Friendship One

by BRBrony9

Standing Firm

The servants who found Celestia that fateful morning had found a pale and haggard Princess, as if she were a shell of herself, something they had never seen before. Something nopony had seen before. She told them in a shaky voice to rouse the Astronomer-Royal, the head of the Equestrian Space Exploration Agency, her military chief of staff, and the chancellor of the Royal Academy of Science. Exchanging concerned looks, the servants had hurried away to enact her commands, summoning the relevant ponies to the palace.

There, in no uncertain terms, she had explained to them what had just happened. There was not a shred of doubt in their minds that she was correct; they were loyal and devout followers of the royal sisters, and knew that Celestia's word was true. The news she bore was bad. Extremely bad. Now the nervous looks were not from mere maidservants, but from stallions and mares of science and security.

The death of Sigma-225b had inadvertently signed the death warrants for every living creature on Equis. The blast of radiation, known to science as a gamma ray burst, was hurtling through the void toward the planet. If not for their divine Princess, ponykind would have had no knowledge of the distant event, no chance to prepare. Not that there was a huge amount that could be done, in any case. The radiation was so powerful that it would simply fry Equis, like holding a chocolate bar directly in front of a military radar dish, or stepping into the core of a nuclear reactor. Bathing the planet in so much energy would strip away the atmosphere, boil the oceans, and kill everything. Pony, Griffon, Zebra, Changeling, rabbit and fly and grass and tree. Everything would be wiped out. That was what the science said about this theoretical event. Except now it was not so theoretical any longer.

There was much discussion in the palace that day. Theories were proposed, then shot down. Ideas came to naught. The great minds of Equestria could offer no solution to their plight. The planet could not be moved out of the way. None of the Princesses had direct control over it the way they did over the moon and sun, and no amount of magic was enough to shift the planet from its orbit- a move which could bring its own calamaties even if it had succeeded- without a similar deep and magical connection as that which enabled Luna to move the moon and Celestia the sun. Even if every unicorn alive lent their utmost efforts to it, an attempt to use conventional, non-Alicorn magic to move the planet was also doomed to fail simply due to its mass. The Moon, despite Luna's influence over it, could not be moved to act as a shield, for it was simply not large enough to obscure the planet from the deadly bath of radiation.

Moving the sun was also not an option. Not only would it destabilise Equis's orbit and possibly cast it out into deep space, or perhaps tear the planet apart from tidal forces or burn away the atmosphere just as successfully as the gamma rays would, there was no true scientific consensus over what exactly would happen when the sun was struck by the interstellar blast. If any scientists survived the end of the world, they might be able to find out, because the gamma ray burst was going to affect not just the planet, but the entire solar system and its immediate environs. The barrel of this cosmic shotgun was many, many trillions of miles wide. This was not a laser-focused beam aimed at Equis, but a great swathe of irradiated and deadly buckshot flying through the void.

With those magical options dismissed, talk turned to science for salvation, but blanks were drawn there as well. There was no action-movie cliche to be found. The Air & Space Corps immediately made sure everypony in the know understood they could do absolutely nothing with their nuclear weapons, because far too often politicians tried to reach immediately for whatever metaphorical big red button lay within reach in times of crisis. Could a shield be erected? Science said no. Any shield strong enough to withstand the gamma ray burst would likely take millennia to construct and require all of Equis's natural resources, for it would have to surround the entire planet- at this stage, nopony could be sure where in the planet's orbit they would be when the blast struck, and thus which hemisphere was likely to take the brunt of the impact. Other options were considered- deflecting the GRB around the planet somehow like the bow wave of a ship, radiation shielding, seeding the atmosphere with ionized particles of some kind to dampen the effects. All were dismissed. Impractical. Impossible. Too time-consuming, too late.

The long meeting dragged into the night, and ended with despondent, downcast ponies trotting out of the palace, looking up at the clear, dark sky with trepidation. Somewhere out there among the stars, death was coming for them all.

The next debate was one for Celestia and Luna to shoulder themselves; the issue of truth. Should the world be told about their fate? Or should it be kept silent until much closer to the catastrophe, perhaps a year, six months, one week from impact? As rulers, the decision was ultimately theirs to make. The problems were obvious on both sides. Keep it quiet, and ponies would have no time to prepare, no time to say goodbye, to make their peace with the world and with themselves. Reveal the truth too early, and there would be panic, riots, uprisings. Probably at least one coup attempt against the Princesses and their government, advisors pointed out. It would not take much for other races, their nationalistic lust kept suborned by the sheer strength of Equestrian might, to find that spark again and demand their independence, a chance to take their own measures against the doomsday scenario which had been outlined to the planet. Wars had certainly started over less dramatic things than the end of the world, after all, and would it not be the ultimate irony if the world were to destroy itself through nuclear conflict, leaving a barren wasteland for the gamma rays to roll over when they finally arrived, their job already done for them by locally-sourced radiation instead?

"We must tell them, sister," Luna had sighed one evening, as the two Alicorns stood upon a high balcony, overlooking Canterlot, the pale neon glow of the city, the darkness of the mountain peaks. A siren wailed out as blue and red flashing lights edged their way through the traffic down below. A jet rumbled through the skies overhead, carrying ponies on business or on vacation.

"We must, but we cannot," Celestia had replied. "Not yet. There is too much at stake. Everything is at stake."

"Then if not now, when?"

"When we know what we can do about the problem," Celestia replied.

"But sister, there is no solution. Is there?" Luna questioned. "Science, magic...it has all failed us. We have failed our subjects."

"Luna...we have not failed them. This is not something we could have ever prevented," Celestia put a hoof upon her sister's shoulder. "It is beyond our power."

"And how will our subjects view us when they learn of that?" Luna lamented. "That some things are outside of our control?"

"They already know this, dear sister," Celestia answered. "Everfree magic, Changelings, Discord. All of those things, we could not and still cannot control. Contain? Yes. Defeat? Sometimes. But we cannot control them. We do not rule this universe, only this planet."

"Then what are we to do?" Luna's eyes brimmed with tears. "How can we save them? Everypony puts their trust in us, sister Their love and faith and devotion, and we...at the end of it all, we're going to let them down..."

Celestia pulled her into a warm embrace. "Hush, Luna...if this is how things must be, then it is how they will be. Our subjects trust us not because we have all the answers to every problem, but because we hold true to our beliefs, because we are strong, and because we never stop fighting for them. That is what we have done our whole lives, isn't it, sister? Fought to protect our subjects?"

Luna nodded.

"And that is what we will do, right up until the end, whenever that finally comes," Celestia assured her. "We will not simply give up. We will do anything we can to protect them, no matter what happens."

Luna nodded again. "Yes...yes, of course. You are right...but...what can we do? There is no solution."

"There may be a chance. A small chance, but a chance nonetheless. If we can stand as one, with Cadence, with Twilight, with Starswirl and Shining Armour and as many other unicorns as we can summon, then on the day of reckoning, we might just be able to hold the tide at bay with magic."

"A shield?" Luna blinked away her tears. "But the scientists said it was impossible..."

"Impossible for science, yes. But not necessarily for magic," Celestia replied, releasing her sister from her embrace. "When it comes, we will stand firm and try. All we can do is try. Perhaps our efforts will be wasted, but at least we can try. And if we fail, our subjects will know that we did everything we could to protect them instead of running away."

"There is nowhere to run to, sister," Luna pointed out. "The whole planet..."

"I know." Celestia looked up at the sky, the infinite void of space, stretching across an incomprehensibly vast distance to the very edge of reality. "But there are other planets out there."

Comments

[Frazikar]

Portal to another planet, maybe ... have to upsize it bit ...

[Booster Spice]

11086692

Its suprising just how many people move around currently. A single major highway can have 150 thousand vehicles an hour. If only private cars are used, because they are the greatest amount, easiest to eject and overload etc, thenthats approaching a million people an hour if filled. Thats if the portal can be made to large TBM size.

One technomagical solution might only be discoverd a distance away, But currently any ship apparently is going to be sublight, meaning a tail chase. Even if you tried to achieve Tau Quanta low enough to doppler shift the rear gamma to Xray, UV or even visible, then whatever was ahead of you would be getting doppler shifted and temporally compressed up to the gamma range instead, just not a fraction the power. Still, the minimum shielding passively would be a rather impressively sized ice cometary nucleus, as in miles, and the only way I can think of accelerating that is a Rama Stellar Slingshot.

The other story currently running on variation of Destruction Of Equestria, has its own option. Due to hand wavery. This requires careful thought.

Maybe even Pushing Ice.