The creatures coming toward them over the dusty plain weren’t quite what Twilight had expected. She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this. The aliens were bipedal, a tiny bit taller than a pony, with wide, heavy torsos and long arms. They wore enclosing suits that looked partially armored, and only a few were helmetless. On the ones without helmets, Twilight could see tufts of long spines or quills arranged in clusters on their heads, curving back and laying against their heads in odd patterns. Their eyes were deeply recessed, and their faces behind the breathing masks they wore looked flat and vertical, without any hint of a nose or snout. Their suits were fairly uniform, patterned black and brown, with insignia on their shoulders that Twilight presumed indicated rank and duty much like the bands of cloth each pony wore on his or her foreleg. The long arms ended in four-fingered hands that looked surprisingly apelike. To the unicorn’s surprise, they were actually advancing in a fairly ordered group, with nearly uniform spacing, and though their gait was odd and slightly rolling due to their relatively short legs they were coming very close to marching, though it didn’t look like they were making any attempt to formally do so. It was quite a contrast to the disordered mob that their fleet had formed. They were all armed, to a degree that was almost silly. Most of them had two long weapons slung over their shoulders, and a host of sidearms and knives depending from various locations on their suits. It was almost comical, honestly, they looked like some of the cartoon caricatures of the Wardens that showed up in certain net publications. (Minus the blood-dripping leer, of course)
The alien in the lead was dressed a little differently. Her armored suit had golden stripes going down the front of both sleeves, a large sun insignia glittered on the center of her chest, and she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat with rows of what looked like feathers running down the sides, sporting the same golden sun logo in the center of the hat. She was also even better armed than the others, and her weapons were more ornate.
Twilight spared a quick glance at Rarity, who was staring at the lead alien with shining eyes. She caught Twilight’s look and whispered, “I want that hat!”
Twilight giggled, in spite of her own tension. “Maybe we can negotiate an exchange.”
The creatures rumbled up to the pony delegation, stopping about six meters away. The alien leader stepped closer, drew itself up tall and lifted its chin, and jabbered out something in a language Twilight had never heard before.
Excitement and a strange sense of disappointment chased through the unicorn. Not that there was anything disappointing about peaceful contact, but that these aliens spoke a language that was, well, alien. Duran and the N.A.I.S., two different alien groups from two entirely different universes had spoken perfect Equestrian, but this creature from her own reality didn’t? Bizarre.
Still, that didn’t make this moment any less special. Twilight drew a deep breath. “In the name of Equestria, the Diarchy, and the Unified World Nation, I greet you in peace, as friends. It’s good to meet you!” She’d planned that greeting in detail, and was pleased that she got it out without stumbling. She beamed at the creature, who blinked at her slowly.
One of the creature’s arms lifted, and its hand went slowly to one of the weapons belts festooning its body. Twilight heard a motion behind her, and as the creature carefully drew a blade from its sheath one of the armored earth pony Wardens stepped smoothly and quickly between Twilight and the alien, her footfalls thumping heavily in the dust despite her graceful movement and the cannon on her back pointing directly at the creature. The Warden mare loomed enormously in her armor, and she didn’t say a word as she stood between the alien and her commander. There was an uneasy susurration of noise from the alien group.
“Wait!” Fluttershy cried, “Don’t shoot!”
“I’m not planning to.” Twilight recognized the calm voice coming from the armored mare as that of the squad’s sergeant, Wintergreen. “But I’m concerned about the fact that she’s drawing a knife, and I want to be in a position to stop an attack on my unarmored commander.”
Fluttershy stared at the alien, clearly thinking hard. After a brief pause at Wintergreen’s sudden intercession, the creature very slowly pulled the knife the rest of the way out, holding it loosely by the blade in its long fingers. It took a single step forward, held the knife out in front of it, and stood still, waiting.
The yellow pegasus glanced around. “A knife!” she blurted abruptly. “Does anypony have a knife? Or anything that looks like a knife?”
There was a click of activating speakers from one of the power-armored unicorns. “Uh… I’ve got a pair of them.”
Fluttershy stared at the soldier for a moment. “Why in the world do you… never mind, i-it’s a good thing. Give one of them to Twilight.”
The unicorn glanced at Applejack, the senior Warden still available, and the orange mare nodded. “Go ahead, Dusty Roads. I won’t even fuss at ya for havin’ nonstandard gear on your armor.”
“Uh, thanks for that, ma’am.” The trooper’s voice was hesitant. A blue-green glow enfolded a boxy protrusion on the unicorn’s shoulder, and a long, handleless blade slid out. It was slim, and looked wickedly sharp. The blade slid slowly through the air toward Twilight.
Twilight almost balked. That color aura was creepily close to what a Changeling would have produced. They’d had major problems with the shapeshifting bug-ponies a few decades ago, and had even caught a few shapeshifters who’d managed to sneak into high positions in the Equestrian government. Others had even been found in the Zebra government, when the Zebras had been approached in the early efforts at unification. There’d been serious concerns about what the creatures had intended, especially since most had fled and escaped after being discovered. Two had been captured, but oddly enough both had suicided in captivity, employing some strange method that destroyed their bodies and left nothing to examine.
The Commander shook her head. The tension was playing tricks on her mind; that aura was bluer than Changeling magic. The Wardens screened extensively for shapeshifters, anyway; there was no way one of the creatures would have made it onto this mission.
“I’m not a Changeling,” the armored unicorn’s voice murmured. She sounded a little different; there was a quiet, tight anger in it. “I was born this way. I don’t know why my magic’s this color.” Perhaps it wasn’t just the tension getting to Twilight after all. An old, quiet pain lurked in the Warden’s words.
Twilight blinked. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“No one does.” The armored unicorn shook her head, and her voice went back to the way it had sounded before. “Uh, sorry. I, uh, it gets awkward.”
“I imagine.” Twilight gave the Warden a kind smile. “I appreciate you letting me use your knife. I’ll replace it if we wind up losing it.” She reached out with her magic, her telekinetic field gently pushing the other unicorn’s aside to enfold the slender blade.
The unicorn Warden nodded once. “No need, ma’am. I’ve, uh, got spares.” She stepped back.
Fluttershy stepped close to Twilight, biting her lip. “Okay, Twilight, you need to approach the creature and offer the knife to her. When she reaches out to take it, you should take the knife she’s offering, but don’t try to take it if it looks like she wants to hold on to it.”
Twilight glanced askance at the yellow pegasus. “Are you sure about that?”
Fluttershy flashed her a smile. “No. But it feels right.”
The unicorn snorted. “Okay. Here goes.” She stepped forward. “Sergeant, stay behind me, but stay close, please.” She didn’t need the Warden’s protection; Twilight could throw up a shield spell faster than some ponies could blink, but having the armored mare nearby might dissuade the aliens from trying anything… rash.
“Yes, ma’am.” Twilight could feel the heavy thumps of the armored suit’s footfalls through the thin dust against her hooves. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The front rank of the aliens actually fell back a bit as Twilight approached, though their gazes were fixed on the fearsome figure of the armored earth pony following her. Some of them reached for weapons, but at a harsh command from the alien leader their hands fell back to their sides.
The alien leader didn’t budge, holding her head high and keeping the knife held out. Twilight felt a stirring of hope that this contact might actually go as well as Fluttershy was expecting.
The unicorn had held the knife close to her side as she walked, and when she stopped close to the alien leader she hovered the blade out and sent it very slowly gliding toward the creature.
The aliens stirred, voices rising in conversation, and the leader turned her head to bark another order. Gingerly, slowly, the ornately-dressed alien reached out a hand, pausing just before it reached the purple glow that surrounded the blade. A few of the quills on her head twitched in an odd motion.
The alien paused, its hand centimeters from the knife Twilight was holding out for it. It extended its other hand, its knife still held by the blade, gripped so loosely that it was barely holding it at all.
Guessing at its motives, Twilight simultaneously pulled her telekinesis away from the back of the knife she was offering (it had a blunt area at the back, though it had clearly been designed to be wielded telekinetically and had no handle) and enveloped the blade of the alien’s weapon in a purple glow. The alien actually flinched a bit at this, though she steeled herself and took of the back of the Warden’s knife between her finger and thumb. She released her grip on her own knife at the same moment, jerking her arm back and leaving the blade suspended in midair. Twilight released the Warden’s blade and brought the alien’s gliding back toward her, and the alien leader followed the motion of the floating knife intently.
Twilight carefully tucked the alien’s gift into her gold rank band, making sure not to slice it by accident, and the alien gingerly slid the Warden blade into its empty scabbard, taking care to seat the razor-sharp, hiltless knife so it wouldn’t fall out.
There was an almost palpable relaxation from the line of aliens, several of them sharing glances though the leader didn’t move.
Fluttershy came trotting up next to Twilight. “You handled that very well,” the pegasus observed, admiration in her voice.
“Thank you,” Twilight smiled at her friend, then turned back to the alien. “Excuse me. We have machines,” she gestured widely to the small mountain of gear Fluttershy’s team had brought down, “that might help us,” she motioned to herself and then to the alien, “talk to one another.” She mimed something coming from her mouth, hoping the alien would interpret the gesture as speech rather than vomit or some other emission. Twilight didn’t bother speaking slowly; she knew perfectly well that the creature couldn’t understand her. She hoped her gestures and tone carried her meaning sufficiently.
The alien made an odd motion with its shoulders, the quills on its head rustling under its ornate headgear, and turned to face its compatriots. It jabbered something, and a small knot of aliens quickly emerged. The one in the center looked different; it was shorter and slimmer than the others by a small amount, its arms were a bit longer, and it had a subtly different attitude that Twilight couldn’t put her hoof on. It was surrounded by other aliens, who seemed to have a protective attitude toward it.
The new arrival spoke briefly to the alien leader, receiving a similarly brief response, and stepped forward. It (He? She? Was the smaller one male, female, or a different race?) looked at Fluttershy and spoke slowly, pointing first to herself, then to her eyes, then to the equipment. “Oh, yes, of course you can look at it! Here, come along!” Fluttershy made a gentle ushering gesture with her foreleg, stepping toward the translating gear. Rarity stepped up next to the translating systems as well, eager to help out.
The smaller alien followed immediately, its escorts moving along with it and prompting two of the Wardens, an earth pony and a unicorn, to step up next to Fluttershy, shadowing her in a similar manner and keeping a watchful eye on the aliens.
Twilight waited in front of the alien leader, giving it an uneasy grin to which it didn’t respond. She hadn’t seen much expression from under the creature’s transparent facemask, and she wondered if it was simply stoic or if its species didn’t have a mobile face like ponies did. It simply stood, waiting patiently and silently as it watched the other alien poking around with Fluttershy’s team’s equipment while the ponies activated and demonstrated various aspects of it.
She remained where she was while the smaller alien dashed off with its escort, returning with armfuls of gear of their own. It started taking things apart, stringing wires everywhere and linking them back together to place near the Equestrian systems. Rarity watched with interest, occasionally stepping forward to hold something or rewire something with the waldo-arms around her neck, since it seemed extremely skittish about her telekinesis. The unicorn mare’s delicate touch was perfect for working with the small components, and its hesitancy quickly dropped away in the face of Rarity’s helpful assistance. While it worked, Fluttershy and her senior tech came back to Twilight with a report.
“This may take a little while, Twilight.” Fluttershy told her in her soft voice. “I don’t think our equipment will interface directly with theirs, no matter what we do, and they don’t seem to have the kind of specialized adaptive translator systems we brought. Their engineer,” she nodded her head to indicate the alien, still furiously rewiring and disassembling components, referring occasionally to what was clearly some form of datapad while his escort stood watchfully, “looks like he or she is trying to build everything from scratch.”
“How are you going to set this up?” Twilight asked.
“Combination optic and radio system, ma’am, since direct connection won’t work.” Fluttershy’s technician, a unicorn stallion with a bright orange coat, spoke up. “We’ve already set up our interface, they’re just trying to match it.” The stallion brought up a screen in front of himself, swiveling it around to let Twilight look at it. “This is the basic architecture we’re using.”
Twilight examined the system diagram carefully, analyzing the system that the technician was proposing. “Hm… it looks good. Which daemons are you using?”
“These, ma’am.” The symbols indicating eight of the powerful, flexible, more self-directing holodaemons and thirty-three supporting datadaemons flashed on the screen, along with the components the virtual entities would reside in. Datadaemons were ubiquitous; the entities were responsible for running most of the more complex bits of spellware in the Equestrian technical base, but thirty-three was a lot. This system was designed for maximum function and flexibility, and even then there was a lot more physical equipment than it looked like it needed.
“It looks okay. You’ve got a little too much hardware for the spellware you’re running, you could probably remove these,” she highlighted the redundant systems, “but having them attached won’t hurt your performance.”
The stallion shrugged, giving her a grin. “I like to build a little redundancy into my systems, ma’am. Just in case.”
Twilight laughed. She could understand that. “Okay, then. Go see if you can help the alien, if your systems are all set up.”
“I was hoping you’d ask that, ma’am. They use electronics, and I minored in that at the Academy. I’ll see if I can squeeze in next to Miss Rarity.” The stallion dismissed his screen and trotted happily off to assist the laboring alien.
Twilight turned back to the leader, who was looking at the spot the engineer’s screen had vanished from with wide eyes. The creature blinked, returning to its stolid waiting.
It took over an hour for the alien engineer and Fluttershy’s technicians to finish their work, and Twilight stood in front of the alien leader all the while. It wasn’t a total waste of time; she spent the time mentally reviewing several theoretical sorcery problems she’d been chewing on for a while, and even came up with a couple of ideas she really wanted to test.
Finally, the technician came trotting back up. Twilight glanced up; the sun had moved closer to the horizon, and this world had short days. They had a few hours of daytime left, but not many. Fortunately, the alien seemed utterly unbothered by the fact that it had stood still for all that time, only moving to turn and trade the occasional word with the others behind it.
“We’ve got a basic setup working, ma’am.” The engineer beamed happily. “It’s rough, but it works, and it’s adaptive so it’ll work better the longer we talk. Mostly our gear; their stuff's... not as good.” The Commander sensed a diplomatic understatement in that last sentence.
“Outstanding!” Twilight grinned. “Are there any limitations I need to know about?”
“Not on your end; activate the translator and speak, and it will do its best.” The tech snorted. “Their end is a little more primitive; their technician is going to have to transcribe their leader’s words in order for it to translate.”
Twilight nodded. “Okay, so it’s ready to go?” At the tech’s nod, she turned back to the alien leader with a smile. “Greetings! I am Twilight Sparkle, representative of the Princesses Celestia and Luna, and commander of the starship Dauntless.”
The spines on the alien’s head stirred. It spoke, the smaller being behind it tapping furiously at a pad it held. “I am Seelith Eklsee, Warrior Commander of the Salinoth nation of the Tazaft. I greet you.” The voice emerging from the translator was belated, in addition to being flat and uninflected, but Twilight could get used to that. “We thank you for your help.”
Twilight grinned. “We were happy to lend it! The beings on those ships attacked our home system, so we’re glad to defend someone else from them.”
The spines rattled. Clearly, they carried at least some of Seelith’s emotional expression. “They attack you? Truly?”
Twilight cocked her head to the side. “Well, yes. Two of our ships confronted an invader in our home system, and they opened fire without responding. Why? Didn’t they attack you?”
Seelith made a sinuous gesture with one hand. “We find them here. Attack them. Were more than we thought.”
The unicorn blinked. “But they started it, right? Attacked your home system first, like they did ours?”
Seelith turned to speak to her technician, and Twilight took the opportunity to speak to hers. Carefully not activating the translator, she asked, “Not very articulate, is she?”
The stallion shook his head, examining a screenful of scrolling data. “Actually, she’s very articulate. The translator doesn’t know most of the words she’s using yet, so it drops them or simplifies. I’m using this pause to try to update the database again, she should be better-spoken after that.”
“They have not attacked our home system yet. They probably will soon.” Selith spread her hands out. “We try to destroy their ships, but Warriors out of practice.”
“Hold on, ma’am,” the technician interrupted. “There was an important word in there that didn’t get translated, let me try that again.”
The translator spoke again. “We seek to destroy their ships, but the warrior caste is out of practice.”
Twilight blinked. “Warrior caste? Your people have a social class of warriors?” She wanted to make sure the translator had gotten that right.
Quills rustled. “Yes. Three castes, leader, warrior,” she turned to indicate the technician typing, who paused and waved. “Worker.”
This was interesting. “Oh, he’s a worker?”
Seelith spoke again. There was a long pause while the technician tapped at his pad. “The brilliant and handsome creature typing out this message, which is entirely faithful to my words and contains no additions? Yes, it is a worker.”
Twilight stifled a snicker. At least it seemed they had a sense of humor, or at least the little one did, and the translator had been surprisingly eloquent for that sentence. Still, something stood out. “It?”
There was a long pause, and Seelith turned to speak to the technician. She turned back. “Did you ask a question?”
The unicorn flushed a little. “Oh, the translator called your worker an ‘it’. I was just wondering if it meant male or female.”
There was another pause, and another consultation. “Your pardon, much of what you said did not translate. What were you asking?”
“Change the subject, Twilight,” Fluttershy whispered. “We don’t want to frustrate them.”
Twilight cleared her throat. “Well, Siluth Uhlsie,” she knew she’d mangled the alien’s name, but it was the best she could do and she hoped the being wouldn’t take offense, “we’ve helped each other. Would you be interested in an alliance, so we could help one another further?” The unicorn knew she was moving a little fast, asking for an alliance already, but she felt justified in light of the alien’s (she had called herself Tazaft?) polite behavior and clear gratitude.
There was another long pause. “Perhaps,” the alien finally said. “I cannot speak for the leaders, or the Tazaft people, but the warriors would be interested in coordinating with you in fighting the Baltornic Council.”
“The Baltornic Council?” Twilight asked, “Those are the people you were fighting?” She felt another thrill; being able to put a name to the faceless ships felt like an odd relief.
“Yes.” Quills rustled, in a pattern Twilight was starting to associate with a nod. “They angered the leaders, and the warriors were called up to show the Council that we were angry.” A pause. “I have a question. You asked about the warrior caste; do you not have warriors? Is the large metal one not your protector?”
Twilight blinked, unsure of how to answer, but Fluttershy stepped in. “We have guardians, but we don't fight wars, so we don't really call them 'warriors.'”
Eklsee made an odd head gesure. “I think this may be another translating problem. Warriors do not only fight wars.”
Twilight cocked her head. Since Fluttershy had presented the Wardens as their example, she decided to run with it. “Our guardians, such as the mare behind me,” she tilted her head to indicate the armored Warden sergeant, “guard our borders and keep our people safe from threats. What do yours do?”
“The warriors fight when fighting is to be done,” Eklsee stated, and Twilight could tell the translation was getting better. “That has not happened in a very long time, though. When no fighting is needed, we take the risks.”
Twilight blinked. “I'm not sure I understand.”
“Risks. When risky things need to be done, it is a warrior who does it. Dangerous jobs in many factories, risk. Keeping peace, risk. Exploring, risk. Things like that. If there is physical danger involved above a low level, we do it. Things that involve little risk, workers do. It is our task to keep leaders and workers safe.” Eklsee pointed to herself with one finger. “I was master of those who put out fires and rescue those in danger in Ekrsa City before it became necessary to fight. I hope I can finish this fight soon to go back to that.”
That brought them to something Twilight really wanted to know about. “This fight you're in, with the, what was it, Baltornic Council? How did it start? Is it going well?”
Spines rattled. “Start? The Council made our leaders angry, like I said. They wished to show them our anger, so they called the warrior caste to fight. We were to blow up ships, destroy the Council's things, get to Baltor to burn their meeting place if we could. That would be a powerful gesture.” The Tazaft made an odd rattling noise with her tongue, accompanying an exhalation. “It is not going well. There have been no wars since before we left our homeworld, Kheles. The warriors have never had to fight in space. It is very different from fighting on the ground, or at sea, or even in the air with planes. The way we are fighting is not working well, and the Council is very good at fighting, it seems. I may never put out fires again.”
Twilight exchanged a frown with Fluttershy. Their new allies had started their fight? That was... unsettling.
Eklsee was speaking again. “Your ship is very powerful, and your arrival saved many of my warriors. If you had not appeared, we would all have died. We owe you a great debt, and we recognize that you may be a powerful ally. Would you be willing to fight beside us? You have said you wanted an alliance; if you fight with us, then the leaders will hear of it and know that you are friends to the Tazaft people and all our nations. It would please me greatly to call you friend.”
Twilight bit her lip, sharing another glance with Fluttershy. “Do you mind if I speak to my friends before I answer that question, Uhlsie?” She again tried her hardest to pronounce the alien's name, but was aware that she'd mangled it. There was a trill and a sort of glottal sound in the name that Twilight's mouth and tongue simply couldn't shape.
“Of course, Ttlaaht Shkukaaal.” Ouch, if Twilight had mangled Eklsee's name as badly as the alien hand mangled hers, then the being was behaving with commendable restraint. “I will wait here happily to hear your decision.”
“Thank you.” Twilight shut down the translator and turned around. Fluttershy did likewise, ensuring that the aliens wouldn't be able to read their lips, assuming the creatures were capable of doing so. “Fluttershy? What are your thoughts? I mean, this is exactly what we came here for, to find friends and allies.”
“Yes,” Fluttershy said uncomfortably, “I was hoping they'd want to be friends, rather than just wanting to beat up the people we both dislike together.” She sighed. “Well, I suppose we'll have to take what we can get. They might be able to tell us more about this 'Baltornic Council,' too, which would probably help. She mentioned ‘Baltor’… I wonder what that is, a world, a species, a city?” The pegasus smiled sadly. “I'm still hoping that we'll find a way to talk to them, too, but after today that seems a lot less likely.”
Twilight nodded. “More or less my thoughts. It would be nice to know we had friends out here.” Fluttershy nodded, pleased with the idea much like Twilight was.
The two trotted back to their friends, and put the question to them as well.
Applejack was strongly in favor. “Seems like a good notion to me. They've probably got bases 'n such around here, and they may know somethin' about these Council fellers and where we could find 'em.”
Rarity nodded. “I have to concur with Applejack; coordinating with these... creatures would be helpful. Even just knowing we aren't alone is enough reason to accept their offer of friendship, I think.”
Pinkie nodded, too. “I think it'd be great for the ponies back home, too,” she added in an unusually sober tone. “There were a lot of ponies that were scared before we left, griffons and zebras too. Knowing we've got friends out here would be a great, big, huge, enormous help, I think, even if they're not all that tough.”
Twilight drew a deep breath. “Okay, then. I'm going to accept her offer.” She cocked her head. “Her offer? His offer? Do we know if she's male or female? I don’t want to offend them.”
“I think neither,” Rarity's senior tech spoke up behind her. “There's no gender case in their language, as far as I can tell. I've been trying to find the terms for male and female on their side of the translator link, but I'm coming up with nothing.” The linguists, who had been working on the translator system alongside the tech, nodded in support.
The Commander blinked in surprise. “A monogendered species?”
“Hermaphrodites, we think.” The stallion glanced at a display that was following him around. “We've found words for mating and birth, so I'm pretty sure they do both, but nothing on different sexes.”
An interesting fact, but irrelevant. Twilight filed it away in her memory, and trotted back to Eklsee. She reactivated the translator system with a quick thought. “We would be delighted to call you friends and allies, and we would be glad to help you in your struggle and to accept your help in ours.” In spite of what the tech had said, Twilight couldn’t think of the Tazaft as an ‘it’, the label seemed too disrespectful. She decided to think of the alien as female instead, to help her identify with the strange creature.
Quills rustled, and Eklsee’s shoulders moved subtly. “Excellent.” The translator was flat, but Twilight could hear animation in the alien’s voice. “That is splendid news. We will give you coordinates of our bases and what we know of the Council, in exchange for the same information from you. Is that satisfactory?”
“Yes, very much so.” Twilight was thrilled by the alien’s response.
“Excellent,” Eklsee said again, “If you would give us information on where you think you will be, we could seek you out for help if we need it, and in exchange we could offer our help to you if you should need it. Is this also satisfactory?”
“Extremely.” Twilight glanced at Fluttershy, who looked a little troubled.
The pegasus leaned in and whispered in her ear, “She’s being awfully generous. Ask her if she’s actually got the authority to make these promises.”
That was a good point. “Pardon me, Uhlsie, but how are you able to offer terms this generous?”
The alien made a sinuous movement of her hands. “I am the fleet leader. I led this attack, as is my responsibility, but all warrior caste ships and bases are under my command, not just these.”
Twilight blinked. “So this isn’t all your ships?”
The creature’s quills stirred in a circular motion, something she hadn’t seen before. “No, this was supposed to be enough for the fleet we saw. We meant to outnumber the eighty ships we saw by ten-to-one, but there were three times as many as we thought. As you saw when you arrived, it was going poorly.”
They brought eight hundred ships? “How many ships do you have?”
“Six thousand when this fight started. We have lost a third of them by now. We are building more, but it takes time.”
A chill gripped Twilight’s belly. “And how many does the Council have?”
There was a pause before the alien answered. “We do not know. More than we have. Maybe many more.” There was another pause, and Twilight shared a tense look with Fluttershy. “Your ships are very powerful, though, they may be enough to tip the scales. How many do you have?”
“Just the one.” Twilight hated saying that.
Eklsee stared at her for a silent moment, and then shivered, her quills rattling. “It is more than we had yesterday. Your ship is powerful; we could use it to break the enemy’s organization, and then we could do great damage, as we did today. Are you building more?”
“Six more ships, a bit smaller than the one you’ve seen,” Twilight confirmed. “They should be ready in a month or so.” The Warden destroyer-class ships would actually be substantially more powerful combatants than Dauntless was; they were pure combat designs, without all the extra systems for exploration that the cruiser was fitted with. Finding crew for all of them, though, was going to be very difficult.
The quills rattled in what Twilight was starting to think of as a nod. “It will be a help. We will give you information about where our bases are; come find us if you need us, and tell us where you are going so we can find you if you are needed.”
Twilight glanced aside at Fluttershy, and received a nod and a soft smile from the diplomat. “It’s a deal.”
“Excellent.” Eklsee turned and barked something at the ranks of Tazaft warriors behind her, and they let out a unified, hideous screech that laid Twilight’s ears back and made her eyes water. She flinched a bit, but they didn’t move; perhaps this was their version of a cheer. The unicorn glanced back and saw everypony wincing to various degrees, with the obvious exception of the Wardens whose helmets had sound dampers.
“We are pleased to greet our new allies. May we have many successes and end our fight swiftly.” Eklsee made a flourishing motion with both hands, and Twilight answered it with a gracious nod, hoping the Tazaft wouldn’t be upset that she wasn’t trying to imitate her mannerism. “Before we depart, might I ask you something?”
“Of course! I would be happy to answer!”
A nod of the quills. “Your technology… it is very powerful, very capable. I have seen this. I admit that I am very curious about the weapons your guardians carry. If I demonstrate mine, will you do the same?”
“Certainly!” It was a minor thing, and an easy request to grant. Besides, the Wardens loved to shoot, and she was certain they’d appreciate the chance to do so. Eklsee gave another quill-nod, and unlimbered one of the long weapons on her back. She cradled it in her arms, looking down the barrel, carefully pointing the weapon away from both groups. There was a strange, high-pitched chirp and a loud crack, and a smallish boulder shattered from the impact of the weapon.
Twilight nodded, not terribly impressed. She could honestly have done almost that much by picking up a rock and using an explosive acceleration spell; the Warden cannon should come as a bit of a shock. She turned around to address the Warden sergeant. “Would you mind demonstrating your weapon, please, Sergeant?”
“Ma’am, that… may not be a good idea.”
The unicorn quirked a brow. “Why not? That’s an accelerator gun, isn’t it?” She peered more closely at the cannon mounted on the mare’s battle armor. “Oh, wait, no it’s not…” She hadn’t gotten a good look before, but there was a lot of unfamiliar equipment attached to that gun.
“No, Commander. It’s a celestian cannon.”
“A what?” That term wasn’t familiar, and Twilight thought she knew all the Warden gear pretty well.
“A mark two levincannon. We’ve been calling ‘em celestians, since they shoot a piece of the sun.”
Twilight reared her head back in shock. The basic levincannon was one of the earlier Warden weapons, a gun that accelerated a solid projectile to supersonic speeds and wrapped it in a destructive magic field. The mark two, on the other hoof, combined that concept with fusion theory from the Library Core and plasma manipulation technosorcery, wrapping a more powerful destructive field around a packet of fusing hydrogen plasma and firing it as a bolt downrange. It was a phenomenally powerful weapon, and Twilight was unaware that it had been so scaled down. “You stuck one of those on your battle armor?” That sounded a little crazy; the full-size mark two levincannon could often cause fatal flash burns as much as ten meters away from the bolt. Of course, those weapons were also so large they required custom vehicles to carry them, and would never fit on a battle suit. Perhaps the downsized version was less… indiscriminate.
Wintergreen didn’t move, but Twilight had the sense that she was looking abashed. “Yes, ma’am. Lieutenant Dash wasn’t sure what we’d be facing, so she wanted one of us with a gun that combined hard-target kill capability with a large soft-kill radius and had me carry this beast. This unit’s brand-new, just out of prototype phase; we were only able to shrink them down this small recently.”
“How were you planning to keep from frying us if you decided to fire it?”
“We’re not total idiots, ma’am. It’s got a heat shield generator to cut down on collateral damage. I just had to make sure I was in front.” Which was exactly what the big earth pony had been persistently doing, Twilight realized. Placing herself where she could step in front of everypony and thus shield them from her weapon’s side effects. Well, that answered the question of whether the downsized version was less dangerous.
“Well, there’s the solution, then. I’ll modify and augment the heat shield spell to contain the thermal bloom.”
“You can do that, ma’am?”
My, it must have been a long time since I last worked with the Wardens. Twilight quirked a smile. “Yes, sergeant, I can do that easily.” She turned back to Eklsee, activating the translator again. “We will demonstrate, but you shouldn’t look when we fire. When you hear me shout, you should all look away, understand?”
Spines rattled. “It is that powerful?”
Twilight nodded firmly. “Yes, it is.”
“Interesting.” The alien turned and gave what were probably brief orders to her people. “We are ready.”
Twilight nodded. “All right, sergeant. Are you ready?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just tell me when.”
Twilight focused her thoughts, her horn glowing as she interfaced with the solid-state spells built into the armor’s weapon capacitors. She could have modified the generators themselves; it was a very, very tricky thing to do, but well within her skills. There was no need to do that, though, so she instead spun out an extension composed of her own power, tightening and extending the cone that contained the weapon’s vicious thermal pulse and setting it up to mesh with the cannon’s own field. She glanced back at her ponies. “Shield your eyes, everypony.” Most of them turned away, though the Wardens with their reactive visors didn’t bother. Twilight brought up a virtual panel, modifying it into a copy of the Wardens’ eye protection. “All right, sergeant,” she called out, loudly enough for the Tazaft to hear and was satisfied to see them turning away, “fire!”
The screen across Twilight’s face went nearly black as it blocked the searing light of the plasma bolt that spat from the weapon on Wintergreen’s back. She felt the radiant heat of the shot smash into the spell matrix she held, and felt it reflected forward, harmlessly, missing both the Tazaft and the Equestrians. The bolt moved at a significant fraction of lightspeed, looking more like a hideously intense laser pulse than a packet of plasma and drawing a ruler-straight line between the Warden sergeant and a large boulder she’d selected as her target. The disrupting spell struck first, crumbling the boulder to powder faster than could be seen before the plasma bolt smashed into it. Much of the rock evaporated, spraying outward and recondensing on the fused glass that now surrounded it. The thunder of the shot echoed off the distant hills and mountains, and a shockwave of warm air smashed into Twilight’s face, though the heat-shield spell robbed it of some of its force and much of its temperature.
There was total silence and stillness from the Tazaft group in the wake of the shot. The technician who had been transcribing Eklsee’s words for translation stared dumbly at the expanse of rippled glass where the boulder used to be, the pad it used to translate dangling loosely in its hands. Eklsee stared from the Warden to the impact site and back again, her quills lying still and close to her head.
The Tazaft leader finally spoke, her voice cracking oddly. There was nothing from the translator, and she finally turned to prod the technician, who shrank back behind the warrior leader and tapped at the pad in quick, jerky motions. “I am suddenly very glad I have tried so hard to be polite while talking to you.”
Twilight shook her head, not even having to look at Fluttershy for the response to that . “We wouldn’t have attacked you for being rude. We only would have fought in self-defense.” She very, very carefully did not mention that Rainbow had been planning a pre-emptive attack, something she’d been trying very hard not to think about yet. The thought sent another spike of pain into her chest; she needed, badly, to speak to the multicolored pegasus when she returned to the Dauntless. It would be the first thing she did.
A few of Eklsee’s spines twitched. “They really started their fight with you? You did not start it?”
Twilight shook her head. “We don’t start fights.”
The Tazaft leader was very still. “They will destroy you.”
Twilight blinked. “What?”
“They have to. They start a fight like this, against people as powerful as you who do not like to fight? You have but one ship, but it was enough to rout one of their fleets. Your weapons,” the alien gestured to the fused dust of the crater, “are like nothing I have ever seen. So powerful, so small, and so controlled, to do all that without even giving me a burn while I stood only paces away. Your computers, your tools,” Eklsee gestured in the air with both hands, clearly referring to one of the illusory screens, “are made of air, and you use them with a thought. Your ship is huge, yet it dances like a mote of dust in the air and is incredibly hard to hit. If they do not destroy you, if they give you time to build and find your feet, you will burn them to ashes and strike their names from the roll of history. They were mad to start a fight with you.”
A chill gripped Twilight, strong enough to make her shiver. She glanced at the other members of the landing party and saw quiet horror on their faces, especially Fluttershy’s. The yellow mare cleared her throat, pushing her dismay aside. “We would never go that far. Never. We didn’t want this fight, and we want to end it as soon as possible. All we really want is to talk to them!”
Eklsee’s quills stirred in a slight nod. “I understand. It baffles me that they have not spoken to you, but perhaps they think they do not need to. Whatever happens, I wish you the best of luck; you will need it. We have already pledged to give you what information we have, and if you need our aid you have but to seek us out.” The alien paused. “I must ask… your home. Is it safe? If they wish to destroy you, that is where they will strike.”
Applejack decided to answer that question before Twilight could. “Our home’s as safe as we could make it. Don’t you worry none.”
The homeworld’s defenses were indeed powerful. The Princesses alone were a formidable deterrent, each boasting as much arcane power as an entire civilization of unicorns. Since the Interloper’s attack, their already considerable might had been boosted by a series of thaumatechnological mechanisms that had been built specifically for the Sisters, systems they could energize and control to project a vast, planetary shield. Other installations could be activated with other defensive functions, and the whole system was tied together in a vast network that could potentially harness the full power of Equestrian civilization, unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi all contributing to the defense of their homeworld. Dauntless would never have left home undefended. Even if the Council struck their home, Twilight and her crew should have time to find someone they could talk to.
Eklsee nodded again. “Very well. Unless there is something more to discuss, I would like to return to my ship. My crew will send you the information we have promised you.” The alien paused. “You may keep my blade, as a gesture of trust.”
“Thank you,” Twilight replied. “You may keep mine as well. Consider it a gift, between friends.”
The Tazaft patted the handleless knife. “This will be a treasure of my family in the future. It will sit in a place of honor in my family’s home, and in the years to come children will point at it and say my name and yours, wishing they could have been here today. Thank you, and may courage attend you when you walk among dangers.”
“And you, Uhlsie.” Twilight was genuinely touched by the Tazaft’s words. The creature flared her quills out, and then turned to walk back to her shuttle. The other Tazaft stayed in place until Eklsee passed through their ranks, then turned as one and followed.
Twilight called for another shuttle to drop from the Dauntless to help retrieve their equipment and personnel, and waited impatiently while the Wardens and the diplomat team (who were looking a bit downcast that they’d had so little to do beyond run the translators) packed up their gear.
Twilight tapped her hoof impatiently the entire ride back up. She needed to talk to Rainbow, badly, and the flight seemed like it took forever.
It did give her time to talk to her friends about the situation, though.
“Rainbow wouldn’t a’ hurt y’all,” Applejack put forward, tentatively, as they flew up through the thinning air. “She’s just been a mite… antsy lately.”
“She tried to sabotage our chance at peaceful contact!” Fluttershy retorted indignantly. “She could have cost us friends… would have cost us friends!” The pegasus shook her head. “I’ve been worried about her, but this is too much. Twilight, I hope you leave her under arrest until we get back.”
“That will depend on what happens when I talk to her,” Twilight said, quietly. “I haven’t decided what to do yet.”
Fluttershy’s teal eyes flashed. “I don’t want her on any more landing parties with my diplomatic team. She’s too dangerous, and too reckless. I don’t want her or her Wardens anywhere near another contact.”
“Now be fair, Fluttershy,” Applejack said soothingly. “You ain’t sayin’ I did anything, are you? I’m just as much a Warden as Dash.”
“You’re one of the sane Wardens. You don’t start fights, don’t go out intending to hurt some innocent creature…”
The orange mare interrupted her. “The critters that get hurt by us ain’t innocent, and I’ll back Rainbow to the hilt most days, even if she was wrong today.” Applejack’s conciliatory manner hardened. “I’ve heard all the stuff you go out and say about us, and most of it flat ain’t true. We only start fights when ponies are in trouble. Or buffalo, or griffons, since we’ve been helpin’ ‘em out since Unification. Rainbow Dash may’ve been outta line, but don’t go generalizin’, the rest of us didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”
“Didn’t you?” Fluttershy’s voice had gone dangerously quiet. “You mean those two pegasi arrested Rainbow Dash when Twilight told them to? You mean the rest of the squad didn’t go along with what she planned?”
Applejack’s jaw set stubbornly. “Careful now, Fluttershy. I ain’t lookin’ for a fight…”
“Stop.” Twilight’s voice cut across her friends’. She’d had enough. “Fluttershy, this has nothing to do with the Wardens as a whole. This was Rainbow Dash’s mistake, and it was a mistake. It could have been bad, but I caught it and fixed it, and despite what she did I’m sure she had the best intentions. I will speak to her when I return to the ship and decide what I am going to do then. Until that happens, please do not antagonize the Wardens; they were trying to keep us all safe the best way they knew how, and I’ll point out that they were entirely reasonable once they saw that the Tazaft meant us no harm.”
Fluttershy looked mulish. “I still don’t want them on any more contact missions.”
“We’ll talk about that when it happens. Until then, stop demonizing them. They all think you hate them.”
The pegasus blinked. “What? I don’t hate them! I think they’re wrong, and I want them to change, but I don’t hate them!”
Rarity spoke up quietly. “Constantly and loudly insisting you think they want to kill everything that breathes gives a rather convincing impression that you hate them, darling. Not to mention some of the things you’ve said about Rainbow Dash on the newslines.”
The muscles in Applejack’s jaw bunched. “Some a’ those things hurt her, Fluttershy. She don’t show it… but it did. You might oughta think about using some a’ them diplomatic skills with us sometime.”
Fluttershy blinked rapidly. “But… but I… I never meant to hurt anyone! I just get so frustrated at her for not listening…”
The shuttle finally docked, and Twilight left Fluttershy with Rarity and Applejack, hoping they could talk the pegasus into lightening her stance toward the Wardens a bit. As they were walking out of the hangar, Twilight waved Pinkie over. The bubbly pink mare was much less bubbly than normal; having her friends fight always upset Pinkie, and she’d been quiet the whole way up. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet since Twilight sent Rainbow back to the ship, actually.
“Pinkie,” Twilight started to say, but the earth pony interrupted her.
“You want me to get rid of that stuff I recorded, where you and Rainbow Dash had that fight.”
Twilight sighed. “Yes. I do. Honestly, I can’t see any good coming of that, and as much as I hate to delete information…”
“I’ll do it.”
The unicorn blinked. “You will?”
“Yeah.” Pinkie looked downcast. “I mean, I can’t see that video making anypony smile, except some really nasty ones and I’m okay with them not smiling. I can cut that part out, no problem.” She looked up, tears in her blue eyes. “I don’t know how to fix this. A party won’t work, getting everypony to laugh won’t work, singing, dancing, jokes, games, I can’t think of anything that will make all my friends smile again.”
“Oh, Pinkie.” Twilight hugged her friend, pulling her close. “We’ll find something that works.”
“I hope so,” Pinkie whispered back, hugging the lavender unicorn as hard as she could.
The door to Rainbow’s cabin was just like all the others in the ship. Quiet, gray metal that didn’t gleam and didn’t shine. Twilight had toyed with the idea of painting the inside of the ship a more cheerful color, but she hadn’t gotten around to it before launch. She wondered what she should have picked? Blue, maybe? A quiet green?
Twilight shook her head. She was stalling.
Taking a deep breath, she signaled the door, only to find to her surprise that it wasn’t locked. Steeling herself, she stepped up and let the door whisk itself aside, allowing her entry.
Rainbow’s room was almost shockingly empty.
That was the first thing to register in Twilight’s mind. The walls were completely bare, the desk was almost empty, there were no dress clothes of any sort in the closet, only a few spare rank-bands. Apart from a cybernetics maintenance kit and a manipudrone at the foot of the bed and a single picture frame that Twilight couldn’t see the contents of from the door, the room was empty except for the pegasus sitting on the floor, staring fixedly at the opposite wall.
Rainbow glanced back at the sound of the door opening, and gave Twilight a smile so rigid and unnatural it almost qualified as a rictus. “Hey, Twi. Guess it’s that time, huh? Gonna blow me out the airlock?”
“Of course not.” Twilight’s voice came out harsher than she meant it to, so she softened it for her question. “Why, Rainbow?”
The pegasus snorted a strangled laugh. “Well, duh. You’re the Commander. I was trying to go behind your back and do stuff you wouldn’t have wanted to do. I betrayed you, and I betrayed the Princesses. That’s either exile or execution, and the nice thing about a spaceship is that they’re pretty much the same thing.” Rainbow’s smile slipped, just for a moment, and Twilight could see the pain in her eyes, artificial though they were. “I’m… I’m sorry, Twilight. I was way, way out of line. Way out.”
Twilight swallowed hard, trying to clear her throat. Even the thought of watching her friend hurled out into pitiless vacuum to gasp out her final breaths was painful. Whatever she decided, whatever happened, that was not an option and never would be. She thought Rainbow had meant it as a joke, but if so it wasn’t funny. “That’s not what I asked, Rainbow Dash. Why? Why were you acting that way?”
Another strangled laugh, this one so harsh it almost sounded like the pegasus was choking. “Maybe Fluttershy and the press-ponies are right. Maybe my augments are making me crazy. Crazy as he was.” She tossed her chin at the framed picture.
Twilight stepped further into the room so she could see, and felt a moment of surprise. The frame had an old, old picture, yellowed with age and fragile-looking. It showed the two of them, along with the human they’d rescued, smiling and laughing at the camera. I wondered where that picture had gone.
“Rainbow, what do you mean?” Twilight asked softly. She was confused; Rainbow had never called their friend "crazy" in anything but joking terms before. “He was certainly eccentric, even before he started falling apart the way he did, but he wasn’t crazy.”
“Yeah,” Rainbow choked, “he was. Found out when I was visiting him, those last couple of weeks.” She swallowed hard, lowing her gaze to the floor and letting her forelock hide her eyes.
Twilight remembered. Duran had been taken to the hospital, the last few weeks of his life. The gradual deterioration of his health had suddenly accelerated, and he’d no longer been able to take care of himself. Everypony had known what was coming, and they’d been trying to make him as comfortable as possible. Twilight had visited as often as she could, as had her friends, but Rainbow had stayed. She’d even slept at the hospital, making sure he was never left alone. It had been hard, brutally hard, on the rainbow-maned pegasus. Maybe harder than Twilight had known.
“He wasn’t himself,” Twilight told her friend. She knew he'd been delirious off and on, and assumed that he'd said something to hurt Rainbow's feelings. “You know that. His mind was falling apart at the same time his body was.” She wondered with some puzzlement why the pegasus had brought this up.
“I know. It’s not…” Rainbow paused. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Twilight felt a sudden rush of anger. “You’d better talk about it,” she snapped, “Especially if it has something to do with what you did out there!” She growled in frustration. “Rainbow, you nearly did exactly what Fluttershy’s been accusing your Wardens of doing, starting another war. If you don’t talk to me, tell me what you were thinking… I don’t know what I’ll have to do.”
“I get you. And yeah, you deserve some explanations. It’s just…” Rainbow paused, taking a deep breath. “I’ve spent so long not talking about this. Not saying a word, trying not to even think about it.” She ground her teeth. “I was so mad at him.”
Twilight was puzzled. “Mad? At Duran?” Rainbow nodded. “For what?”
“For making me a liar. For…” She trailed off, gritting her teeth. Whatever this was, she clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
Well, not talking about it wasn’t an option, especially after a statement like that. “How did he make you a liar, Rainbow?”
The pegasus snarled suddenly. “When I told you he was safe to bring back! When I said he wouldn’t hurt anypony!” She smashed a forehoof into the floor, putting a dent in the deck plating. Her voice rose to a shout. “He made me a liar and I can’t even hate him for it! Because I cared too damned much about him to let it get out!” She sagged in place, looking suddenly exhausted. “I cared too much to hate him.” Rainbow’s voice fell almost to a whisper. “Crazy or not, he was my friend. And he was dying, I couldn’t get mad at him then.”
Twilight frowned. She felt a bit confused and upset, and had no idea what in the world Rainbow could be talking about. It had to be bad if she was cursing; she’d picked that habit up from Duran and had never quite shaken it. “Rainbow, what are you talking about?” Rainbow looked up, miserably. “I was his friend, too, Rainbow! Besides the fact that, as your commander, I need to know what’s bothering you, if it was something about Duran, I have a right to know! Next to you I was his best friend!”
“Yeah,” Rainbow whispered, “you were. That was the problem.” She heaved a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He was killing ponies, Twilight. Nine that I know of for sure, maybe a lot more that I’m not sure of.”
“What?” Twilight blinked. That was hard to believe, but Rainbow clearly believed it, so it was hard to doubt. “How? Why?”
“How was those robots of his. He was building stuff that he could link with inside of two months. Network hubs, super long-ranged repeaters… some of the stuff he built we still can’t build, he was trying to show you how everything worked, started from the basic stuff and tried to teach you and the other smart ponies, but he just ran out of time. With the stuff he had, he could reach halfway around the world without leaving his workshop.” Rainbow shook her head sadly. “Why… why was us, Twilight. You and me.”
The unicorn frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“You know that he looked up to us, right? You and me. He would’ve done anything for either of us.”
Twilight nodded. “You more than me, I think. You were always closer to him.”
The pegasus shook her head again. “Yeah, I might have been closer, but there wasn’t any further he could go. I’m serious, Twilight, he would have done anything for you, or for me. Absolutely anything. That was the problem.” Rainbow rubbed her face, surreptitiously dashing tears from her eyes. “I think something was wrong in his head. Something made him think that anypony who might be trying to hurt our feelings was trying to hurt us. Those were the ponies he killed.” Rainbow sniffed, and Twilight stayed quiet, letting her friend speak. “Remember Red Letter?”
Twilight fought back a creeping, chilling dread. The unicorn’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember, but drew a complete blank. “I’m sorry, the name isn’t ringing a bell.”
“Pegasus reporter? About… shoot, eighty-six years ago, I guess.”
Twilight didn’t remember at all, but that was no surprise after that long. She accessed the ship’s database and ran a quick search. “Oh… here she is. Wrote some rather ugly things about you, when you were just starting the Wardens, I see. Killed in an accident?” Twilight felt a chill in her belly, reading those words and realizing what they could mean.
Rainbow nodded. “That’s her. It wasn’t an accident. Duran decided she was trying to hurt me, so he went after her. Watched her for a couple of weeks, then planted a fake letter from one of her sources saying they had something urgent and asking her to meet them right away. It was in the middle of a storm, but he’d written it like a life-or-death thing, so she flew out to meet ‘em. One of his robots followed her, then grabbed her in the middle of the storm and dragged her under a lake. Held her there until she drowned, then took off and flew back. Wasn’t a mark on her, looked like an accident. Everypony thought she’d just done something dumb, gone flying in the storm and crashed in a lake.”
Twilight shuddered. That was a hideously cold-blooded way to kill someone… but it fit frighteningly well with Duran’s personality. The human had spent what was probably more than a decade living alone in the wilds, and for him to patiently stalk someone and then lure them out and go after them in an ambush like that… it really did fit with mentions of the way he’d hunted that she remembered from his journal on Hell’s Reach. She felt a sudden pang of sick sympathy for the long-dead reporter; it took a long time for a pegasus to drown or suffocate. They had tremendous lung capacity. “Celestia’s name.” Twilight whispered. It was getting harder and harder to deny what the Warden commander was saying.
Rainbow wasn’t done. With the dam of silence cracked, words poured forth. “She wasn’t the only one. Remember Blueblood?” Twilight felt almost sick as she nodded. The arrogant noble unicorn stallion had blocked her efforts to build a university to study the new technology she’d been developing… until he’d died in an accident. Another accident. Rainbow closed her eyes. “He was another one. Duran knew how important that school project was to you, and he knew that Blueblood was deliberately getting in the way and gloating at you about it. So one night, his robots went in with some kind of decay-things. Weakened his house’s supports.”
“And they collapsed,” Twilight finished. This one she did remember. It had been a major thing at the time, a wealthy noble’s home suddenly collapsing, killing him and several other ponies. There had been an investigation, but all that had turned up was poor maintenance leading to a weakening of the supports. The unicorn shook her head, bewildered pain rising in her chest. “How did you find out about this?”
Rainbow sighed. “A journal. He had it with him in the hospital, and I looked at it a few times when I was bored waiting for him to wake up. There wasn’t anything real clear, but there was a bunch of stuff that made me wonder. I asked him at one point, and he told me. Didn’t even bother to talk around it, just flat-out told me about some of the ponies he’d killed. It was like he thought I’d thank him for it.” The pegasus closed her eyes, shivering all over. “I didn’t believe him at first. Thought he was messing with me. He did that, y’know, had a weird sense of humor sometimes. When I figured out he was serious, I was… oh, Celestia, I was mad. I was mad, I was hurt, I was scared… I wanted to blow up at him, to shout at him, but… I mean, I didn’t want that to be the last thing I ever said to him. You remember what it was like, the doctors’d all told me that any minute, he could be… gone. And I was mad, but at the same time I couldn’t forget all the stuff he did for me. For all of us, yeah, but especially for me. He was such a huge help setting up the Wardens, made all that gear for me when I was just starting out and never asked for anything in exchange. Not once. Gave me advice, gave me gear, gave me money when I needed it, and whenever I had a problem he’d sit and listen for as long as I wanted to talk. So I started to yell, but I cut it off.” Rainbow coughed, swiping more tears from her eyes. “And then, later, right when I decided to talk to him about it and was winding myself up to have an argument about it… You ever see someone die, Twilight?” The unicorn shook her head numbly. She’d had friends die over the years, all of them had, but she hadn’t been present when it happened. Rainbow swallowed hard. “I’ve seen it a bunch. Sometimes it’s really messy, sometimes it’s quiet, but it’s always horrible. I was telling myself, when he wakes up next time, I’ll talk to him about it, and sitting there waiting, getting all mad ’cause I was working myself up thinking about what I was gonna say, and he made a couple of little gasps, then he just breathed out and didn’t breathe in again. Like this long, slow sigh that sorta rattled right at the end. At first, I didn’t believe it, then… would you believe I was mad?” The pegasus let out a strangled laugh that sounded like it was half sob. “How messed up is that? He’d just died, and I was mad at him for it! Then it started to hurt.” A few tears rolled down Rainbow’s face, and this time she didn’t stop them. “Oh, it hurt,” she whispered, “It hurt that he was gone, it hurt that he did all this stuff and it was my fault, it hurt that I was mad at him and didn’t get a chance to work it out, and it hurt knowing how you guys would feel if I told you.” She sniffed, looking off to the side. “So I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. I took the journal, and all the others, and I got rid of ‘em. That was all I needed to do; he was really slick about it. Nopony would have ever suspected. Heck, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it written down.”
“You should have told us, Rainbow Dash,” Twilight said quietly, trying to hold back tears of her own. She wished she'd known. How could she not have known? “You should have reported it, told the Guards or some other authority…”
“Why?” Rainbow interrupted, looking back at Twilight. “What would be the point? What good would that have done? He was… he was dead, you couldn’t exile him, or put him in prison to figure out what was wrong with him, and it wasn’t like he was going to hurt anypony else. It wouldn’t have brought those ponies back. All it would’ve done would be to make ponies hate him, and make it harder for you to get all that stuff built that made everypony’s life better.” She sniffed, hard. “So I kept it secret. Never even mentioned it, not even to A.J.” Rainbow chuckled, bitterly. “Y’know, it’s kinda surprising how good it feels, not being the only pony who knows anymore.”
Twilight blinked, shaking her head, feeling the same pain constricting her chest that she was sure was in Rainbow’s. It was hard to take in, hard to reconcile with her mental image of her deceased friend.
Rainbow interrupted her thoughts. “Thing is, today, I think I understand where he was coming from. Maybe. Almost.” Rainbow took a deep breath. “I think, in some messed-up way, he was worried about losing us. Worried that we’d get hurt. I mean, I saw all those aliens coming off the shuttles, and every one of ‘em was armed. I knew there was no way that I could keep them away from you guys with just me and one squad, no matter how hard we hit ‘em. And you guys were just ignoring me, acting like there wasn’t anything dangerous going on. I was so scared I was gonna lose you guys. Maybe that’s how he felt.” She sniffed. “You guys, you, Pinkie, A.J., Fluttershy, Rarity… with this not-aging thing you’re the only friends I don’t have to lose. The only ones I can care about that won’t get old and die. So I panicked. I told the troopers to grab you and run, while I held them off with the rest of the troops. I figured I’d probably kick it, but you guys would be okay.”
“So you made a mistake.” Twilight summarized quietly. She wrapped her feelings up, the feelings of shock and pain, and bundled them away. She had something to do, something important. This mission needed Rainbow Dash, just like it needed all of them. Her feelings, her pain, could wait for later.
Rainbow’s chin lifted defiantly. “A mistake? I don’t think it’s a mistake to try and keep my friends safe!”
“So you think the right thing to do would have been to open fire and risk us getting caught in the crossfire?”
“I…!” The pegasus sagged again, her mechanical limbs emitting a quiet whine as she drooped. “I don’t know. Maybe I was right, maybe I wasn’t. But in the end you and Fluttershy were right. Whether I was right or not, I did it wrong.” She looked up, pure agony in her face. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “And I may have lost you guys anyway because of it.”
Twilight rubbed her head, thinking. How to handle this? “You didn’t lose us, Rainbow. We’re upset with you, yes, but we’re still your friends. I wish you’d talked to us about this.” Having this conversation sometime in the past eight decades would probably have been better, Twilight mused in irritation. That anger Rainbow had been carrying had festered and affected her judgment; Fluttershy was partially right, and the Warden leader had developed a pronounced tendency to lash out when she saw a threat. “Rainbow, I have to ask this, and please answer honestly. Is Fluttershy right? Do you enjoy killing things?” If that was the case, Twilight couldn’t afford to put her back in command. If not…
Rainbow’s mouth twisted. “No. I’m good at it, yeah, but I don’t really like it. Fluttershy mentioned that dragon a couple of years ago, I still have nightmares about that sometimes.”
“I’d… actually started to think that was just a rumor.”
“What? Me killing that dragon?”
Twilight nodded. “Well, it would be an impressive feat, and you never mention it. I’d assumed…”
“That I’d brag?” Rainbow interrupted. At Twilight’s nod, the pegasus looked away. “No. I’m not gonna brag about that. I don’t even like thinking about it, ‘cause it makes me a little sick. Yeah, I killed him one-on-one, without my guns or armor…”
“What?” Twilight gasped. That was the most extreme version of the story, the one that pretty much only the Wardens ever told. Nopony else believed it. The unicorn groped for words, finally coming up with, “…How?!”
Rainbow didn’t look up. She lifted a foreleg with a whine of actuators, and the long metal talons slid free, glinting wickedly in the light. Energy crackled around them, the disruption field tearing apart the molecules of the air and filling the room with an ozone stink. “With these. It was all I had. These and my speed. The nearest Warden unit was half an hour away, and that dragon would have wrecked Orangeseed and killed everypony there by the time they arrived. It was just me.” She swallowed hard. “It took a long time. I shredded his wings first, that was easy. Those big membranes of theirs are tough, but once you get a blade in ’em they tear like paper that’s full of blood. Then I started going after the tendons on his legs.” The pegasus’s voice was hollow, empty, and her words were horrifically matter-of-fact. “It took three or four passes each to cut ‘em. Dragons are big. Dodging his fire was hard, too, but he never tagged me with it. He was mad at first, talking up a storm about all the stuff he was gonna do to me when he caught me, about how my rep was all hot air… he changed his tune after I cut both his hamstrings. He couldn’t fly, couldn’t run anymore, and he hadn’t even touched me. I think he started to realize he was losing at that point, and he started begging me to let him go.” Rainbow gritted her teeth. “I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t. You know how dragons are, how they hold grudges. He would’ve gone home, healed up, and been back in a few years. He’d’ve hit some other town, killed ponies because he’d know it would hurt me, except this time he’d make sure I was nowhere nearby. So I didn’t listen. He got more and more scared when I crippled his front legs, and he was screaming by the time I latched onto his neck.”
Twilight felt sick. “Goddess, Rainbow…”
The pegasus didn’t even pause. “I grabbed onto his spines and just started sawing. You know how thick the scales on the back of a dragon’s neck are? I didn’t until then. They’re crazy. Even with the disrupter fields it took me a long time, especially with the way he was thrashing, trying to get me off. He was screaming the whole time, screaming and babbling, even,” she hiccupped, “even calling for his mom. I nearly let him go then. I didn’t want to…” She paused for a second, and Twilight saw a tear fall to the floor. “I finally made it through the scales and the muscles. Cut his spine, and he finally stopped moving. I got off him, went around so I could see. He wasn’t breathing, but he wasn’t dead yet, his eyes were still moving. I told him,” she hiccupped again, “told him I was sorry. It was stupid, I mean, I just killed him, and I was telling him I was sorry. What the heck is wrong with me.” She cleared her throat, shaking her head. “Then, once he was dead, I hacked his head off. Took it to one of the big nesting grounds, threw it on the ground, and asked them who wanted to be next.”
“That’s hideous, Rainbow Dash.” Twilight had to fight back her gorge. Somehow, the pegasus's tone and the faraway look in her eyes made the story even harder to listen to.
“Worked, though. They’d been pushing us for a while at that point, harassing Warden patrols, showing up to bully towns when we weren’t nearby and then ducking back across the border when we showed up. At least that stopped. All they did was send an ambassador to whine at us, and Fluttershy had been trying to get them to do that for years.”
“There were better ways to do that!”
“Were there?” Rainbow’s gaze lifted, and anger glinted in her rose-colored eyes, the same shade that her real eyes had been. The hideous scar marring her face gave her glare a barbaric, dangerous look. “Then how come no one was using them, huh? I’d told Fluttershy about what was going on. She kept saying she’d talk to the dragons and they’d back off, but they kept not doing it. I kept warning, and they kept getting nastier and nastier and no one was doing anything. The only one that ever listens to me is A.J., and you guys never listen to her either! So yeah, I do my own thing, and yeah, I do nasty stuff that disgusts you. But it works, and no one else will do it!”
There, finally, was the crux of the problem. Rainbow felt ignored, felt like her advice was being cast aside and marginalized. She’d gotten used to acting almost in a vacuum, because she felt like she had to.
“We weren’t ignoring you down there, Rainbow.” Twilight shifted to look the pegasus in the eyes. “We were paying very close attention to what you said. I admit, perhaps I should have sent some of our friends back to the ship, but I thought that it would upset them to be cut out. Besides, we trust you to keep us safe, and I’m certain that if things had gone badly you would have found a way to get us out, no matter what.”
Rainbow perked up a tiny bit, her ears lifting from where they’d laid flat against her neck since Twilight had entered. “Really? You mean that? You’re not just messing with me?”
“Of course I mean it, Rainbow. I take all of my friends’ advice seriously. All of you are smart ponies, good at what you do.”
Rainbow snorted. “Some of us are smarter than others,” she said, a dry, self-deprecating tone in her voice.
“Stop that,” Twilight said firmly. “You’re all bright. It’s just that, this time, Fluttershy was correct, and you weren’t. Nopony can be right all the time, Rainbow.”
The pegasus sighed, grimacing. “All right. Okay. I’ll admit it. She was right and I was wrong.”
Twilight smiled. “Thank you, Rainbow Dash. I tell you what, I will promise not to ignore your advice,” easy enough since she hadn’t been ignoring it in the first place, “if you’ll do something for me."
“What’s that?” Rainbow asked suspiciously.
“I want you to promise me,” Twilight stared Rainbow in the face, her eyes steely, “never to go behind my back like that again. Ever. You may give advice. You may command your ponies as you see fit, so long as you do not counteract my orders. For as long as this mission lasts, I am the commander. Is that clear?”
Rainbow nodded firmly. “Crystal, Commander. I promise not to do that again.”
“Excellent. One more thing.” Rainbow cocked her head, waiting. “I want you to apologize to Fluttershy.”
“For what?” Rainbow asked indignantly. “It was you I went against, not her! She doesn’t have anything to do with this!”
“Exactly,” Twilight responded levelly. “You ignored her. You brushed her advice aside, exactly as you felt we were doing to you. If you want us to change the way we treat you, then I want you to apologize to her for it.” Small steps. Twilight didn’t expect this to heal the rift between the two pegasi, not on its own. But it was a step.
Rainbow sighed heavily. “Fine. Okay, you’ve got a point; I’ll apologize to her.”
“Good.” Twilight nodded decisively. “In that case, you’re no longer under arrest, and you’re reinstated to your position.” Twilight pinged the ship’s network, removing the arrest order and reactivating Rainbow’s clearance and rank. She’d get Fluttershy to apologize for some of the things she’d said about the Wardens at the same time as the cyan pegasus made her apology. “On a more personal note, Rainbow,” the unicorn continued in a softer voice, “thank you for sharing all those things with me. It’s good to know you still trust me.”
“It’s funny,” Rainbow said with a small smile of her own, “I… actually feel a lot better after saying all that. So I should be thanking you.”
“Glad to help, Rainbow Dash.”