The Equus Crusade

Twilight was one with the Canterlot’s Pride. From the burning fuel to the occasional flickering of the shields and the movements of the crew, she could feel everything that was happening on the ship and outside of it.

A storm of claws and jaws surrounded her as she made her way through thunderous dark clouds and malignant faces with blue eyes and deformed mouths. Occasionally, the thunders lashed out from the cover of the clouds and crashed into a wall of purple light.

Immaterial energy was pressing against her shields, attempting to break them and flood the ship. She had learned the hard way that she could not allow that to happen, no matter the cost.

No one really knew why, but any kind of direct contact with the ‘Endless Sea’ could cause several psychiatric Illnesses. That had been the undeserved and undignified fate of Flurry Heart, who had received the honor of leading the first expedition into space.

Twilight still remembered the pride in Flurry’s shining eyes and her wide smile before she ventured into the unknown. That image, combined with the memory of what had returned, was one of the many stab wounds in Twilight’s heart.

She had not died, but the energy that invaded her soul had cursed her with a terrible case of paranoid schizophrenia. Screaming voices, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions of the future now haunted her mind. It was a fate many, Twilight included, considered to be far worse than death.

Twilight herself invented the spell necessary for safe space travel, the one she was using at that moment, after Flurry was placed in a mental hospital for her own safety. The spell required a significant amount of concentration and magical energies and could leave a weak unicorn exhausted for days.

Only unicorns with marks related to their strength of will or their magical prowess could safely guide a vessel through the Endless Sea without losing their minds, but the eldritch energies of the Endless Sea never left them completely untouched.

Twilight, being an alicorn, had no problem in guiding her ship and chasing away anything that approached her. She could feel an ancient and malignant will coming from the concentrations of energy near her.

She had been sitting on the throne at the center of the command bridge for what to her felt like a couple of hours, but it had probably been few days for the rest of the crew, when she felt she had reached the system were the pirate base was hidden according to an intelligence report.

The journey through the Endless Sea had been a strain on her energies and her mind, but she had just enough power left to open a portal surrounded by blue light and close it behind her as soon as she returned to reality.

As her consciousness left the ship and returned to her own limited body, nine yellow lights assaulted her eyes. The lights were the only source of brightness in the otherwise dark command bridge. Iron shutters prevented the crew from looking outside when it was exceedingly dangerous to do so.

The shutters retreated slowly with a metallic sound, allowing the light of a blue star to illuminate the room, chasing away most of the remaining shadows. Nineteen other ships that had returned to real space alongside the Canterlot’s Pride blocked a small portion of the rays and created new darkness.

A fleet of twenty ships was unusually large for any military expedition, but she and Spike had made an exception for what intelligence officers were sure was the location of the elusive pirate base they had been trying to find for years.

Spike was sitting right next to her on a smaller silver chair. Like her, he was looking at the sea of stars in the distance and the holograph in front of the throne showing a heat map of the surrounding area of space. The holograph emitted a soft white light that brightened Twilight and Spike’s faces. In front of him, there was a small black terminal.

The only sources of heat were the other nineteen ships around the Canterlot’s Pride. Every other part of the map was utterly devoid of any signal. The void in front of them was silent and empty; the only feature was an asteroid belt of glistening black and grey rocks in the distance.

“All captains report,” she said, sure that a microphone could easily pick up her voice and send it to the other ships.

One by one, the captains replied. Dangerous energies or malevolent entities had not gotten into contact with any of the ships or their crews. Only a heavy cruiser, the Helpful Spirit, had some minor issues with her engines, but the captain had said that her subordinates could easily fix everything in a couple of hours.

“No signs of them or their base,” Spike said, giving voice to Twilight’s thoughts. “And no signs of the colonists either,” Spike continued as he looked at every corner of the map.

“But the intelligence report said their base was in this system,” Said Twilight. “Maybe we missed the exact spot, but I know it has to be here, we should spread out and search for it,”.

Twilight knew there was something else there; she could feel it.

They had separated the fleet into four groups of five ships to cover as much ground as possible while maintaining a reasonable amount of firepower if they found the enemy.

For the last three hours, the ships had explored the previously unknown system without successfully finding anything. They had sent probes and scouts to look into the distant corners of the system where the scanners and radars could see nothing.

“This is captain White Tail reporting from the Silver Star,” said a bored voice in the primary communication channel. “There is still nothing to report, I think it’s time to leave this place, the intelligence guys were wrong, over”.

“Negative captain,” Twilight replied. “The other unicorns and I still need a few more hours to recover from the spell, keep looking, over”.

“As you wish, princess, over and out”.

As soon as the brief conversation was over, Spike turned to her.

“That captain is right, Twilight,” he said. “Whoever gave us the report is bad at his job”.

“Maybe, but there’s nothing we can do about it right now, the only thing we can do is to explore this system as much as possible. Maybe they are just very good at hiding”.

Before any attempt at carefree exploration could begin, however, White Tail reported once again. This time there was uncertainty and fear in his voice.

“Ma’am, I apologize for reopening the primary communication channel so soon, but my… my group found something”.

“Enlighten us,” Spike said, annoyed by the vagueness of the captain.

“I’m sharing the feed of one camera on my ship so you can see it for yourself,” a new holographic image appeared in front of Twilight. The broken round hulls of several colonial ships were fluctuating lifeless in the cold, uncaring void; many of them had been cut in half by single shots, obviously fired by weapons larger than anything the Equestrian navy could have dreamed of, and those weapons had reduced many more colonials ships to twisted pieces of smoldering metal flying alone in the dark. “We have found the colonists, but I don’t think we’re dealing with pirates here, over”.

“No, I don’t think we are,” Twilight paled as she tried to imagine what kind of alien weaponry could do such devastating damage and what kind of monster would open fire on a civilian vessel. “Every ship, converge to White Tail’s position at once!” she ordered immediately after.

Even without being one with the ship, she could still feel her turning around as the crew followed her order immediately. The engineers who designed the Canterlot’s Pride had the aim of making a ship with superior mobility despite her size. That meant she could change her heading and course in a matter of seconds.

She could also feel something else, something that was getting closer and closer with every second that passed. The sensation, which was sending a deathly chill down her spine, had been growing since she had arrived in the system, but now it had overtaken her mind.

It was a side effect of having to guide a ship through the Endless Sea: she now had a permanent connection with that dimension and she could always feel the flow of immaterial tides around her.

As the minutes passed, White Tail’s ship became recognizable in the distance and she slowly understood what the sensation meant. There were many things, vessels, in the Endless Sea around her, and now they were about to enter the system.

She felt empty bubbles in the immaterial plane approaching her from three different directions at a frightening, thunderous speed. Whoever commanded them, it was someone with access to technology centuries, if not millennia, ahead of what anyone in Equestria could come up with.

“It’s an ambush!” she quickly warned the rest of the fleet as she realized what was about to happen.

“I can confirm it,” said White Tail, who also shared the same connection to the Endless Sea. “Something is coming our way,”.

“Every creature to their battle stations,” Twilight ordered.

Every commander repeated the order to their crew while they felt exactly what Twilight had felt before them. However, it was already too late. Before any ship could report being ready to combat, a multitude of dark, long shapes of black steel and stained glass emerged from their blue tunnels.

The unknown fleet completely dwarfed the Equestrian one, both in sheer numbers and in the size of the individual ships. Each of the flying cathedrals, even the smaller ones, could have contained at least three Equestrian ships and the gargantuan ones could have made an effortless meal out of her entire fleet.

“Spike, can you see if we’re already in range of their guns?” she asked him, wanting to know how much time she had before the battle started.

“The computers are still making speculations about it, I think should have just enough time to join White Tail, but look at the Helpful Spirit,” he pointed at a small yellow spot behind all the others, quickly being approached by a much larger one. “I’m sure she’s technically already in range of whatever guns they have; they just don’t want to shoot at her. She’s about to get boarded”.

The command bridge of the Helpful Spirit was quiet, despite the situation that was unfolding outside. It was all thanks to the leadership and the discipline of the white unicorn mare sitting on the silver chair in the center that imposed calm and order on everything around her.

Warm Breeze, captain of the Helpful Spirit, was not having a very good day. Traveling through the Endless Sea was never a fun experience, especially if she had to do it for a long time. Then she had to deal with the engine problems that caused her vessel to get left behind several times while her crew tried what it could do to fix it.

An excess of optimism had poisoned the report where she had said that her crew could fix the engines in a matter of hours. A mistake on her behalf that she intended to avoid in the future.

The lowest point of her day, however, had been the swarm of enormous and probably hostile ships sitting right in front of her view, and the slightly smaller and grey one that was approaching the Helpful Spirit.

“Ma’am, the grey ship is trying to hail us, awaiting your directive,” a changeling officer working in front of her said.

“I authorize the communication,” She spoke with the calm and collected attitude her subordinates knew her for, but she could not deny the fear that told her she should ignore the safety protocols and run away immediately. She hoped the translation spell worked on a completely alien species.

“As you wish,” the officer pressed a small yellow button.

A broad and tall bipedal creature covered head to toe by grey steel appeared in front of her. The heavenly white escaping from the lenses made him look like an angelic spirit trapped within an impressively large suit of armor.

“This is captain Warm Breeze of the Helpful Spirit,” she began. “Please identify yourself by providing your name and your rank if you belong to any military force,”. She felt stupid saying it, as the creature had a large pistol hanging from his belt.

“You speak to captain Galahad of the Star Lords, I belong to the knights of the Silver Tower,” his booming voice was powerful and deeper than anything she had ever heard in her life. “Relay my words to your lords and ladies, tell them that our banners will soon fly above their walls while theirs shall be trampled and broken as their worlds burn, tell them that the end of their kind is coming, and we are its harbingers,”

“I understand you are proceeding with a formal declaration of war, I have the authority necessary to receive it and accept it,” Warm Breeze maintained her stony expression and her stiff demeanor. “Is there anything else you wish to add to your message before hostilities begin?”

“This chivalrous formality is over, but I will deliver one final message to you, Xeno, if you really are a leader to your kind then know that your head will find its resting place in the halls of the Tower of Memories”. With that threat, so confidently uttered as if it were an honest promise, the conversation was over.

Once the giant disappeared, she heard the forceful sound of an explosion reverberating through the entire ship, and blaring red sirens warned the entire crew that a boarding party had penetrated the hull.

“This is Captain Warm Breeze of the Helpful Spirit, actively hostile personnel has gained access to our third deck and is moving rapidly toward the command bridge. We are at war,” the captain remained calm as she communicated with the rest of the fleet. “An attempt to reinforce us is tactically inadvisable, over”.

“Understood Captain Warm Breeze, good luck, over” Twilight replied.

“The sentiment is appreciated and reciprocated, princess, over and out”.

The channel was closed just as the fire of what sounded like an automated grenade launcher was becoming noticeable. The second after, the black cathedrals opened fire, the blazing trail of their shots piercing the darkness of the void as they finished their short travel by crashing against energy shields and thin iron.

The shots instantly pulverized several ships that had not raised their shields quickly enough. Their positions on the holographic map became brighter for a few seconds as the flames of their explosions enveloped them before disappearing completely as if they had never existed.

Twilight did not have time to mourn the brutal termination of hundreds of lives because she had to focus on trying to survive and not get the Pride destroyed. She had hoped Spike would help her win a battle against pirates, but he was undoubtedly just as lost as she was. No admiral ever had to deal with such a destructive force, that battle was not something anyone could solve with a magic trick or a clever maneuver.

The response of the Equestrian navy was totally ineffective as all their shots just bounced off the shields of the enemy. Even their largest weaponry, naval artillery meant to pierce any energetic barrier with a single shot, was nothing but a mild and imprecise nuisance.

The only thing she could do at that moment was trying to survive long enough to have a chance to escape through the Endless Sea.

“Everyone increase distance from the enemy, now!” The order was instinctive, like the cry of a scared prey to the rest of her herd.

The aliens were methodical, they focused their overwhelming firepower on a single ship, tore it apart, and then moved on to the next target. It was an unsurprisingly deadly and efficient tactic, claiming several ships in a matter of minutes. The absence of a nearby planet meant that the escape pods had nowhere to go to if they were used and entire crews perished with their ships.

It didn’t take long for anyone to realize that getting away from the enemy was not a realistic possibility, as the alien fleet had completely encircled the Equestrian one and was slowly directing all of them toward the center. They were like trapped animals, waiting to be slaughtered.

It didn’t take long before many of the surviving captains became desperate enough to attempt the most obvious, but dangerous, plan to escape.

“This is Captain White Tail of the Silver Star, I am taking the necessary risk to save my crew,” Twilight knew what he meant and what the risks were, he was going to access immaterial space before it was safe to do so. She couldn’t criticize him for trying to save his crew in the only realistic way out.

“Captain White Tail, are you aware of the risk you are taking?” another captain asked him, knowing full well that the unicorns were still not ready for long-range space travel and what could happen if something went wrong while traversing the Endless Sea.

“I know that remaining here means dying a pointless death,” She saw a dark and blue portal open in front of the sleek and long shape of the Silver Star “I don’t need to know anything else,”.

She disliked the idea of risking the sanity of everyone in the fleet, but she knew White Tail was right, she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. If she wanted anyone in the fleet to have a chance to live, she had to risk an unsecured voyage through the Endless Sea.

“Close the windows,” Twilight said to the officers on the command bridge, letting them know she intended to do the same thing White Tail had just done. The chance of getting out of a one-sided bloodbath had unsurprisingly improved the mood on the command bridge, and the windows were closed as soon as the officers heard the order. The room was instantly wrapped in shadows as nine yellow lights in the walls did what they could to get rid of the darkness.

“This is Twilight Sparkle addressing the entire fleet, White Tail’s action has my blessing. Follow his example immediately,” she mustered all the confidence she could despite the dire situation. Then she fused her conscience with the Canterlot’s Pride once more.

She felt the heavy shells battering her shields like hammers against a soft rock; the effort of keeping them activated was herculean and she could only continue for a few more minutes if she was lucky. She opened the portal as fast as she could, knowing she could not afford to wait a single moment now that she was the target.

The portal swallowed her like a gluttonous maw, and she found herself enveloped by darkness.