighters need to be out ASAP," Shining ordered. "Command, try to disrupt their communications, sensors, whatever you can."

"Yes, sir," Thunder Rush answered before dropping into the launch control loop.

"On it," Twilight added a moment later.

As she moved to hook her suit up to the dispensary station, Lightning's voice snapped into her headset. "No time Lieutenant! The ship reservoirs are full, we'll fill up while we're launching."

"Aye aye, ma'am," Rainbow stepped away and towards her fighter, pausing only to bump hooves with the technician standing next to it before stepping into the cockpit. The technician helped her strap herself down and connect her suit with the ship's systems before climbing back out and closing the hatch. For a moment she was plunged into absolute blackness before the displays lit up in a blaze of color. "Launch Control, Gold 11 ready for launch," she reported, frantically running over the displays to check if it was actually true.

"Roger, Gold 11. Launch sequence initiated. Your orders are to cover Green and Black squadrons as they launch. Targeting data is being uploaded to your ship...now."

Wait, what? Rainbow barely noticed as her ship slipped out of dock and towards the hanger exit.Targeting data? Cover? Around Equus? And...that was Fleet Command, not any of the normal launch control personnel!

As her ship completed launching and exited the hanger, a second voice entered her suddenly topsy-turvy world as crisply as a uniform on inspection day.

"Listen up Gold Squadron," Spitfire said. "Fleet's given us our orders, and we're going to make sure Green and Black have the opportunity to form up. Squadron, by sections! Section leaders, you're in charge! Some of these sons of bitches have tangled with us before, well, we're going to make them regret their decision to stop running!"

Rainbow, unfortunately, hadn't heard a word of it. She was too busy gaping at what had sprung to life in her helmet's display. What lay to her right...and ahead of her...were beyond her power of comprehension. She shook her head. That, she could deal with later. For now, she had a job to do.

"Range will be one-zero-zero miles on my mark...mark," Twilight announced to the quiet of the Operations Center. "They must be close to turnaround, but they're still accelerating at a steady 2 gee," she added for Shining's benefit.

"Tactical concurs that they're on a brachistochrone, sir. At this acceleration rate, they'll not get any benefit from a fly-by."

Shining glanced up at the holoprojector's display. The loose sphere of enemy fighters and what he could only presume were the enemy's heavy strike units hadn't changed much since they split away from their support units a minute after jumping in. The twelve green dots representing Gold Squadron and the others just streaming out and forming up seemed pathetic next to the armada advancing towards them. The countdown clock hovering at the edge of the display was ticking down each second until they reached the Mothership, telling them they only had a few minutes to organize a defense.

"Tactical, Ops, Command, talk to me. We need to do something to break up their formation, or our other fighters won't have the chance to deploy."

Cloud Kicker broke in first. "Sir, Tactical--I--think they're protecting not just their heavies but some type of bomber. See the wedge in the center of the formation, just in front of the box of heavies?"

He did. Two "V"s of fighters crossing each other perpendicularly to form a hollow spear-head, a total of twelve ships in the group.

"Each of them is about three times heavier than their scouts based on drive output levels," she continued. "That's not as heavy as our heavy fighters, but Command says they don't have turrets, either."

"Yes," Twilight added. "I mean no, my sensors aren't picking up any sign of turreted weapons on any of the light craft, only the heavies."

"Three times the mass is enough to fit much heavier weapons than their scouts could carry. I don't think the heavies are the only anti-Mothership weapons that they brought to this fight, sir."

"And how does that help us, Tactical?"

"Sir, I suggest Gold Squadron be vectored in to intercept these bombers. The enemy would be forced to react to their approach, especially if I'm right, and it would definitely disrupt them long enough to get the rest of our forces out before they can attack. If they can successfully take down these fighters, so much the better."

"A glorious charge, Commander?"

"Yes, sir. It's cold, I know, but Gold isn't the deciding factor here, Green, Black, and Red are. Even if Gold is completely knocked out, we'll have near numerical parity, 48 for us versus 54 for them, less whatever losses they take from Gold. And we'll have the Mothership's defensive weapons. If sacrificing them means protecting the others..."

"...Ops, Command, give the orders."

"Change in orders, Gold," Spitfire's voice sounded in Rainbow's ear. "Command's designating targets for interception. Maximum thrust."

Rainbow slammed her fighter's throttle against its buffers, muscles tensing beneath her coat. In an instant, the g-meter hanging in the display ahead of her had flickered from zero to twenty, then jumped again, finally coming to rest just above 21. Rainbow felt herself sinking back into the padding of her seat, heard the structure groan as it adjusted to the forces acting on it.

In the display ahead of her, the soft red icons of enemy fighters flared with brilliant coronas, infrared emissions skyrocketing. Rainbow's ears flicked as the warning receiver sounded a high-pitched tone, her attention switching for a moment to the radar plot to see whether there were any incoming missiles. Ahead, the enemy formation was pulling into a twisted cone aimed at Gold.

Rainbow glanced at the mission clock. Less than twenty seconds until they hit their targets, fifteen until they were among the fighters protecting them. A white path to the boxed cluster of spacecraft she was aiming at popped up on the screen, her computer's best guess at a survivable path. She gripped her joysticks and began to follow, sub-vocalizing as she designated the fighters along it as targets of opportunity.

Ten seconds to contact. Rainbow ran over her fighter's status again. Fuel, good, systems, good, ammunition, full. Nothing for her to do.

Five seconds. At this rate, there was a better than 50% chance of hitting the nearest fighters. She pushed the trigger.

At once, the display lit up in a blaze of light. Even before her burst had finished exiting the barrel, the computer was screaming at her to take evasive action. She obliged, twisting about just enough for the main drive to throw her off her previous course before turning back towards her targets. As she turned, her nose drifted across another fighter and she unleashed another quarter-second burst before diving off target.

Before she finished turning back towards the center of the enemy formation, Rainbow twirled again to evade another burst of enemy fire, gun tracking just close enough to another target of opportunity for her to fire again. As she nosed down towards the scattering flock, another pulsed warning tone from the incoming fire alarm split her skull, and she was forced to dodge away again, only able to fire on two more enemy fighters for her trouble.

She swung violently towards her targets, too spread out now for her to catch all of them--and she was still ten seconds away. Snarling as best she could while, technically, drowning, she swung away again as her computer warned her of more incoming fire. Another hapless enemy crossed her sights and was rewarded with a burst of gunfire before she was again able to turn towards her targets. Five seconds away, and it was time to attack. She got off a burst, swung and let off another--then she had to jink away again, losing her chance to strike a third target--and she was past, out of engagement range.

Ahead of her, there were only stragglers, a few fighters who hadn't joined in the main clash earlier. None of them were in range, and she slipped past them at speed, heading straight out of the battlespace. As she passed beyond the last fighters, the trilling of incoming fire monitors, the teeth-jarring whine of the warning receiver, and the hoot of the proximity alarm faded away, replaced by little more than the faint whirr of pumps and hum of electronics.

She checked the mission clock. Fifteen seconds had passed since they had hit the first line of fighters.

As it had at the Infinity, the Operations Center lapsed into a tense silence as Gold Squadron neared the edge of the enemy formation, a warped cone calculated to hit Gold's flying wedge point-to-point.

Shining Armor couldn't turn away as the two wedges met and both red and green dots began to vanish from the holoprojector. Nearer the Mothership, each second saw Green and Black move into more and more coherent formations, and Red into better and better positions from which to defend the Mothership.

Cloud Kicker interrupted as Gold's wedge broke through the enemy lines, only a second or two after it reached them. "Sir, they're not trying to brake," she said, a hint of surprise in her voice. "Their scouts are coming straight towards us at full throttle. They'll blow past us at this rate."

"Assessment?"

"They'll be in range only a little after Gold clears the rear of their formation. Main elements will be separated by quite a bit...enough time for engagements not to overlap," she added, surprise hitching up a notch or two. "Looks like we got what we wanted."

On the holoprojector, Gold's wedge, by this point clearly thinned, was nearly halfway through what had been the sphere of enemy units.

"Sir, Sensors is seeing something very interesting," Cloud Kicker again intruded, only a moment later. "Look at this." A new window popped up on his personal display, showing a greatly zoomed-in view of a small part of the battlespace. Besides the ship icons, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of needles rapidly flying across the screen, too quickly for him to follow.

"Tactical, what am I supposed to be seeing here?" It was obviously a real-time plot of weapons trajectories, but her tone clearly indicated that he was supposed to be seeing something more.

"If you filter the kinetics by origin and eliminate all those not launched by the bombers..."

All of the needles vanished from the plot.

"There's nothing. Absolutely nothing. They haven't fired a shot," she finished.

Up on the holoprojector, Gold was exiting the enemy formation. Even a casual observer could see that they had been mauled on the way through, while the tide of red icons was sweeping into range of the other squadrons.

"Very interesting, Tactical, but I need a situation report. Now."

"Just a moment...the enemy took serious losses. Three scouts, and eight other fighters, seven from the targeted formation. That leaves five of the suspected bombers."

"And Gold?" he asked, dreading the answer.

He could almost hear her grimace. "They lost six, sir."

Spitfire's voice sliced back into Rainbow's headset like a rusty blade, worn and dulled by hard use. "Gold, report."

"Gold Four, reporting."

"Gold Six, reporting."

"Gold Seven, reporting," Lightning said.

"...Gold Eleven, reporting," Rainbow added.

"Gold Fifteen, reporting."

Silence.

"Okay," Spitfire said a moment later. "Four, on me. Fifteen, on Six. Eleven, stick with Seven. Turnover...now!"

She slewed her fighter around to point back towards the Mothership, once again feeling the thrust as her fighter fought to slow back down and return to the battle. Her cockpit's displays gave her a perfect view of the battle unfolding ahead of her as she waited out the deceleration, unable to tear her eyes away. For a few seconds, the elongated cone of enemy fighters was tangled up in the loose wall of Equestrian ships, the mutual disappearance of icons from the plot silent evidence of the fight, before punching through and soaring out past the Mothership. Infrared and gamma signatures dimmed as they turned around like Gold to decelerate and head back towards the Equestrians, giving Green and Black a few seconds before the next wave hit them.

Unlike the bulk of the enemy, the next force had slowed nearly to a standstill as they approached, turning at the last second to pull Green and Black into a twisting, turning, and rapidly growing furball. Skirting the edge of the dogfight, another force of light ships, the targets Gold had been aimed at, headed for the Mothership, undeterred by the guns and missiles of Red Squadron or the defenses of the Mothership itself. More vanished from the screen, but the rest continued until they were within a mile of the Mothership's flanks before sharply turning and soaring just past the bow of the ship. In the background, the four heavies had stopped completely, turning to face the Mothership head-on.

A soft ding sounded in her ears. Rainbow's attention flicked from the tactical plot to her status indicators, locking on almost instantly to the velocity ticker...which was now racing upwards instead of downwards. Her smile was feral.

"Rarity," Pinkie urgently said, "something's wrong."

Rarity gave her friend a flat look as they crowded together in the shelter for the second time that day. "Really?"

"No, I mean, really wrong," she insisted.

Pinkie looked seriously out of sorts, her mane and tail having collapsed from their ordinary puffiness into a matted, snarled tangle of pink hair. And her eyes had the look of somepony being hunted, totally free of their usual cheery outlook.

"Okay Pinkie, I believe you," she assured her. "But what is wrong? Do you know?"

"No," Pinkie admitted. "But whatever it is is really, really wrong. I've got a bad feeling..."

A long, low rumble rolled through the shelter. Rarity looked up. Another sounded, even longer and lower.

"Really bad, Rarity!"

A long, low rumble rolled through the Operations Center.

Shining looked up from the holoprojector just in time to see the entire room tremble slightly as a second low rumble thundered for a long moment.

Twilight broke into his communications headset. "Kinetics. Those heavies are armed with heavy kinetics--they just breached one of the water storage bays--"

Before he could say anything else, a new window opened up on his console, showing the view from one of the hull cameras. For a moment, he could see a huge plume of snow spraying from a jagged crater in the distance before the view blacked out.

"What was that?"

"It--some kind of particle beam. It fried the camera's electronics. And they're deploying some kind of plasma bomb--"

"Ops, Tactical," he keyed in the two officers, "we need to shut down those heavies--"

"Not with our forces occupied like this, sir" Thunder Rush baldly stated.

"But if we don't..." Cloud Kicker murmured just loudly enough for everyone to hear.

"And Green and Black aren't carrying nuclear heads, are they Ops?" Shining asked.

"No sir, kinetics only."

"I doubt those will be effective against ships of that size, sir," Cloud Kicker chimed in.

A slight change in the motion filling the center of the holoprojector caught Shining's eye. Two fighters--friendly fighters--were breaking out of the swirling maelstrom and heading back towards the Mothership. Four more slid into place behind them, forcing a gaggle of hostiles to break off pursuit and head back into the main battle.

"Ops, what's going on there?" he asked.

"Uh...several of our fighters were damaged and low on ammunition, so they were falling back."

Shining studied the holoprojector for a moment.

"Ops," he started slowly, "rearm those fighters with nuclear missiles. Tactical, I want you to coordinate rearming the ones still fighting with Ops. Once you have enough rearmed, I want you to work together to launch a strike on those heavies. We need to wear them down at least, not let them just attack with no response."

"Yes, sir," Cloud Kicker said before disappearing from the conversation.

"It'll be the hanger’s top priority," Thunder Rush promised before he, too, cut the link.

"Alert. Hull integrity breached. Loss of pressure in sectors--"

Applejack growled at the latest bit of bad news. "DC teams 269 to 301, ah need you to report to zones 264 and 265, at a gallop! Make sure to bring your suits!"

She crushed the channel button, switching to read about the next problem that had been bounced up to her. Around her, she could half-hear snippets of her team frantically trying to keep everything in check--

"DC team 91, please come in. Team 91, we need you--”

“I’m not getting--these radiation levels are impossible, what’s--”

--Even as she was struggling with her own problems. She abruptly stopped reading, and hammered the channel button again.

"Lookin' at this...ah have to say, let's evacuate all surface sectors. Atmosphere, get them pumped down ASAP!"

“Gold Eleven, this is Seven. I’m passing my target list to you. Cover me.”

Rainbow glanced at the mission clock. Thirty seconds to contact. Ahead of her, the red and green icons of the two fighter forces were swirling in a maelstrom of combat, encompassing most of the space between the Mothership and the enemy heavies. A cluster of golden boxes sprang up on the edge of the dogfight, highlighting Lightning’s targets. Sub-vocalizing, Rainbow told the computer to add her section leader’s secondary targets to her own primary targets list, and vice-versa, all the while monitoring the sensors for anyone trying to attack Lightning’s fighter.

Six seconds. The closest fighters--their targets--were turning to meet Gold. On the edge of her vision, she could see the other two sections pushing ahead.

Four, three--Lighting fired, and a split-second later, Rainbow followed, unleashing a quarter-second burst before turning to escape, bringing a second target into range, earning it another burst before she dodged again. A second later, and she was slipping past the pair of Green interceptors the cluster of fighters they had smashed into had been chasing, and towards the center of the fight. Lightning turned and burned, targeting a knot of Black fighters and the squadron of enemies they were battling, pulling Rainbow along behind her.

Rainbow rushed to update her targeting computer, in between taking potshots at every enemy they passed and dodging return fire. Ahead, the group they were targeting had split in two to attack the Black section from both sides at once. Clever, but it meant the two of them could go after just one of the groups at a time. Quickly, she and Lightning divvied up the targets, then they slammed into the edge of the group, spitting fire and forcing the enemy fighters to scatter away. For a moment, Rainbow saw the friendlies they had saved turn to engage the rest of the fighters before they flashed past.

Together, they flipped and throttled to the max, killing their velocity before they exited the battlespace. Rainbow slowed to trail Lightning as they headed back in, aimed at a trio of enemy fighters harassing a mismatched pair of Green and Black spacecraft halfway across the battle from them. As they approached, the formation split, streaking away to escape being smashed between hammer and anvil. Rainbow arced towards her primary target, on the left, while Lightning headed for hers, on the right.

The space between her wings tensed, and before she could think about it she turned and throttled up into a tight spin, bending her trajectory by more than ninety degrees in an instant. Before she fully comprehended what she had just done, the proximity alarm blared. The hair on her neck stood on end for a moment as she realized what had just happened, before she was forced to dodge away again. Behind her! There was someone behind her!

“Seven, Lightning, I’ve got someone on my tail,” she pleaded before spiraling away once again, just in time to evade another burst of gunfire.

Before she could repeat her message, Lightning crisply replied. “Roger Eleven, inbound.” In the corner of her tactical plot, Rainbow could see Lightning’s fighter turn towards her and her pursuer, visibly accelerating away from the fighter she had been engaging.

She turned again as her pursuer fired, inside their weapon's envelope, forcing the kinetics to fly wildly out past her, then braked, trying to turn the tables and force her enemy to overshoot. Before she slowed as much as a hoof per second, her enemy was already following suit, and she had to twist about again before another spray of impactors could come her way.

As she racked her brain trying to think of another trick to try, her nemesis turned violently about itself, twisting to face another threat...there! First her rounds, then her fighter flashed by as Lightning made good on her promise. None of them hit so far as Rainbow could see, but her opening had arrived; in an instant, Rainbow slewed nearly all the way around, facing directly opposite where she had less than a second earlier. For a moment, everything moved in slow motion as she finished lining up the gun pipper with her target, setting it dead center.

Then she fired.

In an instant, fifty rounds crossed the narrow gap between them, smashing into and through the side of the fighter like it was cardboard. For an instant, it hung there, before vanishing in a sea of pure white light.

Shining turned away from the mesmerizing image of the battle towards the more mundane business occupying his console.

“Ops,” he asked, “how is the rearming going?”

“Slowly, sir. The nuclear heads are all in secure storage, and it’s taking a long time to cart them down to the hanger. We’ve only managed to get the first two fighters ready so far, sir.”

Before he could say anything, Twilight broke into the conversation. “I’m picking up...hyperspace fluctuations around the enemy ships are increasing!”

“What? Fleet Command, what’s--”

“Significant hyperspace signatures are building up around all of the enemy heavies...they must have decided they can’t win and are leaving to get reinforcements! If they manage to escape...last time they brought back the heavies, next time--we have to destroy them immediately!”

“Fleet--Twilight, calm down. I need to know--how long before they can jump?”

“I’m extrapolating from known core charge rates and jump energy requirements...six minutes.”

“Ops, you heard her. Put together a strike force from what you have and get the rest loaded ASAP!”

Rainbow scowled as the cockpit displays rebooted. Half of them were blank black even after they powered back up, indicating that her ship was suffering from serious computer or sensor problems.

"--Eleven, c--ne--rder--scort stri--"

And her comm systems had completely broken down. She didn't know of any problem that could cause that level of crackling and static, and didn't even know it happened outside of old movies.

Seeing Lightning's icon on the tactical plot--one of the screens still working, thank the Sisters--move away, Rainbow followed. She didn't know what was going on, but her chance of being able to contribute, to keep fighting were far higher with her commander than on her own, half-blind in the middle of a battle. As they moved towards the Mothership, Rainbow busied herself running through the ship's self-diagnostics.

All of the front-facing sensors had been completely burned out by the blast. Unsurprisingly, the laser transceivers had been destroyed as well, and the primary omni antenna had been melted into scrap. The secondary antenna hadn't deployed for some reason, which was probably why the comms systems had completely crashed. Her dosimeter had hit the buffers, and she suspected she would need to visit the medical wards the instant she was back on the Mothership, but she wasn't sick...yet.

At least the radar, drive, and main computer systems were checking back as mostly okay, along with her gun. She could still fight, if nothing else.

Suddenly, Lighting's trajectory swept back out from the Mothership, towards one of the heavies, along with the rest of Gold. Surprised, Rainbow raced to follow, sliding into place behind Lightning as they headed back out. On what passed for her tactical plot with just a radar, she could see that Gold was clustered in a loose wedge around a pair of interceptors, a basic escort formation. She guessed it was a strike mission, especially given what few communications she had received in any vaguely understandable form.

Ahead, the dogfight was breaking up, with ships from both sides breaking off in droves for their respective home bases. Only a few minutes after starting, it was already dissolving. Nopony seemed to notice them as they sped through, accelerating for what seemed to be their target.

Shining Armor glanced up at the holoprojector for a moment, then back down at his console. Dominating the center of the screen was a zoomed-in view of the eight fighters currently flying towards the nearest of the enemy heavies, now thrusting hard away from the Mothership, as if sensing the danger it was in.

"Sir, the next pair of fighters is almost done loading," Thunder Rush interrupted.

"Good," he said. "Scramble an escort and organize a strike on the next heavy as soon as they launch."

On the screen, the tiny clump of Equestrian fighters began to slow, fighting to stop as far away from the enemy ship as possible. Almost invisibly, four tiny slivers continued flying towards the target.

Nopony knew it, but two of the missiles streaking for the enemy ship were already condemned to fail. With the rush to rearm and load the missiles onto their fighters, a few small details had been overlooked by the harried ground crew. The safing pin inserted in missile #2's warhead, for example, intended to prevent any accidental detonations while in ground storage but supposed to be removed before loading, defanging the missile entirely. Or the precise arrangement of the umbilicals connecting missile #3 to its mothership for power, data, and other services while in flight. Before it even left its launch tube, a massive power surge had blown out its guidance computers and sensors, leaving it to fly blindly in the general direction of the enemy.

But the other two had suffered no such faults, and were already warming up their warheads as they flew towards the enemy ship, carefully estimating the distance to the ship to ensure they detonated at the right moment. A fraction of a second before its counterpart, missile #1 entered optimal range. A stream of commands passed down from its control computer to the electronics embedded within the warhead. In a hollow space at the center of the outer radiation case, a nearly transparent pink shielding spell--one of the largest and by far the toughest shield ever artificially generated--sprang into being, hanging stationary for an instant before sweeping inwards, crushing the sphere of lithium deuteride in the center in an inescapable vise. Just before the resulting pressures exceeded even the shield's ability to contain them, the final stage of the detonator triggered, dumping a massive electrical pulse into a fine network of wires lining the outer edge of the weapon's core, igniting a nuclear fire as the atoms of the fuel were crushed together.

Before the weapon could blow itself apart, a second shield appeared around the inside of the radiation case. Able to hold against even the fury of an unconfined nuclear explosion for a fraction of a second, this one had a flaw; a weakness in one part of the shield, aligned with a similar thinning in the radiation case. Charging through this weakness and the carefully designed layering of materials beyond, the fusion explosion found itself shaped, channeled into a narrow beam. By the time it punched through the forward end of the missile, vaporizing it in an instant, it had become a deadly lance of star-stuff, aimed directly towards the ship's tail.

In a fraction of a second, the plasma lance crossed the few pitiful miles separating it from its target, ramming into the ship's flank at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. For a moment, its armor, the finest product a galactic civilization could bring to bear against any physical danger, held, then it shivered away under the bombardment of atomic flame. The remains of the lance charged, through the gap created by the armor's failure, running wildly among the less well protected innards of the ship until at last splashing against the main plasma conduit connecting the antimatter reactor to the primary drive systems. Superconducting cables lining the conduit failed under the incredible heat, and antimatter-laced plasma spun out of control, gouging deep into the refractory lining of the inner wall.

Before it could break through and destroy the rest of the ship, however, emergency controls snapped into place. The reactor's output was redirected down a set of backup conduits. Backups to the systems that had been knocked out by the strike began to come online. The ship began to shake off the effects of the hit, too well-engineered to fall to a single strike.

Then missile #4 struck amidships.

Ripping through the hull forwards of the first strike, it tore at the ship's antimatter storage system, slicing through the barrel-thick bundle of superconducting cables connecting it directly to the ship's reactors. For a fraction of a second, the total annihilation of the ship seemed assured as the super-cold ball of antihydrogen stored in its center veered dangerously close to the walls before the emergency systems could kick in, pushing it back away before they could brush.

In the meantime, with the ship's power consumption wildly fluctuating, the ship's power reactors were struggling to keep from completely failing. After cutting their power output by nearly a quarter in the microseconds between the primary connection dropping out and the backup coming back online, they were forced to surge back to regular output. Overstressed by the massive fluctuations, the main reactor completely failed, allowing the fusing plasma within to scorch the inner wall for a moment before cooling to harmlessness, putting it beyond the reach of anything short of a total rebuild. The backup reactor raced to replace the primary's output, overwhelming and tripping the circuit breakers isolating it from the rest of the ship's systems.

With no power coming in through the primary, secondary, or tertiary power circuits, there was only one option left to prevent the complete destruction of the ship. Capacitors kicked in, mechanical relays flipped, and the final line of defense against containment failure was called into action. Whorls of magnetic force tore the rapidly vaporizing wisps of antihydrogen surrounding the main storage sphere into an array of tubes lining the surface of the containment volume, rushing away under the pressure of the material behind to vents lining almost the entire surface of the ship and out into space, where they headed directly into the sleet of particles surrounding Equus, annihilating in mass quantities, reducing them to little more than a spectacular fireworks display.

Almost as an afterthought, the hyperspace core deep within the ship began discharging, releasing its power back into the ship's electrical circuits. The jump had been aborted.

"Target one's hyperspace signature is vanishing," Twilight reported, "EM activity is way down, we must have cut their power systems."

"Ops," Shining ordered, "launch what you have as you get them and vector them on enemy heavies. We--"

"Wait..." Twilight interrupted. "Hyperspace signatures are spiking for all enemy ships! They're disappearing from all sensors...they're gone!"

Shining was the first to react. "What happened, Command?"

"I...I don't know!" Twilight answered, shocked. "I mean, clearly they jumped out, but they shouldn't have had enough power to do that for three minutes!"

"Your guess must have been wrong, then," Cloud Kicker said.

"Well...but...how?"

"I don't know, but I do know that means we need to clean up after this battle. And fast, sir." Halfway across the room, she turned towards Shining Armor.

"Ops," he started, "first priority is SAR, we need to pick up any pony who ejected. And any alien too, maybe more so. Second priority is to salvage that disabled frigate. Security, we need boarding teams to accompany each of the salvage crews. That ship's crew might still be alive and ready to defend. If at all possible, I want them brought back living. We need answers, and we need a live crew to get them."

"And," he added, "mobilize SAR crews to start searching the Scaffold's wreckage. If anypony's alive in there, I want them out."

"Sir," Cloud Kicker said, in an almost excessively level voice, "what exactly do you think you're doing?"

"Mobilizing SAR efforts on the ships and stations at hoof, Tactical," he responded, equally nonchalant.

In the pit below him, he could see her tear her headset off before spinning around and stomping up towards him. As she stepped up to his console, she slowed, spreading her wings almost unconsciously and cutting them off from the others' vision.

"You're making a mistake, sir," she growled. "No, listen to me, sir," she said before he could open his mouth. "Have you thought what this attack implies? In just a few hours, the forces we engaged at the Infinity traveled back to their base of operations, were reinforced, and managed to return. How long will it take to search the Scaffold for survivors? Days? Weeks? How many more attacks will we have to face?"

"And," she continued, gesturing at the holoprojector, "think about what that means. The orbital fighter bases, the Scaffold, the low orbit defense platforms, altogether they had five times as many fighters and a hundred times as many missiles as we do, and they were utterly annihilated. None of our fighter squadrons is at more than 50% strength, Gold is virtually disabled, and many of our surface turrets were wrecked by those heavies. We couldn't fight off a disabled mosquito at the moment, let alone even a fraction of the fleet that must have destroyed Equus."

"I...I certainly understand why you feel the way you do, sir. We all had friends, and some of us family, on board the Scaffold. Believe me, if I knew my husband was alive over there, I'd like nothing more than to pull him out of that wreckage himself. But, but I can't delude myself. The shelters weren't designed to take that, and even if a few survived, they'd run out of air, water, food, power, something long before we could find them. He's dead. They're dead, sir. And our duty is to the living, not the dead."

Shining opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again. Before he could start, though, he closed it. Finally, he started speaking, "Tactical, I--"

"Wait. Wait!" Twilight interrupted, excited. "The cryo trays! We need to recover them Shiny, we--"

"Twilight, slow down," Shining said. "The cryo trays? They would have been destroyed with the Scaffold."

"I thought that too, but they're actually intact!" The holoprojector zoomed towards the edge of the Scaffold's debris field where, as promised, six titanic white slabs quietly rested, miraculously untouched.

"I'm interrogating their systems...they're almost undamaged! A few systems issues, but nothing especially serious...we need to start retrieving them, right away," she insisted.

"She's right, sir," Cloud Kicker added before he could speak.

"Okay...okay," he muttered. "You're right. You're both right. Ops," he added in a louder tone, "countermand those previous orders. Priority 1 is to recover the cryo trays. Priority 2 is search-and-rescue. Priority 3 is to capture that ship. Ignore the Scaffold." His hoof came down heavily on the communications controls, cutting them off.

"You did the right thing, sir," Cloud Kicker whispered to him before turning and trotting back to her console.

Rainbow blinked as her ship entered the hanger bay. Was it just her, or were the walls closer together than before? As she watched, the walls seemed to move, waving in and out. That...definitely was not good. She couldn't tell whether it was radiation sickness or sheer exhaustion, but she was happy, for once, that she didn't need to be a pilot.

Finally, she saw her docking sleeve rise out of the background, silently thanking the Sisters as her fighter pulled up to it and came to a halt. As it stopped, she reached down and pushed the emergency release button between her legs, ejecting the cockpit hatch, then reached up and grasped the edge of the hatch, pulling as hard as she could, to end up suspended half in and half out of the cockpit, the forwards half of her body collapsed on the catwalk. Frantically, another wave of nausea threatening to completely overwhelm her, she reached for her helmet's quick-release catch. As she pushed it, her helmet fell away onto the catwalk, spilling liquid over the metal surface. Her chest squeezed, and a thin stream of clear liquid shot from her mouth for a second in a drowned groan before a wave of vile yellow vomit followed, spreading over the puddles already littering the floor. Her stomach lurched again, sending another wave of bile out across the floor. She tried to lift her head from the puddle of vomit surrounding her, only for her neck muscles to give out halfway, sending her muzzle back down to splash in the stuff.

Around her, she could dimly hear the ground staff shouting. She could felt the ground crew lifting her, raising her into the air before lowering her onto a gurney. As they carried her away, Rainbow watched as the world faded to black.

"Cryo tray six recovered. Integration in progress," Twilight Sparkle said as the massive door covering the cryo tray processing area slowly slammed shut. "Tray 5 is 12% integrated. Tray 4 is 31% integrated. Tray 3 is 52% integrated. Tray 2 is 71% integrated. Tray 1 is 99% integrated. No active SAR beacons detected. No signs of life detected. Enemy ship is undergoing processing. SAR crews are onboard the Mothership...Shiny, we can go," she reminded him.

"There's nothing left for us here," he muttered to himself, before adding, "Command, let's go. Jump at your discretion."

"Hyperspace core charged. Setting coordinates...generated and set. Brace for jump in three, two, one..."

In Transit

Hyperspace

As the Mothership entered hyperspace, the holoprojector and display screens went blank for a moment, before reverting to a standard ship diagnostics display. Shining slumped in his chair, finally able to relax.

"Fleet Command," he asked a moment later, "how long until we exit hyperspace?"

"About a day," Twilight told him. "The coordinates I generated were almost 300 light years away, in deep space. We'll be safe there."

"Safe," he muttered, under his breath. But she was right, they'd be virtually undetectable in deep space. But, he realized, they needed to figure out what they were going to do next. Almost as importantly, he was just a commodore and in charge of the Mothership's construction and tests; the Admiralty had been aboard the Scaffold or on the surface. At the very least, he would need to work out a permanent command structure with the other watch commanders, before getting agreement on what they to do.

It had been a long day, but it was about to get a lot longer.

A few button presses later, and his communications set was on open circuit, enabling him to address everypony in the room. For a moment, he hesitated, before charging ahead.

"Alright everypony," he started, "it's been a long, hard day, but it's not over yet. We're going to turn over command to--" he checked the time, "team 3, early evening. Then we're going to meet in one of the conference rooms--Twilight will tell you which one--to try to think about what we're going to do next, with the division and command leads and their deputies. See you there at 21:00 sharp."

He closed the channel.

Shining glanced around the conference room one last time. Twilight had told him it was the largest on board the ship. Around the lectern and screen sitting at the foot of the room curved two tiers of dark pseudowood tables in tight horseshoes, each backed by rows of deep, plush chairs, making sixty places, every one of them filled. Overhead the ceiling panels were enchanted to glow a soft, even white. A thick carpet lined the floor, dulling every sound, while the walls were lined with more of the psuedowood. Altogether, it was fit for a panel of admirals debating some point of strategy. Almost, though not quite, what he was doing now, in fact.

He stood. Gradually, the sound of conversations elsewhere in the room dimmed, as more and more ponies noticed that he was standing. "This morning," he began, "over the course of several hours an unknown alien species carried out attacks on Equus, the Infinity, and the Mothership. Fleet Command, if you please," he added, directing his voice upwards.

An image of Equus, marked by the scars of whatever weapons had been used against it, appeared on the screen at the base of the room. Gentle blue-green annotations marked out the locations of major landmarks and cities. No trace remained.

Around him, he could hear the same wails, sobs, and choked gasps that had filled the Operations Center when they had seen it. Seeing it again made him flinch. "Equus was destroyed," he continued as the crying died to a manageable level. "The Scaffold was destroyed," and the image switched to the trail of wreckage littering its orbital position. "The Infinity was destroyed," showing the wreckage of the spaceship. "Everything was destroyed, except for us. We are all that remains of ponykind."

There was silence as he paused to recollect his notes. "Our mission now is to survive. To do that, we need to plan ahead, to think beyond finding a warm hole to hide in, and to do that we need to clearly determine who is going to be making decisions, and how he, she, or they are going to do it. As the senior military officer aboard..." He paused, collecting himself, "As the senior officer alive, military law would dictate that I become commander-in-chief, while with no surviving representatives of any civilian government or the Equestrian Union aboard, I would become in effect the civilian government as well. However, I wanted to check whether anypony might have other, better ideas for how to organize our--our government". Sitting down, he waited.

Not for very long, as it turned out. Less than a minute later he was standing back up to unanimous acclamation as the new commander-in-chief of the Equestrian Space Force. "I'll do my best," he promised, voice cracking. "Now then," he continued more levelly, "we should discuss what we are going to do next. First, though, we all need to know what we're up against. Intelligence?" He nodded towards a pony sitting at the lower of the two tables. While he navigated his way through the maze of chairs towards the lectern at the front, Shining Armor sat back down.

As the intelligence officer stepped up behind the podium, his audience could finally get a good look at him. He didn't look like much; a grey coat, matched with a permanently greasy black mane and tail, with soft, unassuming brown eyes. Almost insultingly ordinary, except for his cutie mark: a leg, muffled by rags wrapped around it. He set his tablet into the lectern to read from, then looked up and out at his audience. "Unfortunately," he began, "we don't know very much about our enemy. Even their biology remains a mystery..."

Fluttershy sighed, slightly muffled by the surgical mask she was wearing. While the other doctors finished suiting up, she stepped into the examination room. For a moment, she stood in the passageway between the theater and the washroom, looking at the empty tiers of seats rising above the facility, inspecting the stainless sinks and countertops lining its walls, and checking the suite of surgical equipment to make sure it was adequate. Then she focused on the naked body, almost but not quite pony-like, lying on the table in the center. Tentatively, she stepped towards it.

"Just speak, and I'll record everything you say. We can review it later to cut anything you don't want saved," Fleet Command said, voice bright and encouraging.

"Um...okay." Fluttershy composed herself before beginning. "Xenozoology Action Team, X-Z Dissection Report One, X-Z Species A. Doctor Fluttershy, Xenozoology Team Chair, supervising. Doctor Keen Eye, Zoology Anatomy Lead, performing. Doctor Sharp Mind, Zoology Anatomy Member, assisting. Doctor Straight Edge, Zoology Anatomy Member, assisting."

That said, she stepped up to the body, walking slowly around it as she narrated. "This evening, at approximately twenty forty-five--"

"Twenty forty-seven, to be exact," Fleet Command interrupted.

"Oh...um, thank you," Fluttershy blushed. "Twenty forty-seven, a military group delivered several corpses to the zoology department, requesting that we autopsy the bodies and return the results as quickly as possible. They claimed the bodies were those of aliens recovered earlier today by SAR teams, although they were not forthcoming about the circumstances that led to alien corpses being recovered by SAR teams."

She glanced at the body. "We selected one of the bodies, henceforth 'Specimen A,' to begin our analysis. A cursory initial examination appears to bear out their statements. Despite having taken severe damage, likely from weapons fire, it is clear that the corpse resembles no known species. Instead, it is a curious hybrid of avian and mammalian features. For example, as you can see in the accompanying images, the forequarters of the being are covered with long grey feathers, while the rear parts are covered with a short, wiry black fur. On the whole, Specimen A's species appears to be some type of hybrid of predatory birds and large cats, with the characteristics of the former visible largely on the forward half of the creature, and those of the latter on its rear."

Stepping up to the body, she began gently poking and prodding it with her hooves, turning it this way and that to examine it in detail. "A more in-depth external examination continues this impression. Structures which appear to be homologous to many of those found on known mammalian species, including ponies, are visible on Specimen A, despite its poor condition, including large wings resembling those of pegasi. Although they appear to have too little wing area to be capable of supporting the individual in flight, it is possible that this species can channel magic through its wings as well and is flight capable, or that it normally lives in a low-gravity or high-pressure environment where less wing area would be necessary for flight. Which hypothesis is correct can only be answered with a living specimen.

"In any case, it is not clear, because of the damage to the corpse, whether it had any injuries prior to death, although there does seem to be some old scarring on the forelegs. It is possible this was inflicted by another member of its species, as each of its forelegs terminate not in a single hoof, as with ponies, but instead a branching structure with four parts, each ending in a long, sharp talon, very similar to the feet of many bird species. In addition, its rear legs terminate in a different branching structure, resembling a cat's paw. As with cat's paws, it is clawed," she added after a brief examination.

Across the table from Fluttershy, Doctor Keen Eye, flanked by his assistants, finally stepped up, fully suited up for the dissection. She nodded at them, and together they rolled the body over. As the other three doctors continued the external examination, Fluttershy narrated. "Examination of the ventral region of Specimen A bears out earlier results. Many structures similar to those found on mammals are visible on the rear part of the body; among other things," she said, glancing at the body's crotch, "this individual appears to be male. Similarly, many avianoid features are present on the front part of the body."

She glanced at Keen Eye, who nodded. "With the external examination complete, we will begin internal examination. Doctor, if you would?"

A glittering array of surgical instruments descended in his aura towards the body. He began his narration, slightly muffled by his surgical mask, "Beginning central incision..."

"...however, we have no idea what the motivations, goals, or even, at this point, the biology of the attackers was. While some of these questions can doubtlessly be answered with the material at hoof, others may be more difficult to solve. Thank you." To the sound of silence, Muffled Step stepped down from the podium and walked back to his former seat.

"Thank you for the presentation, Intelligence," Shining Armor spoke up after he sat down. "I believe," he continued, we have two options. First, we can run. We have the hyperdrive; the Mothership is designed to survive indefinitely without support from Equus. It might take us years, but we could travel across or even beyond the galaxy, far past where they could most likely find us. Second, we could fight. Far more dangerous, but we might be able to win enough of a victory that we could get another home, or even our own homeworld."

"We may not have a choice," said a voice he recognized as Cloud Kicker's. She seemed to shrink on herself for a moment as the attention of the conferees turned towards her, before gaining the energy to continue. "Consider the first hostile act that the aliens performed. They attacked the Infinity, an unarmed research vessel at the edge of the system. To find it--that implies powerful sensors, capable of picking out tiny targets at great distance--"

"Or maybe," she was interrupted by a rather sour-looking, lime-green and white-maned unicorn mare, "they simply jumped around the edge until they ran into her. We have no idea how long they spent prowling around the edge of the system."

"--perhaps," Cloud Kicker continued, unperturbed. "But there is a good chance they could find the Mothership, even here. And to destroy a world...I don't see why they would hesitate to destroy a ship, afterwards."

"Well, who knows?" replied her opponent. "Maybe they were...I don't know, children, and now that it's not fun anymore they'll give up. We don't know anything about them!"

Cloud Kicker grunted in exasperation. "Children? Really?"

"Yes, like in one of those science fiction stories. From an advanced civilization with technology far beyond ours, so that even their children have enormous power. What?" she demanded at the sniggers that followed. "I'm not seriously suggesting it, I'm just making the point that we have no idea what we're up against. We can't make any assumptions."

"And I'm saying that we can't assume that we can run," Cloud Kicker sharply replied. "The little we do know says that they can find ships in deep space, far away from any stars. Whatever we do, we need to be ready to fight--"

"Enough," Shining Armor calmly interrupted. "You're both right, and we do at least need to build a fleet that can defend us, like Cloud Kicker said." Everypony else nodded their heads, even the mare Cloud Kicker had been arguing against. "Personnel, Production, Life Support, what can we do?"

"Production is at 100% capacity, sir," an electric blue stallion in the first row said, turning to face him. "All we need is the blueprints, and we can build it."

"We were scheduled to carry a complement of Space Force personnel in the cryo trays," a plump, sandy-colored mare in the upper ranks added. "We could dethaw them, and needed civilian specialists, and recruit from the staff. There should be no problem crewing the ships or supplying the Mothership-side personnel."

"There won't be any problems feeding them, either," Applejack added quietly from the first row. "We're sized to accommodate three times as many as are active now."

"Alright," Shining nodded to himself. "Production, Design, Research, Personnel, tomorrow we're going to discuss building up the fleet. Fleet Command will tell you the time and the room, bring the staff you think most relevant. Public Affairs, stay with me. Everypony else, dismissed."

"There, sir." The public affairs chief clicked on his tablet, sending a copy of the revised speech winging through the air to Shining's display. "I don't think we're going to get much better."

Shining sped through the updated draft, skimming over the firmly established phrases to see what had been changed. A moment later, he tilted his head back and sighed. "Probably not," he agreed. "Thank you," he added a moment later.

"Of course. It is my job, after all." As he stood, the door slid aside, allowing him to step out.

Shining slumped in his seat and sighed, again.

"It's not that bad, you know," his sister told him.

"I know, it's just..."

"You did fine earlier, big brother."

"I know all those ponies."

"Look," she told him, "just talk to me. Don't think of everypony. Just speak."

"Okay." He sucked a breath in, reaching as deep as he could, filling himself with air, before exhaling with a long sigh. "This morning..."

"Only we survived..."

Doctor Keen Eye was looking at her, eyes grave. "Do you want to stop the autopsy, Doctor?"

With a start, Fluttershy realized that she had just been frozen in place, listening to Shining Armor's words, midway through the dissection. What had she been doing...? She looked, side-to-side. There! Wrapped in her gloved wing, a liver. No, the liver. She carefully lifted it up onto one of the study trays before turning to look the unicorn in the eye.

"No," she heard herself say. "No." She shook her head. "We need to finish."

Keen Eye studied her for a moment. "As you say, Fluttershy," he finally said, before returning to his work.

Fluttershy was lying on her mat, legs tucked neatly under her, wings folded tightly by her side, eyes closed. Her breaths came slow, deep, steady, matching the pace of her heart as she plunged into the meditation.

That, like the mat, had been a gift, she thought, allowing her mind to wander freely. From one of her first professors in biology, the one she had worked for as a student before going on to advanced studies, the one who had encouraged her to pursue research instead of her vague ideas of veterinary study.

"Take it," she had said, Fluttershy could remember, when she had levitated it over to her. "Oh, and this," she said, turning slightly, slipping a book out from under her desk and floating it into Fluttershy's saddlebags with the rolled-up mat.

"What is it?" Fluttershy had asked, confused. "And why are you giving it to me?"

"It's for meditation. The book describes some techniques. If you're confused about anything, just come talk to me," she had said. For a moment...Fluttershy wasn't sure what she had done, but Fluttershy knew she had paused before pressing onwards. "As for why...Fluttershy, you've been working with us for a year. What's your latest project, and how's it going?"

She had gulped, trying to swallow the stinging taste of fear that had polluted her mouth, she remembered. "Um, well.."

She had stopped at her professor's raised hoof. "That. That is why. You hesitate here, when it's just the two of us, when you know I'm not going to chew you out, and when you know I know the answer to the question already. I've seen you with other ponies, Fluttershy. You vanish into corners to avoid being seen."

She had tapped her hoof against the desk. "I know you prefer field time, Fluttershy, but talking to other ponies, presenting your research and convincing them it's worthwhile, is just as important as having bulletproof results. I thought meditation could help you deal with your social anxiety." A moment later she had muttered, almost too low for Fluttershy to hear, "It did for me."

She had been right, Fluttershy remembered. It had helped. She had been more than just a teacher or a supervisor, but a friend, one of Fluttershy's first.

And now she was dead. A whole new world opened up to her as she forced her mind to hold onto it, even as it tried to wriggle away. She wasn't the only one who was dead. There were Fluttershy's parents, her friends, her colleagues. Dead, dead, dead, each and every one of them. She felt as if she should--

Before she could finish that thought, the door to her cabin crashed open, and the trance state was shattered. Her eyes sprang open of their own volition, before she could stop them, and her steady breathing paused, the rhythm broken.

In front of her, she saw an orange-coated, blonde-maned mare. Applejack. Her friend. But not as she had ever seen her before. This Applejack was leaning against the doorframe, apparently having trouble standing up. One of her front legs was curled up around a bottle of some kind.

Before she could say anything, Applejack spoke. "F'uttershy?" she asked, squinting at the pegasus on the floor as if having trouble seeing. "Izzat you?"

Fluttershy unfolded her legs, coming to her full height in a single step. "Yes," she said as she walked over to her. "What's wrong?" she asked as she drew near enough to see the blood in her friend's eyes, the trails of tears down her cheeks, her unsteady posture.

"Wha's wrong?" Applejack asked, hoisting the bottle. As she lifted it, Fluttershy slipped her wing around it, tugging. For a moment, Applejack resisted, but her drunken strength was no match for Fluttershy's sober coordination, and she tucked it firmly under her wing. "Every'thin. Every'thin's wrong," she sadly answered, lowering the leg that had been holding the bottle back to the ground.

"Well, why don't you come in and we can talk about it?" Fluttershy suggested.

For a moment Applejack hesitated. "A'right," she finally answered, lurching past Fluttershy into the room.

Fluttershy slipped the bottle out from under her wing, lifting it so she could read the label. Applejack, it said. From the Sweet Apple Acres Reserve.

It was half-empty.

She tucked it back under her wing, and turned back to the room. Applejack was lying sprawled on the floor, covering her meditation mat. She stepped over to her and sat down, face-to-face.

To Fluttershy's great surprise, Applejack immediately pitched forwards, plunging her face into Fluttershy's chest, followed by the muffled sounds of sobs, felt as much as heard. Automatically, she reached down and began stroking Applejack, soothing her as if she were a child. Her left wing--the one not gripping the bottle of alcohol--swept forwards, embracing her friend.

A minute passed before she spoke. "Mah family," she moaned, head still buried in Fluttershy's chest. "They're all..." she said, turning her face upwards to look at Fluttershy. Rivulets of tears poured from her cheeks as she looked into Fluttershy's eyes. "They were supposed to be safe..."

Fluttershy didn't know what to say to that. So she didn't say anything, pulling her friend into a tight embrace. Applejack poured her grief out, draining herself dry, while her friend did what she could. Occasionally, she could hear her faintly muttering names, places, things Fluttershy couldn't even guess at.

A timeless infinity later, she let go. As Applejack fell away from her chest, she could hear her snoring, fast asleep. She started to stand, only to feel something pulling at her wing. Looking down, she saw that Applejack had grabbed at it, trying to pull it down to be her blanket. She was smiling. A happy dream.

Fluttershy smiled down at her, and sat. Curling up next to her friend, she slept.

"I believe that's all, sir," Triplicate Forms told Shining as they stopped outside of his room. An array of paperwork snapped together and slid into his saddlebags under the unicorn's careful telekinetic guidance.

"Thank you, Triplicate," Shining nodded, and without another word the captain pirouetted and walked away.

For a moment, Shining watched him go, before turning to his own door. A simple touch of his hoof, and it snapped open; a few steps inside, and it just as quickly snapped shut. He was, for the first time since waking up that morning, entirely free of immediate duties. Over the horizon of the night new duties loomed, but for the moment they were far off.

Shining sagged against the cold metal wall. Ragged magenta telekinesis picked at his uniform, pulling it off and dropping it in a crumpled pile in the center of the room.

Shining's eyes lingered on the night-black lump of fabric for a moment before traveling upwards and outwards to encompass the rest of the room. It was plain, a metal box with the ubiquitous composite floor paneling. It did, however, have three luxuries, not quite unique but not present in the sleeping spaces of most of the crew; his private bathroom; his personal workstatio; and, finally, the fact that this room was his, not his and his roommates, his alone. In here, he was as completely private as anypony could be on board.

He was tired; his eyes stung from a too-long day of looking too hard at too many screens, his entire head was prickling and aching, almost uniformly. He yawned. Yes, physically he was tired, but mentally...every time he closed his eyes, his mind churned, examining and addressing the problems he--no, the fleet--no, the species--was facing. Some part of him, and not a small part, either, was insisting that he sit down at that desk, pull up a display, and work on every single one, straight through the night if necessary. Rationally, he knew that this was a bad idea--that, among other things, he needed to sleep to be even minimally competent as a leader--but...

A moment later, he pushed against the wall, standing back upright before quickly trotting the short distance to his desk. A wave of his hoof over the surface later, and an array of displays deployed from the construct's upper surface while he was lay down on the expansive chair lying behind the desk's arc, magic reaching out to the workstation's user interface devices. He reached forwards with his hooves, resting one on the broad sweep of the keyboard and gripping the tactile navigator with the other. His magic lifted a slim, wireless collar from where it had been resting besides the others, sliding it quickly over his horn. A tingle shivered down its length for a moment as the magical interface unit aligned itself with his field.

Shining authenticated himself and logged in to the workstation, then pulled up every scrap of data and every bit of discussion on all of the currently outstanding problems he was facing. Screens filled with overlapping windows, holoprojectors were crowded by 3-D models, and the desk was left a chaotic mess, the sum total of all the data available little more than noise. He went to work, dismissing files of less than immediate importance, shutting down the holo units, and minimizing everything until just the fleet's task management software was open, giving him a complete overview of every open issue and what was needed to solve them. He set to work, categorizing the problems he faced, sorting them into priority order, examining what needed to be done for each, and, where possible, beginning his own efforts. Minutes flew by in great chunks, five, ten, fifteen at a time, lost in work.

There was only one possible thing that could break him out of this fugue before he dropped from sheer exhaustion.

"Shiny?" asked a voice as quiet and as tremulous as that of a foal asking about death, more than an hour after he started. "Can we talk?"

The clicking of the keyboard paused, his hooves rose, and the magical field that had been limning his horn since he had started dimmed and died out. "Of course, Twily," he reassured her. "Anytime."

He had the distinct impression of her drawing a deep breath before she could continue. "I--that is to say--why?"

Now it was his turn to breathe deeply. He had been expecting this; for all the coolness others saw in her, his sister had a tremendous and caring heart, and, for all the detachment she had shown during the battle, that she was no soldier, and could never have been expected to simply accept the suffering and death she had been forced to bear witness to. No, Twilight was no soldier, and he knew she was not just asking "Why would aliens massacre us without even talking?"

"Twilight--" he started. He stopped abruptly before he could say any more. She needed, she deserved, more than just empty platitudes and polished comforts. "I don't know," he admitted. "I just don't know."

"I mean," she continued, running over the end of his sentence in a rapid and rapidly rising voice, "I just can't see it. Maybe if--no, neither of them would stand for it, and together--what possible reason could they have for not intervening? Just--just--why!?" she shrieked.

Shining froze. He himself had never been very religious, but he knew that whatever fervor he lacked his sister made up for, and more. If she was questioning her faith...he needed her, he needed her doing her best as Fleet Command, he needed her focused on the fleet and not theology. And, above and beyond all that, she was his sister.

Carefully, each word tested for hidden pitfalls, he said, "Well, why don't we try thinking about it together?"

A moment passed. Then two. Then she answered, "Okay," voice calm and flat, as if they had just come to an agreement about the value of pi.

He sucked in a deep breath, mind churning as he tried to chart a path forwards. He was aware, vaguely, that there was a term for this sort of problem, but he didn't know what it was, let alone how smarter, or at least older, ponies had addressed it. He was just going to have to figure things out as he went along.

"Maybe there's some higher purpose," he reasoned. "Something so good that it's worth...well, that."

"But what could it be, Shining?" she demanded almost before the words left his mouth. "There were over a billion ponies on Equus," she reminded him. "That had better be a very good reason."

"I...maybe we can't know what their reason is," he argued. "After all, they're omniscient; they know everything. We don't, we can't. If they didn't stop it, they must have a good reason," he insisted.

"I thought of that," she admitted. "It's a very...old response." She paused. "But it's not one I can believe in. Maybe if it was smaller," she admitted. "Just a case of a skinned knee or even a single murder, however brutal. But to nearly wipe out a species...my species...I need something more concrete, something I can--well, not touch, really, but--"

"But there has to be something," he responded, after a moment of thought. "Some greater good...perhaps intervening here would have just caused something worse to happen elsewhere? Maybe if the Sisters had swallowed up the fleet of whoever attacked us, they would be attacked themselves and exterminated."

"The Airship Problem?" she asked in a light, almost mocking tone. "It's...plausible," she admitted, more seriously. "With us in the position of the hapless envelope worker--but still," she quickly added, "it's--well, maybe it's wrong of me, but I have a hard time caring about hypothetical third-party aliens and what they might do."

A thought struck him. "If they made a habit of intervening whenever anything bad went wrong..." He hesitated. It was like he had been looking at one of those funny pictures where besides the obvious picture, the one you saw the moment you looked at it, there was something hidden, something that made you go "Oh!" when your brain finally worked it out. Celestia and Luna were goddesses, weren't they? They could see everything, hear everything, know everything. So why didn't they intervene?

Well, why didn't--or, better, why shouldn't--he try to solve every problem the Mothership faced himself? It wasn't just that he might not have the necessary skills. It wasn't even just because he was only one pony. It was at least as much because if he did, then when he couldn't solve every problem, nopony else would even know where to start. The paradox of responsibility; he had a responsibility for everything, meaning he could actually do almost nothing.

Something he had been failing to recognize, he saw quite clearly--

"Shiny?" His sister's inquiry snapped him out of his state of self-reflection. He blinked, the feeling of it sloughing off even as he tried to recall it. "Yes," he answered, abandoning his self-reflection to try to return to his earlier line of thought. "Yes, if they had a habit of intervening whenever anything bad went wrong, what would it mean for the predictability of the universe? It would destroy it. Nopony could ever know what was going to happen next, because at any time, if there was going to be some bad outcome, the Sisters might change the rules. Science would be impossible, planning for the future would be impossible, life would be meaningless. What kind of goddess could create a world like that?" He shook his head.

Twilight was silent for a long time. Before Shining Armor could ask whether she was still on, she slowly responded.

"I...think I can see it. I'm not comfortable with it, not entirely. Intellectually, yes, but emotionally...But I'll think about it, Shiny," she promised.

The speakers clicked once, then went dead. Shining glanced back at his workstation. With a wave of his hoof, the setup began powering down, folding away displays and interface units, while he stood up and staggered over to his bed. He was fast asleep in minutes.

Rarity jolted awake at the blast of white noise that erupted from her cell's speakers. She frowned. She had just been having a dream...one with Sweetie...it had seemed important, but she couldn't remember what had happened. Even what Sweetie had looked like...she thought it was different from normal, but couldn't quite recall how, exactly.

She shook her head. She had a job to do, and sitting in her cell thinking about some dream she had had wouldn't get her any closer to getting it done. Quietly, she slid her cell door open, stretching out into the dimly-lit room with all the grace of a cat on the prowl. A quick flick of her telekinesis later, and her uniform had floated off the rack and into a neat package hanging behind her, ready for her to wear just as soon as she finished her shower.

She paused, hoof almost at the door. Since last night...she looked back, towards the sleep cells. Slowly, she tiptoed over, eliminating the slightest hint of noise from her hooves as she moved towards Pinkie's cell, uniform trailing half-forgotten behind her. As quietly as she could, a trace of embarrassment hanging around her, she slid Pinkie's door open in her magic's grip. In front of her, the pink mare was gently snoring, wrapped up in her own mane.

Rarity sat. Pinkie was...asleep? Pinkie's shift started before Rarity was even supposed to wake up. And she never, ever, ever missed the opportunity to make everypony on the floor smile with some new creation. If she hadn't gone to work...

"Pinkie!" she hissed under her breath.

Pinkie turned, mumbling some incomprehensible nonsense, but otherwise showed no sign of waking.

"Pinkie!" she repeated, slightly louder. Her eyes popped open, instantly locking onto Rarity's. "Pinkie," she whispered, slightly more quietly, "aren't you supposed to be at work?"

"...don't want to talk about it," she mumbled before turning and trying to squirm away from Rarity.

"You can't just quit!" Rarity hissed at the back of her friend's neck. "Or lay in bed all day!"

Pinkie gave no sign of hearing her, as she crammed herself into the quarter of her bed farthest away from the entrance.

"At the very least, you shouldn't," Rarity hectored her in the same hissing whisper. "If nothing else, shower and dress!" Pinkie continued to ignore her, and in desperation Rarity blurted out the first idea that came to mind. "I'll give you a makeover!"

Pinkie rolled over and faced Rarity. "Will you leave me alone then?"

Relieved by the fact that Pinkie was talking to her, even if it was with an unusual tone of annoyance, Rarity nodded. "Of course!" she added, just in case Pinkie couldn't see her. "Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye," she swore, miming the hoof motions everypony around Pinkie learned sooner or later. She didn't seem to notice.

Pinkie slid out of bed, displaying none of Rarity's grace or care as she pulled herself upright. Rarity floated one of her friend's uniforms over from the rack, folding it into a bundle to float beside her own even as she grabbed at her bundle of beauty equipment. She nodded to Pinkie, who followed her out the door and in to the brightly lit corridor, crowded with ponies. Some were returning from night shifts, others were headed to the bathroom or cafeteria before work, and for some it was their leisure period, and they were just wandering. Almost all looked like zombies, faces blank and tails drooping.

The whole way to the bathrooms, Rarity worried at the problem of what, exactly, she was going to do. It was obvious that something was badly wrong with Pinkie, but how she could help her with it were complete mysteries. She could hardly do anything without getting her to open up about it, but the battle she had had to fight just to get her to take a shower indicated that that would be no easy task. Finally, as they stepped into the bathroom, she decided that she simply had to do something, even if she still couldn't figure out exactly what that was. She ushered Pinkie into the main shower chamber after depositing their uniforms in a locker just outside. It was relatively empty, with only a few other mares presently using it, private enough for her purposes.

Instinctively, she knew better than to launch an all-out attempt to liberate the truth from her friend right away. Instead, she led Pinkie to a tap in one corner of the room, isolated from the others, and lowered her bag of instruments onto a shelf next to it, intended for just that purpose. A flick of her magic, and the tap began spraying a warm, comforting spray over her head, drenching her in moments, while she floated out the most critical instruments she had--basic shampoo, body lotion, brush and comb--to begin her work, focusing for the moment on her own appearance. Nothing complicated today, with her work, but enough to make her feel fresh, revitalized, and beautiful.

Herself cleaned and ready, she began Pinkie's makeover. She stepped around her friend, critically examining every inch of her coat, her mane, her tail. She noted, not without some surprise, the extreme straightness of the latter two, their length, how oily they were. Her tongue clicked and her horn glowed, pulling more and more and more out of her bag. Special shampoos, coat scents--those she reluctantly sent back, they could interfere with Pinkie's job--and tools. Not just a brush and comb, but things to exfoliate, to file, to make coat gleam and mane shine. An array of instruments hovered around her like a fashion halo, ready to descend on her friend in the name of beauty.

She started with the shampoo, working it into Pinkie's mane and tail, closely followed by specialized body washes for the shorter, coarser, and body-hugging hair of her coat. As she worked the soaps and shampoos into her friend's coat, mane, and tail, Rarity was silent, only occasionally murmuring instructions to her friend on where to move, whether to lift or lower her head, a leg, her tail. For her opening gambit, she had decided to simply be there in case Pinkie decided to talk on her own. Simple, and not, she admitted, too likely to succeed, but if it worked, it worked.

As she finished lathering Pinkie up, she was forced to admit that it had not, after all, worked, and as she played the shower tap over her friend, rinsing her soap-free, she readied her second stratagem. As her array of brushes and combs, each specialized to a different part of the body, descended, she spoke. "So, um...any ideas for new breakfast goodies?" Even to her that sounded slightly fake, so she hurriedly added, "Because I know you like coming up with them, and I know I like eating them, ha ha!"

Pinkie was silent under Rarity's ministrations. That was her second bolt, fired and missed, and out of Pinkie's sight Rarity frowned. She somehow doubted that any other indirect approach would fare any better; normally, Pinkie was voluble, to say the least, about whatever new ideas popped into her head, and she had "six a minute, twice that on Sundays," as her father sometimes said about his more...scatter-brained friends. If she wouldn't talk about pastries, there probably wasn't much she would talk about. She really hadn't wanted to do this, but it looked like she would have to directly confront the problem.

"Pinkie, dear," she said, putting the last touches on her combing job, "I know something's wrong. As a friend please, please let me know what's wrong. Does it have to do with the announcement yesterday?"

"Yes," she mumbled.

"Well, what about it?" she asked. "Surely you don't, well, it can't be true?" Rarity started to summon her little laugh, the one that said "oh, how silly that idea is!"

Pinkie whipped her head around, tearing her comb from Rarity's telekinetic grip, anger erupting through her stony countenance. Rarity's little laugh died in her throat.

"No!" she shouted, startlingly loud in the confined space. "No, I know you're not right," she continued at a more normal tone, pushing into Rarity's face. "I know Shining Armor is telling the truth. I know some kind of--some aliens blew it all up and killed everypony. Everypony! And do you know what that means!? Well, do you!?"

With every word she spoke, she took a step forward, forcing Rarity backwards. She backed up to the room's walls, feeling the slick tile push back against her rump, tail compressed beneath. With Pinkie still advancing, she was forced to slide to the floor, pressing her whole back against the wall, her rear half-immersed in the flow of warm water from the shower tap as Pinkie pressed her face into Rarity's.

"W-What?" she asked.

"This is a war!" Pinkie roared in answer "And do you know what no soldier fighting a war ever needed!?" Before Rarity could muster an answer, Pinkie supplied it. "Pastries! Too elaborate, too wasteful, too...unnecessary. Pastries...oatmeal is better. More nutritious. Easier to prepare. Cheaper ingredients. Life Support can only churn out so much algal paste and raw ingredients! Better not to waste them on pastries, not when there's more mouths to feed and less to feed them on.

"And parties! What use are parties? They consume, and consume--cake, streamers, party favors, gifts, maybe drinks for the adults--and what do they give back? Nothing! A few moments of pleasure, not anything you can fight with. Not weapons or nutrition or, or, or, or anything!"

"And if pastries are worthless, and parties are worthless, what am I...?

"I am worthless."

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the rushing spray of the shower-heads. Every other pony had fled, leaving them alone. Rarity could feel her mouth flopping open and shut, unable to think of anything to say.

"You know," Pinkie added quietly before Rarity could compose herself, bowing her head and letting her mane flow down around her head like a veil, "you know, you're a machinist. None of this applies to you. You're going to help build--I don't know--machines, ships, weapons, everything and anything we need to survive. You're essential. I am not."

Rarity closed her mouth and swallowed. Suddenly, this didn't seem like such a good idea. "W-Well...um...wait, you said you knew Equus had been destroyed...how?"

"I just did," she quietly answered. "And you know it too, or would if you thought about it instead of trying to pretend it wasn't true. What reason would they have for lying about it?" she demanded. "Why would they lie about something like that?"

"I--I" Rarity was shaking, trembling on a flood of self-doubt. Pinkie was completely certain, she could see. Trying to hold on to her denial in the face of her confidence was like trying to hold back the dawn; the rising sun banished all signs that it had even been attempted. Her sister--her father--her mother--!

A pink hoof intruded into her consciousness. She grasped it with all the desperation of a drowning mare and was pulled to her hooves, blinking and shaking. She felt a leg reach up and back, around her, pulling her into a hug. A moment later, Rarity leaned out of it, and Pinkie let go, leaving her to stand on her own.

"But you--you--you're wrong," Rarity asserted. "You're not worthless. What you just did--"

"Of limited value," Pinkie insisted, the sharp edge of her terrible certainity lying just beneath the surface of her speech. "You, you're my friend. Not everypony on board. And how useful is it, anyway? You wouldn't have needed reassurance if I hadn't broken you to begin with."

"But morale--"

"If soldiers aren't encouraged by fighting genocidal aliens, no party could help," she replied before Rarity could even finish. "And..." As Rarity hung on that pause, waiting for her to continue, Pinkie's face twisted into an expression of sadness.

"And I don't feel like parties," she whispered, almost too quietly for Rarity to hear.

Rarity stood, transfixed. She struggled to come up with something that expressed just how wrong this world she was in was, and failed. But it was what she had to work with. She--and the facts clicked together, and Rarity knew what she had to say.

"Your problem is that you feel you can't make a contribution," she told her, gently, like a mother to her foal. It was nothing more than a restatement of what she herself had said, but it was the heart of the problem, and worth restating.

"But you can," she asserted, trying to inject the same amount of confidence in her own words as Pinkie had in hers. "The military. If this is a war, they will be wanting recruits. And even if you can't fly a fighter or steer a missile, they need cooks, janitors, technicians as well. Things you can do.

"You can contribute," she said, in the firmest voice she could muster up. "You are not worthless. Enlist. They will find something for you to do."

The only sound was that of rushing water. Rarity gathered up her instruments, packed them away, and started to step out of the shower. As she stepped over the threshold, she paused, turning. "And Pinkie--" she spent a moment examining her work "--you look fabulous."

"Second cousin twice removed..." She muttered, her hoof sliding down the slick clear plastic barrier in front of her.

The mare before her didn't respond, of course. The doctors were keeping her unconscious, for her own good they had said. Looking at her, the halo of shed hair and feathers littering the bed around her body, the arrays of pinprick purple bruises filling the patches of naked skin, the masses of machines crowded around her like priests trying to ease her into the afterlife, she understood.

She'd have wanted to be unconscious too.

The machines keeping Rainbow Dash alive hummed softly, almost too quietly for Applejack to hear through the muffling of the isolation curtain. Without it, she would quickly die of infection. But it also meant Applejack couldn't touch her. Her last living relative. She had checked. The only relation she had on board.

She let her hoof fall, leaving it to dangle from the edge of the chair. She wasn't sure why she had come in the first place, anymore. Rainbow was too sick to talk, and she didn't even have that much time to visit her in the first place.

She stood. Reaching almost unconsciously for a non-existent hat, she oriented herself and began to walk away.

She had work to do.

Report on the Biological Characteristics of a Newly Discovered Xenospecies

CLASSIFIED//APPROVED PERSONNEL ONLY/SCIENTIFIC//PROJECT CODE: PURPLE PIGEONS//DID: 06-1072EAF9-2

INTERIM REPORT ON THE XENOSPECIES 'A'
Supervising Author: Fluttershy
Authors: See Appendix A

ABSTRACT:

During the course of the Mothership Project, contact has been made with a new species of xenobiological origin, which has been designated 'Species A'. Despite limited availability of study material, extensive analysis of Species A's biology has taken place, showing that Species A definitely has no common origin with any previously known lifeform. Besides thoroughly describing Species A's biological functionality, this report therefore proposes that Species A should be granted a new taxonomic designation, Gryphus gryphus, and defines a new level in the taxonomic hierarchy for describing species of xenobiological origin.

...neither Species A nor any of the symbiont organisms found on and within it (see Appendix D, "Xenosymbionts") possess any biochemical compatibility with species of Equus extraction beyond the common presence of certain sugars, fats, and other simple biomolecules. While the same chemical chirality rules as known species are followed, little else of any complexity is held in common; their nucleic acid analogue uses different bases than any previously seen, and none of the twenty-four (instead of nineteen) amino acids detected in Species A tissue are used in known non-synthetic lifeforms. Basic computer modeling suggests that the hypothesis of separate origin is at least 4^8000 times more likely than the hypothesis of common origin. As a result, we suggest the term "Sol," for "sun," as a new taxonomic level, defined as the collection of all levels sharing a common origin, and define the sols Equidae, for all previously known forms of life, and Gryphidae, for Species A, its symbionts, and any other lifeforms which may have stemmed from the same origin...

...this biochemical incompatibility manifests itself most strongly in pharmacology...before trials were halted due to the risk of death, pharmaceutical assays showed, as expected, that no known drugs had the same effect in gryphons as in equines...there were several instances of unexpected effects being found, and further study of the drugs indicated in Appendix I should be undertaken to see if they might have medical utility...reaction to the anesthetics was particularly hostile, with every exposure resulting in serious anaphylactic shock...proximate cause for ending pharmaceutical assays...biochemical studies may allow in silico development of Gryphidae-targeted drugs...anesthetics are the highest priority to allow more sophisticated surgical procedures...

...nutrition has proven another significant problem due to incompatibility of known proteins...stool study showed that only the simplest sugars and fats could be digested...high probability of micronutrient deficiency and kwashiorkor...could result in serious mental degradation...

...many gross organ structures appear similar to equine equivalents, but the details are often different and similarities can be misleading. For example, a structure which appeared on gross dissection to be a parallel to pain-processing centers in the equine brain was not activated during fMRI scanning, but instead a structure which appeared to resemble known equine language areas was very active, despite a lack of vocalizations...

...largest limitation on current studies is limited number of living specimens (eight). Acquiring more should be a high priority for further biological data...

Deep Space: Part I

Deep Space

"Warning: Fifteen seconds to hard dock" a recorded voice intoned over the sounds of frantic scribbling. Sighing, Shining Armor let his pen fall still, folded up his paperwork, slid it into his saddlebags, and reached up to grasp the hold-bar just as the distant thunk of the docking latches echoed through the passenger cabin and the room shook slightly.

Shining Armor released the hold bar and pushed up towards the center of the cabin. Ahead of him, Triplicate Forms, the only other occupant of the shuttle, did the same, floating out ahead of his Admiral and towards the docking hatch. Shining followed a moment later, still running over the latest batch of orders that he needed to sign.

As he entered the shuttle’s central corridor, he saw Triplicate Forms waiting at a T-junction ahead of him, where the exterior accessway intersected with the shuttle’s main artery. As he passed the intersection, turning to travel towards the research ship they were visiting, the adjutant released his magical grip and pushed off to float alongside Shining Armor. “Sir,” he started, “about that report--”

Shining swept one hoof up in a sign for silence. With experience born of years in space, he plotted his course and gave a last shove with his magic, gliding in a slightly upwards but ruler-straight trajectory along the docking tunnel. As he passed through the interface between the shuttle and the arrival/quarantine chamber, the pull of gravity abruptly embraced him, pulling him into a ballistic trajectory that ended with a neat click of his hooves against the floor paneling as he touched down, knees flexing to take most of the impact.

Beside him, a much louder whoomf accompanied Triplicate going down to his knees after his touchdown.

“Yes, I read it,” Shining answered him as he stood up. “I agree; we need to be focusing on the fleet, not the Mothership, and in any case the antimissile array doesn’t seem to be as useful--ah, Dr. Fields,” he greeted the pony walking towards them. An earth pony with a dull red coat and limp mop of brown mane and tail, he had an air of perpetual distraction, as if he was seeing something out of the corner of his eyes nopony else quite could, and devoting most of his energy to understanding it. His cutie mark was simple, two particles, faint speedlines visible behind them, approaching each other.

Shining asked, “I’ve heard Project Hellfire is doing very well?”

The physicist jumped slightly at the question. “Ah yes, yes,” he answered, peering for a moment at his two military visitors. “Excellently! We’re almost ready for full-scale production, and I’m confident you’ll agree with that today during our demonstration. Come,” he added, turning to walk out of the arrival room, “we’re almost ready to start.”

As they walked down the corridor, Shining could see other passageways branching outward like blood vessels from a main artery, but the project director kept them on the main path, leaving only the impression of half-glimpsed activity down the side passages. As they walked towards the main control room, he kept up a constant patter of description, while Shining only half listened to the good doctor, the other half of his mind continuing to chew away at the fleet's production issues.

“--so even before launch we had been conducting research into particle beams...straightforward development of prototypes, combined with data from the battle over Equus...ah, we’re here!”

A heavy metal door, looking more like something from a bank vault than a starship, swung silently open. Stepping through, they found themselves in a dimly-lit room, control panels and display systems glaring in the pervasive darkness.

“Particles,” Fields asked, tone raised, as they walked in, “what’s our status?”

“Ready to fire at your mark,” a young mare sitting at one end of the room answered, spinning her chair to face them. “Dosimeters have been mounted and checked out, rad levels are good, atmosphere pump-down is complete, everything’s been checked out, Fields; we’re good to go.”

“Hmm,” he answered. A moment later, he started speaking, in that fixed tone most ponies used when they were recording something.

“Project Hellfire test one-nine-three,” he carefully enunciated, “demonstration for the fleet commander. Prototype beam projector nine, carbon, energy one hundred MeV, luminosity full, dispersion simulated. Begin recording...now,” and the monitors around the room leapt into life, squiggles incomprehensible to Shining Armor working their way across screens. Across the front of the room, a massive wall of displays lit up, showing nothing but an empty, black space for the moment.

“Everything checking out, Particles?” he asked.

“Yes sir, no unexpected errors, all data taking is operating at full, online processing systems booted and ready.”

“Thank you. Begin test, one second duration, on my mark...mark.”

Instantly, the display wall came to life. Beginning on the right of the complex, a faint blue beam could be seen, concentrated, narrow, and perfectly straight, glowing from an inner light. Halfway along the beam tunnel, a mass of equipment could just be made out in the beam’s light, wrapping around the beam and blocking part of it from view. On the other side, to the left of the equipment, the beam rapidly fanned out, radiance dimming and vanishing from sight as it spread over a larger area. On the far left, the now invisible cone intersected a wall, marking out a perfect circle on its surface. Here, the tranquil calm of the rest of the test chamber was shattered under a mass of flying sparks and red-glowing matter, shading near the center to an almost white heat, unfelt but no less palpable for being only images on a screen.

Then it stopped, almost as quickly as it had started, the target cooling nearly as fast as it had heated up, and the secondary displays going once again flat as the data collection instruments they were connected to lost their signal.

“Mmmmm...” he muttered before Shining could say anything. “Ah! Admiral, you’ll want to see the dosimeter readings!” As he led Shining Armor away towards another of the consoles surrounding the control room, he explained, “Despite what you saw, radiation is the main effect of the beam, not physical damage. This is only a simulation, of course, but we’ve adjusted the physical parameters to replicate what a beam frigate would face in an actual battle as closely as possible, taking into account our limitations, so the dose estimates should be accurate...ah, Dr. Rad Heart,” he added as they came up to the console, in front of which was a pegasus mare, “Admiral Armor is here. Please explain to him the dosimeter readings.”

“Okay, so here,” she waved her hoof at the screen, “we have the doses all the live dosimeters are reporting. And, ah, here--” she paused and tapped a couple of keys, grinning as the image on the screen changed to a photograph of a small room “--this is our test chamber. It’s shielded at the back to protect from any penetrating radiation, and around the front it has simulated armor. This in particular is designed to have the same rad-protection capabilities as those alien armor samples the materials teams are playing with. So we’ve seeded live dosimeters all over it--these are super-rad-hardened, you could drop them in a neutron star and they wouldn’t fail until they hit--”

“The results, doctor, the results,” Fields interrupted.

“Ah, yeah, results. So--” she tapped her keyboard again and switched it back to the dosimeter traces “--all of these are plots of radiation dose during the experiment. See the rapid rise here?” she traced her hoof along one of the plots, an almost delta shape. “That peak? It’s, well, really high. Instantaneous incapacitation high. Except for our super-hard electronics--which, you know, are stupid, not very useful for controlling a ship--anything in there would be dead. Well,” she amended herself, “incapacitated. In a coma. And close to death. Even standard hardened computers would be dead. Delivered in less than a second. So,” she looked up at him, eyes colorless in the darkness. “A hit from this, at full power, would be bad. Really bad.”

“Thank you, Doctors,” Shining replied, before stepping over to his adjutant. “I have something on my schedule shortly, yes?” Triplicate Forms nodded, motion barely visible in the control room. “I am sorry,” he nodded towards the scientific staff, “but I need to go. The demonstration was very impressive, though.” Without another word, he and his adjutant stepped back out into the main corridor, blinking at the sudden wave of light.

“So--” Captain Forms started a moment later, only to be interrupted by Shining’s upraised hoof.

“Full production authorization,” he answered the unfinished question. “Captain, make sure Production hears that; this is absolutely their next priority project.”

“Already sent, sir,” Triplicate answered.

“Thank you; what’s next?” he asked.

“Ah...trials of the Vengeance,” he said. “Back to the Mothership.”

“Very well, lead on Captain, lead on,” Shining said.

Rainbow gratefully laid back in bed, sighing in comfort as she sank into the cushions. The physical assessment had really taken a lot out of her, though the results had been about as positive as she could have expected; a few weeks until her primaries grew back, now that they had stopped the accelerated regrowth, some time to regrow her own red blood cells and check out her new marrow. She’d need physical therapy, but only to push her back to the peak of physical performance, not to relearn how to walk or fly.

She was on the verge of sleep, when a voice snapped her back to reality and pain in an instant. She grunted and cracked her eyes open just a hair.

“Patient Rainbow Dash?” a white-coated, pink-maned earth pony standing above her repeated. She pulled her eyes open and croaked her response, “Yes?”

“You have a visitor,” the nurse told her. “A...Pinkamena Diane Pie?” she added, stepping slightly aside. Behind her was another earth pony, pink-coated with a slightly duller pink mane hanging straight like a waterfall around her face. Sad blue eyes looked into Rainbow’s, and the mare cracked a little smile as she saw Rainbow looking at her.

“She says she’s a friend,” the nurse added, questioning. Rainbow wracked her brain, trying to remember the face. It was somehow familiar, but not anypony she could consciously recall seeing before. She focused, digging deep into her memory for any trace of the mare.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the nurse said a few seconds later, barely audible through her concentration. “I don’t know why you’re trying to--” She saw them turning, the nurse gripping Pinkemena to lead her away. Dash caught sight of her cutie mark, and an image flashed into her brain.

“Wait,” she said, lifting her hoof. “I remember...Pinkie?”

The mare smiled again, this time beaming in happiness. “Yep, that’s me!” she agreed cheerfully, and Rainbow’s mind flashed back to the party right before the launch. Just a couple days ago for her, but...

The nurse looked uncertainly from one to the other. “You have thirty minutes. Miss Dash is still recovering, so you must avoid physical contact and leave if she requests it, do you understand?”

“Yes ma’am,” Pinkie agreed, seriously. “Completely.”

For a moment, the nurse looked as if she wanted to say something else, but she turned and silently walked away.

“Sit,” Rainbow commanded, pointing to the hard plastic chair next to her bed. To be honest, she was kind of curious about why Pinkie was here. She had been visited by the whole squadron at some point since waking up the previous day and Applejack, both yesterday and today. She almost shook her head, then remembered herself. That mare was a little unhinged. The squadron was like her family, and Applejack was family, technically. But Pinkie she had seen, oh, once. So why was she visiting her?

“Why--”

“I just--”

Rainbow leaned back and grinned sheepishly. Of course she would have her own question. As Pinkie was opening her mouth, Rainbow waved a hoof at her and said, “No, you go first. Your question probably answers mine, anyway.”

Pinkie tilted her head slightly at that, but after only a momentary hesitation asked, “What’s it like? The military, I mean,” she clarified a moment later.

Rainbow lay back and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. She could hear the buried edge there, and the question itself was surprisingly difficult now that she started really thinking about it. Saying something like "Awesome" would be unhelpful and wrong; it was, sometimes, but a lot of the time it wasn't, either. What was it like? She reached back into her memories, drawing on what she remembered of her service and what she had done and experienced before, everything from her first parade to the Sonic Rainboom. A whole galaxy of adjectives seemed to swirl around her, vying to be chosen, all falling short somehow or other before she threw them away. Finally, one flew before her, and she reached out to grasp it, knowing it was right, or as right as she could say. “Familial,” she said at long last. "It's like a big family, where you always know where your place is and what you need to do."

Pinkie looked at her for a long time, those eyes studying her, making her feel more than a little uncomfortable. “That’s helpful, but not quite...I meant, what is it like,” she stressed.

Rainbow opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “What is it like,” she repeated. “You know I’m a fighter pilot, right?” Pinkie nodded. “Well, for me, it’s about flying. It's taking machines, huge ones, twenty or thirty times longer than a pony is tall, and pushing them to their limits, making them just as agile and graceful as I am. It's doing that not just because I can, but because that means destroying our enemies. That's what it's about for me.”

Pinkie looked at her. “That’s...philosophical,” she said. “Since when are pilots philosophers, too?” she added, tone light and teasing.

Rainbow grinned sheepishly. “Normally, no. But,” she waved her hoof around the ward, “it's not like I've got anything better to do here. Now,” she continued in a business-like tone, before Pinkie could say anything else, “I think you don’t really want to know what it’s like just because you’re curious. You want to enlist.”

Pinkie nodded.

Rainbow looked at her for a moment. “Do it,” she decided, sliding back into a rest position that let her see nothing but the ceiling. “I was one of the first fighters out when we got back. I saw Equus; it was...burned. Like a cinder. This is a war, and if I know the military--and I am an officer,” she reminded her, “they’ll be wanting recruits. Whatever you’re good at, they probably need. If you really want to, you’re not going to be satisfied in a civilian position, even if those are important also.”

She heard the chair scraping against the floor, the click click click of hooves tapping against it. They paused, and she could almost imagine Pinkie turning to face her, opening her mouth. “It’s no problem,” she assured her before she could ask. “You’re a friend, and that’s what friends do for each other.”

She stood still for a moment longer, then the sound of her hooves resumed. Rainbow closed her eyes, drifting gently off away from her pain to dreams of soaring in endless skies.

“So this here is the digester section we set up for you,” Applejack told her visitor, walking along beside her. “It was a bit of a bear adjusting the protein synthesis units for those new amino acids, but we got her done alright".

Fluttershy nodded, clearly occupied somewhere else entirely, whatever the position of her physical body.

Applejack took a deep breath. She was no biologist, but she wasn’t a fool, or ignorant, regardless of what a few idiots thought when they heard her open her mouth, and she had a sneaking suspicion about why Admiral Armor had informed her--urgently, and in the flesh--that Life Support needed to immediately start synthesizing a bunch of a proteins she knew weren’t found in anypony’s diet, and which were built out of amino acids she knew weren’t found in any natural organism. When they had sent Fluttershy--who had, over the last week, become rather more quiet about what work she was doing, not to mention much harder to get a hold of--to check her team’s implementation of the changes Admiral Armor had requested, that had pretty much confirmed it for her.

Something was up. And she was going to find out exactly what it was.

“What I’d like to know,” she started off, all casually, “is why. You know, I know a little about biology, and I ain’t ever heard of any of these proteins being eaten by nothing.”

“That’s classified,” Fluttershy said, distantly.

Well, she hadn’t really expected her to just come out and say it, though it would have been nice if her friend had trusted her enough to do it, or at least look decently pained by it. Though maybe that was just because Fluttershy wasn’t really listening to her.

“But still,” she pushed, “ah know something's up, and everypony on this team knows something's up. What we’re all wondering, is just what is up?”

“Classified,” Fluttershy repeated, swinging her head back and forth in a ‘no.’ This time she did have the decency to look embarrassed. That got her credit, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t going to...keep going.

“Look,” Applejack said, all reasonable, turning to face Fluttershy. Step by step she advanced, pushing her friend into one of the side passageways between the synthesizer units. Above, their tops swelled out from their base, almost touching, and closing off flight; behind Fluttershy was nothing a blank wall. “There ain’t nopony around here,” she continued, backing her friend into the wall, eyes widening as she returned to the present and realized just what situation she was in. “Any listening devices’ll be wiped out by the sound of the synthesizer units,” and in the background their low rumble did muffle all other sounds. “And you know ah know that the only sensible explanation for why you’re making me synthesize alien proteins is because we’ve got aliens on board. And all ah want to know is a little bit about them.”

“Th-that’s c-classified,” she repeated, trembling as the situation she was in dawned on her. Applejack growled. Her devotion to secrecy might have been commendable in other contexts, but right now...abruptly, she launched herself forwards. Fluttershy spread her wings and reared, as if to take to the air, but Applejack’s front hooves shot out, slamming against her limbs and pinning them to the wall, as Applejack rammed her face almost into Fluttershy’s terrified visage.

“Damnit mare, just tell me what ah want to know!” she shouted in her face.

“O-Okay!” Fluttershy sobbed. The film of anger that had reddened Applejack’s vision faded, and she could see that Fluttershy was crying, great tears streaming down her face. Ashamed and sickened by herself, she released her, turning away as her friend--former friend--rose to her hooves.

“Yes,” she answered her after a long silence during which Applejack thought long and hard about the contents of her stomach. “We do have aliens on board. The aliens,” she stressed.

“Why?” Applejack said a minute later. “Why not--”

“Just kill them?” she asked, in a calm, collected voice. Applejack nodded, distrusting her own voice. “They’re prisoners, captives,” she said. “Why would we kill them when we could learn so much from them, about them?”

Applejack paused. She did have a point there. If you found a new and unexpected parasite or infestation in your life support system, you didn’t kill it, not right away. You isolated it, studied it, found out about what could kill it or control it as quickly and cheaply as possible. Only then did you exterminate. If you did otherwise, you were as likely to make things worse as better.

“Alright,” she said, after working through the logic. “Ah can’t say that I’m happy about it, but ah understand it. These aliens--”

“Gryphons,” Fluttershy said.

“Gryphons,” Applejack repeated. “They--”

“They’re starving,” Fluttershy shrugged. “They need more protein than we do for health...some of them are starting to suffer from deficiency. We figured out that would happen pretty quickly.”

“Alright. So this--” she waved her hoof.

“To keep them alive, to make sure we can learn as much as possible,” she said.

“Okay.” A moment later, in a quiet and shaking voice, “Ah’m sorry about being so hard on you. Friends?”

“That wasn’t very nice,” Fluttershy said, a tinge of anger in her voice, and Applejack’s spirits dropped. She turned away from her ex-friend and stuttered, “Well, ah under--”

“But,” Fluttershy interrupted her, “you probably should have been told.” She seemed to be considering for a moment. “Yes, you definitely should have,” she repeated. “So, if you’re really sorry--”

“Ah am!” Applejack insisted.

“Then...I can’t think of you quite the same way, and I don’t know I ever will. But we’re still friends.”

“Ah suppose that’s fair,” Applejack said. “More than fair. Ah’m sorry, I just--”

“Shhh,” Fluttershy urged her, “we’re past that. We still haven’t finished the inspection...?” she added, voice rising towards the end.

“Ah, yeah,” Applejack admitted. “So--” she started as she turned to lead Fluttershy out of the cul-de-sac, “--like ah was sayin’--”

Rarity was singing while she worked. She wasn't quite sure what she was singing, whether or not it even had words, not while it was being submerged by the sound of the big 6 DOF friction-stir welder joining the two segments of the radiation case together. It looked like a giant vase, like the ones her mother--

Her tail lashed once across the floor. That was irrelevant. Her mother's gardening--it was irrelevant. She had a job to do. Keeping one eye on the machine as its tool ground around the neck of the case, she slowly paced around it, closely inspecting its work. She couldn't see any flaws in the weld, and she sighed to herself, pausing her song for a moment before she resumed, injecting a note of victory into the wordless tones of battle. It would still need to be properly inspected, of course, but it looked like she had wrestled another tricky problem into the ground. Hopefully, her next job wouldn't involve beryllium; the hazmat suit was getting itchy. And she could never get it to stop pinching in places it really shouldn't--

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see another pony standing behind her, also in a hazmat suit. She could just see his face. Steel, she remembered. He mouthed something at her through the faceplate. She moved closer, bumping their faceplates together for a better view.

Meeting now, he said, as she followed his lips. You're wanted.

She considered. The machine should be able to finish by itself...still. If she had messed something up and programmed it to ram the rad case through the enclosure...nopony wanted to spend a month in the hospital being purged of beryllium dust.

You'll cover? she mouthed back. Steel was certified for beryllium, he could monitor it while she attended the meeting.

Of course,, he answered. Go on, get! he added, pointing back towards the secure handling area's entrance, as if it wasn't obvious that she needed to go that way. She trotted past him, rolling her eyes. Stallions.

As she stepped into the airlock, the ventilation system switched on, surrounding her in her own personal hurricane for a moment as it vacuumed downwards, sucking away every little dust particle that could have adhered to her suit. She endured it, and stood impatiently as the flow reversed to really blow off anything left over. As it died down, she stepped into the adjacent locker room. A bit of magic later, and her hazmat suit had peeled away from her body and floated into her locker for later, while she was already stepping back out and into the corridor.

Quickly, almost slipping into a canter at points, she trotted towards the primary meeting room. Her tail slashed violently across the floor from time to time as she moved, irregularly. She didn't seem to notice, though, and as she neared the meeting hall she slowed to a walk. She reached out with her magical grip, pulling the door open.

Hard Nails looked up at her, meeting her gaze with mild eyes.

"Ah, Rarity. We were waiting for you."

"Yes, sir," she answered as she stepped inside. A dozen or so other ponies were already standing in the room, all certified master machinists, though with a variety of specializations. "I was--"

He raised his hoof. "I know. Let's just get to business, aye? Command has just approved Project Hellfire. Each of you--" he pointedly locked eyes with every other pony in the room "--is being assigned one critical component of the Hellfire system to develop. I've just--" he tapped the tablet at the podium "--uploaded the specifications for your parts. Get to business." With that, he stepped down and out.

Rarity pulled out her own tablet from the side sleeve on her uniform. A quick authentication later and she was in, examining an eye-wateringly complex blueprint on the screen. She frowned, studying it, turning the tablet this way and that to get a better view of it, trying to reconstruct the part's 3-D structure in her mind's eye.

Gradually, the details began to crystallize for her. Through the center of the part ran a narrow tube, surrounded by most of the really complex machinery, in particular an intricate magical field projector, all enclosed in a lightweight framework. She recognized this; it was an alignment and acceleration unit, designed to reduce the beam's spread and give it an energy kick. She had built one earlier in the week for the Hellfire prototypes.

"Hey," Daisy Heart said from behind her. The peach mare sidled up past Rarity, craning her neck to catch a look at her blueprints. "What did you get?"

"A&A unit," Rarity answered her.

Daisy clucked her tongue once. "Better you than me. I got the main injector unit. You want we should compare notes? I think the A&As and the injector have some similarities..."

"That sounds like a good idea," Rarity nodded. "Over lunch? I don't know about you, but I'm starving." She twitched. Once it would have been her and her father talking about her latest mechanical exploits over lunch--Her tail slashed across the floor again.

"So am I," Daisy agreed, apparently taking no notice of her friend's strange behavior. Rarity slid her tablet back in her uniform's pockets, and the two mares walked side-by-side out of the meeting room.

"Warning: Fifteen seconds to hard dock," the same mare intoned as they neared the Mothership. Shining reached up to grab the hold bar, allowing the vibrations from the docking to die down before he pushed off for the passage to the docking tunnel.

Triplicate was close on his heels as he entered the shuttle's spinal tube. "Production's just messaged that they've pushed the Hellfire designs to Prototyping," he noted as they reached the T-junction between the spinal corridor and the docking tube. "Sir...I'm concerned about how well these systems will do in the real world." He paused as they touched down in the arrival hall, then resumed as the two of them stood back up. "It's just...we don't really know what we're up against, really."

"Fleet," Shining Armor said as Triplicate finished, "how's the investigation going?" As he spoke he began walking along the corridor towards the transit center, headed for the Operations Center, Triplicate following closely behind.

"Slowly," Twilight instantly replied. "I'm still processing the data center from the Infinity. Those drives were really not meant to be subjected to that environment, so it's taking forever to just reconstruct their hardware-level storage, let alone anything more complex. And--"

"Twilight."

"Sorry," she said. "It's just frustrating, especially since I don't think they saw anything we didn't. But yes, slowly. I wish we had the Scaffold's systems, but we couldn't get them, and I understand that."

"And the enemy ship?" he prompted.

"Ah, that." He could almost hear her grimace. "Of course I duplicated everything and I've been probing it in virtualization, but all the actual data is encrypted and I can't even begin to guess how. With the technology they have, there's no way I can brute-force it. So..."

"Our guests," he finished her thought, grimacing himself this time.

"Yes. We need them to tell us how to break it. I'm working on building a translator, but that's going even more slowly than the Infinity. There's just no references there, all of our systems assumed it would be a friendly contact. And they just won't talk, Shiny, they just won't. I don't..."

When several seconds went by without any more, he asked, "Fleet?...Twilight?"

Moments later, she came back, voice now diamond-hard. "You'll want to see this. Hyperspace signature just opened up at long range. A big one, Shiny!"