Moon and Stars

She filled entire lunar seas with rituals and arcane formulae designed to ferry her back to Equestria. In her darker moments…they were designed to bring about her end. Nothing worked. Dallow her to return from her banishment.

Four hundred years ago, she realized that would never come. She would remain here, alone, for all of eternity. It was, and always had been, her destiny. Once she accepted it, her mind grew quiet and her body stilled. She hasn't moved in a long time.

...A star is moving.

Her eyes unconsciously followed it as it swooped across the sky and turned around. Something in her mind stirred. Is it…supposed to do that? It turned again and stopped, growing brighter, larger…and detailed as it approached her.

The rusty gears of her mind began to turn. Whatever it is, it's not a star at all. If she had to describe it, she would say it looked like three massive, metallic honeycombs glued together, with brilliant fire spewing from it...But there will never be a reason for her to describe it.

Fire shot from the front and the honeycomb slowed down, floating over her at a crawl compared to how fast it had been moving mere moments ago. She didn't bother turning her head to watch it further. If it were closer…maybe she could…

But it's not.

It stayed with her moon as her sister lowered it, circling overhead. Once the moon stopped, fire shot out of the interloper and it began to descend.

Only then did she twist her head to watch it. It was going to crash onto the surface of her moon. She might be able to…Using her knowledge from centuries of stewarding the moon, it took a moment for her to figure out when and where it would land. The newcomer...this is a controlled landing. It's not crashing like the last few. It's chosen to land. It can choose. It can think. It wouldn’t land if it couldn’t also…

It will land in Vallis Celestium. That's nearby. If she ran, she could reach it right as it touches the ground.

With great effort, she willed her long-unused muscles to move, her joints popping and cracking as she slowly, shakily stood up. Just standing was enough to make her legs burn. One by one, she tested her muscles, awakening them from their slumber. Dust was shaken from her fur, falling back down to the surface of her prison.

Forcing one hoof in front of the other, she managed to maintain a slow, loping gallop, relying on the weak gravity of her moon to assist her weakened legs. She felt, rather than heard her hoofbeats against the soft ground, the dull beat traveling through her body to reach her ears. It isn't long before her nostrils flared, searching for air that isn't there.

She collapsed at the edge of the valley she had so long ago named after her sister, just in the nick of time. Fire pouring from its belly, the newcomer, which she judged it to be half the size of her old castle, floated down, landing almost daintily on a set of metal hooves. Taking a moment to rest her screaming legs, she looked over its sharp, grey angles, its dark, reflective glass on the front, the tubes that belched fire…

It's a vessel of some kind. Vessels are controlled by living, breathing, thinking creatures. Thinking creatures required a way to enter and exit a vessel.

Her heart pounded in her chest, and not just from physical exertion, as she climbed to her hooves once more, and approached the interloper as it extended a drill from its belly to the surface of her moon…

 

 

 

 

~

________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

That damn alarm is set too early.

Eyes glued shut from sleep, Anon dragged himself out of bed, his feet hitting the hardwood floor of his bedroom, and shuffled his way to the blaring alarm clock. Blindly fumbling around, his open hand slapped down over and over, until he found the snooze button. Without any electronic screeching, his ears drank in a deep rumble, the closest to silence he's heard for months. But that’s supposed to change today.

His eyes still caked shut with sleep, he turned and instinctively followed the path to his coffee maker. Grabbing the pot, he sloshed it around. Cold sludge. Of course. It's broken again. He steeled himself and drank the day-old coffee anyway. A shudder of revulsion ran through him but it did the trick. Shocked awake, he peeled his eyes open and gazed out his window, at the brilliant red pillars of hydrogen dust that make up the Horsehead Nebula. Newborn stars filled the sky, shining with brilliant blue light.

“Are you serious?” Not bothering to change out of yesterday's clothing, he stormed out of his room, his bare feet soon slapping against the metal floor of the corridors of the IST One Bad Date Too Many. With every window he passed, his annoyance grew, a stress headache threatening to start. Reaching octagonal doors, he jabbed at the ‘open’ button as it was personally responsible.

The doors opened, allowing a hellish red light to pour into the hall, heat from infrared lights soon following. Stepping onto soft carpeted floor, he approached the creature towering above the main console. Standing on four spindly legs, it's hard, bulbous abdomen swayed idly in the air. Its four arms, each ending in two clawed digits, worked away on touchscreens. As he neared, it swung its serpentine head around towards him, and screeched.

The device wrapped around Anon's ear wasted no time translating, “Good morning, Captain. Did you sleep well?”

He ignored the question, posing his own, “Rhindi, what are we STILL doing here? We were supposed to be halfway back to civilization by now.”

Rhindi closed whatever program it had been working on and chittered, “We were on the way to the jump point after you went to bed, when the sensors discovered three new anomalies. We couldn't leave without investigating!”

Anon glowered at the alien engineer, “You mean you just found an excuse so you wouldn't have to be the one to shut everything down.”

“Nope!” Rhindi closed its outer pair of eyes, in what is its species equivalent of a smile. “I already did three jumps while you were asleep. I just wanted us to get a little extra for this job.”

With a sigh, Anon ran his fingers through his hair, “...Go on…”

Rhindi pulled up the results, “The first was a natural satellite that accelerated and decelerated on its own. Landed, took scans and samples. Second was an asteroid made up of an unidentifiable metal. I put it in ring three's cargo bay, section forty one. Last was a shell of electromagnetic radiation around a dead world that I believe were cultural in nature. Could you imagine?! Species evolved, invented radio transmission, and went extinct in a nebula? The speed of development-”

Anon put up his hand, cutting Rhindi off. It was too early for him to deal with another Ssthakic tangent. “Alright, alright, I get it. Three wonderful breakthroughs for the Technocracy to justify our ship. Damn good work, Rhindi.” It ‘smiled’ at him again. Jerking his thumb behind him, he said, “I'm gonna go check on Ket. How long until we're ready to go?”

“A little over an hour.”

“Alright. Head on over to Engineering when you're ready.”

His frustration assuaged, Anon set out into his ship. With a quick stop to get ready for the day, he soon made his way to Gunnery Control.

Stepping in, warm air blowing up from floor vents lifted his clothes on him. He looked up at beams and bars crisscrossing below the relatively high ceiling. Clutching to one of the bars with a pair of grey prehensile claws, was a white feathered creature with rust colored quills covering its back and four wings unconsciously flapping in pairs.

Anon let out a quick series of whistles, which his implant decided to translate for him anyway, “We call upon the Ket before us.” It never did get his voice right…

Two black eyes snapped open and the creature whistled back, “This Ket hears you and obeys.” Letting go of its perch, it swooped down, hovering before Anon. With no real feet, the creature could never truly land. In whistled English, it greeted him, “Hello, Anon.”

Aside from a few smattered words, that was the end of their multilingual skill and they both knew it. But it was the effort that mattered to them both. Being able to give Ket his peoples traditional greeting held more weight, now that he's the only one left. Glancing around, Anon asked, “So, it's been a few months. How are the renovations holding up? Is there anything you want me to tell them when we dock?”

“Unless you have a way to replace the floor with molten lava, it's perfect. Thank you, Anon.”

Anon chuckled, “Maybe if we ever get this thing to a capital ship size.”

“Have we returned to Technocracy space?” If he shared Anon's amusement, Ket made no outward sign.

“No, not yet. Rhindi is as easily distracted as always. But we have some time, and a few leftover probes, so if you wanted to cycle the guns…”

Ket’s ears perked up and he let out a trill, “Absolutely!”

The first thing Anon did when he returned to the bridge was to tweak the lighting controls and tapped a button to cause his command chair to emerge from a panel in the floor. Standing in deep infrared may be perfect for the ‘alien overlords,’ but he's human, he's the captain, he's going to keep resetting the lights to human normal until Rhindi gets the point. After that, he got to work programming flight paths. Corkscrewing loopdeloops, zigzagging switchbacks with the engines cut to hide from sensors, all the most devilish tricks he could think of.

Sending off a quick word of warning to Rhindi, he launched a half dozen probes, each with their new instructions. Allowing a minute for them to establish their bizarre flight paths, Anon picked up an ancient CB radio-so low tech, any enemies would never think to look for it in an actual combat situation. “All crew, multiple contacts on sensors, blue alert, six combat drones.”

The radio crackled to life with Ket’s whistling, “Captain, please initiate a four RPM starboard spin.”

It was their secret weapon. Their dorsal and caudal turrets took just less than fifteen seconds to cycle. Tracking targets across the vastness of space and accurately predicting their movements was hard enough with the ship remaining relatively stable. To do that with the ship spinning around to bring another set of guns to bare? It was impossible for most species. But Ket was not most species. He's able to accurately judge minute changes in air current, to accurately fly and hover with two sets of wings, literally in his sleep. The same parts of his brain that allowed him to do that, made him the best damn gunner in the galaxy.

Initiating the spin, Anon heard the engines shift, and the whirring of servos as his chair under him turned, compensating for the change in relative gravity. Satisfied at the stabilization, Anon looked over at the dynamic diagram of his ship. Most “Instruments of the Ssthakic Technocracy,” were composed of modular hexagonal sections, and the One Bad Date Too Many was no different. While every ship had the minimum of two sections, one for engineering, and the other for command and sensor suite, Anon was proud to say, his ship possessed a third section, for cargo and a dedicated science lab. They were halfway to being a true deep space exploration vessel. Bigger didn't just mean more room to play with. Each segment came equipped with weapon hardpoints-in this case, with large guns. Guns that Anon watched rotate towards the first probe. Brilliant lines of light on the diagram flashed, lasers firing on the drone, quickly followed by a whip-crack running through the ship as rail guns fired and one of the six probes vanished off the sensors. In four seconds, the work Anon put into the drone had been reduced to molten slag and obliterated by slugs traveling at over ten kilometers a second.

Less than a minute later, the last probe vanished off the screen. “Targets cleared, targets cleared. Rhindi?”

The radio hissed, static filling the air, “Capacitors…I think I finally found a solution!” The clacking of claws on plastic could be heard, as the Ssthaki forgot to let go of the button on the radio, “Yes! They would have held for eighteen more minutes! Sustaining that would scare off a ship thrice our size!”

Reaching down, Anon activated counter thrusters to cancel out the spin, “Damn good job, both of you. It looked like…only one miss, and one grazed, Ket?”

“That graze would have been a hit if they were combat weight.”

Anon pursed his lips. Over the radio, he couldn't tell if Ket was bragging or sulking. But a combat drone would have had enough armor to withstand at LEAST one volley, and they would have been firing back, too.

Deigning not to say anything about it, he looked over the various screens before him, looking for something to change the subject. He eyed their destination, a peculiar spot in space that was only a few minutes away. Close enough to start. He keyed the radio again,

“Alright, looks like we're close enough to start prepping for the jump. Rhindi, I assume the science lab is up and running thanks to your ‘discoveries’ earlier?”

Receiving an affirmative, Anon walked to one of the consoles embedded in the wall of the bridge and began keying in commands, “Alright, shutting down science lab computer banks one, two and three. Shutting down habitation for section three and activating manual controls in Engineering. Rhindi, don't let us freeze.”

He waited for confirmation on the monitor before him before continuing on. “Activating Tunnelers.” The entirety of section one shuddered as heavily armored doors opened on the foremost face of the hexagonal section. Without needing to look, Anon knew five large, crooked spires emerged, exotic energy crackling between them.

No matter how many times Rhindi tried to explain it to him, Anon never quite understood HOW the Tunnelers did what they did, he just knew how to use them. Punching in a string of commands, he finished up with their destination, the planet of Rsska in the Iota Horologi system, hit a big red button on the side of the console, and keyed the radio, “Beginning wormhole generation.”

Looking over his shoulder, he looked at a screen keyed to forward facing cameras. Ahead of the ship, multi-colored lightning shot out from the Tunnelers, striking a weak point in the fabric of space-time that he had selected. The stars shifted as light became distorted, bulging outwards as the entrance to their wormhole began to take shape. A whistling came from his radio, “Habitation?”

He snapped back to attention. “Right! Shutting down all habitation systems in sections one and two.” The instant he keyed in the command, the lights on the bridge cut out. A second later, the harsh red light flooded the bridge.

Anon mashed the button in the radio, “Seriously, Rhindi?”

“Sorry, wrong tape!” Once again leaving its radio keyed, there was a shuffling, followed by the bang of heavy switches being thrown. The bridge’s lighting died once more and, after another series of levers being pulled, there was an electrical hum through the radio, and finally, the room returned to human normal.

Muttering under his breath, Anon looked at a handwritten list of computer systems he still needed to shut down. “Damage control, shutting down. Transferring all thruster control to engineering…” His free hand worked to carry out his own orders.

On his end, the job is simple. Type in a command, and turn the computer off. On Rhindi’s? It was having to throw switches to turn on power banks, feed in memory tape, and activate ancient computers that ran on tubes and resistors, instead of microchips and quantum fields. Everything short of getting out of the ship and pushing.

A chime alerted Anon to the display before him. A quick read of the information on it told him Rhindi’s turn is all but over. "Wormhole stabilized. Retracting Tunnelers so we don't have a repeat of last time, and beginning final sensor sweep.” Keying in the order, Anon looks back at the screens around the ‘captain's seat,’ looking for anything out of the ordinary. As he expected, nothing besides the recently created space-time anomaly appeared. They were, after all, in what had been uncharted space before their arrival. “Sensors clear. Looks like we're safe.”

“Good. Shutting down weapons and targeting,” Ket’s voice chirped through the radio. “I’m going back to bed. Wake me up when we’re about to exit.”

Rhindi piped up, “Beginning final burn. Deceleration at three-quarters length in, yes?”

Out of habit, Anon nodded as he keyed the radio, “Yep. Standard wormhole burn. I’m shutting down sensors and translation. The computer’s telling me we’ll be in there for about fourty-six hours. Looking forward to talking to you guys on the other side.”

With that, he set the radio down, and busied himself in turning off the last of the systems on the ship powered by quantum computers. As with the Tunnelers, and all other things quantum physics related, no matter how many times Rhindi’s tried to explain it to him, he never quite been able to grasp why the laws of physics inside a wormhole differed from the laws of physics in the rest of the universe. However, a few costly mistakes taught him a practical truth. In fact, he had a painful reminder of it when he forgot to turn off the Tunneler systems before heading home last mission. Quantum computers, while necessary for the complexities of interstellar travel, stop being so quantum and never are again, if they’re turned on within a wormhole.

Finishing his job, he switched off the blank monitors and walked out of the bridge, whistling a tune to himself. With all the systems off, the bridge, safely nestled as close to the center of the ship as possible, was fairly useless. Especially when it came to seeing what he’s particularly interested in. Making his way through the curved hallways, he beelined for the foremost observation room. Rhindi calls it ‘the biggest structural weakness in the ship.’ Ket calls it "the target." He calls it "The room with the best view in the universe."

Stepping in he was, if you asked him, once again proven right. With the exterior wall entirely replaced with one massive window, it was like he had stepped outside of his ship.

Flumpfing into a recliner he had bolted to the floor, he gazed out upon the infinite abyss. Before him was the writhing, screaming hole the Tunnelers had torn into the very fabric of reality itself. A wormhole. The secret to FTL travel. Find a place where the laws of the space and time get a little funny, preferably where a previous wormhole had been, and tear it wide open.

The wormhole grew larger and larger as the One Bad Date Too Many approached it. His stomach did a flip. While he knows on a conscious level that they'll pass harmlessly into it, his subconscious mind is busy screaming, "What the hell is that?! We're going to hit it, we're all going to die, run, run!" Whether or not he knew it, he gripped the plush arms of the recliner as the hole in time and space filled his window. The wormhole swallowed the ship and the stars shattered. A writhing rainbow of colors, a technicolor hellscape filled his view as the One Bad Date Too Many crossed light-years in the span of seconds. Reclining in his chair, he gazed into the writhing abyss, his thoughts running as wild as his view.

While officially part of the Technocracy, humans were still very much second class citizens. "Dumb apes who couldn't escape their primary star" was the unofficial description. He was one of a handful that had been chosen to captain a ship as part of some pilot program-with a Ssthaki chaperone, of course. The phrase they used at the time still rang in his head. 'A new perspective to bring us new knowledge.' While he had been steadily climbing the ranks…the only thing remarkable about his, and every other human captain's career, has been their species. He suspected that's why there hasn't been a second wave of human-run ships. Why would they bother with a stupid ape when their own species had already proven themselves?

With the ship's Whipple Shields on the verge of total collapse, he had no choice but to make the call to declare the mission complete and head home. Anon knew what to expect when they returned. That he did well…for a human. That he did a good enough job. He had collected enough raw data to keep the REAL members of academia busy for years. Even Rhindi's last minute discoveries had been just more fuel for the academic fires. Nothing that'd make the Ssthaki say 'Wow, where would we be without humanity?'

With a sigh, he got up.It was time to leave all this negativity with the stars they're passing. There's work to be done. Turning away from his precious window, he paused for a moment, his hand on the back of his chair. He had been sure THIS was the mission that'd change everything, that they'd make first contact or disprove some theory. But now that they're in the wormhole, it's too late. Nothing foreign can get in or out. Even if the engines died, they'd still drift to the other side. No, nothing exciting ever happens in a wormhole.

 

~

 

 

Anon has seen untold wonders of the universe. He tackled the mysteries of the cosmos. He had borne witness to sights that no human would have imagined seeing but a mere generation ago. Yet the sight before him is so incomprehensible, so bizarre that his mind refused to process it. He stood there, flabbergasted, staring at a small pile of dirt in the middle of the bare floor of his spaceship.

How could it have possibly gotten here? It’s not like anyone could have just forgotten to wipe their shoes off. Nobody’s left this ship in months and he’s the only one who wears shoes! Where did it come from? He’d be tempted to take it down to the science lab and run a full spectrum analysis of the stuff, if they weren’t still in the middle of a wormhole. Maybe Rhindi would know where it came from? It's always around. He’d go ask, but the only question he knows how to say in Ssthakic, thanks to a fun night at a bar, is if they'd be interested in an interspecies bonding exercise. While that would probably get Rhindi's attention, he doubted it would get him the result he wanted. He'd ask Ket, but again, his vocabulary in "whistles" is severely lacking. Until they can turn Translation back on, the three of them are effectively on their own.

Resolving to get to the bottom of this, Anon crouched down. It seems inconsequential, sure, but it’s an anomaly. An anomaly on HIS ship. That won’t stand. Dirt could mean the One Bad Date Too Many’s hurt, she’s sick, there’s some mechanical malfunction somewhere, and it’s going to kill everyone...plus, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do, now that he had finished all his paperwork. Taking a pinch of it in his fingers, he examined it. A light grey...it’s not black, so that means it’s not carbon coming from the air scrubbers. For him, that was a very good sign. It meant they weren’t about to suffocate. He rolled it around between his fingers. Definitely not organic feeling, so it isn't from any of the crew, it’s not just some random dust that was never picked up by life support…if it's not organic, could it have come from the cargo bay?

Lowering his head to the ground, he squinted. Sure enough, this was not the only bunch of dirt in his ship, he could make out little bits here and there, forming a kind of trail. Staying low to the ground, he worked his way from bit to bit, making his way down the corridors of the One Bad Date Too Many. It’s not a steady trail and occasionally he found himself backtracking, or making guesses at where it was leading. On the third such occasion, Anon cursed under his breath, wishing for a magnifying glass. Those were on the other side of the ship...and with how light the trail is, he doubted it’d last by the time he made it back.

Finally, he followed the trail to the ship’s kitchen...and some moron left the door open. Probably Ket. Anon already knew the excuse he’d have. ‘I can’t hit the buttons as easily as you two can, I’m just a little space birdy don’t be mad at me chirp chirp.’ That still didn’t explain the trail. With a grumble, Anon turned and walked into the kitchen.

“What the hell?!”

His jaw hanging freely, Anon looked at the war zone that had become the kitchen. Food covered every available surface, some half eaten, some simply torn apart. Chairs rested on their backs and flavor packets leaked their contents onto the floors, table and counters. The refrigerator's door had been ripped clean off and rested against the opposite wall. Clutching his head in his hands, he carefully picked his way through the mess, doing his best not to step on any of the debris. Flabbergasted, hurt on a personal level he looked around, as though Ket or Rhindi had left a note for him to know who to blame. “I just...why?!” He shouted into the quiet, still air, letting his shout echo through his ship.

Taking a few deep breaths, he tried to think rationally. Whoever did this waited until they knew they were going home...so this isn’t sabotage, this is their horrible idea of a joke. After all, doing something like...this, ruining a huge portion of their food supply would have either doomed them to starvation or calling the mission early. So an alien prank. Someone was going to get a crash course in what’s a funny joke and what’s just being an asshole. Time to find out if it’s Ket or Rhindi.

His eyes fell on the fridge door, resting against the wall. That’ll be the key. Making his way over to it, he thought, there’s no WAY Ket would be able to get the leverage to simply pry that thing off, not without mechanical assistance, he’s always flying! While Rhindi would easily be able to rip the door off, it has big claws at the ends of its fingers. So Anon will be looking for tool or claw marks. Stepping over a mashed block of tofu, he grabbed the door and pulled it back.

There’s...nothing. No claw marks, no tool marks. The black paint of the exterior is completely unscuffed. Well, aside from the big gouge from when Rhindi tripped and knocked a chair into it, there were no claw or tool marks. Turning his attention to the metal bit that once connected the door to the fridge, it was clearly twisted, ripped off through brute force. So it couldn't have been Ket simply taking the thing apart. If Rhindi wore gloves, that would hide any claw marks…

"Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful." He let the door fall back to its resting place and stood up. "Rhindi, I swear to God, if this is a power play…"

A Ssthaki will always take the word of a Ssthaki over a human. He's just a dumb ape playing with technology his species can barely understand, after all. But why would it pick NOW, of all times, to pull this? Did he do something to upset it? Wracking his brain for any sort of offending incident, he worked his way back through the mess. Was it there that night at the bar or something? Lost in thought, he hit the "door close" button as he walked out of the room.

Instead of sliding shut, a warning buzzer chimed. He stopped and looked back. A little light was saying the door was already closed. Normally this would be something he’d chalk up to yet another convenience breaking, because who has time to get THAT fixed...but with the way the kitchen was destroyed? No. There is no way THAT is a coincidence. The first thing he tried was hitting the door open button, just to see what would happen. There was a loud clicking noise, followed by the grinding of machinery as the mechanisms did their damndest to do as he commanded. Disturbed, he hit the other button. The horrendous noises repeated themselves, but the door refused to budge from its place in the wall.

His eyebrows shot up. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The door would have had to have been pried open with enough force to rip the motor into pieces. With a door built to withstand pressure loss from a hull breach, that’s no easy feat, even for a spider-monster like a Ssthaki. Running his fingers along the only part of the recessed door he could reach, he tried to feel where Rhindi’s claws would have sunk into the metal. He found it perfectly smooth, barely a scratch on it.

Something was not adding up. Ssthaki may get excited, but they don’t rage out like this. He’s worked with Rhindi for years, and it’s NEVER done anything like this. Unless it ate the ‘Ssthakic technology belongs to Ssthaki’ pill and is doing this to try to make him look bad when they return, there’d be no reason for Rhindi, of all people, to do this. That still doesn’t explain how it did this without damaging anything beyond sheer physical force. There should be claw marks, bent and compressed metal...even if this was a frame job, it should have been made to look like he was the culprit.

He thought back to his schooling. If the hypothesis is sound and the conclusion doesn’t make sense then he must not have accounted for all variables. Hypothesis: The kitchen did not destroy itself. If it doesn’t make sense for him, Ket or Rhindi to have been the culprit then...He didn’t like where that trail of logic led.

Leaving behind the crime scene, he walked through the corridors of the One Bad Date Too Many, mostly aimlessly, with the goal of eventually working his way to the bridge, while spotting any other crime scenes that might have appeared on his ship. Despite his noble ambition, his mind was still going too fast to actually pay anything more than a cursory glance. He didn’t even notice Ket approaching until the space-bird clonked him on the head.

“Ow!” He cried, clutching his head in what was more surprise than actual pain. “What the hell?” Turning to glare at his crew member, he glared at Ket, who, holding in his claws a water jug that was the same size as his diminutive body, let out a furious series of whistles. It appeared he found the kitchen, too.

“Yea, I noticed. It wasn’t me, alright? Had to have been Rhindi,” Anon said. While still well aware that Ket was completely unable to understand him, Anon found he was far too irritated to care. His words only earned him another bout of angry whistles, a few chirps being added in for emphasis. Ket then flew straight up and shoved the water jug in Anon’s face. Grabbing it instinctively, he stumbled back, expecting it to weigh a ton...only for him to realize it was completely empty. Wait a second...a glance at the top showed that sure enough, the screw-on lid had simply been torn off. He looked back up, just in time for Ket to grab Anon’s sleeve in his claws. Flapping furiously, he half-lead, half-dragged Anon with him.

Down through the ship, into another section, Anon stumbled, doing his best to stay upright with the half-meter-tall flying alien pulling him along. Soon, Ket let his sleeve go, in front of...Anon felt a lump in his throat form. The door to water storage and treatment was wide open. The panel beside it said it was closed. Fearing the worst, Anon stepped into the room.

His foot splashed in the standing water that covered the floor. The barrels that had been strapped to one wall, had been thrown around the room, each one missing their tops. One of the main tanks had been ruptured, the metal of the tank ripped outwards. Anon’s heart pounded in his chest. All three of them needed water to live. Not just to drink, but electrolyzing water was how they replaced the very air they were breathing. If Rhindi did this, then it might have just committed suicide.

Splashing over to the water tanks, Anon looked over each one. Aside from the one that had been ruptured, they were all intact, still at the levels they should be...Whatever did this, it focused more on the emergency casks. They had enough to get...wait.

Anon whirled around, staring at the ruptured tank. Its shell was all peeled outwards, as though...whatever had done this, had ripped the tank open from the inside. It couldn’t have been Rhindi, that’s impossible, it must have...His heart almost stopped. One icy thought gripped his mind. We have an intruder.

He looked to find Ket hovering behind the doorway, still holding the jug. It was impossible to read any emotion in those big, black eyes. But Anon had a feeling Ket wanted to know what could have caused this.

Anon put two fingers in his mouth. He whistled back one long, loud tone, one of the few words he knew in Ket’s native language. “Enemy.”

 

~

 

They fled through the ship, Anon's soaked shoes squishing with every panicked footfall, Ket leading the way, his talons out. They almost collided as Anon skidded to a halt before the One Bad Date Too Many’s armory. Grabbing hold of the door handle, he fought with the keyring clipped to his belt. He had always thought it was stupid for the most dangerous room in the ship to have the lowest tech level of security. What could happen in a wormhole? Why would we need guns in a wormhole? Why do I have yet another thing for me to lose? As he jammed the key into the simple padlock and threw the door open, he found himself saying thanks that the engineers who built his ship were smarter than he.

Without wasting a moment, Ket swooped in, and they began throwing lockboxes open. Ket snatched up a flechette pistol as Anon looked over a railgun rifle. With shaking hands, he turned it over, sliding bolts, checking displays, making sure it won't jam on him when some monstrous invader is bearing down upon him, teeth gnashing against his throat. Nothing's jumping out at him, it should be good enough. With a metallic clack, he jammed a magazine in.

Slinging a laser cannon over his back for Rhindi, should it prove cooperative, Ket and Anon re-entered the ship at large, weapons clutched tightly. Whatever this thing is, it has gone after their food and their water. Should the pattern hold, life support is next. It wants them dead.

His eyes darting from shadow to shadow, Anon strained his hearing to focus anything other than the pounding of his own heart. Unfortunately, the only thing he could hear was the beat of Ket's wings.

Turning in the direction of Life Support and Engineering, Anon tried to remember what he has been taught to do in the event of a ship incursion.

Step one, covertly alert the crew by making an announcement for a routine ' level three plasma coil diagnostic' …well that's obviously not going to happen. Step two, Identify which rooms have crew in them, can't do that in a wormhole, seal rooms, vent every other room, can't do that in a wormhole, scan for-can't do that, change the light-can't do that, can't do that, can't do that…

Anon swore out loud, causing Ket to screech in alarm and whirl around, gun ready. They may have prepped the ship for it, but nobody ever taught him what to DO if something invaded the ship INSIDE a wormhole. Fine. He'll improvise.

Creeping up on the nearest door, their laundry room, Anon pressed against it. He's not hearing anything… he threw the door open and burst in, sweeping his rifle across the room, Ket covering him. The piles of clothing, washer and dryer sat there, as non-threateningly as possible.

Breathing a sigh of relief, they moved on, making their way through the ship in the same fashion. Every room had a monster until confirmed empty, every centimeter of the halls spent covering each other's back. At one point, Ket let out an ear piercing screech, loud enough to drown out the sound of his flechette pistol firing as he shot through a doorway. Anon, reacting, mag dumped into the room, not registering what exactly he was shooting at. It was only after Ket ran out of ammunition that they realized they had just destroyed their break room. The looks they exchanged afterwards needed no translation software.

Working their way through the ship, they cleared an entire section without encountering their mysterious intruder. For a little bit, they stopped being terrified, and Anon even started to get a little bored. That was, until they got close to the science lab. They stopped dead. The steel of the ship’s bulkhead had been peeled back like the skin of an overripe fruit, debris and a thick coating of dust filled the hall.

Anon, his heart leaping to his throat, poked first his gun in through the floor-to-ceiling hole, and then peered in. One of the cargo bays, holding precious scientific samples from their exploration. The only light in the room was coming from the hall. Of course the lights would be off. Why waste power lighting on a room nobody's going to go in until they get home? Swearing under his breath, Anon scanned the room, looking for anything that could be out of place. There were boxes, storage drives, core and gas samples from different worlds…and lots of shadows anything could be hiding in. Anon glanced back at Ket. After the earlier incident, he didn't think he could trust the space bird in the dark. If he panicked again and shot up the place, he could destroy months of hard work.

Swallowing, he stepped into the dark. His rifle at the ready, it didn't take long to find the devastation. Any semblance of organization had been totally destroyed. Specimens crushed, crates broken into, everything had been thrown around, it was a-

Behind him came a screech. Anon screamed in primal terror and fired. The slug tore screaming out of his rifle, shattering the case of a core sample of an asteroid, sending precious minerals everywhere-a day's work, gone. It continued on, shattering gas samples, detonating through an external hard drive, and continuing deep into the cargo bay, ruining everything unlucky enough to be in its path without any sign of hitting the intruder. Why would it, when it's right behind him? He whirled around to face his impending doom. Rhindi, towering above him ripped the rifle out of his hands, a parent snatching the toy of their disobedient child. It simultaneously pointed at the hole in the bulkhead, the destruction Anon had just caused, and jabbed an accusatory finger in Anon's face, before letting out another ear piercing screech.

His mind flipped through emotions, trying to catch up to what just happened. Terror, confusion, indignation...after a moment of listening to the ear-piercing language of the Ssthaki, Anon furrowed his brow and shoved Rhindi's claws away. "Don't you even start!" He shouted to be heard, "Don't even pretend like I had anything to do with this! You're the only one who's even capable of doing something like that and you know it!"

Of course, with the translation software down, neither one of the pair's well-spoken and highly intelligent arguments were understood by the other. But that little fact didn't stop them from attempting, until Ket let out a high pitched whistle, cutting through the shouting and straight to the bone...or through the exoskeleton, in Rhindi's case. They both stopped and looked at the bird, who was doing his best to perch on the bent remains of the bulkhead. He pointed a claw at the dirt spilling out into the hallway. There were broad, semi-circular tracks leading out and down the hall. Tracks nobody on board should have been capable of making.

Right. The intruder they were supposed to be dealing with. Anon took a deep, steadying breath before he unslung the laser cannon from behind his back and shoved into Rhindi's upper thorax who clutched it in reflex. Snatching his rifle back, he made his way back into the hall with his two crew members following him. They still had a job to do.

With the three of them together and especially the heavy ordinance in Rhindi's claws, the three of them swept through the ship, no longer terrified but ready for whatever might attack them. There were no more misfires, no more jumping at shadows. They may not be able to communicate properly, Rhindi might not have any idea what they're searching for or why but it was able to pick up some context clues...enough to cover the smaller two crew members as they searched room to room. It took time, but they were able to clear through two of the three honeycomb-sections that made up the One Bad Date Too Many without any sign of their mysterious guest. Engineering and life support, to everyone's great relief, were safe. Anon was left stuck sitting on the floor while Rhindi and Ket explored the upper reaches of Ket's room...but it was better than him trying to climb up on all the cross beams and keep a weapon at the ready. Finally, all that was left was the foremost segment. Fortunately, the bridge had been empty. The idea of a firefight in there was not something Anon wanted to imagine. Finally, they opened the door to Anon's room. That's when they froze.

It's there. In his BED! The monster they've been hunting! Flopped on his sheets, there was some six limbed creature, its skin-no, fur- so inky black that Anon's eyes began to sting just looking at it. There was some blue shell on its large head, torso and four of its limbs-Anon's eyes locked onto the long, pointed horn sticking straight out from the creature's head plating. His grip tightened on his gun. He could already envision himself skewered on that thing. But his eyes were drawn away by movement. Not from the creature itself, but almost...behind it. There was a shifting field of stars, like he was looking out the window of his ship...or like this creature simply plucked a piece of space out of reality and brought it with. If it noticed them, it didn't make any indication.

Rhindi lowered its gun and stepped forward. Anon hissed, "Rhindi, what are you doing?!" This was the creature that tore pieces of the ship apart like it was peeling a fruit. If it could do that to titanium, what could it do to chitin?! Rhindi holstered its gun, and clapped all four of its upper mandibles together.

The intruder twisted around on the bed. Massive blue eyes, with pupils slitted like a snake's, opened. It leapt out of the bed and Anon took aim. This is it, it's going to attack-Ket shoved the barrel of Anon's gun downwards as the creature landed on...four of its limbs, the four with the blue casing. It was quadrupedal. The other two limbs quickly became obvious, a pair of wings spread in some threat display. With a long neck and thin legs, the creature looked almost dainty, delicate...but the damage to the One Bad Date Too Many was testament to the strength it held.

Anon had never seen any creature like this. It certainly wasn't part of the Technocracy, or any other space-faring nation that he knew of. If anything, it looked closer to a small horse or deer from Earth…It had to be a native of the Horsehead Nebula. Which meant, given the lack of civilizations they've encountered…this was not something that should be here. Anon began to wrestle with Ket to bring his gun to bare when Rhindi made the next move.

It tapped a leg against the floor, a hard knock ringing out. Everyone froze. Rhindi tapped its leg again, two times. Still nothing. Rhindi repeated the gesture again, this time three taps ringing out. The creature's eyes darted around, looking at each of them in turn. Anon squinted. An intelligence test? What is Rhindi thinking, this thing couldn't possibly… Rhindi repeated the sequence. First tapping once, then twice, then three times. The intruder raised a foreleg and tapped it against the wooden ground four times.

Anon's jaw dropped. So did his rifle. The creature understood the pattern...it's intelligent. The xenobiologists in the Ssthakic Technocracy agreed that if an unknown creature can understand and continue a simple incrementing pattern, it's most likely sapient, and thus subject to all the protections all saptients in the Milky Way are allowed. That's when Anon saw it. The crescent moon symbol on the blue plating resting on the creature's chest. That was a breastplate. The blue stuff wasn't a shell on some monster, it was an outfit! That's what Ket and Rhindi had noticed!

His mind raced. This was a first contact scenario, isn't it? And it's happening on his ship! As captain, he knew what he needed to do. He glanced out the window. They've spent so much time searching through the ship, they were almost out of the wormhole...by the time he got everything, they might be able to… "Hang on guys, I'll be right back," He said, mostly out of habit, as he turned and ran out.

 

 

~

 

Nightmare Moon looked between the three horrors before her, beings ripped straight from the darkest night terrors her people could fathom. She would think she's still dreaming, if she hadn't just been woken by the killing machine before her. It was as if a god, madder than even she, had taken the head of a massive cobra, and attached it to the body of a spider even larger than her- a being practically dripping venom. Behind it, was a red raven with too many sets of wings, simply slapped on without a care. They flapped seemingly out of sync, and the bird hovered with some metal device in its talons. The third was almost a joke. A shaved ape, dressed up in fine clothing like it was attending a wedding.

The Ape and Bird were seemingly fighting over a metal tube in the ape's clutches. She wasn't sure of its true purpose-but it positively buzzed with the magical charge within. All the creatures held some metallic device on them, and none of them looked friendly. She had tried to find the crew, after she made it on board. She knew she had made it into some sort of storage room...though what anyone would want with the dirt and garbage in there, she hadn't the slightest clue. She spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to open the doors...but when desperation set in, she made her own exit. She had wandered the halls, trying to find the inhabitants of the strange, metal craft.

Metal, everything was metal in this place! The floor, the walls, the ceilings, even the doors, she had never seen so much steel in one place! How this vessel could fly was baffling to her. It made every step she took a tremendous clatter, assaulting her long unused ears. When she couldn't find any other living creature, she, having stirred from her catatonia, had sought out water and food. Ooohh, how she feasted!

But now, it seems they've found her…and judging by their chosen representative, they're none too happy with her impromptu meal and bath. The monster of nightmares lifted a clawed, arachnid leg and brought it crashing down to the floor with a clack. She clenched her teeth, ready for it to charge. She knows she's a stowaway…but she's not about to let herself be CONSUMED by this abomination! The creature lifts its leg again, banging twice now. It must be some dominance display. Well, she will not yield! She stood firm as it pawed at the ground again, this time thrice. Waiting for it to charge, to attack.

But it never did. It sat there, waiting for a response from her. When she offered none, it started again, tapping but once. It started going through the pattern again. What game is it playing? Is it a challenge? Then she will rise to the occasion. When the third repetition came, she stomped her hoof, once more than the horror.

The effect was immediate. The ape gawked at her, lowering its metal rod. It babbled something in a language she didn't understand, before running out on its hind legs. It would almost be comical were it not for the other two beings before her. The misshapen bird flew over to what was clearly a writing desk, pulling open a drawer with its beak. The creature from Tartarus itself stepped back, looking over at the bird, making some motion with its foremost set of claws.

She glanced around, making sure not to show a single hint of fear, of weakness. Her legs still burned from the exertion of making it to this...craft. Her search for food and water had not helped them, one bit. Of course, with magic she was unparalleled...or she was, before her defeat. Who knows what those strange artifacts they held could do? Not her.

The bird pulled from the desk a sheaf of parchment...no...papyrus? It was the highest quality papyrus she had ever seen...and cut into rectangles! They had ruined a perfectly good scroll! Retrieving a small black tube from the desk, the bird flew its burden over to the venom creature. Perhaps the bird was the creature's pet? Yes, she thought. That had to be it.

Taking the burden, the spider-snake monster laid itself out on the ground, the papyrus before it. Nightmare took a step back, tensing. This is the atack, isn't it? But no, the creature simply fought with the new black tube, popping off one end and...oh! It used the tube to draw a few simple shapes, like charcoal. An idea began to form in her mind.

She tested her voice, unused for so long, "Are you perchance able to speak proper Equish?" The two creatures there stopped and stared at her for a moment. The bird tweeted some little tune, but she didn't get any sort of real response. The creature of death finished whatever it was drawing, and thrust the page before her, the charcoal resting upon it. It tapped the paper before stepping well back, giving her a wide berth.

Nightmare felt a twinge of annoyance, of frustration. These were the first living beings she's encountered in decades-nay, centuries!- and they weren't even capable of taLking to her! Huffing a sigh, she glanced down at the creature's work. A few simple shapes arranged in a line, with one below half copied. It was like a foal's lesson in writing! She had written hundreds of manuscripts, songs that felled kingdoms, poetry that made the mightiest warriors weep! She didn't need this!

But she paused. She's a stowaway on THEIR vessel. If she didn't play along, at least for a bit...they might turn it around. They might put her back. Keeping one eye on them, she lowered her head, taking one end of the strange charcoal stick in her mouth. Yes, she COULD use magic to move it for her...but she may need it to defend herself. Or to prevent them from trying to bring her back. In but a few seconds, she dutifully copied the shapes the monster had started.

It did a little jig before her, giving an unsettling chitter. It got back to work on making another set of shapes, this time basic polygons, a triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon...when it was passed to her, she took her turn copying them...and then had a bit of a thought. No, she's going to show them she's more than a mindless child. She added an octagon to her copy, a nonagon, and a decagon before she ran out of room to continue. Of COURSE she, of anypony, would know the highest form of mathematics, Geometry.

The creature positively danced when it saw what she was doing. They continued on, working between shapes, a few simplistic problems. Before too long, they started using a series of dots to represent numbers. At some point, the lights changed, and she saw...oh, was that her night through windows? It was as gorgeous as always...but something was off. Her stars weren't quite right...Well. They were in some sort of sky vessel. She must simply be seeing them from a different angle. They must have moved what, a hundred, maybe even two hundred miles? An unfathomable distance in such a short time. She focused on the task at hoof, even as the bird began chirping more, and the nightmare creature chittering, growing, even occasionally giving a screech of what she assumed was joy.

As she finished up a simple demonstration of the pythagorean theorem, the ape skidded back in the room, carrying some new device. It was like a block with a sort of grate on one side. He babbled to the two creatures that had stayed with her, and they responded, as though they could understand each other. In response, the creature of death drew a large equilateral triangle. It held a digit to it and gave a hiss. The Bird tweeted, the ape babbled. They then stopped and stared at her. What are they…? "It is but a triangle."

Seemingly satisfied, they moved through the various shapes she had drawn, her exasperation growing. She was tired, her legs were getting ready to give out from under her, and, frankly, after centuries of inactivity, everything was just moving so FAST she could barely keep up. After they had moved from shapes to various objects, she finally lost her temper.

"What is the purpose of all this?! For what reason are you attempting to probe my mind of the most basic of facts?! Yes, I stowed away in your vessel-but you must understand, I had no choice! Had you been available to beg for passage, I would have groveled! But this? This is ludicrous! What purpose could any of this possibly have?!" Her sides heaved as he panted from the exertion of the longest speech she made since her exile began.

The creatures crowded together, babbling to each other. She got her response, not from any of them, but from the box the ape held, "We-want-learn-you-language. We-want-talk-with-you. Learn-with-you. Want-you-stay-if-you-want."

Nightmare's legs fell out from under her. She fell to the ground as relief broke upon her like the waves. Tears filled her vision as her throat tightened. They'll let her stay...she's free. Fighting, she barely managed to choke out two words. "Thank…you!" Before she dissolved into sobbing, tears of pure happiness. She's finally free!

 

 

 

~

 

The translation software took a good half hour before they were able to get a name, species, and homeworld out of the creature. "Princess Nightmare Moon, a pony of Equestria" she declared herself. It seemed to Anon like the translator didn't like the name, but he couldn't figure out why. The title was translated properly-wherever their passenger was from, she says she's considered royalty.

They had tried to leave Rhindi in charge of both calibrating the translation and introducing themselves to this 'Nightmare Moon.' As much as they all wanted to stay, now that they were out of the wormhole, someone needed to fly the ship. However, when Ket and Anon got up to leave, Nightmare Moon's reaction didn't need a proper translation-she would NOT be left alone with Rhindi. The trio's best guess is that a Ssthaki must resemble some super-predator on her home world. After a little ritual, which Anon had a sneaking suspicion was essentially 'eenie meenie minie mo,' Nightmare Moon chose him as the person she wanted to work with. "Clothing ape," she had called him.

"Alright, it should be good enough for us to talk normally now," Anon said, trying to ignore the machine speaking what he swears is not quite his voice, in a different language. "Now then. Did it translate this properly before? My name is Anonymous, and I'm the captain of this vessel."

"Indeed it did, Captain. If I may say, this is a most wondrous vessel, a kind of which my people could only dream of creating." Anon suppressed the urge to frown as he fiddled with the controls on the universal translator. It's still sounding really archaic...at least he got it to stop spitting out 'thee's and 'thou's at him.

She fidgeted for a moment, still sitting on the floor where she sat down, following their first successful translation. "I recognize that you must see me as a mere stowaway, regardless of my title. You must understand that I only did so through desperation, I would have bartered passage, had I means of contacting your crew."

Without thinking, Anon blurted out, "You trashed half my ship, terrified me and Ket, and you think I'm upset about you being a stowaway?!"

She reared her neck up as the strange, starry field around her head began to writhe. "Clap me in irons if you must, but I will not allow you to return me to perdition. If it is payment for damages you seek, you will be compensated in due time."

Anon held his hands up, "Calm down, calm down. Nobody's planning on arresting you. And even if I knew WHERE to bring you back to, you don't want to go, so I'm not going to make you." That was enough to mollify her, the strange aura slowing back to its usual pulsing. As if he'd toss out his only evidence that he made first contact with another species. He may get yelled at for just bringing her back, cultural contamination and all that, but…Well, a lecture is a small price to pay, for what's in store. He could see it now…a fourth section to his ship, turning it into a true dedicated exploration vessel, he could…

Nightmare Moon looked at him, raising an eyebrow in an almost human gesture. It seemed she had been waiting for him to continue/ Oops. He's letting his mind wander. "If I am not under arrest, then why does it seem as though I am not free to go about my business? You still have that artifact that buzzes with power."

Artifact, what is she-? Oh, wait. Anon glanced back at the railgun still slung across his back. Sapient or no…

He spoke up, "Frankly, I still don't know if you're dangerous. You still haven't given me an explanation for why, and HOW, you tore apart our food and water stores. And it'd better be a good one."

The ears poking through her helmet sank down. She looked away as she said, "I…it had been far, far too long since I had any food or drink. When I found your stores, desperation seized me. I was not…when the means of accessing them were not obvious, I got a bit carried away."

Anon shook his head. "No. No, no, no. A bit carried away, that's not good enough. You tore things apart from the inside out. How the hell did you do that?"

She stared at him in bewilderment. "I used magic, of course."

"Oh…right. Of course, how silly of me. Magic." Not even attempting to hide his displeasure, he started playing with the controls on the translator. He had to have screwed something up. 'Magic.' This was precisely why he wanted Rhindi doing this.

"Is something wrong?"

He opened his mouth, about to tell her what was going through his mind when he paused. He's spent enough time fighting with the computer…he needs to move on. "No, forget it.You said you were desperate? Fine. In retrospect…yea, you took a lot of it, but you only took food and water. But the big question, the one we're all trying to figure out, is precisely HOW, and WHEN did you manage to sneak on board? How long were you in our cargo bay? The uh," he fought to clarify, when the translator flashed an error prompt, "the room with all the random, uh, stuff, in it. You tore a hole in the wall to get out."

Nightmare Moon gave Anon a look as alien as the creature before him as she spoke, "My relationship with time has been sprained. Your vessel landed on my…" She stopped for a moment. "On something that was once precious to me. As you dug into the rock, I used the last of my strength to climb aboard. I waited until I felt movement…but…"

She opened her eyes wide, her pupils dilating. Anon could see the reflection of his face in them, staring back at him, "I've never felt anything like it before. The very fabric of the aether was twisted and stretched, pulled beyond anything I had ever felt…and then I, the vessel, we, were hurtling away, faster than anything I had ever felt. It's stopped now, but…That strange feeling is what brought me back to the present. To the now."

He furrowed his brow, trying to think. He had part of a puzzle, but he knew he was still missing some very important pieces. Her descriptions sounded like she was from a primitive culture, but that was impossible. They hadn't landed anywhere inhabited! In fact, not once, in their entire time in the Horsehead Nebula had they found any life more complex than bacteria. There was no way they would have missed landing on an inhabited planet, scooping up a native…that was it. That's the piece he was missing, something so terrifying he didn't want to see it.

Anon slapped the armrest of his char as the pieces fell into place and sat back in horror. "Nightmare Moon…are you a castaway? Were you from another world and accidentally left behind?"

Nightmare Moon tensed before him, her slit pupils shrinking to thin lines, before she gave a slight nod, her voice a whisper, "Yes…

 

 

Anon had to fight the rather human urge to hug her, regardless of how she'd react. The idea of looking up to see his ship soaring off through the atmosphere without him… "Well, thank god we found you. Where you were stranded, did you even have a breathable atmosphere, or were you stuck breathing the same air, watching your oxygen scrubbers slowly decay as…" He realized, too late, that he may be projecting.

Nightmare Moon's brow furrowed behind her helmet. "Thank…myself…? No, there was no air to be had." With that, she stood up and stretched, audible popping sounds coming from her back. "I have no desire to speak on my imprisonment further. Are you satisfied that I have no desire to nonsensically slaughter you or your crew, and thus damn myself back to oblivion?"

Ignoring the translation issue, Anon threw his hands up before getting to his feet as well. "Alright, yea, you got me, I don't have to worry about you killing and eating us. But," He held up his hand, "There IS one more thing we need to discuss. Now that you're no longer marooned, what do you want to do now?"

The words had barely left Anon's mouth before Nightmare spoke, "I will return to Equestria, my home. I must reclaim what is rightfully MINE, and my sister…" Trailing off, she met Anon's eyes, a mischievous glint in those slit pupils, "Actually…would you be willing to assist me?"

Well, he knew that was coming, the moment he figured out what happened. As nice as it would be to be able to present a member of a previously unknown alien species to the heads of government and shout 'tada!' he knew he had a duty to do the right thing. Plus, being able to point at an unknown, space-faring civilization, a potential trading partner would still get jaws to hit the floor. But…he had an idea of his own. He let his considerations show, before he said, "Of course we can bring you home. It shouldn't be too hard, you said you can feel wormholes, and you hadn't felt it before, so your planet should be close by…one of our stops. But we have a bit of an issue. Even before…you know…we were headed home for repairs. Now we REALLY can't go anywhere until we've stocked back up on food and water. Are you alright waiting a few weeks while our ship gets fixed?"

Nightmare Moon shrugged her wings, "It seems I do not have a choice. A paltry few weeks is nothing compared to how long I have waited…and…it would be prudent to take time to recover my strength… "

"Glad to hear. We should be coming up on an outpost soon, we can figure out quarters for you once we get there. I'm going to head up to the bridge and see what's going on. You're welcome to come if you'd like, otherwise uh…you can stay here, or I can uh…well, have Rhindi or Ket give you a proper tour of the ship if you want." With that, Anon scooped up the laptop that was still diligently translating his voice into Nightmare Moon's language.

A smirk flickered across her lips before vanishing. "A formal invitation to the bridge? Such an honor cannot be refused. Pray, lead the way, Captain."

They didn't make it all the way there, before Anon realized he had lost his passenger. Backtracking around a corner, he found her stopped before a window, staring out of it, her expression inscrutable. Leaning against the wall, he watched her for a moment, his eyes drawn to the rippling of the weird star field that hovered behind her head. He HAD meant to ask about it earlier…but, like now, there's more pressing concerns. "Is something wrong?"

She spoke without looking away, her voice as far off as she must have felt, "I know every star in the sky. Their names, their movements, and every story they tell with the help of their siblings…I should not be able to see these children without the aid of a telescope. There are others still, that have escaped my notice. They've gone forgotten, unnamed for so long…"

"If it makes you feel better, we've named them," said Anon with a grin.

Nightmare Moon whipped her head around, that same strange look now focused on Anon. "What are they." It was a demand, not a question.

Anon shrugged, "I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. I could pull up the star charts in the bridge if you really want to know…but I DO know we're in orbit around Gamma Caeli. It's about one hundred and eighty five light years from my homeworld, and about…I wanna say fifteen hundred from where we picked you up, but I'd have to double check."

Nightmare seemed to think on that for a moment, before she said, "If they are insufficient or inappropriate, I will correct them. This 'Gamma' of the Caeli family was a notable figure, yes?"

Already thinking of how much fun the Ssthaki xenologists were going to have with her, Anon tapped the laptop in his hands, "How about we chalk that one up to another translation error for now?"

The moment the door began sliding open, the screech of the Ssthakic language poured out, the poor speaker on Nightmare's translator straining to be overheard. "-how many could die, I'm telling you that our shields are about to fall apart! One micrometeorite at the wrong angle could split this ship in half, we are NOT going," said Ssthaki, banging one of its hands on the console for emphasis. It was glaring at the stretched out visage of another member of its species. It-no, she, had a web of fine metal chain running between her two pairs of arms, a symbol that she was St'thar'tk, the head of research at-and thus, in charge of-the space station that orbited the gas giant Rsska.

The chain rattled as she gestured just as wildly, her picture shaking as it looked like a pair of arms was shaking the camera. She didn't even wait for Rhindi to finish before countering, "Oh, oh! THREE sapients and a SMALL research craft could MAYBE be at risk of injury and have to scramble for escape pods, versus the lives of MILLIONS of sapients that have only just just crawled out of the mud! You have a human, just tell it this is a suicide mission, they LOVE going on those!"

Anon glanced at Nightmare, who stood with her muscles tensed, in, if he had to guess, some sort of flight or fight ready position, and his cheeks burned. He couldn't think of a worse introduction for her to the Ssthaki than this. His jaw clenched as he strode in, listening as Rhindi once more started shouting, "Of all the speciest things to say tha-"

"Shut up, both of you!" Shouted Anon, before he slammed the hotkeys to both mute and deafen the line. He looked back at Rhindi and tapped a finger against his chest. "My ship. Not yours."

All four of Rhindi's eyes fluttered as it tried to find its composure, deflatedly saying, "I'm sorry Captain, I got a bit carried away." It began fidgeting with its claws.

Anon held up a hand and said, "It's fine, you don't need to apologize. We've all had more than enough stress for one day…not to mention, you saved my ass earlier. Can you see about making Nightmare Moon an ear piece or a necklace or something? She said she's willing to wait for repairs before we bring her home. Uh-space flight, no FTL, I have no idea what we're supposed to do about diplomacy with her."

Rhindi bobbed its head in acknowledgement, "Depends. Are they pre-fission, fusion, where are they technologically?"

With a heavy sigh, Anon said, "I…could you look at the program? I thought I had it right, but it said magic. Not like, primitive, 'what else could it be,' wonderment, but like how 'Ssthaki explaining how the Tunnelers work' to a human sounds."

Rhindi closed its outer pair of eyes, "That's not magic either, but I'll see what I can do." With a word of thanks from Anon, it skittered past Nightmare Moon, who had followed them onto the bridge.

Anon rubbed his face in both hands and said, "Sorry. I hope you don't mind, but I don't want to have to make you carry that stupid computer around everywhere just to understand us."

He looked up to see Nightmare staring at the still-muted video feed of St'thar'tk, who, for her part, was looking much less annoyed despite being on hold. Cocking an ear towards the abandoned laptop, Nightmare said, "I had hoped there was but one of these creatures. They are unsettling to behold."

"What, the Ssthaki?" He paused, remembering the panicked newscasts from when he was a kid, talking about alien monsters. "Yea, I guess they can be. I grew up with them, so they're not that weird to me. Better get used to them, though, they're in charge of my entire species.Speaking of, I left her waiting." He reached out and retapped the keys he hit on his entrance. "Head researcher Sthartak," He said with a grin, not even trying to pronounce her name correctly, "Sorry about that, it's been a long day. Nice to see you again, by the way. Why are you trying to get us killed THIS time?"

"Captain Anonymous! I tried to look up your new companion while you kept me waiting," She clapsed a pair of hands together and closed her inner eyes. Still a smile, but not the good kind. "I was trying to come up with one of your human jokes while you kept me waiting. Something about not picking up every sapient alien you run across and our vessels not being a daycare? But I'm not getting any results! Surely it IS sapient, correct?"

Oh. Oh this was the moment Anon's dreamed of. She's a Ssthaki, it doesn't take much to get them going, she's going to lose her mind. Is she going to scream, or jump up from the computer? Is she going to flail around in front of the camera, and ask Nightmare a million questions? Oohhh, here it is…"I wouldn't have expected you to. After all, this is Princess Nightmare Moon, the first pony of Equestria we've ever made contact with!" This is it, this is it, this is it!

St'thar'tk's smile changed to be genuine, and she said, "Oh, I'm glad to hear a human finally made a proper contribution to the galaxy at large."

Oh, that bitch. He did his best to keep the smile plastered on his face, not to let a hint of his feelings make it onto his face as she turned her attention to the pony in question. "Welcome to the Technocracy, your majesty," said St'thar'tk, oblivious to Anon's rising anger. "You'll have to forgive any lack of decorum or ceremony on our part. We've long since abandoned the rule of royalty or politicians in our society."

"After the ordeal I have been through, a warm meal, a proper bed and conversation is all I ask, of which, this crew has most generously provided," said Nightmare, gesturing towards Anon with her wing.

"Alright," said Anon, already sick of dealing with the researcher on the other side of the screen. He had thought Rhindi was simply doing the typical Ssthaki thing of getting overly excited with its accusation of specism, but now he's wondering if it was right. "What exactly were you and Rhindi arguing about? If you looked up my record, you'd know I don't DO suicide missions."

"If that were true, you wouldn't have the Ket aboard," hissed St'thar'tk's, the translated voice almost conversational.

Anon's mind reeled as though he had been slapped. She's going to bring THAT up?! Now?! As if she, or any other Ssthaki had any right to speak on Ket. His voice barely above a whisper, he stammered out, "H…how dare you…"

St'thar'tk continued on as though Anon hadn't reacted. Her face disappeared from the screen, replaced with a picture of a planet orbiting a star. "Seventy Nine-Tauri, on the outskirts of the Hyades star cluster, is home to the Urundunum species, located on the fifth planet from the star. They are sapient, global, iron usage has only just begun wide-spread adoption. Against all predictive models of their world, a supervolcano on a southern continent is showing signs of imminent eruption. Simulations show an eruption will be catastrophic to Urundunum culture, potentially wiping them out before they've had a chance to get started. We have developed seismic actuators that will safely alleviate the pressure and prevent an eruption, however, we need you and your crew to place them within the caldera."

Anon spat, "Do it yourself. You don't need us."

"Unfortunately for everyone, we do," said St'thar'tk, her face reappearing. "Our ship is down for repairs. The idiot who flew it last, left the computers on when he entered the return wormhole. We won't have replacements for a month, and the Director…has deemed it not a priority. They're not sending anyone else. If you don't go, nobody goes."

The words were incinerated by the flames of Anon's temper. He didn't miss a beat as he said, "Our water system's trashed. We'll be lucky if life support lasts another day and we won't have the hydrogen to break orbit. Not happening."

"Then dock with the station, and we'll cannibalize what you need off our ship!" St'thar'tk roared, getting as heated as she was with Rhindi, "We have three days before the window closes, we can take one to fix what we can!"

"Look," Anon said as he jerked his thumb at Nightmare Moon, "I just got through telling her that we cannot bring her back to her own planet until we fix our ship up. Even IF we don't get killed on this one, you cannot ask me to make her wait even longer because of every crisis that pops up!"

Nightmare Moon opened a wing before Anon, blocking his view of the monitor. He looked over to find her glaring at him with her large, reptilian eyes. "Perhaps," she spoke, her voice as cold as ice, "You should ASK your passenger if she would be comfortable with a delay, due to an emergency." Without waiting for Anon's reply, she turned her attention to the monitor. The strange field of stars around her head writhed as she said to St'thar'tk, "What is the expected death toll? Best and worst case scenario."

"Worst case scenario, total extinction of all planetary life. Best case…," St'thar'tk tapped the claws of all four of her hands together, the Ssthakic idea of a shrug, "There's a hundred million of them worldwide. Maybe a couple thousand survive somewhere. Genetic bottleneck and they're back to banging rocks together and painting on cave walls."

"It would be Discord all over again…" Nightmare Moon muttered, seemingly to herself. The field around her slowed, and she dropped her wing, seeming to contemplate the situation.

With a lull in the conversation, Anon said, "Fine. You want me to ask you, I'll ask. Do you want to risk your life, my life, Rhindi's life, Ket's life, and this ship, and probably spend months stuck on yet another alien world while we sit in drydock, being patched up?"

Nightmare turned to face him properly, a scowl on her snout, "You have a duty to those powerless before you, yet would see millions dead simply due to the inconvenience it may cause us? You are der-"

"Inconvenience my ass, you have no idea wh-"

"Be silent!" Nightmare Moon roared, the lights on the bridge dimming seemingly from the power of her voice. "Were you under my command, I would have you executed for cowardice! If there is some unknown danger in the travel itself, then I will protect you, as you should them!"

Anon's shock and confusion was enough to overwhelm his temper. This cast-away that had just been begging for his help a little while ago, was practically threatening him already? "Look. The armor on our hull is ready to fall apart. That's not something that gets fixed in a day. If we hit a meteor the size of my thumb, it could tear right through the ship."

With the tone of a mother on the verge of losing patience with her child, Nightmare said, "Then fly around them."

 

 

~

The moment the One Bad Date Too Many sailed out of a wormhole and into normal space, Anon ran through the bridge, starting up the ship's computer systems without waiting for Engineering to relinquish control. He held the CB radio to his lips as he waited for the translation software to finish loading, while his eyes danced over the sensors, looking for any sign of a ship-killing rock. Sensors were always the last one off, and the first one back on. Playing with the settings a bit, he didn't SEE anything coming their way…but that didn't mean there wasn't. Just that there was nothing his ship could see, either. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the translation software had started. He thumbed the radio, "All crew, all crew report in."

"Aye," Whistled Ket, "Lasers on manual, ready for point defense."

"Here," Rhindi screeched, "Transferring control back to the bridge,"

There was a moment's pause before the radio crackled to life, "Does that include me?," whinnied Nightmare Moon, "What task should I be performing?"

"I'd say keep standing by to execute the Captain for cowardice. He makes better decisions when you do, " Ket laughed.

"Ha, ha. Ha. And a bonus ha. Rhindi, do I have helm control yet?" Anon said, scowling at the screen.

"Still working on it, Captain."

Rhindi had been less than enthused to hear Anon's announcement of "Looks like we're doing the suicide mission!" It skittered around the ship, complaining loudly about 'overly emotional aliens,' before making a big point of busying itself with checking over Anon's 'obviously mistuned' translation of Nightmare Moon's language. It didn't take long for Rhindi to find a reason to complain about that, too.

"If anything you've overtuned it. Look, right here," it said as it tapped its claw on the screen, pointing to a certain segment of the translator's logs. "Right here, she should be using second person, singular pronouns for your language, not plural…but that's extremely archaic." Rhindi looked back at Anon, puzzlement written across its alien face. "Are you SURE her people are space-capable? Everything here reads like they're pre-steam."

Anon could only shrug at that, "She was marooned on another planet. She didn't say she was abducted, so they HAVE to be, right?"

Rhindi had seemed to consider that for a moment. Finally, it said, "Well, it wouldn't be the weirdest language out there. At least she doesn't speak in metaphors, unlike humans. You were one of the worst species to translate for, half of what you people say are ancient cultural references and memes. When are one of you going to finally explain what 'Ligma,' MEANS, anyway?"

"You know humans can't talk about that with outsiders," was all that Anon had to say in reply. The time wasn't right yet.

Ket on the other hand, had been much easier to convince. The word 'volcano' had barely made it through the translator before Ket was chirping, "I'm coming along!"

As the Ssthaki maintenance teams rushed to repair the damage she had caused, Anon realized he had to find quarters for Nightmare Moon. "After all," he had said to her, "You're going to be on the ship for at least a couple days, and I want to have my own bed back, thank you."

"Do you have anything else as soft? After laying upon the ground for so long, it was like sleeping upon a cloud again," Nightmare asked, oblivious to the quirks in her translation.

"Yea, we can get you a mattress like that, I know Ss'thar'tk will have a spare or twelve. I mean what kind of room do you want? Do you need like, a high ceiling like Ket, or special lighting like Rhindi or…I dunno, open water, like the Oro do?" Anon asked with a shrug.

Nightmare tapped a hoof against her chin as she pondered the question before answering, "I simply wish to see the stars. Is there a room aboard with a good view?"

Anon broke out in a huge grin. "We just so happen to have a room with the best damn view in the universe."

That room, with its couch now shoved against a wall, was precisely where Nightmare found herself, as they descended towards the planet of the Urundunum. Half of her wished for something to which she could hold onto for dear life, while the other half of her wanted to knock out the window and feel the rush of the aether in her mane as they hurtled towards the planet. She could almost feel it hurtling up towards them as it steadily grew larger and larger in the window before them. It was almost the size Equestria had been when she was still…imprisoned…

The 'radio' sitting between her hooves crackled to life with the captain's voice. For a second, she could only make out his bizarre foal babbling, before the device wrapped around her ear spoke his words in Equestrian, mimicking his voice perfectly, "So the good news is, Ss'thar'tk was right. We're dealing with a pre-flight civilization, so they haven't had a chance to fill their orbit with a bunch of junk. Our hull is more than fine for this. The bad news is, if we fly over any settlements on the way to the volcano, we could contaminate their culture." There was a beep, signifying he was done speaking.

The planet before them continued to grow, soon filling the window before Nightmare. She could make out islands, forests…she shuddered. She had become so accustomed to Equestria's geography. Its continents, forests, jungles, badlands….seeing another world before her was like looking into a parody. Everything was wrong, nothing was where it should be, she couldn't make out home…she looked away, eager for a distraction from the funhouse mirror of her world before her.

Nobody had responded to the captain's message. Feeling as though SOMEONE should indulge the weird little ape, Nightmare pressed the button on the side of the radio, as she had been instructed, and spoke, "Contaminate their culture? What do you mean?"

The screeching that met her in response could only mean that horror, the Ssthaki, had chosen to respond. Luckily, the voice in her ear from that strange device was the soft voice of…a gelding, if she had to guess gender, almost melodic, the voice of a singer, "We normally try to allow cultures to grow and develop on their own. If we must interfere, like we are here, we do our best to do so without the natives having any knowledge of our involvement. After all, we Ssthaki wouldn't have wanted another species to interfere with our own development. Thus we only intervene in the most dire of circumstances, like when a species is facing certain extinction."

Before Nightmare could key the radio, it burst out with whistles, Ket responding, "Even then. Half the time they leave them to die. If you're relying on the Technocracy to save you, you and your people are dead." There was a bitterness in the voice that was piped directly into Nightmare's ear. She raised an eyebrow. There was something there, something she wasn't privy to.

"Ket," came Rhindi's reply, "you know that-" it was cut off by a burst of static. Nightmare jumped in surprise as the radio screeched in feedback. She fumbled with the radio, trying to twist the volume knob with her hooves, before it went silent.

"Sorry, my bad," said Anon. "They're all over the southern continent. I can't figure out a way down without going over a few of them. Looks like we're going in hot." As the radio beeped, the world before Nightmare shifted, moving. No, it was the ship that was moving, Nightmare had to remind herself. This isn't Equestria, after all. It settled under the ship, giving Nightmare the illusion that she was flying higher than any pegasus could dream of being. She felt a curious urge to spread her wings. She couldn't see any stars…the light from the planet itself was too great, it simply downed them out.

"How hot?" asked Rhindi, sounding almost grateful for the interruption.

Anon's reply was quick, ""How does, 'The gods of heaven descended as a shooting star to slay the demons of the underworld' being added to their mythology sound?" A curious sound followed. It took a moment before Nightmare's translator resolved it into Ket, laughing. It seemed the captain wanted to bury wherever the conversation had been about to lead.

Well, she could certainly help with that. She keyed her own radio, saying matter-of-factly, "Rather astute. But can we not ensure they are a bit more accurate? The goddess of heaven and her three minions makes for a much more interesting tale."

"The Ethical Review Board are going to be furious with us," came Rhindi's belated response.

The floor beneath Nightmare's hooves shuddered. She whirled around to see what it could have been, seeing nothing new outside the window. The radio cracked with Anon's voice, "Alright, serious time guys, we're hitting atmosphere. We're at about thirty thousand kilometers an hour right now, so clear coms unless there's an emergency."

The rumbling of the ship slowly grew worse, the floor jumping under Nightmare's hooves. She found herself forced to cling to that couch she had previously spurned, the cushioning barely helping to steady her. The world through her window dropped away, before the empty night sky began to glow. Yellow at first, she couldn't see where it was coming from. Then, a star fllickered before her-and then the world erupted in flames!

"Aaaahh!" Nightmare screamed, leaping back behind the couch as though it would protect her. Yet still, she peaked out from behind her cover to watch. The flames whirled around the window, writhing like an angry spirit eager to devour her.They changed color, going from yellow, to red, to violet. Even the mightiest dragon on Equestria couldn't hope to match the sights before her. She risked reaching out her hooves, snatching up the radio. She shouted into it to be heard over the roar of hellfire not a few meters from her, "What are these flames?!"

"Flames?!" Came Rhindi's screeching response. "What are you talking about?! I'm not seeing any fires aboard."

"The captain put her in The Target, remember?" Ket said, "She's probably worried about glass handling reentry, I don't blame her."

"Oh. Don't worry Nightmare Moon, you'll be fine. It's transparent aluminum, not glass. Hull temperature is currently about twenty five thousand degrees, that window is rated for at least double that," said Rhindi.

Despite its reassurances, Nightmare did not feel the least bit calmed. But, true to Rhindi's words, the inferno did not reach her. Then in less than ten seconds, she watched the white-hot heart of perdition die, the flames fading to a dull yellow, so weak they were translucent. Nightmare finally felt safe to climb out from behind her refuge, watching the flames give way, the ships rumbling fading with it, the ground growing steady once more. Soon, it was as though they were never there at all. She was once again soaring above the planet in a starless sky, Yet now, she could see rising well above the clouds, above the curious line between blue and black, a pillar of billowing smoke. The volcano. They were heading directly towards it. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath…and when she opened them again, the sky was blue. Did she miss something? Did she let time slip by..? No. No she didn't feel as though she had one of her…spells. The transition must have been that quick. Resolving not to miss any more, she pressed her snout to the window, barely allowing herself to blink, as they flew, slowing further and further, until the ground came up before them…and there was a thud.

The radio crackled to life as Anon announced, "And we have landed. Everyone sound off." First Rhindi, then Ket, chimed in that everything was good. Nightmare simply stared at the world before her. Before her, were trees unlike any she had ever seen, more akin to giant stalks of broccoli than true trees. They were sounded with bushes like cotton balls, leading up an unfamiliar mountain. Of course it was unfamiliar. She wasn't on Equestria…she was on another world.One as vast as her home. Her world had been everything she ever knew…and here was another one. Just sitting there, as though nothing out of the ordinary. It hadn't sank in until she saw the ground, right there, a few meters below her. If the window wasn't solid, she could reach out and touch it…Everything she had ever fought for, her country, her home, all her struggles…they were meaningless to this new world… "Nightmare, that includes you. Everything good?"

Nightmare jerked back out of the recesses of her own mind. Tearing herself away from the view before her, she turned back to activate the radio, "Oh! Yes, me. Everything is fine on my end…" She looked back, still holding down the talk button, to gaze out at the brocoli-trees before her. "It was that easy for you? A single day to prepare, a few hours journey, and…you're…on another world. Around an alien sun…as though it were routine." She finally let the button go.

Each crewmember on this ship had their own world. Rhindi talked about 'not interfering' with other worlds…and with how casually it mentioned it, there could be dozens...hundreds of other worlds. If even one percent of the stars in her sky had their own world…Nightmare shuddered at the thought. How small, how insignificant WAS Equestria?

"Yep," Anon said over the radio, "for what it's worth, we humans were only barely able to reach our moon until recently." Nightmare glared down at the radio, dread creeping in from the corners of her mind. Why is he talking about going specifically to their moon? Did they suspect…? Without any response, Anon spoke again, "Let's…meet in the aft cargo bay. Ket? Rhindi? Can one of you escort her? And bring an extra away-mission kit for her?"

"You gave me a tour of the ship yesterday. I know where it is," said Nightmare Moon, turning away from the window before her. She made the right choice in quarters. It gave her a glimpse into the true horror reality had to offer…and allowed her time to process and bury it. Those were Luna thoughts, not Nightmare Moon thoughts. By the time she would reach the cargo bay, she had regained her composure as the Goddess of the Night.

 

 

~

 

One advantage to being captain was that Anon knew his ship like the back of his hand. He knew the routes anyone would take to get from point a to point b…which, in this particular case, made it quite easy for him to intercept Nightmare Moon before she could reach the cargo bay. He rounded a corner just as she passed it, falling in beside her. "Hey Nightmare." She downright jumped the moment he spoke, whirling around to face him. "How you feeling?"

She looked him over, seemingly searching for something before she answered, "I was unharmed by our landing. Why do you ask? Should I be unwell?"

He knew there was something off the moment she had taken so long to answer on the radio. Stupid of him not to have realized. He had been so caught up in the preparations for the new mission, it had slipped his mind, the massive tech disparity between the Technocracy and her people, and how it would feel. Of course interstellar flight would have been beyond them. If spaceflight had been routine for them, they wouldn't have left her stranded for so long.Still, he tried to play it casually, with a shrug.

"I had forgotten to mention it before, but we humans are weird, sentimental creatures, and…well, it's a big deal to us whenever one of us lands on a new planet none of us have been on before, and we have a few rituals we have to perform. Am I right in guessing you're the first member of your people to ever make it to a planet outside your solar system?"

The tenseness in Nightmare's features did not waver as she said, her voice steeled, "To my knowledge, I am. What are these rituals of which you speak?"

"We always record the first words any of us say on a new world. We're supposed to come up with something profound, I guess, but I'm not that creative. Ket and Rhindi think it's a big waste of time, and…well, I'd feel a little less silly doing it, if I had someone else doing it along with me." said Anon, mostly telling the truth. He wasn't lying, that humanity kept that tradition ever since they landed on the moon, but he never took it seriously. Half of the time, "humanity's first words" upon the surface of that world were a joke he came up with at the last second. The other half, he just recreated the Mars landing, as half the other human explorers tended to do, much to the consternation of the rest of the Technocracy.

Still, it worked. Nightmare's anxiety melted away as she smiled, "I would very much like that, yes." After a moment, she added, "Anything to put my minion at ease."

Anon chuckled and resumed walking, Nightmare following suit. "Yea, don't think I didn't notice that little comment earlier, right as we hit atmosphere. Nuh-uh, I'm the captain, you're all crew, that makes the three of you my minions."

Nightmare responded in kind, an evil grin upon her snout, "Oh? Did you not seek my counsel before the Ssthakic superior? Is this entire quest not the result of your obedience to my command?"

"Well, Ket would agree with ya on that!" Anon said with a proper laugh. "I just needed someone to remind me to do the right thing."

Nightmare smiled, but kept quiet. They walked in silence until they reached the doors to the cargo bay. "Thank you, Anonymous," she said, meeting his eyes. Anon nodded and opened the doors. The smell of sulfur assaulted their nostrils before a hideous noise attacked their ears.

"There you two are!" Rhindi screeched out, looking up from its preparations, grease staining the scales of its upper body. "What took you so long?"

Anon jerked a thumb at Nightmare Moon and lied through his teeth, "She got lost. I found her in ring three."

"'Tis a lie, I knew precisely where…I…what is THAT?!," Nightmare's voice trailed off, her ears lowering as she looked at the monstrosity that had replaced everything had collected and filled the cargo bay with, over the past several months.

"That," Anon said, "Is what us filthy land dwellers are going to use to get around." At first glance, the vehicle looked like a giant spider robot. Bright orange and dark grey, the colors of the Technocracy, covered every inch of its steel exoskeleton. A large abdomen, shaped like a Ssthaki's, ended not in the normal spinnerets, but in the diode of the mining laser they were to use. The 'head' was a clear dome, a cockpit built for four Ssthaki, hurriedly retrofitted with controls moved down for human height and a stool bolted down in the back. Its six legs ended in large wheels in the same vein as the old human Mars rovers had. Anon had only gotten to drive a 'ground exploration craft' once before, and he was excited to get to play with the big toy once again.

Nightmare made a face of disgust. "Must EVERYTHING be arachnid with you people?"

Rhindi chittered in response, "It's the most efficient design for rough terrain!"

"Would that not be a crab?! What is the purpose of having such a bulbous abdomen?!" Nightmare retorted.

Anon left Nightmare to the mercy of Rhidi's inevitable rant about crabs being abominations. He spotted Ket, hovering just before the lowered cargo ramp. He started making his way over to him, stepping over hoses, ducking under one of their craft's legs. While it was impossible for Anon to ever get a read of Ket's emotions from looking at him, he had a feeling. He made it halfway down the cargo ramp and held onto one of its hydraulic pistons, calling down to Ket, "How's the view?"

Ket didn't look back. "Didn't you say we were going to land by the caldera? There isn't any magma…I was hoping…"

Anon spread his hands apologetically, "It's a super volcano that hasn't erupted in a couple hundred thousand years. The magma's about three kilometers down."

If Ket was satisfied by that explanation, he didn't show it. For a moment he just hovered there, the only sound he made being the beating of his six wings to keep him in place. Finally, he said, "At least it smells like home. Let me guess, you want to do your human thing?"

 

With a smirk, Anon jerked his thumb back and said, "Not just a human thing. Nightmare Moon wants to do it first."

 

Ket looked black to stare at Anon, "Please do us all a favor. Set a good example for her, do something serious. For once."

Flashing Ket a grin, Anon turned back, making his way back over to Nightmare and Rhindi, the latter of which was passionately trying to explain why what was essentially a glorified car, needed a spider-like abdomen for 'efficiency,' while the former was having none of it.

"Were efficiency the only concern, would it not make more sense to put the devices on the end of arms, like a centaur?!" Nightmare cried out as Anon

Rhindi sputtered, outraged as it said, "You mean like a-a CRAB?! Oh, of all the ridiculous ideas, why must that keep coming up again and again?! Crabs are disgusting, a mistake of-"

"Nightmare!" Anon shouted to interrupt Rhindi. He didn't need to hear the crab rant again. He pulled out an old earth cell phone from his pocket and held it up for the two of them to see. "Ready to make history?"

Nightmare nodded and trotted over, graciously taking the opportunity to escape the conversation. Rhindi glared at Anon and hissed, "If you teach her to do the Mars thing, I'm going to lock you out of environmental controls."

Anon feigned outrage, a hand to his chest as he stepped back with a gasp, "I would never! This is a momentous occasion for Nightmare Moon and her people. We're going to do something serious."

"You'd better," came Rhindi's snared reply.

Making their way back over towards Ket and the exit ramp, Nightmare cocked an eyebrow and asked Anon, "Mars thing? What is that?"

Anon fought to keep from smiling as he said, "Let's just say, humanity's first expedition to another world was…memorable." Nightmare stared at him for a moment, obviously expecting him to elaborate, but stayed quiet as he failed to do so. She stopped just before the ramp and looked down, staring at the grass below. Anon stopped beside her and asked, "Would you like me to go first?"

Nightmare took a deep breath and said, "Neigh. I am ready." She walked down the ramp, Ket flitting to the side to make room for her, as Anon held up the phone and hit record. She paused at the very lip of the ramp, holding a hoof up. "With this, I take not just the first steps upon a new world, but the first steps on a new path for all of Ponykind. A step taken with help of friends, one that we will one day take on our own." She stepped forward, the grass crunching beneath her hooves as she walked upon an alien planet for the first time and looked around, her eyes wide. Satisfied, Anon tapped to save the video.

"You could learn a thing or two from her," Rhindi called out from the side of their vehicle's abdomen. "I should have this running in a minute. They didn't set the air filtering correctly."

"Ha, ha. There's a reason they picked me to be captain. Let me show you how it's done." With a bit of a smirk, he followed after Nightmare, holding up his phone to record. "As we step upon this world, we come in hope. Not to conquer or colonize, but to protect." He took a step forward onto the ground, saying, "We come in hope of stopping a great-holy crap!" He stopped and stared at the forest before him. "The trees are brocoli!"

Rhindi let out a cry of frustration from behind him. "You actually had me for a minute!"

"No, seriously!" Anon turned the phone around and pointed for the camera. The trees, stretching to the height of their ship, looked like comically oversized brocoli. It was like something out of a tv show he would have watched as a child. "This is an Earth food, this shouldn't be here!"

"You always do this, Anon," Ket whistled out behind him. Anon turned to look as Ket pointed his beak up, "I'm going to be useful and fly lookout."

There was a rumble from his ship as Rhindi started up their monstrosity of a vehicle, driving it down the ramp towards Anon. Cutting his video short, he ran out of the way, towards Nightmare, who had already made her way to the treeline. She was looking up at the tops of the trees as he approached. Without looking away, she said, "I wonder if these are edible…if they're a food on your planet, would they not be a food here as well?"

Anon sighed in frustration and shook his head. "Look. Just…forget it, ok?"

"No," Nightmare said, turning to face him. "For I know the pain you feel. When your sincerity is thrown back in your face. When your achievements amount to nothing. When those around you mock you, say you can do nothing correct. That everything you do is wrong, that you're a joke, a laughingstock, that you should sit on the sideline while those who claim to be your betters do your job for you." She nodded towards the vehicle that was just now reaching the ground. She continued, spitting each word furiously, "It is not pain one easily just forgets. It clings to you, haunting you when you find yourself alone…" Her sides heaved and her wings shook in anger.

Anon found himself at a loss for words. It wasn't THAT bad for him… was it? She had managed to dredge up old memories of his, exactly what she described, all the times a Ssthaki mocked him, or dismissed his accomplishments…no. No, she's talking about what happened to her. Or what she thinks happened to her. She's obviously suffered a mental break while being marooned. Of course she'd blame the ones who left her behind, yea. That's it…his own rationalization rang hollow in his head.

Nightmare closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. When she opened them again, she looked Anon in the eyes, "How may I assist you, Captain?"

Anon blinked, taking a moment to pry his mind away from the memories Nightmare had dug up in his mind. "I uh…" he said, pointing at her wings, "Can you fly with those, or are they just vestigial?"

Nightmare looked back at her wings as she spread them out. She gave them a light flap before returning her attention to Anon, "It has been quite some time since I have flown properly, but I can. I may need to rest often, until my strength returns."

Anon nodded, "Alright. Fly lookout with Ket when you can, it won't hurt to have an extra pair of eyes making sure no natives find us. Just radio in when you need to rest. You're welcome to hang out on the rover with us if you want."

"Very well," With that, Nightmare lept into the air and beat her wings, soon vanishing above the treeline.

Anon stood there, gazing at no point in particular, as his thoughts tumbled over and over in his mind. He was only pulled back to reality by the rover pulling up in front of him, the door open. Wordlessly, he climbed in and sat down, staring ahead as Rhindi drove them into the forest, navigating the six wheeled vehicle over rocks, around trees, and towards the place they needed to plant the first seismic actuator. After a few minutes of silence between them, Rhindi asked, "Are you alright, Captain? You're being uncharacteristically quiet."

Anon snorted and looked over at his companion. "Yea, I just…aliens are weird, ya know?"

Rhindi looked at him before it closed its outer pair of eyes in an alien equivalent of a smile before it chittered an inhuman noise, which translated to, "You got that right."

 

~

 

 

With all the preparations out of the way, the actual business of saving the world was quite uneventful. Rhindi drove while Anon watched the ground radar, to make sure they weren't going to sink into the volcano. Whenever they made it to a spot that had been designated by Ss'thar'tk's team, he fired up the mining laser, waited a few minutes while it bored a hole a roughly two kilometers deep, and then had the glorious task of climbing out, opening a compartment on the 'abdomen' of their vehicle, picking up a metal ball the size of his head, and dropping it down the shaft. The fact that each metal ball was essentially a nuclear bomb, was something Anon tried to avoid thinking about as he pushed the big red button on the side of one to prime it, before dropping it down the hole.

After dropping what Anon swore to be their hundredth charge, he collapsed in his seat, the whine of their craft's electric motor assaulting his ears. He glanced at the alien sun, which just barely poked above the mountain tops that made up the volcano's crater. "How much longer is this going to take?"

Rhindi answered without missing a beat, "At the current rate, we should be done by the end of tomorrow."

Anon cocked an eyebrow. He had just been complaining for the sake of it. But nagged at him… "Wait. Remind me, how long until the volcano blows?"

"Earliest estimates have the eruption begin in about two days' time." Rhindi said automatically. Anon turned back to see the Ssthaki process the information it just spat out. It looked up, stared ahead for a moment, before twisting its serpentine head around to meet Anon's. "That's not enough time. Estimates could be off, our disturbing of the volcano could speed it up, we could be caught in it!"

Anon swore and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Alright, calm down, we've done worse and you know it."

Rhindi fluttered its two sets of eyes, trying to suppress its desire to panic. After a moment it said, "Like the time with the Jdungthi?"

Anon snapped his fingers and proclaimed, "Exactly! Or like the time I almost flew the ship into a star, and we got out of those intact-"

"Mostly," Rhindi added.

"Your leg grew back, didn't it?"

"It still hurt!" Came the hissing, screeched accusation.

Anon rolled his eyes. It really wasn't ever gonna let that one go, was it? "I don't know how many times I need to apologize for that, but I'm sorry, ok? Let's just review our options." Rhindi chose not to say anything. Anon mulled their situation over in his mind. How could they speed this up…? Finally, he asked, "What's stopping us from just bombarding this thing from orbit? We could have the lasers cut down to the magma."

Rhindi hissed, "Did you even LOOK at the briefing?"

Anon shook his head, "No, I was too busy babysitting the repair crew."

"Seriously?!" Rhindi finally looked back at him properly, its screeching sounding almost mechanical, "Every ship is the same, Anon. They're all the same! Giving ours a funny name doesn't make it mechanically any different. They know what they're doing better than you do."

Well THAT'S not true at all, Anon thought. Meeting the Ssthaki's monstrous glare, he shot back, "I was ALSO babysitting the alien we picked up, you dummy. The controls were biologically incompatible."

"...They were?" Rhindi chittered.

"She doesn't have hands, you goof!" Anon held up both of his, wiggling his fingers for emphasis.

That seemed to mollify Rhindi, "Right, right. How did they even evolve sapience without manipulators?"

Anon shook his head, "I dunno, can we focus here? Volcano. Gonna go boom. Orbit. Why?"

Rhindi hesitated, clearly fascinated by thoughts of theoretical evolution. With a slow hiss becoming a screech, it said, "Theeeee…team under Ss'thar'tk believe the energy would transfer to the magma chamber and could cause the eruption regardless. It's not certain, but we'd be gambling with countless lives."

Anon nodded, "Right. But if it worked we'd-what's up?" He looked up as he felt them come to a stop.

"We're at the next spot. You ready with the laser, captain?" Rhindi said, leaning away from the steering levers.

Anon tapped out a few buttons, aiming the laser back down, spooling it up, and…the coolant hissed as it lit up, melting a tunnel down. Tunnel…that gave him an idea.

"So I know I was told 'don't ever use them on a planet,'-" He was interrupted by the equivalent of a groan from Rhindi, but kept going like he didn't hear that, "but why don't we use the Tunnelers? Crack open a wormhole under the surface, drain the magma into deep space."

Rhindi gave him a look he had grown far too familiar with. The "did this stupid ape just say something THAT stupid in front of me, the almighty alien overlord?" look.

"Think through the physics, Captain. You want to introduce a vacuum in semi-liquid material that is under thousands of tons of pressure. What do you think the surrounding material is going to do? If we're lucky, the volcano erupts anyway. If we're unlucky, we interrupt the dynamo effect that generates the planet's magnetic field and kill everyone on the planet as the atmosphere boils away. If we're REALLY unlucky, it knocks the planet out of orbit, and everyone knows what we've done by the time we get back."

Anon looked down at the laser's controls and said, "Well, we wouldn't want that." He saw that they had reached the right depth and shut it off. "Pop me out a bomb, gotta go save the world the right way."

"Not a bomb," Rhindi said as it tapped a few buttons.

"Yea, yea," Anon muttered as he climbed out and down the side of their rover. He kept brainstorming ideas as he worked his way down one of the legs. They had to recharge the thing tonight…was Rhindi factoring that in? His boots touching down, he crunched grass under him as he walked to the 'abdomen' and slid a compartment open. He picked up the metal ball within, tapped the red button on it and waited for it to glow.

Hmming, he thought that if charge time was a factor, he should be able to jury rig up a way to quickly charge the batteries from his ship's engines. Seeing the "seismic actuator" was armed, he dropped it down the hole and started climbing back up. Pulling himself into the cab, he asked "Hey Rhindi did you-"

"Shush, quiet!" Rhindi screeched over him, one arm held up for silence, before another held a cb radio to its jaws, keyed it, and hissed, "I did not copy that, over."

The radio crackled to life, "You didn't…what?" Nightmare Moon's voice echoed out, sounding totally baffled.

"The captain was talking, please repeat what you had said," Rhindi replied, waving Anon in.

Anon scrambled over to Rhindi's side as Nightmare Moon tried again, "I said, there's some sort of spherical construct flying over the canopy. It's moving back and forth, like it's searching."

"Flying…?" Anon mumbled, furrowing his brow.

The radio crackled again, this time with Ket's peaking whistles, "I'm on it."

"Copy that. Let us know what you find," Rhindi replied. Letting its finger off the 'talk' button, it looked back at Anon, and voiced what he was thinking, "It can't be native. They're at early Iron age, they're nowhere near flying technology."

Anon rubbed his chin as he thought, not liking the implications of that. They had been gone for months…had they missed something big? Surely Ss'thar'tk would have told them. Then again… "Hang on…is this Union territory? Is the damn Union here?"

Rhindi chittered a bit and wriggled its abdomen in a nervous gesture. "They shouldn't be. If they did, they'd fix the volcano themselves and probably drag the Urundunum kicking and screaming to the stars for doing so."

Anon nodded as he kept wracking his brain for who these newcomers could be. It didn't make sense to him, he knew they were on the edge of Ssthakic space, but it wasn't like they were by any major civilizations…

The radio let out a burst of static then went silent. It crackled a second time, and Nightmare's voice came through, "Damnable thing. I have a better view now. It's not spherical, it is a disk with five beings standing on it. They're… As unique as the three of you….I do not know how they're keeping their footing or controlling it, but they're all holding onto staves."

Anon's blood froze. The Ascendency. It couldn't be…it didn't make any sense, why would THEY be here?! He looked at Rhindi. It was clearly thinking the same thing he was. He snatched the radio out of its hand and barked into it. "Get back to the ship, Ket. Now."

Ket's voice warbled through the radio, "No. Nooo, no, no, no! They know I'm here, they're not gonna stop, they're never gonna stop -"

Anon keyed in several bursts of static until Ket stopped transmitting. "Listen to me, Ket. Do you remember how to start up the ship and open a wormhole to Sanctuary?"

There was a pause before Ket replied, "I have it written down. But-I can't just leave you!"

"Nothing is going to happen. We have been in deep space for months. Nobody knows you're here. If this is their territory, we'll apologize and leave. That's it. Understood?" Anon spoke slowly, deliberately, fighting his own fear as he fought his friend's.

"Understood. Heading back now."

"Good. If, for whatever reason, you don't hear from us in the next two hours, take off. You're not dying here. That's an order." Anon paused, running through everything in his mind. Right. The newcomer. "Nightmare? I want you to follow him. Get back to the ship."

"I don't believe that is wise, Captain Anonymous," Nightmare Moon said.

Anon fought the urge to start swearing at her as he snarled out, "Why not?!"

"They've spotted me."

He let out a loud curse before he keyed the radio again, "What are they doing? Are you ok?"

"Of course," Nightmare replied, sounding confused. Of course, she doesn't know what they're dealing with. "The construct has stopped moving and they are conversing amongst themselves while glancing up at me occasionally. I believe they'd follow me if I flew to the ship…"

"Ok, we're going to…" Anon glanced up only to be met with the broccoli-like branches of the forest canopy, the sky behind them patchwork and buried. He spoke to both Rhindi and Nightmare as he continued, "we're going to get to a clearing and fire off a red flare. Land by us. We'll see what we can do."

"I don't understand. Are these people dangerous? They do not seem to be threatening me in any way…"

"Nightmare," Anon spoke slowly, choosing each word carefully. "They wiped out the Ket. They killed each and every one of them."

He waited, hoping she'd get the hint. After a moment, Nightmare replied, "I'll await any sign of your flare."

Their rover lurched forward, as Rhindi started maneuvering to turn around, back towards a clearing they had driven through a few minutes earlier. The tension in the air was palpable, but Anon refused to give into it. They needed to prepare with what little time they had. Anon set the radio down and started opening compartments. There was the flare gun, right in the emergency equipment. He opened the compartment for weapons, and found it filled with spare seismic charges. What in the..? He opened the one next to it, only to find it stuffed full of snacks. He looked up and asked, "Hey Rhindi? Where are the guns in this thing?"

Rhindi let out a strained hiss, "After two negligent discharges and you almost shooting Nightmare Moon in the same day, I thought it would be safer to leave them behind."

Anon fought the growing urge to throttle the alien before him as he spat out, "Yea, and how safe are we without them now? How about you run that idea past the captain next time before I start thinking it would be safer to leave YOU behind? You're lucky I keep my pistol on me or we'd be totally defenseless."

Rhindi glanced back at him with a pair of eyes, "It's not like a railgun rifle will do anything against a hunting party's shields."

"They're not a hunting party," Anon said as he looked around the cab for anything useful. He rested a hand on the holster under his clothes and thought, It does have a point…projectile weapons are useless against them…but energy weapons… His eyes fell on the controls for their mining laser. Perfect. Working his way over to them, he started punching in safety overrides. Punching in his authorization code, clicking past every warning box, he said, "There's no way. It's just not possible. We've been in deep space for MONTHS. We haven't been back yet, nobody knows we're here."

The whirr of the rover's engine died down as they came to a halt. The legs holding up the cab hissed as they lowered it down to the ground, almost painfully slowly. Without waiting for it to reach the ground, Rhindi stepped back from the controls and opened the door. It looked back at Anon, making eye contact with all four of its eyes and said, "There is one person who knows we're here. One who was very insistent we come here. One who knew Ket was aboard."

Anon stared at it, as it skittered out, leaving Anon alone in the rover, his mind racing. Could he have really fallen for an obvious trap like that? Rhindi didn't say anything about it at the time…Would Ss'thar'tk actually try to get them all killed? No…no, he remembered her being overtly abrasive. If this was a trap, it was a piss poor one, he had refused until their new passenger had demanded it.

He looked back at the controls for their laser. Overriding the last of the safeties, he turned it. Tilting it well past its intended range, until the abdomen of their craft, laser included, pointed straight into the clearing. Only then, with what little preparations he could make completed, did he climb out. His feet barely touched the alien gras before he held up the flare gun and fired it. A red beacon streaked up into the sky. The smell of sulfur invaded his nostrils as they watched the flare, waiting for a sign of their impending doom.

"If Ss'thar'tk sold us out, I'll shove every one of her eggs back down her throat," said Anon, as he held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

"I think you'd need a license to do that…" Rhindi held up an arm and, in a surprisingly human gesture, pointed, "I see them."

Anon squinted. There was a little black dot…for some reason, looking at it, his mind went back to the time he saw a black hole with his naked eye. The purest, lightless black, the end of reality as they knew it…for some reason, he knew that speck was Nightmare Moon. Sure enough, it didn't take long for him to make out wings, that bizarre star-field that was seemingly attached to her. Behind her was the disk. They were both approaching fast, faster than he would have given Nightmare credit for. She seemed as fast as Ket going all out with all four wings.

She streaked towards them before she turned into a dive, hooves outstretched. Anon and Rhindi barely had time to dance to the side before Nightmare slammed into the ground, the crack of her impact silencing the normal cries of the native insects for a moment. Nightmare stood on all fours, her wings hanging limp as she gasped for breath. "They have…" she paused for breath, "SKULLS on their necklaces. Who…are they?"

Anon looked up, keeping his eye on the disk as it lazily approached. It knew they weren't going anywhere. Without looking away, he said, "They're the Grogaran Ascendency. Somehow the smallest, yet most technologically advanced faction in the galaxy."

"They're not just advanced," Rhindi interjected. "They're so far beyond us that their technology is like magic. We haven't been able to begin reverse engineering what little we've gotten ahold of."

Anon shot Rhindi a look of annoyance, before eyeing the disk. It was descending. "Yea, more or less. And they shouldn't be here."

They waited, Anon scarcely willing to breathe as the disk floated down silently. It touched down, and five figures, each cloaked and hooded, stood holding crystal tipped staves embedded in the ornate, painted surface of their craft. While the cloaks made it difficult for Anon to identify each species, he knew Nightmare was right. They all had wildly different body shapes. Holding each of their hoods closed was a chain necklace, on the end of which, the eyeless skull of a Ket hung, gazing down at Anon, Rhindi and Nightmare.

One of the members of the Ascendancy on the far edge stepped forward-a quadruped with an upright body, the same general body shape as a Ssthaki. As it went to step off the platform, its scaly clawed feet touched down on something invisible, the same height as their flying disk. Rhindi gave a soft hiss, saying, "They've extended their shields to walk on, so it looks like they're hovering. Like they're above us."

The creature held its staff aloft, its hood falling back to reveal a face not too dissimilar from an Earth squirrel, if a squirrel could be bright purple. Looking at Rhindi, it hissed, screeched and hissed, speaking fluent Ssthakic, "Hail and well met, member of the Ssthakic Technocracy. Why have you come to interfere with our operation?"

"What operation are you talking about?" Anon stepped forward, drawing the attention of all five members of the Ascendency. He stuck his hand out in the typical human greeting of asking for a handshake and said, "Hi, Captain Anonymous. The one in charge. We're here to stop a volcano from erupting."

The squirrel-headed member of the Ascendancy tilted its head to the side to look at Anon and did not take him up on the handshake. The other members of the group made no reaction, as though he was just an insect to be ignored…but the first did respond. "We are here to cause the eruption."

Equal parts relief and bafflement hit Anon. He was right, they DIDN'T know Ket was here. But he couldn't stop himself from blurting out, "What? Why?!"

One of the beings that stayed back, a tall, thin looking thing, tilted its staff forward. The crystalline tip glowed, and an image appeared before them, just floating in midair. It was of a black, almost eel-like creature covered in shovel-like fins, swimming through something orange. In a whistling, spitting language that Anon's translator recognized, it said, "This being is of immense value to us. It has grown large within the magma chamber of this volcano. We require it. An eruption will insure its release without injury to the beast."

Out of the corner of Anon's eye, Nightmare Moon recoiled,lifting a fetlock up to her armored chest as she spat out, "You would kill millions to dig up a single creature?"

"Their lives are irrelevant," Squirrel-head responded, sounding unphased, "Your Technocracy agreed. We informed them of our intentions and they agreed not to interfere."

Anon's stomach dropped. He threw up his hands, opening his mouth to speak, but Rhindi beat him to it, "We had no knowledge of this, a rogue official told us this was a natural eruption. We have been out of contact, in a deep space exploration mission for several months-"

"Hiding your flying companion from us," spoke a third, a squat being with six eyes glowing under its hood. Just like that, the icy talons of death returned to grip Anon's bones. It was Ss'thar'tk, it HAD to be her, she sold them out multiple ways, it was the only explanation.

Squirrel-head held up a scaled claw, pointing at…Nightmare Moon? "You are a Pony, are you not? From the world of Equestria?" Anon's brain came to a screeching halt. Once again, he was left wondering how exactly the Ascendency could know something. As far as they knew, Nightmare Moon was a new species…but these things just name dropped it. But they really don't know about Ket. This might be their way out. He looked at Nightmare Moon, letting his hands fall as he waited for her reply.

Her look of disgust and outrage gave way to confusion, but she kept up what Anon assumed was a defensive posture as she said, "I…am, yes. What business is it of yours?"

"Our lord gave us strict instructions to search for your kind, and to contact him immediately. He wishes to speak with you." Squirrel-head turned to face its companions. The four remaining on their disk held up their staves, the crystals touching, as they began to glow.

Is this how they pull off their instantaneous FTL communication? Anon wondered. While the Technocracy had a form of FTL communication, it required extensive infrastructure and still had a delay on it, which could be considerable at times.

Unhooking the CB radio from his belt, Anon held it up to his mouth and keyed it, knowing full well Ket's would still be on. "Hey, warm up the ship's engines for us, would ya? Don't take off just yet, but we're done here. Ss'thar'tk lied to us, this is an Ascendancy operation, so we're pulling out. Something weird's going on though, so we may be a while. Condition green." He snapped the radio off with a satisfying click before Ket could reply, not wanting to risk his friend's voice being overheard. A green alert would be enough for him to know they were expecting danger.

The Ascendency's seemingly appointed ambassador, the four legged squirrel thing, held up its staff. A beam of light shot from each of the four other Ascendency members' staves, connecting with its. A purple smoke began to billow out of the squirrel-thing's staff, hiding the broccoli-loke trees behind it. Anon's hand made its way over to his hidden holster, unsure of what was about to happen. Glancing at Rhindi, the Ssthaki seemed to be looking everywhere but at the smoke. Was it nervousness or…? Naw. Rhindi had more experience dealing with these guys than Anon did. It might be trying to figure out how their communication system worked. Nightmare…looked calm. With all four legs on the ground, she seemed totally nonplussed. As if this level of technology was perfectly normal to her, a member of a civilization that had not yet invented faster than light travel.

A face began to resolve itself out of the smoke. At first, with its oversized eyes, blue fur-covering and snout, Anon had the irrational thought that it was a member of Nightmare Moon's species. But he soon realized the being's muzzle was shaped entirely differently with a goatee of fur on the end; instead of having a single horn, it had two that arched high over its head, before curling back, under its jaw. A white tuft of a mane ran from between its horns down its neck, where they both vanished into the fog. It looked familiar to Anon, but he couldn't place where he had seen it before…maybe some briefing he had skimmed over. When it…no, he spoke in a deep rumbling language, Anon's translator picked it up instantly. "My people tell me you're a fellow outcast. Long have I awaited this moment."

Rhindi leaned over to Anon and hissed in a Ssthakic whisper, "He's talking in the same language as Nightmare Moon. We've never been able to translate him before, he always spoke through proxies."

"Who?" Anon hissed back, not taking his eyes off the proclaimed "Lord of the Grogaran Ascendancy" as he continued.

"I don't care what high crime you've been sentenced for. Whatever it is, you had your reasons." As he spoke, the leader of the Ascendancy's eyes faded from bright yellow to a deep, blood red. "Know that I have spent my time out here building an army-one that can easily retake our world. I have everything we need to get revenge, but one piece of information. I was thrown so deep within the stars, I was lost. I need to know. Do you know the way home?"

Nightmare Moon spread out her wings and sneered at the apparition before them, "Grogar?! You wretch of your race, you were cast into the heart of a star! How are you still alive?"

Anon glanced around at that comment, looking to see how the other members of the Ascendancy would handle listening to their leader be insulted like that. But they stood there, the squirrel-headed thing staring straight ahead, unblinking. The whole thing was unnerving to him.

Thusly named, Groga's furred lips curled into a wicked smile, showing off every one of his blunt teeth, "Good to see I'm still remembered. They certainly tried. They sent me screaming into the depths of the void, my magic the only thing keeping me alive. But…they didn't count on that star having its own system. With a habitable world. It seems fate has a sense of humor."

"So it certainly seems. It gave you a second lease on life, and you chose to squander it? To go right back to your impotent visions of conquest? You killed an entire species and think only of further meaningless bloodshed?" Nightmare Moon spat every word as the bizarre star-field that clung to her began to writhe. Did she have control over it? Anon added it to the growing list of questions he planned to ask Nightmare, if they made it out alive.

Grogar squinted, a snarl of his own forming on his blunt snout, "You sound so familiar. So sanctimonious, you're in no position to lecture me! You earned the same fate as I, don't pretend you're any better!"

Nightmare reared up on her hindlegs as she shouted, "I earned nothing!" She fell back down, her forehooves slamming against the ground. Shaking, she continued spitting her words, "Betrayal tore me from my world! There was nothing earned, nothing just about it! I escape through fortune and my own guile, only to find you've poisoned the stars themselves!"

Grogar looked unaffected by this outburst. He hesitated, his eyes fading back to yellow as he furrowed his brow, looking over Nightmare Moon's panting form. "Wait…I DO know you, don't I? Little Looney Luna, is that you? You've grown!"

Nightmare Moon jerked at those words as though struck by electricity. Her snarl melted away as her jaw hung open, her wings drooping. When she spoke, she sounded almost unsure, like she was trying to convince herself as much as Grogar, "Luna…was weak. She's…I am what's left. I am her future."

Grogar's lips curled into a wicked smile as he began to laugh, "Ooohh this is rich! I wanted a way home, and fate! Fate gave me the one with a star map in her head! You're lucky I need you alive, or I'd have you killed before you go crying to Big Sister to save you again!"

That did it. Something snapped in Nightmare Moon. She jerked her head back up, her pupils thin slits as she screamed out in unadulterated rage, "I don't need her! I'll kill you like the cloven-hooved dog you are, myself!"

The spiral horn on her head began to glow. Blue light surged out from within the core. Before he, Grogar, or Rhindi had a chance to say anything, a bolt of lightning shot down, through the image of Grogar, and struck the six-eyed member of the Ascendancy. The creature wordlessly burst into flames before simply vanishing, its cloak fluttering down as its staff tumbled to the disk. The image of Grogar vanished in an instant, leaving only the purple smoke behind. For a moment, nobody said anything, the only movement being the beams of light fading, the smoke dissipating, and Nightmare Moon seething, her horn still glowing with its unnatural light. Then the world erupted in chaos.

"Shields!" Screamed one of the surviving Ascendancy. The squirrel-headed being fell to the ground, its four legs spread, as the disk behind it lifted up, several meters, the air around it shimmering. Squirrelhead let loose a screeching cry and swung its staff around, the tip charging with some unknown power.

"Rhindi! Laser, now!" Anon shouted as he pulled his pistol out and started sprinting for the treeline. Snapping the slide back to chamber a round, he saw Rhindi skittering out of the corner of his eye, up the side of their craft. From above, glowing balls in groups of three dropped at random from the Ascendancy's disk-bombs, Anon soon realized, as they exploded when they landed. They didn't seem to be aiming the bombs, tossing them here and there, but Anon didn't want to take that chance. Hopefully Rhindi will shoot down any aimed at them.

Squirrelhead was charging at Nightmare Moon, still swinging its staff around, the light growing brighter and brighter, a miniature sun now. Nightmare, with her wings spread, yielded ground, backpedaling while keeping her glowing horn facing her opponent. She seemed to be pulling stars out of that field that clung to her head, assembling a cloud of bright spheres of light around her head that spun faster and faster. Any anger she had shown were gone from her features-she had the look of a surgeon determined to save a patient at any cost.

Anon skidded to a stop as he reached a tree, bumping into its soft trunk. Pressing against it, he held up his pistol. He doubted any bullets would get through, but he knew gunpowder made for a fantastic distraction. Taking aim at the front of the squirrel-beast's lower torso, he fired a few shots. To his astonishment, the creature cried out, stumbling. One must have gotten through. He didn't have time to celebrate his minor victory. Squirrel-head swung its staff around towards him. He dove behind the tree, hitting the ground just as the light of death passed overhead.

He looked up, not daring to stand or break cover. Squirrel-head's attack had passed right at chest level, and it had sliced through the tree as if it wasn't there-it looked ready to collapse with most of its trunk having been just sliced through. Glancing back, he saw the ones behind him were also cut through. It went back as far as he could see…which, granted, wasn't very far into the forest. If he was a second slower, that would have been him…

From the clearing, Anon heard a whine, followed by hissing of coolant systems. Rhindi was firing the laser. His crew's in danger. Staying low, he half scampered, half ran through the trees, not wanting to give Squirrel-head an easy target. Once he found a tree he liked, Anon poked his head around.

Nightmare Moon and Squirrel head were locked in…some sort of combat. They danced around in a circle as Nightmare was using those balls of light she had collected. Anon watched as her horn's glow pulsed, and three of the 'stars' she collected shot towards Squirrelhead, who in turn, swung its staff to meet them, the crystalline tip glowing as it shot out three thin beams to meet them, disintegrating them in mid air. It's using that thing as point defense, Anon thought, which means it CAN be overwhelmed.

Bringing his pistol to bare, he waited a moment, until he had a sure shot lined up…and to steady his nerves. Once he was sure he had no chance of accidentally missing Nightmare, he shouted, "Hey rat-face!" It worked. Squirrelhead jerked his head to look in Anon's direction, just in time for him to start pulling the trigger. He fired shot after shot, the booming of his pistol becoming muted as he emptied the magazine at his foe, pausing only to make sure he was still on target. Squirrelhead reacted, swinging its staff, those beams of light shooting out to stop every shot Anon made. But Nightmare took advantage of the opening he provided. At once, every one of those little 'stars' circling her horn shot forward. With Squirrelhead distracted, there was nothing to stop them. They impacted Squirrelhead all at once, each one popping like a firecracker, leaving fist-sized holes in the creature. By the time Anon stopped firing, it had slumped to the ground, dead.

Holy hell, we did it, was the first thought Anon had as he stepped out from the forest, fishing in his clothes for a spare magazine. A quick glance for falling ordinances showed him it was clear. His ears were ringing so loud, if it weren't for the translator sitting in one, he wouldn't have heard Nightmare Moon say, "Good work, minion."

Anon absentmindedly replied, "I'm the captain, you're the minion…" as he picked up Squirrelhead's weapon, turning it over in his hands. It looked undamaged to him. If they made it out alive, that staff will easily be the most valuable thing in the One Bad Date Too Many's cargo hold. If. grabbing its necklace, he looked up to see Rhindi still firing, the mining laser pointed up towards the sky. He didn't dare look up at its target. He had no interest in charbroiling his corneas. But the laser was the only thing firing. Something was wrong…he looked back at Nightmare, who's horn was still glowing, and asked "What's going on? Why aren't they shooting back? Where are the bombs?"

"I'm stopping them from raining perdition down upon us," Nightmare replied with a grimace. Her horn was still glowing, and she was looking up at the disk, a shining reflector before the smoke of the volcano. "My strength still has not recovered. I cannot both protect us and slay them."

Anon didn't understand how she was protecting them, or what she was actually doing, but they didn't have time for explanations. He nodded and pointed back the way they had came, "Understood. We're going to fall back to the ship, the weapons on her can take them down. Get to the rover."

"I'll be safer with my wings. I need a line of sight to hold them," Nightmare spread them, giving a flap for emphasis.

Anon gave a curt nod. "Go." He turned and started sprinting to the rover, hearing the wind whooshing behind him as Nightmare took to the skies. He jumped onto one of the legs, scrambling up the craft in record time. and almost ran head first into the cabin door. Rhindi had been smart enough to lock it. Good. He punched in his captain's override codes and slipped in, slamming it shut behind him.

Rhindi looked up from the laser's controls in time for Anon to say, "I'll get on the gun. We need to get back in orbit before they do." It gave a hiss of acknowledgement before skittering to the other side of the craft. He barely had time to get to the controls before the floor lurched out from under him, throwing him forward. He grabbed the controls and only just managed to avoid cracking his skull on them. Holding on for dear life, he looked at the screen before him as what were once soft bumps and rolls, were now hard jolts and lurches. All the error messages told him it wasn't good. Using mining equipment as a weapon was proving too stressful for it, the servos that controlled the position of the laser were already threatening to break. If he kept swinging it around, chasing after the Ascendancy, they were going to shear clean off and leave it pointed at the ground.

Flipping back to what Rhindi had been using as a targeting screen, Anon searched the sky for Nightmare and the Ascendancy's disk. Or tried to, anyway. As Rhindi swerved around trees, the thick, broccoli-like tops of the canopy totally blocked out the sky. He only had a few fleeting seconds, here and there, of an unobscured view of the sky. He barely had time to see the black dot of Nightmare before it was lost again. She was following them. Good. Anon fished out his radio, "Ket come in. Do you read me?"

The reply was almost instantaneous, "I do. What's going on?!"

Anon cried out as they hit a particularly large bump, feeling himself almost going airborne. Hugging the controls for the laser, he said to Ket, "Are the engines warmed up?"

"They-yes, they're on. I haven't taken off yet," the translator conveyed the fear in Ket's voice much more effectively than whistles.

"Good," Anon yelped again as they rolled over what Anon would swear was an entire tree. "Get them running and warm up the guns. We'll be coming back hot."

Ket shouted loud enough to peak the radio's speaker, "What happened?!"

"You're not the only one the Ascendancy wants dead. Apparently their leader and Nightmare have some personal history. She's already killed two of them."

There was a pause before Ket replied, "Good for her. Get them in range and I-"

The rover swung hard to the side, tearing Anon off the laser's controls. He slammed back-first into the side of the cabin as his radio was sent flying. He cried out in pain and groped around, grabbing at the first handholds he could find, just parts of the wall. Looking around, he opened his mouth to yell at Rhindi, when he saw a bright light out of the corner of his eye. Looking, he saw a bright beam coming down from the sky, cutting through the trees and into the ground, right where they had been about to go. "I don't think Nightmare's winning," Rhindi said unhelpfully.

"No…I can't get a good shot in…" Anon said as he tried to think despite Rhindi's driving. The canopy obviously wasn't helping them hide from the Ascendancy, but it was helping THEM hide from his laser. They're too high for him to get a good shot in when he can see them…the best way to get them lower would be to smoke them out. Stealth isn't an option for him, so…

He let go of his handholds. Half crawling, half climbing back to the laser controls, he checked to make sure that yes, it's still aimed vaguely skywards, and turned it on. The laser that was designed to melt rock, immediately ignited the flammable wood above them. as Rhindi sped them on through the forest, it spread behind them like an infernal mockery of a ship's wake. He threw himself back to the ground, crawling after the radio. He found it over by Rhindi's legs, and called into it, "Nightmare, drop down to the treeline! They're too high for me to hit them down here. Laser's on, I'm going to use smoke to force them down."

"You're going to what?!" Rhindi cried out. Anon scrambled out from under the spider-monster as it looked back, and started screeching a series of Ssthakic curses.At least, that's what Anon assumed, when his translator refused to do its job for a moment, before it cut back in with, "completely lost your mind?!"

Before Anon could respond, a pair of death beams came down, one in front of them and one to the right. Rhindi slammed their rover hard to the right and sped on, a low hanging branch cracking against the leg of their rover, sending arm-sized splinters flying.

When Anon finished fighting his way back to his feet, holding onto the doors of their locked supply cabinets, he saw the flaw in his plan. To their side and now their behind, the Ascendancy's weapons spelled death. To their other side, moving behind them, was the growing inferno from Anon's laser. If the third alien they were fighting joined in, the Ascendency could just box in their rover and wait for the fire to overtake them. That one, Anon presumed, was either being kept busy by Nightmare, or was he one flying their craft. Anon hoped it was the former. If not…

The beams from above vanished as quickly as they had appeared, allowing Rhindi to get them heading back in roughly the right direction. For a moment. It wasn't long before they were sent spinning around a tree to dodge a single beam. Anon only had an instant to look at it, but... "Hang on, the angle on that one's a lot shallower. It's working, they're getting lower!"

"Great," Rhindi said as they bounced over a fallen log, "There's a clearing ahead. Cycle that thing so you'll be able to hit them when we reach it." With a grunt of acknowledgement, Anon slung himself back to the controls to do exactly that, shutting down the laser. The fire behind them looked like it didn't need any help. It already did its job anyway.

Anon held on, ready, watching the trees ahead fly by for a few moments, before they hit open air. He scanned the skies-there they were, not even ten meters above them. Nightmare was racing before the disk, her wings pumping, as a dozen bright specks of light circled around her. Anon watched one of the Ascendancy point its staff, its death laser shooting straight at Nightmare only for it to stop, ending a meter away from Nightmare. She was doing something to stop it…

As Anon worked the controls, aiming the mining laser, another rider on that disk swung its staff down at them. The ground underneath their rover simply exploded.

They were pitched up towards one side, leaning dangerously. Anon clung on for dear life as Rhindi screeched and hissed, fighting with the rover's legs. Just as Anon thought for sure they were going to flip, Rhindi let out a screech of triumph, the floor jerked and leveled out. As they shofted back down to normal driving height, Anon centered the disk and answered the Ascendancy's attack by firing the laser.

Just like the death beam directed at Nightmare Moon, it stopped in midair, hitting the invisible wall of their shields a good half-meter from them. But…Anon could see through the monitor, the one that attacked them, had taken up a defensive position with its staff, confirming what Ket had told them. They aren't just weapons, they're also defenses. Drain the power in them and they'll be vulnerable. Nightmare, seemingly aware of this, wasted no time. A jet of blue flame shot out from her horn, engulfing the shield around the disk, revealing an invisible bubble of protection. The two of them attacking seemed to be a tipping point. Death beams and bombs stopped coming from the disk as they must have been focused on keeping up their defenses.

Anon and Nightmare Moon kept up the attack for the entire time it took for them to cross the meadow. He quickly lost sight of the disk as they went back under the tree line. A few moments later, the attacks began again. This time, Anon was prepared for Rhindi swerving and spinning their rover to avoid the death raining from above. They continued on like this, the trees giving them just enough cover to keep the Ascendancy from pinpointing exactly where they were, but not enough protection that they could just run straight for the ship.

But something seemed off to Anon… "Is it just me, or are these," he paused, holding on as Rhindi slammed the rover to a complete stop, a meter short of a beam slicing before them, "These attacks getting faster?"

"It's not just you," Rhindi confirmed as they accelerated again. A moment later, another attack swept their side, slicing a tree in half.

Anon nodded and asked, "How close is the nearest clearing?"

They spun to the right, dodging another pair of attacks trying to box them in before Rhindi responded, "There's one southwest of us. A little out of the way."

Anon said, "Hit it anyway. We need to give Nightmare a break." Rhindi gave a word of assent and turned their rover around.

They dodged a dozen more attacks before the forest opened up once more, giving Anon the clear shot they needed. It took a moment for him to find them against the smoke. It's getting harder to see…there they are. He swung the laser around, the motor whirring as it ponderously turned towards them. Without warning it jerked and stopped halfway to the target. Anon's controls filled with error messages as a burning smell hit his nostrils. Swearing, Anon tried turning it back to no avail. He fought the controls as Nightmare and Rhindi desperately dodged attacks, trying everything he could to get the laser aimed properly. They needed it, they needed him to get it working, they needed a break, they needed…

There was a flash on the screen. A dark figure fell from the sky. Anon's stomach lurched as he saw the sparkling trail following the figure. It was Nightmare Moon. The order came automatically, "Rhindi, turn around, Nightmare's been hit!"

To Rhindi's credit, it had the rover spun around before he finished giving the order. Before they could reach where Nightmare landed, a pair of beams came down, forcing them back. The Ascendancy hovered above her as they circled around, only to be met with another pair of death beams before they could reach her. To Anon, it seemed like they weren't attacking to kill…only to keep them away from Nightmare. After the third attempt, Rhindi risked a glance back at him, screeching, "Fire the laser, what are you waiting for?!"

"The damn thing's jammed!" He smacked the controls for emphasis. It did not unjam the laser. He unholstered his pistol as an idea started to form, "They're watching the rover, keep them looking at you. I'll grab Nightmare." Assuming there's anything left to grab, he silently added.

"Ok," Replied Rhindi, "Wait until I'm turning, then fall out the door." Circling around, it sped the rover, as though planning to simple run over Nightmare if the Ascendancy stopped them. Anon made it to the door, holding onto the handle. At the first flash of light, Rhindi shouted, "Now!" and spun the Rover around, dropping it to the ground. Anon opened the door and simply rolled out, falling maybe half a meter onto the grass.

Anon curled up in a ball and rolled as the rover passed over him, veering off. He watched the beams from above follow Rhindi as it circled around, seemingly getting ready to try again. It worked. Scrambling to his feet, he ran underneath the disk, towards the dark, unmoving form on the ground. Reaching her, he crouched down, looking her over for any sign of life as he tried to ignore the streaks of blood, standing bright against the vanadium black fur. How is he supposed to check an alien? Nobody's even examined her, there hadn't been any time. He gingerly left her side for any sign of respiration or a pulse and muttered, "I swear, if you're already dead, I'm gonna kill you."

The muscles under his hand shifted, and Nightmare Moon said in a strained voice, "I can't die from that." With a grunt, she forced herself onto her stomach, her eyes squeezed shut.

"You're damn right you can't, not under my command. How bad, anything broken? Easy, easy!" He looped a hand under her…well, her equivalent to a chest if Anon was any judge, helping steady her as Nightmare started forcing herself back up.

She tested a wing, then gasped, shuddering and leaning heavily into Anon. "My port wing. They hit it…and," she panted for a moment before shaking her head, "my starboard foreleg doesn't feel right."

"Alright, don't try it, wing around me, like this," Anon stooped down, supporting her right side as she wrapped a wing around him for stability."We'll get under the treeline, out of sight. You'll ride with us back to the ship. Nightmare gave a grimace of pain and then nodded, leaning heavily against Anon as they started working their way to the treeline. Inwardly, Anon cursed himself. Yea, it'll just be that easy. Surely the Ascendancy won't see them walking like this. He hadn't planned this beyond how to get over to her. How they were going to get out…

Luckily, Anon didn't have to plan how to get out. It wasn't long before he heard the tell-tale hiss of the laser firing. What is Rhindi…right, of course, thought Anon, the thing is still functional if brought to the right angle. The rover's a sitting duck like that, but so are they.

"C'mon, we gotta scoot." Together, they managed a brisk walking speed as they made it towards the tree line, all the while Anon braced for a death to come from above…but it never did. Somehow, some way, they made it behind the first set of trees without incident. That was when a flash of light dazzled Anon.

The tall, thin member of the Ascendancy simply appeared before them, Its robe was covered in soot, its hood back to reveal an insectoid head, three bulbous, compound eyes staring in every direction…and at them. Anon brought his pistol to bare, aiming at one of those eyes as it held its staff like a rifle, pointing at him. It chittered its mandibles and Anon's translator said, "Human. Perhaps there has been a miscommunication. Our Lord has ordered the Equestrian's capture. Not yours. You and the Ssthaki are free to go. We will not pursue you further, there will be no punitive action regarding your interference with the volcano. But we must have the pony."

"That's not going to happen," was all Anon had to say, his pistol steady. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nightmare Moon's horn begin to glow.

"What do you think you'll accomplish? If you escape off-world, we'll simply retrieve her from the wreckage of your ship," as the bug-faced creature spoke, the butt of its staff began glowing, the same teal as Nightmare's horn. "If you're still set on preventing the eruption, you shou-gah!"

Its staff jerked upwards, the creature grasping at it as it was almost pulled out of the creatures mandibles. Nightmare shouted "Now, Anonymous!" Anon wasted no time in firing a few shots right into its insectoid face. The Ascendancy member simply crumpled to the ground, seemingly dead. Letting Nightmare go, Anon walked up to it and, with another shot, made sure it was dead.

He retrieved its weapon and necklace, same as he had on Squirrelhead. Nightmare sat down and breathed a stress sigh, shaking her head, "I don't understand. Their attacks are crude, inefficient. I did not even try to hide that, it should have seen it coming. Any mage would. But they're so much more powerful than they have any right to be."

He looked over the staff, checking to see that yes, it too seemed undamaged. "You're familiar with this stuff?"

She shook her head, "Not like this. This is as though…a foal attempted carpentry with a sledgehammer. Only the foal has the strength of a bear." She glanced up and her horn lit up again. Through gritted teeth she said, "They're attacking again. I can't keep this up. Not for much longer."

Anon looked around, looking for…there's the rover, heading right towards them. "Don't. Rhindi's been able to out drive them so far, and now they're down a guy. Once we're moving, just focus on holding on."

It wasn't long before the rover skidded to a halt before them, lowering to the ground. Hefting Nightmare again, Anon helped get her up onto the cabin, earning himself a hoof to the face as she scrambled, flopping belly-first onto the floor. Anon clambered up after her, slamming the door shut.

He found Rhindi helping Nightmare find hand…no, hoofholds she could use, to keep from getting flung around as Anon had. Once Nightmare had wrapped a fetlock through a Ssthakic web-anchor, it glanced at Anon, then looked out the windshield, asking, "Do either of you know why their particle beams are simply stopping before they can hit us?"

Nightmare replied, her voice weak, "Cinderhoof's Shielding Citadel. I can't…keep it up much longer."

Anon grabbed hold of the laser's controls as Rhindi shot him a questioning look. He shook his head. He didn't know either. "Just go."

Without a moment's hesitation, Rhindi skittered back over and the rover lurched under them. Nightmare heaved a sigh of relief and her horn stopped glowing, her head lolling forward, limp. Within seconds, the death beams crashed down around them. Nightmare cried out in surprise the first time Rhindi jerked the controls to avoid them. But it didn't take long for her to get used to it. The attacks were constant now. Whereas before they seemed measured, tactical, now they were angry. Anon saw beams cutting down through the forest nowhere near them, explosions heard but not felt. The Ascendancy were out for revenge.

They were barely making any progress, all of Rhindi's focus was on avoiding the fire raining down from above. After what felt like an hour- but Anon knew couldn't have been more than a moment, Nightmare asked, "Why are you not attacking back? That smokescreen was an effective deterrent."

Anon shook his head and slapped the controls as he said, "Damn thing's jammed, I can't move it. The way it's sticking to the side like this, we'll just set ourselves on fire."

Nightmare furrowed her brow, her teeth gritted as Rhindi slammed them to a halt. She grunted, holding onto her handholds before asking, "What parts of it move? Tell me precisely how and where."

Anon gave a quick, halting explanation, doing his best to stay coherent despite bracing during Rhindi's maneuvering. Whether or not Nightmare understood, Anon could only hope. He finished it with, "Not that it-nnn! Matters. I can't even get a gooood look at them before-" He gritted his teeth and clutched to the controls as Rhindi suddenly reversed direction, spinning them around, "Before THAT!"

Nightmare nodded and closed her eyes, hesitating through a turn and a stop, before saying, "I feel them now. I have enough for simple telekinesis, at least for this. I'll aim it. You activate it."

"What about the shield?" Rhindi asked, before slamming the throttle forward, the rover lurching under them. "We could really use a good few minutes with that shield you mentioned."

Nightmare shook her head. "I need a good hour before I'll have enough for that. Telekinesis is something a child can do, I can, and have, cast it in my sleep."

"What we could really use," Anon stabbed at the controls, pausing while Rhindi through them to the side, just before a beam sliced down, "Is our god-damn fire support. What is taking Ket so long? Laser's ready."

He heard the electric hum of the servos trying to work as the laser powered up, ready to fire. Nightmare's horn glowed once more. Only this time, the 'abdomen' of their rover took on the same glow. There was a metallic screech before it turned-it actually turned again. It spun to the side on its own, the diode tilting back, facing upwards, and Nightmare said, "Now, Anonymous. Cast it!" He tapped the key, firing the laser. He saw a death beam out of the corner of his eye vanish. The fire behind them began anew. As Rhindi continued to maneuver and dodge attacks, Nightmare pivoted the laser, keeping it, as far as Anon could tell, aimed squarely at their attackers. They all breathed a sigh of relief as the attacks slowed…and then a death beam sliced through their front two wheels.

The three of them cried out in various mixes of shock and terror as the rover under them began to flip forward. Rhindi yelled to hold on as it gunned the motor, fighting with the four remaining wheels to restore some sort of balance. For a few, terrifying seconds, Anon was sure they were about to flip over end-to-end. Then Rhindi scraped over a rock, the floor slamming upwards, almost throwing them into the air, and the rover was righted. They were out of imminent peril and, as a beam slicing an arc before them demonstrated, back to simple mortal danger. Rhindi screeched, "I can't keep dodging like that with only four wheels. We're going to need to abandon the rover."

Anon grabbed his radio in response, keying into it, "Ket, do you have a firing solution? We're outta time."

There was a moment's pause, enough time for Nightmare to adjust the laser as another beam cut diagonally in front of them, before Ket whistles cracked out, "The ship's weapons are built for vacuum, not atmosphere. Best firing solution I have, you'd need to be another two kilometers closer."

Anon swore. He glanced at the laser, confirming that yes, it was still firing, before saying, "We're not going to make it. We need something now or we're dead."

There was another moment's pause before Ket said, "I've been working on something. I need a few more minutes to make sure it'll kill them."

"We don't HAVE a few minutes," Anon muttered into the radio. Rhindi slammed the rover into reverse, but instead of it jumping backwards like it had, the wheels dug into the dirt, spinning uselessly for a few seconds before pushing them backwards. Luckily for them all, the Ascendancy had aimed ahead, anticipating they'd keep moving, and the beam came down inches in front of the rover.

"Then let's hope this is enough." A moment later, a whistle barely audible over the rattle of the rover and the crackle of fire, was picked up by his translator. "The Ket still live!"

The attacks stopped. For one terrifying moment, Anon imagined them being turned on his unprotected, exposed crew member. Then the sky erupted. A rapid series of explosions turned everything above the treeline into flame. Anon didn't quite hear the explosions. One moment, he was bracing for impact. He felt the floor beneath him lift up, there was a flash of blue, and then he was on the floor.

Nightmare stood over him, her cat-like eyes inches from his own. Her mouth was moving, but curiously, no sound was coming out. Anon shifted to sit up, but a hoof pinned him to the ground.

"I'm fine," Anon tried to say. Weird. His mouth didn't want to move right, no sound came out. Nightmare glared and silently mouthed speaking again. Wait, hang on. He thought he heard some weird thudding from his translator. Must be broken. Suddenly, a pain shot up his entire arm, his chest, his hand. He screamed in pain, his voice oddly muffled, and a pointed Ssthaki leg joined the hoof on his chest, pinning him down as he tried to squirm, to get away from whatever was causing it. Anon tried to blurt out a swear, demanding to know what happened, but his voice still came out muffled, wrong.

Nightmare looked away, towards the arm that had just caused him agony. She said something but the translator was too quiet for him to hear what it was. The pain promptly vanished, just as quickly as it began. But now he felt worms squirming around INSIDE his arm! He tried thrashing again, still held to the ground. What was going on?!

Nightmare said something else and the worms went still. He thought…the translator said something short. It's getting louder. Rhindi's hissing came in reply, it wasn't long before he could finally make out what the translator was saying, '-not a human doctor, but I remember their bones are supposed to be internal and are usually symmetrical."

"It'll have to do. I'm no surgeon," Nightmare said before she turned back to look at Anon, her leg lifting from his chest. "Be gentle with your port forearm for the next week, or we'll have to do this again."

Before Anon could respond, he heard the voice of Ket in his translator, "We need to move, the fire's still going." Curiously, Anon didn't hear the original whistling.

Rhindi pulled its leg off of Anon's chest, the translator saying, "Someone help him get steady, I'll get us rolling again."

Ket fluttered down and grabbed him by his shoulders. "I go' it, I got it," Anon grumbled as he started sitting up.

He waved a hand to get the space-bird off of him, and started getting his feet under him. He almost made it, too. He was halfway to getting upright when the rover moved under him, his head swam, and he fell forward. In a flash, Nightmare Moon was underneath him, her back supporting him as he fell onto her. "I have you, Anonymous. Steady yourself."

"Thanks," He mumbled, closing his eyes and just holding on until his head stopped spinning. Her sides were curiously cool under that fur, almost like she was colder than the surrounding environment. Normally he'd have questions, but after what they just dealt with, it was nice and calming. Exactly what he needed. Unfortunately, it wasn't what his crew needed. The moment he felt he could, he asked, "Ket, what the hell WAS that?"

"I hit them with every missile we had," came his immediate reply.

It took Anon a moment to process that, finally half asking, "Since when did we have any missiles…?"

"We didn't. But we used to have probes, and we used to have spare seismic charges. I was…improvising while you were out of range. But it shouldn't have killed them. Didn't you say there were three of them left?"

Nightmare responded before Anon could. "We had reduced them down to two, before your attack struck. And how prodigious of an attack it was! You must give me access to these 'seismic charges,' once we're back aboard."

Ket smacked Anon's head with a wing as he flew in front of Nightmare, his claws grabbing hold of the nearest web-anchor. His large, black eyes were inches from her oddly bioluminescent blue as he said, "You killed them?! Three of them?! How. I need to know. Now."

Nightmare reared her head back, glancing back at Anon as she said, "I-well, the captain graciously assisted me with two of the kills."

"No." Anon stood up, feeling behind him for where the stool…there. He sat down, joining Ket as he stared down their new passenger. "We need a real explanation. Start from the top. You clearly have a history with these people. You know their leader and he knows you, but you were playing dumb until they called you out by name. A DIFFERENT name than the one you gave us. What was it again? Something like Lu-"

"Do NOT speak that name!" Nightmare snapped at him, glaring as her horn flashed with light. "It is weakness. It is…everything I've been forced to shed…" She turned around, looking away from both Anon and Ket to stare out the window before she continued speaking, "I thought the name was a quirk of the translator, a mere coincidence. I did not lie earlier. Grogar's survival was an accident of the cosmos. One that must be corrected."

"What do you mean? You almost killed Grogar before?!" Ket asked before Anon could respond.

Anon didn't like that horn flashing at him. Given what he had just seen, it seemed too much like a threat. Keeping his hand resting on his holstered pistol, he said, "Start from the beginning. Who is Grogar to you?."

Nightmare sighed, "Very well. He was known to us as the 'Father of Monsters.' Before the First Founding of Equestria-the nation I once ruled-Grogar rose to power by conquering the local tribes of the region. Anyone who was whom he deemed not immediately useful, he would mutate into an abomination."

"Ket?" Anon looked over for confirmation.

Settling into a more natural-for him- position, Ket let go of the web-hooks on the wall, hovering before Anon and Nightmare, "We know they would change the genetics of any captives they took. If we couldn't rescue them immediately, any Orothian taken would be unrecognizable the next day."

Rhindi turned its serpentine head to the side, two eyes facing backwards to look at them and hissed, "It sounds like ancient history, but he said you fired him into deep space. Genetic engineering, space travel…Did technology backslide? Was there a natural disaster?"

"There was the reign of discord a few centuries later," Nightmare said, matter-of-factly. "I…with my sister…were forced to rebuild Equestria from the ground up, once we defeated him."

Anon held up a finger, leaning forward, "Hang on, hang on a second Rhindi, something's not adding up. Nightmare, you two recognized each other. You're talking about centuries ago, if this is ancient history, how are you two on a first name basis with each other?"

Nightmare turned to face him, a snarl on her snout as she spat, "Because I was there! I was part of the group that defeated him. I was just a filly, a child, but I was one of the ones tasked with turning his power against him."

"We spent years trying to figure out if there even was a way to," Ket said, "How did you do it?"

The snarl faded as Nightmare's eyes took on a more far off look as she recounted the story, "There was a…he called it his 'Bewitching Bell.' I don't know if he made it or found it, but he poured his magic into it and it worked as an amplifier. It…it could just rip the soul out of someone, leave them a living husk…" Nightmare closed her eyes and shuddered "We…my sister and I, we unleashed everything it had stolen, on him. Just reversed it. Gusty the Great-another mage, she shaped the spell."

"How long ago was that?" Rhindi asked, the Ssthakic curiosity getting the better of it.

Nightmare opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Her mouth slowly closed as her eyes grew wide, horror mounting behind them. She breathed out something too quiet for Anon to hear. Luckily, his translator picked it up, "...I don't know…" Nightmare sat down on her haunches hard, staring straight ahead, her ears folded back against her head. "I was on the moon for so long, I've…I don't know how many years it's been, I don't…" Tears welled up in a surprisingly human fashion.

Anon got off his chair and stooped down, wrapping his arms around her in a hug. Nightmare tensed under his touch, and for a moment, Anon was worried the human gesture would backfire and activate some sort of fight or flight response. But then she relaxed, wrapping a wing around him to both return the gesture and hide her face. She shuddered against him as she obviously fought to keep her composure.

He whispered to her, "Sssh, It's alright, you're out of there now. We can figure that out later." Anon wouldn't have liked to admit it, but this was less of an emotional response and more of a calculated gesture. They needed answers. If she shut down or resented them, they wouldn't get any. It worked, too.

As Ket and Rhindi pretended not to notice, Nightmare regained her composure, withdrew her wing and stepped back. She took a deep breath before asking, her voice smooth as the unbroken sea, "Is there anything else? Or do you simply wish to dredge up more painful memories?"

"Yea, actually." Anon took his place back on his seat. "You keep talking about spells, mages and magic. This whole time, I thought it was a translation error. Then we landed and I watched you kill someone with sparkles you plucked out of that…that…whatever that weird star thing is that's stuck to either end of you." Anon waved his hand vaguely towards Nightmare.

"My mane and tail…?" Nightmare said, raising an eyebrow. She turned her head to look back at them, "They have gotten a bit unruly…"

"Sure. Yea. Your hair. You killed someone with sparkles from your hair. So I'm trying to do the Ssthaki thing here," Anon jerked his head towards Rhindi, who glanced back and closed its outer eyes in a smile, "and adjust my worldview to new information. Because to humans? Magic is something from stories. Fantasy. Pretty sure it's the same for Rhindi and Ket."

"We actually have a department for study into extranatural claims put forth by other species. There is a core that insist telekinesis is theoretically possible, but until today, I've personally never witnessed it!" Rhindi chimed up from its place at the front of the rover.

Anon shot Rhindi a look before turning back to Nightmare, "...Right. So. We need to know. Explain it to us like we're schoolchildren. What is this thing you call magic? Let's start there."

Nightmare's horn lit up, and the ghostly image of what appeared to be another member of her species appeared before her, only without wings or a horn. It wasn't entirely unlike the hologram that Grogar had appeared as…only now Anon was suspecting it wasn't actually a hologram after all. Various lines appeared on the pony, moving towards where Anon presumed its brain to be.

"Magic is a force in the same vein as gravity. All living things generate a trace amount, just as all mass generates a trace amount of gravity. In a similar vein, as increasing the mass of an object will increase its gravitational power, increasing the complexity of a living being, increases the amount of magic it creates…for the most part. There are exceptions. We…do not have as firm a grasp upon it as we do other sciences. We can manipulate it to our ends, store it, imbue objects with it, but the deepest intricacies are still a mystery to us."

"So kinda like humanity a couple centuries back? We could use electricity, but without atomic theory, we didn't know the mechanics behind it," Anon offered. The blank stare he received in response from Nightmare, reminded him that oh right, she'd been a part of the galactic community for all of three days.

"I'll have to take your word for it," She finally said. The brain in the floating figure lit up, and she said, "One thing we do know, it that it is which sparks true sapience. Without it, you have no higher consciousness, concepts of philosophy and spirituality simply do not occur without it. Most creatures produce only enough for that, and stop generating extra. However, in a rare few…" The image of the pony grew wings and a horn, resembling Nightmare. The lines moving around it changed position, now heading towards the horn and wings as well. "A runaway reaction occurs. Its body generates orders of magnitude more magic than it should, causing it to change, grow means of manipulating this force, and using it to change the world around it."

"So like you," Anon said.

Nightmare nodded, before tilting her head to point with her horn, "And Ket."

The aforementioned space-bird jerked up, looking between Anon and Nightmare, "What do you mean me? This is just as foreign to me as it is to any of you."

Nightmare gave a bit of a shrug with her wings, "Be as it may, you said the skulls the Ascendancy wore around their neck were of your kind, yes? They were positively buzzing with magical energy."

"How can you tell?" Anon asked, "If this stuff is measurable, we need to know how, how to detect it, and if we can, manipulate it like you can."

"Do we have any chalk? I'll need something to write with," Nightmare replied.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for Anon, Rhindi told her where to find a marker, allowing her to launch into what quickly became a highly technical explanation. He was able to follow right up until she started in with the math equations. It wasn't that he had any trouble with it normally. The issue was that his translator could only help with audio, it did nothing to help him process the foreign symbols Nightmare scribbled on the window of the rover. By the time Nightmare's spoke of horn ring channeling and fifth dimensional folding, he was left feeling like Rhindi was trying to explain how the Tunnelers worked again. It was an apt comparison, he learned, as Rhindi and Ket chimed in. After a bit of back and forth, they tentatively agreed that the Tunnelers must work in part by emulating the force Nightmare Moon was describing, albeit in a roundabout, extremely inefficient manner.

The discussion on how precisely to measure it was more slow-going. Nightmare insisted it was more of a 'feel' than anything else. When they ran through the various sensors and detectors on the One Bad Date Too Many, Nightmare kept saying she would have to try them for herself. Despite the hangup there, they were able to pick her brain the entire drive back to the ship. This was the breakthrough Anon had always hoped to find, he thought. The paradigm shift he had been searching for. It was a shame none of them were going to live to see it.

Anon was so focused on keeping track of the conversation, that he only realized they were back at the ship when he heard, and felt, a metal thunk under the rover. He looked out a window to see his ship looming above them as they drove up the cargo ramp. Half joking, he said, "Just left the doors open, huh? It's a good thing the Ascendancy isn't trying to kill us and there aren't any natives that could walk inside, or we'd be in big trouble."

Ket just looked at him with those large, expressionless black eyes and said, "You were the one who said you didn't have a few minutes…and I didn't want Rhindi to come back with an odd number of legs again."

"I think I would have been lucky to come back with any legs if you hadn't shown up when you did!" Rhindi said with its version of a smile.

They rolled into the cargo bay and the rover set down with a hiss. This was it, thought Anon. Rest time is over. He stood up, following Ket and Nightmare out the door. The moment his feet touched his deck, he was ready. "Ket? Get to gunnery. Stow the guns for atmosphere, but be ready to pull them the instant we hit vacuum. I'll need you watching the sensors."

Ket gave a whistle of assent and flew off towards his post. Nightmare gave Anon a quizzical look. "Is something the matter?"

"Yea," Anon said, refusing to elaborate. He instead pointed to the controls for the ramp. "Can you do me a favor? Mind hitting that for me? The up arrow, you gotta hold it down until you hear the hiss."

As a nonplussed Nightmare clip clopped off to do so, Anon poked his head back into the rover and almost smacked his face right into Rhindi's. It jerked back just in time to miss the collision as Anon hissed, "This thing has a black box, right? And it's been running?"

Rhindi seemed to already know where Anon was going with this. As quietly as it could, it hissed back, "Yes. It's been recording the whole time. Including the discussion on magic. Why?"

Anon nodded, "Good. Pull it, prep it. If you can, copy our sensors' data and prep the recorders," for wormhole travel without us, he added silently.

Rhindi's snakelike neck writhed in fear. Information was everything to the Technocracy. It was currency in of itself. To prep a ship's recorders and databanks like that, to fire it off into a wormhole on its own? That's what a Ssthakic ship does before the ship is destroyed. It whisper-screeched back, "You sure? We've gotten away from them before."

"Not like this. We got lucky last time. The one I shot, near the end, he basically said they're already in orbit, waiting for us. Something about how they'll take Nightmare from the wreckage." There was a penumatic hiss from behind. Anon stepped back and spoke up in his normal 'captain voice' as though he had been issuing orders, "Now get to Engineering. I want every bit of power we have, in those Tunnelers, ready to go the minute we can."

"Very well, captain," Rhindi said as it scuttled out of the rover.

With that, he approached Nightmare, who was still looking over the controls, following the cables leading in and out from it. "Nightmare?" Anon said, still as authoritatively as he could, "I need you on the bridge. With me."

"If it is all the same to you, captain, I will be in my quarters. Healing," Nightmare said, glancing back at herself for emphasis.

"It's not. Until we make it inside a wormhole, we're still in danger out here. The three safest places on the ship are engineering, gunnery and the bridge, and the first two aren't safe if you can't fly. With your wing like that, I need you with me."

Nightmare squinted at him and her ears sank down. Is she going to make it a fight? If she does, he decided, he'll leave her behind. It isn't worth it. "What are you hiding from us? I could hear you speaking with Rhindi, but my translator did not do its job."

"I'm not hiding it, it's just on the bridge," Anon snapped. "Now come on. That's an order."

Without waiting, he turned and began walking. There was a moment's hesitation before he heard the clomp-clompf of Nightmare's hooves behind him. He wasted no time in getting to the heart of his ship. The door had been left open. Ket had left in a hurry. Stepping onto the soft carpet, Anon took a few striding steps to his controls, looking them over. Everything was already active. The ship was sealed, life support online, the engines were warmed up and ready, there was even a course plotted in the autopilot for the exact position they had exited their previous wormhole. Ket really HAD gotten everything ready. All that was left was for Anon to press the button to take off.

"Is there anywhere in particular you wish for me to STAND in here, or am I allowed to choose?" Nightmare's testy voice brought him back to the moment.

Anon began his double check of each system, going down his mental checklist. While it all looked good, HE wasn't the one who did it, which means he can't trust something hadn't been overlooked or glanced over. Without looking back, he said, "Depends. I know Ssthaki can stand, I've gotten used to it…and I can't pull more than six Gs without having to scrape Ket off the wall. You've broken atmosphere before. How did you do it?"

"Screaming," came Nightmare's clipped response, in a tone Anon was starting to recognize meant she wasn't planning to elaborate.

"Well the good news is, this time you aren't in something made by the lowest bidder," Anon held up the cb to his mouth and said, "All crew, sound off." He heard two assents over the radio. He glanced back at Nightmare and said, "You too."

Nightmare was laying with her legs under her, much like a cat. She raised an eyebrow and said, "If you're planning on something stressful with that arm after I just repaired it, and it breaks again, I won't fix it until the next morn. The pain will be a useful lesson."

Anon grinned and said, "I'll take that as a ready." He slapped a button on the controls and said into the radio, "All crew, prepare for liftoff in ten, nine, eight…" As he counted down, he could hear the engines begin to roar. He sat down as the floor rumbled under his feet, flashing Nightmare a grin before the ground leaped up under them, the ship launching right after he finished his countdown.

A few moments later, Anon felt the familiar few seconds of weightlessness as the atmospheric engines cut off. They had run out of hydrogen. A moment later, Rhindi engaged the antimatter engines. He stood up and stretched his back, feeling the familiar 1.12 gs and sighed through his teeth. Had they known they were going to need to take off in a hurry, he would have ordered more fuel tanks. As is, his ship would eletrolise the water they carried into hydrogen for planetary landings and oxygen for them to breathe at its normal pace. Too slow for them to escape. He looked back at Nightmare and asked, "So? How'd that compare?"

"I think I preferred the agony and familial betrayal…" Nightmare said, her voice weak. "How did we move faster than the speed of color…?"

"We didn't. All the blood was forced out of your brain. Be happy you actually laid down, or you would have passed out." Anon explained as he started flicking through the various ships' sensors. There was no sign of the Ascendancy's vessel. Yet. The course was already plotted to the wormhole, their engines were at maximum burn…there wasn't much for him to do but wait.

Actually…there was one thing he could do. Turning his attention to a different station, he looked over the map of the planet, seeing flashing dots all around the volcano. The number was disappointing. Holding up the radio, he said to his crew, "Looks like we only got about a third of the charges planted, down on the planet. Think that'll be enough to stop the eruption?"

"It'll have to be," came Rhindi's reply. "We won't be able to land again."

Anon nodded. He knew it, but…he didn't want to admit it. They didn't just fail, this was a total disaster. "Yea, true. Detonating all armed charges." He let off on the radio, giving it a moment for Ket to hastily chime in, in case he had armed some and left them on the ship. Hearing nothing, he tapped a few keys and the lights on the map of the planet blinked out. Down below, he knew there would be one mother of all earthquakes, part of the caldera would collapse,but whether it'd be enough to screw up the Ascendancy's plans for a world-shattering eruption…well, he wouldn't be the one to find out.

With that finished, he began checking over the ship's various systems, making sure everything was as it should be. A few minutes later, he heard Ket whistle the exact words he had been dreading, "Contact on sensors, Ascendancy battlecruiser." Anon sprinted his way back to the captain's chair as Ket read off the coordinates. One digit at a time, Ket read the same exact coordinates that the computers stated was their wormhole site. The Ascendancy knew exactly where they needed to go and had cut off their escape route.

Without hesitation, Anon reached over and activated their modern communication equipment, the kind everyone would be listening for. "Violet alert, Violet alert, to any and all ships in range, this is the IST One Bad Date Too Many. We are under attack by the Grogaran Ascendancy and require immediate assistance! I repeat, to any ships that hear this, we are under attack and need your help! Violet Alert!" He slapped a button to play the message on repeat.

Nightmare appeared, her black snout poking over Anon's shoulder, "What do you mean we're under attack? I thought we had defeated them back on the planet."

Looking at the sensors, it took him only a second to find the Ascendancy ship. He pulled it up on their camera feed. It looked totally out of place in space. To him, it reminded him of old Earth sailing vessels, a frigate with its masts, sails and riggings replaced with gigantic clock towers, with each clock face a window. Below the screen, data streamed out, analyzing the ship before them. He pointed at one particular section, showing the odd energy readings surrounding their foe. "No, we only took out their away team. They probably had another hundred people aboard. Take a look right here. See that? That's an energy shield, they're the only ones who are capable of something like-"

The readings off the Ascendancy ship suddenly spiked, an alarm sounding. Anon keyed the radio and yelled, "They're firing, hold on!"

He his a button to vent the port airlocks, the ship jolting hard to starboard, before he cut the engines, his body having just enough time to register the loss of 'gravity' before he spun the ship ninety degrees to starboard, a little bit of nausea all he experienced, before he gunned the engines again, gravity returning. Nightmare cried out in a mix of confusion and shock, but Anon ignored her, instead watching the sensors.They should miss if he can just…looking at the sensors and the 3-d representation of his ship, he saw the beam of death pass 'under' their ship. It was official. They were under attack. He grabbed the cb and called into it, "All crew, violet alert.. Rhindi, shunt power to Weapons, Ket, open fire, lasers only. Keep the railguns charged, if those shields so much as flicker, I want a kill shot ready to go."

As he heard both his crew respond with affirmative, Nightmare demanded, "What WAS that?"

"That's why I needed you in here. I have to flip the ship to keep us alive and this is the center of it, anywhere else you'd get thrown against a wall." As Anon spoke, he triggered their RCS thrusters, sending the ship into their standard rotation. He watched on the sensors as Ket opened fire, beams of energy launching from his ship, stopping just short of the Ascendancy's cruiser. It wasn't like the mining laser down on the surface. These were purpose built weapons, delivering thousands of times the energy in a second before needing to shut down for the cooling system to do their job.

There was another spike on the sensors. They were firing again. His hands running across the controls, he cut half their engines, the ground lurching under them as he flipped his ship in the opposite direction before firing them back at full thrust, killing their forward momentum. It was exactly what was needed. Seconds later, the sensors showed their shot passing where the ship would have been. He turned them back towards the planet, giving up on escape through the wormhole now. Closing the distance with the Ascendancy would only reduce the distance their attacks needed to travel. Less time for him to react and evade, and he needed all the time he could get.

"You said there's another hundred crew aboard? How big is their ship?" Nightmare asked. Anon jabbed a finger at the display, only for Nightmare to say, "I can't read that."

Anon looked up to actually read what the computer said. "About…twenty times the size of our ship, give or take. Why?" His eyes were pulled away by another readout. They were charging something…something other than their weapons.

"That's impossible," Nightmare flatly declared. Anon shot her a look that transcended language, prompting Nightmare to elaborate, "The shield they used on the surface is dependent on the size of the caster. It cannot be extended to that size, they must be using a different spell…"

Anon risked a look back at Nightmare, who was gazing at the camera feed in perplexment, "So what does that mean?"

"It means…" Nightmare furrowed her brow behind her helmet, looking away, "I need to scry them. Then…"

The console chirped. New contact. There was no way…did someone actually hear their distress call? Are they getting reinforcements? It chirped again, again and again. He looked back. New contact, new contact, several, dozens, scores, all emanating from the Ascendancy's ship. The radio crackled with Ket's whistles as he said, "They're launching missiles. Hold the ship steady, I'm on it. Rhindi, I need full draw on capacitor."

Anon canceled the evasive maneuvers he had programmed in, leaving the engines on a simple full burn as he watched Ket begin to work his own magic. All twelve of their guns, both trios of lasers and railguns began to move independently, each tracking a missile of their own. A second later, they began to fire. He watched the lasers lancing out, melting their targets, leaving them molten blobs lazily floating towards where the ship used to be. The railguns fired in procession, one after another caused a detonation in space. On the planet below, the natives would be seeing stars appearing and vanishing in the blink of an eye. It wasn't the slow, steady firing of the drill they ran the other day. Ket was fast, frantic almost, firing as fast as the railguns would charge, pushing the lasers to the brink of melting. He missed a good number of his shots, tungsten rounds sent screaming off into the depths of space at relativistic speeds, but the contacts vanished one by one, soon dozens again, several. For a moment, just a moment, Anon dared to think they'd get out of it. Then the Ascendancy's ship fired.

The floor slammed up under him as the ship spun from the impact. Alarms screamed at him as his screens began to fill with violet. Anon's training took over, his hands flying over the keyboards before he consciously knew what he was doing. Thrusters fired, engines in reverse, canceling the rotation of the ship. Damage-what was left of their Whipple shields were gone, simply torn off. There was a hole clear through his ship, from one end of his precious third section to the other.

"Hull breach, ring three, hallway, cargo bay, science lab, dorsal and ventral, " Rhindi's voice came over the radio before he could ask for a full damage report, "Correction, science lab is gone- it's just gone. Venting atmosphere, cutting life support and sealing now."

He wrestled the controls until his ship back under his control. The sensors were filled with debris-not just parts of his ship, but everything in the cargo bay. Months of hard work was pouring out into the vacuum of space, wasted. He spun the ship around in a circle, engines on full but ready to take off in any direction as Ket cleared out the last of the missiles. It was a purely defensive maneuver, like an animal curling up in a ball, but he knew they didn't have much of a choice. That was a grazing hit, they…Anon grabbed the radio, "Understood. They had us dead to rights, why didn't they go for the kill shot?"

Rhindi responded, "I don't know, but we can't handle another barrage like that. I lost capacitor two, we only have another four minutes left of sustained fire-sustained, Ket. They'll give out before another burst like that."

"They want her alive," Ket answered Anon's question. "This is what they would do with us when they were still taking prisoners. Tear us apart piece by piece, force us to waste our power, fuel, and ammunition while they just sat there, totally invincible. Every single time!"

Anon wouldn't let them be taken, not if he had any say in it. He looked at the locked metal covering at the far end of the console. Underneath it was the big red button. Their self-destruct. At the right time…

His display flared again. They were going to attack again. Anon picked a random direction and righted the ship, taking off. Too late, Anon realized he was moving away from the planet. They were fighting its gravity, slowing them down. When the Ascendancy fired, he instantly knew they weren't going to make it. As the ship began to blare a collision warning, Anon shouted into the radio, "Brace for impact!"

"No!" Nightmare cried out behind him and a blue light filled his ship. It jerked hard to the side, like a giant hand simply shoved the entire vessel to the side. His controls filled with violet again, as alarms-different ones this time-blared out. All at once, the momentum stopped. Their ship was back on its original heading as the Asendancy's shot went wide. Anon looked over his display. There was damage, but they were still alive. He looked back at Nightmare, his open jaw meeting her prideful, fang-filled grin as she declared, "I know what they cast."

Rhindi spoke over the radio, "We just lost engine one, what even WAS that?!"

Without missing a beat, Anon replied. "Compensate, Ket hold your fire. Nightmare might have something," splitting his attention between his sensors and Nightmare, he asked, "What about it?"

Getting up on all fours, Nightmare began pacing, her wings held high above her back, "It's so simple, I had overlooked it. They're using the most basic deflection charm, something any novice would know, they've simply scaled it up through raw power. It's slow but reliable to cast, it's meant to protect against wildlife, it's not for combat. Certainly not against another mage."

Sensors showed the Ascendancy weren't firing at them yet. Anon wasn't sure if that was a good or bad sign. Maybe Nightmare's burst of magic had them second-guessing their strategy. They had time…for now. "You must have some insane wildlife on your planet. What does that mean, we don't have a lot of time."

"It doesn't provide any protection against magic, mortal. If one can find the caster-which I have-they will be unable to protect themselves against, say, a sleep spell. Then it's a simple matter of catching anybody else who attempts to recast it."

His whole life the Grogaran Ascendancy was synonymous with the immovable object. Years of hearing reports of their attacks on the Ket, months of running from even the sign of them… "Are you saying you can bring their shields down?"

"Easily. I could put half the ship to sleep in an instant. I am called Nightmare for a reason," Nightmare responded as though she wasn't about to perform a miracle. She was even holding up a hoof and gazing into the armor, as though making sure it wasn't scuffed. "However, if they have half a brain, the rest will throw up wards. I can keep them at bay for a few moments."

"That's more than we need. When I say," Anon said before holding up the radio, "Ket, target their weapons and engineering. On my mark, standard fire."

"Standard? Why would I use the railguns?" Ket replied.

"Nightmare's about to bring their shields down," it was a good thing he was talking over coms. Otherwise he'd see Rhindi and Ket lose their minds. Energy readouts from the Ascendancy's ship began to fluctuate-it looked like they were charging another missile barrage. Rhindi's warning was clear in his mind. If this didn't work… He nodded at Nightmare. "Do it."

Nightmare closed her eyes and her horn began to glow with the same blue light as on the surface. He watched as their energy kept rising, reaching that critical level…then all at once, everything fell, their weapons, their shield, engines, it all dropped to zero.

"Mark!"

Ket fired. Lasers arced out on Anon's display. He saw on the camera as the ornate designs of the towers on their enemy 's ship melted together under his ship's lasers. It was happening. A second later, he felt their railguns fire, the sound traveling through his ship as the towers exploded. Ripped into pieces, the upper spires spun off into space, trailing debris behind them. Fifteen seconds later, the process repeated, Ket tearing away the last of the towers on the Asendancy's ship. The third was all they needed. The central hull of the ship peeled away under Ket's lasers like a lit match to paper, then the railguns tore through the dead center, the impact ripping the ship into two. Just like that, it was over.

Anon sat back in his chair and just watched as escape pods poured out of the wreck. They did it. They actually did it. For the first time Anon could remember, a Technocracy ship had taken on the Ascendancy and won. Not just ran away, but actually won. Keying the modern communication, he canceled the distress call and said, both to his crew and the universe at large, "Stand down violet alert." He felt a giggle start to rise in his throat. They did it!

"And leave the job half finished? I think not," Nightmare spoke up behind him. He heard, both behind him and over the radio, "Ket, only one lifeboat is required to ferry word of our victory. Grant the rest the same mercy they granted your kind."

Anon spun around in his chair to gape at Nightmare, "What are you talking about?! They're in escape pods, they're no longer a threat. Ket, don't you dare!" Did he hit the radio? He spun back to make sure, just in time to see the lasers of his ship-his lasers- arcing out, hitting escape pod after pod. His sensors painted the grisly picture unfolding. Each one struck, even for an instant, became so hot that they simply boiled the inhabitants alive.

"Have you three completely lost your minds?!" Rhindi roared out over the radio. "You cannot fire on lifeboats, it's a violation of every galactic treaty out there!"

If Ket was listening, he chose to ignore them, firing as steadily and as precisely as one of their drills. Anon made sure to mash the button of his radio, his knuckles turning white as he spat into it, "Dammit Ket, cease fire! That is an order!"

The whistle he got back actually carried a bit of emotion this time. Hatred. "Why should I? They never did."

"I'm shutting down weapons from here. Ket's we're going to discuss this on the other side of the wormhole," Anon furiously spat out and slammed down the radio. The moment he touched the countrols, something shocked him. His muscles jerked his arm back involuntarily. "Aah! What in the-"

"I have given an order and I will see it done, Captain." Nightmare spat each word behind him. Anon turned back to see her grinning away, her reptilian pupils spread wide. "I NEED it done. From the moment I saw your ship, I knew I needed it, needed you! The power, the speed-there's nothing like it on my world. It's the key to reclaiming everything my sister has stolen from me!"

Keeping eye contact with her, Anon reached back towards his controls. Ket was still firing, he had to shut it down. Nightmare's horn lit up and SOMETHING grabbed his hand, wrenching it away. He grunted, half in frustration, half in mild pain as he fought against Nightmare's supernatural grip. She kept speaking, the worlds tumbling one after another in an insane confession, "No. This will happen. This whole time, I knew there was nothing stopping you from simply dropping me back on my world and scurrying off with me at my sister's mercy. I needed you, but you didn't need me. But now-Grogar?! The Father of Monsters?"

Nightmare reared up, her hooves hooking around Anon's shoulders as she leaned in, her fangs inches away from his nose. "He knows you destroyed his ship. He knows you have a Ket. He knows you're responsible for this massacre. He'll hunt you to the very corners of creation! And I'm the only one who can protect you from him, the only one who can keep you safe! Don't you see, Anon? Now you need me as much as I need you!"

 

 

Act 2

 

 

 

By the time Rhindi had manually cut power to the weapons, most of the vermin had been dealt with. Not as many as Nightmare would have liked, but she supposed it would have to do. Anon had been quite insistent that she remove herself from the bridge before he left her behind 'and make damn sure they know where you are.' It was just as well, she told herself. She had wanted to rest in the first place and her wing was still bothering her. It wasn't broken, or actively bleeding, so her healing spells would be of no help. Somewhere in the ship, she remembered, there was a room dedicated to politics and healing, she just had to remember roughly where it was.

Thus, she had been left wandering corridors as she listened to Rhindi and Anon prepare the ship for entering the wormhole. She wasn't an expert in ape or abomination behavior, but even she could tell they sounded tense compared to the last time. After they had entered the wormhole, she found a massive set of doors that hadn't been there before. They stretched from one wall to the other, closed so tightly together that it seemed she wouldn't even be able to wedge a knife between them. She keyed the radio to ask…then remembered. Right. Being inside a wormhole meant they had no way to un-garble each others' speech. They were all essentially on their own.

She thought back to the battle. They had all spoken so fast that the translator had barely been able to keep up. Rhindi had rattled off that they had been hit…perhaps the damaged portion was behind it? Were they not going to repair it? She rubbed a hoof against her chin as she thought. She supposed it's not like an ocean-going vessel, there's no worry about them sinking. There's no water to rush in, the vessel kept air in, instead of kept water out. She could open it up, but behind it would be…

She was back THERE. Her lungs screamed for air that simply was no longer there. She tried to breathe but her chest refused to expand. It cried, ached for air to sustain her body that simply refused to expire..

With a shout, she stumbled backwards, her rear bumping into the cool metal of the ship. The ship, right. She looked around the hall. She was on the ship, she never left. She…perhaps she'll find a way around. Those doors can stay closed. She'll…go around them. Unfortunately, her knowledge of the ship was so shaky that she wandered for a good half an hour before discovering that the other entrance to that section of the ship was closed off. Or she had simply walked in a giant circle, passing Rhindi once and Anon twice.

With the medical center of the ship denied to her and not knowing what else to do, Nightmare settled down in her chosen room and gazed out the window at the writhing, shattered reality of the wormhole. It was certainly a more active sight than what she was accustomed to…and the seat was much softer than the ground she had laid on for centuries. It was in every way, the opposite of the prison she had just escaped. Yet it still felt like…

Stupid. She had lost control. She had seen the bright, clear path to victory, and all the lives on it that needed to be cut short to reach the end. Just as she took the first few steps, she plunged herself off by running her mouth. babbling like an idiot to one of the only creatures in the universe to show her a modicum of kindness. Now she can't find the path, she doesn't know how he'll react to her ranting like a luna…like an imbecile. How stupid could she possibly be? She's royalty-no, she's a god, and gods don't make mistakes like that. Gods are not at the whims of mortals and she's already ensured she will-

Ket's talons grabbed her as his face filled her vision, his beak touching her nose. He chirped and the translator in her ear asked "Are you all right?"

Nightmare jerked, pulling back from the alien's touch. She didn't even notice him approaching her. She looked behind him to see the black of the eternal void. They had left the wormhole. She hadn't even noticed. She had just..lost her grip on time and it slipped past her. "How long…?"

"We left the wormhole over an hour ago," Ket replied, before flicking a pair of his wings and slipping back to a respectable distance. "We tried calling you. Is your radio off?"

She was as disoriented as being woken up from a deep sleep. She didn't just lose her grasp on reality, someone else SAW her like that. Vulnerable.Helpless… "Uh…yes. It must be."

Ket bobbed his head forward and backwards in a gesture that was completely foreign to Nightmare. He keyed the radio and started to say, "Found her. She's in-" Ket's whistling came out of Nightmare's radio, the prelude to the earpiercing feedback that assaulted Nightmare and Ket's ears. She pinned hers back as she fought the urge to wince as the radio painfully exposed her as a liar.

An oppressive silence filled the room, held at bay only by the rumble of the engine and Ket's irregular flapping. Before either of them could fight it, Anon's voice crackled in, "What was that? Is she alright?" Ket switched off her radio before responding in the affirmative, much to her relief. "Well get her up here, then. Her life was on the line too, and S'thar'tk's not picking up the-" Whatever the last two words Anon said were, they didn't translate properly.

Ket didn't give the silence much of a chance to show itself. He twisted his head around to look out the window. There was a planet floating before them, with clouds so thick that Nightmare couldn't see the surface through them. "I was joking when I called this room the Target. I don't hate it, despite what the captain thinks. May I tell you why I avoid it?"

Nightmare happily grasp the change in subject, a drowning mare grasping a rope, "Please do."

There was a twinkle in his eyes as he spoke, nostalgia heavy in his translated voice, "It reminds me too much of…before. On our ships, you could turn the walls transparent with a command. Any time you wanted, you could watch the stars go by. Even in a wormhole. We were one of the only ones that found a solution…which we destroyed, rather than let the Ascendency get their claws on it. Some would stare into the wormholes and swear they could see messages. Patterns. That there were things living in them. I always thought it was superstitious nonsense…but now? Now I don't know what's real. What I would have given to have found you five, six years ago…"

Nightmare looked him over, for the first time, seeing not an alien, but Ket as a person. He was older than he had appeared…like her. "I would have given much the same, I feel…you truly think I would have made much of a difference?"

"What you did back there...you didn't just beat them. You crushed them. I've never seen anything like it. Our greatest fleet burned itself just to force them into a fighting retreat. Just to give us time to evacuate, and you…you would have turned that into a victory," His feathers shook with the rage he was suppressing from his voice.

Nightmare gave him a sad smile and shook her head, "I'm afraid you overestimate my ability to repeat that success. They haven't faced an enemy mage in…I doubt they ever have. They didn't even have the most basic of defenses in place. If they have half a brain, which I know Grogar does, they will have wards to keep me out of their minds by the next time we meet."

Assuming they have the skill to cast them, she silently added. as she hopped off the couch. Something about all this wasn't adding up. She recognized every one of the spells their foes had used against them. All of them, without exception, were basic, simple spells. A novice's first shield, a genetic energy blast, bundling all your energy up in a ball and dropping it. Even their vehicle was powered through a basic telekinesis spell, the kind that required constant concentration, something a child learns as their first real spell. Everything is wasteful, inefficient, but simple. Tools for learning, not for actual use outside of the direst of emergencies…but the level of power behind them…she would have been hard pressed to find a sorcerer that could put that much power behind a single spell, and they threw it around with ease.

it was nothing like what she had faced as a child. The mages Grogar had fielded were few and far between-he needed access to a source of magic to infuse them with power. For this? He must have access to something incredible. Nightmare had a sneaking suspicion she knew what, but she didn't want to voice it. Not until she knew for sure. Not to Ket, especially. Not until she knew for sure…it'd be a level of evil she didn't want to comprehend.

"Makes sense." Ket's feathers ruffled approvingly as he backwinged, keeping pace alongside her as they left the room and started making their way to the bridge. His whistling echoed off the metal walls, carrying the tune of misery, and nostalgia throughout the ship, "One warrior against a thousand. But…you said this is something I could do? Something all Ket have access to? That we could have…"

She rustled her wings and shook her head, cutting him off, "I may have spoken in haste. I am not sure what they have done to the bones, they may have infused them artificially. I would need to examine them further with tools I don't currently have."

"Would that be destructive?" Ket's whistling took a shrill reverb. One of alarm.

Nightmare saw an easy way out of this line of questioning. Not until she's sure…and not directly with Ket. He's the closest on the crew to being hers. She nodded and said, "I would have to grind one of them to-"

"Out of the question."

"Of course," Nightmare bowed her head in acquiescence, playing the part he expected. The kindly enabler of his revenge. The mystic who will teach him what he needs to continue his journey. But it wouldn't do to seem to give in too easily, "Is it a religious taboo?"

Ket hesitated in the air, seeming to debate the question before finally answering, "No. We need them to-" the next series of chips and whistles didn't translate. She held up a hoof to call attention to it. After a bit of back and forth, some experimentation, Nightmare attempting to mimic a particular whistle, they determined it had to be a concept her language simply didn't possess. Ket tried again, "There's…a plan that Rhindi and the captain have. The Ssthaki possess technology to…make a copy of the dead. Not resurrect. Copy their body. These would be their own individuals, just physically identical to their uh…predecessor. If, by some miracle, someday, years from now we can collect enough samples, if we can also find the right planet, somewhere they'd be safe…"

The awe of the technological marvel the Ssthaki had was put to the side for now, something she would revel in later. Right now, she could see it again. The bright, clear path. The path to make him her willing slave. She stepped down that path. "You would no longer be the last Ket," Nightmare finished for him.

"To an extent. It's the longest shot, the most impossible of ideas. If it worked, I would no longer be the last member of the species." His whistles took on an acrid, biting tone, "But…those children would grow up on an alien world, in bodies that don't belong to them, listening to stories of dead civilization that they inherit nothing from and living in terror of the monsters from the stars. They wouldn't be Ket. They'd be…something else."

"Perhaps not just stories?" Nightmare empowered her horn, conjuring a simple illusion. A small copy of Ket appeared and flew between them, twirling and rolling through the air, before towers of spewing volcanoes arose. "I heard you speaking to the captain. There are places on my world that are still volcanically active…places my people consider to be uninhabitable. We've defeated Grogar once and can do so again."

The way the feathers on his chest ruffled and quivered. It was cruel, her words a knife twisting into his very soul. Everything he dared not dream about, right before his eyes, hanging inside of an open cage of her design. The most cunning thing about it? It wasn't a lie. Not even a half-truth. She meant every word of it and fully intended to see it through. It was simply an offer she had no right to make. No right to make, yet. She let the illusion fade, the cold metal of the halls replacing the sight of a new home for Ket. "Sorry. It's not something you need to think about right now, of course. As you said, it's something you don't have the materiel to consider yet."

Ket fell silent as he flew alongside her. He didn't speak, didn't twirl around chirping with joy. But he didn't reject or insult her. But she could see it. From the way his feathers pressed flat. The way his wings adjusted. He had climbed into her cage and closed the door himself.

A few moments later, she heard a noise over the rumble of the ship. A hiss-skree-onk. A Ssthaki noise. Her translator stayed stubbornly silent. She needed to talk to Rhindi about that and find out what the volume cutoff is for something to be too quiet for it. The ability to have a conversation remain untranslated could be useful. As they reached the door to the bridge, it finally decided to sporadically do its job. "-true but---don't---pulled the trigger---too easy on-" Ket absentmindedly tapped the button to open the doors, putting an end to whatever conversation had been going on.

"There you are, " the captain called out, waving them over to join him and Rhindi. "What were you doing, giving her another tour of the ship?"

"No…" came Ket's wistful reply, his mind elsewhere…back where Nightmare had left it.

Anon looked between Ket and Nightmare, silently questioning them and receiving no answer. After a moment he seemed to give up, leaned over the console before him to get closer and declared, "I'm going to cut to the chase. I vote we kill S'sthar'tk."

Nightmare kept her ears perfectly still, refused to let the swarm of emotions twist her face into anything the aliens could read. Is this some sort of pathetic, facile attempt to make her out to be some bloodthirsty monster?

Rhindi hissed in what Nightmare suspected was annoyance, saying, "We're not going to kill her."

"One, you're not Captain. I am. Two, I'm not-" A gentle beeping came from a nearby console, green lights over the screens. Anon stopped and looked over at it, "Did she FINALLY decide to hail us?"

"Took her long enough. She must have finally gotten her story straight," Rhindi said as it skittered over to the console, "Oohh, all the way up to green, she must be nervous."

Nightmare tried to think. The captain was the only one who SAW her lose control. Nobody else heard it. If this is his best attempt to slough off responsibility, then… "You can't be serious, Captain. You're talking about murdering a fellow officer."

Anon looked back to glare at her with a look that said 'I know what you're doing.' He stuck out one finger after another as he spoke, "She knew that planet was off-limits. She knew the Ascendency would be there. She knew that we would have no way of knowing that and most of all, she knew about Ket. She wants us dead. Letting her walk away after that is an unacceptable risk to the lives of my crew."

Nightmare glanced between the three aliens. Ket whistled almost nonchalantly, "No, he has a point. I voted with him, Rhindi's hoping you'll make it a tie."

Her mouth agape, she glanced over to see Rhindi was reading through what seemed to be a novel's worth of alien text on the panel before it, its outer eyes closed. It was almost farcical-they treated the lives of their enemies with more respect than their own kind…well one of their own. "What…are there any other options?"

"Yea, I'll just call the space police," Anon said, rolling his eyes as the translator flagged it with a series of tones that Nightmare had been told indicated sarcasm. It wasn't like he had feathers or his ears could move to give it away.

She just stared at him. She was serious. "Ok, fine," Anon said, throwing his hands up. He began to pace as he spoke, his voice growing louder with each word. "I WAS just going to contact the Ssthakic authorities. Our ship has logs of the whole thing-we have her lying about the mission, no sign of any ship in orbit on the way down. Communications, sensors, weapons, everything. But we have a bit of a problem-they're gonna want to know how we got away. They're not going to just believe us when I *beat em.* Even if I fudge the logs to say we ran, they're still not gonna believe it. There's gonna be an investigation. They're going to send a ship out, and then when they're going to find the wreckage of all the escape pods in orbit , because half the crew decided to mutiny and violate galactic law!" Anon stood there seething, a finger pointing at a monitor displaying lines of an alien text. When he next spoke, it was iwth a much more controlled, even tone, "So no. Calling the space police isn't an option. I'm not going to see anyone get 'Corrected' because she tried to kill us."

Mentally, Nightmare reeled as though she had been slapped. Her long life and training unconsciously kicked in, keeping her outward composure, but…this was all because of her. They might have to be branded murderers or let another murderer go because she lost control…because…suddenly the bright clear line didn't look so bright to her anymore. She resisted the urge to look over at Ket. Where was she leading them…?

"Point's moot," Rhindi suddenly declared, tapping a button and stepping back. "We need to get out of here now."

"Why, what's going on? The Ascendency?" Anon asked, his head jerked towards a monitor with the ship and space surrounding them.

"I'm on gunnery!" Ket whistled and backwinged towards the door as Nightmare's blood began to sing.

She closed her eyes and summoned upon what magic she had left-still nowhere near what she should have- and channeled it towards the third and fifth spirals of her horn. She needed to be able to see what her eyes could not. Reaching out, she felt the ship, the cold void that surrounded it, the empty space that she had become so accustomed to…

Then Rhindi's hissing hit her ears, dragging her back to her own body, "No, no, not like that. Everyone stop. We're not under attack."

Nightmare gaped at Rhindi, her blood still singing. She looked between Rhindi and the glass scrying screens of the bridge. She didn't see any new violet runes-the color she's learned they associate with danger. As she tried to sooth her ruffled feathers. Ket downright looped around in the air, glaring daggers at Rhindi. Anon let his head sink into one of his hands, covering his eyes. Without looking back up, he asked, "Then what…?"

"Its an automated message." Rhindi tapped a few keys and the runes changed, green ones flanking paragraphs of alien characters. "It says they abandoned the station after their life support failed…due to their water system being sabotaged."

Nightmare tried to make hooves or tails of the alien script. Why did that sound do familiar…wait, right. That was what the Captain had mentioned after she had been a bit…over exuberant at the prospect of drinking water and taking a bath for the first time in centuries.

Anon, however, seemed to be able to read it. He looked over the message before asking, "Wait a second, tank torn open from the inside…might have been a bomb…this thing says she plugged our old water system in and said we did it?!"

"That's my guess, " Rhindi replied with a gesture Nightmare chose to interpret as a shrug. "I'm not seeing any unidentified material in there on the sensors…I think they took everything we left for the rover."

Anon looked up, his brow furrowed, " Wait, but their ship was down. How did Ss'thar'tk leave without a ship?"

"Really?" Nightmare spoke up, her eyebrow raised. "Everything the alien said was a lie EXCEPT that her ship required repairs?"

Anon stood there, seemingly processing what she said for a moment before he snarled and whirled around, banging out commands to his ship.

Nightmare felt the ground shift beneath her hooves, before violet and indigo runes filled the screens and alarms began to blare. She instinctively jerked back against the cacophony. Ket squawked and flailed, his feathers smacking her ear as the ground came up towards him. With a mighty beat of all six of his wings, he rocketted across the bridge, clinging to one of the control banks as he half landed, half crashed into it.

"Are you trying to tear us apart?!" Rhindi cried as it scuttled to another section of the bridge.

Anon growled through clenched teeth, "I'm changing course. We're going to Lunar One."

"Counterfire RCS or we'll leave laser six and seven behind," Said Rhindi, its eyes down at a screen. "Why wouldn't we just go to Sanctuary? Lunar One's just going to have to order parts, it'll take twice as long to get the ship fixed."

Anon glared at Rhindi as he said, "If this is a Specism thing, where do you think she's going to go, to the planet of the apes or the station of her own kind? The Captain's given you his decision now see it done."

Rhindi voiced a few more half-hearted objections about the competency of the mechanics of Lunar One, only going silent when Ket chirped, "Rhindi, I have a permanent reservation at the hotel. Ambassadorial privilege. I can put you both down as guests."

After a moment, Rhindi replied with a quiet "Thank you."

 

Nightmare stayed on the bridge as they approached the 'wormhole coordinates' as Anon had put it. She had listened to the ritual he and Rhindi went through before each and every transition three times now and she was determined to learn everything she could about the process. If the 'Tunnelers' worked anything remotely like her horn, as Rhindi had implied, then she should be able to replicate it…or use them to replicate something of her design. As they approached the point, she used every scrying spell, every magic probe, everything she could think of to find why that area of void was so special, to no avail. When she finally asked the captain, he gave an answer that she swore was custom tailored to enrage her: "I dunno, that's just where the computer says to do it."

Her requests, then demands to know how the computer knew, were met with delays until the Captain shut down the translation software. Infuriated, Nightmare let loose a verbal tirade so powerful as to have bent the very oceans to submission…only to be met with a stupid grin on his muzzle-less face. For a moment, an instant really, she considered snapping his little neck. Rhindi could pilot the ship. But then she got ahold of herself. She had to settle for storming off the bridge, grinding the carpet under her hooves.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

COME BACK TO THIS SECTION POTENTIAL CUT

 

 

 

 

She needed to keep busy. To keep her mind from…slipping. But there wasn't much to do, inside a wormhole. Well…there wasn't much for her to do normally, either. Everyone had a job to do except her, the music ranged from grating noise to a sonic drill aimed directly at her sanity, and the electronic books owned by the crew were all written in their bizarre languages.

…Books…that gave her an idea. She galloped off through the ship, to the Captain's quarters. She stumbled to a stop just before his bed, having beat him there. In one of the drawers…she used her horn to open them four at a time until she found it. A stack of paper taller than her hooves were wide, of the purest white, brilliant quality. She levitated the entire stack, before purloining a metal pen from his desk and absconding to her quarters. It wasn't much, but it was everything she needed to write a treatise on magic. Her mind would stay anchored if she kept it occupied, and she could certainly-

She could see it. A valley of barren, grey rock stretched out before her. Every inch of it, she had carved runes and equations. Before her stretched a qeb of knowledge, of arcane focuses, runes to bend the mind and twist the soul to a singular purpose: To twist her magic onto itself, create a feedback loop and end her own life. She blinked and she was back aboard the One Bad Date Too Many, sitting on her couch, a blank page of pure white floating before her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The star-speckled black of the void reared up around then like the jaws of a monster around its prey. All at once, Nightmare felt the stretch of the wormhole fall away as the all-consuming darkness surrounded them. She looked up to see the wormhole, a bubble of mismatched, distorted lights shimmer, ripplong like a violent pond, before it splatted out, the bubble popped, revealing an unbroken ring of stars where it once was.

Nightmare breathed a sigh of relief as she felt them slow to something resembling normal. It wasn't that she could feel their momentum. Rather…she had a connection to her former prison. She could feel it, even from this impossible distance. Like it was calling for her…not as a jailor demanding its prisoner. But as a baby bird missing its mother…

The voices of the crew soon chirped in her ear as they began reawakening the ship's mind. Without any way for her to participate, Nightmare half listened, focusing on the stars before her. She was beginning to recognize some of them. The Mourning Triplets, she had named, now had a fourth. They were so, so much older than when she saw them above the planet of the Orundunum. Dragon's Teeth had become more of a spire. Or a belt…Paradoxically they were younger, far younger than it was before. She buried herself in her pilfered papers, mapping out the new night sky. It was nonsensical, impossible. Distance could move stars, she knew that much. But distance could not simultaneously cause and reverse age. If something was truly impossible then it simply cannot be. She must have mistaken these new stars, and corrected the markings thusly. It was a task as much for her as it was for the stars, as it kept her quite occupied while they spiraled down towards their destination, their engines working to slow their descent.

Suddenly, Nightmare felt the floor shove itself upwards, gravity making itself known. She only just barely kept her head from slamming into the ground chin first. The ship groaned around her, giving voice to her complaints. "Bleeding speed, Lunar One doesn't have an atmosphere for us to brake with," Anon's voice came over her earpiece as if knowing what she was about to say.

Nightmare worked her hooves under her and forced herself off the ground. She wanted to feel the increased pull of their simulated gravity. She wanted to defy it. In the past few days, she had shown so much weakness… Gritting her teeth, she relished in the ethereal hoof upon her back. "How much longer?"

"About an hour before one of the tugs gets us. Why?" Anon asked.

"Curiosity." She looked between the view outside and her maps. A tap of her horn and the ink bled through to every page below them. An hour to come up with constellations for three different skies? She'd better get to work.

They went through a series of what the captain called "burns" during that hour. Each time, the ship groaned and strained more than the last. Rivets began to pop on the bulkhead, shooting off with a loud bang each time. After the fifth one, Nightmare started hearing Rhindi giving damage reports, demanding the captain angle the ship like this, compensate for that. If she wasn't acutely aware of her ability to weather vacuum, Nightmare might have thought about retreating to a more interior portion of the ship, something Ket was recommending her to do with more and more urgency.

She had turned them out so thoroughly that she had only vaguely registered some sort of a countdown before the ground fell away under her. She caught herself on her wings by sheer instinct, two powerful flaps sending her rocketing straight up into the ceiling. That was apparently the wrong thing to do. With nothing to catch her, she cried out as she slammed back-first into the ceiling, bouncing off with almost as much force, right into a cloud of the papers she had just been working on. Her attempt at a backwing successfully stopped her from smacking face-first into the ground, stopping her momentum, but it didn't work like it was supposed to-her wings sent her into what should be a fatal spin. With a cry of frustration, she writhed in the cloud of her star-maps, fighting to get herself under control. Then a loud bang ran through the ship, not unlike when it had been shot by the Ascendancy, and gravity began to reassert itself. As though her previous flailing had been intentional, Nightmare landed daintily on her hooves, folding her wings in as the papers slowly settled down around her.

"Alright, the tug's got us," The captain said over her earpiece, as though what just happened was perfectly normal. "Everyone grab your stuff, we have fifteen minutes until we're docked. Meet at the starboard airlock, they said they'll cut it off if they have to."

With a scowl, Nightmare began snatching her scattered pages with her magic. There are hundreds of pages, it was going to take forever for her to-

What was that? She snapped her head around. Her blood turned to ice as she searched around every inch of the window. There had…she thought she had seen…nevermind. It was just the movement of the stars as the ship maneuvered and spun. Nothing more. Her brain was simply playing tricks on her again. She snatched up all the papers at once, pulled them into a ball against her breastplate and, with one last look out the window to confirm, absconded to the airlock.

Nightmare had just enough time to assemble that wad into a neat, if unordered, stack, looking as regal as she should before, one by one, the crew joined her, each ladened with a variety of bags. Even Ket held an oversized black bag, bulging with familiar shapes of Ket skulls. The magic within was almost enough to make Nightmare's fur stand on end. Everyone had an air of weariness about them, as though the battles of the past few days had only finished moments ago. The ship shuddered under them as it touched down. A thought occurred to Nightmare, "If we're not going to tell them what actually took place on that world, how are we going to explain the damage to the ship?"

Anon swore, sounding more weary than she had ever heard him, "I have no idea. Rhindi, do you have the package?"

The Ssthaki rummaged through its bags before it produced a small black sphere, smaller than Nightmare's hoof. "Still prepped, everything from before we left Orunundunum. I took care of the computers. It'll just look like battle damage," Rhindi said.

"Good, gimme, " Anon said. Taking the sphere and holding it up, he turned his head to look at everyone in kind, "This is mutually assured destruction. If the authorities get hold of this, we ALL go to prison, including Ss'thar'tk. So as Captain, I'm ordering you three. Keep your mouths-and beak-shut about what happened there." He waited until all three members of the crew gabe their acknowledgement before burying it in the bag slung over his shoulders.

 

There was a thunk, and the blue sigil before them turned red. "Alright, all crew, safe to disembark, blah blah, you know the drill," Anon said. Seemingly satisfied, he tapped the rune and the door split in two, sliding open.

They stepped out into a tube made of cloth. That was the only way Nightmare could describe it. The floor crinkled beneath her hooves, bare dirt, by the feel of it, underneath. She could see the bulge of a great spring coiling around the tube from one end to the other. She lowered her head, concerned that her horn might rip a hole through the fabric protecting them…well, the rest of the crew, from the vacuum of space.

They soon emerged in a bubble as tall as the ship. The walls at floor level were filled with portculli, half of which were open, all but one leading to cloth tunnels identical to the one they had just traveled. In the center sat a human at a desk, surrounded by monitors not unlike the bridge. "One Bad Date Too Many," he said, forgoing any greeting, "Says here you're supposed to have three segments. But I'm only seeing two."

Anon answered with a grin, "Your screen's dirty, that says thirteen. Better order a few more."

The man at the desk chuckled. "Oooh, I didn't realize we had the next Aggressive Psychology. Someone's moving up, huh? Seriously, what'd you do, forget where you put half the ship?"

"That was my fault," Rhindi hissed, drawing everyone's attention. "The captain had scheduled a return three days ago due to whipple shield integrity falling below mission parameters. However, there were several anomalies that I determined warranted further investigation. It's a good thing I had done so, or we wouldn't have rescued this one." It pointed a claw directly at Nightmare and gave her a pointed look.

Nothing it had said was an outright lie. In fact, outside of who was to blame, it was all the complete truth. Did they have a way to detect lies? In normal conversation? She made sure not to allow any sign of this revelation to reach her face, but the implications were staggering. Every conversation checked and verified? It was a kind of control over the populace she and her sister could have only dreamed of. Control she envied. Oh what she could…something to fantasize about later. She needed to focus on the task at hoof. Speaking precisely enough truth. "They found me stranded, marooned. I…was facing hard vacuum. I do not know what I would not have done if they had not landed."

Rhindi closed its outer pair of eyes, a gesture Nightmare was still…not entirely sure of its meaning. But it seemed to be the right choice, as Rhindi said, "Either way, shields were compromised. They weren't able to take the impact before we could get back to Rsska."

The human at the desk shrugged, his jovial mood having vanished the moment Rhindi spoke up, "Alright, whatever. I'll get one ordered and look over the rest of it. Analysis suite, right?"

"Not this time. We're going to go take this in a different direction, we'll need a combat suite," Rhindi said in the exact tone that would normally spark an argument with Anon.

The human pursed his lips, "Combat suite? For a three segment ship?"

Rhindi opened its outer eyes and leaned in towards the human. It hissed, "Yes. We have plans for this ship. Is that going to be a problem, human?"

The human shrugged and waved a hand, "You want a combat suite, you'll get one. I think Slipped Its Leash was scheduled to get one…" he busied himself with the computer, looking over rows upon rows of alien text. "Yea, we got one ready to go and they're already a week late. I'll order another one for them, we should have yours installed within the week."

"Two week vacation for us, got it," Came Anon's sincere sounding reply.

The man looked sharply up at Anon, "Section and shield replacement, shouldn't be more than three days. Any other damage I need to know about?"

"Yea, my coffee-maker stopped working," Anon said dismissively, looking towards what Nightmare Moon could only assume is the exit.

The man behind the desk adopted a grin so false even Nightmare could see through it, "That's a you problem.

Rhindi spoke in a hiss punctuated by a series of clicks, "I've already sent the system the full damage report from the impact. Multiple hull breaches, capacitor failures, the entire cargo lost. Check the entire hull. One thing that's not in it, the water system failed, it needs to be replaced. An unrelated incident. Now, are you going to make this poor Ket hover here for the rest of the day with that bag, or is it safe for us to go?"

The human opened his mouth, his arms on the chair as though he was ready to stand up, before he thought better of whatever he was about to do, slumping back in the chair. "Captain Anonymous, right?" Anon nodded. "I got your info here. Should have your ship back to you in a week."

"Alright, you heard him, we got a month," Anon said, starting to walk towards the one portcullis with a more permanent-looking hall.

"I said a week!" the now clearly annoyed human said.

"Yea and I know how fast you guys are. C'mon Nightmare, I'll show you the way to the Ket's embassy," Anon didn't even look back. Rhinki and Ket followed his cue, scuttling and flying respectivly with him. Nightmare glanced back at the human at the screens and saw him place his head in both of his hands, leaning into them against the desk. There was something more going on that Nightmare wasn't privy to and it was already starting to put her at unease. She had been in that man's position far too many times when she was younger.

It was larger than the cloth tunnels, about double the size, if Nightmare had to guess. The exposed metal tubes that propped up the walls and ceiling were high up enough that Nightmare had no concern about her horn catching on any of them. the floor, however, abruptly stopped, giving way to two grooves in the floor, heading down the hall. She followed them with her eyes, watching them go on and on. It dawned on her just how long this hall was, when she realized they went out of sight. On the right goove, close to them there was…calling it a cart would be generous. Anon and Rhindi stepped into a railed off square that had guard rails on three sides, a section of floor really. They set their bags down as Ket joined them, setting his own before perching on one of the rails. When Nightmare joined them, Anon tapped a button settled between the rails and the floor piece began to slide forward without making a sound. It started at a walk, slowly accelerating into a trot, a canter, a full on gallop under Nightmare's hooves, forcing her to actually put in effort to keep her papers.

All at once, Rhindi lumped on its legs. "I cannot believe I just did that. I feel like a piece of garbage."

"You wanna talk about a piece of garbage?" Anon burst out. He pointed at Nightmare and said, "That guy had a glowing space unicorn standing right next to him and I don't think he even noticed!"

"He's probably just overworked," Ket said.

"Perhaps he was dropped on his head as a hatchling, or however you spawn," Nightmare said in an attempt to join in. The words had scarcely left her mouth when she felt it. The stares from the rest of the group. The cocked eyebrow from Anon. The raised feathers from Ket. Her cheeks began to burn. For an instant, just a second slip of her mental composure, she let slip a Luna thought. Just like when she was a foal…bury that moment. Now. "I am becoming quite sick of being told half of what is going on. What precisely did you do? Why are you all behaving as though someone is listening?"

"Because they are," Anon hastily said. "Everything's recorded here. Lunar One is a very sensitive place and misinformation. The Technocracy wants the truth, the truth, and nothing but the truth."

"It's…some of the more speciest members of society try to find any reason they can to make a human's life hell. They don't like our involvement here, they think humanity doesn't belong in space with our help…and I did everything I could to make him think I'm one of them. Pheromones included."

"Is that going to be something I'll have to endure?"

"You'll be fine," Rhindi said, "You'll be with me, worst case scenario, some humans might just address me instead of you."

Nightmare fought the urge to roll her eyes. Even on an alien planet, she'd still have to endure being overshadowed by another. She felt her eye twitch as a few very…unpleasant memories threatened to escape the veil in her mind. The mental border between Luna and Nightmare.

The platform they were on came to a stop, the far -side of the hall looking identical to the one they had entered from, save for the portcullis. This one was closed. "Alright," Anon said, "It's your first time here, so heads up, we're on the other side of security right now. There's gonna be a lot of people, don't freak out. Just follow us."

"If you get separated, the translator works as a communicator," Ket added.

At Rhindi's keyed command, the doors slid open, and a cacophony of voices poured in. Dozens, no, hundreds of voices assaulted Nightmare's ears, some Ssthaki, but most human, all combining to overwhelm her translator, the machine giving her bits and pieces of a sentence, a single word here and there, before giving up on it to give her a new phrase by someone else entirely.

"Gate A-12 will be arriving-"

"-wanna get a-

"-to Meridan please proceed to-"

"-here early-"

"-red zone, please proceed to gate C-13."

"-traveling standby, you must-"

It was enough to make her head spin. After so long in total, complete silence, with only her thoughts in her head, such a cacophony was more than her mind could handle. Threatening to topple over from the vertigo, she focused on putting one hoof in front of the other, taking slow, long, deliberate steps as she followed after the crew into the sea of bodies and noise. The first thing that struck her about the place was the LACK of bare grey metal. The plastered walls, the carpeted floor, the tiled ceiling behind glaring lights, the decorative domes in the tiles, everything was a warm, inviting color. Wood desks and counters, stained a pleasing natural color, trees and bushes standing next to bright purple lights stood along the walls, whites, yellows, oranges, all stood in contrast to the ship, a bright backdrop to the throng before her.

Her initial guess of hundreds of voices was right. Hundreds of humans swarmed around them, going to and fro, most pulling suitcases behind them as dozens of serpentine Ssthaki heads stood above, rocks in a cascading river. Keeping her eyes locked on the scales of Rhindi's cobra-hood, she followed close behind, using her crew to break through the current of bodies. Yet still, her attention kept getting grabbed. There were signs throughout the complex. Some were static, others moving, but they all depicted a gaggle of humans enjoying some device or item, with alien text below it. There were even a few signs with Ssthaki. One prominent one hung from a banner over the packed corridor, staring accusingly at the crowd below, one claw pointing directly at anyone who gazed upon it.

It was enough to make her head spin. Vertigo threatened to toss her from her hooves as the sound and fury buffeted her. She wanted to demand an explanation of what insanity had surrounded them, but the crew seemed focused on simply cutting through the crowd.

They passed by a room simply tacked onto the side of the main hall, sectioned off only by a set of velvet ropes and a long, orderly queue of humans. The walls were almost hidden by trees and bushes in pots. It felt almost like an attempt to make it look more like a forest clearing than an actual room. An effect ruined by the grey floor and purple lights above each plant. In the center, atop a plinth, there was a naked wormhole. A bubble of reality bulging outward, it was surrounded by two semi-circular frames, more of a scaffolding, each studded with six inward-facing spikes. They were spiraled much like her horn, she realized. The wormhole rippled like a pond and lights both above and on the frames turned blue. The arms then spun around the wormhole and black lightning flashed out of the spires, striking the wormhole. Each bolt calmed the wormhole until the surface became the picture of tranquility. The frames spun back to the side and the light turned red. The light being the cue, the line of humans marched forward, a small cohort at a time stepping right into the wormhole and vanishing. Seconds later, other humans began appearing, some mid-stride, some clearly landing from a jump.

A Ssthaki touched her flank. Nightmare whirled around to see Rhindi…she hoped. One claw touched its translator and its voice cut through the din, clear and uninterrupted, "Rhindi to Nightmare Moon. That's Dublin, you don't want to take that one. It's a mess right now." As it spoke, it pointed up at a map hanging between two hemispherical decorations above the velvet ropes Nightmare had previously missed. She saw a red button on an island above the largest continent. It was her first time seeing the planet the Captain came from. Seven continents, most of which had some cartoonish drawings of their geographical features, mountains, deserts, rivers. Except for the one. Nearest the center of the map. It was covered in black and orange stripes. There was no label, no hint of what was behind the stripes.

Rhindi beckoned for Nightmare to follow it, and she reluctantly tore her gaze from the map. As they made their way back through the throng, she kept a lookout for them. Each wormhole they passed by, terminals, the name she picked out through the cacophony, had the same map. The dot indicating the wormhole's exit moved all over the map, seemingly at random, but the rest was all the same. Whatever the continent was, it had been completely censored.

Nightmare began to smell food. Various spices, baked breads, even the stomach churning scent of cooking flesh made their way to her nostrils. It was a warning before the corridor spat them into a large bubble of a room. Around it, more halls split off, spokes of a half-wheel coming off the hub. Between them stood the restaurant fronts, with garish signs and steaming dishes of alien cuisine for the humans swarming them. The throngs continued, swarms moving through the room from one hall to the next. Behind them, on a grey stone tower, rested a vehicle not entirely dissimilar to the ship she had just been on. A geometric bubble rested on three wiry legs. A thick suit, clearly intended for a human, stood before the vehicle, the suit's gloved hand in a permanent salute against the golden bubble of its visor.

"Captain Anonymous to Bad Date crew. This is where we split, I'm heading down to North America. Nightmare, stick with Ket and Rhindi, don't do anything stupid. If we stay quiet, a certain goat won't know where to look for us once the ship's fixed. Have fun at the hotel," Anon gestured out towards a window.

Nightmare looked and the sight that met her bit ahold of her very soul. The grey, barren land, the airless, star studded sky, and the blue-green, mocking planet that hung above it all. The sight grew before her, consuming the world around her, bright lights and babbling noises shattering like glass before the monochrome reality.

She continued to persist. Her lungs burned for air that would never come. A cloud of razor sharp dust bit her hide as the Moon devoured the lethality of her spell. It didn't work. The last thing she could think of and the spell..didn't. WORK. She looked out in horror at the thousands of runes carved into the rock of the vallis before her. Each one had been meticulous, perfect. Not a speck of dust to interfere. And it didn't WORK. Dread gnawed at her bones. She could not be here a moment longer. She could not LIVE on the Moon another moment. With a soundless cry, she ripped the helmet from her head. She tore her armor off, her barding, boots, one by one stripping herself of every bit of magical protection she had. The very tears on her eyes began to boil away. The sun cooked her under her fur, skin burning from the direct, unshielded sunlight. Her horn tried to alight with wards but she gritted her teeth and held back, like tensing a muscle. Blood began to seep out from her lips as her skin blistered. Her vision blurred as her eyes dried out and shriveled. Curling up, she waited for the end. Yet…

She continued to persist. Her heart kept pumping empty blood. Her neurons kept firing. Her body refused to just die, it couldn't die, it kept her trapped in her useless skull on this barren empty rock, alone, Until the stars burned themselves out. She had to bring it to an end. Somehow…

She allowed a drop of magic out, enough to repair her eyes. For now. She looked around for…there! A suitable rock. Legs shaking, she lashes it with her magic, ripping chunks away, carving it, refining it to a point, sharpening it, perfecting it, until an atomos pointed needle rested between her hooves. They quaked as she held it up, pointing straight at her. Through the eye. That'd be the thinnest point of her skull. Straight through the eye. Then…she'd just need to swirl it around until she stopped moving. She did it to others before. It won't be much different. With a soundless scream, she slammed head down onto the needle.

Her scream reverberated through the air until it struck her ear, carrying her voice. She gasped, lungs filling with the hot, delicious air, heavy with the smells of various actual food. Her heart pounded louder in her ears than the din of the crowd as she kept gulping down lungful after lungful of that precious air. Lifting a quaking hoof, she gingerly felt her eye. It healed. She continued to persist. Fighting to get her breathing under control, she looked up.

The crowd kept moving around her. She must not have actually…where were Ket and Rhindi?! Eyes darting around, she couldn't find them. They had just…abandoned her…on the…her legs buckled as they almost gave out entirely. Not again!

Making a point of looking away from any windows, she reached up a shaking hoof and mashed it against her ear, pressing into her translator. She took a deep breath and, summoning every ounce of strength she had, spoke with a steady voice, "Nightmare Moon to Bad Date crew. I am altering the plan. I will be lodging with Anonymous on the surface of the planet."

"Ket to Nightmare," came the swift response, "Did we lose you again? I'll just fly above everyone."

"Anonymous to Nightmare. Forget it. I am going home. I am going to enjoy not being Captain for a week, and I'm not going to spend my free time dealing with you."

She took refuge in her anger. The flames of her temper always kept her pain at bay. Her legs steadying, she snarled, "Nightmare to Anonymous. I will not stay here another moment. Now reveal yourself at once or I shall, as you put it, do something stupid."

Waiting for Anon's response, she seethed through her clenched teeth. As she did, a revelation crept up through her anger. She was no longer carrying her star charts. She lifted her wing and looked under it before squeezing it back down and cringing to herself. Of course it wouldn't be under there, why would she…she would have felt it. Shaking her head, she looked down on the ground, for…there they were. Scattered all around her on the ground. Some people stepped over the discarded pages, but more, far many more, stepped on them without notice, scaring them with prints, tearing some of them. Her eye twitched. Something stupid…she could just blast them all back and then pick up her pages in peace…

No, no, she could see someone fighting his way through the crowd towards her. She started grabbing her papers one by one, snatching them between footfalls, neatly gathering them up and tucking them under her wing just in time for Anon to appear out of the crowd. With a scowl, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

With a couple great bounds, and, no longer caring how rude it may seem or how much attention it may draw, shoved aside a few humans to make her way to Anon. The translator didn't bother picking up more than a snippet of their cries of indignation, so why should she care? Once she reached him, she placed her spare wing around his back. She wasn't going to be separated again. He gave her a look, but…he didn't try to shove her off. Keeping her head held high for appearances and eyes low to avoid any…unfortunate sights…she allowed him to guide her back the way he had originally started down. She occasionally heard him saying something, bits of a word here and there. He was talking to someone over the communicator. After they passed the first terminal, she finally heard, "Anon to Bad Date crew. Ket, do you mind meeting us at MIT in three days? Rhindi says it still has some pull over there and is going to make some calls tomorrow, see if it can get the physics department together for the lecture Nightmare is going to give about her peoples unique discovery. Isn't she?"

He what?! Nightmare stumbled as she tried to reach a hoof up to her communicator. Damnable things were made only for bipeds! Before she could get her hoof to it, she heard, "Ket to Bad Date crew. I can. Three days will give us time to do something with Nightmare's room. You'll let me know what time?"

Anon answered in the affirmative as Nightmare was still trying to fit in a tap to her communicator with her stride. Her frustration grew until it eclipsed her pride. Abandoning all dignity, she hopped forward and smacked her ear with her fetlock. "Nightmare to Captain Anonymous. I have not agreed to anything. I do not know what is an MIT is, nor do I know how you have possibly have known of the primer I have been working on, but I will present such a manuscript only once I am quite satisfied with it. Your declaration on my behalf, without consulting me is a level of temerity I will not abide!"

Anon spun around and jammed a finger at her. "Anon to Nightmare. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it's one of the only places on Earth the Ssthaki actually care about, and YOU are going, to pay for your room and board. Because this is how we do things in the Technocracy, you want something, you have to teach someone something to earn it. And what you told us the other day? You're going to teach that to a team of the top physicists in the galaxy, and it's gonna set us all up for life. You want a ship to go play conqueror? You'll be able to get your own and leave us out of your little revenge plot, when we're done."

She gaped at him, revulsion growing where his words sank in. After everything they had been through…he put his life on the line to assist her in battle! They fought side by side and for what? For a payday?! How long had he viewed her as a walking bag of gold? The comfort he gave her after the battle…she had bared her soul to him and he had always intended to sell it. She went to raise a hoof to speak to him…only to just barely catch her footing before falling over. No. It wasn't worth it.

They kept their stony silence until Anon tapped her and turned off to a terminal. To her surprise, he led her around the velvet ropes, past the line. Within a moment, the constant din took on a rather angry tone. Some of the people in line voiced their outrage at this supposed breach in protocol. To her surprise, her translator picked up Anon's called response to the crowd, "Captain's prerogative, they-" He pointed at his communicator. The response seemed to be enough to, if not mollify, redirect the crowd's frustration. They groaned, a few rolled their eyes, but several of them turned and glared at the Ssthakic members of the line. Anon ignored that, leading her to the front of the line.

As they did, Nightmare felt gravity push down on her. Each hoof step took more and more strength, landing heavier than the last. She had almost bounced in the hall, now, in the center of the terminal, she walked. It stopped growing as they passed the frontmost humans, the weight on her settling a little lighter than being on the ship had felt. Anon held up his hand, signalling her to stop. The lights were still red.After a group of people came through, this time a Ssthaki, three humans and a spindly creature that walked on six legs surrounding a spiral shell, the lights over the wormhole turned green. He motioned for her to follow him and approached the wormhole.

She had not seen one this directly before, not like this. The ship always entered them from below. It was a bubble without surface, one of air instead of water. No…she could feel air flowing out of it as they approached, carrying a scent of chemicals, masked by too-strong perfume. loomed larger and larger before her, growing from an object, to a planet, a wall. In the center of that bubble, reality bulging out before them, she could see another room, as open as Lunar One was crowded. There was no line inside. She could see windows, the sky…it was blue. As she neared it, the sphere stretching to a wall, she could feel the magic buzzing around it. The harpoons that bit deep into the flesh of reality. Crude, unbraided ropes stretched out, tying one piece of reality to another. They strained against the force of the universe desperate to heal. Anon hopped forward and vanished. She stepped forward into the wall, the magic like needles dragged through her fur as the world bent around her, the crowd distorting, stretching…and her hoof came down on the ground of another planet.

It was quiet. Not to say empty. The room was vast, far larger than it had any right to be. The walls towered high enough that the entire ship could have fit comfortably, curving into a glass covered dome for a ceiling. It was the source of the blue sky she saw through the wormhole. Below it, the walls were covered in banners and tapestries, each one depicting a human hand grasping a Ssthakic foreclaw, above a written language unique to that banner.

There were hundreds of people, but all were well away from the wormhole. They sat around tables, lounged in row upon row of seats, but they were a murmer. Maybe one in ten bothered to speak. If they were not nursing a drink or a meal, they stared at some device in their hands or a book.

A female voice spoke through her communicator, "Now serving group B-68. B-68." A group of humans, all similarly dressed, stood up from their table and began walking towards them. No, towards the wormhole. Anon ushered her out of the way before others could emerge from the wormhole. As they moved, she caught sight of something above them. There was something hidden behind the tapestries…

Without reaching up to his translator, without declaring who he was trying to contact, he simply said, "Welcome to Earth. Specifically the Massachusetts region of what used to be called America. I'd give you the tour but we're already late."

Nightmare jumped, startled by the contrast. "How did… what?"

"Yea, we're on year three of central translation being down up there. Someone stuck a fork in it or something, I don't remember. Nobody wants to ship a new one, the whole thing's scheduled for an upgrade next year anyway so, we just kinda have to deal with it." Anon held up a hand, "Hang on…" There was a pause and a moment later the woman called out another group to enter the worrmhole. "Alright, come on, we gotta move. We have an aircab landing in a few minutes and if we miss it because I had to come back for you, I'm not sitting around for an hour and a half for the next one." Without waiting for her, he turned and started walking away.

Cantering after him, she leaned her head in and hissed, "This is the fourth method of transportation today, yes? Is there any particular reason for this level of convolution, when I could simply carry you?"

Anon shook his head. "That's normal when you want to… wait hang on. Ke-" He glanced around to see if anyone was listening in without breaking his stride. "You could do that? Our other crewmate can't carry more than a couple pounds and stay airborne."

Nightmare gaped at him. How could there possibly be a need for secrecy now, after Ket had flown around with them in the open on Lunar One?! Regardless, she could take the hint. "My wings…use the same principles as my horn. They're not large enough to lift on their own," she shifted her wings for emphasis as she spoke. Anon responded with a grunt of acknowledgement, so half formed the translator didn't bother, nor did it need to. They fell into an uneasy silence, the murmur of those waiting for their turn lapping at her ears like water at a beach, broken by the waves of the announcer. They passed by another pair of stores, one, a restaurant selling soups of some kind, the cream of the alien food smelling downright delicious to Nightmare, and other selling boxes and trinkets, which, after a quick glance did not immediately reveal their purposes, failed to keep Nightmare's attention. She was more focused on the soup. The food she had scrounged on the ship had proved…lacking in flavor, once she had gotten over her initial joy at eating ANYTHING again.

She opened her mouth to ask Anon about getting some, then paused. His patience was already stained to its breaking point. Perhaps… She'll wait. For now. Yet, it did not stop her from gazing longingly at it, watching with envy as others came up to purchase cupfulls. Purchased… might be the wrong word. She realized soon that she didn't see any actual currency. No coins, no bills, they simply looked over at what Nightmare recognized as a camera before collecting their meal. She was so busy watching it, she almost walked face first into the closing door.

Anon's hand shot out and slapped against it, pulling it back open, annoyance twisting his face into a scowl. His eyes darted from Nightmare, tracing her gaze and his scowl softened. "Hungry?" Biting back a smile, she nodded. Anon shook his head. "You don't want that crap, it's for tourists," he leaned past her and, cupping a hand to his mouth, called out, "They don't even use real lobster!"

A human behind the counter holding the soup pots looked up and responded with a full sentence, only one world of which made it through her translator, before he punctuated the rest of it with a hand gesture, holding a single finger up. Anon responded with the same gesture and a few similar sounding words, before ushering Nightmare through.

Stepping through, she caught a glimpse of the door and understood why Anon had caught it. It was as thick as the outer airlock of their ship and the handle to open it was only on one side, the same side as the metallic arm that pulled it shut behind them. Turning around, Nightmare was met with a boring grey metal antechamber, much like the halls of the ship, if larger. There was another velvet rope, this one separating those leaving from those waiting to enter, walking forward in pairs in time with the same colored lights Nightmare had seen on Lunar One. Watching a group of humans walk through a pair of sliding doors leading into the room she and Anon had left, she spied two half-spheres flanking the door. She had seen them throughout Lunar One, but this was close enough for her to see the details. The grooves, she recognized them. They were smaller siblings of the same pods on the outside of the ship. When she first saw them at the time, she hadn't realized…it wasn't until the battle that she saw what they contained. They were laser turrets.

The voice of the wormhole announcer spoke into her translator with a new message, "As a reminder, weapons of any kind are not permitted on Lunar One. Immediate action will be taken against those carrying weapons, explosives, corrosive or infectious agents without prior authorization. You will know if you have prior authorization."

Anon shook his head, "Don't worry about it, you do. Stupid thing always plays, just ignore it.." Behind him, on the far side of the room, she spotted another two laser turrets. Ignoring it, ignoring anything, was not something she was going to do. How many others had she seen since they landed? What else had she been missing? The commandment to speak no lies on Lunar One, was that enforced by these weapons? Had they been under threat since they landed? What else had she missed?

That's when she realized. She had been so overwhelmed by new sights, by the broken translator, she had not just missed what was there, but what was NOT there. She had failed to notice what was missing. Whenever the wormhole announcer's voice spoke to her, there was no accompanying untranslated voice. It spoke directly through her translator, like when Ket called out to her earlier. It was not the only sound she wasn't hearing…she has only heard the voices of adults. Where were the young? Every human she had met had been what she had to guess was an adult. Some were older, some were a little younger than Anon, but…there had not been a single child. No infants. Every human they saw seemed to be fully grown, with a place to be and a quest to complete. This was the most effective manner of travel she's ever seen, so why hasn't she seen even a single family on vacation or travelling for school? She blurted out the quesiton before she even truly meant to, "Anon, where are all the foals?"

He looked back, bafflement covering his face, "The…the what?"

"The foals, the human foals. I presume you do not simply hatch from an egg fully formed. Why have we not seen a single foal since we've landed?"

His eyes nearly bulged out of his head. He looked around, eyeing the crowd like a pack of rabid animals ready to strike before turning to her. He then spoke carefully, deliberately, "I-look. You're an alien, you wouldn't know, it's fine. It's fine." He beckoned her closer. He opened his mouth to speak and paused, glancing over his shoulders at the laser turrets. He spoke quietly, choosing each word carefully, "We're not at the Ssthaki's level yet. They're helping us get there, that's why they're in charge of childhood education. They have better programs on Sanctuary than we can provide. Now no more. The aircab just told me it's started landing sequences."

Nightmare arched an eye at that last bit. "Wait, how-"

She was cut off by Anon making a rather gutteral noise and jerking his finger across his throat. To Nightmare's surprise, the translator turned it into a long, polite sentence in Anon's voice about how they simply did not have time but, begging her pardon, and if it would do right by her, he would be quite happy to discuss it later. It continued on and on, to the point where Nightmare was certain her translator had broken, repeating the same message over and over again. They had made their way through the facility past the humans, Ssthaki, and yes, occasional alien that were on their way in, into the rest of a building that Nightmare could only describe as a sort of bizarre indoor marketplace, out of the building, and into a stone desert before the message finally stopped.

The black stone of the desert was so hard, Nightmare could feel it through her armor. Even her hooves would probably be worn down on it. It was as flat as the floor of a building, despite being outside…and for a desert, it was filled with what Nightmare had to guess were vehicles. If the rover they had used on the previous planet was made as a spider, then these were made to be earless rabbits. With rounded bodies, four wheels that were tucked in, and a pair of lights in the front, they all looked like the humans were TRYING to make them look like animals. Animals that were ready for battle. They were arranged in column after column, like an army ready to drill on parade grounds…were they not mostly facing each other. Before Nightmare could ask Anon if that had been intentional, he stuck his hand out, pointing. "Aha! The white one, right there, it has visual on us now. See?"

Looking, Nightmare saw on the end of the doublestacked rows, there was a straggler. A rabbit-vehicle, three times the size of any other, with an extra two pairs of arms, all pointing up. At the end of each arm, there were…she had only ever seen concepts of those sketched out. Theoretical drawings…They had actual, real propellers, long and thin, spinning almost as fast as her eyes could keep up. She gaped at them as they drew near. She knew, conciously, that most of what she'd seen was most likely more advanced than this. But…everything else was just some miraculous thing, totally ungrounded from her reality. This? This was theory made fact. This was REAL.She knew the ponies who had attempted to make these. She could picture their faces, eyes full of wonderment, if she could just show them this…that their ideas would work. She could feel the air the rotors were pushing, the breeze tickling her fur. The breeze from the propellers grew as they approached it, turning into a gale by the time they reached the aircab. Anon opened a door, swinging it open and gestured for her to enter. She did so and left her piece of reality behind.

While it was big enough to have comfortably fit the whole crew, they only had access to the back half of the vehicle. A translucent wall, opaque at the bottom but fading to transparent near the top, separated them from the front. They sat down on the cushioned seats as the noise of the gale outside was quieted. A whine began to grow, and behind it, the wind around them grew stronger and stronger. Soon, the seat and ground lurched under her and the vehicle took off. She braced for the bone crushing weight to hit her, but it never came. The aircab was downright graceful compared to the ship. Suddenly, Anon burst out in anger, "Were you trying to start a riot back there?!"

"Pardon?" Nightmare asked, bewildered.

"You waited until we were INSIDE security to ask about the kids thing." He jabbed a finger towards her, "Inside! Where everyone is stressed out and there are literal guns pointed at our heads. How did you even know about that? Did Rhindi tell you to mess with me? Is this some kind of space prank?"

"Oh silence yourself!" Nightmare spat. "Your temerity is outweighed only by your churlishness! You explain nothing to me, spent half the journey in silence, then claim offence because I express curiosity at something as plain as the color of your skin?! If this is how you express gratitude to the one who saved your ship and life, then perhaps we SHOULD part ways at MIT."

"You committed a fff…" He bit his lip and looked over his shoulder towards the front of the aircab, as though something was there, before looking back at Nightmare, "After what you did up there, you are in no place to lecture me. None. You don't wanna be around me, that's fine. I'll tell this thing to turn around and you can go back to Lunar One."

Ice flooded Nightmare's veins at the thought. Through clenched teeth she hissed, "Don't you dare."

Anon threw up his hands in exasperation as he cried, "Well why not?! You certainly didn't have an issue with the idea back on the ship."

She glared at him as glittering towers of crystal and metal passed them by outside the window, vanishing both above and below as though they went on forever. She was beginning to hate how reliant on him she had become. He had already born witness to her at her lowest, her most pathetic…she saw the pity in his eyes before. Worse he might have been feigning it. She would not be looked upon like she was made of glass, ready to be shattered at the lightest touch. Even if it took all her strength to…maintain herself, when alone. She hated herself for it but…she needed him. With a deep, full body sigh, she said, "I spent centuries trapped...on a MOON. Less than a week after my escape you asked me to stay...on a MOON. If I was trying to start a riot, you were trying to torture me."

He rested his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands and just looked her over. Her cheeks began to burn under her fur and she looked away. She couldn't watch him study her, to pity her, looking out the window instead. They were above the towers now, the ugly, mostly flat square tops of the buildings were decorated with pulsing red lights, the only decoration anyone had bothered with the roofs of those wonders of engineering below them. The sprawled below them came to an abrupt end as they went out over water. A lake? No, a quick glance showed that it went on to the horizon in either direction. It was an ocean. Finally, Anon said, "Ok.

He didn't believe her. *Ok? " She looked back at him, an ear cocked.

"I'm going to do the enlightened Ssthaki thing again. Being from two separate species and planets we obviously have different cultural expectations and it has led to a breakdown in communication. That's my fault. I'm the Captain and, to put it mildly, First Contact between us has been a bit of a fiasco."

She thought about that. Scheming nobility plotting against her, a magical abomination threatening the lives of her and those around her, those closest to her can barely stand to be around her…if anything, it was almost disturbing how normal it all felt to her. She kept that to herself.

"Now, from what you've hinted at before, I'm guessing you're a herd species, right?" He waited as Nightmare cautiously agreed. "Alright, so, xenology training. Let me kbiw if any of this sounds off. Your people would normally seek safety in numbers, crowds are where you bring up sensitive topics, private confrontations are typically seen as aggression or intimate. Right?"

A bitter taste filled her mouth. It was true…for her people. They could seek shelter in crowds. They were the ones who were allowed the comfort of others.

But not her. Never her. Why would anyone ever want to be around litttle loony Luna? She's the weird sister who keeps staring at the sky and making up stories for the stars, just leave her alone out in the cold and the dark, when things creep and whisper, she probably likes it anyway, otherwise she'd be more like her sister.

She grunted her assent.

"Well that explains a bit. I know Rhindi told you we're a tribal species, but did it tell you how that's different?"

She cocked both ears towards him. While she may have been… having difficulty staying grounded, she was certain she would have remembered that. "What are you talking about?"

"When the tug had us," Anon spoke as though explaining he did not have a second head, "I told Rhindi to fill you in on Earth while we were waiting to land. What did it tell you?"

"Rhindi did not say a word to me."

"That little bug!" Anon snarled. "Probably threw a tantrum because we didn't go to its home for once! Anonymous to Rhind-aahh!" Anon clutched his ear and curled up in pain.

Nightmare flared her wings in shock. What's happening?! Was there something wrong with his translator? Reacting more than thinking, she reached a hoof up to her own. "Nightmare to Bad Date cr-" an ear-shatteringly loud screech assaulted her through the translator.

"Someone's jamming our cons," Anon said with a voice of steel. He looked around, seemingly paying attention to what was outside the windows for the first time, "status report, where even are we?"

Gingerly holding her ear, Nightmare said, "I don't know. We began over the ocean a few minutes ago."

"The ocean?! What do you mean the ocean?!" Anon cried, leaping to his feet. He stared, gripping the back of his head with his hands as he looked down at the water, now peaking out from the clouds below them. Panic-stricken, he cried as much to Nightmare as to himself, "What are we doing over the ocean?!"

Nightmare bit back a scathing remark, "Were we not supposed to be?"

"No! We're going to Springfield, it's a hundred miles inland." He mouthed something silently before looking back at Nightmare. He wore the same expression he had when the Ascendancy landed, days ago as he said, "We're over twelve thousand feet. That's why I didn't notice anything, I'm hypoxic!"

Nightmare snatched the radio from where it had clipped to her armor and called into it, "Ket, Rhindi, we need you on the surface immediately!"

"Don't bother, they're on the moon, they can't hear that," Anon said, his words casually cutting Nightmare to the bone as he turned to the wall bisecting the aircab. Hand against his translator, he barked out what Nightmare later learned were ‘Command override codes.’ His expression darkened and he repeated them, slower, enunciating each word and number. Nothing happened. With a cry, he punched the wall. His sides heaving, he shouted as much to Nightmare as to the machine, "What do you mean overridden?! I'm a god damn Captain!"

Nightmare stood up, spreading her wings as she looked out the window, judging the coastline. Could she make it from there? She wasn't sure…deciding to avoid the subject until she knew, she asked, "What does that mean? You can commandeer civilian equipment?"

"Kinda? It's for emergencies, I'm not…” He stopped, panting for breath as he looked around, like he wasn't sure what he was seeing anymore. He frowned before he pulled out his pistol and pointed it the door, what Nightmare could only presume were controls. " I have an idea. Cover your ears!"

She dove to the ground, and threw her hooves over her head, thinking she knew what to expect. On the other planet, that weapon was a thunderclap that could kill without a trace. But in this confined space? Each shot was a hammer blow to her skull, each shot knocking her senseless. Once the assault on her ceased, it left behind a strange ringing, like an impossibly small fly had made it into her ears. She slowly rose to her hooves, flicking her ears to dislodge whatever it was. When Anon next spoke, his voice was curiously muffled, moreso than the ringing should cause, “We need to get to the controls!”

The door had remained unphased by his weapon. Eight deep spiderwebs now adorned the interior of the thick glass, but it had refused to yield. Anon kicked at it, again and again, to no avail. Panting, he gasped out, “Gotta…gotta get this thing back down. Below… ten thousand feet. Otherwise I'm gonna pass out. And I'm not gonna wake up…”

Nightmare stepped forward and, spreading a wing, placed it on his chest. With the utmost care, she used it to guide him back. “Then sit down and allow me to open it for you, mortal. Exerting yourself is only going to bring that about sooner.”

Once he was safe she turned her back to the door and began to cast an old spell, one that had been well familiar to Luna. Drawing strength from her horn, she guided it back to her hindquarters, her legs, granting them preternatural strength, power which, when wielded by her sister, was spoken of in myth and legend, power which, when wielded by Luna, was spoken in hushed whispers and threats of the reaper of souls. The spell complete, she leaned forward and delivered a kick that can, and has, shattered rock. The entire aircab shook with the impact. With a smirk, she looked back to inspect her handiwork…only for the pit of her stomach to drop.

Two new spiderwebs adorned the glass, entwining with the others. How?! What was it made out of?! Gritting her teeth, she set herself and, reinforcing the spell, kicked again and again. The cracks deepened, but nothing made it to the surface, it simply refused to yield. Instead, the aircab itself took the impact, shaking and bouncing until it cried in alarm from behind the unyielding glass.

His head resting in his hands, Anon said, "It's bulletproof. You're not gonna get through it."

Nightmare snarled, “I have done many a reprehensible act but I never lie. I said I would see it open, and open it shall be!" But he was right and she knew it. This was getting her nowhere. She let the spell fade. Her back and hips sagged with sudden weakness, the toll of pushing them beyond her natural abilities.

Turning around, she touched the tip of her horn to the impregnable barrier. It may be bulletproof but she wasn't about to let it be Nightmare proof. She gathered her power in her horn, shaping it, giving it form, into an old combat spell. It was not entirely unlike what the Ascendancy had wielded against her. A beam of pure magic but using centuries of practice to focus it tighter and tighter, refining to a pinprick of a pinprick of a pinprick. She knew it could cut through anything-even her own armor. Less than a second later, sure enough, she felt it go through. She caught the spell before it could slice into anything on the other side. Now she just needed to widen the beam, slowly, carefully, keeping the power confined, keeping it shaped, keeping it under her control. She could feel whatever made up the wall bubbling, melting away like wax. An acrid smell assaulted her nostrils. Like burning quicksilver, she had only ever smelled it once before, when the rover had been torn asunder, back on- her spell buckled, the beam lashing out and scorching something on the other side.

Focus, she's gotten rusty, she needs to focus! She pushed the smell out of her mind, concentrating fully on the spell, dragging it kicking and screaming back into her grasp. There. Now she could begin in earnest. Moving her head to keep the spell steady relative to her, she began moving, slowly cutting through the door. She heard Anon say something, but the words failed to pierce the bastion of her concentration. She barely risked a response, saying, "I made it through. I'll cut a hole big enough to crawl through."

Whatever Anon said in response, she couldn't afford to listen to it. She had to stay with the task at hoof, carving up, slowly burning away, like she was mining rock. Only once she had gone as high as she dared to go, her neck straining to keep her head straight, did she open her mind enough to listen to whatever he had been saying. He was laughing.

Anon had been laughing the entire time. She dared to ask him what was so funny.

"It's just that- hahaha- that I'm a SPACE Captain! Aaahahaha! And I'm gonna suffocate! On Earth! That's where all the air is!" He devolved into manic laughter behind Nightmare.

"Don't count on it mortal. You will persist along with me until the day I allow you to expire," she scowled, before returning her sole focus to her sorcery. She ignored his continued laughter, paid no attention to the slow return of a familiar agony in her chest, gave the sounds from Anon changing no heed, focusing solely on cutting through the wall. At some point, Anon stopped laughing.

Finally, she reached the other end, horn to the floor. She pushed with her forehoof and a roughly pony-sized hole in the wall gave way. With an air of relief, she let the spell die…only for her horn to blaze, weaving several spells out of habit. The ice on her fur thawed, her eyes stopped stinging and the whine in her ears ceased. The same spells from…before. Cries of the aircab's desperation poured out through the hole as flashing lights bathed the world in shades of purple. Violet and Ultraviolet, she realized. Falling to her belly, she stuck her head in to look over the alien controls. Dozens of gauges, levers and buttons greeted her. She shouted to be heard over the alarms, "Captain, I'm through! How do I use the controls?!" Panting from that slight exertion, she strained her ears to listen for his instructions. Nothing. She couldn't even hear the translator over the screaming. "Captain? I can't hear you!" Wriggling backwards, she turned and saw his unmoving, frost covered body.

"Anonymous!" In an instant she was at his body. It couldn't be…she couldn't be too late! She bent down and placed her unadorned ear against his throat. He was still breathing! Barely… the final rasps of a dying animal. He needed her magic now, the protection on her, if he was to have any chance of surviving. She just needed to extend it to him, she needed to…to… she couldn't remember. Panic's claws dug into her mind. There was a way, she KNEW there was a way, she watched her sister do it, but she's tied the spells so deeply into her very being and it had been so long since she had another to protect and she couldn't remember, she couldn't get the fog to clear, why couldn't she get the fog to clear?!

Another gasp. Almost like he was snoring. New plan. Air was below them. Her body could cushion the fall. Using her magic, she hauled his limp body onto her back and hooked his arms through the back of her breastplate. It bit into her chest now-good. It was tight. She stuffed her papers into his bag and grabbed it in her mouth, her fangs puncturing the thin material and a foul tasting sock within.

Now the door. If the one to the cockpit was locked, this would be too. But they were in the air. Damn anything foolish enough to fly nearby, they were getting out of this deathtrap NOW! She gathered her magic to her horn, all of it, the power that once brought her world to its knees, and unleashed it without an ounce of control in it mighty blast. The fuselage tore open and a wave of destruction hurtled off into the distance, dooming anything that it would strike. Icy talons tore at her as the wind poured in through the gaping wound. With a galloping stride, she leapt out into the air, wings spread, only for the downdraft from the propellers to knock her senseless.

She tumbled head over hooves, wings beating furiously. It was no use. The air was too thin for her wings to get hold. Anon flopped limply on her back, throwing off any attempt she made at righting herself. As the world spun between sky and sea, an ancient memory bubbled up from her former life. "Legs and wings out Lulu! Like when we hid from the dragons, then you can right yourself. I know you can do it!"

She followed her sisters instructions just as she had so long ago. The air clawed and bit but she held firm, sure enough, her tumble slowed, the ocean settling into its rightful place below her. Next, angle of attack-she needed to fly, not fall. Pulling her legs in, she tilted her wings and twisted herself into a dive. The air poured over her now, but it chose a new target to attack, pulling at Anon, trying to rip him from her back. She clutched at him with her magic and mane as she writhed to get steeper, tighter…now! She flared her wings out. The force slammed into her like a mace to the chest. Her wings were almost torn from their sockets as her head snapped forward, Anon's bouncing off the back of her helmet with a sickening crack. But she could feel the air held under her wings. She beat her wings, turning towards the coastline, naught but a blur beneath the evening sun. Now that she had tamed it on this world, the wind was was as quiet and still as a child waiting to hear the punishment for disobedience. There wasn't even a breeze to help her. All she had was her altitude, she had to pump her wings for every inch over the ocean. She wasn't sure she could make it before, and now? …She HAD to make it. Her Captain was relying on her.

 

 

-----

"Thirty seconds until visual range, sir," said Ensign Husa.

"Understood," Captain Anonymous nodded towards the coms station, "Get our scientific advisor to the bridge."

"Aye Captain," Lieutenant Karo.

"Do we really need the babysitter, Captain?" Lt Green asked, asked, looking back from his station.

It was an apt description, but one Anon did not appreciate. Every human crewed ship had at least one Ssthaki on board, while the opposite was not true for Ssthakic crewed ships. After seven years of success, the general sentiment of the crew was that they had long since outgrown the need for training wheels. It was a sentiment Anon had been trying to quash for just as long.

"Until you can tell me how the Tunnlers work, I don't want to hear it," he looked around at the entire bridge crew, "That goes to all of you. I'm tired of this. Rhindi is as much a member of the crew as anyone else, and frankly, is the smartest person on board. Now are we in range?"

"Aye Captain," Green replied sullenly, as much an answer as it was acknowledgement of the admonishment.

Anon called to see and a moment later the main screen lit with their find. It certainly was not true color, the screen was filled with the darkened surface of a roiling sun. In the center there was a dark mass. Scan lines slid over the screen one at a time, each bringing progressively more detail and color to the object. It soon became a gagged, glittering emerald. Anon gave a low whistle. It didn't look real. "You sure that's a ship? It looks like something I'd buy my future ex-wife."

The joke earned him a couple polite chuckles. "Aye Captain, let me show you," Green started drawing on her screen and labels pointing to various parts of the emerald appeared, "Propulsion, engineering, habitation, these look like spent weaponry, if they ever had any, command would have been… here."

It all looked like one big rock to Anon, but he trusted his crew. If they said it was a ship, it was a ship. He leaned in, looking over the emerald. "No scorch marks, nothing. You were right Green, it's undamaged. Speculation everyone. How do you think it got here?"

They discussed a few ideas, Karo being particularly fond of his pet theory of a living planet chasing them, before they settled onto the much more mundane consensus that it was most likely the product of a miscalculated wormhole jump. "They couldn't contact anyone without the Ascendancy finding out where they were," Husa concluded, "once life support failed, they all would have cooked."

The doors to the bridge opened and a thick spider leg stepped onto the plush carpeting. "Ssthaki on deck!" Everyone but Anon leapt to attention as Rhindi entered the bridge. Its flared its cobra-like hood in annoyance and hissed, their translators activating for the first time, "Why do you keep doing that? We're not in the navy and we're not in Star Trek, it's not real." Well that was where it was wrong. Just because Anon had been beaten to the name Enterprise didn't mean the One Bad Date Too Many wasn't SPIRITUALLY the Enterprise. Not that he could admit that in front of the crew. “What did you want me to see?”

Behind the Ssthaki, as the doors were closing, Nightmare slipped in. Each step was ginger, careful, as though she was walking through a field of broken glass. Anon paid her no mind as he pointed at the monitors, responding to Rhindi's question, “You tell us. Is this what we think it is?”

Rhindi stopped and gaped at the ship on the monitor, labels and all. With awestruck hisses, it asked, “Is that...You found a Ket ship...? What condition is it in?!”

Green cleared her labels and changed the view to a more Ssthakic standard, the colors all shifted deeper into the violet and red ranges, beyond what humans could see, and said, “There's a lot of interference from the star obviously, but we're not seeing any signs of damage. It's just derelict, on a decaying orbit.”

Nightmare picked her way through the bridge, dodging crew members with skill as she looked over the displays with the air of a drill instructor examining a cadet's footlocker. The mist that perpetually surrounded her spread out over consoles, but it didn't seem to have any affect. “I'm not seeing any brain damage...there should be something...” Brain damage? Oh she must be talking about the ship.

Anon nodded to confirm both of his crew members, “Yea. It's a little on the crispy side, but otherwise it seems to be intact.”

Rhindi whirled around, its foreclaws flexing with excitement. “This could be the find of the decade! Of the century! If we could get on board, if their computers are still intect, we could jump ours twenty years in the future! Thirty! And the ship-building! If we could tow it-did you know they GREW those ships?! We could have self-regenerating Whipple-shields! We might not even need shields anymore, we could have regenerating hulls! We need to get on board now! Do you have any plans?!”

Anon nodded and motioned for Rhindi to join him, “That's why I called you in here. We're coming up with a plan to tow it out of orbit and back to Sanctuary. We can't just pull it out so I'm thinking if we open a wormhole next to it and fly in that way...”

“The tidal forces would rip our ship apart,” Rhindi responded.

“Right, but there's a planet in system, I'm thinking we can use its gravity well...”

They worked on the exact calculations together, hashing out what Anon thought was an excellent plan, hampered only by Rhindi's continual insistence that it could not be done on wormhole-compatible computers, that the life support would be unable to take the strain. It eventually boiled down to a professional argument that either the crew would be in jeopardy from the heat of the star, or their quantum computers would be sacrificed on the return voyage, something Rhindi was unwilling to allow. Had he allowed the discussion private, Anon had the feeling it would have risen to personal insults-he was certainly ready to start calling the alien crewmate a few choice names- but neither of them were willing to show that level of unprofessional behavior in front of the rest of the crew.

Finally, Rhindi had enough, “No more. This cannot be done with a Ssthakic ship. It is too close to the sun to be salvaged, I'm officially giving this project a blue light. Do NOT attempt it.” The change in mood from the crew was immediate. Everyone on board was smart enough not to say anything, not to directly challenge the Ssthaki's orders..to its face. But a few of them, Husa especially, looked as though they wanted to punt its abdomen out the airlock for invoking its ultimate authority on the vessel, overriding even the captain.

Anon, for his part, played it cool. He did not frown, he did not argue. He simply spread his arms, hands open in a conciliatory manner, “Alright, blue light it is. Ensign Husa, keep us in a steady orbit. Lieutenant Green, I want every inch of that thing scanned. Get two probes ready, I want to see if they can see into its interior. Lieutenant Karo, See if there are any other ships in range. One ship might not be enough to get this out, but two or three might be able to.” He looked to Rhindi for any further objections, but the Ssthaki simply closed its outer eyes in a smile.

“Aye Captain,” came the general, if sullen reply.

They spent the majority of the day in orbit around the star, keeping pace with their prize, so tantalizingly close, but impossible to reach, as Karo tried in vain to hail another ship. There simply was no one in range. It was the dull tedium of life aboard a scanning ship, too small to do anything useful, too valuable to risk on something dangerous. Just as they were nearing the end of their normal shift, Nightmare interrupted Anon, literally shoving her face between him and the monitor. "No you haven't. It has not been all day, you've skipped over that part. I need lucidity Captain, you need to focus!"

A private message popped up behind her. It was Green asking him to come to her station. Once he did so, she leaned in and pointed to a strange set of readings. It couldn't be... “Are you sure?” he asked.

“I didn't want to say anything without a second opinion,” she said sheepishly.

There was something moving in the ship. Something about a meter tall, that was moving without touching the ground. Something which everyone knew was utterly impossible. Something the computer said was organic, was alive. “Hey Rhindi...?” Anon called out to the alien, which had been busy looking over a materials analysis. “We're seeing lifesigns here.”

Rhindi looked up, disturbed, “That's not possible. It has to be a sensor issue.”

Green shook her head, “Three re-calibrations. They're correct.”

“Then they must be faulty. Scan with the backups,” came the dismissive reply.

Green looked at Anon, silently begging him to let her strangle the alien with her bare hands as she called back, "Already did ."

"Rhindi, do you really think we'd bother you with this if we didn't rule out the obvious? I'm not saying it's a Ket, but I AM saying there's someone on that ship!"

Snarling a polite request to see, Rhindi skittered over to examine the data itself. Anon stepped aside, just in time for Nightmare to rear up on her hindlegs and grab Anon with her fetlocks. Her head towered over him as the cloud of stars writhed around her, like a nest of angry snakes. She bared her fangs and spat out, "Listen to me you idiot. Someone is trying to kill us. I made it back to shore. I don't know where to go next, I need to know where it's safe to hide you!"

"Captain, if there's someone on board, they're not going to last much longer," Karo said, drawing Anon's attention. Nightmare seemed to vanish with a cry of frustration as he looked over. "I'm not receiving any signals from the ship, but I've been working through some ghost signals since we entered system. I just thought it was interference from the star, but… what if it lost power just before we got here?"

Something inside Anon snapped. He strode over to his station and mashed the button for the ship-wide announcement, "All crew, all crew! There is a soul trapped aboard the ship we have been studying. Rescue is possible but it is not without risk to our persons or equipment! I'm putting it to a vote, if you are willing to put your lives at risk for this alien, vote aye now!"

"Have you lost your mind?!" Rhindi roared out and reared its head back, towering over Anon. "I gave you a blue light, you CANNOT go through with this!"

Anon gave a quick glance at his messages. The entire human crew had responded with 'Aye.' With the entire crew behind him, he stepped forward under the ophidian shadow of the Ssthaki's head and jammed a finger into its thorax. "Computers can be replaced. Lives cannot! I am not going to sit here and watch someone die alone on a derelict ship!"

"You put it to a vote," venom dripped from its fangs as it forced that word out like an insult. "That is not the behavior of a Technocrat. That is the behavior of a politician!"

Anon did not back down from the threat of that accusation. He glared up at the Ssthaki, his voice full of the fury that threat deserved, “Politicians hide in bunkers and use regulations and loopholes to hide from responsibility! I am the Captain here, this is MY crew to handle how I see fit, and I am the one who will deal with the consequences when we get back to Earth. Now you have two choices. You can either go to Engineering to help us, or you can sit in a lifeboat and wait while we try to rescue this thing without you. Which is it?"

It glowered at him for a moment before it slowly stepped back, settling back down in its normal curved posture. "I'll see to it that you do, when we return to Sanctuary Station next. Until then, I'll do my best to ensure the safety of this vessel and its crew. In Engineering."

His hands shaking in anger, he turned back to look at the monitor, seeing the tiniest anomaly which he now knew meant someone was clinging to life, waiting as Rhindi scuttled off. As he heard the whoosh of the doors opening and closing, Nightmare stepped up beside him, matching his gaze. "Grandfather of Two, Father of Four, Husband of One. It's little wonder we simply call him Ket."

Anon nodded. "Yea. Even his own name is a reminder of what he's lost."

Nightmare cocked an ear and leaned in, giving Anon a strange look. "Oh? You finally responded. Do you finally see me here, on your bridge?"

Confused, Anon said, "Well, yea. You're as much a part of my crew as anyone else. Aren't you?"

Nightmare's lips slowly curled into a smile, peeling back into a humorless, toothy grin, baring her fangs. She reared up and pressed her forehooves into Anon's shoulders, slamming him back against the console he had just been looking at. She snaked her head in, her neck more like a snake's than it should be, until her fangs brushed against his neck with every word as she whispered, "Do you know how long's it's been since a mortal's defied me in a dream? And you did it three times in a minute!" She ran her hooves, her fetlocks over his chest, her barrel heaving as though breathless, like a lover in the throes of passion, "Ooohhh, what I wouldn't give to drag you down into the depths of your subconscious, to peel your mind layer by layer, until I have everything that makes you, you…"

Anon struggled and squirmed against those hooves, trying to slip away as he had earlier, but she had him pinned. "Green, Husa, Karo, someone get her off me!" He looked around, eyes wild, but he didn't see them. There wasn't even any sign of their chairs or stations. Why would there be? His crew had all been reassigned after rescuing Ket and that was long before Nightmare showed up.

She looked up at him. Her slit eyes were ravenous, a snake ready to devour its next meal. One hoof was planted on his sternum, the other over his heart. She lowered her head until her horntip dragged over his uniform, catching on the threads and said in a voice heavy with regret, "If only I didn't need you awake…" Without warning, she jerked her head forward and impaled him on her horn.

He screamed, grabbing at that horn, trying to push her back, to force it out of him. She twisted her head and drove it forward, deeper. His legs slipped out from under him as they went numb. He was supported entirely by the weight of the horn embedded in his stomach. The corners of his vision began to grow dark as she spoke without a hint of the earlier lust, "There is someone hunting us right now. I believe they are the Ascendancy. We are out of time. I need to know where-" she jerked her head and drove her horn into his heart.

His eyes snapped open. With a scream, he sat upright and ran his hands over his chest, looking for the blood, for the hole in his chest.

"-to go next," Nightmare finished matter-of-factly, like she hadn't just impaled him on her horn. Which…she hadn't, Anon slowly began to realize. He was covered in sand. It had been a dream. He looked around, trying to remember where they had been last…wherever it was, it certainly wasn't here. It was the middle of the night and they were on the beach, he slowly realized, sitting behind a lifeguard tower. Nightmare wasn't even looking at him. She had her back towards him as she peaked out around the tower, watching something in the sky.

Still panting, gasping from the nightmare, he looked back at her and asked dumbly, "What the hell was that?!"

Nightmare looked back and scowled at him. Any trace of the passion from the dream was long gone as she said, "I had tried to be gentle and you failed. I needed you awake. I'm not going to shake you like an animal. Now were you listening to me?"

Hands and legs still shaking, Anon cralwed over to the lifeguard, using it to climb to his feet, still unsteady. He wracked his brain. Where HAD they been last…? He remembered they had gotten on the aircab, they had argued…then they were over the ocean…and…"Someone tried to kill us."

Nightrmare rolled her eyes, "A brilliant deduction. Perhaps you should be a detective, they could write novels about you. I've found the culprit, but I am in no condition to confront them."

"You have? Who?" Anon looked out from the tower but all he saw was an empty, deserted beach.

"Two disks. The Ascendency."