Twilight's Rose

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.”