The fissure was narrow, and had never been smoothed with equine hooves in mind. They crawled in, Luna in the lead. It was a claustrophobic climb, conducted in as much silence as possible, aided by Luna's magic as much as she dared, made possible only by Luna's great strength and the lightness of Summer's small frame. At some sections they scrambled over absurdly uneven ground, placing each hoof carefully to avoid injuring a leg; at others squeezed through narrow passages; and at still others climbed near-vertically. It was a difficult path, and would be still more difficult burdened with a possibly-injured hostage. Only the fact that they would be able to use their flight-fields on the way back rendered rescue by this route at all practical.
Finally, they found themselves standing on a horizontal shelf. Behind them the crevice chimneyed down. From ahead, there came a draught of relatively fresh air. There was a hint in that breeze of mountain heights, but there was also the strong archosaurian tang of Dragon.
They had clearly climbed all the way to the Dragon's lair.
Now, Luna would leave Summer Lightning at the entrance, and fare further alone, to either rob the Dragon of his hostage, or gift him with a far greater one. Or worse, a trophy.
Luna halted Summer halfway along the shelf. Wind, she signed, and showed its probable direction -- toward the dragon with ocasional back-eddies. Scent. This close to the Dragon, she did not want to dare audible speech.
Summer nodded and saluted.
While the stone still shielded her from direct-line detection, Luna dared one last quick casting, a simple odorless spell, that reduced her scent to almost nothing by selectively keeping organic molecules larger than carbon dioxide and methane from leaving the vicinity of her own body. The effect on her would of course be the opposite -- after a couple of hours of this, she would stink -- but there was no such thing as a free lunch, especially where magic was concerned. The thaumic radiation was minimal, and with this and the silence on her hooves, she knew she had a good chance of slipping right past the Dragon, especially if his attention remained fixed on the old launch tube.
At least, going in. Going out, she feared she might have to improvise.
Luna reached the end of the shelf, where a horizontal crack opened into a wide tunnel, broad enough that four team-drawn wagons might have rolled along side by side. The floor was even smooth enough that this might have been practical, which -- combined with the arch-like conformation of the walls and ceiling, made Luna suspect that someone had shaped this cavern -- and, if so, probably more recently than the building of the ancient Amareican missile base, unless the architecture of that base had been very non-standard.
Which, of course, it might have been. In the last half-century of Amareica's existence, conventional wars had become uncommon, as the world stablized under the Amareican nuclear umbrella. However, all sorts of strange criminal and terrorist groups had emerged, and equally-strange special forces and law enforcement units been commissioned and chartered to fight them. The Joes, to which Moondreamer Finemare had frequently served as a civilian engineering consultant, were actually one of the more normal ones. A lot of very odd cutting-edge military and paramilitary equipment had been hidden in some even odder places. They had fought for freedom where there was trouble, and repeatedly saved the world -- until the Cataclysm had come, bringing doom from an entirely-unexpected direction.
Enough wool-gathering, Luna scolded herself. Putting off the moment of decision. But -- in most literal truth now -- 'tis time to face the Dragon!
Cautiously, keeping her most potent spells of offense and defense at the ready, Luna stepped round the corner.
And saw the Dragon.
Or rather, she saw the Dragon's rear end.
This was entirely in accord with her hopes; the reason the Dragon's rear end was facing her was that the Dragon was poised at the opening in the old missile tube, watching and listening intently, like nothing so much as a gigantic cat crouched before a mouse-hole. Its gaze was entirely fixed forward; as long as it remained so obsessed, Luna could pass behind it without being spotted.
Step by step, Luna made her way down the tunnel away from the Dragon, all the while keeping an eye on the immense creature. This was in part to make certain that it wasn't craning its neck around to look at her, but also in part because she liked to look at Dragons: they were such beautiful, magnificent beings, so perfectly formed as weapons of war: like great living swords, yet with minds and hearts and souls.
Even from behind, the lightning-drake was wonderful: massive, muscular haunches, the huge hind legs, almost delicately cantilevered on the long bones of their feet, a delicacy made possible only because their muscles incorporated silane fibers; and their bones, lattices of iridium steel, supporting and protecing the calcium without and marrow within. The Dragon was the size of a small skyscraper, but with its elastic, amply-reinforced musculo-skeletal system, was as agile and resilient as a Pony, its tough construction and excellent evolutionary design defeating the normal implications of the square-cube law as it limited living beings.
She admired Dragons, even though her role as the Lady of War meant that she sometimes had to fight, even kill them. She would almost certainly have to fight, and perhaps kill, this Dragon, but she still found it -- him, she realized, as the haunches shifted, the colossal counterweight of the tail switched, and she glimpsed the narrow cloacum and prominent pubic ridge, signs of draconian masculinity -- to be beautiful. He was much more than a millennium old, doubtless a living repository of lore, second only to a very few other Dragons, and of course herself and her Sister. To slay him -- it would be like burning down an ancient library.
So went her thoughts as she soft-hooved it past the great creature who was vigilantly watching the wrong way in. She was making for the large side-cavern she had spotted in her original density scan, one toward the center of the zone from which she had detected the distress calls of the Alicorn foal. As she approached the entrance to that cavern, she heard a faint but distinctly equine noise, at which her heart jumped and her ears perked up, for fear that the Dragon might also hear it and look toward the source of those sounds -- in the process, spotting her own self. Soon she relaxed, for she saw that the lightning-drake was paying absolutely no attention to them. She, for her part, listened carefully, to gain what intelligence she could regarding their origin and nature.
They constituted a sort of muttering.
The voice was obviously that of a mare, but low-pitched and throaty. It sounded young, but definitely adult. The diction was excellent, and Luna got the impression that -- under better conditions -- it might have sounded lovely.
As it was, the voice was strained, and a bit ragged -- and its owner on the brink of madness.
"... cannot be how it ends," the voice was saying. "Not after all that Trixie has seen, not after all that Trixie has done, not with so much more to see and do. Not after she has glimpsed her high destiny! Surely, Trixie's story cannot just finish, in such an ignominious manner!" There was a faint clatter of chains. "This cannot be how it ends ..."
Luna noticed three things. The first was that this Trixie talked about herself in the third person, even to herself, which would have been a peculiar affectation even for a noblemare in the Time of Thrones, a thousand years and more ago, and seemed almost unknown in this informal latter days. The second was that, even when in danger of her life, and possibly going mad, Trixie still used words such as "glimpsed" and "ignominious", which implied a fairly high degree of intelligence -- or at least vocabulary.
The third was that Trixie was amazingly melodramatic, even in a real crisis. This, oddly enough, made Luna feel some sympathy for her -- Luna, herself, had more than once been accused of the same failing, sometimes by her Sister.
It of course occurred to Luna that this was probably the same "Trixie" whom Twilight Sparkle had encountered earlier at Ponyville, and about whom Luna had been informed by Celestia. "Trixie" was an unusual name, and right now Luna was within sixty-five miles of Ponyville. Besides, that Trixie had been a showmare, and the little rant this mare kept repeating sounded distinctly theatrical.
Could Trixie be the Alicorn foal? Of course, she sounded like a young mare, rather than a literal foal, but there was more than one way an Alicorn could Incarnate. Not all were born Alicorns like Luna and her Sister: some were born as other creatures and then Ascended to Alicornhood. This was especially likely if they had not yet been born as Concepts. This was rare: however, Luna remembered Celestia discussing, long ago, the possibility of a new generation of Concepts emerging from Ponykind.
Whoever and whatever Trixie was, she was an Equestrian Pony in trouble. It was Luna's duty to rescue her.
With one last look to make certain that the Dragon had not yet noticed her, Luna stepped into the side passage. She heard the chains clatter again from within. One good thing about what Trixie is doing, Luna thought, is that the noise will make it harder for the Dragon to hear any sounds I happen to make.
Luna crept carefully into the side tunnel, putting each hoof down precisely, watching out for loose stones. She could sense no warding spells here, but began to feel the faint glimmer of a magic-damper operating up ahead. The Dragon must needs employ it to keep Trixie captive. Still, this is reason for further caution -- a strong enough magic-damper could contain mine own self. Continuing her careful advance, and looking up and to the sides to be wary of any possible damper-traps, Luna pressed onward, further into the side tunnel.
She rounded the curve, and found herself gazing upon the Dragon's hoard.
It was almost definitely not his main hoard, because it would have been foolish for the Dragon to take that into a territorial raid, and a Dragon didn't get to be that big and powerful and old by being foolish. Still, it was quite considerable -- there was a lot of metal and crystal by the standards of any pre-industrial civilization -- a fair amount, even in modern Equestrian terms.
Luna was definitely impressed by it, even though she knew that the Dragon was almost certainly practicing the usual dressing technique of arranging the less precious materials in the center of the mound, arranging the most precious ones as the top layer, to give the illusion of a huge pile of noble metals and precious gems, embodying a truly absurd amount of wealth. It wasn't the wealth that impressed her, though. It was the degree of honor-commitment implied by the fact that the Dragon had been willing to bring this much on his raid -- and then hazard it on a fight he was unlikely to win.
Luna undestood something of Draconic psychology and culture. Though Fischfootur had done something similar, it had been from very different motives. Fischfootur was naïve: it hadn't occurred to him that by challenging Luna, he might forfeit the hoard he'd brought, and in any case he had liked Luna, and Ponies in general. And if Fischfootur had died in the fight, the disposition of his hoard wouldn't have mattered to him, because he was almost certainly childless. Living, the sheer honor of having survived a fight against Luna outweighed his risk of material loss.
The big lightning-drake's position was entirely different. He was old and would be wise; he not only grasped the full implications of the laws of challenge, but was planning to use them to achieve his own ends, especially if he lost, which given his age and wisdom was almost surely his expectation. Luna was uncertain of his ends, save in that they were unlikely to be good for herself, Equestria or Ponykind. He despised Ponykind; he hated Luna herself as a monster. His strategy would be based on his assumption of Luna's monstrous nature; Luna could see this, much as the awareness pained her.
Thus, he was expecting Luna to try to kill him; given the level of power she had shown in the Time of Thrones, he was probably expecting her to succeed in killing him. This did not mean that Luna could relax if there was a fight, as there would almost certainly be, because the Dragon would be doing his best to kill her as well. What it did mean was that he could not be deterred by any threat of death, as he had already accepted his own death as the price of his strategem. Indeed, even if he killed Luna, he would likely die -- Celestia's wrath in that event would be terrible, and it was improbable that the lightning-drake imagined he might slay Celestia.
Given these assumptions, what was the lightning-drake expecting to accomplish? Luna forced herself to think along the unpleasant patterns of diplomacy ... she much preferred outright combat to the prevarications of international politics, but in her role she had schooled herself to comprehend them, an absolute necessity for a Ruling Princess, even if one were primarily the Lady of War.
He wants an incident, she realized. Something that Equestrians would interpret as proper behavior on my part, but that Dragons would find shockingly vile. Not merely killing the lightning-drake, Dragons would consider that a normal possible outcome of a duel, but killing him in some situation that would outrage Draconic morals. Such as ... she looked out onto the glittering mass of metal and crystals ... ... oh. Of course. Killing him as part of the robbery of his Hoard.
The Dragon code of honor was complicated regarding Hoards. A Dragon owned his Hoard, even if it had been plundered from other beings (which was actually where a lot of their wealth came, though another good part came from the regular taxation of lands they ruled). However, a Dragon did not rightfully own anything in a Hoard which had been taken wrongfully -- which is to say from beings with whom the Dragons had promised not to plunder and who did not owe them tribute.
This Hoard was in Equestria, which was a land with which the Dragons had a treaty prohibiting plunder. But the treaty worked both ways. Dragons could not plunder Equestrian persons or their property, but Equestrians were likewise forbidden from plundering Dragons.
If Luna defeated the lightning-drake in the course of a duel triggered by his invasion of Equestria, any Hoard he brought with him belonged to Equestria under the treaty, unless she yielded the right. Yielding the right was exactly what she had done regarding Fischfootur, because she wanted to befriend him; nodrake would expect her to deal as generously with the lightning-drake, under the circumstances.
Here was where it got tricky. Luna, as an accredited representative of Equestria, had the right to fight the lightning-drake and if victorious take possession of the Hoard he had brought.
Trixie didn't. The Dragon's lair was seriously out of the way, high on a steep mountain, and there had been no reports of any of the Dragons making captive anypony save for Trixie. What had Trixie been doing, that had gotten her captured by the lightning-drake? There was one obvious answer, especially if she were the Trixie who had lost all her worldly goods at Ponyville a bit earlier.
If Luna killed the Dragon in order to rescue Trixie, who had tried to plunder the Dragon's Hoard, this would be seen by Dragonkind as an Equestrian violation of the treaty, and by a Ruling Princess at that. If she then took the Hoard, that would seal it in their eyes. This might not mean outright war -- wars were less likely things to start than most layponies realized -- but it would certainly strengthen any anti-Equestrian factions in the Dragon Realms.
Luna could not forbear from rescuing Trixie. Sacrificing an Equestrian citizen to Draconic politics would be a betrayal of her duty as a Ruling Princess of Equestria, and it would moreover -- and quite rightly -- earn contempt from the Dragons themselves. Nor could she avoid fighting the lightning-drake, if he insisted on fighting her. What she could do was try to avoid killing the Dragon, and in any case ensuring the return of his Hoard, so that none could plausibly claim greed as her motive for fighting him.
So, she would neither slay the Dragon nor plunder his Hoard. Though that last was not entirely true. For there was one object in the Dragon's Hoard which she meant to remove, and return to Equestria. But then, that object -- which had just now become visible as Luna further rounded the corner -- was the very reason why she had climbed by such a slow and torturous path through the guts of the mountain.
The object was the Pony chained to a side wall.
Luna experienced a slight emotional disorientation as she realized that she had just thought of the Pony as an "object," which meant that she had been thinking in Draconic reference frames. To a Dragon, there were two ways that another being could "belong" to that Dragon and hence be viewed possessively. The first was if the Dragon and that being really liked one another, and thus the Dragon could count its Love or Friendship as an asset. The second was if the Dragon regarded that being as lawfully-taken prey, and hence as its slave -- or worse.
The fact that this Pony was chained to the wall made it obvious how the Dragon regarded her.
Standing in the shadows, Luna had not yet been spotted by Trixie -- for that was, of course, who it was, an identity confirmed as she resumed her little rant. Luna took the opportunity to examine her unobserved.
She was a blue Unicorn mare, with very pale-bluish-white hair, so pale as to seem almost pure white. Her mane was long and fine. It must have normally been quite beautiful, but it had not been tended for days, and it was tangled, with dirt within. Her delicate, fine-featured face was contorted in a snarl of hatred and rage, an emotion which Luna assumed was directed mainly at the Dragon. Her purple eyes flashed with outrage, presumably at her present postiion.
Look at her, Luna thought to herself. Captive of a gigantic Dragon, facing an unknown fate, and she's still angry, still defiant. Foolish filly. It's almost admirable. She felt a strange warmth toward the captive.
Trixie shifted position, and Luna saw it -- her Mark. Magic wand over crescent moon. It didn't prove anything, of course -- dermosignomancy was not that precise -- but it made what Luna already suspected seem even more likely. Her coloration, her attitude -- they all pointed toward one obvious conclusion. Trixie was her own remote descendant, and one who manifested many of Luna's own traits.
Luna knew that this conclusion might well be false. Even if it were true, the connection would be at least forty generations removed. The similarities would be the result of repeated atavistic combinations. But the combinations were there. The similarities were real. Luna felt sure of it.
She gazed at her distant descendant in wonder. There was nothing new about meeting a direct descendant. She had borne her first foal over twenty-four and three-quarters centuries ago, to Lore Diver of the Crystal City, back in the days when she had still hoped that the tyranny of Discord over most of the rest of the world would be a short one. That filly, Moon Mimic, was an ancestor of pretty much every Pony in North Amareica, by one lineage or another. And she had borne many, many foals since then.
But Trixie -- the similarities were very strong, almost as if she were a daughter or grand-daughter, and that was impossible, as Luna had been absent from the Earth for a thousand years. Or almost impossible -- the Cosmic Concepts, and those who dealt extensively with them, were not entirely bound by linear time, and often had strange arts biological -- but it was very, very improbable that Trixie was closer than fifty generations to herself.
Which made her resemblance to Luna all the more wonderful -- in all senses of the word. Especially because Luna had a very manipulative older Sister, who liked to play some long and twisty games -- and who had more or less assigned Luna her current task. She remembered the strange tone in which Celestia had talked of Trixie earlier. Celestia meant me to meet her, and without my being aware in advance of our kinship.
Still, she could not have arranged everything, Luna reflected. Trixie's humiliation at Ponyville, her capture by the Dragon, those must have been chance events, to which Celestia simply adapted her plans. Ever was it with her, ever shall it be with her. This is why she is such a capable schemer: her schemes are always flexible. So -- why does she want me to meet Trixie?
Luna mulled it over briefly, but could see no answer clear. Moreover, she could perceive no wise in which the answer would affect what she should do in her current situation. She still had to rescue Trixie, and defeat the Dragon without slaying him. So -- on with her quest!
Trixie had once again begun her mad little mantra denying her doom -- a statement which, Luna noted, would be quite accurate if Luna were successful in her mission. Moreover, Luna might turn this mantra to their advantage. She mentally-recorded the little monologue. Having done this, Luna waited until Trixie finished her speech.
As soon as Trixie did, Luna cast her spell and stepped forward into the mage-lights which the Dragon had placed to illuminate his Hoard -- and thus, into full view of the Unicorn.
Trixie's eyes widened as she saw Luna, and Trixie gasped in surprise.
"Hush," said Luna softly. "I have laid silence and an audible glamour on the mouth of this cave to deceive the Dragon, but loud voices will strain the spell, risking discovery. I am Luna Selena Nyx, Princess of Equestria, and I am here to rescue you."
Trixie's eyes fixed on her in mute appeal, and Luna bent to examine her bonds. There were steel shackles around all four limbs: as was standard, these were bent around the cannons in a such a manner that the flare of her hooves precluded their merely being pulled off. As she examined them, she noticed that they had been arc-welded shut.
"Did the Dragon close them with his own power?" Luna softly asked.
"Yes," whispered Trixie, evidently very afraid lest the Dragon overhear. Her expression was very strained.
Luna saw that Trixie's blue hairs were singed all around the metal. That must have been rather painful, she thought, pursing her lips for a moment in unavoidable sympathy. "Did he quench them once they were sealed?" she asked.
"Yes," replied Trixie. She seemed subdued.
"That's good," commented Luna. Had he not quenched them quickly, the heated metal would have discharged its thermal energy into Trixie's flesh for a while, inflicting protracted agony on the Unicorn, and quite probably laming her.
Still, it didn't look as if he'd taken many pains to avoid inflicting some harm, and Luna imagined that the flesh under that steel would be hairless and perhaps angry red. If he'd kept her like that for days, there would be serious infections; as it was, the metal would chafe and limit her mobility.
"You'll be able to walk once these are off," Luna continued.
She looked up, peered at the power-damper affixed to Trixie's horn. It had been chained around her neck, tight-gathered where throat met jaw so that she couldn't just slip it off, and two links roughly welded together at her cheek. There was a burn there as well -- Luna thought it would heal without much scarring, which would probably be important to Trixie if she got out from here alive -- stage performers were vain of their faces.
She knew how the lightning-drake had done all this. Despite their monstrous appearances, Dragons were tool-users, and often skilled ones. Their great talons, capable of tearing through rock with such ease, were remarkably precise instruments, completely under the control of the big and well-protected brains which were deep within those heavily-armored skulls.
"Did he use needle-pliers?" Luna asked. She'd seen the size of the Dragon's claws, and she didn't think he could have done this work bare-taloned.
"Yes!" replied Trixie, looking at her in some surprise. "Ones bigger than Trixie! The ends were like swords! He could have ... at any moment ... Trixie was ..." her voice quavered.
Luna nodded. "I would wager 'twas an unpleasant moment," she commented. She was deliberately understating the issue. It must have been terrifying -- but she did not want to drive Trixie into outright panic.
Trixie simply nodded.
Luna figured out what she was going to do. "I'm going to cut those off," she said. The task was beyond her ability to do at all quietly with any of the tools or weapons she carried. "I am going to use magic -- a sort of magic at which I am very, very skilled. I think I can do this without the Dragon noticing, and without hurting you too much. But this may hurt a bit ... and 'twould go very badly for thee if thou shouldst scream -- dost thou understand, Trixie?"
Trixie nodded, her eyes growing even wider. Her lip quavered. "I .... I ..." she swallowed quickly, her lip stiffened. "The Brave and Stoic Trixie will not scream."
She hath an odd manner of speech, Luna thought. Aloud, she said: "Good girl. Be thou ready for it ... set ... now!"
A very precisely-focused, biphase graviton pulse lashed out from Luna's horn. The two emissions were configured so that where they met -- and only where they met -- an oscillating shearing plane of force was generated. At the same time, a telekinetic field gripped the shackle on Trixie's left foreleg, clamping it stationary against the tremendous forces that Luna was generating.
The gravitons were of course invisible to most mortal perceptions, though Luna could sense them perfectly well, a fact which made her task tremendously easier. There was a flare of visible light along a line along the shackle; a grinding noise, and then a squeal of bending metal as Luna telekinetically-wrenched the cut shackle open, a clatter as she cast it aside.
Trixie gasped -- she would have felt a heat flash as the graviton pulse dumped much of its energy into the shackle as heat; a vibration as the shackle shivered apart along the line of the cut; and none of these would have felt pleasant against flesh already burned by the lightning-drake doubtless-crude and callous earlier welding. But, to her great credit, she did not make any louder utterance.
Now Luna acted even more swiftly. The first removal had given her the exact strength of the steel, and enabled her to know precisely how to proceed. The second removal was a quick pulse-and-wrench, less than a second; then came the third, then the fourth. As the shackles clattered to the floor of the hoard-chamber, Luna lifted her head to the chain of the horn-damper, severed one link with a weaker pulse, and stripped off the damper.
"Trixie is free!" the Unicorn crowed in delight. "Thank you! Thank you!" She took an uncertain step forward.
Luna heard a great clattering sound from the main tunnel outside, one she knew all too well from the many, many times she had fought Dragons. The sound of something very large, scrambling in a small space to turn around very rapidly. Even Luna, hardened by many centuries of battle, felt sudden fear.
She said a very old but very inelegant Equestrian word relating to excretory processes.
"Hey!" squealed Trixie as Luna simply grabbed the Unicorn in her aura and swung her up on the Alicorn's own back. "Trixie was trying to -- Eek!"
Luna galloped forward at full speed, no longer worrying all that much about silence. Somewhere in the middle of the run she launched herself into the air, wings beating, and she was flying as she shot out from the end of the side tunnel into the main cavern, both psychic and gravitic shields snapping up to full power, generating a pulse of psycho-kinetic energy that the Dragon would have had to have been mind-blind to miss.
Not that it mattered, for the Dragon had finished turning around, and was looking straight at her, crest raising in fury, dark-blue eyes blazing in hatred.
"HOARD-THIEF!" the great basso voice boomed at her. Simultaneously came a tremendous wash of Dragonfear, enough that it might well have cowed even Luna had not her mental shields already been at full intensity. As it was, she shivered slightly at the psychic assault, and she heard a whimper of utter terror from her passenger, who was only imperfectly-protected by Luna's mental defenses -- fortunately, it made Trixie cling all the tighter to the Alicorn.
Luna knew exactly why the Dragon had projected the Fear at them -- to make her pause and become vulnerable -- and she wasn't about to fall into that trap. She threw herself into a corkscrewing flight as she headed down the main tunnel, apparently directly at him, pulling the brace of javelins off her war-harness and readying her next maneuver ...
"DIE!!!" the Dragon roared, and brilliant bluish-white light blazed down the tunnel. He had deliberately de-focused his beam slightly, countering Luna's agility with an ion spray that filled the entire main tunnel with multiple lightning bolts. One struck a glancing blow against Luna's defenses; a second hit her dead-on to the breastplate, and she staggered in mid-flight, just in time remenbering to grab the now-terrified Trixie, who was shrieking incoherently as gigawatts of electricity sprayed off Luna's shields, and other bolts blasted boulder-sized debris from the ceiling of the main tunnel. Some of the energy had penetrated to blow off her breastplate, and Luna felt a numbing shock to her front that she knew betokened a wound. Red-hot pebbles from the thermal explosions all around her rattled off her gravitic barrier.
Luna jinked hard to the right just in time, as a tight-focused ion beam -- a solid and straight bolt of lightning -- shot down the main tunnel. She could only guess the joules per square inch of that particle beam -- it was similar to those developed toward the end of the Age of Wonders for shooting down missiles such as the base she had designed was intended to launch. It wouldn't have killed her, but it would have blasted her back down the tunnel, and probably slain Trixie from one cause or another.
I have to pass her off to Summer, Luna realized. And quickly.
She had meant to save this for a more opportune moment, but there was no time now. As the great Draconian head turned toward her, spines glowing as the lightning-drake prepared to let loose with another ion beam, Luna ripple-fired her javelins right at its eyes.
The javelins were not really rockets, but they did not need to be. Luna aimed each javelin with her aura and then accelerated it rapidly with the full might of her telekinesis. Crack-crack-crack-crack! came the four shockwaves as each javelin broke the sound barrier, shooting at hypersonic velocities down the tunnel, trailing glowing streaks from the points where steel met air molecules and converted them into plasma.
It was a purely short-range technique, because these were not the kinetic-kill-vehicles of Sureguard anti-ballistic missiles: the warheads, in particular, were not made of heat-shielded composites, but only high-quality steel. Each javelin was ablating away like a meteorite as it flew, and the points were ruined before they struck, but then -- at over Mach Eight -- they had no need of sharpness in order to inflict their harm.
WHAM-WHAM ... WHAM-WHAM!!! Two explosions blossomed on the Dragon's head as the blunted warheads smashed into his armor at some three thousand yards per second; so fast that even to Luna's perceptions they looked not like projectiles, but rather energy beams. The third and fourth missed their targets and blew craters in the tunnel wall behind him.
The javelins were not explosive. But, at some two miles a second, each struck with tremendous force; enough to dump sufficient thermal energy into both warheads and dragons that the impact points were instantly heated to temperatures sufficient to vaporize both the inorganic steel of the warheads and the organic iridium steel composites of the Dragonscales.
The Dragon screamed in rage and pain as the explosions rocked his head back on his neck. Shattered scales, flesh and blood blew out from the sites of the thermal explosions. Each of those strikes would have killed any mortal Pony born; even an Alicorn would have been out of the fight had she taken those on her naked hide rather than magical shielding; a young Dragon would have been stunned. This Dragon was far from defeated; he was not even stunned: but for the moment he was slightly dazed. His head retreated within the cloud of dust, smoke and steam billowing from the impact points of the javelins.
Luna took full advantage of the moment, darting back down to the mouth of the crack from which she had just entered the main tunnel. She yanked Trixie from her back with her telekinesis.
"Go in, along the shelf," Luna said rapidly. "Mine friend awaits within, to see thee to safety."
Trixie stood there unmoving, eyes unfocused. The Unicorn was obviously also dazed by their recent experience.
"Go!!!" shouted Luna, and shoved her in and down the shelf with her telekinesis.
A faint outraged yelp was Luna's only sign that Trixie had at least partially returned to reality.
Luna had no time to worry about Trixie's feelings. For her radar was registering movement within the smoke cloud, the movement of a great metal-laced mass, and she turned to face the oncoming threat, her own muscles tensing as she prepared to leap ...
... and do battle with the Dragon.