Chapter One
perihelion
For the past thousand years, the mountainside on which Canterlot stood had been slowly disappearing from view. It was something only the immortal would even have noticed. For those brief flickers of light and love that were the majority of the pony race recalled nothing but their achingly transient snapshots of the now-sprawling metropolis and nothing more. They might go about their entire lives thinking Canterlot had always been that way. Princess Twilight Sparkle knew different. In her mind she could, with the eidetic ease of an ancient intelligence, recall the construction of every apartment block, factory, boutique chain, ice-cream parlour and a myriad more beside. She could roll it all back to that time when Ponyville wasn't just a trendy Canterlot suburb, but its own thriving township, with twee little thatched-roof cottages, and where the largest construct for miles around was the town hall.
Now that honour fell to the Spire of Harmony, a great silver strand standing rigid up out of the top of the mountain and into the heavens, an elevator bridging the gap to Equestrian geosync. Gondolas the size of passenger aircraft slid up and down it in a never-ending cascade, shipping ponies and material between the surface and places beyond. There was usually far more in the upward gondolas than the downward ones. It was a boom time for the high frontier. Unexpectedly, the Princess found herself longing for that era long forgotten when the dusty west had been the most daring locale ponykind occupied.
At least Canterlot Castle, seat of power for millennia, had remained mostly the same. It was one of the few things that seemed truly immutable. Of course, it now sang with electronics and other modern conveniences, but here it was all hidden away behind the immaculately maintained façade. The gentle hiss of the door mechanism activating at the other end of the throne room interrupted her nostalgic reverie. She turned to see Rainbow Dash glide in, manner filled with urgent purpose. Immediately Twilight knew something was up. The Lord High Admiral never lost her confident, professional demeanour these days. She rarely flew under her own power either, so it was doubly concerning.
“Your Highness-” she began, but Twilight interrupted her with a dismissive gesture.
“Please. 'Your Highness' was Celestia. You of all ponies should remember that,” she said. It was a harsh put down, but it paid to remind the supreme commander of the price of failure. She had, after all, been in charge of the ill-fated mission that brought about the ultimate end of the Celestian Ascendency. Rainbow Dash frowned and pointedly skipped the usual reverent kowtow.
“Of course. Twilight,” she began, but then paused,, as though the name itself was some strange new word that didn't quite belong to the language. “The Faithful Student just came out of Transition.”
“Oh? How are Rarity and Fluttershy? Did they find Luna?”
“That's the thing. They're not responding to our hails and have made no attempts at contact, or at deceleration into orbit. They've been burning their fusion drives white hot for the last twelve minutes. They're putting on 6g and climbing, headed right at us!”
Twilight thought for a moment, carefully adjusting the soft silk blouse she was wearing, picked to understate the elegant and regal appearance of her frame. As she did, she began to lift up several holographic projector spheres with her magic, prying them from their concealed hollows around the throne.
They responded automatically to her phantom touch, displaying reams of neatly organised data. She carefully manipulated their invisible grids of keys and dials, calling up the aggregated feeds of a thousand satellites. Little camera windows blossomed rapidly, each showing a different perspective, or section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Surely enough, the ungainly looking black wedge shape of the deep space explorer Faithful Student was vectoring in toward Equestria, rapidly approaching the orbit of its single moon and closing still. A surge of adrenaline raced up her spine.
Rainbow Dash gestured, and the optically sensitive linings of the throne room picked it up, translating the slight motion into a zoom command. As she did, dozens of green triangles appeared, clustered in orbit around the top of the Spire of Harmony. Each bore a name, and a brief overview of information such as speed, acceleration, mass and, worryingly enough, weapons information.
“I've parked two divisions of Fast Fleet Harriers here,” she said, resolutely. Usually the elements of Dash's military cadres never ventured so close. The larger ones would now be visible from the ground. There would certainly be political ramifications for her actions later, not to mention the riot when the news networks got hold of the story, but with the unfolding crisis it hardly mattered. “We're ready to work the interception if it comes to it.”
Twilight stared down at the commander, taking her eyes off the holographic swarm that floated in the air between them. “You're not seriously suggesting firing on Fluttershy and Rarity are you? Not to mention the two thousand ponies on their crew.”
“At that velocity, and with their enhanced defensive capabilities, they're going to hit this planet with enough energy to briefly outshine an exploding star. I cannot allow that.”
“I will not allow you to harm our friends!”
“They're going to die anyway! And there are two billion ponies in the kill zone. We're in the kill zone.”
“I'll use the long range amplifier again. Magical braking. Put them on a stable track.”
“There's not enough space to do it safely. I already thought of that,” Rainbow Dash sighed with near exasperation. “And before you say it, she's too big and too fast for matter transmission or a physical rendezvous. I had the Palace computer run the numbers on the way over. Check it for yourself.”
The Princess was busy doing just that. The idea of losing any of her closest friends, bearers of the Elements, was unthinkable. The death of a third of the groundsider population was equally so. It would only end the same way. Rainbow Dash was right. The realisation hurt.
Twilight manually recomputed all the data anyway. Maybe something would show itself. Swirling patterns and vector lines replaced the tactical view. Within the ebb and flow of numbers and symbols, something began to take shape. Moving as quickly as her thoughts would allow, she sequestrated half the connected processing power in Equestria, tying their functions into the central Palace computer.
“Please, Twilight, give the order, we're running out of time.”
The Princess didn't hear her. Shining like a star in the eyes of those that could understand it, an equation appeared. It was genius. Dazzling. Insane. And all of the borrowed runtime in the land had just shown her that it would work.
“Dash, how long can we wait?” she asked, voice dreamy and distracted, still staring at the equation. It was making her giddy, banishing the nervous adrenaline shakes.
“Forty-seven minutes, absolute maximum. Why?”
“Good,” she said, her face set to a calm smile,, something she'd long ago picked up from Celestia. “Get back to your flagship. I think I've found a way to save everypony.”
*
For what must have been the fifth or sixth time since Rainbow Dash had left up the Spire of Harmony, the Princess found herself wishing that Celestia, or even Luna, were here by her side. The older sister was better, infinitely calm and composed, even in the face of dire tragedy. She would be the peaceful heart in a maelstrom of staff officers and civilian leaders, carefully applying force with the inevitability of some natural phenomenon. She also would have had the guts to make the decision Twilight couldn't stand to think about.
Once the glow of the theoretical achievement had passed, it was replaced by an icy, rising dread. On the singular occasion something like it had been done in the past, it was at an energy level barely half of what she was now carefully preparing to do, and even then only because both Celestia and Luna worked together to ensure success. That wasn't a story you would find in any of the official or redacted histories. Her mentor had told her of it only once, in hushed and secretive tones after one too many glasses of wine at a state occasion long forgotten.
She hadn't told Rainbow Dash about that though. The pony had been furious enough as it was with her, and for a moment she had thought that her commander would openly rebel and take action regardless. But the time limit and authorisation to act immediately when it passed had placated her.
Twilight paused for a moment beside her throne to make sure all the holographic projectors were back in their correct nooks, then hopped up off the ground and took flight in one graceful motion. Outside gentle zephyrs of warm evening air carried the soft scents of the hundreds of types of ornamental flowers planted in the garden along and around her, mixed with the sharper notes of distant ponyoak trees and even the smell of the kitchen garden and its hearty fare.
The whole climate was perfectly controlled out to the edge of the estate, where it met up with Canterlot City proper. Otherwise the gusting winds at the height of the mountain would be near storm force on a calm day. The city here was domed and sheltered, visible as a morass of bubbles and tubes beyond the walls. Twilight felt as much of a fraud as the weather as she put on height and speed, circling once over the lawns and flowerbeds before doubling back and heading upwards to her Royal Erie.
In the sky above her, sixteen needle shapes clad in harsh black held station with the vanishing point of the Spire of Harmony. Every so often one of the smaller attendant ships she knew were there would catch the sunlight and throw off a dazzle, making it appear as though they were magic wands, glittering in the oncoming night. As she alighted on the covered platform that topped the Castle, a seventeenth appeared, dropping out of Transition with a silent, invisible burst of hard x-rays.
From a mechanical perspective, what she planned to do was very similar to how the Transition drive functioned, albeit achieved through magic instead of the fantastically complex machines that had given ponykind the ability to leave their own world. They had been invented, after all, as a direct result of her fruitless quest to explain the fundamental properties of thaumatology.
Even after a thousand years of study, that was one area which still eluded her, and probably always would. Many in her scientific circles questioned if it was even possible to probe those sorts of deep interactions with the cosmos. However, the physical effects of magic were easily observed and explained, and had lead to many such groundbreaking inventions across the board.
Twilight settled down into a comfortable position, closing her eyes and feeling the tangible threads of magical energy quiver around her. The phrase echoed around her head as she began to marshal those threads, calling more into being. As though sensing her plans, they felt far harder to call upon than usual, actively resisting the usually simple process. Magical output was always measured in Starswirls, with one microswirl being the force required to manifest a single atom of hydrogen. She felt her horn begin to heat up and whine as she surpassed a gigaswirl. Behind her eyelids the glow of Cherenkov radiation rose to near daylight levels. Two gigaswirls. Five. Twenty-eight. A new personal record.
Twilight concentrated as hard as she could, electric fear keeping her going. If she lost control of the charge now the resulting feedback would go off with the force of a large nuclear weapon. Some fragmentary aspect of her mind cursed the lack of time, cursed the lack of anywhere much safer to do this. For a brief moment she wondered if the cure might turn out to be worse than the illness. Then, without any fanfare, a terrifying and lucid wave came over her mind. A complete stillness. She was standing, watching herself, out of her own body. Then the viewpoints multiplied. She was a dozen versions of herself, hundreds. The purple light was so violent now that the paintwork and programmed plastic construction of the Erie was beginning to melt, boiling and turning black in the ferocity.
Some sort of ripple, like a bubble in lava began to form, some other had stepped in to control what she was doing. She was every one of her many selves, all but the one racked and contorted with the immense effort beneath the bulging orb of pure magic. Twilight couldn't even hazard a guess at its energy output.
The roof suddenly turned into a cloud of hot plasma, quickly followed by the floor, just blown away as though it were made of sand. It didn't seem to matter very much. Normal physical rules about gravity and so on had apparently been upended, as the assembled herd of Twilights remained in place high in the air, suspended like moons around their parent world.
Then the other opened her stolen eyes, staring right at Twilight even though she was deeply multiple, a baffling skewer through concepts about geometry and perspective she once held dear. Though the features were her own, they gave a content, infinitely patient and deeply familiar smile. It couldn't be, it wasn't possible. But the quiet grin could belong to nopony else.
Then her possessed body was fully enveloped by the orb in one fell expansion. Twilight went blind, eyes searing in the first real taste of the energies at work. The air cracked and ripped apart as it was tortured. She swore she heard the grinding scream of bending metal, the castle below falling apart.
And then the planet moved.
*
From her vantage point on the command deck of the Victoryful At Something, Rainbow Dash had a perfect view of the unfolding conflagration. It had begun as a winking point of light piercing the cloud base, which the enhanced reality view told her was localised just above the Castle near the bottom of the Spire. Then the radiation sensors had all gone off, shrieking alerts that the surface was under attack with high yield fusion bombs.
They were easily confused by magic, but it still added to the generally worried air on deck. Officers drifted around her as fast as they could in the microgravity, mostly assisted by tiny manoeuvring packs. It was always possible to tell who was experienced and who wasn't; those with the longest time in space could get around just using their wings and nothing more.
Captain Sabre Rattle, her coat a mute tangerine, appeared out of an access tube, eliciting a spray of clumsy salutes. She returned them smartly and joined her CO in watching the event on the big holographs. “Commander,” she began. “I don't mean to second guess the Princess, but are you sure she knows what she's doing?”
Dash frowned and gave Rattle a glance intended to reprimand. It fell short of the mark. She had never been so unsure of her friend, let alone of her ruler.
“The Princess wouldn't try if she didn't think it was the right thing to do.” It felt hollow, but now of all times she had to maintain at least a fascia of control.
Rattle made a noncommittal noise and gave the slightest of shrugs. If this had been Celestia, Dash would have chewed the Captain out, publicly too. But of all the things Twilight was, she wasn't Celestia.
“Control groups Asp, Boa and Cobra report ready status,” Rattle said, changing the subject. “Some of the Captains are still half-asleep, but we've got good function across the mustered fleet.”
“Good,” Dash nodded approvingly. “Where's the Faithful Student?” Rattle made a subtle movement of her right foreleg and the appropriate tactical data appeared. The view shifted from the surface away into space.
“About ten minutes out. She'll intersect the fire zones of Asp first. Then Cobra. Boa is in stand-off position with heavy weapons online in case Asp and Cobra can't stop her.” Rattle bit her bottom lip thoughtfully. “Ma'am, are we really going to splash Faithful Student?”
Before Dash could reply, the simulated glow of starlight coming from the display rose sharply, casting hard shadows across the command deck. Sensor readouts and camera displays on the ground began to fail, some briefly showing garbled or off the scale metrics before vanishing wholesale from the network. The telemetry downlink reported station loss, and as it did the many satellite constellations all went dark in one go. Then, as though a deadly poison was spreading through their information bloodstream, cameras and sensors mounted on Dash's own flagship died away, finally reducing the data flow to the command centre to zero.
“Sweet Celestia,” Rattle whispered. “What in the name of Tartarus just happened?”
Rainbow Dash said nothing, but began to manipulate the neutered display. It was barely reporting its own active status. All of the internal and tranship links that held the fleet together were gone too, and that made no sense whatsoever. They operated with hard lines and triple redundancy, laser, maser and radio.
The officers and ensigns on deck were all watching her with terrified faces. Their Captain had been knocked for six. If their overall commander lost it too, it might turn into a situation even she couldn't recover. It was bad form for her to directly command Rattle's crew, but she was still staring into the static. A thousand years of experience kicked in.
“Get the shutters open,” she said, radiating calm. “We're flying blind here.” The spell broke and several of the ensigns threw themselves at the task with over-enthusiastic puffs of their manoeuvring packs. Dash subconsciously reviewed the other ponies around her, searching for the right one.
“Maudlin Breeze?”she asked. A pale blue stallion nodded. He was the Engineering Officer, technically a part of their division but stationed on the command deck for quick reference. “ I need you to go find the Senior Engineer. Who is that?”
“M-ma'am, it's Neutron Flux ma'am!”
The name rang a bell that Dash couldn't quite place. It felt as though it should mean something to her. Breeze vanished into the strange gloom. The emergency lighting hadn't come on. In fact, the only thing that seemed as though it had any power was the featureless holograph.
The bridge shutters finally began to move upwards, retracting to show a true, unfiltered view of space beyond. Rainbow Dash didn't quite understand what she was looking at. At first she thought that perhaps the ship had been spun out of its original azimuth, as she had positioned the nose pointing downward toward Equestria. Then the reality dawned on her. Twilight had done it. She'd really done it.
Dash immediately felt terrible for the doubt she'd felt. The Princess had been elevated to status for a reason after all. Something caught the raw sunlight, a spray of glittering objects tumbling gently through space. Without any sort of reference it was hard to tell what was going on, but as she watched, it revealed itself. The Spire of Harmony's end point, High Side, had broken off from the massive pillar below it. The resulting stress had apparently shattered nearly thirty thousand kilometres of carbon nanotube into an expanding field, moving slowly toward them.
Adrenaline spiked and Dash's heart began to hammer. Even if her flagship had been fully operational, it wouldn't survive the impacts of thousands of razor sharp objects at orbital speed. As though to confirm her fears, the flat, lenticular shape of High Side was suddenly struck by an outrider of the cloud, shining as bright as a star for a moment as the carbon hail hit home. Huge spears of white and mauve plasma stabbed through its superstructure. Dash knew she was watching thousands dying in the heat and explosive decompression that would follow. She knew many more would follow if she didn't act.
*
Nitrogen Fixer trotted out onto the warm cobbles of his veranda, greeting the dawn that had risen a few hours earlier over Sumner, Esterházy’s equatorial continent. He stretched himself out, easing the sleep from his evergreen body and idly considered the view down toward Mistime. The little town was just visible behind the slowly rolling vineyards, a growth of black and white silicone composite structures still awaiting the appearance of more permanent buildings.
It hardly seemed necessary. They had survived the ten years since the end of the war and the founding of Mistime just fine, weathering the harsh winter storms and baking summers with equal ease. The house he lived in with his young family was partially built of it, though the decent income he made now the first harvest was finally producing good wine had meant numerous ironbrick and programmed plastic extensions.
“Good morning dear,” his wife murmured, nuzzling him from behind and resting her head under his chin.
Though she had snuck up on him, it was no surprise. He was used to it after two years of marriage. That was Pure Grace's way, after all. Light and airy, with a soft spoken manner only the unlucky mistook for meekness. She smelled of freshly cut grass and hay juice, a product of the breakfast she'd been making for their daughter.
“Don't forget to pick up the new generator parts from Grey's after you drop Gauge Boson off at school.”
Fixer responded by gently nibbling her ear.
Though he did most of the heavy labour at the vineyard, it was Grace who was the mastermind behind its operation. Without her the business wouldn't have lasted past its first season, especially with all the technical problems they'd run into. Out on the frontier of pony occupied space, it was hard to find engineers, let alone many spare parts.
He adored his wife for that ability. Sometimes he swore that was the only reason he'd married her; because she'd rewritten his operating system. As much as he was skilled in negotiating the complex supply contracts needed to sell their wine, he'd never felt very welcome in the local community. His wife, on the other hoof, spoke their Sumnerian dialect perfectly, understood their strange humour, spent time with their foals and seemed to enjoy it all to boot. The fact that she was also the only pony within fifty miles who could fix their farm equipment probably helped too.
After they'd finished eating, Fixer packed Boson into the car and headed off toward the school in Mistime. It was a big electric vehicle, with space for five ponies standing inside. As was usual with almost all technology designed for the masses, it was controlled through gestures. He didn't have to actually drive unless he wanted to though, and it was far safer to let the computer handle things automatically.
Once they'd cleared the packed earth track leading away from the farm buildings, they picked up the main road into town. It was wide enough for four cars, and made out of prefabricated slabs of plastic joined together like a train track. Big native tiapine trees lined the road, interspersed with younger ponyoak trees here and there. Rod-like insects flitted between them, pursued by little frills of feathers and beaks that were called squidbirds, but which were actually more closely related to Equestrian fungus and moss than any sort of avian or cephalopod species.
Mistime had been busy for hours, and was bustling with ponies and even the occasional gryphon marching stoically along the town's one central street. Shops sold all manner of things, but the biggest sellers were music and computer games, or books, all trading hooves rapidly, carried on little rectangles of plastic or crystal. There wasn't a big enough settlement on the planet yet to warrant much in the way of mainstream franchises or an ansible link to a big planet, so the demand for news and entertainment was high. Already Boson was chattering merrily away about which she wanted for her next birthday, or good test result. It wasn't until he pulled up outside the small, two story schoolhouse in the middle of town and waved her goodbye did he have his thoughts to himself again.
As he commanded the car to reverse out and head to its next destination, there was a huge double thunderclap, a sonic boom characteristic of a space-plane coming in to land. It shook the vehicle on its suspension and shuddered through the pit of his stomach. Fixer threw the door open and stared up. There weren't any ships due at their makeshift grass airstrip for another week. Everyone in town knew the schedule like the back of their hooves. They were all looking up too. In the skies overhead, a brilliant deep purple object was coming in fast.
*