//------------------------------//
// Chapter Three - Periastron 
// Story: The Termination Shock 
// by NoeCarrier 
//------------------------------//


Chapter Three


periastron





Twilight had been enjoying the party that her arrival in the stunned village of Mistime had provoked for several hours. After a brief application of some molecular bonding magic to mend broken windows and eardrums alike, the mood had gone from one of dark disapproval to positively rapturous. It was apparently drawing toward the end of Esterházy’s second summer, and the start of the major harvest. As a result a miraculous abundance of fruits and vegetables, as well as the unsettlingly strong spirits one could derive from them, were presented again and again for her to try. There are a great many things bored ponies can do with root vegetables and sugar, given time Celestia had counselled, after what was probably the tenth pungent chutney. Gracious, I miss tastebuds.

At some point in the afternoon a big marquee had been set up, in that delightful outworld way, by nopony in particular, just at the general behest of the entire assembly. The fact that it sat slap bang in the middle of the town's one main thoroughfare, and that their revelry had essentially brought the entire place to a drunken, merry standstill was of interest to none.

According to a schedule half-thrown at her in gleeful abandon by the crowd, VTOL service was once weekly. She didn't want to try any flying, and would need a spacecraft of some description anyway. Before resigning herself to the party, she'd wondered just how far turning up and being royal would go in the “hiring a ship” department. It wasn't as though she ever carried money.

The evergreen pony called Nitrogen Fixer had been by her side the entire night. The stallion had grown up in Canterlot, it emerged, and seemed to consider Twilight of at least equal stature to the lost sisters. Or not so lost, if recent events were counted. Of course, she hadn't told anypony about that. It was probably baffling enough for them that the Princess Regent had dropped in, quite literally. No good would come of trying to convince ponies that the ghost, or magical clone of the mind of a deceased monarch, was somehow riding shotgun. That would get her deposed and thrown in a secure hospital for neurological re-profiling faster than if she began clucking and trying to lay eggs.

Fixer had, luckily, succumbed to too much of his own wine and something devilish made from tubers, staggering off into the warm and richly scented night air laughing to himself. She'd watched him go, saying farewell to a lot of new friends he'd made that evening. It set off an awful feeling of longing, for a time when this had been her life too. Before the wings, before responsibility, before a thousand years of task, and purpose, and duty. What, ultimately, had all it all been for? What good had it done ponykind to ever leave Equestria?

She was some distance away from the marquee now, sitting in the alcove of the front door of some shop, listening to the honeyed sounds of the party. It was self-sustaining at this stage. The foals had been reluctantly put to bed and the adults could now let go of any restraint they might have been showing for the betterment of the younger generation. Existential crises are so last millennium, faithful student.

“Get stuffed.” she replied, keeping her voice low.

The memories I could show you.

“Please don't,” Twilight grimaced and took a gulp out of the ponyoak tumbler containing the tuber beverage. It was crystal clear if still, but clouded up and became milky if disturbed, and tasted like drinking molten lead. “I can't even begin to imagine what you've got up to.”

I'm surprisingly vanilla, actually. Only takes a few hundred years to work through every possible permutation, and after that you just get tired of it all.

“The vagaries of old age, eh?”

Celestia said nothing in response, though a wistful feeling bubbled up around her own grim, cynical thoughts. Twilight raised the tumbler to nothing in particular and grinned.

“To us,” she said, and drank again. “Until the Dawn.”

I made that one up you know.

“Made what up?”

All that 'Til the Dawn' bunk. Last time we had a big Nationalist thing going on I was at this party, and I just said it and downed my drink, right out of the blue. Next thing you know, everypony's toasting that way, saying it when ponies were dying, basically whenever they wanted.

“I didn't know that. Interesting piece of history.”

That's nothing. My memoirs would make your hooves curl.

“You have memoirs? You never said.”

You'd have only gone and published them. And then there would have been at least one war.

“Yipes,” said Twilight, and finished the drink. It was a good burn, she decided. And it was finally beginning to have an effect on her high-order physiology. A cosy, fluffy sensation was building around her temples and down her spine. “Wait, what? Who with? We don't have any enemies, except the PD, and they've been quiet since, well, since the war.”

Wouldn't you like to know. I tell you what, if you can find them, they're yours to do with as you please.

“If I find them before I figure out some way to pattern you into a new body, you mean.”

That wistful sensation again, and silence. Twilight sat up and began to wander, with no particular intention, back toward the marquee. It really was a lovely village. A great deal of harmony and joy wafted through the air around her. She could feel its tangible bands, just at the edge of perception. They practically called out for her to pluck at them with her mind and weave some magical response to their sonorous tune.

You know, if we had never drawn ourselves up out of the mud, things would be a whole lot worse than you think they are. Twilight shrugged and sailed gently into the glow of the big tent, smelling the grass and the mud, and its canvas construction mixed in with the heady aromas of the planet's bounty.

You don't remember what it was really like a thousand years ago, do you? I can see it in your head. You've got this lovely rose tinted view of the world. Here's the rub. Back then, six in ten infants died during foal-birth. Four in ten mares died during the same. Of those that did survive, a further five in ten never made it past the age of two.

Adoring faces greeted Twilight like a lost daughter, pouring out refills of the spirit and more chutney layered onto hearty bread and tiled with cheese and yellow salad leaves. She made sincere small talk with them, chatted about their foals and their lives. It was easy to ignore the voice in her head, making her face reality.

And I had no idea why. I didn't know that there were tiny organisms in the air that infected ponies, that got into the water supply, spreading contagion. Can you imagine how awful that was? You've been in the job five minutes, do one feat of true arcane magic and you're already wishing for the good life?

Somepony handed Twilight an ornate pipe with a silvery inlay, and she made a show of peering at it like the bemused foreigner she was. This elicited a great deal of laughter, until she lit the crumbled orange mixture in the bowl with magical fire and took a puff. Suddenly she came over all dizzy, to an even bigger round of laughter and some stares of faux disapproval from the marefolk before she handed it back.

You changed all that, Twilight. You and your cabal, you've done more for the stock of all living creatures than anypony. You may have never thought so, and these ponies certainly don't know it, but it's true. Antibiotics. Computational engines. The countless translations of magic to technology so that all could benefit, not just unicorns. Faithful student, you gave us the stars themselves.

Celestia sounded as though she was pleading. It had been an age since she'd heard that tone in her mentor's voice. She trotted carefully outside through one of the many flaps and looked up at those distant points of light in the sky. They shimmered almost starkly, far more vivid than on Equestria. As her eyes began to acclimate, many more appeared.

“I've never heard it put quite that way before,” she whispered, bashfully.

It's true. That's why I chose you. My endgame.

“I did always assume I was following your design.”

More beautifully than I could ever have imagined.

A deep, comforting memory arrived in her mind. It was hazy, but she saw herself as a filly, asleep beneath a white, downy wing which seemed to span the heavens like a bridge. A roaring fire crackled an intense yellow, the citrus smell of the ponyoak logs spitting into the air. As if faded, ultimately as all things must, she realised she was still staring at the stars, quite phased out. Nothing more needed to be said between the two. She went back inside to figure out where she would be spending the night. Not unsurprisingly, there was no surfeit of offers.


*





Mason's Star had been slowly crawling toward its ultimate fate for the last ten million years. In life it had been an unsuspecting thing of roughly three solar masses, but now it had spent its primary fusion fuels and begun to grow fat. It would never undergo the quiet dignity of a lengthy retirement as a white dwarf, though. At some ancient juncture gravity had conspired to place it on the same vector as a wandering neutron star, and now the twenty five kilometre ball of degenerate matter was finally within the disparate corona of the red giant. As more of the stellar metals fell inward to acrete against the neutron star, carbon-oxygen fusion, previously impossible within the donor, began to occur. Electric blue flashes of light illuminated the scant rocky bodies still orbiting the ancient star, bathing their landscapes of cracked basalt regolith in hard radiation.

Twelve minutes later, on the open regatta deck of the Puddin' Out To Pasture, the festivities began with a raucous burst of cheering and celebration amidst the sound of popping champagne corks and the striking up of a microgravity band as the light reached them. All of a sudden, Pinkie Pie quite forgot what they were supposed to be celebrating. It was only fifteen minutes previously that her navigator had mentioned the neutron star was about to go up. That, apparently, had been enough.

The pink pony sighed as she instinctively avoided the ballistic trajectories of the corks and their corresponding trails of bubbles. Just a hundred years ago, the cosmic show alone would have been sufficient to justify things. But recently the party crowd aboard her mammoth interstellar yacht had grown stale. The faces all changed regularly, of course. She wouldn't have had it any other way. Only certain ponies were allowed aboard whenever the Pasture put in at some port or other. There was no price for admission, only proof of a particular mindset. And naturally those sorts of ponies wouldn't hang around any one nest of perpetual debauchery and endless hedonism-for-its-own sake for too long.

A particularly ferocious series of silent flashes elicited nervous excitement from the merry makers and a brief lull in the conversation. The neutron star was only just beginning its devouring spree. Over the next few days it would convert up to twenty percent of the remaining mass into energy, with the rest becoming part of the neutron star itself. Her navigator had been rather excited about it, assuring her in too-enthusiastic tones that the combined mass wasn't enough to collapse into a black hole. Something about an Oppenheimare limit.

No, it's not the ponies, she thought. It's me.

Pinkie impelled herself carefully through the crowd with dainty motions of her back legs, avoiding the numerous comatose revellers. They'd been at it almost non-stop for a week since leaving Calhoun, striking out into the heart of a relatively unexplored globular cluster beyond the limits of seventh ring space. It was made up of unusual, tightly-packed stars, mixed-mass X-ray binaries, sub-millisecond pulsars, and even a cataclysmic variable or two.

Certainly, when the rest of ponykind eventually made it out this far, twenty five hundred light years from the world that birthed them, they would be giving this whole region a wide berth. Were it not for the unique construction of the Pasture, with its bespoke magical radiation shields, they'd have all died a handful of Transitions in.

And nopony would ever have noticed. They'd all just assume I'd grown bored of life and gone off to party with aliens, or something. Would they even give me a state funeral? I haven't set hoof on Equestria for the better part of three centuries. I didn't even come back home for the war.

Regret was not a usual emotion for the undeniable queen of living in the moment. Perhaps it was the fact they were so far from their usual stomping grounds. The Pasture typically ran a ten year circuit between the sixth and second rings, as whimsy dictated, or as seasonal delicacies and vintages came off and onto the market. They'd been displaced from this pattern by the war, acting in the civilian emergencies that followed to evacuate planetary populations, and had never quite gotten back into the swing of things.

Recently they'd been loitering skittishly, visiting the outworlds, as though plucking up the courage to dive headlong into what was essentially the unknown. Only a few remote probes had previously hopped their way through, usually at the behest of some corporation eager to exploit distant resources.

Her reminiscing was broken by a gentle beeping in her left ear. It was the Pasture, or more properly, the network of electronic intelligences that managed the many delicate systems aboard. Surprised, she accepted the direct neural link. It was unusual for the aloof machine mind to contact her directly. Whatever it was, it wasn't to share in the natural beauty going on outside.

“Ma'am, we hope we are not interrupting.” The voice seemed to come from somewhere behind her left ear, though in reality it was a controlled hallucination, streaming out into her neurones from artificial counterparts in the centre of her brain.

“Not at all. What can I do for you?”

“We just lost all three ansible links.”

“So what? We were expecting that. We're beyond the outer worlds.”

“That may be true, but we weren't expecting it for another three hundred light years. That's the maximum operational range of our communications drones. We have sent out our entire complement for six successive cycles now. Every time they've come back they've reported the same thing. No carrier wave. It's almost as though the central hub on Equestria is down. But even if it was we'd still have a basic carrier signal. What little data we've managed to pull from the rest of the network is confused and erratic. There's a great deal of panic. The home system has gone totally dark. Nopony seems to know what's going on.”

“What does that mean?” Pinkie asked, heart beginning to race. It couldn't possibly be. The Perpetual Darkness had been wiped out. There were simply none left.

“We thought that there might have been a serious malfunction at a second or third ring ansible hub. But we still have carrier signals for every major and minor hop. It's as though some pony scooped Equestria off the map.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Reverse course immediately and return to second ring space. If anything we can find out what's going on. And we doubt that this failure will remain private for long. Our guests will no doubt realise the problem when they can't get any messages home.”

“All right. Let's do it.”

The bulbous rectangular shape of the Pasture, bathed in the strobing brilliance of the neutron star, vanished down the compressed exotic matter neck of a Transit wormhole a few minutes later, heading inwards toward more friendly space.


*




Gracious. What is this thing you built?

It was the start of another day on Esterházy. Wan rays of amber sunlight crept over the horizon as though sneaking up on an unsuspecting prey animal, stelliferous fangs drawn. The vast majority of the villagers were now sleeping off hangovers somewhere. Twilight hadn't managed to imbibe enough of the various intoxicants on offer to join them in merciful oblivion, however.

The last vestiges of honeyed warmth were draining out of her system with gleeful abandon, Magical Nature determined to keep its charge on an even keel. Sleep hadn't been particularly forthcoming either, despite the big downy bed in Nitrogen Fixer's spare room which his wife had shown her to, and she'd spent most of the night watching the stars, trying to pick out patterns in them.

“What do you mean?” she muttered. Celestia had been absent since she'd shown her the fireside memory from so long ago.

Just catching up on what's gone on since I've been away. Oh, I see. It's my tomb.

“Ugh,” Twilight blushed, half-disgusted. “I'd forgotten.”

I don't see how you could. You spent two years slaving over it. It's very pretty. Is that the stellar life cycle?

“Yes, it is,” she replied, wearily. “Molten uranium is a pain in the rump to sculpt in.”

It certainly looks like it. And I'm glad you kept your promise.

“Which promise was that?”

To delete the memory of Jupiter Red's design.

“Oh. Well, I couldn't have lived with that knowledge stuck in my head. I barely get by knowing that I designed it, that I brought it into the Universe.”

I won't insult you by rolling out any of the tired old, greater good, lesser evil phrases.

Twilight nodded and stroked the ruff of new growth hair jutting out of the back of her head with a hoof. It was still the same colour and style as she'd been wearing it that fateful day a thousand years ago, when the Magical Nature imprinted itself on her and forever locked her into a mane cut that hardly became a princess.

You haven't forged a Principle yet. Was Luna really so stricken with grief that she forgot to hand over the reins properly?

“She mentioned something about it. I couldn't find any record of what a Principle might be so I just put it to one side and forgot about it,” Twilight mumbled, looking out over Fixer's vineyards. They twinkled as the first rays of the sun caught the oily dew drops. Little angry clouds of strange, rod-like insects buzzed between the rows of green and grey fruits, the rippling lines of their gossamer wings all vibrating in unison producing an overall harmonic buzz.

“Those were truly dark days. The war was over. Ninety million dead. Sixty-seven worlds lost forever. We'd lost our princess, the Light-in-Darkness, She-Who-Raises. I had bigger things to worry about.”

That you did, faithful student. And I am sorry. Truly I am. None should have to face what you did alone. I only wish I could have been there for you.

“Yes. Me too.”

There was movement somewhere behind her, and Twilight turned to look. It was Pure Grace, Fixer's wife.

She was balancing a tray of tea cups on her head with the natural ease that befitted her earth pony heritage. Behind her back legs was a filly who couldn't have been more than five years old, staring at Twilight with big, wide, disbelieving eyes.

“Tea, dear?” she asked, smiling warmly. The mare had a disregard for properly addressing royalty that Twilight respected and admired.

“Yes, please, thank you.” the princess replied, telekinetically lifting up one of the fine bone china cups, taking a sip.

Grace and her daughter went back inside and left Twilight to her apparent regal contemplations. The tea smelled of citrus and mint, burning slightly in the same rather pleasant way, much like the leaves she'd sampled back in the forest. The honeysuckle aftertaste confirmed the link.

“So, what's a Principle then?” Twilight asked, once she was sure everypony was out of earshot.

Put simply, magic armour. But it also represents primacy amongst the diarchy, or triarchy.

“It's a monarchy now.”

Cadence is still out there somewhere, you know.

“Like I'd go looking for her! She made it perfectly clear she wanted nothing more to do with us.”

It was never supposed to be a monarchy. I knew I should have written all this down somewhere.

“Yeah, you should have done. But why do I need to show primacy when it's just me? And it's not like I'm ever going to charge headlong into battle. Why would I need magic armour?”

Primarch Alicorns build power progressively, like a battery being charged up. All magical creatures do. The usual mechanism for release is either magic use itself, or a kind of static discharge into the standing magical field. Usually this doesn't matter much because, let's face it, most magic users are like fireworks beside an atom bomb. But when it happens to us, Primarch Alicorns in particular, the effects are far more violent. The Principle acts as reservoir. Like the crowns and the elements, they are constructs of ordered energy. It allows us to safely discharge the massive power levels we naturally produce without sterilising the galaxy when we sneeze. It also looks snazzy when you do actually run head long into a fight.

“So I'm a Primarch Alicorn now? Surely Luna is the senior of us.”

She abdicated. The Magical Nature notices those sorts of things. She will lose her wings within a hundred years and live out the life she had remaining before her ascendency.

“I had no idea,” Twilight said, suddenly feeling very sorry for the Moon Princess. “I sent two of the element bearers to find her. Fluttershy and Rarity.”

Yes. You did. Their return triggered this whole sequence of events. Does that not tell you something?

“What do you mean?”

My sister is more devious than you give her credit for. I wouldn't put it past her to have contrived this entire situation, now I come to think about it.

Twilight could formulate no cogent reply. The idea that Luna might have taken control of the Faithful Student, putting it on a collision course with Equestria just so she would have to take drastic magical action, thereby reviving Celestia, was just too crazy. How could she have known? And if she did, why not simply tell them? The Twilight Princess sipped her tea and continued watching the little village of Mistime come to groggy, hung over life just beyond the vineyards.


*




Fixer came back to consciousness and immediately wished he hadn't. His mouth felt as though it had been simultaneously sandpapered and left to dry out in a pottery kiln. In the middle of his head a terrible ache throbbed merrily away, like a demon jabbing at his neurones with a red hot poker. He opened his eyes tentatively. The midday sun was streaming in through the polycarbonate window panels that made up one side of he and his wife's bedroom. He closed his eyes again and thought carefully about getting up. If the ferocious hangover was anything to go by, the party they'd thrown last night to celebrate the arrival of the princess on Esterházy had been the example for which the archetype would undoubtedly be named.

Extricating his legs as best he could from the tangle of sheets and pillows, Fixer ambled precipitously into the large, open plan living room. There didn't seem to be anypony home. The two big sofas arranged at right angles in the centre were neatly packed away, and the low coffee table's various decorative and functional accoutrements had been rearranged by order of size. This was somewhat unusual. As well as he and Grace kept the house, it was always a homely, chaotic order.

Rubbing his temples and thinking on the matter, he noticed that the veranda doors were open. Just beyond them a few strange lavender objects were scattered about on the floor. It took him a moment to realise that they were feathers. They were far bigger than any found on equestrian birds, and Esterházy had no feathered creatures. Fixer went over and picked one up. 'Feather' hardly seemed to describe it. The shaft was jet black and featureless, except for tiny pores where the bases of deep purple and near turquoise plumes emerged. Running a hoof along the edge he discovered them to be razor sharp, digging into the thankfully non-sensate layer as easily as any scalpel.

He gathered the rest up and went into the kitchen, putting them on the high counter-top where they would be safe. It wouldn't do at all for Boson to pick them up and cut herself. He noted the time on the kitchen display and grunted in annoyance. It was nearly two in the afternoon. Good thing I'm self-employed. Fixer made coffee and tried to coax his memory into recalling more of the night before. It all got too hazy after the second round of orange spore tobacco. He didn't even remember coming home.

Hopefully he hadn't made too much of an ass of himself. But it had been nice to cut loose, especially for such a bizarre reason. No doubt it would all be explained properly in due course. The Princess hadn't been particularly forthcoming as to why she was on Esterházy, or why she'd fallen out of the sky the way she had, but that was the way of royalty. Some things the average pony wasn't meant to know.

If it had been anything major, a war emergency, something like that, they'd know about it by now. Fixer had been on Lyra's World with his parents the last time, and it had only taken twelve hours for the entire Equestrienne to receive news that their world had been attacked, the ansible network had moved so fast.

The coffee was strong and invigorating, and it soon soothed his alcohol-battered self. He set the strange purple feathers aside in his mind and went about half-heartedly at the day's chores, knowing he wouldn't get much done. His wife would undoubtedly be out in one of the vineyards, fixing whatever completely intractable mechanical problem had befallen them today, and Boson wouldn't need picking up from school for another three hours.

It was therefore something of a surprise when a dark shape swooped soundlessly out of the sky and ambushed him shortly after he'd finished setting up the agriculture robots for their first maintenance pass.

“Celestia!” was all Fixer could exclaim as he felt a sharp rush of air overtake him.

“Not quite,” the Twilight Princess replied, alighting primly between the rows of tall, sturdy vines bearing their nascent fruiting bodies. “Only me.”

“Y-yes, of course, your Highness-”

“I think we're probably on first name terms by now,” she interrupted, without trace of admonition. “I was just taking a look around from above. You have a lovely township here. “

“Thank you, your Highness.”

The Princess frowned at him briefly, but after pausing as though listening to some distant sound, she let it pass without further comment.

“You really are all alone out here, aren't you?” she said, changing the subject. “I flew two hundred kilometres east to west and didn't see anything other than a few farmsteads. There's not even a road connection.”

“That's right, ma'am. We're totally reliant on our air link. It either comes suborbital from Merrick, that's two thousand klicks to the south, or exoatmo from whatever interstellar boat happens to be passing.”

“But why are you so far away from anything?”

“Esterházy is a corporate deal, ma'am. Only reason most of the ponies on world are here is because they signed up to a rent-to-own development scheme of some kind,” he smiled wryly at her as noticed her incomprehension. “See, when a corporate entity has an interest in building the general economic and civic infrastructure of a place, they put up really cheap land deals in exchange for committing to some kind of development for the overall good.”

“So you have to build schools and hospitals?”

“Amongst other things,” Fixer said, pointing over her shoulder toward the barely-visible farm house. “Depends what kind of contract you get. All we have to do is be profitable as an export business in under fifteen years. Plus build a bunch of water pipes and stuff we'd have done anyway.”

“I see. So you have to go where the good soil is? That's why you're out here?”

“Yes ma'am. Because of the way the local plants work, they shift nutrients around in the soil into big reservoirs over time. We're right in the middle of one of those here. But that leaves most of the continent unworkable. You'll see it from the plane I imagine. Nothing lives out there at all, nothing but microbes.”

“How fascinating,” the princess replied, sounding genuinely sincere. Fixer was surprised. Usually when he started talking about soil nutrients and Sumner's macroagricultural quirks, ponies started falling asleep. “How on Equestria does that happen?”