When the Sun Sets on Ceres
The clubs on Mars were bigger. But, if you wanted a good band and even better drinks, Port Ceres was the place to be. Blue Nova, the most popular nightclub in the port, was a crescent-shaped building with an elevated stage on the inner curve. And of all the locales in all the universes Sunset had explored, this was the one she kept coming back to. Her Skipper, a pocketwatch-looking device, ticked and tocked quietly in her hand with its analogue face. Twilight’s idea of a little joke.
Never forget where we are.
Sunset’s environmental suit stretched and squished her sides every time she reached for her drink. She expected to hate it, but there was a certain comfort in having its snug support and knowing her eyes wouldn’t vacate her sockets as soon as she stepped outside the Dome.
A gust of purified air from above puffed through her hair. Another benefit of nightclubs in space: the recycled air never reeked of sweat and day-old booze. Sunset let her hair hang down and brush against her shoulders as she closed her eyes and just let the music fill her skull. Blackrust. One of the only bands that bothered to perform live anymore. Then again, did it count as “live” if they were androids?
It didn’t matter. The music was to die for. She let the snares and the hi-hats beat her worries away. She let that rumbling 8-string rip and tear whatever had brought her here in the first place.
The sound of drinks placed on her table woke her from the trance. Sunset looked up at the waitress, who simply traded back a pair of tired eyes and pointed her thumb over to a table behind her. “Regards from the gentleman at table fourteen. Again.”
“Thanks a bunch, sugar,” Sunset winked.
A sixth shot of the manager’s special. Mr Fourteen got points for consistency, even if he had no creativity. The only thing that made it special was the ice they poured the liquor over. Mined from the crust of Ceres itself, massive underground glaciers formed from mineral water that had frozen solid millions of years ago. Either bitter or salty, some even claimed an occasional sweetness if you could believe them, but the appeal was in drinking a piece of time, flavours that had been locked away since the formation of the solar system.
But, nothing came for free. And in exchange for accepting the generous offer of a drink, Sunset put up with whatever dreams that man was imagining. A price that she thought she could pay, at least until he finally mustered the courage to get up from his seat.
And that’s when his weasel of a voice started squeaking. “You having a nice evening?”
“I was. But this place is getting too crowded.”
“Oh, yeah, I totally get what you mean. I’m from Io. I, uh, work on one of the silica mines there. It’s always super quiet and chill since it’s mostly bots. Well, not exactly chill. There’s a volcano near the mine, so I guess it’s pretty hot.”
“Shame, I like the cold.”
“Haha, that’s pretty ironic, coming from a fiery redhead like you. I mean, I know that’s just how you look, of course. I’m sure you’re a super chill girl and all. Or woman, a super chill woman, I mean.”
A second voice cut in from behind before Sunset could retort. “She’s really not. You should quit now before you get burned.” It was a voice she could recognize anywhere.
“What part of ‘I need space’ don’t you understand?” Sunset suddenly snapped, turning in her seat to face Twilight. “How’d you even find me, anyway?”
“Did you think I couldn’t build a second one?” Twilight held up her own Skipper, a newer version that looked like a digital watch.
“No fair,” Sunset moaned. “You always give yourself the cool stuff.”
Twilight took the seat across the table. “You were supposed to remember that the future isn’t always better. You were supposed to come back.”
“And I will. I’m just taking some time off.”
“It’s been six months. In that time you’ve jumped between dozens of different realities. Whatever you’re looking for, you haven’t found it.”
“You tracked my Skipper?”
“Did you think I couldn’t?”
Sunset folded her arms. “More like I thought you wouldn’t. You’re not my mom.”
“Right. Because she’s in the one world you won’t jump to.”
“I thought the point of exploring new worlds was to go to the worlds that are actually new.” Sunset felt a sting in her chest as Twilight’s face grew sullen with disappointment. Now that was playing dirty.
She stood up so forcefully she knocked over her emptied glasses. “Go back to college,” she told her. “You obviously don’t need me around.”
“School’s out, Sunset” Twilight reminded. “Six months ring any bells? It’s winter break, and the girls and I were hoping you’d come back to celebrate with us.”
Sunset gripped her Skipper and got up from her chair. When she was younger, she could have made anyone back off with just a stare, and she still felt like she could, if it were anyone but Twilight with her analytical eyes. She felt like she was being undressed and dissected at the same time There was no winning against her.
“Well, shit. Here I am with no gifts for Pinkie. Maybe a space rock? Nah, that’s more her sister’s ballpark.”
“So you’ll come home?”
Sunset bit her lip, trying to come up with some way to give a definitive “no,” but she knew what that would do to Twilight, and she wasn’t ready to cross that line yet. “Maybe, but I need to grab some stuff first. You know, gifts for everyone.”
“Then I’ll join you,” Twilight said. “I wanted to see what kind of tech they have here anyways.” Sunset opened her mouth to protest, but when Twilight started walking ahead, she figured that was the best deal she was going to get.
Sunset dragged her feet along the flex-glass panels covering the sidewalk. Twilight at least deserved some time for sightseeing.
Ceres wouldn’t have become the spaceport it was without the trade that travelled through the system. It had a few metals. Lithium, magnesium, trace amounts of cobalt and rubidium too. But the real attraction was its size, the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. Ships from Io, Titan, Neptune, and beyond made their stop on Ceres, offloading rare gases and minerals while picking up foodstuffs and organic components cultured on Mars and Earth.
Even with induced hibernation, biostasis, and datanet uplinks, cutting the distance in half was more than lucrative enough for investors on both sides of the Belt to pour billions of credits into Port Ceres.
“You know, if you really wanted to get me a gift,” Twilight said, “you could just point to the nearest bookstore. I’d love to get my hands on a textbook. Undergrad engineering isn’t that fun after you’ve created a portal device.”
“Books went extinct three hundred years ago in this universe,” Sunset replied. “They digitized everything to make space for server banks. Any surviving copies are collector’s items now.”
“No books? But that’s insane! Forget what I said, this place is the worst.”
“Well, you didn’t have to come,” Sunset said.
“You didn’t leave me much choice. We’re all worried.”
“Didn’t seem like it when everyone was so excited to leave for college.”
“Do you think we wanted to split up?” Twilight stepped ahead and threw her arm out, stopping Sunset. “If we could stay together forever, we would, but what do you expect us to do? Not go to college?”
“No. I never did. And I’m happy for all of you. But I can live my life too. So, maybe I don’t want to be tied down to one world anymore.”
“Or maybe you just need your friends again.”
“And maybe I don’t like waiting around for fucking texts!” Sunset pushed Twilight’s hand away and marched on.
She wondered how quickly she could lose Twilight if she started running. She definitely knew Port Ceres better. Unbelievable! The nerve she had to tell her to go back while everyone else got to pursue their own dreams.
“We tried,” Twilight said as she stretched her legs to keep up. “But it’s kind of hard to send a message when you’re skipping to a new world every other day.”
“I stayed behind for three months before I came to you. There was time then. Did I get a hello? A ‘how have you been?’ No. But now I can go literally anywhere I want in the entire multiverse. Why would I want to go back?”
They finally stopped at a docking station where a dozen tankers and light cruisers descended into orbit and landed around a circular platform suspended over a crater. Transport pods of all sizes, from personal use to cargo management, shuttled out onto conveyor belts to be sorted by android labour.
“Settling into college can get busy, Sunset,” Twilight said. “We didn’t intend to get sidetracked, it just happened. But we’re here now, and we just want you back with us. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Biting her bottom lip, Sunset slipped a credit chip from her pocket and held it out to Twilight. She just wanted to get it over with. Go shopping. Get some presents. Twilight stuck to her like ice on a shuttle wing, but she was pretty sure it wouldn’t take much to distract her, not when every shop in Port Ceres had something exotic from the outer planets. She just needed Twilight to take an interest in something, and then she’d be gone.
Yeah. She’d be gone, gone to another world. Another world where she could do anything she wanted. But then, what did she want to do? What was her next plan?
Sunset slowly retracted her arm and took the chip back. “For how long?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I go back, how long will we have? A year? The end of college? Things are going to keep changing and you’re all going to keep moving on with your lives. Seeing everyone again,” Sunset closed her eyes. She couldn’t face the words and look at Twilight at the same time. “If I see everyone, I’m scared I won’t be able to leave. And then I’ll be stuck in that world waiting for everyone to come back until one day it doesn’t happen.”
Twilight held Sunset’s cheek. “That’s not going to happen. I came all this way for you, didn’t I? If that’s not proof enough that we’ll always be together, what is?”
Hand in hand, Sunset squeezed Twilight close and faced her eyes. Up close, they didn’t look like they could dissect you anymore. They just looked warm.
“There is one thing,” Sunset said. “But we’re going to need to get those gifts first.”
Outside Port Ceres, the only sign of development were the bumps and ridges that dotted the distant horizon, towering ice drills and excavators stationed inside craters and automated to dredge up new deposits of salts and metal. There on the salt flats, the distant sun illuminated flecks of white spots across a grey canvas. Nearby, big cylinders once used for gravel silos lay on their side, perforated with holes from the occasional space debris.
Sunset looked down at her feet, watching the gravel crumble away into a bottomless gorge where the only sign of the original contents were the scrapes and cracks left behind by expanding ice. Her breath fogged up her helmet slightly, but her environmental suit systems quickly withdrew the moisture.
“Does it really pay to mine ice?” Twilight asked as she stared down the length of the gorge. “I can’t see it being worth more than lithium or aluminium.”
“It’s a novelty,” Sunset explained, “but with a hundred billion people across the solar system, the demand racks up. Sometimes they mine the ice anyways to get to the ores underneath. Like this one.”
She tossed the grav-boards they had bought and turned them on, watching the narrow titanium platforms wobble and whir as the small grav-cores, rectangular boxes on the back of each board, lifted them above the ground.
“Rainbow would like this,” Twilight ogled the device as she tried to inspect the core. “Do you know how it works?”
“They’re scaled-down versions of what’s used on starships,” Sunset said and shrugged. “Eh, I tried reading about it but got lost. Something about manipulating graviton particles, I think?”
“I’ll have to search the datanet for some textbooks about it.”
“Later. We’re losing light, and fast. Days are only nine hours here.”
Twilight hopped on the grav-board and threw her arms out for balance. It wasn’t necessary, however, as she realized a built-in gyro automatically assisted her position.
“Whoa. This is actually kind of cool. So, what are we going to do with these?”
Sunset pointed down the gorge. “The mine here got shut down when they found an asteroid with some insanely rare crystals buried beneath the surface.”
“I would have thought they’d dig them up.”
“Yeah, but Port Ceres officials want to preserve it as a site of natural wonder. Probably turn it into a tourist attraction.”
“So, why does that involve us?”
“Normal crystals wouldn’t interest anyone. These are quasicrystals, the kind that only forms occasionally from asteroid impacts. And I want to take some before this place gets closed off for good.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Well, the law just says you can't run a mining operation. I don’t think this counts. How much can I really carry in here, anyway?” Sunset pointed to the nano-weave satchel on her back, a small container barely bigger than her helmet.
“Not that I don’t enjoy helping you, Sunset, but exactly how is this going to prove that you can trust me?” Twilight peered down the seemingly bottomless gorge. “I mean, this looks kind of dangerous.”
“Only if you crash.”
“I’ve never even ridden a skateboard, let alone one of these. I don’t know, this is starting to sound like a bad idea the more I think about it.”
“Oh, come on,” Sunset groaned. “This is fun. That’s why we’re doing this. You came all this way to tell me to go back to our world but you don’t even know why I’m out here in the first place.”
“I thought you left because we didn’t keep in touch.”
“Sure, maybe that had something to do with it, but I can’t I just do something because I want to? Not everything revolves around you, Twilight.”
“I didn’t say it did,” she replied with a frown.
“Whatever,” Sunset blew her off. “This is exactly what I mean about getting my hopes up. I thought we could have a good time. But if you’re not serious about this, you can just leave, like you always do.”
“I’m not going without you, Sunset. That said, I’m not sure if I know how to do this.”
Half of her wanted to shoot off into the gorge and see if Twilight had the guts to go after her, but she couldn’t blame her for being scared. She put one hand on Twilight’s shoulder, squeezing her firmly so she could feel her through their suits.
“Lean in whatever direction you want to go and let the grav-board handle the rest.”
Sunset pressed a switch on her suit’s wrist and an LED below her helmet lit up with a blinding flash, exposing the lightless depths of the gorge. Reflecting from the very bottom, one could just barely make out the sparkle and lustre of unmined ice.
“And stay close,” she said as she pitched over the edge of the gorge. “It gets dark down there.”
Sucking in filtered air from her environmental suit, Sunset tucked her arms in as she skated through a narrow gap between two glaciers. She wished she could feel the cold rush outside her helmet, to have her hair scatter in the thin atmosphere of dust and water vapour. Her suit lit up anything fifty metres away with a clear white glow, but it still wasn’t enough to fill the cavern with light.
At her speed, it was almost like flying blind. There could be a dark expanse of nothing in one moment, and then suddenly a random twist in the gorge was throwing a wall of stone into her face. Her insides twisted and bumped around like on a rollercoaster ride, except she was in control. Sunset reached her hand out, daring to skim her fingers along the edges of surviving ice until the gorge cinched down to the mouth of a cave.
It looked as if the drills and excavators had a field day with the dwarf planet’s crust. Where the natural ice cracks stopped, a symmetrical tunnel bored clean through the rock and salts. Mining equipment, from gravel silos to cargo shuttles to handheld laser cutters, lay scattered around the frozen base. Leaving them behind must’ve been cheaper than hauling it all back to the surface.
“You doing good back there?” Sunset asked, leaning back into a halt and waiting for Twilight’s light to catch up.
“I’m managing.” She had her hand stretched out against one side of the tunnel, using it to catch herself whenever she felt like losing control.
Sunset laughed. “We’ll run out of oxygen at the rate you’re going. Trust yourself and let go.”
“I’m not the ‘letting go’ type. Plus, with all the tech in this world, shouldn’t these come with an autopilot? ”
“Some models do, but where’s the fun in that?”
The tunnel ahead narrowed to where portable laser drills had carved out twisted, branching veins.
“Woah,” Twilight said. “How the hell are we going to navigate these?”
Sunset turned and raised a brow at her. “First time I’ve ever heard you swear.”
“It seems I’m trying all sorts of new things today.” Twilight pushed herself away from the wall, wobbling a little as she leaned forward, but moving steadily otherwise. “So, now that we’re stuck, what’s the plan? Turn back around?”
“Nah, I figured this would happen. So I came prepared.” Sunset opened her pack and tossed her a handheld radar before taking one out for herself. “I also have a laser cutter for the asteroid.”
“There’s the Sunset Shimmer I know, always ready with a plan. Good to have you back.”
“One tunnel at a time, we’re not of his yet.”
Or, in other words, she wasn’t ready to go back to the way things were. Sunset magnetically attached her Ground Penetrating Radar to the nose of the board. Once secure, she hovered to one side of the forking tunnels, scanning the right as Twilight did the same on the left.
Despite the advanced tech, their GPRs were small, and there were limits to how far they scanned. Sunset and Twilight resorted to exploring the forking tunnels anyway, picking the deepest ones on either side and hoping they came close enough to the asteroid.
“I have something!” Twilight’s voice crackled over their radios after ten or so minutes.
“An asteroid?”
“There’s some stone in the way, so I’m not sure, but according to the scanner it’s something really big and really dense.”
Sunset snorted a laugh.
“Oh, grow up.” Twilight chided her, though Sunset could hear her snickering as well.
“You walked into that one. Alright, I’ll bring my board around and see what we can find.”
Sunset pulled a silvery cylinder from her pack, barely an inch in width, and placed a few pieces of crystals into the opened end of the X-ray Diffraction Analyzer. There it was, the diffraction pattern of a quasicrystal.
The slag from laser ablation was still cooling at their feet while they inspected the results. “This asteroid must’ve collided when the Ceres was still cooling,” Twilight said with awe. “That’s why there’s no crater, the crust was soft enough to close around it. And that would also make these quasicrystals billions of years old.”
Sunset sorted through the sample, testing each fragment until she found the true gem among impurities. A copper-toned red gemstone. It was small, but under her LED she could just about make out the forbidden pattern of the crystal.
“There might not be a crystal like it anywhere else in the solar system,” Twilight said. “Their composition makes their structures impossible to occur normally.”
“See why I wanted to come?”
“Okay, you got me, it’s pretty cool. What are you going to do with it?”
“Probably put it on display, maybe turn it into a necklace. The colour’s pretty.” Satisfied with her treasure, Sunset stashed the crystal and the rest of her equipment as they retreated from the asteroid, returning to the tunnel.
“So, does this mean we’re good to go?” Twilight asked as they neared the exit to the gorge.
Sunset turned around and looked back down at the tunnel, littered with old mining equipment. There were so many scattered tools and vehicles that she couldn’t help but imagine the dig site at its height, with dozens of androids and humans excavating the crust.
“People are going to come back here,” she said, more to herself than to Twilight. “All the miners who worked here, they’re going to tell their friends and their friends’ friends. Everyone on Ceres is going to know about the asteroid with quasicrystals.”
She looked in her palm, imagining the crystal. “With enough time, not even this is going to be special.”
Twilight gave Sunset a funny look. “What’s the problem?”
Sunset scowled and rode her grav-board over to a discarded mining laser, a heavy model that was easily ten times stronger than hers. “I wanted this to be our special moment,” she said, aiming the laser at the roof of the tunnel. “Something we could always remember, even if I went back home.”
She turned the laser on, ablating sheets of salt and stone from the surface. “Fuck Port Ceres. This place is going to be our memory, I don’t want anyone else stepping over it.” She cut unstable cracks into the tunnel, dropping chunks of rock over the rest of the abandoned shuttles and excavators.
“Sunset, I think you should be careful.”
“I’m fine!” She pushed the button again, pulsing deeper into the crust, building up a wall of fallen debris and scrapped mining equipment. “But I won’t let them turn this place into a so-called protected zone. What the hell would they know about national treasures? They run a damn spaceport!”
“Sunset, that’s enough!”
She felt a tug on her shoulder but ignored it, aiming down the sights of the laser as she lost herself, forgetting how inexperienced Twilight was with the grav-board. A simple lean controlled the direction. And as she shrugged Twilight’s hand away, she tugged her friend forward. Forward in front of her LED lamp. And with its white luminance, Sunset watched a pulsing laser fry open a hole in Twilight’s environmental suit.
Twilight’s scream rattled through Sunset’s radio, but she had to block it out. She had to ignore her friend’s pain to save her. Environmental suits were stretchy and pliable, and usually self-sealing if they were ever punctured or scratched. But the laser pulse melted the polymers and burned itself into Twilight’s abdomen, simply leaving not enough material for the damage to close on its own.
“I got you!” Sunset rushed to her side, ripping open her pack to find her suit repair patches. “I’m sorry! Shit! I’m so fucking sorry, Twilight. You gotta stop moving, the glue needs a second to harden to the suit.”
She braced Twilight against her, applying pressure at the wound. Sunset didn’t need to read the gauges, she could tell her air pressure was dropping fast. Tears streaked across her face as she applied a second repair patch, sealing the places where her quivering hands had wrinkled the first one.
“Can you move? Twilight?” She wanted to shake her awake, but it was too risky. Even with the hole sealed, she had no idea the extent of Twilight’s injury. She only knew she had to act fast. No doubt she was bleeding, but blood loss combined with low oxygen pressure only worsened her condition further.
Sunset laid Twilight over her grav-board, using extra repair patches to hold her arms and legs together since she had already gone limp in her suit.
“You’ll make it,” she reassured as shot them out of the gorge, riding as fast as she could over the crater mounds. “Ceres has one of the best hospitals in the system.”
“No time.” Twilight had softened into a croaking whisper in Sunset’s ear now. “Suit oxygen’s low. I have minutes left. Port’s too far.”
“Then where am I supposed to take you?”
“Home.”
“Are you serious? There’s no way they patch you up as well. What if they can’t stop the bleeding?”
Twilight shook her head weakly. “Mostly cauterized. I’ll live. But I need air.”
Sunset let her breath out slowly, clenching her fist as she chose to follow Twilight’s intuition. The portal rift wasn’t far from where they were. She got her Skipper from her suit’s pocket, ready to make the jump back to Canterlot City.
Her face dried as her suit evacuated the moisture from her tears. Not that it helped. More kept coming.
“It’s my fault,” Sunset said, her lips trembling. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. A real friend wouldn’t have asked you to prove yourself. I messed up, Twi, and you had to get hurt because of it.”
“I should have called.” Twilight gingerly held her hand. “When you asked for the Skipper, I should have known. I messed up too.”
“Shh, don’t talk too much. We’re at the rift, and we’ll get you a doctor, don’t worry.” Sunset rode the grav-board right up to the edge of the rift. The deceptive sliver of white energy, encased in a cluster of ice, rippled and warped as her Skipper started ticking, drawing on the magic seeping out of the rift.
Not a true portal by itself, the rift was still a wellspring of Equestrian magic, enough to power Twilight’s devices as it had in the past. Sunset simply needed a few minutes to configure the coordinates of the jump.
“Wait,” Twilight said, holding Sunset’s hand before she could finish up and plunge the Skipper into the rift. “One more thing.”
“What are you talking about, there’s no time!”
Twilight didn’t listen, however. Instead, she opened a pocket on her environment suit and took out her phone. The antiquated physical touch screen and limited interfaced seemed as out of place as an analogue clock.
Twilight pointed to the distant white sphere, not even larger than how the moon looked from Earth, resting on the horizon. “Nine hour days. It’s already sunset. And I want a sunset selfie. Hah, a sunset selfie with Sunset on Ceres. Say that five times fast.”
“I’d rather take the picture fast,” Sunset coughed a bittersweet laugh as she knelt beside her best friend. Twilight’s face had already turned pale, her eyes sunken and tired. Despite it all, she managed a smile.
And to Sunset’s surprise, she found herself smiling too. Of course she did. She was going home.
