//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: The Termination Shock 
// by NoeCarrier 
//------------------------------//


Prologue


ante bellum decennale







This was truly her sister's ship. Princess Celestia didn't need to see the sweeping, graceful curves of its midsection or the teardrop shape of her service module to know that.

Ex Luna Bellum was the colour of night, somehow competing with the void of interstellar space in the blackness stakes. It was only fitting, too. Despite being well inside the tonnage of a Canterlot-class warship, her hull was almost electromagnetically neutral. Had the enhanced reality holograph taking up most of the space on the command deck of her own ship not been pointing it out to her, it would have blended seamlessly into the background.

It certainly was a lot larger than her own personal spacecraft, though to be fair, her sister always had been the more martial one. Not to mention the design had been conceived during a period of high tension with what had then been the outer worlds, when war had seemed inevitable.

Sol Rex was dwarfed before it, a mere four hundred metre shaft of shimmering silver against Bellum's ten kilometre bulk. Celestia believed that true power was excised through respect and love, not fear and threat. At least she had, once. Recent events put that mindset to a test she wasn't sure it could pass. When the Perpetual Darkness had declared war on life in general, many things fell by the wayside.

But that's what this is all about, isn't it?

Trailing a few hundred metres behind Rex was a slate grey oblate, being pushed steadily along by a standard service module scavenged from a high-mass freight drone. It's innocuous appearance belied the truth behind the Red Jupiter design.

Just thinking about the technological abomination her most faithful student had put together for this application made Celestia's skin crawl. The fact that she herself had requested its inception was even worse. Jupiter Red's operating principles recalled some of the magic Discord had practised long ago, when they had all struggled free of his rule

Perhaps I won't have to use it. They may yet see reason. There must always be hope.