Chapter 18: Mission 24: The Last Step, The First Step
Chrysalis tried not to yawn as the mayor of Manehattan droned on(508) about the dreams of ponykind and the advancement of pony knowledge and all that. She didn’t really want to be here, not now, not so close to the culmination of almost two years of work. But, by the same token, she didn’t want to blow it so close to the end, which meant she had to continue to pretend to play nice with the ponies. And that, of course, meant appearing at public events when invited.
(508) Actually Chrysalis only wished her drones were as boring as this time-serving minor official. Boring meant her careful plans weren’t being totally wrecked to the all-too-familiar tune of, “Oops.”
Not that anyone had invited Queen Chrysalis of the Changelings to any other public events before. Even here she wasn’t the guest of honor. She had been invited only because it would have been unseemly to invite Changeling Space Program’s top astromare and not invite her employer. But even such a begrudging invitation represented an obligation she had to fulfill if she wanted to maintain the public image she’d cultivated as part of this whole scheme.
So she stood, smiling and attentive as she could manage while being bored out of her mind, as the actual guest of honor sat in the front row in front of her, flanked by various high personages, including (of course) Twilight Sparkle and her annoying friends.
“… and by setting an example for what ponies can achieve, beyond the expected limitations of her tribe, Cherry Berry has shown herself a shining example of what Equestria should aspire to be! And so, without further ado-“
I only wish, Chrysalis thought.
“-it is my deepest honor to unveil before you the newest work by August Rodent-“ and here the mayor gestured a hoof to the short bipedal figure of a hedgehog with a beret and a massive beard(509)- “which he has chosen to entitle Exploration. Ladies and gentleponies, I give you the first pony to set hoof on another world: Cherry Berry!”
(509) The beard was so massive and bristly that, if not for the vest the artist also wore, it would have been nigh impossible to tell the hedgehog’s front from his back.
A rope was pulled, and a drape-cloth fell down to reveal a statue of Cherry Berry, twice as tall as life, striding forwards on three legs with her spacesuit helmet held under the fourth. Behind her stood a stone space capsule, and behind that a flagpole, where the flag of the Two Sisters caught the breeze and flapped to life in a way the actual flag she’d planted on Minmus never would.
Bah, Chrysalis thought, and also, Humbug. If she’d taken off her helmet up there she would have died almost instantly. And the flag she planted was mine, thank you very much! And once I’ve taken care of your precious princesses, the first thing my new governor of Manehattan will do is put the correct flag on that monument!
At least she'd arranged to fix the plaque. Instead of the steel plate that read, EXPLORATION - A. Rodent, the pedestal bore a much larger bronze plaque, one Chrysalis had arranged to have made and, the previous night, mounted by six of her more mechanically inclined servants. The new one read, in much larger letters, WE GOT AWAY WITH IT: "Quid mirabilis si potest si quis nesciat quod non potest." - Clover the Clever Chrysalis had run across the quote while looking for subtle insults in Old Ponish, and found this one fit Cherry Berry exactly. Indeed, it was amazing what one could accomplish when one didn't know what one couldn't do- like, for example, walk into a changeling hive and declare oneself in charge of a space program.
And, of course, before long the "WE GOT AWAY WITH IT" blurb would have a much more... appropriate... meaning. Chrysalis suppressed a smirk at the thought.
She cast an eye at the hedgehog sculptor, whose face remained totally still except for a rapid twitching of one eyelid as he stared at the replacement plaque. And the second thing I’ll do, she thought, is hire this pokey-rat to sculpt me- half again as tall! And it won’t be in some obscure corner of the park- it’ll be in the middle of Bridleway, where every miserable pony will be reminded of who is in charge!
Chrysalis’s imagination paused a moment as Cherry Berry got up and walked over to the podium. She’d been asked to have a few select words ready. If that mayor hasn’t already used up all of them, the changeling queen chuckled in the privacy of her own head.
“Thank you all, everypony,” Cherry Berry said. “I’d say this is a great honor, but… well, it’s really embarrassing for me.” The pink pony blushed a bit as she continued, “After all, what I did, any pony with the proper training could have done. And I’m sure a lot more talented and educated ponies will do it in the near future.”
Cherry looked over her shoulder at the dignitaries- and for a moment her eyes met Chrysalis’s before she turned to face the audience again. “And it’s not like I flew into space by myself,” she continued. “Thousands of people of all races, pony, changeling, griffon, minotaur, yak, dragon… all of them contributed to our success. It doesn’t really seem fair that I’m the only one who gets a statue.”
“I cannot sculpt ze changelings,” August Rodent said from where he stood on the edge of the platform. “Ze holes, they make the stone too weak.”
While Cherry waited out the laughter, Chrysalis didn’t bother hiding her frown. Laugh it up, Pokey, she thought. But you’re on my list, now.
And I really didn’t want you to carve me a statue anyway.
“Anyway,” Cherry continued, “on behalf of all of us involved in space flight, thank you for the honor. Because this statue can’t be about just me. It needs to be about everypony who follows their dreams, everyone who dares to do the impossible. Whether you’re a pony or not. Because if a simple farm pony from Ponyville can fly to the moon- like I will in a few weeks- then you can accomplish anything. Thank you!”
The crowd, who apparently hadn’t been listening to the same trite and uninspired dreck Chrysalis had just sat through, cheered, clapped, and pounded the ground with their hooves. Chrysalis caught glimpses of Cherry’s smile as she waved to everyone and repeatedly thanked them for the ovation- that innocent, clueless smile of a simple person who was simply happy for simple reasons.
Well, enjoy your moment, pony, Chrysalis thought. I assure you it won’t come again.
And once my plan is complete, all these fools applauding your little speech will have no reason to thank you for anything…
“Well, hello, Twilight,” Celestia said. “And what brings you by this morning? Don’t you have training for the big flight? Launch is four weeks away, isn’t it?”
“Well, that’s right,” Twilight Sparkle said as she stepped into Celestia’s private chambers. Out the window the faint sounds of the royal guard drilling echoed from the Canterlot palace courtyard. “But… well, I’ve been having second thoughts. About everything.”
Celestia smiled. “Oh, I know how that feels,” she said. “What specifically?
“Well,” Twilight said uncomfortably, walking over to the tea-table and taking a stool, “this is the big flight. Chrysalis gets what she wanted. She gets to walk on the moon. And that means whatever evil scheme she had is almost complete!”
“Possibly,” Celestia admitted. “If nothing else has changed since she first started her scheme, that is. But we have no way of knowing whether or not that’s the case.”
“But we’re actually helping it happen!” Twilight shouted.
“You have been from the beginning,” Celestia said. “When you wrote your essay. When you and your friends created the spacesuits, the life support systems, the thruster packs. Even the scientific instruments helped the changelings along, didn’t they?”
“But I thought that was different!” Twilight said, slumping over the table. “Those were for everypony! But now it’s just us and Chrysalis now, and we’re working together on the same flight! Rainbow Dash and I will be on that flight, helping it succeed!” With a sigh of mixed disgust and despair, Twilight flumped her head down onto the table, her mane half-covering it.
“Do you regret agreeing to go?” Celestia prompted quietly.
“Yes… no… I don’t know!” Twilight sighed. She raised her head again to look at her mentor. “If it was anyone else other than Chrysalis, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’d be going to advance science and nothing else!”
Celestia smirked a little. “And Rainbow Dash would be going to advance awesomeness,” she put in.
Twilight’s mouth curled up for just a moment. Then it turned down again. “But it is Chrysalis, and we know she’s plotting something! Something which will let her take over all Equestria- or even the world!”
Celestia nodded. “Probably,” she agreed. “In which case you will be there to stop it, won’t you?” She stretched a wing over the table to pat Twilight on the shoulder with the tip. “Don’t worry, Twilight. Have faith in yourself and your friends. You’ve never failed Equestria yet.”
“But…” She shook her head. “I just keep thinking that now is the time to stop her, before it’s too late! But… well… I don’t have any reason, any justification! So I keep looking back, wondering what I did wrong, what I should have done differently.”
Celestia nodded again. “I’ve done that so many times over the centuries,” she said. “Just from one princess to another? It doesn’t help.”
Twilight gave Celestia a peculiar look- partly peculiar because she herself didn’t quite know what it meant. “The thing is,” she continued, “there is one thing I keep coming back to that I could have done differently. Something which, if I hadn’t done it, would have left Chrysalis unable to even get started in space flight.” Now the look took on a more defined form: suspicion. “Why did you tell me not to hire Cherry Berry as a pilot?”
Celestia’s smile slipped. “Would you have hired her if I hadn’t?”
“No,” Twilight said instantly. “Not at first. I really thought only pegasi had the reflexes and instincts for flight. I didn’t understand how different space travel was going to be.” Her stare intensified. “But if I’d tried harder I could have got her as ground crew, or an advisor. And after two weeks of listening to her, I’d have put her on the roster. I know I would have!”
Celestia shrugged. “But you didn’t,” she said.
“Why did you tell me?” Twilight insisted.
Celestia broke off her gaze, looking down at her forehooves. With a flash of magic, a tea kettle and a little burner floated over to the table. As the tea began to brew, the elder princess finally said, “Twilight, I have often given you assignments without explaining them. And oftentimes I’ve given you such difficult jobs that you’ve questioned yourself, questioned whether or not you could accomplish them.” She looked Twilight in the eyes again and continued, “But this is the first time I can remember that you’ve ever questioned me.”
“Please don’t sidestep the question,” Twilight said. “Why?”
“I’m not sidestepping it,” Celestia said. “You see… one day you will rule Equestria. And you will have students. And when that time comes, you’ll discover that you can’t tell everything you know about an assignment when you give it. Sometimes it’ll be for the sake of the student- so they can learn something they wouldn’t understand if the answer were just given to them. And other times it’ll be for the good of Equestria- and those will be the hardest times, Twilight. Those will be the times when you second-guess yourself for years after the fact, even when everything ends happily.”
Twilight’s eyes widened. “You mean like when you first sent me to Ponyville,” she said. “To make friends so we could defeat Nightmare Moon and restore Luna.”
“For one example, yes,” Celestia said. “If I’d told a pony just out of fillyhood, one who didn’t even understand what friendship was, that she needed to make friends so she could defeat an evil monster… well, you can imagine how badly that would end.”
Twilight thought about how she’d coped- or failed to cope- with Discord altering her friends’ minds. “I guess so,” she said. “But even so, that was over a year and a half ago. Can’t you tell me now? Or have I not learned the lesson yet?”
“Well, there are two assumptions in your question,” Celestia said as the tea kettle began to whistle. She turned off the burner and poured a couple of cups with her magic, passing one to Twilight and keeping the other for herself. “The first assumption is that the critical moment for secrecy has passed.”
“And has it?”
Now Celestia did sidestep the question. “The second assumption,” she continued after taking a sip of hot tea, “is that you are the student who needs to learn a lesson without being prompted.”
“What??” Twilight blinked, joggling her teacup in her magic and almost spilling it. “You mean you’re trying to teach Chrysalis, of all ponies?”
“Let’s just say I’m hoping she’s open to learning experiences,” Celestia said. “If she is, I believe Cherry Berry will have taught her a great deal, by example if nothing else.”
Twilight blinked. “So… you knew Cherry Berry would go to the changelings?”
Celestia took another sip. “Ask yourself, Twilight,” she said, “what would have happened if she hadn’t? Would Rainbow Dash have survived Flight Five without the changeling-made parachutes? Would Fauntleroy, Fireball and Gordon have been rescued without a viable space program in the wake of the Storm King’s invasion?” Her soft gaze over the teacup sharpened a little. “Would you have advanced as quickly as you did without the pressure of Chrysalis’s effort to spur you along? And how long would it have taken you to learn all the things the changeling flights discovered- by yourself?”
Twilight didn’t say anything for several seconds. When she did speak, it wasn’t to answer any of those questions. “If you knew Cherry Berry was going to join Chrysalis,” she said, “then you had a reason for letting it happen.”
“Several,” Celestia said. “Assuming I did.”
“I’m not going to ask you,” Twilight said. “I trust you to tell me if you could. But…” She set the teacup down and leaned over the table. “But can’t you at least tell me? Is Cherry supposed to stop Chrysalis? How? And do I sit back and wait for her, or do I do something myself?”
“That,” Celestia said, sipping more tea, “is a question I honestly can’t answer for you.” Another sip. “I know some things you don’t know, but I don’t know everything. And when the moment comes, I won’t be there. You will. You’ll have to make that decision for yourself.” A small smile returned to her face as she added, “I’m sure it will be the right one. With you, it usually is. More often than with me.”
“I don’t understand,” Twilight said. “More often than you? What-“
“Twilight, I’m not the infallible sun goddess(510) you make me out to be,” Celestia said. “I have made my share of mistakes in my life. And you have made mistakes and will continue to make them. But as I’ve watched you grow, I’ve come to the opinion that your judgment is better than mine on a great many things.”
(510) Twilight Sparkle was not a devotee of any of the various religions which had sprung up around Celestia. Her faith in her teacher went far deeper than any of those.
“Then why won’t you tell me??” Twilight’s frustration twisted the end of the question almost into a squeak.
Celestia’s smile widened. “Because I can only use my judgment,” she said, “and hope that I’m not making a mistake.” Again the wingtip reached over the table to caress Twilight’s shoulder. “If I did make a mistake, there’s no pony in all Equestria I trust more to make things right. But for now, wait and see. And give Chrysalis a chance to show us what, if anything, she’s learned.”
The sailor ponies cast out lines, and the stevadores on shore secured them to the pilings, carefully drawing the little ship against the quay, while a group of mares leaned over the railings and stared at all the activity on shore.
“Th’ last time I saw so many changelin’s,” Applejack said, “it was in Canterlot.”
Horseton Space Center seemed covered in changelings, one drone after another flying or trotting from building to building. A team of four changelings drew a large wagon full of supplies into the Vehicle Assembly Building, while eight others levitated a large pile of raw materials over to one of the larger buildings in the research and development complex. Uniformed guard changelings exchanged salutes with armored hive warriors. Twilight Sparkle and her friends couldn’t look anywhere without seeing at least a dozen changelings on one errand or another.
And a number of ponies, plus a couple of griffons and dragons, walked among them, not batting an eye at the crowd of bug-ponies all around them.
Members of Twilight’s little ship’s crew shouted orders at one another as about twenty changelings flew up to begin the process of unloading the ship’s hold. There was the occasional angry shout as one worker or another made a slight error, but as Twilight watched, she couldn’t see that much in the way of actual hate or fear.
And as she led her friends down the gangplank and onto the landing, she saw it was the same throughout the space center. No real anger, no oppression, no fear… just hundreds of creatures- of people- with jobs to do, doing them.
“I wonder,” Twilight murmured to herself as she stepped off the planks and onto the concrete walkways of the space center.
“Yes, I don’t doubt that you do.” As if stepping through stage curtains, Chrysalis appeared between two passing changelings, walking up to Twilight’s group. “Today is a special day, after all. Today is the first day of training and final preparations, after all. The day when we begin to take the final step.”
Rainbow Dash stepped around Twilight, her eyes narrowed. “Final step towards what?” she asked.
“Towards everything my children have been working for,” Chrysalis said smoothly. “The hoof of changelingkind is lifted, my dears. And when it comes down it shall leave its hoofprint on the moon.”
Somewhere up above them came a most unusual sound- like roaring wind, and yet harsher, sharper, different. For a moment everyone- all the workers, the sailors, Twilight and her friends, and Chrysalis- stopped what they were doing and looked at the sky for the source of the sound.
It came.
At first it looked like a white triangle in the air, but as it came closer the details of a nose and fuselage became visible. As it approached the roar grew louder, until with an ear-splitting rush of noise and smoke it flew overhead at spectacular speed just above the level of the roof of the VAB.
“Whoa whoa WHOA!” Rainbow Dash shouted, eyes wide. “Was that an aeroplane? I’ve never seen one go so fast!”
“Yes, well,” Chrysalis said with blatant false modesty, “that’s one of the little side projects we’ve been working on. It’s like a rocket, except instead of oxidizer it uses air pumped into the engine at tremendous force. We’ve named it after the pony who’s funding the research: the Jet engine.”
The roaring sound, which had subsided, grew again, but at a subdued level, and as the ponies watched they saw the little swift plane, landing gear extended, touch down on the runway at the far side of the space center.
“Took her long enough,” Chrysalis muttered under her breath, her eyes locked on the plane.
“That’s… that’s fantastic!” Twilight Sparkle gasped. “You’re adopting rocket engines to normal air travel? And you’re doing it safely?”
“Much more safely than rockets, as I understand it,” Chrysalis said. “No need for pressure tanks or cryogenics. We can use room-temperature stable fuels and natural air.” She smirked and added, “And I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to substitute magic. But for now, we remain in the lead.” She waved a hoof around them. “More and more, we’re changing the world in ways we can’t imagine!”
Another changeling trotted up- Occupant, recognizable instantly even without the white vest he wore in Mission Control. “The control tower says Miss Berry has landed, my queen,” he said. Then, noticing the ponies, he smiled and continued, “Oh, hello there! Follow me, and I’ll get all of you settled in to your rooms in the astromare quarters!”
“I’ll leave you to Occupant for now,” Chrysalis said. “I have a couple of little chores to take care of before we work out the sim schedule. Until then!” With a smug smirk the changeling queen turned her back and walked into the crowds, vanishing among the swarm.
As Occupant led the way towards the astromare complex, Starlight Glimmer eased up next to Twilight and quietly asked, “You said, ‘I wonder.’ I wonder what?”
Twilight shook her head. “Huh? What? Oh!” She gave Starlight a moment’s glance, then returned to following Occupant. “I was just thinking… do you think Princess Celestia knew all of this was going to happen?”
“All of what?” Starlight asked. “Flights to the moon? Rocket aircraft? Instant magic communication? Television? Radio?”
“All of this,” Twilight said again, waving a hoof at the crowded space center. “Ponies and changelings working together in peace. Could you even have imagined it two years ago?”
Starlight Glimmer blushed. “Um, two years ago I was still working on the concept of you and I working together in peace. You know, after I tried to rewrite history and-“
“Are you about to apologize again??” Rainbow Dash snapped, swooping overhead to join the conversation. “Starlight, after the two hundred and seventieth time, it gets old.”
“And after a certain point, dear,” Rarity added from behind them, “it sounds less like contrition and more like bragging.”
Starlight’s blush deepened. “I’m sorry-“ she began.
“And we forgive you,” Fluttershy said, just above the background noise around them. “Again.”
“C’mon!” Rainbow Dash said. “I heard Dragonfly just bought a couple of new video game cabinets! I wanna see if she got Star Horse!”(511)
(511) A video game based off a movie which had been released just before the Summer Sun Celebration. Like the movie, the game began with the words: A long time from now, in a pasture far, far away…
Twilight picked up her step, smiling and setting aside, for now, the question of whether her mentor had planned all of this. If this is really the way things are, she thought, then maybe we did the right thing after all…
“Well,” Gordon the Griffon said, opening his claw and staring at the black bean in his grasp.
“Heh. Better you than me,” Fireball rumbled, the hard-baked white bean in his own claw barely visible against his white scales.
“Griffon have all the luck,” grumbled Leonid the Yak.
“At least we don’t have to spend over a week in that ship with Chrysalis,” Fireball put in.
Leonid considered this. “Dragon have point,” he grunted.
“So, that’s the final seat decided,” Cherry Berry said brightly. “Myself, Chrysalis, Dragonfly as capsule crew; Twilight Sparkle and Occupant as mission scientists; Rainbow Dash and Gordo as mission specialists.”
“What pony mean by mission specialists?” Leonid asked.
Fireball snorted. “It sounds better than ‘dead weight passengers.’”
Cherry blushed. “We’ll find something for everypony to do,” she said. “But it’s important that this mission have somepon… er, someone on board who isn’t a pony or a changeling, to show that space is for everybody, not just us.”
“So far as I’m concerned,” Fireball said, “you can have it.”
“Still waiting on your resignation letter,” Cherry said brightly.
“I sent it,” Fireball snapped. “And then Ember un-sent it.”
“You know,” Gordo said, “you’re never going to build up any flight seniority if you keep quitting.”
“Oh, bite me,” Fireball said. “I’ve nearly died twice doing this stupid stuff. All I want to do is get out before lucky number three. Is that too much to ask?”
“Mighty Dragonlord Ember think so, haw haw!” Leonid guffawed.
Fireball glared at the three of them. “Whatever,” he said. “I didn’t get the black bean, so I can go home again. Right?”
“Nope,” Cherry said, shaking her head. “We need you and Leonid along with Spitfire and Fluttershy for the capcom seat. And we also need you in case Gordo gets sick or something else happens. So get ready to work, all of you- sims start tomorrow.”
“Work,” Fireball snorted again, this time letting a little flame come out of his nostrils.
“Yaks good workers,” Leonid said. “Also good at making dragon work.”
“You guys get the easy part,” Gordo insisted. “Chrysalis, remember?”
There are three kinds of guards.
There are the guards who work hard for years, keeping their records clean, demonstrating absolute devotion to duty, with a single goal on their minds: being the guards honored with the most prestigious, publicly visible posts. They are the best of the best, at least when it comes to obeying the rules of the service. If they are actually good at guarding things this should be considered a happy bonus, but their primary role is to make the service look good.
Then there are the guards who get things done. These are the guards who aren’t interested in the shiny buttons or the ability to hold parade attention and ignore all tourist provocations for four hours at a time. These guards live for the moment when they can take down someone who dares to threaten whatever they’re protecting. If they look a little scruffy, or if they have friction with their superiors or peers, so what? To them that’s all style, and they care only about the substance.
And then there is the third, and by far the most common, kind of guard, the kind who fills a uniform and collects a paycheck and, if their superiors are fortunate, does not actively embarrass the service.
In the changeling hive, the first kind of guard forms Chrysalis’s personal bodyguard, under Elytron. The second kind of guard mostly concentrates into the hive defense forces under Pharynx. The third kind of guard, being everyling else, is everyplace else, but an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking the group had gone to paradise wearing not white robes but navy-blue Changeling Space Program security uniforms.
Type One guards never gossip on duty, because it’s against regulations. Type Two guards never gossip on duty, because it gets in the way of doing their job.
Type Three guards never gossip… if they think anyone else can hear them.
And after years of watching non-guards ignore them, they begin to believe the rest of the world is at least slightly hard of hearing.
Two examples of this kind of guard, HSC’s finest, stood by the side door to the VAB’s parts storage room.
“A boardwalk, you say?” the first one said to the second.
“Yeah,” the second said. “I hear Lucky Cricket’s got some investors from Las Pegasus, and he’s getting other changelings to chip in. Gonna build it where the fishing pier is up the road in Horseton. He’s talking about renting one of the carnivals for a year’s permanent show, until the brand-new carnival rides and restaurants get built.”
“Sounds pretty risky. You put any money in?”
“You kidding? It’s Lucky Cricket. The only time he lost money on a scheme, the ponies busted up the scam, and he was able to play victim and get away clean as a whistle.”
“Huh.” The first guard tapped his chin with one holey hoof. “Why do ponies say ‘clean as a whistle’ anyway? Whistles are pretty messy when you think about it. All that spit and stuff.”
“Ponies say it because ponies are stupid,” the second guard said. “Don’t try to figure ‘em out. You’ll just get a headache.”
“Eh, maybe.” The first guard shrugged. “You think Carapace will go in on the boardwalk thing? Big fancy restaurant- that’d be just his thing.”
“I hear he turned Lucky down flat,” the second guard said. “Carapace asked Lucky if his kitchen would be as big as the one he uses to make space rations. When Lucky said no, Carapace told him where to stuff it.”
“Wouldn’t have expected that,” the first guard said.
“Why not? Carapace loves it here almost as much as Occupant does.”
The first guard rolled his eyes. “Well, yeah, Occupant,” he said. “When he dies I think his shell will just stick to the mission control floor. But what does Carapace care about space?”
“He cares about cooking,” the second guard said. “He told me he’s learned more making space food than he did under seven different master chefs. He gets all the ingredients he wants and every single food prep tool you can imagine.”
“Probably more,” the first guard admitted. “I can’t imagine much beyond a pot and a spatula.”
“Well, there you go,” the second said.
“What about you?” the first asked. “Are you staying? Or you gonna ask the queen for a transfer?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” the second guard said. “I mean, with my experience as a trusted security officer at the hive’s most important installation(512), I could probably go to the Odd Jobs and write my own ticket. Probably have ponies beating down the door to hire me.”
(512) Some might argue that the actual hive was more important. No changeling who lasted more than a month on CSP staff would make that argument. You could always dig another hole, but Horseton Space Center was… special.
“That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”
“But I think about that, and then I think: why would I want to work anyplace else?” The second guard gestured at the buildings around them. “This is the place where history happens. Anything after this would be… boring.”
“Maybe,” the first guard said. “But I notice we don’t have any missions scheduled after Twenty-four, right? Maybe this is it. Maybe the queen’s gonna get bored of space now. What happens after that?”
The second guard snorted. “Get bored of space?” he asked sarcastically? “If she gets bored she’ll just find some other part of space to do instead. There’s so much of it up there, you couldn’t possibly get bored!”(513)
(513) As mission planners in many times and from many worlds can attest, they go to extreme lengths and pains to prevent astronauts from getting bored. And no space program ever has been able to counter what happens when governments get bored of space. Considering that the guards were discussing someone who was both an astronaut and a government, the second guard’s optimism was foolish even for him.
“If you say so,” the first guard said doubtfully.
“Hey, cheer up,” the second guard said. “Even if the queen does get bored, think of this: this past two years we’ve had the sweetest, softest scheme the hive has ever run, right? We’re stronger, better fed-“ He fluttered his wings, which glittered even in the shadow of the VAB. “And we’ve got these now, which is pretty darn neat if you ask me. You think she’s dumb enough to drop all of that?”
“No, of course not,” the first guard said. “Though sometimes I wonder. You know how she never rides in the Fun Machine?”
“She rides in the rockets,” the second guard said. “And if rocket rides were as cheap as a ticket for the Fun Machine, we wouldn’t call it the Fun Machine anymore, now would we?”
The first guard sighed. “I’d like to find out for myself someday.”
“Well, then you just stick around here,” the second guard said, as mentor to junior. “Before long they’ll need new astronauts when the others get old or retire, and you’ll be right here ready to be discovered when that time comes.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“Nah,” the second guard said. “If I did that some bug would steal my place in line for the Fun Machine.”
The conversation paused for a moment as a peach-colored pony with a turquoise mane, wearing a shirt that marked him as one of CSP’s small army of general assistants, trotted past them through the doors into the parts room.
“Lepid’s not fooling anyone,” the second guard said. “Least of all the ponies.”
“At least he’s not painting himself anymore,” the first guard said. “I never met a changeling who liked ponies that much. How much do you want to bet he pulls a Thorax?”
“Sssshhhhh!” the second guard hissed. “What if the queen heard you? That name is almost as bad as saying Kevin!”
“WHAT WAS THAT??”
The sudden coming to attention and rigid parade ground salutes from the two guards would have put any Type One guard to shame, if not for the rivulets of sweat running down their shells at the sudden appearance of Queen Chrysalis.
“I asked a QUESTION,” Chrysalis shouted marginally more softly.
“My queen,” the first guard said quickly, “I don’t quite know what you mean, but it certainly wasn’t any changeling saying the Forbidden Names.”
“That’s right, my queen!” the second changeling added. “Why would we be talking about two changelings who are dead to the hive? That would be silly!”
“Two changelings,” Chrysalis snarled, one eye and then the other glaring at the two trembling guards, “who never existed so far as the hive is concerned. And if I hear those names again, it might become four changelings.”
The snappy salutes snapped again. “Understood clearly, my queen!” the first guard said.
“Good!” With that Chrysalis stepped through the door into the VAB. The guards waited until the door latch clicked before they gradually relaxed their stance.
“That was close,” the second guard said. “That was almost really bad.”
“I’ll say,” the first guard said. “And it would have been worse if she knew what our names were.”
Occupant and Dragonfly stared up at the lander under construction. “That’s kind of big, isn’t it?” Occupant asked.
Dragonfly shot him a look that said Don’t be stupid.(514) “It has to get seven people down to the moon from orbit, then off the moon, and all the way back to Equus,” she said. “Of course it’s going to be kind of big! I’m surprised it isn’t bigger!”
(514) Occupant had learned to recognize that look a long time before, from getting it so often.
“Well, yeah, I get that,” Occupant said plaintively. “But I was thinking about the early missions. You know, the Flea missions? Compare that lander to, oh, Mission Two. See how much bigger it is?”
Dragonfly looked at the lander again, sort of squinting her eyes. Her imagination assembled Mission Two in the space next to the lander- a parachute, a capsule, a Flea engine, two goo canisters. Compared to the lander, it looked like a newborn grub.
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Each one of the supplemental fuel pods on the lander is bigger than Mission Two was.”
“I think it shows just how far we’ve come,” Occupant said. In a softer voice, he added, “And how much we’ve changed in the last two years.”
“You may have changed,” Dragonfly said forcefully. “But I’m the same top-flight warrior I’ve always been!”
“If you say so,” said Occupant, obviously not believing it.
Dragonfly didn’t really believe it herself. The Dragonfly she’d been two years ago… well, that Dragonfly would probably have told Occupant to get out of her way and leave her alone. She certainly wouldn’t be sketching proposed design updates for flight couches and supply storage compartments on the assembly floor of a VAB, or anything like it, not where anyling could see.
“But everything else sure is different,” Dragonfly said, guiding the conversation away from awkward personal revelations. “We’re letting ponies walk among us when we’re not disguised. Well, except for that mail pony you liked.” She tilted her head. “Whatever happened to her, anyway?”
“I hear she got a promotion,” Occupant said. “Assistant postmistress in her home town. She doesn’t do the Hive mail run anymore. I’m gonna miss her.”(515)
(515) Carapace, aka Heavy Frosting, already missed having the easiest Guinea pig in the world for new muffin recipes.
“Yeah. Everything’s changing for the better,” Dragonfly said. “Looks like the Bad Old Days might really be over.”
“The Bad Old Days?” Occupant asked.
“Yeah. Think about it,” Dragonfly said, tapping her head. “We were always hungry- well, hungrier than now, anyway. We always had to hide, and everyone and everything was our enemy. Now we don’t have to hide, we don’t have to steal, and there’s always nibbles available. Sure, a lot of ponies still hate us, but we don’t have to be afraid of them anymore.”
Occupant shook his head. “Well, I guess,” he finally said. The doubt in his voice didn’t surprise Dragonfly. He’d never been afraid of ponies(516) that Dragonfly could remember, and he never quite understood why everyling thought him an idiot for that, Dragonfly included.
(516) As a group. Individual ponies could still frighten him, particularly red-faced angry ones shouting things like, “IT’S A BUCKING CARDBOARD BOX!!”
“Makes me wonder,” she continued, “if we’ve come this far, where are we going next?”
Occupant shrugged. “That’s up to the queen,” he said. “But she just approved a post-moon contract. We’re gonna build a ship that stays in space- an orbital way station. That way we can give tourist flights a place to go, and the bulls can send up experiments for zero-G research. And we’re looking at contracts to send probes to Bucephalous and Sleipnir.”
“Huh,” Dragonfly said. “First I’ve heard about it.”
“We won’t begin design work until after Mission Twenty-four,” Occupant said. “But apparently the queen doesn’t think we should quit space flight even after the space race is won.”
Dragonfly nodded. “Good,” she said. “Because I want more flights. I don’t think I’ve danced enough with the Pale Horse yet.”
“Ah, there you two are.”
Unlike the two guards outside. Occupant and Dragonfly did not come to stiff, terrified attention at the sound of their queen’s voice. This wasn’t to say either one relaxed as they turned around to face her. “My queen?” Occupant asked respectfully.
“I want a private word with both of you,” Chrysalis said. She waved them over to the side door into the parts room. “In here, please.”
Occupant obediently trotted along after the queen, and Dragonfly followed with a little shrug. The parts room was small only when compared to the main vehicle assembly floor; it was still one of the six largest enclosed spaces on the space center grounds. Using it for a private meeting seemed really strange to her, especially when every once in a while a changeling would pop through the door, look at the stored parts, make a checkmark on a clipboard(517), and depart.
(517) Sometimes there would even be a piece of paper on the clipboard, but even after two years some changelings hadn’t quite got the concept.
Chrysalis magically sealed the doors as soon as the three of them were alone inside the room. “There,” she said. “No one can eavesdrop on us in here.”
“What’s going on, my queen?” Occupant asked, as Dragonfly silently thanked him for asking the stupid question for her.(518) “Why couldn’t we talk out on the assembly floor? Or in an office. That’s what offices are for, isn’t it?”
(518) Those who claim there are no stupid questions have never asked them of a tyrant.
“Not for this,” Chrysalis said. “Now listen. This is important.” After a quick glance to either side to make absolutely certain no one was lurking in a corner or tucked behind a fuel tank, she said softly, “There’s a chance that the ponies might interfere in the moon landing.”
Dragonfly clamped her jaw shut, resisting the urge to ask the obvious question. Occupant, again, obliged her. “But the ponies are helping us with the moon landing. Why would they sabotage it?”
“Specifically,” Chrysalis said, as if Occupant hadn’t said a word, “they may try to stop me from being the first to set hoof on the surface. Of course they’ll deny it if we accuse them to their faces.”
Occupant and Dragonfly both nodded. This was so obvious to any changeling, even Occupant, as to require no justification.
“So I want the two of you to be ready. Just in case.”
Neither drone asked ready to do what. Again, even to Occupant this was obvious.
“If I say, ‘Occupant, Dragonfly, now,’” Chrysalis said, “or if I say, ‘Dragonfly, Occupant, now,’ I want you to take the ponies down immediately. Twilight Sparkle first- she’s the most dangerous, and you can’t give her even a second to respond. If you hesitate, she’ll stop you cold. Full venom to the neck, don’t spare a drop. If you can’t do that, full power blast. Rainbow Dash comes second, but take her down hard and fast.”
“What about Miss Cherry Berry?” Occupant asked. “She’ll be really upset.”
Chrysalis hesitated only a moment. “I want her alive and uninjured if possible,” she said. “She won’t put up much of a fight once the bookworm and the featherhead are down. But you take those two down as fast as you can when I- if I give the word. You’ll only get one moment, so be ready.” She looked at the two of them. “Do the two of you understand my orders?”
“Actually-“ Occupant began, only to be stopped by Dragonfly wrapping a not-at-all gentle hoof around his buck teeth.
“I’ll explain it to him, my queen,” she said. “We’ll be ready. You can count on us.”
“Good.” Chrysalis took a step back, preparing to leave, then paused. “Oh. And this should go without saying, but not a word of this to anyone, especially Cherry Berry.” She smiled a little smile and added, “After all, it may never happen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dragonfly said, and she used the frog of her hoof to move Occupant’s head up and down.
With a nod, Chrysalis dispelled the seal on the doors and walked away, leaving through the doors leading outside. The two senior drones watched her leave, Dragonfly not releasing her grip until the door shut behind the queen.
Once Occupant could work his jaw again, he said, “Why did you do that?”
“To keep you from saying something stupid,” Dragonfly said.
Occupant’s jaw waggled for a moment before he nodded in agreement. “All right, that’s fair,” he admitted. “But why is the queen doing this? The ponies aren’t going to interfere! Ponies don’t break promises! They’re kind of dumb like that! And the queen knows it!” His face twisted with confusion. “It doesn’t make any sense!”
It did to Dragonfly, as soon as Occupant said And the queen knows it. She saw it all in an instant of clarity.
She really wished she hadn’t.
There’s no ‘if’ about it. The queen intends to do away with Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash. But why? And more importantly, how? Cherry and Gordo won’t stand for it, and we can’t hold them all in the ship for three days. And if we kill them, the ponies will have three days and more to go to war on the hive. So she’s got a scheme… but what?
And more importantly, why? We’ve never had it better. Why throw it all away?
She wouldn’t. She’s the queen. She’s smart and sneaky, and this isn’t a smart or sneaky plan, at least not our part in it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she is just being careful.
But…
“It’s not our job to challenge the queen,” she said out loud. “You just be ready when the time comes. You get the princess’s helmet off, and I’ll take care of the venom. Your fangs wouldn’t penetrate butter.”
Occupant tried to look down and around his own muzzle at his broad, flat buck fangs. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “But Miss Berry is gonna be so mad. I don’t wanna have to pod her.”
Me either, Dragonfly thought. And not just because I think she’ll put up a lot more fight than the queen thinks…
“The only problem is the aerodynamic cones,” Warner von Brawn rumbled. “The friction might be too great for the capsule to get clear.”
“Look,” Goddard the Griffon growled, “use my design or don’t. I put those cones there for a reason. No flat surfaces on the top of the ship. You think you know better? Go ahead and try it.”
“Now, Doctor,” von Brawn said in his normal unruffled tones, “no one is questioning your brilliance. Only this design.”
“Eeeh,” Goddard shrugged, calming down a little bit. “That’s what you always say.”
“Because it’s always true,” von Brawn said. “Your writing, your research, inspired us- my colleagues and myself. Cowley, Bull, Knee and myself would be nothing without what you did before us.”
“Yeah, right,” Goddard said. “Two world-renowned mathematicians, an electronics expert, and you. I expect you’d have landed on your feet.”
“But not as rocket scientists,” von Brawn pressed. “You created the discipline. You are the founder of everything around us.”
“Doesn’t stop you from nitpicking every design I come out with.”
“Of course not,” von Brawn said. “Nor you from, er, nitpicking ours. How else does science advance?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, young bull,” Goddard grunted. “After this flight, science can advance without me. I’m cashing out. Retiring.”
Von Brawn’s eyes went wide. His normally imperturbable expression broke into shards of dismay and agitation. “Retiring? When we’ve finally achieved the first step to-“
“Kid, I’m old,” Goddard interrupted. “I think George Cowley is the only person in this space center older than me.” He paused a moment. “And maybe Chrysalis, but who knows how old her kind gets? And I’ve been working non-stop, harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, these past two years.”
“So take a vacation.”
“I plan to. Permanently.” Goddard stretched his back out, the feline motion producing an astounding number of cracks and pops along with a flinch of pain. “I’ve got enough money now, plus dividends from my stock in the Appleoosa thing(519). I’ve got my life’s work vindicated. I get to see my dream fulfilled. That’s enough. I don’t need more.” He nudged the plans for the revised Mission Twenty-Four lander with a claw. “I sure don’t need this anymore. Let you cubs handle it. I’m done.”
(519) Goddard had been the single highest paid employee in the space race, and he’d invested a significant portion of his monthly pay into Cherry Berry’s Rocket Parts and Odd Jobs. Even with the conclusion of the space race slowing down rocket production, the employment side of the business had expanded to such an extent as to actually create more profit than the space enterprises at their peak. And with new ideas for uses of orbital satellites being proposed every day, the end of the rocket production line still lay years in the future…
Von Brawn’s face recomposed itself into a mask of calm, though it remained a sad mask. “But don’t you want to see your dream carried on to other worlds? To the stars themselves?”
“I can see that just fine from my easy chair,” Goddard replied. “Or did you think that all of this,” and the old buzzard waved a claw in the air to indicate the space program as a whole, “was fun?”
“Well… yes,” von Brawn said. “I literally can’t imagine myself doing anything else.”
“Well, I can,” Goddard said. “I imagine me with a nice cozy eyrie someplace flat. But not as hot as Appleooosa or as humid as here.” He leaned back a bit and added, “I’ve been looking at apartments in the Crystal Empire.”
“Not Griffonstone?”
Goddard snapped his claws, then flinched as two knuckles popped. “That for Griffonstone!” he said. “Griffonstone’s a rotten old dump full of the same fools who laughed at me for nigh on fifty years! And you can’t get anything delivered, and if you do get it, some grasping bird or other steals it. No, this bird will live the pony life and love it, thank you. Somewhere a long, long way from anyone looking to launch a rocket!”
Von Brawn’s little ears drooped. “I’m sorry to hear that, doctor,” he said quietly. “Working with you in this program has been the greatest privilege of my life. And before you make a comment,” he added hurriedly, raising a massive palm to forestall Goddard, “that is not flattery. It never has been. You will be sorely missed.”
Goddard’s sneer slid off his face. “Huh,” he grunted. “I don’t think anybody ever said that about me before in my life. Huh.” After a moment’s hesitation, he added, “Thanks.”
“But while you’re still here,” von Brawn pressed on, “I’d like to suggest moving the decoupler up above the science bay. That would reduce both the danger of a staging failure and the load on the parachutes-“
“Those parachutes are more than enough to handle Mission Twenty-four’s final weight!” Goddard roared, no longer in any way subdued. “We bring back the equipment and save the money- and the science!”
And from there engineering progressed, one argument at a time.
“What is it now?” Chrysalis grumbled.
Training for Mission Twenty-four had gone without so much as a hiccup. Twilight Sparkle’s friends had slid right into their roles for the joint space mission as if they’d been there all the time, with Applejack and Starlight Glimmer taking over as mission control flight director and simulation supervisor(520). The seven-person crew worked well through the expanded training regimen, not just simulations in a mockup of the lander but also a week practicing surface operations on a high-altitude barren plateau in the Dragonlands. Aside from a few moments of snark between Cherry Berry and Chrysalis, the crew ran smoothly, to the surprise of almost every member of it.
(520) Contrary to what you might think, Occupant wasn’t doing the work of two ponies. He was much busier than that.
That had been very deliberate on Chrysalis’s part. She didn’t want any excuse whatever for trouble or dissension. She wanted the ponies as relaxed and unsuspecting as it was possible for a pony to be around a changeling.(521) And as much fun as it had been to twit Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash on CSP-23, she had higher goals for this flight. She wasn’t going to risk them for a moment of amusement.
(521) That is, not much, but Chrysalis still wanted to try.
Still, the combination of an 8:30 AM meeting called by the ponies with a full schedule of training and review for the day, plus Chrysalis having spent two weeks constantly pretending to be semi-nice, put the queen in a cranky mood. She wanted to get the training done, especially since none of it would matter the instant her hoof touched the moon’s surface. This was a delay, and worse yet a delay that cut into her sleep-in time. And if there wasn’t a darn good reason for it, she intended to unload all her pent-up temper at one go.
“There’s a vitally important part of the mission nopony’s addressed until now,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Especially considering this is going to be the most historic voyage in the history of the world.”
Tell me something I don’t know, Chrysalis thought. “All right. What did you overlook?”
“A name,” Twilight Sparkle said.
“That’s right,” Cherry Berry said. “Up until now we’ve just been flying capsules. But this landing is going to be special. And it’s going to have more ponies-“
“And not ponies,” Gordon the Griffon piped up.
“Sorry, Gordo.”
“No sweat.”
“It’s going to have a bigger crew than anything that’s ever launched before,” Cherry continued. “A ship that big, and that important, needs a name.”
“A name.” You made me get up an hour early for a name?? “Fine. I christen thee Rocky McSpaceshipface. Done and done. Meeting adjourned,” she concluded with a wave of a hoof.
“No, be serious,” Cherry insisted. “Ship names are important to ponies, if not to you! This is about something bigger than any of us, being a part of something greater!”
Shows what you know, pony, even after all this time, Chrysalis thought. There’s nothing bigger than me, except maybe Celestia’s flanks. Aloud she said, “Then do you have a suggestion, or are you just wasting our time?”
“Actually, Cherry did have a suggestion,” Twilight Sparkle said.
“Eh, I dunno,” Cherry said, rubbing the back of her head with one forehoof.(522) “When I say it out loud, it seems kinda dumb to me. I was hoping somepony else had a better one.”
(522) A feat that no equine from any other universe would ever accomplish without permanent crippling injury. Which is just as well, since very few of them would even think of trying.
“Well, I think it’s a perfect idea,” Twilight said.
“Great!” Chrysalis interrupted. “I’m glad you think so, princess! Now: try telling us what is the idea??”
Twilight looked at Cherry, who sighed. “Well, I was thinking,” she said slowly. “This ship is going to be carrying all our hopes and dreams on it, right?”
Chrysalis’s eyes widened for only a moment. Then she had to force herself not to narrow them. What does the pony know…?
“But I didn’t like calling it Beautiful Dream,” Cherry continued, apparently oblivious. “I didn’t want to suggest we were all asleep at the stick or something, you know?”
Rainbow Dash had a brief snort of laughter at that.
“So I wanted to name it for someone who has big dreams,” the pink earth pony said. “Not someone sleeping, but someone pursuing a really big goal, something they want with all their heart and soul, right?” She sighed. “But I couldn’t think of anything better than Dreamer after all. Anypony else-“
“It’s a good name,” Chrysalis said. “A very good name. Let’s go with it.”
Six pairs of eyes looked at Chrysalis with suspicion, even the pairs belonging to her subjects.
“What?” she asked. “I’m not just saying that to get this over with this time!” To her own surprise, this was almost true. “This whole enterprise is based on my dreams for my people! And you have your dreams of flight! And I’m sure Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash have their own dreams for this- dreams of uniting the world and exploring the new frontier!” She paused, then looked at the griffon astronaut in the corner. “And I suppose you must have some dream or other too. No offense.”
“Some taken,” Gordon replied, keeping a mild tone in his voice.
“So yes, a ship full of dreamers should be called Dreamer!” Chrysalis concluded. “There isn’t any name that could possibly be more appropriate!”(523)
(523) At this point Rainbow Dash quietly took the piece of paper she had tucked under her wing, upon which she’d written Eaglewing Awesomesauce 9001 before the meeting, and crumpled it up. A janitor peeked at the paper after the meeting and decided to keep it, thus providing ample embarrassment for Rainbow Dash in years to come.
“I agree,” Twilight Sparkle said. “So if nopony else has any better ideas?” After a long moment of silence, she said, “Then it’s decided. From now on Changeling Space Program Mission Twenty-four is the Dreamer.”
“Delightful,” Chrysalis drawled. “Is there any other matter of earth-shattering import, or may I enjoy my last few moments before we all cram into the simulator for… what was it again?”
“Emergency return in Amicitas,” Twilight Sparkle said. “In case something goes wrong with Twent… I mean Dreamer.”
“Oh, right,” Chrysalis said. “Well, I’ll be along on time as usual, then. Ta-ta.”
None of the others wanted to argue over the obvious dismissal, and in a few moments Chrysalis had the conference room all to herself. She stared out the windows onto the space center grounds, watching the other astronauts trail over to the simulations building in pairs- Occupant and Dragonfly, Twilight and Rainbow, Cherry and Gordo.
Dreamer, she thought to herself. I suppose Conqueror would have been a better choice, but obviously that wouldn’t do. And once it’s all over nobody will care what the name was, anyway. They’ll all be too busy bowing to me!
She reached up a forehoof to caress the back of one of the conference table’s chairs. And it’s not like it’s a bad name anyway, she thought. After all, it is carrying my dream. My dream of world conquest! My dream of revenge against Twilight Sparkle and her friends, against Cadence and Shining Armor, against all the ponies who dared stand in my way!
How long had it been? Five years. Five years and six moons, almost. Five years since that day when victory had been snatched away from her, not just at the last minute but beyond the last minute, when defeat ought to have been impossible.
That day.
A tune danced in Chrysalis’s head- a tune she’d last heard on that very day, which now came to her as the perfect tune for this moment. She stared out the window at the backs of those infernal ponies and sang:
That day was going to be perfect
The kind of day that filled my every dream
Everypony on their knees
While I did just what I pleased
I didn’t know it wasn’t as it seemed
The sound of violins filled the room, high, shrill, slightly dissonant, accompanying Chrysalis’s voice as she continued the song:
That day was going to be perfect
Then the moment of my victory had passed
But I struggled and I schemed
Never giving up my dream
And soon revenge will come for me at last
Brasses joined in, striking staccato chords every time Chrysalis gave a word a touch of emphasis.
In this race they’re second place
I’ve won the chase to conquer space
Now I’ll be walking on the moon
And when I seize its mystic power
Comes Equestria’s final hour
When winter comes so does the ponies’ doom
She strode over to the chalkboard, where an old sketch of the trajectory from Equus to the moon remained unerased, the continents of Equus roughly shade in. She put a hoof under the base of the circle and sang:
Once I played the royal bride
Now I cannot be denied
And soon this world will be all mine
Her eyes shifted over to a row of photographs just below the ceiling. The one on the farthest right, just above the conference room door, showed two ponies with helmets off and a third figure with its back turned, standing in front of a brightly lit capsule in an otherwise dark night. She sneered at the smiling images of Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, as the magic music rose to a fully orchestrated crescendo around her.
Now this flight is going to be perfect
One last time I’ll leave this world behind
I hope you’ve had your fun
The race for the moon is won
And Equestria will be mine, all mine!
To a final crash of horns, flutes and violins, the changeling queen laughed, her favorite loud, sinister, shamelessly evil laugh.
Meanwhile, over a hundred yards away, Twilight Sparkle froze in her tracks. Rainbow Dash, noticing the sudden loss of the other half of the conversation(524), turned around and asked, “What’s the matter?”
(524) About what flavor Chrysalis would be, bitter licorice or burning-cough-syrup.
“I’m not sure,” Twilight said hesitantly. “You know that feeling you get, when there’s a musical number somewhere nearby and you’re not part of it?”
Rainbow Dash shook her head. “Come on, Twilight,” she said, reaching over and tugging her friend along. “We’ve got a simulator to prep.”
Winter Ramp-up was coming to Horseton, as much as it ever did, and with it the annual winter festival… greatly expanded with the tens of thousands of tourists come to see the final rocket launch of the space race which had dominated the newspapers and create the new television and radio media almost specifically to cover it.
The carnival midway had already opened by nine in the morning, but only a few ponies were on it as yet. The rides remained motionless. The only carnies doing business were the ones selling snacks and lemonade to late arrivals. Everyone else was looking for one of the few remaining open patches of meadow from which they could watch the largest rocket ever taking flight. Their better-connected and better-prepared fellows already sat in bleachers or on blankets, in lawn-chairs and under tarpaulins, some with portable radios and some listening to the voices on the loudspeakers that hung from every building, every vertical pole, on the grounds. Even inside the VAB, where twenty changelings were already assembling the ESA-16 refueling probe that would launch the next day, the deep voice of Tymbal echoed through the room, explaining this or that bit of comms chatter.
And inside the VIP booth at Mission Control, a dozen film cameras and three of the newly invented live-cast magic TV cameras took every little action on the control room floor and broadcast it to over a hundred thousand receiver sets across the Equestrian continent.
Applejack had debated, for a moment, using the fake Manehattan high society accent she’d learned from Aunt Valencia. After all, the whole world, even future generations were watching. In the end she decided to be herself. Let future generations see her for who she was. She wasn’t ashamed. “All right, y’all,” she said. “Time for th’ go – no go call for this flight. Booster?”
Goddard the Griffon sat back in his chair. “Go, Flight.”
“Systems?”
Warner von Brawn said, “All systems go.”
“Tracking?”
“Go, Flight,” said Minuette.
“Trajectory?”
“We are go,” wheezed George Cowley.
“Recovery?”
Lucky Cricket listened to a last bit of chatter on his headset before answering, “Standing by, Flight.”
“Landing systems?”
Starlight Glimmer double-checked her readouts. “We’re go, Flight.”
“Weather?”
Before Crawley could answer, Eye Wall pulled his mike over to her lips. The weather mare said, “Weather is go, Flight.”
“Medical?”
Lemon Hearts giggled and said, “All go here, Flight!”
“Capcomm?”
“Go, ma’am,” Spitfire reported.
Applejack took a deep breath. “All right,” she muttered, and then in a louder voice, “We are all-“
“Hold the countdown!! HOLD THE COUNTDOWN!!”
Muzzles wrinkled even before ears registered the slamming door and the screeching voice. Certain people had that effect on others(525), and Clickbug was one of them.
(525) Partly because soap had no effect on them, or at least it never had opportunity to try.
“Launch hold!” Applejack shouted! “We have a launch hold!”
“Dreamer, Horseton, we have a launch hold situation, stand by,” Spitfire said in words so clipped that the crew at the top of the rocket wondered if their comms were going ratty.
“Oh, for the love of Tartarus,” Chrysalis snarled, “what is it now??”
A couple of minutes earlier, hundreds of miles away:
“Time is almost up! It must be ready now!”
“Is not ready! Is not tested!”
“Is no TIME for test! Set the bang-bangs!”
“Fuses might be wrong! Ship might not steer!”
“Is Laika in ship?”
“Laika in now!”
“But Rover, is not ready!!”
“Ready or not, ship must fly now! No more time! No more chances! MAKE it work!”
“Bang-bangs set!”
“LIGHT FUSES!”
The bare, rocky ground had been a fertile ground for growing gemstones for as long as ponies bothered to remember. That was what had drawn the diamond dogs to it, despite being totally isolated from all others of their kind, surrounded by pony settlements. For the most part they had remained isolated, except for one ill-thought attempt to expand their labor pool.(526) And even with the advent of the space race, even with their loud brags that they, too, would attempt to reach the moon, the diamond dogs remained isolated, with almost nothing above ground to reveal to the world what they were about.
(526) To be precise, to expand it by the amount of one pony. This worked right up until the moment said pony realized just how sensitive diamond dog hearing was. But that’s another story, with more animation than this one.
Almost nothing, that is, except one dog-burrow which was considerably larger than any of the others dotting the hardpan surface of the gem grounds.
Now a faint echoing sound of hissing, as if a couple dozen snakes had been seriously offended by the same rude remark, wafted up through the hole. At the same time a couple dozen ripples radiated away from the hole, like giant moles in a hurry to be elsewhere.
Which, aside from the species involved, was precisely the case.
The first explosion shook the ground.
The second explosion shook the shaking of the ground, as did the third.
The fourth explosion, the fifth and the sixth didn’t so much shake the ground as play kickball with it.
By the time the tenth explosion hit, there was no longer ground as such, but merely pebbles, gravel and sand in various stages of independent ballistic flight. The after-the-fact report would use this to explain why the explosions from eleventh through sixteenth had no further effect on what they were intended to propel.
Ten seconds after the final explosion, the dirt and rocks settled back down into a very large crater, studded with brilliantly sparkling gemstones, sitting in the loose dirt like freshly turned potatoes ready for harvest.
Which, aside from the objects not being vegetables, was also quite accurate, had any diamond dogs cared about gems at that particular moment.(527)
(527) They’d get around to it before long, of course. Diamond dogs are slow and a bit foolish, but on certain subjects they are very smart indeed.
One object- one very large, mostly metal object- did not come back down with the rest.
Instead, it soared.
“Flight, tracking!”
“Go, tracking!”
“Flight, we’ve picked up a beacon in the air about six hundred miles northwest of us,” Minuette said. “It’s moving up and out really fast. I mean REALLY fast.”
“Trajectory, can ya get a projection on its course?” Applejack asked. “Where’s it headed?”
“Working on it, Flight,” Cowley said. The main telepresence screen flipped from a view of the Dreamer on the launch pad to a map of Equus and the orbits around it. It focused on a high suborbital trajectory that shrank even as everyone in Mission Control watched. “It’s going to fly over us a little north of our position,” the elderly minotaur said. “From the looks of things, that will be on the downward arc of its trajectory.”
“Hallo? Can you hear me? Can you hear Laika?”
The telepresence screen flickered again, the map screen randomly interrupted by flashes of a very roughly-shaped capsule-ish thing, which appeared to have been not so much manufactured as hammered into shape with rocks.(528) It had fins… of a sort… and there were little tubes on the bottom which might, or might not, be little rocket engines… maybe. And there was a porthole, a window which might or might not be cracked, depending on how much the flickering was interfering with the picture.
(528) Not accurate. The diamond dogs used actual hammers. Not that it helped.
“Um, unknown craft, this is Mission Control, Horseton,” Applejack said clearly. “Identify yourself, please.”
“Hello, changelings!” The voice sounded cheerful, even perky, and squeaky enough to be a match for Pinkie Pie. “I Laika! This is Project Stardust! I am going to the moon now!”
“No, she’s not,” George Bull’s low voice echoed from the bullpen.
“Not unless that thing has more delta-V in it somewhere,” Goddard agreed from his station.
“Um…” Applejack struggled for words. “Stardust, we show you as on a suborbital, repeat SUBorbital trajectory. You need to ignite your engines if you want an orbit.”
“Horseton, Dreamer,” Cherry Berry’s voice echoed over the comms. “What’s going on out there? Why are our comms cutting out?”
“Stand by, Dreamer,” Spitfire snapped. “Capcomm will be Fireball for launch.” She took off her headset and waved a hoof at the dragon leaning against a wall to come take her seat. “Flight, if they’re coming down in that, that’s an air emergency. I have to deploy.”
“Got it, Spitfire,” Applejack nodded. “Get goin’.”
Without looking back Spitfire took flight, barging through the mission control room double doors hard enough that they were still open when the outer doors got the same treatment. The controllers could just hear her shout, “WONDERBOLTS ASSEMBLE!” before both sets of doors slammed shut.
“I cannot burn rocket!” the static-filled voice of Laika reported. “I need rocket to come back down! But Great Designer say I not need rocket! Big Dirt Gun is enough!”
“Big Dirt Gun?” Applejack asked.
“Yes!” Laika said cheerfully. “Designer say, one big bang turn diamond dog to paste, but a lot of small bangs and a diamond dog fly! And here I am, flying! Laika is flying!”
“In another three minutes,” von Brawn said from the huddle of minotaurs and griffon in the bullpen, “Laika will be falling almost straight down into the Celestial Ocean.”
“Um, stand by, Laika,” Applejack said. Covering her microphone, she said, “Do I understand ‘er right? Did she just say she got shot out of a dirt cannon?”
“Theoretically possible,” von Brawn shrugged. “Not practical, though. The G-loads would still be tremendous even with staged explosive charges.”
“And I don’t think anything we’ve got could stand up to those forces,” Goddard put in. “Never mind stand up to them and still keep a pilot alive!”
“And it’d be almost impossible to aim,” von Brawn added. “After all, once you dig a hole, it tends to stay dug. You can’t really point it.”
“Oh, hey, changelings!” Laika’s voice put in cheerfully. “You make good space suits, hey? My suit only leak a little bit! Good thing, too! Ship window just blow out!”
“How did she get one of my space suits??” Rarity shouted. “I never fitted a diamond dog!”
“Um… glad to hear you’re all right, Laika,” Applejack said. “But, um, uh… you know, you can’t eat through your space suit, right?”
“Not a problem!” Laika said.
Applejack’s imagination rushed to a conclusion made all the more obvious by the other circumstantial evidence. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Ya cut a hole in the suit so you could eat through it.”
“No!” Laika said. “Lunch fly out window when it blow out! But that is smart idea! I tell Great Designer! He will be so happy!”
“Well, you better come right back down so you can get your lunch,” Applejack said quickly. “Don’t wanna go to th’ moon on a empty stomach!”
“More good idea!” Laika said. “You changelings are smart! I come down now.”
“No kidding,” Minuette muttered from the tracking console.
“Um, changelings?” Laika said, a little less cheerfully. “When I go to fire rocket, all the lights in the ship go out. Great Designer doesn’t answer. What do I do?”
Applejack’s eyes managed to go even wider than they’d already been. “Um… ideas?” she asked.
“On it,” Fireball grumbled, sitting down at the capcom position. “Dreamer, Horseton, capcom is now Fireball,” he said. “Twilight Sparkle, we have a little alicorn situation out here. Could you spare us a minute or two?”
Three minutes later, a figure in a white spacesuit, suspended in the air by sheer magic power(529), slowed down a ball of burning metal enough for twenty Wonderbolts to gather it into a net and carefully lower it to the surface.
(529) Just an example that, in every teacher-student relationship, the learning goes both ways.
Ten minutes after that, a happy-looking diamond dog with sleek gray fur, a long elegant muzzle, and a sling around one arm lay in a hospital bed and watched happily as she watched the second largest explosion she’d witnessed that day lift a steel tower into the sky.
Of all the launches of all the space agencies in the two years of the space race, the Dreamer’s launch went more smoothly than any other. After a steep initial ascent at high speed, Cherry Berry shut down the engines in upper atmosphere and used the same slow tumble Chrysalis had encountered on the prior flight to ditch the ship’s nosecone behind it. A minute later she relit the engines, and after a long and careful burn which ran well into the rocket’s third stage, Dreamer rested in an almost perfectly circular orbit exactly on the same orbital plane as the moon.
One orbit later, after a full check-over of the ship and a test run of the lander’s scientific equipment, the transfer stage’s single Poodle engine lit again, and two and a half minutes later, the ship and its crew of seven were on their way to the spot in space where, three days later, the moon would be waiting for them.(530)
(530) Assuming Luna kept to her schedule, of course. Fortunately for all on board Dreamer, she did, though not without grave misgivings.
The three days outbound passed in remarkable peace. Chrysalis restrained herself from baiting Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, and Twilight talked Rainbow Dash down from her suspicious accusations. Every astronaut participated in the daily “television” shows for the benefit of the press at Mission Control, answering questions and playing little games with their food in zero-G.(531) Between these, the daily chores of watching over the ship, and entertainment piped up from the ground, time passed as swiftly as the miles separating the ship from its destination.
(531) These ended when a slice of flying flatbread ended up perfectly impaled on Chrysalis’s horn. The calm and polite request she made that the shenanigans cease frightened everyone else in a way her usual hostile rants never could.
A single burn brought Dreamer into an elliptical orbit of the moon; a second burn, two hours later, trimmed its trajectory to produce a close fly-by of the drifting Amicitas. Only Chrysalis noticed when, on the third burn, Cherry Berry’s jaw set in that subtle way which it had taken Chrysalis over a year to realize meant I just goofed and need to fix it right this minute. Everyone else might have thought Cherry had planned the last moment braking burn so as to get the closest fly-by with Amicitas … but the two of them knew better.
The docking went… smoother than Chrysalis’s had, but not much so. Chrysalis had had a pony in the target ship cooperating with her; Cherry had a powered-down, uncontrolled target to deal with. To make things worse, the docking port on Amicitas lay in shadow, almost invisible to the tiny forward-facing windows on the outer edges of Dreamer’s forward capsule. It took two fly-bys and most of the charge in the magic-powered maneuvering thrusters for Cherry to finally get an angle on her target and make her approach.
Then came the moment of docking itself, and seven astronauts all not-quite-shouting at once. Dreamer, with its landing stage still full, wasn’t much lighter than Amicitas with its tanks empty. The bump between ships actually pushed Amicitas tumbling slowly away, and only the magnetic collars of the docking points kept the two ships from separating. As it was, each of the crew on board experienced their own eternities in the twenty-seven seconds the ships rocked and rubbed against each other, coming close to ripping one of Dreamer’s solar arrays off or smashing Amicitas’s tailfin against the lander’s science bay, before the docking clamps finally engaged and sealed the two ships together.
The docking lasted two hours, with Rainbow Dash and Cherry Berry holding the two ships stable while Twilight Sparkle and Dragonfly installed the replacement refueling valves in Amicitas’s engine deck. They tested the new system using a hoof-held canister of nitrogen, then purged and secured it again. The robot probe ESA-16, with enough fuel and oxidizer to allow Amicitas to return to Equus, would arrive in lunar orbit a day later, at which point Twilight and Rainbow Dash would finish the job themselves.
And by that time, Chrysalis smirked to herself, no one will care anymore, because my conquest will be well underway.
And then it was time to descend- to take Dreamer down to the surface at last.
“Dreamer, you are go, repeat GO for final approach and landing on Site Alpha. Set timer for twenty seconds on our mark. Hundred percent burn to start.”
“Copy, Horseton. Set at twenty seconds.”
“Mark.”
“Timer started. Switching to surface altimeter.”
Two landing sites had been chosen on the surface, both on the right-hand side of the moon as it faced Equus. The requirements for landing- a nearly flat surface, sun and Equus both overhead, directly beneath Amicitas’s orbit- had narrowed down the acceptable sites that radically. Both sites consisted of small-ish patches of not-really-level ground surrounded by all-sorts-of-not-level craters and hills- difficult, even treacherous terrain, but it was the best there was.
The first couple of small burns had dropped Dreamer into an orbit below Amicitas’s. The third burn took the ship suborbital, enough for Cherry and the mixed team of boffins back in Horseton to verify the final approach, which they had just done.
Now Chrysalis sat in the command seat, watching the seconds tick by on the timer, remembering all too well the hallucination she’d had on the previous flight. “Remember,” she muttered, “keep touchdown below three meters per second.”
“I know,” Cherry Berry murmured back in a shut-up-now tone that warmed Chrysalis’s heart. After all, she’d taught her that.(532)
(532) Or so Chrysalis chose to believe.
A few seconds later, exactly on the tick of zero, Cherry shoved the throttle wide open, and gravity returned to Dreamer at almost the same level as on Equus. The lander’s engine roared, bringing the ship down from almost-orbital speed almost to a dead stop. After about half a minute Cherry Berry pulled the throttle back and let the stability assist system, set firmly on retrograde, gradually reorient the ship so the rockets pointed towards the surface of the moon.
“Eighty meters per second at forty-five hundred meters,” Chrysalis called out, reading off the indicators. “Fuel’s good.”
“Roger,” Cherry replied, keeping her eyes on her own instruments.
On the multiple nav-balls in the capsule, the orange field all but vanished, replaced by blue as the ship’s trajectory went completely vertical.
“Forty-two meters at three thousand.”
“Roger.”
“It’s a shame we can’t see the surface,” Dragonfly said from the third and final seat in Dreamer’s capsule section. “I bet I could design a lander where the windows faced down. Be a lot safer.”
“Thirty seven meters at two thousand,” Chrysalis said, her voice pitching up only slightly.
“Good,” Cherry said. “Almost time to slow her down. Fuel still looks good.”
“Confirm.”
“Holding descent rate at twenty meters per second.”
“Confirm twenty at thirteen hundred.”
The engine’s soft roar had reduced to an even softer hiss, just barely burning enough to cancel lunar gravity, not enough to slow down.
“Hm, that’s too slow,” Cherry muttered. “We’ll use up our safety margin at this rate. Reducing throttle.”
“Slow is good,” The words came out of Chrysalis almost calm and level… almost. After her previous landing experience- even if it had been a hallucination brought on by a mystery voice thing- she was in no hurry to, well, to be in a hurry.
“And bringing it up again,” Cherry said a moment later, and Chrysalis forced herself not to let go a breath of relief.
“Hey, Cherry,” Gordo called up from the passenger bay beneath them, “I’m looking out the porthole at the hill next to the landing zone, and I can see our shadow.”
“Roger,” Cherry said, and nothing else.
“Twelve at five hundred,” Chrysalis said.
“Looks like we’re coming in on the east edge of the landing zone,” Gordo added. “About a five degree slope under us, I think. Should be stable.”
“Sounds good, Gordo,” Cherry said, her own tone rising just a fraction.
“Four point eight meters per second at one-fifty,” Chrysalis said. “Comms silence, please.”
“Thanks,” Cherry said, her steel-violet eyes locked on the nav-ball in front of her. She grunted, and Chrysalis saw a frown form on her face. “Getting a wobble from SAS,” she said. “Switching over to radial-out mode.”
With a flip of a hoof the slight wobble ceased, as the guidance system switched from tracking a retrograde motion it could no longer properly calculate to the more simple away-from-the-center-of-the-moon attitude.
After a couple of breaths to compose herself, Chrysalis said, “Two point zero at forty.”
“Almost down,” Cherry replied.
Chrysalis felt something rise into her throat… that can’t be my heart, she thought, it’s far too large. And besides, I’m pretty sure I can feel that shaking my chest about three times a second…
“Holding descent at one point five,” Cherry said.
“I see dust!” Gordo blurted. “Dust from under the ship!”
A moment later a large blue light lit on the panel directly in front of Chrysalis. “Contact!” she shouted.
“Shutdown!” Cherry Berry said.
The soft sound of the rocket ceased, and the ship tipped slowly backwards to settle on all four legs. There was a tiny bounce- more like the motion of a rocking chair than anything else- and then the ship stood, motionless. Cherry switched off SAS, and the ship’s reaction wheels’ whine faded down to nothing, and yet the ship didn’t move.
For a couple of seconds, no one made a sound.
Then, finally, Cherry Berry said, “Horseton, this is CSP Mission Twenty-four. Dreams come true; Dreamer has landed.”
A quarter of a million miles away, a golden aura of magic reached out to a television knob and turned it on. The screen lit up with a telepresence-relayed image of the outside of a metal tower resting on a gray surface.
"Your tea and biscuits, Princess," the maid said, levitating a tray of nibbles over Celestia's broad, plush bed.
"Thank you so much," Celestia said. "Don't let me keep you. I won't ring until after the big moment."
"Thank you, Princess!" The maid didn't quite gallop off, but the exit would have drawn lese-majeste charges in the time of Princess Platinum. The door was actually allowed to slam shut.
Celestia didn't care. The instant she was alone in her bedroom, she slumped fowards. The teapot clattered in her telekinesis when she lifted it to pour herself tea. Three biscuits bumped into each other in an attempt to hit her mouth at the same time.
"Did I do the right thing?" she muttered. "Did I buck up? Did I buck up? Oh, for Mom's sake don't let me have bucked up..."
Her eyes stayed locked on the screen, and on the little figure climbing down the outside of the metal tower.
“There’s a spot midway down the ladders where the assembly crew didn’t mount the rungs quite straight. I’ll have words with them when we get home. Not dangerous, just annoying.”
“Copy. We’ll be careful.”
“Twenty-four commander, you’re almost to the second extendable ladder. Mind the transition.”
“I feel it. No problem so far.”
Chrysalis scrambled for inane things to say as she slowly descended the series of ladders, some extendable and some permanently hammered into the side of the Dreamer, leading down to the lunar surface. So close- she was so close to victory! She could feel the immense power beneath her, the mystical energy of an entire world unclaimed except for one tenuous link to a single mare a quarter million miles away. She wanted nothing more than to throw herself off the ladder, leap to the surface, and get started on the vengeance and conquest.
She didn’t, of course. She’d got this far by being cautious, careful, circumspect. And she didn’t dare risk it all now, not when the single most powerful mage in Equestrian history waited in the ship above her, probably ready to wreck all her plans at the absolute last second if given the slightest warning.
So she would not give that warning. She would follow procedure, reporting safety concerns back to the others, until she was ready to raise the force field, de-suit, and set her bare hoof on the lunar dust below. Then she would give Occupant and Dragonfly the word, cast the spell to seize the moon’s power, and then…
She chuckled silently to herself. None of them knew. Not even Occupant and Dragonfly knew. Absolute and final victory- victory on her terms, not on some disgusting friendship-and-harmony basis- lay only four meters below her.
Chrysalis’s heart raced as she counted the rungs- five, six, seven, eight and last. Assuming the training mockup was correct, there remained about a two-meter gap between her right hind hoof and the pad of the landing strut. All seven of the crew had proven themselves able to jump the gap well enough to pull themselves up in Equus gravity. Here, weighing only one-sixth as much, the transition would be a piece of cake even without the spacesuit’s thruster pack.
Two meters between myself and godhood…
No. Calm down. I need a clear head. I must be ready.
“I’m going to pause on the ladder for a moment,” she said aloud, “and take in the scenery for a moment. This is all just…” Words genuinely failed her. She hadn’t felt like this since that glorious moment when Celestia had lain powerless at her hooves, defeated in a clash of magic, leaving Canterlot and all of Equestria at Chrysalis’s mercy. The combination of fear, surprise and happiness mixed together into a wave of exultation that threatened to overwhelm her iron self-control.
“Copy, commander,” Spitfire's voice rasped in Chrysalis's earphones. “We show your heart rate elevated. Take a moment, breathe-“
Sound ceased.
Chrysalis noticed it at once; not only did the moronic guard pony's voice stop, but so did the quiet whirr of her suit’s air circulation fans, the slight hum of the active telepresence spell, even the sound of her own breathing. She had the sensation of absolute stillness, as if the entire world had stopped except for her.
And then the sensation she always had when on EVA, the faint background hum of unconditional, omnidirectional love engulfed her, becoming a presence- no, an embrace, tighter than a python, softer and warmer than a blanket.
Welcome, my daughter.
It was that voice.
“So there you are, whoever you are,” Chrysalis said. “And don’t call me daughter. You sound nothing like my mother.”
A soft chuckle. Daughter nevertheless.
“Well, you’re too late to stop me. All it takes now is one step, one small step, and I win.”
I know, the voice replied. And now you shall see your dreams made real.
“Well, of course I-“
Chrysalis’s voice cut off as she felt herself… not turn. Her vision turned, rotating slowly away from the white-painted metal of the fuel tank in front of her, but at the same time she could feel the rungs firmly beneath all four of her suit’s hoof-boots.
The Dreamer panned out of her line of view, leaving the empty, desolate lunar surface… and then, suddenly, another Dreamer, identical to the one Chrysalis was still clinging onto…
… no, not identical. There were lumps at its base.
Like a movie camera, Chrysalis’s vision zoomed in at the white lumps. There were three of them, piled on top of one another at the base of the other Dreamer’s ladders. One of them sported a patch of blue, with a scattering of other colors. A second one ended in a smaller lump of lavender. A third one was all white, except for tiny patches of maroon and purple surrounding a fleck of yellow.
It took Chrysalis only a moment to realize what was going on. “You’re showing me the future,” she said slowly. “The future where I win.”
The voice didn’t reply.
“Well,” Chrysalis drawled, as the illusion drew her in close enough to see the backs of Rainbow Dash’s and Twilight Sparkle’s helmetless heads, “apparently I finally get revenge on Twilight Sparkle and her friends.” She paused a moment, choosing to focus on the golden claw of Griffonstone and not the all-too-visible face of the astronaut wearing the patch. “And apparently Gordon sided with the ponies. Too bad for him.” She shrugged. “No Cherry Berry, but I imagine she was too scared to fight. Which means she gets to watch helplessly at my side as I conquer her species.”
There is more.
“Well, of course there’s more!” Chrysalis snapped. “I can’t rule Equestria from the moon! I must have used my new power to teleport back without the ship! So show me what happens next!”
I will show you everything.
Chrysalis’s vision was pulled upwards, above Dreamer’s capsule, to the sphere dominating the sky overhead…
Wait, Chrysalis thought, isn’t that a bit large for-
And then she fell upwards, flying swiftly towards the thing in the sky, until up became down and the object above became ground beneath. In a matter of a few seconds Equus swelled to fill her entire range of vision. A little more than half of the world lay in absolute darkness, except for the glimmer of moonlight off of the clouds-
-and there are too many of those, aren’t there-
- while the sunlit visible parts shone and glittered under intense light.
And then, after a swift plunge through the clouds, the apparent motion slowed, and Chrysalis found herself flying over… over…
… well, she recognized Mount Canter, so it had to be Equestria… but it wasn’t. Equestria was a green, rolling, fertile land, full of forests and farms and bright colors. Wherever this was, it was a barren wasteland, without a single speck of green to be found. Half-broken trees stood up bare-limbed to the sky. Dust swirled from the ground in whole waves of dust-devils, rising up to further darken an already gray and dirty sky.
The vision shifted, and there in front of her was Mount Canter. An enormous bite had been taken out of the side of the mountain. A few fragments of Canterlot city still clung to the remains of the shelf that had held the city up for a thousand years. Of the royal palace, nothing remained but the hole.
Chrysalis noticed some lighter-colored, lower-flying cloud to the left of the mountain. For a second she took it for only cloud… until she began to see the details. Here and there were the slowly unraveling stumps of what had been beautifully crafted columns and arches. Hollow spots in the clouds turned out to be doorways into once-cozy homes rapidly losing their shape. Just enough of a bowl-shaped structure remained for her to recognize it as Cloudsdale’s coliseum, almost totally reverted to ordinary cloud-stuff. Not a single scrap of rainbow remained.
The vision shifted again, and to her disgust Chrysalis recognized the layout of Ponyville. But this Ponyville had been devastated by fire and storm. The few thatched-roof houses which hadn’t burned down had collapsed in on themselves. The entire top story of city hall was gone. The eyesore which had been Twilight Sparkle’s castle, with all its glittering color, had been reduced to a stump of dead gray crystal.
The vision shifted again, and again, and again, showing Chrysalis one example after another of the total devastation, not just of Equestria but the rest of Equus as well. The Everfree Forest retained a scattering of pitch-black leaves on otherwise gnarled and twisted trunks. The snowy peaks of Yakyakistan lay as bare rock under the sun. The peak of Griffonstone lay stripped bare, not even a single hovel or eyrie clinging to its crags anymore. The haven of the hippogriffs, the caravanserai of Saddle Arabia, the villages of the kirin- all of them lay in ruins, burned, withered, utterly destroyed.
And nowhere, not in a single place, did she see a living soul.
And then the vision brought her to Manehattan. The parks were just as blasted as the farmland on the other side of the harbor. The masonry of the tall buildings of the city still held up, but Chrysalis spotted many with holes blasted through them by magic or some other means. On one wall she spotted a tattered poster with the pictures of two ponies- Starlight Glimmer and some light blue unicorn with a white mane. The words at the top of the poster read: WANTED for Treason Against the Changeling Regime. Another poster next to it showed a picture of herself, not wearing a crown, but decked out in a snazzy white uniform with gold trim and a peaked cap. That one merely read: OBEY.
And then she saw the statue- that statue, the statue of the pony, the one she’d attended the unveiling of just a few weeks before. A CSP flag lay atop the shattered flagpole. Cherry Berry’s head had been roughly removed and thrown to the base of the statue. And at the base someone had spraypainted TRAITO, trailing off in a frantic swirl of spray paint- likely caught in the act.
Chrysalis had watched the vision with her pleasure giving rapidly away to alarm, but the sight of the statue kicked her in the gut in a way the empty towns and barren fields hadn’t. Anxiety gave way to outrage. How DARE they? she thought. Cherry Berry would never betray her friends! How dare whoever this is sully her memory by-
Wait a minute. Why do I care?
Because they’re short-changing my ingenuity! Because they insult me by refusing to believe I could fool a common earth pony…
… no. Even I can’t believe that.
But…
And then the vision blurred again, and this time in front of her lay the ruins of Horseton Space Center. Muck Lake lay bare, cracked black mud gaping up below an intense heat haze that almost rendered the too-distant ocean invisible. Only skeletons remained of the VAB and the aeroplane hangar. Of the rich meadow that had surrounded the buildings, not a single blade of grass remained, and the swamps and jungle surrounding that stood as bare of vegetation as everything else.
And then, for the first time, Chrysalis saw something move- a small, black figure darting between the ruins of the R&D complex. It was one of her changelings, clinging to the corner of a building and looking back and forth as if expecting the wrath of the queen to come down on its head at any moment. Its eyes darted all around, not with the measured movement or trembling terror of a thinking creature, but with the instant shifts of an unthinking, unspeaking creature.
Then, with a hiss that seemed deafeningly loud after the eternity of silent visions, a second changeling leaped out from cover and tackled the first. For a couple of moments the two rolled one over the other, but the second one had the weight advantage, and the first one ended flat on its back, totally helpless.
As hard as Chrysalis tried, the vision would not budge one inch from what happened next. Her mind, trying to blot out what she saw, focused on one detail: the changeling on top, the mindless cannibal, wore the tattered remains of a CSP security guard uniform.
Stop it! she shouted in her head. STOP it!!
I will show you everything.
And then the view shifted to the Badlands, and to a familiar-looking mesa.
Something had been built atop the mesa, or begun. It looked like the foundations of a castle, if the engineers and work crew had been ten million spiders trained in architecture. But about fifteen feet above the top of the mesa the structure ended in fragments, bits blowing like tattered sails in the breeze here, jutting up like broken saw teeth there. The topmost edges of the walls ran black with soot and ash.
The old entrance to the caves under the mesa had caved in. In front of the rubble-filled hole a large granite dais rose, the obvious pedestal for a giant statue… but without a statue. The top remained perfectly smooth, so smooth that, except for some dust and sand, it seemed like the giant mass of rock had been carved only yesterday.
On the front of the stone were two messages. Carved into the stone in letters taller than a pony, the first message read: I AM CHRYSALIS, RULER OF ALL EQUUS. LOOK UPON YOUR MASTER AND DESPAIR. The second message attempted in vain to blot out the first using pink spray paint, and it read: Avenge Miss Berry. The spraypaint ended with the changeling crossbar symbol which indicated a lethally dangerous cavern or burrow.
“What?” Chrysalis gasped. “Avenge? What happened to her?”
Innocence could not save her.
“What?? But I would have been all-powerful! I would have protected her from any foolish pony attempts at revenge!”
For a while.
“For a while? And what do you mean-“
This time, instead of the disembodied mystery voice, Chrysalis heard the voice of Twilight Sparkle. “You’re always looking over your shoulder for someone to backstab you, instead of looking forward! I don’t know what you call it where you come from, but I call that insecure!”
And then she heard her own voice say, “I call it reality, princess.”
Chrysalis did not gasp in horror, but she felt it open its maw deep within her… and, part of her wondered, why? “Are you trying to tell me something?” she asked, when she had recovered well enough to speak coherently.
I will show you everything.
“No!” Chrysalis shouted. “I don’t want to see that! I don’t want to see any more! I refuse to accept this!”
Everything.
“No!!”
The vision pulled Chrysalis up and away from the hive, towards a sky now empty of clouds. In the middle of it soared a burning sun, a little larger than Chrysalis remembered it, blinding bright yet not painful to look at. And then beside it, in the sky with it, there rose the moon, more than twice the size it should have been, much larger than it ever ought to have been, large cracks running across its surface, lava bursting through the cracks… and it grew larger, closer, until it filled Chrysalis’s vision from one corner of her eyes to the other-
-and then Chrysalis felt the rungs of Dreamer’s boarding ladder under her hooves again, saw the white-painted fuel tank before her, and felt the first genuine tears she’d shed in a very great many years in her eyes.
The sensation of love curled itself tighter around her, nuzzling her like a mother pony nuzzling a very little filly. In a soft, comforting tone the voice said, You have now seen your dreams become reality.
Chrysalis wanted to be angry. She wanted to be furious with the vision. But instead of a snarl or a yell, what came out of her was a squeak twisted by a throat that didn’t want to open. “Why did you show me that…?” She couldn’t even say lie. As much as she wanted it to be one, something told her it wasn’t. There had just been too much of it to be false.
Because, the voice said with the soft reassurance Chrysalis had never had directed at her before, I love you.
Chrysalis managed a snort. “You love me,” she repeated sarcastically. “If you love me, then why did you show me all of that? Why did you show me the world ending because of me?”
Because I love all of you.
Chrysalis snorted again, a little more strongly. The tears had stopped, and with a few blinks she could pretend they had never happened. “Is that what this is about? You did this to stop me? Because I’ll still do it! It doesn’t have to happen like that! I can fix it! You’ll see! I’ll make it work!”
I can only give you a choice, the voice said.
“A choice? I don’t see a choice,” Chrysalis said. “All I saw was you telling me not to do it!”
No. You told yourself that.
If Chrysalis could have shaken her head, stuck in her timeless moment, she would have. “I don’t understand.”
Then, the voice said, I will show you something. The tone gave that last word an odd quality, as if the voice meant it as the diametric opposite to everything.
Once again Chrysalis’s vision turned away from the side of the Dreamer, pivoting behind her to see… not another Dreamer, not this time. Instead there stood three flags in a cluster- the CSP flag, the Two Sisters banner of Equestria, and the claw clenching golden lightning which was the emblem of Griffonstone. A metal fence surrounded the site. A patch of lunar ground had been leveled off as flat and hard as concrete next to the fence, with a small plaque on a pole standing next to it. There was no ship; there were no dead pony bodies; nothing but the flags, the fence, and a number of bootprints.
And then movement- something bright zipping across the black sky at tremendous speed, too fast and small for Chrysalis to identify it. But it pulled her attention upwards, and her gaze turned towards Equus…
… an Equus clearly green and full of life, but also an Equus surrounded by a thousand tiny glittering jewels of some kind. Even as Chrysalis wondered what they were, she began falling upwards again, zooming back towards the planet… but this time the vision slowed before hitting atmosphere, pausing in orbital space above the world to see the glittering jewels up close.
Each jewel was a spaceship.
None of them looked anything like Dreamer, or Amicitas, or like anything any of the space races had launched in the previous two years. A few of the ships- the older, shabbier ships- had a vague resemblance to CSP ship designs, but the rest looked totally alien to Chrysalis. She passed ships shaped like tubes, like saucers, like spheres, like bizarre mixes of all three. Her eyes passed over vessels that looked grown rather than built, over vessels that looked more like submarines than spaceships, over things that looked like someone had taken the foam packing forms out of a cardboard box and put engines on them. She couldn’t imagine how any of them flew, or even how they worked.
And among these smaller jewels floated great shapes, spaceships the size of entire cities. She saw one opening a gargantuan hatch to allow a smaller ship to depart. Another one had ships docked around its middle in a giant ring. Chrysalis remembered the new contract Occupant had mentioned, which she’d signed off on casually, never expecting to launch the thing. Space stations, she thought. I’m looking at space stations.
And then a streak of light, like a gigantic magic blast, blurred towards the world… and then stopped, resolving itself into an immense ship that looked like what might happen if ten million spiders trained in shipbuilding read a sci-fi pulp novel. The vision zoomed in to a flag- a changeling flag, except that the green field was a light pastel blue, the wings were solid instead of tattered, and the changeling head had no fangs. And yet, despite the flag being wrong, the name painted next to the flag on the hull read CSP Chrysalis.
She only had a moment to read her own name on the side of the ship, and then the vision shifted, blurring down through the clouds and soaring over an Equestria full of life and color… and yet very, very different from the one Chrysalis knew. There were more cities, and larger ones, scattered across the land, connected by gleaming railways that bore almost no resemblance to the steel and wood ribbons she was familiar with.
Ponyville still had some thatched-roof cottages, but not many. Its central streets had been paved in the same fashion as Horseton’s aeroplane runway, though most of the smaller streets and outlying roads remained dirt. That made sense; hardtop was rough on hooves. But the pavilion tents Chrysalis remembered from the outskirts of the town had been replaced with glass-front buildings and shingled-roof bungalows, reaching out from old town center past Twilight Sparkle’s still-glittering castle to a large complex of buildings rising on a hillside whose design screamed UNIVERSITY right down to the ivy-covered brick.
Canterlot looked the same, only bigger; the shelf the city rested on had been greatly expanded, the base of it stretching down almost to the base of Mount Canter itself. Around its perimeter large airship berths alternated with enormous landing pads, most of which held a sleek gleaming metal craft- the little cousins of the gleaming jewels in orbit above. Only the royal palace remained unchanged… except for the private landing pad built where the great driveway had once been.
Baltimare had swollen to ten times its original size, its outskirts stretching a third of the way to Fillydelphia. Nearby, Cape Friendship had been converted to a massive port for spaceships, with not one but three VABs that dwarfed either Twilight’s current facility or Chrysalis’s own. In addition to its own gleaming rail line, a paved highway ran to and from the spaceship-port, with wagons, carriages and omnibuses going both directions, half of which had no ponies pulling them.
Horseton she only saw for a few seconds. Unlike Cape Friendship, the CSP space center had only a slightly larger VAB, plus a much larger aeroplane hangar, two runways and one large landing pad. On the other hoof, the R&D center had buildings taller than anything else except the VAB and the flight control tower. A smaller university- but unmistakably a university- rose on the ground northwest of the complex, surrounded by various housing. The entire property line south of the old road turned runway was lined with giant tracking dishes, all pointed skywards. Obviously, for whatever reason, the space center had turned its focus to egghead pursuits.
And then Chrysalis found herself dropping into the great crowded square at the heart of Manehattan… which she only recognized by the shape of the streets framing the square. Not a single other landmark did she recognize as she came down. Most of the brick and masonry buildings had been replaced by glass and steel constructions with more floors than she could count, and the buildings that hadn’t been replaced had been covered with what looked like gigantic television screens… except that many if not most of them showed images in three dimensions, ponies popping forward into thin air to show off products or point to news bulletins.
After the other visions, this change hardly surprised Chrysalis… but here, for the first time, she saw the people of the city, and that shocked her to the core.
Ponies were the most common, but they were a minority. Griffons and dragons shared the sky with pegasi, while hippogriffs and yaks walked the street below. She spotted a minotaur with a cluster of goat assistants on one sidewalk, while on the other side of the street a yeti from the Storm Kingdom walked side by side with a harpy, both dressed in sharp business attire. In less than a minute Chrysalis had spotted at least one of every non-monstrous speaking race she’d ever heard of.
And then there were the races she hadn’t heard of. Most numerous were skinny bipedal things, sort of like minotaurs with flat furless faces and no horns, some in pony-type colors, others in various shades of dull beiges and browns. A cluster of beings that looked like robed foxes, with long pointed muzzles and tall pointed ears, walked in solemn formation across the square. Something that looked like a robot from the wilder B-movies strode carefully over the masses, moving with a graceful fluidity nothing like what the cardboard-suited actors had ever managed.
And there were changelings. Sort of.
There were a few of the beautiful black-chitin forms with green or pale blue crests and wings, but the wings glittered in the sun, and Chrysalis noticed instantly their straight horns and total lack of holes. But there were only a very few, badly outnumbered by the other kind, the kind Chrysalis had only seen once before in the worst nightmare she’d ever had in her life- pony-colored changelings, holeless, fangless, all the colors of a particularly nauseating rainbow, all obviously unaware of how disgusting they looked.
Even more disgusting, the “true” changelings didn’t seem to notice, either. By the smiles exchanged as they flew by or walked with each other, they all regarded this as normal.
The vision lingered here, drawing Chrysalis slowly through the streets of Manehattan, choked with wagons and ponyless carriages, swirling crowds of pedestrians and flashing signs and beacons enough to overwhelm the senses. Before she knew it she’d fetched up at the park and at the statue of Cherry Berry, now obviously much-weathered but still quite intact. Slightly newer statues had joined her, each with its own flag behind it. Chrysalis recognized Starlight Glimmer on Cherry Berry’s left, but Dragonfly, to her astonishment, also had a statue on Cherry Berry’s right. And there was a dragon, and a griffon, and more ponies, and one of those skinny weird things-
-and then the vision drew her up into the sky, out into space, and through the walls of a spaceship. The interior gleamed, everything white and shiny and ready to be used for the first time. Over a dozen crew members sat in seats that looked more like actual chairs than flight couches, though each was strapped securely in place. Chrysalis counted two changelings- one of each type- a young dragon, a hippogriff, one of the skinny things, and several ponies.
The pony in the center seat said something- her mouth moved, but Chrysalis only heard a muffled noise without words in it. Hooves and hands moved on controls, and the light in the room- in the bridge- shifted. The vision turned to let Chrysalis see a great window- no, too flat, a telepresence projection- just in time for the sliver of Equus to vanish from the left-hand edge of the screen. A few glittering jewels also moved- or, rather, the ship moved past them, slowly gaining speed as it raised its orbit.
And then, with a bark from the ship’s commander, the stars turned into streaks. Chrysalis had a moment’s sensation of incredible speed, infinite speed, beyond the infinite-
-and then she was still, frozen, hooves once more on the rungs of Dreamer’s ladder.
You have now seen, the voice said.
“I haven’t seen everything,” Chrysalis said. “I haven’t seen who rules that world! It certainly isn’t me, not with those… those… and I noticed none of the statues were of me! If they named a ship after me, there ought to be a lot of statues of me, too! Why didn’t you show me that?”
I did not show you everything, the voice said patiently, because in that world everything did not happen.
“So… so,” Chrysalis said at length. “When you say ‘everything,’ what you mean is the end of everything. You mean that…” She forced herself to say it, as much as each word galled her. “You mean a world that I conquer has no future. But a world where I don’t conquer does?”
What will be is now up to you. But whatever you choose, I will always love you.
“Singular or plural?” Chrysalis asked.
Yes, said the voice, and giggled.
And then sound returned.
“-deeply, and go ahead in your own time,” Spitfire’s drawl picked up where it had left off. “You’re good to stay there as long as you need.”
“Thanks,” Chrysalis said absently, feeling movement return to her limbs. She blinked again, feeling the sticky crusts of what certainly were never tears on her cheeks.
Which reminded her…
Drat. I completely forgot to find out who or what she was.
Chrysalis didn’t believe in gods. Spirits, on the other hoof? Those were documented fact. Windigoes were spirits. The Pony of Shadows, that had been a spirit. And didn’t some ponies say Nightmare Moon was a spirit that had possessed Luna? And she’d heard that dreams could escape the dream realm and become spirits or monsters in the waking world, given enough power. Doubtless there were a host of other spirits of one kind or another, good and evil, generous and predatory.
But why would a spirit powerful enough to freeze Chrysalis in time long enough to see not one but two possible futures…
Why would she call me “daughter?”
And why was I so upset…
She shook her head. No. Time isn’t frozen anymore, and none of that is important. There’s two meters below me calling my name. And before I drop, I have to pick a future.
And I really don’t like the two options I’ve got.
She thought about it, and after a moment the obvious answer came to her.
And I don’t have to accept either one, do I?
I’ll be around a very long time, if I’m not assassinated by my heir, if I ever raise one. I’ll have a lot more chances to conquer the world. I can wait. I can certainly wait until the day when the world won’t end just because I took it over!
I just have to figure out what went wrong and fix it. For one thing, obviously I didn’t figure out the whole sun and moon thing. I need to trick Book Horse into figuring that out. It’s obvious Celestia’s going to hoof over everything to her before long anyway. She might as well get a head start.
But the point is, I’m not giving up!
One hind leg left the eighth rung.
My conquest of Equus is only a matter of time and patience!
The other hind hoof left the seventh rung.
My enemies know nothing, and after this they will SUSPECT nothing!
Forehooves pushed gently away from the ladder.
So stuff THAT up your nonexistent plot hole, Mystery Voice! I do what I want!!
Four space-booted hooves touched the pad at the base of the landing strut.
“I’m on the pad now,” Chrysalis said. “I’m ready to step off.”
One foreleg stepped forward, pushing down firmly on the lunar dust. It held her weight.
“With that I take the last step of the space race,” she said, slowly and clearly. “And the first step in the conquest of the stars.”
She walked off the pad, stepping a few lengths away from the ship before rearing onto her hind hooves. Reaching to her pack, she drew out the Extend-o-Matic flag, popped out its staff, and jammed it firmly into the lunar surface. When the point refused to go more than an inch or two in, she used her magic to bore a hole for the staff until it stood on its own. Then, with a push of a button, the changeling flag popped out.
“I hereby claim this world, the Moon of Equus, for all the speaking peoples of our world,” she said, in the same slow clear voice. “May we continue our exploration of space the same way we began it: in cooperation and in peace, as equals, sharing its dangers and its rewards, together.”
As she spoke she felt the power of the moon dissipate, divided up among millions of new links, with the strongest one still tethered to Princess Luna. A tiny fraction- barely noticeable over her own natural might- came to her, but nowhere near enough to justify a challenge to Celestia or whoever.
She’d made her decision, and now she couldn’t take it back… as much as she suddenly wanted to.
“And now that the history books are happy,” she forced herself to say, “the ground is solid, with only a thin layer of light dust. It clings to my suit, but that’s all. I’d say it’s safe for you to come out, princess… if you’re up to it, that is.”
It was a lame shot. But considering how much she’d teased Twilight Sparkle by saying, “No one will ever remember the second pony on the moon,” Chrysalis had expected it to cheer her up at least a little.
It didn’t.
It’s over. So what do I do next?
A quarter of a million miles away, a golden aura of magic reached out to a television knob and turned it off.
Princess Celestia, Raiser of the Sun, Diviner of the Future, Terror of Bakeries, and so forth, let out an extremely long sigh of relief, slumping back on her plush pillows.
“Thank Faust,” she muttered. “I wasn't wrong. I didn't screw it up. I don't know how it worked, but I didn't screw it up." She rubbed her forehead just under the horn with one hoof. "I'm getting too old for this.”
She poured herself a fresh cup of tea and rang for more biscuits.
Chrysalis’s hoofprints soon had company.
In a few minutes everyone was out on the surface. Occupant and Twilight set out experiments. Gordo and Dragonfly gathered up rocks and bagged them for transport back to Equus. Rainbow Dash and Cherry Berry took photographs using cameras specially built to operate in total vacuum.(533)
(533) There had been a scary moment when Spitfire, acting as capcom back at Mission Control, had had to shout at Rainbow Dash to stop her from removing the lens cap while facing the sun. According to the scientists, the direct and unshielded solar rays might have overexposed the entire roll of film inside the camera, which would have meant that no pictures of Cherry Berry standing on the moon would have existed except those taken from Mission Control’s telepresence projection. For a little while the situation seemed like a narrow escape from disaster, before cooler heads pointed out that it wasn’t really such a big deal. Afterwards it became a thing the ponies could laugh at, particularly among the Wonderbolts: “Picture time! Nopony let Crash near the camera!”
(534) They weren’t. Afterwards Celestia had to talk Twilight Sparkle out of using Chrysalis’s pictures for a monograph entitled, “Geologic photography: how NOT to do it.”
(535) The switch on the spacesuits allowing two astronauts to have a conversation separate from the rest of the crew had been added, on Chrysalis’s insistence, for this mission. She’d expected to use it, if at all, long before this.
And Chrysalis… wandered.
She never went very far from the ship- in fact, she never even went around the other side of it from where she’d planted the flag. Every once in a while she took a few desultory snaps with the camera on the front of her own spacesuit, but she hardly even bothered looking through the viewfinder to check if they were any good.(534)
Only twice, during the entire moonwalk- or extra-vehicular activity, as Twilight Sparkle insisted on calling it- did anyone speak to Chrysalis directly. The first time it was Occupant, who sidled over to her after the last of the surface experiments had been deployed. “Um, my queen,” he said quietly, “private channel?”(535)
“Private channel,” Chrysalis muttered back, turning the knob on her suit at the same time Occupant did on his. “What is it?”
“Um,” Occupant mumbled, “I was just wondering, well, about the, um, the you-know-what-“
“Stand down,” Chrysalis sighed. “Obviously. Back to public and let me be.”
That, after Occupant announced to the others that the private channel was clear again, was the end of the first conversation.
The second conversation came hours later, after everyone had completed their tasks and had a long walk around the surface. Mission Control finally called them back in to prepare for launch; Amicitas would be overhead before long, and everyone wanted a full sleep before ESA-16 arrived, refueling went forward, and final tests were done to ensure Amicitas as spaceworthy.
One by one the astronauts returned to the craft, ferrying in over a hundred pounds of rock samples as they went. Soon Cherry Berry and Chrysalis stood alone on the surface, and Cherry walked over to Chrysalis and said, “Private channel, please.”
Chrysalis, without turning to face Cherry, switched over. “What is it?” she asked.
“I’m just wondering,” Cherry Berry said. “You got what you wanted. But you don’t seem to be enjoying it very much.”
Chrysalis considered and discarded half a dozen half-truths and outright lies before deciding on three-quarters truth. “Like Luna, I got what I asked for,” she said quietly. “And what I asked for didn’t get me what I wanted.”
“Oh, really?” Cherry asked, grinning at Chrysalis as she walked up beside her. “I thought you always wanted all of Equus under your hoof.” She put a hoof on Chrysalis’s shoulder and turned the queen around to face the Dreamer… and also to face Equus, which hung frozen in the sky just above the lander’s solar arrays.(536) This done, she reached up a hoof to the sky. “Now I, Cherry Berry, have all you ants right where I want you! Bwa, bwa, bwa ha hah!”
(536) The moon of Equus was tidally locked, always showing the same face to its mother planet. Thus anyone who stood on the surface for long enough would notice that the big blue shiny thing in the sky hardly moved at all. It never rose; it never set. The only apparent motion was a brief wobble once every twelve hours, when a certain alicorn moved the moon from where it was in orbit to where it should have been.
“Very funny,” Chrysalis grumbled. “That’s not how it works, and you know it.”
“Try it for yourself,” Cherry said, lowering her hoof. “It might make you feel better.”
“I feel just fine, pony,” Chrysalis said, turning her back on Cherry again.
Cherry rolled her eyes- Chrysalis could feel it, even with her back turned. “I’m going back in the ship now,” she said. “We launch in half an hour. Don’t linger too long, okay? If we miss our launch window, it’ll cut into our sleep period.”
“Just a few- wait, public channel.”
“Oh, right.”
Both astronauts switched their comms back to all-call.
“I’m going to be a couple minutes more,” Chrysalis said, now that everyone could hear. “I’ll be in well before launch. Just… thinking about things.”
“Copy, Twenty-four commander,” Spitfire’s voice replied from Horseton. “I’ll remind you in five minutes.”
“Thanks.”
Chrysalis waited until she saw the capsule hatch close behind Cherry Berry before turning her suit comms back to the private channel. She had no interest in her meditations(537) being disturbed by any raspy-voiced pegasus. (And seriously, what was up with that? Spitfire, Rainbow Dash- did Cloudsdale have some sort of epidemic twenty-odd years ago or what?)
(537) Or, more honestly, wool-gathering.
She turned around and looked at Equus again. It hung in the sky behind and just to the right of the ship, a big blue half-circle with a white rim. On a whim, she raised her hoof in imitation of Cherry, putting it over Equus as if doing so would give her power over it.
To her shock the entire planet- the entire world she’d planned to conquer- fit under the sole of her hoof-glove with room to spare. Everything she’d ever known- everything she’d ever wanted to rule- fit on that one small, insignificant dot on the infinite night.
The realization brought her to herself more suddenly than she expected, and she found she needed all four legs for balance. It wasn’t just that it was all so small, though that was a nasty shock to her system as well. But for the first time, she’d looked at the ground below her and realized it wasn’t below her anymore. It wasn’t down there; it was over there.
And she was over here.
Over here, on the moon. On an entirely other world.
She looked around at the brightly glowing gray rock and allowed herself a snort. Not much of a world if you asked her.
But… it wasn’t Equus.
The thought made her feel simultaneously very large and very, very small. Large, because she had traversed the gulf between these two worlds. Small, because the big, vast, wild world she’d come from could be concealed under a few inches of hoof and rubber.
A tune flowed through her mind again, and words followed:
This flight was going to be perfect
Then I let my final triumph slip away
Let the ponies have their fun
All my dreams and schemes undone
And vengeance left to wait another day
This flight was going to be perfect
But now I’m standing on this dustball all alone
I once thought I’d have it all
Now home looks so very small
My hoof can cover everything I’ve known
Her eyes strayed to the tiny, faint dots in the sky, almost drowned out by the sunlight reflected off the lunar surface. According to von Brawn and the other eggheads, each one of those was either its own world or was a sun with its own worlds, millions, billions of them.
So many worlds. And this one- the one she’d been born on- fit under her hoof-glove.
Look at all the stars and suns
Worlds encircling every one
A million planets waiting to be seen
Did I really never care?
Stop at one, leave it there?
One little planet for a little queen?
It’s not enough! I want more!
There’s still so much to explore
Who needs one when I could have it all
Yes. This felt right. Equus? Pooh. Pish and tosh. One piddling little world, full of annoying ponies? Why had that seemed like such a big thing to want? When there were millions, billions, uncountable others just like it out there?
One world? The universe was full of worlds. Staying on just one planet seemed… confining. Cramped. Petty.
Yes. Now she knew what she would do next. More or less.
And the thought of it brought laughter to her heart as she let the music take her one more time.
This flight was very nearly perfect
It’s shown me what the future has in store
Let the ponies lag behind
But the stars shall be all mine!
And Equestria …
… I’ll be back!
She let herself enjoy the diabolical laughter until she began feeling hoarse.
And why not laugh? In space no one can hear you cackle.
She no longer had to hide and cower from ponies. She now controlled more wealth than any changeling had ever possessed, most of it legally. Her subjects were happier, healthier, and more loyal to her than at any point in her reign. And she now had the trust of the pony most likely to invent some magic doohickey that would let her go beyond the moon, beyond the entire solar system, where she belonged.
One world? She’d conquer the galaxy, one spring-loaded flag at a time.
And she’d find whatever it was that dared to call her daughter, too.
She’d see it all.
I’m the first being of any race to leave hoofprints on the moon, she added. And I’ll be the first to the stars. So kiss my flank, Celestia. And Luna, you kiss the other one.
I still win.
Then, switching back to all-call, she said simply, “I’m coming in,” and made for the boarding ladder.
MISSION 24 REPORT
Mission summary: Rendezvous, dock with, and repair ESA-13 Amicitas; land on the lunar surface; plant flags on the moon; conduct scientific experiments and sample retrieval; return to Equus safely
Commander: Chrysalis
Pilot: Cherry Berry
Science Officer: Occupant
Engineer: Dragonfly
Mission specialists: Gordon the Griffon, Twilight Sparkle (ESA), Rainbow Dash (ESA)
Flight duration: 7 days, 5 hours, 14 minutes
Contracts fulfilled: 2
Milestones: First landing on the moon
Conclusions from flight: This concludes the race to the moon. The Equestrian adventure never ends.
MISSION ASSESSMENT: SUCCESSFUL
It was sleep-time, or so the schedule said. Dreamer and Amicitas were docked again, waiting for the arrival of the fuel which would let Amicitas return home. The seven astronauts had scattered among the four rooms available to them, each finding a measure of privacy for sleep…
… except for Chrysalis, who Cherry Berry found sitting alone in Amicitas’s bridge, staring forward out the large forward windows. “Hey,” she said, floating over to the flight couch next to the queen. “I couldn’t sleep. What about you?”
“Mmm,” Chrysalis grunted, keeping her eyes on the thick glass in front of her.
Cherry strapped herself into the seat. “We’ve come a long way from a hole in the side of a mesa, haven't we?” she asked.
“So the brain-bulls told me at every opportunity,” Chrysalis replied.
“Not just distance,” Cherry said. “The past two years… it’s been… really something, y’know?”
“Ah,” Chrysalis said, “the famous poetic muse of Ponyville strikes again.”
“Quit that!” Cherry said, giving Chrysalis’s coveralls a light swat. “You know exactly what I mean. Three years ago I would have screamed and run in terror at the sight of you. Even from Occupant. And you? I’ve watched you warm up. You used to seriously hate everypony. Now you’re just kind of-“
“Please spare me your delusions of my domestication,” Chrysalis growled. “I still hate your entire species. I just make… the occasional exception. For exceptional ponies.”
“Aw, thanks!”
“Did I say you were one of them?”
“Did you need to?”
The silence from the left-hand flight seat said everything.
“And the world’s changed, too,” Cherry went on. “When I go home it’s going to be to a Ponyville that has its own radio station. And I’ll be able to talk to my aunt Jubilee in Dodge Junction without a telegraph, instantly. And maybe before too long I’ll be able to talk to someone here, or on Bucephalous, just as easily.” She sighed. “Of course, I’ll need to get my own place to live. Carrot Top rented out my room to a changeling she hired for the harvest.”
“I don’t remember that,” Chrysalis said.
“You were busy.”
“True.”
Silence fell again.
“So,” Cherry said quietly, “what are you going to do now?”
“Plot, plan, and scheme. When I’ve got one ready I’ll let you know.” For the first time in the conversation Chrysalis moved, turning to face Cherry. “What are your plans?”
“Hmm,” Cherry said. “Well, I don’t know either. I mean, landing down there,” she said, gesturing at the sliver of moon visible through the windows, “that was the single most thrilling moment of flying I think I’ve ever had. Instruments only, totally blind. And I aced it.” She frowned. “Well, almost. If I’d started the burn two seconds earlier, I-“
“It was a good landing,” Chrysalis interrupted. “But what about it?”
“Well, this was my eleventh space flight,” Cherry said. “And, well, it’s nice to fly a rocket, and I think I’m getting better at it… but I like to fly other things, too.”
“You fly your biplane all the time,” Chrysalis said. “And you’re testing that triangle thing of Jet Set’s.”
“I want to fly just for myself again,” Cherry said. “I put so much time into the space program. I’m going to take the winter off, relax, maybe do some balloon charters. It was fun taking the Gold Horseshoe Gals on their semi-annual Las Pegasus trip, but I really had to squeeze that in between stuff.”
“So… are you quitting?” Chrysalis asked.
“Maybe?” Cherry replied. “I still want to fly rockets… but I don’t want any more long trips like this one for a while. Maybe I can take some tourist flights up or something, day-trips and like that.”
“Hmm,” Chrysalis shrugged. “Well, don’t make any final decisions just yet, pony. I’ve still got some thinking to do. We’ll talk more about this on the ground.”
“You already have a scheme, don’t you?”
“Scheming is what I do, pony,” Chrysalis replied. “Now go back to sleep and leave me to it.”
“Miss Berry?”
Something shook Cherry’s shoulder, and the dream of her floating through cherry-colored, cherry-flavored clouds burst apart, leaving her to lift her head off the pillow.
Five days had passed since the moon landing. Dreamer had returned uneventfully the morning before, and Amicitas had landed not long before sunset after an aerobraking maneuver to scrub off the excess velocity gained by returning from lunar orbit. Dreamer, its mission completed, was destined to become a museum piece, with the construction crews returning to Horseton to build a special building just to house it. Amicitas would return to its normal hangar at Cape Friendship, where Twilight Sparkle promised to keep working on the design, improving it for a future flight beyond the moon once the technology was ready.
“Quarantine and observation runs for another three days,” Cherry grumbled, blinking her eyes. “What are you doing-“ Her eyes snapped wide open as she recognized the changeling. “What are YOU doing here?”
The changeling, who remained by far the chunkiest changeling Cherry had ever seen, even if not so spherical as she had once been, shrugged. “Queen Chrysalis commands your presence, Miss Berry,” she said simply.
“No, no,” Cherry said. “That answers what you are doing here. I want to know what you are doing here.”
“Fetching you, Miss Berry,” said Neighing Mantis simply.
“Give me a straight answer or I might hurt you.”
“Oh, please?” Neighing Mantis asked. “All I wanted was some of that cherry-flavored love! It’s so sweet and fluffy! Nothing else is like it! So I just-“
“I am not your personal dessert cart!!” Cherry Berry shouted. “Now go work off some of those pounds!”
“But the queen-“
“Out!!”
Neighing Mantis waddled rapidly out, her security-guard uniform creaking alarmingly as she trotted out the door.
Drat, Cherry Berry thought.(538) I forgot to ask what Chrysalis wants…
(538) The words in her head were a great deal stronger, but Cherry would only admit to “drat”. That said, years of working odd jobs had given her a vocabulary of invective so rich and varied that once, long before the space race, when all four wheels had simultaneously come off a Manehattan trash wagon she’d been hauling, several veteran sailor ponies had stopped to take notes. To her mortification, one had actually been bold enough to ask for definitions.
(539) Chrysalis had her washbowl filled with specially aged algae-encrusted water specifically so she could look her finest. The wash took all the body out of her hair and buried it in a shallow unmarked grave out in the woods, just the way she liked it.(540)
(540) Apropos of nothing, the author just wanted to point out this is, at long last, the final footnote, and thanks you loyal readers for your patience. For those of you who were impatient and skipped these footnotes, he offers only the choicest raspberries. :p
Of course, since Chrysalis was also stuck under medical observation, Cherry didn’t have to work hard to find her. She found the queen undergoing her morning ablutions(539) while talking to Occupant: “And find out who the senior airship designer is at Jet Set’s company. See if we can’t talk him into a side job.”
“Just a moment, my queen.” Occupant was juggling pen and paper while trying to keep several other documents straight and, at the same time, pouring a cup of coffee… and doing all those things poorly. “G-give me a moment to c-catch-“
Sensing (a) imminent disaster and (b) imminent caffeine, Cherry Berry grabbed the mug out of Occupant’s magic. “All right,” she said, sipping carefully from the still-steaming mug, “What’s got you up so early?”
“Where have you been?” Chrysalis asked.
“In bed. Where you’re supposed to be, too,” Cherry said. “I looked at the clock. It’s only six twenty-two. Celestia hasn’t even raised the sun yet!”
“No rest for you, pony!” Chrysalis said cheerfully. “We have a press conference at eleven AM!”
“What for?”
“For our next big project!” Chrysalis said. “Occupant, tell her about the big project!”
“Um, my queen, I’m pretty sure she knows,” Occupant said. “It’s the space laboratory contract-“
“A hotel in space!” Chrysalis crowed. “Princess Bookworm will pay us to build and launch it, and the tourists will pay to spend a night or even a week up there! And we can charge people to get a week or two of training even if they don’t have the bits for an actual flight!”
“Really.” Carpenters could have tested their spirit levels on Cherry Berry’s voice. “And since when did you care about money?”
Chrysalis’s smirk didn’t even flicker. “Since a certain suicidally insane pink pony knocked on my front door and told me she was going to run my space program,” she said. “And speaking of, it’s time you got back to work!”
“Back t- back to wh-“ Cherry spluttered at the thought. “We’re in quarantine for another three days! Hearth’s Warming Eve is in five days! And I haven’t bought a single present yet!!”
“Would you like to borrow some of my catalogs?” Occupant asked. “I’ll try to find you some that still have the order forms. It’s a little late to get things shipped in time, but-“
“Just steal a few moon rocks out of what we brought back, and wrap those,” Chrysalis said. “We collected something like half a ton, didn’t we? No one will notice a few pounds less.”
Cherry felt her eyebrow twitching. She forced it to stay still. “Seriously, Chrysalis, what’s this really about?” she asked. “And no funny business. I told you I hadn’t decided whether or not to keep doing this.”
Chrysalis nodded. “Fine,” she said. “Here’s the truth. We won the race to the moon- and you and I both know the kind of corners we cut to do it.”
Cherry, sipping her coffee, nodded.
“If it had gone on another year- another four months, really- Twilight Sparkle would have won,” Chrysalis continued. “And although she might be handing off direct control of the space program to Moondancer, she’s not going to stop working on it. She will get those magic engines of hers to work, one way or another. Or she might invent some entirely new engine. von Brawn tells me we’ve already reached the practical limits of chemical rocketry.”
“Marked Knee was talking about something called ion propulsion,” Cherry said between sips of coffee. “But he also said our in-space electrical generation tech was about ten years away from even testing it.”
“By which time Twilight Sparkle’s program will be flitting around the solar system on zero-fuel magic rockets,” Chrysalis said. “Which would be fine by me, except that if we let it happen, then I won’t get a seat on any of those rockets.”
“Oho.” Cherry sipped the last of her coffee and held out the mug to Occupant for a refill.
“Oho is right, pony. I intend to keep flying. I want more firsts. And I think the only way I get to do that is if I make myself indispensable to the Equestrian Space Agency’s plans.” Chrysalis took a mug in her magic and intercepted Occupant’s pour. “Which means no let-up in activity, at least for the time being. We have to press our advantage, or at least our current equal standing, while we have it.”
Cherry sniffed at what ended up in her mug, the dregs of the pot. “So, another space race, then?” she asked. “Where to now? Bucephalous?”
“Hardly.” Chrysalis smugly sipped her coffee. “Like I said, in the long term, we lose any future space races. No, what we’re doing instead is division of labor. Complete partnership.” She smirked a little wider, sipped, and added the word, “Symbiosis.”
“Big words,” Cherry said, sipping her own coffee. “What do they mean in practice?”
“Simply put, CSP is going to focus on two things,” Chrysalis said. “Namely, astromare training and long-term space infrastructure. Let Twilight Sparkle’s classmates work out the problems with magic rockets. They’ll be good at that. But we don’t need magic rockets to put permanent ships in space. And we don’t need magic rockets to train new crew on the ground- or to keep existing crew up to speed. And the more we do both, the more ESA will rely on our doing so.”
“Sounds fair,” Cherry Berry admitted. “So why don’t you just say this in public? Why all the rigamarole with a space hotel?”
Chrysalis took a long pull on her mug. When she lowered it, her smile broadened just a little bit more. “Because,” she said, as if it explained everything in the universe, “it’s me.”
Cherry Berry groaned and buried her face in the coffee mug.
“So, get finished with that coffee and come along!” Chrysalis added, setting down her own mug. “We’ve got no time to spare!” Striking a visionary pose and pointing one hoof into the future, she shouted, “Let’s get on with the next stage of Changeling Space Program!”
“Um, my queen,” Occupant said hesitantly, “what are you pointing at? There’s nothing on that wall.”
Chrysalis dropped her hoof and slumped. “Why do I continue to feed you?” she asked quietly.
“Because I like doing paperwork,” Occupant said. “You told me so yourself.” He blinked, then added, “Um, that was one of those questions I wasn’t supposed to answer, wasn’t it?”
“Just get us some fresh coffee,” Chrysalis growled.
THE END
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And that's the way it is folks!
This was really amazing journey.
Ow. <rubs head> Sorry fell over laughing at the last five lines.
"Just get us some fresh coffee"
Indeed.
Somebody needs to give Chrysalis a large t-shirt CSP Logo on the back, the front stating:
"I stepped on the Moon first, and all they let me keep is this lousy t-shirt."
Raspberry... there's only one mare who would dare give me the raspberry........ Roan Star!
I did read all the footnotes, but you give me a line like that and I can't help myself =D
Yes, please.
Wow. Such an amazing story, and it doesn't even really feel like an end. Feels good, man. I like what you've done with the footnotes.
Should be either "It's a long way..." or "...haven't we?"
When she went "Today is special day" I was like "Oh, don't start that song again, queenie"... and then, later...
Also. This alien reference is just perfect.
Nice touch with the song and reprise.
Wow! Great capstone!
Very emotional with the visions and the song and stuff!
Still dunno what Mystery Entity is, I suppose it could've talked to Chryssy from anywhere but it was best done when she was at the Moon.
And presumably it's the same entity that's been feeding Celestia her visions.
----
Typo:
Dun DUN WHAAAAA?!?!?!
Damn but Celestia plays long games.
Dear Sunbutt,
CHEESE?! IT REALLY WAS JUST CHEESE?! YOU KNEW THIS THE WHOLE TIME, DIDN'T YOU?!"
"Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves," Chrysalis groused.
GET YOUR ASS TO MARS!
This...is fascinating. Two years ago Chrysalis wouldn't have hesitated a moment to explain that her plot to steal all the power of the Moon was about to come to fruition, or at least if she did hesitate she would have done so only out of concern that her changelings were morons. Here, she's concealing her motives - I gather - more on the grounds that if she outright stated "I intend to betray the ponies", Occupant and Dragonfly might not go along with it. She instead has to appeal to them in a clandestine way, issue orders but make it seem as though the ponies will be the aggressors.
More signs of how much things have changed...
Little Ponies are part-feline. That's what I think.
I see we do not have a penguin to shoot out of a cannon, so we're getting a song instead.
And I believe that's my cue to start playing the Apollo 13 soundtrack.
EDIT: Read at the perfect speed so that the mission launch theme came on just as Dreamer made her approach to Site Alpha.
EDIT2: And the Universe's vision to Chrysalis began just as "Master Alarm" started playing.
EDIT3: "Re-Entry & Splashdown" picked up almost exactly when Chrysalis started talking about symbiosis and division of labor. Seriously, Kris, fantastic if almost certainly accidental timing.
Ah, but at least she came back. Good girl, Laika.
In a universe slightly askew of this one where changelings can turn ponies into changelings, I'm sure Chrysalis' victory plan will involve morphing Cherry into a 'ling. Which she views as a reward.
Or had she...? Some part of Chrysalis had to know the cost of following through her plans. Like the Universe said, Chrysalis stopped herself. Was she perhaps already working against herself...?
'Atta girl. Chrysalis needs to change - but it doesn't have to be a big change.
End credits are playing on the Apollo 13 soundtrack.
I've loved every update of this series since I started reading The Maretian. That story, and this one, reinvigorated my will to write fanfictions after having written nothing in 2017 and barely anything in 2018. One author to another, I don't think I can give any higher compliment or praise - you inspired me to write again.
Thanks for the wonderful stories, Kris.
Beautiful.
From the depths to the stars through her friends.
Or so Google Translate tells me, but I'd guess it's pretty accurate.
An incredible journey and a touching ending to my second favourite story on Fimfiction (the first being the Maretian). I can't believe it's been 3 years and a bit since I started reading this. I felt a bittersweet yearning when the Maretian ended. I will miss CSP as well, but in a way its ending has in some ways rounded off those lingering feelings from the Maretian. I find it difficult to describe in words how this prequel provided a sense of closure to its sequel. Seeing a glimpse of the future implying that ponies celebrate not only Dragonfly and Starlight Glimmer but also Mark Wattney, seeing where ponykind's partnership with humanity has and will take them, felt like an appropriate sendoff.
I also appreciate Chrysalis' overall character development. This is possibly one of the few great approaches to her character I've seen to date. Reformations are overdone as it is in canon, and you've proven that Chrysalis can sort-of-sort-of-but-not-really redeem herself and the changeling race without fully reforming, at least not without keeping most of her scheming conniving personality intact.
All in all, amazing work. Congratulations on completing this incredible journey, and thank you for allowing us to enjoy it.
That bit after the mystery voice cuts out reminds me of the ending of Going Postal, which I quite enjoyed.
Still wonder who or what that voice was but tomorrow's another day, great work hope you keep writing in the future.
Now that was nice!
God, what a great story. Long time and a great read.
Did younjust make Lucky Cricket into fucking Tilman!?
THIS TIME I HAVE MONEY! AND I WILL BUY IT!
Hah, was right on someone stopping Chrissy on the ladder with the option of either a Lesser Victory or a Devastating Defeat depending on her choice ...
(* have to wonder on how she snatched defeat from the jaws of victory this time *)
I'd expect that incident with Starlight to bring Twiggles' tolerance for that stuff significantly below that
That seems a bit too drastic for just a bunch of toppled governments.
Laika the regular dog unfortunately wasn't
Excellent. I really enjoyed this, from start to finish. What was the Latin motto supposed to say? I couldn't get a coherent translation from Google.
Found a few issues
I think that should be "is."
Pretty sure this should be "panned."
Notes 534, 535, 539, and 540 are misplaced - they're before their references in the text.
I had always sort of thought that Chryssie was going to be "reformed" in spite of herself. And she has, in a way. After getting her nose rubbed in the disastrous mess that world conquest would bring, she's telling herself that galactic conquest is a better substitute (I won't speculate about The Voice that talked her out of it) . And don't think we didn't notice how she's grown to regard Cherry as "Her Pony", almost unwillingly...
Chryssie isn't there yet (and may never quite get there[/there), but she at least recognizes that world conquest may bear a price she's not willing to pay, and subliminate that into galactic conquest. And, who knows? She may find that mutual advantage is a good enough basis for friendship,,,
What a ride, what a fantastic ride.
I find it fitting this story ended on the passing of a man who contributed mightily to NASA: Chuck Yeager.
Mind blowing story. Magnificent end that was just a new beginning.
Beautiful.
That is all.
10572777 The motto is as mentioned in the same paragraph: "It's amazing what one can do when one doesn't know what one can't do."
what a strange ride its been...but a fun one. I loved every minute
The implication that Cherry Berry stuck by Chrysalis in the bad future, willingly or not, enough to be described as a "traitor"? That's fascinating. Although using that single visual of the statue to show the differences between the two potential futures and the present was brilliant.
Overall, this was an utterly fantastic story. I think I still prefer the Maretian due to the smaller scale and slightly more focused plot, but this was wonderful all the same, and I'm incredibly happy to have read both!
Love the equestria at war reference
Minmus?
How fitting.
Tell that to Chrysaslis.
You know, you're probably right.
Oh boy.
I, hm. She has a point.
Oh that's clever.
... She, has a point. Again. She's good at doing that.
That's, actually very flattering.
As if in harmony?
Huh?
... Oh that's brilliant. Well played.
She's apparently having none of this.
Probably.
A fair point.
You two shouldn't have brought up those names.
How far you've come, huh?
That should be interesting. As an aside, I quite like the name of Sleipnir for a pony solar system planet.
Well that's not fucking scary. She said please.
I sincerely doubt it.
Ah. It's about your ego.
Oh wow, she DOES care about her.
And it clicks.
You're serious?
That's got to be weird. Genuine priase.
Oh this'll be good.
Almost.
That, seems ill advised.
I really like this line for some reason.
Good question.
You're kidding.
Yep.
...
I need fanart of that.
Alright, good work!
She knows. She knows Chrysalis is plotting something.
Definitely.
I can't help but feel this is a terrible idea.
The Moon itself is alive?
Yes. She's Ghost Of Christmas Yet-To-Come-ing you.
The Desolate Timeline. It's one where she wins.
Well, that's, ominous.
Well, that's even more terrifying.
She really is getting the Scrooge treatment.
A future where she was respected enough to have a ship named after her.
In a word, yes.
She made her choice.
Hah!
So how does megalomania feel?
Terrifying, isn't it?
Imma steal that.
I suppose you do, in a way.
If you say so.
Sounds like fun.
*sigh*
Basically.
Big words.
Because she schemes like you breathe.
It was not.
Now there's a set of words. It's been a hell of a ride.
That! That was an amazing story. Thanks for the ride, now I can reread the Martian finally : )
I'm sorry to say, this is probably the only part I really don't like. Not only does it come right out of left field, it requires more Batman Gambits than anything in the actual show. It also doesn't match with any of Twilight or Celestia's behavior in the first few chapters. It makes far more sense that Twilight's tunnel vision at times, as we saw later with De-couplers and landing systems, started it with Celestia intervening later. I think it would work FAR better if she was instead ordered not to attempt to hire Cherry back from Chrysalis. Basically..
- Twilight and her one-track mind denies Cherry Berry, believing the Astronauts need to be Pegasai.
- Cherry defects to the hive and joins CSP.
-Twilight realises her mistake and wants to hire her back, but Celestia orders her not to intervene thinking "Wait, we can use this!" and starts her plan from there.
Just my two cents. I love the story to pieces, but that really rubs me the wrong way.
I wasn't sure about this one at the start but I quickly fell in love with it, it has been a awesome ride and I even read every footnote. I hope there is a sequel to this, or atleast a spin off. I want to see chrysalis get her own planet. And to hear more about the ship with her name.
The Chryssi timeline just gave me Equestria At War/The New Order:Last Days of Europe crossover vibes
10573732 There is a sequel, but Chryssy is a minor character in it.
On the other hand, it's more than half again as long as this one was...
And it's already finished! Enjoy!
Only reason I skipped most of the footnotes was because I'm on a phone reading these and its hard to scroll down and then back to where I was. And I don't know how to get a search function working per page on this thing. So thank you for cramming them closer to the relevant passages here.
I was kind hoping for a comedy ending, where chrysalis made it to the moon, but it was just a rock and there was no magic there. It wouldn't have made any sense after all the buildup, but I would have laughed so hard.
I don't know of anyone mentioned it yet or not... but there seems to be an editing error. Namely, several of the footnotes actually appear BEFORE the information the are expounding upon or clarifying... Otherwise? I am so sad to see this end. Fantastic read though. Is there hope for an epilog?
10574070 It does that because, if I do it the other way, the footnotes stack so that they squeeze out the main story.
Well that was a lovely story. It is sad that Chryssi can’t bring herself to truly care for others, but that’s just part of how she is. Looking forward to her further exploits in space.
1) Im still convinced Celestia has some kind if limited future sight and this has not dissuaded me.
2) Oh nooo poor Fireball XDXDXD Trying so hard to quit and he still ends up in the Maretian catastrophy! I feel so freakin bad for him but I also cant stop giggling at this exchange! Reluctant heroes/experts are kinda my favorite.
3) Yes I DID sing Chrysalis’ song out loud and I am NOT ashamed
4) Oh my word I love Laika to death (thankfully not literally.) Also I love that it was the DRAGON out of all these ponies and pony-like creatures who remembered that they have a teleporting alicorn readily at hoof! XD
5) Chrysalis’ vision on the moon was spectacular. I LOVED that shot of Manehattan that gave callback (callforward?) to The Maretian, and also that there was a mix of reformed changelings. Who are the fox guys btw, I didnt get that reference? The contrast between desolate wasteland equus and prospering spaceage equus (and nice Ozymandius reference there) was perfectly contrasted. Seeing Chrysalis actually get emotional about it and defensive on Cherry’s behalf was moving.
6) MOM MOON MOM MOON MOM MOON
7) Hehehe, Cherry’s not getting out that easily XD Although she will definitely wish she did.
I didnt comment on nearly enough (for instance, I loved the footnotes being closer to their annotations! That was tricky for me in past versions because Id forget the context unless I scrolled down immediately ^^; ) This has all and all been a splendid ride! Im sad to see it end but also delighted by the finish. :D Cant wait to see what you focus on next! Thanks for sharing your beautiful work with us and keep up the great writing!
Which begs the question of what exactly "Jet Set" meant to ponies before all this, but that's a question for a different day.
(Laughs in Maretian.)
Some say it is best to be a known and named character, for that improves odds of survival in times of crisis. But there is a certain safety in anonymity as well.
And then only because they found better methods.
This sounds less like KSP and more like experimenting with irresponsible amounts of TNT in Minecraft.
I love this. Seeing these moments of vulnerability and uncertainty, these signs that Celestia really isn't omniscient and moments where there really is something new under the sun... Magnificent.
Oh, honey...
I'll leave my final thoughts in the appendix... which means you've probably already read them.
"And this day will not be Forgotten
When I get to stand up tall
Like pawns in a game of chess
I will rule them all!"
10574509 The fox aliens come from a joke I submitted to "The Infinite Loops," in which an alicorn Rainbow Dash breaks Warp 1 under her own power.
Now, as anyone ought to know, the first time you break Warp 1, you get a visit from some Vulcans... or whatever your universe has for a substitute.
The last line of the gag was one of the aliens raising a forepaw, splitting its long toes into a V, and saying, "We are the Vulpine."
I heartily endorse this product and/or service.
Well.
[edit] Darn my first vid idea was already posted (Loony Toons) so have this instead:
Even if this intro is def more "Murica fuck yea" than other ST inrosThat was a trip - in the bad future, I see a nod to the Hearts of Iron IV mega mod Equestria at War with Starlight and Trixie heading the resistance.
Chryssy is still terrified at the idea of skittlebug changedlings existing. That is funny.
As for the answer to another commentor asking how Chryssy deleting Equestria and Griffonia ends the world, kindly rememner Changelings need love to survive. They are a symbiotic or parasitic race, and can not survive on their own or in a loveless world - they will starve to death if they do.
Feel free to write a The Matrix story but it's Changelings instead of machines.
thank you for yet another fic where i don't stop every other line to think "no, all those characters are retarded!"
on the other hand after getting used to this, it's kinda hard to find something worth reading
So this is it, the end of one journey, and the beginning of another.
As for end credits, Apollo 13 is good, but because of the good future vision, this should be your end credits.