//------------------------------// // 37 - Abandon all hope, ye who enter here // Story: Final Solution // by Luna-tic Scientist //------------------------------// ~~~discontinuity~~~ Fusion appeared over one of the high valleys, casting a brief glance at the chaos beneath. Bodies were being abandoned where they had been stacked, ponies and gryphons crowding around the heavy dog transports. A constant stream of gunships was landing, picking up small groups before flying away. The cargo aircraft were being emptied, a fortune of equipment discarded on the valley floor to make room for the living and walking wounded. A few were already lumbering into the air, accelerating away from the predicted impact zones. At least those things are faster than flying alone... but fast enough? Fusion spotted Gravity standing on one mountain peak, horn lit up like an arc welder and obsidian fog cascading down the steep, rocky walls. She pushed back a sudden urge to join Gravity and fold her in her wings, settling for hovering a few lengths above. Sister, what do you want me to do? Gravity's mind was full of weight, with barely any room left for conscious thought. "I am not leaving!" she choked out. I won't take you away again. Do you want me to help? No, it's hard enough without breaking them up. A half neigh, half grunt escaped from Gravity's lips. Sweat was already starting to lather her neck and shoulders, turning to ice on her flanks. She looked up at Fusion, eyes glowing a solid white. "Find out what they did and stop them from doing it again!" she snarled. Understood. Fusion's wings thrust down and she shot into the sky, fixing the memory of this place in her mind. She closed the sharing down to a narrow, one way channel; a flicker of mental impressions from Gravity forming a backdrop to her thoughts. ...and if you think I'm really going to leave you alone here if you fail, you have another thing coming. ~~~discontinuity~~~ "Where is this 'Tartarus' place, Orgon? Show me." It had taken a seeming age to get back in contact with the Strategist, and Fusion had used the time to gain height, cloaking herself in magic to hold the air close and recycle it. No teleports, not while trying to stay in contact with Hive command, but with height came the ability to accelerate to high enough speeds that Fusion started to feel a little queasy as she approached free fall. "It is a military base deep within Baur territory, part of their strategic thaumic network. These ones had originally thought it a research site -- there were thaumic surges detected over the last quarter gigasecond. They are not quite consistent with the attack, but..." Fusion could practically hear the shrug the dog's voice. "...close enough. It is the right place. The timing matches the strike on your territory. The pony should be careful -- there is still some thaumic activity." A golden marker appeared on Fusion's HUD, approximately in the direction of her travel. She bent her course, watching the distance spool down as the seconds passed. "The Court thought it caught both ponies, but it will know the truth by now. The Hive's thaumic sensor arrays are lighting up, and a high altitude orbital-speed transit isn't exactly stealthy." There was a pause, then a sigh. "What does the pony plan to do? Now the Court knows it has missed, this one might be able to--" Fusion started to feel warm, the heat coming from within rather than bleeding through from the tenuous plasma sheath that was flickering around the tip of her force field. We’ve had this conversation before, dog! "Can you, Orgon? What if there's another weapon like this? What if they try again, but get it right this time, or the effect is lethal? I've tried to talk, tried to reach an agreement, but every step is met with treachery." She shouted the last word into the comms unit, the word filling the confined space within her bubble of trapped air. Fusion whinnied, frustration boiling over and translating into a further increase in speed. The comms unit started to complain of low signal strength as the radio started to have problems penetrating the thickening plasma. "I am going to end this!" "These ones will use Hive defences to strike at the incoming Hammer rounds. It probably won't work, but this one will try." Fusion took a deep breath, slowing enough to restore communications. "Do not get in my sister's way, Orgon. She is fighting to divert the projectiles. Let her face a rifle round, not a shotgun blast." === Orgon stared at the disconnection icon on the comms panel. The primary defensive strategy against this sort of attack had involved maximum-rate launches from all applicable strategic-order sites, something that might have been enough to penetrate the defences of an indeterminate -- but probably quite small -- number of Hammer rounds. There was, however, a backup. "Defence, engage the Hammer strike at maximum altitude." The pony took a long time to shift the single round... "Let these ones’ allies take care of the first one; select the target based on the pony's performance." Giving Merlon one last scratch, Orgon turned away and went back into the main room. "Vanca better be right about the pony," he muttered. His eyes flicked to the Deadpaw screen, still holding at T minus one hundred seconds. The system had switched to its high-frequency mode some time ago, polling all the Hive’s defence stations to determine their readiness. It was just starting to understand that there was a spreading problem with some of the servitor-powered launchers. Alert status warnings were becoming frequent and more urgent; already the two officers detailed to manage the system were periodically resetting the timer. Of course. Deadpaw was a pervasive deterrent system, and the decision had been made that it really should be a deterrent. Actually turning the thing off permanently would require the disconnection of hundreds of tamper-resistant nodes, all designed in such a way that it could be done, just not quickly. And now it will know the Hammer has been fired. There was always the option of retaliation. Baur had lost most of its thaumic suppressors to either the pony or Orgon's own teleport-enabled strike mission; the firing solutions were long calculated and fully refined, and it would be the work of a moment to activate. His gaze lingered on the section of the room devoted to Lacunae's own strategic thaumic weapons, then he grimaced. Millions made mad, driven to psychotic rage or into a deep enough despair to take their own lives. Civilians all; any attack would be completely ineffectual at stopping any sort of military campaign. It would be an act of spite, something to finish what was started with nuclear weapons and kinetic impactors. Resolutely, Orgon returned to his command chair, turning his back on the softly glowing controls. === Fusion accelerated again, cutting off all communications with the lofted Lacunae drones. The HUD tickled her eye with lasers, writing fine traceries of unreadable text across the top of her visual field, but the compass and direction indicators were perfectly understandable, as was the little map. Quite what the various symbols meant wasn’t obvious, but the new target pulsed like a distant heliostat amid the other icons. Sudden realisation made her magic flicker and filled her chest with lead, making it hard to breathe. I was there! Whatever-it-was was right on her previous course, something she would have flown over on her way to her original target. "No..." The word escaped as a low moan and tears made fresh tracks down her muzzle. Would I have seen something and investigated? "That was it? That was the reason for that pointless attack?" They wanted to keep their weapon hidden. If I’d done what I said I’d do, I could have stopped-- Fusion inhaled sharply, shaking her head to try and dispel the images of bodies floating in the frigid lake water. Her own tears flicked away, vapourised before they reached the inside of her defences by the sudden waves of heat radiating from her skin. The heaviness had vanished, burned away by the return of the fire. “Stupid mare, you knew they couldn’t be trusted!” she spat, increasing both speed and altitude; she knew it wasn't a fair assessment, but the whip of self-recrimination drove her to new heights of effort. Some measure of the persistent weakness from the effects of the thaumic weapon faded, burned away by the heat welling up from inside. Ahead, actinic flares of light were climbing over the horizon, rising like sparks over a fire, the dark points at their tips angling in her direction. The thin clouds beneath her hooves lit up a brilliant, monochromatic green, then burned away to expose the distant ground beneath. The lasers, robbed of a fraction of their power by the air they had to travel through, still managed to dump some heat into her defences, so Fusion caught the light and twisted it about, sending it back the way it came. One after another the emitters went out, cauterised by their own beams. The missiles were closing, but Fusion just gave a mirthless laugh and pushed-- ~~~discontinuity~~~ --appearing over the horizon, her needle-pointed defences sliding through the thin air with barely a shock. The weapons, far behind and with a tremendous velocity in the wrong direction, were forgotten, but the launchers were right there. Savagely decelerating, Fusion lost the bulk of her altitude and dropped thirty kilolengths in the space of as many seconds, falling below the high, thin clouds. The sun was setting, lighting the low hills through clear skies to the west, casting deep shadows through the shallow valleys and highlighting the surface buildings in sharp relief. Underground was harder to read, dense layers of thaumic shielding protected the ponies running the launcher, but the starfish-array of the autoloaders spreading from the central pit was clear. She let loose a pulse of rainbow light, turning the ordered march of candle flames into a scrambled mess. Launch operations halted, the ponies’ drive spell collapsed as some of her power leaked through the shielding and interfered with the delicate balancing act required to let that many magic users work together. Without much thought, Fusion diverted power into a jet of accelerated plasma, flicking it about and letting it play on any surface structure she could see. A continuous explosion of vapourised dirt and concrete rubble tracked the end point of her beam, filling the air with choking haze. There was a significant amount of mass in the beam and the recoil threw her in the opposite direction, until she compensated. The amount of force surprised her for a moment, then she streamlined her defences and directed the jet aft, pulling in more air as she accelerated. Her destination was ahead, in territory she’d yet to teleport in. Rather than chain short jumps together and arrive blind, Fusion poured on the power and stayed at hilltop height, only changing course to avoid anything that looked pony. Behind her tail the grass and forest wilted and smouldered, flash-cooked by the heat of her personal rocket engine. === Lilac, still a little damp but no longer filled with the lethal glacier chill from his unplanned swim, fidgeted among the ever-growing herd. The light was dim, drained away by the point of achingly violet light high on one of the valley ridges. The glare made him squint, but the dark fog cascading away from the light was painfully visible. How long have we got? Half a kilosecond? Less? From the panic in the movements of the gryphons, it was probably a lot less. The ponies weren’t panicking; there was no massed gallop to somewhere other than here. They milled aimlessly, pushed this way and that by the motion of their fellows. Eyes glazed with shock, nopony resisted as soldier gryphons herded them, with shouts and curses and back-of-talon slaps, towards the row of heavy transports, packing them in like cargo. Three of the aircraft had already lumbered into the sky, turning towards the south and some chance of safety. Will it work? Who knows... but at least they are trying. He probed at the empty space in his head again, as if it was a gap where a tooth should have been. Nothing, no distant flicker, not even a hint that there was anything there in the first place. Frustration built and Lilac let out an involuntary whinny, echoed a second later from several places in the herd. Another look at the size of the herd and the number of likely places and he reached a decision, slipping away from the perimeter and between the gryphons. One of the soldiers shouted at him, no words, just a bird-screech, but made no move to intercept, and Lilac joined the steady trickle of ponies heading back to the lake and the rows of sodden corpses. Wheels sticking and jamming on the rutted, hoof-pocked ground, he struggled down the path. Coming the other way he met Random, surrounded by her own milling cloud of foals. He caught her eye and shook his head. She broke from her trot and stood there shaking, her attention flicking from Gravity on her mountain top to him to the aircraft. The foals swirled, agitation increasing, and she blinked, lowering her head and giving out a soft nicker. "There’s no hope, then?" "Not unless Gravity can do it. There's no escape in those aircraft... you remember the flash from last time." Random flinched and Lilac offered her a wan smile. "Perhaps I'm wrong. If they can get over the horizon..." He swallowed, nuzzling at the ear of a copper-coated filly standing between them. "We could get underground, but I think I'd rather stay up top. If the strike gets through it won't really matter where we are." And at least it will be quick. She leaned into the touch, twisting to nibble at his neck with toothless gums before losing interest and stepping away. "Hungry, dam," she said, looking up at Random, the words bright and clear. "I know, Thyme. It will be a little longer..." She looked at Lilac, gaze suddenly calculating. "I think with two of us we might manage it. Want to help me feed the ravening horde?" "How can I help without magic? I can barely walk!" The words came out more forcefully than he intended and Lilac's ears folded back; he made an effort to relax when the nearest foals shied away. Random didn't look upset, but instead stepped closer and touched him on the shoulder with one featherless wingtip. "There's always a way. Let me tell you about a pony at my old corral. His name was Slipstream, and he lived without magic for over a gigasecond..." The pair, surrounded by a score of foals, made their way back to the entrance of the base. === A metal needle riven with pits of ice, that's how Vanca had described the Hammer projectiles, or a bee's nest wrapped around a nail. Thrown from Luna with terrible speed, fast enough to reach their targets in a little over half a kilosecond, there was no subtlety anywhere in the weapon. The schematic twisted and tumbled in the small part of her mind not bent to trying to grapple with the distant, slippery things. They are not so big, not compared to the rocks I've shifted so far, so why is this so hard? The targets were vague, ill-focused patches of momentum at the outer edges of her awareness, slowly congealing to more precise definition as they drew close. The vague haze became lumpy, strung out into a series of pulses, with other material strung between and around the primary masses. Defences against a conventional intercept... decoys, jammers and anti-missile systems. Gravity ignored them, barely detectable concentrations in the general haze, and brought her full attention to bear on the first projectile. Much of the carefully built strength from her previous fights had been eroded, chipped away by the dog's thaumic weapon, but there was still something-- She sweated and strained, distantly aware of the cold, ice-speckled sweat dripping off the fur of her belly, and the closest projectile suddenly snapped into focus. Gravity gasped, nearly fumbling the grab, but latching on and pushing, trying to shift the trajectory far enough that it would skip off the atmosphere and out over the limb of the world. It moved, then stubbornly returned, correcting its path with solid kicks that she'd felt before but not understood. In her head, the schematic changed, pits of water ice in hexagonal cells flashing to superheated steam as the low-yield nuclear weapons suspended within detonated, acting as one-shot rocket motors to correct her modifications. There were scores of the pits, wrapped around the tungsten core like a wasp hive around a nail, each one triggering in turn as the idiot guidance systems fought her. How many times do I have to push before it can't fight me? There's a limit to the number of cells it could fire in any one direction, and if I push the same way each time... This, she thought, was the reason she'd failed before. But now I know how it works. The range closed, crossing the outer limits of the debris ring, and Gravity's perceptual resolution increased, starting to provide some sense of shape and surface contour. There was a regular variation to the thing, something that ticked like a rapidly spinning fan with a missing blade. She kept up the pressure, trading momentum with the rocks of the debris ring, and the fan lost another blade. They are spinning it... The ice building up on her fur speared inwards, spreading the cold through her veins. ...so I need it to fire all of them. There was pain, a distant thing locked away by the surge and rush of adrenalin, and the feeling of talons tightening around her head. Her power boomed and surged, scrabbling at the weapon, hunting and prying for some easier way to move the thing. It rattled and shifted in her vague and uncertain grip, vibrating with staccato pulses of momentum. The magic abruptly took off, like cresting a hill in canter and discovering the downslope was far steeper than expected. It ran away from her, seeming to develop a life and will of its own, and Gravity was pulled along in a mad, stumbling gallop. The demands of her body faded still further, her whole mind devoted to keeping the random whiplashes of power on target, the until there was nothing left but jagged pain and the faint sound of someone screaming. The thing's trajectory shifted, bending away from the target area, and this time didn't move back. It flashed past the world, velocity intact, on its way to the edge of the universe. Behind it, only a hundred seconds from impact and already far too close, was a second, and a third. Gravity held on to the pain, using it to claw at her power and slow the terrible, headlong gallop into self-destructive madness. She let out a sob as the spells finally died, the positive feedback loops cut and fading, then inhaled sharply, trying to get some air into her aching chest. I can't-- Something, a whole group of tiny points, was climbing from a few locations in Lacunae territory to meet the incoming projectiles. === The drawn-out howl, barely identifiable as something from a pony's throat, penetrated the gunship's hull even over the drone of the engines. On the mountain peak a globe of darkness cored with an actinic point of violet light abruptly expanded, then vanished. That's rutting torn it. From the co-pilot's stall of a gunship, Ellisif watched the orbital track of the first Hammer projectile shift to miss the world, a bare clawful of kilolengths above the low orbit altitudes. Too long. That took her far too long. High-acceleration missiles were targeting the second, a swarm of things that looked like Lacunae's entire arsenal of last-strike weapons. The feed from long-range thaumic detectors was showing traces of magic around the second projectile, but there was no way Gravity would have enough time to shift it. Strategic defence has reached the same conclusion. Ellisif picked at the back of one foretalon, worrying at the scaly flesh. How well did the dogs build those missiles? she thought. The Court was always at pains to say the Hammer couldn't be defended against, but someone thinks they have a chance. She narrowed her eyes, staring at the trace of the third projectile, then looked out through the forward windows. Gravity still couldn't be seen, but the effects of her magic were starting to return. Swaths of dark fog were cascading down the sides of the peak -- now missing its top quarter -- she'd picked to stand on, cut through with irregular pulses of light from the intense violet star at its heart. The basic thaumic detection suite in the belly of Ellisif's gunship reported nothing but 'out-of-range' errors, and its dire warnings had been muted some time ago. Below was the same herd of confused ponies and a skeleton team of soldiers trying to corral them near the cargo aircraft. Half the vehicles had already left, flying low and fast to try and get over the thermal pulse's horizon, and even with all the fatalities there was no way they had enough transport for the remainder. Ellisif ignored the questioning looks from her pilot; glances that had become more urgent as time ran out. No choice. No choice at all. Ellisif ran a clawtip over the controls, opening a channel to Gravity. The comms system was abruptly filled with strange hisses and howls, and a hard, irregular panting. Her head feathers rose in dismay; the panting was familiar, she'd heard it many times from soldiers in training, soldiers pushed to the limits of endurance and beyond. "Leave number two to the dogs," she rasped out. "They have plans for this." I hope. There was no reply, but the link to the Hive strategic sensors showed the flicker of Gravity's magic fade and recondense around the most distant projectile, only a few tenths of a kilosecond further out. === The cameras showed an empty land, a cold, high desert devoid of life bigger than the occasional alpine shrub or patch of lichen. Rows of amber lights down the side of the view flicked to green, then blasts of dust puffed up from random spots across the boulder field. Rocks and gravel went flying, propelled by long-buried explosives, exposing the heavy armourcrete caps of missile silos. There was a pause, as if the world held its breath, then the thick lids popped open with flashes of solid-rocket fire, the smoke blanketing the land. An instant later, blue-white lightning and crimson flames flashed in the dark depths, punching fat, lumpy cylinders into the air. The view shifted, tracking the ascending missiles. The design was ancient, but there were only so many ways to build a reaction drive rocket. A central core held the main motor, a solid-state nuclear-thermal design fed from tanks of molten lithium; around it was a collar holding the mouths of ram air inlets, feeding secondary combustion chambers fueled by the reactor's superheated alkali metal exhaust. They climbed rapidly on flares of an unholy red light, building pillars of white lithium oxide smoke. Now distant and small on the video feed, high enough that the air was too thin to be useful, they shed their afterburner stages and continued to accelerate on nuclear power alone. "Downlink is good; solid telemetry," the Specialist responsible for the launch muttered. "All birds reached booster separation within expected parameters. Reactors nominal; termination systems have safed. Sensors are deploying." Most of the screens in the command centre were now devoted to the operation. Ostensibly a last-strike weapon, or at least declared to the Court as one, the missiles were many times more powerful than required for a simple ballistic lob, able to manage a fractional orbit trajectory far faster than allowed by the conventional rules of objects ascending to orbit. One view, previously showing the insulated underside of a composite panel, changed as the missile's aerodynamic fairing blew away in a sparkle of dust and fragments, exposing the skeletal tubes of telescopes and the flat, tessellated sheets of phased-array radars. Strategic maps updated, pulling the fuzzy predicted paths of the final two projectiles into clouds of laser-thin lines, fine wires surrounding the central cord of the main shot. The Hive's own weapons were also multiplying, the lead missiles -- already far ahead of the sensor drones and having reached their maximum velocity early by running their reactors at punishingly high erosion rates -- turning into pointillist clouds of tungsten dust. Behind them, still accelerating, was a mix of larger weapons, Defence's best guess at what it would take to stop the Hammer... and a few surprises for the launcher on Luna. It all comes down to mass versus mass, Orgon thought. "Time until engagement? What will the altitude be?" "Lead units will intercept Hammer defence swarm in fifty seconds, plus or minus five. Altitude..." The Specialist's ears drooped slightly. "...only twenty megalengths. Total engagement time will be one point two seconds." Orgon nodded, eyes fixed on the main display. "At least the Hammer cannot dodge if it wants to remain on target; these ones should be thankful for small mercies." And the closer the intercept, the smaller the fragmentation pawprint. The Specialist didn't reply, busy with his console, then made a tiny, probably unrealised, whimper. The main plot showed a bloom of objects, previously dimensionless points inflating to uncounted thousands of disks. "Predictions were correct, dammit," he muttered. "Hammer has deployed anti-ablation systems." Telescopic images whirled crazily then stilled, centring on a circular sheet of some dark material laced with pale wires. Other copies of the same object jostled and moved, like a dense flock of birds. "Spectroscopy indicates graphene composite, spin-stabilised. Lower sectional density than expected. Higher ablation temperature and lower gamma absorption... updating response plan." Which means deeper defences against the small stuff. On the bottom of the screen with its confused tangle of lines, points and icons, was a summary schematic of their defences. Strung out over kilolengths of space were clusters of drones and objects, all split into groups by intended function. At the rear was the strike analysis package -- the bulky, fragile arrays of telescopes and phased array radar -- fanning out to triangulate and feed the strategic modelling systems back in the Hive. Massively redundant, even the clutter of low orbital debris had not depleted their numbers significantly. In contrast, the very front of the defence package was dust, tonnes and tonnes of tungsten dust. Although at the speed the Hammer round was approaching even tiny particles could be devastating, the purpose of this group was to sweep aside the target's outer defences. Light flared and burst, a sudden wall of glare spread across a swath of sky, riven with the brighter spherical pulses of blue-white from megaton-range detonations. Even high-yield devices were normally visually disappointing when detonated in high orbit, but there was so much dust and clutter in the target zone that the flood of X-rays lit the fog like a searchlight. More light, enough to cause the telescopes to saturate and show nothing at all. Orgon squinted into the main screen, eyes searching for any sign of success or failure. The display cycled, flicking from frequency to frequency and through a whole series of false colour images, before settling on a fuzzy monochrome. The radars are still functioning-- He leaned forwards, trying to make sense of the mess of vector lines. Gone was the focused cluster of arrows, replaced with a slowly expanding fan. Some part of the strike package had obviously reached its target; not the big, high-yield -- but ultimately fragile -- nukes used to clear the way, but a fine needle of depleted uranium. A tonne of mass packed into little more than a thick wire, slender enough to slip between the defences and do all its damage by the speed of the Hammer itself. Converted into a lance of plasma, it had thrust deep into its target, imparting enough energy that even the solid metal of the Hammer couldn't resist. "These ones have a kill on the primary projectile!" The amazement in the Specialist's was obvious. "Plotting fragment collision pawprint..." The radar image was replaced by a map, littered with red splotches and patches of haze. "Point defences are tracking ninety-seven objects large enough to be a significant threat. Collision in fifteen seconds." Some of the more concentrated red vanished from the map, representing Hammer fragments further dispersed or vaporised by targeted clouds of tungsten pellets. Unfortunately that was not even close to being enough to vaporise the whole thing. Tonnes and tonnes of high-density metal, a spray of hypervelocity fragments and all the penetration aids, were still on target. Orgon ignored them, focused instead on the final Hammer projectile, less than two hundred seconds further out. === Fusion tried to stay out of Gravity's mind, while still keeping in contact. The feedback, bleeding in at the edges of her awareness, made her eyes widen and her ears fold so flat that they practically vanished into her fur. The horror and sheer animal rage mirrored her own, except for it being shot through with jagged lines of pain. She pushed it to one side, returning her attention to the trees and hills flicking by under her hooves; she'd outraced the sun and the sky was dark, but the ground was lit to noon brilliance by the screaming sheath of incandescent air no more than a horn's length from her body. Abruptly, the map icon was behind her and Fusion spread her wings, actions mirrored by the coils of force that surrounded her. She stopped breathing, muscle and bone made rigid by more magic, as her speed dropped precipitously, then re-entered normal flight under the cover of her defences. There was no sign of activity, just a hackle-raising pool of radiance, rippling and turbulent like a vigorously stirred bucket, surrounding a bright pinpoint. The spot was too small to resolve and was definitely magical, rather than technological. No weapons rose to meet her, no missiles or lasers, not even the subtle glow of radar. Everything on the ground appeared to be non-functional, and somehow wrong. It was like the place was wax under a flame -- things that should have been straight now had curves, metal stanchions drooped, and deep-set armoured windows were pinched shut like they were made of clay. The effect grew more pronounced towards the centre, right above that point of magical light. A slight measure of calm had entered the link back to Gravity, and Fusion felt her sister's short-lived relief as the first Hammer projectile slid past the world. It doesn't look like they will be using this place again, Fusion thought, then dropped downwards to hover a wing's breadth above the surface. The grass was a lurid shade of green, completely unnatural, and covered with large blue flowers that looked like nothing she'd seen before. Something moved among them, some impossible thing still alive amid the thaumic residue. She picked it up, thinking it was a rabbit or large rat, but there was no fur or flesh under her telekinetic touch. A collection of twigs and pebbles, a foal's model of an animal, wriggled in the haze of magic. It moved by itself, trying to escape with a semblance of life. It was full of magic, strange twists of magic that seemed primal and alien. The power didn't fade, but was folded into circles and loops, self-reinforcing though not growing stronger, merely stabilised. Something new... She put it down gently, watching it scurry off, then looked again at the flowers. They also radiated magic, packed with strange, chaotic spells that looked ready to activate at the slightest touch. I don't think so. Fusion hovered while her force fields sectioned the ground, pulling up cubic chunks of dirt and underlying bedrock to expose a dull grey layer of armourcrete. This should have been a little tougher, as it was seeded with layers of magically-active shielding, but the embedded crystals had all melted. It was the work of a few more seconds to break through the thick layer, exposing a dark void. The swirl of pseudo-random magic, a residue from whatever had happened in Tartarus, was finally starting to fade. That in itself was something Fusion had never seen before, at least not on this scale. Every foal quickly learned how to refine spells and prevent anything but the slightest thaumic fallout, and even that decayed within a breath of casting. So much power, so poorly directed. This can't have been what the dogs intended. Horn glowing, she dropped into the hole. The chamber she hovered within was a flattened sphere with a thick axis made of spidery metal running through the middle, reminiscent of the interior of a reactor's tokamak, its walls tiled with hexagons, each having wildly different colours and textures. Fusion hadn't come through quite in the centre, and the axis was still mostly intact, if a little distorted. Half way up was a complex-looking bulge, containing that point of magic she'd seen before; it didn't seem to be changing or emitting any power, so Fusion ignored it and flew a quick loop around the perimeter of the chamber. The tessellated hexagons were the caps of cells, like she was in the middle of a wasp's nest. Each was large, the size of a four-pony shelter, and most contained a trace of fading magic. Each cap was different, but hadn't been so originally. The same magic that had distorted the ground above had worked here -- plain metal twisted into fantastic shapes, or changed to crystal, or viscous liquid. Some had simply exploded, vomiting their grisly contents into the central cavity: scraps of pastel fur and fragments of bloody bone littered the floor. The colours of the magic... Fusion came to a hover, staring at the chamber walls through shadow sight. She sighed, a grim certainty making her wings feel leaden. Just like Naraka. Pony magic without a pony. She deftly neutralised a wild spell, a bit of random magic spalled from whatever had been done here, then gripped one of the least damaged caps and cut it free. Layers of support systems, a high-resolution display, a feeder unit still packed with familiar brown pellets, they all came away at her touch, leaving behind a hemisphere sitting over a complex mechanism of conveyors covered with movable rubber plates. Space for a single pony... how would the pony get out? There was an access point, but it was at the apex of the dome, under a lifting rig obviously built for a pony. Did they ever get out? Her magic swept the installation; there was access to the surface, but only through narrow passages. Nothing on the surface, and not even any internal paddocks like Naraka. Sickness left a bitter taste in the back of Fusion's throat. That's it, then. They didn't get out. She made careful cuts in the dome, pulling a whole section free. Inside, lit by the glow of her horn, was a sprawled shape. It was a pony, a mare by the smell of her, but she was much thinner than she should have been -- not starved, exactly, but with the build of an endurance athlete. Her shape was wrong, and Fusion's gaze locked on her wingshoulders. Where there should have been wide spreads of feathers were nothing more than stubs capped with neat surgical scars. Dropping through the opening she'd cut, Fusion settled on the rubber floor next the mare, leaning forwards to touch her muzzle to the pony's face. She was young, little more than a filly, really, and still warm to the touch. The body was quite stiff, feeling like there was wood under the fur, and it didn't move when she pushed at it with a hoof. Fused with the floor. Suddenly unable to cope with the confines, Fusion backed away, trying to clear her head of the idea of the pony, locked in a small room all alone for Maker-knows how long. Lacunae was at least kind enough to kill their subjects. Her gaze shifted to the magically active thing at the centre of the main chamber. ...and all of these cells, each with their own pony, each killed by a thaumic excursion, all focused on that. She took flight, suddenly aware of the link to Gravity and the building strain that was flowing down it, and circled the mystery object. The target of all the ponies was a ceramic capsule, a holder for the source of magic somewhere within. It sat halfway up the metal axis, which looked like it was part of a transport system, designed to move the thing up from somewhere deep underground. They expose this to the massed magic of a hundred ponies and drove them to thaumic self-destruction... they turned us into a weapon, a disposable weapon. The light level inside the chamber increased, the pastels of her mane brightening and turning the colour of molten iron. They set us on fire and let us burn! The thing responded to the power she shed, shifting to radiate the same colours. The magical background rose, half-imagined spells spalling out of nothing around the object, manifesting as random patches of extreme heat or cryogenic cold or strange transmutations. Part of the chamber wall, a third of the way around the torus, exploded with rainbow light, burning and eating through the already distorted ceramic panels. The colours moved like they were alive, a time-lapse recording of a slime mould consuming a fallen log in some dark, dank forest. Amplifier? Fusion's breath hitched and she stared at the capsule, anger fading. The spurious magic faded with her change in mood, the object dimming back to its original glow. There were no connections to it that she could see, so she ripped it free of the housing, opening the ceramic with quick force field cuts. Within was a polished stone sphere, no bigger than a ripe apple, marked with a fine print of hexagons that matched the cells all around. As she held it in her telekinesis the pattern faded, the sphere turning as transparent as fine crystal. At the core was a speck of light, as distant and glittering as a high-orbit heliostat. Fusion stared at the pinpoint of light. There were depths to the sphere, like it wasn't a solid object but some window into empty space occupied only by that point-blank actinic glare. The simple look of the thing belied its complexity through shadow sight. She pushed at it with her power and felt a tingle of regard, as if an entity within was watching her through the same portal. There was a moment of resistance, like she wasn't quite right, then it reached out and pulled her senses in. Coils of colour and shape, some great, overgrown jungle packed with a riot of polychromatic fungi and plants, filled her mind, intoxicating with its complexity. It should have felt like chaos, but there was order here, a sense of unknowable purpose. It was not static, either: shapes flitted from point to point, each touch changing the jungle where they landed. Feeling overwhelmed, Fusion fumbled for her magic, the fear of being trapped bringing a harsh clarity to everything. There was no resistance and the view shrank, pulling back and back, layering in more and more complexity; what she'd first taken to be a jungle glade was revealed to be no more than a speck of moss growing on some tiny epiphyte that was itself perched on the side of a forest giant. Panic lent Fusion’s push more force than she’d intended, and the ground fell away until even the huge tree-shape was lost amid endless tracts of others, all similar in shape but different in detail. The ground rucked up into arcology-sized hills and mountains, not dead land but themselves alive with fractal detail; blimp-creatures floated jellyfish-like in the valleys and over the peaks, touching here and there with branching tentacles, grasping, moulding and changing everything around them. Everything was in flux. Not the random bustle of thermal motion, but the ordered patterns of a flock of birds. There was intent in every part of the structure and the flow of it and, as Fusion flew higher, there came a sense of design. Parts began to look familiar -- not the components, these were still as alien as plankton or abyssal life -- but how they were arranged. There were intensifications in the complexity, zones where the ersatz life was concentrated, mounded up far past the now small-looking arcology structures. The locations of these were achingly familiar, things she'd seen, things Ellisif had shown her in the hologram of a tactical table-- Maps! The warp and weft of this place mirrored the real world. Not exactly -- there was activity everywhere, even in places that would have been up in the air or deep underground -- but there were definite concentrations that matched the arcologies and bases and the links between them. She pulled back further, higher and higher, until the world was stretched out under her, fat and round and full of possibility. The polychromatic activity didn't cease as the planet shrank, just slowly faded and became dilute, like sugar dissolving in warm water. At this distance only the brightest features stood out: six concentrations, like knots. One was right where she was. There are five more of them... whatever they are. The planet was small now, a tight coil of activity in the haze, but there was something else. A diffuse thing, like a ball of dark lightning and completely different from the bright colours of the rest of the world, darted here and there, engaged in some mysterious task. It felt out of place, a worm in an apple, the sense of wrongness coming from somewhere outside her own head. Things followed the object -- sharks amid the brilliant reef-fish, or raptors among finches -- but never caught up. Unsettled, Fusion turned her attention to the expanse of space; the more she watched, the more a subtle pattern became apparent. The haze wasn't just featureless and flat at this scale, there was a flow, a sense of movement from places on the planet and out into the void. Out from where some of the arcologies were, spreading and spreading until everything seemed to be part of it. The sun finally came into view and everything shrank away at blinding speed. There was a sense of separation, of yearning for missing parts of her new self. There was a pull, in several directions, and-- === Gravity stared blindly up at the sky, past the high clouds and the scattering of meteors from falling satellite fragments. They flared green and white, blinding dazzle-points as they were destroyed by shock heating. Beyond all that were the remnants of the second Hammer strike, still flashing and burning as they encountered dog defences. Not enough of them, she thought dully. The third strike was only a few hundred seconds away; Gravity pushed at it ineffectually. Even if I can shift the third, all the energy from the second has to go somewhere. A thousand megatons. The ponies left behind after the departure of the final transport were being hustled towards improvised flash shelters, sheets of reflective material ripped from the emergency supplies. They were too small and too few and many were struggling to fit underneath, or were just wandering in a daze, ignoring the increasingly desperate shouts from the gryphons. Perhaps I can-- The idea of extending her personal defences out far enough to flashed through her mind and she discarded it, and Gravity grunted as the third projectile twitched under her grasp, stubbornly refusing to be subjected to her power. Every effort made her head hurt. Blood pounded through her veins, laden with waste heat, each thudding beat tinged with pain like it was full of ground glass. Her skin felt tight, too thin, sticky with dried sweat and cooling rapidly as the remainder evaporated away. Through the patchy clouds the sky sparkled, a horizon-to-horizon display clearly visible even in the daylight. It was utterly silent, and within moments the tiny, pretty points merged to become a blotchy glare, like the sun had swollen to fill the heavens. The world became too bright to look at, open sky and clouds alike, bringing with it a baking heat, the desert at noon, a blast furnace open at the belly. Sudden, silent daylight came to the valley, casting confused, wan shadows, pony legs, gryphon wings and haunches in silhouette, merging and mingling, across the muddy, hoof-marked expanse of ground. Faint screams rose up from the valley, then the rest of the clouds boiled away, exposing those below to the flood of thermal radiation. Grass and leaves burst into flames, fires starting in a hundred places. Branches and boughs popped as the water trapped inside them flashed to steam, while the ponies away from the shelters galloped madly in all directions, trailing greasy white smoke. The light, a painful white, started to slide down the spectrum towards orange and red. Her nose filled with the skin-crawling stench of burning hair, the choking smoke from a thousand wood fires, and a smell like a dog barbecue in full swing. She wanted to vomit but couldn’t. There was nothing left to throw up. Gravity's ears drooped and tears flowed unnoticed down her muzzle. I can't stop it. I can't-- She inhaled, clamping down on the pain and screamed up at the sky, a wordless curse of impotent fury. The sudden crash of a sonic boom shredded her concentration and Gravity turned her magic on the interloper, lashing out with a tight packet of twisted spacetime. Her target, a dark, double-ended needle that glowed from within with the outrageous solar brilliance of a focused heliostat, blinked away, reappearing at her side to leave her weapon to gouge a bite from a nearby mountain peak, blasting dust and pulverised rock in strange trajectories. "Fusion?" Gravity croaked. "I said I'm not leaving!" The anger was there, but the conviction had gone. Fusion passed over a crystal sphere containing a point of gold-white, pressing it against the fur of Gravity's chest until she took a hold of it. "What--" Her breath faltered, mind captivated by an alien vista. Barely noticed, the crystal sphere darkened, turning into a mottled globe, half lit and half in shadow, the position of which bore no relation to the external light sources. The weakness and pain started to drain away, sucked into the depths within the sphere. "--is this thing?" "How would you like to show the dogs what it's like to be hit by the Hammer?" Fusion said roughly, her eyes hard. "Remember the wormhole we used to empty the breeding centres?" With the words came flood of images and ideas, undercut with flashes of a dead pony in a dome-shaped room. That rocket spell of yours looks impressive, but I can do better than that. Go find your target. Fusion vanished with a thump; Gravity started the oxygen-recycling magic and sealed her defences, sparing a worried glance for the sky. There was a shockwave travelling down from the upper atmosphere, following on from the thermal flash. One thing at a time... the altitude was very high, perhaps there won't be much energy in it. Feeling for the Hammer projectile, she pumped will into the drive spell she'd previously used as a weapon, holding the locus a bare wingspan above her head. The ersatz mass pulled at her and she fiddled with the gravity gradients, trying to reduce the hair-raising tidal forces pulling at her body. A haze of dust and debris, pulled up from the ground and out of the air, entered short-lived orbits within the spell, turning the invisible magic into a churning bubble. The material at the centre glowed a dull red, radiating the heat of its compression. Gravity pushed and the ground fell away. There was no acceleration other than the steady stretching of tides trying to pull her head from her shoulders. The spell locus remained a fixed distance above her, pulling her along. The atmosphere was behind her in a flash, the world dropping away like a stone falling down a well. === Ellisif's antiflash visor cleared as the light level dropped back towards the bearable. The heat was slower to fade, radiating down from all parts of the sky and making the exposed flesh around her beak tingle. The featherless skin itched from the ultraviolet liberated by the endoatmospheric detonations, but she ignored it. The metallised shelter film had done its job and protected those under it from the thermal component of the distributed fireballs. At least they weren't nukes; gamma rays are harder to block. She pushed away from the herd, releasing her grip on the silver film, and squinted across the valley. It had only been a clawful of seconds since the first pulse, and ponies caught outside the shelters were still burning. Some galloped in panicked circles, screaming out high, ragged neighs and whinnies, others writhed on the ground or dashed towards the river. The air was thick with the smell of wood smoke and burned fur, an acrid stench made almost pleasant by the underlying scent of seared flesh. She risked a glance back at the herd; they seemed to be frozen, overwhelmed by this latest catastrophe. Her medics were already fanning out, smothering burning fur and applying copious quantities of trauma spray and cooling gel. Their movements were practiced and sure; modern warfare, if it left a being alive at all, left them burned and scarred. Ellisif joined one of the medics, helping him hold down a struggling pony. The stallion, his pale turquoise fur turned into a black and red cracked mess from poll to tail root, wriggled and cried out. He didn't respond to the medic's shouted commands, instead evading every effort to apply anaesthetic. The gryphon cursed, failing to dodge a flailing forehoof that knocked a drug injector from his talons. The pony bared his lips and snapped at Ellisif, blunt teeth closing on air with the sound of rock on rock. She grabbed hold of the stallion's muzzle, but he started to buck, wings and legs churning and bloodying the rocky ground. "Let me help." Ellisif flinched at the words, spoken next to her right ear, then nodded jerkily. The mare, a pale cream with a tangled, filthy red mane, her muzzle streaked with old tears but otherwise not visibly touched by the magical failure or the thermal flash, leaned forwards, blowing her breath at the stallion's nose. He calmed almost immediately, and the mare stepped forwards to push Ellisif out of the way, wrapping her wings about his head and whispering something that the gryphoness didn't catch. She waved at the medic, who quickly started to apply gel from a spray can. The stuff came out as slender threads that puffed up to ten times their original size, sticking to and spreading over the charred flesh. She nodded her thanks to the mare, who didn't notice, her whole attention focused on the stallion. The medic worked with calm, rapid efficiency, but the wounds were horrific. Well over fifty percent coverage, full thickness burns. Ellisif kept her expression blank, breathing shallowly to keep the scent of burned flesh out of her nostrils. The medic's motions slowed as he ran out of treatment options, finally sitting back on his haunches and reaching out to touch the mare lightly on the shoulder. She sighed and slumped, eyes still fixed on the stallion as the medic carefully pulled a blanket up to cover the body. Ellisif stared at the pair, the colours of their coats finally registering. Rutting Maker... now is not the time for Gravity or Fusion to discover their sire is dead. Other ponies were splitting away from the herd, heading for the wounded. "Get me an update on the shockwave," she murmured into her command collar, shifting her gaze from the mountain peak where Gravity had stood to the open sky. The pony had gone, despite her promise to stay. Are we all dead anyway? === The spin of the planet meant Fusion's conserved velocity vector was in the wrong direction, but that was easily fixed. With flesh and bone welded into a rigid whole by her power, Fusion's force field blades bit into the air and dumped her supersonic velocity, curving her about. The magic changed shape, optimising for propulsion, and she accelerated towards her target. The connection with Gravity opened and she had a sense of being surrounded by a hungry void. Her sister had reached escape velocity and was still accelerating, gradually changing course towards the projectile. The sharing widened and Fusion began to feel like she had a second body, one not subject to the normal pull of the planet; the feeling of weightlessness was familiar from flight, but that was only ever for a moment. Gravity had damped down her drive spell to a tiny whisper, diverting the effort into one end of a wormhole. The magic stayed below the level of the real, for now, but the complex fractals churned and fluttered as she tried to match Fusion's location. Faint impressions, like remembrances of a dream, told of the wicked forces, and of the exotic matter involved in constructing pathways through spacetime not simply linked or easily described by normal geometry. Not there yet, Fusion sent down the sharing, wrinkling her muzzle as a distraction from Gravity's body. Her own felt heavy and sluggish by comparison, and she directed part of her own power towards the wormhole magic, losing some of her mad velocity in the process. Is that thing easy to use? she sent. We're going to have to think of a name for it, Gravity replied. Be careful when you open your end; don't forget I'm in vacuum up here. There was a pause, and Fusion used the time to sweep the land around her, looking for the right spot. There, on the horizon, was a concentration of lights within her shadow sight. A great termite's nest of activity, or perhaps the glowing hyphae of some fungus, stretched the skin of the world. It was surrounded by flying lights, concentrations of stored energy that just shouted 'military' to her senses. Perfect. How are you going to get away, Fusion? Gravity's mental voice had calmed and sounded more like her old self, albeit with an undercurrent of worry. The spell won't run for long enough if you are not there. "Worry about yourself; there's a lot of debris travelling with the Hammer," Fusion murmured, along with her thoughts. The structure, one of the central Baur arcologies, rushed closer and she slowed further, dropping below the speed of sound. There was activity among the aircraft; flashes of light marked the launching of missiles. How much longer? A pawful of seconds. Hurry! Fusion hardened her defences and poured power into the wormhole spell, opening a hole the size of an apple. More and more of the exotic matter came into being; her magic patterned it, marshalling it like standing waves of photons within an optical cavity. Her target grew close and she batted away the first of an endless rain of missiles and railgun projectiles. They were like motes of dust compared to the size of the enormous Hammer rounds, but each one threatened immediate death, had her defenses failed her. Sweat started to dampen her neck and boil from her flanks, and she wedged the hole open a little further, to the size of an aircar. Now she could hear it over the wind of her passage, a banshee jet-engine roar as atmosphere fell into the perfect sphere of the interface. Somewhere high above and moving away at escape velocity, was a rapidly expanding cloud of air, centred on Gravity's end of the tunnel. Fusion moved to place the hole between her and the greatest concentration of incoming fire; despite its growing size, the construct did not slow her movement. Air did not have to force itself around the interface, but just fell right in, blasted away at near sonic speeds into the vacuum of space. Gravity seemed to be having an easier time of it; the amplifying stone was obviously working. The opening at her end was significantly larger, and Fusion struggled to match the size. === Something punched a hole through Gravity's defences, passed between her outstretched wings, and vanished out of the other side. Gone before she could really register it, it left an lightning afterimage and a sharp bang that made her ears ring. Gravity twitched away, a too-late reflex action, then folded in her wings and legs. The vector of the line wasn't what she'd expect from the Hammer's defensive swarm, rather it was part of the general orbital debris. She changed the format of her defences, optimising them for small, fast, but anything over a certain size would penetrate just as easily as before. The thing Fusion had given her floated within her telekinetic field, nestled between her wing roots, and made things easy again. It's like the dog's weapon was never fired. She released her grip on the drive spell and built the wormhole pattern, first opening a thread to connect to Fusion's magic, then pouring in power to force the path wider. Air started to flood out of the hole, exploding outwards in a gale of diamond dust as the water in it was flash-cooled by adiabatic expansion. Brighter sparkles lit the cloud, laser-straight lines of micrometeors burning up as they struck the unexpected patch of atmosphere. Sound came next, a faint series of crashes and bangs from the sonic booms. Within the outrushing air, the spherical wormhole interface contained strange and distorted images of Fusion, wings wide and stroking furiously, occasionally interrupted by pulses of brilliant green laser-light. How are you going to get away? Gravity kept the thought to herself this time. You must have a plan, you've always got a plan! Fusion's thoughts were accelerating, dopplering like the sirens of an approaching tunnel rescue airtruck, something she'd seen before in her sister's memories. I hope that makes you fast enough, Gravity thought privately, I won't be able to come and get you in time. And then there was no more time; the projectile and its outriders were upon her. Powerful radars on the Hammer, designed to pick out any solid object in its path, looked right through the expanding bubble of air; even the wormhole terminus, with Gravity sheltering behind it, was invisible, the radio waves passing right through. The projectile made no effort to evade, not that there was much it could do, even when the outer defensive swarm struck the expanding cloud of vapour. Pulses of light refracted around the edge of the terminus, bright and hot enough to make exposed skin tingle. Gravity started to tuck her head under one wing, then screamed as the wormhole flashed an intolerable white. The pulse of heat was like a physical blow, burning skin even under fur, and the delicate magic powering the wormhole evaporated with a surge of gravity waves. The light cut off, taking with it most of the heat as the gas cloud expanded into the vacuum. Far below, on the surface of the planet, a point of furious white light, pure and gleaming like the birth of a new sun, had appeared, rapidly expanding to a circular bloom of flame-yellow the size of a foal's eye. === Fusion was almost stationary, travelling at little more than the speed allowed by her own beating wings. All her magic was being expended keeping the throat of the wormhole open, the complex patterns taking enough of her attention that only winged flight, requiring little mental effort, was keeping her in the air. Sweat flowed sluggishly down her flanks, alternately steaming or turning to brittle ice as her control of the entropic magic fluttered under the onslaught of the dog aircraft. The excessive use of her own power had done what it had done in the past: slowed the world to a lazy crawl. There wasn't the extreme clarity of her first time, or the aching, drawn-out burning pain of the second, but it did allow her to evade or deflect the near-constant stream of weapons fire. All of Gravity's thoughts and body feelings had faded to a barely detectable rumble at the edge of her attention, useless except as a comforting presence. How much longer?! The wormhole terminus started to flash and flicker, sharp spikes of light and heat that looked like distant explosions. Fusion swerved to one side, avoiding the searchlight beam that lit the ground far below. Penetration aids striking the gas cloud... how many megatons are being released on the other side of the interface? There was no time to breathe, and even her frantic heart had yet to beat since the first flash yet, to her up-tempo thoughts, time stretched out, filled with an eternity of evading the slow crawl of missiles or the wasp-zip of railgun rounds. The wormhole brightened again, but this time didn't fade. Something was coming through, not mere light, but a solid bar of plasma, radiating enough energy to completely overwhelm her pitch-black defences and make them seem as transparent as glass. Shockwaves of tortured air were expanding out from the explosion, but laggard slow compared to the light. Fusion felt her fur shrivel and the tips of her ears caught on fire; she forgot about the aircraft and concentrated on the wormhole and keeping all that heat away. The lance of fire extended, reaching out lazily to touch the ground, while the thermal surge turned her attackers into white stars that shed sparks and streamers of fast smoke. Missiles in flight exploded instantly and railgun rounds tumbled and broke up as their stabilizing and guidance systems were destroyed. Fusion started to scream, opening herself to the flood of available energy from the her distant candle-flame namesake, pouring the power into the wormhole to keep it open, then dropped the spell and pushed at another pattern-- ~~~discontinuity~~~