To the Borg, the Little Ponies are merely Species 14864. None can resist assimilation. ... Or can they?
I know I'm not the first to think of this, but I couldn't resist. (Because, after all, resistance is futile!)
To you and me, they are the little ponies. To the Borg, they are Species 14864. Resisting assimilation is futile ... but the Borg have never seen unicorn magic before.
This story has been added to the "Other" folder of the group Star Trek Ponies, and to the "Hard Scifi (space travel)" folder of the group The Sci-Fi Ponies. This story was also posted to fanfiction.net under the same title.
To you and me, they are the little ponies. To the Borg, they are species 14864.
It was a bright and sunny day in Ponyville. The last it would ever see.
Twilight Sparkle, her lavender coat gleaming in the morning sunshine, stepped gaily out into the street. Glancing over her shoulder, she addressed the tiny dragon standing in her doorway. "Now Spike, I'm off to help Pinkie Pie set up for tonight's party."
The dragonling's eyes lit up. "Oh! Lemme come along! I'm great at blowing up balloons!"
"Sorry, slugger, but I need you to reshelve all the spellcasting books I've been poring over. The pile on my desk is getting so thick I can't even see my desk any more. Besides, the last time you blew up the balloons you incinerated half of them."
"Yeah," Spike answered, "But the ones that survived became genuine hot air balloons!"
Twilight buried her face in her hoof, then said, "Don't worry, Spike, you'll have plenty of fun when the party actually starts. Now scoot!" The horn protruding from her forehead glowed a dim white, and her front door flew shut with Spike still inside.
Twilight trotted down the main avenue toward Pinkie Pie's house. I hate to shut Spike up indoors on a nice day like this, she thought, But this way I can surprise him at the party with my new spell! He'll really get a kick out of it. All I need is a chance to practice without him watching, and ...
A shadow stole over her. She looked up. This new shadow covered the entire street and every pony-house lining it. Other ponies came out of their homes and glanced around nervously. A few that were already in the street stared straight up, wide-eyed in terror. Twilight followed their gaze and stared straight up into the sun.
A square shadow completely blocked the sun. Square ... or perhaps cube-shaped.
The air boomed, as though the giant shadow were playing the atmosphere like a drum. It hurt to listen. But from out of that din came a voice; a flat, nearly monotone voice that bristled with artificial pings and pops. "WE ARE THE BORG," the voice bellowed. "YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS WILL BE ADDED TO OUR OWN. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE."
The voice died down, leaving behind only the sound of screaming ponies. Panic filled the streets now. Everypony galloped slipshod in any direction it could, running over each other, overturning carts, taking whatever mad flight gripped them on the off chance that maybe, maybe, he or she might escape the coming catastrophe.
But this general mayhem was only the calm before the storm.
A yellow pony with tiny wings on her back, a friend of Twilight's named Fluttershy, found Twilight amid the chaos and galloped toward her. "Twilight!" she said in the almost-whisper that was her loudest voice. "What's happeni—"
She never finished her question. A greenish haze surrounded her, formed itself to her shape, and she vanished.
Twilight gasped, stunned into silence as her friend disappeared. Then, not a second later, another pony on the street shimmered green and dematerialized. Then another. And another. One by one, every inhabitant of Ponyville vanished from the face of Equestria.
And then, it was Twilight's turn.
The world around Twilight warped and sundered, and where Ponyville and its streets and houses had been just a second earlier there was now a hideous metallic grid bathed in sickening green light. It seemed to stretch on forever. The road she'd been standing on was now a harsh metal floor, punctuated by ladder-wells that went down, down, down through a mottled maze of floors and holes. At the bottom of this mile-high grid, she could just catch glimpses of a hazy blue disc stretching from horizon to horizon, specked with continents and clouds.
Equestria! The whole world, there below her! She must have been moved through space, into the giant cube!
As she gazed down on Equestria, too frightened to move, she saw something even more horrifying happening to its surface. Around the perimeter of an enormous chunk of land — was that Ponyville? — green beams lashed downward and carved deep furrows into the dirt and rock. It was hard to judge from this altitude, but the gaping chasms now being dug might be over fifty feet across. When the outline was complete, a wide, whitish beam spread out over the whole of Ponyville and, to Twilight's growing horror, began to tug. The entire town, down to a depth of over a hundred feet, wrenched itself loose from the bedrock and rose into the air toward her.
So these "Borg" had transported her and everypony in Ponyville into their space prison, and were now taking Ponyville with them. Was this what they had meant by "assimilated"?
A two-legged figure stepped out from the shadows in front of Twilight. She gasped. It was clad from head to toe in grotesque machinery, and what little exposed skin it had was a ghastly gray-white. One or two pieces of the machinery on its body buzzed and chittered, like they might pinch her, or worse. She turned to gallop away, only to discover that two more of these metal-clad monstrosities were already behind her. There was no room to run to the left, but maybe she could make it to the ladder-well off to the right ...
And just as she turned right and bolted for the ladder, another metal-shod two-legs climbed up it to meet her.
There was nowhere to turn. Her captors closed in around her on all sides. She tried to scream, but found that her throat had seized up in terror. A metal hand grabbed her, then a second metal arm placed itself menacingly against her neck and ... snikt! Twin talons shot out from the hand and impaled themselves in her neck. The pain lasted less than a second, and the probes withdrew an instant later, but they had done their duty. She could feel her blood buzz, feel her skin begin to ripple. Those probes had injected something into her. Something bad.
She looked down at her quivering legs in horror. Her lavender fur, and the very skin underneath, were growing paler and grayer by the second. Dark purple veins began to stand out, even in patches where no veins had existed before. New bumps protruded ominously beneath her skin. At the apex of her left front hoof, a sheath of dark gray metal sprouted and spread until it wrapped all the way around her leg.
But worse, she started hearing voices. No, hearing wasn't the right word for it. Detecting? Sensing? All she knew was that she was now vaguely aware of a million others — no, a billion others — swimming around inside her head, their voices all gibbering with some elusive singleminded purpose. Were these the voices of the "Borg"? How many of them were there?
She didn't have much opportunity to ponder. Her four assailants grabbed her by the legs and dragged her into another room. Whatever had been injected into her had also left her utterly limp. She couldn't struggle free. She hoped against hope that the effect would wear off with time. Was this what they meant when they had said "resistance is futile"?
As the new room came into view, a piece of furniture in the corner caught her eye. It was a flat metal table, with straps clearly designed to pin down anyone unlucky enough to be on it. And that was where her captors now dragged her. She could only gape with horror, desperately wanting to run but still unable to command her limbs to move. They were going to strap her to that table — what was it, an operating table? A torturer's rack? What new horrors awaited her?
She didn't have to wait to find out. A buzz saw came down and took her left foreleg cleanly off at the shoulder. She didn't, couldn't, so much as flinch in pain. In fact, there was no pain — the nerve deadening must have gone both ways. She watched her limb fall lifeless to the floor. Her foreleg. The constant companion and extension of her will since she'd been a foal. No amount of anesthesia in the universe could get rid of that sickening feeling in her gut as the full reality of this amputation hit her, as the fleeting view of her own foreleg cut off from her body burned itself into her memory. But her view of the leg was quickly obscured by another, mechanical foreleg the same size as the one she'd just lost. An unseen arm lowered this fake metal leg into place and pressed it to the stump where her severed leg had just been. Instantly, metal joined with flesh and her new cybernetic foreleg came to life on its own.
Various pieces of armor plating followed, pressed into place over her fur and grafting themselves directly into her skin. Then came the implant for her left eye. It bore down on her face with terrifying closeness until her left visual field blackened completely ... only to be replaced with what looked like a thermograph seconds later. An artificial eye. The real eye underneath was doubtlessly mangled and useless. Would they destroy her other eye too?
Then, she saw another buzzsaw descending toward her. But this one wasn't aimed for one of her legs, it was aimed for ... for ... her unicorn horn! The focus of what few magic powers she'd learned to master! She couldn't lose her horn, she couldn't! But before she could watch the buzzsaw follow its full, ravening course, another module attached itself to the side of her head and everything went black.
Then, everything went white.
Then, a whole new universe exploded around her.
The collective!
These were the voices she'd heard only vaguely before. But now, she was really and truly plugged in. She could hear them all. Each voice rang out clear as a bell. "Antimatter plasma flow at five point three Planck masses per tick." "Shield harmonic checkin two-times-ten-to-the-forty-sixth Planck times since last, updating rotation." "Planetary surface materials in assimilation pipeline, harvest silicon but discard all carbon." "Species 14864 assimilation progressing." "Sensor sweep still negative for active targets this star system."
Billions of voices all at once, yet there was no confusion. She could follow every conversation simultaneously. It was like the biggest, most beautiful symphony orchestra Twilight had ever heard. Or was she still Twilight? This collective called her sixth of twelve, quarternary adjunct of Unimatrix seventy-two. She could assume this new slot in the grandest-of-grand symphonies any time she liked. In fact, it almost seemed irresistible.
But as suddenly as they'd started, the voices stopped, and the blackness returned.
When Twilight came to, she found herself in a deep crater strewn with boulders, with blue sky overhead. The great metal cube that had been her prison was gone. Had it all been just a nightmare?
She tried to blink away the fogginess that still surrounded her thoughts. Her right eye could blink, but not her left. Then, she noticed the thermograph from her left eye, superimposed over the normal vision coming in from her right. Oh no. She looked down, and saw the artificial left foreleg just as she'd remembered it. This was no dream. It had all actually happened.
But then, how had she escaped? Had her captors just dumped her off here? And where was "here"?
She stood up, grateful that the limpness had faded from her muscles. Her cybernetic leg still felt a bit awkward, but it took far less getting used to than she thought it would. In fact, she decided, if she were going to be stuck with all these cybernetic parts she'd better familiarize herself with each of them.
Her left eye provided a thermal-infrared false-color image of the world in front of her, but could it do anything else? She focused her thoughts on the eye, and — oh! That looked like a command menu. Well, "looked like" was too strong a word. Somehow, she simply knew what options her artificial eye had available and how to activate them, in a way she couldn't articulate with words. According to this command menu, the eye also had a zoom feature; she tried it out, and could make the eye zoom in tight at up to 5x magnification and zoom back out to normal. It also had a heads-up time display, but apparently the Borg reckoned time in Planck time units from some unknown event in the distant past; the numbers were meaningless to her. And ... recording? Her eye could record the images it took? Oh my. Yes, yes it could. In fact, it was recording right now. And it could play back any part of that recording she desired. She backed up 5.4 seconds — what the interface called 10^44 Planck times — and watched. It was only thermal-infrared imaging, but she could still tell she was seeing the same crater rim her eyes had been absentmindedly pointing at for the last half minute, as it was five or six seconds ago.
Twilight felt a sudden thrill. If the Borg had left her eye recording since the moment they installed it, it should have a record of what happened while she was blacked out! She backed up ... farther ... farther ... farther ... there! The point where recording began. She played it back. There, in false reds and yellows and greens, was that buzzsaw she remembered coming for her horn. She flinched just from watching it. And there was the other module — a thin square box, she could see it more clearly this time — passing out of sight as it grafted itself to the right side of her head. She paused playback, and reached up with her right hoof in real time to feel her right temple; sure enough, that same thin metal square was still there, doing whatever it did. From her memory of that moment, she guessed it was some sort of communication module, since this was the moment she became fully plugged in to the ...
To the collec...
She shivered. The collective was still there! The symphony of a billion, the individual threads of conversation all woven into a tapestry with a single will and purpose — she could still tune in to any of them or all of them as easily as ever. But ... something was missing. It no longer sounded beautiful. It was just ... kind of there. It no longer held that irresistible allure to slot herself in as sixth-of-twelve. And now that she reconsidered the possibility, it revulsed her. The collective must have done something to her will, or her desires, and whatever happened that made her black out must have un-done it somehow and given her her will back.
She un-paused the recording. She had to see who or what had saved her.
In the thermal video image, the buzzsaw crept ever closer to her horn. Then, just when it had nearly made contact, the top half of the image got washed out in a blinding white glare. The spherical fringe of that glare looked eerily familiar ... and the pale rays streaming past it ...
Then, she recognized it. Even through the false colors of this thermal-infrared image, she recognized it. It was her horn, casting a spell in overdrive. She'd seen the same image before, on the day she'd earned her cutie mark; the day the sonic rainbow passed over her and she had unwittingly unleashed the full might of her magic. If she remembered everything that happened at that moment correctly ... yes! The right edge of the video playback frame was tinted ever-so-slightly warmer than its surroundings at that very same instant. That would have been the baleful white glow from her remaining natural eye. The few times in her life she'd summoned up one of those full-powered light shows, her eyes had always lit up with the blinding white light of some other world.
She continued the playback. The white glare flared outward until it engulfed the whole frame, and when it subsided a second later, the recording showed only the walls of the crater she was in right now.
Her horn had saved her. Somehow it knew it was about to be cut off, and had kicked in. She reached up and felt her horn, still in the place it had always been, and smiled with gratitude. Her little pointed shaft of keratin must have teleported her out of the Borg cube.
But to where? She was breathing the bright blue air of Equestria, but where on the planet's surface was she? She didn't recognize the jumbled boulders, or the granite beneath her hooves, or the clifflike walls off in the distance. No place in the Everfree Forest resembled this, nor did Ghastly Gorge, nor the Badlands, nor even any of the wastelands in the Frozen North. In fact, no area anywhere on Equestria was known for terrain anything like —
Then it hit her. She was standing in the remains of Ponyville itself.
She tried to imagine the buildings, and streets, and happy ponies that had stood in this spot mere moments ago. Her own library, gone. Fluttershy's critter ranch, and all the critters in it, gone. Rarity's dress shop, gone. The Cutie Mark Crusaders' clubhouse, gone. Sugarcube Corner, gone. The Town Square had probably stood right on top of the very stones beneath her hooves.
No, she corrected herself. This was only bedrock. Ponyville's landmarks had been a hundred feet over her head, level with the top of the crater's walls. Every building, every street, every cart and tree and plot of land were now all up in space, being chewed up and digested by that Brobdingnagian cube.
Speaking of which ... where had the cube gone? It wasn't blocking out the sun any more. In fact, it was nowhere in the sky. Had her captors found what they were looking for and simply fled?
Something caught her eye — not her natural eye, her thermograph. Something at ground level. She froze. There was a heat source not fifty yards in front of her. A heat source about the right size and temperature for a living body....
Nervously, Twilight crept toward the heat source. It was partly hidden behind one of the many boulders scattered throughout this crater. She hoped to high pony heaven that she would see her quarry before it saw her.
With every step closer, she could make out more and more detail on the tiny rounded part of her target that protruded beyond the boulder. There was no question; what little she could see of it was plated in the same knobby metallic exoskeleton worn by those two-legged monstrosities in the cube — and which also now covered wide swaths of her own flanks. Another Borg! She gasped ... and instantly regretted it. Her target heard the noise and jumped out into full view. It stared at her with wide, terrifying eyes.
The gray skin, the implants, the head-to-toe covering with metal and circuitry ... it was a Borg, all right. Twilight crouched and made ready to bolt, then noticed that this Borg was walking on four legs instead of two. And it had a horn protruding from its forehead.
"Nooooo!" this strange Borg unicorn screamed. "Leave me alone!" It seemed to Twilight to be genuinely afraid of her. Twilight puzzled; were there mean Borg and timid Borg? She knew so little about them. The metal plating covered most of its body, but for whatever reason, this one's rump had been left exposed. And now that she looked, Twilight could clearly see an emblem stenciled there. An emblem consisting of three blue diamonds.
A cutie mark!
"Rarity?" Twilight asked. "Is that you?"
"How do you know my name?!" the frightened unicorn screamed. "Stay away from me!"
"Rarity, it's me! Twilight Sparkle!"
Rarity could only cringe. "What? You know her name too? Wh-what have you done with her?"
"No," Twilight shook her head. "Rarity. It's me!" She turned and thrust her exposed rump forward, showing off her own six-pointed red star with the six tiny white six-pointed stars surrounding it.
"Twilight!" Rarity gasped.
Twilight nodded, smiling for the first time since this ordeal began.
Rarity scanned her friend up and down. "Twilight, what have they done to you?! You look positively hideous! Your new color clashes horribly with your mane!"
Twilight chuckled. "This color would clash with anything." She gulped uncomfortably. "You know ... you've turned this same awful color too."
Rarity looked down. "I know. I dread being seen in public like this."
"Rarity," her voice got quiet. "You're alive. You're free. You made it. But you're the only other pony I've seen. I don't know if our friends were as lucky as we were."
Now it was Rarity's turn to gulp uncomfortably.
"So ..." Twilight began, "So, how did you escape?"
"I'm not really sure," Rarity said. "I saw this dreadful buzzsaw heading right for my forehead. I thought they intended to cut off my mane!"
"Your mane?" Twilight barked, flabbergasted. "Rarity, if that was what I think it was, they weren't going to cut off your mane, they were going to cut off your horn!"
"My horn..." Rarity mouthed silently. Her eyes bulged wide. Involuntarily, her head shrank back between her shoulders and turned aside. Then, aloud: "They would do that?!"
"They cut off my leg," Twilight answered. She flexed her left foreleg slightly, letting Rarity hear the whir of its small servomotors. "This one's artificial. But what happened then, after you saw the buzzsaw?"
"Well, I screamed, and then there was this beautiful white light from above, and then ... I was here. That's all I saw."
Twilight nodded. "That's what happened to me, too. It was our horns. They saved us. Somehow, unicorn horns must know when they're in danger of being cut off."
"Did you ..." Rarity paused, not knowing if she should breach the subject. "When my skin turned this ghastly shade, I started hearing all these voices whispering in my head. Am I going craz—"
"That's the collective."
"The which?" Rarity furrowed her brow.
"All the Borg are interconnected in a kind of hive mind. Everything that any of them knows, they all know. That jab in your neck doused you with nanoprobes, to prepare you for full Borg assimilation. One of the things they built inside you was a crude telecommunications receiver. If the assimilation process had run its full course, they'd have installed a full long-range subspace transceiver into your skull, like they did with me. I'm betting you can't hear their voices any more, because your plain old nanoprobe receiver can only pick up short-range omnidirectional repeater broadcasts."
Rarity stared at Twilight in bewilderment. "How do you know all this."
"Don't worry," Twilight reassured her friend, "I haven't become one of them. I'm not going to become one of them. But I have direct access to all their knowledge." She took a deep breath, and seemed to swell with purpose. "It's like the biggest, most well-organized library I've ever seen. Their knowledge goes back hundreds of generations and spans millions of star systems."
Rarity shook her head. "Star what?"
"Um ..." Twilight hesitated. How did you even begin to describe the full extent of the universe, to someone who probably believed that all existence began and ended with Equestria? "I'll tell you later. But there's something even more important about the collective. Its knowledge is constantly brought up-to-date. I can look up events less than ten minutes old on the other side of the galaxy. There's even data about the invasion of Ponyville that just happened. In fact ... hey! I should be able to find out data about what they did to me!"
Twilight's natural eye rolled up into her head, as though she were in a trance. Rarity heard her mumble the odd, disjointed word or phrase. "Unimatrix 72" ... "Species 14864" ... "Sixth of twelve" ... "Chaos" ... "Chaos" ... "Disjunctional failure" ...
Twilight smiled, and her eye lit up with excitement. "Rarity! I think my horn did more than just teleport me. It also burned out a crucial circuit in their transceiver." She thumped the flat square box on the right side of her head with her hoof, for emphasis. "They can talk to me, but they can't control me. Their transceiver normally subverts its victim's will so that she can be completely assimilated, but my horn burned out that circuit before they could suck me in! They weren't expecting it to break!" An almost vengeful look crossed what remained of her face. "I can know everything they know, I can read their every move before they even make it, and they can't stop me."
"Wow," Rarity said. Then: "You're scaring me a little."
Twilight scanned the horizon, planning her next move. "I'm going to look for other survivors. We'll need all the help we can get." She swept her gaze slowly across the crater floor. "This thing they jammed onto my left eye can see heat. That's how I found you. If I can see any other warm bodies ... no, none over there ... can't see anything there ... too many boulders in the way over there ..."
"You know, there's another way to look for survivors," Rarity offered. Then, she took a deep breath and bellowed as loudly as she could: "IS ANYPONY HERE?!"
A couple hundred feet away, a tiny unicorn's head popped up from behind a rock.
Twilight waved her cybernetic leg over her head, to try and get this new survivor's attention. Then she realized this would probably scare whoever-it-was away, and waved her natural foreleg over her head instead. "It's Twilight Sparkle and Rarity!" she shouted. "Come on out!"
A wee unicorn foal, once as white as snow but now a mottled amalgam of grey fur and greyer metal, scampered out toward them. Her rump, too, was exposed, but there was no cutie mark to be seen.
"Sweetie Belle?" Twilight called out as she approached. "Is that you?"
"Twilight! Rarity!" the little one said as she reached them. "I'm so scared! Where did everypony go? Where are we?!"
"We're in Ponyville," Twilight said, "Or what's left of it. I think the rest of the ponies are ..." She looked into Sweetie Belle's big, terrified eyes and nearly broke down crying as another piece of this new reality hit home. "... are part of the Borg now, on that giant cube. I wish I had better news."
"No!" Sweetie Bell half-whispered. "Scootaloo? Apple Bloom? They're gone? But we're the Cutie Mark Crusaders! We ... we can't ..." Her breathing came in rapid gasps. Her gaze darted from side to side, looking desperately for some way out of this terrible news, for some hope that it might not be true. "No, no, no!" She shook her head violently, flinging tears. Then she buried her face in the metal-plated shoulders of Rarity, her sister, and sobbed.
Rarity put her foreleg around her younger sister, and felt the tears well up in her own eyes. Twilight closed in and hugged them both; her one remaining eye was getting blurry too.
A shadow passed over all three of them. Twilight cringed. Oh no, not the Borg cube again! Twilight glared back up at the sun ... but instead of a square shadow, she saw the shadow of a mare with outstretched, feathery wings. It was the most beautiful, most welcome sight she'd seen all day. "Princess Celestia!"
The white mare fluttered her magnificent wings as she braked for a graceful touchdown. Not a single speck of Borg circuitry besmirched her regal form. The sun filtered through her translucent, flowing mane, casting glorious rainbows for yards around. "Twilight Sparkle!" she said, as glad to see her protegé as Twilight was to see her. "You escaped too! I can't tell you how much my heart lifted when I recognized your cutie mark from the sky."
"Princess, I'm so sorry!" Twilight said, and pointed to Rarity and Sweetie Belle. "These were the only two survivors I could find."
Celestia looked down at her favorite student with a bittersweet grin. "This is actually better than I'd feared. I wasn't sure anypony would be left in Ponyville. Twilight, Rarity, Sweetie Belle: You need to know that this disaster wasn't localized. These 'Borg' have abducted ponies from all over Equestria. Canterlot is practically deserted. I escaped because the moment I appeared aboard that metal cube, I dug into my memory and cast a long-range teleport spell that I'd mastered some years back. The good news is, so did my sister Luna. We're both untouched. And I've met several unicorns like yourselves who survived the ordeal with ..." Her face twisted into a scowl. "With modifications to their bodies just like yours." Her eyes grew more desperate, almost pleading despite her regal bearing. "But I have not seen one single earth pony or pegasus pony anywhere on Equestria. Luna's gone off to search Cloudsdale for pegasus survivors, but I'm afraid we have to assume the worst."
Twilight looked up into her Princess's eyes with the one eye she had left. "I might be able to find out where some of them are."
Celestia puzzled. "How? Is there a spell you've discovered in your studies?"
"No," Twilight replied. "The Borg made one big mistake with me. They implanted this transceiver" — she tapped the right side of her head — "Before they tried to cut off my horn. I have access to all their comm traffic, and every scrap of their knowledge base." Her eye rolled up into her head and her brow furrowed as she scanned the collective. "It's hard to look for individuals. Borg don't identify each other by name. Gotta look for drones of species 14864 ... there's one. It's an earth pony, I'm pretty sure. ... Oh heavens. It's Applejack."
"Applejack?" Rarity asked. "She's alive?"
Twilight was grim. "I wouldn't exactly call it 'alive.' She's slaved in to the collective. She's a drone, carrying out the will of the Borg. The real Applejack is buried so deep under that command network that she can't get out no matter how hard she tries. Wait ... there are others ... yeah. Yeah. That drone's Pinkie Pie. ... I think that one's Fluttershy, but I can't see its cutie mark to be sure ... Damn. There are so, so many of them."
"Can you tell where in this 'collective' they are?" Celestia asked. "I mean, where they're physically located?"
"They're leaving the solar system," Twilight told her, "Headed for interstellar space."
Celestia puzzled. "What do you mean? Headed for one of the stars that appears at night? What would they want with a simple point of light in the sky?"
Twilight stared at her mentor in disbelief. "You mean, you don't know? Your highness — Celestia, the stars are distant suns."
Both Celestia and Rarity looked at her incredulously. "You can't be serious, my dear," Celestia said. "The sun is so much brighter!"
"The stars are so far away they appear much dimmer," Twilight explained. "Like how a candle flame looks dimmer if you see it from a mile away than if you see it right in front of your face. The stars are fantastically far away. So far their light takes years to reach us."
"Amazing," Celestia said. "I wonder if any of those distant suns has its own Equestria, and its own Princess Celestia to make its sun rise in the morning! Oh, but that's ridiculous. If any of those stars rose and set over their own world, we would see the star wiggling around in a little circle!"
"Um ..." Twilight scratched the back of her neck with her hoof. Another uncomfortable topic. "That's something I've been meaning to talk to you about. Have you read the works of Nicholas Coponicus?"
Celestia shook her head in bewilderment. "Should I have?"
"It is kind of important to your whole ... sun-raising task. You see, the sun is actually a hundred times bigger across than Equestria. It's millions of miles away. When you make the sun rise in the morning, you aren't actually moving the sun, you're moving Equestria."
"Oh, come on," Celestia glowered down at her.
"I'm not kidding," Twilight continued. "The sun appears to rise, and move across the sky, and set in the evening, because Equestria is rotating on its axis."
Now Celestia looked even more confused. As did Rarity.
"Princess," Twilight said flatly. "Equestria. Is. Round."
Celestia and Rarity looked at each other, then both broke out laughing. "Oh, Twilight!" Celestia said between chuckles. "You really had me going there for a moment! Round! Ha ha! If Equestria were round, you'd fall off unless you stood right at the top dead-center of it."
"Ugh," Twilight groaned. "I see you haven't read the works of Sir Isteed Newton either. Equestria is thousands of miles across. Its mass is what creates our gravity. 'Down' isn't some absolute direction in space, it points toward the center of Equestria from any point on its suface! The ponies standing on the opposite side of Equestria are pulled 'down' in the same direction we call 'up'."
Sweeite Belle blinked, then crossed her eyes in befuddlement.
"Or at least they were," Twilight corrected herself, "Before the Borg abducted them."
Celestia sighed. "This fantastic picture of the universe you've painted is a lot for anypony to take in all at once, even a princess. I'll have to verify it with my own scholars — many of whom are probably aboard that Borg cube right now. So tell me, in this vast universe, do you know how the Borg fit into the big picture?"
"I'm not sure yet," Twilight said, "But I'm learning more about them every minute. Hmmm ..." She focused on the collective again. "I can find no indication that they use magic in any way, shape, or form. But their technology base is incredible. Artificial gravity, microscale electric circuits, teleportation, force barrier projection, attractor beams, faster-than-light travel ... Ugh. It looks like they go from one inhabited planet to the next, abducting its inhabitants and 'assimilating' them into their collective, in some sick never-ending quest for 'perfection.' Then they harvest as much of the native construction as they can for raw materials, and move on. So why did they stop at Ponyville? Why didn't they dig up Canterlot as well? ..." She searched the voices in her mind, then gasped. "They're afraid of us!"
"Afraid of us?!" Rarity asked.
Twilight nodded, still searching, still listening in. "It's our magic. The Borg like an ordered universe, where every action has an utterly predictable reaction. When an enemy uses a new weapon against them, they learn how it works and adapt. But magic is chaotic. It works a little differently every time. They can't adapt. They have no defense whatsoever against unicorn magic. They discovered that the hard way, when they tried to cut our horns off."
"Hmmm." The wheels in Celestia's head began turning. "I wonder if it would be possible to combine our magic and free the ponies they've captured."
"That's what I was just thinking," Twilight said, "But they're already two hundred million miles away. The farthest I've heard any spell could reach was half way around Equestria. Unless you know of a longer-range spell —"
"I don't," Celestia said, and hung her head down. "I've never looked for one. I didn't think the universe was big enough to need a longer-range spell."
"Then we'd have to catch up with them. And there, I don't think our magic can help us. We can make wings to fly in the air, but no spell will let a pony fly into space, let alone outrun a light beam. How the heck can we catch up with ..." Twilight blinked her one remaining eye. "How far?" she whispered to herself. "How to ... how to ..."
Sweetie Belle tugged at Twilight's tail. "Are you havin' a nervous breakdown?"
Twilight didn't flinch. It was as if she didn't notice the world around her at all. Seconds ticked by, and she seemed as rigid as the metal plating her flanks. Then, with a low intensity, she whispered: "Improvised."
Rarity and Sweetie Belle were backing away, slowly, when suddenly Twilight snapped back to life. "We can do it!" she announced. "They're only moving away at warp factor one to save fuel. I found a whole reference library of improvised Borg technology; instructions in case some of their drones get stranded on a lifeless planet, so they can build what they need to survive and get back into space. We can build these gadgets too. All I need is a way to disseminate the instructions to the surviving unicorns, and we can theoretically build anything the Borg can."
"The Borg sound like monsters," Celestia said. "Is their technology safe?"
"Maybe," Twilight said. "Maybe not. But I don't see any other choice. Once the Borg cube reaches the inner comet cloud, they're planning to kick their speed up to warp nine, maybe higher. If we're going to have any chance of saving our friends, we're going to have to build a complete, functioning starship of our own in under a week."
Seated at her makeshift drafting station in Canterlot's library, Twilight put the finishing touches on the twentieth page and then threw her quill down, her jaw muscles completely exhausted. With no fingers, her only options for writing things down were to use her magic horn to move the quill around telekinetically — for which she lacked Celestia's fine control, giving her practically illegible penmanship — or to grab the pen in her mouth and write by moving her head. It was slow going even when she wasn't fatigued. Normally, Spike would take dictation for her. His clawed fingers were perfectly proportioned for writing. Spike. How she missed that little dragon.
Only twenty pages of engineering instructions in the last hour. She'd need to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of such written pages — with labelled diagrams — just to spec out the sublight propulsion system alone. There had to be a faster way.
"You look dismayed, my faithful student," Princess Celestia said as she wafted into the room.
Twilight looked up at her. "At this rate I won't have the instructions ready in time. Do you ... know any spells that might ..."
"Yes," Celestia finished her thought. Her horn glowed dimly, and a book drifted into view from behind her. "I saw you struggling here moments ago, so I got you this." The book levitated in front of Twilight's face, then opened to page 162.
Twilight's face lit up — what natural flesh was left of it, at any rate. "Am I reading this right? It looks like that spell will take any image I can see in my head, and copy it onto paper!"
The princess nodded. "It's from a very old tome. I haven't had occasion to open it in centuries."
Twilight grabbed the book with her own horn's magic, set it down on her table, spread out a blank sheet of parchment to one side, and read the spell's directions. Then she closed her eye, concentrated on one image from the Borg's improvised-technology library, and focused. Her horn shone white for two seconds, then there was a bright flash, and when she opened her eye the text and diagrams she'd seen in her mind were right there on the parchment for all the world to see.
"Yes!" Twilight cheered. "This is exactly what I needed! Oh, thank you, your highness!" She bowed quickly, then turned back to the stack of blank parchment sheets on her table. "I've got a mountain of spec sheets to copy down. I'd better whip up some conversion charts, too — I don't think there are many measuring tools in Canterlot that are calibrated in Planck units."
"I'll send for scribes to make copies of everything you produce," Celestia said. "Then I'll start rallying the troops."
Twilight stood on the balcony overlooking Canterlot's grand courtyard. She had never seen so many unicorns gathered in one place in her life. It was awesome and intimidating. At the same time, the hideous Borg implants marring nearly every face in that crowd reminded her of why she was doing this. On opposite sides of the courtyard, Celestia and Luna hovered above their own balconies, their presence giving official, regal authority to what Twilight was about to say.
"My fellow unicorns," Twilight began. "What we are about to ask you to do will test the limits of each and every one of you. Nopony should ever have to take on a challenge this daunting, but we have no choice. If we're to have any hope of rescuing our earth pony and pegasus pony friends from the grip of lifelong slavery, we have to jump from our current level of pony-powered rustic technology, and become an interstellar civilization, in only a few days. No intelligent species known, not even the Borg themselves, has ever accomplished such a thing."
She paused, and her voice grew more determined: "But we have something no other low-tech species has ever possessed: Complete blueprints for building every component of a starship. I know as well as you do that earth ponies make better builders than unicorns do, and that we'll be asking a lot of you to step outside your comfort zones. It can't be helped. But I think all of you have what it takes to adapt to these new and strange construction tasks."
"Princess Celestia has divided you into teams, according to your talents. Team A, you'll be building the space ship's hull. It has to be completely and utterly airtight; there's no air in space, and even a pinhole will allow our air to escape and doom us to asphyxiation. It also has to be enormous; it must be big enough to hold every earth pony and pegasus pony throughout Equestria with room to spare."
"Team B, you'll be building the warp engine. That's the faster-than-light drive. It's powered by antimatter, the single most dangerous substance in the universe. The engine should be able to provide warp two, which means the ship can fly at up to ten point zero eight times the speed of light. We could go a lot faster if we had a substance called dilithium, but dilithium exists on only a few planets in the galaxy and Equestria isn't one of them. The Borg are still travelling away from us at the speed of light, so a warp engine is the only hope we have of catching up with them."
"Team C, you'll be building the impulse engine. That's going to be our slower-than-light maneuvering drive. We'll need it to take off from Equestria, and when we drop out of warp near the Borg cube. Since we're not planning to leave the solar system, we can also use it as an emergency backup drive to limp home if the warp engine should fail."
"Team D, you'll be collecting the antimatter fuel supply for the warp engine. Antimatter requires an incredible amount of energy to produce in macroscopic quantities, more than any existing energy source on Equestria. But fortunately, the Borg have specs for building a hydrogen fusion reactor that can run on plain water."
"Team E, you'll be rigging up a structural integrity field for the hull. This should reinforce the hull enough to withstand stray micrometeorites, as well as the stress of high-speed atmospheric egress and re-entry. I would have preferred to also build a deflector shield array around the hull for extra protection, but deflector generators look to be a lot more complicated than any of the other gizmos we're going to be building, and I'm afraid we just don't have enough time to master the fabrication techniques."
"Team F, you'll be building the ship's sensor suite. My Borg transceiver can give me constant updates as to the cube's position, but only if I'm in two-way communication with them; that means that so long as I leave my transceiver turned on, they can tell exactly where I am. We cannot afford to let them know that we possess a functioning starship. So, while we're underway, I'll have to turn my Borg transceiver completely off. We'll have to rely on passive sensors that can pick up the Borg cube's warp signature across vast distances, if we're to have any hope of tracking them. You'll also be building a subspace communications transceiver of our own, and an audio-visual display that can show us any sounds and images the Borg send us when we meet up with them. From my sweeps of the Borg libraries, they've only negotiated with another species a few times in history, and every time they used audio and video on subspace carriers."
"Team G, you'll be building the artificial gravity generators. We'll need them to keep from floating around inside the hull after we've left Equestria. More importantly, we'll be using artificial gravity to counteract the tremendous acceleration forces that our impulse and warp engines will produce. Without such inertial dampening, we'd either take months to get up to speed or be squished against the hull's rear wall."
"Team H, you'll be wiring up the interior lights, and the consoles that'll allow us to control all the ship's systems from one central location. And Rarity," she smiled down at her friend, "Those controls are gonna need to be color-coded."
Rarity's eyes lit up with excitement. Finally, after the hell of losing Ponyville and her dress shop and her fur color and most of her friends, she had a chance to shine.
"Team I," Twilight resumed, "You're logistics. We're going to need enough food, and water, and air for a small crew on the way out and a ginormous population on the way back. We're also counting on you to build — or find — whatever storage bins or barrels are necessary hold all these materials on board ship."
"And lastly, this ship is going to need a crew. We're going to need unicorns to work the control panels. A couple of members from every team are going to need to stay aboard with a full tool set, in case any of these strange new systems we're building breaks down in flight and needs to be repaired. And we're going to need lots of magic power. Magic is the only thing the Borg can't defend themselves against. We'll need the most powerful, most versatile magic unicorns among you to provide our fighting force." She raised her one remaining foreleg, indicating the far sides of the courtyard one-at-a-time. "Both Princess Celestia and Princess Luna have agreed to come on this mission. I, too, will have to go along, not so much for my magic as because I'm the only one among you with direct access to the Borg collective."
"We're only going to have one shot at this. If we don't launch on time, or if the warp engine fails, or if we can't muster enough magic to convince the Borg to release their captives, our friends are doomed. So we want each and every one of you to do everything in his or her power to succeed. We're all going to be learning as we go, and there may be more than one right way to finish your task. Use every dirty trick you have, every spell at your disposal, every clever way you can think of to save time. This starship doesn't have to be perfect. But it does have to work."
Twilight stepped back a few paces. She'd motivated this crowd as much as she could. All it needed now was one last regal touch.
Princess Celestia fluttered forward. She let her horn glow bright white to bring all eyes onto her. "Princess Luna and I fully endorse Twilight Sparkle's plan. You each have your assignments. Now I, Princess Celestia, hereby decree: let's go save our friends!"
Twilight Sparkle collapsed on the castle floor beside her drafting table, her mane a shambles, her one natural eye bloodshot. And still, yet another unicorn with a request: "Page 4 of the antimatter containment unit assembly instructions says to use a 'tool 45853.76' on the sprocket seal, but none of us in Team B can find the specs for how to fab one."
Shakily, Twilight pushed herself up into a sitting position, then used her left foreleg — the artificial one, the only limb that wasn't exhausted — to pull another sheet of sheepskin into position. The last of the parchment had run out hours ago. She looked up section section 45853.76 in the Borg's general tool reference, engaged her horn for what must have been the two thousandth time, and flashed her thoughts into printed reality. The page was smudged and a little blurry, but it was the best she could do. "Scribe," she croaked, and another royal assistant trotted in, took the page, and galloped off to make copies. She squeezed her eye shut and rubbed it, trying to stay conscious.
Princess Celestia came in to check on her. Again. "You can't keep this up, my faithful student. You've got to sleep some time."
Twilight glared at her princess and mentor. "You know I can't do that. You saw how many new pages I've had requests for in just the last hour alone. Every minute I sleep is a minute some new construction snag can't get resolved."
"The teams can work around those snags," Celestia tried to soothe her, "Or if they can't, they can work on some other part of their project until you can get them the new page. You just need to have faith in them."
"Faith," Twilight snorted. "I had a feeling from the beginning that this would be impossible. The Borg have assimilated other spacefaring species, and I took a look at how long it takes some of them to build a starship. A construction project of this magnitude typically takes months, and that's assuming that all the parts and tools already exist and that the species has had experience building the same ship in the recent past. Let's face it, we're biting off way more than we can chew here."
"Well if you take that attitude," Celestia scolded her, "If you expect failure, then you will fail. Again, faith!"
Twilight growled, "You know, Celestia, you can be really condescending sometimes."
For an instant, Celestia's eyes flashed at this offense. Then she regained her regal bearing and said, "You're really tired. You need to sleep. The reason you're saying such a thing is because you're horribly cranky right now."
"No it's not, Princess," Twilight spat out the word. Her eye narrowed. "I've never forgiven you for how you handled the whole Nightmare Moon crisis."
Celestia was taken aback. "Forgiven me?! Equestria was saved! And you learned the power of friendship!"
Twilight shook her head. "You did everything in your power to put Equestria in as much peril as possible. You knew Nightmare Moon was coming back! You could have moved the five Elements of Harmony to Canterlot for safe keeping, but instead you let them rot in the ruins. You knew you'd need the power of friendship, right? You could have lined up an army of ponies who already had friends, and had that power at your disposal in an instant! You knew that when Nightmare Moon appeared she would use her powers to deceive, and you could have warned everypony. But what did you do? You relied on me — a reclusive bookworm with no friends at the time — to know exactly what to do, and to find a group of friends that could pass each and every one of Nightmare Moon's tests. Did you even stop to think, for one moment, that if any one of us had failed to come through, your whole plan would come crashing down and Equestria would have been plunged into everlasting night?! Have you even considered the consequences of everlasting night?! Plants need sunlight to live! Moonlight isn't enough! Every tree and bush in Equestria would wither and die in a matter of weeks, and then everypony would starve. Is that how you look out for the best interest of your subjects, Your Majesty?! Good gravy! If Rainbow Dash had been just a little more interested in the Shadowbolts, your plan fails. If Pinkie Pie had been just a little more scared of the Everfree Forest, your plan fails. If Applejack hadn't noticed Dash and Fluttershy swooping into position when I was hanging onto that cliff, your plan fails. If even one single event had not gone off as expected, your plan fails!"
Celestia hung her head in anger and grief, then blinked with understanding. "And now," she said in a low voice, "You are in the same position I was. To save your friends from the Borg, your plan also requires everything to go just right."
Twilight crumpled into a heap and sobbed. "Yes!"
Celestia covered her faithful student with one wing. "You're right. I did make some bad decisions. In hindsight, there were a lot of things I could have planned better, and I'm lucky that events played out as well as they did. Some of the grievances you brought up just now have also crossed my mind, and I've kicked myself more than once for not having thought of them beforehand. But I'll let you in on a little secret. Every single decree I make as Princess carries with it the same burden you're feeling right now. There's not a day that goes by where I don't second-guess myself, where I don't wonder 'would things be better now if I'd decided the other way on this, or that, or the other royal order?'. Even after a thousand years of rule, a thousand years of seeing the consequences of my decisions play themselves out on the stage of Equestria, even with all my experience it still comes down to making one educated guess after another and hoping I get it right."
"Holy cats," Twilight swore. "You mean every time I take command I'm going to get this, this same knot in my stomach that I feel right now? And it's never going to go away?"
Celestia smirked. "I've gotten used to it. In fact, that knot in my stomach is almost comforting. It lets me know I'm fully involved, and that the decision matters. In fact, I get worried when I don't feel that knot in my stomach, because it usually means I've missed something important."
Twilight stood back up, took a long breath, and stared at her drafting table.
"And now, I have one more royal decree for you," Celestia said. "Go. To. Sleep. Trust your people to continue their work for the next several hours without you."
"But what if —"
"That's an order. No interruptions. I'll post a guard to make sure you're not disturbed. Don't worry. If there's a real emergency, I'll wake you. Now go."
Twilight bowed, in royal deference and, internally, in relief. "Yes, your highness." Then she turned and walked to the adjoining alcove where her bed lay.
Twilight could hardly believe her ears. "The fusion reactor's running already? That's a full day ahead of schedule!"
"It's a good thing, too," the unicorn at the head of Team D said to her. His artificial right foreleg looked like he'd been using it for a tool rack. "Team B says they're going to need extra antimatter for some 'ground tests,' whatever that means."
Twilight nodded. "So long as you can still make enough to get the whole ship there and back, that's all that matters."
"Frankly, I'm surprised at how well the antimatter containment unit's worked so far," he replied. "I was expecting everything to blow up the moment we cranked out that first antideuteron."
Twilight clicked her tongue. "Find out who it was that made the containment unit so safe, and put him or her on the short list for the crew. We don't want any antimatter leaking out and annihilating when we're underway."
She trotted away to inspect the next team. Celestia had been right. The teams could handle themselves on their own pretty well. Or at least, they could in the short term.
It was the ugliest thing Twilight had ever seen. It looked like a clam, if a clam could be a quarter of a mile long. Melted lumps of black metal scarred every inch of its surface. "That's our hull?!"
Shining Armor, the leader of Team A and Twilight's older brother, nodded. It had pained her to see her brother in Borg plating, and with an artificial left hind leg, but at least he still had both natural eyes. "She might not look like much, but she'll hold air."
"I can't see any hatches," Twilight noted. "How are we supposed to climb aboard?"
Her brother grinned. "Look closer."
Twilight squinted her one natural eye. "Oh my goodness," she pointed, "Is that the hatch?"
"No no, that's a welding seam. The hatch is to the left."
Twilight could see nothing. The whole area to the left of the welding seam looked smooth, except for the edges of the metal lumps. Then, amazingly, one of the lumps swung outward, and a unicorn stepped out through the new opening. "Warp core housing diameter is within, uh, ten-to-the-thirtieth Planck lengths of spec," the egressing unicorn announced.
Twilight raised her remaining eyebrow. "I never would've thought to look for a hatch there."
"There's a second hatch on the inside of this one," her brother said. "It looks a lot more like a normal door. We opted for a double-layered hull design, to minimize the odds of a leak. Oh, and one of the spec sheets you copied down had instructions for making rubber-rimmed metal sealing pads, that can be slapped into place over a small hull breach by hand. I figure we'd better stock the ship with about 30 of 'em, just in case."
Twilight was thoroughly impressed. "Good thinking! Um ... and before I forget, I have a favor to ask."
"Oh?"
"I'd like you to be on the crew. For your magic."
Shining Armor frowned. "I'd need to appoint somepony to take my place as captain of the royal guard while I'm gone. Canterlot still has other enemies besides the Borg, you know."
"I know," Twilight said. "But you also have a power no other unicorn posesses. Princess Celestia is honing all of her best protective spells for the mission, but ... you're the only pony who can create an omnidirectional barrier around something as big as this hull. The Borg's weapons are terrifyingly powerful, and I don't know if Celestia can hold them all off herself."
Shining Armor took a deep breath. "If that's what you need, then you'd better assign my wife to the crew too. You know how much stronger my barriers get when Cadance and I combine our magic."
Twilight smiled. "How could I forget? All right, consider it done. I'm sure Princess Celestia will approve."
"I'm just a little worried, though," her brother admitted. "All three Princesses, aboard a type of vehicle nopony has ever built before, chasing down the worst threat Equestria has ever faced? If the worst happens to them, there won't be any princesses left in Canterlot."
Twilight nodded, and suppressed a shudder. "I ... I'd better go check up on the other teams," she said, and turned to go just a little too quickly. Bad enough the lives of my friends depend on my whole plan going exactly right, she thought. Now I'm risking the future of Equestria too.
"No no no!" Twilight shook her head violently. "You've got to move the impulse driver coils either farther back, or farther forward. They generate a subspace field of their own, and we can't have it overlap with the subspace bubble created by the warp engine!"
Team C's leader neighed. "Now hold on a minute. The warp engine is Team B's job, not ours. Why shouldn't they move their driver coils instead!"
"Because," Twilight explained, annoyed, "Warp engines don't have driver coils. You can't control the radius of their subspace bubble; it depends entirely on the mass of the object they're trying to move."
"Not according to page 246 of that warp engine spec you copied down, it doesn't!" The unicorn reached into a saddlebag with its mouth, and pulled out a rumpled sheet of parchment that had obviously seen much use. "Warp coils, it says here, use plasma generated by the warp core to create a subspace displacement field, which can be — I repeat, can be — fine-tuned for shape and size."
Great, Twilight thought. Even their own technology is internally inconsistent. "Okay. You win. I'll talk to Team B and see if they can make their subspace bubble a little bigger. If it's tuneable like page 246 says, this shouldn't be an issue. I just ... I could have sworn they'd said their subspace bubble is of fixed dimension."
"What do you mean, your subspace bubble is of fixed dimension?!" Twilight asked, rolling her eye in frustration. "Page 246 of the warp engine spec states that —"
"We can't use page 246," Team B's leader interrupted her. "It contradicts page 387 in at least 3 places. Now that we've gotten our hands on some antimatter and have had a chance to generate a nonpropulsive warp field, we've pretty much confirmed that page 387 is the correct model. Maybe page 246 would hold sway if we had that 'dilithium' stuff you mentioned; but in a pure, unmoderated deuteron-antideuteron warp reaction, the subspace bubble is absolutely fixed in size and shape. I'm just glad that this fixed size and shape are big enough to accomodate that ginormous hull." The unicorn pointed to Team A's creation, the quarter-mile bumpy clam too big to fit inside Canterlot.
Twilight sighed. "All right. I guess I'll have to give Team C the bad news." She turned to go.
"Ms. Sparkle, wait," the team leader seemed apologetic. "I'll send one of my couriers to tell them instead. Don't worry about it. You've got bigger fish to fry."
Twilight wrinkled her nose. "Fried fish? Ew, no thanks. But ... now that you got me thinking about food, I think I'll go make myself a daffodil sandwich. Carry on!" She trotted away. Now that she thought about it, she hadn't had anything to eat at all since the Borg invasion. She'd been too preoccupied. She just hoped those Borg nanoprobes hadn't messed up her stomach the way they'd messed up her skin.
All in all, despite the setbacks, things were looking better than she'd feared. Luck willing, they might even make the construction deadline. But one unknown still bothered her: The Borg relied on microcircuit computers, which would be totally beyond anypony's ability to fabricate for at least the next several years. Without computers to run her ship, all the hardware would have to be controlled manually. She could only hope that her crew would be up to it....
Twilight scanned the fifty nervous, determined faces before her. Even their Borg implants couldn't hide their resolve. They were the ship's crew, chosen for their magic powers or their hands-on knowledge of a piece of the ship's hardware or, in a couple of rare cases, a chance-demonstrated prowess that might come in handy when operating the consoles. She stood between them and the massive hull parked outside Canterlot, which now bristled with sensors and impulse exhaust manifolds and the protruding cylinder of the warp engine.
"Mares and gentlestallions, the starship is complete. Our fuel and supplies are loaded, and every construction team has cleared us to climb aboard. I'm sorry we couldn't test it out more. I know this is all new and strange technology, and that nopony has ever travelled into space before, and I really really wish we had time to take this space ship out for a nice long shakedown cruise; but the Borg are less than a day away from the inner comet cloud. We'll all have to learn the ship's ins and outs as we go."
"There is one last detail, though. Just before a ship first leaves its dock and sails out into the seas, it's customary to christen her with a name. Our 'ship' of space deserves the same honor." She looked to her princess and mentor, standing at the far left of the crew. "I had originally wanted to name her the HMS Princess Celestia; but you could imagine the confusion that might cause." She snickered. "I mean, couldn't you just see it? Something really really bad happens in the thick of battle, and I call out 'Hey, Princess Celestia!,' and I mean the actual princess 'cause she's part of the crew, but you guys can't tell whether I'm talking to the princess or the ship, and you think I'm addressing the whole crew of the HMS Princess Celestia, so you listen up when you don't have to and it breaks your concentration and —" The impatient rolling of eyes in her crew and their uncomfortable sidelong glances at one another told Twilight that, maybe, she was getting juuuuust a wee bit off topic. "Uh ... " She cleared her throat. "Sorry. Had a little Pinkie Pie moment here. Anyway. I toyed with a number of different names that invoked royalty or grandeur or toughness or pomp, but I think what we really want is a name that reminds us all of our mission." She picked up a bottle of champaigne with her artificial foreleg, and held it high in the air by the neck. "So, I hereby christen this ship ... the HMS Rescue!"
She smashed the bottle across its metal hull to make it official.
It was a simple, almost trite name. And not a pony present thought any bit the less of it. The cheers from their throats and the thunder of their applauding hooves was deafening.
"Now let's get on board. Two at a time, please, the hatch isn't very wide."
Slowly, the mob of unicorns organized itself into a pair of lines and filtered in through the hatch. Twilight accompanied Rarity near the back of the line, with Shining Armor and Cadance entering next-to-last and Princesses Celestia and Luna bringing up the rear.
"Everyone all inside?" Twilight asked, peeking out through the open hatchway to make sure. "All right, seal the hatch and start the air circulation pumps."
A few seconds ticked by, then the unicorn responsible for life support found her station and worked the controls. The hatch slowly swung shut and locked itself into place with an ominous clank. As soon as the echoes died away, they could all hear a faint whirring sound. "Air circulation is up and running, CO2 filtration looks good."
"Excellent," Twilight said. "All right, everypony, get to whichever part of the ship you've trained for. The Rescue is a big ship, so don't be afraid to ask somepony if you can't find your way. Bridge crew, let's get to the front." And hope the main control panels on the bridge were all wired up correctly, she thought.
The bridge, like every other cabin on board, had bare-metal unfinished walls and a bare minimum of furniture. At least the stall-seats looked like they'd been welded down properly, though it was hard to get a good look — the lighting was from a few point sources directly above and left the base of each stall and console in shadow. Twilight took the center stall, facing the great black rectangle at the very front. "All right, Amethyst Star, turn on the sensor suite. Let's see how the viewscreen looks."
To Twilight's artificial eye, the black rectangle flared from a flat single-temperature surface to a mottled multicolor image. To her natural eye, though, it looked as black as ever. "Uh oh," Twilight said, "That output looks like its designed for Borg eyes. Can you make it display data in the visible spectrum?"
A couple of clicks and toggles came from the sensor station to her left, then the screen suddenly popped into a beautiful image of Canterlot. A chorus of "Ooh!"s came from the entire bridge crew. Twilight smiled with relief. "That's more like it. Looks like we're seeing the view directly ahead."
"I can adjust the magnification, too," Amethyst Star offered, and twisted a knob. The display zoomed in on one window of the castle, then zoomed in tighter until a single dust spec on the bottom windowsill filled the screen.
"Uh, maybe we'll use that when we're out in space, and everything's far away," Twilight said. "But for now, let's keep it down to actual size."
"Good idea," Amethyst replied, somewhat embarrassed, and zoomed back to 1-to-1.
Twilight pressed the push-to-talk stud on her armrest, then spoke into the pickup: "Attention crew." The words boomed deafeningly from every wall speaker in the ship: "ATTENTION! CREW!" She released the stud instantly. "Oops, maybe I should turn down the volume."
Her big brother shrugged. "At least we know the P.A. system works."
She tried again, this time at a level that was only reasonably loud. "Attention crew. We're about to try out the artificial gravity controls. You may want to brace yourselves, and stow any tools that aren't on a short tether." She released the P.A. stud. "Okay, Rarity, give us a little extra gravity straight down. Point one gee only."
"Hmmm," Rarity said to herself. "I remember picking out these colors. I made the floor-gravity control a darling emerald green, and the forward gravity knob the most subtle pastel blue I could find. Oh, they do look so pretty right next to each other! Point one gee to the floor, coming up!" She turned the green knob a tiny bit clockwise, but she hadn't anticipated what the added weight would do to her foreleg. Her hoof slipped, and accidentally cranked the dial over a full half turn before she was thrown to the deck. Everypony's weight suddenly doubled.
"Ugh," Twilight collapsed flat on her stomach. It felt like somepony was sitting on top of her. "I said point one gee!"
Rarity struggled back to her hooves and finally managed to reach the green knob again. Instantly, nearly all their added weight vanished. "I must say, I think I'm going to need some sort of stall harness to keep me from falling over. But we're steady at an added zero-point-one gee now."
"Excellent. Now let's try going to minus point one gee."
Rarity braced herself this time, and turned the green knob a tiny bit counterclockwise of center. Her stomach turned slightly, as though she were descending in an elevator, but down was still definitely toward the floor. "Point one negative gee," she announced.
"Now the most important," Twilight said, "Forward gravity. Give us point one gee to the front."
Rarity nullified the green knob, and tweaked the pale blue one. She caught herself falling forward. The whole bridge suddenly looked like it had been built at an angle. She felt queasy and had to take a few deep breaths. "Uh," she read the miniature readouts on her panel, "Forward grav plating is holding steady at point one gee."
"All right," Twilight said. "Cancel all artificial gravity. But if at any time on this trip you feel us getting heavy, or floating away, or falling toward the front or back of the ship, turn those knobs until everything feels normal again. Don't wait for my orders. Use your horn to turn the knobs if you have to. The comfort and safety of the crew are in your hooves."
Rarity raised her eyebrows. "My hooves? Oh dear. I'll try not to let you down, Twilight dahling."
Twilight turned her attention to the station directly in front of and below her. "Lemon Hearts, what's the status of our impulse engine?"
The blue-maned unicorn in front of Twilight read the numbers off her console, then consulted her written reference sheet. "Looks like everything's within the normal range. They're ready to go."
Twilight smiled. "All right, then," she took a deep breath. "Let's get the HMS Rescue in the air. Give me one point one gee of negative external gravity."
"Negative ship weight, coming right up!" Lemon replied. She worked the controls. Inside, nopony felt any heavier or lighter; but the entire hull shuddered, and the viewscreen showed Canterlot scrolling slowly downward.
Outside, the gathered throng of unicorns gasped as one. This "space ship," this gigantic metal clamshell, with their princesses and some of their friends inside it, was floating into the air! They'd all seen unicorns levitate some pretty heavy objects in the past, but what this ship was doing was beyond anything anypony had ever done before. It rose higher, and higher, and still higher, until it had cleared the tops of the highest spires in Canterlot. And still it rose!
"We're half a mile above ground," Amethyst called out.
Twilight nodded. "Take down these coordinates." Her natural eye rolled up into her head for a moment. Then: "127 point 7 mark 34 point 9, distance 9.63 times ten to the forty-eighth Planck lengths. Got it?"
"Got it," Amethyst confirmed, writing down the numbers with a levitating quill pen just to be on the safe side.
"Got it," Lemon Hearts also replied, having entered the numbers into her own console.
"Good," Twilight said. "Those are the current coordinates for the Borg cube. It's time for me to turn off my transceiver, before we get any farther from the ground." She blinked once. Hard. As one, the billion voices in her head all ceased. Her universe went eerily quiet. "Whoa." She shook herself back into focus. "All right, I've just gone dark. They won't be able to track me any more, but that cuts both ways. Once we're out in space, we'll need to point a sensor sweep near those coordinates to find them. Their warp signature should stand out against the background comets and stars like a beacon."
She paused, as much for effect as to ready herself for the next challenge. "Okay, Lemon, angle us straight upward and make ready to engage the impulse drive at one-tenth power."
The ship tilted like a pinwheel until its nose pointed to the sky. Even without the engines, Rarity had to adjust forward gravity to -1 and floor gravity to +1 just to counteract the new angle at which they were suspended in the air. There were a few lurches and bumps along the way, but Rarity was getting the hang of it.
"Nicely done, Rarity," Twilight complimented her. "Now when the engine engages, the forward gravity generator should be slaved in to the ship's accelerometer and make the adjustments for you — but in case there's a problem I'll need you to counteract our acceleration, and fast. We don't want to end up squished against the back of the hull."
Rarity nodded, her hoof hovering just above the blue forward-gravity knob.
Twilight keyed the P.A. system one more time. "Mares and gentlestallions of the HMS Rescue, make ready to leave Equestria."
Twilight glared into the bright blue sky on the viewscreen. "We're about to plow through a lot of atmosphere very quickly. Rarity, can you switch on the Structural Integrity field?"
Rarity put her hoof on the sapphire-studded topaz switch and pressed it upward. A tiny trickle of power drained from the ship's main generators into emitters secured at various points around the hull. "The structural integrity field is operating at one hundred percent, dahling."
"All right," Twilight said, not taking her eye off the display. This was it. "Lemon Hearts, engage the impulse engine."
"Impulse go," Lemon half-whispered, and punched the key.
The ship lurched violently upward. The crew felt themselves thrown toward the back of the ship for a split-second, then the feeling subsided. But as the impulse engine ramped up to one-tenth power, the crew were again pulled back, then again released, then pulled back, then released, over and over about once every two seconds. It was like being on a rocking ocean ship in a storm, and more than one crew member felt the nausea rise in their throat.
Twilight shook her head. "Ack, there's a delay between the changing acceleration and the forward-gravity autoadjustment. Rarity, can you smooth this out?"
Rarity was on the floor rolling back and forth with each wave. "I told you I need a harness to hold me in place!"
Twilight looked at her as though she were a puppy having trouble with a new trick. "I thought you knew. Vinyl Scratch, strap her in."
A gentle nudge came from behind Rarity, coralling her back in her stall-station. The DJ unicorn smiled at her; somehow even with her Borg implants, Vinyl Scratch made her purple sunglasses look good. She grabbed a strap dangling from one edge of the stall, pulled it over and around Rarity, and locked it into place on the other side. Rarity was now wrapped in a webbing guaranteed to keep her in one place.
"Oh," Rarity said, embarrassed, "There's been a harness here all along, hasn't there." She grasped the forward-gravity control knob and tried to get into the rhythm of the surges. After three tries, her hooves found a pattern and the ship's rocking became significantly milder.
The brief sideways buffeting as they passed upward through the jet stream was another matter.
Twilight watched the blue sky on the viewscreen slowly darken, then fade to purple, and finally fade out entirely, replaced by a myriad tiny pinpoints of light. The stars! And so much brighter than from the ground! Not one of them twinkled, even the slightest bit.
"That's the first hurdle," Twilight announced. "We are in space. Are we leaking any air?"
Amethyst Star scanned her instruments, then gasped in alarm. "Yes. Yes we are! There's a slow pressure drop."
"Can you tell where? Localize it?" Twilight asked.
"Uh ..." Amethyst began, trying to make sense of the bewildering array of data in front of her.
A speaker next to Twilight buzzed. It was speaker 2, her two-way intercom with engineering. "Twilight," a voice said, "This is engineering. We've got a minor hull breach near the aft end of starboard."
"I'll bet that's our leak," Twilight said to Amethyst. Then, to speaker 2: "Can you fix it?"
"We should have a sealing patch on it in — there, that's got it."
Amethyst looked at her instruments. "Looks like the pressure drop's gone."
Shining Armor smiled. "I told you those sealing pads might come in handy."
Twilight snorted, then the voice on speaker 2 resumed: "The breech looks like a stress fracture. When Team E put up the structural integrity emitters, they must have missed a spot. Fortunately, they tell me they brought some spares, and can get an emitter hooked up on this spot in five minutes. Just ... be gentle on the ship 'til then."
"Acknowledged," Twilight said. Then she pressed the main P.A. stud and spoke into the mike, "Attention crew, be on the lookout for any other areas of the hull that are missing a structural integrity field emitter. Our hull is going to be under even more strain when we start the warp engine." She released the stud and turned to her bridge crew. "In the meantime ... now that we're in space, Amethyst, I need you to look for warp signatures at the coordinates I gave you earlier. Let's hope our sensors are good enough to spot a Borg cube six light-days away."
Amethyst twiddled her controls and studied her readouts. The crude displays Team F had cobbled together — or was it Team H that had turned the sensor data into a pony-readable form? — were mostly streams of numbers with one or two oscilloscope-like vector displays. Interpreting them was more than a little tricky. Looking for a warp signature was a matter of searching for one specific pattern of neutrinos ... against a backdrop of stars that were also sending out their own neutrinos. If she'd had to look in every direction, it might have taken her all day. But — "Hey hey, wouldja look at that!" she blurted. "I think that's them. Bearing 127 point 77 mark 34 point 82." She looked at Twilight. "Nearly the same coordinates you gave me before!"
"Excellent!" Twilight said. "Lemon, point us on that course. Keep the impulse engine steady at one-tenth power until they get that structural integrity emitter installed in aft-starboard."
"Sure thing," Lemon Hearts replied, and touched her controls. The ship swung slowly on its axis, and the stars on the viewscreen scrolled to one side, until they were pointed directly at the coordinates where the Borg cube should be. At this distance, it would be totally invisible ... unless —
"Amethyst," Twilight mused, "Could you increase the magnification again?"
"Sure," Amethyst replied, and cranked the knob clockwise. The stars zoomed outward and new stars replaced them, as though they were hurtling through the galaxy at millions of times the speed of light. Near the center, each dim pinpoint of light got steadily brighter and farther apart as new dim points of light replaced them. Any one of them could have been the metal cube they were after. "And that's maximum," Amethyst said, almost apologetic.
Twilight nodded. "I shouldn't have been surprised. They're 96 billion miles away. There's no way we could resolve details at this distance, unless we had a telescope as big around as this whole ship."
"Engineering to Twilight," speaker 2 said. "The new structural integrity emitter's installed and running. We've also got the hull breach welded shut. From what I hear on the grapevine, it looks like that was the only part of the hull Team E missed. We should be good to go."
"All right!" Twilight said, both to speaker 2 and to the bridge crew. "You heard 'em. Let's get ready to engage the warp drive!"
Lemon Hearts swallowed hard, and nervously scanned her instruments.
Twilight tried to reassure her. "I don't have to tell you, I'm a little worried too. All that antimatter we're storing, in a special containment unit that keeps it from so much as touching the sides of its own container? We're going to be deliberately sending it on a collision course with normal matter. The energies released will be terrifying. But if it works like it's supposed to, we'll be flying faster than light itself."
"Outrunning a light beam," Rarity mused. "I wonder what Rainbow Dash would say about that if she were still here."
Twilight stared with gentle intensely at her friend. "You can ask her yourself, when we've rescued her tomorrow." She turned. "Amethyst, keep tracking that warp signature. Let's not lose our objective. But ..." She glanced at the nameless starfield on the viewscreen. "Can you show us what's behind the ship?"
Amethyst frowned, then found the right control and flipped it. Instantly, the viewscreen flared into brilliance. An enormous blue-white disc filled the display, slowly shrinking. Its right edge was covered in a crescent-shaped shadow, leaving the remaining disc in a gibbous phase. Everypony on the bridge marvelled at the sight.
Twilight took a breath and said, "That's Equestria."
"Oh my," Rarity said, looking on in awe, "It really is round!"
"I've," Celestia began with a little catch in her throat, "I've never seen it from this high up. I can't even make out Canterlot from here."
"We're about to get a lot higher," Twilight said. "Lemon Hearts?"
Lemon tore her eyes away from the viewscreen and checked her instruments one more time. "Uh, it looks like the warp engine is as ready as it'll ever be."
Twilight nodded, then steeled herself. "Engage warp speed."
"Warp go," Lemon said with determination, and clicked the lever forward.
This time, there was no sense of acceleration or rocking. A hum made a quick upward glissando, and Equestria fell away in the viewscreen. Within a second, the planet had shrunk to a tiny disc only two degrees across and kept on shrinking. An even tinier gray disc wafted into view from one side of the frame, and joined Equestria dwindling in the distance.
"What's that gray speck?" Shining Armor asked.
Twilight glanced sidelong at Princess Luna. "That's the moon."
"That little thing?" Luna asked, incredulous. "That's what I've been raising in the sky every night? But it's so small!"
"It's two thousand miles across," Twilight told her. "You know, actually, I'm surprised we're seeing anything behind us at all. We should be going so fast the light can't catch up with us." She turned to Lemon Hearts. "We are at warp, aren't we?"
Lemon nodded. "Holding steady at warp factor one."
"Mmm hmm, that's light speed." Twilight squinted, then shrugged. "Maybe visible-light sensors work differently than our eyes do."
In less than a minute, Equestria was nothing more than a starlike point of pale blue light. "All right," Twilight said, "Viewscreen forward again."
Amethyst flipped the control again, and the screen showed the same familiar starfield dead-ahead. None of the stars had moved. The stars were so fantastically far away that even the ship's prodigious speed wasn't enough to shift their relative positions.
"We're going as fast as light," Twilight said, "But we need to go faster. From what I remember of the Borg's specs, the integer warp speeds represent local minima in the power requirement curve."
"Could you say that in English?" her older brother said.
"It means it's going to take a lot of power to get to warp two, but once we're at warp two it should be easy to sustain it. Well ... relatively easy, at least." She spoke into speaker 2: "Engineering, are you ready to make an attempt on warp two?"
"The warp engine's doing okay for now," a voice on speaker 2 replied, "It's actually kinda neat, watching the plasma pulsing through it. No problems so far, but that's all I can tell you."
"All right. Lemon, take us to warp two — slowly."
Lemon Hearts put her hoof to the lever and eased it forward. The background hum slowly rose in pitch and volume. "Warp one point two," she called out. The hum increased. "Warp one point four." The floor began to shimmy. "Warp one point six!" The whole ship was visibly shaking now. She tried to read the wiggling instruments. "Warp one point eight!" The shaking increased, hammering each unicorn in the hooves and the flanks.
"Cap'n!" speaker 2 blared. "The engine is overloadin'! It canna take much more o' this!"
Twilight puzzled. "Why are you speaking with a Scottish accent?"
"I don't know," speaker 2 answered. "I just ... it seemed ..."
And suddenly, the shaking ceased.
"Warp factor two!" Lemon announced. "And holding steady! Power consumption is back down in the green range."
"Yes!" Twilight cheered. "We're cruising at 10.079 times light speed! At this rate, we'll catch up with the Borg in sixteen hours." She turned to her bridge crew. "All right, folks. Let's spend the next two hours learning as many of the ins and outs of ship operations as we can. Then, bridge crew 2 takes over."
"Bridge crew two?" Rarity asked.
"Sure. Why do you think Vinyl Scratch is standing behind you? She's watching your console over your shoulder, for when she takes your station. We're going to be at warp two for 16 hours, and someone's got to mind the store the whole time. Most of us, myself included, have been up all night making final preparations for the mission. I want my main bridge crew bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when we engage the Borg, not worn down from working like a workhorse for a day-and-a-half. It'll be dinner, a long sleep, then breakfast, and if we plan it right you'll be back here at your stations two hours before we meet up with the Borg." And if the Borg don't see us coming and run for it, she thought.
"In the meantime," Twilight continued, backing out of her stall-station, "I'm going to go check out engineering and the atmospheric plant. ... So that I can get a feel for the rest of the HMS Rescue in action, you understand. If you need me, just call for me over the P.A. system."
"Oh," Princess Celestia spoke up, "My faithful student, there's something I'd like to know before you leave."
The Borg were no longer lost among the stars on the viewscreen. Now, without even having to go to maximum magnification, the cube shape was unmistakable — and grew larger by the moment.
For Twilight, the past sixteen hours had felt ... strange. She'd grown used to having the Borg's entire knowledge base at her beck and call over the last week. To have that grand library turned off, and have to rely only on her memory and her written notes for information, almost felt crippling. Perhaps this was how the collective had gotten started in the first place. She could certainly see how an early civilization that had invented such technology would consider it a monumental blessing. And when the combined knowledge, thoughts, and feelings of an entire species were all updated and shared each instant, who could tell what emergent properties such a meta-mind might have?
It might even have been a thing to strive for, if not for that tiny circuit inside their transceiver — officially called circuit 121840 by the Borg — that her horn had had the good sense to burn out. Subjugating the subject's will to the collective! What sick and twisted motivation had driven the Borg to invent such a circuit? Why had they seen fit to install it in each and every individual, even those born among their numbers?
Twilight didn't know. And as they inched ever-closer to the Borg cube containing every earth pony and pegasus pony on Equestria, she couldn't afford the luxury of finding out. "We'll be caught up with them in one minute," she said. She glanced around the bridge. "Are all of you ready?"
Shining Armor nodded, and glanced at his wife. "I'm ready."
Princess Cadance looked back at her husband. "I'm ready."
Princess Celestia stared off into infinity. "I'm ready."
Princess Luna's eyes narrowed on the cube on the viewscreen. "I'm ready."
Lemon Hearts patted her warp drive control lever with her hoof. "And I'm ready."
Twilight closed her eye for a couple of seconds. "We're going to get one shot this. We can't give them the opportunity to throttle up to high warp." She glanced at the chronograph by her left flank. "Forty seconds ... thirty seconds ... twenty seconds ... ten seconds...." The Borg cube loomed large on the viewscreen, even as Amethyst reduced the magnification further and further. "Five, four, three, two, one, In range! GO!"
A black cloud blossomed from Luna's horn and lanced forward, passing through the front wall as though it didn't exist. The black magic raced across the intervening megamile of vacuum, enveloped the entire Borg cube, then drained through the openings in its hull and at last found what it was seeking. Luna announced, "Got 'em!"
With a flick of her hoof, Lemon Hearts yanked the warp lever all the way back. HMS Rescue fell out of warp instantly. At the same time, Shining Armor and Cadance touched their horns together, and sent out a shimmering pink-magenta bubble that expanded to surround the entire starship's hull. Finally, Celestia's horn flared into white brilliance and fed its own power into the enormous ship-enveloping bubble.
"The Borg's warp drive is now suppressed!" Luna said, maintaining her black magic.
Amethyst looked at the Borg cube filling the screen, and her eyebrows shot up in surprise. "And we're down to one-to-one magnification! We ended up less than ten miles from the cube!"
"Fantastic timing, Lemon!" Twilight said. With a burst of pink from her horn, she reactivated the transceiver stuck to the side of her head. The billion voices, terrible and welcome at the same time, flooded back into her thoughts. "I'm in touch with the collective again. They seem ... confused."
A light blinked on Amethyst's console. She read the label. "What does 'carrier wave' mean?"
"It means they're sending us a message," Twilight said. "There should be a switch near that indicator light for opening two-way communications."
Amethyst scouted around, then brightened and said, "Oh, there!" She flipped the switch.
The image on the viewscreen switched from their own sensor image to a hazy view of Borg drones encased in dimly-lit metal. The Borg were sending video. From the speakers around the bridge came the same flat, quasi-monotone voice they'd heard booming in the air when the cube had arrived in Equestria's atmosphere a week earlier: "WE ARE THE BORG. RELEASE THIS CUBE'S WARP REACTOR."
Rarity gasped and shivered in fear at the voice.
Twilight's eye narrowed, and she answered: "We are from Equestria, the planet you just invaded. Return the inhabitants you've abducted!"
The reply came swiftly, and with equal flatness: "YOUR DESIRES ARE IRRELEVANT. RELEASE THIS CUBE'S WARP REACTOR."
A wide-angle cone of pale white light shot out from the cube toward the Rescue. It parted like a river flowing around a rock.
"That was their tractor beam," Twilight said. "Nice work, big brother! Looks like they can't grab onto us through your barrier."
Shining Armor shook his head. "That wasn't me, or Cadance. That was Celestia."
Twilight raised her one remaining eyebrow at her mentor.
"It's a protective spell I thought we might need," Celestia said, her horn still glowing white. "Looks like I was right."
The Borg tractor beam shut off, and in its stead a narrowly-focused cylinder of intense white coherent light stabbed out from the cube. It struck squarely on the pink barrier surrounding the ship and tried vainly to carve a hole into it. A butter knife would have stood a better chance of carving a hole into a diamond.
Shining Armor smiled. "That was me."
The cutting beam stopped, and a green glowing missile streaked from the cube and smashed into the barrier. No effect. Three glowing white quantum torpedoes followed. Again, direct hits on the barrier; and again, no effect.
"Your weapons can't affect unicorn magic," Twilight told her attackers, "And you can't adapt to it. Return the inhabitants of Equestria, and we will allow you to leave this solar system."
Then, the connection simply ... went dead.
"Hmmm." Twilight rubbed her chin with her remaining natural front hoof. "They stopped talking to us. No ulimatums, no refusals, no acquiescence. I don't know what to make of that reaction."
Rarity was still shivering with fear. "Wh-what if they teleport some of those dreadful drones of theirs aboard? They could beat us up, or muss my mane!"
"Don't worry," Twilight reassured her. "Unlike unicorn teleportation, their transporters don't work through deflector shields. My brother's barrier is enough like a deflector shield to keep them out."
Celestia looked concerned. "If they can't get in, and they can't hurt us, then I fear they may be trying to wait us out."
Twilight's heart sank. "Uh oh. I was ... really hoping we might be able to negotiate with them." She sighed. "Stalemate. Well, if they can play the waiting game, so can we. Right, crew?"
"Uh ..." Luna began.
Twilight turned to look at the dark horse princess. A thin bead of sweat was forming on Luna's brow. Luna said, "It's not as easy for me to hold their warp engines as I thought it would be. I can't sustain this indefinitely."
Twilight gritted her teeth in despair. She searched the Borg collective for signs that they might, maybe, give in; but the collective chittered with the same remorseless resolve as ever. "So if we can't break this stalemate, we lose."
And if we lose, two-thirds of the ponies in all Equestria lose.
There has to be a way, Twilight thought, her stomach tied in knots again. There has to be a way! She scoured the voices of the collective, grasping at straws, desperately searching for anything — anything — that might offer a way to salvage this mission and save her friends.
"I'm ..." she said with a shaking voice, scanning the worried faces of her bridge crew, "I'm open to suggestions."
"You tried bargaining with them," Celestia said. "You offered them escape. Is there anything else they want, that we could give them in exchange for the ponies?"
"No," Twilight shook her head. Her eye stung with welling tears. "They've got what they want: fresh drones from a new species." She scowled. "Our biological and technological distinctiveness. It's just ... the collective is so different from any creature on Equestria. Every member of the collective is in the most intimate relationship you can imagine, and yet they're utterly devoid of any feelings. They don't even try to understand outsiders, except by assimilating them. The simple concept of making friends is utterly beyond their comprehension."
She stared at the metal cube on the viewscreen. "Maybe I need to show them the power of friendship." Then, to Amethyst Star: "Open a communications channel with the cube. Use the same subspace frequency they did when they talked to us."
Amethyst pushed a few buttons, and the viewscreen once again switched to an indistinct image of the cube's interior. "They've accepted. We're live."
"Occupants of the Borg cube," Twilight began, "To you, the local inhabitants you've recently assimilated are merely drones of species 14864. But to us, they're something more. They are our friends. We don't live in a collective like you do. Each of our minds is an island, each physical body an individual. Each of us can only interact with our surroundings through five narrow biological senses. But just like you, we are utterly dependent on one another for our mutual survival and prosperity. We form emotional bonds, attachments with the individuals that make the greatest difference in our lives. We can become so familiar with each other that we and our friends form a little collective of our own, a collective based not on high-bandwidth data links but on personal interaction and the knowledge accumulated over a lifetime. When you took our friends from us, you severed that collective. You caused untold suffering and loneliness, not only in the unicorns you left behind but in the minds and hearts of each and every pony you turned into a drone. For their sake and ours, please, I beg you, consider releasing them from your collective so that they may rejoin ours."
"Well put," Celestia whispered to her. "I couldn't have said it better myself."
The reply came swiftly and as flatly as ever: "YOUR DESIRES ARE IRRELEVANT. YOU WILL RELEASE THIS CUBE'S WARP REACTOR. WE WILL NOT RELINQUISH THE RECENT DRONE ACQUISITIONS, NEITHER SPECIES 14864 NOR SPECIES 14865."
Speci... What?
"Who is species 14865?" Twilight asked them.
The transmitted image on the viewscreen changed. Now, it clearly showed one Borg drone. Like the other drones, it stood on two legs; but this one was much smaller. "THIS IS SPECIES 14865," the speakers said. Even through the metal plating on this drone, the sickening off-gray skin, and the gadgets attached to its head, the body plan was unmistakable. Its head was enormous in proportion to the rest of its body. Tiny fangs protruded from its mouth. And sticking out the back, behind its two stubby legs, was a tail.
A scaly tail.
Twilight screamed. "SPIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE!"
She didn't know exactly what happened next. Only her bridge crew saw it. Her horn and her natural eye both burst forth in blinding white light. The next second, she was ten miles away, inside the Borg cube and right next to the drone that had once been Spike. She didn't notice the metal walls around her. She didn't notice the other drones who turned and marched toward her. She didn't even notice the metal plating and faraway look in Spike's eyes. All she saw was the light of her life, the little dragon that had been her companion since before she first stepped foot in Ponyville, in the thrall of Equestria's worst enemy. There was no planning. There was no thought. There was only Twilight's raw, protective instinct. She threw her forelegs — natural and artificial — around Spike, her horn flashed once, and she and Spike reappeared on HMS Rescue's bridge.
A chorus of gasps rose from her bridge crew.
"Spike!" Twilight shouted as she came back to her senses. "What have they done to you?!"
Spike only stared at her with dead eyes. "I am eighth of ten, quinary adjunct of Unimatrix seventy-two," he said with no emotion. "Return this drone to the cube."
"Spike," Twilight half-whispered, almost pleadingly desperate, "I know you're in there somewhere. I know you can hear me. Follow my voice. Can you get any kind of message to me at all?"
The tiny drone only stared blankly at her and said, "Resistance is futile."
Twilight's heart sank. She shut her eye and shook her head. Hard. She couldn't shut off the thermograph that had replaced her left eye, though, and it showed Luna getting uncomfortably warm. The dark princess was beginning to pant. The strain of suppressing the cube's warp engines was getting to her. And all Twilight had to show for her efforts was a puppet of the collective that had once been Spike. The Borg's hold on him was absolute. No force of will, no matter how strong or how pure or how dedicated, could ever hope to get past circuit 121840.
Circuit 121840!
In a mix of hope and desperation, Twilight quickly scanned Spike's body and located where the Borg had installed circuit 121840 on him. It was at the top of his spine, where the vertebrae met the skull. She concentrated, and the wavy lavender-pink glow of her normal magic surrounded her horn. Staring intently, she focused her magic into a wire-thin tight beam, and aimed it directly at circuit 121840. It hissed. It sizzled. Then, it popped.
Spike blinked.
He looked up into Twilight Sparkle's hardware-clad, expectant face, and gasped as the full force of what just happened finally hit home. "Twilight!" He jumped up and threw his little arms around her neck. "It was horrible! I wanted to tell you, I wanted to stop them, but I couldn't, I couldn't!"
Twilight fell to her knees and held him as tightly in her forelegs as she'd ever held anyone. Tears of joy streaked down her face. "I know, Spike, I know! I thought I'd never see you again!" She held him at forelimbs' length to take him all in. He looked awful, metallic, gray, disfigured by the weight of all that circuitry — and the light in his eyes was the most beautiful thing in the world. "Oh, Spike! We're going to get you home."
She looked up at the cube on the viewscreen, then released her young dragon friend and stood. "We're going to get everyone home." She listened in on the collective again, trying to separate the voices in the cube from the rest of the galaxy-wide chatter. Then she pressed the P.A. stud. "Attention crew. Attention all unicorns! I need every one of you to focus all your magic through me. I'm going to redirect your powers at the control circuits in the Borg drones."
Shining Armor balked. "That cube's nearly two miles on a side. There must be over a hundred thousand drones on board. How are you going to pick out the ponies from all the rest of them?"
Twilight's eye began to glow white as one unicorn after another began feeding its magic into her horn. She took a deep breath, and answered: "I'm not."
As the magic from all over the ship coalesced in the horn on her forehead, it glowed every color of the rainbow at once. It was more raw power than she had ever handled, and it nearly overwhelmed her. Only her determination kept her focused. She strained to keep her targets in her mind, to coordinate the massive energies she was about to loose with the data about the cube's occupants being fed to her by her transceiver. And at last, she fired her shots. 130,000 narrow lances of magic force crossed the ten-mile gap to the Borg cube, each targeted on a separate circuit 121840. Circuits sizzled and popped like popcorn, over and over, in wave after wave throughout the floating city-in-space that housed the Borg. For most drones, confusion reigned, as the collective that had controlled them since they were old enough to crawl ceased its grip on them. For the ponies, they awoke from a week-long nightmare of seemingly-inescapable slavery.
Twilight, panting from the effort, listened to the collective for confirmation. "That's done it!" she cheered between breaths. "Every Borg on that cube is free of the collective's grasp!" She turned to her brother. "Shining Armor, open a hole in your barrier. Quickly, before any of the Borg regain control!"
Shining Armor wasn't sure what she had in mind, but he didn't argue. A circular space opened in the pink-magenta bubble outside, the size of a house's front door.
Twilight focused on the collective again, and found the command pathway she was looking for. In the Borg's current state of confusion, she hoped they wouldn't be able to plug this gaping hole in their security. She sent one overriding command to the cube: Beam every member of species 14864 into the big empty space inside the locals' ship.
Instantly the Borg's transporters came to life, and ponies laden with Borg implants started appearing in flashes of green light. They appeared so fast, in clusters so large, that it was impossible to count them all. The vast, once-empty cavernous interior of their quarter-mile-long space ship was soon filled to the brink with every earth pony and every pegasus pony of Equestria. Dazed and confused, some sobbing, some cowering — but all alive and all free.
Twilight made a pass across her data feed one more time, to make sure nopony was still left aboard the cube. "That's all of them!" she said. "Close the hole in the barrier."
"You got it," Shining Armor said, beaming with pride at his little sister. The space in the bubble around their ship irised shut.
"Amethyst," Twilight said, "Can you make the viewscreen show the inside of our ship? I want to see the ponies in the hold."
Amethyst Star smiled. "So do I." She fiddled with a couple of switches, and a sea of ponies filled the viewscreen. Their faces would be unrecognizable; but their manes and cutie marks should still —
"Rainbow Dash!" Rarity called out. "There she is, in the back!"
"Applejack!" Twilight said, pointing with her artificial foreleg. "Or ... or maybe that's another member of the apple family. But there's Fluttershy, off in the far corner! And ... and there's Pinkie Pie!" She watched the pink-haired Borg-implant-clad pony bound up and down, and more tears of joy came to her eye. "Even Borg implants can't keep her down!"
"And, hey," Shining Armor piped in, "Is that Scootaloo?"
"Where?"
"Next to the gray one!"
Twilight looked at him with a jaundiced eye. "They're all gray."
"Er ..."
"Well, anyway," Twilight regained her composure, "There's one more piece of business we need to attend to. Amethyst, open a communication channel with the Borg cube again."
Amethyst closed the circuit, and this time, a single Borg drone appeared. It looked lost. "I am third of six," it said, still monotone but with an uneasy edge to it. "What do you want?"
"Broadcast this message to all drones throughout your cube," Twilight demanded. "You know how to do that."
Without a word, the drone complied, and now over a hundred thousand tiny drone images all vied for space on the ship's one viewscreen.
"Your collective no longer gives you orders," Twilight said, "So you'd better listen to me instead. You may eventually figure out a way to plug yourselves back in to collective control. You may choose to do so, or you may choose not to do so. But if and when you do, remember this: This entire solar system is off limits to the Borg. Leave, and do not ever return. If any Borg vessel so much as sticks its nose inside of the inner comet cloud again, we will use our unicorn magic to destroy you." She turned to Amethyst. "End transmission."
The comm went dead. The viewscreen once again showed only the view ahead.
"Okay, Luna, release their warp engines."
"Are you sure?" the dark princess asked between heavy breaths.
Twilight nodded. "They're no longer a threat."
Luna stopped the flow of black magic from her horn, and collapsed from exhaustion. On the screen, the Borg cube vibrated slightly, then shot off into the distance at warp nine — directly away from the ship and from Equestria. It dwindled to a point and was gone.
Twilight pressed her P.A. stud one more time. "Crew," she announced. "We did it. We did it!"
The thundrous applause of hooves on decks shook the entire ship. Everypony on the bridge stared at her, beaming in admiration as they joined in the applause.
"Let's go home!" she concluded, and released her P.A. stud.
"Lemon Hearts," Twilight said, "Turn the Rescue back around and take us to Equestria." She remembered their last time going to warp, and added, "But mmmaybe we should keep it down to warp factor one this time."
Canterlot's main reception hall was packed to the rafters. So many ponies ... so many colors.
Twilight had been right about the earth ponies being better builders. Within an hour of being underway toward home, Applejack had studied the engineering diagrams they'd brought with them and come up with a way to reinforce the warp core. Twenty minutes later, HMS Rescue made a smoother transition to warp two than they'd ever thought possible. By the time they made atmospheric re-entry and landed on Equestria, various earth ponies had concocted procedures to remove the nanoprobes from their blood and divest every piece of Borg hardware from their bodies.
Some Borg implants, though, couldn't come off. There was no magic or science that could regrow a lost limb or a lost eye. Twilight's left leg and left eye were still artificial, and looked ... different against the natural lavender of her fur. The Borg transceiver was still stuck to the right side of her head, too, but that was ... voluntary. She wanted to be able to track the Borg should they ever decide to call her bluff. At least, that's what she told herself. In truth, instant access to the biggest library in the unverse was too tempting to resist. You might even say that resistance would be ... futile.
In fact, a few of the earth ponies had elected to do the same.
But contact with the collective had grown slower and more sporadic as the cube distanced itself from Equestria. The transceiver's range was incredible, but it wasn't infinite. Twilight, and a handful of the earth ponies who still had their transceivers, had spent their time scouring this mental library for technologies that had nothing to do with starship construction, and copying down every important scrap of data they could find. Who knew what the potential of any of the Borg's inventions might be, five or ten years down the line?
And now, less than two days after they'd landed, she stood proudly on the same dais she'd been on so long ago. The last time she'd been here, Princess Celestia had ceremonially commended her and her five closest friends for overcoming Discord. The throng facing her today beamed with a gratitude even greater than she'd seen on their faces back then. She looked up into the eyes of her princess expectantly.
"Mares and gentlestallions, fillies and gentlecolts," Celestia addressed the crowd, "We are gathered here today in appreciation of perhaps the greatest act of heroism Equestria has ever seen. Twilight Sparkle," she turned slightly to keep both Twilight and the crowd in view, "You've been my student for several years. I've watched you grow and mature, and I always knew a great destiny was in store for you. But I had no idea just how great you would become. I watched you shoulder the greatest burden I have ever seen anypony take on. I watched you take the reins of leadership, and turn Equestria's darkest hour into its finest. It's no exaggeration to say that two-thirds of the ponies standing here today owe their lives and freedom to you. And thus, it is my great privilege to bestow upon you the highest award any Equestrian can receive: the Canterlot Medal of Honor!"
The princess levitated a blue ribbon around Twilight's neck, from which dangled a metal disc bearing the Canterlot coat of arms and the simple Latin word VIRTUTE.
The crowd erupted into thunderous applause, stomping their hooves like it was going out of style. Cheers rose up that threatened to drown out even their applauding hoofbeats. Then, jumping up and down in place, Pinkie Pie called out, "Speech! Speech!" Then Applejack joined her: "Speech!" Then Rainbow Dash: "Speech!" And soon, the noise of the cheers had given way to a wall of sound echoing "Speech!"
Twilight blushed, and made ready to speak. The crowd noise spontaneously died away, accompanied by the occasional "Shhh!" to let her be heard. She cleared her throat. "I've never been more proud to be a unicorn than I am today. Two weeks ago, if you'd told me that unicorns who'd never picked up a hammer in their lives could build a working space ship, I would have said you were crazy. Every unicorn in this room, and nearly all of those who aren't, stepped up to an impossible challenge, and every one of you came through. We built something nopony had ever built before. We risked our lives by stepping on board an untested vehicle filled with high explosives, then hurtled ourselves through an airless void at an implacable foe. And we did it," she pointed at a throng of earth ponies and pegasus ponies in the audience, "Because our friends were worth saving."
"But, I'm afraid our job isn't over yet. We have only glimpsed the tiniest sliver of the true extent of the Borg. This one cube chose to leave us alone, but there is no guarantee they won't be back. We need vigilance. We need to build a network of orbiting sensor platforms that can cover every corner of the sky, to search for warp signatures and give us early warning should the Borg return. We need to take all this new technology that we've only just begun to grasp, and hone it into tools that will give us every edge against the Borg we can get. I'm not asking for another big push, like we undertook to get the HMS Rescue into space. I'm asking for a long term plan, for us to integrate this technological development into our daily lives. For us to become the same kind of high-tech species the Borg are, without becoming the Borg ourselves. This is not a plan for a week, or a month, or even a year, but for decades. Perhaps centuries. Your children and your grandchildren are going to inherit a world vastly different from the one we grew up in. We need to make sure that that world is a better one. A world in which we can all sleep soundly in the knowledge that the Borg can't abduct us in the middle of the night. Today, in this room, we celebrate our triumph. Tomorrow, let's start building that new world."
She stepped down, and there was more applause. The crowd began to break up into little groups as royal caterers started filtering among them with hors d'oeuvres. Princess Celestia fell into step beside her and said, "Let's go mingle." She lowered her voice. "That speech was a bit of a downer, don't you think?"
Twilight shrugged. "It had to be said. I didn't think I was going to get another opportunity to address so many ponies at once."
Celestia smiled. "Given what I've seen out of you the past week, I think you might be pleasantly surprised. You're a natural leader."
Twilight looked down as the two of them made their way across the room. "I don't know if that's a good thing, or bad."
"Twilight!" Rarity came trotting up to her. "I must see this new medal of yours up close!" She stared at it, and her smile vanished. "Why, it's so plain! It's just a bronze disc stamped with one word and a single design. No gemstones, no scrollwork, no shimmering aura of magical light. It hardly seems worthy of your accomplishments!"
"For once, I agree with Rarity," Applejack said, joining them. "You'd think Equestria's highest award would at least have a couple o' rhinestones on it."
"The medal of honor isn't jewelry," Celestia explained. "What it represents needs no fancy decoration. Only a few ponies in history have ever been awarded this medal. Its design stretches back to a time before even I was born."
Rarity gasped. "But you're over a thousand —"
"That's right," the princess said. "Canterlot has some truly ancient traditions."
Twilight piped in, "The only way Celestia could have honored me any more than this would have been to make me a princess." She snorted. "Can you imagine that? Being turned into a princess by some sort of magic spell? Hah! Princess is a title of royalty. The only ways to be a princess are to be born a princess, or to marry a prince. You can't just grant someone princesshood like you were handing out a promotion!"
Princess Celestia looked away uncomfortably.
"So," Applejack changed the subject, "What're y'all plannin' to do with that gigantic space ship you've got parked outside Canterlot?"
"We could use it to learn from our mistakes," Twilight offered. "It's a prototype, built by unicorns. I'm still impressed it could fly at all. It's got working sensors, working control panels, a working structural integrity field, and working artificial gravity. Any one of those technologies probably has a thousand uses we haven't thought of yet. And ... well ... who's to say we won't decide to build more starships?"
Applejack balked. "What on Equestria for?"
"Well, there's a great big universe out there. We can't explore it with magic, but we can explore it with warp drive. Maybe we'll get lucky, and one of the nearby star systems will have a planet with that mysterious 'dilithium' stuff on it. Then instead of exploring at ten times the speed of light, we can explore at a thousand. We might even decide we want to build a whole exploration fleet to systematically observe all our stellar neighbors up close. We could call it ... star fleet!"
Applejack and Rarity stared at her, then glanced at each other.
"Okay, you're right," Twilight said, "That's a stupid name."
"Besides HMS Rescue," Celestia said, "We've also got an enormous fusion reactor that we built to supply the ship with antimatter fuel. Now that the mission is over, what are we going to do with such a large power plant?"
Twilight furrowed her one remaining natural eyebrow in thought. She thought of the challenges Equestria faced in its immediate future. Rebuilding Ponyville. Caring for and harvesting crops that have gone unattended for over a week. Building this new technological infrastructure. It seemed like more burden than blessing. Then she thought of all the various and sundry automated machines she'd seen Borg plans for, some of which could perform the labor of a dozen ponies and all of which required outside energy to run. She envisioned armies of automated tractors plowing fields and reaping crops. She envisioned motorized trucks hauling lumber instead of pony-drawn carts. She thought of all the ponies could do when freed from back-breaking drudgery, and the answer was clear.
"Simple," she said. "We use the power plant to uplift the world."