The general spirit aboard the starship was pleasant, or even outright happy. Communication had been reestablished with the surface, and now the crew were receiving direct readings and real-time information from the remnus that had been paired with the Goddess. They had also been informed that the time had come to prepare the ship for departure. This came as something of a shock to the crew, although a positive one indeed. The crew had been specifically chosen for an extended mission, with the members selected for their relative youth. To be returning to Empire space after such a short time was more than welcome, as many members had already accepted the fact that they would die of old age in orbit around their ancestral homeworld.
The captain had not been specific on her briefings, but the information that she had given the crew was enough that conclusions had been drawn. It was generally assumed that Twilight Sparkle would be returning with something in tow, something critical to the treatment of the Mortality Virus but overall of unknown nature.
This lead to the crew overall being jovial as they went about their work. Even the remni seemed more cheerful than normal, if such a thing was possible. The only one among them that did not share in their good spirits was the captain herself, who sat sequestered as always aboard her bridge. Inky Nebula stood at her side, maintaining the suppression field that she had been ordered to generate. Not that it would do any good. It had proven impossible to trace the signal parse, but the captain did not need to. There was only one pony who could have split it so effectively and then made all traces of the connection vanish. For this reason, Inky Nebula had also been instructed to keep the sensory implants that ran throughout her body focused on the cultist ship only, watching its every move while the ship’s sensors assisted Silken Dream with navigation.
The cultist ship still remained docked, for the time being. The pair of ships were connected, drifting together through the exosphere of the planet in tense silence. The link remained viable, and cultists were still free to cross, if only because the captain wanted to avoid arousing suspicion until she was able to react- -and because she still had no idea exactly how many of the mages were still residing in their ship, or what else might be lurking in its liquid atmosphere.
Light Gloom had never left the Prodijila. He remained on board, waiting and listening. As the crew began to prepare a shuttle craft and the necessary decontamination equipment, he sat in silence, watching a representation of the pair of dissimilar ships projected directly into his mind by the needles that ran from his armor to his brain. It was a small false-color representation, a slowly revolving model, perfect in every way: his ship, referred to as N689, and the Prodijila, together in unison, working toward the exact same goal.
He stopped the image, and linked himself to the hive consciousness of his kind. “Now.”
In an instant, the N689 fired hundreds of thin harpoons tipped with artificial diamond into the Prodijila’s body. The morphiplasm hardened in defense, but it was not fast enough or hard enough to stop the tethers from penetrating deeply. Some were stopped, but those that succeeded in reaching the aetherite skeleton of the ship immediately grasped and bonded to it. The Prodijila tried to escape, immediately firing its engine- -and from the speed of that response indicating that they had been watching and waiting for a rapid escape - -but with the tethers already installed it could not separate from the N689.
Before the tethers had even attached, the cultists immediately responded to their leader’s orders. They had dispersed throughout the Royal Navy sailors, and although the other ponies had avoided them the cultists had never given them cause to feel threatening. Now they attached those who had attempted to befriend them. Each cultist summoned their standard array of technomagic weapons, firing powerful enchantments into the crowd. The naval crew was unarmored, and cried out and fell as they were struck by powerful stunning spells.
A few among the crew were able to react. Some of them had the capacity to wield technomagic themselves. They were mostly engineers, though, and the implants that gave them use of some artificial semblance of magic had been designed with safety paramount, taking into account the frail bodies and virally-infected nervous systems of the ponies that would be using them. The cultists had received different implants that had not made such considerations.
Some of the engineers managed to deflect the first barrage and fight back or get to cover, but they were quickly overrun and defeated. They were no match for the well-trained wizards that marched through the ship with vicious precision.
Then, suddenly, the ship began to shift. The captain began to intervene, changing the composition and configuration of the ship’s walls. Her crew was isolated form the cultists by thick, impermeable walls, and the cultists themselves trapped in armored rooms. They immediately began to attempt to cut through, but their abilities were useless against the hull of a starship. Even if they had, the material quickly closed in on them, sealing them tightly and imprisoning them.
Light Gloom stepped out of the section where he was residing. The formerly white walls of the ship had faded to diffuse gray. As he watched, they narrowed at either edge of the hall, sealing it off perfectly and trapping him in one region.
The tall mare who had been waiting with him stepped out of the room and stood beside him. “This section has been sealed off. Penetrating shielding will be impossible.”
“I have no need to penetrate it. However, I was hoping it would not come to this.”
“Hope?”
“Indeed. Appearances to the contrary, I still do have that capacity.” Light Gloom opened several interfaces for his technomatic relays and began to mentally entered a complex formula, one that had been given to him personally by his beloved teacher, the Goddess Twilight Sparkle herself.
Before the walls could begin to isolate him, Light Gloom’s body had begun to dematerialize in a sequence of orange-illuminated pieces. Had he not removed his capacity to feel pain, it would have been agonizing. Within less than a second, the tall mare was standing alone as she allowed the morphiplasm of the ship to cover her. She knew what Light Gloom was doing, and trusted in his ability to accomplish it.
Light Gloom reassembled himself on the bridge of the ship, stepping out of the teleportation spell seamlessly. Two of the primary crew members were elsewhere, and records indicated that Golden Star had already been captured while Heliotrope was blocked in a dead-end area near the central engine core. Only Inky Nebula, the decedent of Lunar Cultists, remained with the captain.
Nebula quickly interposed herself between the captain and Light Gloom. She did so gracefully, but not quickly. Her bones, like all of those of her kind, were so weak that breaking into a run could be catastrophic. She stood there, a sensor unit, unarmed and unarmored, against a pony dressed in heavy cybernetic armor, one capable of using the most advanced technomagic in existence with a power assist that made him stronger than any traditional remnus. From the look in her large black eyes, Light Gloom could see that she understood this as well as he did. He might have admired it, had her foolishness and weakness not both disgusted him so deeply.
“Inky!” ordered the captain, “stand down.”
“I cannot do that, captain. It is my duty to protect you.”
“I do not wish to fight you,” said Light Gloom. “Your body is frail. I could inadvertently cause catastrophic damage to you.”
“So be it.”
“Inkamena! I gave you a direct order! Stand DOWN!”
“No, I won’t, I- -EEEK!”
Inky Nebula cried out as the morphiplasm floor suddenly became liquid. She sunk and was rapidly pulled through to a lower deck before the floor assumed a solid, armored form. Light Gloom’s metal-clad hooves clicked across the space where she had just been. “You sent her away,” he said. “Do you care for the girl?”
“I care for all my crew,” said the captain, turning herself toward Light Gloom. “And I do not care for you.”
“It does not sadden me. I do not terribly care.”
“What you are doing is mutiny,” said the captain icily. “You understand that, don’t you? Think for a second, you fool, do you have any idea- -”
“I am not committing mutiny. You are.”
The captain inhaled sharply. Light Gloom was surprised she still could. “How dare you!”
“My orders are absolute, my mission clear and sanctioned by the Goddess. You intend to adopt several stray ponies, as if that would be the cure we require for the Mortality Virus.”
“You parsed my signal.”
“And I know that you were conspiring against the Will of the Goddess. You are a heretic, and jeopardizing the mission.”
“That little- -you’re working with Twilight!”
“I only exist to serve the Goddess. In this case, it involves vaporizing that planet and everything on it. That is Her Will. Which is why I am assuming full command of this mission.”
“You can try,” said the captain. “But you will not succeed.”
The ship suddenly shifted. The morphiplasm struck out at Light Gloom, assembling itself into sharp white needles. He did not even react physically; rather, he projected a shield spell to block them. Once they had struck and continued to attempt to push forward toward his body, he produced an interference field that assumed temporary control of the morphiplasm in his vicinity. The needles immediately collapsed into piles of small cubes that fell to and merged with the floor below.
The captain attempted to strike again, but doing so was surprisingly difficult. It was almost impossible for her to actually see Light Gloom; he was projecting his own interference field, making the ship’s internal sensors almost useless. This forced the captain to use her own eyes, which were nearly blind. She could see him, but not well.
She condensed the morphiplasm around him, hoping to contain him. If she could contain him fully, she could attempt to interface with his suit and overwrite its core functions. She could imprison him in his own armor if she froze the power assist. However, as soon as she reached out for him, he moved.
He was fast. Far faster than any normal pony should have even been able to survive. In a fraction of a second, he was on top of her. The captain attempted to retreat, using the robotic arm linked to her head to pull her back- -but it was too late. He had taken hold of her body. The captain’s breath caught when she realized what was about to happen to her, and how immeasurably painful it would be.
“You are hereby deposed as captain,” said Light Gloom, calmly. Then he pulled, hard.
The captain was not sure if she was giving him the satisfaction of screaming or not, but the pain was certainly on par with what she had expected. What she had not anticipated was the psychological effect. As the cables of light that linked her brain to the ship strained and snapped, she felt herself breaking with them. Part of her- -her mind, and her identity- -was being left behind. The body she had been born with was only a small portion of her true body, which was the ship itself. As she was pulled apart, the pony she had become ceased to exist as she was torn in two.
In general, captains were never removed once they were installed in ships. It was not considered even remotely safe, and some scientists doubted if it was even possible. It was an indignity that was never meant to occur, a humiliating violation as much as an instance of mortal peril. Yet Light Gloom did not hesitate or slow. He tore the captain free of the cables that bound her to the ship, and then tossed her unceremoniously on the cold floor below.
The sensors were gone. The captain- -if she could even be called that; her identity had been stripped from her for the second time in her life- -lay on the hard surface, nearly unable to see. She struggled to move, but her body was so badly atrophied that she could not even crawl.
Light Gloom approached her. As he did, he withdrew a small rectangular device from under his cloak, suspending it in front of him in a suspense field. The captain could not see color, but she still saw the light as what she knew to be an orange hard-light blade assembled itself around the edge of the hilt. It was a long blade.
“Go ahead,” she sighed defiantly. “Finish what you started.”
“Do you take me for a barbarian?” said Light Gloom, gently setting the hard-light blade on the floor next to the captain. “Ponies do not kill. That has been our way since we were primitive tribes on that planet outside, and I intend to make sure that such is always the case.”
“Then what are you doing? What is the knife for?”
“To give you a fair chance. Go ahead. Pick it up. Fight me. I will cast no spell to protect myself. I will allow you to strike me down, and for you to retake your ship.”
The captain looked at him incredulously, but to her even greater humiliation felt herself attempting to reach toward the sword. Her hooves shook and moved a few centimeters, but even doing that left her gasping for breath. The knife sat just beyond her reach, but she could not lift her limbs. A lifetime suspended without use of her body had left her unable to perform even the most basic physical task.
“You can’t, can you?” said Light Gloom. He turned his back to her and stepped onto the platform where the remains of the blue control cables were flicking back and forth, attempting to find the pony who was meant to be connected to them. “You are a perfect example of what our evolution has brought us. What we will become. You can’t fight me. You can’t even walk. Or stand. This is not the state ponies were meant to occupy! You are not what we are supposed to be!”
“You are one to talk,” growled the captain. “Feeling safe and snug in that armor, maybe? Because you can’t take it off, can you?” Light Gloom looked over his shoulder, and the captain grinned maliciously, knowing that she had found at least some way to hurt him, even in the slightest possible way. “That’s why you wear it, isn’t it? If you removed it, you would die.” She let out a pained laugh. “So we’re both just as evolutionarily inferior, aren’t we?”
Light Gloom stared at her, and then cast a stunning spell on her. The captain cried out as the orange light sparked over her body, and then she fell limp. “Interesting how easily you assume,” mused Light Gloom as he stepped to the platform beneath the blue cables.
He shifted his cloak, and a number of thin, multi-jointed robotic arms emerged from beneath. They arced upward, their claws extending and opening as they reached toward the writhing blue cables. The harsh, cold metal of Light Gloom’s cybernetic body met the elegant light of the connections and instantly clamped down, forcing them to be still as he interfaced himself to the ship. Within seconds, he had replaced the captain and taken full command of the Prodijila.
The ship automatically began to reconfigure. Light Gloom’s auxiliary computers took over the functions that would normally belong to a highly trained naval captain’s mind, manipulating the morphiplasm in ways that they had never been modified before. The color of the ship changed, from white to silver and finally dull black. What had once been amorphous and protean became solid and crystalline, hardening into heavy armor. The ship he was forming was not one that was meant to fly, but one that was meant to serve his purposes.
The first order of business was to free his comrades. At the same time, the ship swallowed its former crew, moving them through channels to one of several brigs that Light Gloom assembled with mechanical precision for the exclusive purpose of housing the ponies he no longer needed until the mission was complete.
He also moved several of his members directly to the bridge, depositing them on the circular floor of his new command center before tearing open perfectly square doors at tangents to the room that led to long, dark armored hallways.
Two of the cultists approach them. One was Luminescence, and the other was her sister, Phosphorescence. Their armor was nearly identical, but Light Gloom could differentiate them easily.
“You have taken command,” said Phosphorescence.
“I have,” said Light Gloom.
“That was not part of our original operating parameters,” said Luminescence. She sounded disinterested, as though this were something mildly amusing instead of anything of consequence. Her view of the world was exactly as it was meant to be.
“No. I was forced to improvise.”
“That is exceedingly risky.”
“Especially with such important matters.”
“This was not an unexpected course of events,” argued Light Gloom, calmly attempting to assuage their displeasure. “I had anticipated this contingency. We can no longer expect Twilight Sparkle to lead us to Cadenza’s remains.”
Phosphorescence and Luminescence paused, thinking carefully. “Then what is your intention?” asked Luminescence at last.
“Assemble a team and remove the Prodijila’s central reactor. We will fire it at the planet and detonate it in the ionosphere. The resulting explosion will clear the interference enough for us to target the remains directly.”
“With the reactor removed, we will not have the capacity to fire the dimensional hammer.”
“Reconfigure it,” said Light Gloom. “Connect it to our central reactor.”
“I recommend against that,” said Phosphorescence. “The N689 uses a multifocal crystal-inversion drive. Our reactor is not compatible.”
“I have performed the base calculations. It has the capacity to power the device.”
“Even if it does,” said Luminescence, “I agree with my sister. The risk of a feedback overload is high.”
“We can take steps to mediate it,” said Light Gloom. “But even in the event of feedback, we will still have accomplished our mission. Or should we not be willing to make that sacrifice?”
The pair did not answer. Light Gloom took this to mean that they disagreed with him. This would most likely not matter, of course. He had almost as much faith in the cultists as he did in the Goddess herself; he was sure that they would find a way to keep both ships intact.
“It will take time,” said Luminescence at last.
“How long?”
“I cannot be sure. It has never been done before. But extrapolating based on an itemized list, two to five days.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“That gives us time to evacuate Twilight Sparkle from the planet. Prepare a ship. We will send for her. I would rather not have her on the planet when we atomize it.”
Phosphorescence spoke. “My analysis of the ship’s records and encrypted database indicate that the Goddess left specific instructions that no living ponies were to set hoof on the planet.”
“Then make sure the agents we send to fetch her are very obviously remni. We do not want to alarm her. Convincing her will best be accomplished if all parties involved remain calm and logical.”
“Do you think it will be difficult to convince her to return?”
“The Goddess has selected a different path than expected. I cannot guarantee that her goals are in line with her Will.”
“And if she does not return willingly?” asked Luminescence.
“We must hope it does not come to that. But the solution should be self-apparent.”
“I see,” said Luminescence.
“And the ponies she is with?”
Light Gloom paused. “That is something more nebulous,” he said. “I cannot yet interpret their potential role. I do not have enough data. Your thoughts?”
“They cannot be allowed to breed,” said Luminescence flatly. “Their genetics represent a failed path of evolution. I suggest leaving them on the planet.”
“I agree, with notes,” said Phosphorescence. “Their reproduction is a threat, but leaving them will agitate the Goddess. I will outfit the remni with surgical equipment. We can sterilize them on the surface, and then return them.”
“So be it,” said Light Gloom. “Although I am not as charitable in opinion as you are.”
“And your opinion is, then?”
“Again,” he said, “that should be self-evident.” Z