Part 2: Emperor's Gambit
Olivia knew there were some things she must not do. When she was a child, she had been taught not to run with scissors, not to expose her public Ident to strangers, and never to board a spacecraft unless she knew where it was going. But the years had changed her, and she had learned a great deal. She knew there was information she must not reveal to the enemy, even when she was captured and interrogated. As with all high officers of the United Nations Interstellar Navy, she had been implanted with training that made revealing information under duress impossible for her.
Even so, she felt a growing sense of dread as the pony called Tempest Shadow dragged her broken armor down the length of the Stormbreaker. Her armor weighed over a metric ton, and yet the unicorn dragged her along without effort. Even without her broken horn, it would’ve been impressive. With it, the act seemed impossible.
Olivia did not even try to look at the part of her armor that held the bomb. The instant she’d been captured, she took one last chance to reset the countdown timer—30 more minutes on the clock—and shut off the display. The bomb could be lifted out of her bag during an interrogation, certainly. But if the primitives tried to open it, or tried to shut it off… they would do her job for her. Her only hope was that Tempest was taking them to a vulnerable portion of the ship.
“Why don’t you want my friend?” Olivia asked, loud enough to be heard over the screeching sound the armor made as she was dragged. “He’s Pioneering Society too.”
Tempest glanced over her shoulder to look at her. “Your friend’s face was not known to me. But I know you. Granted, I thought I saw you dead, but that clearly wasn’t the case.” There was absolute confidence in her voice, and she didn’t stop to explain. Just kept dragging into a massive room whose entire wall was a single curved window. It looked a little like a cafe, except that many of the chairs and tables were pushed aside, or turned into partitions for sleeping areas. They were entirely too tall for ponies to use anyway, but might’ve fit the Storm King’s own race. Or maybe humans.
“Shouldn’t be,” Olivia said, trying to sound conversational. She could fake casualness with an enemy easily enough—she learned how long ago, because she was an officer. The one time she’d been captured, it had been during an undercover on an independent anarcocommunist asteroid-colony in the belt. Returning her alive had meant not attracting the UN’s ire, and giving them (as well as her career) a bloody nose. Tempest would have no such restraint, however. “I got a new face after the… incident with Equestria. After Celestia killed me.”
Tempest stopped walking, and stopped dragging. There were a few other guards in the room, but all scattered at her angry looks, leaving the two of them alone in the center. “So it is true, then. They say you killed an entire platoon of the Solar Guard, without one of them seeing your face.”
She looked down, voice falling. “I didn’t want to. I was… hoping to kill Celestia only. But she was too powerful.”
“Not her,” Tempest said. She advanced to within a few steps, lowering her voice to a whisper. “The ancients were who you fought, not her. You could fight an army, but you couldn’t fight all of Equus.”
Olivia nodded. “I couldn’t, and I died. But what do you care? Kill me again, like you killed my friends. Isn’t that how this works? The Storm King promises eternal life to his allies, and death to his enemies. I am certainly that.”
“You are foolish to fight.” Tempest Shadow sat down in front of her. But she kept reaching up with one hoof, gently touching the side of her broken horn. There was a little cloudy fluid dried along it—pus, mixed with blood. Whatever injury had caused that wound, it did not heal cleanly.
“Yes,” Olivia agreed. “But the Storm King is ‘foolish’ to fight against us. While we’re talking, Forerunner is dismantling your grip on Equestria. The territory that took you months to claim will be taken back in a week.”
There was a time when Olivia might’ve said nothing at all. There was far too much danger in letting prisoners decide what was safe to share, and what was not. But there was nothing she knew that Tempest wouldn’t soon discover. It was a shame the flash of nuclear fire would not leave Olivia enough time to see the expression on the Storm King’s face.
“The Stormbreaker is invincible,” the unicorn said, in the same way another pony might’ve commented on the strength of gravity. “You stopped an army, but you couldn’t destroy this ship. Even if you’re right about Equestria—we don’t need it anymore. The ponies who couldn’t see reason will be left naked before the storm.”
“What storm?” Olivia asked. “If you think this ship can scare us, you’re wrong. The only reason we couldn’t kill it last time was we’d never seen it before. But we know it now. You can’t surprise us again.”
Tempest rolled her eyes. “The storm that’s coming won’t come from this ship. But… I didn’t bring you here to waste my own time. I’m sure my king would rather have me out there, retaining parts of his captured territory a while longer. So I will ask quickly.” Her tone changed, and she looked away. “I hear your medical magic is quite advanced. Far beyond anything in Equestria.”
Olivia shrugged, though the motion would not be visible with her trapped in immobilized armor. “I’ve heard your soldiers come back from the dead. If you know someone who needs a doctor, why don’t you tell them to jump off a bridge?”
Tempest Shadow didn’t laugh. Instead she looked away, as though she were the one considering. Olivia wasn’t left wondering about it for very long. “Our king brings back the dead of his own species—he has promised this will change once the storm arrives, but until then… only they return.”
There was probably some computer reason for that—maybe it was connected to the reason why Lucky couldn’t bring back anyone else after her first wave.
“You heard correctly,” Olivia said. “We can treat almost any injury if the brain is intact. She glanced down at her right foreleg. “I have a replacement leg under all this armor. My real one was destroyed during your attack on Othar. You will see the scars, since the fur hasn’t grown back yet.”
“I know you were missing a leg,” Tempest said. “That was among the information Gruber sent back. That the pony leading your rebellion did so without one of her legs. It was supposed to identify you.” She reached up again, massaging her horn. “I scoured Equestria from one end to the other, Wayfinder. I waited in the court of Celestia, and traveled to the laboratories of necromancers. None could repair my horn.”
Olivia didn’t answer for several seconds. She made a show of inspecting the injury—though in reality, she had no idea, and no amount of staring would make it clear to her. “I’m not a doctor,” she answered. “But I’m sure we could. Forerunner has performed delicate surgeries. If you free me, I’ll show you what he did to my hooves. Well… my left hoof. The implants haven’t yet been replaced in the right.”
Tempest laughed. “Free you so you can attack again? I am not so foolish, little pony. Just because I think I would do better than the Solar Guard does not mean I have to take chances. Yet… perhaps your Forerunner will be willing to trade. Some of your lives, perhaps, in exchange for your service. Captivity, rather than destruction.”
Olivia should’ve kept her mouth shut. But something moved her anyway. “Forerunner will not accept slavery to you. He will dismantle this ship and everything you built if it takes a thousand years of war. If it takes ten thousand years. It took much longer than that for us to get here—he’ll be patient.” She leaned forward, glaring up at her captor. “You should think about surrender instead. If you want healing… we can easily forget about your history. There is nothing you could’ve done that won’t be erased. Your service could shorten the war. If you’d rather be part of a free country, instead of a slave to an evil king…”
Tempest turned away before Olivia could see her face. She didn’t know what had prompted the movement at first, not until she heard the faint alarm. It didn’t blare as loudly as she was used to, or use the same range of sounds as a UN naval ship. But there was no mistaking a siren when she heard it. She didn’t understand the guttural words barked underneath, but obviously Tempest Shadow did.
“You will remain here,” she said. “Under guard. I’d threaten you with death if you try to escape… but my guards will not attempt to kill you. I’ve told them to take pieces instead, if you try. Don’t make them do that.” She glanced over her shoulder, laughing quietly. “If you even can. It looks like Forerunner’s ‘incredible power’ has you quite trapped.”
She turned to leave before Olivia could object, vanishing out the way she’d come. Guards flooded back in through the various doors, wearing the same crude armor and weapons they had been last she saw them. Olivia could swear she’d seen some of those faces before, on the dead she had killed. But there was no knowing for sure.
She relaxed into her stationary armor, not even trying to wiggle free. The guards drew close, and started poking at her with their weapons. Not stabbing, probing. “I wouldn’t do that,” she said, as they started eyeing her bags. “Real dangerous stuff in there.”
Sure enough, they went straight for it.
Maybe Tempest will come back in time to blow up, she thought. But it shouldn’t make a difference, really. This ship would have to be sturdy indeed to survive a bomb as big as she carried. The bridge over space hadn’t been that strong.
Sorry I couldn’t keep you alive, Deadlight. But I’ll join you soon enough.
Was that her imagination, or were there lights emerging from the ring below? No, she had to be imagining that.
Flurry Heart had lost track of how much crying she had done. Enough, certainly, that she found her eyes wouldn’t get wet anymore. There came a point when she just wasn’t in enough pain to keep crying. She remembered that feeling well from her time in Celestia’s captivity, though it hadn’t been repeated for months.
There was a war outside, she couldn’t forget. Her best friend had lied to her, regardless of what she thought Flurry knew. Yet in spite of all that, in spite of Flurry Heart abandoning the mission, she was still out there.
“How’s the war going?” Flurry Heart asked, her voice small and weak.
And as usual, Forerunner was there to answer. He hadn’t spared any of the drones to keep her company—maybe he knew that wouldn’t have made her feel better. But at least he was attentive. “Well enough. Lucky and the marines have nearly finished with this camp. But the battle in Canterlot is going much worse—the enemy was better supplied than we thought. The resistance is being slaughtered.”
Flurry Heart shuddered. “What are… we going to do?”
“This ship will take its marines and deploy there,” Forerunner answered. “As soon as we finish here. Lucky will be returning soon.”
There was a brief shockwave, shaking the Wing of Midnight from bow to stern. Flurry Heart rose instinctively to her hooves, looking around. “What was that?”
“The last jumper taking off, the one I was saving for an emergency. There was an emergency.”
“The changelings?”
“Yes. It’s time for a gamble, and they’re one of the most important parts of the play.”
A faint hiss sounded as the berth door opened. A pegasus stood there, the exact same one she’d seen earlier.
Flurry Heart sat up, wiping away anything left of moisture from around her face and fluffing up her mane with her magic. Thanks to Forerunner’s hard work earlier, she could almost feel like herself again. “You’re… Ocellus, right?” Flurry asked. “You don’t have to pretend to be a pony around me.” She looked down, pawing at the carpet. “Us left-behinders should stick together.”
“I… I’m not pretending,” she said, stepping inside. Her voice sounded distant, pained. “I thought it would… I thought it would be easier to be a pony ambassador if I was a pony, so I changed into one when we came back to life.” It seemed there was much more she wanted to say, but couldn’t. Flurry wasn’t going to push her.
“You found a way to come back to life?” Flurry asked. She rolled off the bed, taking a few seconds to get her hooves under her. They were unsteady after being cramped for so long, but she was still a princess. She was also still wearing the compression-suit with its cooling fluid meant for use inside the human armor. “I thought that spell didn’t work! Even L-Lucky…”
“We didn’t find a spell.” Ocellus sat down on her haunches. Outside the Wing of Midnight, the sky seemed to shake with the sound of distant explosions. Like a whole flock of Alicorns were battling up there. “We found the way Celestia used to use. I told it to make me a pony, at the same time Sarah told it to make her a changeling.”
Now she understood. There was something of the familiar in the way Ocellus was staring down at her hooves. Maybe not broken trust, though it was hard to be sure. Even when they looked like ponies, changelings didn’t think the same way. She remembered that from Thorax’s time in the Crystal Empire, even if she’d been young for most of it. “You didn’t go with her either.”
Ocellus nodded. “It’s not my fight. But… I would’ve if I could. But the whole plan would only work for changelings. I would be discovered and make them fail.” She tilted her head slightly as the Wing of Midnight rocked again. “What about you? Plan on hiding in here until it’s all over?”
Flurry Heart took a long time to answer. She couldn’t help but see her friend’s face, twisted with frustration as she battered down the door to Flurry’s room with a rifle. She had looked like an angel then, the memory of one of Flurry’s only good dreams.
But she had also been the one to get her involved in the first place. She’d sent her back to the Crystal Empire to protect herself, hadn’t she? And she’d been the one to prompt Flurry to go on adventures. Before that, her conquests had always been of a different kind. The worst they’d ever brought were scandalous tabloid articles, not what felt like years of torture.
Would I want to go back to that pony? Visiting bars, spending the evening with interesting creatures. They had always been enjoyable—but her time with them left no impact. She never learned, never changed. Lucky Break helped me grow up.
Nothing with her mother would change that. And now she’s fighting Equestria’s battles for me. She’s the hero I should be.
“No,” Flurry Heart finally said. “I was on my way to the armory.”
“You have time if you hurry,” Forerunner urged from the wall. “Run.”
She did run, with Ocellus barely keeping up. She didn’t seem fully coordinated on pony legs. Shouldn’t she have plenty of practice with those? Or maybe she’d been in their kingdom for so long that she was out of practice. “You’re going to fight?”
“Yes.” Flurry Heart stepped right into the center of the room, the same place she’d been only a few minutes earlier. Her huge boots emerged from the floor, snapping into place around her hooves before robotic arms started riveting parts together. A skeletal frame of metal went first, before Forerunner’s body assembled the mechanical parts around it.
“What makes some ponies able to fight while others can’t?” Ocellus asked.
With each new part, Flurry Heart felt her confidence returning. It was as though she were standing in front of the camera again. She had a chance to do something different. To pay back Equestria for her betrayal. Camp Storm might be saved, but Canterlot remained. The city she’d “ruled” from within the palace, approving orders of search and interrogation and looking out over the walls at the bodies of the dead.
No more.
“Dunno.” The armor was assembled around her now, polished as white as any of Forerunner’s drones. She knew—though couldn’t see—the Equestrian flag would be on her flanks, unchanged from the days of Celestia. A symbol of a nation that had died. Maybe when we’re done saving it, we’ll have to build something better. “But I’m not saying you should. It’s not your country.”
“I know,” Ocellus said. “I’m not a soldier.”
Neither am I, Flurry thought. And maybe she wouldn’t do any good—maybe she’d just get herself killed, or slow Lucky down. But she wasn’t going to sit back while Canterlot’s fate was decided.
Ocellus didn’t follow her to the docking bay. By the time she reached it, the marines were making their way back in. Most of them looked only a little banged-up, though there were a few pried free of their armor and sprawled out on cots in the corner.
I should probably ask about how to use Celestia’s trick to come back to life after this, she thought, scanning the crowd for Lucky. Her friend’s armor was in better shape than most of the soldiers. Maybe she’d been hiding in the center of their group this whole time, where she wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack.
Flurry Heart cut through the crowd, which was getting denser by the moment as soldiers rushed back inside. She could see that only a small number were staying behind—assisted by many, many hungry-looking ponies no longer wearing their chains.
“Hey Lucky,” Flurry Heart said, as soon as she was sure her friend would see her. “I hear you’re going back to Canterlot.”
“Won’t take us long,” Lucky said. She froze the instant she noticed Flurry there, her body tensing. Maybe she worried about what Flurry was about to say. If so, she worried in vain. “Less than five minutes. But the whole city is hot—looks like half the Storm King’s army might be inside. Haven’t heard back from the resistance there.”
“Need help?” Flurry Heart asked.
“Yeah,” Lucky said. She sniffed, legs faltering beneath her. “I think so. It’s… it wasn’t supposed to happen all at once like this, Flurry. Our future on Sanctuary will be figured by morning.” She glanced up at the sky. “Emperor’s Soul is on its way up, along with every other space worthy ship we have.”
“I thought we didn’t want to fight the Stormbreaker directly. Forerunner… wasn’t sure we would win.”
“I’m fairly certain we won’t win,” Forerunner said from her headset, directly into her ear. “I observed the field-strength of the barrier protection of that vessel last time I attacked it. But failure isn’t always the condition the enemy expects. Success truly requires only that I get the changelings aboard.”
Apparently Lucky Break was hearing him too, because she replied, whispering into her headset mic and lowering her helmet so none of the soldiers all around them could hear. “Or you chose this plan intentionally. It sounded plausible enough, but had a significant enough chance of failure that you would have an excuse to conquer the whole world if it didn’t work out.”
Forerunner did not respond for some seconds. When he finally did, his voice had lost all amusement, all emotion. “I will be going to all lengths available to me to ensure this plan succeeds. But if it does not, I will end the chaos on Sanctuary. This Storm King is the latest in a long line of local rulers who violated interstellar jurisprudence. We will bring this population into compliance. If that means I have to drag a thousand starships out of the sky, or a hundred thousand—I will.”
The sound shifted, and suddenly there was a figure behind them. A human shape, towering over the marines and attracting several stares. Only he was wearing powered armor too. There was something more graceful about this set—less of a tank welded around a creature not meant for it, and more something specifically crafted for his form. There was no need to carefully reverse-engineer armor for bodies like this. “I see your face, Lucky. I know what you’re thinking. Don’t doubt. The Pioneering Society will bring peace when this is done. If we succeed today, it will only be the first mission of many. There’s a whole galaxy above us. But we can’t explore it until we finish cleaning our own backyard.”
The Wing of Midnight lifted off, causing everyone present to rock slightly back and forth. Flurry Heart didn’t fall over, just like none of the others did. She had magnets on her hooves, and she twitched them on to keep her stationary.
Forerunner’s voice came from his own body as he shouted into the room. “Landfall in Canterlot in thirty-five seconds! I’m dropping you all directly behind the Storm King’s palace perimeter, so expect a bloodbath! Try not to secure kills, if you can. These soldiers can be revived, but only after they die. Make it hurt.”
Davis stepped up beside Forerunner, near the edge of the ramp. His armor was dented and bloody, but he looked otherwise intact. “First squad, you’ll jump as we make our first pass. Everybody else keep your asses warm and your rifles loaded!”
The ramp descended, and the air in the cargo bay began to billow about them. Flurry’s helmet slid down over her face without any input on her part.
“We’ll be going down with the third group,” Lucky said. “I-If you still want to come. Once they start landing… it’s supposed to be really bloody.”
“I’m coming,” Flurry Heart said. This time she meant it.
Sarah could practically feel the air shaking with the battle going on above them—except that there was no air, no sound, and no sign. But Forerunner hadn’t said a single word to her since they boarded the jumper, and she knew that was bad.
There was no armor for them—every spare suit had been given either to their own marines or to “resistance” fighters. So the two of them wore only civilian space suits. Even the bolt of a crossbow could mean the end for them, if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Her companion Photuris wasn’t frantically prepping herself, wasn’t mixing chemicals or building a fancy bomb. She just sat in place, breathing rapidly and muttering to herself. Sarah leaned close, listening as best she could. “You can do this you can do this you can do this.”
But they wouldn’t have to do anything if Forerunner couldn’t get them in.
“I can’t believe I’m actually going on a suicide mission,” Sarah said, conversationally. “I did so much to stay alive… enough that I ended up on the other end of the universe, thousands of years in the future. What about you?”
How much of James was still in there?
“I… I wouldn’t either,” said the changeling, her ears flattening to her head. She looked up from the compression chair beside Sarah, eyes a little glazed. “Nothing that happens up there can kill us, though. These bodies are puppets, machines. Machines with pain-sensors and plenty of range to phone home when it hurts.”
“That’s… one way to think about it.” Sarah sat back in her chair, trying to adjust herself in the space-suit. But it had been built for ponies, and her changeling body just didn’t fit quite right. “I met some religious people who talked like that. That’s how… the soul is supposed to work, isn’t it? Some imaginary force that… that’s really you. It keeps going once you die. Probably a good thing I never believed in that, or I wouldn’t be here.”
Frustration crossed Photuris’s face, and she wrinkled her nose. “How little does our faction know about Equus?”
Sarah shrugged. “Probably way more than I know. I only had a few days of class. I guess… you know more.”
“Obviously.” She looked away, towards the side of the ship. There was no window there, but there was a screen. A screen that showed them nothing of the battle going on outside. All it had was their 18-minute ETA, slowly ticking down. “This entire mission would be pointless if I didn’t know how to control Equus hardware.”
“So tell me,” Sarah said. “Aren’t we going to die out there? We’ll die, but our minds are recorded, so we’ll keep going from the second we went. It’ll be like last time, or… the time we went through Forerunner. Dead, then alive again.”
A frustrated smell emerged from Photuris’s suit. The helmets were off, and Sarah had to imagine it would’ve been much worse otherwise. “The ancients did not consider that acceptable. Many of their number were concerned with the continuity of consciousness. They considered any existence that could not grant that as a guarantee to be unacceptably cruel. That was why Harmony was so forceful with us—the handful of deaths it observed were unacceptable and could not be repeated.”
“Harmony has some fucking broken morals,” Sarah muttered. “Forerunner, can we watch the battle? Those people are dying for us, I want to see how it’s going.”
Forerunner hesitated. “I… calculate too much information will impede your ability to fulfill your mission, which will make their deaths even less significant. Know that I have staffed every ship with the minimum acceptable crew. Most are entirely drone-operated, and only the Soul has more than a dozen—”
“I don’t fucking care about your numbers, Forerunner,” Sarah said. “I’m making a point. If you don’t cooperate with me, that’ll be fucking worse for our numbers.”
There was a few seconds of silence, then every wall of the jumper became transparent. Or that’s what it looked like. She knew on a conscious level it was really just a screen—adaptive materials, showing them a convincing illusion of the world outside. A good thing they were so far up, or else it would’ve been impossibly nauseating at these speeds. But Equestria was a thin strip of land far below, surrounded by a diffuse red glow. Above them—above them was the battle.
Their own ships were highlighted with green IFF tags, along with strategic information including their readiness and compliment and lots of other little numbers that made no sense to Sarah. They were being slaughtered.
Thousands of smaller ships in front, surrounding the Stormbreaker and firing weapons of all kinds towards it. Nothing got close, but the space around it rippled each time.
“Harmony doesn’t want people to die, so why does it let people do that?” She gestured above her head with a leg. “If you know so much about Equus, explain that.”
“Because they aren’t dead,” Photuris said, her voice slow and cautious. Like someone who didn’t know if the person they were talking to was crazy or just stupid. “You experienced it, Sarah. You lived and died and lived again. Soon we might repeat the process. Don’t you understand that your instance has continued to exist through that time?”
“Meh, not so sure how I’d know that,” she said. But it was hard to listen to anything she was saying when there was a battle to watch. Even with the icons and tactical overlays covering most of the image, she could see that hundreds of lives were up here with them. And for each ship, there were a hundred smaller drones without a person inside. The 75th Ranger Regiment’s best pilots were probably up here, making the most tactical use of their lives.
“I feel like I’m still me,” she said. “I feel like I’m the me that grew up on Earth, even though I know I can’t be. That S-Sarah… that… person died of cancer before she turned thirty. She went up to a station, then flew out again, and crawled under a rock to die. Except I don’t remember any of the dying part, I only remember the excitement, the heist. But it must’ve happened. It’s been…” She didn’t know how long it had been. “How long has it been, Forerunner?”
“I do not know,” Forerunner answered. His voice sounded—flat. Which meant he was distracted. No small wonder why that might be, with the battle raging over their heads. “I lost clock power in transit after my solar array was critically damaged. I do not know how long I drifted after that, or how many generations of probes might’ve passed before I was created. But considering I was first generation and there were several later designs, I imagine there were not very many. I could use an extraction of galactic drift and the indexes of prominent pulsars to generate a first-order approximation… but we don’t give that information unless explicitly asked for it by the Governor. Colonies are happier thinking of themselves as closely tied to life on Earth. Better to picture yourselves as only a few minutes past it than centuries.”
Hundreds of thousands of years, Sarah thought. More.
The battle raged on. The flashes of nuclear torpedoes was largely gone now—without impact on the Stormbreaker. The drones had divided themselves quite thinly around the ship now, like a cloud. Every few seconds or so the Stormbreaker would glow bright blue, and a few dozen of them would burn out of the sky. But there were always more.
And behind them all, the Emperor’s Soul. Its decks were empty now, except for the occasional launch or landing of another drone. But something was emerging from under the deck—something long enough that Sarah could see it from there.
“We stopped,” Photuris said, pointing at the transparent ceiling. “Why?”
Sarah was glad to let the matter of consciousness drop.
“Because the Emperor’s Soul is about to fire. I’m fairly certain I will only get one shot. You should both settle into your seats as securely as you can. I will have to push the biological limits of your bodies to get you in—and that’s assuming this even works. You might be squashed against the shield like all the torpedoes we’ve been firing.”
“We’ll be fine,” Photuris said, confidently. “Harmony might not want us here, but the ancients do. We’ll make it.”
Sarah settled back into her seat, keeping her neck straight. She couldn’t look at her companion anymore, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to second-guess Forerunner’s instructions and end up with a broken neck. “I didn’t think there was a difference. Isn’t Harmony some kind of… collective-intelligence AI? It’s assembled out of the population of the ring, so shouldn’t it only be able to do what the population wants? Like a weird… techno-democracy thing.”
“It’s not that simple. But the end of Harmony we see doesn’t have any freedom to choose. It must do what it was created to do. The collective wills of the ancients are subtler. They can do things like… take me in, stop me from going insane, train me in working their ships…”
“Take you in?” Sarah winced as something poked straight through her shell from the suit. She felt a sudden rush of burning fluid. “The fuck is that? Forerunner, why’d you stab me?”
“To keep you alive,” Forerunner said. “Watch the show.” The screen above them focused in on the thin line connecting the Emperor’s Soul and the Stormbreaker. They were both large enough to see little details with her eyes, which made Sarah think they were being enlarged. But that didn’t matter.
Something was glowing on the deck. A machine, exposed from all sides, with a faint line illuminated straight at the Stormbreaker.
The bubble of shield became visible, just as it had during the nuclear blasts. Only this time it wasn’t just the afterimage—this time it stuck. “The hell is that?”
“Our ticket in, I hope,” Forerunner said. “Or it’s going to slice the ship in half. You’ll have to watch the recording, I’m afraid. Accelerating now.”
Sarah’s vision went almost completely black from the sudden acceleration. She saw a flash emerge from the red metallic object, a little like lightning itself. Then the whole screen went blue and started to fuzz around the edge.
“You’re through!” came Forerunner’s voice, a second later. The Stormbreaker was growing larger and larger in front of them, with that dark bubble directly below it. But they were aiming at the ship from above, as Photuris had instructed. Sarah wouldn’t have to get anywhere near the thing. “Good luck, you two! You have my trust, if only because you were the best option I had.”
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Was that like a 0.02c railgun?
Bet that surprised the Storm King.
Still don't get why Tempest needs outside help to restore her horn.
9270251
And why she believes the Storm King will actually help her and not betray her.
9270251 Well, there's no doc in Equestria plain willing or able to fix her horn and Storm King's just "helping" her so he can do world conquest or something. Still, Tempest's a way better villain than Cozy Glow.
9270354
Let me repeat the question: why can´t Tempest kill herself and come back with a horn?
9270510
She doesn't know how to come back.
Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun.
I have always enjoyed how you portray Forerunner. Seems 'human' most of the time, until the facade drops and the cold AI logic comes out.
Now... next chapter, should see how things develop on the ship!
Huh, so even this version of Tempest is still just interested in getting her horn healed. Pretty terrible justification for throwing in with the enemy of the only known remaining bastion of civilized life in the universe.
It's time to roll the dice.
Ouch.
Having a Princess on hand for the Liberation of Canterlot might be a very good thing.
Hopefully this second mission in goes better than the first.
This is getting Battlestar Galactica (2004 SiFi Channel) levels of intense!
STOP TEASING AND EXPLAIN IT YOU LITTLE SHIT! Enough with all this laughing at the primitives while refusing to explain stuff. I expected better from James.
On the other hand, she's not really James as he was anymore.
Come on Lucky, don't insult the AI that has enough emotional depth to know what an insult is.
Ow, I havent seen a smack down like that since Footfall.
Then again, I wouldve prefered to build a Clarke Cannon down into the Ring Structure itself, with the only design limit parameter being, the recoil doesnt actually cause the ring to fold up on itself. Then you sign the shell, With love from Sir Isaac Newton. Lets see how shields work against a 10 9s effective singularity. Trouble is, when Hawking said a 2500 ton black hole evapourates in 1 second, is that with self time dilation and zero velocity, so if that was a tenth ounce mass, its relativistic time would be 3000 years, or am I misssing the square root, in which case it would be 25 kilo and 30 hours? I suspect its more like a plasma wave graser combined with a big chunk of DU working in pumped mode for punching through the shield as a shaped nuclear charge instead of just general blast detonations for the torpedos?
Next theyll probably find out that internal high energy events cause the terraformer device to change time flow in the area or weak force values so that chemical bonds are essentially unaffected but weak forces fizzle or something?
There's the Tempest I know. Though from the sound of it, she still believes the tale of the coming Storm. I suppose we'll see how that pans out.
Good to see Flurry pull her head out of her rear. If nothing else, she should be a nice morale boost in Canterlot.
And the changelings' mission... Well, no one knows they have a ticking clock, depending on how vulnerable the Stormbreaker is to the bomb. And even if the explosion doesn't take it down, if they're in the wrong place at the wrong time...
Well, we'll soon see what happens.
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It's never going to be explained adequately because the mechanism doesn't actually exist. At least, explained in screen. Which is good, as any attempt to do so will fail scrutiny.
9277132
How the thing works can be explained adequately by simplifying it's function. Ofc we're never going to get a detailed explanation why the thing works and the exact 9 dimensional math behind it's function, but how it works can be explained without doing that.
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"The thing basically makes soul's a form of data it records and then keeps on standby until they either chose to respawn or memory wipe themselves back into cosmic energy."
There. i literally simplified how tech far more advanced then should be even possible breaks the very fundamental laws of physics and thermal dynamics in a single throwaway line. your all welcome
9277417
The issue with the throwaway line example is it breaks immersion, in my opinion, as we still have no idea what that means. Best to just leave it a mystery and let us imagine what it could be, as then no one can pick apart the mechanism.
Anyways, I do trust in whatever Starscribe does, as if he does make an explanation it likely still allow us to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it. Like the rest of the story has so far.
9277756
i didn't make the line in an attempt to undermine the author. i simply made it to give the people who were spending too long complaining about the mystery that's suppose to Remain a mystery something they could cling too, until we either figure it out or the story ends.
9277417
That's a guess made from current spotty information and from lines of "advanced" beings laughing at primitives. It hasn't been explained so far.
9278028
please read these two comments
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Storm King holds the ticket to reincarnation over her head for her unconditional obedience with a little dash of brain washing.
I've been sus of you from the start.
At least she can use the same way they transformed James and turn into a changeling again. Albeit a black one, at first. But I'm sure she knows the trick to fix that; she's done it before.
Hee. He knows when to give that little bit of positive reinforcement.
This is armour like in the Starcraft 2 trailer, isn't it?
Ha.
Apply what Perez taught you, Flurry! Make them fear you!
How inspiring
Well. Close to the end! Discord hasn't been active in a while.
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Typo:
Gruber > Grubber
Imagining the vastness of space with a ringworld in the background, and a distant battle above It. A hell of a time for Animusic 2 Heavy Light 4:06 to hit