"...and this is the barracks. We've had to expand it faster than anticipated, unfortunately. When we got the weapons you alicorns sent we got a little bit too bold, and a number of our teams got caught. We lost several cells and had to pull a lot of compromised people out in a hurry. We're working on finding places to get them back out, and ways to strike at the worms, but with the ship up there, well, you know." Dream trotted briskly down a tunnel, with Luna trailed behind.
"Ship?" she asked, hoping for once that she would get a comprehensible answer. She had jumped at the offer of a tour, thinking that she could glean enough information about the situation here to know what to do. Unfortunately most of what Dream had said made no sense. Luna didn't know what a worm was, or why ponies should be fighting them. She didn't know who had sent weapons, since it quite certainly hadn't been her. She didn't know much of anything. She knew that she represented some great hope for these ponies, and she did not want to disappoint them by revealing her complete and utter ignorance, but the more she heard, the more lost she became.
"Yeah. It's just a cruiser, but that's all the worms need, really," Dream said, rather bitterly. "It can drop kinetic strikes pretty much anywhere on the planet. It could probably drop nukes too, there's no way it isn't carrying some, but I'm sure the worms don't want to contaminate their property."
Luna wanted to scream in frustration. When he'd said the ship was "up there", she'd thought she might perhaps understand that much, it must be some form of airship. Yet she didn't know what a cruiser was. She also had only the dimmest idea of what a kinetic strike was. She knew what the words meant, but they made no sense. And "nuke" was complete gibberish to her, she'd never heard the word before at all. Both things were obviously weapons, but how was she supposed to help them defend against something she didn't understand? In the dream, her shield had blocked what was presumably a kinetic strike, but dreams were not reality.
Dream trotted on, oblivious to Luna's frustration. "Here's a weapons storage depot," he said, gesturing at an unlit room filled with dark, squarish shapes.
"Can I look at them?" asked Luna. Perhaps she could sense something from these weapons. If she learned how the weapons they had here functioned, she might garner some clue about how to help these people defend themselves.
"Uh... sure," said Dream, sounding a bit puzzled.
Luna lit her horn a bit brighter. She'd noticed that other unicorns here seemed to have very dim horn glows. She sensed very little power from any of them. The currents of magic here seemed no weaker than those she was familiar with, though. Was it simply that this rather ragged group had failed to attract any powerful unicorns? Were unicorns in this place—obviously very different in many ways from Equestria—simply less powerful? Or was something else going on? Perhaps the enemy, the powerful "worms" that all seemed to both hate and fear, somehow culled the unicorns and prevented those with power from arising? Luna tossed idle speculation around as she examined the weapons storage chamber.
It was filled with crates, all of them bearing labels that had nothing whatsoever to do with weaponry. "They were smuggled in, of course, so what you see isn't what you get," said Dream with a smile. He reached out a hoof and tapped one crate. "This one has grav-drive missiles, for example. I'm not even sure what we're supposed to do with these, that's part of why they're still here and haven't been sent out to people who can make good use of them. They're meant for naval warfare. You can use them down on a planet, but they're not exactly self-launching. We have some people with the know-how to build launchers, but that hasn't really been a priority. They're a bit overkill for anything short of a tank, which thankfully we don't see many of."
Luna reached out her senses to the contents of the box, and her eyes went wide. She almost burst out with a shocked exclamation, but managed to bite it back somehow. The box was full of chaos magic! It was contained and directed somehow, but it was definitely chaos magic. She would know that power anywhere. She swallowed hard.
"How... how exactly are these 'grav-drive missiles' used, should they be needed?"
Dream gave her a somewhat dubious look, as though he were wondering why the alicorn sent to save them was ignorant of such a simple thing, but he answered willingly enough. "Well, you have to make a launcher, you can't let the drive come up and shoot itself, unless you want to obliterate whoever's firing the thing. Usually they're launched from a big mass gun, same as the little pulse mass guns we use as small arms. Once they're outside a certain safe range, they bring up the grav-drive and accelerate like hell. So of course they don't even need a warhead, they're a kinetic weapon. In fact the orbital kinetic strikes work pretty similarly, they're just carrying a lot more mass, and the ship has the launchers to start them off really fast."
"I... see. And they do not need a unicorn to fire them?"
Dream looked puzzled. "No. Why would you need that?"
Luna sat down hard on the cavern floor. She couldn't do this. She could not possibly do this. These ponies were using tame chaos magic, which somehow could be employed by any, even an earth pony, and they seemed to consider that perfectly ordinary. The bits of chaos magic in the box were all small, certainly. They were no more than specks, and she didn't doubt that she could counter any of of them with contemptuous ease. Yet there were dozens of them here. If these struggling rebels had such weapons readily to hoof, how could Luna face those they fought, who surely would have even more? Her utter ignorance would doom her, even if the power she held did not fail her.
It was impossible. These ponies were doomed, and Luna had doomed herself with them by coming here.
"Luna? Princess?" Dream looked uncertain, almost fearful.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, her heart breaking. "I'm so sorry."
"I don't understand." Dream's ears were back, and the fear in his eyes mingled with confusion.
"Fate drew me here, so I thought I surely could aid you. Your dream told me it would be difficult, but I thought it possible. Surely fate would not bring me here if I could offer no help. Yet these weapons, all this... I am not the alicorn who sent these weapons, I do not even know what they are! I am not the one you were hoping for. My home has no such things. There are no 'grav-drives' or 'kinetic strikes' or 'nukes', whatever those may be. I had barely become accustomed to trains, and electricity, and printing presses!" Luna's voice turned plaintive, and she stopped short, shaking her head. "I'm sorry," she repeated.
"But... but you're from Equestria, the lost pony home world. How can you not know?"
"I am from an Equestria, yes. But I came through a portal, and my world is nothing like this place."
"An Equestria? Like... an alternate dimension?"
"Yes."
"But surely you can still help?" Dream's eyes were wide, pleading. "You said fate brought you here. You have to be able to help! You're an alicorn! Your magic is so strong! We've fought for so long, and hoped so hard! You're the answer to our prayers, you can't just leave us!"
Luna looked at him, seeing the churning emotions flickering across his face. She had chosen to come here, knowing how cruel fate could be, merely to soothe his dreams. How could she back down from the real life nightmares that had caused them? She sighed softly, turning away from Dream. Hopeless nor not, it wasn't as though she had any way to go home. She was stuck here for the foreseeable future.
The chaos magic had been a shock, but she shouldn't let herself despair because of it. Fate might be cruel, yet if she was fated to come here, she surely must be meant to accomplish something. She turned back to Dream. "Forgive me. I thought this world would be much like my own. Finding that it is not has been something of a shock. You are right, though, to say that I can't just leave you." She shook herself, her starry mane and tail rippling around her, and gathered both her wits and her determination. "If I am to stay" she said, a hard gleam sparking in her eyes, "I must learn more of this place. Tell me everything. Tell me who these 'worms' are, and why you fight them. Their strengths, their weaknesses, you resources, the history of this conflict... everything."
Several hours later, Luna strode purposefully through the cavern tunnels, with Dream still trailing at her heels, and thought about what she had learned. She found herself wishing that Twilight had come with her. She would have understood things like "FTL travel" without needing to ask for explanations. The awe that had lit Dream's eyes was entirely gone, now. He knew how stunningly ignorant she was, and part of her regretted that.
The rest of her, though, was trying to fit what she knew into some plan of action, some way to help the ponies of this world against the terrible opponent she now knew they faced.
Their conflict had its roots in the early days of space travel. Those times had been so long ago that their history was mostly lost, but all knew that at some point, ponies and other races had left their home worlds and begun to colonize space. The first colonists had used "slow ships," vessels that moved slower than the speed of light, and thus took many years to reach their destinations. Some were even "generation ships", tiny, self-sustaining worlds that might take a century or more to cross the vast gulfs of space. Trade and travel between the colonies had been impossible in those days.
All that had changed with the invention of the grav-drive. Luna knew, as Dream did not, that it used some form of chaos magic. She had no idea how it actually worked, nor did Dream, but something in the interaction between gravitic forces and tamed chaos bent reality in a very specific way, allowing a ship to break the light speed barrier. Early grav ships were still slow, but with the trips between the stars reduced to months rather than years or centuries, travel and trade began to flourish.
With them came war.
Draconia, the ancient dragon home world, became the center of one of the earliest interstellar battles. The dragons of Draconia were the "worms" that Dream and his sister fought. They claimed that they had been attacked by the half-dozen pony worlds nearest their planet. Dream said he suspected the attacking had gone the other way around, but whatever the start of the conflict, it had ended after decades of brutal bloodshed with a weary, reluctant truce. The terms of the truce had allowed free trade between the dragons and their former enemies, and economics had accomplished what battles had not. Dragons were masters of the art of manipulating money, their obsession with hoarding had long ago taught them such skills. So they used those skills to gain power and prestige with their neighbors. Eventually, when the economies of the pony worlds were so intertwined with those of the dragons that separating them would cause economic collapse, the dragons convinced their neighbors to join them, as independent yet allied members of what was then called the Draconian Alliance.
The Alliance gradually spread through space, absorbing its trading partners over slow centuries. Draconia itself invested the vast wealth it gained in the process into building a strong military, especially its space navy. The warships were to protect its trading ships, the dragons said, and that seemed reasonable enough. Yet not all its worlds, nor all its trading partners, appreciated the economic pressure it put them under, and eventually there was a rebellion. That rebellion was crushed, thoroughly and brutally, by the Imperial Draconian Navy. In its wake, the Draconian Empire was born, claiming ultimate authority—for the protection of its trade, of course—over all the former Alliance worlds. In a orgy of violence, it used its military might to conquer a further dozen trading partners who had resisted its economic strong-arm tactics. Ever since then it had grown slowly, its sphere pushing those who hated it out to settle new worlds beyond its reach, yet those worlds in turn eventually being absorbed into it anyway.
It was huge now, so vast that even with modern grav-drive ships rendering most star systems only days apart, it still took many months to cross the whole of the empire. Only the core worlds, the original trading partners and the few dozen more conquered in the first days of the Empire, were under the Emperor's direct control. The fringe worlds, like Sage itself, were governed by dragons who answered to regional offices, who then answered to the imperial bureaucrats of the dragons' home world.
Sage was fairly typical of the fringe worlds. It was a "protectorate" not a member of the Empire, so in theory it had an independent government, and the dragon overseer was merely an "adviser." In reality, the government had little actual power; the adviser and the interstellar corporations ran the world as their own little fiefdom.
Sage had been settled, as were many worlds, by ponies who wanted to find their own fortunes, away from the control of the vast corporations and tight government regulations on trade that favored them. Yet forty years ago, circumstances had combined to send Sage's economy into near-total collapse. Unemployment had been at unbearable highs, the government had been falling apart, crime had been rampant, and the planet had been more or less in the process of melting down completely. Dracodyne Industries had arrived at just that convenient moment and offered to set up a ship-building yard in orbit, to produce hulls for merchant vessels. It wouldn't be on the planet's surface, so Sage would still be technically free of the hated imperial companies, but it would be there, in system, and would employ tens of thousands of out-of-work citizens.
Some of the ponies had fought it. They knew where a Draconian company's presence must inevitably lead. But they had been in the minority. Most ponies welcomed the jobs Dracodyne had provided. The shipyard was still up there, and from that beginning, other companies had wedged their way into Sage, one at a time. A bit over twenty years ago, protests against the way the interstellar corporations were driving local competitors out of business had turned violent, and Draconian marines had been landed on the planet, to protect the Draconian citizens targeted by the protesters. With them had come the dragon adviser, to help the still theoretically free and independent government of Sage deal with the crisis, and now the dragons controlled pretty much everything on the planet, even though less than a dozen actual dragons lived there.
"The ironic thing about the whole situation," Dream had told her bitterly, "is that our father had actually launched a shipyard venture just a few weeks before Dracodyne arrived. It didn't employ as many people right away, but some day it might have. Dracodyne drove it out of business, of course. It hung on for years, managing to compete mostly because our parents put everything they had into it. The yard is still up there, but it was shut down and abandoned before I was born. That was the last straw that drove our parents into outright rebellion. They were part of that first uprising. They were one of the lucky ones that escaped back then, but they were eventually arrested when I was just child. I hardly remember them." He'd heaved a heavy sigh, and Luna had put a wing over his back gently, trying to comfort him.
He had soon taken up his story again, telling her about how he and his sister had continued the rebellion their parents had begun, and how they'd had a few small successes in recent years. A few months ago, they'd apparently become too successful, prompting the dragons to send a military ship to aid the local police forces in fighting the rebellion. Its kinetic strikes, weapons with no explosives, which used the brutal physics of speed plus mass to cause destruction, had forced the rebellion underground, literally, where the ship's sensors couldn't find them so easily.
Dream had explained that the ship could still reach them here, the strongest of kinetic weapons could crack open the tunnels, all save perhaps the very deepest of them. Secrecy was currently the only way to survive.
The ponies here knew their fight was probably futile; worlds never won free of the Empire once it had them in its claws. Yet they could not simply stand by and watch their home being taken from them. They had clung stubbornly to one tiny glimmer of hope; if enough worlds were rebelling, surely even the might of the Empire might be stretched thinly enough to allow a few of them to break free. So they fought. They'd gained another sliver of hope when they thought they had a ally from Equestria.
The mysterious agent had provided them with powerful weapons, and they'd used them to good effect. Yet that too, in the end, had only made things worse. Dream and Glory had fled here to the caverns after the dragons had actually ordered a kinetic strike on the apartment building where they lived, the first such in the heart of the capital city. They'd had bare warning that the strike was coming, thanks to having a compromised some of the Imperial communication codes, and had evacuated the building, so that time the loss of life had been minimal.
The total tally of the rebel dead, though, had shocked Luna. The dragons had killed thousands, and imprisoned thousands more. Officially, Dream's parents were among those living in prison, and Dream still hoped to someday free them, but rebel prisoners were not allowed to communicate with friends and family outside, so he had no way of knowing if they were truly still alive or if they'd been killed after all.
The bleakness in his voice as he told her that had further hardened her determination to help. Now she walked briskly, with Dream directing her towards the surface, where she could find one last piece of information. She knew the history of the dragons and she knew the strength of their weapons, now she needed to learn the strength of her own, and to do that, she needed to know the strength of this planet's moon. Underground it was hard to sense. She knew there was one, she could feel a trickle of lunar power, but the earth over her head attenuated and blurred it. Earth and moon were powers in opposition; they did not work well together.
A glimmer of ruddy light ahead told her that they had reached their destination. The tunnel mouth was draped with camouflage netting which hid it from prying eyes. Luna stopped just inside the tunnel mouth, peering out through the net.
"Let me move that for you," said Dream but Luna shook her head.
"No need. I can sense what I must from here." She looked out over a peaceful valley. There was no sign of equine life within it. This was still a frontier world, after all, and vast swathes of it were completely unsettled. To her left the sun had just set, and the sky was alight with ruddy color. To her right the moon had already risen, showing pale against the purple dusk.
The second moon was just edging above the horizon beneath it.
Luna stared at that in shock. Two moons. She never could have imagined that a world might have two moons. She reached out and felt them both, dual wellsprings of power that flooded easily into her. The force that she thought of as "tide", but which she knew was truly gravitational attraction, played through her veins—strongly, so strongly. One of them was smaller than the moon she knew, but the other was about the same size, though a little further away in space.
Suddenly wondering, Luna reached her mind out further, seeking.
She found what she sought. There was a third moon, still well below the horizon, very much smaller than the other two, but there all the same, and a fourth, much larger.
Four moons. There were four moons here.
With her heart suddenly lifting, Luna threw back her head and laughed.
"Princess Luna?" ventured Dream, sounding confused.
Luna lowered her head and grinned at him. "Your tides must be very interesting," she said.
"Uhm... yes, that's why Brightstar City is inland, not on the coast. But I don't understand."
"I am the Princess of night, of dreams, and of the moon. I feared, in a world where ponies put chaos magic on a leash and dragons can rain death from the heavens, that I did not have power enough to do aught but witness your world falling." Luna stood straight and tall, her mane and tail billowing out behind her, flowing on an invisible wind of pure lunar power, and her grin was frightening and feral. "Now, though, the 'worms' on this world would shake and tremble if they but knew what was about to hit them."