ZECORA STATION, NEW EVERFREE HIGH ORBIT – 07:23 Local Time
[Two hours before Incident]
“You lost, mate?”
Kiln Bread snapped his head towards the source of the gravelly voice and found himself face-to-face with a plump bipedal fish—he couldn’t recall the species’ name—dressed in the grey uniform of the Periphery Explorer’s Guild.
“Umm, just a bit, yeah.” He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his mane. “I was told that I could find Miss Ebony Dew here. She’s a captain, I think? I’m not too sure about the ranks around here.”
The walking fish pursed his very substantial lips and rolled his eyes. “Oi, it’s Captain Dew. We’re part of civilisation too, you know.”
Kiln flattened his ears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
The fish waved him off. “No sweat. You a friend of hers? Or family?”
“I… yeah, I’m a friend of hers. I’m also here on behalf of her family.”
“Well, you’re in the wrong terminal.” The fish slapped a moist, webbed hand onto his shoulder and steered him around. “Down that corridor, take the third left exit, past the loading bays and take the elevator to the officer’s lounge. Move fast. She’s outbound, so you might catch her before she gets into the cockpit. Keep your distance from the loaders and don’t talk back—don’t want to lose a tail.”
Kiln thanked him and hurried off.
Even at a brisk trot, it still took him twenty minutes to reach his destination.
Not that he was intimately familiar with the layout of non-public sections of an orbital station, but the Peripheral preference for bare metal, straight edges and harsh lighting made the whole place more alien and harder to navigate than necessary. Not a single heart or star in place, and they seemed to use an awful lot of text instead of standardised symbols, unlike, say, Harmony Station.
Also, unlike the tighter security found in Equestrian stations, now that he had directions and could at least move like he had a clear purpose, nobody bothered to stop him and find out why a severely underdressed unicorn was trotting around in the freight section. The myriad creatures (including ponies) operating the trundling loaders did shout at him in an unfamiliar language, but he was sure that those were more insults or catcalls rather than queries about his lack of authorisation.
The ‘officer’s lounge’ looked more like a seedy bar than a place befitting a captain, and he wrinkled his muzzle at the mixed odour of smoke, grease and overcooked food. A few heads turned as he entered, but they quickly went back to minding their businesses without a second glance.
He spotted her sitting in the corner, facing away from him.
Kiln would’ve recognised that whirlwind blend of yellow, peach and red colours anywhere, and if that wasn’t already a dead giveaway, the webbed wings and peppy voice would’ve removed any doubt. She was pretty much just a bigger version of the filly he remembered, with the addition of a grey flight suit bearing the Explorer’s Guild insignia.
As he got nearer, he caught snippets of what sounded like a conference call on the tablet in front of her. One male voice in particular sounded oddly synthetic, but the words said gave off an air of sarcasm that was quite rare amongst virtual intelligences and assistive programmes.
He paused when he felt a sudden upwelling of dread in his gut.
Would she remember him? Would she even want to?
Marsh Dew had advised him not to bring up family matters immediately, warning that it was a rather sore spot for Ebony. Would that also extend to any ties she had with her childhood?
He swallowed and trotted closer. “Ebony Dew?”
She turned her head and blinked. Stared for a second or two. Then, she gasped and whipped back around to the diamond dog on her tablet screen and said, “Sorry, I’ll call you back later. Something urgent came up.”
The diamond dog muttered something in response, but Kiln failed to catch the rest of it.
Ebony practically leapt out of her seat and wrapped him in a crushing hug.
“Oh my gosh, Kiln!” she cried, grinning toothily as she released him. “What’re you doing here? I haven’t seen you in ages!”
“Just had some business in the neighbourhood. Got wind that you work here, and decided to drop by,” he lied.
Ebony’s grin flickered for a moment, and Kiln’s heart rate spiked.
Had she seen right through him?
Come to think of it, something about her seemed off, too. He couldn’t quite put his hoof on it, but it definitely wasn’t her change in mane style. She now kept it messy instead of tying it back like she used to in school.
But before he could give it further thought, she chuckled and thumped him on the shoulder. “Aww, that’s sweet of you. We’ve got so much to catch up on!”
“Yeah, we—” he paused and blinked when he spotted the stuffed batpony on the table, facing the now blank screen of her tablet. “Wait a sec. Is… is that Tickles?”
Ebony’s grin widened. “You remember him!”
How could I forget?
So, now she had a physical avatar for her imaginary friend…
Her father hadn’t been so generous. “One of many effigies for her unfortunate delusion”, were the words he’d used to describe the stuffed toys Ebony had started buying or making for herself, no matter how many her mother threw away. It was always a batpony.
Guess this must be the latest model.
It was unusually detailed and well-crafted. Posable, too. Most likely custom-made.
Ebony opened her mouth wide, as if she was about to declare something to the whole world, then slowly shut it and glanced at her doll. She then switched her gaze to her omni-tool bracer, turned back to him and said, “Listen, I’ll be dropping some cargo down to Dragon’s Point soon. Where are you headed to?”
“Umm…”
He hadn’t actually planned that far ahead.
“Just here for a vacation. Goldstone Bay. I heard the northern hemisphere is great this time of the year. Need to unwind from my desk job, you know?” he said, gesturing vaguely with a hoof.
She nodded. “Good choice. You booked a shuttle yet? Any luggage?”
“Uh, not yet.” He then reached around and patted his slim saddlebags. “I’m travelling light.”
“Great! I’ll take you down to Dragon’s Point, and you can catch a train from there to Goldstone. It’ll save you a shuttle ticket, and we can catch up on the way!”
“Wait, are you allowed to do that?”
She bared her fangs in a predatory grin. “In this part of the galaxy, we have a saying: it’s less a question of who’s going to let us, and more a question of who’s going to stop us. Are you in?”
Kiln bit his lip.
He wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of breaking protocol, but if she knew what she was doing, it was probably safe enough. Also, he had no idea if he could easily get in touch with her again if they separated. If they were stuck together in a small freighter, she wouldn’t be able to storm off if she got upset when he brought up family matters as her father had instructed. The only way to get rid of him at that point would be to toss him out an airlock.
She probably wouldn’t do that. Probably.
He nodded. “Sure, why not?”
“Awesome. Let’s go!”
Ebony swiped up her tablet and stuffed it into a pocket, then grabbed her stuffed toy. It had a short canvas strap coming out from its back between the wings, with a quick release buckle at the end, which she then attached to her flight suit so that it could hang snugly tucked underneath her wing.
Kiln found himself herded through another unfamiliar of the section of the terminal, past a few curious and many indifferent faces, until they reached the launch bay housing her freighter. Workers were still loading crates into its cavernous belly.
To be honest, it looked a little unsightly to him. The disproportionately large and blocky fuselage dwarfed the cockpit jutting out at the front and the tail at the back, and the massive engines on either side looked like they had mismatched plating welded on. Then again, it was essentially a space truck, not racer or a pleasure yacht, and he knew better than to badmouth a ship to its captain.
Apparently, they hadn’t even bothered to set up boarding stairs for it, since the pilot could fly.
Ebony carried him up two storeys’ worth of height to the door.
Once they were through the airlock, there was barely enough space to squeeze past a small, internal side cabin, forward until they reached the cockpit proper. There were two seats side by side, and just enough space behind them for a couple of ponies to comfortably stand.
After stowing their loose belongings in the cabin, they took turns using the side cabin to put on the vacuum suits. Ebony said that it was standard procedure, and they’d only need to put on the bulky helmets if they actually got into an emergency.
“Okay, here’s the deal. I’m gonna need you to sit tight in the cabin while I handle the pre-flight checklist and deal with the control tower. You also need to be buckled in for the short time in zero-G after we leave the station. I’ll let you know once it’s safe to come out.”
Kiln glanced wordlessly at the co-pilot’s seat.
Ebony’s cheeks flushed. “Eh heh… sorry, but that’s reserved for qualified pilots during take-off and landing. Also, the control tower might hear you.”
He leaned forward a little more and saw that she’d strapped her stuffed toy into the co-pilot’s seat, and the echoes of Marsh Dew’s unflattering words came back to him:
“Ebony is not well, Kiln Bread. Whatever happens, please don’t encourage her fantasies. It’s been a barrier to any progress we could’ve made in the last decade or so, and now that we’ve an opportunity to get proper treatment for her, it’s all the more important that we don’t waste it. She needs help, and you’re in the best position to start her on the path to recovery.”
He mentally shook his head to clear it.
“All right, you’re the captain,” he said with a smile.
“I promise it’ll be worth the wait. You’ll love the view! And we have about an hour to enjoy it until we reach Dragon’s Point.”
He strapped himself into the cramped cabin seat and waited, listening as Ebony recited various procedures and communicated with the control tower and ground crew. The freighter rumbled to life and the lights dimmed shortly after its loading door thumped shut, and more voices entered the channel, including that synthetic male voice again, reporting various conditions and statuses.
Eventually, they were cleared for launch, and he felt that familiar lurch followed by weightlessness as they left the artificial gravity field of the station. It was too bad that he didn’t have a window in the cabin; he could do little more than gauge the ship’s orientation from the shifting light through the cabin’s open door.
Then, after a few minutes of zero-G, he felt gravity tugging gently once more as they descended to the planet.
“Permission to leave my seat, captain?” he called out.
“Permission granted!”
He casually loped into the cockpit and blinked when he saw Ebony waving him over and gesturing to the vacant co-pilot’s chair. She’d perched her doll up on top of the dashboard instead, and Kiln couldn’t help feeling as if those eyes were watching them like a disapproving older brother.
Still, he wasn’t going to turn down a proper chair, so he sidled into place, careful not to touch the yoke despite her assurances that doing so wouldn’t disengage the autopilot.
New Everfree had some really impressive cloud patterns—great, swirling waves unbound by pegasi magic, bringing rain and sleet to the marble-blue oceans. It was still too dark to make out details on the landmasses, but he knew that they had an almost Equestrian distribution of biomes, with a nice mixture of brown and green. Very few lights marked the presence of civilisation on the surface, unlike much of the Core Worlds. The visible curve of the western horizon had a yellow glow to it, heralding the arrival of a sun without an alicorn’s guidance.
“That’s quite the view,” he murmured.
Ebony took off her headset and followed his gaze. “Mmm. It is, isn’t it?”
“Is it what you’d always dreamed of?”
“Eh?”
“Flying a ship, I mean.”
Her face lit up with a brilliant grin. “Oh, you have no idea. Let’s see, there was this time I nearly gave my instructor a heart attack—”
She told him about her near-misses in flight school. Hauling cargo to the strangest planets on the farthest reaches of the Periphery. Accidentally catching and recovering from alien pathogens. Navigating through debris fields, meteor storms and even fleeing from space pirates.
In comparison, his tales of working in administration for a food processing company seemed rather mundane. She did at least sympathise with his frustrations about the higher-ups not understanding why he couldn’t just make computers reorganise and present data exactly the way they wanted for that particular day of the week, though. And she seemed fairly interested in finding out what their old schoolmates had been up to, in the years since her disappearance.
Speaking of which…
Forty minutes had passed, and it was already daylight on the continent below. He wouldn’t have much time left to convince her of anything if he didn’t broach the subject soon.
So, he quickly finished up his story about Bright Bloom’s marriage to that weird colt down the street, then steeled himself for the coming storm.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you.”
“Mm hmm? Anything you like…”
Kiln turned and felt heat rising to his ears when he found Ebony propping her cheek up with one fetlock, gazing at him dreamily with a lopsided smile.
His breath hitched in his throat, but he gritted his teeth and forced out the words.
“I… I’ve heard a few things about what happened after you left school,” he said as he fiddled with the armrest. “I’m sorry to hear that your mom and dad separated.”
“Well, yeah. That happened.” Ebony sighed and clicked her tongue. “Life is sometimes like that, I suppose.”
“And, umm… your dad spoke to me recently.”
Ebony’s posture stiffened. “Oh?”
It was funny how a single syllable could leach so much warmth out of the air.
Kiln swallowed. “He told me that you were unwell. Is that true?”
She turned and looked at him with slightly narrowed eyes, as if he was some defective knickknack for sale at the market which she wasn’t willing to pay full price for. And once again, he got the feeling that something was off about her…
“What exactly did my father say?” she murmured.
“He told me you had cancer, and that it was caused by your heart transplant. And he said that you were refusing treatment because you had grown… attached to it?” He glanced at the stuffed batpony on the dashboard. “Does Tickles have something to do with it? I’m not sure why, but he seems to think that your… friend is one of the reasons you won’t talk to him.”
Ebony’s eyes drifted over to the dashboard, incidentally giving him a clear side view of her muzzle, and the dark little scabs under her chin. How had he missed those before? They almost looked like tiny barnacles poking out of her fuzzy coat.
He flared his horn, bathing her face in gentle blue light. “Those aren’t natural, are they? I don’t remember you having them.”
She absentmindedly brushed at the scabs with a hoof, then rounded on him with a scowl. “Whatever he’s told you, it’s not the whole picture. I do have a condition of some kind, but my father doesn’t know for sure if it’s dangerous. He hasn’t seen the whole picture—he refuses to see the whole picture.”
“Then what is the whole picture?”
Kiln let his horn light fade as he recalled the old CT scans Marsh Dew had shown him, taken shortly after Ebony’s fateful migraine episode in school. He couldn’t help wincing at the memory of the ghostly images depicting unnatural bundles of tissues branching out like roots from Ebony’s heart, caressing her bones and internal organs. One branch had even snaked all the way up along her spinal cord and formed a mass in her cerebral cortex.
He shuddered to think what her insides might look like at this point, after so many years without treatment.
Ebony still hadn’t answered, so he decided to press on. “Look, whatever concerns you might’ve had with chemotherapy or drugs at the time, they’re probably irrelevant now. The newest treatments have cut down on all those nasty side effects, and your dad said that he’s even got you on a reserve list for a heart replacement – an artificial one that won’t come with the baggage of a previous owner.”
“The ‘baggage’ is exactly the reason I don’t want a new heart,” she suddenly growled.
He blinked. “You… you want the cancer?”
Ebony stared at him for a long while, then slowly sucked in a breath and sighed. “My father’s probably told you that Tickles is just a figment of my imagination, right? I guess it’s time we showed you and let you decide for yourself.”
She glanced at her stuffed batpony and nodded. “All yours, buddy.”
Kiln peered at the inert toy. “I don’t get it. What does—gah!”
The doll suddenly glowed with green light, shifted to sit down on its haunches instead of standing straight on all fours, and then waved a hoof at him.
And barely a moment later, that synthetic male voice droned, “Hello, Kiln Bread. We’ve known each other since elementary school, but I never really had the chance to introduce myself until now. I’m Tickles—currently Ebby’s First Officer. Some people think I’m literally cancer, but hey, what’s a guy to do?”
Kiln felt his jaw drop. “What?”
The doll nodded and threw its fore hooves up in a helpless gesture. “I know, right? People can be unbelievably rude sometimes.”
He blinked. “What?”
The doll tilted its head, then leaned forward as if appraising him. Kiln was sure that it was now mocking him with that stitched-on smirk as the voice said, “Come on, I’m sure you’ve picked up a wider vocabulary by now. We’re not in school anymore.”
Ebony sniggered. “Ticks, don’t be mean.”
Kiln flicked his eyes back and forth between her and the glowing doll. “What?”
Ebony folded her forelegs and huffed. “You wanted the whole picture? Well, here it is: long story short—my father probably didn’t tell you that my heart transplant was an unsanctioned experiment. It was grown from changeling stem cells—no rejection, so I never needed to take immunosuppressants, and the organ would actually grow with me and last as long as I lived. Sounds great, right?”
He blinked.
“Right. The thing is that we didn’t count on my heart growing a brain. That’s when I started sensing somepony sharing space in my head. Other foals were talking to imaginary friends, so hey, that’s what I thought was happening and named him Tickles!” she said with a smile, which then soured as she carried on. “But we soon realised that other foals were only pretending, and nopony believed me when I insisted that Tickles was real, least of all my parents.”
He stared at her. “So, when we were in school…”
“Yup! All real. Tickles was learning, too.”
“But…” He looked at the doll, which gave him a cheeky salute. “How is it doing that?”
“A brain wasn’t the only thing my heart grew.”
She lifted her forelock with a hoof, and he gasped when he saw a curved, bony protrusion on her forehead. It was just over an inch long, with a black, glossy surface in stark contrast to her yellow coat. And it glowed with the same soft, green light as the batpony doll.
“Tickles sees and hears through my eyes and ears, but he couldn’t actually control anything. Not until he got his horn some years after my parents broke up. By then, we were living with my Ma in Canterbury, but even she got tired of us and kicked us out. Anyway, the point is that Tickles finally had a way to interact with the outside world on his own!”
“It was quite a relief, I can tell you.”
Kiln glanced downward, swivelling his ears as he attempted to pinpoint the source of that voice, then settled his eyes on the omni-tool bracer on Ebony’s left foreleg. She obliged by raising it to give him a closer look, and he saw that it had a module with an awfully complex array of buttons and dials attached to a speaker. It looked like a heavily modified and miniaturised text-to-speech device, which was confirmed when a green aura began typing on it too rapidly for him to keep track of the individual keys being pressed.
A split-second later, the voice said, “You have no idea how great it is to be able to write down exactly how she’s made a mistake in math instead of just sending her bad vibes and hoping that she’d figure it out.”
“I… but you—”
Ebony’s smirk mirrored the doll’s. “How’s that for the big picture, huh?”
“This is… a lot to take in. I can’t even right now.” Kiln rubbed his aching temples and shook his head. When that didn’t relieve the pressure, he snorted and growled, “What the hay is going on? Why didn’t your father tell me any of this? Why didn’t you tell me anything earlier?”
“Earlier, when? When we were kids, or—”
“Back at the station!” he snapped.
She leaned back. “Well, I didn’t want to scare you off…”
Then, her eyes took on a steely glint as she frowned and continued, “I mean, you were my friend. I didn’t want to dump all of that on you when we’d just met after not seeing each other for seventeen years!”
“Also, I advised her not to,” said Tickles. “I sensed that you were lying about something. And you were. Her father is the real reason you’re here, isn’t he? He put you up to this. How much is he paying you?”
Kiln opened his mouth, but words didn’t come out.
Marsh Dew had offered to compensate him for the trouble, but Kiln had only agreed to help because Ebony was his friend…
“I knew it.” The doll gave him the wing-finger.
“No. This is crazy. Just hang on a minute! I just—” He shook his head and flattened his ears, feeling the cockpit steel walls and glass windows closing in around him. “Gah, what did I just get myself into?”
He heard the sound of seatbelts being unbuckled, and Ebony was suddenly right next to him, gazing into his eyes. She placed a hoof on his shoulder and whispered, “Kiln, I’m still your friend. We’re still your friends, even if Tickles is a bit cheesed-off at you right now.”
Kiln blinked.
Ebony’s eyes were lime-green. Like a changeling’s.
The Ebony he remembered had amber eyes.
Had he really been speaking to the real Marsh Dew? Had some changeling agent sent him all the way to this part of the galaxy on an elaborate ruse just to be, what? Kidnapped? Assassinated? He was nopony important. Then again, what did he know about the crazy things which happened in the Periphery? They didn’t name the planet New Everfree for no reason…
His heart pounded in his chest.
The Hive Fleet was generally on good terms with Equestria, but even they weren’t a monolith. He was trapped in a cockpit with one, possibly two changelings of unknown allegiance.
The words simply slipped from his mouth. “Have you been a changeling all this time?”
Ebony blinked, and her eyes watered up. “What?”
“How do I know you aren’t just a changeling? That could explain everything I’ve seen so far. Maybe you—”
“No!”
Ebony slammed a hoof down onto his armrest and lunged forward, stopping only when a green aura formed on her chest. “Not you, too. I’ve heard it a thousand times before. Mama kicked me out because she got tired of others saying that I was actually an adopted changeling. She heard it so often that maybe she even started believing it—she once got drunk and accused me of being a changeling who had replaced her little filly years ago, and my new horn was proof of it! It didn’t matter how many times doctors and police couldn’t force me to turn back into a changeling when they hit me with magic, everypony kept saying that there was something wrong with me, and I or my mother must’ve been lying about something!”
She then bared her fangs and snarled, “My whole life, I’ve been told that I’m lying. My own Mama and Papa think that my closest friend is a lie. He is not!”
He had a pistol in his saddlebag—everypony kept one when travelling to the Periphery, because pirates—but that was stowed away in the side cabin. And he didn’t know any proper combat spells aside from stuns and barriers…
They would have to do.
He gulped and flared his horn with as much power as he dared. He didn’t yet know what spell to cast, but he hoped that the sheer charge on display might give them second thoughts about trying anything on him.
“I’m sorry, but I need my personal space,” he said.
She recoiled as if he’d struck her. “Kiln…”
The doll stood up on all fours, and the corona on Ebony’s horn blazed brightly as the synthetic voice said, “Stand down, right now. Or else.”
“Just wait!” she cried, snapping up a foreleg.
Kiln yelped and accidentally released the full charge in his horn. Too late, he realised that she’d only used her foreleg to interpose between her horn and his face instead of decking him on the snout.
The blue bolt of raw, crackling magic bounced on the ceiling and ricocheted all over the cockpit, leaving charged arcs on every surface it touched, until it finally slammed squarely into Ebony’s chest. She only managed a pained gasp before she convulsed and collapsed like a ragdoll, about the same time as alarms blared in the cockpit along with flashing red and orange lights. Sparks and smoke sputtered from the dashboard and control panels, and the freighter suddenly pitched towards the planet’s surface.
Kiln floated out of his seat, weightless.
The doll was floating, too.
“You bucking idiot,” it said.
So it is a separate entity!
Kiln reflexively blasted the doll with magic and sent it bouncing around the cockpit, trailing smoke.
Then, he saw Ebony’s horn flare up again, despite the fact that her eyes had completely rolled up into her head and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth.
A second later, he heard a couple of beeps, followed by a klaxon-like alarm and a different artificial voice which said, “Warning. Manual venting engaged.”
He heard a loud hiss as fog formed in the cockpit, blurring his vision. Everything sounded muffled and off-pitch.
He gasped as the air thinned and conjured a bubble barrier around himself, but he simply didn’t have enough strength to compress the already thin air back to breathable pressure. He couldn’t find his helmet. His bubble popped as more air vented into space, leaving him panting and heaving in vain. A warm spot formed in the nether region of his vac suit.
Despite all that, he retained enough consciousness to realise that the hissing had stopped.
Then, he felt himself encased in a magical aura—a green one—which shoved him back into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled him in. The magic also saw fit to further restrain him with cargo netting, so tightly that he couldn’t move his limbs even if he’d had enough air to breathe.
A moment later, he saw tiny flashes of green magic on the dashboard controls, and the hissing came back. The fog vanished, and sounds returned to normal. Kiln gasped like a landed fish and saw the spots in his eyes gradually fade away.
A dull boom shook freighter, followed by continuous rattling which threatened to crack his clenched teeth. A flickering, orange glow danced outside the windows.
Green magic grasped the pilot’s yoke and pulled, gradually reducing the freighter’s steep downward angle. But it didn’t stop the rattling or remove the orange glow. He no longer felt weightless, and the weight was going into the back of the seat rather than downwards.
Off to the side, he saw Ebony’s body enshrouded in a magical aura of the same green hue as the corona on her tiny horn, awkwardly fumbling its way back into the pilot’s seat like a zombie puppet. Her eyelids fluttered groggily as the magic buckled her in and fitted on her helmet.
Meanwhile, her doll had stopped bouncing around and come to a rest near Kiln’s hooves, with smoke still wafting from the singed spot on its chest.
The next thing he knew, a helmet had been shoved onto his head and magically sealed with his vac suit. A soft hiss announced the arrival of clean air, and he winced when the internal comms activated with a brief burst of sharp static.
“Haven Tower, this is Loggerhead Two-Three-Seven, we are declaring emergency. Engine One failure and uncontrolled re-entry. Attempting to recover.”
“Roger that, Loggerhead Two-Three-Seven. We are clearing airspace below you. Pads one to nine will be available for you.”
He heard a cough, followed by a groan from Ebony. “Ready… ready a pegasus team. Might… need… Kirin crew. We’re coming in hot.”
From the corner of his eyes, Kiln could just make out her forelegs wrestling with the yoke. The orange glow had filled the entirety of the windows, and the whole ship roared with atmospheric friction.
He opened his mouth, but only a grunt emerged.
It was so hot. Everything was so heavy.
He couldn’t even scream when the darkness finally swallowed him whole.