The Black Between the Stars

by Rambling Writer

First published 3rd of August, 2020

Applejack is trapped aboard a disintegrating, alien-infested space station, monstrous creatures hounding her every move. She's alone. She's confused. She's tired. She's scared. And she's not going down without a fight.

Applejack is not having a good day.

She was nopony special: a gardener and sometime-engineer aboard the Golden Oaks space station, providing food and oxygen for the CelesTech researchers living and performing experiments there. She vaguely knew everypony, performed good work, and even was on first-name terms with a certain royal, but wasn't noteworthy. She was nice, a dependable worker, and not much else.

But when the Stellar Thrones send up representatives for a routine tour, something goes wrong. Applejack wakes up a week later, with no memories of what occurred in the meantime, to find Golden Oaks ravaged. The entire station is in lockdown. Communications are nonexistent. The shuttles are destroyed. Power is unreliable. Most of the crew have been slaughtered. The escape pods don't work. Every module has been badly damaged. And something is prowling the station. Something capable of disguising itself as anything.

With only a wrench and herself to rely on, Applejack pushes through the crumbling station to unravel the mystery. But her every step is being watched, her every movement is a risk. Because Golden Oaks isn't a research facility anymore. It's a hunting ground. And ponies are the prey.

---

Although this is a crossover with Prey, no knowledge of it is required.

1 - Alone in The Void

The overpowering stench of uncleanliness assaulted Applejack’s nostrils, bullying her back into consciousness. She groaned and rolled over. The ground shifted uncomfortably beneath her and any exhaustion vanished in an instant. She opened her eyes. Blackness surrounded her, so deep it didn’t even look black anymore. Where was she? What had she been doing? Why was she still wearing her CelesTech uniform? Applejack blinked her weariness away and pushed herself up. Or tried to; one of her hooves slipped on cardboard (cardboard?) and she fell back down, biting her tongue. She blinked again, clicked on her suit-mounted flashlight, and forced the world into focus.

She was sitting on top of a pile of garbage: used plastic tubing, copper wire, banana peels, fried circuit boards, and Celestia knew what else. Sheer metal walls surrounded her on all sides and her flashlight cast a harsh glow on everything. It wasn’t a large room, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet, but it was tall. She looked up; there was a circular hole the ceiling, several yards out of reach. “Hoo-ee, AJ,” she muttered, “whatcha doin’ in the heat melt compactor?” She didn’t even have her hat.

She swept her flashlight around the walls. At least the maintenance hatch was clearly labeled. Applejack wobbled to her feet and awkwardly stumbled down the pile. It was a very porous heap and objects kept slipping out from under her. More than once, she lost her grip entirely and faceplanted. But she made good tim-

Clunk. Whrrrrrrrr…

Applejack froze at the sound of humming machinery. The pile began to rumble. Scraps fell down it in tiny avalanches. And the walls began moving inward.

She scrambled across the trash as best as she could, fighting through the scraps. She couldn’t hear anything except for the roar of the motors. Her light flicked back and forth, alternately showing and hiding the hatch. She reached the ladder; the level of trash began rising as it was forced into a smaller and smaller space. The ladder was shaking enough to almost dislodge her as she climbed.

The walls were three feet away and still advancing when she reached the hatch. “Sun blast it,” she cursed as she forced the lever up. The hatch hissed open, but Applejack couldn’t hear it over the walls. She forced herself into the tiny space as trash threatened to swamp her.

Two seconds after Applejack was in, the walls stopped with a thud, a mountain of trash compressed between them. Applejack lay in a crawlspace barely large enough to fit her and stared at the solid wall of crushed trash, panting. What was going on? Was that a murder attempt? Who’d want to kill her? Like that? At least she was safe for the mo-

Wait. Maybe not. There was another stage to the heat melt compactor…

Applejack pulled herself forward through the crawlspace frantically as the temperature in the compactor started to rise. The exit hatch was only a few yards ahead. The metal grew uncomfortably hot beneath her hooves. Sweat trickled down her face. She touched the handle and immediately pulled away from the heat. She swallowed, forced the handle up (burns be damned), nearly headbutted the hatch open, and tumbled out into the maintenance hall. The cool air on her face felt like wine.

“What- in- the blazes-” she panted, “happened- to- the safeties?” She dragged a hoof down her face, trying to rein in the shaking of her entire body. Her heart pounded in her chest like a piston, no matter how she willed it to slow. She could barely even think straight without getting her mind yanked back to the compactor.

Breathe, AJ, she told herself. Breathe. Breathe. In. Out. In. Out…

Applejack looked up to get a handle on where she was, but that wasn’t any help. She was in some maintenance area she’d never seen before, all tight corridors and steel struts and exposed piping and bare metal flooring. Most of the lights were off, except for a few red warning lights that spun around and around and around. A low alarm blared incessantly in the background.

“Hey!” yelled Applejack. “Anypony out there? Helloooooooooo!”

Only the alarms wailed back, like some techno dirge. Where was everypony?

Applejack groaned. She had a splitting headache and one of her eyes wouldn’t stop watering. She flexed her legs, one at a time. Nothing hurt too much. She stood up and stretched. Again, nothing too bad.

Out of reflex, she woozily got up to stumble to a window to get the time. She was several yards down a hallway by the time she remembered that looking outside was useless for telling time in space (if there was one thing from terrestrial Equestria she missed besides the farm, it was the slow beauty of sunrises and sunsets), she didn’t know where any windows were, and the maintenance sections probably didn’t have many windows, anyway. Poop. She slouched against a wall and glanced at her watch instead (2:23 AM; figured), but did a double-take when she saw the date. March 15? That couldn’t be right. She was missing almost a week if that was true. She could’ve sworn that just a few minutes ago, she was sitting in the Yellow Tulip Bar a day or so after Princess Twilight’s arrival to the station, and she knew that the princess had come on the eighth.

“What the holy haybasket is goin’ on?”

Only the alarms responded, and those responses weren’t useful. She’d need to find answers on her own. So: left or right? Applejack looked left. She saw a dark hallway with exposed infrastructure and metal flooring, illuminated only by warning lights. She looked right. She saw a dark hallway with exposed infrastructure and metal flooring, illuminated only by warning lights, that took a sharp turn about twenty feet down. Left it was. At least she wouldn’t get surprised by something jumping out from around the corner.

The world had stopped spinning by the time Applejack got to her feet. One of her legs twinged a little, but she pushed on through. She kept her ears up, desperate to hear somepony, anypony else, and was sorely disappointed. She was stuck in a part of Golden Oaks she didn’t recognize with nopony around and a hole in her memory. Maybe the parts she did remember would help her figure out what went wrong. Applejack turned back time in her mind, trying to find the gap.

“Alright, turn ’em on,” Applejack hollered to Rose. Rose hollered back, and a few moments later, the sprinklers came on in the greenhouse. Applejack squinted through the artificial rain as she walked up and down the aisles, closely examining which rows of sprinkler heads were and weren’t spraying water. “One’s good,” she muttered. “Two’s good… Three’s good…”

Keeping the greenhouse’s sprinklers up to snuff was quietly one of the gardeners’ most important jobs; all the fresh fruits and vegetables in Golden Oaks came from the greenhouse. No sprinklers meant no fresh food, which meant the station’s researchers would have to fall back on prepackaged stuff. Researchers without good enough food got cranky and did subpar work. Subpar research work meant funding getting slashed, which would eventually mean no more Golden Oaks. So those sprinklers better stay fixed. (Or at least, that was what Applejack liked to joke. In reality, planting the seeds and caring for them personally was satisfying enough for her.)

Up and down and up and down and a few minutes later, Applejack was giving her report to Rose. “Six’s workin’, but only barely. Twelve an’ thirteen’re completely shot. But other’n that, we’re all good. Fourteen’s just fine, so I’m bettin’ the problem with the last two’s got somethin’ t’do with the heads themselves, not the pipe.”

“Six… twelve… thirteen,” muttered Rose, typing the numbers into the greenhouse’s computer. “Do we still have hydration coverage on those areas?”

“Ain’t no problem for six, but I can’t say for the other two. Want me t’start checkin’ it this evenin’?”

“If you could, that’d be great. Aaaaand…” Rose tapped in a last few words and tapped the Send button. “Bing. Repair request sent. How long do you think it’ll take Engineering to get to it this time?”

“Two days,” said Applejack.

“Oh, come on, two days? That’s crazy. It took them four days last time!”

“Yeah, ’cause the airlock in Hardware was messed up and that was their prior’ty!”

Rose shrugged. “Eh. Maybe, but with the VIPs arriving tomorrow, I think we’ll be lucky. Anything else we need to do tonight?”

“I don’t think the tomatoes’re ready to be picked, d’you?”

“Oh, no. Definitely not. Give them another week.”

“Then no, not ’sides loggin’. We’re good.”

“Finally.” Rose stood up and stretched, from her nose to the tip of her tail. “Urrffh! Sorry, it’s just been one of those days for me. Cherry Berry had me running back to her lab every ten minutes since she’s been… Well. You know her.” She rolled her joints, each one producing an audible pop.

“If it’s that bad, want me t’get everythin’ set for the night?” Applejack asked. “I can get it done in a jiffy.”

“That’d be great, thanks. I’ll be in the clearing.” Rose didn’t quite waddle out of the greenhouse, but she was definitely stiff.

After over two years of working on Golden Oaks, Applejack knew the proper logging procedures like the back of her hoof. It only took her five minutes to record everything in the system and lock the greenhouse up. She wiped the worst of the dirt off her face and looked up. A dome of titanium latticework and yard-thick glass reached out far above her, holding in the air of Golden Oaks from the vacuum outside while still providing a good view. The glass even had anti-glare enchantments on it to keep it from being mirrored by the brightness below and the blackness above.

She looked past the glass, at the stars beyond, trying to stargaze. She’d done it numerous times before, but she could only manage a few long moments before the vertigo hit. The blackness of space was so vast, so thought-defying, that it felt like it was going to swallow her up. She tried handling that, but then she remembered how big the space she wasn’t seeing was. She was a microscopic dot near Equus, which was a microscopic dot in their terrestrial system, which was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot on another-

Applejack pulled her eyes away and put a hoof on her chest. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. A worker on a space station who was afraid of space, even after over three years of working there. Who’da thunk?

Once her heart slowed down and the floor was level again, Applejack walked away from the greenhouse, deeper into the arboretum. The cobblestone path (real stones, too!) wound its way through the miniature sort-of forest, with very little obvious artificiality. If Applejack closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the only thing keeping her from being back on Equus was the slightly echoic quality of the sounds and perhaps fewer birds than she would’ve liked. There was even enough dirt to satisfy earth pony magic. She could spend all her time in the arboretum if she had the option.

After a deliberately-slow minute, the trees gave way to a hallway of metal burrowing into a hillside, the stones merging into tiles. One wall was taken up by a security checkpoint, manned by Rainbow Dash. Except that Rainbow was engrossed in a magazine; her eyes were practically glued to the epaper. Applejack didn’t try to hide her footsteps as she walked up, but she still didn’t get Rainbow’s attention. She took a breath as quietly as she could. “RAINBOW!” she yelled.

Rainbow didn’t flinch. “AJ, if I was that inattentive, I’d’ve been thrown out my first week.” She looked up, grinning cockily. “And I mean that literally. Nice try, though.”

“Eh. Figures.” Applejack shrugged, then reached into one of the pockets on her uniform. She put a plastic bag holding an apple on Rainbow’s desk. “Anyway, the latest apple type ripened today. Lemme know what you think.”

“Already? Nice!” Rainbow tossed her magazine away and practically ripped the apple from the bag and devoured a quarter of it in a single bite. She nodded to herself as she chewed. “Mmhmm. Mmhmm. Mmm! Dff tfftf whwwy ghh.”

“…Huh?”

Rainbow swallowed some of the apple in her mouth. “I fed ih taytff guh!” she said indignantly.

“Pardon?” Applejack asked, tilting her head.

Another swallow, this time complete. “It’s good!” protested Rainbow. “Really good!” She took another, smaller bite and chewed slowly. “It’s juicy, but not too juicy. It’s crispy, but not too crispy. And the taste…” She swallowed and smacked her lips. “I wish I could say something besides ‘it’s good’, but trust me, it’s good.” Another bite.

“Great. I’ll let Cherry know and maybe we can get ’em added to the fruit. Thanks for tryin’ it, and-”

“Wait. While you’re over here, could you also look at the door? It’s been screwy recently.” To demonstrate, Rainbow hit a button in the booth. The door to the booth slid open a few feet, then stopped. She smacked the frame and it opened the rest of the way. “See? Like that.”

Applejack sighed. “Really, Rainbow? Nothin’ I do’ll make it last as long as havin’ Engineerin’ fix it.”

“C’mon, you know they take super long to get to anything!”

“Alright. Fine.”

Applejack had never opened an engineering manual in her life. Never attended any relevant college courses (or high school courses, for that matter). Never gone through any apprenticeships. Never dreamed she’d be doing any mechanical or electrical work beyond what Sweet Apple Acres needed, which Granny would teach her.

And yet, the second she stepped into the booth, before she’d even looked at anything, she knew what the problem was from the smell of crisping plastic. “Was the door not workin’ earlier and you figured you’d jus’ fix it yourself rather’n wait?”

“No,” said Rainbow promptly. Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “It was my idea but I wasn’t the one who fixed it.” Pause. “Okay, I helped a little in the actual fixing.” Pause. Pause. Done.

“Right. Wirin’ problem?” Applejack glanced meaningfully at the cup on Rainbow’s desk. “From water damage?”

“No!” Pause. “Grapefruit soda damage.”

“Great.” Applejack sniffed her way through the booth. She quickly found a panel three-quarters of the way up the wall. She screwdrivered the panel off and hacked at the smell of charred plastic. Melted insulation, long since re-solidified, had dripped down the inside of the panel and gotten smeared around. More troubling was a tiny bit of molten copper dribbling down the inside from a thin strand that had obviously been added later and would barely qualify as a wire in a world of mice. “Consarnit, Rainbow,” Applejack muttered to herself, “don’t you know anythin’ about wirin’?”

“Nope.”

“Y’need thicker wires’n this. Volts melted it like ice on a hot day.”

“The repair kit doesn’t really have any thicker wires…”

“Then we’ll hook ’em up in parallel, spread the voltage out. It’ll do ’till you get it fixed. For real. You got any solder?”

“Sure, hang on a sec…”

Neuromods. The way of the future. Instant expertise in a needle. Just one quick shot of the right arcanochemical mix, and bam! You could have whatever skills you wanted, your brain literally rewritten to make it as if you’d always had it. What skill did you want? Computer programming? Mechanical engineering? Biotechnology? Singing? Ballet dancing? Painting? You name it, CelesTech probably had it. Or at least they would, once the mods were mass-producible. They could sell such mods to the rich right now, but Sun Queen Celestia IV was adamant about getting the cost down to the point that the poorer-than-the-average pony could afford it. The scientists complained until Celestia started signing off on every grant that was pushed in front of her. Money was to researchers what pacifiers were to babies.

Such a thing was obviously too good to be true, right? About a year into her contract as gardener, Applejack had voiced her worries saying so in the Yellow Tulip Lounge. And, through a complicated series of events that involved being overheard by one of the researchers, some intense union negotiations, and a side bet with a princess, every worker’s bonus that year had included a free neuromod of their choice as proof that what they were doing was working. Applejack, not taking it all that seriously, had gone with mechanical engineering, in case she ever needed to fix some of the harvesters back home once her contract was up. (Not that she really wanted anything to do with those darn machines.)

Before the mod, Applejack couldn’t take apart a messenger drone with the manual in front of her. After the mod, she could take one apart and put it back together blindfolded.

It was surreal. Applejack had barely ever touched mechanical stuff, yet now she knew it all inside and out. Forget fixing the harvester; she could build her own, and probably make it run better, too. Applejack had never liked being lied to, and now she knew for certain that the work she was abetting was real.

(Of course, while neuromods worked all the promotional materials about them had been vague enough to not mention a few things: That the spells needed a direct connection to the brain to rewrite synapses. That the “connection” had been found via the optic nerve, the nerve with the shortest distance to the brain. That installing a neuromod therefore necessitated stabbing yourself in the eye with a needle holy mother duck. Just a minor detail, really. Applejack totally hadn’t had nightmares about it for a week after the injection.)

As a nice bonus, now that she could do mechanical work, she could get paid for doing mechanical work. She’d been made an official honorary engineer for the arboretum, occasionally fixing or diagnosing minor issues that didn’t require anything more than what you could find in a toolbox and making money for it: frayed wires, jammed gears, leaky pneumatics. And sometimes, if she liked the pony who needed help, she’d do a little bit of extra work on the side for free.

Like helping friends fix grapefruit-soda-damaged door circuits.

“So,” Applejack asked as she soldered in another wire, “how’d you manage gettin’ this bit wet?” (Clear speech with a soldering iron in her mouth had, to her astonishment, been among her neuromod-provided skills.)

“I… really don’t remember,” said Rainbow, her ears back. “I think — I think — it involved Spitfire and a reployer. Somehow? Maybe? I can’t really remember.”

Was that enough solder for that wire? Probably not. Applejack snipped off another length of solder. “I probably don’t wanna know.”

“I don’t wanna know. Except what the heck a reployer was doing there.”

Applejack positioned the last wire and readied her iron. “Those things end up in the strangest places. Never got ’round t’askin’ Engineerin’ what they do.” She squinted at the wires. Good? Good. She punched the Close Door button; it slid shut without any problems.

“Awesome!” said Rainbow, grinning so brightly she was practically a second sun. “Thanks, AJ. You’re a lifesaver.” She smacked the button twice; open, shut.

“Meanin’ it ain’t gonna last forever and y’gotta find a better fix soon.” Applejack shut the panel. “Seriously, Rainbow, shoot an email t’Engineerin’. I did my best, but this’s a fire waitin’ to happen.”

“Eh.” Rainbow shrugged. “I’ll let the next gal get it.”

“Rainbow!”

“Whaaaaat? Shifts are getting rotated this weekend anyway! I’ll be gone in three da-”

Applejack glared at Rainbow, frowning fiercely.

“Alright, I’ll do it,” grumbled Rainbow. “Now get outta my checkpoint.”

Applejack found Rose at her usual spot, a clearing off the paved path in the arboretum. There was no bench, no amenities, absolutely nothing in the way of artificial comforts. Yet Rose was stretched out on her back, lying on the grass, gazing up at the stars. She waved as Applejack entered the clearing.

Applejack lay down on the far side, on a certain not-quite hill, and wiggled into her usual groove. The grass was nice and cool against her head (the only part of her not covered by her uniform), and if she closed her eyes, she could, for a few moments, imagine she was back on Equus.

She rolled over and idly, instinctively looked up to cloudgaze, only to get yanked out of her reverie by the black void of space. Something Rose still seemed charmed by, somehow. Applejack swallowed. “Y’ever think about what’s out there?” she asked. “Not way out there, like aliens, but… just a mile or two?”

Rose’s voice was easy, conversational. Definitely not full of vacuum-induced existential dread. “Applejack, we’re in space. There’s nothing out there.”

“Exactly! Nothin’! Not even air! And that don’t scare you?”

“No. It’s the same up here as it was down there. Just a bit closer.”

Applejack wasn’t so sure. It was the same reason she got seasick: sure, one could know the ocean was miles deep, but it was another thing to be on a ship with no land on the trackless horizon, look over the edge, and see nothing but deep blue all the way down. If she went over, she’d never be found. And space was infinitely larger than that. Literally. At least you’d stop sinking once you reached the abyssal trenches of the ocean. Not so in space, where she’d keep drifting forever.

Having the vacuum be closer, with constant reminders of how close it was — airlocks, shuttles, spacesuit drills — only threw how dangerous it was into sharp relief. Whenever she thought about it too much, it seemed more and more likely that a small failure in some trivial system would spell doom for all of Golden Oaks. There was nothing out there, less than a driveway away, and it was much more dangerous than something.

But Applejack wasn’t sure Rose got that. Knew how little really stood between her and the void. No, the arboretum was safe right now, meaning the oblivion outside didn’t matter.

And so Applejack stayed quiet, staring into the stars as much as she dared.

2 - Guests of Honor

Applejack pressed forward. She heard nothing except the infrequent groaning of machinery, alarms, and her own footsteps. Warning lights and her own flashlight provided the only illumination and the slow, constant flashing gave her a headache. And she never saw any sign of anypony else. The entire maintenance section was practically dead. Maybe literally dead.

No, don’t think like that. They AIN’T dead. “Helloooooo!” she called out again. “Anypony out there? What’s goin’ on?”

No response except her own echo, thin and scared.

Applejack swallowed and kept walking, her footfalls clanging. “Alright, girl,” she whispered to herself, “it ain’t that bad. Maybe- Who’m I kiddin’, there’s no way this ain’t bad. ’Cept if it’s worse. Bettin’ it’s worse.” She did not know when to shut up, did she?

The hallway forked ahead, one part still going straight, the other going hard to the left. A set of signs hung from the wall, pointing straight, left, and back. All of them were maintenance terms meaningless to her except for one, along the straight path: Neurothaumatics. Wasn’t that where they made neuromods? What was she doing here? Whatever. It was a way out. She looked straight. Featureless corridor. She looked left. Featureless cor-

Something twitched in the corner of her eye. Applejack whirled straight again. Nothing but a tipped-over garbage can. She strained her ears. Nothing but some metallic echoes.

Left it was. She’d find another way out.

Applejack crept along, trying to keep quiet. If something was in here with her, she wasn’t going to make it easy for them. The added slowness? Worth it. She glanced over her shoulder and saw nothing.

The metal floor vibrated strangely beneath her hooves as she walked. It wasn’t really solid the same way ground was — or, heck, metal floors in the main part of Golden Oaks. She couldn’t say what, exactly, was different — was it “bouncy”? Did it just vibrate more? — but it was different enough that her attention kept getting drawn back to her hooves.

After she didn’t know how long, she came to another intersection. She stopped to read the signs. Just like she’d predicted, there was another sign pointing to the exit. Rather than the way she’d just come, it pointed to the ri-

Applejack wasn’t moving, yet the floor was vibrating.

She froze, refusing to even breathe. Yes, the floor was definitely shaking, just a little. Someone — or something — besides her was walking on it. If she had to guess, they were close. Her ears twitched this way and that, but she couldn’t hear anythi-

Clink clink.

Yes, she could.

Applejack locked her ears into facing the same direction. The sound was quiet and hearing which direction it was coming from, down here, was nearly impossible. But Applejack held her breath and wished her heart would stop beating so loud and listened and…

…didn’t hear anything. The sounds had stopped.

After almost a minute of waiting, the sounds refused to come back. Even the floor had stopped moving. Applejack looked down each hallway. Blackness. She swallowed, checked the signs one last time, and set off towards the exit. She tried to get her hopes up; she’d be out of here soon.

But that didn’t change the facts: there was something down here.

CelesTech was in the interesting position of being both a free-rein think tank and government-sponsored. It’d created many grand, wonderful things for Equestria and its allies in the past half-century, but all of that was at the behest of the Cosmic Thrones. Sun Queen Celestia IV wasn’t as much of a micromanager of the company as her predecessors had been (according to some of the company’s older members), she still sent up representatives to Golden Oaks for regular checkups. Having somepony be up there in person let them get a feel for research progress and morale far better than word processed reports ever could. Although Celestia wanted the chosen ponies to be as close to the diarchy as possible, most of the time, they were a carefully-selected scientist, someone who could understand at least most of the science being done, and a member of the royal family, solely for the first to report to. After all, it wasn’t like there were a lot of royals who were in possession of one of Equestria’s brightest minds in centuries, a thirst for knowledge that couldn’t be quenched by a lifetime spent in Zebrabwe in the Library of Rakotiru, and a better understanding of classical, quantum, and arcane mechanics than most doctorates.

Enter Princess Twilight Sparkle, a mare so sharp having her rule the country seemed a terrible waste.

There had been some aristocratic furor when Celestia had not only passed over her own son for ascension to alicornhood and the throne, but the replacement was from outside the nobility. Yet Celestia had remained resolute and unwavering in her decision. (One of Applejack’s more politically-minded friends said Celestia’s hour-long speech on the matter boiled down to, “She knows friendship like whoa and I’m the Sun Queen. Deal with it.”) Princess Twilight had gone on to be a perfectly capable leader-to-be, and the dearth of tabloid articles about her that were juicier than Princess Dislikes Ketchup shut up more than a few duchesses about not anointing Blueblood.

Outside of her usual duties, Twilight had proven to be a near-fanatical enthusiast of damn near every field of science and able to keep up with the top ponies. In spite of CelesTech’s already large budget, Twilight kept pushing to increase it further and take her own position in the organization. While specific that issue had yet to be resolved between queen and princess, Twilight’s intelligence meant there was only one option for Golden Oaks’ biannual royalty visit.

CelesTech’s uniforms might’ve looked a little bit silly, but their mandatory nature certainly meant one thing. Applejack didn’t need to worry about what she was going to wear. As she headed to the shuttlebay to greet the princess’s spaceship with everypony else, Applejack reflected that, on Equus, she probably would’ve spent a day trying to figure out what bows went with which dress and what colors went with her coat and still would’ve looked terrible once she dressed up. At least on Golden Oaks, everyone looked equally dorky.

Applejack fidgeted in place as she waited for the shuttle to arrive. The bay was big and cavernous and even surrounded by other ponies, she wasn’t sure she felt comfortable in it. She couldn’t even say why; the lobby of the station was even bigger, and Applejack felt just fine in that. She never went to the bay if she could help it. And she got the feeling she wasn’t the only one.

VP Glimmer paced back and forth at the head of the rows, back and forth, back and forth. She was muttering loudly. “Food? Good. Quarters? Welcoming committee?” She looked at one side of the aisle, then the other, and nodded. “Good. Tour? Good. I hope. So why can’t I calm down?”

“Because the princess is wearing off on you?” suggested a bearded researcher Applejack knew by sight but not name.

“Probably,” Glimmer muttered.

The intercom crackled. “Attention all personnel. Semi-Sacred Geometry is on her final approach, landing in one minute.”

“Okay! Okay. Be ready, everypony!”

Next to Applejack, Rose leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Why do we keep doing it like this? Twilight herself doesn’t even like it!”

“Dunno,” Applejack whispered back. “Protocol?”

Rose snorted. “Protocol is stupid.”

The seconds ticked by. Outside the windows, a big, sleek shuttle, the height of modern luxury, slid into view. It briefly cast the bay into shadow as it passed in front of the sun. It came to a smooth stop outside the port and the entire room trembled a tiny bit as it locked into place. Silence fell, so complete you could hear a pin drop on the other side of the room. Then the airlock hissed open and Princess Twilight Sparkle strode onto Golden Oaks.

Applejack had known Twilight for some time before she was chosen for ascension, and a large part of her personality had survived the species and class switch intact. So it might’ve just been because she knew what to look for, but there was no denying: beneath all those sparkly clothes, Twilight was the most regal dweeb in history. When she entered the bay, her eyes twitched up to marvel at the scienciness of the space, even though she’d seen it plenty of times before. When she glanced at Glimmer, her pace hitched for a quarter of an iota as she ran over (and freaked out about) the dozens of ways the conversation could go. And when she smiled at Glimmer’s greeting, something in her eyes made it the happiness of meeting a close friend rather than mere politeness.

The crew of Golden Oaks bowed to Twilight as Glimmer went over her usual spiel and rose as Twilight went through hers. Glimmer was saying something about how thrilled Twilight would be to see this or that when it happened. A certain somepony among the cafeteria workers squealed, “Hi, Twiliiiight!” She hopped up and down, waving a hoof at the princess from a back row. An embarrassment, a disgrace, a truly terrible breach in propriety and protocol.

At least, it would’ve been if Twilight hadn’t responded in kind. “Hi, Pinkie!” she yelled joyfully, waving like a foal would. She hovered a few feet above the deck so they could get a better look at each other. “I’ll get to you as soon as I’m settled in!”

“I’ll have cupcaaaaakes!”

“Remember to leave off the cherries this time!” Twilight landed again and turned back to Glimmer. “Sorry. You were saying?”

They’d well and truly broken the mold when they’d made Princess Twilight Sparkle.

Behind Twilight, her dragon bodyguard/assistant Spike rolled his eyes. He was a big fellow, taller than Twilight (horn included) and built like a brick outhouse, albeit a winged and extraordinarily dapper one. His toughness definitely clashed with his purple-and-green color scheme. But you forgot the latter because, well, dragon. And with a dragon bodyguard came a certain mystique for Twilight; dragons only protected people (of any species) they held great respect for. After the last treaty, dragons had supposedly been lining up to guard her.

Unfortunately, after Spike came the other guest.

Prince Blueblood stalked out of the shuttle like somepony inside had spat on him. His blonde mane was immaculate, his white coat was pristine, he himself was beautiful (almost sexy, Applejack didn’t want to admit), but the expression his face was twisted into made him look thoroughly punchable. As protocol dictated, and for no other reason, the crew of Golden Oaks bowed. Unlike with Twilight, they didn’t hold their bow.

“I mean, sheesh,” Rose whispered, “who spat in his ear?” She wasn’t the only one with such a sentiment; the ponies around Applejack were stiff and looking straight forward.

Blueblood looked at the crew, like he was expecting something more, then fell into line behind Twilight’s dragon. Trailing him were two pegasi bodyguards: a cyan one who looked like she’d rather be literally anywhere else and a grayish one who had apparently decided that even being a bodyguard to Blueblood was being a bodyguard to royalty, so she should act like it, dang it.

Once Glimmer led the royals and their guards out, the entire order of neat rows broke apart into chaos. Some ponies trotted out of the bay to snatch another look at Twilight, but most found their friends to talk with. Applejack and Rose just found a bench in the waiting area to relax on.

“So,” said Rose, “did you hear why Blueblood was sent up here?”

“Nope,” said Applejack. “And I don’t really care t’hear, either.”

“Oh, come on.” Rose elbowed Applejack lightly in the ribs. “You really don’t want to hear why Her Solariness is picking now to try to whip him into shape?”

“Not at all. I’m less interested in that than a mole is in the sky.”

“Huh. That one actually made sense.”

Applejack swatted at Rose with her hat. “When y’get home, y’need t’get out more.”

Rose laughed, then turned serious. “But, really, this is the first time Celestia has made him behave like a royal in… ever. Most of the time, they yell at each other in private or whatever.”

“So she just got sick o’her son actin’ like a foal when he’s thirty. Ain’t that complicated.” Applejack shrugged. “Wonderin’ why it took her so long, but that ain’t my business.”

“I guess.” But Rose didn’t sound all that convinced. She looked up. “Speaking of changing the subject, how long do you think Pinkie’s welcome cake will last?”

“You know we can take our time, right? She made an entire cake separate for leftovers.”

“Yeah. I mean just the first one.”

“Hmm. If it’s anythin’ like Twi’s last visit…”

3 - Breaking the Tension

Forward or back? Applejack didn’t like either option. Forward was unknown. She suspected whatever was following her was behind her. (She whipped around again. She didn’t see anything again. But she could hear it. She could feel it.) But forward was the way she was going, so forward she went.

She found herself missing the signs, for some reason. Of course, since she wasn’t at an intersection, she shouldn’t see any, but she still wanted to see them. Maybe for orientation. She could walk through the arboretum blindfolded and not hit a tree. These tunnels were featureless hallway after featureless hallway, completely devoid of any-

A door came into the range of her flashlight on one wall. She fast-walked up to it eagerly, only to be disappointed when she saw the keycard reader on the frame. Probably an office. What sort of position did you have in order to score a card-protected office down here? Head janitor? (Maybe regular janitor. Applejack didn’t know a thing about custodial jobs.)

Sighing, Applejack pushed away from the door. She turned her flashlight to the hallway she’d come down. Nothing. She turned around and moved on.

Clunk clunk clunk. Her footsteps were loud, or at least sounded that way. The station was as quiet as ever. Which… was probably a problem, down here. Applejack was surrounded by machinery. Shouldn’t some of it be working? Had the reactor failed?

Something irregular came into view, a shapeless orange mass on the floor. Applejack stumbled to a stop in surprise, almost clicking off her flashlight. But the blob wasn’t moving at all. Applejack held her breath and waited for a response to her light. Nothing. She took a step forward; the thing wasn’t so shapeless anymore. That looked like a leg… That could’ve been-

Applejack gasped in shock and ran forward for a better look. A dark purple earth pony was sprawled limply on the floor, her eyes gazing blankly at the wall. Although a cold pit was forming in her gut, Applejack jostled the earth pony. “You, uh… You awake?”

No response. Applejack hadn’t expected one. She knelt, put a hoof on the pony’s neck. No pulse, either. Applejack swallowed her bile. The pony didn’t look like she’d been hurt. She didn’t look sick in any way. She didn’t even look starved. It was like she’d just… dropped dead for no reason.

Cringing, Applejack poked at the corpse, moved its legs. It was still flexible, but Applejack didn’t know if that meant anything. She shined her light in the body’s eyes. They looked fine, but the pupils didn’t contract. She sniffed. Nothing unusual. She wasn’t going to get any information from here.

Although, just because she couldn’t get any information…

“Sorry.” Applejack forgot to wince as she patted the pony down and examined her uniform carefully. She was wearing the same orange-and-black of a low-level worker as Applejack. Some low-level workers were janitors. And one thing Applejack had learned in her time on Golden Oaks: the janitor always has the keys.

Or, in this case, the keycard. It was sitting in a small pouch, flat and unassuming and maybe capable of opening every single door on Golden Oaks. (Probably not. But Applejack could dream.) “Hope you don’t mind if I borrow this,” Applejack whispered. After pocketing the card, Applejack reached out, hesitated, and closed the pony’s eyes, her hooves shaking all the while. She wiped her eyes down, then stood up.

Now. Back to that door.

Applejack wasn’t much of an Ogres & Oubliettes player, but she knew just enough to be entertained as she watched Rainbow DM a game for a group of ponies. The party was doing the usual fortress infiltration and had, with great difficulty, managed to not get split. Unfortunately, not splitting up meant they could all get cornered simultaneously. As had just happened.

“The guard steps forward…” said Rainbow, an evil grin on her face. “Closer… closer… closer! She pokes her spear into the bush, aaaaand…” She rolled a twenty-sided die behind her DM screen.

It was amazing how thoroughly silence could fall around a group of roleplayers, especially with the noise around them. Pinkie Pie was chewing on her hooves like they were delectable chips, Lyra and Bon Bon were clinging to each other tighter than life preservers, and Time Turner just had big eyes and folded ears. You could cut the tension with a knife, even as air hockey dinged in the background.

“…4!” said Rainbow Dash. “The tip of the spear misses you by a foot! The bush rustles and the leaves pull back, but not enough to expose you! She frowns at the bush, then walks away without suspecting a thing!” A dramatic pause. “At least, not that you can tell, heh heh…” The entire group breathed sighs of relief, except for Pinkie, who breathed a squeal of relief.

Golden Oaks was a long-term facility, meant to hold inhabitants for years at a time. To keep morale up, the habitation decks were designed in a way that’d be luxurious on Equus, let alone a space station. The beds (for Applejack’s pay grade) were mere sleeping pods, but the recreation rooms were an expansive, multilevel affair, with every kind of amenity one could think of. A game room with tabletop games like billiards and air hockey or empty tables for regular board games. A small library with peace and quiet, plus some carefully selected books. A fully-stocked bar. An observation deck where you could just stare out at space if you wanted to (so, naturally, Applejack never, ever went there, ever). Heck, there was even a movie theater, with popcorn and everything. All of it with more space than was needed so the inhabitants felt more at home. And while the sleeping pods were small, they were still comfy. Applejack didn’t spend much time in them, anyway.

With work done for the “day”, the game room was comfortably busy: empty enough to not be claustrophobic or require yelling, full enough to not feel dead. After having too much of Twilight’s welcome cake, Applejack was feeling lazy, so she just sat and watched the O&O game, even though her lack of context meant she had no clue what was going on.

“So,” Rainbow said, “you’re up, Doc.” She leaned back in her chair. “And try to make a decision this year, hmm?”

“That only happened once,” Time Turner grumbled as he looked over his character sheet. “In December. December 31. At 11:57 PM.”

Lyra elbowed him in the ribs. “Nah, just face it,” she said. “You will never live that one down.”

The adventuring party fell into a deep discussion about how to get out of the stupid bush, the forces of the universe falling like chaff before the power of out-of-character talk. Rainbow glanced at Applejack, although she kept one ear turned towards the players. “Are you suuuuure you don’t wanna play, AJ?” she asked for the third time that session. “We’ve got character sheets! I’ll even let you roll up a character with a level to match theirs!”

“Nah. I’m fine,” said Applejack. “I don’t even know how to play.”

“Pfft. That’s easy. We’ll walk you through it.” Rainbow turned to the group. “Right, girls?”

“Right!” said Lyra. “What am I ‘right!’ing about?”

But Applejack shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t think playin’ OnO’s really the… thing for me.”

“I didn’t think so, either,” said Rainbow. “Then I tried it, and now I love it! AJ, you really need to get out of your comfort zone every now and then.” Her ears went back a little and her voice dropped slightly. “Seriously.”

“I’m outside o’my comfort zone already.” Space was plenty frightening enough for Applejack, thanks, and she didn’t want to add the obligation of a weekly gaming session on top of it. She’d be very happy once she was back on Equus.

“Further, then.”

“I just ain’t ready to-”

The door to the game room hissed open and someone with some unusually solid footsteps came inside. Applejack looked up and twitched; Spike was coming in, as the steel-coated of Blueblood’s bodyguards, both of them in more casual clothes than their entrance. Up close, the steel-coated bodyguard looked a lot friendlier than before. Spike and the pegasus exchanged some whispered words, then walked up to the O&O group. Light glinted off of Spike’s claws as he waved. “Um. Hey,” he said, his voice more boyish than Applejack was expecting. Maybe he was young for a dragon? “I’m Spike. I’m Princess Twilight’s bodyguard, and you might’ve already known that.” He grinned, the expression surprisingly friendly and warm for how many very sharp teeth were packed into it.

Bon Bon didn’t look away from the adventuring group, but her hoof went up. “I did!”

The pegasus stepped forward and put a hoof on his chest. “And I’m Thunderlane. Since we’re going to be together for two weeks, we might as well get friendly.”

“Rainbow Dash,” said Rainbow. “That’s Lyra, that’s Bon Bon, that’s Pinkie Pie, and that’s Time Turner.”

“Doctor Time Turner, thank you, that’s very important, it is.”

“And I’m Applejack,” Applejack said, putting her hoof up. “Pleased t’meet y’all.”

Spike smiled and waved, somehow nonthreatening even though literally every motion was exposing Applejack to many very sharp things. He leaned over the table to get a better look at the map. “Ogres & Oubliettes?” he asked. “Or Fatal Fortress?”

“O&O,” said Rainbow. “I’m still new to DMing and it’s easier to learn. This campaign we’re running? It’s so cool! Like, it began with-”

And Rainbow dissolved into an excited babble of RPG-ish gibberish that might as well have been another language to Applejack. She turned her full attention on Thunderlane. “So, what d’you think of…” She gestured vaguely around. “…here?”

“This is… just, wow.” Thunderlane stared up at the ceiling. “This place is incredible. I mean, the whole station, not just here. It’s practically a palace!”

“Well, it does have the best beds for over three hundred miles.”

Thunderlane snorted. “Ha ha. But, seriously, I wouldn’t mind working here. Maybe I’ll see if I can get transferred once I’m done with Blueblood.”

“Drink it!” said Spike, making both Applejack and Thunderlane jump. “Drink it and use Bluff to tell the guard that you’re nothing important!” Applejack managed to recognize his grin as one of pure rules-exploiting.

“But I’ve only got the one potion…” said Pinkie slowly.

“We’ll buy you another!” said Time Turner. “We’re already walking away from here filthy rich if all goes well. Which it won’t if you don’t convince that guard to leave.”

“Alright. I drink my Elixir of Glibness and… and tell the guard it’s just the wind!”

“The… The wind.” Rainbow looked like she was being force-fed manure. “You personally tell the guard you’re just the wind.”

“Well, with my +30 bonus, duh! Should I make a Bluff roll?” Pinkie was already reaching for her dice.

“No, no,” sighed Rainbow. “The guard believes you-”

Spike ran over to Rainbow and whispered something in her ear. Her wings twitched, her back went ramrod straight, and she started grinning evilly. “Not only does the guard believe you,” she said, “she leaves the courtyard immediately and- No. That’s all you notice.”

The adventuring group fell silent and their ears went limp. Their pupils were so small you’d be lucky to find them with an electron microscope. “What have you done, Pinkie?” whispered Bon Bon.

“IIIIII dooooooon’t knooooooooooooow!” Pinkie wailed.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “C’mon,” she said to Thunderlane. She pulled him over to an empty table nearby. “Um. If’n you don’t mind me askin’… why do Twi an’ Blueblood even need guardin’ up ’ere? It ain’t like we’re a warzone or anythin’.”

“Protocol, really,” said Thunderlane. “Better to have bodyguards and not need them than need them and not have them, right? Spike’s also Twilight’s assistant — seriously, that drake can find things in a book faster than a computer can in a database — and… heh…” He glanced around and whispered to Applejack, “Bodyguarding Blueblood’s basically a punishment. You pissed off the wrong ponies in the wrong ways, and now you have to run around with a playcolt like him.”

“Huh. Really?”

“Ooooh, yeah.” Thunderlane’s smile was oddly vindictive. “Every pony who ‘protects’ him is really getting disciplined in some way.”

Applejack nodded again before realizing she was taking an interest in this punishment right in front of one of Blueblood’s bodyguards. The blood drained from her face faster than water from a sieve. “Oh. Uh…”

Thunderlane snickered at Applejack’s expression. “Yeah, including me. I had a telephone pole up my butt, believe me, and I deserved it. Around him, you either lighten up a bit or give up and quit the Guard entirely.”

“Ah.”

A second of silence, then Thunderlane said, “So, what do you do around here?”

“All-natural oxygen reclamation assistant.”

“…Gardener in the arboretum?”

Applejack laughed. “Pretty much. It ain’t-”

The door slid open again, this time revealing the cyan pegasus of Blueblood’s guards. Unlike Thunderlane, she didn’t look much happier up close; her movements were quick and her ears were back. When she saw Thunderlane, she zipped up to him, nearly shoving Applejack aside in the process. “You said you’d wait for me.”

“And you said you’d be out in five minutes, but that didn’t happen, either,” said Thunderlane.

“I had to find this place myself!”

“So did Spike and I.”

“Like you-”

Applejack cleared her throat. “Uh. Hey.” She raised her hoof tentatively. “I’m-”

“Applejack, Lightning Dust. Lightning Dust, Applejack,” Thunderlane said quickly. A lot of restrained anger had crept into his voice.

Lightning Dust barely glanced in Applejack’s direction. “Hey,” she said gruffly. “Thunder, I just-”

“She’s attached to Blueblood because of insubordination,” Thunderlane continued, a bit loudly. He ignored Lightning Dust’s stinkeye. “Tried to be flashy rather than efficient during an assassination attempt on the Crystal Empress, got several members of her team wounded. She’s lucky the Empress is still alive.”

“I told them to duck,” grumbled Lightning Dust. “If they’d just ducked-”

“And if you’d just held back like you’d been trained,” snapped Thunderlane, “you wouldn’t’ve needed to tell them to duck in the first place!”

“Pfft. Training, schmaining.” Lightning Dust rolled her eyes. “Training’s boring. If I can do something cool and effective, why not? They should’ve ducked!”

Thunderlane’s wings sprang open. “THAT’S NOT-” He snapped his mouth shut and lowered his voice. “That’s not how it works. When you joined the Guard, you agreed to be a part of a team. As a team, we live together, we ride together, and we die together. If something goes down, I need to know you are where you’re supposed to be, and every time you do a flip when you shouldn’t, you’re keeping me from relying on you. So for Celestia’s sake, learn your sunblasted place.”

“‘Have your back’?” Lightning Dust snorted. “Please. We’re miles from literally anything. What’s gonna go wrong up here?”

“With that attitude, an awful lot.”

“You know what, I’m done here.” Lightning Dust stepped, saluted in a way even Applejack knew was sarcastic, and stalked over to the air hockey tables.

“Did you have t’do that?” Applejack asked. “I get that she ain’t exactly a ball o’ sunshine, but-”

“She’s going to wash out before the year is over if she doesn’t shape up,” Thunderlane said darkly. “She doesn’t care two whits about protecting others. She wants to swing her arcanosword, hear that swooshing vmmmm, and be told how awesome she is.” He sighed and shook his head. “If smashing her over the head with her mistakes doesn’t get to her, nothing will.”

“Huh.” How was Applejack supposed to respond to that? She’d never asked to hear any of it, she didn’t really care, and now there was this awkward personal secret hanging in the air over them, like a-

“Whaddya mean they’ve got defenses against wind elementals?” yelled Lyra. “They weren’t there in our scouting! And that was this morning!”

Applejack didn’t need to look to know how punchably Rainbow was grinning. “They were set up recently. Remember when you told that guard you were the wind after you drank a Potion of Glibness and she believed you? She thought you were a snarky elemental and hastily put up that trap. How else could the wind talk?” Rainbow’s hoof bumped Spike’s fist.

“…Weeeeell, poop. Hmm.”

“Plants!” yelped Thunderlane. “You work with plants. To exchange oxygen and CO₂. Is that it?”

It had been a long, long time since Applejack had been able to talk with somepony who was interested in her work without already knowing it every which way. Being able to teach somepony was weirdly cathartic. “You bet your biscuit it ain’t. Most o’ the fruits an’ veggies we eat are grown up here. Apples are my specialty — family runs an apple orchard groundside — but we got all sortsa stuff. Tomatoes, sweet peas, green beans…”

“Are there any plants you can’t grow because they take too much work?”

“Oh, definitely. I’m actually real lucky we got apple trees up here at all. Um… Grapes! Sometimes, I just want grapes, but the soil ain’t right in here to grow ’em, and importin’ dirt ain’t exactly a prior’ty. Not when there’s…”

4 - A Dark Disquiet

It only took Applejack a few seconds to return to the locked door. Just to be sure, she looked over the walls for a plaque and found nothing. Figured. Down here, everypony probably already knew everypony and they didn’t need plaques. After a bit of fumbling, Applejack pulled out the dead pony’s card and, holding her breath, swiped it through the reader.

Bee-beep. A small green light winked on and the door slid open. The space beyond was as dark as could be, but it felt like a room. “Thanks,” Applejack whispered to the dead pony as she pocketed the card again.

She found the lightswitch after a moment’s blind flailing. It must’ve been a janitor’s office; it was drab, utilitarian, and stuffed with all sorts of neatly-arranged cleaning supplies and toolboxes, even a reployer. Most of it wasn’t of any use to her, but a computer sat on a desk in the far corner. She ran over, knocking down the trash can next to the door in her rush.

There was a lone cup of coffee on the desk, still half-full. Applejack grabbed it and took a big swallow. It was lukewarm and far too bitter, but it was better than nothing. She tapped at the computer’s touchscreen and, to her glee, found that it still had power. She logged on, gazed upon her desktop, and-

-didn’t know what to do next.

Applejack stared blankly at the screen. What was she expecting to do? Sit down, crack her fetlocks, and COMPUTER her way to victory? She didn’t know a dang thing about computers beyond the surface level. She only had her own very limited functionality, little more than form-submission programs, the station’s personnel tracker, and a few games she never touched. Nothing that could help her with- whatever was down here with her.

Something maybe skittered behind her. Applejack spun around; her flashlight illuminated the empty doorframe and two knocked-over trash cans. She waited. Silence and stillness. It didn’t take much thinking for her to close and lock the door.

At least she had a place to hole up. There was only one way in or out. She still didn’t know where her memory had gone; might as well stay here until she did, or at least found where it stopped. Applejack closed her eyes and thought.

Hey, sis!

Sorry I couldn’t schedule a video call, but things are pretty crazy down here. Twittermite Energy just suddenly took off and I spend all day running around, even with Dynamo’s help. It’s wild! We’ll probably have to expand. Anyway, I’m doing fine. Sorry I don’t have more to say, but it’d all be boring business stuff. Don’t have enough free time to be interesting at the moment.

I don’t know if you heard, but Sugar Belle’s finally pregnant! When Big Mac heard the news, we couldn’t get him to shut up, he was so happy. They don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet and they haven’t settled on a name. Feel free to suggest any. It’s gonna be weird, being an aunt. How did you feel when I was born? Can you even remember? You might’ve been too young for that.

You’re probably waiting to hear some bad news about Granny Smith after being gone for so long, but nope! She’s as spry as ever. (I know that’s not very, but still.) I think she’s immortal. She loved the last strain of apple seeds you sent, says they feel nice, and the trees have been growing nice and strong for their age. She’s been out in the orchards a lot whenever I visit; I bet she wants some arcanobionic legs so she can get back to just a little bit of proper apple-bucking (or as close to proper as you can get with arcanobionics).

Sweet Apple Acres is (are?) still talking about the harvesters with Filthy Rich. They’ve been working alright, but he went back on the contract and wants more money than we have at the moment, and the trees in the new fields won’t be apple-ready for two or three more years. Sugar Belle’s been haggling with him and I think she’s wearing him down to delay our payments for a while. I wish we could just get rid of them, but even Granny knows that then we wouldn’t be able to compete with other, larger orchards. Dad’d probably say something like “quality over quantity”, but quantity has a quality of its own, right? We’ll just have to see how it all turns out.

We all miss you. Hope you get home safe.

Apple Bloom

Applejack scrolled back up through the TranScribe on her uniform’s fetlock and squinted at the penultimate paragraph in the computer’s tiny screen. Harvesters, harvesters, harvesters. Couldn’t they just get back to good old-fashioned bucking? Of course not. They couldn’t collect enough apples to keep up with the competition, which would mean they couldn’t sell enough apples to manage the upkeep of the farm. And once apple-bucking, of all things, was gone, what else would inevitably follow? In a decade, her own home would be unrecognizable.

She flicked off her TranScribe and sighed. “Can I get a beer?” she asked the bartender. Golden Oaks managed to have a real bartender for the Yellow Tulip, apparently because it helped morale more than just having a robot. And Applejack needed some morale at the moment.

“Any kind in particular?” asked Joe. “Or just cheap and strong?”

“Cheap an’ strong, more o’ the strong.”

A few seconds and one exchange of cryptobits later, Applejack had a glass of some kind of beer sitting in front of her. She took a long swig and nearly gagged. Beer was the worst part of trying to get drunk, tasting like burning chemical runoff. But she had to struggle through it, and so she did.

She heard the door open behind her; several ponies gasped and the volume level in the lounge dropped a few decibels. Applejack just kept staring at her cup. Princess Twilight sat down next to her and chirped, “There you are, Applejack! I’ve been looking for you everywhere! How’re things up here? They’d be great for me, since this is a space station, but I’m not you, so I don’t know!”

“Does anypony really like beer?” Applejack mumbled. “Or does everyone just give into peer pressure?”

“I have no idea, but if the latter, it’s a prime example of the Abilene paradox!” Twilight smiled and flared her wings, a sure sign she was going to launch into some psychological explanation, then said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’,” grunted Applejack. “I don’t wanna bother you.”

“You clamming up like that bothers me.”

“…Homesick. And the home I’m sick for ain’t the home I’m goin’ back to.” Applejack sipped at her beer, waiting for drunkenness to overtake her. “You know how things’ve been goin’ down on the farm, right?”

“More automation than you’re comfortable with, yeah.”

“Well, I… When y’offered me the job, the only reason I said ‘yes’ was ’cause I wanted to work with my own four hooves. Real farmin’. I jus’… I wanted t’get away from the fancy-schmancy machines we were usin’. Now I want t’feel some real earth ’neath my hooves for the first time in years, but the farm’s worse’n before and I don’t know if’n I wanna see it again.”

“Even though it’s your home,” Twilight said for her.

“Yeah.” Another sip. “It’s… It’s too easy. Farmin’ ain’t supposed to be oilin’ motors an’ chargin’ batteries, for land sakes! It’s backbreakin’ an’ hard and work!”

“I know what you mean,” said Twilight. “Search engines take all the fun out of research.”

Applejack snorted. “Really? Findin’ exactly what y’need in an instant’s borin’?”

“Yes! It’s just point A to B, with no points C, D, or E. It’s so… unchallenging. And you don’t even get to learn anything interesting on the way! My brother lost an eye in the Royal Guard, did I ever tell you that? And he got it healed, but I was wondering if losing one eye would really affect depth perception all that much, so I started looking through every scientific journal or book I could find about depth perception. And along the way, I learned that there are some species of spider that use depth of field to judge distance.”

“Depth of…?”

“Field. It’s how much something blurs when it’s not in focus.” Twilight grinned. “Isn’t that neat? We all share the same general sense of vision, but they use it in a completely different way! And if I’d used Yahoof to look it up, I never would’ve found it! I could’ve just typed in something like ‘monocular depth perception’ and found the answers I was looking for and nothing more. Can you imagine?”

Maybe. Kinda. Not really. Yes. It was close enough. Even at her most inept, Twilight still tried. But- “That’s all fine an’ dandy, but I ran from my problems. Comin’ up here when y’asked, jus’ to work with my hooves?” Applejack laughed bitterly. “An’ then I got me a fine case o’ astrophobia or whatever. On a good day, I do alright, but I ain’t supposed t’be here.”

“Maybe not. But you are here. And personally?” Twilight whispered in Applejack’s ear. “I think you’re doing a pretty good job. I know change isn’t easy — I didn’t even have these four years ago!-” She flexed her wings. “-but sometimes, accepting it’s all you can do.”

Applejack stared at her beer. She knew that. She’d known that for a while. But she’d kept on being presented with options to avoid mechanical harvesters if she got just a little more extreme. This fertilizer for bigger apples. Those irrigation techniques for faster watering. And now, hey, your own personal garden above the sky. The change she had to accept now was bigger than ever, and who knew what kind of shock she’d feel? She’d kept all this secret. Even her own family didn’t know. But if she was going to talk about this with Twilight, she needed to tell her everything.

In private, of course. “Can we, uh, go to one o’ the personal rooms in Habitation?” Applejack asked. “I… got somethin’ I need t’get off my chest.”

“Of course.” Twilight glanced at Applejack’s glass. “You gonna finish that first?”

“Might as well.” Applejack downed the last of her beer and pushed away from the bar.

And that was the last thing Applejack remembered. The rest of her memory, up to the trash compactor, had been cleanly scooped away.

Huh. Why there? It was too much of a coincidence, too clean, for her memory to cut out right before she and Twilight were about to have some sort of heart-to-heart. It meant something. It had to. But what?

As she stared into the stark white of the computer screen, Applejack reflected that, meaning something or not, she was no closer to learning what the hay was going on. Trying to remember had just made things more confusing and she still didn’t know where, exactly, she was in Golden Oaks. She didn’t even know where anypony else wa-

Ding.

Given the size of Golden Oaks, CelesTech workers wore tracking anklets to make it easier to find employees on board. Why bother spending half a day wandering through the station, looking for So-and-So, when you could immediately be pointed towards the Hardware module? It’d saved Applejack countless hours during work. It even helped the medical workers, monitoring employees’ overall health. She idly went to the crew system, finding the locations of her coworkers. It was hardly perfect, but it was a start.

Then she saw the results.

Every single one of the other arboretum workers was dead.

Applejack — Gardener and engineer — Healthy — Neurothaumatics Maintenance
Berry Punch — Gardener — Dead — Arboretum
Blossomforth — Gardener — Dead — Arboretum
Caramel — Gardener — Dead — Central Executive
Catskill — Security — Dead — Server Storage
Cherry Berry — Botanist — Dead — Shuttlebay

No. No. This… This couldn’t be happening. It just- couldn’t. Applejack scrolled down a line.

Daisy — Gardener — Dead — Life Support

Oh, Celestia, no.

Golden Harvest — Botanist — Dead — Arboretum

This was a dream. A bad dream. She’d wake up at any moment.

Lily Valley — Gardener — Dead — Medical Bay

Yet the same statuses kept flashing past her.

Roseluck — Gardener — Dead — Lobby

Tears filled her eyes and Applejack brought a hoof to her mouth in horror.

Swan Dive — Security — Dead — Reactor

She was at the bottom of the list, yet she kept mechanically punching the down arrow, as if that would conjure ponies from the aether who were still alive. Applejack felt numb. She’d spent years working with all of those ponies, and now…

“Easy, girl, easy,” she whispered to herself. She took a long, shuddering breath. “You can… You can… This ain’t…”

She couldn’t even convince herself. Applejack hung her head in her hooves and sobbed, tears trickling down her legs. She couldn’t do this. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t some action heroine. She was a farmer, stranded on a dead space station in the empty void, thousands of miles from literally anything. She didn’t know what was going on and she had a massive hole in her memory. She had no plan and clue of what to even think of doing.

Granny Smith had long gone on about the Apple family determination. They could get through anything, she said. In fact, the current Apple family only existed because Bright Mac had pushed through the pigheadedness of all the previous Apples. They had weathered all the paradigm shifts of the past hundred years and would weather all the ones of the hundred years to come. No matter what the world threw at them, an Apple would stand as tall and strong as one of their trees.

Maybe back on Equus, Applejack thought. On the farm, where she belonged. But not now. She didn’t even know what had gone wrong.

She was alone and she was going to die up here.

Desperate for some small shred of comfort, her chest heaving, Applejack grabbed the coffee cup and tilted it back for another drink, but it was empty. She sighed and squinted at the inside, the last forlorn little hope that there might be something. But, no, there was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

She frowned and wiped away her tears. The cup was so clean, it was like there’d never been any coffee inside at all. She sniffed. No smell.

She looked at the desk again. There was another mug sitting there. Even though there’d only been one mug when she sat down. Applejack looked at the mug in her hoof. So what was-?

With an ear-splitting screech, the mug exploded in a buckball-sized blob of black goo and whipped itself tightly around Applejack’s body.

5 - Dear Future Self

Applejack would’ve screamed if she’d had any air left in her lungs. The black blob was strong, constricting her body so tightly she could barely think, let alone breathe. Applejack grabbed at the thing, but it was so slick and smooth she couldn’t get a grip. Acting on instinct, she slammed herself into the sharp edge of the desk as hard as she could.

As she rebounded and breathlessly toppled to the floor, the blob chittered in distress and let go of her. When it landed on the ground, it looked like a giant, four-legged spider bigger than her head. It began scurrying away. Applejack grabbed the stool she’d been sitting on, rolled over, and slammed it into the floor hard enough to shatter, but she missed the spider. It skittered away with a sort of slurred clicking and headed out of sight around a shelving unit. It left black ichor in its wake.

Applejack froze for an instant, then lunged for a discarded wrench. She didn’t know what that thing had done, but she’d be damned if she let it jump her again. She twirled it around, feeling the heft, the weight. Yes, as a weapon, this would do nicely. Holding the wrench above her head, keeping her back against the wall, Applejack inched to one side so she could see around the corner.

But the thing had vanished. Its ichor trail stopped in the middle of the floor next to a toolbox.

That… No, that couldn’t be right. Could it? Applejack crept forward, still keeping the wrench high. She looked this way and that, into the corners around the shelves. Nowhere the thing could hide. It was just… gone.

The leg holding the wrench went slack. “You ain’t losin’ it, are ya, girl?” Applejack whispered. She wasn’t sure of the answer. She walked closer to the shelves. Still nothing jumped out at her. She looked over them just in case. Coils of rubber tubing, copper wire, containers for nuts and bolts, a toolbox, some fire extinguishers-

Applejack twitched in recognition and looked at the toolbox again. The exact same toolbox, right down to all the little nicks and scratches, as the one sitting on the floor.

The one the blood trail led to.

…Who would leave a toolbox sitting out in the open like that?

Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe it was a little subconscious nudge. Maybe Applejack was losing her mind. Maybe she was pissed off and wanted an excuse to take it out on something.

But she swung that wrench at that toolbox like it had tried to kill her.

Turned out, it had.

The second the wrench made contact, the toolbox screamed. Before Applejack could react, its shape had unraveled into the four-legged spider thing — thankfully still. Its central orb had been caved in by the impact of the wrench and its legs twitched feebly. That didn’t stop Applejack from hitting it again, then again, just in case. Then again, because she felt like it. Black blood flew, splattered her face. She didn’t care.

She brought the wrench back in case the thing moved again. It didn’t. Swallowing her bile, Applejack leaned in as closely as she dared to examine it and quickly got lost. The thing was oily, slimy, looking more like it was a liquid held in a vaguely spider-y shape than a body. When she looked at one of its legs, it looked like several tentacles wrapped around each other. She didn’t see anything like eyes or mouth; the surface of its… central node was as smooth and featureless as could be. It didn’t look like an animal at all, more like a foal’s sketchy drawing of a spider.

“You couldn’ta done it,” Applejack said to the… tetrapod. “Could you?” It didn’t look that dangerous on its own… But it had turned into flawless copies of a coffee cup and a toolbox, so if it could turn into other things, too, then… And if there were more of them…

A lot more… Enough to kill everypony in the arboretum…

There’d be an alert. Right? A stationwide alert, sent to everypony over every messaging system available. Golden Oaks had such an alert system; it was tested every moon. There was no way the things could take over that quickly. Right?

Applejack tried looking at her TranScribe, but her hooves were shaking so much she couldn’t press the right buttons. She stumbled back to the computer in a confused haze, flinched again at the list of dead ponies, and tapped her way to her mail. Sure enough, the second line was highlighted in the red of an important message. She opened it.

ALERT! UNKNOWN HOSTILE ENTITIES ARE ABOARD THE STATION! SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. WE WILL UPDATE YOU AS THE SITUATION PROGRESSES.

Applejack blinked and reread those few words. Unknown hostile entities — seek shelter. Those things? (She quickly looked at the shelves again. The tetrapod was still there, still dead.) Seek shelter? Where? Golden Oaks didn’t have any sort of protective shelter in case something went wrong. It shouldn’t have needed them. Besides ponies, there wasn’t anything else on board the station except for the researchers’ very-much-inanimate experiments.

Right?

Sighing, she leaned back in the chair and stared into the harsh glow of a lightstrip. The scientists up here were researching neuromods and… She didn’t know what else, if anything. She’d heard rumors about reactors, weapons, computer interfaces, whatever. She didn’t care. She didn’t need to know. She just grew her plants and kept the oxygen levels high. But if they’d been researching aliens, of all things, then-

No. What they had been doing didn’t matter. What mattered was that now, there was something aboard the station.

Applejack groaned and wiped her mane down. Still no hat. Where could it be?

Her mind not much more than a stew, Applejack absently tapped back to her mail. Her gaze flicked up to the top message, then she sat up straight like she’d been hit by lightning. It wasn’t an emergency alert, but that wasn’t what caught her eye. No, what caught her eye was the sender: herself. Then the arrival time: Mar. 15, 2:06 AM. Less than twenty minutes before she’d woken up in the compactor.

Had she known she was going to lose her memory?

Between a lack of better options and simple curiosity, she opened the message. Nothing but a video file with a strange name: Watch me. When you were young you nearly got Big Mac’s leg amputated. Nopony else on the station knew that. This had to have come from her. She tapped the Play button. A second of buffering, then the player filled the screen.

There she was, sitting in a room she didn’t recognize. The Applejack on screen was dirty and disheveled, but held herself bright and alert. She even had her hat. “Hey, AJ,” she said. “Sorry, but… y’ain’t gonna like what’s comin’ next.”

Amnesia. Getting dumped in a trash compactor. Getting attacked by some strange creature that could shapeshift. And now, a message from herself that she couldn’t remember making.

This was a very weird day for Applejack.

“I don’t know how much y’remember,” continued Screen Applejack. “Maybe everythin’. Maybe y’don’t need me at all. But the time right now is 2:01 AM, March 15. An’ four hours ago, somethin’ took over Golden Oaks. It- It-”

“Want me to handle this part, Applejack?” a familiar voice asked, making Applejack twitch. Princess Twilight’s voice. What in Tartarus was going on?

“Sure.” Screen Applejack scooched aside and Twilight herself walked into view. She was definitely the worse for wear, if only relatively speaking; her crown was gone, her mane was messy, and she was covered in grime. But, like Screen Applejack, she didn’t look tired or overly nervous.

Before Applejack could register the sight, Twilight was already talking. “There have been ALIENS aboard the station for the past four months and I WASN’T TOLD!” she yelled. “Aliens! ALIENS!”

“Twi-!”

“Sorry! Sorry.” Twilight cleared her throat. When she spoke again, her voice was much more controlled. “About four months ago, researchers aboard Golden Oaks discovered aliens during a routine spacewalk. They were small, roundish, with four legs and no sensory organs. When they took these aliens in for study — WITHOUT properly notifying the Crown! — the creatures proved to be capable of mimicking the appearance of a similarly-sized item in the vicinity. The researchers ‘creatively’ called them changelings.”

Applejack glanced at the shelves. She knew that already.

Twilight was still talking. “I guess it’s a bit better than ‘mimic’. Anyway, these changelings didn’t seem all that aggressive or dangerous, so the researchers contained them. However, four hours ago — that’s about 10 PM, March 14, remember — the changelings on board the station suddenly broke free of their holding cells and… and…”

The picture was clear enough for Applejack to see the pain in Twilight’s eyes, see the tears slowly gather there. For being a princess, Twilight had always been able to make time for just about anypony. She was Friendship, after all. Applejack had felt numb after seeing all her colleagues dead. How much worse would it have been to have actually been there while it happened? When you knew the name of just about every dead pony on the station? It was a miracle Twilight was keeping it together as well as she was.

“M-most of the crew is dead,” Twilight said. Her voice trembled, despite her best efforts. “Over seventy-five percent, I think. The changelings killed them. And there are… other things out there. The researchers don’t recognize anything besides the regular changelings, but they’re hostile and VERY aggressive. They’re hunting down Golden Oaks personnel like animals.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, then burst out, “They even ruined Pi Day! I’m sorry if it seems my priorities are all out of whack, but it’s PI DAY! One of the only true nerd holidays ever!” She put a hoof to her face, breathed in, then slowly let the air out. “Sorry. Catharsis.”

That was Twilight, alright, hiding her worries with a bad nerd joke. At least whatever was going down hadn’t completely gotten to her yet.

Screen Applejack pushed her way back into view. “But we got a plan. Sorta. Not really.” She grinned nervously and shrugged. “It’s so crazy you pr’y wouldn’t believe Twilight if she said it. But you’d listen to yourself, right? You better. Anyway, we’re in the neuromod labs. Twi here thinks that, with the same stuff we use t’make those things, ma-”

Abruptly, the screen started pixelating, like the quality was dropping. The video stuttered and screen Applejack’s voice started skipping: “-ybe we c-ybe we c-ybe we c-” Then the player closed itself, replaced by a plain blank message:

YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO VIEW THIS ITEM. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMIN.

“Don’t have-?” Applejack spluttered. “It’s my flippin’ email, you goldang-!” She nearly ripped the computer from its stand and hurled it across the room. Even with that under control, she almost broke the touchscreen as she closed the message, went back to her inbox, and stabbed at the email again.

YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO VIEW THIS ITEM. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMIN.

“Don’t you gimme that!” Applejack yelled. “It’s in my account!”

YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO VIEW THIS ITEM. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMIN.

“Son of a motherlovin’…” Applejack closed her eyes, grit her teeth so tightly she could practically hear them cracking, and forced herself to be aware of her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. She was not going to break the computer. She was not going to break the computer. She was not going to break the computer.

And when she opened her eyes again, she did not break the computer. It was close, though.

She stared at the computer; it was something to look at, keep her mind straight. Shapeshifting monsters on board. She had a plan with Twilight. Somehow. A plan she didn’t remember. Twilight herself was nowhere to be found. So what now? Find Twilight? Break into the locked file (somehow)? Deduce whatever plan she and Twilight had come up with? Even if she settled on one plan, where would she even go to begin with?

…The neurothaumatics research labs. That was where the video had been recorded, according to her past self. She’d had her hat in the video. She didn’t have it now. She wanted — needed — her hat. As good an excuse as any. She was heading there just to get out of these maintenance sections, anyway.

So. Heading there alone. Unarmed.

Or was she?

She looked at the wrench she’d used to kill the first changeling. It’d felt good in her hooves, she needed a weapon, and she didn’t know enough about guns to use one well if she found one. She picked it up again and swung it experimentally. Even without adrenaline, it felt like a good, solid whack was enough to ruin something’s week. “I think you an’ me are gonna get along jus’ fine,” Applejack whispered to it. She stuffed it into one of her pockets. Thank goodness hers were so huge.

Still alone, but no longer unarmed. It was a minor relief.

And did she need to be alone? Maybe she could find Twilight through Location Services. Applejack reflexively went back to the Crew tab before she remembered that she only had access to the locations of the Arboretum workers. Security could look through all personnel, though. …Rainbow Dash was security. Applejack knew Rainbow well enough to guess her password, right? Applejack drummed her hoof against the desk and quickly came up with three options. She logged off and tried them one at a time.

User ID: rdash
Password: Aw350m3
INVALID CREDENTIALS

User ID: rdash
Password: aw350m3!
INVALID CREDENTIALS

User ID: rdash
Password: Aw350m3!
WELCOME, RAINBOW DASH

For someone who was part of the security team, it was amazing how much of a security risk that pony could be. Maybe that was why her clearance was pretty limited. There were a few commands she didn’t recognize (so not touching those) and she had access to every crew member in Location Services, plus an extra tab for guests. Open it up, and:

Blueblood — Prince — Healthy — Central Research
Lightning Dust — Bodyguard to Prince Blueblood — N/A — N/A
Spike Chrysophylax — Aide and bodyguard to Princess Twilight Sparkle — Wounded (mild) — Lobby
Thunderlane — Bodyguard to Prince Blueblood — Dead — Neurothaumatics Division
Twilight Sparkle — Princess — Wounded (mild) — Habitation Decks

Huh. Habitation? What was she doing all the way over there? Well, at least she could move. Too far from Neurothaumatics, though; Applejack would get back to her later.

Still alone. But she knew where to find Twilight. It was a start.

Applejack walked to the door on tiphooves, ready to rip out her wrench at a moment’s notice. She poked at the button to unlock the door and winced at the sound it made as it opened up. She looked in one direction, then the other. Nothing amiss. Nothing she spotted, anyway. She set off down the hall as quickly as she dared. The alarms still blared and everywhere was still cloaked in darkness, but it wasn’t as scary now that she had something like a goal.

This is crazy, she told herself in her head. Y’ain’t got anythin’ like a plan. You gonna just keep movin’ forward an’ hope it all magically comes together? The same plan that stuck you up here in the firs’ place?

Well, sure, she responded. What else am I gonna do? Sit an’ cry?

Wait for help. You ain’t a soldier, you ain’t cut out for this, you ain’t-

Applejack ignored that voice as best she could. She’d never been able to sit still for long. She loathed her farm’s harvesters, didn’t she?

One intersection later, the flat corridor turned into a staircase with a sign pointing up it: Neurothaumatics. The hair on Applejack’s back stood up even as she climbed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see what was at the top, but she had to. It was her only way out.

A door loomed into view at the top of the stairs. Plain. Metal. Ominous. Behind it could be just about anything. A truckload of dead bodies. A wreckage of a laboratory. A pile of books, every one of them a changeling. Nothing at all, the entire wing wiped clean. Applejack’s mind raced as she reached for the button and her hoof shook. Then she took a few steps back, pulled her wrench out of her pocket, and reached forward with that. No sense in being any closer to the door than she had to be.

Clink. She hit the frame. Clink. Frame. She wiped a few beads of sweat off her face. Click. Button. The door hissed open.

6 - Equine Elements

There was light in Neurothaumatics. That was good.

What it revealed? Less so.

It seemed the maintenance halls had only escaped damage because they were out of the way. Neurothaumatics had been ravaged. Gashes cut into the walls, exposing the infrastructure beneath. Black blood was smeared across the floor — with very little red, Applejack noticed. Flickering lighting fixtures dangled from the ceiling. If it wasn’t nailed down, it was usually overturned; in one corner, test tubes were scattered out from a smashed cart like some bizarre flower. The same alarms that had been blaring downstairs sang the song of their people up here as well. There were more than a few shell casings lying about.

And, of course, the body, only a few yards from the door.

The stallion was wearing a security uniform and was sprawled out like he’d been tackled while running away from something. But after that… what? Applejack swallowed and took a few steps forward. No wounds. Nothing out of the ordinary from what she could tell. Like the janitor, he’d just died. His mouth hung open in a silent scream.

“Sorry,” Applejack muttered. She closed the corpse’s eyes. It seemed right.

Her eyes fell on the pony’s shotgun. It looked like a regular model and was strapped to the inside of his front leg. Applejack didn’t know much about guns, but protection was protection. Although it made her skin crawl, she unhooked it from the dead pony and attached it to her own leg. The second she clinched the last strap into place, a small, shapeless pressure began pushing on her thoughts, giving the feeling of a switch.

Applejack was mostly used to telepathic controls like that, so it didn’t bother her too much. The ammo counter said there was only a single shell left. Good for testing, although she’d need to raid a security checkpoint. Now, if she pointed the gun that way and just poked the thing like this-

BANG. The gun went off and slammed into Applejack’s shoulder like a sledgehammer, driving her back a step. The sound of the report was forced back in on itself over and over in the tight space until it nearly deafened her; even when the echoes died off, her ears still rang. The counter flickered and spun over to 0.

Well. At least the trigger worked.

Was the gun supposed to be as light as it was? Maybe. Maybe not. Applejack took a few steps, then a few trotting steps. It wouldn’t hamper her, at least. She could even swing her wrench with that leg if she needed to.

Her heart didn’t feel any lighter, but it did feel better-protected. Applejack wiped some black slime off a sign opposite the maintenance door. To the right: Neuromod Removal Chamber. Applejack had heard something about neuromods and memories once upon a time. If that wasn’t a starting place, nothing was. She set off.

Even with the alarms and wreckage, Applejack was more comfortable in the main hallways rather than maintenance. She didn’t know the layout, but the familiar design of the floors and walls let her pretend she did. She walked with her head high and her wrench close.

But the sights she saw slowly chipped away at her demeanor. Applejack knew the labs ought to be clean and pristine, but these resembled a warzone. Walls were ripped apart, vents hung open, and the lights kept flickering. She passed by several labs, all of them large glass-walled chambers. Yet in one case, the glass, a full inch thick, had been broken and left gigantic shards scattered across the floor like the world’s most hazardous confetti. Broken from the inside out. A pony rested against the opposite wall, her back crushed and scored by more shards. Yet other than that, she was just as strangely woundless as the other bodies.

Applejack kept an eye out for suspicious duplicates of objects, but she never saw any. She kept her ears peeled for suspicious noises, but she never heard any. Which made her even more on edge. There could be a changeling right behind her and she wouldn’t know. She patted her wrench. Still there.

Luckily, it didn’t take long for Applejack to spot a sign pointing to a door labelled Neuromod Removal Chamber — Authorized Personnel Only. It was, like the other labs, glass-walled, so Applejack galloped up to the window and peered in. The first thing she saw: her hat! It was resting on the floor, clean and intact, so close and yet so far. She stared longingly at it for a few seconds, then surveyed the rest of the room. A chair rested in the center of the room, its headrest fitted with something that had the uniquely nasty aesthetic of medical tools. A computer was hooked up next to it and next to that was a small table — almost a bedside table, really — for whatever the doctors needed. It wasn’t much larger than a doctor’s office, with enough room for only three or four ponies willing to get a little cozy. Most of the other stuff in there was various bits and bobs of debris. If it hadn’t been for her hat, Applejack would’ve walked away and forgotten about it.

But there was her hat. She’d been here. Why? She needed to get in.

She turned to the door, only to withdraw, gagging. In her excitement, she’d managed to miss the pegasus lying slumped facefirst against the door. Blood was smeared down the door, as if he’d been dragged, and one of his wings had been broken. His head rested at a grotesque angle. Swallowing, Applejack reached forward and delicately poked the body to push it away from the door. The pony fell over and toppled onto his back.

It was Thunderlane, the bodyguard she’d met barely a week ago. His face was battered and bloody, like he’d been smashed against the door repeatedly, with a broken jaw rendering him horrifically uncanny. Applejack clapped a hoof to her mouth and turned away as her stomach heaved. She clamped her jaws shut and breathed through her nose. In. Out. In. Out.

“You can do this, girl,” she muttered. “You can do this.”

Swallow. Eyes open. Nothing she could do for Thunderlane now. Keep on track. Keep moving. Applejack wiped the (still warm) blood from the doorframe, looking for either a card reader or a keypad.

Unfortunately, what she found was a keypad, four places for ten digits each. It was probably too much to ask for it to be something simple, but Applejack tried anyway: all the same digits, variants on 1-2-3-4, even a few random entries. Each attempt was met with an angry failure beep from the pad. Unless she found a convenient sticky note with the code written on it, she wasn’t getting in.

Through the door, anyway.

Applejack squinted through one of the windows again and looked up. A large vent cover was set into the ceiling — big enough for a pony to crawl through, if she was lucky. Maybe… She trotted to the room on one side, marked as Storage. It was protected by a card reader, but her janitor card opened it straight up. “If I get outta here,” Applejack muttered, “I’m gonna give every janitor I ever see a kiss. No matter what.”

The inside of the storage was relatively bare, mostly neatly-organized shelves and lockers and a few crates. The scientists must’ve been real sticklers for organization. Applejack examined the ceiling and quickly spotted it: another vent cover that matched the one in the neuromod chamber. If the vent was as large as the cover — about three feet by three feet — she’d be able to crawl through and come out inside the other room. Thank Celestia for the necessity of HVAC. Applejack planted her shoulder against a crate to push it beneath the vent.

“Excuse me.”

Applejack spun around at the sudden voice, bringing her gun up. “Who’s there?” she yelled. “Show yourself!” She didn’t aim the gun as much as point it vaguely in what she hoped was the right direction. It was hard to tell which direction the voice was coming from; it sounded like the speaker was inside something.

“Not just yet. Trixie thinks you might hit her with panic fire. If you please lower your gun, Trixie will come out slowly.”

Lower her gun? Even with her limited knowledge of firearms, Applejack didn’t want to do that. It was the only thing resembling ranged protection she had. And if this Trixie referred to herself like that, could she be trusted? Or was she crazy?

But Applejack’s options were so limited that, inch by inch, she put her leg back on the ground. “Alright,” she said. “It’s down. C’mon out.”

“Excellent.” A few metallic clinks, and one of the lockers opened a foot. Applejack twitched but kept her feet on the ground. A blue hoof poked from the locker and waved. “See? Here. Trixie is coming out now, so please refrain from becoming trigger-happy.”

The locker opened completely and a light blue unicorn with a long, pale mane toppled out. She got up with a serene… not exactly indifference, more an “I meant to do that” look. She brushed herself off — she was wearing the uniform of a volunteer — and looked at Applejack with a sort of cool but nonhostile confidence. “Greetings.”

Applejack’s leg twitched. “Uh… Hey. Name’s Applejack.” She gestured at the locker with her unarmed leg. “What were you doin’ in…?”

“Trixie was hiding, obviously,” huffed the unicorn. “She has been hiding for the past several hours. Or did you miss the alien invasion in progress?” Her horn glowed as she levitated a tube of hairspray and a lighter out of the locker. She gave the lighter a few experimental clicks to see if it still worked and nodded to herself. “What are you doing here? I thought I locked the door.”

“Janitor’s skeleton key.”

“Ah. Yes, that would do it nicely.” Trixie glanced at Applejack’s gun. “At least you- Wait.” She marched up to Applejack and wrenched her leg from the floor to look at the gun. Applejack pulled away, but Trixie had apparently seen all she needed to see. “You were pointing your gun at me while it was empty?”

“Ehm…” Applejack looked at the ammo counter. 0. “I… guess?” She’d completely forgotten about using up her last shell.

“I don’t know who you are or what you want,” Trixie said, boggling, “but you need to mod yourself up with guns. All the guns. Right now.” She grabbed Applejack’s tail in her magic and stomped out of the lab.

“Whoa, hey!” Applejack dug her hooves into the metal floor as best she could. Earth pony strength beat unicorn magic and she stopped moving. “Bless your heart, but I ain’t doin’ any eye-stabbin’ today!”

Trixie whirled around and glared at Applejack like she had just said something earth-shatteringly stupid. “Listen, Applesnack or whoever you are-”

“Applejack.”

“Whatever. We are in the middle of what can be politely described as an absolute shitstorm and you don’t even know how to use your own weapon. If you don’t take a few seconds out for some educational eye-stabbing, whatever’s going to happen to you is going to be a lot worse than one puny neuromod.”

“Why don’t you do it, then?”

“I despise guns with a fiery, burning passion capable of levelling cities.”

“Ah.”

Trixie turned back down the hallway. “Trixie knows where the mods are stored and will deign to find the correct one for you. They’re just-”

“You go find ’em, but I need t’get in there.” Applejack pointed toward the neuromod removal chamber. “I think-”

Trixie whirled on Applejack like a magnet snapping to its pole and, her eyes wild, yelled, “No! NO no nooooo. We are not splitting up, not now.” Applejack opened her mouth to protest and Trixie wagged a hoof at her. “Ah bah bah! Saying something like ‘it’s only for a minute’ guarantees that something will go wrong. Unless we need to, we are sticking together. We have safety in numbers, you have Trixie’s magic, and Trixie has your… ah…” She eyed Applejack up and down. “…guns and legs.”

Applejack snorted. “Are y’always this paranoid?” she muttered.

“You aren’t? But if you agree to stick with her, Trixie will let you visit the neuromod removal chamber first. Even though I don’t why.” Trixie strode to the door like she was a model on a runway.

“Won’t work,” Applejack said, trotting after her. “Door’s locked.”

“And Trixie will so graciously unlock it for you.” Trixie inched the last few feet as she approached Thunderlane’s body, then levitated a small computer thing, not that different from a TranScribe, from her bags. She held it next to the keypad and stared at it as symbols Applejack didn’t know flashed across the screen. “Now then… Reveal to me your secrets…”

“Uh…”

“The Great and Powerful Trixie is interfacing with the lock,” Trixie said, not looking away. She tapped something on the screen. “It connects wirelessly to the mechanisms to open and shut the door, so if the signal is spoofed sufficiently, we can- Oh, there we go. 5150.” Another tap and the doors opened. Trixie turned to Applejack with a smug look on her face — one that, bizarrely enough, looked strangely fitting for her. Applejack rolled her eyes and stepped inside. Trixie stayed outside, looking this way and that, her hairspray and lighter at the ready.

First things first: Applejack scooped up her wonderful, wonderful hat and plopped it on. The weight of it, however slight, was familiar and reassuring. Just like that, her morale went up several points, then did so again. She had her hat back. The world was slowly coming together again.

“Normally, I’d say I hoped you wanted more than that hat,” Trixie said, glancing over her shoulder, “but it looks good on you.”

“Naw, it looks great.”

“…I’ll be honest. It does. …Did you want something in here besides that hat?”

Applejack shrugged. “I dunno. Lemme look.”

There wasn’t much else to see inside the room that Applejack hadn’t already seen. Bits of drywall knocked from the ceiling, glass shards that had found their way inside… Just trash. Well, and a neuromod. It was resting on the floor behind the chair. Since she wasn’t going to inject herself with an unknown neuromod, Applejack put the bricklike device on the table so she wouldn’t step on it. Maybe there was something on the computer? She tapped the screen to wake it up, and luckily, it hadn’t been long enough for the computer to lock.

Apparently Twilight herself was still logged in, and had been looking at a map screen for some reason. Applejack closed it and stared at Twilight’s desktop. Nothing obvious leaped out at her. No videos, no suspiciously-named files, not much of anything she couldn’t access herself. Nothing. A dead end with no extra branches to follow. Unless she struck out into Golden Oaks at random.

Although… Applejack glanced around the computer at Trixie. She was a volunteer for neuromod clinical trials. Volunteers had files on them. And if Twilight was overseeing the project in general, she’d want access to everything, including volunteer files, right? Maybe. It couldn’t hurt to look up who Trixie was. Just in case.

Not knowing where to start, Applejack went to Location Services, just like before. Lo and behold, it had another tab she hadn’t seen before, for volunteers. She tapped on it, cringed at the long list of dead ponies, and found a Trixie Lulamoon who was still apparently healthy and in Neurothaumatics. Her entry had a link to her file; open it up… aaaand…

NAME: Trixie Lulamoon
ID: 0622
ARRIVAL DATE: 1007-05-05
CLINICAL TRIALS: Computer science skills (confirmed), programming (confirmed)

ASSESSMENT: Although Lulamoon is a convicted felon, her crimes solely involved theft of high-value objects; she has never been known to raise a hoof or fire a spell in anything other than self-defense and the worst injuries dealt were short-lived, if severe, headaches. It is believed that she suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder before her incarceration, but since being released, this seems to have dwindled to low-key narcissism. Although a braggart, she is surprisingly frank about her abilities or lack thereof, and what relationships she establishes are very much two-way. Since her parole, she has never been involved with the law again for so much as a speeding ticket. A close eye should be kept on Lulamoon, but it is highly unlikely that she will cause any problems aboard this facility.

ADDENDUM 1007-10-01: After she experienced success in clinical trials of some more advanced neuromods, Lulamoon took a brief white-hat role, exploiting security flaws in our network to send teasing emails to Time Turner about said flaws. Her computer privileges have been revoked pending further investigation. Removing her neuromods was debated, but Dr. Turner himself insisted that they be left in, largely because her analysis of the flaws was correct.

ADDENDUM 1007-11-11: Following persuasion by Dr. Turner, Lulamoon’s computer privileges have been reinstated and her payment as a clinical trial participant has been supplemented with a small additional fee as a computer consultant.

A bit stuck-up, but good with computers. Honestly, there were worse reasons for Applejack to join up with her. Maybe she could unlock the-

“Um. Applewhack?” Trixie asked quietly.

“Applejack.”

“Did… Did you move the body when you found it?” Trixie backed up into the room, keeping her not-flamethrower pointed out. “Because I’ve been… staring at it for a while and… and the bloodstains don’t make sense.”

“What?” Applejack’s head whipped up. “Show me.”

Applejack hadn’t paid much attention to the area around Thunderlane’s body, but when Trixie pointed it all out, it was obvious. There was an extra puddle of blood several yards away from the door. “And doesn’t it look like he was dragged to here?” Trixie asked. “Look at those smears.”

Unlike Trixie, Applejack was willing to take a closer look at Thunderlane. Sure enough, one side of his body had more blood smeared across it. Had he managed to drag himself to the door before getting attacked? Or had a changeling done it?

It didn’t make any sense. Applejack followed the trail to Thunderlane, didn’t find anything new, followed the trail back to the puddle. She examined it more closely, and- “Whoa, hang on. You seein’ this?” She pointed at a single set of bloody hoofprints, facing backwards and going off down the hallway. Even more traces of blood were smeared across the floor.

“Huh. Weird.” Trixie bent down to take in the hoofprints. “These aren’t even a full set, there’s not enough of them. Just front hooves or back hooves.” She tilted her head. She turned around so she was facing the same direction as the hooves and reared. She backed up, unsteady step by unsteady step, and each footfall matched closely with the hoofprints. “Maybe they were also dragging somepony,” Trixie said as she dropped back onto all fours.

“I dunno,” Applejack replied. “I guess… maybe, but-”

Hold up.

She’d made a plan with Twilight that might’ve messed with her memory. It’d involved the neuromod removal chamber somehow; why else would her hat be there? There was a puddle of blood outside the room where somepony had been dragged away. That somepony almost definitely wasn’t Twilight, who was in Habitation. So- Applejack managed to turn around and get a look at the edges of her rear hooves.

A few flecks of dried blood were still clinging to her uniform. Exactly where it’d collect if she’d been dragged through a puddle of blood.

“We’re followin’ these,” Applejack said resolutely. “Right now.” She didn’t have many other options, anyway. She set off down the hallway, her face practically glued to the ground. Beyond the bloody hoof prints, details leapt out at her one by one. There were a few blood smears… There was a trail through the bullet shells…

“I’m sorry, what?” Trixie galloped after Applejack. “You didn’t find anything in there, but suddenly you want to follow this one trail? Applejack, that pony is probably dead.”

“She ain’t dead. She’s me.”

“…I’m sorry, WHAT?! How do you miss that?”

“It’s complicated. You wanna know why I was tryin’ to get into that room at all?”

7 - Know Thy Self

“So let me get this straight,” Trixie said. “You woke up in a trash compactor with no memory of the past week. You found a message from yourself and Princess Twilight herself about… some sort of plan you two made. But you’re locked out of that message right now because of admin privileges.”

Applejack didn’t look up. “Pretty much, yeah. I read your file on the computer and it said you’re testin’ computer mods?”

“Test?” Trixie snorted. “Trixie does not test them. Trixie uses them to their full potential!” If she was angry at Applejack looking at her file, she didn’t remotely show it.

“So y’think you can, I dunno, unlock the file or whatever?”

“Perhaps. Trixie will do her best.”

Applejack grunted in affirmation and kept her nose right above the floor. The trail was still visible, although since there was less and less of it with each step as blood dried or dripped off, it wouldn’t be around for much longer. She peeled her eyes more than she thought was possible, always on the lookout for the tiniest of specks, which could mean the difference between-

“Look out! Yo-” Bonk.

Rubbing her head, Applejack staggered back and looked up. She’d been so focused on the floor that she hadn’t been looking at where she was going, which turned out to be a door labelled Non-Chemical Waste Disposal. In other words, access to the trash compactor.

Applejack wasn’t sure what she’d find — probably either nothing or whoever had dragged her away in the first place — but she didn’t care. She ripped open the (already unlocked) door and found- nothing. Just a small, bare metal room with carts and bags for trash, rubbish littering the room, a computer terminal in one corner, and a large chute on one wall. She clicked on her flashlight and peered down the chute. It was as silent, cold, and dark as the grave, but not unusual for a garbage chute.

“Hmm.” Trixie looked around the empty room like it had personally offended her. “I was expecting more than this.”

“So was I,” Applejack responded. She examined the floor in front of the chute for the last dregs of the trail. Just a confused muddle of hoofprints overlapping each other as whoever it was shoved her in.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

Applejack groaned and stood up. “Trixie, I… I’m just a gardener. Less’n fifteen minutes ago, I woke up without a huge chunk o’ my memories an’ nearly got crushed t’death. But apparently I got a secret plan goin’ with Princess Twilight herself, somehow, even though I know as much about it as a fish does ’bout flyin’. I ain’t just graspin’ at straws, they’re all I ever had. I’m like a wet cat doin’ everythin’ t’keep her head above water ’cause that’s all I can do. No. I don’t know what I’m doin’.”

Weirdly enough, it was cathartic to admit it all, somehow. Like she’d been lying about having a solid hold on the situation and now she didn’t have to pretend anymore. Should saying it aloud have brought it all closer to home, made her break down? Maybe, but it wasn’t like it’d been sunshine and roses getting here. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies, almost died herself. It’d hit close to home already.

So she had only the barest sliver of a plan. It wasn’t like things could get much worse than that, right?

And Trixie seemed to agree. “Fair enough. I was getting bored in that locker anyway. Besides…” She grinned a grin that was either incredibly winning or incredibly punchable. “Tracking down a mystery will be a great test of Trixie’s skills.”

“I thought you said you don’t test mods.”

Trixie’s stinkeye was uniquely spectacular.

Applejack snickered and said, “Well, I ain’t findin’ anythin’ else here, so why don’t we get those gun mods.”

“Very well,” Trixie said, still glaring at Applejack. “Follow me.”

As Trixie led Applejack passed through more and more of Neurothumatics, Applejack got more and more anxious. The overall sorry state of the module didn’t improve one bit — and if Twilight was right, the changelings had first attacked when nopony was supposed to be here. Just what did the rest of Golden Oaks look like? For all Applejack knew, the rest of the station was a few sneezes from disintegrating completely.

Soon, Trixie stopped Applejack in front of a lab that had a lot more shelves inside than the others. “Right here. If you’ll give Trixie a moment…” She popped out her mini computer and, with a bit of fiddling, popped open the door. “The Neuromod Storage Bay,” Trixie said with far more grandeur than Applejack thought the place deserved. “Every single neuromod CelesTech has created is stored here. This is the repository of the future, a place where-”

“I’m sure the corporate bigwigs appreciate that marketin’ spiel,” Applejack said, “but we’re here for a reason.”

Trixie’s ears went straight up. “Marketing spiel?” she yelled. “Applejack, do you know how important the items stored in here could be? They could change the face of Equestria as we know it!”

“Yep. Frankly, right now, I’m more concerned about my own face than Equestria’s.”

“Hmph. Very well. We’ll need to look up which mod is which.” Trixie stalked to a computer terminal. Applejack followed close behind, keeping her ears up. She hadn’t seen a changeling in a while and she was feeling paranoid. Just one thing out of place, and-

“Alrighty,” Trixie whispered as she sat down, “I don’t suppose you’re nice enough to be unlocked, are you?” She tapped the screen, revealing a login prompt. “No, you are not.”

“That ain’t a problem, right?” Applejack asked. She tried to sound concerned, but couldn’t quite manage it. Anything to delay a potential eye-stabbing with a needle, even if only for a few seconds.

“Fear not!” yelled Trixie. She held up her hooves like she was about to conduct some sacred ritual and had put on a dramatic voice. “The Great and Powerful Trrrrrrrixie shall use her unparalleled hacking skills to get us in!” She rotated the monitor a little and, from the back, plucked a sticky note with a password written on it. Seven seconds later, they were in the account of one Dr. Moondancer.

“Some hackin’,” grumbled Applejack. “I coulda done that.”

Trixie’s grin was eminently punchable. “Ah, but you didn’t.” She began sifting through menus so fast Applejack could barely follow. “About seventy percent of hacking relies on ponies being occasional idiots, and let me tell you-” She wagged a declarative hoof at Applejack. “-ponies are not good at security in a place like this. Trixie saw ponies who worked here replace sticky notes just like this two or three times.” She reached some sort of inventory screen and went to the search bar. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one email has a code for a safe or something, a long rant about proper security procedures, and a big, bold statement telling her to delete the email. Ah, here we go.”

Applejack leaned over Trixie’s shoulder to check. They were in the middle of a long list of neuromods with long descriptors Applejack didn’t recognize and keywords like “dance” or “archery”. It apparently looked fine to Trixie, though. She ran her hoof across one line. “Mod PPN-8, firearms… What’s the description?” She opened up a link and skimmed the resulting page. “Knowledge of all sorts regarding guns of all sorts, blah blah blah, applications in security training, good enough!” She stood up. “Look for mod PPN-8. They should be alphabetized.”

And alphabetized they were. The storage aisles had nice, clean placards on them, like they held food at the grocery store rather than experimental magic devices in a space station. The mods themselves were on shelves behind unlocked glass doors; apparently the designers had thought the room’s security was sufficient. In keeping with the rest of the station, multiple doors had been shattered and neuromods were spilled across the aisles. Applejack and Trixie followed the P’s all the way down to PPN-8. But there were multiple PPN-8s: v3, v4, v5… “Just take the latest one?” Applejack asked.

“Probably, but maybe not,” said Trixie, rubbing her chin. “I’ve heard newer versions can have problems the older ones didn’t. Hang on, I’ll check.” She raced back to the computer.

As Applejack waited, she delicately took a v5 mod from its cradle. It was an unassuming thing, basically a small steel brick with a container of purple liquid sticking out from one side, an eyepiece on another, and some bits of plastic tubing running around it. One of the masterstrokes of neuromods was how easy they were to use. Applejack lightly squeezed the brick between both hooves and cringed at the deployment needle that jumped out of the eyepiece.

It had already come to this. Breaking into labs, stealing their research, and injecting herself with it for a chance to stay alive a little longer. Applejack didn’t think it was wrong, not at all, but it definitely wasn’t what she’d expected to be doing even a week ago. If she pushed into the outbreak, what else would she be doing that she thought she’d never have to do?

Honestly, though, if taking a neuromod was her biggest concern, things were going alright.

“V5!” Trixie yelled, making Applejack nearly drop the mod. “V5 is the best!”

“Alright!” Applejack called back. “I’m taking it now!” She blanched at the needle one more time, then touched the eyepiece to her eye. The physical, wet surface of her eye. She reflexively tried to blink, but the eyepiece was in the way.

“Please wait and look forward,” a soft voice cooed. Purple lines flickered across Applejack’s vision. “Neuromod calibrating.” The waiting, however short, was terrible. Applejack’s eye was watering like mad and she kept wanting to pull the mod away. But if she did that, she’d have to start all over. Applejack ignored her heart and kept looking forward.

“Calibrated. You may learn when ready.” The voice was so soothing, so calm about this, that it made Applejack squirm. And was that the best slogan they could come up with? It sounded like she was loading a gun with knowledge and shooting herself in the head with it. Which, okay, wasn’t that far from the truth, but still.

Well. Nothing to it. She took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

The needle in her eye actually didn’t hurt. It was sharp enough that it didn’t pierce her lens so much as frictionlessly slide right through. It also went through her pupil, so no nerves there. And it was in and out fast enough that it was over before Applejack knew it’d started.

But she felt it, if only for an instant. It tickled her retina. It tickled her retina.

Before the flash of synapse-rewriting magic had faded from her sight, Applejack hurled the neuromod deployer away and reflexively clapped her hooves to her eye. Between the thing touching the outside of her eye and touching her retina sweet Celestia, her eye was watering like crazy. It always did, or so she’d heard. Her engineering mod definitely had.

For five seconds, nothing. Applejack just groaned and massaged her aching eye. Ten seconds. Nothing. Fifteen.

And then Applejack knew guns.

The breadth of knowledge didn’t hit her like a train, knock her down, or overwhelm her. One second she would’ve looked at you cluelessly if you’d asked her about calibre. The next, she could’ve gone into extreme detail about dozens of different calibres and their pros and cons. She felt like she’d been firing guns since foalhood. She didn’t just know how to aim; she knew how to zero a sight, how to clear a jam, how to take apart any gun in the room and clean it and put it back together. She was never aware of it coming into her mind. It was just there.

Applejack looked at her shotgun; through her new eyes, it wasn’t just a shotgun anymore. It was a Throne S6 semiautomatic shotgun, 12 gauge, meant for close-quarters fighting. No slugs, not on a space station; pellets only, to keep the muzzle energy down. Five-round tube magazine, plus another one in the chamber, all tracked by an LED display. Very reliable and capable of being fired in space if need be. Even underwater, if you had the right ammunition (which Golden Oaks didn’t). The pressure in her mind was now comforting, familiar, an easy trigger to pull. The gun was still light, but now she knew that was because the gun was empty. Once she got some shells in, it’d be nice and heavy.

At the far end of the aisle, Trixie leaned in. “Did you get it? Do you feel okay?”

“I’ve been better.” Applejack blinked again and rubbed her eye. Still it insisted on water. “Been a lot worse, too, so I’ll take what I can get.”

“So you know guns now?”

“Like the back of my hoof.”

“Excellent. I suppose now the only thing left is to unlock your video and… do whatever it is the princess wants you to do?”

“I guess.”

Trixie was already hard at work at the computer by the time Applejack got there. Applejack risked a glance at the screen and saw nothing but a command prompt window with a long list of commands and responses she couldn’t hope to understand. “How’s it goin’?” Applejack asked.

“Effh.” Trixie blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. “This is proving to be far more difficult than Trixie suspected. Whoever locked you out had privileges higher than the usual, so many of Trixie’s usual methods aren’t working.” She tilted her head to one side, cracking her neck.

“Many? Y’already tried ‘many’?”

“Trixie is very good at what she does, Applejack.”

As Applejack sat and waited for Trixie, she did the one thing she’d hoped she’d never have to do. She stopped. She slouched forward in her chair, propping herself up on her front legs, shaking all over. She felt partially terrified, one part of her brain screaming her lights out while the rest shut down all emotions and forced her to categorize everything she knew and take stock of the situation.

All of her co-workers were still dead. She was still stuck in space. And every step she took, she was deliberately plunging deeper into whatever madness was going on, completely headlong. She had nothing to go on but a single video that might not even be worth anything once she actually saw it. The only ally she’d met so far was a computer programmer. There was a very real possibility that she was going to die, just like the rest of the station, and the more she kept moving, the higher that possibility became.

But she couldn’t just wait. If waiting was her thing, she wouldn’t be up here in the first place; she’d be letting the harvesters do their jobs at Sweet Apple Acres and not caring that she didn’t have any dirt on her hooves. Moving let her feel alive. Moving gave her a chance to do something — maybe something good, no matter how small. If she survived.

Breathe, girl. Breathe. You can do this. Just keep movin’ for’ard.

“Bah!” Trixie said eventually. She pushed away from the desk in frustration, her ears back, not even noticing Applejack’s distress. “Perhaps Trixie could do this with more time in a less stressful environment, but not here and now. And don’t even think about asking if this is the best Trixie can do, because yes, right now, it is! Stupid…” She sucked in a breath through her nose. “May I have a moment?”

Applejack quickly sat up straight and pushed her hooves down hard onto the floor to hide the shaking. It wouldn’t do to break down in front of her only ally. “Have a whole minute if it’ll make y’feel better.” She knew the feeling.

“Thanks, but I’ll just need a moment.” Trixie picked up a few binders from the debris, walked into the hallway, hurled them with enough telekinetic force to lodge them in the metal wall on the other side, and walked back in. “I’m better.”

“Huh.” Applejack tilted her head. “Not even a scream?”

“Nope. I prefer to keep my lungs intact to introduce myself.” Trixie collapsed back into the chair. “It’s strange. It’s like every email has been locked by an admin. Which I suppose is possible, but…” She drummed her hoof on the legrest, then hastily went to another screen, bringing up a huge table of rows and columns. “Changelog, changelog, changelog…” After a moment of reading, her jaw dropped. “Ah, Applejack… When were you reading your email?”

“Ehm… 2:25? 2:26? Somethin’ like that.”

“Because at 2:26, somepony removed the view permissions for literally every single email on our servers.” Trixie spun around to stare at Applejack as if that meant something. “If you’re not an admin, nopony can read anything in their inbox.”

“Seriously?” Applejack didn’t know much about computers, but she definitely knew that. “Why d’you think they did that? Were they tryin’ t’get me?”

Trixie shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they were trying to keep the aliens from reading the email- Hey, don’t laugh! We don’t know they can’t! They might be sapient! Keeping information from them is a smart thing!” She swiveled back to the computer. “Whatever the reason, this was a panic move, a quick-and-dirty solution for a more precise problem because they were short on time, like using a chair as a hammer. And the permissions were changed by…” She frowned and leaned closer. “No, that is not right. Time Turner? No.”

“You’re sayin’ Time Turner locked everypony out?” asked Applejack. She only knew him by loose reputation, but that was still well enough to disbelieve Trixie. He’d seemed… friendly enough. Besides, locking ponies out of their mail just didn’t make sense now.

“Or somepony using his account,” muttered Trixie. “He was the head of the Computer Science division, so he had access to just about everything… No, it never would’ve been him…” She drummed her hoof on the table and stared at the screen. “He was… so enthusiastic about his work you couldn’t help but get caught up in it,” she said. “That stallion could make searching the phone book the most exciting thing ever.”

“Didn’t he want you to keep your mods?” Applejack asked. “It was in your file. You’d been hackin’ into the network and the scientists thought you shouldn’t be able to do that. All ’cept him.”

“He did. And to be honest, he shouldn’t have.” Trixie spun the chair around to face Applejack and rubbed the back of her neck. “I couldn’t help myself, and that was a ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes’… thing. You know what I mean? And getting my mods removed wouldn’t’ve even set the testing back that much, since I’d already proved they worked. Then Dr. Turner comes along and doesn’t just let me keep my mods, he hires me. I sometimes do some database and security maintenance for him. I know him.” She pointed at the screen. “And he wouldn’t have done this.”

Trixie spun back to the screen. “But who would’ve…? And where-” She twitched and quickly side-scrolled across the logs. “Workstation, workstation…” she muttered. She stopped at a certain column. “Workstation! CRMO1… But… that’s his office…”

The words were out before Applejack knew she was saying them. “Wanna check it out? It ain’t like we got anythin’ else we can do. ’Cept maybe hide.”

Headlong.

Trixie frowned at the screen, tapping the desk. Her ears flopped this way and that. Eventually, she said, “You know that, um, with the thing dragging you leaving hoofprints and using computers… You that probably means there’s a pony on board doing that, right? That… tried to kill you.”

Applejack swallowed. “…Yeah.”

“So… are you sure this is a good idea? I mean… what if…”

“Then if we run into ’em, we’ll try to talk to ’em, figure out why they’re doin’ this. And if they’re plannin’ on doin’ worse things, we’ll stop ’em.”

It sounded so simple when she put it like that. But for all she knew, the only way to stop them might be a wrench to the head. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to do that.

It only took Trixie another moment to nod. “You’re right. Trixie knows enough magic to incapacitate a pony for a little while if we meet them.” She stood up. “Central Research is just a module over. We can be there in a few minutes.”

Once Trixie pointed the way, Applejack went first down the debris-strewn hallway. She was the big, tough, armed earth pony. Still no shotgun shells, but the wrench was as hefty as ever.

She just hoped she wouldn’t have to use it against a pony.