Two royal guards were injured while exploring the bottom sections of the alien ship. The squad had just completed its sweep of the lower levels and were about to return home to report their findings. On the return journey, they came in contact with one of the repair golems. The sudden encounter at an intersecting corridor made Private Contrail panic, and the pegasus took to the air despite orders not to fly inside the wreckage.
Private Contrail reportedly lost control and crashed violently into his squad mate, Private Pumpkin. The injuries were a sprained wing, several bruises, and a dislocated hip. Doctors decided they were to be airlifted by a chariot and admitted to Canterlot Hospital.
Twilight Sparkle tossed the latest report over the command table, causing Rarity and Starlight Glimmer to turn their heads.
“That bad, huh?” Starlight said and pushed away her stack of parchments.
“Two injuries,” Twilight murmured, then turned around until she faced the large whiteboard. It displayed the in-progress blueprints of the alien spacecraft.
“They found more stored-away material and machinery, but still no signs of any aliens,” she continued, and levitated over a red pen, crossing over the section the squad had explored. “I can’t believe we haven't found anyone yet. A ship this massive should be able to house thousands.”
“Yet still no signs of our extraequestrial visitors,” Starlight noted, and placed her head on the table. “I'm starting to believe the ship was crewless to begin with. Maybe one of the golems was the pilot?”
“We can't be certain of that.” Twilight rolled the pen in the air while trying to decide where to send the next expedition. “The front is buried deep in the mountain, and there might be injured ponies inside.”
“I doubt they are ponies,” Rarity chimed in. She tipped her black and white sun hat while reading today's newspaper. “Ponies don't like their ceiling so high up, and those dull hallways desperately need a mare’s touch.”
Twilight's tail swished, she desperately wanted to meet with the alien leader. “Ponies or not, they may need our help, and it's vital we make a good first impression.”
Starlight frowned at the piece of paper in front of her. “At this rate, we will run out of royal guards fit enough to search the wreckage, and those metal golems have been patching up our entry holes. We have less than a week until the whole thing becomes inaccessible.”
“Do we have enough volunteers for another search party today?” Twilight asked, hoping for some good news. Their little camp at the base of the crash site supported nearly a hundred ponies, but so many had to return to Canterlot for medical care. She had asked Celestia for replacements, but the royal guard was already stretched thin. Most of the unicorns were on duty keeping the barriers active above each town since meteors could still be seen to this day, while the pegasi and earth ponies searched the ground and air for anyone who fled into the woods during the first night.
Twilight couldn’t believe that it had already been three days since it all started. That night, she woke up to the sound of screaming. At first, she believed it was all a dream. Only when she stood outside, alongside most of the town, did she realize what was happening. She had teleported up to her telescope, and it dawned on her that the world might be ending, that it would be impossible for anything to survive the massive meteor shower heading for the surface. Despite the hopeless situation, she had erected a protective barrier around Ponyville.
Luckily, she was fooled by her sense of scale. There were no large asteroids among the firestorm, and, as far as she knew, all the meteors were vaporized before reaching the surface. It was determined that the following quake was caused by the crashed alien spacecraft, though she still couldn’t fathom how anything survived such an impact.
“Twilight, darling,” Rarity said, coughing politely to get their attention. “I’m going to visit the medical tent and see if Dash and Applejack are better. You might want to read what's on page twelve.”
Rarity levitated the newspaper over to Twilight’s side of the table, and a curious Starlight Glimmer joined her.
“What does it say?” Starlight asked.
Twilight only needed to skim through the first paragraph and glance at the picture of an abandoned house to know what it was about. The combination of potential aliens on the loose and ponies leaving their homes were causing a fair amount of headlines. What worried her was the rhetoric was getting worse by the day, and how openly some now criticised the princesses’ decisions.
Twilight highlighted her frustration with a deep groan. “Just another article spreading panic by claiming that aliens are abducting ponies."
“I’m sure Princess Celestia will manage,” Starlight replied, and quickly changed the subject. “As for the next expedition, we’re short one unicorn, so I would like to volunteer.”
“Starlight,” Twilight whined, not wanting to have this discussion again. “I need you here by my side. You know that having strong innate magic makes it more dangerous to move inside the ship. Earth ponies can’t control their strength, pegasi can’t fly straight, and who knows what would happen if a unicorn of your caliber has a magical mishap.”
“Alright, alright,” Starlight mumbled and levitated over a parchment. “If I switch with Private Ironhoof in the perimeter patrols, we will have enough.”
“Which patrol?”
“The one lead by Soarin heading south. But I’d have to move out within the hour.”
Twilight just nodded, then pulled her apprentice close with a wing hug. “Oh! Be safe out there, Starlight!”
“Yes, yes, it’s just a walk in the woods,” Starlight replied, pushing herself until she was out of hugging distance. “You should follow Rarity to the infirmary if you’re feeling so affectionate.”
“I have too much to do!” Twilight complained. “I need to make sure Keeper doesn’t burn down another tent, check in on the guards, make sure Spike hasn’t pillaged the larder, and we're running terribly short on toilet pap—”
“Yes, I get it,” Starlight interrupted. “You fix things here, and I’ll go inform the troops.”
Twilight watched Starlight leave the tent, then took a few deep breaths. She hadn’t lied about having a lot on her plate at the moment, but in truth, it was the waiting that bothered her the most. They could be making history at a moment's notice, and it was on her shoulders that everything went smoothly.
Twilight, this is no time to dilly-dally.
She levitated over the latest expedition’s report and went over their findings. The guards managed to search a total of twenty-eight rooms before the squad leader decided it was time to report back. Nearly all were massive cargo storages, stacked with the same metal as the hull of the ship.
They had already confirmed that the golems used the metals to patch up the damage to the ship. The only golems yet encountered were shorter than a pony, and typically moved about on wheeled legs connecting to an otherwise cylindrical body. They could fly, run up walls, extend metal limbs for welding, and carry materials that should be too heavy for such a thin frame.
They’d been unable to communicate with the golems, and Twilight had quickly forbidden any meddling with their repairs. There had been several incidents with royals guards encountering them during their searches, but the golems had so far not shown any signs of hostility.
Twilight shuffled through the paperwork, signing requisition forms for whatever supplies were needed to run the camp, but her mind wandered and made it challenging to organize properly. Her breathing exercises helped in these situations, allowing her to focus on the most crucial issue of the moment.
Right, we’re almost out of toilet paper.
Helena liked to take her time when exploring a new world, but from her vantage point, sitting on a branch in a tall tree, she had to admit that this one was surprisingly dull. The trees and animals were so far only of Earth origin, something nearly all colonists preferred to use when seeding a new world.
There was only one oddity she couldn’t quite place. A sort of invisible ripple in the air and ground around her, almost as if the world reacted to her in some strange manner. It would be easy to uncover the phenomenon with the aid of her ship, but her original plan had been to infiltrate one of the major cities, and so she had chosen to land away from the crash site.
Helena decided on a half-measure: she had a perfect mental visualization of the layout of the land, and it was possible to both move closer to the ship and a settlement if she traveled through the hills and forests.
The only thing she wouldn’t risk was being traced by directly communicating with her vessel. The locals and whoever made this world were likely already at the crash site, and she could divert their attention by allowing them to poke around the ship.
She made her way down the hill, walking at a modest pace through the sparse pine forest. The clothes she wore and her skin repelled the light rain and muddy ground, and if any local woodsman saw her, they would no doubt take note of her attire’s pristine condition in such weather. It was possible to deactivate the repelling qualities of her dress, but since it was the only one she brought, she decided to keep it active.
Since being inconspicuous was no longer an option, she increased her walking speed up to a jog, then a full run, lastly reaching a speed beyond the capacity of most humans. She quickly zoomed through the forest, sometimes even jumping the distance between hills and over rivers.
Helena continued for about an hour until she was alerted to a potential situation. It was considered a low threat since the automatic time-dilation only slowed down reality to a tenth of normal. She turned in slow motion to the direction she had been warned about and was surprised that the trigger was a bear.
A black bear stuck halfway up a tree to be precise. By her estimates, it was a young adult whose mother never taught it how to climb down properly. The loose beehive at the base of the tree told the rest of the story.
Without pausing her momentum, Helena changed direction and leaped.
She caught the bear in mid-air by wrapping both arms around its stomach, and held on tight as the bear desperately flailed its limbs on the way down. Once they landed, she let it go and watched as the bear sat down slowly on its rump. The unfortunate thing tilted its head in confusion, and Helena found the gesture to be surprisingly human-like, but decided not to investigate further and leave the bear to its honey.
With the situation resolved and time resuming to normal, she took off towards her original destination.
“Pinkie, absolutely not,” Twilight said, firmly.
“Aww, why not?” Pinkie replied while bouncing along next to Twilight. They were in the shadow of the giant engine sticking far up into the sky, and the ponies in the camp were slowly getting used to it looming over them.
“Do you know what kind of incident it might cause if we marked every golem with a balloon shaped stamp?” Twilight could see it now. Her sitting in front of a tribunal and having to explain to an interstellar counsel why one of her friends thought it was a good idea to smother their holy constructs in pink balloon marks. “Besides, what will you do if there are hundreds of them?”
Pinkie stroke her chin with a hoof and somehow managed to continue bouncing on three legs. “I could make a bigger balloon stamp that represented the value of ten balloons.”
“Pinke, if you want to keep track of the golems, you’ll need to find another way.”
“But placing party hats on their heads didn’t work either!” Pinkie exclaimed.
“You did what?!”
“Nothing!” Pinkie said and bounced out of sight behind one of the tents before Twilight could confront her.
Breathe in, breathe out.
She was at the southern edge of the campsite, or outpost fifty-one like Rainbow loved to call it, about to visit Keeper, who claimed to have something important to show her. She would love nothing more than to have the crazy stallion booted out of her camp, but he had special permission from Celestia to study a select few contraptions extracted from the alien ship.
His tent was in a secluded section of the camp, mostly because his neighbors were smart enough to relocate after the first fire. Twilight frowned at the sign with a crossed out unicorn horn at the entrance and opened the flap with her hoof. Keeper stood in front of what she recognized as a kitchen table, and he was, as always, wearing his dumb black robe with the hood down.
“What’s that smell?” Twilight asked, sniffing the air as she tried to place the odor.
“Princess Twilight,” Keeper said, not looking away from an apparatus shaped like a metal rectangle with a little hopper at the top. ”Come closer. I want to show you something.”
Twilight had to admit she found the work he did intriguing, and if she weren’t responsible for so much of the administration around here, she would have loved to experiment with alien technology. Maybe Celestia had predicted as much, and that was one of the reasons she had asked Twilight to lead the expedition.
Keeper moved aside so she could get a closer look at the box, but she was more surprised to find several wooden bowls with mounds of various powders on the table.
“What does it do?” she asked and switched her focus to a stack of notes.
“Take some of the red powder in your hoof,” Keeper instructed, and waited while she hesitated. “It’s just copper.”
Twilight did as she was told, but stopped when she recognized the initial smell.
“This powder over here.” She gave one with tiny white pebbles a quick sniff. “Were you the one that stole the bathing powder from the mares’ bathhouse?”
“I needed to test more substances,” he said, neutrally.
Twilight couldn’t see his expression beneath the hood, but she was positive he said it with a straight face. “Of course you did, and I supposed it didn’t occur to you to ask nicely if you could have some?”
“I didn’t have enough time to ask. Much more time efficient to just go in and take it.”
“I’m honestly more surprised you left the tent during the day.”
“Actually, I procured it during the night. Far fewer ponies around to interrupt my work.”
Twilight shook her head, not having the energy to continue down that line again with him. Instead, she took some of the copper powder in her hoof and didn’t need any further instructions. It was apparent she was supposed to put it down the hopper.
“Good, good,” Keeper murmured, then tapped twice on the side of the box. “There is a way to activate it on the side. Slide your hoof over the surface until you feel a barely noticeable bulge, then press down with moderate force.”
Twilight did so, and as soon as she pressed down at the correct spot, the machine came to life. It startled her at first with a quick rumbling from the inside, and what surprised her the most was how the white front lit up like a hologram that displayed a list in the aliens’ written language.
“It’s a machine that analyzes different materials!” Twilight exclaimed, and felt the scientist within her threatening to take over.
“I knew you would catch on quick,” Keeper said and nodded in approval. “It has analyzed everything I’ve tried putting in it so far, and if with cross-reference the data we might—”
“Start deciphering the language,” Twilight finished. “We need to send this to Canterlot right away.”
“May as well,” Keeper said, before gesturing with an outstretched hoof that was barely visible beneath the cloak. It pointed at two more strange machines. “I have plenty more to occupy my mind with.”
“Great work, Keeper,” Twilight said, and forced herself away from the alien device. “I’ll send someone to take it off your hoofs later.” She looked around the room one final time, before turning to the exit. “Was there anything else?”
“Actually, there is one more thing I should mention.”
“Oh?” Twilight asked, hoping it would be brief so she could return to her duties.
“The artifacts from the vaults. The ancient ones now guarded by my apprentice.”
Twilight had read about them. “Yes?”
“I now believe they were created by the same aliens who made the spacecraft. The strange magical distortion, some comparable markings if you look close enough, and the size of the tools all match up.”
“If that’s true, then the aliens have been here longer than ponies,” Twilight said, but couldn’t quite believe it. “How come we haven’t seen any sign of them until now?”
“Maybe they left and abandoned this one ship in space, and it was kept in shape for millennia by the golems. When the meteor storm hit Equus, it could have impacted the vessel and sent it out of orbit.”
Twilight admitted that it was a possibility, but it still left them with a mystery.
How did the stars disappear?
Starlight Glimmer was bored, tired, and dirty.
For three hours she’d been waltzing through the forest, in the cold rain, with a squad of guards at her side. There weren’t many hours of daylight left, and who knew what she was missing back at camp.
“You think we will see the stars tonight?” one guard asked.
Starlight frowned and swirled one ear to listen in on what the pair of earth pony guards were having a conversation about.
“I hope so,” another replied. “The night sky has become so eerie.”
“I heard rumors that the aliens placed a forcefield over Equestria. That’s why we can’t see them anymore.”
“That’s dumb. We can still see the sun and moon.”
“Got a better explanation?”
“Hey, keep it quiet down there,” Soarin said, after swooping in from above. “No more of that kind of talk until we’re back at camp.”
The two stallions saluted and remained silent, yet Starlight knew that what they said was already on everyone's mind. She had more insight into the situation than most, but no more answers. All she knew was that the stars vanished the same night as the alien ship appeared with the meteor storm, and Princess Luna confirmed that she could no longer sense their presence.
Twilight informed her that Princess Luna had fallen into a depression, and now spent most of her time locked away in her bedchamber. The stars had been one of the few things she remembered from her exile, and rearranging their formations at night was to her like greeting an old friend. Starlight highly doubted that Luna’s magic could reach so far out, but Twilight had a theory that Luna simply manipulated the light they emitted.
“Something is moving over here.”
Starlight turned to the sound of the voice. It was their lead scout, a brown earth pony mare with a gray mane, and she was twenty yards ahead, laying with her stomach pressed to the grass and peeking over a small slope.
Soarin was the first to react and quickly gained altitude with a powerful flap of his wings.
Starlight and the two stallions exchanged glances, then eventually made their way over to the mare. When all four of them were side by side, the reason why she had called them became apparent.
In the middle of a grassy field devoid of trees, stood what had to be an alien, watching them in turn. It resembled some sort of fairy out of myth: tall and slender with perfectly smooth skin and an immaculate white dress and long blond mane blowing in the wind. It was hard to make out any more details at this distance, but there was something unnatural with the air around it, almost like it radiated heat in pulses.
Speaking of pulse, Starlight could feel her heartbeat pumping.
Sweet Celestia, I’m in charge of the first alien contact ever.
She had to force herself away from the alien until she came in eye contact with Soarin in the sky. All the patrols had anticipated that this might happen, and it was protocol that the fastest pegasus in the group would immediately head back to camp and report the news.
Soarin nodded, effectively giving her the go-ahead to initiate first contact. The Wonderbolt headed straight up to clear the trees when things went terribly wrong.
“By Celestia’s…”
Starlight didn’t know who said it, but she quickly switched her gaze to where the alien had been only moments ago, only to find it closer and running at a speed that no biped should be able to achieve. The four of them instinctively backed away, but the alien would be upon them within seconds. Just before it reached the slope, however, it leaped incredibly high up, and Starlight lost sight of where it went.
Why did it? Oh no.
Turning around, she found the alien already back on the ground while holding an unconscious Soarin in its arms.
How did it? I need to send word to Twilight. Are we too far away for a signal flare? Long range teleportation?
The alien gently placed the Wonderbolt down on the grass, then turned to face the rest of the squad.
Starlight gulped before finding her voice.
“We come in peace?” she said, lamely.
”She should have been back by now,” Twilight said while pacing back and forth in her command tent.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Fluttershy said and turned to the rest of her friends eating supper at the table. “Isn’t that right, girls?”
Rainbow and Applejack still had gauze covering parts of their bodies, yet both seemed to be in good spirits after being released from the infirmary.
“She’ll be just fine, sugarcube,” Applejack said. “Did we miss anything else today?”
“Keeper found a way to help us decipher their language,” Twilight said and took a seat at the table. “And he believes the spaceship is an abandoned vessel that was forced down by the meteors.”
“No aliens?” Rainbow asked, and extended her bandaged wings without thinking. It didn’t make her cry out in pain, but the grimace she made was telling. “Did you really believe that story?”
“No, but it does explain why we haven’t found a trace of them yet.”
Rarity returned her teacup on the plate and politely cleared her throat. “I read something lately, and I believe you might find it interesting.”
Twilight took a sloppy bite of her toast and motioned for her to continue.
“It was about the first major incident with ballooned airships, the great Hindburg disaster. I’m sure you're all familiar with its history?”
Fluttershy and Rainbow both nodded, while Applejack, Spike, and Pinkie shook their heads.
“I am, but not sure I see the relevance,” Twilight said.
“To make a long story short,” Rarity continued. “The airship caught fire shortly after takeoff, and the only reason the crew made it out alive was because the pegasi on board carried the rest to safety.”
“You believe the crew jumped out of the ship before it crashed?” Twilight knew that had been a possibility from the start, though they judged it as highly unlikely. “It’s been three days.”
“Well, if I was the alien I would make sure to study the inhabitants from a safe distance,” Rarity said, while rotating her spoon in the teacup. “I would make sure I knew what dresses and what music they preferred, and how their high society functioned.”
“And then what?” Rainbow asked.
“The answer is obvious of course, my dear Dashie,” Rarity replied, and switched to her theater voice. “I would swoop in and charm them all until they could do nothing but my bidding.”
She made a theatrical bow and clanked twice with her spoon for emphasis. It had the desired effect, and they all broke down in giggles.
They were interrupted by the tent flap opening, followed by one of the royal guards with his helmet tucked beneath his front leg.
“Princess Twilight, I have urgent news,” he said and didn’t wait for a reply. “One of our patrols failed to report back in time, so we sent out all our pegasi along the patrol route to search for them. The ones we sent out have all returned without finding a trace of the lost patrol, and we await your orders on what to do next.”
Everyone in the tent turned to regard Twilight.
Starlight.