001: Outside Sparkle 11

"If you stop, maybe sanity will get you by the throat. Maybe realization will pry open your mind and the horror that left you down in the sand will seep in." — The Twilight Zone (1960)

Xylexa focused on the wavering, green screen before her. Ahead of the purple blip that was the Godmare, a continuous, jagged red line was fast approaching. A few screens flashed red around her as it grew closer. When they were within one lunar unit of the line, she jerked her head away from the screen, lights dancing across her visor.

"Clear?" her voice was low and sharp—a barked order with no room for insubordination.

"Clear, Captain," said a mousy voice from across the bridge, uttered from the lone crew member of the Godmare, Moon Shadow.

Xylexa grunted in reply and flipped a switch. Everything plunged into true darkness, the only light from distant pinpricks of stars through the porthole-like windows on the sides of the bridge. The ship was completely silent as it glided, unaided, toward the boundary of Sparkle 11—a long-abandoned area of Restricted Dead Space.

Xylexa's hoof hovered over the controls. She counted down from fifteen in her head—the amount of time it would take to travel past Sparkle 11's boundary—then pressed down on the backup switch. A few screens flickered to life, heavy with static as they loaded their rudimentary graphics. The one in front of her fizzled to life in a few seconds, showing the red boundary line behind the ship. A few indicators flashed red, while one screen displayed a warning about entering Restricted Space.

"Clear?" she asked again, watching her own radar intently.

"As far as I could see, Captain," Moon Shadow replied.

She bobbed her head. The ship's propulsion system remained unused in the backup mode, making the Godmare essentially invisible to anypony who may have noted their presence passing the sector's boundary.

"We will return to full power in two hours," she said, turning in her chair to face Moon Shadow. "If all is quiet, we will utilize the SMUT to the outer system coordinates for the vothuythium mine."

She pressed a button—normally yellow, but dark under backup power—near her left hoof, enabling the ship's warning system should anything appear on the radar, then stood from her chair. Her hooves, covered in her sleek, porcelain-like armor, clinked against the metal floor. The noise was sharp in the otherwise silent ship.

"How much time will we have?" Moon Shadow asked, standing from his own chair as Xylexa came near.

"Assuming the patrols are where they should be," Xylexa said, eyes trained out the porthole window at the distant stars, "probably fifty or sixty years."

Moon Shadow exhaled loud enough to draw her attention. She turned her head slightly, noting that the stallion had relaxed somewhat: his wings hung slightly limper than they had since he learned of their excursion to Sparkle 11. He ruffled his green-tipped feathers, then shot her a grin when he noticed that she was looking at him.

"I'm fagged," Moon Shadow said, his heavily accented voice changing into a more conversational tone. "I... uh, am getting in pishcka. You want some?"

Her face twitched at the slang and informal "you," her stern expression turning hostile for a brief moment before she said, "No. And stop talking like a fucking teenager." He winked at her behind his own visor—his colored purple to green and more v-shaped than hers—and stuck out his tongue.

"Of course, Keesha," he said, a smile remaining on his lips as he turned hoof and trotted away. Xylexa glared after him, grinding her teeth as his tinny hoofsteps echoed through the ship, a consequence of the armor, similar to his captain's, that he wore while on duty.

Once Moon Shadow was clear of the bridge, Xylexa sighed and pushed her visor over her mane, allowing her to see the metal of the ship in the proper gray monochrome. She once again turned her gaze to the distant stars beyond the thick glass of the small window, briefly wondering which tiny pinprick was her home planet's sun before pushing the thought out of her mind.

There was no sense of the ship moving, even while glancing out the porthole. The stars were all too far to appear to move as the Godmare glided through space, and Xylexa often found her inability to sense the ship's momentum far more unsettling than any hallucinatory vision she had passing through a wormhole.

Where Siliv was did not matter. What she did—and, this was a relatively new revelation—didn't really matter, not in the grand scheme of things, anyway. Staying out for one too many poker games may not have put her in a position to prevent her parents' murder, but she had convinced herself (poorly) that there was a sense of peace that could prevail over the guilt she felt over the situation from a simple, universal truth: nopony's death mattered.

Even though it did not logically matter, she could, if she thought too much on it, feel the cold, viscous blood above her hooves and smell the overpowering metallic scent of it. Old blood clotted, and it had been hard to scrub from her fetlocks. Some had gone down the drain as small, dark red clumps in pinkish water. Idly, she found herself wondering if the ponies who had put bullets through her parents' heads spoke in the same dialect Moon Shadow had picked up on, and if they had referred to the red stuff as vino or krovvy, but then she realized that dwelling on such matters only stirred a sudden urge to vomit that stemmed from a void deep in her chest.

She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and exhaling on a count of four, then trotted over to the screens by one of the vacant stations. Her eyebrows came together when she saw how little time had passed.

In the station to the left of the one documenting time and coordinates, a radar screen showed the Godmare to be all alone in the icy, dark abyss of space. Xylexa's charts of the sector– astoundingly complete for a portion of space that had not been traversed in several thousand years –had outlined their crossing point as the safest area to drift. There were no debris fields, asteroids or dark planets if the charts were to be believed and time properly accounted for; anyway, the ship would sound an alarm if the charts had been wrong or if a wayward GEA patrol came near.

Two hours of dead-time—ten minutes prior. She grimaced.

She took another glance out the porthole, then walked off the bridge to... to...

To what? She frowned, stopping mid-stride as she walked through the narrow, arched doorway to leave the bridge. Backup lights illuminated the hallway before her in dim, yellowish light. Most of the lights flickered at even intervals, casting deep pools of darkness when they went dark. She glanced toward the doorway to her quarters—the closest to the bridge—and her body immediately felt heavy, reminding her that she had not properly slept since retrieving the charts of Sparkle 11 from a black market vendor a week prior.

The thought crossed her mind to talk to Moon Shadow, at least to inform him that she planned on taking a nap, but she could already hear his feminine, playful tone telling her "zaznoot, Keesha." He would come bother her if she needed to be bothered; it wasn't worth the raise in blood pressure to be berated by teenage slang, no matter how innocuous.

She went into her quarters, hoofsteps certainly loud enough for Moon Shadow to hear, and, overcome with a wave of heavy exhaustion, fell wearily into her cot – armor and all. She placed her visor on the shelf behind her pillow and stared into the blackness of the room. The door was open, allowing the hallway light in, but the lights nearest to her were dark more often than they were lit.

Forty seconds off, five seconds on – she counted.

The only difference in the darkness of the unlit room and the blackness behind her eyelids was that one showed her vague, red-tinted memories she would rather forget. She dozed off twice while counting the seconds of her off interval only to wake up an indiscriminate amount of time later feeling hangover-type nauseous from being dealt a bad poker hand by a faceless unicorn in her redwashed pseudo-memories. Each time, she would awake paralyzed by nausea, sweat flooding her armor; she would force herself to her hooves to check the time on the bridge before returning to her quarters, nausea gone, chilled to the bone from sweat, yet her nostrils still filled with the acrid stench of the faceless dealer's phantom breath. Collapsing into her cot the second time, she rolled over to face the wall, the tip of her muzzle just touching the icy cold metal as she counted the lights' intervals again.

Eventually, her eyelids grew heavy once more, and she entered a void-like sleep devoid of any of the dread-inducing, altered memory-dreams and was able to rest.

From the void of sleep, she was awakened by Moon Shadow's voice, distorted by her exhausted state: "Captain, it is two hours." Her mouth was intolerably dry, and a dull headache had placed itself behind her eyes. Sleep. Her body craved sleep.

But there was no rest while in space. Not on duty. She was Captain Xylexa. Space was not a place for sleep.

She opened her eyes to an unfocused image of Moon Shadow's silhouette in her doorway.

"Report to the bridge," she said, words still slurred with sleep. Moon Shadow cocked his head, then asked what she had said. She repeated herself with slightly better enunciation, and he saluted and trotted away. His hoofsteps were each like tacks being driven into her eyes, each one causing a pain to course through her skull.

There was no time for headaches nor the deep-set muscle ache of exhaustion. Despite every protest her body was giving her, Xylexa righted herself in her cot and stepped down onto the floor with a resounding plink of her hooves against the metal. She retrieved her visor, put it on and, still woozy from sleep, drunkenly wobbled to the bridge.

The lights from the screens hurt her eyes, and she squinted as she sat in her chair. Moon Shadow was by her side almost as soon as she sat down.

"Captain," he said. "You need to-to p'yet, yeah? Here." He held out his canteen– small and silver –to her. It took her a moment to decode his poor pronunciation, then she nodded and took the canteen in a hoof, taking a long drink of the sweet juice inside. She handed the canteen back off to him, then rubbed her eyes with the back of her hoof.

"Return to your station," she said, looking at him long enough to see his wing-salute before returning her attention to the screens in front of her. She stared at the coordinates on one of the screens, an action that normally would have told her how far the ship had traveled, but found herself in a long moment of incomprehension that only broke when Moon Shadow's hoofsteps stopped and she heard the faintest squeak from his chair as he sat down.

The meaning of the coordinates came to her, and she was satisfied with their progress. Additionally, Moon Shadow had woken her up at the correct time, leaving her with a sense of pride in the stallion mixed in with a small bit of loathing toward the pain that had receded to a dull ache behind her eyes.

It was just part of the job. She could sleep when she was dead.

Xylexa checked the screen with the read-out of the ship's systems, ensuring all were labeled as "ready," then pressed a button that would reboot the Godmare back into normal functioning. A loading bar appeared on the read-out screen, replacing the block of text, and listed a boot-up time.

"Prepare the coordinates to the vothuythium mine," she said.

"Heading?" Moon Shadow asked.

"No," she replied, closing her eyes tight as a sharp pain radiated through her head. "Eleven decimals, no heading." She specified 'eleven' in Common; Moon Shadow still had issues with properly pronouncing the subtle difference in the Silivan words for 'three' and 'seven,' and they had opted to speak numbers in Common after a miscommunication that had nearly put them inside a planet they were traveling to.

"Yes, Captain."

She cracked open her left eye to view the progress of the reboot. It was nearly full, so she looked to her other screens, double-checking gauges and any status read-outs that could compromise their jump. The ship beeped, drawing attention back to the progress just as all the lights jumped back to life. The screens that had been blank in the backup power slowly came-to, and the subtle hum of the ship's propulsion system and ventilation could be heard once again.

The soft pink background of the SMUT screen was slowly coming to life. While it did, she glanced across the gauges and read-outs again, ensuring that the period of inactivity had not compromised any of the ship's systems. Assured all was well, she returned to the SMUT screen and asked for the mine's coordinates from Moon Shadow, who dutifully read them off to her. Once imputed, she asked, "Is the radar clear?"

"Yes, Captain," came the reply. Xylexa checked her own screen. The purple rocket design was surrounded by a vast, empty expanse of green. The closest patrol should have been no closer than fifty light years to their location, and the likelihood of the border of such an ancient sector of Restricted Space being monitored by more than patrols was unlikely.

Still, her hoof hovered just over the button to utilize the SMUT.

Moon Shadow started to make a noise, but just as he did, she pressed the button and looked over her shoulder at him, a glint of fear in her eyes as she said, "See you on the other side."

His eyes narrowed in concern, and he raised a hoof as he opened his mouth to speak before the ship passing into the wormhole silenced him.

The Godmare melted away as it always did when passing through the fabric of space, yet, instead of the pleasant lifetime she would often live in her mind between jumps, she was greeted by the same hazy nightmare that had plagued her nearly every night since her parents' murder.

The dealer hovered across from her, his coat a dark blue and his face constantly out-of-focus except for the faint hint of teeth between his parted lips.

"Why, you're back awfully soon, Xylexa." His voice was a symphony of stallions speaking in unison. Cards hovered in cyan magic, shuffling in an arc. The neon signs advertised gibberish behind holes of nothing appearing in the corners of her vision.

"I'm not playing," she said, placing her hooves on the table and pushing herself to her hooves. The world shifted with her, and she phased through a waitress—a warm, static-like feeling across her skin—as she walked out the pub and into the streets of Ras Zhodzan. She glanced over at something in the corner of her vision.

A stallion was bent backwards against the wall of the bar, his spine protruding out of his abdomen, blood running in a steady stream from the wound. Her ears fell flat against her head as she turned away, walking away from the body and into a major street of the city. As she grew closer, agonized yelling became more clear – her father? She picked up her pace, galloping down the alleyway toward orange streetlights and a crowd of ponies. The only pony noise was from one voice; the crowd was also still, their eyes closed. She jumped over a mare at the edge of the alleyway and looked around her.

The city was as it should have been, yet a stage had been erected in a plaza in front of the former Silivan government building. Her father, a teal stallion, was impaled on a flagpole, eyes wild and legs twitching as he let out agonized noises. Xylexa galloped toward him, leaping onto the platform and putting her hooves against his back. His eyes rolled up to look at her. A gurgled sound, different from agony, escaped him.

Who? She glanced frantically around, avoiding the blood-stained metal pole escaping from her father's broken jaw. Nopony but the crowd with their eyes closed was to be seen. Her heart raced, and the overwhelming desire to scream crept into her throat.

"Who did this?" Her voice was upped an octave in panic. Her hooves pressed into her father's back. An inequine sound of torment escaped him, and she dropped her hooves from his back, profusely apologizing as he screamed against his torture. Tears rolled from his eyes and his nostrils flared, leaking snot in the heavy silence between his cries.

Xylexa's lips parted, her teeth clenched as her eyebrows drew down in a different kind of agony. She raised her hooves to her ears, closing her eyes as tears began to flow down her face.

"Back so soon?"

The cries stopped. The air was heavy with cigar smoke. Tears clung to her eyelashes as she opened her eyes.

The dealer sat across from her, shuffling a deck in his magic. The deep-set, spiraling panic still gripped her chest. She simultaneously saw herself sobbing by her father as his eyes darted wildly. His lips—her father's, in that superimposed reality—twitched. Xylexa let out a noise between a grunt and a scream, slamming her hooves on the table, head bent down as her mane fell over her eyes.

"Over your plate?" the dealer asked in his many voices.

She glared at him through strands of her mane. In the other reality, she ran from the platform. Something about a gun.

Realities split. Noises became a layered, indistinct cacophony as she felt the phantoms of her other selves move.

Their thoughts were infinite, looping words of hurt and pain. She felt her measureless amount of hearts beat in different rhythms. Various sights of her father filled her vision. She felt like her eyes had become compound, each facet picking up sights of another reality where she found a way to kill her father and others where she groveled and cried. Others still, she came across a package with Moon Shadow's toothless skull in it and shrieked. Sometimes, she left Siliv. Other times, she didn't leave the bar at all.

Sometime, somewhere where she was still across from the dealer, he smirked and flipped a card: a pony holding a lantern in sharp teeth.

In another, she slammed her forehead against the table.

"End it," all the Xylexas said simultaneously from their different realities.

A laser pistol, held by her own hoof or a captor or a riot officer or, in one case, a bartender, kissed her temple. She scowled and whispered, with venom, "Absolute horrorshow."

The trigger was pulled.

The Godmare had passed through the wormhole.

Xylexa gasped, then doubled over as her head exploded with pain.

"Nu, vaerite..." Moon Shadow whimpered from across the bridge as Xylexa focused on taking deep breaths for the headache. "I omn raerl!" The desperation in his tone sent an unfamiliar pang of distress through Xylexa's chest.

The next few moments were full of Xylexa's heavy breaths to control her headache, which dwindled back to a dull ache. Moon Shadow sniffled at his station and shifted in his seat. The ship began making two distinct beeps, one indicating a radio signal and another indicating they were nearing a solid object.

Xylexa pulled out of her post-wormhole state, doing her best to ignore the renewed pain as she glanced across screens. The radar screen indicated many objects in dark green, almost certainly asteroids, in their vicinity. She used the ship's suggested path to maneuver around the immediate threat– everything was dark from the small windows between panels of buttons and screens as well as the portholes without a nearby sun or other light source –and proceeded to dial into the radio frequency.

Static buzzed across the speakers, no hint of a broadcast.

"Tune to the signal," Xylexa said to Moon Shadow, some of the edge gone from her voice while she worked at following suggested navigation patterns between asteroids between twisting knobs and flipping switches to read gravitational characteristics and adjust the scope of the radar.

It all should have been done before they ever turned on SMUT. She should have prepared– they were going to an asteroid field! The maps were six thousand years old!

"Skitebird," she spat under her breath, the insult directed at herself. The speakers hissed in different ways as Moon Shadow attempted to hone in on the radio signal. Xylexa finally pressed the switch, above her head and behind her, to turn on the Godmare's exterior lights.

Through the small windows surrounding Xylexa's station, she could make out a vast field of brownish asteroids. Many had holes drilled completely through them, while larger ones had run-down ruins of buildings perched on them. They all appeared to be more-or-less in a flat plane, so Xylexa directed the Godmare above the field. She monitored the radar on their current plane, and, content that she had navigated the ship to relative safety, she pressed a button next to a small, green monitor. The color fizzled out to a monochrome, static-filled camera stream of what was under the ship.

Moon Shadow mumbled Ponish curses from his station while Xylexa monitored the asteroids near them. Her head throbbed as she struggled to remain vigilant to the read-outs and windows, the uneven hissing and popping of the radio doing her headache no favors.

The signal was ancient– whatever was giving it off almost certainly no longer functioned correctly. It also could have been from the star the asteroids orbited: a dim red dwarf from the Godmare's port side. The ship's lights were strong enough to illuminate most of the asteroids immediately below it, and the rocks that were rotated completely all showed evidence of mineshafts. Not all had been burrowed completely through, although an effort had clearly been made to extract any and all vothuythium that could have existed in the system.

Despite the thorough mining, though, the possibility still stood that a warehouse of raw ore existed somewhere in the asteroids. The metal had only been found in three locations in the entire Horsehead Galaxy, and any amount of the stuff sold at a hefty price, but the incessant static of the dead signal made Xylexa's headache hold at a steady level of pain just above "tolerable." She was ready to give the command for Moon Shadow to cease his efforts when a few garbled noises came through.

The signal was still heavy with static, but words began cutting through more regularly as Moon Shadow worked the dial. The "words" were in an unrecognizable language, recognizable as such only because they were clearly being spoken by a pony.

"I, uh, has pinpoints," Moon Shadow said.

Xylexa turned to the SMUT screen, then cycled it to autopilot.

"Heading?" she asked.

"Sixty-five, zero. East northeast."

The compass graphic spun as Xylexa entered the vector, then the ship shifted starboard to follow the compass heading with occasional manual inputs from the captain to avoid asteroids.

The signal remained broken, although as the ship began toward its source, sentences began to become clear. The tone of the broadcaster indicated no distress, instead, the announcement exploded with positive energy in his likely ancient tongue.

"Do you know this language?" Xylexa asked Moon Shadow as she brought the ship down closer to the asteroids, but still at a safe enough distance to avoid most of them without needing excess maneuvering.

"No," he said, the word hanging on his lips for a moment; he sounded perplexed. "I know nothing like it." The signal hiccupped; Moon, switching to Common, said, "Ninety zero two east."

Xylexa adjusted the compass and scanned the asteroids through her small windows. She activated the reverse thrusters to slow the Godmare's speed, then switched the system to standby to preserve fuel. After a few minutes of drifting, the signal reached its apex clarity before beginning to dwindle out again. A loud noise– hooves clanking to the floor –drew her attention, and she took a momentary glance behind her to see Moon Shadow pointing with a hoof out the starboard porthole.

"Captain!" His shrill tone sent a pain through her skull. "Lights!"

Lights? She switched off the autopilot entirely, glanced at her radar to ensure clearance, then pivoted the Godmare toward starboard. The signal became more clear with the maneuver. The tops of asteroids greeted her, and the readout from the mounted camera showed nothing abnormal. She frowned, but pointed the ship's nose downward, knowing Moon Shadow's field of view from the porthole would have been lower than she saw from the captain's chair. Her eyes darted from asteroid to asteroid, her frown turning into a scowl as she continued to miss whatever Moon Shadow had seen, then she finally saw it in the distance as a few smaller pieces of rock and debris floated out of the way.

On the largest asteroid she had yet seen in the belt, there was the faintest of lights coming from what she assumed was a building on its surface. Xylexa switched propulsion back on and had the ship creep toward the asteroid.

"Send out a signal to see if there are any docks around here," she said. Moon Shadow's hoofsteps back to his station were enough confirmation that he was off to follow her order.

The odds of a docking bay existing in an asteroid field were unlikely even in systems with routine maintenance, but the mining operation that had once existed to pull ore from the asteroids in the field could have possibly warranted one.

"No docks," Moon Shadow said as the asteroid loomed. The signal came in crystal clear when the nose of the ship was pointed directly at the dim building. The enthusiastic broadcaster was on an infinite loop and sounded as though he were advertising something, but the words were from a language that Xylexa couldn't place. She switched off the radio from the ship's speakers, causing her headache to dull slightly.

The building was part of a larger complex, but only the large, central building appeared to have power. She navigated above the complex, using her bottom-facing camera to attempt to identify a safe place to land. There were many launch pads around the central building, although most were destroyed from the barrage of space, as well as many of the complex's buildings.

She spotted a pad in suitable shape for the Godmare, then looked back to Moon Shadow, who was seated at his usual station—normally used for monitoring radio signals or radar.

"I need you on gravity and docking," she said. He nodded and switched to one of the chairs lining the back of the bridge. Once he had his read-outs ready, he fastened the chair's restraints and signaled with a wing that he was prepared.

Xylexa fastened her own restraints and adjusted her chair to the "locked" position, then cycled her camera stream to a stern view. She pointed the ship's nose upward, adjusting the propulsion system to its landing mode once the Godmare was fully upright.

"Shift gravity to stern," she said. A moment after the command, she was weightless, then, very suddenly, pushed into the back of her chair as gravity shifted back on. The ship began descending toward the asteroid and, after a few tense moments of minute adjustments by dials and foot pedals, the dainty fins of the ship touched the pad.

"Contact," she said as the ship confirmed her statement with a beep. She held onto the controls keeping the ship on the ground until Moon Shadow was able to activate the ship's Sparkle System and have it cast a spell that would allow the ship to reliably stay grounded–like a magical moor line.

"Tether," Moon Shadow said after a few moments. Xylexa slowly let off the controls, assuring the ship would remain in place. The ship remained, and she flipped off the ship's lights and powered down the exterior cameras before flicking a switch that caused the floor to rattle. After shutting down more non-necessary systems and leaving the propulsion on standby, she unfastened from her chair and stepped onto one of the hoofholds that had come from the floor. Moon Shadow was already unbuckled and halfway down the ladder that ran the ship's length, and Xylexa followed.

Moon Shadow had his full spacesuit on by the time Xylexa made it to the bottom of the ladder. His consisted of an airtight covering of his wings over his armor, tail wrapping, glass helmet and rubber tubing into the box strapped to his back as well as his green-to-purple mane—usually to one side—tied back behind his head to improve visibility.

"What do you think we'll find?" he asked as Xylexa donned her own helmet and oxygen unit.

"Who knows?" she replied as she placed the hoses into their correct spots. "A radio signal still existing after alicorns-only-know how long..." Her eyebrows drew together, and her hoof went to the pistol strapped to her side. "Do you have your gun?"

"Puschka?" His voice cracked. He patted down his sides, then glanced at the cabinet next to where their suits had been hanging. "Do I need one?"

Xylexa adjusted her helmet, then opened the cabinet and handed Moon Shadow a small pistol before grabbing another one for herself.

"Better to be overly cautious than dead," she said as she placed her new gun in its holster at her side. Moon Shadow's eyes were large as he fumbled with the gun, then dutifully sheathed it in the holster on his leg.

"Wishing for whloristam," he said.

"Drugs don't fix being a pussy," she said, pressing the button next to the airlock and stepping inside. Moon Shadow followed, and Xylexa closed it behind him before initiating the deboarding sequence.

"Not forever, but... enough for this." Moon Shadow's voice was nearly drowned out by the hissing of air leaving the space.

"It's too bad I don't keep your synthetic balls laying around."

Moon Shadow chuckled at the insult, and Xylexa shot a sideways glare at him as the doors slid open. The complex's main building was a few hundred yards from their landing pad, its entrance clearly marked by a large airlock with a faintly glowing green sign above it. The green light and another faint glow from atop the building were the only light between the ship and building, although the reflective surfaces of scrap metal and landing pads were vaguely outlined in the darkness.

"Place is starry," Moon Shadow said, his voice crackling over the speakers in the base of Xylexa's helmet. She kicked the ship's steps over the ledge and rolled her eyes, then jumped from the door of the ship. As she left the ship's artificial gravity, the asteroid's much lower gravity took over and she floated for a few moments before her hooves very lightly touched down several yards from the Godmare.

She glanced behind her for Moon Shadow, who had opted to use the steps despite the lowered gravity. He was an opaque shadow against the bullet-like silver ship that reflected the complex's light enough to define its smooth edges. He paused, then turned on the light on the chest of his armor, illuminating a twisted heap of metal at his hooves. His voice buzzed in to ask, "What is this?"

Xylexa touched her hoof to a button on her foreleg, then said, "Nothing important. Stop fucking around and meet me at the door to this place."

Moon Shadow flinched at her tone, sending his affirmative in a defeated tone as she turned away and trotted toward the building after switching on the light on the chest of her own armor. The lack of gravity on the asteroid was odd after her time on the Godmare, each step carrying her for two or three times its normal distance. She also paid extra attention to scrap heaps that were scattered between destroyed landing pads, although most appeared to have once been metal crates or kegs whose contents were long-lost to time.

The airlock was a metal door inside a dimly lit, arched breezeway. The green neon sign mounted on top of the entry used an alphabet reminiscent of Ponish script, but its meaning was lost on Xylexa.

"Does that sign say anything?" she asked Moon Shadow as he approached. He stopped next to her and squinted up at the sign before shaking his head.

"It looks Ponish, but it says nonsense," he said, then pointed vaguely toward the sign. "Maybe 'and'?"

"Incredibly insightful." Her tone oozed sarcasm. She pushed the mysterious sign from her mind, then trotted into the corridor. The door opened as they neared, although it appeared to get stuck when it was slightly more than half open. Moon Shadow cast a nervous glance at the door as he stepped into the airlock beside Xylexa, who pressed the lone button by the door in hopes that it was for closing the airlock.

"It's... clean," he said.

The room around them was oddly well-maintained for a building that was apparently several thousand years old, showing only a few signs of aging in its broken tiles and slightly tarnished walls. Xylexa nodded her agreement, although she was more interested in if the door would close behind them. It slid back closed with only a few hiccups, although she felt a tightness in her chest when thinking about if it would reopen when they needed to leave.

A series of three colored lights above the door leading further into the facility indicated the progress of air entering the room, although the yellow light appeared to be non-operational, leaving them with the light from their armor for illumination. Moon Shadow shifted beside her, bumping her side. She glanced toward him and noticed he was chewing the inside of his cheek.

"For fuck's sake, we're not even inside yet," she said. His eyes darted to meet hers as the light above the inner door turned green with a click loud enough to be heard through the glass of their helmets.

The distinct noise of gears grinding to life filled the space, and the door slid open a couple feet before getting stuck. The sound of gears stopped for a moment, then the door slid shut a couple inches before attempting to reopen. After the door faltered twice, Xylexa walked up to it and braced her shoulder against it, pushing against it as the gears pulled it in. With the added push, it moved with relative ease past the point at which it was stuck and slid into the wall.

Moon Shadow said something in Ponish, his voice tinny and words rushed.

The room beyond the airlock had dim pocket lights from a tarnished ceiling, so Xylexa turned off her armor's light to conserve its energy. She looked toward Moon Shadow, who was back to chewing his cheek. The sudden, violent urge to yell at him passed her mind, temporarily constricting her throat, then dissipated as soon as it came. She shook her head as the ache behind her eyes briefly increased enough to notice, then turned to examine the room around them.

Moon Shadow walked from her to look at a stack of magazines on one of the many white, round tables bolted to the floor. Red, egg-shaped chairs were placed around each table in neat order. Shelves mounted on the tarnished metal walls supported books and pots that probably held plants lifetimes ago, and a white, upholstered bench lined the far wall, flanked by two end tables with magazines. Everything was as if the base had been built and furnished, but nopony had ever entered its walls.

"Saying nothing," Moon Shadow's exasperated mumble came through Xylexa's helmet. She looked over to see him delicately handling one of the booklets between his hooves.

"Keep the ones that aren't disintegrating," she said. "I'm sure they're worth something." He nodded, then muted his communication unit as he began moving his mouth, presumably attempting to make sense of whatever was on the page.

Content that the magazines would keep Moon Shadow occupied, Xylexa moved on through an arched doorway into the adjacent room. A long, white desk with a logo on it set inside a niche on the far wall of the rectangular space, and more of the upholstered benches lined the other walls. She squinted at the logo as she walked toward the desk. It was simple: two letters with a stick of dynamite between them. The first letter was reminiscent of a Silivan character, but the other was angular nonsense.

There were terminals behind the desk, so Xylexa climbed on top of its smooth surface before hopping down on the other side. Keyboards, pencils and piles of disintegrated paperwork lined the entirety of the desk, meticulously placed as if the complex had been staged before being forgotten. All the terminals were off except the one in the middle, which had a screensaver under colored static bands of the dynamite logo bouncing across the screen. She pressed a key on its keyboard, and the monitor momentarily froze before bringing up a log-in screen.

Xylexa stared at the dialogue box in the center of the screen, briefly lost in an attempt at grasping onto a train of thought before her gaze wandered to the background.

"What the fuck?" She pressed the arrow keys, moving the log-in box to the corner of the screen.

A map of a building, presumably the one she was in, was the background. A green dot appeared to be placed in the area corresponding to the room she was in, and a dashed orange line led through a maze of corridors to a circled red "X" in the center of the map.

A faint hissing entered Xylexa's ears when Moon Shadow turned his communication unit back on to ask, "What is it?"

"A map," she said.

"Are you follow it?"

"Yes."

"Should I keep with the magazines?"

She pursed her lips as her eyebrows drew together. Even though she had only seen two rooms of the building, there was nothing indicating that anything existed there at all, by far anything dangerous enough to warrant Moon Shadow's company. Her gaze lingered on a pile of what may have once been a stack of documents and said, "Yes. For now."

"Yes, Captain." The response was prompt. Simple. He turned off his com again, leaving her with silence.

She lingered on the remains of documents for a few more moments and came to the realization that she had not had the foresight to bring paper with her.

A gun. Water. One ration of food.

No paper. She clenched her teeth.

It was just a map. Simple, like Moon Shadow's responses to her commands.

She stared at the screen, attempting to sear the orange line into her memory along with the general layout of the entire building. Her head throbbed as she stared at the screen, and she mumbled a curse under her breath before closing her eyes to attempt to ease the ache. The map and its orange line were seared behind her eyelids, solidifying that she should move forward; although her eyes were so fatigued that they had stung when she first shut them. A subtle drowsiness set over her, lulling her into keeping her eyes shut for just a little longer—

She shook her head sharply, opening her eyes as she did so and baring her teeth at her own stupidity. She took one last glance at the map, checking to make sure she had properly counted the rooms between direction changes, then blissfully turned away from the terminal. The green dot had been in the room she was in, and the line had gone out a door that was behind the desk and settled into the wall to her left, out of sight from anypony who wasn't behind the desk.

The door was a simple pocket door operated by pulling on a wire that ran through a system of pulleys. Xylexa wrapped the dangling wire around her fetlock and pulled hard, expecting resistance. The door crashed into the wall with a resounding crack loud enough for Moon Shadow to ask, "Are you okay?"

"Yes," she said, acid in her tone as she pulled the tangled wire from her hoof. "Just a door."

He uttered his affirmative response, then the hiss from his com silenced, leaving Xylexa with quiet once more.

The room beyond the pocket door was simple and retained the same sterile atmosphere as the rest of the building. She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but she felt a drop in her chest from disappointment as she walked through the stark-white room. A kitchen table with no chairs was situated next to a kitchenette, suggesting a break room.

"Moon Shadow," she said as she began wrapping the wire for another door around her fetlock, "when you are finished with the magazines, go into the other room. Behind the desk is a map. Follow it. Look inside rooms and cabinets." She tugged more lightly on the door, and it slid open silently and with little resistance, revealing the hallway beyond.

"Yes, Captain," came Moon Shadow's reply, followed by the prompt muting of his com again.

Xylexa peered around the doorframe. To her right was a mechanical door into the desk room, and to her left was a corridor that appeared to grow increasingly less lit the further along it went. White metal pots of dirt lined the hall in regular intervals, although what had grown in them had been long removed. There were still no signs of life.

She stepped into the hallway, noting that it was only wide enough for two average-sized ponies to walk abreast, and began walking. Her hoofsteps were loud on the metal floor and echoed in the mostly empty space, causing her to pause after a few steps to ensure that there really was nothing there.

She counted to seven.

Nothing stirred.

Content that she was alone, she continued down the hallway. There were doors lining both walls between the metal planters, each with a round plaque attached to the wall beside them with more vaguely familiar letters printed onto them. Some of the doors were gray and mechanical like the airlock doors, but others were doors with five circular windows stacked vertically on one side.

She stopped to glance through the windows of one of the doors, although found only darkness on the other side. A frown settled on her lips. The orange line eventually would send her through rooms instead of hallways, and the thought of not knowing a room's layout before entering was enough to spike her heart rate. She raised a hoof the door, intending to push it open, but stopped.

Her memory of the map was already fading. She had to act fast.

She started down the hall again, taking the first hallway to the left—past six rooms on the right—and began her dash to keep up with her memory, kicking her brisk walk into a canter. She was focused on counting doors and hallways, although was cognizant enough to note that every hallway appeared to have the same kind of layout of planters and door types.

A hiss started up her helmet as she turned down the third corridor and began counting to her next direction.

"Do I check doors?" Moon Shadow's voice was heavy with static—how much distance was between them?

"What do you think I meant by rooms?" she snapped.

"Sorry, Captain." His response came at a slight delay, then his com clicked off again. Xylexa arrived at the ninth right-side door and stopped before it.

It was one of the mechanical doors, polished so well that her exhausted reflection looked back at her. Two sets of sunken, purple eyes met from behind a visor beyond the glass globe around her head. She noted that her pastel mane was mussed, then turned her attention to the plaque beside the door. Like all the others, it was in an unknown language and alphabet. She looked up toward the top of the doorframe and noticed a black hemisphere attached to the frame—an infrared sensor that was most likely meant to respond to unicorn magic.

On the off chance that it was simply going to work off body heat, she stepped into the doorway, the front of her helmet tapping against the door. She had a good look at her pallid complexion as she counted a half-minute in the back of her head. Even though her coat was already pale pink, she looked even more washed-out than usual. She avoided her own gaze as she tilted her head up at the sensor once the thirty seconds were up.

It was completely black, like a pupil, soaking up all the light around it—a sure sign that it was meant to be activated by magic. The fact that its enchantment had held so long, though, was impressive; after six thousand years, she would have assumed that it had fallen back on an infrared or mechanical means of opening.

She stepped back out of the doorway, falling to her haunches as she raised her right hoof up to eye level. Once the glass-like, purple covering around her hoof was pointed toward the sensor, she used her other hoof to pull back on a purple sliding switch on her foreleg. Her ears swiveled at the click from the artificial unicorn being engaged, then guided the thin, purple beam emitting from the point of her hoof to the sensor.

The spell was only good for five seconds, and the beam promptly dissipated with another click from her backpack. She slid the sliding switch back into its disengaged position, then stood up as the whine of electricity met her ears. The door in front of her slowly slid into the wall. Once the door was open, lights flickered to life; several lightbulbs blew at once with a loud pop, leaving the room beyond dim compared to the hallway.

Anticipating a sensor that would cause the door to close, Xylexa moved one of the nearby dirt-filled, metal planters into the doorway in hopes that it would keep the door from shutting. The map was hazy in her mind as she stepped into the room.

The room was like all the others, holding the same surreal, unlived-in quality. It appeared to be a gym filled treadmills frozen in time, racked weights on tarnishing bars and a long-empty swimming pool in the far end of the room. She looked over the walls, slowly at first, then franticly as her eyes darted across them in a desperate attempt to find what she was looking for.

There were no other doors in the room.

The door beeped behind her, likely notifying the nonexistent staff or a nonfunctional, rudimentary AI of the pot blocking it.

"Did you see the map?" she asked through the com.

A couple seconds passed, then there was the distinct feedback followed by, "Yes, Captain."

"Are you still close to the desk?"

"I following the map and going through rooms." Moon Shadow's confusion was apparent with the upward inflection of his tone.

"Stop looking and follow it to me."

"Yes, Captain." His com stayed on.

Behind her, the door was still unable to move from the wall. There were no signs of anypony or anything coming to move the pot, so she took to examining the room more closely. She walked to a treadmill and pressed a few buttons in an attempt to get it to turn on. There was no feedback, so she moved to the next in line only to find it equally as unresponsive.

There was something missing from the treadmills, though: a corporate logo. Every corporation made treadmills, but the logo on the machines was a horseshoe over a red circle. Even if a small, extinct subsidiary had made the treadmills, one of the logos of the six ruling supercorporations would have been stamped alongside it; yet, there wasn't even a second logo printed on the machine.

She squinted at the horseshoe logo. Princess Twilight Sparkle had ruled in the years before corporations, and Xylexa knew the mine and its buildings were older than the GEA, but she hadn't imagined that it had outdated corporate ownership. In fact, a time where the corporations didn't exist, or at least didn't own everything, seemed unfathomable.

The company that had made the treadmills appeared to be as independent as each corporation. Did it have subsidiaries? Was it a precursor to one of the ruling companies? If there were precursors to the ruling body, she had never learned about them. The treadmills came from a hazy part of history that largely only survived in oral tradition. Biological alicorns and a whole host of other creatures had reportedly existed during the reign of an immortal being known as Princess Twilight Sparkle.

Alicorn princesses were fairy tales for foals. Immortality was no better: an adult fantasy and foundation of religious cults across the universe.

It was all bullshit.

Moon Shadow's hoofsteps approached, signaled by Xylexa's ears swiveling in response to the rhythmic, tinny echo in the hall. How long had she been staring at the logo on the side of the treadmill?

I need a cigarette, she thought. Her head pounded in agreement while her body lusted after the carcinogenic taste of smoke on her tongue.

The hooofsteps grew louder and slowed, and she looked up as Moon Shadow stepped into the doorway.

"Captain?" he asked as he walked over. "What's wrong?" His eyebrows drew down with the phrase, the corners of his mouth turning slightly downward.

"Did you draw the map?" Xylexa asked. Moon Shadow's distressed expression deepened from his question being dodged.

"Vi..." The Ponish word drawled on for a moment, followed by, "Yes?"

His tone was condescending. Xylexa's lips twitched, her ears laying back as she said, "Fucking show me, then!"

Moon Shadow recoiled, taking a step back as his ears laid flat against his head. He looked down and mumbled an apology so quiet it hardly registered.

"If you're going to talk, talk," Xylexa said. He nodded his head and reached for the metal box attached to his side. After unclipping it, he pulled a piece of lined paper out and presented it to Xylexa. She took it and laid it on the treadmill.

The map copy was all uneven, wavy lines and only marked down the essentials: the line and basic details between turns. They appeared to be in the correct room.

"This is piss-poor," Xylexa said, looking up from the map. Moon Shadow shifted in place and avoided eye contact. "I don't see a door in here."

"What about—uh... that?" Moon Shadow asked, gesturing a hoof toward the far end of the room where the pool was. Xylexa shifted to look over her shoulder at the pool.

It was deep and lined with a slightly different material than the floor. It had soft edges and a diving board, and the walls around it were cast in shadow from blown lights. She didn't see any indication of a doorway; the walls seemed as smooth as the rest of the room.

"What about what?" she asked, returning her gaze to Moon Shadow. He frowned and pointed again. She narrowed her eyes and glared down at the map, trying to see if the poorly rendered copy held any clues. The line held straight through the room they were in, indicating that something would be in the direction Moon Shadow was pointing.

"The... the bowl?" Moon Shadow finally said, his words laced with uncertainty as he pointed in the direction of the pool again.

"It's 'pool,'" she said; he flashed her a half-smile. "I don't see anything there."

"Follow me?" His voice was laced with high-pitched uncertainty and quivered. His eyes were huge behind his visor: innocent, stupid and pleading. His ears stood straight but were angled away from the com speakers in his helmet.

He was like a well-trained dog.

Xylexa nodded. He took the lead and walked over to the edge of the pool, then turned on the light on the front of his armor to shine into the deep shadows in the deep end of the pool. The edges of a divot in the wall appeared, and Xylexa followed him as he stepped down the steps and carefully navigated the slope into the deep part of the pool.

There was a tunnel in the side of the pool just above their heads, clearly meant for use by anypony who would have used the pool, yet why anypony would use it was a mystery. It would have been completely submerged if the pool was full of water, and, while wide, it was only slightly taller than Moon Shadow and trailed off into darkness.

"Get close to the wall and let me on your back," Xylexa said. "I'm going to climb up there, then pull you up."

Moon Shadow didn't hesitate to follow directions, and Xylexa climbed onto him with all the grace of a three-legged animal. Using the wall for support, she shifted onto her hind legs and clamored up the smooth contour of the tunnel into the dark. She turned around and reached out a hoof for Moon Shadow, helping him up. His light illuminated colorful art on the walls of the tunnel, and Xylexa took the time to switch on her own armor's light before they continued.

The tunnel was not long; with their lights on, the end was in sight a few steps away, but they had to walk with their heads bowed so their helmets didn't hit the top of the tunnel. Moon Shadow stopped halfway through to point at an illustration.

"Is that... a griffon?" he asked.

Xylexa stopped and glanced at the colorful mural. A blue creature, half-bird, half-cat, posed heroically in front of a green valley. A colorful message in the mystery language was written beside it.

"Think about it later," she said. She turned away before she could see his reaction and made it to the other end of the tunnel without glancing too much at the murals on her side of the tunnel. She paid enough attention to notice that her side had ponies with fish tails on it.

The tunnel emptied into another pool like the one they had come from. She glanced down, noting the tunnel on the new side was closer to the bottom of the current pool than the other, and hopped down. She was halfway up the ramp to the top of the pool by the time Moon Shadow had exited the tunnel.

The room was dark until Xylexa's was mostly up the ramp, then a few lights buzzed to life. Some flickered on and off, but most were dark. The room appeared to be an extension of the gym, although the machines were water-based as the shallow end of the pool—only a few inches deep—took up the majority of the floor space. Xylexa paused by one and noted that, unlike the rest of the building, the rowing machine appeared to have seen use. The non-metal parts were slightly worn, and a thin layer of salt clung to the bottom of the machine.

"Those is stronny," Moon Shadow said, walking up to the machine Xylexa was eying. "Who's it for?"

Xylexa shrugged and looked toward the only edge of the pool at the end of the room. There was a small string pull-door with a lock set into the wall. She walked toward it, Moon Shadow following behind. She wrapped the string around her fetlock and pulled. The door shuttered, but stayed in place. One swift buck broke the lock, and the door slid open without any further trouble, revealing a dull gray service tunnel lit only by red floor lights.

"Sod," Moon Shadow cursed. His hoofsteps fell into line behind Xylexa's after a pause. She reached into her saddlebox and pulled the map out again as she walked around dangling wires.

The service tunnel had off-shoots lining up with what must have been important rooms. Occasionally, there were y-intersections leading ominously downward, but the map never took them down. Moon Shadow had turned off his armor's light, but Xylexa kept hers on; the harsh light illuminated the signs of aging that hadn't been present elsewhere: bent metal, rust and chipping paint. They moved carefully past sparking wires, and Xylexa followed the map to the first turn at a hallway junction. The new hall was lit with green lights, and she paused when she saw the remains of a cat-sized robot in the middle of the corridor.

It appeared to have been gutted by something, with wires hanging out of its casing and panels carefully torn off revealing empty spaces. It was beetle-like, and probably ran on wheels in its life.

"Cleaner?" Moon Shadow said, voicing Xylexa's thoughts.

"Probably," she said. There was no other way the place could have been so clean. They moved past it and turned down a blue hall. Xylexa's jaw began to clench with mounting unease as they moved past more and more robot corpses as they grew nearer to the pencil-marked "X" on the map copy. Moon Shadow was uncharacteristically quiet; his usual out-loud thoughts and quiet curses leaving them both in a new, uncomfortable silence.

They turned right onto a yellow hall. At its end was a mechanical door propped open with robot casings. The dim light of a terminal glowed from beyond. Moon Shadow gasped. Xylexa shoved the map to him, and he took it in his hooves. She moved forward with long strides, stepping over piles of wire with no desire to hide her hoofsteps. She paused long enough at the door to push it open wider to accommodate for her helmet, and then stepped into the dark room.

No lights flickered on. The room was all black except for the points where Xylexa's light hit the equipment-lined walls and two glowing screens. She moved toward the bigger and closer screen: dark all but for the bouncing dynamite logo from earlier. She looked around for its keyboard, and Moon Shadow stepped into the room, his own light turning on.

He yelled almost as soon as his light turned on. Xylexa immediately reached for her gun and pivoted on her hooves, pointing the firearm in Moon Shadow's direction. He moved toward her, his scuttling hoofsteps registering only barely over the blood pounding in her ears and her heavy breath. She froze in position for a long moment, and she counted the number of heartbeats that passed as she scanned the room for threats.

Nothing.

She holstered her gun and looked to Moon Shadow, who had ran behind her. His pupils were pinpricks, and she could hear his breath over the com.

"What the fuck was that?" she roared. He flinched. She bared her teeth in a snarl and turned to where he had been, her hoofsteps falling heavy as she moved. In a sharp movement, she turned to face the other screen, and then took a half-step backward as her anger washed away.

The smaller screen was attached to a robot, or, at least, the remains of one. She glanced over at Moon Shadow, who was still sitting on his haunches, then moved toward it.

The vaguely pony-like heap of metal and wires did not move as she neared it, and the screen attached to the front of its "head" remained blank and pale green. Despite it appearing harmless, Xylexa stayed a few feet away as she examined what she could of it, with it being in the corner.

Most of the robot was contained by broken or rusted pieces of metal in a casing that was only reminiscent of a pony's torso. Its legs were all corroded wire and rubber tubing, and wire and tubing ran from between the casing metal to different parts of the body.

Xylexa's rudimentary robotics knowledge was enough for her to believe there was no way the robot could move in such a state, and a few of the wires did appear to plug into a metal box sitting next to it. She took a couple steps forward, then, in her most authoritarian voice, asked, "Are you sentient?"

The screen turned pink.

Author's Note:

i am cringe, but i am free