Heart of Courage

“One minute to re-emergence.” The artificial intelligence of the UENRainbow Dash spoke over ship-wide speakers. Crew members waited attentively at their stations, ready for whatever surprises they might find in the uncharted solar system. So close to the end of their dangerous trek through cygnul territory, the tension in the air of the bridge was palpable.

Five hours dwindled to one, which quickly became scant minutes before they were scheduled to reappear back into the universe. Twilight Sparkle couldn’t help but reflect on how the time had flown by. She still had enough of a break to eat a good meal and try to get some rest, but her mind would not stop racing. The longer they stayed in cygnul space, the more worried she grew that their luck would run out.

As the seconds trickled down, she fought off a yawn before gluing her eyes on a false representation of the tiny star system growing rapidly larger on the front view screen as they traveled many times the speed of light. She knew that the image had to be artificially created on account that they were not even part of the universe at large. The laws of physics did not allow for post-luminal travel and thus, they had to detour through an alternate dimension just to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

The counter had just about run down and Twilight watched her computer’s clock as it cycled through the last few seconds. She swallowed and licked her lips, preparing herself for the uncomfortable pressure that accompanied the transition between dimensions. It had just about reached zero when the ship jerked forward hard, as if a massive hammer had struck its nose. A reverberating bang sounded throughout the entire frigate, something on the bridge blew apart violently, and all sorts of alarms began wailing away.

Re-emergence always seemed to give Twilight Sparkle a temporary foggy-head, but the feeling never lasted for more than a few seconds. This time, however, she experienced a wave of revulsion and terror by the likes of which she had never felt before. Her vision flashed red, a sickly bitter taste overwhelmed her mouth, and a roaring in her ears momentarily drowned out the ship’s alarm systems. Fortunately, the unnatural sensations did not seem to persist for too long and the lavender pony was able to fight back the bile that threatened to rise from her throat.

Blinking back her sight, the mass of grey in front of her stopped spinning and resolved into the metal deck of the bridge. Her seat’s straps dug into her shoulders painfully, and she realized that she was slumped over the legrest of her chair. Flashing lights and screaming sirens all vied for attention and as she glanced around the room; it seemed she wasn’t the only one trying to recover. Every crew member, pony and human alike, struggled groggily to regain their senses.

Luckily, it seemed everyone had used their crash harnesses correctly, even Dmitri, but on the left side of the bridge, one of the wall-mounted control panels had blown apart. Twilight thought she remembered Alice or James telling her a long time ago that it housed manual backup controls for the warp drive, though it did not look functional anymore. Inside of the console, she could see sparks dancing among glowing shards of what used to be a series of large capacitors. The pony who sat in front of the gaping hole put a hoof to his head and groaned in pain. He may have been hurt, but he was at least still alive.

As soon as Twilight felt that the wounded pony did not need her immediate attention, she brought a hoof up to rub her own aching forehead while acknowledging the various warnings on her screen. She stared hard, trying to force her mind to decipher their meanings, while wondering why she was having such a hard time making out individual words. Emergency Re-emergence Initiated… Critical Power Overload… A.I. Core Reboot Activated….

“James?” Her voice cracked harshly, and she flinched from the sharp pain in her throat. Coughing to clear it, she turned towards the captain’s chair. “What’s going on?”

Next to her, James’s head slowly wandered. His unfocused eyes and slack jawed appearance reminded her of the night out with Deval Aldridge in Midnight City, but she felt none of the joy she had been feeling that day. The human mumbled something unintelligible before he tried pressing something on his own computer.

His first attempt failed, but he managed to mute the alarms on the bridge with his second, and their wailing stopped immediately. “Alice!” His voice did not sound much better than Twilight’s. “Situation report! What happened?”

The usually punctual artificial intelligence did not answer them. The armrest on James’s chair where she should have been perched remained empty, and a cold sense of dread formed a knot in Twilight’s stomach. Even though their reemergence had already been fraught with several obvious problems, having their ship’s indomitable computer fail to heed their calls made it clear that something had gone seriously wrong.

We are in a lot of trouble. Twilight focused on her own screen after Alice remained silent. She pulled back the list of ship-wide emergencies and scanned through them again, looking for one that had nagged the back of her mind. A.I. Core Reboot… ninety eight percent.

“James,” She angled her screen to show him easier. “Something forced Alice to reboot her entire core. She should be back any…” Interrupting her, a translucent spectacle of green light flickered through a series of random shapes and patterns before they settled into the miniature earth pony form Alice preferred.

“Captain! We’ve experienced an emergency reemergence from jumpspace!”

“No shit!” From his seat in front of the bridge’s central dais, Dmitri had finally recovered enough to be somewhat back to his old self. The stocky earth pony held his forehead with one hoof while working at his station with the other.

James pressed the AI, choosing to ignore Dmitri for the time being. “What happened to you? Why did your core shut down?”

“We experienced an intense gravitational gradient and it tripped the automated security measures in our jump engines, forcing us to reemerge before the ship could tear itself apart. Without following the standard protocols for reemergence, we experienced a more brutal transition than usual. The ship suffered a power surge and most of my systems had to shut down temporarily to keep me from taking any permanent damage.”

“Well, where are we? What tripped the automated system? Did we emerge too close to the star?”

Alice turned to face the front view screen. Its image sputtered a few times before it managed to focus on a pale red dot, only distinctive because every other star in the near vicinity outshone it by a substantial amount. “We are not close at all. By my initial observation with what’s left of our optical sensors, our intended target is at least light week away, and it is still the closest star to us.”

“That’s not possible.” Isamu Zhang typed a few quick commands at his station and a detailed readout of their intended target appeared on the main screen, confirming what Alice just said. “A star of that mass would have only triggered the emergency reemergence sensor if we were within a million kilometers or so. We are billions of kilometers away. What is going on?”

“The power surge forced me to reboot everything. Not all of my sensors are back and running so I am not entirely sure what happened.” Alice paused a moment before she continued somewhat hesitantly. “I do have our full active sensor suite online, but I did not want to take the risk yet and alert anyone that might be listening.”

Out of the corner of Twilight’s vision, she saw James furrow his brow. “We don’t know what is out there, but something dragged us back into real space and emergency jumpspace transitions give off all kinds of radiation and sensor noise. How long until you have the jump drive back?”

“An emergency reemergence requires a lengthy maintenance routine. Socket Wrench already has her crew working on it as fast as they can. Unfortunately, she seems to be blaming me for the damage done to the jump engine and she won’t speak to me unless she requires certain status readings she can’t get on her own.”

“What about your gravimeter?” James unclasped his seat’s restraints when he took note of the wounded pony by the backup warp drive controls and made his way over to check on him.

“I am still trying to get it back online. The actual device itself needed realignment and Socket Wrench has two engineers putting it back together.”

James gave the pony a cursory inspection, satisfied that he wasn’t in critical condition before making his way back to strap in. “Very well, we don’t have a choice. We need to go active then. Give me one ping only, Alice. Also have Victoria come up to check on ensign Stronghooves”

“Very well, sir. One ping.” The artificial pony stared almost absentmindedly at the front screen, but Twilight figured that she was probably preoccupied as she sorted through the mountains of data that the ship’s active sensors were telling her.

Not more than a minute or two had passed when Victoria came running on the bridge with a bag of medical supplies bouncing on her shoulder. She zeroed in on the injured earth pony and went about checking him out. “He has only superficial wounds, James. Nothing serious, but he is lucky.”

James nodded when on his armrest, Alice’s eyes narrowed and the main screen changed to display the frigate’s position in the local neighborhood. An expanding bubble centered on the Dash continued widening as their active sensor ping explored their immediate surroundings. Various specks appeared, marking small rocks and chunks of ice; surprising since this supposedly empty region of space should have been cleared of any debris from the intense solar winds pouring off the nearby star cluster.

Though the presence of this much interstellar debris certainly drew Twilight’s suspicion, the sudden appearance of a Jovian-sized planet immediately captured her attention. Murmurs washed over the bridge crew as they all reacted to the rogue planet’s presence in the middle of what was thought to be empty space. Taking control of the situation, Captain Fletcher addressed the ship’s AI. “Quiet down everyone. Alice, what can you tell us about that planet?”

“It is large, but not compared to the larger gas giants I have in my database in terms of volume. I cannot determine its mass yet without further observation or the use of my gravimeter, but by how much radiation it is giving off, I would suspect that we are looking at a brown dwarf.”

A brown dwarf? Twilight’s eyes went out of focus as she wracked her memory for details about the strange world that blurred the line between planet and sun. Not massive enough to sustain fusion of regular elemental hydrogen, they still could give off their own energy by fusing the lightest element’s heavier isotopes.A failed star is what I remember them to be.

“That brown dwarf is too far to have tripped the emergency sensors, but could there be a cygnul construct or something that might be able to do such a thing?” James glanced to his right at Twilight and something in his eyes gave her the inkling that he had a theory formulating in his head.

“There is no detectable cygnul presence orbiting this side of the planet.” Alice’s voice seemed to end somewhat abruptly and her avatar froze on James’ armrest. Even the cutie mark of ever changing ones and zeros sputtered for a second before she went back to normal. “I have fully finished rebooting the ship’s optical sensor array if you would like to look around. I am currently cataloging the nearest known supergiant stars to triangulate our exact position.”

Twilight Sparkle worked on her seat’s computer, bringing up a camera feed to the ship’s exterior optical sensors. All around them, stars burned brighter than any night sky she could ever remember seeing. She could even see faint patches of glowing light, indicating the presence of gas clouds illuminated by the local stellar neighborhood. Following the indicator markers that Alice had overlaid on the image, it only took a few seconds to pan around and zoom in on the failed sun.

A splotchy cherry dot widened on her monitor. Still too fuzzy to make anything out other than color and general shape, Twilight could pick out a faint shifting of the planet as it moved away from them. Starting from the top of her screen and cascading to the bottom, the image slowly came into focus as the ship’s computer adjusted the resolution.

She studied its glowing surface, her brow furrowing at something tickling the back of her mind. Suddenly, the lavender unicorn’s breath caught in her throat as she gawked at a brown dwarf that had never been visited by ponies, humans, or any of the other member species of the United Equestrian Nations for that manner. A system that had never before been named, catalogued, or even detected that would have remained undiscovered possibly for millions of years had they not accidently stumbled upon it. She stared at her screen, slack jawed and wide-eyed, because she had seen this planet before.

No… it can’t be… it must just be a coincidence. She clung to that faint hope, quickly changing the dials on her computer in order to continue studying their surroundings. Brightly shining stars spun by, creating a vista that she normally would have taken some time to admire. With the temperature on the bridge feeling a dozen degrees colder, however, Twilight could not waste a single moment as she searched for something to dispel her worst fear, or even worse, confirm it.

She worked the hull cameras so fast that she nearly overlooked what she was searching for. A flash of brilliant colors zipped by quick enough that had she blinked, she might have missed it. With a huff of impatience, the unicorn mare carefully retraced her steps before she rested on the image. A brilliant nebula took up an appreciable portion of the sky, stretching away from the epicenter of a dying star. Its bright orange eye glowed in the center of a crimson ring, and at its very heart, a tiny white dot sparkled brightly.

“James,” Twilight twisted her screen to show the captain what she had been searching for. “This is the system I saw….”

“Captain!” Dmitri shouted over his shoulder, interrupting Twilight abruptly. “Our active ping is picking up cygnul ships!”

“James.” Twilight tried to get his attention again.

“How many ships?” The human’s attention only focused on the pressing matter at hand. On the bridge’s main screen, tiny red dots marking cygnul ship signatures began to appear much too rapidly for anyone’s comfort.

“Excuse me, sir.” She tapped the side of his seat with a forehoof.

“Several fleets’ worth, it looks like.” Alice answered before anyone else could.

“Where did they get so many ships?” Isamu Zhang could not hide his astonishment. “This is more ships than the UEN has on the front lines!”

“Captain James Fletcher, this is important!” Twilight raised her voice, thick with irritation. Silence fell across the bridge as all eyes went to her. Most of the crew had terror plastered on their faces, but a select few, the captain included, seemed simply surprised.

“I’m sorry, Twilight. I guess I got caught up in the, situation, we are in. I am hoping that you have something good to tell me, but frankly, I don’t think I am that lucky.”

Twilight gulped down the lump in her throat. “This is the same system I saw when I entered the cygnul’s mind on Valles. We are here in the heart of their territory!”

For his benefit, he did not doubt her for a moment, and the calm UEN captain addressed his ship’s artificial intelligence. “Alice, get us out of here.”

No sooner had he given the order when a sharp psychic wave washed over Twilight, forcing her to visibly flinch in her seat. The unicorn shook her head once to clear it before looking around to see if anyone else reacted in the same way. A unicorn stallion stationed at the ship’s communications suite rubbed at his horn and Isamu Zhang seemed to be lost in a gaze, but other than them, no one else had any reaction.

All of a sudden, a warning appeared on Isamu’s computer and he snapped back to focus. “Captain, the cygnul fleets are orienting themselves in our direction. They’ve spotted us!”

“I am still charging the warp drive, but even if it was charged, I can’t route access without that panel.” Alice pointed a holographic hoof at the mess of sparks across the bridge. “Socket Wrench is on her way now to manually bypass it but it will take time.”

“I don’t think we have very much time.” Twilight spoke to no one in particular; taking note of the rapidly climbing number of cygnul ships in the top corner of the front screen.

“Stand by; I think my gravimeter is coming online now. I am receiving data on the anomaly.” Alice’s image pixilated when suddenly, the ship’s maneuvering thrusters kicked on, yanking everyone hard in their seat straps. Then, Rainbow Dash’s powerful main drive lit up at full blast, and they rocketed forward in the general direction of the brown dwarf.

The only one not strapped in, Victoria lost her balance and flew backward. At the last possible second, James managed to fight the acceleration enough to lean over and snatch her out of the air. He grabbed her and held her against the ferocious pull of the frigate’s engines.

Twilight struggled to brace herself in her chair from intense shaking as the ship accelerated much faster than it normally should have. If the warnings that popped up on her computer were correct, then the engines were running at temperatures fifty percent higher than their maximum safe levels. She stared ahead as the image of the brown dwarf slowly began to grow larger, remembering how much closer she had been when she saw through the cygnul’s eyes. “Alice… stop!”

The ship’s acceleration slowed to a more comfortable level where its inertia dampeners could compensate for the high g-forces its crews might otherwise experience. As the bridge crew members regained their composures, Alice addressed them as one. “I’m sorry. We were falling in towards the gravitational anomaly that forced us out of jumpspace, and I had only seconds before we fell beyond the point of no return.”

“Where is it?” James helped Victoria to her feet before he readjusted the straps on his chair with one hand while the other swiped across his computer screen, spinning around the view from an exterior camera.

“Approximately four million kilometers and rising. I have oriented it directly on our stern. Analyzing now.”

Curiosity taking hold, Twilight glanced over James’ armrest as he focused the video feed directly behind them. She could see the twin tails of plasma from Rainbow Dash’s oversized engines trailing behind them. A wall of bright stars stretched across the sky, mixed with several irregularly shaped blobs of glowing gas. Four million kilometers was quite a distance, but whatever had pulled them out of jumpspace remained lost to her. “I don’t see anything, Alice. What am I looking for?”

“Well, that explains a lot. Is it what I think it is?” James studied the starry backdrop. “I see why you got us out of there as fast as you did.”

“Yes, sir. It contains approximately thirty times the mass of Celestia’s sun.”

“A stellar-massed black hole,” Isamu spoke up, having caught on as well, “and a decently sized one too.”

Twilight Sparkle looked at her screen again, feeling unease at the doom they had narrowly avoided. A black hole: the fate of a massive star running out of fuel. Its remnant core can’t stop collapsing upon itself until it reaches a single dimensionless point; a singularity. That much mass in such a small volume warps time and space sharply enough that nothing, not even light can escape its event horizon. She studied the starry backdrop but was unable to pick out anything discerning location of the black hole. “Alice, could it have been what forced us out of jump space?”

“Most definitely. I am ninety nine point nine-nine-six percent sure that is what tripped the emergency sensors. If we had tried to pass as close as we were going to, the gravitational gradient would have most likely torn the ship apart.”

“We should have assumed that we might encounter one. A star cluster such as this would have hundreds if not thousands of massive stars dying and collapsing over just the past million years alone.” Isamu Zhang pressed a few buttons on his console and a map showing the local metric of space appeared up front. Their location was marked with a flashing indicator moving towards the brown dwarf, which only slightly bent the fabric of space around it. On the other hand, the local black hole they were heading away from dragged the metric around it so sharply that it just fell away into an endless funnel. “Perhaps we should have done a more thorough survey before…”

He was interrupted by an angry voice that filled the bridge. “Alice, what the hay are you doing to my ship?”

All eyes turned towards the entryway to see a furious pegasus with a swollen black eye. Socket Wrench walked forward, moving with a slight limp in her front left leg. A large duffle bag hung over her shoulders with several tools and random mechanical parts sticking out of its hastily closed opening. Her remaining good eye scanned the shocked faces of the bridge crew, daring anyone to speak.

“Your maneuver nearly crushed me against a bulkhead! What were… you… think….” She trailed off as soon as she took notice of the readouts on the black hole plastered all over the main screen. Her remaining good eye lost its fire, and she visibly relaxed her posture. “Oh… I see.”

A rumble of the frigate shattered the tension in the air as everyone swung back around to check on the ship’s status. Even Socket rushed forward to Isamu’s chair to read over his shoulder. Alice swiped away the readouts from her gravimeter to pull up the system map again. Cygnul forces marked in red traveled along vectors attempting to intercept their vessel. “Enemy Bombardment Barges have opened fire with long range shells. We are being baked by hard radiation but nothing is getting through the shields.”

“Those frigates are coming in fast.” Twilight Sparkle’s worried gaze locked on a series of the nimble attack ships flying in well ahead of the cygnul capital vessels. Rainbow Dash outclassed these ships individually, but she remembered her first encounter with their brutal enemy and how deadly they could be in large numbers.

“Socket, the panel!” James barked orders quickly and the pegasus mare dashed over to the wrecked warp drive controls. “Alice, can we buy Socket Wrench time? Perhaps a high speed slingshot around the brown dwarf? Diving through its magnetic field would definitely throw off their sensors and our sudden course change would ruin their intercept trajectories.”

“There is not enough time. Even if I push the reactors as far as they can go, they will reach us before we can close in on the dwarf.”

An idea popped in Twilight’s head and she interjected in the conversation. “What about using the black hole?”

All activity stopped and several faces gaped at her as if she had just suggested that they invite the cygnul over for tea and cucumber sandwiches. James eventually broke the silence, more for the fact of their dwindling time window than anything else. “Twilight, are you suggesting we slingshot around the black hole instead?”

“Yes, if we flip over and accelerate, I think we could use the much larger gravity of the singularity to further increase our speed without straining the inertial dampers. After we swing around, we should close the distance with the oncoming cygnul fast enough that they would not be able to accurately target us.”

“You crazy!” Dmitri yelled first to be joined in with a rabble from several other crew members.

“It’s never been done before!” Shouted another one.

“We would never survive the tidal forces!” Yet another argued.

“Hey!” Captain Fletcher silenced the bridge with a sharp retort. “Alice, could you do it?”

“If I am so much as a kilometer off, we won’t survive the maneuver.” The holographic pony stood still for a few moments before giving James a shrug with one glowing green foreleg. “It will be turbulent and many of the ship’s systems will be strained, but I can do it.”

“Everyone, buckle up now!”

Victoria and Socket Wrench dashed towards the back wall where crash webbing had already deployed. As they pulled on their harnesses, everyone else on the bridge double checked their own belts and straps while an alarm echoed throughout the ship, warning the rest of the crew about an impending course change. James waited half a minute for he gave the order to proceed.

“Execute immediately.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth when Rainbow Dash’s maneuvering thrusters fired and her nose swung about. The wall of stars flashed by in a dazzling display of swirling lights until it came to a stop on an unremarkable point in the sky. The ship vibrated as her engines accelerated back to full thrust and they bled off the speed they had previously gained leaving the vicinity of the black hole.

On the front screen, a timer indicated the remaining time until their slingshot maneuver would commence. Already, the flotilla of cygnul frigates had adjusted their incoming vectors to attempt to intercept them. A ticker representing the Dash’s velocity relative to the location of the singularity blurred into unreadability, unable to stay up to date as the mass of thirty suns drew them in faster than any artificial engine ever could.

On Alice’s radar, a few of the slower moving cygnul ships appeared to wobble slightly. Twilight Sparkle’s eyes narrowed at the seemingly random movements when she noticed one cruiser seemingly disappear before reappearing a short distance away. “Alice! The cygnul are attempting to teleport closer to us!”

“No, they aren’t.” The AI pony answered immediately with an air of calm. “I am trying to keep accurate data on cygnul ship locations but it is becoming difficult to adjust for effects from relativity. We are traveling fast enough for space to distort beyond my ability to compensate.”

“Don’t worry, Twilight.” James leaned over his armrest. “The same thing will happen to the cygnul frigates on our tail as soon as we swing around the black hole. They won’t be able to target us at all.”

Speaking of which, Twilight nodded before gulping and turning her attention back to their progress on the front screen. She still couldn’t pick out anything definitive yet, but with the distance to their target dwindling rapidly, she refused to pull her eyes off the video feed. They gained velocity faster than anypony ever had before. Like the pony she had been named after, the Rainbow Dash heard the call for speed, and she answered.

Unblinking, Twilight strained to pick up anything out of the ordinary on the front screen. She did not know exactly what to expect as they closed in with the black hole. Most ponies had the common sense to stay away from such dangerous stellar objects that were strong enough to kill long before one could ever physically reach them. Gravity became so convoluted that it literally ripped apart any object unfortunate enough to find itself passing too close to the event horizon.

It started slowly at first. Slow enough that Twilight’s straining eyes did not notice it initially. A faint puckering of the starry wall seemed to appear out of nowhere just above and off to the left of their trajectory. Stars that were immobile before, all of a sudden zipped around a glowing halo of motley colors. Again and again, this ring cascaded the galactic backdrop in a dizzying display that grew larger with each passing moment.

The countdown timer reached the last few seconds until Alice would commence the gravity assist around the black hole. A few metallic groans vibrated through the deck of the frigate, but the resulting cautionary warnings went ignored by the crew. Everyone here understood that their turbulent journey across the galaxy had taken its toll on the patrol frigate but they had no other option. This was their only chance if they wanted to survive the next ten minutes.

From its center, a pitch-black pinprick expanded and ate away the surrounding vista of suns. Growing rapidly, it distorted the sky to the point where individual stars blurred together around a vibrant vortex of light. Twilight found it impossible to stare at anything else. The collapsed star drew everything around it towards its deadly heart.

In the corner of her eye, the countdown timer ticked down the final second, freezing on zero. No sooner had it stopped when The Rainbow Dash kicked her nose around, centering on the middle of the dark sphere. A violent blow knocked everyone on the bridge back into their seats as Alice dialed up the frigate’s engines to dangerous levels. The human and pony built machinery had been put through its paces already today, but the engines performed their job flawlessly and they slipped into their narrow flight path around the singularity.

Now easily visible on the front screen, the black hole ceased growing larger and it hung in the sky twice the size of a full moon. Twilight felt her stomach drop at the sight of the massive sphere, completely devoid of anything but darkness. As the frigate screamed around it, they traveled fast enough to turn the entire galactic background into a cloudy white curtain. Starlight passing near the gravitational singularity curved into the circular ring as bright as the sun.

If Twilight thought the turbulence before had been uncomfortable, it now ramped up to levels that outright terrified her. The roaring of their engines could not drown out the groaning of the ship as the tidal forces pulled harder on their bow than the stern. She could even feel the severe difference in gravity on her own body, driving her to bite down hard to resist the violent forces assaulting her.

Then, as soon as it had begun, the UEN frigate finished its slingshot and they shot away from the black hole at speed. Behind them, the dark sphere and its starry distortion shrank away in an instant, leaving behind unremarkable sky. The ship’s shaking finally ceased, and they accelerated away towards a particularly bright mote of reddish light ahead.

Twilight Sparkle breathed heavily, bringing a forehoof to her still-tingling face. She squeezed her eyes shut a few times before reaching out to her seat’s computer screen to look over the data from their recent maneuver. Something about the violence of the gravity assist nagged at the back of her mind and a quick peek at their closest flyby distance confirmed her fears. We passed within fifteen thousand kilometers! Any closer and we would have been torn apart!

She glanced over at James’ seat where Alice’s avatar stood perched on his armrest. Sensing her scrutiny, the holographic pony turned towards her and met her gaze. Seeing the fear in Twilight’s eyes, she returned the look with one of her own. Their A.I. seemed well aware that they had traveled around an object with the equivalent mass of thirty stars at a distance not much larger than her home world’s diameter.

The glowing pony stared forward once more and she proceeded to address the crew. “Gravity assist completed; cygnul forces are attempting to engage!”

On the front view screen, red spheres indicated the estimated locations of the oncoming enemy ships. With their closing speeds easily reaching relativistic levels, Alice could only guess where they actually were within several dozen kilometers at best. Even so, incoming particle beams stabbed across the void. Fired by their impatient hunters, not a single incoming beam came close to the nimble UEN ship.

“Alice, return fire!” Captain Fletcher ordered, even though he knew their accuracy was just as badly affected. Even so, Rainbow Dash’s guns barked out an impressive volley of fire. Even with her superior computational skills, Alice failed to score a hit on any of the oncoming vessels. However, her barrage did have one unintended side effect.

In a short span of time, the cygnul frigates went from chasing a fleeing ship to now being attacked by a charging one. They hesitated for a heartbeat, but that sealed the fate on their entire fleet. Cygnul vessels scattered from what they thought was accurately targeted gunfire just to find that they had dangerously altered their vectors enough for one of three things to happen.

As they screamed harmlessly past the UEN ship, a majority of the cyg frigates passed around the black hole at distances that forced them on various trajectories across the stellar system. Unable to close in enough to make the turn, most of the enemy ships ended up scattered across the void. At the speeds they were traveling at, it would take them a considerable amount of time to reverse and burn their engines to bleed off their velocity.

About a third of them suffered a much grislier fate. These ships came close enough to Rainbow Dash for their particle beams to actually become visible to her crew. This put them on a direct course for the singularity and though they taxed their engines to the breaking point, it did little to save them from crossing the point of no return. They died nearly instantly; their ships breaking apart into clouds of glowing matter that swirled into the black hole’s hungry maw.

The rest of the cygnul bore the worst demise. These ships passed too close to be thrown away into space, and too far to suffer an instant death. As they came around the black hole, it bled off too much of their velocity for them to fully escape its gravity. The cygnul pushed their engines to their max, but it did nothing to avert their certain doom. As they spiraled in on ever shrinking orbits, these ships had plenty of time to comprehend their unavoidable fate.

Watching this from the UEN Rainbow Dash as she sped away from the singularity, Twilight felt a chill send a shiver down her spine. They had successfully avoided a much larger cygnul fleet, destroying a significant portion of it in the process, but she couldn’t ignore the lump in her throat. We could have ended up like any one of those ships.

Thinking about the cygnul’s mistakes in chasing them, she also came to another unnerving conclusion. Those cygnul were completely fixated on us. They had no concerns about anything else. Whatever power controls them only had one goal in mind; to destroy this ship.

Twilight Sparkle took her screen’s view off the expanding disk of glowing matter spinning around the black hole behind them. Above the system’s plane, the cygnul capital ships worked to alter their courses, but it would take some considerable time to catch the much faster UEN vessel. It seemed that their unexpected course change had thrown a wrench in the cyg’s plans.

Her attention went ahead, focusing on the glowing point of magenta light that began to take shape as a large glowing gas giant. They closed in with the brown dwarf, and Twilight felt her ears droop from anxiety. She did not know what they would find once they reached it but she knew one thing for certain. It will be nothing good.