A small fire danced within the hearth, casting a gentle glow across the entire room. Twilight sipped her cocoa and looked down at an open book. She couldn’t quite recognize what she was reading, couldn’t even remember the title of it. She was just content to bask in the warmth of the flames, alongside her friends.
The winter winds were distant, muted, and almost soothing in the silence. All were quietly enjoying themselves in the peaceful light. Twilight embraced the feeling of contentment as she draped her wings over the five ponies that surrounded her. She felt a bit colder, but didn’t really mind. She was happy now, and only wished for the moment to last forever. This was her favorite dream, but – no… it was just a dream.
The world began to come apart. Twilight reflexively grasped for the seams, to hold it all together just a little while longer. But she flinched back after realizing what she subconsciously attempted, and let the strands fall between her hooves. That was a dangerous path to go down, one she had tread once before and vowed to never follow again. The threads of the dream hit the ground and melted away.
.
She became aware of her own consciousness slowly, finding little difference between opening and closing her eyes in the pure darkness. The derelict ship was devoid of all motion, and Twilight felt the urge to stay equally still. Only the realization that her wings were uncomfortably splayed across a few empty supply crates convinced her that she was no longer asleep.
Twilight threw an illumination spell into the dark. She let out a yelp and tumbled into the wall directly behind her, narrowly dodging the orb of light rebounding an inch from her face. She rose to her hooves indignantly, only to bang her head into the ceiling with a metallic crash. She quickly found herself back on the ground, curled in a graceless heap.
“I’m getting too old for this,” Twilight grumbled as she cast another illumination spell.
She held the magic on the tip of her horn this time, and looked around. There were crates to her left and right, and tight walls in all other directions. Despite having spent years within her cozy ship, Twilight couldn’t quite shake the sense of claustrophobia. In retrospect, she mused, an access tunnel was probably not an ideal resting spot.
She shoved the crates out, and shivered as the cold air came rushing through. Twilight shook her head and slowly crawled back toward the cockpit. The salvage mission was a bust, yielding little more than a few months’ worth of rations. There was no usable hardware whatsoever, but the most lamentable loss was the warp drive. Rebuilding such a complex piece of machinery required dedicated factories supplied by entire star systems, well beyond what she could accomplish alone.
That left Twilight very few options for the little pony she saved. She could leave him here, on the cold, unforgiving, and hostile surface. Or she could bring him along, dragging him ever farther from his family and home, never to either again. That would just barely be a kinder fate.
The alicorn shuddered at the thought of providing a merciful end. She could build a spaceworthy ship in under a month, but without a warp drive, it may as well be a coffin. Twilight frowned as she considered his only way out. Rather than sending him back to the Federation, she had to bring them here.
The fact that she currently stood in an escort class ship gave her a slight amount of concern. It was a medium range vessel, with neither the accommodations for pegasus magic required in atmospheric craft, nor the earth pony magic required for endurance in long range operations. Escort ships were deployed exclusively alongside Federation carriers, and the carriers were always accompanied by a vast array of supporting ships.
It meant there might be a full-scale Federation fleet just a few jumps away. While there was no real urgency – no way for them to catch her here, beside the sheer luck they seemed to enjoy much of recently – the looming threat of overwhelming force unsettled the lone explorer. She leapt out of the wreck slightly faster than she would have otherwise, face set grim with determination.
.
Twisted pieces of metal and slag littered the glacier. There was little left to scavenge out on the ice, but Twilight still took a moment to explore. Shards and fragments of electronics were scattered everywhere, and none were whole. Even if she were to gather every last piece and use every last remnant of magic, it would likely not add up to anything meaningful. She gave up on her brief search and slowly worked her way toward the foundry.
“—sonal correspondence of Equestrian royalty. Unauthorized access is treason and will be punished to the full extent of the law.”
She jumped back, startled by the sudden noise and sharp pain in her foreleg, and turned to face her aggressor while priming several combat spells. She caught sight of an active data crystal, embedded in one of her hoofprints, and allowed her magic to fizzle. Twilight gingerly nudged it with her good leg and allowed it to play. She was well beyond the farthest reaches of Equestrian law, and the threats of punishment meant little to her. While accusations of treason still held some sway, the possibility of any sort of news from home was simply too appealing.
“Sunshine, sunshine…”
She stared at the recording, wide eyed, as the image resolved into a pink pony. Twilight had not heard from Cadence in over a decade, and had not seen her in twice as many years. A pang of sadness gripped her heart as she mulled over that fact.
“Come on, Twilight. I know you’re there. Join in! Sunshine, sunshine, ladybugs awake!”
“… Clap your hooves and do a little shake…”
“And again! Say it with me this time!”
The cheer in Cadence’s voice infected Twilight’s own, as she mirrored the motions in the recording. She was tempted to play it over and over again, to relive memories that she now missed dearly, but she resisted out of curiosity for the rest of the message.
“There have probably been several years between me recording this and you watching it, if it’ll ever reach you, that is. I’ll be sending this recording on every single expedition I can, just to make sure it does. But anyway, it’s been far too long since we’ve talked. How have you been Twilight?”
“Cold, mostly. A bit lonely too, but the stars make for good company. What about you?”
“Things have been… quiet here in the Federation. They’ve been pretty good, but we all miss you. Luna constantly complains about how boring things are without you. Celestia doesn’t show it, but she misses you too.”
As Twilight watched the recording blink away tears that hadn’t quite formed, she began to count each individual light year between Cadence and herself. 4346 and growing, by her last reckoning.
“Oh, I have a lot of news for you! Out of date by now, but at least it’s good news.” Cadence scrounged around off-camera, before returning with various stacks of paper.
“The survivors from New Ponyville just applied for colonial rights. They found a nice new star system, on the fringes of Federation space, with two viable planets for terraforming!”
Twilight looked at the map Cadence held up for her. It was indeed at the very edge of civilization, closer to the galactic center than any other Federation system by over 30 light years, as if they were stretching toward her.
“Heh, did you know, they called the planets Dawn and Dusk? They even voted to rename the star after you, though you’re still technically the one that has to authorize it. They… really miss you, Twilight.”
“We all do.” Cadence was barely audible as she muttered her last line, looking down at the ground. She turned her gaze back up, now somber and without the previous cheer.
“They voted for you to represent them in the Royal Council. Unanimously. I volunteered to do it in your stead. They weren’t happy about it; there’s no way to make them happy, but I’ve been trying my hardest. I’ve had some disagreements with Luna and Celestia recently, about y– …about a few policies.”
Cadence broke into a soft smile, as she lifted up a new sheet of paper. Twilight could see the strain in her eyes, and the fiery determination behind it.
“I know asking you to come back is a lot. But if you ever do return, come to one of my systems. I have your pardon notarized and distributed to every single star system under me, no strings attached. I have the authority to do that now. I even have the fleet to make sure of it, if it becomes necessary. But secretly, I think Luna and Celestia have been giving me more autonomy to allow this while simultaneously saving face. Politics, huh?”
“Sometimes, I feel that you got lucky. Getting away from all…” she lifted a hoof into the air, and gestured back and forth. “… this.”
Cadence let out a long sigh. As she looked up one last time, she held an expression of pure resignation.
“You won’t be back here, I know that much. I’m not a fool. I… I just miss you, Twilight. I hope you haven’t forgotten about me… I hope you haven’t forgotten about Equestria.”
“No. I’d never,” Twilight replied, voice low with conviction. The hologram flickered out of existence as the data crystal deactivated. She tucked it into her flight suit, then disappeared in a flash of light. A few drops of glistening water fell toward the ground, freezing solid well before they reached it.
.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Twilight announced as she teleported into the foundry. “The bad news is that I can’t get you back home.”
“However, the good news is that there’s another way!” She smiled at the only other pony within hundreds of light years. She hadn’t been doing that enough in the past few decades.
“I’ve been trying to develop a means of faster than light communication. Well, faster than sending ships between stars like the postal system of old…” Twilight’s speech died off as she considered her words. She could still recall her encounters with the gray mailmare as if they had been yesterday, despite being almost a millennium ago. She shivered, as all the years of her life caught up with her. Her horn flared briefly as she recast a few heating spells.
“At first I tried playing around with entanglement. But there’s nothing side A can perform that side B can detect: the no-communication theorem. I should know, I spent decades trying to find some way to send messages to the gir—” She coughed a bit, awkwardly, and sat down before continuing.
“Anyway, I’ve got it now. After processing the data I collected a couple of months ago, I realized the possibility of inducing a stable gravitational distortion to delocalize…”
The alicorn shook her head.
“No, I won’t convolute it. I may have slightly exploded a tiny bit of reality on the first run, but I can guarantee it that works. A real ansible, that works almost instantaneously and across vast distances.”
She gestured at the spire that sat in the middle of the room. It was tall and blocky, entirely incongruous with the sleek modern Equestrian architecture the rest of the facility coincidentally followed. The giant cylindrical mana tanks that haphazardly surrounded the base were a particular eyesore.
“Yeah, it’s not a looker, but our typical manufacturing techniques don’t seem to produce the desired result. I call it a Beacon; no matter what sort of shielding I tried, it’s incredibly bright in all wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum. Easy enough to block out locally, but trying to block it at the source interrupts transmissions for some reason. But, hey, it works.”
After a few moments with no response, her smile fell. The pilot she had rescued a few weeks ago was still asleep. She could not wake him; she didn’t have enough supplies to keep him alive.
Twilight shook her head at the rationalization. She herself had been subsisting off of magic for several years, and it wouldn’t take much work to adapt that to unicorn metabolism. No, the real reason was that she was afraid. Afraid of how he would react, and afraid of what he thought of her.
“I calculated everything,” she continued, her voice low. “Your ship had an operational range of 200 light years. Best case scenario, it’s half a month one way if your home fleet is still out there.”
“But we can’t risk it if they’re not. Sending the transmission is an expensive process, and I only have the energy for one destination. Which means you’ll have to wait for help from the Federation. That’s 50 weeks for a straight jump; add in stops and detours for resupply and victualing, and you have to last an absolute minimum of 2 years in the ideal case.”
She looked out the window toward her ship, fully overhauled and shining in the bright snow. It took a month of hard work, but the EQS Harmony was finally reassembled and better than ever. She then turned toward the holographic projector that displayed all of her aforementioned calculations.
“I can leave you with 86.9% of my remaining fuel. Of that, 71.0% will be used to send a transmission home. The rest should generate enough magic to maintain your stasis spell for 25 months. At the end of that, there should be enough left for another few months of basic life support to go with the supplies from your ship.”
Frowning, she checked over her calculations for the thirteenth time, and checked that her count was correct for the fourth. After completing her repairs and compiling her reports, there was little else to do while waiting for her launch window. It was an odd feeling, having so little to do after so many years of unceasing action.
“It’s cutting it close for us both. If it’s not enough for you, I’ve set up a cryogenics facility. It’s really not that difficult to freeze things on this planet. On my end, if anything happens, I might end up dropping out of warp in the middle of nowhere. Though I could technically siphon fuel from my stars, it’s my right to do so.”
“But… they don’t like it when I do that. The new fuel scoop should let me run mana-neutral as long as I’m not in warp, and even refuel a bit if I pass through stellar ejecta. But it’ll be slow going until I get to the next nebula.”
She looked up and smiled faintly. There were another two hours before Twilight could take advantage of a gravitational slingshot to save on fuel, so she pulled the projector over to help pass the time.
“This is the path I’ll be taking; 20 short jumps over the course of a year, if all goes well. Final destination is the Horseshoe Nebula, about a hundred parsecs from here.”
It was a good feeling, finally getting a chance to talk to a real, living pony. It had been far too long since the last time. Though, it would be more accurate to say that she was talking at the unconscious pilot instead. Twilight shrugged at the technicality and spoke on.
“You know, I never saw any resemblance to a horseshoe. And from here it looks nothing like what you would see back in the Federation. I guess ‘Big Red Blob Nebula’ isn’t quite as poetic. At least it’s pretty hard to miss. It’s red, and bright, and huge. Seriously huge, it looks bigger than the moon from–”
Twilight cut herself off upon realizing that he had probably never seen the moon before, at least not from the surface of Caballus. It was highly unlikely that he had ever stepped foot on the Equestrian home world, given the vast size of the Federation. She paused for a moment and frowned.
“Well, it’s really big. You should visit some time.”
The holograms flickered and died as Twilight purged all systems of her calculations. She was hoping for the Federation to come here, and it wouldn’t do to have them finding her plans. Lights all throughout the facility dimmed as non-critical systems began to shut down. After a bit of idle fidgeting, Twilight activated the distress beacon she pulled from her ship. She set it next to her little pony before wrapping both in a blanket, and headed back out into the cold.
.
The frozen surface drifted away so very slowly. Twilight had to make a small detour to disable the orbital defenses, and just passed the threshold for entering warp. Even though she could leave at any moment, she lingered for a while longer to make sure the Beacon was running properly. She stared down at the planet with a sad glimmer in her eye.
She hoped her little pony would be alright.
She had done everything she could for him. On the other hand she could have – no, this was the best course of action. Bringing him to the Core would not be doing him any favors.
All that was left to do was to wait for the Federation to save him. Though, Twilight did feel a slight bit of remorse for lying to them the way she did. Her primary transmission mentioned only space-borne turrets shooting down a ship, the frequency and galactic coordinates of her personal distress signal, and that supplies were limited. While none of it was an explicit falsehood, leaving out the fact that she wouldn’t be there was a distasteful necessity.
“Hopefully the engineers back at Caballus can reproduce my design for the Beacon. If they can contact a forward fleet, it might shave off a good amount of time. I know I’d want to get home as soon as possible…”
Another moment passed, along with another stolen glance at the icy planet, before Twilight slammed her throttle forward. Once the familiar glow of warp flooded her cockpit, she cut her engines as far as she could without dropping back into normal space.
Twilight gazed into the shimmering lights, this time flickering shades of oranges and reds. She kept staring into the chromatic display of warpspace, trying to extract every last bit of amusement from it. It lasted minutes or hours – there was little difference to her – before she snuck a peek at her primary status display.
“1,641,633 seconds… 1,641,631… 1,641,629… Hah! It’s ticking faster than I can even read it!” Twilight tried to convince herself that the warp would be over soon, but she couldn’t quite forget how the screen reported several weeks just a moment ago. Still, she smiled and began to hum to herself.
The data crystal that Cadence had sent her held a treasure trove of reading material. It was full of legal documents, probably put there by the hordes of bureaucrats that Twilight had managed to escape so many years ago. Despite that, a blessed bit contained news articles and correspondence; in the end, new reading material was still new reading material – Twilight wouldn’t complain, even if it was years out of date.
She had already sent a reply, piggybacking off of the rest of her transmission. Originally, she wanted to encrypt it with an absurdly complex algorithm, one of the many she created during her tenure at the School for Gifted Unicorns, but then realized Cadence would never be able to decode it. Instead, she hid it in the middle of all the data she had collected over the past few years.
She had sent back so much information that it would take the entire Federation decades to process all of it. Even Twilight herself had only gotten around to analyzing a tiny fraction. She hoped that she left enough clues for Cadence to find it. That mare never was an avid reader, so it would be entirely possible for her to miss it completely.
“Well, if she hasn’t learned to enjoy reading in the past few centuries, then I guess she’s completely hopeless. I mean, I’ve managed to get even Rainbow Dash to like it within a year. Oh well, there’s no helping it now.”
Twilight sat and read, to while away whatever time she could. Unfortunately, she went through all of the good reading material in a bit more than a hundred thousand seconds. Groaning, she waved the remaining documents of lesser government officials onto her screen.
“Really scraping the bottom of the barrel now, are we? Let’s see… Senate Transcript #140238, Hearing Before the Joint Houses and Royal Council Re: HRH TS Pardon… desertion, blah, blah, dereliction of duty, blah… Introducing Her Royal Highness, Princess Cadence… For too long, we have been persecuting Equestria’s greatest hero… In light of the Fair Service Act that was recently signed into law, it must now be acknowledged that Princess Twilight Sparkle has committed no crime…”
“Cadence… I… thank you. It’s not quite that simple, but still… thank you.” Twilight flicked her hoof to scroll the screen, and continued reading aloud.
“For centuries, she has only ever acted for the good of Equestria, and we have the gall to remunerate her with aggression. The first and most necessary measure is to invalidate the Royal bounties placed upon Her Majesty. I hope none of you are so craven as to play a puppet and reject this motion…”
Twilight tilted her head a bit, somewhat surprised at the language Cadence had used. She must have wasted a lot of political capital pushing this.
“Well, skipping ahead – I’d rather not read about people discussing my virtues, or lack thereof. Let’s see, final vote: 1413 to 88 from the houses in favor of, 1 to 0 in the Council. Huh. I know Cadence had to abstain because of a conflict of interest. I wonder whether it was Celestia or Luna that voted for me.”
Waving her hoof again, Twilight moved on to yet more documents.
“Now, what do we have here? Proposal Re: Stellar Re-designation, FWD by HRH CAD to HRH TS. Oh! This is the about naming the star for the New Ponyville survivors. Hmm… Vespera, I like that name. It has far more character than λ Equulei.”
Typing on her console, Twilight submitted her approval of the name change. It would take thousands of years for word to travel back, making it an effectively meaningless gesture. But she did it anyway; she owed that to the survivors.
“Alright! What’s next? Override of the Veto on the Repeal of the Harmony Act. Wait, but that—ugh, final vote: 142 for the motion, and 96 against, with less than one sixth present. The bill fails to pass over the veto of Her Royal Highness, Princess Cadence. It better have!”
Twilight stared blankly at her screen for some time, out of pure disgust. She genuinely considered turning back had the bill gone through. The Harmony Act was her capstone piece of legislation; she fought to get it passed, piecemeal, over several generations. She had toppled vast political dynasties in the battle, but her greatest achievement in the political arena was paid for with the blood of her old constituents.
She flinched, as the wicked firestorms danced in front of her eyes once more. She struggled to summon forth whatever atmosphere she could, only to have it all consumed in the flames. Intimidation, retaliation, terrorism, Twilight couldn’t spare a thought for the proper words to describe it. She could only race around the planet, saving anyone she came across as the surface of New Ponyville was reduced to ash.
A high temperature alert finally broke her visions. Twilight prepared a cooling spell, but ultimately decided to shunt the heat that permeated the cockpit into her reactors instead. She couldn’t afford to waste the magic, and instead stood up to shake off the sweat. She was overwhelmed with nausea, and immediately sat back down after working the cramps out of her wings.
“I don’t think I want to read anymore.”
Twilight glanced into the flickering reds right outside her window, briefly, before bringing her cockpit windows to full opacity. She closed her eyes and ran a hoof down her mane, before letting out a sigh. Transitioning smoothly, she then tapped her hoof against her chest plate. The familiar beep of her recorder was somewhat comforting, yet Twilight still struggled for her words.
“Journal #43. …H-hey girls. I… I just had those visions again. It’s… I just tried so hard and I still couldn’t save everypony. We caught those star-damned criminals that did it, only a few weeks after the fact. But… it doesn’t bring them back. I’m sorry.”
The silence pervaded her little ship. It was a perfect, complete sort of quiet that could easily drive a pony insane. Twilight had only been able to stave it off recently by reading to herself aloud. The EQS Harmony was in a low-power mode, so the only potential noise would be from the reactor, which was too far removed from the cockpit to hear. She leapt from her seat and galloped stern, as fast of a run as she could manage in the tight corridors. She only stopped when the calming buzz-and-hum of her ship’s fusion reactor filled her ears.
“Sometimes I wonder whether or not I did the right thing,” she continued. “It’s hard to count how many lives your laws have improved. Every now and then, you get a letter thanking you for helping save their children, or for getting food onto their table. But the more vocal group is always your detractors. Billions, literally, of messages all calling me evil incarnate or a harbinger of doom. One pony that stood out used very colorful language to blame me for his losses gambling on free-range rock farm futures, and demanded that I pay him back.”
She scoffed.
“Of course, I know they’re being foolish and petty. But… it’s frighteningly easy to count how many lives you have directly destroyed. 102,732. I managed to save 804 from New Ponyville, only find them without family or home or livelihood. The other 101,928…”
“I took it upon myself to learn their names. Every single one,” Twilight carried on, as if she never even paused to dry her eyes. “If I remember them, then a small part of their memory will live as long as I do. It’s not much, but it’s the best I can do.”
An alarm rang throughout the ship. It was a general one, meaning anything from ‘almost kind of low fuel’ to ‘zonal dampers are jammed and need a good buck’. It required attention, but wasn’t always urgent. Twilight sighed and turned for the cockpit; it was always better to err on the side of caution when spaceflight was involved.
“Alright girls, I have to go. Duty calls. And… thanks for listening.”
She tapped her chest plate to end the recording, and walked back toward the cockpit. She settled into her seat and checked on the alarm – the Harmony was off-course by 0.5 arcseconds. Twilight typed in the correction maneuvers; it was a minuscule change, but missing by any amount while traveling between stars still added up to hundreds of millions of miles. It meant the difference between loitering around her target dwarf star for a week versus being stuck there, trying to refuel, for months.
The silence pressed in again. Twilight took a few deep breaths, merely to make some more noise, but the acoustics of her ship absorbed the sound. She took a quick peek at her windows, only to remember they were blacked out for a good reason. After letting the timer on her display tick a few more seconds, she removed it with a forceful wave of her hoof. Left with a blank screen, she waited for a moment, then spoke out.
“Begin playback of file: video recording #102.”
A pony clad in a full g-suit appeared onscreen. The suit covered up nearly every feature, but Twilight could discern a bit of the familiar rainbow mane behind the dark visor. She smiled with recognition. She was watching one of the earlier recordings of Rainbow Dash’s experiences as a test pilot. She heard her own voice coming in over the speakers.
“Begin preflight examination. Check fuel levels.”
“Mmhm.”
“Check control systems.”
“Yep.”
“Check emergency systems.”
“Sure.”
“Come on, Rainbow Dash. Keep your head in it.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
“This is serious. Your life is on the line if anything goes wrong.”
Twilight could feel the exasperation creeping back, even centuries later. Rainbow Dash loved being a test pilot. It was a way to keep her inner speed demon satisfied, even as she grew older. Twilight was more than happy to provide newer and faster vehicles for her, even though the speedster never managed to leave behind her impatience.
“Yeah, but you’re the one watching my back. There’s, like, no risk at all! I know you already triple checked everything.”
“Quadruple, actually… But still, I’d feel better if you ran them too. Could you do it, for me?”
“Alright egghead, fuel levels within mission parameters. Aileron response is nominal, brake-rudder response is nominal. Throttle check… good, differential systems responding."
“Who sounds like an egghead now?”
“Hey, you’re the one that snuck all that into my brain. Do you want me to finish the checks or not? Fire suppression system is…”
A quiet hiss filled the audio, and was followed by annoyed grumbling.
“Fire suppression system is very wet. Emergency ejection system is armed. Flight computer is good, sensor outputs are clean. All systems are go.”
“Copy that. Lieutenant Rainbow Dash, you are cleared for takeoff in 5… 4…”
“321letsgo!”
The roar of a jet engine running at full throttle drowned out any other noise. The bleak gray hangar that hung in the background immediately gave way to blue skies. As the plane reached cruising altitude, the sound of the engines retreated into a dull droning, and gave way to a stranger one.
It took Twilight a moment to identify it. It was the sound of Rainbow Dash whooping in excitement, along with her past self shouting in anger. Every time Twilight tried to get a word in edgewise, Dash would hit the throttle and cheer even louder.
“Get it out of your system yet, Twi?”
“Almost… that was reckless Rainbow Dash! You could have been—”
The sound of the engines picked up again.
“Woooo! Sorry, I can’t hear you over my awesomeness!”
“Alright… if you’re done taking my incredibly expensive, experimental prototype for a joy ride, there’s still a job for you to do.”
“Yeah I’ll get on it. Figure out the max speed and flight profile. Just one quick question first.”
“Yes?”
“How many records did I break just then?”
Twilight groaned, both in the recording and in the present.
“I think three…”
“Then let’s make it four!”
The jet engine rumbled to life once more, and the soothing white noise quickly faded into the background. Twilight cut the video and let the audio loop. She curled up, draping her tail across her muzzle, and closed her eyes.
“It seems some things would never change,” she mumbled, before drifting off peacefully.