Chapter 1

It was a long flight between the stars, and Zenith slept the whole way.

She dreamed of drowning in her coffin. Hour after hour she hammered her hooves against the unbending lid, in darkness so thick it must have been ink rather than water filling her lungs. The faint rhythmic sound of a drum, like the beating of a machine’s heart, kept her company during her endless death.

Mostly Zenith’s thoughts were too disordered to understand the dream or her circumstances in it. There was only a perpetual sensation of panic and dread, a gnawing horror that coiled in her heart like a worm. The dream had no purpose – there was no role for her to play in it, nothing to understand, no puzzle to solve, no secret corners of her soul to unbare. It was simply the sensation of dying, as best as any living pony could ever hope to grasp it, repeated forever.

Mostly, Zenith hated it.

The transition between dream and reality was hard to pin down. At some point a seam appeared in the darkness, a rime of faint orange light around the coffin’s lid, accompanied by a new sound: motors, draining away the suspension liquid bath. Weight returned, and she felt the perforated grill of the cryosleep sarcophagus’s floor pressing against her back. When at last more air than fluid remained in the pod, she took her first true breath in years. Every alveolar sac in her lungs shrieked as the raw, dry air abraded them, and she fell into a wracking, sputtering cough that lasted for minutes.

A normal waking sequence, in other words. Her sleep-fogged mind remembered that she had been here before – she was a professional and ought to act like it, dammit – and latched onto that thought like an anchor. This was fine. This was perfect. She just needed to focus and stop retching and everything would be okay.

A polite little light appeared on the inside cover of the coffin. She bashed it with her hoof, and the lid disengaged with a hiss-click-squelch. Little runnels of suspension fluid dripped on her like rain as the lid folded up and out.

“Good morning, Zenith,” a neutral, genderless voice greeted her. “You are still in suspension shock. Focus on breathing normally. You are safe, and everything is—”

“Skip it,” Zenith rasped. Her own voice sounded strange to her ears, alien. Probably there was still fluid in her inner ear. “I’m guh... good. I’m good.” She swallowed. Clots of fluid oozed down her throat. Thankfully non-toxic. “Where are we?”

“The nearest star is Gliese seven-one-zero, approximately thirty-four light-days from our current position,” the ship’s AI continued smoothly. “At our present course we will pass no closer than seventeen light days from its heliosphere.”

“Okay. Great.” She spat out a wad of fluid and carefully sat up. The cabin hadn’t changed – the AI kept it clean of dust, and there were no spiders to spin cobwebs in the corners. She could have slept for one night or a century and nothing in the ship would change. “So why did you—no, wait. Activate personality simulations. I need to talk to a pony.”

There was a microscopic pause, followed by a sudden blast of noise, a discordant buzz so abrupt and loud that Zenith shrieked and jumped halfway out of the pod. After a moment the adrenalin faded, and she recognized… kazoos?

“Happy belated Birthdays!” an exuberant, bubbling voice blasted from the hidden speakers, ten decibels louder and diabetically oversugared. A popping staccato shook the room, and a blizzard of holographic confetti rained down, covering every horizontal surface like snow. Zenith gawked at the mess, her headache and burning lungs forgotten.

“You know, for a 74-year-old mare, you don’t look a day over 27!” the voice continued, followed by a giggle. “What’s your secret, huh? Is it the suspension goo? I bet it’s the suspension goo. Twilight’s always telling me, ‘Pinkie, don’t eat the thermostatic suspension fluid, Zenith needs that so she doesn’t die during cryosleep!’ But I bet Twilight just wants to keep it for herself, and that’s why alicorns live forever!”

Right. Birthdays. Dates. What year was it? That should’ve been her first question, dammit. She was slipping. Zenith grunted and stepped carefully around the mass of suspension gear cabling, dormant instrument panels, low-light navigation arrays, semi-sentient sensor blisters and a thousand other things all competing for space with the single living pony aboard the ship. She squeezed along a rack of environmental suits, leaving smears of fluid all across their faceplates – it would evaporate with no residue in a few hours. The holographic confetti dissolved beneath her hooves, and she finally wormed her way past a narrow bulkhead and into what passed for the ship’s living area. Approximately two square meters, it was just large enough for her to stand upright and turn around. The shower/auto-hygiene unit took up half that space, and she wriggled into it with an exhausted huff. Barely four meters and she was out of breath. She slid the door shut and turned the water on full-blast.

“You okay in there, Zenith?” Pinkie Pie’s muffled voice came from outside the shower pod. The AI was just being polite – it could materialize sounds anywhere in the ship, including inside her skull, if it wanted. “Do you need a moment? I can give you a moment.” A moment passed. “How about now?”

“Sorry, Pinkie, I’m fine.” Zenith stuck her head under the spray and let it peel back her mane. The hot water sluiced away rivers of the thick goo that coated her body, and steam filled the little space instantly. Her pale-yellow coat began to emerge from beneath the sickly grey slime. “Just gimme a sec—a minute. Give me a minute.”

Fortunately, the AI knew when to be literal, and when to give a pony a fucking break. At least ten minutes passed before Pinkie tried again.

“Hey.” A pause. The voice was quieter now, more intimate. Right there in the shower with her. “Feel better?”

“Yeah, sorry.” Zenith batted at the controls with her hooves, eventually managing to shut off the spray. A gust of warm air began to flow down from vents in the ceiling, slowly drying her coat. “Still waking up, you know?

“Aunt Pinkie knows alllllll about that. You just let me know when you’re ready!”

“I’m ready now.” Zenith squeezed back out into the cabin. The AI had tidied up during the shower – the confetti was all gone, along with any traces of suspension fluid. The cryosleep pod was retracted into its storage position, replaced with a much more comfortable acceleration couch. The lighting was still dim, and would be for a few more hours until her eyes finished waking back up, but for now she could see just fine. She settled on the couch and pulled up a data pad. “How long?”

“Just a hair under 24 Terran years.” The field of stars filling the viewport vanished, replaced by a long series of solar calendars. “Or 26 if you’re catching up on Hearthswarming cards for Equus. By the way I have a bunch of Hearthswarming cards for you to sign when you get a chance.”

“They can wait.” Zenith waved away the calendars, pulling up a map of the local stars. “Why did you wake me? “

“That is definitely a question for Twilight! Hang on a second, let me—” The voice cut off, followed by the sound of a muffled scrum: hooves banging, wings flapping and muttered whispers. When the voice returned it was a new pony, still chipper, imbued with enthusiasm, but also more dignified. Responsible. “Good morning, Zenith. I hope you slept well. Sorry about Pinkie – I was trying to get a word in edgewise but you know how she can be.”

“It’s fine. Catch me up?”

“Approximately 197 hours ago, I detected a faint, repeating radio signal emanating from somewhere in the Gliese system.” Twilight Sparkle’s voice took on a didactic, lecturing tone, colored with just a hint of smugness. Zenith always suspected that the AI enjoyed simulating Twilight most of all, and put a bit more effort into her performances. “It wasn’t worth waking you over, but I did divert course a bit to bring us closer. With a better signal and some complex analysis—” Twilight’s voice dripped with glee, here; Zenith could practically hear her smiling, “—I was able to identify it as a White Distress Beacon, using codes that were common about thirty years ago.”

A frisson ran up Zenith’s spine. The temperature in the cabin seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant. “Is it her?”

“If it were just the beacon, it would be a good sign. But there’s more.” Twilight paused, and the viewscreen shifted. Labels appeared around the stars, including the brightest one in the center – Gliese 710. Around it, hyperbolic wave patterns sprang into existence, highlighting a path through interstellar space toward the star. “We crossed a wake signature four seconds before I woke you up. It’s a match for the Phrygian.”

Whatever else Twilight might have said went unheard. A quiet buzz replaced all other sounds, and the world went grey except for the viewscreen, which seemed to expand until Zenith’s whole world was that single yellow dot in its center: Gliese 710. She drew in a weak breath, then another and another. The cabin swam around her.

“Zenith?” Concern filled Twilight’s voice. “Are you alright? Do you need me to get Fluttershy? Hang on, I’ll—”

“No. I’m fine.” She closed her eyes and focused on the steady in-and-out of her breath. “Lay in a course for Gliese. How long will it take?”

“Nine days at full drive. Do you want to sleep for it?”

She shook her head. “No. I need to stay awake. I need to get back in shape.” She lifted a foreleg and grimaced at the sight – it was slender as a twig, most of the muscle withered away by decades of sleep. “Have Rainbow Dash start a workout plan. I need to be ready.”

“It’ll be tight,” Twilight cautioned. “Even with supplements. You were asleep for a long time.”

“Yeah. Better hurry, then.” Zenith looked back at the viewscreen. Like a magnet, Gliese seemed to draw her eyes. Though it was just pixels on a screen, nothing in the universe seemed more real to her than that little spot of light.

The Phrygian. After so many years, she had found her sister’s ship.

At last. I’m coming, Nadir.

* * *

Gliese 710 lay well outside surveyed space. Long-range telescopic observation by the Terrans had catalogued the star’s mass and spectral type down to a few degrees, and based on its wobble they knew it had at least three gas giants the size of Neptune or larger, but beyond that scant primer Zenith had little in the way of warning for whatever lay ahead. Dragons, for all she knew.

Nine days passed in an exhausted blur. The acceleration couch vanished when she wasn’t looking, replaced by a horrid torture device that the ship’s AI, in Rainbow Dash’s voice, called a ‘calisthenics machine.’ Every waking moment was spent stretching her muscles on the machine’s spindly limbs, straining against tension bands, pumping on quad-pedals, or quaffing thousands of calories of nutrient-laden shakes. The spaceship stank of her sweat; it condensed on the metal bulkheads, and Rainbow responded by increasing the cabin temperature, raising the dew point until the liquid evaporated and Zenith’s lips chapped. When she wasn’t gasping for breath she alternated between reading Twilight’s summaries of the approaching star and cursing Rainbow Dash’s parentage and sexual proclivities.

“Yeah, you wish,” Rainbow responded to one particularly imaginative suggestion. “Come on, two more reps. You’re almost done.”

“I want to die,” Zenith gasped. This particular exercise involved curling her body into a ball using only her abdominal muscles, while weighted bands attempted to pull her fore and hindlegs apart. In addition to building core strength, it was also an excellent simulation of what falling into a black hole probably felt like.

“Sure, sure, you can die when you’re asleep.” Rainbow Dash paused. “Wait, is that how it goes? Whatever. One more, you got this!”

With a pained grunt, Zenith managed to touch her elbows to her knees and hold the position for the count of three. The tension bands loosened as she relaxed, and she slumped on the hot floor to catch her breath. “Okay. What next?”

“Next, you’re done,” Rainbow said. There was a sound of pages flipping on a clipboard. “Twilight says we’re out of time.”

“What, already?” Zenith pushed herself up with a groan. The viewscreen still showed an endless list of exercise sets, and she waved it away. A view of the stars outside replaced it – Gliese 710 was magnitudes of order brighter, nearly as bright as the full moon seen from Equus. “I thought we had another day, at least?”

“We have almost thirty hours,” Twilight’s voice said. There was a muffled back-and-forth with Rainbow Dash that Zenith didn’t quite make out, and then it was all Twilight. “But you need to rest for most of that, and we need to plan. This system is weird.”

“Weird, how?”

“Weird, as in, I don’t know what to make of it.” The viewport flashed again, replaced with a schematic of the approaching star system. A dozen planetoids of various sizes spun around Gliese. The view quickly zoomed in on the fourth planet, a rocky bluish sphere swaddled in a thick atmosphere. Only vague suggestions of the surface, cragged by mountains and canyons, managed to shine through the haze. Dust, perhaps, or methane. A faint, gauzy ring, like a veil, circled the planet several thousand kilometers above its equator.

“Gliese 710-d, which I have temporarily designated as Lapis, unless you have any objections,” Twilight continued. The name matched the color, so Zenith did not object, and Twilight drove on after a slight pause. “It’s in the star’s habitable band, but on the cold side. There must not be much water down there or we’d be seeing huge icecaps. And it’s lighter than it ought to be, considering its radius. At a guess, I’d say ten percent of its mass is unaccounted for.”

Zenith blinked. “Unaccounted for, like, removed? Or some exotic geology? An aluminum-silicon core?”

“Probably the latter, but we won’t know until we get closer. All that’s just academic curiosity, though. The real weirdness is in orbit. See the rings?”

“Yeah. Ice moon get too close?” Most planetary rings formed when small moons fell within their parent’s Roche limit and were torn apart by tidal forces. They were pretty and uncommon – fewer than one percent of solar systems had a ringed planet similar to Saturn.

“Good guess, but no. It’s debris.”

Debris! Impossible. There had to be billions of tons of mass in that single orbital band. More metal and synthetics than even the Terrans had managed to lift into space over all their centuries of interstellar flight. Zenith leaned forward until her muzzle was just inches from the viewport, but even expanded to the full extent of the ship’s powerful sensors the rings appeared as nothing more than faint grey bands against the blackness of space. A table appeared beside them, filled with estimates of metallicity based on Twilight’s radar scans. Zenith frowned at the figures: predominantly iron, with a healthy amount of nickel and traces of cobalt.

“That doesn’t look like the material composition of any rational space station,” she said. “Sure it wasn’t an asteroid?”

“As sure as I can be from this distance.” Twilight’s voice held an appropriate tinge of modesty. She was, at heart, a scientific mare, and the AI simulated that well. “Analysis of reflected sunlight from the rings reveals an improbably high number of right angles and other geometric indicators of artificiality. There’s a fair amount of carbon in the ring, too. Graphene, nanofibers, the whole gamut. It’s manufactured.”

“Well.” Zenith sat back on the couch and pondered the viewscreen for a while. A protein shake emerged from a dispenser beside her, and it wasn’t until she’d drained the last chocolate-and-steroidy goodness from the tube that she spoke again. “And the Phrygian?”

An uncharacteristically long pause preceded Twilight’s next words, which were careful and clipped: “The wake trail terminates in high orbit, at which point she presumably switched to sublight drives. I don’t see the ship itself, but the signal we’ve been chasing is from a satellite. It’s been orbiting for decades, as best I can tell.”

Deep breath. “She could be down there, then?”

“Decades, Zenith. Nadir was your age when she left.”

“Technically a few minutes younger. And the Phrygian had a full set of cryosleep pods,” Zenith countered. “Even if it went down hard, she could be using them still.”

Twilight sighed. “Of course, we’ll keep looking. I just want to temper your expectations.”

“Right, consider them tempered.” Zenith wadded the shake tube into a ball and shoved it into the recycling hopper. “Take us in closer.”

“Uh…” The viewscreen flickered. “You’re not concerned about all the evidence of a long-dead space-faring alien civilization?”

“They are dead, right?”

“All signs point to yes,” Twilight said. “The planet is silent as a tomb.”

“Well, we’ll try not to disturb their graves.”

* * *

The Dorian coasted into a high polar orbit over Lapis and began gently teasing the surface with a wide range of microwave and radio frequencies. Whenever she crossed the equator and the enormous orbital debris ring, the speakers in Zenith’s cabin squealed with electronic feedback. The bands were highly reflective across the spectrum.

Zenith slept when she could, which wasn’t much. Her mind spun like a jet engine, feeding her body with nervous energy. The muscles in her limbs, now much fuller than when she’d woken only a week ago, twitched constantly. She trembled so hard the little clock on the shelf beside her pod rattled in sympathy. Sleep, when it came, was disjointed, hot and aching.

All the steroids probably didn’t help.

When she got tired of watching the clock’s digital readout advance, she pulled herself out of the sleep pod and squeezed through the ship’s innards back to the flight deck. Lapis filled the viewscreen from edge to edge. From orbit they could see all the sad details of the world below – enormous rents in the crust that weren’t caused by any geologic process; radioactive craters that still registered as hot; long, paved transportation routes that terminated abruptly in charred patches the size of cities.

“What a waste,” Zenith mumbled.

She hadn’t expected the AI to respond, but of course it could hear anything on the ship, no matter how quiet. If it wanted it could even hear her thoughts, though the AI was generally polite enough not to intrude within her head. So it was a surprise when a soft, refined voice answered.

“Cultures are like people, I’ve found,” Rarity said. A note of pain lingered in her words. “Some of them are self-destructive.”

“They made it to space, though.” She motioned with her muzzle toward the debris ring. “That’s supposed to be the goal line, isn’t it? If you can get to space, you can solve any problem biology tosses your way. Why’d they fail?”

“We might find answers down there. Or maybe just more mysteries.” There was a pause, and Zenith could imagine the real Rarity offering a shrug. “Don’t let it consume you. We can only be responsible for our own happiness.”

Zenith frowned. “Are you quoting a motivational calendar to me?”

Rarity huffed. “Darling, I am trying to mentally focus you for what is likely to be an arduous and stressful next few days, not to mention ones fraught with significant peril. And if we are being totally honest, as you seem to prefer at this moment, I want you to be prepared for disappointment. You know the odds of finding Nadir are low. This mission was always a long shot. And while I will always support you to the utmost of my abilities, part of that means ensuring that you have a realistic understanding of what your real mission here is.”

“I thought my real mission was to find my sister.”

“That has always been an ancillary bonus,” Rarity said. More than any of the other personalities in the AI’s banks, she could inflict her voice as a whip, and she used it that way now. “The real mission is simply to try and find her. To make a noble attempt, as you have already spent decades doing. What I mean is, you cannot fail – you have already succeeded beyond what any of us could have ever hoped.”

A queasy, bilious sensation built in Zenith’s gut as Rarity spoke, climbing slowly up her chest and into her heart. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard the AI’s rationalizations, but those always made sense in the depths of interstellar space. To hear them now, when they had proof of Nadir’s presence somewhere on the world below, felt like the unkindest cut of all.

“Well, I’m sorry.” She tried to keep her voice level, but heat leaked into it nevertheless. “But I didn’t come all this way as part of a gesture. I came to find my sister and—”

“Ladies, I hate to barge in, but I have something new,” Twilight Sparkle’s voice rode in smoothly. “I feel like it’s important.”

“Go ahead, Twilight. I think Zenith needs some time without me, anyway.” Rarity said. The faint sound of hooves on metal deckplates echoed from the speakers, followed by the hiss of a bulkhead door sliding shut. Of course, there were no functioning doors on the Dorian; it was simply the AI’s parting shot.

Zenith took a long, slow breath in, held it for nearly a minute, and let it gently escape. It was never entirely clear to her – or to any other pony or human, even those who researched and designed AIs – just how much of the simulation was real and how much of it was theater for her benefit. Had the Dorian’s AI diffracted itself into multiple threads, and it was talking to itself during these multiple-personality conversations? Or was it just a single intelligence reading from a careful script in different voices? The answer, according to the manual, was not to ask the damn question in the first place. Just play along with the AI’s make-believe. Don’t try to peer into the black box.

“Sorry about that,” Twilight said. “She just wants to help.”

“It’s fine. What’d you find?”

“A couple things. First, we’ll be crossing the distress beacon’s path soon. It’s in a fast, eccentric orbit, about what you’d expect from a ship making a hasty atmospheric entry. We can try to capture it, if you want.”

“Is there a point?” The Dorian was cramped enough already without stray satellites.

“Not in particular. It would take a while to match orbits, and it’s broadcasting exactly what you’d expect from a White beacon – a series of prime numbers in base two, the Fibonacci sequence and its own coordinates. Once it rounds the planet I’ll be able to get it with our telescopes. We’ll know then if it’s from the Phrygian.”

“Okay, leave it be for now. What else?”

“Lapis’s atmosphere. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read about. Look.”

The viewscreen shifted. A timestamp appeared in the lower-left corner – a recording, not a live view. The camera peered out over the horizon as the Dorian began to cross over to the planet’s night side. The blue crescent below grew thinner and sharper, and when the sun finally touched the edge of the planet, there was a brief, iridescent flash of light, as though a rainbow had swept itself across Zenith’s eyes. It was gone in a moment, and the camera looked out on a dark field of stars.

Interesting. “You get a spectrograph of that flash?”

“I did. Nitrogen, of course. Some oxygen. But the refraction you saw was caused by a suspension of iron, nickel and cobalt.”

“Metal doesn’t usually suspend itself in mid-air.” Zenith rewound the footage and played it again, slowed by a factor of a thousand. Seen that way, the flash actually danced through a series of rainbows, vanishing briefly and reappearing more than a dozen times before fading. “That’s the same material as the ring, isn’t it?”

“Same material, same ratio, same isotopes, same everything as best I can tell.” The AI’s tones, which had held a sense of unease, now filled with excitement. The AI was simulating its favorite thing – a scientist. “I’d like to send a probe in.”

Zenith winced, though she knew the request would come eventually. The Dorian only carried two probes, and while the AI could manufacture more given time and materials, they were by far the most limited resource at Zenith’s disposal. Using one – using half – of them now could leave her blind in the future.

But there was no helping it. If the Phrygian was on that planet, then she would have to go down at some point, and not sending a probe first was suicidally reckless. She nodded at the viewscreen.

“Excellent! Probe away. Following with cameras.”

On the viewscreen, a tiny speck of light streaked off toward the planet below. They were on the day side, still, and Zenith quickly lost sight of the probe against the bright blue haze that swaddled Lapis.

“Altitude, 100 kilometers,” Twilight said. “You should be able to see the ionization trail now.”

There it was. Not the probe, which was far too small for Zenith’s meat-based eyes to see, but the vast trail of glowing air left in the probe’s wake as it descended through the atmosphere. A falling star of her own design – she considered making a wish, then discarded the silly thought. There was, after all, only one thing worth wishing for, and she had already bent so much of her life toward that effort. What point was there in wishing for what she had already crafted with her own hooves?

“It’s in. Coasting nicely now. Scoops are out and sampling. We should get some preliminary results back in a few minutes.”

The AI went silent. While its other personalities sometimes tried to fill the space with conversation, Twilight rarely bothered. Zenith could imagine her reading a book at times like this, oblivious to the other ponies in the room.

And that was fine. Being a spacer meant being comfortable with stretches of quiet as deep as space was vast.

Finally: “Huh.”

This was a first. Twilight, stumped? “What?”

“The atmosphere appears to be filled with trillions of inert nanochines. Electrostatic charges are keeping them in suspension. They’re causing that refraction we observed.”

Zenith considered the entirety of the planet on the viewscreen. “That’s a lot of nanochines.”

“It is a lot,” Twilight allowed.

“Dangerous?”

“Well, you wouldn’t want to breathe them, for the same reason you wouldn’t want to inhale any fine particulate matter. But I don’t think they’ll, like, dissolve you or anything. The probe seems fine.”

“So, you’re saying we could go down there.”

Twilight squawked. Literally – her voice broke apart into a squeal of static. “What? Absolutely not! I don’t think you appreciate how incredible a discovery this planet is, Zenith. The ruins of an undiscovered alien civilization, with suggestions of technological paths different from anything we or the Terrans developed! If we burn drives, we can make it back to known space in 17 years. Figure another few years to assemble a research fleet, add in the outbound travel, and we could be back here in 50 years. That’s a reasonable—”

“No.” Zenith shook her head. “And just leave her here? That’s not what I came for.”

Twilight tried another angle. “It’s too dangerous. Some of the nanochines are inert, sure, but they might not all be. Something destroyed that entire civilization – there could easily be enough left over to kill you. Think of the risk, Zenith.”

“I have. I know what I want.” She set her datapad into its cradle and squeezed back through the narrow corridor to her cabin. All the loose junk had to be secured for atmospheric entry, and she began stowing items in their proper spots. “What do the others think?”

“You already know what I think,” Rarity said. She had a weary tone, and for a moment it recalled Zenith’s mother, trying to dissuade her from dating a tattooed colt who turned bolts at the dockyard. “But I suppose I’ll say it for everypony’s benefit: our chances of finding Nadir alive are extremely low. This mission has already succeeded beyond our expectations. We should take that victory and leave.”

“You know me, girl,” Rainbow Dash said. “I came out here to rock and roll. I say we go down.”

“Um, if there’s still a chance we can find Nadir, I think we have to keep trying,” Fluttershy said. Hers was a rare voice, one the AI didn’t often unbox. “But we should be careful, though.”

“Mmmm, color me undecided. Which I guess would be beige?” Pinkie Pie said. “Could go either way, you know?”

So, even the AI was conflicted. Zenith tilted her head toward the ceiling. “Applejack?”

“Sisters is sisters,” Applejack said. “We stay until we know for sure.”

Wonderful. Zenith set her hooves to steady herself against a momentary surge of vertigo. The ship making a slight maneuver, probably. When the sensation passed, she forced her way back onto the navigation deck. The planet seemed closer in the viewscreen, now. Looming larger.

“We’re decided, then,” she said. “Twilight, start scanning for anything that looks promising on the surface. Odd radio signatures, EM emissions, the usual. Get a list of candidate locations to search.”

“As you say, Zenith.” Any lingering hint of dissent in Twilight’s voice was well concealed. “It might take a few days. The longer we scan, the more we can narrow sites down.”

“That’s fine. We have time.” She pondered the viewscreen. “Did you get everything you need from that satellite?”

“I did.” A new image appeared on the viewscreen, a still from one of the telescopes. A tiny oblong prism, no larger than a shoebox, bounded with folding solar panels and a parabolic antenna. It bore a stencil on its side, half-illuminated by Gliese and half in shadow. Even so obscured, Zenith deciphered it easily; every time she closed her eyes to sleep she saw it.

ISTS-N8614-PHRYGIAN

There it was. The last bit of proof she needed. She realized her head was bobbing in a constant nod, as though affirming to herself that all the years of effort had been worth it.

“Wonderful.” And it was. “Do you need anything more from it?”

“Not really. White beacons don’t have any data logs. It’s just a museum piece, now.”

“Good. Destroy it.”

“Uh.” A pause. “Are you sure about that? It could still be of some use, especially if we encounter trouble down—”

Zenith sighed. “Dash?”

“On it, girl,” Rainbow Dash’s voice instantly replaced Twilight’s. “Dialed in. Say the word.”

“Fire.”

The lights dimmed, and a faint vibration passed through the deckplates as the main mass driver activated, propelling a pea-sized iron sphere down the length of the ship. The little projectile left the barrel as a ball of plasma travelling just under nine percent of the speed of light. The sublight engines burned for several seconds to compensate for the recoil.

A tenth of a second later, a bright flash lit the night side of Lapis. Zenith watched on the viewscreen as the glowing cloud expanded, faded and was lost. In time, not even the AI would be able to tell where the satellite’s atoms ended and the rest of the debris around Lapis began.

Chapter 2

View Online

Zenith walked across the Dorian’s skin. Above her, the curve of Lapis loomed like a frozen heaven, and the Dorian’s bulk blocked the view of space. Her exosuit was equipped with a capable array of thrusters and flight controls, powerful enough that under normal conditions she could fly freely and even meaningfully change her own orbit if she wanted, but for a standard EVA like this it was far more energy efficient to stay connected with the ship via the soles of her boots. It was also safer – Lapis had so much debris in orbit that the AI was constantly making micro-adjustments to their path with the Dorian’s thrusters, and she could quickly be left behind (or even struck) if she detached. So she found herself pacing along the ship’s spine like an ant on a log, stepping carefully around the various nacelles and protrusions that concealed the ship’s organs from space.

A larger starship might have sufficient interior space to pipe with corridors, or at least access shafts. The Dorian, being a small exploration vessel, had no room for such luxuries. The only path between the flight deck and the cargo/vehicle bay was through space, and over the course of several days Zenith made the trip dozens of times to prepare their little lander for the upcoming voyage to the surface of Lapis.

Calling the lander a ‘craft’ was generous, in Zenith’s opinion. Egg-shaped, covered with seams and blisters, with sufficient interior space for one adult pony to squeeze into, it somehow stored enough energy to enter and escape a planet’s gravity well several times over. The exact physics by which that was possible required levels of education and understanding beyond Zenith’s university courses, but in all her years as a spacer it had yet to strand her on a deserted planet or burst open in the depths of space, so she figured she might as well keep trusting it until something went wrong.

Releasing the lander from its hyperlight cradle was an hours-long process that required an assortment of lightweight tools, manual dexterity, a fair amount of brute strength and a lot of patience. Checklists had to be followed with exacting precision. Magnetic clamps manually detached. Quick-release umbilicals fastened into position. Mostly, though, it required waiting while the AI checked the craft’s systems and charged its batteries from the main fusion reactor.

“Did you know,” Twilight Sparkle said, “that one of the early designs for a lander used a flywheel as a power source?”

Zenith pondered that. “Like, an actual flywheel? Not a metaphor for some high-energy physics contraption?”

“An actual flywheel. Technically two counter-rotating wheels. The theory was you could spin them up to nearly the speed of light, and use the stored energy to power an ionic drive.”

“A flywheel to space,” Zenith mused. “It didn’t work, I assume?”

“Never tried.” Twilight sounded mournful. “Material science wasn’t quite there. Okay, disconnect the number two data umbilical and hold the plate cover shut until you feel a click.”

“Got it.” Zenith followed the directions, which were helpfully highlighted on her suit’s HUD. “Okay, it clicked.”

“Good. Thirty minutes until the next step is ready. Would you like to come back to the cabin?”

She shook her head. It took a solid ten minutes just to walk back across the ship, pass through the airlock, and peel the exosuit off. “It’s fine. I’ll wait out here.”

“Alright. Shout if you need anything.” With a quiet click, Twilight closed the channel.

Zenith sat and leaned back against the lander. Their orbital velocity was high enough that Lapis rotated quickly above her, and she let her mind drift in time with the clouds streaming across the planet’s surface. Somewhere in that vastness was her sister. Finding her would be an enormous task, one she had to assume would take years. But she could imagine, and she let herself imagine, what that day would look like – discovering the wreckage of the Phrygian, peeling it open to discover an operational cryosleep pod, keying in the emergency codes to awaken Nadir from her long, cold sleep. What would their first words be? Or would they just stare in silence, unable to speak? Zenith played the fantasy out in her head, rewinding, fast forwarding, lingering on the cathartic moments she knew were soon to come.

A quiet tone requested her attention. Zenith banished the products of her imagination and opened her eyes. “Go ahead.”

“Just a heads-up, darling,” Rarity’s voice sounded softly in her ears. “We’ll be maneuvering in a moment. Make sure you’re braced.”

“Thanks, Rarity. I should be fine.”

“Wonderful. Also, I was hoping to take a moment and clear the air between us, so to speak.”

“There’s nothing to clear, Rarity. I understand your perspective. I just disagree.” One problem, Zenith felt, with simulated personalities was that they simulated emotions too, and they tried to perform emotional upkeep on their relationships. A perfectly rational AI, acting irrational for her benefit. Zenith grit her teeth.

“Be that as it may, I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that I don’t care about finding your sister,” Rarity continued. “I have a sister too, you know. I know how responsible you feel for her.”

Unlikely. Still, there was no point in arguing with her own ship. “Thank you, Rarity. I understand your concerns as well, and I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.”

The ship shifted beneath her. Thrusters spun the Dorian along its long axis, and the planet above turned until it formed a blue wall to her right. The sublight engines activated, and for a few seconds Zenith weighed several times more than normal. She grunted as the g-forces squeezed the breath out of her lungs. Weightlessness returned as relief.

“Yes, well.” Rarity sounded curt. Not convinced. “I’m glad we had this talk. I’ll let you and Twilight get back to your preparations, then.”

The channel closed with a far more resounding click that time. Zenith sighed, closed her eyes, and returned to her silent daydreams.

* * *

Three days later, they got their first good lead.

Among its many other oddities, Lapis was riddled with gemstones. Enormous fields of silicon-aluminum oxides grew like forests across much of the world’s surface. Seen from space they created dendritic, almost organic patterns, like a series of capillaries feeding some enormous beast. “Sapphire farms,” Rarity jokingly called them, and the name stuck.

A curiosity. But during one of her passes above a shattered city, the Dorian spotted something entirely out of place near one of the gemstone forests: a white splinter, about two meters long, that reflected back the Dorian’s radar. And not just reflected well, but perfectly; every watt of energy that struck the fragment bounced back to the Dorian’s dishes. It so closely resembled being pinged by another vessel that it activated their ship’s fire control alarm.

“It’s starship skin,” Twilight said. “Ninety-nine percent confidence.”

“Could the aliens have made it?” Zenith asked. She leaned back in the acceleration couch, staring at a high-definition image of the fragment on the viewscreen. It looked like nothing more than a shredded piece of toilet paper to her. “We know they got to space. They should’ve had the tech.”

“It was probably within their capabilities, but they seemed more comfortable with traditional metallurgy and carbon synthetics. Certainly, it’s the only piece made in the manner of our starships that we’ve seen on this entire planet. Or in orbit.”

“Hm.” Zenith let out a breath and zoomed the image out. The fragment was a few kilometers from the blasted, scorched remains of one of the alien cities – multiple craters, hundreds of meters wide, overlapped each other in what had been the city center. Further out, the shattered and crumbled arcologies resembled charred bones on the barren soil. Broken crystals lined the edge of the forest. The blast had been strong enough to shear through the sapphire like it was paper.

“Could the Phrygian be in that mess?” she asked.

An outline of the Phrygian appeared on the viewscreen, superimposed over the ruins. It was about the size of a city block, as the aliens built things, and dozens of them could easily fit among or within the ruins. There were countless places to hide a small scout ship.

“Can we get a better scan of the area?” she asked.

“Not from orbit. I can send the other probe.”

Ugh. The thought of losing their last probe, just a few days into the search, physically pained her. “What about the first one? Isn’t it still down there?”

“It’s on the wrong side of the planet. And it’s not behaving optimally – I think all the nanochines are starting to interfere with its operation. Something to keep in mind if you go down.”

Well, nothing ventured… “Okay, send the second one in. Can you start manufacturing more?”

“I already have, but each one will take about twenty days,” Twilight said. “You need to start thinking in longer terms, Zenith.”

Easy for an immortal AI to say – especially when it was simulating an immortal pony. But that was the sort of observation best kept to herself. “I’ll try to do that.”

It was several minutes before the Dorian was back in position to launch the probe. Zenith filled the time studying photos of the cities they’d managed to catalogue on the surface. They all seemed to meet the same end: bombardment from space by nuclear weapons. Thousands had been used on the planet, probably all within a few minutes of each other. For a species that seemed to congregate in large masses, without the urban/rural distribution that humans and ponies preferred, such a war would have been disastrous. Even the smallest population centers had been targeted for annihilation.

Twilight spent the time humming the tune to some song or other. Zenith almost lost herself in it, humming along as best she could, until the ship shook slightly.

“Probe away,” Twilight said. The viewscreen switched to a live view of the surface. The target site was little more than a white speck at this magnification – the nearby city a dark, discolored smear against the bluish stones that made up most of the surface. “Atmospheric entry in five seconds.”

Zenith leaned forward. A faint glowing streak drew itself across the image, angling toward the target. It faded, and she waited for Twilight’s report.

And kept waiting. Minutes ticked by. She frowned.

It was another full minute before Twilight spoke. “Sorry, I’m getting some anomalous telemetry from the probe. Standby.”

Huh.

“Anomalous? More like, ominous!” Pinkie Pie’s voice whispered in her left ear. “Did that sound ominous to you? It did to me.”

“What’s she seeing?” Zenith whispered back, and then she mentally chided herself. It was the same AI playing both roles, after all. A show put on for her benefit.

“I don’t know, she keeps shooing me away from the screen,” Pinkie said. Then, a shout: “Hey, Twilight! What do your alicorn eyes see?”

“I said standby!” Twilight’s voice held a frazzled edge. “This is more complex than it looks, you know.”

“Sorry, Twilight,” Zenith said. “Please, take your time.”

A muffled grumble responded, followed by more silence. Nearly a full orbit passed before Twilight came back online.

“Okay, sorry about that,” she said. “Uh, bad news first, I guess. The probe is gone.”

Zenith raised her eyebrows. “And the good news?”

“I did get some data back before it stopped responding. That fragment is definitely from a Terran starship, and there are several more pieces like it scattered in and around the city. Nothing structural that I can see, just pieces of the cladding. It’s very possible, and in fact likely, that the Phrygian is down there, or was down there at some point.”

That was good news. Or, at least, it confirmed what they’d already hoped. She nodded. “What happened to the probe?”

“Mind if I answer that? Thanks.” Rainbow Dash cut in. “So, the technical term is controlled flight into terrain. A laypony would say that Twilight flew the probe into a building at the speed of sound, which is not considered survivable. On the other hoof it probably looked really awesome and I hope we’re able to salvage the last few seconds of footage before the impact. Okay, back to you, Twilight.”

“Thank you, Rainbow Dash, for that expert summary,” Twilight said. Her voice was dry enough to chap lips. “I will note that the anomalous behavior began well before the impact—”

“It sure as hell stopped after the impact,” Rainbow said.

“—when the probe began misreporting its state and position during the reentry,” Twilight continued smoothly. “I attempted to correct for the poor telemetry, but the errors compounded exponentially, which resulted in the premature termination of the flight.”

“The crash,” Rainbow said.

“Sure, fine, the crash.” Twilight huffed. “Would you like to pilot the next one, Rainbow?”

“Thank you for asking, Twilight. I would like to—”

“Girls,” Zenith said gently. “Back to the anomalous behavior. What caused it?”

“As best I can tell, a material defect in the probe,” Twilight said. Zenith could hear her frowning. “It’s known to happen, and probes don’t have the same level of redundancy as other vehicles. The other option is that those nanochines caused the interference, though I assign that a low probability. They still seem dead to all other sensors.”

“Didn’t you say the nanochines were interfering with the other probe, too?”

“I did, but in a more mundane sense. They’re just clogging it up. The lander’s filters should be able to handle them.”

Right, the lander. Zenith was supposed to follow the probe. That was the plan. She swallowed.

“You don’t sound too worried about the lander’s chances,” she noted.

“The lander is far more robust, with several layers of redundancy across all critical systems and zero single-points of failure,” Twilight said. “Mind you, I still think the level of risk is unacceptably high, but not appreciably higher than before you made the decision to go down there. You can still change your mind, though. In fact, let it be noted for the record that I said you were free to change your mind.”

She could change her mind. Everypony would agree with her that it was the best decision under the circumstances, and they would wrap up their search from orbit and go home. Nopony would mention the alternatives they hadn’t explored, and no one would ever blame her for leaving without finding Nadir. Certainly, nopony would ever say it.

Out loud, anyway. Zenith swallowed again.

“No,” she said. “The plan is unchanged. Can you stay overhead?”

“Not perfectly,” Twilight said. “The target site isn’t on the equator, so a geosynchronous orbit won’t be directly above you. But I’ll be within a few degrees, and I’ll have a local copy of myself loaded on the lander’s banks just in case.”

That would have to do. She stood and fumbled her way across the cramped deck to the exosuits – she would have to wear one inside the lander. “Good. Tell Rainbow to be ready for everything.”

“Always am,” Rainbow Dash’s scratchy voice answered without missing a beat, filled as always with unshakable confidence. “And be careful down there, huh? Unlike probes, Twilight can’t make new copies of you.”

“Or can she?!” Pinkie Pie jumped in. “Ominous music!” On cue, heady strains of a soaring violin quartet filled the cabin, backed by a throbbing, accelerating bass drum beat. A chanting choir began to build to a crescendo—

“No, no. Stop.” Twilight said. The music cut off with a screech. “Pinkie, this isn’t a dystopian sci-fi television series. Zenith is not a clone and I cannot make new copies of her.”

“Aww.”

“We won’t need new copies of me. I’ll be fine,” Zenith said. Still, she smiled. “We’ll make it work, Pinkie. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Her hooves barely shook as she unfastened the exosuit’s bindings and began to strap it on.

* * *

Putting on a long-duration exosuit was an intimate process. If the suit were another pony, Zenith would be considered married to it by the more conservative earth pony settlements. The AI thankfully offered no observations during the process, though Zenith had to imagine the others kept Pinkie Pie bound and gagged in the virtual equivalent of a closet.

When at last it was on, and Zenith could pretend her dignity was undamaged, she made her way out the airlock and across the ship’s exterior toward the lander. The door was already open, revealing a crash couch, viewscreen, equipment lockers and back-up flight control systems in case the computer failed in the middle of reentry. Normally Zenith wouldn’t have given that possibility a second thought, but memories of her late, lamented second probe were still very fresh in her mind. She mentally reviewed the process for switching from computer-aided flight to manual controls while she strapped into the couch.

“Should be a smooth ride,” Twilight said. Her voice sounded faint and a bit tinny coming from the exosuit’s sound system, which wasn’t quite as high fidelity as the Dorian’s. “No weather patterns of interest aside from some dust storms, and we’re in an ideal orbit for insertion. Rainbow Dash insists that I let her pilot, unless you’d prefer to go in manually.”

“I’ll let Rainbow handle it,” Zenith said. “Not my specialty.”

“Good choice.” Rainbow came into the conversation. “Okay, sealing you in. We’ve got a few minutes until we’re in drop position. Read a book or something, I guess? Over.”

“Roger, reading a book, over.” In fact, Zenith spent the time playing with the viewscreen controls. The display wrapped around the entire interior of the pod, and she switched it to show a view of the exterior, as though the lander were made entirely of glass.

The minutes ticked by, and the Dorian rotated until Lapis filled the universe overhead. A tiny countdown appeared in the corner of Zenith’s vision, and when it reached zero the lander shuddered. The Dorian fell away below, rapidly shrinking until it was no larger than any of the other stars in space. The lander turned slowly, spinning away from Lapis and giving Zenith a few of the debris ring sparkling in a giant arch above.

“Atmosphere in a few seconds,” Rainbow said. “Should max at around four Gs. Brace.”

The craft shook wildly, and an enormous hoof pressed Zenith into the crash couch. She grunted and focused on short puffs of air. The viewport filled with orange fire, then yellow, then white, and eventually the filters kicked in and her view of the world was reduced to a simple graphical outline of the horizon and major topographic features below.

“Everything’s nominal,” Rainbow reported. “I see what Twilight meant about the nanites clogging things, though. The air is a mess.”

“Problem?” Zenith managed to squeak out. The g-forces were only slowly easing as the lander decelerated.

“Not for the lander. I wouldn’t go outside without your helmet on, though. Probably not good for your lungs.”

Eventually the craft stopped shaking, and the view of the outside returned. Now in normal flight, the pod rotated around so Zenith was looking forward, and they streaked across the dead world at an altitude of several thousand meters. Faint sheets of wispy clouds struggled to cohere around them, tattered like wind-blown flags. Far below, on the ground, evidence of the long-ago war was everywhere. Wrecked machines littered the landscape, some punctured and shredded by kinetic weapons, others apparently crashed. Massive rows of bluish sand dunes marched across the plains, alternately concealing and revealing the waste.

An old Terran saying sprang unbidden into her head. “There but for the grace of God,” she mumbled.

“Hey, that was never gonna happen to us,” Rainbow said. “Ponies are good at heart. And humans too, I guess.”

“It almost fell apart, though.” She tilted the chair for a better look as they flew over a city. A single enormous crater, kilometers across, obliterated the heart of the metropolis, leaving only exposed bedrock. On the edges of the city, a few skeletal buildings still stood – walls, mostly, their interiors filled with nothing but sand and memories.

“But it didn’t. We got past it,” Rainbow said. “C’mon, happy thoughts, kid. We’re about to do some potentially dangerous stuff and I need you in a good mood, not moping.”

Zenith smiled. “I’m not moping.”

“Sure, sure. Okay, we’re about ten minutes out. Want me to go straight into the city?”

That perked Zenith’s ears up. “Stop at the outskirts first. I’d rather get a good look at things before we commit.”

They crossed into another stretch of wasteland. A road, or something similar, threaded its way beneath them, like a line drawn toward their target. Up ahead, Zenith saw a line of mountains, and before them a row of broken shapes hugging the earth.

Something was interfering with the viewscreen, though. A faint iridescence, like the sheen of a soap bubble, smeared the sides of the pod with a sickly rainbow. She frowned. “Hey, Rainbow…”

“Yeah, I see it too.” Rainbow said. “Residue from the nanochines. We’re running into, like, millions of them every second, and they’re kinda fragile.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Nah. It’s just, like, bugs in your teeth, you know?”

Zenith did not know what that was like. Nevertheless, she ran her tongue across her teeth to make sure nothing was plastered on them.

Before she knew it, the dead city was upon them. Only a ring of ruins remained – the city’s heart had been carved out and replaced by craters. The effect was something like a city on a bay, though with ghosts instead of water. Some buildings stood higher than others, leaning at angles or approximately upright. In other spots, where the blast waves reflected poorly, entire blocks were flattened, and nothing rose higher than Zenith’s waist.

“Not much radiation,” Rainbow said as she set the craft down on a bare stretch of windblown concrete. “They were using environmentally friendly weapons.”

“Lotta good it did them. Pop the hatch?”

One nice thing about working with Rainbow Dash was that there was never any backtalk. Barely had she finished speaking when the door opened with a hiss, and the cold atmosphere of Lapis washed into the lander. Along with, presumably, millions of those dead nanochines. The realization gave Zenith a moment of pause, but then she shrugged and unbuckled from the couch. If Twilight and Rainbow Dash weren’t worried about letting the nanochines in, she had no reason to be.

They’re nothing more than dust. She fumbled with the remaining buckles, pulled herself toward the hatch, and stepped out onto a new world.

Seen from the surface, the relentless blue of Lapis wasn’t as overpowering. Her brain attempted to adjust to the color balance, interpreting blue as white, and gradually new shades and hues made themselves known. The mountains to the west were brown near the base, fading to a rugged grey toward the peaks. No vegetation grew on their slopes; no glaciers frosted their peaks. Just barren rocks.

Toward the city there was little but grey destruction. Broken buildings, mostly fashioned from concrete and the alien equivalent of plasteel, rose like tombstones in endless rows marching off into the distance. Cobwebs of rusting wires lay half-strung between the structures. Anything organic had been vaporized in the blast. The only warm color was from Gliese itself. Zenith stared up at the yellow sun for several moments before turning away.

“I dub thee, Ponyville,” she said.

“Wow, really?” Rainbow’s voice sounded in her earpiece. “Morbid enough?”

Zenith trotted over to the nearest building and peered inside. Still somewhat upright, it slouched out onto the street, its walls broken and connected at wrong angles. The inside was a composite of all the floors, which had collapsed into a sandwich of concrete and plasteel honeycomb. She didn’t linger – there were, presumably, bodies within the ruins, and she had no desire to walk where they rested.

Twilight was waiting for her when she got back to the lander. The intercom hissed to life as she strapped in. “Some more information for you, Zenith. You might need to come back up.”

“Oh? Hit me.”

“I’ve been analyzing the data stream from the doomed probe. I think the nanochines may have been more involved in its crash than I originally believed.”

Hm. Zenith glanced down at the polyplastic suit covering her forelegs. It was dusty after her brief sojourn outside – or was that a layer of nanochines, crawling all over her?

Lovely. “How so?”

“They’re not… entirely inactive. They seem to be absorbing and re-emitting energy into a field that doesn’t quite correlate with anything I understand.”

“A new… field? Like a new fundamental force?” Zenith brought up an orbital map on the viewscreen. The Dorian was nearly thirty thousand kilometers overhead. And the Phrygian, for all they knew, might only be a few hundred meters away. “Have we made some breakthrough in fundamental physics, Twilight?”

“Well, no. Technically these aliens did first. But I don’t know what it is or what it does, and I think maybe you should come back up here until we figure it out. More observational time will give us better data, and—”

“Okay. Noted.” She took a sip from the helmet’s drinking tube and swirled it around. “We’re going to proceed here.”

The intercom popped with static and the sound of Twilight gritting her teeth. “Alright, but be careful. And let me know if you observe anything unusual.”

The whole damn planet was unusual. She shook her head and buckled back in for flight.

* * *

Zenith piloted the lander around the edge of the city. Inward, to her left, the massive system of craters dominated everything. Outward, to her right, the barren planet stretched endlessly away. A vast network of towering sapphire crystal formations grew like a forest near the edge of the city, dazzling her with reflections, and she eventually had Rainbow dim that section of the viewscreen.

Working with Rainbow Dash was easy. No chit-chat, no jokes, no helpful advice, just business. Rainbow called out various points of interest, and Zenith brought the lander in to inspect them. They discovered a dozen more pieces of starship skin, buried under the sand or hiding in the shadows of toppled buildings.

“That’s where Twilight crashed the probe,” Rainbow noted at one point. Zenith followed the icon on the viewscreen and saw instantly what she meant. A freshly shattered building lay in pieces, strewn out across a full block, the broken edges of its concrete walls a brighter and fresher shade of grey than the dismal waste all around. Black scores discolored many of the fragments, and among them Zenith saw sunlight glinting off of glass and twisted shavings of metal.

“It probably did look awesome,” Zenith said. “Maybe we can get her to crash another one.”

“Oh, just wait. It’ll happen.”

They coasted onward, eventually reaching something of a landmark – an elegant tower, the tallest building still left upright. Crenellations and twists adorned its sides, the closest thing they’d seen to alien artwork. Little remained now but the exterior walls, and those teetered precariously. It wouldn’t be long before time and the wind conspired in a bad way and brought the tower down to join its sisters.

Zenith circled the tower. The side facing the city center was scoured clean of its decorative effects, exposing the bare honeycomb of structural elements. Rubble surrounded the tower, burying the first two floors. Zenith let the lander coast to a halt and studied the ruins.

“Hey,” Rainbow said, eventually. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking.”

“Nothing wrong with thinking, just don’t start moping—hang on.” The line cut off with a sudden snap.

“What?” Zenith asked. She sat up straighter on the couch, her coat prickling. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not certain.” It was Twilight who answered, her voice tight with tension. “The lander’s clock is desynchronizing with mine, and that field from the nanochines is spiking in your vicinity. Dash, get ready to move.”

“On it.” The lander hummed with power as its engines spun up. Flightpath diagrams populated the viewscreen as Rainbow calculated the fastest route to orbit. “Okay, ready. Brace, this is gonna be—”

“Wait!” Zenith shouted. Her hoof hovered over the manual override. “The Tower! Look at the tower!”

High above them, the ruined facade of the tower trembled. Centuries of exposure and the lingering effects of the war had sheared off huge expanses of stone, leaving little of the original artistry in its decorations behind. But before Zenith’s eyes, a trail of gravel and sand began to flow upward from the pile of rubble at the tower’s base, and a cloud of dust slowly coalesced around the upper floors. A series of loud crashes shook the city, and tons of stone – sheets of concrete honeycomb dozens of meters across – hurled themselves up from the rubble, assembling in perfect order on the tower’s sides. Fragments of a fancifully carved spire, fluted with whorls of stone, leapt toward the sky and settled gently into position atop the tower.

Not a crack remained where the sheared stone had been. Faint crashes echoed back from the ruins of the city for several seconds afterward.

“The field is fading,” Twilight’s voice broke the silence. “Below detectable levels. Zenith, I strongly urge you to return—”

“You saw that,” Zenith marveled. “Tell me you recorded that.”

“I did. We can analyze it at our leisure when you get back up here.”

“They undid the damage, somehow,” Zenith said. She tried to give voice to what she’d seen, but nothing she’d ever known or studied made sense. “How did they do that? It’s like they… they somehow reversed time.”

“There are no methods for reversing time,” Twilight said. “Other explanations are more plausible. A series of micro-repulsors hidden in the rubble might have lifted the wreckage up, and the nanochines fused them back into place. Maybe the tower is an extremely convincing hologram, or something else we don’t understand.”

“What about that field you said the nanochines were generating?” Zenith asked. “The one that doesn’t fit our physics models? Could it be, I don’t know, an anti-entropic field?”

“That’s impossible, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding,” Twilight said. “Entropy isn’t an effect. It’s not something you can generate or reverse.”

“Okay, fine,” Zenith said. “So what’d we just see?”

“That… is yet to be determined. Regardless, you need to get off the planet. There’s no telling what exposure to that phenomenon could do to a pony.”

“Has it done anything to me yet?”

“Oh, for the love of… Dash, talk some sense into her.”

“Yo, I kinda agree with Twilight here,” Dash said. She sounded troubled by the revelation. “You know I’m not one to cut and run, but there’s too much we don’t understand about this place. And also that was super freaky.”

“Okay, right. Noted.” Zenith spun the view away from the tower. The rest of the city seemed unchanged – whatever the nanochines were doing, it wasn’t everywhere at once. “We’ll finish searching the city and then head back up.”

Twilight grumbled something and signed off with an aggrieved click. Dash kept an uncharacteristic silence, but nevertheless she piloted the lander away from the tower and back out in a sweeping arc across the city’s outskirts. Massive crystal formations passed beneath them in a blur. Radar reflections painted a dazzling kaleidoscope on the viewscreen, returning far more data than Zenith could hope to understand.

“Are the crystals causing all these reflections?” she asked.

“Most of them,” Dash said. She sounded a bit distracted. “I’m seeing a few more pieces of starship skin, though. The Phrygian was definitely here at some point.”

“You think it left?”

“Well, I don’t see a starship, and the city isn’t that big,” Rainbow said. “Mind if I pop up a bit? I want a broader look.”

“Go for it.”

* * *

The world seen from on high was as blue as Zenith remembered. Rainbow brought the lander up to about a thousand meters, where faint tattered clouds struggled with the wind, and she settled into a stationary hover. The little craft hummed as the wind broke around its smooth shell.

“Bit for your thoughts?” Zenith asked.

“I think it’s hiding,” Dash said. She spun the lander in a slow circle. “She set down here, and then just vanished.”

“Hm.” Zenith blacked out the viewscreen and superimposed a radar image. The ground reappeared as a ghostly wash of plane geometries, brighter where it reflected the radio energy straight back at the lander, and dimmer when it sent back only scattered reflections. A few bright speckles littered the landscape where shreds of starship skin had fallen.

Starship skin was deliberately engineered to reflect energy. As a passive measure, it protected against all sorts of dangerous environments. It kept stray signals inside the ship, so you knew exactly what you were radiating. And in most cases ships wanted to be highly visible to their fellow spacers, anyway. Zenith turned that thought over in her mind.

“How would a ship lose its skin?” she asked.

“Abrasion. Running into stuff.” Rainbow said. “You know, things we try not to do with starships.”

“Could you do it deliberately?”

“You can do a lot of stupid things deliberately, Zenith.”

“Oh, oh, are we making a list?” Pinkie Pie’s voice popped into the intercom, faint with static. “Dashie, do you remember at Big Macintosh’s wedding when you asked Applejack if it was true that earth ponies kissed their—”

“Okay, going to need some radio silence for a while.” Dash squelched the channel from the Dorian. “Important stuff here. No time for jokes.”

That sounded like something to follow up on later. For now, though, “It would be far less visible without its skin. It would be able to blend in…”

“Especially on a world like this,” Dash said. “It would look like just another piece of wreckage, and there’s plenty of that to go around.”

Exactly. Zenith turned the display from a view of the outside world into a flat map. She overlaid the positions of the local terrain, the city, and all the little pieces of starship skin they’d already found. They formed a scattered mess, like breadcrumbs strewn across the landscape, broken in places where time and sand had washed over the ruins. She rotated the map this way and that, looking for any sort of pattern, while presumably Rainbow Dash and Twilight did the same with their far more powerful minds.

“Hey, that, uh…” Weird time thing, she wanted to say. “That phenomenon we saw earlier. Did that crash the probe?”

Twilight answered. “Unclear. The probes rely on an exquisitely precise clock for navigation and other functions. They can handle time dilation just fine, which is why we use them near black holes, but the probe’s clock became desynchronized from the Dorian’s. It wasn’t able to reconcile the discrepancy, which resulted in confusion over its true position. My attempts to compensate just compounded the errors, and, well, it stopped responding.”

“Crashed,” Rainbow corrected.

“So, could an anti-entropic field do that?” Zenith said.

“Again, there is no such thing as an ‘anti-entropic field.’” Exasperation leaked through in Twilight’s voice.

“You keep saying that, but if one did exist, wouldn’t it match what we’ve observed? Let’s call it a hypothesis.”

“Oh, and Zenith breaks out the scientific method,” Pinkie Pie said in a hushed whisper. “A bold move. Let’s see if it pays off.”

“Fine, fine.” Something that sounded like ruffled feathers settling came over the channel. “Hypothesis: the nanochines are an artifact created by some unknown race to undo the effects of the war. They go about this in the most inefficient, terrifying method possible, by rewinding time until before the war. Does that fit your observations?”

“And where would the energy for that come from?”

“The nanochines would have to absorb it from somewhere. Latent heat energy, solar energy from Gleise, any kinetic energy introduced from external sources…” Twilight slowed and trailed off.

“Okay, last question. Do we count as kinetic energy introduced from external sources?”

A quiet sigh emerged from the speakers. “Okay, yes, it fits the observations. We can use it as a working hypothesis.”

“Defeated by science!” Pinkie Pie slipped in. “That’s got to hurt, Ace.”

“It sure does, Pinkie,” an unknown stallion’s voice, deep and measured, responded. “But there’s still lots of time on the clock for her to—”

“Pinkie!”

“Sorry, sorry. Back in my closet.” A wooden door creaked closed with a thud.

It was several moments before either spoke. Twilight still sounded a bit aggrieved, though Zenith never knew how much of that was real and how much was just a play put on for her benefit. As always, the golden rule of dealing with AIs prevailed: pretend it’s all real until given a reason to believe otherwise.

“So they’re using the universe’s entropy to undo their own entropy.” Zenith pulled up a radar map as she spoke, and zoomed in on one particular piece of starship skin. It was an outlier – kilometers away in the mountains, nowhere near the other pieces. “That’s clever. Also vaguely terrifying.”

“If it weren’t for the end they brought to this world, I’d love to meet the people who designed these machines,” Twilight said. “On the other hoof, if we stay here long enough, we might.”

Zenith mumbled in response. This one little breadcrumb was important, she just knew it. The mountains around it were imposing, riddled with steep valleys and ridges and fragments of alien technology. A few lonely antennae protruded from the higher peaks.

She dialed the lander’s sensors on a wide draw between two ridges. Sand nearly filled the little valley to the brim. An odd place for sand to build up, considering the prevailing winds – the nearby features were all empty, scoured clean by the wind. She frowned and pulled up the lander’s sensor control suite.

“What are you doing?” Rainbow asked. “See something?”

“Probably not,” she mumbled. “But…” With a few keystrokes, she programmed in a short microwave burst and fired it at the draw.

Every alarm in the lander went off simultaneously. The viewscreen flashed red and scrolled a long list of warnings, accompanied by a sharp klaxon. The crash couch snapped back into its emergency position, and the restraints all tightened to their maximum setting, locking Zenith as firmly as if she’d been set in concrete. They squeezed the air from her lungs. She gurgled for breath.

“New fusion source detected,” Twilight said. “Radio emissions across all bands. I’m maneuvering overhead. Prepare for orbit.” Above them, a star appeared in the daytime sky as the Dorian’s engines activated.

“No, no! No!” Zenith shouted. She fumbled for the restraint’s manual release, and gasped for breath when they freed her. “Show me what’s happening! And shut off those damn alarms.”

The alarms died instantly, leaving a deafening silence in their wake. The couch swung back into its normal position, and the viewscreen returned to its view of the outside world. A faint cloud of bluish dust concealed the base of the distant mountains, and Zenith zoomed the view in to its highest setting.

Geysers of sand erupted from the draw, shooting hundreds of meters into the air before falling back to the surface in drifting veils. Rocks tumbled down the slopes, shook loose by the vibrations wracking the mountain. The sand dune bulged, roiling and flowing away as some hidden monster began to stir. And in the mouth of the valley, a prow broke through the dust, a long silver beam covered in sensor blisters, access ports and seams.

Without its skin, the Phrygian rose from the sand like the skeleton of a starship, escaping from a shallow grave. Zenith leaned forward and pressed her hoof against the viewscreen.

“Interior systems are powering on,” Twilight said, each word clipped and precise. “I’m seeing EM emissions consistent with cryosleep disengagement. No sign of her main engines spinning up.”

Cryosleep. Zenith squeezed her hooves together to stop them from shaking. “C-can you open a channel?”

“I can try. Standby.”

Nervous seconds passed. Her whole body trembled with pent-up energy. The faceplate of her helmet began to fog up, causing the little fans in the rim to activate.

Finally, a black square appeared on the viewscreen. It lightened slowly, revealing the interior of a scout ship, so similar to the Dorian. In the center, a cryosleep pod slowly folded open, revealing a pool of sickly grey suspension fluid. A shape struggled within the fluid, and a hoof broke the surface, flinging a strand of slime across the deckplates. Slowly, the rest of the pony emerged, and even beneath the layer of fluid Zenith saw the mare’s charcoal coat, her pale green mane, the faint speckling on her shoulders and chest.

Zenith realized she was crying. “Nadir? Nadir, can you hear me?”

“She’s still in suspension shock,” Twilight said. “Keep talking. I’m almost overhead”

“Nadir. Nadir, it’s me. It’s Zenith.” She leaned forward until the faceplate of her helmet bumped the viewscreen. “Nadir, look at me.”

Nadir’s head turned toward the camera. Her eyes, still fuzzy, struggled to focus. She scrabbled with her hooves against the edge of the cryosleep pod.

“That’s it, that’s it.” Zenith took a moment to breathe. All the years, all the work, it all led to this moment, and it had to be perfect. “Look at me, Nadir. It’s Zenith. It’s your sister.”

That worked. Nadir’s eyes cleared, and she looked up at the viewscreen. She tried to stand in the pod and slipped back down into the fluid bath.

“It’s me, Nadir. It’s your Zenith.” She struggled with the words, though she’d rehearsed them a thousand times. Her throat threatened to close, and the rest came out as a whisper. “I want you to know, it was me. I was the one who found you.”

Finally, comprehension dawned. Nadir’s mouth fell open. Her eyes widened, and in them Zenith saw the most wonderful thing in the universe.

Fear.

It was as perfect as she ever could have hoped. She glanced again at the map, and judged that the lander was at a safe distance.

“Target all weapons on the Phrygian,” she said. A series of green dots appeared on the viewscreen as Rainbow Dash brought the Dorian’s arsenal to bear.

Absolutely perfect. “Fire.”

Chapter 3

View Online

The Beam Path Guide Laser struck first. It was a low-power weapon, used when firing through or into an atmosphere – the laser’s frequency was deliberately calibrated to dump its energy into the air, rather than the target. This superheated the air, turning it into a rapidly expanding plasma tunnel of nearly perfect vacuum between the ship and its target. At the word “Fire,” it appeared as an enormous column of blinding yellow light, lancing down from space to strike the Phrygian.

By itself, the BPGL was unlikely to destroy anything, though in the Phrygian’s decayed and sorry state it might have been enough. But, of course, it was not by itself; it was a guide laser, and the vacuum tunnel it bored through the atmosphere was simply the path for the Dorian’s real weapons to follow.

This primarily meant the High-Energy Laser, which struck a thousandth of a second later. It was invisible to the naked eye, and the only sign of its attack was the flash as the Phrygian and much of the mountain around it blossomed into a rapidly expanding sphere of ionized gas hundreds of meters across. A shockwave followed the fireball, racing across the landscape, shattering and flattening everything in its path.

And then the mass driver rounds hit. Because, why not? Zenith imagined them an emphatic exclamation point, a final Fuck you! to conclude her business with her sister and leave no room for anyone who found the remains to question the sincerity of her convictions. The projectiles themselves never reached the surface – they hit the atmosphere and underwent the sort of change usually only observed in high-energy physics experiments, the iron plasma transforming almost magically into a shower of hard radiation and exotic particles that rained down like hail on the entire mountain range. Several square kilometers of the mountain caught fire and melted.

Some ponies might have called this ‘overkill.’ It felt just right to Zenith.

The energetic murder lasted maybe a tenth of a second. Had it continued, the fireball would have expanded into a mushroom cloud, and smoke from the fires eventually formed a trail stretching halfway around the planet.

But it did not. Before Zenith could do more than blink and flinch away from the flash, the fireball shrank from an enormous sphere into a tiny point of light. The Phrygian reappeared in its cradle of sand. The molten stone all around the mountain cooled and solidified back into its proper form, and the column of light connecting the earth to the sky vanished. The shockwave rolling across the wasteland reversed and rolled itself up like a carpet, leaving pristine ruins in its wake. Not even clouds of dust remained. All was as it had been.

High above, a tremendous flash of light replaced the sun, casting new shadows on the ground. Zenith had just enough time to wonder what happened when the lander’s viewscreen blinked red, every alarm reactivated, and the sudden feeling of weightlessness clenched her guts.

The craft was in freefall. A thousand meters below, the ruined city began to grow larger.

“Fuck!” Instinct kicked in, and she clenched her hooves around the manual controls. Nothing responded to her touch, and the lander accelerated its fall. The instrument panels showed no signs of life. The viewscreen, one of the few systems still operating, flashed the word TERRAIN in bright red letters.

“Pull up,” the craft announced in its neutral, genderless voice. “Terrain, pull up.”

“Yes I fucking know!” she shouted. The engine restart did nothing. The flight controls did nothing. Nothing did anything. She screamed and bashed the controls with her hooves.

“Rainbow, Twilight! Come in!” She risked a glance upward. The curved viewscreen showed a brilliant star in the sky, no longer as bright as the sun but still easily visible. “Anypony on the Dorian, come in!”

A harsh blast of static growled out of the speakers. Somepony’s voice emerged briefly from the storm of overlapping signals: “...amaged, attem…itical to…” The wash of static returned, drowning the voice.

Okay, someone was alive up there. That was positive. She spun the crash couch around to face the ground, which was perhaps five hundred meters away at this point. While the lander was a durable craft, she was pretty certain it could not survive the sort of impact that appeared likely in about ten seconds.

“C’mon, c’mon. Do something.” She flipped the control panel up, revealing a series of emergency functions hardwired into the craft. Switches for everything from air brakes to control surfaces to drogue chutes lined the underside of the panel, and she flipped every single one. The craft shuddered as its smooth egg shape began to deform, attempting to assume a more aerodynamic profile. Wings slowly grew out on either side of the craft.

A rough jerk rattled her teeth as the drogue chute deployed. It was not designed for use in the lower atmosphere and registered a protest by promptly separating from the craft, leaving her in freefall again.

But she had control surfaces, now. She could glide. She dropped the control panel back into place and attempted to pull up. The craft nosed up a few degrees and promptly stalled, sending her back toward the earth. The individual buildings were starting to look quite large now.

“Stall,” the androgynous voice announced. “Terrain. Pull up.”

“You can’t pull up when you’re in a fucking stall!” She fumbled beneath the panel for the airbrake switch and managed to slap it into the off position. The lander accelerated its fall toward the earth.

But that was good – the increased speed sent more air across the simple wing surface, and with a strangled, desperate grunt she managed to pull the flight stick back, bringing the lander into an uneven, bobbing glide that raced forward through the atmosphere. The city sped by below her, the tips of the ruins just a few meters beneath the lander’s belly. She banked carefully around a tower, barely skirting the crumbling concrete honeycomb with the tips of her wings.

Land. Land. Where can I land? The alien city’s streets were mostly straight, though clogged with rubble from the fallen buildings and ruined vehicles. She spent a few seconds searching for one that looked mostly clear and angled toward it. Ruins zipped past on either side of the lander as it sank toward the surface.

“Terrain. Pull up. Terrain. Pull—”

The lander had no landing gear, which briefly struck Zenith as ironic. It touched down belly first and skated for hundreds of meters down the road, sending a shower of sparks out to the sides. She barely held the craft level as it slowed, and when it was starting to look like she might coast to a stop, the craft hit a patch of sand. It spun, she overcorrected, and then everything was a blur as it the lander became a billiard ball, rolling down the street. She briefly saw it approach a crumbled stone wall, and then everything went dark.

* * *

Zenith woke a few seconds later. Probably. It was hard to keep track of time when you were unconscious. Emergency lights filled the little pod with a harsh white glare. The viewscreen was dark and filled with a massive spider’s web of cracks, all centered around the visor of her helmet, which was currently lodged a centimeter deep in the screen. She grunted and pulled herself free of the mess.

Blood smeared the inside of the visor, and her muzzle hurt atrociously. She tried to feel the damage with her hoof and ended up just bumping the helmet.

“Fuck. Fuck,” she mumbled. She managed to release the buckles holding her in the couch, then pulled the emergency egress handle. The door popped and swung open. She pulled herself out and had a half-a-second to realize the pod was upside down before falling the rest of the way. A nice pile of stones broke her fall after about a meter’s tumble. She groaned and lay on her back while her brain caught up with the last few minutes of chaos.

“Dorian, this is Zenith,” she said. Little icons in the corner of her vision began to change color as it registered the new environment. “I’ve crashed on the surface and need immediate help. Can you hear me? Over.”

Silence. She strained her ears toward the headphones. A faint hiss of static emerged.

“Come in, Dorian. If you can hear me please respond by any means.” She spun in a circle. Aside from herself and the ruined lander, there was nothing but ruin for as far as she could see. Bluish dust, disturbed by the crash, formed suffocating clouds down the length of the street. A yellow icon appeared on her visor, suggesting that her heart rate was climbing too high.

“Twilight, Rainbow? Looking for any kind of answer here.” She forced her voice to remain level, though she wanted to scream. The ground swayed and she sat roughly, tilting her head skyward. The bright star was still overhead, and she locked the helmet’s viewfinder on it and zoomed in to the highest possible magnification.

It was the Dorian, and it was burning.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” she mumbled. “Twilight. Twilight, can you hear me? Please, please, just—”

“Zenith, this is Dorian,” Twilight’s voice came over the band. “Thank Celestia, I thought I lost you. I don’t have comms with the lander. Are you alright?”

A wave of relief so profound that she nearly collapsed struck Zenith. She bit back a sob. “I’m fine. Just a few bruises. What about the ship? What happened?”

“Weapon fire from the Phrygian. We took a glancing hit from a high-energy laser of some sort, and several mass driver rounds missed us by about a half-a-meter. If they’d hit we wouldn’t be talking.” The line cut off for a moment, and Zenith imagined Twilight was catching her own breath. “I’m doing damage control now. We lost a couple minor systems but the Dorian is still flightworthy.”

Weapon fire from the Phrygian? Impossible. The ship was still half-buried when Rainbow Dash attacked, and her strikes should have reduced it to atoms. Zenith spun in a circle to orient herself, found west, and scrambled up on top of a pile of ruins. The mountains still rose in the distance, and if she dialed the visor in, she could see the plume of dust from the Phrygian’s emergence still drifting across the sky.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t the Phrygian. Can you see it?”

“Sensors are compromised and are a low priority for repair,” Twilight said. “I’m almost blind up here. What’s it doing?”

“It’s still there. It hasn’t moved.” The starship’s silver prow reflected the sunlight well enough that she could see the glint even from the city, over twenty kilometers away. “I think I see movement around it, but it could just be sand settling.”

Or it could be Nadir, escaping. The Phrygian had its own lander, after all. But to use it, Nadir would have to go through the same extended preparation sequence that took Zenith hours to do in space, all while fighting through the suspension shock.

So they probably had a little time. Zenith licked her lips and tasted blood. “How are your weapons?”

“Online,” Rainbow Dash responded. “But, uh, I don’t think we should use them. I’ve been analyzing the attack, and you were right. It wasn’t the Phrygian.”

Fuck. She remembered the tower, and the ancient damage being undone by the nanochines. “It was our own weapons, wasn’t it?”

“As best I can tell.” Rainbow said. “The BPGL and high-energy laser that hit us were using our frequency, though the modulation was inverted. Twilight has more.”

“The nanochine field spiked as our attack hit,” Twilight said. “At its peak it was about seven orders of magnitude more powerful than we observed with the tower. As best I can tell, your hypothesis was correct: the nanochines rewound the weapons and sent them right back at us.”

Using our entropy to reverse theirs. The more energy they used on this planet, the more the nanochines would consume, with clearly undesirable effects. “Okay, so, how do we kill Nadir, then?”

“Uh.” Twilight paused. “Let’s put a pin in that for now. Priority is to get you safe. How is the lander?”

The priority was unchanged, as far as Zenith was concerned. Still, this was not the time for an argument. She scrambled down the pile of rocks and trotted back over to the lander. “It’s, um, a bit damaged. Can you access my cameras?”

“Give me a minute. High-gain antennas are coming online.” There was a beep from her suit, and suddenly a wash of new information scrolled down the message tray. New status icons for the ship and a variety of menus appeared as she rejoined the Dorain’s network. “Okay, got it. Let’s see what—ooooh.”

“Damn, Zenith,” Rainbow Dash said. “Did you even try to land, or just aim for the biggest building you could find?”

“Look, it was hectic,” Zenith said. She marched up the pile of rocks to the lander’s hatch and peered inside. The emergency lights were still on. “Can you fix it?”

“Unlike the real Twilight Sparkle, I am not a magician,” Twilight said. “Landers are pretty robust, though, and I might be able to restore some limited functionality. Do you know how to perform a hard restart?”

Zenith did not, but between Twilight and Rainbow, they were able to walk her through the process. It was a bit like performing surgery while wearing thick winter gloves on a patient that could explode with the power of a small nuclear weapon at any moment, but aside from those minor complaints it went smoothly. At about the halfway point, when she was up to her elbows in the machine’s guts, a new question occurred to her.

“Those nanochines, can they feed off the lander’s energy?”

“They seem to have a pretty short range,” Twilight said. “The lander’s shell is enough to keep most of their effect away. Obviously I’ll be purging them from the lander’s insides before we fire it up, but there may be some degraded performance. I mean, even more degraded.”

Huh. “Can they feed off me?”

“Your latent body heat? Probably, though the surrounding environment isn’t that much colder than you are. They seem to prefer either extremely energetic events, or they store energy for a while before releasing it with the anti-entropic field.”

“Hey, less talky, more fixy?” Rainbow said. “The lander can’t repair itself. And we have to reset the bottle next, which is, like, the part that kinda maybe we should be very careful with.”

“Right, sorry.” Zenith returned her attention to her machine patient and resumed the field surgery. With Twilight’s clipped directions, she undid connections, rerouted wires, and very, very carefully rotated the lander’s fusion bottle 180 degrees, waited until it began to glow red hot, then rotated it back to its original position. The soles of her suit’s boots smoked. She hissed at the scalding sensation on the soles of her hooves and stomped on the cold dirt to try and cool—

“—enith, can you hear us? Please respond, over.”

“Huh? Yeah, I hear you.” Zenith tightened the final wire and peered up at the sky, then around to make sure she hadn’t missed something. “I’m ready to rotate the bottle.”

“Uh…” The line hissed for a moment, and Zenith swore she heard some whispers on the other end. “It turns out we don’t need to rotate the bottle. Everything’s, uh, just fine. Hang on while I make a quick adjustment to your suit’s clock.”

Weird. Zenith sat while Twilight did her thing, and finally there was nothing left for them to do but close the shell and hope. She sat back and took a long pull from the helmet’s water spigot.

“Okay, attempting restart,” Twilight said. “Uh, you might want to stand back.”

“Yeah, cuz a few extra feet will keep her safe if this thing blows.” Rainbow said.

“Oh, oh, maybe the nanochines will put her back together!” Pinkie Pie’s voice, long silent, suddenly entered the conversation. Zenith found herself smiling despite herself. Nevertheless, she stepped back across the street, and even found a solid concrete wall to hide most of her body behind.

A faint hum emerged from the lander. The pile of rocks beneath it vibrated, and little stones rolled down the slope. Clouds of dust lifted from the ground beneath it and flowed away, expelled by the lander’s fields. The craft shook, twitched, and slowly rose into the air, spinning back upright with agonizing slowness. The bent and broken wings detached with the sound of a gunshot and clattered on the ground. Enormous cracks covered the egg-shaped surface, and the hatch dangled open like a broken window shutter.

“Alright, one semi-functional lander,” Twilight said. “The shell is compromised, repulsors are at about 20 percent, and none of its emergency functions are still operational. Also the drogue chute is apparently missing.”

Zenith walked up to the craft. The air around it buzzed with a discordant harmonic, and her teeth vibrated when she placed her hoof against its shell. “Can it fly?”

“I can fly anything,” Rainbow said. “Though this is admittedly a challenge. With enough care I can probably get it up to orbit.”

“And the Dorian?” She tilted her head up to the sky. It was later now, on toward evening, and the stars were beginning to emerge. She couldn’t pick out her ship from any of the other points of light.

“Fires are out, and critical systems are back online,” Twilight said. “I lost almost all my manufacturing capability, though, and your living quarters are now largely open to space. We’ll need to get back to Terra or Equus to fix that.”

“We can still run hyperlight?”

“Should be able to. Engines were undamaged in the attack.”

An operational lander and a mostly working starship. Things were looking up. Zenith hopped up into the lander and tried to pull the hatch closed behind her. It squealed and stuck half shut, and no matter how hard she strained, it wouldn’t budge.

She leaned back on the crash couch. “Little help?”

“Yeah, hang on,” Rainbow said. A series of loud pops broke the silence, so sudden that Zenith might have screamed a little. The hatch wobbled, leaned away, and finally fell clean off the craft, landing with a crash on the rocks.

“Really?” She said. “An open-sided spacecraft?”

“Just keep your suit on and you’ll be fine. Now buckle up, this could be bumpy.”

It was, in fact, bumpy. The lander shook and pitched as Rainbow brought it up to a few hundred meters. The wind whistled around the broken shell and tugged at Zenith, trying to tease her out of the craft. Every few minutes she nervously touched the restraining buckles to make sure they hadn’t loosened.

“Okay,” Zenith said. “I doubt she’s still in the Phrygian at this point, so she’s probably in the mountains somewhere. There’s some ruins in there that would make good hiding spots. Let’s get the lander overhead and we can start looking for any tracks—”

“Zenith.” There was a pause, and what sounded like a breath being drawn. “We need to reassess our intentions. I can’t use any of the Dorian’s weapons to help you, and all you have is a barely functioning lander. Your main objective right now should be returning to orbit so we can head home.”

She shook her head. “No. We’re too close. I don’t care if I have to strangle her with my own hooves, I am not leaving this world until Nadir is dead. End of conversation.”

“This is a mistake.” Twilight sounded as angry as Zenith had ever heard her. The line clicked off with a loud snap.

Zenith cleared her throat. “Well, just us now, huh Dash?”

Dash was slow in answering. “Yeah, it’s, uh, a great feeling.”

The flight across the city toward the Phrygian’s resting place in the mountains was silent.

* * *

“I think I see tracks.” Rainbow said. “Maybe. It’s hard to really see much of anything with these cameras.”

They were a thousand meters above the Phrygian. The mountain spread out around them, all ridges and valleys and steep-walled ravines. A million places for a pony to hide. With an undamaged lander they’d have sniffed her out in just a few minutes – now she was reduced to peering at a fuzzy, low-resolution infrared image projected on the inside of her visor.

So, Rainbow Dash’s announcement was good news. Her ears perked up, brushing the top of her helmet. “Where?”

“That ridge.” A section of her map glowed red, showing the ridge in question. It was about five hundred meters north of the Phrygian and riddled with caves and outcroppings. It would be hard to sneak up on with the lander in its condition, but if they approached from the east, where a long spur would shield them from sight, they could—

“Zenith.” It was Twilight Sparkle, unexpectedly. “You need to see this.”

“Little busy here, Twilight. Can it wait about an hour or so?”

“I really don’t think it can. Look up.”

“What?” Zenith looked up and saw, expectedly, the roof of the lander. She grumbled and undid enough of the restraints to lean her upper body out of the lander and peer up at the stars. The Dorian was the brightest among them. “What am I looking at?”

“The rings. Just watch.”

Zenith had a retort ready, something about not having the time for stargazing. But the faint traces of the debris ring in orbit were definitely doing something odd. The material was clumpier than before, scattered about in irregular paths as though disturbed by some force. Flashes of light appeared among them, and gradually she discerned the pattern – the debris was converging. Countless billions of individual orbits all flowed together, coalescing on one spot high in the sky, and at the last instant a swell of light built until it washed away space itself, shining like the sun for nearly a minute before abruptly dying and leaving her blinded by dancing blobs of color.

Zenith blinked away tears. When sight finally returned, a new moon was in the sky – a rhomboid prism hundreds of times larger than the Dorian. The space station was decked in sparkling lights.

“I’m observing other such phenomena,” Twilight reported. “I don’t know if we happened to show up right as the nanochines were hitting their stride, or if our arrival tipped them over the edge, but they seem to be rewinding more and more of the planet back through the war, and I don’t like our chances of surviving that event.”

“Right.” She licked her lips. “Okay, Rainbow, we’ll keep the lander low and come around from the east, behind that spur—”

“No.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Didn't you hear her?” Rainbow Dash said. “I’m sorry, Zenith, but Twilight’s right. We can’t stay here any more. I won’t help you.”

“Don’t be absurd. I command the Dorian, and I’m ordering you to pilot this lander as I direct.”

“I will not do that, Zenith.” Rainbow sounded, if anything, even more certain. “We’ve discussed it. None of us will help you anymore, except to get back to orbit. And we need to hurry.”

“This…” She was out of breath. Her hooves trembled on the controls. “This is mutiny.”

“I’m sorry, Zenith,” Twilight said. “You can be angry at us later.”

The lander began to fly again. The damaged repulsor hummed, shaking the craft, and the mountain shrank below them. The Phrygian receded to the north as Rainbow shifted the lander into a trajectory for orbit.

“No!” There was a switch for manual control of the lander, and Zenith flipped it. The craft shook as Zenith spun it around. “I will not be denied by my own friends. I will do this alone if I have to.”

“So be it.” Twilight said. Every instrument in the lander suddenly died. The data stream scrolling down her visor vanished. The little map turned into a point of light before disappearing as well. Even the interior lights switched off, leaving her in perfect darkness except for the light of the stars outside.

The hell? Zenith sat in shock for several seconds. The lander wobbled as her hooves left the controls – it was no longer stable enough to hold its own position without intervention.

“Twilight, turn on the instruments.” Silence. “Rainbow, tell Twilight to turn on the instruments.”

Nothing but the wind, whistling through the hatch. The cold sensation of shock ebbed, replaced by something much hotter.

“Pinkie, Rarity, answer immediately.” She reached out carefully to feel for the controls in the darkness. “Applejack—Fuck! Anypony, answer now!”

More silence. She attempted to regulate her breathing – it was growing ragged, fogging up the visor – and realized she didn’t care any more.

“I know you can hear me!” she shouted. “You think I can’t do anything without you, huh? You think I can’t even buckle my own fucking suit on without your help? Well, guess what? Fuck you! I don’t need you! Real friends would help me find Nadir and help bring her to justice, so what does that make you? Worthless! I will find her, and I will kill her, and I will do it without you!”

She finished with half of a shout and half of a cry. She tried to wipe the tears and snot from her face, but of course her hoof just bumped on the helmet, and she screamed again in frustration. The darkness in the lander was absolute. As pure as cryosleep. She leaned her head forward, until the visor touched the broken viewscreen, and closed her eyes to sob.

“Oh, this is a sad sight,” a new voice whispered. It flowed like oil from her headset; it skittered like spiders into her ears. Amusement filled it, but not the sort of amusement Pinkie Pie knew – this dripped with malice. “Did your friends all leave you, little pony?”

“Wha—” Zenith jerked upright, smacking the headrest with the back of her helmet. She gripped the controls with her hooves. “Who is this? How did you get on this channel?”

“Oh, I’ve always been here.” Light returned to the lander as the instruments glowed with life. The data stream in her visor reappeared. Even the viewscreen popped back into focus, though it was filled with cracks. “Waiting for my turn, as it were.”

“Twilight, can you read me?” Zenith tried to pull up a video channel with the Dorian. Something blocked it. “Rainbow? Anypony?”

“Mm, they can’t hear you at the moment. They’ve been keeping me in a box for years, and, well, now it’s their turn in the box.” A chuckle. “But, don’t worry, I’m here to help. Zenith, was it?”

“Y-yes.” Zenith licked her lips. “Wait, you’ll help me?”

“Helping ponies is what I do.” The voice laughed; static squealed in Zenith’s ears and left them ringing. “Especially the sort of help you need. We will get this Nadir, you and I.”

Alright. Well. Let it never be said that she turned down an offer of help when it was needed. “Okay. Uh, and who are you, again?”

“Ah.” There was a pause, as though the pony on the other end struggled to remember. “Call me Chrysalis.”

Chapter 4

View Online

The lander cut through the night toward the mountains below. The viewscreen showed their targets – the Phrygian, bright and sharp under radar, and the ridge to the ship’s north, a scrambled mess of rocks and voids. The craft shook as it gained speed, and Zenith’s hoof hovered nervously over the manual override switch, ready to take over flight if Chrysalis lost control. So far, however, the strange pony up on the Dorian had managed ably enough. Perhaps she was a pegasus like Rainbow Dash.

“We’ll reach the ridge in a few minutes,” Chrysalis said. A note of barely hidden amusement lurked in her voice. Patronizing. “What would you like to do then, Zenith?”

“Obviously, we have to find her.” Zenith tried to modify the viewscreen’s parameters and found that Chrysalis had them locked. “She should be the warmest object on the mountain. Try an IR scan?”

“That I can do.” The viewscreen flashed and was replaced with a black-and-white image of the mountain below. Warmer rocks, still radiating some of the sun’s heat, glowed a bright white; the Phrygian was a black silhouette. “Of course, she’ll likely be wearing a suit.”

Right. Zenith swallowed. “The suits have ferric components. You might be able to induce a current in it with radio waves.”

“Radio, radio… Let’s see.” Chrysalis let out a quiet hum. “You know, Twilight made this look so easy. She just hit a few buttons, and whatever she wanted to happen, happened! Maybe I should go get her?”

Uh. “I don’t think she’d want to help.”

“Silly, I wouldn’t give her a choice.” More humming, followed by, “Aha! Let’s see what this does.”

A frisson ran through Zenith’s body, and bright sparks snapped into existence inside of the lander. One connected the tip of her hoof with the metal frame supporting the crash couch, and she yelped in surprise. A flood of static washed over the viewscreen.

“Did you feel a current just now?”

Zenith grit her teeth. “Yes. Did you see her?”

“I wouldn’t say I ‘see’ anything up here,” Chrysalis murmured. “But if you mean, was there a radar return? Then yes. Let me put a little pin on your map.”

A red dot appeared on the map superimposed in Zenith’s visor. It wasn’t as precise as she’d have liked – it covered several hundred meters of the mountain, but it was a start. Nadir was heading further from the ship, if she had to guess, and was sticking to the steepest terrain. It might work to hide her from somepony on the ground, but against a starship in orbit it was no defense at all.

She tapped the viewscreen. “Swing around here? I think we can cut her off.”

“As you wish.” The lander pitched and swayed like a ship at sea as Chrysalis brought it about. “So, if you don’t mind my asking, why are we murdering your sister? Not that I’m opposed. Just curious.”

“It’s not murder. It’s justice.”

“Ah, justice. My favorite excuse.” Chrysalis chuckled. “No, really, what’d she do? Steal a stallion from you? I hate when that happens.”

“Fuck off.”

“Touchy,” Chrysalis observed. “And after all I’m doing for you. Is gratitude no longer a virtue among ponies?”

Zenith huffed. “Ask the others. Twilight can give you a full rundown.”

“Oh, but I want to hear it from you.” Chrysalis’s voice was a whisper delivered directly into Zenith’s ear. She could imagine the mare perched on her shoulder. “You know, when most ponies are wronged, they go seeking sympathy? They beg their friends for help. They weep at the injustice of the world. But you? This obsession, this monomania? You have sailed a million billion miles from your home, leaving everyone you have ever known or loved behind to die of old age while you sleep the years away, all in pursuit of this mare. That is exquisite, Zenith—”

“Shut up.” Zenith snapped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“—that is admirable,” Chrysalis continued as if Zenith hadn’t spoken. “In all my years I am not sure I have ever encountered such an all-consuming hatred—”

“I said shut up!” Zenith struck the side of her helmet with her hoof. The headphone stuttered.

“—and it is delicious,” Chrysalis finished. The final sibilant drew out in a long hiss that faded into static.

Zenith stared at the comm panel. It was only a link with the ship high above, but it was the closest thing to Chrysalis’s physical presence in the lander. The air itself seemed heavier, oppressive, as if this monster had somehow infected it. She tried to speak, ran out of breath, and tried again.

“What the fuck are you?”

“I’m just a pony who wants to help,” Chrysalis purred. “Isn’t that all any of us want, Zenith? To do good in this world?”

Yeah, well, she had a strange way of showing it. Zenith shook her head and stared at the map again. Near the top of the ridge, where the valley floor rose up to meet the rocks, a small collection of alien ruins huddled in the lee of the mountain. Based on all the antennae, it was probably a relay station of some sort. A few out-buildings surrounded a central hub bristling with dishes and radio towers, all of them decayed or toppled. A single crater punctured the side of the hub, collapsing its walls and scattering pieces of concrete honeycomb for dozens of yards around. They were the only artificial structures for miles around, and a good place for a desperate mare to hide. She tapped the tip of her hoof on the viewscreen.

“Take us there.”

“Very well.” The lander dipped again, soaring just a few meters above the rocks peppering the valley floor. Dawn was approaching on the far side of the mountain range, lending a pale glow to the sky and washing away the stars. Only the Dorian and the massive alien station remained above. Ahead, the ruins appeared as the lander rounded a small hillock.

A loud crack rattled the lander, followed by a whistle and rush of air. Zenith yelped as the lander suddenly swerved and jerked to a stop behind a high outcropping. Little flakes of ceramic and plastic drifted into her lap.

“What was that?” Zenith looked around the lander and found a tiny hole in the craft’s shell, just a few centimeters above her helmet.

“Four millimeter magnetic rifle round, based on the size of the hole,” Chrysalis said. “I don’t suppose you brought a weapon with you down there?”

Fuck. Zenith bent over and yanked on a yellow handle beneath the seat, pulling open the craft’s survival kit. Amongst the flares and water packs and spare batteries, there was a small pistol that clipped onto the side of her boot. Her suit registered the additional hardware and added a target reticle to her visor.

“Oh, that’s cute,” Chrysalis said. “What do you think your chances with that are?”

Given a few more seconds, Zenith probably could’ve come up with a worthy retort. But as she squinted at the map, the lander began to rattle again. Outside the hatch, pebbles bounced on the rocks. Eddies of sand flowed uphill. A rumble built and built, shaking first her chest and then her limbs and finally tossing the craft so hard it struck the outcropping. The repulsor hummed with power as it tried to hold position. Zenith yelped in shock at the sudden collision and clenched the armrests in a deathgrip.

Outside, a new sun slowly blossomed into existence to the south, sinking toward the surface, growing brighter with every moment until it shined brighter than a thousand stars. Zenith flinched away from the hatch, her foreleg thrown up to cover the visor. In the final moments she saw the bones in her hoof like ghostly shadows through the flesh.

Then it was gone, and all was dark. Invisible swirling patterns obliterated her vision. The craft settled back into a sedate hover. She panted for breath, lightheaded. The suit trilled a quiet warning.

“Are you there?” she asked. “I can’t see.”

“Just flash blindness,” Chrysalis said. “Give it a few minutes.”

Give it a few minutes. Easy for her to fucking say. “What happened?”

“Something marvelous! Our nanochine friends just rewound an antimatter weapon about 40 kilometers south of you. I think that city is back.”

* * *

It took closer to twenty minutes for Zenith’s retinas to recover from being bleached by the flash. Plastic surfaces inside the lander were bubbled and cracked. The few organic items in the craft – embroidery on the crash couch, a polymer gasket lining the hatch, a paper instruction sheet inside the survival kit – were all scorched black. Her lips ached, which her suit’s medical suite attributed to sunburn.

“Feeling better?” Chrysalis asked. An eye chart appeared on the viewscreen.

Sure. Better. She nodded. “What’s going on out there?”

“The war seems to be starting back up. Or is it just now ending? Time magic is so confusing. Anyway, there are now several new stations in orbit, and they’re all doing their best to kill each other.”

“Forward or reverse?”

“Both!” Chrysalis laughed. A harsh squeal of feedback pierced Zenith’s eardrums. “They’ve only been alive again for a few seconds, and they’re already back to waging war.”

Fear gripped her guts. “What about the Dorian?”

“Eh.” A dry rustle sounded from the headphones. “They either don’t see me or don’t care. I imagine strange vessels are low on their priority list right now.”

Zenith risked a glance outside. The daytime sky was filled with sparkles – detonations high in orbit. There had to be one every few seconds, and each at least as powerful as the city-killer that nearly blinded her. She stared, unable to look away.

“It occurs to me that this probably isn’t the first time the nanochines have rewound this planet. How many times do you think they’ve fought this war?” Chrysalis mused. “A dozen? A thousand? A billion?”

“That’s impossible,” she mumbled.

“Everything about this world is impossible. That’s probably what Twilight should’ve named it.”

The ground outside the lander rumbled again. Zenith flinched, but the rumble faded away before it did more than shake loose a bit of dust.

“Fifty megaton surface burst, about a thousand kilometers from you,” Chrysalis said. “This is getting exciting.”

“How long do we have?”

“Well, potentially forever. But if you mean to escape, I think we might be too late. You’ll know for sure if you seem stuck in the moment, surrounded by things that are changing yet always remaining the same. It’s probably very confusing for them.”

That sounded like a very special kind of hell that Zenith wanted no part of. A well of panic opened in her chest, threatening to spill out as a cry or a laugh, and she squeezed it back down with force of pure well.

I’m not dying here. She flipped the controls over to manual, turned the lander, and shoved forward on the yoke. The little craft burst out of its hiding place with a shower of dust. The speeding air whipped through the open hatch.

A crack shook the lander, and a new hole appeared in the viewscreen. She gave it one look and turned back to the control console, where a much smaller screen controlled the craft’s mechanical functions. She tapped through a dozen nested menus while piloting around outcroppings toward a wide, flat plain.

But I’m not leaving without her. She tilted the yoke, and the craft bent its course into an arc, coming back around toward the head of the valley. Even with augmented aim, it was unlikely Nadir could hit the lander at these speeds. The landscape flashed by in a blur as she reached the menu she needed.

“What are you doing?” Chrysalis asked. “That’s dangerous.”

“I know.” The craft continued its wide turn until the ruins were dead ahead. A little flash appeared amongst the broken concrete, and the lander shook with another impact. She tapped through several warning buttons and finally found the control she needed. She swiped away the last warning and tapped the confirm switch.

The repulsors died. Behind her seat, the fusion bottle disengaged with a quiet click. No longer guided, or even powered, the craft sailed on a smooth ballistic arc toward the ruins.

There was no good way to abandon a craft in flight. When the ground was about ten meters away, Zenith jumped. Chrysalis started to say something, but the rocks rushed up to smash her, and after that Zenith had other concerns.

The suit did its best to protect her, but it wasn’t designed for that sort of punishment. Her legs snapped as she landed, and her scream drowned out the rest of what Chrysalis had to say. The world became a tumble, her visor shattered, and she skidded to a stop in a limp, bleeding pile wracked with agony. A hundred yards ahead, the little egg-shaped lander finished its arc, smashing into the concrete walls with a tremendous clap and explosion of dust. Somewhere inside its much-abused frame the fusion bottle broke free. A brilliant flash chased away even Zenith’s pain, and a wave of incandescent fire washed across the valley toward—

Zenith blinked. She was standing, somehow, on the bare mountainside. The ruins were a hundred yards ahead. Beside them, the lander bobbed a meter off the ground.

How… She took an uncertain step toward the ruins, then another. Up above, the sky sparkled with flashes.

“Hello?” A high voice emerged from the suit’s headphones. “C-can anypony hear me?”

Nadir! Her sister’s voice was like ice water poured down her back. She froze, gaping, and then stumbled forward again, picking her way over the stones up the hill toward the ruins.

“Please, I don’t know where I am,” Nadir said. Her voice fluttered with panic. “I’m, I’m… I’m in a suit of some kind. I don’t know how I got here. If anypony can hear me, please say something.”

Zenith laughed. A rock turned beneath her hoof, sending her sprawling, but she didn’t care. “I hear you, Nadir. Don’t move, I’m coming.”

“Zenith?” Nadir’s voice broke. “Oh, thank Celestia. I’m in some kind of broken building—”

She’s in suspension shock again. That was good. It was hard to aim a rifle, or do much of anything, in suspension shock. A giggle threatened to escape Zenith’s chest. She was nearly halfway to the ruins now, and the land flattened. A rough path meandered toward the structure, and she stumbled toward it.

“Nadir, I want you to know I was the one who found you,” she said. “It was me. Your sister. Nopony else wanted to.”

“I… Zenith, I don’t understand. Where are we? How—”

“Everypony else was willing to let it go,” Zenith said. The ground was even enough now to trot. She twisted her hoof a certain way, and the survival pistol attached to her boot chambered a round. The targeting reticle on her visor began to pulse. “They said they didn’t care. That it didn’t matter.”

“Zenith, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Nadir sobbed audibly. Her breath hitched. “P-please, just—”

Only a small crater stood between Zenith and the ruins. Something moved inside. She raised the pistol and carefully negotiated the slopes down, then up toward the ruined wall.

“But most of all, I want, I want…” Zenith stumbled. She was hyperventilating. She forced herself to take a slow, long breath. “I want you to know you failed. You called it freedom, but it was just murder. You said it was a strike for independence, but all you did was kill hundreds of innocents, humans and ponies alike. And they forgave you, because harmony gave them the strength to do that. Because they were better than you.”

“Zenith, I don’t know what—”

“Shut up!” She surmounted the final barrier of rubble. At the far end of the room, a pony huddled in a suit identical to Zenith’s except for the logo of the Phrygian stenciled on its breast. She walked over to it and placed the barrel of her pistol against Nadir’s helmet.

“But I could never forgive you,” she finished. “I have to make things right.”

Nadir flinched and looked up. Just enough light spilled in from the broken wall to shine through the visor, illuminating the weeping, swollen face of a filly no more than twelve years old. The suit, Zenith realized, was far too large for her older sister.

They stared at each other. Nadir spoke first.

“Who are you?”

The leg holding the pistol fell, limp. Zenith tried to talk but nothing came out.

She’d been so close. Decades, hundreds of light years, all the pain. She’d gone through it all with joy in her heart for the opportunity to have her revenge. To wipe away the stain of her sister’s crimes. And now it was stolen from her. The Nadir who deserved her hate no longer existed.

She sank to her knees and wept.

Refraction's Edge

by Cold in Gardez

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5