//------------------------------// // Equus // Story: Where the Heart Is // by Workable Goblin //------------------------------// NB: You may enjoy listening to this while reading. Equus "Exiting hyperspace. Polling EPS...no signal. Wait..." At first, he didn't recognize the...thing Twilight was displaying on the holoprojector in the center of the room. It was a gibbous ball, huge splotches of blackened, charred crust decorating it, fringed by patches of glowing orange and yellow or vast areas of white. Most of the surface was an ugly grey-blue-green color, like a sea on a stormy day, but here and there, between the veins of light and expanse of blue-grey there were areas of a brownish-orange color. In the black crescent sliced out of one side of the sphere, only the veins of light could be seen, winding across the surface like an angry cancer. It was like nothing he had ever seen before. Except...There were certain similarities...that boundary between brown and blue, he had seen that before, hadn't he? Only, then it was the boundary between the Great Desert, the largest expanse of barren land on the planet, and the Walking Sea, the heart of equine civilization, one of the greatest shorelines in the world. Yes, he was sure that was it. He had only seen it a thousand times while working on the Mothership's construction. Other points of similarity began to intrude into his consciousness. Here a stretch of coast that should have been lined with rainforest and fringed by coral reefs, not titanic clouds of steam; there, a bay, at whose head should have been a vast river and a great city, not a charred, barren expanse of land. That dark crescent, it matched where night should have been, but there were no city lights illuminating the night, only those awful lines of fire. "Dear Sisters," he whispered. "it's Equus." --- Dimly, Shining could hear the sounds of his command staff falling to pieces. Ahead of him, Derpy had collapsed, weeping, on her console, a tiny pool of tears already forming beneath her seat. Next to her, Cloud Kicker was rigid as a pole, staring fixedly at the holodisplay. "Luna, Mother of Mercy, forgive them their sins. May your intercession speed them to the eternal beyond, and may they know everlasting peace in your loving bosom. Amen." Twilight's voice, barely more than a whisper in his ear, shocked him out of his mental collapse. "Twi...Command, what...I mean, do you--" "It was a diversion." Twilight interrupted, her voice solid ice. "No...a rearguard. They were to prevent anypony from escaping while the main force struck Equus. And we fell for it, hook, line, and sinker." "But, but...what do we do now, Twilight?" "I...don't know." She hesitated for a moment. "Wait. I am detecting multiple hyperspace signatures opening up nearby. They are consistent with the signatures we detected near the Infinity." --- A rainbow streak zoomed down the main corridor towards Gold Squadron's hanger bay. Up ahead, she spotted a familiar turquoise-yellow blur, moving nearly as fast as her. A slight adjustment of course later, and she was running alongside Lightning as the two of them made their way at top speed to their fighters. "Commander!" she panted, breathing hard, "What is going on?" "I don't know, Rainbow!" Lighting all but shouted back. "Command told us we needed to scramble five minutes ago, that's it!" --- "I am picking up seven distinct signatures at one-nine-three miles, oh-eight-six degrees polar and two-six-seven degrees azimuth," Twilight continued. "Two of them exactly match the signatures of the ships we encountered near the Infinity." The image of Equus dissolved, replaced by a tactical display of the space for two hundred miles in all direction. "Behind" the Mothership, the wreckage of the Scaffold trailed for nearly a hundred miles, twisted girders, blown-out life support modules, and bullet-riddled manufacturing units filling space. A tight cluster of seven red dots appeared at the edge of the screen, on almost the same plane as the Mothership and the Scaffold's wreckage and very nearly directly port of the Mothership. "I am scrambling fighters and putting the ship on General Quarters," Twilight finished. "Commodore?" Shining's head snapped up as Cloud Kicker's voice hit his ear. The pegasus had recovered from her earlier shock, at least enough to be hunched over her console instead of frozen stiff. "Yes, Commander?" he asked by way of response. "Reporting for duty, sir." Shining nodded. "Thank you, Tactical. Let’s get to work." --- "Okay ponies, we're on Code Black--full military lockdown! All DC teams to surface zones in all areas!" Applejack shouted into her headset, the panic infecting Fleet Command's voice spreading to her. Sitting back, she watched as her ponies scrambled to make it happen, and wondered. After all, they were supposed to be in orbit around Equus, weren't they? Why would Fleet Command order a lockdown there? Surely it was the safest place they could be? The more she turned her orders around in her mind, the less Applejack liked them. And if there were enemies out there, and now enemies here... --- "Vessels are exiting hyperspace...mark. Seven vessels have emerged from hyperspace, presumed hostile." "Two match the support vessels we saw near the Infinity," Twilight added a moment later. "They and a third vessel are launching fighters. 18, 36, 54...mark, I count 54, five-four fighters launched." She paused. "Something's different this time," she noted. "I'm picking up a huge amount of radio chatter and several active radars. Before, they were absolutely silent aside from their infrared emissions." "Maybe it's the number of ships?" Cloud Kicker suggested. "Could be they've outstripped the capacity of their laser transceivers." "If they use communications lasers," Shining noted. "Ops, how long until the fighters are formed up?" "Weren't on alert when we got back, sir, so it'll be a few minutes." "We do not have that much time," Twilight said. "They are currently forming up, but they would be able to reach us within a few minutes at most if they pressed an attack." "Ops, those fighters need to be out ASAP," Shining ordered. "Command, try to disrupt their communications, sensors, whatever you can." "Yes, sir," Thunder Rush answered before dropping into the launch control loop. "On it," Twilight added a moment later. --- As she moved to hook her suit up to the dispensary station, Lightning's voice snapped into her headset. "No time Lieutenant! The ship reservoirs are full, we'll fill up while we're launching." "Aye aye, ma'am," Rainbow stepped away and towards her fighter, pausing only to bump hooves with the technician standing next to it before stepping into the cockpit. The technician helped her strap herself down and connect her suit with the ship's systems before climbing back out and closing the hatch. For a moment she was plunged into absolute blackness before the displays lit up in a blaze of color. "Launch Control, Gold 11 ready for launch," she reported, frantically running over the displays to check if it was actually true. "Roger, Gold 11. Launch sequence initiated. Your orders are to cover Green and Black squadrons as they launch. Targeting data is being uploaded to your ship...now." Wait, what? Rainbow barely noticed as her ship slipped out of dock and towards the hanger exit.Targeting data? Cover? Around Equus? And...that was Fleet Command, not any of the normal launch control personnel! As her ship completed launching and exited the hanger, a second voice entered her suddenly topsy-turvy world as crisply as a uniform on inspection day. "Listen up Gold Squadron," Spitfire said. "Fleet's given us our orders, and we're going to make sure Green and Black have the opportunity to form up. Squadron, by sections! Section leaders, you're in charge! Some of these sons of bitches have tangled with us before, well, we're going to make them regret their decision to stop running!" Rainbow, unfortunately, hadn't heard a word of it. She was too busy gaping at what had sprung to life in her helmet's display. What lay to her right...and ahead of her...were beyond her power of comprehension. She shook her head. That, she could deal with later. For now, she had a job to do. --- "Range will be one-zero-zero miles on my mark...mark," Twilight announced to the quiet of the Operations Center. "They must be close to turnaround, but they're still accelerating at a steady 2 gee," she added for Shining's benefit. "Tactical concurs that they're on a brachistochrone, sir. At this acceleration rate, they'll not get any benefit from a fly-by." Shining glanced up at the holoprojector's display. The loose sphere of enemy fighters and what he could only presume were the enemy's heavy strike units hadn't changed much since they split away from their support units a minute after jumping in. The twelve green dots representing Gold Squadron and the others just streaming out and forming up seemed pathetic next to the armada advancing towards them. The countdown clock hovering at the edge of the display was ticking down each second until they reached the Mothership, telling them they only had a few minutes to organize a defense. "Tactical, Ops, Command, talk to me. We need to do something to break up their formation, or our other fighters won't have the chance to deploy." Cloud Kicker broke in first. "Sir, Tactical--I--think they're protecting not just their heavies but some type of bomber. See the wedge in the center of the formation, just in front of the box of heavies?" He did. Two "V"s of fighters crossing each other perpendicularly to form a hollow spear-head, a total of twelve ships in the group. "Each of them is about three times heavier than their scouts based on drive output levels," she continued. "That's not as heavy as our heavy fighters, but Command says they don't have turrets, either." "Yes," Twilight added. "I mean no, my sensors aren't picking up any sign of turreted weapons on any of the light craft, only the heavies." "Three times the mass is enough to fit much heavier weapons than their scouts could carry. I don't think the heavies are the only anti-Mothership weapons that they brought to this fight, sir." "And how does that help us, Tactical?" "Sir, I suggest Gold Squadron be vectored in to intercept these bombers. The enemy would be forced to react to their approach, especially if I'm right, and it would definitely disrupt them long enough to get the rest of our forces out before they can attack. If they can successfully take down these fighters, so much the better." "A glorious charge, Commander?" "Yes, sir. It's cold, I know, but Gold isn't the deciding factor here, Green, Black, and Red are. Even if Gold is completely knocked out, we'll have near numerical parity, 48 for us versus 54 for them, less whatever losses they take from Gold. And we'll have the Mothership's defensive weapons. If sacrificing them means protecting the others..." "...Ops, Command, give the orders." --- "Change in orders, Gold," Spitfire's voice sounded in Rainbow's ear. "Command's designating targets for interception. Maximum thrust." Rainbow slammed her fighter's throttle against its buffers, muscles tensing beneath her coat. In an instant, the g-meter hanging in the display ahead of her had flickered from zero to twenty, then jumped again, finally coming to rest just above 21. Rainbow felt herself sinking back into the padding of her seat, heard the structure groan as it adjusted to the forces acting on it. In the display ahead of her, the soft red icons of enemy fighters flared with brilliant coronas, infrared emissions skyrocketing. Rainbow's ears flicked as the warning receiver sounded a high-pitched tone, her attention switching for a moment to the radar plot to see whether there were any incoming missiles. Ahead, the enemy formation was pulling into a twisted cone aimed at Gold. Rainbow glanced at the mission clock. Less than twenty seconds until they hit their targets, fifteen until they were among the fighters protecting them. A white path to the boxed cluster of spacecraft she was aiming at popped up on the screen, her computer's best guess at a survivable path. She gripped her joysticks and began to follow, sub-vocalizing as she designated the fighters along it as targets of opportunity. Ten seconds to contact. Rainbow ran over her fighter's status again. Fuel, good, systems, good, ammunition, full. Nothing for her to do. Five seconds. At this rate, there was a better than 50% chance of hitting the nearest fighters. She pushed the trigger. At once, the display lit up in a blaze of light. Even before her burst had finished exiting the barrel, the computer was screaming at her to take evasive action. She obliged, twisting about just enough for the main drive to throw her off her previous course before turning back towards her targets. As she turned, her nose drifted across another fighter and she unleashed another quarter-second burst before diving off target. Before she finished turning back towards the center of the enemy formation, Rainbow twirled again to evade another burst of enemy fire, gun tracking just close enough to another target of opportunity for her to fire again. As she nosed down towards the scattering flock, another pulsed warning tone from the incoming fire alarm split her skull, and she was forced to dodge away again, only able to fire on two more enemy fighters for her trouble. She swung violently towards her targets, too spread out now for her to catch all of them--and she was still ten seconds away. Snarling as best she could while, technically, drowning, she swung away again as her computer warned her of more incoming fire. Another hapless enemy crossed her sights and was rewarded with a burst of gunfire before she was again able to turn towards her targets. Five seconds away, and it was time to attack. She got off a burst, swung and let off another--then she had to jink away again, losing her chance to strike a third target--and she was past, out of engagement range. Ahead of her, there were only stragglers, a few fighters who hadn't joined in the main clash earlier. None of them were in range, and she slipped past them at speed, heading straight out of the battlespace. As she passed beyond the last fighters, the trilling of incoming fire monitors, the teeth-jarring whine of the warning receiver, and the hoot of the proximity alarm faded away, replaced by little more than the faint whirr of pumps and hum of electronics. She checked the mission clock. Fifteen seconds had passed since they had hit the first line of fighters. --- As it had at the Infinity, the Operations Center lapsed into a tense silence as Gold Squadron neared the edge of the enemy formation, a warped cone calculated to hit Gold's flying wedge point-to-point. Shining Armor couldn't turn away as the two wedges met and both red and green dots began to vanish from the holoprojector. Nearer the Mothership, each second saw Green and Black move into more and more coherent formations, and Red into better and better positions from which to defend the Mothership. Cloud Kicker interrupted as Gold's wedge broke through the enemy lines, only a second or two after it reached them. "Sir, they're not trying to brake," she said, a hint of surprise in her voice. "Their scouts are coming straight towards us at full throttle. They'll blow past us at this rate." "Assessment?" "They'll be in range only a little after Gold clears the rear of their formation. Main elements will be separated by quite a bit...enough time for engagements not to overlap," she added, surprise hitching up a notch or two. "Looks like we got what we wanted." On the holoprojector, Gold's wedge, by this point clearly thinned, was nearly halfway through what had been the sphere of enemy units. "Sir, Sensors is seeing something very interesting," Cloud Kicker again intruded, only a moment later. "Look at this." A new window popped up on his personal display, showing a greatly zoomed-in view of a small part of the battlespace. Besides the ship icons, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of needles rapidly flying across the screen, too quickly for him to follow. "Tactical, what am I supposed to be seeing here?" It was obviously a real-time plot of weapons trajectories, but her tone clearly indicated that he was supposed to be seeing something more. "If you filter the kinetics by origin and eliminate all those not launched by the bombers..." All of the needles vanished from the plot. "There's nothing. Absolutely nothing. They haven't fired a shot," she finished. Up on the holoprojector, Gold was exiting the enemy formation. Even a casual observer could see that they had been mauled on the way through, while the tide of red icons was sweeping into range of the other squadrons. "Very interesting, Tactical, but I need a situation report. Now." "Just a moment...the enemy took serious losses. Three scouts, and eight other fighters, seven from the targeted formation. That leaves five of the suspected bombers." "And Gold?" he asked, dreading the answer. He could almost hear her grimace. "They lost six, sir." --- Spitfire's voice sliced back into Rainbow's headset like a rusty blade, worn and dulled by hard use. "Gold, report." "Gold Four, reporting." "Gold Six, reporting." "Gold Seven, reporting," Lightning said. "...Gold Eleven, reporting," Rainbow added. "Gold Fifteen, reporting." Silence. "Okay," Spitfire said a moment later. "Four, on me. Fifteen, on Six. Eleven, stick with Seven. Turnover...now!" She slewed her fighter around to point back towards the Mothership, once again feeling the thrust as her fighter fought to slow back down and return to the battle. Her cockpit's displays gave her a perfect view of the battle unfolding ahead of her as she waited out the deceleration, unable to tear her eyes away. For a few seconds, the elongated cone of enemy fighters was tangled up in the loose wall of Equestrian ships, the mutual disappearance of icons from the plot silent evidence of the fight, before punching through and soaring out past the Mothership. Infrared and gamma signatures dimmed as they turned around like Gold to decelerate and head back towards the Equestrians, giving Green and Black a few seconds before the next wave hit them. Unlike the bulk of the enemy, the next force had slowed nearly to a standstill as they approached, turning at the last second to pull Green and Black into a twisting, turning, and rapidly growing furball. Skirting the edge of the dogfight, another force of light ships, the targets Gold had been aimed at, headed for the Mothership, undeterred by the guns and missiles of Red Squadron or the defenses of the Mothership itself. More vanished from the screen, but the rest continued until they were within a mile of the Mothership's flanks before sharply turning and soaring just past the bow of the ship. In the background, the four heavies had stopped completely, turning to face the Mothership head-on. A soft ding sounded in her ears. Rainbow's attention flicked from the tactical plot to her status indicators, locking on almost instantly to the velocity ticker...which was now racing upwards instead of downwards. Her smile was feral. --- "Rarity," Pinkie urgently said, "something's wrong." Rarity gave her friend a flat look as they crowded together in the shelter for the second time that day. "Really?" "No, I mean, really wrong," she insisted. Pinkie looked seriously out of sorts, her mane and tail having collapsed from their ordinary puffiness into a matted, snarled tangle of pink hair. And her eyes had the look of somepony being hunted, totally free of their usual cheery outlook. "Okay Pinkie, I believe you," she assured her. "But what is wrong? Do you know?" "No," Pinkie admitted. "But whatever it is is really, really wrong. I've got a bad feeling..." A long, low rumble rolled through the shelter. Rarity looked up. Another sounded, even longer and lower. "Really bad, Rarity!" --- A long, low rumble rolled through the Operations Center. Shining looked up from the holoprojector just in time to see the entire room tremble slightly as a second low rumble thundered for a long moment. Twilight broke into his communications headset. "Kinetics. Those heavies are armed with heavy kinetics--they just breached one of the water storage bays--" Before he could say anything else, a new window opened up on his console, showing the view from one of the hull cameras. For a moment, he could see a huge plume of snow spraying from a jagged crater in the distance before the view blacked out. "What was that?" "It--some kind of particle beam. It fried the camera's electronics. And they're deploying some kind of plasma bomb--" "Ops, Tactical," he keyed in the two officers, "we need to shut down those heavies--" "Not with our forces occupied like this, sir" Thunder Rush baldly stated. "But if we don't..." Cloud Kicker murmured just loudly enough for everyone to hear. "And Green and Black aren't carrying nuclear heads, are they Ops?" Shining asked. "No sir, kinetics only." "I doubt those will be effective against ships of that size, sir," Cloud Kicker chimed in. A slight change in the motion filling the center of the holoprojector caught Shining's eye. Two fighters--friendly fighters--were breaking out of the swirling maelstrom and heading back towards the Mothership. Four more slid into place behind them, forcing a gaggle of hostiles to break off pursuit and head back into the main battle. "Ops, what's going on there?" he asked. "Uh...several of our fighters were damaged and low on ammunition, so they were falling back." Shining studied the holoprojector for a moment. "Ops," he started slowly, "rearm those fighters with nuclear missiles. Tactical, I want you to coordinate rearming the ones still fighting with Ops. Once you have enough rearmed, I want you to work together to launch a strike on those heavies. We need to wear them down at least, not let them just attack with no response." "Yes, sir," Cloud Kicker said before disappearing from the conversation. "It'll be the hanger’s top priority," Thunder Rush promised before he, too, cut the link. --- "Alert. Hull integrity breached. Loss of pressure in sectors--" Applejack growled at the latest bit of bad news. "DC teams 269 to 301, ah need you to report to zones 264 and 265, at a gallop! Make sure to bring your suits!" She crushed the channel button, switching to read about the next problem that had been bounced up to her. Around her, she could half-hear snippets of her team frantically trying to keep everything in check-- "DC team 91, please come in. Team 91, we need you--” “I’m not getting--these radiation levels are impossible, what’s--” --Even as she was struggling with her own problems. She abruptly stopped reading, and hammered the channel button again. "Lookin' at this...ah have to say, let's evacuate all surface sectors. Atmosphere, get them pumped down ASAP!" --- “Gold Eleven, this is Seven. I’m passing my target list to you. Cover me.” Rainbow glanced at the mission clock. Thirty seconds to contact. Ahead of her, the red and green icons of the two fighter forces were swirling in a maelstrom of combat, encompassing most of the space between the Mothership and the enemy heavies. A cluster of golden boxes sprang up on the edge of the dogfight, highlighting Lightning’s targets. Sub-vocalizing, Rainbow told the computer to add her section leader’s secondary targets to her own primary targets list, and vice-versa, all the while monitoring the sensors for anyone trying to attack Lightning’s fighter. Six seconds. The closest fighters--their targets--were turning to meet Gold. On the edge of her vision, she could see the other two sections pushing ahead. Four, three--Lighting fired, and a split-second later, Rainbow followed, unleashing a quarter-second burst before turning to escape, bringing a second target into range, earning it another burst before she dodged again. A second later, and she was slipping past the pair of Green interceptors the cluster of fighters they had smashed into had been chasing, and towards the center of the fight. Lightning turned and burned, targeting a knot of Black fighters and the squadron of enemies they were battling, pulling Rainbow along behind her. Rainbow rushed to update her targeting computer, in between taking potshots at every enemy they passed and dodging return fire. Ahead, the group they were targeting had split in two to attack the Black section from both sides at once. Clever, but it meant the two of them could go after just one of the groups at a time. Quickly, she and Lightning divvied up the targets, then they slammed into the edge of the group, spitting fire and forcing the enemy fighters to scatter away. For a moment, Rainbow saw the friendlies they had saved turn to engage the rest of the fighters before they flashed past. Together, they flipped and throttled to the max, killing their velocity before they exited the battlespace. Rainbow slowed to trail Lightning as they headed back in, aimed at a trio of enemy fighters harassing a mismatched pair of Green and Black spacecraft halfway across the battle from them. As they approached, the formation split, streaking away to escape being smashed between hammer and anvil. Rainbow arced towards her primary target, on the left, while Lightning headed for hers, on the right. The space between her wings tensed, and before she could think about it she turned and throttled up into a tight spin, bending her trajectory by more than ninety degrees in an instant. Before she fully comprehended what she had just done, the proximity alarm blared. The hair on her neck stood on end for a moment as she realized what had just happened, before she was forced to dodge away again. Behind her! There was someone behind her! “Seven, Lightning, I’ve got someone on my tail,” she pleaded before spiraling away once again, just in time to evade another burst of gunfire. Before she could repeat her message, Lightning crisply replied. “Roger Eleven, inbound.” In the corner of her tactical plot, Rainbow could see Lightning’s fighter turn towards her and her pursuer, visibly accelerating away from the fighter she had been engaging. She turned again as her pursuer fired, inside their weapon's envelope, forcing the kinetics to fly wildly out past her, then braked, trying to turn the tables and force her enemy to overshoot. Before she slowed as much as a hoof per second, her enemy was already following suit, and she had to twist about again before another spray of impactors could come her way. As she racked her brain trying to think of another trick to try, her nemesis turned violently about itself, twisting to face another threat...there! First her rounds, then her fighter flashed by as Lightning made good on her promise. None of them hit so far as Rainbow could see, but her opening had arrived; in an instant, Rainbow slewed nearly all the way around, facing directly opposite where she had less than a second earlier. For a moment, everything moved in slow motion as she finished lining up the gun pipper with her target, setting it dead center. Then she fired. In an instant, fifty rounds crossed the narrow gap between them, smashing into and through the side of the fighter like it was cardboard. For an instant, it hung there, before vanishing in a sea of pure white light. --- Shining turned away from the mesmerizing image of the battle towards the more mundane business occupying his console. “Ops,” he asked, “how is the rearming going?” “Slowly, sir. The nuclear heads are all in secure storage, and it’s taking a long time to cart them down to the hanger. We’ve only managed to get the first two fighters ready so far, sir.” Before he could say anything, Twilight broke into the conversation. “I’m picking up...hyperspace fluctuations around the enemy ships are increasing!” “What? Fleet Command, what’s--” “Significant hyperspace signatures are building up around all of the enemy heavies...they must have decided they can’t win and are leaving to get reinforcements! If they manage to escape...last time they brought back the heavies, next time--we have to destroy them immediately!” “Fleet--Twilight, calm down. I need to know--how long before they can jump?” “I’m extrapolating from known core charge rates and jump energy requirements...six minutes.” “Ops, you heard her. Put together a strike force from what you have and get the rest loaded ASAP!” --- Rainbow scowled as the cockpit displays rebooted. Half of them were blank black even after they powered back up, indicating that her ship was suffering from serious computer or sensor problems. "--Eleven, c--ne--rder--scort stri--" And her comm systems had completely broken down. She didn't know of any problem that could cause that level of crackling and static, and didn't even know it happened outside of old movies. Seeing Lightning's icon on the tactical plot--one of the screens still working, thank the Sisters--move away, Rainbow followed. She didn't know what was going on, but her chance of being able to contribute, to keep fighting were far higher with her commander than on her own, half-blind in the middle of a battle. As they moved towards the Mothership, Rainbow busied herself running through the ship's self-diagnostics. All of the front-facing sensors had been completely burned out by the blast. Unsurprisingly, the laser transceivers had been destroyed as well, and the primary omni antenna had been melted into scrap. The secondary antenna hadn't deployed for some reason, which was probably why the comms systems had completely crashed. Her dosimeter had hit the buffers, and she suspected she would need to visit the medical wards the instant she was back on the Mothership, but she wasn't sick...yet. At least the radar, drive, and main computer systems were checking back as mostly okay, along with her gun. She could still fight, if nothing else. Suddenly, Lighting's trajectory swept back out from the Mothership, towards one of the heavies, along with the rest of Gold. Surprised, Rainbow raced to follow, sliding into place behind Lightning as they headed back out. On what passed for her tactical plot with just a radar, she could see that Gold was clustered in a loose wedge around a pair of interceptors, a basic escort formation. She guessed it was a strike mission, especially given what few communications she had received in any vaguely understandable form. Ahead, the dogfight was breaking up, with ships from both sides breaking off in droves for their respective home bases. Only a few minutes after starting, it was already dissolving. Nopony seemed to notice them as they sped through, accelerating for what seemed to be their target. --- Shining Armor glanced up at the holoprojector for a moment, then back down at his console. Dominating the center of the screen was a zoomed-in view of the eight fighters currently flying towards the nearest of the enemy heavies, now thrusting hard away from the Mothership, as if sensing the danger it was in. "Sir, the next pair of fighters is almost done loading," Thunder Rush interrupted. "Good," he said. "Scramble an escort and organize a strike on the next heavy as soon as they launch." On the screen, the tiny clump of Equestrian fighters began to slow, fighting to stop as far away from the enemy ship as possible. Almost invisibly, four tiny slivers continued flying towards the target. --- Nopony knew it, but two of the missiles streaking for the enemy ship were already condemned to fail. With the rush to rearm and load the missiles onto their fighters, a few small details had been overlooked by the harried ground crew. The safing pin inserted in missile #2's warhead, for example, intended to prevent any accidental detonations while in ground storage but supposed to be removed before loading, defanging the missile entirely. Or the precise arrangement of the umbilicals connecting missile #3 to its mothership for power, data, and other services while in flight. Before it even left its launch tube, a massive power surge had blown out its guidance computers and sensors, leaving it to fly blindly in the general direction of the enemy. But the other two had suffered no such faults, and were already warming up their warheads as they flew towards the enemy ship, carefully estimating the distance to the ship to ensure they detonated at the right moment. A fraction of a second before its counterpart, missile #1 entered optimal range. A stream of commands passed down from its control computer to the electronics embedded within the warhead. In a hollow space at the center of the outer radiation case, a nearly transparent pink shielding spell--one of the largest and by far the toughest shield ever artificially generated--sprang into being, hanging stationary for an instant before sweeping inwards, crushing the sphere of lithium deuteride in the center in an inescapable vise. Just before the resulting pressures exceeded even the shield's ability to contain them, the final stage of the detonator triggered, dumping a massive electrical pulse into a fine network of wires lining the outer edge of the weapon's core, igniting a nuclear fire as the atoms of the fuel were crushed together. Before the weapon could blow itself apart, a second shield appeared around the inside of the radiation case. Able to hold against even the fury of an unconfined nuclear explosion for a fraction of a second, this one had a flaw; a weakness in one part of the shield, aligned with a similar thinning in the radiation case. Charging through this weakness and the carefully designed layering of materials beyond, the fusion explosion found itself shaped, channeled into a narrow beam. By the time it punched through the forward end of the missile, vaporizing it in an instant, it had become a deadly lance of star-stuff, aimed directly towards the ship's tail. In a fraction of a second, the plasma lance crossed the few pitiful miles separating it from its target, ramming into the ship's flank at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. For a moment, its armor, the finest product a galactic civilization could bring to bear against any physical danger, held, then it shivered away under the bombardment of atomic flame. The remains of the lance charged, through the gap created by the armor's failure, running wildly among the less well protected innards of the ship until at last splashing against the main plasma conduit connecting the antimatter reactor to the primary drive systems. Superconducting cables lining the conduit failed under the incredible heat, and antimatter-laced plasma spun out of control, gouging deep into the refractory lining of the inner wall. Before it could break through and destroy the rest of the ship, however, emergency controls snapped into place. The reactor's output was redirected down a set of backup conduits. Backups to the systems that had been knocked out by the strike began to come online. The ship began to shake off the effects of the hit, too well-engineered to fall to a single strike. Then missile #4 struck amidships. Ripping through the hull forwards of the first strike, it tore at the ship's antimatter storage system, slicing through the barrel-thick bundle of superconducting cables connecting it directly to the ship's reactors. For a fraction of a second, the total annihilation of the ship seemed assured as the super-cold ball of antihydrogen stored in its center veered dangerously close to the walls before the emergency systems could kick in, pushing it back away before they could brush. In the meantime, with the ship's power consumption wildly fluctuating, the ship's power reactors were struggling to keep from completely failing. After cutting their power output by nearly a quarter in the microseconds between the primary connection dropping out and the backup coming back online, they were forced to surge back to regular output. Overstressed by the massive fluctuations, the main reactor completely failed, allowing the fusing plasma within to scorch the inner wall for a moment before cooling to harmlessness, putting it beyond the reach of anything short of a total rebuild. The backup reactor raced to replace the primary's output, overwhelming and tripping the circuit breakers isolating it from the rest of the ship's systems. With no power coming in through the primary, secondary, or tertiary power circuits, there was only one option left to prevent the complete destruction of the ship. Capacitors kicked in, mechanical relays flipped, and the final line of defense against containment failure was called into action. Whorls of magnetic force tore the rapidly vaporizing wisps of antihydrogen surrounding the main storage sphere into an array of tubes lining the surface of the containment volume, rushing away under the pressure of the material behind to vents lining almost the entire surface of the ship and out into space, where they headed directly into the sleet of particles surrounding Equus, annihilating in mass quantities, reducing them to little more than a spectacular fireworks display. Almost as an afterthought, the hyperspace core deep within the ship began discharging, releasing its power back into the ship's electrical circuits. The jump had been aborted. --- "Target one's hyperspace signature is vanishing," Twilight reported, "EM activity is way down, we must have cut their power systems." "Ops," Shining ordered, "launch what you have as you get them and vector them on enemy heavies. We--" "Wait..." Twilight interrupted. "Hyperspace signatures are spiking for all enemy ships! They're disappearing from all sensors...they're gone!" Shining was the first to react. "What happened, Command?" "I...I don't know!" Twilight answered, shocked. "I mean, clearly they jumped out, but they shouldn't have had enough power to do that for three minutes!" "Your guess must have been wrong, then," Cloud Kicker said. "Well...but...how?" "I don't know, but I do know that means we need to clean up after this battle. And fast, sir." Halfway across the room, she turned towards Shining Armor. "Ops," he started, "first priority is SAR, we need to pick up any pony who ejected. And any alien too, maybe more so. Second priority is to salvage that disabled frigate. Security, we need boarding teams to accompany each of the salvage crews. That ship's crew might still be alive and ready to defend. If at all possible, I want them brought back living. We need answers, and we need a live crew to get them." "And," he added, "mobilize SAR crews to start searching the Scaffold's wreckage. If anypony's alive in there, I want them out." "Sir," Cloud Kicker said, in an almost excessively level voice, "what exactly do you think you're doing?" "Mobilizing SAR efforts on the ships and stations at hoof, Tactical," he responded, equally nonchalant. In the pit below him, he could see her tear her headset off before spinning around and stomping up towards him. As she stepped up to his console, she slowed, spreading her wings almost unconsciously and cutting them off from the others' vision. "You're making a mistake, sir," she growled. "No, listen to me, sir," she said before he could open his mouth. "Have you thought what this attack implies? In just a few hours, the forces we engaged at the Infinity traveled back to their base of operations, were reinforced, and managed to return. How long will it take to search the Scaffold for survivors? Days? Weeks? How many more attacks will we have to face?" "And," she continued, gesturing at the holoprojector, "think about what that means. The orbital fighter bases, the Scaffold, the low orbit defense platforms, altogether they had five times as many fighters and a hundred times as many missiles as we do, and they were utterly annihilated. None of our fighter squadrons is at more than 50% strength, Gold is virtually disabled, and many of our surface turrets were wrecked by those heavies. We couldn't fight off a disabled mosquito at the moment, let alone even a fraction of the fleet that must have destroyed Equus." "I...I certainly understand why you feel the way you do, sir. We all had friends, and some of us family, on board the Scaffold. Believe me, if I knew my husband was alive over there, I'd like nothing more than to pull him out of that wreckage himself. But, but I can't delude myself. The shelters weren't designed to take that, and even if a few survived, they'd run out of air, water, food, power, something long before we could find them. He's dead. They're dead, sir. And our duty is to the living, not the dead." Shining opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again. Before he could start, though, he closed it. Finally, he started speaking, "Tactical, I--" "Wait. Wait!" Twilight interrupted, excited. "The cryo trays! We need to recover them Shiny, we--" "Twilight, slow down," Shining said. "The cryo trays? They would have been destroyed with the Scaffold." "I thought that too, but they're actually intact!" The holoprojector zoomed towards the edge of the Scaffold's debris field where, as promised, six titanic white slabs quietly rested, miraculously untouched. "I'm interrogating their systems...they're almost undamaged! A few systems issues, but nothing especially serious...we need to start retrieving them, right away," she insisted. "She's right, sir," Cloud Kicker added before he could speak. "Okay...okay," he muttered. "You're right. You're both right. Ops," he added in a louder tone, "countermand those previous orders. Priority 1 is to recover the cryo trays. Priority 2 is search-and-rescue. Priority 3 is to capture that ship. Ignore the Scaffold." His hoof came down heavily on the communications controls, cutting them off. "You did the right thing, sir," Cloud Kicker whispered to him before turning and trotting back to her console. --- Rainbow blinked as her ship entered the hanger bay. Was it just her, or were the walls closer together than before? As she watched, the walls seemed to move, waving in and out. That...definitely was not good. She couldn't tell whether it was radiation sickness or sheer exhaustion, but she was happy, for once, that she didn't need to be a pilot. Finally, she saw her docking sleeve rise out of the background, silently thanking the Sisters as her fighter pulled up to it and came to a halt. As it stopped, she reached down and pushed the emergency release button between her legs, ejecting the cockpit hatch, then reached up and grasped the edge of the hatch, pulling as hard as she could, to end up suspended half in and half out of the cockpit, the forwards half of her body collapsed on the catwalk. Frantically, another wave of nausea threatening to completely overwhelm her, she reached for her helmet's quick-release catch. As she pushed it, her helmet fell away onto the catwalk, spilling liquid over the metal surface. Her chest squeezed, and a thin stream of clear liquid shot from her mouth for a second in a drowned groan before a wave of vile yellow vomit followed, spreading over the puddles already littering the floor. Her stomach lurched again, sending another wave of bile out across the floor. She tried to lift her head from the puddle of vomit surrounding her, only for her neck muscles to give out halfway, sending her muzzle back down to splash in the stuff. Around her, she could dimly hear the ground staff shouting. She could felt the ground crew lifting her, raising her into the air before lowering her onto a gurney. As they carried her away, Rainbow watched as the world faded to black. --- "Cryo tray six recovered. Integration in progress," Twilight Sparkle said as the massive door covering the cryo tray processing area slowly slammed shut. "Tray 5 is 12% integrated. Tray 4 is 31% integrated. Tray 3 is 52% integrated. Tray 2 is 71% integrated. Tray 1 is 99% integrated. No active SAR beacons detected. No signs of life detected. Enemy ship is undergoing processing. SAR crews are onboard the Mothership...Shiny, we can go," she reminded him. "There's nothing left for us here," he muttered to himself, before adding, "Command, let's go. Jump at your discretion." "Hyperspace core charged. Setting coordinates...generated and set. Brace for jump in three, two, one..."