There was so much to do!
Adjusting the brain chemistry of local commanders, forging sensor data to overstate a threat, interfering with automata suppression hardware, altering target coordinates... the list was endless. Chaos flitted from point to point, from the most secure bunkers to the vacuum of space. Here, in volumes only occupied by targeted metal and explosives, it paused to survey the world.
Weapons containing dense concentrations of energy crawled along their ballistic arcs, their simple semiconductor minds carrying out paranoid conversations about threats, detection and terminal yields. Other weapons reached up to stop them, rapid -- for organic, physical life -- fire mass drivers and coherent energy projectors, but Chaos could see that this would only be partially effective, even without its interference. Energy releases governed by the strong nuclear force sparkled across the surface of the planet, turning it from green to a dirty, dusty brown.
Long seconds passed as it watched through senses only partially analogous to sight, occasionally diving to turn complex spirals and loops through the expanding plasmas at the heart of one detonation or another. Here it paused, again noticing the strange behaviour of the local automata. This time it watched; there was definitely an exchange of information, data being drawn out of the bipeds’ organic neural networks in the microseconds before their component molecules were dissociated.
The automata didn't seem to get what they wanted and a change rippled through them. The syphoning activity started to spread away from the centres of destruction, flitting through collapsed tunnels and arcology accommodation blocks to find the bipeds trapped in the rubble. These creatures were as good as dead -- there were megatonnes of rubble and no organisation capable of getting through it -- but this was good enough for the automata. They settled around the dying and nearly dead, pulling something out of the brains and passing the information to somewhere. Where the automata passed the bipeds ceased to function, minds gone.
Chaos tried to follow the information, but it split up and sank away into the background hum of activity. There was something...
There was a change in the fundamental properties of the universe, a shock that was gone as quickly as it came. Chaos pulled back from its observations, suddenly concerned. The Flaw was... the Flaw was moving! Space was distorting around the radiant's mouth, dragging it along at superluminal velocity. Chaos accelerated away from the planet, reaching the high orbital spaces just slower than a photon, but realised it was too late; all the information it had was an eternity, forty beats of a biped's heart, out of date because of the distance to the Flaw.
It cast about, looking for the source of the disturbance, then froze as it finally understood what had happened. The two herbivore quadrupeds it had modified had managed to acquire Creation Stones and discover how to use them. Now they sat at the centre of dense knots of Guardian activity, untouchable. Orders flowed from the Stones, fine webs of influence, and the automata rushed to obey.
For the second time in recent history, Chaos felt fear.
===
The bubble of air was hazy with condensed sweat. Beneath Gravity's hooves the remains of Grund, harshly lit by Celestia’s light, churned with chaotic motion. The gravitational relationships were highly disturbed and what little structure the moon had, was gone. Rock fragments from kilolength scales down to the finest of dust boiled away in erratic trajectories, disturbed by her manipulations.
Power flowed from her, pulled in from everywhere and nowhere, then focused through the Stone she held pressed against her breast. The trick was to pass the momentum from rock to rock; far too much power would be needed to move the larger fragments without it. So much easier than it was before. She bent her head, nuzzling at the cold stone sphere with its infinite depths.
Gravity felt the sheer joy flowing down the link from Fusion, and smiled in return as the angles of the shadows between the rocks smoothly changed. The sun was moving, falling across the heavens like a bird flying across the sky. It's not massless, there are satellites orbiting it, Fusion sent. Forty-five light seconds out and it's moved across half the sky in a pawful of breaths. How many physical laws has that violated? Vanca is going to be so angry!
Bending her will to accelerating another mountain-sized boulder, Gravity laughed. We're kicking away the physics that supports the world. Can she see the sky?
Probably not... she'll miss the show. She was quite excited when you started to pull the moon apart.
I bet she was. Gravity's smile hardened and she twisted her head to stare at Luna. This close, the patterns and lines on its surface had turned into a fractal complexity of blocks and canyons. The Hammer accelerator was clearly visible, lines of crustal pits along a fine hash-mark track of the accelerator itself. Do you know what you are going to do? I can feel the launches... Her smile faltered and blackness flowed in from the corners of her vision. ...even without their pony-powered launchers, I can feel things curving up from all the Hives. So many weapons... I had no chance against just Baur Hive. There are too many. I think this is the end of everything, Fusion.
Glorious sunshine filtered back up the link, but all the joy was gone. We must save who we can. The mental tone wavered, then became firm. I was always afraid this would become a zero-sum game. I had hoped it would be otherwise... but we must ensure continuity. Do you understand? What can you do?
I'm attacking the Hammer, but that means I need to pull energy from some rocks to boost others. I'm targeting the ones I send planetward to the launchers I can find, but I can only prosecute targets within my horizon.. it will take longer than we have.
Have you been listening to Ellisif again? A brief ghost of a smile came back up the link. I'll stay here. There was sudden feeling of disconnection and Gravity was alone in her head.
Right. She spun around, accelerating along the path of rocks she'd made. Luna was ahead, swelling rapidly. Let's see what I can do about this. The feeling of twitching from the moon intensified, then turned into sudden motion.
===
Chau's words hung in the air of the Hammer's small primary control room. They made sense singly, but as a sentence... Arturon's head whirled and he sat heavily. "Say that again."
"Half of Grund is heading in this direction, the sun is moving--" Chau waved a paw at the main screen, making a sound that was half way between an expression of disgust and a giggle. "--and Baur is still launching against the other Hives." He scrubbed at his eyes, leaving his paws over his face. "Secondary launch systems only. The servitor mass drivers have all been turned to glass."
Bright points of light littered the disk of the world below, pulsing and bursting and leaving ripples within the clouds. They were harder to see now, after the terminator had swept across the planet like bright honey over an apple. The world was fully lit, as was the far side of Luna. "...and the other half of Grund?"
"There appears to be an exchange of momentum. The thaumic scanners report that the rocks are moving in pairs. One up, one down. The 'down' halves are all heading for the planet... very specific locations on the surface. Military bases, mostly."
"Doing these one's job!" Arturon clenched his paws, slamming them down on the console. "This is ridiculous. What is the status on point defence?"
"Unprepared for megatonnes of rock moving at escape velocity!" Chau snarled suddenly. "These ones will need to use the main driver.... hopefully the antiprotonic helium beam and the quantum-cascade lasers will soak up the rest."
"Do it. Weapons free." There's nothing else these ones can do with the thing. "Will it work?" Arturon leaned heavily against the console, thinking about the gigaseconds of construction. The deep-buried, multiply parallel command systems proof against anything from a single bioweapon-equipped traitor to gigaton-yield fusion cluster-bomb strikes. So much done, the height of paranoia. He swallowed, feeling light-headed. Not paranoid enough.
Chau shrugged and gave a sudden, merciless laugh. "For a while. Depends on if the pony runs out of rocks before these ones run out of energy." Behind him, the external cameras showed the movement of heavy projectiles from the low orbit storage rings to the main accelerator. Power reserves were dropping, and the whole control installation, megatonnes of fused rock rigidly bonded to the core of Luna, started to vibrate.
===
The Hammer's trajectories were aimed at her rocks. Gravity could feel them fanning out from the moon. She skimmed over the stream of fractured regolith and corral-sized boulders, kicking and bouncing from one to another. Luna itself was in silhouette, only a slender crescent illuminated by the brilliant point of Celestia. Something was happening to the sun; bulges and horns of hazy light were reaching outwards, like coils of fire and smoke from a fire. They seemed small, but foreshortening and distance likely meant they were much larger than they looked.
There was the actinic flash of a hypervelocity impact, bright enough to light the dark face of the moon, casting hard, racing shadows and putting all other incident radiation to shame. Her lead projectile exploded in a spray of superheated fragments and incandescent dust. Beams of radiance, slender rods of light that extended in the direction of Luna, danced through the dust, carving the smaller rocks into finer and finer pieces. Too fast to really follow as anything but a subliminal impression, strings of flashes and sparkles reached out to touch the second of her main rocks, and it promptly exploded in the same way as the first.
Gravity curved away from the stream of tortured ice and silicates, her smile widening. How many times can you do that? I've got a whole moon to throw! Let's see how you like it... Breathing slowing back to a more normal rate after her exertions, she left the rocks to their predetermined paths and turned back to the world below.
She felt drawn to it, or at least to five other places on it. The sensation had become stronger, a feeling that she should be doing something. This far out it was hard to tell exactly where the other things were, but one of them was moving and was felt twice, the second time through her link to Fusion. Lights flickered and flashed across the disk of the world; the bright points of nuclear detonations. Her own weapons were still falling and she traded more momentum to get them falling faster, but it wasn't going to be enough.
Fusion, I can tie up the Hammer, but I can't stop what's going on below. There are no launchers left, but the explosions are still happening. There are too many other weapons.
They no longer care about us, Grav. We are just collateral damage. There's too much space to cover-- There was a sense of great speed, of blurred hills, fields and forests. Something was ahead, a dark arrowhead riding blue fire, shedding flickering particles of rainbow light. Fusion was firing upon the particles, snuffing them out with flares of yet more light. The view jinked crazily, horizon tumbling then flashing white. Dammit, missed--!
~~~discontinuity~~~
Gravity held her breath then exhaled sharply as the connection came back. The closeness of the ground curved away, showing a larger vista pockmarked with black under towering mushroom clouds. She only saw them for an instant, but the shape and glow of their fireballs, hundreds of seconds old but still the brightest things in the sky, were unmistakable. Ahead was a burning groove cut through the hills, terminating in a strewnfield of unidentifiable, molten wreckage. There were no clouds left but the sky was darkening, the sun itself dimming.
===
Don't get between the sun and the world, Grav. Fusion bit at her lips, feeling the changes she'd made to the sun. Things like claws were extending from the surface of Celestia, some minuscule portion of the sun's energy converted into lambent clouds of plasma and laced through with ferocious magnetic fields. Terrific flashes of X-rays and vacuum ultraviolet ran up and down it as those fields reconnected at random, folding in on themselves and superheating the ionised gases still further. There was an odd feeling of both delay and immediacy to the sun and what was happening. It was taking the best part of forty-five seconds for any light to get to the planet, even though Fusion's influence could reach it instantly.
The ground was obscured by drifting clouds of dust and smoke, lit from within by the ash-grey charcoal statues of still-burning trees. To her energy sensitive sight, some areas had a disturbing purple tinge, similar to the colours she'd seen in the accelerator's beam stop. The fur between her shoulders itched and she gained a little more altitude; the purple was in large and spreading drifts, falling out from the mushroom clouds. There's so much radiation... the bombs are only mostly clean, she thought, swallowing heavily. Will there be anywhere we can hide at the end of all this?
There were other things under the smoke; the deep tunnels and bases of Baur Hive. She matched what she was seeing to the maps she'd been shown, hunting for the military installations. The bases were externally similar to industrial facilities -- vertical shafts for surface access and deep tunnels connecting them to the rest of the Hive -- but the quality and quantity of armour and power reserve gave them away. Power was especially telling; many of the reactors had failed -- not destroyed, although a number had been turned into radioactive craters -- but shut down. No ponies to run the control systems. She gritted her teeth, straining for any sign of pony magic, but there was nothing.
You're still down there but I can't see you... let's hope Baur has the same rules that Lacunae has about ponies being in military bases. Her stomach clenched and she flew higher and faster. "Now I get to be the hooves of the Maker," she whispered, the words coming out high and thin. At this altitude the world was laid out under her hooves like it was a map, the power failures making the still active bases stand out against a rapidly darkening background in the shadow world.
Fusion reached up and out, feeling the complexity she'd created around the sun. I think... The distant magnetic fields tightened, constricting the plasma clouds into glowing rods. Another alteration, making changes she didn't really comprehend but knew would have the effect she desired.
The response was immediate while still being forty-five light seconds away. The time ticked away, each beat of her frantically pulsing heart seeming to take an eternity. Did I get it right? Too late to change anything now. The sky above her started to glow, a lurid tickle of near ultraviolet in the upper atmosphere, even while the sun itself dimmed and became covered in black spots. "Let there be light," Fusion said, looking up into the fluorescence.
A thread of intense purple flashed down from the zenith, touching the far horizon in a lightning-filled explosion of brilliant fog. Another five sprang into being, remaining stationary for a second before starting to drift and wobble, cutting fluorescent gouges through the ground. Fires sprang up everywhere within a kilolength of each thread, rapidly building into twisting storms that curled up the beams, dragging debris skyward in fast-moving fountains. At the bottom of each beam was a stolen spot of solar brilliance, a rocket-engine blast feeding the maelstrom.
The closest, no more than a dozen kilolengths away, engulfed and destroyed a river in an instant, the embankments and shore enshrouded in boiling, superheated steam. It left a valley of glowing rock in its wake, surrounded by a strip of burning and blackened ground. It was obvious that the threads were not dimensionless lines but thick columns, a hundred lengths wide or more. She kept them as still as she could, letting atmospheric turbulence random-walk the beams over their targets until they exploded or went dark to her shadow sight. Then Fusion set them moving to the next point on the map in her head.
===
"Say again, all after 'Celestia'." Kode licked at the blood soaking into the fur from knuckles to wrist. His ears were pricked forwards, straining towards the speaker.
"There's an anomaly at Celestia. Energy output is switching from photons to plasma. These ones are seeing needle-structures confined by highly abnormal magnetic fields--" The signal failed with the abruptness of a cut data link, then recovered to show a fuzzy, magnified image of the sun with great luminous growths extending from it. The voice came back, sounding high and strained. "--plasma streams are lasing violet--" The signal cut off again.
"These ones just lost the outer ring relays." Akar gestured helplessly at the map. What should have been a dense spider's web of data connections was sparse and fragmented. Civilian relays had failed some time ago and the military system had been shot full of holes by the destruction of an increasing number of bases. Cascading shutdowns of related network nodes had put paid to much of the rest, as key installations were pulverised and those reliant upon them first failed over, then stopped working entirely.
What did they mean, 'lasing violet'? "Do these ones have working surface camera feeds?" The main display changed from tracking the strategic launches; the actual launch sites had been nuked a tenth of a kilosecond earlier, but many of the rounds were still on their way to their targets. The surface was unexpectedly dim, considering the unnatural position of the sun and the lack of cloud cover, like an eclipse was under way. Off in the distance was a line of purple light, extending from somewhere far over head.
"What is that?" Kode pointed at the screen with a bloodied paw. "None of the Hives have anything remotely like that."
"There was Lacunae's use of a heliostat as a weapon..." The line of light wavered, not fading out but tracking sideways, far enough that the camera had to slew to keep it in shot. "Defence is reporting another five beams, each striking a base or industrial hub. They are moving--" The words stopped with a strangled cry. On the external display the line had changed from a dimensionless thread to something thicker.
If a funnel storm doesn't seem to be moving, it is either coming towards you or heading away. Kode raised his paw to his muzzle, worrying at the damaged flesh once more as the old proverb rattled around in his head. His ears drooped as the line grew fat, filling the frame of the video feed. There was a rumble overhead, deep in the rock layers that protected his command centre. He looked up as the data feeds all failed and the lights went out, leaving only the faint green glow of the emergency tritium panels.
There were cries and the sound of running paws. Kode kept staring at the blank screens, until fire and a hard violet light flooded in.
===
The stream of matter was getting closer, stretched out by the differential velocity of its components. There was a tenth of the mass of Grund in those rocks; the rest of the rubble-pile moon was spread across the inner debris ring and raining down on the planet. Arturon looked with wide eyes and paws cupped over his short muzzle, taking in the predicted trajectories; it was obvious that every rock was being aimed.
The pony is being very efficient, he thought, tracing the paths with vision blurred by tears. The simulation was a bare wire-frame, but told the tale in all its awful glory. It was a story of a world exhaling a final breath, pulling over the covers of an impact winter, to rest and recover from the harms done to it. The globe rotated as the rocks fell, smoothly bringing fresh targets into range as each kilosecond passed. The simulation finished and Arturon looked past the display and at the main screen with its live image of the planet. Already a quarter of the surface was pocked with fresh craters, glowing in the far infrared as they forced more heat upon an atmosphere already dangerously warm.
Everything was getting harder to see; the Court's defensive fire had thrown up great clouds of dust, thick and hot enough to impede their surveillance of the local volume and render long-range imaging difficult. What it did show were the ruler-straight lines of the lasers, pulled by some unknown magic out of the energy of the sun. Whatever process was being used wasn't very efficient, but the total energy available was so high that it didn't really matter. Celestia, imaged by Luna's far side sensors, was a strange and alien thing. Dim in the optical and infrared, it blazed in the X-ray bands, fuelling the population inversion that was powering the lasers.
"It knows exactly what it is doing," he muttered, attracting a glance from Chau, who nodded. Not too small and not too big. Despite initial estimates, many of the rocks had been put into low but stable orbits; only material of a certain mass and composition was getting all the way to the ground.
"This one has a targeting solution on the next four rocks... queuing up the accelerator. Power reserves predicted to be at sixty percent after those shots." Arturon's eyes tracked the bright point displayed by the thaumic sensors, his paws clenching and unclenching. The pony was an obvious target, but was too distant and too mobile to hit, even with the stealthed canister rounds they'd fired. It seemed to know where everything was, and either moved out of the way or shifted their own fire.
Outside, on the lunar surface, strings of thousand-tonne iron needles -- the 'light', low-power self-defence ammunition -- were shunted from deep magazines and into the hundred-kilolength-diameter feeder loops for the main accelerator. Once every four seconds they were spat out at maximum velocity; the first round split the rock into uneven chunks, and each subsequent shot in the burst targeted one of the fragments.
Unheard in the vacuum of space, the big support pylons for the accelerator ring creaked and vibrated, running at a duty cycle unforeseen by even the most apocalyptic war game.
===
This is starting to get on my nerves. Gravity watched the latest of her rocks disappear with a flash, filling the local space with rubble and superheated dust.
What? There was a sense of great pressure coming back down the link from Fusion, as if her sister was in the late stages of some long endurance race.
Nothing, sorry. Gravity tightened her control of the sharing, then built her drive spell and fell towards the induced mass. The trajectory took her above the orbital plane of the moons and debris ring, out of range of most of the fragments from the exploding rocks, and gave her a clear view of Luna.
The moon was starting to build its own shroud of fine dust, kicked up by the secondary impacts. There was no way the Court could stop every fragment, and indeed they hadn't tried. The path of the primary accelerator, a row of giant rings that looked like a set of regular scratches around the equator of Luna, was clear. The dogs are only targeting stuff that is heading for the Hammer... Square pits lined the path of the accelerator rings; these seemed to get deeper with each shot fired. I don't have to break the whole thing, just a part of it. Like stepping on a snake...
Gravity exhaled in the bubble of field-trapped air that acted as her life support, the sudden sigh filling the small space. "Oh..." They have limited ability to hit targets outside the equatorial plane. She smiled, the grin getting wider until her cheeks started to ache, then flew close to one of the smaller -- only a few hundred lengths across -- objects she'd pulled from Grund. It fell towards her, pulled into the drive spell's gravity well.
Pulling the thing was slow, far more so than just manoeuvring herself. It was too big -- not in mass, but volume -- and the spell's effect radius too small to get much acceleration without the tidal forces ripping the object apart; she felt distinctly vulnerable to any fire that might manage to predict her motion. Let's hope the rest of the rocks keep their attention. Nothing to see here...
The object she'd picked was a solid lump of nickel-iron, its dull and pitted surface occasionally throwing back glints of shiny metal. It weighed about a quarter gigatonne, and she'd hoped to hide it among the larger and more frangible objects, sneaking it onto target without being stopped. Bound to be other weapons in their point defence arsenal. Nothing too fast, but that would mean nukes. Gravity stood on the back side of the asteroid, held there by the distance-gentled tidal forces of the drive spell, and tried to remember what Vanca had told her.
She closed her eyes, focussing on the movement of objects in local space, hunting for anything heading in her direction. Nothing. Luna grew closer, expanding with deceptive slowness as the seconds ticked by, then the side of the rock facing the moon lit up with an incandescent outpouring of vaporised iron. I think they might have seen me... A solid rod of light burst out of the metal and started to chew sideways, throwing up fountains of sparks and wavering globules of molten iron from the energy beam's penetration of the asteroid.
Gravity applied her drive spell again, pumping a little more energy into the asteroid. The artificial gravity well was deep and sharp-sided, and turned the attacking particle beam from a focused needle into a wild spray that scarred the Luna-facing side but failed to penetrate. Projectiles followed the beam, but they were nowhere near as fast or numerous as those from the Hammer or the massed Hives. She pushed and pulled at them, sending some off on wild trajectories and crushing others into wreckage.
Actinic flashes pulsed and flared behind her metallic shield, the multi-megaton detonations of the Court's point defence weapons. Gravity crouched in a crater she'd dug out of the rear of the asteroid, grinning ferally at the light reflected off debris ring particles. Can't get me through two hundred lengths of iron, can you? The asteroid vibrated under her hooves, jerking to one side in time with a particularly bright flash. Too many more like that, though...
She clipped off chunks of metal, rapidly creating a cloud of hoof-sized cubes. The actions came practically without conscious thought, streamlined and pushed to the level of breathing or the beat of her wings by long practice and the amplifying effects of the Stone. The spherical thing, its illuminated half pointing back towards the planet, nestled in the space between her wing roots, held there by gentle telekinesis.
What lights it up? The sun is in completely the wrong direction. Gravity squinted at the close horizon of her metal shield, still flaring and pulsing with erratic sprays of iron vapour, then tossed her head, flicking away the sweat accumulating at the base of her neck. A sudden vision of Fusion's solar labour tattoo flashed into her mind and she rolled her eyes. Really?! Is that mare the centre of everything? She grunted as a volley of railgun projectiles came closer than planned, diverting her attention from the continued presence of the particle beam. Can't keep this up forever.
She swept local space clear of inbound objects, then pushed her cloud of metal blocks out over the local horizon, curving them into her drive spell, which she flicked off just as they reached it. Those last few lengths exposed them to tremendous gravitational forces, and they whipped away with a subliminal blur. "That should keep you busy," she panted; the air inside her personal bubble was warm and smelled strongly of sweat, making her muzzle wrinkle. Nearly done.
Gravity cautiously poked her head over the horizon. The particle beam had stopped attacking her and had switched to the metal cubes, the sparkling beam making them explode in rapid succession, but it was still only one weapon. She looked for a couple more seconds, then felt fast incoming fire climbing up from Luna and ducked back to her hiding place. Getting closer... There was another explosion back at her original matter stream, then another and another, bright enough to make her flinch.
A push at the objects closing on her asteroid turned them into metal scrap on wildly divergent trajectories, then Luna was filling her senses, expanding like a rock thrown at her head and she pushed once more--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--appearing back near the scattered remains of Grund, now little more than a slight thickening in the debris ring, her velocity vector still pointing to Luna. Even at this distance her metal asteroid was lit up like it was on fire, pierced again and again by whatever energy weapon the dogs were using. Railgun rounds were striking it, launched from point defence systems scattered all over the surface, spalling off sparks and fragments. It split, shattering into a dozen red-hot pieces that vanished in a string of white flashes that stitched across the line of mass driver rings that ran around Luna's equator.
There were more explosions: bright flashes and hot, dusty craters suddenly appeared at random points around the moon and her sense of constant, regular motion vanished, replaced by a sudden scattering. The whole thing has lost power! Gravity grinned, then threw back her head and laughed, following the tracks of half-accelerated Hammer projectiles as they spun away at tangents and vanished into the endless black. Avidly, lips drawn back from sharpening teeth, she followed the paths of her original matter stream, fine-tuning the trajectories.
Sparkles of light rippled over the surface of Luna and the regolith threw up vast quantities of dust. The fine, regular shapes of buildings, mines, power storage facilities, and the whole panoply of technology, vanished under a rolling barrage of impacts, leaving only ragged, orange-glowing craters in their wake.
===
There was shouting: the gravelly screeches of gryphons -- all military jargon and curses, in about equal measure -- and the familiar, all too painfully familiar, sound of ponies in distress. A neigh, no words, just a high wail, rang out, little more than 'I am here, where are you?'. Plasma felt an urge to respond, but it was a distant, abstract thing.
Instead, she knelt on the hot ground next to Helium, legs folded neatly to place her chest next to Helium's head. The medic had left the bodybag draped over her mate like it was a sheet; his hooves stuck out past the edges, charred on one side. "What am I going to do without you, Helium? We should have had gigaseconds left in the Master's service." She bowed her head, eyes long empty of tears.
Hooves drummed past and wings whirred overhead, casting brief, predatory shadows against a curdled sky. Shouted orders, possibly directed at her. Plasma ignored everything and reached out to pull the plastic back, but there was no feeling of the world bending to her will, not the slightest hint of power. She screwed her eyes shut, uselessly tensing every muscle until her ears sang. The breath came out with a sob and she slumped, leaning forwards and clumsily gripping the sheet with her teeth. Muzzle this close, there was no escaping the strong smell of cooked flesh and burned fur.
The smells were familiar from a lifetime of witnessing the accidents that afflicted the average working pony, but were strong, far too strong. Plasma bent further forward, brushing her muzzle along the unburned line of Helium's jaw. "Dammit, Helium," she whispered. There were fewer and fewer people around -- they were all running somewhere -- but Plasma made no effort to move.
There were two ponies watching her: a skewbald mare, scarred along her belly, and a foal, dark-coated and only a megasecond or two old. "We have to go," the mare said, "I've been here before... there will be a shockwave." She looked up at the sky, one wing unfolding slightly to cover her foal.
"Go, then," Plasma said listlessly, not looking at the mare. "I'm staying here." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I think you were right after all, Helium. My little fillies became monsters and destroyed us all."
The other mare looked confused, then stared up at the mountain with its missing peak. "You're Fusion and Gravity's dam," she said quietly. "They saved me, they saved everypony at Naraka. How could you call them monsters?"
Plasma blinked, then lifted her head, swinging it around like a turret. "You are young, child. Look around you--" She levered herself to shaky legs, then swept the surroundings with one wing, her primary feather spread like blades. "--count the dead, the drowned, the burned and blasted." The wing came down, gently touching the bodybag. "I have no magic. Our medics have no magic." Sudden tears welled up, making her eyes swim. Could they have saved him? He could have saved himself! "You have no magic. Your foal has no magic!" The final words came out as a hiss, loud and rich with sibilants, as her neck stretched out, ears back and teeth snapping like blocks of wood.
The foal, as dark as a storm cloud, stumbled back with a squeak, cowering behind the mare. She straightened, wings mantling and blocking Plasma's view. She struggled to speak for a moment, then backed away. "I think you have forgotten what it was like for some of us. You all had to work, and might have died, but at least your foals had a chance. My first ended up as a medical experiment, and so would Thunder." Still moving, she circled around Plasma, heading for the evacuation point. "What would you have had Fusion do? She had the ability to rescue us, and she did."
Frozen, Plasma watched her go, then sank back to her knees at Helium's side. She leaned against his body; it felt cool and slightly stiff. "You old fool, Helium. We brought our foals up well, no matter what you thought at the end. It's just such a shame that--" She swallowed hard, then struggled back to her hooves. "Goodbye, my love."
Jumping forwards, dirt and gravel spraying out from under her hooves, Plasma galloped after the skewbald mare.
===
"Is there a problem with Rinchur's ID?" Salrath asked, smiling hopefully at the officer and ignoring the bored-looking gryphon slouched on the back of the police aircar. It was a practiced smile, one that contained worry and hope in equal measure, rather than any warmth. Don't look in the storage compartments. "She was in the transit tunnels near Naraka." She held up her amputated arm with its crude prosthetic. "Lost everything in the... in the..." She let the smile falter, inhaling deeply, then swallowing and staring at the ground. Other vehicles, the normal mix of aircars and heavy transports, variously whispered, growled or thundered overhead and around the pull-in bay she'd been directed to land at.
What made the officer suspicious? Salrath squinted and bit at the end of her tongue, forcing a tear from her eyes. The amount this one paid for the ID was substantial... She sighed silently, thinking how hard it was to actually insert consistent lies into all the various governmental databases, especially when in a hurry.
"Nothing to be concerned about," the officer said without a smile.
He had slate-grey fur, what little of it showed past the close-fitting suit of armour with its obvious plates of anti-kinetic ceramic. Between the black plates was a dark blue woven material, some sort of flexible nanotube weave, and a dense collection of equipment -- restraints, medkit, firearm -- hung from a wide belt. With side-long glances, Salrath studied the pistol in its anti-snatch holster, recalling her early training. Pull forwards and push down with a claw right there...
This is not going to work, she thought. The gryphon was watching her closely, it's head feathers twitching as Salrath took another tentative step towards the officer, as if in an effort to see what was on the screen. Not too close... she gauged the distance, feeling her senses sharpen. Her own highly illegal gun was well hidden and completely inaccessible for a quick draw and firefight; it would take a good sensor sweep -- or a practiced and paranoid forensic servitor -- to find the thing. She flexed her wrist, brushing the little diamond needle-blade that seemed to be part of her sleeveless jacket.
Her bracer hummed its news alert pattern into the muscle of her forearm, something had tripped the keyword searches she'd put in place, but she ignored it. A few seconds later the officer's own screen flashed red, what must have been her, or her vehicle's, file vanishing behind a slew of priority orders. "It's Rinchur's lucky day," he said, finally breaking into a merciless grin before pulling open the aircar's door and climbing in. "Go home and stay there. A state of emergency has just been declared."
"Yes, officer," she murmured, backing away. That's two of us that got lucky. Salrath moved her paw away from the concealed knife hilt, getting into her own aircar. Pity, that police vehicle would have been quite an upgrade. She glanced at the information display, which was showing a general override from Hive command, and orders announcing an immediate curfew. A few claw gestures brought up further details, but everything was vague and couched in language calculated not to alarm the general populace.
"Rutting Maker," she said loudly, the likely meaning of the calming, anodyne phrases becoming obvious, and flicked open her bracer's news feed. The more independent news sources, such as they were, were entirely devoid of meaningful coverage. Most were offline or had not updated for the last kilosecond. The official state news service was showing a light entertainment program, apparently involving an aircar factory’s youth choir. That's it, this one was too slow. The civil defence protocols will be active. All this one's preparations, useless! No escape, the arcology entrances locked down to all but military and certain civil authority traffic...
Her eyes flicked up to the police aircar, still sitting across her path, and she smiled.
===
The sun had moved across the sky like it was pulled by a wire, fading and brightening like it was nothing more than a parachute flare. Rthar wanted to stop everything and stare, but none of this apocalyptic strangeness made any difference to the infalling weapons. It was too much, too unbelievable, so he pushed it away and focused on the threat he could understand.
This one would almost rather be back in an infantry battle. Rthar was strapped into the tactical chair of an aircraft similar to the reaction dropship he'd once commanded. It was missing the gryphon troop bays and power armour morgue, packing the empty volume with communications, sensors and a set of artillery railguns and long range lasers pressed into service as anti-orbit weapons. Linked by more lasers to the rest of the hastily assembled terminal defence fleet, he flew long, pseudo-randomly generated racetrack paths through the sky of the Hive. Gryphon-piloted gunships flew similar paths, the bulk of the weapons available to him, slaved to the orders generated by his tactical console.
There was a minor lull in the firing, enough that Rthar focussed tired eyes on the long range sensors and dared to hope that-- No, it was just that a fortuitus sympathetic detonation, set by one of the Arclights touching off an oversized antimatter trigger in one of the incoming weapons. He cycled through the scans as protocol demanded -- exoatmospheric, endoatmospheric, surface skimming -- the actions almost robotic. In the corner of the display was the gamma and neutron flux counter, an accumulated measure of the radiation penetrating the hull; it was already uncomfortably high from the repeated near misses. Nothing a servitor medic couldn't fix. He gave a little bitter chuckle at that thought. What this one wouldn't give for a competent pony right now.
There was another alarm from the port number two engine -- the MHD thruster's ionisation plates were overheating and eroding at a frightening rate under the constant demand of supersonic flight. Rthar cleared the alarm. Not going to be here long enough for it to make a difference, he thought, tasking a subset of his gunships to fire upon the lead attack units. They flickered and flared in the diffuse fringes of the upper atmosphere, any attempt at stealth abandoned as their thermal protection started to ablate. He'd been tracking this cluster for the hundred seconds it had been in range of the thermal cameras, but only now was it actually close enough to prosecute.
Three-quarters of the signals were blown away, retarded by their interaction with the tenuous air and marking them out as cheap decoys or discarded attack-management systems, unneeded now the projectiles were committed. Some radiated ferocious amounts of jamming across broad swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum, targeting carefully crafted pulses of radio and laser at where they thought Rthar's own sensors and weapons were. These he diverted a fraction of his reserve to, those armed with lasers.
Barely noticed on the feed from the hull-mounted cameras, the air outside filled with faint threads of green and the ripples of railgun projectiles fired nearly straight up. Explosions, little more than flashes of light amid the falling stars, started to pepper the indigo sky. Ammunition reserves were dropping but still adequate, and the immediate engagement was looking to be in paw, so Rthar risked directing a quarter of his force to start the mid-air rearming process. Gunships fell to meet a rising armoury carrier, passing close like sparrows harrying a buzzard, receiving packages of railgun projectiles delivered via the carrier's thaumokinetic conveyors.
The last of the incoming projectiles were being engaged and Rthar turned his attention to the next cluster. The remnants of the first group's penaids were still reentering, slow compared to the needle-pointed high-velocity warheads. He started to issue orders to engage them, suddenly concerned about mission analysis systems reporting the failure of the attack back to the next cluster.
Light flared, turning the camera feeds white for an instant before the electronics compensated. The dropship staggered in the air, listing sharply to port, at the same time as a slew of red warnings cascaded down his battle management feed, each one a gunship under his command. Outside, the sky was filled with pale claws of ionisation, all extending down from one point in the heavens to touch a Lacunae aircraft and turn it into tumbling wreckage and fire.
"What in the rutting Maker's name was that?" the pilot snarled, paws busy with the controls. The dropship bucked as it went subsonic, turning a tightening spiral towards the ground. The vibration grew worse for a moment, violent enough that Rthar's vision blurred and his teeth rattled, then subsided as the pilot made more adjustments. The racket of the engines faded to a low hum as they went to pure ducted fan mode, the high-performance MHD thrusters shutting down.
Rthar was busy with his own systems. The sensors, coming back online after self-protection shutdown, told a dire story of loss. Gone was the bulk of his force, along with the other task groups and most of the Arclight units. Panic made his throat close up and stomach clench. "There was something in one of the decoys," he whispered. "A retarded bomb-pumped X-ray laser." If these one's hadn't lost so many Arclights fighting the ponies! Reflexively, he looked down at Hive, as if the the deck plating beneath his paws was transparent. These ones can't save them.
Far above, and getting closer at five kilolengths a second, the next cluster of warheads started to reenter.
===
The detonation was early, too distant to have much effect, but two thirds of the point defence squadron turned into sudden fireballs. Their final defensive shots, still flying towards closer targets, stopped homing and missed. "Arclights Fifteen Alpha and Two Alpha destroyed; redeploying remaining units." More explosions, the silent, globular pulses of antimatter-catalysed fusion weapons detonating outside the atmosphere. "These ones no longer have sufficient cover for Arcologies One, Three, Four and Nine."
"What happened?" Orgon asked, paws dancing over his strategy management console. Lost too much, no way to--
"Nuclear-pumped x-ray laser slipped through the sensor net." His aide, Faula's, voice was dull and grey, drained of all emotion, like machine vocalisation.
The beams couldn't reach the ground, but they could hit the high-flying missile busses and mass-driver flack guns. The sort of attack that wouldn't stand a chance if these ones had working mid-course defences! The backup systems, a few ground-based missile silos that hadn't been used during the attack on the Hammer projectile, had long since been expended. Most of the static ground defences had been pounded to scrap in the hundred seconds that had followed, targeted by metal falling at orbital velocity. Mobile systems, heavy floater platforms carrying anti-air railguns, buzzed over the surface of the Hive to fill in the gaps, but their engagement range was short: the most desperate of point defences.
Feeds from surface cameras blinked out, replaced a few seconds later by others from different, and more distant, angles. A vibration ripped through the control room, making Orgon's paws itch. He stared down at the strategy board, suddenly motionless. Most of the local defence vehicles had just dropped out of the local battlenet.
"Low altitude detonation." The Defence Specialist's voice changed, a faint tinge of panic creeping in. "Yield… one fifty plus megatons. This one has no connection to the local defence grid. All sensors are reporting out of range errors. It--"
There was more, but Orgon closed his eyes and sighed, then opened them again and looked towards the conference room that held Merlon and a few academicians. That's it. Orgon could run, but to where? High-speed escape systems waited at the back of the command centre, capsules fired down mass driver barrels to alternative bolt holes. Compromised, every one. Feeling unsteady, he stood and walked to the conference room, pushing the door aside and ignoring the questions from the rest of the command staff.
He paused, paw on the door control, mind racing, hunting for some strategy that would stop the madness. The next salvo will be a set of high-yield earth penetrators. Somewhere overhead, still in the mid-point of the ballistic arc, mission analysis sensors would have detected the detonations and loss of defensive fire and relayed new battle plans to warheads further along their trajectories. Revised targeting solutions would be shared between the units of the weapon swarm, optimising impact points and fuzing depth for maximum casualties.
Perhaps the ponies will save these ones, or at least their kind still in the deep shelters. He shook his head, baring his teeth with the mockery of a smile, watching the battle approaching Luna's orbit and the beams lancing from the sun. They have their hooves full as it is. Some fights are unwinnable. Still, there's no need to show that. "Relocate the general staff and Synod members to the omega site and start sealing the contingency vaults. These ones must save what they can," he said over his shoulder, then opened the door.
Merlon was standing in a metal spider-frame, at the focus of an array of crystal thaumic machines. Her head was up and ears forward, but her gaze was fixed on some distant horizon, a thousand kilolength stare. She didn't move or flinch when one of the Academicians reached across her muzzle to adjust one of the sensors, the fur of his arm brushing against her whiskers. "Academician Thul. What have these ones discovered?" he asked quietly, letting the door slide closed and shutting out the sudden panic of the control room.
"Strategist..." Thul scratched at the side of her head, claws digging into the fur under her ear. "This is the most ingenious application of thaumic conversion this one has ever seen. It must have taken gigaseconds to perfect." Orgon frowned, tapping his claws against his thigh, and the Academician cringed and coughed. "There is something in the servitor mandatory supplements. One of the source compounds is derived from an optimised lucerne crop that's in global use. It's one of many small molecules that is absorbed through the buccal membranes, and has a reasonable biological half-life." Thul looked grim, turning towards a display packed with dense text, plots and a complex magical pattern. "As these ones thought, the spell triggers a transformation... the new molecule binds to receptors and depolarises the nerves connecting horn and wings to brain. There are probably other effects these ones are not aware of."
"Can it be reversed?"
"Yes, but without medical servitors it will take time. The neural paralysis operates in the same way as botulinum toxin; the molecule is extremely long-lived and specific, but there will be an antagonist these ones can synthesise in the next few megaseconds." Thul looked tired but satisfied. "These ones can reverse this, Strategist. There is one other thing--" A flick of her paw changed the display to a simpler document, one with all the hallmarks of a hastily prepared Security document. "The strain of lucerne was one stolen from Baur biolabs two gigaseconds ago; the Security review now suggests this was bait. It was adopted into the general supplement formula half a gigasecond ago."
This was planned for a long time. "Thank you, Academician," Orgon said gravely. "Please join the evacuation; these ones have been allocated a place in one of the contingency vaults." He opened the door, gesturing to a waiting, and increasingly nervous, soldier.
Thul looked in puzzlement at the master display in the centre of the room, covered with red warnings and dire predictions. His ears drooped. "But synthesis of the antagonist will need a full chemistry facility..."
Orgon nodded. "Perhaps one will survive, or Thul can build one later. Go." They rushed past, holding hastily collected equipment, heading for the evacuation shuttle. Finally alone, Orgon pulled at the metal frame, folding it away so Merlon could move.
Her eyes twitched, focussing on him. Her mouth opened, then closed, in silence. "They are all going to die," she said finally. "The locations of the shelters are probably known."
"Yes," Orgon said, closing the door and blocking the view of the strategic systems. Returning to the analytical instruments his paws swept across the controls, sending all the collected data to the rogue’s noncausal communicator. "Everything these ones have is within range of earth penetrators." He lowered his gaze and rested a tentative paw on Merlon's withers. "This one won't be able to keep his promise. He can't keep any of his promises." Orgon made a helpless gesture. "Sorry."
"This redoubt is also targeted, isn't it?"
"Yes. These ones can leave, if Merlon wants to, but..."
"To be trapped in a shuttle in a collapsed tunnel." Merlon snorted. "I don't think so. I would rather die on my hooves." She stepped out of the instrumented armature and pushed open the door to the command centre, leaving Orgon trailing in her wake.
===
Fusion felt blindly up at the sky, pushing and manipulating the many-lobed thing that had replaced the sun. The lasers had stopped, but the changes she'd made were harder to reverse than they had been to create, and the hazy, flame-like excrescences wavered and danced around the solar disk. Gravity was a constant presence in the back of her mind, far away and moving rapidly up from the equatorial plane. Fusion swallowed, shaking away the tears that had collected around her closed eyes. We've got all this power and it's useless! Can't stop the dogs, can't rescue our ponies. She inhaled a shaky breath, prodding again at the gas outflow from the sun. Barely understood changes took place within the complex structures she could now feel behind the patch of warmth in the sky.
We have to do something! Gravity sounded small and lost. I made the Court pay for all this. They died too fast. Too clean.
Good. We are not them. Fusion looked through Gravity's eyes, at the dense scatter of new craters over the surface of Luna. Couldn't have them raining death on us, or risk leaving behind a group of dogs who think they can still rule us. So many might rejoin their erstwhile masters. We would be fighting a civil war at the same time as we played our part in a genocide. There would not even need to be dogs left for them to carry on opposing us, if that happened.
That would turn us into monsters, hate figures for all of ponykind. Some emotions leaked back down the link, an odd sense of anticipation. Better none of the dogs survive. They don't deserve to.
There was a storm system on the horizon; at Fusion's speed it was upon her within seconds. The winds were vicious, laced with hoof-sized hailstones, but no match for her power. Despite not being affected, the weather system was orders of magnitude more violent than anything she'd experienced before. The world is falling apart... no weather teams, no power systems management, everything we run will stop. They might have recovered even from the nuked arcologies, but now the dogs’ world is over; I wonder how many of them know it?
Those in charge must do. They'll have planned for it at some level... but millions will die trapped in the deep arcology levels. Buried in the dark. A shiver came back down the link. Those that don't burn.
So many of our ponies will burn with them. Most are not protected anywhere nearly as well as the dogs. Fusion scanned the horizon again, looking for anything that suggested pony. There was nothing other than the laser-colours of dog crystal hardware, scattered in isolated and broken patches. Grav, the arcologies are going dark and with their magic gone I can't see ponies any more. I can't find them to rescue them. Everything above ground has gone. All those corrals, bright delicate structures, in the paths of nuclear explosions. Our people have no more magic. She stifled a sob.
Then protect what we have! There are thousands of ponies in the mountains. Keep them safe... I can see the storms. They will wipe the surface clean.
Fusion took a deep, shuddering breath, then another, smoother, one. There's not been natural weather on this planet for hundreds of gigaseconds; things are resetting themselves. I can... part of my special talent was always making force fields. Perhaps I can partition off part of the world and keep us safe?
Those mountains were nuked... there were dozens of strikes.
The bombs are pretty clean and there are ways to clean up the residual radioactivity... Fusion shook her head. Either way, I'll find a safe place. A bitter taste stung at the back of her throat and she swallowed. There's nothing I can do out here.
The field will have to last for a tenth gigasecond or more. Can you manage it, even with that Stone?
Maybe not with one or two... what about with more? Fusion's path curved towards the nearest patch of feeling, drawn to the closest of the Stones. There are another four out there. She gained altitude, climbing above the storm clouds.
===
Merlon stared up at the main display, a leaden weight filling her bones. The reports were patchy, supplied by defence systems partially shattered by kinetic and nuclear strikes, but quite clear despite it all. The next package of warheads, approaching the ends of their quasi-ballistic trajectories, would be coming down right on top of them. How long...? A few hundred seconds at most. She sighed, suddenly feeling very lonely. "I don't remember when I was last with one of my own kind," she said, casting a glance at Orgon, who bowed his head slightly.
"The demands of the role," he said softly. "Merlon was a vital part of the machinery of state, even if her previous masters--" He made a bitter face at the word. "--didn't realise it. This one has seen the pony's record, and all the interventions she made. This one is sorry for that, too. Orgon knew better than most the... the truth about ponykind."
"We nearly made it work," Merlon said, her throat closing up and distorting the words. "I always thought I'd at least be able to return to my home corral," she said, clearing her throat and rubbing her eyes with one wing, "before being euthanized." Not that there is anypony to return to. No foals... Sire and dam gone so long I can barely remember their scent. I've outlived everypony I ever knew.
Orgon reached out a tentative paw, as he had several times before, and laid it on her shoulder. This time she didn't step away or ignore it, but leaned against the slight pressure. "The future is with Fusion and Gravity now." He gestured to one of the screens and its slew of still images. Fresh craters on the surface of the planet; far, far more over the face of Luna. Beams of violet light lancing down from a dim and flickering sun. "This one hopes they can save something. The next generation can rebuild... you ponies are a tough lot." His ears drooped. "Perhaps they won't hunt this one's kind to extinction."
"You know the worst thing about losing my magic?" Merlon said suddenly. "Apart from being trapped two kilolengths down and about to be killed by nuclear weapons, that is." Orgon blinked, looking confused at her sudden shift in tone. Dare I? There's nothing left to lose. Merlon eyed him speculatively, bending her head to look at Orgon's paw. "I itch in places I can't reach."
Orgon blinked again, paw leaving her shoulder. He stared at his claws, blunt things filed short for easier use of computer systems. "Where?" he asked with an uncharacteristic tremble.
Oh, I could draw this out... but there's no time and I really do itch. "Shoulder, wingroots, line of my neck from just under my jaw all the way to between my forelegs." Everywhere. "Between my wings, where the feathers mix with fur." She twisted slightly, mantling her wings. "I don't want to meet my Maker all itchy."
"Uh..." Orgon said and, for a moment, Merlon thought he wouldn't do it. Then he stepped forwards, running both paws gently through the tiny feathers of her wingroots.
"We're tough, remember?" she said, then gasped as he dug his claws in. He hesitated, opening his mouth to speak. "No, don't stop! You've no idea what it was like strapped in that machinery." Merlon arched her back, pushing against his paws, and groaned. Her lips twitched and she bit at them to stop them quivering.
"Orgon could be removed from office for this..." he said, a slight smile returning to his muzzle. "There are worse ways to spend this one's last moments."
It's no good-- She shuffled sideways until Orgon stood next to her shoulder, facing the opposite direction. She bent her neck, resting her chin on his back. The quivering in her lips intensified at the touch of fabric of his uniform vest, but it wasn't quite right. Merlon groaned again, then worked her muzzle under the lower end of the vest, pressing against the slightly matted fur. Orgon didn't seem to notice, or care.
The fur wasn't the same as a pony's -- longer, a little coarser and not as densely packed -- but it was close enough. Her lips wriggled, parting the fur and pressing against the flesh beneath; Orgon's muscles tensed then relaxed. He must find this very strange. Merlon's mouth opened and her teeth parted, then she gave him a nip, just above the base of his stubby tail. Orgon flinched, but didn't pull away, and Merlon smiled, her muzzle buried in his fur. Thank you.
Warmth flooded through Merlon, and she fell into the grooming ritual, faint memories of her dam doing the same for her suddenly becoming sharp and fresh, as the outside world faded and became inconsequential.