The Termination Shock

by NoeCarrier

Rating: teen
Tags: Princess Celestia, Twilight Sparkle, Main 6, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Adventure
Length: 15142

Twilight Sparkle plays a dangerous game in order to save her friends and the planet she loves so dearly. But will the gamble pay off? What happens when the dead are not so quiet?

The war has been over for ten years. The Equestrienne, administered from the planet that gave ponykind its birth, spans hundreds of worlds over thousands of light-years. But peace has come at a cost. Princess Celestia is dead, and her sister, stricken with grief, has been missing since the end of the war. Twilight Sparkle, Equestria's mother of technological innovation, has been forced to take the reins of a nation deep in mourning.

Now the past returns to haunt the present. Can Princess Twilight Sparkle ever hope to fill the gaping hole her mentor left behind?

Editing and pre-reading by Luna-tic Scientist
Image copyright Ars Technica

Please note: Termination Shock shares no continuity with Nectars.

Published 2013-07-29 23:10:03 UTC
Last updated 2013-07-29 23:10:03 UTC

Prologue

Prologue

ante bellum decennale

This was truly her sister's ship. Princess Celestia didn't need to see the sweeping, graceful curves of its midsection or the teardrop shape of her service module to know that.

Ex Luna Bellum was the colour of night, somehow competing with the void of interstellar space in the blackness stakes. It was only fitting, too. Despite being well inside the tonnage of a Canterlot-class warship, her hull was almost electromagnetically neutral. Had the enhanced reality holograph taking up most of the space on the command deck of her own ship not been pointing it out to her, it would have blended seamlessly into the background.

It certainly was a lot larger than her own personal spacecraft, though to be fair, her sister always had been the more martial one. Not to mention the design had been conceived during a period of high tension with what had then been the outer worlds, when war had seemed inevitable.

Sol Rex was dwarfed before it, a mere four hundred metre shaft of shimmering silver against Bellum's ten kilometre bulk. Celestia believed that true power was excised through respect and love, not fear and threat. At least she had, once. Recent events put that mindset to a test she wasn't sure it could pass. When the Perpetual Darkness had declared war on life in general, many things fell by the wayside.

But that's what this is all about, isn't it?

Trailing a few hundred metres behind Rex was a slate grey oblate, being pushed steadily along by a standard service module scavenged from a high-mass freight drone. It's innocuous appearance belied the truth behind the Red Jupiter design.

Just thinking about the technological abomination her most faithful student had put together for this application made Celestia's skin crawl. The fact that she herself had requested its inception was even worse. Jupiter Red's operating principles recalled some of the magic Discord had practised long ago, when they had all struggled free of his rule

Perhaps I won't have to use it. They may yet see reason. There must always be hope.

Chapter One - Perihelion

Chapter One

perihelion

For the past thousand years, the mountainside on which Canterlot stood had been slowly disappearing from view. It was something only the immortal would even have noticed. For those brief flickers of light and love that were the majority of the pony race recalled nothing but their achingly transient snapshots of the now-sprawling metropolis and nothing more. They might go about their entire lives thinking Canterlot had always been that way. Princess Twilight Sparkle knew different. In her mind she could, with the eidetic ease of an ancient intelligence, recall the construction of every apartment block, factory, boutique chain, ice-cream parlour and a myriad more beside. She could roll it all back to that time when Ponyville wasn't just a trendy Canterlot suburb, but its own thriving township, with twee little thatched-roof cottages, and where the largest construct for miles around was the town hall.

Now that honour fell to the Spire of Harmony, a great silver strand standing rigid up out of the top of the mountain and into the heavens, an elevator bridging the gap to Equestrian geosync. Gondolas the size of passenger aircraft slid up and down it in a never-ending cascade, shipping ponies and material between the surface and places beyond. There was usually far more in the upward gondolas than the downward ones. It was a boom time for the high frontier. Unexpectedly, the Princess found herself longing for that era long forgotten when the dusty west had been the most daring locale ponykind occupied.

At least Canterlot Castle, seat of power for millennia, had remained mostly the same. It was one of the few things that seemed truly immutable. Of course, it now sang with electronics and other modern conveniences, but here it was all hidden away behind the immaculately maintained façade. The gentle hiss of the door mechanism activating at the other end of the throne room interrupted her nostalgic reverie. She turned to see Rainbow Dash glide in, manner filled with urgent purpose. Immediately Twilight knew something was up. The Lord High Admiral never lost her confident, professional demeanour these days. She rarely flew under her own power either, so it was doubly concerning.

“Your Highness-” she began, but Twilight interrupted her with a dismissive gesture.

“Please. 'Your Highness' was Celestia. You of all ponies should remember that,” she said. It was a harsh put down, but it paid to remind the supreme commander of the price of failure. She had, after all, been in charge of the ill-fated mission that brought about the ultimate end of the Celestian Ascendency. Rainbow Dash frowned and pointedly skipped the usual reverent kowtow.

“Of course. Twilight,” she began, but then paused,, as though the name itself was some strange new word that didn't quite belong to the language. “The Faithful Student just came out of Transition.”

“Oh? How are Rarity and Fluttershy? Did they find Luna?”

“That's the thing. They're not responding to our hails and have made no attempts at contact, or at deceleration into orbit. They've been burning their fusion drives white hot for the last twelve minutes. They're putting on 6g and climbing, headed right at us!”

Twilight thought for a moment, carefully adjusting the soft silk blouse she was wearing, picked to understate the elegant and regal appearance of her frame. As she did, she began to lift up several holographic projector spheres with her magic, prying them from their concealed hollows around the throne.

They responded automatically to her phantom touch, displaying reams of neatly organised data. She carefully manipulated their invisible grids of keys and dials, calling up the aggregated feeds of a thousand satellites. Little camera windows blossomed rapidly, each showing a different perspective, or section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Surely enough, the ungainly looking black wedge shape of the deep space explorer Faithful Student was vectoring in toward Equestria, rapidly approaching the orbit of its single moon and closing still. A surge of adrenaline raced up her spine.

Rainbow Dash gestured, and the optically sensitive linings of the throne room picked it up, translating the slight motion into a zoom command. As she did, dozens of green triangles appeared, clustered in orbit around the top of the Spire of Harmony. Each bore a name, and a brief overview of information such as speed, acceleration, mass and, worryingly enough, weapons information.

“I've parked two divisions of Fast Fleet Harriers here,” she said, resolutely. Usually the elements of Dash's military cadres never ventured so close. The larger ones would now be visible from the ground. There would certainly be political ramifications for her actions later, not to mention the riot when the news networks got hold of the story, but with the unfolding crisis it hardly mattered. “We're ready to work the interception if it comes to it.”

Twilight stared down at the commander, taking her eyes off the holographic swarm that floated in the air between them. “You're not seriously suggesting firing on Fluttershy and Rarity are you? Not to mention the two thousand ponies on their crew.”

“At that velocity, and with their enhanced defensive capabilities, they're going to hit this planet with enough energy to briefly outshine an exploding star. I cannot allow that.”

“I will not allow you to harm our friends!”

“They're going to die anyway! And there are two billion ponies in the kill zone. We're in the kill zone.”

“I'll use the long range amplifier again. Magical braking. Put them on a stable track.”

“There's not enough space to do it safely. I already thought of that,” Rainbow Dash sighed with near exasperation. “And before you say it, she's too big and too fast for matter transmission or a physical rendezvous. I had the Palace computer run the numbers on the way over. Check it for yourself.”

The Princess was busy doing just that. The idea of losing any of her closest friends, bearers of the Elements, was unthinkable. The death of a third of the groundsider population was equally so. It would only end the same way. Rainbow Dash was right. The realisation hurt.

Twilight manually recomputed all the data anyway. Maybe something would show itself. Swirling patterns and vector lines replaced the tactical view. Within the ebb and flow of numbers and symbols, something began to take shape. Moving as quickly as her thoughts would allow, she sequestrated half the connected processing power in Equestria, tying their functions into the central Palace computer.

“Please, Twilight, give the order, we're running out of time.”

The Princess didn't hear her. Shining like a star in the eyes of those that could understand it, an equation appeared. It was genius. Dazzling. Insane. And all of the borrowed runtime in the land had just shown her that it would work.

“Dash, how long can we wait?” she asked, voice dreamy and distracted, still staring at the equation. It was making her giddy, banishing the nervous adrenaline shakes.

“Forty-seven minutes, absolute maximum. Why?”

“Good,” she said, her face set to a calm smile,, something she'd long ago picked up from Celestia. “Get back to your flagship. I think I've found a way to save everypony.”

*

For what must have been the fifth or sixth time since Rainbow Dash had left up the Spire of Harmony, the Princess found herself wishing that Celestia, or even Luna, were here by her side. The older sister was better, infinitely calm and composed, even in the face of dire tragedy. She would be the peaceful heart in a maelstrom of staff officers and civilian leaders, carefully applying force with the inevitability of some natural phenomenon. She also would have had the guts to make the decision Twilight couldn't stand to think about.

Once the glow of the theoretical achievement had passed, it was replaced by an icy, rising dread. On the singular occasion something like it had been done in the past, it was at an energy level barely half of what she was now carefully preparing to do, and even then only because both Celestia and Luna worked together to ensure success. That wasn't a story you would find in any of the official or redacted histories. Her mentor had told her of it only once, in hushed and secretive tones after one too many glasses of wine at a state occasion long forgotten.

She hadn't told Rainbow Dash about that though. The pony had been furious enough as it was with her, and for a moment she had thought that her commander would openly rebel and take action regardless. But the time limit and authorisation to act immediately when it passed had placated her.

Twilight paused for a moment beside her throne to make sure all the holographic projectors were back in their correct nooks, then hopped up off the ground and took flight in one graceful motion. Outside gentle zephyrs of warm evening air carried the soft scents of the hundreds of types of ornamental flowers planted in the garden along and around her, mixed with the sharper notes of distant ponyoak trees and even the smell of the kitchen garden and its hearty fare.

The whole climate was perfectly controlled out to the edge of the estate, where it met up with Canterlot City proper. Otherwise the gusting winds at the height of the mountain would be near storm force on a calm day. The city here was domed and sheltered, visible as a morass of bubbles and tubes beyond the walls. Twilight felt as much of a fraud as the weather as she put on height and speed, circling once over the lawns and flowerbeds before doubling back and heading upwards to her Royal Erie.

In the sky above her, sixteen needle shapes clad in harsh black held station with the vanishing point of the Spire of Harmony. Every so often one of the smaller attendant ships she knew were there would catch the sunlight and throw off a dazzle, making it appear as though they were magic wands, glittering in the oncoming night. As she alighted on the covered platform that topped the Castle, a seventeenth appeared, dropping out of Transition with a silent, invisible burst of hard x-rays.

From a mechanical perspective, what she planned to do was very similar to how the Transition drive functioned, albeit achieved through magic instead of the fantastically complex machines that had given ponykind the ability to leave their own world. They had been invented, after all, as a direct result of her fruitless quest to explain the fundamental properties of thaumatology.

Even after a thousand years of study, that was one area which still eluded her, and probably always would. Many in her scientific circles questioned if it was even possible to probe those sorts of deep interactions with the cosmos. However, the physical effects of magic were easily observed and explained, and had lead to many such groundbreaking inventions across the board.

Twilight settled down into a comfortable position, closing her eyes and feeling the tangible threads of magical energy quiver around her. The phrase echoed around her head as she began to marshal those threads, calling more into being. As though sensing her plans, they felt far harder to call upon than usual, actively resisting the usually simple process. Magical output was always measured in Starswirls, with one microswirl being the force required to manifest a single atom of hydrogen. She felt her horn begin to heat up and whine as she surpassed a gigaswirl. Behind her eyelids the glow of Cherenkov radiation rose to near daylight levels. Two gigaswirls. Five. Twenty-eight. A new personal record.

Twilight concentrated as hard as she could, electric fear keeping her going. If she lost control of the charge now the resulting feedback would go off with the force of a large nuclear weapon. Some fragmentary aspect of her mind cursed the lack of time, cursed the lack of anywhere much safer to do this. For a brief moment she wondered if the cure might turn out to be worse than the illness. Then, without any fanfare, a terrifying and lucid wave came over her mind. A complete stillness. She was standing, watching herself, out of her own body. Then the viewpoints multiplied. She was a dozen versions of herself, hundreds. The purple light was so violent now that the paintwork and programmed plastic construction of the Erie was beginning to melt, boiling and turning black in the ferocity.

Some sort of ripple, like a bubble in lava began to form, some other had stepped in to control what she was doing. She was every one of her many selves, all but the one racked and contorted with the immense effort beneath the bulging orb of pure magic. Twilight couldn't even hazard a guess at its energy output.

The roof suddenly turned into a cloud of hot plasma, quickly followed by the floor, just blown away as though it were made of sand. It didn't seem to matter very much. Normal physical rules about gravity and so on had apparently been upended, as the assembled herd of Twilights remained in place high in the air, suspended like moons around their parent world.

Then the other opened her stolen eyes, staring right at Twilight even though she was deeply multiple, a baffling skewer through concepts about geometry and perspective she once held dear. Though the features were her own, they gave a content, infinitely patient and deeply familiar smile. It couldn't be, it wasn't possible. But the quiet grin could belong to nopony else.

Then her possessed body was fully enveloped by the orb in one fell expansion. Twilight went blind, eyes searing in the first real taste of the energies at work. The air cracked and ripped apart as it was tortured. She swore she heard the grinding scream of bending metal, the castle below falling apart.

And then the planet moved.

*

From her vantage point on the command deck of the Victoryful At Something, Rainbow Dash had a perfect view of the unfolding conflagration. It had begun as a winking point of light piercing the cloud base, which the enhanced reality view told her was localised just above the Castle near the bottom of the Spire. Then the radiation sensors had all gone off, shrieking alerts that the surface was under attack with high yield fusion bombs.

They were easily confused by magic, but it still added to the generally worried air on deck. Officers drifted around her as fast as they could in the microgravity, mostly assisted by tiny manoeuvring packs. It was always possible to tell who was experienced and who wasn't; those with the longest time in space could get around just using their wings and nothing more.

Captain Sabre Rattle, her coat a mute tangerine, appeared out of an access tube, eliciting a spray of clumsy salutes. She returned them smartly and joined her CO in watching the event on the big holographs. “Commander,” she began. “I don't mean to second guess the Princess, but are you sure she knows what she's doing?”

Dash frowned and gave Rattle a glance intended to reprimand. It fell short of the mark. She had never been so unsure of her friend, let alone of her ruler.

“The Princess wouldn't try if she didn't think it was the right thing to do.” It felt hollow, but now of all times she had to maintain at least a fascia of control.

Rattle made a noncommittal noise and gave the slightest of shrugs. If this had been Celestia, Dash would have chewed the Captain out, publicly too. But of all the things Twilight was, she wasn't Celestia.

“Control groups Asp, Boaand Cobra report ready status,” Rattle said, changing the subject. “Some of the Captains are still half-asleep, but we've got good function across the mustered fleet.”

“Good,” Dash nodded approvingly. “Where's the Faithful Student?” Rattle made a subtle movement of her right foreleg and the appropriate tactical data appeared. The view shifted from the surface away into space.

“About ten minutes out. She'll intersect the fire zones of Asp first. Then Cobra. Boa is in stand-off position with heavy weapons online in case Asp and Cobra can't stop her.” Rattle bit her bottom lip thoughtfully. “Ma'am, are we really going to splash Faithful Student?”

Before Dash could reply, the simulated glow of starlight coming from the display rose sharply, casting hard shadows across the command deck. Sensor readouts and camera displays on the ground began to fail, some briefly showing garbled or off the scale metrics before vanishing wholesale from the network. The telemetry downlink reported station loss, and as it did the many satellite constellations all went dark in one go. Then, as though a deadly poison was spreading through their information bloodstream, cameras and sensors mounted on Dash's own flagship died away, finally reducing the data flow to the command centre to zero.

“Sweet Celestia,” Rattle whispered. “What in the name of Tartarus just happened?”

Rainbow Dash said nothing, but began to manipulate the neutered display. It was barely reporting its own active status. All of the internal and tranship links that held the fleet together were gone too, and that made no sense whatsoever. They operated with hard lines and triple redundancy, laser, maser and radio.

The officers and ensigns on deck were all watching her with terrified faces. Their Captain had been knocked for six. If their overall commander lost it too, it might turn into a situation even she couldn't recover. It was bad form for her to directly command Rattle's crew, but she was still staring into the static. A thousand years of experience kicked in.

“Get the shutters open,” she said, radiating calm. “We're flying blind here.” The spell broke and several of the ensigns threw themselves at the task with over-enthusiastic puffs of their manoeuvring packs. Dash subconsciously reviewed the other ponies around her, searching for the right one.

“Maudlin Breeze?”she asked. A pale blue stallion nodded. He was the Engineering Officer, technically a part of their division but stationed on the command deck for quick reference. “ I need you to go find the Senior Engineer. Who is that?”

“M-ma'am, it's Neutron Flux ma'am!”

The name rang a bell that Dash couldn't quite place. It felt as though it should mean something to her. Breeze vanished into the strange gloom. The emergency lighting hadn't come on. In fact, the only thing that seemed as though it had any power was the featureless holograph.

The bridge shutters finally began to move upwards, retracting to show a true, unfiltered view of space beyond. Rainbow Dash didn't quite understand what she was looking at. At first she thought that perhaps the ship had been spun out of its original azimuth, as she had positioned the nose pointing downward toward Equestria. Then the reality dawned on her. Twilight had done it. She'd really done it.

Dash immediately felt terrible for the doubt she'd felt. The Princess had been elevated to status for a reason after all. Something caught the raw sunlight, a spray of glittering objects tumbling gently through space. Without any sort of reference it was hard to tell what was going on, but as she watched, it revealed itself. The Spire of Harmony's end point, High Side, had broken off from the massive pillar below it. The resulting stress had apparently shattered nearly thirty thousand kilometres of carbon nanotube into an expanding field, moving slowly toward them.

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

*

Nitrogen Fixer trotted out onto the warm cobbles of his veranda, greeting the dawn that had risen a few hours earlier over Sumner, Esterházy’s equatorial continent. He stretched himself out, easing the sleep from his evergreen body and idly considered the view down toward Mistime. The little town was just visible behind the slowly rolling vineyards, a growth of black and white silicone composite structures still awaiting the appearance of more permanent buildings.

It hardly seemed necessary. They had survived the ten years since the end of the war and the founding of Mistime just fine, weathering the harsh winter storms and baking summers with equal ease. The house he lived in with his young family was partially built of it, though the decent income he made now the first harvest was finally producing good wine had meant numerous ironbrick and programmed plastic extensions.

“Good morning dear,” his wife murmured, nuzzling him from behind and resting her head under his chin.

Though she had snuck up on him, it was no surprise. He was used to it after two years of marriage. That was Pure Grace's way, after all. Light and airy, with a soft spoken manner only the unlucky mistook for meekness. She smelled of freshly cut grass and hay juice, a product of the breakfast she'd been making for their daughter.

“Don't forget to pick up the new generator parts from Grey's after you drop Gauge Boson off at school.”

Fixer responded by gently nibbling her ear.

Though he did most of the heavy labour at the vineyard, it was Grace who was the mastermind behind its operation. Without her the business wouldn't have lasted past its first season, especially with all the technical problems they'd run into. Out on the frontier of pony occupied space, it was hard to find engineers, let alone many spare parts.

He adored his wife for that ability. Sometimes he swore that was the only reason he'd married her; because she'd rewritten his operating system. As much as he was skilled in negotiating the complex supply contracts needed to sell their wine, he'd never felt very welcome in the local community. His wife, on the other hoof, spoke their Sumnerian dialect perfectly, understood their strange humour, spent time with their foals and seemed to enjoy it all to boot. The fact that she was also the only pony within fifty miles who could fix their farm equipment probably helped too.

After they'd finished eating, Fixer packed Boson into the car and headed off toward the school in Mistime. It was a big electric vehicle, with space for five ponies standing inside. As was usual with almost all technology designed for the masses, it was controlled through gestures. He didn't have to actually drive unless he wanted to though, and it was far safer to let the computer handle things automatically.

Once they'd cleared the packed earth track leading away from the farm buildings, they picked up the main road into town. It was wide enough for four cars, and made out of prefabricated slabs of plastic joined together like a train track. Big native tiapine trees lined the road, interspersed with younger ponyoak trees here and there. Rod-like insects flitted between them, pursued by little frills of feathers and beaks that were called squidbirds, but which were actually more closely related to Equestrian fungus and moss than any sort of avian or cephalopod species.

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

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

*

Chapter Two - Aphelion

Chapter Two

aphelion

Every ship in Rainbow Dash's hastily assembled fleet had been disabled by whatever awesome cosmic forces Twilight had unleashed. It was only through some remarkable jury-rigging on behalf of the engineer Neutron Flux that she'd been able to re-establish contact with anyone at all. They'd resorted to manually signalling nearby vessels with the mercifully still functional running lights and Morse code. As the Victoryful was a tremendously large ship even by fleet standards, it gave them a lot of room to work with.

However, even with the entire areas around the gaping maws of the assault cruiser docking bays flashing brightly like Hearth's Warming Eve decorations, it had taken too much time for the rest of the formation to catch on. Dash could only watch as several Rapid Response Auxiliaries that had hung back from the main control groups vanished in abrupt flashes of blue and white brilliance. She mentally tallied the losses. Sweet Succour and Safe Sanctuary were only small ships, but it added up to nearly three hundred ponies all in. Stupid, pointless deaths. Surely Twilight would have known the great length of the Spire would break. She had taken a rash, unconsidered action out of ancient sentimentality. Her earlier new-found reverence for the purple monarch was now tinged with uncertainty once more.

It was only then that Dash recalled that the Faithful Student was likely disabled in the same way as everyone else. They, however, had been accelerating through almost 25g at the point when the sensor feeds cut out. The deep space scout would now be careening toward the sun, its vector bent by gravity to send it rapidly out of system again.

She tried not to think about what might have happened if the engines had held out longer than the inertial dampeners. Even the engineered genetics of that special crew couldn't take unprotected acceleration of such intensity without being converted into a fine multicoloured mist. Dash compartmentalised that thought and set it aside. They would need to get power and communications back before any kind of rescue could be considered.

Neutron Flux arrived on the command deck to no particular fanfare. Every hoof was now engaged in various activities at his behest, and with Sabre Rattle currently dosed up to the withers on various sedatives following her perplexing nervous breakdown, Dash was only too happy to delegate general command to the chief engineer. It was a big technical problem, after all. They only had about another ten minutes before the deadly rain of carbon shards encountered the fleet proper. None of the crew batted an eyelid at this, adding to the growing concern as to the competency of her flagship's captain.

“Ma'am, I think I've got a solution for you,” Flux said, his dark blue fur and mane covered in black lubricant gel. Several ugly cuts scored the area around his simple triple star cutie mark. He'd obviously been hard at work inside one of the big ship's many complex parts. Dash still couldn't place him. The nagging feeling of familiarity just wouldn't go away. “I think we can save most of the fleet.”

“Yes? What do you suggest?”

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

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

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

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

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

Dash thought for a moment, staring into his muted green eyes.

“Aright. Send the word out,” she said, finally. “Make this happen. I don't want any more casualties.”
Neutron Flux was already halfway out of the door, but then Dash suddenly remembered why she remembered him. “Wait a minute,” she called, grinning. Flux turned confused.

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

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

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

*

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

It took him awhile to get it, and he kicked himself when he did. The star field corresponded to the other hemisphere, but it was distorted further somehow. Stars occupied positions they weren't due to be in for tens of thousands of years. Other stars seemed to have regressed back along their orbits around the Galactic barycentre, defying the natural progression of linear time and gravity.

Only a few of the familiar southern asterisms were left. Even they were crooked and bent out of shape. Parallax wasn't much for theoretical physics, but even as he applied some of the more blue sky ideas to the situation at hand, none made sense. His eyes were telling him causality had been violated. A lifetime of work told him that couldn't possibly be the case.

Parallax began to fish around in his brown mock leather saddlebags for his migraine pills. He could feel a fierce one coming on. How ponykind hadn't managed to solve the trifling problem of chronic headaches when they could now make a pony live forever was something that perpetually eluded him. They could visit those distant points of light in the sky he'd spent his days researching, but couldn't fix a simple skull ache.

He ate four of the little blue pills and quickly replaced the plastic bottle. As he did he noticed the tethering device for his glasses was reporting a total loss of signal to both the planetary internet and national repeater feeds. That was seriously unusual. Nobody was ever out of range of the internet, especially not up here where the high-bandwidth nature of their endeavours meant heavy duty connectivity at all times.

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

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

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

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

“If you say so.”

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

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

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

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

“What do you think we're getting this thing out for? We have to get eyes on. If we manage to get communications back the world will be clamouring for info, and we're best placed to provide that.”

Parallax nodded. The MKMSF had the largest scientific x-band array on the planet, and the third most powerful net switch. The entire population of twelve and a half billion ponies could tune in and watch a high definition feed in as close to real time as the speed of light allowed and still they wouldn't lack for bandwidth.

There was no room inside the observatory itself to set up the old scope, so they took it outside and began to assemble its cradle on a relatively flat and regolith-free area a few hundred yards from the squat cluster of spherical buildings that made up the facility. It was certainly a comprehensive design, Parallax admitted. The functions usually performed by programmed plastic strands and mechanical actuators were here done by gears and cogs, their workings made out of tungsten annealed with brass and copper.

Alignment arrows and knobs were made of gold or silver, and each bearing had a tiny ring of ruby or sapphire to mark it out. It was clearly more a labour of art and love than a truly practical telescope, though it seemed to work in that respect too. Once they'd constructed its base and mounted the tubular body into it, Parallax gazed down the eyepiece and tried to locate some guide stars to calibrate the machine. Pulse and Metallicity had been right. The optical properties were perfect even after two hundred years. It was just that the sky was so out of order that meant Parallax couldn't find a single recognisable star.

*

Parallax left his technical subordinates to continue their efforts and headed down the gentle incline toward the administration blocks and the more public areas of the facility. He passed through several big security gates bridging the gaps in the circular barbed wire fences and had to heft their solid mechanisms open with his magic. He began to pant and wheeze from the effort after the third one. It occurred to him how little he used his magical birthright for anything more than paperwork and making coffee.

The administration block itself resembled a fungal growth of plastic and steel composites bulging out of the side of the massive museum annex that sat between the observatory and the access way for the long-dead volcanic caldera. Night staff were spilling out of it carrying emergency torches, looking like worried fireflies buzzing around a fantastical magic nest.

The museum held far more than the usual astronomical display pieces and fallen impactors. It was here, almost five hundred years ago now, that the Celestial Sisters had founded their Eternal Celebration of the Six, the immortal saviours of ponykind and still-living figureheads for the harmonious elements they represented.

Most ponies couldn't name them, or speak in anything other than vague terms as to what they had done that deserved such praise. Science and technology had robbed them of the mythological wonderment previous generations felt on seeing the magic of friendship in action. Parallax had thought his way carefully around this conclusion. Regardless of how clearly magical theory could poke at the underpinnings of it all, he would never forget his heritage and their legacy.

He trotted in through the front entrance of the Eternal Celebration, carefully avoiding any of the panicked ponies outside. He had no meaningful explanations for them, and they likely had none for him, given the still silent nature of external communications. The central hall that greeted him was dark, but emergency biolight cubes built into the walls and ceilings had begun to shine a soft blue light over the six primary exhibits. They cast an unsettling ambience on the whole show, with the darkness barely recessed into the deep shadows of the huge hall. He'd never seen it like this before.

The thirty metre high ceilings seemed to press down in a far more unpleasant manner than usual. Parallax passed Fluttershy's Cottage, uprooted and held in a fine mesh of supportive wires and surrounded by non-functional holographic displays that would usually be showing scenes from her early life, the formative years and so on. The big mound of plastic-sealed dirt felt far less lively than it was supposed to. Holographic rabbits and tiny birds would swarm around it in mellifluous stature, expanding about the exhibition space controlled by simple AI to amuse and enlighten visitors. Now that they weren't, it was as though the building had fallen into a deep coma.

Beyond the cottage there was a break in the Eternal Celebration where the other wings joined on to the main hall. Parallax headed down the right fork and into the mess of offices and workshop spaces hidden just behind the gift shop and café. An enormous amount of work, both pony-derived and automated, went into keeping the many ancient artefacts in good condition. He wandered past quiet ranks of vaguely oblong robots, their many tentacles of programmable plastic silent and packed away.

From there it was only a short walk to the big vault-shaped garage buried just below the volcanic substrate of the caldera. It was packed with dozens of six-wheeled all terrain vehicles. With Celestia's Grace surely hanging over him, he discovered the simple electric engines they ran on worked just fine. He hopped in and ran his magical influence over the controls. They were physical manipulators, built for the mostly-unicorn staff of the facility and used to negotiate the steep path down into the little support industry town thirty kilometres below the rim of the caldera. Parallax eased the big rover out of the garage, up a steep volcanic glass ramp and headed out into the night.

*

Nitrogen Fixer had been nearly deafened by the sound of the strike. It was only sheer luck that he hadn't ended up like half the town's other residents, crowding the little hospital as a shouting mass of walking wounded. He and a bunch of the other stallions and gryphons were now picking their way through the fields and forests around Mistime, heading toward the pillar of unpleasant black smoke roiling up from the northern horizon.

As they got closer, the green and yellow vegetation became more abused, trees set on fire or simply vaporised by the radiative heat of whatever had come down. Swarms of squidbirds were fleeing the scene, making their strange trilling alarm warble and grouping into little knots in the air for safety. And all the time the smell of flash-fried wood hung heavy in the air, its particular content throwing up a sickly sweet honeyed note.

It took them half an hour to find the point of first impact. A thirty metre wide furrow had been gouged in the landscape, throwing great chunks of the loam and topsoil aside. It had obviously been going at a great clip as it had bounced shortly after encountering the ground. They followed it in silence, some member of the group occasionally kicking at a carbonised stump or looking for debris that might suggest what had fallen. It was conspicuously absent. Even with modern starships and their tough construction, only the crew capsule was designed to survive an accident intact, with the rest of the ship acting as a form of ablative armor.

It couldn't have been a natural rock either. All settled worlds were equipped with orbital radar facilities and early warning stations capable of tracking stuff down to half a metre. Those sorts of systems were part of standard colony kits by law. They were guaranteed a twenty-four hour warning at least. Not to mention the thing had been a sort of muddy purple, sparkling brightly all the way in as though covered in glitter. Fixer was no expert on these matters, but he was fairly sure meteors weren't supposed to be purple.

Progressive furrows guided them through the woodland, getting longer with each one. With the ponyoak trees far behind them now, the undamaged plants around them were beginning to change from the deep black boughs of the tiapine to the marbled white of verpine, and the striking yellow of the far rarer squidbird tree. These were the homes of the birds themselves, though how separate the two species actually were was a matter of constant debate locally. Squidbirds would grow out of the tree itself, becoming more and more independent as they matured. In this fashion they could almost be thought of as hyper mobile fruiting bodies with sharp beaks and a penchant for insects.

It was Fixer who spotted it first. It was glowing a lambent pink and sat in a particularly deep part of a furrow. Hardly believing his stinging eyes he could pick out the shape of a tiara. Foggy memories of official ceremonies he'd witnessed as a foal stirred. An aspect of royalty. It was clearly incredibly hot. He felt his skin start to prickle and singe, and the group near simultaneously stopped.

“A crown?” Branko the gryphon said, incredulously. Fixer had met him a few times. He ran a café in town. “What in Tartarus happened here?”

“It's a tiara,” Fixer corrected. “And I think I know who it belongs to.”

*

I can't believe you actually did that.

Twilight had been hearing the voice ever since she'd landed. It sounded like Celestia. But it didn't seem like her. The crater she'd come to rest in was some way behind her now. She was weaving her way without much purpose through the undergrowth, dazed from the forces she had unleashed. The pain was getting easier to manage too. Twilight was trying to ignore it along with the voice. Her Magical Nature was busy knitting blackened flesh and skin back together.

You could have killed a whole planet. Over two ponies. I mean, this was always my backup plan. A big power hit. But like this?

“I wasn't ready for any of this!” Twilight shouted. Talking to guilty hallucinations. I must've hit my head harder than I thought. Might as well humour myself until I can get my bearings.

And I don't blame you, faithful student. Luna leaving in such a misguided way was unexpected even by me. I thought I had taught her better.

“She went looking for you.”

I know. She won't find me. That version of me died utterly.

“I don't understand. What are you now?”

A backup. It was supposed to initiate if anything truly unpleasant ever happened to me. But the way I died, it must have prevented a proper transference event.

“Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell Luna?”

My mistake again, faithful student.

“No. It was mine. But I blamed Rainbow for it.”

It was neither. It was my decision to use Jupiter Red. It was my decision to take it to the Perpetual Darkness home world. And it was my decision to try and negotiate. I placed myself in that position. You are not my keeper, Twilight Sparkle.

She thought about this as best as she could, sitting down beside a large yellow tree. Her mane had been burned away almost entirely. That was something the Magical Nature would take far longer to fix, unless prompted. Recalling the past at all hurt more than any wound or loss of hair. The thought that the voice in her head might actually be some remnant of the dead Princess shone like a beacon in a nest of sorrows.

I'm not a remnant. I am that I am, faithful student. Besides a few lost memories and a body, everything that I was I am yet.

“But how can you be here? What did you do?”

In reply, a burst of mathematical formula appeared in her mind. It was ferociously complex. The intellectual footprint felt like a physical weight. It eluded her understanding, too.

That is as best as I can describe it. The action itself is just something I do. I don't pretend to know any of your notation, though. It is your mind alone that presents that. You are interpreting it. True comprehension will come soon. But I was meant to reform at the icon of the Summer Sun celebration. It is the most ancient magical thing of which I know, and so best placed to weave a copy of myself into.

Twilight sighed deeply and stared up into the canopy overhead. A soft, near-amber light was streaming in through strangely calm leaves. It dappled her newly-minted skin and fur, calming her somewhat. Old style biospheres always did. Creases appeared across her brow. Where on Equestria was she, anyway? The light spectra was all wrong, and she recognised none of the plants around her.

Diamond shaped yellow fronds cushioned her, coming up right to the base of the tree, where their stems and roots seemed to blend seamlessly into the bark. Maybe it was one of those experimental horticulture areas they used to test new bioforming concepts. That would explain the different lighting. She peered back toward the direction she thought she'd come down from, looking for a tell-tale hole in the hexagonal roof structure. Nothing was forthcoming. She couldn't see well enough.

With that kind of energy applied to a wormhole, do you really think you're still on Equestria?

“Oh yeah? So where am I?” This would be the ultimate test. If the thing in her head could supply her with information she couldn't possibly know, but could also later verify, it wasn't an hallucination.

I just did. All those numbers and symbols. Whatever those are. But okay, as you see fit. We're on planet Esterházy. continent of Sumner. The tree is a dead give away. Nothing like a squidbird apple turnover.

“Squidbirds?” she repeated, suddenly unsure of the looming yellow tree behind her. She stood up and looked over her shoulder. Tiny flecks of mustard coloured powder coated her fur. “I hate squid.”

That's good, because they're more like mushrooms. They actually taste like a kind of earthy coconut. Very little eating to a bird. Lots of fussy beaks and claws. You have to get
them just right. Apple Bombay knows how. That's why I keep the poor colt around.

“How do you know about this world, then? I've never even heard of it.”

I keep track of all my subjects, no matter how far they roam. Or what delightful local plants and pseudoanimals they might sell back to the royal kitchen. This is a sixth ring outer world. Something like eighteen hundred light years from Equestria. I think that might be a record. Certainly beats my attempt. You did recall that when I tried this, I misplaced several satellites of Saturn? They never turned up again. I hope the same fate has not befallen our beloved home.

“Eighteen hundred light years?” she half-whispered, rising to a distinctly unregal squeak. “Misplaced?!”

I guess the lesson you learned today was, 'if a drunk demi-God tells you about this really cool thing she did once involving the ineffable forces of the living Universe, you shouldn't do that thing, not ever'.

Twilight swore she could feel the presence smirking. She kicked at the plants half-heartedly, thinking of taking a bite. It felt like it had been days since she'd last eaten anything. As much as the idea of a squid-thing anywhere near food was disgusting, the concept of it was what counted.

She countenanced a quick nibble. It tasted unusual, like honeysuckle and mint leaves crushed together and set on fire, burning slightly on the way down. Twilight took a proper mouthful of it. As the remarkably agreeable taste hit her tongue again, she began to hear voices calling her name, and they weren't even in her head. She began to trot toward them.

I wonder how they know your name?

The purple princess frowned. That was odd. If this was really some distant backwater, her face wouldn't even be on the money. Outer worlds had their own electronic currencies. It was only first and second ring worlds that found any value in cash you couldn't spend beyond Equestria.

Oh, I see. You lost your tiara. Must've come off during re-entry.

“Re-entry?” she gasped. Not knowing anything was becoming annoying, but she couldn't help the surprised outbursts. “Oh for pony's sake!”

Relax, faithful student. I saw what you didn't.

The same sensation of memories flooding into her mind came on again, almost sending her hoof-first into the ground. Suddenly she recalled the brightest of lights, like a nuclear explosion, then an uncountable moment of nothing followed by the appearance of a ruddy brown planet.
The twitch of a hypnic jerk as her emergency forcefield came on. A flash frame landscape of yellow and black fields, meeting the horizon in a line of azure mountains. Landing. Bouncing. The memory transfer ended.

“Princess Twilight Sparkle!” a voice yelled, filled with bemusement. She turned to see an evergreen earth pony ahead of a lumbering, sombre gryphon. He practically bounded across the remaining brush only to grind to a halt at a respectful distance, as inevitably everyone did on meeting royalty. “Are you okay?”

Someone's got a fan. The smirking again.

She nodded politely, smiling. Even though she had taken a backseat role in the actual day-to-day statesmare duties, she'd been well schooled in how to behave formally.

“Yes, I'm fine,” she said, in a manner to suggest that any further discussion of the topic would be moot. “Could you please tell me where I am?”

“Yes, of course, your Highness. You're on Esterházy.”

A strange electric chill rose up Twilight's spine. She was absolutely sure she'd never so much as heard the name.

So now do you believe me?

“Yes.”

“Excuse me ma'am?” the green pony asked, puzzled.

“Oh, nothing. Could you tell me your name?”

“Nitrogen Fixer, ma'am.”

“Pleased to meet you, Nitrogen Fixer.” she extended a hoof, which he shook rather nervously. The gryphon had paused somewhat further back, and was looking her up and down with smart yellow eyes. She returned the gaze. “And who might you be?”

“Branko.” he replied, firmly. There was an awkward moment, and a glance from Fixer at the gryphon that was filled with desperation. After an all-too-long few seconds, he bowed his feathered head down until it was level with his body. “I am told it is an honour.”

The appearance of a crowd within ear shot broke the tension. As a whole rainbow of colours and interested, wary faces emerged, the now-confirmed Celestia said quite sincerely I'm glad you recall your etiquette.

*

Freundschaft Uber Alles was the first of the larger ships in the formation to die. Dash was easily able to make out her diamond shape transiting in front of the sun through her suit's polarised visor. Not so easily the object that struck her amidships and near enough gutted her. Fusion plasma spiralled out of the exit wound, flaring brightly before the loss of containment returned the fuel to a lambent gas.

Communication via the running lights had broken down a few minutes beforehoof. Apparently they'd been trying to launch the lifeboats instead of following the plan handed to them. For what was the tenth time that day, Dash ruminated on how violently and how quickly one could die in space. The edges of the diamond began to break up, and then there was nothing more to see even on maximum zoom.

Dash had put on one of the bulky exosuits and joined her comrades outside simply because of how alone and isolated, so utterly useless she felt floating about in an empty command deck. At least the suits and their integral radios were working. Apparently the fleet wide systems failures were a result of a problem with digital command authority. All of their primary gear, power generation, long range travel, weapons and communications had been designed with the possibility of enemy subversion in mind. They would return to a hard lock down if the central command core, and with it central authority, was destroyed.

Usually the commanding officer of any ship would never place themselves in such obvious danger, let alone top brass, but that was one of the perks of the job. Her stare alone had quieted Neutron Flux's protests. Now they were quietly drifting along the sun-facing side of the Victoryful to where the jink system fuel tanks were, moving in twos, following a line of magnetic emergency beacons stuck to the hull.

All she could hear was her own breathing, and the occasional muffled burst of distant com traffic from other teams on other ships doing the exact same thing. The distance was too great for the suit radios to be much use without high powered repeaters to throw their signals further, but the garbled sounds gave her a big confidence boost. She swivelled her head around, trying to get eyes on them visually. Not much could be seen. Besides the Freundschaft and her sister ship, who sat as permanent fleet tenders to the Victoryful, their last known fleet positions meant the flagship was in the way.

Neutron Flux had insisted on partnering up with Dash. The stallion had four hundred hours logged extra-vehicular, and she'd been more than glad for that. Her own time was a paltry twelve, just enough to make the EV rating. As easy as she found it moving around in microgravity within the confines of a starship, out in the blackness things worked differently. It wasn't possible to use her wings properly. The suit translated small lateral motions of them into big puffs of reaction gas. She had to focus constantly, more so than she’d ever had to do in recent times.

“All right,” Flux said, turning round to face her. His voice was tinny and filled with static. “This is as far as the rope goes. Unclip yourself.” Dash had been dreading this moment. There was only four hundred metres of secure cable, and two thousand metres along the hull to traverse.

“After this, it's medals all round,” she replied, unfastening the carabiner grimly. “Then we kill Twilight Sparkle.”

“Ma'am!” Flux said, feigning horror. He laughed. “Haven't you heard of lese majeste?”

“Bah. She can court martial me when she turns up with Equestria again. Then I won't care.”

“What happened down there anyway?”

“That's need to know information.”

“Call it professional curiosity, ma'am. Was it one of those new Transit drives the internet is alive with rumours about?”

“Nope. Something eldritch involving too much magic for anypony's own good. I don't understand it. Maybe she'll tell us all about it before I see just how immortal she actually is.”

They came up to a section of the hull that rose away from the main body at a steep angle. It was covered in serrated parallel slats, made of a material that put the black of space to shame. Light seemed to encounter it as a young filly encounters a burly gentlecolt in a back alleyway after too much cider. Dash had trouble focusing clearly on any one section for too long. Flux caught her gaze.

“It's part of the anti-emissions system,” he said, as they began to float gently past it, keeping a metre or two clear. “But mainly it’s designed to protect crew and vital systems, plus their interlinks.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I didn't realise they were this big.”

“This is a minor array. It's five hundred metres long, comes to an apex half way. We've got twelve of them alongside six of the major versions. Those are a kilometre.”

“You really get a feel for the size of this thing when you’re all alone out here in the black.”

“I take it you don’t have too much of an EV rating, ma’am?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Usually it’s only newbies who grouse as much, ma’am.”

“Who’re you calling newbie? What are you, twenty five years old?”

“Twenty seven ma’am.”

“Yeah, well, I’m so old when I was a filly you could fly all the way from Canterlot to Ponyville and not once lack for green below you.”

“I’m sure you could ma’am.”

Dash responded by way of a mirthless chuckle, shaking her head.

“You'd think they'd have put more exterior airlocks on this thing.”

“Exterior airlocks are a structural weakness, ma'am.”

“This boat berths fifteen corvettes, five frigates and two destroyers in comfort. I think we can afford the addition.”

“Engineering concurs,” he smiled. “But usually we send the robots outside, not ponies.”

Ahead of them the first pair in line had just cleared the apex and fallen out of visual range. They could still be seen in the visor enhanced reality mode as little ephemeral blue dots, trailing range and pony data. As much as she and Flux were making jokes, Dash knew that at any moment they might lose another ship, or suffer the same fate themselves. Everyone who died wouldn’t even know it, but she would.

A thousand straight years of exposure and bondage to the Elements meant she had a Magical Nature not so far removed from that of an alicorn. Even though the suit was heated and thoroughly insulated, Dash felt a chill run up her spine. Spending her eternity lost in the void was something too awful to comprehend.

Chapter Three - Periastron

Chapter Three

periastron

Twilight had been enjoying the party that her arrival in the stunned village of Mistime had provoked for several hours. After a brief application of some molecular bonding magic to mend broken windows and eardrums alike, the mood had gone from one of dark disapproval to positively rapturous. It was apparently drawing toward the end of Esterházy’s second summer, and the start of the major harvest. As a result a miraculous abundance of fruits and vegetables, as well as the unsettlingly strong spirits one could derive from them, were presented again and again for her to try. There are a great many things bored ponies can do with root vegetables and sugar, given timeCelestia had counselled, after what was probably the tenth pungent chutney. Gracious, I miss tastebuds.

At some point in the afternoon a big marquee had been set up, in that delightful outworld way, by nopony in particular, just at the general behest of the entire assembly. The fact that it sat slap bang in the middle of the town's one main thoroughfare, and that their revelry had essentially brought the entire place to a drunken, merry standstill was of interest to none.

According to a schedule half-thrown at her in gleeful abandon by the crowd, VTOL service was once weekly. She didn't want to try any flying, and would need a spacecraft of some description anyway. Before resigning herself to the party, she'd wondered just how far turning up and being royal would go in the “hiring a ship” department. It wasn't as though she ever carried money.

The evergreen pony called Nitrogen Fixer had been by her side the entire night. The stallion had grown up in Canterlot, it emerged, and seemed to consider Twilight of at least equal stature to the lost sisters. Or not so lost, if recent events were counted. Of course, she hadn't told anypony about that. It was probably baffling enough for them that the Princess Regent had dropped in, quite literally. No good would come of trying to convince ponies that the ghost, or magical clone of the mind of a deceased monarch, was somehow riding shotgun. That would get her deposed and thrown in a secure hospital for neurological re-profiling faster than if she began clucking and trying to lay eggs.

Fixer had, luckily, succumbed to too much of his own wine and something devilish made from tubers, staggering off into the warm and richly scented night air laughing to himself. She'd watched him go, saying farewell to a lot of new friends he'd made that evening. It set off an awful feeling of longing, for a time when this had been her life too. Before the wings, before responsibility, before a thousand years of task, and purpose, and duty. What, ultimately, had all it all been for? What good had it done ponykind to ever leave Equestria?

She was some distance away from the marquee now, sitting in the alcove of the front door of some shop, listening to the honeyed sounds of the party. It was self-sustaining at this stage. The foals had been reluctantly put to bed and the adults could now let go of any restraint they might have been showing for the betterment of the younger generation. Existential crises are so last millennium, faithful student.

“Get stuffed.” she replied, keeping her voice low.

The memories I could show you.

“Please don't,” Twilight grimaced and took a gulp out of the ponyoak tumbler containing the tuber beverage. It was crystal clear if still, but clouded up and became milky if disturbed, and tasted like drinking molten lead. “I can't even begin to imagine what you've got up to.”

I'm surprisingly vanilla, actually. Only takes a few hundred years to work through every possible permutation, and after that you just get tired of it all.

“The vagaries of old age, eh?”

Celestia said nothing in response, though a wistful feeling bubbled up around her own grim, cynical thoughts. Twilight raised the tumbler to nothing in particular and grinned.

“To us,” she said, and drank again. “Until the Dawn.”

I made that one up you know.

“Made what up?”

All that 'Til the Dawn' bunk. Last time we had a big Nationalist thing going on I was at this party, and I just said it and downed my drink, right out of the blue. Next thing you know, everypony's toasting that way, saying it when ponies were dying, basically whenever they wanted.

“I didn't know that. Interesting piece of history.”

That's nothing. My memoirs would make your hooves curl.

“You have memoirs? You never said.”

You'd have only gone and published them. And then there would have been at least one war.

“Yipes,” said Twilight, and finished the drink. It was a good burn, she decided. And it was finally beginning to have an effect on her high-order physiology. A cosy, fluffy sensation was building around her temples and down her spine. “Wait, what? Who with? We don't have any enemies, except the PD, and they've been quiet since, well, since the war.”

Wouldn't you like to know. I tell you what, if you can find them, they're yours to do with as you please.

“If I find them before I figure out some way to pattern you into a new body, you mean.”

That wistful sensation again, and silence. Twilight sat up and began to wander, with no particular intention, back toward the marquee. It really was a lovely village. A great deal of harmony and joy wafted through the air around her. She could feel its tangible bands, just at the edge of perception. They practically called out for her to pluck at them with her mind and weave some magical response to their sonorous tune.

You know, if we had never drawn ourselves up out of the mud, things would be a whole lot worse than you think they are. Twilight shrugged and sailed gently into the glow of the big tent, smelling the grass and the mud, and its canvas construction mixed in with the heady aromas of the planet's bounty.

You don't remember what it was really like a thousand years ago, do you? I can see it in your head. You've got this lovely rose tinted view of the world. Here's the rub. Back then, six in ten infants died during foal-birth. Four in ten mares died during the same. Of those that did survive, a further five in ten never made it past the age of two.

Adoring faces greeted Twilight like a lost daughter, pouring out refills of the spirit and more chutney layered onto hearty bread and tiled with cheese and yellow salad leaves. She made sincere small talk with them, chatted about their foals and their lives. It was easy to ignore the voice in her head, making her face reality.

And I had no idea why. I didn't know that there were tiny organisms in the air that infected ponies, that got into the water supply, spreading contagion. Can you imagine how awful that was? You've been in the job five minutes, do one feat of true arcane magic and you're already wishing for the good life?

Somepony handed Twilight an ornate pipe with a silvery inlay, and she made a show of peering at it like the bemused foreigner she was. This elicited a great deal of laughter, until she lit the crumbled orange mixture in the bowl with magical fire and took a puff. Suddenly she came over all dizzy, to an even bigger round of laughter and some stares of faux disapproval from the marefolk before she handed it back.

You changed all that, Twilight. You and your cabal, you've done more for the stock of all living creatures than anypony. You may have never thought so, and these ponies certainly don't know it, but it's true. Antibiotics. Computational engines. The countless translations of magic to technology so that all could benefit, not just unicorns. Faithful student, you gave us the stars themselves.

Celestia sounded as though she was pleading. It had been an age since she'd heard that tone in her mentor's voice. She trotted carefully outside through one of the many flaps and looked up at those distant points of light in the sky. They shimmered almost starkly, far more vivid than on Equestria. As her eyes began to acclimate, many more appeared.

“I've never heard it put quite that way before,” she whispered, bashfully.

It's true. That's why I chose you. My endgame.

“I did always assume I was following your design.”

More beautifully than I could ever have imagined.

A deep, comforting memory arrived in her mind. It was hazy, but she saw herself as a filly, asleep beneath a white, downy wing which seemed to span the heavens like a bridge. A roaring fire crackled an intense yellow, the citrus smell of the ponyoak logs spitting into the air. As if faded, ultimately as all things must, she realised she was still staring at the stars, quite phased out. Nothing more needed to be said between the two. She went back inside to figure out where she would be spending the night. Not unsurprisingly, there was no surfeit of offers.

*

Mason's Star had been slowly crawling toward its ultimate fate for the last ten million years. In life it had been an unsuspecting thing of roughly three solar masses, but now it had spent its primary fusion fuels and begun to grow fat. It would never undergo the quiet dignity of a lengthy retirement as a white dwarf, though. At some ancient juncture gravity had conspired to place it on the same vector as a wandering neutron star, and now the twenty five kilometre ball of degenerate matter was finally within the disparate corona of the red giant. As more of the stellar metals fell inward to acrete against the neutron star, carbon-oxygen fusion, previously impossible within the donor, began to occur. Electric blue flashes of light illuminated the scant rocky bodies still orbiting the ancient star, bathing their landscapes of cracked basalt regolith in hard radiation.

Twelve minutes later, on the open regatta deck of the Puddin' Out To Pasture, the festivities began with a raucous burst of cheering and celebration amidst the sound of popping champagne corks and the striking up of a microgravity band as the light reached them. All of a sudden, Pinkie Pie quite forgot what they were supposed to be celebrating. It was only fifteen minutes previously that her navigator had mentioned the neutron star was about to go up. That, apparently, had been enough.

The pink pony sighed as she instinctively avoided the ballistic trajectories of the corks and their corresponding trails of bubbles. Just a hundred years ago, the cosmic show alone would have been sufficient to justify things. But recently the party crowd aboard her mammoth interstellar yacht had grown stale. The faces all changed regularly, of course. She wouldn't have had it any other way. Only certain ponies were allowed aboard whenever the Pasture put in at some port or other. There was no price for admission, only proof of a particular mindset. And naturally those sorts of ponies wouldn't hang around any one nest of perpetual debauchery and endless hedonism-for-its-own sake for too long.

A particularly ferocious series of silent flashes elicited nervous excitement from the merry makers and a brief lull in the conversation. The neutron star was only just beginning its devouring spree. Over the next few days it would convert up to twenty percent of the remaining mass into energy, with the rest becoming part of the neutron star itself. Her navigator had been rather excited about it, assuring her in too-enthusiastic tones that the combined mass wasn't enough to collapse into a black hole. Something about an Oppenheimare limit.

No, it's not the ponies, she thought. It's me.

Pinkie impelled herself carefully through the crowd with dainty motions of her back legs, avoiding the numerous comatose revellers. They'd been at it almost non-stop for a week since leaving Calhoun, striking out into the heart of a relatively unexplored globular cluster beyond the limits of seventh ring space. It was made up of unusual, tightly-packed stars, mixed-mass X-ray binaries, sub-millisecond pulsars, and even a cataclysmic variable or two.

Certainly, when the rest of ponykind eventually made it out this far, twenty five hundred light years from the world that birthed them, they would be giving this whole region a wide berth. Were it not for the unique construction of the Pasture, with its bespoke magical radiation shields, they'd have all died a handful of Transitions in.

And nopony would ever have noticed. They'd all just assume I'd grown bored of life and gone off to party with aliens, or something. Would they even give me a state funeral? I haven't set hoof on Equestria for the better part of three centuries. I didn't even come back home for the war.

Regret was not a usual emotion for the undeniable queen of living in the moment. Perhaps it was the fact they were so far from their usual stomping grounds. The Pasture typically ran a ten year circuit between the sixth and second rings, as whimsy dictated, or as seasonal delicacies and vintages came off and onto the market. They'd been displaced from this pattern by the war, acting in the civilian emergencies that followed to evacuate planetary populations, and had never quite gotten back into the swing of things.

Recently they'd been loitering skittishly, visiting the outworlds, as though plucking up the courage to dive headlong into what was essentially the unknown. Only a few remote probes had previously hopped their way through, usually at the behest of some corporation eager to exploit distant resources.

Her reminiscing was broken by a gentle beeping in her left ear. It was the Pasture, or more properly, the network of electronic intelligences that managed the many delicate systems aboard. Surprised, she accepted the direct neural link. It was unusual for the aloof machine mind to contact her directly. Whatever it was, it wasn't to share in the natural beauty going on outside.

“Ma'am, we hope we are not interrupting.” The voice seemed to come from somewhere behind her left ear, though in reality it was a controlled hallucination, streaming out into her neurones from artificial counterparts in the centre of her brain.

“Not at all. What can I do for you?”

“We just lost all three ansible links.”

“So what? We were expecting that. We're beyond the outer worlds.”

“That may be true, but we weren't expecting it for another three hundred light years. That's the maximum operational range of our communications drones. We have sent out our entire complement for six successive cycles now. Every time they've come back they've reported the same thing. No carrier wave. It's almost as though the central hub on Equestria is down. But even if it was we'd still have a basic carrier signal. What little data we've managed to pull from the rest of the network is confused and erratic. There's a great deal of panic. The home system has gone totally dark. Nopony seems to know what's going on.”

“What does that mean?” Pinkie asked, heart beginning to race. It couldn't possibly be. The Perpetual Darkness had been wiped out. There were simply none left.

“We thought that there might have been a serious malfunction at a second or third ring ansible hub. But we still have carrier signals for every major and minor hop. It's as though some pony scooped Equestria off the map.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Reverse course immediately and return to second ring space. If anything we can find out what's going on. And we doubt that this failure will remain private for long. Our guests will no doubt realise the problem when they can't get any messages home.”

“All right. Let's do it.”

The bulbous rectangular shape of the Pasture, bathed in the strobing brilliance of the neutron star, vanished down the compressed exotic matter neck of a Transit wormhole a few minutes later, heading inwards toward more friendly space.

*

Gracious. What is this thing you built?

It was the start of another day on Esterházy. Wan rays of amber sunlight crept over the horizon as though sneaking up on an unsuspecting prey animal, stelliferous fangs drawn. The vast majority of the villagers were now sleeping off hangovers somewhere. Twilight hadn't managed to imbibe enough of the various intoxicants on offer to join them in merciful oblivion, however.

The last vestiges of honeyed warmth were draining out of her system with gleeful abandon, Magical Nature determined to keep its charge on an even keel. Sleep hadn't been particularly forthcoming either, despite the big downy bed in Nitrogen Fixer's spare room which his wife had shown her to, and she'd spent most of the night watching the stars, trying to pick out patterns in them.

“What do you mean?” she muttered. Celestia had been absent since she'd shown her the fireside memory from so long ago.

Just catching up on what's gone on since I've been away. Oh, I see. It's my tomb.

“Ugh,” Twilight blushed, half-disgusted. “I'd forgotten.”

I don't see how you could. You spent two years slaving over it. It's very pretty. Is that the stellar life cycle?

“Yes, it is,” she replied, wearily. “Molten uranium is a pain in the rump to sculpt in.”

It certainly looks like it. And I'm glad you kept your promise.

“Which promise was that?”

To delete the memory of Jupiter Red's design.

“Oh. Well, I couldn't have lived with that knowledge stuck in my head. I barely get by knowing that I designed it, that I brought it into the Universe.”

I won't insult you by rolling out any of the tired old, greater good, lesser evil phrases.

Twilight nodded and stroked the ruff of new growth hair jutting out of the back of her head with a hoof. It was still the same colour and style as she'd been wearing it that fateful day a thousand years ago, when the Magical Nature imprinted itself on her and forever locked her into a mane cut that hardly became a princess.

You haven't forged a Principle yet. Was Luna really so stricken with grief that she forgot to hand over the reins properly?

“She mentioned something about it. I couldn't find any record of what a Principle might be so I just put it to one side and forgot about it,” Twilight mumbled, looking out over Fixer's vineyards. They twinkled as the first rays of the sun caught the oily dew drops. Little angry clouds of strange, rod-like insects buzzed between the rows of green and grey fruits, the rippling lines of their gossamer wings all vibrating in unison producing an overall harmonic buzz.

“Those were truly dark days. The war was over. Ninety million dead. Sixty-seven worlds lost forever. We'd lost our princess, the Light-in-Darkness, She-Who-Raises. I had bigger things to worry about.”

That you did, faithful student. And I am sorry. Truly I am. None should have to face what you did alone. I only wish I could have been there for you.

“Yes. Me too.”

There was movement somewhere behind her, and Twilight turned to look. It was Pure Grace, Fixer's wife.

She was balancing a tray of tea cups on her head with the natural ease that befitted her earth pony heritage. Behind her back legs was a filly who couldn't have been more than five years old, staring at Twilight with big, wide, disbelieving eyes.

“Tea, dear?” she asked, smiling warmly. The mare had a disregard for properly addressing royalty that Twilight respected and admired.

“Yes, please, thank you.” the princess replied, telekinetically lifting up one of the fine bone china cups, taking a sip.

Grace and her daughter went back inside and left Twilight to her apparent regal contemplations. The tea smelled of citrus and mint, burning slightly in the same rather pleasant way, much like the leaves she'd sampled back in the forest. The honeysuckle aftertaste confirmed the link.

“So, what's a Principle then?” Twilight asked, once she was sure everypony was out of earshot.

Put simply, magic armour. But it also represents primacy amongst the diarchy, or triarchy.

“It's a monarchy now.”

Cadence is still out there somewhere, you know.

“Like I'd go looking for her! She made it perfectly clear she wanted nothing more to do with us.”

It was never supposed to be a monarchy. I knew I should have written all this down somewhere.

“Yeah, you should have done. But why do I need to show primacy when it's just me? And it's not like I'm ever going to charge headlong into battle. Why would I need magic armour?”

Primarch Alicorns build power progressively, like a battery being charged up. All magical creatures do. The usual mechanism for release is either magic use itself, or a kind of static discharge into the standing magical field. Usually this doesn't matter much because, let's face it, most magic users are like fireworks beside an atom bomb. But when it happens to us, Primarch Alicorns in particular, the effects are far more violent. The Principle acts as reservoir. Like the crowns and the elements, they are constructs of ordered energy. It allows us to safely discharge the massive power levels we naturally produce without sterilising the galaxy when we sneeze. It also looks snazzy when you do actually run head long into a fight.

“So I'm a Primarch Alicorn now? Surely Luna is the senior of us.”

She abdicated. The Magical Nature notices those sorts of things. She will lose her wings within a hundred years and live out the life she had remaining before her ascendency.

“I had no idea,” Twilight said, suddenly feeling very sorry for the Moon Princess. “I sent two of the element bearers to find her. Fluttershy and Rarity.”

Yes. You did. Their return triggered this whole sequence of events. Does that not tell you something?

“What do you mean?”

My sister is more devious than you give her credit for. I wouldn't put it past her to have contrived this entire situation, now I come to think about it.

Twilight could formulate no cogent reply. The idea that Luna might have taken control of the Faithful Student, putting it on a collision course with Equestria just so she would have to take drastic magical action, thereby reviving Celestia, was just too crazy. How could she have known? And if she did, why not simply tell them? The Twilight Princess sipped her tea and continued watching the little village of Mistime come to groggy, hung over life just beyond the vineyards.

*

Fixer came back to consciousness and immediately wished he hadn't. His mouth felt as though it had been simultaneously sandpapered and left to dry out in a pottery kiln. In the middle of his head a terrible ache throbbed merrily away, like a demon jabbing at his neurones with a red hot poker. He opened his eyes tentatively. The midday sun was streaming in through the polycarbonate window panels that made up one side of he and his wife's bedroom. He closed his eyes again and thought carefully about getting up. If the ferocious hangover was anything to go by, the party they'd thrown last night to celebrate the arrival of the princess on Esterházy had been the example for which the archetype would undoubtedly be named.

Extricating his legs as best he could from the tangle of sheets and pillows, Fixer ambled precipitously into the large, open plan living room. There didn't seem to be anypony home. The two big sofas arranged at right angles in the centre were neatly packed away, and the low coffee table's various decorative and functional accoutrements had been rearranged by order of size. This was somewhat unusual. As well as he and Grace kept the house, it was always a homely, chaotic order.

Rubbing his temples and thinking on the matter, he noticed that the veranda doors were open. Just beyond them a few strange lavender objects were scattered about on the floor. It took him a moment to realise that they were feathers. They were far bigger than any found on equestrian birds, and Esterházy had no feathered creatures. Fixer went over and picked one up. 'Feather' hardly seemed to describe it. The shaft was jet black and featureless, except for tiny pores where the bases of deep purple and near turquoise plumes emerged. Running a hoof along the edge he discovered them to be razor sharp, digging into the thankfully non-sensate layer as easily as any scalpel.

He gathered the rest up and went into the kitchen, putting them on the high counter-top where they would be safe. It wouldn't do at all for Boson to pick them up and cut herself. He noted the time on the kitchen display and grunted in annoyance. It was nearly two in the afternoon. Good thing I'm self-employed. Fixer made coffee and tried to coax his memory into recalling more of the night before. It all got too hazy after the second round of orange spore tobacco. He didn't even remember coming home.

Hopefully he hadn't made too much of an ass of himself. But it had been nice to cut loose, especially for such a bizarre reason. No doubt it would all be explained properly in due course. The Princess hadn't been particularly forthcoming as to why she was on Esterházy, or why she'd fallen out of the sky the way she had, but that was the way of royalty. Some things the average pony wasn't meant to know.

If it had been anything major, a war emergency, something like that, they'd know about it by now. Fixer had been on Lyra's World with his parents the last time, and it had only taken twelve hours for the entire Equestrienne to receive news that their world had been attacked, the ansible network had moved so fast.

The coffee was strong and invigorating, and it soon soothed his alcohol-battered self. He set the strange purple feathers aside in his mind and went about half-heartedly at the day's chores, knowing he wouldn't get much done. His wife would undoubtedly be out in one of the vineyards, fixing whatever completely intractable mechanical problem had befallen them today, and Boson wouldn't need picking up from school for another three hours.

It was therefore something of a surprise when a dark shape swooped soundlessly out of the sky and ambushed him shortly after he'd finished setting up the agriculture robots for their first maintenance pass.

“Celestia!” was all Fixer could exclaim as he felt a sharp rush of air overtake him.

“Not quite,” the Twilight Princess replied, alighting primly between the rows of tall, sturdy vines bearing their nascent fruiting bodies. “Only me.”

“Y-yes, of course, your Highness-”

“I think we're probably on first name terms by now,” she interrupted, without trace of admonition. “I was just taking a look around from above. You have a lovely township here. “

“Thank you, your Highness.”

The Princess frowned at him briefly, but after pausing as though listening to some distant sound, she let it pass without further comment.

“You really are all alone out here, aren't you?” she said, changing the subject. “I flew two hundred kilometres east to west and didn't see anything other than a few farmsteads. There's not even a road connection.”

“That's right, ma'am. We're totally reliant on our air link. It either comes suborbital from Merrick, that's two thousand klicks to the south, or exoatmo from whatever interstellar boat happens to be passing.”

“But why are you so far away from anything?”

“Esterházy is a corporate deal, ma'am. Only reason most of the ponies on world are here is because they signed up to a rent-to-own development scheme of some kind,” he smiled wryly at her as noticed her incomprehension. “See, when a corporate entity has an interest in building the general economic and civic infrastructure of a place, they put up really cheap land deals in exchange for committing to some kind of development for the overall good.”

“So you have to build schools and hospitals?”

“Amongst other things,” Fixer said, pointing over her shoulder toward the barely-visible farm house. “Depends what kind of contract you get. All we have to do is be profitable as an export business in under fifteen years. Plus build a bunch of water pipes and stuff we'd have done anyway.”

“I see. So you have to go where the good soil is? That's why you're out here?”

“Yes ma'am. Because of the way the local plants work, they shift nutrients around in the soil into big reservoirs over time. We're right in the middle of one of those here. But that leaves most of the continent unworkable. You'll see it from the plane I imagine. Nothing lives out there at all, nothing but microbes.”

“How fascinating,” the princess replied, sounding genuinely sincere. Fixer was surprised. Usually when he started talking about soil nutrients and Sumner's macroagricultural quirks, ponies started falling asleep. “How on Equestria does that happen?”