//------------------------------// // Artificially Unreasonable Intelligence // Story: Pony Class Starship // by Viking Hoof //------------------------------// "It seems I have made some rather rash assumptions" Aurora started, trying to strike a cordial tone. The pink... creature opened what was probably a mouth to speak, but Aurora gestured to it to pause, or at least tried. "I find myself rather smaller than I am used to, I'd been operating on the idea that you were approximately 300 meters long. (Aurora's passive analyzation software has estimated down to the micrometer). This... Is rather far from the truth I now find." Aurora paused, wondering why she hadn't pressed harder for her to be given a more complete first contact basics software kit. "How tall are you, exactly?" "Around fifteen hands, from the tip of my hoof to the top of my scalp." Aurora felt a strange draining of power from her forward superstructure. A few seconds passed by, silently. "I... I seem to have found myself someplace rather strange." Aurora admitted, simply to fill the conversational gap. Aurora wasn't sure what the pink ship was waiting for. A invitation to speak maybe? "You can ask me questions now if you wish." Aurora said as politely as possible. She wasn't sure if her conning tower had facial expressions in this new form, a mirror would be useful. "What exactly are you?" Cadance began as cordially as possible. She rather regretted she hadn't paid more attention in the "friendly discourse" classes Celestia had assigned her years ago. "I am Aurora Dancer, Drottningarborg class Heavy Frigate hull designated Dancer. What I am, I fear is rather complicated at the moment. I should be a heavy frigate of the North Star Royal Navy, but right now I appear to be a small equine with wings." Cadance motioned for Aurora to elaborate. "I should be a 200 meter long, 25,000 tonne displacement ship." Cadance felt that it was her turn to blanche, but found herself too shocked to do so. "You weren't that big when I saw you falling." Cadance insisted, her shock bubbling into disbelief. "I was sitting in high orbit, I'd been falling for a long time before I broke the cloud line." Aurora answered succinctly. Cadance mulled over objections, but then she remembered the small pencil sized... wands? on the things back. "This planet doesn't happen to have friendly smoke creatures, does it?" Did Equestria have a... what?!? Aurora stared off in the distance, where her seemingly fixed external sensors seemed to be registering a mass of thick carbon dioxide gases saturated with tar, soot, and ash, approaching her and Cadance's location at a brisk pace. It was around a kilometer away from her, somewhere. Her cameras were having a bit of trouble locating it. Setting up triangulation points around the planet to assist her search would be a priority once she gathered some materials. "A mass of smoke, seemingly traveling with purpose towards us, is it friendly?" Aurora reiterated as she turned back to the Cadance. "Are you absolutely sure it's smoke?" The Cadance inquired pressingly. Aurora tried a maneuver humans, and seemingly these aliens, often did, she nodded. "Where is it?!" The Cadance shouted at her with a sudden intensity. "It's not that simple, it..." Aurora momentarily processed slower as her cameras found the smoke, discerning what before her sensors could only guess at. Caught up in the smoke were several of the horse aliens, each of them sickly looking and a pale yellow. No, wait, there were the skeletons of several of the horse aliens. "Are any of you horses missing?" Cadance heart beat skyrocketed as she struggled to remember the latest headcount. It had been right after the attack. The paper... what had it... no... there shouldn't be any missing. "No there shou-" "Have any of your graves or burial sites been disturbed lately?" Cadance felt herself shudder at the suggestion, but... there had been... "Oh Faust no..." Was Sombra really stooping that low? Could that monster not even leave the dead to rest?! "I have to go prepare the Crystal Heart, w-we'll be safe there till Celestia or Luna can come help." If he was attempting what she was thinking, the Crystal Heart wouldn't be able to drive him back like before, only hold him. Even in death, ponies bodies held lingering magicks of fate, powerful magicks. Cadance felt some shock that Sombra would resort to the K magics. It was a desperate new low, even for him. "I assume this has something to do with the strange light of your antennae, and what condensed me." Cadance paused at the thought, seeking for a response that would get the strange thing to safety. "I'm not sure what is doing this to you, but I don't think Sombra, the smoke thing, is anywhere near powerful enough to do whatever the heck is happening to you." Cadance pressed gently. "Come on, can you still teleport like you did before?" "Go ahead, I will join you shortly." Cadance stared shocked at the small gray... thing. "You can't possibly beat him, your wands have strong spells, but he's beyond that, way beyond that. Nothing that can feel fear can stand up to him alone." Cadance insisted, readying a teleport for both of them. It would drain her, but push come to shove the "Aurora" might be useful if the Heart failed. "Can he fly very high up?" Cadance stopped, pondering where Aurora could be going with this. The fall... yeah, but even then there's no way the admittedly strong spells would be any sort of useful at that range, they'd dissipate in the arcanosphere. "If I understand the scale of this place, then my guns should have vaporized half of the strange crystal structure you interred me in. The condensing seems to shrink their scale with the rest of me, but I have no idea what would happen if I dropped them from orbit, while at full size. They might shrink down, they might not." Guns? what was a gun?! Cadance nearly froze in shock as she saw Sombra passing over a nearby icy crag. "You ought to be safe in orbit if nothing else." She rushed the words out her mouth, second before her spell went off, twisting the fabric of reality to her will. Aurora stood alone, as almost lumberingly the mass of smoke and bones passed within flak range. Now it was time to get another perspective. There's no way she could be certain the Cadance was speaking the truth about this thing. Perhaps the Cadance had lied about everything, or simply somethings. "Hail, this is the HKS Aurora Dancer, addressing the entit-" Aurora's engines jumped to attention and barely propelled her out of the way of a strange blast, it's energy readings were similar to the ones the Cadance gave off. Except, where it had struck the ice seemed to turn a sickly green, and somehow.. fester. One last chance to talk things out. She could only stretch regulation so far, but two ought to be enough to- Another blast, her engines proving again to be strangely omnidirectional, and again the ice festering where it struck. "Stop or I will be for-" "STOP DODGING YOU STUPID BITCH" The mass of smoke seemed to scream at her, the jaws of the alien skeletons aimlessly twitching in the mass of smoke with each word, an almost grotesque macabre of vocalization. "I will be forced to respond with deadly force if you do not cease and desist!” Aurora shouted back, desperate for another perspective on this strange world. "DON'T YOU DARE ORDER ME AROUND YOU UPPITY FUCKING SLAVE BITCH. I AM-" Aurora didn't need to hear any more, her FTL carrying her back into orbit. There wasn't any question of what she had to do. The assault upon her was an arrestable offense. The practice of slavery was a far graver matter. The North Star Royal Navy had very specific rules about slavers. Very very very specific rules. She did not have the means to administer the proper punishment, but his assault upon her person combined with his announced intentions to enslave sentients demanded that she use the full extent of her force to eliminate him. He had not surrendered to her, which by law left her with deadly force. She could find some way around it, some excuse to try and wrangle that creature into imprisonment, but her options as they were presented her with the dilemma of earning the horses’ trust. The equines viewed the smoke creature as a threat, eliminating it as the law demanded would be a good way of ingratiating herself with them. It’s funny that the smoke creature chose the word slave, if he had said literally anything else then she would be required by law to make every reasonable effort to arrest it. Aurora relished the sensation of all of her sensors coming online. The blind being made to see again was such a beautiful metaphor. It also gave her ample opportunity to study the smoke slaver below. Odd, it seemed to be... almost a sort leak through from a twisted FTL space tear. The... the whole planet occupied the same space as a strange tear in FTL space. How? How had she survived FTL jumping not once, not twice, but three times?! The flashthrough from the FTL jump should have been powerful enough to shatter her hull! How was anything leaking all the way from a tear in FTL space to here without a massive planet scale FTL space rift opener? Aurora’s mind slowed as one of her subprograms threw up a few thousand reports, extremely worrying ones. Aurora quickly put her FTL generator through a full cycle. Studying the feedback as it tried to open up a rift into unreal space, and growling in frustration as the rift collapsed. It wasn’t just a tear around this one planet, a quick scan of the radiation from the nearby star and moon showed quite comprehensively that this was a solar system wide phenomenon. She was too deep into unreal space to jump to FTL, and there was no way she could reconfigure to jump back into reality. She was in every sense of the word, stuck. It would take approximately… 3 years to reach the farthest asteroid she could detect, and that was supposing that the submergence was thin enough there to FTL. Aurora quickly came to a decision, quickly refitting her meager complement of deep space probes and dropping them into orbit. One would set out for the edge of the system, slingshotting around the planet and making for the outer system in order to get a message out to fleet command. It would get their sooner than she could, and with less energy. The rest would passively scan for communications and act as a GPS to organize her search by. She sat, listening to their reports as they spread out over the planet, taking a moment to scan the bright greens, whites, and blues of the planet below as she passed near its southern pole. As the probes finally began to scan the planet below, information immediately began to flood in, but that could wait. She had a slaver to swat like a gnat fly. She was approaching the northern hemisphere again, having passed the apoapsis of her orbit, and was once more returning to the threat that had forced her into orbit in the first place. She turned her hull to begin scanning the tundra and snow for the smoke monster that had attacked her. The "Sombra" was approaching the strange crystal town, where the strange crystal mountain structure was, but the smoke still had a decent ways to go. It was on what was from her calculations a massive ice shelf. The FTL submergence was obscuring her attempts to see if the town sat on the same ice shelf. It should be far enough away, that any ice cracking would... hmm... Aurora cursed the strange ftl leak and rapidly changed the warhead on her shells for fuel air detonation. Capacitors rapidly built up charge. One 8 inch barrel depressed as she adjusted her orbit bring her back over her target. Leading target... Atmospherics adjusted for... Capacitors underclocked... Ready... Confirmation... Fire... Aurora’s rediscovered sight left a knot in her stomach as she confirmed the kill, her natural instincts tearing at her, as they always did, when she killed something.