//------------------------------// // Prologue // Story: Moonlight by Starlight Book One: Rebel Moons // by SPark //------------------------------// The night would have been quiet, were it not for the crackling of the fire. It was a soft sound, yet that was only because the flames had nearly burned out. Hours ago they had raged and roared. Now only a few feeble tongues remained active, licking among the glowing embers that threw ruddy light up towards the paired moons in the sky. They in turn sent a silvery gleam back down on what had once been a small but thriving town. It was now a shattered ruin, with not one single home left intact. Many of the houses were merely craters, no longer identifiable as buildings at all. Others were burnt-out shells; still standing, but with walls and beams that were more charcoal than wood. Occasionally something would shift, and a wall would collapse or a roof fall in. Those short punctuations were the only sound, besides the fading crackle of fire, that broke the stillness of the night. A spark floated through the rubble-strewn streets. At first glance it might have been mistaken for an ember, a true spark blown by a breeze from some burning house or other. But the tiny glow drifted with purpose, slowly moving up one street and down another, as no bit of wind-blown debris could have. Whenever a noise sounded, the spark darted towards it with swift purpose. In one particular house, the fires had mostly died. The roof had fallen in, but all four of the walls were more or less intact. The windows gaped open, their glass shattered, and the door was likewise vanished into ruin. The floor was strewn with the charred remnants of the roof, mixed with blackened scraps of what little remained of the house's furnishings. An untidy pile of such debris shifted suddenly, something moving beneath the embers and ashes. A trap door slowly inched upwards, sending bits of burnt roofing tumbling aside. It lifted further, until a pair of wary eyes finally peered out at the destruction. The stallion who had lifted the door coughed suddenly, and his face twisted with terror at the noise. He rapidly dropped the trap door. It fell, and the pile of debris across it fell too, creating a startlingly loud crash. The little spark zoomed over to the noise and bobbed through the burnt-out house for some time, exploring the empty shells of its rooms. Eventually, though, it found nothing, and so drifted away once again. Time passed. The fires faded further. The moons drifted across the sky, a third one now edging slowly above the horizon. Finally, the trap door moved again. Once again it eased up, revealing the same pair of frightened, tired eyes. After those eyes regarded the ruined house for nearly fifteen minutes, their owner finally lifted the door further, and climbed out. The stallion, his coat color almost invisible beneath streaks of grime and soot, looked back down into the basement, and nodded towards whatever he saw there once, solemnly. Then he shut the trap door carefully behind him, and moved slowly across the room, taking great care to make as little noise as possible. Suddenly the front wall of the house gave way, the charred wood no longer able to hold up its own weight. It collapsed with a dull roar, the crumbling embers birthing a few live sparks that flew up into the air. The stallion didn't curse, but he looked as though he wanted to as he dove back for the trap door. He yanked it up and dropped through, letting it slam shut behind him. The sparks that had rushed up into the air settled and went out, but one spark bobbed now above the trap door. It hovered uncertainly for just a moment, then vanished with a tiny pop! High overhead, between two of the gleaming moons, another spark hung. It looked like a star, but anypony who knew the constellations here would know it was no part of them. It was a little bit too bright, and it drifted slightly out of sync with the motion of the other stars, moving on its own course that only loosely paralleled theirs. From that tiny speck fell a bolt like lightning, streaking down from the heavens to the earth. Unlike lightning, however, it did not move at some random whim. It came with terrible purpose, slamming into the exact spot from which the spark had vanished only moments before. Its white heat was beyond imagining, and when it touched the floor of the house, the world itself seemed to explode. House, ground, and everything for dozens of meters around vanished completely into a white hell of energy, vaporized completely. A shock wave of heat raced out from the impact, flattening several partially intact houses around the target zone, and re-kindling fires on any bit of unburned wood within its reach. When the explosion was finally over, the spark popped back into existence, in the same place it had been. It hovered now, though, at the center of a huge crater. There was no trace whatsoever of the house, the trap door, or the basement that had lain beneath it. High above the once again peaceful night, aboard the orbiting speck that was the IDS Flame of Justice, Lieutenant Thunder Chaser of the Imperial Draconian Navy lifted his hoof from the firing stud. He was a fairly ordinary pegasus stallion, with a blue coat and green mane and tail that clashed a bit with the crimson, black, and gold of his uniform. Beside him, Ensign Dappled Petal looked up from her screen and nodded, her horn glowing gently as she provided a bridge between the sensor spell and the ship's computers. "Target destruction confirmed, sir," she said briskly. She was also wearing crimson and black, but with a single, narrow gold band on her sleeve and just one simple gold pip on her collar, where Chaser had one wide band and one narrow, along with the two pips of a full Lieutenant. Her cream colored coat and light pink mane and tail didn't exactly compliment her uniform either. In truth, most ponies looked a bit out of place in Draconian colors, even though ponies made up the majority of those who wore them, both in the navy and in the other branches of the Draconian Empire's military. "Excellent," said Chaser, and his lips curved in a hard, bitter smile. There were many reasons for a pony to join the navy. Some joined out of a sense of patriotism, because they wanted to serve their nation and the noble dragons that ruled it. Some joined because they were good at the work, and found it satisfying to use their skills. Some joined, of course, for power and prestige. There were few ways a pony could rise higher in the Empire than through the navy. Civilian administrators were nearly always dragons, but space was at a premium on a warship, and there was no room for them there. So even at the highest ranks, those who flew and fought the ships of Draconia were always non-dragons. Only the Grand Admiral himself, who oversaw the entire Imperial Draconian Navy, was a dragon. So power was definitely part of the allure for many. For Thunder Chaser, though, it had been hatred. Hatred blended with family tradition. His mother had been in the navy, and had risen to the rank of captain, before being killed in one of the countless outbreaks of senseless violence out in the fringe worlds at the edge of the Empire. Chaser had been thinking about the navy before that, but once the news came, any indecision he might have felt had vanished. In fact, he had gone directly from his graduation ceremony to the recruiting station. He wanted a chance at vengeance; a chance to kill some of the equine scum who thought they were too good for the Empire, who dared to challenge the might of their overlords, and who caused thousands, perhaps even millions, of senseless deaths across dozens of worlds every year. Deaths like his mother's. She had joined up because she wanted to make a difference. She'd told him that, whenever he had asked why she'd wanted to be away from her children so much. She'd wanted to make the galaxy a safer place by serving and protecting the Empire's citizens. Then somewhere on some pathetic ball of rock, some pony had selfishly decided to throw away everything the Empire provided for them and rebel against it. That rebellion had been larger than most. The rebels had actually stolen a pair of naval pinnaces somehow, flying the small but heavily-armed craft up to attack his mother's ship. The ship itself had survived, but many of its crew had not. None of the rebels had lived. And none of the scum down there, on this ball of rock, would live either, if Thunder Chaser had his way. "Ahem." The throat-clearing sound cut through the subdued bustle of an orbiting cruiser's bridge. Thunder Chaser jumped, and all around him ponies did the same. "Captain on deck," called the marine stationed by the bridge's door, belatedly. "Tell me, Lieutenant," said Captain Burning Zeal, from directly behind Chaser, "are you familiar with your own orders?" "Y-yes Captain?" "Including the ones that say kinetic strikes are to be cleared with me before being fired?" "Uh... I'm sorry, Captain, that one slipped my mind. Ensign Petal reported catching a glimpse of an equine energy signature, and I didn't want to give any of the rebels a chance to get away, sir." Captain Zeal, an incredibly stocky unicorn, obviously from a heavy-gravity world, frowned. His charcoal gray coat and platinum mane and tail actually complimented his perfectly-pressed uniform, with its four gold cuff stripes and three gleaming golden stars, quite well. "Your devotion to the cause is commendable, Lieutenant, but orders are orders. I'll let it slide this time, given your stellar record, but it had better not happen again." "Yes sir," said Chaser, saluting briskly. The captain returned the salute somewhat less crisply. "Carry on, then." He settled into his chair at the center of the bridge and surveyed the ponies around him with an air of satisfaction. Flame of Justice wasn't the biggest ship in the navy, nor the newest, but it was a fine little vessel and it had done its duty well for many years. It would certainly continue to do so for as long as he was its captain, Zeal would make certain of that. And as long as the Empire continues to squeeze its fringe worlds for all it can get from them, he thought rather cynically as he looked at the planet that hung on the main display in front of him, there will always be plenty of work for ships like this. There were several hundred worlds in the Empire, most of them fringe worlds. Only a few dozen were counted among the "civilized", protected, and in Zeal's opinion rather pampered core worlds. Those were gleaming monuments to everything good about the Empire. The rest of its worlds, well... that was the way of things. The strong prospered and the weak struggled. The faint smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth was far less bitter than the one on Lieutenant Chaser's face, but it was no less hard. That was the reason why Zeal had joined the navy. You could be a little fish in this universe, or you could be a shark. He was going to be a shark. Far below, the crackle of flames still broke the otherwise peaceful night, and a little spark zipped away from the smoking crater that had once been a house, with a basement that had sheltered the last four survivors of the tiny town, whose name its destroyers had never even bothered to learn.