Chapter One: Generation
Chapter One: Generation
Aurora Pinfeathers awoke to the soft tick of her homemade timer. Her pale green eyes slid open as the lights in her room slowly brightened by degrees, courtesy of a dimmer she’d installed years ago. She inhaled deeply, resigning herself to the beginning of a new day.
The synthetic sheets whispered across her cutie mark as she rolled out of bed: an outstretched steel wing that reflected a ribbon of green and blue light across its metal feathers. It was another footnote in a long history of cutie marks that seemed to embody its owner’s name rather than a special talent. Most ponies in Stable 10 reported their cutie marks appearing on the day of their first job assignment. Few ever saw a correlation between their mark and the work the overmare assigned them. Some called it a side-effect of living in a Stable. Most didn’t think about it at all.
The single-occupant room Aurora occupied between her shifts down in Mechanical was little different than the other hundreds of personal compartments spread throughout the Stable. Every pony was given a bed, a simple metal desk complete with a personal terminal and a partitioned washroom compartment that was small enough to touch either wall with her wingtips.
A row of hooks studded the wall next to the pneumatic steel door. A worn set of saddlebags hung on their straps from one. Next to them, a pair of fitted wing guards - protective sheaths which prevented a host of injuries made possible in their confined home - showed few signs of actual use. On the last hook, a crisp blue and yellow Stable suit dangled by its collar. She didn’t remember the last time she’d actually worn it.
Aurora carried herself to the washroom and looked herself over in the mirror. A long streak of machine grease hung in her white mane and had painted her right cheek as she slept. She grimaced and turned to look at her bed.
“Millie?” she said.
A soft tone chimed from the overhead speaker in the main room. “Yes, Aurora?”
She turned back to the washroom and lifted the sink handle, cupping her wings under the stream of clean water. “Order new bedsheets and a pillow.”
She pressed her face down into the pooling water while the Stable’s artificial intelligence processed her request. It flowed over the top of her mane, soaking down to her scalp and washing away the last ghosts of sleep. She was staring down the barrel of a ten hour shift with the Stable generator today. No one would notice if she skipped a shower.
“Order complete. A delay has been noted.”
Aurora’s shoulders slumped as she rose her head out of the stream, her mane mopped over her muzzle. She picked a mostly dry towel off the floor and rubbed her face into it. “What kind of delay?”
Millie paused, then politely chimed: “Logistical. A forty-four minute loss of power was logged by the Fabrication Wing. Your order will arrive no later than 8pm tomorrow evening.”
Aurora pressed her lips together and groaned. Ever since Tally Mane had been assigned production lead in Fabrication he had developed a tendency to push the equipment harder than necessary to meet his own fictitious quotas. She had personally sent his terminal more than a few warnings that he was drawing more than his share of power from the Stable grid. His replies were professional, polite and ultimately non-committal. Aurora had met seized engines that cooperated more willingly than Tally Mane.
She tipped back a capful of mouthwash, swished and spat. Her wing tipped the faucet handle up, then down, rinsing the sink. “Millie, take a letter addressed for Tally Mane in Fabrication.”
A pause. Aurora listened as she walked into her room and lifted her saddlebag off its hook. “Tally Mane is not assigned in Fabrication. Would you like to address the letter to Tally Mane in Sanitation?”
Her eyebrows sprung up and she snorted, sliding the saddlebag around her flank by her teeth and shifting her hips until it felt comfortable. As she tightened the straps she considered sending Tally a letter of congratulation, but the machine grease that mottled her rumpled bed reminded her that she didn’t have the luxury to be vindictive. She imagined Tally pushing a mop through the mare’s restroom and smiled before moving on.
“No, Millie. That will be all for now,” she said.
A soft chime toned above her and Millie was gone.
She bit the straps tying the pair of wing-shaped imitation leather together, tugged the gear off their hook and slung it over her back. Her wings dipped into their guards while she pressed the button next to her door with a hoof. It slid up with a hiss of a well cared for machine.
For a moment she considered the blue and yellow pinstriped Stable suit. Sledge would tear her ass in half if she showed up without it after his warnings, but she knew Sledge. His bark was always worse than his bite, and she had her reasons to leave the suit on the hook. Most pressing was that the generator room had an ambient temperature that hovered somewhere between welding burns and balefire.
Aurora shut the door behind her and walked out into the hallway.
Ponies milled through the hallways, some stopping to chat with friends while others ducked their heads while navigating around the chattier clusters while trying to shake off the vestiges of sleep. All of them wore wing guards.
Stable 10 was populated solely by pegasi. The exact reason had always been murky, even by the overmare’s understanding, but the consensus among residents was that Stable-Tec had reserved Stable 10 for pegasi as a gesture of goodwill to the Enclave. Nopony knew for certain if the Enclave knew their Stable existed, let alone that it was populated exclusively by pegasi, but it was the narrative that checked the most boxes and so it became the prevailing theory.
Aurora nodded greetings to those who would make eye contact with her and found other things to look at as she brushed past others whose gaze drifted lower.
When the Stable sealed its doors two hundred and twenty years ago, Stable suits were a peculiar piece of dress code meant to instill a sense of community among a disparate group of survivors. It worked extremely well. Suits became the new normal and within the span of a few short years, nudity slid into a gray area between tradition and taboo.
Aurora’s eyes wandered the fabricated murals that broke up the dull passageways, not paying attention to any one image in particular. Along the well-worn path to Mechanical each scene drifted by her like an old friend. A panorama of a green pasture with a pink barn nestled against a vast orchard. An artist’s rendition of a stained glass window depicting a horned serpent surrounded by the lost princesses. A blown up photograph of Applebloom, Scootaloo and Sweetiebelle standing in the lobby of the newly constructed Stable-Tec HQ building, smiling patiently for a forgotten photographer.
None of them wore a stitch of clothing save for the coats on their hides and the uniquely similar set of cutie marks on their hips. Aurora failed to suppress a wry smile as she turned the corner toward the service elevators.
Solidarity.
She joined the queue outside the row of double-doors and sidled into the first available lift. A dim yellow light flickered to life when she pressed the button marked Mechanical. A mahogany coated pony reached over her to press a button a few levels above them and sighed in resignation as the doors closed and the lift began to descend.
“I heard Jenny shit the bed this morning.”
Nearly everypony on the lift turned to the source of the voice with varying degrees of confusion. Aurora’s ears drooped, recognizing the owner of the voice as soon as she heard it.
“Generator,” she clarified, more for the benefit of the ponies around her than for the jet black stallion over her left shoulder. “Good morning, Carbide.”
Carbide continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Last shift couldn’t figure it out. Thinks you might have an idea. Flux thinks one of the rotor poles might have gone to shit. Threw her off alignment again. Rumor is they may need to put us on backup power to do another teardown.”
Aurora suddenly wished she had checked her terminal before she left. The lift slowed as it approached Mechanical. The gentle hum of the lift gradually gave way to a deeper vibration that reverberated through the walls around them. Aurora spared a glance at Carbide and saw something other than borderline jokes on his expression. He looked worried.
“Sledge is in a bad way, Aurora. Don’t push him today.”
The doors separated and immediately the lift was assaulted by a cacophony of noise. Aurora and Carbide stepped out, leaving the rest of the ponies on the lift to flatten their ears and hastily punch at the DOOR CLOSE button.
This was the world Aurora knew.
The Mechanical wing was noisy at best. Deafening at worst. Few visitors ever ventured down to the bottom of the Stable where welding torches flashed together what the fabricators couldn’t print with sintered metals, where broken tools too valuable for the recyclers were carted down to have new life breathed into them. And where the Stable’s climate control systems struggled to keep the temperature below sweltering. The stinging odor of burnt grease and sweat permeated the air and seeped into anything porous and even some things which weren’t.
It was home.
Mechanical was one of the few places in the Stable with the exception of the atrium that offered a space that couldn’t be described as a hallway. The walls had all been ripped out in favor of an open floor plan that allowed crews to navigate pallet jacks loaded with tools, material, and scraps across a the vast concrete floor divided up by scuffed lines of paint. Somewhere on the floor, a pony pushed a pallet jack over a bit of debris, embedding it into the flat composite wheel, adding a manic tak-tak-tak-tak-tak to the din.
Carbide didn’t hear him say goodbye but she caught the mock-salute he made as he trotted off to punch in. Aurora nodded back as and watched him go, the start of her shift tainted with bad news before it could begin.
She cast her attention past the meticulous chaos of mechanics and repair ponies, past the lines of blue plastic crates piled high with snips of pipe and plating, to the far wall of Mechanical. She swayed between ponies moving in and out of the main walkway toward a door not much larger than the one to her personal compartment. A small black semi-sphere was inset next to the door, a pinprick of green light glowing at its center. The light widened into a thin line that swept down her face, comparing her to the handful of ponies on file with access to the generator room. The door emitted a heavy clunk and slid into the ceiling.
Immediately she knew something was wrong.
She pinned her ears back against the thundering reverberation of the Stable’s heart. She couldn’t hear the door sealing her inside a massive space reserved for an equally massive machine. The top half of the generator stood two levels high, easily ten ponies tall. The bottom half was sunk deep into the Stable floor where its behemoth rotor spun at several thousand RPM within a cage of metal and cables thicker than Aurora’s barrel. The ground beneath her hooves was made of steel plate that allowed them to access the junctions and wires that snaked out from the generator and up into the Stable above. The generator wasn’t built in the Stable. Stables were built around their generators. For ten hours of every day, Aurora was responsible for making sure it kept spinning.
The steel panels beneath her hooves sang with the vibrations emanating from the center of the room. Her hooves tingled as they absorbed the alien harmonics of a machine that was doing something it was never designed to do.
To her left, behind a wide shatterproof window set into the concrete wall that ringed the generator milled a small cluster of ponies from the last shift. She adjusted her wings in their protective guards as she trotted to the access door a few meters down from the window. The roaring hum dimmed to a muffled drone as the door sealed behind her. A bank of lockers led her to the control room.
“--output has stayed consistent since it began. It doesn’t explain any of this.” Aurora recognized the reedy voice of Flux, the team lead for third shift. She sat in front of a terminal built into a half-wall of centuries-old meters and gauges that twitched in the same way they had twitched since Aurora could remember. The bank of readouts had been wiped clean recently, a centuries-old task that had eventually scarred their glass windows. On the desk next to the terminal, a thick layer of dust sat atop a fire-red telephone.
Around Flux stood six engineers from her shift, none of them willing to speak into the silence. Their Stable suits were caked with grease, showing the signs of a hard night. Flux looked as if she were lost. The yellow pegasus pressed her closed eyes against her foreleg, trying to rub the exhaustion out of them.
Behind the cluster of worried faces loomed the reason nopony was forthcoming with suggestions. The Head of Mechanical had the same softness and disposition of a brick wall. Where the stallion’s ruddy coat wasn’t smeared with grease it was slick with sweat. His right foreleg was a patchwork of scars from an accident that should have taken his leg off, but by luck or his own stubbornness had remained attached. Most ponies knew to give Sledge a wide berth unless they wanted the full brunt of his attention.
Currently his brown eyes were slowly burning a hole in Aurora’s chest.
“Of all the fucking days, Pinfeathers,” he rumbled, pushing past the third shift. Anger radiated off of him like a furnace as he came to a rolling stop in front of her. Flux’s team pretended to look busy as Sledge unfurled his wings. “Of all the fucking days you decide to show up without your suit.”
She and Sledge had a mutual respect between one another that few ponies were aware of. Sledge had spent years building his reputation as a brute that took exactly zero horseshit from anypony. Aurora had known him long enough to realize he smarter than he let on and that his famous tirades were made with purpose in mind. When he realized she’d seen through him without trying to take advantage of it, he took her under his wing as his apprentice.
Fifteen years later she still wasn’t sure whether that had been a curse or a blessing.
Working under Sledge was a trial by fire. He never mollycoddled her. Her workload doubled some days. Tripled on others. He gave her tasks intended to fail and when they inevitably did he drilled her on the “why.” It didn’t take her long to start owning her mistakes while recognizing the challenges that were outside her control. Sledge fed her knowledge and experience spoonfuls at a time until she began to seek out the bowl on her own. She learned. She grew. Eventually, she came to work alongside him on the generator. Their job titles were different but for all intents and purposes, they were equals.
Their mutual respect ran deep, but her stubbornness about the suits ran even deeper.
She set her jaw and stared up at Sledge, knowing the routine. Interrupting Sledge would only get her ears chewed off faster and likely land her working overtime with the next shift.
He jabbed a cracked hoof into her bare chest and gestured out the window at the machine that powered their world.
“Do you think this is a joke?” he bellowed. Aurora blinked at a speckle of spit that landed under her eye. “Is that damn machine so low on your list of priorities that you can’t be bothered to wear a fucking suit around it? Look at this!”
He held his scarred foreleg up to her face. Where the short sleeve of his suit met his red coat, a wet lather slicked his fur. “It’s called sweat, Pinfeathers. Some of us here have the decency to endure it.”
She sucked her teeth, waiting for him to decide whether he was done. The silence began to stretch.
“You know why I don’t wear it,” she said evenly.
“Aurora.” Sledge bent his neck so he was eye level with her. She recoiled slightly. This was different for him. Shaming. He never shamed her. “What I know is that you’re standing here in your bare pissflaps while our generator is doing a better job at tearing itself apart than we are at stopping it.”
Her eyes widened. Behind Sledge, Flux stared through the terminal. None of the third shift ponies made eye contact but she could see the ears trained on her. The generator droned uncaringly. She grit her teeth and narrowed her eyes at Sledge. He’d crossed a line.
“Don’t,” he said. There was something brittle in his voice. “Not today.”
She saw it for only a moment. A twitch at the corner of his lip and she knew what it was he was desperately trying to hide by tearing her hide.
Sledge was afraid.
Aurora closed her eyes and took a calming breath. They weren’t done, but she could afford to be embarrassed later. Something bigger is happening, she reminded herself. She caught a glimpse of apology on Sledge’s face that the others couldn’t see. She swept past him, his misstep forgiven.
“Tell me what happened,” she said to Flux.
It took several seconds before Flux refocused enough to speak.
“A few hours ago the floor started picking up vibration. We thought it might have been the rotor poles but we can’t find anything wrong with them. Ratchet thought it had something to do with Fabrication tripping their breakers at the start of the shift but everything is behaving like it should on paper.” Flux shook her head and stared at the stream of data that steadily trickled across the terminal. “All of the data says nothing’s wrong, despite all… this.”
Aurora scanned the terminal and saw that Flux was right. Voltage readings were fine. Temperature sensors were well within the safe ranges. The vibration warning light on the console was dark and the liquid-filled gauge labeled VIBE barely moved at all. She poured over a dozen other gauges, watching the needles for anything resembling an oscillation. Something that indicated any one of the sensors might be seeing something.
Nothing.
The floor thrummed with a deep, hungry energy that insisted she think harder. She remembered something Sledge had told her years ago when she was still apprenticing: if you aren’t seeing the problem, you’re not looking at the problem.
The gauges waved lazily behind their windows.
“It’s not the generator,” she said, piecing together a theory. “It’s something else.”
“There’s nothing else in the Stable powerful enough to vibrate an entire wing,” Sledge countered.
Aurora looked to him, then back to Flux. Neither offered further suggestion. Both ponies had hit a road block and Aurora was fast approaching one as well. She spared a glance at the other technicians and saw more than a few eyes had settled on her hip, proving Sledge’s point that leaving her suit behind had been a poorly timed distraction.
When Aurora was a filly, Nimbus Pinfeathers had read her stories from before the war that attempted to describe the beautiful sheets of color that had once drifted over the infinite Equestrian sky. There had been ponies who believed the lights arose from unicorn magic, possibly created by Luna herself as a good omen. Many earth ponies suspected that the living world under their feet had a magical power of its own and that the lights were a manifestation of something far greater than unicorn magic. Among the pegasi of Equestria, a less popular opinion prevailed that the aurora was a natural event no different and less wondrous than the thunderstorms that gradually assembled in untended sections of sky.
Her mother believed that all three stories were true to some degree, and had the war been avoided they might have been able to learn that truth. It was a lesson she reminded Aurora of whenever the opportunity arose. Not having all the answers was its own kind of magic because it meant there was still more out there to discover.
Aurora tried to see what was magical about being in a control room full of ponies who didn’t understand why their world had been plunged into chaos and came up with empty hooves. The only thing magical about a generator that seemed intent on turning itself into shrapnel was the ignition talisman that had spun it up over two hundred years ago.
Her heart skipped a beat. The harmonics weren’t mechanical.
“It’s magic,” she said.
Flux looked at Aurora for the first time, her eyes widening with understanding. “The ignition talisman.”
“It’s the only thing that fits,” Aurora said, nudging Flux away from the terminal so she could find what she needed. She found it buried deep in a hard drive partition that hadn’t been opened since the first years of the Stable. A diagnostic tool for the magical artifact that had been used to turn the generator’s hulking rotor after it was constructed. An artifact that had supplied it with a tightly calibrated flow of rotational energy that the generator whipped into an electric frenzy that fed the Stable.
Aurora opened the diagnostic tool. The terminal stuttered. A lockout notification appeared on the screen.
- RESTRICTED ACCESS -
CRUSADER-LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED
[| ]
Her muzzle wrinkled. “Why would this be locked out? It’s a diagnostic.”
Sledge looked over her shoulder at the screen. The cursor patiently waited for an override code far above any of their pay grade. “Someone doesn’t want you to use it.”
“But it’s a diagnostic,” she insisted.
“Someone really doesn’t want you to use it,” Sledge answered. Aurora looked up at him and saw a weary smile tugging at his muzzle. His eyes were intent on her. She was focused on the wrong problem.
“The Crusaders were what the Stable-Tec founders called themselves.”
“So they say,” Sledge nodded.
“They’re all dead. Who has that kind of access anymore?”
The floor sang dully beneath their hooves in answer. Aurora silently wished that her hunch was wrong, that a magical artifact nopony in the Stable had any idea how to repair had become unbalanced. That, even if they knew how to fix it, it couldn’t be done with a welding torch. The Stable above her began to feel heavy.
Her eyes moved to the dusty red telephone.
Two hours later, Aurora had her answer.
The were alone in the humming control room. Sledge occupied a chair to the left of Aurora who hadn’t moved from her seat in front of the terminal. Overmare Delphi, a thin, rose-tinted mare stood behind them unsure of herself in this stifling, unfamiliar corner of the Stable. Her graying mane clung irritatingly to the sweat forming around her neck but she made no complaint. Flux and her engineer team had been sent away with orders to say nothing.
Whatever was happening, she needed to contain it. Let the rumor mill churn for now. She would cobble together a formal announcement afterward to explain her unprecedented visit to Mechanical.
Aurora stared over the peak of her hooves at the terminal. The overmare had opened the lock on the ignition talisman’s diagnostic tool and the dapple gray mare had gone to work taking output samples from the artifact.
At first nothing looked suspect, but nopony was sure what they were looking for. A spreadsheet labeled with unfamiliar abbreviations flickered open on the first tab, strings of numbers rising or falling by decimal points. The second tab looked similar to the readout of Aurora’s old oscilloscope. A sin wave shimmered on the screen measuring the rotational frequency of the talisman. She moved onto the next tab. Some sort of diagram that represented the talisman’s inner architecture. A few of the boxes looked as if they might be programmed to toggle on or off. She didn’t touch those.
She kept returning to the second tab just to see something familiar. She’d been to this screen more times than she cared to think about. The green line drew the same sin wave thousands of times per second. Out of habit, she ticked the ZOOM+ key a few times to view the crests of the wave. She blew the image up until two thin waves filled the screen. She measured their crests. The same. She measured the troughs. The same.
She looked again.
Nearly the same.
Aurora blinked hard to refocus her eyes and zoomed in on the troughs. Where the bright green lines should have gracefully arced back up toward the edge of the screen, they flattened. It was barely imperceptible to the naked eye. Five pixels interrupted the curves in a straight row as if something had pressed the wave against a table. Her heart sank.
“Sledge,” she said, indicating the terminal. She reclined in her chair. The plastic crackled in protest.
Sledge squinted at the screen.
“Well shit.” Sledge rumbled. “It’s braking.”
Overmare Delphi looked between the two, uneasy with being the third wheel to anything. “What will you need to fix it?”
Aurora looked over her shoulder at the older mare, not bothering to swivel the chair. “Not breaking. Braking,” she said, but the confusion in the overmare’s lavender eyes remained. “The generator is being decelerated.”
Realization dawned on Delphi’s face. “Can you stop it?”
Sledge grunted. “Seen any unicorns around lately?” He quickly added, “Sorry, ma’am.”
Delphi nodded and chose not to pursue the slight. She looked out the window at the mysterious machine that kept her Stable alive and wondered why she hadn’t come down here before now, but she knew the answer. Mechanical was a self-sufficient wing. Any problems it created could be resolved with a memorandum sent by terminal. She let ponies like Sledge keep their jobs so they could put down any unpleasantness through more personal means.
“Ma’am,” Aurora began, “Nothing is telling the ignition talisman to do this. The talisman is doing it on its own. It’s… built into the spell matrix. This was planned. I don’t know how to stop it.”
Sledge sneered bitterly at the floor. The overmare simply sat down on it, stunned.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“It’ll kill anypony who touches it without a horn,” Sledge said. The scarred stallion stared through the floor. He knew that wasn’t the answer to Delphi’s question. “Brownouts. We’ll start seeing them where the power draw is heaviest. Fabrication, first. Maybe Hydroponics after. At some point we’ll have to start cutting the power to ration what we have. Keep the food growing. Keep the air recyclers...” Sledge’s throat constricted. He cleared it, looking away. “We’re going to run out of power, Overmare.”
Aurora could feel her heartbeat quickening. For the first time in her life the walls of the Stable began to look like the walls of a tomb.
A long silence filled the control room.
“How long?” The aging mare whispered.
Aurora reached to the terminal and plotted the slow death of the generator. “A year. Less, if there’s a panic.”
“Of course they’ll panic,” the overmare scoffed. “Who wouldn’t?”
Briefly, a flash of anger scorched Delphi’s face.
“I knew they would do this,” she said ruefully.
Aurora’s ears pricked up. She and Sledge turned to look at the overmare who in turn looked up at them, her eyes brimming. Delphi raised a hoof toward the generator. “This is what they do. This is what they’ve always done. They build a pretty box, wrap it with a pretty bow and tell hundreds of pretty ponies they’ll be safe inside. And then they… crush it to see what colors leak out.” Tears drew trails through her coat. “This is why they didn’t give us a single unicorn. It’s another one of their Celestia-damned experiments.”
Delphi wept. Sledge brooded. Aurora’s eyes fell to her lap, her dapple gray coat shining with the sweat that Mechanical had been wringing out of her for the last fifteen years. She felt a pang of guilt for having left her Stable suit in her compartment. She heard Sledge’s voice in her head. Of all the fucking days.
Aurora turned her hooves in her lap. It was the first time that she’d gone this long in Mechanical without getting them dirty. “Maybe…” she began, but fell silent before she could give the idiotic idea a voice.
Sledge brow rose as he looked at her. “We’re all ears, Pinfeathers.”
Aurora tipped her head left to right, considering the risk of what she wanted to suggest. She looked at the overmare and was caught off-guard by the intensity of her stare. Delphi’s lavender eyes shone wetly. She looked so small in that moment yet so very desperate. Her Stable had been given an expiration date. Any alternative was better than starving to death in a blackout.
She looked back to her lap, unsettled by her reflection in Delphi’s eyes.
“Maybe they have replacements.”
Sledge puffed through his nose. “No. No, I don’t think we do.”
“Not us.” Aurora said, chewing on her lip. “Stable-Tec.”
Sledge stood abruptly, his chair squeaking away from him. “No.”
“Sledge…”
“Absolutely not.” He thumped his hoof into the floor for punctuation. “That is not an option. That is death. End of story.”
Aurora swiveled to face him. “It’s our only option right now! Stable-Tec made the ignition talisman. There’s a good chance they may have more. They weren’t able to finish all of the Stables before the bombs fell so it stands to reason--”
Sledge’s hooves landed hard on her chair’s armrests forcing it to sink several inches on its piston. “NO.”
Aurora stared at him, her eyes wide with fear.
Sledge realized what he was doing and recoiled. Her chair hissed relief.
“Look.” His voice softened as he chose his words. “We’re not going to figure this out today and the longer we sit here doing nothing the more worried everypony out there is going to get. Aurora, take the day off. Go up to Mercantile and get something to eat. And take a shower, you smell like I look.”
Aurora bit down a smirk, but he saw it try to surface all the same.
“Overmare, ma’am, I’m not giving you any orders but I would think someone in your position would want to put on a strong face and tell those ponies out there that everything is under control.”
Delphi blew out a breath and nodded. “I’ll need something believable.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sledge assured her. He looked down at the gauge labeled VIBE and struck it with his hoof. The glass window splintered, deforming the needle. “You’ll tell them what they want to hear: that I was wrong. That I rushed Flux’s team and they overlooked a faulty gauge. Flux will know it’s horseshit but she’ll keep shut if it comes from you. As far as the Stable needs to know, the generator is running a little rough and we’re looking for the best time to schedule a tune-up. It’ll buy us time until we can think of something more convincing.”
Delphi stood up and wiped her eyes, smearing her makeup in the process. “If we make it through this, you might consider running for overstallion when I retire. You definitely have the mind for politics.”
Sledge snorted. “I know where I belong. Bathrooms are behind you, next to the lockers.”
Delphi looked at the traces of eyeliner on her foreleg and tipped her head to Sledge in thanks. She met Aurora’s eyes for a moment, something unsaid passing between them.
Aurora broke the gaze and listened to the restroom door sigh open on well-oiled hinges. The gray pegasus looked up at Sledge through her mane. The same strand of grease swayed in her view of him. “I’m not wrong,” she said as she stood.
Sledge pressed his tongue under his molars, shaking his head. “We’ll think of a better idea.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed. Her mentor went stock still before patting her back with confusion. Aurora let go and turned away before he had a chance to see her face. She walked across the control room back to the access door. He spoke just as she set her hoof on the door handle.
“We’ll talk more tomorrow, then.”
Aurora looked back at the stallion who taught her how to dig straight to the root of a question and pry out the right answer. She wondered if he would regret that he’d done that.
She smiled. Her eyes were stinging.
“I’ll bring my suit.”
