//------------------------------//
// Chapter 17 
// Story: Hegira: Rising Omega 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
Twelfth Month, Ninth Day, Celestial Calendar

Kephic

My mind raced ahead to dozens on dozens of possible explanations.  Tactical reasoning.  Trying to get inside the enemy's twisted, monstrous heads.

Even as Shining Armor tried to distill it all for Celestia, each new word adding to the deathly pall hanging over her study, I replayed the previous conversation with IJ over and over in my head.

How could the Wisps possess Changelings?  Even if their biology was compatible, what about the Hive mind?  Apparently whatever the thing had done, it had been not dissimilar to the trick Skye had used to feed false patterns back into the network to cover for itself.

Was the second infiltrator possessed?  No, just the one.

Why didn't we see the Wisp depart when the infected Changeling died?  Apparently the Wisp's own memory imprint of the moment of death had also persisted in the Infiltrator's mind.  It had chosen to die rather than escape, in hopes of remaining undiscovered.

I reflected with an internal half smile that had we not had a Changeling, and a remarkably skilled one at that, on our own side, we would never have known.

And then the most pressing question for us all.  One none of us seemed to be able to answer.

Why?

Of course all the basic reasons had been gone over time, and time again.  It was Luna who had voiced what Varan and I already knew, and most likely IJ as well.  At a bare minimum the point of the infiltrators' actions had been to shatter the foundation of a burgeoning reformed Changeling/Equestrian alliance.

But it seemed redundant.  Why infest and possess a being who would have likely done exactly what you drove it to do in the first place?  What was the point?

I watched as Luna sat impassively beside her sister, doing her very best to hide the outward signs of her own dark inner thought spirals.

I could only catch the barest hint.  I expected Varan could too.  Celestia almost certainly, she knew her sister as the Sun knows the Heavens.

Luna was holding on to something she meant to say, but was struggling to find the right words to say it.

As Shining's summary reached its end, sure enough, Celestia turned and fixed her sister with a questioning gaze.  Apparently she didn't even need to vocalize the question.

Luna bowed her head, then nodded slowly.  Her voice was steady, but dour.  Tired too.  And perhaps just a hint...  Defeated?  No...  Not defeated.  Saddened.

"Inside Joke shared with me the contents of the Wisp's memories, at least as far back as its infestation of the infiltrator Drone.  We have no access to anything beyond that..."

That ability was news to me.  Apparently Alicorns' ability to do more with magic than Unicorns extended to a great many useful spells and abilities.

"...As I feared, these Wisps are indeed the servants of the Nightmare.  More than that, they are her very kith and kind.  The resonance is...  Intimately familiar to me."

Finally I understood.  Luna's thousand year exile was not an oft discussed topic outside the Equestrian nation itself.  And even within it, her people's love for her, as well as their twisting of the facts into legend and myth, meant that it was only ever talked over in hushed tones on rare occasions.

The Nightmare was the leader of the Wisps.  The very same Nightmare that had once possessed Luna and made her into the Nightmare Moon entity.  Small wonder her sister had imprisoned her...  If she had power over an army of Wisps, the consequences for her being bonded to an Alicorn, and roaming free...

I shivered involuntarily at the unwanted mental image.

But something about it tickled the edge of another memory, like a feather against my side.

I didn't want to speak.  Didn't want to make her replay the old traumas any more than she already had.  But I had to know.  The tickle had grown into a road.  An overwhelming need to know.  To hear her dismiss my theory, so that I'd be able to sleep well that night.

I cleared my throat, and reshuffled my wings nervously.

"Princess...  Please forgive my asking.  But I need clarification, and I would not raise the issue unless it was of serious importance..."

Luna dipped her head smoothly in assent, locking eyes directly with me.  At the subtle encouragement, I forged ahead with less recrimination, but no greater enthusiasm.  How I hoped I was wrong.

"My understanding of the events you are referencing are that they ended in your being freed from this... Nightmare, by the Elements of Harmony.  In that process...  Do you know...  Was the Nightmare destroyed...  Or did it live on?"

My words brought about a heavy silence.  I could see Stan, Varan, Shining, and IJ fiercely turning wheels in their own heads, picking up on the threads of my idea and following them as far as each could.  

Varan was the only other one in the room who had been exposed to the events that had precipitated the question.  I wished Fyrenn, Skye, and Neyla were there too.  They'd seen it.  They would have valuable opinions and recollections.

Luna shook her head slowly, and from her muzzle came the words I had most feared.

"I long believed...  Hoped...  That it was destroyed.  But dark have been my dreams of late.  I have tasted her foulness nipping at the edges of my mind, and that alone enough to have perhaps ruined us all.  No... Good Gryphon... I believe that the Nightmare lives."

I nodded slowly, and let the breath out of my lungs in a long, drawn out hiss.  I didn't want to press the new questions that some of the ambiguity in her statement had raised.  I wanted to first follow my thought-thread to its bitter end.

I raised a claw, and inclined my head as I spun back the memory behind my eyes, with the usual perfect clarity of the avian mind.  As it played out, I spoke, primarily directing my words at Luna.

"You doubtless know of what happened in New York three years ago.  You keep well abreast of Human affairs, as most of us do."

She inclined her head, tone unreadably flat in response.

"We do."

I inhaled again, and continued with growing confidence.  And concern.

"At the end of the battle, we witnessed something.  Myself, Varan.  Fyrenn.  Neyla.  Skye.  Something that we could never explain, and which was later more or less stricken from the official reports."

Varan interjected with a single deadpan word, reaching the conclusion himself.

"Veritas."

I absently stropped my right thumb talon against the underside of my beak, and sighed.

"Yes.  Veritas.  A being who exhibited the ability to reach out and seize hold of a mind...  Who vanished before our eyes...  Not quite like a Wisp, but similar in many ways..."

Luna stiffened, and leaned forward.  As silence reigned, she finally rose, and moved to stand directly opposite me, locking eyes in a disconcerting manner.  Her words came out almost as if they were chips of ice forced between her teeth.

"Describe it."

The hackles on the back of my neck rose, and my ears flattened as I did what she asked.

"She morphed in an instant, as if vaporized.  Into a cloud of stars and blackness, as if the night sky itself were made into a physical thing.  And then she flew out of the tower...  And vanished without a trace."

Even though silence fell yet again, Luna's expression gave me my answer.  The way her jaw set, and her wings flared unconsciously.  The loathing, both for herself, and for that perhaps ancient entity both dancing behind her eyes.

Finally she voiced what we were all thinking.

"This  'Veritas.'  I believe she is no mere Unicorn.  The Nightmare has returned."





Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
December 9th, Gregorian Calendar

Alyra

I stiffened as I saw the readings flash across my panel, the report coming out of my beak before the thoughts were even fully formed.  My talons danced across the controls.  I'd had more than enough time to stare blankly at them to get an idea how they worked.

Optical lock acquired.  The older Gryphoness at helm was already turning us to keep the enemy lined up with my primary emitters.  Bless her and her clan a thousand times over.

"It's moving!!  Turning to our port, one four six relative, two nine five true, accelerating.  There's an energy buildup.  They're trying to get away.  Probably getting ready to jump."

I wasn't too sure what that meant.  That Mom and Dad, and Skye, and Laura had failed...  No.  Couldn't let that idea stick.  It had to be that they'd won, and the enemy was running away.

But then why haven't we heard from them.

I crushed the thought like a discarded tin can.  There's always hope.  Or we wouldn't still be breathing.  Every breath a gift.  Every gift to be used for the greatest good.  That's what Sonya had taught me.  And Dad.  And Mom.

Hutch shared a quick glance with Martins.  She caught on quick, and no one had to say a thing.  She tilted her head up and spoke in sharp, swift words.

"Computer, unlock particle weapons.  Recognize Martins, authorization Pi one one three eight."

I didn't even wait for the last note of the confirmation tone, stabbing one talon so hard into the 'FIRE ALL' control that it scratched the ruggedized coating of the touchscreen.

"FIRING FOR EFFECT!"

The Wisp ship had cleared the Lucapa perimeter fence already.  I didn't need to be subtle.

A dozen bright blue beams streaked out like fire from an automatic weapon, peppering the ugly dark mineral shape ahead of us, causing its energy shielding to flare violently.

Hutch slammed his hand into the Captain's railing, a manic grin plastered all over his face, mirroring the one I wore.

"Hit them again!  Continuous maximum yield fire, burn out the collimators if you have to!  Cue up the HASP!"

As I began to enter the next command sequence, and re-adjust my optical locks, Hutch flicked a switch on his console, connecting him to the JRSF fighters and bombers that were just cresting the horizon.

"Menace One-Five, Firebrand One-Five;  This is Shenzhou.  Release all weapons on every target you can find!  My taccon is hitting the soft spots, just follow the lady's lances in!  Maintain minimum safe escape distance.  Weapons free, weapons free!!"

"Shenzhou Actual, Firebrand lead Airstream, acknowledged.  Deploying heavy anti-armor!"

"Shenzhou, Menace lead Werewolf, acknowledged.  Menace Squadron;  Weapons free."

My grin widened as the Shenzhou's beams whipped out and sliced into the areas of the Wisp ship that I guessed were the most vulnerable.  A few seconds later bright streaks of yellow rail saw fire followed through.

The missiles arrived only a couple seconds later, producing huge fireballs that sent great big chunks of crystal flying off the edges of the enemy ship.  I watched their power curved tank like a stone dropped from a ledge.

"Got em!  Their teleport drive looks like it just went to pieces!  HASP ready!  Firing third particle salvo!"

And then my weapons just stopped working.





Skye

Oh bad.  So bad.  So very bad.

I was making about the sort of progress with whatever The Nightmare had done, as a drunk first year grad student on a capstone semester programming test she didn't study one lick for.  Definitely not a feeling I know from experience.  Nope.  Not at all.

I could tell two things for sure.

Number one, she had done something that was going to blow up the ship, using the antimatter, and it was going to be exactly as big a fireball as we all feared.

And two?

We had about thirty seconds left.

On a problem I conservatively guessed I'd need eleven minutes to untangle.

Oh sweet Celestia, please please don't let it end this way.  Not now.  Not like this.

My breathing began to increase, rapidly, as hyperventilation set in as a precursor to all out panic.  I began to lose what little complex spellweave I had finally managed to form.  I was so, so tired.  

And the sound of Fyrenn and Neyla trying to keep Aston alive, and slowly losing, was not helping.

"Stay with us Laura, goddammit.  Stay awake!"

I winced.  She'd taken that blast for me.  So I could save us all.  And I was going to fail.  That was the thing that hurt most of all.  The thing that pushed me over the edge.

STUPID, STUPID FILLY!  You're in WAY over your horn.  What did you THINK was going to happen?

I slammed one hoof against the deck in frustration, the words finally spilling out of me even as the tears started.

"Guys?!  I can't do this!  We've only got about twenty five seconds!"

A moment of silence passed.  Fyrenn rose, and made his way over.  I grit my teeth inside my muzzle, dreading some sort of pep talk, or panicked tirade.  Or worse, cold calculated anger.

When he snagged me in his wings and pulled me close under his chin, I didn't do a thing to resist.  The smell of warm feathers far overpowered the faint nasty traces of Veritas' innards that were still splattered on his sides.

It was such a nice smell.  I had no idea for the life of me why so many Ponies thought so poorly of these big lovable feather dusters.

He just crooked his neck around mine, and sighed deeply as he whispered in my ear.

"You are the sister I never had.  A day with you in my life would have been a gift greater than any physical thing, or small victory in battle.  You've outfought legends in your time.  And I am honored to have known you."

Sobs began to wrack my body.  I was ashamed to think of just how much ugly crying I was doing, wrapped up in the forelegs, wings, and neck of a vicious predator...  Who was one of the closest things I had to real family.

The beat of his heart was amazingly calm, and deeply reassuring.

I dimly heard him speak to Neyla as he raised his head again.

"I love you."

The words extracted another wracking sob, mixed with a forlorn laugh.  I glared up at the big feathery oaf with tear soaked eyes, vision blurred.

"You wait till right fucking now to tell her you brainless clod?  And I bet I don't even get to watch you snog.  Because you won't, will you?  Not even when you're about to die?"

He barked out a harsh laugh, and then reached for Aston's hand, clutching it hard in his right claw.  I watched as her fingers weakly folded over his claws.

Neyla strode over silently, and put her forehead against Fyrenn's, wrapping us both in her wings before speaking just four words.

"And I love you."

Three heaving breaths passed for me.  I thought about Stan.  Kephic.  Varan.  And my former herd.  Wished I could have said a proper goodbye.  Spared no thought whatsoever for my biologicals, except to wish I could teleport the antimatter right on top of their bigoted stuck up no good blue-blooded noble heads---

Holy matterbucking quantum shit on a popsicle stick.

Teleport.

And then I had it.  A way out of the jaws of death.

I wriggled out from under the embrace, and sucked in a huge breath.  The familiar energy began to thread around my horn at breakneck pace.

Ten seconds.

Fyrenn exhaled sharply, and tilted his head to the side.

"Skye?"

I glanced back over my shoulder, vision clearing, then dipping into a wild bevy of colors and shapes as my eyes switched to arcane sight.

"NOT NOW YOU IDIOT!  I NEED TO CONCENTRATE!"

I whipped my head back around, and focused on the antimatter.  Just the antimatter.  The fuel bottle, and the torpedo warhead fell away, leaving behind nothing but glowing pinpricks of lazily dancing light.  Almost like fireflies.

Five seconds.

Some hotshot had once tried to teach me a teleport spell.  Twilight Twinkles or something.  Maybe it was Sparkle.  Or Sprinkles.  

I'd annihilated the first five things I tried to move, producing a pretty mess in the process.

Apparently teleporting was something even Alicorns didn't do regularly, and little miss purple priss had figured it out all by her onesie, at least over very short distances.

Cute shit.  Nice party trick.  I clearly didn't have the aptitude.  The math was easy, it was the instinctive part I couldn't quite nail.

I had given up after the sixth test dummy, which never rematerialized.

Lost, Twilight had told me, to the Thaumatic ether.  Moved to its destination coordinates on the higher dimensional layer, but never returned to our plane.  She said the second I'd released the spell, the dummy had been subsumed as energy.  It made a nice little 'POP!'  Like a firecracker.

And she'd said that if it had been an energetic, or large enough thing...

Trying to get a lock on the antimatter was like trying to hold down a cloud if you weren't a Pegasus.

I inhaled one more time, and poured every last erg of myself into the spell.

Three seconds.

Almost there.  Just need to integrate one last function.  Take the cosine of a few nth dimensional angles...

Two.

Plot a guesstimate position.  Reach out and sense the weirdest discontinuity...  Yep, found it in one.  Man that ship looks even uglier in arcane sight.  Find the center, the biggest wide open space... No mistakes, or nothing you've done will matter---

One.

I fired the spellweave, and breathed one last prayer to Fyrenn's God that things would turn out, murmuring out loud as a disturbingly sharp 'SNAP' issued forth from the antimatter storage compartment.

"Surprise motherfuckers."





In an instant, the Wisp Hiveship turned from a dark black lightsink that radiated nothing but menace, into a white-hot mote of incandescence that radiated heat.  

A titanic spherical blue and white pulse split the craft midships with a sound akin to a guitar string the length of the Earth's equator being plucked, even as the Shenzhou's particle lances ceased, starved of their antimatter powersource, and leaving the ship's fusion cores to maintain the engines and flight systems.

Human JRSF fighter and bomber planes scattered like chaff on the wind, most missing the blast entirely.  The hull of the Hive Ship itself had absorbed the majority of the energy anyhow.

The few jets that were caught in the trailing edges of the shockwave were easily far enough out to allow their pilots time to eject.  Pity.

Veritas watched through the sight of a dozen dissociated Wisp platforms from the inside of the spatial fold as the trajection spell yanked her away, heat singeing her tail with blinding force for a trillionth of a second.

So few had survived.  But then, the ship only had a minimal crew aboard.  A tactical hedging for which Nightmare was intensely thankful.

The blast was nothing like it would have been if the antimatter had actually reintegrated to physical space-time.  But the sheer dump of the energy to the higher layers of the thaumatic ether, rather than the dead voids of lower dimensional subspace that the failsafes were designed to discard it in, was still colossal.

Easily equivalent to several kilotons of conventional Human explosives.

The three remaining fragments of the Hive ship pinwheeled almost gracefully away from each other, finally reaching the end of their ballistic arcs, and slamming into the gray and red dirt of the plains with a resounding sound something akin to the collapse of a megaskyscraper.

Black crystal, scarred and powerless, ploughed up three half kilometer furrows, before finally coming to rest in a protesting squeal of overstressed crystal and metal.  Dust and smoke rose in equal measure over the now silent hulks.

"They can beat you.  They *will* beat you.  I can see exactly how it's going to happen."

The unwelcome, unbidden voice was yet another in a chain of nasty shocks.  The host hadn't spoken aloud to her in many years.  Something that thrice-damned Unicorn had done when she hit her with that disruption spell.

No matter.

Nightmare's response was actinic white, piercing the host's mind with as much pain as she could dump into it.

As she writhed in pain, and fear, Veritas spat a final retort at her just before she reintegrated back at the evacuation point.

"They barely held me off here in this magic-forsaken place.  It is of little consequence;  One ship out of five, and the smallest at that.  A hundred Wisps out of four billion.  They will stand no chance when I have my full strength to call upon."





Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
Twelfth Month, Tenth Day, Celestial Calendar

Luna

Never had my beloved stars felt so alien.  Cold.  Distant.

It seemed grimly fitting that it should be a new moon as well.  All but invisible against the dark and trackless expanse as it crested apogee.  A frosty gust blew across the balcony, chilling the metal of my peytral to an almost painful degree.

Of the two of us, Celestia was ever the optimist, and I the realist.

It spoke great volumes of the situation that she was reduced to being the realist.  And even as she conferenced with her most faithful student, and sent dozens of dispatches across the Kingdom, that left me to be the pessimist.

Neither rest, nor hope for the wicked.

I sourly rehashed the few scraps of useful morsels I had been able to provide.  

I knew barely as much about the Nightmare as anyone else that had ever crossed her path.  A thousand years spent together, lashed, tossed, and buffeted by her chained rage.  And through it all not one tiny slip.  Not once did she show a fractional hint of her memories.  Her desires.  Her plans.

"And the stars shall aid in her escape..."

I didn't realize I'd murmured the words aloud until a rustling of feathers answered from the study doorway.  I could tell it was Varan by scent, and the cadence of his claw and paw steps.

He did not break his silence until he had reached the balcony, ensconcing himself on his hind legs in cat-like fashion.

"Legends have a peculiar blend of truth and fiction to them.  It is difficult to parse one from the other without an understanding of the context in which they were first melded.  The thousand years of exile for example.  A round number only because great magics breathe, like living creatures, and they have ebbs and flows as of the tides and stars.  Moments of weakness."

The golden-brown Gryphon tilted his head to bring his gaze off the sky, and I turned to meet it as he continued in his usual comforting, even, quiet tone.

"If I may be so bold as to speculate in an educated fashion...  I have just had a chance to read the text to which you refer, with no small amount of clarification from some of your best archivists.  Having seen more than one of these Wisps, and fought them, and seen the manner in which they appear to us in their natural form...  A floating Pony-shaped field of pinpoint lights, not unlike stars...  I would posit that the reference to her means of escape from the Moon becomes much clearer in light of that connection."

An astute visual observation.  So typical of a Gryphon.  I envied their sight.  Sometimes I even fantasized that when my time to cede my post would come at last, that I might choose to spend the gift of my final mortal life-cycle as one of them.  

Fantasized more often than not recently.  How I hated the complexity of rule.  The stresses of a thousand different Ponies tugging in a thousand different directions, and far too many of them increasingly falling into selfishness and self-assurance.

The life of a Gryphon, while much more dangerous on average, sounded so much simpler.  Not by any stretch easier.  But simpler.  I longed for simplicity.

But I settled for engaging with Varan's speculation instead.  A problem to occupy the mind.

"I would go so far as to say that your speculation could be taken nearly as fact.  I do indeed recall the presence of other voices during the time of her escape, and return.  Nothing more than shadows at the edge of my hearing and vision.  She kept me as isolated as she possibly could..."

In light of the Gryphon's observation, I steeled myself, and re-examined those bitter memories.  

I'd done my best to keep them out-of-mind for years, and while I'd always suspected in half-formed thoughts that Nightmare was not a lone instance of a monstrosity, but rather a member of a kind, the concept had never been given fully worded form to me before.

A foalish oversight on my part, in my desperation to avoid contemplating the mistake I had made.  What it had cost my sister.  What it had almost cost everypony...

Something flicked across my mind as I rewatched the horror of the moment when I'd almost slain dear Twilight.  A weapon in Nightmare's hooves.  A tap affording access to almost limitless power...

I sucked in a deep breath of the cold night air.  The tingle of the frigidity in my lungs helped me to focus my thoughts, and strip away some of the emotions.  I did my best to speak with a demeanour to match that of my company, not so different from my normal placidity.

"...When I was freed from the Nightmare, it was done using the Elements of Harmony.  At the cusp of that moment, as her mind and being were ripped apart from my own, I felt her call out.  She expended an enormous amount of power...  I always had thought that she got most of that power from me, but she could have also absorbed a nearly limitless quantity of raw energy from the Elements in the brief time she was connected with them.  And it had never occurred to me that she might be calling out not in rage, or fear...  But calling out *to* something..."

Varan's unblinking eyes glistened in the starlight, miniature solar furnaces that reminded me of my sister's Sun.  He was swift of mind, and he understood the implication, finishing my thought for me with a hint of trepidation so small that I wondered if any but I, and his brother, might have caught it at all.

"So...  Not drawing power from you to defend herself...  But drawing it from you, and from the Elements...  And then calling out to the others...  Sending that power to them?"

I nodded slowly, and reseated my wings.  A nervous gesture Alicorns, Pegasi, Dragons, and Gryphons all seemed to share in common.  In spite of the fact that I knew I didn't have to say it for practical reasons, for Varan had surely reached the same conclusions, I still bared the awful truth aloud.  

Almost like a confession.  A feeble hope that my fear being heard aloud and accepted by another might make it feel less powerful.

"I distinctly remember her anger at the end.  Her unbridled fury...  But in light of all this new...  Context...  I do not believe it was directed at Twilight.  Nor her friends.  Nor even at me, or the situation she found herself in...  In retrospect it seemed to be more of a..."

The words caught in my throat as the truth of what I was about to say was laid bare by the very putting of it into spoken form.  I had to push hard to get them out as my mind ranged ahead to the implications.

"...A triumphant rage.  As of a warrior who strikes a killing blow against a nemesis, crying out their victory as the stroke of death falls.  She may have screamed aloud in a semblance of fear for the benefit of the Element Bearers...  But the only thing she was feeling in that instant was pure hatred for something...  Or someone...  Other."

Varan nodded slowly, and ground his right thumb claw against the sharp edge of his beak in a thinking gesture.  After a moment to absorb, and follow my hypothesis to its logical conclusion, he responded, his gaze turning back to the stars above contemplatively.

"If your recollection holds true, and I have no doubts in your prowess of mind...  Then that would imply that the Nightmare always intended to face the Elements after her Exile.  Such context would better explain how six young Ponies were able to beat her so swiftly, in spite of the fact that she wielded deadly power through you, and had the benefit of far greater experience, and malice, on her side to overmatch the greater power they brought to bear."

His gaze abruptly shifted back to meet mine as he finally came to the worst truth of all.

"She always intended to be defeated.  She had no intention of harming the Bearers, because she needed them to direct at her an enormous amount of power.  Power otherwise inaccessible to her because the nature of the Elements would exclude her use of them outright.  Power which she could then combine with a draining of all of yours to bolster it further, and send out to the rest of her kind...  But for them to do what with it?"

I shook my head slowly, swallowing hard to dislodge a sudden lump in my throat.  I could only muster a whisper in reply.

"I do not know.  But I do know that the kind of power we are discussing is sufficient to make, or unmake, entire worlds.  To lay bare the very fabric of the universe and weave it to one's desires with very little limitation.  She could have obliterated our entire reality in that moment.  Whatever she chose to do, I can't fathom how we did not see some sort of result, or side affect or conseq---"

In that horrifying moment I knew what she had done.  What I had opened the door for her to do.  It was the only thing of such raw resonance and consequential effect that we had all seen with our own eyes, which could possibly explain where all that energy had gone.

My horn flared, eyes filling with white light as I reached out to touch the fabric of the ether, to feel around the edges of the great quilt of our world.  I had to know.  My breaths turned shallow.  My stomach turned to ash.

Though not seen in my third eye as arithmetic in any conventional terms, I could compare the information I needed as if each piece were a number.  The degree to which they matched was conclusive.  I felt my spirit shatter like glass dropped upon hard unfeeling stone.

"No!"

The word escaped me as a sharp breath of exhalation as the magic faded.  How could we have all been so foalish?  We'd tried so hard, for so long, to find answers to that problem.  A solution.  Any solution that would stop what had begun...

No wonder we had failed.  We were but two small fillies trying to hold back the torrent of a broken dam with nothing more than a couple of buckets.

How had we missed the correlation then?  I knew with a sickening twist of my insides that the oversight was also my own fault.  Celestia had never directly seen the memories of those final moments of parasitic existence.  I'd never shared that nightmare with anyone...  Never examined that part of it closely enough myself to reduce the event to cold statistical knowledge.

Some small voice, the sound of my sister's viewpoint, cried out in the back of my mind, insisting that I'd never had any reason to think of things this way before.  No one had, or could have.

It was a terribly small comfort to hold back the blackness.  The horror of what I had a hoof in enabling was so great, than it knocked the wind from me.  Numbed my bone and sinew with its magnitude.

It took me several seconds to realize that Varan had extended a wing and a foreleg to support me, his head down under mine and staring up into my eyes with deep concern.

I allowed a few tears to begin to form at the edges of my eyes, lacking any energy to hold them back as I forced out an explanation.  The finality of it nearly cut my life from my heart.

"The Barrier.  What the Humans call the bubble...  It is nothing more than a discontinuity...  Like the shock front ahead of an arrow as it pierces flesh on its way through the body.  Equestria is passing through Earth's reality, locked to its location by a gravitational bond...  We always thought it was a natural phenomenon.  A terrible happenstance of situation..."

Varan sucked in a sharp breath, his own eyes going wide, and his ears flattening.  His tail lashed reflexively in distress as he said what I could not bring myself to say outright, in a deep and quavering note that was the most uneven and shocked I'd ever heard come from his beak.

"The Nightmare...  The Wisps...  They set our world on a collision course with the Humans' Earth...  Intentionally.  And they used your Elements of Harmony to do it."

I collapsed onto the Gryphon's shoulder, every single ounce of effort in my body directed purely at holding back great heaving sobs.

He awkwardly held one wing around me.  I could feel him slowly shaking his head.  His whispered prayer only added to the intractable sense of pressure clenching down on my heart.

"My God...  Grant us mercy."





Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
December 10th, Gregorian Calendar

"Earthgov Air Force eight five seven heavy, descend and maintain flight level ten thousand until you reach outer marker.  Squawk thirty two twenty two for Basse-Terre tower.  Be advised, your handoff team from JRSF is already on the tarmac and waiting.  Two Gryphons, two Ponies, two Humans.  Ground team says they all look... Unhappy."

Norris sighed, and worked the joints of her wrists against the inner edge of her cuffs to relieve an itch.  The Javelin's comm-loop had been left connected to the rear compartment speakers, in a subtle nod to the fact that the aircraft's crew, and the four armed guards detailed to her, had no more desire to be part of the proceeding than she did.

They'd even addressed her as 'sir' or 'ma'am' and saluted throughout her arrest, detention, evacuation from GMCC, and subsequent loading into the executive transport.

At least the JRSF had the foresight to send Ponies and Humans with the handoff team.  Norris wasn't worried about her fate in the slightest, providing she could stay alive long enough for the Council to get stuck-in to negotiations.

They'd see to it that she got off lightly.  As far as most of them were concerned...  As far as she, and anyone on her staff was concerned, she had done nothing wrong.

Posturing.  That's all this was, she reflected, in an attempt to reassure herself.  Her worst fear had been that she'd be handed directly over to waiting hungry Gryphons.

There were more than a few stories of the beasts devouring their defeated enemies as 'victory meals' while forcing the underlings of the dead to watch.  A way to enforce fear.  Norris decided she could at least respect the efficacy of such a tactic as a means to 'winning the future battles' without having to fire any more shots.

But the thought of ending up as one of those meals?  Unable to put up a fight at the end?

The General shivered, and closed her eyes for a moment.  Dammit.  Those mental images were not going to go away quickly.

Suddenly they were replaced by something much worse.  Gryphon banners lofted over the ruins of Earthgov Council buildings.  Equestrian flags flying over municipal government centers.  Long lines of military Police with their hands clasped behind their heads, force-marched into detention centers, with the only way out being the acceptance of a cup of purple goop...

Her own staff lined up against the wall of the GMCC by Gryphon shock troops in JRSF power armor, mowed down one by one as a Dragon JAG agent moved down the line and pronounced sentencing without trial...

What if the Council couldn't force a solution at the negotiation table?  Worse...  What if they surrendered to the pastel freaks and their monstrous guard-birds?

"Eight five seven heavy, Basse-Terre tower.  We show new traffic at your eleven o'clock low, rising through flight level niner thousand, climbing.  X-Band gives no ident-lock, and they are not responding to transmissions.  IFF not present.  Can you look out your canopy and tell us what you see?"

Norris stiffened, and brought her gaze up to peer through the open cockpit door.  She leaned forward in her seat, trying to see out the canopy glass, watching as the copilot pressed his face as far forward as it would go.

"Aaahhhh...  That's a negative Bass-Terre.  It's pretty dark outside, and I don't see any lights or---"

Norris found her world turned upside down, in every literal sense.  The Javelin was upright, level, and gently descending one moment, and then spinning about two axes like a rock in a clothes dryer the very next.  A roar filled the General's ears, the drums bursting instantly, and the bite of her seat's five point safety harness caused bruises to bloom on every part of her body as the G-forces of an uncontrolled tumble intensified.

"MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY!!  EAF Eight five seven heavy, declaring an emergency!"

The pilot's panicked shouts were barely audible above the sounds of the Javelin breaking up under impossibly intense dynamic stresses.

So.  This is how I die.  I wonder if it was a malfunction?  No...  An unknown contact, and then the aircraft carrying me goes down in flames?  No such thing as coincidence.  Fucking traitorous Equestrian scum.

As the thought crossed Norris' mind just as she began to black out.  Oxygen was plentiful enough below ten thousand feet, but the G-forces of the Javelin's tumble were too intense for even a trained pilot.

Emotion drained away, and her vision clouded as Norris watched one of the craft's immense wings shear down its centerline, flip end over end, and cut the fuselage in half with its passage, missing her by only a meter or so.

And then a red flash.  A strange face that she couldn't quite make out, and a string of barely comprehensible words as something placed a hand...  Hoof?  On her chest.

"Right.  Time to go dear.  We want them to think you're dead, and not to be right about it after all.  I warn you, this next part stings."

The strange red face was not wrong.  There was a short sharp sense of tingling and burning on her skin, and then Norris' world vanished into darkness completely.