The tunnel was large. The entrance had once been secured by great steel airtight hatches, which had originally been a head or more thick; at some point in the past, whoever had reopened these mines after the Cataclysm had managed to get those blast doors for the immense wealth they represented; doubtless they had long since been melted down and new objects forged of their metal. Not moonsilver -- even the Age of Wonders hadn't been that wealthy (they could have been if they'd listened to me and opened Lunar mines, she thought mournfully, remembering from her memories of Moondreamer an argument that was now more than four thousand years hopelessly lost).
For a moment the gulf between four millennia ago and today, between Luna and Moondreamer, seemed as insignificant to the Moon Princess as it would have seemed to her Cosmic self; then she realized that it had been two hundred generations of mortal Ponies, that even when Luna Selena Nyx had been born at Paradise Estate the world that had created this place had been seventy-five generations dead and buried. Her mind briefly reeled before the abyss of Time this represented, the abyss of time she represented; even though she had been raised by Undying Ponies who had seen the Age of Wonders it suddenly seemed too much, the alienation between even her Incarnate Self and the mayflies among which she dwelt. She actually stumbled, overwhelmed by it all.
"Princess Luna! Are you all right?" the mayfly beside her asked, coming to her side, ready to support her should she fall.
Luna turned, briefly confused that a mayfly should issue equine speech in converse with her, and then perspective and sanity returned.
"Just ... remembering," she said to Summer Lightning, who was a Lieutenant of the Day Guard Rangers, whom Luna wanted for the Night Guard, and who was moreover a real Pegasus Pony with her own thoughts and hopes and dreams, not some sub-creature to be scorned, no mayfly, even if Luna would be alive a hundred generations after Summer was dust. "A great, great while gone."
"You remember this place, Ma'am?" Summer asked her.
"Yes," replied Luna. "I have never been myself here before, but I ken well what sort of place this was. In another time ... another place ... I planned such places."
Summer's eyes were burning with curiosity.
"A ... military base," Luna explained. "United States of Amareica Strategic Air Command. The shafts leading up to the Dragon's lair are deep tubes leading up from the main magazine."
"A fortress?" Summer asked. "Of the Age of Wonders?" In her excitement she forgot to append any honorific.
"Yes, of a sort," Luna explained, unconcerned with the famliarity, here in a place which had been delved when the birth of Equestria. and hence her royal status, lay two and a half millennia in distant futurity. "Here were great missiles which could fly across a world, strike and destroy whole cities in half an hour. Sunfire explosives. Like unto the most powerful blasts my Sister can create, but many times more powerful."
Awe and terror transfigured Summer's pretty, fine-featured face. "Is that ... is that what caused the Cataclysm?"
"No," replied Luna. "The sunfire missiles never were used. An ultimate threat, never needed, for the foe against whom they were built yielded without a fight." She grimaced bitterly. "Had it been those, we would long since have come all the way back. The Cataclysm was worse. Far, far worse. Would that it had merely been global sunfire war!"
Luna had the dubious satisfaction of seeing Summer shrink in horror, at the thought of something worse than warheads which could destroy whole cities. You know it not, Luna thought, but in both, 'tis me that you fear. I helped design the sunfire missiles, and the great engines which caused the Cataclysm. Innocent child! You know not how bloody-hoofed is she with whom you walk! But she said nothing, for she had no desire to utterly terrify the poor little Ranger.
"This boots not now," Luna said. "Dwelling in the past only blights the future." She smiled. "We have a captive to save!"
"Yes, Ma'am," replied Summer, recovering her composure.
"We needs must be silent soon," Luna said. "Dragons have sharp ears, and the tube may lead straight to his lair."
Summer nodded.
They made their way through the literally-antediluvian base, walking as soft-hooved as possible. The complex had been long ago stripped of everything of possible value, including the heavier hatches, and all the lighter doors, and furniture, had long since fallen into ruin. They had to move carefully -- more than once, something shifted or even clattered, and they both tensed, though they were still too far from the launch tubes for it to be likely for even a Dragon to hear them. Eventually they learned the trick of it; both of them were stealthy mares to begin with, and this was but another environment to master.
As they approached the magazine level, Luna concentrated hard, trying to match the memory of her mass scan with Moondreamer's original blueprints. This base had been designed to mount four tubes, each served by a twelve-missile rotary launcher. Standard loadout, three ICBM's and nine ABM's per tube, giving the complex a robust second-strike capability. WIth each missile a four-warhead MIRV, this single base had the power to destroy a single small nation, barring active defenses.
All that mostly irrelevant, now. What was important was how the tubes were arranged. There were two possible layouts in Moondreamer's old designs, and she did not know how this base had modified them. Moondreamer had been more concerned with the rockets and warheads themselves; the base had been an afterthought. The compact layout, essentially a 2 x 2 square, and the linear layout, which was exactly what it sounded like. The first one took up less space for the support tunnels, but was easier to knock out with a single hit; the second one was more resistant to enemy counterforce strikes; a third design, with the missiles at the four corners of the base, had been voted down by the Congress as too expensive to be practical.
Judging by the memory of her mass scan and what she was seeing in the facilities, this was a linear layout -- probably built that way to keep the height of the tubes roughly even on the mountain slope. Most of the base was horizontally between the launch tubes and the mountainside, which made sense -- take out the launch tubes, and all this base became was an exceptionally-expensive fallout shelter. She remembered the position of the Dragon's lair, and saw how #2 tube intersected one of the tunnels of the upper caverns.
She'd have to damp her light most of the way down going up, or she might as well be flashing strobes for all the stealth she would have going in. Which reminded her ...
She motioned at Summer. "Low light vision," she whispered. "Hold still."
Summer nodded.
Luna leaned forward, put her horn right between Summer's eyes, and cast. It was a low-powered spell, unlike the energy required for a flight-field or graviton blast, and there was no way the Dragon could detect it through all the metal and rock around them. She was very familiar with the enchantment, as she had used variants of it on the Nocturnae, and on the armor she had crafted for the non-Nocturnae of her Night Guard.
"Half a day," Luna explained.
Summer nodded.
They padded into a long room which Luna recognized as Maintenance. All the equipment here had long since vanished. Luna did not bother to mention a certain danger; it was irrelevant in any case, since she wasn't detecting significant hard radiation. This base had probably been partly or wholly decommissioned before the Cataclysm; even if it had been operational at the end, the missiles might have been removed, or whoever stripped the accessible metals in the intervening millennia might have taken them. If they had been fissionable-triggered, those fissionables had probably long since been used as somepony's material components: there were whole families of potions that could be enhanced by various isotopes of uranium or plutonium -- though the alchemist had of course to be careful how she handled them.
Luna looked right and left. They were standing right before Launch Tube One. The blast doors had been dismounted and their metals extracted long ago, so she was able to look right into Tube One. Curious, she stepped cautiously onto the pad. There were bits of the complex rotary launcher all around her, but no sign of any missiles. No Peacekeepers, and even the Sureguards had probably been pulled out before the Cataclysm. That was unlucky for the post-Cataclysmic miners, who probably would have liked to strip their fuselages for moonsilver, but lucky for Summer and her if this was also true in Tube Two. Less debris to stumble over.
Summer watched from the door, eyes huge at the incomprehensible ruins all around her. She understood steam engines and locomotives, batteries and electric lights, but this had been built by a technology a hundred years beyond anything she had ever seen. Even in this pathetic state, the sheer scale of this Information Age ruin it was impressive to this daughter of a merely Industrial Age civilization.
It's not that amazing, Luna wanted to say. No bigger than some of the skyscrapers Equestria has already raised again in Manehattan, and this base was all dedicated to death. Your culture is kinder. Your rockets will be lovelier. But this was not the time to risk noise that might echo up the shaft, if this one had even a crack into the lair, and alert the Dragon.
Luna stepped back into the maintenance room. There had once been flash guard doors which could segment the maintenance room when the base was at full alert, but those had long ago been stripped for their metals. They walked past the debris of a bygone age to Launch Tube Two.
They stepped into another great stripped space, similar to Launch Tube One. The vast chamber of the magazine rose a hundred heads above them, narrowing in a buttressed funnel to the actual launch tube. This in turn rose hundreds of heads beyond, until Luna's hornlight disappeared into a darkness that not even her low-light vision could pierce.
Fortunately, Luna remembered the design of this part, because it was part of the launch system, and Moondreamer had worked on this personally. There should have been two hatches on the launch tube; a lower one protecting the magazine and an upper one capping the tube against the outside. They formed, essentially, a flash-lock, preventing any truefire detonations above from easily penetrating to the magazine -- the base would have been able to survive any but a direct hit by the heaviest sunfire warheads. Thanks to Moondreamer's clever design of the exhaust tunnels, it was theoretically possible to launch a Peacekeeper through one of these without ever providing an external enemy a direct line-of-blast to the magazines.
The lower hatch was gone -- stripped by the long-gone post-Cataclysmic miners for its metals. But the upper hatch was either still there or had been replaced by some other blockage, something Luna knew because she couldn't see even starlight up the tube. She also knew from the memory of her density scan that there was a direct route up this tube into the caverns where the Dragon laired. This was very good, because it meant that the Dragon might not have even realized the significance of the tube: he'd only been in this lair a short time and probably hadn't had time to explore everything.
It meant her plan had an excellent chance.
The problem, of course, was getting up the tube. They could do it in an instant by simply flying, and that would work in the escape if the captive could fly or was small enough to carry, but flying up the tube seriously risked alerting the Dragon. Likewise, teleporting would be dangerous, even if she sent a radar pulse up the tube to ensure she had a clear exit point. The Dragon had already demonstrated he had active radar, which meant he could detect Luna's own active pulses.
No, they had to climb, and the problem with that was that while the miners had not stripped out the stairs and maintenance ladders (they had apparently decided to leave those for last, for the obvious reason), those structures were over four thousand years old. It was a minor miracle they hadn't already collapsed of their own weight -- Luna sniffed a guardrail, licked it experimentally.
An aluminum-based alloy. And the air in the old base was dry. It had formed a thin layer of stable surface oxide in most places, and henceforth been protected by that layer. The stairs might actually be able to bear their weight: they had followed Moondreamer's original design here, and she had massively overengineered them to survive a full missile launch and retaliatory bombardment. And they looked as if the builders had not stinted on her original specifications.
Luna roped herself and Summer together, with about thirty heads of slack. This should be enough that they wouldn't both be standing on the same exact section of stairs at the same time, but not so much that they would constantly be getting the rope hung up on corners. Luna took the lead. If a section could take her weight, it could take Summer's, and with the abilities of the other Four Kinds, Luna was much better at dealing with the consequences of a fall while radiating the minimum PKE.
They climbed the stairs. Luna had removed her metal sabatons, but even stepping softly, their hooves sometimes made faint little clangs against the ancient metal that were louder than Luna would have liked. Looking back, Luna saw Summer's face screwed up in concentration as she stepped very carefully. Their senses were utterly alert to every motion of the metal that supported them, keeping them ready to react should the millennia-old structure fail beneath their weight.
It was an eerie feeling, climbing through this great cavern, delved as it was from the living rock by nigh-mythical Ponies from before the current cycle of the World. The Earth had shaken to the Cataclysm, and this place had remained. The snows of the Fimbulwinter had fallen, and this base had remained. The world had heated, the icecaps melted, the seas risen, and this base had remained. The Windigos had howled and the Coming of the Ice threatened to crush the continent, and this base had remained. The Three Tribes had migrated, Discord had risen and been defeated, Equestria founded, Luna herself made her spiteful rebellion and spent a thousand years mad on the Moon. And under this mountain, this base had slumbered, uncaring of the passage of the long years, decades, centuries.
The two mares were climbing out of this strange survival of an eldritch past, a lost world of computers, metallurgy and sunfire missiles; back toward the mundane modern world of mages, alchemy and Dragons. Luna had been Moondreamer; she remembered that lost world, and yet it all seemed to her like something out of a forgotten fairy-tale. She could only imagine what it must feel like for Summer Lightning, who had probably lived a fairly normal life, for a Day Guard Ranger.
They reached the roof of the magazine chamber. The stairway had climbed the inner wall of the magazine, because no missiles would have actually been near that wall during a launch; but it could not climb the launch tube itself in such a manner, let one of the tough but thin-skinned rockets rip open a fuel tank on a damaged flight of stairs, and suffer a chemical explosion on launch in its own launch tube. Luna understood full well why Moondreamer had made the design decision to run the stairs up the outside of the launch tube, in the narrow space between the wall of the tube and the armored sleeve around the tube proper.
Gangways continued across the ceiling almost to the tube. From here the whole magazine chamber was spread out beneath them. Enough parts of the old rotary loading mechanism remained that Luna could plainly see how it had been constructed so as to quickly and selectively maneuver the next missile into position. Rate of fire would have been important in a hot war, when the survival of the base might have depended on getting a Sureguard aloft in time to knock down an enemy missile before the attacker could score a direct hit. Within her, Luna felt Moondreamer's satisfaction at the elegance of her own design.
As Luna approached the stairway up into the launch tube sleeve, the gangway beneath her creaked alarmingly under her weight. Moving step by step, feeling the structure shudder at each cautious placement of a hoof, she got past that section to firmer footing, though there was one hairy moment as a bolt sprung free, falling for long seconds to clatter on the floor.
Both mares froze, intently listening. There were no further sounds, no indication that the Dragon had heard this. The acoustics were complex and unknown; Luna wasn't even sure that the sound would echo up the tube into his lair. She had sufficiently Silenced their hooves that their footfalls were not clanging on the metal with each step, but she dared not do more lest the Dragon directly sense the thaumic radiance.
Looping some of the rope's slack around one cannon and positioning herself what she knew to be a relatively stable section of gangway, Luna motioned Summer to come on.
Summer was trying to keep it out of her expression, but Luna could see the fear in Summer's eyes as she stepped cautiously onto the weak part of the gangway. She was much smaller and lighter than Luna. However, at least one bolt had already worked loose. The gangway creaked and shuddered, and Summer's wings flared as she used them as counterweights to keep her balance, scrupulously suppressing her flightfield.
Summer took another step, then another. The gangway shuddered again, jerked, then seemed to find a new stability. Relief came into the eyes of the small Pegasus, and she smiled confidently as she gathered herself for the last few steps to safety.
With a loud SPRONG! the gangway collapsed. Summer's eyes went wide and her mouth became an almost-comical "O" as her footing fell away from beneath her. Her wings flared, and there was a faint flicker of flightfield; then a resolve came onto her face and she damped her field all the way down, mindful of the mission, trusting to her leader rather than her own natural abilities to save her.
Luna heaved on the rope, gathering Summer up toward the remaining end of the gangway before she had fallen more than ten feet. Summer's muscles were ready for this, and she took the tug well -- she would have bruises tomorrow morning, if she lived to see tomorrow morning, but Luna judged that the motion had caused her comrade no serious harm.
She hauled Summer up fast, because the real disaster was about to happen. She'd thought about Silencing or telekinetically cushioning the fall, but either of these would provide a PKE flare which the Dragon could not hope to miss, and could not be explainable as anything but the presence of high-level magic. The mission could still be saved -- if they moved rapidly.
Summer's hooves caught the edge of the intact section and, with some help from Luna, the Pegasus scrambled onto the platform, standing upright. She looked no more than upset by the experience.
There was an immense clattering and crashing as the collapsed section of gangway struck the floor of the magazine chamber, a hundred heads below. There was no way the Dragon hadn't heard that.
Luna gathered in most of the remaining slack in the rope, made a "Follow me!" motion, and bolted for the stairs.
"TREACHERY!" came a great basso roar, echoing down the shaft. There was an awful noise from far above, which Luna knew to be talons longer than whole Ponies tearing through ancient armored steel and concrete. There was a sound of heavy objects clattering downward.
The two mares ran up the stairs, Luna first and Summer hard on her heels. Good thing I Silenced our hooves, Luna thought, or we would be so loud that the Dragon would certainly hear our motion.
"HAIRY ... VERMIN!" the Dragon roared, his voice seeming more distinct, despite the fact that it must now be rebounding off the magazine chamber floor. Large objects battered off the armored surface of the launch tubes, some of the sounds audible from far up the stairs, others echoing from below.
In an instant they were within the main armored sleeve of the launch tube, around which the stairs spiraled. Luna motioned Summer to step back completely out of sight of the magazine chamber, but risked exposing her own head a little so that she could see something of what was going on beneath.
They could hear vast motions from far above; metal scraping over metal. Dragonscales over the armored double cylinder, Luna knew, and looked up the stairs. There was not enough room for the Dragon to crawl down without the sleeve without essentially digging up the stairs every head of the way; surely he would not attempt this?
Large pieces of debris struck the magazine chamber floor far below them. Luna plainly saw in her limited field of view one chunk of rusted steel and concrete slap onto that surface, shattering on impact, converting itself into almost a fragmentation bomb, spraying head-sized pieces of ferroconcrete in all directions, rust crystals puffing out everywhere in what would have been an eye-stinging haze. She was glad no Ponies were actually down there at that moment.
She suspected it was about to get worse.
It did.
"NOW ..." boomed the great voice of the Dragon. resounding in a manner that made it obvious that his huge head was now within the launch tube, a blue-white glow beginning to build "...DIE!!!"
Just in time Luna averted her eyes, folded her ears and pulled back Summer ... who against orders was trying to peep over the edge down the stairs ... Luna enfolded Summer in the safety of Alicorn wings, then buried her head in her own breast, squeezed her eyes tight shut, and prepared to endure pain in silence.
An intolerable blue-white glare burned Luna's eyes even through her closed lids, since she had deliberately avoided providing the thaumic signature of a magical barrier. There was an immense pulsating flash that went on and on and on, as the Dragon breathed full-powered lightning right down the launch tube. The stairs down to the magazine chamber collapsed in a clatter of metal. Oven-hot air whipped their manes as it howled up past them.
The thunderclap was, at such close quarters, immediate and deafening. There were great cracks and what must have been thermal explosions. Luna was now very glad that there were no missiles in the magazine -- though the lightning could not have triggered truefire explosions, they could have set off ordinary chemical ones in the detonators, degraded as those detonators would have been after four millennia without maintenance, spraying earth-hot fissionables all around.
Through this all Luna noticed approvingly that Summer managed to avoid screaming, though at one point she let forth a sort of subdued half-whimper. Luna sensed only indirect Dragonfear -- the inner armor was protecting them from the Dragon's psychic radiations -- but the more natural kind of fear was quite understandable at such a moment. Luna herself was still mostly calm -- but then she was very powerful, and had been in this sort of situation several times before in her long life. Summer was just a Pegasus, and this was all very new to her.
The glare died down. There was the sound of debris clattering and clanking into new positions, a crackle-pop-hiss of cooling concrete and metal. Then ... silence.
Luna put her mouth right up against Summer's ear.
"Canst thou hear me?" she breathed.
Summer did the same thing to Luna.
"Yes ..." she replied, omitting the honorific.
This was fine with Luna, as she was not feeling particularly formal right now. The fact that they could hear one another confirmed that neither of them had been deafened, a very real hazard considering what had just happened.
"Remain still," Luna said. Carefully, she opened her eyes. She could already see in the near-darkness ... Alicorns regenerated their visual purple rapidly, as they did all else. She peeked out into the magazine chamber.
This was less dark than it had been before, because the crater that Dragonbreath had torn in the immensely strong and refractory material of the launch pad was still glowing red-hot in places. Luna was impressed: that pad had been built to survive the blast from a half million pounds of solid-fuel rocket thrust at near point-blank range, yet the Dragon's lightnings had torn right through its surface, spraying red-hot and molten wreckage in all directions. There were fires burning in the magazine, including some smouldering in substances normally-not flammable, but those were dying down, chilled by the now merely desert-hot atmosphere within.
Luna pulled her head back in, moved close in to Summer. Her companion had mostly regained her composure, though Luna noticed a telltale tremor in her legs.
"We still have a chance," she whispered to Summer.
"D-d-doesn't he know we're here, now ... Ma'am?" Summer replied.
Luna could here the stress in even the whisper of the small Pegasus.
"He suspects." She elaborated upon her theme. "He thinks he may have slain or cowed us. If he knew he had not, he would be coming down the launch tube. He is not."
"Why not?" Summer asked, looking fearfully upward.
"We might be a trick. He is alone," Luna explained. "If he crawls down here he leaves his hostage guardless."
"B-b-but Ma'am, if we go right up the tube we'll fly right into his jaws." Summer's eyes were pinpointing.
"We know something he knows not," Luna said.
"What's that?"
"The crack he widened is not the only one leading into the upper caverns," Luna informed her. And unless I miss my guess, he cannot watch them all."
Summer trembled. Then she closed her eyes tightly, breathed in, then out, opened her eyes again.
"I'm with you, Ma'am." she said, somewhat more calmly.
"Good mare!" whispered Luna, patting her shoulder encouragingly.
They began climbing the long stairs.