Sunrise
Chapter XII - First Strike
“There.” Celestia set down a stack of boxes with her telekinesis. “That’s the last of the packing.”
“I’m sorry to see you go.” Winter Wheat looked around what used to be the sisters’ shared bedroom, now a storage space once again. “As upset as I was about Star Fire, I liked having you and your sister around. It’s always been just me before you two moved in.”
“And I liked being here.” Celestia nodded. “Our house in the city may have more conveniences, but this has more of a heart, if that makes any sense.” She looked around the room and sighed. “But we’ve done all we can here, and it’s time for us to finish what we started.”
“Speaking of which, I’ve noticed Miss Clover hasn’t been around these last few days,” Winter Wheat said.
“No, she hasn’t.” Celestia shook her head. “She has her own part to play, and it’s keeping her busy elsewhere for now. We’ll be without her guidance for a little while.”
“Alright. I just wondered if she would come around because I wanted to offer to return part of the rent to her, since she put up the bits and your last month here hasn’t been a full one. I don’t suppose you could deliver it to her?”
“No, don’t worry about that.” Celestia smiled. “Keep it. You’ve more than earned it.” She hugged Winter Wheat. “Thank you, for all you’ve done for us.”
Winter Wheat returned the hug. “Will I ever see you again?”
“I don’t know,” Celestia said. “I hope so, but I honestly just don’t know. I can’t say how things will turn out from here.”
“I worry about you,” Winter Wheat fretted, forelegs still wrapped around Celestia’s neck.
“I know.” Celestia nodded. “And that caring nature is why you’ll be a great mother someday. That’s why we have to do what it takes to make sure you get to have that chance.”
“Thank you.” Tears started gathering in Winter Wheat’s eyes. “Is there any way I’ll know if you’re okay? How will I know if it worked?”
“In a few days,” Celesia said wistfully, “whether or not we succeed will be clear to you and all the rest of the world. What we have to do... it won’t leave room for a single shred of doubt.”
☙ ☀ ❧
“How was your day?” Luna asked as Celestia emerged onto the observation deck from inside their house.
“Strange.” Celestia shut the door behind herself and looked around. Their shared house in Quartz City was exactly as they’d left it when they’d moved to Winter Wheat’s farm. Being back home again felt like the fit of an old well-worn shoe, but what was coming left something lurking, a pebble stuck uncomfortably underneath it.
“How so?” Luna asked. “Doesn’t it feel good to be working at the solar thaumocontroller again?”
“I’m assisting the other solarites with the investigation into my own caper with the sun.” Celestia shook her head. “They’re in a panic over it. It’s all they think about, all they talk about. Nopony has a clue who or what could have torn away control. They’re monitoring around the clock, watching in case it happens again. I knew going back to the solar thaumocontroller would be different than before, after what we had to do in Cloudopolis, but it’s even more tense than I imagined.”
“I can’t say I blame them,” Luna said.
“Yes, in their position I would be panicking also,” Celestia agreed. “How are things for you?”
“The lunarites are concerned as well, of course,” Luna said. “They’re also monitoring the moon continually, but I don’t see a sense of panic. Then again, most of what Night Veil instructed me to do was running around taking care of minor odd jobs, so it’s possible I just didn’t get to see the panicky parts.”
“It feels strange to walk around the other solarites, knowing I have the answers they’re desperately looking for.” Celestia paced. “I feel guilty, in a way. These are ponies I’ve worked with. Most of them are good ponies just trying their best. I understand why Clover sent us back to our old assignments while we wait, but I sort of wish she hadn’t.”
“I know.” Luna nodded. “Knowing I can drive the moon to rise and set on a whim feels so dissonant to pretending to be just an apprentice putting in her hours.”
Celestia nodded. “Hard to imagine that in just two more days, this”—she waved her hoof around in a wide circle—“all of this, it’ll all be over. The end of the world as the Unicorn Kingdom knows it.” She looked over at her sister. “I’m scared, Luna.”
“So am I.” Luna looked out at the city, taking in the scene with an expressionless, almost hypnotized gaze. “So am I.”
☙ ☀ ❧
“Luna!” The voice snapped her out of her work and back into the world again. She set down the quill she was transcribing with, careful not to let any of the silver ink make errant marks on the deep blue paper.
“Yes, Mage?” Luna looked up to see the familiar dark midnight mane and dappled silvery-grey coat of her over-instructor.
“You were really lost in your own world there, weren’t you?” Night Veil looked at Luna curiously, the color of her sapphire eyes barely visible in the dark.
“Oh. I must have been. I’m sorry,” Luna said. “I was making a copy of the year’s lunar schedule, for my reference.”
“Yes, I can see that.” Night Veil nodded. “Tonight I need you to assist Star Shine at the primary monitoring station. She could use a second set of eyes as backup. Keep her awake, will you?”
“Yes, Mage.” Luna put away her transcription, then stood up and crossed the lunar thaumocontroller operations floor, a huge ring of steel floor plates around a cluster of enormous crystals that comprised the resonating and focusing mechanism to grasp and steer the moon. The building was perpetually kept dark to make the imaging systems showing the night sky more easily visible. The most prominent illumination was from the huge crystals, which gave off a dim purple fluorescence creating barely enough ambient light to see by.
Luna passed by several unattended secondary display stations showing various keying stars while she walked the wide semicircular path around the central crystal machinery and over to the primary lunar monitor. There were a few hushed exchanges from the lunarite operators across the room as they chatted between themselves, but otherwise there was no sound, just a familiar nighttime silence that Luna found both eerie and comforting at the same time.
“I’m here to assist, Lunarite Star Shine,” Luna announced before she sat down at the station, next to a purple unicorn.
“Mmmhmm.” Star Shine didn’t take her eyes away from the set of displays. Luna read the dimly lit numbers: angular velocity, acceleration, altitude, rate of descent, inertia, response lag time, and a host of others. It was a familiar station she’d spent many hours at in the past. She remembered how watching the changing influence of the machine on the moon over the course of the night had fascinated her at first, when she began apprenticing here.
The novelty had long since worn off, even before recent developments. The exercise only felt more tedious now, knowing that there would be no abnormalities because the one thing that could possibly interfere with the moon—herself—would not be doing so.
Not yet, anyway.
The numbers on the displays shifted slowly through their nominal values, always staying exactly on point for the time of night, while Star Shine said nothing, eyes locked on the readouts. Luna found herself feeling sympathetic. She wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to miss an abnormality either. Hours dragged by with Star Shine’s laser focus unbroken.
“I need to go get coffee,” Luna finally announced, itching for movement and unable to take sitting still and silent in the dark any longer. “Do you want some?”
“Mmmm.” Star Shine’s horn glowed faintly while she levitated over a tall mug from her far side and transferred it to Luna’s magical grasp.
Luna trotted off quietly and sighed on her way to the break room.
She knew the next two nights were going to be long, and yet somehow, at the same time, they felt all too short. Anxiety and excitement tingled in her nerves when she thought about the moment that was drawing ever closer.
☙ ☀ ❧
“You have your calendar copied?” Luna asked.
Celestia nodded quickly from across their small kitchen table. “You?”
“Yes,” Luna said. “I found some time to finish, despite the long hours being a backup watchstander to monitor lunar transits I could have told everypony would be completely uneventful.”
“Sounds boring.”
“It is.” Luna rolled her eyes. “Incredibly so.”
“Still sounds better than pretending to investigate an incident you caused and needing to keep finding ways not to make much progress,” Celestia said. “Fortunately, since there actually is very little real evidence about who or what did it, the illusion of being unable to figure anything out is easy to maintain.”
“Well, I think it won’t matter soon,” Luna said. “It won’t be hard to tell after sunset. Finished packing?”
“Yes.” Celestia nodded. “Saddlebags are ready to go.”
“Once this happens—” Luna stared out the kitchen window at the late afternoon city “—we can’t go back, can we? We’ll never see it again, any of this.”
“I don’t know.” Celestia shrugged. “Not in the same way, at least. And yes, maybe not at all.”
Luna’s voice lowered almost to a whisper. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
“Well, whatever it is,” Celestia began, “at least—”
“—We’re in it together,” Luna finished.
She walked over to her sister and they hugged in silence.
☙ ☀ ❧
The two sisters stood on the observation deck circling the conical roof of their home. Luna watched the east, while Celestia stared out to the west, both their manes and tails flowing in the breeze blowing out of the north.
The sun was most of the way set and sinking lower by the second in the fiery orange and pink sky. As Celestia watched, it touched the horizon. More and more of it vanished until it reached the halfway point, then one quarter. Finally, the last of its disc slipped under, leaving only the colorful afterglow in the sky.
“It’s time,” Celestia said quietly.
“Are we good ponies?” Luna whispered.
“I hope so,” Celestia whispered back.
Luna nodded slowly.
Both of them closed their eyes and their horns began to glow. Celestia’s magical aura was rose-colored at first, then quickly shifted to a bright white-gold. Luna’s started out as the teal of her eyes before turning a pale silvery-blue.
The long sunset shadows of buildings suddenly began shortening and the sky lightened as the sun rose back above the horizon to the west, quickly climbing in retrograde motion.
At the same time, the moon rose at an equal pace from the east.
Ponies in the streets of Quartz City stopped and stared upward, with murmurs of confusion. They watched in silent disbelief while the moon and sun rose until they loomed directly overhead, sharing the sky right next to each other.
Unnoticed atop their observation deck, Luna and Celestia stood and focused, their manes and tails beginning to shimmer with translucence and wave gently while they floated on an ethereal wind.
⁂
“Mage Sun Song! I’m reading a course drift!” The shout pricked up every ear in the solar thaumocontroller’s operations floor. “Rapid movement in retrograde! Velocity and acceleration are outside the safe limits!”
The mage being addressed, Sun Song, started trotting toward the monitoring station in a semicircular path around the huge central pillars of crystal. “Is it a problem with the setting procedure?” she asked.
“No, mage,” the solarite responded. “Everything was fine right up until the sun crossed the horizon and control was released. This just started out of nowhere a few seconds later.”
“Conduct an emergency startup,” Sun Song ordered while she moved to examine another station. “Reestablish guidance control and course correct to the assigned track. Quickly!”
A flurry of activity began as solarites rushed to various stations. Numerous horns glowed in a rainbow scattering of pastel colors as they interacted with display and control panels. The crystal shafts in the central area started emitting a white-yellow light while they powered up, flooding the huge room with daytime brightness.
“Solar control is non-responsive!” a solarite shouted. “Lag’s off-scale. Same indications as when this happened before.”
“Raise the power,” the mage barked. “I want it at the maximum we can manage. Get control back, now! Whoever’s messing around, we can’t let them keep doing this.”
The crystals’ glow suddenly started rising in intensity.
“Not that fast!” Sun Song cried, her eyes widening. “It’ll damage the control focus!”
“I’m not doing it,” the solarite said, her face blank with dumbfounded confusion.
“What?” Sun Song squinted against the increasingly bright light flooding through the room. “How is that possible?”
“Crystal temperatures are rising,” another solarite yelled. “They’re close to the safe limit. I don’t think— nevermind, safe limits exceeded, and still rising.”
The light in the room kept getting brighter.
An alarm sounded, accompanied by a warning light. A solarite rushed over to the panel it was on and placed it in silent, the noise replaced by a rapidly flashing red indicator. “Ultraviolet exposure alarm!” she announced loudly.
Sun Song briefly turned her head toward the station. “Deploy the UV filters!”
“Deploying.” A mechanical humming sound accompanied a set of dark smoky glass plates rising out of the floor in a ring around the central crystals. As they came up, the light in the operations floor dimmed to more tolerable levels.
After a moment, the filters reached their maximum height and stopped. “Ultraviolet exposure alarm clear,” the solarite at that station announced.
“Good.” Sun Song nodded. “Now, let’s see what we can do about cooling down the—”
“Power excursion!” a pony screamed. She pointed at the central pillars. Every head in the room swiveled to stare at the gigantic array of crystals. Even through the smoky glass, they were visibly turning incandescent red-orange, glowing with heat and getting brighter by the second.
“Shut it down!” Sun Song ordered. “Emergency stop!”
“I already did!” A solarite responded in a panicky voice. “The feedback resonator is disconnected, but power’s coming in from somewhere else. It’s not us. Whatever this is, I can’t stop it.”
Sun Song looked around uncertainly, glancing back and forth between all the solarites at their stations looking to her for orders and the enormous crystals getting continually hotter and brighter.
After a brief moment of silence, an ear-splitting crack announced one of the crystals shattering under thermal stress. A huge jagged piece of yellow-hot quartz shot off and slammed through one of the plates of shielding glass, shattering it and turning an empty monitoring station behind it into twisted scrap metal. The sound of glass shards raining down onto the metal floor filled the room, and a fan of light too intense to look directly at spilled out onto the operations floor from the gap left in the filter.
The air was sweltering now, making the room very uncomfortable.
Sun Song heard the sound of more crystals cracking under the immense strain of being rapidly heated. One of the pillars snapped at an angle along a ragged cleavage line and toppled over, breaking up into more pieces as it fell and hitting other surrounding crystals on the way down.
She stared in horror, frozen for a half-second before her horn glowed and she cast a voice amplification spell. “Evacuate!” she boomed out. “All ponies evacuate the thaumocontroller immediately!”
The solarites on the operations floor stood up from their stations and started filing out silently, all wearing numb, shocked expressions on their faces.
Sun Song followed behind them, looking around briefly to verify that she was the last to leave. As she glanced back, she noticed sparks and ashes raining down in the central area over the crystals. Her jaw dropped. The domed steel ceiling had been burned open by a collimated beam of impossibly intense light blazing into the building from the sky, leaving a hole glowing orange-hot around the edges. The crystals were impossible to look at now, painfully bright even through the dark shielding glass.
By the time she turned and ran, some of them were already melting into a viscous liquid.
⁂
Although her eyes were closed, Luna saw the city clearly in her mind as she scried far into the sky to get a bird’s eye view. She quickly located the round building she was looking for: the lunar thaumocontroller, unmistakable with its huge domed roof, peaked at the highest point by the small, highly polished sphere of a panoramic imaging crystal.
She was sure they were getting a show right now, and it was only just beginning.
The moon moved easily at her command, swinging through the sky until it was directly overhead. Although she looked forward to the test before her, there was also a strange feeling of uncertainty now that the moment had come—the general idea of what to do had seemed clear, but the specific reality of exactly how to go about it was something else.
While she pondered her task, a nagging annoyance kept distracting her. Something else was grasping at the moon, trying to pull it away from her control. Her grip was stronger and it posed no real threat, but the resisting force—the thaumocontroller—kept trying. She felt it radiating the kinetic influence magic it was using to pull at the moon, fighting her weakly but persistently.
She was also a little worried that the rapid moonrise she’d just forced was not a gentle process. In the subtle flux of the magical interplay between moon and planet, she could actually feel distant oceans sloshing from the sudden pull, probably creating rogue waves of a size unknown in living memory. Fortunately, the coasts of the continent were far away and largely unpopulated. She sensed tidal forces straining the moon as well, deforming it slightly from its spherical shape, friction of rock against rock and the squeezing of the iron core generating heat. There would be serious moonquakes, after this. But, fortunately again, no one lived on the moon.
Gravity on planetary scales was an incredibly powerful force, one she would need to be cautious of in the future. But for right now, this gave her sudden inspiration, making the solution to her problem seem self-evident.
Once the moon was in place over the city, she reached out far and wide and directed its emanations, normally diffusing out into space in all directions, into a more focused and coherent arrangement. Concentrating hard, she lensed its gravitational pull to a small but crushingly powerful pinpoint.
This focal point started about halfway between the planet and the moon, and once she was satisfied with its tightness and her degree of control, she began carefully lowering it toward the planet’s surface. It entered the atmosphere, sucking in air and creating intense winds and a high-density pocket that bent light like a clear glass marble.
She lowered it closer and closer to the city, making fine adjustments as she went, aiming toward the lunar thaumocontroller.
When it was a hundred meters above the thaumocontroller, she could see through her scrying that the domed roof was shaking and buckling under the force. Small bits of debris were being sucked in now, forming a dusty nucleus at the gravitational focal point. At fifty meters, the panoramic imager broke loose and flew up to join the rest of the captured flotsam. At twenty meters, the steel beams of the dome roof were screaming in high pitched notes as they deformed.
At five meters, they started snapping under tensile stress. The sheet metal of the dome crumpled up like paper and joined the ball of twisted scrap accumulating in the air.
A small throng of ponies, composed of the mage and lunarites on shift that night (or what would have been night), poured out of the building. Luna felt sorry for them, in a distant, detached way. All they could do was flee into the streets and leave their thaumocontroller to whatever fate was about to befall it.
By the time the focal point reached where the roof had been, it was gone, leaving a gaping hole over the now-exposed crystal pillar assemblies of thaumomachinery. They still tugged weakly at the moon, running on dumb automation at this point.
She continued lowering the focal point through the hole in the building until it reached the crystals. They began shattering under the stress of tidal forces, cleaving along their internal planes with sharp cracking noises and breaking apart into splinters. The force they exerted on the moon wavered and stopped as the machinery failed, leaving Luna with no competition and no more nagging distraction.
The ball of debris grew larger as Luna lowered the focal point slowly until it reached the floor, tearing apart the thaumocontroller’s heart as it descended. Sharp pieces of stone and metal ground each other into jagged needles and glittering dust.
When every emitter crystal was finally broken and torn loose to join the deadly sphere of rubble, she lifted the focal point back up, rapidly pulling all of the mess she’d just made up through the sky. After a few minutes, it passed the point where the air thinned out and vanished. Once it was clear of the atmosphere, she made the final push, one last powerful shove to send the massive shafts and splinters of crystal hurtling through space before she released the gravitational focal point and let the magical emanations of the moon return to normal.
Luna let out a breath she’d been holding and smiled, eyes still closed. Soon, she knew that what was left of the thaumocontroller’s enormous crystals would crash into the moon, where they would spend the rest of eternity embedded in its surface to serve as a gratifying reminder of this day.
⁂
Using the vast power the sun made available to her, Celestia concentrated and held the shape of the huge collimating lenses she’d formed high in the sky out of telekinetically compressed air, carefully focusing a beam of concentrated sunlight. It had already made pleasingly quick progress, burning through the roof of the solar thaumocontroller and exposing the crystal apparatus within to the blazing light.
She also pumped solar energy directly into the emitter crystals, causing them to surge with power far beyond their design limits and nowhere to get rid of it. After just a few seconds, she could feel these crystals cracking and shattering under the stress, then liquefying as the sunbeam heated them, turning to puddles of yellow-hot slag and flowing across the floor. Equipment in the operations area began catching fire from the radiant heat. Ashes and sparks flew, swirling in cyclones of shimmering superheated air over a slowly expanding lake of molten quartz glass.
When the destruction was thorough enough to leave her satisfied, Celestia let go of the air, allowing her lenses to dissipate in great bursts of wind. The beam vanished, leaving the solar thaumocontroller nothing but a hollow shell of smoldering ruin with smoke billowing out of the charred hole.
The white-gold glow from her horn slowly faded, although her mane and tail, now striped in blues and greens as well as pink, continued floating gently on an unfelt breeze. She opened her eyes and turned to the other unicorn on the observation deck.
“Luna, I’m finished. Have you—”
Without warning, the two sisters disappeared in a bright flash of white light.