//------------------------------// // Brightstar Yard // Story: Moonlight by Starlight Book One: Rebel Moons // by SPark //------------------------------// The shuttle was quite crowded. Mostly with ponies, but a half dozen diamond dogs were crammed in too, all headed up to the orbital yards to work. They would spend several months on-shift, doing nothing but working and sleeping, since Dracodyne didn't provide any sort of recreational facilities. Then they would have perhaps a week off planetside, before coming up again aboard the alarmingly decrepit shuttles that ran every day between the planet and the shipyards. The scarred floor of this one showed where seats had once been bolted to it, but those had been removed at some point to allow more workers to be packed aboard. It was horribly unsafe, but then only about half of the workers wore spacesuits, so safely clearly wasn't the first priority here. The company didn't provide any, the workers had to supply their own. Saving up enough for one was possible on a yard worker's pay, they were better paid than the average worker on Sage, but not by all that much, and it was very easy for the money to end up going elsewhere, given the near-total lack of social services available from what the dragons had left of Sage's government. At least the lack of suits meant that Luna didn't stand out. She was using a small spell to make her wings invisible and her mane and tail seem ordinary. She could probably have provided the illusion of a spacesuit too if needed, but she was just as glad she didn't have to. The other three members of the little rebel expedition were suited. Glory and Dream both had suits that were fairly good quality, even, a relic of their parents' shuttered business. Rosie, the diamond dog who had been so pragmatic at their earlier meeting and the fourth member of their little group, had a suit that looked as though it might come apart at any moment, but she had assured them that it was functional. Luna had needed to assure Glory and Dream too, since they'd initially insisted that a suit she could wear be found. It would have had to be cobbled together from two suits, given that she had a unicorn's horn and pegasus wings, and the unusual length of her horn would probably have been a problem. Thankfully she had managed to convince them that a suit was completely unnecessary. She could already feel her power growing as the planet dropped away below them. Its gravitational pull was still strong here, but much weaker than on its surface, and the moons were also that much nearer. It was a rather heady sensation. Closing her eyes, Luna let her senses expand out into space. She was aware of the moons, of course, swinging through the heavens on their gravitational strings, their energies glimmering in her inner eye with cool, soothing light. The planet too was very obvious, a dull, warm glow behind her. It wasn't unpleasant, but it still clouded her mind, and she found she was glad to be speeding away from it, the dulling haze of its power fading with every second. She could also sense the sun, distant but brilliant. Being close to it would be even worse than being close to the planet, it radiated so much more than gravitational energy. Thankfully it was distant enough, and she was used to tuning out its glow. Distant too, just at the edge of her ability to sense them, were several other planets which orbited this system's sun. Their gravitational forces were negligible at this distance, so she could dismiss them as currently unimportant. Smaller but much stronger—utterly impossible to dismiss even if she'd wanted to—was a blazing point of active chaos magic that tugged at the fabric of space itself as it circled the planet. It was the warship whose destruction was her eventual goal, or rather it was the ship's drive. Even as she watched, the drive dimmed, the ship completing its course change and putting the drive on standby as it settled into a new orbit. With that blaze of energy no longer obscuring her senses, she could sense the hull of the ship itself, and the little flecks of life within that were the ship's crew. Other flecks of chaos magic, bright but inactive, lay dead ahead of her. They were the drives, some installed, others waiting in storage, that belonged to the merchant ships being built at Dracodyne's orbital shipyard. That shipyard sprawled through space, growing steadily larger ahead of her as the shuttle approached it. She flung her senses out, looking for anything else in orbit. An additional spark of slumbering chaos magic from what must be a merchant ship drew her attention to a vast storage space that seemed to be some kind of orbital warehouse, and she found several other such in orbit, though none of them had ships docked at them, so they were harder to find. Then she found what was probably her eventual destination. It quite tiny compared to the immense bulk of the Dracodyne yard, but it too held the vast hull of a merchant ship cradled in the same sort of construction dock that the other shipyard did, and it was right where Glory's charts said the abandoned facility should be. It also flickered with a dim trickle of power, which Luna thought was probably a very good sign. "I've found the shipyard," she murmured to Glory quietly. "Good. You're sure you can get us there?" "Definitely." Luna could have gotten the whole shuttle there, and the thought made her smile. The regular working ponies around her would probably object, not to mention the consternation of the people above who were expecting the shuttle's load of workers. The shuttle's pilots would probably be a bit upset as well, particularly since she might do their engines some damage if she just yanked the shuttle off its course like that. Those engines also contained chaos magic, a small spark compared to the blaze of the warship, but still quite distinct and impossible to completely filter out from her senses. Luna found herself idly prodding at the engines, trying to figure out exactly how they worked. And how the chaos was contained and controlled so closely. She would have said such a thing was impossible, had she ever been asked, yet here it was. Of course breaking the speed of light was also supposedly impossible, which was probably why the ships needed chaos magic in order to do it. She hadn't known the term "FTL" before Dream had explained it, but she understood the principle behind it quite well. She had to, given that the distance between herself and her moon was usually large enough for the delay in the moon's light reaching her to be a measurable thing. Light moved at a speed, and nothing else could move faster than it. She paused for a moment to consider that this must actually be quite untrue, for she could sense anything that happened on the moon, or on any of the four here, well before the light of such actions reached her. The bonds that bound her to the moon must somehow operate at greater speed. Did magic move at faster than light speeds, then? She would have to ask Dream or Glory if they knew. Yet if magic moved faster than light, why was chaos magic needed to move ships around, why not more ordinary, less dangerous spells? Perhaps ordinary magic moved at light speed, and only alicorn magic was instantaneous. Perhaps she could devise some experiment to discover if this was the case. There were still so many things she didn't know, and her ignorance was a constant source of frustration. She was tugged from her thoughts by a subtle shudder as the shuttle reached its destination and docked with the shipyard. It was followed by a series of mechanical sounds as the shuttle's airlock mated with the docking tube. Then the shuttle's doors hissed open and people began streaming out of the shuttle. Luna moved with them, feeling an irritating sense of vertigo as she did. The shuttle's artificial gravity didn't bother her too much when she held still, but whenever she moved, the fact that her body could feel a gravitational pull while her finely tuned magical senses felt no planetary or lunar pull to match it was profoundly disorienting. It wasn't quite enough to make her actually dizzy, but she still didn't much like it. It was actually a relief to step from the shuttle into the free-fall of the docking tube. She launched herself smoothly down it, using a touch of magic to help her maneuver. She moved more easily and naturally than Dream did, and he looked a bit green. Obviously he found free-fall, not artificial gravity, to be dizzying. Rosie, thankfully, was there to help him along, and though Glory wasn't particularly graceful, she managed to make her way down the tube competently enough. Luna sighed in regret as she exited the tube and landed lightly within the shipyard itself, feeling that faint sense of disorientation return, but Dream breathed an audible sigh of relief as artificial gravity closed in around him again. "Are you going to be all right if the Brightstar Yard doesn't have active counter-grav, Dream?" asked Glory, quietly, as the quartet made their way through the corridors of the Dracodyne Yard. "I'll be fine," said Dream firmly. "It wasn't that bad, I'm just not used to it. Anyway, there should be counter-grav, shouldn't there? It must have power, otherwise it wouldn't still be in the right orbit, it would be decaying." "It probably has power, but there will almost certainly be micro-meteorite and other debris collision damage. It might have taken out the grav units. Hell, the whole thing may actually be a floating wreck, full of holes, and only staying in orbit by sheer dumb luck. We have no way of knowing until we get there." Luna chuckled. "Actually, I had a look at it while we were on the shuttle. I can't tell if it has small holes at this distance, but there aren't any big ones, and there's definitely power of some kind there." Rosie let out a low whistle. "You have some useful skills, your highness," she said. Luna smiled. "Well, if I didn't, we'd be in trouble, since my skills are going to get us over there." She glanced around. The flow of workers had thinned as they peeled off towards their various different duties, so the quartet was nearly alone now. "Assuming that somepony else gets me to the airlock we're looking for first," she added. "Right this way," said Rosie, and moved down the hall at an easy pace, with the three equines trotting along behind her. She had worked here until she'd been fired, which had been a final straw that had driven her to active revolution, "As much because I have literally nothing better to do now as for any other reason," she'd explained when telling Luna her story. Dracodyne was the only active shipyard in the system, so Rosie had had nowhere else to turn for employment, save the most menial and low-paying of jobs. She had decided that doing something about the horribly broken system that had led to such a situation was the best thing she could do, even if it might be futile. Luna couldn't help but admire that about the rebels. They were up against something that was almost beyond imagining, and they had all gone into it knowing they probably couldn't win, but they'd done it anyway. Glory expected, and Luna agreed she was probably right to, that if they could show that rebels could win after all, most of the planet would be squarely behind them. And with that many hooves turned to the task... She pushed that thought out of her mind. That was for the future. For now she needed to think about their more immediate plans. They were making their way towards an empty construction bay. Various malfunctions had caused it to be shut down some time ago, and it hadn't yet been repaired. Several unnamed, sympathetic yard workers had, in addition to making the arrangements for the quartet to get passage on a worker shuttle, gotten the sensors here to malfunction, so there were no cameras recording them, nor would there be any record of the airlock that let out into the bay itself cycling. They could be seen walking into the blank spot, of course, but workers did that all the time, the broken sensors extended into areas that were still used, so unless someone was unusually alert, it was unlikely that their brief passage through the shipyard would ever be noticed. They were just four more people among the thousands who worked here, with nothing to draw any particular attention to them. They trotted through increasingly empty corridors until they came at last to one that terminated in a pair of heavy double doors with a control panel set beside them. Rosie went to the panel and tapped a series of buttons, causing the doors to slide open, and revealing a second set beyond them. Taking her helmet in her paws, the diamond dog gave the suitless Luna a long glance. "You're absolutely certain that you'll be fine?" she asked, sounding dubious. "In case you've never seen what exposure to vacuum does to a pony, you should know it's not pretty." "I lived on an airless moon for a thousand years, Rosie," said Luna, giving her a confident smile. "I'll be fine. Go ahead and cycle the lock." "All right," she said, still sounding dubious, but she shrugged and donned the helmet. Glory and Dream did the same, though they took a bit longer, since they had to be careful positioning the horn caps on top of their helmets, lest they accidentally damage their own horns by ramming the close-fitting metal down over them at the wrong angle. Now prepared, the quartet stepped through the first set of doors and into the airlock. Rosie went up to a second panel inside and tapped another sequence of keys. The doors slid shut. The second set of doors didn't open immediately, instead a pump sucked a good portion of the air out of the little room, so it wouldn't be wasted. Luna felt the curious sensation of thinning air around her, and felt her magic and her body reacting, adjusting her vital functions, drawing what she needed directly from lunar energy, rather than from oxygen. She didn't know exactly how it worked, the process was instinctive, but it was also quite effective, and by the time the far set of doors slid open, letting out the last wisps of air, Luna was fully prepared for the hard vacuum that now surrounded her. She smiled serenely at the three sets of somewhat startled eyes looking at her. She'd told them, but they still hadn't quite believed it. With no air she couldn't speak to them, but she gestured to the now-open door and the cavernous space beyond it, and they nodded and stepped out of the airlock one by one. Luna dropped her disguising illusion, then folded her magic around them, and began accelerating them all, herself included, out of the docking bay, towards their distant destination. She couldn't see it with her eyes, but her magic knew it was there. She arrowed through space as fast as she dared, but with three fragile, mortal beings along, that was slower than she would have otherwise preferred. They would accelerate constantly until they were about half way there, when she would have to begin slowing them lest they soar past their goal, or worse, run into it and be splatted into goo, for it was far enough away that with constant acceleration, even as low as she was forced to hold herself to lest she break her companions, they would be moving very fast indeed when they arrived. The need to slow would increase their travel time, but it couldn't be helped. It would be at least an hour, probably closer to two, before they arrived. As she soared through space on wings of magic, she let her magical senses explore the cosmos around her. Once she had once again scanned the large and obvious objects around her—natural or otherwise—she turned her attention to smaller details. Eventually she noted something faint but quite nearby. In fact, it was radiating from her three companions in irregular bursts. It was a vaguely familiar radiation, something like light, something like sound, something like magic. It was especially like light, but with a much slower, or perhaps broader, sort of vibration. She could see that the others were talking, and without air to carry their voices, she knew they must be using their com units to keep in touch, so it wasn't hard for her to reach the conclusion that this was the energy she sensed. Curious, she prodded at the energy with her magic. It wasn't directional, it radiated outward from each of them, so it was easy enough for her to sample it. With nothing better to do, and with no need to concentrate on the simple, low-powered spell that propelled them through space, Luna started experimenting with the com signals. Surely there must be some way for her magic to interact with them such that she could tell what the others were saying? She toyed with various small spells, and finally hit on something that worked. "...owing what's there until we get there." That was Rosie's gravelly voice. "I know, I know," said Glory. "I just can't help but speculate. We're nearly half way. I can't see anything yet, I wonder how close we'll be before we can?" "Assuming we're headed for the right place at all," said Dream. "Hey, Luna has done everything she's promised she could do so far, including at least one thing that's completely impossible," said Glory. Dream sighed. "I know. I just... it's scary, some of the questions she had to ask me. I can't help but worry that she's misunderstood something somewhere along the line. She doesn't know anything about how the world works." Luna frowned, suddenly feeling bad about eavesdropping. They had no way of knowing she could listen to them talk about her. Deciding that listening without letting them know she could wasn't really right, Luna began working out a second spell, that would let her broadcast as well as receive. "She seems to be picking things up quite quickly," said Glory. "I wouldn't worry too much if I were you." Dream snorted. "You never worry enough, I have to do all the worrying for you." Glory chuckled. "I worry plenty, but if I let my worries stop me from doing things, we'd be sitting back in that lousy apartment building, applying for menial jobs as good little lackeys for the dragons, rather than risking any of this. Frankly, so far we're doing better than I ever realistically thought we would." Getting her spell to the point where it seemed workable, Luna cast it and then spoke. Or rather sub-vocalized, since she couldn't truly speak without air to breathe. "We can do quite a bit better still, even if everything doesn't go entirely according to plan," she said, and grinned as it successfully broadcast on the same frequency as the others were using. "Luna?" squeaked Dream, shocked. Luna giggled. "Yes. I have just now created a spell that can interface with your suit coms." "Ha! I told you she was picking things up quickly," said Glory. "I guess so," said Dream, still sounding startled. "We're nearly half way, so it's time to start slowing," said Luna. "It's called 'turnover' usually," said Rosie. "Whatever one may call it, I am beginning it now," said Luna, shifting her propulsion spell to reverse its vector. Now instead of gaining speed they began losing it, slowing as they drew nearer the little shipyard ahead of them. Luna's keen pegasus eyes eventually spotted a faint speck of sunlight gleaming off the yard and the single ship there. As they drew closer, it grew until the others could see it as well. Dream said nothing about his earlier doubts, and Luna didn't bring them up, but she did feel more than a little smug when they finally arrived, the spell canceling the last of their momentum, letting them drift gently to touch down on the scaffolding of the abandoned shipyard. With the boots of their spacesuits having built-in tractors that latched them on to the scaffolding, the others were able to walk along it, heading for the main module on the other end and the airlock that had to be there. As they went, Luna hovered by them, propelling herself with a touch of magic. The scaffolding cradled the immense bulk of a cargo ship. It was an almost perfect sphere, save for a few protrusions where sensor ports were embedded in its hull matrix, or where shuttle docks and access hatches showed. Those were quite small, though, so most of it was simply a smooth curve of silvery alloy like a miniature moon, which loomed over the scaffolding and absolutely dwarfed the quartet as they made their way along it. The ship was over half a kilometer long, and Luna had been told that it wasn't especially large for a merchant ship, larger ones were common. The central module of the shipyard was tiny by comparison, though the entire apartment building where Dream and Glory lived, or the whole of Canterlot Palace, could easily have fit inside it. Its surface was dotted with the slick shine of solar cells, which Luna could sense gathering in the sun's power. She smiled a bit to see them. They no doubt used some arcane methodology to turn solar energy into power the edifice could use, but they, at least, she understood. How could she not when she'd witnessed Celestia drawing power from the sun on countless occasions? They found the airlock, which yielded to Glory's security codes, but its double doors weren't needed, for the inside of the module was as airless as the outside. Luna stayed by the doors, knowing she would only get in the way, and watched the others spread out, searching for information. They needed to know a dozen different things, from whether there was stored air still here, and whether the walls were still sound enough to contain it, to the state of the ship itself, and what—if any—of its internal systems had been installed before it had been abandoned. Several hours later they gathered to discuss what they had found. Luna had grown bored enough to explore as well, though she didn't know enough to really contribute to the search. "First thing's first," said Rosie. "There is some canned air here, and a working enviro plant. So we won't have to head back to get more air when the suits run out." "Excellent," said Glory. "Unfortunately what I found wasn't so good. The ship is there, the hull is intact, and the bridge and the crew quarters are pretty much finished, along with the sensors and navigation systems, but the final crystals for the computer were never installed and, worse than that, there's no drive at all. We can get our hooves on some crystals, probably, but a drive is much harder to swing." "The parts storage here is pretty much empty," reported Dream. "There are plenty of tools, though, so you're right that if we can steal computer crystals we can install them. The drive though... that's not good news." "That means the ship can't move, yes?" asked Luna. "Yeah. Though I'm starting to wonder if you really need a ship. I mean... you've said you can pull apart the cruiser without needing its weapons, and you've just demonstrated you can move through space on your own. Can you just... go fly out to it and take it out?" "Well... yes, I suppose so. My power is already much increased, but we're still very close to the planet. I need to be further out to have enough to be certain of destroying the enemy ship. Still, there's no reason I can't fly out to one of the moons and do so from there." Luna wasn't quite certain she liked that, using the ship had been the perfect plan, for it had allowed her to aid these ponies while also giving them an active role in their battle. She didn't want to just sweep in and solve all their problems for them. Still, if the ship itself couldn't be flown, doing it by herself was probably the most viable option. "You know," said Glory, looking thoughtful, "I'm wondering if there's any way to take the ship intact. Can your magic target its crew, rather than destroying it outright?" Luna blinked at her. For just a moment her mind shied away from the very thought. She didn't want to kill the crew. Then a shudder ran through her as terrible realization dawned. The night will last forever... She had thoughtlessly embarked on a course that would kill the ship's crew, and she hadn't even considered their deaths. The ship would be destroyed, that was all that needed doing, and never mind that destroying it would almost certainly kill everyone on board. Just like before. Just like when I broke the heavens and kept the sun from rising, only this time I don't even have a thousand years of madness as an excuse. She shuddered again. Her first attempt at bringing darkness had been an eclipse, which had been bad enough, but when she'd tried a second time to bring eternal night she'd done much worse. The celestial mechanisms that should have kept Equestria spinning, and its moon orbiting around it, had been shattered by Discord long ago, so Celestia had needed to keep a gentle hoof constantly on the planet, shepherding it through its proper course, just as Luna had needed to carefully guide the moon. Similar damage from ancient chaos also meant that ponies had to direct the weather, and shape the seasons. Equestria was a broken world. Then Luna herself had damaged it further. She hadn't been able to control the planet, then as now it resisted her influence, so when she'd been freed from her lunar prison she'd simply smashed at it, bludgeoning it to a halt. Celestia had been able to repair the damage and start it moving again, but Luna herself would never have managed it. The night really would have lasted forever had Twilight Sparkle and her friends not defeated her, even if she'd changed her mind and wanted it to end. She would have eventually, she knew. She hadn't given it any thought at the time, but later she'd done the research. She'd even had Twilight help her with the math, and the conclusions she'd reached had been inescapable. She would have killed millions. The night side of the world would have frozen, while the day side baked. Plants and animals would have died, and people with them. She wouldn't have quite exterminated all life, a narrow twilight band would have allowed a few to survive, but even if every pony, gryphon, minotaur, diamond dog, dragon, donkey, and every other thinking being on Equestria had been able to reach it—and most of them would not have, she knew—they would not all have been able to survive there, conditions would still have been harsh. Some areas would have no rain, ever, while others would have such constant rainfall that they'd never see the sun, even though it would stay fixed on their horizon eternally. Mountains would cast shadows of lifelessness, and only constant labor would enable crops to grow. She would have been forced to watch her ponies die, and she would have regretted her actions, but she would have been utterly helpless to change anything. She could not move the sun, it was simply beyond her abilities. The worst thing was that although Luna hadn't realized the full extent of the catastrophe when she set out to destroy Celestia and create eternal night, she had known perfectly well that at least some ponies would die. She'd put it out of her mind, and not thought about their deaths, but she wasn't so stupid that she could completely delude herself into believing that no one would suffer if she halted the planet's rotation. But their deaths would have been indirect, no blood would be on her hooves, so it had been easy, all too easy, to do it anyway. Now here she was, doing the exact same thing again, if on a smaller scale. She had known that the ship's crew would die when she destroyed her ship, but she'd been perfectly willing to kill them. Now she was being asked to kill them directly, individually, and once again she was forced to face the fact that she was an inequine monster. It's so easy to kill when the blood isn't literally on your hooves. So easy... "Luna?" said Glory, sounding puzzled. "I'm sorry," blurted Luna, her body shuddering. "What's wrong?" asked Dream, his booted hoof reaching out to her. Luna sprang to her feet and shied away from Dream's touch. "I'm sorry," she repeated, then she turned and ran. A babble of confusion and dismay broke out behind her. Luna cut off the radio transmission spell, and utter silence embraced her as she fled into the darkness.