"Curious," Twilight said as she telekinetically held the device.

"There! That should do it," Twilight said, bringing the device over to Trevar. "You know, I'm rather surprised at the sloppy way you tried to work on it. It would never have worked properly after the way you did the job. But I fixed it for you," she said, smiling.

"Wait—WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'YOU FIXED IT'?!?" Trevar exclaimed.

Pardus and Panthera both did a quick scan of the tactical nuke and realized it was active again.

'What? That can't be right!' Pardus exclaimed. He looked for the detonator and high explosive that Trevar had removed from the plutonium trigger. It was missing from the top of the tool box! Panthera reported the backup ignition capacitor that Trevar had snapped off the controller board was missing from where Trevar had thrown it on the floor! He then saw the slug of lead from the bullets that had been poured into the shot cavity was now sitting on the floor by the tool box!

"FLAMINGSHIT! OUTTATHEWAY!!" Pardus roared, grabbing it with his tractor beam and launching for the exit. He felt a bit of resistance before he reached the passageway suddenly drop off, and then Panthera warned him the blue pegasus was chasing after him. He didn't have time to talk! Both their sensors agreed with one another: the countdown was at fourteen seconds!

Pardus had the maps that Panthera had developed when she had initially followed the blue pegasus, and he used all the power he could pump into the antigravs and additional tractor beams to pull/push him along the zigzagging route, trying to move faster and faster until he could reach an exit to the sky. Even so, there were a few times his wings scraped along the narrow passageway.

Open sky and eleven seconds remain! Sensors indicated the pegasus had stayed with him the entire run through the corridor.

"Sorry, Little One, but this is where I have to leave you behind" he muttered. Kicking his antigrav into overdrive, he shot straight up and broke Mach 1 before he had gone a few hundred feet. Blasting through the storm clouds that had already begun to dissipate, his sonic boom sped the process. Angling his shields to aid in piercing the atmosphere, he was already at Mach 6.7 and accelerating, ramping up the power being fed to his inertial dampeners and internal antigrav generator. He was effectively doing 323 gs at the moment, and this was only the beginning. It was a good thing that whenever they carried something within their shields, they became the frame of reference. Otherwise, the warhead's explosives would have felt the shock and set it off.

But at that moment, his sensors indicated a disturbance below. Looking down, he was surprised at seeing a prismatic shockwave spreading as the pegasus had somehow broken the sound barrier as well and was still giving chase!

"Impressive! Most impressive!" Pardus said.

Mach 21.25 and nine seconds remain. The pegasus was still following nearly reaching Mach 5 by now.

Mach 47.6 and eight seconds, His altitude at the moment was 17 kilometers. The atmosphere was thinning much faster than back on Earth. It was well below survivability for anything needing lungs. Sensors indicated the pegasus had ceased to follow. She had lasted far longer than expected, making just over Mach 15 before finally giving up at 6760 meters.

Pardus looked down and had to use maximum zoom on his optics in order to spot her.

Correction, she hasn't given up! She's wandering aimless, no doubt due to hypoxia. The altitude she's reached is way too thin to breathe. With the way the air pressure dropped off on this world, it was the equivalent of 12 kilometers on Earth. She's in trouble!

But he couldn't stop to help. He had to dispose of the nuke! Mach 144 and six seconds. 55 kilometers altitude, atmosphere density equal to about 99.5 kilometers back on Earth.

"WHAT THE HELL YOU MEAN 'YOU FIXED IT'?!?" Trevar angrily shouted at the purple—creature, repeating his question.

"HEY! DON'T YA BE YELLIN' AT PRINCESS TWILIGHT!" Applejack yelled, jumping forward to get in Trevar's face.

"Why are you so ungrateful? I analyzed it and found you hadn't done a very good job of repairing it," Twilight Sparkle said, taken aback by Trevar's outrage. "The least you could do is thank me. But that creature stole it, and now we have to get it back!"

"That's a fucking nuke!" Trevar said, pulling back his volume but still trying to get around the orange pony. "I wasn't fixing it! I was intentionally breaking it! I was making sure it would never work! Now we've got less than ten seconds before that thing goes off!"

"BACK OFF, BUCKO!" Applejack hollered, rearing up to put a hoof on Trevar's chest.

"Wait! It's a bad thing if that happens?" Twilight asked, seeming to finally catch some of Trevar's concern. She stepped up to pull Applejack back.

"Uh, yeah! Pardus is risking his life right now trying to get it to a minimum safe distance," Trevar said.

"That's only a ten-kiloton device," Scott said. "A couple miles is all it'll need. But why is that creature taking it?"

"There's the damage to the planet's environment to consider," Trevar shot back. "These creatures have never had to deal with plutonium poisoning or the long term radiation hazards. 'Minimum safe distance' is outside the atmosphere!"

'Panthera! Mark my position and my telemetry!' Trevar heard Pardus send. 'The blue pegasus tried to follow me but she's gone too high. She's at twenty-two thousand feet and is in freefall! I've still got this bloody nuke to deal with. Seven seconds left!'

"Your friend's in trouble!" Panthera suddenly shouted before launching to fly to the exit.

"Rainbow? What's happening?" Twilight exclaimed.

"She's passed out from flying too high," Trevar informed the natives. "Hopefully, Panthera will be able to catch her. Pardus gave her your friend's last known location."

"How d'ya know that?" Applejack demanded.

"Apparently, Mr. Trevar and those—shadowcats—are telepathic with one another," Scott said. "As well as being telekinetic."

Twilight and Applejack blinked at the news.

"You can do magic?" Twilight exclaimed. "B-b-but humans can't do magic!"

"And how would you know that?" Trevar asked, glaring at her. The pegasus-unicorn, the unisus, he reminded himself, nervously gulped.

"I-I-I've been to y-your world," Twilight admitted.

"Hmm, I think we'll need to talk about that later," Trevar said. "Meanwhile, I think we should go out to meet your friend when the shadowcats bring her back. Assuming they're able to find and catch her in time."

"What'd they do ta Rainbow?" Applejack shouted.

"Pardus is flying up out of the atmosphere to get rid of that nuke, but your friend chased him and has gone too far up. She's passed out."

"'N tha' varmint left her ta die!?" Applejack yelled.

"The nuke first! Then your friend! Assuming Pardus isn't killed when that thing goes off," Trevar angrily snapped back. "And the pegasus is at least in freefall from twenty-nine thousand feet. It'll be quite some time before she hits the ground from that height. Besides, Panthera's on her way, so there's a good chance she'll be caught."

Mach 218, minimal orbital altitude, five seconds to go and there's the sun! Pardus noted then blinked in surprise. And—SHIT! That—sun—is awfully damned close!

Fuck it, it'll have to do! he thought, putting his full power into his tractor beam and flung the bomb at maximum acceleration toward the glowing orb. Focusing his graviton emitters, he drove the nuke as hard as he could, pushing it almost to sixteen percent light speed before it was out of range. By his estimation, the nuke would be just over a fifth of the way there when it detonates, not because of anything to do with relativity but because the sun was just that damned close! Just a bit over 273,000 miles! But at least a large portion of the debris would continue on into the body. Most would be scattered about into innumerable long term obits about the system, but at the speed he was able to send it, almost nothing of the blast would come back to the planet.

Satisfied that it was safely on its way, he turned back to the planet so that he could aid in rescuing the stubborn little blue creature. But then the information he got from his sensors, suddenly gave him pause.

First, he was still rising up, but way too fast. He had gone nearly three hundred miles further than he should have by now and wasn't slowing down as gravity ought to be dictating.

Second, the planet itself was a hair shy of 4,460 miles in diameter! 'It's not much bigger than Mars, but it has Earth-normal gravity?' he exclaimed.

Third, he just began detecting a couple of intense graviton beams that were being emitted from an area very close to his launch site. Weirder yet, the beams were somehow bending! They lanced out, narrowly missing him, but now the beams where diverging. One going to this world's rocky moon that was still in the night sky, the other curving about the horizon to latch onto the sun!

Fourth, the moon was suddenly moving!

'Da'fuq?!?' Pardus exclaimed. 'Panthera…? When you get a chance, can you confirm my readings?'

'I was about to ask you the same thing! Am I seeing the moon has suddenly started moving like someone's manually shifting it?' she asked.

'Yeah, I think so,' Pardus replied. 'I'm picking up a hell of a strong graviton emission coming from an area north of your position,' Pardus said, diving for reentry. 'For a moment, there was a second beam coming from the same area and was somehow bending about to latch onto this planet's sun! But it's gone now. Oh, and the sun is not even seventeen forty-seven hundred klicks in diameter and just two seventy-one thousand miles out!'

'That's not possible! Did you get a spectrum reading off of it?'

'Mostly silicon vapor or plasma, but mixed with other stuff! It's almost the same composition as our moon,' Pardus replied as his shields started to glow from reentry. 'But that's no ordinary star, that's for damned sure!'

'I'm now detecting that second graviton beam again!' Pardus said. As he broadcast, the sun started to come around the planet's limb.

'Holy fuck!' Panthera exclaimed.

'Got that pegasus in sight yet?' Pardus inquired when he reached the creature's last known position at twenty-two thousand feet and reduced his speed to subsonic.

'I see her! She's fifteen hundred feet below you in free fall and five miles out bearing 249 relative to you,' Panthera said. 'I'm coming up on her right now.'

'Got you both in sight!' Pardus sent going back to supersonic. 'I'm on my way!'

They reached her at about the same time, and then matched her falling speed so that Panthera could reach out to pull her in.

"She's not breathing!" Panthera exclaimed. "And the air's still too thin for CPR."

"Combine our shields! Reach out as far as we can and grab as much air as possible," Pardus instructed after giving the problem a moment's thought.

"And pull the shields in to compress the air we capture, and then do CPR! Got it!" Panthera said, understanding.

Rainbow Dash gasped and coughed after a couple of puffs were applied to her mouth.

"Huh! That's an interesting feature!" Pardus said, observing how the pegasus' eyes acted when she woke up. "So weird! Their irises can contract, too; and apparently independent of their pupils."

"Heh! I noticed that when I decloaked behind them back in the tunnel!" Panthera said with a laugh.

"Hey, you bunch'a thievin' vultures! Give back that object you stole from the humans, RIGHT NOW!" the blue pegasus yelled when she became aware of where she was.

"And you're welcome!" Pardus said, laughing.

"I'm warnin' you! I'll so kick both of your tails!" the pegasus exclaimed, glaring from one to the other panther.

"First of all, I just saved all of your lives, and kept a nice chunk of real estate from being poisoned for thousands of years," Pardus said. "That object was a bomb that Trevar had disabled until your purple friend unwittingly fixed it and nearly got us all killed!"

"Wha-a-a?" Rainbow Dash exclaimed.

"I manage to get rid of it by tossing it into your sun, before coming back down here to catch you so you wouldn't go splat!" Pardus finished. "Again, you're welcome."

Rainbow Dash looked about and her eyes did that weird double contraction of pupils and irises once more.

"Whoa! I've never been this high before! We shouldn't even b' able ta breathe up here!"

"For a while, you weren't!" Panthera said.

"So—uh—how're we breathin' now?" the pegasus asked.

"We're helping with that," Panthera told her. "Just relax and we'll get you down safely."

"You're a very impressive creature," Pardus said. "We've never encountered a biologic who could break the sound barrier at will without protective machinery."

"Well, if it's all the same to you, I'll—" the equine began, trying to pull away from Panthera's embrace, but was interrupted by both Panthera tightening her grip and Pardus laying a paw on her side with claws outstretched.

"Belay that. Right now, you have two choices," Pardus said, growling as his eyes flared with a red aura. "You can either relax and enjoy the trip down, or—" He looked off to the side and fired off his eye beams set to stun. The beam lanced out to stop at their enveloping shields. "Or, you can relax and not enjoy it!" he emphasized as he looked back at the pegasus with his eyes still glowing. "Your decision."

"Uh—I'll-l-l-l take door number—one?" Rainbow Dash ventured with a nervous gulp.

"Good choice," Pardus said, grinning. But he left his paw laid on her and his eyes remained powered up. Just in case.

"I can't believe you're with the NSA," Scott said as they came out of the Castle. "No one who works for them would ever trust a nuke with a strange alien they just met!"

"Well, I've certainly have got a better reason to trust those cats than I do you," Trevar said, pretty much ignoring the lieutenant's argument that had begun once they started out of the chamber. "They neither tried to blow me up with a nuke, nor tried to stop me from disarming it."

"Then how do you explain—" Scott started in again, but was interrupted by Trevar rounding on her.

"Truth be told, Lieutenant," Trevar began, "I never said I was with the NSA. In fact, I'm not even sure the person your colonel spoke to even told him I was."

"Just who the hell are you?" she demanded.

"Think about it for a moment. If I were NSA, then just about everything I've told you would be a lie. It is what their job entails, after all. However, I've not spoken one single lie to you whatsoever for the entire time we've been together," Trevar said with a smirk.

"Are you a terrorist?!?" Scott yelled.

"I am, what would be properly called, a renegade vigilante, thank you," Trevar responded with a mock bow. "Mostly, I focus on organized crime and illegal narcotics. But sometimes, I operate as a freelance anti-terror agent to stop several little matters that would've made 9-11 look like a minor act of vandalism. Or sometimes as a troubleshooter, for such little problems like what you guys cooked up at your base. And the clearance needed to know who I really am is way above the paygrade of anyone in the government. Including and especially you," Trevar finished.

"What, like—Batman?" she asked, laughing.

"Hmm—more like—'Bat-Lizard'," Trevar wispily said.

"And you've got your own set of warp coils?"

"Yep. Like I said, several in fact."

"And you know how to disarm nukes, too?" she asked.

"Yep. Like I said, they're pretty simple and straightforward."

"If you've got all that, you could've been a multibillionaire! Then why that 'renegade vigilante' lifestyle, as you call it?"

"Because how I learned about building warp coils and all that goes with it would raise too many questions," Trevar grimly responded. "If they ever caught me, I'd be facing several murder charges. Whoop-dee-doo. But if I ever revealed that technology, eventually, they'd force me to explain where I got it from. And should I do, then they'd really be after my blood! I'd be hunted more for far worse than I'm being hunted for my freelance work."

"And where exactly did you get it?" she demanded.

"Let's just say—those shadowcats and these talking ponies aren't the first confirmed evidence I came across that proves 'we're not alone'," Trevar said glaring at her.

"Personally, I'm still calling you a terrorist!" she spat.

"Wutevah," Trevar sighed.

The natives, for their part, kept silent as they proceeded, obviously listening to every word that was being said. When they passed through some of the hallway with the damaged overhead, the ponies expressed delight. The sun had risen and the storm clouds were dissipating, but other than that, they kept silent.

He wasn't too awfully concerned, at least not about the lieutenant. She would be dead about the time the ship arrived to pick him up. There might be some possible problems with the natives, though. But at least for the time being, his companions could pass for possible natives that they just hadn't seen before, so he had that going for him. Anything that the lieutenant would bring up, she would more likely have to face the consequences for such than he would. It was her nuke, after all.

"There's good news," the Trevar said, turning to them. "They've caught your friend. She suffered some injury but she seems to be doing well for the moment. I suggest you have whatever physicians you have check her over."

"Oh! That's great news!" Twilight exclaimed. "Can you tell us what happed to her?"

"The cold and the thin air had gotten to her," Trevar said, continuing to walk. "She wasn't breathing when they got to her, but she immediately woke up with CPR and they say she doesn't seem to have taken any noticeable brain damage from it. I know it sounds serious, and yes it should be treated as such. But Panthera said your pegasus friend was flying erratically just before they reached her, so she must've still been breathing up until she started to free fall."

The Equestrians were initially shocked by the news then visibly relieved.

"Oh my goodness!" Rarity exclaimed. "I hope she'll be alright!"

"The damned thing must be a regular Chuck Yeager," Trevar said with a laugh. "She sure stretched The Envelope to the breaking point!"

"Hey! Tha's no way to talk 'bout our friend!" Applejack shouted.

"No! That didn't sound at all very nice!" Rarity agreed.

"Actually, General Charles Yeager is a hero on our world," Lieutenant Scott spoke up. "He was the first man to break the sound barrier where we come from."

"Oh! A general?" Rarity squealed. "That does sound good!"

"Heh! Don' nopony say nuttin' to her 'bout being called a gen'ral!" Applejack muttered with a chuckle. "Rainbow's head's swelled 'nuff as is."

"Although, what the lieutenant said isn't entirely accurate," Trevar spoke up. "Yeager is just the first human to break the sound barrier—and live! Others had broken the barrier before, but they all died when their planes broke up or they lost control and crashed."

"That's horrible!" Twilight said astonished. "When did all that happen?"

"Let's see…Yeager broke the barrier in 1947, some ninety-one years ago," Trevar explained. "The very first time the barrier was broken is rumored to have been shortly before jets were created during a really bad war just a few years before but no one knows who or the exact date. However, all we do know that, if it was true, the poor bastards didn't live long. Of course, because everybody now had had jets, and once the war was finally over, the effort to break Mach 1 got serious. Of course, the records are more complete from there. There were lots of crashes until Yeager finally managed to bring it home.

"And the old buzzard's still around, as far as I know. He's currently supposed to be the oldest human still living. Never got a chance to meet him, but I'd love to have the opportunity. He's quite the character, from all accounts. Back home, they started naming bridges, roads, and airports after him. He once talked about how they normally name such things only after dead people and that he was worried that someone was trying to tell him something," he finished with a grin.

But their discussion was brought to an abrupt end when they saw a couple unisi approaching from the air.

"Princess Celestia! Princess Luna!" the purple one suddenly exclaimed and took the lead to greet the newcomers.