Home in the Black

by FuzzyVeeVee

Rating: teen
Tags: Profanity, Adventure, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe, Original Character, Science Fiction
Length: 241790

In the space-faring future of Equestria's galaxy, the unwitting crew of the cargo vessel Claudia set out to find a home in the space between worlds delivering goods. But of course, the galaxy always has trials to throw at those who venture forth

In the far future of Equestria's history, ponies and the other species of their world have ventured out to live in all the wondrous corners of their sparkling galaxy. Now, the spiral arms hold both the borders of six great civilisations and vast unclaimed regions of glittering stars.

Starships of all shapes, designs, and sizes now carry their crews as they seek adventure, fame, fortune, curiosity, or for some...to discover the secrets of the galaxy's turbulent past. But to many others, it's simply their day-to-day job to haul cargo and make a life in the space between worlds. To be one of the thousands who keep the galaxy running.

To be one like the cargo ship Claudia.

The crew of the small vessel all came from different places, desiring different things. Whether it was their wish to do this to prove themselves, their need for the money to save a loved one, their ambition to make a name across the stars, or having to make do with a path in life they hadn't expected to find their dream. But no matter their mixed origins, no matter their unassuming nature, they have one truth of the galaxy to discover.

That the black leaves few without trials if they wish to find a home within its both beautiful and foreboding expanse.

Published 2019-09-22 19:30:02 UTC
Last updated 2024-11-04 22:12:54 UTC

Pilot's VLOG, Stardate: Sunday

Author's Note

The events described in this story's introduction concern Session #1-#30, as described in depth in the Session Summaries document (Link) of the tabletop game, should you wish to see the detailed events between Tami's departure from Chrysolite, and this story.

This particular (quite short) one was written mostly as a chance to try my hand at writing 'as' the other players' characters in the tabletop game, hence it's smaller size. Tami was my own, so I wanted to try out with the others before attempting something much, much bigger, which you may see next...

Pilot's VLOG, Stardate: Sunday

Tammani's departure from Chrysolite marked a new stage in her life. Her journey to Port Medusa was fraught with more peril than had been expected, as her shuttle came under attack by pirates in the void of space while close to the old Port itself.

Tagging along with the other kidnapped people aboard, Tami thankfully escaped, even if she had to be carried out while nursing a wound to her shoulder. Fleeing to Port Medusa she fell in step with this new group for safety as she recovered, as she waited to see what kind of crew, or ship, Port Medusa might offer her.

As it turned out, she'd already found them.

Thrown together by chance in the attack, that very same group she had escaped with became a crew. Not long after that, and despite a few misadventures and distractions along the way, Tami made good on her promise to report home about what she'd found for herself out in the black...

Pilot's VLOG, Stardate: Sunday

* * *

The video took a few seconds to buffer, warping and tearing the image into a mess of colour and static. The playback was struggling, adjusting as best it could to display on a monitor designed and manufactured half a galaxy away from the device that had actually recorded the video in the first place.

Then, an image suddenly appeared upon the screen; a hazy shape of someone unidentifiable, before the footage began to play a half second after its initial appearance. Quickly, the quality improved and the image of a young, bright orange and cream hippogriff beaming a joyful smile into the camera became apparent. Her eyes widened with excitement, and the speakers erupted into a barrage of sudden music. Impossibly bouncy and sung by a young chart-topping female pop-star, it completely drowned out the hippogriff's voice.

"HI! Ta-...here! I ju-...yo-...wait! I think…-o lou-!"

With her bouncy mane bobbing around her head, and an awkward panic coming over her, she fumbled around pressing several buttons behind the camera. The lens pointed right at her torso as she leaned over the device to try and fix something, before the picture cut out.

* * *

Seconds later, after a period of blackness, the video emerged a second time. This time the music had been cut, replaced with the light droning rumble of a running starship. The hippogriff took a breath, checked something on top of the camera, and sat down again in what was now clearly a hammock.

"Hi! Tami here! Sorry about that, I just thought it'd be cute to have some music playing to introduce this, but uh...I don't think this thing's set up for recording ambient noise too well. It's just a little thing I bought on Medusa! Anyway! Hi Mum! Hi Dad! Hi Orbit!"

Her wings flared out, and she lifted her overall-clad body off the hammock with a strong flap, picked the camera up and looked directly into it. Her enormous smile exploded onto her face, words spilling from her mouth as though she might run out of time to say them all.

"Sorry it took a while to do this, but I know you read my mails to see why. We've got a little time right now while flying back to Medusa from the Republic after a passenger transit, just gotta drop off some cargo en-route. Acid or something. I don't go near it. But I wanted to make this for you all, to get to show you Claudia, and the crew I found to live with! It's all turned out great, look at this!"

The camera's viewpoint whirled around, until it was looking at where she'd come from. The back end of a bridge, with a hammock strung up between a bulkhead and some personal workstations lined against the corner. Bags were strewn under it, along with a small pile of paints, and brushes in a jar. Paintings of nebulae, stars and other celestial objects were dotted along the plating behind it, while a blonde dog-looking soft toy half lay leaning off the hammock itself. Fluffy slippers were lined up below some cargo containers welded to the wall like makeshift shelving. Someone had put a great deal of effort into turning the ship's bridge into a cozy den.

"They let me live up here on the bridge! Technically I have a room, but I've not slept a night in there yet! I can just relax here, watch the black through the bridge windows, or even just get up and fly around when I need to. It's so relaxing up here, nothing but the hum of the ship and the occasional beep of the helm. Buuuut..."

The camera whirled around, looking up at her face. Tami teasingly winked at it, a newly rediscovered energy about her personality.

"I'll show you the workstation I have later, Dad. I know you'll be itching to see it! Aaaand if I do it now I'll talk for an hour. I wanna introduce you to people and show you the ship first! So! It's just turned day-cycle for us, so everyone's just getting up. When better to go meet them?"

Not a single word of her last sentence betrayed even a hint of sarcasm, and Tami excitedly hopped on the spot, making the camera's viewpoint bob and blur.

"I can't wait! I've been wanting to do this for so long! They didn't let me do one in Basic or the Academy, so this is the first VLOG I get to make for you both! It's like confirming I made it, right? C'mon! Let's go see who we can find!"

Tami turned the camera sharply, the viewpoint shifting to look ahead of her as she walked toward an already open metal door. It was heavy, clearly of minotaur design by its size and robustness. Immediately behind it, a set of stairs ran to a lower deck, but more prominent was the long passageway behind them that ran down, presumably, the spine of the ship. Tami hummed and (judging by the movement of the camera) skipped her way past the stairs to travel down the length of ‘Claudia’ instead.

"So this is sorta like the big corridor inside her. You can get from the bridge to the room closest to the stern from here, all the way down the dorsal. I call it the main street, 'cos its the single longest section of Claudia's crew areas there is. But also, it's the way you reach our first destination on the Claudia Tour! Engineering!"

At the very bottom, perhaps a few dozen meters from the bridge a double set of heavy doors were sitting open, and the camera's bobbing finally settled on the powerful shape of a ship's reactor behind them. The microphone buzzed with a lethargic chugging noise, one that only amplified as Tami hopped through the doors and into the room.

"And here's who I thought I'd find in here already! Hey Kiffie!"

Panning over the engineering section with the viewfinder, several thickly reinforced terminals could be seen still blinking into life, scrolling with power readouts, environmental statistics, temperature gauges, fuel line pressure, and maintenance rotas. The churning heart of Claudia in the middle of the room was also visible: a massive section of heavy machinery on struts that dominated the middle of the room with its magic-influx turbine, before Tami’s camera’s pan settled on the sole inhabitant of the engineering section.

An enormous griffon was hunched over with his head bend around a removed wall panel, surrounded by multiple bags of strewn tools. His calico body colours were contrasted by puffed out brown feathers that half enveloped his loose clothing and utility belt.

Not startled, but seemingly more bewildered by Tami's excited greeting, the griffon shimmied backwards and extricated himself from the wall.

As it turned out, this was not a rapid process. And it became even more apparent that his feathers had been compressed by the tighter space, as they now impressively resembled the look of a plush toy that had just gone through a wash and a hairdryer. It was punctuated by a curious tilt of his head, and an innocent look of curiosity.

"Oh, good mornin' Miss. What're you doin' with that?"

Panning upwards to look at his face, Tami waved in front of the lens.

"I'm filming for my parents! So! This is Kerfuffle! He's our engineer. Say hi, Kiffie!"

As though informed that he was suddenly at a formal event, Kerfuffle rapidly straightened out and widened his eyes, before waving a meaty talon toward Tami...and then only after a clear non-verbal prompt, a second time to the camera.

"Oh! Well, hi there Missus...uh...and Mister...uh..."

Kerfuffle blinked, before looking away at Tami again.

"Don't...remember their names. Were they asking anything? Only, never really recorded much before."

Tami's sweet laughter over-rode the chomping of the reactor's cycles, making the camera shake. She spoke loudly, trying her best to hold the camera still at a distinctly fidgety Kerfuffle.

"Oh, don't worry! Now, like I said. Kerfuffle's our engineer on Claudia. He keeps her running smoothly and fixes anything that's gone wrong. And he's real good at it too, like, he can just look at a machine and know what's wrong with it without even touching it. Like that cleaning bot you got, Dad? How we never could get it to turn properly so it just bumps into walls? Kiffie'd be able to see what's wrong, I'm sure of it. And-"

The big griffon's eyebrows shot up, his awkward stance finally letting his gaze come to the camera itself. He leaned in, a saddened look on his face as he took up the camera. He held it high in his own claws, looking upward at the lens.

"Oh, the poor thing's always bumping its nose into stuff? Has it got a broken traverse gear? Oh dear. Is it a Vectronix? A Cleaneasy?"

His look of genuine concern was contrasted by the sight of Tami sliding into view over his shoulder, holding both hands over her mouth and silently giggling away. Kerfuffle, however, continued his questioning. His voice throughout was unexpectedly quiet for someone so large, with a hushed little polite tone underneath it all. A gentle giant by any measure.

"If he's a Confederate RX type, then look under his bottom plate and see if he's got a misaligned chain. And...and let me know if it's an RT unit instead, because I have the manual here since he shares components with Patch. If you send a picture to Miss Tami I can have a look at it to help the little thing not be hurting himself all the time. Oh, and check the front sensor; he might have gotten clogged up if he's been over a lot of dust, he might be blind! And-"

Tami couldn't hold it any longer, her high-pitched laughter picking up as Kerfuffle's rambled through half a dozen known issues, repeatedly expressing his concern for the cleaning bot. The smaller hippogriff finally flew up to land on his back and take the camera.

"I'll make sure they do, Kiffie."

"Oh, oh that's good then."

He paused, going somewhat more silent as though realising his long amount of talking, until Tami giggled and briefly hugged around his neck from behind. Or at least that was what the odd movements of the camera implied.

"Hey, why don't you tell them a little about Claudia and what you're doing this morning?"

Kerfuffle clearly took a second to think, before finally smiling more openly. This was obviously a subject he was more comfortable with. Sweeping his large body to the side and turning them both, he indicated the missing wall panel with an outstretched claw.

"Well, y'see, Claudia's been having hiccups every time she transitions from turbine to fusion power. And she did it again last night just as I was goin' to bed even without a turbine cycle. So I thought I'd get up early and come give her a nice bit of attention until she and I can work out how to make her fly nice and smooth again. The hiccups were keeping me up, so I can only imagine..."

Tami made an 'aww' sound, dropping off of his back. She stepped back to show both Kerfuffle and the reactor, before swinging back to the panel as the griffon moved back over to it and picked up some tools. His voice might have been soft, but his movements certainly had weight to them. While not clumsy, it was clear he was used to working in minotaur-designed environments involving weighty levers and heavy materials. And there was plenty of that around him in the steamy engineering section

"So I figured maybe she's just got a little blockage in her transfer manifold. Lotta power for fusion, not nearly as much for turbine; so maybe some of its just getting dumped from capacitors hours after it got left as excess. Like when you get a cold and your nose runs for a long time after the illness is gone. So I'm just installing a relay to let her direct any excess to the heat sinks, and burn it all off. She don't deserve to be all stuttery just flying at night..."

Tami's hand reached out and patted Kerfuffle's shoulder. Her talons disappeared up to almost the wrist in his thick feathers. She grinned up at him.

"You'll put her right, you always do.” She turned to the camera. “See? Kiffie's super good at all this, 'cos he cares so much."

Kerfuffle looked down at her. He rubbed the back of his head, and bashfully smiled.

"I just don't like seeing her not right, is all. It's nothing big...if we get sick a doctor takes good care of us, right?"

"And if a machine needs help, the engineer helps her." Tami finished for him, as the viewpoint panned around. She had flown off him to land on the deck once more. "Hey, I'm gonna go see the rest of the crew, okay?"

Kerfuffle nodded, and sat back down near the wall panel.

"Okay, Miss Tami. I'll see you downstairs. Oh!"

He reacted suddenly, as though he'd forgotten something crucial, his wings and feathers fluffing up, as his eyes turned back to the camera.

"And bye to you too Missus Rose and Mister Gaius."

He smiled gently, even as Tami's surprised exclamation filtered into the camera's microphone, before shrugging and blushing.

"Just took me a second to remember."

Tami's hand again reached out to pat his forearm, before she upped and turned.

"Bye to you too, Kiffie!"

She got around four feet out of the door, before there was an urgent clattering of claws and a shocked gasp behind her. The camera spun rapidly to find Kerfuffle half out of engineering.

"I almost forgot! Bye to you too, Orbit!"

There was a pause, before the camera dropped to look at the floor, and Tami burst into laughter.

"Oh, Kiffie..."

Still laughing as the big griffon turned back to his workstation, she turned back to the 'main street' and skipped her way back down it. About mid way, the viewpoint turned until it was looking upwards at her face mid-trot. She was red in the cheeks and giggling, her lips curled into a permanent smile.

"He's just the softest, nicest thing. I know he seems a little slow or simple at times, but he's really really smart with machines, and polite to a fault. And...I think a lot of people underestimate him. Including himself. He's a lot wiser than he seems. When I've been upset over something, he always seems to know how to put things in perspective and make me think about it in a better way."

She stopped for a second to compose her words.

"I wish I'd had him around earlier in life sometimes. With, y'know...how I was."

Taking a deep breath, she looked away behind her, before rubbing an eye and smiling at the camera.

"Anyway! Let's go see who else we can find."

The video feed cut-

* * *

-and skipped to a different viewpoint. Looking down the stairs outside the bridge into what was clearly a common room. Tami was, owing to the lack of stepping sounds, flying her way down.

A table with a holo-display dominated the centre of the already well lived-in section of the ship, surrounded by metal seating topped with a variety of inconsistently shaped and coloured cushions to provide some comfort and colour to the otherwise hard and mundane chairs. At one of them, a young colt was sitting with cereal, watching cartoons on a digital screen upon the far wall above the modular kitchen unit.

"And this is where we all hang out or come to relax!" Tami's voice broke in, as she panned around. "We got a table, big screen, and look at all this!"

She turned in mid air, giving a full three-sixty view of the common room. Flanked with what were clearly crew quarters to every side, a room that had once been bare metal had, with a little decor, been turned into something quite homely. Name plates had been added above the doors; and a series of thick rugs brought colour to the floor. A pool table dominated the far side near one of the twin open doors to a much larger room, along with a worn but comfortable couch that resided below the stairs themselves. While clean, the layout bore all the hallmarks of a normal crew used to living around one another. Stacked food capsules and boxes were piled on the kitchen surface, breakfast's washing was still needing done by whomever's turn it was, and magazines were strewn on the table ahead of the colt. A washing basket of clothing ready to be hung up sat near one of the doors.

Aside from the colt, no-one else was present; his cartoons masking the noise of any others in the area.

Tami continued on, trembling as she went. "I do like it here sometimes, can just come and get some munchies, watch things together, or just to lie back on the couch if I need to. There's always someone here for some reason, so I like coming down just to see who's around if I'm free. Aaaand this time we get Jelly Biscuit!"

Tami flew down behind the colt's chair and pointed the camera to him. The colt turned briefly to look at her.

"What are you doing?" His voice betrayed an unexpected maturity for his age, despite his body still looking scrawny.

"Sending a video to my parents. They wanna see who I'm flying with, is all. So, this is Jelly Biscuit! We picked him up from a...uh...distress call a little while ago. We're still getting the meat back on the bones, huh?"

Jelly just stared at the camera, then Tami, then the camera, as though unsure what to say, before unexpectedly pulling a silly face, pulling the edges of his mouth apart and sticking his tongue out.

"Jelly! Don't do that!" Tami couldn't help but laugh as she ruffled his hair. "Say hi to them!"

"Hi 'huu 'hem!" He never changed his face at all, his tongue out giving his voice a lisping rasp.

"Be nice!" she chided.

"He nith!" he rasped.

"Jelly-"

"Helly-"

"-is silly!"

"-ith hilly-hey, wait!" He dropped the face, giving her a harsher look, only getting his mane ruffled again in response and wriggling to get her to stop. "Tami! Stop it!"

She only laughed and patted his back, even as the colt turned back to his cartoons again. "He's such a rascal...anyway! I know where I'll find someone fun before the first hour of the day cycle is up! This way!"

The camera whipped up, and its viewpoint moved to the other side of the stairs, bumping about as she hopped her way toward the door at the very back of the common room, gave it a rapid knock, and then walked right in.

"Hey, hey!" she chimed, coming into a large quarters. It was dominated by a set of patterned canvas panels obscuring the side of the room used for sleeping, and a large hanging monitor that covered the wall closest to the door. A quick pan brought the view to rest on a desk in the corner opposite the door. The quarters was hardly as tidy as the common room outside, stacked with a computer entry unit, various star charts, a chunky looking pistol, a veritable legion of post-it-notes, and a couple empty beer bottles acting as stationery holders. There were two ponies sitting on either side of it, both of whom looked up in confusion and bemusement.

One sparkled gently under the white LEDs of the ship lighting, both on her soft cream body and hazy orange mane: a lithe crystal pony. Every part of her seemed meticulously cared for. From her finely bunched mane, to the patterned eyelash directions, and even her smooth and clearly well exercised body under a pressed suit. She looked completely awake. Her thin, strict eyes betrayed a softer side as they arched up in questioning as to Tami's sudden intrusion.

The other sat behind the desk and seemed to be the polar opposite. Clutching a mug of steaming coffee within light green telekinesis on level with her sunken and tired eyes, as though to let its warmth seep into her still waking brain, sat a smaller-framed unicorn. A strong blue coat on her face was partially obscured by the drooping green mane, forced down by a trucker hat rammed tightly on her head. Her mouth was flat, and after one glance at the rabidly enthusiastic hippogriff skipping in, the unicorn looked at her coffee and, by the increased pace of her chugging it, clearly decided she needed to intake caffeine a lot more urgently.

The camera whipped back between the two, and Tami spoke up before either of the others could query.

"Good, you're both together, that makes it easy! I'm recording a VLOG to send home! So the crystal pony on the left there is Volatility Smile. She's like our business head; handles all the job contracts, border controls, route legality and accounts for the company. All the boring stuff, basically."

Volatility Smile was mid way through a small wave to the camera, but stopped and coughed politely. "Boring stuff?"

"Yeah," Tami brightly answered. "Like when you have to spend hours sitting there reading market share percentages and comparing them in spreadsheets to different systems' versions of the same things."

At that Smile pursed her lips, and gestured idly with a hoof.

"Tami, that isn't work for the company; that's just having fun with shares after work is done."

There was a pause in the room, both Tami and as of yet silent unicorn looking at the crystal pony. Smile spread her hooves as though they had just claimed that space was white.

"What? It's a thrill. Never know what you'll end up being able to do. But speaking of fun, will you be joining Niko and I for our morning aerobics session, Tami? You did say 'maybe later'. I'm sure your parents would appreciate seeing you getting fit with the crew."

"Uuuuuh..." Tami let her tone drone on, the camera shakily looking over at the unicorn, who only shrugged dismissively with a small grin that shifted the freckles on her face, briefly showing a sense of humour below the tired, gruff exterior in the morning.

Smile winked. "And you'd do well with the beat, with how much you dance about on the bridge-"

"I-I do not!"

Smile laughed, a curt and measured noise, with a look of utter incredulity. "One of these days we'll get you all in there with us. It's good for the body on long journeys! I'd ask Patch to bother you about it, if I could stand being around him."

"Maybe...maybe later," Tami muttered, and quickly turned the camera to face the unicorn, clearly seeking to change the subject. "And this is who I thought would be in here in the first place!”

The unicorn looked up, taking a long sip of her coffee, the edge of her mouth crinkling upwards slightly as she leaned back in her chair.

"This is Captain Hair Trigger! She keeps everything going in the right direction and gets us all together. Say hi to my folks, Captain!"

Hair Trigger finally let the long sip of her drink end, and leaned on her desk casually. A cheeky smile crept over her face as she fixed her eyes on the camera.

"A'ight there? Hey, has Tam told you about her new ‘boyfriend’ ye-"

"CAPTAIN!"

The camera whirled away in a frantic rush, the viewpoint spinning into indecipherable shapes, accompanied by the sound of Tami rapidly rushing out of the captain's quarters, accompanied by the unicorn’s raucous laughter somewhere behind her.

Shaking violently, it briefly looked at Tami's blazing red face as she moved through the common room, fumbling for the button to stop recording.

"No, see, it's not-she's just winding you up and...well, I m-mean I’ll likely never seen him again and I hardly know him an-wait, wait no...oh geez, c'mon!"

She finally found the button, and the footage cut.

* * *

The footage resumed on a blank door.

Tami's hand reached out and knocked on it three times.

"Hey, um, you up? Niko?"

After ten solid seconds of waiting, there was no answer. With a short grumble, Tami turned the camera to face her, the common room visible at the edges around her mane.

"Feels like he's never here sometimes. Okay, we'll, uh, we'll find something else. We'll go through the cargo hold to the bridge.”

She turned around, bringing the footage back to the common room itself, in time for Volatility Smile to come wandering out of the captain's quarters. The groomed pony briefly smiled at the camera.

"No luck with Nikomachos then?"

Tami sighed. "None. I think he's still sleeping."

Smile glanced at the door and looked somewhat disappointed, "And morning fitness was meant to start in a few minutes. Oh well, suppose I'll be alone for it. Unless-"

"I-have-a-lot-to-do-on-the-bridge!" The words exploded out of Tami's mouth.

"Okay, okay. Just remember we have our sit-down meeting later, all right?" Smile winked, and went into her room.

Tami hesitated for a moment, before beginning to wander back toward the doors at the other end of the common room, emerging into an enormous hold. Industrial shipping crates and metal containers dominated the middle, surrounding a hydraulic crane system. A ceiling height airlocked door was sealed at the far end, with a second one spread across the floor under the crane. Ladders dropped from above with a line of drying clothing strung between two of them. It wasn't particularly difficult to tell who each item belonged to.

"She'll be talking about doing stuff in here. Those two do a lot of aerobics and lifting all those things."

She zoomed in crudely to show a set of bar-weights and dumbbells stacked against the far wall around a lifting bench. A small music player sat waiting on a crate near them, and a few papers on the wall bore routines and personal records. Three columns of the listed five crew members were entirely empty.

She turned the camera around, briefly looking into it as she walked toward one of the ladders in the middle of the room. "Smile's pretty business first, but she's a nice pony, really. Get this, she helped me out with my student loans by showing me some things I could do, and got them completely written off!"

She hesitated with a single hand clenched on the ladder and bit her lip.

"Only, now I'm pretty sure I remotely own a company in an Avalon tax haven with two very bored employees. I guess that's what she wants to talk about..."

Turning the camera, she started climbing up, presumably tucking the device into a chest pocket.

"So we'll go up here, and we'll be back in the-woah!"

Kerfuffle’s large face suddenly popped into the hatch above her, staring down at her and the camera.

"Oh, sorry. Give you a hand, Miss?"

He stretched out his hand to hers, and effortlessly lifted her up and through to the main street again, just outside engineering.

"Thanks, Kiffie."

Kerfuffle shifted on the spot. "Just heard you coming up. I've been doing some reading and it's a good thing you're still recording. Because there was a Cleanmaster series that had that exact problem, and your homeworld only ever had them come in, so it's definitely a sensor issue. If they take the chassis off and help it out by clearing out the dust, it'll be fine. I guess it musta' been second hand to be like that already."

Tami was quiet for a second, before bursting into a fit of frantic laughter, pushing forward to hug the big griffon. The camera was momentarily nothing but feathers, until she pulled back and angled it.

"Oh, oh my. Thanks. I'll tell them. Gonna go show them the bridge."

"Okay, Miss. Let me know if its still not feelin' too well."

He nervously waved, and clambered back into the engineering section. Even in a minotaur ship he had to adjust his body to get through the door. In his wake, Tami held the camera below her face as she walked, cheeks red from laughter.

"Isn't he such a sweetheart?"

The viewpoint rotated to look toward the bridge again, and Tami passed around the stairwell to reach it. While about to reach the bridge, she paused as a faint humming of rotor blades began to be audible in the recording.

"Oh, now look who it is."

Tami quickly turned to look downstairs, as a floating object came whirring up them to hover in the air before her. Robustly constructed, the drone's main housing was connected to two small rotary units and several extendable arms with multiple joints. It paused in its route, looking at Tami, before speaking in an ill-fitting booming voice, like that of a supervillain's robotic bodyguard.

"Crewmember Tammani. Commencing daily rounds. Delivering personalised medical advice in three...two...one."

It blooped and buzzed in the air.

"Ignoring breakfast is adverse to a healthy life. Return downstairs and acquire sustenance for optimum operation."

Tami snorted, and reached out to pat the drone's housing.

"Aaand this is the last one around. This is Patch. Kerfuffle rescued him from those pirates I told you about in my mail. We fixed him up, and now he's our on board doctor. Hey, Patch, say hi to my parents!"

Patch gently floated up again; the pats had disrupted his level flight, his small rotary units roaring away like the fans in a server.

"Request to connect for proxy-advisory approved. Medical duty requests that parental action is taken to reduce Crewmember Tammani's calorie intake and encourage accompaniment of Crewmember Nikomachos and Crewmember Volatility Smile in daily exercise."

Tami's hand instead rubbed at his chassis, as though the small drone was a pet.

"He cares so much about us all; sometimes a little too much. Besides, I do get exercise! I still dance when I'm alone to get some sweat going."

The drone bleeped. "Crewmember Tammani does not possess medical licence. Unit PATCH provided efficient tempo and collected playlist information for activity titled 'Dancercise' from databanks. Playlist was not accepted by Crewmember Tamanni."

Tami chuckled and wandered on past him. "Because that stuff was boring! No lyrics or fun!” She rolled her eyes into the camera. “See? He's got such a sense of humour for a drone."

The sound of rotary units accelerating as Patch moved off down main street came from off-camera, along with a fading voice.

"Record added. Crewmember Tammani music tastes for dance related programs updated to 'limited'."

Ignoring him, Tami wandered into the bridge, the clatter of her hands and hooves on the metal decking changing to a softer tread as she moved onto the rugs she had laid down to personalise it. Yet immediately ahead was the great void of space itself. Deep space, far away from solar bodies. Without the light pollution of any nearby stars to shine across Claudia’s angular windows, the endless black showed its true beauty. Countless far away dots, blinking lights, and hazy distant auras of colourful nebulas surrounded the ship. A sight that was as deep as it was dark.

The windows, misted at their corners, lay beyond the stations for the bridge crew. Two crew chairs at the very front were surrounded by a series of hanging screens, control levers, a yoke, several button panels, and a large touch screen each. A pack of choconuts lay open and clipped onto a display on the right hand side one, easily indicating which was Tami's side.

"And this is where I do all my things! She's a good ship to fly. Takes a while to get used to the weight, the minotaurs build them hard, and she’s a heavy cargo lifter. But hey! The vectors are good at compensating for it all and-oh, look!"

She shuffled forward, moving to sit in the pilot's seat. Before her, the ship was half way done with the morning diagnostic, flickering words too fast for any organic to follow across the screen as every system was scanned, pinged and -if possible- tested.

"So right here, I got my pilot display unit. It's got a direct link to the navigation, so I don't even need to look up to use that. Unless it's FTL, which is over here. Oh, but the external camera only displays up here..."

She proceeded to go through all the controls at length. The sort of explanation only someone who knew their parents were ship crew themselves could possibly give. She excitedly squealed with delight at getting to work with triple redundancy stick servos, and giggled at the 'silly' minotaur bridge layout of having environmental panel back behind her and not on the main unit, meaning she had to get up.

It went on for some ten minutes, including a demo of how to set destinations on the new automated navigational systems, and on demonstrating an FTL chart for a multi-system jump.

"Oh, and look at this! For such a ship as she is, her roll speed is really smooth. Look!"

With one hand around the yoke, she threw it thirty degrees up, sending the stars spinning wildly around in the window view.

"Sometimes I just love to do this on the night watches. Deep space, nothing to hit, nothing to worry about...just me and the ship. Veer around, try out old maneuvers. It's so relaxing!"

"So that's why the ship’s route-tracker on my terminal has little squiggles at times..."

Tami squeaked, as Hair Trigger's voice cut into the recording. She spun to look, and caught sight of the unicorn dropping into the other seat.

"Uh...y-yeah?" Tami's voice was hesitant.

"But I'm sure it's just good trials to ensure your skills are sharp, right? And that Claudia works fine?"

Hair Trigger winked with a smirk, laying a re-filled mug on the top of a display screen’s casing.

Tami gradually let her voice pick up volume in reply.

"...yeeeeah, that's it."

"Thought so. Still recording, then?"

Tami must have nodded, as no verbal reply was heard at first.

"Just showing them the bridge, Captain. And I guess now you're showing them where you sit up here a lot too. The Captain joins me for chats and seeing where we're going, sits in the co-pilot's chair a lot. It's basically hers now. When Jelly isn't using it."

Hair Trigger raised a hoof and coughed. "Ahem, not 'co-pilot's' chair. This would be the 'Captain's chair."

"That's what you said about the couch two nights ago when Smile was on it."

"A Captain must have a backup. And besides, you can't drink a beer on a metal chair. She needed a better supported surface for the stick up her ass anyway."

There were a couple of seconds of them looking at one another, before they both broke into childish little chuckles. Tami re-arranged the camera, sitting it atop the pilot interface to let it look across the bridge at both of them.

"I got real lucky with the Claudia here. Such a friendly crew, everyone's so nice to me, and the Captain here is really supportive and understanding. Not as much of a grump as she looks. Captain here is the best captain I've ever had."

Hair Trigger rolled her eyes and leaned over to knock Tami's shoulder. "I told you before, I'm the only captain you've had!"

Giggling for a moment, Tami didn't once take her eyes off the camera, before mouthing the word again. 'Best'.

Hair Trigger smirked, and got up from her chair. Wandering around, she quickly grabbed Tami from behind in a small hug, looking over the hippogriff's shoulder at the camera. Tami yelped in surprise, before leaning the back of her head into Hair Trigger’s chest as her Captain spoke directly into the lens.

"In which case, Mister and Miss whoever? Let me tell you straight, you raised one hell of a pilot in Tami here. Couldn't have asked for a better or brighter one to join us. Not failed us yet, have you, Tam?"

Tami blushed severely, looking over her shoulder at Hair Trigger, "Well...there was-"

"Not once, far as I see it, 'cos we're still flying."

The young hippogriff bit her lip and gently nodded. "And that's what matters. That's what you said, wasn't it?"

"That's what I said."

Hair Trigger clapped Tami's shoulder, went back to the 'captain's chair' to collect her coffee, and trotted to the door.

"Anyway, came to tell you that we're throwing something on the grill. Head down in a minute if you want a hot breakfast."

"I'll be there."

With a final grin at the camera Hair Trigger left the bridge, leaving Tami to sit alone. She looked after the captain, before finally turning back around to the camera and smiling.

"Time to get ready for the day. Got four jumps to make. I'll try and add something later on, but just know...I'm happy. I've found what I wanted out here. We're taking pretty mares on honeymoons, I got to visit the Republic, I saw a pulsar, and I've met some really cool people on desert planets and ancient stations. It’s...amazing! Thanks so much for getting me back on top, both of you. I feel like I did in this again."

She panned it around briefly, showing a photo stuck to the side of her console. In it, there was Tami herself while she was much younger, her proud parents, and a golden retriever happily sitting with his tongue out. Tami was hung between her parents, both of the holding her off the ground, with oversized aviator goggles around her head, and beaming with all the hope of a dream about to come true.

There was an indistinct shout from behind her, and Tami quickly panned back to her face as she got up.

"I'll try to send something again soon, but I'll still mail every few days! See you then!"

A few awkward seconds of figuring out the buttons again led to the video cutting.

* * *

The video emerged again on a scene of chaos. All six members of the crew were around the main table in the common room, drone included. Hair Trigger and Kerfuffle were eagerly stretching over to the laid out breakfast, lifting food from the veritable buffet they had laid out. Jelly eagerly stretched a hoof out from under the griffon, beating the much politer and slower reach of Smile to the last fruit pudding. Patch sat on the couch, partially inactive, but ultimately watching with a disapproving glare at the crew. Voices of varying accents clamoured over one another, mixed with laughs and shouts.

"Okay, I got it!"

Tami's voice cut above the din, as she ran from behind the camera into frame, joining them and trying to hustle the crew together.

"C'mon! Just one! Look over at it there! No, there, Jelly! C'mon Captain it'll still be warm! Smile? Okay, okay!"

Nearly diving amongst them, she pulled and pleaded to get them around one side of the table, squeezing into the middle of the assembled crew. Hair Trigger still bore her plate in her magic, while Smile had already sighed, grinned, and sat upright.

"And say...Claudia!"

"Seriously?" Jelly deadpanned.

"Claudia!" Kerfuffle eagerly began, pushing his very best school photo smile despite his hunched body, being followed by a chorus of sardonic, muffled, or willing repeats of the word. Surprisingly, Patch had even flown into frame again for some inscrutable reason.

And with that, the screen froze, pausing on a frame of them together. Tami squeezed between Hair Trigger and Kerfuffle. The former with a sausage half in her mouth, the latter staring directly ahead rather than into the lens. Her arm reached around Smile, tugging the normally upright pony sideways, half bending Jelly over between them. Together, as one crew; one family aboard a ship.

* * *

Staring at the frozen image, Gaius couldn't help but reach one of his long arms over and pull Compass Rose in tight against his chest, leaning down to kiss the top of her head.

"She got there in the end, Rosie."

Rose sniffed, having already been shedding a few tears at the sight of their daughter so happy. The banter she'd shared. The way they'd teased her, helped her with her problems, and supported her wants.

"Looks like she got a good crew faster than we did too; a lucky break. Goodness knows, she needed it by now..."

Gaius gazed at Tami's expression on the screen, knowing too well the honesty in that genuine joy.

"Not luck. She earned this."

They fell silent, just holding one another, before Rose chuckled.

"What's that about?" Gaius inquired, smirking at his wife's amusement.

Rose looked up to Gaius and kissed the end of his beak, winking at him. "Who do you think the Captain meant by boyfr-"

Gaius rolled his eyes. "Oh no, we're not getting into this again. She got her curiosity about other people's relationships from you, you know?"

"She did. And we most definitely are. So, who?"

Gaius sighed, chuckled, and shook his head.

He was in for a long next hour.

* * *

Captain Hair Trigger

A tiny yet gruff-looking unicorn mare. Trigger hails from a large family of spacers, and has spent almost her entire young life aboard one ship or another, before coming to command one of her own. Image by Kalemon)

Volatility Smile

An elegant and authoritative crystal pony mare. Smile is a businesspony from the Crystal League, travelling in search of profitable new ventures after her last job went south. Image by opal_radiance)

Kerfuffle

A big, fluffy male griffon. Originating from a working class family on a Minotaur Confederacy mining colony, now seeking to earn money to send home by working on a vessel. Image by Floots)

All four will be returning in the next story, in the first full length 36k word adventure I wrote for them...

One Of Those Days

Author's Note

The events described in this story's introduction concern Session #31 to roughly Session #83, which can be read in the Session Summaries document. However, knowledge of these is not required for this story. One Of These Days is not part of the tabletop game's story, taking place at an indeterminate time between sessions and (other than the crew) the characters who show up in person are of my own design.

In effect, this is the first adventure I wrote for the crew of the Claudia that was independent of the game they originated from, and marks the largest thing I wrote since ending MN7. Hence the size. This is a full and proper story this time.

I hope you enjoy. This one was an absolute delight to put together.

One Of Those Days

Quickly becoming firm friends, Claudia's crew truly began their lives in the black. Running cargo for legal and occasionally less-than-legal reasons, transporting ponies to where they needed to go, and generally all the jobs they could manage to put together to make ends meet.

There were more than enough unusual encounters along the way. From dangerous clashes with pirates, minefields, and crime syndicates to intriguing meetings with an NLR spy (a stoic field agent known as Whisper Step, who Tami quickly began looking up to in fangirl-like awe), pirate royalty (whose name was almost as long as her bank balance) and even a mysterious unicorn who still retained the use of magic spells...

But between each adventure, there was always the next job. The next job meant next month's pay. It meant the fuel to jump into the extradimensional realm of magic space for FTL speeds, and repairs needed to keep flying. Altogether it meant opportunity, and opportunity, just like the next job, could come from anywhere.

Now, after receiving an invite for a new job in the Confederate system of Kavala, Claudia has set a course to meet their contact for the unknown task ahead...

Claudia's route from Port Medusa to Kavala (Green line)

One Of Those Days

* * *

The quiet droning of a starship was something that any spacefarer got used to in time. That distant, bassy rumble of a fusion-core reactor sounded more or less the same no matter where you were on board, and after so long in the black anyone could be forgiven for getting so used to it that lacking it meant for restless nights.

But while aboard and in your own bed, it could also be the most relaxing, reassuring reminder that you were somewhere comfortable and warm, held cosy and safe inside a metal hull away from the void with nothing for unthinkable miles around to disturb you.

It meant deep sleeps and low stress levels, especially to those who had been born off-world that had grown up with such sounds all their life.

This easy aura of dozy serenity also happened to explain Hair Trigger's incalculable hatred of her multiband's furious beeping as it tried its hardest to shatter that very bliss and wake her up.

The keening sound penetrated every level of comfort, amplified by the sheer metal walls and sloped ceiling into an echoing, painful lance of irritation that speared deep into her slumber, dragging her consciousness kicking and cursing into the waking world.

Her eyes didn't open at the same time. Instead, they took an uneven, alternately blinking route that never quite made it all the way to the eyebrows. She was facing the wall at the rear of her quarters, the dull mixture of grey and brown just a gentle hint in the lightless room. It felt like every shrill alarm was bouncing off it and somehow hammering into her retinas rather than her ears.

"Mmrrr!?"

Her eloquent question as to the multiband's gumption to ring this early went unanswered, other than for the automatic snooze setting to increase the volume even further, before sharply cutting off.

Groaning, dragging hooves that weighed as much as one of Claudia's nacelles up to rub at her face, Hair Trigger closed her eyes. The covers were too warm to want to move. Too close. Too inviting. The depression in her bed she usually slept in was too form-fitting. The world could wait. It'd have to. By the time that even the closest thing you could call a world light years away would be able to reply to her mentally projected message to get stuffed, she'd have gotten the extra sleep she felt she richly deserved.

This, she concluded, was a captain's privilege.

The logic was sound to the fuzzy-headed unicorn, and she let her straining body collapse back down into the bent pillow with a long exhalation.

Disappointed that it had been ignored, the multiband - a normally wrist-worn smart device - on the desk at the far end of the room decided in its infinite wisdom to try again, and thus a sharp, frantic buzzing again filled the almost silent room. Clearly, it figured, its owner must have just not heard it.

The sudden glow of telekinesis under the covers, and the grip of magic around the device that started to blindly and haphazardly attempt to hit the 'Stop' button against the desk made clear that there was a mighty disagreement with that conclusion.

Only vaguely certain she even had the right object by the sound of the alarm changing tone from being turned over and over, Hair Trigger fumbled and fought her sense of magic around the multiband, not able to feel or see it from under the covers clenched around her head. Drawing it this way and that, making the sound garble in ways that only further violated her sleep, she finally gave it a rough tug with her horn's imprecise magic, sure that she had the stop button on the side depressed now.

Instead she felt her sleepy magic falter, and the sense of an object held in it suddenly disappeared.

A second later, she heard the polymer screen of the multiband crack on the metal floor.

"Oh fer f-" The expletive didn't even get to finish before a long groan overtook the word, growing into a frustrated growl. Finally, the realisation that she'd have to get up slammed home like a harsh dose of reality, and she didn't enjoy it one bit.

Muttering and sighing, Hair Trigger pulled herself upright - or at least tried to. Eight attempts later, she finally got her top half up and slumping forward, just to sit idly for a couple minutes more. Her mane drooped, hanging over her face and neck even without her cap to push it down, while her muscles rebelled at being asked to perform such a horrendous action as 'moving'. Even the loose shirt she wore to bed felt clingy and sweaty all of a sudden. Rubbing her cheeks, she glanced over and saw the glint of the multiband's broken screen still functioning, but with half of it displaying a corrupted image.

"Oh, you stupid idiot..."

Muttering to herself in annoyance at her own clumsiness and swinging the covers off her, Claudia's captain finally forced herself to get up and deal with it. A bad wakeup was just another thing to push past; a good shower would see things right.

Pausing at every step, she nodded repeatedly to psyche herself up for leaving bed, crammed her hat on her head, and hopped off the side.

"Right, let's-"

Her right hind-hoof, unfortunately, managed to unerringly locate the multiband’s upturned charging plug with all her weight behind it, and the device exacted its revenge via proxy.

For the second time that morning, the relaxing drone of the reactor was interrupted by a very loud - and this time very angry - scream, an even louder set of curses, and a crash of dividing screens being knocked over.

Thrashing, tossing the fallen screens off of her and beating her foreleg on the bed in anger, Hair Trigger seethed at the lancing pain that fired up her hind leg. It had gotten right into the soft tissue at the very edge of the frog. Throbbing, stinging, arching up and down, she yanked herself up, reeled off a dozen words she'd never repeat around the crew in quick succession, and picked up the offending object.

"It's gonna be just one of those mornings, isn't it?"

She snorted at the plug, hurled it onto her bed in frustration, and limped painfully for her desk, wincing on every step. It felt like stepping on a nail every time her hoof touched the deck.

Hair Trigger hadn't even gotten halfway to the door after setting the multiband on the desk before her personal ('Captain's', she would insist) ship terminal began its own blooping and bleeping, followed by the sound of a beer can being opened.

Stopping on the spot, Hair Trigger ran a hoof down her face and scowled. It meant mail. The can opening sound had been her choice of the default set of alert sounds, but it was quickly beginning to lose its appeal. Perhaps, she figured, it was less to do with the exact sound and more to do with what it represented. Who else but a certain someone would be sending mail at this hour of the morning?

Collapsing into her chair, gasping at taking the weight off her hoof, she awkwardly bent over to tap the hoof print recognition panel. While waiting for the computer to log her in and bring up her mail app, she pulled her hindleg up to get a look at it, flicking the lights on with her magic as she did so.

There was a nasty red mark, right between the sole and the frog - one that stung to touch and radiated a swollen heat already.

"Ngh, damn it!" she muttered again, still trying to pull her thoughts together. The broken multiband sat like a trigger point reminder of everything already going wrong this morning, and the rapid series of pop-ups informing her of how much mail had been received weren't helping.

[Rota] Maintenance and Cleaning, followed by a date, and the time, sent by Volatility Smile a few minutes ago.

Volatility Smile had to be the only pony Trigger had ever known who'd send out a work rota for a crew of four people and one drone first thing in the morning. And looking further down at last night’s mails from after Trigger had gone to bed, clearly the only one who would send a daily report each evening as well, containing details for “Captain Hair Trigger's attention” on the things that Captain Hair Trigger herself had done.

Opening the rota out of morbid curiosity more than anything, she saw it contained four schedules. One for each of those aboard at the moment. Its contents were intrinsic, covering general cleaning tasks for the kitchen and common room and then a series of more specialist jobs such as bridge system checks for Tami, reactor limit drills for Kerfuffle, account revision and approaching market assessment for Smile herself, and ship tours and appraisal for Hair Trigger. With times. To the hour.

Not for the first time, Hair Trigger wondered just who ran this ship sometimes.

Tabbing down through each mail, she saw a third one marked by a red exclamation mark, with the astonishing inclusion of the dreaded letters 'KPI' in it, accompanied by individual documents for every crew member, including Patch.

"Okay, nope. Fuuuuuck that."

Pain or not, she quickly got up, grabbed the closest mug in her magic, and hobbled her way to the door instead.

Coffee and shower. That would do.

At least the morning couldn't get any worse.

* * *

Claudia’s common room still bore the untidy aftermath of the night before. Empty bags of crisps and half finished salsa tubs were dotted amongst a scattering of plastic bottles with only dregs remaining in them on the main table and around the sofa. So lay the aftermath of movie night - a not insignificant part of the reason why the crew had bunked down so late, despite the early start they knew they had.

Yet that was not the first thing that Hair Trigger felt herself made aware of.

That honour belonged to the thumping, allegedly invigorating beat of music with seemingly only three lines to its lyrics encouraging everyone to get up and move coming from the cargo hold. Having just escaped the shrill beeping of her broken multiband, this new racket was enough to make her pause, close her eyes and make a strained sound through her frown, before moving fully out of her room.

Stepping over a few fallen cushions from the table's chairs, remnants of a crew too tired to clean up before collapsing to sleep, she made her hesitant and painful way to the kitchen top at the far side of the room. Every step sent a spike up her hind leg, making her curse that it hadn't even had the grace to be a foreleg; at least those you could limp moderately well without.

Dropping her mug on the worktop, Trigger held her hind leg off the ground and set about finding what coffee she could muster from the cupboards. They were covered in papers, mostly containing whose job it was for cleaning that week, suggestions for movie nights, and one smaller list marked 'Systems we don't go to any more'.

Naturally, every system’s inclusion on that list had a story behind it to tell curious passengers.

Grabbing the handles, she found the first cupboard was empty of any caffeine

The second one joined the first in its rebellion against morning ponies.

Sighing, Trigger lit her horn and spun the rotating carriage on the wall, mostly used to store herbs or spices. If it came to it, instant coffee would have to do.

So focused was she on the search for packaged enlightenment, that she failed to hear the trotting near to her over the pounding music.

"Unfortunately, someone didn't remember to mark coffee as low last week."

Hair Trigger didn't turn away from her task, tossing packets side to side to get a look right into the back, her still sleep fuddled mouth gnashing and recalling the power of speech.

"Smile, if you're trying to softball me that we're out of coffee..."

To Hair Trigger's side, the crystal pony dabbed her towel on her head, still dressed in her sporting wear and, judging by her laboured breathing and sheen of sweat on her glinting body, was less than a couple minutes off of having finished her routine. Tilting her head to the side with a glance at the cupboards, she took a second to get her breath for another sentence, before continuing.

"Well in that case, we're out of coffee, because someone-"

She was interrupted by the hard dunking sound of horn-on-kitchen-top and the clinking of metal and plastic the impact caused. Volatility Smile was straight talking, but she knew when to adjust her words when needed. Smiling softly, she drew back her tone.

"Because someone else here, namely me, went through this exact hunt earlier this morning, and came up fruitless."

Hair Trigger spoke with her face plastered onto the worktop. "Well saved."

"I haven't a clue what you're referring to." Volatility Smile gave a brief wink, despite Hair Trigger's current staring contest with the polymer worktop restricting the captain from paying her any visual attention. "Regardless, I'm certain we can pick some more up today in Kavala. Confederate coffee, strong enough to build a factory on."

The small unicorn turned her head to Smile, before dragging her head backwards and standing up with another groan. "And by then, it won't be morning any more." She looked vaguely at the electronic clock on the hanging screen upon the wall, and narrowed her eyes. "You win this one, waking hours."

Volatility Smile nodded with a brief snort, rubbing a hoof under her own right eye. Coming from the normally prim and properly upright crystal pony, it was an unusual sign of lethargy. "We can win the war with extras and caffeine shots tonight to pep you up then. Because frankly, Captain, you look like hell this morning. Wrong side of the bed?"

Hair Trigger could only yawn and make a motion somewhere between a nod and shake, accompanied by a glare at her leg.

"Just the one with a damn charging plug waiting in ambush..."

Volatility Smile chuckled, quickly picking up the reason for her captain's limp. She wandered back to the cargo bay door and flicked off her exercise music.

"Well don't let Patch see it. Last thing I need to hear before I have some hot drink in the morning is his voice, and he's already bothered me about my posture. Mind if I take the first shower?"

She nodded toward the bathroom door beside the kitchen, and Hair Trigger idly waved a hoof. "Sure, I'm gonna go check on the rest. Got to do the rounds sometime."

Smile wandered to the table, picking up a folded washing towel she'd left there, and gave Hair Trigger a curious look as she tugged her mane's ties out to let it fall loosely about her head.

"Already? They'll still be getting things together, I think. That's why I pencilled the morning tour in for an hour from-."

Trigger snorted. "What am I going to do? Stare a coffee mug to death in the meantime? I'm going to the bridge, gonna see how long till we arrive. Enjoy the shower."

The unicorn turned, hobbling and cursing her way to the panelled stairs after dumping her mug by the kettle. The thin metal steps clapped and bounced under her on her route, until she disappeared above decks.

Behind her, Volatility Smile watched her grouchy captain go. Hair Trigger was usually a bit grumpy in the mornings, and she had long learned to give the captain a little space in such times. Content that it meant going for a shower, Smile dabbed her forehead with her dry towel and made to open the bathroom door.

Today hadn't been going well at all for her, owing to a frozen laptop update, an encounter with Patch mid-exercise, and no coffee. And now it threw yet another curveball.

The latch turned, but the door refused to slide aside. A thick clunk and only a tiny shift in its weight were all that the pull accomplished. She rattled it a few more times, to no avail. It wasn't locked. It was just jammed.

Her workout clearly wasn't done yet. The normally poised businessmare dropped her towel and grabbed the handle with two hooves to tug at again and again. Finally, her increasingly annoyed yanking bumped the lock up a little and the door sprang open, almost throwing her off her hooves. Smile staggered backward and dropped next to the kitchen on her haunches, banging her head on the edge of the worktop. Grumbling, she rolled her eyes.

"Oh, stars above...this morning."

* * *

Hair Trigger willed her way to the top of the stairs via the unbridled power of a grumpy mindset, one that didn't want to let one ambushing inanimate object inhibit her day. Coming up to the main street, she quickly reached for the heavy handle to the bridge.

After all, if there was one person on board she could trust to cast a ray of happiness onto a dismal failure of a morning, Trigger knew where to find her. Lifting her injured hoof off the ground, she tensed her shoulders and tugged at the sealed door.

Only to find it refuse to move.

"What."

The flat tone in her throat was matched only by the flat lack of reaction from the bridge door. She tried again with a little more force. Unlike the disagreement between accountant and accessway she could hear below decks, this was not a jam. The bridge door was well and truly locked shut.

Somehow, Hair Trigger didn't feel too surprised at this point that the morning had yet more to throw at her, but this particular detail was unexpected. They'd never had a locked bridge policy before. Especially not one locked to the captain.

Yet behind the locked door’s heavy metal, she could hear noises. Familiar ones that no-one on board Claudia would be unfamiliar with after at least a few days. Still with half-lidded eyes she leaned closer, her ear to the metal.

Music.

Taking a long breath, Trigger reached up and thumped her hoof on the door.

"Tami? Tami!"

She knocked it again, giving the door a few proper whacks.

"TAMI!"

The music dropped in volume, and she heard the scrambling of someone inside the bridge. Soon enough, she heard the clunk of metal and the click of a lock signalling the bridge-side security lock being undone, and the way inside was pulled open by just a little.

The first thing to escape was the sugar-sweet, hyperactive pace of colourful music, and the second was the soft, heart shaped face of Claudia's pilot poking through the gap. Tami's big eyes blinked, and she smiled brightly while clutching the door, her so-called 'triple-p patterned-pink-pyjamas' still clad around the visible arm. Behind her, the kaleidoscope of magic space whirled in the bridge's windows, providing an eye-straining visualiser backdrop to the high pitched lyrics and relentless bouncing beats that assaulted her thrice attacked ears this morning.

"Oh! Morning, Captain!"

Hair Trigger's face barely changed from a squinted clench. Even confronted by someone she naturally felt predispositioned to be gentler with, part of her still felt like it was sunken into her bed downstairs.

Taking a slow breath, feeling her very brain thudding away with the happy bumps in the tune, Hair Trigger formed her words with strained care. "Tami, why was the bridge locked?"

The hippogriff pursed her lips, clearly giving the answer a little bit of thought. Her visible talons gripping the door tapped in time to the music out of nerves. "Well...most of you lock your quarters at night, y'know? I'm just doing the same. Privacy!"

She smiled sweetly. Sleepy or not, Trigger knew she'd been wording that one in her head for a while.

"This is the bridge, Tami."

"Yeah, and I stay here, and the place someone stays is their quarters so..."

It took a monumental level of effort to keep her voice steady. The last thing she wanted to do was snap at anyone this morning, least of all the one in front of her now. "We don't lock the bridge, it's not a private quarters."

"But I'm sleeping here. I mean, you can just knock and then I'll know 'cos I might be getting dressed and-"

"Just-" Hair Trigger put a hoof on the frame of the door, her voice spiking upward a little. She was having to listen to her home's quiet hum being interrupted for the third time, and this time while speaking through a crack in the door to her own ship's bridge. It took her a second, before dropping back down to the grumpy morning tone she knew even Tami was used to by now, accentuating the words with a hoof motion in the air. "Just leave the bridge unlocked, okay?"

"Aye, Captain."

"Good girl. Besides, we've all walked in on you dancing before anyway. Nothing we haven't seen. All good?" Trying to offer a smirk, her mouth instead contorted into more of a twisted grimace. Thankfully, Tami seemed content with the tease, at least by her standards.

"I-I wasn't! And we should be transferring out to sub-light to Confederacy space in an hour, I was just-"

"Just listening to that song for the fiftieth time. Believe me, I think even I know the lyrics by now. But...okay, get dressed and clean up whatever paints you spilled that are making you hold the door closed like this to try and hide it. I'll go check on Kerf and get a shower first. Get readied up. And no more bridge locking, okay?"

"What? Paint? Noooo, no no."

Hair Trigger angled her head, raising one eyebrow.

Tami gulped. “Really!”

Biting her lip, the hippogriff just smiled wider, until her captain finally nodded, turned, and stumbled away down the main street.

Tami waved meekly at the departing unicorn and shut the door rapidly so she could turn back to her dilemma, only now resuming her panting breaths and grabbing more rags from her bag. That had been close.

Republic Blue was not an easy colour to get out of decking, or pyjamas.

"Oh, this is the worst morning..."

* * *

At every turn, Hair Trigger was beginning to recognise a pattern emerging now, and approached the engine room with a resigned expectation to whatever might be next.

Its doors were open already. Inside, she found the big griffon hunched behind the primary drive system at the back, half hidden away. He was busy at work, as diligent and reassuringly predictable as ever.

She stepped over the frame of the heavy bulkhead to the engineering section; one that could be shut and sealed more securely than any others that weren't an airlock, and found herself slowing down until she was standing still.

Inside, Hair Trigger had finally found what she was looking for.

That hum. The sound of a ship. Here, she found its source. To others it may have just been white noise in the engine room itself. But after an encounter with shrill alarms, overly motivated beats, and tooth rotting sugar in audio form, the simple mechanical sounds of a happy ship felt like the crooning of a meditation room.

Slowly, she felt her eyes close again, and a very pleasant tranquillity begin to rest in her mind after the conga line of aggravation thus far - one that was happy to let her rump drop to the deck and take the pain off her hoof.

"Oh. Mornin' Cap'n."

Opening an eye, she saw the calico coated griffon peering over the reactor at her, his gentle voice barely disturbing the atmosphere.

"A'ight." She nodded. "Nothing noisy is about to happen in here, is there?"

The griffon's head tilted sharply. "Don't rightly think so..."

"Any sudden slams, loud music, sharp objects, missing things or spillages?"

Kerfuffle thought about that for a few seconds, scratching at his feathers with long talons. "Nothing more than just myself and Claudia having a quiet morning here, Cap'n. Why're you sitting on the deck all quiet?"

Hair Trigger finally let a small smile creep onto her face, and closed her eye again.

"Happy place, Kerf. Always have a happy place."

Kerfuffle wasn't certain what to make of the comment, but Hair Trigger's obvious contentment reassured him. He turned back to his work on the core’s secondary coolant inlet. He’d been up all night already, trying to get it to line up after it had jolted loose during the emergency drill he and Tami had run the day before.

He had thought it would be a ten minute job, and stayed up after bedtime to finish it.

That had turned into a sleepless night of wondering just how in the world it had ever fitted at all, because it certainly wasn’t any more. Rubbing his tired eyes, he went back to his laborious task. This was not the kind of morning he preferred. It never was if Claudia wasn’t working how she should, and it unsettled him to think he couldn’t fix her on his own.

Unaware of the resigned stress behind Kerfuffle’s impenetrably calm face, his Captain let her mind and temper settle with nothing but the ship and the quiet griffon. Finally, Hair Trigger spoke up on her own. "Tami says we'll be there in an hour. Anything we need to be aware of before then? We got a job on arrival, not looking for any surprises."

Kerfuffle didn't look up, pulling a small locking tool from his slung belt. He set himself to bang it into place, before pausing, remembering the Captain's look, and instead gave it a gentle wiggle to slide over the lug instead. "She'll make it there, Cap'n. Gotta run a hyperdrive technical stripping before long though."

Trigger nodded. "We'll make the time. They've got a proper dock there in orbit."

The big mechanic seemed pleased by that, momentarily patting the side of the reactor housing. While she didn't hear what he said, Hair Trigger was certain she saw him whisper something to the ship through her peeking open eye. Her smile slowly grew a little more. Trust Kerfuffle to be the one steady, reliable source of zen on a morning like this.

Even then, her watchful gaze saw an uncharacteristic sluggishness in his movements. The big griffon was exhausted, and she made a mental note to order him to take the afternoon off if they had time.

Slowly, she got up, grunting as her back leg came down. "Better go get ready. Prep her for sub-light, Kerf, and thanks for the quiet. Gonna go get a shower soon as Smile's done, then we'll see about getting everyone together."

She turned to wander out, hoping against hope that Patch wouldn't find her before she got back to her quarters to wait on Smile. She was in no mood for a drone prodding at her hoof.

This was, however, an improvement. The edges that every other stop had sharpened were now softening, and she felt a more genuine smile finally coming to her face as she started to rationalise everything in a stream of calming thoughts.

Another day. Another job. Just a rough wakeup, that was all.

She just needed a nice. Warm. Shower. That was all she needed to rid herself of this. Just a shower. Warm water. That was all. Forget everything else. Just that. Just. That.

She had only just got out of the engineering section when she heard Kerfuffle shuffle over to the door behind her.

"Oh, Cap'n, you might wanna know there's no-"

From downstairs, there came the shriek of a very surprised - and very cold - crystal pony, followed by the crash of a curtain railing.

"-hot water. Thermal regulator threw a fuse..."

Hair Trigger stopped on the spot, eyes wide and staring at absolutely nothing. Her pupils contracted and her eyebrows hardened.

Kerfuffle looked at the trapdoor the sound had emerged from, and then back up at the now still unicorn halfway down the main street corridor. Her neck behind her mane started to tighten as her head tilted, with one eye twitching.

"And we'll need to dock first if we want to-”

"FOR FUCK'S SAKE!"

Any sense of comfort and quiet was broken by the frustrated, angered cry of utter exasperation, before the still loudly complaining and ranting captain stormed her painful way down the stairs once again, leaving the tentative griffon behind to slide back into his own happy place, and this time close the door.

* * *

Back on the bridge, Tammani finally put the finishing touches on her plan of obscurement until she could purchase a supply of paint thinner for a large area. It wasn't the greatest one, but it'd have to work.

"Right...there!"

Patting down the adjusted blanket, she stood in her stained pyjamas, stared at it, and tried to control her breathing the way Volatility Smile had shown her. Slow inhalations and exhalations. Each one measured to eight seconds. A competitive shooter's trick for bringing down the heart rate after swimming for miles, one Smile had learned from that unusual combined sport.

Smile had said to do it for a few minutes, but really, Tami wasn't much capable of being still that long. Not when she was so close to the endpoint of an FTL jump. Instead, she took to her more favoured method of calming down and hit the play button on a patterned music device sitting on the centre console of the bridge.

Soon enough, the soothing energy of Lady ZaZa's seasonal release was filling the bridge once more, while Tami took the opportunity to get dressed, repeatedly casting her eyes back at the warping colours out the bridge's slanted windows. The drifting shapes out there were starting to wobble and ripple in more intense waves, like a stone slammed hard into water, just unthinkably large and only growing in rapidity.

Tammani always loved this part. As much as the thrill of breaking into the otherworldly rift of magic space was an adrenaline rush, the transfer back to the known universe held an oh-so-satisfying feeling of accomplishment. To see just how accurate you'd been, and if you came out on the correct alignment. She and her friends back in basic flight school had always sought to be the one who could come out with as few adjustments needed on each axis after a jump.

This was particularly the case with their destination in Kavala. Smile's receipt of their job from the client had demanded extremely specific exit coordinates, down to a zone of space no more than a few hundred kilometres in diameter only just outside of a standard moon's orbital distance from a planet. The message had been quite explicit. Miss the job distance, and you don't get in.

It had puzzled Tami all trip as to why. She'd been through this system before, but to approach Kavala III there were all these extra demands. Smile had been doing research on it, but so far no answer had emerged. It wasn't a significant problem. She knew she could send Claudia into an area half the volume in a system populated with translation beacons to help them out, but it was unusual all the same.

Shrugging it off, and tugging her rainbow leggings on while sitting on her hammock, Tami kicked her legs and hummed along to 'Ovation'. Verbena, her new friend on Port Medusa, had provided her with the song, despite Tami's already knowing of it. She'd never owned it before though, and had spent the last few days getting to know every beat.

She glanced down, spotting her hoop lying where she'd left it last night.

A small smile came to her face. ZaZa's video had the Lady Ykina herself dancing with props. Not to mention, the zebra had worn bright striped colours. With a glance at herself, her leggings without the overalls certainly qualified.

Besides, hooping while exiting FTL with that colourful surreality backdrop? Even the pop star herself had never done anything that cool in a video! Real magic space!

With a nervous glance to the unlocked door Tami hopped off the hammock, took up the hoop, and felt a thrill of excitement fighting with embarrassed nerves.

“Aww, whatever. Let's do it.”

Giggling away to herself, she stepped into it, tapped her hoof, waited for the big drop into the chorus...and then let the beat take her over. The flow, the glow, and the unrelentingly confident singing surged into her, driving Tami to move from slow, uncertain movements until she was half hopping, half shuffling...and threw the hoop out to catch on her own body's movements.

“Woah, haha! Aw yeah!”

Soon enough, the (literal) blues of the morning were being forgotten.

Half humming lyrics she barely heard, waving her wings out for balance while wiggling and feeling the hoop roll round and round her midsection (with only a small cheat by holding the PA system above her for balance) she lived her own music video, as magic space joined her in its cascade of neon and flickering like a backdrop amid the hyperdrive's efforts to break back through into the galaxy.

The pilot panel pinged, barely audible over the music.

'APPROACHING MAGIC TRANSLATION.'

Claudia's voice echoed through the bridge, and Tami heard the slightly delayed repeat from outside.

Grinning wildly, Tami turned her shivering and excited self toward the window, rolled the hoop around and around, and watched. The sudden break of the psychedelic into the thick black and soft colours of real space to see where you'd gone was what she lived for, and what a conclusion it would be with the song winding down.

Outside the windows, magic space folded in on itself, and a bright white glare erupted across the ship, even as the final note hung and faded.

“Oh wow, that was -hehe- that was great. I gotta do that ag-”

'PROXIMITY WARNING. EMERGENCY MANEUVERS REQUIRED.'

“Huh!?”

The white flare of translation to the black snapped away, being replaced with the looming shape of a mass conveyor vessel in their flightpath, Claudia’s huge exit velocity bringing it so close that its ends exceeded the edges of the windows.

A wailing klaxon erupted throughout the ship, while three separate master warnings on the consoles lit up the entire board with intense buzzing and alternating red and yellow texts.

Tami screamed, diving forward into her chair, the hoop clattering across the bridge. She didn't even get to sit down before grabbing the control sticks and simply yanking back on them as hard as she possibly could.

A harsher, more immediate alarm rung out, making her cry out as half a million tons of metal darkened the windows with its approach, the turn struggling to affect their velocity.

'COLLISION WARNING. EMERGENCY MANEUVERS ESSENTIAL. BRACE BRACE BRACE!'

“No, no, no, no, NO!”

She frantically reached for the vector controls, hearing herself screaming a second time.

* * *

Downstairs, Hair Trigger had been midway through a most uncomfortable cold shower by the time the first alarm went off. By the second, she was mid-way out of the door, wrapped in a towel to find the others getting up from their late breakfast to head for the bridge.

“What the hell is going-”

Their world turned by ninety degrees.

Every light in Claudia switched off for a second, then suddenly began flickering madly. Hair Trigger's gut twisted on the spot, and she was thrown forward across the common room by the sudden shift in gravity. Trigger briefly saw Kerfuffle grabbing Smile, before she slammed into the pool table and skidded off of it with the sting of carpet burn. Wheeling through the air, she painfully clanged against the far door back first. The air was driven out of her, the wall feeling like the floor from the crushing forces. An ill-fittingly harsh and dominating voice rattled through the rumble of the ship's hull and whining reactor, and she saw Patch pin-balling from stairs to table to ceiling, alerts and bloops reeling out of his speaker as much as his requests for assistance.

“User assistance for Unit PATCH required! Gravitational anomaly interfering with gyroscopic stabilisers!”

She barely got to catch her breath before everything inverted once more, and she went flying toward her own room amidst a cloud of soaring utensils, cereal and empty bottles, the sharper edges of the stairs approaching fast. Crying out, she tried to turn her head away from them.

From below, a huge clawed hand grabbed her out of the air and yanked her down into a soft, cushioned embrace. She could see the glittering of Smile's coat beside her, as Kerfuffle held them both down below him, bracing his legs under the stairs and couch to keep them still as small objects bounced off of his back. He made a grasping attempt for Patch, but the aggressively complaining drone whirled away in a rapid series of warbling bleeps to crash through the strung up laundry.

“What in the blazes is going on out there!?” Smile's voice rang about the cacophony of every object unnaturally dropping to the floor again, no matter what velocity it had once had. She felt sick to her stomach, and her ears were whirling with imbalance.

Hair Trigger didn't bother replying, instead clambering out from under the griffon and rushing her damp and ever more pained body upstairs to the bridge. Everything was shaking, like great winds were blowing at the ship, and Trigger could hear the vector engines rattling in their housings. Her hooves felt loose on the deck. The artificial gravity was still off kilter.

Throwing open the door, she found a scene of utter chaos.

Claudia's bridge windows beheld a blur of motion. A colossal metal object filled the entire right and bottom, hurtling by them as though they were soaring low over an orbital station. Claudia veered away from it sharply, and another proximity alert rang out; not even getting half way through the alarm before a third joined it. Tami screamed, and Claudia spun again, the main engines roared with the effort of dodging something completely unseen to those without the information a pilot’s station granted them.

Dragging herself along the floor against the g-forces trying to press her into the wall, Trigger looked at the screens on her side of the console for the source of the alert signals. She saw the two kilometre vessel they'd just pulled away from dominating the display. The other, a rapidly moving transport ship, had just buzzed within fifty meters of Claudia’s underside.

The sensor screen was covered in so many indicators that Hair Trigger couldn't even count them. Looking back up, she saw a second enormous vessel coming into view, turning on full burn toward them to evade the first one they'd just pulled away from. The viewpoint of the windows suddenly twisted away from it, and Trigger felt more than saw the flying town rumbling overhead of them, and the concussive impacts of engines as wide as Claudia thumping into them as they passed its flightpath.

“What in all the damn galaxy is going on? Tami, did we just jump into a damn fleet engagement!? Did we hit something?”

“NO! No-it's...NO! Can't talk!”

Claudia banked and wheeled around, turning on her head before inverting and pointing out towards an area notably not filled with gigantic metal objects. Tami, sweating profusely, grabbed one side of the controls with both hands to hurl the yoke over and hit the thrust stick to its maximum with a wing. Even past the artificial gravity, Trigger felt her empty stomach lurch at the three-dimensional turn, something that would be impossible in an atmosphere without breaking the ship apart.

Behind them, Smile and Kerfuffle came running up after Trigger, the griffon carrying Patch with him.

Claudia powered forward for almost thirty seconds, only slowing once Tami fired the retrothrusters. The jarring deceleration rippled through the ship, and the angry beeping of alarms began to settle down. Breathing hard, Tami let go of the yoke and slumped over her controls, not even bothering to arrest the lazy spin the hard burn had given the vessel.

“Oh geez...”

Slowly, Claudia drifted. Glancing over at the shocked hippogriff, Hair Trigger reached forward and used a wet hoof to pull the control switching lever. Assuming pilot control of Claudia, she started gently easing the ship around to try face the way they'd come.

“You okay?” she quietly asked, glancing over at Tami in concern. The poor hippogriff was only partially dressed, shivering all over.

Taking slower breaths, Tami just nodded, before looking up at the windows. Hair Trigger reached over to pat her shoulder, and felt Tami’s hand settle over her hoof to hold it there.

“What did we hit?” Volatility Smile glanced from screen to screen, rubbing the side of her neck, yet there was no indication of damage to Claudia.

“Nothing.” Tami turned to the others, shrinking back on seeing them all nursing bruises. “I had to do a fully angled vector-turn while we were still transitioning back to normal space, and we passed through the magnetic field of a mass conveyor during it. Y'know, all those electromagnets holding containers on its hull? The uh...the artificial gravity didn't like that much. Went a bit, well, selective? S-sorry if anyone got jostled about a bit...”

The three who had been downstairs of them glanced at one another. Hair Trigger in particular was still wringing out her neck.

Kerfuffle eventually spoke up, looking back at them from the diagnostic screen, his concern for Cladia’s wellbeing paramount. “Better than losing all gravity hitting a conveyor.”

“Improper environmental conditions for possession of Unit PATCH may result in denial of warranty in the unlikely event of crew members seeking insurance cover. Transgression has been added to logs,” added Patch, a brand new dent in his casing just below the star sticker.

Kerfuffle hefted the drone up to stare into his visual receptors, momentarily tracing a claw around the dent, analyzing it. “Now that ain't nice to say. Wasn't us who parked a big cargo ship right there, was it now?”

From over the bridge, Hair Trigger twitched the controls a little more, then hit the retrothrusters to slow down their spin. Staring out, she narrowed her eyes and sat back.

“Looks like it wasn't just them. Or us. Damn...that's a crapstain of a mess out there.”

Hair Trigger’s careful control of the vessel brought Claudia around to a new heading, passing by the chaos of panicked ship movements breaking out before them. Yet moments after, a sudden flare of light from the system’s sun flooded into the bridge, illuminating the scene before them.

They had landed in the right spot. Nothing about the jump had been off. Before them lay a planet: their destination.

Kavala III.

The hazy gold and orange of a predominantly dry-to-temperate planet lay before them. They could see the shifting clouds and tan landmasses, indicating their jump point had brought them out at an unusually closer distance than most jumps did for a planet arrival. Normally planets were distant little balls, but not here. Here, they were nearly in a high orbit already, with all its details visible to the naked eye through a window.

Yet surrounding it was something that drew the attention all the more.

Asteroids. Countless asteroids, forming a near-spherical field of dark rocks and minerals all around the planet itself, rather than in rings. It was deep, from near orbit to out past the limit of one very notable feature amongst the field itself.

A broken moon.

Shattered of almost a third of its volume, the natural satellite hung like a giant parent of the asteroids, keeping watch over its millions of children as they spun and drifted in lazy orbits around both itself and the planet. Within the colossal field there were flashes of light, like fireflies at night. Sensor pings were clearly marked on Claudia's overlay, revealing those lights to be a vast orbital infrastructure anchored in the larger - safer - gaps of the asteroid field. Stations, drydocks, refineries, and vast mining motherships hanging in orbit populated the entire side of the planet they were facing.

Their jump location had been mere minutes’ flight short of the enormous rocks. On it, they saw what had caused their chaotic near miss, and what had attracted Hair Trigger's colourful comment. A traffic jam.

Of all things in space, they were witnessing a traffic jam.

Dozens of ships fled in all directions away from the crush. Some out toward Claudia, others drifting into the empty black away from the asteroids. Some stubbornly tried to make position at the gap in the field where the largest orbital station resided. Security cutters were darting around the first mass cargo ship that Claudia had missed, no doubt reprimanding and trying to direct the motionless - perhaps malfunctioning - ship away from Kavala III's crowded jump-in point before a tragedy occurred.

Even as they watched, an industrial class miner broke through to real space and recreated Claudia's own panicked turn, spinning away with flickering engines.

Wandering around the chairs, Kerfuffle pressed his beak against the glass and frowned at the number of ships already being towed after collisions. “Now why they gotta go make a jump point they tell everyone to go to and make a mess like that?”

Behind them all, Volatility Smile cracked her neck out, releasing some of the tension from the havoc downstairs, and tapped at the bridge's spare computing console. “Why, I am very glad you asked.”

Grinning at the chance to show what she'd been researching, the crystal pony reset her mane with a hoof, waiting for their attention to turn. They were a motley bunch at the moment. Tami was only quarter dressed, Hair Trigger still dripping from her mane onto the deck, and Kerfuffle looking like he'd gotten in a fight with a mane curler and lost.

Of course, Volatility Smile left herself out of the mental regarding of the messy situation they'd had to live through this morning. She coughed into her hoof and indicated a map of the system she'd drawn up on the console.

“Kavala III isn't part of the Confederacy.”

The line had just the impact she'd hoped for. Raised eyebrows and confused looks. Oh, how she loved to pause after such a look, and let others wonder for just a second.

“See, back during the war against the dragons, this system was used as a testing ground for many of the WMDs the various galactic nations were using as part of joint research. Records however show the legality of such weapons meant they could not be detonated on planets or orbital bodies by anyone but the owning sovereign nation. So, to allow all allied nations to test here, the owning government agreed to make Kavala III a neutral world within the borders of what would eventually become the Confederacy.”

Hair Trigger, having clearly seen the tone Smile was taking, grabbed one of Tami's towels after a glance for approval from the pilot, and started dabbing down her mane. “Fighting dragons of all things, and they still went by the letter of the law to have to make this place neutral first so other civilizations could test their bombs on it?”

Volatility Smile shrugged. “More or less. Rewriting the legality wasn't exactly top priority at the time, so they started testing even before the law was in place. Eventually, anyone who was anyone was throwing WMDs at the moon in this place to try them out first. It was here that it's believed the largest arcane explosion ever created by a non-dragon race was carried out. The allies were so impressed, they decided to stockpile the weapons on the moon itself, until they could develop a delivery mechanism for them.”

Hair Trigger's eyes moved to the window again, casting a glance at the distant, though still enormous, moon. Her eyes rested on the section of it that had been wholly torn out. “Let me guess, they stored hundreds of these uber-bombs underground on the moon, and then...”

Volatility Smile nodded. “And then the dragons decided that they weren't about to let such things ever be used. They attacked, and their magic detonated the stockpile. All at once.”

She gestured to the window.

“And that's why the moon's missing nearly a third of its mass.”

Tami whistled lightly, using the camera on Claudia's hull to get a closer look at the shattered moon. “Explains why the field's such a weird shape around the whole place. Was only a few hundred years ago; gravity hasn't had time to turn it all into rings yet. Hey, you can even see where they're starting to form.”

Beside her, Kerfuffle scratched his head. “So why insist we jump in so close?”

Smile clapped her front hooves together. “And that, I am delighted to explain, is the best part!”

Trigger raised an eyebrow. “Their reason for shitty jump coordinates is a bigger part then dragons destroying a moon?”

“I was just as surprised as you are, but listen to this.” Smile had not a hint of anything but truth in her voice, as she changed the page on the console, bringing up what looked like a legal document. Behind her, Trigger rolled her eyes with a grin at Tami, making the hippogriff giggle into her hands.

“Remember when I said Kavala III, even within its own system, was considered neutral territory? Well, after the war when the minotaurs formed the Confederacy, they certainly didn't bother with this place. Too dangerous to mine from, too chaotic among the asteroids. With no magic, they all had bigger fish to fry before dealing with this wreck. Only, the push to make this a legal place to test WMDs had left a loophole when lawyers finally dug up the records to formalise the Confederate territory. A pretty big one, in fact. They hadn't cosigned Kavala III as a legally binding neutral and unclaimable territory. Only unaligned.”

“Oooh...” Tami tapped at the back of the chair with her talons. “So someone-”

“That's right,” Smile cut in, determined to not have her own moment of the reveal guessed ahead of time. “Someone came along before the Confederacy and claimed it. Didn't do anything with it, just left it for decades and decades. Fought off legal wars, built a few cities of free trade, appointed a successor to their corporation, and then died of old age. Now the successor, she had different ideas. See, while we don't have automata like long ago, newer models of remote drones can now handle the dangers of mining an unstable asteroid field like this one.”

Her hoof waved to the screen hanging between Trigger and Tami's chairs.

“And that's the infrastructure you see there. The biggest independently owned mining site in the entire sector! Enough orbital infrastructure to support dozens of mass transports and hundreds of drone miners out of a fleet of hub-ships controlling them. All the profit, none of the danger to pony life. Think of it like a wholesale full of rare goods suddenly opening up in your backyard and being able to price them without any investor skimming.”

“But...” Tami hesitantly tried to speak up again, “that still doesn't explain why they're getting everyone to jump into this stupid small spot.”

Volatility Smile had been leaving this for last. The cleverness of it had left her grinning for an hour last night. It was the deceptively sneaky part, just the kind she loved.

“Because that tiny point over there? That's the only safe, regularly asteroid-free spot within Kavala III's tiny borders that doesn't cross over from the Confederacy. If we went even a fraction of an AU further out, we'd be entering Confederate space and get tagged by long range scans. We'd lose our licence to operate here because we crossed from Confederate space into a contested territory.”

The blank looks staring at her showed they clearly hadn't realised it yet.

“But we did cross into minotaur territory...” Kerfuffle was glancing at the map, wondering if he'd missed something.

“And that's the beautiful loophole. No, we didn't.” Smile grinned, nodding at Tami. “Did we?”

“Well we left Jealousy, which is Republic space, jumping to Kavala, which is Confederate space, but we...ooooh.”

Smile grinned widely. “We entered it from magic space directly. And the Confederacy doesn't own magic space now, does it?”

If she had hoped for them to act excited over such an elegant evasion through a legal loophole, she was disappointed. The trio just mouthed, nodded and tried to work it out. They could be so blind to the art of it all sometimes, Smile thought. The simple deviousness, using a specific magic space transition to jump the border and get around a Confederate denial of trade contract. How could you not love that?

It was perfect.

Behind them, through the window, there was a sudden flash of light. The engine nacelle of a transport erupted in flames after colliding with an asteroid while trying to evade a supertanker that had just jumped in.

Well, almost perfect.

Hair Trigger finally sighed, grinned, and gestured at Smile. “Is school done, Miss? Can I go on recess now?”

Tutting, Smile closed off the terminal and made for the door. “I'm going to get cleaned up. And by the way, that successor I mentioned, the one who started all this mining? That's our client. So, best looks everyone.”

Leaving the bridge, she headed downstairs to clean up and get ready.

Behind her, waiting till she was gone, Hair Trigger spun and sat back down, staring at the colossal sight before them. The radiant planet, the collapsed moon, the spherical field of spinning rock, the enormous structures and guiding beacons hanging in orbit to coordinate vessels, and the lines of ships attempting to weave in from the chaotic jump point. At the base of it all somewhere, there was one person waiting for them.

“You know those cartoons you watch, Kerfuffle? The ones where the creatures turn into different ones as they get stronger?”

The griffon sheepishly nodded. “S'better than it sounds, really...”

Hair Trigger didn't respond directly at first, other than a calming nod, before glancing back at the planet and its bizarre surroundings.

“I think we're about to meet the later version of Smile down there.”

* * *

Over the next few hours, and with the disaster of a jump point slowly being cleared of its titanic obstacle by a series of tugs launched from the planet, Claudia began to slowly drift its way into the marked lanes approaching the field itself.

Flickering beacons created highways in space, held in place by a networked series of small thrusters to maintain their position relative to the gaps in the field. Between them came ships of all sizes, directed into lanes befitting their class and role.

Kavala III was busy. Very busy.

Buoyed by traffic from the still developing Republic and the ever hungry for precision margins merchant fleet of the League, the planet was being swarmed. Millions of tons of freight traffic was either compressed into tight areas of safety that had been carved out amongst the asteroids, or lingered in high orbit of the planet just beyond the field itself. Several service platforms, like gigantic square plates in space, attracted most of the enormous super-class vessels, while countless other ships were directed into holding patterns. Here they would wait, sometimes for days according to Smile, making use of the small stations and their services until a landing spot on the planet finally opened up, or one of the refineries had a spare docking port.

It was into one of these areas, with a League-pattern station at its centre, that Claudia was instructed to go.

On the bridge, Kerfuffle had been avidly observing the unusually cramped spatial environment as they passed into the field itself. With a gap of perhaps only two kilometres for small ships to pass through in this section of the mining and market infrastructure, the colossal operations were visible to the naked eye.

It wasn't the station shaped like a bonsai-tree ahead of them, or the drifting rows of hundreds of cargo ships - including some identical in class to Claudia herself - that caught his attention. Nor the spiralling platform of thin arms that reached out among them to act as a refuelling probe to twelve ships at a time. It wasn't even the enormous boards of flickering holographic light that advertised stock prices - and how much lower Kavala III's were compared to the Confederacy - bolted between asteroids.

He was watching the techniques of mining operation itself.

Not far out from the sheltered waiting areas for ships, he could see streaks of light biting into the mineral and rare metal asteroids. Swarms of blocky ships moved in coordinated groups ahead of lumbering excavation barges. Automated drones, driven by a simple intelligence to discern the shape and composition of an asteroid, then burn away its crust with powerful thermionic beams, leaving behind the valuable deposits. Even as Kerfuffle watched, he saw one asteroid torn into rubble by the hornet-like attack of twenty drones biting to its core in mere minutes, before immediately moving on. Behind them, a second wave of small miners followed them up, making more advanced movements that betrayed remote piloting as opposed to automated flight. Moving within the shattered remains of the asteroid, they began smaller scale, more precise cuts, grappled what they cut off using diamond-edged blasting hooks, and towed the valuable minerals back to the dirty yellow barge following the whole operation.

Kerfuffle had witnessed a dozen instances of it occur over the two hours it took Claudia to lazily edge its way in behind ship after ship to her assigned 'parking spot', as Tami had put it. Organic and synthetic intelligence working in harmony; it was enough to make the quiet griffon smile to himself.

Yet with a sudden flare of light, he witnessed the other side to why drones were being utilised in such numbers. A fragmenting chunk of moon impacted on another, resulting in a small chain reaction. Caught within chaotically tumbling rocks, six of the drones were shattered into their component parts. Immediately, a salvage party broke off from the hull of the excavator. Drones collecting drones, to repair and send them back in again.

The smile quickly disappeared. “Now that ain't right...”

“Nothing about this morning much has been so far, big guy.”

Hair Trigger limped into the bridge, giving Tami a pat on the shoulder to let the hippogriff go and get something to eat. Watching Tami go for a moment, she slumped down into the chair beside the griffon. Kerfuffle tilted his head as he saw the unicorn floating a mug of steaming brown liquid with her.

“Thought there wasn't any coffee, Cap'n.”

Trigger didn't look up as she transferred control to her side, and kept Claudia steadily rumbling toward a flickering beacon that had been marked on the main screen. She took a sip, scowled, and shrugged. “S'not. Just warm water with some brown food colouring, whitener, and sugar. Figured I might as well try to at least trick myself into thinking I've had some.”

She stared directly ahead of them at the planet itself, running over everything that had happened since she'd pulled herself from her bed. Already she knew this was a day to be in a foul mood. Pulling up her hind-leg, she rubbed cautiously at the plug-attacked frog of her hoof.

“Son of a...” She followed it with a harsh mutter. “Better not be walking anywhere down there. Great idea! Get out and immediately stand on a damn plug. Limp all over the place in front of a client who owns a planet. Aren't I set to be the utter example of a professional captain today, huh?”

Kerfuffle had been looking at the drones again, eagerly hoping the recovery operation would grab one of the ones he'd seen spiral off out of sight. Yet at the small rant behind him, he turned and shook his head.

“She probably couldn't do what you do, Cap'n. That'll be why she wants you. So even if you've got an injury, don't mean she's gonna turn you down.”

The unicorn didn't take her eyes off the angrily swollen feeling section of her hoof. “Just always full of the simple bright side, aren't you?”

“Mama always said that was what Lena did. Figured that meant I should too, is all.”

Hair Trigger stopped for a second and looked up. She hadn't expected an actual answer from her sense of rhetoric, until reminding herself just who she was conversing with.

“Lena… Sister that was, yeah? Galena?”

“Mhm.” The griffon nodded slowly, glancing back on the window again.

“Well...carry on with it then. Besides, our collective asses are gonna need a bright side if any more goes wr-oh hello...”

The last comment had been directed to a sudden blip on her co-pilot console’s top panel. An automated transmission was being beamed to them from the communications beacon lingering in the void above their holding area's station. Hair Trigger reached out for the ‘receive’ icon on the touchscreen, grumbled briefly as her hoof failed to reach the large control’s (minotaur designed) height, and hit it with a telekinesis-propelled mug instead.

“They sure do got a lot of stuff running on automatic out here...” Kerfuffle mumbled, glancing over the edge of the seat...and Hair Trigger's head.

If the grumpy unicorn noticed his shadow bearing over her, she didn't say, instead activating the message to play through the bridge speakers. The clipped, electronic voice was as emotionless as it was rapid and to the point.

“For attention: Captain Hair Trigger of the Claudia. Sender: Chief Executive Officer Asset Margin of Kavala III mining and wholesale facilities. Message Body: Arrival detected and logged, proceed within the hour from holding area nine to high orbit infrastructure pattern. No free landing platforms at facility on surface. Automated shuttle will approach and dock, permitting flight to visitor drop off at Corsinica Headquarters as replacement. Scheduled appointment is sixty four minutes behind schedule due to unexpected jump traffic incident. Shuttle will require manual flight to building at attached coordinates. Staff will instruct upon arrival. End of line.”

There was a second chime as the coordinates referred to were dumped directly into Claudia's incoming data buffer.

Trigger sipped her not-coffee and furrowed her brow. “Getting the impression this client isn't all about having a lot of employees...guess we better get going then. If she's as anal about this job as she is about her messages being that specific then we'd better not be too late.”

Reaching out with her magic, she grabbed the PA system handset and yanked it down to her mouth, depressing the button. “Call to work just came in, everyone. Stow up, pack up, and get your asses ready to hit planetside. Tami, we've got permission for an orbit, let's see you up here in ten. Kerf...oh.”

Kerfuffle angled his head down, having been so quiet that Hair Trigger had thought he'd left.

“...never mind. Step to it, and lets get our payday done. Captain out.”

She let go of the button, and hung the handset back up.

“Get her ready for a long orbit, Kerf. If Asset's as long winded as Smile can be, we'll be here a-”

Hair Trigger paused, suddenly hearing her own voice still echoing back to her from the speakers just behind the bridge, and slapped a hoof into her face.

“Son of a bitch?”

Half a second later, the speakers asked her the same question right back. How had she missed that? Fiddling with the handset, she checked the button depression only to find it was indeed in the 'off' position.

“I swear if one more thing decides to break or go wrong this morning...”

The PA system was still active, transmitting every frustrated grunt she made as she reached up and whacked the side of the system housing itself.

“Will. You. Turn. Off. You. F-”

Hair Trigger's catharsis-delivering hoof stopped in mid-air, clutched in a griffon's hand.

“Cap'n, that ain't goin' to help.”

Trigger breathed in sharply at the griffon's hasty reprimand, before feeling the anger bubble away inside her. She knew her temper had gotten shor-

She paused, and reworded it in her mind.

-had gotten limited in record time today. And now it fought with embarrassment and regret at having to be told to calm down by the normally neutral engineer.

“Yes...yes. Just fix it, Kerf. I'm fed up of this already.”

She got off the chair and attempted to make the galaxy's angriest hobble toward the door. Smile was coming up the stairs as she departed.

“PA system seems a little 'long winded', Captain.”

Hair Trigger paused and shot a glare at the crystal pony, muttering a quiet but sharp 'don't', before making her way downstairs, not even turning her head to look at the sofa below her as she spoke.

“And you can stop giggling away down there as well, Tam!”

“Snrk...aye, Captain!”

* * *

Though Kerfuffle and Tami both put off their morning routine and spared some prep-time to investigate, the PA system's fault couldn't be located. After twenty minutes or so, it finally decided the joke had stopped being funny and shut off on its own.

Soon after, under Tami's gentle control, Claudia was given permission to leave the holding area and pass deeper into the rocky field. To the hippogriff's perception of the distances, it almost felt like flying the ship through a series of caves to close deeper in toward the planet. Yet as they reached the permitted orbital layer, it finally began to ease off.

Even in this more open inside gap between the spherical field and the planet itself, there was little ease in the sensation of being in a crowded sky. Lines of ships at various station points waited for their turns to drop to the planet's few starports, and there was a secondary layer of engineering hubs and logistics stations dotted around the planet. In total, Tami had counted an awe-inspiring twenty six stations of habitable scale, from a few dozen personnel to a couple with hundreds. There were a few dozen other automated platforms out there too.

Easing into the final orbit path, snuggling Claudia between a Trandex class liquid transporter and a despondently ugly looking Confederate basic transport, little more than a near featureless block in space, Tami set the autopilot to hold their path. Within minutes, she spotted the approaching remote shuttle making its way toward their assigned speed and vector. To her surprise, it docked on the starboard port of Claudia without much of her own input required, rocking the ship lightly as the airlocks sealed.

Getting out her seat, Tami hastened to the door and shouted down the stairs to the others. “Good for planetside!”

Below her, Hair Trigger stopped holding the ice pack against her hoof and waved up at the hippogriff.

“All right. Let's get going, everyone.”

* * *

The whole crew gathered around the airlock in the cargo hold, carting their belongings with them. Hair Trigger was glancing at her multiband, tapping a hoof on the edge of the crate she sat on.

“Right, route looks fine. So, plan is: Smile, Kerfuffle, and myself will head down there and meet with Asset. If it's all legit, we handle the job then and there. Far as we know it's all planetside. So that's why I want you staying here, Tami.”

The hippogriff looked up in surprise, having been checking the battery in her taser. “On Claudia?”

Hair Trigger nodded. “Exactly. New client, new territory. I'd rather have an ace card in the figurative sleeve ready to move up here.”

Volatility Smile handled her own rifle, ensuring it was unloaded before stacking it into the shuttle. “Expecting trouble?”

“Why else would someone who makes more money in a day than we will in our lives want an independent crew if there wasn't a little twist to it?”

“Fair to note. Although...” Smile leaned on the shuttle's door and ran a hoof through her mane. “Speak for yourself on your life's ambitions.”

Hair Trigger made a small snort of amusement. “Point made, now go get the shuttle fired up. You'll be on helm, you've done more atmospheric work than I have.”

Behind the two ponies, helping Kerfuffle with the packs of provisions to last a day or two's journey, Tami couldn't deny that the news was quite welcome. She tossed her own medical supplies to him.

“Actually kinda glad I don't gotta go down there...”

Grabbing her thrown medkit, Kerfuffle turned and laid it beside the shuttle's door for the Captain to pick up and take inside. He cocked his head curiously. “Why's that, Miss?”

Tami paused, indicating herself. She was still somewhat frazzled all over, after having spent the better part of the morning resetting the artificial gravity software to account for the confused mess of a reaction earlier.

“Because with all the nonsense this morning, I haven't even had the time to do anything! I still haven't finished breakfast, or done my coat, or my mane or...or my tail. Look at it! My tail looks like I just threw it in an ice-cream mixer! And it's still got paint in it! How could I meet someone who's like a planet's leader like that?”

Kerfuffle blinked and waited a moment, then smiled. “Now that ain't right, Miss. Your tail looks fine. The Cap’n thinks so too.”

Tami paused in her ramble. “She does?”

“I do?” Hair Trigger chimed from behind them, raising her head up from the multiband.

Happy with his deduction, Kerfuffle nodded. “Yup. Why else would she look at it and smile a little sometimes when you turn around? And she did it this morning too when you left the bridge, so don't worry.”

Smiling, the big engineer stood proudly, before wondering why Tami suddenly started blushing. Behind him, he heard the slap of a hoof on a forehead.

“Thanks, Kerf...”

“You're welcome, Cap'n. Can't always be you keeping us all cheered up.”

Satisfied with his efforts, he leaned down to grab and hug Tami goodbye, before ducking his head down to clamber into the shuttle through the airlock, leaving Trigger and Tami on the deck to glance quietly at one another. From within the small ship, they could hear the hum of it powering up as Smile got to work at the controls.

Picking up her rucksack and shoving her pistol into its holster, Hair Trigger chuckled. She reached out to clap the hippogriff on the shoulder.

“For the record, he ain't wrong.” She winked, before continuing. “Bit of paint in the tail does look cute, come to think of it.”

Tami’s wide cheeks didn't much change from their reddened state, and she held the hoof on her shoulder with a hand. “If you say so, Captain. Good luck down there.”

“You going to be fine up here on your own?”

Tami nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, don't you worry about me, I got my plans already! Nothing but a quiet orbit with plenty of sights up here and...oh! I should paint that moon! And-and-and I can see what they've got available on the streaming service from the beacon; I've missed so much out here.”

Behind Hair Trigger, Smile appeared at the airlock. “Shuttle's primed, we're good to go!”

Trigger let go of her pilot and wandered into the airlock itself. “Just keep Claudia warm for us. Enjoy the time.”

Giggling, Tami patted the music device clipped to her belt. “I will! Got a whole bunch of music to catch up on too. I'd offer to put it in the shuttle for you all but uh...maybe not your thing. Some of it's pretty, y'know, obscure or...whatever.”

Smile laughed as she set the airlock to start closing behind them. “Tami, your idea of obscure music is something that was number one for less than a month. I think we'll be fine. Take care up here.”

“I will! Have, uh, have a good job! Hope things go better than this morning!”

She saw the crystal pony and unicorn smile at her as the airlock door slammed shut and locked, its bar spinning in place from the other side to activate the pressure seal on all sides. Within a minute, she heard the gentle thump of the shuttle departing, and flew back up to the bridge to watch them on the external camera.

The sloped, gently gleaming silver shuttle turned away from the larger Claudia, taking a route away from the planet at first to get clear of the orbiting ships. Finding a way through, it began arcing back down and around to make headway for the largest continental landmass.

As soon as they were away, she turned back to the bridge at large; and by extension the whole of Claudia.

Hers.

Grabbing her paints and an easel, scrolling through her device's long list of music, Tami concluded that today, despite its start, was going to be a good day.

* * *

Today, Hair Trigger had concluded, because of its start, was not going to be a good day.

Already the banging and tossing of the shuttle on re-entry to Kavala III had knocked her hind leg off the co-pilot position consoles three times, and the stark brightness of the sun over the terminator line had spent all of the journey thus far beaming right into the shuttle's main windows. Tinted glass or not, it was making her eyes hurt.

Smile fought with the controls, muttering and sighing at its ill-configured presets. “Getting the feeling they don't have it manually piloted very much. Ack, this sun! Come on...”

Smile was normally too composed to rant, but enough irritation would draw out even her bitter, snappy tone.

Eventually, mercifully, they passed low enough into the atmosphere for the sun to dip to a merely rising state, and the bumpiness of the ride finally eased off.

“In-atmo,” Smile muttered gratefully, switching the autopilot on - after a few false starts - to carry them to the facility. “Good enough reason as any to ask Raw Deal for a shuttle if we ever get one, and not Asset for a surplus.”

Kerfuffle wandered around in the back, now free of the restraining straps used during re-entry, and cast his eyes into every nook and cranny of the shuttle's small passenger and cargo section behind the dual-seated front. It could only carry around three or four large crates. Or, apparently, two passengers and one enormous griffon.

“Don't know about that, she's a fixer-upper. Maybe give the engine cowlings some realignment, or flush out the fuel-lines. Few weeks of care ought to do it.”

Smile glanced over her shoulder. “You can't be serious. We're not buying a shuttle off someone who can't even keep its piloting software up to date.”

“Then we can update it, give her a new lease on life that ain’t just being used for less than she's worth.”

Hair Trigger threw up a hoof sharply. “All right, enough! We haven't even met her yet, and we're not buying anything. At least not this time. I'm not trusting a damn thing more today.”

She threw off her restraints and hopped her way into the back to the larger seats, getting the ice-pack out again. She leaned back, and held it against her hoof with a pained hiss of inadequate relief.

“Sure it's been a bad mornin', Cap'n, but maybe it'll-”

“No!” Hair Trigger stopped him mid sentence with a sharp look up, then threw another barbed glance at Smile. She wasn't angry at the pair, but they were the only living objects in proximity and would have to endure her built up vitriol. “Nothing more today! The rate things are going this whole thing's going to go pear shaped just to match up, I'm telling you now.”

“You think so, Trigger?” Smile turned the seat around, leaning back in it with a gestured hoof.

“I know so,” she snarled, before gasping sharply and hurling the ice-pack across the shuttle as turbulence made her squeeze it too hard onto her hoof. “I can't even get up out of bed without shit happening, then when I DO get out of bed, shit happens all the more.”

Exasperated, any true anger dying to a sardonic groan, Hair Trigger slumped in her chair, swinging her forelegs in small circles.

“Add in all the stuff going wrong, almost jumping into a damn freighter, and I'll tell you what's going to happen next with that luck. We're going to go down there, and she's not going to have any late morning coffee on hand for guests. And I'm probably going to hate her, and yet I'll need to listen to her for a long time. And then we're going to start the job and head out to pick up whatever it is she wants gotten to call a crew like us - which is of course going to be through a fucking storm en-route because why wouldn't it be at this stage?”

“I think you're being a little over the top, Capta-”

Smile didn't even get to finish, as Hair Trigger's voice suddenly swelled up again, and her hoof waving only grew in intensity.

“And then! After a long flight we're going to arrive wherever it is, we'll realise that it's actually something super illegal and morally bankrupt that she's asking us to get and we'll have to all sit there and have the usual debate about whether to do it for the money or not!”

“Captain, seriously-”

“AND THEN! Just as we thought all the bad shit had gotten done, we're going to get betrayed! Mrs Asset's going to slam on floodlights having flown ahead of us somehow, and laugh like a stars damned supervillain from a balcony flanked by flames about how this was all just a big fucking test!”

Smile's brow furrowed at the ongoing, expletive-filled rant, not even trying to interrupt the unicorn now. Hair Trigger wiggled a hoof around in a circle near her head, talking half as much at the ceiling.

“And then all hell is going to break loose, because we failed the test by not taking the illegal crap because she's probably into funding pirates, or the snakes, or some...some crap like that! And I bet one of us gets shot. And I bet it's in the ass. And I bet we'll have to go home with nothing but new scars and then I'll have to listen to Sweet Ass oh-so-nicely tell us we shouldn't go to other independents outside of her all over again. And I bet we don't even get any damn coffee before we need to make the journey back because anything going right would be too much to ask, would it?”

She sat back with a huff, forelegs crossed. And hind legs.

After a few seconds, Smile finally ventured, “You done?”

“Oh, I'm done. I am very done.”

The crystal pony rolled her eyes, turning back to the controls. “Now look, Asset didn't get to where she is by doing things like that. She's made a lot of enemies even on this world. She controls much of it, but anywhere with a city you'll never run it all, and she's the biggest target. You ought to watch out more for who wants her, that's who I'm worried about; because it's them we'll undoubtedly need to be going against in this case.”

“No coffee; shit cargo; fucking betrayed.” Trigger's voice was muffled below the hem of her hooded top.

Dropping her forelegs by her sides, Smile groaned aloud at the nearly petulant reply, rolling the shuttle upright as they descended through thick cloud.

“All right, I get it, you had a bad morning! We all did, okay? I had to do our charting costs for the Republic exit on a notepad because my laptop's broken! And it wasn't just you that got tossed around by that damn jump! If anything is going to go wrong, we're going to have to deal with a very bad mess. We're the canaries here; we're the ones getting sent to deal with something she can't show face at or risk going to. The more I read about this planet, the more I'm convinced you were right about one thing: there's going to be a twist to this. She's got four corporations alone trying to buy up stock in her mining company lately. She might be the head honcho of the planet, but she's still fighting to keep that position.”

Hair Trigger snorted, a bit put out from her own over-the-top rant. “So what, someone's going to try and pay us more, or we get sued?”

“More that whoever is going after her is going to bring a few stallions in suits to persuade us to do whatever they want instead if we don't keep aware of who we're meeting. Remember, Asset doesn't need to follow us up if we disappear. And I promise, their suitcases won't be full of contracts. Corporate warfare's a nasty business in independent systems, or planets in this case.”

“Great. You know, I think I prefer my one, actually. At least it has less pliers and broken kneecaps.”

Throughout the barbed conversation, Kerfuffle had quietly occupied the majority of the shuttle's passenger section, hunched down from the ceiling despite sitting on the deck itself. Rather than stare at the two grouchy ponies, he instead watched the window as the darkness of space began to transition to the upper reaches of the sky.

Up there, surrounding Kavala, was the Confederacy where he'd grown up. His home, the Labyrinth mining colony, was just two systems away. This whole planet he was now descending to, though, was a strange anomaly. Despite his proximity to it, he hadn't known it existed outside vague mentions of a competing mining corporation in the sector. That in itself wasn't unusual; not much information about other planets got into Labyrinth that didn’t concern relevant details.

But he knew the Confederacy, and he knew they didn’t approve of Kavala III. The border controls were one example. The lack of a through-signal from this planet to Confederate space to let him send a short range message to his sister even just two systems over was another.

Now, however, he was just beginning to hope they weren’t about to see just how far the Confederacy’s distaste with Asset's little oasis in their space extended.

* * *

After around two hours of flight in Kavala III's atmosphere, the away party's shuttle pinged that it was approaching its destination. For the last thirty minutes since they'd come in from across a dried up ocean bed they had been flying above enormous canyons of golden rock. Briefly, Smile had wondered if the lack of water had been a result of the moon's shattering long ago, but the real reason quickly became apparent. The canyons were not empty.

Instead, they were populated by the colossal wrecks of ancient ship designs. Boneyards; ship graveyards, where hundreds of vessels of all sizes had been deorbited or crashed into the canyons. Rolling the shuttle to bring it into view of the windows, Smile could see everything from haulers, to warships, to even the behemothic carcass of a luxury cruise liner broken across a turn in the largest canyon. Its skeletal remains only barely betrayed its once splendid shape. While Smile wasn't the type to recognise exact ship classes, she knew pre-Wyrm War designs with their organic, magically crafted hulls when she saw them.

They bore old colours of long dead nations; once bright, but they had long faded into worn grey from powerful dust storms weaving between the hulks far below the shuttle’s altitude, like the tide was still coming in across the coast. Only now it was a dry, weathering surge that twisted in little eddies among the exposed ribs of old carriers, or spurting out the missing top panels of a crumpled colony ship like a whale’s blowhole. Some were unintelligible piles of torn metal, where a wreck had come screaming out of the sky and fallen upon the rest. Others were held by supports embedded into the rock walls, more gently landed and shockingly preserved. Even then, she could see where many of them had collapsed over time.

The old world had ended up buried here, isolated from the decades-long cleanup that had happened on more populated planets. All this barren dryness had been from the impact of ships never intended to enter an atmosphere being struck down here from orbit to gather dust. A hundred miles of deep impact scores, blackened rock, and mountains of fragmented ships strewn through entire canyon systems, three or sometimes four wrecks deep. It had changed the entire climate of what had once been a coastline.

A telling reminder of the scale of that war.

Behind her, Kerfuffle squeezed his bulk until he could put his head sideways on the passenger door and peer with one eye through its porthole.

He looked aghast at what he was seeing.

Watching the griffon, Hair Trigger reached out and nudged his shoulder.

Well, his elbow, really.

“Chin up, big guy. Someone's gotta be the bottom of the list to help restore 'em. They'll have their time. Metal's patient.”

Kerfuffle shook his head. “S'not that, Cap'n. They've got remote vessels down there stripping them apart. Ain't right. Just ain't right. Deserve their retirement after what they saw back then. Oughta just leave those ones in peace to rest.”

Hair Trigger shuffled up to the cockpit, peering down. Kerfuffle wasn't wrong; there were small moving objects among the hundreds of wrecks littering the canyons. Flat table-like vessels were having salvaged components dropped onto their hulls by the articulated arms of vertical-take off scrapper drones - the same sort she'd once seen tear one of her family's oldest ships apart on its decommissioning.

“Y'know, I'm with Kerf on this one.”

Smile glanced again, but didn't reply. Instead, she swept the flatscreen of the pilot interface aside after the ding of a received message. The curt message displayed in small text, along with a number.

“Docking permission. They've seen us coming. Should be just around-oh my stars...”

The shuttle veered around the edge of a cloud-scraping mountain, before finally coming into sight of Corsinica Headquarters, but that was not what they saw to begin with.

The barren, rocky canyons had given impressions of an entire planet formed of nothing but crevasses, dry air, and scrap metal. The canyons formed part of a continental wall against what had once been an ocean. Beyond them, however, was something else entirely.

The five hundred metre heights they soared over suddenly dropped away, revealing much greener pastures. A pale, patchy type of vegetation perhaps, but nonetheless still fertile land sheltered from the apocalyptic drops of orbital wreckage by the high mountains bordering the canyons they had just passed. But what drew the attention of all three in the cockpit was an expanse of salt cliffs that sharply dropped away on the far side of the range. Glistening white, they reflected the enormous sun out of mirror-like pools staggered down the six mile long slopes in a strange stepped formation. Naturally formed, miles wide, and stretching down into the plains beyond the heights.

In these plains lay one of Kavala's old cities. Once evacuated before the use of its moon for superweapons, it had now been rebuilt by those seeking a life free of the larger galactic nations. To their surprise, skyscrapers already protruded, a symbol of the shocking growth that Asset's predecessor had sparked on this once lonely world. Its modern glass-panelled structures glimmered brightly in the morning sun like a host of fireflies in broad daylight, interwoven with the hot, hazy endless rows of lights surrounding heavy industry and colossal spacecraft factories. Closer to the shuttle, small villages at the city’s outskirts expanded into the green lands, up to the salt cliffs themselves, where chairlifts promised a certain hope as a holiday destination someday.

Smile gave a small smirk, muttering quietly to herself. ”Good luck getting holiday insurance risk assessment past that jump zone up there.”

Their shuttle received a harsh automated communication, demanding their adherence to the flight lanes, and Smile pulled back the sticks to fall in with scant few other small vessels that filtered in from the eastern side of the city itself. As they fell in step with the marked path, she could see much busier lines of drones at lower altitudes, filtering in and out of factories or the numerous scrapyards. Perhaps half a million population, Smile estimated, the outcome of the still ongoing boom period she'd read about, followed up by Asset's mining bringing in several thousand more representatives from worlds all across the surrounding sectors. In short order, they all had begun wanting a slice of rare metals without needing the Confederacy's tax levies. Most corporations, of course, based their operations in the orbital stations, but any serious infrastructure always had a planetary basing in some form, and this was the result.

Yet the route took them past the city itself, passing only through its one-way flight system. Corsinica Headquarters lay beyond.

Another colossal step of cliffs behind the city dropped off for another few hundred metres, casting the height above sea level of their previous route into being much higher than any of them had predicted. This one was empty, but for one building.

“And here we are, Captain.”

Hair Trigger had already been gazing in wonder at the city, but she suddenly found the cockpit area cramped as Kerfuffle squeezed up to take a look as well. Crushed in together, the trio watched the home of their client grow closer.

Cream and silver, it shone with smooth curves, overhanging the very edge of the cliff itself on long struts and wires. Rounded corridors were suspended in mid-air, while a sail-like shape sheltered it from the direct sunlight. It could have been mistaken for a combination between a trillionaire's home and a sailing ship of ancient times.

Dropping into the canyon, Smile brought the rattling shuttle up underneath the strange facility, directed by the nav-unit to a sheltered dock for small vessels. Slowing to a hovering speed, they pulled into the shade of the great sail, and eventually under the 'roof' of the dock itself, before a small drone buzzed up to direct their path onto the landing pad.

As they turned and committed to the always agonisingly slow landing procedures of an occupied dock, they could see various visiting vessels. A mining command ship riddled with radars for drone networking was just departing. Beyond that the far half of the area was dominated by the sleek curves of a large stellar yacht. Twice the size of Claudia, made of gleaming silver metal and bronze highlights, it hovered above the drop on reserve power, gangplanks running up to its smooth surfaces. The lifestyle of the rich. To her surprise, Trigger could see a few retracting doors pulled back, revealing three self-defence autocannons being maintained.

Clearly, Asset knew there were some looking to get her at any opportunity.

With a rough thunk, the shuttle dropped onto the smooth metal and spooled down its engines. Giving the hull a moment to cool, Smile hit the lock for opening the side door. Immediately a stuffy heat washed into the cooled interior, as the reason for the sail-shade became very clear indeed.

Hair Trigger didn't even get to the door before she saw smartly uniformed engineers galloping forward to fix the shuttle in place and start refuelling procedures. Even more formal was the suited security team approaching. Noting they were made up mostly of earth ponies, she lightly cursed at their height as they circled the shuttle. Opening the hatch with a hiss, she saw at their centre a dark red hippogriff; his weathered face somehow managed to twist around a vicious scar to offer a polite smile.

“Captain Hair Trigger, welcome to Kavala III. I am Security Director Garwyn, and I'll be escorting you to the Director's office. However, I will require your armaments. No weapons are permitted off of the docking area.”

“Straight to business”, muttered Trigger, as she floated out the combined weaponry of their team to lay onto a trolley that was wheeled forward. Her pistol, Kerfuffle's shotgun, and Smile's rifle were all tagged and barcode scanned, before being taken to a security office at the back of the bustling hangar bays.

Garwyn smiled again, his mouth doing strange things every time he did. “Miss Asset Margin is waiting for you. She apologises for things running behind schedule, and for the incident in orbit with that freighter losing propulsion out of its jump. It has been a trying morning for us down here.”

Hair Trigger's shoulders relaxed, a sense of strange calm overcoming her at the casual tone. “Tell me about it. Let's go.”

The team formed up around Trigger, Smile, and Kerfuffle, taking an easy pace between pads full of identical shuttles. Relatively few technicians worked on them, supported by tracked robots that followed them around and clunkily handled fuel lines or off-board generators.

Ahead of them, the doors quietly swept open to take them out of the noisy hangar and into a spotless world of smooth metal and, mercifully, functioning air conditioning. As they passed through a quiet reception toward a series of glass elevators that moved on the exterior of the building, Hair Trigger glanced at the crisp lines of the security ponies and the lavish smoothness of the curved roof and rounded doorways around them. She regarded her own frayed top with its loose hood, and muttered quietly to the others.

“Get the feeling we're under-dressed?”

“Speak for yourself, Captain.” Smile grinned, smoothing down her suit, before her face hardened. “If you don't mind, I think I should do the talking here.”

“Carry on, Smile. We're in your world now.”

The elevator doors shut around them, and the magnetic rails swept them upwards, toward the executive level.

* * *

Six hundred kilometres above the city, Claudia maintained her orbit in complete silence.

Within her quiet rooms, little moved, and one could have been forgiven for thinking a fight had broken out with the amount of belongings scattered upon the floor after the gravity fluctuations that morning.

Yet up the stairs, and into the bridge of the vessel, there was sound. Beyond its door, bouncy pop music reigned, drifting out into the quiet main street, and in the centre of it stood a concentrating hippogriff.

Tammani lightly bobbed her shoulders up and down, legs bending in time to her light humming, even as she held a paintbrush an inch from a canvas. Greys and blacks had been swept over it; forming a backing layer in the vague shape of Kavala III's moon, the same fractured satellite that shone into the bridge itself in her view.

“Hmm, hmm...somethin' I can dance to...”

Gently singing the few words she actually knew, Tami made a few light, wisping strokes. Just lines, curves, shapes...the usual, but it always brought a bit of life to her face to see it forming. Things were good, but in the quiet of the ship, her excitement for this day had started to wane slightly. Things just felt muted up here alone after a few hours, or at least felt like she wasn't making use of the opportunity she had available.

“Somethin' I can...ooh, come on. Is that all you've got, speakers?”

Turning her paint-stained cheeks, she glanced at the small speakers sitting on the nav-unit between the bridge chairs. They did her fine when her ears eventually got sore from the earphones, but they really weren’t the best quality. Tinny, and never as loud or as impactful on the beat as she'd like.

And when alone on Claudia, she really had wanted the chance to turn it up a little.

Sighing, she wandered over to the twin speakers after putting her paintbrush behind an ear, and began fiddling with the volume settings. Dropping into the pilot's seat, Tami found it to no avail, and instead idly flicked through the music device's playlist a good four times for something that'd get things moving, for something energetic enough to feel worthy of this rare home alone scenario.

“C'mon, gotta be something, I can't waste this.”

Looking around, Tami eventually paused, and then looked upwards. Her eyes fell upon the PA system's handset, and gently pulled it's wire free from the PA system with a careful, nervous tug.

It was the same kind of input plug as her music device used to connect to speaker systems.

Slowly, she began glancing from her device to the PA system's input port and back again. Rather quickly, an idea dawned on her.

Tami's lips began to turn upwards into a mad, excited smile.

* * *

If the Silver Dome ever wanted a fancy connection between its land-of-the-rich buildings, Hair Trigger thought, they'd need to speak to whoever designed Asset's Corsinica Headquarters.

In theory, they were walking through a small corridor four ponies wide with little furniture. Nothing to write home about.

Only the corridor had no walls or ceiling. After exiting the elevator and passing by a second security gate, they had entered this. A suspended glass tube of a hallway between two sections of the building arching out over the edge of the cliffs with nothing but the multiple hundred metre drop below. If it hadn't been for the criss-cross pattern of the great sail's shade reflecting off of the glass itself, she doubted they'd have even seen it around them. Above them and to their right lay the angles and curves of the patterned building holding a multitude of offices visible through arched windows. They were occupied by a frantic looking workforce nestled around several holographic displays. Drone controls, Trigger presumed, given the quantity of them in Asset’s service.

Yet she couldn't help but notice half the seats were empty. That had described much of this place. Despite its lavish construction something about it made her feel like she was walking around a place still being advertised to be bought. It felt hollow.

Truthfully, though, she was more focused on the constant battle to not wince, grunt, and limp with the long walk through this elaborate building. Her hoof was stinging and aching in alternating times. The half-broken multiband hardly completed the best look for meeting a client.

The remainder of the guards had stayed behind when they exited the hangar, leaving the trio with only Garwyn directing them. He tapped the wall of the suspended corridor.

“It's a single piece, same polymer composition that ship windows use. Not really glass no more. But I've seen it take hurricane season; always fun taking the newstarts through here when it starts swaying.”

His voice had changed. Dropping the disciplined tone, he instead betrayed an accent not too dissimilar to Kerfuffle's own drawl, punctuated by a chuckle at some memory of light hazing.

Hair Trigger smirked, appreciating the drop of formalities. “We used to drop gravity to the cargo hold while newbies were in there, asked them to go get a free-float from the storage.”

Garwyn laughed openly. “The classics. Right, game faces on. That's us here.”

Stopping for a moment to check over his own uniform, he hit the switch for the doorway at the end of the suspended corridor, which opened into what could only be described as the third level of reception in one building. Plush seating sat curved around synthetic plants, while a giant display rolled the galactic market across it in a pattern of numbers and arrows to their right, partially warped by the fish tank sitting between them and it. The room looked like it could seat twenty, but not a single person else was there. To the right of a gold embossed door at the back, a very bored receptionist suddenly perked her head up from behind a tall desk. A young pegasus, no more than her low twenties, and coloured a light pink with purple hair. Hair Trigger grinned, seeing her shocked face and frantic clicking as she attempted to close something on a monitor behind the level of the desk before anybody approached too close.

“O-oh! Oh, hello there! Would this be Miss Asset's nine o'clock?”

Garwyn didn't stop, moving over to tap the pony's desk with his talon. From the angle of his head, he clearly winked at her. “The nine o'clock at ten thirty, just typical for this morning. Still, it's a little better to get to come say hi to you, Pearl.”

She blushed, putting a hoof at her lips, before playfully tossing a pen at his chest. “Oh, you scoundrel. Yes, she is running rather late, thank you for bringing them. Ah...Captain Hair Trigger, Miss Volatility Smile, and Mister Kerfuffle, I presume?”

Smile gently laid a hoof on Trigger's shoulder, and the unicorn stepped to the side. This was the crystal pony's wheelhouse. “That would be us, Ma'am. It's a delight to be brought to her office itself, very generous of her to see us so privately.”

Pearl regarded Smile with surprise, picking up her pen again and shooing Garwyn's hand from her tabletop, before glancing at the glowing blue screen before her.

“Oh, 'us'? I'm sorry; that won't be necessary. This was booked as a one to one.”

She glanced past Smile.

“With the Captain.”

Smile's mouth twisted somewhat, and she backed off with a polite nod, leaning down to quickly whisper to Trigger. “I've seen this. She's done her research, and this is very deliberate if she knows you have a business savvy pony with you. Be careful.”

Without taking her eyes off the doorway beyond the reception, Trigger replied under her breath. “Any quick tips?”

“Just focus on what you want, and be comfortable. She'll lose a lot of time to get someone else; you've more on your side than it might seem. Act natur-”

She paused, thinking that one through.

“Maybe just the first bit.”

Trigger snorted, trotting forward. “Thanks for the warm endorsement of my personality.”

Pearl looked back up from her screen. “Captain? If you'd like to go in, the door is unlocked and on automatic.”

Hair Trigger shook out her neck, reasserted her hat, and trotted forward past Pearl. “Like pretty much everything else here, huh?”

“Quite, Captain.” The pegasus smiled sweetly. “Miss Asset is rather fond of taking as much work out of others’ hooves as possible. Your friends may wait out here.”

Nodding and approaching the door, Trigger found it swept soundlessly open in a curving motion. Each section twisted as it disappeared into the housings either side, to reveal another wall behind it that curved around to the right. Glancing back to see Kerfuffle sit down to stare at the fish, and Smile watching after her directly with a put-out look at being denied, Hair Trigger took a breath and entered.

The moment she stepped through, the door swept shut behind her just as quietly.

The sunny, open transparency of the building behind her disappeared, leaving her in the dark. And upon turning her head to look into the office itself around the curve, she realised why.

She was back in the black.

Enormous fragments of the collapsed moon arced around her, passing above her head on their endless dance. Mining drones chased them, swarming out from the bulk transports. Further out from where she stood, she could see the colossal refinery stations in orbit glowing away from their hundred meter tall heat vents.

Only after a few seconds did Trigger realise the entire office was made up of seamless video panels. A jet black floor beneath her cutting off the images where it met the walls was the first clue, and a turn of her head confirmed the route she'd come through was another gap in the virtual space-expanse. At its centre, a curved table of dark marble was scarcely visible, punctuated by a glossy red chair behind it, and two simpler black ones in front.

A red glow to her left drew her eyes, and she saw the shape of a unicorn's horn lit against the wall-panels’ dark video footage. A tall, slender mare of unknown detail and colour stood in the darkness with her back to the door, her head following a greenish asteroid as it was towed and sheared apart. Her magic was working with something on the desk: a small remote.

Seconds later, one quarter of the wall switched to display another angle. This time of a stricken mass conveyor being towed into a maintenance area.

“I was pondering, Captain, how much I ought to charge them for this.”

Her voice was smooth and rich, deeper than the lithe frame implied.

Hair Trigger remained where she was. No sense in pushing the formalities into unknowing by assuming where to trot. Instead, she just let her eyes fall on the freighter; the first chance she'd had to pause and look at the culprits.

“Well, whatever you decide, you can throw in the cost of a new platinum superconductor for the one we burnt out fixing the artificial gravity, three mugs, and a new multiband screen if you'd like to get them to pay me as well for what they did to my ship.”

Trigger glanced at her multiband's warped display. What the hell, it was worth a shot.

The mare before her broke into a short laugh. “And here I thought I asked the Captain to enter, rather than the one in the suit. I'll see what I can do. Welcome to Kavala III, Captain Hair Trigger.”

“Appreciated, and it's good to meet you too. So what do I call you? Director? I know one owner of a large business that likes that.”

Asset Margin finally turned, as the screen filling shape of the moon gave a glimmer of white light across the office and illuminated her from one side. She was a hazy cream, with a two-tone green mane. It was short, not even hanging behind her head but bunched into a tiny ponytail. The front bore two long strands that hung in front of her face from where the mane parted on her forehead. Behind them, two eager red eyes regarded Hair Trigger with a curious interest.

Asset Margin was prim and proper in her suit, but as she trotted back to her desk there was a more casual look to her step. She dropped into her comfortable looking chair, its back coming to well above her head, and folded her white shirted forelegs over her dark waistcoat. “Please, Captain. Asset will do. And my apologies for the incident in orbit. Our jump zone has little room for error, and they made perhaps the largest error I've seen here. Now, coffee? It's been a hell of a morning for me sorting it out, and from the looks of that limp on your way down the corridor here, you've had one as well. I trust not from the evasion?”

She indicated something Hair Trigger had neglected to observe: a silver urn with still steaming vapour coming from the top. At Asset's beckoning, she sat down. Clearly, the businessmare had seen the desiring look in her eyes, for she was already pouring two cups.

Hair Trigger smiled more openly. Finally, someone that got how to respond to an angry space captain's bad day. “Much as I'd love to say it was heroically pulling a crewmember away from danger during it, not quite. Meeting the CEO of an entire planet's orbital infrastructure and mining operations while limping from standing on a plug hadn't been my intended way to go about a first impression.”

Taking the cup, Hair Trigger paused to smell it and then gratefully raised it to her lips to taste. Asset rolled her eyes, and took the chance to speak as the unicorn drank.

“Having to watch my security director flirting with my receptionist in front of you wasn't mine either. You know he has a wife? Can't take him anywhere. Or, for that matter, watching said receptionist trying to buy and sell shares of competing companies from every business savvy visitor I've gotten in the past week that has to wait there more than five minutes. I'd replace her if she wasn't so damn good at her job.”

Hair Trigger raised an eyebrow over the cup. “Is she now?”

Asset floated her own cup up to knock against Trigger's, allowing herself to smirk. “Including ones belonging to the rival corp I'm looking for you to help me with.”

Rolling the still full coffee around, Hair Trigger thought for a second, before holding up a hoof. “If you would excuse me for a second, Asset.”

She turned in the seat, pointing her mouth toward the closed door.

“SMILE! Sit down!”

In the silence of the office, as Asset Margin stared with confusion at the sudden shout, both unicorns heard the sound of hooves and then the crumple of one of the seats outside being sat in heavily.

Both eyebrows remaining high, Asset perched her hooves together and chuckled. “And they say a CEO must know her employees.”

Hair Trigger waggled her eyebrows. “Just as a Captain needs to know her crew.”

Asset smiled warmly. “I think we'll get on quite well, Hair Trigger. You're refreshingly at ease when most think I'm going to be some sort of tyrant. Not all trillionaires are. Promise.”

She winked and clicked her mouth, finishing her coffee in one rather improper gulp.

“Now, I believe you'll be wanting to know more about what I'm looking for you to do. Fun as having someone to chatter to who's had an equally shitty morning is, I am rather behind schedule already and need to press on.”

The sudden curse caught Trigger off guard. The word sounded unusual from Asset’s refined tone, but the little bile below it held a genuine bitterness. Briefly, Trigger wondered just what else had happened to the mare this morning.

“Well, don't let me hold you back. You gave me coffee after all, I'm all ears to drink and listen. See what we can do for you.”

“Then let's get started.”

Asset leaned back, fiddling with her controls, until the pleasantly dark and quiet space-scene switched on half the room, instead displaying what looked like a CCTV from the roof of a tall, brown and silver metal building overlooking a heavily dusty city. To its right, a portrait of a griffon overlayed the scene - red feathered with white highlights. He looked past his prime, and was looking away from whatever covert camera had taken the photo.

To its left lay footage of a smoking wreck, looping every few seconds. Hair Trigger recognised it as one of the scrapper drones from the piled wrecks of ships over the plateau behind the city.

Asset Margin used her magic to propel her chair over to the screen, pointing to the wrecked drone. “One week ago, I had something stolen from me. You flew over the boneyard on the way here, so you've seen where much of my salvage income emerges from. Well, this drone found something a bit more valuable than just components or rare alloys. Mid-way back, boom! Goes down. I send Garwyn out, and he comes back with the report that it was shot down. And this here, I know, is the one who did it.”

She pointed to the griffon. Hair Trigger edged around the desk, staring at the huge avian and the bristling anger in his eyes.

“Doesn't much look like another man of business. More the sort of guy I'd see in the periphery stalking ships.”

Asset smiled and nodded. “Because he is. You're not the only off-worlder the corps here are hiring, Captain. That is Kreer, a pirate turned corporate wet work operative. Someone got him to do a job, and that job was stealing from me. The drone was carrying a relic from the wreckage of a Wyrm-era ship we'd found three layers down into the pile. News had gotten out we were moving in on something. Guess some rival took a shot, literally, to get it without even knowing what it was.”

Trigger rubbed her cheek, finished her coffee, and leaned on the desk to watch the smartly dressed unicorn. “All about the drones with you, isn't it? They're all I've seen everywhere I look. Might have figured it involved one of them.”

If Asset found the presumption anything but a compliment she didn't show it, spreading her hooves. “Of course, Captain. How else could we mine the field above? Far too dangerous for piloted vessels to go into the dense sections, and the cost savings from an automated, ceaseless force in tandem with this being effectively a tax haven? I fell in love with the approach. We now have over eight hundred automated platforms in service, and a high degree of autonomy within our refineries in the black. No-one on this planet even comes close to our net profits because of that.”

Hair Trigger smirked; her theory on why this place seemed so devoid of organic employees was beginning to be justified. She pointed at the griffon. “And that's why he's here. They're all out to get you when you're the top dog on this world. Because everyone outside sees you as this planet's ruler, and they want the brand.”

“Corporate warfare, Hair Trigger. It's made for ugly work. Share wars, buying up property, corporate sabotage...plenty of stallions in suits looking to persuade people away from investing in me. And their suitcases-”

Trigger leaned back in the leather chair. “-aren't filled with contracts? I'm guessing that's a saying in the business world; heard the same from Smile on the way down. So, what do you want us to do in this?”

Asset's hoof moved to tap the glass wall on the image of the city.

“Shining Reach. An inaccurate name for that dustbowl if ever there was one. It's around six hours away by shuttle. I've learned that an engine signature from the site of the crash went to a warehouse I know is used by Kreer. They took my find there, Captain. I want you to retrieve it. I can't risk using one of my own assets, not with every other corporation waiting to dive on a story of 'Corsinica attempts theft of rival's assets'. My own name would go well with the headlines, of course. Even on a planet with only a few million inhabitants that sort of thing can bring you down.”

Hair Trigger nodded slowly. She'd never really grasped the press. Living off-world all your life naturally removed you from the papers, the debates, and the politics. All the same, she knew their power. “So we're the unknown factor. Far as Kreer and his client will know, we were just any old thief. Same way he got it from you.”

“Now you're catching on.”

Asset got out of her chair, and trotted over to her desk without it to stand and face Trigger. “For this, I can pay you two hundred thousand for the safe recovery of the relic. Three hundred thousand if you can remove Kreer from the game. I don't care how. Pay him off, convince him, recruit him, kill him...whatever. As I said...”

Her eyes showed a flash of a serious, cold nature.

“Corporate warfare is ugly work. It's not impossible he might be there still.”

Hair Trigger wanted to whistle, but kept quiet. She'd expected to barter for even six figures; this was double that. After a second, deciding not to hedge her bets, she leaned over and shook Asset's hoof. “We're not murderers, Asset; don't expect a corpse coming back with us. But we'll do it.”

Asset's shake was a firm one, business standard. Beaming with delight, she clapped her hooves together and moved around the desk. After a second, Trigger realised she was being ushered to the door and got up quickly to limp her way there.

“Excellent, Captain. Excellent. Now, I have prepared a shuttle for the job, and you'll find codes to the warehouse I had my cyber defence experts, hm, acquire. Automated coordinates are installed to take you to Shining Reach, and we fished it out of the junkyard last night so it's completely off the record, even to you. No threat to your own ship being traced. I've even had Garwyn leave you all a packed lunch for the journey.”

Nearing the door, Hair Trigger paused, holding her sore hoof off the ground after an irritated glance at it. She looked back, momentarily amused. “You got your security director making lunches?”

The corporate mare only smiled. “One downside of a drone workforce is you tend to start asking people to do things the robots can't. Good luck, Captain.”

Hair Trigger nodded, pulled her cap on tighter, and walked out the door. “We'll be in touch soon enough. See ya.”

The door gently closed behind her, and Hair Trigger took a slow breath. That had gone well. She caught the eyes of Kerfuffle and Smile as they got up, the former from staring at the aquarium, the latter putting down her multiband. She grinned.

“We got ourselves a job.”

* * *

Garwyn was waiting for them by the shuttle, leaning on its engine housing and swinging a rucksack from his talons. At the sight of the ponies and griffon approaching, he nodded to the interior.

“Weapons are already stowed for you, Shining Reach preplanned in the nav-unit, and...”

He sighed, looking at the bag before tossing it to Hair Trigger.

“And packed lunch. Have fun at school. Courtesy of Miss Mother upstairs.”

Trigger caught it in her telekinesis. “Surprised you actually did it.”

“The hell do you think I am? Course I didn't. Told the new guy he had to, and I'm pretty sure he told the interns.”

The two shared a knowing smirk, as the three clambered back into the shuttle and Smile started to get it fired up. The hippogriff also tossed another device to Trigger: a small pad with a locked screen.

“Password's with four zeros, it'll have the package unlock app ready. Tap it on and off to locate the box, it'll beep like a car. Should help you find it.”

Closing the hatch over behind them, Garwyn paused, and gave them a harsher look. “No matter what she says, be careful. If Kreer's around...well, I have this scar for a reason.”

Checking her pistol over the moment she got inside, Hair Trigger holstered it and nodded. “I'd rather he not be. We'll be in and out.”

“With any luck.”

He didn't say goodbye, slamming the hatch closed and thumping its side. Hair Trigger turned back to the shuttle at large and shifted up to the front, sitting in beside Smile. Curiously looking into the rucksack, she spoke without turning her head.

“Kerf, send a message to Tami; we'll be back early in the morning, maybe half a day.”

“Sure thing, Cap'n.”

Unpacking the lunch they'd been left as the shuttle roared and lifted from the floor, Hair Trigger found multiple foil-packed objects. On them lay the name 'Garwyn'. She snorted; clearly the interns had their revenge for the passing of the buck.

Curiously, she unwrapped them, finding a small stack of tomato sandwiches. Nothing else. Trigger sighed at the lack of variety. It'd have to do. Maybe they could stop for something in the city.

Smile turned the shuttle around to face the horizon opposite the sun.

“We're free to move, Captain.”

“Make it so, Smile.”

* * *

Still six hundred kilometres above the city, Claudia maintained her orbit much the same as before.

Only now, at least internally, there was no such thing as complete silence.

The bridge beeped with the notice of an incoming message, then relayed it to the intended multiband.

That, too, beeped.

Neither was heard.

Every room, every crevice of Claudia, was part of the happiest time possible. The entire PA system thumped and blared with the most sweet-toothed, spring-stepped music that the pop genre had ever created. Lyrics of dates, kissing, holidays, fun, and playing in the sun turned all of Claudia into a gigantic party of sugar-pop, the bass sending reverberations through every deck.

She had danced in the bridge. She had danced in the main street. She had danced in the engine room, and the common room, and the shower.

Then she had moved to the cargo hold, the biggest area to fly, spin and hop from leg to leg around containers. Sliding backwards between them, or surfing the grav-cart. Music echoed in there, making it sound like a live event. Her smile had been unending, her laughter lost in the volume and tempo.

Eventually she'd not been able to keep the happiness to herself, finding a reluctant dance partner to swing around in her hands.

“Unit PATCH requests that Crewmember Tammani refrain from interfering with intended path of gryostabilisation mechanism.”

“You're so into it! You're wiggling your gyros! It's adorable!”

She leapt up, flapping out her wings to spin them both, before letting him go with one hand to let him extend out and whirl, and drawing him back him to grip with both hands.

“Warning. Excessive volume may result in tinnitus. Documenting fifth warning to record.”

“What!?”

Over the noise, the sudden buzz of the airlock snapped her attention away. Patch took the chance to quickly fly away to the main street above them both as the hippogriff suddenly squealed and bounced her way toward the door itself. Hitting the lever to open it, she found the small space between the doors soon occupied by a pressure-suited deer holding an atmosphere sealed container, with a shuttlecraft's small door locked onto the other side. The sudden volume of the music made him shake his head with shock.

“Uh...two pizzas, one garlic, one hot and spicy, with soda and Billionaire Cake? Delivery for an...Admiral Tammani? You're a...”

She snorted with laughter, quickly tabbing through her multiband to the contactless app. “I didn't think that'd actually get accepted on your site. I didn't even expect the orbital stations even did deliveries for food!”

The deer grinned. “People wait here for a spot, people want their pizza. We make it happen. Party can't wait!”

“Best. Idea. Ever.”

“I know! Enjoy, Admiral!”

Tapping her multiband onto the offered tablet with a beep, Tami scooped up her feast and gave him a sweet smile. “Thank you!”

Seeing him out, she looked up to see a very disapproving looking Patch still at the join between the hold and the corridor.

“You want any?”

“Affirmative. Unit PATCH requests possession of all sustenance to prevent imminent threat of over-consumption and stomach ache. Prevention is better than cure. Ninety-nine percent of non-privatised doctors agree.”

“Greedy so-and-so!”

Tami stuck out her tongue at him, skipping and hopping side to side on her merry feasting way to the common room.

* * *

Shining Reach had looked like a rough, dusty place on Asset's CCTV footage. She'd said it hadn't deserved the name.

Trigger, Smile, and Kerfuffle were finding that image very incorrect at the moment.

Their journey had shot them ahead of the sun's terminator line, bringing them into the cover of night. But the moment they had dropped below the clouds, a thick slurry of rain had begun pelting the shuttle. Like snow, it slapped on and dragged up over the top from the craft's velocity, leaving streaks and blurry colours of the approaching city itself below as the only things visible. A heavy storm was assaulting the city and the viewpoint of the shuttle shuddered and bucked as the not-so-aerodynamic vessel fought with the winds.

Hair Trigger instead concerned herself with the thin lines of a wireframe map of the streets on the console itself, using a hoof to drag the image around and zoom in toward the address of the warehouse. Every few seconds she would grumble and mutter as the bumpy ride made her accidentally tap and bring up the 'What's here?' window that would then take ten seconds to close and reload the map again.

“Oh fer...okay, looks like there's space to land maybe half a block away. Sheltered by a hab-building for the workers. Should be quiet.”

She shovelled another bite of the sandwich in her magic into her mouth, chewing with distaste. The fad food had been fun on Medusa when Crazy D had first brought it up, but six hours with only it to eat in stale bread was wearing on her patience.

Kerfuffle, despite the rain, was sitting behind the two front seats and staring into the clouded mess of the window, following the bright lights of the city as they closed in.

“Should be easier at night. Miss Margin sure thought this through for us, didn't she? Making sure we'd arrive in the dark.”

At the controls, Smile fought with the winds, finally bringing the shuttle to the city's own level with a whine of decelerating engines as she navigated through the storm in near darkness. She grimaced and squinted, trying to fly by numbers as much as sight. ”Clearly, she's very thoughtful to send us in during this time right now.”

The griffon nodded without an ounce of irony. “Sure is.”

Rolling her eyes, Smile dropped the nose, finally getting the ship in amongst the buildings. Shining Reach was much smaller than Corsinica: formed of tall prefabricated buildings assembled by orbitally dropped construction modules, and thus ultimately had little spread or suburban area. It looked like a full city condensed into a tiny area, maybe only a few kilometres in rough diameter. Buildings, mostly of Confederate design, were little but dark shapes in the storm, but bright neon signs and holograms lit up on their surfaces. Massive billboards showcased everything from corp logos, to financial data, to sultry ponies aiming their two frame animations at any passing ship.

Hair Trigger couldn't suppress a chuckle at the sight of Kerfuffle politely waving back at one of their animated hooves.

Slowing to the pace of most ground vehicles, Smile took the shuttle the long way around, using the blocky and top-heavy shape of the habitat building Hair Trigger had indicated as cover from the target warehouse. With the hull's flashing lights illuminating the dull concrete of an abandoned car park, she finally let the wearisome ride through the elements end with a shuddering landing on the hard surface.

Weapons ready, and donning their protective armoured vests, the trio gathered in the passenger section of the shuttle. Hair Trigger hit the release latch.

“We get there, use the code on the door, get in, beep the box and just get the hell back out. No waiting around, no taking anything we aren't contracted to. Move quick as we can, at the gallop until we're near it, okay?”

With the pair nodding, Trigger slung the door of the shuttle back and let the freezing air and slurried rain in. It swept around the shuttle, broken only briefly as the huge shape of Kerfuffle dove past and ran out into the streets, closely followed by Smile galloping alongside him. The sparkle of her coat quickly dulled in the dark atmosphere.

Slapping the shuttle closed, Hair Trigger turned to move on herself, finding the other two with their long strides already further ahead than she could reasonably catch up to, disappearing into the night. She grumbled under her breath, and began unsteadily limping and stumbling along after them in the rain.

“Quick as we can, I said...real smart today, aren't I?”

* * *

Smile rounded the corner onto the warehouse's street, her hooves slipping on the wet asphalt, until she could slow down and get a look over what was ahead.

Five seconds later, she hastily moved into cover of the alleyway she just left, and held out a hoof to stop Kerfuffle going past her. The griffon looked strangely deflated in the rain.

“Mrs Smiles?”

“Shh.”

She was aware that her sparkling coat and mane were not the easiest things to try and hide in a dark city, especially with the neon and colour fifty metres above them. Holding her hood around her head, she peeked around the corner.

The street itself was actually more of a promenade, laid against a river rather than a coastline - if you could even call it a river. The edge opposite her went to what looked like a forty foot drop before the filthy water even started. From the looks of it, the unusual drop was simply to keep the city level with its modular construction on higher ground elsewhere. The city was unrelentingly flat at ground level.

Smile had always hated places like this. For all it made financial sense, even she could appreciate a living area that didn't look like it was made out of a mathematician’s wet dream for uniformity. Idly, she wondered how Asset's predecessor had even gotten Confederate construction materials onto a planet the Confederacy denied access to.

Yet right now, her true focus was on what was ahead through the harsh rainfall.

Down the street, under the dull orange glow of street lamps, two hover-vans were offloading goods to the very warehouse they'd expected to approach. An enormous shutter door, coloured red, was still dropping down behind them, with a dozen ponies and griffons dragging the last boxes up the ramps and inside. Others were shutting up the vehicles.

“Looks like they're about ready to leave.”

Above her, Kerfuffle's entire head poked out from around the corner until the crystal pony reached up and nudged him back by a few inches, her eyes not leaving the convoy.

“Mrs Smiles, ain't that the griffon the info on the shuttle had?”

“Smile. And what? Where?”

She caught Kerfuffle's hand about to point around the corner, and saw the red plume come into view. Kerfuffle had to have spotted it from higher up.

Kreer moved harshly, his head whipping back and forth to stare with beady eyes at anyone in the immediate area. A bulletproof vest was tightly wound on his barrel-like torso, and Smile could spot a squat, vicious-looking carbine on his back - more of a cut down service rifle than a light weapon.

Under the flashing of signs above the dark warehouse - itself a wide and thickly walled metal building - Kreer banged the side of one of the vans, giving it the signal to flex its engines and roar off into the space above the river. Rain spray and litter from the pavement blew up in cyclones around it. Soon enough the second one joined it, the whine of hover-pads deadening behind the scathing rain as soon as it dropped out of sight.

The sound of hooves behind Smile alerted her to the Captain approaching, and she waved frantically for Hair Trigger to slow down.

The unicorn had her hood up over the ever-present hat, but it already looked soaked through. Cautiously, she crept forward to look around the corner, filling in the gap below Smile as all three faces peered at the red griffon.

“Ah, crap,” Trigger muttered, watching Kreer move off with two pony guards, one a pegasus and the other a unicorn. The three moved to a metal set of stairs fastened to the side of the building that let to the upper levels of the warehouse, disappearing inside to the offices upstairs.

Dropping back into the alleyway, Hair Trigger fought to urge to whack her head off a broken drainpipe.

“I've already had my fill of brutal wet work operatives with rifles lately, so of course he had to be here, didn't he?”

Kerfuffle looked at the street again, then shrugged. “He's going upstairs. Maybe what we need is downstairs on the main floor? Most things in warehouses back home were. And we don't often go in Claudia's cargo bay.”

Checking her rifle, Smile wiped the water from her face and held it under her body to shelter the mechanism. “You know, you could be right. We have the code after all. In. Out. Before they even realise someone's come inside. Like you said, Hair Trigger. And the shuttle's just a few minutes away.”

Water dripping from the brim of her hat, Trigger looked about as downright miserable as she ever had today, before finally shrugging. “Well if you're wrong, it'll be you dealing with Patch's resupply demands to heal us. Let's go.”

All three hustled out into the rain, sticking close to the porches and overhangs of the other warehouses leading up to their target.

Mid-way there, Hair Trigger and Smile paused behind a low brick wall, keeping an eye ahead. The warehouse’s heavily misted windows let them see occupied rooms with lights and the faint shadows of moving bodies. Below them, thin vents and another layer of half smashed windows indicated the bottom level itself was still in the dark. There weren't any obvious cameras. Indeed, if it weren't for the lights above, it would be easy to think it abandoned.

There was a worryingly familiar feeling of hidden danger about this to Hair Trigger. The quiet darkness of a grey warehouse in a shady part of town felt all too similar to a rescue from a certain building not too long ago. One she preferred to not think too much on.

After a couple more seconds, Trigger realised the rain had stopped, only to look up and see a gigantic wing held above her head, with the other over a similarly bemused Smile.

Kerfuffle hunched between them, as subtle as a rhinoceros hiding behind a lamppost, his wings flitting in the wind as she stared down the street at the objective.

“Appreciate it, big guy. But little time to hang around.”

She darted forward again, delighted in that it only took her a couple seconds of thrashing her hind legs in the air to get over the wall (and trying to ignore the graceful hop and roll Smile used to get over in one bound) before cantering as fast as she dared to the warehouse itself. A service door was facing them from its front, and Hair Trigger pressed her body into the metal of the wall beside it, squeezing herself in tight to get out of view from the windows above. Her heart was thumping hard enough enough that her head pounded as much as her hoof. The adrenaline from the moment was nulling the pain, as they neared a hostile area.

“Always for the big pay days...” she muttered, as Smile and then Kerfuffle fell in beside her.

Above her head, at the height a minotaur would design something, she could see a touchpad with a fading glowing panel. It read 'LOCKED', with a key slot just below it.

“Kerf, you're up.”

“Aye, Cap'n.”

Shimmying out from the wall, the griffon shuffled up and drew out the code they'd been given. Imprinted on a small card, it slid into the reader easily.

The panel, however, flashed a 'DENIED' at them.

Hair Trigger swore, and Smile, behind her, held her rifle ready while looking over her shoulder. “Come on, you two; can't hang around here.”

“Workin', Miss...” Kerfuffle muttered and tried again.

'DENIED'

“Aw hell, they must have changed it.” Trigger bumped the side of her head on the wall, wishing Tami were down here with her tech-kit right about now. “Any ideas?”

“Hang on a minute, Cap'n.”

Kerfuffle hadn't taken his eyes off the reader, and then traced them to the door itself. Scratching the wet surface of his beak with a talon, he started running his other hand around the frame. The metal wall was flash-welded on, likely by a gigantic line-beam for rapid construction on new worlds. But to insert a reader, they'd have had to make a hole into the original template. He could see the newer welds surrounding the reader from where they'd cut into the prefab material.

That gave him an idea.

Grasping either side of the reader, he made a low grunt, tugging back sharply, the often underappreciated musculature usually hidden underneath his feathers flexing and powering through the movement. The entire reader itself popped out of its socket, attached by wires that ran to a hollow between the wall’s outer and inner layers.

“The hell?” Trigger breathed as she watched the griffon work. “Kerf, you sure we-”

“Hold this, Cap'n.”

A second later, she found herself in possession of a brand new card reader, while the griffon fought to fit his head into the gap itself. After a second or two, he emerged and dug into his toolkit for a screwdriver. Uncomfortably pushing his arm within the gap, he started adjusting things hidden from view, switching tools a few times.

Upstairs, the sound of hooves on metal became louder, and they heard an outer door open.

“Kerf...” Trigger hissed, drawing her pistol in her magic, while Smile aimed at the bottom of the stairs that Kreer’s goons had gone up.

“There we go.”

Taking the reader back from her, he re-inserted it into the wall and tried the card again.

'OPEN'

The reader bleeped, and there was a sound of the door's lock clunking back into its housing. Without much waiting, Hair Trigger pushed past him and threw herself inside. Smile followed, pausing to tug the griffon after her; he'd stopped to correct and smooth down the angle the reader had gone back in at.

“But-”

“Not important, come on!”

Shutting the door behind them, they hid down in the darkness of the warehouse, finally free of the heavy rain, to let their eyes adjust. Outside there was the brief sound of hooves - of someone having a smoke where they had just been.

“Too close,” Smile whispered, squinting to see through the blackness. With only a hint of light passing through the misty windows above them, she could only get a vague sense of the piles of crates, shipping containers, and walkways all around them. “Hope Tami's got Claudia ready if we need to make a break for it at this rate.”

Trigger nodded. “Just take it easy, they haven't spotted us yet. Nicely done, Kerf.”

Grinning widely, hidden only by dint of the darkness, Kerfuffle bashfully shrugged his shoulders. “Not a problem, Cap'n. And don't worry.”

As the other two began to creep forward, he looked up through the skylight, past the rain clattering on its suffering glass.

“Miss Tami's good at what she does. She'll be all ready at the controls if we need her.”

* * *

Objects floated gently in the air around Claudia's cargo bay, spiralling and lightly bumping against one another before taking different routes. Art canvases floated past empty pizza boxes and the cases of already-watched movies. The PA system broadcast the calming sounds of the cosmos, a relaxation suite of soft strings and gentle percussion, designed for those who loved to stargaze.

Upside down, with her arms, legs, and wings splayed out as she idly let her body go wherever it wanted, Tami concluded with the most content-of-content smiles that there was no better way to spend a food coma than floating in zero gravity.

Eventually her multiband beeped, and her eyes sprung open. Gazing down at her forearm, she saw with all delight that her download had finished.

The HugePilot remix of one of her favourite songs had released even as she'd eaten. Slow and heavily firewalled connection to the greater SpaceNet or not, she'd picked it up on the spot.

The most dance-worthy, heart-pumping, fun-sung, mood-lifting, high-tempo, happy-causing, and happy-sounding song she owned, remixed by an artist known for amping up the bass and momentum of tracks into intense, cheerful bursts of skin-shivering beats?

Now she could be in zero gravity, with a brand new remix, with max volume over the whole ship's PA system?

As she transferred it to the PA system's stored buffer and hit play, she felt herself tense up (and slightly squeak) in anticipation.

Tami knew nothing could ruin this day now.

* * *

The interior of the warehouse was as dark as they'd expected and hoped.

They’d come in on an elevated side section to the main floor, behind a set of railings that divided it from a large concrete area. After letting their eyes adjust, it had become clear that Garwyn's device would be essential for locating the box.

The place was filled to the brim.

Shipping containers were stacked beside wooden crates. Metal strongboxes lay in formation beside loose piles of electronics and junk. Rows of shelving passed under metal walkways that criss-crossed above them, impossible to see in any detail. They led around to the occupied room, which sat directly above the main shutter door to where the vans had departed.

Yet aside from the hum of a few automated dust sweeping robots shuffling around the main floor, their red lights blinking gently, it was motionless.

“Do it, Smile.” Hair Trigger whispered the words, and kept her eyes on the piles of boxes.

Beside her, Smile tapped the key code into the tablet and hit the giant 'unlock' button on the touchscreen. For a second, nothing happened, and then - distantly - they heard a small magnetic lock being disabled from somewhere in front of them.

Smile tapped it to lock the container once more, and again the sound echoed in the dark warehouse.

“Louder than I'd like. Let's not use it too much.”

Moving down the ramp onto the main floor, Hair Trigger limped her way toward the closest pile of boxes to the direction of the sound. She had her pistol back in its holster, not trusting the glow of telekinesis. She kept angling her head up, watching those lit windows and hearing deep voices from behind them. The shuffle of her hind leg and the clumping of the big griffon behind her were wearing on her nerves. She felt vulnerable. Exposed. In theory, they were standing in the open, were it not for the darkness.

“Again.”

Smile tapped the button and Hair Trigger heard the sound to her left. Turning, she stumbled around some cardboard boxes, spotting a grav-sled sitting near the entrance.

“Think this is it. Once more...”

A heavy briefcase atop the grav-sled clunked.

“Got it! Unlock it, let's get it and get the hell out of here, and then-”

The sound of metal-on-metal grabbed her attention and she lit her horn, swinging her pistol up to the rafters. Smile dropped the tablet and lay her rifle over a box, while Kerfuffle's shotgun was held loosely in his hands.

Up top, on the walkways, they immediately saw the blinking lights of a fire-prevention drone making its way around on patrol. The clunky, hard square machine was, other than the lights, difficult to see, but the chugging of its tracks on the unsteady metal was ringing out in the quiet of the building and making its route obvious. It had to have been idle when they came in, only starting its automated patrol now.

“Shitting...” Hair Trigger muttered, shaking her head and holstering again. “Smile?”

The crystal pony, holding her clothing around her gleaming body as best she could, tapped once more, and the briefcase popped.

Daring to light her horn just a little, Hair Trigger lifted the top as she and Smile finally got a look at what they'd been sent to collect.

Inside was foam casing, designed to hold a single object nice and still. At its centre was a clear polymer bottle. Thickly reinforced, with a triple lock neck and several warning signs on it in languages Hair Trigger didn't recognise. All that was clear in any format she could understand was a name.

“Methylphosphonic dichloride,” she muttered.

Beneath it, a white crystalline substance filled the bottom third of the container - so fine that it almost looked like sand.

The container looked old, though. Very old.

“The hell is this?” she muttered, as Smile tapped on her multiband, bringing up a translator app, and swept it over the bottle.

Smile went rather pale as she searched for the meaning of the translated words.

“Stars above...”

Behind them, Kerfuffle looked back over at the exclamation while Hair Trigger turned to the crystal pony. Volatility Smile slammed the briefcase closed, and hit the lock for it rapidly.

“Smile? Again, the hell is this? What are you-”

Smile shook her head sharply enough to quieten even the Captain.

“That's Wyrm-era language. Warnings for toxicity. Extremus level.”

Her wide eyes betrayed the seriousness before her harsh tone even emerged again.

“That stuff is the catalytic mixing agent for chemical contagions, Trigger. Asset must have dug it up from the old boneyard - some of those ships must have come down from the weapons testing when the moon was destroyed.”

“...fuck.” Hair Trigger breathed the word with more meaning than any irritation-induced curse had held all day.

Smile turned away from the container and ran a hoof through her mane, even under her hood. She had expected an ancient relic, maybe. Some form of reaction formula or document on creating materials, or even just an expensive piece of history.

She had never expected this.

Behind her, Hair Trigger eyed up the briefcase with distaste. Everything about today had been plunging her mood deeper, and now this was one hell of a moment to just want to be done with it all. She heard Smile approach again, and the crystal pony's smooth tone came to her ears.

“They're fighting over the means to create a chemical weapon, Trigger. This is more than just profit now.”

“I know...”

Kerfuffle shook out his shoulders anxiously, more than uncomfortable with this. Solid, physical things he knew, but unseen, lethal chemicals made his skin crawl. He shook his head. “Ain't right, Cap'n. Stuff is buried for a reason.”

“I know!”

Thumping her hoof on the boxes beside the briefcase, Hair Trigger looked up sharply.

“I know, all right? So here's what we're going to do.”

She turned to the others, a grim look upon her face. “We take it. We steal it like she wanted, and then we toss this thing in the closest and deepest ocean we can find. We get to Claudia, and then we get the hell out of here. Maybe we tell her we got chased off, maybe we tell her it's been destroyed. Maybe we rat her to the Confederates. I don't know yet. But we're sure as hell not giving this to her or whoever she's taking it from. Shit...damn her! Damn that smiling, suit-wearing bitch! I have had it today!”

Her hoof thumped a second time. “After everything that happened today already, I am not going to be used like this!”

A smooth voice broke through the quiet warehouse.

“Oh I assure you, you were not being used, Captain.”

Floodlights thumped, and blinding white light seared into the trio's eyes. All three yelled aloud at the intensity, their night vision ruined. Hair Trigger whipped her head away with a hiss, before prying an eye open and feeling her blood boil.

The vague shape of a pony stood out between the beams upon a walkway high above. Either side of her, two fiery laser weapons sparked and erupted into life with deathly hums, aimed by two figures.

Kreer and Garwyn.

Between them, with an amused chuckle, Asset Margin stepped forth into the light and winked. “But you were being tested.”

Squinting, looking up, Smile winced and shielded her eyes with a forehoof. Her rifle rested in the other across a box, but the sight of those two burning energy weapons pointed their way kept her from aiming it. Hearing the Captain's low growl to her right, she desperately hoped Hair Trigger could keep a lid on that temper.

Asset looked down on the three of them with absolute smugness. The CEO rested her head back in a casual tilt to raise her nose at the crystal pony's look. With a short chuckle, her glare returned to Hair Trigger.

“And I'm sorry to say, but with that little declaration there, Captain...you failed.”

Smile kept her hoof on her rifle, but didn't dare raise it. Hair Trigger's teeth were bared, and Smile could see the unicorn's body starting to tense up. There was an explosion imminent, if Hair Trigger got to talk.

Volatility Smile quickly stepped in. “There was no theft, then.”

“Correct!” Asset's voice was chirpy.

“And it was all a lie to see if we were the kind who wouldn't care what it was? To see who we really are?”

Asset's mouth twinged up in amusement. “I prefer the term 'observed interview', myself. After all, I can't just talk openly about this in a publicly traded office now, can I? By the way, I suggest you don't move too far; I assure you, these two brothers are quite accurate.”

Hair Trigger's anger was boiling over. Her teeth hurt from clenching them, and her hoof throbbed as hard as it ever had that day. The sight of that smirking face didn't help. The crystal pony and griffon with her could see her whole face turning into a barely held back rictus mask of absolute fury starting to mount up.

Hastily, Smile kept talking. Anything to avoid being gunned down by lasers for another few seconds. “I suppose we should have guessed by all the automated things in here.”

Surprised, Asset's eyebrows raised, and she looked at the dust-drones on the ground level and the fire-prevention robot whirring slowly behind her on the walkway. Asset made a neutral sound, as though realising they could have been a clue for the first time, before giving a dismissive shrug, permitting Smile to go on.

“And this is why you wanted a shuttle for us, so your shiny yacht we saw could overtake us. I mean, I can't deny that it's impressive. Maybe if-”

Asset shook her head, the two strands of hair in front of her face swaying around as she raised a hoof with a single-shouldered shrug and interrupted.

”Disappointing is the word I would choose, Miss Volatility Smile. Please, I'm not in it for negotiation or re-runs at this point. Actually, I'm quite dejected that it turned out this way. A crew known to work with Sweet Alyssum? Whose ship transponder when traced on the black-navs even included Countess Karmelita's territory? Who somehow got into and out of prison in Avalon within a day through some obviously organised influence? For goodness sake, I thought I'd struck gold with you lot. I had such a nice contract ready for the delightful materials industry I've uncovered in this old place. What a pity.”

Kerfuffle shook his head sternly, the shotgun held at the low ready, but with a very serious look to his normally soft eyes. “Sorts stuff they were testin' here back then ain't delightful, Miss. Ought to be forgotten. Ain't right. Lot here ain't right. Been saying it all day.”

She actually rolled her eyes at him.

“It's right by me so long as they pay me and don't use it on my planet. And believe me, on the side, I have happened to wind up with a very interested buyer already. I just needed a crew off the record to transport it. Such a pity that I'll need to put out another job offer.”

Briefly, Asset ceased her conversationalist tone, leaning her forelegs on the railing of the walkway and glancing down. Her comfortably pleased grin turned to Hair Trigger.

“Captain...you've been unusually quiet. ”

One of Hair Trigger's eyes was larger than the other, twitching and shaking with her solid facial muscles. Her whole mouth was twisted out of alignment, as she felt something deep down fire up with the force of a supercarrier's reactor going critical.

“After all, you seemed so talkative and up-front before; so very...expressive. Before we see this sorry business done, don't you have anything to add?”

Hair Trigger's baleful gaze suddenly whipped up toward her so quickly that Asset actually recoiled an inch or two from the bloodshot eyes.

“Yes! I! Do!”

Pursing her lips, Asset turned sideways and waved a hoof near her ear.

“Oh? And that is-”

Hair Trigger instead whipped toward Smile, her entire head moving on every word.

“I FUCKING CALLED IT!”

The meaty pistol in Trigger’s holster flew out in a spark of magic and fired a single, completely blind shot toward the walkway, guided by nothing but sheer anger.

It was an impossible shot. An impossible chance. But she hadn't once dared think it wouldn’t work. Today had been just too much of an infuriatingly horrendous day for her to dare let one bullet not do exactly as she WILLED it to do.

The round whipped past Garwyn's mane and slammed into the fire-prevention robot passing behind him, where it ricocheted off the pressurised extinguisher on its chassis with a sharp ping of metal and buried itself into the side of Asset's flank.

Eyes bulging wide, her smug tone turning to a high pitched shriek of shock and pain, the composed mare went down in an undignified heap, her griffon and hippogriff guards momentarily too stunned to even realise what had happened.

And behind them, an eerie whistling sound suddenly grew louder.

“Oh...” Garwyn's eyes widened as he saw the gas venting from the extinguisher and heard the high pitched sound growing louder.

“Shit!” His brother finished for him.

The entire walkway exploded in foam and mist, drowning out Asset's thrashing, cursing and furious moaning. There was a sharp crack as the robot's lithium batteries detonated, sending a plume of sparks high above the foaming cloud. A deafening alarm bell sounded as the warehouse’s fire system kicked in. Seconds later, sprinklers activated all over the building, bringing down a monsoon that created a damp, vision-obscuring mist in all directions.

“And fuck that dirt-shit you called coffee this morning too!”

Hair Trigger glared into the mists, seeing red, then turning to the others, finding their bewildered stares looking between her and the walkway, which was rapidly disappearing behind a cloud of foam.

“Well? Let's get the hell out of-”

A red beam lanced out of the white and grey clouds, striking the ground near Hair Trigger. The intense delivery of light and heat exploded the concrete into shrapnel; and Trigger felt bits of stone ping off of her armour and skull.

“Get down, Cap'n!”

A claw reached out and tugged her away - a second beam slapped down and left a second six inch crater of erupted stone on the floor. These were nothing like the precise needles of energy fired by Cascavel's rifle. These were raw and wasteful blasts; a crude imitation of plasma armaments for those who couldn't acquire them. Hair Trigger could hear the weapons’ exposed dynamos hissing and sparking in the damp from somewhere ahead of her.

Out of it all, they could hear Asset's voice frantically screaming at someone to 'get down there and kill them', followed by an impressively blue-collar series of curse words and a groan of pain.

Trigger, Smile, and Kerfuffle fled across the width of the warehouse, Smile stopping only to grab the briefcase en-route. Three more snaps of the laser weapons zapped out of the depths of the mist. Guided only by the sound of their targets' hooves, the shots flashed wildly by. One of them flared when it struck and melted a steel railing inches from Kerfuffle’s side.

Above them, a gigantic red shape loomed down, the laser rifle in his hands charging up with a fierce glow.

Hair Trigger gasped, then waved frantically. “Scatter!”

Diving to every side, they heard Kreer's shot blast apart a crate behind them, throwing a cloud of fabric and textiles into the air.

Smile stumbled on her hooves, running directly into the shelving that bordered the way out. She'd gone further into the warehouse in her rush to get out the way, losing her sense of direction in the mist. Hair Trigger fell in beside her and quickly gave her a shove to dodge the chasing griffon's second attack. The shelving's foundation exploded, its supports collapsing and bringing the three layers of stacked goods crashing down. Rolling on her side, trying to get her rifle up and on target, Smile saw Hair Trigger trip on her hurt hind-hoof and look up at the shelving coming down.

“Aw, crap...”

The resigned groan gave way to the captain hurriedly curling up, hooves over her head, her horn lighting up just as she was buried under half a ton of broken wood and metal.

“Trigger!” Smile cried aloud, giving up her aim to try and rush forward to help the stricken unicorn. A hot flare of red streaked down her side from above, scalding and stinging her exposed coat on a near miss, and she again threw herself away, scrambling madly to get behind a wooden crate.

“Find cover, find cover!” she muttered to herself, bunching up behind it.

Two seconds later, a blast of red energy tore right through the crate, missed her face by inches, and blew a hole in the ground behind her. She stared at the gap in the crate with wide eyes.

“Find better cover!”

Smile got her sore legs powering forward again, deeper into the warehouse, chased by the flying attacks every few meters until ducking into the rows of shelving still standing near the back. Fighting down a sense of panic at being chased by a flying, mostly unseen assailant, she galloped down line after line looking for anywhere she could try and wait in ambush. The sprinklers were making it into a nightmare, blurring her vision as if she were lost in an urban fog. The warehouse felt twice the size it actually was, and yet claustrophobic all at the same time.

She yelped as another laser whipped through the shelving to her left, followed by a semi-automatic burst of them that had her diving to the ground to let them go above her head. With a crunch of metal, she felt a hard impact on her ribs and cried out in pain.

“What the...?”

She'd landed on pipes. Two pipes that gurgled and throbbed with running water. Following them to the side, chasing the sound, she saw a large tank against the back wall - open-topped with a rain filter draining into it. It was a cheap, crude reservoir for the sprinkler system the size of a business class garbage container, only five times longer to reach all the outlet pipes that led up to the roof.

Hearing a griffon's weight landing on the shaking shelves above, Smile didn't bother thinking and threw herself up and into the chilly water, falling beneath the surface with a practised breath.

Seconds later, that same griffon landed heavily on the concrete where she had just been, crunching some fallen debris below him.

Kreer shouldered his rifle, feeling the warm haze of the dynamo's energy built up inside the welded housing of the rifle tingling his cheek. His feathers felt slick and drawn under the mist of the sprinklers, and his eyes stung as red as his body and rifle from the foam of the extinguisher drone. Hard-faced, he swept the weapon’s hissing, steaming muzzle around each shelving corner, straining to look for the telltale sparkle of a crystal pony. Stalking the rows, his side to the reservoir, his big griffon eyes stared and scanned for any motion. The unicorn was done for, and he trusted Garwyn to handle the other one.

This was the moment he lived for: the hunt. The prey running. It appealed to his baser instincts to hear the panting as their hearts raced. Now he saw she had disappeared, and grinned as he looked at the reservoir.

“Really...come now,” he purred, flapping his wings to lift up and point his rifle down at the water. The pumps working to feed the sprinklers were making the surface thrash and churn. Starting at one end, he started to fly down it, always watching.

He hadn't thought for one moment that a pony could swim as fast as this one could.

At the opposite end, much farther than he'd anticipated, the drenched form of Volatility Smile powered out of the water and rolled onto an inspection plate at the top of the tank itself. The fluid, smooth motion of an athlete used to having done this a thousand times. She came to lie on her belly, rifle already aimed, its water-resistant seals holding up as they always had.

Kreer only had time to open his beak in bewilderment, before the thin crack of Smile's rifle echoed in the vapour fog and flashed its report over the water.

The round slammed into the dynamo on the side of his rifle, shattering the casing and sending a spark of scalding energy across his face. The smashed dynamo spat red arcs and streams of energy in all directions, with an unsettling - and intensifying - whine of uncontrolled power. The weapon shook and rolled in Kreer's grip, its unstable systems powering out of control, and he hastily tried to hurl it away.

Smile watched from down her sights with a squint as the laser rifle exploded in mid air, four feet from Kreer, the loud crack of the explosion drowning out his panicked scream. Regaining her vision from the blinding crimson flare she saw him lying on the floor, moaning and incapacitated.

“Still got it.”

She allowed herself a small grin, before dragging her tired and drenched body off the reservoir and toward the sounds of a vicious fight nearby.

* * *

Dust from shelving and wood splinters were dry and prickly in Hair Trigger’s mouth, almost as uncomfortable the rest of her complaining body.

With her muscles protesting, she got her forelegs under the metal panel she'd pulled over herself to protect against the collapsing metal shards of the broken shelf stands and pushed. It scarcely moved. The frame had protected her from most of the weight, but it was pinning her down.

“C'mon...you stupid...” Gritting her teeth, twisting until she got her shoulder against it, Trigger heard the clatter of fragments falling off the pile. Through her hazy vision, she saw droplets of water falling down and crawled her battered body toward them. One foreleg at a time, Hair Trigger pulled herself from out under the rubble that had almost crushed her.

The moment her top half was out, she felt a talon grasp the back of her hooded top with aggressive intent.

“Oh, gimme a fuckin' minute heeeere!”

Her deadpan was driven into a sharper cry on the last syllable, as she was dragged out and hurled head over flank into a second shelving unit. Careening through the cardboard boxes, she fell out on the other side in time to see Garwyn whip around the stands.

Half the hippogriff’s body was covered in a white stain from the foam, and he'd lost his rifle somewhere in the explosion. His hands were balled up, and he was using his wings to help him balance to fight. The crooked scar on his face twisted his grin in strange ways.

“This oughta be a bit more fun than the single shot I expected.”

Hair Trigger spat out a wad of dust and blood, finding her lip split. She began pulling herself to her hooves, lowering her head to get her horn between him and her. Her weary grin seemed to catch him by surprise.

“C'mon then. Been looking for something to take some aggression out on after today. Got plenty of it stacked up.”

Garwyn chuckled. “Mildly annoyed then? Not a lot of room to stack it.”

Trigger's grin disappeared on the spot.

“Oh you fucking-!”

She never finished her sentence, charging forward with bared teeth and ducking below his awkwardly descending punch. Throwing her every bit of weight into his thighs, her horn careened into Garwyn's armoured stomach. The pair collapsed in an untidy heap together, with the smaller pony clambering and lashing out with her hooves toward his face, straddling over his chest to stomp down again and again.

The delicious wave of satisfaction every time she connected drove her to draw up her hoof time after time - striking down hard - until she suddenly felt his whole weight shift.

“Sneaky little shit!” he cried out, his face already bruising from Trigger's unexpected dive, as he used his wings to hurl his whole body around and grab her mane.

She yelped at the sharp tug, her whole head yanked backward. She reached with her hooves to knock and fumble with his tightly clenched fingers, wrestling back and forth, her hat flying off her head.

Below her, Garwyn drew back his other fist and sent it crunching into Hair Trigger's exposed underbelly, knocking the lighter pony clean off of him. Keeping hold of her mane, he dragged her by it, and spun to slam her into the fallen stack of shelves again, then back around in the other direction into the ledge up to the way the crew had entered the warehouse.

Hair Trigger yelled and snarled, eventually wrapping her forelegs around his arm and pulling herself up to sink her teeth into his wrist. The hippogriff gasped, letting go before she could break the skin.

Rolling away, clutching her belly, Hair Trigger got back to her hooves, and faced him down with a glowing horn. For a moment they stood off, both panting.

“Had enough?” He winked, rubbing his wrist. “You look ti-”

The wooden crate Hair Trigger had tugged from the level above slammed into the back of his head.

Rushing forward, Hair Trigger didn't give him time to get back up before leaping at him again, hooves flying and her throat emitting an angry cry. His outstretched talons met her as the hippogriff floundered and thrashed. With hoof and hand they tussled and rolled, a brutal fight on the concrete. His hand caught her nose and set it bleeding - before she head-butted his mouth. His talons, blunter than a full griffon's, raked at her back until she jabbed a hoof under the jawline and into his throat.

Eventually, however, she felt his weight again surge up, and none of her strength could stop it.

Garwyn got a grip around her body, harshly lifting and slamming her down to the concrete. Hair Trigger made a strangled gasp and moan, the air being crushed out of her, fruitlessly pulling at the talons gripping around her neck.

He picked her clean off the floor and hurled her against the safety railings near the door out of the warehouse. Their metal poles dug into her back, and she dropped to the ground.

Twice more he picked her up, his arms keeping her swinging hooves at length, before dropping or punching her down.

Lying on her stomach, pain and dizziness washing over her whole body, Hair Trigger just groaned.

Bleeding across his face, Garwyn stood up in the damp fog of the sprinklers and spread his arms wide. A cocky, victorious stance. “It's over, short-stack. What can I say? There's always someone bigger than you.”

Trigger rolled onto her side, stared past him for a moment, and grinned.

“Got that right.”

Garwyn's momentarily confused look was quickly covered by an enormous taloned hand wrapping around his neck and mouth, muffling the shocked yelp, before he was yanked clean off of his hooves.

Kerfuffle hurled the security director to the side, slamming the much smaller hippogriff against the concrete wall with enough force to shake loose a cloud of dust. A second later, his head was crashed through the same crate Trigger had dropped. Bodily thrown, he smacked against the railings beside the unicorn, staggering back into a sweeping club of the griffon's forearm that actually back-flipped the hippogriff onto his stomach.

Making a staggered whimper of pain, Garwyn offered no resistance as he was effortlessly picked up off the ground, and found himself being hoisted up.

The last thing he saw before he went to sleep for the rest of the day was a door approaching at high velocity.

* * *

Outside the warehouse, the two ponies who'd been told to wait and cut off any escape had finally decided they should head in and help out. Assault rifles ready, they galloped up to the door, ready to flank and kill anyone they didn't expect to see.

They certainly didn't expect to see the door come to them.

Propelled off of its hinges by a deeply unconscious hippogriff, the metal entrance slammed into both of them and knocked all three of Asset's employees through the railing of the door's steps to crash in a heap on the rainy street.

Poking his head through remaining frame of the doorway, Kerfuffle looked either side with the same sort of innocence as a foal about to cross the street.

“Looks clear, Cap'n!”

Weaving back and forth behind him, Hair Trigger pulled her hat back onto her pounding head, getting it mostly straight. She tapped her bleeding lip, feeling like she had eight hooves to keep track of. “Nothing much is clear at the moment, big guy...”

The sound of hooves on concrete made her spin, only to see a familiar and soaking wet crystal pony galloping over from inside the building. After a moment, Volatility Smile tossed a familiar pistol to Hair Trigger. She had the briefcase on her back, taking a glance as she sighed and spoke.

“What was that about us leaving immediately?”

Looking up at Kerfuffle, Hair Trigger nodded - and then quickly regretted the motion.

“Fine, let's-”

A surge of red energy blasted into the doorframe, making the reader Kerfuffle had repaired spark and fall cleanly off. All three turned on the spot to see the red griffon limping toward them through the warehouse, aiming his brother's rifle for another shot.

“Oh, for fu-...come off of it!” Hair Trigger exclaimed, wishing she had the time to roll her eyes. The trio leapt off of the smashed hole in the railings, pursued by two more deadly blasts.

The moment Trigger landed, she felt her whole body drop below her. Her hoof, still sore from the early morning, slipped out from under her. Her head felt like it was everywhere. Groaning, she felt a clamping tightness at her stomach, until realising it was her being picked up.

“I got you, Cap'n.” Kerfuffle swept the smaller unicorn up, and then after a moment of thought grabbed Smile as well. Spreading his wings with a powerful snap, he took off for the ship, leaving the wounded Kreer firing ineffectually into the rain behind them.

The crimson feathered griffon scowled, letting the rifle's muzzle droop. His keen eyes picked out the targets disappearing around the corner, toward the shuttle. Below him, the unconscious form of his brother lay stricken.

How desperately he wanted to continue the hunt, but his right wing felt like something had broken in it and wouldn't extend fully.

Then, before his anger could take hold at allowing them to move without his pursuit, a shout called out to him from the warehouse, and he turned and limped his way back inside.

* * *

Asset Margin half-limped and half-fell down the gantry stairs to the rapidly pooling water on the floor of the warehouse. Her short mane had come loose from its tie, hanging untidily about her head, and her waistcoat and shirt were both drenched and muddied from hitting the dusty floor of the walkway.

And of course, her backside felt like a solid chunk of hot metal had been buried in it.

Mostly because one had.

“Kreer! Get your red ass back in here and help me! Kreer!”

Asset pulled herself up, limping on three legs in a fashion annoyingly similar to that of a certain unicorn that had limped up to her office that morning. She had smirked while watching her then; things felt very different now, and Asset felt that sting more than the wound itself. She gasped sharply, stumbled again, and held a silk handkerchief over the oozing red hole in her flank.

The griffon came bounding over, pulling off his pack to find a medi-seal gel dispenser. After a minute of hissing, swearing and beating her hoof against the metal railings, Asset felt the numbing effects take hold.

Kreer’s voice was short and to the point. “They got away, Ma'am.”

“I sorta' bloody figured on account of you not dragging that irksome midget's corpse back in with you! AND for my briefcase disappearing!”

“It was just frozen baking soda in the container, Ma'am. Real deal's secure.”

“But it WAS a really nice briefcase! Get this strapped up, we've got-argh, damn it...”

Kreer held a dressing over the furious unicorn's hindquarters, trying his best to not open himself up to a slap about the face for putting his talons where they ought not to be. He matched his employer's angry glare for just a second. Even to a hardened ex-pirate like him, he knew it would be a mistake to let himself get frustrated her berating him. Asset had many plans in the event she didn't come back from somewhere, and Kreer valued having wings. Wounded or not. Besides, she paid well for little work in a place no law ever hunted him, and he didn't imagine Karmelita would much let him go back to his old stomping grounds any time soon.

Pulling the dressing tight, he heard her seething in pain, and watched Asset testing her leg's range of motion. Noticing her obvious discomfort, he hit her with an added shot of local anaesthetic to the leg, and picked her up.

“Don't worry, Ma'am. Garwyn got the immobiliser fitted last night. Their shuttle's not going anywhere. Soon as you're evac'ed and I get him up, we'll go hunt them down. They don't know the city.” He let the predatory grin come back to him. “They aren't going anywhere.”

Asset let herself be lifted up onto his back, as he himself limped to the doors. She could hear the hover-vans returning to pick them up outside. After a moment, she shook her head and insistently dropped down to limp and gasp in pain instead. She wasn't about to let the others all see her being babied out.

On emerging, two earth ponies ran up to her, ones she recognised as having been the trackers for the shuttle. Standing in the rain, her leg still belting with pain, she let her hard gaze find their obviously apprehensive faces.

“What. Happened?”

They looked to one another, the two mares seemingly holding a telepathic argument over who should pass on the news.

Thankfully, neither had to, as the sound of a shuttle's engines blasted across every block for two miles and the off-red afterburners of a very familiar ship rocketed into the sky past them.

Asset's mouth twisted into an indistinct, but very exasperated shape.

“HOW!?”

* * *

Kerfuffle turned the odd device over in his hands a couple times.

Really, it was a wonder why anybody would want to fit an immobiliser into such a silly location. All it would do was interfere with the startup motor's flow of power and make the shuttle have to work overtime to get anywhere.

Confidently happy that he just brightened the shuttle's day, he dropped the offending piece of machinery into a maintenance drawer in the back and settled back to nurse his stiff wings.

Up front of the shuttle, behind the glass showing the night sky slowly turning to a more complete darkness as it climbed back to orbit, Smile rubbed her torso with one hoof and set the autopilot with the other.

To her left, Hair Trigger continued the expletive ridden rant she'd kept up for the last ten minutes.

“-have to just get screwed up right at the last damned minute! Every! Time! Didn't I call it? I damn well called it! Called! It!”

Beginning to weary of the sound, Smile couldn't hold back a snarking tone. “If I remember, you said 'no coffee, shit cargo, fucking betrayed.' Well, she gave you coffee. But two out of three isn't bad.”

Throwing a dangerously explosive look back at the crystal pony, Hair Trigger instead went back to holding her head in her hooves, trying to fight the headache that was waging war with her hoof for which could produce the worst throbbing.

Volatility Smile, content that she'd at least put an end to the shouting, breathed out and focused on finding Claudia amongst the cluttered orbital layers of Kavala III on their nav-unit.

The mining infrastructure filled most of the screen with yellow dots, and Smile wasn't certain how to actually filter it for just Claudia. She could vaguely see the lines of orbiting ships highlighted in reds and blues, yes. But it was proving difficult with a touchscreen intended for minotaur fingers to actually get her hoof on target to check the names of each of them. She could actually see some of them ahead of her now, glinting in the sky like a ring around the planet. Beyond them, enormous chunks of moon were turning.

Then, just as the atmosphere finally broke and she heard the engines fall to silence in the vacuum of space, she saw something.

“Captain, did you see a spaceport big enough for a cruiser-sized vessel at Shining Reach?”

“No, why?”

“Nothing that might be big enough to support a cruiser-sized vessel there permanently?”

Hair Trigger gave up trying to figure out the instant-freeze ice-packs in her hooves, and glanced at the screen to see a red dot approaching from behind them, its designation marking a vessel of above fifteen thousand tonnes on the planet's navigational stream.

“Oh...”

It suddenly veered, and took a course heading right toward them.

“Shit.”

* * *

The luxury yacht erupted out of its escape velocity climb like a submarine surfacing at speed, its curved prow breaching into the void with a silent crash and a flurry of residual vector-engine vapour being caught in the sun's light. Almost as though it were on a two-dimensional plane, it dropped its nose, curling along the very outer edge of the mesosphere, before finally rolling itself the right way back up again. Its silver hull became a dance of colour from the stellar radiation affecting its chemically reactive paintwork, turning it a mix of white and cream in elaborate patterns.

Yet as beautiful and artistic as the gracefully curved vessel was, its movements held a menace, and a very defined purpose. It’s bow wound over, and turned to take a course after a fleeing spot of light.

The doors to its bridge slid open, and Asset Margin stormed through at an angry limp. She was filthy, with a matted mane and a flank streaked with dried blood under a hasty dressing. Holographic displays at the six crew positions were frantic with the crowded orbit of Kavala III, but every uniformed member kept their eyes smartly on their complex layouts.

They had gotten advance warning from Kreer that Asset was not in the mood for people staring.

She had only three words to growl.

“Where are they?”

Regretting his recent promotion, the bridge officer gulped, keeping his eyes firmly on the curved display screen ahead of them.

“Ten minutes out and closing, Ma'am. We're faster than they are.”

Asset narrowed her eyes, finally allowing herself to smile again.

“Ready tac-cannons; got a rogue asteroid to shoot down. Also, be a dear and get me drone command for the Secondis refinery...”

* * *

“Eleven minutes till intercept? C'mon, when will this day just END? Smile, how long till we make Claudia?”

Having finally located the right blip, Volatility Smile set it as the current destination, and waited a few seconds for the nav-unit to update with their estimated time out. “Seven or eight minutes.”

Hair Trigger bit her lip, then winced at the sharp reminder that it was still split and bleeding. “Better hope Tami can run an FTL from orbit in three minutes then.”

She reached forward and keyed the communication panel onto her own display. Entering Claudia's general frequency code, and then her Captain's authorisation, she opened a channel to the bridge.

“Tami? Tami I hope you-”

All three crew members in the shuttle were assaulted through the speakers by a wall of noise. Loud bass, high pitched synth instruments, and a female vocalist exploded into the shuttle so suddenly that even Kerfuffle behind them covered his ears with a wince at the audio feedback.

Hair Trigger yelled in shock, before slamming a hoof into the 'send' button, setting it to play through all available speakers on the ship.

“Tami! TAMI! What the hell is-”

* * *

Dropping to the floor of the cargo bay with a squeal, a dozen objects tumbling down around her, Tami regretted her hasty resetting of the gravity on the spot.

She could hear the vague sound of the Captain's voice somewhere below the lovey pop-lyrics and the clatter of boxes and cases striking the metal deck, and Trigger had that ‘on the edge’ tone that always implied a lot of things had given her a reason to sound like that.

Scampering madly, Tami raced into the common room and up the stairs, shouting toward the open mic even before she got to the pilot's seat, half expecting to see a Changeling invasion in the space around her by the sound in Hair Trigger's voice.

“Captain! I'm here! I'm here! What's going-I mean, what do you need me to-”

“What I'm needing is an imminent getting the fuck out of this system!”

Drawing up her map, overlaying the communication's sender onto it with a few quick swipes of her fingers, Tami quickly spotted the shuttle coming in at speed, closely followed by a much larger ship.

“Tami!?”

“I-I'm on it, Captain! I'm on it! Just get here!”

The comms clicked, ending the link.

Tami frantically began throwing everything out of idle mode and within ten seconds Claudia's reactor was starting to wake up to a ready state for all ahead full. Yanking the FTL panel across, she paused only to reach up to the PA system playing the deafening music and click it to 'off'.

The button went down.

The ship-wide music, blasting out of every speaker it could, did not cease.

Clicking the switch up and down a couple times to no avail, then suddenly remembering the incident this morning with the same function, Tami held her mouth open for a moment.

“Uh oh...”

* * *

With a hard and hasty docking that made all aboard wince at the dull clang of hull on hull, the shuttle attached to Claudia's right-side airlock. They'd come in at such a speed that for the first time, Smile started to understand some of Tami's persistent nervousness when it came to piloting.

Hair Trigger didn't waste time in pressurising the lock and throwing the doors open, immediately recoiling at being reunited with the same track that had minutes before filled the shuttle. Hip shaking energetic beats and lyrics about a prom night filled the ship, reverberating from the walls of the cargo bay.

“What was she even doing up here?”

Realising no-one even heard her question, she rapidly stumbled and hopped her way into her ship and limped up toward the bridge. Finding the door ajar, she spotted the thick mane of the hippogriff at the controls.

“Tami what is going on with this-”

The pilot whipped around suddenly, her hands already up and waving, shouting to be heard. “I'm sorry, Captain! It won't turn off! Same issue, and I can't fix it, and-”

Closing her eyes with a growl of frustration she'd normally suppress around the skittish pilot, Hair Trigger waved her off. “Nevermind, no time! Just get us out of here, Tam! Go, go, go!”

Grabbing Claudia's control sticks, Tami wrenched the ship around in a one-eighty and reoriented onto the longest stretch of empty space she could find in the gap between the asteroids and the planet itself. Reading down to her side, she threw the thrust-stick forward.

Both the main outlets on the rear of the ship and the vector controls along the side shifted their metal plates, opening up or angling in, before erupting with light. Her entire frame creaking, Claudia powered forward and headed directly away from her monstrously larger pursuer.

Accompanied by the height of the pop world's remix charts, Claudia committed to the chase. Straightening her out, Tami fought down the growing pressure in her breast at the ongoing thump of music and every slightly-too-lovey lyric blaring into the crew compartments with her friends around her. Hands dancing on the touchscreen, she keyed in the easiest jump vector she could think of and got the drive spooling.

“We'll be gone ahead of them!”

“What!?” Hair Trigger shouted above the song.

“FTL NOW!” Tami screamed back.

There was a pitch shift in the whine of the reactor, a sense of rising tension began to creep through all aboard the vessel. Ahead of them, space seemed to begin folding and thickening.

And behind them, the yacht's prow had opened up.

* * *

“Activate!”

At Asset’s barked command, the two specialists at the front of the vessel keyed in the final signal. Behind them, Asset grinned.

“You don’t get to leave yet, Captain!”

* * *

There was a silent flash. A white beam, flickering like a giant strobe-light, spat out from a dish on the front of Asset's ship and lit Claudia up from behind.

Sensitive systems inside the bridge of the Pioneer class transport suddenly grew very hot and erupted like a firecracker below Tami's hooves. The hippogriff leapt up from her seat with a shock at the flash below her, smelling smoke. To her left, the FTL display flashed red.

'TRANSLATION ERROR'

“What happened!?” Hair Trigger leaned over the console, as she saw the familiar surge of the ship’s jump rift suddenly collapse in front of them. Like a hazy-edged crack in a window repairing itself, the rift twisted itself out of existence in an eruption of twisted rainbows, leaving them with nothing but a hostile system and a singer extolling the delights of a first kiss.

Scrambling over her screen, Tami gaped in horror. “She's got a jump scrambler!”

“A what!?”

“A jump scrambler!” Tami repeated, then a second time as her voice was muffled by the sudden drop of bass inside the ship.

“What IS that?”

Tami was already clawing at the floor panels, pulling them away as smoke belched out into her face.

“It's a-” She coughed from the acrid smoke. “It's used by police forces! Most FTL systems have some form of wireless connection for commands somewhere in their electronics. A scrambler projects fake signals to us that gives it the wrong stuff, makes them overload!”

Volatility Smile ran up into the bridge, having felt the FTL's vibrations cut. “What's going on? And can't you turn that music off!?”

Tami threw up her hands from unscrewing the panel. “I'VE TRIED! The PA system is-”

Trigger tossed her hat onto the screen in front of her in frustration, spinning around on both of them. “Drop it! Less arguing about the song! More fixing the FTL before they-”

* * *

“Fire?”

The officer's query to his boss told all. They were in range, and they had the tac-cannons ready. Mainly intended to ward off pirates and stray asteroids, they would be more than enough against an unarmed vessel.

Asset Margin purred in response. “Oh yes, please do...”

* * *

Claudia rattled heavily, throwing every crew member off their hooves. The concussive impact sent the ship's window view whirling through stars and asteroids, as Claudia veered and reacted to the sudden force impacting near her.

Through the windows, Trigger, Smile and Tami all witnessed several other shots hurtling through space and erupting into yellow flares ahead of them, missed rounds reaching their maximum limit before self-detonating.

Under the cover of Tami's music, the crew staggered up, and Hair Trigger groaned. “I was gonna say tackle and board us, but come the hell on!”

She hopped back into the Captain's Chair and transferred control to her side, pointing at Tami. “You and Kerf fix the FTL! Do whatever you have to!”

Tami gaped at the window, then at her Captain preparing to fly. “D-do you even know how to evade fire!?”

“Nope! But I'll do what my dad told me to do for when you’re flying a ship and can't do the right thing!”

She ratcheted the thrust stick as far forward as it could go and threw the controls over to steer Claudia in toward the asteroid field.

“The wrong thing, but very enthusiastically!”

Gunning the engines once more, Hair Trigger set Claudia onto a long curving arc to get away from the firing lines of those guns, diving in toward the closest chunks of moon she could. Microfragments started pelting off of the bridge window, reflected by the tough minotaur design and adding a strange snare drum-like tone to Tami's music.

With an oddly fitting build and hit-after-hit of big tempo beats, Claudia dropped her nose like the music dropped the bass and hurtled at speed into the asteroid field. Rolling and banking, Hair Trigger flew her behind every bit of cover she could spy out there, feeling and seeing rather than hearing the concussive thumps of vicious flak-rounds slamming into the chunks around them.

The yacht soared in after them, the two frontal tac-cannons spitting their high-velocity rounds again and again. The cannon mountings lacked automated guidance, but spat out a rapid stream of exploding munitions that followed Claudia, lighting her pale hull from every direction, and turning the musically propelled ship into a mad rave of exploding rock and flickering space. The gleaming yacht powered through chunks of debris and space-rock, its hull absorbing and denting but remaining strong with its dual-layer design.

On the yacht's bridge, scowling at her prey evading her in the tightening density of the field, Asset stormed with an angry limp to the communications officer. “Hail them! I want to speak to that idiot! Hack into their PA system...I want them all to hear.”

“Aye, Ma'am!”

Asset narrowed her eyes at the transport making hasty, panicked turns and committing to the ugliest manoeuvres she'd ever seen a fleeing target do. Were it not for the asteroids constantly blocking her gunner's solutions, they'd have been fragments by now.

“Ready to commit, Ma'am! I have control, opening channel to their internal PA in three, two, one...”

Asset put on her most calming voice. “Captain Hair Trigger, I think you-”

Then she screamed, covering her ears along with the rest of her bridge crew, as a loud voice pleading her to 'love her like it's prom night' cut her off and belched through the entire bridge, accompanied by a rapid fire series of synth and chiptune at the maximum possible volume. The ship's course wavered away from Claudia as the helmsman lost control in shock.

Screaming, Asset whirled to the comm-panel. “WHAT THE EVERLOVING HELL IS THIS!?”

“Ma'am!” The comms officer yanked off his headset. “They appear to have some form of sophisticated electronic defence suite! I...I can't cut it! It's like their system is locked open to us!”

Asset Margin grabbed the headset up from the floor and screamed into the microphone. “Listen here, you little shit! I've had enough of this! I've had enough of this day! There is no way you're leaving this system! You've cost me too big a loss profit margin for me to let you get away now!”

After a few seconds and a fumbling sound from the other end, Hair Trigger's taunting voice came back through the speakers, fitting into a gap between the irritatingly hyperactive lyrics. “Get the hell off my bridge speakers, Asset Margin! The only 'margin' you'll get is the one I gave you earlier in your Ass-ets, and you'll fucking love it!”

Asset hurled the headset into the startled comms officer's face, turning to scream over the music at the rest of her crew. “Little...where the hell is drone command!?”

* * *

Hair Trigger had no idea what she was doing.

She was desperately trying to fly behind every asteroid she could lay eyes on to put more material between them and those cannons. She went with her gut, unable to see the yacht itself, instead guessing just from the direction of the shots whizzing past the bridge windows. Apparently, it was working, and she was very glad Asset's ship wasn't more agile than it was. From rock to rock, she sent Claudia on a mad race to stay ahead of the eruption of flak filling space behind them.

“That one!” Volatility Smile pointed sharply.

“I know! I know!” Trigger sent Claudia banking for the asteroid.

“Dodge more!” Smile cried as they went to a flat trajectory.

“I KNOW!”

Trigger threw the controls back and forth, sending Claudia into an erratic spin to squeeze between two asteroids. Briefly losing control, rolling more times than she’d intended, Trigger wrestled with the ship’s engines to arrest the spin and getting them pointing roughly the way she wanted to go. Back in control, she began jinking and weaving their flight path again. The ship rocked from another close impact, and alarms began blaring all around, adding another layer to the audio madness.

After a second, Smile knocked her on the shoulder.

“WHAT!?” Trigger barked up at her.

“Stop dodging in time to the music, they'll pick up on it!”

Realising her hoof was tapping on the bridge deck, Trigger could only sit and stare for a moment at the absurdity this day had come to.

“Oh, fuck me for ever bothering to get out of bed.”

She surged the main engines again, coming far too close to an asteroid, enough that the proximity warning sounded, drowned out by yet another easily dance-inducing chorus that set Trigger seething.

“How long is this song!?”

Tami's face popped up from the floor. “It's the extended version!”

Hair Trigger rolled her eyes as the pilot grabbed a new circuit-board from Kerfuffle, and got back under the bridge decking with a soldering iron.

Another shot flew over their heads, and Trigger threw Claudia away from it before the detonation; the controls bucked hard as the mechanical force carried down through its robust minotaur design.

After a second, she noticed a very worrying crack appear on the side window. Yet it was what was beyond it that drew her attention.

All the mining lasers of the drones in the industry field sections ahead of their flight path were cutting out. With a look at her console, she saw a swarm of fifty mining drones suddenly turn and start rushing toward Claudia to cut them off.

Asset Margin's furious, sneering voice managed to fight through the deafening music to make herself known on Claudia's bridge. It was distorted, with a repeated echo of the song behind her.

“Wanna know what happens when I tell my drones that you're an asteroid? I sure do.”

Out of the black, dozens of blinking red lights began powering toward Claudia. Much more agile than the clumsy yacht, they weaved and darted around the asteroids like a swarm of wasps.

“Oh hell no, no way I can out-fly them! Tami...Tami how long on that FTL?”

Tami's voice was muffled from the crawl-space below Trigger's own seat. “Few minutes! Just a few!”

Hair Trigger glanced at the surrounding field on the main screen, looking for any way she could evade the yacht's line of fire without going directly toward the drones. Only one way remained that held anything of a hope. With a moment of consideration, she knew she was going to regret this. And a lot of people were about to get very angry with her.

Throwing Claudia onto her side and twisting the vector nozzles as far as she dared, Trigger sent the ship on a crudely sharp turn, directing their route down toward the clearing through the asteroids. The one they had flown in through.

The one populated by a dense cluster of cargo ships.

The second Claudia erupted out of the field and dove into the midst of the carefully controlled lanes in the tight area, a dozen ships made sudden swerves to get out of the seemingly insane pilot's route. A dozen ship captains hailed Claudia's hacked-open speaker system to demand answers, and a dozen bridge crews were all immediately granted a streaming service to the barrage of sugar-high music spreading like a happy plague in the void above Kavala III.

A swarm of drones followed the reckless Pioneer, diving on their simple routines to buzz around and over the frantically evading supertankers and mass conveyors. One that had only just had its engines repaired after causing a nightmare earlier that morning now found its repaired intake suddenly in-taking a fifty ton drone, putting it right back out of commission and signifying the sudden choice of retirement of its chief engineer. Another had its entire bridge crew duck as Claudia missed their windows by only a hundred metres, followed immediately by a series of the compact drones that set their elevated bridge shaking on its frame.

Claudia banked, tried to turn, failed from excessive velocity, and then tried again with more success. Hair Trigger's teeth were clenched, along with at least one other portion of her body, as she evaded ships with frantic, violent movements. She was dodging by sight alone - precisely the sort of way you weren't supposed to fly in space.

To her horror, long mining beams sometimes spiked past them as soon as the drones felt they had a clear run to 'mine'.

“Captain, there's another problem.” Smile's voice picked up, leaning down to the intensely focused unicorn's ear.

“Go...ahead...Smile...”

“Even if we get FTL, she'll just use the scrambler again.”

“Then figure something out!”

Smile cocked her head. “Me?”

“Well I'M a little busy at the moment!”

Smile thought for a moment, wandering to the back of the bridge. What could she do? A rifle was hardly going to manage it. She'd need something they could launch that was a lot-

“...bigger.”

Amazingly, she realised she did have an idea, and ran out of the bridge.

It was at that point the yacht decided to return.

Given space by its authority on the radar of every ship in the area and driven clear of the asteroids by its more powerful engines, it powered along the top of the space-lane. Hair Trigger spotted it angling itself to cover the end of the lane out into open space.

“Tami, we're blocked in, please tell me you have something for me!”

“Few minutes!”

Hair Trigger couldn't hide the mounting worry in her voice. “You said that a few minutes ago!”

“It felt like seconds!”

“Cap'n!” Kerfuffle's steady voice was still oddly calm, as he looked around the ship's windows, more particularly off to the right, before gazing at the main screen. “Drones're smart-”

“I'D NOTICED!”

“-but they need to be near their mother to work right.”

Her anger born of adrenaline momentarily interrupted, Hair Trigger risked a look at the griffon. “What?”

“Further they are from the hulks they take off from, slower they get. Bandwidth only goes so far for that much data. And the control ships are all lining the field to our, uh...right, that those ones came from. And the hulks are pretty cautiously moving.”

“You mean slow?”

Kerfuffle looked awkward. “Slower...but I wouldn't insult them so much like-”

Hair Trigger didn't need told twice. For the third time, she committed the suffering ship to a hard turn and burn, pointing it back into the asteroid field opposite the mining control ships.

As soon as she got on target, she had to wave off and turn again as a colossal mobile refinery thundered into their flight-lane, sending an automated message that barked angrily in some language she didn't know.

Claudia spun out, her engines mis-angled, and no matter what Hair Trigger did, nothing could correct the unnatural vector she'd been thrown on. Forced to hit the retrothrusters to avoid an uncontrolled spin, Claudia slowed to a near stop.

On the screens, the drones swarmed in.

* * *

On her bridge, Asset had the tac-cannons take aim, and finally allowed her rigid, twisted face to smile again.

* * *

“Shit! Shit-shit-shit!” Hair Trigger beat at the side of the chair, trying to rework the vector engines to where she wanted them - while trying to make heads or tails of the spinning in the windows.

“I...we've got FTL back!”

A dirty orange mane and an oil-stained face poked back out of the floor with a triumphant shout and a wave of a soldering iron. Tami started pulling herself up, until Kerfuffle helpfully lifted her out by her overalls. She collapsed into her chair, just in time to see Hair Trigger switch the controls back to her side.

“Then get your three-dimensional mind working and get us out of here!”

Tami glanced at the controls, then the screens, and her mouth gaped.

“Is-what-Captain I didn't realise it wa-th-there's like fifty of them incoming a-”

Suddenly leaning over, Hair Trigger grasped the hippogriff by both shoulders, forehead to forehead. “Tami, Tami listen to me. Now really, really isn't the time to go back to that.”

“But Capt-”

“This is your wheelhouse, Tam. And I want to mail a picture of my notably not-shot ass to that bitch in the yacht after we get out of here just to rub it in, so I need you to do this.” She winked, “You flew Regulus like a foal bounding around at Hearthswarming. I've seen what you can do. Wouldn't it be a great thing for me to tell Whisper about this?”

Tami's eyes widened; she looked down at the waiting controls.

“I....”

Her hand reached out.

* * *

Asset Margin swiped away the ship's doctor for the third time, leaning on the bridge's railing like a psychotically invested sports fan as she watched the drones close in. She loved drones. She loved robots. Things doing things on their own. She loved watching them tear asteroids apart and imagining the credit signs popping out of them.

She'd never gotten to see them do it on a ship before.

The drones swirled around, dancing past the final ship in their way, and clustering about the Pioneer they'd been chasing. At this point she wasn't sure what she wanted more - Hair Trigger to die for shooting her in the ass, or that ship to die to shut that damned music off.

Thankfully, she could have both.

“Time's up. Time to mine!”

She gleefully laughed...until her giggling suddenly faltered as Claudia's engines fired.

The gunners with the tac-cannon firing solutions had their sights set ahead of the ship, waiting for its inevitable last try. The drone's AI was following the vessels slow forward drift.

Neither anticipated her to suddenly spin every vector engine and power off backwards.

Fifty mining lasers criss-crossed in a bright orange star of light where the ship had once been, their logic confused by their stationary target suddenly moving. Seconds later, the drones reengaged their protocols and spun as one to give chase.

Asset's mouth dropped in exasperation, as she saw Claudia pick up speed from a sudden burst of power to the vector-engines, catapulting and weaving in reverse ahead of the drones. Blazing from every outlet but the main ones, Claudia banked and spun. Keeping her bridge facing the tide of drones, she rolled to fit between ships, even once between the empty stems of a conveyor's cargo arms. Rapidly accelerating, evading even in reverse, Claudia quickly passed underneath the slower yacht and out of its weapon arcs.

Looking down, Asset grabbed her comms officer's mug and threw it at the helm officer to break her out of staring. It shattered on the ground, making the pony yelp. After a second, having spotted the comms officer out of the corner of her eye, Asset followed the throw by cuffing him across the ear to get him to stop bobbing his head to the music.

“What are you all staring at!? GET AFTER THEM!”

Drones and yacht surged forward as Claudia inverted, firing its vectors vertically to make a transversal jink, passing under a refinery ship and out of sight, moving in reverse for the asteroid field opposite the drone controllers.

With a last burst of her vectors, Tami blasted the engines on one side only, then from the other side after a quick re-angling of the engine nozzles. It threw Claudia into a smooth, rapid J-turn to make a flat spin, until caught by the retrothrusters to hold the whirling ship on a trajectory away from Asset’s drones.

With the crew inside holding on as the artificial gravity was strained to its limit, their stomachs churning, the main engines surged even before the turn was complete, Tami guiding it through a curved arc, moving as much sideways as forward. Finally finding her desired path amongst the cramped vessels, Tami threw every bit of power she had into the main drive, the complex three-dimensional maneuver finally bringing her to where she wanted.

Taking off like a rocket, Claudia powered forwards through the incoming traffic. With wide, focused eyes, Tami smoothly twitched and eased the control sticks to carefully steer with the vectors rather than by angling the main engine. Her fine-tuned manoeuvring sent Claudia on nerve-wrackingly close encounters with other ships. Skimming the surface of freighter’s shipping containers, she used a sudden blast from starboard to roll Claudia over one-eighty and drop down the other side of the massive vessel, putting it between them and the drones, and hurtled into the asteroids.

Already, thanks to the high energy escape, the drones were slowing. Their bandwidth was struggling to keep up this far from their motherships. Asset's yacht, however, had no such problem. Its tac-cannons swung onto station and opened fire as the larger ship surged after the transport, following it down the line of asteroids.

Shells slammed into the rocks, firing at maximum rate in a blistering wave of destruction that shattered asteroids and filled the air with heavy shrapnel and concussive waves. With the yacht flying parallel to Claudia everything between the ships was savaged by the violent broadside.

And yet, to Asset's continued frustration, none of their shots would just HIT.

She could see the camera zoomed in tracking that ship, as the Pioneer banked, rolled and made irritatingly smooth adjustments at speed to fly between asteroids, around the arcs of fire, away from the shockwaves, and once even through the still separating pieces of an asteroid her ship had just blown apart. The movements were aggressive and flowing, retaining momentum and allowing the ship to roll on its ends and sides in awkward directions, more telling of a trained evasion pilot than some random truckers.

Asset began wondering just where the hell had this piloting been a minute ago. Yet the end of the asteroid field was approaching, and she knew they only had so far to run. No cover and no amount of suddenly fancy flying would save them then.

“Ma'am! They're charging FTL! Scrambler coming online!”

* * *

Tami was panting hard. Sweat dripped down her face as her eyes flickered in different directions, sometimes independently of one another. The flashing of explosions and the whirling of rocks that she had to evade or had to rely on Claudia enduring impact with was like the worst of the tests she'd ever taken at the academy, where simulated mass obstacles were thrown at them to react to while answering basic questions.

Yet while her body and face were rigid and terrified, her hands were moving with grace and smoothness. Switching motion from vector to main engine housing with a preset, or changing velocity to pre-empt movements and turns, she led Claudia on a dance to match the song that she couldn't help but murmur along with under her breath in some vague attempt to stay calm. Possibly the only living person for one AU actually finding the climaxing music useful right now, she slaved both vectors to one control stick and used her other hand to prep the FTL. She idly sang to herself, a vain attempt to stay calm.

“Go down and take-”

“What?” Hair Trigger raised an eyebrow, gripping her seat tightly.

“Nothing! Okay, Captain? I hope you've got an idea for the scrambler, ‘cos we're ready to go! Just need some space, we gotta get out of the asteroids!”

On cue, Smile's voice came over the intercom, shouting to be heard. “Tami! Got an idea ready down here! I'm at the airlock with the emergency release ready, you understand?”

The hippogriff thought for a second, and then it clicked. “I-I got it! I'll tell you when!”

Hair Trigger gave her a curious look, then suddenly made an appreciative smirk. “Kerf? Might wanna close your eyes, big guy.”

* * *

Thumping her hoof on the railing of the bridge again and again, Asset had finally had it with these gunners. She'd already made the decision to fire them. To fire most of this crew. To fire her ship trackers. To fire her drone controllers. Anyone who'd failed her so utterly today.

The tac-cannons were firing slower, reaching their heat limit and being forced to fire alternately. Still that elusive lump of metal refused to be hit, and again she wished her love of automation had extended to being able to acquire military grade auto-locks.

“Captain, if you'd be so kind as to please stop wasting my ammunition. Remember who pays the bills.”

“We're...we're trying, Ma'am! Scrambler is ready! But the gun, their pilot must have been trained for partial manu-”

“CAPTAIN!” The helm suddenly cried up to them, and the sight of Claudia on their viewscreen changed significantly.

The ship fired its vectors and retrothrusters on the port side all at once, sending it on a crazed roll right toward the yacht itself, arcing up and above their line of fire, right toward them.

“What are they even-”

The ship wasn't getting any smaller, and it wasn't stopping.

“All stop! They're trying to ram us! FULL REVERSE, HELM!” the Captain bellowed, before everyone on board staggered at the powerful frontal thrusters cutting speed.

Claudia followed through on its long barrel roll, arcing upside down above the yacht, before suddenly dropping directly in front of it, completing the cylindrical manoeuvre.

Asset stared at the bright engines of the transport. She could see open black beyond them both, and the twisting of reality that signified Claudia's FTL charging.

“What are you-...SCRAM THEM!”

* * *

“NOW!” Tami screamed in to the handset.

Down below, aided by a reluctant Kerfuffle, Smile yanked down the heavy grade lock and activated the emergency decoupling.

On Claudia's side, the shuttle they had arrived in banged, air pockets exploding it off the hull into free space.

* * *

Asset Margin's eyes widened, as she took a moment to believe what she was seeing.

Her own shuttle, one she'd paid for, came arcing off the small ship and careened right back at her yacht.

As her crew panicked, shouted, and tried in vain to move the ship, Asset simply sat down in her chair and held her head in her hooves, beyond done with this day.

* * *

The shuttle crashed into the sensitive components of the scrambler, shattering its dish, and piledriving into the hull of the yacht itself. Twenty tonnes of metal buried itself three decks deep, knocking out generators and spiralling the larger vessel end over end from the transfer of momentum, leaving it spinning helplessly on the fringes of the space its owner took to be hers.

Ahead of it, space erupted into light, and then an unusual tear in the fabric of reality opened. Claudia, propelled by the closing notes of one very happy song, disappeared into it and left Kavala III in the far distance.

* * *

A few hours later, once someone had gotten Tami a bag to breathe into and they had let Patch take a look at them all, the crew had taken Claudia some distance from Kavala before doing anything else. They had arrived back in Jealousy, and only then allowed the ship to ease off on the reactor, safe in another civilization’s space.

Only then, after all that, had they finally gathered.

It had been set to be a celebration: a chance to sit down, meet, and let any lingering adrenaline out. Instead, they just sat in tired silence around the common room table as the exhaustion and painkillers set in, idly glancing at movie lists and board games with absolutely no energy left to try any of them. Smile had explained that the Confederacy had a reward out for information on Asset Margin's suspected activity, and they had made a tired cheer. Their payday would still happen, if substantially less than originally planned.

That, and Smile found she had a very fancy new briefcase.

Hair Trigger had rarely been more thankful to hear nothing but the tranquil hum of the ship's reactor, and nothing else. As the quiet between them all wore on, she knew it was expected of her to say something about it all. Not by the crew; she knew they wouldn't hold her to it. But she'd come to feel a duty toward her position. Being a Captain was more than just making decisions. As she'd grown into the role, she'd seen it was about taking care of your crew and bolstering them after hardship.

Trying to think about what to say, Trigger instead just got up and walked over to the kitchen. She idly added Kavala III to the 'systems we don't go to any more', and made to pour a cup of-

Hair Trigger paused, internally letting loose a tired curse as she remembered.

Yet somehow at this point, she just smiled. The smile quickly turned to chuckles, and then to laughter as she dunked the mug down and leaned on the kitchen.

“Nothing.”

The other three looked up at her in confusion, moreso when they saw her broad grin.

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Cap'n?”

Hair Trigger limped back toward them, and leaned on the back of a chair with a weary sigh. “Absolutely nothing went right for us today. Tech failed. Job was a bust. Ship got screwed up. Shuttle had an immobiliser on it. Got shot at. Got beat up. Got betrayed. Almost crashed a dozen times. Hull's scratched to hell. Had a crap morning. No coffee.”

She let her attention fall from Kerfuffle's still confused face, to Smile's curious one, and to Tami's mouth spreading even as she brought up the energy to smile back. Trigger hopped down and trotted around them to behind Tami, her back to her own room's door.

“Everything went wrong, and yet we came out of it. Y'know why?”

Tami looked over her shoulder. “Why, Captai-eek!”

Hair Trigger's foreleg hugged her from behind, pulling the back of the soft and quickly giggling hippogriff's head to her chest, the other one ruffling through her thick mane, before pointing at each of the crew.

“Everything went wrong, but even with that, there was this crew to fall back on when it all fu...when it all went to hell.”

Chiding her own curse, feeling the day’s anger begin to fade from her own words to not need to express it as much now, she let Tami go.

“Asset surrounded herself with automation. Demanded people do things. She hired skills, and ‘things’, not people. She didn't have what I have here. What we have here. Others to hold on when luck throws the worst at you. Friends you can rely on behind you.”

Smile lived up to her name, her head angled to the side in a casual glance. “How eloquent, Captain. But...accurate.”

Kerfuffle nodded along eagerly, an unspoken 'what she said'.

Hair Trigger felt her heart well up, and she patted Tami's shoulder.

The young pilot looked up, then squished her cheek into Trigger's hoof, speaking cheerfully. “S'what makes a crew different from a crowd, Captain, that's what my dad said.”

“Smart guy. Now, if you excuse me, I got beat up by a big nasty hippogriff, so I'm gonna go lie down and groan for a while. Advise you all get some rest. We'll head back to Medusa tomorrow...then just see whatever the black's got to offer us next. So...g'night.”

She gave a brief wave, then limped back to her room.

Inside, the screens were still on the floor, and she tossed her broken multiband onto the desk. Dropping off her hat and hooded top, she didn't even bother with her night shirt; and instead just wandered naked to her bed.

Finally, finally this day was over. Finally, things going wrong were done.

Eager to relax and return to slumber, she threw herself back first onto it with a sigh.

And landed directly on the upturned charge plug she'd tossed onto her bed in anger that morning.

* * *

In the common room, three heads perked up in unison at the sudden cry and barrage of swearing muffled by the thick doors.

Volatility Smile got up, unable to stifle a smirk of pure schadenfreude. “Well then, Captain's orders. Off to bed.”

She moved to her own room, the door closing behind her before her laughter got loud enough to be heard.

After a brief hug from the big griffon, Tami flew off upstairs, returning to her own 'quarters'.

Kerfuffle, now alone in the common room, was left to turn out the lights for the impromptu night cycle. One by one, he moved around to dull them in both decks, taking his usual tour of the ship before turning in. Making sure that all was good - that all was now fine - before returning to his own doorway.

Holding it open, he paused and gently patted his hand on the frame; on the wall of the ship. Leaning in, he whispered gently.

“Don't worry, she meant you too.”

He closed his door and Claudia fell silent, ending one more day.

One more day of a crew needing to come together, to rely on one another and to find a way around whatever the galaxy held in store. Even when chance tried its best to pull them down.

One more day reminding them why it wasn't easy to live in the stars.

But also one more day to remember that it was the spirit of working together in overcoming hardship that had brought all species off of that now distant single planet in the first place.

One more day for the difference between a crowd and a crew.

And between crew and family.

* * *

A system away by now, a ship drifted aimlessly in the black. Sparking and blackened about its nose, it turned over and over. And within its bridge, between the sparking remains of two bridge consoles, a very angry unicorn sat in a burnt suit, and mused.

Her backside hurt. The new second horn of a lump on her head hurt. Her pride hurt. Soon enough, her wallet would probably hurt too.

Around her, ponies ran in circles trying to regain some sort of control, but their employer was silent. Eventually, she reached out for a communicator and punched in a number back to Kavala III.

“Yes, Pearl? Cancel tomorrow. All of it.” Asset Margin paused, and glared through the cracked display screen to the stars outside. “And get me the special contractor list ready.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I'm not letting this go.”

* * *

The Last Promise

Author's Note

This story was written after one of the darker periods in game, as an introspective on how Tami, an otherwise energetic and bright character, was getting on with the horrors she was encountering in the game. (Thanks, Games Master!) As it was approaching Halloween last year, I decided to return blending to a genre that I absolutely love writing...

This one is a bit more connected with the tabletop story, but I've tried to offer the best context I could to account for new characters, and a change in the point in time.

The Last Promise

During their time in the black, the crew unwittingly became involved in the search for a mysterious ‘Project Snowdrop’. This was a secret program that turned out to be owned by the Sidewinder Syndicate, a super-corporation with a very dark, organised criminal underbelly of black secrets and wetwork agents.

The elusive secret project, it seemed, was attracting the attention of several interested parties all the way up to entire governments, all of whom interacted with, allied with, or fought and hampered the crew in some way.

To fight against this, the Sidewinder Syndicate sent in one of their operatives to try and protect their project: a ruthless batpony known by the nickname ‘Cascavel’ who was tasked with hunting down all those trying to find it.

The Solar Empire sent Tundra Gem, an investigator of the mysterious Æther Corps, a group of unicorns with the rare gift of still having magic abilities. His intellect and friendly charm came to aid the crew greatly, with Hair Trigger even falling into a relationship with him before long.

And lastly, the New Lunar Republic. Unwilling to let the Solar Empire investigate this alone, they sent one of their own stoic, focused agents. Whisper Step: a quiet, often stern mare of lethal covert talents that Tami quickly came to look to in awe as someone bearing the cool confidence she never had herself.

Finding themselves allied with Whisper and Tundra (despite the difficulties of their opposed allegiances), the crew thus were at odds with Cascavel and Sidewinder, being attacked several times.

Tami in particular grew to fear the dangerous batpony, for he always seemed to influence and attack even where she felt safest. Be it encountering him after a massacre aboard the derelict ship Starweaver, a Sidewinder systems hack forcing Claudia into an almost fatal jump, or through the threats and attempts to murder her friends.

This was to take a turn for the horrific, after Cascavel and his agents captured and interrogated Whisper Step. The first knowledge of this was harshly known in a call to Tami, as she heard the electric shocks and screams first hand.

Cascavel and Sidewinder brutally tortured Whisper over the course of weeks for information on their goals until, after a nerve shredding race against time, the crew were able to rescue her with the aid of Tundra Gem. Whisper, free of her bonds, killed Cascavel herself. Ramming the same implement he’d used on her into his eye socket in a defiant revenge, she made a vow to hunt every one of them down.

Even so, the events left lasting scars on all of them. Whisper worst of all, leaving everyone uncertain of just what damage to her composure she was hiding below the intense - and at times reclusive - stoicism. Tami meanwhile, after being shot and injured by Cascavel in the firefight, felt her terror of him only grow. It was illogical to feel that still, what with his death, but after Cascavel himself promised that he had planned the same horrors for her as he had done to Whisper, she found it difficult to let herself feel safe.

He was dead, and yet the fear just wouldn’t leave her.

Some weeks later, after a terrifying mishap with Tundra’s magic, one that pushed the crew to face some of their worst fears in a waking dream, Tami found everything she had worried about brought to life in front of her again. Only this time, it was her at the mercy of Cascavel, about to enact his promise.

The escape from that nightmarish illusion did little to settle her. Even if she didn’t fully remember it, in the way dreams quickly fade, a hazy shadow of fear remained.

And out in the black, there is a lot of empty space and slow time for worries to fester and grow into something worse…

The Last Promise

* * *

Within the spiralling stars of a galaxy, there were gulfs of darkness, far greater in distance and relative size than any map or travel schedule would have anyone believe.

And within that great darkness, known as the black to those who traversed it, there was a ship.

Silver-grey, highlighted in dark off-blue panels, it gently turned in a slow spiral of its own, completing its rotation once only every hour. Alone. Alone in the black, caught in the dark between stars, a gulf so vast that a sane mind could scarcely grasp the true scale of it, let alone that of the galaxy beyond.

And every time it turned, on the hour, every hour, the faint lights of its hull illuminated its name.

Claudia.

Those same lights, even if they could reach those worlds that might see them, would have taken years to arrive.

Having stopped between jumps in this great emptiness to rest from her efforts, Claudia was alone to a degree that defied simple understanding.

Upon her hull, above those telling letters, the glass of her bridge turned with her. The reactive tinting of the windows was at its lowest setting this far from light, leaving little sense of any difference between the void outside, and the dark, empty bridge behind them.

Two seats stood before an elaborate cluster of darkened screens, their standby modes active, and small photos stuck onto their rims, visible only as muddy shapes. The hammock behind them was unoccupied, its blankets hanging untidily off of it. The patterns and colours on the fabric were scarcely discernible in the faint aura of a multiband’s blinking light upon the floor below them, the flashing battery icon indicating that it was reaching critical battery levels.

The door to the bridge was open, revealing the way to the so called 'main street', the dorsal corridor that led from the bridge to engineering.

At this moment, engineering was only a vague hint, as light from the reactor core within it gave a dull ambience to the relatively distant compartment and highlighted the two ladders before it that led to the cargo bay.

And in there, within the hold, was near silence. Large containers filled either side of a primary hatch on the deck itself, looming quietly in their lightless hold. Between them, the hatch was slightly ajar, the trails of LEDs within it revealing the small cockpit of an attached ship. A tiny speck of light that nonetheless became like some form of a beacon.

Past them, from beyond two closed and sealed doors, was the source of the only noise in the cargo bay.

Behind those doors: an oasis of light, and sound, and warmth.

* * *

“For crying out loud, he doesn't even have his unit badge on the right side of his tac-vest! That one didn't exist till years later, either!”

Hair Trigger rolled her eyes, lifting a bit of popcorn from a bowl below the common room's sofa to toss with her magic at the source of the interruption. She'd have used her hooves for the satisfaction of hurling it, had they not been tightly wrapped around a comfortably fluffy unicorn.

“For the twelfth damn time, Swan! It's just a movie!”

The popcorn bounced off the mane of an irate hippogriff sitting at the far side of the room by the table, an ex-Solar Empire soldier hired to bolster security aboard. Swan, grumpy and picky as the day they’d met him, dropped the bottle from his mouth and held up his other hand, palm-open, at the screen.

“Details! What schmuck did they get as advisor? Some FNG who only stayed in for the warm meals and called himself a damned vet despite only fighting with the barracks fridge? Look! That one's got a Kalsen Mark Eight-Oh-Two! Those were only issued a year ago!”

The common room's large flat-panel screen gave a good view of the clean, finely crafted rifle in the hooves of a menacing looking civil war-era Empire soldier. He stalked through the ruins of a burning, rustic village, with the shot panning to reveal the frightened face of a slit-eyed batpony just barely hidden from her assailant.

Swan sighed. “Why isn't he using his heat-scanner? We all had them for counter-insurgency to root out the Lunatics being that slippery. And where's his guardian angel? We always moved in twos and-”

Volatility Smile, sat on the opposite side of the table, made a loud groan and clamped her hooves to her face, slipping down in her chair in utter exasperation.

“Because absolutely no-one cares!”

“I care!” Swan countered, looking back around just in time to catch the end of the batpony having managed to pull the pin on one of the unicorn's grenades, and diving out of the homestead just as it exploded. Relieved and triumphant music slid in, tinged with a mournful bittersweet violin as she was able to be picked up by a ship that had been looking for her and her child, the last evacuees off world.

At the sight of static text before the credits noting how many supporters of Princess Luna had died on that world prior to evacuation during the war, Swan just went back to his drink with a grumble. “Empress-damned propaganda...”

Across the room, upon the sofa, Tundra Gem rubbed a hoof through his short beard as though thinking for a moment. “Actually, while it was a League production, I believe those numbers are quite close to reali-”

Hair Trigger's hoof tapped on Tundra’s mouth, and she shook her head with a grin.

“Isn't worth it, sweetie. Isn't worth it.”

The tap turned into a little stroke at his beard, and she caught the flush of red on his cheeks as he tried his best to confidently smile it off. She did like that look on his face. The 'trying so hard to look all at ease that it turns obvious' look. Hair Trigger had been developing ways to make it happen, and thus far had enough material that she figured a book entitled 'Wizards and How to Startle Them' wouldn't be too tall an order.

“Yes, probably.” Tundra moved her hoof down with a grasp of his stronger magic. “Besides, it's quite late. Too late for digging out sources and conflicting evidence, I suspect.”

“If that's your way of trying to hint for us to get into bed, Gemmy-boy...” Trigger waggled her eyebrows.

Tundra coughed, his eyes rapidly looking past her shoulder, as though hoping the others hadn't heard it.

“Well, I just meant you've got an arrival back at Medusa tomorrow and-”

“Hey, I'm not complaining if it is.” Hair Trigger smirked. “It's a step up from me needing to spell out that I was wanting you to-”

“Okay, okay! I get it!” Tundra rapidly interjected, his eyes perpetually looking past his marefriend, before giving her a playful nudge. “You know they trained me to confront the surreal unknowns and mysteries of the galaxy, and yet you take the cake for catching me unaware.”

“You know it.” Hair Trigger let herself be shoved, not letting up on her smile, before turning to the rest to announce them turning in. Even before she spoke, she could see Volatility Smile and Swan were grabbing the rubbish from the night's snacks.

Yet closer, Kerfuffle and Tammani sat together at the bottom of the stairs. The enormous griffon was hunched over, sat on one of the steps. Trigger couldn't see which underneath his thick feathers.

Below him, Tami sat on her beanbag, her back resting on Kerfuffle's chest.

They both looked tired. Kerfuffle's head was hung, his arms limp by his sides. Only his talons lightly toying with the edge of the steps gave an indication he was awake.

Tami, however, was looking woozy. Her upper body was wavering, her eyes staring blankly into the floor.

“Tam?”

There was no reply. Hair Trigger raised her voice a little.

“Hey, Tam!”

This time, the hippogriff snapped upwards, blinking rapidly.

“Oh? Oh, uh, Captain?”

Patting Tundra's hoof with her own as she got up, Hair Trigger lowered her tone and wandered closer to her pilot.

“Snooze cruise? You look ready to keel over.”

On cue, Tami yawned. Hair Trigger had seen them before, and remembered them well. Tami had quite a dramatic yawn when she was exhausted. Her mouth opened wide, her wings stretched out to the sides, and she emitted a quiet little groan, before it all sharply sank down, like the will had just gone out of her muscles.

“Jus' tired, Captain...”

Giving Kerfuffle a rub with her hoof to stir him as well, Hair Trigger moved gently and slowly. It’d only been a few days since they had all gone through quite an experience back on Medusa on Tundra's ship, and she'd seen how rattled the pair before her now had been.

That, in fact, had been the reason she'd accepted this low profit pickup job. Get everyone back out in the black for a bit. Get them working, get them time around one another away from everything else. A quick trip to help them reset, and a couple extra movie nights to boot.

In truth, she'd needed it herself as well; but the crew had to come first.

“Reckon it's late for you two now, Tam. Report to bed and hammock. That's an order.”

Kerfuffle spluttered and shook his head. “Aye-aye, Cap'n.”

“Aye, Captain...” Tami muttered from below, rubbing her eyes.

There was a quick sound behind them: a metal door opening and shutting. Turning her head, Hair Trigger caught side of a dark earth pony moving out of the door beside the sofa. Tall, wiry, moving with purpose, and bearing two piercing golden eyes, Whisper Step exited what had become her quarters.

Hair Trigger gave her a quiet nod and saw a fraction of the same in return. Hair Trigger regarded the stern, dangerous mare for a moment as she watched the agent move past them toward the kitchen, before turning and winking at Tami.

“And if Whisper's up, then you know it's past bedtime for all of us. Go on, shoo.”

Giving the pair of them an overacted ushering, she was pleased to see the small smirk it got from the pilot. Hustling her crew away, Hair Trigger finally turned and lit her horn, grasping Tundra's beard to 'encourage' him over.

“C'mere loverboy, need a fuzzy chest as a pillow.”

Cantering over with his chin poked out from the magic, Tundra just scoffed, before his own horn lit instead.

“If you're going to test me with telekinesis...”

Before Hair Trigger knew what was happening, she felt the tingling grasp of magic around her, carting her off to her own room. Wiggling her legs, she eventually crossed the front ones as she floated away with a look of indignation on her face.

“It's mutiny then.”

“And you always say I'll pay for it until someone gives you a really tight hug.”

The door closed behind them, leaving the deadpan expression of a spy rolling her eyes into her coffee.

* * *

Climbing the stairs out of the common room, Tami felt an odd sensation, like a shift in the atmosphere.

The 'main street' dorsal corridor was dark. A sharp and sudden contrast to the light coming from below her. With everyone else moving into their rooms, and only the generally silent Whisper Step left below her, any sounds of her friends talking were quickly deadened by inches of bulkhead.

She'd moved only a few feet vertically, and yet it felt so much further. Moving between decks in ships was always an unusual transition, especially when running on the night cycle with most compartments left on low level lighting only.

Pausing at the top of the stairs, she turned and glanced down the main street, spotting the heavy glow emitting from the reactor’s core at the far end. She could only barely see the shape of the walls and piping down the dorsal corridor in the darkness between her and engineering. Lit only by a couple of panels on the walls, the whole tunnel felt so much longer and deeper, like staring into the abyss. It held the same feeling of looking into a living room at night on the way to a bedroom; when one’s own home didn't feel quite as cosy any more out of the full light.

Normally, the feeling wouldn't have bothered her. Tami had gone on wanders more than once before through Claudia during the night cycle. Knowing Claudia was a sealed environment gave her a comforting sensation amidst the thrill of exploring the dark places on board.

As of late, in particular since a few days ago, those feelings had been harder to come by and she had slept restlessly. Often since the events in Tundra's vessel, she had woken drenched in sweat, feeling like she had just forgotten something the moment she'd opened her eyes. Forgotten something that made her heart clench tight, and left her wondering if she was lucky to not know. It was always the same sensation she'd felt when waking up on board the Lady of the Lake, like all the details were just inches away, concealed within a ghostly fog of memory that she could feel, but never describe.

Tami figured the others thought she was just being quiet and wanting peace. But in truth, it was simply because she was exhausted, having not caught much more than four or five hours sleep at any time-often less-in sporadic bursts. Once, Kerfuffle had come across her while she had been tearing up for no reason she could understand. Embarrassed, she had still held onto his neck as he had stood by her hammock and leaned in to cover her with a wing for a few minutes.

Feeling her eyes grow heavy, Tami turned away from the dark of the dorsal passage and eased herself into the bridge.

Here, at least, she felt safer.

The bridge was her true home. The moment she stepped into it, she felt her heart lift to see the sights. It was just as quiet and just as dark, yet darkness in here wasn't the absence of light, it was the presence of the cosmos, filled with its gentle colours that glimmered in the far distance. A serene and gentle vista. A view into infinity that helped her breathing remain steady and relaxed all her anxieties. It was a different black, not of unknown shadows, but of tranquillity.

All the same, she made sure to switch on several of the monitors, letting their 'dark mode' colours cast more light into the bridge with diagnostics, navigation data, and even just a few idle-screens of famous celestial phenomena she'd chosen. It gave the bridge some more illumination; made it feel more comfortable and familiar.

Briefly, Tami considered that if she felt the need to do that, then maybe there wasn't as much a feeling of safety on the bridge as she'd thought.

Instead, leaning on the back of her pilot's chair, Tami stood on her hooves and watched the void, imagining what every glint might be and spotting her favourite constellations. She'd always done it to calm down. Indulge in her truest love. To be out here. To stare at her dream from within it.

Finally managing to draw up the will to smile again, she dressed for bed, set her multiband on charge, and clambered into her hammock.

Under the soft hue of glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling above her, Tami shoved the wall with a wing to set the hammock swaying, and cocooned herself in the soft thermal blanket.

“G'night, Claudia...”

Muttering the words, she knew they were pointless. Relaxed or not, it took her a long time to sleep now. It was frustrating to feel so tired yet so unable to just switch off.

There was always the anxiety. The dreaded worries. Worries about what she'd seen. Worries about why she felt so scared, vulnerable and unsafe. And above all, worries about why those feelings just wouldn’t let go of her.

And so she hazily dozed, drifting half into sleep before opening her eyes time and again.

She was waiting. Waiting for the time she'd open them and feel the grip at her chest and the sweat on every inch of her body. Waiting for the one restless waking up where she'd suddenly realise she had slept just long enough for some unknown terror to have gripped her, and then been forgotten again the moment she woke up.

Three nights in a row now.

Slowly, Tami felt the world become that bit more muffled, and her body that much more still. And as she felt her eyes close, there was one last creeping wash of dread.

She knew. She knew it would happen, and she couldn't stop it. Not herself.

Never hersel-

She gasped. So sharply and suddenly, that her whole body jerked, a violent spasm shooting through her. Feeling a sudden shock of cold run through her whole body, like she’d fallen in polar waters, Tami yanked the blanket in tightly, hunching herself as much as she could.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she realised she had drifted off for some indeterminate time and was now shaking terribly from icy temperatures.

“Wh-wh-what?”

Struggling to open her heavy eyes, she found everything blurry and sore to look at. The glare of screens, like hazy lens flares, made her squash them shut again. She could feel her heart rattling at multiple beats a second and dampness on her cheeks. An unseen, freezing hand ran beneath her skin with crooked claws and clutched at her heart.

She felt terrified. Terrified and cold. And she didn't know why.

Something was deeply wrong, and Tami fought against her sleepiness to try to force her numb body to awaken. She groggily wondered if temperature control had broken down in the night, and the ship had only now gotten cold enough to wake her.

“Oh gosh, right...right...”

She made to open her eyes, rubbing them to clear her sight.

And as she looked out from her hammock, every single source of light on the bridge suddenly cut.

She jumped in fright. A loud bang of powerful electronics sharply powering down thumped into the darkness around her; monitors shut to black and low-level lighting thudded off all at once. LEDs below switches disappeared, and the hazy glow of Claudia's external lights that eeked into the fringes of the bridge windows snapped away entirely. Even the emergency lighting didn’t trigger.

In the distance she heard the reactor emit a strangled, tortured scream, quickly winding down, before its ever-present hum disappeared entirely.

Within her single held breath, Tami was plunged into such pitch black that she could not even see her own hammock.

And through the windows, there was nothing. No stars. No colours.

Just black.

A suddenly very enveloping, and menacing, black.

* * *

Limbs frantically flailing to try and get feeling back into them, Tami fell from her hammock to an unsteady landing on her hands and hooves. The deck was biting and prickly, like a sheet of ice, while the thick and motionless air grasped at her. A feeling like she had fallen into a chilly lake sunk into her skin, and Tami shivered powerfully as she huddled and staggered toward the pilot's chair.

Panic was settling in. She was navigating by memory alone. A ship without power this far out had nothing like enough light to see anything inside it. The emergency lighting had failed, telling her this was no normal outage.

“Right, right...warn, assess, act.”

Reciting the mantra that all space-goers were taught, she fumbled around until she found her chair. Pawing her hands over it, she started reaching up until she found the PA system's handset. It was connected to its own power supply, purposefully disconnected from the rest of the ship.

Holding the button down, she instinctively looked out the windows.

Or at least, the direction where the windows mere feet away would be. Now, they hidden in the darkness, and she couldn’t tell where the bridge ended, and space began.

“Captain? Captain are you awake?”

Letting go of the button, she waited. Those few seconds of dead silence dragged longer and longer with every one of her rapid heartbeats. Quaking, holding her wings around herself for warmth, she pressed it again.

“Kiffie? Anyone?”

Only this time did she think to realise that she'd set it to broadcast in all compartments, and she couldn't hear it from the main street behind her.

The PA was dead.

Biting her lip, she heard herself make a strangled, fearful whimper. Tami rushed across toward her multiband. She couldn't see it, and found herself blundering into the hammock again while clasping around frantically. It had been on charge; it would be ready.

Yet as her hands found it to yank it up, pressing the power button resulted in nothing. Its screen was blank. She could still feel the cord attached, and began to wonder how long ago some systems had started cutting out. How long had she slept through it until the cold woke her up?

“Oh no, please...”

Grabbing her blanket down from above her, she wrapped it around herself and began trying to find her way to the door. She had to get the others up. If only to fight off the suffocating, alien sense of isolation creeping in at the edge, mixed with a growing concern as to just how bad this was. What it they couldn't reactivate the reactor? What if they were left to freeze in here?

“Nooo...”

Shaking her head, she located and pulled at the cold metal of the bulkhead door to the bridge.

Behind it was nothing but a black void.

The main street would normally have stretched out from her door, illuminated by the reactor at the far end and a couple of small lights. Now it was as though she'd opened a door from nothing...into nothing.

Tami stopped and gasped sharply. She could hear something.

Distantly, coming from somewhere far off, she could hear the sound of a bell. One similar to a shrill school bell, faintly and continuously ringing in the dark.

She didn't recognise it, but the sound set her nerves alight with tension and made her gut clench.

Leaving the door open, Tami carefully crept through, aware of stairs just in front of her. Using her wings as guides, she felt one brush against a railing and gripped onto it, gasping as the ice-cold surface shot up through her wing-stem. Descending step by step toward the pitch dark common room, Tami saw no further light down there either.

Quickly, a thought came to her.

“Whisper?”

She gasped the word by accident, before gulping and trying to get her chattering teeth to work with her.

“Whisper, are you still up? Whisper! Are-yah!”

She stumbled forward, tripping over her own beanbag. Landing hard on her side, Tami squeaked and flailed until she could get back up, feeling empty bottles and food packets slide out from under her. She hadn't even realised she'd reached the bottom until her hand hadn't found another step to land on.

The ringing was louder down here, hammering in her ears and distractingly loud, as though she were in direct sight of the source now. Turning around as she stood up, Tami realised she'd lost all sense of direction. The sound was coming from her right side, but she no longer knew what part of the common room that meant.

She felt numb from the cold shock. The adrenaline spike on waking up was being stifled and worn down. Frustratingly, her mind felt full of cotton wool, unable to think clearly.

Moving forward, she found a chair in the black void, but that meant nothing. Chairs had been everywhere last night.

Putting each step in front of another, slowly, spreading her wings out, she moved further in. Or away. Or back the way she'd come. Her hand came down into a sticky mess, likely left by a soft drink that had spilled, and soon her every step with hand and hoof was having to pull up with a little more effort.

Tami walked, and walked, until an impossible, irrational thought began to settle in her mind.

She had walked far enough that even if she'd started at one corner and gone toward the furthest one, she'd have found the other wall by now.

“What's going on?”

She vocalised the words, but they felt tiny - absorbed by the still air. Frantic, Tami began to theorise. Had she walked into the cargo hold by accident? No, the floor was still sticky. Ended up turned around on the spot? Improbable.

As each option presented itself, she felt her mind starting to rest on one far more terrifying possibility. One she immediately shut down and tried to forget about.

“No, no...I can't remember them every time. I don't ever feel them during it...”

Shaking her head, Tami rushed forward. At this point she didn't care if she hit or tripped on anything. She just wanted something, anything to tell her where she was. That ringing was getting painfully loud. She ran across the sticky floor, and suddenly barreled into the edge of the table. The lip struck her in the side, knocking her over with a pained yelp.

Lying on the floor, feeling wet all over her body and clothes from the syrupy puddles of spilled drinks, Tami curled up.

“Please! Someone wake up! WAKE UP! HELP!”

There was no reply. Her words echoed away into the nearby cargo hold, returning to her after an unusually long time as though the atmosphere around her had suddenly forgotten that an echo had to come back.

Feeling her whole body clamp up in terror, she grabbed the nearest chair and clung onto it, her claws scraping the thin metal. Anything to give her some sense of solidity in the pitch dark.

She felt alone. So very, very alone. More than anybody ever should with their friends mere feet away, seemingly unaware of the disaster unfolding on their ship.

Sniffling, Tami then noticed something at the edge of her vision.

Opening her eyes wider, she could see a hazy line. A white, glowing crack, like the underside of a door with a light behind it.

Someone was up!

Scrambling, pulling herself up, Tami took off and flew unsteadily toward it.

“Hey! HEY! Whisper, is that you? Whisper!”

Nearly colliding with the door itself, recognising it as Claudia’s bathroom, she frantically grasped at the handle, twisting it down and giving it a strong pull, throwing it open. The light cascaded over her, hurting her eyes, but bearing a relieving ambience to it after the dead space behind her.

Standing in the doorway and squinting hard, Tami endured the stinging glare of the light source until she could get a look at what was there, desperate for another person or even just a place of illumination.

Yet, as her vision adjusted, she instead gasped.

She wasn't looking at Claudia's bathroom.

It took her a few seconds to recognise it, but eventually she knew. She knew all too well.

Before her, through the door, lay the captain’s quarters of the Starweaver. Equipment and beds were strewn around, with fallen utensils and ripped bandages. The wall, the floor, and everything within it caked in a slick red.

Blood.

Blood, but no bodies.

Feeling her voice stolen from her, Tami stared into it with a gradually mounting whine caught in her throat. It was impossible. It was beyond impossible, and it lent power to the theory she had been suppressing and deeply hoping would not be true.

“No...no...no, Captain!”

Fully intending to rush right into Hair Trigger's quarters, she turned back to the common room - and screamed in horror until she fell back and collided with the kitchen unit behind her. Tami’s eyes remained locked on to what lay ahead of her, even as plates collapsed over and around her, shattering on the ground.

The door she had opened lit up the common room, exchanging total blackness for more varied - yet darkened - colours. She could see the doors of all of her friends’ quarters, all of them with a sickly, red liquid slowly oozing from below each door of a room that she knew would be occupied.

“No, no!”

Choking on her voice, she could see the puddles of it had reached where she'd been, leaving a trail of it near the table. Looking down at her stained hands, hooves, body and blanket, she realised she had been wrong about spilled drinks the whole time.

Tami knew she was right now. She knew this wasn't a power loss, or sabotage, or an event horizon being crossed.

She knew what she was trapped in now.

Fighting back to her hooves, she backed away from the bleeding edges of the doors. Nothing now could have made her dare approach them, and instead she fled into the cargo bay.

The moment she passed into it, the bell grew to a horrendous, unbearable volume. Its sound warped and twisted, as though sensing her coming closer. It was coming from a singular red light at the centre, on the control panel for the crane and floor airlock. The crimson aura it emitted mixed with the white light from behind her, dimly casting eerie, two tone rays across the hold.

Looking all around her, holding her head with bloodied hands from the thumping noise, Tami paused to try and get her breath. Every sucking of air felt laboured and painful. Her lungs felt numb, and yet the freezing air stabbed at them on every inhalation.

“Please let this end! End now! Just end!”

Tami knew where she was. She knew what had happened. Knocking her own head or body hadn't worked to break it. Knowing what it was hadn't helped. In a single, immature and desperate moment, she came to an insane conclusion to get back to her hammock. Would it even help? She'd never felt one this vivid, this self-realised. This was the stuff of-

Well, yeah.

She was struck by the sudden and dread-filled thought that perhaps she would have to live it all through. Endure whatever horrors it threw at her. Just like before...

Feeling her cheeks start to dampen, Tami dropped her red-stained blanket on the deck, hardly even realising she’d somehow kept hold of it, and paced back and forth.

Hammock. Bed.

It was the only thing she knew she could do, if she even had a choice in the matter any more.

Looking ahead of her, she saw one of the two ladders leading up to the main street. From there it was a straight run to the bridge.

“Okay...okay!”

Urging her legs into motion, she ran toward it.

Before she was even halfway, a deafening voice broke through the bell's painful volume. Electronically tinged, coming from every speaker throughout the ship, speaking as the ship itself.

“CARGO BAY AIRLOCKS OPENING.”

The female voice was not Claudia. But she did recognise it from the other end of a call long ago. Mocking and smug, it had once preceded her overhearing Whisper’s agony.

Stopping briefly in shock, Tami looked up, and then around her as she heard the metallic bangs of locks being disengaged. Stark fear ran through her as the bell that had been running suddenly cut, and was replaced by the blaring of a depressurisation alarm. Red lights flashed from the roof of the cargo bay. Screaming, Tami willed her limbs into operation and galloped for the ladder.

“Stop! Stop! I'm in here still! STOP!”

The doors to either side of the cargo bay rolled open with two violent clangs. Seconds later, so did the large one in the floor, before the gigantic main door followed suit. A sharp hiss gave way to the bassy roar of rushing air. Tami screamed, grabbing around the ladder as tightly as she could, feeling her clothes, mane, tail, and wings blown backwards and forwards as air whirled in an indecisive cyclone around the bay as it fought for which open door to blast out of. Daring to look back, she saw the black through them all, as Claudia's internals were exposed to a nebulous vacuum. Her ears popped, her skin felt like it was burning, and yet she summoned all she could to keep climbing.

Tami fought to grip tight, and to yank herself up the ladder, feeling air tearing at her body. Her wings were thrown painfully back, threatening to rip her from the rungs. Her own mane blinded her, its size like a great hand around her head trying to drag her back down. Back toward one of the doors. Cold tendrils, wrapping around any part of her they could reach, tugging her, constricting her attempts to escape, trying to capture her and drag her out there with them.

The roar of rushing air grew to a peak. Alarms, wind, bells, and the clattering as boxes and the small gym were all sent tumbling across the floor and ejected into the void assaulted her senses. Her hands felt loose on the searing icy cold ladder, slipping from sweat and blood as she pushed up rung after rung.

Squealing, she slipped, and her lower body was immediately pulled away from the ladder, leaving her hanging by the grip of her talons.

"ENGAGING EMERGENCY JUMP."

“NO!”

Familiar terrors quickly returned, spurring her to strain forward and grasp the ledge of the hatch at the top of the ladder. A mounting whine, and crackling of unnatural magical energy began to build around her as she pulled, got her hooves on the rungs again, and yanked herself through the hatch.

Crying aloud with the pain and the effort, she turned, moving to slam it shut. Yet even as she looked back down, the hurricane of air blasting out of Claudia began to settle. Below her, she could see stars through the floor airlock, and realised the impossible logic that she could still breathe, even after all the air had been blown out.

As though whatever that had been only cared about getting her.

Head still hurting, she didn't even try to think about it, slamming the hatch shut and falling against the wall to hold her head in her hands. Her home felt dark and dangerous now, as the realisation of what she was stuck inside was fully beginning to land on her heart. Using her hands to shake herself, she pleaded and whispered over and over.

“Let me out...please, let me out...make it end.”

Even as the decks rattled and shook from the sensation of a jump to FTL speeds, she whimpered and shivered on the spot scarcely knowing what to do, or if she even could do anything.

"Let you out? So soon?"

Tami's eyes bolted open, her pupils becoming tiny pinpricks as she heard the voice. Male, calm and confident, tinged with just a little sense of playful amusement.

Her blood turned cold. Lowering her quivering hands, Tami turned her head to stare toward the engineering compartment's open door.

In the darkness within it, there were two vividly green eyes gazing at her, one of them warped and damaged, like something was blocking it. Around them, there was only a vague hint of an outline. A slender body with snapping bat wings, blacker than the shadows it was hidden within, bleeding and vague at its every edge, like dark ink running through charcoal.

"And I thought we were just starting to bond last time.”

From engineering, even in shadow, Tami could see a thicker, more complete darkness start to emerge. Crawling, slithering only at the corners of her vision, as the terrifying shape moved toward the doorway itself with malicious intent, its steps altogether too slow for how fast it was moving.

“It's just in my head! Tundra said the magic was gone! I'm just having a-a-”

She didn't finish, screaming aloud. Throwing herself forward, she slammed the door to the reactor shut and ran back toward the bridge. Within a couple seconds, she felt her right side erupt into a gripping, burning, and yet utterly familiar pain. She almost collapsed with a gasp, whole body travelling slower than she willed it, as though she were trying to run through an unseen mud that gripped at her every motion.

“Ngh! No! Come on! Please!”

Feeling dragged down, Tami nearly fell forward, feeling like she were having to draw and strain every one of her limbs. Gritting her teeth, she held her side and pulled herself toward a door that only seemed to keep moving away from her. There was nothing holding her back, but she felt weak. Trapped. Like half her body was suddenly made of lead.

And with every step she could feel, rather than see, a darkness coming up behind her. He was coming. He was coming for her. Just her. She had his full attention and no-one else to help her.

Running, then struggling, then pulling, then crawling. Digging her talons into the mesh sections of the floor panels, she pulled, and pulled, and cried, and pulled.

A dull, distant rumble of a void, like the wind in a cave opening, began to pass over her. She couldn’t even see the door to the bridge any more, and the sounds of his hooves on the metal were only getting closer, accompanied by an amused little chuckle at her fear. She whined, and haphazardly threw her body forward with as strong a flap of her wings as she could muster.

“NO!”

Finally grasping the railings around the stairwell. Tami tugged herself up by them. Hauling around them, she cried out at the sight of those same baleful eyes looking up at her from the black void of the common room below.

“And we never even got to what I'd promised you.”

Bleeding out of the dark, it came for her, rising up from the stairwell until it leered over her. Its transparent wings gave a leathery flap, the snap blowing a chill air and the smell of sweat, blood, and urine over her. Shrieking, Tami fell as she tried to back away from it.

Hitting the floor, she realised she’d fallen into the bridge, tripping on the frame of the door. Panting hard, sweating even in the frigid ship, Tami grabbed the door and tried to throw it closed. The door jammed inches before it shut, and the sickly-coloured eyes drew up only inches from her face, staring through the last remaining crack. Unblinking eyes surrounded by a shifting, melting face. Stainless white teeth - including two sharp fangs - made a cocky, almost flirtatious smirk.

“You do remember?”

In the distance, from down the stairwell, ghostly, helpless shrieks echoed. All of them familiar voices. The oily, dripping face blew her a silent kiss, as though seeing her distress at the torturous sounds.

“Don't you?”

Tami pushed the door closed, locked it with shaking hands, and then turned her back against it, clutching her searing torso. Her knees buckled from some unseen force, and she fell with a scream. Behind her, the door began to shudder and vibrate, as though coming to life all on its own. The locks that sealed it were moving all on their own.

“I want to wake up!” Tami shrieked the words as she fled from the door. She began pawing and clambering for her hammock, the only thing she could even vaguely think of. “Let me wake up! PLEASE! Let me wake up!”

Using her wings to lift herself, Tami finally lunged for the hammock. Getting into what had once been the safest place she could ever think of, childishly trying to hide beneath the blanket, she quivered and waited.

Waited.

She heard the faint rumbling of the locks coming undone and squeaked in terror, gripping her thin pillow so tightly that her claws dug into her own palms.

“Wake up...wake up, please, I want to-”

The door opened.

The rumbling grew until it was an ever-present, suffocating atmosphere about her. Enveloping her. She heard the soft sound of hooves on metal, echoing within a bridge that never normally echoed.

Tami closed her wet eyes tightly, whimpering as she heard it coming, and then squealing as her blanket was violently torn off of her.

Slowly, first hearing the skitter of metal on metal, she felt and saw thin wire cables slithering over the ground, reaching up and lashing tightly around every wrist and ankle. She was paralysed, unable to stop them winding around and around. She was unable to move at all.

“Just like I promised. Do not worry.”

A mouth with ice-cold breath began nuzzling its dry lips into the inner side of her ear. It spoke quietly, as though trying to be reassuring; an unseen hoof caressing its way through her mane.

"You'll be joining agent Whisper soon enough."

Eyes fully open, she stared directly forward as she heard a distant, helpless, and painfully familiar scream from somewhere in the darkness. The cables suddenly tugged hard, and her body was ripped from her hammock. Behind her, what had once been the pilot's seat rotated, now looking like a seat used for a much more malicious purpose, the wire dragging her frozen body toward it.

As she neared it, unable to move anything but her eyes, she saw the ends of the wire connected to a charged electric battery. She felt a very new, very terrifying reshuffling of priorities in her mind.

Don't let me remember this when I wake up.

Tami felt the cables tighten. They roughly dragged her into the chair. Tears rolled down her paralyzed, unblinking face.

Please, don't let me remember this.

A leathery wing stroked her cheek from behind. “Now, it’s your turn.”

Please...

She closed her eyes, heard the searing crack of a static discharge, and jerked violently as she screamed and-

* * *

-fell, until the deck came up to meet her.

Hearing her own awful scream still echoing off the plate metal, she landed hard, collapsing in a heap. Tami flailed and spasmed in fright, fighting with her own blanket on the ground in blind terror.

Drenched in sweat, her throat feeling rough, Tami pulled herself out of the blanket, blinked and looked around at the dark bridge, her stomach feeling twisted and hollow. Twinkling stars and the idle screens of displays gave off enough light around her to see. It was still the night cycle.

All thoughout her body she felt gripped by fear, and yet she couldn't remember what from.

For a moment, there was silence.

And then she heard the sudden clatter of approaching hooves.

Pushing herself back from the entrance to the bridge, Tami felt her skin tighten in fear.

The door was knocked open, slamming loudly against the wall. A tall pony came barrelling through, rushing into the bridge with purpose and a submachine gun held at the ready.

“Tami!?”

Golden-yellow eyes swivelled around, and Whisper Step quickly spotted the hippogriff lying in a tangled heap with her blanket on the floor.

After a second, as the spy realised there was no true danger, the weapon was lowered, and Tami saw her aggressive, focused stance abate slightly.

“I heard you scream.”

“I...I did? I mean, sorry, I did...” Tami lowered her eyes away from the piercing gaze, before cradling her face in both hands, feeling tears still emerging.

Above her, the stoic agent stood in place, looking back at the door she'd come through, before making a quiet sigh. Hooking the weapon back on her suit, Whisper spoke quietly, yet her words were terse. “Are you all right?”

Habitual instinct made Tami want to nod, but after three nights of this, she simply lacked the energy to summon any real resistance to the query. Sniffling, she gently shook her head, her voice pitching up and cracking as she struggled for just one word.

“No...”

There was a long pause. Tami sat and held her head, feeling wholly embarrassed to sob so openly in front of a pony she looked up to greatly, while Whisper Step just stood still and looked around the bridge. Whisper looked behind her at the door a couple of times, as though impatient to get back to something.

Then, finally, after ten seconds of silence, Whisper took a slow breath and spoke up.

“Tell me.”

“What?” Tami gasped, looking up; her eyes glazed with dampness in the low light.

Whisper's face turned only partially toward her. She wasn't smiling. Her eyes were as piercing as ever, seeming to glow in the darkness.

“What's wrong. Tell me.”

Her mouth hanging open, Tami still took some seconds to process that. Even weeks into knowing her, Tami still felt apprehensive about exactly what she said to Whisper at any given time. Especially when alone.

Clutching around her blanket, Tami sat up properly and looked at the floor. Strangely, in an odd moment of realisation, Whisper's quiet pause struck her as unexpectedly comforting. Whisper wasn't forcing the issue, despite the stern tone. The spy was waiting for her, not rushing her to speak.

“I...” she began, before faltering and holding a hand to her face again. “Sorry...”

Whisper Step remained silent and serene in the low light of the bridge; half her face was illuminated by the spectrum of colours from a half hourly diagnostic beginning to flicker over the main display.

Tami tried again.

“I've been waking up at nights. Every time feeling...feeling scared, or screaming. Like something cruel was about to happen to me. I find stuff that was in the hammock with me spilled out, and I feel like I've been so terrified that my whole body's tense and sore, a-and then I d-don't sleep for the rest of the night. ‘Cos I'm too afraid...”

She sobbed, and grasped a portion of her own tangled mane in frustration.

“And I never remember what it was! Sometimes I think I know why b-but I just can't know and-”

Whisper Step cut through the babbling, not taking her eyes away from looking out the front of the ship.

“What do you think it is, then?”

Tami opened her mouth, and then sharply closed it. Anxiety flowed through her as she considered that question.

“I don't know...”

“You said you did. Or had an idea.” Whisper's voice was level. She turned her head back to Tami, even as she moved forward to lean against the back of the Captain's chair.

Panic was setting in. There was no way that Tami could bring herself to say it. She couldn't. Not now. Guilt was too ridden in her gut to dare broach the subject in present company, and she clammed up.

“S-sorry, I can't.”

It was a poor excuse. A telling one, to those trained to spot such things.

To those like Whisper Step.

“It's Cascavel, isn't it?”

The sudden opening of Tami's eyes to their fullest was an obvious confirmation of Whisper’s guess, and the hippogriff shook her head violently.

“No, no, it's-”

“And you're worried to say it is, because I'm here.”

If striking the real problem had been a target, Whisper would have scored a bullseye. Tami felt frozen in place all over again, uncertain how to even reply. How could she? After everything Whisper had been through, how could she sit here in front of the spy and cry about her own issues from those events with Cascavel? It felt wrong. Her own were less important than Whisper’s. Less intense. Tami knew she was only acting like this because she was weaker than Whisper, and it made her feel guilty.

Eventually, she just nodded in defeat.

“I'm sorry...”

She heard Whisper make a neutral sound in her throat, and the rustle of her clothing moving, even as Tami looked at the floor and felt ashamed.

“You had a rather traumatic accident a few years ago, didn't you?”

Tami's misty eyes crept open, hearing Whisper continue.

“One that badly hurt you, and not just physically. Correct?”

Feeling her heart skip, Tami swallowed, and meekly replied.

“...yes. How did-”

Whisper interrupted, “If Hair Trigger or Volatility Smile were to take the helm here, and collided with something that led either of them to harm, or to a loss in confidence...even if not to the same severity as your own experiences, what would you do?”

Licking her dry lips, Tami gulped and looked up at the spy. Whisper was half lounging against the side of Hair Trigger's seat, idly playing with the disabled flight control panel.

“I'd t-try to help them.”

Whisper's eyes suddenly moved to look at her, even though her head remained still. One eyebrow raised. It was a silent query, one Tami realised the meaning of after a couple seconds.

“O-oh...right. Sorry, I just didn't...” Tami trailed off, not knowing how to follow that up.

Eventually, Whisper let go of the yoke, letting it snap back into position, and turned more properly toward Tami.

“You're having night terrors. That much is obvious.”

Tami blinked, confused. “Is that a Republic euphemism for nightmare because of what that word means to-”

“No.” Whisper's voice was firm, but calm, before softening. “No, night terrors are different from nightmares. In simple terms, nightmares you remember, night terrors you do not. There's more to it that I'm sure a medical student could bore you with, but that is effectively what the main difference is. Thrashing and screaming in the night? Waking up in a panic feeling terrified of something, but only a vague idea as to why? That's what it is.”

Tami listened intently, surprised to hear Whisper speak at such length on a subject not related to her work.

“How do you know that so off-hand?”

Whisper, surprisingly, grinned.

“Now that one IS a Republic thing where the association with the night makes up a saying. When they trained us, they told us to be night terrors, not nightmares.” She winked, with a dangerous, playful smirk that betrayed the real nature of her job. “Because something you don't even know the nature of coming after you is a hell of a lot scarier than what you can remember and describe. That's what we do.”

To her own surprise, Tami felt her spirits lift a little at the boast, before fading quickly as she looked back at her hammock, and felt a dull pain in her hip where she'd landed on her side.

“And here I am just being just a stupid coward that's afraid of someone who's dead...and having childish nightmares or...or night terrors or whatever and bawling b-because I...I...”

She heard movement, and squeaked as she found Whisper suddenly walking directly toward her with a purpose, leaning in sharply to look her sternly eye to eye, mere inches away. Her voice was much more serious, and tinged with a darker -and incredibly insistent- tone.

“They. Are not. Childish.”

Eyes wide, Tami stared back, feeling herself quiver, worrying she'd implied something she really shouldn't have in her own self-degrading ramble.

Yet as fearsome as it was, the conviction in Whisper's voice drove home a change in perception to Tami's mind. If someone as strong as Whisper could say that about such problems...

The forceful expression on Whisper’s face dropped slightly, and she sat back.

“Have you been staying awake after them every time?”

Gently, Tami nodded.

“Then that's the problem. You're building a schedule, Tami. What you need is a good night's sleep.”

“But-!”

Whisper cut the fearful complaint off. “To get back to bed and sleep it off. Break that cycle you're getting yourself into.”

Tami didn't like the thought of where this was going, shaking her head frantically.

“No, no I can't face all that again! It's-it's awful! I can't remember, except in a way I can a-and...I don't want it again! I keep waking up alone and not knowing if it's real and even those few seconds are so awful, I can't do this! I-I need to be up in like, a few hours to do the next jump anyway s-so I should just stay up, really...”

Whisper's turn of expression was curious. Her hard eyes softened, before she stood up and unhooked her submachine gun from its harness.

“Get into the hammock. And sleep.”

“Whisper?”

Tami stood up as the spy wandered back over to Hair Trigger's seat, slid it back as far as it would go and sat sideways on it. Her dexterous hooves turned her weapon over, made it safe, opened a panel to remove its strange, stubby form of round, and hit a latch that sprung open the two-tone receiver to reveal its complicated internals. Moving it from side to side, Whisper began disassembling it before Tami's eyes.

“Always preferred to do it by starlight. You don't mind?” Whisper turned her head to look at the hippogriff. “I can be quiet, I promise.”

Her mouth hanging open, Tami finally caught up with Whisper’s real meaning, and nodded.

Whisper nodded back, then turned back to her cleaning. “Thank you. Good night, Tami.”

Tami didn't know what to think, other than that the reassurance, the act itself, made her realise truly how tired she was. Whisper was right that she needed sleep. She was scared, but as foalish as it seemed, knowing someone as capable as Whisper was right there made it feel, well, easier. Safer.

Silently, she backed away, and with a clumsy flap of her wings, rolled back up and into her hammock. Reaching down to her multiband on the floor, she groaned, realising how little sleep she'd be getting even if she were to drift off now. Yet even as she put it back down, she couldn't avoid the words quietly being blurted out.

“Whisper, thank you.”

The moment she spoke, Tami heard the sound of the weapon’s springs and hinges cease and spotted Whisper's eyebrow raise again in her direction, her voice gentle.

“When I woke up after only an hour the first night back here, I saw a comforting sight by my bed too.”

Clutching into her blanket, Tami honestly didn't know what to say.

“Eyes closed, Tami. It generally helps.”

“O-oh, sorry...okay. G'night...”

Closing her eyes, Tami's thoughts were overridden enough that any fears were a far distant second in priority. Thoughts of what Whisper meant about this or that. Or the reassuring sounds of components being undone or clicking back into place from just nearby with expert regularity. A presence. A quiet reminder to latch on to.

Within a minute, her limbs went loose, and Tami was asleep.

* * *

After a minute more, Whisper Step looked up and saw the pilot fast asleep.

Staring at Tami for some time, she finished her work on the weapon; her hooves clicked and snapped the pieces back together without even looking at them.

Getting up, she winced, and glanced down at her hooves, at the chipped edges and scar tissue from electric wire burns. That gallop upstairs to the bridge had made them hurt again, and she'd done her best to not dare show it in front of Tami.

That little thing had more than enough worries on her mind already without the physical reminders as well.

Trotting closer to the hammock, Whisper stood over the hippogriff, momentarily considering the recent events from Tami's perspective, before quickly dismissing them. Such thoughts wouldn’t help her right now, and any good operative always had a finely honed crap-filter in their mind.

What mattered was dealt with, and it made her smile.

Looking around, her eyes caught sight of Tami's multiband on the floor. Silently, she leaned down to pick it up, casting a brief glance to the sleeping form before her. Entering Tami's password to unlock it, Whisper quickly navigated past the pop-rock wallpaper to the alarm clock app and disabled it.

Placing it back down, at precisely the same angle as it had been in, Whisper looked again at Tammani, and spoke quietly. Firmly.

“I promised I was coming for all of you, Cascavel.”

She leaned in, a hoof hovering above Tami’s head for a moment, before placing it on the hammock's side instead, setting it gently swaying with a soft push.

“That includes in there as well.”

Turning, she walked across the bridge to the door and locked it before finally moving toward Tami's own pilot seat.

Slowly, a grin came to her face as she slid around and onto the cushion the hippogriff had added to it. Whisper reached out and took the controls. She had a few hours to familiarise before the crew's next jump was scheduled.

“Well, I let you fly mine...”

* * *

Agent Whisper Step (Image by Kalemon)

Tundra Gem (Image by Kalemon)

The Most Wonderful Time of Manufacture

Author's Note

This chapter was written in response to a few things. The approaching of the holiday season last year, and that one of my close friends who plays one of the characters in the tabletop game this is based on was having a pretty awful time. I wanted to help cheer him up with a tale of the crew during happier times, featuring much of the cast from the GM's NPCs showing up in some form. It's a fun way to see more people who live in this world.

Thus, this section of the story was born. Enjoy, as we come into another winter, not too far from holiday times.

The Most Wonderful Time of Manufacture

With the horrors of recent events behind them, the crew of Claudia eventually returned to Port Medusa to rest once more. They had earned some time off, Captain Hair Trigger felt, both for themselves and their allies. That and they needed some more time to get to know Swan, the new mercenary on their crew, and catch up with some of their acquaintances who live and work on the space station itself.

But the black has its own traditions. And for once, some can be of a positive, heartwarming nature for those in need of it.

The Most Wonderful Time of Manufacture

* * *

The flying mug impacted on the lip of a rare unoccupied stool, careening up and over in some rebellious defiance of common physics. With fiery liquid flying out in all directions, the clatter of its landing on the table amongst an ongoing card game was joined by rampant cries of annoyance and anger. Half a dozen burly shipmates looked up, and soon the insults were flying back along the mug's trajectory, accompanied by a metal ashtray.

Bushel Hops looked up from her customer with a scowl and rattled a hoof off the metal plate on her bartop three times. The one she kept on a little spring between an upper and lower metal surface precisely to make a noise louder than any shout.

"Hey! Chill out or get out!"

A couple dozen faces from the rival shipping companies looked up at her from either side of Port Medusa's tavern. Many of them glowered, some even swore under their breath, but all went back to grumbling among themselves instead, pulling stained cards back to hands and hooves.

Captain Hair Trigger dropped an empty shot glass to the bar's surface with an amused chuckle, having watched the bartender take care of business quite happily.

"Rowdy night, Bush."

The bartender didn't take her stern look away from the groups, and Trigger could have sworn the earth pony's eyes were looking in two directions at once. To Trigger’s right, a hippogriff somewhat larger than her made a neutral sound.

"Young hotheads with their drink," muttered Swan.

Bushel finally turned back to Trigger, shrugging dismissively. "Bad blood, competing contracts. I'll be lucky if I can close up without them kicking off. Speaking of hot fuses tonight, I'm not going to expect anything from you again, am I?"

Her wary glare turned to Swan, and the affronted indignation on his face set Trigger to laughing uproariously, knocking her hoof on the table.

Grumbling, he grabbed his beer again. "You start one fight with some ass who more than deserved it, and suddenly you've got a reputation forever. For the love of..."

Feeling the warmth of the spirits in her gut, Hair Trigger felt herself laugh far more than she had intended to, snorting and tapping her empty glass to signal for a refill.

"Oh, don't worry, Bush. Got him on a tight leash."

Bushel Hops took a second, before finally cracking into a grin and short laugh at the roll of the hippogriff's eyes, leaning over the bar conspiringly on one foreleg. She winked while pouring the stiff drink for the Captain. "You do, huh? Guess my hunch was wrong then. Always figured you were the one who preferred being tied up."

Hair Trigger met the bar-mare's waggling eyebrows with a confident smirk. "Oh, you did, did you? So, that's why you never said anything to me. You needed someone you thought would be the one to strap you to the bed-frame instead, huh?"

Bushel cackled, sliding the glass to her customer. "I'm quite certain we both know who'd be the one tying who, filly."

"And I'm very certain us starfarers know how to tie better knots, babe," replied Hair Trigger, her voice sudden and smooth.

"And I'm absolutely certain I'm too sober to be sitting next to this exchange," deadpanned Swan, leaning on a claw and upending his bottle. The liquid inside sloshed, being downed at the rate only an experienced drinker could manage.

Hair Trigger snorted, downed her shot, shook her head, and collected the tray of drinks she'd initially come for. The remainder of her crew were sitting at the far end of the bar, behind one of the two parties she'd seen arguing. She could see the top of Kerfuffle's plume over them, and (like any good partner) hear Tundra even through the din. After a moment she spotted the bright green of Verbena Mint's tail sticking out from the side as well.

Whether Sweet Alyssum, the station’s much feared director, knew of Verbena - her half-sister - being in Bushel’s was something Hair Trigger was not certain of, nor something she wanted to know.

Knowledge meant complacency, after all. Ignorance in this case was bliss.

She knocked Swan's shoulder. "Come on over when you get the chance, you're spending too much time off alone as is."

There was a brief grunt in reply; Swan turned his attention to the hanging display screen to watch some far off anti-gravity based sport with his drink.

Shrugging to Bushel, Hair Trigger took up the tray in her telekinesis. Giving the bartender a wink as she turned, Hair Trigger spoke up above the noise.

"Cheers, Bush. I'm sure that cider will have Tam going off the wa-HEY!"

Mid-turn, a heavy body barged into her. The metal tray squashed between them, flattening into Hair Trigger's face and knocking her off the stool. She hit the ground, back to the bar. The tray upturned, drowning her in various forms of alcohol; the glasses rattling one by one off of her head.

With a feeling of absolute indignation, Hair Trigger felt one of the bottles land perfectly on her horn.

A surge of fire washed through her. Opening her eyes, feeling them stinging from the spirits flowing down face, she could see a hefty, blurry shape above her. A minotaur, belonging to one of the transport crews. He looked down and gave Hair Trigger a dismissive kick on her hindleg with his hoof, his hands patting at his soaked clothing. His own tankard lay on the floor.

"Watch yourself, you clumsy little shit!"

Trigger's mouth caught open, and she scowled. Floundering for a moment, feeling a searing anger at the laugher of others around the room she surged up, rose to her full height, and stared him sternly in the groin.

"Says the bastard who just knocked clean into me when I wasn't even moving!" She bared her teeth, looking upwards and trembling.

The minotaur just grinned at her. "Heh...tiny pony thinks she's a big shot. Not that you should be here."

Hair Trigger let out a low growl, her head twitching to one side. "How. Do you figure. That?"

The minotaur nodded to her side at the way in, and a thickly worded warning written on it.

"No minors allowed in the bar."

He reached forward and clipped Hair Trigger around the ear. The impact was solid, dizzying the unicorn for a moment, feeling like she'd run into a steel bar - enough to almost take her off her hooves.

"Playpen’s up on level six, kid."

He gave her another knock, before Hair Trigger whipped her head around, her face projecting a visage of growing rage.

"Aww, look at her, lads! She's wanting a fight!" The minotaur waved to his crew. "Little thing's got a cutie temper tantrum! Guess she's got a SHORT fuse!"

Hair Trigger stomped the ground.

"Oh. Fuck YOU."

"Oh you want to fight? Well come o-"

Before his fist could even clench, a pony's skull -complete with a firm and well directed horn- headbutted him in the groin with all the sudden force and fiery anger of a torpedo hitting a capital ship's hull.

Hair Trigger felt it land. Hard. Hard and true, followed by the minotaur collapsing in front of her, wheezing and gasping, his legs failing like they were made of jelly. He made a strangled cry.

Catching the brute's beard in her magic, she grabbed his cheeks and yanked his head down, slamming it against the heavy metal stool. With a sound of a boulder hitting a brick, the enormous creature dropped to the floor and curled into a ball.

"And you'll damn well apologise when you're done crying you stupid...fuck...ing..."

She had caught the look on Swan's face, the hippogriff having turned from his game.

Slowly, he raised a hand and pointed behind Hair Trigger. In a moment, some of the red mist cleared, and Hair Trigger sighed, already knowing in her gut what she'd see.

Turning to look over her shoulder, she saw twelve other creatures raise up from their table, the sound of scraping chairs and dragging bottles in hand filling the bar.

Hair Trigger stroked her hatless mane and muttered quietly, "Aw, shit..."

From along the side of the bar, she could see her crew still somewhat unaware, other than Volatility Smile. The crystal pony was already up, reluctantly easing herself in towards Hair Trigger and Swan. She gave the minotaur on the floor a glance, and then turned her eyes to the hippogriff. "Seriously? Did you start another fight?"

"You what!? Why does everyone just assume-"

One of the minotaur's friends stepped forward: a burly earth pony. Hair Trigger fixed him with a stare, refusing to blink as his crude accent belched out.

"Oi! Fuck you playin' at!? Now here's the deal, you're gonna apologise to us, and him, real nice like. Gonna be some drink in it too, see?"

Volatility Smile groaned, her head turning to see who Trigger were looking at. She leaned down to her Captain.

"Hair Trigger, think about what you're saying, and we-"

"How about you all eat a bag of dicks!? He's the one who came at me!"

The invitees of the phallus-consumption looked to one another, as though scarcely believing what they heard. One shrugged, before they rushed forward. All of them.

Volatility Smile sighed, hung her head, and moved to duck the first punch.

* * *

"Hey! HEY!"

Bushel slammed the metal panel again and again, but its noise was lost. She called the names of those she knew. She promised suspensions.

None of it helped, as she witnessed the brawl break out in front of her. Hair Trigger and her two crewmates quickly amalgamated into the whirlwind of thrown fists, hooves, and claws. She saw some of their attackers break off and charge at the rest of the crew. A missed punch struck a lonesome mercenary at the bar on the back, who quickly joined in as a third party, throwing hooves at anything in range. A drunkard flailed into it all, seemingly just up for any fight.

Then, with terrifying stillness, she saw one thrown bottle arc up and away.

Slowly, it descended, end over end, until it crashed into the back of one of the rival crew's heads. It shattered, and a string of curses broke the air.

Before she knew what was happening, the other half of the bar spun into a fury and charged into the fray. The sound of breaking furniture mixed with glass exploding. Screams of rage and the dull thud of impacts drowned out the sports channel.

Throat hoarse from yelling, Bushel hit a red button below her bar and went back to slapping and shouting at anyone within reach.

* * *

Hair Trigger had somehow already ended up wrestling and punching with three of the instigating rival crew. She had one of their manes in her teeth, jarring it as she rammed her horn again and again to jab at the side of the one holding her in a headlock. Her hindlegs were connecting with someone every time she kicked, and it didn't sound like any of her crew.

Thus, she decreed, it was a viable target.

Hooves smacked into her sides, and she fought to keep her head protected, feeling the impact of punches on her forelegs. There wasn't any pain. The adrenaline and anger steamed through her to keep her thrashing like a rabid wolverine in their hooves, until one of them bodily picked her up and hurled her onto the bar top.She felt claws on her back, dragging her down the length of it, clattering into bottles along the way.

"For-argh! Fucks-ack! Sake-ow!"

Her head impacted on the cash register and she lashed out to the side on sheer instinct. Her hoof caught one of them in the sternum, and she wrestled her way onto her back. Clumsy fighting ensued as she traded hooves with another brawler, before finally sneaking a strike by to clip his chin and make him back off.

Drink sprayed over her from a tossed plastic cup, making her wince away. Opening her eyes, she saw a pony rise up to stomp down on her chest. She sucked in air, trying to toughen up before the impact.

An orange hoof swung a bottle that crashed over her assailant's head, and what she now saw was a pegasus went down hard, falling off the bar to the floor, wings splayed out.

Hair Trigger paused for a moment, and saw Bushel Hops glowering at the groaning pony below them.

"Never did pay his damned tab,” muttered Bushel.

She tossed the empty tip jar at him -just for punctuation- before looking up and clearly spotting some other trouble. She rushed off quickly down the bar, pulling at a plastic container someone was trying to hurl. “Hey! No! Leave that right where it is!”

Taking a second to take a glance at the brawl, Hair Trigger stood up on the bartop and looked for her crew among the thirty-something bodies tussling and fighting in every corner.

For a moment she thought she could see Tundra's cloak getting tangled up in it, but more freighter crews -presumably called via multiband- had piled in from the nearby hangar. She could-

A can bounced off her forehead.

“Gotcha, shortstack! Haha!”

The aggravating pain shot through her, and Hair Triggered glowered, vibrating in outrage. Her mouth twisted and she decided, quite simply, 'fuck it' and 'fuck you', in short order.

Her telekinesis glowed and picked up two broken chair legs. Staring death at the group of jeering ponies amidst the brawl, she just bellowed in rage, ran across the bar top, and dove right off it clean into the midst of the mayhem swinging the hunks of wood at anyone within reach that happened to be taller than her.

This, as it turned out, was itself quite a tall order.

* * *

Volatility Smile rebounded off of a unicorn's side, knocked herself away and then was driven back again by the crush of ponies swinging and tackling on all sides. She ducked a punch coming for her head, using what self-defence techniques she knew to shift around the attack. Giving the drunk a sharp shove from behind, they keeled over and got lost behind a couple of griffons brawling on the floor. She ducked a bottle, before grabbing the nearest chair and swinging it to buy herself some room.

“Get back!”

Turning, the chair sweeping, she felt it suddenly stop in mid air, a magical field enveloping it.

“Smile, it's me!”

Tundra Gem’s look of shock met her as he fought to untangle himself from his own cloak. Even before he could speak again, a pony tackled into his side and took the unicorn off his hooves.

As the space-trucker sought to get atop Tundra, a sudden flare of magic sent him firing directly upwards to join the flying bottles in soaring across the room. He cleared most of the brawl, a high pitched, warbling yell accompanying him, before falling on top of - and breaking - a table on the far side.

Smile grabbed Tundra's hoof to help him up, and the unicorn leaned on a chair as he steadied himself.

“What in Equestria got this started?” Tundra asked hurriedly, panting and looking around, his magic instinctively catching an ashtray and two bottles in mid-air.

Volatility Smile shrugged and gave a 'what-can-you-do' look. “Rather what 'triggered' it.”

Tundra paused, opened his mouth slowly, and then nodded. “Yes...yes, I think I can grasp roughly what transpired now-look out!”

A griffon came barrelling toward them, smashing the remaining chair from Smile's grip. She stepped around a haphazardly thrown claw, turned, and bucked him as hard as she could. She couldn’t even get her balance before another pony fell into her and ran past before she even saw them, sending her tumbling into Tundra to fall together in a heap. Hissing in pain on the ground, Smile saw the griffon come back at them again. He was wild with rage, seemingly with no other goal than to get some hits in.

“Fuck you!” he cried.

“Eloquent.”

The voice from behind him caught the griffon's attention, before a purple coated arm threw a fist into the side of his beak.

Swan drove into the larger opponent, using stance and momentum to make up for what he lacked in comparative strength, powering wicked hooks again and again into the griffon's stomach. The moment he had the head low enough, Swan grabbed it and threw the griffon down, giving him a nasty kick to the solar plexus. The air was blown from the thug’s lungs, and he lay coughing on the ground.

Getting up together, Tundra and Smile pushed and shoved behind Swan to the edge of the room, away from the mad brawl.

“Eloquent? That's your taunt?” Smile chided. “Coming from you of all people?”

Swan shrugged and kicked a can away, looking back into the thrashing crowds near the bar. “Least I put some fucking effort into it. YES!”

“What!?” Both Smile and Tundra remarked together. The hippogriff pointed at the display screen and thrust both hands in the air.

“Third inning, last possible moment from the sidelines! I knew they had it this season!”

Bewildered, staring at one another, unicorn and crystal pony just shook their heads.

“Make our way to the exit?” Tundra suggested.

Smile nodded. “Sure, just...” She turned back to the fighting, concern brewing in her head. “...what about Tami?”

Tundra's calmness faltered. “Oh no, let's go!”

* * *

Tami slipped backwards as far as she could, caught against the bar itself at the opposite end. She'd tried to hold on to Verbena, until the crush had separated them. Now she had no idea where anybody was.

“Hey! Hey you!”

Tami squealed in fright, turning sharply. There was a pony limping toward her. Long haired, rough, and clearly coming off a long time in the black.

“I...recognise you, halfbreed!” A distinctive Empire accent slurred from heavy intoxication, as the earth pony stumbled and pushed toward her. “You'wi...you'wif the short one who'm hurt mah mate!”

“What? No! I'm j-just here to get a drink, I was just going to go! I'm going! It's okay!” She pleaded and spoke rapidly, possibly too fast for his inebriated mind to keep up.

“Nah! You wiff her! C'mere!”

His hoof rose.

And his hoof fell.

She felt a stinging smack across her cheek and fell to the ground with a cry of pain - one that stood out amongst the crowd. She fell into a puddle of ale, feeling dizzy and with a stinging throb in her face. She opened her eyes, feeling them dampen in fear as she saw him leering over her.

“Git up, fight!”

She couldn't reply, shaking her head over and over.

“Git up, fi-”

Kerfuffle's fist hit the side of his head like a pneumatic ram.

The pony was catapulted over the bar, his head staying oddly where it was in spatial terms as the rest of his body rotated around it. He crashed - upside down - into the shelving at the back, before dropping out of sight in a clatter of decorative bottles, quite unconscious.

Tami looked out from behind her raised hands, seeing the big griffon look over his handiwork with some degree of surprise before gently reaching down to her.

“C'mon, Miss. Let's get you someplace safe.”

“Oh, Kiffie...”

She grasped his hand and let him lift her onto his back, safe between his raised wings.

“Sorry I didn't get here sooner, Miss,” he began, seeing her holding her bruised cheek. “Some very rude people got in the way.”

Unbothered by anyone (and indeed with many moving out of his path entirely) he started moving toward the door, where Volatility Smile, Tundra Gem, and Swan were waiting. As he stepped around strewn objects, from his back she could see a trail of around twelve groaning spacers on the ground on a rough trajectory from where Kerfuffle had been seated to where she'd been.

“Wait, Kiffie...Vebs!”

Kerfuffle looked around, before pointing.

“Here she comes, Miss, all safe.”

Tami looked up, and then gaped at just what she was seeing before her, where Kerfuffle pointed.

“What...?”

* * *

At first, Verbena Mint had been scared when the fight had broken out. A much larger pony had rammed between her and Tami and knocked her over, but when she'd gotten up, something strange had happened.

The first pony that saw her had come running to throw a punch, before suddenly stopping.

“Oh, no! Not you!” he'd said, before turning to find someone else.

Then, a crude looking mare covered in painted tattoos had swung toward her with a bottle in hoof, before pausing and backing up.

“Shit...I ain't got nuthin' against you!” she'd said.

Both of them had rapidly exited, and then she had realised what was going on.

Calmly, almost smugly, she had wandered back through the brawl to her seat and collected the milkshake she’d brought into the bar from where it had spilled. Half of the thick drink was still left. Another pair of spacers had given her an evil eye, before suddenly switching to an apologetic look. Verbena had watched them go, and waved.

There had been a brief worry when a bottle lightly impacted on her flank. But the two stallions eagerly arguing and trying to say it was the other one had made it worth it. She had just tapped her chin, letting them sweat over her thoughts, before trotting past.

Now, she delighted in the look of surprise from the Space Jammers near the entrance, as they witnessed her skip serenely through it all and back to them.

Stopping in front of them, she sipped from her straw and giggled.

“What...what was that?” Tami gasped down from above atop Kerfuffle's back.

Verbena felt a twinge in her heart at the bruise on her bestie's cheek, but gave a cheery grin and a dismissive shrug all the same. “Spend a few weeks here...people learn who your half-sister is.”

She winked, reflecting that now she knew why Sweets enjoyed this sort of life so much.

* * *

The crew gathered, free from the still furious violence erupting inside Bushel's tavern. Tammani still rubbed her cheek with one hand, the other accepting some spilled ice that Verbena had wrapped in a tissue and passed to her friend. It stung, but the cooling sensation was enough to let her feel relieved at getting away lightly.

“Best we maybe head back to Claudia till things cool off?” Swan offered, rubbing his side. Someone had gotten a good shot in.

“Are we not we forgetting someone?” Tundra chided, angling his head back to the singularity of drunken madness.

After a half second of everyone staring at one another, the confusion wore off and Tami gasped aloud. “The captain! Where's the captain?”

As one, they cast their eyes to the tumbling, frantically swinging bodies. It was hard to see individuals amongst the upturned tables and flying beer. Yet eventually, as Tami looked from her perch on Kerfuffle, she started to see something from her higher perspective.

A section of the brawl had an odd anomaly. Every few seconds, one of the drunkards would cry out and drop downwards out of sight with a sharp cry, like swimmers being pulled below the surface.

“There she is!”

Tami pointed, and Kerfuffle lifted her down to the ground. Following her direction, he waded back in. She saw the big griffon breeze past some stumbling, walking wounded and reach his hand into the melee. After a couple seconds of grasping he gripped something, and pulled a whirling dervish of a pony out from the crowd in one hand.

“Come on! Come on! Call me that will you! C'mere you bastard! C'MERE!”

Even as Kerfuffle lifted her up and quickly walked back, Hair Trigger was swinging all four limbs in the air, her teeth bared, her coat soaked in beer and her face covered in a few bruises.

“I think you got enough of ‘em, Cap'n.” Kerfuffle spoke softly.

Hair Trigger's protests fell on deaf ears, or at least calmer ears, as Kerfuffle walked her back over. On the way, the sight of a dozen security drones surging into the tavern past her seemed to calm the unicorn down somewhat.

Dropping to the ground again, she bristled and stared back at the fight, then grinned at the satisfying sound of several taserings occurring in quick succession.

“All right, maybe it was worth it to leave early,” she tacitly admitted.

The sound of running claws and paws caught Tami's attention, and she - along with the others - turned to find Gerhard sprinting up to the tavern, somewhat out of breath and still trying to buckle his protective layers on.

“Just typical.” he was muttering. “Utterly typical we get a riot the moment the drone update screws the response cues. So...”

He stopped by the door, seemingly happy to let the drones buzz in and pacify the situation, before his gaze fell to the crew. Tami watched as his beady eyes travelled between all of them, before settling on Swan.

“You didn't start this, did you?”

“Oh for the Empress' damned sake!” The hippogriff threw his arms up, turned, and promptly just left in the direction of Claudia, stomping and swearing as he went.

Tami could have sworn she saw a grin on Gerhard's beak. Drawing his attention back to them, the security chief nodded sideways at the brawl as he knelt down to Verbena.

“Miss Mint, all okay?”

She put on an exaggerated scared expression, making a slow nod. “I'm okay, they got me out after the bad ones in there all started it.”

Gerhard watched her act for a second, one eyebrow slowly raising, before turning to Hair Trigger. “So I'm sure if I check the footage...they'll have struck first, and you'll have calmly headed off to your ship to stay out of the way for a day or so in order to not wander into any more trouble, am I correct?”

“I think that'd be about right, sans a quick trip for some painkillers...ow.” She winced, rolling her shoulder around.

Gerhard nodded, apparently more concerned with the resolution than a blame game over a bar brawl. “On your way then. I better get this settled.”

Nodding their thanks, the crew began to move off, as Gerhard sighed and watched the drones deploying restraining clamps. “For goodness sake, I expect this more around Hearthswarming in a few months, not now...”

Walking past on her way out, Tami paused, watching him for a second.

“Hearthswarming?”

Her gentler voice got the griffon to turn and Tami felt oddly on the spot, her friends already rapidly departing into the hangar, or to the next door shop, other than a patient, watchful Kerfuffle waiting at the curve for her.

Gerhard tilted his head. “Yes, Hearthswarming.”

“On a station? How do you know when it is? You don't have seasons.”

The griffon took a second, before chuckling. “Ah, of course. Old tradition. Hearthswarming, they say, is on the anniversary of the date of manufacture of the artificial construct. Commissioning is the birthday, so they say, but the day it was completed? That's Hearthswarming. Differs station to station, ship to ship.”

Tami cooed, her mouth pursing at this idea. “Oooh...I see. I never knew that.”

He shrugged. “Mostly a Peripheral thing. Anyway, off you go.”

“Oh, yes, yes, sorry!” She smiled at him and turned to canter back to the others, catching them on the way to the hangar.

Behind her, Gerhard turned, and saw an old drone finally limping its sluggish way down the corridor toward the tavern.

“And just where the hell have YOU been?”

* * *

Tami lay awake on Claudia’s bridge, mindlessly toying with a paintbrush in her hands.

It was night cycle inside the ship, with all the lights dimmed and the rest of the crew asleep downstairs. That this included Tundra Gem as part of the word 'crew' didn't prompt a second thought to her now.

They were asleep. Yet she was not.

Swaying in her hammock, the windows of the bridge shuttered against the everpresent lights of the hangar, Tami couldn't help but feel she'd missed something. A little niggling at the back of her mind giving her pause.

Adrenaline from the fight? No, she'd had a long shower to flush that (and the stink of beer) out of her. Concern about a job? Couldn't be, they were still on downtime. Lingering worries about a couple weeks ago? Definitely not - Whisper's advice had been on point, Tami hadn't had another occurrence since.

No, she reflected, this was different. This wasn't a worry. She knew worry and anxiety like old foes by now. She could recognise their insidious approach on her mind.

This was something more benign. Like feeling you had forgotten to lock the door after leaving your home, whether you already bought milk, or if you couldn't remember the exact date of your dad's birthday.

The paintbrush stopped moving.

“Gift...”

Tami clambered her way out the hammock and into motion. Tapping across the rugs in the bridge, she hopped into her seat by the pilot station. The darkness of Claudia's nerve center lit up with a login screen, its background that of an NLR boy band. (The stars and hearts around the band member on the far right were not photo-edited at all, she had maintained, when asked about them.)

Her credentials entered, Tami started digging. She parsed to the base level Pioneer class systems screen, then to factory level information, and then to the ship summary. Scrolling through countless lines of pointless data and legal text, Tami rubbed her tired eyes and continued to flick-flick-flick at the screen with a claw.

Eventually, after ten minutes, she found what she was looking for and gasped sharply.

“Oh gosh!”

She flew from the chair, hurriedly wriggling on the floor to get her pyjamas off and her overalls on before unlocking the door, throwing it open, and flying downstairs as fast as she dared without waking anyone.

* * *

“Kiffie! Kiffie, come on!”

Tami's hands knocked and shoved at the not-exactly-small shape under the oversized sheets in Kerfuffle's quarters.

“Wake up!”

Unresponsive, the giant griffon lay still on his side.

Making a far too high pitched sound of frustration, Tami spread her wings and flew up to land atop his hip, before making light jumps from hands to hooves again and again.

“Kiffie! Wake up! C'moooon!”

There was a sudden, sleepy snort, and the griffon's leftmost eye creaked open. “Mmph, hmm?” Shaking his head, Kerfuffle sat up, hunching to avoid the slope of the wall, and looked down as Tami dropped back to the floor. “Is somethin' wrong, Miss?”

She grabbed his claw, tugging and pulling with all of her might, her hooves rapidly skittering on the floor, wings flapping eagerly. Kerfuffle didn't move an inch.

“I need your help! We've gotta go shopping right now, and I can't carry it all myself!”

Kerfuffle twisted his mouth side to side, clearly considering her meaning for a moment, before shrugging and sitting up, patently deciding to go along with it.

“Comin'. We in a hurry?”

“Yes, we gotta do it before the others get up.”

Tami hurried to the door to let him get dressed, before whispering back through the gap again.

“And bring a sack!”

* * *

Hair Trigger was in her optimum state.

It was quiet, it was warm, it was comfortable, and it was shared with someone else.

Drifting between deep sleep and a lazy morning snoozing, she willed rather than consciously moved her forelegs into gripping the squeezable object, tugging its back against her chest and burying her head into the back of its neck. The satisfied, pleased groan it made was enough to push her toward sleep again.

After another few blissful minutes, enough cohesion of thought began to gather to start identifying simple aspects of reality. That meant things like 'bed', 'Tundra', 'nightshirt not present', and 'damp spot, don't roll backwards.'

Grasping her hooves around Tundra's front, she reaffirmed her place pulling against his back and let her head fall to the pillow again, feeling something on top of it.

Oh, that was where my nightshirt got to.

Even as she declined to move again, accepting the discarded article as a replacement pillow, her ear twitched when she heard a noise from outside her quarters.

Two people talking, like they didn't want to be heard.

Immediately, a curiosity caught in her heart, and refused to go. A hunch. And she rarely ignored them knowing that something was afoot. Pushing sleep aside, Hair Trigger yanked herself up.

“Tundra.”

“Mmrr.”

“Tundra!”

He stirred lightly.

Her hoof snapped out in a light, but firm smack of his rump.

The unicorn jerked and snapped awake. “Ack! What!? What? Trigger, what was th-”

She nudged him, nodded at the door, and got up quickly.

“What's going on?”

“I don't know, just heard something. Someone's up to something out there.”

Wiping his tired eyes, Tundra rolled onto his front, grimaced briefly as his foreleg rested on a 'spot', and got to his hooves. “Something bad?”

Hair Trigger didn't reply, her magic grasping around her revolver, before she heard another noise. This one was much louder. The short, surprised squeal of a young female, followed by a crash.

Hair Trigger smirked and dropped the revolver back onto her table.

The pair of them went to the door and opened it just as another two doors opened at the same time. The morning-mane of Volatility Smile poked out and she saw Swan's curious glance.

All of them, together, then stared in wonder.

Claudia's common room was different. Brighter. More colourful.

From the supports on the roof, glinting tinsel and jury rigged flickering lights had been hung in a haphazard assortment. Cheap ornaments of sparkling reindeer and candy canes were dotted around the shelves and kitchen. The edges of the main display were covered in a plastic green leaf design, while doors to quarters bore wreaths and bells. Bags of food were heaped at the far end.

Yet on the table stood a manufactured tree, every strand glowing and shifting colours from embedded LEDs. A large griffon stood up to his full height beside it, a star in his claw, caught as though his hand had been found in the cookie jar.

At its bottom lay an upside down hippogriff, lying on her shoulders with her hindquarters hanging above her against the tree, collapsed into a pile of hastily half-wrapped boxes and obvious trinkets. A garish, overly bright red sweater with snowflakes and colour changing tiny bulbs in the shape of a tree flickered on her chest.

“Oh, uh, gosh...uuuh...”

Blushing, she put on her best grin and - still upside down - spread her arms wide with a forced grin, shaking her hands.

“...ta-daaaa!”

Feeling her heart attempt to implode from the stupid, adorable little sight, Hair Trigger instead just burst into laughter.

* * *

It took only a few short minutes for explanations, and Hair Trigger almost kicked herself to think she hadn't even checked for this. She'd known about the tradition from her own family, but her assumption had always been that Hearthswarming was miles away, since she'd had one just before leaving for Port Medusa in the first place, mere months ago.

But this stupid, overly sneaky, silly way to do it cut off any negative feelings at the knee, and instead she just grabbed her pilot into a tight hug.

“You are too much of a sweetheart, you know that? And you!” She pointed at Kerfuffle, who had finally assembled the tree's lighting in an energy efficient manner. “You were in on this! You of all people?”

“I guess, Cap'n?” He shrugged in response, before rushing to catch the once again falling star.

“This is quite the shock; I guess I was only thinking about it back planetside.” Volatility Smile walked into the common room more properly, looking about her in wonder. “You even picked up food? Kerfuffle, that's so sweet of the two of you.”

The big griffon climbed down, looking more bashful than anything, picking up the Hearthswarming hat he had been 'volunteered' to wear, and proudly affixing it onto his plume again. Volatility Smile, after a second, failed to hold her composure, and cracked up at the sight.

“This truly is something. I hadn't known of that tradition out here,” Tundra observed, calmly as ever, before a more childlike glee overtook his eyes at spotting one label around a gift with his name on it. “Oh!”

Tami squeaked as Hair Trigger gave her another squeeze, hearing her Captain speak loudly in her ear. “Two Hearthswarmings in four months. Oh, I love Periphery traditions! Now c'mon, all of you: get dressed and get out there to get your presents while Tam and Kerf set the rest of this up. Tundra? Shower first. And Tam? See who you can rustle up to join in.”

Tami, nodded eagerly, still grasped in the hug, before her brain caught up with the instruction for Tundra and started piecing two and two together from the awkward blush on the wizard's face.

Gingerly, she detached herself from close proximity to Hair Trigger.

Swan, for once a relaxed smile on his face, clapped his hands and grabbed his casual clothing from the line over the door. “Well, you heard the mare, everyone. Hop to it!”

* * *

What followed was nought but a whirlwind of Hearthswarming preparations. One eager crew condensed days of work into the space of a single morning. The original pair remained on board to prepare. Tammani eagerly sent out mail to anyone she knew on the station. Kerfuffle, fighting to contain his glee at his first ever Hearthswarming, began finding the difficulties of not getting tangled in ribbons while wrapping the things he and Tami had bought. The others, now properly awake, began galloping around Medusa looking for what they needed.

Swan returned first, ever the bastion of efficiency and experience, with the job of finding gifts for several people. He quickly set about the kitchen, putting together a late breakfast of the only sort anyone could expect of him. The presence of pancakes and smoked fish, he claimed, made it a Hearthswarming one.

Volatility Smile bumped into Verbena mid-route, the young pony having already been rushing down to pick up her own things. The pair joined forces. One with knowledge of the station, the other with knowledge of making a cashier's life a living misery. Between them they acquired their gifts, some treats for general handouts, several free samples, and one managerial resignation.

Captain Hair Trigger went about Hearthswarming shopping the way she normally did. With indecision, muttering, and eventual bursts of inspiration. Yet caught on one gift, she eventually headed into the station elevator after consulting with Bushel. She descended into the lower levels of the station to find what she needed, and two hours later emerged with the last item on her checklist. And a grin.

* * *

Kerfuffle spent far too long gingerly undoing every facet of the wrapping with his talons, trying to keep it all in one piece as much as he possibly could. After all, it had his name painted on it around little cogs and wires. How could he rip that apart?

Tami clenched onto his arm to watch, finding the sight as amusing as it was adorable, until finally Kerfuffle popped the top and upended the box into his palm.

Inside lay an input-logic-converter with a dual-feed connector.

Kerfuffle's eyes lit up, his beak opening in a silent gasp, before burying the hippogriff amongst his feathers in a bear-hug of utter delight.

“I love Hearthswarming!” he cried out loudly, arms and wings wrapped around the muffled sounds of delighted laughter from his chest, before finally letting the spluttering pilot down. A second later, he hugged her again anyway.

“Now your little spider-bot can fit a camera to see where he's going!” she spoke up happily.

“That's so kind, Miss! I dunno how I didn't see you buy it earlier. Guess I was still tired.”

Even as they hugged, another excited unwrapper was on his third present already. Tundra, like a foal on his first Hearthswarming, gleefully pulled open a parcel to find a book on the pre-galactic history of Equestria, 'Skyborne Tales of the Sapphire Coast'.

“Oh, most wonderful!” he exalted, immediately flicking through its maps and long texts of deeds, individuals, and adventures, despite the other presents left nearby.

“Most welcome.” Swan gave a nod from the kitchen, turning to dump another load of food onto the table. While there, he stopped, finding Volatility Smile handing him a small package.

“Don't think you get left out.”

Confused, Swan took it. “I've already gotten a few from the rest; I don't feel left out...”

Smile winked. “You'll know what I mean. I've seen what you've got stitched to your bags.”

Beginning to suspect, Swan placed the food down, tossed the kitchen towel back to the drawers, and peeled the small box out to open. Inside, he found a patch. One bearing the logo of Port Medusa. Momentarily taken aback, he just laughed. Laughed, and clapped Smile on the shoulder. “Thank you. I suppose where I’ve been matters as much as who I’m with..”

“Can go right beside those old unit patches then. Like a life's journey, right?”

Handing her a plastic cup of cider, early or not, Swan knocked his against hers, and then took a long drink. “Yeah. Now here, go finish off your own. I've got to see to the fruit pudding.”

Volatility Smile lived up to her name in response, turning back. Yet the moment she did, she found her way blocked by a griffon. Looking up, she found Kerfuffle awkwardly standing with a gift in his hands. “You uh… You missed this one from the tree, Mrs Smiles. Here you go. It's, uh… This one's mine. From me.”

“Oh stars above, I'm so sorry Kerfuffle. It must have just passed my eye. Thank you.”

Placing her drink down first, she pulled the not entirely well wrapped paper off of it and began laughing aloud. Holding her gift aloft, she shouted across the room. “Hey! Tami, sweetie! Look what I got!”

The hippogriff looked up from handing a gift to Tundra, her eyes blinking and squinting to see what Smile had in her hooves. Volatility Smile grinned and shouted the answer to her. “Bounce Beats Volume Four, for the ultimate cardio experience!”

The look on Tami's face dropped Smile to the chair behind her with laugher. The aghast look of someone desperately trying to figure out more than a few more excuses was too rich.

“I'll see you in the mornings!”

Tami rubbed a hand over the other, offering a polite nod, as she tried to sneak herself away from the immediate topic. Shimmying to the side, she got midway toward the sofa before stumbling across a gift held in a telekinetic field.

And from behind it, one Captain Hair Trigger with a generous smile.

“You've been running in circles all morning - haven't caught you. Happy Hearthswarming, Tam.”

Tami gasped, hands to her mouth, before bouncing in glee, the terror of Smile's sessions forgotten all but instantly. “Ooh! Captain, oh, thank you!”

The present was propelled into her hands, and she hopped her backside up onto the sofa to pull the ribbon off the top. Scything one of her fingers around the lip, she pulled open the top and peered in with eager excitement. The inside of it was dark, and she squinted to get a grasp of what lay within it, angling the box to let the light panels above shine in so she could see it and-

Almost immediately, her cheeks flushed cherry red, and the top of the box was slammed down with a shocked squeak. Her eyes rapidly swivelled, hunting to make sure no-one else was watching them. Her voice was a sharp, stammered hiss.

“C-Captain!”

Hair Trigger only winked, her grin reaching ear to ear, before nudging the hippogriff's side with an elbow. “Gotta look out for the morale of my pilot, don't I?”

Tami bit her lip, holding the top tightly down, as though what was inside would leap out and be seen by everyone. Her face looked more like a beetroot. “Th-thanks...I g-guess?”

“That's the spirit, Tam.” She grinned, giving the hippogriff another little squeeze with her foreleg. “Wanted to get you something to wow Midnight with too, but I doubt Medusa's the place to find attire like that. Didn't know your size anyw-”

Tami's wing batted at her face, and Hair Trigger burst into laughter even as the blushing hippogriff leapt onto her and playfully fought hand on hoof, barely suppressing her own nervous giggles. “You're-you're something, Captain! I don't know what yet but I'll think of a word!”

Letting the unicorn back up, Tami shot her a look somewhere between a pout and reluctant enjoyment of her Captain’s antics. Hair Trigger just gave her a wink.

“Wouldn't be me if not. Now if you-hmm?”

Hair Trigger's eyes slid sideways as the presence of another making his way to the sofa caught both their attentions. After a moment, Tami hid her gift behind a pillow, as if the unmarked box in wrapping paper wasn't cover enough.

Tundra stood there, the others still laughing around the table behind him. He had one more box in his magic, and floated it forward.

“I...I may have hesitated to give you this, Captain. My gift, to you. For you, I mean.”

Giving Tami a brief wink, Hair Trigger felt her own face flush lightly and stood up to take the box for herself. She gave him a suspicious look and shook it. Behind her, Tami sat up, hands clenched around her own body as she watched the (to her) cute couple sharing a moment. Across the room, directed by a point from Volatility Smile, the others started paying heed.

It was, after all, the last gift between them all.

Finding herself the centre of attention, Hair Trigger gave Tundra a cheeky look, listening to its contents, before tearing it open without losing eye contact. “Pressure of the moment, huh? For me or you?”

“Definitely for me.” Tundra confessed, looking away briefly with his front legs rubbing over one another.

“Well then, let's see how you did on our first Hearthswarming.”

Hair Trigger threw open the top. Her hoof rummaged inside, and yanked the gift out without any hesitation.

There was a silence, and then there were gasps from the others. Smile's pleased one. Tami's excited one. A sense of heartwarming was palpable among all.

Hair Trigger stared at the object before her and felt the moment slow down. Condensed into just her looking at it...before she fought back the wisp of tears in her eyes.

In her hooves, rested a pristine piece of quality headwear, to suit any captain of a starship.

Looking up at his worried, anxious face, Hair Trigger simply surged forward and grabbed him by the chest into a vice-like grip, as his magic firmly slid it onto her head.

* * *

After a late Hearthswarming brunch and getting the presents squared away, the crew took a couple of hours to themselves. Yet after mid-day on Port Medusa’s own cycle other ponies gradually started to arrive.

It started as one, with Verbena Mint running through the hangar to open up Claudia and head inside, long since accepted as one who could enter at will. She rushed up to and hugged Tami, Hair Trigger, Volatility Smile, and then nearly disappeared into Kerfuffle before deciding she had better get to business. Presents, sweets, and an eager, filly-like glee about Hearthswarming re-energised Claudia’s atmosphere.

Even as she and Tami got to work preparing a playlist of the most sugar-happy space-pop to throw on (much to Swan’s chagrin) an unexpected arrival made its presence felt from a ring at the airlock. On opening it, Volatility Smile found a deer; ‘Crazy D’ - Port Medusa’s most well known fast food cook - was standing on the main ramp. Known for keeping his customer’s orders stuck to his antlers on notes, the impressive horned growths were instead now decorated with hanging baubles and flickering lights. To his side, somewhat embarrassed for his father, was his son Sruth - the young buck was dragging a trolley of food along with him.

“Hearthswarming!” The older deer declared. “Hearthswarming requires food! I do food! I do Hearthswarming! Yeah?”

After they had rolled the food up the cargo ramp into the ship itself, Smile didn't even get the door closed before spotting a very tired and still nonplussed Bushel making her way toward the ship. Her voice travelled ahead of her, along with the clink of glass in her rucksack.

“You let that captain know she still agreed to help me repair the tavern tomorrow for helping her find Kinky-Dink’s Emporium, y'hear!? I need a night to drink instead of watching others do it.”

Volatility Smile didn't know what to think. Bewildered, she held the door for the brash mare. “I...Tami messaged you too? I can't say we expected you and D and-”

Bushel shrugged. “She put it out on the general notice mailing list. We usually jump on any ship having its Hearthswarming here anyway. Why not? Excuse to get slammed. Now c'mon, show me where your coolant valves are. Medusa Special doesn't do well with normal fridges.”

Wandering past, Bushel left a stunned Volatility Smile by the door. Blinking, turning her head to the hangar at large, Smile noticed the crews of several other docked ships starting to gather outside their hulls and point toward Claudia.

Smile gulped.

“Oh my stars...”

* * *

As Port Medusa's internal cycle turned from midday to early evening, Claudia bore host to more ponies than any of its crew had expected. A full fifty others crowded the common room and cargo bay, each adding to the piles of food and drink, or bringing gifts for those they knew among the crowds.

They entered in groups, usually other crews. Even the two rival ones that had fought the night before seemed to mysteriously get along. It was half an hour before Hair Trigger even realised she was sharing horrendously inappropriate jokes with the raucous crowd that she had beat over the head with bottles less than a day ago.

At any given event the best times were always found in the kitchen. Any experienced party-goer would confirm that. But on ships it was a different matter.

Instead, the best times took place in the engine room.

Kerfuffle, to his delight, found that eventually every mechanic and engineer in the ship gravitated there. He had spent some hours sitting awkwardly, unsure how to broach the crowds and loud voices, before quietly retreating to familiar territory. There, he had found a few other mechanics already sharing a drink and chattering about the well maintained regulators around the core. Others made their way up over time to talk shop. Finally, surrounded by those who knew what true entertainment was, Kerfuffle settled into his place for the night.

Tami and Verbena, as ever, found one another's company almost immediately and rarely parted sides, quickly adding Sruth to their little group of the younger ones on board. Before long, music began pumping all over the ship, as Tami showed both of them a 'little trick' she had learned with the PA system not too long ago.

Among those who often came from different civilisations, there was usually friction. But for Swan, finding a New Lunar Republic veteran who had fought on the opposite side of the War of the Two Crowns instead gave him a drinking buddy for the night. Much time was spent sharing tales from either side of the same front, and laughing equally as much at the false perceptions as to who thought who was attacking or defending in those confused times.

Volatility Smile, concerned as much for the ship as anything, fell into the role of trying to stay somewhat sober, running around and being wary of where everyone was and what was happening. Yet eventually she settled near Tundra, the unicorn keeping his distance from many of the crowds and seeming ill at ease with such an intense environment. Happy for a more familiar face, the pair shared time and laughs, both easing off their high strung worries a little.

And among it all, Patch (bearing a hippogriff-dispensed red bow on his chassis) nearly ran down his battery careening around at a rapid rate in a dire attempt to dispense alcohol, sugar, and fat warnings to counter the horrific event taking place. Unable to prevent the health damage, his confused algorithms eventually logged the event as 'mass ritualistic suicide' and he retreated to his charger.

* * *

Squeezing through the crowds, Tami pulled Verbena behind her to the kitchen's fridge, working around the frantically serving deer to their right.

“There, there, that one!” Verbena pointed, before grabbing out an ice cool bottle of Confederate vodka. “Oh, I am so going to-”

The sudden sight of Tami rapidly cutting her hand over her own throat got the young earth pony to look round. Verbena spotted the sudden and withering glare of her half-sister looking her way, the Director - surrounded by a small fleet of security drones - having just entered the room.

“-hand this to the pony who asked me to collect it!”

Grinning too wide, speaking much too loudly, she passed it to Tami, who just as meekly handed it to (unknown to her) a very confused Sruth, who simply passed it to his father beside them.

“Ah, Confederate cooking oil,” came the offhand remark from the older deer, before D took a sharp slug from the bottle itself. “Sometimes also used in the food.”

Sweet Alyssum gave a small - but sharp - smirk before taking up a short drink of her own. She wasn't going to stay long, but it did well to show face at a visiting ship's Hearthswarming. Her attendance was never expected, but it was generally a useful impression to have circulating about herself for attracting crews to her station.

And the looks on the faces of those present was always worth it, she thought to herself, waving and smiling to a known pirate whom she knew wouldn't be leaving her station the next day...

* * *

It had taken many long hours waiting for an opportunity, but Hair Trigger had finally managed to reacquire the Captain's Sofa.

With only one in the entire ship, it had disappeared quickly under ponies using it, until she had staked out her claim and dove onto it while someone went for another drink. And just to assure that no-one else joined when she didn't want them to, she dragged Tundra down with her.

Seemingly quite happy to get off his hooves, the Solar Empire investigator dropped down with a sigh, catching both their drinks in his precision magic, before floating Hair Trigger's to her mouth with a goofball grin. “I can't say I earmarked this as what I expected when being assigned this mission, Captain. Serving alcohol to a marefriend on a sofa at Hearthswarming - and they say that real espionage doesn't involve any parties and drinks. This is the second you've taken me to.”

Hair Trigger smirked, sipping at the upturned glass, before using her own telekinesis to adjust the Hearthswarming lights that someone had hung around Tundra's neck. Much as spacers saw it just as an opportunity for a bit of a get together, there was a very festive theme to the night. Most had brought one gift for the hosting crew, and then a few others for people they knew personally. Clearly, Periphery crews knew this routine well.

“I did say I'd show you the sights.” Hair Trigger winked.

Raising an eyebrow, Tundra scoffed, and prodded one of her hindlegs with his across the sofa. “I believe you weren't referring to events at the exact time you said that, Captain.”

“Whatever gave you that idea, Tunny-Buns?”

The pair of them cracked into giggles, and she leaned into his side, pulling one of his forelegs over her shoulders. “You know, I do love it when you insist on still calling me 'Captain'.”

He grinned. “Why do you think I've observed to keep saying it? Your pupils dilate every time.”

“Least I know you're paying attention to my eyes at some points, then.”

She knocked his side, and in a moment of high-spirited fun, he returned the gesture, the pair of them chuckling together like school-kids at their first party.

Yet as they flirted and joked, a small set of leaves began to slowly ease into the top of their vision. Descending from above, a sprig of mistletoe lowered until it rested just between their faces.

Hair Trigger raised her eyebrows and tilted her head to look up and find Tami holding it, hovering in the air above the pair and extending the mistletoe in one hand with expectant glee on her face, clearly waiting to see something between the couple.

Tundra Gem looked back down at Hair Trigger with a small snicker. Trigger looked back at Tundra, thought for a second, and then let a sly grin come across her face.

Seeming the smile, Tami lightly shook the mistletoe back and forth, egging them on, and slowly drew in her breath as she saw the two lock eyes.

Hair Trigger looked up, then down again at Tundra with a lick of her lips, and chuckled. “Well...all right then!”

She sat up, then leaned forward.

And grabbed Tami by the cheeks.

The surprised hippogriff had only a second to emit a shocked squeal before Hair Trigger's sudden movement yanked Tami down and planted her lips firmly onto the startled pilot's mouth.

Tami's wings faltered before flapping rapidly to catch her, all four limbs below her doggy-paddling in the air in bewilderment at the sudden kiss locking around her lips.

“Mmphmm!” Her face rapidly turning cherry red, Tami made a muffled squeak, her wings losing control and dropping her onto her hands and hooves by the sofa's front end. A not entirely quiet 'mwua!' sound signalled Hair Trigger letting the kiss go, a cheeky, pleased grin plastered over her face. “Not bad, Tam! Not bad!”

Tundra Gem, for his part, was already doubled over in laughter at the wide-eyed look of confusion on Tami's face, as she staggered and dizzily fell back against the nearest door frame to catch her breath and process what had just happened. She was breathing heavily in surprise, her chest rising and falling.

“C-Captain! I d-didn’t mean m-me-I-I-what was-” she babbled rapidly.

Hair Trigger laughed, “Just do that to Midnight and you'll be good. Y'aight?”

Flustered all over, Tami staggered up and made a vague nod, her eyes as round dinner plates with small pupils. “Wh-what? Y-yeah, Captain what-you-I...I think, wait-I mean...I-need-a-drink!”

Blushing fiercely, she staggered off, leaving Hair Trigger to chuckle to herself and turn back to her boyfriend. “Oh, that reaction...priceless. She's too-”

The mistletoe, caught in a magic field, floated in front of Hair Trigger's face. The front of her hooded top was yanked forward, hard. Tundra pulled her into a tight hug, tickling her nose with the leaves. “Hope you didn't forget someone who'll kiss back.”

Hair Trigger felt her cheeks flush, before grinning. “Who said she didn't?”

Tundra just laughed, and pulled Hair Trigger in for a deep, long kiss.

One that didn't let up for some time.

* * *

The music and voices echoed outside of Claudia into the hangar, drifting out to the force fields and reflecting with strange, pitch adjusted echoes from the unusual physics at work. With most of the other ships, ground crew, and even those like Raw Deal inside, it was deserted. Empty ships waited, staring at Claudia as though wondering why she was getting all the attention.

Kerfuffle stepped off the bottom ramp, exiting the party for a moment. He moved unsteadily, balancing on his hindlegs until he had the airspace to use his wings. Awkwardly carrying a tray of food, he also bore a small, stuffed bag under an arm.

Quietly, not wanting to disturb the other ships in their silent rest, he flew around Claudia's front and across to the next ship. Much smaller in bulk than Claudia, more akin to a heavy fighter, its robust and angular shape around large engines betrayed the ferocious speed it could reach in the void. Stopping on its hull, Kerfuffle awkwardly leaned down to gently tap on the tinted glass canopy of the single person cockpit.

For a few moments there was no reply, and he almost left then and there, but after a moment the sound of miniaturised servos picked up and the glass slid backwards.

Below it a set of golden eyes on a dark coat stared up at him, and then at what he carried, with some momentary confusion.

“Kerfuffle?”

Kerfuffle coughed, looking just as hesitant himself at what he carried under Whisper Step’s hard glare. “Evenin', Miss Step. We gave you some time to turn up, but I figured you weren't comin' after a while.”

Whisper glanced back at the main screen within the Regulus, where a mail advertising Claudia's Hearthswarming was still displayed. She pursed her lips and shrugged, looking away toward the cargo vessel.

“Not exactly my kind of environment at the moment.”

“Figured so. S'why I brought this out. Can't be havin' you going hungry while everyone else eats all merry-like. And well, bein' honest with you Miss, you never seem to eat much the best of times. Mama never said that was good for you.”

He set the tray down on the edge of the cockpit. Bitesize nibbles, a small platter of Crazy D's always barely identifiable but (usually) edible rolls and pies, and a couple of bottles from the drinks bin.

Whisper Step swapped her attention back to the griffon, and then the tray. Her mouth opened slightly, as though genuinely surprised, before she found herself being handed a small bag.

“An' this is from all of us. Ain't right we all pass our presents about and you don't get yours on Hearthswarming. Can't have a member of the Captain's crew missing out.”

The dark earth pony took the bag in her hooves, finding a manner of haphazardly wrapped gifts within, covered in achingly colourful and cheap paper. Pushing a couple to the side to see all five, she raised an eyebrow and looked back up. “I'm not under Hair Trigger's command, Kerfuffle.”

The griffon nodded. “I know that, Miss. But that don’t mean you aren’t still part of her crew.”

There was a long silence. Whisper, for once, looked actually somewhat confused about what to say or do, before a slow smile crept across her stoic face. She took the bag into the cockpit proper, stowing it by the seat, and drew the tray in behind it. Holding up one of the bottles, she gave its label a look of approval. Gently, she snickered. “You lot are ridiculous. Thank you, Kerfuffle.”

The big mechanic smiled warmly, stepping back away from the cockpit onto the hull itself. “You're welcome, Miss. Happy Hearthswarming.”

“Happy-” Whisper laughed under her breath, as though finding the notion silly, even if genuine. “Happy Hearthswarming to you… And pass it along to the others.”

Kerfuffle gave her a blissfully innocent look and made to fly back to Claudia. “I'll do that. And Miss Tami'll be glad to hear you're using the slippers she made for you too. Good night!”

He took off, missing the sudden widening of Whisper's eyes and the sharp protest that died in her throat at seeing the griffon already gone. Mouth open, Whisper sat there for a few seconds, before closing it and shaking her head.

Gently, she lifted one present out, its half-wrapped state revealing it to be from the griffon himself.

A toy spy-pen, with 'invisible' UV illuminating ink.

After a moment of staring at it with hard eyes, she couldn’t prevent a chuckle breaking through, one that rose into an uncontrolled laugh, the first true one she'd had to herself in some time.

“I swear, this crew...”

Putting the gift, and her work, to one side, she popped the cap of the bottle off on the edge of the cockpit latch, sat the food on the auxiliary panel, and laid back to enjoy the ambience of Claudia's Hearthswarming - if from a little further distance than most.

* * *

“Captain!”

Hair Trigger looked up, hearing Volatility Smile's voice somewhere above the music and chatter bouncing off the walls.

“Hair Trigger!”

“Over here, Smile!”

Gradually, fighting her way between a couple of dancing stallions, Volatility Smile squeezed and pushed her way through toward her. She could see Smile trying to move while holding a brown package, shaking out her mane once through the crowd. At some point the crystal pony had given over to the inevitable and let it hang loose for the night, its sparkling glints catching the lower lighting well.

“Was down by the entrance ramp, had one of the station's drones fly by with a delivery.”

Raising an eyebrow, Hair Trigger got off the sofa, passing her drink to Tundra before taking the package in her hooves. She felt its balance shift as it was turned, like it had liquid in it. A letter was hoofed over as well, which she unfolded separately in her magic.

“I didn't order anything. Who's it - oh.” She saw her own name on the letter. “Huh.”

Smile nodded and offered a shrug. “To you. No sender noted on it. All it says is 'open first' on the letter. That's about it.”

Turning it over, Trigger found the words herself, and slid its contents out to read.

Behind her, she heard Tundra get up, and felt him rest his chin on her shoulder. His cheeks were still flushed, whether from her or from the drink she wasn't certain. Possibly both.

“Got a secret...secret admirererer, Captain...” he chuckled.

Definitely the drink.

She reached up and patted his cheek without turning her head, and squinted in the low light at the letter itself.

Contact this number in private when you have a moment.

Don't open the package till you do.

Hair Trigger furrowed her brow.

“Either Whisper's playing games, something I doubt, one of you is playing a prank, which you all know better than to instigate with me, or this is going to be quite the surprise.”

Volatility Smile sat on the common room stairs, picking up a glass of wine she'd left behind earlier. “Well, who knows what tomorrow brings. Suppose you've got some free time now, right? Want one of us to come in, just in case?”

Hair Trigger shook her head and looked back up at Smile, gently lifting Tundra off her shoulder as she did so. “Nah, I'll handle it. You all stay out here, enjoy yourselves. Or keep adding to that stock check, whatever makes you happy.”

Smile laughed, waving the leg bearing her multiband. “S'not that, Hair Trigger.” Her voice was a little less precise than normal. “It's getting the dates other crews have theirs. So we can keep an eye on who else is out there about to have a Hearthswarming. Networking isn't just for business, I assure you.”

Pausing, Trigger smirked, then nodded. “Well played, Smile.”

“That's what you have me for. Also, tracking results of that lot through there on who can lift the most weight on the bar.”

Laughing, Hair Trigger gave Tundra a kiss on the cheek, “Of course. Now you...” She turned to the unicorn, and ushered him to sit back down on the sofa. “Just going to my room for a moment.”

“I'll...I'll be right through!” He perked up with a grin, only half hearing her.

Cracking up, she tapped his head to push him back down. “Not what I meant, just stay here and look after my drink.”

Clearly catching up on remembering the letter, Tundra nodded and glanced at his glass. “I think averting from this stuff for months may be having an effect on me.”

“No shit, magic-man. Back in a moment.” She chuckled, picked up the package and made pace for her quarters.

* * *

With the ambience dulled through the thick walls of her quarters, Hair Trigger collapsed into her desk chair. Immediately, a sense of tiredness crept through her, as her body recognised a quiet moment to settle after from the long day.

Resting the small package on the desk, she pulled out the letter and unlocked her workstation to bring up the communication interface. A quick glance revealed the number to be a pre-paid access line for a real-time video link across systems. Technology wasn't quite at the level to allow full streaming for everyone to do it yet, but premium services for those who really wanted one did exist.

Someone wanted to speak to her face to face.

Punching the numbers into her satisfyingly clacky keyboard with quick spikes of telekinesis, Hair Trigger didn't waste any time on hitting the icon on the screen to call it. She could sit for minutes second guessing, or just do it and see what happened.

When confronted with such moments, that was how she rolled.

The screen switched to showing three circles. One for her, one for the hubs between Claudia and whenever this was, and one for the receiving connection. Quickly, the hub connection lit up, before it sat on the receiving end for around half a minute, then a full minute, and then two.

She was about ready to call it a lost call, when it finally blinked green and chimed a short countdown to full video link. An electronic voice announced the call.

“Real-time streaming stable. Connection established.”

A video window appeared on the comm-app. It was blurry, the video buffering struggling for a moment or two to catch up with the active link’s signal. After a second, she could see fragmented pixels of colour that began to steadily come into focus. She could make out blonde feathers, probably a griffon. They were moving the camera - likely on a laptop - placing it down on what she thought was a desk.

Finally, the real streaming quality and framerate kicked in, and Trigger saw a blonde griffon, clearly in his fifties at least, but with a youthful energy in his eyes. He sat back with a calm smile, clearly having finally gotten a good connection in return. Behind him, a chunk of a ship's hull was affixed to the wall of what seemed like a cosy living room.

“Captain Hair Trigger. Glad you received my mail.”

Hair Trigger's eyes followed past his head to that piece of hull on his wall, and saw a symbol upon it: a griffon wing, with a smaller pegasus wing overlapping it. She grinned, recognising it immediately.

“Captain Gaius, I presume. In other words, Tam's-”

Gaius scoffed, as though surprised to hear the title before his name. “Tam's father, yup. Took a while, but finally glad I got a moment to speak with you. Just captain-to-captain, hm?”

“Sure it's not dad-to-captain?” Hair Trigger snarked, settling back in her chair and crossing her hooves.

Gaius laughed shortly. “Well, if you'd prefer it be. But I think I can convince you elsewise. You got my package with you there?” She lifted the brown paper object, waving it in her magic in front of her display's camera. Gaius smiled and motioned with a large claw. “Open it.”

Hair Trigger paused for a moment, and then unfurled the package’s string binding. Eventually, the 'tink' of hoof on glass became apparent. The moment that she pulled a small, unlabelled bottle with just a small drink's worth of dark amber liquid at its bottom from the wrapping, Gaius slid the full bottle that it had clearly come from into view, with around one third of its contents left.

“See, I have a tradition,” he began, pouring a small measure into a tilted glass, “one that started far back when I first took command of the Tammaran. Every time I had another ship's captain aboard, or any time I visited another ship to meet its own one, I would sit down with them and have a small drink from this. Direct from Equestrian space itself before the split, sixty five years aged before bottling.”

Hair Trigger whistled, suddenly regarding the glass in her hoof with a little more care, watching as Gaius poured a measure for himself.

“It's a pity I couldn't get out there to meet in person, but I figured what the hell. I've not had the chance to do this in two decades - I can bend the rules a little. Hope you've got a glass.”

Hair Trigger winked, floating across a simpler, but more than viable spirits glass to pour the bottle's scant contents into. “For a drink like this, I'd run out and buy one if I had to. Thank you.”

“Well said, Captain. Please, go ahead.”

Without waiting himself, Gaius settled back, taking up his glass to sip from. Hair Trigger followed suit, raising it in a quick toast before trying not to look too eager in bringing it to her lips.

It was lighter than she'd expected, passing into her mouth with a heavy, fragrant tone. She almost had to remind herself to not gulp to chase the subtleties, before the sudden heavy aroma and flavour broiled and swam around behind her lips and into her throat. Spicy nutmeg, with a cured, unexpectedly thick headiness that took a second to really erupt.

She couldn't help herself, breathing out suddenly and smelling the meaty tingle in the exhalation, before lightly shaking her head.

“Wow.”

Gaius sighed, looking like he'd come back to an old friend, settling in his chair in a much more relaxed manner as he brought the glass down from his beak. “It's quite something, isn't it, Captain?”

“I feel like I just drank my yearly earnings. How did you even afford this, if I can even ask that?”

Gaius smirked, and tapped his beak with a claw. “Ask the captain of the Empire supply ship I took it from.”

There was a pause, before the pair of them laughed. A simple, easy laugh, taking the edge off of the conversation. Gaius settled the glass in a palm and nodded. “How is Tami?”

Hair Trigger felt the hair on her neck raise up and the drink catch in her throat. How was one to say 'Well I got her into a bar fight recently where she got punched, bought her something you probably don't want to hear about, and then snogged her - with tongue - less than an hour ago' to her father? Taking a second to shelter behind a mock sniff of the glass, Hair Trigger gathered her thoughts in a less suicidal direction.

“Probably bouncing off the walls about now. We've got a bit of an event going on board at the moment.”

He nodded. “I can vaguely hear it. I'm not keeping you?”

“Like I said, with a drink like this, you could pull me away from my boyfriend asking me to bed.”

She snapped it out before thinking on sheer habit, and was surprised to hear Gaius suddenly guffaw with laughter. Hair Trigger smirked, feeling somewhat more at ease. “Tami's doing great for us. Flying Claudia about just as we need her to...even if she sometimes needs reminded she can. But really, it's just her being herself that makes us glad she's with us. I wouldn't give up the spirit she brings on board for anyone else at the helm. That, and she can fly like a demon when she has to.”

Gaius flushed, and Trigger observed an odd look of bashful pride about his face. “Well, she made an old dog like me grip the seat when she took me up. So I can believe it. I still get surprised by what these newer ships are capable of. But what I'm more interested in is, how has she been doing though, as herself? I don't mean in piloting.”

Hair Trigger tapped her glass against a hoof a couple of times, formatting her answer as quickly as she could, before spotting the easy look on Gaius' face. It was honest and open. He wasn't digging for issues. Taking a second to collect her thoughts, she took one more decadent sip of her drink and placed the glass down with a gentle breath.

“It's been trying at times. Lately especially. I won't try to pretend she hasn't had her moments where it's clear she's scared or anxious. I've had to...had to occasionally just sit with her for a while. After something frightening, or if she makes a mistake, or if we're ever in danger. Really, when she starts doubting herself, that's when it gets bad. But we're here for her, and we'll help her, because we all want that smile in our lives. I promise you that.”

The few seconds’ pause from Gaius set her stomach churning a little, before he gently nodded. “I believe you, Captain. And I thank you for doing that for her, and for being honest with me. I know my daughter. I know what she's been through. And if someone had tried to pretend what you just said didn't exist...well, that's when I start booking shuttles out of worry.”

Hair Trigger smirked. “Knew the dad-talk bit was in here somewhere.”

Gaius chuckled in response. “Well I could tell you that I'd follow your ship into the next galaxy if I ever felt she was being mistreated aboard, would that help make things feel more traditional?”

She didn't reply, just making an amused look and taking another delectable sip of the provided spirit, trying to make it last. After a second, she rested the glass against her chest as he spoke again.

“This is your first command, isn't it, Captain?”

“Mhm,” she replied tacitly. “Needed something apart from my family. My own little slice of space.”

“How are you handling it?”

The question caught her by surprise. She had been preparing for every eventuality that led back to Tami in some way, but a query directly to her was not on the expected card. She stumbled over her words for a moment, holding the glass in both hooves. “Me? I… Well, it's been a few months since I left the others and came here. It's been… trying. I wake up every morning and still need to remind myself at times I'm the one who's got to walk out and make the calls. Just taking some getting used to.”

The frankness of her own reply surprised her. Maybe it was being plied with a top-end and rare whiskey, or the easy authority in his voice, perhaps even the alcohol from before, but she felt her lips move before her head caught up.

“Hardest thing is getting used to the retrospective. Look back, see things that happened, wonder if you made the right call. Been a few rough moments. Few times people, even Tami, got hurt. Crewmembers leaving either right after you get them, or mid-job, when you're wondering if they thought you were taking them a direction you shouldn't have. And there's no-one above yourself anymore to look to and ask if you're calling the right shots.”

The glass circled in her hooves. She didn't know where that had come from, and momentarily felt ashamed she'd said it.

Gently, Gaius' voice came through the speakers with a warmer, paternal, and more experienced tone. “What you said? That isn't a negative thing, Captain. What you said is just what it is to be a captain at all.”

She looked up, finding him looking directly into her own eyes.

“I had command of a vessel for twenty years during the most tumultuous event in our modern history. Life out there, it draws you into things you don't expect, or sometimes don't even want. It happens before you've even realised. One job turns into a rabbit hole and before you know it, you're playing a part in a front of a war that you never even knew existed. The only real question has to become...is this for some good in the end?”

Hair Trigger felt her glass run dry, and she settled it on the desk.

“...I think so.”

“Then the very fact that you worry about things like that tells me all I need to know. To know that you're doing things the right way, Captain. You're concerned about your crew as people, not just their performance. You're questioning what's right out there.”

He sighed lightly, finishing his own drink. “For example: that blasted Academy in orbit above here, they took Tami in, and after one year sent the wrong damn girl back to me, from how it was to see her again. There in body, but…” Gaius glanced away and shook his head. “They took my daughter away from me for four years with what they did.”

He leaned down, closer to the camera, and suddenly smiled, holding up a tablet with a still frame from one of Tami's VLOGs in it, with Claudia’s crew around her, the hippogriff beaming with unrelenting joy and contentment.

“Whereas you? You gave me her back.”

Gaius paused, letting the words sink in, and Hair Trigger felt rather than heard the emotion in his tone. “So as far as I'm concerned, my daughter isn't wrong. She found herself a great captain, Captain.”

There was extra emphasis on that final word, and he set the tablet down. Hair Trigger had to look away, feeling something inside she hadn't before. A certain well of affirmation she'd been afraid to judge for herself since leaving the roost.

“...thank you.”

Gaius gave her a few seconds, then tapped the desk. “Listen, you've got my contact now. Just between us, if you ever need anything, or to ask anything...just let me know. My life's experiences are at your disposal; it's the least I can offer as thanks for what you've done for me and my family.”

“Thank you,” she repeated, touching a hoof to an eye. “And I promise I'll keep them safe, even if-”

“Even if you're finding that same rabbit hole.”

“Yes, because I think we are,” she added quietly.

Gaius, surprisingly, smiled. “Then much as I can worry, it makes me proud to know she's out doing what I used to. Go do some good, Captain, and Happy Hearthswarming.”

Hair Trigger nodded again, smiling, before twisting her mouth up in confusion. “Wait, I never told you it was Hearthswarming on my ship. How'd you know our date of manufa-”

Gaius laughed and winked. “To the next galaxy, if I have to. Good night, Captain.”

The connection cut on her bewildered look, before she made a single, short laugh followed shortly by a much longer one.

Then, she sat in silence for some minutes.

After rubbing at her eyes, she moved to head back outside.

* * *

Things were still in full swing: a Hearthswarming atmosphere of drink, dance, laughs, reunions, first meetings, love, and friendship around the flickering tree at the centre of the common room.

Tami stood slightly to the side of it, clutching her third cider in her claws, taking her time with it. She wanted to be cohesive for tonight, but it gave her a warmth in her belly to feel that little heady easing of her anxieties around such a dense crowd. This had been more than she could possibly have expected. Far more.

She heard the sound of a door closing behind her, but paid it no heed.

A few seconds later, she felt hooves grab her from behind, and spin her around to face them. She had just a second to realise who it was, before her Captain grabbed her into a tight, long hug. An embrace that she was more than happy to return in kind, uncaring of whatever reason had initiated it.

* * *

The frivolity continued long into the night cycle. A time of colour and smiles, and new memories.

In time, groups departed and waved, smiling more than when they had arrived. Eventually, even those closest bid their farewells, returning to their own homes or ships. In many cases, those there the same thing.

They left behind a ship that bore the décor of a place that had seen joy. A mess that told of fun. A clutter that held cheer.

Leaving six within it to meet, to smile, and to reflect. To gather and take the quiet hours to themselves before the inevitable cleaning.

A first Hearthswarming. A tradition born to a new ship, for its newest crew.

And as they each fell to sleep, either in a solace long sought, in the company of a loved one, in the relaxation of letting one's hair down, or slumped against a dear friend on a sofa, Claudia finally fell silent, filled with nought but smiles.

In nearly a thousand years since they had first left Equestria, much had changed, adapted, shifted, or simply been forgotten. But some things still remained as they had once been, no matter how many stars lay between it and its origin, or how differently its people had grown apart.

And across a galaxy, that same spirit of Hearthswarming remained strong.

* * *

The Mongoose

Author's Note

The world that these chapters are based in was originally designed for the game by Napalm Goat, the GM of the tabletop game (or DM, for the classic RPG players among you). He came up with the setting, the world design, the factions, and many of the characters you've seen in this thus far.

So this chapter is a bit special, as it was written by him, not me. He's given his permission for it to be included here, and I'm delighted to collate it with my own works in the world he's made in order to share it with you.

This story could only have been written by him, as it offers a short look behind the veil of secrecy (one not even I as a player got to know about!) surrounding one of the story's most notable and enigmatic characters from a time just before she met the crew of Claudia. That being Field Agent Whisper Step of the New Lunar Republic, who we've seen in the last two chapters. (In other words, this one takes place before them.)

Also, I'm told there might be more Whisper Step content coming soon from him soon, so watch this space...

The Mongoose

The Mongoose

Written by Napalm Goat

*****

Top of the hill, Heroes of the Revolution Park.

The distant glasteel buildings of the city centre were glinting in the pale white light of the young star. The many birds and other creatures hidden in the nearby aquamarine hued trees were busying themselves with their daily life. Pathways, benches and picnic tables dotted the immediate surroundings. A nearby pond with its flat mirror surface shimmered in the sun. And not a soul was in sight.

Save for a single pony, the area was deserted. Even the nearby street was silent.

A quick glance at her hooves for one last check was followed by a content sigh. The rigid neon pink and black shoes were secured and tight.

The mare let out a breath, waiting for her heartbeat to steady. She adjusted her outfit to feel most comfortable, then cleaned her brow and muzzle with a quick rub of a sweatband.

She brought her forelegs to her head and firmly inserted the small white earphones. She had no need for a helmet. Not at her skill level. It would only be an annoyance.

She looked down on the path before her; it was steep.

Too steep.

But not for her.

She drew in a deep breath.

She muttered a single word-

“Play.”

-and threw herself off the hill.

As her body gathered speed, she moved her lips silently to the lyrics. The mare’s eyes were focused firmly on the path ahead.

Soon, the objects around her were matching the speed of the beat thumping into her ears. The early hour made it easy to navigate the park’s smooth pathway. No passers-by to keep an eye out for.

But she couldn’t afford to grow complacent. Doing that could lead to lapses in concentration. Slips. Accidents. It was not a luxury she was privy to - not here, not on the job.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t have some fun.

With a smooth move of her left legs she sailed diagonally across the pathway, right in time to miss a surprised jogger. They yelled something behind her back, but she was too far away already.

The blasting drums made it easy to not hear the cry of protest anyway.

She didn’t care.

It was not the time to care.

The time and place for that would come later.

A place for everything, and everything in its place. Especially time.

Now was the time to enjoy the simple things.

She smiled to herself as she bent her legs and drew her body closer to the ground, her speed only increasing. The fear had been exterminated years ago; she was content in her abilities.

There was no stopping her.

Not here, not now, not ever.

*****

The shop assistant sat on the uncomfortable chair with a drooping posture. Luckily, the slow graveyard shift was almost over. Only thirty more minutes and he’d be able to get back home, take a nice hot bath and perhaps spend some time with the missus.

A loud beep of the door sensor ripped him out of the daydream. He looked up slowly at the entering pony and forced a fake smile.

The mare was an earth pony. She had a long, loose mane and tail the colour of charcoal. Her coat was of a strange shade, a colour he found impossible to name properly, even when she was standing right in front of him. Maroon? Rose? It was a striking mix of thin purple, pink and gray, and all of that muted like a washed out t-shirt.

She was taller than the average mare. Her body was lean, like that of someone used to light athletics. Her tight fitting sports pants and loose sleeveless shirt didn’t leave much to the imagination. Her sporty appearance was fitting, given she always appeared drenched in sweat and in a set of sleek rollerblades.

But that was not what always caught his attention. Every time she appeared when he was behind the counter, he saw them. He was pretty sure no one could have missed them.

Those eyes.

Those piercing golden eyes. Like the shiniest doubloons from the pirate holovids he had liked so much when he was a colt. He had a wife, a wife that he loved very much. But something drew his attention to them. They were beyond being simply attractive. They were mesmerizing.

Many times hehad found himself lost in them. Luckily she never noticed, or she didn’t care.

Probably for the best.

He was always wondering about her when she dropped by. There were lengthy stretches of time where she walked into the shop day after day to buy an isotonic drink at 5:45 am. Like clockwork. Then she would vanish for weeks, sometimes months, before just reappearing all of sudden one morning like nothing had happened, buying another drink.

Like clockwork.

The stallion watched her awkwardly walk to the freezer on her locked rollerblades, grab her drink - always the same, blueberry - and display the autocash machine. She paid quickly with a swipe of her multiband, gave him a barely noticeable nod and left the shop chugging on the bottle.

They never exchanged a word.

*****

The hazardous material detector blinked a green light as she walked through the guardhouse into the compound. A small gated community on the outskirts of the city, reserved mostly for those with cushy business positions or the retired and wealthy. She was the only pony that was going inside; everyone else was leaving in their shiny premium class e-cars to inevitably be stuck in the morning rush. It never ceased to amuse her.

The bored security guard had been granted a brief glance and a tiny nod. She never bothered to utter a greeting, more as professional habit rather than spite. Getting too friendly with those that were irrelevant to a mission could result in dire consequences.

With the rollerblades hanging around her neck she began to walk towards her flat. It wasn’t far. She just needed to follow the gravel path past the artificial pond. It was still early; the groundskeepers were out and about, cleaning the azure water, trimming the neat rows of conifers and mowing the large open lawns with precise machines. The whole area looked like it was maintained by automatons. Not a pinecone was misplaced, not a bush untrimmed, not a wastebasket filled. She had chosen this place because she liked it that way. Orderly. Organized. Uniform.

Qualities her usual work environment severely lacked.

Following the winding path, she passed by a playground. Spring riders in the shape of colourful cartoon characters, ornate synthwood seesaws, big polymer slides, but most importantly, no foals in sight thanks to the early hour. She didn’t hate children, they were just alien to her. She didn’t know how to deal with them. She had no point of reference.

She had never found the time.

Soon, she reached the building. A four story block of yellow cavorite with subtle steel beam highlights and many balconies sticking out. Just as she was about to input the code to the building’s door she heard a grinding male voice right behind her.

“Wine Glass! He’s done it again! I’ve had it up to my horn with these escapades! Tell him that I did not allow my daughter to marry him so he can throw away the money from her- MY family business willy nilly on such idiotic things like independence!”

The mare turned to the stallion, quickly smiling. “Mister Grape, I am Laser Point. And I am not your daughter. I am your neighbour.”

The elderly unicorn narrowed his eyes at the mare with a visible look of confusion on his face. “Say what missy? I do not recall you ever marrying into the family, you are no daughter of mine.” He pointed a cane-armed hoof at her. “And do not ever think of calling me dad!”

She sighed, slowly walking over to the elderly pony and gently lowering the belligerent cane. “Where is Miss Pitter Patter? Isn’t she supposed to be taking care of you?” The stallion found himself being very slowly rotated away from the flat and towards the nearby trees. “Go back to the park, she must be worried sick about her charge.”

He screwed his face and tapped the cane hard on the concrete. “That skank? I do not care what she thinks, no one will babysit Grape Juice! I have a reputation to uphold!”

“Yes, a reputation of a very hard pensioner. Go back there before she calls for security.”

The stubborn unicorn waved his cane in the air a few times before slowly moving towards the indicated spot. “And you are with her? You lied to me all my life? Damnit, if only Princess Celestia saw how the youth are treating their elders these days she’d banish you to the moon right away!” He turned his head surprisingly quickly for someone of his age and gave the mare an evil eye. “Say, what was your name again?”

The earth pony smiled patiently, lightly nudging him in the direction of the park.. “Feedback Swirl.”

She returned to the door.

Grape Juice could be heard walking away and grumpily vocalizing his displeasure at the current generation as she input the six digit code and entered into the foyer. She passed the glass elevators standing at the ready and made towards the staircase, then with a few quick preliminary steps in place the mare began to jog upwards.

*****

The toughened door smoothly slid open and just as smoothly closed behind her.

The rollerblades were tossed into a corner, soon the shirt and pants followed into the laundry box in the nearby bathroom and the multiband and earphones were put on the shelf by the door.

Her hooves softly clattered on the bocote paneling as she got close to the open doors separating the antechamber from the rest of the apartment. Beyond them was a large room, two stories high. The opposite wall was fully transparent, doubling as a window and showing the neighbourhood. Further beyond the gates and the low urban sprawl, the city. Tall oblong buildings of the downtown, easily visible even from this distance, and even further than that, the jagged peak of Mount Reis. To her right were stairs consisting of nothing but a set of synthwood blocks embedded in the nearby wall, leading to the raised sleeping area and a small private lounge. Under the stairs, a kitchen in a simple yet elegant style, light gray nu-modernistic furniture holding less than a dozen plates and a barely used set of kitchenware. On the far right wall, rows and rows of shelves filled with paper books, more of a fashion statement than a practical collection in this day and age. She did read them from time to time, but the smell and the feel of old paper could not beat the convenience of a simple e-reader.

The left wall was adorned with many intricate metal hangers and holders, the vast majority filled with house plants of all shapes, colours and sizes. A miniscule lizard-like drone was climbing between the fragile leaves and vines, dutifully spraying the plants with hydration agent. The few remaining empty pots were waiting their turn for new occupants from far off worlds in far off nations.

Everyone needed a hobby.

She flexed her neck and shoulders a little, then, with a light heave, she threw herself up on her hindlegs and hooked her left foreleg on the metal bar mounted in the doorframe. Then she took a deep breath and pulled herself up.

One.

Two...

...Three....

She dropped on the floor and gave herself a moment to catch her breath, then looked up at the bar and threw herself back up again. The right one needed work too.

One.

Two...

...Three...

Her forelegs were burning as she returned to the ground. Breathing heavily, she started walking, or more accurately, stumbling, towards the bathroom. As soon as her breathing steadied, she called out.

“Resume playlist.”

A gentle guitar began immediately from the ceiling mounted speakers.

‘I'm on lonely street age nearly three. Recently mama's crying all the time...’

“Stop playlist.” She took a deep breath and exhaled softly. “Change playlist. Chill 2. Play.”

Again, the apartment was filled with soft music, this one purely instrumental. Full of light drums and bi-wave xylophones with a sprinkle of macro synthesizers. The mare nodded with satisfaction as she entered the bathroom, a medium sized room entirely covered in ivory tiles, only the floor made of black marble. With a neutral expression she glanced at her reflection in the big wall mounted mirror and walked into the corner, under a free hanging shower head. She tapped one of the multitude of identical white squares, which blinked to life with a light green holo-interface, then adjusted the settings to ‘Hot’ and ‘Rain/Mist’ before tapping ‘Start’.

The shower hissed and the mare let out a moan more befitting a bedroom as her muscles melted in bliss.

*****

With white towels firmly wrapped around the top of her head and her entire tail, the earth pony stepped out of the bathroom. A different song was playing now, a slow paced ambient track with a lot of grand piano mixed with aggressive use of electronic samples. She looked around the apartment as she prepared a mental checklist for the day, and smiled as she realized it wouldn’t be long.

First: Plant care. They all need to be tended to; the donkey tail would need to be replanted soon and the desert rose would have to be trimmed. The really exotic ones would be fine - she’d taken care of them on tuesday. Often she chuckled to herself when she imagined her coworkers reacting to her taking care of houseplants, rubber gloves on hooves and holding a small trowel, or even the tiny shears needed for the rose. This time was no different.

Second thing on the agenda: one of the window’s false-image holoprojectors had been acting up and she’d rather no one from the outside could actually see in. Of course, she could forward a request to logistics to have them install bulletproof shutters, but she didn’t want a bunch of agency techs milling around her home during her leave. Besides, shutters had an annoying tendency to block sunlight. She could change the holoprojector herself as soon as they delivered a new one.

Lastly: she was out of strawberry jam.

All of those could wait. At least until noon.

She walked upstairs, approached the big modern couch and slowly climbed up. Hindlegs stretched, back propped up with a large satin pillow, she let out a content sigh,

“Television.”

The music stopped, then the transparent wall showing the distant city instantly dimmed. A second later it lit up, showing a handsome stallion in a checkered suit sitting at a desk. To his side, a smaller video feed was visible, showing a crowd of ponies brandishing crude signs and chanting angrily in front of an impressive official-looking building.

“-citizens gathered in front of the Royal Senate to voice their displeasure at the contentious Repopulation Bill which was proposed last week. At the moment, the bill aims to lower yearly income tax for families with at least two children. Princess-Regent Luna is yet to-”

“Television off.”

As the music resumed, the mare sighed again, this time with annoyance.

She narrowed her brows, then reached to the coffee table and picked up an ebook reader. It took her awhile to finally find a desirable position that didn’t irritate one old scar or another, but once she was satisfied, she clicked the reader and opened a page.

‘Chapter 9: Colonel Kraft's Ingenious Plan’

*****

Two chapters in, the mare’s attention was grabbed by a soft jingle coming from the apartment’s speakers. A very particular jingle she had purposefully selected for that specific contact. Without taking her eyes off the reader, she frowned at the audacity of the caller to ruin her leave.

“Accept call.”

The speakers chirped; she didn’t wait for the caller to identify themselves.

“What do you want?”

Even though the voice was purposefully distorted, it was clearly displeased at her lacking discipline, or even common courtesy. “Standard operating protocols require you to ID yourself first.”

Her frown deepened. “You are calling me at home during my free time. The only one I will identify myself to is the Zebrahan restaurant’s delivery drone.” She locked the reader. “This better be important.”

“It is. Eagle Eye has intercepted a message that you might find very interesting.” There was a short pause. “I don’t have the details yet, but it must be related to Snowdrop.”

The lounging mare slowly looked up and put the reader back on the coffee table, then she got off the couch and descended the stairs towards the kitchen. The wall mounted panel blinked, indicating the call was rerouted to this section of the apartment. “COMINT doing their job? That’s a new one. Are they sure it is not some solar flare radiation, system glitch or dud decryption?”

“I made them check thrice, and I also asked Section Twelve to do it too. They are all certain it’s legit.”

She filled the wireless kettle with water and set it on, then opened a cupboard, pulled out a metal mug adorned with stenciled floral patterns and set it down on the counter. “I trust twelve to know their job. Fine, what do you have?”

“It is not about what the message says, it is about where it was sent from...”

The mare was looking through the small ornate porcelain containers on the counter as the distorted voice continued.

“...And to whom it was addressed.”

She finally decided on the content of one of the containers and pulled out a rose scented teabag to drop in the mug. “And who would that be?”

The digital distortion on the caller’s voice failed to mask their consternation. “We have no idea. But we are working on it.”

“Oh. I think I can see where this is going.” She smiled at herself as the orange light on the kettle faded before grabbing it and filling the mug.

“HeadOps wants you to find that out, but that is enough details. I expect to see you in my office in the next two hours.”

She let out a defeated sigh. So much for leisure time. “I’ll see you there then.” The speakers clicked and the soft instrumental music resumed playing. She blew into her mug and took a small sip. Immediately she recoiled as the tip of her tongue was burned.

The mare gave the kettle a flat stare.

“Fucking Sidewinder.”

*****

Eight hours and a short jump later, a reinforced bulkhead opened with a hiss of pressurized air. Behind it, a long tubular corridor was visible. She walked into it at a brisk pace. The other end was nearly three hundred meters away.

To some, the sights the glasteel tube presented would have been breathtaking. Naval Station Tiberius One; the primary anchorage for the Republic fleet, right above the capital planet of Hope. Even though majority of the navy was constantly patrolling the borders of the Republic or based in other, more distant locations, the sights offered never failed to impress newcomers.

All around, the vacuum of space had a strong colouring to it. Swirls of sapphire, midnight blue, ultramarine and everything in between, with tiny dots that were different stars sprinkled all around. White, yellow, orange and red. The Galleon Nebula - named after its appearance bringing an ancient ship of the line to mind when viewed from the far away Equestria.

On her left was a panoramic view of Hope’s southern hemisphere, half of it perpetually covered in darkness, tiny gatherings of faint yellow visible here and there. The other half presented massive mountain ranges and vast clusters of landmasses broken apart by malachite green seas.

Hope was a pristine world not unlike primeval Equestria. Perfect to settle for the exiles, who had turned the virgin planet into their new home away from home over the past three decades. Much of the world was still untouched purely because of the simple fact that the republic’s population had spread very thinly in this sector of the galaxy. There were simply not enough ponies to fully exploit the controlled planets. But they were getting there. It was best visible with Hope.

With a population of roughly half a billion, the planet had only a few dozen major cities, most of them located on the perpetually dark side to accommodate the majority of the bat pony citizens living below. Only the capital city was built on the equator, right where the dark and light sides met. It was entirely possible to drive around the city in circles, thus experiencing sunset and sunrise multiple times in a short span of time.

On her right was a massive orbital station that always brought to mind an image of a flattened spider, dozens of ships attached along the leg-like berths. The Royal Republic Navy was far from the biggest, maybe not even the third biggest given the Crystal League’s aggressive expansion the past few years. But even Nightmare Star’s vast armadas had to be wary of the modern ships of the NLR. Especially since her sister’s followers rarely engaged in a direct confrontation. The RRN was never meant to destroy the enemy in a decisive battle. They were meant to raid logistics, strike high value targets far behind enemy lines, disrupt strategic capabilities of the hostile power, sow chaos and force the superior opponent to scatter. Only so the enemy could be singled out and destroyed in a series of swift strikes.

Lessons learned from eight bloody years of civil war.

That didn’t mean there were no hard hitters however. Closest to the walkway, in the nearby berth, lay a massive dreadnought easily over a kilometer long. Its hull was shaped roughly like an ancient battleaxe, with the bridge at the cutting edge and superheavy mass driver turrets along the ‘shaft’. The pride of the fleet built almost forty years ago, back during a better era. Now upgraded countless times, outfitted with the best offense and defense systems available to the Republic, and sadly the only one of her type on this side of the galactic core. The RRNS Celestia.

Right on the other side of the berth- rested the sleek and modern teardrop shape of a Stormreaver class battlecruiser with its bulbous gravity well generator. The first indigenous supercapital design of the fledgling republic.

Two berths away, as if purposefully isolated, rested a strike carrier, dwarfed by its supercapital sisters in arms. Merely three hundred meters long. Either Princess Cadance or Shining Armour. The only two of their class. It was hard to tell which one was it from this distance.

Among them, near and far,was a multitude of smaller capital and sub capital ships.

A single mobile shipyard, a squadron of missile destroyers guarded by an electronic warfare frigate, a cruiser sized fleet tanker, orbital bombardment monitors. All were being resupplied or repaired, docking or undocking, or simply waiting for their next assignment.

And in space, around them all, dozens of various corvettes and even smaller craft. Venoms, Banshees, Vertigos. Even a couple Harpies long withdrawn from frontline service, now retrofitted and affectionately nicknamed ‘salvettes’.

The mare didn’t pay an ounce of attention to any of this. In fact, the only thing that occupied her mind was the duffel bag on her side, filled with essential supplies. Going to the Periphery always meant that she had to pack heavy, and carrying one of those all the way from the shuttle depot was not a pleasant task.

Walking the full length of the corridor took her well over a minute. As always, at the end there was a single security bulkhead with two guards standing up front in full zero-g combat gear. She was just about to walk through the door when one of the helmeted ponies stood in her way. His opaque visor stared down as his electronically tainted voice rang out.

“Halt! Turn around and go back where you came from, miss. This area is for clearance zero personnel only.”

The mare very slowly shifted her gaze from the ground and pierced the overzealous guard with her golden eyes. She calmly reached into a front pocket of her tacsuit and withdrew a plastic ID card. Before she could fully show it to the guard, he was shoved away by his companion.

The other guard stood at attention with rigidness that would make a statue blush. He saluted sharply with one of his leathery wings and barked out.

“Good evening ma’am. I apologize for my partner; he was transferred here recently from the surface.” The smart guard quickly moved himself from the way, allowing her to go through the door.

The mare made an ‘o’ face and looked at the newcomer before returning to the second guard. “At ease Master Sergeant.” She hid her ID again and walked through the door.

Just as they were about to close, she heard an annoyed voice behind her.

“You absolute reta-”

The door shut with a hiss.

*****

The mare smelled the air with a deep breath as she relaxed on the perfectly fitting seat. The suited pony allowed herself a smile when her nostrils caught a whiff of silicone mixed with aloe. She closed her eyes and slacked all the muscles she could. Only the soft humm of the reactor somewhere behind her existed now; nothing else mattered at this precise moment.

Then she thought of her mission, of her contacts, of her plans, of her backup plans. The mental checklist was being ticked nearly as fast as it was appearing. Finally, she took another deep breath, opened her eyes and keyed the radio.

“Tiberius flight control this is Paladin. Requesting undock clearance at berth D-nineteen. Over.”

The reply was quick and to the point. “Paladin this is Tiberius, you are cleared for departure at D-nineteen. Assume vector two-two-seven by negative nine-zero until the perimeter break and egress spinwards. Over.”

The mare started flipping the multitude of switches on the console in front of her. “Understood flight control. two-two-seven by negative nine-zero. Paladin departing now.” She quickly keyed the coordinates into the nav unit and slightly pushed the throttle forward.

The superstructure on the other side of the tinted canopy began to move. Soon, it disappeared behind her.

“Separation successful. Tiberius flight control out. Good hunting.”

She allowed herself a tiny smirk as she pushed the throttle further and heard the humm from behind intensify.

*****

Only the dark blues of the nebula and the distant stars lay ahead of her. Not even the sensors picked up any contacts in range. A quick glance between all the status displays for one last check was followed by a content sigh.

She looked down at the job before her; it was tough.

Too tough.

But not for her.

She drew in a deep breath.

She muttered a single word-

“Play.”

-and initialized the magicdrive sequence.

She moved her lips silently to the same lyrics again as the space in front of Regulus flickered and the dimensional rift began to open.

‘Would you take a bullet? Would you bite the gun?’

The mare’s eyes were focused firmly on the path ahead.

‘Through the fire I'll keep burning on.’

Castle of Glass

Author's Note

While I've been busy catching up on a couple FOE Shorts I wanted to do over on the Fallout Equestria: The Untold Individuals page, I knew there'd be a short break until I could get around to writing its next piece.

Thankfully in that time, Napalm Goat is back with another story centred on Whisper Step. This one is pretty special. It's his largest writing project yet in story form, and it is one of the most inventive and risky stories I've seen in a while. I'm curious to see what people pick up from it, and delighted to bring it to you all as part of 'A Home in the Black'.

To refresh for people, given you're seeing snapshots of her story in these chapters: Whisper Step is a field agent for the New Lunar Republic who encountered the crew during the game's story. In searching for Project Snowdrop, a secretive pursuit by the ruthless megacorp 'Sidewinder', the crew found Whisper, their new ally, abducted. Soon, they learned of her brutal interrogation taking place, both horrific pain, and a terrible, mind-alterring drug named 'Delta C' being administered to try and make her break.

We saw the after-effects of this experience on her in the chapter "The Last Promise", after the crew -namely Hair Trigger- had found her in a dark crate within Sidewinder's clutches. Now, though, the game's GM himself takes us back a little, to look deeper into Whisper's story...

Castle of Glass

Castle of Glass

Written by Napalm Goat

*****

When was it? When was the first time?
Was it before or after my first assignment? So long ago. A year? Two? A decade?

It was summer.

I remember… I remember standing there and looking at it all. Clean. Freshly renovated. Was the furniture in there already or did I bring my own? The Agency, I got it from them, I think. They care for their people. They have to. Especially after that mess with-.

Poor girl. Couldn’t handle the pressure. Hopefully her family moved on.

What was her name? Cloudy? Sunny something?

Donkey Tail.

I was so proud of them, one fully grown and potted under my foreleg and a couple of saplings resting in the basket. I couldn’t wait to settle in and plant them, and the others too of course. Maybe hang them on that wall over there? I’d have to order some hangers then. But maybe it would be best to go out myself? Find the local flower shop, get acquainted with the neighbourhood?

No, not in this heat. I had enough heat for the whole year after that survival exercise.

Heat? Not heat. Rain.

The flash of lightning shook me out of my musings. Beyond the window I could see the far away city, its brightly lit buildings shining through the darkness. The flowing droplets on the other side of the glass made the huge hanging neon signs appear to dance and weave to the drumming of the rain.

I leaned back on the seat, sipped from the glass and listened to the rain. The storm outside occasionally banished the room’s darkness with a distant flash. My nose picked up a hint of fresh dirt from the recently hung pots. My limbs were slacked pleasantly as I lounged on the soft cushions.

Easel was right; it was worth it. And how convenient!

I looked over my shoulder at my guest. One of the most handsome bats I had ever hooked up with, if not the most. But now he was leaving.

Tall, fit, but not overly muscular, with that amazing roguish smile. If I had a normal job I could see myself falling for him.

He put on his leather jacket and winked with one of those slitted emerald eyes. “I’d stay for the night, but I have a job to do, pretty.”

Giggling and nearly spilling the cocktail, I half turned and pointed a hoof at him. “We had our fun charmer. You can drop the act!”

He just shrugged and walked over, the lightning illuminating his silhouette. “It’s not an act. I am one hundred percent genuine.” He stopped on the side of the chair, extended his neck and gently pecked my cheek.

I giggled again, but it was cut short as I felt his leathery wing brush the inside of my thigh. “Now you are getting cheeky.” I regained my senses and playfully swatted with my foreleg. “Get out of here!”

I watched him strut towards the door. No, I did not just watch. I ogled his flank like a starving mouse would a piece of cheese.

With a roll of my eyes I put the wine on the table and followed to see him out.

The door opened with a hiss. He stopped in the threshold, turned around and watched me come closer with a smile. Once I stopped before him, he wiggled his eyebrows and simultaneously flapped his wings once. Then, he leaned close yet again, as close as before. His eyes were the only feature I could see as he whispered, dead serious. “What do you know about Snowdrop?”

Lightning struck right in the park under my windows. I winced at its roar and shut my eyes tight out of reflex. When I opened them again my companion was as blank as before, its featureless faceplate staring through my head.

“Thank you for using our services. If you enjoyed this unit’s performance we can offer you a discount on the monthly sub-”

I pressed the button and shut the door in the pondroid’s face. Easel was right, it was worth it. But it lacked something. I chuckled to myself in amusement. “A goodnight kiss most likely.”

Slowly I walked back to the living room, made myself comfortable in the seat and idly rubbed my fetlocks, then grabbed the glass and took a sip of my whiskey. “Resume playlist.”

‘The lunatic is on the grass…’

Downtown looked beautiful covered in snow.

*****

This getup sure was a new experience. I didn’t mind, not at all. How often did I get to wear something that annihilated the notion of function?

Worn khaki poncho?
Check.
Tight iridescent one piece?
Check.
Baggy rainbow sequin pants (with obligatory generous cutouts for cutie marks)?
Check.
Fluorescent paste on said cutie marks?
Check.
Silvery reflective horseshoes?
Check.
Chemlight collar?
Check.
Perfectly placed face jewels?
Check.
Animated optical fibers running through mane and tail?
Check
Attenuation filter ear plugs?
Check.

And a very special necklace.

Check.

It was quiet. A little self discipline, and you could filter out any noise. After this short moment of clarity, I decided it was time to get going. I released my breath and focused my senses outwards.

The world regained its sounds one more time.

Like a freight train, the roar of music and the noise of over three thousand people filled my ears. Screaming, yelling, talking and laughing. Despite this, the thumping electronic beat was palpable.

‘You get a phone call from the queen with a hundred heads.’

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes.

All the colours of the rainbow, periodic table and the galaxy were before me. Ponies, griffins and zebra among others. Their coats and their outfits were just as extravagant as mine, if not more so. Towering colourful chapeus, flowing floral robes, obscenely high platform boots, vast amounts of intricate jewelry and the ubiquitous chemlights.

And above them all, a stadium-sized glassteel skylight ran over the sea of people, offering a view into the cosmos.

Space. Infinite, black and red and blue and green. And right in the center, an apple sized disc, made of smudged colours from the ether around it, with thousands of tiny white dots packed tightly in a thick ring surrounding it. The further from the muddled center they were, the less cramped the dots appeared, until they finally transitioned into normal starscape, far enough away for light to escape the insatiable appetite of the cosmic devourer.

And below it all, sheltered by mere inches of glassteel was a sea of people partying on the edge of infinity. There were the searchlights, lasers and holograms, flickering, spinning and weaving to the rhythm. All of them constantly shifting patterns, colour and intensity, changing the floor into an ecstasy fueled kaleidoscope that perfectly blended with the music. And between all of this equipment, in the middle of the stage a hundred meters before me, a duo of bat pony stallions behind a huge table, headphones on, forelegs dancing on the consoles.

The air was filled with soap bubbles lazily falling down, heedless of the crowd’s collective energy. I smiled as I watched the colourful stage lasers reflect in those small shimmering orbs, like miniature supernovas.

All around me, huge metal bulkheads - easily thirty meters tall - were covered in sound absorbing material. Here and there, an archway or other passage led into one of many side corridors and rooms.

The ship used to be a bulk cargo transport long ago. Now it was repurposed as a mobile festival and concert arena, currently orbiting Light’s End at a distance most space travel agencies would find in grave violation of the widely accepted common sense and ship operation safety standards.

I took another breath and began walking, bouncing my body to the music. It was surprisingly easy; as soon as others saw my outstretched foreleg they took a step to the side, just enough to let me pass. Amusingly, no one tried to ‘accidentally’ grope me. A welcome change in comparison to the last job at a similar event.

“What were they called again? Something about a metal boot.” I spoke loudly to myself, not that I could hear it.

The beat intensified, and the crowd reacted in turn. Even I stopped limiting myself to just bobbing my head and shoulders up and down, and began swaying. Hips and all.

It took me a good five minutes to get to my destination, but finally I approached a duo of gruff looking minotaurs flanking a large open hatch labeled AC1609. They looked hilariously out of place. Cheap black uniforms covered them from head to hoof. One of them looked down at me questioningly. I showed him a simple red synthetic band on my fetlock. He squinted his eyes at it, barked something I couldn’t hope to hear and motioned for me to enter as I gave him a sweet smile and went in. Behind the doors, a set of short metal stairs led me up and above the main floor, and onto a relatively small, open platform. A crowd of people was here too, all wearing the same bands as I.

I quickly scanned the area. It was quite a sight. Not only was it a miniature copy of the crowd below, it also had quite a few unique amenities the main floor did not possess. Namely, tables with bottles of champagne in sleek ice-filled buckets, standing right next to neat lines of white powder arranged by length and thickness. Quite a few of them clearly in various stages of consumption. Young waiters and waitresses in brave clothing patrolled the floor, refilling the buckets and contractually giggling at an occasional haughty look or slap to the flank. On the sides, large circular cages held mares and stallions who bent and weaved in tune with the booming music. Right above the middle, just barely out of reach from the floor, a slim zebra mare was suspended upside down. Her hindlegs spread horizontally in a perfect line, somehow holding onto a hanging hoop above her. A red semi transparent ribbon was barely wrapped around her body, covering what little modesty she still had. She held a part of it between her teeth, grinning at an infatuated deer buck who was fruitlessly trying to bite down the very end of it.

The deer buck I came here for.

He appeared young for a deer, mainly because of his modest antlers which were entirely covered in pinkish glitter. His coat was light gray, almost white in colour, though most of it was hidden by an unbuttoned shirt with a floral pattern. Other than that, he wore what appeared to be a standard set of accessories for such an event. A pair of shutter shades with colourful animated LEDs, simple pieces of expressive jewelry; mostly plastic and glowing or reflective one way or another, and to top it all, his hindlegs were covered by sporty shin guards.

An increase in the music’s tempo shook me back to the present. I instinctively resumed swiveling before looking around. A large bar counter with a trio of tenders on the other side was nested opposite the main stage. I made my way towards it, and waited for the buck to have his fun.

Thankfully the space by the counter wasn’t crowded. Enough to blend in, but not enough to lose sight of my quarry. I stood sideways to be able to see the main stage, and by extension, the deer.

Even in this VIP lounge it was obvious the music was the main attraction, with people dancing and cheering, no doubt their enthusiasm fueled by alcohol among other indulgences. I couldn’t say it was my type of tune, but I couldn’t lie and say the universal energy radiating from the crowd and the performers did not put me in a giddy mood. It was… infectious.

“What'll it be miss!?”

The bartender’s shout got my attention. I leaned over the counter and yelled back. “Ring up a Vesper!”

The griffin nodded in an overexaggerated manner, making sure to signal to me that she understood, then quickly started prepping my drink.

I turned my back to the counter and leaned on it, then grabbed a strand of my mane and twirled it playfully. A large unicorn in a colourful blouse walked right beside me. He was moving slowly, bouncing and bobbing his head only very slightly.

I let go of my mane and giggled before muttering under my breath. “A for effort, soldierboy.”

As the stallion walked past, I rolled my eyes and shook my head in amusement. If you were trying to stay undercover, do not watch everyone like a hawk. And most definitely do not pack anything bigger than a thirty-eight.

Amateurs.

I threw my head back, closed my eyes and listened.

‘That he could wish himself health on a four-leaf clover.’

I could have sworn I heard those lyrics in some ancient and very different song before. No matter.

The beat that came right after did the trick, and I heard the excited yelling of the crowd all around me. I couldn’t help but lightly throw my loose mane around. Partially to blend in, but mostly because it was just plain fun.

A light tap on my back broke me out of my reverie. Reluctantly, I looked over my shoulder to see the bartender pointing at my now filled glass. I gave her a quick nod before swiping my bracelet on the portable terminal in the griffin’s hand and grabbing my cocktail.

A sip of the bitter liquid, just enough to feel its coarse burn, and it was time to go.

Show time.

I took off and made my way to the opposite end of the platform. The buck was by the railing, stomping, swaying and tossing his head around. Lost in trance. I really could not blame him.

Weaving between other party goers, tables and the staff, I managed to get to the railing. With friendly smiles and a bit of elbow grease I finally reached the very front, stopping right next to my target.

One more step and an accidental tumble later, the contents of my glass landed straight on his shoulder.

He jumped, startled, looked at me through his flashing LED shades, and made a surprised expression.

I quickly grabbed the edge of my poncho and started rubbing it against his coat. “I am so sorry! I am such a goof!”

He looked annoyed for just a split second, just long enough before he noticed my rich golden eyes. As he did, his expression became neutral. Then, the corners of his mouth went upwards. The song was ending by now, but I still barely registered what he said.

“Hey! No problem!”

I’ve put on my best innocent smile I could muster. “Sorry, sorry! I shouldn’t have come all the way here! It’s too tight to just stand and drink!”

His smile grew into a grin as he waved a foreleg, dismissing the notion. “You should really fasten your seatbelts in this place girl! Come on, stay and have fun! I promise I will get you a new one later!”

His obvious wink was all the confirmation I needed to know that he thought I was his now.

More precisely, it was what I wanted him to think.

After one of the burly unicorns the deer waved over took my now empty glass, I graciously nodded and smiled some more. I then put a hoof on his shoulder, drawing him close enough to not have to yell. Once I got his attention, I pointed the other hoof towards the stage. “Who are these guys anyway!?”

He looked at me briefly, then at the stage. “Oh them!? I am not sure, first time hearing them! Some kind of art bats!”

“I think I like them! Are they going to go on for long!?”

The buck glanced at his multiband and tapped it twice. His response was drowned out by the roaring cheers of a couple thousand throats as the tune passed its climax. “...nding! The next set is the bomb! You don’t want to miss that!”

I gave him a few quick nods. “Oh yeah! I am not alone in that! That’s what I’m here for!” I had little knowledge of what he was talking about. “You want to get me that drink before it begins!?”

Out here, there was no such thing as the beginning or end, just periods of slowdown for resting. The event was running for three days in a row, but right now was the ultimate concentration of the party. The peak of freedom. The depths of hedonism. The supernova of pleasure. I’ve spent the last three and a half hours looking for this deer. No intel, be it Republic or Imperial, could have tracked him down this precisely. Not in this place. Torann Corcra, also known as the Fading Halo, eldest son of the owner of the most powerful big pharma megacorp in Avalon. Ninety nine point nine percent of all the drugs at this party were made in his father’s laboratories.

But that was not why I was seeking him out. Arrest him for drug trafficking? I was not here to play cops and robbers. A month ago, one of our missing Avalon agents was finally found. More precisely, his hindlegs and a roach infested torso had been found. In three separate waste barrels no less. Sloppy, not something a rival agency would do. But a mob? Section Twelve finally found out who was responsible. Looked like daddy decided to change sides.

It was time to return the favour.

I flashed my eyebrows. “Come on! Before they start playing the good stuff!” They were already playing the good stuff, but I had to take my chance before Torann was lost in the zone again.

Tugging at his antler playfully, I headed for the counter. He quickly followed.

Of course he would.

I reached the bar first, turned around and waited for the buck with a playful smile. Once he rejoined me, he waved one of the bartenders who dropped whatever she was doing and immediately approached the deer. She knew who he was, that much was obvious.

“Hey Ringo! Aquileian Light!”

The bartender nodded and yelled back, eyes still on the buck. “And for the lady!?”

He looked at me with a coy smirk. I held his gaze with a smile. “Lake City Coup!”

The bartender disappeared as quickly as she appeared, not that he noticed. I think he was lost somewhere between yellow and gold.

The music was picking up again, but it was obvious it was just a slower piece intended to let the crowd rest since the last performance.

I grabbed a strand of my mane and played with it in my hoof, all the while staring into the buck’s soul. “You’re a regular, aren’t you!?”

The sound of his chuckle was covered by the fast beat. “I’ve been around! Here, Highlands, Radar, Yesterdayland, Sunset, Moonburn… The list goes on!” He puffed his chest out proudly.

I opened my mouth in awe. “Wow! I haven’t been to any big ones yet! Unless you count this! You’re a vet!”

The deer was beaming; that did the trick. “You won’t find this kind of fun anywhere else!” He lowered his eyes for a moment before looking at me again. This time however, Torann wasn’t looking at me like he would have had at a new toy; his gaze was focused inwards. As if he was reflecting on a philosophical dilemma, or lecturing a neophyte. “In this kind of music the beautiful thing is that it is not hurrying along! There are no verses, no chorus, no refrain, everyone can just experience it as they please! It's just... music!”

Before I could have answered, our attention was grabbed by the bartender. We took the two tinted glasses filled with with our respective orders.

The deer spoke again. “Are you going to finally tell me your name or do I have to get you more drinks?”

I brought my drink to lips before giggling at his question. “Oh yes! I am Memory Lane!”

He nodded, tapped his glass and smiled charmingly. “My name’s Torann Corcra, Purple Noise in deerspeek! A pleasure!” The buck raised his drink with a wink.

Half closing my eyes with a warm smile I brought up mine and we clinked our glasses together.

“Well, Miss Memory Lane!” He downed his entire drink in one go. “Let’s PARTY!”

“Woohoo!” I followed suit and threw one of my forelegs into the air.

This was bad. I was supposed to drop the pill into the drink and conveniently vanish. Not get smashed and listen to whatever the fuck kind of trance this was with a soon to be a very stiff druglord.

Torann put his glass on the counter, then did the same with mine. Then, he grabbed me by my shoulder, before gently pulling me into the crowd.

I habitually touched the piece of jewelry on my neck. I had to try again later, or come up with another option. Close enemies, I supposed.

As he pulled me along between the colourful partygoers, I felt the warmth reaching my stomach. The last time I drank anything stronger than a beer was… I didn’t remember. The blasting music’s tempo quickly matched my own heartbeat. This time it was faster than before, even more energetic. It didn’t take long for it to unfurl. I could hear the crowd singing in unison.

‘Reach up to the sky above. Higher like you can't get enough.’

He pulled me along. There were noticeably more people here now. Figures. It was the hour where the really good stuff started. Soon, we found ourselves surrounded by partying people.

But we weren’t going to the platform’s railing. The deer was dragging me towards the stairs leading out of the VIP lounge.

“Where are we going!?”

Torann yelled without turning around to look at me. “That was just an entrée! We’re going to the main floor! Trust me!”

I quickly looked around, trying to spot the heat packing stallions, but they were nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t remember if that was good or bad. But I knew I had to stay close to the deer.

We gracefully weaved through the crowd, running down the stairs two steps at a time. Then, headed for the main floor, right under the massive glassteel roof. The buck held my hoof gently, but securely enough to not lose touch. Minute after minute, drop after drop, beat after beat, we made our way into the middle of the huge crowd, perhaps twenty meters from the stage.

The crowd here was dense, but there was enough room to stand freely. More importantly, there was enough room to throw oneself around, which Torann immediately started to do.

I couldn’t afford to stand out.

‘And then you bring it back.’

We couldn’t get drinks here. How was I supposed to give him the poison? I had to figure out something, and fast.

I was probably the only person on the floor right now that was thinking. Not that others were incapable. They were just… gone. Consumed by rhythm, lights and each other’s bliss. The closeness of another, be it lover, friend or a total stranger. All were lost, heedless of the world at large. Their daily burdens, issues, monotony. All were away, far from here. Just for this weekend. It was good.

I drew in a sharp breath as the beat slowed down.

Closeness. That was it. Risky. Extremely so. But I had a job to do.

Alternating between my four legs weaving, stomping and twisting, I sidestepped closer to the buck. Close enough to brush my side against his coat.

He looked at me with a smile and turned it into a grin. “This is awesome! COME ON!” With a quick reach, he hooked his foreleg over my shoulder and began swaying left and right in tune.

My laugh was drowned out by the music as I followed suit. “YOU’RE RIGHT!” Turning to the deer, I lidded my eyes and grinned. “I’m glad I’m here with you Torann!”

He lifted his LED glasses and looked into my eyes with an expression of gratitude. It took him a short moment to finally escape the sea of gold. “The night’s still young! But something already tells me it will be unforgettable!”

I couldn’t help but cover my muzzle with a hoof and laugh. It’d been a while since someone looked at me like that.

I thought.

Damned alcohol.

We embraced each other and laughed as the song transitioned. But instead of letting go, I pushed the deer away forcefully and laughed at his confusion. “How about that other drink you promised me!?”

He balked at me for a split second before bursting out in laughter. “Oh so you are that kind of mare!? Don’t worry! I have something better!” He slowed down his swaying and reached a hoof into the small satchel around his midsection, rummaged there for a moment and pulled out two tiny wraps of tinfoil.

I could see them clearly. I instantly knew what they were. After all, he was a specialist.

Torann slowly unwrapped one of the packages, licked his hoof and put it into the foil. Then he lifted it and pointed at my muzzle. A small pale orange pill was sticking to it. Shaped… like an owl?

“Nothing serious, not some insane tranquilizer! Just enough to make you fire on all cylinders!” He turned the hoof around, opened his muzzle and started to move it to his mouth.

Quickly, I reached out and grabbed his foreleg. He looked at me in surprise as I turned it around, gave him a devious smile and licked the pill off it.

It immediately sucked out all the moisture from my mouth, and was by far the single most bitter thing I ever swallowed.

The buck raised his eyebrows high before chuckling, at least I thought he was chuckling, not that I heard anything. “What about me!?” He leaned down and began to carefully unwrap the other packet.

That was my chance. I turned to the side and grabbed my necklace. A small, wooden crescent moon on a linen string, holding a shiny gemstone. Grabbing it with both hooves I clicked the gemstone and from the other side another pill fell out. This one white and round. I quickly put it in my mouth. I knew it was safe; the chemical compound was tailored to deer DNA. An earth pony like me would end up in a street corner and puke for the rest of the night, but for a deer like Torann it would be lethal. After all, it was made by his own father’s company.

Turning quickly back to my quarry I called out. “You fed me mine, how about I feed you yours!?”

I could see the cogs in his head turning. Once he got it, he grinned and passed me his pill.

Quickly, I grabbed the owl and deposited it in my mouth.

I was going to regret this later.

Holding the necklace pill between my teeth, I swallowed the disgusting drug, then shifted the white pill between my lips… And threw myself at the buck. Forelegs around each other’s shoulders, our lips met passionately and I wasted no time in pushing my tongue, and the pill, deep inside his mouth.

We stood like that for a long time. He was busy trying to feel the inside of my muzzle. I was making sure he swallowed the pill. I would have lied if I said I did not enjoy it. He was a cute young buck.

But a job is a job.

Finally, once I was certain Torann had gulped down the pill, we broke off, breathing heavily and shaking. He grinned at me like a colt who just had his first kiss.

I smiled and waved my mane in return. “Wow! This thing is really dry! Get us some water, will you!?”

The buck nodded eagerly, leaned in close and gave me a smooch on the cheek before leaving. “I’ll be right back!”

Too easy.

As soon as I was sure the deer was out of sight, I turned towards the stage and began pushing through the crowd. All I had to do was extract without him finding me, get a gastric lavage, and it was back to the NLR for some well earned rest.

I had to take the long route back. Get to the stage, then to the side, and skirt the edges of the crowd as far away from the VIP lounge as possible. I did not want to run into his bodyguards. They would surely be on the lookout for his lovebird once he realised I was not waiting for him.

The crowd was even denser here. No matter. The less obvious the route, the better.

I could hear the shift in the music’s tempo; a new piece transitioned, and judging by the crowd’s ecstatic reaction to the high, almost coy female voice, it was a banger. Stopping briefly, I cast my sight backwards to where I last saw the deer. There was no sight of him. Instead, I saw hundreds if not thousands of grinning, blissful faces. I couldn’t help but crack a smile at the scene - it grew and grew. As soon as the lyrics started, I saw nearly everyone following along.

‘Our hearts tend to wander’

Such a fascinating place.

Facing the stage again, I looked at their idol. A griffin female, barely visible from behind the huge console. Fortunately, her station was televised live from multiple angles on the many screens hanging all around the venue. The ashen red griffin’s image alternated between colourful outlandish visualizations and shots of the colourful crowd.

I stood there, staring at it all. Even as an outsider I felt like I belonged. There was no judgement here, no prejudice, no hate or ridicule. Everyone could enjoy the event, everyone was welcome.

It made me feel happy.

My legs felt like they were made from putty.

And my face was graced with the biggest smile I’d ever felt.

I was certain.

I threw my head backwards and stared at the madly spinning spectacle behind the tinted glassteel. The pale blue jets of the pulsar’s emissions weaved as only a young filly’s braids could. In the middle, where they met, a tiny dot of brightest white radiated like no ordinary star ever could hope to accomplish. I was hypnotized.

‘Set yourself free!’

The crowd EXPLODED.

I was swept away by their ecstasy, yelling and cheering like so many others around me. Finally, I unglued my eyes from the distant star’s red glow and looked towards the stage, at a multitude of screens. The pegasus was still at it, then the image on the screens shifted. An overhead shot of the whole crowd. Then it shifted again. A heavily stylized negative colour visualization of what I guessed was the ship itself, floating through a psychedelic rendition of the cosmos.

With wobbling muscles I hefted myself up to stand on my hindlegs and threw my forelegs up.

A golden rush.

The bright moving lights of the stage had an almost perceivable aura around them, as if I could have touched the shine. I balanced on my hindlegs and reached out to touch it.

‘Welcome back agent Whisper Step, ready for another round?’

The smooth, brazen male voice echoed through my skull.

Smiling, I look at the gigantic screen behind the stage, the only one present. It was clearly visible, the whole floor was dark, with only occasional, electric hot searchlights shifting through the blackness.

On the screen, a pair of emerald slitted eyes.

Unblinking.

Peering straight at me.

The chorus exploded again.

‘Snowdrop. Tell me what you know about Snowdrop.’

I grin at the eyes. They are beautiful.

My fetlocks start to itch.

*****

The job was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab. Get to the university, quietly grab the professor - by force if necessary - get back to the extract point and wait for pickup.

Of course no one expected a squadron of hyper advanced pursuit robots to crash our plans. I was on the run from the moment I snatched the zebra, at least fifteen minutes ago. We managed to make our way out of campus and into a more isolated area, but they were not letting up.

I could hear the flechettes hit our cover as I shouted into the radio. “Damnit Sir, I need some help!” The rushing wind all around me made it hard to hear anything else.

The voice in my ear was calm, but the level of intensity it carried only reinforced how serious the situation was. “We’re working on it Paladin. Get to the top of the temple, we’ll have a dropship pick you up.”

I nodded, knowing well that the many telescoping cameras watching me from the orbit would not be enough to let the voice know I understood. “What in Luna’s name are those three legged freaks?”

The voice was quick to reply. “Unknown. Their profile doesn’t match anything the Caliphate might have in service.”

I let out a blind burst from my SMG over the pile of construction materials I was using for cover, then pulled out and primed my last EMP grenade before lobbing it over towards my pursuers. The electric zap of an explosion was clearly heard from here. “Empire?”

“Unlikely, nothing suggests they are involved in this operation.” The voice paused, then continued with a tinge of annoyance. “We don’t know who made them or who sent them.”

I took a deep breath and counted what remained in my ammo pouch. It should last. “Great.”

Finally, for the first time since the tireless hunters appeared, I properly regarded my mission objective. An elderly zebra, wearing pure white flowing robes with golden filigree, now a little dusty from the chase. He was thin, nearly emaciated, I was not sure if that was because of some sickness or old age. His milky white eyes were staring into space, somewhere I could not hope to perceive. Every time I looked at them, I felt like I was being dragged in deeper and deeper. Something was telling me I would not have liked where I would end up at. Was that how others felt when they looked at me?

I did not know who he was, other than some high ranking scholar the Agency wanted to have. Frankly, I did not care, and even if I did, there was no way to know. The stallion did not speak a word of Equestrian.

“Paladin, looks like they retreated. Keep moving.”

“Roger that Emperor!” I peeked over our cover. The pursuers were gone, at least for the moment. With a slight nudge I brought the zebra up and we started moving again. He wasn’t resisting, even though I had just kidnapped him straight from his lunch break. All we had to do was to extract. Easy enough.

That had been the case until those things appeared out of nowhere. I had counted at least eight, but once we get out into the open, Emperor had confirmed it was just five. They were just very, very good at teamwork and misdirection.

They were also nearly bulletproof and could take full advantage of the urban terrain thanks to their agility and articulated limbs. With some effort, I'd managed to down two of them with EMP grenades, but the others seemed to have gotten wise to my tricks.

That is why we had run here. Al-Bayir, the biggest and oldest university in the Caliphate. A prestigious centre of learning and knowledge, both secular and religious. A shining pearl of early post-colonization zebra architecture, its three hundred plus meter golden dome we were currently climbing dominated the city’s skyline and, conveniently, offered the biggest open space where our pursuers could not exploit their strengths. Fortunately, the building was undergoing renovation and was currently covered in scaffolding and repair gantries. The machines had to follow them to the top, same as we. It was also devoid of any workers thanks to an important holiday.

I quickly checked again if the robots were gone. Once I was sure I didn’t see any, I helped the old stallion along. He mumbled something I could not understand in protest, but started moving anyway. We quickly followed the narrow path made of prefab support segments, drawing closer and closer to the temporary landing platform at the very top.

The scaffolding was spiraling around the bulbous dome, but fortunately we had already passed the point of biggest diameter. Each bend of the upwards spiral was becoming shorter and shorter. I had to stop every now and then to allow the zebra to catch his breath; each time I expected an inevitable ambush. It never came.

After a few more rounds I spotted a platform extending from the scaffolding that held workers’ equipment and supplies. We crouched down behind bags of dry plaster. “Emperor do you have a visual on the hostiles? I cannot see any of them.”

“We’re scanning all spectra but so far nothing, it’s like they vanished. Stay alert.”

“Understood. I have to hold here so the VIP does not kee-”

The serene zebra suddenly whipped his head to the side and stared into empty space with alarm. I followed suit, but there was nothing.

Then, in a blink of an eye, a form took shape. Pale white, I saw an inverted conical body shimmer into being. It lifted up, standing on three well-articulated legs, until it stood easily over a meter taller than I was. A glowing robotic eye was mounted on a rail around the middle of the cone and a flechette launcher was attached to its top like a turret. But for all the uncanny valley in that shifting eye, it was the small pair of eerily organic griffish talons hanging from the bottom of the cone, grasping and feeling the air that sent shivers down my spine.

I brought up my weapon and dumped the whole mag’. They were nearly bulletproof, but that did not mean they were invincible. Majority of my bullets ricocheted off the conical body, but those that hit managed to hurt it. It’s robotic eye was shattered and one of its leg servos was torn at its base. The machine staggered, screeched, and after a few shaky steps fell to the ground. I winced as I watched the small griffish arms still reaching out and clutching helplessly, even after the rest of the robot had been ruined. Two down to EMP, one to plain old bullets, two to go.

I took a deep breath.

Less than a second later.

‘Thwip! thwip! thwip!’

It was a distraction.

I felt a sharp pain in my side as the force of impact made me gasp for breath. The flechettes embedded themselves in my carapace and started glowing, faster and faster. Frantically I attempted to dislodge them, but I was too late to get them all.

As I reached for the third one, the glow became constant and the blue end of the projectile exploded in an electrical discharge.

Over a blink of an eye I could feel the wave of the shock travel from the flechette’s tip through skin, through muscle, searing every nerve it found along the way, then all over my side, spilling over my torso. I whipped my tail as all my muscles spasmed. I felt the insides of my teeth cry out in pain.

I don’t know how long I screamed.

I fell to my knees as the shock ended and my muscles gave up. I found myself staring forward, eyes wide. Drawing in fast and shallow breaths. My heart was racing. The machine that shocked me was gone.

“-adin respond! What is your situation!?” Emperor’s concerned voice thundered in my left ear.

“Dey hafe-” I balked. My tongue was burned. The shock must have boiled my saliva.

I forced myself to swallow. “They have some sort of cloaking device, that is why you couldn’t see them!”

“Shit. Get to the landing pad right now. Exfil in three minutes.”

“On it!” I turned to the zebra and grabbed his robes, pulling him along. “Come on old man!”

Two more levels. We ran as fast as the old stallion’s legs allowed, far below the speed I'd normally keep when being hunted. Every now and then the zebra would start mumbling something under his breath. After a minute, I realized he was chanting, words I couldn’t understand, nor cared for. All I needed from him was that he cooperated and followed me to the top.

We ran and ran. I didn’t bother checking every nook and cranny of the extensive scaffolding. If the robots were capable of cloaking, all I could do from now on, was to anticipate their moves and react to their ambushes.

The curve of the dome revealed another platform ahead. I stuck out my foreleg to tap the zebra and we slowed down. He looked at me with his piercing eyes, then at the platform and said something questioningly.

“That is where I would wait too, old man.” Checking my ammo I started to move slowly ahead, my weapon’s holo-sight close to my eye. Despite the howling wind and the hustle and bustle of the metropolis below I found myself whispering. “Emperor, anything on sensors?” The zebra wisely held back.

“Scope’s clean. They are hiding.”

“I don't think that is much better. They know you are watching. I am pushing in.” I just hoped there was a limit on how long they could stay hidden.

The platform was maybe the size of a typical living room. My left side was covered by the golden wall of Al-Bayir’s dome; ahead were stairs to the next level. On the right, beyond the platform’s railing, open sky.

I stepped carefully onto the platform, prefab components groaning under my weight. There was no sight nor sound of the prowling robots. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, relaxed my muscles and focused. The distant hum of the city and the rush of the wind slowly dulled out into silence.

I could hear the zebra’s quiet chanting.

My footsteps.

My heartbeat.

The creak of a floorboard, two o’clock.

Immediately I opened my eyes and leapt to the side.

‘Thwip! thwip! thwip!’

They tried the same trick again, but this time I was not there.

Bringing myself up, I aimed at the machine I heard. It hadn’t finished decloaking yet, and I was not planning to let it. Thirty rounds later it collapsed in on itself on the platform. I could hear its brother galloping away on the scaffolding above.

One more.

I stood up and walked over to where the zebra was hugging the golden wall. “Downed another one, Emperor. There is one hostile left, it ran away.” Reaching out I pulled the stallion’s robe and lightly shoved him along, then with a quick move I swapped the empty mag out.

“Understood. Continue to the top. Dropship ETA ninety seconds.”

“Any chance of it supporting me?” It was a fair shot.

“Negative. It’s unarmed.”

Of course it was.

And so we started moving again. Now that I knew there was only one drone left I played it safe. It had to face me directly without its allies to misdirect me.

Two more sets of short stairs and we finally reached the small temporary landing pad at the top of the dome. It was simple, just a metal rectangle built over the top of the dome, big enough to allow a light dropship to land, deposit supplies and takeoff. “At the landing pad. Hurry up, will you?”

I could hear Emperor’s muffled chuckle. “ETA ten seconds, approaching from the south east.”

Sure enough, in the corner of my eye I could see the sleek form of a small unmarked coal-black dropship, it’s two vectoring nacelles maneuvered as the onboard programming actively counteracted the drag.

Keeping both the mission objective and my weapon close I had nothing to do but keep watch and wait for the automated craft to land. There was no sign of the last remaining cone freak.

With the clang of landing gear the dropship touched down and a door on its side slid open. Grabbing the zebra by the scruff of his neck I led him towards the passenger compartment. “We are boarding now, Emperor.” It was not easy to haul an eighty-something year old stallion into a tiny black ops dropship designed to hold four ponies at most.

The zebra started to reluctantly climb aboard; I had to help by pushing his flank into the dropship. Once he was inside, I grabbed the handle and started climbing in myself.

‘Thwip! thwip! thwip!’

Crap.

I let go off the handle and jumped down. The flechettes embedded themselves in the hull exactly where I was half a second ago. Turning around I brought my weapon high and aimed at the opposite end of the platform.

The last remaining machine was only a few meters away. It scanned me with its single eye and adjusted its stance.

‘Thwip! thwip! thwip!’

This time I was faster, diving ahead and rolling right in front of it. The shock projectiles flew overhead. I brought my weapon up again and depressed the trigger at almost point blank range.

At the same moment, the drone fired again. This time however, its salvo was cut short by the damage done by my submachine gun.

A sharp jolt of pain in my left foreleg signalled that a single flechette hit its mark. I looked at the blue glowing tip and quickly pulled it out. That gave the drone an opening - it swiped one of its long legs and hit me square in the muzzle.

I can hear my nose cracking.

The force of the swing spun me fully in place and made me drop my gun.

I was not sure how I managed to stay upright. But I wasn’t going to waste it. With the flechette still in my left hoof, I threw myself at the machine. It was preparing to swing at me again, but I was swifter.

We crashed together. I stabbed the projectile into the robot’s front, but before I could withdraw, the glow at its tip became constant.

Lightning.

Lightning inside my foreleg.

Crawling slowly, deep under my flesh.

Higher and higher, to the shoulder.

My foreleg bends as all the muscles tighten.

Along my neck.

I feel a vice grip my windpipe.

It hurts.

I felt it reach my face.

My eyes bulge - I feel like they are going to fall out.

It hurts so much.

I can feel the darkness suffocating me.

No. Don’t give up. They are counting on you.

NO.

I snapped my eyes open, feeling like I just woken up from a nightmare. My head was pounding and I could feel the blood from my nose making its way down my face, neck and under my armour. I could barely stand.

Before me, the three legged drone lay on the ground. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Just in time to see it stir and start getting up. Its singular eye sharply turned through ninety degrees to face me.

I let out a painful whimper. Then, I screwed my eyes shut and roared.

I ran straight at it.

It didn’t have the time to stand up properly; my body slammed into it. I used my stronger right foreleg to punch and batter the singular eye as the drone desperately tried using its frail griffish hands to grasp at me. The machine was trying to steady itself but it was for naught with my full body weight constantly pushing it back.

Finally we stopped. I took a step backwards, crouched down and swiped my hindleg low, clipping two of the robot’s articulated legs. It wobbled like a spinning top.

Before it could regain its footing I stood up and threw my hoof square at its eye, finally shattering it with a crack.

The machine leaned back from the force of the impact. That was enough to send it over the edge. It tried to balance, but it was too late.

No programming could beat physics.

I stood there, breathing heavily. Only the sound of running engines and the rush of the wind could be heard. Just a few moments more and all of this would be over. I’d drop off the VIP, debrief and then crawl into nice comfortable bed aboard-

“Paladin, you okay down there?” Emperor’s voice brought me back to reality.

I moved my left foreleg. The muscles were still taut, so I had no choice but to keep it close to my body and walk to the dropship on three legs. “Perimeter clear, let’s get out of here.”

“Roger, get on board and it will get you to orbit. We’ll pick you up in twenty minutes. Emperor out.”

I slowly made my way to the awaiting dropship, the door on its side was still open. Inside I could see the zebra. He was sitting calmly on one of the folding seats, eyes closed. For someone currently being kidnapped, he was suspiciously stoic. Or maybe he knew there was nothing he could do. Smart guy.

As soon as I climbed in and secured the door, I fastened the stallion’s seatbelts before sitting down and doing the same for myself. Once that was done, I tapped the green button on the console nearby. The muffled whine of the engines intensified as I felt the dropship take off.

After the console informed me that we were underway did I lean my head against the headrest and let out an exhausted moan. As I slacked my muscles and began to relax, I could not help myself from thinking about what happened.

Who sent those drones? Who BUILT those drones? How did they know I was here? Why did they want the zebra? Did they really want the zebra? Or did they want me?

I had no answers. Probably for the best - it looked like something way above my paygrade.

I decided not to dwell on it and attempted to rest as much as possible. I’d have to request at least a month off after this mission. Two if I also wanted to get my head back together.

Just as I felt my eyes slowly closing on their own, the dropship’s lights turned from white to red. An alarm shrieked. Before I could gather what was happening the cabin turned pitch black and quiet.

No console. No lights.

No engines.

Immediately I was fully alert, my body summoning last reserves of adrenaline.

“Emperor come in! The dropship lost power!”

“Paladin, verify. All green on our end.”

“We are going down! No damage! It just… turned off! I have no te-”

I screamed and threw my head as the small receiver in my ear burst into deafening static. Quickly I pulled it out and turned it off. Then, I heard the groaning of the dropship’s hull. Without power its flight characteristics were on par with a dead swallow.

And just like a dead swallow, it fell to the ground. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the blood rushing into my head from the negative G force affecting my body.

There was nothing I could do.

Blindly I checked if my seatbelt was properly secured. I looked where the zebra should have been, but in the windowless inside of the dark dropship I couldn’t see a thing. I wasn’t sure if he was there; no sound was coming from the old stallion.

Just as I was about to yell out to him, the dropship shuddered. I could hear something scraping on the other side of the hull. But we weren’t done falling. A few more hits like that, and then a humongous crash followed by a white hot spike of pain drilling into my flank mercilessly.

Then, darkness.

...

How long was I out? I couldn’t tell, but mercifully I started feeling my pounding head again.

I opened my eyes slowly.

I saw a large blue rectangle with white clusters of fluff.

Sky.

I was looking at the sky through the ripped out door. Outside I could hear the noise of a busy street. My head was pounding. I couldn’t focus on the clouds above nor the noise outside. I decided not to.

Looking to the side I spotted the zebra. He was still in his seat, fastened and secure, lying nearly motionless with his eyes closed. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest suggested that he'd survived the crash. I tried yelling at him, but that only made me realize my ears were still ringing as I couldn’t hear my own voice. At least that was what it felt like.

There was also the matter of dull pain in my right upper hindleg.

Not being able to do much from there, I unfastened my seatbelts and crawled out of the seat. What was left of the dropship was lying on its side, the only means of exit was the ripped door above. Once I made sure we were in no immediate danger I inspected myself for injuries.

Cuts and bruises, nothing serious. Then I stood up.

Bad idea.

I squealed in pain as my right hindleg settled on the ground. Quickly I moved it up, holding it close to my belly.

It was broken. I didn’t need a medibot to know that. It also meant I had to use my other wounded limb if I were to walk anywhere.

Gritting my teeth, I hobbled over to the zebra and leaned down. A tiny wound was visible on his left temple, the small amount of blood he lost staining the elder’s pure white robe.

I quickly checked for any other visible injuries or dangers - fortunately there were none. None I could have seen at least. Regardless, I got up and shuffled to the back of the transport cabin. A first aid kit was attached to the wall with a three point strap. I grabbed the plastic box and moved back to the stallion, then sat down carefully, still mindful of my own injury.

The kit was rudimentary at best; painkillers, antiseptics, bandages and so on. I singled out a few items and began to dress the zebra’s wound. He was still out and it didn’t look like he was waking up anytime soon.

“Please don’t be a brain hemorrhage.”

If it was, there was nothing I could do. We couldn’t just go to a hospital.

Once I was done with the zebra, I popped open a cap from another stimshot applicator and slapped the needled tip into the base of my neck. The device let out a quiet hiss of pressurized air and momentarily I felt the pain in my body numb. I tossed the applicator aside and began to secure my broken limb with bandages and elastic bands.

There was little time to be thorough. The crash surely drew attention - we couldn’t have cleared out of the metropolis in so little time. And I didn’t want the local officials to get close. With the upper half of my hindleg wrapped in elastic bands and splints I settled down again and pulled out my communicator, turned it back on and inserted it into my left ear.

“This is Paladin. Package is secured but the dropship has crashed. I need an immediate evac.”

Nothing.

“Emperor, are you there?”

Silence.

“Emperor. Paladin. Are you reading me?”

No one.

I hung my head and mouthed a curse. How could this have gone so wrong? Who was after me? This was not a quick reactionary play by the Caliphate. It was too precise, too well planned.

Biting my lip hard I looked up and pulled out my weapon, then checked the magazine.

Halfway. I had two more spare.

Whoever planned to ruin the mission would also have planned what to do once the dropship was brought down.

Carefully I unstrapped the unconscious zebra and threw his limp body over my back. Then, I started climbing out of the wreckage. It was no easy task with a broken hindleg, a shocked foreleg and an elderly scholar in tow. But thanks to the many handles inside the dropship and my regular workouts, we made it. It still took much longer than I liked.

Finally, I climbed out and onto the ruined dropship’s side. The craft had crashed into a deep artificial channel, about thirty meters across, now nearly empty. Only a lazy stream flowed at the bottom. It was fetid, most of the water’s surface was covered with junk and refuse, the rest was covered with thick mushy plant matter. At least I hoped it was plant matter.

It certainly did not smell like plants I was used to.

The vertical sides of the canal ended at the same height as my head, and I was standing on top of a small spaceship, wrecked in the middle of the structure. Additionally, an imposing wall extended above the right side of the channel, at least three stories tall. Further above it, rich highrise buildings, clearly the edges of a different, wealthier district. There was no way I could have gone over that.

A small crowd of zebra wearing simple clothes were gathered at the left edge of the canal; they were lively, talking and watching me and my wrecked spaceship. Some were taking photos or filming me with their hoofheld devices. None of them looked like they were eager to come closer.

From my perch on the fallen dropship I could see that behind them, was a narrow street running along the canal. Small utility trucks, smaller city cars and what looked like dozens, if not hundreds of mopeds; most of them running on antiquated internal combustion engines.

And all of them honking.

Whatever parts of the street were not filled with vehicles were filled with pedestrians. Dozens of zebra walking one way or another, carrying huge packages, stacks of fruit or tall clay jars. All on their heads, and all mares.

More often than not, the two areas intertwined. This it seemed, was the source of the constant honking.

Beyond the street, I could see small shanties haphazardly cobbled together from sheet metal, loose cinder blocks or other jigsaw construction materials. Even further, a scattering of low buildings. Dilapidated, dirty and looking as if they were about to collapse. Every structure was adorned with a multitude of old signs and advertisements, many of them hoofpainted, no doubt by the owners themselves.

We were in the slum district.

Balancing on the mangled hull of the dropship I stepped down into the fetlock deep water with my quarry on back, then made my way towards the wall and the shanties. Fortunately, the wall of the canal had steps cut into it allowing me to climb out relatively easily. That said, given the stallion’s weight, my wounds, the shining sun and the length of the stairs, I was sweating once I reached the top. After steadying my breath I looked up and froze.

The zebra from before were gone, dispersed into the flowing crowd nearby. Only three remained.

Two fillies and a colt.

The trio watched me with blank expressions. The oldest - a pre-teen at most - had a smoking cigarette stuck in the gap where her front teeth used to be. Her mane was a clogged mess; I suspected it had never been cleaned. The middle one - also a filly - was peeking out from behind the cigarette kid; I could see her closely clutching a decapitated head of a plastic doll. The colt, whose age gave an impression of a recent escapee from daycare, was dressed in an oversized hoodie bearing a washed out Imperial Sun crest.

I knew my stare had an effect on people. But the stares of these three?

It was…

I didn’t know.

I didn’t want to know.

But I instantly knew I would never forget it.

A loud shout somewhere off to the side grabbed mine and the foals’ attention. Another zebra ran over to us. This one was an adult, a mare, perhaps ten or fifteen years older than me. But then I couldn’t tell - she was too grubby-looking to make sure. Disheveled, just like the foals.

The mare shouted again, something I couldn’t understand, and something that made the three foals instantly bolt back to the adult and far away from me. As soon as they rejoined the adult zebra, she reached out her forehooves and held the trio close. Then gave me an accusatory stare and vanished with the kids back into the crowd on the other side of the street.

Only then I realized. Everyone was giving me a wide berth, which was no easy feat on such a busy street. It felt like I was the most alone person in a slum.

The Slum.

The zebra of the Caliphate and the rare, more adventurous individuals living abroad always had a very defined cultural identity. If two zebra living on the opposite ends of the Core met each other for the first time, the separation didn’t matter. The tribes had their shared customs, language and traditions long before they had spaceships. One of the most basic pillars of social life for a zebra was their tribal identity and blood ties. The tribe helped an individual as much as an individual helped the tribe.

That was, of course, unless a zebra was one of the Manaeat.

The Barred Ones.

The untouchables.

There was a slum like this in every major metropolis across the Caliphate. Filled with Manaeat, the zebra without a tribe. Outcasts mostly, for one reason or another.

Of course, there was also another way of becoming one.

Being born into it.

I quickly filtered out any further thoughts about it; this was not a place nor time to think about their misery. Of course, I had to go into that misery if I were to get out of there. The slums were not safe to outsiders, especially after nightfall. It felt more like a wild frontier than a city.

After a quick check of the unconscious stallion on my back I started moving into the narrow alleyways between the shacks. Finding a place to catch my breath and properly treat myself was my main goal now.

“Emperor, this is Paladin, do you read me?” No reply, but it was not impossible that only I was being jammed. “I am somewhere in the slum district, looks like north quarter. I am wounded and I have no means of extraction. I am going to look for someplace to stay low. Proceeding on hoof, over.” Briefly I worried that the message could be intercepted by whoever was chasing us, but then I decided that I had no other choice if we were to leave this place intact.

If any reply came, I couldn’t hear it over the constant noise of the street.

“Damnit.” I looked at the old stallion as we rounded a corner and proceeded deeper into the shantytown. “You better wake up soon or we will both suffer for it.”

He was as talkative as my communicator.

I had no choice but to look forward and walk in silence.

The ‘streets’ here were nothing more than narrow, uneven asphalt pathways allowing pedestrian traffic between the shanties; none of that stopped anyone from driving their mopeds through though. Nothing in this part of town was regulated, supervised or maintained in any official capacity, and it showed.

Most of the shacks were made from bleak cinder blocks - bare, save for an occasional piece of spray painted graffiti or street art. The buildings were stacked on top of one another without rhyme or reason, which made it obvious how frequently they were built, rebuilt and modified. It wasn’t uncommon to see a structure where the first floor was made out of blocks with each following floor being constructed from a different material. Many of them lacked doors and windows, and instead used tarps, old pieces of furniture or plastic covering to block my sight.

If the buildings were a mish mash of random crossed with accidental, another thing was nearly universal. As I limped along the street everyone was watching me. Wherever I went, conversations died. Vendors protectively covered their wares displayed on simple pieces of clothing laid out on the ground. Street craftsmen stopped their ancient noisy machines and tools, and watched me from under furrowed eyebrows. Oncoming passers-by swerved to the other side of the street just to not get too close to me. Mares, stallions, colts and fillies watched from many windows above the street.

All stares were on me.

All stares were fearful.

No one dared to approach me.

I was growing increasingly concerned as more and more zebra began taking notice. A block later I noticed a small mob had started to follow me.

I was a stranger there, but this place should not have been like that. Indifferent, yes. But not openly hostile.

“Why?”

It didn’t matter - what mattered was that I had to deal with it. And fast. As soon as I spotted a thin alleyway I turned into it and started hobbling faster. It was barely wide enough to allow two ponies walking side by side. I could see and hear doors slamming as I walked past them, the curious onlookers frightened by my proximity. Only a scant few kept them open, but just enough to only peek at the pony with one eye covered in shadows.

The alleyway was so narrow that the buildings above blocked sunlight, but I could clearly see sunshine at the end. With a quick glance I confirmed that I was still being followed. At least six young stallions. All holding gas-pipes, knives or other brutally simple weapons.

Two and a half mags.

How many of them were out there?

I winced painfully as I began to trot. My shocked foreleg was barely usable. The pain followed like hot burning wire deep in my tissue all the way to my clavicle.

Grinding my teeth, I pushed on.

Finally, I reached the end of the alleyway. Upon exiting the narrow path I was nearly blinded by the sun. As soon as I regained my sight I saw a zebra holding a metal chain standing in front of me. She was shorter than me, but well built, a black ornamental eyepatch covered her left eye. Her neck was adorned with ornate metal rings and she was wearing a spotless bright orange robe with golden filigree. Not unlike the robe of the zebra on my back.

At the other end of the chain was a snarling creature roughly the size of a large dog. It looked like a dog too, but something was off. I couldn’t really settle on what exactly. It’s brown-gray coat had distinctive black spots all over the creatures body. Its jaws looked like they could bite through my bones with ease.

I could have sworn it laughed as it sniffed the air towards me.

The zebra was standing in the middle of a rectangular yard, surrounded on all sides by tall dirty buildings. Corroded rainspouts adorned the walls. Above I could see tiny barred balconies around every wall, and beyond, a depressingly small rectangle of blue sky. All the doors on the ground level appeared closed tight.

There was no way out.

I grabbed my weapon and brought it up, aiming at the mare. The chained creature snarled.

“Fire that gun and your spirit will wander these streets forever, looking for the pieces of your vessel.” She didn’t bat an eye as she serenely spoke in heavily accented equestrian. Her eye was locked with mine.

I glanced over my shoulder at my pursuers. They were standing at the end of the alleyway I just left, weapons ready.

“Let me leave in peace, I am not here by choice.” I indicated the big double doors behind her with the barrel of my weapon.

“That is why your foregoers guided me here.” She pointed a hoof at the armed thugs. “They do not want him around and will do anything to get the rot out of here swiftly.”

I looked at the stallions, then at the unconscious elder on my back. “Then tell them that I want to leave. I need to get out of the city.”

The mare lightly tugged on the chain, making the creature pant and retreat to its mistress. “They won’t help you, they will not help anyone who deals with the Shayatin.” She pointed a hoof at the stallion on my back. “And he does. They think you and your friend will doom the souls of everyone in here.” The mare paused, looked at the creature and said a single word in a language I could not understand. The furred beast obediently sat down and let out a monstrous yawn, giving me a full view of its bone crushing jaws.

“The cleverest out of you and me is I. For I am the one with the evil eye. Your soul is pure.” She chuckled and nodded at my raised submachine gun. “At least when it comes to demonic possession.”

The mare took a few steps forward and her bestial companion closely followed. She smiled and extended a bracelet covered foreleg towards me. “I will-”

Her words were drowned out by a sudden crash of wood and metal. I saw it clearly.

The double doors on the other side of the yard were pulverized.

Between the pieces of shattered wood and other debris I could see a frightening sight. Dozens of segmented metal limbs, flailing around, breaking through what was left of the door.

“GET DOWN!” Mercifully, the zebra and her companion dashed out of the line of fire, giving me a clean shot. I let out a long burst, but it had no effect on the machine.

It strode into the yard on its many arms, each of them making a loud clunk as it anchored itself in the ground or nearby walls. The thin appendages were attached to a rotund torso, roughly as wide as two ponies. In the middle of it hung what I could only describe as a face of a mechanical arachnid, with groupings of optical sensors of various shapes and sizes. They scanned the immediate area.

I wasn’t going to stay and find out what it wanted.

Running shoulder first into the narrowest door I could spot, I broke the weak lock and we tumbled into a dark building. I landed on my back on the old tiles, staring at a winding staircase leading upwards. Doing my best to ignore the brief pain in my third limb now, I got up and turned around to where the stallion was lying in a heap; he was still unconscious. As I moved again to pick him up, I noticed one of the metal tentacles reaching in through the narrow entryway, snaking its way towards one of elder’s hindlegs.

I pulled on the strap of my SMG, brought the weapon to my eye and fired what I had remaining in the magazine. What bullets hit seemed to make the machine reconsider as the tentacle retreated hastily.

I wasn’t about to waste time either. Picking the stallion up I started to make way to the staircase and upwards. Once I set a hoof on the first step, the sound of shattering glass and wood rang from above. Pieces of skylight dropped next to me with a crash as I saw another octopus-like machine enter at the top of the staircase.

Its many eyes glowed crimson as they locked on me. Its tentacles expertly anchored the robot in the walls and the staircase’s structure, making it hang three floors directly above me. For a second it looked as it was going to jump down on me. I slapped in my penultimate magazine and aimed up, steadied my racing breath and depressed the trigger.

The octopus instantly swerved to the side, hugging the wall and using the banister as cover as I kept firing short bursts at it. It moved faster than I could have tracked it. Plaster on the wall bulged and ripped, wooden stairs broke and splintered, the banister’s metal rods bent and warped as its tentacles propelled the technological horror in a downwards spiral towards me.

I turned around only to see another set of tentacles reach in through the door which I had entered through. Dumping the remaining bullets at it, I frantically looked for a way out.

The stairs lead below the ground level, to the cellar.

There was no time to look for alternatives. I had to hope that the doorframe would be too narrow for the robots and hobbled inside.

Into the darkness.

With a flick of a switch I turned on the flashlight mounted on my weapon and descended down the stairs. I could hear the thrashing of the machines behind me, their long manipulators not stretching down the basement entrance far enough to reach the zebra on my back; we were too deep already. The robots couldn’t fit.

The cellar was pitch black, cold and damp. It was sizeable enough to allow a couple branching corridors leading deeper into the structure. The shine of my light revealed rows upon rows of open storage units. Most of them were empty, while those that weren't held mostly junk. Anything from rusting machine parts, through stacks of rotting furniture to plain trash.

I picked a direction at random and began walking carefully, weapon to my shoulder. Once I rounded a corner I could no longer hear the robots above. This dark place was nearly silent, only my own hoofsteps and the squeaking of rats rummaging through the abandoned items could be heard. I had to find a way out; put distance between me and whatever those mechanical freaks were.

What were they? Who sent them?

I let out a quiet curse as my left foreleg reminded me of the previous adversaries I'd faced on this mission.

Were they sent by the same people?

I didn’t know.

I really don’t know.

I tried my communicator again. “Emperor, if you are listening. I need help urgently. I am being hunted. I am in the slum, in a...” I stopped, lowered my weapon and let out a pained moan, my voice cracked in the middle of it as I shuddered.

“A dark place. It’s full of… things.”

I turned the SMG and shone its flashlight at the knocked out zebra. No change.

“I don’t know if I can take it any longer. Paladin out.”

He was heavy, my lungs burned, my head was pounding and my two healthy legs were nearly buckling from the strain.

I need rest. Please.

There was a storage unit right beside me - a couple plastic bags filled with trash were visible thanks to my flashlight. I limped over there and lowered the stallion onto the pile. I needed a way to move freely to locate an exit that was hopefully not guarded by the robots. Sliding my last remaining magazine into the gun I closed the door to the storage. There was no padlock or other means of securing it, but I didn't have much of a choice.

The doors were marked with bold digits.

Site One.

I took a mental note of the number and began looking for a way out.

The dry air of the cellar irritated my nostrils as I carefully limped along the hallway. More storage units and no sign of exit. This place was a maze.

Turn after turn, I found nothing to give me direction. Looking up and down, I spotted piping attached to the ceiling. It had to lead somewhere. At the very least, it was something. With every step, my left foreleg ached more and more. Electric aftershocks ran along my nerves, from the tip of my hoof all the way to my neck.

It wasn’t as bad as it was before.

Well, it was.

I’d just stopped caring anymore.

I didn’t care much about anything by now.

Except the mission.

Emperor would get that stripe and give him to the nerds at Silent Bo’s Institute to do Princess knows what.

I frowned and scolded myself mentally. Focus. Keep alert. It was getting dark; what little light entered the cellar through the tiny ground level windows was fading rapidly. There had to be another exit.

I had to make best use of the still available daylight. My movement became more rapid - as much as my body hated me for it. I had to push. I had to pull myself together. I had to keep on holding on.

Room after room, corridor after corridor.

Trash.

Dead ends.

Nothing.

A deep corner of my brain was starting to think that I was lost in an impossible maze; imagined days passing by. Infinite gray concrete corridors for hours, filled with nothing but trash and darkness. It felt colder than the vacuum of space.

Then, suddenly, a sound of scraping metal nearby.

Instantly I turned to the side and aimed the shotgun at the source. The flashlight revealed a slowly rolling can and a sickly black rat, rummaging through the trash. I let out my breath and furrowed my eyebrows at the scavenging rodent.

A miniscule piece of plaster dropped from above and bounced off my muzzle.

I drew my eyes upwards, only to spot a dozen red dots appearing in the darkness on the ceiling.

My brain told me to raise the gun and shoot, but my reflex forced my body to throw myself to the side. Just in time to avoid being struck by a metal tentacle. I rolled to my back and fired a long burst.

The rifle’s noise was deafening in the tight confines of the cellar.

I didn’t have the time to see if the bullets did any damage. Getting out of this place was more important. Seeing as I was not skewered by a robotic limb, I thought it was safe to say that my attack gave the drone pause.

I ran.

I ran as fast I could have with one broken limb and another battered. There was no sign of pursuit as I retraced my steps.

Turn after turn, corridor after corridor. Everywhere I turned, the cellar looked the same. It was a labyrinth.

Then, I could hear it. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The cellar’s corridors and bare walls reflected and distorted the noise too much. A clunking of metal on concrete. Faster and faster.

They were coming for me.

Faster, I had to move faster. Get the zebra. Drive them off.

Somehow.

More turns, more corridors, more darkness and the all-present noise of the machines chasing me. Every now and again I looked behind me as I turned a corner. Nothing.

They were too smart to go after me directly.

Move.

My foreleg was already numb. The muscles of my hindleg ached from constantly having to keep it off the ground.

Quickly.

My breath was running out. The throbbing pulse in my head was pounding.

Get out of here.

My heart was racing. The clunking noise was ever present. They were relentless, and they were coming for me.

Get out of here now.

Another turn, I almost fell as I ground to a halt. There it was.

Site One.

I reached for the handle.

Only for the door to buckle and bend. Then, with a screech of rusted hinges giving way, it flew straight at me.

The wood hit me hard, knocking me down on the floor. Before I could get my bearing and stand up, I heard the noise of a robotic appendage reaching out and grabbing what was left of the door. Then it pushed on the debris, pinning me down.

I failed to choke down a desperate scream as my limbs flared in pain.

Through teary eyes, I saw the unconscious zebra’s white robes flow as he was raised by a metal tentacle, its claw holding him by the neck. It lifted the stallion through the door, and behind him an oblong shape with red glowing eyes followed, its other tentacles anchoring into surfaces all around and pulling itself toward me.

The machine hoisted the stallion all the way up to the ceiling, then moved its torso under the zebra. A jawlike apparatus I previously hadn't seen extended from below what could be described as the robot’s face.

With a snap the jaw split and widened, to easily thrice its previous size. I saw a semi-transparent skin like membrane between the jaws. The machine threw its head upwards, then lowered the stallion down into the jaws. As soon as the victim touched the membrane, it started expanding. More and more as the body was shuffled inside the macabre sack, then it started filling with liquid.

Barely half a minute later, entire stallion was inside a bulbous container. Full of liquid, and with a hapless zebra inside, the machine now looked like a honeypot ant. It slowly turned and stared at me with its multitude of eyes.

Run.

I couldn’t. The mission.

Those things will hurt you.

I was in no shape to move, no shape to resist.

Do you understand?

I screwed my eyes shut. I felt the tentacle grab my foreleg and make its way along it, then it started coiling around my chest. Then it squeezed. I could feel my ribs grind on each other.

I whimpered.

The grip loosened. I felt myself being brought up - my limbs dangled freely as the robot held me high.

I dared to open my eyes.

A smudged sight full of red lights greeted me. Only after I blinked the tears away I saw that they were cameras and other optics of all sizes arranged in a pattern at the front of the robot’s body. The machine held me merely a hoof’s reach away.

I watched helplessly as the lenses on the cameras turned and hissed, scanning me closely.

This… this was the end.

The eyes turned green.

Emerald green.

Then they started to move, no, flow; swirling and joining together. I could see irises forming. Until there were only two left.

Finally, two slitted pupils appeared.

I could feel their gaze drilling into my thoughts.

“Now Agent Whisper Step. Relax and let’s try it again, shall we?”

*****

Darkness. Only the soft orange glow of my HUD stood out from the blackness of the cosmos beyond the tinted glass.

I carefully watched the AR path displayed on my helmet’s visor and followed it with gentle moves of the throttle and the joystick.

“Three hundred meters.” The synthetic voice confirmed what my HUD was showing.

I reached over to the side console and flipped a switch.

“Silent running.” The hum behind me eased as the ships systems powered down. Only drives, short range sensors and life support were left online.

I watched the speed indicator drop slowly as I eased on the throttle. My target quickly filled the canopy. An unassuming old freighter. Easily a hundred meters wide and twice as long. I locked the throttle on neutral and let the momentum carry my ship forward. According to the blueprints on the monitor, the service access was right ahead. Last quick visual check and I was ready to go. “Regulus, Initialize EVA procedure.”

“Initializing EVA procedure.” The ship’s voice was quick to reply. Slowly, the hum of the reactor eased as atmosphere was pumped out of the cockpit. Soon, all I could hear was my own breathing through my personal life support system. As it was happening, I was eyeballing the access hatch; a small rectangular door marked with a dim light right above me.

With a quick flick of my wrist I fired the retro thrusters and the Regulus came to a halt.

“Cockpit atmosphere expunged. Ready to initiate EVA.”

I took a deep breath of the recycled air. “Regulus, initiate EVA.”

The tinted canopy soundlessly slid up and behind, exposing me to open vacuum. I unbuckled my belt, grabbed a bag containing my gear and stood up from the pilot’s seat. As soon as my upper half cleared the cockpit I grabbed the side of the canopy and gently pushed myself out of my ship. The freighter’s hull was about ten meters away. That gave me enough time to tap a button on my suit’s multiband and initiate my magnetic horseshoes.

Once that was done, I carefully turned myself around, legs first toward the freighter.

One.

Two.

Three.

My legs snapped to the metal hull. Almost on target too. Not bad at all. Three silent steps forward and one to the side and I was looking at the access hatch. The lock was simple enough. I just had to plug my hacking device into the control panel and it would do the rest. Carefully I pulled it out from the bag and reached to plug it in.

The hatch opened.

A wave of violently escaping atmosphere and debris blew the device out off my hooves, some of it bouncing off my visor with a loud audible tinkling noise.

Not debris.

Pills.

Before I gathered what was happening, a shining metal tentacle reached out from the freighter. It grabbed me by the neck and pulled, overcoming my magnets. Then, with a swift motion it ripped me off the hull and held me away from the ship. I watched as the rest of the creature crawled out of the now open corridor. Yellow spinning alarm lights blaring a depressurization warning.

The tentacle was one of many attached to a young buck. No, not attached. They were coming out of his torso through numerous holes ruptured in his nearly white coat and tissue. The buck was not wearing any protective gear. His body just dangled, suspended on the macabre limbs.

I struggled, but the mechanical claw’s grip only intensified. It started to choke me.

Despite being exposed to hard vacuum and having many robotic tentacles bursting out of his torso, the deer appeared fine. That was until I looked at his face.

The buck’s emerald green eyes were bulging out, almost as if they were going to fall out at any moment. His nose was covered in long-dried blood. His blue tongue was out and his mouth was covered in foam. A long, red, semi transparent ribbon was tangled around his antlers, flowing freely in zero g.

I watched with horror as the buck opened his mouth and began to speak.

Even through the vacuum, I could hear the voice.

As if it were echoing out inside my skull.

“Reaching vision. Everywhere. You will die.”

The mechanical tentacle on my neck eased off.

And then pushed me away.

“NO!”

I yelled and flailed haplessly as my body began drifting away from the creature, the freighter and the Regulus.

There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

Faster and faster, the monster, the freighter and the Regulus were growing more and more distant. I quickly looked for my bag containing my pneumatic anchor launcher. It was my last hope.

The bag was nowhere to be found. I hadn't even registered when it had went loose.

“No…”

I threw my head up in panic towards the monster again. It was already gone. So was the freighter and the Regulus.

It was just me and the distant stars. I was alone.

Then the stars started to go dark.

One.

By one.

I began spinning wildly, looking around. Distant nebulae and constellations, dimming and vanishing. Everywhere the space around me was quickly becoming solid blackness. There was no point of reference left.

Finally, the last remaining source of light gave out.

My helmet’s HUD.

Solid, infinite darkness.

Was this how dying felt? A dark void? There were so many things left to do, so many things left to say. I thought of the Agency. My friends. My family.

I’d do anything to spend one last moment with them.

“Anything?”

The voice pierced through my brain. Through my soul. As if it was always there, a piece of me.

I opened my mouth to reply but I found it full of liquid. Water.

My helmet was filling with water. Panicking, I grabbed it firmly with my forelegs and undid the seal, then ripped the helmet off.

Deadened noise became a roaring crash, and a wave struck me in the face.

I was swimming with my head poking out of the liquid. I could feel the resistance as I frantically paddled with my legs, but I could barely keep my muzzle above the surface. It was still dark, I couldn’t see anything. But at least I had a point of reference. If there was water, that meant there was a surface and a bottom.

I aimed to keep as far away as possible from the latter.

It was a struggle - the surface was not calm. Every time I managed to get my head above it, another wave splashed over and brought me down again, even if just momentarily. I had enough strength to keep my muzzle and my eyes above the surface, but with each wave it was becoming harder and harder.

Another wave.

My chest was pounding.

Another wave.

My muscles were aching from the strain.

Another wave.

My head was spinning.

Another wave.

There was no surface to breach.

I pushed and pushed, but I couldn’t reach the surface again. I reached a hoof before me. Maybe.

Somehow.

Please.

Someone grabbed it. Then squeezed and pulled me up.

I breached the surface and immediately started coughing up water. My lungs burned. It was still dark. The only reason I was afloat was because of what was holding me. I could feel it through my suit, it was someone’s foreleg. Despite the darkness I looked up. Two glowing, emerald slitted eyes peered straight at me.

“What do you know about Snowdrop?”

It was the same voice from before.

I choked and forced myself to speak through the pain. “I don’t know... what you are talking... about!”

“Wrong answer.”

The foreleg let go. I went back under instantly.

Again I tried swimming upwards, to the surface. Maybe if I told the voice something, this would end?

My hooves hit a wall.

There was no surface here.

I somehow managed to not cry out and lose valuable air. I must have gotten disoriented and reached the bottom. Instead, I turned, planted my hindlegs on the wall and pushed myself off it. Then I swam in the opposite direction.

A few strokes later and my hooves hit a wall again.

No.

My chest was on fire. Again I turned and pushed myself off the wall. I extended my forelegs to start the first stroke, and they hit a wall.

I reached to the right.

A wall.

Left.

Wall.

Up.

WALL.

Down.

WALL.

It’s a cube.

It’s a cube. With no way out.

With me inside.

Alone.

No...

No more.

I am done.

I give up.

I relaxed my limbs, there was no sense in trying anymore.

I opened my muzzle. The water rushed inside. It burned, but quickly stopped.

I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

The darkness enveloped me.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Light.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

A female voice.

"...Whisper?"

How Do I...

Author's Note

This was a short slice of life one I wrote after a couple sessions in the ongoing tabletop game. The story has advanced a fair bit since the last one by now, with a new major NPC entering the fray (People who keep up with the session summaries will recognise her!) and another being back with us.

This is nothing more than a little comedy based on the recent events, the humour being...a little more "teen rated" than normal in just this one. It felt fitting when it came to the subject matter given some of the jokes in game (such as Tami being anonymously 'gifted' a bit of chocolate shaped like...well, something very naughty indeed. Many laughs were had).

So relax a little after some of the stresses lately, and enjoy the ramblings of a young hippogriff encountering dodgy chocolate gifts, unusual help, and a healthy dose of young crushes.

How Do I...

After tremendous events, stressful encounters and narrow escapes, Claudia's crew finally managed to find something of a downtime to get to relax, recover and get to know their newest crew member. Freed from Sidewinder's clutches in a magical experimentation lab, "Specimen Eleven", a prodigy of magical strength and yet unknowing of the world outside her scientific prison, now resided with them aboard their ship. At least, that was the plan, until such a time as they could locate her original home, or family, or even just a way to keep her safe.

Yet soon, they all found themselves an invite waiting for them. One that stemmed from the Marid star system, within only two jumps of their current location. One addressed from one Duke Midnight Haze, a stallion and young noble that Tami had been getting a little closer to in the recent months.

Naturally, Hair Trigger wasted no time in making that their next destination, much to the sudden and embarrassed fright of a certain hippogriff...

How Do I...?

* * *

Carefully now…

Carefully...

Tami knew every inch of Claudia's bridge by now. Every rivet. Every weld. Every panel and wire and socket. She knew their time until maintenance, before she had to go bashfully ask Kerfuffle to come fix something. She knew the warm spots, and the exact line on the deck beyond which the half hour diagnostic chime became too loud to sleep with.

But right now? Now, she was using her knowledge of the deck panels and bulkheads to know which ones would flex and make a slight sound when someone else on the ship opened or closed a door. She had studied this extensively by now, and at this point knew exactly which sound meant which door was opening.

With her face tense and her heart thumping she moved one step at a time, working out the route in her head. She crossed to the door and peered out into the main street.

Nothing. No-one.

At the end, she could see the engineering bay door sitting open, the reactor core visible even from this end of the ship.

Nothing. No-one.

Leaning out, she peeked down the stairs into the common area.

Nothing. No-one.

Bringing up her multiband, she keyed into the crew's current activity on the ship's internal network. Admin level access was useful at a time like this.

The other three crew members were in their own rooms, active on their terminals. The two guest accounts with them were much the same. No-one could exit a room and walk up the stairs without her knowing.

Slowly, she let out her breath and eased the bridge door shut. She moved back to the pilot's chair, heart in her mouth. Her nerves were growing tense again, and her muscles felt like they were making miniature cramps all over her body. Not anxiety; it didn't have the sickly growl in her stomach for that. No, this was simple, raw apprehension.

Tami almost got to her chair before she scampered back again, looking around a third time. Everyone in their rooms. All main compartments deserted. Then for the third time, she came back to the chair and settled into it. Leaning down, she picked up an elaborate box bound by a ribbon. Gulping deeply, she looked behind herself and listened.

Nothing.

Slowly, she let out her held breath, and with shaking claws opened the originally unasked for package in her lap. She had her suspicions who gave her it, but didn’t know for sure. Pushing aside the unnamed gift tag, she unfolded the top.

The aroma hit her the moment she did. Rich, sweet, and smooth. It promised the most delicious, the most exquisite taste. The perfect, chilled brittleness, with the more velvety gentle centre made her sigh, and she felt a tingle run under her skin down her back.

A cocoa-based treat made fit for a princess.

That is, it would be, had this upper crust brand of chocolate not been shaped like it was.

Tami could feel her cheeks turning burning red the moment she lifted it from the box and the treat's shape and 'form' became clear. She held it in claw tips and sucked her bottom lip, this masterpiece of a snickering chocolatier letting its own tip point back at her.

Of all the shapes, it had to be this?

And why did white chocolate have to be her favourite?

Trembling, she gulped and quickly turned her head to the closed door again, listening. Nothing.

Retracting her head, making a gentle squeak in her throat, she started to raise it. Swallowing tightly, she licked and opened her trembling lips while trying not to look at it. Her shoulders hunched and she leaned forward, the end of the treat wobbling, until her teeth held it between top and bottom, and she gingerly began to bite dow-

The sound of the door closing behind her slammed through the bridge.

“Starting with the teeth? Oh Tam, you and I have got to have a little mare-to-mare chat about technique one of these days.”

Tami squealed, her hands blurring in a frantic motion of luxury chocolate item repackaging. She spun in the chair to see her captain smugly trotting over toward her, a freshly steaming mug of coffee held in her magic.

Stuffing the covered box down below her pilot’s display panel, a furiously red faced Tami scrambled to reassert her position at the helm. Babbling madly, she turned right and then left again to find Hair Trigger had moved to the central panel, leaning on it with raised, knowing eyebrows.

Tami gulped. “Captain! I...I-you scared me! It's...wait, wait! I didn't hear you coming upstairs and, hang on a sec and-”

The scruffy unicorn leaned a foreleg on the centre console, rested her cheek against it, and gave her a wink. Then, she glanced at the box below the pilot's legs.

“I wouldn't be a very good captain if I didn't know when a crew member needed some help now, would I? Practising for when we arrive at Marid?”

Hair Trigger gave a wide, eager grin, and Tami simply groaned in response, slumping in the pilot's chair, hiding her burning face behind her clenching hands. “Caaaaptaaaain...”

Said captain only took a loud sip of her coffee, and then chuckled to herself. Reaching over, she gave the hippogriff a firm pat on the shoulder before getting up to move to her own chair. “You do know the longer you put off just eating that thing rather than trying to make it quietly disappear, the more amusing it gets, right?”

“Urgh...” Tami just groaned in response, hands sliding down her face to drop heavily on her thighs with a soft, dejected clap. She stared at the ceiling, eyes sliding over to the side. “How did you even get up here so quietly anyway?”

Her captain didn't even pause from wiping a hoof over her console's touchscreen to bring up the pilot logs and nav-data. “Captain's instincts, I guess. I have to know these things. How long till we arrive?”

Tami screwed up her face, her rounded cheeks squeezing out as her eyelids shrunk down at the evasion of the question. Sighing, her heart finally starting to slow down, she looked back at her own screen and unlocked it. The bountifully smiling golden retriever wallpaper slid away to let her active bridge apps pop up.

Along with one word document. One she sharply drew in air at seeing, and hurriedly tried to minimise. Unfortunately, 'Captain's Instincts' were a thing of bleeding edge beauty in their ability to sense and act.

“'Ways to make it go well'?” Trigger momentarily peered over and read the title aloud. She waggled her eyebrows. “Looks like an empty list. Sure you weren't getting in a warm up to figure out what to add? Maybe a top ten? What of? Need any suggestions? I got safe, uncommon, adventurous...”

“Agh! Captain! No! It-” Tami exasperatedly groaned, haphazardly opening the wrong display for antenna control instead of the nav-unit readout with her jumping hands. “It's not that! It's just...uh...for ideas on how to approach this! And him! Because I've never been in this situation where I'm going to him first! So I was trying to write down what I'm supposed to remember and do because, really, I want it to be memorable. And make sure he enjoys it too rather than always taking care of me worrying.”

Hair Trigger heard her out and then softly nodded, putting down her coffee. Slowly, she got up and walked around the chairs, coming to behind Tami's, and laid both her hooves on her pilot's shoulders, each of them slowly pushing over onto Tami's upper arms.

“Well then, Tam...”

Tami blinked, and looked up at the unicorn's broad smile and bright eyes. Trigger's voice was low as she tilted her head around the back of the chair.

“...if it's 'advice' on making it 'memorable' for him you want?”

Tami made a strangled sound and frantically twisted in her seat.

“Oh-look-at-that-I-have-to-meet-Kiffie-sorry!”

She dropped down, scrambled off her chair and near-ran past the smirking form of Hair Trigger, spreading her wings to rapidly evacuate the bridge. As she hurried into the main street, she heard the voice calling out playfully behind her.

“You can always come to me, Tam!”

Hair Trigger laughed quietly and leaned on the pilot's chair. Watching the blushing hippogriff frantically flapping away, she floated her mug over to take another deep drink.

“I'll be waiting.”

* * *

“-and because I've met him before it makes this feel even weirder! The first time we just stumbled on each other, and the second time he never knew! So this is like th-the first time, intentionally! And it makes it feel so awkward and like I suddenly feel lost because I dunno what this place is like, or who'll be there, or what it is he is expecting! Or-”

Tammani continued her now approaching six minute ramble, her hands actively animating her every worry as much as a Zebrahan street-circus mime, as she lay on her back atop the reactor core in Claudia's engineering section.

If the big griffon working on the hydraulic fluid reservoir tank's outlet valve below her minded the incessant, high pitched, often repeating and occasionally unintelligible narration over his shift, he didn't give any indication of it. In fact, Kerfuffle had quietly swapped from the power tool that would achieve this job in twenty seconds for the hand-crank that would take over twenty minutes precisely so he didn't drown her out.

“-and even Vebs tried to give me the same talk that I know is right but that just made me wonder if I can even do that correctly, because I never have like this and-urgh...”

Exhausted, she lay down, and fell draped on her back over the thick frame holding the blinking core of their hyperdrive upright, her head hanging off the edge upside down to look at Kerfuffle.

The calico griffon patiently moved the crank to the next slot on the valve and gave it a sudden, strong ratchet around. Content it was at minimum safe tightness now, he paused and looked upward at the young pilot strewn over Claudia's core-frame.

“That's a whole lotta' worries there, Miss.” His voice was gentle as he scratched the side of his head, claws disappearing under a layer of feathers. “'Fraid I don't rightly got a lot of, er, knowledge on all that. But Mister Haze seemed a nice sort. I'm sure he'd hear you out if you're worried about it. Jus' gotta 'splain it all to him the way you did me, then he'll know how you feel.”

The sheer, innocent simplicity of it actually made Tami laugh. The tired, chest convulsing laugh of someone who clearly wished that could just be it. “I wish it were that easy...”

Kerfuffle sat down beside the core and scratched the other side of his head. “Why's it not? Mama always said that communication was the best skill of them all when it comes to meeting others. S'why Papa always knew when it was his turn to clean the hab-unit after bringing some work home with him.”

Tami looked down, seeing the honest smile on his face at offering the example of a happily married couple. She wanted to sigh, knowing it wasn't relevant, but looking at that face she just -well- couldn't. Instead she turned and hopped cleanly off the core. Seconds later, as expected, she felt strong arms and soft feathers catch her without much announcement and safely deposit her on the deck. Walking across its anti-slip metal covering, feeling the mesh panels above miles of wires and piping flex gently below her, she turned and looked up at the big engineer.

“Kiffie, I tried making a list. Of things I could do to make this not an embarrassment. But I just couldn't think of anything, and all the websites were just flat out useless 'cos they all assume we're in a club or have a city's worth of stuff to do. The only 'on a ship' ones I found were really lame fictional stories. Well, except one, but it's too long...and I don't think he has clones of himself. Anyway!”

She drew a long breath, and knew she was stalling. Groaning, Tami sat down in front of him so she could spread her arms, palms upturned. Time to just ask.

“Do...you have any advice?” She winced and made a slow, awkward shrug. “From a male perspective?”

There was a long silence.

Kerfuffle's gentle eyes stared at her, then his head raised, gazing over her own to the far wall. Into the void beyond. Glacially, they began to widen.

So this was how Papa felt, he thought, when Galena had grown old enough to figure out that not all baby griffons came from mineshafts and then ask where. 'Ask your mother' wouldn't do it.

A waving hand in front of his face made him blink and reassert himself. “Kiffie?”

He blinked.

“Kiffie? You okay?”

Kerfuffle shook his head, then shook it again, then nodded. “Sorry, Miss. Had one of them, er, 'existential moments of leave', my teachers used to call it. I, er, well...”

His talon moved from its common scratching of his cheek to the back of his head.

“I don't got much experience there an' all but, 'Lena once asked Mama what she was 'sposed to do to make her end of education cycle-years party go good for another griffin she wanted to dance with.”

Tami's eyes brightened, finally sensing some good, mature advice to be passed along! “Yes?”

Kerfuffle brought his scratching hand down and looked at the ceiling. Absent-mindedly, he picked up the hand crank and wedged it into the valve seal again, starting to pull as he thought. “And she sat 'Lena down and told her all 'bout it. I remember it. Was somethin' like...”

“Yes, yes!?” Tami was on her tippy hooves and tippy claws, wings outstretched behind her, teeth showing.

The valve sprung and Kerfuffle muscled it around to lock down the next of the steps. Pulling the crank out again, he paused and turned back to her with a content nod and smile. It all came back to him.

“Call me every half hour, be back home before ten, and don't walk there or back unless your big brother's with you.”

Patting the heavy crank into his other hand, Kerfuffle smiled and settled down on all fours to be level with the oddly dull faced hippogriff.

“I was so proud walkin' her, she looked just like you do now.” He flushed underneath his feathers. “I, er, wouldn't mind walkin' you there and back again if you felt it'd help, Miss.”

Tami's hand had been sitting near her multiband's touchscreen keyboard, ready to take notes. Slowly, it retracted, closed the application, and she pushed a slow, wide smile onto her face.

“Oh. I think I will be...fine! Yes! Anything...else?” she awkwardly forced out.

The griffon thought for a moment, turning the hand crank over again and again in his huge claws, before he suddenly seemed to grasp something, tightened his grip, and straightened his back with pride.

“Er, an' remember to flare your malfunctioning engine to attract attention!”

Tami gently coughed in the musty heat of the drive room, and angled her head. “What?”

Kerfuffle reached out, took her hand, and gently rotated her on the spot so she had to turn under herself, like a slow danc-

“OH!” she yelped, suddenly remembering, and half jumping back around again to face him, the gantry below her clanking under her step. “The dancing!”

“That's right, Miss!” Kerfuffle slowly but firmly stated, “That worked.”

She couldn't help but laugh, then blush, then chuckle, and then finally sigh gently. She smiled up at him and patted his chest. Opening the program on her multiband again she gingerly added 'Dance with him again?' to it.

“I...guess that maybe helps...”

“Sorry if I'm not a big help, Miss.” He shrugged, before wandering around to the back of the hydraulic reservoir again. “But 'Lena got that dance too in the end, and we know you can dance.”

The young pilot began trotting to the heavy bulkhead door that separated the engineering bay from the main street and gave a small smile. “I suppose. Sorta. Thanks, I'll, um...bear that all in mind.”

She stepped out.

“Miss!”

Pausing, Tami looked back, seeing Kerfuffle digging out the power tool again now that she was leaving.

“I'll have my multiband on so if you need to call me every half hour too. If that makes it better, then you can do that.”

Tammani, in all her fairly intelligent mind, hadn't a clue whether laughing, blushing, or just staring open mouthed was the answer. As a result, she coughed and choked as she almost tried to perform all three.

“Th-thanks, Kiffie, I...guess!” she muttered, returned his wave, and stepped over the frame of the door to wander through the intersecting passageway between engineering and the main street.

“Good luck, Miss!”

“Mm. Guess I'll see who else is...y'know...around to help.”

Then, just as the ambience and noise of engineering began to fade, she turned away from the big mechanic...and froze, her eyes widening.

Standing ahead of her, leaning against the side of the lockers at the far end, stood Hair Trigger. The unicorn looked up as though just seeing her, but the smirk had already been there.

For five whole seconds, Tami blanched and slowly shrunk back as she saw Hair Trigger mimic holding something Tami didn’t want to think much about in her hooves and start to draw breath.

Tami interrupted, speaking overly loudly. “Oh, sure, Kerfuffle! I. Will. Go. Get. That. For. You!”

Not waiting, she dove head first down the nearest ladder to the cargo hold, a very confused griffon peering out from behind where she'd been, wondering with surprised happiness how she'd known he needed a plasma-socketer.

* * *

“So, you're just not sure how to approach him when he's already invited you?”

Relieved, Tami breathed out with a long sigh and nodded her head in answer.

Volatility Smile was currently pretzeled on her work mat on the deck of the cargo hold, stretching one hindleg over the other and curling her back. With a gentle grunt she released the tension and sat upright, grabbing a nearby towel to wipe the sweat from her face and shoulders. Craning her neck to the left, then to the right, she rolled her shoulders once and then shifted her position to face the hippogriff standing by her.

“Well that shouldn't be too difficult to help you with, should it? You aren't stumbling across him unexpectedly or surprisingly; you have time to breathe, and you have time to prepare.”

Her voice was smooth, calm, and confident, and it made Tami's tension drop significantly. Smile had experience in relationships; she would know the answers like she would know how to ace an interview.

Tami nodded and brought up her list again, readying one hand to type. “Yes, yes, I guess. So...what do I do?”

Standing up, Smile grabbed her water bottle from her bag and took a deep slug of the recycled fluid. With a long breath, she sat on the edge of the lifting bench to push out her hindlegs and lean over them, her head held up to let her sparkling eyes stay in contact. “What parts are you worried about?”

Tami drew a deep breath.

“One example only,” Smile quickly and firmly interrupted, “For now.”

The hippogriff closed her mouth and thought for a moment. Of all the lists she was struggling with, this may have been the longest existing. Counting fingers, then feathers, she grabbed one at random and tugged down the edge of her blouse. Under it, the shortened, regrowing hair of her coat was still entirely visible around a pinkish healing mark on her neck. When she spoke it was with a gulping, anxious worry.

“I'm hurt. In a few places. Visibly. Unavoidably. And I don't want it to make it awkward when I meet him and he asks about what happened.”

There was a brief wince on Smile's face. Tami thought she knew why, and still wished she'd found time to approach about that. But for now, she let the crystal pony think.

“Well...” Smile began, and then she let a small smile grow. “Thankfully, I know the solution to that.”

“Really!?”

“Of course! It's a classic: the initial meet! With that, it all comes down to knowing what you're going to say, how you say it, and then practising it!”

Tami sat down, talons tapping their tips warily. “You mean like, I get a mirror?”

Smile grinned, shook her head, and stood up sharply, moving over to grab Tami's shoulders and get her up standing with a burst of energy. “Of course not, that's the realm of pre-teens figuring out how to ask for a social dancing class partner. Here's what we'll do.”

“We?”

The businessmare nodded and stepped back a few feet, shaking out her mane before tying it back in a bun. “So, pretend I am Midnight, and this is you just entering his ship. I'll greet you and then you just try out what you might say.”

Tami felt her wings droop on the spot, her mouth turning flat. “You have to be joking.”

“Perish the thought, I am not! This is a highly respected and time honoured method! Now, go behind that crate there and walk around it. I'll meet you back here. Go on. It will help make it easier when the time comes.”

She ushered the reluctant hippogriff away, and Tami felt her legs skittering over the deck as she was pushed and cajoled across the cargo hold. “Smile, really, I don't know-”

“Nonsense, sweetie.” Smile gave a dismissive wave of a hoof. “Just give it a try. We're all adults here. Now, let me see...”

She wandered away from Tami, muttering to herself. “Okay, Midnight...polite upbringing, rules based social awareness, slight touch of a roguish charmer if he's anything like his father...right.”

She disappeared back toward the bench, leaving Tami standing behind the large container in the hold. The pilot slumped her shoulders and bonked her forehead off the side of the metal box. With a sharp exhaling of air, she got back up after a good few seconds, and edged toward the other side to walk around. Then, she paused. Then she moved, then paused again. She groaned lightly. “Okay...urgh...”

Tami straightened up and walked around the container into view with a deep, regretful sigh.

“Tammani, welcome!” Smile immediately turned, a broad smile on her face as she hurried across to the hippogriff. “I didn't expect to see you here so soon.”

Tami's chest and throat felt like someone was using them for a knot tying competition. She let out her breath and awkwardly paced on the spot, unable to look Smile in the eye. “Urgh...uh-ah...hi! Uh...your majesty?”

The crystal pony made a soft tut, holding a hoof across her chest. “Tami, you know you don't need to call me that. Not between us.” She reached down and took Tami's hand, holding it between both her forelegs.

Oh come on, that's not fair! thought Tami, as she awkwardly looked anywhere but into her friend's all too well-acted face. She took a deep swallow. This was horrifically awkward in every way she could imagine. Her stomach was clenching. Her face glowing, she forced the words out.

“Sure, you-uh-Midnight. I'm-well-happy to see you too! It's nice. Being here. Seeing...you?”

Smile shot her a look similar to that of a director to her actress on stage on seeing the character finally emerge. Then, a look of concern came across her face and her hoof raised, gently moving Tami's blouse to see her neck.

“Tami...whatever happened out there? Are you all right?”

The hippogriff felt her teeth grinding as she tried to collapse her head into her own ribcage. “I got stabbed. Uh...in the neck?”

“No, no, Tami.”

Tami blinked, and saw Smile shake her head. “Not so bluntly. Be gentle about it. Embellish a little!”

“You want me to boast?”

“Of course!”

Tami groaned, looked away, took a deep breath, and reasserted herself with great reluctance, going back to her previous tone of voice. “I...”

She sucked in a deep breath and pushed the most uncertain grin onto her face she possibly could, trying her best to look like Hair Trigger and regretting every second.

“I got it while, um, saving someone from their robot guards?”

Duchess Midnight Smile made a sharp gasp and sat down, holding Tami by her upper arms. “Tami, I hadn't realised you and the crew were engaged in such heroic efforts out there. Are you okay?”

Tami could not cease feeling her own voice screaming inside her head and her every nerve contort until she was hunching just so she could force a wobbly looking smile onto her face. “I am, now you're here?”

Smile's mouth swept upwards, and Tami felt her lungs cry out from not breathing properly for over a minute now.

“Just...wish you didn't have to see it, Midnight?”

“Tami...” Smile fluttered her eyes and held the side of the hippogriff's flushed cheek. “It doesn't change anything while it's there. You look just as charmingly delightful as ever.”

The crystal pony winked, and Tami winced. She waited, and waited, until Smile whispered. “Don't leave him waiting!”

“For what!?” she hissed back.

“Take his hoof! Or accuse him of being devilishly forward. Put yourself back in control.” Smile patted the hoof on Tami's cheek, as though encouraging.

“Why...uh...” Tami began, and grabbed Smile's hoof to gently remove it. “...how, uh, cavalier of you to say, your majesty.”

Smile upturned the removed hoof, bringing Tami's hand closer, winking as she kissed the air near it. Then, she let go, and stood up straight sharply. “Excellent!”

“Really?”

“Mostly.” Smile chided. “Now, let's do it again. But notes! Let's try to get your answers on your wounds right off the bat, okay?”

Tami shrunk down, groaning, before dropping her arms and sighing with embarrassment. “I dunno...”

“And!” Smile trotted over the metal deck and whispered gently to her. “This time, when you inevitably call him 'your majesty', don't listen to him telling you not to...it'll get right into that thrill centre all stallions have to hear you insist on calling him tha-”

Tami shot up, wings flapping to lift her in the air as she looked at the wrong arm for her multiband. “OKAY! Time for lunch! Gotta goooo!” She landed and hurriedly cantered off with an overly loud laugh, leaving Smile to huff and cross her forelegs at the closing door.

“Her generation...hmph.” She blew a strand of her bun away from her face. “No respect for the fine arts.”

* * *

Vacuum packed sausages with herb and onion? No.

Two hundred calorie peanut flavoured protein block? Very no.

Sun dried tomato sandwich? Reserved.

Half a remaining whipped cream chocolate éclair?

“Why, thank you,” Tami giggled to herself as she reached into the common room fridge to retrieve the latter half of her snack. After today she could afford a little treat. Picking up the plate, she pulled it back.

And then almost dropped it as someone spoke over her shoulder.

“You don't need that.”

It was a sweet and young, but opinionated and declarative female voice, one that made Tami squeak and slam the fridge shut. The closing metal door revealed the bright pink of their newest ‘crew member's’ coat with a snowglobe cutie mark right behind it. She was holding a circuit board in her bare hooves and her big eyes were staring right at Tami.

Specimen Eleven. By designation. By name. It was a name Tami wished that 'Elly' would find a replacement for now that she was free from Sidewinder's lab experiments. It felt derogatory to Tami, to be nothing more than a number. Yet for now Eleven was sitting quietly and Tami suddenly realised that the blue haired pony had to have been watching her. She looked down at her éclair and gave a confused look to the unassuming unicorn.

“What? What's wrong with a snack?”

Eleven shook her head. “No, not that. That!”

She pointed with a hoof to the fridge and Tami took a few seconds to try and figure out what she meant. Eventually meeting nothing but failure, Eleven sighed.

“The light inside the fridge that turned on when you opened it. It’s so unnecessary!”

Tami scrunched her face, sitting down and picking up her éclair in one hand. “How? It lets us see.”

Eleven's eyes rolled to look at the ceiling, pointing at each end with very animated, pointed pokes. “You’d see anyway! The normal light in this room provides more than enough light! Lumens! Illumination! Whichever!”

“And if the room light's aren't on?” Tami spoke cautiously, but tersely.

“Well then why are you opening the fridge instead of turning them on?” Eleven spread her hooves, as if it were the strangest thing to ever have to consider that. Somehow Tami got the impression that a few hours later that light would somehow disappear into the growing mound of spare parts she knew was forming somewhere on board.

She sighed, and then smiled at Eleven. Strange thought she may act, it hardly mattered. The unicorn had been through horrors and was changed - probably forever - by Sidewinder trying to force their way into powers they shouldn't touch. That allowed Eleven a lot of leeway in Tami's mind.

Cautiously, as though awaiting another judgement for her actions, she opened her mouth and let herself bite into a much delayed sugary snack for the day. Light cream melted in her mouth as soft dough and sweet chocolate mixed. She couldn't help herself; she groaned a little.

It was always too good when they were just out the fridge, the slight firmness and the chill cream giving a perfect flavour rush, enough to push away the feeling of wanting to cringe and moan into a pillow when she remembered that chat with Smile.

She watched Eleven sit against the kitchen surface and start to fiddle with the platinum plated board, telekinesis making tiny circuit swaps and a little spark around their ends soldering them in place without even a tool. Instead just using that ominously powerful magic lurking in her. Eleven smiled at her work, looking relaxed and friendly; Tami had a thought.

A thought that made her almost grind her teeth and turn away.

No. She couldn't.

But what harm was it?

Edging over, Tami pressed her back against the cupboard below the sink front and settled down until she was sitting beside Eleven. Éclair for her, circuit-board for Eleven.

“So, Eleven...” she began, bringing up her multiband file. “You heard who Vebs and I were talking about right? How I'm going to meet someone? Midnight Haze? You, uh, well you know a lot of things. So...got any tips for me?”

Eleven didn't even look up. “Mhm.”

“You do?”

“Uh huh!”

Tami smiled, and took up the third number in her document, right below the 'make him sweat instead?' one from Smile's 'lesson'. “Well go on! Honestly, I need all the help I can right now.”

Eleven smiled that beautiful, innocent smile, and turned her head to look at Tami eye to eye. “Leave him!”

A sudden shimmer of a telekinetic field was all that stopped Eleven being sprayed with fancy baking. Tami coughed and hacked, trying to drive air into her malfunctioning lungs. “Ack! I-ah-WHAT?”

Eleven reached over and firmly patted Tami’s back. “Aren’t you twenty one?”

Almost choking in surprise, Tami managed to nod.

“Well, a hippogriff's average age for an effective reproductive cycle doesn't begin for at least another five years.” She sharply tapped her right hoof into her upturned left five times near the pilot. “You are being very hasty. I'm surprised you don't know this about your own species, Tami.”

Tami wiped her mouth and, hand on chest, looked at her in disbelief with her voice loud and bewildered. “I'm not looking to-to-THAT! I just want to have a fun day or two hanging out with him!”

Eleven made a neutral, somewhat denied sound, and got up. Her horn suddenly glowed and lifted a host of plastic cutlery from beside the sink, talking even as she seemed to inspect them, making them each move along like little soldiers in the air before her discerning eye. She pursed her lips. “So you just want to meet him?”

“Yes!”

“As friends?”

“Yes!”

“And not breed with him?”

“D-don't say it like that! But...yes!”

Eleven almost closed one eye, and wriggled a hoof up under her mane to scratch at the metallic implant running down her spine as she tried to choose between two seemingly identical forks. “Then I am confused.”

“How?” Tami asked quietly.

“Because I see you 'hang out' with all the crew here as friends every day with minimal issue. Why is this ‘Duke’ any different? It is the same broad activity.”

Tami paused. She blinked, and the immediate 'but that's wrong' response died in her throat as what Eleven was saying felt aggressively logical and almost, oh-so-almost, made complete sense?

She knocked the back of her head into the cupboard. “It's not that simple, Elly. It's...a bit more than just friends here, because-”

Eleven made a short 'aaah' sound. “It is because you MIGHT someday want to-”

Tami lowered her eyes. “If you say that word one more time I am leaving right now.”

The pink unicorn just shrugged, then suddenly grinned as she found the fork she wanted, and got up, taking her whole little project with her. Moving past, she stopped and turned. “Then this, well...I don't know what more I can say.”

Tami grunted as she got up, finding Eleven's magic helping to tug her along the way. She flushed, and stood before the teenage pony. True enough, Eleven had never had a lot of life experience being essentially kept in a lab since she was a foal.

Not that Tami felt bad for asking. No result didn't mean she didn't want to include her. And seeing her try was the important thing. “Thanks, Elly. Just, well, maybe Vebs and I can go over it all with you next time.”

Eleven nodded firmly. “Sociology isn't quite as interesting as applied sciences but well, okay. I wouldn’t mind it! You two were amusing. Strange, but amusing. But I'm going to find Kerfuffle. He’ll need this soon.” She shook the circuit board and turned. “Maybe the others might help you better.”

“Maybe...”

Eleven trotted off, and as she did, Tami's blood froze on the spot. Eleven's moving away from that spot revealed the part of the sofa her presence had hidden behind her. More particularly, revealed one Hair Trigger sitting on it, silently watching with a coffee mug held ready.

With an eager grin, Hair Trigger reached over and patted the sofa beside her.

Tami's mouth opened inconsistently, a gagging, stuttered choke emerging. “O-Oh look at the time! I'm almost late for my shower, ha-ha-haaaaaabye!”

She backed off, bumped into the side of the open door and stumbled her away into the bathroom to lock it sharply behind her.

* * *

Some twenty minutes and a mentally resetting hot shower later, a still somehow thoroughly unsettled hippogriff peeked out of the bathroom door. She cast her eyes warily to either side, leaning out to look into the blind spots. She'd made that mistake before.

She was alone.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Tami finally exited, and started making her way toward the bridge again. Flapping around the table, she typed mid-flight, adding 'Is it different?' to her list. Landing, she started up the stairs. But as she put weight on them, she stopped.

Instead, Tami found herself glancing briefly to her left. Then right back again, screwing her eyes shut. After a long breath, she opened them again, exhaled with a sigh of defeat, and turned away from the stairs. Moving past the sofa, she raised a hand, clenched in a loose fist.

“I can't believe I'm doing this...” she muttered, and knocked on the door nearest the sofa.

Immediately, she regretted it. But the deed was done.

Seconds longer than they ought to feel passed until finally there was a twist of the lock and the door swung open sharply. Gulping, Tami found herself face to face with a bleary eyed, sharp bodied rogue spy.

Whisper Step was quiet for a moment, looking down at her. Then, in a low voice, she spoke. “Tami? What's wrong?”

The words were to the point. Tami knew her quaking body had been seen and analysed right away. “Can I...come in a second? And talk?”

One of Whisper's thin eyebrows raised. There was a few seconds gap and then she quietly seemed to sigh, and nodded into her room, turning around. Hardly feeling any more settled, Tami wandered after her, thinking over and over how to word anything at this point.

Edging inside, she sat on one of her old cushions that still lay in the corner, while Whisper hopped back onto the bed, settling herself against a small mountain of pillows. Her tough-framed laptop sat there, and the agent grabbed it as she lay back, bringing it onto her thighs to start tapping away at with a precision cadence. Empty mugs sat beside her.

After logging in, Whisper's piercing eyes looked up. “Well? What is this about?”

She wasn't sounding impatient, or frustrated. Just focused, more sharply curious than anything. Tami took a long breath.

“So, there's this guy...”

Whisper's typing stopped immediately, those gold-yellow eyes narrowing as they raised up to look at the cringing hippogriff. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“...and-” Tami gulped. “-and he's invited me to-”

“Midnight, I know.”

“You do?”

“It's not exactly difficult to notice.”

Tami blinked, then blushed, then hid her face behind a wing with a small squeak. “Sorry, I just, I've never had such an 'invitation' in. And I don't know what to expect or how best to-I f-figured, y'know? You might know something? You know people, right? How they act? How to act right?”

Whisper sighed and started to type something rapidly, looking intently at her own work. Her voice sounded more like an aside comment as though she too couldn't believe she was even giving an answer. “Tami, if you're edging around asking me how to seduce someone...”

The pilot shook her head rapidly, waving her arms. “No! No, no! It's not that!”

“Wasn't it?”

Whisper turned over her laptop, bending it until it was a tablet like device, and started spinning what looked like floorplans around. The interruptions for her to work made the room feel so very thick with uncertain silence.

Tami groaned, slapping her palm into her face. “No, it's...I just don't know because I have all these worries like how I'm hurt or what I'm doing or how he's not seen me for me and like a dozen others and-and I just want to not make a mistake and ruin it and-”

“And you're coming to...me? For this? I-” Whisper paused and sighed, then cut herself off, not once looking up. “I suppose. All right. What do you want from him?”

“Huh?”

Whisper slowed down every word. “Romance? A close friend? A quick fling? Just sex?”

Tami gulped, partly from Whisper's bluntness, but partly because she honestly wasn't sure. The social class difference, the distance, the cloak and dagger element to it all? Was it more? Or just close? Or just indulgence? Thankfully, Whisper didn't force an answer from her.

“If you're going to get close to anyone, within their personal space, you need to know what you want from them first. Then figure out what they too want that would let you move in to attain your goal.” Whisper paused, then quickly added, “And his. Of course. Do you think he just wants you in his bed?”

Tami squeaked gently. “Uh, no? I...think he just wants someone in his life who doesn't pressure him like the rest of nobility.”

“He wants an escape then. That'd be easy.” Whisper spoke with an odd degree of satisfaction and cunning, looking up thoughtfully for a moment. To Tami, it was an unnerving tone.

“Whisper, did you just mentally prep how you'd case and entrap a stallion I like?”

“I haven't a clue what you're talking about, Tami.”

Tami narrowed her eyes. “You're smirking.”

Whisper made a dark chuckle, patting the tablet. “He's a Solar Empire noble. Call it a professional reflex.”

“Whisper...” Tami chided, only getting a sly grin in response. Biting one side of her cheek, Tami sucked on it and gulped. “So...”

Whisper looked up, and Tami delayed. After a long pause, she took what felt like an even longer breath to break the awkward cut, and continued.

“...should I take a gift? Or does that put him on the spot?”

And again, that still just as awkward silence.

“Or use that crystal mane shampoo?”

Whisper breathed out sharply through her nose and briefly shrugged, the loose shirt about her whipcord body only barely moving. Yet as she settled, she idly tapped the edge of her device, extending the silence. The dark earth pony settled back. “And I can't even pretend to get a call from my handler to escape any more.”

“Hey...”

Whisper looked back over at her, shaking a hoof as though to assure it was just in jest. “If you want to just talk with him. Or hug him. Kiss him. Bed him. Date him. Whatever? Figure that out first, I guess.”

Tami had started taking notes but then paused, seemingly unsure. “I...just want us to have fun? It's in two days. It all just feels so difficult to nail down. I can't be open about it, but I know he and I want, well, something? We spoke about just whenever we meet or...maybe even he isn't sure either. Maybe we're both just dancing around it not able to know.”

The tablet bleeped and Whisper turned it vertical. “That tends to be how it goes in some lines of work.”

Tami didn't think much of that response at first, but then she raised one eyebrow. It was a curious statement. “Speaking from experience?”

The athletic spy looked up and made a brief sound of mirth. “Maybe. Never know if you'll find someone nice on a mission.”

Tami couldn't resist a slightly curious smirk. “Pity there's none on this one, huh?”

Whisper stared for a long time. “...sure. Listen, I have a lot to do, Tami...”

“All right.” Tami breathed out and got up, feeling somewhat foolish for even broaching the subject. “Sorry, I was just-”

Whisper nodded slightly. She knew.

Tami turned, trotting her way to the door and opened it again. But as she did, she stopped at hearing her name.

“Tami?”

“Huh?”

Whisper looked up from behind her. “Remember to lock doors, use a proxy on your multiband to contact, and know his schedule. The nobility don't enjoy casual relationships outside their circles. Hang a towel over any keyholes in a room you're going to meet in. Scan for low-emitting wireless signals before you say anything incriminating, be wary of invisible servants nearby; they're good at that, don't wear lipstick, and always have an escape plan.”

Tami just blinked, staring at Whisper in rapt confusion. The earth pony just upturned a single hoof.

“It's what I'd do.”

“Thanks, Whisper.” Tami was tacit in her reply as she quietly moved to the door. “Sorry to bother you.”

Whisper just gave a dismissive shrug. A non-verbal 'no problem'. Tami gently closed the metal door and turned her back to it with a sigh. With an idle hand she added 'Have escape route?' and groaned aloud. Lethargically, she yanked herself up and started toddling to the stairs again.

That toddle quickly became a hurried push as she heard another door opening, and scrambled up even as she saw the green mane emerge from the Captain's quarters, mug floating out ahead of it. Hair Trigger looked up and made a teasing wink with a cheeky smile. She tilted her head, gesturing into her room with her eyes.

Tami squeaked and caught herself in the air before disappearing off upstairs. “Busy, sorry!”

Below, there was just a sip of caffeine, a giggle, and a slow closing of the door.

* * *

“And I just don't even know what to prepare, or think. I know they're all helping in their own way, I appreciate it, I really do! But even I don't know exactly how this is. Midnight and I only sorta vaguely alluded to it in letters, but never in person and I don't know if I can speak as easily then. Or will this place be too cramped and locked down with people we can't find time away? What if it's even worse because I'll be in overalls and I still can't get this oil out my tail from a few days ago. And will it spook him to see my wounds still? Or-or-or what if I make a mistake and get him in trouble? I just don't know what to prepare or think or so or...urgh.”

Tami lay back in her hammock, head flumping between her pillows, hands over her eyes. She sighed long and hard, and then turned her head.

“What do you think?”

“Relationship Counselling software module not installed. Please contact your supplier.”

Tami hummed gently. “So maybe if I send him a letter beforehand, we could work out and, uh, I could plan better?”

“Relationship Counselling software module not installed. Please contact your supplier.”

Her face dropped somewhat, and she stared back at the moon and star stickers on the overhead frame of the bridge, mentally picturing Claudia getting close, time running shorter. “Or maybe that'll just make things worse. Somehow. I don't even know how! Just somehow! I just want this to be a chance to...to relax. To be around someone I like. To let my mane down and forget all this horrible stuff lately for a day or two. Oh Patch, what am I supposed to do?”

The drone bleeped, a red light flickering.

“Relationship Counselling software module not installed. Please contact your supplier.”

Tami frowned and sat up, turning to hang over her hammock sideways, hindlegs hanging off the side near the wall, forelegs off the side near Patch. She thought for a moment and then tried a different approach.

“Patch, I'm nervous about getting a vaccine, but I know I have to go for one regardless. I'm scared of what might happen. What should I do?”

Rotors buzzing, Patch blooped.

“No required vaccine detected on file.”

“Theoretical.”

Again, the lights on his chassis blinked, and then his voice, a deep bass, resounded in the bridge as he began to hover away out to the main street.

“There is no requirement for fear in this scenario, Crew-member Tammani. You will only feel a little prick in your hindquarters and that is all.”

“Oh, thanks, Pat-wait WHAT did you just say!?”

Tami scrambled up, nearly tripping out her hammock to chase the medical robot.

“Are you trying to make fun of-”

She stopped as she reached the door, almost slamming into a pony coming the other way.

“Woah there, Tam. Where are you hurrying off to?”

Hair Trigger held her hooves up, stopping Tami in her path and holding her in the bridge. Moving above Trigger, Patch escaped retribution, floating away down the main street to his charger. Tami went white.

“Uh...I...was just-”

“Heading to the bridge to be 'busy', huh? Figured I'd join you.”

Hair Trigger pushed her chest gently, stepping inside by making Tami move backwards. Trigger's hoof kicked the door closed behind them. Her magic locked it. “Didn't get a chance to finish our 'chat' earlier. Seems you've been 'busy' since.”

Tami was sweating, blushing, backing away until she tripped and fell into her beanbag, Hair Trigger still advancing above her.

“So where were we? Ah...” Trigger raised her eyebrows, and leaned in. “How to make a cute young hippogriff's little private time with a handsome, strapping stallion leave you both-”

She switched to a whisper.

“-absolutely breathless.”

Suddenly, Trigger dove down, and landed beside her pilot on the beanbag, grabbing around Tami's shaking shoulders, her voice dropping as she leaned into Tami's ear. “And you know I'll give you only the full, absolutely raw details needed to blow his-

“C-Captain!”

“-mind. Ready?”

“N-no?”

“I want you...”

Trigger grinned, and reached over, pulling Tami's face to pull it close to hers. Tami squeaked, closing her eyes.

“...to just be yourself, Tam.”

Shivering, Tami waited, and waited as she heard the words. There was no follow up. When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing but her Captain, who would take any chance to make her blush, staring back at her, slowly letting go over her to sit back more normally.

“Huh?”

Hair Trigger smiled and hugged Tami into her side. “I want you to do what you always do around him. I want you to blush the moment you see him and never quite be able to get it off your face. I want you to stumble over your words when just trying to greet him because you can't get the words out right. I want you to end up rambling nervously on weird tangents until he has to smoothly laugh and interrupt you somehow. I want you to squeak and hunch up if he ever flatters or touches you, even though it's all happened before.”

She took Tami's hand in her hoof. Tami just stared, open mouthed.

“I want you to be that weird, heartwarming combination of endearing shyness and excitable energy that we know you for. Because it's unlike anyone he has to spend his life around with the stuffy upper crust. I swear to you that's probably what he's attracted to, and what he's most looking forward to seeing.”

Trigger poked Tami's nose.

“You.”

Cheeks bright red, Tami just blinked back.

“I-uh...”

Trigger laughed, and ruffled her mane. “Yeah, pretty much like that.”

Tami knew Hair Trigger was right. She knew it, because Trigger usually was when she spoke like that. She let herself be hugged in against the unicorn's side, blinking and thinking it all over. Somehow, with that mental reset of perspective on the whole thing, the rest of them suddenly made a lot more sense.

Kerfuffle hadn't been unaware. He'd just been telling her she'd already done it before and would know what to do, and that he'd be there right up until the time if she wanted.

Smile hadn't been trying to embarrass her. She'd been trying to make whatever actually happened nowhere near as awkward as what she'd play-acted already.

Eleven hadn't been clueless about it. If anything, she'd seen the clear logic right then and there. All she had to do was remember how she acted normally, and do that.

Whisper hadn't been trying to make her worry. She'd been just trying to make sure she was being safe and telling her how to quell her worries with practical steps.

Tami stared at the deck between the two of them, and felt her mouth slowly grow into a smile. The worries, the nerves, they were still there. Tami sighed in relief and nuzzled her cheek onto Trigger's shoulder. “Thanks...you're the best captain I ever had.”

Trigger snorted, amused. “Told you before, I'm the only captain you've ever had.”

“Still the best,” Tami whispered, and let out a long breath. “You realise I'm still gonna be worrying up until the moment, right?

“I'd be worried you'd been replaced if you didn't. Long as you're not about to implode from it. All good?”

Tami gently nodded, and settled down. “Yeah.”

“Good.”

Trigger sat up and pulled Tami up with her, activating her own multiband. As the lock screen faded, Tami saw that It had a paused video on it. One that made her eyes bulge out wide as she saw the title. Her face turned to one of utter shock as Hair Trigger reached forward and hit the ‘resume’ icon.

“What is tha-CAPTAIN!”

Trigger's foreleg grabbed around her tightly, trapping her on the beanbag before she could flee. Instead, Tami covered her shocked eyes and the smirk she couldn't hide at her captain's antics with both wings.

“So, next topic!" Trigger laughed. "Examples on how to not use your teeth and the best way to-”

* * *

Specimen Eleven

Image by Kalemon

Loose Ends Part 1: That Fragile Bubble of Joy

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Loose Ends Part 2: The Great Recollection of Assets

Author's Note

Welcome to Part 2 of the story that began with "Fragile Bubble of Joy" before.

This was a tale that I wanted to tell at some point while the game was running. I knew I wanted to clear up some loose ends of character moments as I headed toward my own little finale of my own stories. I wanted to bring in many elements of the game's characters.

As such, I give a heads up and a warning. There are going to be some characters, interactions, powers and references in this that are significantly more reliant on the game sessions itself. A reminder that you can read the full and complete tale of the tabletop game from Snipehamster's amazing Session Summaries docs, that turns a 4 years campaign into a very readable and entertaining 'story' divided session by session. It is highly recommended, particularly for the upcoming Part 3.

But for now... enjoy!

Loose Ends Part 2: The Great Recollection of Assets

---

Course / Vector: 68.9°-17.3°-91°

Velocity: 1,489 m/s

Navigation Status: Underway

Position check: 2 min ago

Position transmit: 8 months ago

GMO / SMSI: 9557433 / 215630000

Callsign: BT08LUA

Flag: Crystal League Corporate Navy

Length / Beam: 610ft-80.7ft

Fleet Tag: CRYT

Vessel: CLCN Adroit Animadvert

Current Tasking: Passive observation of Empire/NLR tension, Periphery Region, Jhurope
---

If the Adroit’s advanced and dedicated covert role were described to those who had never laid eyes upon it, then many common traits would be assumed about its appearance. Silken, curvaceous perhaps, and attractive to all the wannabe pilots of the academies to void-cruise in style. Others may assume it to be perhaps angular and razor-like, bristling with advanced weaponry and bearing enormous dishes or arrays to spy on the furtive and decrypt the galaxy’s deepest secrets.

The truth was somewhat less romantic. Designed to never enter an atmosphere in its entire service life, the Adroit was a formless skeleton of mathematical efficiency. Three rings more akin to a pre-artificial gravity design held around its long eel-like centre. Each ring bore mismatching reflective-coated boxes and ugly antennae protruding to varying lengths. Some pointed outward, some directly ahead. Its engines, far from being the mighty afterburners of sexy spy films, were low impulse and shielded behind nozzle-shrouds, yet surrounding them was an entire battery of inactive fusion-engine outlets held within inelegant compartments betraying a powerful FTL capability. Ahead of them were racks of super-heavyweight beyond-visual-range torpedoes, unwieldy and bolted to the two rear rings in asymmetric volumes.

She would not dogfight majestically. She would never sit in orbit and make a statement with her mighty presence. She would never take place in a battleline. But she could outrun an interdictor, go dark amidst the void, and cripple anyone who dared think they could blunder around pinging to find her. She was one of the prized and yet utterly deniable classes of the Crystal League: a long endurance spy craft and a deep space apex predator.

Yet in the two years since a silent commissioning she had never operated in anger. For the last two years her cream of the new-age crop of graduates had been paired with long serving old-hands and drifted in the dark observing everything but their distant homes.

Everything. Every signal. Every stray bit of dust out of the normal in the Periphery that drifted by the Adroit’s ever-seeing eyes.

* * *

The Adroit’s bridge was dark as the slow hours of the night cycle crawled by. The black crept in from the backswept windows, crawling into the gaps between bright orange holograms, flickering consoles and deep reclined seats. The bridge held two levels with eight workstations in all, and a soft red carpet ran down a gentle slope from the upper section to the hunkered recess of the helm crew’s three stations at the fore. Despite the vessel’s size the bridge itself was intimate, housing only a portion of the system crew. Most were sequestered down in the sealed operations room, leaving only a handful with a view out to the stars. Most of those stations were empty, leaving only three present at the helm: a griffon, a deer, and a pegasus. They were all young, with only scant murmurs of chuckled banter and the quiet, soft-edged chiming of their consoles daring to breach the atmosphere of the silent watch.

One of them, the griffon, reached up at the ping of a console and pulled down a monitor on a hanging arm above her workstation. “Another imperial frigate enroute, Sir. AIS snatched it heading to Mothellum. Few hours yet.”

There was no reply from either of the other two. The griffon’s tone had been easy, like a short, bored sigh. But she turned, tilting her head as only a griffon could. “Maybe two hours, four if they make a refuel stop, sir.” Another pause. “Lieutenant Commander?”

The pegasus at the main helm station between the other two blinked and sat up as though coming out of a funk. He turned briefly with a long breath and a smile. “Oh, sorry. Had my head in. Confirmed, one FFG, two to four out. Thank you.”

The griffon nodded, going back to her work and thinking no more of it other than an assumption her friend and current officer of the watch had simply been engaged in another data-page of astrometrics.

The pegasus, however, was not. Nodding along with his thanks, he turned back to using one feather like a lazy finger upon his console’s centre touchscreen, sifting through the local reports and events of the Periphery. Predominantly pirate alerts, he had been trying to discern a pattern, spot routine methods of evasion, or identify new tactics to adopt from the always inventive rogues. However something had caught his eye and made his wing pause in mid-air between sips of strong Caliphate coffee.

“Lieutenant, can I have four-eight-six up please?”

The deer to his left nodded. “Four-eight-six, Sir, aye.”

After a moment the deer swept a dainty hoof toward the pegasus’ station, and a full brief of a listed event passed over to his terminal. Spreading feathers, he expanded it, opening it.

Port Medusa… Freighter M-Drive Malfunction…

His keen, focused eyes skimmed over the troubling details. They all knew that station well, for it had been the focal point of tensions lately. Was this sabotage? A false flag? From the details he doubted it based on their current intelligence of the situation, but he dug anyway. Alyssum seemed to have it all in hoof, and most of the supplementary reports had been crossed off already. All except one. He prodded it, already tuning out of a brief conversation passing over his head from the other two under his watch.

Confirmed shuttlecraft skiff incident… Found empty… Registered to Space Jammers Inc…

The report slid over an image of the shuttle class. Confederate. Then over to a blue freckled unicorn with a green mane as the missing persons report drew up.

Occupants one Captain Hair Trigger, one Pilot T-

He stopped; the mug of coffee froze midway to his mouth.

Occupants’ location unknown upon corporate recovery…

His eyes were unblinking.

Suspected kidnapping during illegal salvage operation…

The mug clattered down suddenly enough to spill.

The lieutenants on either side looked up as the helmspony got up sharply, his pressed, sharp uniform over a spruce blue coat catching the light from the glowing consoles. “Sir?”

The pegasus was frantically dragging every screen around, downloading the whole report to his multiband, along with an imprint of the local area readings, unclassified ship movements and public-source action reports. Then he was already moving, fixing up his navy grey mane into an organised ponytail with his wings as he went. He walked, but moved with an alarmed pace across the deadened sound of the bridge. “You have the bridge, Lieutenant Serro. I need to speak with the old stallion.”

“Yes… Sir?”

The pair exchanged a look, but by then he had already marched to the starboard side door and passed through. The moment it closed, he broke into a canter toward the nearest steps, proceeding to the upper deck directly above the bridge: the captain’s ready room. Without any hesitation he keyed a panel by the door. “Officer of the Watch requesting an audience, Captain.”

After a moment the panel gave a trio of rising bleeps and a deep, mature male voice rang out. “Come!”

The door slid aside, scarcely interrupting the silent ship’s noise discipline as it revealed a small but comfortable office divided across the middle by a metal desk lined with firm sound-dampening foam. In contrast with the lowered lights, the captain himself sat sparkling a bright azure glint, a crystal pony of his homeland, staring into a blue-hued monitor. Captain Sun Dodger.

He was old, approaching retirement and held back from admiralship only by choice and a lack of time for the political niceties and mandates it brought with it. He was an intimidating force of nature aboard, a thickly built maelstrom of expectation and demand bound up to a fierce paternal frankness and love for his crew. The perfect choice for a vessel intended to forge the imagination of newer generations in how stellar operations could be conducted together with old experience. He looked up at the young officer, nodded a firm greeting, then went back to his reading.

The officer knew better than to assume he was being told to wait, nor did he want to. “Sir, I…” He took a deep breath, steadying his heart. “I wish to request an absence of duty for personal reasons.”

The captain didn’t look up, and did not reply.

“I… I realise the duty of my command and the opportunities afforded to me are beyond the norm.” The officer spoke with a wavering, hastily thrown together justification. “That our secrecy, even from the academy onto this placement was in reward for our scores and efforts, but I have come into… into news regarding a personal issue that I wish to declare to match the requirement for mandated leave in other ships which I know isn’t-”

Captain Dodger finally looked up. The old dog’s glare was enough to halt the clutter of attempted sentences. “This isn’t you,” he said, his voice direct and honest, “you’ve been in deep space since you were offered this, grinning and talking the ears off the rest of the crew about the vessels and phenomena we see. Never a problem with time away or isolation.”

“I-” the officer began.

“And furthermore,” the captain continued, “we’re in the Periphery. We’ve not had any contact with our families for months to remain signals-dark. And your only family is in the League. So no contact from them gave you this impulse either.”

The pegasus remained quiet. His captain just nodded, firm and impassively weighted in confident knowledge. “But all that aside I know why this is, Lieutenant Commander.”

“Sir, I understand this is-”

Captain Dodger snorted loudly, interrupting him by noise alone. “You’ve been one of my aces this whole long journey, son. You’ve kept morale up; you’ve become something of a heart to many of the young officers. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the quiet talks you have with some of them when they’re faltering. That and what you’ve brought to the helm- well, you make me long to yank it away from you and get at it myself again.”

The tall, broad-shouldered crystal pony raised his multiband and tapped a few commands. “We’ve got a replenishment coming in on the next graveyard watch to restock consumables. You can transfer with them to the nearest station and meet back up with them after. If anything it’ll stop the bleeding hearts gang back home pinging me every contact meeting about the lack of leave for crews on this sort of posting. You’ll have two weeks to meet back up with us. Find the same solid replenishment ship again; it’s scheduled for our next one too.”

“Captain,” the officer began, swallowing, hardly believing what he was hearing. “Sir, I… I assure this isn’t just a holiday request. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me on this, I just need to assure this is a genuine-”

Captain Sun Dodger reached out and turned his terminal toward the pegasus. The screen was hazed with a glare-shield, but behind it lay the same thing he had seen on the bridge. The young stallion went wide eyed.

“I know, Commander Vair. I know.”

There was a brief silence between them, as the old captain regarded his lieutenant commander’s break of composure. A look of amazement, worry, shock.

“Don’t ever dare think I don’t pay attention to the histories of every officer I bring out here. Now the Periphery is a dangerous place off-board, so stop by the armoury on your way out. I’ve authorised you to carry.” Captain Dodger paused and grumbled. “I’d rather the right person stay with me eventually than the denied person leave me because they feel they need to go behind my back. Besides, what you see on the ground in Medusa might prove useful to us if you really want me to justify this further.”

“Sir…” The young pegasus tried to not let his voice hiccup. “Thank you.”

“Do what you need to do, lad. Now, graveyard’s in two. Get your skinny butt moving, Vantage. Out of my ready room! On the double!”

He barked the words, shattering the quiet of the vessel, leading Lieutenant Commander Vantage Vair to salute on reflex before turning and galloping out, with only one last look at the screen facing him.

Upon it lay an image of an orange-maned hippogriff, an eager explosion of a smile between soft cheeks, spreading across a heart-shaped face.

* * *

Ice in the veins.

Clamming, suffocating, entrapping. The frost felt like it had penetrated beneath her skin, pulling her body apart and leaving nothing but a numb void in its wake. A nightmare where legs would not run. Where digits could not work. Where eyes could not see. Crushing the heart and mind until the pressure would squeeze her frightened and weary soul from her body.

Waves crashed against her. Tussling forces tugging over, round, up, down. Then gentler ones, a sense of travel. Dull colours devoid of shape, like the scathing aftermath of bright light, lazily moulded and sundered upon each other. Sometimes many, sometimes none. Then suddenly, bursts of white noise. Painful undulating crackles and throbbing hums, like crinkling paper and voices through thick water.

It all congealed.

And then came a soft feeling. A painful icy burning, not recognisable until it had seeped below the skin, growing, growing, until it faded slowly. She felt something seizing at her. Pulling, grasping. More than one. She tried to grab onto them, to numbly grasp and squeeze for comfort. But none of them would hold back, none of them would comfort her.

And she felt warmth.

The last time she had known warmth, it had come from someone. The one she knew had saved her life. Who? Captain! Her captain! The last comfort she'd clung to. It had to be, that’s what it had to-

Her eyelid split open, and memories cascaded through her mind. Painfully bright colours rushed in through the slit of vision, melded among moving shapes. She pulled them closed for what felt like hours. And then, at last, there was quiet, and she dared to open them again.

Tami tried to rub her eyes, but her arms wouldn’t move. Her wings felt flat below her. She saw four bulbs above her, and realised she was lying on her back. Thick warmth squeezed from every side of her body, a body that felt alien and swollen and stung as blood flowed again through her veins. With a monumental effort, she lifted her head and saw the inflated foil-coated suit about her.

It was a survival and recovery bodysuit, slowly heating up from water coursing through it. She could feel its thermal gel-packs in her armpits, around her neck and between her legs to target circulation. Intravenous tubes were inserted into her forearm, with a clear fluid dripping through. She lay on a gurney in a glass-walled room with lines of chromed shelving and immaculate white cupboards, but everything was blurry and everything outside the glass melted into a wash of colour. Her head whirled and she lay back down again, focusing instead on her hearing. There was the beep of a health monitor and a familiar, reassuring sound of a reactor core’s hum. A ship. She could smell antiseptic. A sickbay or trauma room then.

Cautious relief began to trickle into her. Every detail spoke of safety. Rescue. Recovery. The fear that she would die began to fade for the first time in days.

The sharp hiss of automatic doors retracting to her left proved a sharp rebuttal. Whirring and clicking as the running pistons hit metal, they revealed a huge shape moving through. For a moment, her heart leapt at the silhouette. Wide, tall, with large feathers.

“Kif-”

Red feathers.

Her voice died in her dry, hoarse throat, leaving Tami to stare up and to try to focus on the newcomer. A griffon for sure, easily as large as Kerfuffle, with crimson feathers tipped in a creamy white. He was older than the mechanic and held a datapad, his talons tapping away at it. His claws were long and purposefully kept sharp on the end of scarred, muscular arms. There was a hazy discolour to one side of his face, like the feathers had regrown only weeks ago. He didn’t look at her.

“The captain…” she croaked, trying to breathe harder. Tami tried to sit up, pushing her pained body as far as she could, but found it quite impossible. “Is she-”

Then she realised it wasn't her condition keeping her flat.

She was held down. Zip ties were looped about her wrists, feeding down to the gurney’s bars. A medical strap looped over her chest. That alone would have been understandable, but together? Tami’s heart began to thump faster, driving a tingling pain in her every extremity as blood flowed. The griffon’s face was inscrutable behind the sharp glare of the lamps.

“You are Tammani? The pilot of that ship? Can you hear and understand me?” His voice was heavy, leery with uncaring disdain.

She nodded fearfully.

“Speak your reply,” demanded the griffon. He sounded restless - unwilling to extend any interaction with her further than he had to. Tami nodded more frantically.

“Y-Yes… Sir, please, my captain, is she ali-”

“You fly PNR class?” He wasn’t looking up from the datapad.

“Yes,” whispered Tami. Her throat felt sore. Words were clumsy in her mouth, her tongue thick and bloated from cold swelling. She squirmed, looking away as her vision slowly recovered, seeing the large glass walls looking out onto an opulent vessel’s common deck. A slick gym lay nearby, with a juice bar, large hot tub, and a recreation area with an enormous panel screen and expensive sofas. Crystal lighting rigs hung from the ceiling, and every surface was smooth and pristine, shining with patterned white rock and dark laser-etched metals. What was this place?

“With no licence?”

Through all the heat, a cold spike of terror now began to flow through her. What was this!? Who was this? Police? She never got to answer.

“Class A pilot error incident on record at Chrysolite VIP Pilot Training Academy. Forced to acquire a job somewhere that lacked legality to keep you away from the controls of a starship. Qualification training covers personal to sub-capital class vessels only with failed first year training in evasion maneuvers and protection flying. Is this all correct?”

Tami didn’t know what to say, but she saw his powerful eyes suddenly train on her. They promised so many things, chief among them impatience. She felt like prey, a victim, a target under those uninterested, uncaring eyes that gave away only a hint of his true nature. She knew that look.

She’d seen it on Whisper’s face once in the rogue agent’s most terrifying moods. She saw an unfulfilled hunter brimming below the surface, forced into duties that did little to slack the urge.

A thick hand hit the gurney, making her squeal at the clatter of metal and the bounce of the surface. “Answer me! Is this correct? Is this you?”

“Yes, yes!” she yelped, trying to squirm, but the bonds held her firm. She could feel the heating suit flex and bubble as she tried to turn away and clench her hands over her face, but her wrists just jarred at the restraints.

“Understanding of class three universal systems for flight control?” He paused, then slammed it again. “Answer!”

“Yes! Yes I-I do!” Tami felt herself start to hiccup. The posture, the lack of proper breath, it all clammed her up. She wanted to look away, but she didn’t now dare.

“Classes for close proximity flight routing and object interaction. Hmph - passed on the third attempt only?”

She closed her eyes. She remembered that one. It hadn’t been the test. It had been the instructor. Her fierce commands. The sight of others doing so well ahead of her. The pressure of her classmates all watching her go last. “Yes… B-but it wasn’t the test, it was-”

“Less than impressive qualifications,” he snapped, interrupting. “Excuses are only window dressing; you failed. Hrm, it’s less than I’d hoped. It will do, but I will investigate this further to ensure there are no further lies about anything else you lack.”

He looked up, but Tami didn’t reply. She felt like she’d been slapped. Excuses? They were reasons. Weren’t they? Tami felt an uncomfortable stirring in her heart. The griffon shook his head and looked down at her.

“You suffered acute hypothermia due to your mistake in flying into that rift. In three days you will be well enough to be moved after we arrive.”

“Arrive where?” Tami felt so small, her voice tiny in response to his authoritative, punchy tone. She could feel a welling up, something unseen. Through her gut. Her mind. “Wh-Where am I now? The captain, is she-”

The red griffon locked his datapad and turned away, long claws tapping at the clean metal floor.

“Who are you? Please! Is the cap-is Hair Trigger okay!? A-Am I in trouble? Under arrest? I don’t know where I am!” She babbled, panicking, the thought of being left without a single answer starting to truly terrify her. “What’s going on!? PLEASE!”

The doors slid shut behind him, leaving her alone. She realised the glass of the infirmary was soundproofed. Aghast, she watched the griffon move across to the bar. He wasn’t even going to do something else urgently. He just sat to get a drink, taking his time and working on his datapad. He had heard her, she knew that. He was choosing not to answer her. Choosing. Only after finishing did he finally leave through a quiet half-circle of a door that curled out into the walls at the far side of the open health deck.

Now, Tami felt true terror start to take hold. Police wouldn’t have said ‘it will do’ about her qualifications. She wiggled her arms in the restraints until her body screamed at her for moving too much and forced her down again with exhaustion and pain. She felt her eyes turn wet, stinging the areas where frozen tears had burned her eyelids in the shuttle. The quiet infirmary became filled with fearful murmurs of worry and sniffling. She shook deeply, feeling utterly helpless. Alone.

“Please…”

Direly wishing she knew if her captain was even alive.

“Please…”

If anybody knew where she was.

“Please…”

If anybody out there would ever come.

* * *

Loose Ends - Part 2

The Great Recollection of Assets

* * *

Space tore open violently, an incandescent tear in reality ripping through it with hanging barbs of white light. The ship didn’t even wait for the edges to slowly draw open before it fired out of the rift. Claudia streaked into Saphiban glowing hot on her nozzles and trailing a vapour of rainbow tinted Æther behind her. Ignoring the normal protocols of remaining still until neighbouring ships could plot the new arrival’s location, she turned for the great metal monster of Port Medusa in orbit of the second planet and burned hard for the docks. Engines screaming silently in the black, she rocketed along the tops of the long trade queues waiting for an assigned port and aggressively ducked in ahead of the leading vessel, prompting other ships to take evasive action. Radio traffic around the station lit up. Angered traders and freelancers squawked their outrage at a ship ramming to the front, met with harsh demands from docking control.

Claudia ignored them all; Claudia only girded her frame and moved with an impassioned purpose. She rotated her thrusters and began to kill her speed as she turned, lining up with the shielded entry to a dock. Spotting an empty space, she simply pushed through, silence becoming a roar as her vectors held her up. Her presence sent ground crew scattering before she could drop landing gear and slam onto the heavy, meters thick deck of the docking level between two mining vessels. Seconds after the clunk-hiss of her forced landing on heavy hydraulics, there was an enormous crash of metal from beside her. A frozen shuttlecraft had disengaged from the hull’s starboard cargo mount, dropping twelve feet to the hangar floor and spraying cold mist from the shattered ice on its hull. Its underside dented on the impact, almost rolling onto its side before it toppled back over, becoming still.

Behind her, Claudia’s main rear doors ejected a pillar of vapour and began to open, managing only a meter in width before four figures squeezed and hurried out. Volatility Smile sprinted ahead across the decking to the bay’s standing terminal by the bow of the ship. Normally used for payment of docking fees, it offered the fastest connection to the station’s internal network. Not trusting the time lag of a wireless connection in the crowded station, Smile jammed the wire from her multiband into the terminal. She immediately began scouring local pickups and rescues reported during their time away.

Logic said someone else had helped their lost crew first, that they had simply been the second rescue to arrive. Experience, however, told her they might have still been the first. And so, as she let the search continue through hundreds of gigabytes of galactic data, she brought up her shipboard application and started to dig into the shuttle’s owner to look further into the origin of the job. The freighter accident that had started this whole mess couldn't have been intentional, she knew, but something was worrying her about the vessel simply being left behind after picking up Hair Trigger and Tami.

“Who would not recover something worth that much?” she muttered, voice terse and clipped, speaking only to herself, ignoring the growing circle of stunned creatures surrounding Claudia, or the distant shouting of Raw Deal regarding ‘over there!’ to someone else.

Behind her, Kerfuffle grabbed one of the shuttle’s icy panels and bodily tore it off to expose the innards. His eyes were focused, his movements strong. Dropping the hundred kilogram slab of metal like a toy, he squatted down to peer inside at the shuttle’s flight systems near the nose cone. He parsed its layout for a few moments, then grabbed a broken water pipe, braced himself, and tore it clean out of its housing to expose a bank of electronics behind it. Normally, treating any vessel so harshly might have offended his sensibilities. Right then, though, it was but a distant concern. He pointed at the exposed circuits. “In there, Miss; this model’s always got it below the sensor suite. Thinkin’ this pipe burst, lost the cooling for the heat sinks, blew them out. No wonder she froze.”

Beside him, a soft blue mane atop a pink head pushed itself and most of a unicorn's upper body into the shuttle’s hull, reaching where the griffon could not. Eleven started to try and reactivate some of the vessel’s systems and bypass the damaged components, dragging a couple new wires and tools from Claudia in with her. She was unusually quiet. Something about the intensity of the flight back had felt uncomfortable in a way she’d rarely known. She liked quiet. Normally she found it settling. In this case though, the quiet had been from absence. From loss. She had sat and watched Kiffle and Smile and Verbena stare at the ‘time until translation’ in Saphiban for hours, wrestling with a gut feeling that felt oddly familiar and yet totally new.

It had taken most of the trip to realise this was the first time in her new life that some of her friends might not come back to her again. It was eerily similar to how she had felt in the long, lonely wait on an abandoned planet for them to collect her after the Starw-

Eleven clenched her eyes shut.

“Miss? Everything okay in there? Is it too broken?”

“Like a really broken puzzle. And-” She wiggled and turned onto her back, her upper half entirely squeezed inside the shuttle. With a spark, something restarted, and a glow from the cockpit lit up the misted window. She sucked up the feelings, pushing them down. Deep down. Ball them up and just shove them neatly in a corner. Keep them quiet. Think quiet. Quiet.

“This design is inefficiently archaic. Even a normal pony would find it s-simple to fix. Unless you can’t get outside the ship. Or have a spare pipe. They couldn’t have done it.” She spoke with a muffled sigh inside the bow, and the strained tinge was all too clear. “G-Go on, Kiffle! I’ll find its brain.”

Kerfuffle looked down, one eye looking in at her, about to open his beak to offer again. She nodded more firmly. “Go!”

He paused, then stepped aside. “All right, Miss.”

Gripping into the door, its panel buckled from the ejection from Claudia, he yanked the emergency release and tore it open along its rails. Pushing his heavy frame up, he hunched inside the craft itself to investigate the interior once again now he had an atmosphere to work in.

Verbena Mint stood between the group, looking left to right between the crystal pony and the unicorn-griffon team. Her eyes felt wet with worry. She hadn’t dared let the others see her lapse in composure on the way back, doing what her half-sister always had.

“I-I’ll go speak with sis’! See if she knows anything!”

“All right, go!” Smile was firm and didn’t look up; Verbena couldn’t blame her. She turned and threw herself into a gallop, a gallop that lasted about two feet. Running directly into an immovable wall of flesh behind her, Verbena bounced, falling back onto her rump on the decking. Dizzed, Verbena looked up to see a sculpted, monstrous mask of glinting metal and marred plate stared down at her with eyes hidden by opaque glass inserts. Hanging decorations adorned the armour, the brass metal mixing with a dark earthy coat and powerful wings into a vicious, yet stoically still terror twice her height and eight times her mass. The beast’s mere presence was holding back an entire squad of security from approaching the bay.

Blitz made a low, rumbling sound in his throat. “The Director sent me to collect you and to kill the others.” He looked past the small earth pony. “I believe she was being hyperbolic.”

“YES SHE WAS!” Verbena shouted up at him, then took a breath. “Blitz! Tami and Hair Trigger. They’ve been taken. By someone. I-I don’t think it was a rescue. They’re gone.”

She gulped, seeing no change to the mask, but she’d been around Blitz long enough to know that meant nothing on its own. The quiet pause and then lash of his thick tail on the floor behind him told her everything.

“Your sister asked me to bring you to her. Come.”

He lowered down, resting a wing like a ramp that Verbena clambered up. “Thank you. Smile! I’ll be back, I promise! I’ll see what else we can do!”

She didn’t begrudge Claudia’s current command not looking up, before holding on tight as Blitz surged off along the hangar, scattering the crowds as he went. Verbena’s presence gave the security detail a reason to pause and simply observe. With the director's sister involved, none of them felt encouraged to dare act against Claudia's crew without double-checking.

Back inside the shuttle, Kerfuffle regretted leaving Eleven to pull the sensor-drive on her own, but he couldn’t sit still with this. Not after before. Not now that he could finally contribute something too. And so with a methodical process in mind, he started yanking up floor panels, pulling aside furniture and hunting for all the clues he could - even if it meant just running his claws over the hull to look for any damage or hidden compartments. Some clue. Something he’d missed on his checks. Anything. A frantic nature filled his movements; usually so careful and respectful, they were now filled with a growing rush and dire need.

Food packets. An empty bottle. Rugs and torn fabric. They had taken survival measures. Gel-filled gaps in the hull. They had repaired it as best they could.

A red hat.

He picked it up carefully, reverently tucking it into a pocket. The sight was crushing. So much of her in one object, but not her.

Eventually he started tracing the damage, wondering if it had been deliberate. He followed the pipe’s track from the broken area back. His guess had been right. Liquid leaking and a lack of functioning heating elements had pushed it beyond its design limit. The fault hadn’t been deliberate or left to occur on purpose though, that much he could tell.

One way or another, this had been an accident - at least to some extent. But it didn’t add up. They would have been reported collected by now. He thought it through. Accidental damage didn’t mean accidental cause. A vandal didn’t always know what exactly their hammer would do to a machine. That meant there was some other angle. Some other clues. Throwing away the burst pipes from his plans, he stopped tracing them and looked for something else, something someone who had planned this might want.

Outside, Smile rarely blinked. She scanned the contract of the job, having held off pinging the buyer yet as to the nature of what had happened. Every instinct told her to get in touch, to demand if the shuttle’s owner had been contacted by a search party, but she held herself back. Wariness instilled by months of living under the threat of Sidewinder made her uncertain. Instead she took the shuttle’s details and ran a background check on ownership.

The job had leased it to the crew as a temporary vessel. As expected, it was to be returned afterwards. The owner was a business, ‘Providence Holdings Inc.’. It didn’t seem to link to any site or observable activity. Private, no presence on the stock market. A false company? Or just a rich owner’s personal indulgences given official means to transport rare goods to their pleasure? The latter would fit. She dug further, cycling dates of issue, before noting one thing. The shuttle had only recently been assigned to Medusa despite Providence having had a presence there for years.

Given a hook, Smile tugged hard. She went back on the shuttle’s history, watching Kerfuffle strip away a seating arrangement to check the navigational computer for any sabotage as she read the serial number below an engine nacelle. Inputting it, she snarled at the lack of mandated free access owner logs in the Periphery, paid for the immediate vessel tracking application and drew up its ownership history.

“Kerfuffle!” she shouted out, reading through it. “This ship… It was built in the Confederacy ages ago.”

He looked out, nodding. “Yes, Missus Smiles. She’s an enduring one.”

Behind him, Eleven pulled out of the front, carrying the operating boxes for the sensor suite with her. “But it’s not original!”

Briefly, Kerfuffle and Smile looked over to her. Eleven showed them what she was holding. “I don’t know what everything in a ship is called. Or what models are which like you or Tami do, Kiffle.” She held up one box, then the other. “But I can tell when someone’s putting two things together that weren’t originally meant to be that way and had to make an ugly join.”

She gulped and gave a worried smile. “It’s like what I do. Whoever built it didn’t intend these to be used with it. But it’s VERY amateurish work.” She sniffed, adding her opinion of it quickly as though to distance her own talent from this example, giving the irregular weld lines and taped wires a disgusted look. “They even have spare ports for automation systems that aren't even being used left in there, and their electrical levels on it were waaaay excessive.”

There was a brief silence. Both Kerfuffle and Smile had ceased moving, and were staring at her. Eleven looked from one to the other and felt a pang of guilt. “Sorry, did I say something wrong? I just meant it looked cobbled together, not normal...”

“Like it came from a scrapyard, Miss?” Kerfuffle offered, his eyes narrowing.

Eleven nodded, looking lost. “Yes. Why? What’s-”

Smile brought up her multiband. “Manufactured in the Confederacy, off-record for some time, then turns up here shortly before the contract… Wait, I can trace this further, see where the original buyer was taking it. The shuttle disappearing in its records for a time like that? It’s a sign of an internal private buyer. Wait a minute and I’ll have it.”

Kerfuffle, however, wasn’t waiting.

The moment Eleven had confirmed it, he had started moving over to the shuttle. He heaved the entire cargo out through the rear doors with a clatter of glass and plastic, then lifted a floor panel. From the inside, he tore up the soft shock-resistant foam flooring, accessing a side of the engine that would never normally be checked. There would be no reason. Unlatching it, he dug into the nacelle from the other side, fervently looking for something. Something specific.

Smile paused, and finally managed to dredge up the ship that took the shuttle to the buyer originally. Looking back through its known destinations, one of them stood out to her only because she recognised the Confederate warning placed on its transit choices.

“Kavala…”

Eleven arched an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

There was an ugly crunch inside the shuttle. Kerfuffle emerged, carrying a short, heavy rod laden with wires and a connector valve. An engine immobiliser. A device intended to retard the start-up motor of any propulsion system on remote command. One he’d found in a confederate shuttle before in an equally unusual fashion. He held it up.

“It means, Miss, that we know exactly who took them.”

* * *

Captain Hair Trigger very much felt like lashing out at the nearest, meatiest object in her immediate vicinity.

She couldn’t see. The sack over her head was pulled suffocatingly tight - so tight about her neck it almost garroted her. Every time the talons she could feel on her body pulled or shoved, clumsy hooves betrayed her and she would stumble and drop. What was but a simple forced walk in darkness felt like an obstacle course of stinging pain as her recovering body attempted to let blood flow feel normal again.

Nearly a day, she guessed. Nearly a day strapped to a rack with tubes in her forelegs and the sweating, searing discomfort of regaining feeling inside a clammy suit. Nearly a day of passing in and out of consciousness. She'd seen faces, heard voices - old foes, recent friends, distant family - until she'd lost all track in the drifting between reality and dream.

The murmured, confused response she’d given to a question from the blurry shadows if she was feeling well enough to walk had then given rise to this violent drag. That, and the answer that those hazy shapes hadn’t belonged to those with her best interests in mind.

She heard the clink of metal cutlery. She smelled strong coffee. She felt the tile give way to smooth marble below her dragged legs. Walking was more of a stumble and her captors weren’t willing to wait. She tried to aim a bucking kick roughly for where certain spherical objects on her assailant might be but her limbs didn’t want to move that quickly. Her joints still felt frozen.

Eventually there was a clean swish of a quiet doorway, and Hair Trigger felt her balance upturned as someone threw her through it and down to the ground. A hand grasped her neck and shoved her face into the smooth, hard floor. Then, a cold metal barrel pressed behind her right hindleg’s knee.

“Try anything and you’ll wish you hadn’t.” A male voice. Experienced. Mature. Familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

Hair Trigger coughed, lying still and trying to snort the bag out of her mouth and nose. “Sounds like leftovers day at Craz-AGH!”

The butt of a gun rattled into her side, making her ribs flare up in a reminder that feeling had indeed returned to her body, before she felt herself being yanked up and the hood ripped from her head. Light cascaded into her vision and Trigger gasped and winced, looking away from the blinding source. Her eyes ached in their sockets. She blinked and looked around the floor; the light from off to the side of her vision arced and spread into long flaring lines. Even the texture around her seemed hazy, shifting on the walls in a way she couldn’t grasp.

A voice spoke out from in front of her, effortlessly confident and particular. Well intoned with a touch of bemusement. “Welcome back, Captain.”

Trigger froze in place. Squinting, she turned her eyes back to face forward. The room wasn’t bright, quite the opposite in fact. The floor and walls were a twinkling black marble. Angular for the most part, blocky when they weren’t, immaculately clean and minimalist like the inside of an obsidian monolith. A deep, heavy desk rose from the floor to her right, built of the same material. An aquarium rose up on her left, its quartz glass polished so well that the water and the pony-sized ghostly translucent eel within seemed to float in mid-air. After a moment, Trigger’s adjusting eyes saw text scrolling across some of the seemingly normal blocks. Unseen projectors or transparent displays were rolling stock market numerics and predictions around her, shifting and transferring from one block to another as they changed. The lower they got, the closer they came to the great desk in the centre.

The stunning, painful light however, had come from the far wall. Or rather, its window. From the very bottom of the floor to the fifteen foot high ceiling was an enormous concave bulge from the side of the starship itself. Completely see-through with only four running support pillars to break up its shape, it gazed out into the cascading deluge of whirling colour that was M-space. Surging past from right to left in streaks of impossible rainbows and violent eddies, it told of a mightily powerful ship hurtling through the unusual dimension at speeds Claudia could never hope to match. It was the sole source of light in what was clearly an office.

And the sole source that backlit the one who now spoke again.

“I’m happy you could make our scheduled meeting.”

A slender figure stood staring out into the immaterial vastness, cast in shadow by the bright visage of M-space before her. She was tall, clad in an offensively well-fitted black and white suit that lit from her horn’s red glow. The tinge of cream coat and a two-tone green mane and tail contrasted the tailoring.

Trigger knew immediately that what she’d thought to be a confused dreaming image was indeed reality. The recognition was immediate. Even if it hadn’t been clear, the sheer arrogance to stand that way -the exact same way she’d once met in the past- was enough to let her know precisely who had found them and let her anger surge to the surface.

“Where is Tami you obsessed rich-bitc-HRRN!”

Hair Trigger had been standing up, but a rifle butt to the back of her hindleg dropped her fragile, still shivering body back to the floor. She winced, and looked up into the twisted, scarred face of a dark red hippogriff.

Garwyn didn’t hesitate. The finely suited hippogriff reached down and yanked Hair Trigger back up, faced her to Asset Margin again and planted his hands on her shoulders. Asset was approaching, swaggering with forelegs almost crossing over one another - somepony who could afford to take her time, to revel in life’s little moments, until she came just outside of hoof’s reach of Trigger.

“Oh, your pilot’s around. Alive, you’ll be glad to know. You should be thanking me really, neither of you would be without our intervention. I don’t think any other ship was closer than a few days from finding you.”

Trigger snarled back, not entertaining for a moment showing any gratitude. “I want to see her, I want you to prove sh-”

She gasped again as Garwyn struck her side with his open palm. His other claw grabbed her hood as she buckled over, wrenching her neck to keep her from falling over. “You don’t get to make any negotiations this time.” His voice was brimming with pent up aggression. Trigger could sense he was being held back by orders from striking again and again. But she also saw something else: a smirk was growing on Asset's face the more she pushed about Tami.

Instinct kicked into her cold, clouded brain. Neither Asset nor Garwyn knew Tami as anything more than a pilot in her service. They knew nothing of how close they were.

Of how much they could hurt Trigger by possessing her.

It went against everything Hair Trigger knew and desired to not demand over and over. She wanted to bargain and shout and refuse to do a damn thing until they let her see the hippogriff. Even so, she realized she had to reel back on it - to keep herself in the dark about Tami and just hope with all she had that her pilot was all right. It hurt to imagine, to not know, but she knew it had to be done to protect her pilot.

She met Garwyn’s eyes, then looked back at the smirking unicorn standing easily in the centre of the office. Asset made a rich, deep-voiced laugh and wandered off toward her desk, seemingly happy with Trigger being silenced on the matter. Trigger noticed with some satisfaction she still moved with a limp.

“I see I’ve not stopped being a pain in your ass in a while then?” She tried to make a chuckle, but her throat felt thick and clumsy. “Hope you think of me every time you sit down for the crap you pulled on us!”

Asset paused, and Trigger saw a steaming mug lift from the table and tilt toward her.

“That mouth will get you killed someday, Captain. You know, last time we met we got on famously. We shared morning coffee. We talked of leadership. We were in and out in under fifteen minutes; that’s fast in my world. It’s a pity you had to decide to be a little shit and ruin it all on the way out.” Her voice took on a poisonous, spitting anger, and Hair Trigger felt some subdued pleasure in knowing the mare was still so seethingly furious about losing. Asset whirled on the spot and glared daggers at her, the hoity expression clenching into an affronted disdain, her voice biting. “You didn’t really think I was going to ignore you forever, did you? Someone who put such a stain on my record on Kavala? Do you have any idea, any idea at all, how many competitors I’ve had to fight off in the wake of what you did? How much financial loss I incurred?”

Hair Trigger coughed and breathed out hard, glaring daggers at her with a hoof gesturing around at the extravagant room on the high performance ship. “Oh, I’m sure you’re struggling.”

Asset raised a hoof quickly as Trigger felt Garwyn raise his fist to strike again. The motion stopped him in his tracks. “Money is not the question. It is credibility, Captain. When a nobody from the Periphery can humiliate you, rivals start gathering. I would have come after you sooner but suffice to say I’ve had to handle more immediate problems first. Thankfully, now that I’ve reasserted my position-”

She spread her forelegs and did a small pirouette around while coming closer to Trigger. Her short ponytail and long fringe strands were so starched they barely moved. Pausing, she finished by kneeling down to Trigger’s height. “I could finally tie up some loose ends and make it very clear that you don’t just get to cash out and walk in this game.”

Asset went to tap her on the cheek, but Trigger shook her head away from it with a snort. The motion suddenly made her aware she didn’t have her hat with her. “Yeah? Almost killing an entire freighter to catch us didn’t seem like some game to me. Those were innocents you crazed bitch!”

The trillionaire scoffed and snorted. “Oh, you think I did that? Oh no, Captain. What do you take me for? Come, sit!”

She trotted away, and Trigger felt a shove from behind. Glowering back at the barely restrained Garwyn, she wandered in toward one of the jet black seats. Sitting wasn’t any more comfortable. The pressure on her skin was making her feel fragile, like paper that could rip as the swelling all over died down. Squirming, it took her a second before realising this office was almost identical in shape to the one on Kavala, just varied in its elaborate tricks. ‘How neurotically egotistical did you have to be?’ she thought.

Asset sat ahead of her in a tall-backed chair. She stared over, grinning smugly and rotating her chair left and right slightly. “I recall you dislike my coffee, so none for you I’m afraid.”

“Good, thought I was going to get tortured again,” Hair Trigger spat back at her without blinking, and felt rage elevate at Asset’s casual laugh.

“Garwyn asked to, you know? He’s a little peeved at you from last time. His brother’s not let him once forget losing to you and your griffon-friend in a fistfight, has he?”

“Every time we spar.” Garwyn sat behind Trigger, arms crossed. She could see he still bore a scar on his face. His beak looked off centre; it hooked a little as he stared down at her. “Just give me a reason.”

Asset chuckled. “Perhaps in time. But anyway, you asked about my coming for you! Honestly, it wasn’t all that complicated. Give a quick job again and again and lightly deny others until you took it, immobilise the shuttle, whisk you over after stun grenading the crew compartment and-” She clapped her hooves loudly. “-there we go. I didn’t expect to have to use my own vessel’s private transponder to relocate it out here but, well, I suppose it paid off. The freighter, I regret to tell your little conspiracy growing mind, was a legitimate accident. At least, I think so… Who knows, I hear a lot of people want your head these days. Maybe I crossed paths and didn’t know it.”

“You’d love to hear you’re not even top five.” Trigger leaned back in the chair.

“Please.” Asset winked. “I’ve done my research this time. I think I’m at least in the top three at this point. But right now, I’m the one you should be concerned about. Let’s see…”

She pressed a button, and Trigger groaned as the obsidian behind Asset lit up, hurting her eyes. The twist to avoid looking stung even more. She just wanted to lie down again, feeling weariness at even a short journey creeping in, but she doubted she could walk more than a few feet, let alone try to make an escape.

The blocks formed an adaptive screen, displaying a scrolling bill of credits.

MRSR-04 Mining Drone x5 - 60,000,000c

Aether Class Yacht (Platinum-Edition) - 457,000,000c

Confederate PN-01 Shuttlecraft - 700,000c

Planetdrop Series Modular Colony Warehouse - 2,700,000c

Jump Scrambler Republic Police Model - 15,000,000c

84mm by 618mm High-Explosive Rounds x 1,600 - 2,112,000c

Fuel Expenditures - 4,100,000c

Traffic Collision Insurance - 315,000,000c

Hair Trigger scrolled her eyes over every forming line of the bill, feeling an intense sense of pride grow, moreso as she caught Asset’s frustrated, irked expression as the bill of their last encounter continued. But then the listings began to get rather specific.

Audio Systems Purge - 82,000c

Crew Medical Expenditures - 900c (Insurance Excess Minimum)

CEO Medical Expenditures - 900,000c (Private with cosmetic work)

“Oh I see you treat them VERY well compared to yourself, Ass-et.”

Asset spoke rather disinterestedly. “They signed the contract.”

Downtime Loss of Profit - 14,451,120,002c

Novalite Leather Suitcase (Black) - 2,300c

“You HAVE to be joking.”

“It was a very good suitcase, Captain,” Asset Margin bitterly commented, and let it continue.

Complimentary Coffee - 20c

Baking Soda - 150mg - 8c

Tomato Sandwich - 5c

“Oh COME ON!” Hair Trigger thumped the solid desk, then wished she hadn’t.

“I am merely surmising all of the payment due to the responsible party. It would be unprofessional of me to ignore the fine details of-”

“It would be unprofessional of me not to tell you to kiss my still distinctly un-shot ass.” Trigger spat the words over the table.

Asset paused, and Trigger saw the mug shake again as the unicorn fought to control her own temper. She took a breath, then leaned forward on the table to take a long sip of her coffee, but her eyes betrayed an internal fury and her voice took a more precision strike of whipcord cadance. “-of proper compensation. I shall presume you will pay now?” She raised an eyebrow before grinning at the anger on Hair Trigger’s face, her own temper simmering down a touch. “Oh come now, Captain. I’m not unreasonable. I’ve left the anger to Garwyn and Kreer. It’s only around fifteen billion credits really, and I’ve even left out the dozens of billions I lost in share sales and wetwork I had to conduct to keep my stability on Kavala. Shall we discuss recompense then?”

Hair Trigger held her mocking gaze. This was a show trial; Asset knew Trigger couldn’t produce that sort of money. She was enjoying this, and Trigger had no wish to play into her games. She kept quiet. Asset only smirked at her.

“Struggling? Tried down the back of whatever mangy couch you must have on that rusty ship?” Asset winked. “Can’t call your business friend for a little handout? What about Sweet Alyssum? Oh I’m sure she’ll bail you out to the sum of her entire quarterly earnings right now on that miserable station. Shall I give her a call?”

She wiggled a hoof beside her ear, then took another long sip of coffee, making a horrific sucking sound into it while waiting for a response. In the silence that followed there was nothing but the undulating warble of M-space warping around the hull. Eventually Asset sighed at Hair Trigger’s furious stare and shrugged. “Well then, I suppose we’ll have to discuss my repayment options more formally then. Thankfully for you, I predicted that you’d be a stubborn little brat and had one prepared earlier.”

Asset’s voice grew into a touchy, spitting annoyance. She lifted a remote idly in her magic, clicking. One of the jet black blocks fizzled and reformed. Trigger felt her heart clench as Tami’s smiling face looked back at her. The photo she knew her pilot used as photo ID. Qualifications ran down the bottom of it.

“My mining operation has grown a little understaffed as of late from recent expansion. I could always use another drone... pilot. So I’m more than happy to have a newcomer into the workforce as contracted servitude to pay off your debts to me. It’s legal on Kavala, you know? If one cannot repay what they owe? I mean, I effectively paid for the modern labour laws there so I would know!”

Her smile turned deadly. “If she’s half the pilot she was in your escape, oh I’m sure she’ll be able to work it off before retirement age. Maybe. Compound interest can be a bitch, can’t it?”

Hair Trigger fought hard to not launch herself over that desk. To not use her magic to tilt the coffee into Asset’s face. To not call her a savage bastard. She couldn’t. She could not dare let them think of Tami as anything other than a piloting asset. Even so, the mere thought chilled her blood all over again. Trigger knew Tami well enough to understand what such a thing would do to her. A lifetime sentence, cut off from everything she loved, doing nothing of passion and denying the wanderlust Trigger knew she sought, all while facing brutal, soulless treatment.

The thought was too terrible to contemplate.

She bristled. “You want us to pilot your drones? Be your little toys to laugh at on shifts?”

Asset Margin was barely listening. Her desk had beeped, and from its surface, an integrated screen rose out of it to display something for her. Trigger could see an incoming call on it, a fluid animation rolling waiting for a pickup. Reading it, Asset smiled. “Oh? Not ‘us’. Just her, as amusing as getting Kreer to be your floor manager would be. You? Oh I found a better use for you.”

“Let me guess. String me up? Torture me to death? Airlock me?”

Asset laughed, her deep, rich voice sounding oh-so enthused by the thought. “Oh you are so dramatic. Nothing so grandiose. I’m a businessmare, not a tyrant. I have something else in mind for you, but, alas, we have gone over time for our little standup, shall we say? I have a meeting to attend regarding just what to do with you, so I’ll be sure to let you know what’s happening as soon as I can. I’m sure its arrival won’t be too long. I’ll have the contract for Tammani drawn up, and you can rest and recover until we arrive.” Asset stood up from her desk and gave Trigger a sudden snorting look of anger. “This is what happens when you screw with me, Captain. I was never going to let you go for the shit you put me through, nor your crew, trust me I have things for the others too in due time! Take her away, Garwyn dear. Take that wretched little midget out my office!”

“Ma’am.” Garwyn didn’t hesitate or blink an eye at his boss’ anger, dragging Hair Trigger from the chair with savage strength. She was thrown down and shoved across the office floor before she could recover enough to turn and kick out at him. Hair Trigger felt her clothing slide on the marble and groaned as she got up. She breathed in, out, in, out, and felt a nasty streak turn up. She saw red. She swung around.

“HEY, ASSHOLE!”

Asset Margin whipped her head up from being about to accept the call. “WHAT!?”

Hair Trigger just gave her best shit-eating grin. “Nothing, just wanted to see if you responded to Ass-hole.”

Asset almost looked about ready to hurl the lamp from her desk, and only ceased when Garwyn suckerpunched Trigger’s gut for her, grabbed her, and flung her across the room. The unicorn thumped into the doorframe; she was promptly grabbed by her clothing and then forced back into the stifling black hood. Once again she found herself being dragged across polished marble, back to the dark isolation of the brig, with Asset's smug laugh ringing in her ears.

* * *

Port Medusa’s level four disembarkment terminal was still running more slowly than it ought to. Crowds pushed past huddles of bored, impatient visitors still waiting for their cancelled flights to be rescheduled out on the higher arrival deck. Aromatic street food stalls had been dotted against every wall, while some opportunistic marketeers had even set out their wares in the middle of the terminal floor or around the walls. Here and there, floating security drones broke up fights with barked threats. The cavernous terminal reeked of sweat and oil from its clamour, mixed with spice and grease from the street food, giving the air a thick, artificial cluster and making a normally very open space feel very close indeed.

Yet amidst its congregation of all species, age and walks of life stepped a figure in a dark sweater and jacket, a hood pulled up about his head. Sorting his saddlebags, he made its way through the crowds past the ramp of a landed vessel and followed the faded paint on the deck toward the check-in desk.

Thirty impatient minutes later, he finally moved up toward the very drained receptionist. An exchange of ID was performed. A declaration of armament was given. Papers were stamped.

As he waited for the papers to be handed back, his head turned to the colossal windows behind the desk. They were thirty feet tall, curving slightly to match the shape of the station's ring-shaped hangar level.

“Is there anything more I can help you with?”

A multiband rose, bearing an image of a Pioneer vessel. “Where is the cargo vessel, Claudia?”

* * *

Gold rim passed within millimetres of white ceramic. It did not touch. Slowly, it tilted and a clean, quiet stream of thin orange fruit tea flowed from a spout into the chalky cup. It was gentle, precise and elegant in its motion, and almost silent.

And it entirely mismatched the current ambience of Director Sweet Alyssum’s boudoir lounge upon Medusa.

“You can’t do nothing!” Verbena Mint slammed her hooves on the table, making the formal place setting of tea judder and shift. “Trigger’s one of your employees, and Tami’s my best friend out here!”

“Putting aside the amount of times I feel like I have this conversation every day-” Alyssum held the pot steady until the cup stopped shaking, then continued. “-I did not say I would do nothing. I said that there was little I could do.”

Verbena narrowed her eyes. “Don’t play words with me to my face! I’m not an employee begging for a handout! We have proof! Come on, you’ve got a fleet gathering with Karme-”

Suddenly, her half-sister’s voice crept upward, and Alyssum sat up straighter. “Your foreknowledge of that deal is regrettable, Verbena. Regardless of the situation with a single ship I will not reveal my entire hoof to the galaxy to handle one petty revenge from a far off rival. I. Am. Sorry. But this is the Periphery and you knew that coming out here. I will not ruin this sector’s chances to come together by jumping the gun on this, and I will not have you making an outburst of that aloud where others might hear! Am I understood?”

She didn’t expect Verbena to kowtow and apologise or even agree or ‘understand’. Alyssum was quietly proud to see that she did not.

“Then what CAN you do?”

‘That’s better’, thought Alyssum. Verbena made to speak, but the triple bleep of her comm-panel on the antique desk at the other side of the colourful, elaborately carpeted and tapestry-ridden room caught her attention. She carefully sipped her tea. “I did ask not to be disturbed. Can you remind them of that, Verbena?”

The young earth pony huffed at the delay, moving over to jab the button with a hoof. “What!?”

A startled receptionist replied, “Volatility Smile, Kerfuffle and er-one other here to see you, Direc-er-Miss?”

Verbena locked stares with Alyssum across the room and spoke without breaking eye contact. “Send them in immediately.”

She let go of the communicator and advanced back to staring at her sister across the table, her own tea sitting completely untouched. Alyssum didn’t move anything other than to tilt the cup upward in a long drag of the fragrant, sweet-tart drink, her eyes remaining thin and inscrutable. There were thirty seconds of silence between them ahead of the bloop from the door signifying visitors.

“Come in!” Verbena moved aside, leaving room beside the table and the heavy fabric cushions surrounding it.

While the room itself was layered in fabric, criss-crossing rugs and hanging drapery, the door ground and hissed when it opened; heavy machinery characterized every level of Port Medusa, no matter the status of a given deck’s occupant. Behind it came the trio. Volatility Smile strode in confidently, followed by Kerfuffle and then Eleven. The pink unicorn wore a large cyan hoodie over her head, looking like an exceptionally reluctant and moody teenager.

“Director, we-”

“Verbena has already briefed me, Miss Smile. She got your message about the identity of the kidnapper some minutes ago.” Alyssum put down her tea and gave a flat look to her half-sister. “Indeed we have just been discussing it.”

Smile stopped short. ‘Stars bless that young mare’, she thought. The receptionist had been aiming to deny them for a moment. “Then I’m sure you’re aware of the severity of the situation, Director. Asset Margin is not only a rival attempting to pull one over you by taking two of your employees, she did so after attempting it in your own backyard.”

Alyssum remained quiet, watching Smile, before looking down. “As I recall, I suppose I should say Acting-Captain Smile, your deal that went awry with Asset Margin was against my own recommendation to stick to the Periphery and not to indulge in the rivalries and temptations of private system owners amidst the empires. And that this plot was a result of your personal interactions with her unrelated to me. Would that be correct?”

“Sis!” Verbena shouted out, but Kerfuffle’s voice was louder.

“This ain’t just about contracts, Missus Alyssum!”

The outburst was short, and even the griffon seemed surprised by the effect his own voice’s volume and power had for a moment in silencing the room. He quickly regained his footing. “This is two folk who don’t deserve this gettin’ taken from you and us. You know the sorts of stuff going on with us these days.”

Beside him, Eleven looked up with wide eyes before sucking in air and planting one hoof down. Her own voice was gentler, more appealing to an emotional pull. “The Captain and Tami are what keep that ship together, Mis-Mrs? Just as much as Smile and Kiffle. They’ve helped me stay away from Sidewinder-”

Smile raised her eyebrow. “Eleven, should you-”

But the pink unicorn pulled down her hoodie, letting her ears spring up. She turned her head to gesture at the two with her. “They and the others kept me safe from a group who wants to take me away too, Mrs Director! And they did it because they just felt it was right - they didn’t come asking you to help with it then! That’s how good they can do, and-and I don’t think you would want to lose them so, please! Please give them a chance!”

Kerfuffle looked down at her in shock. Eleven being willing to reveal herself and her situation to push the issue? His drive momentarily hiccuped in admiration of her heart, even if he knew there was little chance Sweet Alyssum hadn’t figured her out days ago. He nodded, picking up from her. “An’ it matters to us, Mrs. And it matters to your own sister.”

Kerfuffle looked over at Verbena, seeing the earth pony quivering, worried like any of them. “An’ you don’t let a sister down. Ever. Not unless you wanna’ lose all respect forever.”

Eleven reached up, stroking the griffon’s arm with a hoof. Smile looked back pensively. She didn’t expect emotional plays would work with Alyssum, but she couldn’t have stopped those two if she had tried.

Sweet Alyssum took one more long draught of tea, and inhaled its scent.

“Asset Margin has, since your last visit, substantially enhanced her operations.”

She opened her eyes and touched her unlatched multiband on the glass table, making it project a small holographic image of Kavala and the substantial asteroid field around it. “I don’t know if it’s where she’s taking your friends, but it is most likely. Kavala is her fortress after all and the only place I know of where she exhibits utter control… and where she needs to be seen to make an example. Since you last visited the mining operations have increased, despite her facing heightened tensions from her corporate rivals, and I have observed her taking new holdings in unspecified trade, highly protected and not listed on public markets. Very ‘know a friend of a friend’ type, and one I have not yet penetrated. With its profits, she has set up a new station in orbit handling the drone fleet, security drone perimeters running automated protocols that the Confederacy really aren’t too happy about and recently spent almost thirty billion on something I cannot actually determine.”

Alyssum pointed to the new station amidst the asteroid field, and a construction convoy moving near the moon. “She may not have the influence - the soft-power - I do, but I won’t deny she certainly has the financial advantage. And that’s why there is actually little I can do. I can find her hidden accounts out here and crash them, but that’s of little consequence to someone who makes their fortune from in-system mining. I can provide you with her recent purchases I identified, but I cannot go sending hired pirate ships into a war on Confederate territory, particularly not as they would have to pass through the Republic en-route at this moment in time.”

Smile pursed her lips, sitting on a cushion to observe the hologram. “We’ll take that at least. What you sound like you're telling us is that getting in there is impossible, and that we won’t know where to even start looking once there. There’s a whole planet, and now even more of an orbital infrastructure”

“That won’t stop us tryin’, Missus.” Kerfuffle quickly added. “They would for us.”

“Quite.” Alyssum reached down to the table’s touchscreen control, sending the data Smile’s way. “But you’re a single unarmed ship with - forgive me for the insult but I saw your landing - a non-specialised pilot and only three aboard.”

“Four,” Verbena techily muttered to herself.

Sweet Alyssum ignored the comment. “I can’t stop you from trying. I can even provide you with some aid in the form of intelligence. But at present I see a suicide mission, Volatility Smile.” Alyssum put down her tea, sat up, and gave a very firm, very frank look with a level, mature tone. “Perhaps it’s time to cut your losses? You of all ponies I know are familiar with the concept.”

There was silence in the room. Verbena looked horrified at the suggestion. Eleven held on to Kerfuffle, who glared with an intensity matched only by his last visit to the director. Volatility Smile stood still. She met Alyssum’s eyes head on. There was a subtle tremble about her, and then her mouth opened with great care and precise volume.

“Thank you for your time, Director.”

She turned, trotting toward the door. Something about her declaration, her motion, carried the others along with her. Kerfuffle looked distinctly unhappy, Eleven glanced between them all as though wondering why there wasn’t more. Several awkward seconds later, Verbena was the only one left by the door itself. She gave her half-sister a disappointed look.

“I can’t believe you.”

Alyssum caught her eye with a firm, meaningful look. “You ought to.”

“They’re still going to try, you know that right? Whether or not you believe they can!”

Verbena left, slamming a hoof into the controls to close the door behind her, leaving Sweet Alyssum alone. The director took a sip of tea in the refreshing quiet, then keyed her multiband, tapping into the cameras in her own reception area.

“On the contrary, my beloved sister. I’m rather hoping they do.”

She put down her empty cup and watched Smile go from a maintained walk to a head down, determined canter toward the elevator, shoving a stallion out of the way to collect her rifle, pack, and get out of there. Alyssum smiled to herself.

“Oh dear. I think I may have pushed her a little too hard.”

* * *

“Now arriving: Kavala.”

As though on command, the cascading aether of faster than light travel sharply cut to a sedate black on all sides of Asset’s vessel, a transition so quick and sharp that Tami instinctively braced on the gurney for the jolt. None came. Instead, the ship glided through the translation from M-space to its destination with the grace of a ballet dancer. Tami scarcely felt a thing below her in the deck.

The curved starboard corridor of black marble she was being rolled down was lined with long rounded rectangular windows of clear polymer out to the void, each of them embossed with injected golden lines forming images of alicorns, wyrms and other magical beasts. She’d barely noticed them before with the light of M-space, but in the black they stood out and contrasted to flourish magnificent artwork along every meter of the long, spacious route. Briefly, Tami had wondered why a vessel had such a wide running compartment on its side, until she’d realised that this was a pathway for staff to roll giant tables, grand pianos and lavish sculptures down to events. She’d already been taken past side doors to a grand ballroom that would give the Silver Dome serious rivalry in its opulence. This was no rescue vessel, nor a military ship. It was an enormous yacht, a luxury tour ship for the megarich of the kind she’d often wanted to see. Just not like this.

Every muscle in Tami's body still stung. They had removed the heating suit an hour ago and instead dressed her a thick set of padded navy blue overalls. Ill-fitting, they pinched at the waist but, along with a heat-retaining blanket, were keeping her shivering body steady. That said, Tami had a worrying feeling as to how uniformly mass produced the overalls looked, like something she’d seen deck workers wearing before. Worrisome speculations as to her captors' intentions whirled through her mind, making her close her eyes. Whining, she turned her head to see the quiet stars, just for a moment to-

“Be quiet, girl.”

The simple words shocked Tami out of her distractionary tactics, and instead mounting fear twisted her gut. They weren't loud, but they were forceful. They carried a rough, threatening undertone that clashed with the sophistication of the luxury vessel. Kreer. She’d figured out who it was after her muddled brain had finally put together the clues and remembered what the others had told her. Kavala was the final confirmation of who had taken them. The massive griffon was right behind her, his movements eerily quiet. She’d been surprised to not be tied up or cuffed. He wasn’t even armed. It quickly occurred that she posed no threat to him; his physical presence was all the security necessary.

The outer passage of the ship led to a curved door of gilded frames, large enough for a small vehicle. Yet Tami could see the mandated warning stickers by its control panel, indicating that it was a sealant door, one that would lead to a disembarkment chamber with an airlock. It slid apart gracefully, and beyond it Tami witnessed the true extravagance of wealth. What on most ships would simply be a utilitarian compartment beside an airlock was an enormous entrance lobby. A trickling fountain of a suggestive, fluffy deer, spouting water from her pursed lips rose up from the very centre of a patterned and paved slab floor. To her left, arching staircases ran up each to a higher level, like a mansion’s main hall rather than some mere receiving gantry for onboarding guests.

Fighting the urge to whimper as she realised this meant a departure from the ship, Tami glanced to her right instead. Through the heavy glass surrounding the airlock she could already see the gold and orange planet glowing in the dark, spotted and surrounded by a whirling cascade of asteroids on all sides that became increasingly clear as they closed in. They’d arrived at the same unique jump point Claudia had once used, the planet’s loophole from Confederate law, and Tami could see massive cargo freighters laterally shifting to permit this VIP vessel’s entry through the narrow corridor. She hid within those details, evading the terror at her situation gnawing inside by stargazing and following the whizzing drones that surrounded the space lane they kept clear of asteroids. She saw yellow-armed handlers that could drag the shifting rocks around or recover smashed drones, star-shaped omni-directional ‘roid-cutters’ with powerful orange beams, dull gun-metal grey brutes the size of cruisers that acted as mobile recharging and repair stations with flat hulls to mount and land smaller craft upon.

As Asset’s yacht rolled and turned them down toward an auxiliary pathway in the cluttered, dangerous field, she saw something else. Something new.

In the inner layers she could see the same orbital stations with their reaching cables and long, thin arms extending from bonsai-tree shaped hulls: freighter mounting points and docking tethers. Beyond them the rolling, knurled cylinders of reprocessing plants spun and lines of waiting vessels dotted the void between them all - Kavala’s gargantuan mining operation. But between it all she spotted trios of small remote vessels gliding on smooth patrols, not as erratic and active as the mining drones, these had larger vector engines on each of the four sides like a cross around a central sphere, and as one group passed by them she saw what could only be a traversable twin-cannons mounted in a rotating gimbal at its centre. There weren’t many, but Tami winced as she easily identified the hole in drone security from last time had been closed.

They escorted the ship’s arc into the asteroid field with tiny puffs of vapour from their engines as Tami felt their destination change. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the rocks and planet whirl out of sight. She’d expected to go to the surface, but now it all silently swung away.

“What? What’s happening, where are we going?” She sat up, the motion causing her to gasp from lack of breath.

Kreer interrupted. “Quiet. You’re not going planetside. You’ve got other plans waiting for you.”

Tami turned and looked up at him with wide eyes, her pupils shaking. He didn’t look back, but just stared above her head. Her imagination did leaps of horror, but there were scant seconds before she finally saw where the ship was headed.

Through several side routes in the orbital field, cleared by drones for smaller vessels than the ‘cargo monsters’, Tami could see another station hanging in orbit, as large as any of the refuelling or mineral processing facilities. But while they were blocky, modular and at best had sheets of pre-made curved metal on their bulbous tops, this was cohesive in its design, with no prefabricated modules, universal sockets or mismatching silhouettes of different eras on its greater silhouette. It looked as though it had been hand-crafted as a singular, one off creation. Something by a designer who had an artistic vision rather than quotas to meet. Each side of its top third curved over in great arches like the pauldrons of some ancient suit of armour. Lines of clear glass rolled across them, shining through to layers of internal levels behind them with castle-like protrusions and towers rising up from between them, making for a maze of observation decks and sensor arrays, shaped to look like an orchard of trees around the bases of the towers from afar and shielded between the thick shoulders of the upper hull.

The lower section was made of two great monoliths of hull with an adjoining bridge, forming an ‘H’ shape. Their monolithic sides were built from vertical flat extensions, layered and thickened until they reminded her of an uneven stack of paper standing on their end. All of it bore a long worn bronzed pallor that once might have shone in gold and brilliant cream paint. The whole station was ringed with docking lights of sapphire blue guiding arrivals into the upper and lower gaps of the ‘H’ underside where she could see great bays and docking gantries. Crystal shaped elevators traversed on the outside of the hull, shunting vertically and horizontally around cavernous spaces and glinting when they caught the light of the moon.

Yet as Asset’s yacht closed in toward it on a docking vector and drew closer to one of the extended gantries for large vessels, the sheer natural beauty began to taper off and Tami saw the truth.

It was devastated. Her eyes had been enraptured by the greater shapes, but she could see holes in the station’s hull between the restored bays, void-ridden compartments open to the black. One of the pauldrons was shattered, a dozen decks inaccessible behind it. Racks and racks of mining drones were haphazardly bolted onto recognisable Confederate mounting points, disgustingly inconsistent with the aesthetic. The art that had formed the shape of the upper docking bay was now an ugly, automated assembly line in perpetual motion to repair and replenish the drone fleet. It all almost prevented her from finally identifying what the station really was.

A great moulded symbol worn down by time and erosion was emblazoned on the middle join of the large ‘H’ shape, a symbol she’d not seen since her time within Æther Corps on Equestria’s moon. Two alicorns in a spiral around one another, both of burnished hull plate to stand out in separate colours when the reflected light from Kavala or it’s shattered moon caught it. Portions of the symbol looked bent and torn. Then she realised, almost all of the damage was on one side of the station, the side facing the exploded moon itself, giving Tami the last confirmation she needed.

It was a pre-wyrm orbital station. Asset had restored, no, ruined a pre-wyrm artifact of rare significance to expand her drone operations. There were perhaps only single digits of such pieces left intact in the entire galaxy.

Affronted, Tami almost missed that the station wasn’t alone in this separate area of Kavala’s operation. Hanging in space perhaps twenty kilometers distant from it Tami could see something unusual in the distance. It was large, the size of a small station unto itself, merely dwarfed by the monolithic giant beside it, shaped like a massive satellite dish. Angled downwards with great mirrored frames extended from its edges, it gave the impression of a colossal chandelier hanging in the darkness. It was surrounded by what Tami recognised as science vessels, their articulated arms working on its unusual technology.

She hadn’t a clue what it was, and Tami knew well that she was a passionate expert at void-structure identification.

“Admiring my latest commission there, Tammani?”

Tami froze at the sound of the voice, her body feeling rusty and unwilling as she turned to see what had to be Asset Margin looking directly at her. The tall, green maned unicorn wore business attire, lacking only the jacket, leaving her black waistcoat and brilliantly clean and smooth shirt visible below. Tami could see its tips lined with something, like a gentle hint of silver, a soft highlight of expense. If the tone hadn’t been clear enough, Tami saw the limp, remembering her captain’s grinning story. With the door below the stairwells closing with a hiss, she was flanked by two others, both female, one an earth pony carrying the suit’s jacket for her, the other a zebra rapidly working on a multiband.

“It-It’s…” Tami stammered.

“Delightful, I know.” Asset strode on long legs around the fountain and sauntered closer, patting Tami’s chest, turning her to look at the station again and standing far too close for the hippogriff to be comfortable. “Repurposed from a colony to emergency use when Kavala began work against the Wyrm threat, then left derelict when the moon exploded. They called it The Sun of the Night. Ostentatious perhaps.”

Tami briefly considered the gilded framing and marble across the mansion of the yacht.

Asset continued, “It’s a nightmare to buy stations into Kavala, so I had the simply brilliant idea to take an old relic and use it as a spare hull. Drones don’t care if half of it’s sealed to the black now, do they? And I promise...”

She leaned in to whisper. Tami screwed her eyes closed.

“The insides are just as splendid; you’ll enjoy your time flying for me there. I am told you love your ships. I expect great things from you.”

Tami gulped, looking away from her and trying to muster words. “The… The Captain, where is-”

“And I presume you saw my other little project waiting just off it?” Asset pointed to the satellite. “Well I can’t say too much but… Well, it’s wonderful what you can dig up on Kavala sometimes.”

She purred a small laugh out and clapped Tami’s back, making the hippogriff go stiff with pain as her recovering hypothermia stung through her body. “As for your ‘captain’...”

She turned and gestured to one of her aides. The zebra spoke, looking panicked. “She… She will be here in about five minutes, Miss. I sent the request as you asked to Kreer to-”

Asset’s brow stiffened. “I recall asking you some time ago to have her ready for my being here at eleven shipboard time, Amari…”

Amari gulped, noticing her earth pony companion shuffling away from her. “It’s still five to eleven though, she’ll-”

“And I am here. Amari, Amari, Amari - when I say I want someone there for when I am there, I mean when I am there. The schedule moves around me, not you! Do you not think, filly?” Asset groaned. “In fact, get out of here! You’re fired! Go!”

“Miss-”

“GO!” Asset roared across the hallway. “Get out of my sight!”

The zebra, terrified, turned and galloped away up the gilded staircase behind her. Tami, cowed by the shout as much as the poor mare, heard Asset grumble and was surprised to see the unicorn looking at her as she spoke. “Typical. The day somepony invents a drone-assistant…” She rubbed her face with a hoof. “Kreer, open recruitment for a new intern. There’s always more where that came from.”

Tami swallowed deeply, risking a nod to placate the short-tempered trillionaire.

“Ma’am,” the huge griffon rumbled, tapping onto his oversized multiband. “Garwyn’s coming up now.”

No sooner than he spoke did the doors opposite where she had come from slid silently apart, and Tami’s eyes erupted in size. Behind them was a red hippogriff, a similar shade to her own captor, but she barely noticed, her eyes spotting only the blue coated unicorn staggering ahead of him in restraints. They both saw one another at the same time.

“Tami!”

“Captain!” Tami’s legs moved before she could think, clumsily dropping from the gurney. She hit the floor, gasped, and bounded forward. Emotions swelled in her. Relief. Safety. Gratitude for saving her life. Enough to drive the weak, poorly hippogriff to throw herself into Hair Trigger’s grip and momentarily believe if she did, then all this would be fine.

Kreer’s hand, however, stopped her short. The huge griffon had bounded along behind her, and Tami yelped as claws grabbed the back of her collar, stopping her dead. Her hooves skidded on the smooth floor as her top half stopped dead above them, almost falling on her side, her stretching hand missing her captain’s reaching hoof by inches.

“Tam! It’s all right! You’re going to be fine, okay? You will be fine! Don’t struggle, just-”

“Captain! Captain I-I don’t know what’s going on, what’s happening? They aren’t telling me it’s-it’s-” she panted.

“Well isn’t this precious?” Asset’s chuckle cut anything Hair Trigger had to say short. The suited unicorn trotted idly over by the fountain, putting herself between her prisoners and smiling at Trigger’s furious look. The great station loomed behind her, and an extending umbilical was moving closer to the airlock. “I thought you’d want to be here, Captain. See your pilot away.”

“Away?” Tami breathed, momentarily struggling in Kreer’s grip. “What’s happening!?”

Asset raised an eyebrow, dragging her hoof through the crystal clear water. “What? You think I’d want this excuse for a farm-tractor pilot working my drones? Perish the thought.”

“Flew well enough to show your toys up last time.” Trigger spat the words at her, throwing her head to the side to try and shake Garwyn’s claws from her shoulder without much success.

“As I remember it, they were ready to rip your ship apart with you in control, Captain.” Asset smirked.

“As I remember it, you once had an intact ass a mare might want to hit, or do your drones do that for you now too?” Trigger gave a furious, biting look.

Asset sharply inhaled, her face screwing up. “Garwyn?”

Tami witnessed the hippogriff viciously smack her captain around the head with an open palm, drawing an angered snarl from the unicorn.

“That mouth of yours is going to get you punished sometime, Captain. You’re like a broken record.” Asset bitterly spoke, before the yacht rumbled at the station’s umbilical connecting to it, the airlock hissing open moments later. The earth pony assistant coughed lightly. “Ready for disembarkment, Ma’am.”

Asset recovered her composure enough to take a deep breath and smile. “Well, as I said, I thought you’d want to be here, Captain. To see your pilot away to her new career. Wish her luck. After all...”

She reached over, wrapping a foreleg around Tami’s shoulders to pull her in, as though for a joint photograph. “It’s probably the last time she’ll ever see you.”

Tami’s eyes went wide - her blood ran cold at the calculated tone in Asset’s voice. Heedless of the pain, she beat her wings hard and flung herself forward. She felt claws scratch through her heavy overalls and heard Asset’s annoyed intonation, but Tami didn’t stop, not until she could throw herself onto the unicorn, grabbing tightly and feeling forelegs wrap around her.

“Captain no, no no no… I-I-I-” she mumbled into Trigger’s shoulder, and felt a hoof pat her back and stroke through her mane.

“Don’t worry, Tam.” Trigger’s voice was low, immediately comforting, and Tami could sense the depth of effort to keep it level and quiet. “This ain’t the last. It ain’t.”

The hippogriff couldn’t form words, just a mumbled whine, and held tighter.

“Just stay safe. It’ll be okay. It will.” A pause. “You’ll make me proud. You always have.”

Tami wanted to reply. Wanted to think of the words to say, but claws grasped at them both and tore them apart. Tami felt herself being dragged back onto the gurney by the umbilical, and wheeled off through the airlock, toward the great pre-wyrm station.

She loved her captain’s confidence in her - she always had. But right then Tami had another cloying feeling in her gut as they were separated. One she recognised, and had never wanted to feel ever again.

A friend was being taken by those who would do them harm.

* * *

Volatility Smile had little break in her stride. Crowds parted if they had any sense, and those who didn’t care or didn’t notice quickly found there were ways to physically shove past someone without actually lifting a hoof. Most who saw her face, even those hardened to a hard life in the void, quietly made room in advance. Every few steps she looked down at her multiband and tapped three or four times, then proceeded onward. She ignored a shout from behind. She ignored Crazy D’s loud call of greeting.

What she did do was stop to terrify the vendor of Medusa’s small-arms and on-board protection licence provider into taking a downpayment, slam her multiband into the contactless pay screen, and walk away with a dubiously legal authorisation to carry laser weaponry across the NLR border for the next month. There would be no halts at the border.

Volatility Smile wouldn’t accept anything halting her now.

She rounded the top of the heavy steel staircase onto -rather purposefully- one of the quieter levels of Port Medusa, an observation ring. Situated the deck above the market and the docks Claudia rested in, it bore predominantly digital businesses; navigation assistance agencies, independent banks and insurance outlets blazed their wares in vivid blue and purple neon. The lights reflected from the single window running around the entire circumference on the outside, the viewport that gave the deck its most common use to the layman, a place to come to get away from the crowds. A handful of other occupants were scattered here and there, laid back on the benches or sipping hot drinks near the bubbled windows. Most were just seeking a place to sit, either in small groups or in one case, a grey-blue stallion simply sitting by himself.

Through an inner window between the modules containing the varied businesses, Smile could see the bustling, steamy marketplace below where they’d exited the elevator. Crazy D was serving a veritable horde, and fear of NLR blockades was leading to more crews crowding the station. The noise had made it impossible to think. And right now she had to do just that.

“Missus Smiles, wait up!”

Volatility Smile turned her head, seeing Kerfuffle, Eleven and Verbena round the stairwell to the same level. The griffon was holding the unicorn’s hoof to help her through the crowds surrounding the steps.

“What did you find out?” Smile’s tone cut right to the chase, the trio stopping sharply.

Kerfuffle shook his head. “Ain’t no bounties offered or claimed, Asset’s stayin’ quiet.”

“Damn it.” A small vibration on Smile’s foreleg led her to pause outside of a mercenary escort hiring guild, its pricing board casting her crystal body into an azure hue. Looking down, she scowled at the screen.

Space Jammers Inc. Public Message Service:

Inter-Sector Message Update complete:

Inbox;

No new messages present

Sent;

Outgoing;

Mailing Lists;

No new messages present

The pause gave the trio a chance to gather around her, Eleven still huffing gently at the effort she’d taken to push through the hordes below. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. That’s the point. I’d hoped incoming mail after a full reconnective update would maybe give us something. Or the bounties. A clue. Asset’s ego driving a ransom or wanting people to know. Some information. Anything.” Smile bitterly snorted and lowered her hoof. “No. If she cares about us, she isn’t showing her hoof yet.”

“She’d want money? Like a ransom?” Verbena looked from Smile to Kerfuffle, eyes wide and hopeful. “It sucks to give in but Tami’s boyfriend could-”

Kerfuffle shook his head, briefly looking regretful that the suddenness of his movement had hushed the young earth pony. “Sorry, Miss. That’s not how she does things. Money won’t do it, this is revenge.” His face turned, his cheeks tightening with his eyes growing hard to look at Smile. “An’ you know it wouldn’t work to offer, she’d just laugh.”

“I know.”

“An’ we need to get them back. We’re gonna’ do it.”

“We will. We did it with Whisper, we’ll do it with Hair Trigger and Tami.”

Smile seemed distracted, looking down at her multiband again. She hadn’t looked up much since storming out of the director's office. All the way down the elevator, even in the market’s crush. She moved apps around, her hoof sliding and tapping at great speed on the glass screen.

Eleven, quiet as the others carried forth their better knowledge on this second enemy apart from Sidewinder, trotted softly in place from nerves before sighing. “So… Sorry, what are we doing then? I didn’t realise there were so many enemies out here after you. What’s different here, though? We’ve done everything else, we can do this!”

Her hopeful spirit stood out at odds in the quiet observation lounge. Kerfuffle nodded. “We will. It’s just…”

Smile momentarily paused, then smacked her own multiband with her hoof, dropping down to sit on the closest bench by the window and leaning the back of her head on the cool glass. “It’s just that based on what the director gave us that place is a fortress now. Stations, planetside facilities, security drones. Stars, there's even records of an electromagnetic lockdown device for any vessel they don’t want doing its own thing.”

She closed her eyes, grimacing. “And we’ve got one unarmed, highly recognisable cargo ship with no real pilot, only four crew and no idea where those two are even being kept, if they’re even still together. Any friends we have either don’t have the resources to change things, or if they do, they aren’t close enough to help us right now. So if I sound tense it’s because I am not letting this day end without having a plan for when we do go in. Because we are.”

Volatility Smile fell quiet, the rush of anger and adrenaline that had kept her rushing to collate information finally starting to peter out. She raised a hoof down the deck to the mercenary booth. “So we need to start preparing immediately.”

Kerfuffle shifted a little uncomfortably. “Missus Smiles, this is a crime. We shouldn’t need to do it ourselves. This ain’t Sidewinder. The Confederacy don’t like her either. There’s the police.”

Verbena nodded. “Yeah, Tami told me about the loophole! They’d take any chance to throw her under!”

“We’re Periphery based, the incident didn’t occur in their space so it won’t give them a legal mandate. But yes, the Confederacy would no doubt be happy to - with a small bribe - give us some intel on Kavala. They monitor her much closer than Alyssum does.” Smile looked back down at her multiband and started sifting through contacts again. “The wonder of the Confederacy and how to pass any barrier.”

Kerfuffle gave a somewhat perplexed look at her comment on his home, Volatility Smile just smirked. “I’ll get started on that. Verbena? Show me somewhere I can get a cross-sector communication.”

Verbena proudly smirked and blew a raspberry. “As if I haven’t figured out the ways into Medusa’s database on foreign police forces yet.”

“Good. Kerfuffle, Eleven?”

The unicorn, looking unusual in her hoodie, spoke up first with a definitive and eager stamp on the decking. “You need us to do what creators do and come up with a way in and out of a place that doesn’t want us there, right?”

“Right.”

“We can do that! Kerfuffle knows all about Claudia and how to hook anything up to her better than anyone in this galaxy.”

“An’ you know more about every other bit of invention better than anyone in this galaxy, Miss.” Kerfuffle stood taller. “We’ll get back to Claudia an’ we’ll get to work, Missus Smiles. We’ll come up with somethin’. Together. In fact, while you were trottin’ ahead we had some thoughts.”

Smile held up a hoof. “Let me guess, Eleven’s going to break what I know of physics.”

Both the large griffon and the grinning pink unicorn nodded eagerly in perfect sync. His claw turned to a thumbs up.

“And this has never been done before?”

The joint nodding shifted to a proud shake.

Smile narrowed her eyes. “And this has no chance of splicing timelines, creating a self-cascading singularity, shattering the fragile veil of sane-space or otherwise irreversibly affecting the galaxy’s stability of physics at large on a macro-scale?”

There was a pause. Kerfuffle turned his head to Eleven. She screwed up her face in an innocent shrug, hooves upturned. Turning back to Smile, his claw leveled out flat and tilted side to side.

Smile sighed. “Bring it to me once you have something.”

“We will. Promise.” Kerfuffle lowered himself down and, with a ballet dancer’s grace, Eleven turned and hopped up onto his back. Kerfuffle tensed as though to move off, but paused on the spot. “And, er… I’ll…” Resolve stiffened his form. “I’ll figure out what to tell their families. The report that they’re missing will get to them before any good news does. It oughta’ come from us.”

Smile saw that Eleven bore a warm smile behind his head at his thoughtful awareness, and gave a slow nod. That wasn’t an easy task he’d set himself. “You’re the best of us sometimes, you know that?”

“Well…” replied Kerfuffle, scratching his head.

“He is.” Eleven held onto his back and pushed her head over his shoulder. “Let’s go! I’ve got several ideas forming and I need my design palace back on Claudia for it.”

Smile hesitated. “You mean the cargo bay.”

Eleven just shrugged. “When was the last time you ever used it for that? My name is more accurate these days.”

Kerfuffle smiled. “To the design palace it is. We’ll stay in touch!”

The pair rocketed off, the pink unicorn holding on tightly for dear life as the griffon swerved to avoid a blue stallion getting up from a bench. Left behind, Verbena Mint smiled after them, feeling eased by their confidence. After what she’d seen Eleven do lately, she had just enough hope to feel whatever the unicorn had cooked up would work.

“Verbena? Come on.”

Nodding, Verbena turned and pointed down the observation deck. “All right, far side! There’s an admin station there separate from the main resources deck, we can log in from there and get whatever sis’ has on the Confederate police.”

The pair took a fast stride around the opposite edge of the station from where Kerfuffle and Eleven had departed back to the hangar, the look on Smile’s face giving any would-be salesperson reason to stand away. Verbena felt a touch awkward to walk in such quiet, until eventually the temptation to break the ice was overwhelming.

“Do you really have a plan?”

“Yes,” replied Volatility Smile, “to get intelligence first, then see what help might be worth a damn if there’s any way through.”

Her words were curt and clipped, and again gave way to a silent progression between synth-trees and thick bulkheads. Verbena sighed. “Smile, be honest… Is Asset the type to hurt them? Will Tami be-”

“We’re going to get them, Verbena.” Smile turned her head to look at the shorter teenager. “That’s all that matters. If Asset’s made one great mistake, it’s thinking capturing the captain means she put us out of action. She didn’t count on the brains still bei-”

Then she paused, and Verbena saw Smile’s eyes glance backwards once, before rounding to the front again. “Verbena, listen very carefully, don’t stop trotting.”

She certainly hadn’t been stopping. “What? What’s-”

“Does your sister normally have you tailed to protect you?”

Verbena felt a sudden chill of imminent worry pass through her. “Usually Donner, but I kinda rushed off to be with you and- Wha- Wait, lemme look and-”

“Don’t turn!”

“Trust me.” Verbena whispered, and then shouted out loud. “Selfie!” She grabbed the crystal pony around the shoulders. Laughing too loudly, she held out her multiband in front of them both but rather than taking a like-baiting pursed lip and ‘cheeky eyes’ image, she scanned the reverse facing camera toward herself. At first she saw nothing, but after re-angling her multiband her eyes caught a figure coming right behind them, slowing as they did. Snapping a picture, she let go, and held it between them.

Blurred, hooded, alone.

Not one of the types her sister would assign to guard her, particularly not since Blitz and Donner had arrived. Verbena shook her head to Smile, and cursed under her breath. “They’ve been tailing us since we started moving. I saw them come up the stairs and sit down, didn’t think much of it but...”

They rounded the corner to the admin wing, a blocky station module that jutted out from the circular hull of Port Medusa. A large sealed door separated it from the main walkway, flanked by an info-board displaying tech support numbers and cross-sector price-rates. Verbena ran up to the blinking door console while Smile kept an eye on the windows, using the reflection to spot the figure moving in after them as they shifted to the mismatching floor of the new and empty area.

“So what do we-” Verbena began.

Smile’s tone was hard. “We take the gift we’ve been given.”

She slowed, and Verbena felt her worried protest fall flat as she saw Smile subtly reach for her laser rifle’s strap. Since the kidnapping, other than leaving it aside on the executive level, she’d never taken it off. Pausing, she waited until the hooves behind her came closer, motioned with her eyes to the nearest corner and hard cover for Verbena, and then swung around, rifle coming up.

The instant she did, she saw the pony behind her throw aside their coat. A shortened weapon similar to Whisper’s SMG flipped open and extended its buttstock automatically, a stubby barrel pointing her way.

“STOP!” She swung the weapon to bear on their head, and found herself staring at a stallion hunching into a trained posture to point his weapon back up at her.

“Put the weapon DOWN!” he bellowed out in response, his hood falling back. A navy grey mane, well trimmed and kept, spilled out above focused, intense eyes. “NOW!”

“You first.” Smile didn’t let up, slowly trotting aside to get the line of fire away from Verbena behind her. The stallion, a pegasus she now saw, did the same.

He shook his head by the tiniest of fractions. “Volatility Smile, of Claudia and the Space Jammers?”

“Who’s asking?” she replied firmly.

His face tightened. “Where is Tammani? What have you done with her!?”

The atmosphere in the entranceway of the data centre fell silent. Slowly, Verbena crept around the side, eyes on the stallion. She blinked, looking deep in thought. “Wait…”

“Now I need to know who in the stars is asking me.” Smile didn’t take the glowing sight atop her rifle away from centre mass on the stallion. Something tugged at her mind, something stuffed deep down in memory, but with a barrel in her face and her radar to trickery strung too tight to dare fall for a possible misdirection. “Tami’s been taken from us-”

“To who!? Sold?”

Smile caught a hint of worry in his voice, daring to lower her rifle by a couple inches. “Listen, I think you’ve got it wrong! Tammani is our friend! She’s been kidnapped and-

Verbena stepped forward. “Yes, I do know you!” She carefully moved forward hoof by hoof, and Smile saw the stallion’s barrel jitter side to side. “It’s… your name, it was-”

That was it! Smile’s memory finally dredged up the face. The spruce blue, the slim body and the broad shoulders. She'd seen him before - in Tami's prom photo.

“Vair…” Verbena spoke triumphantly with a pointed hoof. “Vantage Vair.”

‘Bless that young mare’s memory’, Smile thought. She saw the stallion’s eyes react in genuine surprise, but the gun didn’t lower. Below the coat, Smile could see a bulletproof vest, Crystal League issue she guessed. Navy. He looked uncertain, disbelieving. She had to keep pushing.

“Tami’s not even supposed to be out here, she-”

Smile cut him off. “We’re not lying! We’re on the same side here, I promise! Look, I'll prove it.” She thought quickly, trying to find something of worth, before remembering one thing. She raised her voice. “Final exam in Basic Flight for spacecraft, you were both together in a shuttlepod since you were the two top students. It’s where you both, well, culminated your growing relationship after sneaking on board treats”

Vantage stared back at her, one eyebrow shooting up in off-guard confusion. “What!?”

Smile just nodded again, a confident smile creeping on her face. She had this now. “First time.”

“You know- But-” His focus wavered, looking utterly bewildered, wings drooping. He shook his head and stood up straighter, quickly reasserting his aim. “Okay, how drunk did she get to tell anyone that story?”

Smile didn’t miss a beat. “Two shots and half a cider.”

Vantage Vair stood rock still, and then dropped the barrel, clicking the safety back on. “All right, that’s definitely Tami.”

He stood up more fully as Smile relented in turn, looking twitchy from adrenaline and nerves, and more than slightly embarrassed as he glanced and saw Verbena’s ‘hey, I knew too’ shrug. He sighed. “Lieutenant Commander Vantage Vair, Crystal League Corporate Navy. ”

“Volatility Smile, Acting-Captain of Claudia.”

“Verbena Mint, official bestie. What are you doing here? How do you know about Tami? Was it my message to you?” She bit her cheek, muttering quietly. “Please don’t be because of my message from her multiband, look there was vodka and-”

“Another time to explain that, Verbena.” Smile cut her off, trying to hide her own smirk at the outcome. She had always aced interviews. This had been no different. It was always about who you knew, not what you knew, they said.

Smile knew best that it was really what you knew about who you knew.

Vantage looked behind him, folding his weapon away, something Smile recognised as a League Naval PTW: a shortened carbine with a blocky magazine and extending stock that could be held quietly under a weather-cloak of the uniform and auto-folded into a firing state within seconds. True to form, it whirred as it collapsed into itself to tuck under his coat.

He spread his hooves. “Volatility Smile, I have a lot more questions for you about all this.” His face had lost its confrontational edge, but it still held accusations and intense worry. “Forgive me but I have to question why I should trust that she’d even be in some Periphery cargo operation to begin with. Tami’s one of the best pilots I ever saw. She should still have a year of teaching left in the Chrysolite VIP Academy before qualification to something, again forgive… more than this? How could she have even been here?”

With a long breath, she slung her rifle and glanced at Verbena; the earth pony seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Well…”

Volatility Smile hung her head, the gradual realisation taking hold. She nodded in agreement. “I think you’d better come with us. There’s- there’s a lot you need brought up to speed on about Tami.”

* * *

Amid the cluttered debris of Kavala III, the Asset Margin's extravagant yacht shone greater than any object surrounding it. Reflective heat-tiles enabling the twenty five thousand ton vessel to enter an atmosphere twinkled in creamy spiral patterns, while its ruby solar fins trailed glitter in their wake thanks to artificially coloured vector nozzle outlets. A star of sophistication, it glided between asteroids as automated drones left their workplaces to manually attach and thrust the rocks clear of its lazy path, enabling the thick, nigh-impassable barrier above the surface to be bypassed by a ship many times outside the safe size limit.

It was not, however, headed for the surface. Instead, as it moved away from the ancient pre-wyrm station, the vessel angled toward another object in space. One much larger and eerily closer to the planet than something of such mass ought to be; the cause of its desolation.

Asset’s yacht instead headed for Kavala III’s shattered moon.

Growing in size until it dominated the bridge’s viewports, the bone white corpse of the gutted satellite emitted a faint rumble into the silent void; a rumble that could only be picked up by sensors looking to hear it. All around the moon, cracks in the exposed mantle stretching the size of continents groaned and shifted as they had for centuries. Ghosting drifts of white dust that had hung for hundreds of years flowed into the wake of the luxury vessel, twisting in unusual contrails and following it from the transfer of momentum. The yacht turned, gravity reasserting its will as the vessel shunted below the level of what was once the surface, into the great crater from which a full third of the moon's mass had been torn. The crater that had exploded out to become the very field that now made the ship’s owner rich beyond measure. As it approached, hanging security drones with electromagnetic pulse generators in domed dishes turned with focused intent. Waived by a signal to permit right of passage being sent to the drone station in the asteroid field above, the automated units turned back to their waiting positions.

Now alone, a single speck above a yawning darkness so wide the ship could no longer see its edges, Asset’s yacht began its long descent into a crater so deep its bottom was obscured in a deep cosmic gloom. The slopes to the surface became a high horizon, one that stretched higher than a planet’s sky from the ground. The effect was uncanny; the sheer scale threw off the senses until those looking up from within would feel like the crater was much thinner than it could possibly be, or that the edges simply disappeared and seemed closer than they really were. It formed a world lit only by the planet itself, an inverse of how celestials were normally lit from their parent star, creating spectacular views when the crater pointed directly at Kavala and had it fill every inch of what passed for a sky.

The missing gap in Kavala’s moon was a legacy of desperate madness to combat the seemingly unstoppable by testing things of scales unknown, only to find that very ambition becoming its own destruction to the power they’d sought to match.

Upon the very site of that great hubris, Asset had built her most exclusive endeavour.

The floor of the crater was a mass of void canyons and mountainous shapes, and upon the side overlooking the black above and the deepest point below now lay a silvery-white structure. Luminescent, it glowed in the devastated, cragged fracture of the moon like coral reef, shaped like mushroom caps on the wall of a cave. Circular complexes of several decks each surrounded a low, wide, flat-topped central structure, all of them supported by a framework of enormous legs embedded into the surface. Bubbles of poly-glass covered balconies that ringed the lush decks, while the top of some structures bore clear sheets through to lush agroponics gardens. When the planet passed by, it would all glitter like diamond, and when the crater was enveloped in darkness it would shine like a lonely beacon of safety in a past galaxy’s devastation.

The structure was, however, incomplete. Scaffold still spoiled much of its right hand side, while a skeletal framework implied a still far-off dream of what would someday be a hanging landing platform without any visible support. Holographic images flickered on approach as the yacht levelled out, projected from hanging beacons to guide the vessel into a yawning, open hangar. The main dock was split between a cavernous lower section for storage and maintenance of ships, and a resplendent upper quarter that served as a passenger terminal. Shaped and styled like the front of a mansion, with glassteel umbilicals ready to extend, the terminal waited to greet VIPs in the most luxurious terms as they were dropped off. Their vessels would then slide by and drop downward into the less prestigious docks waiting below to wait on their charges.

The complex, once complete, would be exclusive beyond measure. A place of meeting for those who wanted to be seen and to talk, but only to their peers and strictly in unobserved private. A club for the unthinkably wealthy and the ethically malleable.

An Equestrian hymn praised the glory of the stars themselves as great doors rose and swept away like wings before the entering party, sharply dressed freelancers in gleaming uniforms of viridescent jade-green snapping to a formal poise. Beyond lay twin arch-laden mezzanines running down a white marble reception hall with a grand display of natural flowers and a pricelessly old antique life-size sculpture of all four Princesses together atop a clear fountain. Grand staircases rose towards event halls, a palatial spa that was still under construction, and accommodations to make a president envious. Relics of all six major civilisations were displayed in glassteel boxes in an effort to stun and attract those who could afford anything, from thousand year old Zebrahan amulets to a hull plate from the Confederate’s first FTL capable ship after the Wyrm Wars to a fragment of the Crystal Empire’s castle on Equestria. Most ostentatious of all, a secure box atop one of the imperial staircase landings contained an open display - a magenta cushion bearing several fragments of Nightmare Moon's armour. These were once-in-a-lifetime salvage, salvaged from one of the Grey Fleet ships that had tried to smuggle them from the Solar Empire to the nascent New Lunar Republic only to be intercepted and destroyed in Mothellum.

Hair Trigger saw none of it.

Blinded by the coarse bag over her head, she was getting very deeply sick of being shoved, cajoled and talked down to upon this entire journey. Instinct told her she wasn’t planetside, and this didn’t feel like any station she’d visited, leaving an unusual sense of displacement. None of the clues her ears and nose gave her suggested anything other than a hidden asteroid base amid Kavala’s field.

Around her she could hear the rapid cantering of assistants or waiting staff. The floor felt too smooth for an office or prison. The heavier snaps of guards coming to attention were obvious, and yet the sounds echoed. Large rooms, then, she presumed, with Asset’s tendency for minimal overworked staffing. She felt an elevator, then more walking and a stairwell. Every so often she could hear Asset’s limping gait and annoying tendency to make a half-hearted toneless hum as she led them, clearly appreciating whatever place she’d made. Garwyn kept a tight grip on Trigger, directing her and standing ready to stop any deeply wished attempt to shut that humming up every time it started.

Trigger very quickly began to find new depths of hatred for this mare. In a way she was glad for it. Anger was better than fear. Adventures lately had taught her to lean into that, Asset simply made it much easier to do.

Garwyn caught her neck, preventing her from advancing any further. A moment later, the hood was yanked from her head. Searing brightness shone into her eyes and blinded her all over again. Wincing, grunting and turning her head away, she muttered bitterly, “If I open my eyes and see a stage...”

“Hardly, Captain,” replied Asset with impatient eagerness.

Painful brightness in her eyes, Hair Trigger opened them by a slit. Several bright lights shone from high above. Spotlights. Focusing her sight, Trigger nearly recoiled.

They were not in a corridor, nor a mere room, but an enormous hall, flanked by thick colonnades of dark jade-green atop a shimmering, black marble tiled floor dotted with white speckles. Arched balconies ran around its edges above spiral staircases, and she could see cloisters to either side leading to display halls with huge windows into a dense black.

What had made her react was not the wondrous architecture, but the great glass cases that filled the hall. Atop crafted wood lay artefacts of all shapes and sizes - relics of a time that by her reckoning should probably remain lost. She saw unusually designed firearms and their ammunition from centuries ago, sets of thick void-armour bearing emblems of lost civilisations, inactive monomolecular blades and a case of shimmering magical orbs. There were blank-eyed wrecks of automata between the colonnades, posed to stand guard. Arcane crafters of a kind never since replicated without magic sat with example three-dimensional prints ready to demonstrate. Vials of ominous substances sat behind triple layered glass near warheads of a kind Trigger knew had been banned even by the Solar Empire.

And above everything, between hanging examples of ancient void-automata, dominating everything below the spotlights was a colossal skeleton, its mighty feet resting on two platforms in the middle of the museum-like cloister: the bones of what Hair Trigger knew had to be that of a dragon. Its mighty jaws were supported open and twisting, howling silently.

A moment later, and Hair Trigger’s eyes found the truly horrifying detail of this lost technology. Every case, every item, bore a magnetic seal bearing a digitally displayed number.

Price tags for the unearthed horrors created to fight gods.

Suddenly she remembered the pre-wyrm station, and before that the entire peninsula of ancient crashed vessels on the surface of Kavala. Asset had the resources, the time and the freedom to dig and dig…

“Oh… Oh you’ve gone off the deep end now you crazy bitch.” Hair Trigger couldn’t even muster up any volume to her words, her eyes wide with shock and wonder.

Asset strolled behind a glass counter, opening it to retrieve a gilded pistol. Trigger recognised it from idly browsing articles on old age firearms; it was a needle-firing model, intended for a poison she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemies. Asset stroked it with one hoof as though it were a delicate flower.

“One small find in my trash pile and that would be eighty million credits, thank you very much. Minimal effort, pure profit.” She grinned. “Welcome to the Desideratum, Captain, my recent venture. In a few months I’ll have my first party here, you see. The invited kind who might be interested in this sort of thing. Purely by recognition of course; a clientele so small and elite that even the Silver Dome would be jealous.”

Hair Trigger wanted to protest, wanted to speak of what some of these things could do, but there was no world where Asset didn’t also know. She’d no doubt priced them accordingly. “All the digging, the mining? It was-”

“-intensely profitable, Captain. Hardly just a means to an end, but also a useful process to unearth what else was buried in the ruins and wreckage.” Asset held the thin-barrelled pistol like it were a foal, before floating it back inside its container. “The best of those in affluence know you always need your next expansion ready before it occurs. I’m sure your suited and shining friend might have lent you such entrepreneurial guidance.”

“You have no idea…” Trigger deadpanned, before grunting to avoid any single sentence sounding too familiar. “So eighty million credit question. The fuck did you bring me here for then? Test dummy for your kit during the show?”

Asset made a teasing smile, tutting with a waved hoof that set Trigger’s blood boiling. The audaciously strung out answers were getting to her, but she swallowed her frustration down to deny a reaction. Asset’s waved hoof signalled Garwyn to drag Trigger forward again. Shaking him off, Trigger made to trot on her own, but felt him grasp hold.

“You’re not walking in here alone. Not a chance, small fry,” he growled, and held on to her as they approached the far door. Hair Trigger felt the hood once again thrown over her. She groaned aloud.

“Starting to feel like you’re scared of me knowing something.”

“Please Captain,” replied Asset smoothly, the inconsistent tap-tap-taptap of her hooves obvious ahead of her on the smooth floor. “Garwyn?”

“You’re a unicorn,” he grunted, giving Hair Trigger a hard shove. The texture of the ground changed. “You have magic that can grasp things, and you’ve got a habit of breaking things belonging to Miss Margin. You’re not seeing anything fragile unless we want you to.”

Stairwells proved a painful exercise in the hippogriff's impatience. After three flights there was a set of heavy-sounding doors. Trigger lost track of her memory of the route after an elevator. Eventually there was a quiet, lacking the gentle chimes and jingles of the great halls. The complex sounded deserted, with nothing but the occasional group of roughly bantering guards standing-to at Asset’s passing or the hum of something automated. Along the way, she listened to the exchanges.

“Take us down, Linear.” Asset spoke to an unseen pony.

“Down to which floor, Ma’am?” A young stallion’s reply.

There was a sigh. “Garwyn, strike him off, find me another intern. This one’s no good.”

She felt Garwyn shove the pony out and hit the button himself.

“Keep good employee retention don’t you?” Trigger snarked.

“And now you know why I prefer drones. Which one of us is the trillionaire, Captain?”

More walking. Round in circles. After one final clang of a door, Hair Trigger felt the oppressive quiet of a smaller chamber. One much smaller. Claws grabbed her forelegs and dragged her upward until her hindlegs dangled. She kicked out, but found nothing but air. Tight, biting pressure squeezed about the fetlocks of her foreleg. Chains. They tightened and raised, until she felt herself hanging a couple feet above the floor.

Only then was the hood torn from her head.

The room was made of dark metal, hexagonal in shape with one side extended in a short rectangle where Hair Trigger had been turfed into. A faint amber light overhead failed dismally to light the corners. But it did illuminate the top of Garwyn and Asset Margin ahead of him.

“Welcome to your waiting room, Captain.” Asset routinely spouted the title in a mocking twist of every sentence, bobbing her head side to side. “You’ll stay nice and safe here until such a time as… Well, I come to claim my profit.” She leaned closer. “I’m just dying to know what you’re thinking right now. You must be shitting yourself more than you were before you came into my office the first time. What’s going through your head, hmm?”

Trigger looked back, making heavy breaths as she felt her forelegs pinching and her shoulders aching already. She could see a table to her left, unusually rustic by Asset’s standards, bearing metal toolboxes, rope and chains. There was a browned drain right below her, and the door looked heavy and reinforced. It didn’t look like a designed cell, more an unfinished shell of some future storage room. She breathed in the rust and damp, exhaled through her nose and looked Asset dead in the eye.

“What I’m thinking is, whether I’m in deep trouble or in for a hell of a good time depends entirely on what side of that door has a lock.”

There was a twitch in Asset’s eye, and the smile creaked out with great effort to not scowl. “Well, you’ll get to know it. You’ll certainly have enough time. But now I leave you.” She turned and moved off to the door, a splendidly dressed guard opening it for her from the outside. Trigger hadn’t even seen there was one under the hood. “Garwyn would like a ‘chat’ of his own.”

The scarred hippogriff crunched his knuckles together in none too subtle an implication.

“Restrain yourself to just some overdue catharsis, Garwyn. Don’t damage the goods like your brother usually does. I mean it.” Asset whipped her head toward her security chief at the warning, the two long strands of mane over her forehead wavering. “I’ll be back in a while, Captain. Enjoy your stay.”

She exited the door, slamming it closed, leaving Trigger alone with Garwyn. The hippogriff shuffled over, his face at Trigger’s hanging head height. “And just so you don’t try anything surprising, Captain, that brother of mine? He wouldn’t hesitate to do much worse than I ever would.”

He grabbed her rapidly deteriorating hooded top and held her closer. “He’s with that pilot you care for so much. If you or any of your friends try anything? He wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Immediately. So let's keep things professional, shall we?”

The fury encapsulated within Hair Trigger’s weary body had been building enough. She snarled and lashed her forehead forward to jab with her horn, finding the most intense lack of result when he simply leaned back, picking up the plank of wood in one claw.

“But for now? This is payback for last time.”

“Didn’t put me down for good then,” Hair Trigger muttered, and steeled herself for the first impact she saw being swung in.

* * *

Vantage Vair didn’t need to be told who lived on the bridge.

He had walked alone onto Claudia’s nerve centre after half an hour of hearing things he was still struggling to maintain his composure over. In a lull, he’d had to ask Volatility Smile to pause. He had needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Now finding his way to the bridge, in the last two full minutes he hadn’t moved more than a few feet from the thick plate door other than to stand and stare.

He saw the paintings - deep purples, ocean blues and raging crimsons banding across a sparkling, multicoloured haze over black the way he knew she saw space, differently from anyone else he knew. The colours meshed and blended better than any he remembered, betraying years of personal improvement.

“Hey, instructor’s asking us to come down for a brief and-oh wow.”

Vantage could see the hippogriff between her dorm room’s bunks. He didn’t know her name yet. She was gently applying a streaking azure trail behind a comet arcing through the deep black. The length of its glittering tail told of a huge velocity in deep space, free of tugging gravity holding it down. He stepped in with a smile, relaxing his posture at her skittish wince.

“I… Uh, yeah I guess. I know I’m not very-”

“It looks great, really got it moving. What is it? The League Chaser? Wait, no, blue. Gotta be the Wonderbolt Comet then?”

She looked at him with big, blinking eyes. “Yeah… How, wait, you know?”

Vantage smiled and held out his hoof. “Vantage, think I’m in the room just upstairs.”

“T-Tammani.”

Warily, she took it. And cast against the streaked yellow sunset of Chrysolite, Vantage saw the most incredible smile creak onto that face as he spoke of his photos of that same comet he could show her.

He’d always loved Tami’s paintings.

Gently, Vantage picked up that same brush, fallen and placed it on the easel’s lip. Years of service had seen it gradually reduced from doing smooth, trailing detail into a messy spread drybrush. Rugs and hanging tarps covered the bridge in comfortable, soft materials. It made it homely. Warm.

Like her.

Looking toward a side of the bridge, he couldn’t resist a small, weary smirk as he recognised the off-hand vector control window by the right-side console, swapped with the power-regulation tab.

“So why do you always arrange it like that in every shuttle anyway?”

He reached across the cockpit, tapping the single panel display in front of Tami.

“Like what?”

“Backwards? You’ve got the vectors there. Left clawed?”

Tami giggled and shook her head. “Nah! See, the Gleaner RB-Eight was laid out like this by default before the single-panel refit came for it. Aaaand that’s the one I learned about first at home from my dad’s tech-manuals.”

“The Tammaran.” He grinned wolfishly, and saw her cheeks glow.

“Doooon’t,” She flustered and waved a wing at him.

“It is adorable, that you’re-”

She squealed in embarrassment and curled away from him in her seat, giggling uncontrollably. “No! Don’t say it!”

“-named after a ship.”

She batted his face with a wing. “Vantage!”

They laughed together.

The console recognised his proximity, chiming and lighting up from his hoof passing over it. The touchscreen glowed in the quiet bridge, raising a login screen wallpaper of Orbit lying on his side amidst a Hearthswarming celebration. It cycled through various images of astral phenomena and ships he knew she’d adored.

‘How could I have not been there for her when she needed me?’

The question pierced his mind by surprise, and Vantage realised he’d been reminiscing to trick himself. To dodge the guilt he knew would be coming. He’d wandered up here to feel closer to her. Like he’d caught up now. Like he was there to help. The thought disgusted him. His secretive career boosting choice to join the Adroit program had cut him off, but still he’d believed she was having as much fun, as much success as he had been.

Turning from the console, he saw her hammock. He saw the blanket upon it, stars and moons of all brilliant colours. Compass Rose, Tami’s mother, had bought it for her.

“I can’t do it! I can’t!” Tami’s voice cracked under choking sobs that made her convulse and incoherently grasp at nothing in front of her. “It all messed up! I didn’t mean to it-it-it just-”

Vantage didn’t even consider hesitating. He’d grown up the eldest of five under a single mother; it was built into him to react. He dropped beside the hippogriff that had fast been becoming a close best friend and wrapped his forelegs around her. Her claws squeezed him tightly, and she buried her face into his chest. “A-And then it all went wrong! I panicked and-”

“It’s okay…” He breathed the words and rocked his body to sway her. “It wasn’t your fault. The master alarm was set way louder than it should have been, I checked. Someone playing a stupid prank.”

“I-I couldn’t! I just froze when it-it-I-just- If anything like that happens I’m going to fail and it’ll all go wrong!”

“No it won’t.”

“It might...”

He squeezed her tightly, rubbing his cheek on top of her head, into her mane. One of his wings pulled her blanket from home over both of them, stars and moons shielding them in gentle warmth. He had tuition in a few minutes, but it could go to hell right now for all he cared.

“But it might not. And if it doesn’t, it’ll be because you’re being the pilot I know you are.” He looked down and saw her damp, wavering eyes staring back up at him. “Take your time. It’s okay to feel like that. Hey, how ‘bout we go sneak into the simulators and do it again, just us? The janitor owes us anyway to look the other way. What’dya say?”

Sniffling, Tami held onto him much closer than he expected. “Mhm, okay… They’re set to the Despair system I think.”

He stroked her mane before even realising he’d dared be so forward to do so. “Then how about we set it to Confidence instead?”

Vantage felt his jaw tense, and he stared at the floor.

He’d found all the confidence in the world, not even knowing Tami had fallen into the depths of despair for years. The thought that he’d ever laughed and smiled, completely and guiltlessly ignorant as to her state brought actual, physical pain to his gut.

He raised a wing to his eyes, rubbing gently with a sharp sniff.

“I’m so… so sorry, Tami...”

Behind him, the sharp clip of hooves on metal made him turn his head. Volatility Smile briskly trotted into the bridge, stern eyes glaring at him. In the artificial light, Vantage was surprised to see what looked like winding scars coming up from below her collar, like a lightning strike’s jagged edges etched into her glittering body. She seemed to assess his state in seconds, opening her mouth while casting a hoof about the bridge-turned-living space.

“We try our best to help her since we saw her worries first hoof. We love her here, Vantage.”

“So do I.” He looked at the floor, words but a whisper. “And I wasn’t there when she was in pain.”

Smile showed little reaction to the battle he waged to remain steady before her, but gave him time. Right now, with her captain and Tami on the line, he knew her offering a brief silence was as valuable to her as anything. Already he was grasping the disciplined, driving force in this mare. That, and her eye for opportunity. The bridge felt somehow cold and empty, despite no change in lights or running. Vantage wasn’t even a crewman and yet he could feel it. There was a void in here with those two chairs empty, that drained it all to a dreary, cold compartment of a simple ship.

“I want to help.” The words came suddenly. Quietly.

Smile nodded. “You can pilot a ship?”

“Almost as well as her,” Vantage said quickly, raising his head to look at her with wavering eyes. “I’m not going to leave her alone this time, Volatility Smile. I’m not.”

She advanced, and he was surprised to see her extend a hoof toward him. “I’m sorry about what happened, Vantage.” Her voice was steady, firm, poised, but he felt the honesty. “If it helps, Tami never spoke of you as abandoning her. Not once. I know for a fact she doesn’t see it like that.”

Vantage took her hoof in his, surprised at the strength in the shake. “Thank you.” He took a steadying breath. “PNR-03. Pioneer. I could figure her out. And then I’ll make her dance for you if you need it. Whatever it takes.”

Smile sucked her bottom lip, angling her head to the bridge stations. “You’re free to go for it. Might have to use the port side station though; I don’t know her password.”

He considered that statement, seeing the personalised items on the port side too. “But you know your own captain’s if that’s her side?”

“Admin has to have backups.” A wry smirk came across her face.

“Thank you Miss, but I have a feeling I might be able to guess hers quickly enough.” Vantage turned and looked at the console again.

Smile rolled her eyes. “Oh please, I have that enough from others. ‘Smile’ is fine.”

He didn’t hear her. His eyes were staring in sunken realisation at the scrolling wallpapers of Tami’s console. The goofy, conditionless love of a golden retriever was on many; Orbit had judged him worthy of barreling him over several times before. But the canine had moved to a new photograph. One of-

The stars shone from the balcony outside the dorms of Basic Flight. They shone just the way they’d always loved staying up far past lights out to watch and talk.

‘Quiet Time’ they’d called it. Anything but. Excited chatter about stellar phenomena, about mysteries, about whether a new ship would be popular. He’d never had anyone to be so open and passionate with. She’d given him an outlet to a love he’d never known he had so strongly.

And he stared into her eyes as she gaped at a sky unpolluted by light and saw a face as though she’d never even seen it before. Endless, self-reviving adoration and need. Her want, no need to go up there had dragged him along, inspired him, pushed him beyond his own limits just to keep up with her scores.

He felt nervous. An impulse was building in his gut, his foreleg around her shoulders. He wanted to say her name, try to hint something. Imply it. Make this easier to control.

“Tami-” He started, but when he saw her bring her attention to him on that bright, heart-shaped face, he just knew. He leaned in and bumped his lips to hers, holding his foreleg around her in a gentle squeeze. There was a surprised squeak, and then a gentle pressure of warm lips. Clumsy, he felt their teeth collide with a jarring knock, and he quickly retracted.

“Sorry! Sorry… I just, uh-” He began, until he saw her staring back at him. “Tami?”

“Ah-” Her shock turned to blinking disbelief, and then she breathed in sharply. She stared at him in a new way, and then stiffened up as though her mind switched gear from idle to FTL in seconds. She leaned in an inch. Then again. “Sorry-sorry-wait-wait I was just surprised I-”

“Are-”

He never finished his sentence before she unexpectedly dove against him, as though he might have suddenly said no if she hadn’t, and they tumbled together, her soft mouth finding his again.

The photo showed her as happy as he’d ever seen her, squeezed cheek to cheek with a unicorn of sable black coat and bright amber eyes. A well kept mane of teal, blue and rosy pink draped his head, his foreleg squeezed about Tami’s shoulders as she held her multiband up in front of them for the photograph.

He knew the look on her face. He knew.

Vantage Vair felt a deep hollowness in his chest, sighing openly with closed eyes. He nodded and didn’t really know why, but felt a hoof come to his shoulder. He turned back to see Volatility Smile’s carefully firm but honest face. “It was over three years, Vantage. You know that she-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just… Yeah.” He let out a long breath through his nose and swiped the login screen to replace the photograph with the password entry field. “It’s all a lot to process. That’s all.”

It had always been ‘till then’. Naive for two such young people, perhaps. He’d not found anyone since, not in his environment. Almost once. Almost. He understood. He understood. He was happy someone had been there after this crew had stepped in to help her. But some deep part of him that had imagined she’d been happy all the time he’d been away had always thought-

“You sure?” Her eyebrow raised questioningly.

“Yeah,” he lied.

She looked disbelieving, and pulled him back. “Ship’s not leaving yet. I was going to hunt through the Confederate records for any intelligence on Asset Margin before we met you. That still needs done. Now. And from what you tell me about yourself, you could give me more of an ‘in’.”

Vantage pulled his eyes from the screen. His voice was terse and direct, feeling like just a junior midship officer again. “I cannot utilise the CLCN’s full intel bank, but I brought several reports with me on the local area and its rivals, and recent open-source shipping databases of vessel AIS pings to public systems. More than you’d find without our processing power. All legal.”

“Then you better come with me. If you want to help, we need to know what we’re facing first before we start trying to ask who or how.” She turned and strode for the door, before pausing. “And Vantage, look. I said Tami doesn’t blame you.” She shrugged. “And for what it’s worth, I’ve chased ambition too. Even if it meant leaving somewhere, not knowing when I’ll be back to ease people who might be worr-” She paused, as though rethinking. “To that extent at least, I understand.”

“Appreciated.” His voice felt breathy. “Genuinely, I mean, sorry I’m just-”

“I know. Come on, let’s put that drive to better use, hm? Don’t worry, if anyone asks, I’ll just tell them it’s shock at your meeting Eleven and, er, what she can do. Sorry, we forgot to give you a heads up about that.”

He made a brief snort of amusement, but it was without any real mirth. “Magic… Not lying to say that’s a shock. I’m still trying to process that one.”

“You’ll get used to it, we’ve had to go through that a few times. Sudden yelps and cries like that are normal around such unicorns. Now, let’s go. Stuff to do.”

She left the bridge at a fast trot, and he heard her speaking to Verbena below. She was right. Today had brought a horrid truth about his best friend’s life to him, only to then reveal it was but a stage of a greater pain she was fighting. One he’d always known Tami was battling inside even from the first days he’d known her. He'd always respected her resilience, and wished that she would someday take pride in it.

He’d missed the start of this battle.

He wouldn’t miss the end.

Vantage Vair rolled his shoulders and cantered after Smile. He almost managed to avoid looking back once more at the bridge.

Almost.

* * *

The interior of the Sun of the Night was unlike any other Tami had walked within. Unlike the brutal sheer faces of Port Medusa, the angular VIP Pilot Academy, the cosmopolitan stretch of the Crystal Heart or even the relic of Isla del Dragón.

Lying on the rolling gurney, flanked by two griffon guards in murky green ceramic-composite plate, Tami was moved from between floors away from the airlock’s musty, moulded lobby by a circular floored elevator. Broken murals of ponies playing together lined the insides, but their faded wonder paled as the doors opened into a tall atrium that made her gasp with its scale.

A hundred people flew and galloped and ran. They climbed, hammered, cut and welded. Around them, a multi-domed ceiling rose four floors up with spiral staircases running between fence-like brass railings on each of the open plan mezzanines. Huge gaps with rounded sides were cut into the walls along the wings of the atrium’s connecting compartments. Tami at first thought they had been burned through by tools, until closer inspection made it clear they had once held stained glass, long shattered and in mid-cleanup from the ground. Pillars mirrored the external design of layered vertical metal in what once might have been gold and cream, arching above in complex weaves to join the dome’s form. Between the golden lines she could see cracked illustrations of painted day and night skies mixed above on the insides of the domes, like the roof of some grand castle or palace.

What once might have shone in metallics and polish was now rusted and marred by centuries adrift as a wreck. Wall and deck plate might once have been silver-lined white, but now they were a scarred black and at best a muddy beige. Ancient balconies had fallen, now supported by newly erected frameworks that mismatched the ancient style so sharply that it only magnified how obscure this style was in the modern day. Many compartments were sealed entirely with flashing biohazard warnings. Others were open to the void, their walls behind the glass doors exploded to the edge of the station.

Being wheeled by the works to install new wiring and repurposing the compartments, Tami felt a great sense of loss. Where modern stations had a sense of practicality and economy, the Sun of the Night, conversely, felt alien. The word had little use within the developed galaxy, but in this case it fitted well. Little was sharp-edged. Everything bent in complex arcs, even the corridors might once have looked like angular masterpieces, but in the void-torn decay and inadequate lighting they were more like ancient and darkened bones. The Sun of the Night was being gutted one deck at a time, as though grafting inelegant cybernetics to a once dignified corpse from a lost race.

Beyond the atrium’s busy centre lay colossal windows, their holes patched and sealed, looking out into the massive construction and docking space in-between the sides of the station. She could see dozens of robotic arms collecting, dismantling and repairing drones before returning them to their mounting recharge points, ready to be held in the void for their pilots to take control. Others wound and built drones from scratch out of plate metal. A production line to replace, repurpose, repair and relaunch the casualties from asteroid mining. She let her eyes go wide at the sight - what she saw outside the window was only part of a massive hangar. Through its shielded exit, four hundred metres away, a second dock was also under construction.

“What… What was this place?” she croaked, curiosity overcoming her nerves.

“Your place of work,” Kreer snapped, either mishearing or deliberately ignoring the tense of her question. He walked beside the gurney, having passed over to one of the hard faced guards to push it. They moved by the high windows into a curling side corridor of rib-like framing. It arced down in a long slope to cross between decks, something virtually unseen in most stations. “The drones you saw are what you will pilot in indentured service to Asset Margin’s mining operations.”

“I’ve never-” Tami whispered, and was cut off as a warning siren suddenly shattered the already bustling noise of the atrium. She yelped and hid her face away when a PA system barked overhead.

“Intruder alert! Section eight! Section sight!”

Kreer keyed his multiband. “The hell is going on up there?”

As he listened to the reply, the alarm ceased.

“Then GET it fixed!” he snarled. Tami began to wonder just how badly damaged this place still was.

He pushed Tami on. “Now, your limited qualifications still make you viable for piloting. Kavala has no strict mandate.” Kreer’s voice continued from behind her. “You will learn and you will perform. I’ve been told to make sure of it and to keep an eye on you while you’re here. You are our only indentured worker, so you’ll get ‘special’ security.”

There was a bitter hint to his tone that Tami decidedly did not enjoy. The sloping corridor came to more cramped conditions of black and brass, a crossroads on the edge of the manufacturing line. The noise was horrific, hissing and clanking shaking the industrial passageways as Kreer directed them deeper into the station.

“You will be provided accommodation and meals that will be deducted from the commission made from mineral acquisition. So don’t worry about starving. We don’t want you to fail to pay back your debt.”

Kreer sounded mocking, and Tami wasn’t certain if it was to her or to the whole idea.

“H-How much?”

“You will see.”

A thick door juddered as it opened, stalled, and then ground the rest of the way. Tami couldn’t see them, but she heard rampant chatter as they moved by accommodation racks for other mining workers. She could smell the latent sweat and thick scent of caffeine from kitchens. Immediately, she felt a clenching terror at being thrown in amongst those she didn’t know, an outcast ‘criminal’ to them.

She needn’t have worried, but the reality was no better.

Under the audible calls of changing shift patterns and assignments, she was wheeled out of their area, by a stairwell marked for ‘Secondus Drone Control Room’, and through to a quieter side of the station’s deck. Here she saw red runes of ancient script above locked doors, each bearing an observation window into a brig. Identical compartments of cells fanned out from the central chamber like the vanes of a leaf; two levels with five doors each. At the foremost door, Tami found them pausing.

“This is where you’ll stay whenever you are not on shift.” Kreer dragged her with a shocked yelp off the gurney, walking with his claws painfully around her wrist. Stumbling, sick, Tami whined and struggled to get him to let go, but found herself being sharply turfed through a barred door.

The compartment was dark, half-hexagonal in shape with a cell on each of the three walls opposite the main door, gunmetal and obsidian facings lit by the faint white of Kavala III through the long, narrow window lining the outer edge. Thrown in the leftmost cell, Tami found a light sheeted bunk, a bare metal chair and desk both welded to the floor and a small access terminal bolted to the desk itself. Strip lighting above, offering a dismal halogen glow, barely helped.

“The computer contains details on what you need to pay back and on drone control. You’re already a pilot.” He scowled. “Apparently.”

“I… I’m actually-”

He knocked the door closed. “So your training shift begins in eight hours. Then maybe they’ll finally see this is a stupid idea.”

Tami hunched against the desk, looking over at the deep red griffon peering through at her. The guards waited outside. “W-Wait, I’m still not recovered, I feel sick! I-I’m not ready for that!”

“No, apparently you’re not.” Kreer pointed at the computer. “And your flight history makes that obvious. I don’t expect much, but if you can avoid crashing another object in training you’ll maybe be able to earn Miss Margin something at least. Learn quickly.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Or it’s me you’ll be hearing from. I am not a babysitter, and I don’t want this task to linger around you. So if you fuck up again, it’ll be me and I’ll not be pleasant, understand?”

Tami could already feel a deep shivering overtaking her. She didn’t understand. This was all too quick. Too sudden. Too big.

“Eight hours till first shift. Clothes will be collected, provided, and cleaned. Food will be delivered three times per day between shifts and before lights out.”

“But-”

“This is your life now. No-one knows where you are. There’s no-one left to come for you. Get used to it and get your head down, and don’t fail another employer.”

And just like that, he turned and stalked off unhappily. Tami got the sense of a predator stuck behind bars just as much as she was. One who longed to let out darker urges. She finally let out her breath when he disappeared.

And was met with silence.

A dark, bare, and utter silence in a warped, alien construct.

That last remark had hit her like a slap. Holding herself, she numbly hit the keyboard on the desk out of a will not to ruminate on those words. She saw a basic UI display. The login - simply a collection of numbers for username and password - had been left for her on a note. Entering after three failed attempts from her unsteady claws, still sitting beside rather than on the bare chair, she saw it was less a computer and more simply an extremely limited workstation for datasheets and shift patterns.

She saw the large numeric displaying how much she was debited by, and her heart nearly stopped.

She saw the average mineral worth intake quota expected per day by most of the voluntary workers on the station. Modifiers for types of mineral, collection rates, repair costs of broken equipment.

Good with numbers like any FTL user, Tami did a mental calculation, taking the averages and applying them to a seven day working week, applying the modifiers, worry welling up inside as each number fell into place.

Twenty eight years.

Twenty eight years.

By the time she worked off the debt Asset expected of her, she would be almost fifty.

Clutching her sore, still chilled body, Tami whimpered and huddled up on the cold floor. The events since waking up had been all so fast. From the infirmary to the captain and Asset, then the station, now here. She barely grasped what was even happening. She hadn’t even begun to piece together her feelings on the certain death she felt she’d evaded. Already she could feel it all congealing, forming into a heavy ball of stress ready to lay on her shoulders.

It had all been so… clinical. Brought here, given a job, told that was it. No drama, no last effort. Just that’s it, you’re a slave now in some backwater independant.

Twenty eight years.

She didn’t even realise how long she sat trying to process the horror of that, until she screamed at the sharp siren alert of food being delivered. The door opened, an automated, tracked aid winding through and placing it through a hatch on her cell door. It left silently.

Tami shook terribly, the one mundane event pulling the trigger. Gripping her head, she felt it all collapse, all crash upon her like a wave. The terror and the sheer utter solitude of her lonely cell, so far from help. So far from warmth. It was everything she had known before. The loss of her ability to go where she wanted. To be trapped.

Panic rose, like a cloying demon stretching its claws over her shoulders, seeping in like the moulded, broken decor of the station’s brig. It crept down the walls like those rib-like bulkheads, winding toward her. The old feelings began to come back, and she felt her already horrified mood edging closer and closer to a precipice she knew she couldn’t dare fall in again. One she couldn’t imagine the effort to stay away from on her own for twenty eight years.

She hadn't even realised she’d started crying until her effort to shake her head broke the sob into a stuttered hiccup. No, no she couldn’t. The thought of being back there, back where she had been three years ago; she couldn’t face it. Heedless of the pain, she got up and paced. What would the captain do? What would Kerfuffle do?

She paused. What would Whisper do?

Tammani looked around.

The Sun of the Night was still in mid reconstruction. It lacked things. Electronics were still being fitted; Asset had prioritised industry above prisoners. Tami was the first. Mind racing, she sat on the bed and tried to wipe her eyes. Figure out the logic - it was what Kerfuffle would do, right? Find something until-

There’s no way they can find you here.

She whined and forced air through her teeth to shove the thought away. What might the station lack? What was the route to have something to do here? Whisper would know; an Agent would know. Eyes blurring, she looked about the chamber. Dared to look at its drooping arches and long broken patterns to search for what felt wrong. Her eyes scanned. Something felt like it was missing, but she couldn’t figure out what. Everything was so unnatural and half-broken that it melded together. Then, finally, she saw it.

There were no cameras.

No-one was watching her. They had left her to her own misery, to wait obediently. They thought her a defeated coward.

They’re right.

Reluctance surged. Fear. Fear of what this thinking would do. The urge to do nothing, do what they said, to not risk it, to just let them win to avoid any consequences; it was overwhelming. Tami froze, summoned up all the courage she could, and went to war within. Quiet. Personal. Yet savage and hard fought. Shivering, claws gripping her sickened, weary body, she remembered everything they’d told her. She wouldn’t let it take her. Not again.

She almost had it. Almost-

A siren hammered into her ears from just above her cell door. The PA system crackled.

“Intruder alert! Intruder alert, section nine!”

Sheltering, she waited till it cut off again, the horrifically loud noise having startled her frantic, hurting nerves.

“Think THINK! I won’t let them-” she whined and beat the side of her head once, a claw over her turning, clamping stomach. “No camera… No cameras! It means… It means… They can’t see if I-I-I-”

She turned and saw the computer station.

And started trying to find something that could unscrew a bolt.

* * *

“So if Claudia's main capacitor banks redirect the excess charge into the auxiliaries-”

“-since they're not needed for the BIG jump across any stellar distance-”

“-then it'll give her enough space to handle this activatin' much quicker than normal, right Miss?”

“Yes! That’s it! And by doing it this way, it’ll prime the fold in space. Then it can pop in more quickly and stagger the expenditure to just what we need. Ah, come on-oof!”

Eleven almost fell as she hopped from the rusted hull of an orbital tug to the discordant mess of pulled circuitry heaped up opposite it. Wires and connectors tumbled down the side in a miniature avalanche, rolling to a halt by Kerfuffle’s claws. The big griffon heaved, dragging out an enormous cable over four inches in diameter and lined with insulant, bending polymer. He checked the tri-bar output on its tip, then started hefting eighty kilograms of it onto Claudia’s cargo-sled behind him.

“Careful up there, Miss!”

“I’m fine! Oh!” Eleven circled, before leaping up and diving down into the fifteen foot high pile of discarded parts, hips wiggling in the air as she dug and scrounged. The enormous junk heap was just one of nine of Port Medusa's obsolescence bay, the graveyard for unsellable scrap and the worthless possessions of those, well, ‘repossessed’ by its owner. Beaming spotlights from above shone down on it, giving stark contrast between a spectrum of hull colours and deep shadow in the crevices between. Kerfuffle moved in the quiet, deep valleys of heavy chassis and fallen reactor housings, carefully muscling over the bulkheads fallen between the slopes. Eleven bounded and skipped between peaks and through the scrappy heights.

They’d been hunting for the past hour for materials to use in their plans. Schemes, as Verbena had put it after seeing Eleven clap her hooves and rub them above the drawn schematics, but Kerfuffle had gently opposed applying a negative tone to anything Eleven created. Requirements arranged, they’d come to the lower decks to assemble their shopping list. Eleven was trailed by a sparkling row of transistors, switches, diodes and resonators that all mimicked each jump and prance she made, like school children following their teacher in a game. Every so often two of them would press together and, if they connected, floated down to the grav-sled. For his part, he would check the type of what she found, and ensure to attain the supporting frameworks that could connect them to Claudia.

“Kiffle, what about this?” She held up a red-encased superconductor. “I could do a lot if I could use one of these!”

He tilted his head and peered up. “Sorry Miss. Claudia ain’t really meant to work with them.”

“Not work with, or not work with until I try?”

He smiled at her. “Sorta like if you asked me to grow hooves, Miss.” He felt a brief well of contentment at the giggle he heard echo down from far above. “But if you can find one like it, except green, and connect ‘em together then it’ll be able to understand her better.”

“Okay!” There was a rustling as she started digging among the smaller components up top, like a foal at Hearthswarming being told the entire tree’s presents were for them. Kerfuffle almost had to remind himself to keep looking for a number of tungsten alloy restraints. At least, until the voice came again from up top.

“Soooo… That pegasus? That was Tami’s other mate? I didn’t assume she had more than one.” Eleven didn’t really look down as she floated two things to her hooves and took a deep look into them.

A blue and grey pegasus had followed Verbena and Smile into Claudia earlier. Kerfuffle had felt awkward at his initial wariness. At that moment, unknowns felt like threats, but the moment he’d heard who it was he felt like they’d been thrown a lifeline.

He’d heard Tami talk about Vantage. And whatever chance had brought him to them, he hadn’t needed to hear him say he’d help to know he would for one simple reason. That as far as he considered it, anyone Tami trusted that much and who had helped her with her problems simply had to be a good person. He shook his head gently. “I don’t rightly know every detail, Miss. Didn’t see fit to go askin’, but Mister Vantage and Miss Tami weren’t able to stay together. Seems he’s a good one though. Still cares about her enough to come out here right now.”

“And he’f helfing?” She tilted her head, voice muffled from holding several tools at once in her lips, magic picking out the individual ones she needed out to pry apart a device she’d found.

“Looks that way. Miss Tami said he’s one of the best pilots there is.”

“Oh? Thaf’sh ghud!” Eleven muffled the words, then dropped the tools onto the pile. “I was worried I would need to inform Volatility Smile that her flying skills are too slow and clumsy for the plan.”

“Not sure she’d enjoy hearing that, Miss.”

Her hooves were like a blur, her horn working in perfect tandem with them. With every click and spark, Kerfuffle felt like that innocent genius sitting high above him in the sparkling beam of a spotlight was pulling his hope back together. She looked up. “Well, it’s true! And we will need a good pilot. Our creation and I won’t do all the work.” She paused and offered a bashful shrug. “Only the vast majority.”

”Miss Tami believes he’s that good. I’ll trust her on that, Miss.”

“Well, I trust Tami. And I trust you. I’ll trust him.”

He felt a little pride there. He remembered merely weeks ago that Eleven wouldn’t have even dared do half of what she was doing now. Eleven had come a long way from the incredibly cautious unicorn afraid to get too close to anyone they’d pulled out of Sidewinder’s lab.

Eleven screwed a wire into a board, and then took two parts that really were not supposed to be used together. Tongue out the corner of her mouth, one eye clenched, she wiggled and wound copper around a connector. “All right. And Kiffle-” She looked up. “You really don’t have to call me ‘miss’ all the time, you know that?”

Kerfuffle paused, caught a little off guard, and let go of another of the thick cables. He shuffled on the spot, looking side to side, claws scratching at his neck. “Well, I just figured- I s’pose it- Sorry, you don’t like it? I’m just being polite. It was just cos’ I don’t think enough people were with you until recent.”

She tapped her hooves. “Oh. No, it’s comfortable. I just didn’t want you thinking you had to. Since you’ve been so nice to me. Worked with me on these things. Only if you choose to.”

“I do, Miss.”

Eleven tinkered away, chin tucked close. “Good. Because I don't want you to feel uncomfortable. Because I feel very comfortable like this. Just being able to make things with you.”

He tapped his beak closed, wringing his thumbs against his palms. “I don’t, Miss. Anythin’ but. Actually.” He trailed off and looked at the pile of scrap in the grav-sled, “I feel like when you’re here with us, when I look at you with an idea, I jus’... It makes me believe it’ll all be okay.”

A quiet look between them led to a gentle smile, and Kerfuffle felt himself flush somewhat. Taking a long breath, he dragged the final cable onto the sled, and heard her riding a panel down the pile like a great big slide. She impacted at the bottom and catapulted into his fluff with a heavy impact to squeeze tight.

“It’s easy. Just dimensional theory. It’ll work.” She let go and put a green and red joined superconductor into the sled with a theatrical dusting off of her hooves before hopping on top of the small pile they had amassed. “And we’re all set!”

Kerfuffle took up the sled’s grips. “Design palace, miss?”

She pointed a hoof dramatically ahead. “Onward!”

It didn’t take long to get everything back to the hangar; the connecting elevators and service tunnels were intended to get ships down from there after all. Within a quarter of an hour Kerfuffle had dragged the sled, even with Eleven beginning work mid-way sitting on its pile, back to Claudia. There, they closed up the main hatch behind them and dragged the tarpaulin off the origin of their plan.

It had already existed. Eleven’s most ambitious project yet. A work of weeks; a long project in her world. Situated at the port side of the cargo bay was a device formed from a chaotic maelstrom of spare parts. Few of them matched, with pipes and cables welded or soldered to jury-rigged power conduits, torn off databank servers, splayed wires, Makatu-boards from an FTL subsystem, deck plating ripped up and bent into shape and a spare mana-scoop meant to collect magical energy from M-space were bonded to a quarter of Claudia’s reactor coolant injectors. At its centre, within the nightmare amalgamation of metal and assembled scrap lay one single chair, and a vicious metal spike aimed at neck height for any who sat in it.

Her Trans-Dimensional Engine.

Eleven was already crawling all over it, preparing to fit some new elements necessary for their idea. “I doubt we’ll get a chance to test the T.M.D.E. But I’m sure it’ll work!”

Kerfuffle fetched a clamping-welder, readying for his role in all this as he laid the cables out, ready to lead them up into the engine room. “Wait, T.M.D.E? Isn’t it-”

“If it’s going to do what we’re doing, it’s not a T.D.E any more is it? Now! The magnetoencephalography I’ve added is going to be much more specific soooo I don’t need this any more - oh! Or this! But I’ll need this to be like… hmm! This is going to be so complicated and it all has to be ordered perfectly or it’ll trap us in several places! Conventional physics doesn’t apply - I get to theorise a new form!”

Her voice pitched upwards in delight. Kerfuffle felt happy, feeling at last a sense of urgency. Progress. They had something. Surprise aid from another. A pilot. An idea from Eleven.

A job he could do.

“So if this is our way in there; our surprise?”

“Of course it’ll be a surprise!” Eleven scoffed and looked back at him, snapping down welding goggles to move onto the first cable attachment the moment Kerfuffle had it lifted into place. “This Asset Margin is a pony of your greater galaxy! That means she is like everyone else out here and didn’t ever just sit down and spend the time to figure out superluminal jetting of solid matter through nothing.”

“In other words, she ain’t a clue what you can do, right Miss?”

She gave him a sudden look and a firm shake of her head. “Wrong!”

“...wrong?”

“She hasn’t a clue what we can do.”

Kerfuffle looked up at the unicorn now standing atop the machine. She raised one of her clean, precise, graceful hooves. He opened his huge, oil-stained claw and carefully moved its weight up to press his palm to her hoof. They both smiled. They both got to work again. Tools arced through the air, tossed between them. Cables were slotted and locked in just as Eleven was needing them. Kerfuffle sweated and heaved the heavy material up to bring it to the reactor, or tightened plating holding it all together, while Eleven scampered and burrowed around it with the details and the fine connections.

“So! Plan is!” Eleven called out as she dropped back into the chair, adjusting an EEG-like headset, a new addition. Kerfuffle picked up on her unfinished sentence.

“Go into Kavala, find where Miss Tami and the Cap’n are.”

“Yes! And then we activate this-”

“Which’ll catch her off guard with it modified to-”

“Mhm! And use it to go right to them! Surprise this weird sounding pony going in-”

“-with moving like she ain’t ever seen.”

Eleven smiled and rolled her eyes. “Well we don’t actually move anywhere, Kiffle. Not like, ‘move’. I can get the folding paper again - I think I’ve got it around here.”

Kerfuffle grinned and shook his head. “I understand it like that. Still just tryin’ to wrap my head around it is all, Miss. I just trust what you do and that’s enough for me. Think Miss Tami’s the best one to actually understand it.”

Eleven turned up her nose a touch. “Tami understands A, B, and C of the arcane-stellar mechanics alphabet. I work out past Z to interact with ⅋ and ᵹ at the end.”

“I-” The big griffon paused for a moment, blinking as he struggled to grasp what he’d just heard for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Well, I know Miss Tami enjoys that stuff, maybe you should take it up to her on the bridge and-”

There was a pause in the cargo hold.

Kerfuffle realised what he’d said, and the clank of the ratchet in his claws knocked against the cable idly. It had been instinct. Habit. Muscle memory expectation of the norm after a moment of happy chatter with someone he enjoyed being with. When hadn’t Tami or Hair Trigger been around here when he was? At best small gaps, but nothing like not available at all.

Nothing like ‘gone’.

“Kiffle?”

Eleven had clambered down. Kerfuffle looked at the connected cables. The heavy grunt work. The mechanics to affix, secure, weld, energise from the reactor. His side of it was almost done for the moment. Eleven could tinker forever if she wanted.

“I was just…” He looked side to side, voice bending hard. He always had been a terrible liar. “Worried about how to speak to their folks.”

Eleven considered that, looked back at her machinist’s pandemonium behind her, and gave him a gentle smile. “Want me to come help?”

That gentle smile, he reminded himself. But he shook his head. “I got this, Miss. Galaxy’s not ready for your things yet. I’ll let you work on surprisin’ it.”

“Umm… no, the galaxy was always ready. How matter works never changed. Just the creatures in it never got it. But, if you’re sure?”

He nodded. “Won’t be long.”

There was a small pause as Eleven looked up at him. Her mane looked a tad frazzled from all her magic, soldering, electricity and clambering over the pile of doodads and gizmos that was her machine, but even below a few loose strands, her eyes narrowed, thinking something through before finally nodding. “All right.”

He never enjoyed leaving Eleven. It always felt like he was distancing from her, but Kerfuffle needed a moment. Moving away up the stairs to Claudia’s upper deck, he entered the bridge and held for some time by the large panel on the centreline console for communications.

Try as he might, he couldn’t do it. He knew how; he knew the contacts, he had the money to afford a real time call. There was no technical problem to doing this job like any others. But still his claw wouldn’t press the buttons. He knew this was the right thing to do, but he began to doubt if he was the right choice. If he had made the right choice volunteering for it.

The right choice? He’d been decisive on account of Tami and Trigger. But now? Similar thoughts had been plaguing him even before the kidnapping, even before the freighter accident. Incidents had been mounting, and he felt like if there were any one mistake, it would become a fault.

And as a mechanic, he wasn’t sure the right way to fix that one if it did.

After minutes of standing in the quiet, he finally reached forward to the console. He keyed his quick passcode in, but he didn’t go for the crew details to find the contacts. That would have to wait. He knew one person he could contact. One sole person he could seek aid from right now. He didn’t dare worry Eleven over it and Smile was running ragged busy. That left only one.

He keyed in a memorised twenty nine digit number for a cross-galactic contact without hesitation or error, paused for a moment, then tapped ‘Connect’ with a clawtip. Claudia’s main viewscreen terminated its board of warnings over his work in the engine room and switched to a connection pattern. He watched it depart, relay, and waited half a minute until it went shooting through the galaxy’s transmitter arrays. The final step hung for second after hesitant second, until finally it chimed, and the picture blurred into a video footage from a laptop.

Bright white feathers framed the face of a young female griffon, staring back at him in delight from a whole galaxy away. Her shape was hazy as the encoding sorted out the connection, but he’d recognise Galena anywhere.

“Fuff! I didn’t expect a call right now! Sorry, just had to run in from eating with the students here. Weren’t you going to call tomorrow? It’s hardly cheap! Well, not that I’m complaining.”

Behind Galena, Kerfuffle could see the esoteric decor of the accommodation the Æther Corps had provided during her treatment. But more than anything, he saw her beak. Her face. Unobscured by the crucial breathing mask and talking excitedly without one wheeze or strain. His eyebrows raised, and he felt an impulsive smile almost break through the worry.

“‘Lena, your mask is- Or I suppose it might be-”

Galena, as ever, knew when to just cut to the chase for her big brother. “I’m on my first test trial for a night without it here. They say I’ll probably need it again during the early morning, but they want to gauge if the work is improving things.” She grinned. “And they told me to talk normally, do normal things! So I’m writin’ and workin’ on a thing I want to show you an’ your friends.”

She clasped her talons together and briefly sung a melodic note. But at its end there was a wheezing heave. Galena sucked in air, a claw to her chest as she gave her big brother a look that he knew spelled ‘whoops, overdid it, but I’ll never regret it’.

“Just do what they say an’ go easy on it, okay?”

“You’re so like Mama. I will. Whew, ok. I will.” She got her breath back, shifting the laptop over till she could lie sideways on her borrowed bed. “So. C’mon, Fuff. What’s wrong? You’re the biggest creature of habit I ever knew. You wouldn’t call off the date for kicks.”

Kerfuffle stood still and silent.

“Fuff?”

He fidgeted, and he felt the silence getting longer and longer. This was out of his element. Problems weren’t something you dropped on those not affected by them. You just got on and fixed them. But this time, this moment. He needed it.

“Lena, there’s… There’s been a problem. With the Cap’n an’ Miss Tami.”

He began to explain, to tell the whole crushing story. He told of the first encounter with Asset Margin on Kavala, the freighter accident, and then the terrible loss of Tami and Hair Trigger - all the way through to figuring out who had taken them. He barely met her eyes as he did, mumbling and playing with a wrench idly in his claws mid-story. When he finished, he just sighed. “An’ now I said I’d go an’ tell their folks, ‘cos the missing person’s report’s gonna reach ‘em in a day or two. I thought it’d be better to hear it from us, who can tell ‘em we ain’t leavin’ them. But I said I’d do it and now I dunno if I made the right choice by volunteering. If I’ll say it all wrong. Or make them more worried. Or give them hope that-”

He only saw her from the corner of his eye as he cut himself short.

“Been wonderin’ a lot lately if the choices I make are always the right ones. ‘Cos I feel like I ain’t done all I shoulda’. An’ the ideas I had weren’t always the best in places, other places too I mean, and...”

He trailed off, losing his flow. Galena sat with a pillow hugged into her belly.

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” She spoke quietly, putting a claw on the screen near the camera. Kerfuffle mimicked it.

“We got plans. I got some too, but the others’. Miss Eleven’s, Missus Smiles’. I feel like I trust ‘em more than mine.”

“Doesn’t sound like that to me.” For such a small griffon, Galena had very telling eyes. Anyone who had to express their whole personality through a breathing-aid for most of their life naturally grew an emphasis. And here, they stared into him, as much piercing as they were caring. “Your story’s got a lot of holes in it, Fuff,” said Galena, every word careful and teasing.

“Huh?”

Galena sat forward, her head filling much of the camera. “Like how did you all even get into that warehouse? You skipped how. Or this ‘Garwyn’ guy, he was beatin’ down your captain and then just vanished from your tale. And what about that shuttle? You said it had an immobiliser on it, but then you all just flew back to Claudia up in orbit. Then later, suddenly Medusa’s leader just gave you all access to the sensor-place and you didn’t say a word about how that happened, or how the shuttle got ID’ed as the same immobiliser from the last one.”

She twisted the corners of her beak.

“Funny how they’re all the bits that would be solved by an application of heavy strength or mechanical skill, ain’t it? It’s just like how I told you back here, that no supervisor was going to ever promote you if you just worked quietly. Papa got his ‘cos of when he took matters into his claws an’ told the others where it was goin’ wrong and then fixed it himself. They saw him do it. Smile and Eleven make others see what they’re doin’. But you, Fuff...”

Her voice softened.

“You just work away at every problem. You don’t ask for, nor want recognition for it. You jus’ wanna do it. See it done. Not try to do something outside the box or wild. But now there’s only a clawful of you and ideas gotta come up on the move, ideas that don’t seem easy, and it’s all the same thing I’ve always told you.”

“That... S’better to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission?” He mumbled the words.

“Spot on. Just like you always kept tellin’ me to not get too carried away and give up the slow steady path to hope. To not burn out. I thought you were just a Mom 2.0 an’ the times I shouted… Yeah, feel a bit silly now.” She pointed to her uncovered beak with a smile. “But I’ll tell you what, Fuff. It wasn’t Mama, or Papa, or me that came up with the idea to go into those pits like an idiot to fight for my health, or to jump off and head into space earning bigger money on your own, and get an unheard of secret magical order to bring up classified medical tech to give me more of my life to have.”

She pointed.

“That was all your idea to kick those off, and you better not regret that. Even the bad one, it still formed who you are. For all I know what you learned in the pits saved your life out there.”

Kerfuffle fell silent, one claw gently closing over his chest.

Galena shook her head. “You’re worried ‘cos you never want a bad idea of yours to hurt anyone, Fuff.”

“I don’t… An’ I keep thinkin’, what if I do what I thought, but those reports don’t reach their families? What if me tellin’ em just makes ‘em worry and worry and hurt. The moment they even see me an’ not them it’ll be a minute of not knowin’ if I’m comin’ to say they’re-” He stopped short of the morbid word. “-and they’ll never forget that feeling. I remember it every time Mama sat me down to say you’d gotten worse, Lena! The few seconds between ‘It’s about Galena’ and hearing the details! Or when Professor Jhaziea talked about Miss Eleven and left me not knowin’ about the future for her! It hurts to not know!”

His voice rose louder than he expected it ever would. Ashamed, he dropped it again.

“An’ I don’t know what’s best. Or what to even bother tellin’ them nice folks that their daughters are… Are gone. ‘Cos all my promises to them just feel real weak in my head, Lena…”

Galena sat quietly, and Kerfuffle could see her eyes look like they were shimmering. But as ever, she held herself with a resolve, and when she opened her beak, the words came with a careful honesty that only one’s true sister could have.

“You just tell them the truth, Fuff.”

“...Lena?”

“You tell the truth, exactly as you feel it. And you have no idea how much the truth could matter, or what it’ll spark in someone. To tell them what’s gonna’ happen.”

“I…”

“That both of you I see there are gonna’ try to save their lives.”

“Both…?”

Kerfuffle sat up sharply. From behind him, almost silent on the deck, Eleven bent under his shoulder and hooked her body up under his arm to lean her cheek against his chest and neck.

“Both,” confirmed Eleven with a small nod and a tearful smile.

Kerfuffle looked down at her, then over to Galena. He fought hard to stay composed, shook, and eventually nodded. “That I know. They would for me. Lena, I’m sorry to make you worry if I’m-”

“Don’t even try it, big brother.” She smirked. “You’ve no idea how proud you make me knowin’ more about what you do for others now. Besides… I still need to hear from Tami what she thought of that music.”

Eleven grinned at her. “Don’t worry, Lena! I’ll watch out for him! Promise!”

Galena giggled, nodding. “Now, make the call, Fuff. Both of ‘em. Both of you. I think you made the right decision, even if it’s hard. That you’re even asking that? Says a lot.”

“Thanks, Lena…” he mumbled.

“S’what family’s for right?”

“Thank you.” Eleven added.

“I’ll still call you tomorrow,” Kerfuffle added quietly. “I’m gonna call ‘em now.”

“Let me know how it goes, and stop keeping this stuff to yourself for goodness sake. See ya.”

“Bye, Lena.”

The white griffon smiled, wiped an eye, and cut the connection on her side. Kerfuffle watched the blank hangup screen for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and turned to hold the pink unicorn back for a few seconds to compose himself.

She patted his back and made an icebreaking chuckle. “Anytime, ‘Fuff’.”

* * *

Six holographic displays of system scans, four dataslates of shipping manifests, six separate mail-chains and thirty thousand credits later, Volatility Smile slumped back. A hard plastic chair creaked at her limp weight. She'd claimed a vacant office in Medusa's administration wing; the cramped space and spartan furniture felt uncomfortable yet comfortingly familiar. She hadn’t gone on that deep a sourcing dive through breadcrumb trails since her first trials-by-fire in the exchange.

But she had the information she needed. Not all the information she wanted, but enough to know how awful the situation really was. Groaning, she willed her body to stand up again, noting the alert from her multiband of having missed sleep. It had been over twenty four hours since she’d last rested and her body was feeling heavy. Her scars hurt. Her eyes felt like cotton wool. Yet even so, she exhaled sharply and rocked herself upright again, taking the collated master-drive of information with her.

Outside the glass-walled office she could see Verbena sitting on a desk, talking quietly with Vantage in the dark. Both were lit only by the glow of a three-monitor setup. She was working on her personal laptop, surreptitiously granting Smile access to Medusa’s records of corrupt border and law agents. The pegasus was running his own data, using his experience in tracking shipping lanes and signals intelligence to piece together the parts Smile couldn’t. They’d been streaming their finds to her from across the empty office with, fittingly, military efficiency and the eagerness of those with a personal stake. Pausing, Smile listened in for a moment as she parsed her own words to interrupt.

“You ran from your parents to come here?” Vantage muttered with an amused smile.

“Wouldn’t say ‘ran’ so much as skipped dinner,” replied Verbena, “look - life was boring; I wasn’t getting challenged and with the family’s accounts s’not like I had any real need to worry about anything.” She shrugged. “Wanted something exciting. Figured Sis’ knew how.”

He looked up. “And did you find it?”

Verbena lifted a hoof a few inches, wiggling it in a small circle toward the ceiling. “Give and take. Kinda fun having pirates and smugglers terrified of me because of Sweets. But also horrendously boring with just scruffy cargo-shippers and mercenaries. Hair Trigger, Tami and the others were muuuch more fun… and were just better to hang out with.”

“So I’m learning. But it doesn't sound all that boring from your day one arrival.”

The young mare sat up straight, looking down at him from her perch rather sharply. “Wait, you heard about that? How did-”

“Smile brought me up to date.” He stopped typing and turned to her fully, leaning a foreleg on the table and tiredly resting on it. “Thank you, Verbena. From what I hear you saved them all, getting them their chance to fight out.”

He extended a hoof to her.

“And that includes Tami - that and giving her someone to be herself around out here. So far as I’m concerned, it makes what you did just a little bit really important to me. You were there for her during the time I wasn’t.”

Immediately squirming on the spot at the appreciation, Verbena just waved both her hooves dismissively, cheeks a touch rosy. “Oh, c’mon! Look it’s just-” After a moment she sighed and gave his hoof a quick, embarrassed shake. “Look I was just, y’know... Aww c’mon! Don’t throw that kind of formality on me outta nowhere! We got stuff to do!” She laughed quietly, grabbing her bottle of water.

“Didn’t know when else I might get the chance.” Vantage tapped a hoof on the desk and tilted his head before going back to his work. “But if you’d rather we talk about the vodka-message incident-”

Verbena spluttered loudly, spraying water across the thin carpet. “Do NOT go there! I was just- Look, OKAY! Sheesh! I was drunk, okay!?”

“I’m getting the impression people out here do that quite a bit based on how much everyone knows about each other.” He smirked at her.

“Shut up!” She scoffed and threw the empty bottle at him. It bounced off his shoulder onto the floor, making him quietly laugh. There was something about the laugh, Verbena observed. Earnest, but hollow. Verbena knew well - mostly from her time around Sweet Alyssum - when to read between the lines with people. There was a lot of confidence in Vantage, a lot of charisma, but there was a thread to something intriguingly deeper and vulnerable. She opened her mouth and took a breath, ready to pull on it.

Smile spoke first, walking closer across the office. “All right, listen up. We’ve got what we can get for now.”

Verbena, her words denied before they got to emerge, sat back up with a brief huff of air, rubbed her forehead vigorously and closed her laptop. “All right, all right, what’s it all?”

Vantage turned in the chair, immediately paying quiet attention. Volatility Smile laid her data-drive down on the desk. “Info’s on there. But in short, I got in touch with a chief signals analyst. Confederate border patrols did observe Asset’s yacht returning to Kavala. They know it’s her, so they long distance tracked it into the asteroid field surrounding the planet as a matter of protocol. But it’s not the best news.”

She paused, but neither of them interrupted; they just sat, keenly interested. She took a breath. “Her yacht stopped at an old pre-wyrm station known as the Sun of the Night. Brief pause, passenger delivery likely, then moved on toward the moon itself.”

“What’s in the station?” Vantage asked.

“Remote-piloting for industrial drones. Sounds like the sort of thing Hair Trigger or Tami could perform, so I had a thought to check if she wants them as ‘indentured contracts’. Turns out there’s only one listed on her open company records since yesterday, around the time the yacht arrived. One more ‘slave’ legally added.”

“Tami.” Verbena spoke quietly.

“Exactly. Between the two, it makes sense she’d be the one taken for pilot work. Which begs the question of just where in the stars she took Hair Trigger. The station? The surface? Elsewhere? We can’t assume they’re both in one place any more.”

The problem became clear immediately. Vantage groaned. “And we can’t be in two places at once. Whoever we save first, they could kill the other before we can get to them.”

“We don’t know that. But we can’t discount it, damn them.” Smile spat the words. She felt an anger building - a fury born of helplessness. Kerfuffle and Eleven's idea to slip into Asset's territory using the TDE might have gotten them to a specific location in time, but that wasn't an option now. Even the Sun of the Night alone was a huge structure - it'd take forever to narrow down the location of a single person. Furthermore, the Confederate reports confirmed that Asset had invested heavily in security. Armed drones, greater numbers of hired guns as guards, EMP projectors hidden amongst the asteroids all controlled by a mining station - goodness knows what else was in there.

Something tickled Smile’s sixth sense of expenditure. Asset was rich, but Smile knew very well the rich didn’t spend idly. That was after all how they stayed rich. Such a massive increase in security seemed an excessive response to one rogue ship embarrassing her. Smile pondered what she had planned, but it hardly mattered. At the end of the day, the heightened security meant one hard fact.

“We can’t do it.”

Her words were simple, and she drew up a hoof to silence Verbena’s quick opposition.

“We can’t.”

Vantage sat up after glancing at Verbena. “Are you meaning to say we just give up?”

With a brief, daring smirk, Volatility Smile shook her head. The pair looked startled.

‘At last, a good dramatic reaction’, she briefly thought, then purged amusement from her mind to the task at hoof and opened her mouth to speak.

* * *

Claudia’s main screen on the bridge chimed as the connection was made.

Kerfuffle’s hands were shaking, and he felt Eleven hold the one on her side tighter between her forelegs. Looking down, he saw her bright eyes keenly watching him. She smiled. The sight bolstered his resolve.

Ahead of him, through verging pixels and smears of colour, the connection settled into showing two people he’d only seen in images. A blonde griffon, getting on in years, and a pegasus with a mane and eyes that made his heart skip a moment.

“She looks a lot like her mother,” Eleven whispered, but Kerfuffle had no time for a reply.

Gaius and Compass Rose, Tami’s father and mother, appeared before them. Both were smiling broadly already, and he could see a glass of wine in Gaius’ claws, along with two others on the coffee table near the laptop as it was set down.

“Hello there!” Gaius spoke loudly, a touch of a pre-existing good mood bursting from every word. But Kerfuffle saw the instinctive look of confusion and worry on Rose’s face at the connection from their daughter’s ship not including Tami immediately.

“Sorry to… to bother you both, Mister and Missus.”

Gaius seemed to catch up with his wife’s thinking, but he didn’t lose his smile. Kerfuffle just saw the small glance from his eyes, searching. “We were just sitting down to a night with an old friend. Kerfuffle, isn’t it? And sorry, I don’t know your face, Miss…?”

Eleven blinked in surprise at the immediate reference to her. She looked up at Kerfuffle and, seeing his nod that they could be trusted, stood up a little straighter with a hoof to her chest. “I am Eleven. I’m their trans-dimensional and temporal mana-anomaly specialist.”

The brief pause as the words registered to griffon and pegasus made Eleven bite the side of her lip. “It’s a… uh, new technology.”

Rose chuckled lightly, taking a sip of wine. “Two decades out and we’re out of the game of jargon now, dear.” The brief banter to her husband didn’t last to amusement though. “To what do we owe the contact? Is this something Tami’s doing?”

Kerfuffle could feel the gentle urging in her voice. He hated to do this. They seemed nice, not demanding of this unusual call from an unfamiliar face at all, not even betraying their impatience. They were good people. They didn’t deserve-

“Kiffle,” Eleven whispered out of mic-pickup, and shook his claw lightly.

He closed his eyes, and more than anything, he felt their moods turn very very serious from a half second of delay. He drew up Galena’s words tight inside and opened his eyes again with a short breath to tell the truth in the best way he knew he wished others would have done for him so many times.

"Mister Gaius, Missus Rose, Tami's alive." He couldn’t bear to not open with those words. “But a pony called Asset Margin’s took her from us ‘cos we all ended up in a spot of bother with her earlier this year. Caught our Cap’n and Miss Tami while they were in a shuttle. An’ right now… Right now our best guess is that since she took them, it’ll be as revenge to be forced to work for her, or be prisoners or whatnot. She doesn’t seem the sorts to go taking it out on them with harm, but we don’t know how they are right now or what her plans are.”

He wanted to explain so much more. Justify. Detail. But the facts. The truth. The important bits he felt he’d want to hear first had to come first. And when he looked at the screen, he saw their faces. The serious, immediate attention being paid to everything he said. Behind them, their guest peered over, a hippogriff with worry on his face. Kerfuffle didn’t recognise him. Suddenly, he felt more on the spot than he ever had in his life.

“I felt it best it came from us, an’ not from the missing persons report that’ll arrive soon enough to their direct contacts.”

Gaius spoke up suddenly. The wine glass had been put down. His words were more rapid, staccato and meaningful. “Oh Tami… This Asset Margin, who is she? What was the last you saw of them? Where to?”

Kerfuffle did his best. As he answered one question, another would emerge. Sometimes overlapping. He held onto Eleven’s hoof tighter as two minutes stretched to ten. He told them of their previous Kavala mission, of the shuttle mishap. He told them everything he’d told Galena, and tried his best to answer them. He felt out of breath, and as he wilted, he felt Eleven step forward.

“Tami’s been a friend to all of us. I’m… I’m really sorry we had to come tell you all this.” She looked down, but then steeled herself and glanced at Kerfuffle, hardening her eyes. A hoof crossed over her chest and she kept her head high, her voice pure and crystal clear. “But I can tell you one thing.”

Her horn suddenly ignited, vivid and intense - a fiery brightness that put all unicorns to shame. A galaxy of shimmering blue and purple stars whirled around her horn more dense than any magic Kerfuffle had ever seen. Gaius and Rose's eyes lit up in surprise as the young mare turned back to face them. Eleven wore a firm and absolutely resolved expression.

“We’re not leaving them behind. And it is in my power, our power, to do that.”

* * *

“Precisely because it’s not something we can do,” Smile said, “is why we’re not going to be the only ones doing it.”

She lifted her multiband and opened up her address book. Vantage leaned in.

“Why, who are you contacting?”

* * *

“We think we got a plan to use Miss Eleven here’s specialities and our knowhow to duck in and get them both out safely. An’ we’ll not stop till we do. We’re gonna’ bring Tami and the Cap’n back.”

“And we’ll use everything we can do to make it happen.” Eleven smiled confidently.

Magic and ethereal potency stood side by side with raw strength and utterly patient determination. Kerfuffle drew breath, and spoke the honest truth.

“I promise you that.”

* * *

Volatility Smile met Vantage’s eyes and slid her hoof across the screen - a message detailing their situation and the need for assistance. He saw the button marked clearly.

[Send All]

“Everyone.”

Smile hit the button.

* * *

From a single multiband, the digital mail pinged through to Port Medusa’s central data array as a single file. From there, the banks of processors powering the station’s stellar-antenna split it into the desired number of messages and encoded them all into the next info-bursts to be sent across the stars. Sixty eight seconds after, loaded within a vehicle of ultra-high band signals to be blasted out into the void, Smile’s message was scanned and checked. Seeing who sent it, a copy was sent to a support desk for confirmation. They sent it up the chain to an Administrator’s desk, who forwarded it on orders to the Director.

Looking away from her negotiations with the steely eyed pirate lord - a menacingly tall griffoness - across from her, Sweet Alyssum let the corners of her mouth crease up in satisfaction to see who was sending it, and authorised an immediate data-burst to the closest GalaNet beacon.

At the rushed command, the digital-vehicle was readied and transmitted from Port Medusa’s three hundred metre long antenna atop the station. And from there, its journey began across the unknowably intricate webs of a network that fed information galaxy wide. Across the so-called GalaNet. It shot from beacon to beacon at superluminal velocity. It whipped into and out of M-space on extreme range broadcasts that utilised some of the most ancient technology still running in the galaxy to power a galactic informational network in almost real time.

In a dozen directions it shot off. It powered through Port Medusa’s internal delivery mechanisms, pinging Verbena and Vantage’s multibands. It reached a deserted hangar in the belly of Medusa, where an enormous, vicious shadowed creature of claw and teeth saw the update and turned to the serene, quiet unicorn with her; the equine nodded. It went into the New Lunar Republic. It sent its mail through the Confederacy, the League, the Caliphate and more. It reached Equestria and its moon. It reached ships in the void.

In one hour, it had reached everyone she needed it to.

* * *

Gaius thanked Kerfuffle and the unusual new unicorn beside him for their thoughtfulness, then closed the connection.

Sitting back with a sigh, his head in his hands, he felt Rose lean against him, her head on his shoulder, a hoof comfortingly around his back. He knew it wasn’t just to help him. A second later, he held her in return. Taking a breath, he looked up, seeing her wet eyes looking back at his own doing their best to avoid the same.

There was a despondent whine. Orbit stood by the sofa, looking up at them both with sad eyes. He lifted a paw onto Gaius’ thigh, almost a pleading gesture.

The silence was brief, but horrifying. Neither knew what to say.

“I can find if I know anything about this-”

“I can speak to-”

Both of them spoke at once, and both halted short. The shock was total. The will to act frozen in the unknown.

“I shouldn’t have-” Gaius began.

“No. No you know that’s not true, remember her.” Rose shook him. “We just need to-”

No words came.

But across from them in the front room of the house they had settled in, retired in, their guest made a sharp exhale and got up from a cushion. Aileron sniffed, rubbed his face with a claw and moved over to them both, one hand gently knurling Orbit’s head to comfort the canine.

“Gaius, Rose?” His voice was quiet. “You two saved my life. Pulled me off that planet ahead of the Solar Empire’s bombs.” Every word hung in the quiet air. “I know we never said it openly. But I was still young. I was alone. And you two took care of me. Gave me a new home on board. Taught me. Gave me skills. A job. Eventually a command. Surrogate or not I-”

He screwed up his face, then knelt down. He looked up at his former captain, and the two who had helped him come to be who he was.

“I was the first after you two to ever hold her. And… I always thought of Tami like a distant sister to me because of it. Even if I knew it would only ever be one way, with how things turned out. I meant what I quietly promised myself then for all three of you. So...”

Aileron hardened his face, collected himself, and picked up his multiband from the side table. He cued a transmission into it and spoke up in a firm, commanding tone.

“This is the Captain. All crew return to stations immediately and prep for emergency departure.”

Aileron met Gaius’ eyes and he saw a resolve take hold in them he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

“The Captain needs us and the Tammaran for one more run.”

* * *

Verbena Mint didn’t even knock.

“You saw the request, I know you did!” Her voice barked across the office toward her half-sister; Sweet Alyssum looked up in advance, as though having expected this. “If it’d make you feel better, I’ll go with Gerhard and-”

“You? You are not going!” Alyssum was momentarily startled, sitting up.

“The hell I am! It’s Tami, and-”

Sweet Alyssum actually scraped her desk across the baroque flooring as she came suddenly to her hooves. “You can support them however you wish, but they are going into danger. Danger I do not want you to be a part of! You will not go to Asset Margin’s space, Verbena Mint.”

“Don’t you use my full name like you’re Mom!”

“Well one of us has to take the role since apparently you still need one.” Alyssum muttered the words, coming to stand above her younger sister. Sensing the backlash building from her tone, Alyssum sighed, and laid a hoof on Verbena’s shoulder, lowering her voice. “Listen, I’ve agreed to patch information to them and to help fast-track Leopold onto the station again to equip them. But Asset Margin is not some side-rival of mine with a two ship flotilla, and I don’t want you charging into danger. You can do all you want to set them up, I know you’ll help them that way. I’ll even give you access to stay in touch at long range. But please, you. Stay. Here. Understood?”

Verbena scrunched up her nose, snorting at the ground.

“Understood?” Sweet Alyssum felt her voice harden, then retracted, adding, “-sis?”

Verbena Mint looked up, matching eye to eye with a soft, obvious worry, then deflated. “Okay...”

Sweet Alyssum didn’t say anything; she just kept a long stare upon her half-sister. “Mom would-”

Verbera groaned and turned away. “FINE! Okay. Whatever! I’ll just… not go help rescue my best friend out here then will I?”

“I didn’t say that.” Sweet Alyssum didn’t modulate her tone at all. “Leave it to them.”

The younger earth pony looked down, as though regretting the sudden accusation. “I need a moment. Alone.”

Alyssum nodded slowly. “I’ll come by later.”

Verbena turned and stomped away out past the door to Alyssum’s reception hall; hardened pirates who had come to pay tribute to the director warily stepped aside in her path. She didn’t look back as she took a right turn and trotted away from the crowds, heading round the arc of the deck into the restricted section of this level. The compartments where Alyssum lived and had given her a quarters of her own. Fine red carpet softened the angry steps as she passed window after window to the spectacular views of Saphiban II’s drifting rings and came to a door that opened automatically for her. A clipped, electronic voice rang out after a small jingle at her entry, the lights of the apartment flickering on.

“Welcome home, Verbena.” It paused as the door slid shut behind her. In front of her lay a three room dwelling, spacious and wide, with convex walls that curved outwards from the floor and ceiling like a swollen bubble from Port Medusa’s executive level. The central open plan room contained an untidy kitchen of lacquered wood and several luxury side rooms beyond grey arches, but most prominently was dominated by a central recreational area. The latter space was drowning in data-disks and books stacked around red couches sunken into the floor, a retro-tech projector and a hanging white sheet. Beyond it lay four monitors, three keyboards and a full server rig dominating what was technically supposed to be a dining table.

The voice continued its report. “System intrusions: Zero. Attempts: Twelve. Sources: Various malware and three ‘Port Medusa’. Downloads Completed: Horror Between Worlds VIII, Tempest Lance the Animat-”

“Cancel update.” She spoke without breaking her stride, moving over to start a transfer of various softwares of dubious legality from her rig to her laptop. Once the download was underway, she went to the bag she’d brought with her. The one she’d sworn she’d finish unpacking one of these days.

“Got your fat ass out once already, Tami.” Verbena dug out a sealed box, and drew her ‘borrowed’ piece from within it, an object she really wasn’t supposed to have. It was ready.

And now so too was she.

* * *

Far, far across the galaxy, a three hundred year old teleporter lit up.

White sparkles flared over its golden struts; glowing runes hanging in the air wobbled and folded into themselves. In a flash of light, a unicorn came marching out of thin air as though he had never once broken stride.

Grey cloak billowing behind him, Tundra Gem marched out across the Æther Corps’ hangar level, the bright runes of yellow-gold below his cloak reflecting on the polished azure walkways between landing platforms. A drop into an ethereal blue nebula in the black drifted below the walkways and starship berths in the gargantuan space, large enough to dock a cruiser. Its ceiling was hidden behind a projected veil of Equestria’s beautiful night sky. Twinkling stars of the illusion shone down upon two rows of ships lined against either of the star-chart embossed walls, empty and quiet while a slit of real stars behind a masked field covered the far end and exit from Luna’s Moon.

Glowing lines of lapis-lazuli pulsed silently across the floor into guiding lines of inlaid obsidian and cobalt glass around his hooves, his heavy steps echoing in the silent space. His eyes were focused on one particular vessel, his pace strong and determined as he approached, floating a hasty pack of ‘liberated’ acquisitions from the archives with him to the vessel of his choosing.

Lady of the Fountain. The fastest of the Corps’ vessels he'd been able to quietly force access to in such a short time, and in the same class as the lost Lady of the Lake. Stepping onto the floating podium that carried it, he lit his horn to release the near-invisible twinkling shield restraining it in place. He impatiently reached out with the arcane-signature to unlock it in a thin beam of yellow.

And felt his magic reflect.

“What!?” He tried again, finding no difference. Breathing out, he rushed the spell again, and again. “What is this?” He spoke up. “Twilight, there appears to be a problem with the release spell.”

From all around him the helpful, pleasant voice of an artificial construct intelligence modelled on an ancient and beloved figure replied to him from the void itself. “The Lady of the Fountain’s restraining field has no existing faults.”

“Then why is the release spell not working? I’m in a hurry, Twilight!”

The voice didn’t change its patient, gentle tone. “The release frequency authorised to you has been updated within the last ten minutes, Magister Tundra Gem.”

“By who?”

“By me, Tundra.”

Tundra froze where he was. Then quickly, he turned to see Dean Blood Moon standing in the middle of the walkway he had just approached from. The long, grey-streaked black mane of the garnet mare pooled lightly on the smooth floor, her horn long and curved. Silver shoes clipped loudly across the flickering lazuli floor to approach him.

“This is highly unusual to see from you.”

Tundra felt a grip of being caught in his heart. “I understand this is sudden, but if you’ve stopped me then you know why!”

Blood Moon stopped. Even fully grown he didn’t reach her full height, and he felt the eternally familiar sensation of looking up into those dark, intelligent eyes. “Of all the Corps’ Magisters, of all of its specialists, there are few I would expect an unauthorised requisition and departure from less, Tundra Gem.”

Her mouth curled slightly. Tundra raised his forelegs up. “Wait! It’s Hair Trigger! She’s been taken! Tami too! And Volatility Smile has sent a message requesting assistance immediately. Blood Moon, you know I can’t wait for the investigative petition to go through. I cannot simply sit this out. Even if I risk the reprimand and the consequences from the faculty, I have to. I-I...”

She didn’t blink. “You what?”

Tundra swallowed and looked away. “I love her.”

Blood Moon listened, and Tundra fought to draw up yet more words.

He never got the chance to use them; her hoof raised to clasp his cheek, and turned his head back to look at her, not letting go once he was.

“I remember my worries, Tundra, back when we brought you here to be one of us. How every time I looked in on your classes you were apart from the others. Head in a book. Sleeping early. Never ignored, but never truly among the nexus of the other students. I worried for the future of this young, promising colt. After all, magic is not the only thing in our lives and our path is already a rather introverted one to begin with. I admit, I felt protective. I always have.”

Her hoof turned, coming below his chin and lifting it up until her red eyes were looking directly at him.

“Blood Moon, I… understand, I know what happened at the Sidewinder site. You’re worried about me. But I have to do this. For Hair Trigger.”

“I know.” She gently smiled, and for a moment, Tundra swore he saw a fragility in her eyes. “And it’s for that reason I have to understand that I can no longer hold onto you and shelter you. At last, I can see the stallion I had always hoped that quiet, lonely colt could become has suddenly arrived before me, willing to break the rules for the very thing I feared he might lack.”

Tundra blinked, then blinked again. Blood Moon simply pulled his head down, leaned forward, and kissed his forehead at the edge of his braided mane.

“And I have to say, it makes me very proud to know he’s finally found his place in the galaxy.”

“Blood Moon, it’s just...” Tundra hushed his words, the magnitude of the hangar’s space enveloping his voice to almost nothing. He took a stoic breath. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. For giving me this home. This family. This power. But now I have to use that power to do something for me rather than for the Corps. The Lady, may you please-”

Blood Moon gave a braying little laugh. “I certainly shall not.”

“But-!”

“I insist that you take the Knight of the Cart instead.”

Her horn suddenly lit up, and fifty metres away another of the circular pads lit up in sudden moonlight from the ether-born sky above. A leaner vessel, lance-nosed with an octuplet of fusion-engines in two nacelles at its rear of its crest-shaped wide hull. Tundra felt his mouth drop.

“The Knight series? But Blood Moon, they’re-”

She turned. “They are among the fastest ships through M-Space we possess. And of all those I imagine are coming, you have the longest distance to cross. You'll also be needing point defence; crude as it may be it is occasionally required by even our profession. I would not dream of sending you in a vessel that was not protected.”

“Yes, I know… They have Eclipse’s Drape of Mist and Shadow spell imbued on them. I-I don’t know what to say..”

She lit up her horn again to unlock the vessel. “Thank you?”

“Thank you, Blood Moon.”

She guided him back down to the central walkway and the pair approached the Knight of the Cart, its rear ramp lowering between the elegant nacelles. She stopped them, turning to face him. “Now, you ensured to bring at least one Tome of Refreshment to replenish yourself during the trip? And you have checked each of your spells since your recovery? You have a scrying device to remain in contact?”

“Yes, Blood Moon.”

“And you have cleared the route through to Medusa? The Republic will be wary.”

“Authorised, yes, it’s-”

“And your pendant is recharged?”

“Yes!”

“And I am certain you would not have forgotten to bring at least one of Aurora’s Projection Orbs? This is a rescue after all and I was quite certain I left them outside of their safe half an hour ago where any rogue investigator in a hurry might feel they needed everything they could get.”

Tundra paused, mouth open, before bashfully nodding. “I know better than to lie at this point.”

She grinned. “Good.”

Reaching out, she put a leg around his shoulders. Then, he felt the mare he’d grown up looking up to pull him in, her soft coat brushing against his neck as she touched hers to it. Feeling a quake of need in his breast, his hooves moved on automatic to hold the closest thing to a maternal figure he’d ever had, feeling her long mane rest on his shoulder. In silence, he held on, before he took a stoic breath and stepped back.

“I need to go now. Volatility Smile is waiting, and every day-”

Blood Moon shook her head and pulled a strand of her mane away from her eyes. “Then stop trying to justify it and go, Tundra.”

With as brave a smile as he could muster, Tundra turned and cantered up the ramp. Laying down his saddlebag, he turned to her.

“Thank you. I’ll see you before long. I’ll be fine.”

“I am sure,” said Blood Moon. She paused, then hastily added, “and call me when you reach Medusa.”

The ramp whined and began to raise, Tundra giving a familiar nod. “Bye, Blood Moon.”

Seconds before the ship closed, she witnessed him turn. His smile vanished mid-way.

And she saw the face of a stallion on a mission to save his love.

* * *

“That sanctimonious bitch-fuck! She thinks she can do this!? She thinks she can do this to ME? To MY family!? That shit-ass pissflap! Where the fuck is this motherfucker hiding!? I’m going to punch her teeth out for this! I’m going to tan her ass purple and keelhaul her! I’m going to string her up by her balls! I’m-”

Kerfuffle and Eleven stood side by side, the latter holding onto the former for protection, while he held his palms over her ears at the now three minute long tirade of increasingly anatomically impossible threats that the so-called ‘Big Momma’ was laying down upon them.

Somehow, looking at the raging mare filling the video screen, Kerfuffle honestly believed she would be quite capable of all of them.

‘Big Momma’ of the cargo shipping family Hair Trigger descended from was in many ways the spitting image of the captain they knew. Thick clusters of freckles dotted the face of an earth pony mare on the other side of fifty. A much deeper shade of blue than Hair Trigger, she bore a mane that might once have been a lush black but had faded to a multi-toned grey that varied from dark to light from streak to streak. It scattered out from being stuffed under a decades-worn cap. A loose green-plaid shirt lay open over a heavyset body that for all its rotundness in some places betrayed a monstrous core strength in her shoulders.

“That ass-gobbling coward! She just made the shit-list!” The older mare turned, scribbled something on a piece of paper, and actually did slam it onto a board sitting beside her desk.

“Er, Missus Momma’, like I said-” Kerfuffle attempted again.

“Kavala!? She’s the bitch that ruined the route through to Jealousy too! Oh fuckin’ stars give me the strength to choke that-”

And off she went again. Kerfuffle flushed to hear some of the words used. He especially wasn’t fond of the o-word she used a lot. And he’d never even heard of that one before.

“Like FUCK-” She sent the speakers into a fizzling crack as she overloaded her microphone. “-am I going to let that cocksucking bitch get away with this! With my Short Fuse!? Oh fuckin’ NO! NO I tell you! NO! You hear me!? NO!”

“I hear you, Missu-”

‘Big Momma’ didn’t even pause. “I swear if me and the fleet weren’t in Avalon I’d be over there right now ringing her ears! Let’s see how she likes a million tonnes comin’ in-atmo to flatten her skanky-ass into the pavement! I only got one ship close to Medusa as it is, and you better believe she’s comin’ over! Whatever you need carried for what you said, she’ll carry it! Halo’s got command of it now. If he gives you any shit just give him a cuff!”

“That’s wonderful, Missus. What’s the ship’s-”

“She’s an older one, just does local mostly where she don’t need to win contracts, but she’s a tough ol’ son-of-a-bitch even if she’s just as big a one to patch up again and again from all sorts. Goes by the name Shit Heap. Got that?”

Eleven felt the wince shoot through Kerfuffle as he replied. “We’ll get, erm… Miss Heap checked in, Missus. Thank you.”

The enraged mare actually fell quiet for a moment, studious eyes glancing side to side at the pair in Claudia’s bridge. “Lil’ Fuse talked you up good, Kerf, Ellie. So you two make sure my little girl is coming back! You hear me!? Cos I’ll turn this fuckin’ galaxy on its head if she’s been hurt and I need to come over there myself if you fail! The Wyrms are gonna turn and think ‘maybe fuckin’ NOT’ if they’re still watching when they see the shit I’ll push in if this goes wrong! No-one takes my Fuse away like that! No-one! So you two get her back! Got it?”

“Yes, Missus!” Kerfuffle hastily barked.

“Yes! We will!” Eleven gulped.

“We promise!” They both snapped upright as though to attention.

“Good lad and lass! Momma’ out! That fuuucking BIT-”

The screen cut out. Slowly, Kerfuffle and Eleven turned to face one another.

Eventually, Eleven swallowed and tentatively spoke. “That… explains a great many things.”

* * *

Port Medusa's hangar deck rang with a metallic cacophony. Opposite Claudia, three recovery vessels bound for the ongoing freighter cleanup were being maintained and refuelled by a swarm of metalworkers, hydraulic lifters, and power-hammer equipped mobile-units. The collective noise was like several ironmonger's shops tumbling down a mountainside, so loud that Volatility Smile was forced to use earphones just to hear the video-call from her multiband. She trotted with head down, winding around running teams and trolleys, watching the laggy, hiccuping connection of Duke Midnight Haze streamed from Port Medusa’s suite to her device.

He sighed, his normally perfectly kept mane an unkept stringy mess, eyes hung with heavy marks. “I’m truly sorry, I tried. But Felix’s job from my father explicitly includes stopping me doing this sort of thing, and I don’t have the means to transport myself personally there in any useful capacity. I swear, I would have, but I just could not convince him. He would permit me as far as Port Medusa, but by the time we arrive...”

“We’d have left. I know. You don’t need to apologise, I understand the reasons why.” Smile was direct and firm. “You’re already helping in a significant, indeed critical, fashion.”

“This is to help Tami and Hair Trigger; I have to. The funds were wired earlier, Miss Smile. Or should I say, Chief Executive Officer.” There was no enthusiasm behind the quip. “Please, I’m worried about her. I’m not used to this sort of-” He paused and simply shook his head.

“I promise, the moment I know anything you’ll be the first to hear, Midnight.”

“Thank you. I’ll begin moving toward Port Medusa as soon as the company is all set up on this side; it should help reduce the lag time on the communications and ensure we’re within range, even if you’ll be gone before we arrive.”

“And you’ll be there to meet her afterwards. I’ll be in contact again just before it’s time.”

“Good fortune, Smile.”

“Ideally that comes later, Duke Haze. Right now it's all about them.”

That at least drew a tired smile from him. “That is reassuring. Until then.”

She closed the connection, looking up as she approached Claudia. Immediately, her view of the ship was blocked by a twin peaked mountain of muscle, fur, wing, talon, teeth and armour. One a stark titan with winding facepaint and armour of ebony, the other an earthy wine bearing a heavy, sculpted mask and armour of brass. The former bore her teeth in a wicked, eager grin, claws extended to grind on the metal deckplate with her tail noticeably thrashing. The latter was a statue of primed and focused murderous power.

“Donner. Blitz.” Volatility Smile halted and looked up at the monstrous organic weapons. “I wasn’t sure if-”

She paused, for between them, sheltered from view between the massive pair, was a much smaller equine in an ill-fitting hoodie. A simple unicorn of dark green, both coat and mane. Small scars coated her disarmingly fit and tough body, tracing up to the mess of heavy black implants and bundled wires grafted to the back of her skull. Red panels glowed on the casing stretching around to her cheeks, contrasting the cerulean eyes that remained wide open and as passively simple as the thin line of a closed mouth below them.

Smile paused, then stepped closer, her words quiet and urgently quick. The hooded top covered most of the telling implants, but this close they would still be visible. “Coatie! You’re supposed to be staying out of sight with them in the disused decks! It’s too public up here!”

‘Coatie’, once Coatlicue, once Specimen Six, once the failed predecessor to Eleven’s gift, did little other than blink in response. Then, she took up a small pad, floating a stylus over it in a flowing, rapid motion that curled and flicked with absolute control. The entire process took scarcely more than a few seconds before she held it up to Smile.

“The Captain and Tami have been very
nice to me. I would like to help them.”

Her expression remained simple. Not blank, but absolutely stable as though frozen in a mask of inquiry and curiosity. Smile put a hoof to her head, but she couldn’t help the endeared smirk she gave the young unicorn. “I never once doubted you would, but please, let me know next time so I can arrange for you to be more covertly moved? But you two!”

Smile stepped back and pointed a hoof to Donner and Blitz in turn. The pair hunched and twitched at the address, looming down. “You’re employed by Sweet Alyssum. I’d accept you in a heartbeat. But can you? You have your mantra, after all. Serve the demands?”

There was a rumbling growl from Donner, and the slap of a tail upon the hangar floor. She shifted in place, leaning over Smile with her wings arching out. The sight made more than a few of the crews surrounding them pause and warily back off.

“What is beholden, and yet cannot behold what held it?” Her lips parted; rows of fine teeth stacked upon themselves gleamed.

Volatility Smile looked up, before turning to Blitz. The second of the twin creatures was silent, but tense. Coatie blinked, her face tilting lightly without a change to her serene calm. Smile turned back and replied. “A contract. It binds, but has no physical presence that does so.”

A deep rumble emerged from Blitz. It took Smile a few seconds to realise it was dry laughter. “This is not our service. It is our intent.”

He turned and padded away toward Claudia, as if that answered everything. Still bearing a malicious face, Donner shook her head. “Close.”

Donner sharply turned and bounded away, chasing Blitz’s slow walk. Coming alongside him, she gave him an eager bat with a claw to hurry up. A snarl and a savage maul that would have beheaded a pony in return set them both prowling sideways to the ramp, hunched and wary of one another. Smile sighed and shook her head, returning her glance to Coatie. “Any idea what she meant?”

Coatie simply nodded, and once again the stylus flew across the pad with flurried grace. Smile noted she didn’t delete much of what was there before.

"The Captain and Tami have been very
nice to many people.”

* * *

Light beamed through the sliver of an opening door into Hair Trigger’s eyes. Struggling to focus, Trigger squinted and blinked through the aching, dull pain that washed through her midsection, thighs, flanks and back. She couldn’t see her own body in the dark, but she could feel the swelling lines of bruises across her. They throbbed when she turned her head to witness Asset’s eventual return. Trigger felt exhausted, limply swinging on the chains about her forelegs.

Somehow, the sight of the smug face ahead of her made Hair Trigger bite the pain in. She’d not given Garwyn anything more than furious curses and she was damned sure she was going to keep it that way for his boss too. She had enough anger to burn on ensuring it, that was for sure.

“Have fun, did you?” Asset Margin cast a look at Garwyn. The hippogriff threw down the offending plank of wood he’d been using with an echoing clatter in the small room and let out a simpering smile.

"Been waiting to do that since the warehouse."

Asset simply glanced at the purple welts and clicked her tongue. “And you, Captain? Starting to realise that’s it? That in the end, we’ve come back to our little talk about those in suits with suitcases and no paperwork, haven’t we?”

Hair Trigger swung gently, keeping her eyes on Asset. And with a roll of her shoulders she whispered, “Hey. Hey, Asset?”

“Yeeeees?” Asset tipped her head.

“I… I think you gotta’ get yourself a new right-hoof man there. This guy can’t even spank me as hard as my boyfriend. And trust me,” Hair Trigger forced a smirk from one side of her mouth, “that is not a particularly high bar.”

Garwyn’s face lit up with incensed fury as Hair Trigger broke into a tired but audible laugh, his sudden advance stopped only by Asset’s outstretched hoof. “I told you, Garwyn. Nothing excessive.” She paused. “You did just beat her up, right?”

“YES!”

“Is that what you called that?” Hair Trigger gave her best shit-eating grin.

“Ma’am, she’s just trying to-”

“Right. Don’t worry.” Asset never took her eyes from Hair Trigger. “Funny mare. But I think that attitude will just love the news I have to bring you then. About what’s happening to you.”

“So you’ve not brought me here to let your boytoy finally touch a mare? ‘Cos if he’d had another hour maybe he’d have finally gotten me-”

Asset’s hoof again had to stab out as Trigger provoked the hippogriff, the reprimand drowning Trigger’s comment out. She took some satisfaction in drawing more of a reaction from him than he’d gotten from her after any punch or strike with that plank.

“To cut to the chase, Captain, my original plan had been to have you just working for me. But when I checked the special contractors channels… Well. It Turns out that you really are getting well known. There was already a little contract out on you. Suffice to say I’d rather earn than spend, so I decided to take matters into my own hooves, acquire you myself… and then let the sharks fight over the blood.”

She turned over a tablet, floating it up. Hair Trigger saw an image of herself taken unconscious post-shuttle recovery as proof. Already she could see there were numbers in a line marked ‘listing history’.

Top Bid Accepted: [Anonymous User] - 300,000 credits
New Top Bid Accepted: [BCKS-DarkFlameRox] - 400,000 credits
Automated New Top Bid Accepted: [Anonymous User] - 410,000 credits
New Top Bid Accepted: [BCKS-DarkFlameRox] - 430,000 credits
New Top Bid Accepted: [SD-SDWN] - 435,000 credits
Automated New Top Bid Accepted: [Anonymous User] - 445,000 credits

An auction.

“Who knew you got so popular, Captain?”

Hair Trigger groaned at the sight, rolling her eyes. “Never thought I’d be rooting for that freak to win anything.”

Asset flipped the device over again and locked it. “I’ll be back to let you know when we have a winner in a few weeks, Captain. And soon after that? They can be my first guest here on their way to pick you up. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make an early sale from the gallery!”

Her guffawed laughter drove many wicked thoughts through Hair Trigger’s brain.

“Until then, feel free to enjoy the room here. I’m sure Garwyn will be down every time he’s had a bad day and needs something to punch…”

The hippogriff stared at her with his talons balled up. She saw the brutal promise in his eyes. He grabbed the handle on the wall, spinning it. Trigger felt the tension holding her up vanish. She fought the pain, landing on her hooves to glare at the pair as they exited the room, leaving her alone.

And only then, after she heard their hooves moving away, did she allow herself to collapse against the wall with a gurgled hiss of pain. Limbs shaking, she bit her lip tightly and scrunched her eyes closed. The heavy chains weighed her fetlocks down, and she could feel the cold bite through the floor.

This was bad. Not only could she not even begin to fathom a way out, but she could only guess who was bidding on that black market auction. Plenty of people right now disliked her. She had to get out. Had to have some plan. Some ace up her ruined sleeve. One look at the dingy, barely completed compartment of this extravagance-in-progress though told her to not expect much. There weren’t any usable vents, the table was clean with no objects left behind, and she could hear the chatter of guards outside. Hobbling, she tried to reach the wheel above her the chain was looped over, and found it annoyingly out of reach. After a moment, she lit her horn and reached out telekinetically to it. Her magic could grasp the chain and lift it off with some effort, but she doubted her telekinetic or physical strength could wield it right now.

She toyed with its give, practised looping it a few times. It was heavy, clumsy, hardly ideal, but it was something.

Now to wait for a chance to make something of one good surprise.

* * *

Within Claudia, Kerfuffle and Smile were separate.

It was the first rest either had taken in what felt like a week. Eleven and Vantage had insisted, and so they had taken to their quarters for a few hours.

Kerfuffle hadn’t even undressed before flopping onto his bed. Worry gripped his heart in the quiet, metallic room. He’d visited the bridge to power Claudia down now they knew they were no longer rushing out that day, a task that Tami would normally perform.

In his hands he held his multiband, and on it a small video played. One of Tami speaking into her own camera, walking away from having just met him.

She was red in the cheeks and giggling, her lips curled into a permanent smile.

"He's just the softest, nicest thing. I know he seems a little slow or simple at times, but he's really really smart with machines, and polite to a fault. And...I think a lot of people underestimate him. Including himself. He's a lot wiser than he seems. When I've been upset over something, he always seems to know how to put things in perspective and make me think about it in a better way."

She stopped for a second to compose her words.

"I wish I'd had him around earlier in life sometimes. With, y'know… How I was?"

Taking a deep breath, she looked away behind her, before rubbing an eye and smiling at the camera.

His beak ground across itself. He remembered the first time he’d seen her ‘VLOG’ home. Way back then.

“I’ll be around, Miss.”

The bed creaked as he got up and went back to work at his personal workbench. Beside it sat a cluster of parts, from chassis, to motive, to high pressure components.

Across the common room in the opposite row of cabins, Smile sat in her own room unclothed and quiet. She stretched, making the electric burn scars that ran across her crystal body like an artistic cluster of zig-zags flex into new shapes. She was fretting over fine details. Her plan was sketchy, but with every confirmed response via the mail-link from ally after ally, she was able to solve problems one by one. Even so - even if Vantage could handle piloting, even if Eleven could bring her gifts to bear, and even if Donner and Blitz could savage a platoon, someone had to organise it all. Someone had to step up and harness the emotional flailing of individuals all trying to do their part at once into a cohesive strategy. Without it, they’d never stand a chance.

That decision had come at a cost. Time. It was a hurtful risk. A risk that hoped Hair Trigger and Tami would be safe for the extra week it would take to get everyone to Port Medusa and give them enough resources to pull her plan off. It felt wrong, but a wise old boss on the cusp of retirement had once told her there was a difference between acting quickly and rushing. To undock and jump now would be to rush. To save their lives, they needed more information and greater capabilities.

As much as she worried for the pair, she knew it had to be this way. The rationale that Asset hadn’t just killed them immediately, and the hint of Tami’s employment had led her to make the choice. The others hadn’t liked it, but had either understood or reluctantly agreed. She didn’t begrudge the look some had given her. Just part of her job now. Acting captain…

She smirked. “So this is how it feels, huh, Trigger?”

It had all seemed so invisible an effort from the small unicorn. Perhaps in future there was more respect to be had. Or perhaps a better chance to help her. She wasn’t sure what worried her more. The sudden burden of lives hanging on her decisions, or the worry that she actually was enjoying the pressure somewhere deep down. Her smirk turned to an irked grunt.

“Sometimes I hate it when you’re right, Pinion.”

Then, to her right, her laptop chimed.

‘Chat request incoming - Unknown profile’

Blinking, Smile waited, debating if she ought to get Verbena to run a check. But something felt enticing. Alone, just her, a connection to whomever? ‘Devil dare’, she thought, and hit to connect without a moment of waiting more. The universal chat application sprung up, open source and meant to simplify connection between a galaxy using millions of apps. One message was waiting for her.

Unknown User #4562 has joined the conversation.

Unknown User #4562 [SB23:13]: You’re sending a lot of mail lately.

Smile sat in silence, scanning the message. It's tone and choice of words. The use of punctuation and time to type the messages. She glanced at her contacts list and those who had replied or not. Smile considered carefully, then reached out.

Vol.Smile [SB23:16]: Trigger and Tami have been taken.

Twenty seconds passed. She saw the user on the other end begin typing, an unusually long time for the short reply.

Unknown User #4562 [SB23:19]: Send me everything you have.

Unknown User #4562 [SB23:19]: Stellar-Box Prime 45CU-T.

Unknown User #4562 has left the conversation.

Volatility Smile sat back to wait.

She looked delighted.

* * *

One Week Later

* * *

In the silent ocean of the void, MD-45f rolled unsteadily.

Angling one side up, the laser-system embedded in its nose flickered, casting bounding lines over the half-mile wide mountain of rock spinning free amidst its slow orbit. Shaking, wobbling, MD-45f tried its best to match the spin rate and direction, to stabilise its rotation and aim at a point less than a metre in diameter marked by a mineral beacon. Five agonising minutes passed.

Attempt. Failure.

Attempt. Failure.

All it had to do was stay in position, retain its aim, and it would cut free the magnesium silicate, aluminium and cobalt held within.

Attempt. Failure.

Overcompensating, it veered off in a panic. Gaining too much velocity from the sudden burn, it had to make a sudden roll in the opposite direction to avoid ramming into a second asteroid. Caught between the two, an enormous outcrop of valueless rock came looming around from the first asteroid, two hundred metres high, casting MD-45f into deep shadow.

In one last frantic motion, it fired thrusters and rocketed upwards. The sudden move glanced its hull off jagged rock and, in a shower of sparks, broke it into a spin. Trailing vapour and lacking a thruster; it upturned, impacted a second asteroid, and spun off into the black. Immobile. Its power supply was cut.

Dead.

* * *

The loud honk of the crash-alert tore through the remote-station, making Tami squeal and let go of the controls, talons coming to her face to hold and hide. Tearing off the virtual-cockpit helmet, she felt her chest heaving. She felt dizzy, sweaty and frantic. Hyperventilation rippled through her in panic. Not entirely from the crash.

She could hear the stamp of hooves on metal stairs behind her already.

The mine operations station was built like an auditorium, curved with stepped lines of drone-control consoles, ten to a row for five levels. Each bore six screens curled around the pilot, a full suite of basic controls, and a processing datalink to connect them to their assigned drone via a virtual-reality headset. Up above lurked the supervisor’s box, from where he could identify anything that went wrong. Already she could see the other, less indentured employees glancing around at her. They knew what was coming and their faces held no sympathy, only frustration.

A hoof snatched the back of her chair, spinning it around to bring her face to face with a broad-shouldered earth pony built like a slab of meat that had melted to his low belly, aging with a threadbare mane and a glass eye.

“What in the fuck do you call that!?” He bellowed the words. “You’ve ruined another one!”

Tammani hunched back in her chair, her claws raised. “I-It was an accident,” she babbled, “th-the asteroid I saw another one a-and I tried and-”

His hoof cuffed her around the head, cutting her off. She curled up with a squeal.

“This is the third in a week you’ve put in the repair shop,” said the supervisor, tetchiness dripping on every word, “I was told you were some sort of good pilot! Apparently not! First one from you shaking so much you can’t even fly in a straight line! Second because you got a little input lag and freaked out like a foal on a bike, and now because a big scary asteroid suddenly appeared? In an asteroid field? What a fucking surprise to see one, huh?”

Tami felt the barbed reminders hit her harder than the hoof. She kept her eyes closed, shaking terribly in her seat. She could feel tears on her cheeks. The pressure. The shouting.

He’s not wrong. No-one else breaks drones this much.

Hiccuping in a deep sob, she heard the supervisor stand up straight and grunt dismissively. “Ten years with this op and I’ve never seen a pilot as bad as you come into this room, you know that?”

“I-It’s the time constraint! A-And how we’re all competing to get the highest yield and-and-I just-I-”

He slammed his hoof into the side of the metal chair, making her yelp and cut her babbled explanations short. “And the worst part is you don’t even seem to realise it! Trying fancy tricks now and again to be like the ones who can actually handle a spacecraft. Trying to keep up with them are you? Well you’re not like them! They are pilots,” he snapped, “you are not. Get out of here!”

Tami felt her gut twist deeply at the words.

He looked away, before waving up toward the top level. “Kreer! Get this waste of space out of my sight would you!”

From high up, his arms crossed, the looming and dangerous figure of Kreer tugged at his rifle’s strap and began to slowly move down. Tami noticed through tears that his beady eyes never left her once. She felt like she was being hunted. Stalked.

He didn’t even pause. The moment he was within reach, the huge griffon drove a powerful arm forward and grabbed her overalls with large claws. Tami felt herself dragged out and thrown ahead of him. A chillingly quiet tone followed. “Out. Now. And-”

For the fifth time this week, the entire room was drowned by the squealing horn of the intrusion siren.

“Intruder alert, section fourteen!”

Standing up, Tami could see other drone pilots, older and younger, pulling off their headsets and turning at the racket of what she’d been told was an ongoing malfunction. Rather than responding to what was the sixth false alarm in as many days, they'd seen the commotion. They were watching her. Ignoring them, Kreer shoved her again, and again, forcing her out the door beneath the howling alarm. The siren finally cut off after thirty seconds, as she was driven past the living quarters, past the savagely contested leaderboards of mineral yield this month, and eventually taken back to the prison level below the drone-mining ops deck. The electronic lock buzzed and magnetically unsealed before her, and she felt herself shoved within. Falling to her rump, she turned to find a data-disk hurled into her lap.

‘Drone Piloting - Basic Functions’

“Read it. Again.” Kreer filled the cell’s door. “And try to actually understand it this time. Asset wants to hold onto you as 'insurance' even though you're nothing more of a burden on whoever’s got to babysit you, so if we have to teach you the basics again and again, we will.”

“I do…” she whispered, “it’s not that…”

“Apparently you don’t.” Kreer cut in, advancing on her. A claw pointed directly at her face. “No wonder you couldn’t even complete the first year at that academy. No wonder you had to go crawling out to the Periphery to trick some captain into thinking you could fly."

She clutched the data-disk tightly, looking away, cheeks glinting in damp. “I-I-”

“Don’t even dare say you can. I’ve watched you all week. If you’re not making basic errors because you’re overwhelmed by it, you’re freezing up because you seemingly can’t choose a damn thing to do when the shift begins and you all begin the haul. Everyone else rushes out, eager, wanting to be the best. But you? You just sit there, dot around in little shaky moves worse than some rookie. And you-look at me!”

The sudden roar carried a violent aggression; Tami slammed her back into the desk, eyes wide and staring at Kreer. She was shaking. Shaking so much. Her heart felt tight. She felt sick. She wanted to curl up, look away, sleep, pretend nothing existed. She hadn’t felt like this since… Since…

“And you keep trying to deny it. Excuses this. Scared by that. Not comfortable with healthy competition. Not used to here or there.” Kreer moved closer. Tami could see why Asset had chosen him for the role of her wetwork operative. The griffon was monstrously huge, but he moved with a feline grace she’d only ever seen in Donner or Blitz. He leaned down. “So before we go any further with this charade of pretending you’ll ever amount to anything for us… Admit it. What are you?”

“Wh-What?”

Tami clenched up below him. She knew this feeling. It was building. Seeping in. Like… Like when she’d been at the Academy. That voice inside was still there. Claudia had pushed it to whispers, but now she could hear it again. ‘The truth’ speaking up to her.

‘Claudia only coddled you. Now you’re just being exposed.’

“What. Are. You?”

“I’m-”

‘You know what you are. Just admit it.’

She made a sucking sob and hung her head, her by now thoroughly unkept mane falling about her.

“-a terrible pilot…” She sniffled, scarcely loud enough to even hear herself.

Kreer watched her like a bird of prey, as though hunting for any remaining truth. Satisfied, he rose up, turned his muscular bulk toward the door, and left.

For five minutes after he left, there was nothing but the sounds of quiet sobbing from the leftmost cage of the brig.

Then, even as her body shook in terrible convulsions and she felt her mood turning from worry to a deep, dark pit that she well knew the depths of, she slid the loose bolt of the Key-Point Indicator computer in her cell free and began to fiddle with some wires, hoping no-one ever came to check if the device still worked.

It had been all that had held her together. All that she could take refuge in while away the long hours between arduous shifts. Every night she would curl up, shiver away the pained emotions and focus on trying to be ‘Agent Coconut Rice Pudding’. It had been aimless at first. Peeling off the case of the computer’s rear, she had tried to get a mental inventory of the wires, connectors and lengths she had to work with.

But now, as she pulled out a small circuit board from the old connector ports inside it, Tami had the beginnings of one desperate ploy. She’d ground a plastic spoon from a meal packet on the knurled metal of the cell bars to make a poor spanner and used it to detach components. It was laborious, awkward and exhausting on her digits, but every one that she repurposed onto the board was one small victory. One small moment to stave off the horrid pit she could feel her confidence in all her abilities hanging over.

But try as she might, she couldn’t avoid a horrid doubt she’d left behind on Chrysolite creeping back into her mind, making all the months of discovery and empowerment start to fold and peel away.

* * *

A week was a long time to Eleven for a number of reasons.

A week consisted of six hundred and four thousand eight hundred seconds. Each second was a potential period of application toward something. A theory. A consideration. A solution. A leap of logic. A chance to take that which was chaotic and bring it into order within her control.

When your job was to save two lives from a complex scenario, that made for a lot of theories to think through. She appreciated the others; some of them had unique perspectives she lacked. That was valuable. But ultimately they didn’t think like she did. And she thought a lot.

But that also meant a lot of time to think about what was coming. The modifications to her greatest work were almost complete, provided the ship's kettle didn't really need its boiling vessel back, but after that things got a lot murkier.

Eleven held a soldering iron, a welding torch and a volt-metre in her magic all at once, and yet she sat idly as they all darted, prodded and worked before her, thinking.

She could get them into Asset’s territory. If they were lucky maybe even get them all out. But what happened in the middle was the loose end that worried her. It would be hard. Likely violent. Possibly she might be in the thick of it too. If she had to use her magic to defend herself, then-

Sitting back, Eleven took a long breath, closing her eyes. The words were little more than a silent mutter under her breath.

“What would you do?”

Silence reigned in her design palace as she sat alone.

“No, no, not another one. I won’t. I can’t. What else?”

Quiet.

“I suppose…”

Frowning, she opened her eyes again and checked the welds her magic had conducted. She analysed the angles, the number of welts. She let magic flow over the shape to ensure its symmetry. The matching form was necessary for the input of mana into the T.M.D.E’s great purpose to surge and travel correctly. Finding an anomaly, she sighed and began again on it.

It had to be perfect. Alike on either side of its middle line. Anything less would only bring pain instead of helping people.

“I won’t be any good on the frontline. I’ll only hurt people. You know that right?”

She gulped deeply in the large hold.

“All right. But don’t expect I’ll do much past this… I shouldn’t.”

“With the potential you hold in you, I should say you will.”

The other voice rang out from behind her. Eleven looked up sharply. By Claudia’s rear doors, Eleven saw a unicorn. A curved horn atop his head above thick braids and a heavy cloak with a simple, but admittedly effective, enchantment woven into its fibre.

She stood up quickly. But for the moment, the unicorn trotted over to her. She could sense the magic flowing about him, from within his saddlebag, held in passive readiness about his horn. On the surface, the numerics of it seemed... low. To her at least. But she knew that even a magic user of his level was a powerful ally in this all too anti-magic world she’d left her steel cage into.

“Tundra Gem!”

She smiled, hurrying forward to him. He made a lavish but stilted bow; even she could tell it was just from habit. His mood, indeed his aura, was one of worry.

“I just arrived. There was no way I couldn’t come, not when I heard. If there’s anything, anything I can offer to you within my power, you all have it. The others?”

Eleven off-hoofedly lifted the blowtorch to point to the common room and their quarters. “Everyone’s working on preparing their own things. I can call them!”

“Please. And, of course, I offer what I have to help with your more magical projects.” He forced a weary smile. “I’m sure you’ve been quite lonely with them, being, you know… The only one of your sort to-”

She didn’t pause in her stride as she merrily hopped away toward the common room. “Nope! It’s okay! I’ve got Kerfuffle, he’s way more smart about this stuff than your group for the stuff I don’t make.” Innocently honest, she rapped on the door frame. “Tundra’s here!”

The magister stood with a rebuked, if slightly amused look. A number of doors rattled open, bringing Kerfuffle, Smile, and after a moment Vantage into Eleven’s designing area. Glancing at her machine, she simply sighed and reapplied the tarp to it for now. “Later.”

“Tundra!” Smile hurried over, taking his hoof for a firm shake. “How’s the… everything?”

“Recovered enough for this, Volatility Smile. You have my horn, and my technology, and if need be my ship.”

“Thank you. We’ll need it. I was hoping for some magic cannons to open black holes around her defences.”

Tundra sucked air through his teeth. “It… Has some tricks, but unfortunately that’s rather impossible.”

Eleven felt a brief admonishment, folding her hooves with a bright smile. “No it isn’t.”

Tundra glanced, as though uncertain if she were joking. She tried not to show the sigh. Behind her, Kerfuffle waved, freeing Tundra up from having to answer. Eleven saw him look over shoulder. “Hello, Kerfuffle and- Ah…”

His eyes fell to someone, and with a turn, Eleven saw Vantage waiting by the group, looking curiously at Tundra’s cloak. The pegasus made a light sigh of exasperation. “"Right. Right. More magic users from another part of the galaxy I've never heard of despite living in it for twenty three years."

“I’m afraid so.” Tundra gave a calming shrug.

“Eleven here makes science-defying machines and apparently can warp spacetime. The other one, Coatie, can bench press a starship. So let me guess, you have a secret alicorn form hidden below the cloak? Or that cloak could be quietly melting my sanity with those runes - and can at a will erase my memory of all this? Perhaps even charm any equine with a single word of power?”

There was a pitch of light humour to his voice, one Tundra caught onto with a playful smile. “Maybe. At least one of them is correct.”

“Great. Well... I fly starships.”

“A lovely talent that I highly respect.”

“Just one I used to think was a lot closer to the peak of skill to be able to do. I’m waiting to wake up in my rack any time now.” There was a brief silence, before Vantage held out his hoof. “Vantage Vair. I knew Tami from before, I’ll be piloting for them.”

Tundra took the offered shake. “Then I’m happy to work with you, Vantage. I’m sorry this has to involve so many shocks.”

Eleven sighed sharply and clapped her hooves loudly. “Okay! Everypony not intelligent enough to be working on the trans-dimensional engine can you please go elsewhere? I have a lot to do and you’re all disturbing the shaping of the mana.”

Smile held up her hooves. “All right, all right. I needed to head out anyway. Tundra, let’s see this ship.”

The unicorn stallion gave the pink mare a look that she knew was saying ‘I know very well that’s just nonsense to get some space, but okay’. He nodded. “Follow me.”

The group moved to the rear door. But as they went, Eleven’s magic caught Kerfuffle’s shoulder. Relieved, he looked back to her and grabbed his toolbox.

Eleven just smiled. “I did say only those intelligent enough to work on it.”

“Then let’s finish her off, Miss.”

* * *

Smile, Tundra and Vantage didn’t even make it to the Knight of the Cart before they were ushered aside by hangar control. Two deer waving lightsticks lashed to their antlers warded them back from an incoming arrival.

Vantage recognised the ship entering Port Medusa immediately, his jaw dropping.

A two-stepped angular housing of beige hull plate coated her upper half, smooth in places and sharp in others, giving way to a matte black underside bearing the boxy shape of a large cargo hold and two pairs of rectangular engines either side. The tall vessel's spherical bridge jutted out from the prow, surrounded by windows tinted to protect from direct starlight. Impacts scars coated her hull, with off-set colours repainted over and over. One engine housing was asymmetrically mounted, a different model from its twin now that the old model of engine was out of production. And yet she still flew with a grace long envied by newer classes.

A Gleaner RB-Eight, emblazoned with a pegasus wing overlapping a griffon wing on her side.

The Tammaran.

Hissing steam and vector thrust blew across the hangar and lifted metal and plastic particles from between the floor plates as the old vessel placed herself down right beside Claudia. Landing struts rung on metal, then hissed as hydraulics pressed back against the weight to settle her upright.

Vantage swung his head toward Smile and caught her already watching his shock.

“You knew they were coming!?”

“Surprise.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Smile made a smug grin. “You seemed like you needed a bit of extra hope.”

A loud secondary generator kicked up to drive the heavy rear cargo door of the Tammaran open. Hurrying around, they arrived in time to meet Gaius, Compass Rose and Aileron as they disembarked. Behind him, Vantage could hear Kerfuffle and Eleven join those staring; even Coatie trotted out to passively watch the events.

Volatility Smile moved up, shaking Gaius’ claws firmly. “Thank you for coming. I regret we meet this way.”

“It’s Tam.” He spoke the words simply, his voice strained and quiet, as though that was all that needed said. Vantage couldn’t think what more justification was needed for parents.

Yet as he watched the hoofshakes and welcomes and thank yous, he felt suddenly very at odds. He watched them both meet Smile. Tundra. Eleven. But eventually, he saw Rose’s eyes turn to him. Recognise him.

“Vantage? Is that you? Oh goodness, your mane is so different.”

He gulped, feeling his body shrink under the look as she approached. Compelled by guilt, he hung his head and stepped forward to meet her, seeing her stop short in confusion at the pained look on his face.

This was it. This was when he’d have to face up to it. To them.

“Missus Rose. I…” He willed himself to speak. Speak damn it! “I only learned this past week what happened. With Tami. I-”

He took a long breath. He could feel tears threatening.

“I’m very, truly sorry that I wasn’t there. I should have been. I-I should have. I was too complacent in my confidence, I should have been there, and she… she suffered for it when I could have helped, I-”

He swallowed hard, unable to meet the mother of the hippogriff he loved eye to eye.

He didn’t expect to feel strong hooves grab him and tug him into a tight embrace.

“Oooh. Vantage! Don’t say that you silly boy!”

Her voice was friendly. Loud. It disarmed his worry like a wire being snipped so suddenly that he felt legitimate cold shock settle in about the warmth of the pegasus holding him to her breast.

“Wha? But-I-”

Rose pulled his head to look at her. “Vantage, I remember talking to you both when you made your decisions. We had experience up there, your mother didn’t. I remember helping you write that application to the navy.”

She raised a hoof and gently batted his cheek with it five times for five words. “So. Don’t. Go. Regretting. That. Because if you hadn’t, well… we’d probably lack a pilot like you now, wouldn’t we? We got her through it. Her being out here? It’s not been her losing out to be with Claudia. And this? Now we can solve this together and you can use every facet of every bit of training you’ve done to do this.”

Rose turned him, facing him toward the rest of the section of the hangar where the others were congregated. They were from all from the far flung ends of the galaxy, from all walks of life, from regular people to legendary secrets. Now he saw it. Saw the three ships gathered with many who cared so much that they would risk their lives to rescue two of their own. So many who would all have said the same thing.

That they knew any of them would have done the same in return.

“You have no idea how happy she is here, compared to where she’d have been if she’d stayed at that school any longer, Vantage.”

Once, long ago, Tami had said something to the pegasus. He’d found her crying, worried. He couldn’t remember what had happened, but he’d said something to her. Something to recontextualise it. He’d forgotten what that was. But he did remember her reply.

“You help me see things the better way.”

Now, at last, he knew what that felt like.

Ten feet away, Kerfuffle strode up from beside Eleven to Gaius. Habit forced his hand forward. “Sir, I jus’ wanted to say, I promise I’ll give it my all. Get them both back. I felt real sorry to have to tell you all that on the video.”

He was surprised at the firmness of the grip coming back from the smaller griffon. A stern, firm tone nonetheless brimmed with paternal strength and resilience.

“Son, you don’t need to say it. What you said, it didn’t make me think we were helpless.”

He gripped tightly.

“You doing that for us led me to believe that if we took this on, we’d be with those who would try just as hard as we would to get back Tami and Hair Trigger. I’ve spoken with her enough to know how much her captain means to her. And when I looked into your eyes...” Gaius’ manner held a strong force of presence - an authority awoken after decades dormant. “I saw the same sort of feeling in them I’d have felt whenever it was one of my own crew.”

Kerfuffle held still, processing that, the meaning behind it, the things Tami had told him about her father. What the depth of those words really meant. But Gaius had one more sentence to say, and Kerfuffle’s heart finally unlocked and drained of tense, stark apprehension to hear it.

“You made the right call to do what you did.”

He hardly knew what to say, but swallowed and nodded. “Thank you, Sir.”

“Please, just Gaius. Any friend my daughter says, with honesty in her eyes, that she feels safe around is a friend to me.”

“Thank you.” Kerfuffle just repeated, caught up on that one sentence - words he never knew he’d needed to hear.

Gaius let go and clapped him on the arm, giving Eleven a confident wink. Then he looked about and spoke up.

“The Tammaran is at your disposal. Every trick, trade secret and shred of experience her crew have, both old and new, is open to you. My daughter brought me here, but there’s a saying out in the black. A crew in need is one you save. So we’re not exclusive. If anything we can do will help bring both home, then we’ll do it.”

Volatility Smile was already eagerly chatting over the Tammaran’s capabilities with Aileron, but put down her multiband - the device rapidly running out of hard drive space. “I’ve already got you in for something important. We’ll all be going over it today; if you’d like to head into Claudia, and once your shock at Donner and Blitz is done, then we can get to discussing everything.”

“Then let's not waste time.” Rose clapped Vantage on the back. Spirit rising again, the pegasus grinned back at her and gently chuckled.

“Captain Gaius-”

“Gaius is fine.”

Vantage paused, smiled, and began again. “Captain Gaius, Missus Rose. As the other resident newcomer here, I feel I ought to warn you.”

He glanced at Eleven, then Tundra. He worded it as best he could.

“There are some ponies you may be about to meet who have some strange, perhaps world-changing abilities you-”

“Ah yes, unicorns who can still use magic?” Rose smoothly quipped.

Gaius’ eyebrows rose. “Oh yes? Same group that one who escaped a few decades back was from, kid?” He directed it at Tundra, who bobbed his head side to side from neutral indecision, before eventually just nodding. Gaius smiled at Vantage as he went by with a click of his tongue. “Mhm, yup, been there.”

The full group shifted toward Claudia, leaving a stunned Vantage standing alone. He gaped, then blinked then made incoherent sounds in his throat as he tried to sum up the words before at last cantering after them.

“Am I the only pony in this galaxy who wasn’t made aware that magic is back!?”

Beside him, a green mare quietly trotted up, scribbling on a pad. She turned and looked at him blankly, showing the writing.

“In comparison to many, you are
handling it very well.”

Vantage looked at Coatie, expecting some form of dry wit or teasing banter, but he saw only a silent stare of utter tranquillity.

“Thanks, I think?”

“You are welcome.”

* * *

A harsh grunt of pain preceded the door to Hair Trigger’s dull, dark captivity opening with a loud clunk.

Breathing hard through her nose, Hair Trigger strained and growled to keep her composure after the violent impact on her waist. Ahead of her, Garwyn looked over his shoulder at the pony entering: Asset Margin. Snorting, he got in one last slap against Hair Trigger’s thigh and flank from the side. “Ma’am.”

Wandering in, Asset Margin gave a bright smile. Trailed by what had to be the sixth replacement intern in as many days, this time a unicorn in a tight suit, she stopped in the middle of the cell and took stock of the bruised, battered unicorn hanging there.

“I see you’ve enjoyed your new stress ball, Garwyn. I hope you haven’t given away the gel-ball one I gave you for one year’s loyal service already though?” Her arrogant, self-righteous glance turned to Hair Trigger. “You’ve been down here letting off steam on her, what? Two or three days this week? She’s probably pleading by now? Are you, Captain? No shame in it really… Got anything you wanna say now?”

Garwyn sneered. Exhausted, Hair Trigger breathed out and looked through her matted mane at him, before pushing to let out a deep, entirely socially unacceptable moan. “Ngh… harder daddy…”

The sight of Garwyn’s eyes almost popping out of his skull would be enough to sustain her a few more days, she was sure of it.

“Little creepy bitch! I swear I’m gonna wreck you the moment I’m allowed.”

Hair Trigger cackled in pained amusement.

Asset looked unamused. “Tch… Remind me to not hire you for interrogations, Garwyn.”

“You said not to do anything too-”

"I know, I know. I'm actually tempted to give the pair of you an hour off the books. But-" Asset trotted over, grabbing Hair Trigger's chin. "Your auction is done. We have a winner."

“Great, maybe they’ll not charge you for damaged goods.” Trigger spat bloody spittle on the floor.

“Captain I tell you, this is but light treatment. If I had wanted you squealing and sobbing, I would have given Kreer half an hour with you and a-”

“Suitcase without contracts, yeah, yeah… Never get dirty yourself do you?”

Asset sniffed sharply. “When you can employ others to take the danger? Never.”

“Ah yeah, employees. Hey, intern?” She spoke past Asset to the quaking unicorn. “I got odds you last ten hours with this neurotic shit of a boss.” Hair Trigger cackled at the pony’s fearful hunching down. “Besides, having others in the line of fire didn’t stop you getting a lead buttjob did it, Ass-hole?”

And like a spring being wound too tight, something in Asset’s mood suddenly snapped. A hoof slapped across Trigger’s face. “Do you have ANY fresher material? Oh fuck you for that bullet, you little cocky shit!”

“Fuck me yourse-NGH!”

Garwyn’s plank had found another target. Asset fumed, mouth screwed up, but as she drew back her hoof, she paused, breathed out, and lowered it. “Well, thankfully unlike you I do have news to say. Perhaps you want to know who won your little bidding war, Captain?”

“Anyone can be better than staring at you every day.”

Asset purred in delight. “Oh, I think you’ll reconsider.” She leaned in close, one hoof holding Hair Trigger’s mane to keep her still. “I had absolutely no idea that Sidewinder hated you to such a degree that they’d pay so much for you.”

Trigger’s blood ran cold. Through all the bluster, all the resorting to anger to hide the fear and the pain, that one word cut deep. It drew up images; metal rooms, bloody chairs, trapped unicorns and bags filled with-

Asset giggled openly. “Oh your eyes, Captain.”

Trigger tried to control her breathing from staggering too much, and forced her head forward. She lowered her volume. “Listen, you delusional bitch. You have no idea what you’re getting into if you’re going into bed with them! They don’t want me for me! You think they’ll pay you!?”

Asset just serenely toyed with her suit, then flicked her green mane’s long fringes to the side. “Oh don’t I?”

“If I told you half of what they-”

Asset held up a hoof to interrupt. “Captain, you have it very wrong. Very, very wrong. You assume you’re the one who knows them best in this room. But you see, I’ve spoken with them about their relationship with you. Places you’ve been. You think I’m some naive businessmare dealing with some unknown devil? Oh no, I’ve found them a particularly good client many times over the years. After all...”

Her grin turned monumentally smug.

“...who do you think supplied the heavy materials to build such a large and off-the-record research site in the first place?”

Hair Trigger felt her eyes widen, and her heart clenched.

“What?”

“A very lucrative contract, actually. One I never thought I’d find an extension to with you.”

“Have you any idea what they were doing there!? What they did to ponies? To foals!?”

Asset Margin fixed her collar and turned to the door. “Business is business, my dear Captain.” She turned, giving her intern a signal with a brief and impatient spin of her hoof. “Although in your case, I wish I could say it wasn’t personal. They’ll arrive very soon to pick you up.”

“You hateful, fucking CU-”

The door slammed, drowning out the frantic scream of hatred.

* * *

“Useless!”

Tami was turfed, once again, into her cell. She scrambled across to the corner near the bed.

“A fourth!?” Kreer slammed the cage-door shut, activating the maglock before he stalked off. Tami watched him through the barred walls, seeing him through layers of metal to the middle of the room.

“I didn’t mean to-”

“Of course you didn’t! But I think you better take a long, long hard look at yourself, Tammani.” Kreer marched back over to the bars, staring in at her. “Because any more of this and profits will drop. And if profits drop, Asset begins to ask questions about exactly what we do with you.”

“I’m trying my best!” she shrieked.

“Then your best clearly isn’t good enough is it? I looked over the tracking records the black market has on your last ship, you know that Tammani?” He spoke again. “Falling through sandstorms? Almost getting shot down in the Crystal Heart? Running your passengers into a minefield?”

“N-No it was-”

Tami felt the barrage of accusations land. It had been horrible. The other miners had jeered, angry after her mistake had cost them a lucrative area to excess fragmental debris. Enraged hisses decrying her, her talent. A whole week hearing it. Every night she’d come back, she’d struggled to sleep, clinging desperately to the thin sheet and wishing it were someone to hug. The captain. Kerfuffle. Midnight. Coatie. Anyone.

Every night alone in the empty brig.

“Even without me having been on its bridge, I can see the moments you took the wheel, because that was always when things went wrong!”

‘Wasn’t Hair Trigger always on co-pilot then when you got out of it?’

“It wasn’t-”

‘What if she was just helping you quietly to make you feel better?’

Kreer shook his head. “You are, simply, a terrible pilot. What are you?”

“I’m- But, I won a dogfi-”

‘Whisper was helping you. Both times. That wasn’t you alone.’

She fought to keep the hard truth from landing in her mind. From rethinking every flight. Every dangerous moment. Every time she’d been celebrated.

“Useless. Utterly useless.” Kreer stomped off, the door hissing down behind him.

Tami crawled into her bed, grasping the sheets close to her body. She tried to run from the looming sensation in her mind. Pretend she was home. In her hammock. On Chrysolite. With Midnight. It was confusing, terrifying. Lonely. She’d gotten better but-

‘You’ve been over-exaggerating yourself, stop lying.’

-but was it fading again?

“It’s not him. It’s not him.”

‘No, it’s you.’

She gulped, pulling herself out and dragging the wires and the circuit board free from under her bed, toward the maglock. It didn’t quite reach yet. She’d need another board to act as an adaptor. The realisation was on autopilot; her mind entirely elsewhere.

“I’m just-

‘You always were a terrible pilot.’

“I’m just being honest with myself…”

She sniffled, let go of the board and fell forward, sliding down the bars.

It was pointless. She’d just fail.

Again.

Curling up, she finally gave in to it; let the mood take its course. A final, week long fight over, to just give-

The sirens wailed, a horrific tone that shrieked through the cell area.

But this time, the brig lit up in a frazzling, unnatural light. Looking up, her face a mask of tears, she saw a rift in space beyond the door. It warped, struggled, and then exploded open. Sensors, detecting it, had set the alarm ringing. Tami fell backward in shock.

And through it emerged a shape.

Pink.

From actually, literally nowhere, Specimen Eleven dropped out of the rift, stumbling. She looked exhausted, bearing bruises and scuffs of dust and dirt. Tami’s jaw dropped.

Frantic, running on pure adrenaline, Eleven threw herself against the cages. “I can’t keep it open for more than a few seconds! Where are you!? They can’t hold longer!”

“Elly! Please, help! Don’t leave-”

The unicorn simply screamed over her in a wild panic. “WHAT DECK ARE YOU ON?”

* * *

Claudia’s common room was full to the brim.

Volatility Smile finally exited her quarters. She’d been ready two minutes before, but she’d needed them. To breathe. To prepare. Now, fully cleaned, dressed, prim and suited, she strode out into the crowd.

“Listen up.”

She let her voice be firm. Authoritative. She saw Kerfuffle and Eleven, sitting together and tensely comforting one another. She saw Gaius and Compass Rose standing before the crew of the Tammaran. To their right, perched on the arm of the sofa was Vantage, his uniform standing out among the crowd. He was still skimming Claudia’s manual, but looked up. She saw the hulking forms of Donner and Blitz, the former licking her lips at Smile finally emerging, the latter angling his head forward. She saw Tundra Gem with a focused, firm look upon his face, Hair Trigger’s hat held against his chest. She saw Coatie, waiting patiently and looking over at her calmly, as though nothing had ever happened, but Smile knew the truth. On the monitor on the wall, Duke Midnight Haze had made another connection, intercut with Big Momma’ in another panel. Even Patch hovered, claiming that the common room was above safe maximum personnel levels.

She knew them all. Their skills. Their potential. They had pilots, frontline fighters, medical capacity, magic users of skill and raw power, experienced hooves and sly rogues, and more besides.

“We can absolutely do this. Thank you, all of you for turning up. Before, we couldn’t. Now?”

She slammed a large folder of images down on the desk. “We have everything we need to do it. Tami is being held within the Sun of the Night station. Hair Trigger is being held on the moon in a newly constructed void-structure.”

“How do you-” Tundra began, but Smile didn’t cease.

“She has combat drones in the asteroid field, on-station automated units, large numbers of hired private security, and an EMP network controlled from one of the orbital stations. We-”

Blitz spoke. His voice was not loud, but from his sheer scale alone it controlled the entire room the moment he did. “You mentioned this EMP. We will handle that.”

Donner lashed her tail, grinning.

Smile paused and squinted. “Actually, I believe-”

Blitz shook his head. “We will handle it. I will speak with you later. Continue.”

At that, Volatility Smile paused, and made an exaggerated gracious bow, drawing a stifled chuckle from those assembled. “Very well, we will talk later. Any other interruptions?”

None moved, but as she spoke, there was a heavy tread, and a hard slam of the common room door. A deep, yet articulated voice spoke up.

“I do believe that I have made it here in time, yes?”

Smile froze where she was, and a large, truly delighted grin began to spread over her face. Turning, she found him filling the door. Huge, broad shoulders below tipped horns on a massive body that lugged a heavy machine gun as though it were an assault rifle. The minotaur dropped a heavy bag and returned her look of delight.

“Niko!” Smile couldn’t even keep her composure. “This is… This is unexpected!”

Nikomachos nodded sharply. “There was a cry for help. And when you have fought together, you do not abandon those you once fought beside. Those that gave you the chance to be where you are now.”

Moving forward, he formally shook her hoof.

“I will fight with you again. And we will win, yes?”

Heart thumping, her mental calculations of the odds skyrocketing as she considered every asset she had now collected, Smile turned and slammed a hoof on the table.

“Yes, we will. Asset hasn’t a clue what she’s got coming. And this-”

The hoof tapped.

“-is how we’re going to do it!”

* * *

On Kavala’s moon, Asset Margin was relaxing the stress of meeting one little shit of a unicorn away within her heated pool atop the glass-domed penthouse of her new moon-residence. It wasn’t her delightful estate on the surface, but she enjoyed being surrounded by the potential. The belief that within months, others that shared her path in life would be here, enjoying the delights, eager to purchase gloriously profit-busting relics once they had been suitably jazzed up to a few ‘extras’ on their intended deal. Illuminated by the light of Kavala shining into the moon’s continent sized crater, she settled into the forty degree water with the very finest in Republic rum - a guilty pleasure after a sour day.

But at least one that had a perfect ending in a return buyer. Missing the last sale for the chemical compound had almost cost her dearly, but this would more than make up for it.

There was a soft chiming, followed by a louder bleep. She reached over to the comm-unit installed on the side of the pool.

“Yes?”

Kreer answered. “Ma’am. Communications messaged me rather than you as you requested.”

“They’re looking to talk dates?”

Kreer sounded like every word was a sigh. Asset knew he hated running adjutant duty, or watching that pilot. He was a killer, a field operative. But she also trusted him with this client’s initial contacts more than any. Certainly not any intern. He and they were somewhat alike.

That, and she valued his ruthlessness if it came to carrying out her threat on the hippogriff, should the amateur businessmare and her pet idiot try anything.

“Patch them through.”

There was no screen in her open plan home. A frame over the pool began to pour water down, and from it, a video connection was projected across the falling liquid, spilling faint prismatic light about the edges.

But what she saw on the screen was anything but beauty and rainbows. Instead, there was a dark cockpit, and an even darker figure front and centre. Behind him she could see another shape with two glowing blue crosses across blacked out eyes. Its entire outline was blurry, as though cloaked in a drifting mist whenever she looked directly at them. On the opposite side of the centre figure was a unicorn’s silhouette in a wheelchair. They were tied securely into it, head slouched, horn glowing intermittently.

The central figure was equine - she could tell that at least. Male, old. Older than her for sure, perhaps into his fifties. His forelegs shifted with casual, fluid motions to pilot their ship as he spoke.

“You have the unicorn; Captain Hair Trigger of Claudia?”

His voice held no insult and yet no respect either. It was powerful but dry. She had heard it only from the most senior of CEOs and royalty. Those who had seen everything.

“Quite, and I suppose you would be the pickup?”

“Indeed.”

Asset cast her hooves wide. “Then I invite you to luxury upon your arrival as my first buyer. Would you give me a name, that I may have my defences recognize you?”

There was a pause, and then the lead figure leaned forward slightly. She saw two fierce, weathered eyes of amber glaze that stilted Asset’s smile and gave even her pause.

He spoke quickly and simply before cutting the connection.

“Boa.”

* * *

Specimen Six / Coatlique

Image by Kalemon

The Impenetrable Fortress

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Between Two Crowns

Author's Note

Welcome back all!

A couple of housekeeping things to mention... It's been a while. A very serious family emergency hospitalisation took a lot of my time and my mental stamina to write for the last year or so, coupled with losing my job this year (don't worry, I got another one!). As such, the finale of Loose Ends is still only around half complete. But I'm working on it! It will come! If there's one thing I hope people know about me it's that I get big projects done in the end.

But in the meantime, I thought I'd put this up here to tide you all over. I wrote this for fun a few years ago, following the backstory of Gaius and Rose, Tami's parents. It covers how they met, and the events that carried their career in space that's been so heavily referenced throughout HITB.

This is written more as a descriptive piece. Like reading a 'dramatised documentary' description of their history, rather than a perspective story as it was mostly for myself and the original game followers. But I tried to make it filled with as much interesting worldbuilding outside of just them and builds for the current story as I could. I think you may find it satisfying as a hold over until the finale is done.

Napalm Goat's wonderful 'The Impenetrable Fortress' introduced us to period pieces on the War of the Two Crowns. Now, I'd like to zoom that scope out a little more and tell its story through two pairs of eyes...

Between Two Crowns

An Orphan’s Dead End

He was born in one of the most remote systems in the Crystal League: Rosaline, a ‘dead-end’ system - one that lacked any FTL route passing through it, only one in and out. In particular, he was born on Rosaline II, long regarded as one of the forgotten worlds where few of the megacorporations had ever truly invested any of their holdings. It offered few natural resources, was too distant for efficient manufacturing, and was generally seen as a very backward and ill-educated world. Among its threadbare colonies, lack of export meant most industry was focused on local needs.

It was within one of these self-sustaining bio-habs that Gaius grew up as an orphan. The exact circumstances of his parents’ disappearance from his life remained unknown, owing to poor record keeping and rapid staff turnover by the time he was old enough to realise and ask. Employed, like most local orphans, into farming via the orphanage’s parent company that owned the greater habitat, the young griffon found himself falling in with a rebellious group in the hab-domes, made up mostly of other griffons. Pranks and petty theft were common, as was a disdain of the other groups. Yet as young males got older, and egos grew the pre-teens would compete or even fight. Caught out by his younger age compared to the others, Gaius found his place in the pecking order dropping rapidly.

Instead, he found himself being looked to by the non-griffon orphans for protection, seeing him as one outside of the ‘main’ group of delinquents and troublemakers. Lacking any real urge to go back to those tormenting him, Gaius instead acted as a ‘playground head’ for many of the ponies also present in the orphanage. Yet before this had a chance to bring him into direct conflict with his old peers, fate intervened and saw him adopted and taken away from the fields toward Rosaline II’s singular spaceport enabled city.

Gaius’ foster parents were part-owners of the planet’s ancient space elevator service, a relic of the pre-wyrm era that had somehow survived to still function, albeit barely. Notoriously unsafe (and technically illegal), its presence was simply permitted by the lack of attention shown to the little visited planet. Other than by the occasional journalist or vlogger seeking to make a record of this curious, isolated world and its single point of note in the elevator, few took notice. However, quickly after arriving into his new ‘home’, even the young griffon began to realise something was not as it ought to be. The house was far larger than any living space he had ever known, but the two ponies who had adopted him were rarely present, leaving him to a maid and a tutor. Quickly, he began to feel distant from his ‘parents’. This was further compounded when other orphans joined the home, making him one amongst a dozen. Soon enough, there was little difference between his new life and the orphanage.

He never really connected with the other ‘siblings’, leading to a return to his delinquent juvenile ways. After numerous reprimands, seen as the black sheep who couldn’t behave, the final straw came with the discovery of the ‘marketing goodwill’ concept after eavesdropping on the staff of the house. On a world with nothing, those with money were everything, and they were the only connection between this world and the greater galaxy via the orbital ports. Being seen to take in orphans was a way for them to show charity, to appear philanthropic against a jealous population, rather than to ever be truly parental. At least as far as until the children were old enough to not be as useful as a symbol. Gaius could quickly see the charity running out as his age climbed toward that of a young adult, and his personal discipline and impulse control went into a nosedive.

With his behaviour risking expulsion, Gaius upon his sixteenth birthday instead made the daring choice to simply go off on his own terms. But not on this planet, there was nothing here.

Taking an access disk from his foster father’s office and using the cover of an adopted son looking to meet him at work on the orbital platform, Gaius took the elevator for the first time. With saucer-size eyes at the passage off-world, Gaius found himself finally seeing the great vastness of the galaxy he lived in, and almost turned around on the spot at the intimidating void.

Disembarking, he found himself in a very new place, surrounded by small ships hauling cargo to and from the world. Quaint by any other world’s standards, but to him it was an unthinkable splendour.

He didn’t even bother to meet with his father before using the access disk to enter the hangar floor and stowing away on the first ship he could see departing; A PNR-01 ‘Pioneer’, the initial model of what would become a successful series in the coming decades.

It was less than a day after the ship departed that he was discovered. Attempting to sneak out of his hiding spot below the decks to acquire food during the night cycle he heard a startled gasp and turned to find a young filly across the common room, her wings across her mouth in shock...

A Dream in Freefall

By contrast, and born within the Equestrian civilization at the height of its still united power, Compass Rose grew up as the daughter of a successful couple. Owning their own logistics and shipping business, with a fleet of twenty small to medium scale cargo vessels, they made a comfortable and well educated life for her on Ursa III, close to the idyllic home planet of the galaxy’s denizens: Equestria itself.

Their business predominantly traded with the other civilizations of the galaxy, most notably the market powerhouse of the Crystal League. Rose was used to trips across the stars even by her twelfth year, usually aboard one of their fleet ships with her parents as they sought to meet and greet, or to negotiate a maintenance contract abroad in the League. She would always sit on the bridge with them, but quickly her parents noticed her staring more at the navigator’s magic hooves controlling such amazing feats of technology from one little station at the back. With such comfort as her parents provided and such interstellar splendour to see, she grew into a happy, cheerful filly with a surprisingly cheeky sense of humour.

Yet by her tenth year, she happened upon a strained argument of her parents late at night in their home. Quickly realising they were not actually angry at one another, she overheard them casting worry and bitterness over a change in law. Equestria’s mandates on the freedoms of its private companies were being steadily shut down, and their transits to the Confederacy were being threatened with closure. The ramifications of this were far from the mind of a filly, but she saw them talk with many stallions and mares in stiff suits, and felt their increasing worry.

By her pre-teens, Rose had seen their lovely home sold, and then the smaller home after that, until they were living above their own warehouse. Smart for her age, she heard the basics of how their fleet of mostly Confederate-type ships was having its parts chain to Minotaur space restricted by new laws focused on ‘improving Equestrian-raised industry’, The reduction in ship availability due to lack of spares had just cost them a long term contract. As clients left, their business began sinking rapidly, and instability created by the apparent abdication of Princess Luna only worsened matters. While the fine details went over the filly’s head, she understood well enough that her parents’ company was being strangled out of existence.

Later that year, the decision was made to leave Equestrian space. It had become unsustainable to operate from Ursa, and the family business sought to take three of its few remaining ships to the Crystal League to start anew. To enable this, the company ownership was sold out to a much larger logistics giant in the League, and her parents found themselves becoming crew aboard their own vessels.

Mere weeks after the convoy left Ursa, news of civil unrest breaking out behind them arose; mere portents of the events that would impact Rose’s life much later on.

Attending school in the League, Rose’s sweet and pleasant personality lent her an advantage to fitting into a new world, and soon she was rekindling the bright spark of her personality again, proving herself an intelligent filly. She would spend her time in a dormitory at a private school, her parents somehow finding a way to afford the best for their daughter even as they were away hauling cargo. In her holidays, she would often return to space to be with her parents on their journeys.

It was at the age of fourteen, as her parents’ ship made a small run to Rosaline III, that she got a notable shock on board. Staying up late while doing her holiday coursework, she departed her quarters to get some water, only to spot an unfamiliar blonde griffon by the fridge holding some of their food in his claws.

The voice caught in her throat before she could scream, but the terrified, desperate look on the griffon’s face stole away her urge to panic. Watching him quickly throw the food back in, she squealed and backed against the wall as he hurried up to her, the scared and out of his depth youngster begging her to not tell anyone.

Unfortunately, that one squeal was enough to reach the sixth sense of any parent. The captain’s quarters door was thrown open, and soon after the rest of the crew were up as well.

Rose could only stand with her wings across her mouth and watch as the griffon was hauled into a chair to be sternly questioned as to his presence onboard as a stowaway.

Meeting in the Stars

At first Gaius’ arrival on board the ship was a matter of confusion. The thought to turn and take him immediately home was stymied by the requirement to finish their contract. The owning corporation had been notoriously strict regarding their schedule, and Rose’s parents were well aware of the fines. Career-ending collateral hung over their heads in this new, harder life.

As such, the decision was made to take Gaius with them until they could locate a ship going the other way. After a thorough dressing down, the young griffon was given the instruction to work for his ‘passage’ in the meantime. Cleaning dishes, scrubbing bulkheads, and carrying tools and cargo among many other menial tasks.

To their surprise, his only protest was knowing he had to go back, afraid of what his foster parents might then do. The tasks themselves he undertook without anger or lethargy, even outwith that which they had required. There was a hopeful determination about him, one that left many of the small crew scratching their heads as he hurried about his business. After only two days, he had already asked for more tasks. After four, he no longer even asked before doing. Some questioned just how much he actually slept, and before long they were including him at mealtime chatter, learning about his past and his daring escape, even as he set (and later cleaned) the table for them.

Gaius, for a lack of any other option, was doing the only thing he could, no matter how far fetched it seemed.

And all the while he did, there was always a curious little filly watching the strange new addition to what she saw as her home, occasionally giggling at the jokes of his antics in the fields.

After several in-space deliveries, a week had passed before they eventually arrived at a populated planet with shuttles to various locations. It was here that Gaius was met with a true shock.

After gathering to inform him as to which ship would take him back to Rosaline and saying goodbye, the entire crew jokingly closed the cargo door ahead of him walking morosely away. Then and there, Rose’s father placed a hoof on the griffon’s shoulder, and asked him if he’d be willing to work that hard long term and stay out in space a little longer.

Gaius had no idea that when eagerly taking the captain’s hoof and accepting, ‘a little longer’ was to eventually total more than twenty years out in the black.

Family and Friends

For the next few years, Gaius would gradually integrate himself into the crew. First simply as a ship’s mate doing much as he’d done on his first voyage, but soon to learn. Lacking any direct education for space travel, he instead simply tried to learn a bit about everything. Often he would be found in the engine room or the bridge shadowing the crew, memorising what their hooves and hands did to achieve results and why. He went with the captain on deliveries, and learned to shoot, barter and treat injuries. There were no formal qualifications, but he learned fast.

It wasn’t long before he and Compass Rose became friends. Being the two youngest on board lent them a natural chemistry and her cheerfulness was never going to hold her back from getting curious about the unusual new recruit. Oftentimes on nightwatch, he would find her coming up to keep him company and to idly chatter about seemingly anything that crossed her mind. At first he just entertained her, but as they both matured, became young adults, and the two-year age gap began to mean less and less, the talks became more mutual. He would talk of his wonder to have made it out here to see such unknowns, and his luck in finding a crew like this who were beginning to feel like an adopted family. She would talk of the stars, their details, and the fun of mathematics in navigating them. The latter always went completely over his head, but he enjoyed her passion for it.

Before too long, Gaius began to learn more complex things in the bridge. At first it was how to change the autopilot, and then manual reangling. With a few years of daily exercises, he was manoeuvring the vessel on his own, and soon after committing to re-entry, landing, and takeoff. He would learn beside Rose who, during her few months at a time on board, was to her long-awaited delight being tutored on the use of the navigator’s console. She had been bothering her father for months to let her try, seeking a new outlet to learn from.

When she returned to university each year, she would always give them all a hug goodbye, until her next run back ‘home’ on the ship.

It wasn’t long before Rose’s father, with traditional paternal intuition, spotted his roguish young crewman missing his daughter’s presence in those times. While at first wary, he eventually grew to find it amusing, particularly when learning that Rose was regularly forwarding letters to the griffon on how her studies were going. In time his reservations faded away, especially when watching how much she would smile around the griffon, and how tightly she’d dive onto Gaius for a hug on returning.

For six years the pair continued to develop, sharing time together and apart on board. Gaius took a half year absent from the ship on his twenty-first year to attend and qualify his ‘on the job’ skills as an official pilot, while Rose graduated as a fully fledged navigator. With the retirement of crewmembers from both such positions on her family’s ship, they had only one natural place to go for a job. Within one year of each other, they both had finally ‘made it’ into their long-sought purposes. A life outside of nowhere. A stable life away from constant change. And people to share it with.

The Tammaran

The sixth and seventh years of Rose and Gaius’ lives together were to prove to be a period of great change, both personal, and of the world they had around them.

Within the sixth, they took a long overdue break from their working life. After graduating with qualifications, the rest of the crew granted them leave for a month at the same time. Allegedly only the pair themselves failed to spot the clear hints from the rest of the crew who had, by this point, been taking a pool on the exact timing of what they called ‘the inevitability’.

The pair, as expected, elected to share their holiday, travelling via chartered ships and short cruises from Chrysolite in the League to the Confederacy, the Periphery (including what would someday become the New Lunar Republic), Avalon, the by-now-called Solar Empire, and finally meeting up back in the Crystal League. Partially subsidised by the crew themselves as a gift, the pair travelled, experienced, laughed, and relaxed together. Whether in a picturesque hotel overlooking an otherworldly vista or huddled in the guest quarters of a not-so-glamorous ship, they journeyed far, and their bond grew immeasurably with no work to keep them focused elsewhere.

It was aboard a tour yacht in orbit around a planet with no true name yet in the Periphery, at the furthest end of the galaxy from where they met, that the crew’s predictions finally found their date and time. Watching the tidally locked planet amidst a great blue nebula and admiring the day and night below them from the clear glass bubble of an observation deck, Gaius felt Rose pull him gently into her side and look up, one of her wings stroking his blonde cheek. Smiling back to her for a long time, he finally decided not to let this embrace end so simply. His wing layered over hers to shield them in their own little private vista for a moment, and he leaned in to make it all clear.

On their return, amidst the delighted cheers of the ship’s crew (and after a traditional ‘Captain Dad’ talk to Gaius) the pair had little time to resettle. Contracts needed done, and the ship needed its newly romantic bridge-pair to fly it. It was in this time that their skills finally flourished, given the freedom and trust of one another and those on board. Gaius, the longest running crewmember outside of Rose’s direct family, eventually became a young second-in-command to Rose’s father. Here, a new natural talent surfaced. Coming from little, and having worked from the bottom, he understood those coming aboard, developing into a calm, comforting link between the crew and the captain. He began taking more responsibility, and after a collision damaged the vessel and incapacitated the captain, it was Gaius who took over to lead damage control, undoubtedly saving lives.

Yet come their seventh year, once again the undignified crunch of corporate decisions would affect Rose’s family. Their owner’s changing ‘strategy’ elected to condense its fleet assets into a series of vessels that the crew were no longer familiar with. Within months, the long-running family company was ignominiously stricken from existence, disappearing from the League counting boards and trade floors, and leaving only a dead site on lingering GalaNet signals. Its ships were auctioned off, including their home. Rose’s parents received just enough severance pay that they were able to afford a small home on Chrysolite II to retire into. They were of the age to consider doing so, after all. It was earlier than expected, but they were able to settle into some small jobs until the employee pension of the city’s corporate owner would kick in.

For Gaius and Rose though, their life in the stars was far from over. Indeed, it was little more than a beginning.

Finding themselves unable to find a ship needing both a pilot and a navigator so they could remain together, and with their accounts swollen with lump-sum redundancy wages on top of years of savings, they had one last idea. One remaining way to stay in the stars. Combining the funds they had, they approached a junkers yard in orbit above Chrysolite III, and simply picked what they could afford.

Later that day, with barely enough money to keep clothes on their backs and food in their bellies, the pair stood within the cargo bay of a Gleaner RB-Eight. Known as the ‘Shell’ due to its smooth, angular top half and somewhat less aesthetic underside it was little more than a rusted old vessel with a hundred things needing repaired.

But it was theirs. And as Gaius limped it out of the yard towards a storage dock at sublight speed, he could not deny a smile from forming.

They had no corporation owning them. No-one higher than themselves. No contracts beholding them to any particular space.

It was a risky, daring move. It cost them everything they had and put them immediately into the red, relying on this all coming off with pay to function. Their newly-hired crew would be without wages if they couldn’t repair the ship and find tasks within a month.

But it was theirs, and they chose its name as a combination of themselves to reflect that. ‘Tamm’ from Gaius, a slang reference from his homeworld for something precious, and ‘Amaran’ from Rose’s own world; an old word for space, meaning ‘escape’.

Thus, their route to freedom in their own lives became known as the Tammaran.

With only a month to fix her up, Gaius, Rose, and their four new hires did all they could. The new crew were inexperienced, young, enthusiastic, each of them also seeking a ship that was not aligned with anything greater. Mostly from the League, wanting an escape from the megacorps for one reason or another. Debt, mostly. None were older than twenty five, an unusually young crew for the time. But at last they had all they needed. A systems technician, a comm-operator, a reservist field medic, an engineer, Rose with her navigation skills, and Gaius himself with the knowledge to pilot a vessel.

But only now, after he saw five creatures looking for him to give the word to depart the system, did he realise he was now also a captain as well.

Still half complete, with only enough fuel for a single moderate journey, the Tammaran bore her crew into a magic rift, leaving the League behind them.

At almost the same time, systems away, deep in the Solar Empire, groups of thestrals and their allies cracked open smuggled crates and removed the weapons within. They watched the news of the continued crisis regarding the shutdown of the robotic armies amidst the ongoing riots and skirmishes. They looked to their leaders and received a nod. It was time.

The Tammaran had entered M-space at a time of instability and revolt.

By the time it exited again, it would be a time of open civil war across the stars.

Two Crowns

Lacking the collateral to acquire contracts in the League, the decision had been made to head for the Empire. Contracts were cheaper to acquire there with Rose’s old family contacts, needing less paperwork and more handshakes with the smaller institutions that were less affiliated with megacorps. Yet as the Tammaran burst back into realspace near a refuelling hub in the Empire system ‘Vigilance’, it ran into a scene of chaos.

Radio channels on the bridge went haywire. Masses of weapon locks on all freighters and cargo vessels in the area were being held by Imperial Warships and the distant heat signatures of weapons fired across the vacuum of space flared across all warning sensors. Even as they watched, converted merchant vessels were opening cargo doors to reveal improvised cannons and silos, launching illegally modified weapons at the resplendent vessels of Nightmare Star’s armada. Panicking, the fleet began attacking every such ship it thought may do the same, and before the Tammaran’s crew even knew what was happening, a massacre began to occur.

Unarmed and unshielded merchants were vapourised by magnetic accelerators and lumbering conveyors effortlessly caught by interceptor missiles. Revolutionary converted ships hid among them, ambushing and crippling frigates and destroyers from close range, before immediately attempting to jump into M-space.

Gaius desperately did what he could to veer the Tammaran behind the larger transports as cover as the comms-front erupted in panic, threats, death-throes, and pleads to cease fire. Rose danced her hooves over her station, trying to pull up anything she could. Any destination that was possible. Working as one, they pulled the ship to align on their route, leaping into M-space even as the lock warning rang out on the bridge. Confused, still uncertain of what was happening, the crew had to make six further emergency jumps through the Empire. At every point they were hounded by demands to stop, or mass spam across the net to join the fight. Less than an hour between arrival and departure from any given system, at the limits of what lower end ships of the time were safely capable of, they conducted a day of terrifying escape and evasions by the skin of their teeth to try and reach the Periphery. Even then, at Mothellum, patrols on emergency orders to return to imperial space began angling toward them, and the tired young crew were forced once again to expend precious fuel. Only after coming into Jhurope were they finally able to let the Tammaran’s complaining core (and engineer) rest. Sweaty, on edge and short tempered, the new crew gathered around a screen in the common room to connect to the information channels and finally catch up on what had just occurred.

What many had said was coming but which few had believed possible had erupted. An Equestrian Civil War, between those loyal to Nightmare Star and the Empire, and those aligned with Princess Luna to try and overthrow the so-called tyranny. In almost every system of Equestrian space, the population had shattered in two. Controlling the media, the Empire made clear that it remained the majority, and told of the terror strikes against them and civilian vessels. Yet all across the net, reports reflected from League and Avalon sources told of a brutal crackdown on freedom fighters seeking to end the corruption of an evil force that had taken hold of Celestia. The information war, as much as the physical one, had begun.

Left alone, isolated from friendly ports, the Tammaran’s crew tried their best to process all of this. Mostly League-born, there was some natural bias in favour of the rebellion, but they had all seen revolutionaries using merchant lanes as cover to ambush from. Was the situation really that desperate? How far would this go?

And in particular to Rose, what was becoming of her world? Her home? The area of space that, even while its laws pushed her out, she still loved for the stars and planets as they were?

Wandering away from the questions and arguments, she settled back into the great domed glass bridge, aligned the ship to look back upon the steller direction of the Empire, and simply stared.

Only when Gaius came to sit with her later did she finally stir, look up at her partner, and finally snap back to her senses. At his gentle urging, she began to plan.

They were caught in unaligned space, with a civil war between them and home. With almost no fuel, no money, and a redlined vessel.

After checking local signals, they finally found one place. One port nearby, away from the storm.

The Iron Jellyfish

Using the last dregs of their fuel reserves, Rose and Gaius brought the Tammaran to Saphibban, aiming for the one port they could find within their limited remaining range. As they slowly drifted across the system, they finally received the automated welcome ping, followed soon after by an escort of skiffs converted into gunships that brought them to within range of the station itself. A colossal series of metal rings and circular plates held in orbit above a planet’s rings, crowded by dozens of freighters, shuttles and even two cruise liners.

Joining the procession of other refugees and ships stranded by the outbreak of civil war, the Tammaran arrived at Port Medusa. Fairly new by comparison to the more established stations in the galaxy, it had become a hive for those preferring to operate in the grey area of legality. Quickly the crew questioned Gaius’ decision to dock there, citing the number of pirates operating from the port itself, ‘polite piracy’ or not. He could only tap the malfunctioning fuel gauge and remind them that they had no other choice.

And with no means to jump again, it would have to be here that they would find work.

Soon after landing, and after barely talking his way around the immediate docking fee, Gaius exited his ship with Rose at his side. The others remained to watch over their new home, as the pair moved into the chaos of the station itself. Screaming crowds lingered around comms-relay providers, wanting insurance contacts, family calls, or lawyers. Security drones buzzed relentlessly, hounding those who let fear and panic turn to violence. Gaius and Rose found themselves doggedly pursued by an older model of one such machine over the same docking fee issue, much as it had already been dealt with, until they required the assistance of a guard to get it to finally leave them alone.

Needing work to get any money they could for their dire situation, and with the shipping receptions too gridlocked to operate, they found themselves quite at an end. The civil war had crippled operations even into the Periphery with the economic backlash and closure of space lanes.

In the end, they didn’t find work.

Work found them.

After days of hapless searching and increasingly desperate attempts to waive the docking fee with no means to pay it, the pair were called to the upper level of the station’s primary hub. Flanked by security drones, Gaius and Rose were marched to a security gate, and soon after, into the station director’s office.

An ambitious, driven stallion, the director of the station demanded the pair find a means to pay, or he would claim their ship. Threatened with homelessness aboard a pirate station, they pushed for any method they could think of to pay off the mounting debt, but only one began to emerge.

In the days since the civil war began, the grey and black markets had been driven into overdrive across the sector. Refugees were looking for anyone promising a way out, Luna’s forces were seeking access to any weapons, supplies, and ships they could muster, while Solar Empire military contingents stranded on far flung worlds were trying to garner allies to help them survive amidst a rebellion. The director’s contacts, ever eager to exploit the situation, were overflowing with prospective jobs.

There, on the spot, the director gave Gaius and Rose an ultimatum. He would take ownership of the vessel, they would take jobs from him to pay off the ship’s worth and the accrued debt, and he would support their ship’s requirements until financially stable, with two clauses. One: that he would take a cut of all earnings; and two: that they would do the jobs he wanted.

Faced with little choice they agreed, already knowing in their hearts where this would take them.

The dream of personal freedom had died before it had even begun, and a journey back into harm’s way at the will of a ruthless business stallion stood ahead of them.

Profit Runners

The crew did not react well to the news, but ultimately there was a realisation that it was not the fault of anyone but fate. With the docking restriction lifted, the Tammaran began to receive its first instructions within the day, and by the following morning had already departed Port Medusa.

The first task was to become a familiar one: to use their status as a commerially unflagged, independent cargo vessel to penetrate within the Solar Empire’s borders, smuggling arms, medical supplies, and communications equipment to whichever side the director had received a contract for. Immediately, the jobs received debate and stressed the new crew’s chemistry to breaking point. Shouting matches erupted on board at bringing weapons to irregular Solar Empire forces to help them subjugate rebellion, just as much as there was about flying a server network to a group known for committing indiscriminate attacks on pro-Nightmare Star civilian locations. War profiteers from the Periphery were taking advantage of the confusion, and the Tammaran was nothing but a contractually obligated provider held in place by the threat of losing everything.

The stress of enduring on-board inspections by both the Imperial ships and roaming insurrectionists along with ending up caught in the gunfights of compromised deliveries began to take its toll. Yet as scars mounted, experience began to set in. The crew identified all the nooks and crannies of their ship to hide materiel in, or how best to spoof comm-signals to hide their real location. The ship they had hoped to use as their home became a grey entity. A neutral force beholden to the will of another.

Opinions on the war were fractured. Witnessing all sides of it like this was trying to all. They were young, impressionable and given to emotion, yet the realities of these dangerous lowlife meetings and dispassionate business calls stifled the youthful fire. There was a slight bias toward Luna’s forces, partly due to a shared sense of feeling like the underdog trying to escape their own situation, and partly due to growing intelligence from the Crystal League on the true nature of the Solar Empire’s shift toward totalitarianism behind the scenes. Some on the crew began to wonder if they were only seeing the worst of it via the director’s less-than-reputable contacts.

Yet every time the meetings came to judge their progress on their debt, there was always more. Weeks turned to months. Months turned into a year. Progress was made, but their own funds were kept locked away from them.

Through it all, Gaius absorbed the stress of his crew. Giving a pep-talk, a stern word, a forced order, or just a big hug where needed. Many times he had the option to replace some of them; the director even offered to exchange for his own experienced group, but the griffon would not allow it.

Through a year of hell, for all their flaws, he held on to those same hopeful souls that had come with him in the first place. He stayed strong for them, even if they weren’t. Yet in quiet, as he retreated to his shared cabin with Rose, he would fall to her chest, feel her forelegs wrap around his head, and himself be comforted as the tears of worry would fall.

The Stars Aflame

If this long period was to do anything, it was to harden the crew. Maturing quickly, they began to flourish and bond. Rose’s skill at navigating kept them safe, able to jump when needed, and Gaius’ leadership was coming into its own as a natural born talent to make the best use of everyone under his command. They were their own people, caught in the middle of two sides.

Yet, in the second year of the war, events would transpire to finally push them to one side of the fence.

In the initial confusion, the forces of Nightmare Star and Luna had encircled one another on a hundred worlds. There were no frontlines, no safe zones. Even Equestria itself knew the scars. But as time went on, the core worlds began to assert their dominance, pushing out the rebellion almost entirely, while some of the fringe worlds, particularly those positioned to receive clandestine aid from Avalon or the Crystal League, began to almost come under the control of those loyal to the Princess of the Night. A rough order of battle began to emerge; Luna appeared to be trying to force a stalemate - an opportunity to better develop her uncertain position. As the anniversary of the outbreak passed, millions in the Empire began to realise they were on one side or the other, whether they wanted it or not. In a strange twist of fate, refugees fled in both directions based on their choices. The Empire was harsh as they had ever been in recent years, but the rebellion brought its own brand of hardline rule under the justification of a conflict.

Backed by captured infrastructure and foreign aid, the rebellion grew until its capabilities were enough to wage war conventionally. This was seen as a dire threat to the Solar Empire. If Luna's forces could establish an organised breakaway state within the Empire's borders, they might formalise diplomatic contact with other sympathetic states like the Crystal League or Avalon. Though Nightmare Star's fleets could soundly crush the rebellion given enough time, the possibility of Avalon and the League guaranteeing this new power's independence threatened a far less certain war on three fronts.

Indeed, news soon broke of Princess Luna visiting both of those possible allies, but for whatever reason the negotiations stalled. History never knew why, often theorised to be due to League transports being shanghaied by Luna’s followers for desperately needed materials. But the negotiations did not wholly collapse, and the threat remained. Thus everyone knew that the Solar Empire would act fast before Luna could entrench and seek factional standings from other civilizations. But no-one could have dared imagine the lengths to which they would go to achieve it.

The Tammaran had spent a number of days slipping past Imperial patrols via the means of coordinated jumps from nebula to nebula. They were dangerous routes on the very fringes of charted space between systems, but with the ship packed full of rare metals, Avalonian fire control systems, and even a League hyperdrive for the rebellion’s ship conversion efforts, Gaius wasn’t taking chances. Rose had simply accepted the challenge, diving into several sleepless nights surrounded by maths and route plots with an eager grin to get off the main routes a little and explore the open space between the stars.

To their shock, upon arrival in the Empire, and after spoofing an automated identification beacon, they encountered an Imperial task force already blockading the planet hosting their buyer. Electing to come in via the other side and travel in-atmo to avoid detection, they drifted on minimal power through the debris of the planet’s most recent conflict before dropping down from orbit.

Meeting their Lunar-aligned contact amidst a bustling cliffside city, the crew made the delivery amidst frantic preparations for planetary defence. There was every sign that an orbital landing was about to take place, and Luna’s followers prepared as best they could to hold until their own fleet could arrive. Gaius and his second were accepted, seen, and quickly sent away with a notice to get away from the impending war zone as rapidly as possible.

It was as they signalled the Tammaran that they were returning and boarded a maglev transport to return to the starport that the true nature of the Empire’s attack took place. Mid-route, as the high line passed over a great lake, every display showing the planet’s news in the maglev train changed, emitting a keening tone and displaying an emergency broadcast transmission. A shaking voice informed of a colossal detonation in the atmosphere and a loss of contact with the planet’s orbital infrastructure. Warnings to reach shelter were themselves interrupted by the train’s screens shorting out, exploding in a shower of sparks on the panicking civilians. Moments later, Gaius, Rose, and the rest of the shore party were nearly blinded as the horizon toward the planet’s capital, hundreds of miles away, lit up, and an earthquake rolled through the landscape.

With a horrendous groan of tortured metal, the supports of the maglev line collapsed. Sixteen train cars fell one after the other, taking shrieking passengers with them into the water below. Taking to the air on their wings, Gaius and Rose managed to pull their crew through a broken window. Rose clutched a young hippogriff to her chest as she went, the only other trapped creature she could grab before being forced to flee. Clawing their way out, they launched into the open air, struggling and faltering under the weight of carrying multiple others. By some miracle, they managed to crash land onto the remaining strut of the railway as the trains pulled hundreds of others to their deaths below, only a handful of other winged creatures managing to get free.

In the fifteen minutes they spent there, stranded aboard a thin pole above open water with Rose holding the crying hippogriff colt to her breast, they witnessed three other searing detonations over the horizon. Eventually, the city they had just left was devastated by another strike.

Too tired to fly to land, and with no other place to go, the group of a dozen creatures could only hold one another to avoid the harsh winds and long range concussive impacts throwing them off the support. For an hour, they remained quiet. For an hour, they faced the certainty of eventual collapse.

Yet even as the metal creaked and groaned, the one ray of hope left would come to them. With a roar of turbines, the Tammaran dropped from the clouds, having been following the known route of the maglev line to look for them. Awkwardly flown by their engineer, the clumsily banking ship at least got close enough for Gaius and Rose to fly the survivors onto its cargo ramp.

Most collapsed, but the pair girded themselves and flew to the bridge. Angling up and pushing the reactor to its very limit, Gaius set them away from the planet. Warnings flared as further impacts took place within the flight route, forcing him to redirect to avoid the monumental forces pulled down from the atmosphere as hypersonic projectiles surged past them. A fire broke out in the engine room as he kept the afterburners on for far longer than was safe. Eventually, the safety of the black melted around them as the Tammaran erupted into the void and powered into a high orbit, before finally dialling back.

Only then could they take stock and realise what had happened.

The Empire, desperate to quell Luna’s growing force, had unleashed their so-called ‘deterrence arsenal’. The fleet they had seen carried not an invasion force, but weapons of mass destruction. Twelve mass-reactive kinetic warheads had rained from orbit to the largest centres of infrastructure across the planet, most centred on one continent. Even now, they could see the bright lights upon the surface. The comms-channel was alive with noise, drowning in thousands of distress calls; the buffer was only able to accept some at a time, resulting in it playing three or four overlapping messages at once as signals fought for prominence. Screamed orders, pained shrieks, desperate begging for someone to come, and unnatural dead static cut over one another. A planet, as one, cried out for help and the crew could do nothing but drift and listen.

Still reeling from the shock of their own narrow escape, they witnessed millions of lives ended in but a few hours. And just as they were at their most vulnerable, the reports began to filter in. This was not an isolated incident. Crystal League and Avalon outlets reported the same escalation at five other planets, all core bastions of Luna’s rebellion. On top of that, smaller tactical level weapons of the same mass destructive class being used were crowding reports, confusing the information as to just how much had been unleashed or not.

Even before the Solar Empire confirmed the ‘limited’ use of ‘clean, non-radioactive surgical strikes’, there was not a soul in the galaxy who did not have their eyes glued to the largest devastation unleashed since the conflict that had brought on the Dark Age. The game had changed, and in less than a week, what had been a developing conventional war became a desperate struggle for survival.

In the shadow of a burning planet, listening to the horrified pleas for mercy, something changed for the crew of the Tammaran. None of them vocalised it at first as they limped their way back to the Periphery, but they could all see the look on Rose’s face. Even through the tears, a steely, determined visage had come over the normally bubbly pegasus. The one who had been, due to her birthplace, the most torn had made up her mind; and not even their captain needed to give the order for them to know where their jobs would be focused from now on.

And as they carried the survivors of the planet with them to safety, none of them would have disagreed for even a moment.

The Choice

Upon returning to Port Medusa Gaius finally tore himself from his distraught partner’s side, bore a grim look, and marched his way to the administration level. Scuffling with the griffon on duty, a newly started young security attendant, he forced his way past the waiting list into the director’s office, heedless of the numerous rifles that the bodyguards within pointed his way. With a sharp reprimand from the director himself, they held fire; the ruthless businesspony saw the fire in the young captain’s eyes, even as the two griffons separated.

There, staring down the pony that had set their lives down this path, Gaius made a declaration to him. That he’d pay off his dues. He’d still work. He’d do all the efforts he’d been doing thus far. But he’d be damned if he ever did another job that would support the Solar Empire.

After a few tense moments, the uneasy silence was broken by a great grin across the director’s face. A slow clap of hooves followed, as the master of Port Medusa indicated Gaius to his advisors, and remarked upon ‘someone who finally has the balls to show a little passion here.’

He slid his console around and showed the impetuous griffon that he could more than accommodate this ‘adjustment of contract’ for someone clearly so eager to take on such danger.

Gaius felt the red-mist dissipate just enough to turn his eyes from the smirking pony’s face to scan the display, and realised what he meant. Even in the days it had taken to get back, hundreds of requests for aid had flagged up from contacts Gaius knew were associated with Princess Luna. Backed into a corner, suddenly fighting for their lives against an enemy they couldn’t hope to outshoot, they were turning to desperate measures. Both on the offense, and to prepare for the worst.

If Gaius wanted to work for only one side, the director declared, then he was more than free to throw himself into the fire for the jobs that other captains wouldn’t dare touch.

If the director had expected this to curb Gaius’ errant choice, then he would have been wrong. The griffon only nodded and asked for the first available task to be forwarded to his ship, before departing on the spot.

Through the ether, information rushed ahead of the captain to the Tammaran. On the bridge, holding a crying, scared, and suddenly orphaned and homeless young hippogriff in her forelegs to rock and hush, Compass Rose saw the main console light up and the details emerge.

She scrolled through it with a wingtip, reading the details, and felt her heart settle on knowing Gaius had chosen the path she had wanted for them.

The Empire was already marching now that the weapons of terror had shattered their enemy. Luna’s command structure was in tatters, isolated and unable to coordinate a mass retreat from world after world in the face of such indiscriminate power. The rapid flight to the fringes of the Empire had left several important ponies and assets behind. Things that known ships of the rebellion couldn’t reach.

But not for the ‘grey fleet’, as they had been coined. Ships like the Tammaran, still capable of flying within the Solar Empire somewhat freely.

Somewhere in there, one of Luna’s advisors and his family needed rescuing from a conquered world, and they had just been handed the location to go and make it happen.

Holding the hippogriff’s hand, Rose cantered out of the bridge and hailed the crew to her, displaying the authoritative voice that was so often underestimated by those around her. Smiling, feeling a little sense of good creep into her weary heart, she directed them to make ready to leave.

When Gaius returned to the hangar floor, he found his ship and his crew needing little more than him to take the helm, and his partner completing her ordering them around. He took a few moments to watch her, letting his fury fade. And as he witnessed that strength in her rekindled of her own accord, and saw that cheeky, adventurous look as she turned to his bewildered face with a look of ‘well, you coming?’, he made a solid decision about her.

He knew then and there that he was going to ask that pegasus to marry him someday.

Night Runners

Bolstered by their year of tense smuggling runs, the Tammaran’s crew quickly took to the change in roles, and soon the tasks were arriving faster than Port Medusa could keep up with in its limited availability of ships. The Tammaran began flying deep within the Empire, moving with authorised trade lanes on false documents, or taking unusual FTL approaches on the very fringes of the connection routes to evade notice. Quickly, they became adept at their signature manoeuvre. Provided with details on Solar Empire wake-detection systems, they began jumping outside of systems and allowing the ship to drift on minimal power past the detection grid, until well within the normally classified ‘clutter zones’.

The technique, pioneered by a member of the crew, proved effective - if slow. The Tammaran rescued two separate high ranking rebel officers in this manner over the course of the first four months. Eventually, however, one of the so called ‘night runners’ aiding Luna, another ship from Port Medusa, was caught and its crew imprisoned while attempting the same. Within weeks of that event, adjustments to Empire sensors rendered the shared technique worthless. The captured crew, and the fate that had befallen them for such private information to be given up, remained forever unknown.

Instead, Gaius and Rose plotted with their crew to devise new tricks. It was a game of cat and mouse of competing imagination between rogues and empire. More than once, they hid their vessel inside a paid-off mass conveyor, until searches of holds became common. Thereafter, they attained an illegal wake-spoofer, that - at range - made them look like a small Empire frigate to most sensors. It lasted a month before one rushed chase and a few scars on the hull made it clear that the Empire knew about that method too.

But with every dangerous outing, and every miraculous survival, they were bringing what was needed to Luna’s forces. Be it returning the lost survivors of the WMD strikes, pouncing on known isolated Empire transports for a generally bloodless bit of ‘robbing the rich’ via trickery and bluffs, or carrying physical assets from planet to planet under the noses of the Empire.

For another year, the Tammaran seemed blessed by luck. The identifications on it never quite stuck, and its crew remained mostly unseen. As far as the Empire knew, they were a regular transport commonly seen in their space. Slightly suspicious, but one amongst a thousand such on the record, and commonly overlooked as ‘not worth the time’.

Throughout these, their morale bolstered by the sense of doing good for a side they now fervently believed in, the crew began to bond. In particular, the young hippogriff they had picked up became a regular on board. Known as Aileron, he -despite being new to space- displayed a strong demeanour to push past the horror of the past year. Gaius knew what it felt like to leave home like that, and was adamantly against abandoning the youngster to Port Medusa’s mercies. Simply as a ‘mascot’ or not, he joined the crew, and eventually began to follow Gaius’ teachings, much in the same way as the griffon had done under Rose’s father years before.

But there was only so long the Tammaran could remain untouched. The work was fraught with danger, and while they all knew it, the point at which the Empire would eventually catch up to their presence was not far off.

Faced with the now called ‘War of Two Crowns’ (a name not officially recognised by the Solar Empire, who repeatedly stated that it was an ‘ongoing terrorist situation’) changing once again to a less conventional field of battle, the Empire similarly adapted. Guerilla warfare across the stars brought the importance of field agents back to the fore, and a game of shadows spread far beyond the borders of the war itself. The League, Avalon, and even the Confederacy and Zebraha found their lands bearing the passage of ‘Solar Agents’ seeking to root out sources of support for Luna.

The Periphery was no different, and they had long since suspected Port Medusa. Indeed, they knew well it was conducting such operations, but could ill afford the brute force necessary to wipe it out in the middle of a war, especially given the not insubstantial loose affiliation of pirates protecting it. Instead, they sent a much more subtle approach.

Over the next four months, the Tammaran’s excursions to and from the Periphery began to get mysteriously more difficult. Patrols began moving around their lesser known routes, and two out of the six jobs undertaken resulted in on-site ambush. In the last one, to deliver a veteran Lunar Operative back into the Empire, Gaius barely escaped with his life. He and the operative had disembarked to meet their contact, only for the contact to draw a pistol and murder the operative the moment their backs were turned. Shot in the leg and wing, Gaius was able to hurl himself through a window to escape the betrayal. Under fire, he was pulled back into the Tammaran by a remarkably courageous Aileron.

It was to mark the first instance of a dire reality. From that point on, every mission became an exercise in paranoia with double agents, turncoats, and information warfare seeking to curb the ‘grey fleet’ in their work.

Within a single day, three ships from Port Medusa simply vanished, never arriving or returning after entering M-space. A week later, the director’s staff found a sabotaged line of code within the station’s FTL database, the same one those ships had uploaded their preset jump coordinates from. Tracing its origin, the director shared a file with Compass Rose: an intercepted, decrypted transmission made from the station, one that explicitly named those three ships and the Tammaran as having been targeted for the sabotage. Only Rose’s personal pride of writing her own calculations rather than using station presets had averted disaster. Yet with it, the confirmation was clear. Not just the Empire, but a specific individual, was targeting them.

Efforts were undertaken to mask their activities. Taking on purposefully mundane tasks and then diverting after undocking became the go-to method to disguise their intent. A three month stretch of deliveries to the Confederacy was offered simply to break off the suspicion, but shortly into the second month a dire cry for Avalon medical supplies in the aftermath of yet another ‘tactical’ strike from a weapon of mass destruction drew them back in.

And with that opportunity, a patient watcher made her move.

Emerging into the ruins that had once been a secretive asteroid base, converted from an old mining colony for one of Luna’s three remaining major fleets, Gaius flew the Tammaran into the line of Empire ‘charity transports’ allegedly bringing relief supplies to the civilians and prisoners of war involved. In truth, their ‘medical scans’ were also a cover for identifying known rebels should any of them seek their help. The front face of the station had been devastated, a sudden retaliation strike in vengeance for a widely controversial act by the Lunar Fleet. A week before, a civilian ship broadcasting distress signals had wandered toward an imperial shipyard before detonating a nuclear warhead on its own unstable reactor. Six thousand naval personnel and yard workers had been killed, itself a revenge strike for an earlier planetary bombardment.

The mass accelerator attack on the supposedly hidden Lunar base here was revenge in turn.

Landing within one of the few areas still possessing an artificial atmosphere, the crew began to offload to their contact, sneaking the materials past the ‘charity workers’ to the individuals who couldn’t dare submit to such aid. Within a hidden mining compartment of the asteroid, they found dozens of ponies bearing radiation burns and horrendous crush wounds. Their on board medic did what he could, joining the field team to distribute aid. Gaius and Rose instead took a moment to the side to discuss what to do next, standing watching the shattered wreckage of the Lunar Fleet drifting by after the impact.

The first shot hit Rose from above. Punching down, narrowly avoiding her skull from a lucky step forward, the searing laser scythed down the side of her torso. The moment of shock from Gaius as he saw his partner’s mouth open, and felt her slip away from him allowed the second to spear through his shoulder. Falling away, the follow up intended for his head hit the metal decking of the crude facility.

Dropping down from the ceiling, magnetic hooves disabling, a slender unicorn in an infiltrator’s bodysuit danced away from his desperate, almost blind shots. Gaius had always been a fast draw, but the acrobatic speed of the assailant seemed to blur around the hasty return and a snapping point of a hoof, its magnetic gauntlet active again, tore the pistol from his claws entirely.

The gunfire set the area into a panic. The injured screamed for help, and the two rebel guards who came running found a hidden mine detonating right beside them. Pushing through the distraction of the concussive wave, Gaius threw his heavier bulk toward the attacker, even as another laser cut through his side. Falling on them as much as tackling, a desperate struggle for the weapon ended only as hooves wickedly targeted the laser burns, making him gasp and fall away in agony.

The suit their enemy wore was blurry and shifting in colour to match the ambience around it, an emotionless, tinted bubble of polymer glass surrounding the head that tilted toward him. The laser pistol again rose toward him, cold and simple.

In a burst of fire, that bubble shattered.

Rose, crawling on the floor, opened fire a second time, driving the attacker away with one of the dead guards' rifles. Darting, bouncing and galloping down the thin corridor, their assailant made to escape. Through the broken helmet, they briefly glimpsed a gold-coated mare with a hard, focused expression.

The remainder of the guards arrived, along with sentry drones who began to chase the infiltrator. Terribly injured, both Gaius and Rose could only submit themselves to using the same supplies they had brought. Hastened back to their ship, they conducted an emergency jump from within the reaches of the asteroid’s small field even as Empire ships began to reorient, warned by whoever it was that had attacked them.

As they held one another in the aftermath aboard their ship, they were forced to accept yet another confirmation that they were no longer an unseen success.

Now, they were being hunted.

The Bright Dawn

From that day, as the war moved into mid-2014, there was a steady decline in hope.

The Grey Fleet was being reduced in number. ‘Accidents’ and betrayals on arrival were killing crews that both Gaius and Rose had regarded as friends and allies as their hidden assailant tortured the Grey Fleet’s resolve. Twice more, Gaius and Rose encountered the same operative, a mare with an uncanny talent for stealth and disguise. Both times, it led to desperate conflict and ever more threadbare escapes. Port Medusa itself had gone into a state of near martial law, as its increasingly paranoid director feared a direct clandestine attack from within.

Even as the director’s opinion of Gaius grew, and eventually so much so that he freed the Tammaran from its debt in trust that its crew would continue to support Luna out of ideal alone, Port Medusa’s approach to the war under his authority began to change. The Empire’s actions were furthering his favour of Luna, and his neutrality began to become suspect. Skirmishes between Medusa-aligned pirates and the Solar Empire's own equivalent of the Grey Fleet took place all over the Periphery. Clear lines of allegiance began to break down in the frontiers beyond the frontline itself. Despite the Director’s turn of opinion toward Luna, Compass Rose was troubled by the thought of it after witnessing the brutal actions of some of the “pro-Luna” contacts he was making. Chief among them was the Bright Dawn, a group in favour of attempting to put an end to Nightmare Star, began using tactics designed to spread terror or strike at soft civilian areas in the very core worlds.

Despite the princess of the night's public disavowal of the Bright Dawn, the damage was being done. In the wake of each attack, fresh rumours and speculation cast doubt on her sincerity. The Empire's media behemoth had all the fuel it needed for an effective propaganda campaign. Within a few months, support for war bonds, recruitment levels, and willingness to inform on ‘seditious activity’ exploded, as imperial citizens who had thought themselves safe from the fighting now felt threatened.

With much of their public support being compromised under a wave of misinformation, Luna’s forces faced yet tighter conditions, with many beginning to think that the miracle they’d hoped for to recover from their crushing ousting over a year ago simply could not exist if this kept up. As attacks mounted with increasingly sadistic methods, the Bright Dawn’s approach was crippling the rebels’ presented role as the victims in the war.

Arguing with the director until he was red in the face, Gaius finally managed to convince the station’s master to grant a mission. One deep into the core worlds, to try and convince the leader of the Bright Dawn to stave off their attacks. The director would not give up his existing contracts, but offered deeper, more public ones if Bright Dawn cleaned up their act. He only sought the profit in the end, and saw the meeting as too risky, but if Gaius wanted to undertake the danger to take that offer to them in the core worlds that was his choice. He was, after all, now a ‘free captain’, able to make his own decisions.

Armed with the location of the Bright Dawn’s leader on the same planet were Rose had been born, the Tammaran began its deepest, most dangerous infiltration of the Empire yet. Disguised as a different vessel, with upgrades even to change the flare of its engines in colour and length, and non-functional scrap to present itself as a different variant of the hull, they made their slow, week-long journey. At the very least, they hoped, such a journey would throw off their perpetual rival. No-one would expect them to be heading this deep, after all.

Returning to the comparatively untouched worlds, Rose insisted on accompanying the task, her nature and childhood memories giving her a method to blend in. Passing through contact after contact, and more than a couple hasty relocations at night to dodge authorities, they eventually were granted audience under the guise of bringing plans for furthering the Bright Dawn’s aim. They agreed to a one week time of visit, for the group refused to permit such an obvious entrance and exit within the same day.

Sitting upon rugs in a muggy basement below a desert region’s shanty town, the pair waited for their talk. Gaius had rehearsed it in his head; he had multiple contacts with Luna’s forces he could offer to let them find a better route. He could promise them passage aboard the Tammaran back to the fringes.

As soon as he saw the leader arrive, he felt all those hopes fade away. For he and the leader recognised one another immediately. A golden-coated mare arrived in the basement, smiled in surprise, and then immediately ordered them taken prisoner.

Two Betrayals

The Bright Dawn, despite their brutal methods, were genuine in their goal to depose Nightmare Star. However, as early as their initial formation they were already known to the imperial intelligence agency. An agent of the Empire was quietly inserted into the group, and quickly rose to lead it altogether. The Bright Dawn, for all intents and purposes, had unwittingly served Nightmare Star from the beginning.

This same agent was implanted to Port Medusa to foster support from the director, and to create the infrastructure needed to sabotage flights that might aid the rebels and encourage those helping the Bright Dawn carry out their attacks. Each ‘accident’ carefully orchestrated and passed along to imperial command. Every ‘near miss’ was planned. Every ‘assassination’ was to further some internal goal of those deemed expendable. The Bright Dawn themselves had no idea of their genuine purpose, believing themselves saviours even as their work ultimately played to the long term goal of discrediting the Princess-in-exile in the eyes of the public.

Holding responsibility for both leading the Bright Dawn and crippling the Grey Fleet, the same operative found her luck delivering her long sought rivals in the stars right to her. Playing her role, she had them held underground, and left the Bright Dawn to interrogate the two 'imperial agents' for information, knowing all too well that it would result in two of those she wanted gone losing their lives.

Now realising the truth, Gaius and Rose did their best to inform the Bright Dawn of the betrayal at play here, but the members were fanatical and stubborn, and not given much to listening to an alternative narrative.

Days passed. A slow, horror-filled time of stress positions, scorching sunlight, and repeated barrages of shouted questions and threats. Into the second week, it became apparent that the excitable faction was about to begin more torturous methods to find the answers that neither griffon nor pegasus could give them.

Yet even as they tore Gaius away from a furiously kicking Rose, threw a bag over his head and began opening the cellar, the sound of fusion engines split the air. Intuiting what was to happen, Gaius threw himself flat on the ground.

The Tammaran raced above, its nozzles angled down, sending a surge of engine power across the village. It tore down buildings, blew Bright Dawn guards from their hooves, and sent pegasi crashing into the ground. Piloted by the still in learning Aileron, the crew that Gaius had never given up on, now never gave up on him. They had searched, wrangled, risked, and fought to find the Bright Dawn of their own accord, aided by the director himself, and brought those who had lost their own ships. The refugees of other vessels hit by the operative. Even those not given to combat had come armed, and a furious firefight ensued as they struggled to find time to land and bring the battered and confused captain and navigator back aboard.

Even as they freed Gaius, a savage burst of laser fire cut down two of Gaius’ original crew even as they just released his bonds. Gaius threw himself to the side as the operative dropped down to finish the job, laser SMG spraying fire and chasing his panicked, desperate rolling to find cover.

Coming to his senses and finally glancing out, he watched in horror as the two injured crew members were executed before his eyes by a casual spray of fire at the hooves of the solar agent.

Bellowing in anger he threw himself at the golden mare, his larger bulk letting him knock the SMG from her hooves, yet her savagely skilled martial ability struck back in excess of her smaller size. Shrieking in pain as she caught, twisted, and broke his wrist, Gaius felt his arm bent around, hooked around a hindleg, the elbow joint exposed.

And then, seconds before a horror could unfold, Rose was there as always.

Having freed herself from the basement at the outbreak of trouble, she came flying off the roof of the building, cannonballing into the operative. Through Rose was no brawler, it gave Gaius a chance. A chance to get up and join his marefriend. As the sand whirled, engines roared, gunfire erupted around them, Gaius and Rose fought tooth and claw. Injured, weary, only the presence of both of them gave them any hope. The operative was fast and merciless, sinking a deployable knife into Rose’s side before Gaius could grab the pony’s fetlock and hurl the agent through a hut’s wooden wall. They rolled and scuffled. She attacked his wrist, he resorted even to using his beak to force her onto the defensive. It was all he could do to keep it uncoordinated. Keep it brutal. Remove her chance to be skillful and agile.

He heard the shouted command to move, before a clay pot collapsed over the agent’s head. Rose collapsed even after throwing it, giving Gaius one more chance to throw a mighty, vengeance-fueled punch to break the agent’s nose. Tackling her, the pair came out the other side of the hut and nearly on to the Tammaran’s entrance ramp itself as Aileron finally got her down. Separating, and hearing Gaius’ crew returning to the ship after sight of him and Rose near it, the agent threw a flare to the ground. Its mighty bang blinded them all, and by the time they had recovered their senses she was gone.

Pulling their dead with them, a relieved yet sorrowful crew boarded the Tammaran and finally departed.

A sombre mood reigned on board the Tammaran. Gaius, his wrist splinted for now, stood over the body bags and, for the first time for many aboard to witness, wept. Two of the four who had followed him since buying the ship were now gone.

By his measure he had failed to protect them, and worse, they had lost their lives coming to rescue him.

Compass Rose’s perspective differed; owing to her raising in Equestrian space, she saw the truth: that this was what friendship could mean, and that neither of them would regret it, because they knew he would have done the same.

Despite her gentle squeeze, he still elected to be alone with the bags ahead of their launching them into space. Closing off the cargo hold, he stood a silent vigil of memory as they left the planet.

And it was during that last watch for his crew that the agent dropped from the dark supports in the ceiling.

Crashing down upon him, fury in her eyes at his crew’s having beheaded the Bright Dawn’s headquarters and ruined years of work, she dropped him to the ground, smashing her hoof over and over into his face, kneeling on his broken wrist. Shrieking in pain, writhing to get the shockingly strong mare off of him, Gaius could at best only push up and then throw himself away.

Pain snapped through his back as she grabbed a heavy crowbar and brought it down upon him. He fell away, and away, his cries of pain unheard by the remainder of the crew. He had sealed the hold for privacy, and now found himself alone with the rival who had hunted them for years.

Every time she struck, he backed away, unable to fight any more, until his back was to the wall.

He caught her eye and saw the first true expression besides anger and disciplined intelligence. Satisfaction. She told him of how they had placed a black mark on her record. Of how they had evaded her. Through luck or trickery. If only to her pride, it had become personal.

The crowbar slammed into the metal wall behind him as Gaius tried his best to dodge, ducking and weaving. Finally, he threw himself haphazardly away from her, feeling the crowbar impact a wing as he went. Rolling across the floor, he reached up and struck the one thing he could think of: the override command for the main cargo door.

A blaring alarm was met by a bang of displaced air. Gaius was blown toward the main doors, his one good arm hooked around an emergency handle.

The agent had no such warning. Grabbing onto his wing, she howled and clambered as Gaius struck with his hindlegs again and again. With no air still enough to breathe, and the effects of the void seconds away from overtaking the cargo hold, he made one last strike, and caught the agent’s broken nose dead on.

His last sight of her was the look of bewilderment. Of disbelief as she was blown away, knocked off the descending ramp and out into the black itself, to be with the two bodies that had been ejected, the last remnants of that personal war sent out together. Two for peace, and one to end.

Holding on for dear life, Gaius knew he couldn’t reach the button again. If all he had done was save the rest of his crew, it would be enough. Yet even as he held on, and held on, and felt the unnatural sense of a death approaching, the cargo door closed again. To his relief, the ship hissed as it began to repressurise.

Alerted by the sudden depressurisation of the hold, Rose and the crew rushed back to him.

And this time, there was more than just Rose holding him, as he lay amongst them all, held them all, and told them that finally, finally their hunter was gone.

The Sun Rises, The Moon Falls

It was a great personal victory for them. Taking a month to rest and recover from their ordeal, the crew remained in the Periphery, shipping goods to relay stations for the war effort and staying away from the Empire. Gaius took longer to recover than most. It wasn’t just the physical damage; often Rose would come across him sitting morosely with his thoughts resting on the crew members he had now lost along the way. It would take time for him to finally accept their choice, feeling the responsibility rest heavy on his still very young shoulders.

But if it seemed like a relief to them, for Luna and the greater war, it was not to be the case.

Gaius and Rose had actually been sharing a relationship anniversary dinner when the news broke across private channels. Having settled into a new station to further distance themselves from the repetition of the previous routes, a deep Periphery waypoint outpost titled as the ‘Huss Shelter’, they had laid low. Yet even here, on the surface of a moon far from the common routes, news reached every single screen around them.

The Solar Empire had once again unleashed a series of mass destruction attacks. The third such wave in two years, and by far the largest. Each time before it had been used to break up any regrouping elements of Luna’s -by this point purely guerilla- forces. Only now, it had broken the back of her efforts by targeting even rumoured locations. Civilian targets were repeatedly hit over the most tenuous of justifications, and even those who had been reluctant to take a side found their consciences challenged.

It had taken multiple years, but the Empire’s greater resources, stronger communication networks, and rigid discipline had allowed it to organise and carry out a simultaneous assault on the last remaining strongholds with merciless attacks. On every front, Luna’s followers were in full retreat. Entire fighting arms were being encircled and cut down. One of the remaining greater fleets was wiped out by a cunning trap, exiting M-space to find a fusion-charge minefield waiting for it. Planetary assault forces rained from the sky to breach the last stands that were being undertaken across the Empire.

Outnumbered many times, the believers in the Night Princess were scattered, broken, and rounded up for mass capture. Nightmare Star had signed the decree of mass ‘recollection’. In effect, an order to intern en masse those who had supported her ‘fallen to evil’ sister. Columns of prisoners young and old, the populations of entire settlements who had 'supported' the rebellion simply by existing in proximity, were marched to disarmingly elegant ships. Prisoners of war were held in their thousands in cargo holds. Stories of mistreatment abounded. Hunter-killer teams stormed through burning habs, dragging out those trying to hide and putting down resistance.

The galaxy at large, even those who had criticised Luna’s methods at times, looked on in horror.

In the wake of the free use of WMDs, and with every possible plan being found untenable, Princess Luna within a week took to the air in a rare appearance to declare an open admission of failure. A soft spoken alicorn by this point, weariness clearly gripped her character, held together by a stern passion. In an emotional speech, she spoke of how her goals to curb Equestria’s fall into tyranny were, after so long and so much sacrifice, now ultimately beyond her grasp.

At length, she told of Equestrian history. Of the Elements of Harmony and their meaning. Of the first days, of her own redemption after a thousand years. Open, frank, and vulnerable, she spoke of the last decade and its decline, and promised all of those that believed in her, that if it took another thousand years, she would continue to believe in what their people had once stood for. In the tone of old, conducting a majestic series of evocative memories to times long lost, she gave context to the history of all peoples’ place in the stars. And yet noted that for now, the battle was lost.

Instead, she unveiled a new aim. An aim to preserve life. She tasked every available vessel that remained loyal to her to take who they could, and to evacuate ‘Equestrian’ space entirely into the Crystal League, Avalon, or if they had no other choice, the Periphery.

To the end of the pivotal, historical speech, Princess Luna of the Moon and the Night made an appeal. A direct request to ‘any who bear the means to traverse our stars’ to consider the travesty unfolding now. Footage of the mass captures, predominantly batponies, was spliced in, along with that of planets burning under orbital bombardment. Billions would need to be rescued from such a fate. It would be the largest migration of souls ever undertaken.

In a pleading, humble tone, she asked any who would come to their aid to do so, and to show the true spirit of Equestria that she still believed in.

In years to come, the video would be the most viewed piece of footage in the history of the galaxy. Debates, studies, and controversies would reign over its content, its wordings, and Luna’s body language. It would be re-edited many times for propaganda until its true form became impossible to prove and would be banned in the core worlds of the Empire. But at that moment, it broadcast in its original form to those lucky enough to see it and be able to tell future generations that ‘I was there to lay witness’.

Generations of ponies were trapped in the Empire, Luna’s fleets unable to evacuate them all. There simply was not the space, nor even the infrastructure at times. Many were cut off entirely.

Yet within twenty four hours of that broadcast, after the call had gone out, border stations of the Empire casting their sensors into deep space began to detect a most unusual signature. A great disturbance in M-space. They reported it and were called delusional by their superiors. The numbers to create that sort of disturbance were impossible.

As it turned out, the numbers were very correct.

All across the Solar Empire, from every possible direction, rifts to M-space tore open and a legion of ships began to pour forth in the tens of thousands. Small shuttles and sports vessels flew beside bulky cruise liners and kilometre long mass conveyors. Contracted pirate vessels, rented ships from distant families, rogue traders from other nations, the scattered remnants of the Lunar Fleet, and every kind soul who felt a stir to action descended upon the Empire’s borders. Caught so unaware by the enormous rush of mostly unarmed vessels, the Solar Fleet held fire. Orders were given, but many ship captains denied them. Others had outbreaks of mutiny by officers who had had enough of the massacre.

For those planetside who had lost hope, hope now came to them, as ships to number the stars in their sky came to their aid.

And among the first wave, running her engines to the limit to penetrate deep into the Empire as it always had, was the Tammaran.

The Railroad to Hope

The effort captured the imagination of the galaxy, and for months it felt like all the news could talk about was the innumerable stories taking place of daring rescues, controversial attacks by imperial vessels, and heartfelt stories of families finding one another in the refugee zones. The Tammaran stuck to its job, taking information from their contacts among Luna’s remaining followers. They used the cover of the mass relocation to extract resistance leaders, popular figures, and even some captured agents or crewmen. They teamed up, or worked alone. They would land planetside via illegal means, board space stations, or hijack imperial vessels. There was little pay, for the infrastructure to make such contracts was long gone to the Periphery, but this was no longer about a job.

Eventually, a month after the beginning, a destination was found and broadcast to all. A system at the far end of the galaxy from Equestria. Unclaimed, hidden behind a startlingly blue nebula. It was decreed by Luna that this was where they would make their home, and that it would bear a new name: Hope.

All evacuees were to be taken there and distributed to planets to which she had already sent her remaining colony ships. It became a saying. Pick up those who needed to evade the Empire, and give them ‘Hope’. In between the dangerous deep-work missions, the Tammaran would land in the fringe systems and pick up sometimes dozens of distraught civilians to take with her all the way to Hope. Some became new crew, helping keep the ship running as months of constant work passed.

Eventually, as the ferrying began in earnest, the Empire took further steps to block their progress by interdicting or searching ships, and the Tammaran was caught behind the lines with a hundred other vessels. The Solar Fleet moved in with more vicious orders to engage. Their ‘easy grabs’ in areas Luna’s ships couldn’t reach had run dry, and they needed new successes to avoid being seen as complacent. They moved in and cornered the evacuation ships near the League border.

In one of the greatest and most hotly debated moves of the war, a military scale coordinated jump emerged from a third party. The Corporate Fleets of the Crystal League jumped into imperial space to form a cordon around the rescue vessels, declaring a moral emergency to preserve life as their justification to intervene. No shots were exchanged, but the incident would mark the beginning of a new distrust between the navies of both nations.

Eventually, the Tammaran became one of the fewer ships that continued to ferry even after the Empire began locking down systems more firmly. Over the course of the last year of the war, Gaius and Rose’s crew saved over two thousand ponies and other species to bring to Hope and the forming New Lunar Republic. Many of these were brought from active warzones after days of searching.

They were hunted still, they fought their battles, they had their tragedies and their setbacks, but as the war wound down, so too did they. The last few excursions were truly dangerous, including a twenty-system chase by an Empire frigate from Mothellum all the way to the NLR, with several diversions to get around long range patrols. It was during this pursuit that, stuck planetside and veering around atmospheric buildings of a long abandoned colony to avoid a target lock, they were ambushed. In orbit there was enough of a blockade that they could not escape, and a series of jump-limiter units had been deployed, covering all of empty space in navigation-scrambling electronic interference. Such units made it impossible for a civilian ship to jump into or out of the system safely. The Tammaran and its passengers, some of the last families from the Empire, were stuck.

It was an absolute trap, like a little slice of imperial space out in the Periphery, too far from the NLR to receive help.

Scanning the starmap as he heaved the weighty vessel around, Gaius overheard one plan. In their truest traditions, it was an impossible one, one he barely even believed he had heard right. Rose claimed that if she could pull off an in-atmo jump calculation to get them off-world with a miniature FTL ‘hop’, and nail the exit close enough to the system’s star, it might shield them from the signals of the limiters. On hearing it Gaius, lacking further options, told her she could try. He flippantly added that if she pulled such an impossible thing off, he’d be so impressed that he’d ask her to marry him on the spot.

After a moment of disbelief, she only shot back with her trademark daring smirk. Hooves dancing, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth, she began to put her masterwork together, a work that sent the Tammaran tearing off-world in the depths of M-space, a jump location the vessel had never even been designed to handle.

Less than a minute later, they erupted back into space in the blue glow of a sun, casting the entire bridge, and Gaius’s disbelieving stare in its hue. A few seconds later, he felt her lean both her forelegs on his shoulder and turned to see Rose waggle her eyebrows at him.

Her impossible jump, as she would come to call it.

It was in that glow of the sun that they held one another, as Gaius stayed true to the bet. He revealed the ring he’d been holding for months now in a shaking hand, and asked her.

Her post-chase adrenaline-fuelled grab of his head into a passionate kiss seemed a fitting non-verbal reply.

Later that week, after Gaius and Rose escaped the noose once more, the newly engaged couple settled on Hope to deliver their rescues.

It was while there that they were thanked in person by high delegates, told of their tracked numbers, and were given the chance to meet many of those they had pulled across the galaxy to safety. It was a moment neither would forget. Being hugged by so many, and thanked over and over again even as they held each other, hand in hoof.

As the evacuation drew to a close, Gaius looked over across the main floor of Hope’s single scratchbuilt starport, spying an ornate, sleek vessel. With its lowered ramp surrounded by grim-faced and obviously well armed batpony guards he watched as its weary crew disembarked, accompanied by a tall, cloaked figure. Taller than most ponies or even griffons he knew.

A glinting starlight emerging from under that shadowed hood caught his gaze, lingering for just a moment before it shifted in a slow vertical motion and turned away, leaving him wondering if that had been eye contact.

Even thirty years later, Gaius never did know if he had seen who, or what, he thought he’d seen, and he never tried to claim it openly.

But inside he quietly believed it, and felt as though all those years of work had been appreciated.

New Life in the Stars

In the aftermath of the War of Two Crowns what had once been Equestria was split, and both sides now licked their wounds and came to a ceasefire. Luna could not hope to push back, and the Empire under Nightmare Star was already suffering from sanctions imposed by other political groups in response to their less than admirable tactics. The New Lunar Republic conversely was itself isolated, tales (in some cases quite true) of desperation leading to morally ambiguous attacks still circulated, leading them to also be cut off from much of the galaxy’s open trade.

As a weary populace was displaced across the galaxy, many away from even either civilization, all simply seemed to grow tired of war, with many living light years away electing to see it as nothing but bickering princesses causing problems for millions.

But for the independent starships, the New Lunar Republic was a wealth of potential. Thousands of jobs needed done. Colonisation efforts to carve out their home needed support, while families were still split apart and in need of both location and transport. Materials by the millions of tons needed acquired, and mercenaries filled in for the reforming fleet.

For the Tammaran, this became their new stomping grounds, taking jobs as they came, and finally acquiring some measure of the peaceful, wandering life that Gaius and Rose had dreamed of. No more infiltrations, firefights, and smuggling. Just passengers, cargo, and the beauty of the nebula to fly within for the better part of the next five years.

In that time, captain and navigator were married back in the Crystal League. Many of Rose's family still lived in the Solar Empire, and neither Gaius nor Rose could safely cross the border again. The League, with whom the Empire maintained peaceful if frosty relations, was the next best thing.

It was, at first, an awkward affair for Gaius. Rose’s family attended in droves. They saw to her, gifted them, and yet he felt somewhat inadequate. The sight of so many of them was a harsh reminder that he lacked any family of his own to bring.

Yet as soon as he entered the venue of the ceremony itself, prepared to his side of the aisle standing empty, he was taken aback.

Rose’s family crowded one side, but the other was filled to the brim, standing area overflowing. They were predominantly ponies - many of them thestrals - and at the front in the area for ‘direct family’ sat his crew. In secret, they had made contact with much of those Gaius’ command had rescued years ago, many electing to be there for his wedding to support him as thanks.

To the present day, he still never did once feel an ounce of shame for being the one between them to be teary eyed as they swore their vows, and exited that wonderful day as husband and wife.

They settled on a gentle honeymoon to a natural resort in Avalon’s capital system. Far from the debates and stresses. Once it came to an end, they once again took up their ship and continued searching for the next job. The NLR was booming, and while the Empire would always be restricted territory for their ship, they had a galaxy to make use of. Dangers always remained, and more than once there was a quick evasion from an Imperial vessel that bothered to actually check its logs of known troublemakers. Times when the money was low led to more dangerous endeavours, and more than one task led them down a rabbit hole of factions at play. The Tammaran would never be a place to get bored, that they knew and somewhat took pride in, but always the good times would return.

Over the course of a decade after the war, the Tammaran and her crew were for the most part at peace, and both the ship and its inhabitants could enjoy their life in the void together.

Tammani

In the fifteenth year of their career aboard the Tammaran, Compass Rose took Gaius aside and quietly informed him of something they’d been trying for over a year now.

Within the year, husband and wife would become father and mother.

Amazed, speechless, Gaius just gaped and held on to her shoulders. They had discussed it before, and had tried before. The combined genetics of griffon and pony always made it harder, not rare, but certainly a less common prospect to produce a hybrid. Finally, after longer than most had to try, things seemed to have taken for them too.

A stop over by a medical station in the Confederacy at Heraklion confirmed it in the most fitting of ways. A female hippogriff. The combination of both of them, just like their ship’s own icon and its name. From that moment, they already knew the name for this final culmination of their coming together: Tammani.

They hadn’t, however, taken much time to consider the needs. The Tammaran was a ship mostly occupied by those older than thirty by this point, and too small to healthily raise a child within, let alone support a newborn foal. After a series of difficult decisions, they elected to take an early retirement and settle in Rose’s old family house upon Chrysolite once Tammani’s birth was near. It had links to education, their citizenship was assured, and it was in friendly territory. They did briefly contemplate the New Lunar Republic, but turned it down for fear of future war breaking out with the Empire and a concern that a decade had eroded the impetus to seek settlement as thanks for their efforts in the evacuations. Most of their involvement had been off the record, after all. Chrysolite was safe and feeling the fragility of life more than ever now, that was what mattered to them.

But it left them with an issue: while the Tammaran was doing well for itself, they didn’t maintain the funds to make a full retirement this early. Most of their personal accounts had been used keeping the ship and its crew in order, and they dared not leave their friends under their command with nothing by raiding the Tammaran’s own assets.

Eventually, the answer came to them from an old ‘friend’: the director of Port Medusa.

The message reached them as they were crossing the Periphery, requesting their audience for a ‘talk’, and a possible job. Arriving back at the Iron Jellyfish, they found an older, more relaxed lord of the void coasting his business on the grey market now. The end of the war had brought him stability, with his biggest concerns having become more that of other pirate lords than either the Empire or Republic. Medusa was doing well.

But despite that, he still had his contacts, and one of them had requested the Tammaran specifically.

The director had the ear of the Republic Intelligence Corps, owing to the station’s later bias in the War of the Two Crowns. One of their informers in the Empire, a turncoat within a secretive organisation that the Director was not privy to the details of, was requesting an urgent extraction. For ten years, he was told, the Republic had been attempting to build a ship that could infiltrate the Empire via stealthy means, but the project had hit snag after snag and was mired in delays. A decade was not a long time for a civilization to form, after all, and the NLR was struggling to find a way in with their still limited resources.

Someone at the Intelligence Corps had looked through the archives, saw a certain ship’s name come up several times, and had begun asking questions as to whether the vessel and crew that could get in and out were still around.

The job was to be dangerous; to not just go into imperial space, but to Equestria itself.

Holding his wife’s hoof in his hand, feeling responsibility for more than just the two of them now, Gaius opened his mouth to deny it, until he felt Rose’s wing tap his shoulder, drawing his attention to the pay. A large number stared back; enough to set the crew for another year, and enough for their cut to let them retire.

After a long pause, Gaius nodded his head and reached out to shake on it with the director.

One last run to attain a future for himself, his wife, and their daughter.

The Equestrian Job

They had expected convincing their crew to take time, but instead they found Aileron waiting with the answer as soon as they told them. By this point they were all family, and much of the crew were looking to their captain and navigator’s upcoming retirement with a positive, wanting attitude. The money was good, Aileron claimed, but making sure the pair that had taken them through all this got their happy ending was more important. Not one of them debated returning to their old ways once again.

They were to enter via Avalon, acquiring a neutral shipment from Zebraha co-signed to a Solar Empire defence company. The plan was to hide in plain sight and fly under the radar carrying sensitive goods in service of the Empire after re-registering the ship in another name and giving her a new paint scheme. Patrols, they knew from experience, were less attentive to stopping ships that might draw complaints from an angry ‘just-in-time’ based corporation awaiting some power converters or treated alloys for the latest monument to the Imperial Navy’s power. To further this, they registered the Tammaran over to a new captain and corporate title. Aileron, under a fake name, would now officially be 'captain' in the eyes of those scanning the vessel, removing the ‘tainted’ name and face of Gaius from its record, permitting them to stow away themselves if searched. To further distract the patrols, they prepared a series of fake distress and regroup call signals, mounting them in junk satellites to launch from the cargo hold, and would stick to the less known routes. The signals were keyed to NLR ship frequencies, setting the stage for a mock stealth insertion by official Lunar craft, taking attention away from civilian ships who would only be seeking to get away from the ‘developing situation’. The Empire would be chasing some unknown stealth ship even as the real source slipped by.

The key point, however, was simply their knowledge of the doctrine and habits of the Solar Empire ships. Space was a large place, and easy to move around if one was patient enough and clever enough to think one step ahead. After fifteen years to learn, they were just that. The NLR might have had more resources, but in this case, there was no replacement for straight up experience in the art of smuggling to keep things quiet.

It took over a week to traverse the Empire, making stop by stop, and doing a couple of legitimate jobs within its borders to further avert suspicion. Rather than sneaking past the border they followed a meandering trail of mundane work, carefully chosen to carry them through areas of relatively low security and closer to Equestria itself.

Neither of the two had ever visited the ‘home of homes’, as some called it, before. Compass Rose was more wistful, seeing an opportunity to lay eyes. Gaius, for his part, seemed more enthused about the sense of whisking someone away from under Nightmare Star’s own nose. Wistful exaggeration as it may have been, the thought brought him pleasure.

Landing off Fillydelphia, they settled in for a week-long wait. Masked as a ‘between jobs’ holiday, the pair of them took a chance to contemplate and rest before what was coming. Or rather, they would have tried.

Only a lucky choice to go out for dinner led them to be absent from their hotel room when it detonated. A small, controlled explosion seared the room in monoblade fragments that would have torn them limb from limb. It was an advanced weapon, and the pair immediately fled to the Tammaran, fearing official pursuit.

None came. As far as they could tell, even the police had no idea who was out for them.

After a period of contemplation they decided to change dock, and lingered in the air above the Celestial Sea as long as they could to remain safe before advancing to their meeting point. While Rose was willing, care for their daughter came first, and Aileron was chosen in her stead.

The meet time was in the dead of night, within an old mall, long since disused and shut down. As Gaius and Aileron picked their way through it, the imagery on the walls of a softer, gentler sun princess and her sister of the moon, along with six colourful ponies, gave hints as to why it had been left to rot by official mandate. There, they hid and waited in a great plaza.

After two hours in the dark, eerie mall, they finally heard hooves approach. Down the rows of silent shops came a figure bound in tight leather, twin lines of fabric hanging from the back of their neck, almost like a royal attache. A mare approached and spotted them in the darkness, her curved horn lighting up to reveal a tired and stoic face.

She revealed her name to be Silent Boreal, and made clear that she had also been chased, but not by the local authorities at all, although she was certain the intelligence agency, and ‘her own comrades’ would be coming for her as well. When queried as to what group Boreal was defecting from, she refused to answer.

Yet as they met and hashed out a plan to get her undercover to the Tammaran through the streets, their meeting was disturbed. The clink of broken glass was all the warning they got, before three black-clad figures dropped down from the level above in the great plaza, unusual and advanced weapons unloading from between them.

The griffon and hippogriff had no chance to dodge the expert ambush, but instead found the bursts clattering into a shield of glittering magic, as a pink aura erupted from Boreal’s horn. The entire bubble wavered, and then rocketed into the trio attacking, blowing them from their hooves. Boreal grabbed the pair in a powerful field of telekinesis, urging them with a powerful shove to run and show her the way out.

Staring at one another in disbelief, Gaius and Aileron turned and fled, leading Boreal with them. Around them, the crash of doors and windows rang out. A whole hostile team was arriving and searching for them. Eventually leaping from a window with the two winged creatures carrying the unicorn, they made way for the Tammaran, intent on a rapid departure.

Again, the local police seemed unaware of a hunt, not bothering them as they hustled past. Flight keeping them ahead of the chase, they were startled to see an unmarked vehicle pull up near the Tammaran on their return. Even as they advanced up the ramp, low calibre weapons began spraying at them from across the road, and the same three figures emerged once again.

Breaking docking regulations to flee the planet, Gaius set the ship skywards, despite the warnings from the unaware Fillydelphia Port-Control. Justified or not, the declaration of intercepting frigates being dispatched to catch up in orbit was enough to drive the panic home. They were on Equestria, in the heart of the Empire, on the run from the Empire themselves and an unknown force, carrying a unicorn who had just demonstrated powers thought lost centuries ago.

Spraying decoys from their hold, Gaius had the ship make haste for the shipping lanes off world. From a combination of using much larger ships to hide behind and direct heat-tracking and the electronic interference of their own decoys, they got a brief window to disappear among the cargo-haulers to carry them out of orbit. Nestled between the struts of a colossal ship transporter, they were unable to begin the FTL spool, but could at least get some distance from the planet.

Deeper space listening posts, however, reported their position almost immediately, their more sensitive detectors picking the Tammaran out from the clutter. After only three minutes to rest and start asking Boreal just what the hell was going on, further pings from an escort fleet on exercise meant they were forced to move on again. Commiting to an emergency jump, Compass Rose sent them spiralling to the next system on perhaps the messiest route she had ever made.

By the time they arrived, the Empire was already waiting. The core systems were policed by a well drilled, well trained force, and the Tammaran’s exit jump came immediately into the lock range of several vessels. The ship’s illegal comm-unit began picking up emergency broadcasts through space, directing any available ships to converge on the unknown vessel’s trajectory. Further M-space rifts opened around them, as interceptors began to catch up.

Caught within a net of imperial vessels, Gaius did what he could. He began unleashing the rest of their decoys to scramble communications and overloaded the engines to push them toward the rings of a planet for cover. What followed was two hours of evasion, tricks, backtracking, and pushing his long honed skills to the absolute limit. Through some miracle, he held them off until Rose could spool the FTL again. Taking multiple pieces of rock with them, they jumped again and again and again. Every time, a weary battle of wits against doctrine ensued. The Tammaran suffered hits, and only through a monumental effort did they keep her running. As they neared the border to the Periphery, shocked to the core over the effort the Empire was putting in to prevent their escape, they recognised four separate interdictors leaping ahead and around. The advanced, fast vessels were trying to predict their routes, aiming to catch them as they exited a jump and snare them in with their powerful electronic warfare systems.

Many more times, with increasingly desperate measures, Gaius, Rose, or any of the others, had to outfly or outrun them. The route was not straight, with them even trying to go back toward the Empire again just to throw off pursuit. For over a week, the exhausting challenge went on, Gaius and Aileron switching turns at the helm, while Rose simply endured as best she could, sleeping at her station.

In a brief hour of rest within a nebula, a tired Gaius could be found with his wife, his hand resting on her stomach, promising her they would make it. Promising that he would move the stars themselves to keep Tammani safe and to see her smile. With every jink and every close call, the image of their coming daughter was fixed in their minds. It drove them to limits they never realised they had.

Yet for as good as Gaius and his crew were, there was only so long they could keep this up. As they emerged on the border to the NLR, the Tammaran’s core finally failed, and the M-space transition shattered the mechanism. Hull breach alarms blared all through the vessel, until the engineer sealed the drive bay off before the void could claim it. Spinning out of its suspension, the core itself erupted and blew a twelve foot hole in the outer hull, venting gas and fluid equally, leaving the FTL unit itself glowing in the black with a searing magical light.

They were dead in the water.

Powered by newer, more reliable engines, the Empire didn’t take long to close in. Their hunt successful, they had hounded down the elusive ship through sheer weight of persistence. Jumping in around fifty thousand kilometres away, they began their impulse drive toward the stricken Tammaran.

Yet even as they closed, another signature opened up just off the Tammaran’s bow: a small vessel, large enough only for perhaps three ponies, broke through into realspace. Viciously armed, jet black, it was virtually invisible in the void both to sensors and the naked eye. As it arrived, Gaius found it hailing them, and a disarmingly casual voice began asking them to transfer Silent Boreal to their vessel. If they did, then they would help the Tammaran escape the coming punishment.

The unicorn overheard and shook her head. She told them this was not an ally to be trusted. When Rose demanded to know who, the unicorn fell silent.

The demands were reiterated; firmer, more urgent. Rose ran every check she could on the vessel, but it seemed like it either didn’t exist, or was behind some level of confidentiality. Raising from his chair, Gaius approached Boreal. A rare anger from him picked up, as he told her of Tammani, of what mattered to him now. With stern eyes that shocked even his own crew, he told her that there was only one way out of this. When no other choice was left, the unimaginable was all you could do, he told her. It was all his life had been, from its origin until now.

Boreal finally, firmly, nodded.

Using the remaining thrusters to angle their ship, Gaius allowed the newcomer to dock with them. Soon after, before the interdictors could catch up, the black vessel spooled its own FTL and jumped them into NLR space, behind the lines of their prowling defenders watching out for Empire signatures.

As they transitioned, Gaius let Aileron take the helm, patting his shoulder and nodding.

Safe from the Empire within range of the Republic’s border scans, the ship again hailed them. They demanded Boreal be handed over. The voice was more insistent now; intelligent, predatory in its tone. The accent wasn’t of the Solar Empire. He implored Gaius to think of his crew, his ship, and to ask himself why such a clearly special unicorn was defecting. He made it clear that if he had to cut through the docking airlock to get ‘the data’, he would.

Finally, Gaius opened comms, asking the newcomer who they were, only to be told it wasn’t what he should be caring about. Again, the ‘requests’ for Boreal and ‘the information with her’ were reiterated.

Gaius hadn’t been without an answer.

He’d simply been waiting.

Shouting to Aileron, the hippogriff and Rose activated the Tammaran’s FTL. The core was dead, but they had used the other ship’s transition through M-space to charge their own drive through the intake scoop. Blasting the retrothrusters to angle as best they could, the Tammaran tore itself off of the other ship as the rift drew it in, and left their pursuer behind.

As they left, the shouted panic over the comm from the trio in the other ship as they tried to disengage before being dragged in unprepared gave him some satisfaction, and the name of one of them he would never know the true meaning of in his remaining time aboard.

‘Boa’.

End of an Era

On Hope itself, as Silent Boreal was escorted away by a cautious set of guards, Gaius found himself standing with one of the NLR’s directors of intelligence.

A contract lay in her hoof, ready to be taken. The pay was the same as the previous one. In recognition of the measures they had gone to, there were more tasks lined up. Even before the debriefs and interviews, Boreal had brought with her a series of further tasks to be done, the director said. They could use such continued services as an independent contractor, especially now.

It was enough money that they could have lived a rich retirement. One more job and they could settle anywhere they wanted. One more job for luxury.

But despite all the promises, Gaius could only turn it down. There were only so many ‘one more jobs’ that a responsible captain could undertake in his life. He had everything he’d wanted to get when leaving his backwater home. His love, his coming daughter, years of adventure behind him, and even more years of peace ahead. He would have a decent little home on a nice planet, and enough put aside to fund his child’s future.

In the end, despite being born with nothing, he could confidently say to those offering that he had now found all that he needed.

As he came back to his crew and took Rose to his side, he made the last declaration to them: that the pair of them were retiring, and that Aileron was to assume command of the Tammaran on a permanent basis from then on.

What followed was a respectful pause, and then a series of stomping and clapping of hooves and hands. Several light whoops emerged, and one by one, they all hugged their now ex-captain and navigator. There were well wishes in that hangar, there were tears and hopes and promises. Aileron, crying openly to lose a couple he had thought of as surrogate parents, told over and over that he wouldn’t disappoint their legacy with the Tammaran, that he would keep its name, that he’d stay true to what Gaius and Rose had always done. His ever respectful handshake instead got him yanked into a hug from both husband and wife as they comforted - and took comfort in - the young hippogriff they had rescued so long ago. He only let go after they promised to keep him updated on Tammani.

With a splendid week of relaxation on Hope itself as the Tammaran was repaired, the ship eventually made its voyage for their new home. Under Aileron’s command, they took Gaius and Compass Rose back to Chrysolite, and helped them set up their home as a crew, remaining in the League for as long as they could find the contracts. Eventually, as the news broke, they were present as their ‘extended crew’ gained a new member when Tammani finally entered the galaxy.

Holding their child between them in the hospital, Gaius and Compass cuddled and reflected. This was it, they knew; the start of a new stage in their lives. From a chance meeting of a stowaway, through misfortune, wars, hunts, and most of the galaxy, they had made it. Made it together.

And with a gently kicking and wriggling hippogriff between them, they had no better symbol of it being both of them that had done it.

Those Distant Stars

The adjustment wasn’t easy. Seeing the same sky every morning took some getting used to, but their attention was more than elsewhere. Finding casual work to bolster their funds, the pair relaxed into early retirement to raise their child. As Tammani grew, they saw her inherit the positives of their life experiences. From Gaius' gentle nature and eager thrill seeking, to Rose's wholesome love and boundless wanderlust. None of their worries about old loose ends coming back to them panned out, leaving them both in peace to watch Tammani run in the wheat fields of Chrysolite, flapping the still tiny wings on her back to try and lift herself off the ground. They would encourage her, watching her little limbs doggy-paddling in the air as though it would help her stay off the ground, and feel content.

Occasionally they would reminisce and share in old tales. Some with their daughter, some just to themselves. It delighted them to watch her squeal and hug the golden retriever they bought to keep her company. Orbit, as they had named him, would smile as only a dog could, and enthusiastically lick Tammani’s cheek as he played with the foal. Many photographs were kept of both Tammani and Orbit exhausted and collapsed together, the canine wrapped protectively around the tiny hippogriff. It made them laugh to witness her eyes bulging out at some fancy treat, or to see her stumbling gait trying to copy dancers in videos.

But for all that side of her, every time they watched her wistfully staring through her telescope at night, or caught her eagerly pointing at a passing vessel in the atmosphere, they would look to one another with a knowing glance at seeing the awestruck passion on her young face.

Long before Tammani brought a quiet, curious question to them about how people got to fly those things, they knew where she’d be going someday.

They just knew.

Glass Ceiling

Author's Note

These stories were originally written as side stories to a pony-themed sci fi tabletop RPG played with friends over Roll20, mostly just as gifts to them for being an amazing group of people to play with. Eventually, after I started garnering a few of these stories, I was convinced to bring them to FimFiction to let others share in them as well and follow some of the misadventures and events surrounding the party in the game. In other words, the crew of Claudia.

As such these stories, while in chronological order, are in effect ‘side stories’ to the plot of the game itself, adding depth to character backgrounds, their relationships, and adventures of my own devising on the side. Because of this, there are fairly hefty time-skips between each story, with events in the characters’ lives happening between them (ie - the game sessions). I have done my best to include introductions to each story to help give some context on what transpired between each one in our tabletop game, to give you the understanding needed to enjoy them. But for those interested in seeing the full tale, there will be “game session summaries” posted at the end of stories. These aren’t required at all, but if you’d like to know more about the game beyond these stories, feel free to take a look.

After a long break after writing Murky Number Seven, this world is what got me writing again. From all of us involved, we hope you enjoy them.

Story Writer: Fuzzy
World Design and Original Game GM: Napalm Goat
Story Editor and Session Summaries: Snipehamster

Glass Ceiling

Space, the final frontier. Or at least, it used to be.

Over a thousand years have passed since Nightmare Moon's defeat by the Elements of Harmony, and Equestria's denizens have now looked beyond the satellite moon that once contained her, leaving their homeworld to seek their destiny in the stars.

At first, this was a golden age of discovery, settlement, and optimism. Great civilizations born of the species of Equestria formed across the galaxy, and incredible feats of both science and magic were accomplished. Faster-than-light travel, artificial intelligence, and wondrous spells flowed freely between the stars. With Celestia and Luna still watching over all those who had left Equestria, nothing seemed beyond them.

It was not to last.

What they knew as dragons on their world were soon revealed as a minor offshoot of a race that lived beyond known dimensions. Wyrms: creatures of immense power from beyond the galaxy’s rim. Affronted by the growth of magical AI, something they saw as an exponential threat, they gave an ultimatum to the galaxy to end their use.

Their demands were met with a refusal, giving way to a devastating galactic war between the elder wyrm race and the united galaxy, one that plunged it into a dark age, destroying all they had built.

Even as the dragons finally relented and fell back to deep space, none could truly call it a victory. Entire civilizations were crippled, and after one last colossal spell by the wyrms, born of spite and desperation, the magic that powered both the automata and the ponies’ own abilities was stripped from the whole galaxy. Without magic - the source of all intergalactic technologies - the links between worlds collapsed, and almost every planet found itself stranded and isolated, alone in the black once again. The age of enlightenment...was gone.

With no magic but the barest levels of telekinesis and scant amounts to power advanced technology, it took three hundred years of redevelopment to recover and reconnect their shattered galaxy.

Forming new civilizations to replace the old, the darkest days are a thing of the past. Those of the modern day see a new and stable age at last emerging, even without the magic that had once empowered them.

There were still upheavals. A malignant force used the stress of those dark days to corrupt the seemingly immortal Princess Celestia, transforming her into the malevolent Empress Nightmare Star. Her presence broke Equestria’s space into a civil war between herself and Luna. In the aftermath, the Princess of the Night now leads the New Lunar Republic, a breakaway collective of systems housing those who fled Nightmare Star’s emergence. Both sides remain in a state of cold war, divided by the length of the galaxy and the presence of the other newly formed empires in the stars. The Crystal League, the Minotaur Confederacy, the Zebraha Caliphate, and Avalon’s deer rest side by side between these two old powers, acting as independent bulwarks between the warring sisters.

Across a galaxy, billions live out their own stories. Their own adventures. Their own dreams of what the stars offer them in this far future. Be it the harmonic ideals of a connected and broadly peaceful galaxy, or the darker machinations of those seeking to use the complexity and ancient secrets of a galactic civilization to their own ends.

Now, on one world in the Crystal League, a young hippogriff is trying to chase the same steps those of Equestria took a thousand years before, the same steps all those around her have taken to disappear into the sky away from her.

To reach, and live, among the stars.

Glass Ceiling

* * *

“Cadet Tammani! Your assigned place of docking is training hangar four, change course immediately! Confirm!”

Breathing heavily, feeling her own breath wash back on her face inside the cramped and thoroughly uncomfortable helmet, Tami let go of one side of the control handles and tried to hit the 'send' button on the flickering communication panel. It took her a few attempts, the pressurised training suit making her movements feel clumsy and slow. The moment after she felt the button depress, she grabbed the controls again to continue wrestling with the high speed of the training shuttle. Wrenching the sticks back and to the right, she veered away from the bonsai-tree shaped orbital station ahead of her, seeing stars whirl incomprehensibly in the front of the shuttle's thick windows, before a huge shape loomed from one side.

The reflected light from the terminator line of the planet below shone across the bow of the ship and blinded her as she sought to re-angle on the station. Enormous rings, shining like diamonds, suddenly dominated the horizon behind the colossal station.

Her voice was gasping, breathless. She was travelling at a speed she'd never even realised the bulky shuttle was capable of.

“You...you said it was hangar three before!”

The shuttle rattled as she fired the retro thrusters to slow her speed and reorient on a new approach. The g-forces slammed her forward and then down, straining the bulky suit against her restraints, until she pushed the thrust control forward again to launch into a new orbit of the station.

“Plans change, Cadet. You must be prepared to adapt.”

The faint, static-backed voice being so difficult to hear was a reminder of just how battered and bare bones these shuttles were. Designed as mock ups of VIP yachts or transports, they held none of the sophisticated systems, comfort or aesthetic. Instead, it was all replaced by dented bulkheads and reams of training and observation instruments. Her every motion, every press of a button or flip of a switch, was being recorded for post-flight analysis. Whether she corrected a mistyped frequency before she had hit send or not, they'd know. They'd made that clear. Everything was on the individual in Chrysolite's VIP Pilot Academy program.

But it promised so much if one could do it. If you could, then you could lay claim to a dream of touring the stars in the lap of the high end of society.

The weeks she'd spent here had put more pressure on her shoulders than she had ever imagined, as heavy as any emergency turn and burn. Now, with all eyes on her performance, her heart felt like it was about to burst out of her suit. Every limb felt stiff and ready to freeze up at any second. Her eyes couldn't sit still, glancing at every single corner of the pilot display consoles to her front. She'd come to rely terribly on the information they provided her, using every ounce of data they put out to help her keep up with the demanding program.

It had been tough lately. Several nights ago she'd been unable to sleep at all, and just lay in her bunk aboard the station gripping a pillow and trying to stop silently weeping after an instructor had torn her out over messing up the order of a start-up routine.

“I-”

She shook her head, forcing all that back down as the station roared by the right hand side of the cockpit window. Picking up speed again, half squinting from the neon glow of various landing approach beacons floating amongst the black to guide pilots in, Tammani wrenched the control sticks and rolled the shuttle back on itself to re-angle its front toward hangar four. Drifting sideways during the manoeuvre, she used the remaining velocity on a transversal turn, spinning the shuttle on its own axis until it lined up with the new hangar on the opposite side of the station. The glittering and flashing multicolored lights streaked across the cockpit windows until it came into view, its shape highlighted by the bright white of the Chrysolite system's star obscured behind it.

It was a brief, beautiful moment that reminded her of why she was doing all this: a love of what was up here. The tranquil beauty of the stars. Others just called it 'space', but Tami saw it differently. She saw a place of wonders on a scale that no single planet could ever offer.

She had yearned to reach it. That was why she was here.

“I understand, approaching now!”

The roar of the powerful engines set the hull rattling, vibrated the pilot's seat, and set her heads-up-display rocking so badly that she could barely read anything from its thin lines and rapidly changing numbers. Despite being in an endless void, she felt claustrophobic within a tight suit, within a small cockpit, surrounded by lights, sound and a view filled with an enormous station. The hangar bounced all over her vision as she fought to remember everything about docking at speed.

“Warning,” a monotone female voice from the console intoned, “proximity alert. Object approaching at collision velocity.”

“I know, I know!”

Now the ship was pressuring her too. Tami slapped the button to turn it off. Pilots of the quality they wanted had to be able to launch, navigate and dock at higher speeds than normally accepted by the on-board software.

Daring to look away from the flight control display, she turned to her side and started trying to go through the landing procedure on the panels above and to her right. Grunting as she tugged heavy switches, she looked back up every half-second to pull the shuttle back on track while doing mental math and twisting archaic numerical dial-pads. The retro thrusters were primed. The landing struts were mid-way through deploying. She could hear their grinding hum below her. The physical and mental effort was making her sweat inside her suit.

The young hippogriff's talons gripped the sticks again, and she stared back into the flashing red of the flight control display. She could see the distance to designated landing zone. She could see her velocity. Everything she needed.

She could do this. She knew she could fly well, she just-

The flight control flickered, and then went dead.

The entire panel shut down with a low hum of fading power. Staring at a black monitor, then looking up at the rapidly approaching monstrosity of metal and neon lights, a void to match the vacuum outside opened in her gut.

She had no numbers to rely on. No way to understand what she was seeing. No pilot assistance meant no guiding automation or projected routes!

Tami felt her entire body clam up.

“No...no, no, no!” She reached out and hit 'send' again. “Central, do you read? Central! I have a major malfunction and-”

The harsh voice broke across the comm-unit's speaker.

“This is not a malfunction, we have disabled your pilot assistance modules. Fly it in manually. We've taught you how.”

She almost screamed. The shuttle began to wildly shake around as its previously planned route began to falter from micro-adjustments on account of her shaking hands, threatening to go into a three-dimensional spin if she lost track of the station itself. The controls felt heavy and unresponsive in her grip, but every tiny movement made the metal station and stars veer wildly outside.

She had no idea what the engines were doing. Manual flying in the event of a pilot-aid system loss was all about remembering the details from before, and understanding what controls added what numbers to your velocity or angle of approach. In a moment of horror, she realised she couldn't remember them.

Every second, they felt harder and harder to picture. Fear began to grip her, clouding her mind with clammy, insidious worry. She was hyperventilating, feeling a sense of vertigo overcome her, as the ship pitched, weaved and bobbed on its heading. Every time she tried to adjust it, the nose would fly even harder in the other direction away from the rapidly approaching hangar. Everything she touched was making it worse and worse.

“I can't!” she yelled aloud, barely thinking of how it sounded to her instructors. The hangar was rapidly blurring, as her shuttle started to move near-sideways toward it rather than in a direct path. In a panic, she hit the retro thrusters to slow herself down.

The sudden deceleration rocked the training shuttle, tossing her in her seat with a cry of pain as it spun away from facing the hangar entirely. The angle! She'd forgotten the angle! Seeing the station only once every second flying across the cockpit windows, the terror-stricken hippogriff grabbed the controls and wrenched hard in the opposite direction.

“Cadet, control your spin!”

“I-”

Her fighting with the shuttle only seemed to make its flight path become more chaotic, the turnspeed growing out of control.

“Cadet, you're panicking! Control yourself and react accordingly!”

Tears forming in her eyes, she could barely remember knew what to do. Suddenly, starkly, the fear for her own life broke through the pressure, as the thought of slamming into the hangar and disintegrating into a thousand burning pieces shot through her. Screaming, she threw the sticks forward and threw every ounce of power the shuttle had into the engines, hoping against hope that she could throw the shuttle far enough that it'd miss the station and drift off until recovery.

The engines roared, then cut as the rash move threw a compressor stall through them. With a loud bang, the interruption in the outlet’s flow blasted the shuttle into an accelerating spin on a separate axis to the previous one. She smelled smoke. The ship spun and spun, her body was getting weary as the g-forces tore at her. A klaxon on board the ship rang out with a final proximity warning.

“Help me!”

“Cadet! Use your-”

She couldn't hear the rest. Letting go of the controls, she covered her visor, curling up as best she could in the seat like a frightened child.

The rear of the shuttle impacted at speed on the side of the hangar. The tough training vessel absorbed the impact, bending around the station's superstructure before spinning and drifting away from it. Shattered panels and sparking wires erupted from the point of collision, and red alarm lights flared all over the hangar floor.

On board, Tami felt her body violently slammed and crushed back into her seat as the cockpit crumpled around her. The impact had been like someone hitting her in the back with a sledgehammer. The shrieking engines sounded like howling demons, firing inconsistently and pumping smoke into the trapped pilot’s cockpit. A dozen alarms were blaring and flashing lights at her from all sides. She couldn't even hear herself wailing in terror.

“Cadet! Come in!” The fading speaker broke into static. They were trying to establish contact, but her forelegs felt heavy and dead, unable to reach out to reply.

“Cadet!”

An eternity of stars, the ones she loved so much, began to turn to nothing but black in her vision.

“CADET!”

* * *

The humid and still air of Chrysolite held none of the usually invigorating radiance that returning to planetside often had. Normally, after time in the black, the rush of colour was a pleasing sensation.

Not this time.

Almost soundlessly on its electric drive, the starport's connecting transport pulled away on the tarmac, wheeling around a smooth turn until it could once again repeat its endless cycle to and from the terminal building. Departing in a cloud of thin dust, it left only a single passenger standing by the empty road.

Tammani stood quiet and still below the metal sun shelter with her scant luggage, her eyes not even raising enough to see the seemingly endless fields of wheat and corn that stretched out from the opposite side of the road. They, conversely, shifted restlessly, filling the still air with a low rustle. Their movements were driven by a sluggish wind that she couldn't even feel.

She hadn't felt a lot of anything the past few days.

For perhaps the hundredth time, she pulled the crumpled slip from her breast pocket, gingerly moving her left arm in its sling to hold it before her eyes. For the hundredth time she read it, hoping against hope that she'd missed some singularly important detail.

And for the hundredth time, she was crushed.

The past two weeks had been naught but recovery. A broken left arm, whiplash, and a concussion had been the lucky escape's leftovers. The shuttle, her suit, and the in-hangar response teams had saved her life; not that she'd seen any of it. She'd first woken up in the medical ward, but after the first week they had brought the news she had dreaded, and they'd handed her the slip.

Six days later, she now stood here in the sun, beside an impossibly straight road that divided the wheat before her from the one place that connected her to the stars.

They hadn't even given her time to go back to her bunk first.

Staring at the slip, feeling her still healing arm start to ache from shaking, Tami hurriedly stuffed the paper back in her pocket and screwed her eyes shut. She could feel the bitter frustration and anger welling up inside her stomach again. Like it was balling up and twisting over and over.

That was all she'd wanted. It was what she'd spent years reading every book she or her parents could afford about space flight, about the stars, and about all sorts of ships. It was why she'd focused all her chosen classes toward it. Why she'd worked so hard in basic flight school to earn the required credit for such an opportunity. Why she'd spent more time staying up into the early hours simply to look up and hope for a cloudless night. To go there, to see that boundless dreamscape. To fly amongst the colour, the grandeur, and the unthinkable. That had been her mission. She had been one of the few her age that had known exactly what she wanted to do in life.

And now that one opportunity was gone.

Tami felt her head pound, the stress and horrid craving for this outcome to stop joking and reveal itself as a mistake had been making her dizzied and sore state take much longer to heal than it normally would. She couldn't stop turning the issue over and examining it from every angle. Her breathing started to stutter as she began to hyperventilate again, just like during the crash.

What had gone wrong? She had put all that effort in. The books, the schools, the study. The shuttle had worked perfectly. The course had been everything she'd been told to expect. The instructors had given her every resource. The area around her had been empty of other traffic or any significant distractions.

There was just one thing had gone wrong.

Shivering violently, feeling her eyes well up as the crushing silence of being forced back to the ground kept becoming ever clearer because of the one thing that had failed.

Her.

Standing on all three good limbs, Tami stood and felt wretched, knowing it to be the truth. She had failed. She had ruined her own life's dream. There was no-one else to blame.

In that moment, she felt a creeping sense of anxiety in her head, telling her that she simply hadn't been good enough.

Overwhelmed by the last two weeks finally catching up to her, she wept and sniffed, a sense of inadequacy and shame entering her mind, one so strong that she didn't even notice the noise of another vehicle pulling up. Or the sound of the sleek and blonde griffon who got out moving around it to her.

“Tam...oh, Tam...”

His heart broke at the sight of his daughter and he immediately clasped her in his arms, carefully pulling the smaller hippogriff to his chest and stroking her mane gently and endlessly.

“Come on, let's get you home.”

* * *

Compass Rose closed the door to Tammani's room with a soft click and wiped her eyes with the edge of a wing. She had done her best to appear in control of everything until she could hide her eyes from her child, but the moment she had left the young hippogriff to rest off her injuries, Rose’s emotions had become impossible to keep down.

It had taken everything to not immediately turn back once again.

Rounding the landing on the upper floor of their home, she turned off the lamp in the hallways window as she passed to the stairs. It was night, and their quiet, rural town on the fringes of wide farmland was silent. Chrysolite's star was but a dull, light haze over the very edge of the horizon. F-class, Rose briefly reminded herself. Old navigator habits died hard. They led her to always looking to understand where she was, and how to move to the next place.

Yet right now, she just wished she could find some direction for her daughter.

Trotting downstairs, she spotted her husband. Gaius was still poring over the summary discharge documents Tammani had brought back with her. The griffon sat hunched on their front room's sofa, barely lit by the fire. His normally confident and bright demeanour, that spark of humour and genial roguishness that had so caught her attention decades before, now looked sullen.

Rose knew that look. It was the same he'd worn when they'd thought they had no way out: when Gaius took a determined mood to try and pull them all out of the fire. When their ship had lost her nav-unit in deep space. When they had been caught without FTL in a system with the Empire's navy scourging for every signal they could spot. When the Confederacy had impounded the ship and seized all their belongings. Every time, he would wear that look until he had a solution.

This was the first time she had seen that look about him since their retirement. They’d settled here on Chrysolite to raise their daughter in a more stable and peaceful environment. After spending so many years not seeing him as a captain, it was unusual to see that sterner side of him re-emerge.

Shuffling to the bottom of the stairs, she reached out and clicked on the light to their living room. With a start, Gaius looked up at her, as though not having heard her approach.

“How is it?” Rose kept her voice quiet, treading across the soft carpet to sit alongside her husband.

Gaius sighed, almost pressing the paper to his forehead, before swapping hands and running his talons through his plume.

“It's...” He hesitated, looking around the room as though for distraction. Homely, simple, and comfortable, their small house still bore remnants from their ship dotted around. Their old bridge seat covers decorated their sofas now. The toolkit they kept around was the same, still bearing tools they'd never need. Even their kettle came from the old ship. On the wall hung a section of battered hull plating, bearing the painted name and symbol of what had been their home for over fifteen years. The voyage that had permitted their early retirement in their forties to raise a child.

The Tammaran, and its symbol: a set of overlapping griffon and pegasus wings. Their symbol they had chosen. One that, by fate and some chance genetics, stood for something very different today in both their minds.

The choice of name had been all too easy for them when she had been born.

“Hun?” Rose prompted him, seeing the far-away look in Gaius' eyes.

He blinked and shook his head, bringing up the document again.

“It's not good. Not good at all, Rosie.” Gaius sighed, indicating the larger text marking both the title and the final paragraph of the VIP Pilot Academy's final report on Tammani. “Dismissal without chance of appeal, and removal of all pre-obtained qualifications on their ground. They don't want anything attached to them that isn't a full graduate.”

Rose had guessed as much, but still gently wrapped her forelegs around Gaius' arm.

“There's other ways, though? We could try and get the funds together to help her qualify as something else. The cruises? Maybe even the Pioneer Science Division? She's got as good a head for numbers as I do, or-”

“That's the problem.” He finally looked at her rather than the paper, before handing it to her. “The crash has been labelled as a category A incident.”

“Meaning? I'm an independent navigator, hun. Not a League pilot.”

Gaius' voice was patient and apologetic, “An incident that either resulted in a loss of life or, in this case, an excess of ten million credits damages. No-one but Tami was hurt by the crash, but a category A incident goes on a pilot's permanent record. These days, everything is connected. Even Republic or Confederacy interviews would check the League pilot records now.”

He sighed and let the paper drop onto the coffee table before them.

“There's not a flight career around would ever accept a pilot with a category A on their record. Even though she's more than qualified for training on most of them, that's all they'll see.”

There was a pause between the two, as husband and wife, father and mother, looked to one another.

“I can't...Tammani wants to...”

Rose took up the document, not wanting to believe the same words. Her eyes scanned the digital print from the Academy's Chancellor. She saw the 'must inform', the 'undue risk' and the 'cannot accept' throughout, and felt an anger bubble within her. That someone had willingly locked her daughter away from what they'd all knew was meant to be for her felt so frustratingly, gut wrenchingly unfair.

“Oh, Tami...” she whispered, feeling her eyes well up again. “There has to be...isn't there anywhere that-”

“Not with this.” Gaius got up and paced back and forth, restless and defeated, until he sank back down beside his wife and felt her wrap her smaller wing around his back.

Above them both, upon the upper floor in the darkness of the mezzanine, Tammani sat against the centre pillar of the house and eavesdropped. She didn't look down, but simply stared through the window at the darkening sky and listened.

She'd known everything her father had known. She'd known it from the moment she had woken up. But she'd always hoped that perhaps they'd see something she didn't. He'd been the captain of a starship for fifteen years. She'd been a navigator for just as long. They'd been up there. They'd always seemed like bastions of knowledge and advice to her. They'd encouraged her from the first day, and their support had cultivated the talent she'd needed.

Not enough talent, she reminded herself. She'd not only let herself down, she'd wasted the investment and time they'd poured in to help her.

She couldn't listen any longer, and quietly pulled her battered body up. Limping, she slid back into her dark room.

It had never ceased to be a 'clean but untidy' mess even in the time she'd been away. Her sheets half fell from the double bed when she'd sneaked out. Piles of books were stacked by the bedside and on desk and drawers. Astronomy, electronics, programming, aerodynamics, physics and space-art. The messy easel sat with a half finished quasar beside her prized telescope, a tenth birthday gift that her father had taken on a brief stint of post-retirement jobs to afford. The large window at the back that it stood before was open against the summer heat, its glass looking out over the rolling low hills.

It was a cloudless night out there, and already the dazzling twinkle of the deep black was starting to filter through the light pollution. Others just saw white light, but she saw so much more. The gentle red hues, off-yellow sparks, and brilliant silvers were hidden in plain sight to those who hadn't spent so long looking upwards.

In utter silence, she stared at them, lit by moonlight in her own room, until she could bear it no longer.

“Why wasn't I better?” she asked the empty sky, feeling stupid for even speaking aloud to herself. “What's wrong with me?”

Cheeks running wet and eyes stinging, she choked back a sob and dropped back into her bed, lying on top of the sheets. Head into the pillow, her shoulders shook and her wings drooped.

From the darkness at the back of her room, however, something shifted. It had watched her quietly, its energy having been spent since originally seeing Tami return a couple of hours ago. Yet now, over time, it was beginning to sense that something was amiss.

The Tami it recognised was here, but the Tami it knew had not returned.

Something was wrong.

As Tami struggled with wanting to sleep, but not wanting to face what the future would now bring, she didn't hear it approaching her bed, until a soft weight hopped up from the floor, bringing itself into view in the moonlight.

Orbit was his name, her golden retriever. Bought for the family, but in the end really connected to her, he now padded across the bed to her side and furiously dug and buried his head under her wing. Pausing to listen every few seconds, he eventually drove himself up alongside her body and pushed under a foreleg, until he could snuffle and prod his nose at her neck and face.

Orbit didn't know exactly what was wrong. Orbit didn't care.

Orbit just knew what made him feel better, and pushed in deep against the hippogriff. The same she'd done for him whenever the lightning had come. He'd felt safe and happy with her hugging him close. Now he sensed by instinct that he had to do the same.

Feeling her arm wrap around him and tug him in, he licked at her cheek and knew he'd done good.

And if he could have understood her, he'd have recognised the weak sound of a choked laugh, and a quiet 'thank you' as she curled up with him to sleep away the remainder of the horrid day.

* * *

“Driver nineteen? Tammani? Your next assigned fare is the Four Club, change over from the Tristarant job immediately. Twiddle will handle that. Confirm?”

Breathing heavily, feeling her breath simply impact on the humid air in the cramped cab, Tami let go of the control handles with one hand and hit the 'send' button on the radio panel. Her movement to depress it was lazy and limp.

There was no need to do anything fast here.

“...all right.”

No reply came, only the click of someone shutting off their end. She didn't mind; talking on the radio made her nervous. Every other taxi unit tuned in could hear the communication on their very limited system.

Sitting back with a sigh of frustration, Tami rolled her eyes and made to finish off the quick meal she'd grabbed from the suburb market. A pre-made sandwich was about the most she could squeeze in between fares, although she'd ensured to spare enough time to treat herself. A tonka bean and orange oil ring doughnut. It was Friday, a day she always permitted herself one of the fancy treats from the little cafe beside the store.

In the two years since she'd gotten this job, she'd gotten to first name basis with the owner and made a point of sampling all his individual hoofmade treats each week.

Pausing for a few seconds, she held it in both hands, admiring the glistening coat of orange icing and patterned chocolate drizzled over it. A few nuts were formed into the shape of a bow on one side. Her heart beat a little faster as she anticipated the taste itself, and she closed her eyes even as her mouth opened.

The tangy explosion of orange in her mouth was more than enough to make her forget about the monotony of the job, if only for the few minutes it took to savour the pleasure of a sugary delight.

And there was a lot to want to forget. In the two years since her return, this job had been all she'd been able to get. She'd tried other piloting routes, of course. She'd even looked at in-atmo roles, but it seemed they had access to the same details, and she hadn't even made the interviews. Reputation meant everything in the League with your career, and they hadn't wanted hers attached to them.

Unable to escape the world, and unable to fly its skies, she had turned to what would let her move, and found this. Working the night shifts five days per week driving home party goers, air and starport arrivals, and those who'd gotten stuck for one reason or another.

It was, in a word, boring. Unfulfilling, stressful, and with no scope for advancement even at this lowest rung of the profession. The kind of job most people her age did until they could get their real career started, and for those who had become stuck needing something that took in anyone. At twenty, she was by far the youngest of that latter group.

Crumbling up the remains of her meal's packaging, she tossed it into the needless passenger seat beside her, regretfully raised the windows and went through the wholly unsatisfying startup sequence of an electronic automobile. Three steps. Three dull little steps to get moving.

Switching the LED board on the roof to 'Reserved', she pulled away from the street-side and slowly eased her way back into the quiet roads. The taxi itself, a family model like some toy imitation of a cargo hauler, was effortlessly smooth on the road and made little noise. The heads-up-display cast her route onto the windscreen, and she began the ten minute journey there.

The world felt empty at this time of night. As she passed further into the city from the outskirts, the streets bore only a few wandering parties, trying to find an unoccupied club. The real hustle would begin in a couple of hours. Neon signs flickered above the taxi, making her flip down the sunshield to not aggravate her vision. The journey wasn't hard, just one straight line through the centre, then a few side street turns.

Nothing so much as a nice country road with a few gentle turns to tackle. The taxi even had an autonomous mode for quiet street driving. Something she found painfully ironic was the fact that she had elected to stay manual, in an attempt to squeeze some form of interaction with life out of the work.

Five nights of neon signs, drunk and laughing public who couldn't care for her at all, and then if she was lucky and not too tired, two days to spend with her parents or the scant few friends she'd kept since returning.

Tami winced and felt a hurtful feeling shoot through her. 'Friends', only in the loosest sense. When she couldn't do most of what they wanted due to the working hours of her job, it rather put a hard limit on how close they could be with how tired and boring she knew she was. By this point, she suspected they were just entertaining her and didn't have the courage to send her away.

It was beyond frustrating. All her memories of Basic Flight School prior to the VIP Academy felt so far away now, like an old dream. The days when she would cry laughing with her friends, go on holidays between semesters, and hug at least a few different people every day between classes and exciting flights. Daytime, filled with colour, and her not feeling quite so tired all the time.

She had felt like the person she wanted to be. The bright and bubbly cute friend. She had loved being that for them. She had been close to them, knew all their lives; and they'd known hers.

They were all gone now. Vantage Vair to the League Navy; Poppy to the cruise industry; even Olivine had gotten a job with Basalt Industries right out the gate. They were off-world. They'd gotten to leave.

Pushing those thoughts from her head, she focused on her driving instead, and wound away from the bar streets to a more classy side of the city centre. Clubs here generally weren't so rough. If she was lucky, her fare might not even be-

“Aw, no...” she muttered, and thumped her head on the steering wheel. Her newly regrown mane flopped down around her as the automated navigation activated and pulled her to a stop beside the ponies she was due to transport.

The collection of mares by the roadside whooped and waved to her.

They were drunk.

Very drunk.

Apocalyptically drunk.

Hooves battered against the side of the taxi before she could even collect herself and unbolt the locks. She wasn't worried about contact -the front of the taxi had a shield that barred them from her- but she hated these fares most of all.

Finally, the door whizzed open on silent hydraulics.

“OH! OH MY GOSH! IT'S A GRIFFON!”

“I win the bet!”

“No, it's not! Look, she's a hippo!”

Tami winced. The city's game of betting the final round payer on what species the taxi driver would be had never been amusing enough to even need to get old. It was simply annoying.

“Half and half then! Half and-”

The voice stopped, as seemingly for no reason the unicorn burst into shrieking laughter, joined by the others. Tami simply closed the doors, focused ahead, and began driving. She already had their destination from the reserved fare entry on her heads-up-display. Thankfully no need to interact with them.

The soft whirr of the taxi was drowned out by their laughter. Screeching jokes and yells as though they thought the taxi was a light-second wide led to a headache developing before Tami even reached the lights out of the side road at all. Gripping the wheel as tightly as she could, she took the taxi out onto the sliproad to the motorway.

The faster she could get them home, the faster she could hope for a quieter fare. The money be damned.

Arcing up and around the slip road to the elevated motorway itself, Tami tapped the touchscreen a few times to increase the cruise control to the now unlocked speed limit. It felt horridly restrictive; she couldn't exceed it even if she wanted to. Every taxi was fitted with an area recognition limiter.

Only now could she finally put the engine to work, and take the party going on right behind her somewhere she could be rid of them.

As the vehicle hit its stride on the motorway, travelling through the empty night, she did however feel something inside. A dull melancholy creeping up from down low. The mares clambering over one another and taking pictures with loud screams began to fade away in her mind. Tami's eyes focused on the unfurling road ahead, before creeping upwards.

She didn't mean to. She knew what this was. It happened every few weeks.

She started to think about what could have been.

It was a mistake, but feeling the sense of motion around her, while transporting others, and sitting behind the controls of anything; it just brought it all up in a deceptively enticing way. It would feel relaxing, a moment of escape to ward away the dullness. But she knew what would happen. It invariably turned to just upsetting her.

On her parents' insistence, she had visited a therapist after their worry for her had grown. For half a year she had gone and talked out her frustrations, until the slot was finished and she was sent home with piles of paper containing information on self-esteem, changing one's viewpoint, and post-traumatic stress.

She hadn't felt it had helped. What she felt she needed to fix herself wasn't what they could offer.

Tami had seen a dream before her, with her very eyes.

She had sat in cockpits and bridges of starships that had soared throughout the system, and even once beyond it to Turquoise. She had travelled at hypersonic speeds, and seen the glint of beacons, asteroids and stars slowly move across the window. She had been intending to carry the most important, refined people in the galaxy from wonder to wonder.

Yet now, she sat in a stuffy cabin of a banged up taxi, never moving further than the city within an hour of her home. She travelled now at her maximum speed, nought-point-nought-nought-nought-nought-nought-nought-six AU per hour, watching only dull streetlamps and headlights of other vehicles pass by the windscreen. She carried people who threw up in her taxi, screamed abuse through the cabin barrier, and only ever wanted to go to some dark home street or to another hideous club.

That was it. That was what she'd always knew that feeling did.

It always turned around and reminded her. Two years separated, months of therapy, and a loss of what she even used to have down here, with no future she wanted laid out for her...all because of her own stupid lack of talent at the helm.

Tami gripped the wheel and drove on into the black, hoping they wouldn't ask her anything. Right now, she couldn't have answered; this was not the black she had longed for.

* * *

It was the early hours by the time Tami got off the last bus and reached the quiet neighbourhood of her home. Finding the door still open she stepped inside without a word, so as not to disturb her sleeping parents.

Inside, she could now see the glow of an orange lamp from the living room, heavily indicating that caution was at least partially unwarranted.

Dropping her bag, she glanced through and saw the hunched shape of her mother silhouetted by the desk's lamp. Stacks of booklets and brochures lay around her, while the screen of a datapad sat inactive on a screensaver.

Compass Rose looked up at the sound of the door closing, and pushed a smile onto her tired face.

“Hi, hun.”

The hippogriff tried to force a smile back, hanging her coat beside the stairs.

“Hi.”

Rose looked back to the papers, and stood up with a stretch. “Long night, then?”

Tami nodded quietly, and Rose quickly caught the obvious mood her daughter was in. She'd seen it enough times. Often the morning after when Tami got up, or whenever she stayed up late to be there for her daughter returning, like now.

“I've been trying to see if there's any openings about; got a few things we can look over in the morning?”

“Mhm...”

Tami's voice was dreary, and Rose clicked her tongue.

“That bad, huh?”

She moved forward and sat on the bottom the steps, facing her daughter. Gently, she reached out and hooked a stray strand of Tammani's thick mane behind an ear. She had been happy to see her grow it back out from that Academy short-standard to help her look past it.

“There, now I can see you proper, huh?” She tried to smile, to keep herself seeming relaxed, but she saw little reaction on Tammani's face. Sighing, she leaned her head on the banister and took the hippogriff's shoulder, feeling it shaking. “What's wrong, dear? Please, talk to me.”

Tami's eyes shot open for a moment, before she quickly shook her head. “No, no, just...I'm just tired. It was a lot-”

“Hun, I know there's more than that. Ever since...” She took a breath and paused. They'd been down this road enough times that she knew not to bring it up. “It's rough shifts, I know. But even when you're with your friends you're just not...you.”

“I just don't see where I'm going, mum!” The words were sudden and blurted, and she tore away from Rose, wandering back into the living room. “I can't get a job I want, I'm not good enough for the other ones that are like what others are getting, and my friends aren't really...”

She paused, and Rose heard a quiet sob. Something had clearly been playing on Tami's mind all night. Trotting through after her, she found Tami sitting on the side sofa near the window.

“We just need to keep trying to find you some-”

“There isn't anything!”

The sudden rise in her volume caught them both by surprise, until Tami lowered her voice and continued.

“We've looked at everything! And...and I can't get any of them! There's nothing else I can find with that huge mark on every record they look at! No-one wants the hippogriff who crashed something and who can't even stay calm enough to talk to anyone important in a job! That's why my 'friends' just don't want to be around me, 'cos I'm just a failure, okay? I work a trash job and missed my chance! And I-”

“It's not your job that worries me, Tammani!”

Compass Rose' own voice drowned Tami out. She surged over to her, staring her daughter right in the eye, barely keeping the anger and frustration that had been building up inside her in check to hear her daughter talk that way. Tami's eyes bulged wide, and she recoiled enough that Rose felt a pang of guilt, checking the shout to a quieter, but stoic tone.

“It's not your job. It's not you finding a job. It's not about what's next. It's what I see right here! It's you. I'm worried about you! I see you constantly putting yourself down, and talking about how you're a failure at everything every time this comes up. That's not true!”

“It is!” Tami protested.

Rose's hooves took both of the hippogriff's hands and squeezed them tightly.

“It. Is. Not! I won't have you talk about yourself that way! One mistake doesn't ruin your life. I thought… I thought we'd helped with this a year ago. The therapy about the accident?”

Eyes reddening, Tami just looked away and shook her head.

“I couldn't even speak in the groups! And one to one th-they couldn't fix what-it wasn't just that, I-I don't know what I'm...”

“Tami...” Rose rubbed their hooves and hands over one another, trying to warm them as she felt how cold the sudden chill at night on this planet had made Tami on the walk home. “Finding you something you want to do just takes time. And we will. I won't stop looking till I do, but what I can't abide is seeing you do this to yourself. Honey, you're hurting yourself. Diminishing what you've done. I remember you telling me about how you broke Basic Flight's orbital transition record. How you had so many friends there. You can do that again. And we'll help you. You just...you just need to believe in yourself a little more.”

“I'm just being honest with myself...” Tami muttered.

Compass Rose let go of her sharply, stood upright, and sighed. The sigh quickly turned to a frustrated groan of annoyance.

“No you are NO-”

Her hoof stopped inches from the table it had been about to hit, and the brief fury quickly abated. Seeing Tami staring up at her with wide eyes, she simply sank down, and pulled her into a close embrace.

“I'm sorry, hun.”

Mentally chiding herself for letting her mounting frustration at his daughter's problems over the past years get the better of her, she simply held onto her, stroking Tami's mane with her hoof over and over. She could feel her gripping tightly back.

“I'm sorry I'm letting you both down, mum...”

Compass Rose couldn’t think of anything more to say that wouldn't make herself break on the spot, and so she just squeezed her daughter tightly.

Afterwards, she let Tami sit in peace as she got her a hot drink, and despite feeling an urge to go over possible avenues of life she had researched, instead decided to leave it for now. Perhaps she had been doing it too much, pushing these possible routes in life on a tired young girl in her determination to solve the issue. Tami wasn't like her husband, who preferred things so direct. Tammani had her mother's approach when something was bothering her, and Rose knew the issues she'd had with that sort of thinking in the past.

Seeing her off to bed, Rose watched her head upstairs. After a full minute on her hooves, staring at that door, Rose returned to her desk, feeling completely helpless and worried, beginning to doubt herself much in the same way. The sense of failure at not being able to fix things for her daughter was starting to root in deep.

It would be morning before her husband would find her still at her desk, slumped over it, with some of the papers below her head still damp.

* * *

“Tam?” Gaius called upstairs. “Tam?”

He heard the sound of a door opening, and Tami's head poked around the top of the mezzanine, her long mane arranged in a crazed mess. She was likely only just up.

“Could you fly down to the store? We'll need some more milk and some food for Orbit. Just a pickup, I called ahead.”

Tami rustled her mane, and nodded. “Sure, just lemme get dressed. Hey, Orbit? Walk!”

There was an excited bark, and the sound of four paws rushing madly around the room. Gaius could see the top of their pet's blonde head moving in circles around Tami. Even before she was back in her room to dress, the golden blur came rocketing down the stairs past Gaius, nearly headbutting the front door. Orbit sat up, his tail thumping hard against the entrance to their home twice a second.

Forcing a smile upon his face, he ruffled Orbit's head, and waited on Tami to hustle down after the canine. Her movements were slower and lethargic, not the excited flurry of wings he remembered her usually making to take her dog out.

“Won't be long, dad.”

Her voice was a bit brighter, and Gaius appreciated that she was still trying, but he could see the dark shapes under her eyes. Tami had not slept well at all, and he could sense his daughter was riding a knife edge of another mood crash again. Gaius felt tense, too tense to do much more than just weakly smile to her as he watched her get ready. He knew they had plenty of milk and dog food in the house already. The called order had another purpose.

Before long, the hippogriff and dog had both left. Only then did Gaius reopen the living room door and go back to his wife.

She was sitting at the dining room table through the back of the archway toward the kitchen, tissues in her hooves, and a small stack of used ones to the side. Sobbing and shaking, she blew her nose and leaned on a hoof, staring at the wooden criss-cross pattern of the heavy table.

Gaius hadn't wanted Tami to see this, and hadn't wanted his wife to have to be seen either.

“Rosie...” he started, and then realised he didn't know how to follow it up. Sitting beside her, he put an arm around her, gripping the pegasus' shoulder tightly.

“What went wrong?” Rose gasped and heaved the words out, hiccuping and screwing her eyes shut. “Gaius, I...I can't do this anymore.”

He squeezed her to his side, resting his cheek atop her head. “We've been th-”

“No! Don't even-” She nearly threw him off, tossing the tissues away to stand up and pace restlessly about behind him instead. Her voice raised, accompanied by heavy steps that knocked on the panel floor. “This isn't like then! We had ways out, and it was just ourselves and the crew! This is...this is so much worse! It's been two years, Gaius! Two years I've had to watch my daughter be upset and full of pain! We've been 'trying' all this time, always thinking the next thing might work, but it's not! It's not, Gaius! It's like some rival we can't even see. Like some fault that we don't understand!”

Gaius got up, trying to move over to her, but Compass Rose stormed past, still aimlessly wandering and knocking his hand away. His eyes narrowed, feeling shocked, even offended by her casting off his attempt to hold her. His voice raised to match hers.

“Rosie, we just need to get her to believe in herself! We've got to!”

“We've tried that for two years, Gaius! Look how far it's gotten us; she's worse than ever! Barely goes out because she thinks everyone's looking down at her, like she doesn't belong! Every time I find her coming home from a shift at that horrid job, she's like someone else!”

Rose stood up straight, shouting directly to her husband, looking him in the eye from the front. To his own shock as much as hers, he felt himself sighing and rolling his eyes.

“We've been through this every other week for that whole time, Rose. What else can we do but try to support her and help her look for something better? That Cat A on her record isn't going away!”

Compass Rose's wing grabbed and pulled his head back to face her.

“And it's not working!” She spoke sharply. “And it's tearing us up as well as her going through this each time she has a low mood! Because I can't do it this way any longer! I can't bear seeing her like this!”

“Well what else CAN we do?” he bellowed in return, knocking her wing away and sinking down into the chair behind him. “What? What else, Rose?”

“Something! Anything!” She spread her front hooves wide, an open invitation for something to emerge to help this, her cheeks soaked. “Because seeing her like this...Gaius, I'm going to need help too. I'm failing my daughter! I can't help her!”

He leaned forward, taking a short breath to calm himself, and held her shoulders. “That's not true.”

Rose simply sniffed, the volume in both their voices having dropped. “Do you know what she said to me last night? That she was sorry. Sorry for disappointing us.”

She spluttered, gripping Gaius' claws on her.

“What kind of parent can I feel like if my child believes I'm disappointed in her?”

Gaius had to pause. The weight of what she'd said was slowly landing home. His gut turned and clenched, and he felt just what Compass Rose had the previous night.

“I'm going to go shower,” she muttered, and pushed his hands off of her. “I just...I need to be alone for a moment. Gaius, why can't we fix this? What was it you said? Back when we had four interdictors hunting us, when we knew Tami was coming? When it looked like there was no way out?”

Still reeling from hearing what Tami had said, he could only whisper in response. “That I'd move stars to keep her safe and happy, if I had to...”

Rose wiped her eyes and nodded. She got up, shuffling away to the living room.

“Why can't we both do it now?”

Taking a deep breath, she moved to the stairwell and left Gaius behind with his thoughts.

After some minutes listening to the sounds of the shower upstairs in the background, Gaius finally, slowly, edged his way into the living room and sat beside the fire.

His eyes found the desk littered with job applications and career event pamphlets, but he couldn't bring himself to sit there. Not yet.

What Rose had said was bothering him. She was right.

They had tried everything else. Science foundations, observatories, ship design, programming houses and everything more. Yet each time, any interviews had turned up negative. And while it hurt him to think of his daughter in such a way, he was convinced that half of the issue was Tammani herself.

He had seen her leave for the Academy, and he had been the first to see her on return. Sometimes, he felt like they'd sent him the wrong girl back. That nervously eager confidence she had grown up with seemed to have been stripped from her. Tammani had always been skittish, but since she had returned it had been like her confidence in herself had all but gone.

After her return he had written to the Academy to demand an appeal interview with her instructors, but no reply had been forthcoming. In desperation to restore some of his daughter's spirit, he had even tried to contact some of her old friends. He knew she and Vantage Vair had been close in Basic Flight, but every message he'd tried to send had been returned as unsent. Wherever the navy was keeping him, it was out-with his reach.

Last month, he'd even proposed a return to space to his wife. To try and locate a freighter wanting an experienced pilot and navigator. If they had to go back to the black and live on the move once again to try and help Tammani find something to believe in, they would. But such a search had shocked him. Advances in bridge systems to assist pilots had rendered navigators in the manner Rose had trained for almost obsolete, while his own credentials were twenty years out of date. Piloting was a whole different beast these days, and even designs he recognised had been refitted to do things he could only have dreamed of.

At some level, that only increased his anger at this whole scenario. Tammani was likely better qualified than he was now, and yet he could not help her.

And now it always nagged at him. Even if he found a way for her to get on a ship’s bridge, he worried that she was still so hurt inside that she would defeat herself in the attempt.

He needed a way to make Tammani believe in herself again. There was no quick fix, but even just enough to get her a chance to show herself what she could do.

Gaius sat back, yawned, and rubbed his claws through his plume. As he often did, he stared at the hull segment of his old ship and tried to think what he'd have done, had he still possessed the resources he once commanded.

Blinking, he paused and thought for a second. The resources he'd had? What resources? They'd been an old ship still operating on analogue components for most of their time. They hadn't had any mounted weaponry. They couldn't outrun much.

What had he done instead?

Staring at that hull section, and remembering the cause of every scuff, burn and bump, he knew only one answer.

Anything.

He'd done anything.

How many times had he thought that in these two years, after two decades of being out of that life? How much had life here softened him to the realities of survival out there?

Back then, to protect his love and his crew, he'd have gone to the ends of the galaxy. That was what he’d told himself to do, if he had to. To do the stupid. Do the insane. Do the impossible. Do anything.

No matter how outrageous it seemed.

Denial shot in immediately, but he forced it back. Now wasn't the time to be cautious. Restless, he surged up and strode in a circle.

Anything. Anything.

How far could anything go?

And in that moment, he had one last, insane thought. Reaching for his datapad, he began a search.

Eventually, after numerous mugs of coffee started to pile up, he finally entered a single series of numbers into his multiband, waited for the pick up, and began to speak.

“I'd like you to send a message for me to your boss. Yes, yes I am aware of who she is. Tell her that I knew her father, and leave the name Captain Gaius of the Tammaran with her. I'd like you to pass along a request for a ship search on her station's records...”

* * *

The next few months proved to be very busy.

Gaius had a lot to do. Thankfully, being retired left him plenty of time to do it.

He'd told Compass Rose his plan that night, and to his delight she had grabbed and embraced him, offering all she could help with. He was grateful; he'd need her.

He'd need her for more than just getting things organised. He hadn't said it, but Tami's collapse in mood over the past years had been wearing hard on him too. Captains often didn't let such things out easy, and the old habits were stubborn. All that had kept him going was seeing what was happening around him. His daughter was in pain, and now his wife was faltering too.

If he'd let himself fall to the same nightmare and oppressive feelings, well, the thought of what would happen to him and his family was too much to bear even imagining.

And so he set to work. This wouldn't happen quickly, and he had to keep it a secret. Much as he wanted to tell Tami right away out of a wish to give her hope, the timescale before being able do it made him worry that her mind would twist it with anxiety and denial until it would no longer work.

In the days after sending his message, he waited anxiously. During that time, he and Rose drafted a very particular message, and studied shipping records for Chrysolite itself.

By weeks end, they had registered with Chrysolite's goods shipping industry as temporary distributors. Rose had always taken care of short term contracts, and Gaius stood with pride behind her in the signing to see his wife talk up what they needed. A single issue contract licence; one to carry a shipment from Chrysolite to any registered buyer. Rose got the agreement in hoof, sorting through the mountains of League bureaucracy to ensure its validity.

They could send one shipment off-world.

It took them three months more, but after spending all their days and nights, they finally found some borderline obsolete cooling units for sale. They had been dumped by a corporation entering liquidation into scrapyards seven hundred miles north. They were being sold for almost nothing, and Rose had located a parts dealer two systems away willing to buy them for a price that would leave no profit, but also no lost expenses.

For any other seller it would have been pointless, but they had other reasons.

Gaius finally picked them up a month later. Lacking the budget to hire a logistics branch, he had travelled across the country to meet an old friend of theirs that he'd learned was still in business. Borrowing a mass transporter from them, he drove the goods himself, masked as going off on a 'guys holiday' with his old pals. Arriving back to where he had first seen Tami after all this nightmare began, he booked them into a storage facility.

While there, he also paid a visit to the control tower. He'd checked many records of faces he'd once known, finding where they had gone. Some envelopes changed hands, and well wishes were exchanged.

Some tricks of the trade, no matter how long he was out of it, never went out of fashion.

By the time they were finished, and after turning down eager -but confused- offers from various ship captains, Gaius and Rose finally got a response from the original message that had been sent.

Together, they peered at the monitor on their living room desk and read the short correspondence.

‘She's on her way. That uses up the favour my father owed you for the Empire job. We're done. S.A.’

Husband and wife looked to one another, and each saw the other's mouths brim upwards. Hand in hoof, they shivered, as an excited glee came over both of them.

She made to hug him in her joy.

She instead yelped in surprise as he, just as delighted, scooped his love of nearly forty years up off the sofa instead, and stopped her laughter by kissing her for a very long time.

* * *

Two months later, Tami was sleeping.

She'd come back from her shift only to find her parents still up and informing her that they all had to go help a friend of the family move house. Tami had tiredly complained, but they had been insistent that she could sleep in the car on the way.

Quiet and morose, she had done just that, curling up in the back with Orbit.

Her parents had been all over her lately. Taking her to dinners, trying to get her re-involved in old hobbies, and spending more time with her. She appreciated it, but felt like a holding pattern. Like short term smiles. Tami knew she was failing, and just didn't know how to address the problems she had.

As such, her dreams remained restless and anxious. Unable to find a deep, full sleep from the quiet rumble of the vehicle, she drifted in and out on their journey several times. The sun slowly rose, and let its searing warmth start to heat the open fields again. While she would never hear it from inside, the wheat began to rustle once more in the winds.

The same wheat she had stood in front of almost three years before.

The car rocked as it rode over a speed bump, and Tami jolted awake. Orbit was out cold, idly kicking his forelegs while leaning on Tami's chest.

The sky was bright through the windows, and she lazily pulled herself up. Chrysolite's rings were faded in the sky, arcing from one side of the car to the other.

Then she did a double take as she saw where they were.

They were driving over an enormously wide and paved area, littered with equipment, terminals, logistics vehicles and brightly uniformed ponies running to and fro around the objects that dominated the view.

Starships. Spacecraft. So many of them.

An enormous New Republic passenger-liner dominated the view and blocked the rising sun. Backlit, its azure blue-topped hull shone and glistened like sapphire. In front of it, organised rows of vertical take-off business shuttles stood ready. They were all identical, all built right within Chrysolite itself. Yellow and black, they differed only in their numerical identification on the sloped nose. Even their waiting pilots looked the same in their uniforms and coat colours. Steam rose from the crude, but monstrously powerful nacelles of a squat, powerful looking Confederate frigate to the right of their car, kept isolated behind tall fencing and security checkpoints. Minotaurs stomped around it, ripping a damaged hull plate off with their arms alone to begin repairs. It looked like an object had collided with it. Its crew were hazy, the ambient heat of their ship making the air blurry around them.

They paused to let a series of buses whirr past, and Tami watched two unicorns rushing with a coolant pipe to the underside of what she guessed was an Endeavour class mining unit. Not a ship unto itself, but one that mounted on the hull of the actual mining vessel, like a phoretic fish that held onto a whale for protection during travel. Under its armadillo-like armour to resist asteroid impacts, she could see the crystal tip of the mining laser surrounded by collapsed servo-arms. It wound past as Gaius started moving again, disappearing behind the corner of a low, but wide terminal building.

It was the starport. The same one she'd arrived back home at.

“Wha? Mum? Dad? What...what are we doing!?”

Compass Rose made a short, surprised sound, and turned to face her from the passenger seat. “Good morning, hun. Just in time.”

“What are we doing!?”

Gaius didn't look, but threw a thumbs up between the seats. “Honestly didn't think you'd sleep that long.”

“What. Are. We. Doing!?”

Orbit answered her with a sleepy shake of his head and a quiet, muffled bark. He'd watched the plans. Unfortunately, it wasn't the most descriptive answer. He'd mostly paid attention to the treats he got while keeping Gaius and Rose company during it.

Her mother just smiled, and reached out to pat Tami's thigh.

“Well, we didn't entirely lie. We are going to help someone move something.”

She looked over her shoulder and saw something that Tami couldn't. Gaius began to smile more warmly than Tami could ever remember, picking up from his wife’s line of thinking to speak up.

“And we definitely are going to see an old friend.”

Tami squeezed forward and peered between the front seats.

And she gasped.

Directly ahead of them, coming into view between a fuel truck and the lean hindsection of a police interceptor, she saw a ship that she knew. One she'd never seen in person, but would have recognised anywhere within seconds.

It was built, as any cargo ship was, around the main hold itself. The top half of the vessel was a smooth, angular shape like the armour of a beetle, stretching from the bridge to the housings of the vectored fusion engines at the rear. Beige ceramic composite plates were segmented over the black hull, inconsistent in sections where re-entries had torn the plates off. A second level rose above the hull, surrounded by thin windows to what she knew their common room. Below the ceramics, metal grey and treated black paint made up the less aesthetically shaped underside of the ship. The huge hold projected from down there like a big rectangular box to the rear, with the engine housings just above the rear cargo door. Traversing thrust units were kept in four places to the left and right of the hull, angled down from the recent landing.

Landing struts strongly held its weight off the concrete from six points, three either side of the hold. At the front, the bridge projected forward from the ship itself, and a metal wireframe held the feature she had always loved most about it.

The bridge itself was almost entirely contained within a stretched glass bubble. Wider than it was high or long, the windows formed almost all of the front and sides like an observatory suspended in space. Some of the window panes she knew had thin monitors mounted in them, connected to cameras on all sides. Only the very underside and part of the roof were made of thick mounting units, giving it unparalleled visibility, and had earned the class acclaim for its ease of docking and close area navigation.

It was a specialist transport class ship, meant for high value goods, but commonly seen as an ideal, comfortable home for those who preferred to live life off-world. It was manufactured in the Crystal League for its hordes of ongoing trade deals. It was an old design, over fifty years by now, but had kept the model chugging on through countless refit programs.

It was a Gleaner RB-Eight class transport, but as she saw the repainted iconography on the hull plating, she knew it was more than that.

It bore two wings overlapping one another.

It was the Tammaran.

And Tammani, seeing the place she had once been but had never visited, the ship that had inspired her own name, felt her heart beat faster than it had in years, and gaped.

* * *

The moment they got out of the car, Gaius began striding over the many cables and fuel pipes littering the ground to connect to the Tammaran. From its open cargo door, another figure began doing the same as they closed to one another.

He was a hippogriff, a deep brown and black one, but possessing a brilliant white smile. He and Gaius met below the engines, and there was a firm grasping of hands.

“Captain.”

“Captain.”

There was a moment of pause, before they tugged each other's hand in and grasped in a firm embrace.

“Good ol' Captain Gaius! Damn, it's been too long since you've come to see the old girl.”

“It's good to see you again, Aileron. How's she holding up?”

Aileron backed off and waved a hand over the Tammaran. “Good as she ever has! Vector manoeuvring is as clean and agile as ever, especially since we got the fibre optics in the bridge replaced a couple years back during the systems overhaul. You could make her roll with a single finger these days. Totally different bird to fly with that; you'd probably not even recognise the pilot's position.”

Gaius nodded with a small smile, casting his eyes over his old home. It was like going back to your old school, casting a sense of time lost and offering a whole new perspective. He could still remember the origin of those knocks and marks on the underside, alongside some he didn't recognise. Life had gone on for her since he'd given Aileron the captaincy upon his retirement.

Beside him, Aileron spread his arms and wings.

“Compass! Come here!”

Rose and Aileron met in a tight embrace, each exchanging kisses on the cheek.

“Nav-system still showing false event horizon warnings every so often?” She chuckled, holding onto him for a few seconds.

Aileron just laughed. “We've replaced that damn nav-unit twice now. The refit even replaced the core level code. In theory, whatever was causing that is scientifically impossible to still be in there now...but they still turn up every so often to spook any new crew. Guess she just has her own little quirks that'll never go away. Likes to keep us on our toes, does our Tammaran. Speaking of...where's the adorable namesake herself?”

Gaius and Rose both turned, as though to introduce Tami to their old friend...only to find she wasn't there.

“Where has she-” Rose began, before a rapid, excited barking caught their attention.

Orbit was living up to his name, bounding in circles around the Tammaran, weaving underneath its landing struts and leaping into the air. His head was angled up.

Gaius, Rose and Aileron all let their heads do the same, to catch a glimpse of the cream and orange shape flying at speed around the ship above wherever Orbit was.

Tami couldn't contain herself to simply looking at it from the ground. Feeling a surge of excitement, she simply had to see it from more angles. Now, flying low above the hull, she soared around it to take in everything that it had to offer. She finally looked at how the ceramics were patterned up close. She stared into the engines. She peered through the windows to the cosy living space, built up over decades of use. But most of all, she looked into the bridge. Its energised tinted glass left her frustratingly unable to see the exact details. They'd presumably left that enabled against the sun on planetside, but it meant she could only see the vague shape of two chairs and the hanging monitors.

There was a flutter, and she felt her mother's hoof on her back. Hovering in the air beside her, Rose giggled and rubbed Tami's mane.

“It'll be easier to see from the inside, right?”

Tami gasped, “Really?”

“Well, duh?” Rose chuckled, kissed her daughter on the cheek, and began to lead her down. “Come on, you technically lived here for a number of months, so you've as much right as anyone here to-”

Tami was already gone, and Rose felt a relief she hadn't known in years begin to settle home.

* * *

As they passed into the cargo hold, and up the gantry steps to the living levels, Tami observed the rest of the crew passing out. Each of them stopped and paid respect to Gaius and Rose on the way, even those that Tami knew were too young to have worked alongside them.

Soon enough, other than Aileron, their party was alone within the ship.

Aileron was talking about recent jobs and answering questions on how the ship was getting along, while Tami simply looked around. The common room was stuffy and warm with the air conditioning turned off, but it was crowded with hanging drapes to cover the hull and pillows strewn around a games table and kitchen, transforming it into a colourful, comfortable space to meet within. It looked well used and untidy, but something about its personality really stood out to her.

She could see the same passion in her parents. They looked as excited as she felt, with big smiles, laughter and eager recountings from the strangest of little findings. Live for fifteen years in one area and every inch of it will eventually have a memory associated with it, Tami figured.

Briefly, through the excitement, she felt a pang in her gut. Much as she hated to admit it, everything she was seeing here made her envious. It was why she'd stopped coming to watch ships at the starport since returning; it had been too much to bear whenever she'd have to inevitably go home again.

She began to feel like she'd made a mistake getting so worked up here. This would never be hers. As awesome as it was to walk within, and as much as she appreciated what her parents had arranged to try and cheer her up, she just wasn't sure if she wouldn't feel horrible again. The feeling always came back, no matter what. No matter how many times she'd tried going to movies, listening to music, painting or doing anything that wasn't to do with the big black out there, it always came back. Always. Like some spectre she couldn't banish that returned every time she started feeling like maybe she was starting to recover.

A heavy hand fell on her shoulder.

“C'mon, Tam. I know what you're really wanting here.”

Her father smiled down at her, reached out and hit the entrance key for the bridge door. With a loud grinding of its old hydraulics, the heavy metal gateway opened and revealed the short hallway to the glass-lined brain of the ship itself.

Well, she'd come this far. She'd regret not getting a peek at least.

“Sure.” She smiled as brightly as she could, forcing it out, and walking alongside him, her mother, and Aileron to the bridge itself. Behind her, she could hear the ground crews starting to load something into the ship, presumably whatever it had come here to collect.

The gantry to the bridge was suspended above a cluster of wires and capacitor housings. Bridge systems took a lot of power to run modern FTL computation, and pushing all that energy into such a small section of the ship needed a lot of backups and electronic protection. At a glance, she could tell this one had to have already gone through the old changes from manual to automated navigation. Some of the conductors were too new for the class.

“Welcome home,” Aileron smirked, and let the final door to the bridge open.

Sunlight shone into the crowded passageway, even with the tinted windows. It made her squint, before she covered the sun with a wing and finally got to look inside.

It was where she'd have loved to live.

Open and spacious, the bridge had the whole crew interface on a lower level from where she was now standing. A short stairwell led down to it, with both pilot and co-pilot seats right next to one another, surrounded by a U-shaped series of terminal banks, modular function panels, and a rack of displays. Each of the colourful, animated flat-screens were clipped onto a window panel, projected over the window glass itself, or hanging on steady-arms from the metal struts between the panels.

Up above, surrounding her now, was an open space. Marks on the floor showed that some systems had been removed from one side, where she knew the navigator station had once been. Now, it was simply empty, but she could imagine hanging somewhere to sleep there, or placing her art in such a spot. Where she could look through the enormous windows on all sides at whatever was out there in the stars.

It was like getting to glance back into a dream.

Aileron nudged her from behind.

“Go on, Tami. Get a good look if you want.”

Nervous, feeling a little embarrassed, as though all the attention was on her, she flapped her wings and tentatively floated down into the pilot's seat.

“W-wow...”

The cushions were long flattened by whoever the pilot was these days. She guessed either another hippogriff or a griffin, given the height of the controls. But all the same, this felt...

Right.

In front of her, she could see a clear glass plane mounted on the metal of the crew suite. It wasn't active, but she could see the LEDs below to project the HUD right in front of the pilot's face without blocking their view of the windows themselves. A ship status screen to her left blinked and updated steadily with the ground crew's works. Rows of satisfyingly clacky looking switches lined her right. Most had taped notes denoting their purpose. Window tinting, door lock, and then rows for communication presets and master ignition startups. They weren't all in the default positions; the pilot must have customised the wiring.

Slowly, she put out her hands and grasped the much newer looking control sticks. The moulded plastic slid into her hands and flexed gently below them. To her side, the thrust lever was locked in place, but the main one in her hands shifted with ease. She yelped and nearly jumped as she heard the vectored engines outside moving; someone had left them active.

Aileron laughed. “Go ahead, look.”

He pulled down one of the suspended viewscreens, and Tami realised it contained the external camera's viewport, watching one side's engine outings shift, raising and lowering the ceramic shell around them to orient the outlets.

“They're so smooth.” Tami spoke lightly, rotating it around.

Aileron's mouth grew into a wide grin. “Roll rate increased by around fifty percent when the modern bridge got added. Responsiveness delay reduced by half a second in orbital conditions. The big switch from old to new. Had to get a lot of retraining done.”

Her father stepped down after her, leaning over the chair from behind. After a practiced glance over it all, he screwed up his face. “You don't say, I barely recognise any of this. Where's the FTL transfer panel gone?”

“Gone is the right word.” Aileron smirked. “Went out the same time navigators in ships like this got made redundant. It all feeds direct from the pilot control panel now. Right-”

“-there!”

Tami surprised herself, hearing her own voice cut in, as she pointed to the main pilot interface screen and drew up the FTL control tab. The blinking icons slid away and brought in a much larger scale map, along with a flashing OFFLINE note, given the state of landing.

“And look,” she continued, “there's the archive state for storing destination data, since the memory banks got large enough to-”

“-let us not have to put it in every single time,” Aileron finished, and winked at Rose. “And it doesn't send us to Kozani by accident neither.”

Compass Rose made a silent 'ha ha' gesture, and punched him in the arm.

Gaius meanwhile reflected on the new bridge system in silence, watching Tami point out this and that. The sight made him smile, and he was glad that his hunch had been right.

He turned and nodded quickly to Aileron and Rose.

The hippogriff returned the gesture and stood up again, “Well, I better go sort out the lads and ladettes their accommodation. That is the captain's duty after all.”

“And I'll go watch Orbit, I think. The ground crews must be wondering what he's doing here,” Rose added to that. “And you can tell me all about what's gone on.”

The pair turned to leave, but not before Rose bent over to kiss Tami's head.

Confused, the hippogriff looked up and around. “What? So what are we-”

The door to the bridge shut, and Gaius dropped into the co-pilot seat beside her with a grunt and began strapping himself in.

“Well, see...I've been missing getting up in this old girl for twenty years now, and I feel like another flight for old times’ sake. See, there's only one problem here. I haven't a clue how these new systems work. I need someone who does. Lucky for me, there's one sitting at the helm already.”

More words, questions and thoughts ran through Tami's mind than there were stars in existence. She made a strangled sound, mouth dropping open, and her hands let go of the sticks sharply. Outside, feeling the loss in control, the thrusters all returned to their default position.

“Me!? Wait, but, I'm...I didn't, no, no, you can't mean-”

“I mean what I said.”

Gaius' voice was stern, but comforting and reassured. Now that they were alone on the bridge, he leaned closer and took her hands.

“Tam, I've struggled to get you to believe in what you're capable of for three years now. But there's nothing, nothing down here that can compare to what it is I know you love. To what I know pushed you to break records, graduate young, and get an acceptance to somewhere that few pilots can even get to in the first place. I've watched you, because I taught you. Remember when I hired that prop-plane for your fourteenth birthday to fly you around in, and I let you take the controls for a while even though I technically wasn't allowed to? Because I trusted you could do it?”

He gently put her hands back on the control stick.

“Just think of it as that, but on a bigger scale.”

Tami was frozen. From disbelief as much as worry. Her heart accelerated, thumping against her breast hard.

“Dad-but...I-the Tammaran?”

“What better?”

She bit her lip, looking at the controls. She couldn't believe this. It was beyond disbelieving. There were conspiracy theories about drives that could go through black holes that were more believable than this.

“I don't know if I can...”

“Of course you can, Tam. You're qualified. You passed basic flight training with flying colours. You know how, I know that.”

She screwed her eyes shut, taking several deep breaths. She wanted to. She dearly wanted to see it again, but every time she thought about it, problems kept coming up in her head. Bad outcomes. Failures.

“But the control tower-”

“Already looking the other way for Aileron not being present.”

“Th-the cargo he needs to do on time?”

“What do you think we're going to go and deliver?”

“But landing with the wrong pilot on another planet?”

“We're making an in space delivery direct to the client.”

“Without the rest of the crew? What if-”

“Only the bridge interface changed that much. I know this ship's every nut and bolt if I have to. And I have you for up here.”

He smiled, and continued before she had a chance to come up with another worry.

“Two systems away. Two days out in the black. Just the two of us to get you believing in yourself again. Pilot to pilot. All sounds fitting for a second chance to me, so...what do you say?”

Tami stared at him for a long time, feeling the sticks flex in her hands. Out of the front of the flat-spherical bridge windows, she could see Chrysolite stretching out before her. She could see the fields of wheat under the sun, and a small drop-off point for the starport’s bus service in the distance.

And when she looked up, to see the deep blue of the sky, that glass ceiling she'd been unable to do much but peer at through the nights. She could only just see the planet's rings through cloud and sun glare.

“I...I can't...”

Slowly, her hands came off of the control stick.

And instead moved to pull across the touchscreen monitor’s primary startup sequence checklist.

“I can't wait!”

The smile that broke upon her face was three years of hurt shattering apart to Gaius' eyes.

“Then take it away, helm.”

“Aye, Cap...uh...Dad!”

Gaius contacted the ground crews and received the okay from them. The Tammaran was refuelled, rechecked and ready to go. Aileron had already completed the safety walk around before they'd arrived; as attentive and borderline precognitive as a captain as he had been as a first officer.

And yet, as he watched his daughter go to work, he was astonished. She was hesitant and clearly overthinking some things, but the way her hands danced through the ignition checklist of a ship she'd only ever read about was that of someone with far more experience than she'd actually had.

She hit each switch for the reactor, and Gaius felt the rumble pass through the floor as it ignited. By the time she had finished resetting every bridge screen to navigational maps, her hand returned to initiate the main drive within seconds of the reactor building up the charge required.

He was watching a new era of pilot before him, as she handled both helm and navigation set up. He couldn't imagine having to learn both and not having Rose handling one side of it, but those of today’s generation, including Tami, did just that.

“Okay, I...” She hesitated, then began to test the thrust stick, making a harsh cough emerge from each side of the ship. “Pre-flight checks are done, route to Mocca via Erinite is planned, estimated time at most efficient route is thirty-eight ho-”

Her father shook his head and smiled. Feeling a tiny flush of hope in her chest, Tami chuckled.

“...forty nine hours, if including a few orbital passes of planets and celestial objects along the way.”

Gaius winked and grabbed the radio from his side, “Control tower check, Gleaner name ‘Tammaran’ ready for departure and requesting air clearance. Flight account keyword is 'belief'.”

There was a brief pause with faint noises, as though someone on the other side was talking just away from the microphone itself.

“Tammaran you are clear for takeoff utilising vector two-seven-nine from centre point with a thirty degree arc of freedom until above thirty-thousand, confirm?”

“Confirmed, tower. Many thanks.”

“Very welcome. Fly her safe, Captain.”

Tami's look of amazement was, he had to admit, entirely worth not having explained the plan ahead of time.

“How far did you go for this?”

“As far as I had to. It's that sort of thinking that took us to the stars off of Equestria in the first place, and it’s one both of us needed to remember. Now, I believe the tower told you that you can go?”

He grinned at her, and Tami looked back to the glittering colours, shapes and texts whirling around her station, and across the HUD before her.

And she understood it all.

Taking the safety off the main thrust, she cranked the stick to her side forward, and felt the enormous satisfaction of a ship's gaining power about her body. Her bones rattled, and her displays began to flash impressive numbers to her.

Then as she depressed the final step on the panel all four vector thrusters erupted into life on both sides of the ship. Through the windows, the fields of wheat began to move downwards, and the horizon began to expand outward into a gently increasing curve. Hands shaking on the stick, she took a deep breath, and gently urged the ship to the permitted facing. Using the pilot-aid to gain the correct vector, she pulled back to angle the nose...and finally felt the sensation of being at the controls of something truly powerful enough to make the trip to the black again.

“Okay, Tam, now just increase the main engines a little to-”

Her hand transferred the thrust stick from vectored to main engine power, and threw it forward.

Both father and daughter were plastered back against their seats, as the refitted Tammaran's new systems surged reactor power into the engines. Fuel flowed in greater quantity and mixed with the engine's internal chemicals. Science and engineering came together to create what amounted to a localised fusion reaction, enough to power a whole town on its own, and thrust every ounce of that energy out the back of the ship.

Out of the window, Gaius saw the crew, Orbit, and Rose looking on from far back, in the brief second before they became specks. Eyes wide, he looked back to the controls to see numbers that bewildered him.

The Tammaran roared forward, angled to the sky. Willing, eager, even desperate. Speeds of climb it had never been capable of in his time were setting the compartments in the bridge rattling around them.

The entire ship rolled over ahead of the stratosphere, positioning itself upside down even mid-climb. The sky began to darken, and Gaius heard the roar of the wind outside quieten. He realised his hands were gripping the inactive control sticks on his side of the bridge out of nerves. Never in his life had he seen her flown like this before. There was a keen, focused drive to that brutal acceleration and high-G movements to roll in the air.

Much of that could be put down to the refit, but as he strained his head to look over, and he saw the open eyed concentration of his daughter...he knew it was more than that.

* * *

The Tammaran erupted from the atmosphere like a homesick angel, vapour spreading off of her shell like ghostly wings until there was none left to spray. It broke into the black, where the deafening, eager roar of its engines gave way to a tranquil silence.

What had been rough and furious soon became smooth and silent.

The engines cut, allowing the ship to drift on its remaining velocity away from Chrysolite’s gravitational pull and enter the orbital pathways around the planet itself. Free of the sky, the bridge's bubble gave way to a dark void.

Breathing as though she'd just sprinted the whole way up, Tami let go of the controls and just allowed the ship to spin gently amongst the black. Her eyes wide, she looked around in a slow, astonished arc with an open mouth.

She saw the black, but that wasn't all she saw. Already, there were the soft colours of the stars she had only just been able to glimpse from the surface. But up here, like glitter on dark velvet, they shone so much brighter. Their personalities, their tones, and their beauty was all returned to her. Soft, drifting fields of microfragments wafted across space, being drawn from the planet's own gravity to each of the moons by their own strange, still only vaguely understood pull. They filled space with soft blues, greys, and silvers, transforming it from the oft believed empty void into a canvas full of cascading watercolours.

And just there, at the very top of the bridge's viewpoints, she saw the enormous rings of her homeworld stretching over twenty thousand kilometres in diameter. The scale, as ever, was impossible to describe to those who had not sat there to see it for themselves.

She couldn't help herself. For the first time in three years, she felt tears on her face that were not from the pain of failure and regret.

Gaius finally sat up out of his seat. Mouth open, he broke into a shocked laugh. “What...what was that, Tam? What kind of transition was that?”

She nearly didn't hear him, lost in her thoughts. It felt like all the crushing hurt had been left behind her aggressive ascent, and a wave of soothing, long-sought relief from the hollow moods and pain finally flowed into her. She'd been afraid of even booking a cruise, even if she could have afforded it, worrying that it would feel like a taunting that she couldn't stay. But now that she was here, Tami felt it all over again. The magic inside her heart beating away, the passion flowing through her every thought. The realisation of how much she'd needed this crashed down upon her.

“Tam?”

The sound of her father’s voice finally penetrated her transfixed stare. Heart in her mouth, she gulped, trying to control her emotions as she caught up with what he’d said, speaking without ever letting her eyes drift from those bright, long missed stars.

“It...it was just, y'know, standard? I mean, I figured that if you rolled on your back, then it means come the edge you're already in the right angle to accept the gravitational slingslot, right? Soooo...so you need to push it a bit more, maybe another couple hundred metres a second extra to account for it, which is what makes it faster?” She finally looked over and bit her lip. “Did I do something wrong?”

Gaius just gaped, and then laughed. He grabbed her hand with both of his and squeezed it tightly. “No! I...Tami, I've seen pilots with years of experience not leave a planet like that! To get the aerodynamic angles and timing right for arcing while at escape velocity is just...”

He had to fight to control himself, and leaned over into a hug, clutching the seemingly frozen hippogriff in his arms. “I've never gotten to see you fly a ship with my own eyes...you never told me you were doing things like that!”

She blushed, bashfully turning her head away even as his hug enveloped her. “I mean, I never thought much of it.”

He simply laughed. That was the daughter he'd missed. The one who had muttered that it had been 'no big deal' when she broke a record at Basic Flight's final. Opening one eye, he noticed the titanic rings on their slow dance across the orbital plane.

“Well then, why don't you show me what you know?”

She caught his eye and remembered something she'd always wanted to do. No flight academy, basic or VIP, would have ever permitted it.

She had watched those rings all her life, but she'd never gone near them.

Smiling, feeling a bolstering pride from her takeoff impressing her father, she leaned back, tightened her straps, and slammed the thrust stick forward.

With both of them grinning like idiots, the ship launched forward. Fusion engines casting a blue streak behind her, the cream and black metal vessel careened into the light blue haze of the drifting fields. It stood out against them, like a singular fish in a vast ocean, even though they were still hundreds of kilometres from the main bodies of the rings.

At the urging of her father to 'go wild', Tami let the excitement in her heart bubble over to her actions, and she made the Tammaran dance. Wrenching on the controls, she set the vector engines to whirr and turn, blasting their forces out at strange and oft unused angles to make the Tammaran jink and spin on its route. Roaring and curving around to submerge into the azure mists before ratcheting back up again. Cresting out of the dust and ice fields, trailing blue vapour from each edge until diving back among them again, Tami drove her family's ship deep toward the rings themselves.

The smile upon her face was held rigidly strong. Colours washed across the windows, with the micro impacts harmlessly deflecting and sparking around them off the hull. Gaius watched the velocity indicator climb until it bypassed the highest reading he'd ever known the Tammaran capable of. Its new engines were powering it to a full thirty percent higher manoeuvring velocity than their old limitations, and they showed no sign of abating their climb.

He held himself silent, as the rings suddenly spun upside down and Tami rolled, dove, and skimmed around the first enormous chunk of ice and minerals that made up Chrysolite's rings. Mid-way around, the ship righted and rolled the opposite direction, before he heard the hydraulics of the vector-engines scream. His gut churned, as the Tammaran lifted her back end, stood on her head, spun, and drifted 'downwards' and backwards until the fusion engines re-ignited and arrested the transversal movement.

Her eyes glued to the pilot-aid screen, Tami absorbed and factored in every proximity alert and every marker on the three-dimensional HUD holograms to weave, accelerate, turn and spin her way through the mass of slowly rolling objects.

Her face cast in the blue light of the rings, the joy in her eyes infectiously being taken up by her father, she let the Tammaran rocket around, above, below, and once even through the varied shapes drifting amongst those beautiful lines. Every so often, she would let the ship leap out of the top, before turning and diving back in, leaving an eruption of sparkling ice in her wake that drifted into the clouds surrounding them.

She felt the urges. The reactions. Dropping down, she brought the Tammaran to within fifty metres of an asteroid, blasting dust from its surface up behind her while veering between mountain-like shapes across its surface. To the awe of her father, she would spin and roll within those turns, her flying relaxed and precise. He had never learned these sensitive, fluid new systems. He was used to wrestling ships to and fro, but here he knew that the ship that had once been his had evolved beyond him. It was capable of things he could never have led it to.

And here, he had those new limits demonstrated to him by someone who could.

The thought of who it was doing it made him want to shed a tear with pride.

They spent thirty minutes in silence, before she pointed out something incredible. A green ice deposit, coloured by the ores held deep within its hard rock. That got them talking, directing with claws to the rainbow of colours they were finding in the outer rings. He spotted an ancient satellite that had somehow ended up there. They witnessed two asteroids colliding in a spray of debris, a field that he was stunned to find Tami flew towards and began rocketing through with fine angling and aggressive manoeuvring that had him gasping and holding the edges of his chair. The look on his face made her laugh.

Finally, as the ship began to flash overheat signals, she angled the Tammaran up, and rocketed out into the space beyond their world. There, she shut down the main engine to let it cool and lay back in the seat, sweating and giggling.

“Tam, I said it when you graduated Basic Flight, but you're a natural.” He finally breathed, feeling his hands still shivering. Those last spatial aerobatics had been astounding, and clearly the result of her VIP Academy training bringing out the gift she had, no matter how that had ended.

She had so many things to say, but instead she just launched out of her chair and hugged around his neck. Sobbing happy tears, laughing, smiling, and thanking him over and over.

They stayed that way for some time, as relief finally soothed the hurt. Eventually, as the emotional well began to finally run dry, they sat enjoying a small tub of ice cream he'd found in the fridge on board.

He had one more thing to bring up.

“Tam, we've been looking to find you a way to go...but we'd been thinking about it all wrong.”

That got her attention, and she looked up from her treat with curious eyes. “What do you mean? I mean, we know no-where-”

He waved a hand idly. “No, nowhere like that. See...obviously my first thought was Aileron taking you on. I know he would if he could, but he's registered now. He wouldn't be able to take you, same reason as before. But this ship, it wasn't always like that. Long ago, when we first started out, we were independents. We worked the fringes, not as part of a corp. Freelancers, self employed traders, whatever you want to call it. And it got me thinking...”

Tami felt her heart begin to race already. She figured she knew where he was going, but the thought hadn't ever occurred - at least not in any plausibility.

“See,” Gaius continued, “my problem was...you weren't you. I was afraid that if I sent you out like you were, then things might end up worse. I was afraid. But what I just saw there? Tami...you're not just a good pilot. You're an incredible pilot, when you believe in your own ability. It's all there, deep down, and when you're smiling - when you're going into it knowing you can do it, you do what you just did. That makes me feel that perhaps we can look farther afield. What you have has to fly, it's criminal to keep it down on the ground.”

“Wait, you mean-” She stopped and gasped.

He nodded. “There's places in the peripheries. Not quite safe, but not wholly lawless. Places you can find work. Places who would love a pilot like you. That would even love a person like you on board. It's not just your flying; it's who you are too. The periphery is free space, but that doesn't mean it's all pirates and crime lords like the vids imply. There are good people out there who simply prefer living that way, like I once did. To not have any shackles holding them down. Who can go where they want. Do what they decide. See what they want to see.”

He put down his tub and stroked her mane to hook it behind her ear.

“Port Medusa. An old independent station. I used to do jobs for its last owner during the war, and from what I know his daughter keeps it tightly controlled. They don't look at past records the way the League does here, not for the kind you'll be talking to. We could afford you a shuttle there. If you find people you're safe with and trust, then you might find what you're after. If not, come on home and we'll look at something else.” Gaius winked. “If you're up for a challenge again.”

Tami waited for a few solid seconds to process all that, before a singular little voice from years ago suddenly rose up, and she took a sharp gasp to answer.

“YE-ABSO-PLE-I-I-I...oh gosh, YES! I mean, yes! Yes! I'll give it a shot! At the very least I get to go to the periphery? Yes! Did I say yes? Sorry, I mean...oh gosh! YES!”

They embraced once more, with Gaius laughing at her tripping over a dozen thoughts.

“Now,” he teased, knocking her shoulder. “Come on, we've got a delivery to make, and a few sights to see.”

* * *

The starport was, for the fourth time in her life, a place of great change.

Tami stood with the same bags about her, only now carting her collapsible canvas stand with her, and far more items for personal enjoyment than before. Her crafts set, fancy treats, paints and her own blankets just for starters.

Standing at the edge of the terminal gate for the departure lounge, she was hugging her mother tightly.

“Try to send us updates on how you're getting on, okay? On who you find, and what ship, and where you're going.”

Tami giggled. “Yes, mum! Yes, yes, okay!”

She knew her mother was just teasing with the 'typical mother' routine, but Tami knew she wanted to send all those reports anyway. If anything just to show them everything she found out there.

Compass Rose gave her one last squeeze, making her stuffed bags rattle around her. Rose was trying to hold back the tears, not knowing if they were because Tami was leaving again, or if it were simply out of happiness to see her find a direction, or an avenue to one at the least.

“I knew you'd pull through, honey. I knew.”

Equally teary eyed, Tami looked her back in the eye, and up to her father too. She wanted to say thank you again and again, but she'd already done it at her going away dinner. And at new years. And while packing. And when her mother had bought her a tech-set to take with her. And when her father had given her all the advice she'd needed on what to buy on the stop off point before Medusa.

Even so.

“Thank you so much...” She could barely say it through a cracking voice.

If Rose had wanted to rush forward and hug her again, she was too slow.

Orbit got there first.

Rapidly barking, the golden blur slammed into Tami, knocking her clean off her hooves and feet with a clatter of dropped luggage. She fell laughing, grasping, stroking and hugging her lifelong friend.

“Haha! Thank you too, Orbit! You never gave up on me either, did you, boy? Good boy!”

Orbit's two favourite words had been uttered. He leapt up, bounding from front to hind legs, and conducted a five lap orbit of the entire group. He only saved the five lap ones for special occasions.

Behind them, the bonging announcement board flickered over and advertised the flight to Mothellum. The fringe Empire system before the periphery. She'd transfer to more local shuttles from there. The big transport lines didn't go any farther.

Trepidation threatened to overwhelm her. She, more than most, knew the distances involved.

But for once in her life, she gathered her resolve. From somewhere deep down, it emerged and pushed her to kiss her parents, hug her dog, collect her things, and depart.

Behind her, watching Tami depart for her second chance, Gaius and Compass Rose held hand in hoof.

They'd chosen her name for the ship that had brought them together, and thus brought Tammani to this world.

Somehow, they'd both known that this had to be how it was, to watch that name once again take to the stars.

* * *

Tucked into the shuttle, Tami watched the rings of Chrysolite once again.

Yet despite all the emotion she didn't feel like she was departing a place she belonged.

Looking out to the black, she was home.

Home was out here. She'd always known it. Always wanted it to be that way.

Some people considered their house their home. Others their town, or their country, or even their world.

But Tami didn't see it that way. She'd always seen her home as more than that. As a larger scale. This galaxy, and all of known space and its wonders, were her home. She simply saw her house as a lot bigger than most others.

And who ever wanted to stay in one room forever?

Feeling her gut churn at the shuttles transition into a surreal rift in its FTL spool up, it only fed her excitement to see the vessel being sucked into the surging colours of infinity. As the shutters closed, she sat back and kicked her hooves in excitement.

Now. Finally, she could say it was 'now'.

Now was the time to finally see what else her home had in it.

* * *

Tammani

(Note: The beginning of the tabletop game pre-dates the MLP Movie, as such the hippogriff design/naming scheme we know today didn't exist back then! Image by Kalemon)

Tami will be returning in another chapter of her story here very soon. In the meantime, if you would like to see what happened when Tami left to find a ship during the tabletop game (Named, amusingly, "Space Horse") between this and the next story , then please check out the "Space Horse Game Sessions Summaries" from Sessions #1 to #30. This doc by Snipehamster tracks all that happened, check it out!

Without the Masters We Always Had

Author's Note

After some time, a new story can be brought your way. The third instalment in this series by the world's original creator, Napalm Goat, this full and complete half-novel of a story follows a much different cast. Indeed, unless you've been reading the story summaries, you won't have yet met this highly unusual pair that the normal cast found woven into their lives yet.

It also brings a very different area of the galaxy. Focusing on the enormous residential space stations that dot the orbits of many worlds. If Port Medusa were a small town, this is a metropolitan city in scale, and shows us a very starkly different perspective on life in this world from those who permenantly live aboard them.

I had a blast reading it once it was completed, and I'm delighted to get the chance to present the next part in this series with its next major installment from Napalm to you all. Enjoy!

Without the Masters We Always Had

Over time, the crew of Claudia met many unusual creatures. From stoic spies, to arcane investigators, to even freeing a magical prodigy from her imprisonment as an experiment. However, few compared to the unusual couple they met while carrying out a job for Countess Karmelita of the Periphery Space Pirates.

Donner and Blitz. Two enormous bodyguards of a species they could barely determine and the escaped remnant of a long forgotten Empire bio-weapon program. After Karmelita's downfall, the pair while looking for a new master returned as unusual allies to Hair Trigger and her crew, and the pair elected to stay aboard for some time as hired muscle. However life in space can always be dangerous, and in an encounter with Sidewinder's ace pilot 'Taipan', Claudia was badly damaged.

Unable to remain idle, and their current mission on a clock, the crew continued on their journey with Tundra aboard his own vessel, leaving Donner and Blitz to watch over Claudia during its repairs on a Confederate Station above Heraklion.

It was thought that with those two, nothing could have gone awry.

That was the thought, anyway...

Without the Masters We Always Had

Written by Napalm Goat

Chapter 1

“Monsters in the hangar,” they’d said.

Ashen Star, Chief Inspector of the Miners’ Prospect police force, was getting too old for this shit. The batpony sighed and checked the time on his multiband impatiently as a rickety rail carriage carried him towards the other end of the structure and the station’s latest incident. An incident supposedly important enough to drag him out of bed in the middle of the day cycle.

The docking bay was one of the smaller ones on the station. Despite this, it easily contained over two dozen frigate class starships. Ashen Star was not a pilot nor a captain, but working on a space station for over twenty years had caused him to memorize the silhouettes and basic capabilities of the most common freight ships. Two republic Basketeers, six League Spinnerets - one converted into a liquid gas transport - and even a Caliphate Jamal resting between six various corporate and private models he was unable to categorize. And of course, over a dozen Confederate Pioneers, each in a different configuration.

The carriage was heading straight towards one of them: a PNR-03, one of the most basic and ubiquitous variants. The Pioneers were perhaps the most common light freighter on this side of the galaxy. A confederate design through and through. Crude, ugly, simple, sturdy, dependable. In constant production for over two hundred years. Ashen knew that many of the Pioneers that had rolled off the assembly lines so long ago were only still flying due to one incredibly useful characteristic: reliability. You could repair one on the fly with nothing but a proverbial hammer and two types of spanners.

It wasn’t the ship that caught Ashen Star’s attention however. Right behind the parked Pioneer the batpony spotted a group of his own police officers. At least two squads created a semicircle around the Pioneer’s main airlock. The ship’s sizable engines blocked the view and he didn’t know much other than what a short page on his multiband stated. Two suspects, ‘monsters’ rather, disturbing the peace. That was all he had gotten from his deputy, Ink Blaze. That and a cryptic message about having to see it with his own two eyes. At least his officers seemed to be in control of the situation. They all had their weapons out: stun guns, shock batons and sonic rifles. He could easily spot his deputy’s golden coat and thick red mane.

Ashen Star furrowed his brow in annoyance as the carriage started to slow down and carefully unpinned his holster. The carriage neared the Pioneer and stopped. Finally, he saw the source of the commotion: what appeared to be two large griffins stood by the ship’s airlock. One of them was circling around, clearly agitated. The other was perfectly still.

Ashen stepped out of the carriage and approached the mare at the center of the formation - Ink Blaze was responsible for the day shift on Miner’s Prospect. He flapped his wings loudly for attention, prompting the red-maned unicorn to turn around. He could see her expression changing as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. “Inks, what is going on here and who are these two?”

The mare opened her mouth to speak but then closed it. She looked over her shoulder at one of the big figures and started again. “Thank the stars you’re here, Sir - one of the patrols investigated a report of public disturbance. S-someone reported monsters prowling the streets…” The young mare grimaced as she realised how stupid she sounded, but Ashen just nodded along, allowing her to continue. “When the patrol identified the suspects and tried to question them, they refused. The officers called for backup…” She turned around to indicate the two large figures. “Well, after that, the backup called more backup. When they arrived they wanted to call in the Special Tactical Team.” She offered an uneasy smile. “That’s when I showed up.”

Ashen gave Inks The Look. The look he knew worked every time the moment he saw the recipient's face. It was a look he mastered over his entire career, one that he had to use annoyingly often in the force. With only a slight move of his eyes and a flick of an ear he could telegraph a full sentence. That look and that sentence were very well known to Inspector Ink Blaze. The message was simple.

Are you fucking serious?

Ashen wasn’t going to wait for his deputy to reply. “What did they do?”

Inks nervously fidgeted in her kevlar. “T-they were scaring people, Sir.”

“Scaring people how Inks?” His voice was becoming more and more tired.

“The caller reported two monsters walking around deck sixteen.”

“Walking around?”

She nodded. “Y-yes Sir.”

Ashen slowly raised a hoof up and squeezed the bridge of his muzzle. He took a deep breath followed by a heavy exhale. Another deep breath, then he started walking straight towards the cordon. He saw the tense expressions of his subordinates, the way they held their raised weapons and the nervous glances between them.

They were afraid.

Only when he approached the strange duo by the airlock did he finally get a good look at them.

These were no griffins. Both could have been easily mistaken for them from a distance - if griffins were about twice as big. He had never seen creatures like them before.

Both had feline paws like griffins, hindlegs and forelegs, their feet easily twice the size of his hooves. On their backs rested enormous wings that resembled those of a pegasus. The one sitting by the ramp had them folded, the other one who was pacing shook them every now and then. A tell he was familiar with - the creature was anxious to fly. Each had a long and muscular leonine tail. However, theirs were nearly as long as their entire bodies. One was resting perfectly still, the other whipped and swayed in anticipation. Because of their alien physiology it was hard to determine the pair’s age, but if Ashen Star had to guess, he’d have placed them around the mid thirties. He realised the one who was pacing was a female; her head was big and round, with a short muzzle not unlike a pony’s. That is where the similarities ended however. She was grinning, no, snarling. He could easily see her teeth. There were far too many, and all of them sharp. She reminded him of a shark. Her big yellow eyes had slitted irises - not like the ones he had. Hers were more like those of a reptile rather than a cat.

Around her eyes, he spotted what looked like makeup. Light purple on the eyelids, which he was surprised the creature possessed in the first place, and strange, black geometric markings around the corners of her eyes. He could see similar markings on the armour she wore; it appeared to be made of some kind of polymer, a matte plastic-like surface in the colour of raw iron. It covered her upper chest and all of her forelegs, but the most impressive - and as Ashen theorized, useless - part was the headdress. A crest resting on top of her head, between large ears that ended in small tufts of fur akin to his own. The crest was shaped to look like a stylized ibis head, way too small to be a helmet. Its beak and eyes were made of what appeared to be azure marble. From the back of the piece sprouted many flexible plates of the same polymer, mixed in with thick dreadlocks covering the entirety of the female's head and neck; and all the way to the shoulders.

The creature didn’t have a cutie mark, only more of those strange black markings on her rump and wrapping around the middle part of her tail. Her coat and feathers were of a deep peach colour, with her paws, exposed stomach and the tuft of hair at the end of the leonine tail being a lighter cream shade.

Ashen suddenly realised he was staring, and she was staring back. He also realised she was circling him, her steps deliberate and careful, like a cat cornering its prey.

He was too old for this shit.

He closed his eyes briefly and cleared his throat. “I am Chief Inspector Ashen Star of the Miner’s Prospect Police Force. My colleague informed me you two were disturbing the peace. Is that true?”

“No Chief Inspector, we were just stocking up on supplies.”

It wasn’t the female who spoke. The voice was deep, calm, professionally aloof. The batpony looked at the source, the other creature who was sitting still just a few meters away.

He appeared to be the member of the same species and wore similar armour. There were, however, a few differences. His coat and feathers were deep burgundy, fading to brown-gray shades in the same places the female's coat was also lighter. He was clad in armour that resembled the other’s, but was the shade of dark brass. The biggest difference was that he was wearing an elaborate mask made of the same material; it covered his entire face and most of his head, all the way down to the throat. Where the female had her armour stylized to look like a bird, his looked like a canine. A jackal, Ashen surmised.

The batpony scrutinized the male before taking a step forward. In the corner of his eye he could see the officers in the distance fidgeting nervously as the female shot them hostile glares.

This had a potential to spiral out of control quickly. At the very least, the male seemed to be more placable.

Ashen Star had seen a lot during over twenty years of his service, but this was certainly something new on the station - he still had to make up his mind if it were a mortal threat or a mere curiosity. He kept walking towards the male until he was six meters away, just enough to give himself time to draw the pistol and allow his officers to react.

Just in case.

“Is this your ship? What are you doing here?”

The male was sitting still just as he had been for the last few minutes. He only slightly shook his massive head and looked down at the batpony. “It belongs to our captain. She and the rest of the crew are not here. We are taking care of it until they return.”

The chief inspector half turned his head over his shoulder and raised his voice. “Inks. Come over here.” He could hear a low growl coming from his side. It was the huge female. He turned to face the male again as he heard Inks’ hooves clattering on the metal deck.

“S-sir?”

Ashen kept watching the creature's ornate mask as he spoke. “Did you run a check on the ship?”

“Yes Sir. Docked in nine days ago, paid for two weeks and repairs, which were completed three days ago.” She paused, clearly looking for more information. “Arrived from the League, no cargo to declare.”

“And the crew?”

“Six individuals, four left on a different ship two days after initial arrival. I-its legit, Sir.”

Ashen acknowledged his deputy with a nod before addressing the creature again. “So you are the two that were left behind. To take care of it, correct?”

The creature didn’t move an inch as it spoke. “Correct.”

The batpony turned fully to the unicorn and spoke with a tired voice. “Inks, did they do anything that broke the law on the station?”

The red-maned mare looked up from her tablet and reluctantly shook her head. “No Sir but the residents-”

Ashen let out a sigh, the type that had been becoming more and more common those days. “Inks, I like to think that I’m still too young to have memory problems, and if I’m right, there is nothing in the code about looking scary being a crime.”

The mare gulped. “Y-yes Sir.” Judging by her expression, she was already visualizing the verbal thrashing he’d give her in his office later.

With a slow, nearly laboured move of his wing the batpony clasped the safety on his holster again. “Send the guys back to work. We have bigger fish to fry, the top wants the investigation on the Knights accelerated. There’s nothing for us here.”

“Yes Sir! Right away Sir!”

He felt the corner of his mouth raise slightly as he watched her scamper away with her tail between her legs and start shouting orders to the gathered officers.

“Are we free to go?” The deep voice ruined the moment.

“Yes, on behalf of the Miner’s Prospect Police Force I apologize for the misunderstanding.” He looked at the creature just as he finished his sentence, only to see him rise fully to stand on all fours. The batpony couldn’t help but feel a shiver run down his spine at the towering mass of muscles before him.

“Thank you Chief Inspector.”

Ashen turned to leave but stopped mid step. He looked back over his shoulder, the two creatures were already heading for their ship. “What do they call you?”

The female quickly turned to face him, her long tail whipping in indignation. She narrowed her eyes and spoke with a surprisingly deep voice. “I am Donner, this is Blitz.” She kept staring at the batpony, likely expecting another question. Instead, he only nodded slightly and headed in the opposite direction.

*****

The airlock leading to Claudia’s cargo bay opened with a hiss before two huge creatures walked in. Blitz was heading straight towards the hatch leading to the common room at a slow pace. Around him, Donner sidestepped and paced as usual. She bent her forelegs and looked up at her companion. “They almost started a fight! That would have been… enjoyable.”

Blitz grunted and kept walking, not sparing the female a glance. “Yes, but it would also cause us to fail our task. The ship would have been taken.”

She snarled, righting herself up and skipping a two meter step to get back in front of Blitz. “I agree - it would have ended badly.” She flashed her triangular teeth in a grin. “For the police mostly.”

He finally stopped and deliberately turned his masked head to face her. “You are tense.”

Donner made a disgusted face; her voice was almost wailing. “We have been stuck here for almost ten days! Idle! You know we were not made for this. Hier festzustecken ist reine Folter!” Her tail loudly slapped the deck behind her. “I know you are perturbed too. It's frustrating!”

Blitz’s left wing snapped open and closed quickly, the first sign of annoyance since the encounter with the police. His voice raised in volume. “We were given a task. It is our duty to carry it out.”

She pawed the deck in annoyance. “I know! Don’t talk to me like you would to some foal.” A low growl escaped her throat, her tail whipped again and she could feel the fur on her back raising.

Blitz was now working both of his wings, slow circular motions that made the long feathers rustle. “Then don’t try to murder the station’s police force for your enjoyment!”

Donner reached out a paw and swiped at the air with a hiss. She then brought it close to her face and with an audible noise extracted the five massive claws hidden inside the pudgy paws. “I am bored! And so are you!” She slammed the paw into the deck and dragged the claws with a horrid screech, leaving uneven grooves in the metal.

The masked colossus spread his wings wide and flapped them once. “Das ist mir egal. We will remain here until the captain and the crew retu-”

He was cut off by a ferocious growl. Donner sprang at him with both paws outstretched.

Blitz roared in challenge but otherwise was too slow to reply to the ambush. A huge mass of muscle, teeth and claws slammed into him, sending both tumbling on the floor in a massive grapple.

The two rolled on the deck, trading blows and kicks. Hissing and roaring, filled with animalistic rage. Her tail firmly wrapped around one of his hindlegs, effectively immobilizing it. In reply, he grabbed her left wing and pulled it hard, causing the female to let out a muffled cry of pain. They rolled across the cargo room, each trading blows and trying to get a good grapple on the other. Nothing worked. Every time she bit on his leg, he thrashed to dislodge her. Every time he grabbed her shoulders, she managed to weasel out. Blow for blow, grip and escape. And all that accompanied by unholy roars, growls and hisses.

They could feel their blood pumping faster, their muscles working under their thick skin, their minds flushing with adrenaline and a primal urge to kill.

As they rolled they crashed into something metallic, something that crumpled under their weight. Neither paid much attention to it; both were giving their opponent their full focus. With a swift headbutt he managed to drop her on her back and jump on top of her, holding one foreleg on her throat with force strong enough to break a pony’s neck, then started to choke. He looked down through his mask at her face, filled with bestial wrath. She flashed a mad grin. Blitz felt a sudden jolt of pain running up his spine as his tail was pulled - not hard enough to cause any harm, but enough to distract him.

That was Donner’s chance. She pumped her hindlegs into his stomach like heavy duty pistons, causing Blitz to gasp for breath. Then she extended one of her muscular limbs fully, using the floor as leverage.

He found himself being flung over her head and landed on his back with a heavy thud. Once he looked up he saw her standing above him, grinning.

“Gewonnen!”

Blitz lay motionless. Only a low, dangerous growl escaped from under his mask. He watched her grin for a few seconds, until finally she let out a gust of air through her nostrils and reached out a paw towards him. He grabbed it and found himself being effortlessly pulled to his feet. Once he was fully standing he shook his entire body and growled again. “This cabin fever will be the end of us.”

She was watching one of her wings closely as she worked it, checking if it still retained its full movement range. She spoke casually. “With the captain gone, we could use her quarters. Her bed is big enough.”

He stood there, motionless as usual. She watched him closely as she stretched her limbs one by one, eyes fixated on the ornate mask. Finally the silent giant spoke. “Perhaps later. You know that napping in a comfortable bed won’t change anything.”

A hiss and a swipe of a huge paw was her reply. After a moment she let out a deep chuckle. “We are the same age. Don’t tell me you are getting old.” She turned around, her long tail reaching over to Blitz, the furry tuft at the end of it softly brushing on his faceplate. “Forty years ago you were the one that kept impatiently waiting for the next rest period.”

If Donner’s teasing had any effect, the deep-voiced giant didn’t show it. “Forty years ago you were the one that kept impatiently waiting for the next fight.”

She lashed her tail across his covered face like a whip and headed for the common room. “Fine, but we still need to find something to do. Being cooped up here is driving me crazy.”

“Einverstanden.” He was about to follow her but then something caught his attention. A panel in the middle of the cargo room - the one controlling the cargo crane and the floor airlock. The screen was cracked; the wirebox running to the airlock was smashed and dropping sparks. That must have been what the duo crashed into when they had their playfight. He also noticed that the airlock was ajar. Not by much - just a few centimeters - but it would be enough to ground the ship if it couldn’t be closed. He called after his retreating companion. “I think I just found us a task.”

*****

Located in orbit above Heraklion II, Miner’s Prospect was the biggest anchorage in the sector and a prime export center for the massive amounts of raw materials mined throughout the system. As a result of this and its placement on the state’s border, cargo ships hailing from outside the Confederacy docked there to fill their humongous holds on a regular basis. This had a side effect of making Miner’s Prospect an unusual melting pot of cultures and nationalities, a rarity in the otherwise quite uniform socialist state. Creatures of all kinds walked its streets - mostly minotaurs and griffins, but also pegasi, unicorns and earth ponies. Even deer and crystal ponies were occasionally visible. The station’s markets and primary thoroughfares were nearly as cosmopolitan as similar trading centers in the NLR or Avalon.

Donner and Blitz, of course, were not in the habit of frequenting the primary thoroughfares.

The alley was dark; this part of the station had only the barest illumination. The original intention in the station’s design had been that the main streets would have been used for cargo and pedestrian traffic, while the alleys would have been relegated to use by the locals as marketplaces and communal space. The reality of Miner’s Prospect was different. When the battered refugees of the War of the Two Crowns settled on the other side of the border, the entire sector had experienced a massive boom in demand for raw materials. Within twenty months the station’s population had tripled, and it was quickly discovered that the original facilities would just not cut it. After massive redevelopment efforts by the Party, the station had gained modern cargo terminals able to service the biggest of freighters. The void left by the old infrastructure was taken over by the previous occupants of these streets; now the many smaller paths in the station were left abandoned and in disrepair. Perfect places for unsavoury characters to do their shady dealings.

Donner wrinkled her snout at the foul stench as she walked. Even the massive columns of steam rising from the faulty heating conduits that ran along the deck didn’t protect her sensitive sense of smell from the stink of refuse permeating the alleyway. “We should have taken the main street. It would be far easier to find some way to obtain credits there.”

Her companion kept pace beside her. She couldn’t see it, but Donner knew he was also irritated by the smell. “We do not wish to antagonize the security again.”

She flared her wings in annoyance, then followed up with a toothy grin. “Their leader said it himself. Being scary is not a crime.”

Blitz graced her statement with a small nod. “I’d rather not take any more chances.”

She put her foot down hard on the next step, eliciting high pitched squeaking from the darkness as some small vermin ran for cover in panic. “I enjoy their fear, as do you. As long as we-”

Donner was interrupted when a dozen meters ahead, the door on the side of the alley slammed open with a crash. Loud but muffled music blasted forth. A second later a shape was violently tossed out. It rolled on the hard metal deck and came to rest in a pile of rancid trash bags on the opposite side. The light spilling from inside the building revealed the shape to be small and vaguely equine shaped.

The duo stopped, still in the darkness. Only Donner’s tail weaved and spun in anticipation as if it had a life on its own.

A large stallion stepped out through the door and slammed it behind him with a kick of his hindleg. Most of his mane was covered by a plain black bandana. He stared the shape with hatred on his features and with a flick of his magic unsheathed a metal rod from a holster on his belt before trotting over to the refuse pile. “Useless piece of trash!” With another flick of magic the rod swung and extended, then swung down with a wet smack, then again, and again, faster and faster. The stallion leaned down and grabbed the shape with his large hoof before hefting it up, his booming voice filled the alleyway. “You do what you are told!” He turned and flung the shape away and into the side of a trash bin. It impacted with a dull metallic thud. “When will you get it into your empty head!?” He marched over to the cowering shape and raised his foreleg high above his head.

It didn’t go down.

The stallion whipped his head back, only to see a giant paw hold his hoof in place. His eyes followed the thick foreleg, up, up and up until they settled on an ornate mask. Its opaque, unblinking eyes stared back.

“What the fuck?” He pulled back quickly and slid out of the grip. “Get the fuck away you freak!” The thug took a step backwards only to bump into something else. He turned even quicker to see a large round face bearing a grin of too many sharp teeth and large slitted eyes stare him down.

“SHIT!” In a burst of panic, he telekinetically pressed a button on his weapon. It crackled loudly with electricity, and the stallion smiled. He held the charge button as the baton sailed forward, straight at the face of the freakish creature.

A cream paw grabbed the shaft of the baton and held it firmly. He realised he had not seen the limb move. He kept holding the button, the electric crackling was continuous; thin wisps of smoke started escaping from between the creature’s clenched paw. Finally, the device sputtered and died, its battery exhausted. The grin never vanished.

“Wrong move.”

The last thing the unicorn felt before he lost consciousness was a vice-like grip lifting him off his hooves by the neck.

Donner dropped the nightstick on the deck before depositing the thug in the nearby trash container. As she did, she glanced at the small shape lying still nearby. She looked at Blitz, asking a silent question. Only after he gave her a small nod did she approach the shape and scoop it up with her wing. Holding it like an infant, she followed her companion, who started walking down the alleyway towards a circle of yellow light from a lone lamppost.

Once they reached their destination, the shape was gently deposited on the deck. Donner faced it and sat on all fours, folding her forelegs under her bulk, while Blitz stood watch just a few meters away.

The shape turned out to be a zebra. A mare, no, a filly. Donner’s best guess was that she was somewhere around eighteen years of age. It was hard to gauge it correctly. The filly's right eye was swollen heavily, totally obscuring her vision. The zebra’s other eye was wide open, staring at Donner, unblinking, allowing her to see the light red disc of its iris. She could see the wetness at the bottom of the eyelid, but no tears were flowing. She could also see the purple eyeshadow and the thick, pretentious eyeliner around the zebra’s eyes. More gaudy makeup was visible: deep red lipstick, now smudged heavily, was present on the filly’s lips. Her fine face was well illuminated by the light, it still held the last vestiges of a juvenile appearance. The zebra’s mane was long and must have been well kept - it reminded Donner of a flowing wave - only now it was partially ruined by the recent ordeal. She wore clothes and accessories even someone like Donner knew were affiliated with the oldest trade. A set of large hooped rings dangled from her ears, and on her neck was a tight leather choker with a single metal link and an unknown monogram. A slim, half transparent, sleeveless top stuck to her lithe form firmly, her flank was barely covered by a dark jeans mini skirt. It hid half of the zebra’s mark, an abstract shape Donner could not decipher with certainty. The entirety of the zebra’s body was covered in an aggressive-looking zigzag pattern of her natural stripes - charcoal and matte silver, colours so common among her species.

Donner’s well attuned senses could feel the zebra’s fear. The little thing was trembling, her heart was thumping like a jackhammer, her jaw muscles were straining from clenching her teeth. Her good eye was firmly anchored right at Donner, it’s pupil fully opened. The filly looked like she was about to cry.

Yet, no tears were coming.

Donner sat there in silence. She closed her eyes slowly and took a deep breath, then looked at the zebra and spoke quietly. “You will not be hurt.” She shifted her eyes in the direction of the door briefly before returning to the filly. “We are not these people.”

The zebra sat there, silent and trembling. Her eye never left Donner’s face.

The large female watched the filly closely for any sign of reply. Even a minor shift in posture or a mouthed word would be a significant tell.

No such luck.

Blitz’s deep voice could be heard from deeper in the alleyway. “We have to go, someone will soon be here to see where that unicorn went.”

Donner didn’t reply to her companion; her full attention was on the filly.

An ugly sound could suddenly be heard, but in the quiet alleyway it sounded poignant, especially to the keen ears of Blitz and Donner.

The zebra started sniffing lightly.

But no tears came.

Carefully, to not startle the filly, Donner rose to her feet. She looked down on the zebra who was still fixated on the same spot as before. In turn, the filly was looking directly upwards to keep her vision of Donner’s face.

“Wir müssen gehen.” Blitz was already heading deeper into the barely lit alleyway.

Donner broke eye contact with the zebra and stepped after her companion, only to feel something grab the end of her tail.

She didn’t turn, she didn’t look. Instead, she lowered one of her wings to the deck. A soft clatter of hooves followed, then a tug on her feathers and a feeling of small weight holding on to her plumed limb. The large female stood patiently. Finally, after she was certain her passenger had a good grip, she effortlessly lifted the wing up and deposited the fragile cargo on her back before heading into the darkness after Blitz.

*****

Blitz and Donner sat in silence, facing away from the common room’s couch on which the filly was sleeping. The two giants, with the exception of Donner’s tail, were perfectly still. Their backs were straight, their forelegs locked and their gazes impassive, like a pair of military guard dogs faithfully performing their duty. It was the only way to put the filly at ease long enough for her exhaustion to push her to sleep.

After over ninety minutes, Blitz broke the silence, his voice carefully low to not wake up the zebra who was cradling a worn pillow between her forelegs. “She still hasn't said a word. Are we certain this is the correct course of action?”

Donner kept her gaze nailed to an imaginary point on the wall straight ahead. Only her ear facing Blitz flickered, more out of habit and restlessness than to indicate that she registered what he said. “I am not sure. Someone could come after her. Cause trouble, endanger our duty. Do you think we should give her away? The police perhaps?”

The masked colossus let out a deep growl. “No. We took her in. It would be… irresponsible to relinquish that burden.”

The female blinked slowly, her gaze still glued to the same spot. “So we keep this… filly? At least until she can decide on her own? What about our mission? How do you intend to repair the ship now?”

“We will have to find a source of income and use it for repairs. The sooner we find it, the sooner we will be in a position to assist the zebra.”

The zebra whose sole healthy eye was watching the huge forms in front of her. Their massive wings, their muscular backs and their thick tails. She had no idea what they were or who they were. All she knew was that they saved her from a lot of pain.

Her swollen eye burned, her ribcage ached with each breath, her flank stung. She knew this kind of pain could be ignored, or at the very least endured.

There were other things that left their painful marks much more deeply.

But she didn’t think about those for the first time in a very long time. Her mind was filled with questions about the two giants. She couldn’t wrap her head around them; there were so many things she didn’t understand. She knew one thing for certain however.

For the first time in years, hidden behind a wall of muscle, claws and teeth, she felt secure. The filly squeezed her forelegs around the pillow and drifted back into dreamless sleep.

*****

“Come now sweet thing! Mommy has a very special friend that would love to meet you.”

The tug on her neck was enough to make the filly wake up with a gasp. She reached to hold a hoof to her choker, only to find it inert. Her singular eye darted around, only to reveal the same room she remembered falling asleep in.

It had just been a dream.

She took a deep breath and waited for her pounding heart to slow down, then looked properly around. This definitely was the room where the giants brought her last night, aboard their starship. She was currently lying on a worn couch. In the middle of the room were a large round table with a set of chairs, as well as an old pool table. The filly also spotted a large screen on the opposite wall and a simple kitchen area. Sets of reinforced doors were present on every wall.

It all looked strange to the zebra, so unlike the places she was used to. It was also quiet. No muffled music or drunken conversations from behind the walls. No cries or curses spilling through the closed doors. If not for the barely audible rattle of a life support unit and the strange, distant humm from somewhere above, she could almost hear herself breathing.

Suddenly she realised something. She was alone. Her heart started to race again. Where did they go? Did they leave her? Worse, did they lock her in?

The filly jumped off the couch, enduring the stinging pain in her chest. She started walking towards the nearby door, but just as she was about to grab the heavy handle, another door on the other side of the room opened.

Blitz held his wings close to his body as he passed into the common room. His masked face turned towards the filly, who was standing by the hatch to the captain’s cabin. “You are awake.” The giant walked towards the kitchen counter and deposited a stack of styrofoam containers; a subtle whiff of cooked fish and exotic spices could be detected. He watched as the zebra’s nostrils expanded subtly. “You must be hungry. You are welcome to join us if you wish.”

He studied her as she watched him with apprehension for a short moment, before she took a tentative step forward, then another, until she reached the round table and sat on one of the chairs.

The huge male nodded and scooped up the containers in his wing. He took two steps and laid them out on the table. “My companion will be here momentarily.”

The filly looked awkward, as if she had no idea what to do. He saw a tinge of fear in her uncertain movement. Only after he pushed one of the containers across the table and nodded, the zebra reached for the plastic box and slid it towards her. She ripped the paper sachet containing the single use utensils and opened the box. Blitz watched the twinkle in her eye as her face was covered in a cloud of white vapor and gazed upon the mound of plain rice, two large pieces of steamed fish and a generous serving of cauliflower salad. The zebra didn’t waste time - she started wolfing down the meal.

Blitz split the remaining eight containers between himself and the space next to him. They all contained the same meal. Just as he finished, the hatch from the cargo bay opened again.

Donner walked in with a sour expression, she took a seat next to her companion and glanced at the zebra who was eating her food eagerly before looking at Blitz. “I couldn’t find any opportunity to earn more credits. The best I got was a no.” She flashed a grin. “Most were too afraid to even answer.” She grabbed one of the containers and leaned over it but suddenly stopped. Her impassive stare first moved to Blitz, then to the filly, before moving back to Blitz again. Her eyes focused wholly on the opaque eye slits in his mask. An unspoken question was asked.

He nodded and faced the zebra who was too busy with her food to notice, then got up and took his four containers before leaving for the upper deck.

Donner watched him go before she started eating her own meal. She didn’t bother with the chopsticks; they were too small for her paws anyway. Instead she used her hoof-sized tongue to scoop up large portions of food one by one without chewing. The numerous, tiny hooks covering it were especially helpful with small grains of rice. After just a few minutes all four containers were empty.

“That was good.”

The melodic, juvenile voice caught Donner off guard, her pupils expanded as she looked up at the zebra sitting on the opposite side of the table. “So you talk.”

The filly bit her lower lip and darted her eyes anywhere but towards the large female. It was obvious that Donner’s attention made her nervous. “Y-yes, I do. I’m sorry, I was just so scared before. I didn’t even know what to think!” Donner noted the zebra’s rushed speech, as if she were trying to excuse her actions in front of a parent or a teacher.

Or a master.

The zebra continued hurriedly. “You and your friend, if you didn’t do what you… did, I would have ran at the sight of you! You are huge! And scary!”

The corner of Donner’s mouth shifted slightly upwards at that last word. “That we are.” Her tail began to weave and shift, more so than usual. “We decided to intervene to protect you, something our captain no doubt would have ordered. There is no merit in fighting those that do not fight back.” She studied the filly’s face; it was apparent the zebra was becoming confused. She closed her eyes and fanned her tongue on her upper lip, then addressed the filly again. “I am Donner, my companion is Blitz. What are you called?”

The zebra blinked a few times in confusion at the strange display before fidgeting in her seat. “I am K’yopi.”

“K’yopi?” The deep voice announced from the top of the stairs behind her. Blitz carefully walked down to the common room, four empty styrofoam containers under his wing. He headed for the kitchen counter and deposited them there before turning around and stopping right next to the young zebra. “It is good to finally hear your voice.”

The filly offered a nervous stare back at the ornate mask watching her. “Thanks? I uhhh…” She shifted her head between the two large creatures. “Whatever your reasons, thank you.” She watched as Donner stood up and approached her from the other side of the table. Suddenly, the young zebra felt very tiny and very vulnerable.

She flinched as something soft and bushy touched her shoulder. When she turned she saw Blitz reaching his tail towards her face. Her mind was screaming at her that these two giants were allies, but her body could not shake off the instincts she had been forced to adopt over the years. She closed her eye and tensed...

Only to feel the fluffy tail rub thoroughly around her healthy eyelid. When it retreated she opened it again to see that the bushy tuft was smudged with black and purple.

She reached a foreleg and swiped it along the same eye. There was no colourful stain on her coat; the makeup was gone.

“Welcome to Claudia K’yopi. You are safe here.”

*****

K’yopi lifted her face from the filled sink with a gasp and shook her head, spraying water everywhere. The filly watched her reflection in the mirror, and winced as her towel-covered hoof gingerly touched around her right eye. It wasn’t hurting as much anymore, but the swelling still made it nearly impossible to see anything. For now she would have to live with it. At the very least, her natural markings would hide the bruising.

Careful to not irritate the swelling, she rubbed the towel around her face, cleaning off the last remains of the ostentatious makeup. She watched as water droplets slowly made their way down the mirror’s surface. She could feel her heart thumping faster.

The filly reached a hoof and carefully removed one of the hoops hanging under her ear, then the other. She dropped the cheap jewelry into a nearby trash bin before grabbing the choker and unbuttoning it. A chill went down her spine as her eye passed over the indent it left on her coat.

Next, the zebra pulled off the top and unbuttoned the mini skirt before sliding it down and off. She stood naked in front of the mirror, watching as the water warped her reflection. Slowly, with hesitation in her movements and fear in her mind she turned, inspecting her form from all sides.

There were marks. Most of them fresh like the bruises from last night. But there were also those that would never disappear. Small scars, cuts of blade or claw, cigarette burns and needle pricks. She felt her muscles tense up again; a rush of panic started flooding her mind. She had to force herself to close her healthy eye and stop staring at her own reflection. Her heart was racing again.

Carefully, she turned around and entered the shower. She fiddled with the controls for a moment, and the whoosh of water drowned out the sound of her own blood pulsing in her head. The hot, flowing liquid didn’t do much to stop the zebra from shivering. She remained frozen, standing in the middle of the shower as the heated water thoroughly drenched her form.

After ten minutes she finally felt her body relax. Her soaked mane obstructed her vision as she blindly reached a foreleg and closed the cabin, then carefully slid to a corner and dropped on her rump.

K’yopi attempted to not think about anything. Thinking in this state of mind was never a good idea. Instead she focused her gaze on the shower’s drain and the swirl of water going into the hole. The filly hugged herself tightly and tried to make herself as small as possible.

She sat there, letting hot water cleanse her body for a long time. She might have sniffed once or twice, maybe even a few times. But she never cried.

*****

Blitz stood by the common room’s table, idly watching an imperial news broadcast about some sort of commotion in the Periphery. Behind him, Donner lay sprawled on the couch, one of her hindlegs raised and stretched as she worked on grooming her coat with her tongue.

With the tip of a semi extended claw the huge male tapped a button on the table’s control screen and muted the broadcast. “She’s been there nearly an hour now.” He turned to face his companion.

Donner looked up, tongue still out and touching the fur around her muscular thigh. She only let out a guttural acknowledgement before resuming her grooming.

Before Blitz could offer a rebuttal, the door to the bathroom squeaked open, grabbing the attention of the two giants. A head peeked out through the gap; its entire face was covered by a gray-black tangle of hair.

If K’yopi could see through her own mane she didn’t show it. “Could I have something to cover myself with?”

Blitz nodded at the filly. “I believe the captain should have something in her cabin.” He watched as the head retreated back into the bathroom and the door closed. It took him a few moments to realise that the zebra was not coming out and he would have to search for something himself.

The captain’s cabin looked exactly how she left it. The bed cover was a twisted mess; Blitz could see strands of long green and brown hair lying on the pillow. Nearly half of the ship’s supply of coffee mugs rested on the desk, in addition to a pile of empty beer cans in the bin. The male reached one of the drawers and pulled it open. After a brief search he found something satisfactory: a small-sized mechanic’s jumpsuit, never used by the captain, judging by the fresh look. He held it under his wing and made way towards the bathroom.

Donner was busy with her wings now; a small pile of damaged or loose feathers was collecting on the floor as she diligently nibbled on her wing’s trailing edge.

After a knock, the door to the bathroom opened just enough for a striped foreleg to reach out and scoop the clothes Blitz had brought before shutting again. He took a step back and waited.

The door opened fully, and K’yopi looked around before slowly stepping out. From her neck down to her fetlocks she was covered by the jumpsuit, but her mane was a wild mess of damp hair. With her single healthy eye she watched Blitz as if unsure how to proceed. Finally, after a prolonged moment she nodded hesitantly.

“I am fine.”

“Come here.” Donner’s voice nearly made the filly jump. She shifted her position on the couch to lie on her side along it, her hindlegs and forelegs dangling from the opposite ends. She indicated a spot right in the middle with a wing.

K’yopi looked at Donner, then at Blitz. The look in her eye, along with her posture, betrayed her worry.

Donner patted the couch with her massive wing. “Sit down. I will help you.”

That took the zebra by surprise. Those last two words, she hadn’t heard them in a very long time. She could only gingerly nod and walk over to the resting female.

As soon as K’yopi sat on the couch, Donner extended one of her huge wings and wrapped it against the zebra’s chest. The filly suppressed a flinch as she felt her back rest against the giant’s chest. In turn, her own front was gently covered by a massive feathery appendage. She felt the warmth emanating from the female, the rhythmic movement of her chest pushing against K’yopi’s back. The soft feathery tips gently brushing against her forelegs. The filly felt a strange calmness overtake her - it almost muted her subconscious screaming warnings into her head. Almost.

Blitz watched closely for a few moments; he didn’t know what Donner was planning, but he had no intention to interfere. Instead, he busied himself with gathering up the empty takeaway containers and depositing them into the ship’s incinerator chute.

“W-what are you doing?” the filly asked without turning her head. Instead of an answer she heard a different sound. A constant, soft, buzzlike noise emanating right behind her. In addition to the noise, K’yopi felt Donner’s large body vibrate softly. She opened her muzzle to ask the same question again, but was cut off when a large paw grabbed her still-damp mane and began working it.

Donner’s soft paws gently started to arrange the filly’s mane. The soft touch of feathers and the creature’s purring had an otherworldly effect on K’yopi she could not easily explain. She felt her worries drifting away. The screaming voice in the depths of her mind became quiet, then muted, until it finally disappeared. She took a relaxed breath and closed her eye. Only the occasional tug of her mane and the soothing purring filled her attention. They almost made her feel sleepy.

Minutes passed as Donner worked the filly’s mane quietly. Finally, K’yopi opened her eye and looked at Blitz who was sitting on the floor nearby. “What will happen to me?”

His masked face turned, and its unblinking eyes stared at the zebra. “That depends on your choice.” The giant was immobile, something K’yopi noticed was in stark contrast to the female. He always seemed to act like a statue while his companion never ceased moving. “Do you have a home? Family or guardians to get back to?”

She never did. The streets and corridors of Miner’s Prospect have been the closest she could consider ‘home’. Squatting whenever possible or staying on the run. She had contacts, even allies, but they were few and far between. Besides, she had no idea where they were now. The closest she ever had to a guardian was Mother.

Mother - K’yopi hadn’t seen her in a very long time. Long ago she had thought that Mother was good to her, cared for her. Oh how naive she was. She'd done a lot of growing up since they parted ways.

Since Mother traded her away for a briefcase full of drugs.

“No, I don’t. Never had.” The zebra found it easy to admit that; she had accepted it long ago. A street child like her would very quickly learn to face the harsh reality of life. She watched as Blitz nodded slowly, but because of his mask there was no telling if he had any reaction to her admission. The nagging question rolled in her thoughts. Who were they? What were they? They looked like soldiers. No, mercenaries, what with their armour and strange markings.

Mercenaries. Mercenaries needed money; K’yopi knew that much. An idea formed in her head, something she had been daydreaming about for a long time. Something she had always sworn to do the moment she escaped that awful place. And here was her chance.

“Can I stay with you? Please? You need money? I know where to get it. Take everything, just please let me stay here.” She wiggled her forelegs from under Donner’s wing and clasped them together in a pleading gesture.

Blitz studied the filly. She seemed genuine enough, and they needed the credits. He indicated for her to continue with his wing.

The zebra gulped and started talking again. “There is someone who…” She had to force the words through her throat. “Someone who took care of me long ago. I know where to find her.” She had an idea of where to find her. “T-there is a bounty on her head. A big one!”

“You wish for us to claim a bounty on someone who helped you?” The giant’s voice was neutral, careful not to imply anything or judge.

The zebra shook her head frantically, which prompted an annoyed hiss from behind. “Mother is the reason I was in that place you found me! S-she… she gave me away! She never meant to be nice to me, she just groomed me to - to…” Her throat clenched shut as she found herself unable to speak more.

Blitz didn’t need to hear any more. “Very well. Donner?”

The female took her eyes from her work on the filly’s mane and nodded. “We help the child, gain credits to repair Claudia and actually do something for once?” She bared her triangular teeth. “I am in.”

Blitz nodded and addressed the zebra again. “We will do as you ask.”

K’yopi waited for him to continue, to add a ‘but’. The giant was silent. She couldn’t believe it. After years of misery her fortune was turning around. She reflexively leaned back, only to feel the back of her head bump into what must have been Donner’s snout.

“Halt still, Ich bin noch nicht fertig!”

The zebra froze at the loud voice. “W-what?”

“Don’t move,” The voice from behind continued as the tugs on her mane resumed. “You don’t speak griffish.” More of a statement than a question.

The filly was about to shake her head but wisely decided to not do it. “I don’t even speak zebra.” She sighed deeply. “I-I can’t even read properly.” If Donner had somehow reacted to the admission, K’yopi didn’t see it. She could only watch as Blitz made his way through one of the doors and disappeared inside the room beside the stairs. She closed her eyes and tried to ease her nerves.

It was nearly impossible now. Her mind was racing. Would they really do it? Would they punish Mother? What then? Would she be able to stay on this ship forever? She never before had to think for herself further than a week or two into the future. It was becoming very confusing very quickly.

“Finished!”

Donner’s deep voice brought K’yopi back to reality. Then, she felt herself being gently pushed off the couch. Upon landing on the deck the zebra turned around to face the large female, still sprawled across the couch. She reached a hoof to touch her mane and felt thick clumps of hair woven into a number of individual strands. After a brief inspection she grabbed one of the strands and pulled it in front of her face. The filly realised she had seen those before, right at the back of Donner’s head.

Slowly, Donner sat up before she slid off the couch which creaked heavily under her bulk. “Wait here.” She headed for the room Blitz had entered a few moments earlier.

Closing the hatch behind her, the female sat in front of the captain’s desk. On the opposite side sat Blitz. His padded paw moved on the touch screen built into the desk. “Mother. Twenty five thousand credits. Preferably alive.”

Donner creased her eyebrows in annoyance. “That will cost extra.”

Blitz continued reading from the screen. “Last seen on Miner’s Prospect in the Heraklion system. Two months ago. Current whereabouts unknown.” His paw swiped the screen to reveal a high resolution mugshot of a griffiness. According to the file she was thirty seven standard years old. Her yellow beak contrasted with her dark blue feathers. The last two or so centimeters at the tip of the beak were missing. An easily recognizable mark. “There is no information on where to find her.”

Donner studied the inverted picture, attempting to commit it to her memory. “The child says she knows where to find this… Mother.”

With another flick of his wrist, Blitz closed the file and returned to the desktop, which showed a wallpaper of a unicorn foal blowing a raspberry. He looked up at Donner and spoke quietly. “She will have to come with us in that case.”

*****

K’yopi stood in the shadows, the two monstrous creatures flanking her. She reached a foreleg to point out ahead. “Right there! That is the place where she looks for clients! Rotlicht!”

From their vantage point at the mouth of a dark alleyway the trio could clearly see the entire street. A crowd of perhaps thirty creatures was formed into an orderly line of twos and threes. The head of the line started by a closed, unmarked door. A large pegasus and a larger minotaur were acting as bouncers, blocking the door. It looked like the place wasn't open to guests yet.

Donner’s wings shook as she wrinkled her snout in annoyance. “I don’t think we are wearing acceptable attire.”

Blitz nodded before steering K’yopi back into the alley. “We will have to find a different way to enter. It would be unwise to make a scene with so many bystanders around.”

As she followed, Donner could only groan at the severe lack of violence in the plan so far. “You want to do it quietly? How? They won’t just let us in through the back door.”

The trio kept walking, using the alleyways to head for the back of the target building. The male’s voice had an almost amused tinge to it. “I want to do it quieter, not quietly.”

The female let out a brief, contented purr as they rounded another corner.

K’yopi had to nearly trot to keep up with the giants’ strides as she tried her best to stay between their large forms. “What about me? I-I can help! Mother knows me.” She shifted her head rapidly between the two, looking for any form of acknowledgement.

“You will come with us.” Donner didn’t look down as she spoke. “It would be dangerous to leave you unattended.”

The zebra nearly tripped. “I can handle myself! I know… stuff.” Maybe she didn’t know how to read, but K’yopi was certain of her streetwise skills. Years of living on the station’s streets had required them mercilessly.

Blitz peered around the street’s corner before indicating for them to proceed with a gesture of his wing. His voice, as usual, was calm. “She didn’t mean that.”

Even though neither of the giants were watching, the zebra blew a raspberry. “I am not a child.”

They were walking through the alleyway that would lead them to the back of the club. Both Blitz and Donner kept alert; their ears pivoted in different directions, often independently from one another. K’yopi realised that her own hurried steps were very audible. Suddenly self-conscious, she slowed down as much as she could without falling behind. She knew how to walk silently. A small tinge of pride made her chest puff out as her own hoofsteps quieted. Being quiet was one of the things she was good at.

If Blitz noticed, he didn’t show it, but his voice was muted now. “You’ll be safer and more useful. Your contacts will aid us in the task ahead.”

The zebra opened her mouth to protest, then blinked, and blinked again. They were really taking her with them. She took a deep breath. “Oooh boy.”

Donner lightly brushed a wing on the filly’s side. “Problem?”

K’yopi nearly jumped at the touch. “N-no. No! I am fine.” She wasn’t fine. She had imagined this moment a thousand times. Where Mother paid for what she had done to her. And now, it was finally happening. She thought she’d feel glad, maybe even happy. But right now she was feeling exceedingly nervous. Mother would surely recognize her; it hadn’t been that long after all. Barely over a year. What then? The zebra had a hundred thoughts racing through her mind at the same time, and very few of them were happy.

A hard, metallic snap grabbed her attention. She realised that she has fallen behind. A few meters ahead, Donner had just used her claws to pry a thick padlock off the club’s back door. As soon as the female was clear, Blitz opened the door and peered inside, then with a flap of his wing he indicated for the others to follow.

The club’s backstage appeared empty and relatively clean. Narrow hallways forced the trio to walk single file, with the zebra in the middle and Donner at the back. They walked for a few moments as Blitz led them. K'yopi couldn't tell why the giant chose a particular route each time they passed an intersection or door, but he seemed to be moving with purpose. Or at least making educated guesses. Soon they reached a room, big enough to let them file out. Inside there were stacks of supplies, pallets full of bottled water, piles of beer kegs, cardboard boxes with snacks, metal crates, lighting and audio equipment. The most prominent feature, however, was a pegasus mare wearing a black t-shirt with the club’s name on the back. Her head was buried in one of the supply crates, her wings digging for something in agitation. She hadn’t spotted the intruders.

Donner took a silent step forward. Step by step, she was getting closer to the unsuspecting mare. Just as she raised her foreleg to strike, Blitz spoke out and shattered the silence. “Do you know where Mother is?” Donner froze and looked over her shoulder with a scowl directed at her companion.

The pegasus didn’t look up; only a single wing poked out of the crate and pointed to the nearby door leading to a staircase. “Getting high up top as usual.” The wing returned back to the crate, resuming its search. Not a second later the mare stopped. She started speaking again as she raised her head. “Wait, do I know y-” Now the mare froze, face to chest with Donner’s massive bulk. Her paw was still raised to strike. The pegasus swallowed hard as her eyes travelled upwards until she looked at Donner’s face.

The female slowly bared her pointed teeth. K’yopi could swear she heard a sound like a blade being unsheathed when five massive, wicked claws extended from Donner’s paw.

Donner slowly moved the clawed paw towards the pegasus’ face; the young mare was transfixed on the murderous implements. “Run.” She didn’t have to say it again - the mare instantly bolted towards the door the trio entered through. As soon as she was out of sight, Donner growled at Blitz, then slammed the raised paw on a crate and slowly dragged it against it.

Sparks shot out from the tortured metal, and K’yopi’s ears flattened at the horrid screeching. She quickly forced herself to speak. “Up the stairs, t-that’s where we will find Mother.” She headed for the door. “Come on!”

The narrow stairway led them to the first floor and a small junction. A miniature bar was nestled in one of the corners with simple synthleather sofas on either side. Three sets of doors were visible. There was no one else inside. K’yopi moved her head around, her nose whiffing, and smelled the barely perceptible odour of long-spilled alcohol and cigarettes. “Now what?” Her healthy eye blinked as she spotted something. “Guys!” The filly pointed to the far door, where a faded plaque marked with a symbol of a shooting star was visible. “I think she’ll be there.”

Blitz nodded at the zebra and stepped towards the door. Donner followed him. They both quietly took positions on either side. Not knowing what to do, the filly decided to stick as close as possible to Donner and hid behind her bulky torso. They stood like that for a long moment. K’yopi didn’t know how, but she could sense the anticipation. Both giants were nearly motionless. Only Donner’s tail weaved and spun, occasionally brushing against the zebra’s jumpsuit. The filly held her breath.

Before any of them could move, the door opened violently. A lavender tail swished out, followed by a white mare backing away from the VIP room, her violet bat wings gesturing in agitation as she stopped with her front half still inside. The high level of annoyance in her voice failed to mask her flowing non-Confederate accent. “That is the third time in a row you didn’t provide a good candidate! If you won’t have a promising unicorn next time I visit, we will be forced to renegotiate your loan!” The door slammed and the batpony turned, then flinched and raised a leathery wing to cover her face at the sight of the ornate mask next to her. The mare lowered her wing nearly instantly and seized the giant with her slitted pupils, then brought up a foreleg and glanced at her antique and very expansive looking wristwatch. “I don’t have the time for this.“ She shook her head and went for the exit.

K’yopi blinked. “What was that?”

Donner blew air through her nostrils audibly. “Not our target.”

The filly ignored Donner’s tail as it passed above her head. “M-maybe we should just knock? I can talk with her. She might try to escape if you just run in.”

Donner’s huge, round head moved to look down at the filly, a small grin flashed. She then looked up at Blitz and nodded. Without waiting for his approval, the large female tapped her huge paw on the door twice and walked in.

As she hurried after, K’yopi was certain that there had been payback for what had happened in the supply room.

*****

The room was sizable - as big as Claudia’s common room, Donner surmised. On the wall opposite the entrance she had just taken was another set of doors, a clear escape route. To the right, a bar with a richly decorated counter. Behind it, racks and shelves filled with various bottles were running along the entirety of the wall. The wall furthest to the left was made entirely out of angled glass. Its bulbous shape allowed Donner to see the dance floor and the milling staff below. In the middle of the room was a designer glass table flanked by two just as expensive-looking couches. The corner between the bar and the other door was occupied by a muscular minotaur; the elegant black suit he was wearing looked as if it were about to rip at the seams at any moment. Additionally, the top of his head was covered by a wholly unfitting black bandana. He took a step towards her with a raised arm, but just as he opened his mouth to say something, another voice called out.

“Nonono! Let them be.” The voice belonged to a thin griffiness sitting on one of the couches. Donner didn’t need to look closely at her beak to know it was Mother, yet her form didn’t appear very motherly. She was slender, almost emaciated. Donner could easily see the gentle curves of the griffiness’ ribs. Her blackish coat and dark blue feathers contrasted heavily with her clothing. Large, circular sunglasses with golden frames rested on her beak, obscuring her eyes. A fluffy, brown-pink boa was wrapped loosely around her neck. On her back was a sleeveless jacket with a huge gap at the front which exposed her feathered chest; its gold and violet tigerstripe pattern shone in the room’s reflected light. Her wings were folded on her back, but Donner could see that the tips of the feathers were painted, each in a different colour of the spectrum. They offered an impressive display, gently swaying with her movements.

Next to Mother, half sitting on the couch, half lying on the griffiness was a stallion, an earth pony with light brown coat and a two tone chocolate-pink mane, the same shade as Mother’s fluffy boa. He was barely older than K’yopi. Twenty at most. The stallion wore a tight, form-fitting fishnet shirt. A choker much like the one K’yopi wore when they had found her was firmly locked on his neck; a thin golden chain connected it to a wristband on the griffiness’ right forearm. The stallion himself was adorned with large amounts of metal: earrings, lip and eyebrow pieces, even a pair of metal studs on his accentuated collarbones. With all this jewelry and his boyish, almost feminine aura, it was easy to guess the pony’s purpose.

Mother sat up fully and stared at the trio through her black non-reflective sunglasses. The stallion at her side lazily followed her gaze as his hoof gently brushed against her chest. She spoke quickly, words firing like a pitch adjusted machinegun. “Oh and who are you?! Please, please come in, have a seat! You don’t have an appointment but I can already see you will be very interesting guests!” She waved her talons at the couch across from her. “And look who we have here! Oh K’yopi sweetie, I didn’t expect to see you again so soon!”

K’yopi was running on autopilot; she just followed Donner and avoided any eye contact with the griffiness’ black lenses. Instead, she idly glanced towards the window. The floor was empty, but just as she sat down on the couch she caught a glimpse of motion. Something purple flickered on the other side. She wasn’t thinking much of her surroundings as Donner sat on her left; she didn’t register Blitz sitting down to her right either. Her throat felt as if she was attempting to swallow a hoof-sized cement ball. She tried to think of anything else then the griffiness ahead. Finally her healthy eye focused on the table between them and Mother and her plaything.

The table was low, barely on the level with the couch. It was more of an aesthetically pleasing coffee table than a proper place to dine. Nonetheless, a number of items were visible: a tray with a few elegant glasses and a large, matching bottle of what looked like carbonated water, all crafted from crystal clear glass with golden filigree accents. Right in front of Mother rested a small, dormant tablet. Its pink, fluffy case aggressively spilled synthetic fur in all directions. On the tablet the zebra could see two lines of very fine blueish powder, and judging by the residue there used to be more of them. Mother was known for her exotic tastes, especially her addiction to ionic crystals. She was almost constantly riding the wave of energy and inspiration provided by the peculiar drug. She was high right then - K’yopi could tell from just a glance. Whenever that wave came crashing down, Mother's mood would come crashing with it and she'd turn into an abusive, evil creature. The zebra still had awful memories from the last time she had been the only one around when that happened.

Even before Mother traded the filly away - for more crystals of course - everyone around her had wondered how the griffiness did not pay the price for the constant abuse. A few in the underworld circles of the Miner’s Prospect swore they had seen a video of the eccentric trafficker drowning in her own regurgitated lungs, but those claims had never been proven. Rumor had it that she was helped by an unknown benefactor, had a surgery and received a cybernetic replacement which allowed her to take even more crystals. The zebra blinked as a pair of slender, feline legs in black stockings rested on the table next to the tablet. She looked away at the floor the moment the claw-tipped toes flexed.

Mother leaned back on the couch and gently tugged at the stallion’s chain, which prompted the pony to rest his head on her exposed chest. She smiled from under her sunglasses. “Ah, shy as always.” She looked up at the two large creatures flanking the diminutive zebra. ”Tell me who you are and what it is that you want from Mother. I can see you came from very far away. Let me guess. Empire? Maybe the Caliphate?” She grinned as her clawed hand started caressing through the stallion’s mane. “Very far away indeed!”

Blitz watched the griffiness from beneath the cover of his mask. He was trying to read her. It was obvious Mother was a personality like no other. Eccentric, narcissistic, maybe even charming. It was not the charm of a certain hippogriff pilot however. Hers was much more deadly, akin to the kind so common to the ruthless investigators of the Imperial Secret Police. It wasn’t what she said, it was what she didn’t. She was also careless. Something the giant could exploit. “We heard many things about you. Allegedly you are the best supplier of exotic merchandise on this side of the Core.” He raised a paw and firmly placed it on K’yopi’s head. The filly froze in fear. “As attested by the trial sample. Our master would like more.”

Mother moved one of her painted wings, shrouding the stallion’s body in a grotesque mockery of a protective embrace. “And who is your master my mysterious friend? I didn’t order you thrown out because of your amazing physique…” The stallion at her breast let out a short gasp as her clawed hand moved down and behind the cover of her wing. “...but I have to say, just looking gets boring very quickly.”

It was Donner’s time to speak now; she quickly picked up on her companion’s plan. “The Countess, in the Periphery.” She idly played with an empty glass, her paws leaving smudges on the crystal.

“Karmelita? A name I haven’t heard for a while. Honestly I thought she’d be dead by now. Poor thing.” Mother briefly held her free hand to her heart, just within reach of the stallion who gave the talons a gentle lick. “Such an unexpected tragedy. I should probably speak with her, it’s been years.”

“She’s managing.” Blitz gave one of his typical barely visible nods. “That is why we are here. She is on the lookout for new experiences.”

Mother let out a short chuckle. “Of course she is; she was quite the party girl back in the day. I imagine now she cranked it up to eleven.” She snapped her talons suddenly. “For the sake of old times between us, I’ll let you speak further.”

The huge male continued. “We were tasked to review your selection personally. No second hand merchandise.” His large paw ran down along the back of K’yopi’s head until it rested on her shoulder. “Take us directly to your supplier. We pay in unrefined painite.”

Mother’s toy let out a gasp as she tensed briefly. “Now I know you are telling the truth. The Countess doesn’t use credits when she wants something really badly.” She looked down at the stallion and cooed as her free claw gently stroked his cheek, before facing Blitz. “Not many know that painite is her shiny rock of choice.”

Donner slapped her tail on the couch. “Will you take us then?”

The griffiness extracted her forearm from under her wing and clasped it with her other hand. “I think we can arrange something.” She raised her wing, revealing the stallion, before grabbing him by the muzzle and roughly pushing him off.

Just in time for a beam of energy to punch through the window, narrowly miss his head, and slice cleanly through Mother's throat.

*****

As if in slow motion, K’yopi watched the griffiness sag on the couch. She was twitching, one hand grasping at air in front of her while the other held the wound. The blood was flowing freely. Already her entire chest was soaked in deep crimson, but it kept coming. Something moved quickly with intent in the corner of the filly’s eye, but she didn’t care. Her full attention was on Mother. The griffiness was trying to squeeze the wound shut, but her talons were simply too small. She choked soundlessly, leaving a red smear on the table. K’yopi could hear a gun fire nearby, but she still didn’t care. She had been scared when coming to this room, even horrified when Blitz used her for his bluff. She didn’t care now. She watched Mother’s sunglasses slide off her beak as the griffiness choked. Her bloodied talons let go of the wound and fell to the couch. K’yopi never forgot those eyes, the deepest malachite green she had ever seen. Those beautiful eyes that could be caring and cruel, nurturing and vile. Full of life yet dead inside. Now as they stared back at the filly they were neither.

They were full of terror.

And that made the corner of the zebra’s mouth lift up.

Something large and feathery hit the filly hard from the front and sent her flying over and behind the couch. She crashed onto the floor as a mighty roar filled the room. She climbed to her hooves only to watch the minotaur bodyguard charge Blitz with his huge horns. They lodged around her companion’s chest, lifting him like a heavy duty forklift. The minotaur was not done - he kept charging until his catch hit the bar counter and sprawled on it with a crash. With his horns still holding Blitz, the minotaur started slamming his fists into his exposed stomach, pummeling him with massive punches. Just as the bodyguard was about to land another hit, Donner jumped on his back, her claws leaving bleeding gashes on the once elegant suit. Without pulling them out, Donner dislodged the minotaur from Blitz and spun him violently, before sending him tumbling back to the middle of the room with a nose-cracking headbutt. The huge bodyguard tripped and crashed into the glass table, flattening it with a roar of pain. With Blitz momentarily stunned, Donner charged the bodyguard, throwing herself on his lying form, teeth bared.

“You fuckers! You killed her!” The anguish filled cry drew the zebra’s attention. It was the brown stallion. His forehooves were covered in Mother’s blood; somehow he had managed to detach the chain binding him to the now cooling corpse of the griffiness. His face was screwed up with rage and pain as he reached for a smashed water bottle lying on the floor. He looked at Donner grappling with the bodyguard, then at Blitz who was still stunned, hanging on the counter. He went for the easier target.

K’yopi looked around frantically - she had to help! Somehow… She wasn’t a fighter, not in the slightest, but she had to help… Her eyes spotted a black metal shape lying on the floor right in front of her. A sleek pistol - it must have been lost by the bodyguard during the initial struggle. The filly awkwardly grabbed the weapon and brought it up at the charging stallion’s side. She had maybe two seconds before the glass shank sank into Blitz’s soft abdomen.

She couldn’t do it.

A million images raced through her mind’s eye. How she had imagined Mother, dying slowly and painfully. The daydream fantasies she had of the griffiness suffering as much as possible. She had just watched her die and it had made her feel good. Yet she couldn’t shoot someone that had been through the same nightmare she had.

No. That wasn’t it.

She couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t take a life.

Not like this.

“DIE YOU FUCKER!” The yell roused Blitz; he saw the brown stallion charging him at just the last moment. Enough to sweep a wing and protect his stomach from being gutted. The stallion was fast, however. Just before striking, he angled the bottle and tossed himself at the huge male, landing with a battlecry on top of Blitz’s chest. The bottle went down aiming for the throat, but Blitz quickly readjusted his head. The stallion’s makeshift weapon shattered into a hundred pieces as it struck the giant’s masked chin. That didn’t stop the assault; the enraged pony started striking his hooves along Blitz’s chest and sides with all his adrenaline-fueled might. The blows were weak; now without his weapon, the stallion was an inconvenience at worst. With one paw, Blitz grabbed the stallion by the scruff of his neck and lifted him up. Just enough so he could reach his other paw deep between their bodies.

Suddenly the stallion stopped moving. Blitz watched as the anger on his face instantly turned into shock and pain. Then, the stallion let out a high-pitched, ear-shattering wail and dropped off the giant before crumpling to the floor, forehooves deep between his hindlegs.
Blitz slid off the counter and tossed the bloodied half-ring aside with a clatter. It was nowhere near close enough to be audible over the wailing. He caught a glimpse of Donner sailing towards the full wall window on the opposite side of the room as the minotaur threw her. She slammed into it face first, with enough force to crash through with an ear-piercing shatter, leaving a sizeable hole in her wake. She tumbled down towards the dance floor.

As soon as she was out of sight, the bodyguard stood up; his slashed, bleeding face smirked at Blitz. The minotaur spat out a wad of blood. “You don’t scare me, freak.”

In return, the giant cracked his neck with loud popping noise. “Good.” He snapped his massive wings, launching himself at his opponent.

*****

With shattered glass falling all around her, Donner landed on a large console with a thud, the multitude of dials, indicators and switches painfully digging into her chest and stomach. Standing right in the middle of the dance floor was a light purple unicorn - a very odd-looking one. He was of average build and height, but possessed a number of unique features. His sizable horn was sharp and had a slight backwards curve to it. Magical sparks which reminded Donner of electricity coursed through it, crackling and occasionally probing the air with tiny, volatile discharges. His mane and tail looked even stranger. His hair branched and split until it coalesced into small, semi-palpable clouds of what looked like blue plasma. They gently swayed on an invisible wind, magical energy much like that on the stallion’s horn coursing through them. Curiously, he wasn’t wearing any clothes and he had no cutie mark. Donner had never seen a pony like him before.

The stallion’s handsome features were somewhat ruined by the utterly child-like expression of surprise he was giving the sprawled female. His unnaturally blue eyes blinked and the energy running through his horn vanished as he graced Donner with a perfect smile. “Hello madame. You are not who I am looking for.” The stallion took a step forward, his smile instantly shifting from pleasant to cruel. “But I have to ask. Do you work with Sidewinder? I have a debt to repay.”

“No!” Donner growled with annoyance as she pushed herself up from the console. “Now get-”

Her ears twitched as she heard a soft click somewhere to the side, near one of the doors leading to the dance floor. She turned only to see a small, cylindrical shape sail through the crack in the door. Her eyes followed the cylinder as it was tossed to the middle of the room where the unicorn was standing. It bounced off the floor once, then exploded in a flash of white blinding light and roar of miniaturized thunder. At least, that is what it would have felt like to someone with naturally evolved eyes and ears.

She felt her irises singe at the flash and her ears wince at the thunder. To her, it felt like being briefly blinded by a pocket flashlight while having a foal’s firecracker pop off nearby.

She grinned.

Two figures hurriedly poured into the room from the same door in an uncoordinated fashion, dressed in street clothes and black bandanas. One of them held a knife in his magic, but the pony in front had a pistol. Rushing forward, Donner closed in with the attackers, blindsiding them and crunching the one with the pistol against the wall. The other had no chance to react and swing his weapon at her as she grabbed her catch by the neck and squeezed. Once she heard the satisfying crack, she flung the body into the remaining attacker, knocking him down. Before she had a chance to leap on the pile, her keen hearing picked up another warning. The doors on the opposite side slammed open, and bullets immediately filled the air. A griffin in similar garb came rushing, a blazing machine pistol held high and upside down above his head. Donner had plenty of time and maneuvering space to dive behind the large metal table holding the console. She briefly wondered where the unicorn had disappeared to, she was certain she’d seen him vanish into thin air right before the flash grenade went off.

The moment the weapon stopped, Donner rolled out of her cover. She dug her claws into the plastic floor and leapt towards the shooter using her muscular hind legs. The griffin’s eyes widened at the sight of the giant shape composed of teeth and muscle effortlessly sailing towards him. His claws clutched a fresh magazine he desperately tried to insert into the gun. Just before her paws connected with the target, a tiny ball of blue energy appeared between them. The ball materialized into the purple stallion from before, his back turned towards Donner. An electrified particle beam much like the one that had hit Mother erupted from his horn, piercing the griffin. She had no time to express her consternation at the display as she was unable to arrest her dive. Donner slammed into the unicorn’s back who in turn hit the ganger, tumbling to the floor under her momentum.

Donner, the unicorn and the corpse landed on the floor in a layered heap, the purple stallion let out a pained yelp as her bulk flattened his body. Her muzzle was briefly buried in his semi-ethereal mane; it smelled like air right after a thunderstorm mixed with a tinge of sulfur. She pushed herself up on her forelegs, just enough to allow him to breathe again and roll around to face her. With his head between her forelegs and his lower half firmly under her hindlegs, the unicorn regarded her with a confused expression.

“Hello again.” He attempted to squeeze out, but it was fruitless.

“Who are you?!” Donner bared her teeth and tracked the stallion’s strange blue eyes as he admired her smile.

To her annoyance, the stallion smiled. “Now I could ask you the same question. But I’d rather ask you to please stop crushing my pelvis.”

The huge female narrowed her eyes suspiciously before benevolently standing up.

“Thank you!” He pulled himself from under Donner and climbed to his hooves before dusting off his chest. “Now, I believe we started off on a wrong hoof. What do you say if w-” His eyes darted somewhere over Donner’s shoulder as one of his hooves reached to push her away. “Look out!” Instead of pushing the large creature away, the stallion just tugged pitifully, unable to move her mass.

A bullet hit somewhere high above the female’s head, causing a stage lamp to drop to the floor with a crash of broken glass. Donner whipped around her giant body with surprising speed, her wide wings fully spread, effectively doubling her size. The roar that followed made the purple unicorn behind her wince.

The last remaining thug, now armed with his fallen comrade’s pistol, froze. She watched the internal battle in the stallion’s eyes as he was faced with a basic choice. Fight or flight. Die or live.

He chose the latter.

There was a momentary silence. Donner folded her wings as she scanned the room. It was empty. Almost empty.

“Well, I believe we handled that quite splendidly.”

She furrowed her forehead in annoyance as the purple unicorn stepped next to her, a confident smile on his muzzle.

“Now to finally-”

The battered body of a minotaur crashed on the DJ’s console with a crack. The bodyguard groaned in pain and started to slowly get up. His fall must have triggered a switch or knob on the console, as the speakers around the dance floor suddenly blasted music...

‘I come around the turn and people stop and stare…’

...only to be cut off as the console cracked when the huge mass of Blitz dove on his chest a second later. The minotaur heaved, gasped, and finally stopped moving.

K’yopi slid off Blitz’s back and trotted over to Donner, clearly shaken. “Donner! Are you okay? I heard guns!”

The giantess whacked her tail on the floor, speaking through gritted teeth. “I am fine.”

The strange unicorn shifted forward and leaned down to the filly, who instantly took a few steps backwards. “Thanks to me! We were off to a rocky start but our partnership worked out in the end!” He offered a wink to the zebra only to watch her scuttle away and hide behind Blitz who just climbed off the unconscious bodyguard.

Blitz didn’t appear wounded either. His masked face studied the smaller unicorn for a tense moment before looking up at Donner. “Who is he?”

The stallion took that as his cue for speaking again, straightening up as much as his pony form allowed him to keep his eyes level with the giant. It wasn’t enough. “I am glad you asked! Please allow me to introduce myself.” He dug his hooves into the floor, then tossed his semi-ethereal mane. The curve of his horn sparked with magical energy. “I am Specimen Three. A bounty hunter! A pleasure to make your acquaintance!”

Three let out a high pitched squeak when Donner’s huge paw grabbed him by the neck and lifted him off the floor. Despite the iron grip, he managed a smirk.

Taking cover behind Blitz’s wing, K’yopi watched as the purple unicorn’s horn lit up and the stallion vanished in a puff of magical sparkles, leaving only a tiny sphere of blue energy. In the blink of an eye the sphere shifted and the stallion reappeared at Donner’s side. He was still smirking. Despite her hurt eye, both of her eyebrows shot up at the display.

“Please, please. We are all friends here. Everyone just take a deep breath and calm down, okay?” He lifted a hoof and mimicked breathing in and out.

Blitz was clearly unamused by Three’s antics. His voice remained as steady as ever. “You are a bounty hunter? A very lousy one then. The bounty on Mother was for bringing her in alive.”

Three clicked his tongue. “Oh. How unfortunate. I am still rather new to all of...” He gestured a hoof vaguely around the room. “...this. No matter. Baby steps!”

Donner slammed her forepaw on the floor. “It was our bounty! You little thief!”

The unicorn raised a hoof in a calming gesture. “Donner dear, please. Stay calm, I am positive we can figure something out with you and your friends.”

K’yopi watched Donner’s right eyelid twitch. The female growled and leapt at the purple unicorn, who again vanished in a cloud of flashy residue. As Donner landed with a slam on the spot where Three had been half a second ago, K’yopi felt the corner of her mouth inch upwards.

Three reappeared with a magical pop next to the fallen female. He quickly shifted his head at Blitz and the zebra. “Who are you again?”

Blitz’s only reaction was a light shift of his head to keep Three in his view. “I am Blitz.” He moved one of his huge wings to reveal the zebra.

“THIS IS THE POLICE!”

“Hello The...” Three blinked. “Wait.”

*****

Ashen Star was too old for this shit.

His back ached, his wings were sore, and his blood didn’t have enough soycaff in it. Across him, on the other side of the featureless metal table, sat the two strange creatures: Blitz and Donner, as he learned when he met them in the hangar bay before. Their forepaws were bound by chains; the station did not have hoofcuffs big enough. On the male’s left sat a juvenile zebra. The cuffs on her forelegs were woefully oversized, which allowed her to move her hooves freely. On the female’s right sat a strange unicorn with a flowing, flickering mane. When questioned, he’d said that it was a cosmetic cybernetic. The Chief Inspector didn’t believe it, but there were more important matters to discuss. At the very least the unicorn was cuffed properly.

The chief inspector rubbed his forehead with a hoof and continued in a tired voice. “So you say you were bounty hunting?” He briefly glared at his empty mug, as if his stare was able to magically refill it. “The report states three dead, one wounded. All members of the Black Knights.” He studied the quartet before him. The two giants were still, only the female’s tail kept constantly swaying from one side to the other. “Among them was Mother, an affiliate of the Knights and infamous trafficker of narcotics and slaves.” The filly was staring at her own hooves, but otherwise she seemed calm. “Up until today we thought she had left the sector.” The purple unicorn was the most animated of the group. He kept looking around, observing the interrogation room and all of its mundane details. He reminded Ashen of his officers’ foals when they visited the station during a bring your kid to work day. The inspector continued. “Yet, not only did you find her, you also killed her. The bounty explicitly stated that she was supposed to be captured.”

Donner let out a low growl, the chains binding her paws rattling as she fidgeted. “We were trying to take her alive.” She shot a nasty look at the unicorn, who was currently making faces at the one way mirror on the wall behind Ashen’s back.

Ashen uncramped one of his shoulders as he consulted the tablet held in his wing claws. “Not an optimal outcome, but I have to say I am surprised you managed to find her in the first place.”

The purple stallion stopped inspecting his molars and turned to the batpony. “Oh it was quite simple, really! I just had to persuade some fellow bounty hunters.” The unicorn smiled. “Once they graciously relinquished their claim on Mother, they also provided me with clues as to where I could find her!”

The filly suddenly looked up. Her eye and tone were filled with anger. “Are you charging us with murder!?” Ashen knew her type; there were plenty of rebellious youth on Miner’s Prospect like her. She knew what to say and not to say - he was certain that this was not the first time she had found herself in police custody.

The batpony sighed and threw the tablet onto the table. “I should have! But there is something you could do for me. You’ll get your reward.” He watched Blitz’s impassive mask. “Twenty percent of the original value, that is the most I can offer.”

The unicorn narrowed his eyes in concentration. “Five thousand credits!” He turned to look at Donner and grinned. “Is that a lot?”

The filly let out a deep sigh as she rested her chin on her forehooves. “No, Three, it is not a lot. Even less when you split it in four.”

Three’s grin turned into a pout and he hung his head. “Aww.”

Ashen Star cleared his throat as he straightened in his chair. “We should lock you up for that stunt you pulled at the Rotlicht, and impound your ship.”

Three snapped his head up. “You have a ship?”

For the first time, Blitz spoke. His deep, calm voice echoed in the almost empty room. “But?”

A small smile spread across Ashen’s lips. “You are going to do something for us. You seem like you can handle yourselves in a fight.” He glanced at the filly, particularly her swollen right eye. “Well, most of you.” He faced Blitz again. “I have something where skills like that could prove invaluable.” Ashen grabbed the tablet again and tapped on it for a few seconds. He reached it over and slid it on the table towards the group. “This is the Duke. Head of the Black Knights, the thugs wearing black bandanas. Miner’s Prospect Police Force is offering a three hundred thousand credits reward. Deal with him for me and I’ll forget about those scum you wasted.” On the tablet was a photo of an aging crystal stallion with a black coat and a well-groomed green mane. “Reward’s doubled if you bring him in still breathing.”

The zebra let out an impressed whistle.

Donner creased her brow. “And you are fine with just a body?”

Ashen Star nodded casually at the female. “He and his gang have been a thorn in our side for years. The Heraklion Workers’ Council has greenlit the bounty after reviewing the damages caused.” He sighed at the still empty mug before waving a wing vaguely. “Racketeering, drug and pony trafficking, illegal gambling, the list goes on.”

Blitz spoke again. “Why did you not take him down yet then? What is the catch?”

The chief inspector crossed his forelegs across his chest. “He controls a large part of the lower decks and has an army of thugs at his disposal. Additionally, rumor has it that he is receiving outside funding.” Ashen rolled his eyes; he was long past caring about the image of the police force. “I have too few people and too many other problems to deal with it.” His leathery wing extended and pointed a claw straight at Blitz. “You do this, or you spend a long time in a gulag. The choice is yours.”

The zebra looked up at Blitz. “The Black Knights are the most powerful gang on the station! No one goes against them. Not even the pigs!”

Ashen didn’t react to the verbal jab. He was too old, tired and frankly fed up with the whole situation to care. Instead, he watched Blitz’s masked face for any indication of an agreement.

Instead, it was the unicorn that spoke. “We’ll do it!”

Chapter 2

The airlock opened with a hiss. Immediately, Three walked into Claudia’s cargo hold backwards. He was facing the others, speaking in a lively manner. “We find where the Duke is, go in, Blitz and Donner will kill everyone we meet while I go after the primary antagonist! Oh and you K’yopi will watch my back.” He rubbed his chin in thought. “You’d need a gun!”

Donner growled. “She’s not getting a gun.”

“A butterfly knife then? I seem to recall seeing one in a shopfront a few level-” He yelped as his hindleg stepped into the gap in the floor airlock. Before the unicorn’s rump hit the deck, his horn lit up.

K’yopi watched as the faint sphere of magic coalesced and took form again. Three reappeared, facing the gap, hooves firmly spread on the deck and head low. He scanned the room, magical energy crackling along his horn. She took a few steps and pulled on his tail, trying to grab his attention. The stallion whipped around instantly. The vicious expression on his muzzle, augmented by the tiny, lightning-like discharges of his magic, made K’yopi shrink back and cover her face with a foreleg in reflex.

Three blinked as he realised what was happening; the magic around his horn fizzled out. He waited a beat for his muscles to relax, then placed a hoof on his chest. “Oh silly you! Please do not do that again.” He looked down at the cowering filly. “I might not recognize you in time one day.” She kept huddled behind her foreleg, as if expecting a strike. Three looked up at Blitz questioningly.

The huge male extended a wing and walked by, scooping the zebra with him, all the while keeping the intricate mask trained on the unicorn. Finally, they disappeared behind a set of doors deeper into the ship.

“You are a charmer.” Donner’s voice grabbed the unicorn’s attention, so he offered her his best smile.

“You flatter me dear!” Three pointed at the half-open airlock. “This is a safety hazard, I could have tripped and broken a leg! Do you know what happens to ponies with broken legs?”

She rolled her eyes. “They get shot?”

“Yes!” He blinked, confused. “No… but I am certain it is something just as bad!” Three looked at the broken airlock again. “Who runs a ship like that?”

The large female stepped closer, towering over the unicorn. She pursed her lips and growled at him. “If you don’t like it, leave.”

He dropped on his rump and raised his forelegs defensively. “Out of the question! I would not dream of leaving my new henchmen stranded.” He shrunk back as the large female gave him an angry look. “Underlings?” Three’s ears twitched at the loud meaty slap of Donner’s tail on the deck. “Okay fine! Compatriots! We are a team now! Equal in partnership of… equality and camaraderie!”

Donner raised a wing and briefly held it to her forehead. “Just stay out of our way.”

The unicorn smiled as he rose to his hooves. “Yes! I can do that. Be a team player.” He shot another roguish smile at the female. “But if I can make a suggestion: now that we are a team, we need a name!”

Donner wondered why she was still listening to the stallion. He was infuriating. His flamboyant mannerisms, the inflection of his voice, his aura of entitled superiority. He was everything that Blitz and Donner were not.

And above all, he never ceased talking.

“What about Three’s Angels? No, that is too pompous. Fellowship of the Three? Too cliche.” He was pacing around Donner, deep in thought. “The good, the bad and the beautiful… and the zebra!”

Donner sat down and rotated her head, following the unicorn walking in circles around her. As soon as he disappeared over her shoulder, she slightly raised her tail. The sound of the stallion crashing onto the deck with a yelp was enough to make her smirk.

The feeling of satisfaction disappeared just as quickly when she felt her tail being grabbed and pulled. A moment later the unicorn came into her view again, his magic firmly held the tip of her tail above his head.

“I would appreciate it if you watched where you put this thing.” He was pointing the fluffy tuft at the end of it at Donner, then turned it at himself and brushed his throat with it. “Hm, it’s quite pleasant actually.” His face lit up. “Oh I know! We are all freaks!” He pointed the tuft at Donner again, oblivious to her growing scowl. “You two look like some kind of genetic train crash, I know magic, and K’yopi… K’yopi is our racial diversity token, just in case we need to sign any exclusivity contracts!” He grinned as he hugged the tail to his chest. “We are Team Freak! I am a genius!”

Donner pulled her tail, freeing it from the unicorn’s grip, she then swung it wide and back until it whipped straight into Three’s muzzle.

The unicorn exclaimed painfully, holding his reddened nose. “Why would you do that?! Ow.”

Donner’s tail retreated behind her back in a motion of uncanny grace. She stared at the unicorn again. “So you would shut up and stop doing that.” She stood up and started towards the common room where Blitz and K’yopi had gone a few minutes ago. “If you are to stay with us, you are going to show respect. For all of us.”

As she left Three behind in the cargo hold and entered the common room, Donner spotted the filly by the kitchenette. She was balancing on her hindlegs, with both forehooves outstretched above, attempting to reach something on the highest shelf. The zebra looked like she would lose balance and fall at any moment.

Donner half turned her head at the curious sight. “Do you know where Blitz is?”

The filly let out a startled squeak. Her entire body overbalanced and she dropped down on her back.

K’yopi opened her healthy eye and looked up at the large female. Donner looked even more intimidating from floor level, especially now that she was viewed upside down. The filly winced. “Ow… H-he went upstairs.” She reached a hoof to point to the nearby stairs.

Donner regarded the zebra with a curious expression, then nodded and headed for the upper deck.

As soon as she was gone, the filly got back on her hooves. She rubbed her back in annoyance, then with a heave reared up again. “Come on…” Her hoof blindly searched for something on the top shelf.

“K’yopi dear!”

Another voice startled her again; fortunately she managed to keep her grip on the high shelf. She turned her head towards the source. “WhaAAAH!” The filly screamed at the sight of Three’s grinning face merely an inch away from hers. This time her grip failed and she went tumbling down again.

She gritted her teeth and closed her eye, but Instead of slamming into the hard deck again, the zebra found herself… not falling? “Huh?” She opened her eye, only for her vision to be filled with Three’s purplish face again. His horn was glowing. “C-can you stop doing that?”

The unicorn raised his eyebrows and the magic cut off.

K’yopi dropped on the deck again. The zebra could only groan now, more from frustration than pain.

“I am not fully certain why you asked for that.” His tone was entirely honest.

After climbing to her hooves for the second time in the span of a minute she turned to face the unicorn. She had to force herself to speak up - she was still a little afraid of the strange pony. "How do you do all that magic stuff? I never saw a unicorn strong enough to hold someone before. Or - or disappear or shoot lasers! It's crazy!"

The stallion looked at his horn. “Oh. This?” Thin wisps of energy danced around the tip of it briefly. “I cannot really tell.” He let out a big shrug. “It was always there, as far as I remember. I think I was just born with it.”

“Born with it? But other unicorns cannot do anything like that. No one does that!”

Three looked back down at the filly; his expression kept shifting between shame and confusion. Finally he spoke again. “I am sorry, I do not know how to explain it to you.” He took in a sharp breath. “It is just an integral part of me, like a second nature. I focus and it happens!”

The zebra watched the unicorn closely. Once she was sure he would not explain further, she waved a hoof at him. “Forget it. What was it?”

Three beamed; his full smile looked like it was taken straight from a villain in a B-rated slasher holovid. “I would like to present my apology!”

The zebra narrowed her eyes in suspicion, her voice carefully neutral. “For what?”

If Three minded her guarded disposition, he didn’t show it. Instead, he placed a hoof on his chest and bowed. Simultaneously, one of his hindlegs bent and lightly tapped on the deck. “I did not realise that I frightened you earlier.” He looked up and briefly put a hoof to his nose in thought. “And just now, come to think of it.” The hoof went down with a metallic clap on the deck. “Either way! I am truly sorry. I did not consider that my appearance or skills could have such an effect on youth such as yourself.” He briefly looked to the side, avoiding her gaze. “Truth be told, you are the first juvenile I really had any contact with whatsoever.”

K’yopi felt a little warmth of endearment at the stallion’s antics. She also felt curiosity. “What do you mean? You never met a teenager before? How?”

The stallion straightened and let out a heavy sigh. “Let’s say I have been living a rather sheltered life. Not many opportunities to meet new people that way.”

The filly shrugged. “I am the opposite. I don’t think I ever had any time to do what I wanted.” She frowned deeply. “I always had to do what others told me.”

Three’s expression turned into a smile. “Really? We could compare notes! I had very strict teachers too!”

The filly bit her lip. Teachers was not the word she’d use when thinking about her past keepers. Yet, a feeling at the back of her mind made her want to know more about this quirky unicorn. Maybe it was his magic? Maybe his strange personality? K’yopi couldn’t tell.

She could however, nod and offer him a mischievous smirk. “On one condition.”

Three took a half step forward, his eyes eager. “Yes?”

The zebra looked up and pointed a hoof at the high shelf she had been trying to get to earlier. A cardboard box bearing a cartoon of a pudgy mascot was visible. There were words too, but she could not read any of them. “I want that.”

The unicorn followed her hoof, then looked back at the zebra. “Very well then.” He lit up his horn and the box floated down, straight into the filly’s grasp.

The zebra shook the box; the satisfying rustle promised a generous supply. She looked over the mascot, then carefully inspected other sides of the box. More words she couldn’t hope to understand. She furrowed her brows. Not being able to read always made her feel inferior. “Three, can you read this?”

The unicorn stood side by side with the filly and lowered his head to read the fine lettering on the box. It was so close that their cheeks were rubbing against each other. He opened his mouth as if to say something but then closed it, then opened it again. “No, it's not in equestrian.”

“Look!” K’yopi pointed at the side of the box. A set of pictograms showed the instructions. “Okay, we need a bowl, a spoon...” She blinked in confusion at one of the icons. “Ummm…”

Three gasped. “Oh I know. Cow juice!”

“Cow juice?”

“Absolutely. Cow juice!”

“What’s a cow?”

She could feel his shoulder rub against her frame as he shrugged. “I don’t know, but cow juice is white and I found it in every fridge I have encountered so far.”

“How do you know it’s cow juice then?

“Because one I have procured before had a label saying it was genetically synthesized from simulated free range cows!”

“Right.” She detached herself from Three and grabbed a bowl and a spoon from a nearby drying rack, then walked over to the table. “So, do we have any cow juice?”

Three was already neck deep into the fridge. “Hmmm. Salads, cheese, a lot of beer… a piece of plaster? Ah ha!” He pulled his head out; a black and white cardboard carton with bold lettering hovered in his telekinesis. “That should be it!”

K'yopi watched as Three's magic meticulously sliced a cone off the corner of the container, then swivelled it to fill the bowl with white liquid. Meanwhile, she ripped open the sachet found in the box and poured the tiny brown squares into the mix. She watched as the cow juice quickly changed from white to faded brown. Once the bowl was full, the filly grabbed her utensil and put a spoonful of the mix into her mouth. She blinked at the crunchiness, and the coldness of the cow juice. Then her tastebuds exploded. K’yopi kept munching until finally swallowing. Her head looked up as her eyes darted towards Three.

“Holy shit this is amazing!” The filly immediately filled her mouth with another spoonful. This time she chewed slowly, savouring the rich, smooth flavour and the pleasant crunchiness. Only when everything had melted into sweet paste she did swallow.

Three watched the table before him for a few quiet moments. Finally he spoke. “I’ve only recently found myself being able to choose my path.” He slowly looked up at the filly; she stared back mid crunch, her red eye wide open. “I am aware that my disposition might not be… the most appreciated.”

He raised a hoof as if he wanted to stop any protests or questions from the zebra. K’yopi’s healthy eye slowly blinked, and she followed with a loud crunch of the delicious flakes. Three continued, “Worry not however! From now on I will endeavour to refrain from such incidents.” He smiled at the filly. “I promise!”

K’yopi loudly swallowed the mix and put the spoon on the table. She slowly nodded. “Uh huh.”

The unicorn beamed. “Excellent!” He walked around the table and stopped next to the zebra. “Now, I hope you don’t mind me asking.” He climbed into the chair next to hers and rested his forelegs on the table. “You mentioned that you never really had a choice either. Would you mind telling me about it?”

K’yopi shifted her gaze from the unicorn to the now empty bowl. His question was straightforward; he seemed genuinely curious. But the zebra couldn’t understand why. Her mind began racing again. Should she tell him? Could she tell him? Which parts should she leave out? All of them? Maybe she ought to lie to the unicorn. Speaking about her life felt like an impossible task.

On the other hoof, she’d never had anyone willing to listen before. No one to share her frustrations, angers or fears with. They had always been kept locked away, deep inside in the darkest pits of her psyche. Until there was too much and they would spill. But with no one to listen, they didn’t manifest as words, but pain - usually apathy. An overwhelming feeling of not caring. Not caring about what was around her. Who was around her and what they were doing to her. Not caring about herself or her future. Sometimes she even stopped caring about finding a way out.

Sometimes she stopped caring about living.

Yet, she never cried.

She turned her head at the unicorn and studied his face closely. His deep blue eyes weren’t showing pity, nor mercy. They reminded her of foals she sometimes saw on the station’s streets. Happy foals, with families and friends. Blissfully unaware of the hardships of those less fortunate around them. But also filled with curiosity, eager to explore the world and all of its mundane secrets that dazzled their little minds.

His ears were fully turned to her, giving an impression of an attentive guard awaiting orders. No - a pony willing to listen, to soak up whatever she said and actually pay attention. To let her speak as long as she felt like it.

As long as she needed it.

She turned her face back to the table and took a deep, shaky breath. “I think I was born here, on Miner’s Prospect.” Her voice was quiet. “I don’t really know who my mother was.” She shrugged weakly. “She was probably some whore. Who else would leave their daughter like that?”

Three’s voice cut in. He sounded oddly happy. “I never knew my parents either!” The filly turned to look at the stallion, who narrowed his eyes in concentration before pouting his lips like a child. “At least I think so. Never thought about it. Hmmmm.”

K’yopi blinked in surprise. “You didn’t? How can you be so… carefree about it?”

The unicorn opened his mouth wide, thought for a moment and shook his head. “Why should I care? They were never there. Why should I think about something that has never been a factor in my life?” He pointed a hoof at the filly. “Do you think of all the space rocks flying around that could pulverize this entire station before we knew what happened? Because they are out there.”

Now it was K’yopi’s turn to pause in thought. “No, I don’t. I would not have the time to think about anything else.”

He smiled. “Exactly! Not thinking about your problems doesn’t make them go away, but it certainly makes you sleep better!” He leaned back in his chair, seemingly content with the explanation. “A million things could happen to us every second. Some things could be bad, some good. But worrying about what could have been or what ifs is a waste of life.”

The zebra pursed her lips. “So what do you think about then?”

The stallion shrugged. “A lot of things. Things that I know that I have influence on.” He looked up at the tip of his horn. “What should I eat today? How do I find credits to afford that food? What will I do if I won’t find those credits? Should I take them by force? Will I be happy with that choice?” The brief spark in his eyes left no doubts.

K’yopi put her forelegs on the table before resting her head on them with an aggravated sigh. “You make it sound so easy! I worry about so much stuff! Right now I worry what will happen when we go after the Duke. What if something bad happens? What if Blitz or Donner are caught or killed? What if I will go back to… to...” She clenched her eye shut as a powerful shiver shook her body. Dreadful flashbacks filled her mind again, but before the rising tide of anxiety could envelop her, a hoof grabbed her shoulder.

His voice was somber; she hadn’t heard him speak like that before. “It is not easy, no. It takes a lot of work and discipline. And a very specific mindset.” She could hear him shuffle closer, but not close enough to feel personal. “I’ve had a lot of time to think, to ponder. I had all the time in the world. Mysteries of the universe? Faith? Magical theorem? Vengeance?” She heard him let out a short, amused snort. “Worthless. Do you know what is the most important thing in the universe K’yopi?”

The sound of her name made her open her eye and shift her head at him. She looked at the unicorn and lightly shook her head.

The stallion offered a small smile and pointed a hoof at the zebra. “You.” The hoof turned and pointed at his own chest. “I.” He nodded as if he was reassuring himself. “The most important thing in the universe for everyone should be themselves. And no, I am not asking you to become a toxic egoist.” His hoof lightly squeezed her shoulder. “You can be selfless if you wish; give and ask for nothing. Maybe even sacrifice your very self for the good of others.” His eyes narrowed. “But when you do that, you realise you do that because you want to do it. Because it makes you feel at peace with your actions.” His voice raised an octave. “You want to throw your life away to save another! But it's your life, and your choice!” He closed his eyes and breathed in. When he spoke again his voice was soft. “And that, my dear, is the ultimate freedom.”

K’yopi bit her lip. “I’m not sure. I don’t know much about freedom.”

His hoof patted her shoulder before sliding off. “Well, I do believe you are on the right track so far.” He nodded at the half full box of brown, crunchy goodness.

The zebra briefly regarded the box before turning back to the stallion, she could feel the corners of her mouth lift slightly. “I guess you are right Three.” She grabbed the cow juice carton and the crunchy bit box and poured herself another serving.

A second bowl and spoon wrapped in blue magic floated over and settled next to her. “So… do you think I could have some of those?”

She wordlessly reached her hooves and poured him a serving. A moment later both of them were crunching together.

“Holy shit you were right, this really is amazing!” He barely managed to not spill out the food.

“I know right?”

*****

Blitz untangled himself from his companion’s limbs and stepped off the bed. He glanced at the chronometer on the captain’s desk and noted the hour: 0938 shiptime. He had been asleep for nearly thirteen hours. Their high-energy bodies required a lot of downtime to keep them running, hence the two took frequent catnaps together at any opportunity. Donner was still fast asleep - only her tail twitched occasionally as she lightly snored.

The giant made his way to the common room and looked around. It was empty, only a stack of dirty bowls and empty milk cartons on the table suggested any activity from the zebra and the unicorn. He made a deep, neutral noise in his throat and headed for the cargo hold. Once inside, it wasn’t hard to spot the duo. They were sitting on the main airlock’s loading ramp, facing towards the docking bay. There was a pungent smell in the air. He stretched his wing and slowly walked over to the two.

“...she could change nearly instantly, into anyone! To this day I am not sure how she really looked like for sure!” Three puffed out a cloud of thin, wispy smoke, then started choking. Once he regained his breath he added, “She could be a real manipulative bitch, but that also made her a good conversation partner.” He frowned. “I never did figure out if she was lying to me or just wanted to have someone to speak to. A little bit of both I suppose.”

“Wow, that is really… weird? Like something from a holovid!” The filly spoke with a lit cigarette held expertly between her lips.

“What are you doing?” Blitz’s deep voice rang out from above the two.

Three looked around, a half finished cigarette held in his magic. “K’yopi is showing me how to smoke tobacco!” He grinned at the giant. The pointy burning tip broke and a hot ember fell on the unicorn’s foreleg. He squealed in fright, batting at himself to smother the still smoldering remnants.

The zebra looked at Three and his impromptu pantomime before moving her gaze to Blitz’s expressionless mask. “He’ll get there.” She shifted the cigarette in her muzzle. “Someday.”

The mask stared. Just as the filly was about to say more he spoke. “Where did you get those?” The tip of his large wing pointed at the pack lying on the deck between the sitting equines.

K’yopi shifted her eyes; she wasn’t sure if she was in trouble yet. “Ummm… From the market?”

Blitz’s wing retracted. He took a deep breath, smelling the foul stench, and spoke again. “You didn’t buy them. You have no credits.”

The filly took the cigarette out of her mouth and smothered it on the deck. “Noooo….?” She blinked quickly. “I mean. No. No!” Her back straightened and her chest puffed forward. “I stole them.”

“You stole them?” The giant remained inscrutable.

The zebra nodded. “Yes! I am good at that.” She narrowed her eyes. “I am very good at that!”

Blitz shook his giant head. “It does not matter. We cannot risk drawing attention. Not now when the Knights might be on the lookout for us.”

K’yopi’s mouth hung open for a brief moment. “But…” She crossed her forelegs. “Have you seen yourselves? You do nothing but draw attention. You look like… like...”

Three piped in, seemingly done with his fight against self-immolation. “Freaks! We are Team Freak! People always stare. We look weird, that is what we do.”

The giant kept addressing the zebra. “Donner and I can handle ourselves.”

K’yopi creased her eyebrows. “I can handle myself!”

Three nodded. “She can! She’s a badass! Did you know she once almost bit off a guy’s ear when he tried to drag her into b-”

Blitz continued ignoring the unicorn. “I do not doubt that. But can you handle a band of armed thugs?”

The zebra did not look so certain anymore. “I-I can run away from them!”

“From two, maybe three. What about a whole gang?” He continued staring at the filly. “You just escaped their captivity. Do not throw your life away by being careless.”

She rolled her eye, turning away from Blitz. Her voice was harsh like sandpaper. “Fine.”

Three’s blank face turned to Blitz, then to K’yopi, then back to Blitz again. The long silence that followed was making him confused. The zebra was looking outside at the hangar bay with a sour expression; the giant was still as usual.

Suddenly, Blitz spoke. “What was the first pony-made invention that could see through a wall?”

K’yopi turned around suddenly, her face flabbergasted, but Blitz was already walking to the common room. “What does that have to do with anything?!”

Three clapped his hooves together with a smile. “Oh it is a riddle! I know riddles!”

She turned to the unicorn with a questioning expression. “A riddle?”

The stallion nodded eagerly. “Absolutely! I read some of them in the activity books my handlers graciously provided from time to time.”

“So… how do we solve it?” The filly ran a hoof through her dreadlocks in thought.

Three shrugged. “Sometimes you have to draw a route through a labyrinth, sometimes solve a crossword and sometimes use the crayons to correctly colour the little animals.” He squeezed his head between his shoulders before staring off into space with a vacant expression. “Those were onerous.”

“Umm… Three? I don’t think it's that kind of riddle.” She pushed her cheek out with her tongue. “Blitz mentioned an invention. It has to be some kind of a machine.”

“A machine?”

The filly nodded. “Seeing machine, like a scanner or a telescope. You can use things like that on the viewing deck to see through the windows, watch the stars around.”

Three stared at the tip of his horn, as if he could magic an answer from thin air. “How peculiar. I’d hazard a guess it would be a distant ancestor of those devices.” He frowned at the filly. “I am afraid I will be of not much help here. I am dreadful with machines.”

She reached a hoof up to his shoulder which caused the stallion to perk up with a smile. “I bet we can solve it together.”

“K’yopi! Three! We are leaving.” Donner’s voice carried over through the empty cargo hold. She and Blitz were coming towards the airlock.

The filly stood up and turned to the two giants. “Where are you going?”

Donner flapped a massive wing which sent a gust of wind strong enough to make the filly’s mane blow. “We are going to find more information about the Black Knights.”

Blitz watched the unicorn and the zebra for a moment before adding, “Stay with Claudia and do not let anyone in until we are back.”

K’yopi looked at Three; the unicorn just shrugged. She looked back at the leaving duo. “Hey wait! You can’t just leave us here!”

Neither of them stopped. Donner weaved her tail in annoyance while Blitz spoke out, “Why not?”

The filly turned to Three again. He just looked at her questioningly and mouthed the same. She narrowed her eye at him and hissed. “Come on!” K’yopi broke into a trot after the giants who already left the cargo hold. She lunged and bit down on the fluffy tuft at the end of Blitz’s tail.

The large male stopped, then slowly rotated his head and looked at the zebra over his shoulder. His voice was calm and measured. “You wish to come.”

The zebra spat out the tail before sticking out her tongue and wiping off some lingering hair with a hoof. “Yes! Please! I can help you - I know where we can find the Knights!” She looked up at the giant and gave him her best impression of a sad puppy. “Please, please, please!”

Three moved next to the filly and did his best impression of her. “Please, please!”

It wasn’t very good.

Blitz glanced at Donner who was standing beside him, one of her paws idly drumming a beat on the deck. She took a deep breath and exhaled with a shake of her wings. “Na schön. I suppose we can use her knowledge.”

Both K’yopi and Three tossed their forelegs high. “Yay! Go Team Freak!”

The filly raced to walk between the two giants while Three brought up the rear. She looked between her companions expectantly. “This is going to be so much fun.”

*****

“This isn’t fun at all,” K’yopi groaned, burying her face in the table with a soft thunk.

The four of them sat at a streetside table outside an open air cafe - as open air as it could get on a space station. It had taken only slight persuasion from Donner to convince the previous occupants to stop hogging the seats. Once the quartet was comfortable, they had each ordered a drink from a very nervous waitress. Two pitchers of freshly squeezed vegetable juice - straws included - for Donner and Blitz, a glass of soda for K’yopi and green tea - no sugar - for Three. He was on his fourth.

They had been sitting here for nearly an hour, watching the front door of the club across the wide and busy street. The club K’yopi had led them to, she explained along the way, was the place where much of the Duke’s ‘merchandise’ was shuffled through until it found a new permanent home with one of the clients. The same club they saved her from.

“Why exactly did you decide to pursue this venture?” Three lowered the cheap, faux-porcelain cup onto an even cheaper looking saucer. He cut off the magic and offered a gentle smile to his conversation partner.

The detailed, unmoving mask on the other side of the table spoke. “We need credits to perform necessary repairs to the ship.” Blitz’s voice rang out in a calm and collected manner.

Three shook his head, the smile never leaving his lips. “No, no, no. I mean to ask, why are you striving to procure those funds through an activity such as this one? Certainly there are better and much faster ways to obtain the money, am I wrong?”

Donner, who sat on Blitz’s right, spoke this time. “The bounty targets a leader of a known gang.” The massive claws could just be seen slightly peeking out from her padded paw resting on the table. “That means a lot of gang members to slice through. Something we are…” She offered Three the full view of her serrated teeth. “...exceptional at.”

The unicorn nodded and returned the grin. “Ah yes. Violence!” He magiced the cup to his lips and took another sip. “How enthralling!”

Donner narrowed her eyes as she studied the stallion closely for any signs of mockery, but found none. He really meant what he said.

Blitz picked up from there. “We were made to be the best at what we do. It is our purpose.” The mask on his face kept watching Three constantly.

The stallion clicked his tongue in surprise before looking up at the tip of his horn. “I would not be so certain my dear friend!” He lifted the cup once again and finished his remaining tea before setting it down. “But that is not what I have been inquiring about. Please, tell me. Why did you specifically decide to aid K’yopi?”

Other than the sounds of a busy street around them, Three did not receive an answer. After nearly a minute he opened his mouth wide. “Oh.” He slowly closed his mouth and drummed his hooves on the table’s edge. Blitz’s mask was still staring at him. Meanwhile, Donner moved her attention back to the observation target. Her ears moved from time to time between Three, Blitz and their surroundings.

Finally, the unicorn spoke up again. “Let me get this crystal clear. You are doing something, something highly engaging and possibly dangerous might I add, but you have no clue why you are doing it?”

He heard a growl and a murmur from the female’s direction, she was still pointedly looking away.

“I am sorry Donner dear, could you speak up?” He watched as the female’s ears flattened and her mouth turned into a scowl. Three looked at Blitz’s masked face. “What did she say?”

Suddenly, Donner slammed her paw on the table, making Three’s cup clatter in its saucer. “Because we chose to!”

Three didn’t flinch at the outburst. “I don’t follow.” He watched the female with a questioning expression for a moment, then turned to K’yopi. “What do you think K?”

The zebra was gone.

*****

K’yopi climbed on top of a trash container - the same container she was tossed against not so long ago. From the container, now moved against the club’s wall, she could reach the narrow grate covering the ventilation shaft. It was held closed by a simple latch, nothing the zebra could not overcome.

With a heave she pulled herself into the narrow duct. The only source of light was a grate somewhere far ahead. The perpetual draft made her shiver. What little dust had managed to settle on the walls was disturbed by her hooves as she fully climbed in and closed the cover from the inside.

She took a deep breath of recycled air and stared down the duct with determination. She knew the ducts covered almost the entire building, but this was the first time she had actually entered them. She was too afraid of what would have happened if she were caught before. Besides, she had been too well guarded back then.

But now, she was motivated by a deeply rooted feeling of rebellion. Both against her former masters, and against the protective giants. She’d show them. She’d show them that she could also be useful to the team - that she could get results without the need for muscle or magic.

The first section of the duct was long and straight. Every few meters there was a grate on the left side, overlooking the backstage corridor. She had to crawl slowly, partially because the noise of her limbs pulling her along travelled far. Partially because she was terrified of stirring the dust and sneezing. Every now and then she saw someone walking down the corridor. Some of them were familiar faces. Duke’s goons mostly, sometimes a member of the club’s staff, sometimes the ‘merchandise’.

She tried not to look when she saw those that were still forced to the same fate she so narrowly escaped just less than two days ago. She hadn’t been here long enough to create any friendships, and besides, how could a friendship work in such a place? But by the sheer nature of a place like this, she intimately knew a couple of others. The physical side of that knowledge disgusted her, but the unique bond she had with some of those people was difficult to ignore. A burden shared was a burden lessened. For a moment she wondered, shouldn’t they try to save them? Have Blitz, Donner and Three storm the place, punish the guards and let the others leave? It would help those that were suffering here.

No, doing that would alert the Duke even more - he’d go to ground and be impossible to find after two of his operations were destroyed. And with that, any attempts to save even more would be gone too. She gritted her teeth and slowly inched forward as she heard a muffled yell - one of the thugs ordering someone around.

After a few more meters K’yopi reached an intersection. She recalled the floorplan from her time spent here and realised that the left duct would lead her towards the storage area. The right one would lead in the direction of the bar. Perhaps there she could find some kind of useful information. She had to lie on her side and bend awkwardly to navigate the corner; only her small stature allowed her to squeeze through. A normal-sized pony like Three would not have had any hope of braving these ducts. But then, he was Three. K’yopi rolled her eye as she imagined the stallion turning into mist and simply flowing along.

Finally, she was through. She waited a long moment, wary that the noise she made might have alerted someone. But once she was certain no alarm had been raised, she continued onward. More grates: staff rooms and offices. She had rarely seen those; they looked normal. As if this place was a normal nightclub, with music, expensive drinks, drunk guests, mares and stallions there to entertain them.

Well, it had all that. The only difference was that many of the mares and stallions were not here willingly.

The offices were empty. The nightclub part of the establishment was closed at the moment, hence the lowered activity. But K’yopi knew it was just a coverup; the real purpose of this place could be found upstairs in the VIP areas.

The stretch of the duct ahead was nearly pitch black. There were no grates providing illumination. The filly rubbed a mote of dust from her nose and started crawling forward. Her limbs were already straining. At the very least, the jumpsuit protected her coat from chafing on the rough metal.

Once her body covered the grate behind her, the filly found herself crawling through darkness. She blindly shuffled her hooves forward, careful to not make noise. Her swollen eye itched fiercely, but she did not dare rubbing it with a dust-covered hoof.

After what felt like minutes, her hoof bumped into a wall. She reached to the right. Another wall. She reached to the left. No resistance. She pulled herself a bit further and spotted another grate a few meters ahead and around the corner. Awkwardly squeezing her small body, she passed another turn. What little muscles she had were already tired, and all that squeezing only made them ache with remnants of the pain inflicted upon her not so long ago. At the very least the air was mercifully cool and dry.

K’yopi made her way forward, towards the grate. As soon as she reached it, she stopped and lay down. Only the top of her head peeked through.

Directly below her she could see the bar’s counter. She was right above the main floor. Behind the counter was a pony. An aged stallion she knew as Mugs. Mugs was the most experienced bartender working there; he was also the one of the few that were kind enough to not abuse her. He didn’t spike her drink with drugs or alcohol. Sometimes she’d wished he had - maybe that way she’d forget.

The filly watched Mugs’ work for a few minutes. He was busy inspecting his supply of liquor stashed under the counter. If he was there, that meant the club was expecting many guests that night. Or important guests.

If that was true, she knew where she had to go next. The question was how to get there.

More minutes passed as K’yopi waited for Mugs to finish his work and walk away from her sight. She didn’t dare crawl right above him where he could just look up and see her through the grate. Once he was gone she hurried forward, as quickly as she could without making noise. Ahead, she saw another wall. Light was coming from above this time.

The vent bent upwards here at a ninety degree angle. The filly squeezed herself into the vertical section and stood on her hindlegs, her back resting against one of the walls. Only when she changed position did she realise how tired she was. She looked up and squinted her eye at the light above. It was hard to tell how far the featureless vent kept on climbing, but she could count at least three openings on the sides with grates on the opposite walls. One set above another. She needed to get to the floor above.

This was going to be tough.

She carefully slid into a sitting position and waited. Her mind started filling with unwanted thoughts. Why was she doing this? Why did she not stay with Three, Donner and Blitz? Why didn't she stay on Claudia? Why did she not just leave Miner’s Prospect behind at the first opportunity and run away from her past? Why not just forget about this nightmare? She was no cop, nor a mercenary or bounty hunter. She was just a little street rat. What was she supposed to do?

She took a deep breath and cracked her neck. She didn’t know what to do. But she knew she had to do something.

But how?

There was no ladder, and she had no rope. The first floor’s opening was perhaps five meters above her. She frowned and tapped a hoof on the opposite side with frustration.

The distance between the walls was nearly perfect to allow her to lock her leg straight in place.

Her eyebrow raised.

The filly stood up, positioning herself so that the openings in the walls above were on her right side. With her back pushed firmly to the wall behind her and her hooves reached to push against the one in front of her there was just enough space to allow her a steady hold. Slowly and with great effort she started pushing herself upwards.

Eight tiny steps later, all of her muscles were screaming in pain.

She was a meter above the ground.

But she kept going.

Her legs were burning, her shoulders and flanks were aching, her back felt numb. She couldn’t think. The voice in her head kept repeating ad nauseam. ‘Come on, you can do it. You can do it! Do it! Come on!’ She had no capacity to think of anything else; all of her concentration was focused on careful steps and pushing every bit of her meager strength into keeping the hold.

And she kept going.

Sweat was dripping from her forehead by the time she reached the third meter. On fourth it was flowing in streaks. She had to clench her eye shut to not be distracted by the saltiness. She could feel her limbs trembling. Blindly she reached a hoof in search of the opening to her right.

Nothing.

She whimpered as she realised she was still not there. Just a few more steps. Just a few.

Another step.

A muscle deep in her left hindleg suddenly exploded with pain. She let out a high-pitched squeal. Before her dulled mind could make the connection, her reflex overrode any thoughts and her right foreleg clamped over her muzzle. Or at least tried to. As soon as her grip loosened, she started sliding down. Loudly.

The surge of adrenaline hit her like a punch to the face. The zebra immediately slammed her hooves on the wall and pushed against it with all her might. She stopped. The pain in her hindleg was unbearable. Her jaw muscles hurt from clenching her teeth. She didn’t dare open her eye. She could feel the burst of strength rapidly depleting. She had to get up there now or never.

Another step.

She decided to do it quickly - the noise she just made during her fall was louder than a fast climb. She could only hope no one had taken notice of it.

Another step.

She couldn’t feel her left hindleg from pelvis to the knee. Only a numb feeling around her hoof made her aware she was still able to use it for climbing.

Another step.

The muscles on her back started shaking hard. She could feel they were nearly gone just like the hindleg.

Another step.

She stopped sweating; only a feeling of a thin, salty crust covering her neck and face persisted.

Another step.

The pulse in her head was slowing down. She felt woozy.

Another step.

The voice in her head was filled with wrath. It was screaming at her, reminding her of the awful things she’d gone through before. Reminding her of the pain and suffering. ‘Was this really worse? Was it?! Will this be what defeats you?! You endured so much more! You outlasted it all!’

“And you never. Ever. Cried!”

Her hoof reached a flat surface. She hefted herself over the edge with a muffled groan of pain and collapsed, catching air greedily with her panting muzzle.

She didn’t even notice herself drifting off to sleep.

*****

K’yopi slowly opened her eye and groaned. Her strained muscles quickly reminded her of what happened and how foolish she had been. Well, she’d done it. It would be a horrible waste of effort to go back. The filly moved her limbs one by one and winced as her left hindleg painfully reminded her of the climb. Once she was sure nothing was seriously damaged she returned to lying still and breathing slowly. Just a few more minutes.

Suddenly, the noise of distant, muffled music made her ears perk up. Only then did she consider how long she had been lying there. The club was open! That meant enough noise to mask her awkward shuffling in the vents. This was the perfect opportunity to do some serious snooping.

The filly lifted herself up as much as the low vent allowed and started moving with renewed purpose. A grate with a slowly spinning fan blocked the vent ahead, but fortunately right before it she saw another bend. K’yopi made her way towards the fan. She inspected the grate for any means of removal, but without tools she couldn’t do much. The bend on her right did not have a fan like that, she squeezed into it and kept moving.

Soon, K’yopi reached another grate, this one on the side of the vent. Beyond it and below she could see part of a room. A large bed filled the view; she saw intense movement under the covers. The filly didn’t need a wild imagination to guess what was happening. She resumed crawling.

Another few meters, another grate, another room, and another bed. She froze at what she saw. A young mare was lying on the bed, her hooves bound close to her body with ropes. Her eyes were covered with a rag, a thick metal ring around her horn. The mare’s golden coat bore signs of struggle. Her red mane was disheveled and matted with sweat. The filly didn’t recognize her. Did they already bring another poor pony to replace her? Another life forced to endure these awful things happening here? K’yopi could only swear to help her and the others like her.

The mare struggled against her bindings. It was futile - they were too tight. She whimpered, then called out.

“I am resisting arrest officer! You’ll have to use force. Please.”

The zebra blinked.

A stallion came into view, one of the ‘entertainers’ she knew from her time here. He was wearing a uniform not unlike the one worn by the station’s police.

K’yopi groaned as she planted her face into the vent below her with a soft thud. She didn’t stay to watch the arrest.

Another room. This one, fortunately, was not in use. Briefly she considered kicking the grate out and jumping down. Maybe the staff didn’t know she had escaped - maybe they just thought the Duke’s people had moved her somewhere else. The zebra lay there, staring into the empty room and considering her options. No, it was too risky. Even if they didn’t go after her immediately, she couldn't get back into the vent from the outside without help, and exiting through the doors was out of the question. She would have to keep using the vents.

The filly knew she was running out of rooms on this floor. Either she found something useful now or she’d have to go higher.

She couldn’t do another climb like that.

Last room on this side of the building. As soon as she reached the grate, she heard the door below slam closed. The filly looked down at the bed and recognized another pony. It was Sapphire, one of the crystal ponies she knew. The stallion was sitting on the bed and cleaning his face with a hot towel. A voice called out from beyond K’yopi’s line of sight.

“Well, that was uneventful. I swear, if I got a credit for every young hotshot coming in thinking they are some kind of sex machine that can last longer in a threesome than it takes me to warm up, I’d open my own place by now!”

Sapphire tossed the towel on the bed and pointed a hoof at his invisible conversation partner. “Come on Smokey, you can’t blame him for wanting something new.” He picked up a discarded bathrobe and put it on. “Besides, he was kinda cute.”

“Looks aren’t everything, you know that!” K’yopi watched the stallion track the speaker, who continued talking. “Not bolting out after fifteen minutes is a plus too. I never saw a grownup griffin cry before.” There was an elongated pause before the voice resumed again. “At least that means we have forty five minutes of lazy time!”

Sapphire stretched his forelegs wide and let out a satisfied moan. “I won’t mind at all mistress Smokey.” He deftly dodged the pillow tossed his way and chuckled, then pointed a hoof. “Cranky ‘cause you didn’t get any attention, are you?”

“Shut up, cocksucker.” Another figure came into view. Smokey was a unicorn, known for her no nonsense attitude and voluminous stature. She sat down next to Sapphire with two glasses held in her magic and offered one to the stallion. “Drink up.”

Sapphire held the glass in his hoof as he watched the mare take a swing from hers. “Whiskey so early? Wow, you really are pissed.”

The chubby mare grunted and took another sip. She leaned down to put the glass on the floor before turning around and lying on the bed with her back up.

Sapphire shrugged and took a sip from his own glass, then looked at the mare. “You know, if you want someone to give you proper attention you might still get your chance.” He grinned. “Scuttlebutt says Satin will appear tonight. And you know how she is. She loves her mares.” Sapphire took another sip of the golden liquid. “Just make sure you know what you are saying or else your ass is grass.” An unnaturally loud, wet slap reverberated through the room and the vents as Sapphire hit his hoof on Smokey’s buttcheek.

K’yopi didn’t listen to the following curses from the mare and the stallion’s laugh. She’d heard enough.

Satin.

She knew Satin and Satin knew her.

Satin was the reason why K’yopi sometimes woke up screaming at night, drenched in cold sweat.

Satin knew K’yopi very well.

Satin was the Duke’s right hoof - she’d lead the Freaks towards their goal.

The filly’s body started to crawl back automatically. Her mind was too occupied by racing thoughts to think of her movement.

*****

K’yopi slid out of the vent back first and landed on the trash bin with a thud. She gasped as her strained hindleg gave out and slid from underneath her. The filly lost balance, tumbling off the container and onto the street below with a loud yelp.

“Stupid leg.” She hissed through gritted teeth as she stood up, then started moving the numb limb. It felt stiff; she started walking in place, then trotting. Finally, the pain eased and the feeling in her hindleg returned. It still ached, but at the very least she could walk on all fours again.

“You! You little shit!” A harsh voice called out, making the zebra jump in surprise. She turned quickly at the source and saw a stallion. He was a burly unicorn wearing a black tracksuit with four white stripes running through the length of it and a black bandana covering his mane. The one that had savaged her in this very alley two nights ago.

K’yopi’s pupil shrunk at the sight. She started backing away blindly.

The stallion snarled and began advancing, malice in his posture. The punishment for being caught would be severe.

She screamed as her rump bumped into a wall.

The stallion’s lips parted into a vicious grin. “What? Those freaks abandoned you? Why don’t you come back where you truly belong, huh?”

K’yopi closed her eye and shivered, his voice making her imagination run in a direction she did not need - now, or ever. The filly whimpered. “N-no.” She found herself paralyzed; her brain was yelling at her to run, to do something. But her body refused to move, only shaking from the icy chill of fear.

“That’s right. You’ll be back doing the only thing you are good for in no time.” The voice was moving closer. It made her feel as if every orifice in her body had been violated by a flood of freezing water. A cold, metal ring was tightening around her brain. The black ice of terror ravaged her senses.

Suddenly, she felt a hoof grip her shoulder. In an instant, her body stopped shivering. She snapped her healthy eye open and saw the stallion’s leering face. The sight was enough to send her body into panic-driven overdrive.

K’yopi felt like a passenger in her own body as her muscles contracted, driven by an unseen force. As if in slow motion, she watched as the stallion smiled and raised his hoof to strike her, only to roar in pain and recoil when her own teeth buried themselves in the side of his neck.

The next thing she felt was the taste of blood in her mouth and a sensation of motion. Her body was already running down the alleyway when she regained control of it.

“You little bitch! I’ll have you flayed alive!” The beast’s voice was right behind her.

She ran, heedless of the injured leg. That was the only thing she could do. There was no other way out. The alley was leading into a bigger street. She could see silhouettes moving ahead. This was her chance; she could lose him in the crowded market.

The zebra burst into the busy street at the maximum speed she could sustain. She didn’t have time to look around. She ran straight ahead, aiming for the kiosks and stalls.

Fresh food, so hard to obtain in Miner’s Prospect. Fish, fruits and grains. Black market delicacies smuggled into the station. K’yopi didn’t pay any attention to any of it as she dodged and weaved through the crowd with difficulty. Behind her, surprised passers-by yelled obscenities as she caused a ruckus, only to be cut short by the thug chasing her pushing through them a second later.

The filly was flanked by rows of shops on both sides and a crowd of people ahead. She gritted her teeth as she dove down and slid between the legs of an oblivious minotaur. As soon as the filly regained her footing she looked behind her, only to see her pursuer shove the same minotaur aside and continue his chase.

K’yopi couldn’t hear her own thoughts over the racket of the market and the pounding of her heart. But then, she didn’t think of anything but escape. She had to run or face the wrath and brutality. Hurt hindleg or not.The street ahead opened into a bigger square. The heart of the market. It was free of solid obstacles like stalls, but it was filled with people. She lowered her head forward and forced herself to run faster. This could be her chance.

Finally, she reached the square. As soon as she dove into the crowd she quietly cursed her own coat. She stood out like a sore hoof. Maybe if they were all zebra she’d have had a chance to blend in. No such luck. She was the only striped equine on this deck - maybe even the entire station - at least she was small. Keeping her head low, she made her way towards the middle of the square, where the crowd looked densest. It was becoming hard to push through, but when the filly looked back she couldn’t see her pursuer. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Three, Donner, Blitz. Where are you?” Her voice was weak and laboured; the noise of the crowd drowned it out. The run made her lungs burn, her legs ache and her swollen eye sting. But she kept pushing through the crowd. She knew how to move through it unseen - it was a skill every pickpocket had to master quickly - but this was too dense even for her. It was nearly solid by now; she had to crawl between legs or force herself between bodies. Every now and then someone looked down with surprise or curiosity.

Most were indifferent.

She kept going. Suddenly, she stepped into the open. Before her, she saw a trio of griffins. Two female and one male. The male was broad, his sculpted musculature accentuated by a tight skinsuit. He was balancing on his thick foreleg, his entire body standing on it upside down, his hindlegs spread wide and high above him. On each hindleg, using only one of their own, stood one of the females. Their suits were just as tight and reminded K’yopi of some of the rubbery outfits she’d seen during her time at the club. They were leaning back towards each other and supporting themselves by the other’s intertwined talons while their free hind legs were outstretched for balance. Each of them held a torch lit up on both ends in their beak. The trio’s wings were bound with synthleather straps.

K’yopi stopped and stared. Even the fear of the immediate threat somehow failed to keep her moving. She had never seen anything like it. It was obvious neither had the other spectators. This, apparently, was the cause of the dense gathering.

She watched, flabbergasted, as the females slowly rotated their bodies until they were bending forward without breaking their grips, the flames of the torches shining bright. Meanwhile, the large male reached out his free foreleg and grabbed another torch, put it in his beak, then reached out for a lighter and lit it up. Then he started doing press ups.

The crowd, zebra included, gasped aloud. She couldn’t fathom it. The tricks mares and stallions from the club performed on steel poles were nothing compared to this. They were just so graceful in their movements - even the large male who was nearly as big as Blitz and Donner. With her head held high, K’yopi was stunned at the display.

The thug that had been chasing her emerged from the crowd off to the side, moving between her and the performers. For a split second, the filly didn’t know what to do.

Their eyes met. Instantly, the stallion lunged at the filly, forelegs outstretched. She screamed and jumped back; his hooves missed her face by a hair’s width. The thug landed in a heap with a groan, but quickly started to get up.

K’yopi looked around. The crowd of spectators was creating a ring around the two of them and the three performers. She couldn’t see an opening.

There was only one way to go.

“Oh this is so not fun.” She kicked her hooves and ran straight at the crouching stallion. With deft moves she ran up on the stallion’s back, then kicked again, using him as a springboard and jumped off. Right through the gap between the three performers. She could have sworn she saw one of the females balking as their eyes briefly locked.

The zebra sailed to the other side to the applause of a hundred people. As she landed, the crowd opened to let her through. She used the momentum of her jump to propel herself forward, away from the square.

The angry cry was all the confirmation she needed to know that she was not in the clear yet. The street she took was leading out of the market, the stalls and the crowd were thinner here. She could run in a straight line now.

So could he. And given he was nearly twice her size, he was gaining.

Her muscles ached, still not recovered from the arduous climb. She was getting more and more tired; she knew she couldn’t keep this pace for much longer. Her instincts told her to get out of his sight, find someplace to hide, but he was too close. There was no way she'd lose him in the open like this.

Just as she considered that, she spotted something big moving ahead. An elderly stallion hooked up to a gravcart stacked with prefab crates began crossing the street from one of the shopfronts. The huge cargo blocked almost the entire width of the street.

The filly summoned another burst of speed from her failing body. Just as she was about to collide with the gravcart she locked her legs and hunched down. Her teeth chattered as her hooves slid on the pavement and the gravcart sailed above her. She tried to stand up and resume running, but she had too much momentum. With a squeak of surprise the zebra tripped and toppled to the ground.

She couldn’t stay down - not when he was so close.

As she rose to her hooves she heard a sound of smashing. The noise of broken crates and the cries of the cart driver made it clear that her pursuer was attempting to go straight through.

A T-junction could be seen ahead. The way forward was blocked by a metal railing. Beyond it, a rectangle of huge open air gap was visible, easily a few hundred meters deep, with a massive wall on the other side. This must have been the edge of this deck. She was right next to one of the main cargo thoroughfares.

K’yopi slid to a halt by the railing. From here she could see the enormity of the thoroughfare. A giant tunnel running through the station. Tall and wide enough to allow starships to cruise through, many of them as big or even bigger than the one the Freaks used as a base. Every now and then, one ship or another would fly past with the deafening sound of engines at the leisurely pace enforced by the station’s authorities. The filly frantically searched for another way out. To her left was a maintenance catwalk, unfortunately locked with a gate and padlock. To her right, another street running along the thoroughfare’s railing. She whimpered as she realized that route was gated off for construction work. She looked down. Around twelve meters below her she saw another deck protruding from the sloping wall of the thoroughfare.

The sound of smashing crates was growing faster.

K’yopi bit her lip and stepped a first trembling leg over the railing. Down was the only way. She screamed and hugged the railing close as a wave of air displaced by a passing cargo hauler almost made her lose her grip. She dared to look down again and gulped as the wind threw around her thick dreads.

It was too high. She knew she’d break her legs if she jumped. But there was no other way out. For a split second, the filly considered surrendering. These thoughts were swiftly cast out when her body remembered what had happened after much smaller infractions.

He was getting through - she had to find a way out fast.

The zebra looked around again. Maybe she could force the padlock on the maintenance door open? No, she was already weak and she had nothing to leverage it with. She looked to the other side, towards the construction area. A bright yellow plastic chute used for removal of debris was attached to the railing. She didn’t realise what it was at first, but now that she took a closer look, she noticed that the chute went all the way to a garbage bin on the level below. This was her way out.

A bellowing roar grabbed her attention. The stallion from before had finally broken through the cart and was barreling towards her, bloodlust in his eyes. The filly gasped as she jumped off the railing and tumbled to the ground, just in time for the stallion to miss her and collide with the metal bars. K’yopi used his momentary blunder to get to her hooves and sprint towards the chute. As she climbed in, she dearly hoped the bottom would not empty into a pile of discarded rebar.

The chute bent and clattered as she went sliding down. Before she could think of bracing herself, it spat her out onto a pile of ruined plaster and construction wool. That didn’t mean the landing was pleasant. K’yopi groaned in pain as her muscles reminded her of just how much running and climbing she’d done in the last hour.

She coughed fiercely to clear her lungs of the dust cloud her landing raised. “Shit.”

The chute she’d just used started to clatter again.

“Shit!”

The filly grunted painfully as she clambered out of the garbage bin and started hobbling along the thoroughfare. On her right, a solid wall plastered with old posters and colourful graffiti. On her left, a giant open space with fast moving spaceships. And behind, one very angry and very dangerous stallion.

The zebra clumsily ran the only way she could: straight ahead. She nearly lost her balance as another passing starship blew her away. The traffic here was heavy; she could see an intersection with another thoroughfare a hundred meters ahead. If only she reached that point she could turn right and lose line of sight to her pursuer. Maybe then she could quickly hide somewhere - a nook or cranny between the pipes and supports. She was good at hiding.

And she had no other ideas.

She ran, wincing every other step until the wall on her right disappeared into open space of the second thoroughfare.

There was no right turn.

A railing on her left.

A railing out front.

A wall to her right.

And the stallion behind.

“No!” Her hooves frantically tapped the railing as if to search for a hidden button for a secret passage. She did the same with the wall on her right, but only a faded propaganda poster showing a young, beaming mare driving a tractor was there.

She looked down over the railing. The previous drop had looked like it would have left her in a crippled state. This one was bound to leave her in a liquid state.

“End of the line you little whore.” The stallion’s horn lit up and a large serrated knife floated up in his telekinesis. He took a menacing step forward. “You’re coming back with me.” He kept advancing.

Her single pupil shrank at the sight of the blade. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen it. She paced around in panic from railing to wall, then to railing and wall again. The stallion was coming closer step by step, clearly enjoying her fear. He was less than ten meters away.

She clawed her hooves at the wall, ripping the old poster to shreds. “Help! Someone please!” She quickly stepped to the railing and waved her forelegs frantically at the passing starships. “I am here! Please!”

None showed any signs of slowing down.

“You best do yourself a favour and not resist, or I will have to drag your sliced carcass all the way back.” He sliced the air with the blade as he advanced closer.

K’yopi let go off the wall and turned to the stallion. She didn’t know what to think; her hooves carried her away from the thug until her rump hit the railing. She half turned and looked down into the abyss. The filly hung her head and faced the stallion. Her voice was weak, barely audible over the noisy environment.

“Okay…”

She took a step forward. Then another. The stallion stopped and watched the zebra make his way towards him. Step by step the filly was getting closer. Her legs were heavy. Her muscles ached. Her lungs burned. All from the exhaustion of the chase.

She stopped just a meter from the thug.

“That’s right, nice and easy. You’ll be back home soon enough.” He reached out a hoof to grab her.

K’yopi looked up at the stallion. Her single healthy eye was wide open, filled with anger and contempt.

“Over. My. Dead. Body!” With a pump of her legs she rushed the larger stallion directly.

He pulled a malicious grimace, raising the knife.

The zebra collided with the thug. She felt a lash of pain on her right cheek. The stallion didn’t fall thanks to his larger stature, but the clatter of the knife dropping to the concrete told her that it had been enough to surprise him.

Using the last reserves of strength the zebra rebounded herself off the larger pony and started galloping the opposite way.

Towards the drop.

Mere meters before reaching the edge, just as she was about to squeeze her eye shut before the jump, she spotted a tiny, glowing sphere of blue energy appearing directly before her.

With a poof of sparkles the sphere turned into a unicorn.

A unicorn with a very cocky grin on his muzzle.

Three’s smirk instantly turned into a surprised frown as he realised K’yopi was about to slam straight into him at full speed.

Half a second later they both lay sprawled on the ground in a tangle of limbs and hurt.

“I don’t know where you came from, or who the fuck you are, but you are going to pay just like this little slut.” The burly stallion walked into Three’s field of view, the large knife held in his magic.

Three let out a pained groan before looking up at the stallion. “That is no way to talk in the presence of a lady. Especially when there are two of them around.” He raised his left foreleg and pointed over the thug’s shoulder.

The stallion whipped around instantly. The blade followed. No more than a meter away was the monster that had knocked him out cold in the alley two nights ago.

The creature grinned.

He pointed the oversized knife at her threateningly. “Just what kind of freak are you?!”

The deep voice came from behind. “The last you’ll ever see.”

The stallion turned around yet again. Instead of the strange unicorn and the zebra his entire field of vision was filled with a metallic mask. Its featureless eye sockets stared straight at him.

With a roar the stallion swung his weapon at the creature. It hit something with a meaty sound and went in deep. He took a step back and let out a laugh. “I’m not afraid of you.”

Blitz brought his left forepaw up and stared at the knife impaled through his paw. The weapon had sunk all the way to the hilt; thick orange blood seeped from the wound. Less than half of the now orange-coated blade was pointing out of the exit wound on the other side.

The giant slowly rotated the paw, inspecting it closely as if one would inspect a rare jewel. He shifted his mask at the attacker. The stallion was staring at the blade too. His muzzle was wide open in disbelief.

Donner slightly angled her head at Blitz as if asking a silent question. The large male effortlessly pulled the knife from his paw and tossed it away over the edge, then raised his right foreleg. In a split second a set of five claws appeared, each nearly as big as the knife. Donner mimicked the gesture, adding her own quintet.

Three moved his hoof to cover K’yopi’s healthy eye.

The twelve hyperturbine engines of a humongous freighter rising from below the edge of the deck drowned out the screams.

*****

K’yopi winced as Three’s magic attached a small plaster under her right eye. The cut was not deep enough to require stitching, but it would leave a mark. The Freaks were heading back towards the club that they had been busy watching before the juvenile zebra decided to take matters in her own hooves.

“You were fortunate the blade missed your eye.” Donner spoke without looking back at her.

The filly was currently being carried on the huge female’s back. She nodded and stood up, resting her forelegs on Donner’s head. “I know, I-I didn’t know what else to do.”

Blitz, who was walking alongside, slightly angled his head at the zebra. “You were fortunate we found you.”

His tone was level as always, but that slight angle of his head and the implied consideration it gave her made K’yopi wince. “I’m sorry. But… I had it! I had it almost all the way until the end!” She grabbed Donner’s fluffy ears and squeezed, prompting the female to let out a low grunt of annoyance accompanied by a quick flick of her long tail. “I know how we can trace the Duke!”

Three, who had been following behind the two giants, stepped forward in an attempt to squeeze himself between Blitz and Donner. The latter tried to block him with her massive wing, but to no avail. “Are you saying you managed to outwit and outmaneuver the entire security force of a location of such great importance to our adversary?”

K’yopi looked down at the stallion from her mobile perch and bit her lip. “I mean… There weren’t any guards really. And I didn’t have to do a lot of… outwitting.” She nodded and continued with conviction in her voice. “But I know what we need to do now.”

Three’s face lit up. “You do? Oh most wondrous of news! You performed splendid work K!” He quickly added, “I mean, you could have avoided almost getting stabbed to death. Or almost falling to your death. But splendid work indeed!”

Donner shook her shoulders, making the filly’s hold on her ears tighten in reflex. The huge creature didn’t seem to mind anymore. “The risk you took was severe, and you almost paid for it.” The bushy end of the long, leonine tail briefly rested on the zebra’s shoulder. “Deciding to be aggressive enough, quickly enough, is the hallmark of a sharp mind.”

“It was foolish to go alone.” The voice came from Blitz, who was staring ahead as the group walked. “You did better than any of us.” If the giant had anything else to say he did not elaborate.

Three looked between the two before smiling up at the filly again. “See? Even Blitz thinks you did good!”

The filly felt a strange sensation in her chest; it felt as if she were about to pop like a balloon. Only after a few moments did she realise it was pride. She looked at Three’s grinning face, Blitz’s enigmatic mask and Donner’s fluffy ears. “I, umm…” She nervously licked her top lip. “Ummm… Thanks guys?”

Three returned to watching the street ahead. “You’re welcome!”

The group was nearing the club where Satin was supposed to appear. From the opposite end of the large street they could see that a line of people was already gathering at the main entrance. Every now and then someone skipped the queue and went straight in as the bouncers opened the door in front of them.

K’yopi took in a deep breath. “We need to go after Satin.” She attempted to mask her cracking voice

It didn’t work.

Donner shook her wings as the four of them rounded a corner and headed for the same cafe they used for observation earlier. “Who is this Satin?”

The filly continued from her perch. “S-she’s the Duke’s right hoof. The biggest, baddest and meanest person on Miner’s Prospect.” She took another deep breath. Even thinking about Satin made her nervous. “She’s supposed to appear here tonight. If we could shadow her she’d lead us directly to the Duke.”

“Are you certain she’ll be here tonight?” Blitz’s head was turned towards the crowded entrance, regarding the gathering.

“Yes! I overheard some workers talking about it! They got their best staff ready. Satin is coming!” Suddenly she realised her throat was dry.

Satin was coming.

The memories struck again. A cocktail of bone-chilling dread, mute fury and crippling helplessness washed over the filly’s thoughts. She felt shivers dart down her spine. A familiar grip of helplessness in her gut. Phantom pains connected to long healed marks of violence and mistreatment clenched like strong hands. She knew that even in the far future, long after she’d forgotten the traumas and long after she’d made peace with the nightmares, it would all come rushing back like an avalanche if she ever again heard that name, even just that word.

She realised she was staring into nothingness. A blink later she was back in the real world. Only the choked terror deep in her gut and uneasy sensation of filth remained. She swallowed hard and addressed the closest of her companions. “We just need to follow Satin back to the Black Knights’ headquarters and we will find the Duke.”

Blitz’s mask was facing her directly. “Do you know what Satin looks like?”

She drew a short breath and nodded. “She’s a mino! She’s taller than you! Has huge muscles and even bigger horns!” K’yopi raised her forelegs to mimic two horns erecting from her temples. “Look for a silver coat with black spots, impossible to miss. Oh! She also has a robot eye.”

Donner let out an amused snort. “Finally. Sounds like something challenging to kill.” Her huge wings raised, then grabbed the zebra on her back and deposited her on the seat by the cafe’s table.

Three took the seat right next to the filly. He then put on his usual slasher smile before raising a hoof and waving at a waitress. It was the same poor mare that served the Freaks’ table before. Once he had whispered a few words into the waitress’ ear the unicorn looked back at his companions. “Well, that does indeed sound like an exceedingly hard to miss persona.” He glanced at the filly. “And why is this Satin coming here exactly?”

K’yopi held her forehooves close to her chest, looking down in an attempt to avoid Three’s eyes. The unicorn’s smile vanished as he connected the dots quickly. “Oh.”

He looked up at Blitz and Donner who sat on the opposite side of the round table. He leaned forward slightly, just enough to free his back off the chair. His face was perfectly still; only his deep blue eyes moved between the giants from beneath half closed eyelids. Tiny, hair-sized lightning bolts arced along his curved horn. His voice was quiet, with a razor thin delivery as he addressed them. “You will annihilate that thing the moment she brings us to the Duke.”

Donner raised her forepaw. “What are yo-”

His eyes threateningly flashed with magical energy. “Do it.”

The large female let out a low growl, resting the forepaw back on the table, her tail was cutting circles in the air behind her. Meanwhile, Blitz readjusted his position and nodded. “Very well. We will do as you ask.”

The shaking voice of the waitress cut the uncomfortable silence. “T-two pitchers of mineral water, cup of green t-tea and an extra large Strawberry F-fantasia?”

Three’s cold expression immediately vanished, replaced by his trademark slightly-too-large smile as he looked at the waitress. “Thank you dear! I’ll wave you if we need anything else.” Three’s magic levitated the orders to each recipient as the waitress made herself scarce.

K’yopi looked up at the large glass which landed in front of her. Tiny droplets of condensation slowly ran down the sides. It was filled to the brim with a mushy, light pink liquid while the top was adorned with a hefty serving of thick, white fluffiness that was spilling over the edge of the glass. To end the effect, its rim was adorned with a red, triangular fruit covered in tiny specks and a long plastic straw that looped and bent on itself at least three times.

The zebra blinked at the unusual sight. She had never seen anything like it before in her entire life, and certainly never drank anything like it. She turned to face Three with a questioning look.

The unicorn nodded with a thin smile. “Go ahead dear, it’s for you. I figured that you’d need a little pick me up after that horrendous ordeal.” He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “It’s made of cow juice.”

The filly greedily chomped on the fantastical straw. A second later her eye rolled backwards and her forehooves happily tapped on the table.

Blitz turned his covered face between Donner and Three, then spoke with a measured voice. “The important question now remains. How do we get the information about the Duke’s whereabouts from Satin?”

“We go in right now and beat it out of her!” Donner’s paw slammed the table, making Three’s cup clatter on its saucer. “That way we will obtain the initiative and be able to strike before the Knights can prepare!”

Three clicked his tongue. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Donny, but I am afraid such a plan would be a foolish one.” If the unicorn noticed the large female scowling at the unsolicited pet name, he did not show it. Instead he just continued, smile oblivious as always. “The Duke knows someone is going after his operations by now. After all, me claiming the bounty on Mother was quite a high profile event.” He nodded as if congratulating himself.

Just before Donner could growl at the stallion, Blitz added dryly, “He’s right. Mostly. We have to assume that disrupting this place would only justify the gang’s suspicions. And if we go after Satin we will leave no doubt as to who is our target.”

Donner forced out a breath through her nostrils before crossing her forelegs across her chest. She spoke quietly, yet with a noticeable undertone of annoyance in her voice. “We do not have other options. Going through the main door seems to be the only way.” The female somehow relaxed her posture as she pointed an accusatory claw at Three. “What would you have us do then? Threaten her? She is too tough for that. Use a bribe? We do not have enough credits. Sneak in? None of us can do that!” Her massive wings flared briefly, startling a group of nearby ponies.

“I can do that,” K’yopi called out, before tossing the red fruit into her mouth. Her healthy eye blinked in surprise as she chewed. Her companions watched her swallow before she wiped the trace amount of milkshake from her lips and nodded. “I snuck in there after all. Shadowing someone is not much different!”

Three raised a hoof to protest. “And you almost got eviscerated, K! Did you ever think of what would have happened if I hadn’t come to save you?” The unicorn ignored an exasperated sigh from Donner.

The zebra whipped her face at the stallion. “I had it under control! All I had to do was to jump down on that freighter! Her juvenile voice cracked at the high pitch. “If I did, Blitz wouldn’t have been stabbed!”

The masked giant laid his left forepaw on the table. The stab wound was still visible, but the bleeding had stopped long ago. He didn’t seem to show any signs of it causing him pain or discomfort. “And you would have broken all your legs, then likely gotten spaced as the freighter left the station with you ly-”

The abrupt slam of small hooves on the table caused Three to jump in his seat. “I know how to take care of myself!” The zebra was breathing heavily, staring straight at Blitz’s emotionless mask. Her red eye was wide open with anger. “I’ve been on my own my entire life! Do you think I would have been here to talk with you if I didn’t know how to do it?!” Her voice was rising in pitch and volume with each sentence. “I might not be huge or strong or have weird powers or anything! But I’ve been through SO. MUCH. SHIT.” The filly’s hooves slammed the table with each word. “I learned how to float on it! So please! Stop! Treating! Me! Like! A! CHILD!” She reached for the now empty milkshake glass and swiped it off the table. As it broke on the ground she let out a frustrated cry before standing up and hurrying away.

Donner slowly rotated her head until she was staring at her masked companion. “Sie hat recht, das weißt du schon oder?”

Three stood up quickly, casting his glance at the shattered glass first before shifting it to Blitz. “I do believe the expression she would like me to use would be…” He creased his eyebrows in thought for a second, then offered a pleasant smile. “You fucked up.” The stallion trotted after the zebra. Fortunately she wasn’t far; he could see her striped head poking up over the crowd on the other side of the street. As soon as he reached her it was clear why.

*****

K’yopi was sitting on the roof of a small vehicle, popular in the crowded insides of the Miner’s Prospect. Three had learned the locals called them tuk-tuks. Why? He had no clue.

“Leave me alone.” The filly called out from her perch before the unicorn had a chance to say anything. She pointedly turned away as he opened his mouth to speak. “I don’t want to talk with anyone right now.” The slight timbre in her voice betrayed her anger, still simmering.

Three clamped his mouth shut and looked around. He was too big and too heavy to climb after the zebra so he had to sit down on the curb. The stallion bit his lip, wrangling his mind on how to approach the filly. Three days ago he had never met a teenager before; now he was trying to think of a way to placate one. It filled him with a feeling he loathed. A feeling that stood directly in opposition to his core principles.

He was nervous.

Moreso, he couldn’t understand why she made him feel like that. Many things made him nervous. Of course, he never showed it. But he always could understand the reason why they were making him nervous, and with that knowledge he could brave them.

This time, he had no idea why he felt like that. And that made him afraid.

It also made him frustrated. Why? Why did this little zebra stir such visceral emotions in him? His mind couldn’t explain it. He cared for her of course. She was fun to be around, definitely more than the other two. She was also clever and resourceful, something Three had attributed to his brilliant guidance. But deep down, he knew he was lying to himself.

It was something else. A deeply rooted feeling of belonging he felt with the zebra. An unspoken bond between two individuals connected by the virtue of surviving the worst life had to offer. Their pasts were as different as day and night, but they had one common element.

The will to endure.

To him she felt like a-

“Sibling? Donner must be his sibling.” The filly was speaking in a barely audible tone, her gaze focused on the street. “I mean, what else could they be? The way they look, the way they act and most importantly the way they fight.” She let out an elongated moan of annoyance. “They are not a couple! Maybe they are clones? Is that how clones work?”

The stallion blinked. “Excuse me?”

The filly threw her forelegs up with frustration. “Clones! Like in the holovids. That’s a thing, right?”

The side of her face Three was able to see seemed calmer now. He slowly shook his head. “No, not really. As far as I am aware, only Avalon uses cloning technology and only for medical cases such as limb or organ replacements.”

K’yopi rolled her eye at the stallion. “Right. Whatever. Right now they act like they own me.” Her frown deepened again. “I’ve had enough of people owning me and my body.” Her striped foreleg reached into one of many pockets on her jumpsuit and retrieved the cigarette pack. She flicked the lid open and pulled out one orange-white piece with her lips. Her other foreleg started tapping the jumpsuit’s pockets, but after a brief search the filly stopped and let out another groan of annoyance. She turned her head down fully towards the unicorn for the first time since he arrived. “Can I have a light?”

The stallion looked down at his bare body. “I… uh, no.”

“Three.” Her voice had lost its edge; it sounded tired now.

“What?” He looked up again at the filly, his face full of uncertainty.

The corners of her mouth lifted slightly as she tapped a hoof on her forehead.

The unicorn blinked. “Oh!” Instantly, a tiny lightning arced along his horn. Simultaneously, a blue glow of magic enveloped the tip of the cigarette the filly held between her lips. Half a second later the glow disappeared, instead replaced with an orange ember.

She closed her eyes and pulled. After a few seconds she breathed out the gray cloud and looked down at the unicorn. “Did you come to tell me I should get back? Or to watch over me?”

Three stood up and fidgeted from hoof to hoof. “I… No.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, K’yopi. I-I just wanted to…” His tongue felt like it was tripping over itself. “I just wanted to say that I think your idea is good. We really do not have other options.”

She took another drag before flicking off the ash at the end of the cigarette. “And you really think that?”

“Yes! It’s very risky, but you showed that you can do it. I…” A brief thought occurred to the unicorn. He had never said anything like that before. “I believe in you.”

The filly’s head angled in curiosity as her eye flickered. “And you really mean that?”

The vigorous nod from the stallion did not leave any illusions. “Yes! Absolutely! You’re smart and crafty and you know this station like none of us! If anyone can pull something like that off, it's you!” He offered her a smile. Not like the one he usually had, filled with an aura of superiority and self assured preconception of always being right. This one was earnest, reassuring.

It was honest.

The filly’s eyebrows went up. She was puzzled, almost lost at what to think of the strange pony. This was the second time she’d managed a glimpse at the stallion behind the brick facade built of cockiness and confidence. A shocking contrast to his daily disposition.

Yet, she found the feeling evaporate quickly. Instead it was pushed out by something else. Something strange she hadn’t felt in a very long time.

A sense of trust.

This stallion trusted her. She couldn’t explain how she knew it, but she knew his trust in her was final. She’d felt trust before, misplaced of course. Long ago she’d trusted Mother and many others she’d met in life. She had been too young to understand that they were abusing that trust. But watching this pony below her, his warm smile and his soft blue eyes, she realised she felt an even more alien emotion.

The feeling of safety.

“Well? Do I have to grab you with my magic and pull you down?”

His voice brought her out of her thoughts. She took one more drag of the cigarette before tossing it away, then slid down from her perch to the street below, right next to the unicorn. She watched him closely; he was still smiling. “Umm.. Three?” She rubbed her forehoves on one another. “Thanks.” The zebra felt herself dragged towards the stallion as his horn lit up. Before she had a chance to protest Three wrapped his forelegs around her small form, holding her tightly. She flinched in fear at first, her mind conjuring horrible memories, but at his touch, they were banished as quickly as they appeared. The warmth of his body and the feeling of his neck rubbing against hers. His hooves gently rested on her back, pushing her close to his chest where she could feel his beating heart.

She let out a soft sigh as her muscles relaxed. Her mind attempted to run a hundred thoughts at once again, but she willed herself to ignore them. Only the closeness of the unicorn occupied her thoughts and senses now. She felt a sudden shiver shake her body.

Three spoke in alarm. “I am sorry!” He started to back away.

“No!” Now it was her turn to grab him close. “No, it’s not that. Please, it’s okay.” She spoke in a calm, soothing voice as she rested her chin on his shoulder and sniffed.

“It’s okay.”

Chapter 3

Claudia’s common room was quiet. Only the faint rattle of ventilation and the distant humm of the reactor could be heard. Blitz sat on the couch with his legs folded under his body, while Donner lay spread on her back across the nearby stairs. The screen on the nearby wall was showing a muted rerun of last year’s Polocrosse Grand Championship Cup. Neither of the giants paid any attention to it. Just as the female was about to roll over, the door to the cargo hold burst open.

Three quickly walked inside. He was nearly on the tips of his hooves, switching from leg to leg in a nervous dance-like routine. He looked at the two creatures and gasped. “How can you two just lie there?” The unicorn stepped around the table and towards the stairs, giving Donner an accusatory glare. “She’s not here yet. Something bad must have happened!” His horn lit up and the stallion turned into the small sphere of energy. It zipped in front of Blitz then turned into the unicorn again. “Don’t just sit here! Something went wrong!”

Donner watched the frantic pony with amusement from under her half lidded eyes. A small grin was spreading across her muzzle.

Three lit up his horn again and materialized by the door he had just come in through. He peered into the cargo hold, back into the room, then again into the cargo hold. He disappeared again. The energy sphere shifted in front of Blitz, yet again and yet again the unicorn appeared. “What if she got captured by the Knights?!” He sat down and ran both of his forehooves down his face. “What if they are doing horrible things to her right now?!”

Donner waved her paw at the air above her. “You convinced us to let her go on her own. Now you are the one who is having second thoughts?” She threw her limbs out in a mighty stretch before rolling on her side and facing the unicorn. “Either be quiet or leave this room. You are more annoying than usual.”

The stallion’s eyes bulged out at the female. “Annoying? Annoying?!” He took a step forward, then another, all the while pointing an accusatory hoof at the large creature. His voice was filled with disbelief. “It seems to me I am the only sane one around here! You just... just…” He stopped and moved the hoof between Blitz and Donner. “...Lie here all day and laze about! You… you… faineant felines!”

The female let out a hiss and swiped a paw at the unicorn, only for him to straighten up and light up his horn in return. Her reply was to extract the five deadly claws with which the paw was armed. She followed with a long, bassy growl directed at the stallion. The stallion who immediately poured more magical energy into the horn, making it crackle with miniature lightning bolts of raw power.

Blitz had been sitting comfortably on the couch, watching the scene. His ears perked as the two began their sabre rattling. Just as Donner was about to leap on the unicorn from her perch while Three prepared to cast a spell, the large male snapped his wings wide with the poignant sound of ruffling feathers. “Enough!” Despite the mask covering his entire face, his voice was loud enough to fill the room to the brim. “We will not accomplish anything if you two kill each other right here and now!”

The female hissed, keeping her eyes glued to the unicorn. “I guarantee you I would not be the one who’d die here.”

Three’s face hardened as a particularly sizable bolt shot out wildly off his curved horn. “You want to gamble on that?”

“I said enough!” The giant male stepped down from the couch and stood between the other two. “K’yopi’s abilities are adequate for the task.” There was a short pause as the mask turned between Donner and Three. “If she really failed, she would be with the Duke. We will need anothe-”

The giant’s speech was interrupted by the shrill sound of a mechanical buzzer coming from Claudia’s PA system.

Three’s head didn’t finish turning; the unicorn’s entire body shifted into a tiny sphere of magic in a flash, disappearing through the door leading to the hold.

Without one half of the current issue present, the giant turned to face Donner. The female rolled her eyes, standing up and walking down the stairs. “You have to admit, he is annoying.” She also headed for the cargo hold.

Blitz allowed her to go first, then closely followed behind. Just before she crossed the door to the hold he spoke quietly. “It had been a long time since I saw you bear such strong opinions about someone.”

Donner’s fluffy tail smacked the ornate mask behind her. “Halt die Klappe.”

On the other side of the cargo hold, Three was already standing by the airlock’s console, ineffectually slapping his hooves on the buttons. “Come on! How do you use this infernal contraption?”

The console replied with a sad, mocking beep.

Crackles of magic appeared on the unicorn’s horn as he threateningly narrowed his eyes at the stubborn machine. Just as he was about to blast it, a huge, cream-coloured paw reached past and tapped a sequence of buttons before flicking a red switch.

“Do not even think about it.” From her half-turned face, Donner’s single eye bore into the unicorn. However, he ignored her as the heavy door of the main airlock began to slide open. As soon as the gap was wide enough, a small form slithered in.

K’yopi ground to a halt before the trio; she was panting heavily, barely catching her breath. The filly’s entire body was coated in red.

She threw a foreleg up and struck a pose. “I did it!”

Three’s face was aghast. He clearly did not share the filly’s enthusiasm. It took him over five seconds to articulate his thoughts. “W-what happened to you! Oh goodness gracious K’yopi are you hurt?!” The stallion winked out of existence, only to appear with a flash at the zebra’s side. His hoof reached out and grabbed her face before inspecting it closely. “You are covered in blood!” His speech was rushed, almost to the point of panic. His hooves couldn’t seem to decide if they should risk touching the zebra and possibly make the wounds worse, or remain idle.

Blitz and Donner, however, were not fooled. The male nodded appreciatively at the filly, the end of his bushy tail pointing at the unicorn. “It is good that you are back. Someone was becoming quite worried.”

Donner meanwhile lowered her head to the ground level as she flapped her massive wings once, then gave the filly a large toothy grin. “Your arrival could not have been better timed.”

Three threw his head over his shoulder at the two giants. His eyes were wide and disbelieving. “This is not the time for this! Can’t you see?” He sat down only so he could point both of his forelegs at the zebra. “Blood!” Just as he did, he felt one of them squeezed tightly. Slowly, his head turned to see K’yopi pulling it down. Her eyes were closed as she placed it carefully on her chest and hugged it.

“It’s okay, Three. I’m fine. It’s not blood.”

“It isn’t?”

“No silly, I had to dive into a trash container.” She let go of the leg and opened her healthy eye. “It was full of old tomatoes.”

The unicorn balked. “Tomawhats?”

She shook her head in disbelief as she reached out the airlock’s console and flipped the switch, then headed for the common room. “Never mind. I’m okay. Come on!”

He watched her go, expression quickly shifting between worry, confusion and curiosity. It repeated that cycle at least four times as the unicorn sat, unable to formulate words. Moreover, he wasn’t certain why he reacted in such a way, and that only added to his consternation.

Blitz was waiting for Three by the hatch leading to the common room. His head slowly turned as the pony rejoined him. “Your dedication to the filly is admirable.”

The unicorn stopped and angled his head, clearly not following. “What?”

The giant continued. “Your emotional attachment is clearly visible. Are you certain you never met anyone like that before?”

The question caught the stallion off guard. He peered at Blitz’s mask, looking for hints of deception or farce. Of hints of anything. Of course, there were none.

There never were.

Three took a deep breath and frowned. “I… no. Never, but…”

The giant was quick to pick up on his hesitation. “But?”

The stallion creased his eyebrows in thought. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, not directed at his companion. “Sometimes… Sometimes when I wake up I feel a glimmering. Like a half remembered dream, but not quite.” He looked at Blitz again with a distant expression. “It is more like a memory I never thought I had. Too real to be a dream, but too fantastical to be real.”

Blitz was seated by now, giving the unicorn his full attention. His deep voice was soft, devoid of its usual aloofness. “What do you feel?”

The question was simple. Three asked himself that many times over the years. Yet, he could never answer it.

Until now.

The feeling left by that glimmering had always eluded him previously. Like a train of thought slipping through the dark crevices of his consciousness and into the recesses of his mind he had no way of accessing. No matter how hard he willed himself to remember.

But right then and there, he realised something. Even though he still couldn’t remember, he now possessed a point of reference with which he could compare and identify the feeling.

That point of reference was K’yopi.

The stallion squeezed his eyelids hard before looking fully at Blitz. “I think…” He looked over the giant’s form to make sure the other two were safely away. “I think I knew her before.” He shook his head. “No. Not her. Not K’yopi. I have never met her before. But…” He took a deep, steady breath. “That attachment you mentioned. Even though I am positive I have never met that filly before. That attachment…” He felt a jolt of a shiver run down from the tip of his horn all the way to the end of his tail. “I remember that attachment. I remember the feeling of…“ He stared at his hooves as he had to pause for breaths now. “The feeling of caring for someone deeply. Pride, sometimes jealousy. Rivalry and cooperation. Frustration and satisfaction. I feel like I could watch her repeatedly run into a wall and laugh but also skin alive anyone who tried to hurt her.” His throat let out a soft disbelieving noise. Carefully, as if afraid, the stallion looked at the mask before him. “What does it mean? Why are there so many opposites? I don’t understand.”

Blitz was quiet for a long moment. Just as the unicorn was about to repeat his question, he spoke, his voice still soft and measured. “You care for her that much even though you met barely two days ago?”

The stallion threw his forelegs in a huge shrug. “I have no idea why! It flabbergasts me. All I know now is that it is something I felt very long ago.”

The giant nodded slowly. Then, to Three’s confusion, reached out a paw and placed it on the unicorn’s shoulder. “I know what it is you are describing.” The mask moved closer, filling the stallion’s vision entirely. Blitz’s deep voice resonated from within. “I know now that you can be trusted with her.”

Three blinked. “I... Okay. Yes? I mean. Yes!” He took a deep breath to steady himself, for as much as he loathed to admit it, the blank stare of the ornate piece covering Blitz’s face made him feel uncomfortable from this close. “Will you tell me what it is that I feel?”

The mask shook slightly from side to side. “It is best if you figure it out. On your own.” The giant’s voice returned to his normal volume and lack of attachment. “I know this topic very well.” Blitz pulled away and turned, then went into the common room, his long tail swaying after him.

Three let out an elongated groan as his hoof ran a line from the base of his horn to the tip of his muzzle.

“Hey, you coming?”

He lowered his hoof only to see K’yopi’s head poking out from the doorframe. It was still covered with the red goo.

The unicorn looked up and forced a smile. “Yes, yes. Of course.”

*****

K’yopi was sitting on one of the chairs, Blitz and Donner flanking her sides, waiting patiently. As soon as Three took the seat to Donner’s left the filly began. “I followed Satin to deck twenty nine.” She nodded at Blitz, who reached a paw and pressed the table’s touch screen. A holographic projection showing a wireframe model of the entire deck blinked into existence above the table. Kilometers of corridors and shafts, with hundreds of sections and even more rooms; to the uninitiated it looked like a four dimensional puzzle. “These schematics are pulled from the public database of Miner’s Prospect.”

“Which means we cannot trust them,” Donner said, narrowing her eyes at the slowly rotating image.

The filly continued. “Yeah… You’re probably right. Either way.” She planted one foreleg on the table to steady herself as she reached out towards the projection and pointed at a specific part. “This is as far as I could get without being spotted.”

Three also leaned in; to him the hologram looked like an impossible jumble of lines and lights. “What is it?”

K’yopi tapped the space inside a hologram and a visible ping appeared, marking the location with a red dot. “The edge of the Duke’s turf. No one else goes beyond there.” She swiped her hoof and the image shifted, the centre of the view now showed a large chamber. “I bet you a hundred creds this is where we will find the Duke himself.”

Blitz nodded slowly. “Another hangar bay.” His paw tapped on the touchscreen again and a prompt containing a few paragraphs of text appeared before him. “Unused by the station authorities, flagged condemned after Miner’s Prospect received the upgrade to new thoroughfares and cargo terminals.”

Donner let out a pleased purr. “An ideal nest for gangsters and others that want to keep out of sight.” Her tail spun and weaved over her back. “No one will miss them.”

Three drummed his forelegs on the table’s edge in a little pattern. “Well, that makes our stratagem exceptionally easy.” He pointed at the hangar with the tip of his horn. “We go there, blast the door open and kill everyone that tries to stop us until we hack our way to the Duke. All we have to do is to keep our eyes peeled for a black crystal pony with a green mane.”

The table was silent.

Just as the silence was becoming uncomfortable, Donner spoke up abruptly. “I like this plan.”

Blitz was quick to follow. “Agreed.”

K’yopi raised a hoof carefully. “I am coming with you.”

Three looked through the hologram at the filly. “Of course!”

“But I-” The zebra’s eyes went wide. “Wait, really?” She turned to look at Blitz and then Donner. Neither of the giants spoke out in protest.

“You are part of the team K!” The stallion offered her a toothy grin. “You gotta be there for the finale.”

She looked at Blitz again. “Are you okay with this?” Her immediate inclusion felt welcome, but certainly surprising.

The giant’s head turned, displaying the ornate mask to the zebra fully. “You showed you can take care of yourself.” The mask briefly shifted towards Donner and Three before returning to the filly. “Besides, you possess skills we are lacking. It would be a waste to not include you.”

The filly felt a surge of pride swell within her at the words. She reached out both forelegs and awkwardly hugged the mask. It was rather clumsy given her small size compared to Blitz, but she managed to get a brief hold on the giant. “Thanks. You guys are the best!”

Three let out a haughty chuckle. “Was there ever any doubt?”

The zebra shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Not if you ask this gal!” She thumped a hoof on her chest. “We are going to make the Duke pay for all he has done!”

Donner reached out a wing and gently pulled the filly off Blitz. “First go clean yourself up. You reek.” She scrunched her nose to drive the point in.

K’yopi jumped off the chair and headed for the ship’s bathroom. “Okay fine, fine! It’s just old tomatoes, sheesh.”

As soon as the filly closed the door behind her, Blitz turned off the hologram. “We do not know how many followers the Duke has.” His wings raised up and down slightly, as if the giant were shrugging. “If their numbers reach a critical mass even we might have problems.”

Three leaned back on his chair and spread his forelegs wide with a flourish. “Let them come! I am fine with whatever they throw at us.” He grinned. “One or one hundred. Easy!”

Donner looked down at the unicorn beside her and rolled her eyes. “Stop boasting. We need to think this through. Consider our options.”

The stallion’s face screwed up. “I am not boasting! It’s true!” He sounded almost offended. “In fact, perhaps it would be best if you just brought up the rear! Leave the heavy lifting to me.” He smiled deviously at the female. “After all, you can do only so much with claws compared to what I can do with magic.”

Donner stood up instantly with a ruffle of feathers. She looked down at the smug unicorn and bared her many teeth. “I’ll show you what I can do with claws!” Her left forepaw raised up, then pushed towards Three’s exposed stomach.

Only to strike the chair on which Three was sitting on a split second ago.

With a pop and a shower of magical residue the stallion appeared behind Donner. “See? You are only proving my point!”

She shifted to the side and let out a frustrated growl. Her tail coiled like a spring and her wings raised, ready to strike again. In the corner of her eye she saw Blitz still calmly sitting at the table.

The unicorn’s smile grew. “Donner dear. Please stop before you hurt yourself.” He watched as the female simmered down, her posture relaxing. After a few seconds only the deathly stare and her wildly moving tail gave any indication of her frustration. He eased his smile, shifting from smug to pleasant. “See? That wasn’t so hard.” The stallion turned his head to the side, flaunting the best side of his profile as he put a hoof to his chest. “You just need to accept your bette-”

Three was painfully cut short when the female collided with him like a wrecking ball. He felt his ribs grind against each other as his back slammed into the door of one of the cabins behind him, the push of their bodies forcing it open. Before he knew it, he was lying on the deck, pinned under her massive bulk. He struggled for breath as he helplessly flailed his limbs in an attempt to dislodge the female. As he looked up, he could only see her grinning face leaning down towards him.

Her voice was low as she hissed through her clenched teeth, mouth barely an inch away from his face. “Not so tough now are you?”

It was nearly impossible to concentrate with her heavy, muscular torso covering almost his entire body. Fortunately, as much as he had hated the process, he had been trained to perform under extreme duress. He had to act quickly; it was impossible to breathe and he was already starting to feel faint. Three closed his eyes and focused, shunting residual mana into his horn. The surge of energy he felt made him grin back at his captor.

Before Donner realised what was happening, Three vanished into thin air again, only to materialize half a second later, sitting on her back. Not wasting the opportunity, he reached down to grab at the base of her wings before twisting with all his strength. She did not try to dislodge him. Realising that he had the upper hoof, the unicorn let out a boastful laugh. “You appear to be at my mercy now Donner dear!”

The female let out a soft moan.

He twisted again, the large wings squirming uselessly on the floor. He heard her tail whip out with a crack, then start to slowly swing back and forth across the deck like a pendulum.

Every few strokes it rose up and its fluffy tuft brushed against his back

The stallion froze. His mind swarmed with thoughts. He wasn’t sure what to think. They were fighting just a moment ago and now she…

The tail wrapped itself lazily around one of his hindlegs. He let go of the wings and placed his forehooves between them, then leaned forward and rubbed on her back.

He could feel her entire body shiver in response. Her forepaws reached out far, paws spread wide.

Before he had a chance to realise what was happening, the tail wrapped itself around his chest and lifted him up before gently lowering him to her side. She rose up and extended a wing, then pushed Three to the floor.

The unicorn was at a loss on what was happening. “D-Donner?”

She squeezed his chest again, this time harder. Her voice was quiet, nearly whispering as she spoke through gritted teeth. “Keep going.” With great care, the female stepped over the unicorn and carefully lay on top of his lower half, pinning him down.

His bottom half was snugly covered by silky smooth fluffiness so unlike the coarse coats of ponies. Hers was soft and gentle; it was also surprisingly warm. He reached a hoof and ran it through the thick hair. Three imagined that was how touching clouds felt.

It was mesmerizing.

Despite being trapped under the large creature he felt surprisingly calm. The warmth and the soft hair made him forget their previous argument. He just kept brushing.

Only after a few minutes did he realise that the female had curled up on top of him. With her weight pinning him down, the unicorn was truly trapped for good. He tried getting her attention but her eyes were already closed. A deep, loud purring could be heard coming from her insides.

The sound made him feel odd - it felt like what he imagined getting irradiated was like. Only instead of deadly particles causing terrible wounds, this caused a feeling of deep contentment somewhere inside the unicorn. It also made him sleepy...

*****

As soon as Blitz heard the lock on the other side of the door click, he glanced two rooms to the right, just where the bathroom was. He pivoted his fluffy ears between the two doors and listened.

Donner’s deep purr. The sound of rushing water.

Satisfied that he would be alone for some time, the giant stood up and walked over to the kitchenette. He then opened one of the drawers and grabbed a fresh kitchen rag. At the same time, his long tail swerved towards the sink and wrapped around a bottle of dishwashing detergent. With the two items he returned to the table and sat on the floor between two chairs. He placed the bottle and the rag before him, then reached at the back of his head. Two metallic clicks followed.

The giant placed a paw on his mask and slid it upwards and off, then placed it on the table.

He poured some of the detergent on the rag and began scrubbing the inside of the mask. It was a simple and quick process, more of a habit than a necessity - the mask rarely got dirty on the inside. Nonetheless, the giant carefully applied the rag to the inner crevices of the piece. The mask’s inner design was simple; behind the ornate front lay a polymer core reinforced with hard metal supports made of lightweight yet durable alloy. The entire construction could withstand two or three direct hits from a rifle caliber cartridge, not that anyone had a chance to fire more than one. Donner had one like it too, resting above her forehead, but she almost never used it. She had no reason to. Besides, she preferred to have access to her jaws when fighting. Both as an additional weapon, as well as means to strike fear into her opponents.

Blitz could do without the mask, of course, even though it wouldn’t improve his level of expression much. But he knew his appearance made others nervous, mask or no mask.

There was no need to make them scared. Usually.

Blitz kept listening for a few moments. Once he was satisfied that neither K’yopi nor Three and Donner were coming out anytime soon, he reached a paw to the table’s control and pressed an icon on the touchscreen. The large screen on the nearby wall turned on. It was the local news network; the well measured voice of the newscaster was speaking about some sort of a commotion in the Periphery. Blitz didn’t care. He tapped again and the channel switched, this time to what looked like a martial arts showcase. The giant briefly regarded the lithe, gray unicorn mare and her opponent, a doe sporting a fluffy, velveted chest. Just as the first round of the bout started he tapped the touchscreen again, lowering the volume until it could barely be heard. He finally looked down at the mask and began carefully cleaning the small visors within.

Nearly forty minutes later he was done. The mask, now perfectly cleaned inside and outside, rested in his paws. He turned it slowly, inspecting the surface for any spots or loose hairs. Once he found none, the giant turned it around and stared at the jackal’s face. The opaque glassteel of the vision slits stared back, unblinking as always. He worked his jaw as he studied the mask; a brief feeling of nostalgia enveloped him. For a time when life for him and Donner was simpler, bloodier, more structured.

"Freiheit." He scoffed. "Vielleicht eines Tages."

He turned the mask around again and put it back on its place, securing it in front of his face.

Just in time to spot the door to the bathroom creak open.

K’yopi walked out into the common room, mane covered with a drying towel and coat hidden by a comfortable, fluffy bathrobe. Why there had been one in her size on the spaceship was unknown to her. She walked over to the table, her healthy eye moving between the screen and the masked giant. “What are you doing?”

Blitz extended his right forepaw and grabbed the armored vambrace with the other. He flicked a set of snap-catches, then carefully slid it off and placed it on the table with a clatter. “Maintenance.”

The filly climbed on the seat on the opposite side of the table and pointed a hoof at the massive piece. “Can I watch?”

The giant reached for the rag and began polishing the vambrace, replying to the zebra without looking up at her. “If you wish.”

The filly watched with curiosity as Blitz’s paws moved over the armour piece. The rag was rubbing meticulously, cleaning every reachable spot. Once that was accomplished after five minutes, the large male held up the vambrace and clicked another catch somewhere inside. K’yopi watched with interest as the piece split into more: one main section which wrapped around the foreleg, and a number of smaller articulated pieces that covered the wrist and elbow. Once the parts were separated, Blitz poured more detergent on the rag and started to clean them one by one with utmost care.

She suddenly realised something strange. The large knife wound through Blitz’s left paw was gone. Only a patch of soft scar tissue remained on both sides. It looked as if the giant had never been stabbed in the first place.

“Wow. How is your hoo- hand?”

He paused his work and brought his left paw up, then slowly rotated it for the filly to see. “Fine. The mark will be gone by tomorrow.” The voice he used made it sound like he was talking about a bruise rather than a massive stab wound.

K’yopi angled her head and narrowed her eye in an attempt to spot any gory details she might have missed. There were none. “But how? I saw it go through all the way! That is impossible!”

He lowered the paw and went back to work. “Just one of the perks of being what we are.”

Her eyes opened wide, she immediately winced and rubbed a hoof on the one that was still swollen slightly from the assault in the alley. “Does that mean you and Donner are immune to stabbing? Broken bones?” Her voice raised an octave as she lifted herself over the table on her forelegs. “Are you guys immortal?”

Blitz calmly finished cleaning the remaining piece of the vambrace. “No, we are not. But we are very, very tough to kill.” He put the rag away and started reassembling the piece. “We are resistant to injuries. Stabbings, blunt force, gunshots, sickness, radiation...”

The zebra blurted out, interrupting the giant. “Fire?”

Only the dull click of the vambrace snapping over the forepaw broke the silence.

His voice was calm and measured. “No. Not fire.”

“Oh. Okay…” She watched him remove and start working on the left vambrace. The clicking of its components nearly drowned out the broadcast. She looked up at the screen. On it, a badly bruised doe was giving an interview with a large, key shaped trophy held in her forelegs. K’yopi looked back at the giant sitting in front of her again. “Hey Blitz…”

The mask kept focused on the work below. Only Blitz’s fluffy ears twitched at the mention of his name. “Yes K’yopi?”

She bit her lower lip, unsure how to proceed. Should she ask? She had no idea - asking things like this had never ended well for her in the past. The filly steadied her breath. “Are you angry at me?” As soon as she uttered the first word, she lowered her volume in hopes that the broadcast would make it impossible to hear.

The filly watched as the giant stopped his work, then slowly raised his head, the ornate mask facing her directly. She felt a shiver run down her spine as she stared back into those empty eyes.

He could see that she was afraid, just as she had been with Donner when they first met. It felt strange - the filly had been shown nothing but support and care since she came under their protection. Blitz had to agree that even Three had contributed his part. A big part from what the giant could tell.

Yet, there were times when her deeper thoughts were open wide to a keen observer. The way she walked, with a slight uncertain shuffle. The way her eyes kept darting towards the nearest door when she heard a loud noise. The way she involuntarily flinched every time someone touched her when she didn’t see it coming.

There was a deep, dark pit of sadness inside this young girl.

And he had no idea what to do about it.

He knew one thing though: he didn’t need to add to it.

“No.” He rested his left forepaw on the table, palm up. “You went ahead on your own, then you tracked Satin and gave us invaluable information.” He watched as her posture partially relaxed. “I did not want you to do that because I didn’t have insight into your capabilities. Have I known you were that capable, I’d have let you go right away.”

The filly blinked and let out a short, nervous chuckle. “T-that’s good, right? Because I’m afraid that if I anger you or Donner, you will- will…” She breathed in and out quickly. “That you’ll toss me out on the street.”

His massive head shook hard; never before had K’yopi seen him be so expressive.

“You will only leave this ship on your own volition for as long as the captain is away.” He turned the mask back to the zebra again. “And once she returns, we will ask her to help you.”

“C-captain? I don’t even know who that is! She doesn't even know who I am!”

The giant leaned forward, his words slicing the air between them like bullets. “She will help you.” He leaned back and added calmly, “I know she will.”

She looked down, face furrowed. “But why? Why would she?” Her head turned back to the giant. “Why would you for that matter? Blitz, why are you and Donner helping me?”

The creature on the other side of the table rose up, K’yopi watched as he slowly walked around the table all the way towards her. Finally he stopped, his large form dwarfing the filly.

Blitz brought out his left paw and placed it flat on the table right in front of her. “Look.” He rotated the paw, palm up. The scar in the middle of the dark pad was plainly visible from this close. With a slight flex five enormous claws slid out of the paw. He could hear her gasp softly.

She watched the display with an open mouth, then, gingerly, as if afraid to hurt herself she reached a hoof and tapped the blunt edge of one of the claws. “I-I don’t understand.” She looked up at the intricate mask. “What do you mean?”

“Donner and I, we are not normal. There are no others like us out there in the entire universe. Do you know why?”

The zebra’s head shook as she racked her mind for an answer.

“That is because we were made for a very specific purpose.” His head turned to indicate the claws. “To kill. Over, and over. And over.” He watched her gulp as she studied the claws again. “It was our only purpose. To take orders and execute them.” He gently flexed the paw, making the claws extend, then retract. “We never questioned it. Until very recently.” His voice turned softer, with an audible note of nostalgia behind it. “It was hard at first, nearly impossible, but slowly we both realised that others are right. That it was possible to live a life without the masters we always had, and to make our own decisions.” The claws retracted instantly, then the paw lifted, moved towards the zebra and stopped before her face. “We want to help you because you could never decide for yourself either. You never had that freedom. This decision is our freedom.”

The paw softly landed on the zebra’s chest, nearly covering it entirely.

“And we chose to share that freedom with you.”

K’yopi looked down at the huge appendage. “But Blitz, I don’t even know what to do with it.”

The male nodded. “Find a purpose. Just like we did.“ His paw gently pushed the zebra’s chest. “You are our purpose now.”

K’yopi raised a hoof and put it on the paw, holding it close. “I don’t really know what to say…” She bit her lip and sucked in the air through her teeth. “Blitz… I need to tell you something.”

One of the giant’s ears flicked, something K’yopi had already learned was his way of signalling for her to continue.

“When I first met you in that alley, I was scared. Scared of you and Donner. Scared of what would happen to me.” She raised her other hoof and placed it next to the first one, hugging the giant paw to her chest. “But I just realised, you and Donner, even Three…” A soft sigh escaped the filly’s lips. “You never forced me to do anything. Ever.” She looked up at the unmoving mask. “I didn’t even realise how I became free.”

Blitz watched as the filly lifted his paw off her chest and brought it to her cheek, then leaned on it with eyes closed. “Thank you.”

With a decisive motion the giant extended one of his wings, then carefully wrapped it around the zebra until her entire form was covered in soft, delicate feathers.

They sat there quietly for a long moment. Both pondered the last few days, each in their own way. She didn’t attempt to move, still hugging the paw to her face. He was content to let her do it under the protection of his huge wing.

The door to the cabin opened.

Donner walked out into the common room with a big toothy grin on her muzzle. She planted her paws wide and arched her back like a bow. A monstrous yawn filled the entire room as she stretched fully. Her giant tongue slid out and licked her upper lip. “I am starving. I am going to obtain some food.” She quickly disappeared through the door leading to the cargo hold.

Through the open door behind her K’yopi could see the curled form of the purple unicorn. He was sleeping soundly, holding a pillow between his forelegs.

*****

The narrow corridors of Deck Twenty Nine had seen better days. It was apparent that no one had bothered to perform maintenance there, certainly not since the Knights moved in. The muted yellow lighting failed to mask the signs of disuse. The labyrinth of rusted walls and dirty floors seemed to stretch endlessly, only occasionally broken by rooms filled with garbage or old, useless machinery. The lower decks were a different world compared to the rest of Miner’s Prospect. Their depressing uniformity contrasted with the bright and lively upper levels. Many of the corridors were impassable, either because of piles of rubbish, massive structural damage or toxic leaks. It made this section of the station feel like a derelict abandoned in deep space centuries prior rather than a bustling center of commerce.

Neither of the two equines paid much attention to any of that as they cautiously walked through the corridors.

“We’re almost there.” K’yopi spoke quietly as they entered yet another hallway.

“Oh, about time, this place is positively dreadful.” Three grimaced at a crude graffiti showing a stylized equine skull wearing a golden crown on a nearby wall. ”Also, boring. I cannot wait to get this started.”

“Shh!” The filly’s hoof reached out to stop the stallion. “There!”

Ahead, the two could see a large bulkhead. In front of it, two ponies sat on foldable chairs, watching something on a tablet. A table with a few empty bottles and empty takeaway containers lay between them. The ponies, a mare and a stallion, wore simple street clothes, the only common piece being black bandanas resting on their head and neck respectively. They appeared unarmed, but the stallion was nearly twice as wide as Three.

The unicorn cleared his throat and started walking directly towards the duo. As soon as he got close enough, the gangmare tapped her companion and stood up to confront the newcomer.

“This area is off limits. Scram you weirdo.”

Three stopped before them and spoke calmly. “”I do not care. Step aside, we are here to see the Duke!”

The gangmare scowled. “The Duke?” She looked at her buddy. “Do you know of any dukes around here?”

The other pony shook his head, then slowly rose and joined his companion.

“See? No dukes here. Never heard of them.” She flashed a smug smile at the unicorn. “No one to see here bud.”

Three stomped his hoof in annoyance. “You will let me through or you will regret you woke up today!” His attempt at intimidation only amused the two guards.

The large stallion spoke for the first time as he took a step towards Three. “Didn’t you hear the lady? Get lost, fuckboy.”

The unicorn groaned. “Oh for…” He glanced over his shoulder at the filly waiting a few meters behind, then back at the gangers, just in time to be roughly shoved by the bulky stallion.

K’yopi watched how in a span of a single second a number of things happened.

Three’s horn crackled with magical energy, which prompted the big stallion to throw a kick at the unicorn. He was too slow. With a crack, a concentrated bolt of magic lashed out from the unicorn’s horn and hit the stallion, causing him to let out a short scream as his body briefly spasmed. Before it even hit the deck, another bolt erupted from his horn. It hit the mare straight in the chest and sent her flying into the opposite wall with a thunderclap. The two ponies were still twitching and smoking as Three walked over the stallion and waved to the zebra. “I did warn them, didn’t I?”

The filly quickly trotted over to her companion and glanced at the two zapped ponies. They appeared to be still alive, if barely. “Uhh… Yeah, you did.”

Three smiled brightly. “I was justified!”

“I don’t think that is how it works.” She sighed and walked over to the door the two had been guarding, then pulled on the handle. It didn’t move. “These open from the inside. I kinda wished you’d left one of them still standing.”

Three looked at the zebra, then at the groaning mare crumpled by the wall, then back at the zebra. “Oh relax. We’ll be fine! Hmmm...” He looked around, inspecting the walls and ceiling. Finally, his eyes stopped and his eyebrows shot up. “Aha! You just stay here and don’t go anywhere!”

Before K’yopi had any chance to issue a protest, the stallion’s form shifted into a sphere of energy with a spray of magic particles, then zipped up to the ceiling and disappeared between the grates of a ventilation duct.

A moment later she heard a muffled shout of surprise on the other side of the door, then another thunderclap. Shortly after, the dull sound of locks being undone could be heard and the door swung open.

Three was standing over a smoking body of another gang member. “That is all the guards around this entrance.” He briefly glanced deeper into the hallway. “But I wager there are many more right around the corner.”

The filly walked through the doors and pointed behind her. “In that case, you better go bring Blitz and Donner.” She looked at the zapped pony. “I think we will need them from here on out.”

The stallion stepped out and walked into the halfway they just came through, then prodded one of the unconscious gang ponies. Once he was certain they would not get back up anytime soon, he faced down the hallway. “BLITZ! DONNER! IT’S OPEN, COME OVER HERE!”

K’yopi winced.

The two huge creatures rounded a corner and calmly walked towards the duo. As they did, Three headed back through the recently opened door and leaned down over the gang pony. His horn flickered with magic and a small, semi automatic pistol lifted up before floating into K’yopi’s hoof. The stallion nodded to himself with a smile before walking deeper into the hallway.

She looked at the gun closely, inspecting it. It was a simple polymer and milled steel design, light enough that even she could- A large paw reached over and grabbed the pistol, then tossed it away like a piece of trash.

“She’s not getting a gun.”

*****

The guard fell down to the ground faster then he registered what was happening. As soon as he did, Blitz released the pony’s neck from the grip of his long tail. He glanced at Three, who was standing nearby over the smoking form of a hippogriff, and nodded.

Three looked over his shoulder and waved a hoof. “Come on in! The Knights are taking a nap.”

Donner walked into the room, the filly riding safely on her back. She let out a growl when K’yopi tried to use one of her ears as steering aids but nonetheless headed in the direction indicated. Finally she stopped by a wall-mounted control panel right next to a large door and waited for the filly to jump down. The door was substantial - both wide and high enough to admit shipping containers.

“Over here! This must be the loading dock leading to the main hangar.” K’yopi pressed a hoof on the icon she knew opened the door.

With the sound of heavy pistons and the wailing of a warning alert the door began to slide slowly upwards.

K’yopi looked at her companions. Blitz and Donner were their usual selves, one calm and almost motionless, the other constantly in flux and emotional. The spinning, yellow lights of the door made the strange giants cast sharp, elongated shadows that only accentuated their monstrous features. Meanwhile Three looked excited, giddy even. The grin on his muzzle was all the confirmation the filly needed that the unicorn was looking forward to what was about to come.

As the huge door continued sliding upwards, the entirety of the hangar the Black Knights used as their main base revealed itself.

The enormous volume of the bay in front of the Freaks could fit two Pioneer class freighters side by side and another two on top of them. On the far right, the wall was dominated by a massive heavy duty gateway, no doubt leading to open space. Judging by the mounds of random mechanical junk piled up at the bottom, it hadn’t been opened in a long time. The hangar’s remaining walls and ceiling were covered with gantries and catwalks, many of which were in a horrible state of disrepair. Even more were clearly aftermarket additions, cobbled together from bits and pieces. Some of them didn’t even have railings.

But neither of these managed to grab the attention of the Freaks as much as the sight right in the middle of the hangar. The enormous, angular hull of a military dropship filled more than half of the room’s free space. Its building-sized dimensions left only a relatively thin strip of unoccupied deck in front of the gateway. By the looks of it, the ship also had been here for a while. The hyperjet engines used for atmospheric flight had been gutted on the starboard side, exposing old wiring and hydraulics. Likewise, many holes had been cut out of the hull, more often than not in locations that would make venturing into vacuum a certain doom for the vessel and its occupants. The huge, crane-like struts protruding from the vessel’s sides, intended to externally ferry pods with armored vehicles straight from orbit to a combat zone, now held crudely attached shipping containers, which in turn were connected by a hodgepodge of catwalks connected to the gantries on the walls or leading deeper into the ship itself. The floor of the hangar was littered with old equipment, likely gutted from the dropship. Everything from piles of defunct computers, through rows of sheet metal to corroded engines could be seen clogging the direct path to the dropship.

Long ago the vessel could have quickly and efficiently carried an armored company. Now it was a home to an army of Miner’s Prospect’s worst.

The army that was nowhere to be seen. Other than the Freaks, not a single creature could be spotted. Just as K’yopi was about to point that out, the unicorn spoke.

“Well, isn’t that a sight to behold? You have to admire their resourcefulness!” Three stepped into the hangar, but the moment his hoof crossed the threshold a loud wail of a siren echoed through the air. He frowned, turning to the others. “And here comes the reception committee.”

Blitz immediately broke into a run, heading for one of the dropship’s smaller loading ramps located under the vessel’s drooping nose. “Move it!”

The others followed, but before any of them could reach their target, half a dozen gangers wearing black bandanas and armed with a variety of weapons poured out from the ship. They took cover whenever possible using the piled up machines and started laying down fire at the two advancing giants. Both Blitz and Donner spread their wings and dashed the remaining distance, too fast to allow their enemies any form of accurate fire.

Meanwhile, Three and K’yopi had to take cover behind a pile of discarded machines strewn on the hangar’s deck. Occasionally a bullet loudly ricocheted off their shelter, making the zebra cover her ears.

Soon she didn’t have to. The gunfire shifted and quickly started dying down, instead being replaced by panicked screams mixed with bestial roars. It wasn’t long until different noises joined in. With a shiver the zebra realised many of them were sounds of flesh being torn asunder.

The filly was rapidly reevaluating the standing plan of direct assault.

On the other hoof, Three appeared quite happy with the arrangement. Every now and then he poked his head out of cover and let loose a beam of magic. This time it wasn’t the nice and safe shock spell, but the same lance of magic he’d used to slay Mother. He watched with glee as one of the gangers who was about to fill Blitz’s side with buckshot dropped down, a clean laserlike cut through the back of her head. He leaned back into cover and smiled at the filly. “Don’t worry K! We got this under control!”

She stared at the unicorn, eye wide open. “A-are you sure? They have a lot of guns!”

The stallion nodded calmly as his cover rattled from bullet hits. “Positively. Between me, Donner and Blitz there is nothing a band of some lowly criminals can muster to stop us.” He smiled at the sound of a pain-filled scream coming from the ramp. “It is just a matter of...” His eyes shot up. “Oh pardon me!”

K’yopi watched a beam of energy erupt from the stallion’s horn and hit something above and behind her. By the time she turned to look, she could only see a crystal pony still clutching a rifle that was falling down from one of the catwalks. The filly winced as he impacted the metal deck with a wet crunch.

Three continued as if nothing happened. “As I was saying. We can handle this without any issues!” His ears perked up as the gunfire stopped. “See? There we go!” The stallion carefully leaned over the cover and looked towards the ramp. He then glanced back at the zebra and walked into the open.

K’yopi followed suit, the two of them approaching Blitz and Donner who were surrounded by a pile of broken bodies.

Only a few of them moved.

A griffin was dragging himself towards a discarded rifle with one claw on the deck, leaving a snail-like trail of red. Blitz calmly walked over to the ganger and looked down. He lifted a paw, pinned the griffin’s neck to the deck and pushed his weight on it. Only after he heard the crack did he turn his masked face towards the approaching unicorn and zebra. “We should keep moving, more are bound to appear.” He glanced towards the closed airlock at the top of the ramp. “That is our way in.”

K’yopi trotted up the ramp towards the airlock’s control switch. The outer doors were already open. She pulled the large lever, but nothing happened. “Crap, I think they locked it from the inside. We’ll have to find ano-'' She was interrupted by the screech of grinding metal. Her head whipped around to see Donner standing on her hindlegs, her clawed paws firmly wedged between the airlock’s large doors. With another heave she started pulling them apart. K’yopi could easily see her back muscles bulge and strain under the heavy load.

As soon as the gap was wide enough for the zebra, the giant female let out a low growl. “Get in! Quickly.”

The filly didn’t think for long; she immediately squeezed under Donner’s torso and slid through the gap. The moment she did, the door slammed behind her. She jumped at the noise and looked back at her tail - a tuft of hair at the end of it was gripped between the doors. The filly let out a nervous breath and pulled, wincing at the prick of pain as she regretfully had to leave a few strands behind. With her tail hidden between her legs, she turned to observe her surroundings.

The interior was barely lit, only low power xenon tube lights ensured it was not pitch black inside. The hexagonal entry corridor was as wide as the doors, a few meters ahead and to her left and right, K’yopi saw openings leading to smaller rooms. She desperately looked for a control panel for the airlock, but the dirty walls were blank.

“Move it! They’re at the main airlock!”

Her head snapped at the distant voice coming from the depths of the dropship. Momentarily, she heard a clatter of fast-approaching hooves. She hissed a curse and ran towards one of the openings before diving into a sideroom. It was small, barely bigger than Claudia’s bathroom. Fortunately, a large piece of equipment she couldn’t hope to identify allowed her to take cover and hopefully remain undetected.

She huddled in the darkness as a group of figures ran past. She heard them stop; clicks and clacks of readied weapons followed. Then she heard the same voice from before, this time much closer.

“Get ready. The moment these doors move I want you to unload everything we got on those fucks!”

K’yopi took a deep breath and left her cover, then carefully inched closer to the edge of the corridor. She listened for a moment and once she couldn’t hear any voices in the immediate vicinity she dared to take a peek.

Eight knights stood in a semicircle with their backs to her, their various guns aimed at the airlock. The one she assumed was their leader was wearing body armour with a bundle of grenades strapped to her flank.

On the opposite side of the corridor was another small room, much like the one K’yopi was in. There she spotted a control panel, exactly the same as the one outside of the airlock.

That gave her an idea.

She waited a few more moments, making sure that none of the gangers would move. At least that was the explanation she believed in, but deep down she knew she was just trying to make herself ready for what was to come.

The filly took in a short breath and quietly stepped out into the corridor. She moved slowly towards the leader. Her heart was pounding. Yes, she had done things like this before, more or less. But never before had they included gunfights and the immediate threat of death.

She gritted her teeth and step by tiny step moved closer and closer. Her hooves didn’t make a sound on the metal deck - a skill she had perfected over nearly a decade. Her eyes kept darting from one ganger to another, praying with held breath that none of them would suddenly decide to look behind them. Finally, she was close enough.

She stopped and reached her foreleg towards the bundle of grenades.

Just as she grabbed one of the round bombs the mare in front of her shifted and raised a hoof to her ear.

“Boss, it’s Westly. We got the main entrance covered. So far they haven’t tried to enter.”

K’yopi froze with her hoof outstretched, not daring to move. She didn’t even dare to blink.

The mare nodded. “All right, will get you an update when that happens Boss.” Her hoof went down and she adjusted the grip on her rifle.

The filly waited a second more, then quickly pulled a single grenade off the harness. With her loot in hoof she took a step backwards, then another. Finally, when she was confident that she’d put enough distance between the two of them, she slowly turned and stepped over to the airlock control room.

Resting her back against the cold metal wall, she allowed herself a few quiet breaths. She glanced down at her prize: a small metal sphere with a lever and a round pin. K’yopi thought about what she was about to do. She stared at the pin. She at least knew she had to pull that to make it explode. These people were the source of all of her suffering - hers and many others’. She hadn’t felt pity or remorse when she watched Mother bleed out, nor when she watched Blitz break the neck of that griffin.

Yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not directly.

The grenade rolled in her hooves. Suddenly, she blinked with realisation.

It was a grenade.

She looked up at the control console. All she had to do was to pull the lever to open the airlock. The zebra stood up and grabbed the controls with one hoof. With the other she firmly grasped the grenade. She bit her lip.

“This better work.”

With all her strength she threw the grenade into the corridor. She heard it bounce off the wall and land with a clatter. Then, a panicked voice called out.

“GRENADE!”

As soon as she heard the sounds of scuffling and clatter of hooves she pulled the lever. Instead of an explosion she heard the door open with a hiss, quickly followed by bestial roars. Someone fired a gun, but only managed a couple shots. Then came the screams mixed with zaps of magic, slams, cracks and rips.

Then silence.

“I’ll be frank with you: I was expecting this to be harder. Now, did anyone see K?”

She took a deep breath to steady her shaking body and called out. “I am here Three! Are you guys okay?”

The purple stallion appeared in the doorframe with a clatter of hooves. He smiled widely at the sight of the zebra. “Never better!”

Blitz briefly appeared behind Three. “We have to keep pushing.” Donner was close behind. The two of them led the group deeper into the dropship, following the corridor.

It continued for another ten meters before ending in a four way intersection with another big door ahead. That corridor was blocked by a bulkhead that was crudely welded over long ago by the sight of it. The two side passages were narrower, Blitz and Donner could barely fit inside standing side by side.

“Decisions, decisions,” Three’s chirpy voice called out as the Freaks stopped. He looked up at Blitz. “Do you have a preference? Or should we pick at random?”

K’yopi studied the corridors closely; none bore any markings or other indications of what awaited deeper inside. “I don’t think we can tell either way.”

Donner snarled and headed for the left corridor. “We will find the Duke sooner or later. This is his seat of power - he won’t abandon it easily.”

Blitz nodded and followed the female. “I would rather it be sooner. We have to move faster.”

With Blitz and Donner leading the way, the group started hurrying deeper into the Knights’ dropship.

*****

“Perhaps we should have taken the other route!” Three had to yell over the sound of gunfire, squeezed between Blitz and a wall. The two of them were taking cover in a cramped indent meant for housing long gone firefighting equipment. On the other side of the bullet-filled corridor K’yopi and Donner were in a similar position. The machine guns thirty meters down the corridor did not sound like they would cease anytime soon.

“Can’t you do your trick and get there to take them out?” Blitz’s voice was measured and calm, despite the fact he was hard pressed to keep his large body out of the firing line.

Every now and then a bullet would ricochet off the walls with a deafening whine. “It is not a trick! And besides, it is too far!” Three winced as Blitz’s armour uncomfortably pushed into his chest. “I’d have to reappear halfway there.”

On the other side, held protectively by Donner’s wing, K’yopi looked between the two giants. “We have to do something before they figure out they have us pinned!”

Three started to squeeze out from between Blitz and the wall. “I can try hitting them with my magic beam!” He managed to free his forehooves. “Just let me take a peek!”

Blitz’s paw grabbed the unicorn by the neck and roughly shoved him down. “Stay there. You point the tip of that horn out and you will have it shot off along with your face.”

Three opened his muzzle to protest, but after a brief consideration decided not to press the issue. Finally, he looked between Donner and Blitz. “Well, what now then?”

“I got an idea!” K’yopi had to yell to be heard over the gunfire. “Guys, look!” Her hoof pointed to the ceiling, where a big, round hatch was visible. Likely an entry to a maintenance shaft or escape route.

Three smiled. “Good thinking K!” His horn lit up with a magical aura and the handles on the hatch turned. It opened with a clang and pivoted down, covering half of the hallway. “Now let me just…” He narrowed his eyes and stuck out his tongue in concentration before sending a concentrated beam of magic at the hinges holding the thick slab. With hiss of melted metal and a loud clang, the door dropped on the floor between the two pairs.

“Uhh.. I…” K’yopi watched with rising confusion as Three lifted the hatch up with his magic and turned it towards the incoming fire like a shield. Her ears flattened at the horrid sound of bullets smacking into it. “Guys…” Moments later, she watched as Blitz nodded at Donner while simultaneously getting a firm hold of the unicorn.

“Wait, what are you...” Three tried to protest as he was hefted up by Blitz’s huge forepaws.

“Just hold that thing steady!”

On the other side, Donner smirked. She pushed the filly deeper into the crevice and leapt out into the corridor, using the metal hatch like a shield. The moment she was in position she let out a growl. “Los!”

With eye wide open, the zebra watched as Blitz picked up the unicorn and tossed him over the large female, straight at her. Both K’yopi’s and Three’s expressions turned to surprise as the unicorn flew towards the filly, only to be intercepted by Donner’s raised wing.

K’yopi wasn’t sure what she was surprised by the most. That everyone seemed to have a different plan on how to act, that they were doing it all while under heavy machine gun fire, or that Three held the slab floating in front of Donner throughout all of this.

“ARE YOU INSANE?!”

“Shut up and hold on!” She didn’t look at the unicorn on her back. Instead, she just raised her wings in order to safeguard him from falling off her sides.

With the makeshift shield in front of her and the unicorn holding said shield on her back, Donner launched herself down the corridor at the incoming gunfire.

K’yopi could only stare at Blitz, who was still sitting under the opposite wall. She studied the giant’s face, but as usual, the mask made it impossible to tell what was going through his head.

A few seconds later a loud roar could be heard down the corridor, then a scream followed by a massive crash. The gunfire stopped.

Blitz calmly walked into the corridor, motioning with a wing for the filly to follow. After a short hike the two of them reached a shattered barricade guarding an entrance to a large room. With Blitz’s help K’yopi made her way over the bent metal. She had to step carefully to not slip on the hundreds of rifle casings spilled on the deck. Their source was obvious: a shattered automatic turret with two machine guns attached to a robotic arm lay by the barricade.

Further ahead, and through the V-shaped trail of devastation she had left in her wake, was Donner. She was sitting with legs folded under her body on the hatch she used as shield and battering ram. The zebra noticed a bloodied hoof poking from under the hatch. She shivered at the width of the gap between the deck and the metal slab.

“I would appreciate it if you were to warn me next time!” Three poked his head out from behind Donner and her gruesome throne. He magicked over a blood-soaked satchel and started going through its pockets.

Blitz sat next to the zebra. “You performed your part of the plan admirably.” His masked face shifted to the filly. “That was a very good idea.”

The zebra looked back at the giant. “Um riiight buuut… My idea was for me to climb into the maintenance hatch and find a way to disable that turret, Blitz.”

The large male angled his head slightly at her. “Oh. Well, in that case...” He looked back at Three and Donner. “Great resourcefulness.”

Three raised a hoof without looking up from the satchel. “I did not agree to this!” He blinked in surprise before pulling out a plastic access card for everyone to see. “Lucky us! This might be of use.”

Donner stepped off the slab and approached the unicorn before deftly snatching the card from his telekinetic grip. “This way.” She crossed the room to a set of reinforced doors marked with a crudely painted cross. The rest followed. Holding the card in her paw, she planted it on the scanner by the door. Momentarily the device beeped and lit up with a green light. The door opened with a hiss. What they found inside gave even the giants pause.

Rows of cells.

On each side of the thirty-meter corridor were tiny, bare rooms, each separated with thick metal bars. Inside were ponies of all kinds, griffins, even minotaurs. Often more than two or three in one cell, clearly designed for one occupant. The entire place reeked like only a prison could.

K’yopi dropped on her rump and covered her muzzle with shaking hooves. She forced herself to look into one of the cells. It held a young griffiness and an even younger stallion. Despite their dirty coats and haggard looks, their shapely bodies and pleasing faces did not leave any doubts as of what their captors had in store for them. Three slowly made his way along the cells, looking into each with a stone cold expression.

The zebra’s mind parsed the sight. She knew the Knights did things like this, but she had never expected their operation to be this big. There were perhaps forty or so prisoners there. None of them made a sound at the appearance of the quartet. It didn’t feel like a prison.

It felt like a slave camp.

She blindly reached to her side, only managing to grab someone the second time. When she turned to face them she saw the ornate mask staring down at her. “Blitz… W-we have to help them. Get them out.”

The giant was quiet.

“B-Blitz.”

“They can wait until we get the Duke. We have to be quick or we risk letting him escape.”

She gritted her teeth and shook her head. “No. I’m staying here and helping these people. Screw the bounty.” The filly surprised herself with how determined and collected her voice sounded.

Just as she was about to speak again, the voice from beneath the mask replied. “Very well. Three will help you. Once you escort the prisoners out of the dropship, follow our tracks.”

The filly barely relaxed at the news. “Tracks?”

The giant turned and headed out of the room. “Blood and severed limbs, K’yopi.”

Meanwhile, deeper in the room, the unicorn walked slowly from cell to cell, his eyes not stopping on the occupants who looked up at him with confusion, fear, sometimes anger. Those were the most common expressions. But every now and then he’d see a creature giving him a pleading look, or worse, just blindly stare into space. He didn’t need to look at them fully. He knew all of these faces by heart. Even if he’d never seen them himself.

He knew many of them would kill to get out of there.

Even their own cellmates.

The stallion stopped and screwed his eyes shut.

It felt like it had been a lifetime ago. But standing on the other side of the bars was different. It supplied him with a perspective he’d never had before. Suddenly, the unicorn felt a gripping ache in his chest. It filled him to the brim, but didn’t stop. He felt the pain pouring out of his body and mind in an unending torrent of unbearable emotions. An ice cold concoction of shame, fear and regret.

“I am sorry.”

No one could hear his whisper.

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t addressed to anyone present.

A large paw tugged on his shoulder. “There is no release mechanism anywhere in this room.”

He reached a hoof to rub his eyes clean before turning to the female with his usual smile. “Well, it is great that you have me then, isn’t it? I am confident that I could make short work of these locks.”

The large female lowered her head to look at the unicorn, almost close enough for their muzzles to touch. “Help K’yopi free these people.” Her voice held a tinge of warning in its tone. “Do not let her out of your sight for even a moment.”

Three held Donner’s stare with his own cold eyes. “She’ll be safe with me.”

The giantess watched the unicorn closely for a few seconds, then broke off with a sharp exhale and rejoined Blitz who already vacated the holding room. After passing the room with the dismantled barricade, she found him in the nearby corridor, waiting by another set of doors.

The moment she rejoined him, the giant opened them and walked through. “Just you and me again.”

Donner grinned widely as she stepped after her companion. “Wie in alten Zeiten.”

*****

The loud ding announcing the arrival of the elevator filled the room, but the door did not open.

The gathered gangers gripped their weapons tighter with uncertainty. Only after their leader prompted one of his underlings did a single pony approach the cargo elevator's door. Just as he was about to press the door button, a muffled voice could be heard on the other side.

“No, please! I beg y-”

The words were cut short as the door shook with a loud thud, then another. The gang pony looked back at his comrades with an uncertain expression, not knowing what to do.

Before the leader had a chance to say anything, the door buckled outwards and launched off its frame, slamming into the unfortunate underling. Thick, gray smoke began pouring out of the elevator, followed by a huge shape. The shape in turn was pouring out even more smoke, quickly obscuring visibility in the room.

“Light these fuckers up!”

Every single member of the Knights present in the room unloaded their weapon at the advancing, smoke-covered figure.

Blitz spoke quietly as he hung upside down on the elevator’s ceiling, his claws gripping the metal tightly. “When was the last time you were shot?” His voice was barely audible over the uneven streams of stray bullets hitting the elevator’s cabin below.

Donner, hanging right beside him, looked at the mask and shrugged lightly. “At the Crystal Heart I think. Why?”

The male made a neutral sound in his throat. “They have a lot of guns.”

Donner smiled - or frowned. He was not sure given their inverted position. “Clearly not enough.” Her ear flickered as the gunfire died down. “Besides. Kein Fleiß, kein Preis.”

The room was now saturated with gray smoke, forcing the group’s leader to tread carefully. He inched towards where the large shape had fallen, gunned down by his people. His hoof touched something soft and wet. Straining his eyes through the irritating smoke, the pony looked down. The sight made him blink in surprise - a minotaur’s body lay in an expanding pool of blood, almost unrecognizable from the amount of bullet wounds it had sustained. Racks of ruined smoke grenades were attached to their chest with duct tape.

He was about to scream in alarm, but a different kind of scream rang out from the smoke first.

A type of scream that made his skin crawl.

He turned quickly and aimed his rifle at the direction which the scream came from. “Stay together! Find th-”

He was interrupted by a short burst of gunfire followed by the sound of splashing liquid coming from the grayness far to his left. Someone on the other side of the room yelled and fired blindly. “Shit!”

He turned yet again and trotted towards the noise. Only to find a pair of severed griffish claws still clutching a submachine gun lying on the deck. He stared at the gruesome sight with eyes wide open, and felt something land on his shoulder.

The stallion jumped at the sudden touch and nearly fired a burst from his rifle at the figure, but stopped himself in time when he noticed their muzzle was covered by a black bandana. “Crap, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

The other pony stared back with large open eyes, tightly holding a shotgun to her chest. “L-let’s get out of here!”

The leader nodded and turned to look down again at the severed claws. “Right, we go to the bridge. Gather the…” He turned to look back at the mare next to him.

She was gone.

“...others.”

He brought his weapon up in line with his eye and began quickly turning in every direction, scanning the thick smoke for movements. “Hey! Where are you!?”

The voice that replied wasn’t the one he knew. “Closer than you think.”

Before the stallion could do anything, he felt a sharp, painful tug on his neck. He tried to scream in pain, but only wet gargling escaped his throat. He didn’t register dropping down on the deck, only the unnatural coldness filling his entire body.

*****

The door to the dropship’s bridge opened with a hiss. Donner stepped in, scanning her surroundings, followed by Blitz. The moment they entered fully, the door closed again behind them. The two creatures fanned out into the sizable room, looking for any movement. The many computer consoles lining the walls were still running, there was even a still-steaming mug of coffee on one of the desks, but all the seats were empty. As was what used to be the captain’s command chair.

“There is no one here.” Donner frowned as she made her way to the large window overlooking the hangar below. She could see a small clump of haggard creatures making their way out the main entrance under the guard of a purple unicorn.

“The Duke must be nearby.” Blitz rejoined her by the window and briefly looked down. “Three and K’yopi would have seen him.”

The female let out a low, bassy growl. “Are we certain of that?” Her head half turned at the masked male, who in turn kept watching the scene below.

“No, but it would make sense that the Duke had to at least get out of the dropship to escape.”

She growled again, this time she added a smack of her muscular tail on the deck. “Well, where is he then?”

Blitz raised a wing and pointed through the window with its tip. “Right there.”

Across the hangar, on the gantry surrounding the derelict dropship, the two giants saw a running stallion accompanied by a rifle-toting pegasus mare. A light gray suit covered most of the stallion’s shining black coat, but thanks to the vivid green mane he was easily identifiable. Judging by the distance the Duke managed to clear so far, it looked like he had abandoned the dropship only moments before the duo had entered the bridge.

Blitz growled with an unusually open frustration as he turned around on the spot and ran towards the door which they entered through. “Go through the window! I will look for whichever exit he used!”

Donner didn’t waste time replying; she pounced the glassteel window with her forepaws. The moment her thick claws dug into the surface she started pulling, rending deep grooves into the transparent wall. She heard the door to the bridge open again as Blitz headed out of the room. But instead of the sound of the closing door, an electronically tinted voice called out.

“Hello, kitty.”

Instantly Donner’s head whipped around and over her shoulder. Only to see Blitz being lifted off the deck by a mechanical hand wrangled around his neck.

The hand was attached to a massive suit of armour which towered over the duo. It was composed of thick, armored plates and artificial myomere muscles. Heavy weapons consisting of a pulse laser emitter and miniature flamethrower were clearly visible, mounted on its shoulders. To top it off, the suit was covered in black and pink paint and streetgang iconography. Donner knew this design - a minotaur heavy exosuit, designed for military use by the Confederate armed forces.

The suit’s head, or rather, a bulbous shape resting where the head should have been, clicked and moved, then lifted up with a hiss of servos. The broad face of a minotaur woman sneered from inside the exosuit. The fur on her face was silvery, with a large black spot covering her left cheek, eye and temple. Instead of her right eye, a bright green cybernetic ocular was visible. She bared her teeth at the squirming Blitz before looking at Donner. “You two have been causing quite the stir haven’t you?” The suit’s head locked down again, the six holes in the faceplate glowing as the woman continued. “I am Satin, and I don’t take kindly to strays in my yard.”

With a hiss of servos, the suit’s other arm came up and grabbed Blitz by one of his hindlegs, then effortlessly lifted him up over its head and tossed him through the door before slamming the controls with a steel fist to lock the doors shut permanently. “I’m afraid your tomcat will have to wait. It’s just us girls now.”

Donner spun around to face the armored behemoth and let out a wrathful snarl. “I’ll crush that tincan along with you inside!”

The suited minotaur extended a hand, mockingly beckoning Donner with a single finger. “You might look like a cat, but I can clearly see you’re a massive bitch.”

Donner roared in anger as she broke into a charge, heading straight for the exosuit.

Satin’s outstretched hand instantly clenched into a fist. At the same time, the weapon mounted on the armour’s left shoulder fired a thin emerald laser beam towards the charging giant.

But Donner was faster - she dove down and rolled under the beam as it left a scorched scar on the glassteel window behind her. Without losing momentum she closed the distance, then, at the last possible moment, she sprung her hindlegs and launched herself at the armour.

Satin wasn’t going to leave herself exposed. The exosuit’s servos whined as she took a half step forward, bracing herself as the armored hands rose up, shielding her from the incoming blow. “How predictable.”

Donner grinned. Her massive wings flapped once with a gust of wind that sent scattered sheets of paper floating around the dropship’s bridge. She sailed over the armored figure, out of reach. On her way past, her tail wrapped tightly around the laser emitter, prompting a surprised gasp from Satin. With Donner’s entire weight pulling it, the mount twisted and bent until finally giving way, dropping on the floor in a shower of sparks. The moment she landed, Donner began to spin, readying herself to sink her claws into the armour’s back.

Before she could do any of it, she felt metal fingers grip around her hindleg. The suit was much nimbler than she had expected. The hand grabbed her tightly - a moment later, another joined in. Without giving her time to react, the suit began to turn in place, lifting the giant female up in a mighty half circle, then letting go.

“Clever, but not clever enough!” Donner crashed through the dropship’s command chair, shattering it into a thousand plastic pieces. More crashes followed as Satin made her way through the abandoned bridge, bulldozing away computer stations, screens and tables in her path as she closed in the distance.

Donner quickly got to her feet and turned to face the attacker, just in time to raise her foreleg and catch the descending arm at its mounting point on the wrist. Her own laboured grunt mixed with the noise of the suit’s servos and artificial muscles as bioengineering and robotics battled for supremacy.

And she was losing.

She watched as the hand slowly moved towards her face, metal fingers outstretched, clutching for a grip. With teeth bared, Donner let out a bestial roar and pushed hard, adding her other foreleg to counteract the force of the machine’s single arm.

That gave Satin an opening. The suit’s left arm rocketed forward, straight at Donner’s exposed chest. With a mighty slam, Satin’s opponent was sent flying backwards towards the glassteel window. The creature dropped on the deck and rolled a few times. Satin followed, breaking into a run at full speed. “Not so tough now are you?” The distance disappeared nearly instantly. Satin looked down at the still struggling creature, reached out an armoured hand and grabbed her by the muzzle, then lifted her up and pinned her to the window. The other hand started hammering Donner’s chest. One, two, three. With each slam the window cracked more and more. With each slam the large female’s wings twitched, until finally, an elongated, pained snarl escaped Donner’s muzzle as something cracked under Satin's armoured fist.

“I expected more. Say goodnight kittycat.” Instead of punching again, the armour’s free hand tightly grasped one of the outstretched wings, then twisted with all its might.

The bridge filled with a roar of pain and rage.

But Satin wasn’t done yet.

The suit’s right leg rose high, then stomped directly onto Donner’s chest. With a crunch of bones the large female was rammed through the tortured window and out into the open air of the hangar, its metal floor fifteen meters below.

Despite her disabled wing and the broken ribs, Donne’s natural instincts kicked in - her body twisted and weaved in the air until all of her paws were oriented towards the ground. She managed to land on all fours, but the searing lance of pain in her chest that immediately followed caused her legs to buckle and the female dropped to the deck with a hurting hiss. She allowed herself one deep breath, shooting a glare at the exosuit standing in the broken window.

Satin took a step backwards, then another. Then with loud stomps she started forward, leaping from the window. The massive suit crashed into the deck below, its gyros heaving as they kept a tonne of armour balanced upright. The suit turned to the wounded creature and the headguard slid up again.

The minotaur sneered with contempt. “Still alive? Impressive. Maybe whatever is inside you will fetch a nice price on the black market.” The flamethrower mounted on the suit’s right shoulder rose up, its thin nozzle turning towards the sprawled female. “Of course, first I will have to season you up a little.”

Donner let out a hacking cough, then narrowed her eyes at the ugly face and grinned. “What element is not on the periodic table?”

Satin's natural eye blinked, dumbfounded. “What are you taARGHHH!”

Knifelike claws slashed the minotaur’s face in a spray of blood, then grabbed the armoured faceplate and ripped it off with the groan of shredding metal.

The exosuit spun wildly, spewing liquid fire around the hangar. The armored hands grasped for the giant creature on its back, but were unable to reach it. Blitz kept holding on despite the violent ride, slashing and kicking at the exposed subsystems on the back of the massive suit as armor plates fell off in showers of sparks. He reached a paw over the bulky shoulders, aiming for the occupant’s face again, but one of the hands managed to get a grab. Instantly it pulled, dislodging the male off the suit’s back and tossing him over its shoulders into a nearby pile of scrap machinery.

Satin roared. “My eye! Shit! You took my eye!” Half of her face was covered in blood and deep wounds, only a mangled eye socket in place of her remaining natural eye, leaving the minotaur with only the cybernetic replacement on her right. “You fucking freaks!” The flamer swiveled on its mount and let out a tongue of flame into the pile where Blitz had landed. “Die!”

Donner felt a sudden surge of adrenaline fill her body, her heart pumped faster, filling every inch of her being with a specially tailored concoction of blood, boosters and hormones. Her vision sharpened, her hearing became more acute, her muscles relaxed, ready for another fight.

Her rage turned to cold fury.

*****

K’yopi was running back towards the hangar at full speed, the purple unicorn right behind her. They’d freed the prisoners and helped them out of the area before turning back to rejoin Blitz and Donner.

The moment the two entered the hangar they screeched to a halt. What looked like a giant suit of armour was locked in titanic battle against their companions on the other side. Roaring flames filled the air as the armour tried to keep up with the speed with which Blitz and Donner moved. Time and time again one of them would draw fire while the other moved in to attack, slashing and ripping metal with their claws, but not without cost.

K’yopi could see that both Blitz and Donner were wounded. One of the female’s wings dragged on the deck uselessly, while Blitz kept his left hindleg curled up close to his torso. There were other signs too - cuts and bruises, reddened burns and splashes of orange ichor.

The suit was also damaged - shredded armour all over the carapace, sparks and thin wisps of smoke emanating from the gaps. Only after a moment did K’yopi notice the suit’s occupant. She felt satisfaction as she noticed Satin’s mangled face.

None of the sustained damage seemed to slow the combatants significantly.

The trio moved into the close quarters range. The filly watched as the massive bodies of Blitz and Donner spun and weaved, deftly avoiding the suit’s powerful fists. It was obvious that Satin had the strength advantage, something K’yopi had never thought could happen to the two giants. They were forced to rely on their speed, agility and numbers.

She watched as Donner charged Satin and bounded off in the last moment, only for Blitz to strike from the side. The minotaur was not an easy target however; with a swift move she raised her arm to block most of the damage from the leaping male. The claws dug deep into the armored limb, shredding armour and damaging myomeres. Donner struck from behind at the same moment, sinking her claws into the suit’s lower back. Before she could do any real damage, Satin spun with a roar, lifting Blitz up and smashing him into the female, sending the two of them tumbling away. The flamer raised again, tracking the monstrous forms.

It sputtered weakly, down to its last dregs of fuel.

Satin let out a mighty curse, pushing the suit into a run, and stomped her way towards the two giants.

“We have to help them! Three! Do something!” The filly looked to her side for the first time since they’d run into the hangar.

The unicorn was gone.

“Wha-” She looked frantically around, finally spotting him by one of the scaffoldings leading to the gantry surrounding the dropship. She also spotted movement twenty meters above.

It was the Duke. He was making a run for it.

The zebra bit her lower lip and looked back at the fight nearby, then back to Three who was already climbing the stairs. There was a sinking feeling down in her gut. It was fear - but she wasn’t afraid for her safety. She was afraid for Blitz, and Donner, and Three.

And now she had to make a choice. She had never needed to make a choice like that in her life. It terrified her.

Donner’s furious roar echoing through the hangar brought K’yopi back into the real world. She took a deep breath and closed her eye, then focused her thoughts. She wasn't a fighter, she didn’t know how to use weapons, and she was awfully fragile. There wasn’t much she could do to help the giants. On the other hoof, Three was alone.

The filly looked around the hangar, searching for a way to cut off the Duke.

K’yopi opened her eye and instantly rushed to the nearby gantry.

*****

Three hastily ran up the open staircase, his hooves clattering loudly on the metal framework. Every few bends he’d poke his head out of the structure and look up, tracking his target. He could see the crystalline, grayish stallion climbing higher, just a few floors above. The crystal pony was obscured by many levels of catwalks and the metal structure of the staircase separating the two, making hitting him with a spell exceedingly difficult. With short, repeated casts of his translocation spell he began to close the distance, but the Duke’s head start kept him frustratingly out of reach.

He ignored the sound of a massive crash down below and kept running. Hoofsteps clattered on the grated staircase above - he was gaining on the stallion that could only be the Duke from the chief inspector's description.

The staircase around him erupted as gunfire rattled the bare metal. The loud noise of thin steel sheets being punctured by bullets made the stallion instinctively lower his head. Despite the risk, he didn’t stop. As he turned yet another flight of stairs, he spotted the source. Far ahead and above near a different gantry, a single pegasus armed with an assault rifle was inaccurately hosing him down.

Three kept climbing; he only needed to close the gap just a little more for the shooter to be in range. One more turn. The unicorn stopped, pointed his horn at the target and focused his magic. The hovering pony slammed another magazine into the weapon and fired. The rifle wasn’t aimed at him however, but towards a different staircase on the other side of the hangar.

Three froze at the loud, high pitched shriek that followed after the shot. He instantly felt the pressure at the base of his horn intensify as a wave of boiling anger filled him to the brim. A thin line of cascading magical energy erupted from the unicorn’s horn and instantly connected with the shooter. The pegasus jerked and dropped her rifle as the beam hit one of her wings. She dropped out of sight, flailing wildly.

The panicked screams cut off quickly.

The unicorn didn’t pay any attention to it. He looked down to the other structure and spotted a striped shape on the staircase. “K’yopi, what are you doing?! Get back down!” He could just make out the zebra looking up with a worried expression.

Her yelling was almost drowned out by the sounds of the battle from below. “He'll escape if we don't get him! I have to help you!”

Three looked up again and started running. Thirty seconds later he was at the top of the gantry. A long, rickety catwalk led over the derelict dropship and to the other side - in the distance he could spot his target.

The Duke was running along a wide catwalk that bridged the hangar and connected to the gantry which the filly was climbing. If only she could reach the top in time, they’d have him trapped. A large platform sat in the middle of the catwalk, directly above the dropship. A short shaft connected it to the ceiling, likely another staircase leading to an airlock or hatch placed there. That seemed to be the Duke’s escape route. Crates and various construction supplies littered the platform, enough to make sure the mobster had cover to facilitate his escape.

If Three wanted to stop the stallion, he would have to do it immediately.

“It’s over! Cease fleeing!”

He lit up his horn, just in time to see the Duke look back and point a pistol at him. The crystal pony was faster.

Three threw himself down just as he released his magic. As he fell, he felt the bullet part his mane with an ominous whine. At the same time, his discharge of energy zapped a support beam right next to the Duke. The mobster stumbled but kept running; he reached the platform and disappeared behind a stack of crates.

Three let out a frustrated sigh and lit up his horn again. With an electric zap and a flash of magic he reappeared in the middle of the platform the Duke had escaped to. It was cramped, filled with cargo containers, stacks of various supplies, machines, tools, spare parts and building material for the dropship below. In front of him was a single heavy door, marked with emergency exit signage.

Just as the unicorn started wondering if he missed his mark, the doors let out a soft chime, then slid apart. Four heavily armed goons wearing black bandanas poured out. They formed a semicircle around the unicorn, training their weapons on him. Three of them were armed with various rifles, but one bore a revolving grenade launcher. Behind him he heard hooves on the metal floor, then a calm, measured voice.

“I do not know who you are or why are you here. And really, I do not give a damn.”

Three darted his eyes between the arsenal of weapons pointed his way before glancing back at the source of the voice. A black crystal pony - the wrinkles on his face failed to mask his angular, nearly chiseled features. His green, well-kept mane showed hints of silver, which only added to his mobster’s persona. The stallion was wearing an elegant light gray suit, clearly tailor-made to fit his stocky body perfectly. The Duke. His brown eyes narrowed as a venomous smile appeared on his muzzle.The gang leader’s rough and drawled out voice betrayed his heavy confederate accent.

The unicorn frowned. “It is unfortunate we did not make proper acquaintances before this entire situation. And frankly, I somehow doubt we will have the opportunity.” Out of the corner of his eye Three could see the Duke moving to his flank, towards the elevator his backup just came in through.

The crystal pony’s wrinkled face sneered in disgust. “You got that right boy! You might have had a lucky break, but right now Satin is mopping the floor with your buddies, and it seems to me like you’re not in a much better position.”

The unicorn narrowed his eyes as magical lightning bolts began to arc around his horn. “Oh I wouldn’t be so certain.”

The Duke let out a short laugh. “I heard of ponies like you, throwing wild magic around like you are some sort of wonderchild. Well, your tricks won’t help you now!” He glanced at his lackeys and spoke calmly. “Kill-”

The unicorn was prepared. In half a beat he unleashed another translocation spell, disappearing right before the lead pierced his bare body. The target was only four meters ahead. The goons balked in shock as the unicorn reappeared in front of the one standing in the middle of the semi circle. The one holding the grenade launcher.

Before any of the knights had a chance to wrap their minds about what had just happened, the unicorn shifted his eyes down at the large weapon and focused his magic. A series of clicks followed as the launcher’s drum was emptied onto the floor beneath the ganger’s feet.

Three channeled his magic again and vanished, only to reappear ten meters further back. He aimed his horn at the spilled explosives and fired a brilliant lance of energy.

The resulting explosion bathed the thugs in shrapnel; the entire platform shook. The unicorn felt the blastwave flatten his chest, but mercifully he was unscathed. The moment the smoke cleared and the ringing in his ears eased, he looked around to assess the damage.

The grenade launcher Knight was gone; only a smear of blood remained where he had been standing. Another scrambled to their hooves off to one side, but was swiftly cut down with a concentrated beam of magic. The third gang member lay crumpled near the elevator, never to move again judging by their wounds. Three zapped the elevator’s control panel just to be certain that avenue of escape was unusable. Just as he did a shout alerted him to the danger - too late. The final Knight slammed into the unicorn, sending both to the floor. Neither of them were armed - the gang member must have lost his weapon in the explosion - but that didn’t mean it was an easy fight. This wasn’t one of Donner’s calm pins; Three had to resort to his basic instinct of biting and kicking as the two ponies tumbled on the ground in a savage bout. He tried to summon another spell in between the hits, but the window of opportunity was too small; the relentless assault left him no time to focus properly.

The unicorn grunted in pain as his opponent unleashed a flurry of blows into his stomach. He tried to bite at his assailant’s neck, but the Knight, clearly more used to this kind of fighting, skilfully held him at bay. More blows followed, hooves striking Three’s chest and sides. He felt his breath escaping his lungs with each pummeling hit. The other stallion finished it off with a mighty kick to the side of the unicorn’s muzzle.

He briefly felt his vision go dark, only to regain his sight when his head painfully bounced off the metal floor. There was no way he could concentrate now - not with pain that severe. He felt his opponent get off him, then stand up. The Duke’s voice called out, full of fury and malice.

“Beat that fucker to a pulp!”

Momentarily, Three’s stomach exploded in pain as a hoof stomped from above, then another. The unicorn groaned and whined. Another kick, this one much stronger. He felt something crack in his chest as he was sent tumbling away.

“You see? He’s just a pony!”

His head swam; he couldn’t focus his thoughts, not to mention magic. But he knew one thing - that he had to get up and do something. Anything. Otherwise he’d be finished.

He took a deep breath and hissed at the pain in his torso, then, slowly, he rolled onto his legs and painfully began lifting himself up. His head rose, only to see the thug in front of him, ready to unleash another barrage of blows. The Duke was standing to the side, grinning.

“Still got some fight in you? Good! That means more time to watch you bleed!”

Just as he was about to stand fully, Three’s legs gave out. He dropped to his knees with a cry of pain. He wasn’t a fighter - he couldn’t stand up in a brawl like that.

“Oh? No? Well, too bad then, fucko.”

The thug began to charge, readying another kick aimed straight at Three’s head.

Three smirked. He wasn’t a fighter - but he was a unicorn. One with a uniquely curved and pointed horn. With a cry of anger and exertion Three sprung up, thrusting his head at an upwards angle. The pointed tip of his horn struck something, then penetrated with a meaty squelch. He felt warm liquid splash on his forehead and streak down his face. He stood like that for a few seconds, regaining his focus. Then, with a telekinetic blast, he threw the skewered stallion off his horn. They wouldn’t be getting up again.

The Duke was standing nearby, eyes wide as saucers and jaw hanging open.

Three smiled at the crystal pony. It was a smile devoid of any mirth or joy, but full of wanton brutality. Blood dripped from his horn and down his beaten face. The lightning arcs that appeared around his horn had worrying red tinge to their colouring. Quietly, he cooed, “I am far more than just a pony.”

The Duke's surprise turned into horror. “W-wait. Wait! You can’t harm me!” He brought up his foreleg and tapped on the multiband there. “You do and everyone here dies! Do you understand that?!”

The magic coursing through the unicorn’s horn did not ease up. “Good, because you are coming with me.”

The Duke growled, seemingly emboldened by his threat. “No you bastard! You are letting me go free or everyone in this hangar dies. Including the stock on the lower decks you didn't get to!” He narrowed his eyes as Three’s horrid grin eased its intensity. “That’s right. You thought I keep all my eggs in one basket? Heh.”

The unicorn hissed as he slowly turned after the moving target, his horn still brimming with energy. “You wouldn’t dare. You’d die too.”

“They’d give me the noose anyway! I have nothing to lose now!” The Duke kept walking sideways towards the exit from the platform. “You think I’d be that dumb? To not have insurance?” He let out a short laugh, pulling a small concealed pistol from under the jacket. “Think again frea-”

“Three!” The juvenile voice was muted by a single gunshot.

The stallion felt a hard thump on the right side of his chest. He looked down, surprised. A rapidly expanding red smear was visible on his coat. He’d never been shot before. He’d thought it would be agony, but other than the cold around the wound, he just felt numbness overwhelm his entire body.

He didn’t even register his legs giving out. He looked up.

Only to see the Duke dance like a string puppet as he was perforated by a close range storm of rifle fire.

Three’s chin hit the deck. He could see a small, striped form dropping the assault rifle and galloping towards him.

K’yopi slid to a stop by the bleeding unicorn. Her trembling hooves reached down and grabbed his shoulders, pulling him into a sitting position. “Three! Three! Oh shit, oh fuck! What do I do? What do I do?!” She watched as the unicorn’s eyes turned and met hers. Then he smiled.

“Good to see you again K.” He let out a hacking cough, spitting blood on her hooves.

“D-don’t talk! You’re shot. Badly!” She looked around the platform in panic. “Oh crap...”

“Hey. I-it’s not that bad!” He put his hoof on her shoulder. “I d-don’t think I am dying... yet.”

Judging from the way the unicorn had to fight for breath the filly didn’t entirely believe that.

After a few deep inhales he spoke again. “I can wait. G-go get Donner, or Blitz. One of them! Quickly.”

“I… I Can’t leave you!”

WIth effort, the stallion reached a hoof and grabbed the zebra on the back of her head, then pushed her closer to his face. “Go. There is n-nothing you can do… here.” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you understand me?”

Terrified, the filly gulped then nodded weakly a couple times. She leaned in and nuzzled her neck to his before placing his hoof on the wound. “J-Just hold tight, okay?”

A weak, throaty laugh caused the filly to flinch. She looked down at Three, but he was just looking back at her, confused. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

The Duke’s body was moving. One foreleg slowly and with great effort reached to the multiband, then pressed a blinking icon. The laughter continued, but quickly morphed into a tortured, gurgling wheeze. FInally, the breathing slowly quieted down, the body going limp in a pool of blood as a multiband showing an activated app clattered to the floor.

Before she could realise what happened, a loud klaxon could be heard throughout the hangar. A synthetic voice followed.

“WARNING! CLASS A CHEMICAL FIRE DETECTED INSIDE THE BERTH. ALL EXITS SEALED. ATMOSPHERIC PURGE COMMENCING.”

The massive door spanning the entire wall in front of the dropship began to slide open.

*****

The yellow warning lights flashing on the gate behind Satin’s back highlighted the damage done to her exosuit. Large gashes were visible all over the plating, mainly concentrated on the torso and arms. The suit’s left hand was a mangled mess of metal and wiring and, though still a dangerous club, it had lost all ability to get a grip on anything. The flamethrower, spent long ago, was likewise gone. Satin herself was also wounded. Her unprotected face bore deep, bloody rends caused by the strike which took her left eye. Blood was seeping from a wide tear on the armour’s right side.

Her opponents weren’t faring much better. Donner’s right wing dragged uselessly on the deck behind her; her skin was abraded or split in many places. The orange, honey-like liquid that was the creature’s blood seeped like amber and matted her coat around the wounds. She winced everytime she drew a breath - the broken ribs were hampering her composure.

To her side, standing on three legs was Blitz, his left hind leg kept high in order to avoid putting weight on it. Other than the crippled limb, the giant was the one with least debilitating injuries. He was far from unscathed however. Two uneven cuts marred his chest; a number of tiny metal shards were embedded in the ornate mask covering his face.

The three of them found themselves facing off near the dropship’s main ramp when the klaxons announced the venting procedure.

Satin’s mangled face twisted in an uneven grin as she briefly looked back. “So the big stallion is done for, eh?” She faced her enemies, retaining the grin. “I will make sure you will die here with everyone else.” The heavy arms of her exosuit raised, then pounded together twice. “You mangy kittycats have been a major pain in my ass, but this ends now!” The minotaur let out a fierce roar and charged towards Blitz.

He expected to be the target of Satin’s anger - he was the only one who could still fly. It was a wise tactical choice to go after him, but even if he wanted, he couldn't. Donner was too vulnerable to be left on the ground alone.

With a flap of his wings, the giant rolled out of Satin’s reach. He was faster, but even with all the sustained damage, she was far from slow. The exosuit’s right arm reached out after him. He felt a prick as the mechanical fingers grabbed at the trailing edge of his wing and pulled out a few feathers. It was clear she wanted to ground him. Going into melee range was asking for a crippled wing.

Fortunately, he wasn’t alone.

Seeing an opening, Donner leapt into action. Her claws struck low, into the suit’s left thigh. Satin tripped but the armour’s tortured gyros kept it upright, then with a tug of inertial force pushed the suit back into standing position and over as it swiveled on one heel and turned right at the female.

Another mighty blow sent Donner tumbling on the deck. “I’LL RIP YOU LIMB FROM LIMB!” With a hiss of servos she raised her left hand high above her head in a protective stance, turning the other one backwards like a pinwheel just in time to thwart the ambush. She felt Blitz’s weight land briefly on her shoulders, then use the suit like a springboard and launch himself up and over, leaping out of reach of her swinging fist. Keeping his wings half open to steady himself against the strengthening draft, the creature landed on a nearby cargo crate, then jumped down between his companion and the minotaur.

Both of them were right where Satin wanted them. Between her and the hangar door. She watched with glee as the slit in the middle of the door began widening with a rapidly increasing howl of escaping air. Beyond it, a black void adorned with tiny twinkling dots.

Six meters and growing. Already nearby containers, machines and pieces of trash started passing through the gap as they were sucked out into the black. She knew her suit could withstand the pull; all she needed to do was finish this before she suffocated. Even when the escaping air reached supersonic velocity, as long as the doors were not fully open it would take minutes for the massive volume of atmosphere in the hangar to vent out completely.

She took a heavy step forward. “Well, lost your bite? Come on!”

Blitz had to raise his voice to be heard over the roaring air current. He spoke without taking his eyes off the exosuit. “Find the unicorn and the zebra and get out of here!”

Donner unsteadily got back to her feet. “Maul halten! I can fight.” She took a few shaky steps forward and formed up on the male’s side. “Besides, if we are going to die, we are doing this together or not at all!” She assumed a predatory stance and let out a growl directed at the minotaur. “Whatever we choose, we just need to be quick about it. “ Already their manes and feathers were being tossed violently on the hurricane wind created by the suction of the opening.

Blitz angled his mask at his companion. “I’ve got an idea.”

Donner kept watching the exosuit with a vicious snarl. “Do tell.”

“Festhalten.”

The female grinned. With effort, she stepped closer to Blitz and pressed her side against his, her healthy wing wrapped tightly around his torso.

Satin took another step forward. “Didn’t you get the memo? No animals allowed! RAARGH!”

She charged again, arms outstretched. She expected them to swerve to the sides again, or try to go high and above.

They did none of that.

Instead, both of them dropped to the deck as she smashed her hands together right above their heads. It surprised Satin, but it wasn’t anything she wasn’t prepared for. With practiced moves she readjusted her working fist and slammed it downwards in a powerful hammerblow.

Only to watch her fist be stopped by four paws, right in front of the male’s masked face. The servos whined as the mechanical arm pressed to overpower their grip. Satin sneered. She still had the second arm. It rose high above her head, aiming to hammer into the freak’s skull like a nail.

“Now!”

The limb fell down with full force. But just before it hit, Blitz spread his massive wings wide. Immediately they caught the rushing air - and pulled the two creatures towards the gap.

And with their tails wrapped firmly around Satin’s ankles the exosuit was dragged along. The machine couldn’t hope to counterbalance such force so quickly. With a yelp of surprise Satin crashed onto her back, then started to slide across the deck along with her two opponents.

The moment the armour gained momentum, Blitz closed his wings. He and Donner slid along the deck, well within the suction zone of the vacuum, accompanied by more and more items from the hangar flying past, bouncing and crashing all around them. He threw his left forepaw to the side and slammed his claws into the deck. Sparks flying as the metal was ripped open like a cheap aluminum can, it gave him and Donner enough leverage to swing out of the way of the barreling exosuit. Once Satin passed them, screaming obscenities and desperately trying to find a grip with her only working hand, Donner released her hold on the male and sunk her own claws into the deck a few meters behind. The draft was so strong and loud here that the two of them felt like they were hanging over an infinite chasm.

Just as Blitz was about to look behind him towards Donner, he felt squeezing pain explode in his hind leg.

Satin was not done yet.

*****

“Three! Three! Hold on!” The entire platform was shaking. K’yopi had to cover the lying unicorn with her own body to protect him from the flying items. Crates, rivets, spars, and everything in between were devoured by the twenty meter wide gap in the door. She was already bleeding from her shoulder; a piece of sheet metal had nearly decapitated her.

K’yopi staunched the unicorn’s bleeding with the sleeve of her suit, but it was already soaked in red. She looked at his face. He was still awake, but the paleness of it filled the filly with dread. She held him close, using her hindlegs to hold them in place by the platform’s railing. His lips were moving, but the rushing air and the unholy clatter of crashing metal made it impossible to hear anything. K’yopi screwed her eye shut and leaned her ear to the unicorn’s muzzle.

“Get o-out of... here.”

Even though his head was right besides her, she couldn’t help but yell. “I-I can’t leave you here!”

The unicorn shivered and let out a weak cough. She could feel warm droplets land on her ear. “You h-have to… go.”

The filly gritted her teeth. “I am not leaving you!” She moved her head and stared into the unicorn’s blue eyes. “Do you hear me?! I AM NOT LEAVING YOU!” She looked up and around in desperation. There was no way she could move him off the platform now; the air current was too strong to even stand.

“Blitz, Donner! Where are you guys?” She looked down at the bleeding unicorn. “T-Three we have to-”

The railing gave way. The two of them slid away and entered freefall.

She screamed. There was nothing else she could do.

She screamed as the two of them plummeted towards the deck thirty meters below.

She watched it race closer and closer- then felt hooves wrap around her small frame.

Just as they were about to hit the deck, her world changed.

Blue. Endless blue. A swirling vortex of indigo, ultramarine, sapphire, teal, azure, cerulean, cyan, iris. A silent abyss of swirling energy and impalpable shapes. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t do anything. It felt like minutes.

She felt watched.

She felt like an intruder.

She could swear she heard whispering.

Before she could even start wrapping her head around it all, the vortex was replaced by the hangar’s deck again.

The zebra and the unicorn hit the metal. She let out a quiet hiss at the pain in her side; it felt as if they had fallen from a chair instead of a thirty meter tall gantry.

It wasn’t over, however. Immediately their bodies started to slide on the deck, pulled by the suction force of the vacuum. K’yopi held tightly to the wounded unicorn and cowered. The only other thing she could do was to lift her head and look through the wide open door, into the dark void hungrily consuming everything that was not nailed down.

They were sliding towards it at a speed that made her heart sink. The filly screwed her eye tightly and buried her head in Three’s mane. She could feel his weak foreleg wrap around her midsection reassuringly.

She thought about the last few days - how her life had changed in a way she wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred years. She thought of the people who were the catalyst of this change: Blitz and Donner. And of course Three. The quirky unicorn that came out of nowhere, their paths crossed by pure chance. K’yopi had never thought about destiny or fate; she had never thought about things like that ever before. Her mind had dismissed it all as nonsense, a phoney spiritual lie that some people used to make themselves feel better about the bad things that happened in this world. But something else gave her a feeling of strange acceptance. A profound sense of calmness and peace of mind. A silent, soothing whisper that assured her that everything would be alright. That she was exactly where she was supposed to be. That she belonged.

And that she was free.

It was her choice to stay with the unicorn until the end. No one forced her to.

He was her purpose.

She finally understood.

She only regretted not being able to enjoy it fully.

The violent tug at her midsection forced her eye open in surprise. Both she and the unicorn stopped.

The filly looked up only to see a long, thick tail holding them in place. It’s owner was anchored firmly into the deck just a few meters above.

“Donner!”

The female’s head was barely visible over her large bulk. The strain on her face made it obvious she was barely holding on. “I cannot do anything from here! You have to close that door!”

“B-but how?!”

“Think of something, fast! Before Blitz is done for!” As if to punctuate her point, Donner whipped her tail and swung the two to her other side. Once there, only a few meters away and below her, K’yopi saw the other giant desperately trying to dislodge the fearsome mechanical monster which was clutching one of his hindlegs.

Blitz had no other choice than to hold on. Donner was too far away and too wounded to help, and Satin was using her only working hand to grip tightly around his paw. He couldn’t even kick her away as his other leg had been crippled in the fight before.

“K’yopi…” Three’s voice was barely audible over the rushing air. “You have to h-help him. I will…” he let out a hacking cough again. “I will close the door.”

The zebra stared at the unicorn, frightened. “H-how? I have no weapons! I don’t know what to do!”

His misty eyes met hers as he offered a weak smile. “Figure something out. You are g-good at that.” His eyelids fell down and a glow formed at the tip of his horn.

“Shit.” The filly looked around, the floor on which they were all lying was effectively a smooth vertical wall, thanks to the mass of air rushing into space beyond the door. By now the pressure difference was big enough to overcome the station’s gravity. Letting go would mean a fall into open space. She closed her eye again and whispered under her breath. “Think. Think. You can do it.” Blitz’s pained roar nearly broke her concentration. “Come on! There has to be something.” She could see the blue glow enveloping her and Three even through her eyelids.

Her healthy eye shot open. “Donner! Let me go!”

“What?!”

“Hold Three and let me go!” She looked up at the female. “Trust me!” She looked down at the purple unicorn. The glow at the tip of his horn was so intense it obscured his eyes. She winced as magical lightning began to shoot out from within the glow. Whatever he was doing, the filly had never seen him use that much magic ever before. She didn’t know if he could hear her. “I’m sorry Three!”

The zebra wrapped all of her four limbs tightly against the unicorn’s torso. She could feel the warm blood on his chest and the jerk of pain as she held him close.

“Donner! Go!”

After a brief moment she felt the tail holding her midsection ease up. She let out a yelp as she fell for a few centimeters before her hooves locked the unicorn in a grip. Once she was certain her hold was secure she looked up again. By now she couldn’t even see the large female; the glow from Three’s horn and the magic discharges around it were too bright.

“Swing me towards Blitz!”

“It’s too far!”

“It’s our only chance! Do it!”

The tail holding the stallion swung like a pendulum, dragging the two of them on the deck. K’yopi watched as she moved towards Blitz and Satin, then back again. “Closer!” She dared to reach one hoof towards the struggling duo. It was still too far. “I need to be clos-”

A wild, deafening bolt of magical lightning erupted from Three’s horn and struck the deck right where Donner’s tail was just a second ago.

The female roared over the noise. “I can’t keep this up!”

K’yopi looked with concern at the unicorn but had to avert her gaze. “Once more! Just a little further!”

The tail swung again. Back and forth. K’yopi watched Blitz and Satin get closer again. But it was still too far.

She jumped.

The small zebra slid across the deck, propelled by Donner’s muscular appendage. Soon, the forward momentum was lost and she began sliding down. “Oh shit!” Her trajectory was nearly vertical now. Blitz’s mask snapped up to look at her. He couldn’t reach a paw to grab her, but he gave her the next best thing: his massive wing. She had to fight to orient herself properly, slide on her back with all limbs outstretched, ready to grab the feathery appendage.

The moment it came within reach she grabbed with all her might. As she steadied her breath, she realised that somehow she had managed to find purchase. The wing moved and slid her closer to the giant’s body. A deep voice rang out.

“Nice of you to drop in.”

“Are you serious!?” Her hindlegs wrapped around Blitz’s lower torso for even more grip.

Another bolt of magic pierced the howling gale around them, this one even stronger than before. The zebra winced at the thunderclap. “Blitz, help me down!”

Again, a dextrous tail rose up and wrapped itself around her midsection. “I cannot do anything from here. You have to be quick. Soon the atmosphere will be too thin for you and Three to breathe.”

She didn’t have the time to question it. “Right. Right.” Instead she climbed on the giant’s back, secured by the tail like an alpinist. She looked down again.

Satin was holding tightly to Blitz’s hindpaw, her savaged face sneering back at the zebra. The filly was certain the minotaur recognized her, but at this point she didn’t care one bit for it. Blitz’s other paw was curled up, out of reach of the armored suit, but coated in amber blood.

The same synthetic voice from before could be heard through the maelstrom. “WARNING. MAIN HANGAR DOOR MECHANISM NOT RESPONDING.”

K’yopi strained her eyes to see the far away motors lined on both sides of the massive door. All eight of them were fully enveloped by an intense blue glow, sparks flying from their innards. The machines struggled as if suddenly they had to counteract an invisible wyrm trying to hold the doors together. Suddenly one of the engines exploded, spewing debris and thick, black smoke which were sucked away into space straight away. The left door stopped and then, pushed by an unseen force, started to slowly close.

The filly looked over her shoulder towards Three. The unicorn’s head was nearly entirely enveloped by magical glow; lightning bolts as long as her foreleg were escaping it nearly every second. She yelled at Blitz. “He’s doing it! He’s closing the gate!” She reached to her chest and tugged the tail. “Blitz. Get me down now!”

She didn’t have to repeat herself. Momentarily, she found herself drawing closer and closer to Satin’s face.

The minotaur gritted her teeth, turning her cybernetic eye on the zebra.. “You!? Oh sweet little stripe. You will pay for this. You and your mangy friends!”

K’yopi felt bile rising in her throat as reached out and hooked her hooves around the exosuit’s gauntlet. She started looking for a way to somehow break the iron grip on Blitz’s paw. “It’s time you paid for everything you’ve done!”

Satin let out a cruel laugh. “Then you die!” She brought up her left arm, heaving it towards the filly like a club. In a rushed reaction to keep her from being turned into a red smear, Blitz let her go.

K’yopi slid down, right as the maul slammed into the deck where she just had been. Her hindlegs were steadily placed on Satin’s shoulders now, while her forelegs grabbed the suit’s right arm. There was no way the minotaur could dislodge her without letting go now.

There was no way to dislodge the minotaur without following her also.

The filly inspected the arm - she winced at the sight of what the thick metal fingers had already done to Blitz’s skin but forced herself to keep looking. There was no visible way to dislodge it, not without severing his leg.

“Get! OFF!” Another swing, this one poorly aimed and easy to avoid.

The filly didn’t grace the minotaur with a glare. Instead she raised one of her hindlegs and firmly struck it into Satin’s face. The surprised curse that followed was all she needed for confirmation that it had hit its target. She kept searching the arm from each side, lower and lower until she finally reached the shoulder. She threw in another kick to keep Satin distracted.

The suit had to have some sort of emergency release in case the operator needed to get out but was unable to do it themselves. It had to! She just needed to find it! Her hooves desperately searched every crevice of the mechanical arm, working their way from the wrist and down towards the torso. Finally, K’yopi spotted a small lever marked with a black and yellow border, located on the inside of the armour’s armpit. Satin yelled something, but she was drowned out by the explosion of another motor.

“I am no longer your sweet little stripe.” The zebra grabbed the lever and pulled it. “Effective immediately!”

The seam between the armour’s arm and shoulder popped out, then expanded. Momentarily everything below it, the occupant included, started to drop away. K’yopi watched as Satin’s muscular arm slid from the gauntlet. The minotaur’s mangled face was stuck in a furious scowl as she and the exosuit fell towards the void below. She tried to grab the deck with her other arm, but its damaged end scraped and stood no chance of digging in without its fingers.

“BLITZ!” The agile tail instantly wrapped around the filly, holding her tight.

She kept watching the minotaur fall. She kept watching as all of the remaining motors around the doors exploded all at once. She kept watching as the exosuit’s leg clipped the deck and caused it to spin violently. She kept watching as Satin drifted into the black. Drifted, until finally disappearing as the massive doors slammed closed with a sound of tortured metal.

The maelstrom eased with a hiss of sucked-out air, enough for the noise of burning motors to be audible.

The filly felt herself lowered gently to the deck. She got up immediately and galloped towards the purple unicorn. Right away she spotted that his entire chest was covered in red. His eyes were half closed and glazed over. The tip of his curved horn was blackened and smoking. Donner was already by his side, holding a wing under the lying pony protectively. At the sound of K’yopi’s hooves she looked down. Her expression was impassive.

“N-no.”

*****

It was hard to focus. His head was pounding. His horn felt like a metal rod impaled deep into his frontal lobe. His breaths were too shallow, but he couldn’t force himself to breathe in deeper. The right side of his chest was numb, as if it wasn’t there anymore. He tried to get on his hooves, but they barely moved.

He could see blurred shapes moving frantically in front of him. Voices, high pitched and quick. Something landed on the side of his neck. He felt his head droop down. It was so hard to keep it up. His eyes closed. What was happening? He didn’t know. He was so confused.

The vortex.

His own private space. It was strange; he didn’t recall translocating. Why was he there? It didn’t matter. This was his realm, the closest thing to home he ever had. Even if he was an intruder there. Even if it wasn’t strictly speaking his. Nevertheless, it filled him with a feeling of serenity.

He heard a voice.

“Wake up!”

The landlord.

“Wake! Up!”

The Voice.

“WAKE! UP!”

No, it wasn't It. This voice was different. It wasn’t filled with venom and deception. Instead, it was soft and pleading.

Desperate.

“PLEASE!”

His eyes shot open.

His vision was filled with a face of a young zebra. She seemed familiar, but he couldn’t remember her name. Her red irises were fully dilated. Her eyes were wide open.

And she was crying.

He blinked once, twice. It all came back together instantly. He smiled. “Hey K.” His voice was barely above a whisper.

The filly let out a mighty sniff. She tried to say something, but only random noises escaped her lips. Her tears were not stopping.

He reached out a weak hoof and rubbed it under her healthy eye. “Don’t cry. You don’t cry, remember?” He drew in a shallow breath. A spike of pain pierced his chest and caused him to gasp pitifully.

But he kept smiling as his eyes were locked on the zebra.

“I don’t think I am going to be around for much longer, K.”

She placed her own hoof on his, holding it close to her cheek. Her mouth opened as she tried to speak again but failed. She sniffed a few more times, then finally managed to articulate words. “N-no. No Three, please no. You are the only one I-I have. Y-you can’t-”

He let out a weak chuckle. It hurt. “You have Blitz and Donner, silly.”

“D-don’t leave me! Please!” The tears started flowing with renewed intensity.

He lifted his other hoof and hooked it around her neck, then gently pulled her towards him. Her head rested under his chin as she cried into his shoulder. He felt his strength failing again.

“K’yopi.”

She broke away and looked into his eyes, her face an inch away from his.

“It’s okay.”

Darkness enveloped him.

*****

Three opened his eyes with a gasp. “Window!”

He sat up, immediately regretting it. The dull pain in his chest made the unicorn look down. He blinked at the sheet covering his body. He tried to move it by using his magic, but couldn’t summon any; he was entirely spent. His hoof reached to move the covering, only to reveal dried smears of red and orange matting his coat. Dressings were wrapped tightly around his torso.

Then he remembered what happened.

The hangar, the firefights, the Duke, the vacuum.

Blitz.

Donner.

K’yopi.

“K’yopi!”

The unicorn summoned what little strength he had and lifted himself off the bed. He was in a moderately sized room, most of it occupied by a queen sized bed, along with a desk with two opposite seats and a wardrobe.

He looked down again at his chest and gingerly peeked under the bandage. The wound was gone. It still hurt, quite a lot actually, but at the very least he wasn’t bleeding.

“How?”

He didn’t know. The last thing he remembered was the zebra’s crying face. Three shook his head and made way towards the only door in the room. On the other side was Claudia’s common room. Except for the screen showing some kind of animated show, it was quiet. There was no sight of Blitz nor Donner. He didn’t care. All he cared for was right there.

The filly was sleeping with her head on the table, an empty bowl resting in front of her. Mindful of his injuries, Three walked over and looked down at the zebra. Her eye was back to normal. Likewise, she was missing the medical patch on her cheek. There wasn’t even a scar.

The unicorn thought better than to wake her up by touching her. Instead he sat on his rump and steadied his voice.

“K’yopi. Wake up.”

The filly’s ear twitched slightly.

“Hey. Wake up!”

“Huh? Sorry, I just…”

Her ears stood up fully, then her entire head followed as it spun to the source of the voice. The unicorn watched as her face went from bleary eyed confusion, to disbelief, to shock. He tried to say something, but the filly jumped off the seat and threw herself at him with spread forehooves. As the two collided, he felt himself losing balance and finally crashing to the deck. He let out a pained hiss as K’yopi’s modest weight pushed on his chest.

The filly gasped and raised both forehooves to her muzzle in fright. “Oh no! I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”

The unicorn lay there, unmoving. His chest ached even more now with the added weight. He coughed, then smiled at the filly. “Last I remember I died. But I seem to be better now.”

Her concerned face shifted slowly. Her red eyes, both of them, went from perfect ovals to narrow slits as her cheeks rose. A sound like a bird of paradise’s song filled the air. Melodic, full of warmth and joy. It took him a few moments to realise what was happening.

She was laughing.

She laughed and laughed.

It was infectious.

He started laughing too.

He reached up a foreleg and hooked it around her shoulders, then brought her down and held her closely to his chest.

They kept laughing. They laughed and laughed, unbothered, carefree.

Pure.

After a few minutes the laughter started to die down enough for the filly to attempt speaking. “I-I thought you'll n-never wake u-up. I thou-”

She started hiccuping.

“I thought y-”

Again.

“What is-”

Again.

Three looked at the zebra’s confused face. “You get hiccups when you laugh?” He forced himself to choke down a snicker. “T-that is absolutely hilarious!”

He couldn’t hold it anymore and burst out in laughter again. Spurred by his reaction K’yopi joined in between the loud bursts of hiccupping.

It took over five minutes for them to calm down. Another couple for the zebra to regain her composure. Finally she was able to breathe normally again. “I thought you’ll never wake up.”

Three’s grin had turned into a more measured smile. “To be perfectly frank with you, neither did I.” He narrowed his eyes. “What happened?”

She smiled as she moved herself off the unicorn and stood up. “It was Blitz and Donner! They saved you!”

He slowly got up to his hooves, careful to not strain his aching body. “Saved me how?”

The filly shrugged. “Blitz explained it to me but honestly I wasn’t really listening.” Her features softened as she looked at the unicorn. “I was worrying about you!”

“Well, I am better now. Where are they?”

As if on cue the door leading to the cargo hold opened and in walked the giants. They seemed to fare much better than they did the last time Three had seen them, but the recent injuries were clearly not gone yet. Blitz was limping, while Donner’s wing was held close to her back. The smaller wounds, however, were already gone. Blitz made his way towards the unicorn and the filly right away, while Donner deposited a covered metal bucket on the table.

"What's that?" The filly asked.

"A guarantee that we get paid,” Donner replied enigmatically. From the size of her toothy grin, K'yopi quickly decided that it'd be best not to pry any further. She looked at the unicorn and gave him a clueless shrug.

“You are awake. Good.” The giant’s mask was emotive as ever. “We were concerned that your injuries might be too severe, even for us to deal with.”

The unicorn’s eyebrows raised up. “What do you mean? Can you tell me how am I alive?”

The large female stepped over towards the unicorn, her tail swirling slowly behind. “Your body has been healed thanks to our magic.”

“Magic?”

She offered a toothy grin. “You are not the only one with strange powers around here, unicorn.”

The filly let out a soft giggle. “The blood. They shared a lot of it.” She pointed a hoof at the wrappings around the unicorn’s chest. “I helped too!”

Three looked between the trio around him. K’yopi’s smiling face, Donners grin and Blitz’s mask. “Well, in this case... what is our next step?”

*****

Miner’s Prospect’s shuttle terminal was as busy as ever, one of the many smaller docks specifically dedicated to short range passenger traffic. Hundreds of travellers were entering or leaving the area, hundreds more were already waiting for onboarding. Behind the large window a hangar bay could be seen, not unlike the one where the Duke made his base of operations. This one instead was filled with smaller shuttles ferrying passengers to and from the station and down to the planet below. Said passengers were giving the two monstrous figures and their companions standing near the entrance a wide berth.

K’yopi held the printed tickets tightly. She was nervous and at the same time eager to see what was next in store. Not a feeling she was used to. She looked towards the gate before turning around. “Well, this is it.”

Three nodded. “Remember, the moment you get down there, get to the hotel room we rented for you. Everything is paid for, you won’t even have to leave it.” He raised a hoof and gently placed it on the zebra’s back. “I will be back with you in two days’ time. Right after we clear everything with the chief inspector.”

“Why can’t I wait with you?”

Donner spoke with a smirk, reveling in the worried glares from the passengers and security. “The Duke might be gone, but there may be some who could wish to take revenge. Sending you two separately would make it much harder to track you down.”

K’yopi wasn’t happy about this, but after all they had been through she decided not to press the issue. Instead she stepped forward and attempted to wrap her hooves around Donner’s chest. She threw her head upwards to look at the creature’s face. “We’ll meet again someday, right?”

Donner looked down. The female’s huge paw reached and gently caressed the zebra’s mane. “Someday. For now you wait for Three, then you both get as far away from the Confederacy as possible.”

The filly nodded. “Right, okay.” She watched the creature’s huge slitted eyes for a moment. “Donner?”

“Yes?”

K’yopi lowered her head and pushed it against the female’s chest, sinking it into the thick coat. “You’re pretty great!”

The huge female bared her sawlike teeth in a slasher grin. “We were made to be. Stay safe, K’yopi.”

The zebra squeezed Donner one last time with all her might and finally let go. “I promise we will!” She awkwardly shuffled before facing the other giant.

Right before she moved closer, Three leaned down and whispered something into her ear. The filly paused, chuckled and nodded before proceeding towards Blitz.

The mask was already angled downwards. “You have surpassed our expectations. More than I would have imagined.” He raised his left paw and showed it to the filly. There was no trace of the stab wound. “Remember what I told you. Find a purpose.”

The filly beamed and grabbed the extended paw greedily. “No way, first I am getting vacation.” She wrapped it around herself and pushed closer to the giant before attempting to hug him too. “After that I will think of what I want to do in life.” She let out a giggle as she felt the fluffy tuft at the end of his tail brush her back. “You are pretty great too Blitz.”

The ornate mask kept looking down, unmoving. “You’re welcome.”

She looked up with a smirk. “Window. The answer is window!”

K’yopi could hear an amused chuckle coming from Donner to her side, but the giant in her forehooves did not react. His mask just kept staring at the filly for a long moment.

Finally, he spoke. “Your reward.” One of his wings extended forward. He reached with his free paw and plucked a single rusty feather, then placed it firmly behind the filly’s ear. “I am hard to find, difficult to leave and impossible to forget. What am I?”

The filly blinked. “What? Another? Not fair!”

His deep voice rang out with something K’yopi could have sworn was amusement. “Think about it. You’ll tell me the answer once we meet again.”

“Fine, fine I promise!” She held him for a few more moments before separating, then took a couple steps away and faced both of the creatures. “Thanks guys. You are… you saved me. You changed my life for the better, long after I gave up on doing it myself.” She sniffed. “I-I don’t know how to thank you.”

Donner crouched down, as her thick tail moved in to wrap around the filly. A moment later the zebra was lifted off her hooves with a surprised yelp and moved back towards the giants. As soon as she was deposited on the floor again the two moved in closer, flanking her.

K’yopi heard the sound of rustling feathers, then she was bathed in darkness as the enormous wings covered her fully. She only felt their chests lightly pressing against her sides and the beats coming from within.

She had never felt so safe in her entire life.

*****

Three months later...

K’yopi leaned over the steering wheel and adjusted her sunglasses in the rearview mirror, then looked over through the passenger seat window towards the sidewalk and the thin beach below.

The purple unicorn was standing on the sand; every few seconds his hooves were awash with saltwater. He looked up into the twilight sky and squinted his eyes at the twinkling, distant dots. Finally, his horn lit up. A delicate flower with sharp, crystalline thorns on the stem floated up. He regarded it closely, watching how the soft petals subtly changed colours akin to a prism when exposed to direct light.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

“I promise you, I will do better.”

The light at the tip of his horn intensified and the flower was sent hurtling far into the water. He exhaled heavily and turned around.

K’yopi watched the stallion come over and enter the car. The moment the door slammed shut she tapped a hoof on the ignition button. “We are nearly an hour ahead on the schedule, there’s an ice cream place with a five star review just two blocks out.” She lifted her shades and turned her brilliant red eyes at the unicorn with a smile. “Cow juice?”

The unicorn kept watching the sea through the window, his voice was oddly distant. “Milkshake, it is called milkshake. And yeah, sure K.”

The filly raised an eyebrow and asked carefully, “Three, is everything okay?” She watched as his head turned towards her; his face shifted from wistful to neutral, and then a small smile appeared. It grew and grew until she was certain the unicorn was earnest with her.

“It is now, K’yopi. It really is.”

Specimen Three and K'yopi by DinoHorse