☢★★ Whirling Gears ★★☢
I stared at my somehow cognizant mother, jaw somewhat agape, Sweetie Eyes locked in tracking mode and failing to focus. “I—”
A text field popped up in my field of view and cut me off.
Critical Error!
LOGIC STACK OVERFLOW CONTAINMENT FAILURE
Subprocessing Unit 43893 designated primary backup.
Please Restart your Zebra in Safe-Mode to avoid initiation of auto-destruct sequence.
I just went ahead and said no to exploding today. It felt so nice to be able to just ignore that sort of error message now. Thanks, me.
“How come I can tell what face she’s making without her skin on her chassis?” I heard Dash say as I snapped out of the moment.
I shook my head to further clear my vision, then did the best Sweetie Glare I could manage to execute in my current state and focused on mom’s visor. “What do you mean I could give you a heart attack?! You’ve been a full-on space cadet who can’t even keep track of time for over two hundred years, and the one time I go far away from home and get really beat up just trying to do my job, you suddenly are aware enough to tell that I’ve been damaged?! You literally just crashed most of my logic chips!” I thrust a hoof into her chest. “Check my log files! SU-43893 just got designated as backup system to avoid a crash!”
And a self destruct, but let’s not worry mom. I managed to warlock that problem away. She need not know. She’d probably newspaper bap me for being so direct with my spirit work.
Come to think of it, now that mom’s lucid I should ask why she thinks percussive maintenance works on foals.
Mom’s angry look immediately softened. “Oh, honey, I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll have you fixed up good as new as soon as I can, and I’ll be sure to un-jank those flank enhancements you got done by, and I am only assuming here, a sex robot designed off of a marketing ploy for a soft drink. You should have said something, I'd have done that for you,” she cleared her throat and flashed me the shakiest of smiles. “As for my current state; due to a dictionary error, I forgot to update my calendar software which has been having a buffer overflow for the last two centuries. I performed the patch a short time ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “I should have thought to check that.”
Then again, I’m a mail mare. The only reason I even know how toasters work is because mom insisted I had to know… in spite of us never once toasting toast.
Rainbow blinked several times. “Wait, what?” she demanded angrily. “Two hundred years of her being an invalid, all because of some software crap, and you can say is “oh”?”
I looked over my shoulder at Rainbow. “It explains everything perfectly. What more could I ask for?”
Rainbow raised a hoof to object, then shook her head. “Whatever,” she sighed. “Look, we don’t have much time. We need to get into the lab right now.”
She turned towards the door and waved for everyone to go inside. A small group of ponies was clogging up the lab’s outer doorway. I did my best to make sure I could see everypony and knew them. Without my pelt, a lot of ponies might want to shoot me on sight.
The group was composed of: Desi, Ribbon, Mom, Speed, and—
And a still somehow glowing ghoul pony in a spacesuit!
“Vinyl!” I eed at the top of my not-lungs before running over to her to give her the biggest hug I could.
“Gerk!” Vinyl said as my forelegs hydraulics whined loudly.
“Eeep!” My ear servos flicked back as I let her go. “Uh, sorry… just happy you’re not dead! I thought you were dead. But you’re not. Which is good! Because I love you.”
Vinyl held up a hoof and wheezed as her ribs repaired themselves and she got her lungs reinflated.
Lyra leaned in, making me jump a bit, and took a squint at Vinyl’s face, still looking confused, then shook her head dismissively.
“Nah… Coincidence. Timeline doesn't add up.” She murmured quietly before withdrawing out of my view.
Vinyl took a deep breath, signifying her lungs were no longer over hugged. “I’m glad to see you again too, Gears,” she said while returning my hug with a much lighter one. “You feel kinda mangled. Are you okay? I had a spell go off in my face and I’m mostly blind right now. It’s getting better pretty quick, because glowing, but yeah, sucks right now… Kind of a bummer.”
I nodded. “Mhm! I’m pretty much okay. My pelt will grow back as soon as I can eat something.”
“Good. I remember you mentioning you use it for cooling.” Vinyl commented idly.
“So,” Ribbon’s large voice said from well above me. “You’re way more cybernetic than we thought.”
“She’s not organic at all, actually,” Mom said proudly. “She’ll insist her pelt is, and it was at one point, but with how many times it's been magically regenerated it should really be classified as synthetic.”
“Is?” Desi asked with a cute little frown. “Possible ocular error detected.”
I gave her a pat on the head. “It’s okay. It will grow back if I can eat something.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Lyra’s face had gone pale as she stared at the doorway wide-eyed. Poor thing. She’d been trapped in here for so long with just one or two other ponies and now a walking tank was standing in her doorway. That would unnerve most ponies.
I offered her a reassuring smile. “It’s okay! Loom’s nice.”
“Just reminding everypony there’s a war outside,” Rainbow said through a very strained grin.
Oh. Right.
I gave Vinyl another much gentler hug and then let go, turned, and trotted into the Lab so everypony could follow Rainbow’s directions.
I couldn’t help but feel I was forgetting something very important because of just how baffled and delighted I was. I frowned and stepped to the side, bumping into one of the workbenches. Workbench! That was it, the translator thingie!
I picked it up from the bench and held it out to Rainbow as she walked into the room, followed closely by Desi and Speed.
“By the way, I accidentally bumped this thing and it works. It’s a translator. We might need it, and it can do Equish so...” I shrugged. “Even if not, it’s pretty neat. Can I keep it if you don’t want it?”
Rainbow squinted for a moment. “Is that what that was? Damn. That’s twelve bits I owe her now… Go ahead and keep it. I thought it was a space-pipbuck.”
Desi shook her head once. “Bad guess.”
Rainbow raised one eyebrow slowly while I tucked the translator into my saddlebag.
Desi blinked, confused by the expression.
“She wants to know why her guess is bad,” Loom prompted like you would for a foal in school.
“Desi’s an adult,” I said to Loom as firmly and honestly as I could. “She’s just not good with language.”
Loom’s face went from natural to delight almost instantly. “Whaaaat?! But you’re so teeny!” She said as she stooped down to look Desi in the eyes.
Desi humphed, crossed her forelegs, and levitated her book to reference it. “Am not “teeny”! Am space-efficient.”
“Yes, teeny,” Ribbon teased.
Desi took out her book and started paging through it while Rainbow shook her head again and began to trot through the lab’s inner door to the stairwell.
“Come on, guys! There’s a lot we have to do if we're going to stop the Enclave today… You know, before they explode everything.” Rainbow prompted through a strained smile.
Desi finished her word-look-up while Loom began to walk to the stairs along with everypony else.
“You are much bigger than most ponies. We come in many sizes.” Desi said cheerfully.
Ooo. Bit of a tonal whiplash there. I’d have to explain emoting while speaking to her again.
Lyra cleared her throat as I began to walk down the stairs. “Sooo uh… Is anypony going to ask her or do I need to?” she said with a really weird tone in her voice.
Loom sighed and shot Lyra a hurt look. “Yes, standard construction can support my weight, even in armor.”
“No! Not you!” Lyra said, sounding genuinely baffled. “Why would you— You’re just big! Also, a wrestling star who really should be dead now but if Rainbow made it this far, whatever. I guess rads make you immortal or something. Not the point. What I meant is anypony going to ask the Little Gray Mare over there what the flying buck her people were trying to do with the whole random abductions and anal probing thing?”
I snorted as I realized what had been bothering Lyra this whole time. “Oh! She’s from the—”
“Science bondage,” Desi answered extremely casually.
“What?” the entire stairwell of ponies asked as one as we all turned to look towards the tiny mare.
Desi frowned, held up a hoof to tell us to wait, and levitated out her book to check something marked with a tab. She read for a moment, nodded, then repeated. “Science bondage.”
“Yes,” I said with a nod. “Now. WHAT?!”
“Small fringe minority enjoys erotic data collection methods,” Desi said as if I should have understood that is what she meant by her baffling word combo.
“I knew it!” Lyra exploded. “I bucking knew it!”
I giggled. I had no idea Desi could tell a joke like that, the fact Lyra took it seriously just made it even more funny. At least, I hoped it was a joke.
She scootched up so she could press past Vinyl and look Desi in the eyes from beside her. “Soooo, can your ship beam us out of here or…”
Desi shook her head. “No? Not an alien. Technically.”
There was a loud click as Loom disengaged part of her armor so she could reach down and picked Desi up by the scruff of her neck, then gently set the little mare atop her turret’s barrel. “Here. Now the sillyfilly can’t bug you with conspiracy theories.”
Desi made a cute happy noise and settled in on top of Loom’s weapon.
Lyra snorted. “A mere two-meter eleveation has never stopped me from bugging a pony!”
“She’s not an alien, Lyra,” Rainbow agreed, her eyes shut painfully tight. “Look, you were right. We found remains in the ship. Aliens are bipeds.” Rainbow sighed in defeat, seemingly knowing what was to come before adding. “Yes, they have hands.”
My left ear went deaf from the fanfilly squeal. Fortunately, it worked again with a quick power cycle and two rotations.
“I knew it! I knew everything in that ship was built for hands! My gauntlets work too well with them! Hey, do you think maybe humans actually—”
Rainbow facehooved with one hoof and put the other in Lyra’s mouth to shut her up. I was horrified, but Lyra seemed to act like this happened all the time by just… being attentive.
I don't like you, mint pony. You break the entirety of my social norms database...
“I don’t know!” Rainbow hissed. “There were only bones left. And most of them were broken to bits… Come on, guys! We need to get that old ship’s power core up and running so we can teleport out of here! We don’t have much time and… and I don’t even think that we have the time to get it working.”
I triple blinked. “W— Wait. You said there was a hidden command room.”
“Yeah,” Rainbow sighed, her ears folding down in defeat. “Because “Hey, so I have a desperate last-ditch world saving plan involving a wrecked alien starship” is not going to get anypony to help. Ever. At all.”
“I’d help,” Mom said without hesitation.
“I would have believed you,” I said after a moment’s thought. “Especially since you said you needed a machine spirit to get this mission done.”
Rainbow raised an eyebrow. “Really? You would have?”
I nodded. Speed nodded too.
“Sure!” she agreed cheerfully. “There’s all those hidden alien encounters in your training sims. I figured they had to be real otherwise why include them in military simulations?”
Loom coughed into her hoof. “I uh… I might have? I believed for years that I was abducted as a foal, but my parents took me to therapy and it all seemed crazy but… Yeah. Starblasters. I always swore I’ve seen them before. Somewhere.”
Desi shuffled her hooves nervously. Dash smiled up at her. “Hey, I know you’d believe me. I’m guessing your timeline’s Swann used this ship to send you back here, right? Which is good news. It means my plan isn’t as last-desperate-act as I’d feared. So thanks for that.”
Desi remained quiet.
Rainbow turned and kept walking down the stairs. “Okay… full disclosure time. And I’m skipping the oaths of secrecy and loyalty. The anti-magic reactor and the Rainbow Relay were both reverse engineered from this ship. We never got the ship itself working properly, but it should still have backup power. If, and this is a big if, we can get the ship’s reactor working using that backup power, then we should be able to use it to teleport to Star Drop Station… If I can figure out how the controls work. We uh, we had to invent whole new interfaces. It’s just the stupid panels don’t do anything for ponies. If I have to make it go by touching wires together, so be it.”
Lyra snorted and flashed Rainbow a smug look. “It’s touch controls meant for five-digited hands. I worked them out years ago… and uh, accidentally fired a laser into the wall… Hen!” She admitted sheepishly.
Rainbow shook her head. “No, they’re not. We tried touching the screens. That doesn't work.”
“Not with hooves, no,” Lyra agreed. “You need a certain amount of conductivity. It’s a capacitive touch system. Your nose would work…” she trailed off then wiggled her weird cyber-gauntlets at Rainbow’s face, showing small soft padded tips to each finger. “Or you can modify your cybernetics to work with it.”
“I like you,” Mom said with an approving nod. “Have you need of a significant other? My daughter is single.”
“The buck she is!” Vinyl said with stern disapproval.
I eeped and spun around. “That’s right! Uh, Mom, this is Vinyl. Vinyl, mom. We’re a couple.”
“Oh?” Mom asked through a small frown. “Is she—”
“She’s got a pipbuck fused to her leg, so yes, she is a cyborg” I sighed, closing my eyes.
Mom was quiet for a bit too long. “I... was asking if she knows she’s radioactive.”
“Sure you were,” I said with a giggle.
“Yep!” Vinyl said cheerfully. “Pretty amazed this hasn’t worn off yet… Anypony know the unicorn equivalent to a Sonic Radboom? At least my eyes are working okay again.”
“Good,” Rainbow commented as she vanished through a doorway at the bottom of the stairs. I turned my attention to what lay ahead and passed through the doorway myself.
I stood on a catwalk within a cavernous room lit from above by dozens of stadium lights. My targeting scanners told me the room was huge, my eyes told me it was tiny. In the same way, a huge table can make a room feel small, the massive vessel below and ahead of us made everything feel tiny.
The skyscrapers in the city above us could only just begin to compare to the colossus of smooth silvery metal. It would take several of them stacked side to side to match her beauty. You could tell she was a ship instantly. Even with the smooth, graceful, flowing, alien look to the large bulbous-arrowhead shape to her hull, even with the obvious impact damage and crumpled bulkheads, the burn marks, and other signs of battle damage, this was clearly a ship.
A lot of that being it fit my exact notion of what a starship should look like. Arrowhead shape, bump on top for the bridge. Sleek hull lines like nothing on Equis. Silver in color with the red stripe along the sides, and those little indents for the torpedo launchers and thrusters.
At the far end of the catwalk was a docking port leading into an arched hallway with oddly orange ribbing-like support columns, tan carpet, and gray walls with big light panels set into the walls every few pony lengths. The Light spilled out, inviting and warm.
Ironic… Something I’d longed to be real always had been. I couldn’t help but wonder if her name actually was the Protector.
“Weird,” Rainbow commented. “I thought you would be squeeing again.”
“I’ll be honest,” I said with just the faintest of grins. “Mom suddenly being okay still has most of my systems going too nuts to really get the proper reaction to it. Also it doesn't have any visible guns on—”
“OH-MY-LUNA-IT’S-REAL!” Vinyl squeed far too loudly.
She rushed past Rainbow and I, pushing us aside on the catwalk to bolt for the open docking hatch. “Last pony to 38 Starboard is buying the shots!”
“Also DJ Pon3 is clearly the bigger fanfilly here,” I noted.
“Wait a minute…” Lyra said with a steep frown and cocked her head. “She uses the name DJ Pon3?”
I nodded. “Yes. Why do you—”
Lyra shook her head. “Nothing. She just sounds like a pony I used to know and has the same names, but can't be because two centuries have passed and also this mare is obviously not a huge bitch. A bit spooky is all.”
Rainbow stopped mid-step and turned her neck to look at Lyra in shock. “I— but— Lyra… She— She looks exactly the same as she did… How the buck—”
Lyra’s eyes widened in horror. “W— What? B— But if it’s really been two centuries… you I get. Horrible science accident shitty immortality. The Ribbon would have been in cryo because of your soldier thing. I— How—” Lyra’s extreme confusion warped into horror almost faster than my eyes could detect.
She reached up to her face and clasped her robotic gauntlets over her muzzle. “Oh-no-Octavia-is-in-the-bar!”
Lyra began to sprint down the catwalk after Vinyl, calling for her to stop.
Rainbow shook her head, took two steps, then squeaked. “Oh no…” as she realized something.
It took me a second longer than Rainbow, but then it hit me too. “Oh no!”
Vinyl somehow didn’t put together that Lyra was her Lyra. Maybe it was the mech suit. Maybe it was the fact she completely believed her friends were dead. Maybe she was tired and exhausted… whatever the reason was, she just hadn’t noticed.
Oh right she said she’d gotten flash-banged with magic. Concussion. That’s why.
Vinyl was going to run into that ship, be just over the moon that she could apologize to her wife, but for Octavia, all of the things Vinyl spent centuries atoning for were just four years in the past.
Thinking quickly, I looked up to Desi. “We have to stop her!”
Desi nodded, lit her horn, and simply lifted Vinyl off the ground.
I nodded, thoroughly impressed with the sheer simplicity. “Effective!”
Vinyl twisted in the glowing bubble of light and shot a grumpy look back towards us. “Hey! That’s cheating! Also, money does not exist in the show. Come on! Let me down, I need a drink. My eyes are still spotted up… Whisky normally fixes this. Break Clean works too, but only post-ghoul. Do not use brake clean on eyes if not ghoul, okay?”
Yep. She’s concussed.
Lyra caught up to Vinyl a moment later. She was surprisingly fast on two hooves. Her exosuit had to have a motion assist system.
Lyra grabbed Vinyl by her shoulders and pulled her in close to her face. Desi stopped levitating Vinyl a moment later, letting her hooves thunk to the catwalk.
“Vinyl Scratch. Look at me.” Lyra demanded.
Oh… Oh no! Lyra was also going to be livid!
The rest of us closed the distance as fast as we could. It wouldn’t be fast enough.
Vinyl squinted through her helmet for a moment. Then she blinked. “W— Wait. But… But you died?”
Lyra shook her head. “No, but I should have. We all should have. I took everypony here just days before the end so we could hope my safe room would work as a fallout shelter. And it did,” She paused for a moment and pulled Vinyl up so they were both on their hind hooves. “I’ve been trapped in this building for four, bucking, years, Vinyl! And that’s by my clock. Apparently, some archmage’s bullshit in the lab’s made that two centuries for everypony outside.”
Lyra cleared her throat to get back on track. “Four. Bucking. Years. One building. No ability to order takeout. Not even Short John Gold’s and that’s barely classifiable as matter! We would have died if I hadn’t found a way to hack into this place, and there hadn’t just so happened to be an alien ship that can make food and water out of raw magic just stashed away in this hole. And WHY was this?! BECAUSE YOU WERE TOO BUCKING POLITICAL TO LET YOUR WIFE AND FRIENDS SHARE A STABLE BECAUSE WE WEREN'T EQUESTRIAN ENOUGH!”
Lyra let go of Vinyl with one gauntlet and slapped her across the face hard enough to smash her helmet and make bone crunch. “BUCK YOU, WITH A BUCKING ANCHOR!”
I froze in my tracks. On one hand, I knew Vinyl kind of deserved that, and that her helmet and face would fix themselves in just a few seconds. On the other hoof…
She slapped my mare in a way she doesn't like!
Target: That-bitch’s-stupid-ass >:C
Range: 10.26412 meters.
Wind: 0.00000 knots by 0.00000 degrees.
Compensate for target’s motion...
Compensate for drag…
Compensate for Coriolis effect…
Compensate for pellet spread…
Compensate for Equus’s rotation…
Target locked! Targeting time, 0.01 milliseconds.
I felt Loom’s hoof gently push my battle saddle’s shotgun mount down. “No. Bad.” Loom said to me quietly.
“I was just going to shoot her in the butt… She’s got armor. She’d take it.” I muttered bitterly.
“Right,” Loom continued with a calm nod. “But that armor looks like it’s made from Luna Titanium. A shotgun won't do dick for shit against armor that thick. Here, let me plug you into my turret’s control system.”
I felt my core skip several beats. I timidly pointed up to the massive artillery piece mounted to the back of her power armor. “I— I could shoot that?!”
Hot!
“Yeah!” Loom replied casually.
“NO!” Rainbow snapped, her own eye twitching as she stepped between Loom and I. “No you cannot! We have to stop the end of the bucking world! What is wrong with all of you?! Does everypony here have the worst kind of ADHD?!”
Mom cleared her throat. “I do.”
“Yes but that’s fine. Yours is a super power. It’s them I’m angry at,” Rainbow replied politely before turning back to the rest of us and putting on the mother off all angry mare shouting voices. “Now. Everypony. Yes! Tons of personal drama. I get that. But. There. Is. A. Giant. Gun! Pointed. At. The. Planet! FOCUS! Reactor! Get working, now! Please.”
Mom nodded in firm agreement. “Agreed. We can engage in personal politics later. I have an opening in my schedule for after Heat Death. Does that work for everypony else?”
Everypony fell quiet for several short moments. Something about the honest simplicity of Mom’s question made it sound just so genuine.
“D— Do you mean you never want to be around drama, or that you have a plan to survive the end of the universe?” Lyra asked after another moment of quiet.
“For Celestia's sake!” Rainbow growled while holding both her hooves to her face.
“Yes.” Mom said to Lyra, giving one of her usual non-answers before trotting down the catwalk to the doors. “I will begin repairs now.”
Rainbow looked up from her hooves. “Uh, wait, you don’t know how it works. I’ll need to explain—”
“I have already begun repairs!” Mom shouted back.
“She’s ignoring everything because of their drama. Meaning she switched her microphones off and registered your speech only as a change in air pressure with a threshold of signal to noise,” I explained to Rainbow. “We should let them attend to that and make sure she doesn't make something explode.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we should.” Rainbow said as she rushed off after mom.
Ribbon, Desi, and I joined her. Vinyl and Lyra remained where they were, letting me listen in as I rushed along.
Vinyl cleared her throat. “Okay so, they’re right. But for the sake of peace, I deserved that. You’re right. I bucked up. Bad. If you want me to be punished, I’ve spent two centuries so far being undead. So. Yeah.”
“Undead? So that’s how you survived that slap. Huh. Nea— EEEP! I’m covered in zombie juice!” Lyra shrieked, making me wish I was still looking at her.
I could just picture her trying to shake the various bits of Vinyl left on her gauntlet off. Hehe!
“Yeah, that’s not how it works,” Vinyl laughed. “Just make sure a balefire bomb mostly kills you, and you’ll be fine.”
The rest of us ducked into the alien ship’s interior and… And it was exactly what I remembered from the TV show. As in, to the very last bit of detail. The carpeted hallways, the simple smooth surfaces that begged for decoration yet that’s what made them feel alien and futuristic, everything. If it weren't for the random bits of film-making equipment like cameras and Steadicam mounts scattered about the hallway I’d have been very unsettled.
I felt very silly for feeling unsettled by the idea of ponies recreating an alien ship to film a show rather than just filming on the ship. That emotion let me just sort of coast through the hallways while Rainbow explained everything to Loom, who had to stoop to not knock Desi’s head into the ceiling’s randomly spaced protruding ribbing.
“... wait, it’s been here how long?” Loom said, sounding quite confused.
“Ages and ages,” Rainbow sighed. “It was here before the Ministries, and if the dating we did is accurate it crashed around the end of the First Zebra Empire.”
I blinked once. “Wait, what?”
“You know, about… ten thousand years,” Rainbow said with some hesitation. “I think. Ancient history wasn’t my thing.”
“Huh… Think aliens blew it up then?” Loom remarked.
“The ship’s last log said it was damaged in battle,” I commented half to myself. “But… if it’s that old, how did nopony ever find it?”
Rainbow’s left ear twitched slightly. “Oh, who knows—” She stopped mid sentence and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I do know. There’s little point to old state secrets anymore, but it's still hard to talk about them without oaths of secrecy and loyalty to people without clearance. They really burn the need for that into you. It was found by a pre-Equestrian kingdom. They used parts of it to study magic. They never knew what they had and thought it was just some older civilization’s fort. Princess Celestia beat them in one of the Equestrian Unification wars, and had this ship buried with all their other relics. Not like, there’s a big pile of lost civilization stuff. She just… made these people disappear from history. I got to ask why once. Long story short, they were very dangerous. If she hadn’t, Equestria would have gone wasteland long before my grandparents were even born.”
She snorted and shook her head. “Celestia sort of had a thing for just tossing problems into a deep pit for others to deal with later. For a few years, it felt like every other week some ancient evil was creeping back out of a hole Celestia had tossed it down. I… I think the girls and I handled everything she couldn’t after losing the Elements of Harmony. Pretty sure.”
“You know, those ancient ponies were right,” Loom snorted. “This is just some ancient people’s ship. I mean, it’s not like it built itself… You mentioned finding bones?”
“Yeah, the aliens are bipeds. The bone fragments we could piece together indicate they were kinda like monkeys. It was really weird coming across something that was an intelligent biped. I mean, sure, dragons are bipeds when they’re little, but they grow out of it when their wings start coming in. Sure we have a few bipedal toolmakers like Minotaurs here, but the vast majority of intelligent life is equine. Threw me for a major loop.”
Desi shifted on Loom’s back, seemingly uncomfortable. “Why reactor not work?”
Rainbow looked over her shoulder. “Well, engineering is right here. Take a look at it. You’ll have as good of an idea as I do.”
Desi’s ears flicked in irritation. “Probably know more…”
Rainbow stopped walking and put a hoof against a set of large sliding metal doors which, sure enough, I recognized as the entrance to Engineering. I shook my head slowly. “You… Really did just shoot the whole series here, didn’t you? Is the reactor really just some big glass tube filled with lava-lamp stuff?”
Rainbow snorted. “No.” She said as she started to shove the door aside to open it.
“Good, because I don’t know what my mom would do if it was,” I said, grateful that mom’s hearing was still disabled.
“That was a special effect done in post. The real thing—” Rainbow yelped as Mom extended several of her mechanical arms and simply wrenched the doors open to walk into the room beyond.
“Sluggish auto-doors added to maintenance docket,” Mom said as she trotted into the room and began to look around.
Rainbow blinked twice. “Does… Does she ever do anything but fix stuff and make things?”
“Yes,” I nodded solemnly.
“Oh, good, because—”
“She also waits for things to break while looking sad.” I finished.
Rainbow winced. “Well… at least this place will be heaven to her.”
I nodded and stepped into the engineering room. It felt so weird. I remembered Jasmine watching all kinds of things happen in this place that the short hallway filled with computer terminals before the big circular bay area wrapping around the big glass tube they called a reactor felt familiar. Super familiar. But then there was how things were now.
It was dark, only half the lights worked. The reactor’s “Magic-antimagic” reaction was gone, leaving only a hollow tube. Random bits of debris and equipment were scattered across the floor, and one of the terminal's screens slowly pulsed red. The only other light was the weird white illuminated panels everywhere that always bugged me because why would anyone ever install those at eye-level?
It felt like walking into an extra dark episode of the show mid-disaster. Which was only exacerbated by the fact we were here to stop a space station from blowing up the planet.
“... it really is an episode,” I murmured to myself.
“Huh?” Rainbow said with a frown as she walked towards the large flat computer terminal set into the bench-top directly in front of the reactor. “Oh. Yeah. I wish. Then this would have been wrapped up in 45 minutes and we’d get a cool action scene. Also I could write in a date with Daring Doo for myself.”
Mom trotted towards the same console as Dash, eyed it for a moment, then looked beneath it, nodded, and looked up to Rainbow. “I can persuade the spirits here to restore full power to this console. Do you need it?”
“Can you hear again?” Rainbow asked.
Mom nodded. I blinked and took a quick look around the room, doing my best to detect the presence of any machine spirits.
There were none.
“Yes. Speech is needed for work, unfortunately,” Mom sighed. “Do we have ten minutes? I could give you a modem then we could talk properly.”
“No thank you. But please do get the console working,” Rainbow agreed before turning to Loom. “The floor over there is a panel covering up a big machine, network, thingie. Can you open that up? It takes four ponies normally.”
Loom nodded and moved towards the patch of floor Rainbow indicated. Mom stared at the console for a moment. I took my own good look at it.
“Uh, mom? There’s nothing in that console. It’s spiritually dead.” I said as quietly and politely as I could.
Mom ignored me and simply smacked the side of the console with one hoof. The panel atop it blinked white, then hummed to life, transforming into the weirdly familiar nonsense display of many dozens of small colored shapes.
“You were saying?” Mom said, offering me a smug grin.
My jaw dropped. “But… but there was nothing to—”
“There’s plenty here. All around us. You need to look for it. They are not like Equestrian spirits. They prefer to hide,” Mom said as she gently gave the panel a pat with her hoof. “I found them first when working with the Star Blaster. Buried deep down. They’re afraid of things like us, you see.”
I frowned and took another look at the console, focusing as hard as I could on every last detail. “I… I really can’t sense anything.”
“I’ll show you one day.” Mom said as stooped under the console to pop open the console’s hatch. “Ministry Mare: The console is operational. Its link to the ship is severed. I will repair it. This spirit is warning me of a power flow irregularity in a system I do not know of nor understand. We will need to activate the diagnostic station before bringing the reactor online.”
“Not to interrupt but I got the floor open,” Loom added quickly. “It was bolted down. There are no longer functional bolts. Sorry.”
“Thanks, Loom,” Rainbow said to Loom before turning back to mom. “Now, what’s the chance the spirit you’re in contact with can boot up the reactor?” Rainbow asked with a hopeful flutter of her wings.
“Zero point zero percent. Alien spirits are compartmentalized. They hide. They know one thing.” Mom murmured while soldering something, based on the rancid smell of melting flux.
“Great,” I grumbled. “Then we have to fix every single console until we figure out which one is for the diagnostic system.”
“It is fixed,” Desi called from the hallway entry section of the engineering bay.
I turned to see Desi standing up atop a box in front of one seemingly random terminal on the left side of the hallway. She’d seemingly pulled some wires from the bulkhead over the console and hooked them into it via a panel she’d pried open. The screen was glowing cheerfully with colored symbols, much like every other interface Id’ ever seen on the show, only with more purpose to them.
“Good job!” I said with a smile.
Rainbow nodded in agreement and began to trot over. “Let's hope the others are as easy to fix. How will we know which one is the one we need?”
Desi’s ears flicked back in irritation. She flapped her wings to hover up to the bulkhead above the terminal she’d repaired and tapped some alien writing with a hoof. “Station 10. Diagnostics. Fixed it. Emergency Power bus. What do now, machine pony?”
Rainbow, Loom, and I shared a stunned silence while mom called. “What’s wrong with this reactor?” from across the engineering bay.
I facehooved. “Oh. Right. She was raised on this ship in the future by its computer. Of course, she knows how to read their language.”
Rainbow laughed half-nervously. “Right. Okay. What are the odds she can just, turn it on?”
“Forty-seven percent,” Desi answered with an odd little frown. “Machine pony, what do now?”
“The big round coily thingies that go to the reactor’s big bulbous whatchamacallit. What does it say the power flow to that thing from those things are?” Mom called back with an extremely worrying lack of proper terminology. “Additionally, I have a name. There are several machine ponies present. Label use is important.”
Desi took out her book and flicked through it a few times. “No flow to the core. The antimatter flow regulators are locked. Manual valve actuation required." She said after a rather tense moment. “Turn the wheel-thing attached to the lump along the three corrugated tube do-dads till it clicks twice.”
“Understood,” Mom called.
Desi looked over to me and gestured for me to come closer. I took a few steps forwards, deciding I was pretty useless here anyway and might as well help Desi however I could.
Desi leaned over and whispered into my ear. “No, remember machine pony name. What is?”
The world came to a halt. “What do you mean what’s her name?”
Desi embarrassedly scuffed her hoof against the terminal. “Failed to hear name when introduced. Was riding big pony. Happy. Negative attention paying.”
“That’s our mom, Desi,” I said, concern creeping into my voice. “D— did she look different in the future?”
Desi blinked and looked over at mom much more intensely than I thought a pony could look at something. “Never met. Never saw. … Can complain about plasma-residue allergy? No. Never brain that. Not this pony’s fault.”
I titled my head. “What?”
Desi looked up at me. “Shoddy workponyship. Have allergy. Mom not good with biotech?”
“I’ve never seen her work with biotech, like. Ever. Just machines,” I reapplied as I took a look around the engineering bay. “Never seen her work on anything like this before. If she knew anything about it we might stand a chance… Unless you can do something here, I think we're screwed. I mean, if we had time, mom would get it done. But we don’t…”
I turned to Rainbow for a moment. “Hey, how long do we have before they can fire again?”
“They can already fire again,” Rainbow replied. “We have no time. Whenever they feel like it, they can fire. So we need to really get the lead out. What happens after the anti-whats-it flow is restored, Desi?”
Loom cleared her throat. “So I’m out of the loop but it sounds like Desi here is the result of time travel. Kinda like that time Ministry Mare Sparkle went back in time to warn herself not to stress about the future only to make her stress about the future. Except instead of a scroll, Desi used this ship. Sooo… Can you just, switch it on? Let us get right to the bad guy killing? Because, well, frankly, as good a robot as Gears is, I’d much rather have Ashen as backup for this kind of thing, but he’s not here and—”
Loom paused, pursed her lips, and turned to Rainbow. “Hey, wait… Shouldn’t he be in his pod? Why don’t we just beam it over, crack it open, throw him at the enemy, and then crack open some beers?”
“I thought of that,” Rainbow sighed. “They didn’t deliver the pod to the base before the bombs dropped.”
I tilted my head. “Wait, who are we talking about?”
“An experimental combat robot and prototype computer system Lyra’s son invented,” Rainbow remarked. “Also a damn good soldier… Unfortunately, there were… espionage problems.”
“Damn good? You’re underselling him,” Loom snorted. “There was a court case where they decided robots couldn’t earn medals. If they could, he’d have been issued the Solar Crest and you know it. And best of all it would have been the 117th medal issued, which would have been perfect, because you know. Serial number.”
“I’d have given it to him, but that was Luna’s call… She seemed to hate everything I tried to end the war,” Rainbow muttered.
I trotted over and gave her a quick hug. “I can’t imagine having been able to prevent this… but forbidden to. That has to suck.”
“Yeah, it does,” Rainbow sighed before straightening back up. “Bucking hell, the drama is infectious or something. Desi, can you—”
Desi tapped the screen in front of her with her muzzle, making it do a cute little doublet chirp as she manipulated the terminal via touch. “Already doing it.” She said chipperly. “Rainbow give translator?”
I reached into my saddlebag and took out the small device. “I kept it, actually.”
Desi took the device from me and fiddled with it for a few moments, making it chirp and beep. Then she hooked it into the terminal with a loose cable and worked on the terminal for a few more minutes. After a while, she nodded to herself in satisfaction and hit one last button.
The terminal chirped yet again. Desi unplugged the translator and passed it back to me with her magic just in time for the ship itself to seem to speak from everywhere yet nowhere.
“Universal Translator Database updated. Default Language changed to Equish,” it reported.
Everypony except Desi jumped.
“What the bucking crap it’s alive?!” Rainbow squeaked. “I’m so sorry I spilled coffee on your bridge console!”
Desi rolled her eyes. “Not alive. Dumb AI. Also bad mother.” She tapped a few more things on the console then nodded. “Machine pony get secondary power working. Can try reactor start. Might explode. If explode, guarantee delete city. Acceptable risk?”
“Given we’re trying to stop an extinction event, yes,” Rainbow reapplied a little too quickly.
Desi nodded twice then turned back to the terminal, working it with both her nose and wingtips. The incessant beeping each touch made got my left eye to start twitching along with each aggravating pulse. How the hay could anypony, or anyone at all, work with what would have to be hundreds of if not thousands of blinking and beeping lights blinking and beeping all the time?!
Also how had Jasmine never thought of that herself before? Interesting… I’d have to sit down and discover who I was after our merger sometime soon. After all, there was a point to life now. I had Vinyl again. She didn’t die.
Desi stopped working and turned to look back at Rainbow. “Decided to safety very little,” she said with just a hint of worry. “Is power for transport. Array pre-charged. Can beam five. Problem: Station shields active. Can beam one to station. Take more power go through shield.”
Rainbow sighed. “Right. So… Turn on the reactor, please.”
“Risky plan,” Desi held up her hoof and quickly referenced her book. “If we synchronize the transporter's annular confinement beam to the station’s warp core frequency, we can bypass shields and send two ponies of mass, or one Loom.”
I tiled my head. “To the what frequency?”
“What she said,” Rainbow agreed.
Desi blinked at us, then pointed to the reactor. “Warp core.”
“Oh,” Rainbow said with a nod. “So that’s what they called them… Yeah, Star Drop doesn't have one of those.”
Desi made a distressed sound and let her ears droop. “No want start. Do not want explode today. Reactor very hurt and upset!”
“Is there that much risk of an explosion?” Rainbow asked with a worried grimace.
Desi nodded. “Four hundred isotones antimatter in fuel tanks. Ten tanks total. Very explode!”
“Anti what?” I asked, completely lost.
“I think she means anti-magic, but… solid? Why would you make that?” Loom asked with a shiver.
“Yeah, bad idea.” Rainbow agreed with a wince. “Okay… Let's take a minute to do this safely then. We could maybe beam to the Rainbow Relay and use it. That would take less power because no shields, right?”
Desi opened her mouth to reply only to squeak in terror as the room was plunged into bright electric blue light. I swiveled my head to look at the reactor just in time to see a blue gas and a red gas flood the chamber, begin to glow brightly, convert into plasma, then wrap around each other in a double helix like a mad storm of oncoming doom! Then stabilize into an energized cloud of purple mist.
Mom poked her head out from the hole Loom had opened in the floor. “I found the on button. It was next to the main fuse box.”
She turned her visor to look at each of our horrified faces in turn. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Warp core should have exploded,” Desi said firmly.
“Yes. It’s okay. She promised not to. I’m good at talking machines out of suicide. I could have been a therapist,” Mom said as she pulled herself out of the hole. “So what’s this about a space station? The comm line spirit mentioned somepony was looking at a space station. That sounds cool. Can I see it?”
“Yes!” Rainbow said with a relieved yet still terrified smile. “Yes, you can! Come on everypony, let’s get Vinyl and her friends and get off this thing before our Warlock’s charm no longer keeps this thing from exploding.”
“That’s a good plan,” I said as I began to run to the engineering room doors. “I’m happy to be a part of it.”