Chapter 2
Zenith walked across the Dorian’s skin. Above her, the curve of Lapis loomed like a frozen heaven, and the Dorian’s bulk blocked the view of space. Her exosuit was equipped with a capable array of thrusters and flight controls, powerful enough that under normal conditions she could fly freely and even meaningfully change her own orbit if she wanted, but for a standard EVA like this it was far more energy efficient to stay connected with the ship via the soles of her boots. It was also safer – Lapis had so much debris in orbit that the AI was constantly making micro-adjustments to their path with the Dorian’s thrusters, and she could quickly be left behind (or even struck) if she detached. So she found herself pacing along the ship’s spine like an ant on a log, stepping carefully around the various nacelles and protrusions that concealed the ship’s organs from space.
A larger starship might have sufficient interior space to pipe with corridors, or at least access shafts. The Dorian, being a small exploration vessel, had no room for such luxuries. The only path between the flight deck and the cargo/vehicle bay was through space, and over the course of several days Zenith made the trip dozens of times to prepare their little lander for the upcoming voyage to the surface of Lapis.
Calling the lander a ‘craft’ was generous, in Zenith’s opinion. Egg-shaped, covered with seams and blisters, with sufficient interior space for one adult pony to squeeze into, it somehow stored enough energy to enter and escape a planet’s gravity well several times over. The exact physics by which that was possible required levels of education and understanding beyond Zenith’s university courses, but in all her years as a spacer it had yet to strand her on a deserted planet or burst open in the depths of space, so she figured she might as well keep trusting it until something went wrong.
Releasing the lander from its hyperlight cradle was an hours-long process that required an assortment of lightweight tools, manual dexterity, a fair amount of brute strength and a lot of patience. Checklists had to be followed with exacting precision. Magnetic clamps manually detached. Quick-release umbilicals fastened into position. Mostly, though, it required waiting while the AI checked the craft’s systems and charged its batteries from the main fusion reactor.
“Did you know,” Twilight Sparkle said, “that one of the early designs for a lander used a flywheel as a power source?”
Zenith pondered that. “Like, an actual flywheel? Not a metaphor for some high-energy physics contraption?”
“An actual flywheel. Technically two counter-rotating wheels. The theory was you could spin them up to nearly the speed of light, and use the stored energy to power an ionic drive.”
“A flywheel to space,” Zenith mused. “It didn’t work, I assume?”
“Never tried.” Twilight sounded mournful. “Material science wasn’t quite there. Okay, disconnect the number two data umbilical and hold the plate cover shut until you feel a click.”
“Got it.” Zenith followed the directions, which were helpfully highlighted on her suit’s HUD. “Okay, it clicked.”
“Good. Thirty minutes until the next step is ready. Would you like to come back to the cabin?”
She shook her head. It took a solid ten minutes just to walk back across the ship, pass through the airlock, and peel the exosuit off. “It’s fine. I’ll wait out here.”
“Alright. Shout if you need anything.” With a quiet click, Twilight closed the channel.
Zenith sat and leaned back against the lander. Their orbital velocity was high enough that Lapis rotated quickly above her, and she let her mind drift in time with the clouds streaming across the planet’s surface. Somewhere in that vastness was her sister. Finding her would be an enormous task, one she had to assume would take years. But she could imagine, and she let herself imagine, what that day would look like – discovering the wreckage of the Phrygian, peeling it open to discover an operational cryosleep pod, keying in the emergency codes to awaken Nadir from her long, cold sleep. What would their first words be? Or would they just stare in silence, unable to speak? Zenith played the fantasy out in her head, rewinding, fast forwarding, lingering on the cathartic moments she knew were soon to come.
A quiet tone requested her attention. Zenith banished the products of her imagination and opened her eyes. “Go ahead.”
“Just a heads-up, darling,” Rarity’s voice sounded softly in her ears. “We’ll be maneuvering in a moment. Make sure you’re braced.”
“Thanks, Rarity. I should be fine.”
“Wonderful. Also, I was hoping to take a moment and clear the air between us, so to speak.”
“There’s nothing to clear, Rarity. I understand your perspective. I just disagree.” One problem, Zenith felt, with simulated personalities was that they simulated emotions too, and they tried to perform emotional upkeep on their relationships. A perfectly rational AI, acting irrational for her benefit. Zenith grit her teeth.
“Be that as it may, I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that I don’t care about finding your sister,” Rarity continued. “I have a sister too, you know. I know how responsible you feel for her.”
Unlikely. Still, there was no point in arguing with her own ship. “Thank you, Rarity. I understand your concerns as well, and I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.”
The ship shifted beneath her. Thrusters spun the Dorian along its long axis, and the planet above turned until it formed a blue wall to her right. The sublight engines activated, and for a few seconds Zenith weighed several times more than normal. She grunted as the g-forces squeezed the breath out of her lungs. Weightlessness returned as relief.
“Yes, well.” Rarity sounded curt. Not convinced. “I’m glad we had this talk. I’ll let you and Twilight get back to your preparations, then.”
The channel closed with a far more resounding click that time. Zenith sighed, closed her eyes, and returned to her silent daydreams.
* * *
Three days later, they got their first good lead.
Among its many other oddities, Lapis was riddled with gemstones. Enormous fields of silicon-aluminum oxides grew like forests across much of the world’s surface. Seen from space they created dendritic, almost organic patterns, like a series of capillaries feeding some enormous beast. “Sapphire farms,” Rarity jokingly called them, and the name stuck.
A curiosity. But during one of her passes above a shattered city, the Dorian spotted something entirely out of place near one of the gemstone forests: a white splinter, about two meters long, that reflected back the Dorian’s radar. And not just reflected well, but perfectly; every watt of energy that struck the fragment bounced back to the Dorian’s dishes. It so closely resembled being pinged by another vessel that it activated their ship’s fire control alarm.
“It’s starship skin,” Twilight said. “Ninety-nine percent confidence.”
“Could the aliens have made it?” Zenith asked. She leaned back in the acceleration couch, staring at a high-definition image of the fragment on the viewscreen. It looked like nothing more than a shredded piece of toilet paper to her. “We know they got to space. They should’ve had the tech.”
“It was probably within their capabilities, but they seemed more comfortable with traditional metallurgy and carbon synthetics. Certainly, it’s the only piece made in the manner of our starships that we’ve seen on this entire planet. Or in orbit.”
“Hm.” Zenith let out a breath and zoomed the image out. The fragment was a few kilometers from the blasted, scorched remains of one of the alien cities – multiple craters, hundreds of meters wide, overlapped each other in what had been the city center. Further out, the shattered and crumbled arcologies resembled charred bones on the barren soil. Broken crystals lined the edge of the forest. The blast had been strong enough to shear through the sapphire like it was paper.
“Could the Phrygian be in that mess?” she asked.
An outline of the Phrygian appeared on the viewscreen, superimposed over the ruins. It was about the size of a city block, as the aliens built things, and dozens of them could easily fit among or within the ruins. There were countless places to hide a small scout ship.
“Can we get a better scan of the area?” she asked.
“Not from orbit. I can send the other probe.”
Ugh. The thought of losing their last probe, just a few days into the search, physically pained her. “What about the first one? Isn’t it still down there?”
“It’s on the wrong side of the planet. And it’s not behaving optimally – I think all the nanochines are starting to interfere with its operation. Something to keep in mind if you go down.”
Well, nothing ventured… “Okay, send the second one in. Can you start manufacturing more?”
“I already have, but each one will take about twenty days,” Twilight said. “You need to start thinking in longer terms, Zenith.”
Easy for an immortal AI to say – especially when it was simulating an immortal pony. But that was the sort of observation best kept to herself. “I’ll try to do that.”
It was several minutes before the Dorian was back in position to launch the probe. Zenith filled the time studying photos of the cities they’d managed to catalogue on the surface. They all seemed to meet the same end: bombardment from space by nuclear weapons. Thousands had been used on the planet, probably all within a few minutes of each other. For a species that seemed to congregate in large masses, without the urban/rural distribution that humans and ponies preferred, such a war would have been disastrous. Even the smallest population centers had been targeted for annihilation.
Twilight spent the time humming the tune to some song or other. Zenith almost lost herself in it, humming along as best she could, until the ship shook slightly.
“Probe away,” Twilight said. The viewscreen switched to a live view of the surface. The target site was little more than a white speck at this magnification – the nearby city a dark, discolored smear against the bluish stones that made up most of the surface. “Atmospheric entry in five seconds.”
Zenith leaned forward. A faint glowing streak drew itself across the image, angling toward the target. It faded, and she waited for Twilight’s report.
And kept waiting. Minutes ticked by. She frowned.
It was another full minute before Twilight spoke. “Sorry, I’m getting some anomalous telemetry from the probe. Standby.”
Huh.
“Anomalous? More like, ominous!” Pinkie Pie’s voice whispered in her left ear. “Did that sound ominous to you? It did to me.”
“What’s she seeing?” Zenith whispered back, and then she mentally chided herself. It was the same AI playing both roles, after all. A show put on for her benefit.
“I don’t know, she keeps shooing me away from the screen,” Pinkie said. Then, a shout: “Hey, Twilight! What do your alicorn eyes see?”
“I said standby!” Twilight’s voice held a frazzled edge. “This is more complex than it looks, you know.”
“Sorry, Twilight,” Zenith said. “Please, take your time.”
A muffled grumble responded, followed by more silence. Nearly a full orbit passed before Twilight came back online.
“Okay, sorry about that,” she said. “Uh, bad news first, I guess. The probe is gone.”
Zenith raised her eyebrows. “And the good news?”
“I did get some data back before it stopped responding. That fragment is definitely from a Terran starship, and there are several more pieces like it scattered in and around the city. Nothing structural that I can see, just pieces of the cladding. It’s very possible, and in fact likely, that the Phrygian is down there, or was down there at some point.”
That was good news. Or, at least, it confirmed what they’d already hoped. She nodded. “What happened to the probe?”
“Mind if I answer that? Thanks.” Rainbow Dash cut in. “So, the technical term is controlled flight into terrain. A laypony would say that Twilight flew the probe into a building at the speed of sound, which is not considered survivable. On the other hoof it probably looked really awesome and I hope we’re able to salvage the last few seconds of footage before the impact. Okay, back to you, Twilight.”
“Thank you, Rainbow Dash, for that expert summary,” Twilight said. Her voice was dry enough to chap lips. “I will note that the anomalous behavior began well before the impact—”
“It sure as hell stopped after the impact,” Rainbow said.
“—when the probe began misreporting its state and position during the reentry,” Twilight continued smoothly. “I attempted to correct for the poor telemetry, but the errors compounded exponentially, which resulted in the premature termination of the flight.”
“The crash,” Rainbow said.
“Sure, fine, the crash.” Twilight huffed. “Would you like to pilot the next one, Rainbow?”
“Thank you for asking, Twilight. I would like to—”
“Girls,” Zenith said gently. “Back to the anomalous behavior. What caused it?”
“As best I can tell, a material defect in the probe,” Twilight said. Zenith could hear her frowning. “It’s known to happen, and probes don’t have the same level of redundancy as other vehicles. The other option is that those nanochines caused the interference, though I assign that a low probability. They still seem dead to all other sensors.”
“Didn’t you say the nanochines were interfering with the other probe, too?”
“I did, but in a more mundane sense. They’re just clogging it up. The lander’s filters should be able to handle them.”
Right, the lander. Zenith was supposed to follow the probe. That was the plan. She swallowed.
“You don’t sound too worried about the lander’s chances,” she noted.
“The lander is far more robust, with several layers of redundancy across all critical systems and zero single-points of failure,” Twilight said. “Mind you, I still think the level of risk is unacceptably high, but not appreciably higher than before you made the decision to go down there. You can still change your mind, though. In fact, let it be noted for the record that I said you were free to change your mind.”
She could change her mind. Everypony would agree with her that it was the best decision under the circumstances, and they would wrap up their search from orbit and go home. Nopony would mention the alternatives they hadn’t explored, and no one would ever blame her for leaving without finding Nadir. Certainly, nopony would ever say it.
Out loud, anyway. Zenith swallowed again.
“No,” she said. “The plan is unchanged. Can you stay overhead?”
“Not perfectly,” Twilight said. “The target site isn’t on the equator, so a geosynchronous orbit won’t be directly above you. But I’ll be within a few degrees, and I’ll have a local copy of myself loaded on the lander’s banks just in case.”
That would have to do. She stood and fumbled her way across the cramped deck to the exosuits – she would have to wear one inside the lander. “Good. Tell Rainbow to be ready for everything.”
“Always am,” Rainbow Dash’s scratchy voice answered without missing a beat, filled as always with unshakable confidence. “And be careful down there, huh? Unlike probes, Twilight can’t make new copies of you.”
“Or can she?!” Pinkie Pie jumped in. “Ominous music!” On cue, heady strains of a soaring violin quartet filled the cabin, backed by a throbbing, accelerating bass drum beat. A chanting choir began to build to a crescendo—
“No, no. Stop.” Twilight said. The music cut off with a screech. “Pinkie, this isn’t a dystopian sci-fi television series. Zenith is not a clone and I cannot make new copies of her.”
“Aww.”
“We won’t need new copies of me. I’ll be fine,” Zenith said. Still, she smiled. “We’ll make it work, Pinkie. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Her hooves barely shook as she unfastened the exosuit’s bindings and began to strap it on.
* * *
Putting on a long-duration exosuit was an intimate process. If the suit were another pony, Zenith would be considered married to it by the more conservative earth pony settlements. The AI thankfully offered no observations during the process, though Zenith had to imagine the others kept Pinkie Pie bound and gagged in the virtual equivalent of a closet.
When at last it was on, and Zenith could pretend her dignity was undamaged, she made her way out the airlock and across the ship’s exterior toward the lander. The door was already open, revealing a crash couch, viewscreen, equipment lockers and back-up flight control systems in case the computer failed in the middle of reentry. Normally Zenith wouldn’t have given that possibility a second thought, but memories of her late, lamented second probe were still very fresh in her mind. She mentally reviewed the process for switching from computer-aided flight to manual controls while she strapped into the couch.
“Should be a smooth ride,” Twilight said. Her voice sounded faint and a bit tinny coming from the exosuit’s sound system, which wasn’t quite as high fidelity as the Dorian’s. “No weather patterns of interest aside from some dust storms, and we’re in an ideal orbit for insertion. Rainbow Dash insists that I let her pilot, unless you’d prefer to go in manually.”
“I’ll let Rainbow handle it,” Zenith said. “Not my specialty.”
“Good choice.” Rainbow came into the conversation. “Okay, sealing you in. We’ve got a few minutes until we’re in drop position. Read a book or something, I guess? Over.”
“Roger, reading a book, over.” In fact, Zenith spent the time playing with the viewscreen controls. The display wrapped around the entire interior of the pod, and she switched it to show a view of the exterior, as though the lander were made entirely of glass.
The minutes ticked by, and the Dorian rotated until Lapis filled the universe overhead. A tiny countdown appeared in the corner of Zenith’s vision, and when it reached zero the lander shuddered. The Dorian fell away below, rapidly shrinking until it was no larger than any of the other stars in space. The lander turned slowly, spinning away from Lapis and giving Zenith a few of the debris ring sparkling in a giant arch above.
“Atmosphere in a few seconds,” Rainbow said. “Should max at around four Gs. Brace.”
The craft shook wildly, and an enormous hoof pressed Zenith into the crash couch. She grunted and focused on short puffs of air. The viewport filled with orange fire, then yellow, then white, and eventually the filters kicked in and her view of the world was reduced to a simple graphical outline of the horizon and major topographic features below.
“Everything’s nominal,” Rainbow reported. “I see what Twilight meant about the nanites clogging things, though. The air is a mess.”
“Problem?” Zenith managed to squeak out. The g-forces were only slowly easing as the lander decelerated.
“Not for the lander. I wouldn’t go outside without your helmet on, though. Probably not good for your lungs.”
Eventually the craft stopped shaking, and the view of the outside returned. Now in normal flight, the pod rotated around so Zenith was looking forward, and they streaked across the dead world at an altitude of several thousand meters. Faint sheets of wispy clouds struggled to cohere around them, tattered like wind-blown flags. Far below, on the ground, evidence of the long-ago war was everywhere. Wrecked machines littered the landscape, some punctured and shredded by kinetic weapons, others apparently crashed. Massive rows of bluish sand dunes marched across the plains, alternately concealing and revealing the waste.
An old Terran saying sprang unbidden into her head. “There but for the grace of God,” she mumbled.
“Hey, that was never gonna happen to us,” Rainbow said. “Ponies are good at heart. And humans too, I guess.”
“It almost fell apart, though.” She tilted the chair for a better look as they flew over a city. A single enormous crater, kilometers across, obliterated the heart of the metropolis, leaving only exposed bedrock. On the edges of the city, a few skeletal buildings still stood – walls, mostly, their interiors filled with nothing but sand and memories.
“But it didn’t. We got past it,” Rainbow said. “C’mon, happy thoughts, kid. We’re about to do some potentially dangerous stuff and I need you in a good mood, not moping.”
Zenith smiled. “I’m not moping.”
“Sure, sure. Okay, we’re about ten minutes out. Want me to go straight into the city?”
That perked Zenith’s ears up. “Stop at the outskirts first. I’d rather get a good look at things before we commit.”
They crossed into another stretch of wasteland. A road, or something similar, threaded its way beneath them, like a line drawn toward their target. Up ahead, Zenith saw a line of mountains, and before them a row of broken shapes hugging the earth.
Something was interfering with the viewscreen, though. A faint iridescence, like the sheen of a soap bubble, smeared the sides of the pod with a sickly rainbow. She frowned. “Hey, Rainbow…”
“Yeah, I see it too.” Rainbow said. “Residue from the nanochines. We’re running into, like, millions of them every second, and they’re kinda fragile.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Nah. It’s just, like, bugs in your teeth, you know?”
Zenith did not know what that was like. Nevertheless, she ran her tongue across her teeth to make sure nothing was plastered on them.
Before she knew it, the dead city was upon them. Only a ring of ruins remained – the city’s heart had been carved out and replaced by craters. The effect was something like a city on a bay, though with ghosts instead of water. Some buildings stood higher than others, leaning at angles or approximately upright. In other spots, where the blast waves reflected poorly, entire blocks were flattened, and nothing rose higher than Zenith’s waist.
“Not much radiation,” Rainbow said as she set the craft down on a bare stretch of windblown concrete. “They were using environmentally friendly weapons.”
“Lotta good it did them. Pop the hatch?”
One nice thing about working with Rainbow Dash was that there was never any backtalk. Barely had she finished speaking when the door opened with a hiss, and the cold atmosphere of Lapis washed into the lander. Along with, presumably, millions of those dead nanochines. The realization gave Zenith a moment of pause, but then she shrugged and unbuckled from the couch. If Twilight and Rainbow Dash weren’t worried about letting the nanochines in, she had no reason to be.
They’re nothing more than dust. She fumbled with the remaining buckles, pulled herself toward the hatch, and stepped out onto a new world.
Seen from the surface, the relentless blue of Lapis wasn’t as overpowering. Her brain attempted to adjust to the color balance, interpreting blue as white, and gradually new shades and hues made themselves known. The mountains to the west were brown near the base, fading to a rugged grey toward the peaks. No vegetation grew on their slopes; no glaciers frosted their peaks. Just barren rocks.
Toward the city there was little but grey destruction. Broken buildings, mostly fashioned from concrete and the alien equivalent of plasteel, rose like tombstones in endless rows marching off into the distance. Cobwebs of rusting wires lay half-strung between the structures. Anything organic had been vaporized in the blast. The only warm color was from Gliese itself. Zenith stared up at the yellow sun for several moments before turning away.
“I dub thee, Ponyville,” she said.
“Wow, really?” Rainbow’s voice sounded in her earpiece. “Morbid enough?”
Zenith trotted over to the nearest building and peered inside. Still somewhat upright, it slouched out onto the street, its walls broken and connected at wrong angles. The inside was a composite of all the floors, which had collapsed into a sandwich of concrete and plasteel honeycomb. She didn’t linger – there were, presumably, bodies within the ruins, and she had no desire to walk where they rested.
Twilight was waiting for her when she got back to the lander. The intercom hissed to life as she strapped in. “Some more information for you, Zenith. You might need to come back up.”
“Oh? Hit me.”
“I’ve been analyzing the data stream from the doomed probe. I think the nanochines may have been more involved in its crash than I originally believed.”
Hm. Zenith glanced down at the polyplastic suit covering her forelegs. It was dusty after her brief sojourn outside – or was that a layer of nanochines, crawling all over her?
Lovely. “How so?”
“They’re not… entirely inactive. They seem to be absorbing and re-emitting energy into a field that doesn’t quite correlate with anything I understand.”
“A new… field? Like a new fundamental force?” Zenith brought up an orbital map on the viewscreen. The Dorian was nearly thirty thousand kilometers overhead. And the Phrygian, for all they knew, might only be a few hundred meters away. “Have we made some breakthrough in fundamental physics, Twilight?”
“Well, no. Technically these aliens did first. But I don’t know what it is or what it does, and I think maybe you should come back up here until we figure it out. More observational time will give us better data, and—”
“Okay. Noted.” She took a sip from the helmet’s drinking tube and swirled it around. “We’re going to proceed here.”
The intercom popped with static and the sound of Twilight gritting her teeth. “Alright, but be careful. And let me know if you observe anything unusual.”
The whole damn planet was unusual. She shook her head and buckled back in for flight.
* * *
Zenith piloted the lander around the edge of the city. Inward, to her left, the massive system of craters dominated everything. Outward, to her right, the barren planet stretched endlessly away. A vast network of towering sapphire crystal formations grew like a forest near the edge of the city, dazzling her with reflections, and she eventually had Rainbow dim that section of the viewscreen.
Working with Rainbow Dash was easy. No chit-chat, no jokes, no helpful advice, just business. Rainbow called out various points of interest, and Zenith brought the lander in to inspect them. They discovered a dozen more pieces of starship skin, buried under the sand or hiding in the shadows of toppled buildings.
“That’s where Twilight crashed the probe,” Rainbow noted at one point. Zenith followed the icon on the viewscreen and saw instantly what she meant. A freshly shattered building lay in pieces, strewn out across a full block, the broken edges of its concrete walls a brighter and fresher shade of grey than the dismal waste all around. Black scores discolored many of the fragments, and among them Zenith saw sunlight glinting off of glass and twisted shavings of metal.
“It probably did look awesome,” Zenith said. “Maybe we can get her to crash another one.”
“Oh, just wait. It’ll happen.”
They coasted onward, eventually reaching something of a landmark – an elegant tower, the tallest building still left upright. Crenellations and twists adorned its sides, the closest thing they’d seen to alien artwork. Little remained now but the exterior walls, and those teetered precariously. It wouldn’t be long before time and the wind conspired in a bad way and brought the tower down to join its sisters.
Zenith circled the tower. The side facing the city center was scoured clean of its decorative effects, exposing the bare honeycomb of structural elements. Rubble surrounded the tower, burying the first two floors. Zenith let the lander coast to a halt and studied the ruins.
“Hey,” Rainbow said, eventually. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking.”
“Nothing wrong with thinking, just don’t start moping—hang on.” The line cut off with a sudden snap.
“What?” Zenith asked. She sat up straighter on the couch, her coat prickling. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not certain.” It was Twilight who answered, her voice tight with tension. “The lander’s clock is desynchronizing with mine, and that field from the nanochines is spiking in your vicinity. Dash, get ready to move.”
“On it.” The lander hummed with power as its engines spun up. Flightpath diagrams populated the viewscreen as Rainbow calculated the fastest route to orbit. “Okay, ready. Brace, this is gonna be—”
“Wait!” Zenith shouted. Her hoof hovered over the manual override. “The Tower! Look at the tower!”
High above them, the ruined facade of the tower trembled. Centuries of exposure and the lingering effects of the war had sheared off huge expanses of stone, leaving little of the original artistry in its decorations behind. But before Zenith’s eyes, a trail of gravel and sand began to flow upward from the pile of rubble at the tower’s base, and a cloud of dust slowly coalesced around the upper floors. A series of loud crashes shook the city, and tons of stone – sheets of concrete honeycomb dozens of meters across – hurled themselves up from the rubble, assembling in perfect order on the tower’s sides. Fragments of a fancifully carved spire, fluted with whorls of stone, leapt toward the sky and settled gently into position atop the tower.
Not a crack remained where the sheared stone had been. Faint crashes echoed back from the ruins of the city for several seconds afterward.
“The field is fading,” Twilight’s voice broke the silence. “Below detectable levels. Zenith, I strongly urge you to return—”
“You saw that,” Zenith marveled. “Tell me you recorded that.”
“I did. We can analyze it at our leisure when you get back up here.”
“They undid the damage, somehow,” Zenith said. She tried to give voice to what she’d seen, but nothing she’d ever known or studied made sense. “How did they do that? It’s like they… they somehow reversed time.”
“There are no methods for reversing time,” Twilight said. “Other explanations are more plausible. A series of micro-repulsors hidden in the rubble might have lifted the wreckage up, and the nanochines fused them back into place. Maybe the tower is an extremely convincing hologram, or something else we don’t understand.”
“What about that field you said the nanochines were generating?” Zenith asked. “The one that doesn’t fit our physics models? Could it be, I don’t know, an anti-entropic field?”
“That’s impossible, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding,” Twilight said. “Entropy isn’t an effect. It’s not something you can generate or reverse.”
“Okay, fine,” Zenith said. “So what’d we just see?”
“That… is yet to be determined. Regardless, you need to get off the planet. There’s no telling what exposure to that phenomenon could do to a pony.”
“Has it done anything to me yet?”
“Oh, for the love of… Dash, talk some sense into her.”
“Yo, I kinda agree with Twilight here,” Dash said. She sounded troubled by the revelation. “You know I’m not one to cut and run, but there’s too much we don’t understand about this place. And also that was super freaky.”
“Okay, right. Noted.” Zenith spun the view away from the tower. The rest of the city seemed unchanged – whatever the nanochines were doing, it wasn’t everywhere at once. “We’ll finish searching the city and then head back up.”
Twilight grumbled something and signed off with an aggrieved click. Dash kept an uncharacteristic silence, but nevertheless she piloted the lander away from the tower and back out in a sweeping arc across the city’s outskirts. Massive crystal formations passed beneath them in a blur. Radar reflections painted a dazzling kaleidoscope on the viewscreen, returning far more data than Zenith could hope to understand.
“Are the crystals causing all these reflections?” she asked.
“Most of them,” Dash said. She sounded a bit distracted. “I’m seeing a few more pieces of starship skin, though. The Phrygian was definitely here at some point.”
“You think it left?”
“Well, I don’t see a starship, and the city isn’t that big,” Rainbow said. “Mind if I pop up a bit? I want a broader look.”
“Go for it.”
* * *
The world seen from on high was as blue as Zenith remembered. Rainbow brought the lander up to about a thousand meters, where faint tattered clouds struggled with the wind, and she settled into a stationary hover. The little craft hummed as the wind broke around its smooth shell.
“Bit for your thoughts?” Zenith asked.
“I think it’s hiding,” Dash said. She spun the lander in a slow circle. “She set down here, and then just vanished.”
“Hm.” Zenith blacked out the viewscreen and superimposed a radar image. The ground reappeared as a ghostly wash of plane geometries, brighter where it reflected the radio energy straight back at the lander, and dimmer when it sent back only scattered reflections. A few bright speckles littered the landscape where shreds of starship skin had fallen.
Starship skin was deliberately engineered to reflect energy. As a passive measure, it protected against all sorts of dangerous environments. It kept stray signals inside the ship, so you knew exactly what you were radiating. And in most cases ships wanted to be highly visible to their fellow spacers, anyway. Zenith turned that thought over in her mind.
“How would a ship lose its skin?” she asked.
“Abrasion. Running into stuff.” Rainbow said. “You know, things we try not to do with starships.”
“Could you do it deliberately?”
“You can do a lot of stupid things deliberately, Zenith.”
“Oh, oh, are we making a list?” Pinkie Pie’s voice popped into the intercom, faint with static. “Dashie, do you remember at Big Macintosh’s wedding when you asked Applejack if it was true that earth ponies kissed their—”
“Okay, going to need some radio silence for a while.” Dash squelched the channel from the Dorian. “Important stuff here. No time for jokes.”
That sounded like something to follow up on later. For now, though, “It would be far less visible without its skin. It would be able to blend in…”
“Especially on a world like this,” Dash said. “It would look like just another piece of wreckage, and there’s plenty of that to go around.”
Exactly. Zenith turned the display from a view of the outside world into a flat map. She overlaid the positions of the local terrain, the city, and all the little pieces of starship skin they’d already found. They formed a scattered mess, like breadcrumbs strewn across the landscape, broken in places where time and sand had washed over the ruins. She rotated the map this way and that, looking for any sort of pattern, while presumably Rainbow Dash and Twilight did the same with their far more powerful minds.
“Hey, that, uh…” Weird time thing, she wanted to say. “That phenomenon we saw earlier. Did that crash the probe?”
Twilight answered. “Unclear. The probes rely on an exquisitely precise clock for navigation and other functions. They can handle time dilation just fine, which is why we use them near black holes, but the probe’s clock became desynchronized from the Dorian’s. It wasn’t able to reconcile the discrepancy, which resulted in confusion over its true position. My attempts to compensate just compounded the errors, and, well, it stopped responding.”
“Crashed,” Rainbow corrected.
“So, could an anti-entropic field do that?” Zenith said.
“Again, there is no such thing as an ‘anti-entropic field.’” Exasperation leaked through in Twilight’s voice.
“You keep saying that, but if one did exist, wouldn’t it match what we’ve observed? Let’s call it a hypothesis.”
“Oh, and Zenith breaks out the scientific method,” Pinkie Pie said in a hushed whisper. “A bold move. Let’s see if it pays off.”
“Fine, fine.” Something that sounded like ruffled feathers settling came over the channel. “Hypothesis: the nanochines are an artifact created by some unknown race to undo the effects of the war. They go about this in the most inefficient, terrifying method possible, by rewinding time until before the war. Does that fit your observations?”
“And where would the energy for that come from?”
“The nanochines would have to absorb it from somewhere. Latent heat energy, solar energy from Gleise, any kinetic energy introduced from external sources…” Twilight slowed and trailed off.
“Okay, last question. Do we count as kinetic energy introduced from external sources?”
A quiet sigh emerged from the speakers. “Okay, yes, it fits the observations. We can use it as a working hypothesis.”
“Defeated by science!” Pinkie Pie slipped in. “That’s got to hurt, Ace.”
“It sure does, Pinkie,” an unknown stallion’s voice, deep and measured, responded. “But there’s still lots of time on the clock for her to—”
“Pinkie!”
“Sorry, sorry. Back in my closet.” A wooden door creaked closed with a thud.
It was several moments before either spoke. Twilight still sounded a bit aggrieved, though Zenith never knew how much of that was real and how much was just a play put on for her benefit. As always, the golden rule of dealing with AIs prevailed: pretend it’s all real until given a reason to believe otherwise.
“So they’re using the universe’s entropy to undo their own entropy.” Zenith pulled up a radar map as she spoke, and zoomed in on one particular piece of starship skin. It was an outlier – kilometers away in the mountains, nowhere near the other pieces. “That’s clever. Also vaguely terrifying.”
“If it weren’t for the end they brought to this world, I’d love to meet the people who designed these machines,” Twilight said. “On the other hoof, if we stay here long enough, we might.”
Zenith mumbled in response. This one little breadcrumb was important, she just knew it. The mountains around it were imposing, riddled with steep valleys and ridges and fragments of alien technology. A few lonely antennae protruded from the higher peaks.
She dialed the lander’s sensors on a wide draw between two ridges. Sand nearly filled the little valley to the brim. An odd place for sand to build up, considering the prevailing winds – the nearby features were all empty, scoured clean by the wind. She frowned and pulled up the lander’s sensor control suite.
“What are you doing?” Rainbow asked. “See something?”
“Probably not,” she mumbled. “But…” With a few keystrokes, she programmed in a short microwave burst and fired it at the draw.
Every alarm in the lander went off simultaneously. The viewscreen flashed red and scrolled a long list of warnings, accompanied by a sharp klaxon. The crash couch snapped back into its emergency position, and the restraints all tightened to their maximum setting, locking Zenith as firmly as if she’d been set in concrete. They squeezed the air from her lungs. She gurgled for breath.
“New fusion source detected,” Twilight said. “Radio emissions across all bands. I’m maneuvering overhead. Prepare for orbit.” Above them, a star appeared in the daytime sky as the Dorian’s engines activated.
“No, no! No!” Zenith shouted. She fumbled for the restraint’s manual release, and gasped for breath when they freed her. “Show me what’s happening! And shut off those damn alarms.”
The alarms died instantly, leaving a deafening silence in their wake. The couch swung back into its normal position, and the viewscreen returned to its view of the outside world. A faint cloud of bluish dust concealed the base of the distant mountains, and Zenith zoomed the view in to its highest setting.
Geysers of sand erupted from the draw, shooting hundreds of meters into the air before falling back to the surface in drifting veils. Rocks tumbled down the slopes, shook loose by the vibrations wracking the mountain. The sand dune bulged, roiling and flowing away as some hidden monster began to stir. And in the mouth of the valley, a prow broke through the dust, a long silver beam covered in sensor blisters, access ports and seams.
Without its skin, the Phrygian rose from the sand like the skeleton of a starship, escaping from a shallow grave. Zenith leaned forward and pressed her hoof against the viewscreen.
“Interior systems are powering on,” Twilight said, each word clipped and precise. “I’m seeing EM emissions consistent with cryosleep disengagement. No sign of her main engines spinning up.”
Cryosleep. Zenith squeezed her hooves together to stop them from shaking. “C-can you open a channel?”
“I can try. Standby.”
Nervous seconds passed. Her whole body trembled with pent-up energy. The faceplate of her helmet began to fog up, causing the little fans in the rim to activate.
Finally, a black square appeared on the viewscreen. It lightened slowly, revealing the interior of a scout ship, so similar to the Dorian. In the center, a cryosleep pod slowly folded open, revealing a pool of sickly grey suspension fluid. A shape struggled within the fluid, and a hoof broke the surface, flinging a strand of slime across the deckplates. Slowly, the rest of the pony emerged, and even beneath the layer of fluid Zenith saw the mare’s charcoal coat, her pale green mane, the faint speckling on her shoulders and chest.
Zenith realized she was crying. “Nadir? Nadir, can you hear me?”
“She’s still in suspension shock,” Twilight said. “Keep talking. I’m almost overhead”
“Nadir. Nadir, it’s me. It’s Zenith.” She leaned forward until the faceplate of her helmet bumped the viewscreen. “Nadir, look at me.”
Nadir’s head turned toward the camera. Her eyes, still fuzzy, struggled to focus. She scrabbled with her hooves against the edge of the cryosleep pod.
“That’s it, that’s it.” Zenith took a moment to breathe. All the years, all the work, it all led to this moment, and it had to be perfect. “Look at me, Nadir. It’s Zenith. It’s your sister.”
That worked. Nadir’s eyes cleared, and she looked up at the viewscreen. She tried to stand in the pod and slipped back down into the fluid bath.
“It’s me, Nadir. It’s your Zenith.” She struggled with the words, though she’d rehearsed them a thousand times. Her throat threatened to close, and the rest came out as a whisper. “I want you to know, it was me. I was the one who found you.”
Finally, comprehension dawned. Nadir’s mouth fell open. Her eyes widened, and in them Zenith saw the most wonderful thing in the universe.
Fear.
It was as perfect as she ever could have hoped. She glanced again at the map, and judged that the lander was at a safe distance.
“Target all weapons on the Phrygian,” she said. A series of green dots appeared on the viewscreen as Rainbow Dash brought the Dorian’s arsenal to bear.
Absolutely perfect. “Fire.”
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Good lord.
Well.
That ending was unexpected. Please don't leave us hanging for too long!
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The update schedule is in the description.
11104299
And of course no author ever misses a date on an upload schedule..... Silly me.
11104326
It will all be done by Jan. 6 :)
In hindsight I should have realized she'd do this when she destroyed the beacon in the first chapter. You certainly haven't lost your touch; this is excellent so far. These nanites are most interesting. And so is the fact that the ponies in this universe met humans and seem to get along. You even made us not be the civilization that nuked itself. But why is Zenith hunting her sister?
Already in the first paragraph, its far superior to any of the Star Trek Next Gen movies. Its more like Wrath of Khan level of excellence.
Show canon Equestria has lots of gemstones, while this story's Equestria is possibly implied to not have them because of the above paragraph saying that being riddled with gemstones is an oddity. Possible hidden plot point?
Also, great plot twist!
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I kinda wonder if the ponies were created by / from the humans? We'll see.
Yeah, I thought this might have been her intention.
Well, now her blowing up the beacon satellite makes sense... But why does she want to kill her Sister?
I wonder how she plans to decontaminate the nanochines before she returns to Dorian? Does she plan to return?
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I took it to mean there were fields of towering, above ground crystals as opposed to underground deposits.
Now, now, that's not a very pony thing to do.
Aw, that's really sweet she found her sistHO SHIT
I love it!
This is the kind of sci-fi I really miss. Im more ol school hard sci-fi. And this really has some of the feel of those kinds of works.
Reminded of Niven and Pournelle's works.
That certainly took a turn.
Uhm, okay, that was not what I was expecting. Nadir certainly found her sister though.
....oh. That wasn't what I thought would happen.
Uh what just happened?
ooh, i love flywheels! mechanical energy storage is pog
oof, let's see how this line hits at the end of the story
another aspect i love about this setup! kind of wish i had the simulated Mane Six following me around helping me with my life
hehe, very fun. lots of layers there
love the genre awareness. reference to Moon?
haha, oof, i can imagine
yet more possibly ominous lines
that is what i would have guessed!
ooh, very neat hypothesizing
well, now that is a twist! absolutely did not see it coming. on the edge of my seat here!
At first I was intrigued with the AI, and to a lesser degree Zeniths story. Now I'm just curious what happened with this planet! I'm glad you already established Humans are around because I was a little afraid it was just another It Was Earth All Along!
A male voice willing to go along with Pinkies antics? I'm guessing Discord.
If the world around them is healing itself then it's possible the world healed itself around the ship, trapping the ship in a restored building.
And then you get to the ending... Wow.