Twilight's Rose

Chapters

Chapter 1: Approach
Chapter 2: Retrograde
Chapter 3: Static
Chapter 5: Descent
Chapter 4: Decompression

Chapter 1: Approach

“Dropping to sublight now,” the stallion said, glancing down at the glowing console in front of him. He looked up and scratched his head with a hoof before jamming the crumpled captain’s hat back on top of his thinning blond mane. “Get me a read on this thing, Domino.”

The midnight-blue unicorn looked at his screen. “Huh. It has no FTL capability.”

The captain swiveled his chair toward Domino and raised his bushy eyebrows, replying in a sing-songy voice. “Well if they could jump to FTL, then we couldn’t get a salvage award, could we, Boots?”

Domino rolled his eyes and hid his white hooves under the console. “No,” he said, nodding at his screen. “They have nothing. I’d be able to pick up a dash drive, even if it was damaged or inoperable. This ship has to be pre-colonization.”

“Impossible!” A third stallion pushed Domino to the side and crowded over the console.

“Dammit, Luminov! There’s only room for two on the bridge, and Captain Long Shot is big enough on his own.” Domino squeezed around the steel-gray mountain of meat and tried to breathe. “Freakin’ biggest ponies always end up in space, I swear.”

Luminov ignored him. “No dash drive. No transponder. No gel-matrix armor.” He pointed out the window with a massive, shaggy hoof. “Look at wear on hull. No markings left, no dishes, no sharp edges. Is no dust out here, but ship looks sandblasted. Must be prehistoric. Literally.” He shook his head, keeping his eyes glued on the massive ship blocking out the stars. “Kid is right.”

Long Shot swatted Luminov with his hat until the stallion had retreated out of the cramped bridge, then jammed it back between his ears. “Do you realize what this means?”

“Yeah,” Domino said, scrunching his white muzzle in thought. “No owners of record. We could sell it outright.”

“No no no,” Long Shot said, tilting the hat farther back on his head. “If this ship was built pre-FTL, then there’s only one place it could have come from.”

“Oooooooh, no.” Domino shook his head. “You’re not going to start this homeworld crap again.”

“Imagine a planet, where the cities don’t need walls. Plants grow, just everywhere! Even food crops! Beds don’t need nets, and every pony’s house has windows that just… open! You can breathe outside without a filter. Can you imagine it?”

Domino sighed and rolled his eyes, swiveling his chair back and forth. “Yeah, it’s in all the foal’s storybooks. Besides, everypony knows that Falax is probably the original homeworld. It was ruined by a plague, or a mutagenic virus, or something. Maybe invasive species from other planets, before they realized how important it was to keep xenogenics away from pony ecosystems.”

Long Shot shook his head. “Can’t be. Falax just don’t feel right.”

Luminov nodded. Domino ran a hoof through his bangs and sputtered, “B-but, you can’t base that on a feeling. All the evidence points to—”

“Y’ever wonder why so many Earth ponies run ships?” Long Shot leaned forward until his muzzle nearly met his reflection before the stars. “The planets just feel wrong. The dirt, the plants, everything. The farm habs feel better. Actual living pony dirt under your hooves. In some of the bigger ones, where they grow trees and the dirt is real and deep, you can almost pretend you’re home. Almost.”

Domino slumped in his chair and crossed his hooves over his chest.

Long Shot traded glances with Luminov. “I don’t expect a unicorn to understand. Falax ain’t home. And neither is this tug.”

Domino sat up and returned his attention to the console, pressing a few buttons. “Aaaaaaand that’s why you named your ship Ain’t Home. I signed up with a crazy Lost-Earther crew.”

“Everypony deserves a home, kid.” Long Shot reached over and poked Domino’s horn. “Even a sparkly bastard like you. What else can you tell us about this ship with no name?”

“Well, there’s no distress signal. Probably never equipped with one, because they expected to be the only ones out here. There’s no life signs at all. No life support either, though it’s got full oh-two everywhere – no hull breaches. If life support is running, it must be at such low levels we can’t pick it up. Not enough to actually, you know, support life. Probably filled up the ship after everypony stopped using up oxygen.”

“Which would explain ‘no life signs,’” Luminov said from where he was leaning on the doorway. “I would rather not to go aboard flying graveyard, but we will have to.”

Domino squinted at the stallion. “Why? Can’t we just loop-and-drag? That’s what this scow was built for.”

“Ha! You are still wet behind ears. That behemoth is nearly thirty kilometers every side. No tug has sufficient cable to make dash field that large. See if you can find airlock.”

“Already did.” Domino pointed through the thick glass. “See, it’s a giant square, with what looks like engineering sections on the corners. I only see four airlocks, total. I don’t think it has a conventional bridge, so I’m guessing the information you’re looking for can probably be accessed from any of those tech sections. If I was building this ship, each of those corners would have their own power supply, too.”

Long Shot looked at Luminov. Luminov nodded, his coppery mane bouncing.

Domino looked back and forth between the two Earth ponies. “Sooooooo, how do we get paid if we can’t tow it? I mean, I know you guys want your home planet and whatever, but we need money. We’ve got enough fuel for one more stop, and only if it’s on the way back to civilization. And we’re” —he shrugged— “pretty much out of food. It’s half-rats for the next two months until we hit port. If we don’t get paid there, we won’t be able to break orbit from whatever planet we end up circling.”

Long Shot leaned against a control panel and smiled, his one silver tooth glinting in the blinking lights. “We go in, look around, and figure out what’s valuable. Anypony who owned any of this stuff is long dead, so no guilt, and the law’s on our side. We can stretch our rations long enough to fill our hold with enough stuff to sell. Then, we refuel, buy some more dash cable and come back. Even if we can’t get enough cable… A ship this size? Just making trips back and forth could be a career, if’n we can keep anyone from following us back. We can all make a decent living. Then retire early.”

Luminov pulled a tiny notebook and pencil from a pocket on his vest. “What kind of loot, exactly, are we looking for?”

“You figure anything in there qualifies as an antique? Besides, any of a dozen universities would pay through the nose for any history from before colonization. But first priority is finding any information on the location of Earth, so keep an eye out for star charts, logs, or astronomical data.” He pointed at Domino. “Meanwhile, let’s run a trajectory trace and see where this ship came from.”

Domino rolled his eyes but kept tapping away at his console. “Already started. We’ve got a couple hours of velocity data on it, but if its path went past a star or something, even a tiny uncertainty in our measurement could make a huge difference in the trajectory shift, which of course will introduce exponential error with every additional close approach, so the simulation will have to split into a new calculation based on the uncertainty bounds.” He wheezed and took a deep breath. “We also have no idea when the ship started, so the trace will have to go indefinitely. I’ll just leave it running in the background, since we’re not using nav at the moment.”

Luminov finished scribbling in his notebook, then folded it and put it back in his pocket. “Sounds good. What is our ETA?”

Long Shot pushed his hat back and leaned over his screen. “Fast approach, decel and maneuvering? We’re looking at about eight hours before we drop clamps.”

Luminov backed into the corridor. “Good. Let us prep our suits, then get some rest. Long day tomorrow.”

[scene break image]

Luminov held up a wand and kept his eyes glued to a screen he held in his other hoof. “Air is good,” his voice crackled over the radio. “You go first, kid.”

“If the air’s good,” Domino said as he unlocked the clips around the edge of his oversize helmet, “then why do you want me to go first?”

“Device tests for most common atmospheric problems on ship. Pressure, oxygen, cee-oh-two, flammable organics, nitrates, and most of common coolants. It could miss anything from deadly microbe to recent fart.”

Domino levitated the helmet off his head and took a few tentative sniffs. He smiled. “It kind of smells like flowers, actually.”

Both Earth ponies’ ears perked up in their helmets. Long Shot asked, “What kind of flowers?”

“I dunno.” Domino shrugged. “Flowers. Why? Why are you guys staring at me?”

Luminov stepped forward and grabbed Domino’s head, using his suited hoof to stretch one eyelid open and stared for a few moments. “No lachrymation.”

Domino took a step backward and batted away Luminov’s hoof. “No what now?”

“Some nerve gas smell like geraniums.” Luminov unlocked the rear latches on Long Shot’s helmet, then turned around and waited for his latches to be undone. “Others like fresh-cut grass. If you have ever been around either of those.”

“I’m vaguely aware that geranium is a flower,” Domino muttered. He latched his helmet onto his back and watched his companions do the same.

“Now,” Long Shot said, “we can’t assume we’re the first ship to stop by, and their xenohygiene may not’a been as good as ours. Let’s keep our eyes open.”

Luminov chuckled. “Do not want to get surprised by Durandi spiders again?”

Long Shot’s hoof wandered up to the holster on the chest of his suit. Domino looked down at his own holster and jiggled the pistol inside. “Didn’t our scan show no life signs?”

Luminov didn’t touch his gun. “Some critters hibernate. Or sleep. Or lay eggs.”

Long Shot harrumphed and pointed toward a placard on the wall directly outside the airlock. “Let’s see if we can’t figure out where to go.”

The placard was pristine. Sharp white letters spelled out ‘Airlock B’ across the black-enameled surface, just above a clearly-labeled map. Luminov sketched into his notebook while Long Shot dragged his hoof down a diagram of a hallway. “Past the crew quarters, there’s some offices what might be useful. Power distribution probly’s got a more comprehensive map. And this here arrow? Looks like it goes to the main living area for the passengers.”

Domino scuffed a boot on the metal grating that served as a floor, then let his eyes wander up the dull brown walls, covered in pipes and neatly arranged bundles of wire, with access panels bolted on at regular intervals. “I guess space decor doesn’t change much. It’s cleaner than I expected, though.”

Long Shot walked up to the massive steel door at the end of the short corridor. “I suppose they never used this section much. And if you can invent a ship what don’t need walls and pipes and wires, just feel free to let me know.” He slapped a hoof against a control panel next to the door. “‘Cuz I’m pretty sure most all ships look the same inside, a coat of paint notwithstandin—”

The door whooshed open, flooding the corridor with brilliant daylight. The smooth metal floor gave way to lumpy cobblestones, and the harsh echo from metal walls faded into the faint whispers of open sky.

Luminov held a hoof over his eyes and squinted. “It… It cannot be!”

“It’s not,” said Long Shot. “Give it a second.”

As their eyes adjusted to the light, they could see fluffy white clouds painted on the sky-blue roof, several stories above the surface. There was no single source of light. It was as if the paint itself was glowing.

Domino glanced up, then back at the ground. “Hey, that’s cool. If you don’t look right at it, it looks like the sky.”

“Look at this, though,” Long Shot said as he trotted forward and poked a white picket fence. At his touch, the curling paint flaked off, revealing gray wood beneath. He raised his eyes, taking in an entire building made of wood and stucco. The windows were all wide open, as was the front door. The entire street was lined with similar houses, most of them still standing, more or less upright. He looked over his shoulder at the others. “They used wood like it’s free. We could make a living doing nothing but coming back here to collect wood.”

Domino kicked at a fencepost experimentally, the hollow thunk echoing off the distant ceiling. “I don’t get it. Why hasn’t it rotted after all these hundreds of years?”

Luminov rubbed some paint off a wooden cart where it lay in the road. “Rot is microbial action. Fungal colonization requires twenty percent moisture content in wood to metabolize lignin.”

Long Shot threw a hoof over Domino’s shoulder and pointed upward. “Look at the pitch of that roof. It’s designed to let the rain run off. This ship had weather. And I’m guessing it hasn’t rained since the last pegasus died.”

“Speaking of,” Luminov called from inside a house, “come see this.”

They made their way across a lawn of crunchy brown grass and squeezed past a door with hinges rusted in place. The ancient carpet had been crushed to powder where Luminov had trod, his hoofprints leading past a wooden coffee table with a crazed finish, and the wooden skeleton of what had once been a couch.

Luminov stood in front of a bed frame, where the corpse of a stallion rested on a bed of dust and curly fragments of rusted steel wire. His coat was still a cheery shade of green, though his mane was streaked with gray. The drying skin had stretched away from his teeth and eye sockets, giving him a wide-eyed grin, as if the three ponies in space suits had decided to throw him a surprise party for a funeral.

“This is good omen,” Luminov said quietly.

Domino gulped. “Y-you find a dead guy, and it’s a good thing?”

Long Shot picked up a framed photograph from a bedside table, and studied it as he spoke. “Look at his hooves. They’re folded over his chest. Somepony who loved him left him here. It wasn’t a violent end.”

“I mean, I’m all for—” Domino glanced up at his captain, then back down to the deceased “—going out peacefully in your sleep, but if they’re all dead, what does it matter?”

Luminov stood up straighter. “A violent end is not.”

Domino cocked his head toward Luminov. “Is not what?”

“A violent end is not an end. Their souls would seek vengeance.”

Long Shot set down the photograph. “Dove wasn’t always a peaceful planet. Guy kills your brother, it’s up to you to bring justice for your family. Only, when you do, it’s that guy’s brother who goes looking for justice.”

“Uh, no offense to your planet or anything, Luminov, but why not just have the police arrest the guy?”

Luminov turned to leave the room. “There is no police on planet with only few thousand settlers. After population grows, hundreds of years of tradition is difficult to change. Takes a war.”

Domino followed him into the living room, kicking up a tiny cloud of pulverized carpet with each step. “So, you guys had a war that was so bad you became pacifists? Then how come everypony I’ve seen from Dove carries a gun?”

“Is not so simple. Read a book.”

“But—”

“Hey guys.” Long Shot was squinting at a series of faded, nearly-white photographs lined up on top of a mantel. “This isn’t that stallion’s house.”

Domino and Luminov looked at each other, then turned toward Long Shot. He looked back at them. “He’s not in any of the pictures.”

Domino rolled his eyes. “So? Maybe those are pictures of his kids and their families.”

Luminov shrugged. “He died too far from own home. Was impractical to carry him so far, and this house was empty.”

“I suppose you guys are right.” Long Shot poked one framed photograph, rotating it a few degrees so the others could see. “Beautiful family, though.” He sighed. “Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

Domino shuddered. “It is a creepy place. Makes you wanna look for anything out of the ordinary.”

“This entire place is out of the ordinary,” Long Shot said as he trotted toward the front door and stepped outside. “An entire ship what looks like something out of kid’s book?”

“Or a Lost-Earther’s fantasy?”

Long Shot smirked at Domino. “Let’s head toward the end of the street. It looks like there’s a bigger structure up there.”

They proceeded in silence, the rubber hoofpads of their suits muffling the fall of their steps. There were no other sounds. No insects, no unseen rodents scrabbling about, not even the rumble of a ventilation system. They stopped at several of the houses, peering through windows to occasionally find stallions and mares peacefully laid to rest on their beds or reclining in disintegrated chairs. The three of them didn’t speak a word, saying with melancholy glances all that needed to be said.

Hanging lanterns and colored lights decorated the sweeping archway leading into the large structure, lifting the somber mood as they approached. Giant letters above the entrance read “Buck Plaza.” Luminov pointed at a seam within the archway as they passed through. “Look. Hidden doors here. Airtight. This is emergency shelter.”

Domino spun in a slow circle. There were shops and stalls along both sides of the wide corridor, with light fixtures still illuminating faded signs that were tacked above counters or just hoof-painted on the walls. A second level above them was packed with even more shops, connected by walkways over their heads. “Hey, Luminov. What was the symbol on the map for this place?”

“Muffin and shopping bag.”

“Makes sense.” Domino pointed at various counters and stalls. “That looks like a coffee shop. I’m guessing this one is fresh produce. A bakery. That one’s still full of toys. It looks like you could make one pass with a broom and open this place for business inside an hour.”

Long Shot trotted past a stand with angled wooden shelves. Little hoof-drawn pictures of vegetables had been scrawled onto the front of each section. Eggplants, squashes, carrots, apples. He ran his hoof across the wooden planks. Except for a layer of dust, all of the shelves were clean. “They had to have farms on board, but it looks like there wasn’t anything left at the end. I wonder if something went wrong with their food production?”

“I dunno,” Domino replied. “That grass got pretty shaggy before it died. I know I’d sure be eating some fresh green grass before I let myself starve.”

Luminov chuckled and tapped on a metal sign riveted to the wall near one of the stalls. The edges were rusty and the enamel paint was bubbling from corrosion where it hadn’t already flaked off, but in the middle was a picture of a tan stallion with a short-cropped brown mane and a big smile. The sign said, “No more wait! Let Sparky take your order!”

Luminov put his gigantic front hooves on the counter and leaned over into the employee area, looking left and right. “Hey, Sparky! I want cup of coffee, black.” He turned to the others with a grin. “Do you guys want anything? It is on me.”

Domino chuckled. “I’ll have a cappucino, if you can find any fresh milk. How ‘bout you, Captain?”

Long Shot watched Luminov climb over the counter and start digging around. “Bah. I don’t want no ancient-ass coffee.”

Luminov pulled his head out of a cupboard with a lumpy foil packet in his teeth. He spat it on the counter and said, “Vacuum sealed! Good forever, yes?” He picked up a glass pot, only for the plastic handle to turn to dust and send the carafe crashing to the floor. He tucked the packet of ground coffee beans into his suit’s breast pocket along with his notebook. “Maybe later.”

Long Shot poked Luminov in the chest. “Just don’t complain if that pouch breaks open and ruins your precious paper notebook.”

“Hey guys,” Domino said, staring at a bulletin board. “What do you know about alicorns?”

“Huh?” Long Shot trotted up next to him and squinted at the board. He pulled a set of glasses out of his pocket and perched them on his muzzle.

The largest poster on the bulletin board was the only one intact enough to read. It had probably been laminated at one point, but now was nothing more than wrinkly yellowed paper covered in a thin layer of dust. Rust spots on the corners showed where tacks had once held it in place. The writing was gone, and all that was left was a ghostly blue image of an alicorn with her wings extended.

“Well,” Long Shot said as he stepped back and folded his glasses. “It looks like it might be promoting an event of some kind. Maybe a concert, or a speech. Room for a title on top, and a description or something on the bottom.”

“Yeah, but… Do you think they believed in alicorns?”

“Almost certainly not,” Long Shot said as Luminov trotted up next to him. “If the ponies on Earth knew enough to build a spacecraft, and knew enough to aim it at, presumably, another planet, then they certainly knew enough about astronomy to know that the rising and setting of a sun and moon is due to the rotation of a planet. It would be kind of silly to believe in alicorns once the reason for their existence is negated.”

“You’re probably right,” Domino said as he continued to stare at the poster. “It’s too bad, though. She’s kinda cute.”

Luminov raised his eyebrows and nodded. “True. Is probably artistic theme. Unity rally, or such. Alicorn represents all three tribes at once.”

Long Shot poked Domino in the ribs. “You’re not going to say anything about me just assuming this ship is from the homeworld?”

Domino sighed. “I follow the evidence. And the evidence is going your way at the moment.”

Luminov held up his notebook and compared it to the corridor ahead before tucking it back into his pocket. “And I follow map. Offices are this way.”

As they passed more shops and kiosks, Domino looked up at the blue-painted sky visible through the mall’s glass roof. “It’s starting to get easy to forget we’re on a ship. And this giant floating graveyard isn’t as creepy as I thought it would be, ever since we saw those ponies resting peacefully in their own homes, you know?”

“Just don’t get too relaxed, kid,” said Long Shot. “We still don’t know why they all died. For all we know, it could have been a plague, and we’re all infected now. Or maybe there’s space bugs, waiting for us to drop our guard.”

“Or maybe,” said Luminov as he stood in front of a chalk signboard advertising the daily specials of the Café du Vide, “they were all murdered by serial killer who posed the bodies at his own whim.”

Domino shuddered. “Why would you even say tha—”

“Awww shhhhhyeit.” Long Shot stepped up to the seating area and worked his jaw back and forth like he was chewing on a rock.

Over a dozen ponies were seated in the café, some with coffee cups or the dessicated remains of a sandwich resting on a plate in front of them, others with menus propped up in their still-colorful hooves. All of them were thin, with ribs and hips clearly visible through the tightly-stretched skin, and each of them with the wide-eyed grin they had seen on the first stallion.

Domino squeaked, then cleared his throat and whispered, “D-do you think… They died this way?”

Luminov stepped closer to inspect one of the corpses. “Do you think they all fell on metal rods to hold up their bodies?” He looked back at Domino with one eyebrow raised, then turned his attention back to the mare who was seated in front of the rickety table. “There are wounds on body, but are sewn up. Stainless rods and wires. Built to last.”

“You don’t,” Domino said with a look over his shoulder, “d-don’t think the killer is still here, do you?”

Long Shot laughed. It was a dry, shallow laugh. “Those bodies been dead for longer than a lifetime. Even if he was the last one alive, the killer would have died of old age long, long ago. Besides, the scan showed no life signs.”

“Still, is not good omen.” Luminov backed away from the table and bowed his head slightly before turning to face the others. “Let us get to offices and conduct our business. If we return to this ship again, perhaps we can lay them to rest as we find them. Will be good for their spirits, and for ours.”

Long Shot started trotting again. “That’s something we can discuss if we decide to come back. Let’s go.”

They trotted a few more moments in silence, their ears pricking at every noise, real or imagined. Echoes of their own hoofsteps came back to them in multiples, from every direction.

The corridor widened as they neared an intersection. A defunct fountain stood empty, its bottom lined with crusty coins. On opposite corners stood a cinnamon roll stand and a confectionery, each with a few tables in front. But in the center of the intersection stood the structure that captured the attention of all three stallions.

A concrete planter, full of living, blooming roses.

Long Shot licked his lips. “H-how are these still alive? All the grass is dead.”

“Probably,” said Luminov, “this is watered automatically. Fountain has plumbing. This too, maybe?”

Domino took a tiny step forward and sniffed the air. “I’m not a flowerologist or anything—”

“Botanist,” Luminov corrected.

“I’m not a botanist, but how long do roses live?”

Long Shot spoke quietly. “I grew up in a farm hab. They claim to have an apple tree almost three hundred years old. Maples don’t live to a hundred. There’s rumors that some kinds of cedar never die. But I don’t know nothin’ about roses.”

Domino reached out toward the thorny bush with one hoof, and gingerly poked a blossom. “Is it possible that this thing has just been growing wild, ever since… you know?”

Long Shot glanced at Luminov. “Should our sensors have picked up life signs from this bush?”

“I honestly do not know. Could be is just very big ship to scan. Could be sensors only look for ponies on ship. Or pony size creatures. I do not know about” —he waved a hoof at the tangle of green— “this.”

“It looks like,” Domino said, stepping closer to the planter and poking a branch with his hoof, “this has been trimmed. It… It’s weeping. This is a fresh cut!”

All three stallions turned around, their muscles coiled to gallop back to the airlock, when they were instantly frozen by the sight of a purple alicorn standing directly in front of them. The garden shears in the crook of her hoof glinted in the artificial sunlight as she took a step toward them with a blank expression on her face.

Chapter 2: Retrograde

“Most flowers will grow wild, of course,” she said. Her long indigo mane dragged on the floor as she took a step toward the frozen stallions. “But roses are different.”

Luminov and Long Shot shuffled to either side as she approached, but Domino had already backed up against the concrete planter.

She took another step forward, putting her muzzle-to-muzzle with Domino. “A wild rose bush is nothing but a bunch of thorny sticks, with an occasional sickly bloom.”

Domino squeezed as close to the planter as he could get. He heard the sound of pistols being slowly drawn from their cloth holsters. The mare shuffled forward and raised the shears, shifting her weight to her rear hooves as she gripped the razor-sharp gardening tool. “Roses really require cultivation.”

She snipped off a single rose. “If you pour your soul into a rose, it becomes something beautiful. A reflection of yourself.” She dropped the shears and sat down, then carefully bit the thorns off of the rose’s stem, spitting them into the planter. “A lot like friendship, actually.”

Domino licked his lips and formed a word with his lips a few times before he managed to say, “W-who are you?”

The mare spoke without looking away from the flower in her hooves. “I’m Twilight’s Rose.”

She started, her wings fluttering for an instant. She scrunched her muzzle, then squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. She looked down at the rose in her hooves, then back up to Domino. “I’m sorry.” She tucked the thornless rose behind his ear. “I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle.”

Domino swallowed hard and nodded.

Twilight Sparkle froze, then squinted at the trembling stallion. She poked his face with a hoof, and her eyes grew wide. “Y-you’re real!” She galloped to the other stallions, and squeezed their faces with her hooves, then pulled them all together and hugged them. “Y-you’re not hallucinations!”

Luminov and Long Shot traded glances while the alicorn sobbed and laughed and nuzzled them in turn. Finally, Twilight let go of them all and leaned back, rubbing her muzzle with a hoof. Domino was still frozen, his white muzzle sticking out of the long, silky mane draped over his head.

Twilight leaned back and tugged on her mane, trying to untangle the unicorn. “I’m sorry, you’re caught in my… Wow. When did my mane get so long?”

Domino blinked, and glanced at his crewmates as they slowly holstered their pistols. “Uh, Miss?”

“Technically,” she said as she held up one lavender hoof, “the correct title is ‘Your Highness,’ but really, I’d rather you just call me Twilight.”

“Okay, um, Twilight. Are you… real? Like, I’m not hallucinating or anything?”

Twilight giggled. “Of course I’m real. Just a second ago, I was the one imagining you.”

“But—” Domino gestured to the wings folded at her sides “—you have wings and a horn.”

Luminov cracked his neck. “And Earth pony strength.”

Twilight blinked. “Okay.”

Domino sputtered, “B-but you’re real!”

Twilight tossed the bundle of her mane hair on the ground. “Do you mind if we continue this repetitive conversation on the way to a barber shop? I wasn’t really expecting company, and this mess is pretty embarrassing.” She pointed down a corridor. “There’s one just past the ice cream parlor, and then you can all help me install a little invention of mine that should get us to the next habitable planet in just a few hours.”

Long Shot’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead until they got lost under the brim of his hat. He glanced at Domino, then Luminov. Both of them had similar expressions. Domino mouthed the word, “Hours?”

Twilight cocked her head to the side. “Well?”

Long Shot cleared his throat. “Sure. Lead the way, lady. Princess.” He blinked. “Highness.”

Twilight smiled and started to turn, then looked back to them with one forehoof still in the air and her ears folded back against her neck. “Can… Can you please not disappear when I look away?”

All three stallions nodded.

“Great! Do you guys want ice cream?” She started trotting.

The Ain’t Home’s crew fell in step behind Twilight. They could hear her mumbling to herself as she went. Long Shot whispered, “What the hell is going on?”

Domino whispered back, “We just found a spaceship from your legendary planet, with a legendary immortal goddess on board, who’s invented a faster-than-light drive that’s two orders of magnitude faster than the best we’ve got.”

Long Shot glared at him. “So you’re a believer now?”

Domino watched Twilight’s tail swish back and forth as she walked. He turned back to his captain. “I have eyes.” He stepped over the length of hair that flowed like an indigo river behind Twilight. “How about that FTL drive, though?”

Luminov hopped over Twilight’s tail and leaned in close to the other stallions. “She could be genius. She could be crazy. She could be lying.” He nodded toward a hat shop staffed by a very stylish corpse. “She could be murderer.”

“Or,” said Domino as he glanced at the stallions trotting on either side of him, “she could be a pony who needs our help.”

Long Shot rolled his eyes. “We ain’t pirates. Getting her safely back to civilization is a given.” He paused as Twilight laughed at some unspoken joke. “But getting us back safely is important, too. That means not gettin’ taxidermied, and it means gettin’ paid so we can eat. You wanna get paid, don’t ya?”

Nopony bothered to nod.

“Good. Now, the two most valuable things on board this ship are the location of Earth, and that drive she wants to install. Our salvage award is based on the value of the ship and everything aboard. Drive installed: big money. Drive not installed: pile of junk on a workbench.”

“Besides,” said Domino, “if someone with a bigger scow finds this ship after we have to leave it behind, they might have enough dash cable to wrap this whole thing and drag it back. We found it, so there’s no reason to think somepony else couldn’t find it, too. It’s in the middle of nowhere, sure, but it’s big enough that I’m surprised we’re the first to have found it.”

Luminov grunted. “Let us not count eggs before they hatch. This drive she invented may be ruse, or imaginations of a sick mind.”

Domino nodded. “Sooooo… What’s the plan?”

Long Shot took a deep breath, then set his jaw and let the air out through his nose. He whispered as the others leaned in. “Okay, in order of importance. One: Don’t get taxidermied. That implies Two: Find out what happened here, why everypony’s dead. Three: Figure out where Earth is. Four: Get the tech installed so we can get a salvage award and retire on our own private floating islands. How does that sound?”

Luminov raised an eyebrow. “What about the—” he tilted his head to the side, and made a strangling noise with his tongue lolling out of his mouth “—everywhere?”

Long Shot nodded. “That’s part of objective two.” He looked at Domino with a grin and pointed to the flower behind the younger stallion’s ear. “She seems to like you. You ask her.”

“Fine,” Domino hissed as he adjusted the rose and smoothed down his mane. “Should I ask her about Earth, since you’re both obsessed above and beyond even filthy luchre?”

“Don’t push her,” Long Shot replied softly. “Just keep her talking. And try not to upset her.”

Luminov chuckled. “You know. Any more than she is already.”

Domino rolled his eyes, then sped up until he was trotting by Twilight’s side. “So, uh, Twilight.”

“Hmm?” Twilight looked at Domino and gasped, her wingtips fluttering and then settling back to her sides. “Oh, it’s you. Uhhhhh…” She blinked and opened her mouth. “I’m so sorry! I’m a terrible host. I haven’t even gotten your names. It’s just been so long since anypony has visited, I’ve kind of forgotten my manners.”

Domino stopped and did a mock bow with a sweep of his front leg. “Domino, at your service, Your Highness.”

Twilight rolled her eyes with a grin, then gave him a look up and down and bopped him on the nose. “Well, you are almost black-and-white, aren’t you? Do you have white boots under that suit to match your muzzle?”

“Boots!” hollered Luminov and Long Shot in unison before dissolving into a fit of chuckles.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” Twilight said, turning back to Domino. “Don’t be so grumpy about it, Boots. Nicknames are often a way of bonding with friends.”

“Bonding. Right,” he grumbled. “Anyway, that’s Luminov and Captain Long Shot.”

They both waved. Twilight gave a soft smile. “Nice to meet you all.” She turned to her right and took a step toward one of the shops. “Chocolate or vanilla? Maaaybe strawberry swirl?”

Domino looked up and grimaced at the shriveled mare standing behind the counter. Her purple and white mane was pinned up in a style that looked like a mound of soft-serve ice cream. A bright blue stallion with a yellow mane was seated at one of the tables, grinning at nothing and staring permanently over the top of his empty glass sundae dish.

“Actually,” Domino said as he turned back to Twilight, “I wanted to ask about… these ponies.”

Twilight cleared her throat. “Oh, that. I’ve been very lonely for a very, very long time. This here is… was Jerry Rig. He was brilliant, and a very close friend. One of the last to go.” She looked up at Domino and let out a shuddering breath. “Do you know what happens to a pony when the oxygen runs out? It’s not painful at all, you know. His last few minutes were euphoric. I couldn’t do anything but watch as I held him in my wings.”

“I’m sorry. I just…”

“We come here for ice cream all the time,” Twilight said as she reached out and caressed the deceased stallion’s chin.

Domino opened his mouth, then closed it.

Twilight looked at Domino, then back down at Jerry Rig. She jerked her hoof back to her chest and shot a glance to the parlor’s counter. Her breaths came faster and faster as she squeezed her eyes shut. “I… I don’t…” Her lower lip began to tremble. “T-there’s no ice cream, is there?”

Domino looked at the floor beheath his hooves. “No. There’s not.”

Twilight sat down hard and wept. Her wails filled the mall, echoing off every surface and returning even more bitter. Domino turned his head to look at his crewmates, then sat down next to Twilight and wrapped a hoof around her shoulders. She buried her face in his neck and let her wings sag to the floor as she shook with each sob.

When she finally pulled away, she wiped her face with her wings and muttered, “I’m sorry, I’m such a wreck.” She dragged a hoof down the front of his chest. “I got your space suit wet.”

“I’m sure I would be a wreck too, after… Um. How long have you been on the ship?”

Twilight sniffled. “I have no idea.”

“Were you born here?”

Twilight snorted. “I built the ship. The whole mission was my idea.”

“And what mission was that?”

Domino thought he heard a whimper from Twilight. She bowed her head in silence for several seconds before she took a deep breath. “To establish an offworld colony in order to mitigate the risk of a potential worldwide catastrophe.”

“Ah. So you built the ship to…”

“To bring ponies on a one-way trip. To take them away from their loved ones. To let them die of old age in a tiny metal box. To doom their children and grandchildren to imprisonment in a coffin of my own design.”

Domino bit his lip. “I mean… You were trying to save them, right? To save ponykind. At sublight velocity, they all knew their descendants would be stuck living on the ship until you arrived at your destination. They had to know that, right? How long was the trip supposed to last?”

Twilight leaned into his shoulder and muttered, “About four hundred years.”

“Our history,” said Domino as he rubbed Twilight’s shoulder, “goes back nine hundred years. The records get fuzzy before that, but we’d already colonized a dozen planets with faster-than-light ships before then.”

“The life support system started degrading about sixty years after we set out,” Twilight said quietly. “The rate of decay was very slow. I kept it a secret until the first generation had passed away. No need to burden them all with the kind of guilt th-that… Well, we tried to find a solution. Fixes, modifications to the life support system. I looked for more out-of-the-box options. Suspended animation spells, ice preservation, teleportation. But there was less and less oxygen production, and more and more ponies were dying. By the time I’d figured out how to make a faster-than-light drive that could get us to our destination, I was the only pony left.”

Domino felt Twilight shudder. He looked up at his crewmates. Both were staring at the floor between their hooves. Silence lapped at their ears like ripples on an overgrown pond. Domino took a deep breath. “And you’ve been alone here ever since? That makes you - and the ship - well over a thousand years old.”

Twilight pushed herself off of Domino’s shoulder and sat up straighter, her eyes still downcast.

Domino stood up and reached a hoof out to Twilight. “So, is it true that you’re immortal?”

Twilight took his hoof and stood up, then glanced at the barber shop just a few steps away. She looked back to Domino with a smile, the fur under her eyes still wet with tears. She sniffled and chuckled at the same time. “Technically, one can never know that unless and until one dies. Because you might always die tomorrow.”

“How, uh, cheery.” Domino trotted into the barber shop with Twilight. “So you’re either a scientist or a logician.”

Twilight settled onto a dusty stainless stool beneath the bright lights still shining from the ceiling. “I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years. But I’ve always had a knack for science.” She watched Domino use his elbow to polish the mirror on the wall across from her. When he stepped away from the mirror, she scowled at herself. “Wow. I’m surprised you didn’t run off screaming when you saw me.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said as he ran a suited hoof through her lengthy tresses. “Isn’t there a fairy tale about a princess with very long hair, marooned in a high tower?”

“Don’t you get any ideas, mister,” Twilight said with a pretend frown. She crossed her forelegs over her chest and stuck her chin in the air. “I don’t need to be rescued by any wannabe prince.”

“But you do need to be rescued by a barber.” He looked up and down the countertop until he found an intact jar still full of bright blue liquid. With a nod, he lifted the ground glass stopper and pulled out a pair of scissors and a comb with his magic, shaking them dry as he turned back to Twilight. “Unfortunately, I’m not a barber. And I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Don’t worry,” Twilight said as she sat up straighter. “I have a lot of experience telling barbers exactly what to do.” She glanced up at Domino with her eyebrows raised. “I was a very particular filly.”

Luminov leaned over to Long Shot as they watched from just outside the barber shop. “Can you believe is real alicorn?”

Long Shot shook his head. “My first thought was ‘changeling,’ but they can’t imitate that level of strength. She’s part Earth pony, for sure.”

“Look at him. Thought of changeling never crossed his mind. You think he ever has met changeling?”

Long Shot snorted. “Not that he knew of, I’m sure. Maybe he’s heard stories.”

“Like the one about salvage crew who throws mare out airlock of her own ship?”

Long Shot grunted. “Kid don’t need to hear about that. You and I know she was a changeling.”

“Is no knowing. No proof.”

“Okay.” Long Shot turned to face Luminov and tugged on his cap, pulling it down tightly over his eyebrows. “Let’s assume she was a flesh-and-blood pony. She was still a pirate.”

“We do not know that, either. But I do know that when we kill her and take her things,” Luminov said as he turned back toward the barber shop and sat down, “that makes us pirates.”

“You know full well that’s not what happened. What, you meet a goddess and suddenly grow a conscience?”

Luminov kept staring straight ahead, watching Domino pull up combfuls of Twilight’s mane and snip them to length. His ears drooped for an instant before he spoke. “Do you think we will have to…”

Long Shot sighed. “I dunno. I hope not. I like her. You know, when she’s not being creepy. Or flipping between disturbingly cheerful and disturbingly sad like a light switch. If I was stuck on this ship all alone for a thousand years, I’d be nuttier’n squirrel turds. Preserving the bodies of my friends is probably the least weird thing I’d be guilty of.” He watched Twilight throw back her head and laugh, then playfully poke Domino on the nose.

Luminov grunted. “I would be throwing myself at first mare to show up, too. Kid does not know enough to be scared enough.”

“See, now I can’t tell whether you’re being paranoid or just jealous.” He chuckled as he watched Luminov roll his eyes. “Let him enjoy the attention. She ain’t the only lonely pony who’s been in space for too long.”

Domino called out, “All finished!” He spun the chair around to face the mirror. “See! I’ve cut off zero ears today. A new record!”

Long Shot and Luminov golf-clapped from the shop’s entrance.

Twilight looked at her reflection and toyed with her bangs. “I look like me again.” She took a deep breath and let it out with a hum. “Thank you.”

“Well, I hope it helps you feel like you again.”

“I hate to interrupt before we get to the highlights and perms,” Long Shot said, “but we do have some rather important questions.”

Twilight hopped off the stool and joined the stallions in the corridor. “And I’ll be happy to answer any and all questions.” She clasped her hooves in front of her chest and tilted her head with a smile. “But first, since there’s actually ponies here to help me, I have a plan to get the ship running again. I mean, sure, I had to invent a faster-than-light drive, but, heh-heh-hey, you do what you gotta do, right?”

Domino helf up a hoof. “You already mentioned that, actually, and I’m dying to find out how it works.”

“Right,” said Twilight, “so you’ll help me install the drive?”

Long Shot cleared his throat. “Maritime Law requires that I inform you that we are salvors, and any assistance we grant you in repairing or towing your ship will result in a merit salvage award commensurate to the effort and risk undertaken by the salvors, and to the value of the salvaged property.”

Twilight wrinkled her forehead for a moment. “Well, I don’t have any money. Not that would be worth anything to you, anyways. But you’re welcome to keep the ship once my mission is complete.”

Long Shot blinked and glanced at Luminov, then turned to Twilight and pursed his lips before asking, “Why would you give us everything?”

“I… I never really owned the ship. I was steward of it. It was these ponies and their families who owned it. The plan was to dismantle it and use it for materials at our destination.” She spent a few seconds looking down the empty stretches of the mall, still bright and empty, as if waiting for ponies to shop and play and laugh. “They don’t need it any more.”

“I do not mean to be rude,” said Luminov gently, “but if everypony is dead, then why do you bother to complete the mission? We already have colonized all habitable planets in this part of galaxy.”

“It’s my mission.” She clenched her jaw and stood taller, lifting her chin into the air. “I must complete my mission. These ponies died for the mission. Without a crew to track our location and decelerate the ship, I overshot our original destination long, long ago, but I owe it to these ponies to lay them to rest on a pony planet, even if they weren’t the ones to colonize it.”

“We appreciate your generosity,” Domino said, “but what is it that you want?”

“I want to complete my mission. These ponies deserve peace. The kind of peace that I can’t give them here.”

Domino shook his head, the silky rose petals tickling the fur on his ear. “No, I mean, what do you, personally, want.”

Twilight blinked. She tilted her head down and held a hoof to her chest. “Oh, um. I… I want to make friends, and see them happy. A real friend, someone to talk to” —she glanced back to the ice cream parlor, where Jerry Rig’s toothy smile continued to shine— “and have ice cream with. I want to make somepony truly happy. Not just smile-and-nod and pretend to not be creeped out by a thousand year old psycho on a graveyard spaceship. Really, truly happy.”

She turned and began shuffling down the corridor, away from the rose bush where they had met.

Luminov trotted after her. “Which begs question: What is nature of happiness?”

“Oh, so you’re a philosopher?” Twilight tilted her head and smiled at him.

“He thinks he is,” said Long Shot as he followed behind.

Luminov shrugged. “I have much down time. I read many books.”

“Oh, really?” Twilight tucked a lock of her mane behind one ear. “I happen to have a lot of books, myself.”

“Hey,” Domino said as he trotted up on Twilight’s other side, “I read a lot of books, too.”

“Hush, boy,” Luminov said with a wink. “Grownups talking now.”

Twilight giggled. “Happiness is the only thing ponies pursue for its own sake. Riches, love, power… Those are all things that ponies try to achieve because they think it will make them happy. But happiness is elusive, because if it’s your goal, you won’t find it. Some philosophers have said that happiness can only be earned through struggle and pain, because it’s through that pain we truly see what in life has great worth. This is, theoretically, the basis of culture.”

Luminov nodded, his bushy orange eyebrows bunched together. “And what is it, in your opinion, that is of great worth in life?”

“Friendship,” Twilight said in a voice that was audible only in the silence of the empty space filling the mall.

The four ponies trod softly, their ears and eyes cast downward.

Twilight cleared her throat. “Since you asked the question, I’m sure you have a philosophy of your own to share. I’d like to hear it please, Luminov.”

Luminov gave her a fragile smile and took a breath. “One theory contends that ponies live life in conflict between desire to live, and awareness of inevitability of death. This conflict, called mortal terror, is managed by embracing cultural values that provide life with meaning. Values like friendship, as you say.”

“Wow.” Twilight smirked. “Did you just pull that out of the chapter summary?”

“Mostly. I have spent many nights looking at stars and thinking about my own mortality. But what about you? If your death is not inevitable, do you live in conflict?”

“Double wow.” Twilight hung her head and took a deep breath. Her wings shifted and settled tighter against her sides. “That’s quite a question.”

“It is,” Luminov said. “If you permit me observation… You do live in conflict.”

Twilight nodded, squeezing her eyes shut and biting her lip as she marched forward. When she opened her eyes, they were brimming with tears that didn’t fall. “Some days, I’m convinced that I’ve already died, that I’m just haunting this place. That thought terrifies me more than anything else. So, yes, I fear death. I’ll do just about anything to get my mind off that notion. Maybe you’ve already noticed that.”

“Yes, uh, is making sense now. Is interesting to note that both our theories account for friendship as path to happiness.”

Twilight shuddered and lifted her eyes just long enough to make eye contact with Luminov before she shuffled to a stop in front of a pretzel stall. “Not all theories will end up at that same conclusion, though.”

Domino sat on the floor next to Twilight. “You have another theory?”

Her eyes darted to the ceiling as she tilted her head with half a smile. “Not so much a theory as… I read a book a long time ago. The author lived just about a hundred years before I was born, on an orange farm on the river, not too far north of Ponyville where my castle was. I forget the name of the story, but his pen name was Two Marks.”

Luminov gasped, his eyes lighting up as a smile spread across his broad face. “Samuel Clementine! I knew he was real!”

Long Shot cleared his throat and stepped around Luminov. “There have been some rather, uh, contentious debates regarding the authenticity of Two Marks as a pre-colonization author. Some of his books survived, but most folks thought they’d been written by Lost-Earth hoaxers. I guess that’s settled, now.”

“I am sorry,” Luminov said, taking a deep breath and smoothing down his mane before he turned back to Twilight. “Is very exciting. You were saying about one of his stories?”

A fleeting grin crossed Twilight’s face. “Don’t apologize. It’s nice to make somepony smile.” She sighed. “Anyway. I don’t remember the story really well, but, basically, this mare meets some kind of supernatural being who can grant wishes. At some point, she wishes for a friend of hers to be happy.

“The creature grants her wish, and the friend suddenly believes herself to be queen of the world. Even though she’s living in squalor and nearly starving, she thinks that she’s in the lap of luxury, enjoying lavish feasts. The mare asks the creature why her friend is now crazy, and the creature responds that the only way to be truly happy is to be insane. I think that was just a minor point in the story, but it’s always stuck with me.”

Luminov cocked his head. “I do not think I have read that one. Do you believe is true?”

Twilight chuckled. “Well, I’m not exactly a model of mental health at the moment, but I’m not particularly happy, either. Although, that proves nothing because it’s a converse error.” She looked up at the stallions and shrugged. “I’m not sure. I was happy once, you know. I had some wonderful friends. Sometimes I wonder if I was crazy then. Imagined them all. Or if I’m crazy now. It feels like another life. That those memories were from another Twilight. A previous incarnation or… Or whatever.”

Her head sank lower and lower until her horn finally touched the floor. She swallowed and took a deep breath, then sat up and cleared her throat. “So, do I need to sign a contract or something for you guys?”

Long Shot shook his head. “No maam. I wasn’t asking for an agreement, just notifying you that when we reach a planet, a merit salvage award will be determined by a court. Since you have no money, the ship would be auctioned off to pay the award. Unless, of course, both parties agree on compensation.”

Twilight nodded. “Either way, though, these ponies will be laid to rest on a colonized planet, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Twilight smiled with wide eyes and clasped her hooves in front of her chest. “Then consider me informed! Execute plan seven.”

Long Shot squinted, his eyebrows bunching up in the middle of his forehead. “What’s plan sev—”

“Hush!” Luminov held up a hoof. His ears pricked as he held perfectly still, his eyes tracing the shops and stalls lining the corridor.

A metallic clatter rang out from the back room of the pretzel shop and echoed up and down the hall, coming back in waves. All three stallions reached for their pistols as the air filled with a deep groan that resonated in their ears. As they spun in circles, the sound of hoofsteps came from all directions.

Chapter 3: Static

“The bitch set us up!” Long Shot shouted as he ripped his pistol out of its holster and turned to face the nearest shop.

Luminov drew his gun and wrapped Twilight in a headlock, pulling on her horn with his left hoof while jamming the gun’s barrel into her ear. He hollered into the empty corridors, “If you play dirty, so can we. Is not our first ambush!”

“Owowowowow!” Twilight whimpered as the stallion wrenched her head sideways, nearly lifting her off her hooves. “W-why are you doing this?”

Domino spun in circles, levitating his pistol over his head as he glanced at one shop after another. The rose behind his ear slid forward, obscuring his vision before he pushed it back into place. “Twilight, you said you were alone! You lied to us and led us into an ambush, and now you’re playing the victim?”

“Please,” Twilight gasped. “They’re not ponies! They won’t hurt you!”

Long Shot raised his pistol and shouted, “I see one!”

Domino and Luminov turned to see a pair of dim lavender specks glowing in the darkness of the pretzel shop’s back room. As it neared the doorway, light glinted off the edges of a pair of circular hollows, finally coalescing into a shape like a pony skull.

Domino’s jaw hung open, and the magic aura surrounding his pistol faltered, dropping the weapon onto his head. Long Shot lined up his sights between the creature’s glowing eyes as it marched slowly forward, apparently unaware of or disregarding the threat of gunfire. Twilight sputtered, “P-please, don’t shoot! I’m running out of spare parts!”

“Spare parts?” Long Shot lowered his pistol just enough to see the tool box clenched in the creature’s teeth. Its metallic jaws were articulated by a pair of tiny hydraulic cylinders, and its legs were cobbled together from bits of rusty rebar, pistons, and clockwork gears.

“You…” Domino breathed, “You built robots?”

Luminov relaxed his grip enough for Twilight to straighten her neck. She gasped and took a couple of deep breaths. “They’re carrying parts for the drive.”

Domino turned around to see a pair of the robots dragging a short section of heavy hose with a gas cylinder attached. Another robot emerged from a maintenance hallway with a bundle of wire wrapped around its body. Domino retrieved his pistol and kept it levitated at the nearest robot as he sidestepped to keep them all in his field of view. Half a dozen robots came to a stop near Twilight, all carrying various bits of equipment, and all ignoring the armed stallions.

“Mister Luminov,” Twilight said with a nervous giggle, “can you please, uh, let me go?”

Luminov glanced at Long Shot. Upon receiving a nod, Luminov pulled his gun out of Twilight’s ear and stepped back. He kept the weapon pointed at the floor as he backed away and positioned himself ninety degrees away from Domino.

Twilight cleared her throat. “Umm, okay.” She held her hooves out toward the stallions. “In hindsight, maybe I should have told you guys about the robots before I gave them orders to bring me stuff. But can you please—” she clasped her hooves together and closed her eyes “—please not point guns at me? It makes me super uncomfortable.”

Domino holstered his pistol. He looked at Luminov, and waited for him to holster his. Long Shot rolled his eyes and put his away as well. Twilight stood with her head held high, glaring at the three stallions. Domino elbowed them both.

Long Shot sighed, then bowed his head. “Your Highness, I apologize for addressing you in such a crude fashion. At the time, I believed that you had led us into an ambush.”

Luminov bowed low, a blush showing through the gray fur on his cheeks. “Your Highness, I beg your forgiveness. I wanted only to protect my crew.”

Twilight reached out and lifted Luminov’s chin with a hoof. “I admire your loyalty to your friends. If, you know, I had been evil, that would have been great. I guess.” She cocked her head to the side. “Have you done that before? Did it work?”

Luminov bit his lip and glanced sideways at Domino before returning his gaze to the floor. “Is j-just long-standing plan.”

Twilight nodded. “I’m willing to move past it if you are.”

“I would like nothing more, Your Highness.” Luminov kept his head bowed.

“I’d also like to move past that. Please call me Twilight.”

Luminov stood up with another bow and looked away.

Domino licked his lips and spoke. “You have robots?”

Twilight grinned. “You like them?”

Domino chuckled and shook his head. “We have a thousand years of technological progress on you, and we haven’t gotten them licked. How’d you get the personality programming working?”

Twilight squinted at Domino as she turned and began walking. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Domino said as he trotted next to Twilight, “the programming was too complex to do line-by-line, so we wrote self-learning algorithms. It started with recognizing speech patterns. Some of the first AIs were deployed on social media networks, but… they didn’t work out so well. They learned from their environment, but it turns out the world is a harsh place, and nobody was comfortable giving a mechanical body to the terrible personalities that were created. So robots are limited to automated factories and such.”

“I have nooooo idea what you’re talking about.” Twilight shuffled to a stop and looked at the sky outside the mall entrance. “What do you mean by ‘programming?’”

Domino squinted back at Twilight. “You know, the instructions that you provide to a microprocessor so the computer can perform tasks?”

Twilight’s mouth hung open for several seconds before she tilted her head and directed yet another squint at Domino. “What is a microprocessor? Or a computer?”

Luminov looked at Domino. Domino looked at Luminov, then turned back to Twilight. “You built robots, and you don’t even know what a computer is?”

Twilight shrugged. “I guess? So what is a computer?”

Domino’s mouth flapped like a fish out of water. “I-it’s a… an electrical device that does mathematical calculations to carry out logical operations. You can program a series of operations based on input parameters to achieve any number of functions. You can control anything with a computer. Our ships, our homes, our… everything. I mean, if you need anything to do a thing, you put a computer in it.”

“Ummm,” Twilight said, tapping her chin with a hoof. “Yeah, I guess we don’t have those.”

“How? How did you make robots if you don’t even have computers?”

“Oh, well,” Twilight said with a hint of a blush. “I got the idea from Princess Luna. See, she created a spell she called the Tantabus. She used a part of herself to create a living, self-aware spell that lived in her dreams. Well, in her nightmares. The point is, it was a self-maintaining spell that carried out a set of instructions. So, when I built these mechanical ponies, I created a tiny, self-aware spell to inhabit each of these mechanical bodies. The original Tantabus nearly became powerful enough to become a threat to Equestria, but I only gave each of these robots enough awareness to follow simple orders and perform basic repairs on the ship’s most essential systems.”

Domino held his head between his hooves. “You… You’re blowing my mind right now. You invented robots that don’t run on computers, but on living spells based on bits of yourself? Wait. If there’s no computers, how does this entire ship run?”

“Yes, and, well, it mostly doesn’t.” Twilight trotted up to a set of lockers near the airlock. “The ship relied on dozens of engineers at different stations throughout the ship, who communicated by intercom. All the systems were connected, but the ship wasn’t capable of running itself by, as you say, a set of programmed instructions. It’s not like it really needed to, though. It was more of a self-contained city than a ship that needs to be piloted.”

Luminov squinted at the mechanical ponies standing around behind Twilight. He glanced up at her for an instant before looking away with his ears folded back. “Who is ‘Princess Luna?’”

Twilight smiled and planted her flank on the floor. “Princess Luna raised the moon. Except for a thousand years she spent in exile after a failed coup attempt. But when she escaped from exile, my friends and I rescued her from the Nightmare, and she reunited with her sister Celestia, and together they ruled Equestria. Well, until they started training me to be a princess.”

Long Shot took off his hat and rubbed the thinning hair atop his head. “She raised the moon?”

“Yep! And Celestia raised the sun.”

“You mean,” Long Shot said as he squashed the cap back between his ears, “like a ceremony every morning and evening?”

“Well, no. There wasn’t much ceremony about it except once a year.”

Long Shot squinted at Twilight. “So, it was symbolic, then?”

Twilight squinted back. “No, they literally raised the sun and moon. And set them, so the night and day could begin, respectively. I did it a few times, myself. Mostly when they were incapacitated by whatever evil was trying to take over the world at the time. I remember once, both the sun and the moon were in the sky at the same time. It was chaos! Half the sky was daylight, and the other half was night with stars and everything.”

Luminov rubbed his temples. “We are spacefaring culture. We know how planets rotate. A-and atmospheric scattering to light the daytime sky. You cannot expect us to believe that this is true?”

Twilight giggled. “Of course it’s true!”

Luminov huffed. “How is princess raise sun, if sun is not raise but only appear to raise due to rotation of planet?”

Twilight inhaled, then closed her mouth. She pursed her lips, then said, “What planet?”

Long Shout nearly shouted, “Earth! Your planet!”

Twilight giggled again. “Earth was never a planet. We theorized that planets may be inhabitable, if their natural gravity kept an atmosphere and anchored ponies to its surface. And that a star may work as an ersatz sun, providing light and warmth, so long as the planet rotates at about the same frequency as Celestia and Luna maintained the sun and moon. I guess we were right.” She began opening lockers and rooting through the contents.

Domino took a breath, but only managed to wheeze. He took another breath and wheezed again. After a third breath, he closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows. He spoke without opening his eyes. “The… The pony homeworld isn’t a planet?” He opened his eyes and watched Twilight pinch a saddlebag in her teeth and drop it across her back. “Then what is it?”

Twilight shrugged. “I dunno. A world. It’s flat. Alicorns raise the sun and moon. You guys wanna stow your space suits in these lockers? They look heavy and uncomfortable.”

Long Shot shook his head. “Everypony thought those old stories about a flat world were just… Not even myths, like alicorns. I dunno, like symbolism or something.” He shrugged and unzipped the front of his suit. “As crazy as that sounds, it would explain why we never found Earth. We’ve checked every star with a habitable planet within reach of colonized worlds. Doesn’t seem likely it’d be farther out than we can already reach… But it ain’t around a star at all!”

“B-but, how do…” Domino sputtered. “If there’s no star, where does the sun’s energy come from? If there’s no planet, where does the gravity come from?”

“Magic,” Luminov mumbled as he stepped out of his own suit. “Ponies and griffons and changelings and dragons, all have magic. No xeno life has magic. Pony homeworld must be steeped in it. Is why so much magic in all things pony.”

Twilight nodded with a wrench in her teeth. “Heef rie.” She spit it into her saddle bag. “Being on this ship was a definite challenge for the first generation who was used to the entire world being suffused with magic.”

Domino lit up his horn, doffing his suit in one smooth step, then lifted it onto a hook. He leaned against the locker and turned his head around. “I don’t think that much magic could possibly be stable. It would be like unicorns trying to control the weather. Total chaos.”

Twilight watched Luminov pull the tool belt off his suit and buckle it around his waist. Once it was secured, he pulled the holster off as well and attached it to his tool belt. Twilight looked away as he glanced up at her. She cleared her throat. “There were some problems, yes. Have you ever been in a boat? When you move a paddle through the water, it makes a vortex. When ponies live in a world with that much magic, just moving through the world creates a magical vortex that can, say, bring a pile of rotten wood to life as a timberwolf. Imagine a predator twice the size of a pony… but made out of magically animated sticks and logs.”

Long Shot attached his own pistol holster to a harness around his neck. “Yes, I’m imagining that. My sister’s a pegasus, one of the hunters on Bari. I’ve seen the things she’s killed, the things that hunt ponies. I don’t even want to think about those things… but with magic.”

“Well,” Twilight said, “they were a nuisance, but as long as you didn’t go into the woods you were pretty much okay. The bigger problems were creatures like Discord, Sombra, or Tirek. Powerful, intelligent creatures with the potential to take over the entire world - for their own amusement, or just to exterminate ponies to settle ancient grudges. It was one such close call that spurred us to attempt gaining an offworld foothold, to ensure the survival of ponykind if the worst should happen.”

Domino looked at the pistol on his space suit, then turned to Twilight with his hoof still on the locker door. “When you said ‘worldwide catastrophe,’ I assumed you meant something like a giant impact, or a solar instability phase. Something that could wipe out an entire planet.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Giant impact?”

“We’ve observed hundreds of comets or asteroids impacting planets with enough energy to destroy entire cities, or raise dust clouds that change the climate for hundreds of years. We’ve seen giant craters from such impacts on every habitable planet. Mass extinctions in every fossil record. We’ve diverted two such impactors from inhabited planets.”

“Oh, well,” Twilight said with a chuckle, “without the gravitational pull of a star, there’s no orbiting debris.”

“I…” Domino closed the locker door and turned back to Twilight. “I guess that makes sense.”

Twilight nodded toward the neighborhood bathed in daylight. “The nearest engine room is across town, but we’ll have to make one stop first. It is a bit of a walk.”

As the group started trotting down another street lined with picket fences and quaint wooden homes, Long Shot came up next to Twilight and removed his hat. “Miss, uh, Twilight? I’d like to hear more about our home, if you don’t mind.”

Twilight looked at the others. Domino nodded. Luminov avoided eye contact.

“Well,” she said as she tilted her head up and focused her eyes far beyond the painted sky, “I don’t know how to explain the world itself, but I’ve got a lot of stories to tell. Might as well start at the beginning, right? Well, I was the personal student of Princess Celestia…”

[scene break image]

“This is a school?” Domino asked as he looked up at the rickety wooden structure. Every one of the thin glass windows was open, and the faded red paint clung only in thin patches to the grain of the plank siding. A tarnished bronze bell hung at the top of a steeple.

Long Shot poked him in the side as he trotted up the stairs toward the school’s open doorway. “Clean, breathable air. No xenopredators. Free wood.”

Twilight giggled. “I guess you could say that wood… Grows on trees!” She cackled and doubled over, finally landing on her hindquarters and wrapping her hooves around her chest, gasping for breath.

“I mean,” Domino said as he ran a white hoof through his mane, “I know wood comes from trees. But I don’t get the joke.”

Twilight sat up and wiped her eyes. “Heh. ‘Cuz trees grow everywhere for free.”

Long Shot pulled his hat down over his eyes and huffed. “You’re killin’ me, Boots.” He lifted one side of his hat and looked at Twilight with a single eye. “We ain’t all that slow. You mean somethin’ like we’d say, ‘cheap as an acre,’ right?”

“Well,” Twilight said, “I’ve never heard the saying, but from context I can assume that an acre of land is cheap or nearly free on most of your colonized planets?”

Long Shot slapped Domino on the back. “It looks like she… Took you to school, huh?”

Twilight giggled at Domino’s blush while Long Shot ruffled his mane. She trotted inside the schoolhouse, stopping to straighten the rose she’d given to Domino before crossing the floor and dropping her saddlebag beside a splintery teacher’s desk.

Domino squeezed into a schooldesk in the first row and leaned forward with a grin, his mane still sticking up in several places. Luminov stood in the rear of the classroom and stared at his hooves while Long Shot pulled a book marked “History” out of a shelf along the wall. The book’s spine crackled as he opened it. The pages were still bright white and the ink was a deep black, untouched by the centuries.

Twilight’s voice floated across the classroom. “Acid-free paper. Archival quality. We knew we’d be in it for the long haul, and if there’s one thing worth spending the bits on, it’s books.”

Long Shot flipped through the pages for a moment, then closed the book and looked up at Twilight with moist eyes as he held it against his chest. “This… M-may I have this book?”

“I told you,” Twilight said, “everything on this ship is yours. There’s a few dozen schoolhouses like this one, all full of books, but if you want to carry that one around, be my guest.”

He chuckled sheepishly as he slid the book back into place. “Right.”

Domino raised a hoof and held it in the air. Twilight facehoofed. “We’re not—” she glanced left and right. “Okay, we are in a school, but we’re not in school. You don’t need to raise your hoof.”

Domino lowered his hoof slowly as he sank into the chair of his tiny desk. “I, uh, I was just going to ask how long this has all been on the chalkboard?”

“Oh, that.” Twilight turned around and looked up at the black wall of slate. There were no spots larger than a hoof that weren’t packed with complex diagrams and tensor equations scrawled in white chalk. “Well, carbonates are exceptionally stable long-term, as is the silica the blackboard is made of.”

“No,” Domino shook his head with a chuckle. “I mean, you already had this drawn up? Like, just waiting for somepony to stop by?”

Twilight shuffled her hooves and grinned at the floor. “Um, just, uh, call me an optimist.” She picked up a pointing stick in the crook of one hoof and gestured toward the back of the classroom. “I wrote up an installation manual, too.”

Luminov looked up, wide eyed, and shrank back against the wall. His eyes followed the pointing stick to a shelf with a string-bound pamphlet of hoofwritten pages. He picked it up flipped to the first page, then held it up in front of his face.

Twilight tilted her head and spent a moment staring at Luminov before she turned to Domino. “So, you wanted to know how my faster-than-light drive works?”

He nodded vigorously.

“Okay!” Twilight trotted toward the left end of the board and turned back to face him with a bright smile across her face. “A couple of decades before I left Earth, we’d completed some tests with particle accelerators that confirmed some aspects of string theory. The best model we had before I left was eleven dimensions. That’s nine spatial dimensions, time, and a closed timelike locality.”

Luminov held up the installation manual and backtrotted toward the door. “I am just going to, uh, you know. Read this. Outside.”

Long Shot rolled his eyes and set down the book in his hooves. “I’ll join him. I don’t think either of us need to hear all this, uh, theory ‘n stuff.”

Domino waved without looking away from Twilight. She nodded and called out, “We’ll meet you in the engine room when we’re done here!”

Long Shot stuck his head back around the corner. “Sure.” He disappeared.

Twilight turned back to the board. “Where were we? Ah, yes.” She pointed at a standard three-dimensional coordinate axis. “Our traditional three dimensions of space only appear that way. There’s actually three dimensions within each of our three dimensions.”

She pointed at a simple equation. “Of course, DeBray’s equation relates the wavelength of any particle to its momentum - and therefore its energy. At low energies, every particle we know of is relatively large. So imagine a normal particle is like a marble, and each of these axes is like a garden hose. A marble can only move back and forth within the hose - one degree of freedom.

“But as you increase the energy of a particle, it gets smaller. Imagine a grain of sand inside the hose. It can move any direction within the hose. So, at higher energy, particles have the freedom to move in three dimensions within each of our traditional three dimensions. That makes nine separate dimensions of space.

“The problem of high speed travel is that when you get to high speed, each of your particles has high energy. That means any additional energy you add can be expressed in nine dimensions of vibration, instead of translation in the one direction we want to travel in. This is analagous to the mysteriously low specific heat of monatomic gases such as helium.

“Helium is a single atom, so when you add energy to it, all of the energy goes into translational motion - which, on an atomic scale, is heat energy. Whereas, say, water, which requires a huge amount of energy to change its temperature because energy you add to it can go into rotation in three axes, or into bending, or stretching the hydrogen/oxygen bonds.

“So if you try to increase the velocity of a ship, there comes a point where the kinetic energy of each of its particles is so high, that the particles are small enough to experience the full nine dimensions. The energy you add is increasingly expended in additional vibrational modes within these unfolded dimensions. This causes diminishing returns such that the velocity of any object with an infinite amount of energy added to it asymptotically approaches the speed of light, cee.

“The solution is to artificially prohibit every particle from being able to express vibrational modes in additional dimensions!” Twilight slapped the stick at another portion of the board and danced on her hooftips. “And since a brane is an n-dimensional object which behaves locally as if it has n-minus-one dimensionality - just like a membrane is a three dimensional object that looks two dimensional up close - it’s a natural choice for manipulating dimensionality. We can use a brane to set up an n-dimensional resonator with sufficient energy density to divide the nine spatial dimensions by n, resulting in a noninteger dimensionality, boosting the maximum velocity by a factor of ten to the power of n!” She turned to face Domino and leaned toward him, beaming.

Domino blinked and lifted his chin off his hooves, flashing her a lopsided grin. “Why, Twilight, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you’ve seen a dash drive before.”

Twilight blushed and pulled her head back, holding a hoof in front of her chest. “W-what do you mean?”

“That’s exactly how a dash drive works.” Domino tilted his head. “Great minds think alike, I suppose.”

“Wait,” Twilight said. “If you knew all that theory already, why didn’t you stop me?”

“You, um, you seemed to be enjoying yourself. It’s the first time I’d seen you look really comfortable and happy. I thought I’d let you have your moment.”

Twilight tilted her head and blushed. “That’s so sweet.”

Domino looked off to the side, then back to Twilight. “But to create that kind of resonator, you’ll need post-transuranic alloys. Which we happen to know you don’t have.”

Twilight stepped closer to his desk. “Why would I need that?”

Domino put his hooves on the desk and sat up straighter. “You can’t get the kind of energy density you need in a one-brane without superdense materials.”

“Oh,” Twilight said, scrunching up her muzzle. “I hadn’t even considered a one-brane. Supposing you had a long enough, thin enough cable, it would sweep out a one-plus-one is two dimensional worldspace, which would give you nine-divided-by-two, four point five dimensions. Noninteger, yes, but you only get up to ten-to-the-power-of-two cee. A hundred times faster is better, but that’s still a couple of months between neighboring stars. And, as you mentioned, I don’t have the materials for that kind of energy density.”

“I mean, that’s worked for us, so far. We’ve colonized hundreds of planets with a few month travel time from one star to the next. So…” Domino drummed his hooves on the desk. “What are you going to use for a resonator?”

“Well, the hull of the ship, of course.” Twilight looked at Domino with one eyebrow raised.

Domino shook his head. “You can’t do that. A three dimensional object isn’t a brane, it’s just three-dee. You divide nine by three, and you get three. No matter how fast you were going, you engage that field and it instantly drops you back down to marble-sized, low-energy particles. Instant deceleration.”

Twilight leaned forward and began shaking her head, grinning progressively harder as she got closer and closer to Domino, her bangs swishing back and forth against her forehead. She froze, their noses nearly touching. “Buuut!” she cried as she leaned back. “If the three-dee object sweeps out a fourth dimension of worldspace, that would make it a brane. I found a way to make it resonate in the closed timelike locality.”

“B-but,” Domino sputtered, his eyes blinking rapidly, “that… That would be ten to the fourth. You’re talking about ten kilo-cee. Y-you could go from one star to the next in a matter of hours, instead of months!”

Twilight giggled. “Yes, I did say exactly that.”

Domino tried to jump out of his schooldesk, but found himself stuck. He lunged forward, scooting the desk forward in tiny hops while Twilight pinched her lips together and held a hoof over her mouth. Domino pointed toward a section of the blackboard. “Is this how you achieve resonance in the timelike locality?”

She trotted up next to him and nodded. “Uh huh. You see…”

[scene break image]

Long Shot swatted Luminov with his hat and slapped it back on top of his head in one smooth motion. “Weird weird. I dunno if loverboy noticed it, but Twilight sure did.”

Luminov gritted his teeth as he trotted, the hefty manual balanced on his flank. “Maybe you can point gun at mare, then forget and go back to business as usual.” He hung his head and sighed, watching cobblestones pass beneath his hooves before looking up at Long Shot and poking a hoof at his face. “I was this close to kill her. A sweet, innocent mare.”

“Look, we made the best choice we could with the information we had at the time. That’s all you can ask of anypony. Besides, it worked out though, didn’t it?”

“You admit information was wrong.”

Long Shot glared at Luminov. “Awww, no. This isn’t about Twilight. This is about Marina, isn’t it?”

Luminov glared back.

“And now you’re questioning the information we had when we made that choice.”

“Were we wrong then, as well?”

“Look,” the captain said, taking a deep breath. “You fell for a mare, and she turned on us. She used you, changeling or not. That’s like to render anypony a bit suspicious of the fairer sex. But just ‘cuz you got hurt once don’t mean every mare’s out to getcha, and just ‘cuz this mare was innocent don’t mean you did wrong to hold a gun to her head.”

“I can see her look. When she look at me, her eyes go here” —he tapped the gun on his tool belt— “and is all she sees.”

“I’m sure she understands. Things get blurry out here, and you do what you gotta to survive.”

Luminov shook his head. “Did we? Or did we do to it to make the bits?”

Long Shot looked straight ahead. “Is there a difference?”

The two trotted in silence past dozens of wooden homes. They finally approached a brick office building with a heavy airlock door. Luminov pulled out his notebook and looked at a sketched map, then glanced at rusty street signs. He nodded and put the notebook back in a pouch on his tool belt.

Long Shot reached out and slapped a button on the control panel embedded into the brick surface. The heavy door disappeared upwards with a gust of air. They marched inside, both standing a bit taller in the familar setting of metal walls and bundles of pipe. At the first junction, Long Shot stopped.

Luminov slowed and stopped, then turned around to face the orange stallion.

Long Shot reached to Luminov and lifted the manual off his back. “Look. You’ll feel better if you get the facts. Why don’t I study this thing while you nose around a bit. See if her story checks out.”

Luminov sighed. He looked back the way they had come, where the thick steel door blocked out the blue sky and idyllic homes along the quiet street. “I need to know. If it comes down to such a choice again.” He turned back to the captain. “I want to sleep well. I will look around.”

“Good. I’ll find this—” he held up the open manual for several seconds “—high voltage relay station, find a seat, and read through this manual. Try not to get lost.”

Luminov grunted and started walking.

“Don’t strain yourself tryin’ to talk so much,” Long Shot mumbled as he studied an enameled map on the wall.

[scene break image]

“So you’re telling me,” Twilight said, squinting with one eye, “it’s easier to filter all the air that goes into a town than it is to just deal with the plants that grow naturally on a planet?”

Domino glanced at Twilight as he trotted past a quaint post office. “You have to keep in mind that every planet has a different chemistry. The soils have all been modified by millions of years of life that is unique to that planet. Pony plants can’t compete in the native soil. It takes decades of Earth pony work to get the soil in each hermetic enclosure to grow pony plants. They have to start with the most noxious weeds, the ones that’ll grow anywhere. That’s… pretty much all I know about the process. Long Shot would be able to tell you more. He grew up on a farm.”

Twilight turned to face Domino and trotted sideways in the middle of the street. “So that’s what Earth ponies do. What do you do?”

“Oh, well, I mostly navigate.” He pointed to the constellation on his flank. “And I move stuff on the outside of the ship. EVAs are expensive. Suits are wear items, and they leak a lot of air compared to a ship. And every cycle of the airlock loses a little air, too. So pretty much every ship has to have a unicorn on board.”

“And how about the state of magical research?” Twilight turned an ear toward him and smiled with her eyebrows raised.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Unicorns who invent new spells. I invented several new ones myself. I figured out how to reveal a changeling, how to reverse gravity, I once turned a frog into an orange. Mostly. I completed one of Starswirl the Bearded’s incomplete spells.”

“Oh, he was real, too?” Domino pinched his lips together and nodded. “Ya learn somethin’ every day.”

“Sooo,” Twilight said, waggling her eyebrows, “what kind of new spells are ponies inventing?”

Domino shrugged. “I dunno. I only see spells that are useful in my line of work. They’re listed in books that you can look up in the ship’s computer. There’s too many spells to memorize unless you need to use a particular spell a lot. So most unicorns just look up a spell when they need it.”

“Oh.” Twilight nodded and turned to face foward again.

“I’m sure you can find some research journals whenever we make port.” He adjusted the rose on his ear. “Most planets have a university, too. I’m sure they’d appreciate any research you’d care to help with. Actually, I’m sure you’ll be a celebrity once word gets out. Everypony will want to hear your stories. I bet you could write a book or three, couldn’t you.”

Twilight giggled. “I have written books, you know.”

A brick office building loomed in front of them. Domino turned toward Twilight and smiled. “Tell me about these books.”

“Well, I’ve tried my hoof at fiction over the years. My first novel was a raging success, but I suspected it was solely due to my name attached to it. My next story was under a pseudonym, and barely recouped the printing cost. I released a book of poetry after the last of my best friends died, but I only gave that to my closest friends - the ones who were alive. The friends I made later, I mean.”

Domino slowed his pace to match Twilight’s. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“No,” Twilight said, waving a hoof as she stood up straighter and marched toward the heavy steel door. “I’ve had a long time to get over it, and a long time to realize that some things you never get over.” She made eye contact with him. “Thanks for being here for me to talk to about it. It means a lot.”

“Uh, no problem.” He brushed his bangs aside. “I don’t promise to always be good at, you know, these kinds of conversations. But I’m happy to at least be here.”

“Like I said, it means a lot.” Twilight trotted through the door as it whooshed open in front of her.

Domino followed her inside and gestured toward the metal walls. “See, this is what most space ships look like.”

Twilight grimaced and stuck out her tongue. “Blech. I’ll take the cobblestone and picket fences any day.”

“Heh. This was my first time ever seeing cobblestones.” He turned to look over his shoulder at the idyllic rural street and stared until the door closed. “Or picket fences, for that matter.”

“Huh.” Twilight tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Anyway,” Domino said, “let’s find the others and get this thing installed.”

[scene break image]

Luminov trotted past another door that had been welded shut. The paint on the door was blackened and blistered where it hadn’t been burned completely off, rendering the painted words on it unreadable. He hummed around the pencil in his lips and glanced at his notebook, making another mark on the page. The maze-like series of corridors on his paper ended up with a single room the size of a small warehouse, with every door marked out by a heavy line. A dozen other rooms were labeled as “office,” “storage,” or “power relay 7,” but this one remained blank.

He grunted, then squatted down to look at the floor beneath his hooves. Portions of the floor were heavy steel grates with cable trays underneath, but there was far too little space for even the tinest pony to fit under the plating. He stood on his hind legs and poked at the ceiling. The ceiling was solid, with no plenum or access panels.

Dropping back to all fours, Luminov chewed on his cheek. He glanced between his notebook and the hallway, then started trotting and made a left, toward a blank spot on his sketched map. After turning the corner, he stood in front of a door and made a note that said “Reactor 2 Control.” He pressed the button next to the door and stepped inside.

The reactor control room was spacious. Several stations were set up around a display panel on the far wall, such that every pony in the room could see every status indicator. Luminov trotted into the room and looked up at the wall with a raised eyebrow. “Control rod status?” He glanced at a novelty warning sign propped against a control station, showing a stallion reclining on a river bank with a fishing pole in his hooves. Large black letters spelled out GONE FISSION across the top. Luminov snorted and shook his head. “Ship is built by caveponies, I swear.”

He flipped a page and stuck the pencil back in his mouth, glancing between the notebook and the display as he jotted down notes. Control rods fully inserted. Fuel rods in storage. Zero percent power. Zero over ambient temperature. Zero neutron flux. Zero alpha. Zero beta. Zero gamma.

With the pencil tucked back behind his ear, Luminov trotted to one end of the room and opened a door marked “REACTOR ACCESS.” The tiny room was packed with monitoring equipment, tools, and instruments, but no radiation suits. The other end of the room had a heavy airlock door with “DECONTAMINATION” and a radiation hazard symbol emblazoned across it.

Luminov looked at the instruction placard on the door panel, then pulled a geiger counter out of his tool belt and took a deep breath. He slapped the button. The door whooshed open smoothly while he kept his eyes glued to the meter. The needle did not move, and the counter gave no more than the occasional background tick. He stepped into the room, and looked around. A series of stalls on the perimeter of the room surrounded a cluster of air vents, shower heads, and floor drains. Another heavy door sat at the other end of the room, bright yellow, with a number of warning signs plastered on and around it.

He leaned over one of the stalls and scanned the interior. It was just big enough for one pony to stand inside, and it had what looked like some kind of electrical connection on the wall. The geiger counter registered no radiation in any of the stalls, or anywhere else in the decontamination airlock. He waved it around the edges of the yellow door, and along the floor where it locked into the bulkhead, but there was nothing above background levels of radiation. As he stood up, he glanced at the signs.

DANGER: CONFINED SPACES

WARNING: RADIATION AREA

COOLANT LINES: GAS HAZARD

HAZARDOUS AREA: SPARKY ONLY

Luminov stared at the last sign and blinked. A grinning stallion stared back at him - the same stallion from the sign at the coffee shop. He poked the sign and tilted his head. “Fission reactor runs on coffee now? What is this?”

He pulled out his notebook and looked at the map. After carefully sketching in the control room and the decontamication room, there wasn’t much paper left on the other side of the door. Just a hallway, and the mysterious room. He looked up at the door and tapped the pencil against the notebook for a long moment. Finally, he spit the pencil into his hoof and tucked it behind his ear, then stowed his notebook and squinted at the door. “You go up or down. Access tunnel. But is worth risk?”

The silence rushed in Luminov’s ears like a distant ocean. He looked at Sparky’s image, and smiled back. “I do this. We will see what Twilight is hiding.”

Luminov placed his geiger counter on the ground just in front of the bright yellow door, and looked at the open door on the other side of the room. He mumbled to himself, “Two most effective shielding for radiation is time and distance. Has been a thousand years since was hot.” He gulped. “And I will be standing over there. At least I am in decontamination room already.”

He mashed the yellow door’s button, and galloped to the other end of the room as the first door closed. Ducking into the stall nearest the door controls, he listened for the telltale clicking of the geiger counter. There was none.

Carefully, he snuck up to the instrument and looked at the gauge. The needle still showed nothing above background. He looked up to the doorway, and saw a ladder leading downward. Leaning over the edge, he could see that it only went down a few steps. With a shrug, he wrapped the counter’s strap around his fetlock and began climbing down slowly, listening for any increase in radiation.

The tunnel stretched in two directions, carrying a bundle of pipes and heavy wires through a space so narrow that Luminov had to remove his toolbelt to fit, looping it around a rear hoof and dragging it behind him. He counted his steps as he slid along the tunnel, ducking every few steps to avoid a red-tinted light bulb in a wire cage, until he saw a panel surrounded by handles. He counted his steps again and looked up, imagining the walls above him, then turned his attention back to the wall.

Yellow letters stencilled onto the panel read: WARNING: EMERGENCY ACCESS ONLY. DO NOT OPEN WHILE REACTOR IS ONLINE. PANEL MUST BE REINSTALLED BEFORE REACTOR START.

He shrugged. “Reactor is off.” He gripped one of the handles and pulled. Nothing happened, but the handle refused to fold back down. Upon closer inspection, he could see that the metal edge around the panel had been torn. He tugged on the next handle down, and felt the metal give way. One handle after another, he slowly peeled the door open. “I swear, if is nothing but sardines in here—”

The panel came apart with a shriek, slapping Luminov in the nose, then falling to the floor with a heavy thud and pinning him against the wall. He struggled to lift it off himself so he could shuffle backward far enough to get out from under it. When he did, it fell against the far wall, diagonally blocking the tunnel. He looked at the powdery white corrosion on its surface, then reached out to poke it with a hoof. Gentle pressure was enough to smash down the sharp edges from where it had torn away from the wall. He gave it a few stomps, bending the entire solid lead panel out of his way, then turned and looked into the opening.

The tunnel was identical to the one he was standing in, but without the reactor coolant pipes and electrical cables. Moreover, there was a ladder just a few steps in. He squeezed through the opening and climbed up the ladder, then pushed the floor grate out of the way and peeked over the edge.

Large machines dominated the room. Something like a paper mill loomed on his left, and a trio of milling machines stood in another corner under a layer of dust. Luminov grunted and hauled himself out of the hole, then brushed off his coat and stepped into the room. As he buckled his tool belt around his belly, he turned a slow circle, sweeping his eyes across the long-dormant machines. Nothing looked particularly out of place. As far as he could see, there was no reason to seal off this room.

Until he had turned to face the near wall, where the skins of eight ponies had been stretched and tacked to the wall, spelling out the words “NOT ALIVE.”

Chapter 5: Descent

Twilight’s hoofsteps thudded past the door while the alarm blared. Domino slammed the button with a hoof and stuck his head out the door in time to hear Twilight shout, “Guys?”

Domino hollered, “What happened?”

Twilight skidded to a stop and turned around, then galloped back to the open door and jumped inside. “The outer seal on airlock B just blew out!”

“Airlock B?” Long Shot said. “We came in through that airlock!”

“Yeah!” Twilight replied with a snarl. “That’s probably why it happened!” She sat down and squeezed her eyes shut, then held out a hoof toward the old stallion. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little upset that my ship is falling apart right now. I know it’s not your fault. I mean, it kinda is, but it’s not like you did it on purpose.”

All three stallions stared at her. She blinked back at them. “It’s a piece of rubber that’s been drying out for how many centuries? It was fine until you opened it. The seal probably didn’t rebound to its original size, and didn’t seat properly when you closed the airlock. You’re all lucky you made it into the ship before it blew!”

“Actually,” Luminov said with one shaggy hoof in the air, “we still had suits on at the time. Would have been simple to go back into our own ship.”

“I…” Twilight stuck out her lower lip and nodded with her eyebrows raised. “Okay, yeah, I see that.”

“But we still can’t get out through airlock B,” Long Shot said. “How are we gonna get back to our own ship?”

Twilight forced a smile and tossed her mane back. “You don’t have to worry about that right now, do you? I mean, we’ve got work to do, and it’s not like your ship is going anywhere, right? We can all calm down, and relax, and worry about it later.”

She looked at the trio of stallions. Long Shot was sweating, Domino was hyperventilating, and Luminov looked like a statue. Twilight took a step backward. “I… I think the alarm is making you uncomfortable. I’m just gonna go turn that off and slap some sealant on the inner airlock door just in case. I’ll be back in just a minute.” She turned to the door as it slid open, then paused and looked back. “It’ll be okay guys. I promise.”

Domino stuck his head out the door and watched Twilight disappear down the hallway before retreating back into the room and bumping into Long Shot. He turned around and looked at his captain for several rapid breaths, then swallowed hard and stammered, “Y-you look scared, sir.”

“Hell, I ain’t in no navy. Some law against lookin skeer’d?”

“I just, I mean, you guys have been around, right? You’ve dealt with this kind of thing before. Right?”

Luminov inhaled, then let out something between a sigh and a hum. “No. Airlock is overbuilt. Strongest part of ship. Is a lot of preventive maintenance on airlocks. Ponies live and die by airlocks for nearly a thousand years. Is not something that goes wrong nowadays.”

The dark parts of Domino’s face got paler. “So, what do we do then? How do we get back?”

“There’s only one thing we can do,” murmured Long Shot as he adjusted his hat. “We go out another airlock, and EVA back.”

Domino’s voice got higher in pitch. “And what if that one blows, too?”

Luminov chuckled. “That one is easy. We replace seal on our way out. Preventive maintenance.”

“Still, though,” Domino said, gripping his head between his hooves, “the nearest airlock is a full thirty kilometers away. That’s an entire day of walking, and waaaaaaay longer to EVA back. Our suits don’t have the air for a tenth of that.”

Long Shot grunted, then glanced toward the ceiling as the klaxon abruptly stopped its wailing. “You think I don’t know that, kid? I’ve been tryin’ to figure it out. I’m sure there’s oxygen bottles on this ship, but I’m sure their plumbing don’t match our plumbing, so we can’t grab a bunch of oxygen and go. Twilight might have a solution, but I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

Luminov stepped toward Long Shot and put a hoof on his shoulder, then nodded and said, “But she has wings. You could probably throw her very far if she glide.”

Both stallions looked at Luminov. He shrugged.

Domino rolled his eyes. “Even if we manage to EVA all the way back to the ship, there’s no way we’re gonna carry enough salable goods to refuel, much less buy the equipment to drag this thing back. We’ll have to move Ain’t Home to the other airlock, and come back aboard.”

“For that matter,” Luminov asked in a low voice, “how do we explain to her why are we taking things? She gives us ship on condition we bring it to planet. If she knows we take things, it seems like we break deal.”

“Whelp,” Long Shot said with a devious grin, “we just need a distraction. Maybe Boots here can bed her. That should buy us at least thirty seconds.”

Luminov and Long Shot laughed while Domino sputtered and blinked rapidly. Finally, Long Shot punched Domino in the ribs and sighed. “D’worry ‘bout it, kid. I think she’s a tease anyway.”

“Seriously, guys.” Domino rubbed his side and blew the bangs out of his eyes. “She’s going to be back any minute, and we need to have this figured out.”

“He is right,” Luminov said. “We cannot take things without her notice. We maybe not can even leave before we install fake drive. And if we install it, she will know then that it does not work. There only is one way to do this. We must tell her the truth. At least then, she will know that we will return for her.”

Long Shot raised one bushy eyebrow. “You mean Boots is gonna have to tell her the truth?”

Domino sighed and regarded Long Shot from the corner of his eyes. “Because she likes me.”

“Exactly. Just make sure she knows that we’re not going to abandon her. I think that would be the single worst thing we could do.”

The door whooshed open and Twilight stuck her head in. “You guys still in here? Good. I slathered enough sealant on the inner airlock door to keep it from blowing out, too. We should be good now. You guys wanna get this drive installed?”

The crew of Ain’t Home looked from one to another silently until both Long Shot and Luminov ended up both staring at Domino. The younger stallion rubbed his muzzle with a white hoof and looked at the floor. He reached up and pulled the rose from behind his ear, holding it in his hooves while he took a deep breath. “Twilight, we need to talk.” He turned to his crewmates and said, “Can you guys give us some space?”

Luminov and Long Shot retreated to a far corner of the office and sat near a leafless potted plant. As the two of them began a quiet conversation, Luminov coughed quietly, a cough Domino recognized as noise to cover the surreptitious drawing of a pistol.

Twilight frowned and pinched her eyebrows together. “What’s going on?”

Domino sat next to her and fiddled with the rose in his hooves for a moment, then looked up at her. “Twilight, I like you. I’m very glad that we met, and I’m happy to be your friend.”

Twilight sat down and bent over, looking up at Domino from under her bangs. “Buuuuut…”

He tilted his head and let out his breath in a quiet huff, then inhaled again. “I have bad news about your FTL drive.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow.

“It doesn’t work. It can’t work. And… And you know. Or, at least, you did, when you made these installation manuals and filled that chalkboard. You covered up the problem, so you had to know it was there.” He licked his lips and forced a smile. “I don’t think you intended to deceive us.”

“It… It doesn’t work?” Twilight bit her lip as her eyes darted around the floor. “And I already knew?”

Domino nodded.

“Is it the timelike oscillator? I feel like… Like I remember that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I—” Twilight cringed and grabbed her head in her hooves “—I remember… Ponies came and I showed them my drive. Sometimes we installed it. Sometimes we were even underway. But always, they disappeared. I would turn around, a-and they would be dead. Stuffed, like the ponies you saw.” She looked up and pulled her hooves to her chest. “I came up with the whole thing just as… as a game? I was playing pretend the whole time?”

“I’m sorry, but you needed to know.”

Twilight sniffled and rubbed tears off her cheeks, then reached out and grabbed Domino, touching his face, his mane, his hooves. Domino wrapped a foreleg around her and held her gently, cradling the rose in his other hoof. He whispered, “I’m real. We’re real.”

“Don’t leave me,” Twilight murmured, then lifted her head and looked Domino in the eyes. She took the rose from him and tucked it back behind his ear. “Don’t disappear. Don’t. Please.”

“Twilight, we can’t dash your ship anywhere. We’re going to have to go get some equipment and come back—”

Twilight jumped to her hooves and screamed, “No. NO! You can’t leave me! Please, please don’t leave me!”

Domino stood up and reached out a hoof toward Twilight. “Of course not, Twilight! I said ‘we’ will have to leave to get equipment. You’re coming with us. We’ve got food, a fresh bed for you, and everything. We can sleep in shifts, so one of us will be with you all the time. You don’t have to be alone any more, Twilight.”

Twilight turned her head and let her ears droop.

Domino continued, “But we’ll need money for fuel and equipment, so we’re going to have to take some things to sell. And it’ll take some time to get everything together. It’ll be about three years before we get back.”

Twilight shook her head. “I can’t leave. This is my mission. I can’t abandon these ponies, not after what they gave up for the mission. What they gave up for me.” She made eye contact with Domino, then returned her gaze to the floor. “I can’t leave. It’s out of the question.”

“The only way for you to complete your mission is for us to go get this equipment. I don’t want to leave you, Twilight, any more than you want us to leave. I think these ponies would understand if you stepped out for a bit to get what you need to complete your mission.”

“Out of the question,” Twilight murmured without looking up.

“The only way to complete your mission is for us to go get those supplies. And to do that, we need to get back to our ship. Twilight, we need to get to another airlock, and we have to figure out how to get back once we’re outside. Our suits don’t have enough air to make the trip. You’re the smartest pony I’ve ever met, and we need your help. We’re not going to leave you, but we need to get back to our ship to help you with your mission.”

“No,” Twilight said, her head buried in her hooves. “You’re going to leave me.”

Long Shot stepped up behind Domino and put a hoof on his shoulder. “Maybe you can stay here with her while we go get the stuff. We can make port without you, and leave a beacon so we can find you again.”

Domino sighed. “There’s no life support. The air in here wouldn’t last three years, not with two of us breathing. It’s a miracle there’s any air right now, with just Twilight breathing.”

“Don’t leave,” Twilight whimpered as she began rocking forward and back.

Domino squatted next to her. “We’re not leaving.”

“Yes, you are!”

“You’re going to need the navigation system and starmaps from Ain’t Home if you’re going to get your ship to a planet. How about we worry about one problem at a time? After we reestablish access to our ship, we can talk about making sure that you’re not left alone. We’re all smart ponies, I’m sure we’ll figure something out.” He gently rubbed Twilight’s back and leaned closer to her. “How about an engineering problem to help you get out of your head?”

Twilight looked up and pouted, glaring at Domino through narrowed eyes. “Don’t treat me like a foal. You can’t just fix everything by trying to make me forget everything that’s going wrong.”

Long Shot snorted. “The whole booze industry would say otherwise.”

Domino ignored his captain and sat down. “Okay, Twilight. Here’s the deal. We’ve got to get back to our ship, but the airlock it’s connected to is busted, and there’s a looooooong stretch of vacuum between the next airlock and our objective. Our suits don’t have enough air to travel that distance, and there’s no hoofholds left on the outside of your ship anyway. Can you think of any way to get us there safely?”

“This isn’t fair,” Twilight said as she sniffled and wiped her cheeks with her hooves. She gave a halfhearted grin. “You’re using my smarts against me. How much air do your suits have, and do they have any sort of propulsion?”

[scene break image]

“So, this is what we’ve figured out,” Twilight said as she stood next to Domino and gestured toward an array of materials on the floor in front of them. “You’ve got about sixty minutes of air in your suits, and a distance of about thirty kilometers to cover in that time, plus two corners. The air tanks I have won’t fit your suits, but they don’t have to. Because we’re using them for propulsion!”

Long Shot scratched his chin. “I’m listening.”

Domino pointed at a yellow air cylinder and some metal bits. “You just screw this half of a regulator onto the bottle, then attach some cable here and here. It’s both a rocket nozzle AND an attachment point for the cables. The center of thrust is ahead of the center of mass, so it’s self-correcting. Any minor course corrections can be made with our suit thrusters. One tank should be enough to accelerate the three of us up to speed in just a few minutes, and then we just let go. That gives us time to attach cables to the other tank that we’ll use to slow us down when we get there. We should be able to cover the distance in less than forty minutes. Meanwhile, Twilight dons a suit and replaces the seal on the outer airlock, so that one won’t blow out when we get back. Oh, and the best part is, we don’t have to carry the bottles on the hike, because they’re standard equipment in all four airlocks.”

Luminov clapped. Long Shod nodded and tipped his hat. “Great job, kids. Twilight, thank you for helping.”

“Well,” Twilight said with a blush, “I have to say you were right. It really did help get my mind off things. It was a fun little hypothetical exercise.”

All three stallions froze, then turned to face Twilight. Domino pursed his lips and squinted at her. “What do you mean, ‘hypothetical?’”

Twilight looked at the floor. “We can’t actually get to any of the other airlocks.”

Domino chewed his lip for a moment, then asked, “Why not? Our scans showed no hull breaches, and full oh-two everywhere.”

“It’s… It’s just too dangerous. The habitat isn’t in good shape. There are… It’s not safe. I locked the doors a long time ago.”

Luminov began picking up pieces of the rocket harness and stuffing them in his belt pouches. “Maybe you can tell us story while we walk to the mall.” He coiled up the lengths of cable, slipping them over his head like a necklace before reaching out a hoof to Twilight.

Twilight took his hoof and stood up, then shuffled alongside them as they walked. She spoke without lifting her eyes from her hooves. “The entire ship was left empty for ponies to build homes and businesses in. I made sure there was enough of everything we needed, but I mostly let it grow naturally. Once the ship was full, a completely functional and self-contained city, we departed.

“It looked like Ponyville, or Canterlot, or any other city from Equestria. There were farms and bakeries, rivers and forests. We had dozens of schools, shops, and all the business and industry that a successful city needs. And all the ponies.

“When the life support started to run out, everyone realized that there were too many bodies using up too much air. At first, it was grandparents and such volunteering to… to stop breathing, to save air for their family. Ponies really came together and it was wonderful to see how much love there was…

“Until it got desparate. There were murders. Can you imagine a nice, sweet mare killing a dozen ponies, just so her foals could breathe for a few more days? I had to put her down. She was breathing, and she didn’t deserve to.

“No, that’s not right. She wasn’t a bad pony, you know. She just wanted to protect the ones she loved. I can understand that, only, I loved all of them. I couldn’t choose who would live and who would die.” Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. She took a trembling breath and continued walking. “But then I had to. I had to make those choices. I had to put her down. That was my choice. But it wasn’t long before suspicion and mistrust started taking more lives than the air.

“Then, one day, it happened. The whole hab was a war zone. Farmers with pitchforks and axes, unicorns blasting magic or teleporting each other into walls. Pegasi throwing tornados at entire buildings. It was terrible, but… as we watched from one of the engineering control rooms, seeing one pony die after another, all we could see was an oxygen gage ticking upward in our heads, more days on the clock for each of us with every life lost.

“Not that there was anything we could have done to stop a riot on that scale, but each of us felt guilty for feeling… relieved. By the time the violence had died down, I was ashamed to be a pony.

“There was nopony left alive. Not a single one.” Twilight cringed and stopped walking. “Well, I’m sure there were. A few survivors here and there, huddled in a basement with weapons at the ready. We sealed it off, and redirected all the life support to the engineering sections, where we lived until…”

Long Shot glanced at the mall entrance where they had left their effects in lockers. He looked to Domino and gestured toward Twilight, tilting his head and mouthing the words, “Keep her talking.”

Domino nodded silently and put a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder. He started walking, prompting Twilight to join him, and asked, “And you’ve been in the engineering section ever since? You haven’t gone back into the habitat at all?”

“A couple of times,” Twilight said. “Just for curiosity, or to get a part from one of the other engineering sections. I never went far before I turned back. I just made do with whatever I could scrounge in this section.”

“But you have wings,” Domino said as he stopped beside his crewmates and watched them open their lockers. “I get that there’s a lot of rubble and ruin or whatever, but couldn’t you just fly over it?”

Twilight glanced down the length of the mall, then turned back to where Long Shot and Luminov were stepping into their space suits. She sighed. “You’re going to go anyway, aren’t you? I guess you’ll see.”

[scene break image]

“Please, please don’t go in there!” Twilight pleaded, standing in front of a massive two-story door that spanned the entire width of the road. “I like you guys. It’s dangerous, and you don’t have to go. You can stay here, with me!”

Long Shot stepped forward and put a suited hoof on Twilight’s shoulder. “Miss Twilight, we can’t stay here. For one, we can’t help you complete your mission unless we get to our ship. But, and this’n is pretty important to me personally, we’ll die if we stay here. There’s no life support, and I don’t even want to imagine what you been eating. We can’t stay here.”

Tears shone in the corners of Twilight’s eyes as she turned and shuffled aside. Long Shot stepped forward and pressed a button on the control panel mounted near the center of the door, then stepped back as a deep rumble shook the ship. The door split in the middle and began rolling to both sides.

There was no daylight on the other side of the door. The wide road’s well-set cobblestones turned to irregular piles of smooth rocks, and a smell of pervasive damp came pouring out of the gap. Twilight stepped up to the growing crack in the door and gestured to the others as she glanced inside. “We should get through and close it behind us. We don’t want the door open any longer than it has to be.”

Luminov drew his gun and approached the door. Long Shot followed Twilight’s gaze, then turned to her and asked, “I thought you didn’t want us going in?”

“I don’t want you getting hurt,” Twilight growled, “and if you’re gonna go anyway, I’d better be there to protect you.” She stuck her head through the door and glanced both ways, then up into the sky before turning back to her companions and nervously stamping her hooves. “Come on!”

With a grunt, Luminov stepped through the opening and kept his gun at the low ready, swiveling his head back and forth as Long Shot walked up beside him. Domino took one last look at the bright blue skies and picket fences. The doors went quiet for an instant as they stopped and reversed direction. Long Shot called out, “Hey, kid! Get in here.”

Domino hopped over the threshold as the doors rumbled back towards each other. The pool of light from the engineering section grew narrower as the doors closed, until the they shut completely with a deep thud and the four ponies were left in a dusky gloom.

Although the doors had gone silent, a muted roar still filled the air, punctuated with regular wet slapping noises. Twilight leaned against Domino as their eyes adjusted to the half-light. Domino whispered loud enough for everypony to hear, “Is it some kind of simulated nighttime in here, or…”

“No,” Twilight replied quietly. “The skypaint glows permanently. We couldn’t figure out a way to turn it on and off. Best solution we came up with was for the weather team to move a really thick cloud around. The kind you’d use to build a house out of. It got dark enough for ponies to sleep, and for plants like tomatoes to grow.”

“The hell is a tomato?” Long Shot drawled as he squinted up into the sky. “I can kinda see a glow up there. It looks… dirty?”

Twilight squinted into the gloom. “Decades without air killed all the animals, even the bugs. The only things to survive were fungi and some of the simpler plants. I’m guessing that’s moss growing on the skypaint. And the fungus, well…”

Domino raised an eyebrow. “What fungus?”

A distant splash echoed off the monolithic wall. All four ponies turned to look out into the habitat. The road stood above swampy mires on both sides, its smooth, lumpy stones disappearing into the darkness ahead. The sky above was splotchy and uneven, tinged with green, and completely black in some spots.

Luminov clicked on a flashlight. Every surface reflected a moist sheen, from the polished cobblestones to the rubble spilling onto the road from what must have been a building that had since sank into the bog. He swung the beam to his right, panning across a soggy landscape of brightly-colored mushrooms and fuzzy black slime interspersed with tar-black ponds that jiggled when bubbles broke on their surfaces.

At the far reaches of the beam’s throw, a strange shape manifested, visible at first only by the specks of reflection on the hundreds of shiny bubbles on its surface. As they stared at it, they could see that it was like an inverted funnel, easily larger than a house, rising upward. Luminov raised the beam, catching light from more and more of the spherical bubbles as the mass narrowed and stretched into the sky. Soon, the beam was unable to illuminate the higher reaches of the pillar, but it’s dark shape was visible against the diffuse light filtering through the fog behind it. The column rose all the way to the ceiling, where it met one of the dark patches on the skypaint.

“Oh,” Domino said. “That fungus. There’s another one over there!”

Luminov swung his flashlight toward where Domino was pointing, his beam sweeping across a network of what looked like shaggy ropes, some of which hung low enough that the stallions ducked when they were suddenly revealed. Long Shot pulled out his flashlight and traced one of the ropes to another pillar on their left. The entire sky was full of these strands, trailing from one pillar to another, with raggedy black tatters hanging from them in irregular intervals.

“Well,” Long Shot said, “I wouldn’t want to fly through this either.”

Luminov cleared his throat. “We should now be going. Domino, where is next airlock?”

“We’re in one corner of a square. We can follow the wall to our left or our right, then EVA back.”

Long Shot trotted to the edge of the road and sunk a hoof into the muck up to his first joint. “Good luck with that,” he said with a grunt.

Twilight gestured up the road. “The capitol city, Blossom, is up ahead. All roads lead there, eventually. We just left engineering section B, which we called the city of Buck. To our right, under the swamp, is Generosa, and past that the engineering city Centifolia. Engineering city Alba is on our left, on the other side of Floribunda. That’s the five-bit tour. Any questions?”

Domino held up a hoof. “There’s a road from here to the center. Isn’t there a road from Buck along the wall toward, uh, whatever you called engineering sections A or C?”

Twilight took a deep breath and tilted her head. “There… are. But they’re under so much mud you can’t even open the the door. Well, you can, but you’d spend weeks digging out enough mud to shut the doors again. Guess how I figured that one out.”

“So,” Long Shot said, swinging his flashlight back to the road, “the only way to get to the next airlock is to follow this here road to the city in the center, then go back along another road.”

Luminov growled. “Assuming road does not disappear into swamp between here and there.”

Twilight turned to Luminov and looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Like. I. Said. This place is dangerous. We might not even make it to Blossom. We can still go back. The door’s right here.”

Domino walked up to Twilight and put a hoof on her shoulder, looking her in the eyes. “Twilight, if we stay here, we’ll asphyxiate. You’ll have to watch us die, and you won’t be able to complete your mission. The things you’re doing are contrary to what you say you want. Do you understand what that means?”

Twilight swallowed hard and nodded. “I’m acting irrationally.”

“So, let’s take some action that aligns with your goals.”

Long Shot rolled his eyes. “Are we done talking about feelings, now?”

Luminov chuckled as he watched Domino and Twilight begin to pick their way through the hoof-sized rocks. He turned to Long Shot. “Maybe you could learn from kid.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Heh. Kid has made more progress with mare than you ever have.”

Long Shot snorted. “You know I been married, right? Twice.”

Luminov smirked. “I know.” He started walking.

[scene break image]

Twilight lifted her head at the increased volume of the roaring noise. A stiff breeze whipped at her mane and tail as she turned back to the others. “We should find shelter before the rain gets here.”

“Rain?” Domino asked.

“Shelter?” said Long Shot. “We been hiking for hours, and we ain’t seen more than a pile of worn-down bricks.”

“The habitat is large enough that there’s a significant gradient in both temperature and humidity between the ground and the ceiling, or between Alba and Buck. That means wind, and rain. As to shelter, we built those at regular intervals in case of catastrophic hull breach. They were airtight, and made of the same metal as the ship. Hopefully, some of them are still standing.” She picked up her pace, carefully navigating between the hoof-sized stones. “And hopefully we can get there before the rain starts.”

Domino glanced skyward. “W-what’s wrong with the rain? Is it acid, or something?”

Twilight turned around and squinted at him with one eyebrow raised. “Your suit’s got a big open collar. It’ll fill up with rain. I know I sure wouldn’t want to spend two days hiking in a space suit full of water. Let’s hurry up, and try not to sprain a fetlock.”

“You know,” Domino said as he hurried after Twilight, stepping as quickly as he dared in the three bouncing flashlight beams, “us mortals… living on normal-sized spaceships… don’t get a lot of exercise.”

Long Shot trotted past Domino, puffing his cheeks out with each breath. “You’re welcome to stay back here, kid, but I plan to be dry and warm till the storm’s passed.”

Luminov trotted past both of them. “Neither of you noticed our ship has gym?”

Domino rolled his eyes and trotted faster.

The wind picked up, blowing a sticky fog across the road and carrying with it a nutty odor of decay. The saturated air threw the flashlight beams back in the ponies’ faces. They turned off their flashlights and ran with their heads down, each pony focusing only one step in front of their own hooves as they followed the sound of hooves in front of them.

The wind whistled louder through the strands overhead, changing tone as they rippled and bounced. The effect was not unlike some alien symphony

They see a giant mushroom, think it’s a house, but twilight tells them to steer clear as the winds cause tendrils to whip out with a crack and stick to things with globs of glue. They reach a shelter, the size of a large room, still sealed. They go inside, and it’s mostly dry. A dead earth pony and foal are inside, their corpses rotted away, leaving nothing but brown stained bones. They clearly didn’t die of violence.

Domino takes off his suit, the others envy him for being able to get in and out of it so quickly. Because it takes so much time, they leave their suits on in case they have to leave quickly. They eat some fruity oaty bars, then decide to get some sleep. Twilight cuddles with Domino and they fall asleep while Long Shot takes first watch.

When the storm is over, they go outside and see the cobblestones having been washed around, and standing water everywhere. Long black fronds stand out of the water like grass, waving gently in the breeze.

As they're climbing over collapsed houses and creaky roofs, Long Shot slips and falls. He's injured, and his suit is torn. They need a first aid kit and a suit patch. But Twilight doesn’t want them wandering off alone, so they decide to stick together until they get to a more structurally-sound area (houses were built lightweight like actual houses, but the government areas were sturdier and airtight, to be used as emergency shelters), then split up to find the supplies.

After they split up, Domino heads toward an infirmary while Twilight looks for a suit patch, and Luminov sneaks off toward what looks like a big town hall. Luminov finds a large, opulent bedroom. With a dozen corpses, propped up with wires, surrounding a giant bed, upon which lays the corpse of a purple alicorn.

As he turns to leave Twilight's bedroom, her voice comes over the intercom. “I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

Chapter 4: Decompression

Twilight smiled. “Just hit the big button on the intercom, and I can hear you from anywhere on the ship. I went into the operator’s room and just plugged everything in.”

Domino looked up from the floor where he was surrounded by an array of mechanical bits. “Wait.” He brushed a multi-colored bundle of wire out of his hair and straightened the rose tucked behind his ear. “You mean like an old fashioned telephone operator? Like a room full of mares in tortoiseshell glasses, chewing gum and plugging wires into a switchboard?”

Long Shot shook his head with a smirk as he leafed through his copy of the installation manual.

Twilight looked at Domino and tilted her head. “Well, I mean, anypony could work there, but yeah. How else would you make an electrical connection between two intercoms that needed to talk to each other?” She scrunched up her face as Domino giggled. “I told you, we don’t have ‘computers’ to run the whole ship. Without central control – which by the way, I totally don’t have at all – we had to communicate with the ponies at each of the control stations.”

Domino held up his hooves defensively. “Hey, keep your socks on, Princess. I just thought it was funny, you know? The, uh, the combination of really old-fashioned tech and these highly-advanced robots.”

“Juxtaposition,” Long Shot said without looking up.

“Thank you,” Twilight and Domino said at the same time. They looked at each other and giggled.

Long Shot peeked over the top of his book with one eyebrow raised. “Well, that was exactly the wrong combination of cute and creepy.” He slapped the manual closed. “Do you mind if I ask a question, Twilight?”

“Not at all!”

“Where is Earth?”

Twilight cleared her throat. “I, um, I don’t actually know. I don’t even know how long I’ve been coasting out here. I don’t know where I am, or where I’ve been. There’s some records in the capital city, in city hall, that should help you find it. Constellation charts and whatnot. If you’ve got star position maps, it should be relatively simple, if tedious, to figure out where those constellations were viewed from. Unfortunately, it’ll be really, really tough to get to them until we reach a planet. That part of the ship just… isn’t in very good condition nowadays.”

Long Shot’s ears drooped as he took a shallow breath and let it out. “Yeah, I figure that’s reasonable. Dunno what I expected, really.” He looked back to Twilight and clutched his hat against his chest. “But, the information is there? We can really find it?”

Twilight’s smile was warm and genuine as she looked him in the eye. “Yes. We just need to get this drive working so we can get to a planet.”

“Do we need to wait for Luminov, or can we go ahead and get started installing?”

Twilight looked around and asked, “Where is Luminov, anyway? And for that matter, why was he acting all weird around me? He seemed pretty friendly until… well, until the—” she curled her feathers into a gun shape and pointed it at her head “—you know.”

“Heh,” Long Shot grunted as he shook his head. “You just answered your own question, lady.”

Twilight glanced from one stallion to the other. “I still don’t understand.”

Long Shot sat down and took off his glasses. “Pointing a gun at somepony isn’t something that any of us does lightly.”

“He seems to be bothered by it more than you guys.”

Long Shot said, “I think you remind him of someone, is all.”

Twilight nodded. “Maybe I should ask him.”

Long Shot glanced at Domino before looking back to Twilight. “Or maybe you should wait until he’s ready to tell you.”

“Fair enough. I want to respect everypony’s boundaries, but we’ll have to work through these issues if we’re going to be friends.” Twilight’s grin faltered as she looked at the floor and rubbed one of her forelegs with the other. “I know it can be uncomfortable to deal with these things, but…”

Long Shot squinted at Twilight. “Y’know, you spend an awful lot of time worryin’ about everypony’s feelings.”

Twilight grinned with all her teeth. “Well, I j-just really don’t want to screw this up. I haven’t had friends in so long. I’d do anything to keep you from leaving me.”

Domino looked up with wide eyes, one hoof still on the page of Twilight’s installation manual. “What?”

“No!” Twilight dragged a hoof down her face and groaned. “I realize how that sounds, now that I hear it out loud. I didn’t mean, like, I’m going to ponynap you. I just didn’t want you to be all like” —she lowered the pitch of her voice and crossed her eyes— “‘You don’t respect my feelings, Twilight. I don’t want to be your friend any more. I’m leaving!’”

Long Shot kept his eyes glued to the alicorn as he sat up straighter. He took a shallow breath and exhaled with a flare of his nostrils. “Well, I’ve said goodbye to a fair number of mares in my day, and I can assure you words to that effect are unlikely to ever leave my lips.”

Twilight frowned. “You’re not exactly making me feel better.”

“Then the feeling’s mutual.” Long Shot stowed the book in his saddle bag. “I’m gonna head out, see if I can’t find Luminov. You think you’ll survive here without me?”

“I think so,” Twilight and Domino said simultaneously before turning toward each other and giggling.

Long Shot groaned as he pressed the button by the door, then threw one last unamused glance over his shoulder and stepped into the corridor. The door hissed shut behind him, leaving only half-imagined murmurs of conversation echoing through the steel walls. The old stallion turned and looked at the door, listening to a peal of laughter from the other side. He sighed and started walking with a shake of his head. “Careful, kid. I get the feeling she’s broken more than a few hearts.”

[scene break image]

Luminov squinted and leaned forward, his eyes scanning across the pony skins on the wall. The hides had been cleaned expertly, with not even a scrap of flesh remaining. A moist sheen reflected the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead. Not even the edges had dried out and hardened into the translucent white of rawhide. He took a deep breath, feeling the weight of his pistol shift against his side as his ribs expanded.

He reached out a hoof and poked at one of the skins. It felt drier than it looked, and far softer than it should have been. He dragged his hoof across the wall as he walked the length of the room. The fur on the back side of each skin was the same unremarkable tan color. Luminov grunted and turned to one of the hulking machines bolted to the floor.

It seemed to be some combination of hydraulic press and automated forge. A rack of familiar-looking parts hung near a pair of buffing wheels. He bumped the rack with a hoof and scrunched his eyebrows, then turned to the next machine.

Hoppers of some kind of chemical feed stock loomed above a mixing tank and a set of shiny steel rollers. Shears, a heat gun, and other hoof tools were dangling from a pegboard on the wall behind the machine. A box that looked something like a waste bin was butted against the edge of the work surface. Luminov leaned closer to the box and reached out with a hoof to tilt it forward. As the box tilted and its contents came into view, a furry ear poked out over the edge.

Luminov grunted and reached into the box, pulling out the scrap of skin by the ears. An eyeless face stared back at him, its mouth wobbling in a soundless facscimile of laughter. Luminov glanced up at the wall of skins. The fur color was the same. He flipped the face over and rubbed his hooves across the bare hide on the flesh side, then brought it closer to his muzzle and sniffed. With another grunt, he tossed it onto the table and pulled open a drawer, rummaging around for a moment before pulling out a wrench.

With a couple of quick turns of the wrench, Luminov loosened one of the steel rollers, then pried it out of the way with the wrench’s handle. In the space between the rollers was a mass of soft material. He used a knife to scrape some of the substance out, then rolled it between his hoof and the table. It had the same color and consistency as the skin tacked to the wall, or the face he’d pulled out of the box.

Luminov glanced back to the rack of parts hanging by the press. He held up a foreleg and squinted, positioning his elbow in front of one of the parts and flexing the joint before turning back to the table and picking up the face by the ears. “Hello, Sparky. I can make guess of who peeled off your face. But why she did?”

He dropped the face and picked up the box, dumping its contents on the table. Scraps of skin, fur trimmings, and entire ears fell off the table as he sorted through the pile. He pulled a long purple feather from the scraps and nodded. “No surprise, Princess.” He glanced back up at the wall where the robotic stallions’ skins still spelled out NOT ALIVE, and took a deep breath. “But why?”

[scene break image]

“Alright,” Twilight said as she stretched upward into the open panel on the wall, “can you see this?”

Domino pressed his face against the bulkhead and squinted past her shoulders. “No, you’re still in the way.”

“Well, maybe if…” Twilight trailed off as she squirmed and turned around in the tiny gap. “Can you magic where you can’t see?”

“What, you mean like I hold it in place from out here while you turn the wrench?” Domino shook his head. “Afraid not.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that. Can we—” Twilight grunted and twisted her torso, squeezing her ribs against the side of the opening. “Can you get in here?”

“I, um.” He cleared his throat as he looked up to where the purple alicorn’s torso disappeared into the access panel. “I can try.”

Domino scooted up to Twilight and looked at the remaining space. He brushed his bangs away from his face and took a deep breath, then pressed his cheek against Twilight’s flank and maneuvered his ears ears and horn upward into the hatch. With a side-to-side motion, he tilted his head back and forth until he heart Twilight gasp. “Ow, my wings! Hold on, lemme…”

Twilight exhaled, and pulled her wings up into the hatch. “I hope that gives you a bit more room.”

Domino squeezed past Twilight and stood on his hind legs, looking around the cramped space. Twilight’s wings were spread out against the walls, covering every surface and giving the impression that the two ponies were sharing a tiny, conspiratorial hut made of lavender feathers. A single bare light bulb had been wired into a tray of cables, illuminating Twilight’s face in a soft light that seemed to add warmth to her cheeks and the tips of her ears. She wiggled the tips of her wings and chuckled breathily. “Sorry about these things. They’re just kinda in the way sometimes.”

“Oh, no, they’re—” Domino tried to ignore a feather that was tickling one of his ears “—uh, spectacular.” He held his hooves tightly against his upper chest. “Also, wow, you’re really cold!”

“And you’re so warm!” Twilight purred as she wrapped her hooves around his neck and leaned in close to him. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I felt the warmth of another pony?”

Domino let his hooves rest on the back of Twilight’s neck as she nuzzled his chest. The area just behind her left ear was exposed as her mane fell over his shoulders. She smelled like roses, and her fur was soft against his chin. As she tilted her head, he could feel the fur behind her ear brush against his lips. He leaned his head back and squeaked, then cleared his throat and said, “So, uh, where’s this part we’re replacing?”

“Oh, yeah.” Twilight said, pulling her hooves back. “That’s what we were doing.” Her eyes darted all around the compartment, landing everywhere but his eyes. “I, uh, can get distracted easily. I’ve been so alone, you know? I just kinda did what I wanted, when I wanted. And, apparently, I can forget that it’s changed. Adjusting back into normal life is going to be difficult for me, isn’t it? It seems like I’m trying to be romantic, but that’s not what’s happening. I needed a hug. A hug from anypony. Oh, not that I don’t like you, or that I’m not interested in romance. Are… are you…”

Domino swallowed hard, then took as deep of a breath as he could with the princess pressed up against his chest. “I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. And it’s not because mares aren’t ever interested in me. Cuz, you know, they are. Totally. It’s just that you, well, you’re way out of my league. You’re beautiful, you’re smart. Then there’s the whole immortal goddess thing.”

“I’m not a—”

“I know,” Domino said, “that when we get back to civilization, you’ll find somepony more like you. A prince, or a president or something. You won’t want to be tied to somepony like me, a nobody from some backwater planet, riding around nowhere in a rust bucket.”

Twilight chuckled softly. “It’s very sweet of you to be worried about me.”

Domino huffed. “I wasn’t trying to make you like me more.”

“I don’t like princes, or high society. I do like backwaters, and ponies from them who care about their friends.” She patted him on the shoulder. “But I’ll try not to marry you before we get back to civilization and I have a chance to shop around. How’s that?”

“I… I’m not completely sure that makes me feel better.”

“Besides. I did learn one important thing about friendship before I left. Nothing lasts forever, so you should enjoy spending time with ponies while they’re here. And right now that means you can warm me up, and we can both enjoy the company.”

Domino nodded. “And by ‘the company’ you mean…”

“The warm snugglies, yes.”

“Alright then.”

Twilight leaned forward and nuzzled Domino’s cheek. “Is that okay?”

Domino nodded rapidly, his lips pinched together in a thin smile.

“The timelike oscillator,” Twilight said, stretching a hoof above her head and tapping on a metal piece projecting from a conduit, “replaces this part here. Unfortunately, we have to shut off the power to this section, replace the part, get everything sealed up, and get the section powered up before the molten carbonate fuel cells freeze solid. I’ve done the math a hundred times. Well, way more than that. But it’s impossible for one pony to do alone. Just the time spent running from here to the power relay and back is too much.”

“And they don’t have cold-start capability?” Domino studied the connections on either side of the part.

“Well, they do, but that requires fuel cells in other sections to be running, and ponies at both ends to coordinate. Which brings us back to the original problem.”

“Uh-huh. So this looks pretty tricky. We’ll have to line it up” —he pointed with a hoof— “here, here, and here. And then hold it in place while inserting the bolts and tightening it.” He glanced at Twilight, then back up to the conduit. “That would be tough to do alone, even without the time pressure.”

Domino sighed. “I can’t imagine being so close to a solution for so long, with it just out of reach.”

Twilight’s eyes sank as she let out a heavy breath. Domino pulled her into a hug and murmured, “I’m sorry.” He felt her tail wrap around one of his hind legs as she squeezed tighter against his chest.

“THE HELL ARE YOU DOIN’!?”

Domino and Twilight both hit their heads as they jumped away from each other in the confined space, then bumped their heads together as they tried to squeeze through the hatch at the same time. Long Shot’s booming laugh echoed through the walls while Domino bit his lip and waited for Twilight to squeeze past his belly.

When Domino pulled himself out of the access panel and dropped to all four hooves, he saw Twlight’s cheeks burning as red as his own while Long Shot continued to chuckle. Luminov somberly stood beside the captain. After several moments, Luminov reached into his saddlebag and pulled something out, then tossed it onto the floor with a wet plop.

Twilight recoiled immediately, squeezing her eyes shut and turning away. Domino looked at the furry chunk of skin on the floor and then raised his eyes to Long Shot, who scratched his head. Twilight took a shuddering breath, then spoke without opening her eyes. “I forgot they had faces.”

Luminov took a step forward, and kicked the artificial skin a short distance across the floor. “What is this, Princess?”

Twilight whispered, “You know what it is.”

“Okay, sure. But why you do this?”

Twilight inched away from the face and sat down, her flank barely touching Domino’s hoof. She looked up at Luminov with moist eyes. “I was so alone. I… It was getting too easy to see them as real ponies. The Sparkys can turn a wrench, or remember your coffee order, but they’re no good at conversation. And—” she glanced at Domino before lowering her gaze to the floor “—they’re also bad at cuddling.”

Long Shot took off his hat and tapped it against his other foreleg. “You peel a bunch of stallion robots, so you don’t get to thinkin’ they’re friendly?”

Domino wrapped a foreleg around Twilight’s shoulders. “I think that’s, uh, kinda reasonable.”

“How do we know,” Luminov asked as he took half a step forward, “you did not peel the skin off living ponies, too?”

Twilight clutched her hooves to her chest and leaned forward, shouting, “I didn’t, I swear!” She dropped one hoof to the floor and lowered her head. “Well, okay, sort of. But they were already dead. You saw those. I just, I wanted to remember them the way they were. Full of life. My friends.”

Domino let go of Twilight and put his hoof back on the floor. Long Shot was still holding his hat and chewing on nothing in particular. Luminov raised an eyebrow and asked, “How do I know you didn’t kill those ponies?”

Twilight instantly tensed up. She glared at Luminov and lowered her head, snarling words at him. “I did. I murdered every last one of them. I planned the mission, I convinced them to trot on board and doom their descendants to extinction. I’ve killed every single pony who ever set hoof on this ship. I’ve been paying for my mistakes for centuries. The princess of friendship, alone, forever. I’m always paying for my mistakes. This isn’t the first time I’ve been ‘rescued,’ you know. The mind, it can, can… blur the line between fantasy and reality. You know what? I’m just waiting. Waiting for the moment when I’m lucid enough to see you for what you are. You’re n-nothing but corpses, just like everypony else on this ship. Them, you, me. And it hurts! It hurts every time I turn around and see the face of a friend from centuries past, when I thought I was talking to… Say something.” Twilight trembled, tears streaming down her face as she looked from one stallion to another. “SAY SOMETHING!”

Domino wrapped Twilight in a hug, pinning her forelegs against her chest as he pulled her close and rested his chin on top of her head. She melted into his embrace, sobbing into his fur. Long Shot picked up the Sparky skin and stuffed it back into Luminov’s saddle bag.

When the tears had stopped and Twilight pulled away from the hug, Domino said, “Guys, I think you need to go easy on Twilight. I don’t think she’d willingly hurt anypony.”

Long Shot put his cap back on and stared at Domino. “And I don’t think you’d notice if she set your tail afire. We are gonna have a conversation that doesn’t involve googly eyes, while you read a book—” he slapped one of Twilight’s installation manuals against Domino’s chest and used it to push him to the other end of the room “—over here.”

Domino frowned. “I—”

Long Shot lifted the book to the younger stallion’s mouth and jammed it inside. “Read. Grownups are talking now.”

Domino spat out the book and glared at his captain marching away. With a grunt, he sat down and halfheartedly flipped through several pages while keeping his ears trained on the conversation. He stopped when he reached a section on the timelike oscillator. He’d seen the bolts and the place where it was to be installed, but Twilight hadn’t explained how it worked. There were no equations in the manual, but Domino pulled a pencil out of Twilight’s toolbag and began scribbling calculations and notes in the margin. Soon, he’d filled all the available space on three different pages. He dropped the manual and the pencil to the deck and took a deep breath, pulling his hair back with both hooves as he stared into the distance with a slack jaw.

The others were still talking, but Domino had stopped listening when he started doing math. He picked up the oscillator in his hooves and turned it over. Except for the label hoof-scrawled in grease pencil, it appeared to be identical to the existing part. Domino let the part fall from his hooves, then jumped up and marched across the room. He put a hoof on each of the stallions and started pushing them toward the door, throwing a toothy grin toward Twilight as he went past. “Don’t worry, Twilight. I’ll get these guys sorted out.”

When they reached the end of the room, Luminov pressed the button to open the door and the three of them trotted into the hall. Domino cast a glance over his shoulder and watched the door close. He turned aside to the next room on the other side of the hallway, and activated the door, then ushered his shipmates into what looked like a small office.

Luminov scanned the room, his eyes dwelling on each door for a split second before he returned his attention to Domino. “What is wrong?”

Domino hung his head, then looked back up. “It’s not real. The FTL drive. It can’t work.”

Long Shot cursed. “Well, her understanding of quantum physics is what, a thousand years old? We figured this might happen.”

“No,” Domino said as he looked from one stallion to the other. “I mean, she knows it can’t work.”

Luminov took a deep breath and looked at his captain. Long Shot returned his gaze, then turned to Domino. “How do you know that?”

“Her entire drive is based on the idea of a 4-brane, which requires resonance in a fourth dimension to reduce the nine spatial dimensions to a noninteger—”

Long Shot held up a hoof. “I immediately regret asking. Cut to the chase.”

“Oh. Well, when she sold us the idea, she showed us the math for our dash drive, then said she could do it a hundred times better with her timelike oscillator. Scientists have known that a four-brane would work better since the concept of a dash drive was first thought up, but the hard part is making the oscillator work in four dimensions. She completely skipped that part. I did a basic dimensional analysis on the oscillator, and the units don’t match. It’s like measuring speed in kilograms.”

A stony frown weighed down the captain’s face. “Could it be a mistake?”

“No way. Not only is she too smart to make a mistake like that, but that’s the only part she left out. Everything else was explained perfectly, right up until this part, then it’s all hoof-waving for a second, and it goes back to legit math.”

Luminov nodded and adjusted his tool belt. “So, what? Is trap?”

“I don’t think so. I think she believes that it’s real. I mean, she knows it isn’t, but I don’t think she understands. She’s not trying to lie to us, she’s trying to convince herself. Maybe she already has. I don’t know. Maybe it started as a game with her, uh, imaginary friends or whatever, and since then she’s forgotten. She kind of seems to shift back and forth between being here and… being somewhere else. Remember when we first saw her?”

Long Shot reached up to Domino’s ear and poked Twilight’s rose. “How could we forget?”

“Question is,” Luminov said quietly, keeping one eye on the door, “what is plan now?”

“Plan A’s out the window, ain’t it?” Long Shot said. He put a hoof on top of his head and swirled his hat around between his ears. “There’s no drive, so there’s no reason to stay here. We can’t take the ship with us. Ain’t got the fuel to come back unless we grab somethin’ to sell. We’ll have to take enough to buy a set of dash cables. I’ve been doin’ the math on this since we first set hoof on board.

“I don’t think we can even get that kinda cable installed on Ain’t Home. Nobody makes a set of standalone cables that long, either. Hell, it might be the longest set of dash cables ever made. We’ll have to get one’a them asteroid-dragging jobbers. That’s custom fab territory. At that point, we’re basically commissioning an entirely new ship. That’ll take a year, at least - once we place the order. Or, rather, once we pay up front.

“Ain’t any orbital shipyards we can reach without stopping to refuel. That’s two months to the nearest port, sell some loot, another four months to a shipyard. Figure eighteen months for design and construction of the largest tug ever made. Five months back here.” He sighed and shook his head. “We’re looking at nearly three years before we can get back.”

Luminov scanned the room again. “Should we get contract with her? In case other salvage ship find her first?”

Domino shook his head. “No court would enforce it. She’s not mentally competent to enter into a contract.”

Long Shot chuckled and poked Domino in the ribs. “So you admit she’s crazy? You still got the hots for her or what?”

Domino rolled his eyes. “She’s cute, she’s smart, and with a year or two of normal social interaction, I’m sure she’d be fine. But no court in the galaxy would uphold a contract she signed.”

“True, but it don’t have to convince a court. We just gotta wave the contract at anypony who shows up - since nopony else is going to be able to drag it back without making the same trip we’re gonna. They don’t know she’s crazy.”

Luminov grunted. “Do you think we can get her to sign contract?”

Long Shot looked at Domino. Domino shrugged. “I honestly don’t know what she’ll do if we shatter her fantasy. She could agree to come back with us, or wait for us to get back, or freak out and… I don’t know. I don’t think she’s… I don’t think she’d hurt us. I think she genuinely wants to be friends. But I don’t think it’ll be pretty.”

“Hmmm.” Long Shot lifted his hat and ran a hoof through his mane, then replaced the hat and hitched up his tool belt. “So that’s the plan, then. We grab enough high-value loot to commission the biggest tug in history, and we get out of here. Then—”

A deep boom resonated through the walls, its echoes drowned out by a wailing alarm as red lights in each corner of the ceiling began to flash.