Hello? Hello World? Is it working?
Ah, at last. At least the narratator is still working properly. Maybe we'll even get to end this story. Now where were we?
Yes, Tanelorn. The Machine. Dangerous stuff. If I'd pushed Sweetie Belle to be a bit stronger, to do something, make some noble self-sacrifice while she had the chance, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation. Maybe everything would be fine. But it didn't seem likely … and after everything she'd been through, I didn't have the heart.
Coulda', shoulda', woulda', I suppose.
Besides, I had my own reasons for wanting to get back to Equestria.
Chapter 17
Flight
Reality came back, instantaneous and shocking in its intensity, like falling through thin ice into the water below. She caught the tail end of the spell: A low electrical buzz and a violet aura glow ceasing a fraction of a second later.
She was left with Blueberry's face, close enough to feel the breath on her muzzle. Their horns were crossed. Blueberry's eyes were closed. She looked like everything Sweetie Belle didn't feel: Relaxed, satisfied, comfortable. Beatific.
Blueberry inhaled deeply through her nostrils, opened her eyes slowly and sat back, holding eye contact. “Well done,” she said softly, patting Sweetie Belle on the cheek. “You've been very brave. And you know what? I think we're finished. I have everything I need.”
Sweetie Belle realised she was shivering.
“Of course,” continued Blueberry, holding out a forehoof to Cannons, who had been waiting in the corner of the cell and now took it and helped her up, “I have to keep you with us. Just a precaution, you know. But don't worry. It won't be long – and after that, everything will be fine. And when we change ship I'll get you into some nicer accommodation than this nasty old place, okay?”
Cannons picked up the cushion Blueberry had been sitting on. “Get her something to eat. Best thing we have, as much as she wants,” she ordered him. Then she swept out of the cell with him in tow, and bolted the door behind them.
After they'd gone, Sweetie Belle let her head sink forward until she was resting it on her forelegs, with her nose pressed up against the grainy metal tabletop. Eventually the shivering subsided.
Four sessions. Four sessions of Blueberry poking around in her mind, while Sweetie Belle let her. They were like dreams, but also nothing like dreams. No scenery and images flashing past. Just an attenuated consciousness of some immense silent black ocean, filled with things you could feel but never see or hear, with Blueberry's spell an alien mollusc searching for whatever it was she wanted. No sense of time in that place; it could've been minutes or days.
Afterwards, her muscles and bones felt like old rope and wood, sun-baked and crumbling. The cell light was always on, so she had no sense of time here, either. She slept fitfully and shallowly, sometimes woken for a new session. Cannons or Sorghum brought her food and took away her bucket, but she wasn't sure of there was any rhythm to this. She struggled to eat using just her aura.
At least, she thought to herself, she wasn't being tortured.
And now they were finished. Maybe things wouldn't be so difficult.
Soon Cannons came in with a tray, plonked it down on the table in front of her, and left without saying anything. She stared at the food. Oatmeal as usual, but also lettuce and even a few slices of dried apple. She was hungry, but not ravenous, and she didn't feel up to the task of eating.
“I know,” said a wind-chime voice, “it would be an insult to ask you how you're feeling.”
Lifting her head a little to look at Saffron standing beside her, Sweetie Belle gave a tiny nod. “And I feel it would be an insult to pretend this compares to anything you've been through,” she said without speaking.
Saffron responded with a wry smile.
After the first session, Sweetie Belle had asked her if Blueberry had noticed her presence. “No,” Saffron had said. “She isn't looking for me, and I'm familiar with the spell she's using. It's not hard to stay out of sight.”
Now she said, “Blueberry thinks she's got everything under control.”
“I wonder what gave her that idea.” Sweetie Belle made a show of looking at the cell surrounding them.
“I didn't tell you this earlier because it might've failed, and I didn't want to get your hopes up for no reason, but while she was in your mind, I got a look at hers. Just shallow stuff. Whatever was flitting across her consciousness from moment to moment. But it was enough …”
Sweetie Belle stared at Saffron. “What?”
“A few things, actually. But most importantly, I know the operational frequencies of that thaumic inhibitor.”
“You can get it off me?”
“Well …” Saffron chewed at her lip. “Maybe. The inhibitor works by using your own magic to stimulate a whole range of autonomic responses – everything from physical pain to nausea.”
“I noticed.”
“Right, so, the only exception is if you try physically removing it. In that case, it tries to drain your magic to produce the same effect. With me so far? So if I can counteract that drain, it'll starve the inhibitor of power and muffle the effect. That's where the maybe lies … I can muffle it, but I can't turn it off entirely. It'll be unpleasant, but with any luck it won't send you into a coma.”
Sweetie Belle picked gently at the inhibitor and felt a twinge of pain run through her head. For all its power, it felt so tiny. Like a bit of string glued to her horn. “I guess now they won't be worrying about me too much,” she whispered. “But what then? There's nowhere to go, and Blueberry's way more powerful than I am.”
“Something else I picked up,” said Saffron. “They still have the gunship on board.”
After a few moments of staring at the door, Sweetie Belle gingerly got to her hooves. “Can you do it now?”
“Yes.”
“Give me a moment.” She sat beside the corner of the table and placed the base of her horn firmly against it. “This'll do it, right?”
“That'll do it.”
Anticipation coated her insides like ice. Every instinct she had told her not to do this and brought up as evidence the memories of the last two times she'd tried to rebel against the inhibitor.
She closed her eyes and sighed. “Ready.”
Some faint sensation in her horn seemed to shift. “Now,” said Saffron.
Sweetie Belle raked her horn as hard and fast as she could down the corner of the table.
The pain was blindingly hot, all-encompassing, incomparable. Her mind had only one direction: To scream. And she couldn't even do that – her throat seemed to seize up as she tried.
And then it was over. She found herself curled up, face pressed against the floor, shivering again, almost hyperventilating. But the pain and nausea were fading. After a few seconds she lifted her head and blinked the tears from her eyes.
The inhibitor lay in front of her. It did look like string after all – two pieces of black string rolled into a coil, no more than an inch long. It still had a slight curve from where it had been stuck to her horn. She prodded it with a hoof. Nothing happened.
She pushed past a brief burst of terror that its effects were still there, and tried lighting up her aura. A pale green glow came from floor.
She looked over at Saffron. “Thank you,” she croaked, and scrabbled into a better sitting position.
“Now I can ask: How are you feeling?”
“Like I've been chewed up and used as a spitball by a dragon. Otherwise good.”
“Good enough for a daring escape?”
Sweetie Belle glared at her, then looked away, sighed and dragged the tray over. “Yeah … Just give me a moment.”
Once she'd eaten and spent a few minutes resting on the mat, her headache had receded enough for her to feel ready to leave. She asked Saffron where the gunship was being held.
“Turn left. End of the corridor. Down the stairs on the right. Then turn right again.”
Not feeling up to making any more, Sweetie Belle conjured a lone sylph and took it to the cell door. She stared at it for a few seconds. No point in waiting.
She closed her eyes, and reached through the door with her aura. How freeing that felt! On the far side her aura felt the bolt. Not a proper lock; just a bolt. She slid it open, then stepped to the side and gave the door a gentle pull. If anypony was out there, they'd run into the sylph first.
Nothing happened. She peered out, then stepped out into the empty corridor, expecting with every step for an alarm to blare or guards to come running round the corner.
Except there were no guards, she realised. Just Blueberry and Cannons and Sorghum on this ship, and nopony else. So long as she didn't run into Blueberry, she should be fine. She closed the door behind her, put up a shield just in case, and cantered down the corridor following Saffron's instructions until she reached the hangar.
It was poorly lit by two lamps in the ceiling, but on the far end a razor of light lay between the bay doors. Directly in front of it were a set of bays to hold gunships. Only one was occupied.
First she cantered back and forth across the hangar, to the doors themselves, looking for any sort of controls that might open the doors. She found nothing.
Eventually, feeling the growing pressure of every second she remained, she went over to the gunship. The door opened without trouble.
Inside, the controls spread out before her like a bad omen. Every time she'd sat here, disaster had followed: Escaping from the griffons, fighting at the sintering facility, leaving Scootaloo behind.
No, she told herself. She was being silly. She forced herself back to the moment. The fuel gauge wasn't great, but it wasn't disastrous either. She'd be able to fly for a while.
And then?
First things first. The hangar door. She called her sylph into the cockpit – leaving it to go after the engines seemed like too big a risk – and closed the door. Saffron's startup instructions whispered in her head, and she flicked switches across the board in front of her. The engine rumbled. The propellers spun up from a murmur to a roar.
She aimed the guns at a hinge and fired, running from top to bottom. Bullets clattered; metal screeched; and the door was left hanging by a threat of chewed-up metal near the floor. She looked at the ammunition gauge as she aimed at the second door. Nearly empty. She fired again. The door leant over for a few seconds, then came away entirely and tumbled away into the sky. The guns, now empty, spun for a few seconds and eructed smoke.
Golden light filled the hangar. Sweetie Belle held her hoof to her brow and blinked a few times. The sun was low in the horizon. Morning or evening? She had no idea.
It didn't matter. Any stealth she had was certainly gone by now. She brought the gunship to a hover, and edged it forward. Its nose clanked against the remaining door, which gave no resistance, and twisted away, half open and half off.
At last in the open air. Her grin glowed briefly. Now, where to? The gunship could easily outrun the scout, but its range was shorter. She could orient herself using the Scar (so, she figured, the sun lay to the west – it was setting), but she had no idea where Ilmarinen was. She could head back the way the airship had come, which would work so long as it hadn't turned during its journey and she got the course exactly right ...
But what other choice was there?
She tilted the propellers forward and set off as fast as the gunship could go.
Her mane looked terrible, thought Blueberry, as she worked a comb through it. It felt greasy and was clearly beginning to lose some of its glimmer. And the mirror was dirty.
But, she reminded herself, this was the most important mission in the history of existence. Some sacrifices had to be made.
And far more important, she had the transform. It had taken a while to make it work, but now she had it. A hundred incomplete, useless scraps of information she'd downloaded into her head were coming together. It was the keystone, the final point needed for the triangulation, the nth equation that revealed all the unknowns.
Now she knew where to find Tanelorn. She knew its location to within a metre. She knew how to get in, and had a good idea as to what she'd find there.
As a bonus, she'd gained mastery of a few more spells, two or three of which would come in useful. And a few details about Sweetie Belle's personal life, which convinced her that the mare really would be better off when all this was finished.
“What do you think, boys?” she asked Sorghum and Cannons, holding a mane clip in her aura. “Up or down?”
Before either could answer, the room around them rumbled, and a faint roar came through the deckplates.
Blueberry turned from the mirror. “What –”
Again, a roar and a rumble. Gunship fire?
“Cannons, check her cell. Sorghum, come with me!” said Blueberry. She threw the clip to the side and swept out the door.
A few minutes later, the three of them stood in the hangar, looking out at the setting sun through the hole Sweetie Belle's departure had left. The gunship was still visible, just, rapidly retreating.
“Should we go after her?” Sorghum asked.
Blueberry considered this for a few seconds. Sweetie Belle was clearly smart enough to be a threat. But she wasn't the sort to take revenge, and there was no reason to suppose she'd take any more interest in their plan. Besides, once they reached Tanelorn, they'd be close to unstoppable anyway.
“No,” she said. “Even if she has to land, it'll take hours or days to search for her. We keep going.” She gestured at the hole. “Sombra doesn't need to know the details. If anyone asks, we got this in a battle, clear?”
“Clear.”
“Good.” Blueberry led them back in the direction of her room. ”You know, I think I'll try it up for now.”
As Sweetie Belle flew, the sun fell rapidly toward the horizon. A shallow mountain range rose to the east, its slope lit up pink, and ruffled outcrops of rock began poking up through the desert and pointing their long shadows towards it.
The fuel gauge was nearly empty. Sweetie Belle stared at it, then back up at the desert ahead. Maybe Ilmarinen was just over the horizon. Maybe if she flew just a few more kilometres she'd see it.
But though she'd approached Ilmarinen three times now, she didn't recognise the landscape at all. That didn't prove anything, but it wasn't a good sign.
The fuel gauge passed into the red section. A light blinked on the far side of the console.
“We're going to have to land, aren't we?” she said out loud.
Saffron appeared beside her. “I think so.”
Sweetie Belle kept flying. Maybe it was just over the horizon. If she couldn't reach Ilmarinen, at least she'd get close enough to see it..
The fuel gauge crawled down. The sky remained empty.
She looked down at the rock field below, out at the horizon, then back at the ground. With a small sigh, she brought the gunship to a hove above one of the outcrops. Better this than crashing. Slowly she descended and landed on a flattish portion of the outcrop.
To the left, the grainy, whorled surface of the rock descended several metres into a dip, then rose again steeply on the far side; to the right, it dropped away vertically to the desert below. It was still warm for the moment, but that would change soon. Sweetie Belle closed her eyes and curled up in the seat. She almost wished she'd stayed on Blueberry's ship.
Scarlight soaked the cockpit in almost-orange, casting shadows at wrong angles across Sweetie Belle's coat. Daemons whispered in her ears, and words she didn't know she understood came sneaking through the sibilant flow without warning: Now; resplendent; attention. The air became colder, but wanting to conserve her energy, she wouldn't cast any warming spells until it became unbearable.
The last few days were stuck on a loop. Everything she'd been through, all she'd learned, and it had come to nothing.
She screamed out some incoherent curse as loud as she could, and slammed her hoof down on the side of the cockpit. That accomplished nothing, so for a few seconds she sat trying to calm herself.
She ran through the past few days again – and realised something.
“Saffron, remind me again how that giant skull can pick up magic from far away.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Right, there are three ontic fields. The field equations for one of those make it extremely effective for the propagation of waves. So much so that nearly every use of magic sends out waves in this field, and –”
“Okay, so if I were to use a spell right now, some echo of that would go out get caught in the skull right now?”
Saffron, now manifesting beside Sweetie Belle, gave a small shrug. “Within a few nanoseconds, yes. But I'm the only one in this place who could make sense of such a signal so if you're thinking of trying to signal for help …”
“It doesn't have to be the skull, though, does it?” pushed Sweetie Belle. “Anyone in Amaranth who was looking for the signal.”
“Yes, but still, you're thinking of screaming for help in the land of the deaf.”
“Isn't there anyone – anyone – who might notice a magical wave?”
“Blueberry and her friends?”
“Anyone else?”
“No! Listen, nobody from your world … wait. No. Wait.” Saffron's face widened into a big grin. “Aelewyrms can sense magic.”
Sweetie Belle stared at her. “Let's go back to Blueberry as a main candidate.”
“No, not the big one. The hatchlings! They like you. They're already familiar with your thaumic signature, and they're bonded to you. And they have better hearing, if you will, than the big one. I just need to concoct a sort of summoning call and make it into a spell you can you use. Give me a moment.”
Sweetie Belle waited.
“Okay, done,” said Saffron a few seconds later. “There, you feel that spell? It'll be draining, but it should work.”
She was right. The spell seemed to swallow all the remaining strength in Sweetie Belle's muscles as it built. Her horn flashed green briefly – and that was it. She sagged down in her seat and leant over the console. A needle of ice lanced down from her horn to the back of her neck and stayed there.
“Will it work?” she whispered.
“I'm sure … I'm pretty sure it might,” said Saffron.
“Oh, good.” Sweetie Belle shivered. “Don't get me wrong, I'll be glad to see them, but how are they going to help me?”
“You can ride them.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course,” said Saffron. “They're not sapient, but they are very smart, social creatures. Actually, my mate and I were considering raising one.” The thought seemed to trip her up. She stared off into the distance and chewed at her lower lip, then turned back to Sweetie Belle. “Anyway, the adult you've run into isn't representative. That's a lone dominant male. I think he's caught into a sort of permanent musth. Generalised aggression, attacking anything that looks remotely like competition.”
“The hatchlings won't grow up to be like that, then?”
“Probably not.” Saffron cocked her head. “I can't say for sure. I'm an engineer, not a biologist.”
“That's good to know.”
Saffron shrugged. She still looked preoccupied after the mention of her mate.
“What else did you see in Blueberry's mind, then?” said Sweetie Belle.
There was a pause. Saffron looked away. “I thought it would be best to leave that until we'd found safety.”
That caught Sweetie Belle's attention. “It's that bad? Well … I'm here now, and I haven't got anything else to distract me.”
“Tanelorn,” said Saffron. “That's what I saw in her head. Tanelorn.”
“And what's that?”
Saffron gave her a sidelong glance. “A city. No, more than that. The capital city of qilin civilisation. I thought … I thought it was gone. Destroyed like everything else. But Blueberry Pancake seems to believe it still exists.” She smiled faintly to herself. “I know what she was doing. Repositories automatically form networks– they find other repositories nearby and share basic information. Position, that sort of thing. Normally the effect is limited to a few hundred metres. But remember what I said about the world being fluid before you lot came here? Given that, and given millions of years, it's possible the last few repositories left on Amaranth shared information. Fragmentary and incomplete, yes, but Blueberry's been putting it together. My repository held the last piece of the puzzle. And now, if there's repository in Tanelorn, she'll know where to find it.”
Sweetie Belle took a moment to consider this. “So she finds Tanelorn? And what's there – a lot of qilin technology? Is that that she's after for this 'S.' creature?”
“I hope so,” said Saffron.
“What? What else is there?”
“I told you that there were many civilisations in Amaranth before the qilin. One of them left behind a machine. Not a machine in the way you'd understand it – it was closer to a self-sustaining spell, or a defect in the ontic fields, hidden in a sliver of quartz. It was old – we estimated it predated qilin civilisation by at least three million years. It took us decades at the height of our power to understand it. But by the end, we had a pretty good idea of what it was meant to do, even if we didn't understand the mechanism.
“It connects to the Scar – maximum magical potential – and infuses a creature what that potential.” Saffron smiled faintly. “We called it the Apotheosis Machine.”
“It makes you into a god?”
“If you like, yes. You don't have to worry about spells or energy. You get a direct connection from will to effect.”
“So why didn't you use it when the daemons came through? You could use it to get rid of them, right?”
“We stepped up research … that was one of our main attempts to save ourselves near the end, but we never managed to make it work properly.”
Sweetie Belle tried to ignore the daemon whispering in her ear. “Then we don't need to worry about it, do we? If you couldn't make it work, Blueberry has no chance.”
Saffron paused, looked at Sweetie Belle, then looked away.
“Oh, for pony's sake, there's more?” said Sweetie Belle.
Saffron sighed. “I suppose I may as well tell you everything. When the daemons finally learned our language and started to affect us, we still hadn't found a way to stop them. I managed to put together a field generator that repelled them. The problem was it only worked in a single pulse, needed hours to recharge, and was only effective to a radius of thirty metres or so. Then they'd flow back in immediately. And everything was going to hell around us.
“So my mate and I did the only thing we could think of. We stole a small ship, took it out, and used the generator to clear it of daemons. So long as we didn't get too close to any other technology, we could avoid getting any on board.
“We lived together on that ship for two years while civilisation disintegrated around us, trying to make the field generator work properly. Eventually, we fell out. He thought the field generator wouldn't work in time, and came up with a plan to make to Apotheosis Machine work. We …” Saffron paused, looked out into the dark desert ahead. “We had an argument, and he set out on his own. He believed he could get to it before the daemons affected him too much, use the Machine and clear them all out. He said he'd come back to me if he succeeded.”
“So did he succeed or not?”
“I thought he'd died in the attempt … but no. He survived, and must have used the machine. I saw him in your memory when I was trying to find a way to talk to you.”
Sweetie Belle stared at her.
“You know him as Discord.”
“So, let me get this straight. Discord used to be a qilin like you. Which is why you decided to hitch a ride with me in the first place. Now Blueberry and her friends are going to find the hidden city of Tanelorn so they can make someone – probably S. – as powerful as him?”
“Probably more powerful. The Apotheosis Machine requires an immense amount of thaumic power – I don't think he used it at full power, so the effects were limited.”
“It'll be fun getting the Ilmarinen navy to believe any of that.”
“You're going to tell them?”
“Well, I'm not going to go after her, that's for sure.”
Saffron cocked her head.
“What?” said Sweetie Belle. “What could I possibly do to stop her? I couldn't even escape from her. I came here to find Scootaloo, and that's what I'm going to do. Then we'll all go back to Equestria, you can see Discord again, and it'll be fine. I'll tell the princesses too, just to be on the safe side. But it's not my problem, okay? I …” She looked into Saffron's dark eyes and found she was struggling through a lump in her throat. “I've had enough, okay? Enough. I just … I just want to get Scootaloo and go … go home!” She turned away. Her breathing was ragged and there were tears in her eyes. She brushed them aside with her pastern, and looked out at the desert to try and calm herself.
“Okay,” said Saffron. “I understand. We can just go home and forget about all of this.”
Sweetie Belle nodded, still unable to speak.
She might have slept for a while; she wasn't sure. But when she looked out into the sky again, she saw something in the sky. No, five things. A long way off.
After staring at them for a few seconds, she struggled from her stupor and slammed open the cockpit door. Freezing air enveloped her immediately, but she got out anyway onto the gentle slope of rock. Her shadow in the false-orange light smeared to the side. She trotted to the edge of the rock and waved to the approaching aelewyrms
Ten or fifteen minutes later she could hear their chirrups and sussurations. Soon after they landed in a scattered formation around her.
The closest nudged at her chest and head. “Hello, hello!” she cried, she putting her hoof against its upper mandible and gently wrestling it down. “Yes, I missed you too!” She nuzzled that once, then turned to the next which was pushing forward. “They came. They actually came,” she said, turning to Saffron, unable to stifle a grin. Now she really was crying.
She went from each to to the next and back again, greeting and playing with them. They'd grown – maybe fifteen feet from mandible to tail. They smelt sweet and slightly sickly, and padded back and forth across the rock, occasionally unfurling and stretching a wing-limb, then coming back to nudge Sweetie Belle again. A couple explored the gunship, and one pulled away the fuel cap and investigated inside.
“You need names!” she decided, then hesitated. Five names, when she was only beginning to be able to tell them apart. “Maybe … maybe we should save that till later. Actually, you. You whine a lot. I might call you Chardonnay.”
“The welkin rings,” muttered Saffron, and shook her head. “How about we get out of here and get you rested before you try any more names.”
Sweetie Belle looked up at her. “Yeah … probably.” It was getting colder, after all. “How to I ride one of these things? They're wild, and I don't exactly have any training.”
“No, it should be fine,” said Saffron. “I think.”
“You think?”
“Again: Engineer, not animal trainer. Pick the most good-natured one … I think that one, over there. Go up beside it. Touch its mandibles like you've been doing. Like that, yes. You can communicate a little with your magic …”
After half an hour or so of Saffron's careful instruction before Sweetie Belle at last convinced the aelewyrm to lower the body segment between its foremost and middle pairs of wings. It sat their patiently while she tried to climb up. Eventually she managed. Its body was just a little too wide to grasp comfortably with her forelegs.
“Now, those magical signals we talked about?”
Sweetie Belle nodded and signalled forward.
And suddenly the aelewyrm was in the air, she was shrieking, and it felt like she'd left her stomach two or three feet below. After a few seconds she managed to regain her composure.
She was flying! Not in a cockpit or on the deck of an airship, but actually flying free, with the wind buffeting her face and mane. The other aelewyrms took to the air behind her, and on Saffron's instructions, she took the aelewyrm on a broad circle around the rock. Then, at last, she set off towards what she hoped was Ilmarinen.