The door opened with the tinkle of a tiny brass bell, and Ginger looked up from her sewing machine. The bland nonexpression she wore when she was concentrating on her work dissolved into a wide, happy grin at the sight of the stallion stepping into her shop.

“Roach!” she squealed, dousing her horn as she hurried around the counter. He grunted as she threw her hooves around him, practically squeezing him to a second death. “You wonderful thing, it’s been too long! How are you?”

He smiled, quiet as always, and gave her a squeeze around the neck before letting her step back to look at him. “Same as before, same as tomorrow,” he rumbled, adjusting the satchel around his neck. “I brought you some new books to read.”

“Darling, you know I can afford to purchase my own…”

Roach waved her off and she followed him to the counter where he upturned his satchel. No less than five paperbacks flopped out across the wooden surface, some of them remarkably well preserved. He separated one in particular from the others, using his hooves to clumsily flip it over so she could see the cover. “I don’t think you would have wanted me to wait to bring you this one.”

Her eyes widened at the raised letters of the author’s name, then she flushed at the implication of the practically explicit cover art above.

“I had no idea A.K. Yearling dabbled in erotica.”

Roach chuckled. “You’ll have to let me know if it’s any good. How’s business been?”

She gave him a noncommittal smile and tried to think of a way to avoid admitting Gussets & Garments was barely treading water in this market. The memory of the excuse she’d given trickled into the front of her mind and she blinked, confused for a brief moment before the details around her shifted into sharper focus.

Ah, she thought. This again.

As Roach’s unanswered question echoed from his throat a second time, she stepped around the counter toward the closed door leading to her storage room and the stairwell to her apartment overhead. Something told her when she opened it there wouldn’t be a pile of crates or the old desk she used to keep track of sales. As dream-Roach rumbled on with his end of the conversation stuck on repeat, she turned the knob and pushed it open.

The Tantabus waiting on the other side startled, her own magic pulling the door from the other side. “Oh!”

Ginger felt the very strange sensation of her actual limbs spasming in shock somewhere distant from where she stood now. The disconnect disoriented her for a brief moment before she regained focus on the creature in front of her.

The Tantabus made an echoing noise that sounded like embarrassed laughter. “You scared me, little shade!”

Taking a step back, Ginger murmured, “I apologize.”

“Oh, there’s no need. I welcome the rare opportunity to be surprised.” Even without a proper face to express it, she could vaguely see by the shape of the creature’s pale eyes that it was smiling, and broadly too. Something had it excited. With no small amount of trepidation, Ginger realized that something was her.

“Have you come to visit again?” the creature asked.

After a quick peek at the dizzying infinity of burning doors behind the creature, she pursed her lips and nodded. “I suppose I have.”

Then she paused as a worrying thought snaked into her mind.

“Will this happen every time I fall asleep? Reliving my old memories until my magic runs out?”

The Tantabus frowned. Or at least, Ginger thought it was frowning. Without a mouth, it was hard to tell, but it looked into the frozen scene of her old shop with something like disappointment in its eyes. “Is this a bad memory?”

She winced at the misunderstanding. “No, not really. It’s just… difficult.”

Rather than step out of her way so that she could leave the dream, the Tantabus stepped fully through the doorway and closed it behind her. It didn’t dawn on Ginger until then how tall the creature was. The tip of its spearlike horn nearly scraped the vintage tiles of her tin ceiling. Thankfully it was all an illusion.

The same horn began to glow and for a moment, Ginger felt a wave of vertigo wash over her. It was as if she had fallen out of herself only to be pulled back in. She squeezed her eyes shut. When the confused sensation ebbed, she opened them to a singularly white void.

She blinked. Her shop, the displays, its tinned ceiling, Roach… everything had been replaced by nothing.

“Think of a good memory,” the creature urged, and suddenly Ginger felt the cool weight of feathers on her shoulder. “I will bring it to you.”

A moment of pause. A good memory. There weren’t many to choose from. All the happy moments of her foalhood had been tainted by that single moment in her father’s study. The struggle that came after, the scraping she had to do just to afford her little shop on the corner. The wastelanders who trickled in, saw thousands of hours of her labor displayed on the floor only to haggle her down to a pittance.

And yet a small smile crossed her lip.

The Tantabus’s horn once again took on a ghostly glow, and the four walls of her store reformed around them. The pale midday light streaming through dust-streaked windows. The smell of old leather, musty fabrics and beaten metal wafting out from the storage room behind her. Salvaged mannequins bearing her latest attempts at crossbreeding reliable armor with style, none of which sold particularly well but which she kept creating all the same.

The antique door squeaked out of its frame and jingled the bell above. She remembered how she grinned with surprise at the sight of Roach once again coming to visit. And then, tense and uncertain yet following close behind him, a familiar dapple grey pegasus stepped across the threshold. A deep warmth filled her chest as she met Aurora’s green eyes for the first time all over again.

“A good memory?” the Tantabus inquired.

Ginger nodded. “One of the best I have.”

Opal stared at her terminal, rereading Aurora’s forwarded message for the third time and still unsure whether the mare was being serious or if all those days on the surface had finally driven her past the limits of sanity.

“We should probably start looking into it,” Sledge nudged.

Leaning back in her chair, she spun around from her desk to face him. “She’s suggestin’ that we rip up the floor in my server room. Our situation is already precarious, Sledge. You can’t blame me fer bein’ a little worried that pokin’ around for mystery cables might only make things worse.”

She watched the brick red stallion shrug his powerful shoulders, evidently undeterred. She didn’t blame him for being desperate for a solution, even a temporary one, but this Stable that Aurora found out there was a completely different complex. She could have been comparing an apple to a pear for all the similarities the two shared.

The Stables were supposed to be isolated. Islands of refuge intended to survive a calamity that rivaled the centuries-long winter fabled to have been delivered by the Wendigos. There wasn’t a network bridging them together with great, forgotten filaments of wire. Perhaps a connection to Stable-Tec Headquarters, but from Stable to Stable? Allowing the potential of one overmare to contact another?

“What if she misunderstood what she was lookin’ at?” Opal posited, ignoring the growing impatience on Sledge’s face. He made her office feel smaller than it was, but she knew Delphi wouldn’t have installed him as overstallion if she thought he couldn’t handle some pushback. So she pushed. “Aurora was one of yers, not mine. She coulda been readin’ old messages from the Stable she was inside of.”

Sledge sighed. “She didn’t, two of her allies did. And they got a response back.”

“How do they know they weren’t speaking to the Stable’s Millie system?”

He pressed his lip into a firm line and stared at her. She held up a placating wing and let the issue drop. “Sledge, I’m an old mare. I’ve had plenty of time t’see the pegasi in my department swear up n’ down that they were right about somethin’ they clearly weren’t, and I’ve never once seen so much of a byte of data come into our servers from the outside. So yes, I’m gonna pester ya a bit before your demolition crew comes. Doesn’t mean I’m not with yeh.”

His features softened by a few degrees. Good to know that some stallions could still take a little prodding without letting their egos take over.

“So you’ll let Mechanical take a look?”

She snorted. “Heck, I already got a genuine Element of Harmony rootin’ around my files lookin’ fer ghosts. Can’t get any stranger ‘n that.”

It was all he needed to hear. When Sledge left, Opal chased him with a well-meaning harumph and went about the business of telling her pegasi to make room for company. Once that was done, she decided to double-check that she wasn’t so old that she was doing the same blind swearing up and down she’d just blamed her staff for.

Her desk terminal connected to the server network and she spent the next hour digging. Old logs, backups of recent data, supply manifests, work orders, the whole lot of it spilled across her terminal. She poked around inside the messaging system, making a note of her access per Stable protocol, and saw nothing unusual. No ponies whispering sweet nothings across the dead air outside. No overmares or stallions demanding to know who dared access their isolated networks. Nothing. Not a whiff of inbound communication for the past two hundred or so years.

Whatever Aurora and her friends thought they found, they were going to be sorely disappointed to find out none of it was happening here.

Her back made noises she chose to ignore as she got up from her desk and made her rounds through the IT Wing. If she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t much of a wing as it was a trio of unusually secured corridors in the shape of a U. She giggled to herself at the thought of renaming it the IT Shoe. She could do it, at least for a few hours it would take until Sledge convinced her to undo it, but it would absolutely be worth the laugh.

There wasn’t terribly much to do in the Stable’s smallest department. She had a team of techs tasked with answering house calls, tuning up stubborn terminals and fixing the odd Pip-Buck, but beyond that repairs were often within the purview of Mechanical and Fabrication. Sometimes an IT pony would be needed to replace a bad logic board or troubleshoot a software update that wasn’t taking, but most of her staff tended not to leave the wing at all.

She took the lift up to the Atrium and treated herself to breakfast. The Brass Bit was well within her budget but she never wanted to be seen as a department head that was too fussy to use the cafeteria. Today she needed a pick-me-up. Her coffee and bagel - an everything bagel and consequences be damned for what it would do to her gut later - were delivered by a lovely young mare who recognized her as one of the few ponies who were in communication with the outside. She asked after Aurora and Opal told her she was doing well, which cheered the waitress up a bit, and then she mentioned Aurora may have even met another mare out there, which significantly dampened the poor thing's enthusiasm. She billed Opal’s account and left her to eat, avoiding her table for the remainder of breakfast.

Opal used her Pip-Buck to send a tip to the poor mare anyway.

She took a detour to the residential level just above Mechanical and smiled at the young stallion tasked with watching Aurora’s door this shift. He recognized her and stepped away from the auspicious card reader and she swiped herself in. She found Rainbow Dash curled up on top of her bed sheets like one of her ancestor’s scruffy little lap dogs. Rainbow watched her enter but said nothing, and she understood that this was the Blue phase that her time trapped in the tunnel had inflicted on her.

Opal smiled at Blue and the much older mare set her head back down, watching her with those eerily vacant eyes while Opal checked the compartment’s terminal to see how she had been getting along. Several screens were active, all pertaining to Delta Vee and her family. She skimmed a few of them and nodded to herself. There was something important going on with Opal's predecessor.

From the corridor, she heard the muffled warbling of Sledge’s voice over the Stable’s PA system. Seconds later, the stallion outside gave the door a gentle knock, not having access to enter himself. Opal turned around, picked up the empty gold necklace from the floor and held it out to Blue in her open wing. The mare’s eyes focused intently on her Element and picked it out of her feathers by the teeth, tucking the necklace between her hooves as Opal departed.

The door slid shut behind her.

“The overstallion paged you to IT, ma’am,” the young guard stated.

She smiled, nodded, and made her way back to the lifts to see what it was Sledge needed.

Her smile lasted right until she reached the keyed door to her server room, and disappointment set in quickly as she found it propped open by a black plastic wedge. As she stepped over the threshold and into what was supposed to be a carefully climate-controlled space, she caught a whiff of something acrid like hot metal.

Sledge spotted her stalking through the servers and waved her over toward the source of the stink. Right as rain, the odor was coming from a large hole his grease bandits had sawed through the floor. A broad square of bright white linoleum had been peeled aside like a scab to reveal the steel substructure below. To her dismay, she realized this wasn’t the only place they’d uprooted perfectly good linoleum. Several sheets had been peeled away along the wall, culminating in the larger patch they’d settled on in front of her.

A bright square of steel had been removed, revealing a cavity below.

“Overstallion Sledge.” Her voice was brittle as she tried not to think of how much unfiltered ferrous particulate the servers behind her had been forced to suck in. “Explain this fer the less astute among us.”

Sledge walked her to the side of the hole where the missing panel of steel lay tipped against the wall. A bright silver line had been cut through an older trail of dull, bubbled metal. A weld line.

“It’s a hatch,” he stated, and she could see the excitement on the faces of the Mechanical ponies gathered nearby. “Somebody flipped it over and welded it closed.”

She frowned and leaned over the hole, observing the mass of cables underneath. They snaked in from every direction, using the gap between the floors to reach their ultimate destination. A cable port, wide as her torso, burrowed straight through the concrete wall.

“This is the outermost wall of our Stable,” she stated. It wasn’t a question. She knew what it was. They all did. “Why is there a hole.”

Sledge sounded breathless. “I think we just found what Aurora was looking for.”

She wrinkled her nose and aimed her feathers at the point where the cables had been carefully joined together into one massive bundle. Where a myriad of lines were roughly severed just short of the joint, and pulled well away from the root to ensure no chance of a shorted connection. Only a few errant cables had been left intact, the reason why known only to those who sealed the hatch behind them.

“Looks to me yer not the first ponies to come down here with a saw.”

Her overstallion nodded. “I think this explains why we’re not seeing this network of hers.”

Opal bent down, lifted one of the severed cables and frowned at the rat’s nest of broken optical fibers. Someone, and she had a pretty good idea of who, had cut their umbilical to the outside world.

“I don’t like this,” she murmured. “I don’t like this one bit.”

Rainbow Dash awoke from her fugue in the same way she was becoming accustomed to: tired, disoriented and with a foggy anxiety that lingered until she was sure Blue was truly trading off the reins to her.

When she was young, back before the bombs or the ministries or the war across the sea, she would have given every bit she had to be able to zonk out into catatonia just to get a break from Twilight’s lecturing. Or Rarity’s neverending opining on fashion. Or Pinkie Pie’s… Pinkie-ness. Just long enough to check out and recharge her batteries between the strange adventures that managed to always rope them together.

Something like that would come in handy, especially right now.

She turned the little orange bottle side to side between her ragged feathers, frowning at the white pellets inside. Sledge silently watched her from the sealed compartment door. He was doing a poor job of hiding his discomfort. He swallowed, waiting for a response.

She wrinkled her nose at the dosing instructions printed across the label. “You want me to take antipsychotics.”

Sledge didn’t answer at first, and it took a force of will for her to refrain from pushing him for one. Surprising an Element of Harmony with a prescription for crazy pills probably wasn’t something he’d signed up for when he took the job as overstallion, and browbeating him for wanting to help her wouldn’t be fair. She swallowed her indignity, set the bottle beside her on the mattress and looked up at him.

“Do you think they’ll help?”

After another pause, he shrugged his brick red wings, causing a few long feathers to pop out of the same protective leather sheaves she’d seen pegasi out in the hall wearing. “Best I can say is maybe. I tried to explain your… episodes to the doctors up in the infirmary. They weren’t thrilled by the fact that they couldn’t come down to speak to you directly, but they agreed this might be a good place to start.”

Rainbow slid off the bed, considered the pill bottle, then scooped it into her wing and took it with her to the compartment’s cramped bathroom. She unscrewed the cap and tipped one of the tiny oval pills onto the edge of the sink. “I wouldn’t have said no to a check-up, Sledge.”

She could hear the grimace in his voice. “I know.”

Capping the bottle, she set it aside and picked up the pill. Losing a wing made everything a chore now, but she wasn’t going to start complaining. Applejack would have never let her live it down if she heard her whining about surviving the end of Equestria. She stopped for a moment, letting herself feel the shallow wave of sadness that came with the memory of what had been lost, then put it away as she popped the pill into her cheek.

She opened the tap and bent down until the clear water burbled across her lips, slurping up enough to swallow her medicine. When she straightened, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and frowned. Water clung to her bare skin like raindrops on a leather jacket - she had a leather jacket once. Nicer than the hide that clung to her now, too. The decades had taken most of her coat with them, leaving a few patches of blue hair to cling to her grey skin. She looked like a corpse that didn’t have the decency to stay buried. No amount of medicine would fix that. It didn’t surprise her at all that Sledge might be hesitant to let anyone else in the Stable see her.

She shut off the tap, looked down at the pill bottle and tried not to think about what might happen if Blue decided to grab the controls while she was in the midst of dozens of curious residents. Nothing good, that's for sure. Putting that part of her to bed might not be the worst idea ever.

“So,” she said, stepping out of the bathroom, “Opal filled me in on what you two found under the servers.”

She let herself relax as Sledge’s discomfort shifted away from her and toward their situation at large. He crossed the room and sat at the foot of the bed while Rainbow took the chair at the desk. Creases formed at the corners of his eyes as he squinted to skim the top of the document that she had left open on the terminal.

“Something tells me we’re getting close to the bottom of this whole mess. Whoever sliced those cables was in a hurry, but they still decided to leave two data lines intact.” He grunted, tipping his nose toward the terminal where one of Delta Vee’s personal logs dominated the screen. “Those cuts were too precise to be done by just any pony. The cables, the encrypted first decade of this Stable, everything we’re finding keeps pointing to that mare.”

Rainbow leaned back in her chair and nodded. Spitfire might have been the one to slam the door shut, but Delta was involved in this somehow too. Opal had been convinced that Delta would have had the knowhow to effectively erase the first ten years of Stable records if Spitfire had ordered it, but instead she chose to coil them up in encryptions and bury them deep within their own hidden nook within the archives. Doing so would have been a blatant act of disobedience. Defiance, even. Rainbow had a good feeling the two of them might have gotten along.

She tapped the keyboard, idly scrolling down the document as she reaffirmed her suspicion. Something had happened during the first ten years of the Stable’s history that Spitfire had wanted erased and Delta Vee didn’t, and the apparent fact that she might have severed the umbilical that had connected Stable 10 to a larger network that bridged all the other Stables only fueled her motivation to keep chipping down toward the root of Delta's motivation.

The terminal chimed. Rainbow pecked a key and her message queue flickered onto the screen.

“Good news, hopefully,” Sledge murmured.

Rather than get his hopes up, she shrugged. “Just the next batch of decrypted files. I should get back to it before these start piling up. I’ll let you know how the meds work out.”

It was the politest way she could think of to say, let's get back to work.

Sledge rose to his hooves and nodded once. “Docs say to take one pill a day and keep a journal to track when Blue comes and goes. I told them you’ve been timing it since you arrived, so you’ll be able to tell whether there’s improvement.”

Blue’s appearances were already getting shorter, but there had been no denying that progress had begun to slow. Maybe medication was the last push she needed before she could regain some semblance of normalcy. One way or the other, she would find out.

“Thanks, Sledge.”

“Anytime. I’ll swing back in a few hours with lunch.”

She waved goodbye and turned more fully to the screen. She opened IT’s latest dump and was encouraged to see they had taken her advice and begun prioritizing outgoing messages from Delta’s personal terminal. Now that she had turned her focus solely toward anything authored by the Stable’s first head of IT, Rainbow had begun sending the ponies upstairs decryption requests en masse. She likely wasn't going to win points with them by doing so, but one of the benefits of being locked in her own compartment meant no one could come knocking on her door to complain.

She half-listened to Sledge rummaging through his pockets for his keycard as she skimmed the new entries. Something about seeing so many neutral, whitebread subject lines gave her a touch of nostalgia for her time at the Ministries. As much as she hated having to type messages with one wing while using the other to constantly cover her ass, she liked to think she’d gotten pretty good at weaponizing it when she needed something done. A tiny smile touched her lip as she ran through the list.

--- Network Traffic Report - Week 43
--- REMINDER: Fabrication terminal update 1AM Friday
--- Week 43 Dept. Head Meeting Agenda
--- Thoughts from Tuesday call…
--- Re: Dinner?
--- Shift Plan for 11/31/87 Anniversary
--- Need Serial # ASAP
--- Department Report
--- Re: re: Dinner?
--- Applicant background check approved
--- To my beloved husband, Jet
--- October 1087 Productivity Summary
--- Server Integrity Check Results
--- Re: re: re: Dinner?

Rainbow paused, scrolled back up and narrowed her eyes at one subject line in particular.

To my beloved husband, Jet.

That didn’t track. Not a bit. Jet Stream and Delta Vee were famously divorced. Even outside of the casual tabloid, most ponies had once been painfully aware of the controversy that swirled around the rise of Jet’s multibillion bit corporation and his ex-wife’s comparatively impoverished existence running a junkyard on the outskirts of Las Pegasus. Husband, he was not. Beloved, even less so.

The compartment door let out a chirp and hissed open. She spun in her chair. “Sledge, hang on a sec.”

He stopped halfway over the threshold and glanced back at her. Ponies in identical blue and yellow jumpsuits milled through the corridor, several of them taking the rare opportunity to steal a glimpse inside as they passed. Sledge shot them warning glares as he backed into the compartment and swiped his badge to reseal the door.

She waved him over and opened the message.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 10
To: Delta Vee
Bcc: Jet Stream (CEO)
From: Delta Vee
Subject: To my beloved husband, Jet
11/01/1087
[1 file(s) attached.]

The seed is at perigee.

A riddle. Rainbow deflated a little. She was getting tired of trying to figure out where all these pieces fit. She wasn’t even sure if this was part of the same puzzle.

“She sent it to herself and Jet Stream?”

The stub of her ear flicked toward Sledge, catching his confused tone. It was strange, but that wasn’t saying much. Everything about this was strange.

Sledge tapped a feather against the screen. “Opal said she was the only one of her family to make it here before the Stable was shut. If this was sent ten years after, why would she bother copying Jet at all? He wouldn't be here to read it.”

Rainbow shrugged. “I don’t know. Symbolism, maybe? Like a message in a bottle?”

“No. The sappy long lost lover angle doesn’t cover cryptic, riddle-me-this…” he trailed off. “There’s an attachment.”

He was right. She’d almost missed it. Her feathers ticked over the keyboard and opened it. The terminal briefly chattered as a new window appeared, bearing a strange line of text.

STECSYSTEMS > Stable10 > Directory Archive > Partition List > Partition 40 > 10/01/1087 - 10/31/1087 > Video Archive > 10/31/1087 Logs > Security > OverseerDoor01.cam

7:19pm.

Rainbow stared at the terminal. Her hoof took on a nervous bounce against the floor. Beside her, Sledge’s jumpsuit rustled as he sat. Partition 40. That was where Delta had sealed away the first decade of Stable 10’s history. The one that had to be chiseled away at file by file, each uniquely obscured by encryptions of a long dead mare’s design. And here, tucked away in a strange message sent by that same mare, was a map.

Her throat went dry. She swallowed to loosen it.

“I think this is it.”

Sledge took a breath and nodded. “I'll call Opal.”

“How’re you holding up, short stuff?”

Julip’s feather-muffled snort was encouraging. She’d spent the better half of the night alternating between worrying herself sick and crying herself back to sleep. Roach had never seen this side of her before. Any question that she might be putting on an act for Aurora’s benefit had been rendered moot by the Enclave mare’s…

...former Enclave mare’s first panic attack. Some things were not faked easily and in order to keep her from waking Aurora and Ginger over and over again, Roach quietly took her away from the shack where she could ride out the worst of the shaking and sweats in relative privacy. He remembered how Ginger had reacted once she finally had time to slow down and dwell on her bold decision to leave her family and expose herself to the dangers of the untamed wastes. He knew there would be moments when he could help and moments when his presence, if it was wanted at all, was all he could offer.

Amongst the thicket of dead branches, he had sat beside her in silence, only encouraging her to keep talking when it seemed like she was locking down. Ginger once told him that letting her babble on about her fears was what helped her push through the darker moments. It seemed to be working for Julip, too. Just a little bit.

“Don’t call me short,” she muttered back. After it had become clear she was going to be up and down throughout the night, she’d resigned herself to sleep out on the dirt within sight of the shack. Her head was tucked under her wing like a strange bird, and he smirked a little as she kept it there, hidden from view. “I’m doing better, thanks.”

He sat down and watched her. “How’s your stomach? Think you can handle some breakfast?”

She pulled her head back, pausing to sniff before rubbing the gunk from her eyes. They were rimmed red from tears and exhaustion. With dawn, or what amount to dawn when there was nothing to see but overcast, about to break it would be time for them to refuel and resume their journey. “A little, maybe.”

“A little’s better than nothing.” He stood and helped her up off the dirt, noticing her confusion as she looked back to the empty shack. “Ginger took Aurora out hunting. They should be back soon.”

Julip nodded and followed him back to the abandoned structure where their gear lay neatly in the corner. “I thought Aurora was a lousy shot.”

He smiled. “Hence why she’s out getting practice. And don’t let her fool you, she’s better than she lets on.” Lifting the flap of Aurora’s saddlebag, he pulled out the thermos that Meridian had gifted them with her tarry instant coffee, holding between his teeth. “Good idea or no?”

Julip plopped down in the corner next to the broken wall and shook her head. “Just water.”

He obliged, bringing her Aurora’s canteen instead and one of the apples from Stable 1.

She unscrewed the cap with her feathers and sipped from it, letting him keep the fruit for now. “I probably sound like a broken record but I’m really sorry I fucked things up for all of you.”

Setting the apple on the dusty boards, he settled down beside her. “I haven’t seen a single pegasus in the sky since you chased off Chops and Dancer. No spritebots, either. Could be Primrose doesn’t know you lied.”

He watched her, waiting to see if the wave of anxiety would come roaring in again. She looked miserable as she nursed the canteen, staring off at the boiling clouds above. Wiping her eyes again, she shook her head. “She knows. Our spritebots aren’t just glorified eyeballs, they’re flying lie detectors, and my vitals were all over the place when she asked. I’m a dead mare if I go back home.”

Roach hummed, then held out a hoof for the canteen. She traded it to him and he rolled the apple toward her in exchange. “Eat.”

She scrubbed her nose and started eating.

“I don’t think any of us ever asked,” he said, taking a swig. “What’s… what was waiting for you back in New Canterlot?”

Julip pulled off a chunk of fruit and shrugged as she chewed. “The archives. My bunk. Food, shelter. My fucking purpose.”

“Any friends?”

Another shrug, but no answer this time.

“Family?”

She shook her head. “That old grey mare ain’t much to talk about. I already gave you the highlights worth talking about. Drunk, drugged and undependable.”

Roach capped the canteen and set it down next to Julip’s wing. Their ears twitched at the dull crack of Aurora’s rifle as it echoed across the slowly brightening valley, and he was heartened to hear no follow-up shots. For a mare who understood precision machinery, it made sense that she’d adapt to a quality rifle so naturally.

He cleared his throat and Julip glanced at him. “Want to know what I think? I think last night you made out like a bandit.”

Julip puffed a breath through her teeth, but he was undeterred.

“From what you’ve said, you lost three square meals, a bed, your job and not much else. In exchange you’ve got what I would argue are three pretty decent friends, a happy family of dustwings who don’t even know what you’ve done for them yet and maybe even a better purpose than the one the Enclave assigned you.”

He waited for her to absorb that, hoping this time around some of it might stick now that she wasn’t swamped by panic. She continued to work on her apple, eyes glued to the floorboards as she ate the core, and then finally heaved a long sigh. “Maybe.”

“Maybe nothing. Far as I’m concerned, Enclave or not, you’re with us now.”

She swallowed and turned so he couldn’t see her face. Her hoof tapped gently against the floor as she choked.

“Thanks.”

The molerat stopped its waddling, stood up on its hind legs and snapped its beady little eyes toward her. In the same moment she squeezed the trigger. Desperate Times bucked against her shoulder with a sharp crack of fire and the oversized rodent spun several yards over the valley floor.

Aurora let out a victorious little hiss. “Gotcha!”

She grinned as Ginger gave her a congratulatory pat on the shoulder and pushed herself off the dirt to flip the smoking rifle’s safety on, still mindful of the next round that had popped up into the chamber. More and more she found herself appreciating the rifle’s simplicity, and the thought of carrying one of the pipe rifles the slavers favored baffled her.

“When we get back to camp I’ll show you how to field dress it,” Ginger promised.

Shouldering the rifle, Aurora started down the slope. “Hooray, I can’t wait to count the tumors.”

“I prefer to cut around them, but you can do whatever you like when it’s your turn.” Ginger shot her a wink. “Joking, of course.”

“Of course, darling,” Aurora jibbed, earning herself an eye roll.

As they approached their soon-to-be breakfast, Ginger encompassed the dead molerat in a bubble of magic that popped with an audible rush of displaced air. Without so much as a warning the rodent flashed into existence mere feet from Aurora’s nose, startling a yelp from her as she instinctively ducked to keep from trotting into the disgusting thing face first.

Ginger trilled with an apologetic laugh, swinging the creature away from her and off to the other side. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it that close!”

Aurora pursed her lips and swatted Ginger across the flank several times with her feather, shuddering at the mere thought of how much shampoo it would take to clean her mane had she actually headbutted the overgrown critter. “Gross, gross, gross! How does that even work?”

Turning toward the distant shack, Ginger shrugged. “I’m not sure I even understand it. Ever since I did it the first time, it just seems to work. Mostly, that is. I really wasn’t trying to give you a molerat facial.”

Aurora stuck her tongue out and shivered. “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

Ginger blinked, frowned and then recoiled. “Oh, Aurora, that is heinous!”

She grinned and chalked a line in her column, but with the shack slowly growing larger amongst the toppled trees the mood began to shift. Aurora pressed her lips together, taking a breath. “Think she’s going to be okay?”

Ginger followed close behind, zigzagging through the fallen stumps like tiny two ball bearings enclosed inside a novelty maze. “In general, or as an Enclave target?”

“Both, I guess. She was up and down all last night.”

“I wasn’t surprised,” Ginger murmured. “She and I spoke about it while we were on the stairs. When I started asking questions she couldn’t answer she started reciting Enclave regulations like she was trying to tell me why she couldn’t answer, but without saying so explicitly. I knew the Enclave drilled that sort of thing into their members but I didn’t know it got that bad.”

Aurora frowned. “She really believes they’re going to come after her.”

“Their leader has a reputation for responding to disloyalty with a fair bit of theater. My parents took my sister and I to one of the executions when we were old enough.” She winced as if reliving the memory. “They aren’t merciful deaths. If Primrose knows she’s been lied to, Julip has every right to be afraid.”

When they reached the shack, they could both see that Roach and Julip were in the middle of a discussion. They nodded their good mornings and Ginger held up Aurora’s kill for them to see, then went about clearing out enough of the surrounding wood behind the shack to build a small fire. Even though they could still hear the low tones of the conversation, neither of them put any effort into prying. Julip needed privacy. She wasn’t going to get it with two curious mares pressing their ears to the wall.

Aurora discovered, to her dismay, that she did not have the iron stomach for field dressing that she thought she did. Her gut did flips as Ginger instructed her on where to cut, what to remove and which organs to avoid puncturing lest she ruin the meat. She was actually glad that the centaurs had forced them to abandon half of their supplies because that half they had lost contained Ginger’s knife. Utilizing the same spell she’d harnessed to dehorn Autumn, she slid her magic through the carcass for the purpose of the demonstration.

She managed to get through the lesson without losing her composure, but when the gut pile hit the dirt her appetite dried up like a strip of jerky. How one molerat could contain that much blood and viscera was a magic trick in itself. Mercifully, Ginger bubbled the mess in her magic and poofed it out of sight. Aurora shook her head, both disgusted and impressed, and pecked Ginger on the crease of her muzzle to thank her for taking the time.

The small fire had burned itself to crackling coals by the time the demonstration was over, and the flat stone Ginger affectionately referred to as a “hot rock” waited to be put to use at the center of the embers. She sliced thick strips from the carcass and, after checking them for lesions, laid them across the stone. They sizzled and popped, browning on one side and then the other. Lost appetite be damned, the smell of cooking meat had Aurora’s stomach perking up like a starved animal.

“Shame we don’t have salt or pepper,” Ginger mused. “Something Roach taught me when we first met. You can have all the seasoning in the world, but ninety-nine percent of the time all you need for a good meal is a pinch of salt and pepper.”

With nothing to sit on that might catch the entire valley on fire, she sat down on the hard pack with Ginger on her hip. “I’ll try to remember that. You think Roach needs a break?”

Ginger shook her head. “I don’t think he’d want one if he did.”

The embers shifted while the strips of meat cooked crackling puddles of fat. Tiny geysers of fire puffed out from the coals as it dripped off the edges of the hot rock.

“He’s really gone all-in with her,” she murmured.

“It’s just something he does. Once he sees the potential for good in someone, he doesn’t stop.”

A smile creased her lip. “Even you, huh?”

Ginger chuckled. “Absolutely not. I’m a lost cause. As soon as you’re not looking, I’ll be pulling a Nightmare Moon and taking over Equestria.”

They laughed together, taking care not to let it carry so far that it might distract from any progress Roach was making. When the first strips of meat were cooked, Ginger lifted them out of the embers and sliced them into bite-sized cubes. She popped one into her mouth and nodded her approval as she chewed, hovering a morsel off the tip of Aurora’s nose for her to nip out of the air. She dropped two more cuts onto the hot rock for Julip and Roach, and for several wonderful minutes they ate the softly smoked meat in happy silence.

Aurora plucked another bit of molerat from Ginger’s magic and leaned against her shoulder. “Have any interesting dreams last night?”

Ginger nodded, keeping her voice to a whisper. “A few, actually. Once those two are finished, I’ll fill you all in. It wasn’t an easy night.”

She murmured in agreement. “I think I woke up at least--”

Aurora stopped at the sound of a stick snapping on the other side of the shack. Roach’s subtle way to let them know they were heading over. The two of them glanced back as he and Julip made their way around the corner, the latter of which was red-eyed yet managing something of a reassuring smile.

As they reached the fire ring, Aurora pushed herself up and wrapped Julip in a quick hug. She half expected the smaller mare to give her a black eye to match the dark shadow around her own, but she returned it instead, saying nothing. When Aurora let her go, Julip allowed herself to be squeezed by Ginger as well. In that moment, without a word spoken between them, there was no longer any question that Julip was part of the team.

One by one, they sat down together and ate.

“Huh. Weird name.” Julip hummed, testing it out for herself. “Tantabus. Does it mean something?”

Aurora tightened the strap of her rifle as she listened and double-checked the safety. With their bellies full and cantines passed around for the last time, there was little left to do besides pack up their gear and prepare for the last flight east.

“I thought it might be rude to ask,” Ginger admitted, using her magic to scoop dirt over their cookfire. “It is a mouthful, though. And I’m not entirely certain she is a she.”

Beside her, Roach chuckled. “There’s an easy way to check.”

Ginger balked, swatting him in the ribs with the back of her foreleg. He snorted a pained laugh and turned his attention back to the task of burying the emptied bags of Rad-Away. Thankfully, with the aid of Aurora’s Pip-Buck, they had learned their exposure to his brief burst of radiation hadn’t been enough to cause significant harm. Still, the faster they purged the extra rads from their systems the better off they would be.

“You could call her Tandy,” Julip suggested.

Aurora offered a considerate hum as she double-checked the contents of her saddlebags. Her nose wrinkled when she spotted fresh bruising on the remaining haul of apples. Too much jostling. Her father would just tell her the blemishes make them sweeter. She nudged them to one side of the bag and propped them into a loose pile with the narrow journal Ginger had taken from the cabin a week earlier, leaving the remainder of her supplies to their own little pocket.

“Is that even a word?” she asked.

Julip shrugged, busying herself by stretching and retracting her freshly healed wing. “Does it have to be? Tantabus sounds just as made up as Tandy.”

“Well,” Ginger supplied, “I imagine if Princess Luna gave it to her, it’s likely to be an ancient one. It may have fallen out of use a millennium ago for all we’ll ever know.”

Aurora wasn’t convinced. Tandy sounded like a nonsense word to her ears, but then again so did Tantabus. She frowned, realizing the longer she focused on any name she knew, it started to sound like gibberish. “This is making my head hurt.”

“You poor thing.” Ginger shot her a wink and finished tamping dirt over the coals, her gaze drifting to Aurora’s saddlebag. “Something wrong?”

The question made her ears perk up. She’d been staring at the contents of her bag without realizing it. Her cheeks went warm as she dipped a wing inside and drew out three worn holotapes, their paper labels sunbleached into illegibility. “I forgot all about these.”

Ginger tapped the ash from her hoof and came over to see. “Quincy’s holotapes?”

She nodded, sliding them against each other in her wing. With everything that had happened lately, the little diskettes had fallen off her radar and shuffled their way to the bottom of her bags. Now, as they prepared to undertake what felt like the final leg of their journey, she wondered if they were worth bothering with.

“Quincy, as in Autumn’s runt secretary Quincy?” Julip had stopped stretching at the sound of his name, crossing their modest campsite to better see the holotapes in Aurora’s feathers. “My caps were on that kid winding up as deathclaw food. What’s on them?”

She cupped two of the tapes and separated the third, pinching it between the tips of her feathers and turning it side to side. “No idea. He told me he swiped them from Autumn’s office before he escaped.”

Julip held out a wing and Aurora obliged, tipping the first two into her feathers for her to examine while keeping the third. Tilting her Pip-Buck to the side, she unlocked the tape deck beneath the screen, slid the holotape inside and pressed the door shut. Unseen mechanisms buried inside her Pip-Buck chattered to life and the screen went blank as data spooled off the tape. In the span of a breath, fresh lines of text appeared in bright green letters.

Aurora paused at the last subject line, then turned to see the green mare’s gaze fixed on the screen.

Julip swallowed. “Open it.”

She did. The Pip-Buck flickered, then began to flow with fresh text.

---

03-11-1297
Let it be known to whoever gives a shit that Corporal Mint Julip is an incorrigible bitch. This is why I hate working with the Enclave. It doesn’t matter if they have a mountain full of old world tech if they cling to every clean nut and bolt in the wasteland like it’s their birthright to own. They’re physically incapable of showing appreciation for the work it took me to open up one fucking trade route between the two most stubborn powers of this shithole we all share. One straight answer. That’s all I want from them. Just one straight answer.

SOLUS exists. I don’t care what Minister Primrose’s envoys say, there’s too much data here that says otherwise. The Steel Rangers know it exists, too. Coldbrook practically dropped out of his sheath as soon as he realized I’d found breadcrumbs out here. Newspapers don’t lie. The film reels Cider found in Manehattan don’t lie. SOLUS is up there, somewhere, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let either of those power hungry fucks get to it first.

I’m taking a risk keeping the corporal under lock and key, but it’ll be worth the risk if she can pull her head out of her ass and help me crack these servers.

03-13-1297
Lot of sprite-bots in the area now. They’re looking for the corporal.

She decided to quit her hunger strike and start eating again. Far as I can tell, she hasn’t touched the terminal we put in the cage with her. She has a nose for bullshit.

03-15-1297
Quincy refuses to take the corporal up for any more bathroom breaks after she pissed on him this morning. Can’t say I didn’t laugh when I heard about it, but Julip clearly isn’t taking her situation seriously.

03-18-1297
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I gave the corporal an ultimatum, today. Help us find SOLUS or my security team helps themselves to her. The corporal has since begun using her terminal. Hopefully that keeps her motivated long enough to find it, but if she digs in her hooves again I think I’m prepared to deliver on my threat. SOLUS is too important. This company can only keep the raiders cowed for so long before they figure out a way to push back into their old territories, and Equestria is never going to rebuild itself if every little faction is too busy killing each other over the next pile of scrap.

If Blinder’s Bluff can flourish off the power of one Stable, then I have every reason to believe Equestria can be resurrected by SOLUS.

03-21-1297
Progress, finally! The logs from the corporal’s terminal confirmed that she’s cracked open a cache of messages penned by the late great Jet Stream himself! I knew when we relocated here that there would be a chance we might find credible evidence, but this could be the entire motherlode. She’s finding technical data on SOLUS. Real, legitimate schematics of the satellite modules. All we need now are the orbital coordinates and we’re in business!

03-22-1297
Julip discovered the virtual network that we restricted her terminal to and bypassed it. She attempted to wipe the servers but didn’t get far. Still, we lost mountains of data in the breach. Before she can be trusted to access the archives again we need to create a backup. I’ve tasked Quincy with the project.

Cider will be back tomorrow. He’s good at… leaving an impression. We could have lost SOLUS because of her. I need her to understand what happened today can’t happen again.

03-23-1297
I’m going to give Julip a couple days to herself. Cider was rougher on her than he needed to be.

03-25-1297
Spoke to her this morning. Hard to get much out of her besides insults and death threats. I can’t say I blame her. I tried to get her to understand the potential good that could come from harnessing SOLUS, but she refuses to listen. When I showed her the news clippings she told me they were all lies and claimed that I was trying to manipulate her into betraying the Enclave.

I sent Cider out on the western route. There’s a few towns down that way he needs to check in on, and I don’t like the way he keeps asking me whether the corporal has been cooperative. Best to send him out to blow off steam at one of the brothels up at the Bluff.

03-28-1297
She found SOLUS. It's still up there.

Launch times, docking schedules, everything down to its orbital period (1436mins) and semi-major axis (42,164km). I can’t stop laughing. Quincy thinks I’m losing it. Jet Stream put it on a 63.2° inclination. I don’t even have to draw it out on a map, it’s right above our heads. All this fucking time, SOLUS has been loitering in geostationary orbit and all we had to do was look up to see it. No wonder the Enclave won’t stop pumping the sky full of clouds. If every wingless yokel like me could unlock a new golden age with a little stargazing, the Enclave would have been out of business a century ago.

I’m leaving Quincy in charge of processing out the caravans for the next few days. I don’t need to fly to be able to make contact with SOLUS. I just need altitude and a decent transmitter, and I know exactly where to find both.

04-02-1297
Home sweet home. I couldn’t find it. It might be gone.

The DJ in charge of Hightower Radio was out for the day, and her gryphon caretaker was completely unhelpful. All brawn and no brains. Legs for days, though. She let me use Flipswitch’s broadcast equipment when I told her I wanted to check the skies for satellites, but the idiot bird wouldn’t leave me alone for a moment. I had to figure out how to use the transmitter with her breathing down my mane. I swear on Celestia’s crown that thing was in heat.

I tried broadcasting a selection of diagnostic queries toward the coordinates SOLUS should have been at, but nothing came back. The gryphon suggested amplifying the signal, which of course I had already done, but it was as if the satellite wasn’t there at all. Maybe the cloud cover obscured the signal, or maybe I’m using outdated coordinates. Maybe SOLUS reentered the atmosphere.

Try to stay positive, Autumn. It’s still up there. You just have to find it.

04-09-1297
Cider is dead.

SOLUS can wait.

I’m going to find Ginger Dressage and I am going to make her HURT.

---

Aurora looked up from her Pip-Buck to see Julip’s eyes glazed with angry tears. They were wide, focused intensely on some distant point far, far away from where she was now. A little over a week before Aurora left her Stable, before the generator began showing signs of slowing down, before she had any concept that her world was as fragile and impermanent as the one that had come and gone before it, Julip had been suffering alone in a tiny cage, forced to endure the brunt of what Cider chose to inflict upon her.

She realized to her own frustration that she didn’t know what to say to her. For Aurora, she’d only been made to endure the attempt. She’d been in a position to fight back, and she had. Judging by Julip’s brittle frown, that hadn’t been a luxury she’d enjoyed.

Roach stood and sat himself beside her, settling a leg over her shoulder for comfort. Somehow, he always knew the right thing to do. Julip squeezed her eyes shut and took a long, pained breath as she buried the worst of the pain. A few stray tears dropped off her cheeks and nothing more. She leaned, letting her shoulder briefly touch Roach’s chest as an acknowledgement, then cleared her throat.

When she spoke her voice was thick, but under control. “I don’t want to be pitied, and if any of you starts treating me like a fucking porcelain doll I’ll put my hoof up your ass. Okay?”

Aurora felt the tension in her face begin to soften. “Deal.”

“If you ever want to talk, d-”

She cut off Ginger with a rough shake of her head. “I don’t. Thanks for the offer, really, but I’ve had worse days. Trust me.”

Aurora looked to Ginger and could tell the unicorn had some serious doubts about that. Still, she let the issue retire with a simple nod. Then, as the threat of an uncomfortable silence loomed, she leaned past Aurora and lifted a brow at Roach. “I thought you said SOLUS was some kind of a spy satellite.”

A look of abject confusion began to form on the changeling’s face before recognition dawned on him and he let out a little snort. “During our meeting with Elder Coldbrook.”

Julip blinked and looked up at him. “You've met him?”

Roach nodded, taking his hoof back from her shoulder and using it to gesture vaguely at the air in front of him. “Maybe meeting isn’t the right word.”

“Hostage negotiation is more like it,” Aurora growled.

He nodded grimly. “Coldbrook took the opportunity to squeeze us for information at the end of our stay at Blinder’s Bluff. He tried to feign ignorance of what SOLUS was to see if we would offer him anything he didn’t already know. I fed him a line about SOLUS being an observation platform, but either he didn’t know I was lying or he was smart enough not to call me out. Judging by Autumn’s journal, Coldbrook apparently has a better idea of what it might be than he was letting on. If he knows SOLUS was designed to supply solar power to the surface, it would explain why he’s so eager to threaten a Stable just to get his hooves on it.”

Julip shook her head.

Roach frowned. “No?”

She hesitated for a beat, then said, “SOLUS isn’t an energy source. It’s a weapon.

Hours Earlier…

Primrose awoke to the soft tapping of a hoof on her door, cracked the one eye not buried into her pillow open and groaned. What time was it? No, scratch that, what day was it?

She buried her nose into her plush linens, briefly blocking out the morning glare beyond her curtained window, and tried to wish him away. He knocked again, a little more firmly. She sighed. Almost three centuries old and she still wasn’t allowed to sleep in.

Flopping onto her back, she kicked off her silken sheets and lay there like a butterfly pinned inside a picture frame. He knocked again.

She groaned, again. “Come in.”

Her personal advisor, a prissy little yellow stallion with the death stare of a grizzled librarian, pushed open her door and gently shut it behind him. As always, he kept a clipboard nestled under his left wing that held a thin sheaf of papers containing his morning report. Primrose watched him glance at her, adjust his glasses with a free feather, and promptly pulled open her curtains more fully. He was as much a nanny as he was an advisor, but he was also the only assistant she’d had in two hundred years who committed the duties of his job to memory. Obnoxious as he could be, she secretly appreciated his punctuality.

“It’s 7am, Miss,” he said. “Time to greet the day.”

Not ma’am. Not Minister Primrose. Miss. A subtle affectation that she suspected meant he saw her not as a ranking superior or herald of the late princesses, but simply as an employer. The mare of the house. Grudgingly, she sat up and slid off her mattress before he started pestering her again. He waited, shifting through his papers while her mind fought to catch up with her waking body. As it did, she squinted at the unfiltered shafts of sunlight that opened and closed beyond her bedroom window.

Her advisor also had a bad habit of starting into work before she was ready. “You have an urgent notice from--”

She waved a wing to shut him up, ignoring his flat stare as he pressed his muzzle closed. Dropping onto the carpet, she dragged a few clutching feathers across his face partly to indicate he should follow but mostly to irritate him as they rumpled his otherwise flawless mane. He knew the drill and fixed his mane in silence as he followed.

The simulated sunlight beaming into her bedroom flickered dark as soon as the door shut behind her. Their hooves clicked off polished concrete, passing through another set of highly secured pneumatic doors before they entered the primary corridors of the underground complex. In the early days after the bombs fell, the Enclave had struggled to find the resources to construct the first few hallways. But as the decades wore on and it became clear there were other elements gathering power in Equestria, a need for a hardened structure to base their operations became more pressing.

Primrose let her wing slide across the metal bulkhead, guiding her down the next turn to the elevators at the end of the hall. It was no Stable, something many initiates first assumed when entering the almost prewar structure, but it was sufficient. Primrose had been the highest value target for the Steel Rangers for the last two hundred years. It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d stockpiled enough of Twilight’s stimpacks to last her a millennium when all it took was a single bullet to yank her from the picture. Distasteful as it was, she’d learned to tolerate spending most of her time in her horizonless home sweet home.

They stepped into the elevator and she flicked the topmost button. It heaved beneath their hooves, ferrying them past the bustling core of the Enclave’s operations toward the surface. Safer or not, she refused to live this “blessed” life of hers shuttered away from the sky.

The elevator ground to a stop and split open into a round, spacious hall. Fluted pillars spaced along its circumference bore finely woven banners depicting scenes plucked from the heights of Equestrian history. Golden braids of fine silk framed a beautiful depiction of Canterlot Castle, the sky behind it split down the center by day and night. The defeat of Nightmare Moon, Chrysalis, Discord and Tirek carved another into quarters. Primrose stepped into the busy rotunda, mindful of the many eyes being drawn to her, and sent her best mournful smile toward the tapestry which bore the fallen city of Cloudsdale across its stitches. Bent along the tapered bottom stood a single word: REMEMBER.

Her public obligation fulfilled, she continued across the grand hall and pushed open the finely carved doors into the plaza and New Canterlot beyond.

Spreading her wings, she propelled herself into the air. Her assistant dutifully followed.

Up, up, up she went without sparing so much as a glance to the sprawling city shrinking below her. Equestria these days wasn’t much to look at. Drab, dreary and desolate even on the best of days, it was a necessary sacrifice to ensure the Enclave could traverse the skies undetected. Sparing a look toward the scarred slope of Canterlot Mountain, she could just make out the grey concrete slabs embedded below its peak. The snow there, or what was left of it, had long since been stained grey by the chemical mix that her aptly named Weather Factory pumped into the sky. She squinted as she passed through the pillowy layers of cloud-seeding smog, trusting her wings to guide her through.

The eruption of light behind her eyelids let her know they were through, and she opened them toward the rising sun. A few moments later her advisor popped through the brown layer of haze and quickly tracked toward her just as Primrose’s hooves settled into the manufactured mist. Like always, he said nothing about her ability to cloudwalk, but he did as usual take a quick peek at the polluted pockets of condensation that toughened beneath her hooves. Another perk of Twilight’s enchanted ampules that only added to the mythology Primrose had spent so much time building around herself.

“The day has been greeted,” she murmured as he tread air beside her. “What do you have for me today?”

He cleared his throat and resumed where he had left off. “Foremost, Miss, there is an urgent notice from Comms regarding Corporal Mint Julip.”

Primrose tucked her wings against her hips and slipped into a casual trot, enjoying the gentle give of the clouds despite their sickly appearance. “Is she dead?”

She smiled as her advisor kept the exasperation out of his voice. “No. The report only states that the sensor logs taken from the corporal’s debriefing show a high likelihood of deliberate deception over the course of your conversation.”

Her smile grew dim. “She lied to me?”

“It seems so, Miss. Her vitals peaked immediately after you made mention of the dustwing sightings in that vicinity. We’ve also received word that Lieutenant Dancer and Corporal Chops were dismissed from their assignment and told by Corporal Julip to assist with reconnaissance operations at Foal Mountain.”

Primrose’s expression hardened. “Dancer outranks her.”

“He acknowledged that when he reported in to one of the spritebots on fixed patrol near Kiln. They claim Corporal Julip told them their orders came directly from you, Miss.”

She stopped walking and pinched the bridge of her muzzle between two pink feathers. “Conniving little runt.”

Her advisor stayed safely quiet. Primrose took a breath of untainted morning air and cleared her mind.

“I need to speed this up,” she muttered, then looked up at the stallion flapping his wings beside her. “I assume the lieutenant and corporal have been returned to their original assignment?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Issue a commendation to Dancer and Chops for reporting in. Give their egos a massage on their minister’s behalf.” She needed to be careful with her next step. Members of the Enclave didn’t lie to their minister for no small reason. Not when there were so many painful ways to punish them for the offense.

Her jaw tightened slightly. Julip had dropped off the radar the moment she crossed into the Pleasant Hills and reappeared more than halfway across the mountains over a day later. Something had happened during that blackout that she was hiding, that much was clear. But if she answered that silence with fire and brimstone, there was a good chance Aurora would bolt.

And she couldn’t afford to let that happen.

“Have the following reassignment sent to Dancer and Chops. They are to monitor the corporal for the remainder of her mission and are to relay anything that might explain her…” Primrose paused, choosing her words carefully. “...unintentional misinterpretation of her debriefing. They are to avoid direct contact with the corporal or the assets of her assignment. Their mission for the time being is to observe and report back with their findings. Repeat what I just said, please.”

The stallion recited her orders verbatim.

“Good. Now what else do you have?”

“Photos, Miss. Sent to your terminal this morning.”

She lifted a brow at her advisor. “Photos of?”

“The Steel Rangers’ presence at Foal Mountain. It appears Miss Pinfeathers’ suspicions were correct. They’ve mounted a significant excavation project that explains the troop movements we detected several days ago.”

Primrose took a deep breath and blew it back out. Stable 10. Ever since the world came tumbling down, all her problems seemed to stem from Stable 10.

“Why don’t you head back down and relay my orders to high command. I’ll take a look at the photos within the hour.”

“Yes, Miss. Enjoy your walk.”

No questions, no insistence she do something else. Just a prompt collapsing of his wings that dropped him into the mist. It was one of the many things she appreciated about the stallions selected to grace her inner circle. They knew exactly what needed to be done, when and who to pester about it. But most importantly, they knew how to obey.

It never ceased to amaze her how much improvement a simple gelding could accomplish.

As she resumed her trot, her thoughts inevitably turned back to the pureblood and Stable 10. Spitfire’s Stable. She chewed her lip, giving a billowing tuft of cloud a hard flick of her hoof. It broke apart without resistance, swirling away to reform elsewhere.

Trouble, trouble, trouble.

The second holotape contained little of value beyond records of expired merchant contracts with F&F Mercantile and several very private musings of Autumn’s in regards to her brother. Aurora was compelled to read several of the latter before Ginger, with some visible discomfort, pressed the eject button for her.

“Perhaps you could read those in your spare time,” she murmured.

Aurora flushed as Ginger dropped the holotape into her saddlebag. As she moved to load the third and final tape into her Pip-Buck, a spread of green feathers blocked the tape deck. Aurora looked up to see that Julip wasn’t as eager to hear what else her former captor had to say.

Dropping the tape back into her saddlebag, she cleared her throat and winced a silent apology to the mare. “Maybe later.”

She mentally kicked herself as her companions gradually went back to packing their things and double-checking their equipment. Daylight, or what amounted to daylight out here, was burning. With the worst of the Pleasant Hills and Equestria at large behind them, the coast was barely a day’s walk ahead.

Then a thought occurred to her. A few pecks on her Pip-Buck brought up the now familiar map. The icon marked HOME still glowed on the margin of the screen accompanied by a pulsing green arrow to indicate just how far away Stable 10 was. She turned away from it, focusing instead on what lay ahead. The squiggly terrain lines of the mountains began to spread apart the further east she looked until other features stood out between the gaps. Bright bends of highways and roads that pulled together as they neared a dense cluster of streets and boulevards, like strands of a frayed rope joining together in a tight braid.

She eyeballed the remaining distance to Fillydelphia and hummed.

“We could make it there in a few hours if we took the air.”

Roach and Ginger both perked up at the suggestion. The prospect of skipping another day of trudging across broken roads in exchange for being carried the rest of the way to Fillydelphia wasn’t a hard sell. It seemed like the more ground they covered, the more the wasteland tried to slow them down. Coasting the rest of the way had a certain appeal.

“I wouldn’t.”

Julip wrinkled her nose uneasily to the low hills in the east. “The Rangers don’t like seeing wings over their cities, and not just Fillydelphia. They’ll shoot us down as soon as they see us coming.”

“What, with guns?” Aurora looked down at her own rifle, then back to Julip with one brow cocked. “We’ll just fly over the cloud layer like the Enclave does.”

“The same Enclave that probably wrote me off as a defector before breakfast,” she countered. Aurora pressed her lips shut, suddenly unsure whether she should agree, apologize or somehow pull a way to do both out from behind her ear. Julip saved her from having to do either, though her explanation came coupled with some visual discomfort. “We… they’ve marked the majority of the Rangers’ larger coastal holdings as red zones. No Enclave assets are permitted to fly over those cities, not even for high-altitude recon. The Rangers don’t need wings to control their skies. They’ve got the Steel Curtain for that.”

Ginger’s ear twitched. “Steel Curtain. I remember hearing about that when I was little. The pegasi were always on edge that the Rangers would find a way to smuggle one of those turret systems in range of New Canterlot and switch it on.”

“Wait,” Aurora said. “Turrets?”

“Zebra tech.” Julip nodded to Ginger. “And they still worry about it. The only reason the Rangers haven’t made the attempt is because they don’t have the equipment to repair the ones they would lose, and it’s hard enough to find dustwings willing to admit they’re pegasi let alone ones willing to locate and carry back a weapons emplacement one piece at a time. Either way, I can think of better ways to kill myself than flying over Fillydelphia.”

Aurora frowned for a beat. Then, despite herself, she blew out a sigh and shook her head. “Well you’re no fun.”

Julip shrugged, but there was a touch of relief in her eyes as well. Aurora had plenty of experience in life being the odd mare out and knew how tenuous those first steps toward being a part of a larger group could be. How easy it could be for Julip to feel too far on the outside and start rethinking her chances with the Enclave.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ginger sent Aurora an approving smile. If she’d known someone like her was waiting out here, she would have broken out of Stable 10 a long time ago.

She smiled back just as Roach gently cleared his throat.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t fly most of the way there,” he murmured. “There’s still a lot of ground left to cover, and cutting down even some of it would be nice. If Julip’s wing is up to it, that is.”

Julip lifted the wing in question and rolled it back and forth in its socket. The swollen lump of flesh that had hindered it thus far had receded almost entirely, thanks to the stimpack Aurora had bartered off of Dancer and Chops. Julip looked to her as if she was weighing the options. “It feels alright… but if I say we need to land, we land. And we fly low. No cloud-surfing. Deal?”

Aurora looked to Ginger, who shrugged, then Roach whose eyes were already tilted toward the low rolling clouds above. How long had it been since he saw the sun? It felt unfair that, out of the four of them, he was the only one to have gone this long without breathing the crisp, clean air of the open sky.

He looked at her with a knowing smile. “Maybe on the way back home.”

While the obvious intention was to ease some of the guilt she was feeling, his assurance only made her feel that much worse. It was the sort of cliche a pony said in a dimestore novel right before they died. Just enough sympathy to remember for a moment before the author spent an entire chapter reminding the reader of how tragic it was that the pony didn’t get to go to the place, see the relative or eat at the restaurant they always meant to. Aurora could almost see the figurative axe hovering over Roach’s neck in that moment. That axe could fuck right off.

She adjusted her rifle under her wing, walked to where Roach stood and half-crouched beside him.

“Alright, detour. Hop on.”

If ghouls could blush, the flesh between Roach’s chitin would have glowed bright pink. “Um.”

“We’ve got most of the day ahead of us,” she pointed out, ignoring Ginger’s look of utter amusement as she waited on Roach. “An hour isn’t going to kill us.”

“Knock on wood.”

She arched a brow at Julip. “You stay here where Ginger can protect you.”

“Be easier if I had a gun,” she pointed out.

A pause. Aurora considered the weight of the pistol she’d picked up inside the silo of Stable 1, but only for a moment.

“One thing at a time,” she hedged, then looked impatiently toward Roach. “C’mon, big guy. While we’re young.”

He snorted. Then, after some hesitation, he hooked his forelegs over her shoulders and seated himself across her back. “You have a way with words, Aurora.”

“I’ve been accused of worse.” She chuckled as she pushed herself upright and turned her attention to Ginger. “Make sure she behaves.”

The unicorn quirked a lip. Julip smirked behind a single, upturned feather.

Aurora grinned back at them as she lifted her grey wings skyward.

July 10th, 1076
Las Pegasus

“T minus one five minutes. We are still a go for liftoff.”

Delta Vee looked up at the monitors suspended from one of the ballroom’s ivory pillars and scowled. In the corner of her eye, a young stallion bearing a tray of fluted glasses drew within wing’s reach and she snatched one away, still glowering at her ex-husband’s overfunded homage to himself. The new heavy launch vehicle was just one of six completed thanks to the ministry contract Jet had managed to magic out of his ass. Condensation drifted into the evening air as crews began disconnecting the liquid oxygen lines from the lower stage, causing the slickly designed rocket to appear and disappear in the golden rays of sunset. Typical. If ever he needed to be convinced he had the biggest cock in Equestria, here he was hosting a party for himself as he launched one into space.

“Ma’am,” the waiter murmured with a hint of disapproval, “perhaps I could interest you in a glass of water, instead?”

She turned away from the screen - the ballroom was littered with the fucking things - and stared at the younger stallion, saying nothing in return. She watched with a touch of satisfaction as he cleared his throat and continued along his way. As he departed, she brought the glass to her lips and tipped back her third glass of champagne. Someone would be around eventually to cut her off, for all the good it would do them. Just because the dress Jet had delivered to her last week didn’t have pockets didn’t mean she didn’t have her own ways to hide an emergency flask. Besides, if he didn’t want her getting shitfaced he shouldn’t have begged her to come here where the open bar was on the company tab.

“Bwuh,” she muttered, pressing a hoof to her chest as a foamy belch rolled out of her throat. A nearby clutch of ponies worth more than a thousand of her grungy junkyards recoiled and quickly found somewhere else to be.

She waggled her empty glass after them. As she did, she spotted Jet watching her from across the crowd, the quiet disappointment as clear as the empty crystal she held between her feathers. She rolled her eyes, spotted the stretch of open doors leading out to the balcony and decided if she was going to piss off Jet tonight she might as well do it proper. As she slipped between the brown-nosers and ass-kissers of the Equestrian elite, she dipped a wing under the fringe of her midnight blue slip and dug out a soft pack of smokes and a gas station lighter from under her garter. To the ponies around her, she must have looked like a chem fiend picking at some unspeakable lesion by the way they cleared a path for her. She grinned, happy to give them a nugget of culture to take home for the night.

Stepping out into the dusk, she found an empty spot along the stone railing and unceremoniously flicked her glass over the edge. With both wings free to go about their duties, she nipped the first stick of the night out of the pack and lit the tip with a habitually singed feather.

She sighed as the first drag of nicotine filled her lungs, gradually smoothing away the raw edges of her nerves. Pale smoke curled through her two-toned mane as she stared out at the sprawling launch complex in the distance. Just two years earlier, Jet Stream Aerospace had been another west coast fantasy company held together by heat tape and a few million bit investments made by a wingful of minor broadcast stations who had bought his bullshit pitch about the future of satellite television.

Now he was actually making good on those promises. A tiny fleet of JSA branded satellites arced over the horizon every day. A telescope bearing his name peered out into the inky abyss of space, logging new discoveries that the princesses could refute less and less. He was making waves. Now he was ready to make a splash.

“Hey, mom.”

Delta chewed on the edge of the filter for a breath before pulling the cigarette from her lips and directing a stream of smoke away from her daughter. “Hey, kiddo.”

Apogee had been a stubborn kid, and now she was a stubborn adult. Already a stone’s throw away from thirty, she made no qualms about dropping a yellow wing over her mother’s shoulders and pulling them together for a quick squeeze. Delta allowed it only because she knew resisting would only make her daughter that much more determined.

She met Apogee’s freckled smile and felt a little less sour about being dragged out of her junkyard to come here. “You’re dad’s pulling out all the stops for this one,” she commented. As her daughter’s smile began to widen at the mention of Jet, the same old defenses came crashing into place. She added, “Are you buying into his sales pitch too?”

And just like that, Apogee’s smile waned. But rather than walking away - she would never walk away - she hooked her forelegs over the railing and stared out to the rocket waiting on the pad. “SOLUS is going to change the world, mom. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe that on some level.”

Delta dragged on the last of her cigarette and flicked it into the warm July air. “I’ve got a lot of levels.”

“Very deep, mom.”

She snorted, shrugged, and blew a cloud of nicotine toward a pair of mares snapping photos of the brightly lit complex. They wrinkled their noses at her, but a little smoke wasn’t going to stop them from committing this moment in history to their photo album.

Delta hiked up her dress to put her smokes back where she’d found them. “I just don’t want him getting your hopes up. He’s promising everyone here the moon. Don’t be surprised when he starts giving out I.O.U.s.”

She sighed as Apogee wrinkled her nose, an affectation that stuck with her through her foalhood years. “There’s going to be risks no matter what we do. We’re at war because we built faster than Vhannan oil could keep up with.”

Worry touched her brow. “Apogee, don’t say-”

“It’s their land, mom. Not ours.” Her daughter tipped her nose to the ballroom behind them. “They know it too. That’s why they’re here. They’re betting that SOLUS is going to do what dad says it will.”

Delta fought the urge to roll her eyes again, but she couldn’t keep the judgment out of her voice. “Free, unlimited energy for every pony in Equestria. I remember hearing the same promise when they built the refineries up north.”

Apogee made an irritated noise and fell quiet. Delta stole a quick glance at her and winced at the sight of her staring off toward the distant rocket. Sometimes she forgot how sensitive Apogee was when it came to her father. She’d wrongly assumed her daughter would grow thicker skin over time, but that didn’t seem likely to ever happen. It was moments like this that reminded her that despite the state of their fucked up little family, Apogee had love enough for both of them.

What’s more, she could tell when Delta was being a pessimist for the sake of punching her daily asshole card. Normally that didn’t bother the kid, but rocketry was one of the few things in life that gave Delta purpose. The fact that she would piss on that in the hopes that a few drops might hit her ex-husband caused Apogee more distress than she deserved to endure.

She took a deep breath and leaned just enough to bump her shoulder into the young mare beside her. “Sorry, kiddo.”

“It’s okay,” Apogee lied. “We can talk about something else if you want.”

Yet another olive branch from a daughter who had no shortage of them to give. Delta pressed her lips together and tried to smile, but it was a tall order when she didn’t know what to say.

“One of your dad’s prototype engine nozzles went up for auction this week. An XR-25 from back when we were throwing our mortgage money into mock-ups. I’ve got the top bid so far.”

Apogee sighed. “You know he’ll give you one for free if you just ask him.”

“I know,” she said, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “I’m just a stubborn old mule. Feels better to do it on my own.”

“You’re not old,” Apogee said.

“Tell that to my knees.”

She watched as Apogee fidgeted her feathers together, uncomfortable with the topic of her mother growing old. Unsure what to say, Delta glanced over her shoulder to see the waiter from earlier giving her a wide berth as he made his way among the guests on the balcony. She narrowed her eyes at him, and he promptly returned the expression. Little shit.

Inside the ballroom, someone turned on the volume to the array of monitors and a dry stallion’s voice droned over the broadcast. Ponies turned to the screens, the low hum of conversation dimming as all eyes became glued to a close-up shot of the rocket.

When she turned back to Apogee, the freckled mare was still playing with her feathers. Delta frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“Dad asked me to command a crewed mission to SOLUS.”

“Abso…” she clamped her mouth down on the objection and forced herself to think first. Not one of her strong suits, but neither was the maternal instinct suddenly kicking around inside her head.

Absolutely not. The words pressed against her lips, begging to be spoken. Jet was insane if he thought he was going to send their only daughter up there! Trusting a few billion bits’ worth of technology to the uncharted vacuum of orbit was one thing. That made sense. But sending Apogee out there? Entrusting the life of their daughter to a million unknowns?

Her heart thundered in her chest. She wouldn’t allow it. Jet might have run off with their dream but he wasn’t about to send their daughter out on some daredevil mission without at the very least asking for her input. She was still her mother for Celestia’s sake!

Seeing the worry in Apogee’s eyes stopped her in her tracks. She wasn’t a filly anymore, and Delta’s window to play the protective mother had slammed shut years ago. And yet something told her that if she put her hoof down, told Apogee not to do this, her daughter would listen. She would stay grounded just as Delta had done. Her dream slowly withering because, despite all the shitty things Delta had said and done to the kid, Apogee would still rather give up on her dreams if it meant earning just a sliver of approval from her mother.

She took a deep breath and pushed her fears aside. Her gaze shifted toward the rocket, and the tinny launch updates that filtered out from the ballroom behind her. Everywhere she went, she left a little whiff of poison. But not for Apogee. Never for Apogee.

Her voice came out barely a whisper. “When?”

“Next year,” Apogee answered. “Sometime in the fall, after the last SOLUS module is docked. The M.A.S.T. talismans have to be sent up in a separate payload, and someone is going to need to go up to install them manually. Dad thinks I can do it.”

“And he’s sure you’ll be safe?”

A pause. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Dad’s going to ask you to help work out some of the kinks with the EVA suit’s interface. I was kinda hoping you’d say yes.”

She frowned. “Work with your father.”

As if sensing her resistance, Apogee touched her mother’s shoulder. “Working with me.”

In the distance, a cascade of sparks flowed beneath the nozzles. Behind her, the stallion announcer began counting down.

She didn’t know where the impulse came from, but she wrapped a wing behind her daughter’s ears and kissed her on the forehead. Apogee tensed, but only briefly. Then, just as quickly, she felt Apogee’s forelegs wrap up around her neck and yank her into a crushing hug. Delta grunted but didn’t pull away like all the other times.

“Hey,” she murmured. “We’re going to miss the launch.”

“Don’t care,” Apogee said, squeezing her tighter. “This means yes, right?”

Delta relented. “If it means keeping you safe, then I guess so.”

In the periphery, a bloom of piercing light signaled the launch of the first of six SOLUS modules. A happy applause of hooves thumping against the ballroom floor was soon joined by the ear-rattling thunder from the distant launch pad.

“I love you, mom.”

Her lip quirked into an awkward smile as she watched the rocket push through the wispy golden clouds overhead. “I know.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 30: Fillydelphia Estimated time remaining: 43 Hours, 21 Minutes