Before you ask, no, we did not have sex right then and there. I mean, we’d only just admitted that we liked each other. What the fuck do you think this is? The real world is a lot messier than that. Case in point, instead of sex or anything like that, there was a lot of hugging and crying and kissing. But sex was the furthest thing from my mind. The only thing I could focus on was this: I’d finally found somepony who could help fill that Zip-shaped hole in my heart, and she needed me as much as I needed her. We didn’t really complete each other—I was definitely not her Z, and she was definitely not my Zip—but it was a start. And a start was all that mattered.

Neither did the moment last that long, either. That was practically a given considering how much Ace had drank before we both confessed our feelings for each other. Instead, after a few minutes of kissing, I found myself stroking Ace’s mane as she laid her head on my shoulder. We’d been together for only a few minutes and already I was comforting her as the alcohol slowly wreaked havoc on her body and her senses. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t really something we could wait for. Surge was still trapped inside the installation, and I wanted to see what was going on down there before we started moving out again.

“Can you walk?” I finally asked her, looking at her closed eyes set inside the angular features of her face.

“I can walk,” she insisted. “I didn’t have that much.”

“What I meant was, ‘can you walk straight?’”

She snorted and opened her eyes. “I promise I’ll try my damnedest.”

I rolled my eyes and helped her stand. “What are Gauge and Nova gonna think when we meet back up with them as a couple and you’re still shitfaced?”

“I ain’t shitfaced,” Ace protested. “I gotta drink a lot more for that.”

“Please don’t,” I told her when I saw her glance at the bag that had her whiskey in it. “The last thing we need is you drunkenly bumbling about a possibly really dangerous installation.”

Ace blinked and furrowed her brow. “We going in? I thought we was just gonna grab Surge and go.”

“I want to take a look around,” I told her. “We come across so few of these places while we’re wandering around that we can’t waste this opportunity.”

“I guess,” Ace said with a shrug.

“Come on…” I bounded ahead a few steps and then turned back to face her. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what happened to the Synarchy and why the world is such a shithole?”

“I been disappointed too many times in my life to get my hopes up,” she said, but she nevertheless began to bumble after me. “Just… don’t move too fast. I… ugh… forgot I hadn’t eaten much lately.”

“The whiskey hitting you harder than you thought it would?”

“You shut the fuck your face.”

I chuckled and waited until Ace was at my side before setting off together. It felt nice to have somepony to walk with through the Spines; I’d certainly done so much of it by myself in the past two days, just fighting for survival. We rubbed our coats together as we walked, and the bubbling joy of new love almost kept our necks glued together (even if I was using mine to help Ace walk steady and straight apart from the simple pleasure of a comforting touch). I occasionally gave my new marefriend a kiss on the cheek, and she would giggle happily and try to do the same. It was odd seeing Ace’s tender self beneath that toughened shell of an outlaw, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. Seeing her happy and smiling like that was a thrill in itself. She hadn’t even pulled her mane back down over her eye, instead leaving it tucked behind her ear where I’d left it. It was like she was a whole new pony, and I didn’t mind that that mare was a happier one.

Our little happy moment sort of shriveled up and died when we made it to the base of the Walsalhn, however. Some bodies still lay around the tree, left there to rot from my friends’ failed assault on the tree the day before. They were starting to smell, and I scrunched up my muzzle as I moved past them on my way to the door. “What happened here?” I asked Ace, who held a wing over her nose to try and filter out the smell.

“I tried to move Gauge and Nova around a bit to get a kill zone set up,” she said. “We got spotted before I was done. Shit went downhill fast from there.”

“I’m just glad you’re all in one piece,” I said. “Gauge told me that Surge made it to the door with SCaR before you guys had to retreat. I’m surprised she wasn’t able to keep Yeoman out of the place; I ran into him when a tower rose up out of the ground not too far from here and he came barreling out of it.”

After we picked our way past the bodies, we came face to face with the trunk of the enormous tree. It took a little bit of looking around, but I finally found the hidden entrance to the installation at its base. It’d been camouflaged into a groove running along the exposed part of one of the tree’s massive roots, but when I stooped down and peered into the darkness, I could see exposed metal reflecting dim lights from somewhere further inside. The walls of the little tunnel that ran down to the metal were covered in tribal paint and art, and if I squinted, I thought I could see another body down there. “Come on!” I called out to Ace, and then I slid down the dirt ramp leading to the door.

I had to stoop down to move around the claustrophobic little hollow hidden underneath the tree, and when Ace slid down after me, she shivered and shuddered. “I fucking hate caves,” she groaned. “Pegasi ain’t meant to be in ‘em.”

I ignored her muttering and pressed forward, letting my horn glow for a little light. With a little illumination, I could finally see the body lying in the dirt, and though I wasn’t surprised to see who it was, my heart still dropped regardless. “Shit,” I muttered, flipping the tattooed stallion over with my magic. Sandy’s face stared up at the low roof above us, eyes rolled back and almost looking right at the bullet hole in his forehead.

“That Sandy?” Ace asked, craning her neck over my shoulder to get a better view. “Fuck. I’d been hoping… well, maybe…”

“Another innocent bystander caught up in all this signal shit,” I said, closing the stallion’s eyes with my magic. “He deserved better than this.”

“They all did,” Ace agreed. “But we can’t do nothing for them now.”

I nodded and gingerly moved the body out of the way. “We’ll get him on the way out,” I said. Then, turning my attention to what lay ahead of us, I moved towards the entryway to the installation itself. I was surprised at what I saw, though. Instead of an intact door like what we’d seen at Bluewater, or something blown apart from high explosives, the door was already parted wide enough for a pony to slip through, and it and the entryway behind it were heavily rusted and corroded. I could tell just from the amount of rust built up around the joints that it hadn’t moved from that position in a very long time.

These doors had been forced open at least a hundred winters ago… and maybe more. What had happened here?

…Had these doors been open since the beginning of the Silence?

Ace took one look at the doors and frowned hard. “I, uh… thinkin’ I’m gonna wait here,” she said, leaning against the wall. “Gonna wait for the booze to wear off… yeah…”

“What’s the matter?” I asked her. “You didn’t seem this nervous when we went under a mountain for the last one.”

“That one didn’t have a living tree growing atop it.” She shook her head. “It was all sealed up tight, too. Not compromised none. I ain’t looking to get buried alive today.”

I rolled my eyes and turned around to face her. “Fine, I’ll pick up Surge and she’ll keep me company.” Though I was disappointed and nervous about going in here alone, I at least understood Ace’s anxiety. That she was inebriated probably didn’t help her state of mind either. So instead of guilting her to come along, I stepped forward and pecked her lips. “Go sit out in the open some,” I told her. “Wait until the world stops spinning. Okay?”

The corners of her mouth twitched up. “Yeah, sure. Just try not to get yourself buried alive down there, ‘kay?”

“I can teleport, I’ll be fine.” I pressed my nose against hers once more and then stepped back. “I’ll be back out as fast as I can.”

She nodded in acknowledgement and I turned back to the installation. I took one breath to ready myself before squeezing through the door, my hooves practically crunching on piles of rust on the other side. A staircase leading down immediately greeted me, and there were more torches and tribal paints decorating the stairwell. I guess the Feati went inside the doors, too, though I had to wonder how deep inside they went. I was going to be really upset if they’d somehow destroyed all the shit inside of this installation through countless years of exploring and worshipping at it. What if the signal was lost and we’d be leaving here empty-hoofed? But all the installations Blackwash had pinged when it first got the signal had responded, so this place was in working condition as recently as two months ago…

Had it really been about two months since we heard the signal? Fucking stars…

Though the torches were all extinguished, some of the lights inside the decaying base still worked, giving plenty of light to see by, even if it was flickering in places. The door at the bottom of the stairs had also been open for some time, though it wasn’t as badly rusted as the entryway I’d just come through. My eyes settled on an access panel next to it as I cautiously walked down the stairs, and as I drew closer, a light on it began to blink an erratic, electric blue.

“Hello, Sparky,” I said, stopping in front of the panel and lowering my horn to it. A jolt of mana rushed through my body from horn to hoof, and my legs twitched and my tongue felt fuzzy as I felt a familiar presence settle herself back inside my brain. I involuntarily coughed once and my lungs fluttered for air for a few moments before the shock had passed and I finally had control of the reins to my body again.

“Celestia, that took you long enough,” Surge said, though she finished her sentence by working my jaw from side to side. “Ugh, moving from machines and wires back to a living body is disorienting.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I responded, smiling lightly. “It’s good to have you back, girl.”

“It’s good to be back,” she admitted. “Electricity is like diet mana. My soul can survive on it for a while, but it’s not very filling. Speaking of which, when was the last time you ate something?”

“Nothing since before the wargs,” I told her. “It’s a long story.”

“Spare me the details,” she responded, and I felt her quickly sifting through my memories to get caught up on everything she missed. “So, you killed Yeoman? Put your mind at ease?”

“For now,” I said with a nod. “Did you get the piece of the code?”

“Not yet,” Surge said, shaking my head. “It’s on a separate circuit than the door controls and basic installation functions. I jumped from SCaR to the door panel only to realize I couldn’t get to the database from there, and by that point the drone had already flown off.”

“Fuck. Do you think Yeoman—?”

“He didn’t,” Surge cut in, almost as if she was reading my thoughts (and she probably was). “I could watch what he was doing through the cameras. He damaged the computer after he got what he needed from it, but I should still be able to access its memory. And before you ask, no, I could not see the holographic screen from where the cameras were placed.”

“Alright,” I said, squeezing my way through the next door. “Where to?”

“Let me do the walking,” she said, and she swiftly took control of my legs. I was just along for the ride at that point as Surge walked me through the installation, and I let my gaze wander over the interior. I noticed that unlike the installation in Bluewater Gorge, which had been spick and span and cleaned by automated robots for who knew how long, this one hardly had the same level of maintenance to it. It was dirty, it was in a bad state of disrepair, and I’m pretty sure I saw one of the robotic cleaners impaled on a shaft of metal and hanging from the ceiling. I guess the Feati didn’t like the little robots that much.

Speaking of the Feati, this place was covered in their art and decorations. Offerings covered what was once a secretary’s desk, and the metal walls had all been painted over with a depiction of what I could only assume was their history. Surge didn’t offer me much of a chance to look at it all (not that I really would have been able to make sense of it without another Feati nearby to explain it to me), instead moving me briskly towards a door that’d been forced open at the other end of the reception area. As we approached it, however, I was able to make out some letters painted underneath the smear of tribal art on a nearby wall.

“Hold up,” I said, forcing Surge to stop. I trotted over to the wall and squinted at the letters, trying to make sense of them without ruining the Feati art. Though it wasn’t exactly easy, I was able to piece together what it said:

“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked Surge. “Civilization reconstruction? Why would the Synarchy be studying something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Surge admitted. “But it explains why the Feati are here. They were stripped of all their language and knowledge and left to build a civilization together from the ground up.”

“But why?” I asked her. “That just seems… dumb.”

“The Synarchy was inefficient in a lot of ways, but all these installations were placed here with a purpose,” she said. “And this one was part of the Dusk Protocol. Whatever they were doing here, it was deemed vitally important to the survival of our species.”

She started moving me back along the path, but I was too caught up in my thoughts to really notice. Civilization reconstruction? What kind of government would come up with a study for that… or consider it so important that it was integrally tied to this supposed worst-case backup protocol?

…Did the Synarchy worry that civilization as they knew it was about to be wiped out forever?

We passed through the door and continued deeper into the installation. Here, however, the walls were free of Feati paint, and though the place wasn’t in the cleanest of states, it was definitely better beyond the reception area. “The Feati never forced those doors open,” Surge explained. “Yeoman took care of that. They were the first ponies to enter this part of the installation likely since the Silence began.”

“They’re going to have access to it now,” I said. “It doesn’t look like we’d have an easy time resetting those doors.”

“Would we even want to?”

“I mean, maybe?” I cocked a brow. “I’m just… I guess, thinking about the Feati and how they’ll adapt after all this. Are they gonna keep being primitive and stick to their way of life, or are they going to try to be like the rest of us? I’m just worried about what stumbling into all this technology like this would do to them.”

“It’s not our place to decide,” Surge said. “They’ve been exposed enough to the outside world to know what it’s like, for better or for worse. How they decide to go on from here is entirely up to them.”

We walked past a few more rooms, places I gathered were sleeping and crew quarters. The ponies who worked in this installation likely didn’t have the chance to go outside much, lest their subjects discover them. We walked past another room that had some of its walls made out of glass, and inside were several mounts for hologram screens on one of the walls. “They would have monitored camera feeds from here,” Surge said. “All of the cameras are long gone, now. Not sure if the Feati found them or time simply did its number on them, but we’re not going to get anything from there.”

“It’s sick to think about,” I said. “Forcing a colony of ponies to survive on their own in the wilderness while you observe them from underground. What if they just… I don’t know, all died or migrated somewhere else?”

“Who’s to say that that never happened?” Surge asked me. “The Synarchy had no shortage of political prisoners to send here.”

As horrible as that thought was, I knew that it was likely true. Lost study populations could be easily replaced. The Synarchy didn’t value the lives of the ponies they forced into this experiment. It only cared about the results… for all the good they did them in the long run.

Again, just like in the Bluewater, I noted that there weren’t any bodies or bones lying around, apart from those coming from vermin like spider rats. Yet again, we were wandering through another installation that had just been abandoned. It was as if all the ponies inside had gotten up and left everything where it was. What had happened here? Why were there no bodies?

“I checked through all the cameras I could access,” Surge said, reading my mind. “No bodies, no weapons, no battle damage. I don’t think this place had an armory or an armed garrison like my installation. It was just Dr. Hozho and her staff, isolated from their subjects and the rest of the world around them.”

“Maybe they just left when the Silence began,” I suggested. “How long would you have kept up your operations when you stopped hearing from Equus?”

“Admittedly, not more than a few months,” Surge said. When I blinked in surprise, she shrugged my shoulders. “A few months is hardly a long time when you worked for the Synarchy. We were all loyal—well, mostly loyal—intellectuals, and we had dedicated our lives to helping the Synarchy thrive. I would have maintained discipline over my team for a few months, but after that, even I would want to put that aside in order to find out what was going on. But Dr. Hozho…”

“She wouldn’t?” I asked.

Surge shook my head. “Hozho was nothing if not dedicated to her work. To a fault, even. She put the interests of her studies above all else, and she was fanatically loyal to the Synarchy.” I saw memories of a short, pale mare with equally pale green hair giving a presentation beneath a thick pair of glasses and through a heavy accent while I—or Surge, rather—looked on with wavering attention. “She never would have let her team waver in their mission. Communications or silence, she had her assignment and would see it through to the end.”

“Whatever way that would come,” I said. “I doubt everypony on her team shared her deep convictions.”

“I can’t say.” Surge used our magic to open a door in front of us and we strolled through to the other side. “I never interacted much with her team, but she hoof-picked all of them. Even I wasn’t trusted enough to assemble a team on my own. Half of my team was assigned to me by the government, and they forced us to support a garrison as well. Her father may have been on the High Council. I honestly can’t remember.”

The room beyond looked like a central communications hub, and I knew immediately that this is what we had come for. Surge walked me over to the computer terminal built into the wall next to a set of damaged laser display bars and touched my horn to it. I felt a rush and my head filled with air as she zipped into the circuit, leaving me to frown and shake my head to get rid of the sensation in her absence. After a few seconds, the lights on the terminal flickered to life, and I heard Surge’s voice crackle over the speakers.

“Ah… well, the speakers are in working order. That much is good at least. The display is damaged beyond repair, though. Let me see what I can find.”

“Take your time,” I told her, pulling over a chair with my magic. “Yeoman’s dead and the Ivory City won’t be getting this piece of the code. No hurry.”

Surge went silent and I could hear the computer whirr as she poked through it. “Found it,” she declared after a few seconds. “Let’s see here… the code fragment is ‘GFXAX, V, 36-J’. Got that?”

I did my best to commit it to memory. “I think so,” I said. Then, frowning, I slouched back in the chair. “What the fuck does this shit mean, though?” I asked her. “All these fragments are just gibberish.”

“They’re part of a cipher,” Surge reminded me. “And we won’t be able to figure out what it means until we know all the code fragments. That’s how an ADFGX cipher works. Splitting the code up across seven installations ensured that nopony would be able to crack it without all the pieces.”

“But how would we crack it?” I asked her. “You were part of this whole Dusk Protocol thing, surely you should know how to do it?”

“It involves manipulating the letters of each piece of the code and translating it back into the standard alphabet once we know how to arrange them all and what the code table in 36-J is,” she said. “You’ve found four code pieces, and each of those had a tag with them that spells out a code word. E, F, I, and V, if I’m recalling correctly. We’d have to rearrange all the parts so the tags form a word, and then we could start decoding the message.”

I frowned for a moment. “You can spell ‘five’ with those,” I said, grinning at my revelation.

“And what about the other three missing pieces?” Surge asked.

Well, there went my one shot at feeling smart. “Alright, ruin my hopes and dreams, why don’t you?” I muttered, dropping my attention to the floor. It was then that I noticed something lurking beneath the shadowy overhang of the control terminal that a pony would have normally sat at and worked with the computer Surge was now interfaced with. I raised an eyebrow as I grabbed ahold of the white thing with my magic, then promptly dropped it in shock and disgust when I saw it was a unicorn skeleton.

“What the fucking fuck?!” I shouted, sliding my chair back. What the fuck was a skeleton doing here? It was intact, too, and wearing tatters of clothing—tatters that practically disintegrated as soon as I touched them. Lying next to the skull was a pair of glasses with the left lens completely missing, and it didn’t take me too long to find the little shards littering the area. Some were stained with a sort of brown or black crust—long dried blood—and now that I looked around the floor, I saw specks of it in the tiles, too.

“What is it?” Surge asked, and I saw the camera in the corner of the room pivot. “What did you find—oh. Well, I think we can reasonably conclude that Dr. Hozho did not abandon her work willingly.”

Once I got over the fact that I’d just unwittingly handled the skeleton of a long dead mare, I got out of my chair and looked down at her body. Her bones were still relatively intact, or at least, as intact as one would expect them to be given the passage of time. I didn’t see any damage to her skull, and her ribs were still connected firmly together. But when I looked over her head, it was pretty easy to figure out what had killed her. A pen stuck out of her left eye socket, the point buried somewhere deep in her skull, probably deep enough to stab her brain.

“She didn’t, but I think her team did,” I said, pulling the pen out. Surprisingly, I was able to get the ink flowing again, but I wasn’t about to keep it. Why the fuck would I want to keep a murder weapon around with me? When the fuck would I have to write something down? Paper was hard enough to come by as it was. I just did it because it felt… right to do so. Even if she was a fanatical Synarchist and responsible for the horrible experiments performed here in the Spines, her body at least deserved a little respect.

“Hey, can you look through that computer for anything interesting?” I asked Surge. “Maybe she left some reports before she died. And if she was better connected with the Synarchy than you were, maybe she might have had some insight as to why the Silence happened?”

“I suppose it’s worth a shot,” Surge admitted. The terminal whirred and clicked again as she began to look through its memory. “A lot of the files are badly corrupted—no surprise there, considering how long this thing had been left without maintenance. But I think there are a few things I can pick out here. Let’s pull up the first one.”

A set of lenses built into the wall underneath the damaged display lit up, and I stepped back a few paces when a hologram of a mare materialized almost right where I’d been standing. Thanks to the glimpse of Surge’s memory earlier, I recognized Hozho, even if her colors were skewed towards the blue and purple side by the holograph. She slowly paced back and forth, short tail swishing from side to side, her magic holding a few sheets of etch glass in front of her. I couldn’t tell how much of her thick accent was a product of the poor quality of the file and how much it was that she just couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘L’, but it made her very difficult to understand.

“…test group 3-C fled their territory under the cover of darkness,” she said, lifting one of the etch glass sheets closer to her nose. I guess we had jumped into the middle of a recording? At any rate, the middle-aged mare only continued to mutter to herself and pace, discarding the sheet when she was done with it. “That makes four control populations lost in nineteen months. We need to invest in a settlement for future groups. Without something permanent to tie them down, they will eventually attempt to flee the observation grounds, and our perimeter can only catch and return so many before the group must be decommissioned.”

I frowned down the length of my muzzle at the hologram of a long-dead mare. Decommissioned? I was pretty sure I knew exactly what she meant by that.

The mare sighed and tossed all the sheets out of frame of the hologram, where they disappeared from sight. “I need to meet with my team tomorrow morning,” Hozho muttered aloud. “We need to change our approach. The Synarchy is counting on us, and we won’t let them down…”

The hologram warped and flickered back and forth, and anything more she may have said was lost to static. Surge powered it down, and I found my gaze settled on the long-shattered remains of some etch glass in the corner of the room. “Are there more?” I finally asked her.

“Two more that I think I can recover,” she said. “The others would take some time and effort.”

“Might as well see them,” I said. “I want to know what the fuck was up with this place.”

“This one is stamped almost four Auris years later,” Surge said. “There’s not much surviving in between, but here we go…”

Once again, the hologram of Dr. Hozho flickered into existence. But even though I knew she was only four years older than the last one, she looked like it was closer to ten. Her features were growing increasingly haggard from stress, and I could tell from the coloration that her mane was beginning to gray. Her glasses had thickened a few lens sizes, too, probably from way too much time staring at tiny print. This time, instead of pacing, she was seated in a swivel chair, hooves pushing aside reports arrayed on a desk in front of her.

“Group 17-A seems to have developed a robust social hierarchy,” she droned, and it was pretty obvious she’d had a few sleepless nights lately. “They’re outcompeting groups 17-B and 17-D. Only 17-C can amass the same amount of resources as their stronger peer, and that’s likely due to their focus on building a protective settlement above all else. It hurt their numbers in the short term, but they should be poised to eclipse the other groups in the region before too long. That is, if 17-A doesn’t raid and crush them while they’re still exhausted from building up their defenses.”

“Were they making the groups compete against each other?” I wondered aloud.

“It would make sense,” Surge said, her voice momentarily drowning out Hozho’s over the speakers. “If she was trying to simulate the reconstruction of civilization after some apocalyptic event, there would be competition between survivor groups. I think they were trying to see which approaches worked best for longevity and prosperity.”

When she stopped speaking, Hozho’s voice once more took over the speakers. “…incidents. I had her whipped and placed in the holding cell. Two days with no food, water, or light. She cried like a griffon pup when we let her out, but afterwards, she swore she’d learned from her mistake. That’s good. I need my team focused on our project, not gossiping about the war situation back home. But I can’t help but feel like I’m losing them. The Synarchy needs us, every last one of us. What we’re doing is too important. The future of our species is in our hooves, and if we fail, ponykind fails with us…”

The hologram flickered out of sync once more, and Surge shut it off. “I guess not even her hoof-picked team had the same fanaticism that she did,” she finally said.

“I don’t think there’s many ponies who would be like that,” I said, shrugging. “Being trapped down here for years, watching ponies fight each other like rats in a cage… That’s a bit much even for a bunch of fanatic racists like the ponies back then. Err… no offense, I guess.”

I’m sure Surge was rolling her eyes, but she didn’t exactly have any right now for me to see. “Whatever. Last one, then we should probably get moving.” I nodded in agreement, and once more, a projection of Dr. Hozho appeared in front of me.

But this Hozho was different. She had her head in her hooves, and her body was trembling. A bottle of something—liquor, presumably—stood off to the side. I couldn’t tell if it was empty or not through the hologram, but I had a feeling she had been drinking when she recorded this.

“I… I heard the news from my father,” she said, her words slow, quiet, afraid. “They… they were some of the last words to arrive. The last words I’ll ever hear from him…”

Her throat bobbed, and she looked up at the camera. I trotted around her and caught a glimpse of tears on her face. “It’s the beginning of the end,” she whispered. “Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve fought for… it’s all coming apart at the seams.

“I knew this day would come,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “That’s why I’m working on this project. That’s why the High Council implemented the Dusk Protocol. The Coalition War… this ‘War for Survival’… we were never going to win it. All we did was send our children off to die, die by the thousands, in a fight we couldn’t win.”

She looked at the bottle next to her, picked it up in flickering magic, and took a few gulps before setting it back down. “I read the dispatch sent out from the comms outpost. It all came down to one decisive battle over Baltimare. Our navy against the Coalition’s. Everything we had, mustered for one last stand.

“And they broke it. They broke it like plywood.”

Her lip trembled again, and she began to massage her temples. “How many thousands of sailors died defending our home skies? How many stood their ground as salvo after salvo of Coalition cannons ripped through the hulls of our warfleet? Ponies blown out into the vacuum of space without any environmental protection, turned to plasma as kinetic rounds ripped through airtight compartments…

“I don’t have the numbers. I don’t think we ever will. But the entire fleet is destroyed. Stragglers that fled were caught and shot down, or bombed as they crash landed on the surface. Who knows how many Coalition ships we took down with us? It doesn’t matter. Their industry is five times greater than ours. The entire world, united against us… it was only a matter of time. For every cruiser we make, they can make five. And now that we have no more navy, they can bomb our land as much as they want. Shields will protect our population centers, but our farmland? Our factories? What will protect those?

“And the shields won’t even keep our cities safe forever.” Her face took on a haunted look as she stared into the distance. “I moved to Baltimare when I was eleven,” she said. “I practically grew up there. It was the longest I’d ever stayed in one place. And then our ships started falling out of the sky. The reports that came in… it’s gone. The entire city is gone. Millions dead as our cruisers’ hulls began flattening buildings. And then their fleet stuck around to glass whatever was left. Civilians just trying to flee for their lives, reduced to ash from orbital strikes…”

She hiccupped and squeezed her eyes shut as more tears tried to escape. “We have no navy left. Nopony is going to come to Auris anymore. And our entire communications relay was destroyed. We can’t send anything back to Equus, and Equus can’t send anything back to us.

“We’re trapped,” she said, baring her teeth in pain. “We’re cut off. We’re alone. And when they’re finished with Equus, the Coalition will come for us. What chance will we stand then?”

Hozho looked around like she was lost, bewildered and lost, but struck herself in the face and stopped. “I can’t let my team see me like this,” she said, trying her hardest to calm back down. “If they know something has happened… it could be the end of us. Of all of us. We must stick to our objective and see it through. The Dusk Protocol demands it. It was designed to be implemented in case something like this happened. And when it’s activated, the Synarchy will need my research to rise again.

“We Survive Together,” she said, repeating some mantra she must have heard throughout her entire life. “After every dusk is a new dawn. And so long as we work through the night, tomorrow will be so much brighter.”

Her eyes looked into her camera, and since I was standing in front of her, it almost looked like she was looking directly at me. “One day we will be reborn. The Dusk Protocol will make sure of that. And it starts with us.”

The hologram abruptly disappeared after that, and I could only stare into the space where Hozho had been in shock. What I’d heard, I… I didn’t know how to process it. Finally, after so long, I finally understood Auris’ oldest mystery. I was the first pony in almost two centuries to know what caused the Silence. The Synarchy had been fighting for its life, and it had lost. The Coalition destroyed the relays that let it speak to Auris and scrapped its entire navy, severing all ties we had to our mother planet. We had been cast into the dark while our mother died alone, light years away.

But the Coalition had never come after us. Did they not know where we were? Or did something else happen to stop them?

I slowly turned back to the computer terminal, noting that Surge had been quiet for a long time now. “There’s… there’s nothing else?” I asked her, prodding for something more, anything more that would give me some more answers. “That’s it?”

“She didn’t leave any recordings after that,” Surge finally answered. “I think she didn’t see the point in them… or she simply wasn’t able to.”

I looked at the skeleton lying on the floor and pulled the chair over. Flopping down on it, I held my hooves to my temple and slowly massaged them. “The Silence… that’s how it all began…”

“If Dr. Hozho knew this much from the Synarchy’s final messages, she likely wasn’t the only pony to understand what had happened,” Surge said. “No wonder that chaos followed so soon. It’s hard to keep a secret like that. It would get out eventually, and then…”

“Anarchy,” I concluded. “Do you think that’s why the garrison at your installation…?”

“How they heard it before me, I have no idea,” Surge said. “But I had heard rumors to the effect right before the mutiny. It’s just… to think that…”

The speakers crackled with static; I think Surge was choking up. And I couldn’t exactly blame her, either. She’d died because of the Silence. She’d died and then spent the next two centuries trapped in some kind of horrible purgatory, left to wonder why it had happened. And now, to get some closure on all that after so long…

I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was feeling right then and there.

“We should go,” she stated. “We have what we came for, and we… I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”

I dumbly nodded in shock. Yes, it was time to go. Lingering here any longer wouldn’t accomplish much. I would need time to think about what I’d heard. The Silence, the Dusk Protocol… what did the Protocol mean, even? ‘One day we will be reborn?’ Was Hozho simply spouting the words of a fanatic… or was there something more to it?

Yeoman had told me a long time ago that the code would ‘awaken the Azimuth’. Surge had thought it was a cruiser or something to that effect. But what if the code was going to awaken more than one ship? After all, a code this important wouldn’t just be used to activate one dormant orbital cruiser. It would be for something more important.

Was it really a way to bring back the Synarchy, as Hozho had seemed to imply?

I lowered my horn to the terminal for Surge to jump back, but before I got close enough, I stopped. “Wait,” I said, stepping back. “One more thing before we go.”

“Yes?” Surge asked, though there was some impatience in her voice. “What is it?”

“Is this installation’s communications shit still working?”

“For the most part,” Surge said after a moment’s hesitation, likely to check all its systems. “Why?”

The shock lingering on my muzzle after hearing all this shit gave way to a small and eager smile. “Because I have somebody I want to talk to…”