//------------------------------// // Chapter 07 // Story: The Forbidden // by CMDR Kovacs //------------------------------// Major Greyfeather groaned as he rolled out of bed. What does she want now, he thought. Scratching his back, Armet gladly took the cup of coffee his long-time friend Gamarts concocted into his claws. He glanced at the clock on his bedside, it was 03:29. “Too damn early,” he grunted. “I know, but she just got back from Equestria.” A slurp of straight black, “And?” “She’s downstairs right now, practically asleep on her paws. Poor girl, she’s exhausted.” A nod, “Alright, hang on a sec.” Greyfeather rubbed the sleep from his faded azure eyes. I’m getting too old for this, he mused to himself. He pushed open his bedroom door with one ruffled wing, and a small sniffle floated up the stairs. Oh boy… Gilda was the spitting image of her mother, golden fur, bleach-white feathers and those same violet eye-feathers framing a pair of dazzling sapphires. Armet had lost count how many young suitors he had to chase off from her, and Gilda still hasn’t found a parter that was just right for her, except… He sighed, “Alright, c’mere.” Gilda blinked her bloodshot eyes, and sniffed before stumbling over to her father. “You wanna talk about it?” he asked as she fell into his embrace. A nod. She matched her dad in attitude, almost precisely. “It’s Dashie…” Armet sighed in understanding, probably fell out. “What happened?” “She doesn’t want to be my friend anymore…” “And?” A sniffle, “There was this one pony named Pinkie, or somethin’, and I-I was mean, and I dunno why I acted like I did. She was just trying to be nice, a-and I wasn’t.” That was all he needed to know what happened. “Pranks?” A moment, then a nod. “Ah.” You see, while Gilda loved to prank people, she hated being pranked. It was something that she didn’t know how to handle, and struggled with trying to accept it for what it was. It had took him Gilda’s entire childhood to stop pranking her too badly, and even then, he slipped up from time to time. They had been like that for a few minutes before Gilda let out a quiet snore. Smiling, he lifted her onto his back, occasionally adjusting her to a better position. Gamarts used his magic to try and hold her steady, but he had to be careful. He was starting to run out of love, and it was taking its toll on his changeling body. He had only barely managed to scrape by in the past fifty-five years. Soon enough, the two best friends had gotten Gilda into her bedroom, which had been her father’s room all those years ago, and she was soon snuggling into her covers. Gamarts left to go back to sleep, and Armet found himself smiling down at his sleeping daughter, her face scrunched cutely as she get some well-deserved rest. When Armet went back to his room, he found himself unable to sleep as he lay in the dark quiet of Yadrolev, crickets chirping and playing their song outside in the cool pre-dawn night. “Well, crap…” he muttered quietly, knowing that sleep was now futile. [/HR] “How are you feeling?” “Honestly? A little loopy...Is that bad?” “No, of course not, Sweetie! That’s perfectly normal, although…” “What?” “Maybe you should stay home, just in case? Would you like that?” “But, my friends! We were gonna go crusading today!” “Oh, fine. I would have thought that a filly would have jumped at the chance to stay home from school.” Sweetie Belle was sick. Well, kind of. You see, she had a Cold, which is something that had never been in Equestria, Yadrolev, Hirschland, the Zebra Wilds, or Grendelheim. In fact, the wee little virus that everyone has taken for a basic fact of life has never existed on the planet of Ionia, even though that isn’t what the races that live on it call it. That name was given to the little backwater by the humans who had found the system just floating static between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. While Ionia was perfect for colonization, it just wasn’t possible, or worth it, really, to spend time and resources just to discover eight other sentient species. Nope, not worth it at all. Sweetie Belle was possibly the only pony that called it by the name the Estovakian Union of the Soviet Republics gave it, naming it after one of their High Priestesses. The name just came to Sweetie in a dream, as she explored the space around her world alongside Princess Luna in her dreams. Except, Luna didn’t call it Ionia, and when Sweetie Belle asked her what it meant, she had replied, “Whatever thee desires it to.” So, whenever she gets the chance, Sweetie uses her dreams to look at her world from above, in her dreams. One moment, she’s looking at one part of the planet with the sun and the moon directly across it at an angle, others it’s another part of the planet with the celestial bodies in a different position, and it’s never once the same view. Unbeknownst to her, she was accidentally linking up to a Novan deep space probe that had been launched seven years prior, just two months after she was born, in order to locate their missing agent. So why the sudden interest in her own planet? Simple. Idle curiosity, bolstered by the fact that only three ponies in recorded history ever tried to study the shape of the world and the solar system beyond it. One of those was Star Swirl the Bearded, and he was only building onto the data collected by the two before him. In other words, mostly inconclusive, and they just figured out that the world was a little on the round side. Not much else, but certainly better than it being flat. In other words, this is the first academic interest Sweetie has ever had since she discovered her ability to dream lucidly. Not something your ordinary unicorn has, right? I guess you could call it her special talent, even if she doesn’t think so. Yet. After Rarity left her sister alone in her room, Sweetie Belle sniffled a little bit, snot accumulating in her nose. Using a tissue that Rarity left a box of on her bedside table, she blew said nose until most of the mucus was in the tissue. Of course, as every human ever knows, not all of it comes out, so she was left with her ears clogged, one nostril plugged and the back of her throat burning with the cool air that rushed through the other nostril, which had the little drip that just bugged the heck out of the poor filly. In all honesty, the appearance of a virus that, even in the 24th Century of humanity’s Common Era they weren’t able to cure, probably meant it was a bad omen. But for Sweetie Belle? If she knew the words, she’d be able to only barely describe how she felt before Rarity scrubbed her mouth out with soap. Implying, of course, that she knew what the words meant. Why is Sweetie Belle able to tap into human technologies in her sleep, you ask? Why, such a good question! The answer lies in the same reason that she, inexplicably, managed to catch a cold. It all happened on a crusade. The Cutie Mark Crusaders were attempting to get their Spelunking Cutie Marks, and they had found this strange, orangey grey rock, sitting in the middle of a cavern. It looked like the rock smashed through the cave’s ceiling, if the rubble around the circle of daylight was any clue. As the trio approached, the rock beeped and a small red light popped through the side of the rock. As you may have already gathered, this was in fact an Estovakian probe with a payload of messages, written in the Arstotzkan, Novan, Grustonian, and Alvian languages, as well as many more. Sweetie Belle, being the more curious of the three, slowly inched towards the probe. The red light flared blue before winking out entirely, and it was only four days later that Sweetie Belle had found herself ill in bed, at this very time. That same probe was a shared knowledge transmitter that the Estovakians sent to any planet they were unable to explore at the current time in search for sentient life. While the Soviet Sovereignty of Arstotzka, the Estovakian Union’s brother state, had preferred to maintain a xenophobic stance towards the Spatial Domain, Estovakia had much preferred to play the Peacemonger while searching for extraterrestrial life. The agreement made between the members of the Soviet Republics had stated that should any sentient xenos prove hostile, Arstotzka would step in and bring war in response. Once again, Sweetie Belle was completely oblivious to this information, only knowing the name of her world, Ionia, and the approximate statistics of the solar system. It just so happened that Sweetie Belle was keeping a diary on her discoveries, and was unwittingly waiting for the chance to prove her findings. It’s rather amazing that Nikhilus had found himself so close to home, yet so far away. If only the United Novan Republics had been able to spare the resources to retrieve one of their SPECTRE operatives twenty-eight years ago, when they had received his deep-space transponder’s signal. [/HR] Consoles beeped and computers flashed their status lights aboard the UNR Winter Solstice. Captain Benji Sinclair stood at the helm, looking over his navigational officer’s shoulder. It had been seven days since the Winter Solstice set its course for Ionia, locked onto the beacon of one of the Estovakians’ probes. While Captain Sinclair would know nothing about it, the Spectre they were being sent to recover was very important. Everything else, as usual, was covered in black ink. The Winter Solstice was a Hades-class battlecruiser, measuring 2,419 metres long, 912 metres across, and 466 metres tall. If you saw one in person, you might compare it to falcon, but bulky and slightly less smooth. She was equipped with two Zendikar-11c Fusion generators, a decent amount of gauss and particle weaponry, and one Kovarsky-Yamato Translight Engine. When in FTL, she could jump from one system to another using the Zenith and Nadir points of their stars, or make a blind jump for a distance of 250 light-years in two and a half hours. When travelling at sublight speed, two Z-11c’s could pump enough power into the gravimetric thruster to send it from one edge of a large system to the other in four days. “How much further, Helmsman? Our round teams are starting to get restless.” Although he wouldn’t admit it himself, Benji was getting the same way, as this was the fifth time he’s asked Lieutenant Greene in half as many hours. “Just a few more light-years, Skipper.” “And how much is ‘a few’?” “Oh, sorry, Benji, I meant a few hundred light-years. We’ll be just outside the system in four hours, so no worries,” he snarked. This was about one of the few times that Greene could call Captain Sinclair by his first name, Benjamin, or “Benji” for short. Sinclair grumbled, “Oh, fine. I’m gonna get me a stiff drink, all this waiting’s killin’ me.” And he did just that. The lift doors to the CIC opened with a hiss, allowing Captain Sinclair into the sterile white environment. He pressed the button for the Officers’ Lounge, and the lift took him three decks down. The elevator silently whirred to a halt, and opened to let in the musty smell of the darkened lounge. In the back corner, seven people, all of them shock troop regulars, were playing strip poker, and to the dismay of the three men, their female companions were winning. “What did I say about playing strip?” Benji growled angrily as he stomped over to the table. “Not without you,” they stated boredly, the clamor well-rehearsed. It would have been good, too, if some of them weren’t already so drunk as to have trailed behind or ahead of the others. Sinclair smiled, “And to not get too wasted. At this rate, we’ll have to put some of you beer-buckets through the Energizer.” All of their faces turned green, it was never fun to use the Energizer, as it purged your system while refreshing your mind. The experience was never pleasant, and it was worse if you were drunk. That’s why most preferred to sleep during transit. “You just had to ruin the mood, didn’t you, Benji?” Major Osinov said, throwing her subordinate’s lost T-shirt at him. He caught it, smiling, “That’s the captain’s job, isn’t it? Come on, deal me in, we got four hours to arrival, and we might as well spend it having fun, am I right?” The other troopers cheered at that, Corporal Stauss the least clothed, and the most drunken, of them all.