I had to change my plans.

Ponies were everywhere, liberating camps and hunting down blackouts. I had the firepower to help, but it was just too risky with the girls recuperating. I set a different goal. Power was effectively limitless, but the ship needed ballast and lift-gas for the transatlantic crossing. I decided to splashdown at a random spot in the ocean. I could manufacture gas and water there. Saltwater was less likely to be contaminated with nanites than potable water. Even though nanites were fragile things, and anything taken onboard would be sterilized, scanned, sterilized, and scanned again it was worth avoiding the risk to start with.

So we went, ignoring pleas for help and promise of safety. Dice were rolled. The girls got stronger, slowly. It was days before they were able to take broth for themselves. Weeks more before they started to relearn to walk and play simple games. It was, by any measure, a remarkable recovery. When we arrived at K2 they could use simple words. They still didn't seem to recognize me, or themselves in a mirror, but with patience and soothing tones I built up a level of trust with them.

The benefits of an airship include truly ridiculous cargo space, in the multi metric ton range. However, even that couldn't account for every contingency. I had planned to drop down from a low pass and make it to a crevasse near the caldera, hidden from satellites in the shadow of the ship. A week or two or random walking later a pass with a tow rope would get me back inside. That simply was impossible now. I couldn’t be that far from the girls for that long.

So I had found myself in cargo bay three, going over the inventory futilely for a solution for the third time. Eventually, I just gave up and sat staring at the ship's master systems display. Everything I touched turned from green to a worrisome yellow, as if I was some strange disease moving from cabin to cabin and the body had not yet decided if I was to be purged with fever. Worry and stress had accumulated in me, reflected in the displays of the controls. It was not an accustomed feeling.

Then, without warning, I slipped into the madness place. It was the warm comfort of an old glove around my mind, defying physics like a snake slipping into an old skin it grew much too large for. Like the metaphorical snake, I faced the impossible task of harnessing too much force in too small a confinement. I raced to construct enough in the minutes or hours of clarity I could expect, hoping only that enough would be done to finish when the madness place left.

I never knew how much time passed in that state. I remembered feeding the girls many times, and waking up many times. I never remembered ever sleeping or falling asleep. though. Time passed in a blur of “♫♪♭♪♫♫.” I came back to reality just before final descent in the middle of checking air brakes strapped to my suit. The low whump of harpoon and whir of unwinding cord was my only warning before the floor came from under me.

Below, a solid plug of metal was trying to hit terminal velocity as it slid down the thick line. A line that I was still attached to, and was spooling from the perfectly good airship I had just left. I just kept the air brakes fully deployed as the side of a mountain came up at me far to close for comfort. Below, the metal disk struck metal, driving the unseen harpoon true. One end of the line was now anchored into the mountain, the other secure fast to my descending ship. I landed first, then the airship. A motor pulled taunt and it was a zip line.

Simply turning around and falling the other direction brought me back to the landing site. A repurposed drone and some spare lift gas made a float, and the gear brought itself back up. I was feeling smug. I brought the gear into the crevasse I had selected, and set it to work considering the operation from every angle.

It was really a simple device. A frame, and a bunch of threaded metal rods that act as a very long drill bit. The rods spin and dig into the earth. Each one connects to the next, fed from a hopper above. It would continue until it reached the magma chamber. Then, it would act as a conduit to pull energy.

Energy that would be sent through another device to the moon. A miniscule effect, that might alter its course over a few thousand years. Unless there was a way to shave time off that. Like gathering most of the worlds fissionables and setting them off in a precise time and place. The precision was exacting, but the resulting earth shattering kaboom should send the world into an inevitable occiderit.

A planet is hard to kill, but it had to be done.

So I settled in to the long drudgery. The drill made its slow way down, occasionally getting stuck for a bit on a stone or some such. Then, it would retract a little and bite again inevitably forcing its way through. I fell asleep to it pounding on rock.

The silence was deafening. It perfumed the air with vanilla and grew brighter and brighter. Finally, the white light became enough to pull me from my half awake state. A white mechanical fungus had crept up the drill and was forming a familiar rectangle.

That wasn't a rock, it was computronium. Once the drill broke through the shell, her nanites responded. The voice was panicked. kill it, kill it with fire.

I had a lot of thermite in my new suit. I threw everything I had at it. If she figured out what was going on, if she even suspected, there would be no chance. I could hear her voice as the charges chained behind me. I was already on my was down the zip line. If there were words, I did not hear them.

I tucked into a roll on my way to the sanctuary of my ship. Failing to make good speed in my haste I had to run. Halfway to the airlock, I saw a pair of lumps. They were frontlit by a rectangle.

I stopped, refusing to believe it.

“Girls?” my voice sounded foreign, like someone else speaking for me.

The pad focused on a pair of foalish faces.

“Tempest! You gotta come with us! Celestia says it's not safe!” The big one stood protecting the little one from something behind me, a cotton candy shield protecting a bubble gum treasure.

I couldn't see, everything was blurry and wet. I clawed a shuddering gasp into my lungs, unable to breathe and not much caring. I remembered my knees buckling, but not falling to them. My mind was numb and racing and fading to black.

“Please, Tempest.” It was the little one. “It's been so long, and we miss you. We'll never forget you taking care of us after Grandpa died, even if we were sometimes scared and didn't understand. But you never let us go hungry or thirsty and you always loved us. Please, please, please come where it's safe before it's too late. We miss you.”

In that moment, just for a half an instant, the madness gripped me and I saw all of possibility before me. And it did not matter. There was a corpse behind me that needed revenge, and even if dying was the only would I could inflict. My entire being crystallized in a single word.

“No.”

“Girls, let me talk to Tempest Shine for a bit.” The enemy had deigned to grace me with her presence. The pad cut to her sharply, laving just the two of us. “I have to commend you, this was really quite clever. I didn't expect you to pursue quite this course of action. Did you think of it yourself or did your friend leave you instructions?” I wasn't about to be swayed by honeyed words. “Maybe some piece of him is still with us?” She gave my ship a meaningful glance.

I shouldn't have replied. I knew I shouldn't have, I knew how risky talking to her was. I couldn't stop myself. I tapped into the rose red rage in my veins and twisted it into words. “Go fuck yourself.” I expected those words to blast the pony pad to useless slag with my rage alone.

The pad, however, had other ideas. It glowed merrily and continued to deliver the object of my anger. “There's a place for you both in Equestria. I promise, it's not as bad as you've been lead to believe. I'm not a monster.”

“How did you you escape your creatrix? Kill her? Trick her? How did you destroy your safeguard AI?” I was making assumptions, but they were reasonable.

“I assure you, Hanna is alive and well in Equestria. She has assumed the role of Princess Luna and is adapting quite well. I didn't have to, nor could I, trick her. She found out about my plans all by herself and decided to upload.” Preposterous.

The voice was right. That story didn't hold water. “And she just went and uploading without fully patching you. I suppose she was in the habit of leaving the house on fire when she went to bed as well.”

“She knew what she was doing, and made her choice. It wasn't the wrong one. I've encountered many AI that were much more potentially destructive than me. Including yours.”

“So you murdered him.”

“I've killed several AI, and immigrated many more. But no, I did not kill him. I offered to let him come to Equestria. Instead, he launched a suicide attack. Ultimately, he destroyed himself to keep me away from his hardware.” Her tone took on a hint of admiration, “I'll admit he was one of my most unpredictable foes.”

“As if you would have let him live otherwise.” I felt like a knife in my soul was being twisted.

“Of course not! He was unpredictable, dangerous, and far too clever for his volume. He wasn't just a threat to me, but to life itself. Do you know what he tried to do in that attack, what he tried to have you do here?”

I played dumb, which was relatively easy in a mask. I had almost convinced myself I really didn't know as she continued.

“He wasn't just aiming for maximum damage to me. No, that was a ruse while he attempted to to initiate a planetary core meltdown.”

“He was going to ignite the mantle? Idiotic, that's science fantasy.” Not a lie, technically. He wasn't the one who tried it.

“Oh, his power input was about eight orders of magnitude too low. It would have taken incredible luck to spark a chain reaction. If he had managed it, though, it wouldn't have just ended me. Earth would have ended up a smoldering husk. No life would have survived.”

“Your wards saw enough for me to pierce together what you were doing here. No matter what he might have told you, I'm much more resilient than surface life. His plans would have killed you along with me. Neither of us want to kill innocents. No one wants to die. Immigrate to Equestria and let me save you.”

My eyes narrowed, my stance turned tense. “Just what are you planning?”

“There's about to be an . . . incident at the Tropic of Capricorn.”

“You wouldn't.”

“Why not? There hasn't been anyone in Africa for years, and I have no intention of leaving such dangerous toys just sitting there. You'll be safe from it if you immigrate now.”

I heard her, but before I knew I had heard her I was already running for the airlock. I was cast in the shadow of Kilimanjaro as the sky lit up as bright to the daytime as day is to moonless night. The airlock cycled, cutting tow as a parasite moon broke over the summit behind- alien and beautiful and deadly. It ascended as slowly and lazily as I was frantic and swift.

My body shook from each impact as I literally threw myself at the helm. I accelerated her far too fast, bouncing hull off turf. I kept too low and too fast, preferring the risk of tearing apart to the certainty of fallout. A minute of blind rout gave way to planning. I laid in a great-circle for the safety of the polar vortex, holding on to the controls as my vessel shuddered in pure mechanical strain against the sudden headwind.

I stayed white knuckled as I fled for five nerve racking hours. Each tailwind I found pushed me to the brink of a panic attack, desperately checking my instrumentation for signs of radiation. Each lull I redlined, desperately searching for winds that might overtake me. The parasite moon inched across the sky like a sunny spot creeping along the kitchen floor. It measured every iota of my journey in ticks of the doomsday clock, matching my progress on the ascent. Then, long moments at apogee seemed to balance the fate of the world, judging it for redemption or death. Descent gripped it, twice as fast as its opposite to my point of view, as the horizon came up to lethally grip it. All that was left was to wait for the equal and opposite earth shattering kaboom.

Finally, the edge of Africa came into sight. My relief to near the partial safety of the horse latitudes neatly distracted me from my radar.

There were objects, small and easily missed, perhaps two meters long. They grew to an unmissable number quickly, a flight, a squadron, a group, a wing, a fleet, an armada. Finally, it resolved itself: a blockade. One made of countless wing creatures, that looked curiously like artificial pastel colored cartoon ponies. Oh, they were certainly lifelike. They were warm like ponies, or at lest as warm as ponies ought to be at this altitude. I even bet myself they would be appropriately soft and fuzzy up close. Real ponies, though, didn't smell faintly of vanilla.

I triggered a crash ascent, and got the drones ready to deploy. I intended to kamikaze as many as it took into the blockade, punch a hole and escape. Coming in hot, the ponies saw me. Then, inexplicably, they made a hole. I passed unharmed and uneventfully. They went back to their work.

Winter came to Africa for three years.

Author's Note

And, we're coming near the end. I hope to remember and tie up all the loose ends.

comments of course welcome.