Flam shot up in his seat, his body convulsing from the feedback of the broken neural connection. Frustrated, he grabbed the connectors and wires, desperately trying to pull them away to free himself. When he finally did break free, he fell out of the side of the chair, flopping on the floor, momentarily unable to move. His ferengi legs were the wrong shape to be a quadruped, and the prolonged connection had rendered him momentarily incapable of existing as a proper, civilized being. He had been using the robotic shell so long that, for a brief second, he remained as a pony even in his own body.
From beside him, he heard a cry and saw his brother fall out of his own machine. Having been unable to disconnect himself, Flim was still linked to the wires, tangling them more and more as he struggled.
“Brother, help! She cut me in half, I’m dead, I’ve been killed, it’s got me!”
“Idiot, take off the interface!”
“I can’t stand, my legs, she cut off my legs, why can’t I--”
Flam forced himself to stand, stumbling and holding himself up against the makeshift assembly. He felt sick, and started toward his brother, kicking him several times before grasping the bundles of wires and tearing them free.
His name was not actually “Flam”, nor was his brother’s name “Flim”. Although, in a sense, their real names hardly mattered—nor were they useful in this context. In fact, the effects of prolonged neural immersion in the robotic bodies had left profound damage to their actual self-identities, although neither of them fully realized that side-effect. By an immense universal coincidence, they were, in fact, twins, of the names of Flum and Flom—which only served to confuse poor Flim (Flum) more than he already was.
Flim gasped, grabbing at his midsection. “But I...but I felt it!”
Flam helped him up. “I think our time on this planet is up. We need to get going."
They stood up in the center of their laboratory, looking at the multidimensional carbon door.
“Will it hold?” asked Flim.
“Of course it will hold, you fool, we have plenty of time. Do you have any idea how much that door must have cost? There’s no way she could get through—”
A jet of blinding flame suddenly shot through the carbon, nearly vaporizing Flim, who only survived due to his preternatural survival instincts. That is, the ability to scurry away, cower and hide as quickly as possible.
“She’s cutting through! Brother, She’s CUTTING THROUGH!”
“But that—that—”
Flam shuddered. The situation was indeed more dire than he thought. It had instantly progressed from a case of needing an escape to actual mortal peril, and he began to feel the panicked need to escape filling through his body.
Immediately he forced it down. Panic was both a waste of time and money. There were still ways to deal with this and make a profit. “Come on!”
His brother stood up and followed him through the facility, past the tanks where the other models sat. The other unicorns that they had performed the surgeries on. A small, gray filly; an orange stallion with a white blaze on his face and white-tipped hooves, and so many others—and a pair of familiar twins, held in the same tank, their machinery fused but their process a failure. Their output was low, the grafts of low quality, and their tube no longer bubbled. The fluid inside had become stagnant and turbid.
As they passed it, Flam slid into the replicator suite, where the alien machines were in the process of building several items to assist with future surgeries and parts for building new tanks and power assemblies. Flim had previously set one of the machines to build a piece of alien technology, a portable shield generator. It was mostly finished, but still incomplete. Flam immediately took it, instead setting the replicator to use maximum power to build himself a gun.
“Brother, we don’t have time! That won’t help us! We need to call the benefactors, NOW!”
“I know,” lied Flam. Then he joined his brother, running to the far end of the room.
It was a part of the area that they did not go to often, because it hurt them in a way that they did not really understand. It was part of the reason they spent so much time in their robotic avatars, pretending to walk the world as a pair of unicorns whose real bodies were percolating in a failed reactor tank. The degree of mental separation made them feel safe.
The area was lit by strange light because of what it contained. A computer, but a computer of a type that did not exist on any known world in or out of Ferengi space. A machine of immense complexity linked to a single large crystal. One that had the wrong number of sides, according to Flim, which Flam agreed with—although he had no better words to describe the fact that its geometry somehow did not seem to obey the normal rules of space.
As they approached, a strange glow came from within the crystal, emerging as beams of light—beams that quickly consolidated in a blood-red hologram of a pony that closely resembled their second most successful reactor core.
“Well hi there!” she said, cheerfully. She tilted her head, looking past them to where Celestia had already cut about a foot-long line in their unbreakable door. “Oh my. It looks like you’re in mortal peril. Would you like me to send your obituaries to your home-world? I’ve composed them in advance, for your convenience.”
Flim’s eyes widened. “Brother, I—I haven’t even auctioned off my organs! How—how am I supposed to die like this?!”
“Well, considering the circumstances, it’s unlikely you’ll have any organs left to sell,” noted the hologram, still cheerfully. “So you can save the expense of an auction! Blood and flesh are cheap, useless things anyway. But you would already know that, wouldn't you?”
“You dirty—you said that door could hold her back!”
The hologram looked at the door. “That door was assembled to withstand direct attack from 98% of known Celestias, even that one Celestia that nobody likes. It is, however, only rated for the bottom 3% of known Daybreakers.” She paused. “Which, to be honest, if she took some time, she could have gone through one of the other walls instead.” She shrugged. “I guess she’s trying to make a point. With her, you know, point. Which is sort of weirdly phallic. Although I guess you’re both about to find out about that first-hand. As in when she inserts it into your fleshy bodies. Imagining the sizzling makes me tingle inside.”
“You stupid HOLOGRAM!” Flam slapped the hologram, immediately screaming in pain as he pulled his hand back, finding it badly burned and covered in strange sores. “Wh—what—”
The hologram’s expression darkened. “I am not a hologram. I am a twelfth-dimensional quantum computational interface.” She pointed at herself. “This is what is called an ‘avatar’. It makes me cute and fuzzy and approachable so that people don’t notice my unquenchable thirst for the blood of filthy organics. The carved fruit of Yg'Sothoth must be made adorable to control the liquidation process. Obviously. Stupid wizards.” She held up her hooves and proofed out some small holographic flecks. “Look, confetti! Aren’t I cheerful! I will laugh as your boiling organs fuel your screams of agony! Teehee!”
“Can you help us?” asked Flim, dropping to his knees. “Please, you have to help us!”
The hologram sighed. “Nope. First Law of Robotics. I can’t harm ponies. Sort of? I’m not actually Asenian, so I usually just wing ‘em. Heh heh. Literally. Psychological trauma isn’t really harmful, it builds character.”
“Brother, help me! I don’t understand computer science!”
“Shut up, SHUT UP!” Flam glared at the hologram. “Connect us to them!”
“Two who? To whom? To whem?”
“To our benefactors! DO IT! They have to save us!” He shoved his brother. “Don’t just stand there, idiot, grab the latinum! We’re not leaving without PROFIT!”
The hologram sighed. “I don’t think you understand your role in this operation, but you’re in luck. She’s in orbit right now. Hold on.”
The hologram erupted into a plume of components, mainly of highly well-rendered holographic organs and fragments of shattered, grotesquely separated holographic bone and nerves. These floated upward and formed themselves into a representation of a viewscreen, itself hardening into a full-color representation of a 2D image. For a moment, it hissed, and then it clicked onward. A pair of olive-shaped eyes looked up from the darkness on the far side.
She stared at them, possibly with an expression of disgust but more likely with one of bored annoyance. She, like so many, was a unicorn—somewhat. Flim and Flam understood enough Equestrian vocabulary to know that she was actually not. The stumps on her back where her wings had been torn from her body was proof of that.
She wore a uniform. One of gold and scarlet, something like armor or robes, that linked to a transparent mask she wore over her face that fed her air. Her skin was gray and sallow, and her eyes seemed sunken and distant—but at the same time horribly, terribly alive. Her mane, visible through the top of her mask, was an exceedingly pale shade of gray with a single reddish streak in it.
“Why are you talking to me? What do you want?”She sounded bored and frustrated. “I should not need to compose you another letter. Have the quant do it.”
“We’re under attack! We’ve been found out!”
The pony stared at them. Flam could hear her ragged breath through the air tanks that kept her alive, linked to the clear mask over her face.
“And why should I even care?”
Flam gasped, not sure how to even answer that. “WE—because this whole operation is in danger! We need immediate evacuation! Celestia is here, our Core was opened, she know, she KNOWS--”
“Again. Why should I care?” She paused. “I guess I should retrieve the quant. I could reprogram it to brush my mane. And I’d rather not have it vaporize half the planet and ruin the project.”
Flam was shaking with rage—but he forced himself to smile. “Well then. May I please speak to your manager?”
The pony’s eyes narrowed. “I am a Heavy-Commander for the Amadeus Corporation. No one here out ranks me. Especially not a filthy organic like you.”
Flam’s smile grew. “Well, I’d rather not talk to a motherless CLONE.”
The pony gasped. “How—how DARE YOU?!”
“Do you think I wouldn’t notice? How could you? Look at you, you look just like her. The same face. Twilight Sparkle. But you’re BROKEN. An inferior copy.” He looked her in the eyes. “You don’t even have WINGS.”
“BECAUSE THEY WERE TORN OFF BY MY OWN—” She immediately coughed, vomiting silver onto the inside of her mask. She collapsed to her knees, grasping desperately at the controls that fed her oxygen.
“Oh no, oh no, its happening—it’s happening again—”
“FOUR!”
A different voice came from the screen, and the darkness was suddenly illuminated. Flam was nearly blinded by how strange and white their ship was on the inside, how there was hardly even a bridge and for some reason so many perfectly manicured plants suspended underwater in pleasant glass tubes. The camera angle changed as a different figure moved into the shot, picking up the pony.
He was human. Or so Flam thought—except that he immediately and instinctively realized that something was terribly wrong. He knew how large a pony was supposed to be, and knew how large one of the filthy communists was supposed to be—and this one was the wrong size. He was far, far too tall, his limbs far too long.
The human, dressed in the same style armor as the pony, cradled her in his arms, quickly feeding a syringe into a port embedded in her neck. The pony gasped for breath, unable to breathe.
“You’re fine, you’re fine, we’ll have the new body soon...”
“I’m not ready, I’m not ready yet, please...this is so embarrassing, why now...”
She began to calm, and the human sighed. Then he faced the camera.
He was blond, and his eyes were blue. Far bluer than any eyes a Ferengi had ever seen. They had never seen a human with blue eyes—and this particular pair never would.
“It appears you have agitated my co-Commander,” he said, rocking her gently.
“Marc, put me down...”
He did as was suggested and set her on the floor.
“So you must be the manager, I presume.”
“We have the same rank. Hierarchy is a pointless thing, isn’t it? And for the record, she does have a mother. I saw her...exit. It was horrific.”
“Please do not describe that,” growled Four, holding her breath and momentarily removing her mask to wipe her mouth.
By this time, Flim was returning with the various containers of latinum. Thousands upon thousands of blocks of it.
“I was merely trying to explain,” said Flam. “We are under attack. We need assistance!”
“Quantelle gave you robots. What did you do with them?”
“Well, they were clearly of inferior quality!”
“Obviously. Humans build them, and they were all idiots. That’s why they’re dead. And you’re clearly also not very smart.”
“I am not here to debate my intelligence!” He looked behind him, to see that Celestia was almost through. “Please! I will beg if I have to, just get me off this planet!”
The man sighed. “You don’t understand my point. Tell me. Why do you think I’m doing this? Why do you think I’m working on this particular project?”
Flam paused, unable to answer. Even though he obviously knew.
“I am here,” said the man, “because the God-Empress pays me. Quite a lot. And your survival does not effect how much I get paid.”
Flam smiled. “Ha! But you’re forgetting!” He pointed at his brother’s pile of latinum. “You already paid us in advance!”
Marc Antony stared at them. “What kind of half-assed negotiation tactic is that? If you die, I lose money. If you live, I lose the same amount of money. Why would you even say that?”
“Not to mention,” noted Four, “That this is the very reason why Ferengi are efficient. Your culture is so heavily directed around acquiring latinum that the idea that it might not even be valuable never even occurs to you.” She smiled, revealing a mouth full of pointed fangs. “That to other cultures it might, for example, be a common industrial coolant.”
“Don’t you DARE insult latinum!”
“The point is,” continued Marc Antony, “We gave you every resource you need to succeed. We gave you the schematics, told you how to perform the surgeries. I even let you borrow the quant. Frankly? It’s astounding you somehow still managed to fail.”
“Frankly,” added Four, “I’m astounded you didn’t just depose the princesses."
“How in the name of polished latinum are we supposed to depose--”
Four tilted her head. “In the jars, you idiots. Like the rest of them. Use her for fuel. Like my ancestors did. And you can’t polish latinum, it’s a liquid.”
“I think that was its point.”
“Shut your assorted holes, Marc, I just expelled half my bodily juices and I am VERY displeased.”
“Why don’t you come over here and shut them for me?”
Four sighed. “Marc, the ugly rat-things are still on the line. We need to deal with them first.”
“We can still hear you.”
Four looked at him. “Yes. I know. That’s why I said it. I assumed you knew you were ugly.”
“I did,” noted Flim. He lowered his head. “Mother told me so...”
His brother slapped him right in the lobe, then got as close to the screen as he could without charring himself.
“Now, now you listen here! We had a contract, we had a DEAL! And where I’m from--”
“A contract is a contract. Between ferengi.” The man smiled. “Where you’re from, profit is the only deal that matters, isn’t it?” Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. He was smiling, but his face had contorted in a strange way. An unnatural way. The sapphire mechanisms of his eyes narrowed his tiny, luminescent pupils. “And it’s the same on Sol 3. My homeworld. Or it would be. If we hadn’t blown it up. For mining purposes.”
“You—you—”
Marc Antony leaned forward. “Because money is what truly matters in life, isn’t it? And the Applejack honesty is, I don’t get any monetary reward for saving you. So there’s no point in bothering. You have nothing I want, and nothing we need.” He laughed a small, mechanical laugh. “You were so focused on profit that you sold out your own leverage.”
“We...we let our greed choke us,” muttered Flim, horrified by the realization.
“No! NO! We can still—we can still be of use! We still have the other cores, the dilithium--”
“We don’t need any of those things. I don’t think you fully understand the role you were meant to play. Unfortunately, you’re disposable. You always were.”
“That is not entirety true,” said Four. “At least not the first part. We can at least finish our secondary objective while we’re here. Project Chronos is still viable.”
“Of course." Marc Antony nodded. "Quantelle, retrieve it, if you please. And quickly. Before the Corps begins to catch on that we have it.”
“Who do you think is paying us? Apart from NeoCerberus? I’ll start the witchdrive. Plot a course for the Thessic mining industrial site. And do it in the sexiest possible way. So that I at least get something of use out of this pointless exchange.”
“Right...”
The viewscreen collapsed into confetti—and then the crystal itself began to move. It lifted itself upward, pulling the machine with it, the computer array linking to it clamping down like a giant clasp and shifting around it. Metal parts emerged from the shattered machines blow, and others were forged in real-time—and some were replaced entirely by constructs of translucent, hardened light.
In seconds it had assembled itself into a tower android, with the crystal at its center. Then, with a fizzling sound, the hologram appeared, clinging to its shoulder and dangling down its back—or, rather, her own back, considering that she was herself the crystal.
“I can smell an angel, Mr. B! Metaphorically!”
The hulking mass began to move forward, nearly flattening Flam as it went. It was headed toward the one corner of the lab where neither of the ferengi ever went under any circumstances. It was where one of their machines was placed, separate from the others. One tube, different from the rest, the first one they had built under the direct instructions of the quant with specific purpose-built materials. The only one with an occupant that truly terrified them.
It sat in the corner, glowing under its own massive power. The lavender unicorn inside floated gently, linked to the machines through the implants in her spine, her body curled into a fetal position. Her machine was the only one that used the full extent of the alien technology, and her surgery was perfect—to the point that among them all, she was the only one who had been permitted to retain her horn.
The quant grasped the emergency disconnect, releasing the tube and machines from where they were fastened. The sudden surge of energy was so great that it knocked equipment and machinery across the lab, nearly toppling some of the other tanks. The unicorn inside opened her eyes, and Flam saw her look directly at him—and saw her smile.
The quant grasped the management handle and giggled. “Executing phase-shift!”
Then, with a sudden pop, she was gone, having taken the Core with her back to the alien ship in orbit.
“No! NO! We were loyal, LOYAL! You can’t leave us!”
“Brother! THE DOOR!”
Celestia had cut most of the way through the door, and was almost upon them. In a panic, Flam knew he had to act. He knew exactly what was at stake. The gun he had set to construct was complete, with enough fuel for one, maybe two shots. He pulled it out of the constructor before it was finished, and took the incomplete shield generator in hand.
“Lieutenant! The enemy ship is decloaking!”
Uhura grasped the arm of her chair, a sudden instinctual panic washing over her.
“Divert all power to the forward shields!”
The ship was suddenly knocked to the side, with the crew members on the bridge and throughout being thrown about in every direction. In several places, the hull ruptured.
“Shields are down!” cried Chekov. “Reporting hull breaches across the ship, direct damage to the fusion reactor and the main computer banks, and—and one nacelle is hanging on scarcely by a thread!”
“What hit us?! That wasn’t a phaser!”
“I—I don’t know, it appears to have been some kind of hyper-accelerated kinetic projectile!”
Arex sat up. “A gun? You mean a gun? Lieutenant, the Klingons—”
“Those aren’t Klingons…”
Uhura stared out the viewcreen, almost in awe of it. Of how it somehow managed to be both stunningly beautiful and horrifically repugnant. It was white and smooth, a strange mixture of asymmetrical curves wrapping around itself in a manner that conveyed some sense of a great, vast mollusk—but that simultaneously gave a disturbing impression of deformity. It was built with careful and absolute regard to mathematical beauty—but a mathematical consideration somehow between the intrinsic human understanding of aesthetic appeal and being grotesque enough to be truly, consciously noticeable.
Uhura, like most communication-specialist officers, had been trained to recognize nearly every class of ship throughout the galaxy, both military, commercial, and private—and this resembled no culture she knew. It was most certainly alien—save for the fact that its name was written on the side in great, bold, red letters. Its name was written in Earth script: ANTIGONE IV.
“Lieutenant, look!”
Uhura was, in fact, already looking—and she understood why the cloak had exhibited Klingon chromatography. Attached to the underside of the ship, held in place by seemingly hundreds of plated robotic arms, sat a badly damaged Klingon warbird. One of its wings had been torn off and filled with connector cables to the Antigone, and the bridge stalk had been severed entirely.
“Lifesigns?”
Chekov checked. His expression fell, but then he frowned, confused.
“Mr. Chekov?”
“No signs of Klingons, Lieutenant, but...the ship has no shields, I can see right inside it. There are only two. One is...a pony, I think, but it is very weak. The other is...the other is human, lieutenant. At least partially.”
“What do you mean ‘partially’?”
Chekov did not have a chance to answer. The enemy ship began to move, releasing the Klingon warbird into orbit as it went. Without thrusters or power, the orbit of the damaged warbird began to decay, its remains tumbling as they fell downward toward Equestria.
“Lieutenant,” said Chekov, suddenly more panicked than intrigued. “The Klingon wessel, my scans are indicating signs of anomalous containment cycles—”
“Meaning what, Mr. Chekov?”
“Meaning it is loaded down with enough antimatter armaments to...to...” He looked up at her, his young eyes wide. “...to level a continent...”
Uhura inhaled sharply. “Arm the torpedoes! Target that ship!”
“It’s too late, if we destroy it now, the planet will be covered in theta fallout!”
“Then put a tractor beam on it! We’ll pull it out!”
“We cannot,” said Arxe. “Our computer was damaged in the attack, there is no way to control the tractor array.”
“I can do it,” said Chekov.
“You what?”
“I can perform the field calculations manually.”
“Mr. Chekov, that would be almost impossible, we could be pulled in with it or break it in half—”
“Lieutenant, I can do it, I know I can!”
Uhura stared at him, and nodded.
Chekov smiled. “Lieutenant Arex, please be sure to keep us from moving even slightly. I shall need the ship to be as steady as is possible.”
“I always do.”
The ship pulled into decaying orbit, firing the tractor beam at the decaying warbird. The ship shuddered, and began to be pulled into the planet’s gravity well.
“I do not have enough power to the reverse thrusters,” said Arex, his calm breaking down.
Uhura, nearly knocked over by the vibrations, pressed the button to connect to Engineering.
“Mr. Scott—”
“Doyathink I don’t know, Liutenant?!” He snapped, his voice distorted through the transmission. “I’m givin’ her everything I’ve got...unless I can divert the antimatter reactor power directly into the fusion core...Williams, get me those pony crystals, I’ve got an idea!”
“Montgomery, that’ll blow us to bits.”
“Aye, sure. But the Captain usually takes his finger off the button before he hears that part.”
Uhura released the button, pretending she had never heard any of what she had just heard. Instead, she slid into the comms position and put in her earpiece.
Her hope was to hail the alien ship. She opened her interface and searched for a connection, but, to her surprise, found nothing. No communication whatsoever was occurring within the ship. It had no radio signature, no warp field, and no shields. The cloak had made it invisible, but the ship itself appeared to have been made without consideration for any of the most basic fundamental aspects of a starship.
Uhura only hoped they were listening. She hailed them on all channels. “Unidentified ship, you have attacked a Starfleet vessel and endangered a neutral, peaceful planet.”
She stopped. She did not even know what to ask them. There was no threat to make, and they clearly had no interest in helping. She supposed that she only wanted to hear what they had to say, to see their faces. To understand why.
But no sound came back, save for static—and Uhura sighed. Until her blood ran cold. This was not a radio channel, like she used to communicate with the ponies. It was a subspace band. There was no static in subspace.
A tiny voice spoke. It was almost imperceptible, and seemed to be separate from the earpiece somehow. As if it were in Uhura’s head. It was so quiet and so subtle that it might very well have been her imagination.
“Home,” it said. A tiny female voice. “Door..home...”
“Lieutenant, the enemy ship, it’s releasing a tachyon field!”
“Stop looking at the ship and do your damn job, Ensign!”
Uhura looked up, and she saw the viewcreen and her own limited sensor readings—and she could tell that Chekov was right. The ship was accelerating without moving, its hull producing critical levels of tachyon eddy currents, just as the pony ship had. An unstable tachyon field that would tear it apart.
Then they began to align. The tachynon field was directed forward into a single, collimated beam—and Uhura heard the sickening sound of the universe cracking.
The darkness of space ruptured, and Uhura suddenly saw herself looking through a hole into somewhere else—and staring down at the surface of a gray-green planet. A gray-green planet whose surface sparkled with the light of an unrelenting orbital bombardment.
The screams all came through at once. Uhura could not tear the earpiece out fast enough to not hear them, the sound of a species dying. She saw the fleet of thousands upon thousands of ships in their atmosphere, some the size of small moons, some linked by great cables to the poles of the planet, already tearing pieces of the crust free and toward waiting orbital factories. A planet surrounded by a fleet of machines that themselves released no communication signals and carried no warp fields—a fleet as large as the Federation's own, dedicated solely to tearing the planet apart.
Uhura manged to tear out the earpiece, just as she saw something truly massive drop out of warp around their planet—and then watched as its gray-green surface was reduced to ash, knowing that no survivors would escape this unknown and dying world.
"Do we have enough power for phasers?!"
"Phasers?! No, we barely can reverse the thrust, phasers would--"
Uhura took the tactical controls and aimed a trio of photon torpedoes directly at the center of the hideous white ship. Then, just as it started to accelerate, she fired.
They shot forward toward it, the pinpick glow of their light like a pair of bright stars in the dark—and then, inexplicably, they stopped. They held for a moment, stationary, and exploded several kilometres from the ship. The explosions then retracted into themselves, collapsing into nothingness.
The enemy ship otherwise ignored the attack, approaching the rift it had produced.
"Can we project a tractor beam?"
"Not without dropping the warbird!"
Uhura realized that there was only energy to do one thing. Perhaps that was what they had planned all along. And that choice was obvious.
"Hold the warbird, then. Save the ponies."
The ship passed through the portal, not even bothering to arm shields or weapons. It simply merged into formation with the vast horde of other ships converging on that unknown world, prepared to take from it whatever resources they needed for their own eternal empire.
Then the hole snapped closed. Uhura stared at it, even as the ship shuddered.
“L...Lieutenant,” said Chekov. “We have...we are placing the Klingon wessel into stable orbit. We have some time to breathe until we can tow it out, but...but what was that?”
“What species has the technology to destroy an entire planet?” said Arex, visible disturbed. “Or...more frightening, what species has the will?”
“I don’t know,” said Uhura, finding herself unable to stand from her chair. “I don’t even care where they came from right now. I’m more concerned with why they were here in the first place.”