//------------------------------// // Chapter 31: Thysanodes // Story: Meliora // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Jackie had to give Misty a little credit—her little figment had taken her command to heart. “Bring everyone,” she had said. And now everyone was here. The leaders of Meliora’s councils, of course. Experts on war, farming, trade, manufacturing, terraculture, logistics, and religion. Queen Avery of the breezies, along with half a dozen of her closest scholars and aids. But there were more—apparently word was going around the Dreamlands that something big was about to happen, and so many other figures had come. Eureka was here, despite his professed apathy towards their future. No other Alicorns were still on the planet, that she knew, but there were some who came close. Among them was the possibly dream-spirit Artifice, her ward Hat Trick, and a handful of other important spirits of the Dreamlands. She had half-expected Voeskender or one of the other beings to be in attendance here, when such a fundamental conflict to their own future would be decided. They used a massive, floating building, modeled after a pre-Event cruise liner of indeterminate name and age. The ship itself rocked gently to air currents instead of water. Up so high, almost all of the residents of Meliora would be out of reach to stumble into affairs accidentally, while their meeting place could still benefit from the preexisting bubble of stability it was located within. She explained everything she could at first, but the longer she spoke the more clear it was to her that the details were escaping them. So she took a simpler approach. “We hoped we might have months for this war,” Jackie said, once they were all there. “But we don’t. While gathering information in Mundi, I accidentally found myself placed in command of the extermination fleet. It’s loading right now—probably will be done and on its way before too long. I don’t need to get graphic about what will happen when it gets here. But briefly—if City Hall is destroyed, then the bridge between Meliora and the real world will be broken, trapping a million mortal minds inside. “Any of you who know anything about the cosmology of the Dreamlands understand how fucked that will make everything. This world will effectively end—the Dreamlands will eventually decay into an impassable wasteland of hostile magic and insane demons—created from all these people. There is a possibility—and not a small one—that the very act of severing the bridge will permanently dissolve the boundary between the sleeping and waking worlds. So all the demons made of our former citizens would either not be created, because they could make it back, or maybe it might be even worse because they’d be able to strike out at still-living ponies on the other side. Hard to say which would suck more.” The crowd was silent for a long time—most of her own ponies saw the other guests and remained subdued, ears flat and eyes downcast. She’d asked them to come into the affairs of gods with the experience of a modest city council. “I say this by way of pointing it out,” said a voice from the back. Artifice. At least she didn’t sound as smug as usual. There was apparently a threshold of seriousness that could capture even her within its gravity. “Not by way of suggestion. But if it is the dream world you want to preserve, we could evacuate the city now.” She raised a wing, cutting off Jackie’s own minister of logistics. “I know, there is not enough food on the other side. But I don’t think they’ll live long enough to starve. The plan you just described—they’ll be slaughtered on our side. No demons, no destabilization of the cosmos. Better in the long-term.” “Better that everyone die?” Misty asked, from beside Jackie in the air. For the first time in such a meeting, she was not her natural size, but impersonating a regular seapony. Not one that looked like Alex, at least. She was growing into her own identity. “On some axis of better,” Artifice said. “Again, not suggesting it. Just pointing out that it doesn’t have to be a cosmic crisis. I think you can evacuate in a day.” “Assuming we don’t get a riot,” said Lavender. “We’d basically be condemning our entire population to die. They’d figure it out.” “It’s possible,” Jackie said. “But I’d like to preemptively dismiss that idea. Alicorns of the past have planned that way—sacrificing their lives for the future of some unknown population yet to be born. Hell, that’s what Athena is doing. She thinks that all this will make life better for ponies way in the future. Maybe she’s right, but I don’t fucking care. I don’t care if all of us dying fucks up the dream world. That will be Athena’s problem, not ours. And if not running from it means there’s a chance we win…” She heard murmurs of ascent, mostly from her own city council. Maybe they took solace in having one of their own who could argue with these great figures. She couldn’t tell if they were really understanding or not, but she hoped they could. Their lives would be the most impacted by this. No Alicorn would die tomorrow unless they chose to. “So what do we do then?” Eureka asked, perhaps noticing her gaze. “Not sacrifice your civilization experiments, fine. We have to do something.” “We do,” Jackie agreed. “I have… already changed Athena’s plan a great deal. So long as she does not detect me, I think I can carry my changes through. They should give us significantly better odds of survival, since we won’t be getting bombarded from orbit. See… the Spirit of Eternity is going to park pretty low. In range of a daring pegasus to fly to, or a short-range teleport. I’m thinking we can take it for ourselves.” “You’re thinking wrong,” said a tiny voice—the first time any of the breezies had spoken. She lifted up from her little table, horn glowing. Little Avery dressed in a tiny jumpsuit, woven of a shimmering fabric like a space suit. “I had Lynn look into our archives for you. Turns out the Spirit of Eternity belongs to the old class of Worldship battlecruisers. They’re designed for interstellar use primarily, and were built before the newer generation of relativistic drives.” All but Eureka looked to have completely tuned her out. Even Liz looked confused. “Which means…” Jackie prompted. “They will be almost entirely computer controlled,” Eureka supplied. “Athena does not care about designing her ships for redundancy—so far as she’s concerned, no ship she isn’t piloting should keep working. There are likely a thousand layers of hardware on that thing all designed to make sure that if she loses control, it falls out of the air.” “That is correct,” Avery said. “Those systems aren’t malicious—they date to the Great War. Charybdis could not design its own computers, or build its own warships, but it was very good at salvaging dead ones, and taking over living ones. Every weapon possible incorporated some sort of security failsafe. Interstellar ships, even those without explicit weapon systems, are the most dangerous weapons of all.” Jackie deflated. So much for that idea. Her imagined image of sailing away with the Spirit of Eternity, smacking it straight into Athena’s central processor on Olympus… died. There would not be such an easy way out. “Then we have to bring it down,” she said. “Preferably before it can finish unloading its marines. I’m aboard it right now… is there anything I could do? Some… central vent I could clog, or… reactor I could overload?” “You would have to block Athena’s presence,” Eureka said. “Only with her gone would the ship be destroyed. Any damage you caused less than that would be detected and repaired.” “So how do we do that?” Jackie asked no one in particular. “We have about a day before the ship gets here. Soon after this meeting ends, you won’t be able to talk to me anymore. Anything I need to do, I gotta learn about it now.” The room exploded with suggestions. Ponies shouted over one another, argued, and a few even rose from their seats in anger. Jackie waited patiently for the waves to settle down a little, before one idea rose above the others. “Artifice, wait. Say that again, louder.” The room went quiet. “Well, it’s obvious. Athena’s transitioning into wetware. More and more she’s aware of the world we live in, and she knows she can’t rule it like she rules the physical. That… attack of yours, it was effective. But a magical attack trained her to create a magical countermeasure. Now she’s got servants. Nasty, right out of Lovecraft’s nightmares. Last I checked, her shipyards have been cold for two centuries. All the fleet is old, left over from the Great War. And each one of them has an Indrik in control. Kill it, and then we could blow up the rest of the receivers with some well-trained people. The Spirit of Eternity should fall right out of the sky after that.” “I have some teams who could do the exploding,” Avery said. “Lots of breezies work with the colonization authority, and they’re still using the Worldship design. But I’m not sending anypony onto that ship while there’s a monster on-board. We’re already fragile enough.” “I’ve seen them,” Jackie said, and for the first time she found her confidence wouldn’t come. She could still see those mismatched eyes, feel its attention on her. Every second she had imagined it would be reading her mind, and that it would discover her betrayal. It would see her one second, and she would be dead the next. But that hadn’t happened, and she’d made it all the way here. Her body was still alive on the other side too, though she couldn’t say much more than that. Perhaps she was in a cell, just waiting to wake up. But until then… “You know about them; do you know how I kill one? They’ve got unicorn magic like I’ve never seen… floating in the air every second like they’re goddamn legendary Pokémon.” She drew her knife from the holster under her shoulder, flipping it once over her leg. She knew she could kill anything with that blade. She’d killed worse. But she wouldn’t be able to get it into the monsters. Silence descended on the gathering. “There’s one more thing you should consider,” Eureka said. “When we do this—supposing we can—this will be the event that escalates their entire nation to war. If you blow that ship up tomorrow, then the rest of their fleet begins preparations to leave the next day. While the ship is important, it is not the most important. We must decide what to do about Athena. Perhaps the answer is to flee. We could… hide, perhaps. Relocate your central node. Move it somewhere she can’t reach.” “Give up living in the real world,” Lavender said. “That’s what you’re saying. Give up… having real children. I know that’s impossible in the Dreamlands.” “Well, yes,” he said. “But you won’t get any older while you’re in there, so… win-win? Don’t need to replace yourselves with the next generation if you won’t die anyway.” That’s just a slower version of what Athena wants to do. Instead of transforming into demons all at once, they’ll change slowly. Gradually lose what makes them human. Well, not human. “No,” she said. “We won’t run. The planet is ours, not hers. We’ll take it back. Soon—before her second attack. There won’t be a second invasion, because when we’re done, Mundi is going to be scrambling to figure out how to turn the lights on without her.” “Big talk,” Artifice said. “How will you do that?” She met Eureka’s eyes. “I have an idea. A spell… I can talk to you about it after. For now, I need ideas for how to kill the monster. I kill it, then Misty can signal to you, Avery, that it’s time for the team.” “I don’t see why you can’t just deal with it the same way you fought that assassin,” Liz said. “Sure, it’s powerful… maybe stronger than you. But what if you brought it into this world? You said it looked like a unicorn… maybe that means it isn’t very good at dream stuff. You could beat it here.” Jackie found herself smiling. “Maybe I could.”