CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON
I broke into a trot, with my Equestrin physique that amounted to a flat-out run for Terrestrial Ponies. Even a Pegasus with a dive behind them would have been hard put to keep up with me. A Unicorn could teleport faster but I could cover an awful lot of ground in the time it would take to cast the spell and Luna help the one who tried to materialize directly in my path in an effort to stop me!
The Mare In My Head quietly tried to put on the brakes but I overrode her inputs every time. She tried to point out that I had no idea where I was going and that I was in unfamiliar territory but I told her what to do with her suggestions… after wrapping them in razor wire first! She replied with some choice retorts straight from the lowest levels of Equestrin Society complete with visual aids and threw herself back into her Command Chair and produced a padd to catch up on some reading. She pointedly swiveled her chair away from the Main Viewer and hunched her shoulders just to drive home the point that she could be just as stubborn as me. She made a gesture over her shoulder with one hoof and a single digit that effectively ended the discussion.
Out of sheer spite I killed the lights on the Bridge and left her fumbling to find the light on her padd in the dark, cursing in the dark!
Ok, it wasn’t my proudest moment… but I wasn’t much concerned with my pride just then. All I had was my grief and fear and the burning tears that I had to keep dashing from my eyes as I tried to run away.
To this day I have no clear recollection of the path I took or how long I ran. Eventually, though, I managed to notice some of the weirder aspects of the place I was running through.
I started down corridors that wouldn’t have been out of place on any ship of the Starfleet, or any good passenger liner for that matter. But at some point the neutral walls and hidden lighting gave way to other decors…
There were occasional frames in the corridors like the bulkheads in a ship where one would expect to find the housings for the doors that would seal a corridor in the event of an emergency. More often than not, in the TARDIS, these signaled a chance for a change in architecture.
I remember going down corridors lined with synthetic flooring and walls, not unlike those on the Hermes. I also remember times when my boots rang on metal decking, thumped hollowly on wooden planking, or slapped on stone. The lighting would change, ranging from hidden track to old-style fluorescent tubes, incandescent bulbs, floating glow-globes of various shades, even incredibly archaic oil lamps made of brass and smoky glass!
There were doors every so often. Modern sliding pocket-doors, metal panels, painted wood, even brass-bound timbers or planks with bright copper nails. Bright, worn copper door latches, stainless steel doorknobs or their crystal or plastic counterparts refused to catch my eye noncommittally as I passed. I didn’t care. I. Just. Didn’t. Care.
I ground to a halt eventually. I wasn’t tired, far from it. I was bursting with the need to do something but there just wasn’t any point any more in just running. I sank to my knees and hugged myself. I cried and, when that just wasn’t good enough, I screamed and beat on the floor. But the floor only mocked me silently. I snarled and looked around for something that would yield satisfying results. My hoof found the balephaser attached to the back of my trousers. I tore the thing clear and regarded it with mayhem on my mind.
The sarium krellide power cell in it contained enough energy to vaporize me and a hundred feet or so of the immediate landscape, the Balefire that remained would be my only tombstone. The energy density of the thing is truly frightening; the casing was about skin temperature, a tribute to the fantastic amount of power pent up inside it. The tiniest crack in the insulation would set off the equivalent of a one point five kiloton explosion right in my face. Balephasers are recharged via a high energy plasma tap routed from Engineering. An arc from a loose connection in the process can take out cubic yards of the Ship before the safeties killed the circuit as they engaged in less than a billionth of a second! Engineering and Security don’t get paid enough!
I’m Equestrin stupid, but I’m not Roamulan stupid! I carefully removed the powercell and slid it a discrete distance away. I gripped the tiny, lifeless remnant of the weapon as best I could with both hooves and wrenched will all my might. The thing popped and creaked as it bent and twisted in my grasp. The cylindrical forepart of the gun, the part that rotated to allow changes in the power settings, broke free of the rest with a snap into my right hoof leaving the ruined pistol grip in my left. Leftover components littered the floor in front of me as I flung both halves away. As I listened to the clattering impacts I became aware of a stinging in my left hoof. Looking there, I saw blood. The duraplastic housing had shattered and some stray shard, sharp as glass, slashed my palm and three fingers. The bleeding slowed and stopped even as I watched. Score one for Augment physiology! I wiped the blood off on the side of my trousers and encountered the bottle of Janx Spirit in my pocket.
I pulled the thing out carefully, grateful and a little amazed that it hadn’t broken by then. Obviously it was made of something sturdier than mere glass! I hefted it in my hoof and held it up to the light to study it with an Equestrin eye that was more familiar with exotic crystalline forms than the average Terrestrial Pony.
It felt cold to the touch and the surface was free of scratches or the blurring one could expect from mere reheated silica. I popped the stopper, made from the same stuff, and tapped the neck of the bottle with it. It chimed a soft, deep chime. Rock crystal, possibly a precious or semi-precious gemstone of some sort I wasn’t familiar with…
The area of the TARDIS I was in just then was walled in stone blocks, gray in color. Dressed but not polished, the stone was rough to the touch and the blocks were set without mortar. I couldn’t identify the type of stone. The ceiling was apparently slabs of the same stuff, darker in hue. The floor was paved with hexagonal flags of something dark like polished basalt. This section of the place was lit by short sections of cylindrical crystals held in brass brackets high up on the wall opposite me every twenty feet or so. They gleamed with cold yellow light faintly tinged with orange; call it about forty watts apiece. Dimmer than the corridors of the Hermes but just about as bright as the sections of the Mines of Equestris I labored in when I was younger.
I held the bottle up until it was between me and the nearest light fixture. No refraction or distortion, only the faintest prismatic effect as the light flowed through the smooth edges of the thing. Quite a neat piece of work!
Maybe it was the pain, maybe it was the primal satisfaction gained from the gratuitous destruction of over fifteen thousand credits worth of equipment… the dilithium chips in balephasers are expensive… but my useless anger had drained away leaving only the echoing void of despair and uncertainty in my heart. I grinned a grim grin as I tried to convince myself that this was an improvement.
I looked around at my surroundings. I usually have an eidetic memory but my grief and heartache had kept me from paying attention to precisely which turnings and twistings I had taken to get to my present locale. I was lost and alone in the labyrinth of a time travelling, extra-dimensional construct built by an enigmatic alien species belonging to a self-professed madpony and his sweet natured, autistic sidekick. To make matters worse I had gotten myself lost, running away blindly from the prospect of my responsibilities. I sighed and sagged back against the wall. …So much for the advantages of being a genetically ‘superior’ breed, I could just imagine the Eugenics Council back Home shaking their heads. In the pre-Federation days my personal DNA would be reevaluated in an effort to weed out whatever imperfection brought me to this state. I’d probably be sterilized. Maybe Daddy would be, too. Certainly my entire bloodline would come under intense scrutiny. I was already a Tier Four Citizen, existing on probationary status until I could demonstrate that I could be of some viable use to the Colony. I was a borderline dwarf, my body being just above an arbitrarily acceptable minimum height that would just allow me to operate equipment designed for my more Optimal kinsponies. My sexual preference was for my own gender and I’d already eschewed the idea of being a broodmare for excess sperm and ova from more ‘gifted’ Equestrins. Performing manual labor in exchange for a higher education was my only hope of proving my worth. If my genes were declared defective the only alternative was the Soylent Tanks. In the eyes of the Council there was no gain in feeding useless mouth, at least my biomass would serve some useful purpose.
Is it any wonder that I jumped at the chance when the Federation called for volunteers to fight the Roamulans? It was my chance to show all of them that I was worth keeping, that I was an asset and not a liability. I didn’t do so badly after all. I survived the War… a lot of other Ponies didn’t… and I made the rank of Commander in Starfleet to boot. Hell! Nowadays they call me Captain, not too shabby for a Mare from the Colonies!
But I could just imagine the Council’s reaction. It’s easy to shine, I’m sure they’d point out the fact, when you keep the company of non-Augments. I’m supposed to be better by my very nature. It’s what I was bred to be. That was the whole point of Augmentation, remember? Or was I too inherently inferior to feel the pride of my ancestry? Too many of them say that I live with suboptimals just so I could feel superior to somepony, to be the big nugget in the pile of gravel for a change. I’m only in Starfleet for the sake of stroking my poor little ego that I choose to live in a society steeped with Magic because I need all the help I can get. They would point out, in any event, that I only got the Captain job over the dead body of my friend. I didn’t make it on my natural talents; I was just next in line for the position. It was given to me by a quirk of Federation bureaucracy.
The smell of olives and cough syrup wasn’t an attractive distraction but it was a more appealing prospect than my dark musings just then. I contemplated the bottle I held in my hoof and shook it a little, setting the electric green fluid within it dancing in the weak light. I raised the thing in a silent salute to the Federation that gave me the chance to become something better and took a drink.
I gasped and coughed. My eyes watered as my sinuses and palate seethed with, well, green! The color of the trees and grass back on Earth, the waters of Equestris, and the fur of the exotic dancers from the Orion system in that bar on Wiggley’s Pleasure Planet…
I blinked and shook my head, eyeing the bottle askance. I put the stopper back in firmly and rose to my hooves with just a little bit of swaying. I paused and took a deep breath that made the green fumes swirl in my nasal cavities. I wiped my eyes and stuck the thing back in my pocket resolutely.
I might not be the most Optimal daughter of Equestris or the most dutiful granddaughter of Earth. I don’t make any claims to being the best or brightest anything of the Federation. I’m just a Pony with no wings or horns or any sort of Magic in my genome that can be scientifically quantified (If that is even possible, semantically speaking!) Maybe I don’t measure up to their exacting standards but I sure as Hell didn’t need to resort to a bottle to cope with my inadequacies! Take that, Equestris! And a little gesture as old as Equine middle digits for the Council for good measure!
On the subject of Magic, they teach us on Equestris … and the Vulcan Science Academy agrees… that ‘Magic’ is nothing more than raw psi, Metaphysics rather than hocus-pocus. Pegasai flight is a result of a psionically-created inertial dampening field. Telekinesis is obviously the result of manipulating local Spacetime, the same goes for teleportation. A Science based on a different set of physical laws that at present defies conventional qualification. The latest theories postulate an ability to manipulate energy at the sub-quantum level via an act of will. It amounts to nothing less than changing reality. Think of it in relation to the ways the forces of electricity and magnetism were perceived before the Industrial Revolution and it falls into place. An author of the early twentieth century, I think his name was Clerke… Carte… something like that. He was quoted as saying that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from Magic.’ Any Pony from the Paleopony Period would swear that each and every one of us in the present were Sorcerers of the highest caliber! Even the abilities that Tyllae exhibited aren’t so farfetched when you consider her as a member of a fantastically advanced species. After all the gulf between the Paleopony Period and us is less than an eye blink in the history of her people. What is incomprehensible ‘Magic’ to us is as natural to her as being able to do simple arithmetic in our heads is to us.
Like Hindstein said, it’s all relative. If we keep calm and look at things logically, like the Vulcans, we’d be better off. The Vulcans have been around for a long time so there has to be something to what they say…
I paused to look around me and frowned. The Vulcan Science Academy also proved, mathematically, that Time Travel is categorically impossible. It would be interesting to see how Sekkack would take the news of the TARDIS. Would the Academy be as hidebound as the Council of Equestris or would they be willing to admit that they were wrong about something? The peril of associating with Aliens, it seems, is that they can point out things about your culture that you take for granted… like the unshakeable faith in ones people’s infallible correctness and the intolerance of others ideas. The idea that the culture one was bred in is the only one with the correct grasp of what is Right and Good is something that every intelligent species seem to share with one another. Hell, even the Vulcans hint at a dark, savage past in their histories. Something that made Khan look like a fumbling piker. Now there’s a frightening thought!
The Augments had a dream of the Perfect World once upon a time, one which they refused to compromise on. They tried to cram it down everypony else’s throats… a process that ultimately killed sixty percent of the Earth’s population. Before that the Rushins and the Neighmaricans were locked in a war of ideologies that held the world hostage for decades. And before that, the Germanes tried the same thing with less finesse… twice… as the ghosts of Neighpoleon and the Roaman Emperors looked on approvingly.
A cynical observer of Pony nature… like, oh I don’t know, maybe a certain group of voluntary exiles residing a marginally livable world twenty-odd light years away for instance… would be tempted to point out that it is an inherent flaw in the species that allows it to follow the drumbeat of a single leaders ideal vision time and again to catastrophe, allowing superstition and intolerance to override their better instincts. They might be right in their conclusions… except that, in every case, something better arose from the ashes. The Mater of Roam, the Prench Republic, the Neighmarican Democracy, the League of Pastures, the United Pastures, and, finally, The United Federation of Pastures. All of these represent a step up toward a Better Ideal indicating that, for all its other faults, the species has a Potential… a potential that the Tellarites, the Andorians and even the staid and sometimes stodgy Vulcans recognized. The Roamulans and the Klingons realized it and fought against it, the former unsuccessfully and the latter gamely holding out on matters of principle apparently. One wonders if that means there’s hope for the Klingons. After all, they’ve avoided all out war against the Federation… so far. They might be militaristic and barbaric by our standards but they certainly aren’t stupid. Insensate animals don’t build starships. Time will tell, I suppose.
So there I stood, heiress of twenty-three centuries of Pony civilization. Feeling very much a living metaphor of my species I paused and gathered my thoughts after my emotional meltdown.
How could I carry out the mission I’d set myself on if it meant risking the life of the foal I helped bring into the world? Would the defeat of Discord be worth his or her existence? How could I make that decision?
The answer came to me. If I ran, turned the Ship back to safety and fobbed the responsibility off onto somepony else I could buy us time, years maybe even decades, depending on the whims of the insane Lord of Chaos and his Prism. He would come to take his irrational vengeance as sure as crystals grow in a rock farm. It was just a matter of when. Time would only make Him stronger as he sowed the Chaos across the Galaxy that would ultimately weaken the Federation beyond the point of being able to fight back.
One day I would have to face my child and answer the question of why I didn’t go forward when I had the chance. Our child would be the best of both us… and could I bear to see the disappointment in those eyes when I told the tale about how I lost my nerve? That I chose to watch my child’s life be cut short just for the selfish sake of having him or her with me for a little while living under a cloud of doom rather than taking this one best chance to make sure everypony’s foal could grow up safe and secure? I wanted our foal to be proud of me… I owed him or her that much at least. I’d do my damndest to make sure Sunny survived even if I didn’t. A lot of Ponies died for less noble causes.
There! The decision was made at last. I wasn’t the hardest tool in the box but I could still make the cut to my own satisfaction and I’d stack the results up against anypony else’s proudly. The Mare In My Head nodded approvingly and I welcomed her back, arranging for a nice little bouquet of daffodils to show there were no hard feelings. She waved me off as she took a nibble and shrugged as I wondered just which way I should go to rejoin the others.
The balephaser wreckage was behind me therefore I had to come from that direction. It was a good an attempt as any toward retracing my steps. I started off, a little unsteadily thanks to the Janx, (Sunny’s right, I’m no sort of drinker!) and nearly fell over when the lights went out.
Slagging Hell! Now what?