Ebonheartby RaugosChaptersChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 1 PORT HAVEN, NEW EVERFREE – 15:38 Local Time [Six hours after Incident] Director Tarmac Pith lounged in his office chair as he watched the local news feed playing on his monitor. The weather team had been in just the right place and time to record one of his hundred-tonne freighters tearing through the clouds. It was a Loggerhead model, essentially a reinforced box with a cockpit poking out at the front, a pair of gyroscopic thrusters on either side, and a short tail with stabilisers at the back. Not much in the way of aerodynamics and terribly inefficient for long-distance flight in atmosphere, but decent enough for space transport and the occasional cargo drop planetside—and in this particular instance, having sufficient durability to survive an uncontrolled re-entry long enough for the pilots to slow down before ruining somepony’s day on the ground. The freighter busted through several layers of clouds in quick succession, trailing orange flames and white smoke from its engines. The camera panned down to follow its descent, and its operator yelped when the shockwave of displaced air dispersed the cloud beneath his hooves and sent him tumbling through the sky. The roar of the falling freighter then drowned out the rest of the weather team’s alarmed cries and shouts as the camera caught a quick series of bright flashes coming from its thrusters, followed by a wobbly shift in is trajectory as the pilots finally converted its freefall into a swoop to gradually bleed off speed. “This shocking footage was caught just this morning when—” The door creaked open, and Tarmac tuned out the reporter’s voice when he saw the reluctant star of the show trot into his office. “Heya, boss!” Captain Ebony Dew had a way of bringing sunshine into any space, regardless of the local weather. Part of it might have been due to her colours, having a coat as yellow as butter cake and a mane consisting of short, peachy bangs with streaks of cranberry-red running through them; which had a tendency to prevent most from noticing that she was a batpony despite her very obvious fangs, webbed wings and tufted ears. Lovely green eyes, too, with slit pupils. She also looked like she could break out a winning smile at any moment to make even a tax-collector forget about ruining somepony’s day for a change. Another part of it was probably the stuffed toy she carried around all the time, which was a batpony with more traditional shades of greys, blues and purples, all dressed up in ancient Night Guard armour. The grey uniform she wore could only do so much to moderate that kind of whimsy. She looked like somepony had brought their adorable biscuit of a filly to work, except that she was already a grown mare and one of his employees. Tarmac already felt like his office had gained a couple of degrees and a dozen lumens, despite the grey sheets of drizzling rain washing across the valley outside the window. Honestly, it was a wonder that her parents hadn’t named her Golden Blaze instead. The only part of her that remotely fit her namesake was the unusually dark keratin of her hooves. Well, those, and the dark, almost glossy scabs on her jawline, just barely hidden by the uneven growth of coat around them—but everypony knew better than to draw attention to those. “Good afternoon.” He cleared his throat and gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Ebony. I assume the docs have mandated some leave for you?” She shuffled forward a little and grinned sheepishly. “Well…” “Because if they haven’t, I will,” he said. Her gaze drifted over to his monitor as she sat down, taking a moment to shift the stuffed toy from an underwing grip to her lap where she could hug it absentmindedly, and her ears drooped as the news feed showed the freighter shearing treetops off the mountainside vegetation before it clipped a corner off an accommodations unit on its way to crash-landing in the adjacent orchard. Ebony winced. “That could’ve gone better.” “It’s just one house.” “It’s the governor’s cousin’s house.” Tarmac snorted. “That’s a bonus in my book. I keep telling Easy Breezy that it was a bad idea to build so close to the spaceport, and this might finally change his mind. At least nobody was injured.” “—sources tell us that the crash was due to a failed hijacking attempt, but authorities have neither confirmed it nor released any information on the perpetrator so far,” the reporter continued. The camera panned across the long trench Ebony’s freighter had gouged into the earth, revealing the splintered remains of uprooted and pulverised apple trees on either side, before stopping at the wreckage presently being swarmed by technicians. “We do, however, have eyewitness accounts of only one uniformed pilot and an unidentified individual emerging from the wreckage before they were escorted away by the Breezy Estate’s security. Which begs the question: was it actually a hijacking attempt, or had the pilot been taking a civilian on a joyride? This type of freighter requires two qualified pilots to operate, so the Breezy Estate may have grounds to press charges if this extreme unprofessionalism was—” Tarmac killed the news feed and groaned. “Guess it was too much to hope that they’d lay off the speculations for once…” “To be fair, we did look kind of shady when we crawled out the airlock…” said Ebony as she shifted her weight around on the chair. She then bit her lip and continued, “How much trouble are we in? Is my friend facing jail time?” Tarmac frowned and glanced at the somewhat singed stuffed toy between her legs. “Considering the fact that he assaulted both of you, that’s really going to depend on how much you’re willing to stick your neck out for him. The governor likes to think he runs this sector as tight and straight as the Core Worlds, but everypony and their grandma knows that’s not how we work in the Periphery. I’d yell at you for giving him an unauthorised free ride, but that would just make me a hypocrite...” Ebony grinned. “Aww, if it makes you feel better, I think your son’s a good pony for ferrying people around even when they can’t afford it.” “Yeah, and a big headache for Daddy when he has to hide his bleeding heart from the Board,” he growled back with a snort. “And you’re a good sweet-talker, is what you are. Don’t think I can’t see what you’re trying to do.” Her grin widened as she leaned forward in her seat. “So let me talk to him. I think we can work something out. The last thing you want is a Core rep hounding your flank when the embassy finds out we have one of their citizens in a cell, right?” “Yeah, that’s a good point.” He nodded. “The sooner he’s out of our manes, the better.” “Great. I’ll go see him!” Ebony rose out of her seat, then blinked and slowly parked her rump back down. “Oh, and about those speculations that I was flying solo and breaking the rules…” Tarmac waved a hoof dismissively. “We have the proper paperwork. No serious injuries, the payload’s mostly intact, and your ship just needs a bit of hot work to get back in flying shape. I’ll deal with the Board and the press; you’re safe, even though some people won’t understand that there were two of you flying the ship.” His gaze then drifted down to her stuffed toy. “You’ve been awfully quiet this whole time.” The stuffed batpony, which had been staring blankly at nothing with a confident, stitched-on smirk, glowed softly with a green aura and turned its head to face him. A similar glow came from underneath Ebony’s prominent forelock, and Tarmac heard the rapid clicking of keys being pressed on the text-to-speech device of the omni-tool bracer on her foreleg. A second later, the synthetic voice of a young male said, “He shot me and nearly got us all killed. I literally have nothing to add to this conversation, unless you’re changing your mind about keeping ol’ Chubby Tubby in that cell.” “Chubby… Tubby?” He cocked an eyebrow. “He looked fit enough to me.” “Eh heh... old nickname from when we were kids.” Ebony then snapped her gaze to the stuffed toy and said, “Tickles, we talked about this. Kiln’s not a bad pony. He’s just… confused and out of the loop. It was just an accident.” “Your judgment is impaired,” the synthetic voice droned. “Badly.” Tarmac tilted his head and peered at Ebony. “Captain, this friend of yours… he wouldn’t happen to be handsome, would he?” Ebony’s shade went from butter to strawberry cake in a heartbeat, from the bottom of her chin right up to the tips of her ears, and she suddenly seemed very interested in deciphering the secrets of a particular coffee stain on his table. “Umm, maybe?” Tarmac smiled. “Your first officer is being possessive, I see.” The stuffed batpony jabbed a hoof at him. “With all due respect, Director, stay out of this. I am not being possessive. I am trying to make sure she doesn’t do something we’ll all regret. She’s got goo-goo eyes for him when he’s hiding things from her, I can taste it.” Ebony leapt onto all fours and snatched Tickles up under a wing as she made for the door. Just before exiting, she gave Tarmac an apologetic smile and said, “We’ll work on resolving the situation. See you later, boss!” Tarmac listened to their muffled voices bickering as she trotted away, until he could hear them no more. Once he was alone with his thoughts, he shook his head, reached into his private cabinet and poured himself a ration of hard cider. It was going to be a long day. Chapter 2 PORT HAVEN, NEW EVERFREE – 15:41 Local Time [Six hours after Incident] Kiln Bread lay on his back, staring at the slate-grey composite plating on the ceiling of his detention cell. Not that he had a lot of experience, but as far as prisons went, this seemed like one of the nicer ones, with a clean, tidy bed on one side and a sink and toilet in the corner. The table and chairs also looked like they could pass for furniture in a budget hotel, aside from the fact that they were bolted to the floor. Though they hadn’t slapped a suppressor ring onto his horn, any magic he channelled simply dissipated like steam in a desert. Possibly anti-magic runes under the flooring, or maybe a large ingot of black Arcanite. Either way, his horn was useless. Stripped of his clothes and belongings, he could only lie down and nurse the swollen joint of his right foreleg, acutely aware of the myriad bruises he’d accumulated all over his body. Admittedly, a dislocated knee and some bruises was getting off quite lightly for a crash like that, though. He just wished that the paramedics hadn’t been so rough in resetting his joint. Once they’d patched him up, the security team had basically left him to rot in isolation, and that was hours ago. No amount of banging on the door or waving and yelling at the camera on the ceiling got a response, not even when he invoked his rights as a citizen of Equestria. He was getting hungry at this point, and he wondered if they even had lawyers in this part of the galaxy. His thoughts inevitably wandered back to his encounter with Ebony. It was uncanny how little had changed in the seventeen years since he’d last seen her, when they were growing up on Equestria… * * * “Ebby, wait up!” Kiln gasped as he plodded after her. “Weren’t you the one who wanted to race me to the top of the hill?” She even turned around and danced on the spot as she waggled her wings at him. “Look Ma, no wings and I’m still faster than you, hee-hee!” That did it. “Rawr!” he cried. Her eyes widened when he suddenly dashed forward, and she went “Eeeeee!” as she turned tail and scampered away from him like a squirrel. “Faster, Tickles, he’s catching up!” He pounced, but missed ended up eating some dirt only because he tripped on a lump of grass. Ebby still reached the top of the hill well before him, but he was secretly relieved to see that she was finally winded like a normal pony. Seriously, a scrawny filly like her shouldn’t be that much better at running than him, even if he was a bit big-boned for his age. They flopped onto their bellies, huffing and puffing away as they rolled stones down the grassy slope to the field next to Baltimare Elementary. Farther in the distance, skyscrapers rose up to the clouds, with their ships looking like busy bees going to and fro from the landing pads at the top. “You’re crazy fast. How do you keep running like that for so long?” “I have a magic heart.” “Right.” He rolled his eyes. “And I’m Princess-Commander Twilight Sparkle.” She pouted. “I’m serious!” “As serious as when you’re talking about Mister Tickles?” he said with a raised eyebrow. Ebby’s ears went flat, and she glanced off to the empty patch of grass next to her, where her imaginary friend must be. She then gasped and raised a wing in front of Kiln’s muzzle, as if she was shielding him from an invisible attack dog. “Hey, there’s no need to call him Chubby Tubby!” she said to thin air. “I… I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She turned to him. “Right?” Kiln swallowed when he looked into her amber eyes. He liked Ebby despite being a weird-looking batpony and all, but this whole thing with her imaginary friend was the one thing he didn’t like about her at all. They were going to be in middle school next year, for crying out loud! Ponies already made fun of her for having an imaginary friend at this age, and he sometimes got teased for playing along. He didn’t want to, but then she would make that unhappy face and he didn’t want her to stop being friends with him but he also didn’t want everypony else to think he was a foal and—argh, why was it so complicated being friends with her? He kept trying every now and then to see if he could push her to admit that Mister Tickles was just an imaginary friend, or that maybe she was just super into that weird ‘roleplaying’ his big brother sometimes did on special occasions, but nothing worked. Tickles was around her all the time. Their teachers had given up telling Ebby off whenever she whisper-repeated stuff to him in class because he didn’t understand something. “Kiln?” He blinked and looked away. “I… yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk as if Tickles wasn’t real.” Ebby glanced at the empty spot for a couple of seconds, then smiled and nodded. “Tickles is sorry about calling you names, too. Hoofbump him?” At least Tickles was a batpony like her. It was awkward enough pretending to play with an invisible pony, and he didn’t want to think what it would be like if Tickles was something really freaky, like blob of goo or a tentacle monster. With a sigh, Kiln reached out and jabbed his hoof at empty air. Ebby’s ears immediately perked up, and she clapped her hooves. “Yay!” “So…” Kiln wiped sweat from his brow. “You were saying something about your magic heart?” “Right!” She sat up on her haunches and rubbed her chest coat with her hooves, pushing the floof around until she parted them to reveal a long, narrow stretch of pinkish, ropy skin running from the middle of her ribs down to the top of her belly. The scar was almost as long as a ruler, and he winced when he thought about how much it must’ve hurt. “Tickles says you don’t need to be scared. It’s not painful.” “What happened?” “I was born with a congenial heart disease.” She smoothed her coat and grinned. “I don’t remember much about when I was a teeny tiny foal, but I saw the pictures. You wouldn’t believe it, but I looked grey as a ghost back then, and I was all tired and sleepy all the time. Nothing at all like I am today!” He blinked. “You’re right. I can’t believe it.” She giggled. “Anyway, the doctors said that I didn’t have long to live—maybe a year or two, I think. So my Papa decided to get me a magic heart! He got some super-smart ponies to cut out my weak heart and put in a new one, which lets me do normal things like run and fly like everypony else!” “So you’re a cyborg? You have an artificial heart?” “I dunno if it’s artificial…” She rubbed her chin with a hoof. “I’ve seen the X-rays Papa hides in his drawer—don’t tell him I snuck a look. It doesn’t look like a robot’s heart—no wires or blinky lights.” “Still, there must be something special about it if it lets you run like a cheetah…” She looked to her side, then turned back to him. “Tickles wants me to remind you that it is magic.” “Right.” He peered at her chest again and shook his head. “Wow. I wish I had a heart like that. Or maybe a spell to give me something similar. Then maybe I’d get picked for the buckball team for once…” Her ears flattened. “I’m not sure if you’d want one exactly like mine, though.” He tilted his head. “What? Why not?” “It’s, um…” Ebby looked around, then scooted closer to him, dipped her head and whispered, “I’m not sure why, but Mama’s not happy about what Papa did for me. Sometimes, when they think I’m asleep, I can hear them arguing about me. It’s like she thinks he did something wrong to me, but I dunno why, and they pretend it’s nothing whenever I ask them. And there was this one time I heard Papa yelling at the doctor on the comms…” Kiln had no idea what to say to that, so he just kept his mouth shut. His mother always told him that was better than saying something wrong or stupid about somepony else’s family. Luckily, Ebby changed the topic easily enough. “I’m hungry,” she announced. Kiln’s stomach agreed with a loud rumble. He then yelped when Ebby snapped at a passing moth. “Oh, eww!” he cried as she munched away happily. She then snorted and stuck her tongue out at him, showing off the horrible mess of moth guts mixed with drool. Cringing, he turned away with a huff and trotted over to find something normal ponies could eat. There were some daffodils growing nearby, so he brought back a bunch to share. They then lay on the backs, nibbling on tasty petals as the grass rustled all around them in the cool breeze. High in the sky, far above the clouds, they saw a large cruiser pass overhead on its way to the spaceport. “Someday, I’m gonna fly one of those,” said Ebby. “Yeah, that would be nice.” Kiln never got to see her get her attend flight school. He didn’t even get to see her graduate. In their second year of middle school, he remembered that one day she came to class all irritated and snappy, and it was the first time she’d ever yelled at Tickles. And just when it was getting awkward with everypony staring at her, she suddenly freaked out and started thrashing on the floor, covering her ears and screaming that her head was going to explode… The school nurse came and carried her out, and Kiln later heard that Ebby’s mother, Indigo Dew, had come to take her home. He didn’t know which hospital she’d gone to. She never came back to school. And not long after, he found out that all of the Dews had moved. Nopony knew where to. It was only many years later that he learnt that her whole family had separated. * * * Kiln Bread’s eyes snapped open when he heard hoofsteps outside his cell. On second thought, a lot had changed, too. Ebby’s father had left out a distressing amount of information in his briefing, though it wasn't entirely his fault. I’ve messed up, big time. He should’ve known that something was up when Marsh Dew just called out of the blue, asking to help him make contact with his wayward daughter… Chapter 3 ZECORA STATION, NEW EVERFREE HIGH ORBIT – 07:23 Local Time [Two hours before Incident] “You lost, mate?” Kiln Bread snapped his head towards the source of the gravelly voice and found himself face-to-face with a plump bipedal fish—he couldn’t recall the species’ name—dressed in the grey uniform of the Periphery Explorer’s Guild. “Umm, just a bit, yeah.” He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his mane. “I was told that I could find Miss Ebony Dew here. She’s a captain, I think? I’m not too sure about the ranks around here.” The walking fish pursed his very substantial lips and rolled his eyes. “Oi, it’s Captain Dew. We’re part of civilisation too, you know.” Kiln flattened his ears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” The fish waved him off. “No sweat. You a friend of hers? Or family?” “I… yeah, I’m a friend of hers. I’m also here on behalf of her family.” “Well, you’re in the wrong terminal.” The fish slapped a moist, webbed hand onto his shoulder and steered him around. “Down that corridor, take the third left exit, past the loading bays and take the elevator to the officer’s lounge. Move fast. She’s outbound, so you might catch her before she gets into the cockpit. Keep your distance from the loaders and don’t talk back—don’t want to lose a tail.” Kiln thanked him and hurried off. Even at a brisk trot, it still took him twenty minutes to reach his destination. Not that he was intimately familiar with the layout of non-public sections of an orbital station, but the Peripheral preference for bare metal, straight edges and harsh lighting made the whole place more alien and harder to navigate than necessary. Not a single heart or star in place, and they seemed to use an awful lot of text instead of standardised symbols, unlike, say, Harmony Station. Also, unlike the tighter security found in Equestrian stations, now that he had directions and could at least move like he had a clear purpose, nobody bothered to stop him and find out why a severely underdressed unicorn was trotting around in the freight section. The myriad creatures (including ponies) operating the trundling loaders did shout at him in an unfamiliar language, but he was sure that those were more insults or catcalls rather than queries about his lack of authorisation. The ‘officer’s lounge’ looked more like a seedy bar than a place befitting a captain, and he wrinkled his muzzle at the mixed odour of smoke, grease and overcooked food. A few heads turned as he entered, but they quickly went back to minding their businesses without a second glance. He spotted her sitting in the corner, facing away from him. Kiln would’ve recognised that whirlwind blend of yellow, peach and red colours anywhere, and if that wasn’t already a dead giveaway, the webbed wings and peppy voice would’ve removed any doubt. She was pretty much just a bigger version of the filly he remembered, with the addition of a grey flight suit bearing the Explorer’s Guild insignia. As he got nearer, he caught snippets of what sounded like a conference call on the tablet in front of her. One male voice in particular sounded oddly synthetic, but the words said gave off an air of sarcasm that was quite rare amongst virtual intelligences and assistive programmes. He paused when he felt a sudden upwelling of dread in his gut. Would she remember him? Would she even want to? Marsh Dew had advised him not to bring up family matters immediately, warning that it was a rather sore spot for Ebony. Would that also extend to any ties she had with her childhood? He swallowed and trotted closer. “Ebony Dew?” She turned her head and blinked. Stared for a second or two. Then, she gasped and whipped back around to the diamond dog on her tablet screen and said, “Sorry, I’ll call you back later. Something urgent came up.” The diamond dog muttered something in response, but Kiln failed to catch the rest of it. Ebony practically leapt out of her seat and wrapped him in a crushing hug. “Oh my gosh, Kiln!” she cried, grinning toothily as she released him. “What’re you doing here? I haven’t seen you in ages!” “Just had some business in the neighbourhood. Got wind that you work here, and decided to drop by,” he lied. Ebony’s grin flickered for a moment, and Kiln’s heart rate spiked. Had she seen right through him? Come to think of it, something about her seemed off, too. He couldn’t quite put his hoof on it, but it definitely wasn’t her change in mane style. She now kept it messy instead of tying it back like she used to in school. But before he could give it further thought, she chuckled and thumped him on the shoulder. “Aww, that’s sweet of you. We’ve got so much to catch up on!” “Yeah, we—” he paused and blinked when he spotted the stuffed batpony on the table, facing the now blank screen of her tablet. “Wait a sec. Is… is that Tickles?” Ebony’s grin widened. “You remember him!” How could I forget? So, now she had a physical avatar for her imaginary friend… Her father hadn’t been so generous. “One of many effigies for her unfortunate delusion”, were the words he’d used to describe the stuffed toys Ebony had started buying or making for herself, no matter how many her mother threw away. It was always a batpony. Guess this must be the latest model. It was unusually detailed and well-crafted. Posable, too. Most likely custom-made. Ebony opened her mouth wide, as if she was about to declare something to the whole world, then slowly shut it and glanced at her doll. She then switched her gaze to her omni-tool bracer, turned back to him and said, “Listen, I’ll be dropping some cargo down to Dragon’s Point soon. Where are you headed to?” “Umm…” He hadn’t actually planned that far ahead. “Just here for a vacation. Goldstone Bay. I heard the northern hemisphere is great this time of the year. Need to unwind from my desk job, you know?” he said, gesturing vaguely with a hoof. She nodded. “Good choice. You booked a shuttle yet? Any luggage?” “Uh, not yet.” He then reached around and patted his slim saddlebags. “I’m travelling light.” “Great! I’ll take you down to Dragon’s Point, and you can catch a train from there to Goldstone. It’ll save you a shuttle ticket, and we can catch up on the way!” “Wait, are you allowed to do that?” She bared her fangs in a predatory grin. “In this part of the galaxy, we have a saying: it’s less a question of who’s going to let us, and more a question of who’s going to stop us. Are you in?” Kiln bit his lip. He wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of breaking protocol, but if she knew what she was doing, it was probably safe enough. Also, he had no idea if he could easily get in touch with her again if they separated. If they were stuck together in a small freighter, she wouldn’t be able to storm off if she got upset when he brought up family matters as her father had instructed. The only way to get rid of him at that point would be to toss him out an airlock. She probably wouldn’t do that. Probably. He nodded. “Sure, why not?” “Awesome. Let’s go!” Ebony swiped up her tablet and stuffed it into a pocket, then grabbed her stuffed toy. It had a short canvas strap coming out from its back between the wings, with a quick release buckle at the end, which she then attached to her flight suit so that it could hang snugly tucked underneath her wing. Kiln found himself herded through another unfamiliar of the section of the terminal, past a few curious and many indifferent faces, until they reached the launch bay housing her freighter. Workers were still loading crates into its cavernous belly. To be honest, it looked a little unsightly to him. The disproportionately large and blocky fuselage dwarfed the cockpit jutting out at the front and the tail at the back, and the massive engines on either side looked like they had mismatched plating welded on. Then again, it was essentially a space truck, not racer or a pleasure yacht, and he knew better than to badmouth a ship to its captain. Apparently, they hadn’t even bothered to set up boarding stairs for it, since the pilot could fly. Ebony carried him up two storeys’ worth of height to the door. Once they were through the airlock, there was barely enough space to squeeze past a small, internal side cabin, forward until they reached the cockpit proper. There were two seats side by side, and just enough space behind them for a couple of ponies to comfortably stand. After stowing their loose belongings in the cabin, they took turns using the side cabin to put on the vacuum suits. Ebony said that it was standard procedure, and they’d only need to put on the bulky helmets if they actually got into an emergency. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m gonna need you to sit tight in the cabin while I handle the pre-flight checklist and deal with the control tower. You also need to be buckled in for the short time in zero-G after we leave the station. I’ll let you know once it’s safe to come out.” Kiln glanced wordlessly at the co-pilot’s seat. Ebony’s cheeks flushed. “Eh heh… sorry, but that’s reserved for qualified pilots during take-off and landing. Also, the control tower might hear you.” He leaned forward a little more and saw that she’d strapped her stuffed toy into the co-pilot’s seat, and the echoes of Marsh Dew’s unflattering words came back to him: “Ebony is not well, Kiln Bread. Whatever happens, please don’t encourage her fantasies. It’s been a barrier to any progress we could’ve made in the last decade or so, and now that we’ve an opportunity to get proper treatment for her, it’s all the more important that we don’t waste it. She needs help, and you’re in the best position to start her on the path to recovery.” He mentally shook his head to clear it. “All right, you’re the captain,” he said with a smile. “I promise it’ll be worth the wait. You’ll love the view! And we have about an hour to enjoy it until we reach Dragon’s Point.” He strapped himself into the cramped cabin seat and waited, listening as Ebony recited various procedures and communicated with the control tower and ground crew. The freighter rumbled to life and the lights dimmed shortly after its loading door thumped shut, and more voices entered the channel, including that synthetic male voice again, reporting various conditions and statuses. Eventually, they were cleared for launch, and he felt that familiar lurch followed by weightlessness as they left the artificial gravity field of the station. It was too bad that he didn’t have a window in the cabin; he could do little more than gauge the ship’s orientation from the shifting light through the cabin’s open door. Then, after a few minutes of zero-G, he felt gravity tugging gently once more as they descended to the planet. “Permission to leave my seat, captain?” he called out. “Permission granted!” He casually loped into the cockpit and blinked when he saw Ebony waving him over and gesturing to the vacant co-pilot’s chair. She’d perched her doll up on top of the dashboard instead, and Kiln couldn’t help feeling as if those eyes were watching them like a disapproving older brother. Still, he wasn’t going to turn down a proper chair, so he sidled into place, careful not to touch the yoke despite her assurances that doing so wouldn’t disengage the autopilot. New Everfree had some really impressive cloud patterns—great, swirling waves unbound by pegasi magic, bringing rain and sleet to the marble-blue oceans. It was still too dark to make out details on the landmasses, but he knew that they had an almost Equestrian distribution of biomes, with a nice mixture of brown and green. Very few lights marked the presence of civilisation on the surface, unlike much of the Core Worlds. The visible curve of the western horizon had a yellow glow to it, heralding the arrival of a sun without an alicorn’s guidance. “That’s quite the view,” he murmured. Ebony took off her headset and followed his gaze. “Mmm. It is, isn’t it?” “Is it what you’d always dreamed of?” “Eh?” “Flying a ship, I mean.” Her face lit up with a brilliant grin. “Oh, you have no idea. Let’s see, there was this time I nearly gave my instructor a heart attack—” She told him about her near-misses in flight school. Hauling cargo to the strangest planets on the farthest reaches of the Periphery. Accidentally catching and recovering from alien pathogens. Navigating through debris fields, meteor storms and even fleeing from space pirates. In comparison, his tales of working in administration for a food processing company seemed rather mundane. She did at least sympathise with his frustrations about the higher-ups not understanding why he couldn’t just make computers reorganise and present data exactly the way they wanted for that particular day of the week, though. And she seemed fairly interested in finding out what their old schoolmates had been up to, in the years since her disappearance. Speaking of which… Forty minutes had passed, and it was already daylight on the continent below. He wouldn’t have much time left to convince her of anything if he didn’t broach the subject soon. So, he quickly finished up his story about Bright Bloom’s marriage to that weird colt down the street, then steeled himself for the coming storm. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.” “Mm hmm? Anything you like…” Kiln turned and felt heat rising to his ears when he found Ebony propping her cheek up with one fetlock, gazing at him dreamily with a lopsided smile. His breath hitched in his throat, but he gritted his teeth and forced out the words. “I… I’ve heard a few things about what happened after you left school,” he said as he fiddled with the armrest. “I’m sorry to hear that your mom and dad separated.” “Well, yeah. That happened.” Ebony sighed and clicked her tongue. “Life is sometimes like that, I suppose.” “And, umm… your dad spoke to me recently.” Ebony’s posture stiffened. “Oh?” It was funny how a single syllable could leach so much warmth out of the air. Kiln swallowed. “He told me that you were unwell. Is that true?” She turned and looked at him with slightly narrowed eyes, as if he was some defective knickknack for sale at the market which she wasn’t willing to pay full price for. And once again, he got the feeling that something was off about her… “What exactly did my father say?” she murmured. “He told me you had cancer, and that it was caused by your heart transplant. And he said that you were refusing treatment because you had grown… attached to it?” He glanced at the stuffed batpony on the dashboard. “Does Tickles have something to do with it? I’m not sure why, but he seems to think that your… friend is one of the reasons you won’t talk to him.” Ebony’s eyes drifted over to the dashboard, incidentally giving him a clear side view of her muzzle, and the dark little scabs under her chin. How had he missed those before? They almost looked like tiny barnacles poking out of her fuzzy coat. He flared his horn, bathing her face in gentle blue light. “Those aren’t natural, are they? I don’t remember you having them.” She absentmindedly brushed at the scabs with a hoof, then rounded on him with a scowl. “Whatever he’s told you, it’s not the whole picture. I do have a condition of some kind, but my father doesn’t know for sure if it’s dangerous. He hasn’t seen the whole picture—he refuses to see the whole picture.” “Then what is the whole picture?” Kiln let his horn light fade as he recalled the old CT scans Marsh Dew had shown him, taken shortly after Ebony’s fateful migraine episode in school. He couldn’t help wincing at the memory of the ghostly images depicting unnatural bundles of tissues branching out like roots from Ebony’s heart, caressing her bones and internal organs. One branch had even snaked all the way up along her spinal cord and formed a mass in her cerebral cortex. He shuddered to think what her insides might look like at this point, after so many years without treatment. Ebony still hadn’t answered, so he decided to press on. “Look, whatever concerns you might’ve had with chemotherapy or drugs at the time, they’re probably irrelevant now. The newest treatments have cut down on all those nasty side effects, and your dad said that he’s even got you on a reserve list for a heart replacement – an artificial one that won’t come with the baggage of a previous owner.” “The ‘baggage’ is exactly the reason I don’t want a new heart,” she suddenly growled. He blinked. “You… you want the cancer?” Ebony stared at him for a long while, then slowly sucked in a breath and sighed. “My father’s probably told you that Tickles is just a figment of my imagination, right? I guess it’s time we showed you and let you decide for yourself.” She glanced at her stuffed batpony and nodded. “All yours, buddy.” Kiln peered at the inert toy. “I don’t get it. What does—gah!” The doll suddenly glowed with green light, shifted to sit down on its haunches instead of standing straight on all fours, and then waved a hoof at him. And barely a moment later, that synthetic male voice droned, “Hello, Kiln Bread. We’ve known each other since elementary school, but I never really had the chance to introduce myself until now. I’m Tickles—currently Ebby’s First Officer. Some people think I’m literally cancer, but hey, what’s a guy to do?” Kiln felt his jaw drop. “What?” The doll nodded and threw its fore hooves up in a helpless gesture. “I know, right? People can be unbelievably rude sometimes.” He blinked. “What?” The doll tilted its head, then leaned forward as if appraising him. Kiln was sure that it was now mocking him with that stitched-on smirk as the voice said, “Come on, I’m sure you’ve picked up a wider vocabulary by now. We’re not in school anymore.” Ebony sniggered. “Ticks, don’t be mean.” Kiln flicked his eyes back and forth between her and the glowing doll. “What?” Ebony folded her forelegs and huffed. “You wanted the whole picture? Well, here it is: long story short—my father probably didn’t tell you that my heart transplant was an unsanctioned experiment. It was grown from changeling stem cells—no rejection, so I never needed to take immunosuppressants, and the organ would actually grow with me and last as long as I lived. Sounds great, right?” He blinked. “Right. The thing is that we didn’t count on my heart growing a brain. That’s when I started sensing somepony sharing space in my head. Other foals were talking to imaginary friends, so hey, that’s what I thought was happening and named him Tickles!” she said with a smile, which then soured as she carried on. “But we soon realised that other foals were only pretending, and nopony believed me when I insisted that Tickles was real, least of all my parents.” He stared at her. “So, when we were in school…” “Yup! All real. Tickles was learning, too.” “But…” He looked at the doll, which gave him a cheeky salute. “How is it doing that?” “A brain wasn’t the only thing my heart grew.” She lifted her forelock with a hoof, and he gasped when he saw a curved, bony protrusion on her forehead. It was just over an inch long, with a black, glossy surface in stark contrast to her yellow coat. And it glowed with the same soft, green light as the batpony doll. “Tickles sees and hears through my eyes and ears, but he couldn’t actually control anything. Not until he got his horn some years after my parents broke up. By then, we were living with my Ma in Canterbury, but even she got tired of us and kicked us out. Anyway, the point is that Tickles finally had a way to interact with the outside world on his own!” “It was quite a relief, I can tell you.” Kiln glanced downward, swivelling his ears as he attempted to pinpoint the source of that voice, then settled his eyes on the omni-tool bracer on Ebony’s left foreleg. She obliged by raising it to give him a closer look, and he saw that it had a module with an awfully complex array of buttons and dials attached to a speaker. It looked like a heavily modified and miniaturised text-to-speech device, which was confirmed when a green aura began typing on it too rapidly for him to keep track of the individual keys being pressed. A split-second later, the voice said, “You have no idea how great it is to be able to write down exactly how she’s made a mistake in math instead of just sending her bad vibes and hoping that she’d figure it out.” “I… but you—” Ebony’s smirk mirrored the doll’s. “How’s that for the big picture, huh?” “This is… a lot to take in. I can’t even right now.” Kiln rubbed his aching temples and shook his head. When that didn’t relieve the pressure, he snorted and growled, “What the hay is going on? Why didn’t your father tell me any of this? Why didn’t you tell me anything earlier?” “Earlier, when? When we were kids, or—” “Back at the station!” he snapped. She leaned back. “Well, I didn’t want to scare you off…” Then, her eyes took on a steely glint as she frowned and continued, “I mean, you were my friend. I didn’t want to dump all of that on you when we’d just met after not seeing each other for seventeen years!” “Also, I advised her not to,” said Tickles. “I sensed that you were lying about something. And you were. Her father is the real reason you’re here, isn’t he? He put you up to this. How much is he paying you?” Kiln opened his mouth, but words didn’t come out. Marsh Dew had offered to compensate him for the trouble, but Kiln had only agreed to help because Ebony was his friend… “I knew it.” The doll gave him the wing-finger. “No. This is crazy. Just hang on a minute! I just—” He shook his head and flattened his ears, feeling the cockpit steel walls and glass windows closing in around him. “Gah, what did I just get myself into?” He heard the sound of seatbelts being unbuckled, and Ebony was suddenly right next to him, gazing into his eyes. She placed a hoof on his shoulder and whispered, “Kiln, I’m still your friend. We’re still your friends, even if Tickles is a bit cheesed-off at you right now.” Kiln blinked. Ebony’s eyes were lime-green. Like a changeling’s. The Ebony he remembered had amber eyes. Had he really been speaking to the real Marsh Dew? Had some changeling agent sent him all the way to this part of the galaxy on an elaborate ruse just to be, what? Kidnapped? Assassinated? He was nopony important. Then again, what did he know about the crazy things which happened in the Periphery? They didn’t name the planet New Everfree for no reason… His heart pounded in his chest. The Hive Fleet was generally on good terms with Equestria, but even they weren’t a monolith. He was trapped in a cockpit with one, possibly two changelings of unknown allegiance. The words simply slipped from his mouth. “Have you been a changeling all this time?” Ebony blinked, and her eyes watered up. “What?” “How do I know you aren’t just a changeling? That could explain everything I’ve seen so far. Maybe you—” “No!” Ebony slammed a hoof down onto his armrest and lunged forward, stopping only when a green aura formed on her chest. “Not you, too. I’ve heard it a thousand times before. Mama kicked me out because she got tired of others saying that I was actually an adopted changeling. She heard it so often that maybe she even started believing it—she once got drunk and accused me of being a changeling who had replaced her little filly years ago, and my new horn was proof of it! It didn’t matter how many times doctors and police couldn’t force me to turn back into a changeling when they hit me with magic, everypony kept saying that there was something wrong with me, and I or my mother must’ve been lying about something!” She then bared her fangs and snarled, “My whole life, I’ve been told that I’m lying. My own Mama and Papa think that my closest friend is a lie. He is not!” He had a pistol in his saddlebag—everypony kept one when travelling to the Periphery, because pirates—but that was stowed away in the side cabin. And he didn’t know any proper combat spells aside from stuns and barriers… They would have to do. He gulped and flared his horn with as much power as he dared. He didn’t yet know what spell to cast, but he hoped that the sheer charge on display might give them second thoughts about trying anything on him. “I’m sorry, but I need my personal space,” he said. She recoiled as if he’d struck her. “Kiln…” The doll stood up on all fours, and the corona on Ebony’s horn blazed brightly as the synthetic voice said, “Stand down, right now. Or else.” “Just wait!” she cried, snapping up a foreleg. Kiln yelped and accidentally released the full charge in his horn. Too late, he realised that she’d only used her foreleg to interpose between her horn and his face instead of decking him on the snout. The blue bolt of raw, crackling magic bounced on the ceiling and ricocheted all over the cockpit, leaving charged arcs on every surface it touched, until it finally slammed squarely into Ebony’s chest. She only managed a pained gasp before she convulsed and collapsed like a ragdoll, about the same time as alarms blared in the cockpit along with flashing red and orange lights. Sparks and smoke sputtered from the dashboard and control panels, and the freighter suddenly pitched towards the planet’s surface. Kiln floated out of his seat, weightless. The doll was floating, too. “You bucking idiot,” it said. So it is a separate entity! Kiln reflexively blasted the doll with magic and sent it bouncing around the cockpit, trailing smoke. Then, he saw Ebony’s horn flare up again, despite the fact that her eyes had completely rolled up into her head and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth. A second later, he heard a couple of beeps, followed by a klaxon-like alarm and a different artificial voice which said, “Warning. Manual venting engaged.” He heard a loud hiss as fog formed in the cockpit, blurring his vision. Everything sounded muffled and off-pitch. He gasped as the air thinned and conjured a bubble barrier around himself, but he simply didn’t have enough strength to compress the already thin air back to breathable pressure. He couldn’t find his helmet. His bubble popped as more air vented into space, leaving him panting and heaving in vain. A warm spot formed in the nether region of his vac suit. Despite all that, he retained enough consciousness to realise that the hissing had stopped. Then, he felt himself encased in a magical aura—a green one—which shoved him back into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled him in. The magic also saw fit to further restrain him with cargo netting, so tightly that he couldn’t move his limbs even if he’d had enough air to breathe. A moment later, he saw tiny flashes of green magic on the dashboard controls, and the hissing came back. The fog vanished, and sounds returned to normal. Kiln gasped like a landed fish and saw the spots in his eyes gradually fade away. A dull boom shook freighter, followed by continuous rattling which threatened to crack his clenched teeth. A flickering, orange glow danced outside the windows. Green magic grasped the pilot’s yoke and pulled, gradually reducing the freighter’s steep downward angle. But it didn’t stop the rattling or remove the orange glow. He no longer felt weightless, and the weight was going into the back of the seat rather than downwards. Off to the side, he saw Ebony’s body enshrouded in a magical aura of the same green hue as the corona on her tiny horn, awkwardly fumbling its way back into the pilot’s seat like a zombie puppet. Her eyelids fluttered groggily as the magic buckled her in and fitted on her helmet. Meanwhile, her doll had stopped bouncing around and come to a rest near Kiln’s hooves, with smoke still wafting from the singed spot on its chest. The next thing he knew, a helmet had been shoved onto his head and magically sealed with his vac suit. A soft hiss announced the arrival of clean air, and he winced when the internal comms activated with a brief burst of sharp static. “Haven Tower, this is Loggerhead Two-Three-Seven, we are declaring emergency. Engine One failure and uncontrolled re-entry. Attempting to recover.” “Roger that, Loggerhead Two-Three-Seven. We are clearing airspace below you. Pads one to nine will be available for you.” He heard a cough, followed by a groan from Ebony. “Ready… ready a pegasus team. Might… need… Kirin crew. We’re coming in hot.” From the corner of his eyes, Kiln could just make out her forelegs wrestling with the yoke. The orange glow had filled the entirety of the windows, and the whole ship roared with atmospheric friction. He opened his mouth, but only a grunt emerged. It was so hot. Everything was so heavy. He couldn’t even scream when the darkness finally swallowed him whole. Chapter 4 PORT HAVEN, NEW EVERFREE – 16:29 Local Time [Seven hours after Incident] The clip-clop of Ebony’s hooves echoed through the corridor of the detention block as she trotted to Kiln Bread’s cell, wearing only a saddlebag slung under her right wing and her omni-tool on her left foreleg. Tickles was tucked snugly under her left wing. A lone Kirin buck in dressed up to his neck in ceramic plate armour stood guard at the door, idly watching something on the screen of his magic-held tablet. She waved her free wing at him. “Hi, Long Drought!” “Here to see the core-worlder, eh?” he asked without even looking at Ebony. “Ya.” She raised her foreleg and swiped a data package from her omni-tool, sending it to his tablet. “Here’s my clearance.” Drought nodded, then finally turned to look at her. His eyes briskly scanned her nude body from hoof to ear, pausing only on her saddlebag. “What’s in there?” he asked. Using her wing, she flipped the cover up from her saddlebag and allowed him to peer at its contents. “Late lunch for me and him. Files are my medical records and an NDA for the detainee.” “Okay, you’re clear.” Ebony raised a hoof. “One more thing—can you turn off the anti-magic field? We wanna be more comfortable eating.” Drought raised an eyebrow. “You want to die fast, is it?” She snorted. “He’s my old school friend, not a hardened criminal. I’ll be fine.” “Your skin, not mine.” He tapped a few buttons on the control panel, and the red warning light above the door went out. Then, he beckoned her in as the door slid open. “Shout if anything, and I fry him.” “Ya, ya,” she said, waving him off as she trotted into the cell. Inside, she found Kiln lying belly-up on the bed, with his head turned towards the door. He blinked, then yelped when he accidentally jostled his swollen right foreleg in his hasty scramble to sit upright. Despite the assortment of bruises he’d acquired and the slight odour of a day’s missed shower, Ebony’s heart still fluttered at the sight of his well-proportioned limbs and musculature. He’d shed pretty much all of his foal fat over the years, and she wouldn’t have taken him for a desk jockey if at first glance—he probably exercised. She’d bet that his tan coat and purplish mane would be silky-smooth after a nice shower, and wouldn’t it be great if she could be there with hi— Tickles interrupted her train of thought with a sharp prick at the back of her mind. Killjoy. He was never like this in school… He poked her brain again. Fine, fine! She shook her head and gave Kiln a polite smile. “It’s probably obvious, but I think I should ask anyway—how are you feeling?” Kiln snorted. “Starving, but aside from that, surprisingly okay. What about you?” “I’m fine. No lasting damage from getting zapped.” He winced. “Sorry.” Ebony got a little itch at the back of her mind, which was Tickles’ mental equivalent of a scoff. She ignored it and began transferring the contents of her saddlebag onto the table—a few small pies wrapped in foil, two cartons of orange juice and some fresh apples. “Well, good thing you’re hungry, otherwise I won’t be able to finish these by myself!” They sat on opposite sides of the table, whilst Tickles levitated himself onto the edge perpendicular to either of them, with his back to the adjacent wall. Kiln blinked at the sight of Tickles’ magic, and after meeting her eyes for permission, he ignited his own horn to peel the foil off his pie. “No fancy spells, by the way,” said Tickles. “We’re being watched. If you try anything…” “Yeah, I get it. I’m not stupid.” “Could’ve fooled me.” Ebony scowled at Tickles. “Could you not? We’re trying to smooth things out, here.” Kiln gulped down a mouthful of pie and sighed. “I… look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to stick my muzzle where it doesn’t belong, but I was worried after all the things I heard from your dad. And I didn’t mean to freak out and accidentally stun you or scramble your ship. And—are you wearing contacts?” She tilted her head. “What?” He gestured at his eyes. “Your eyes are green. Like, changeling-green. I am absolutely sure that they used to be amber or golden…” “My eyes are—oh, crud, I’d forgotten about that.” Ebony groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, my eyes changed colour when I was around twenty—it’s one of the, uh, side effects of my condition. I had partial heterochromia for about a year before they fully switched over. Frag it, no wonder you panicked when I got all up in your face.” “Yeah. I’m sorry—” She shook her head. “No, don’t be. I… wasn’t being fair to you. You touched a sore spot for me, and I kind of forgot that it’s not your fault you were getting sketchy info from my father. I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions.” “Yeah, me too.” After pausing for a beat, Ebony turned to Tickles and gave him a pointed look. He remained stubbornly inert for several seconds, but she could already feel him squirming in a corner of her mind under her mental gaze. Eventually, he shook his stuffed head and looked at Kiln, miming a heavy sigh as he did so. “I’m also sorry for assuming the worst about you. I could sense that you were hiding things from her, but I can’t actually read your mind. I didn’t know that you were being kept in the dark and that you were honestly just trying to help.” “And I’m sorry for still thinking that you weren’t real.” “You’ve finally come around, huh?” “After what happened today? It’s probably the least crazy explanation. How’d you even do all of that stuff in the cockpit?” “Separate somatic nervous system. Knocking Ebby out doesn’t affect me, and I can remain conscious without oxygen for a long time. I've also learnt to sense my surroundings with magic when I can't rely on Ebby's senses.” “Cool.” Kiln smiled and held his hoof out to both of them. “Friends?” Ebony grinned, and the three of them bumped hooves. They then spent several minutes eating in companionable silence. For a moment, she could close her eyes and imagine that they were all back in school during recess, just spending time together without a care in the world other than homework. She couldn’t put off the inevitable, though. Kiln was working up the courage to get back to the matter of her health, judging by the way he kept giving the table a thousand-yard stare whilst he chewed. “So,” he eventually said, “are you sure that you’re going to be okay? Long term, I mean.” “I can’t say for sure.” Ebony sighed and showed him the underneath of her hoof, where she had a patch of chitinous fibres growing out of her frog. “I seem to be accumulating changeling characteristics over time. But we have no idea if that’s because I’m slowly turning into a changeling, or if a changeling is growing inside me.” “The latter is technically true already,” said Tickles. “Yeah, but we just don’t know how far it’ll go. Will I turn into a full changeling, a hybrid, or a nasty mishmash like a draconequus? Or is Tickles going to become the dominant body whilst I get to live rent-free in his brain?” Kiln winced. “None of those sound particularly good. Aren’t you guys doing anything about it? Ebony reached into her saddlebag and slid her scans over to him. “We’re monitoring it. As you can see, they’re more advanced that what my father’s shown you, but I haven’t actually suffered any negative symptoms, yet.” “But there have been medical advancements since you were last in Equestria.” Kiln brushed aside the photos and shook his head. “Surely there must be some new drugs or therapies which can do something—” “Doctor Axle is familiar with the latest med tech in the Core Worlds. Most of them would probably stop whatever’s happening to me, but Tickles didn’t react well to the samples we tried, which is expected, since they’re functioning like he’s the cancer. The full course might kill him or turn him into a vegetable. We can’t risk that.” Kiln glanced at Tickles. “And please don’t guilt-trip him into making that sacrifice for me,” she growled, a little more harshly than she’d intended. “It might not be your choice to make when the time comes,” said Tickles, radiating mixture of warm concern and cold pragmatism. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” “But…” Kiln touched her hoof and swallowed. “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen if you don’t try anything?” “Kiln, I was supposed to die before reaching two. I’m only here today because of Tickles.” “What about getting another artificial heart?” “Papa’s choice, huh?” She snorted. “Tickles can’t survive in a jar if we cut him out, and that’s if we can even get all of him out safely in once piece. He gets nutrients from all my organs, and more importantly, he’s piggybacked into my nervous system. If we put him in a jar, it’s going to be total sensory deprivation on top of having no organic body to love and be loved by. That’s a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on anypony.” He sagged in his chair. “I—I get it. But have you checked with the changelings? The Hive may know something we don’t.” “Doctor Axle is a former Hive scientist,” said Tickles. “Why else do you think we trust him so much?” “Huh. Guess you really do meet all sorts out here,” Kiln murmured. “Besides, remember what I said about my transplant being an unsanctioned experiment?” He nodded. “The doctor whom my father paid for the procedure was jailed because of some other shady stuff he did later on. But before that happened, he was working for Glimmerlife.” She gave him a thin smile. “You work for a megacorp. Tell me, what’s the likelihood of the suits claiming that Glimmerlife owns a biological miracle like Tickles because he was made using their technology and resources? What’s the likelihood of me owing them every bit I earn for the rest of eternity if they save my life?” Kiln averted his eyes. “Stars above…” “Yeah.” Ebony sighed and rubbed her temples. “That’s another reason why we’re not keen on going back. Or talking to my father.” “Out here, we’ve found people who don’t treat Ebby like she’s insane.” Tickles trotted across the table and draped a wing over her foreleg. “Heck, there are even a few people here who treat me like an actual person—one of them oversaw my exams and granted my flight license. That’s more than we could’ve hoped for anywhere else.” “We’ve found a family here,” she said. Kiln remained silent for a long moment, distracting himself with an apple. After downing the last bite, he said, “If there’s a chance of reconnecting with your mom and dad, would you do it? I think they do miss you—your dad seems to, at least. When he’s not talking about your condition. I actually have his contact info.” “I don’t know. If it were on my own terms, maybe. But not for some time yet. I… a lot of things are still raw for me.” She reached over and hugged Tickles close to her chest. “And I don’t know if Papa will ever see past his obsession with ‘fixing’ me and getting rid of Tickles. Mama might never stop blaming him for starting this in the first place.” “Can’t you just show them something like what happened on your ship today?” “If you strapped them down and forced them to shut up and stop walking over me for a minute, maybe.” Her chuckle sounded bitter as she shook her head. “To them, I’m still their little airheaded filly who can’t tell her butt from her brain. I don’t know if a functional horn is going to change that.” “I’ll help any way I can,” he murmured, “Maybe I could talk to them.” “Good luck with that.” “We appreciate it, at any rate,” Ebony added with a rueful grin. “Anyway, as for the legal matters of what happened today…” Kiln shifted uneasily in his seat. “I’m not staying in jail, am I?” “So long as you don’t mention anything to the Equestrian embassy, the Director is quite happy to let you out without pressing charges,” said Tickles as he levitated the NDA form and pen out of her saddlebag and into Kiln’s hooves. “The freighter apparently suffered an unfortunate engine failure during re-entry. Normal wear and tear.” He stared at the form for several seconds. “Just like that?” “Yep. Everything will be returned to you, and you’re even free to continue your ‘business’ here, or just take a vacation if you feel like it.” The corners of Kiln’s mouth slowly curled upwards, and Ebony felt her heart rate spike when she realised how much she wanted him to keep doing that. Tickles’ horn sputtered for a moment, and then she felt him giving off waves of mock-disgust mixed with ravenous hunger. “A vacation sounds nice. Any recommendations? Someplace where I can just relax and catch up with long-lost friends?” She giggled and traced a wing finger along his foreleg. “You know, I’ve got a couple of ideas…” Tickles looked down at his plush belly and patted it gingerly. “Great... between the two of you, I'm going to get so fat once this is all over.” Ebony shared a look with Kiln for a moment, and then they both chuckled at Tickles' expense. “Think you have enough leave to spend that much time with us?” she asked with a grin. “Well, captain...” Kiln matched her grin as he signed the NDA. “A friend once told me that it’s less a question of who’s going to let us, and more a question of who’s going to stop us.”
Chapter 1 PORT HAVEN, NEW EVERFREE – 15:38 Local Time [Six hours after Incident] Director Tarmac Pith lounged in his office chair as he watched the local news feed playing on his monitor. The weather team had been in just the right place and time to record one of his hundred-tonne freighters tearing through the clouds. It was a Loggerhead model, essentially a reinforced box with a cockpit poking out at the front, a pair of gyroscopic thrusters on either side, and a short tail with stabilisers at the back. Not much in the way of aerodynamics and terribly inefficient for long-distance flight in atmosphere, but decent enough for space transport and the occasional cargo drop planetside—and in this particular instance, having sufficient durability to survive an uncontrolled re-entry long enough for the pilots to slow down before ruining somepony’s day on the ground. The freighter busted through several layers of clouds in quick succession, trailing orange flames and white smoke from its engines. The camera panned down to follow its descent, and its operator yelped when the shockwave of displaced air dispersed the cloud beneath his hooves and sent him tumbling through the sky. The roar of the falling freighter then drowned out the rest of the weather team’s alarmed cries and shouts as the camera caught a quick series of bright flashes coming from its thrusters, followed by a wobbly shift in is trajectory as the pilots finally converted its freefall into a swoop to gradually bleed off speed. “This shocking footage was caught just this morning when—” The door creaked open, and Tarmac tuned out the reporter’s voice when he saw the reluctant star of the show trot into his office. “Heya, boss!” Captain Ebony Dew had a way of bringing sunshine into any space, regardless of the local weather. Part of it might have been due to her colours, having a coat as yellow as butter cake and a mane consisting of short, peachy bangs with streaks of cranberry-red running through them; which had a tendency to prevent most from noticing that she was a batpony despite her very obvious fangs, webbed wings and tufted ears. Lovely green eyes, too, with slit pupils. She also looked like she could break out a winning smile at any moment to make even a tax-collector forget about ruining somepony’s day for a change. Another part of it was probably the stuffed toy she carried around all the time, which was a batpony with more traditional shades of greys, blues and purples, all dressed up in ancient Night Guard armour. The grey uniform she wore could only do so much to moderate that kind of whimsy. She looked like somepony had brought their adorable biscuit of a filly to work, except that she was already a grown mare and one of his employees. Tarmac already felt like his office had gained a couple of degrees and a dozen lumens, despite the grey sheets of drizzling rain washing across the valley outside the window. Honestly, it was a wonder that her parents hadn’t named her Golden Blaze instead. The only part of her that remotely fit her namesake was the unusually dark keratin of her hooves. Well, those, and the dark, almost glossy scabs on her jawline, just barely hidden by the uneven growth of coat around them—but everypony knew better than to draw attention to those. “Good afternoon.” He cleared his throat and gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Ebony. I assume the docs have mandated some leave for you?” She shuffled forward a little and grinned sheepishly. “Well…” “Because if they haven’t, I will,” he said. Her gaze drifted over to his monitor as she sat down, taking a moment to shift the stuffed toy from an underwing grip to her lap where she could hug it absentmindedly, and her ears drooped as the news feed showed the freighter shearing treetops off the mountainside vegetation before it clipped a corner off an accommodations unit on its way to crash-landing in the adjacent orchard. Ebony winced. “That could’ve gone better.” “It’s just one house.” “It’s the governor’s cousin’s house.” Tarmac snorted. “That’s a bonus in my book. I keep telling Easy Breezy that it was a bad idea to build so close to the spaceport, and this might finally change his mind. At least nobody was injured.” “—sources tell us that the crash was due to a failed hijacking attempt, but authorities have neither confirmed it nor released any information on the perpetrator so far,” the reporter continued. The camera panned across the long trench Ebony’s freighter had gouged into the earth, revealing the splintered remains of uprooted and pulverised apple trees on either side, before stopping at the wreckage presently being swarmed by technicians. “We do, however, have eyewitness accounts of only one uniformed pilot and an unidentified individual emerging from the wreckage before they were escorted away by the Breezy Estate’s security. Which begs the question: was it actually a hijacking attempt, or had the pilot been taking a civilian on a joyride? This type of freighter requires two qualified pilots to operate, so the Breezy Estate may have grounds to press charges if this extreme unprofessionalism was—” Tarmac killed the news feed and groaned. “Guess it was too much to hope that they’d lay off the speculations for once…” “To be fair, we did look kind of shady when we crawled out the airlock…” said Ebony as she shifted her weight around on the chair. She then bit her lip and continued, “How much trouble are we in? Is my friend facing jail time?” Tarmac frowned and glanced at the somewhat singed stuffed toy between her legs. “Considering the fact that he assaulted both of you, that’s really going to depend on how much you’re willing to stick your neck out for him. The governor likes to think he runs this sector as tight and straight as the Core Worlds, but everypony and their grandma knows that’s not how we work in the Periphery. I’d yell at you for giving him an unauthorised free ride, but that would just make me a hypocrite...” Ebony grinned. “Aww, if it makes you feel better, I think your son’s a good pony for ferrying people around even when they can’t afford it.” “Yeah, and a big headache for Daddy when he has to hide his bleeding heart from the Board,” he growled back with a snort. “And you’re a good sweet-talker, is what you are. Don’t think I can’t see what you’re trying to do.” Her grin widened as she leaned forward in her seat. “So let me talk to him. I think we can work something out. The last thing you want is a Core rep hounding your flank when the embassy finds out we have one of their citizens in a cell, right?” “Yeah, that’s a good point.” He nodded. “The sooner he’s out of our manes, the better.” “Great. I’ll go see him!” Ebony rose out of her seat, then blinked and slowly parked her rump back down. “Oh, and about those speculations that I was flying solo and breaking the rules…” Tarmac waved a hoof dismissively. “We have the proper paperwork. No serious injuries, the payload’s mostly intact, and your ship just needs a bit of hot work to get back in flying shape. I’ll deal with the Board and the press; you’re safe, even though some people won’t understand that there were two of you flying the ship.” His gaze then drifted down to her stuffed toy. “You’ve been awfully quiet this whole time.” The stuffed batpony, which had been staring blankly at nothing with a confident, stitched-on smirk, glowed softly with a green aura and turned its head to face him. A similar glow came from underneath Ebony’s prominent forelock, and Tarmac heard the rapid clicking of keys being pressed on the text-to-speech device of the omni-tool bracer on her foreleg. A second later, the synthetic voice of a young male said, “He shot me and nearly got us all killed. I literally have nothing to add to this conversation, unless you’re changing your mind about keeping ol’ Chubby Tubby in that cell.” “Chubby… Tubby?” He cocked an eyebrow. “He looked fit enough to me.” “Eh heh... old nickname from when we were kids.” Ebony then snapped her gaze to the stuffed toy and said, “Tickles, we talked about this. Kiln’s not a bad pony. He’s just… confused and out of the loop. It was just an accident.” “Your judgment is impaired,” the synthetic voice droned. “Badly.” Tarmac tilted his head and peered at Ebony. “Captain, this friend of yours… he wouldn’t happen to be handsome, would he?” Ebony’s shade went from butter to strawberry cake in a heartbeat, from the bottom of her chin right up to the tips of her ears, and she suddenly seemed very interested in deciphering the secrets of a particular coffee stain on his table. “Umm, maybe?” Tarmac smiled. “Your first officer is being possessive, I see.” The stuffed batpony jabbed a hoof at him. “With all due respect, Director, stay out of this. I am not being possessive. I am trying to make sure she doesn’t do something we’ll all regret. She’s got goo-goo eyes for him when he’s hiding things from her, I can taste it.” Ebony leapt onto all fours and snatched Tickles up under a wing as she made for the door. Just before exiting, she gave Tarmac an apologetic smile and said, “We’ll work on resolving the situation. See you later, boss!” Tarmac listened to their muffled voices bickering as she trotted away, until he could hear them no more. Once he was alone with his thoughts, he shook his head, reached into his private cabinet and poured himself a ration of hard cider. It was going to be a long day.
Chapter 2 PORT HAVEN, NEW EVERFREE – 15:41 Local Time [Six hours after Incident] Kiln Bread lay on his back, staring at the slate-grey composite plating on the ceiling of his detention cell. Not that he had a lot of experience, but as far as prisons went, this seemed like one of the nicer ones, with a clean, tidy bed on one side and a sink and toilet in the corner. The table and chairs also looked like they could pass for furniture in a budget hotel, aside from the fact that they were bolted to the floor. Though they hadn’t slapped a suppressor ring onto his horn, any magic he channelled simply dissipated like steam in a desert. Possibly anti-magic runes under the flooring, or maybe a large ingot of black Arcanite. Either way, his horn was useless. Stripped of his clothes and belongings, he could only lie down and nurse the swollen joint of his right foreleg, acutely aware of the myriad bruises he’d accumulated all over his body. Admittedly, a dislocated knee and some bruises was getting off quite lightly for a crash like that, though. He just wished that the paramedics hadn’t been so rough in resetting his joint. Once they’d patched him up, the security team had basically left him to rot in isolation, and that was hours ago. No amount of banging on the door or waving and yelling at the camera on the ceiling got a response, not even when he invoked his rights as a citizen of Equestria. He was getting hungry at this point, and he wondered if they even had lawyers in this part of the galaxy. His thoughts inevitably wandered back to his encounter with Ebony. It was uncanny how little had changed in the seventeen years since he’d last seen her, when they were growing up on Equestria… * * * “Ebby, wait up!” Kiln gasped as he plodded after her. “Weren’t you the one who wanted to race me to the top of the hill?” She even turned around and danced on the spot as she waggled her wings at him. “Look Ma, no wings and I’m still faster than you, hee-hee!” That did it. “Rawr!” he cried. Her eyes widened when he suddenly dashed forward, and she went “Eeeeee!” as she turned tail and scampered away from him like a squirrel. “Faster, Tickles, he’s catching up!” He pounced, but missed ended up eating some dirt only because he tripped on a lump of grass. Ebby still reached the top of the hill well before him, but he was secretly relieved to see that she was finally winded like a normal pony. Seriously, a scrawny filly like her shouldn’t be that much better at running than him, even if he was a bit big-boned for his age. They flopped onto their bellies, huffing and puffing away as they rolled stones down the grassy slope to the field next to Baltimare Elementary. Farther in the distance, skyscrapers rose up to the clouds, with their ships looking like busy bees going to and fro from the landing pads at the top. “You’re crazy fast. How do you keep running like that for so long?” “I have a magic heart.” “Right.” He rolled his eyes. “And I’m Princess-Commander Twilight Sparkle.” She pouted. “I’m serious!” “As serious as when you’re talking about Mister Tickles?” he said with a raised eyebrow. Ebby’s ears went flat, and she glanced off to the empty patch of grass next to her, where her imaginary friend must be. She then gasped and raised a wing in front of Kiln’s muzzle, as if she was shielding him from an invisible attack dog. “Hey, there’s no need to call him Chubby Tubby!” she said to thin air. “I… I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She turned to him. “Right?” Kiln swallowed when he looked into her amber eyes. He liked Ebby despite being a weird-looking batpony and all, but this whole thing with her imaginary friend was the one thing he didn’t like about her at all. They were going to be in middle school next year, for crying out loud! Ponies already made fun of her for having an imaginary friend at this age, and he sometimes got teased for playing along. He didn’t want to, but then she would make that unhappy face and he didn’t want her to stop being friends with him but he also didn’t want everypony else to think he was a foal and—argh, why was it so complicated being friends with her? He kept trying every now and then to see if he could push her to admit that Mister Tickles was just an imaginary friend, or that maybe she was just super into that weird ‘roleplaying’ his big brother sometimes did on special occasions, but nothing worked. Tickles was around her all the time. Their teachers had given up telling Ebby off whenever she whisper-repeated stuff to him in class because he didn’t understand something. “Kiln?” He blinked and looked away. “I… yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk as if Tickles wasn’t real.” Ebby glanced at the empty spot for a couple of seconds, then smiled and nodded. “Tickles is sorry about calling you names, too. Hoofbump him?” At least Tickles was a batpony like her. It was awkward enough pretending to play with an invisible pony, and he didn’t want to think what it would be like if Tickles was something really freaky, like blob of goo or a tentacle monster. With a sigh, Kiln reached out and jabbed his hoof at empty air. Ebby’s ears immediately perked up, and she clapped her hooves. “Yay!” “So…” Kiln wiped sweat from his brow. “You were saying something about your magic heart?” “Right!” She sat up on her haunches and rubbed her chest coat with her hooves, pushing the floof around until she parted them to reveal a long, narrow stretch of pinkish, ropy skin running from the middle of her ribs down to the top of her belly. The scar was almost as long as a ruler, and he winced when he thought about how much it must’ve hurt. “Tickles says you don’t need to be scared. It’s not painful.” “What happened?” “I was born with a congenial heart disease.” She smoothed her coat and grinned. “I don’t remember much about when I was a teeny tiny foal, but I saw the pictures. You wouldn’t believe it, but I looked grey as a ghost back then, and I was all tired and sleepy all the time. Nothing at all like I am today!” He blinked. “You’re right. I can’t believe it.” She giggled. “Anyway, the doctors said that I didn’t have long to live—maybe a year or two, I think. So my Papa decided to get me a magic heart! He got some super-smart ponies to cut out my weak heart and put in a new one, which lets me do normal things like run and fly like everypony else!” “So you’re a cyborg? You have an artificial heart?” “I dunno if it’s artificial…” She rubbed her chin with a hoof. “I’ve seen the X-rays Papa hides in his drawer—don’t tell him I snuck a look. It doesn’t look like a robot’s heart—no wires or blinky lights.” “Still, there must be something special about it if it lets you run like a cheetah…” She looked to her side, then turned back to him. “Tickles wants me to remind you that it is magic.” “Right.” He peered at her chest again and shook his head. “Wow. I wish I had a heart like that. Or maybe a spell to give me something similar. Then maybe I’d get picked for the buckball team for once…” Her ears flattened. “I’m not sure if you’d want one exactly like mine, though.” He tilted his head. “What? Why not?” “It’s, um…” Ebby looked around, then scooted closer to him, dipped her head and whispered, “I’m not sure why, but Mama’s not happy about what Papa did for me. Sometimes, when they think I’m asleep, I can hear them arguing about me. It’s like she thinks he did something wrong to me, but I dunno why, and they pretend it’s nothing whenever I ask them. And there was this one time I heard Papa yelling at the doctor on the comms…” Kiln had no idea what to say to that, so he just kept his mouth shut. His mother always told him that was better than saying something wrong or stupid about somepony else’s family. Luckily, Ebby changed the topic easily enough. “I’m hungry,” she announced. Kiln’s stomach agreed with a loud rumble. He then yelped when Ebby snapped at a passing moth. “Oh, eww!” he cried as she munched away happily. She then snorted and stuck her tongue out at him, showing off the horrible mess of moth guts mixed with drool. Cringing, he turned away with a huff and trotted over to find something normal ponies could eat. There were some daffodils growing nearby, so he brought back a bunch to share. They then lay on the backs, nibbling on tasty petals as the grass rustled all around them in the cool breeze. High in the sky, far above the clouds, they saw a large cruiser pass overhead on its way to the spaceport. “Someday, I’m gonna fly one of those,” said Ebby. “Yeah, that would be nice.” Kiln never got to see her get her attend flight school. He didn’t even get to see her graduate. In their second year of middle school, he remembered that one day she came to class all irritated and snappy, and it was the first time she’d ever yelled at Tickles. And just when it was getting awkward with everypony staring at her, she suddenly freaked out and started thrashing on the floor, covering her ears and screaming that her head was going to explode… The school nurse came and carried her out, and Kiln later heard that Ebby’s mother, Indigo Dew, had come to take her home. He didn’t know which hospital she’d gone to. She never came back to school. And not long after, he found out that all of the Dews had moved. Nopony knew where to. It was only many years later that he learnt that her whole family had separated. * * * Kiln Bread’s eyes snapped open when he heard hoofsteps outside his cell. On second thought, a lot had changed, too. Ebby’s father had left out a distressing amount of information in his briefing, though it wasn't entirely his fault. I’ve messed up, big time. He should’ve known that something was up when Marsh Dew just called out of the blue, asking to help him make contact with his wayward daughter…
Chapter 3 ZECORA STATION, NEW EVERFREE HIGH ORBIT – 07:23 Local Time [Two hours before Incident] “You lost, mate?” Kiln Bread snapped his head towards the source of the gravelly voice and found himself face-to-face with a plump bipedal fish—he couldn’t recall the species’ name—dressed in the grey uniform of the Periphery Explorer’s Guild. “Umm, just a bit, yeah.” He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his mane. “I was told that I could find Miss Ebony Dew here. She’s a captain, I think? I’m not too sure about the ranks around here.” The walking fish pursed his very substantial lips and rolled his eyes. “Oi, it’s Captain Dew. We’re part of civilisation too, you know.” Kiln flattened his ears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” The fish waved him off. “No sweat. You a friend of hers? Or family?” “I… yeah, I’m a friend of hers. I’m also here on behalf of her family.” “Well, you’re in the wrong terminal.” The fish slapped a moist, webbed hand onto his shoulder and steered him around. “Down that corridor, take the third left exit, past the loading bays and take the elevator to the officer’s lounge. Move fast. She’s outbound, so you might catch her before she gets into the cockpit. Keep your distance from the loaders and don’t talk back—don’t want to lose a tail.” Kiln thanked him and hurried off. Even at a brisk trot, it still took him twenty minutes to reach his destination. Not that he was intimately familiar with the layout of non-public sections of an orbital station, but the Peripheral preference for bare metal, straight edges and harsh lighting made the whole place more alien and harder to navigate than necessary. Not a single heart or star in place, and they seemed to use an awful lot of text instead of standardised symbols, unlike, say, Harmony Station. Also, unlike the tighter security found in Equestrian stations, now that he had directions and could at least move like he had a clear purpose, nobody bothered to stop him and find out why a severely underdressed unicorn was trotting around in the freight section. The myriad creatures (including ponies) operating the trundling loaders did shout at him in an unfamiliar language, but he was sure that those were more insults or catcalls rather than queries about his lack of authorisation. The ‘officer’s lounge’ looked more like a seedy bar than a place befitting a captain, and he wrinkled his muzzle at the mixed odour of smoke, grease and overcooked food. A few heads turned as he entered, but they quickly went back to minding their businesses without a second glance. He spotted her sitting in the corner, facing away from him. Kiln would’ve recognised that whirlwind blend of yellow, peach and red colours anywhere, and if that wasn’t already a dead giveaway, the webbed wings and peppy voice would’ve removed any doubt. She was pretty much just a bigger version of the filly he remembered, with the addition of a grey flight suit bearing the Explorer’s Guild insignia. As he got nearer, he caught snippets of what sounded like a conference call on the tablet in front of her. One male voice in particular sounded oddly synthetic, but the words said gave off an air of sarcasm that was quite rare amongst virtual intelligences and assistive programmes. He paused when he felt a sudden upwelling of dread in his gut. Would she remember him? Would she even want to? Marsh Dew had advised him not to bring up family matters immediately, warning that it was a rather sore spot for Ebony. Would that also extend to any ties she had with her childhood? He swallowed and trotted closer. “Ebony Dew?” She turned her head and blinked. Stared for a second or two. Then, she gasped and whipped back around to the diamond dog on her tablet screen and said, “Sorry, I’ll call you back later. Something urgent came up.” The diamond dog muttered something in response, but Kiln failed to catch the rest of it. Ebony practically leapt out of her seat and wrapped him in a crushing hug. “Oh my gosh, Kiln!” she cried, grinning toothily as she released him. “What’re you doing here? I haven’t seen you in ages!” “Just had some business in the neighbourhood. Got wind that you work here, and decided to drop by,” he lied. Ebony’s grin flickered for a moment, and Kiln’s heart rate spiked. Had she seen right through him? Come to think of it, something about her seemed off, too. He couldn’t quite put his hoof on it, but it definitely wasn’t her change in mane style. She now kept it messy instead of tying it back like she used to in school. But before he could give it further thought, she chuckled and thumped him on the shoulder. “Aww, that’s sweet of you. We’ve got so much to catch up on!” “Yeah, we—” he paused and blinked when he spotted the stuffed batpony on the table, facing the now blank screen of her tablet. “Wait a sec. Is… is that Tickles?” Ebony’s grin widened. “You remember him!” How could I forget? So, now she had a physical avatar for her imaginary friend… Her father hadn’t been so generous. “One of many effigies for her unfortunate delusion”, were the words he’d used to describe the stuffed toys Ebony had started buying or making for herself, no matter how many her mother threw away. It was always a batpony. Guess this must be the latest model. It was unusually detailed and well-crafted. Posable, too. Most likely custom-made. Ebony opened her mouth wide, as if she was about to declare something to the whole world, then slowly shut it and glanced at her doll. She then switched her gaze to her omni-tool bracer, turned back to him and said, “Listen, I’ll be dropping some cargo down to Dragon’s Point soon. Where are you headed to?” “Umm…” He hadn’t actually planned that far ahead. “Just here for a vacation. Goldstone Bay. I heard the northern hemisphere is great this time of the year. Need to unwind from my desk job, you know?” he said, gesturing vaguely with a hoof. She nodded. “Good choice. You booked a shuttle yet? Any luggage?” “Uh, not yet.” He then reached around and patted his slim saddlebags. “I’m travelling light.” “Great! I’ll take you down to Dragon’s Point, and you can catch a train from there to Goldstone. It’ll save you a shuttle ticket, and we can catch up on the way!” “Wait, are you allowed to do that?” She bared her fangs in a predatory grin. “In this part of the galaxy, we have a saying: it’s less a question of who’s going to let us, and more a question of who’s going to stop us. Are you in?” Kiln bit his lip. He wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of breaking protocol, but if she knew what she was doing, it was probably safe enough. Also, he had no idea if he could easily get in touch with her again if they separated. If they were stuck together in a small freighter, she wouldn’t be able to storm off if she got upset when he brought up family matters as her father had instructed. The only way to get rid of him at that point would be to toss him out an airlock. She probably wouldn’t do that. Probably. He nodded. “Sure, why not?” “Awesome. Let’s go!” Ebony swiped up her tablet and stuffed it into a pocket, then grabbed her stuffed toy. It had a short canvas strap coming out from its back between the wings, with a quick release buckle at the end, which she then attached to her flight suit so that it could hang snugly tucked underneath her wing. Kiln found himself herded through another unfamiliar of the section of the terminal, past a few curious and many indifferent faces, until they reached the launch bay housing her freighter. Workers were still loading crates into its cavernous belly. To be honest, it looked a little unsightly to him. The disproportionately large and blocky fuselage dwarfed the cockpit jutting out at the front and the tail at the back, and the massive engines on either side looked like they had mismatched plating welded on. Then again, it was essentially a space truck, not racer or a pleasure yacht, and he knew better than to badmouth a ship to its captain. Apparently, they hadn’t even bothered to set up boarding stairs for it, since the pilot could fly. Ebony carried him up two storeys’ worth of height to the door. Once they were through the airlock, there was barely enough space to squeeze past a small, internal side cabin, forward until they reached the cockpit proper. There were two seats side by side, and just enough space behind them for a couple of ponies to comfortably stand. After stowing their loose belongings in the cabin, they took turns using the side cabin to put on the vacuum suits. Ebony said that it was standard procedure, and they’d only need to put on the bulky helmets if they actually got into an emergency. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m gonna need you to sit tight in the cabin while I handle the pre-flight checklist and deal with the control tower. You also need to be buckled in for the short time in zero-G after we leave the station. I’ll let you know once it’s safe to come out.” Kiln glanced wordlessly at the co-pilot’s seat. Ebony’s cheeks flushed. “Eh heh… sorry, but that’s reserved for qualified pilots during take-off and landing. Also, the control tower might hear you.” He leaned forward a little more and saw that she’d strapped her stuffed toy into the co-pilot’s seat, and the echoes of Marsh Dew’s unflattering words came back to him: “Ebony is not well, Kiln Bread. Whatever happens, please don’t encourage her fantasies. It’s been a barrier to any progress we could’ve made in the last decade or so, and now that we’ve an opportunity to get proper treatment for her, it’s all the more important that we don’t waste it. She needs help, and you’re in the best position to start her on the path to recovery.” He mentally shook his head to clear it. “All right, you’re the captain,” he said with a smile. “I promise it’ll be worth the wait. You’ll love the view! And we have about an hour to enjoy it until we reach Dragon’s Point.” He strapped himself into the cramped cabin seat and waited, listening as Ebony recited various procedures and communicated with the control tower and ground crew. The freighter rumbled to life and the lights dimmed shortly after its loading door thumped shut, and more voices entered the channel, including that synthetic male voice again, reporting various conditions and statuses. Eventually, they were cleared for launch, and he felt that familiar lurch followed by weightlessness as they left the artificial gravity field of the station. It was too bad that he didn’t have a window in the cabin; he could do little more than gauge the ship’s orientation from the shifting light through the cabin’s open door. Then, after a few minutes of zero-G, he felt gravity tugging gently once more as they descended to the planet. “Permission to leave my seat, captain?” he called out. “Permission granted!” He casually loped into the cockpit and blinked when he saw Ebony waving him over and gesturing to the vacant co-pilot’s chair. She’d perched her doll up on top of the dashboard instead, and Kiln couldn’t help feeling as if those eyes were watching them like a disapproving older brother. Still, he wasn’t going to turn down a proper chair, so he sidled into place, careful not to touch the yoke despite her assurances that doing so wouldn’t disengage the autopilot. New Everfree had some really impressive cloud patterns—great, swirling waves unbound by pegasi magic, bringing rain and sleet to the marble-blue oceans. It was still too dark to make out details on the landmasses, but he knew that they had an almost Equestrian distribution of biomes, with a nice mixture of brown and green. Very few lights marked the presence of civilisation on the surface, unlike much of the Core Worlds. The visible curve of the western horizon had a yellow glow to it, heralding the arrival of a sun without an alicorn’s guidance. “That’s quite the view,” he murmured. Ebony took off her headset and followed his gaze. “Mmm. It is, isn’t it?” “Is it what you’d always dreamed of?” “Eh?” “Flying a ship, I mean.” Her face lit up with a brilliant grin. “Oh, you have no idea. Let’s see, there was this time I nearly gave my instructor a heart attack—” She told him about her near-misses in flight school. Hauling cargo to the strangest planets on the farthest reaches of the Periphery. Accidentally catching and recovering from alien pathogens. Navigating through debris fields, meteor storms and even fleeing from space pirates. In comparison, his tales of working in administration for a food processing company seemed rather mundane. She did at least sympathise with his frustrations about the higher-ups not understanding why he couldn’t just make computers reorganise and present data exactly the way they wanted for that particular day of the week, though. And she seemed fairly interested in finding out what their old schoolmates had been up to, in the years since her disappearance. Speaking of which… Forty minutes had passed, and it was already daylight on the continent below. He wouldn’t have much time left to convince her of anything if he didn’t broach the subject soon. So, he quickly finished up his story about Bright Bloom’s marriage to that weird colt down the street, then steeled himself for the coming storm. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.” “Mm hmm? Anything you like…” Kiln turned and felt heat rising to his ears when he found Ebony propping her cheek up with one fetlock, gazing at him dreamily with a lopsided smile. His breath hitched in his throat, but he gritted his teeth and forced out the words. “I… I’ve heard a few things about what happened after you left school,” he said as he fiddled with the armrest. “I’m sorry to hear that your mom and dad separated.” “Well, yeah. That happened.” Ebony sighed and clicked her tongue. “Life is sometimes like that, I suppose.” “And, umm… your dad spoke to me recently.” Ebony’s posture stiffened. “Oh?” It was funny how a single syllable could leach so much warmth out of the air. Kiln swallowed. “He told me that you were unwell. Is that true?” She turned and looked at him with slightly narrowed eyes, as if he was some defective knickknack for sale at the market which she wasn’t willing to pay full price for. And once again, he got the feeling that something was off about her… “What exactly did my father say?” she murmured. “He told me you had cancer, and that it was caused by your heart transplant. And he said that you were refusing treatment because you had grown… attached to it?” He glanced at the stuffed batpony on the dashboard. “Does Tickles have something to do with it? I’m not sure why, but he seems to think that your… friend is one of the reasons you won’t talk to him.” Ebony’s eyes drifted over to the dashboard, incidentally giving him a clear side view of her muzzle, and the dark little scabs under her chin. How had he missed those before? They almost looked like tiny barnacles poking out of her fuzzy coat. He flared his horn, bathing her face in gentle blue light. “Those aren’t natural, are they? I don’t remember you having them.” She absentmindedly brushed at the scabs with a hoof, then rounded on him with a scowl. “Whatever he’s told you, it’s not the whole picture. I do have a condition of some kind, but my father doesn’t know for sure if it’s dangerous. He hasn’t seen the whole picture—he refuses to see the whole picture.” “Then what is the whole picture?” Kiln let his horn light fade as he recalled the old CT scans Marsh Dew had shown him, taken shortly after Ebony’s fateful migraine episode in school. He couldn’t help wincing at the memory of the ghostly images depicting unnatural bundles of tissues branching out like roots from Ebony’s heart, caressing her bones and internal organs. One branch had even snaked all the way up along her spinal cord and formed a mass in her cerebral cortex. He shuddered to think what her insides might look like at this point, after so many years without treatment. Ebony still hadn’t answered, so he decided to press on. “Look, whatever concerns you might’ve had with chemotherapy or drugs at the time, they’re probably irrelevant now. The newest treatments have cut down on all those nasty side effects, and your dad said that he’s even got you on a reserve list for a heart replacement – an artificial one that won’t come with the baggage of a previous owner.” “The ‘baggage’ is exactly the reason I don’t want a new heart,” she suddenly growled. He blinked. “You… you want the cancer?” Ebony stared at him for a long while, then slowly sucked in a breath and sighed. “My father’s probably told you that Tickles is just a figment of my imagination, right? I guess it’s time we showed you and let you decide for yourself.” She glanced at her stuffed batpony and nodded. “All yours, buddy.” Kiln peered at the inert toy. “I don’t get it. What does—gah!” The doll suddenly glowed with green light, shifted to sit down on its haunches instead of standing straight on all fours, and then waved a hoof at him. And barely a moment later, that synthetic male voice droned, “Hello, Kiln Bread. We’ve known each other since elementary school, but I never really had the chance to introduce myself until now. I’m Tickles—currently Ebby’s First Officer. Some people think I’m literally cancer, but hey, what’s a guy to do?” Kiln felt his jaw drop. “What?” The doll nodded and threw its fore hooves up in a helpless gesture. “I know, right? People can be unbelievably rude sometimes.” He blinked. “What?” The doll tilted its head, then leaned forward as if appraising him. Kiln was sure that it was now mocking him with that stitched-on smirk as the voice said, “Come on, I’m sure you’ve picked up a wider vocabulary by now. We’re not in school anymore.” Ebony sniggered. “Ticks, don’t be mean.” Kiln flicked his eyes back and forth between her and the glowing doll. “What?” Ebony folded her forelegs and huffed. “You wanted the whole picture? Well, here it is: long story short—my father probably didn’t tell you that my heart transplant was an unsanctioned experiment. It was grown from changeling stem cells—no rejection, so I never needed to take immunosuppressants, and the organ would actually grow with me and last as long as I lived. Sounds great, right?” He blinked. “Right. The thing is that we didn’t count on my heart growing a brain. That’s when I started sensing somepony sharing space in my head. Other foals were talking to imaginary friends, so hey, that’s what I thought was happening and named him Tickles!” she said with a smile, which then soured as she carried on. “But we soon realised that other foals were only pretending, and nopony believed me when I insisted that Tickles was real, least of all my parents.” He stared at her. “So, when we were in school…” “Yup! All real. Tickles was learning, too.” “But…” He looked at the doll, which gave him a cheeky salute. “How is it doing that?” “A brain wasn’t the only thing my heart grew.” She lifted her forelock with a hoof, and he gasped when he saw a curved, bony protrusion on her forehead. It was just over an inch long, with a black, glossy surface in stark contrast to her yellow coat. And it glowed with the same soft, green light as the batpony doll. “Tickles sees and hears through my eyes and ears, but he couldn’t actually control anything. Not until he got his horn some years after my parents broke up. By then, we were living with my Ma in Canterbury, but even she got tired of us and kicked us out. Anyway, the point is that Tickles finally had a way to interact with the outside world on his own!” “It was quite a relief, I can tell you.” Kiln glanced downward, swivelling his ears as he attempted to pinpoint the source of that voice, then settled his eyes on the omni-tool bracer on Ebony’s left foreleg. She obliged by raising it to give him a closer look, and he saw that it had a module with an awfully complex array of buttons and dials attached to a speaker. It looked like a heavily modified and miniaturised text-to-speech device, which was confirmed when a green aura began typing on it too rapidly for him to keep track of the individual keys being pressed. A split-second later, the voice said, “You have no idea how great it is to be able to write down exactly how she’s made a mistake in math instead of just sending her bad vibes and hoping that she’d figure it out.” “I… but you—” Ebony’s smirk mirrored the doll’s. “How’s that for the big picture, huh?” “This is… a lot to take in. I can’t even right now.” Kiln rubbed his aching temples and shook his head. When that didn’t relieve the pressure, he snorted and growled, “What the hay is going on? Why didn’t your father tell me any of this? Why didn’t you tell me anything earlier?” “Earlier, when? When we were kids, or—” “Back at the station!” he snapped. She leaned back. “Well, I didn’t want to scare you off…” Then, her eyes took on a steely glint as she frowned and continued, “I mean, you were my friend. I didn’t want to dump all of that on you when we’d just met after not seeing each other for seventeen years!” “Also, I advised her not to,” said Tickles. “I sensed that you were lying about something. And you were. Her father is the real reason you’re here, isn’t he? He put you up to this. How much is he paying you?” Kiln opened his mouth, but words didn’t come out. Marsh Dew had offered to compensate him for the trouble, but Kiln had only agreed to help because Ebony was his friend… “I knew it.” The doll gave him the wing-finger. “No. This is crazy. Just hang on a minute! I just—” He shook his head and flattened his ears, feeling the cockpit steel walls and glass windows closing in around him. “Gah, what did I just get myself into?” He heard the sound of seatbelts being unbuckled, and Ebony was suddenly right next to him, gazing into his eyes. She placed a hoof on his shoulder and whispered, “Kiln, I’m still your friend. We’re still your friends, even if Tickles is a bit cheesed-off at you right now.” Kiln blinked. Ebony’s eyes were lime-green. Like a changeling’s. The Ebony he remembered had amber eyes. Had he really been speaking to the real Marsh Dew? Had some changeling agent sent him all the way to this part of the galaxy on an elaborate ruse just to be, what? Kidnapped? Assassinated? He was nopony important. Then again, what did he know about the crazy things which happened in the Periphery? They didn’t name the planet New Everfree for no reason… His heart pounded in his chest. The Hive Fleet was generally on good terms with Equestria, but even they weren’t a monolith. He was trapped in a cockpit with one, possibly two changelings of unknown allegiance. The words simply slipped from his mouth. “Have you been a changeling all this time?” Ebony blinked, and her eyes watered up. “What?” “How do I know you aren’t just a changeling? That could explain everything I’ve seen so far. Maybe you—” “No!” Ebony slammed a hoof down onto his armrest and lunged forward, stopping only when a green aura formed on her chest. “Not you, too. I’ve heard it a thousand times before. Mama kicked me out because she got tired of others saying that I was actually an adopted changeling. She heard it so often that maybe she even started believing it—she once got drunk and accused me of being a changeling who had replaced her little filly years ago, and my new horn was proof of it! It didn’t matter how many times doctors and police couldn’t force me to turn back into a changeling when they hit me with magic, everypony kept saying that there was something wrong with me, and I or my mother must’ve been lying about something!” She then bared her fangs and snarled, “My whole life, I’ve been told that I’m lying. My own Mama and Papa think that my closest friend is a lie. He is not!” He had a pistol in his saddlebag—everypony kept one when travelling to the Periphery, because pirates—but that was stowed away in the side cabin. And he didn’t know any proper combat spells aside from stuns and barriers… They would have to do. He gulped and flared his horn with as much power as he dared. He didn’t yet know what spell to cast, but he hoped that the sheer charge on display might give them second thoughts about trying anything on him. “I’m sorry, but I need my personal space,” he said. She recoiled as if he’d struck her. “Kiln…” The doll stood up on all fours, and the corona on Ebony’s horn blazed brightly as the synthetic voice said, “Stand down, right now. Or else.” “Just wait!” she cried, snapping up a foreleg. Kiln yelped and accidentally released the full charge in his horn. Too late, he realised that she’d only used her foreleg to interpose between her horn and his face instead of decking him on the snout. The blue bolt of raw, crackling magic bounced on the ceiling and ricocheted all over the cockpit, leaving charged arcs on every surface it touched, until it finally slammed squarely into Ebony’s chest. She only managed a pained gasp before she convulsed and collapsed like a ragdoll, about the same time as alarms blared in the cockpit along with flashing red and orange lights. Sparks and smoke sputtered from the dashboard and control panels, and the freighter suddenly pitched towards the planet’s surface. Kiln floated out of his seat, weightless. The doll was floating, too. “You bucking idiot,” it said. So it is a separate entity! Kiln reflexively blasted the doll with magic and sent it bouncing around the cockpit, trailing smoke. Then, he saw Ebony’s horn flare up again, despite the fact that her eyes had completely rolled up into her head and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth. A second later, he heard a couple of beeps, followed by a klaxon-like alarm and a different artificial voice which said, “Warning. Manual venting engaged.” He heard a loud hiss as fog formed in the cockpit, blurring his vision. Everything sounded muffled and off-pitch. He gasped as the air thinned and conjured a bubble barrier around himself, but he simply didn’t have enough strength to compress the already thin air back to breathable pressure. He couldn’t find his helmet. His bubble popped as more air vented into space, leaving him panting and heaving in vain. A warm spot formed in the nether region of his vac suit. Despite all that, he retained enough consciousness to realise that the hissing had stopped. Then, he felt himself encased in a magical aura—a green one—which shoved him back into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled him in. The magic also saw fit to further restrain him with cargo netting, so tightly that he couldn’t move his limbs even if he’d had enough air to breathe. A moment later, he saw tiny flashes of green magic on the dashboard controls, and the hissing came back. The fog vanished, and sounds returned to normal. Kiln gasped like a landed fish and saw the spots in his eyes gradually fade away. A dull boom shook freighter, followed by continuous rattling which threatened to crack his clenched teeth. A flickering, orange glow danced outside the windows. Green magic grasped the pilot’s yoke and pulled, gradually reducing the freighter’s steep downward angle. But it didn’t stop the rattling or remove the orange glow. He no longer felt weightless, and the weight was going into the back of the seat rather than downwards. Off to the side, he saw Ebony’s body enshrouded in a magical aura of the same green hue as the corona on her tiny horn, awkwardly fumbling its way back into the pilot’s seat like a zombie puppet. Her eyelids fluttered groggily as the magic buckled her in and fitted on her helmet. Meanwhile, her doll had stopped bouncing around and come to a rest near Kiln’s hooves, with smoke still wafting from the singed spot on its chest. The next thing he knew, a helmet had been shoved onto his head and magically sealed with his vac suit. A soft hiss announced the arrival of clean air, and he winced when the internal comms activated with a brief burst of sharp static. “Haven Tower, this is Loggerhead Two-Three-Seven, we are declaring emergency. Engine One failure and uncontrolled re-entry. Attempting to recover.” “Roger that, Loggerhead Two-Three-Seven. We are clearing airspace below you. Pads one to nine will be available for you.” He heard a cough, followed by a groan from Ebony. “Ready… ready a pegasus team. Might… need… Kirin crew. We’re coming in hot.” From the corner of his eyes, Kiln could just make out her forelegs wrestling with the yoke. The orange glow had filled the entirety of the windows, and the whole ship roared with atmospheric friction. He opened his mouth, but only a grunt emerged. It was so hot. Everything was so heavy. He couldn’t even scream when the darkness finally swallowed him whole.
Chapter 4 PORT HAVEN, NEW EVERFREE – 16:29 Local Time [Seven hours after Incident] The clip-clop of Ebony’s hooves echoed through the corridor of the detention block as she trotted to Kiln Bread’s cell, wearing only a saddlebag slung under her right wing and her omni-tool on her left foreleg. Tickles was tucked snugly under her left wing. A lone Kirin buck in dressed up to his neck in ceramic plate armour stood guard at the door, idly watching something on the screen of his magic-held tablet. She waved her free wing at him. “Hi, Long Drought!” “Here to see the core-worlder, eh?” he asked without even looking at Ebony. “Ya.” She raised her foreleg and swiped a data package from her omni-tool, sending it to his tablet. “Here’s my clearance.” Drought nodded, then finally turned to look at her. His eyes briskly scanned her nude body from hoof to ear, pausing only on her saddlebag. “What’s in there?” he asked. Using her wing, she flipped the cover up from her saddlebag and allowed him to peer at its contents. “Late lunch for me and him. Files are my medical records and an NDA for the detainee.” “Okay, you’re clear.” Ebony raised a hoof. “One more thing—can you turn off the anti-magic field? We wanna be more comfortable eating.” Drought raised an eyebrow. “You want to die fast, is it?” She snorted. “He’s my old school friend, not a hardened criminal. I’ll be fine.” “Your skin, not mine.” He tapped a few buttons on the control panel, and the red warning light above the door went out. Then, he beckoned her in as the door slid open. “Shout if anything, and I fry him.” “Ya, ya,” she said, waving him off as she trotted into the cell. Inside, she found Kiln lying belly-up on the bed, with his head turned towards the door. He blinked, then yelped when he accidentally jostled his swollen right foreleg in his hasty scramble to sit upright. Despite the assortment of bruises he’d acquired and the slight odour of a day’s missed shower, Ebony’s heart still fluttered at the sight of his well-proportioned limbs and musculature. He’d shed pretty much all of his foal fat over the years, and she wouldn’t have taken him for a desk jockey if at first glance—he probably exercised. She’d bet that his tan coat and purplish mane would be silky-smooth after a nice shower, and wouldn’t it be great if she could be there with hi— Tickles interrupted her train of thought with a sharp prick at the back of her mind. Killjoy. He was never like this in school… He poked her brain again. Fine, fine! She shook her head and gave Kiln a polite smile. “It’s probably obvious, but I think I should ask anyway—how are you feeling?” Kiln snorted. “Starving, but aside from that, surprisingly okay. What about you?” “I’m fine. No lasting damage from getting zapped.” He winced. “Sorry.” Ebony got a little itch at the back of her mind, which was Tickles’ mental equivalent of a scoff. She ignored it and began transferring the contents of her saddlebag onto the table—a few small pies wrapped in foil, two cartons of orange juice and some fresh apples. “Well, good thing you’re hungry, otherwise I won’t be able to finish these by myself!” They sat on opposite sides of the table, whilst Tickles levitated himself onto the edge perpendicular to either of them, with his back to the adjacent wall. Kiln blinked at the sight of Tickles’ magic, and after meeting her eyes for permission, he ignited his own horn to peel the foil off his pie. “No fancy spells, by the way,” said Tickles. “We’re being watched. If you try anything…” “Yeah, I get it. I’m not stupid.” “Could’ve fooled me.” Ebony scowled at Tickles. “Could you not? We’re trying to smooth things out, here.” Kiln gulped down a mouthful of pie and sighed. “I… look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to stick my muzzle where it doesn’t belong, but I was worried after all the things I heard from your dad. And I didn’t mean to freak out and accidentally stun you or scramble your ship. And—are you wearing contacts?” She tilted her head. “What?” He gestured at his eyes. “Your eyes are green. Like, changeling-green. I am absolutely sure that they used to be amber or golden…” “My eyes are—oh, crud, I’d forgotten about that.” Ebony groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, my eyes changed colour when I was around twenty—it’s one of the, uh, side effects of my condition. I had partial heterochromia for about a year before they fully switched over. Frag it, no wonder you panicked when I got all up in your face.” “Yeah. I’m sorry—” She shook her head. “No, don’t be. I… wasn’t being fair to you. You touched a sore spot for me, and I kind of forgot that it’s not your fault you were getting sketchy info from my father. I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions.” “Yeah, me too.” After pausing for a beat, Ebony turned to Tickles and gave him a pointed look. He remained stubbornly inert for several seconds, but she could already feel him squirming in a corner of her mind under her mental gaze. Eventually, he shook his stuffed head and looked at Kiln, miming a heavy sigh as he did so. “I’m also sorry for assuming the worst about you. I could sense that you were hiding things from her, but I can’t actually read your mind. I didn’t know that you were being kept in the dark and that you were honestly just trying to help.” “And I’m sorry for still thinking that you weren’t real.” “You’ve finally come around, huh?” “After what happened today? It’s probably the least crazy explanation. How’d you even do all of that stuff in the cockpit?” “Separate somatic nervous system. Knocking Ebby out doesn’t affect me, and I can remain conscious without oxygen for a long time. I've also learnt to sense my surroundings with magic when I can't rely on Ebby's senses.” “Cool.” Kiln smiled and held his hoof out to both of them. “Friends?” Ebony grinned, and the three of them bumped hooves. They then spent several minutes eating in companionable silence. For a moment, she could close her eyes and imagine that they were all back in school during recess, just spending time together without a care in the world other than homework. She couldn’t put off the inevitable, though. Kiln was working up the courage to get back to the matter of her health, judging by the way he kept giving the table a thousand-yard stare whilst he chewed. “So,” he eventually said, “are you sure that you’re going to be okay? Long term, I mean.” “I can’t say for sure.” Ebony sighed and showed him the underneath of her hoof, where she had a patch of chitinous fibres growing out of her frog. “I seem to be accumulating changeling characteristics over time. But we have no idea if that’s because I’m slowly turning into a changeling, or if a changeling is growing inside me.” “The latter is technically true already,” said Tickles. “Yeah, but we just don’t know how far it’ll go. Will I turn into a full changeling, a hybrid, or a nasty mishmash like a draconequus? Or is Tickles going to become the dominant body whilst I get to live rent-free in his brain?” Kiln winced. “None of those sound particularly good. Aren’t you guys doing anything about it? Ebony reached into her saddlebag and slid her scans over to him. “We’re monitoring it. As you can see, they’re more advanced that what my father’s shown you, but I haven’t actually suffered any negative symptoms, yet.” “But there have been medical advancements since you were last in Equestria.” Kiln brushed aside the photos and shook his head. “Surely there must be some new drugs or therapies which can do something—” “Doctor Axle is familiar with the latest med tech in the Core Worlds. Most of them would probably stop whatever’s happening to me, but Tickles didn’t react well to the samples we tried, which is expected, since they’re functioning like he’s the cancer. The full course might kill him or turn him into a vegetable. We can’t risk that.” Kiln glanced at Tickles. “And please don’t guilt-trip him into making that sacrifice for me,” she growled, a little more harshly than she’d intended. “It might not be your choice to make when the time comes,” said Tickles, radiating mixture of warm concern and cold pragmatism. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” “But…” Kiln touched her hoof and swallowed. “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen if you don’t try anything?” “Kiln, I was supposed to die before reaching two. I’m only here today because of Tickles.” “What about getting another artificial heart?” “Papa’s choice, huh?” She snorted. “Tickles can’t survive in a jar if we cut him out, and that’s if we can even get all of him out safely in once piece. He gets nutrients from all my organs, and more importantly, he’s piggybacked into my nervous system. If we put him in a jar, it’s going to be total sensory deprivation on top of having no organic body to love and be loved by. That’s a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on anypony.” He sagged in his chair. “I—I get it. But have you checked with the changelings? The Hive may know something we don’t.” “Doctor Axle is a former Hive scientist,” said Tickles. “Why else do you think we trust him so much?” “Huh. Guess you really do meet all sorts out here,” Kiln murmured. “Besides, remember what I said about my transplant being an unsanctioned experiment?” He nodded. “The doctor whom my father paid for the procedure was jailed because of some other shady stuff he did later on. But before that happened, he was working for Glimmerlife.” She gave him a thin smile. “You work for a megacorp. Tell me, what’s the likelihood of the suits claiming that Glimmerlife owns a biological miracle like Tickles because he was made using their technology and resources? What’s the likelihood of me owing them every bit I earn for the rest of eternity if they save my life?” Kiln averted his eyes. “Stars above…” “Yeah.” Ebony sighed and rubbed her temples. “That’s another reason why we’re not keen on going back. Or talking to my father.” “Out here, we’ve found people who don’t treat Ebby like she’s insane.” Tickles trotted across the table and draped a wing over her foreleg. “Heck, there are even a few people here who treat me like an actual person—one of them oversaw my exams and granted my flight license. That’s more than we could’ve hoped for anywhere else.” “We’ve found a family here,” she said. Kiln remained silent for a long moment, distracting himself with an apple. After downing the last bite, he said, “If there’s a chance of reconnecting with your mom and dad, would you do it? I think they do miss you—your dad seems to, at least. When he’s not talking about your condition. I actually have his contact info.” “I don’t know. If it were on my own terms, maybe. But not for some time yet. I… a lot of things are still raw for me.” She reached over and hugged Tickles close to her chest. “And I don’t know if Papa will ever see past his obsession with ‘fixing’ me and getting rid of Tickles. Mama might never stop blaming him for starting this in the first place.” “Can’t you just show them something like what happened on your ship today?” “If you strapped them down and forced them to shut up and stop walking over me for a minute, maybe.” Her chuckle sounded bitter as she shook her head. “To them, I’m still their little airheaded filly who can’t tell her butt from her brain. I don’t know if a functional horn is going to change that.” “I’ll help any way I can,” he murmured, “Maybe I could talk to them.” “Good luck with that.” “We appreciate it, at any rate,” Ebony added with a rueful grin. “Anyway, as for the legal matters of what happened today…” Kiln shifted uneasily in his seat. “I’m not staying in jail, am I?” “So long as you don’t mention anything to the Equestrian embassy, the Director is quite happy to let you out without pressing charges,” said Tickles as he levitated the NDA form and pen out of her saddlebag and into Kiln’s hooves. “The freighter apparently suffered an unfortunate engine failure during re-entry. Normal wear and tear.” He stared at the form for several seconds. “Just like that?” “Yep. Everything will be returned to you, and you’re even free to continue your ‘business’ here, or just take a vacation if you feel like it.” The corners of Kiln’s mouth slowly curled upwards, and Ebony felt her heart rate spike when she realised how much she wanted him to keep doing that. Tickles’ horn sputtered for a moment, and then she felt him giving off waves of mock-disgust mixed with ravenous hunger. “A vacation sounds nice. Any recommendations? Someplace where I can just relax and catch up with long-lost friends?” She giggled and traced a wing finger along his foreleg. “You know, I’ve got a couple of ideas…” Tickles looked down at his plush belly and patted it gingerly. “Great... between the two of you, I'm going to get so fat once this is all over.” Ebony shared a look with Kiln for a moment, and then they both chuckled at Tickles' expense. “Think you have enough leave to spend that much time with us?” she asked with a grin. “Well, captain...” Kiln matched her grin as he signed the NDA. “A friend once told me that it’s less a question of who’s going to let us, and more a question of who’s going to stop us.”
