//------------------------------// // G6.3850: Equestria by Wire // Story: Message in a Bottle // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Over the next week, life in Othar fell into a consistent pattern. Lightning Dust started a flight school on the other side of the island, deep inside the caldera of the extinct volcano. It was a pain getting enough clouds inside so that ponies who fell out of the air wouldn’t have an unpleasant landing, but with some help from Lucky, it only took a few hours. Lucky Break didn’t need basic flying classes, so she only visited when Dust wanted her help. Mostly she spent hours and hours each day recounting cultural details for Olivia or one of her soldiers, and answering questions about Equestria’s history of war or the abilities of its troops. Lucky knew few of the answers to those sorts of questions—she hadn’t been a soldier, and she hadn’t been interested in military history. One theme ran through all others—Equestria was not a military power. It would not be prepared for war, and it wouldn’t be fighting an invasion. It had no national army, only an equivalent of the National Guard and a handful of police in each city. “But that’s not what we have to worry about,” Lucky Break repeated, for the dozenth time. “It’s Celestia deciding that she doesn’t want us here. She’s the one we won’t be able to fight.” Well, her or any of the other mature princesses. Luna, Twilight, Cadance… even Discord. After a week of Q&A, broken with many hours of explaining Eglathrin and drawing out the basics of the language on video for the Forerunner to process, she found herself in Martin’s lab. Lucky had given up wearing her uniform after the third day. Embarrassing or not, being dressed was pointless when the temperature was always comfortable. “What do you want to show me?” Lucky asked, tapping one of her hooves impatiently. “Shouldn’t you be at flying lessons?” Martin shook her head. Like Lucky, she wasn’t wearing very much, though she still had a pair of shorts. Thanks to the way their anatomy was arranged, that was enough to cover anything a human might care about, though of course a pony wouldn’t see it that way. Martin was not a proper pony, but she was far less resistant to the idea than Olivia. “Nah.” She opened her wings, flexing them with a proud expression on her face. “I mastered gliding. Lightning Dust is working the major’s meatheads through that until they get it. She’ll call me back when the whole class is ready to move on.” Pause. “I think. You should really be there more often. Melody tries so hard, but she just doesn’t understand Eoch like you do.” As it turned out, Lucky’s prediction for what might happen when they returned to the Forerunner had been exactly the opposite of what happened. Lightning Dust was loving having ponies to teach, while Lucky herself went slowly insane. Melody—her clone’s Eoch name. Lucky had started using it the instant she learned it, both because it didn’t sound as awkward in her mouth and because it didn’t confront her with the reality of her cloning. “You’re calling her that now? Have you picked out an Eoch name too?” “Don’t sound like the major.” Martin strode away from her, over to the large holofield set into the center of the lab. The system still had that “just manufactured” scent, and Martin wouldn’t let anyone touch it, “just in case.” Even as she approached, the mare put out a hoof, forcing Lucky to stand a full meter away. “I wouldn’t pick one. Maybe once you teach the Forerunner perfect Eoch and it can just give us a chip to translate. Then I might want one for a night on the town. Deadlight could give me one.” “Make sure you get some of the major’s fur dye while you’re at it,” Lucky said. “Last I checked, I’m still a wanted criminal. You look almost exactly like me.” She lowered her voice. “I really need to get back there. What if Flurry Heart needs me? What if Celestia doesn’t want her to know?” “I don’t know what you mean,” Martin said. “But maybe if you care that much, you should use some of the major’s dye and go in. But don’t go alone—lots of us want to see what Equestria is really like.” “Even you?” Lucky walked up beside the holospace, ignoring Martin’s injunction against it. The physicist could be easily distracted—now that she was thinking about something else, the sanctity of her equipment wouldn’t return unless Lucky reminded her. “I thought you only cared about the data.” Martin shrugged. “Data tells an interesting story. But stripped of its context, what does it mean? There are no absolute frames of reference, Lucky. The enemy’s gate is down, the outside of this ring is outer space. The star inside is invisible and Earth is long dead. Fall into a black hole and maybe you’ll watch the future history of the universe flash before your eyes. Maybe I want to get a good look at the civilization living on the ring. Maybe I’m hoping for some observations to make sense of what I’ve seen.” Lucky waited for Martin to explain what she meant, but she seemed to be finished then. She’d started fiddling with the controls again, moving her hooves through the air in the holofield. She cleared her throat. “You wanted to show me something. Something you discovered?” “The Forerunner discovered it,” she answered, waving a dismissive hoof. “I interpreted it. I was the brain.” She gestured, and a representation of the ring appeared in the air in front of them, rotating slowly through space. It was high-fidelity, though nothing compared to the map she’d seen in the Ringbuilder’s station. “You’re not gonna like it, Dunbar. But hiding it from you will only delay your pain. Here.” She moved her hoof through the field again, and the image zoomed. A single section of the ring far away from Equestria filled the entire image. It was an entire surface covered in structures, some of which would’ve made the megastructures of Earth cities look puny. Yet even from this composite satellite photo, something was clearly wrong. It looked very much like what she had seen in person—buildings rusting, whole sections collapsed. Nothing moved, no vehicles, no ponies. No sign of other kinds of life either. “How big is this?” Martin shrugged. “About twenty percent of the habitable area of the ring. They aren’t homogenous either.” The image changed to another city, with completely different architecture. Another that looked like it was some kind of farming mecca, with floating fields on stony terraces that held themselves in the air in defiance of gravity. All were universally desolate. “You don’t want the Forerunner’s casualty estimate, Lucky. Believe me.” She nodded. “You’re right, I don’t. I’m guessing it’s… more than everyone on Earth.” “By an order of magnitude,” Martin said. “And that’s just one estimate. It’s a huge range, depending on what the population density of these cities were.” “How old is all this?” Lucky asked, leaning in close to the holofield and staring at the lingering image of a distant city. This one had a series of metal pyramids rising from a sprawling desert, with a dry riverbed covered with bridges running through the middle. “Difficult to say. We can’t make safe assumptions about the continuity of the atmosphere, let alone its composition. Your artifact—” She gestured towards a glass case in the corner of the room. Its every pattern had already been scanned, though whatever format of data storage it used was not known to them. “It’s between two thousand and fifty thousand years old.” “That’s… quite the range.” “Yeah,” Martin agreed. “It is. The glass was as pure silicon dioxide as you can get. We can’t make assumptions about the material it was created from, because there’s no crust concentration here. We can’t just assume they used what was available as far as isotopes. The shell is radically different here than at Landfall—we’re on a different segment. It’s possible different planets were disassembled to construct this segment… then again, it’s possible there were never any planets in this system, and the material came from star lifting. There are no planets now for certain—no wreckage of the elements they didn’t need. That material had to go somewhere.” Lucky retreated from the projection. Such questions were interesting, but not the subject of her curiosity. She didn’t care so much about the construction of the ring as the ones who had built it. “That’s not the only question. What is the ring doing with all the energy it’s storing? Not keeping us warm—we’re not even a rounding error in that calculation. But the energy must be going somewhere. If it isn’t raising the temperature of the ring, it’s gone somewhere else. It must be.” She went on, rambling as though she thought Lucky was still listening. “I thought it was a habitat for pony civilization, but if that was the case, why kill them? Is it culturing them, raising them to a certain level of advancement, then harvesting them to start anew? But the resources on the ring are finite, that would accomplish nothing except—” “Hold on.” Lucky stopped backing away, hurrying back in a rush. “Say that again. The ring did what?” “Oh.” Martin blinked, looking up from her rapid series of scrolling images. “I thought that was obvious.” She scrolled to another image, this one little more than a black, melted slurry. It looked like a volcano had erupted and covered over everything. “This is what happens when the ring doesn’t cool its exterior surface. The internals appear unaffected, but the outsides…” She zoomed out. The melted slurry went on and on, an endless wasteland that dwarfed Equestria many times over. A quick glance suggested nearly half the ring looked this way, entirely contiguous. The only exceptions were occasional openings for the ring’s own systems, which were entirely devoid of the uneven rocky debris. “How could the ring do that to half of itself and not the other half?” Lucky asked. “How could it have atmosphere where people live, but nowhere else?” Martin responded. “Ask God, maybe he’ll tell you. Because the ponies you love so much? They’re living on a little green speck. It’s about three times the size of Equestria. This ring could house a trillion ponies no problem, but it only has a few pre-industrial civilizations. Why?” “I don’t know,” Lucky admitted. There were so many questions in her mind—too many. The future of her species—whatever species that was—depended on the answers. She couldn’t hide in Othar forever. “Are there any other ring systems nearby? Maybe we could search for answers without even going back to Equestria. Without one of their royals messing with me, there’d be nothing stopping us from studying for years if we needed to.” “Reminder,” said the Forerunner into her earpiece, startling her from her conversation. “Free citizen James Irwin Generation Three requested local time update for planetary area ‘Crystal Empire’. It is currently eleven forty-five local time, and exactly one week has passed. Reminder ends.” Lucky’s eyes widened, and she immediately turned for the door. She’d almost missed it! “Sorry, Martin!” She started running, not even sticking around long enough to hear whatever she said in response. “I won’t miss this, Flurry Heart,” she muttered to herself as she galloped. I hope you’re able to talk. Lucky landed in the materials lab, only a little out of breath from her flight through the hallway. Like so many of the scientific areas, this one was mostly empty, with only the automated equipment running in the absence of staff. Her space suit rested in the examination tray under a suite of sensors, which had probably long since finished extracting whatever information they were going to get. There was no one to interpret the data, so Lucky didn’t know what the Forerunner had learned. She reached in, making sure the “Sensors in Use” light was red instead of green, before yanking the plastic tray out and spreading the suit out on the floor. She didn’t know how to remove the helmet, didn’t know how to use any of the suit’s sensors without using all of them. So, she had to struggle into the suit as quickly as she could. It helped that it had been literally made for her, helped that despite being a space suit the fabric was soft and flexible. It took her about three minutes to get dressed. She made her way over to a console, retracting the helmet. “Forerunner, begin an audio recording.” “Recording in progress.” Flurry Heart hadn’t said anything since she put the helmet on. That might mean they were out of range, it might mean she wasn’t able to use her own suit, might mean lots of things. Lucky hoped none of them were the case. “Flurry Heart,” she said, loudly and clearly. It was hard to know exactly how she was supposed to use the suit’s transmit function. There were no buttons to push. It had always somehow known when she wanted to speak to somepony else, and when she’d only been muttering something to herself. “Can you hear me?” There was a long silence, with no indication of whether the message had gone through. On a whim, Lucky put on the helmet again, scanning over the interior display. Most of what it said still didn’t make sense to her, but she was sure one section was complaining of a slowly depleting fuel supply. It had replenished its supply of air, there were no radiation warnings, no sign of any transmission errors. A voice came over the transmitter. It wasn’t Flurry Heart’s, didn’t belong to anypony Lucky had met. Yet there was no mistaking the absolute confidence in its tone. The harsh judgement, the barely suppressed anger. Whoever this pony was, she was mature and accustomed to obedience. “I hope you realize the damage you’ve done,” said the voice. “Flurry Heart might not recover. Don’t think the eyes of Harmony aren’t watching right now.” Lucky didn’t know how to respond to that. Could they be tracking the signal? The smartest thing to do was probably to shut the suit down. Maybe throw the whole thing into the biorecycler. But she couldn’t, not with such ominous words about her friend. Lucky had to know. But the one on the other line—she still assumed it was a pony, though there was no image to suggest that—didn’t wait for her to recover. “I don’t know where you came from that Harmony didn’t predict this and stop you. If you’re a changeling agent—you can’t imagine what you’ve interfered with. Forget about your petty invasions, forget about the emotions you’re trying to harvest. You’ve put all Equestria in danger. Are you willing to be the one responsible for taking millions of lives? Do you think your sheltered burrows will escape Harmony’s wrath when it comes for Equestria? Whatever you’ve done to escape its notice won’t work when we’re subjected to its vengeance. You and everything you know will die with us.” Lucky Break had been silent all this time, too overwhelmed by what she was hearing to speak. She had a fairly good idea of who she was hearing now. There was only one pony in Equestria who could sound like this and who might have access to Flurry Heart’s suit. It wasn’t Cadance—Lucky had heard her speaking at a distance more than once in the Crystal Empire, and would have recognized her voice. Twilight was too young, and Luna too undisciplined to remain so calm. That only left one. Even so, she wasn’t going to sit there and say nothing. She probably should have—but she didn’t. “Why is Flurry Heart in danger?” she asked. “All we did was find the truth. Hiding isn’t going to change what happened.” For a moment, Lucky wondered if something had gone wrong with her suit. There was such a long delay, that she couldn’t be sure. But then the voice returned. It sounded about the same as before—barely suppressing anger, brimming with righteous indignation. Yet still calm, somehow. This time, it had been tinged with the slightest hint of surprise. “Don’t waste your time trying to conceal your nature with me. I know how little you care about her. If you cared, you wouldn’t have abandoned her to fly back to the Empire alone.” Lucky didn’t argue. There was at least some truth to that—she’d cared more about remaining free than she had about Flurry Heart’s safety. But then again, they’d only been a few kilometers away, in the country that the young princess had spent her entire life. There was no reason to believe she shouldn’t have been able to fly back alone. “If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be trying to get through to Flurry Heart right now. How were we supposed to know what we’d find in there? Nopony in Equestria even knows they’re living on a ring! Flurry Heart didn’t!” There was much less of a delay this time. “I’ll say it once more, whoever you are. The forces you’re meddling with are beyond your comprehension. Equestria has survived because it moves with Harmony instead of against it. I will not allow you or anypony else to interfere. My sister is already working to repair the damage you’ve done to young Flurry Heart. My successor will find you. You will not be allowed to harm the young princess again.” Pause. “And if you think Discord will help again, forget it. We’ve made sure that indiscretion will not be repeated.” Only then did the first signs of compassion return to her voice. “Even if I don’t approve of the choices that created you, I realize this is your home too. When you’ve been destroyed, I will personally ensure you have close observation next time. Your mind is better in Equestria’s keeping than it is with those who would embark on such an insane mission.” Silence. The distant pony, Princess Celestia said nothing further. Lucky Break didn’t either—instead, she removed the suit as quickly as she could, her whole body shaking with the weight of everything she’d just heard. Princess Luna was “repairing the damage” she had done to Flurry Heart? What did that mean, counseling? Erasing her memories? Celestia’s successor must have been Twilight Sparkle. Twilight was the one who told me about that station in the first place. It was a good thing she hadn’t accidentally mentioned that. Worst of all, though, was the remark about Discord. Seeing what he had done, the power he’d demonstrated in saving her life, had made Lucky feel a little like it didn’t matter what she did. She could stay hidden away in Othar while the city slowly grew. It was the safe option, because the longer she waited the more ponies could forget her actions. But Discord apparently wasn’t coming. No—she wasn’t a pawn in anyone’s game anymore. The only one to move her piece was herself. She thinks I’m a changeling. She thinks we’re from somewhere else on the ring. So Princess Celestia wasn’t omnipresent. She hadn’t seen or learned enough to know the truth of Lucky’s origin. That was reassuring, though it wasn’t much to go on. Lucky Break slumped to the floor atop the shell of her suit. She needed to be big—big enough to make big choices. Discord had warned her in the bar where this path would lead. Lightning Dust had warned her too, though her advice had been more pragmatism and less prognostication. But just now, Lucky Break didn’t feel very big. She didn’t know how long she lay there, sobbing quietly in the materials lab. She didn’t even look up when she heard the door open, just buried her head further into the fabric of the suit. Whoever it was, they would have to wait. “Hey kid,” Lightning Dust said from behind her. “Missed you at class today.” “Yeah.” Lucky didn’t look up, didn’t move. She heard hoofsteps, then felt Lightning Dust sit down beside her. Dust still smelled like sweat and jungle plants, along with the damp of weather magic. She’d obviously just returned. “W-what are you...?” She couldn’t even finish the sentence. “What, me?” Dust raised an eyebrow. “Nothing, you carry on. I’m just sitting here.” Lucky suppressed a laugh, which mutated into a choked sob in her throat. “H-how’d you even find me?” Lightning Dust smiled down at her. “The wall-voice is getting much better at Eoch. You must’ve been giving him lessons.” “I have,” she admitted, finally sitting up. She wiped some crust from around her eyes with the back of one leg, though she still didn’t have it in her to look at Lightning Dust. “The Forerunner talks to you?” “Whenever I ask,” Dust said. “Which isn’t much. But I asked him where to find you and he sent me here. Where’s that pony at, anyway? I’ll have to thank him.” “Nowhere,” Lucky tried to explain. “It isn’t a pony. The Forerunner is just a spell—it’s an object, not a person.” “Okay,” Dust said, though there wasn’t even a trace of comprehension in her voice. She said nothing further. “What am I supposed to do?” Lucky eventually asked. “About what?” Dust asked innocently. Though of course she couldn’t have any idea what had just happened. The Forerunner had recorded the conversation, but it was unlikely to share that recording unless asked. Without something clearly actionable in what it had heard, there was little reason to get the crew involved. Stress would only make their jobs harder. Lucky gestured down at the suit. “I just… I think I just talked to Princess Celestia.” Lightning Dust stiffened, her eyes widening. “Really?” “Y-yeah.” “She was here?” “No, she used my suit. Flurry Heart was supposed to be there to talk to me, but it was Celestia instead.” Lucky sighed. “I don’t think she knows where we are. She might not even know about anypony but me. So, you’re probably okay.” Lightning Dust shrugged. She didn’t say anything else, though Lucky could hear her breathing had accelerated. And she couldn’t blame her. I’m sorry I got you into so much trouble, Mom. I’m more trouble than I was ever worth. “The princess thinks I tried to do something to Flurry Heart. Mess with her mind, or share secrets, or… I dunno. She talked like what we saw was putting all of Equestria in danger. Have you heard of Harmony before? Is that a pony you know of? Like… another princess?” Dust laughed. “No, no. Harmony is just…” She grunted. “I’m not the best pony to talk about it, probably. But the ones who do usually talk about it like it’s a… pony’s natural sense of right and wrong. It’s this thing ponies are supposed to feel, that makes them want to be nice to each other. Makes them want to be friends.” Dust rolled her eyes. “I don’t think it’s real. Just an expression ponies use.” “Celestia didn’t talk about it like that. She talked like Harmony would hurt Equestria. Like, searching with Flurry Heart had put Equestria in danger.” Dust laughed. “Well of course she’d say that. Telling ponies things she doesn’t want them to know disrupts the way she organized Equestria. Celestia thinks that telling stories about ponies who use ‘friendship’ to keep them warm will be enough that we don’t ask what really happened. But she didn’t expect you and Flurry Heart, did she?” Lucky swallowed. “She said she’s searching for me. She said her sister is trying to fix Flurry Heart. Are there… Are there spells for erasing memories? You think she’d do that to her own family?” Lightning Dust shrugged. “I don’t know much about Princess Celestia. All I know is she kept Equestria together when we were surrounded by chaos. Often that meant doing hard things other ponies never could’ve done. She banished her own sister to the moon for a thousand years. Did she say she was going to do that?” “N-no,” Lucky admitted. “But it sounded like she planned on something like that. Apparently, Discord isn’t going to help us either.” Lucky whimpered. “I don’t want the ponies here to pay for what I did. Maybe I should go… let Princess Celestia find me. If she catches me, she won’t punish them.” She rose to her hooves. “The best way to secure the success of this colony is to get as far away from it is possible.” Lightning Dust rose as well, though she didn’t start pacing as Lucky did. “Think carefully about that, Lucky. If you get caught, do you think that Celestia won’t be able to learn everything you know?” Lightning Dust looked down, apparently considering something unpleasant. “I’ve been through it. There’s magic for that. She will learn everything from you she wants to know. Including everything you know about this underground city.” Lucky whined. “What am I supposed to do then? I can’t just jump off a bridge, Celestia would think I was still out there and keep looking for me!” “Well that isn’t the reason.” Dust sounded angry for the first time. “I wouldn’t let you.” Lucky waved her off. “I don’t want ponies to suffer for my stupid mistakes. Othar deserves a chance. Olivia and the rest never did anything to attack Equestria. Celestia won’t come for them.” “They foalnapped Deadlight,” Dust said. “And you came from here. If Princess Celestia really wants to make sure nopony like you ever comes again, she’ll have to get rid of this place. Get all its ponies somewhere they’ll be watched, tear all these machines and stuff apart. Wreck the ones that made you. Kill the… Forerunner?” “And she might find them anyway if she’s looking for me.” Lucky was crying again, tears streaming slowly down her face. There was no way out. Somehow, she’d muddled into powers she shouldn’t have. Equestria had been doing just fine without her getting her hooves dirty. It hadn’t needed her to interfere. “There might still be a way. Othar could evacuate without telling me where they’re going. The Forerunner too. They could leave, and I could turn myself in, and…” “She’d still know they were out there. Still go looking for them.” Lightning Dust sounded uneasy. “Or maybe Twilight will never find you. She gave you the information about that ruin in the first place, didn’t she? Why would she be upset that you acted on it? Unless she knew you were my daughter. Knew getting you investigating would make Celestia angry…” “No!” Lucky squeaked. “I know you hate her, but there’s no reason for her to do that! Ponies act the way they do for a reason! Even princesses.” She sighed. “Celestia must think she has a good reason. Maybe she does. This ring killed lots and lots of ponies, Dust. I thought it was some kinda habitat to keep you all safe, but what Martin showed me… that isn’t what it is. Maybe Celestia has a point. I need more information, but I can’t get it without putting the ponies I love in danger. "Okay, I don’t love anypony but you. But I love the Pioneering Society. I want this colony to work. I want humans and ponies to be friends, just like I said. How am I supposed to make that happens when Celestia wants to kill me?” “I… dunno,” Dust finally admitted. “I’d give you advice if I had it, squirt. But you’re in way deeper than I ever was. Most ponies who get a big question like this go to a princess for help. But you can’t do that, since the princesses are your problem.” “Can’t do that,” Lucky repeated. Luna and Celestia worked together, she couldn’t go to them. Flurry Heart was captured, and Cadance was probably even more furious with Lucky than Celestia. But there was another one. “Maybe I can. Maybe I should go to the one who got me here in the first place. Twilight can tell me in person why she sent me to the Ringbuilder base.” Lucky collapsed back into her chair, staring across the room at Olivia. Only one of her seal-team goons was here, the team leader, Lieutenant Diego Perez. She’d just finished explaining everything to Olivia, including her speculation about the viability of an evacuation and the possibility they might’ve lost their ally in Discord. “So that’s why I want to talk to Twilight,” she finished. “She’s the one who sent me out to find the transit station. I think she might be our only ally left. Lightning Dust and I already have a plan mapped out…” She tossed a computation surface onto the table between them with her mouth, showing a map of Equestria. “We’ll fly in from the east, so we don’t hint at what direction Othar really is. We’ll catch a train into Ponyville posing as rich visitors from—” Olivia raised a hoof. “No need for that part. I think you’ve communicated exactly what you had in mind clearly enough.” “But I haven’t even said anything yet!” she whined. “You don’t have to.” Olivia pointed at the map. “After everything you just explained, sending an untrained civilian into danger like that is stupidity of the highest order. You just got through telling me the ruler of that country made you a public enemy, that she plans to extract what you know and then kill you. Then before a minute has gone by, you tell me you’re going to mount a mission into Equestrian territory to surrender yourself to the enemy.” She raised a hoof again, glaring. “No, I know you didn’t mean it that way. That’s why you’re a linguist and I’m the one in command.” Lucky shivered. It wasn’t impossible to see how Olivia could get that impression, given what she had learned. And there was a chance that would be what she was doing. Her plan would have bet the future of Othar (and possibly the Forerunner as well) on the hope Twilight wanted Equestria’s secrets revealed. If she was wrong… “I could bring a cyanide pill! I should probably get something like that anyway. In case they capture me at some point in the future. Anyone who goes up there should probably have one.” Lucky didn’t imagine for a second she would have the balls to use something like that. But she didn’t expect Olivia to even think that far ahead. She’d never consider any of Lucky’s ideas now. “That’s the first smart thing you’ve said.” Olivia pulled over her own computation surface. “Forerunner, we need a dental module and one false tooth for every member of the crew.” Diego nodded in agreement. “Better to have and not need than to need and not have.” “Oral surgery module not present in Othar,” the Forerunner said flatly. “Added to fabrication queue.” “So, you’re letting me go? I can get a fake tooth filled with poison and then—” “No.” Olivia glared at her. “Dr. Irwin, you’re greatly underestimating your value to humanity. Not only you, but the native as well. You’re fluent in two alien languages. You understand native culture. You’re the only ones who we can trust to teach us to fly. We can’t risk losing you on some purposeless passion venture to play pony politics.” She wanted to scream that she wasn’t doing anything like that. Lucky was worried about her friend. Princess Celestia had not sounded terribly eager to grant her mercy. Apparently, she thought Lucky was a changeling, thought that she should be killed. Would Celestia still be willing to do that to her own ponies? Perhaps most importantly of all: did Flurry Heart or even Lucky knowing about the station put them in danger from its wrath? Celestia had certainly sounded like she thought so. But that doesn’t make sense. If knowing about the ring put civilization in danger, it was already in danger. Celestia and Luna obviously know. Maybe Twilight too. And the only one who can help me understand now is Twilight Sparkle. “What if there was some way to communicate with Twilight that didn’t put Othar or me at risk? Would you allow that?” Olivia considered that a moment. “You run any plan you have past me first, then sure. Perez and his team might have suggestions for you—but whatever they are, they will not involve sending anyone into Equestrian territory. It’s going to be off-limits for the near future, until the whole damn country isn’t talking about you.” “Until the…” Lucky repeated, bewildered. Then all the pieces slotted into place. “Hold on! How do you know what ponies are talking about?” Olivia didn’t look abashed to be caught with this information, even though she would’ve known that Lucky (and Lightning Dust too) would’ve cared to find out what was going on back in Equestria. She only nodded to Perez. The pony looked like Deadlight, just like all the males did. He didn’t sound anything like him, though, speaking with a slight accent. Not that it bothered Lucky—she would’ve understood him just as well if he’d wanted to speak to her entirely in one of Earth’s many “dead” languages. “Equestria uses telegraph for much communication,” he said. “My hacker, Mogyla, has one of the arteries tapped. Forerunner helped us with the technical details of their encoding.” He gestured with his wings. “Stepan could tell you the details, he did it all. We are capturing everything they send. Radio transmissions too, though fewer of those. Still haven’t found their secure lines, so nothing sensitive. But we keep looking.” “You won’t find them,” Lucky muttered, slightly frustrated. “Anything secret would be sent by magic—at least one of the princesses has a dragon she uses for that kind of thing. You’ll never be able to listen in on that.” Her own mind had begun to turn, however. “Wait a minute… you’re listening to their telegraph lines…” Presumably they had inserted a remote probe somewhere along the line. It wouldn’t be hard, considering how many miles of unattended wire there would be out in the wilderness. “Could you send as well, or just listen?” Perez looked to Olivia, who nodded her permission for him to continue. “We haven’t yet chosen to use our ability to transmit. Stepan tells me he can imitate their encoding now, if he wishes to. But we cannot be aware of all the details of their system. We don’t know if they leave the lines open at certain times for good reason or not. We don’t want to give away what we’re doing and risk that the enemy would deprive us of new information.” Lucky did not know the intricacies of how the telegraph system worked. “Can I talk to Stepan? Maybe he can help me send a message to Twilight, and make it look like it’s from somewhere else in the system.” Olivia looked doubtful. “Talk all you want. But you will present your plan to me in person before you attempt anything. Is that clear?” Lucky rose to her hooves. She barely stayed long enough to nod before she was rushing off through Othar. She didn’t know specifically where Technical Sergeant Stepan Mogyla would be, only an idea based on what she knew about him. Mogyla was the InfoSec expert from the generation the other scientists affectionately referred to as the “seal team.” Mogyla’s name sounded Eastern European, or maybe Russian. Lucky didn’t know yet, but she suspected addressing the pony using their own language would make them more amenable to helping her. As it turned out, she was right. She found Stepan had made a den out of his security booth, complete with an impressive layer of trash on the floor. Considering Othar had drones to clean that sort of thing up, this represented an achievement on behalf of the pony. He didn’t stink, but his mane was ratty enough that it looked like he should. True to Deadlight’s stolen bat wings, Mogyla’s lair had almost no light, and was illuminated only by the naked glow of a dozen terminals arranged around him. After a nervous introduction, Lucky explained her problem, and learned from the hacker that Perez didn’t even know the extent of his achievements. He wasn’t just listening to pony transmissions, but he’d built a comprehensive map of the network, adding tiny camouflaged listening nodes along as many of its veins as he could. The network had three primary arteries, through one of which every message in Equestria eventually passed. All they had to do was insert the message there at the right time, with the right (incredibly basic) protocols, and it would be delivered to the destination they wanted. Where Perez had been skeptical, Mogyla proclaimed a near-certainty that they could deliver the message without being detected. “So long as we don’t make a habit of it,” he said. “There won’t be any way for them to know we slipped it in. Everything goes through one of those three—they will suspect intrusion into one of their own stations, if they suspect anything.” Another hour or so of discussion, and Mogyla had helped her select an origin point—the smallest telegraph station they currently knew about, located in a remote mining town called Silver Lode. So far away from the path of Equestrian travel that it didn’t even have rail, and Lucky herself had never heard of it. It also happened to be up in northern Equestria, which would support the fiction that Lucky and the survivors of the jumper crash were still up there. “I need to send Twilight Sparkle a message. Obviously other ponies are going to read it along the way, so it needs some kind of text-level encoding… something the princess will guess but won’t seem abnormal if anyone is reading her mail.” Mogyla shrugged. “Your problem, not mine. You tell me what to send, I’ll make it look like it’s from anywhere you say.” “How long is a typical message running through this network? How many words?” He fumbled with the keyboard for a few moments, searching through the data. He wore a gauntlet over each forehoof, with a skeletal hand made of metal and joints on each one. He could type almost as fast as a human might that way, though it did look a bit morbid to Lucky’s eyes. “Longest messages are several hundred. Average message is about twenty. Somewhere in there. Guessing they charge by the word.” “Yeah,” Lucky answered. “They do.” She already had an encoding method she could use—the one Twilight herself had chosen. But what could she send that wouldn’t attract suspicion? More importantly… “If she sends back this way, can you stop the station in that town from getting it? Messages to ponies that don’t exist would probably raise some eyebrows.” “Yeah, sure.” He waved dismissively. “I’m already screening for anything about us. We’ve got all three of their transmission lines on a three-second delay. Just pull those out of the queue, and no one’s the wiser.” “Good.” Lucky couldn’t imagine the technical details that might be required to make something like that happen, and just now she didn’t care. While she had been sitting around doing nothing in Othar, Olivia had been hard at work moving to control information in Equestria. There would be much she couldn’t change, since they still used the post for most communication. With some cajoling, Lucky got permission to send her message. Hardly the in-person visit she had hoped for, but it would have to do. She did what she had before, addressing the telegram as though she were a fictional student in the tiny town. With her surface wording, she referred to explorers past Equestria, exactly as she had done before. With some careful misspelling, she was able to insert a short sentence hidden within the banal text: “whysentruincantcometalk”. A daring amount of information, considering the method. But she wasn’t willing to risk making it any more obvious than it already would be. Now all she could do was wait.