V
Manehattan, Lower East Side
“From EBC Studios in Manehattan, I’m Head Line with your "News at Noon." Troubling news from Canterlot Palace today, as reports of military action near the western border of Aquastria appear to be confirmed, refueling suspicions that the reclusive sea-pony kingdom, from which no communications have been received for nearly two years, may indeed be arming for a potential offensive. Joining me now is our palace correspondent Inside Track and, ah, Ms. Track, I have to say these reports seem awfully farfetched. Has there been any official word from the palace regarding this information?”
“ … Nothing direct at this time, Mr. Line. I’ve spoken with several of the Princesses’ advisors, and all that I’ve been able to glean is that less than two hours ago, both Celestia and Luna called an emergency session with Equestria’s joint chiefs of staff. We’re anticipating an official statement any moment.”
“Have we, ah, heard any word from the Royal Navy? Are they mobilizing in response to this potential threat?”
“ … Hard to say. There are reports that Fleet Admiral Blue Aegis was not among the ponies attending the session. Some of them are saying he may even be working in the field as we speak. These rumors are putting a considerable number of the nobility on edge, and by extension, a large part of the popu—”
“Ah, Ms. Track, so sorry to interrupt, but, ah, an edict has just been sent down to me; I’m to go live to Canterlot immediately. Pending any other developments, we’ll continue our discussion later in the hour.”
“ … Of course, Mr. Line. Thank you for your time.”
“My pleasure. … If you’re just tuning in now, viewers, ah, this just in from our correspondents in Canterlot: I’m being told that Princess Luna has called for a press conference regarding the reports of renewed military action by the Aquastrian Empire. After the break, we’ll be taking you live to the Palatial Gardens, where the conference is set to take place.”
The small throng of ponies that had been gathering near the bank of brand-new televisions in the display window had turned into a sizable crowd. Through this, the news story that had been blaring on every single one had spread like wildfire, and it was immediately apparent that everypony was beginning to look uneasy. Granted, this was unexpected; uneasiness was almost second nature to a pony, a deep-seated neurological reaction that was very hard to overcome. But there was a line in the sand between uneasiness and panic—and this crowd was looking to cross that line.
The trouble was, they never had the time; for time itself was presently slowing to a snail’s pace, and within moments had stopped entirely.
There were only two ponies were apparently unaffected by the connotations of the breaking story—or, for that matter, by the sudden freeze in time—but even here, in the case of the larger stallion with the guitar slung over his back, he was more frustrated than anything. His smaller companion, barely even a colt—or so he looked—only appeared uneasy more because of the growing crowd than the televisions. He clung to the stallion’s hind leg like a lifeline, not even daring to let go.
“Well, on the plus side, that makes it a bit easier for me to find him,” grumbled the stallion, almost inaudible under the cacophony of the rabble around him. “Minus side … it makes it a bit easier for him to find me.”
He turned to the colt. “Feel like goin’ swimming?” he asked him kindly. “Where you’re from, I bet you’ve done it a lot more than I’ve been able to. I used to swim too, y’know—quite a bit, really. But my body ain’t the same as it was back then. Wouldn’t be able to take it anymore.”
The colt stared at him for a good ten seconds, before he finally, slowly nodded.
“C’mon then, hop on,” the stallion offered, freeing up some space on his withers and neck. “Word o’ warning though, kid. The river over here ain’t quite like the one you’re used to. And I’m gonna need some time to get set up, so you’d best brace yourself in advance—an’ don’t wander off on me, ‘k?
“ … ”
“I’ll take that as a yes. C’mon.” And the pair launched away through streets and alleyways, dodging frozen passersby left and right. Occasionally they passed more crowds of ponies and other sapients; all of them looking on the verge of mass panic as the news began to spread even further.
Something suddenly caught the stallion’s eye, and he skidded to a halt; at the same time, time resumed its normal progression. A camera crew—probably one of the local stations, the stallion decided—was interviewing a random pony, presumably about current events. The stallion snorted—in his eyes, they were trivial. The real danger—the real current event—was still to come.
“So what do you imagine the Princesses’ response will be?” asked the newsmare. The camerapony behind her was looking directly into the concrete-gray face of a rattled-looking blonde pegasus, only inches away.
What the pegasus’ reply was going to be, the newsmare and her audience never found out, as the stallion had strode up almost muzzle-to-muzzle with the camerapony, who now trained his equipment on him. The newsmare let out a surprised “Oh!” and instinctively brought the microphone to his muzzle, as if she was actually anticipating a reply from him. This prompted a laugh from the stallion.
“You really think it’ll matter what they say?” he said, calmly—almost jovially. “Maybe ya haven’t taken a look around lately. All these ponies what got their saddles all knotted up—and how d’ya think they ended up like that?”
As if to emphasize his implication, a carriage raced by, nearly bowling the camerapony over. A quick glance out of the corner of the stallion’s eye showed the official symbol of the police department emblazoned on both the carriage and each badge of the four tough-looking ponies that occupied it.
“You ponies are weird, y’know?” he laughed. His voice was calmer now, almost deathly so. “It’s like ya enjoy bein’ in a tizzy. Like ya almost thrive off gettin’ the wits scared outta ya. But that’s exactly where ya gotta watch your step. Mass panic in the streets is one thing. Stampedes an’ riots are another. But knowin’ that ya just might’ve caused ‘em to happen?”
The stallion left the question hanging for a few seconds, taking in the sight of the newsponies. Both looked like they had half a mind to shut off their equipment and turn tail.
Eventually, he breathed a hefty sigh. “Eh, whatever. Can’t remember the last time my word actually meant somethin’ to you lot, anyway. I can already tell none o’ ya are gonna bother payin’ me any mind. I’ll be here one moment, gone the next. That’s how it always ends up.”
The newsmare blinked, clearly lost for words.
“Welp, I gotta be on my way. Take care now.” The stallion flipped a jaunty, mocking salute at the bemused newsmare and her camerapony. Then he was on his way, the colt in tow. With a single effort of will, he slowed the flow of time to a standstill once more, and did not lift the spell until he and the colt had arrived at their destination.
SSR Everfree, 120123Z
1200 ft below sea level
“Twelve hundred feet,” said the diving officer over Sonar’s PA, easing the lever back to its upright position.
“Slow to one half. Set course two-seven mark four-four-nine,” Deep Six’s voice followed moments later, and Sonar smiled as he felt the voice of his friend permeate the spherical chamber. “Admiral, we’re in position, over.”
“I read you, Echo Leader,” said Blue Aegis gruffly. “Begin your sweep, over.”
“Roger, Stable One. Over and out.” Click. “Sonar, conn. How’re you doing in there?”
“Sonar, aye. Never better, Captain.” Sonar spoke in the characteristic raspy, sibilant voice of the chiroponies, yet another of the stigmata they’d had to overcome in the last half century.
“Ready to do your thing, old buddy?”
“I’ve already synchronized my magical leylines with the arrays of the Æthon and the Winsome,” Sonar answered him; indeed, his curved horn was filling the entire chamber with a soft violet light. “The three of us together should be able to create a large enough field to scan the affected regions from here.”
Six cackled. “Sonar, I dunno about you, but next time you get shore leave I’m treatin’ you to a night on the town. I know this one club where the mares just about melt in your mouth—if you can repeat what you just said to any one of them, I guarantee they’ll be swooning in ten seconds flat.”
“Melting in your mouth? You sure that wasn’t the soft-serve you had thrown in your muzzle that one time?” The diving officer’s cutting remark was met with hoots and sniggers from ponies on every end of Sonar’s channel, and Sonar swore blind that even the Fleet Admiral was chuckling. The chiropony couldn’t help but contribute to the laughter at his friend’s expense, and even Six joined in after a few seconds.
“Sisters’ sake … ” he wheezed. “Seriously though, Sonar—a regular night owl like you? You’ll have to beat the mares off with a stick before long!”
“You flatter,” Sonar replied dryly, “but now’s not the time to have visions of pretty mares dancing in my head—unless I can concentrate perfectly, they’ll be dancing in the sonar as well. And that’d be a sight to see, wouldn’t it?”
“Wish I could join you in there, ol’ buddy.” Six’s voice sounded wistful—not entirely because of dancing pretty mares, Sonar suspected. “Bet it gets beautiful inside.”
“If you ponies ever invent a small enough camera that won’t get fudged up by my magic,” Sonar said, “I promise I’ll let you have the first look, Captain.”
“Sounds good to me.” One last chuckle from Six, and then it was all business. “Let’s get started.”
Sonar fitted a chrome metallic casing onto his curved horn, smoothing out the many wires extending from it behind his mane; this would give him better freedom of movement, as well as a largely unobstructed view. Next was a special set of goggles over his eyes; Sonar’s magical field could readily tell the shape and size of an object and the direction it was coming from; but the distance was not so easy to tell. These goggles, when connected to the instrumentation covering his horn, could correct this shortcoming easily.
“Sonar, Echo Flock; Sonar, Echo Leader. Ping on my mark.”
“Sonar, Echo Two, aye,” came the reply from Æthon’s navigation officer.
From the Winsome: “Sonar, Echo Three, aye.”
Sonar waited a few tense seconds later, closing his eyes and exhaling. Then: “Mark.”
Several things happened at exactly the same time; first, a high-pitched “byooooooooonnnng” sound, as clear as a bell, sounded within the chamber. Second, the chamber was immediately plunged into absolute darkness, at which point Sonar sent a controlled surge of magic through his horn, precisely coordinated with the arrays of Echo Two and Three.
He pricked up his oversized ears; seconds later, the chamber began to glow a faint, purplish color, spreading from the top of the enclosed sphere. Slowly but surely, the Aquastrian Ocean as seen by the submarines of Echo Group began to unfold before Sonar’s eyes.
The image was not completely crisp, nor would any adjustments by Sonar make it so; the same microfractures in the acoustite that made the Everfree’s sonar array possible also interfered with the clarity of the images produced. But it was clear enough for Sonar to discern differences in light and shadow on the near-white shapes off to his right; the Winsome and the Æthon appeared stationary relative to the Everfree. This was good, Sonar thought; their teamwork thus far had been executed almost as flawlessly as the image their combined efforts had produced.
“Starboard lateral array confirms Echos Two and Three currently maintaining formation,” Sonar dictated swiftly. “Aft array is reading normal fluctuations from engine noise. Forward array—ooh, that’s a big school of fish right there.” He frowned as he turned his attention to the other side. “Portside lateral array is currently picking up interference, distance three nautical miles. Assume normal byproduct of hydrodynamic anomalies in the region. Compensating.”
Sonar siphoned off a little more magic from his horn, directing it to the portside array. This was one of his workarounds for the limitations of the sonar array; a denser magical field would increase the definition of the image in a specific region. It wasn’t without its drawbacks, however; it was one thing for a unicorn to create a perfectly uniform force field, but it was another to create a non-uniform field, and to maintain it indefinitely. Sonar had done this procedure so many times in his years of service that it was almost second nature, but it would always leave him with a splitting headache. Most times, though, the resulting image was worth the headache.
Today, as he soon found out from the portside array, was not going to be one of those days.
He squinted through the goggles at the picture before him. What in the world?
“Conn, Sonar.”
“Conn, aye.”
Sonar’s voice sounded worried. “I’m picking something up on portside lateral, Captain. You better have a look.”
Deep Six signaled a technician. “Put sonar on your console.”
“Aye, sir.” The technician flipped a bank of switches, and his console screen lit up with a two-dimensional overhead view of Echo Flock’s combined array.
“Sonar, put it on speakers.”
There was no acknowledgement from Sonar other than a single, faint flick of a switch. One second later, the PA blared to life with the sounds of the Aquastrian Ocean.
And something else.
“Sonar, what is that?" Six was bewildered by the strangeness of what he was hearing. “That doesn’t sound like the anomalies we were listening in on an hour ago.”
“They are,” Sonar said simply. “But that was when I was doing this all by myself, sir. With all three of us combined, Echo Flock’s array is picking up better details at a better distance, and right now I’m picking up these anomalies as clear as day. Can you?”
“Confirmed,” said the technician, peering up from his screen. “The magical residue’s starting to fade, but I studied fluid dynamics in school, sir, and I know a rotation when I see one. That’s definitely some kind of vortex. A whole bunch of them,” he added, his expression suddenly incredulous. “Hundreds, it looks like.”
“What?!” Six nearly bowled him over in his rush to get to the console. And truly, the entire upper right corner of the readout was infested with those tiny distortions. “Where’s Delfin in all this?” he asked.
The technician tapped his hoof on the console, exactly where the rotations were the thickest. Six guessed that was about five nautical miles’ distance, north-northeast of the Everfree’s current position.
“How big are these vortexes?”
“Vortices, sir, and they’re not that big,” corrected the technician. “I’d estimate average funnel width is maybe two, three feet wide maximum. But width isn’t what really matters with a vortex; it’s the speed of the rotation, and unless these readouts are playing tricks on me, these vortices are pulling nearly twenty kmh!”
The news was like a kick to the gut for Six—that was faster than most known whirlpools in the world. “Those vorte—vortices are too close together,” he said. “There’s no telling what could happen if we tried to rush them head-on!”
“This must be the Aquastrian defense network,” the diving officer surmised. “And a tight one it is, too. Anything non-magical goes through there gets thrown off course but good. We won’t be able to rely on torpedoes here.”
Non-magical … thought Six. “Echo Leader, sonar, Echo Flock,” he said, a sudden thought coming to him. “Boost the output on your arrays. I want to see if we can’t map a way through this.”
“Copy, Echo Leader.”
“Ping on my mark.” Six held his breath for what felt like a whole minute. “Mark.”
Byooooooooonnnng!
The effect was immediate—the readout on the technician’s screen suddenly lit up like Hearth’s Warming. The distortions on the screen could be seen in much clearer detail. Immediately, Six’s eyes began flitting this way and that, looking for patterns, gaps in the patterns, anything that might prove useful to circumventing this—
“Conn, Sonar!” Sonar’s voice sounded alarmed.
“What is it?”
“There’s something inside the vortices!”
Inside the vortices? Six wondered. “How is that possible?” he asked nopony in particular.
“I don’t know, sir, but something’s in there. It’s very faint; we’re too far away to make anything o—Dammit!”
Six could count on his hooves the number of times he’d ever heard the normally eye-of-the-storm calm Sonar swear out loud. That scared him more than anything. “Conn, report!” he bellowed into the PA.
“Some of the vortices are heading right for us.” A tense pause, and then: “It looks like … torpedoes!”
Six swore under his breath. “Echo Flock, Echo Leader. Battle stations, load all tubes—repeat, battle stations!” he roared into the PA, slamming his whole hoof onto the ALERT button. Immediately, the bridge dimmed further still, and was suffused in a bright red color. Klaxons began sounding all over the ship, calling the crew to arms. “Sonar, I need details!”
“Full dozen of bogeys incoming, Captain,” Sonar reeled off, raising his voice only slightly over the clamor of the alarms; the acoustite absorbed the worst of it, allowing him to work without much interruption. “Bearing eight-nine mark two-two-three!”
“Helm, bring us about. Move to return fire!” Six shouted over the alarms. “Tactical, status?”
“Locked and loaded, Captain,” Sonar heard a controller respond.
“Echo Two standing by.”
“Echo Three standing by.”
“Tubes 1, 2 and 5, AT-yield. Fire!”
At Six’s command, three torpedoes streaked out from the launch tubes of the Everfree. AT-yield meant anti-torpedo, Sonar knew; it was the first line of defense in submarine warfare when the other side made the first move. Upon detonation, they released a cloud of chaff imbued with explosive magic that could disrupt most torpedoes in use today. The ensuing reaction almost always resulted in a premature detonation for the enemy torpedo, allowing the other side enough time to return fire.
The torpedoes’ aim was true; five of the enemy missiles—registering as purple distortions in his magical field—had faded out of existence in the near whiteness of the AT-yield’s detonations, and a faint rumble shook the Everfree’s hull. But seven were still headed their way, and it would take time to reload another salvo.
Save us.
“Who said that?” Sonar asked instinctively, ears up, eyes alert. The voice was rough, harsh and grating like sandpaper, and it was so crystal-clear that if Sonar was anything other than a chiropony, if he’d closed his eyes, he could almost imagine it was whispering in his ear. “Who’s there?” he said again, starting to feel spooked.
Silence.
The torpedoes were getting closer.
In times of great danger or stress, a unicorn or any other magically attuned creature can experience a sudden boost in their magical abilities, similar to an adrenaline rush in an earth pony. The reaction is a biological occurrence, evolved as a defense mechanism. Therefore, it can be both unexpected and impossible to control, except under meticulous conditions.
The conditions of the Everfree’s sonar station, when combined with the ensuing battle outside and the puzzled consternation inside, did not fall under that particular definition of “meticulous.”
Without warning, Sonar’s horn radiated an incredible wave of magic that nearly overloaded the sonar system, and the images before him glowed with a brightness that outshone Celestia herself. Blinded even through the goggles, Sonar squeezed his eyes open after a few moments, hoping to chance a glance.
The glance immediately turned into a stare, and the chiropony sat slack-jawed at the images he was seeing.
The waters around him were like fresh, clean air, the Æthon and the Winsome were bringing their own torpedo tubes to bear; he could see the shadows they were making against their hulls. The enemy missiles—
Wait.
“Save us,” the voice had said.
Those aren’t torpedoes, Sonar realized. They’re …
Oh, no.
He snapped out of his daze just in time to hear the Æthon’s captain bark, “Tubes 3 and 4, C-9 cap. Fire!”
Sonar felt his throat seize up in sudden panic as he yelled, “No, wait! Don’t—!”
But it was too late. A pair of streamlined shapes had already been loosed from the Æthon. Sonar closed his eyes tightly, and tucked his ears along his head as far as they would go. He did not need them or the sonar array to know their aim would be true.
And sure enough, when he dared to look ten seconds later, the array was clear. There were no more bogeys.
Sonar wasn’t sure how to feel. There was a chance that he could just have lost his life, along with everypony else he’d learned to call his friend. But knowing what he did now, he wished that had been the case.
“Sonar, conn.” Six’s voice was coming through, but he did not acknowledge. “Sonar, conn. Do you read?”
With shaking hooves, Sonar grasped the PA. “Sonar … aye,” he managed to say.
“Sonar, what in Tartarus happened up there?” Six’s voice sounded immensely relieved. “I thought I’d lost you.”
The chiropony shook his head. “I’m … not sure,” he said, half-truthfully. “I don’t know if I can tell you right now. But, Captain, we’ve got a much bigger problem.”
“Did those torpedoes damage the array somehow? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Those weren’t torpedoes, Captain.”
“What the hay is that supposed to mean?” Six said, a little louder than he’d meant to.
“ … That surge of magic,” Sonar said hesitantly. “It picked up … ”
There was a long pause, and what sounded like a pained hiss of breath.
“Picked up what?” Six shouted.
“ … Life signs.”
Six nearly dropped his PA. “Life signs?!”
“Aquastrian life signs, sir.”
Six really did drop the PA this time around. It clanged on the metal floor, but the sound went unnoticed, as a cold sweat was now forming on every single pony’s neck as the ramifications of Sonar’s revelation slowly sank in.
The Dream Valley
Twelve hundred feet above, the mood was no different on the bridge of the Equestrian Royal Navy’s flagship. Lieutenant Mareze had a hoof to her muzzle, Itchy Hoof stood alongside her, eyes shrunken to pinpricks in utter shock, and Fleet Admiral Aegis had a look on his face that suggested a very close friend of his had just passed away. Even Inkie Pie looked unusually somber, her normally wispy iron-gray mane falling limply across her withers.
“Twelve Aquastrians,” Mareze said slowly, shaking her head side to side, not wanting to believe it. “Twelve innocent ponies … and we just killed them.”
With great effort, Aegis turned his eyes away from the communications console—where everypony on the bridge had been practically glued to since the Everfree had sounded their alarm—and made his way to the door. “Lieutenant … get me a secure line to DWRDIV. Route it through to my quarters. Then contact Echo Flock, and tell them to make their way home. We’re aborting the mission.”
“Sir?”
“Abort the mission, Lieutenant.” Aegis’ voice was hard as diamond. “That’s an order.”
There followed one of the loudest silences that had ever been heard before.
“Aye, sir.” Mareze said briskly. She moved her hoof to the comlink …
… and promptly drew back when Captain Six’s panicked voice crackled through the speaker.
“Stable One, Echo Flock. Do you copy?”
Mareze recovered quickly. “Stable One, aye. Captain, status report!”
“It’s bad. Very bad.”
“We know about the Aquastrians, Captain.”
“It’s worse than that, Mareze. All those vortices we spotted over Delfin? It’s not a defense system—it’s a smoke screen!”
Aegis frowned. “Explain, Captain.”
“It was just a cover, Admiral. As long as they were active, they were concealing the real danger.”
“What danger?”
“Sonar says it’s forty feet wide and sixty long, and that it’s heading right for—”
The rest of Deep Six’s transmission was lost in a deafening burst of static. Almost instantly after that, a massive BOOM rocked the Dream Valley, sending everypony flat on their backsides.
“What in Tartarus was that?” Itchy Hoof asked.
Mareze pointed out of one of the starboard windows. “Look!”
Everypony crowded around her just in time to see a foamy white plume expanding in the distance. It was comparatively tiny, but Aegis knew it was much bigger up close—possibly hundreds of feet high.
It was the unmistakable explosion of a depth charge.
“Admiral.” Mareze’s voice was shaky. “That was the last reported location of the Everfree.” She immediately raised her communicator. "Echo Flock, Stable One." A beat. "Echo Flock, Stable One, respond!"
Aegis felt another dull blow to his barrel as Mareze frantically continued to futilely reach the ill-fated craft. “There were nearly two hundred and fifty ponies on board those submarines,” he said hoarsely. Almost as many as Diomedes Squadron, he recalled. That was six hundred lives he’d been responsible for—six hundred lives he’d led to a doom they should never have deserved.
How could he live with something like this now?
So absorbed was he in his grief that he almost didn’t see Inkie Pie making her way to the navigational console. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked—he was too broken to raise his voice. “Get away from there.”
Inkie stared him in the eye. “I told you I had a plan. Don’t you remember?”
Aegis’ jaw sent slack. “I remember telling you it was a bunch of horseapples. There’s too many X’s and O’s in the air for it to work!”
“And wouldn’t you know it, they just all came together,” Inkie said, that infectious demeanor of hers beginning to work its way back. She tapped a few buttons, and stepped back with her legs crossed. “I’m waiting, Admiral.”
Aegis stared. What else do I have to lose? “Do it.”
Inkie giggled, and produced a remote-control device from somewhere Aegis didn’t see. The device contained a single red button—and Inkie pushed it with all her might.
Nothing happened.
At least, nothing anypony could see.
“I made some modifications to your sonar system,” Inkie explained with a smile—a monumental achievement in and of itself, all things considered. “Go on—take a look for yourself!”
Aegis decided to table the issue of how Inkie was able to commandeer such an advanced console, and one she’d never seen before at that, for a later time. The Pie herd had long been associated with the improbable and the strange; it was often better to just shake your head and go with the flow.
He activated the sonar system, and he thought with a pang of Echo Flock, who’d been wiped out in less time than it had taken to bite into an apple. But his melancholy was instantly replaced with—
“Surprise!” Inkie laughed. “Pretty cool, huh?”
click
Aegis, albeit grudgingly, had to admit it was. He suspected Inkie had rerouted all the seismic buoys—the same ones the ERN had spent half of today dropping in preparation for their testing—through the console. The large slice of ocean that was currently displayed on the sonar proved it.
click
“Inkie … ” Aegis was stumbling for words. “I’m … I’m impressed,” he eventually settled on.
click
“You’d better save it for later,” Mareze said, peering over at the screen. She tapped the far right of the monitor. “I think that’s our bogey right there.”
click click
“Sisters,” Itchy Hoof swore. “Whatever it is, it’s pulling forty knots easy. It’ll be right under us in two minutes!”
click click
The bridge exploded into a hive of activity. Alarms lit up all over the ship. “All hands, battle stations!” Aegis spoke urgently into the PA. “I repeat, all hands to battle stations. This is not a drill!”
click click click
“Bogey is accelerating, sir!” the nav officer yelled. “Reading sixty knots now!”
click click click
Sixty? Aegis stared wild-eyed out of the forward windows, where he imagined that whatever this bogey was, it was right there. There isn’t a submarine out there that can hold that speed for long!
clickclickclickclick
“What in the name of Celestia is that noise?” Aegis shouted.
clickclickclickclickCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK
“Eighty kno—augh!”
The navigations officer screamed, ripping off her headphones, which she had been using to listen to the sonar feed. She was clearly in pain, rubbing her ears tenderly; Aegis guessed something loud must have—
BOOM.
The Dream Valley lurched violently from a massive detonation somewhere under its keel. Everything and everypony that was not properly secured was sent flying. Itchy careened into a terminal, which sparked briefly and went dead; he slumped to the ground unconscious. Aegis fell against his seat, and was instantly winded as the armrest hit him directly in the ribs.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
Aegis tottered to his hooves. “Report,” he coughed.
Mareze checked a monitor. “Minor flooding in Engine Room 3. Emergency bulkheads stopped the worst of it.”
“Casualties?”
“Nothing serious, sir. Got an ensign with a head injury over at deck ten. Medics are already treating him.”
“What about the bogey?”
Mareze checked the sonar. “Heading west-northwest, maintaining eighty knots … Sir, it looks like the bogey is shrinking.”
Aegis galloped over as quickly as he could. “What do you mean, it’s shrinking?” He looked at the readout.
He was only able to see it for a little less than two seconds before it disappeared completely. The shape was about the size of the frog of his hoof. It was vaguely triangular, with two smaller, thinner triangles branching out from both sides, and then a series of shorter triangles bringing up the rear, like the flukes of a tail.
Then Aegis saw that the strange object was, in fact, shrinking. In one blip, it was half the size it was before, and in two blips, another half. On the third blip, it disappeared from the screen completely, and only then did Aegis notice how silent the bridge of the Dream Valley was. He turned around, and for the third time today, felt like his stomach had just dissolved.
Inkie had hit the cold metal floor head-first; her iron-gray mane was matted with blood, and it was still trickling from the wound over her left eye. Mareze was gently prodding her with a hoof, but the mare wasn’t responding at all. And considering how advanced in years she was, this put her in a very precarious situation. And Aegis knew it.
“Get her to the ship’s doctor,” he ordered. “Now!”
A pair of ensigns gently lifted Inkie onto their backs, and walked out of the bridge side-by-side, taking care not to upset their precious cargo.
Mareze looked mournfully at her prone form before it disappeared. “Our doctor won’t be enough,” she told Aegis. “A mare her age needs proper medical attention. We have to get her back to the mainland quickly. There’s a hospital in Manehattan,” she added reassuringly. “Their geriatric ward’s one of the best in Equestria. If anypony can help Inkie, they can.”
“Does she have enough time, though?” Aegis looked doubtful.
Mareze sighed. “With respect, Admiral, the question is whether we will have enough time.”
“Lieutenant?”
The Stalliongradi mare had a thousand-yard stare about her that Aegis didn’t like one bit. “That thing … that creature … it’s heading right for downtown Manehattan. It’ll make landfall in less than an hour.”