My story begins, like so many others, with a knock on the door. Unfortunately, the sudden noise breaking my concentration caused my hoof to touch one of the lasers I was working with, nudging it slightly off center. I could only widen my eyes as the spinning piece of metal it was focused on glowed bright red, warped, then shattered into hundreds of red hot shards—one of which found a new home in the soft flesh of my cheek.

Not exactly the perfect beginning to my story, really, but at least it sets the tone.

“Ember?!” The stallion’s voice accompanied the opening of the little sheet metal door, which rattled on its rusty hinges as he barged through. Black and white stripes blurred in my vision as the zebra rushed to my side and gently cradled my head while I flailed and gnashed my teeth. I heard a little masculine yelp that might have been the result of my teeth closing around his foreleg; honestly, the burning in my cheek wasn’t helping me think clearly.

The hoof to my horn did, however, snap me out of it, at least long enough to stop biting.

Strong hooves lifted me into a sitting position with my back resting against the rusted side of the lather (some horrendously evil pun on ‘laser’ and ‘lathe’ that made me want to go back a few hundred years and slap the creator) while the red haze from my vision slowly cleared. When it did, the four or five zebras in front of me fused into one, who was giving me quite the worried look with his green eyes. “You alright, Ember?”

I used my hooves to answer that question. To be fair, he should’ve seen it coming.

He recoiled from the sudden application of hoof to nose, rubbing his striped muzzle as I struggled to stand, only to end as a flailing mess. “Gauge, you fucking—gah!” I screamed, hissing in pain through my clenched teeth. Turns out having a three inch long shard of metal protruding from your face makes talking more than a little painful. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes, grabbed the fucking thing in my magic, and tore it free with a little more force than was absolutely necessary. I could’ve sworn I was going to pass out from the pain alone, and my head lolled back against the side of the lather.

The curved splinter of metal clattered to the ground somewhere by my tail, and I simply focused on breathing to keep the pain at bay. In, three, out, three. My hoof traveled to my cheek to stem the warm blood pouring from the wound, and I floated over a first aid kit hanging on the doorframe. I dug out a vinegar-soaked rag from a plastic bag and pressed it against my face, hissing as it reignited the pain and cleansed the wound. Simple and basic, yes, but really, when your colony’s almost two hundred winters late for a supply drop from the next star over, you make do with what you have.

“Let me see,” Gauge said, kneeling in front of me and taking the rag out of my magical grasp. He pulled it away from my face, inadvertently letting me see the red plastered to it, before refolding it and pressing it back. “You have any Stabil-Ice?”

“A small pouch,” I muttered, pulling it out of the kit. It was a little plastic pouch, not even bigger than my hoof, colored in faded blue and white lettering. They were fairly uncommon nowadays, but were practically divine, capable of closing up deep wounds almost instantly. On the one hoof, the cut to my face wasn’t life threatening. On the other, it wouldn’t stop bleeding until I used Stabil-Ice or got stitches. And stitches meant dull needles and thread made from a mare’s tail hair. Given without anesthetic. With more vinegar splashed into the wound so it didn’t get infected.

I primed the pouch by folding it in two, then dropped it in Gauge’s hoof and took a breath. Gauge, careful as always, tore the end off of the pouch with his teeth, took the rag away from my face, and squeezed the clear ooze into the wound. I gasped as an icy tingling seized hold of the left side of my face, then faded into numbness. A few experimental stretches of my jaw worked out the chilly touch of the gel while Gauge chucked the empty patch into the furnace at the end of the room.

“Better?” he asked, offering a hoof to help me stand.

“Meh,” I responded, taking his hoof in my own. He heaved, pulling me to my hooves, and I rubbed the now-closed wound on my face. “Now I have to explain to Mom why I used one of our pouches.”

“I’m sure she’ll understand,” Gauge said, stepping to the side and eyeing the other shards of metal on the floor. “What were you even working on?”

“Barrel for Fortitude,” I muttered, picking up all the pieces of steel and throwing them in a melting pot sitting next to the furnace. My little forge was a mess, with tools strewn all over the various counters and benches, all illuminated by the flickering orange light of the furnace placed in the corner. I shut the laser lathe off with the flick of a switch, then gathered all the parts to a disassembled rifle I had lying on a workbench. With expert, almost mindless precision, I put the rifle back together without even looking at it, then set it aside.

Yeah, I’m pretty good with guns. I’ve had a lot of practice with them.

Gauge gave it a little poke with his hoof. “And why are you taking apart your family’s heirloom?”

“Because the barrel is worn and crooked, and the thing’s not accurate beyond fifty yards.” I slapped a hoof on the schematics I’d drawn up, which in turn were crammed to the sides of some older diagram that must’ve been drawn at least eighty winters ago. “I was trying to make a barrel myself, but out of proper steel instead of that cheap aluminum alloy Equestria used to make everything out of. The steel will give it some forward weight so it doesn’t recoil as much, and it won’t be damaged as easily as the old aluminum barrel.”

“I see. And how did this cause a shard of steel to become embedded in your face?”

I didn’t have to see him to know he was giving me that sly half-smirk of his. “Because our lather is two hundred winters overdue for a tune up, the controller circuits in the vertical beam are fried, and the horizontal beam’s optics are a broken pair of glasses and a magnifying glass. Any sudden movements to the lasers caused by, I don’t know, the machinist getting startled while she’s adjusting them can cause the spinning metal to warp and bend instead of vaporize, and then the torque rips the thing to pieces.” I spun around and pressed my hoof into his chest. “That’s how.”

The corner of Gauge’s striped muzzle twitched. “Sounds like a personal problem.”

“Oh, it’ll be your fucking personal problem,” I grumbled, turning back to my workstation and placing my tools back where they belonged. A quick flash of my horn was all it took to get things back into place. “What do you want? SCaR need new parts?”

At the mention of its name, a little drone about the size of my head chirped from outside and whizzed into the room on a pair of thrusters. Once upon a time, it was an old military drone, used for defending the base. That’s what its name stood for: Surveillance, Combat, and Reconnaissance. Gauge had managed to cobble together enough parts to repair one of them after they’d been just lying around for a hundred winters or so, and now it followed him around like a dog. It was pretty cute, really. Even if it did have an electric probe that could tase a mare and leave her paralyzed for a few minutes.

I should know. I’d slapped Gauge once before he’d gotten safeties programmed into it. SCaR didn’t like that very much.

“No, he’s good as ever,” Gauge said, leaning on the workbench with one elbow and smiling at the drone. It made a happy trilling noise and began to idly wander around my forge. “Nova sent me to get you. She wants you to be there when the techies run the tests.”

“Figures she’d send a dirty greaser to let me know,” I teased, trotting over to the furnace. I closed the vents and then shut the door to snuff out the oxygen supply and save the fuel inside for later. “They finally finished repairing Dish One?”

“We finished repairing Dish One, yes, thank you,” Gauge replied, pressing a grease-stained hoof to his chest. “The techies were just playing with their code and calculations and that sort of thing while we did the hard work. But now that that’s finally finished, they want to get started as soon as possible.”

I nodded, imagining just how antsy the techies must’ve been to get going. Maybe we could get some radio transmissions from the rest of Auris. It was one of the few ways that we knew we weren’t alone on this damn planet—whenever they occasionally trickled in. Since the radio tower we had broke a few winters ago, though, we hadn’t heard anything.

I tossed a box of .308 rounds onto a shelf above my workstation and turned back to Gauge. “Well, we don’t want to keep Nova waiting, then. Somepony has to make sure she doesn’t chew her own hoof off.”

“Working on it,” he said, shaking his head. He pivoted on the black soil and began walking towards the open door while I followed not far behind, SCaR hovering around us. “There’s only so much you can do to get a mare out of a nervous habit.”

“True that,” I muttered, then raised a hoof over my eyes as I stepped out of the forge and into the bright blue sun. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the light, then set off after Gauge, leaving the forge behind. Ahead of us, on the other side of town, three enormous structures loomed, alien constructions on an alien world. They were all massive satellite dishes, or at one point, they had been. Only one dish was still mostly whole, while the second was pockmarked with missing panels and holes across its face, and the third was just a skeleton of steel and titanium, its aluminum dish long since torn down and scrapped for parts. Many of those panels made up the buildings around me as I walked down the ashy streets.

The crisp mountain air seemed to slice its way under the hot soot clinging to my coat, peeling back layers of sweat and ash to make me feel alive again. I hummed as the bright blue light beamed down on me, providing just enough warmth to offset the high-altitude chill. Of all the places to be stranded on a foreign world, this one didn’t have much to complain about.

Except winter. Fuck winter.

Gauge bumped into me, drawing me out of my thoughts. He had that sly half-smile on his striped mug I knew all too well. “You taking everything in for one last time before Equestria picks us up?”

I rolled my eyes and shouldered him back. “Oh, definitely. It’ll be tough giving up the clean air and the view for hot water and a steady food supply. Oh, and working tools.”

“You know, I always thought that was part of the fun.” He winked at me as we skirted around the rickety porch of an aluminum shack and continued down the road. “I mean, not many forgemares can find so many different uses for aluminum.”

“Not many forgemares have only aluminum to work with,” I grumbled.

Gauge chuckled and flicked an ear at another zebra as we passed. “That’s even assuming there’s forgemares left on Equus.”

“Eh, fair point,” I conceded. I puffed out my chest and grinned. “I’ll take pride in being the best forgemare I know.”

“I think your mom still has you beat.”

“Shut up.”

Though by no means a large settlement, Blackwash was still big enough that it took some time to cross from one end of the mountaintop to the other. The walk took close to fifteen minutes, five minutes longer than it would’ve taken had the streets been empty, but it was thirteen in the morning, with another hour left until noon, and ponies (and a few zebra families) were beginning to fill the streets for lunch. An excited buzz hung over Blackwash, filling the spaces in their conversations. Everypony knew that something big was supposed to happen today involving Dish One, although nopony really knew what it was. Access to the dishes was restricted to techies, greasers, and militia. Thankfully for me, I was friends with both the techies and the greasers, and was training to become a militiamare myself. Nopony cared that I technically wasn’t a part of any of the three factions.

A rusted chain-link fence topped with jagged razor wire separated the listening outpost and the radio dishes from the rest of town. Signs that’d all but faded away from the intense blue sunlight over three centuries warned that the razor wire was also carrying a deadly arcing current designed to fry pegasi flying overhead. Clearly the signs were out of date, as I saw half a dozen pegasi glide over the fences in either direction as they came and went from the station. We’d needed that generator for other things a long time ago. I made a mental note to salvage the signs later for their aluminum.

Gauge and I shared a few words with the guards on duty, Maxima and Soil Toil (the latter of whom simply called himself Toil, because honestly, even I had to agree that the name his parents gave him was dumb), and entered the compound. Lots of flat ground, perfect for marching and drilling practices, occupied most of the space within the fence. At the far end were the buildings that made up the compound, and they were, like all pre-Silence Equestrian architecture, flank ugly. Harsh, squat structures made out of steel and aluminum, with sharp edges, small windows, and imposing doorways. Two overbearing multi-story buildings made up the barracks, which nowadays housed the techie, greaser, and militia families who didn’t have homes in town itself. The buildings exuded power, dominating the will, reminding you that you were a piece of the Equestrian machine, designed to serve and support the glory and prosperity of your nation.

Our Equestrian flags had worn away into tatters long before I was born. Guess they weren’t as powerful as they wanted us to believe.

The listening outpost itself was smaller and distinctly prefab. A few rectangular rooms were connected together with square hallways, then fastened with bolts to keep them in place. A huge blast door blocked entrance into the structure, which I always thought was strange, since Gauge told me that the walls were only an inch of steel thick. Even I could cut through that with my lasertorch, given a few minutes. But, like the barracks sitting a few hundred yards away, Equestria really did like to go all-out. Just not on the things that really mattered.

I stepped aside as Gauge approached the blast door and placed his hoof on a frog scanner. Even though I was more or less welcome within the outpost, I still didn’t have clearance to the door, and I likely never would. Only the techies and greasers were allowed in and out of the building unsupervised, and no matter how much I pestered Nova to get my hoof into the system as well, she always refused. I guess even when your dad’s the head honcho of the town, you don’t make exceptions.

Oh, yeah, that. Nova’s dad was the ‘mayor’ of Blackwash, I’d guess you call it. He didn’t really go by any title like that, though. We all just called him Chief Technician, or Stardust if we knew each other well. And since Nova and I were lifelong friends from when we were just little fillies, I knew him fairly well.

The door opened with a pneumatic hiss that was more akin to the death throes of a shrieking shrike than the gliding silence one would expect. A stuffy, dingy, rusty hallway led deeper into the prefab structure, with the ribs supporting its shape plainly showing, and the floorboards little more than dented metal grates between the ribbing. Gauge stepped inside first, his hooves making the grates dully rattle, and I followed at a tail length’s distance. There were a few greasers milling about the halls, and we exchanged some words and greasy hoof bumps with them as we passed. I didn’t mind the grease; after all, I was covered from head to tail in soot from the forge. What’s a little grease and grime on top of that?

The command room of the listening outpost was a hive of activity. Desks, panels, and blinking lights that I’d long since given up on making heads or tails out of were all but covered in papers and notes. Three dozen ponies wearing lab coats in various states of decay scurried back and forth across the room like they were trying to be everywhere at once. Their excited (and nervous) chatter filled the room, and I had to dart backwards several times to avoid getting taken out by a techie with their nose in a clipboard. After a fair bit of shuffling, Gauge and I made it to the corner of the room, which offered the smallest chance of being on the wrong end of a hit-and-run from an egghead.

It didn’t take us long to find Nova; her pristine white coat and blazing red mane stood out like a sore hoof in the dim lighting of the room. She and her dad, who was pretty big for a pegasus, were talking in the center of the room, but I couldn’t make out the words over the noise of the other techies. Stardust caught sight of us first, and patting Nova on the back, he opened a wing in our direction. Nova’s turquoise eyes found us almost immediately, and with a flutter of her own wings, she crossed the room in one bound.

“You made it just in time!” she shouted, landing on her forehooves and letting her momentum carry her muzzle forward into Gauge’s. Her wings fluttered to keep her hind legs off the ground and balance her on the tips of her forehooves as she and Gauge kissed. Seeing the large zebra and the mare I had a full head over meet for a kiss somewhere in the middle was totally adorable. SCaR just made some stuttering noise that was probably its best imitation of rolling eyes it didn’t have.

“I figured you’d need some moral support,” I teased, reaching forward and ruffling Nova’s mane when she and Gauge finally finished their tonsil hockey. She made some mewling protest and skirted away from my hoof, then held her wing out and rubbed her head back and forth against the crest to muss her mane back into its natural position. Once again I was reminded how pegasi seemed to have more bird in them than they let on. “So you’re gonna bring us back to Equus, right?”

Nova rolled her eyes, once again straddling that line between ‘playfully immature’ and ‘educated genius’. “Honestly, Ember, I really don’t think Equestria’s just waiting for us to get the outpost up and running again, assuming there even is an Equestria left. All we’re hoping for is some parting message, some explanation why.”

She waved a wing, and Gauge and I followed her bounding walk back to the terminals in the center of the room. Her father had already moved away to talk with some other techies by a massive stack of recording equipment, leaving the three of us to simply talk amongst ourselves. While Nova flung herself into a threadbare cushioned seat and did some science stuff to the dials and switches in front of her, I grabbed one of the clipboards lying at her desk and brought it up to my face. It was filled with scary symbols I didn’t really understand, and I tossed it aside almost immediately.

“Why is math so scary?” I asked, pointing to the clipboard. “Like, how can you even make sense of all that?”

“Through a lot of practice and even more patience,” Nova responded. Her wing swept up all the clipboards and set them aside, and her hooves began to tap dance on the keyboard and poke at the holographic screen in front of her as she queued up some something or other. “Thankfully, we already did all the math for today a while ago. Today we just sit back and listen.”

Well, that was comforting at least. If there was going to be complicated math involved, I didn’t want any part of this.

Gauge sat down by Nova’s side and rested his head against her downy coat. “When are you gonna get started?” he asked in that soft, sweet voice of his. Sometimes I don’t think Nova realized how lucky she was to have a stallion like him. I certainly realized it.

“When my dad finally gets around to it,” Nova said, shaking her head. I saw Stardust standing in the back of the room, sharing a laugh with some of the older techies who’d undeniably been spending their entire lives working up to this moment. He happened to glance in our direction, where Nova was exasperatedly waving her forelimbs. With that, he said a few last words to the other techies and began to trot over. Good thing, too; I was starting to be afraid that Nova was going to explode if this got put off any longer.

“Ember! Gauge! Happy to see you here!” Stardust bellowed, his booming voice rattling my teeth in my jaw. He gave Gauge a hug then wrapped his forearms around my midsection in a terrifying embrace that took my hooves off of the floor before gently putting me back down again.

“Ack… You too,” I wheezed, pressing a hoof to my presumably bruised ribs as I stumbled backwards. He often forgot that even though I’m a forgemare, I didn’t have warrior’s blood like his race, and I wasn’t really built to be marehandled. I didn’t know how Nova managed to survive until adulthood. Pegasi, am I right?

By the time I caught my breath, Gauge was snickering (wisely outside of my reach) and Nova and Stardust exchanged kisses on each other’s cheeks. One of Stardust’s mighty wings wrapped around his daughter and his eyes darted over the flickering holographic displays before them. “Do you have everything ready?” he asked.

“Everything’s been ready for a while,” Nova droned, flicking his snout with a feather. “Sensors are calibrated and we’ve got fresh discs in the recorders. Let’s do this already.”

Stardust chuckled and patted Nova on the shoulder. “Calm down, my little shooting star, you’re not the only one that’s excited. But if Equestria’s been silent for two hundred winters, then I don’t think a few minutes will hurt.”

He stood up to his full height, which was at least another head and a half on me (seriously, he’s a pegasus, they’re all supposed to be shorter than unicorns), and trotted toward the front of the room. The mere movement of such an enormous body drew everypony’s attention, and by the time he was finally there, he didn’t even have to ask for silence. It was already given.

Stardust looked around him for a few seconds, flustered, then gasped like he suddenly had an idea. His teeth found the back of an old chair and he dragged it in front of him. Placing his front hooves on the chair, he stood up straight, thoughtfully moved his jaw from side to side, then made a gagging noise. Wiping his muzzle with his hoof, he put a large smile on his face. “Ech, there’s just no taste like three hundred year old chair, right?”

That earned a chuckle from everypony present, myself included. Stardust clapped his hooves together and looked around the room. “Well, I’m going to keep this short. We’ve poured a lot of effort into this, long days and sleepless nights, and some of us have spent years working on this project. Stars, it’s been my life’s work for a long time. If my daughter hadn’t joined me, I don’t know where I’d be.”

Nova fidgeted under his gaze, and I elbowed her as a few ponies around the room cheered and whistled. She responded by lightly shoving me, to which I snickered. It was always adorable making ponies with lighter coats blush.

As the noise quietened down again, Stardust shuffled his wings and nodded. “It’s been a long journey to get here. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears from everypony in this room, techie and greaser alike.” He nodded in Gauge’s direction, and Gauge nodded back. A few whistles and playful insults from some of the greasers who were present also added to the response. “But enough about that. How’s about we dial in Equestria and ask them why they’re late to dinner?”

Cheers answered him, and a lot of them, too. But by the time the noise died out, everypony had shifted to business. Techies ran to and fro between machines, and many more sat down at desks like Nova’s and put on headsets. I began to stand, feeling awfully out of place in the middle of this oiled machine, but a look from Nova made me stay. The subtle pleading in her eyes told me all I needed to know.

All the ponies hustling back and forth, the noise and commands shouted from one end of the room to the other, it all made me feel like I was sitting in the middle of a prickwing hive, and I was understandably uncomfortable. In case you’re not from Auris, they’re abominations which more or less resemble some unholy combination of a hornet, a mosquito, and a spider. At least when ponies are scared of bugs here, they have a good reason.

As the techies went about their business, all I could do was sit back, try to relax, and (hopefully) enjoy the show. On the other side of Nova, Gauge leaned in and gently ran his striped hoof down the gap between Nova’s wings, making them involuntarily flutter at her sides. She shot him a flirty look, pecked him on the nose, then pressed her face into the holographic display in front of her as her colleagues cried out over one another. SCaR, meanwhile, patrolled idly around the perimeter of the room. I guess old programming dies hard.

“Power supply connected.”

“Maximal draw to the receivers; let’s get them warmed up, they haven’t been on in a long time.”

“EM Recorders on standby. All other systems nominal.”

“Good. Open ‘er up.”

Nova sat up straighter, and both Gauge and I leaned in as she tapped a button on her headset and then stuck her hoof through the flickering holographic display. “Signal processing beginning… data flow in five, four, three, two, one…”

The holographic panel turned green, and the machinery in the back of the room chattered to life. There was a click from above as the speakers turned on and gentle static began to pour into the room. The techies let out a few triumphant cheers, and Nova was absolutely beaming. She let out a little gasp, kissed Gauge, then turned to me, mouth already beginning to form words.

And then I heard something that I wasn’t expecting. And based on the look on Nova’s face, she wasn’t expecting it either. Over the speakers came a sound, one tiny note, that paralyzed the entire room. It lasted for a fraction of a second before it was gone, and after a few seconds, it was followed by an identical tone. And another one. And another one.

Then the machinery chattered to life to the sound that would change my world forever.

Beep.