Where the Heart Is

by Workable Goblin

Outskirts

Equus Outskirts

“Exiting hyperspace”.

Shining exhaled. He hadn’t even had to hold his breath, as quick as it had been. That moment behind him, all that was left was to rendezvous and dock--

“Wait,” Twilight said. “Stellar positions indicate we are approximately 30,000 miles off of expected target...scanning...wait,” she said again, this time in a considerably less collected tone of voice. “I’m seeing several objects in the expected position of the Infinity. Some of them look like...they’re venting atmosphere? None of them have the right thermal profiles.”

Shining frowned. Had the Infinity hit a lonely chunk of ice, here in the outer system? It seemed unlikely...

Before he could finish that thought, Twilight jumped in again. “Picking up two hot objects at oh-one-seven degrees polar, three-one-nine degrees azimuth. Wait, they’re thrusting. High power...picking up very strong five-eleven line gamma radiation! They’re using antimatter!”

“Xenocontact?” Shining asked. To be in a first contact situation on the maiden voyage...!

Before Derpy could say a word, Twilight interrupted. “Pinging lidar...they’re 57,000 miles off our bow. Coming onto intercept trajectory. Multiple objects separating from them! Smaller objects are thrusting, using antimatter too...accelerations in excess of one gee. Ah...ah...intercept in fifty minutes.”

“Xenocontact, first contact protocols. Target the big ships. Operations Director, scramble all available fighters,” Shining ordered in a tone of voice which entirely belied his uncertainty and doubt. “Do not let them reach the Mothership.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Fleet Command, take us to General Quarters”.

---

"Gold 13, report engine status--"

"Gold 9, sensors are green, I say again green--"

"Section 2, weapons cold, I said weapons cold Five!"

If the shrill warbling whistle of the General Quarters hadn't shocked Rainbow from the drowsy lethargy the launch ceremony had put her in, the eruption of activity on her squadron's comms as their fighters undocked and began to file out of the hanger certainly would have. As her fighter slid out from its berth and into space under Hanger Control, she frantically scanned through her ship’s displays, trying to bring herself up to speed in record time.

"Gold Squadron," Spitfire's voice sliced into the chatter, "battle formation echo, all sections on section leaders. Uh..."

As Gold Squadron paraded out of the Mothership's hangar, Rainbow's slid into position a dozen or two miles behind Lightning Dust's fighter, in the perfect position to support her section leader without sacrificing her own maneuverability.

"situation is: unknowns, possibly hostile inbound, about an hour away. We're going to intercept them before they can reach the Mothership. Weapons fire not yet authorized.”

---

The shock of the siren was so great that Rarity almost jumped into the air. Almost. She did drop her fork, the utensil clattering unheard to the floor when her telekinetic grip slackened.

All around her, she dimly perceived the others who had come to watch the launch jumping to their hooves, in a few cases mouths moving, whatever noises they were making unheard amid the clamor of the General Quarters alarm.

Just a few seconds after it started, the siren abruptly stopped. A female voice followed the alarm over the ship’s speakers. Rarity quickly recognized Fleet Command from the launch ceremony she had been watching on the televisions in the cafeteria less than a minute earlier.

“General Quarters. General Quarters. All crew, report to duty stations. All crew, report to duty stations.”

She tried to remember what she was supposed to do in the event of a General Quarters, then nearly laughed. Report immediately to nearest emergency shelter. Well, here she was!

What was next...? Follow orders of shelter supervisor. Well, that varied based on shelter and time—although she could have named, in order, the supervisors for Prototyping’s shelter, she wasn’t sure who—

Almost as soon as she thought it, a certain cotton-candy voice cut through the fog of conversation that had begun to grow. “Hi everypony! As the senior chef on duty, I’m going to be your emergency shelter supervisor this morning!” Pinkie was waving excitedly from the not-yet-dismantled stage she had used the previous night.

Rarity groaned.

---

“I don’t care! Get sectors 52 and 53 locked down! Right now!” Applejack snapped into her communications headset. Before the team leader could respond, she reached out to her expansive console and flicked over to another of the channels screaming for her input.

A moment of listening later, and she was back to barking orders. “Look, ah get that everypony wants to take care of their problems before they get to shelter, but there ain't time for that! They need to get there now! Send sweep teams if you have tah, but make sure they get to cover ASAP!”

---

Gripping the mess of fish in her teeth, Fluttershy lifted herself into the air, ascending until she was skimming the lab's ceiling. She came to a halt above the largest aquarium in a room filled with them, a titanic construction occupying most of the back wall. Slowly, to avoid dropping the fish, she descended onto the aquarium's roof, stepping lightly to an access hatch on one side. Setting the fish down, she pulled it open, then turned to pick the fish back up before dropping them in, one by one.

The fish slipped quietly into the water, where their bodies slowly drifted downwards. In the center of the tank, just at the edge of the descending plume of food, a squid, about twelve inches long, was waiting. As she saw what was coming for her, her mantle began to rapidly flash different colors, conveying a clear message to the Yellow One above about what she thought of her diet.

"Now, now Ms. Squidley, I know you like anchovies, but you know they give you terrible indigestion," Fluttershy chided the complaining squid. "These are a nutritionally balanced, healthy meal for you, and I've tried to pick tastier fish than before. Won't you give them a try?"

Reluctantly, the squid waved out her tentacles, snagging one of the carcasses as they drifted downwards and bringing it to her beak, where she began to tear into it, ripping off chunks of flesh to swallow greedily. Slowly and begrudgingly, her mantle again began to change color.

Fluttershy smiled. "Well, I'm very glad you think--"

Knock knock

Fluttershy settled to the ground, turning as she descended to face the door. Before she could quite work out what was going on, the door sprang open, a tight cluster of three ponies in body-enveloping pressure suits forcing their way into the lab.

"Um...hello?" she said.

"Um, Doctor, uh...?" their leader stumbled.

"Fluttershy," she supplied.

"There's been a General Quarters issued and you're to report to emergency shelters immediately," he continued. "Surely you heard it?" he added, confusion evident.

She frowned. There had been an alarm a minute or two ago, but she had assumed it was part of the test. "Um...maybe?" she offered.

"Anyway, you need to get to the shelters ASAP," the leader finished. Without another word, he and his squad turned and began trotting down the corridor, away from the aquatic habitat.

Fluttershy turned her head to look back over her shoulder. Ms. Squidley was quickly devouring the fish carcasses, and she had already finished feeding most of the other creatures in the lab. The few who hadn't been would hardly die if their next feeding was delayed a few hours. Nodding to herself, she stepped out of the lab, carefully closing and locking the door, then rapidly trotted away towards the shelter.

---

Rarity winced. That joke had fallen so flat it had been almost painful. She couldn’t hear anypony else laughing, either, although she could hear whispers passing through the small clusters that had grown up around the stage.

“What’s going on?” “Do you know what’s happening?” “I heard there was a fire!” “A fire!?—”

What was going on? Was something wrong with the ship? And out here—!

She forced herself to stop and breathe. Panicking would help nopony, least of all herself.

She nodded, feeling herself coming back into balance. Yes, panicking was pointless. She glanced around herself again, gauging the crowd’s mood. Like herself a few moments earlier, they seemed on the verge of rash action. There was nothing to it: Pinkie needed help.

There were few ponies around the front, and Rarity was easily able to slink up to the stage. A few hooves away, she took a running leap, hanging herself from the stage’s edge for a moment before Pinkie reached down and helped her up.

Pinkie started saying something about her, but Rarity tuned it out as she looked over the crowd from her new vantage point. Even the slightest glance was enough to show that as she feared they were paying no attention to Pinkie’s antics, or her speeches. She leaned over towards the party pony and whispered in her ear, “Pinkie, this isn’t working”.

“I know that,” she hissed back, and Rarity could see a few hairs springing out of place in her mane. “But I have to try.”

“Well...if we did something else like...hmm...ideeea~!”

---

Shining Armor watched as Derpy and her team frantically cycled through their library of first contact messages, desperate to find something, anything, that could elicit a response from the aliens.

“Sir, alien thermal output and drive plume size has just made a major jump,” his sensors officer interrupted.

“They went from two to twenty gee at the same time. Looks like they were holding back,” Twilight concurred. “That’s better than anything we have but the Arrows. Time to Mothership is now sixteen minutes. Current time to intercept for Gold Squadron, fifteen minutes.”

At that, Tactical jumped in. “If what Sensors and Command are seeing is right, Commodore,” Cloud Kicker said, “Green and Black won’t be able to make intercept if the bogeys do any evasive maneuvers. Not if they have any reasonable mass ratio.”

“Sir, Gold Squadron is nearing the edge of the exclusion zone. Go for throttle up?” the fighter director added to an already overloaded conversation.

“Of course,” Shining ordered. “Gold is go for maximum thrust. Tactical, on Green and Black--”

“Yes?” Cloud Kicker asked.

“If the bogeys launch missiles--”

“I agree, sir,” she interrupted. “They still have a role to play, even if they don’t need to be charging out there for a probably futile intercept of the busses or fighters or whatever.”

“Thank you, Tactical,” Shining replied. “Fighter Director, Green and Black are not, again not authorized for maximum thrust at this time. They are to proceed forwards into the missile intercept region, but slowly, Green ahead. Maximum intercept area, commander.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

---

Shining Armor was studying the strategic plot again, watching his fighters and the alien spacecraft continued their slow crawl towards one another. Derpy’s team was still transmitting, but at this point it was time to face facts: the aliens weren’t interested in talking.

He opened a channel to Derpy and Cloud Kicker. “Xenocontact, Tactical: Should we go weapons-free?” he asked as soon as it turned green.

Cloud Kicker responded in an instant. “Yes, sir. All the evidence we have is that they’re hostiles, and could cause major damage to the Mothership.”

It took much, much longer for Derpy to reply. When she did, it was with a haggard, beaten-down voice. “I have to agree with Tactical. They have not responded to our hails and with the destruction of the Infinity...”

Shining keyed over to the the fighter director and Twilight. Without preamble, he announced “All ships are free to fire at will. Fleet Command, uplink targeting and intercept data.”

---

Rainbow watched the aberrant constellation slowly crawl towards her. In her helmet’s display, she could see the alien ships blazing away in the infrared, diamond-like points of light trailing vast streamers of exhaust as they raced towards their meeting in—she glanced at the timer—five minutes.

She was no stranger to boredom punctuated by explosions; but this was different than what she had experienced in SFTC or flight school. There was a tight little knot wrapping itself up in her stomach, growing by the minute, but she distracted herself, mentally reviewing her fighter’s start-up checklist, the engine settings, the position of every single one of the ship’s controls. Because if she thought about that little knot...

Apparently, somepony else was having trouble too, because before she could finish that thought Lightning had keyed in to her ship, on a private channel. “Lieutenant,” she said, without preamble. “Just remember: Do your job and you’ll be fine.”

Rainbow sighed, as much as she could while immersed in g-protection fluid and accelerating twenty times harder than her body was ever meant to. She was thinking far too much with all this sitting around and waiting. Evidently, it was getting to her superior officers, too.

Spitfire interrupted. “Gold Squadron,” she began. “ROE update: fire at will. Targeting data and intercept trajectories are being uploaded...now.”

The sparkling points of light ahead suddenly changed color, from a brilliant blue-white to a startlingly bright red, standing out against the black background of space. A tight yellow box surrounded her target a moment later. Moments later, her computer added an overlay of white arrows and diagrams, showing the exact moves she should take for optimal positioning.

Rainbow gripped the control sticks and began steering her fighter onto its course. She tried to think about something--anything--else, but again and again her thoughts kept returning to that little knot in her stomach--well, not so little anymore. She knew exactly what it signified, and hated it. Fear--it just wasn’t--well, wasn’t her. And for all that she wished she could share in her superior’s self-confident bravado--and for all that she would never have publicly displayed anything else--she couldn’t lie to herself. Not for very long, anyways. She--

A loud buzzer sounded in her ear. Startled, she saw that she had drifted slightly off course. More importantly, there were no longer five minutes to intercept, but a bare sixty seconds, ticking downwards as she watched. Gently, she put her fighter back on course. Thirty seconds. Fifteen seconds. Five seconds. Zero--

---

Fifty impactors zipped down the fighter’s gun, accelerated to a speed more than six miles per second greater than the already incredible velocity Rainbow had built up over the past eleven minutes.

Each of them, as they emerged from the gun’s barrel, was spinning—just a little, nothing like a rifle bullet back on Equus—scanning a well-defined region of the space ahead of them, where the fire-control systems had computed the enemy fighter would be. Even as blind as they were compared to the fighter that had spat them out, its exhaust stood out in the infrared like a fire in the night, utterly distinct from the speckled backdrop of stars and galaxies behind it. As each of the impactors detected it, they ignited the rockets they carried in their bellies and aimed themselves for a point a few hundred miles ahead.

A second passed. The enemy fighter had spotted the stream of rocket plumes heading in its general direction almost as soon as they ignited, and more distantly hundreds of others as the Equestrian fighters opened fire. For a few dozen milliseconds, its onboard computer systems tracked the kinetics, long enough to determine where they were going--and where they had come from. In a gout of antimatter-hot plasma, the alien fighter slewed and spat a potent response to Rainbow’s attack, then slid as it began evasive maneuvers.

Rainbow’s impactors noted the sudden change in the enemy’s drive profile immediately. The barest instant later and they were already following, frantically changing their own thrust vectors as the enemy fighter jerked and skidded unpredictably across the sky. As time flew by in intervals of a half-dozen milliseconds, more and more of Rainbow’s kinetics were forced to concede that they would not be able to make the intercept, redirecting their thrust to blow them impotently out of the battlespace. In a hundred thousand years, perhaps, they would return and threaten some other ship; but for today, they had been harmlessly spent.

Three seconds after they were fired, only fifteen of the original fifty were still tracking.

A second later, seven of those remained on course.

After five seconds, just three were still on course for the alien fighter when...

They hit.

---

As the moment of intercept approached, the background hum of the operations room died away as operators less concerned with feeding information back and forth between the Mothership’s nerve center and its subsidiary departments and operational divisions than with the impending outcome of the battle neglected their consoles to watch the slow approach of the two clouds of fighters towards each other. A hiss of sucked in breaths marked contact--followed by the slower sound of exhalation as the two groups passed through each other, neither vanishing from the display.

Shining Armor was not immune to the psychic pull of the room’s mood, but unlike most of the room he did not turn away after it was clear that neither side had been destroyed to return to a previously neglected task.

Instead, he simply asked a question, eyes never leaving the display. “Tactical, results?”

“One second, sir,” Cloud Kicker said as the information popped up on her screen. “Four down for us. For them...six. Wait,”

“--they’re breaking contact,” Shining Armor could hear Sensors saying, confusion evident.

On the holodisplay the projected tracks for the alien fighters were diverging, flowering outward from the ruler-straight trajectory they had been following since their launch. While before they would have eventually run into the Mothership itself, now they would--provided they continued thrusting--now they would fly around it.

“I’m picking up...something,” Twilight interrupted while everypony was trying to interpret the new alien formation. “It’s like a very diffuse cloud, traveling along their former trajectory, straight towards us...I can only see it on radar...It’s kinetics! They fired at us before breaking contact!”

“Makes sense,” Cloud Kicker said. “They couldn’t have had any goal besides destroying us.”

“What about reconnoitering us?” Twilight sharply responded. “I’ve been looking at the information from the intercept; those kinetics won’t do more than scratch our paint. But if those fighters are scouts, like ours...”

“...then they were--will be,” Shining Armor corrected himself, “in a position where they can observe the effects of their weapons on our armor and gather data on it.”

“Exactly,” Twilight said. “But that information would be useless if they didn’t have heavier units around somewhere. They can’t have expected to destroy us by themselves.”

Shining looked down at his console, then back up. “How long until we can reach the Infinity, Fleet Command?”

“About ten hours at maximum thrust. If we use the conventional drives.”

What--no. No, he was going to head this off at the pass. “You can’t be seriously suggesting jumping to the wreckage! Not when our last jump was 30,000 miles off target!”

Twilight was entirely unperturbed by his outburst. “It’s the only way,” she began. “We will have to spend nearly half a day reaching the wreckage, and who knows how long searching it. Meanwhile, the heavy units associated with the force we just drove off might attack, more confident now that they’ve tested our strength. Or maybe they’ll bypass us and head directly for an unprepared Equus. It will waste time, and time,” she relentlessly pressed forward, “is the one thing we don’t have. I have recalibrated the drives,” she confidently added. “We will not be off-target.”

“Tactical?”

“...she makes good points, sir. Tactical must agree with her assessment. I am in favor of the jump.”

“Drives?”

“Fleet Command has adjusted hyperdrive calibration settings. We’re looking at...wait, ah, we believe that they will lead to significantly increased precision in exit location.”

“Operations Director, how long to recover all launched fighters? And can Gold Squadron make a rendezvous at the Infinity?”

“It will take several minutes, sir. It will be squeezing things very, very tight to wait for recovery with those kinetics inbound. And yes, although it will take some time for them to make it.”

“What if Green and Black squadrons proceed at best speed to the Infinity?” Shining asked.

“That will take more than twenty minutes for Green Squadron and almost thirty for Black Squadron,” he replied. “However, it will take only ninety seconds to recover just Red Squadron, in that case.”

“Do it,” he heard himself say. “Fleet Command--”

“I will, Shiney, don’t worry. Just let me work.”

---

“Core capacitors charged. Coordinates locked. Navigation set. Hyperspace jump on my mark...three, two, one, mark--”

As smoothly and quickly as she had entered hyperspace, the Mothership withdrew, some thirty thousand miles away from where she had started.

Twilight was the first to react. “Calibrating current position...we are eighteen point seven miles off of the Infinity’s remains,” she concluded, the faintest trace of smugness in her voice.

“Thank you, Fleet Command,” Shining acknowledged. “Operations Director, are the ship’s SAR teams ready?”

“Getting there sir, but not yet. They were--”

“That’s fine, Ops. Tell them we’re bringing everypony home. And have you alerted the salvage crews?”

“Yes sir, they’re reporting to their ships now.”

“Good. Make sure they’re coordinated with the SAR operations. They’re to keep an eye out for the Infinity’s computer systems; we need to know exactly--”

“Sir,” Cloud Kicker interrupted, drawing his attention away from the minutiae of the salvage operations. “The alien fighters--” He looked at the holodisplay. As before, the projected trajectories of the aliens were curving and bending away from where they had been. Now, instead of flowering outward to encompass the Mothership and her fleet, they were bending back inward and shortening, signifying a reduction in speed.

Before they could work out what was going on, Twilight added “Picking up hyperspace signatures...they’re coming from the initial hot sources.” The two objects vanished from their position trailing well behind their brood of fighters only to emerge moments later thousands of miles downrange, beyond where the Mothership had been a few minutes earlier.

“Extending time projection,” Twilight said. Suddenly, the projected trajectories snapped forwards, extending several times in quick succession. Moments later, what they had been wondering about moments earlier was abundantly clear: the trajectories all intercepted each other at the same point--where the two vessels that had just hyperspaced were.

“They’re leaving,” Shining Armor said.

“It will be some time before they can make rendezvous and dock,” Cloud Kicker noted. “We’ll have a float after that if they decide to bring in their heavies--if they have heavies,” she added, glancing at the ceiling for a moment. “I’m still not convinced this isn’t somepony biting off more than they can chew. Raiders or pirates or something of that nature.”

“Opinion noted, Tactical, but save it for the after-action report.”

“Sir,” she turned away.

---

As the cherry-red earth pony stallion’s performance came to an end, Rarity plastered on her best glassy smile and started her own part of the routine. “Well, that was fascinating, but I think--”

“You know, there’s a lot more where that came from! I could--”

“No dear, that’s quite alright,” Rarity emphasized, hitching her smile one notch higher in the process. “Pinkie!” she called out before he could object. “Who’s next?”

“Hmmmm...you!” the pink pony said, leveling her forehoof at one of the members of the impromptu audience they had pulled over from the knots of ponies who had been worrying themselves to death in the cafeteria. Rarity scanned the crowd for a moment, looking for any signs of an incipient panic. Fortunately, most of them seemed to be concentrating on their fellow crewponies making fools of themselves rather than worrying about whether the Mothership was about to explode, allowing a little bit more of the tension that had been warping her gut and making her feel rather...unpleasant for the past few minutes to let go of itself and fade away.

“Rarity, you’re up!” Pinkie whispered to her, and her attention snapped back to the matter at hoof. She considered the pony before her: pegasus, female. Pink coat, somehow perhaps more than even Pinkie’s, but with a terrifically clashing pumpkin orange mane and tail, together with light green eyes.

Just as she opened her mouth, Rarity spoke. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Oh, um, I’m Fusion Flame,” she started awkwardly, gesturing to her cutie mark: a deuteron and a triton merging in a flash into a helium and a neutron. “Um, I work in Engineering, the drive design department.”

“Alright, and is there anything you particularly like to do other than that? Singing, dancing? Maybe you have some interesting--”

Before Rarity could finish trying to draw Fusion Flame out, the loudspeakers clicked on with a piercing two-tone whistle, followed quickly by Fleet Command’s voice: “Attention all crew, attention all crew: General Quarters is lifted, I say again General Quarters is lifted. Resume normal duty.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Search and Rescue teams report to Hangar Bay Twelve-C. Salvage crews report to Hangar Bay Fourteen-D. I say again, Search and Rescue teams report to Hangar Bay Twelve-C, salvage crews to Fourteen-D.”

As abruptly as it had started, the announcement ended, leaving Rarity hanging mid-sentence. She smiled broadly at Fusion Flame. “I suppose you just earned a stay of execution, dear,” she joked. More slowly and nervously, Fusion smiled back before turning and hopping down off of the stage, quickly returning to the clique she had come from.

“Thank you so much for helping out Rarity!” Pinkie bounded up to her, unconstrained grin punctuating her words. “At first it was just going so...badly,” she frowned, hair drooping around her face, before perking back up as she continued, “but then you came in and everything was fine!” Before Rarity could react, Pinkie threw her hooves around the machinist, pulling her into a tight hug, adding “Thank you!”

Rarity squeezed her friend right back, “It was no trouble at all, dear. Anything for a friend. Now,” she said, pulling out of the hug, “how about we go back to eating, hmmm?”

---

Fluttershy peeked around the doorframe. Nopony in sight. Quietly, she gave a small exhalation of relief and walked in, muffling the sound of her hoofsteps so that they could barely be heard even by her.

Once she was in the center of the room, surrounded by cages, she began by simply saying “Hello, everyone...” Before she could go farther, she was interrupted by a wave of sound, synthesized from the chittering of a hundred hundred rats all trying to speak at once.

“Oh dear. Nopony told you?”

As before, the room filled with sound as the animals replied.

“Oh, um, well, that was a General Quarters. It means something was wrong--I’m sorry, I don’t know what--so they needed to tell everypony in a hurry. And then everypony had to leave to get to someplace it’s safer.”

Not paying any attention to the response, she sighed and dug the tip of her hoof into the ground, not daring to look up at all those she had let down. “I’m sorry for not telling you earlier. It was thoughtless of me. Can you forgive me?”

Fluttershy smiled as they responded, a smile that grew broader and broader as she processed what they were saying. When they finally fell quiet, she replied,

“Oh, um, thank you very much!”

“Fluttershy?”

“Eeep!”

From her position upside down on the floor, Fluttershy could see who had just spoken: a brown-coated, blue-maned stallion. She couldn’t see his cutie mark from where she was, but she knew it would be a lattice of DNA strands, woven in a cat cradle; it was only Gene Seed, her geneticist. She sighed.

“Um. Was I interrupting something?” he asked, looking curiously around the room while she pulled herself to her feet.

“No!” she answered, rather too quickly. “Um, no, just checking on the rats after the General Quarters, can’t be too careful, um...” she elaborated.

He fixed her with a look for a moment. “Well, if you say so,” he said, breaking eye contact. “You do remember there’s supposed to be a team lead meeting in five minutes, right?”

She gasped.

“I take it the answer is no, then,” he dryly responded. “Go on, I’ll check the other subjects,” he said a moment later as she stood there, frozen. At the sound of his voice, she came to life, springing out the door.

A moment later, she poked her head back around the frame. “Thank you!” she said before running off again.

---

Applejack was worried.

Rationally, she knew that nopony at home could even know about this little fight yet; that even if she had never left home, she couldn’t and wouldn’t have done anything that could make them safer. But irrationally...

She knew why, of course; ever since college she had found the minutiae of creating and operating life support systems intoxicating, and when you’re asked--asked!--to put a passion like that at the service of the greatest project in history...how could anypony have said no?

Still, compared to leaving her family behind...

“Ma’am?”

Her attention snapped back to the cramped conference room she and a half-dozen other ponies were crammed into, more specifically to the blue-coated, golden-maned unicorn standing, pointer floating half-forgotten beside him, at the front of the room. On the screen next to him was some bullet-pointed list of excuses for the sloppy performance of the Bioregenerative group earlier in the morning; she must have tuned out at some point, because none of it seemed familiar to her, except for the sour stink of deflection.

If she was being entirely honest with herself--and she at least tried to be--she was doing a lousy job today. Too focused on irrelevancies, she chided herself. Focus on what’s at hoof.

What was at hoof was a mess. Everypony was trying to blame everypony else for everything that had gone wrong earlier in the morning, and Applejack was getting very tired of it. Who had screwed up, if anypony, was irrelevant; what mattered was getting it right next time. Maybe she needed to make that more clear.

“Now, ah know y’all did your best earlier,” she started. Before her subordinates could plaster their feelings on their faces, she stomped her hoof down on the tabletop, ensuring everypony’s attention was firmly on her. “But that wasn’t nearly good enough! It took us six minutes--six minutes!--to get the whole ship locked down. Sure, that’s a heck of a lot better than any city on Equus could do. Sure, that was more than enough time--this time. But what about next time?

“Ah mean, we ran into aliens--hostile aliens--just on the edge of our own system. When we actually leave it...who knows what we’ll find? I’d put money, good money, on us finding more aliens who don’t like us too much. And when we run into them, maybe next time they’ll be five minutes away. Four. Maybe less. Next time, we could lose ponies because we didn’t lock down fast enough.

“So once we get back to Equus, we’re going to be running a lot more drills, practicing to do it faster.” She raised her hoof to forestall the inevitable protests. “Ah know, ah know drills disrupt y’all’s day-to-day work. Ah know they, well, they suck. But they’re the only way we can get better. And we gotta do better. Next time we have to do something like this, ah want it done not in six minutes, but ninety seconds. Y’all clear?” She looked at everypony else at the table. Slowly, one by one, they locked eyes with her and nodded. “Good. Now, if y’all will excuse me, ah need to actually write this up for the colts upstairs...”

---

“See, Lieutenant,” Lightning Dust expounded between slurping down strands of her fettucine al pesto, “it’s like this: if they hadn’t screwed up, the others would still be here, eating with us. They did, so they aren’t.”

Rainbow ignored her mentor’s words, instead forking another bite of the microwaved vegetable lasagna sitting on the plate before her into her mouth. As her commander continued to lecture on how nopony could possibly have died without making a mistake somewhere, Rainbow continued eating, allowing Lightning’s words to flow over her like the wind past her wings, without her mind engaging with them. She could see where they were really coming from.

Fear.

She knew the look in Lightning’s eyes; it was one she had worn herself all too often, even if she did her best to make out otherwise in front of, well, everypony. Lightning was just plain scared, but couldn’t admit it. Too much of her self-image was wrapped up in not admitting it, in being fearless. If she couldn’t admit she was afraid, though, maybe she could convince herself that she wasn’t, or at least shouldn’t be. If ponies only died because of screw-ups, well, as the great Lightning Dust she wouldn’t screw up, therefore she wouldn’t die, no?

It was all too familiar a line of thought to Rainbow, sitting there listening to Lightning carrying on. She hoped her superior would break herself out of that line of thought sooner rather than later. Rainbow had nearly killed herself more than once trying to rationalize away her fears; she hoped that if things came to that this time, it would end with somepony being only almost killed.

Abruptly, a loud screech echoed from Rainbow’s plate. She looked down, only to see her lasagna gone and her fork trying to murder the plate it had been sitting on. She couldn’t even remember how it tasted.

Abruptly, she looked up at Lighting chewing away on the other side of the table. “Permission to speak, ma’am?”

“Of course,” Lightning answered her, waving her free hoof dismissively.

“I, um, need to stretch my legs,” she half-lied, the tingle in her hooves justification enough to escape the conversation.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Rainbow answered, stepping away with her plate and utensils for the disposal station. As she stepped into the hall just outside of the mess, she saw Spitfire emerge from one of the lounges

Rainbow slowed to a stop just in front of the Captain, puzzled by her behavior.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” she said, without an ounce of emotion touching her voice or face.

“What? Why...I mean, what are you congratulating me for?” Rainbow asked, confused.

“You are the first pilot in Space Force history to score a combat kill,” Spitfire said. “By half a millisecond, according to Fleet. I think...” her face scrunched up in thought “the first pony to have killed anypony in battle in...a hundred years? Was that when the Onion War ended? Or was it a hundred and ten?...Anyways,” she said, mind and gaze snapping back to the present, “there you have it. Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Rainbow caught herself a moment later, saluting her captain.

---

"Core is secure"

Shining Armor blinked, lifting his muzzle out of the mass of paperwork overflowing his desk. Around him, the Operations Center quietly hummed away, coordinating the salvage operations. No alarm there. With nothing for him to do, he sank back into his paperwork...

Only to bolt back up once the words penetrated his head. The Infinity's computer core! After the salvage crews had verified its location and (relatively) intact status, it had been nearly three hours of slicing into the ship and clearing debris before the entire room and its computer systems could be removed for later forensic analysis. With no way to know which of the thousands of storage clusters the crucial black-box data was residing on, they couldn't be any more selective. It had been a peculiar mix of utterly terrifying and absolutely boring waiting for the salvage crews to finish their work. On the one hoof, there was the spine-tingling threat of further aliens showing up, especially once their frigates had, as Twilight predicted, hyperspaced away beyond the Mothership's sensor range, while on the other there had been absolutely nothing for him to do (besides paperwork) once the initial orders had been given. Twilight was managing the salvage operation with her unparalleled ability to constantly monitor and update the plan of operations, and anything he could do would just get in the way.

All this flashed through Shining's mind in an instant, and was compressed down into two words: "Status, Command?"

"The core's out, but it still needs to be secured for transport back to the Scaffold. Thirty minutes for that, I think. And the bodies..."

"Half of them are already on board?"

"Yes, and the rest should be in the mortuary within the hour. Shiney, I..."

"Don't," he interrupted her. "They left knowing they might not survive. They died for Equus."

---

“Hyperspace core charged. Coordinates for the Scaffold set. Engaging hyperdrive on my mark...mark.”

Comments

[tiwake]

Woah, this is not dead... time to do some reading

[malletmann]

The next chapter is going to be awful... and I don't mean the quality of the writing.

[Tonto the Trotter]

Best Homeworld crossover story, ever

[Macedoneus]

3983632 The perils of a Homeworld crossover, though it might be possible for something less tragic to occur. I hope anyway.

[Wade]

I think I accidently skipped this chapter, earlier. This was good. The Fluttershy subplot in particular is pretty fascinating -- did I read that right when she described the blue scientist as 'her geneticist'? Raises some interesting questions...

Applejack's bit had promise, but we'll see. Interested to see how she's going to react to the destruction of Equis, along with her life and family.

[Workable Goblin]

4429765

You read that right, indeed. Fluttershy is the chair of the Xenozoology unit (this will be explicitly stated at the beginning of the next chapter, if it hasn't been already), and as such has a staff of support scientists and non-scientific staff who are there to help investigate any extra-Equus life they come across. Like, say, the mysterious attackers who just blew up their planet...

Also, I think I can safely say that Applejack will not take the events of chapter 3 very well, no.