Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher

by Pyrite

01: Friendship is All We Have Left

Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher
By Pyrite.
01: Friendship is All We Have Left

She called it Sweet Apple Acres, but it wasn’t the same.

No matter what fertilizer they put in it, moon dust wasn’t Equestrian soil, and the dome above them wasn’t the wide-open sky. She looked out at Equestria through that dome, and let herself imagine that she could still make out her old home, the farm that had once supported her family, had once meant everything to her.

She closed her eyes and let out a breath. Damnit, ah know better.

Then she looked back at the trees standing in neat rows on crafted hills, thousands of them filling the massive crater, with dozens of ponies rushing around them, checking the moisture levels of the soil or bucking apples from the trees.

The domed orchard was big enough to encompass the old Sweet Apple Acres several times over, and its trees had been enhanced by a combination of advanced techno-ecology and refined Earth Pony magic to put out a new crop of apples every month. The overwhelming size intimidated her, though she’d never admit that to anypony, and the schedule she had to run the place at often had her gasping for breath.

It would probably never be home, but this was what she was born to do, and this was what kept the population of the Lunar Republic fed with something better than tasteless vatgrains and recombined foods out of a maker. Food that was grown from soil worked by Earth Pony hooves, like it was meant to be, or as close as you could get anymore. It had taken the better part of ten years to build, and as alien as it was to her, she was damned proud of it.

They were in the middle of what she’d come to call ‘hyperbucking season’, the one-day period in which they had to get all the apples off of the trees in order to keep the cycle going. Once upon a time she’d stressed and worried over the seasons and an annual cycle, and had often barely kept up. Now every month there was a strain to produce as much as possible, no matter what. At least she had a lot more hands than the old farm had ever been able to afford. There was no replacing earth pony magic, and she was glad for that, regardless of the expense of having so many bodies grown. Not all of them had been born as earth ponies, or in some cases even as ponies at all, but Applejack had spent the last ten years trying very hard to learn to look past that sort of thing.

She could feel in her hooves that this kind of farming was wrong, that it just wasn’t the way things were to be done, but she’d choke on those feelings before she let her apples be something that only a bunch of high-falutin’ ‘hyperelites’ could afford to enjoy. And as it was, too few ponies could even afford to live in a body that needed food.

She walked through the trees, between dozens of mares and stallions bucking the month's crop down into mesh nets and carrying them away. All of them were working their hardest, keeping her dream, and their own dreams, alive—

--almost all of them. She saw the crook of a pony’s leg sticking out from behind a tree ahead of her, just lying there, completely still.

Applejack reacted instantly, sidestepping behind a thick trunk to her left, and quickly scoping out the area. Mares and stallions dashed back and forth, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She pulled up displays from the many and various systems used to secure her little piece of the moon, and none of them registered much unusual. No violent disturbance outside, no odd heat signatures, no sudden change in air pressure. And none of her cameras had an unobstructed angle on the other side of that tree.

Was this an attack? While most anarchists would prefer to grind their axes against larger and more obvious targets than her, some didn’t make those kinds of distinctions. And more than one corporation on Civicnet had it in for her. And then there was the chance that some of her other activities over the past ten years had been traced back to her...

Tactically, her position was terrible. She wasn't carrying a weapon, and if this was real she didn't have time to go get one. She just had her hooves, and the hope that the tight rows of the orchard would favor her if she needed them.

Applejack let out a quiet snort. Buck up, ponygirl. If fancy cameras or sensors won't tell me what's over there, my own hooves will.

She left the cover of the tree, and silently advanced up the lane between trees, ready for anything. as she cleared the tree she saw that the leg was attached to a golden-tan stallion with a buttery yellow mane, who appeared to be dozing behind a tree. She felt her attitude transitioning from edgy to indignant as she trotted over to him.

[Who’s this here?] she whispered inside her head.

A tiny, angry-looking caricature of Applejack fell into her vision, landing hard on the stallion’s head. He didn’t react, of course, considering that the little pony wasn’t really there. ‘Appletini’ was AJ’s muse, the digital servant that served as her interface with the now-unmanageably-digital world. Some ponies, like Twilight or Pinkie Pie, could handle having to access that much information on their own, but even they accepted the help, and a pony like Applejack would be lost in the mesh without her muse.

Pinkie had made the little AI pony as a birthday gift for Applejack’s seventieth birthday party. She'd realized that her friend had been floundering for some time in a world that was moving beyond the information age, and reasoned in her oddly-insightful way that the only thing AJ would ever be willing to depend on to that degree was herself.

Appletini gave the lazy pony’s ear a spiteful kick from her perch on his skull, which made Applejack smirk for just a moment. [This here layabout is named Corn Cob,] the little pony answered. [You brought him on just a few weeks ago. Standard four year contract, this is his first hyperbucking season.] She leaned far forward, turning her head to glare comically at him. [Liable to be his last, at this rate.]

Applejack had to suppress a chuckle. Appletini’s antics and exaggerated aggressiveness always managed to put things into perspective for her, showing her an example of how she was acting to make her think twice. More than anything, she actually felt a little ashamed that she hadn’t remembered the name of a pony she’d talked to only a few weeks ago. So much happened every day anymore, and her memory wasn’t what it used to be.

She shrugged off her maudlin feelings, and smirked mischievously, lowering herself to the ground. She crept forward until her muzzle was just inches from his.

“Well, good morning Corncob! Ah do hope yer enjoyin’ yer little nap while the rest of us are workin’!” she almost shouted, her voice the perfect blend of angry, hurt and disappointed.

Corncob’s eyes flashed open to find his boss staring him right in the face, and jumped to his hooves, coming back to his senses with an alacrity that revealed he hadn’t actually dozed off. More likely, his muse had noticed the situation and pulled him out of whatever XP he was living through. she decided she didn’t care to know what eXperience Playback sense-recording he’d been experiencing; it would probably just make her angrier, and she was angry enough as it was. Or it would be something like a memory of his family before the fall, and then she’d feel angry and guilty.

“Er, Applejack, hi… I was, uh, just taking a bit of a breather,” he said, and then winced as her glare only intensified.

She shot back up to stare him in the eye. “Don’t lie to me, Corncob. Ya told me when ah bought yer contract that you were willing to put up with a bit a hard work. Now I don’t like spyin’ on my workers, but if I do look back through the security recordings, are ya goin’ to tell me this has really just been five minutes here an there?” she asked.

He deflated, his defense crumbling before he could prepare it. “No…” he admitted ruefully.

Satisfied that he'd chosen not to dig himself any deeper, she continued. “You see, I don’t think y’unnerstand how lucky you got it. By my reckonin’, I’m about the only pony offerin’ a fair deal to ponies who had to leave their bodies behind on Earth.” She stepped forward, tapping a hoof to his chest. “This body was made fer ya just how ya wanted it. In four short years, it’ll be yours. Not like most ‘corps, who’ll wring at least twenty years out of a pony, or ten if they’re willin’ to put up with dyin more’n once, all just to slot ya into a body that’ll go out on ya in three years, or even one of those…clanking… things.” She scrunched up her face in disgust. “What I’m sayin’ is, things could be a lot worse fer ya than this.”

The plump stallion cowered. “I… I’m sorry…” he whimpered. Applejack looked into his eyes, and saw the world dropping out from under him.

She swallowed, falling on her rump hard.

“look, Corncob… It’s alright. Ah’m mad at more’n just you. There’s a lot gone wrong with the world and you don’t deserve to have me taking it out on ya.”

“I didn’t mean to—“ he started, his mouth hanging open as he rethought what he had been about to reflexively say. He shook his head. “It won’t happen again,” he finished, forcing some determination into his words.

“Good.” She smiled at him, continuing, “I expect ya to work hard, but it’s work ya can be proud of. And Corncob?” she asked for his attention, continuing when his eyes met hers, “ah’ve never sold a pony’s contract to one o’ those jackals. Ah don’t intend to start, and I’m sorry ah implied to ya that might happen. But if you don’t carry your weight around here, ah will make it mah personal project that you earn what ah’m givin’ you. An’ that’ll make this four years go by a lot slower.” Her smile had gained a bit of an edge to it, her eyes hard. She'd outlined the path to forgiveness, and it was up to him to take it or not.

He nodded, gingerly backing down a few steps, suddenly feeling a rush at his narrow escape from serious trouble. “I’d… uh, I’d better get back to work,” he excused himself lamely, and then hastily cantered off to a distant tree that needed bucking.

“That’s the spirit,” she called after him, smiling widely. She got up, heading over to the corner of the dome where she kept her personal stock: the copse of McIntosh reds that she cared for and bucked the apples from personally, to remind herself what real work was like. And to remind herself what she’d lost.

She was about halfway there, pausing to wipe her eyes with her forelocks for a moment, when her muse cut in, [Hey, we’re getting’ a vidmessage from Twilight. Feel like watching it now?]

[Not really, but ah probably shouldn’t let it wait.] Applejack replied, her voice reverberating in her head as she thought at the computers implanted there. She raised a hoof to her face, as if she could hold her emotions in with physical pressure.

[let’s see it then,] she replied, glad that lightspeed issues made a recorded message more convenient than a real time communication with the research station Twilight was on. She really didn’t want her unicorn friend to see her like this. She was stronger than that.

A window opened before her eyes, seeming to emerge from the side of the apple tree in front of her. She preferred that things blend into the real world whenever possible, and hated it when she had to have an augmented reality window pop out of thin air. She had never liked the whole thing, really, but trying to live without the virtual world was basically impossible these days. Especially on the moon, where millions of ponies lived and were all connected to the same wireless mesh network. Even with her stodgy ways, she’d become a business leader again, and couldn’t afford to let herself fall behind the times.

The window looked in on a small, cluttered room, which seemed from this view mostly taken up by a bed. The bed was framed by a set of hard-plastic bookshelves, which curved around it organically, also forming it’s headboard. AJ smirked. She thought of herself as old fashioned, and rightly so considering, but Twilight was the only pony she knew anymore who even read actual books, with pages.

Well, she thought, At least some things don’t ever change.

Then she took in Twilight. The unicorn was lying across the bottom of the bed, with her legs hanging off of the side. She was gazing toward the camera, and Applejack flinched at the sight of her. Her mane was a jagged mess, her eyes were sunken, and she looked like she hadn’t slept for days.

“Hey Applejack,” Twilight began hollowly, hesitating a moment before continuing. She bit her lower lip, seeming to consider whether to start with small talk, but then just launched into it. “I’ve been having those dreams again. The ones about The Fall.”

Applejack kicked the tree in annoyance. She knew what this meant.

The Twilight in the recording didn’t see her reaction. She looked almost in pain as she continued. “I--I really need to talk to you. In person. I know it’s a lot to ask for you to farcast over here, but I really need a… a friend right now.” She sighed. “You don’t have to do this, I know you’re busy. I hope everything’s going well over there. You keep that moon spinning more than anypony but Luna, you know? Hope to see you soon.”

[Ah assume there’s some kind of coded message for me in that.]

Appletini nodded. [You bet. Gimme just a minute.] She leapt up from the side of her view on top of the window, falling through it and into the frozen scene. The vid played again, fast forwarded and without sound, and as it did the little pony pulled words and images off of the books, some of them only visible for a moment as Twilight’s head moved in and out of view. The order had looked random, but when Appletini rearranged them, feeding most into one cypher or another she’d been given by the network, a message emerged:

Possible existential threat in Saturn Orbit. E Cell activated to respond. Farcast to The Horseshoe to pick up Oatmeal. Transport through Danger to Paradise to meet Tom and the Tree. Rendezvous with team leader via Leap of Faith en route to Saturn orbit. Ask Tom about the measurements.

The tree’s bark crept back over the window until it disappeared. Applejack closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, letting the scent of the orchard stream through her nostrils. It wasn’t the same air as what she’d grown up with. By all rights, she should be buried next to her brother and grandmother in the soil she had worked over the course of a very long life. This place wasn't the same, but by Celestia, it was hers.

But it wasn’t the reason she kept going anymore. She didn't have a family to provide for, not since Applebloom went to Mars, and her friends needed her. “Looks like I’m takin’ a bit of a holiday, then. I’ll see you soon, Twi’.” She said. kicking at the dirt.

[Am I sending that along?] Appletini asked.

[Go ahead. It works as well as anything.] Applejack answered. [Now I just gotta clear my schedule for a week.]

---

The inky darkness receded inside as Applejack pushed the door open. She peered in for a moment, her eyes adjusting, before stepping in from the neon-lit streets of Hobble, the most crowded of the Lunar dome-cities. She kicked the door closed behind her, and all light was banished from the room.

Then the walls flared with illumination. She blinked away the momentary glare as Appletini quickly broadcast a passcode, before the second phase of security response could activate. When she could focus again, she found herself in a rectangular room with a set of hard metal tables lining three of the walls. Three of the eight tables were occupied, each with a pony’s body strapped to it, a series of tubes and wires running to their limbs and muscles, keeping them fresh.

Probably a team of sentinels, she thought to herself, before shaking her head to banish it. Not your operation, dammit. Keep yer nose outta what ya don't need to know.

Between each pair of beds sat a thick, gently-curving console, almost like an end-table. Instead of the usual lamp, each sported a pair of thick cords, each of which was attached to an ego bridle, a device designed to connect to the back of a pony’s head so that the pony’s ego, their mind and soul, could be transferred to and from their biological body. Since nopony had yet figured out how to move faster than the speed of light, other than by stepping through the unpredictable Discord Gates, this was the quickest way to get from one planet to another.

The only other things present were a small chest of drawers on each side of the room, and a plastic coated mechanical pony standing between the two beds against the far wall.

Applejack jumped a little when the robot suddenly moved out of it’s place and casually took a step toward her. She huffed a breath through her nostrils and glared at it as it approached. “Whose that in there?” she asked, walking up to meet it and clapping a hoof against it’s chest-plate to emphasize her point. The blow rang with a hollow sound.

If it was annoyed or amused by her reaction, it was impossible to tell by the blank, emotionless face. The body it rode was a casemorph, a cheap robotic frame capable, barely, of playing host to a pony’s ego. It was unexpressive, slow, clumsy, mentally limited, and fragile, but a pony sometimes had to take what they could get, and a pony in a casemorph could blend into a crowd almsot anywhere in Luna as one of the ‘Clanking Masses,’ the underclass of impoverished indentured servants who would spend a decade or more working menial labor or service jobs with the carrot of a real, flesh-and-blood body hung out for them at the end of their term.

“You can call me Killjoy,” the casemorph answered from a speaker somewhere in his body. His mouth was just a line in the plastic plate on the front of his head. His voice sounded synthesized and bored.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Ah assume that wasn’t the name you were born with.”

“It’s the name that Dreamcatcher knows,” he answered emotionlessly. “But my origin is irrelevant. I assume you are here for a higher purpose than to harass synthmorphs?”

She glared at him again, nodding curtly. “Ah need to book a trip to a habitat trailin’ Saturn called The Horseshoe,” she said, barely keeping the edge out of her voice. “It needs to look legitimate, and I’ll be goin’ under another name.” With a sweep of her hoof, she passed him the data for her second identity.

Killjoy shifted, staring into the middle distance for a moment, then turned his empty eyes back to lock on with hers. “That shouldn’t be a problem.” he circled around to one of the tables, tapping it’s surface with a hoof. “Step on up. I’ll have you there before you know it.”

Applejack walked up to the table, scrutinizing him every step of the way, for what little it was worth. His nonexistant expression and body language only further frustrated her.

She set a shoulder on the edge of the table and rolled onto it, repositioning herself onto her belly with her hooves by her sides. She couldn’t help but cast a sharp glance at the waiting body on the table next to her as Killjoy pulled the ego-bridle over her face, setting the curving metal plate against the back of her neck. She shivered as it made contact with her coat.

“Ah expect to find my body in the same condition I left it in, y’hear,” she grumbled.

“I have no intentions of joyriding, I assure you,” he answered, hooking a respirator up over her muzzle. A few moments later, he had her as plugged into the medical systems as the others were, a process that Applejack found more than a little demeaning, especially administered by the passionless casemorph, but was far too proud to complain about. Finally, he was done, and stepped back in front of her. “Ready?” he asked.

Applejack nodded slightly, careful not to dislodge anything.

The back of the ego-bridle began to glow with a pure white aura. In the last few seconds she had left, her eyes darted to a small display on the machine in front of her, showing the current timestamp. As she recited it to herself, the aura behind her head shifted to a pale orange color.

She shuddered, her eyes shooting wide open, and then her muscles gave out and she collapsed onto the table.

As her body went slack, Killjoy reached a hoof over, pressing a release on the Ego-bridle. In a flash, the aura sped away down the thick cord and into the machine, to be transmitted out to it’s destination. “Good luck.” he said to the room of empty pony bodies. “I’m sure we’re all counting on you.”

---

When Applejack opened her eyes again, she was over 300,000 kilometers away from her home on the moon. She blinked a few times as her new eyes adapted to the light. She felt the ego-bridle being unstrapped and removed by somepony behind her, but that wasn’t the first thing that concerned her. She quickly snapped her head around, fighting against the immediate sense of vertigo and nausea.

She found what she was looking for on the wall to her left, a display of clear numbers lit in a reassuring blue-green showing the local timestamp, shining through the dim room toward her. An hour and a half, almost exactly as long as she’d expected it to take.

She sighed in relief. How many times have ah gotta go through this before I get over that?

“Please stay still and remain calm, ma’am. You’re still integrating,” pled a mare’s voice from behind her.

A deep shiver went through Applejack’s body, and she suddenly was feeling every inch of her skin and muscle at once. Earth pony magic thrummed through her spine to her legs, not as strong as it was in the body she usually wore, but reassuring all the same. She was left gasping for breath as the internal awareness subsided.

She looked back at the clock in nervous habit. It was bad enough that she had to let herself be shot across the solar system as a coherent beam of magical energy like this, but waking up with lack, lost time from a hiatus in cold storage or restoration from a backup after an unfortunate death, was the stuff of Applejack’s nightmares.

“Apple Cobbler?” came the mare’s voice again.

Applejack lifted herself on one leg and turned behind her, more slowly this time, to see a sea-green unicorn mare looking her over carefully. The mare smiled, seeming to check something off in her head as the earth pony on her table responded to the name.

Applejack sighed, answering “Ah suppose so,” as she twisted a little on the table, getting a look at her own cutie mark: A scoop of cobbler with a green apple slice sitting on top of it.

Apple Cobbler. She’d been one of Applejack's several second cousins, and through the mysteries of extended family genetics, they had shared a striking resemblance, though Cobbler had always been a bit more willowy. The two had always gotten along, and Cobbler came a long way to visit ponyville sometimes, when life out on her own farm got a little too meandering.

“This town is always good for a little excitement!” Applejack could hear her say, and she cringed at the memory.

Apple Cobbler hadn’t made it out of the fall, but her identity had, and now it served as a convenient cover for when Applejack needed to slip off of the moon and pursue Dreamcatcher business. The cutie mark was proof of that identity, enforced by most habitats to keep track of who was who. In a way, by using it, Applejack was stealing everything her younger cousin had been, and everything she’d aspired to.

Thinking about it made her sick, but she knew it was necessary, so she resolved not to think about it.

The nurse pony seemed a little confused by her reaction, but after a moment she shrugged it off, instead switching to a cheery, greeting-visitors tone of voice. “Well, Cobbler, welcome to The Horseshoe! My name is Tender Care, and I’m one of our habitat’s physicians. You seem to be adapting to your new morph quite well. Are you experiencing any cognitive issues? Difficulty focusing, compulsions, anything like that?” She’d passed Applejack a digital tour guide, and after Appletini nodded that it was safe, she went ahead and accepted it, quickly glancing through it as Tender blathered on.

The Horseshoe was a space station set in a nexus of travel just behind the orbit of Saturn. Its design was a testament to elegant simplicity: an enormous ring with one quarter flared open, and large enough that spinning it for the half-Equestrian-gravity its inhabitants preferred gave the transparent arboreal domes built on its inner rim three hours of ‘day’ after every nine hours of ‘night.’ Ponies had found ways to adapt after the Fall, with the sun now hanging motionless in the sky. The solar panels on the outer rim of the station gave it all the power it made daily use of. Most of the 20,000 ponies who called it their home preferred to work hard and be left alone to their business. It was run by a mixture of the more liberal inner-system hypercorps and Titanian Commonhoof microcorps, in a cooperative to design habitats out past the belt. The horseshoe was one of the tighter-laced habs in the outer system, which was why the Lunar Republic even allowed ponies to egocast there.

“Nope, everything seems fine so far.. Thank’ya kindly fer yer help, but I’ve got a friend to meet,” Applejack replied, flipping herself deftly off of the table and onto her hooves. The new morph she found herself in responded well enough, though on top of having only the standard level of magic, it lacked the muscle tone she was used to. She’d have to see to that over the trip. At least she’d been able to afford a quick treatment to alter her coat and mane colors and have her face skinflexed to the facial structure she preferred while they re-sleeved her; she could look in a mirror and maybe recognize the pony who looked back as her, if she squinted.

Just before stepping out the door, she turned back to Tender Care, offering her a weak smile. “Hey, ah don’t suppose you’ve any idea where a pony might go on this hab to ‘get down?’”

---

The only place for anypony who knew what they were doing to really ‘get down’ on The Horseshoe was a club in the lower decks called “The Nail.” It had taken some convincing, but Tender Care had passed her a file detailing how to find it, along with a concerned look and an extra note of how to make it back to the hospital from there. Applejack made sure to give her a recommendation for being so helpful to newcomers.

The club was set claustrophobically deep within the lower plumbing of the station, out of the way of polite society. The tight, irregular open spaces were crowded with ponies desperate for a good time, each dancing their heart out despite being nearly pressed together. It was a mosh pit, a kind of contained stampede that ground everypony against one another, only instead of panicking they just tried to grind back harder.

Applejack grinned as she waded into the mess. She didn’t care much for the music the kids liked these days, their Nightmare Metal and Parabolabeat, but pushing her way through this rowdy almost-brawl was much more her speed.

The air was laced with a swarm of specialized, photo-receptive nanobots, carrying flickering lines of light that spun and danced about the room, oscillating with the music. Every time a pony touched one of them, it sent a new tone reverberating through the music, and altered the beat, forming odd, crowd-sourced harmonies.

This was where the party was. Even if the low ceiling, bright lights, and crush of dancing ponies would usually be overwhelming to Applejack’s sensibilities, this was clearly the place. She kept low and pushed through the throng. She took the occasional buck to the side, but when she retaliated with one of her own, knocking the offending pony back into the crowd behind him, she suddenly had room to breathe again. Applejack worked her way toward the liveliest corner of the floor.

And there she was, surrounded by a group of ponies who were clearly having the time of their lives. They’d somehow moved a number of the spinning lines of light together above her, and as she danced in a space cleared in the center for her she kicked out her pink legs at them, sending them spinning and twisting. It soon became clear that most of the coherent tune was her freeform composition, which might have been why Applejack had found the music even halfway bearable.

Applejack got a few dirty looks as she forced her way through that crowd. Some of them tried to hold her back, but the farmpony had almost a century of experience shoving other ponies out of her way. She turned from staring down one of the stallions she’d pushed aside to see Pinkie Pie. She wore a look of pure, serene bliss as she made up the combination dance and musical performance on the spot. Applejack opened her mouth to get Pinkie’s attention, but couldn’t quite bring herself to interrupt someone having that much fun.

Then Pinkie Pie stopped with a twitch, the music shifting instantly as she spun around, saw Applejack, and launched herself at her in a tackling hug. The two tumbled back through ranks of confused onlookers, and when they rolled to a halt, Pinkie Pie was on top of a bewildered Applejack, arms locked in a death grip around her body.

“Applejack! I’m so glad to see you! When did you get here?”

“It’s... uh... it’s Apple Cobbler, actually.” Applejack replied in a tiny voice, glancing between the faces of the onlookers.

Pinkie’s smile fell a couple of notches. She looked skeptically at Applejack for a moment, raising a hoof to her chin in thought. “I guess that must be one of the things I’m not telling myself,” she concluded, shaking her head to clear any unnecessarily analytical thoughts away. “But anyway, Cobbly! I haven’t seen you in so long! I’d invite you to a party, but we’re already totally at an awesome party so I guess that saves me some time.” She stood properly, and bent a hoof to help Applejack back up. “Come on! Now that the two of us are here, we've doubled the fun! Lets tear it up!” She reared, pumping a hoof in the air. “Woo!”

“Pinkie...” Applejack groaned, pulling her friend back down to her hooves. “Ah love a good time as much as the next pony, but we need to talk business.

“Business?” Pinkie asked, quirking an eyebrow at her. She gestured with a hoof to the club around them. “But Cobbly, I’m having fun. Having fun is my business.”

Applejack glared at her, saying her words slowly and carefully. “Look, Pinkie, ah know yer livin' the dream here, but we’ve gotta focus.”

Pinkie’s eyes widened, and her jaw went slack for a moment as something came over her. When she spoke, the tone of her voice was suddenly subdued and reasonable. “Alright, Cobbly, lets get out of everypony’s way, then.” She turned to lead Applejack over to a less-crowded corner of the room. The herd of ponies they left behind looked a little disappointed, but it only took a moment for them to forget the momentary distraction and resume their night.

Arriving at a cramped little nook between two large pipes, Pinkie Pie turned to face Applejack, their front hooves subtly brushing slightly together .

Pinkie started the conversation. “It really has been way too long. I know I haven’t been to the moon to visit recently, and I can’t wait until we can go that way again. You know we always pick up a crate of your moon apples when Surprise is in orbit. There’s no replacing them, they’re almost as good as they used to be.”

While she made small talk, a different message came through over the coatlink connection the two ponies were sharing. [I’m really sorry, Applejack, but I don’t really know what this is about. All I know is that you might be in danger, and that I need to help you, no matter what.]

“Almost…” Applejack answered, giving her a perplexed look. She tried to keep her voice even as she replied to Pinkie in public. “We work pretty hard on them, but that don’t mean you’ve gotta wait until ya park that barge of yours above us ta come out an’ see me. Ah know yer not as skittish as ah am about sendin’ yer mind flittin’ about through space, so ya oughta come by more often. The moon’s a welcomin’ place.”

Through the link between the electrical fields flowing between their coats, she replied to Pinkie’s message. [What are ya talking about, sugarcube? Y’practiacally built the network yerself, how can you not know?]

“Not as welcoming a place as you might think,” Pinkie answered, idly scraping a hoof againsst the floor. She shot back out of her momentary melancholy just as quickly as another thought came over her. “Oh, I’m so lucky I get to be here when you come to visit! I don’t get to see you very often you know and if you’d gotten here a little later I wouldn’t have run into you!”

She also replied in their silent, private conversation. [I didn’t put everything I know in my head. Probably to keep bad ponies from getting it, I don’t know. I’m just here to have fun and help these ponies have a good time.] She gave a tiny shake, and her eyes flitted over to the side, but she didn’t turn her head to follow. [Are you in trouble, Applejack? Somepony is closing in on us.]

“Ah’m just lucky, ah guess.” Applejack answered nervously, unable to keep herself from glancing in the direction Pinkie had cut her eyes to. All she noticed between the haze and the bright lights against the darkness was that the crowd around their little corner had thinned a little. She pulled in a breath, and let go of it, feeling her body tense up in anticipation.

[There ain't no one should be followin’ me,] she sent to Pinkie. Then the smell hit her, a sticky, dank, rotten smell that almost made her retch.

[Pinkie, why does it suddenly smell like dead pony?]

Pinkie pie took a sniff at the air and rolled her eyes as the remaining ponies around them turned and moved to block their route of escape. In the dim light in this corner of The Nail, Applejack couldn’t make out much about their features, but they all seemed wrong somehow. Some were all jagged edges, while others sagged alarmingly.

“Oh, it’s these guys again. I told them I’m not interested, but some ponies just can’t take a hint I guess.”

“Funny you should say that, Pie,” came a harsh, wet voice from around the corner. “Most ponies would have taken the hint we gave you about the exclusivity of our business on The Horseshoe, and realized how... impolite you are being by just handing out blueprints to anything a pony wants to get high off of. Most ponies would be more respectful of the dead.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow at the ghoulish stallion. “What hint?” she asked, then gasped comically. “Oh! Is that what the severed hoof you sent me was about? I thought maybe that was just how the Revenants welcomed new ponies to the station.” She waved a placating hoof toward him. “I was going to tell you guys that’s a really terrible way to welcome new ponies, maybe recommend you try flowers or cake instead, but I guess a severed hoof makes a lot more sense if you were trying to intimidate me.”

Her utterly blase attitude tripped the unicorn up for a moment, and while he sputtered for a reply, Pinkie glanced back to Applejack.

[The unicorn’s name is Thriller Killer, though everypony usually just calls him TK. The Revenants are his crew, and they're the biggest gang on the habitat. Ever since they all started getting their bodies modded out with that ‘zombie pony’ look, they’ve worn the meaniest pants around here. Not many ponies are willing to stand up to them anymore.]

Applejack gave Pinkie a hard look while she absorbed this information. [Wait, what was that he said about ponies gettin’ high?]

TK, on the other hand, looked to his gang for strength, then turned and took three slow, menacing steps forward, the other six ponies closing in ranks to his sides, and cutting off any real hope of slipping past. “You scum think you can just step off of your ships and trot around on a hab like you own the damn place, well I have an update for your muse to feed to your addled brain: you don’t run this place. We do.”

Applejack looked over her shoulder at him disdainfully, like she might scrape him off her hoof after a hard days work, and wrinked her nose at his increasingly oppressive smell. “Don’t most ponies who run habitats bathe from time to time?”

He turned his gaze on her, and she realized that his pupils reflected the dim light of the room back at her in a smouldering red glow. Probably some fancy enhanced vision he’s got, she thought to herself, eager to rationalize his intimidating visage.

“Cute,” he commented. “Who the buck are you?”

She smiled, and actually had the gall to turn and pass a hoof toward him, sending him a digital copy of her business card. “Apple Cobbler, business consultant.”

TK stared to her left, where she was sure her business card was on his optics, at a loss. “What.”

Applejack gave him a sarcastic smile. “By the way, that piece’a advice was a free sample, though I am open for light contract work at the moment.”

Silence descended between the two groups as Applejack held Thriller Killer’s murderous stare.

Pinkie, sensing the impending violence, stepped in and broke the quiet. “Well, really TK, I'm really sorry If I’ve been stepping on your hooves, and I was just wrapping up here. We can just take our shuttle back out to Surprise and we’ll be out of your mane, Okay?” She took another step between them, and sat down, holding out a hoof toward each of them to hold them apart.

“No.” TK answered darkly, his horn lighting up with a turquoise aura. A matching aura surrounded Pinkie Pie, pulling her off her hooves and to the side, holding her legs splayed out around her.

Thriller Killer quickly backed out of Applejack’s reach as he floated Pinkie over their heads and spun her around. “I think it’s time for an object lesson instead,” he said as Applejack launched herself at the gap he’d left, only to find another pony in his place. “Now you get to watch us tear your friend apart.”

The unfortunate stallion who'd taken TK’s place had a jagged-edged shaved-dog look to him, and seemed to be missing his lower jaw. She adjusted to the new situation quickly, shoving off of him into a midair spin that she landed with her forehooves on the floor. Her rear hooves never landed, however and before he’d recovered from the first awkward blow she'd given him an applebuck straight in the exposed teeth, sending him tumbling to the floor.

He had, however, succeeded in arresting her momentum, and the noose closed in around her, the other five Revenants rearing up to slam their hooves down at her. She saw them coming on, and pulled her rear legs back in to launch herself at the pony who had lost time circling to a better position behind her, a cheese-colored pegasus mare with sooty black feathers. She looked like she’d had holes eaten randomly throughout her flesh, some that Applejack would swear she could see clear through.

Her AR profile said her name was Coriolis, and featured pictures of a happy dark-coated pegasus flying above the trees in the habitat’s inner dome. Applejack felt a momentary pang of guilt, wondering when the filly’s life had gone so wrong.

Applejack caught her just as she'd started to rear, adding her inertia to the equation and slamming her down on her back, driving her rear hooves into her exposed underbelly. Whose tellin’ what good that’ll do with these freak bodies, though, she thought.

Then Coriolis flexed her wings up, making contact with Applejack's sides. Metallic shock feathers laced through her wingspan carried a paralyzing jolt of electrical current right into the other mare's body, pulling a strangled scream from Applejack and freezing her in a vulnerable position, just as she was preparing to leap over the pegasus.

It didn’t take long for another of the crew to take advantage. The pony next to her, his bare flesh clinging tight to his body, looked like a gnarled and tumorous dead tree. He spun and slammed into Applejack with the jarring weight of a modified bone structure, throwing into the side of a pipe. The blow seemed to actually bring Applejack back to reality, and in the moment it took for Coriolis to scramble out of the way so he could advance on her she had picked herself back up. His name was Driftwood, or so his profile advertised. It didn’t say much else.

As he took his next step toward her, Applejack was ready, hammering him right in the face with her rear hooves. She sent his head snapping backward, but he only took a moment to recover. She recoiled, feeling like she’d bucked a cannonball. Skull’s reinforced, she realized, growing frustrated at her own inadequate, stock body.

She took the moment that had bought her to scramble free, working out a limp as she moved. For all her expertise in hoof-to-hoof combat, Applejack was badly outnumbered, and the Revenants broke formation to hunt her like a pack of timberwolves, two breaking to circle in front of her while the rest pressed her from behind, hot on her hooves.

TK leered at Pinkie, whose eyes flitted over the scene and trembled as she watched it unfold. “Maybe I’ll give you her stack when we’re through with her. We wouldn’t want her to forget this experience, after all.”

Pinkie pie looked at him, then back at the scene, struggling helplessly against his telekinetic grip. Then she took a deep breath and closed her eyes, blocking it all out.

“Nope,” she responded after a moment. “You aren’t going to do that.”

TK’s eyelid twitched, and the aura holding Pinkie jarred suddenly to the side, though the jolt seemed to have no affect on her composure. If anything, now she’d begun to smile.

His smouldering eyes bored into her, certain this was some kind of crazy, last minute bluff. “The buck do you mean?”

Pinkie Pie opened her eyes and returned the stare, the sparkle in her eyes entirely natural. “The whole tearing apart thing? Totally not going to happen,” she answered simply.

“I beg to differ,” he said, gesturing with a melted-looking hoof toward Applejack, who was finding herself in increasingly dire straights.

Applejack had elected to simply charge through the ponies rushing out in front of her, expecting to barrel between them through sheer superior will. Instead, a gaunt, pale pegasus stallion with a bony muzzle and skeletal-looking wings sidestepped further into her path, forcing her to slam into him and sending them both tumbling across the floor. He flared his bony wings to stabilize them, and ended up on top of her. His hooftips were sharpened to deadly points, and he slammed them into her chest, probing for a weak spot in her ribcage. He flapped his wingbones in her face, their own sharpened tips tearing bloody scratches across her coat.

She closed her eyes and got her legs under his midsection, throwing him into the low ceiling. Before she could get up, the other pony who had circled ahead caught up with her. This one was another mare, and she looked like she’d been immolated, every inch of her coat replaced with a blackened scab. A lump on her shoulder split open to reveal a wide silvery barrel. The name over her head was ‘Cinder Shadow’, though Applejack didn’t have time to look through her profile as the wide shredder barrel swiveled to line up with her chest.

She frantically rolled to the right, which saved most of her from the blast. The cone of diamond shards that sprayed from the barrel tore a ragged hole in the floor, revealing the fullerene hull plate beneath it. She only realized that it had also annihilated a patch of her coat when her roll pressed her weight against the bloody patch of muscle left behind.

AJ jumped back onto her hooves, but she’d ended up on the wrong side of Cinder to get to TK, and the shock and rapid blood loss were starting to take their toll. On top of that, Driftwood was still coming at her like some kind of juggernaut, and Coriolis had managed to mostly recover. It was only a matter of time before they brought her down.

Thriller Killer grinned at Pinkie, laughing wetly. “Now, tell me again how we’re not about to eat your friend for dinner. You scum are always good for an entertaining lie.”

Pinkie’s smile burst into a grin. “Oh, that’s just because I’m the one who designed the nanoswarm The Nail uses for it’s effects.”

One by one, the oscillating lines of light across the dance-floor flickered out, in a wave moving out from where Pinkie was floating. Within seconds, the club had darkened, with only occasional dim emergency lights to cast long shadows across the room. Everypony blinked and took a moment to look around, readjusting to the sudden darkness.

Then suddenly the full spectrum was back, with all of the lasers crowded around the faces of the Revenants, beaming brilliant light directly into their dilating eyes. The music descended into a fast, schizophrenic melody as the nanobots interacted with the instinctive flailing they were doing to get their hooves between the light and their eyeballs.

The telekinetic field dropped, and as soon as Pinkie’s hooves hit the floor, she was reaching into her hair, withdrawing a small pink sphere caught in the gap of her hoof. “You ponies need to loosen up. Here, have a party grenade,” she said, throwing the smooth ball into their midst.

The lights dispersed, and the Revenants had just enough time to turn and look at the grenade before it twisted open, launching confetti everywhere. Then it began strobing patterned lights like a disco ball.

“What in Tartarus...?” TK asked, blinking. “Was that supposed to-AAH!” His hooves shot out from under him as he suddenly found himself melting through the floor, then the ceiling crashed through him, grating him into spagetti. He tried to wriggle back into shape, but the lights from the ball kept smashing him apart.

Applejack staggered to Pinkie, who reached down and held her face between her hooves. “What’d ya just do?” she asked.

“Look at me, don’t look at the pretty lights, that’s a really bad idea. Just look at me.” Pinkie said, her own eyes tightly closed. Only as Applejack watched, her pink coat stretched and darkened red. Now it was Big Macintosh holding her, staring into her eyes, his own begging her to trust him. Her rear hooves felt like they were hanging over a deep chasm, and she didn't dare look behind her

“Ain’t you dead?” she asked him, confused.

He nodded serenely. “Ayep.”

“Then what’re you doin’ here?” she tried to yell it at him, but she didn’t have the strength. She was fading fast.

“Ya need me,” he answered.

Around him were her fields back home, the fields both of them had worked so hard to keep productive, to keep feeding ponies, to keep the family afloat. Only everything was going crazy, like it had the first time Discord had come back, chocolate raining from the sky, corn popping on the stalk, and a dozen other calamities she only was vaguely aware of. She brought a hoof between his and tried to pry herself free. “Lemme go. We gotta stop this mess.”

“Nnnope,” he said. “Jus’ hold on ta me fer now. You’ve got your own work to do, an’ ah’ve got mine.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but instead she felt like she was falling forever in an instant, only he’d already caught her. He smiled at her, and she couldn’t help but smile back as blackness crept in from the edges of her fields and smothered them both.

Comments

[Shoggoth]

Yosh! I have been waiting for this to show up for ages Pyre, Nice to see you finally put it up.

[NeoSilver]

I haven't even read it yet and I'm drooling. That's a good sign.