Luna should have been asleep. It was midmorning, the birds were singing happily, and Luna had spent the whole night overseeing the dreams of her ponies. Just the thought of her work made her smile, and Luna did a quick little turn around the castle spire nearest to her.
Her greater wingspan put her comfortable altitude above most pegasi. Luna sailed slowly across a thermal draft, then spotted her target far below. Luna tipped forward and started to dive. Tucking her wings in tight, only the very tips affected the surrounding airflow. The edge of Canterlot flew by her, and the cliff of the huge mountain became her companion.
The sleek ship below grew larger and larger. Luna's eyes were half-closed as the air rushed past, but she worked out the point at which she needed to pull her dive up. Turning slightly, she snapped her wings out against the hurricane of wind. Pressure strained at her muscles, but Luna was more than able to arrest her dive and bring herself into a lazy glide to Kiera's lift.
"Lady Kiera, you requested an appointment?" Luna tried to keep her tone warm, and it wasn't hard. Excitement and a love for the world filled the Princess of the Night, and it colored her words and her face. Smiling at the thought of another viewing of the "star map" that Kiera had shown, Luna still felt the butterflies of anticipation fluttered around her belly.
"I did, Princess Luna." Kiera was getting better at picking the moods of ponies, but she didn't need to have a diplomacy module feeding her the information to see that Luna was in a good mood. "Please, you are most welcome aboard."
Stepping onto the lift, Luna heard the soft clopping sound of her hooves on a solid surface. "You must forgive us if this is disrespectful, but you really are quite the marvel, Kiera." Luna tried to imagine a way for the lift to work without magic, and was coming up empty.
"Compliments are never disrespectful, Your Highness." The compliment would have had any of the shellperson advocacy groups raising eyebrows, but Kiera was comfortable enough in her own shell to not take such a minor issue as an insult. "Although other shellpersons might take offense at the reminder that they are constructed." Her tone was carefully upbeat.
Luna waited for the lift to stop, and stepped through the airlock and into Kiera. Each step reminded her of the miracle of engineering that made the starship. She followed subtle lighting until she reached the cockpit of Kiera. Turning directly to the dull gray pillar of metal, Luna dipped her head slightly. "It is wonderful to see you again."
Kiera was tickled pink by how quickly the ponies she had interacted with had adjusted to addressing her in her shell. Though Kiera still used the translation systems, she was studying the pony language herself, in a more direct sense. "Your Highness I—"
"Just Luna will do, when we are alone." Luna wasn't quite sure why she offered Kiera the use of her untitled name, but she got the distinct feel that she was a peer.
"Luna," Kiera tested the waters with the name, "I have been puzzling over your solar system, and I am interested if you can help resolve the conundrum." Kiera brought up a map of the solar system on the pilot's three-dimensional display, and trailed her voice around the room's speakers so that it was coming from the same console.
Catching the flash of light from her peripheral vision, and tracking Kiera's voice with her ears, Luna turned and her heart started to beat faster. Enraptured by the display that hovered in mid air, she stepped closer to it. "That's us…" She lifted one hoof and pointed at the representation of Equus.
"The existence of planets around a magnetar is not unknown. Where the inner portions of your solar system should be, is cleared most capably by the gravity of your star." Kiera used little arrows to gesture between the star and a region of empty space around the hungry, mountain-sized solar body. "But you have never seen your star—"
"We… I have." Luna's memories rushed on her, and she found her mouth moving. "Centuries ago… close to three thousand years. Discord showed my sister and I something like this," she gestured to the map of the solar system, "but much more crude. He told us that he was 'so done' with keeping what was left of the planet alive, and offered us to do it."
Kiera was lost in the story, she had no reference of who Discord was, or what had actually been reported. But dutifully recording everything, Kiera was rapt at the idea of a being thousands of years old.
"We were just fillies, we didn't know what he… what it would do." Luna smiled at the memory of meeting the capricious being before he had gotten carried away in his games. "He took us to see the other side." Luna raised her hoof to the planet Equus, and to her delight it grew to a full size. Tapping the blistering red side of the planet, Luna continued. "The magic there is wild, beyond compare to anything I have ever felt. It was pure, and Discord's domain. He exposed Celestia and I to that power, and it took root."
"That is why you can move such huge things in the sky?" Kiera was trying to follow the story and assemble it into fact at the same time.
Luna paused and thought about the question. "It is true that the sun and moon are much larger than anything we could shift here, so it must be as you say. When we feel the potential in a pony to survive the process, we duplicate what Discord did to us, carrying the pony to the other side and imbuing them."
"It can't be radiation." Kiera was thinking out loud, although she was extremely glad most of her non-flesh processors had no access to her vocal processes. "Radiation would eventually soak the planet and affect everyone. What does magic feel like?"
Closing her eyes and focusing hard, Luna tried to connect with the power she always felt. There was nothing there, simply nothing. Opening her eyes back up, she relied on memory. "Like catching spider webs with my horn. Magic floats and snags, and the more I push the more catches."
"Perhaps a WIMP of some kind?" Kiera had to check her nutrient levels and adjust them to calm her adrenaline down. "Would you like to go on a trip?" The moment she asked, Kiera saw Luna's eyes widen in anticipation.
"You mean," Luna's voice was a little shaky with excitement, "up? Space?" She almost trembled in anticipation. "Yes!" She felt like a filly all over again, and danced from hoof to hoof in sheer excitement. "Err," sobriety had a fraction to attempt to take hold, and failed utterly, "yes please!"
Kiera inhaled. There was no other way for her to describe the process of opening her engine's intake ports, of pumping air into the intercooling system that would chill it down for use as an oxidizer. She inhaled deeply, and breathed out.
The gravity systems in Kiera accounted for the hard shove of her planetary engines shoving backwards, but the small twitches of turbulence were too swift to be accounted for. The screen before her—above the holographic three-dimensional display—flashed to life and showed the world slipping away. The ride was smoother than any flight Luna had personally made, and each second left her breathless in excitement and shock. Equus curved before her, the horizon of the planet outlined by what she and her sister termed The Astral Plane.
Keeping the ride steady, Kiera prided herself on how smooth she had transitioned from the atmospheric engines to her attitude thrusters, and how perfect she had kept the gravity generator in the ship. She didn't want to intrude on the moment Luna was experiencing, but as time dragged on, she felt she needed to say something. Just as she was about to intrude, she saw the tears trail from Luna's eyes.
"It's amazing…" Luna had no more words for the sight. To see the planet in such detail, the world she had watched over, stole every faculty she had. Tears of delight flowed freely. Without thinking, she reached out for her moon, and the special magic the Astral Plane had given her responded.
"Please stop that!" Kiera watched the asteroid zoom through space towards her, and the moment she barked the request it stopped. Her engines were already dialing up, ready to spit thrust to avoid the collision she had expected. "Sorry, Luna, but I don't want to hit that."
Hearing Kiera snapped Luna back to the present. "I will be careful." Luna reached again, and pulled her moon to just within half its diameter of Kiera. Her eyes widened as her moon took up the whole of the viewing screens. "Can… can you show me how large it is compared to you?"
Adjusting the second three-dimensional display was swift, and Kiera fed it the information to the controls. Her avatar on the screen started by taking up the whole display, then shrank. Smaller and smaller the little Kiera got, until the side of the asteroid was visible as an almost perfectly flat wall. "You see why I was worried?"
Luna could only nod in shock. "And that is really how big it is? How can I move that?" She waved a hoof as the display zoomed out further and further. When her moon was roughly half the size it was a moment ago, another huge rock-shape appeared. This one wasn't the pale white beauty of Luna's moon, it was a white-hot sphere of what seemed like light itself burning. "Celestia's sun… are they that close?"
"I am comparing them for size. The strangest thing is that the sun isn't actually burning." Kiera's sensors were picking up plenty of light, but while there was heat it certainly wasn't anything considerable with a fusion reaction.
"Hold on a moment." Luna reached back out to her moon, but not to move it. It felt warm to her touch, despite what Kiera had said. "I can feel heat in it, Kiera." She held her focus. "But it isn't heat like a fire." Reaching around it, she touched the opposite side and felt a rush of power that almost made her stagger. "Magic! Lots of magic!"
Kiera's attention was locked on the huge asteroid. "Does it feel like cobwebs?" All her sensors were straining, their gain turned as high as it would go. She got nothing.
"Yes… no!" Luna caressed her moon. She wrapped her magic around it and felt every square inch of its surface. "It is the same as the cobwebs, if the cobwebs were steel cables." She felt closer with her moon now than ever before. Banishment had seen her trapped in the moon, but she wasn't aware of it. "Thank you, Kiera."
Snapped from her focus by the raw emotion in the words, Kiera felt connected with the Princess of the Night. "You are quite welcome, Luna. So the glow is some reaction of magic with the surface." She was fairly comfortable establishing that, so long as she kept equating "magic" as "something scientific."
In a state of almost complete serenity, Luna closed her eyes and felt her moon only with her magic. Touching it so closely, she could feel the power boiling off it as light and heat. She let it wash through her, over her, and around her.
"Can you trace the steel cables?" Kiera tried a different angle. "Can you feel for them and point where they are coming from, and going?" She watched Luna intently, and the mare nodded just a faction.
Feeling around her moon, Luna traced where it was cutting the cables, and followed the line of them. "That way." Her voice almost trembled as she pointed. "But they aren't straight." The further she reached along the cables, the more they curved. "And they are moving!" Her eyes snapped open at the revelation. "They are moving really fast!" Any hint of the Royal Canterlot Voice, or her archaic style of speech she still affected was gone. Luna couldn't be anything but completely open.
"Can you feel anything else moving that fast? Maybe one of the other planets?" Grasping at straws, Kiera felt like she was using Princess Luna like a sensor, one that was as inaccurate as it was important. But even inaccurate sensors can be used.
Luna didn't have her magic, or she would have shown what the cables felt like. The only magic she possessed was that related to her moon, and she was very sure Kiera didn't want her doing anything related to that inside the ship. "They all curve." She reached further and further, but rather than growing weaker with range, her power seemed to become stronger. "It curves a long way… it curves around that!" Her hoof lifted, pointing at the display on the first three-dimensional display.
"You're pointing at the star, the magnetar…" Kiera accessed all her stats she had for this particular star, and cross referenced them with other reported magnetars. "It seems normal, I don't know why…" She trailed off, stunned. "Radio!"
"Radio?" Luna, assuming Kiera was done with her exploration of the magical cables, opened her eyes and released the vast power that was swirling around space. "What do you mean, 'Radio'?"
"A magnetar usually sends out a lot of radio radiation. There is a reason we called them 'pulsars' in the old days." Kiera was into her favorite topic, space. She loved spacial anomalies, and this one seemed just about the most anomalous ever. "Your star isn't producing the massive radio radiation it should be, but is generating a field of some kind. Because the cables are parallel, it isn't radiation but an actual type of field. Like magnetism."
Luna was eating up the description, her ears perked forwards and—despite how un-princess-like it was—wagging her tail a little. "Your model showed it spinning."
"Yes!" Kiera's voice was excited.
"And from what Princess Twilight explained, moving a magnet transfers its power through its field." Luna hadn't been to any of Twilight's lectures on the subject, but when Luna needed to sleep, listening in on Twilight Sparkle's dreams had no peer. "So our magic—"
Kiera was so excited she cut Luna off. "Is the energy of your spinning star, transferred through this field. The planet itself is shielding some of it, but the other side of it—"
"The Astral Plane is receiving the full field!" Luna panted in surprise, shock, and not a little wonder at how she and Kiera had just discovered the origin of magic. Her earlier thoughts came back, and she smiled. "Princess Twilight is going to want to know about this."
"She really loves science and magic, doesn't she?" Kiera felt flush. She quickly checked her systems and found the ship was having a little trouble shedding heat. "Princess Luna," she used Luna's title to get the mare's attention, "could you move the moon a little further away please?"
"Of course, Kiera." Luna wanted to fly, but she kept her excitement to just moving her moon back to where it should be for the day time of Equestria. "This is so amazing!"
The huge asteroid zoomed away from her, and Kiera felt much safer without the giant object so close. "Now, would you like an orbit or two before we go back?"
"What's an orbit?" Luna's question was answered when Kiera showed her a model of the ship, and the planet, then the ship spinning around it twice. "Yes please!" Her wings ruffled and extended slightly, but Luna barely managed to suppress the urge to extend them.