“The bond that was broken before time shall be reforged with fire and light, and they shall remake the world according to their will. Every being shall rejoice and be stricken with fear.” — Prophecies and Predictions of Star Swirl the Bearded. Date unknown.

Chapter 61: A Mission to Plan

Celestia stood facing into the wind, the pounding rain battering her muzzle and the storm pulling at her mane and tail like a flag whipping in the wind. She squinted her eyes slightly, keeping out the driving rain drops. Lightning flashed in the sky above her and a loud crack of thunder reverberated off the Montana mountains, rolling and echoing like an explosion. She held her ground, narrowing her eyes as if challenging the storm, all four of her hooves in a wide stance. Her horn glowed with a golden aura and a razor-thin beam of light shot from the tip into the clouds. Immediately, the wind started to subside, the driving rain became a light drizzle, and the clouds began to break apart. A minute later, shafts of sunlight began to penetrate the ever thinning clouds. A couple of minutes after that, the sky was clear. Only her wet fur, the small puddles on the ground, the light pitter-patter of rain dripping off trees, and the fresh, clean smell of ozone in the air remained as evidence that the storm had ever existed at all. Birds began to chirp, and the wild critters of the forest emerged from their places of shelter.

She turned and started walking back to the cabin where Eric and the others were working. The storm she had just dissipated was not the one her quarrel was with. Using magic to destroy a small summer thunderstorm in Montana was one thing. Destroying the category five hurricane she had seen on the news that was churning towards a state called Georgia in this country she found herself in would be a quite another. It was beyond her ability, she knew. Breaking up a hurricane that large, or even just turning it out to sea, would require at least three entire squadrons of weather pegasi. Destroying the small thunderstorm overhead had been cathartic — a way to vent her frustration that she couldn’t destroy the hurricane in the east. But it had accomplished nothing of practical value.

She lit her horn again, casting a quick drying spell on herself to dry her coat before stepping inside, then used a small amount of magic to open the door. Immediately, she had to turn to the left and walk a wide circle to get to the back of the cabin. Almost all of the open space in the cabin’s main room was now taken up by a large, donut-shaped metal device that had wires and pipes attached to virtually every part of it. The wires were strung along the floor and taped to the walls, each one connected to a computer, some other part of the device, or some kind of monitoring device with various knobs and displays. Not only had the main room started to look like some kind of mad scientist’s lab, but navigating the maze of wire on the floor without tripping had become a challenge for all of them. But time was of the essence, so they hadn’t invested any effort on luxuries such as making the thing look nice. Eric had called the large donut-shaped device a cyclotron, and said that it was a miniature version of the device that had sent James to Equestria. Of course, it was far less powerful than that one. That one had been able to produce one trillion electron volts of energy. The miniature one in the cabin could only produce about one million. That wasn’t nearly enough to send her back to Equestria, Eric had explained. Not even with unicorns using magic to pull from the other side. But it was enough for them to generate small scale experiments, gather data, and then interpolate the results to much larger levels of energy. At least, that was the plan. Nothing like this had ever been intentionally done before, and no one knew for sure whether any formulas or values calculated from them would still hold when they actually punched a hole in the veil between two dimensions to send her home. This was an uncharted area of quantum physics that even Eric couldn’t be certain about.

After working her way in a large half-circle around the device, stepping carefully to avoid tripping on the wires, she stood in the doorway to the kitchen on the other side of the room where Eric and the others were gathered and discussing the results of their latest round of experiments. They paid her no mind, not even wondering about the storm that had suddenly disappeared. Destroying thunderstorms had become somewhat of a routine habit for her over the last couple of days since she’d learned about the hurricane eyeing the east coast. For the most part, she paid them no mind when they were working either. She wished there was more she could do to help, but most of the discussions they had were beyond her. For the most part, she stayed out of the way, only contributing to their work when they had specific questions about the magical aspects of the plan Twilight and James had sent them. For the moment, however, it seemed they were not discussing mathematical formulas she didn’t understand, and so she listened more closely.

“The parameters James and Twilight sent us assumed we would be sending Celestia home from Fermilab in Chicago. But obviously, that’s not going to be possible,” Eric was saying. “Fortunately, they sent us the formulas they used to create the parameters, so we’ll be able to create new parameters.” He paused and sighed, rubbing his temples with thumb and index finger as if he had a headache before continuing. “Unfortunately, it’s not going to be that simple. Twilight will be targeting Chicago because she assumes that’s where we’re going to be. In Equestria, they don’t know the tevatron was destroyed beyond repair. Somehow, we are going to have to send a message to her letting her know the new parameters, and they are going to have to adjust on their end too.”

“But we can’t send anything to them because Twilight said the dimensional energy is currently polarized against us, so it’s only possible to send things from there to here. Which means we have a new problem we have to solve, and we aren’t going to get any help from Twilight or James on this one,” Thomas stated.

“Exactly. Anyone have any ideas?” Eric asked, looking around the table at the others.

“One. But it’s radical,” Michael responded.

“Right now, even radical ideas are better than no ideas,” Eric said.

“We could bend the portal ourselves to make up for the location difference.”

Eric shook his head slightly. “It’d require too much power. We’d melt the superconductors, assuming we didn’t blow out the transformers first.”

“If we tried to maintain it long enough to send Celestia home, yes. But what if we only maintained it long enough to send the revised calculations through? Then we could drop the power level and Twilight and her team would be able to make the necessary corrections to their … their magical tractor beam or whatever it is.”

Eric smiled slightly at that. “Interesting idea. It might work. You did an internship at RHIC, right? Is it powerful enough to do it?”

Michael shook his head. “Not nearly. There’s only one accelerator in the world that has even a chance of being powerful enough to do it.”

Eric frowned and his expression took on a troubled appearance. “The Large Hadron Collider … So now all we have to do is figure out how we are going to smuggle an alicorn and a pegasus into Switzerland … And once we do that, we have come up with a way to commandeer the LHC control room.” He rubbed his temples again, as if whatever headache he might have had earlier had just gotten much worse. “Could this possibly —”

He cut his statement short when he noticed her standing in the kitchen doorway. She knew he’d stopped short for her benefit. But it was already too late. She didn’t need him to finish the sentence for her own expression to take on the same troubled appearance as his.

o.O.o

Later that night, Celestia rested in the bedroom they had given her. It was completely dark outside her window, and it still felt strange to her that she didn’t have to lower the sun. The moon was just starting to rise, and silver light glittered and danced off the snow of the distant mountains like thousands of twinkling stars. Moonrise was the hardest time for her. Every night, for a brief moment, she found herself thinking her sister was here, and that everything was going to be okay. But only for a moment. Then she would remember that just like the sun, the moon rose and set of its own accord here. And then the reality of the situation would slam back into her as if she were standing in the middle of a train track staring down the Canterlot Express.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep again, but so far, all attempts at sleep eluded her. Mostly, her thoughts kept wandering to Equestria. Had they been able to rescue Luna yet? Had they gotten the sun back? Did Equestria still exist at all? Or was it merely a frozen wasteland covered in arctic tundra and the emaciated skeletons of trees, starved of the sunlight they needed to survive, their bare limbs and branches sticking into the air like bony fingers as a monument to what once was? She shoved the vision down, as if striking it with a giant hammer. But she knew it would invariably surface again, like pounding down the peg on a door hinge that always manages to work its way back up again. One thing she knew for certain: They were going to have to figure out a way to raise the sun without her there. There was no way Equestria could survive until her return without the sun.

Then her thoughts turned to the east coast of the country she was in now, and the hurricane that was barreling towards Georgia. A mental clock in her head counted down the hours until it was predicted to strike. She had been baffled when Eric told her that large numbers of people would ignore the evacuation order put out by the government. The people here often didn’t trust their government, it seemed. Many of them thought that the storm would weaken before it made landfall, or that it would turn out to sea and only graze the coast. Anger at the stupidity of the people ignoring the evacuation order mingled with pity in her mind as she thought of what would happen to them. The storm would continue to churn towards the coast, like some unstoppable army that no weapons could affect. Eventually, the people would realize it was going to march right over the top of them. But by then, it would be too late for them to get out of the way. Their houses and their lives would be crushed under its enormous footprint — a footprint that covered an area of more than half a million square miles.

But there was nothing she could do about that either. She couldn’t help Equestria, and she couldn’t help the people on the world she was currently stuck in. Never in her life had she felt as helpless as she did right now.

A soft thump from the kitchen brought her out of her thoughts, and she swiveled her ears in the direction the sound had come from. She heard several more of the thumps and realized it was someone walking in the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator door open and close, a few more thumps, and then the sound of someone sitting down in one the chairs at the table. She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep, then.

She got out of bed and used a small amount of magic to open the door, the golden aura glowing faintly in the darkness, then made her way into the kitchen. There, she found Eric, sitting at the table with a glass of water and reading over something on his computer. He moved his finger over the trackpad, clicked, and read some more.

“Eric, you should be in bed,” she said.

He jumped slightly in surprise, having been so engrossed in his work that he apparently hadn’t seen her approach.

“Celestia … You startled me. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Can’t sleep?” she asked, walking to the other side of the table and stopping when she was standing next to him. Glancing at the computer screen, she noted that he had two windows open. One contained what appeared to be shipping maps over the large body of water she recognized as the Atlantic Ocean from the world map she had studied. The shipping routes ran from the east coast to Europe. The east coast map again made her think of the hurricane that was about to hit, but she forced it to the back of her mind for now. No sense dwelling on it. The other browser window was filled with text, but she couldn’t read most of it since she hadn’t spent much time studying the alphabet that the humans used. There was also a picture of a small cargo ship on the page, along with a portrait picture of a grizzled man with a shaggy, sandy-colored beard wearing what she guessed was a seaman’s uniform. His darker complexion and facial features suggested he was some from some other tribe — nationality as the humans called them — than Eric.

“I’m not tired. And I have a lot planning I need to do,” Eric responded.

She turned her head away from the computer and looked at his face. His eyes were slightly bloodshot and there were dark, baggy circles under his eyes. His hair was disheveled, suggesting he had been lying down recently.

“When was the last time you slept, Eric?” she asked with a slight hint of accusation in her voice.

“I tried sleeping, but I can’t,” he responded, confirming her suspicions as he rubbed his bloodshot eyes lightly with a forefinger. “I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get you to Switzerland. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to get you through airport security, so we are gonna have to go by boat. The crossing is gonna take about a week.”

She nodded slightly, feeling herself in inner turmoil. That was a week less time that they had to try to work out the accelerator equations, which was definitely putting them in a time crunch. However, she didn’t let her discouragement show to Eric or any of the others. That was part of being a princess. You always had to maintain an air of confidence even when you felt uncertain. Your subjects always had to see you as strong and full of assurance. Seeing their leaders full of confident assurance inspired them to be confident as well. She wasn’t a leader here, and she didn’t think they saw her as a leader. But still, she knew they were doing the best they could, and working as fast as they could. Showing them her discouragement would definitely not help the situation.

“Any ideas?” she asked, looking back towards the computer screen.

“I’ve found a few small cargo ship operators. Some with skippers who I suspect are a bit … less than on the up and up. But it’s risky. Some of them may already be on government radars as possible contraband runners. Illegal drugs, weapons smugglers, that sort of thing. But I don’t see that we have any other choice. It’d be foolish to ask an operator that is running completely legally.”

“So we’ll avoid initial detection and discovery, but at an increased risk of getting discovered later if we get boarded by the Coast Guard or something.”

“That’s pretty much the tradeoff, yeah.”

So none of their options were particularly good then, but a smuggler seemed like the best option. She wasn’t thrilled with the idea of shacking up with criminals and contraband runners, but it seemed like the least risky option. Indeed, perhaps the only option.

“Do you think they’ll take me, though?” she asked, “I mean even if they are used to smuggling things, I’m not exactly …”

“My plan is to smuggle you onboard in a shipping container. They are probably used to not asking questions about contents if they get paid enough. Once we are safely on board, you can teleport out at the first available opportunity and then spend the rest of the journey in my cabin. Just before we arrive at port in Europe, you can teleport back into the shipping container. That way there won’t be any evidence that it was ever opened or tampered with.”

“And my Captain?”

“There'll be room in the shipping container for both of you, assuming you can teleport him in and out with you.”

“I can,” she answered with a nod.

“Alright … At least we’ve got that partially figured out, then,” he said, making a visible effort to stifle a yawn.

“You need some sleep, Eric. I know you want to keep working, but you’ll think better after you’ve slept. And you’ll make up for the lost time anyway when you are refreshed.”

He looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “You got a spell that can help me sleep? I don’t think I could sleep if I tried.”

She frowned and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. My sister could easily help with that. But sleep spells go almost entirely against my nature, being the ruler of the sun and all.” She mentally kicked herself now for never asking Luna to teach her a sleep spell. She probably could have learned one if she’d tried, but she’d never considered it a priority. She always had other things that had seemed more important.

“It’s alright. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll go back to bed and try to get some sleep soon.”

She turned and started to make her way back to the kitchen door. “Good night, Eric.”

“Night, Celestia,” he responded before turning his attention back to his computer.

She started back towards her bedroom, but then changed her mind, turning towards the main room and making her way towards the door instead. She cast a light spell, lighting the path in front of her as she navigated through the maze of wires and around the cyclotron donut again, then opened the door and stepped outside, She let the light on her horn go out and slowly made her way down the driveway, just using the light of the moon to guide her. At least she could be glad that Eric had stopped addressing her as ‘Your Majesty’, and that he was finally comfortable enough around her to be somewhat casual. All of the students still addressed her formally, but she hoped that they would start to become more comfortable and casual as well.

Another concern entered her mind. Eric had never said anything about it, but she knew he must be running out of money by now. Between the cost of all the parts he had to buy to build the cyclotron, the fact that he was going to have to bribe a ship captain to take them to Europe, and the fact that he wasn’t working right now, the money had to be getting tight. If she’d had a way to send messages to Equestria, she could have asked Twilight to send gold from the Royal Treasury through a portal. She could have provided him with virtually unlimited funds. But here, she could do nothing. She might as well be the poorest being in all Equestria for all the good the Royal Treasury did her here. Providing funding for Eric’s research was yet another item she could add to the list of things she couldn’t do. Yet another thing to make her feel helpless.

“Is that you, Your Majesty?” a male voice called out from her left. She immediately recognized the voice of Captain Swordstorm and turned her head in that direction, but she could not see him.

“It is, Captain. Where are you?” she asked, straining her night vision, but still unable to see him.

Slowly, he appeared from almost directly in front of her, as if he were a figure appearing from the end of a pitch black tunnel. He was wearing the Lunar Guard night armor he’d brought with him from Equestria.

“Even you can’t see me in the dark,” he said with a smile. “We might have to equip the entire Royal Guard with this stuff.”

“We’ll have to consider it. You should be in bed. What are you doing out here, Captain?” she said as he turned and the two of them began walking down the dirt path side by side.

“Watching … Guarding,” he said as he scanned the area. “I’m not comfortable leaving you unguarded. Especially not after we failed to protect you and your sister from being ambushed, your Majesty.”

“That’s what’s bothering you?” she asked, compassion filling her voice and flooding her heart. “Captain, that wasn’t your fault. It was nopony’s fault. It should have been impossible —“

“Your Majesty, don’t,” he said firmly, almost using his command voice as he cut her off, stopping to turn and look at her. There had even been a hint of anger in his voice, and she knew his anger was directed at her. She looked back at him for only a brief moment before nodding her head in acquiescence.

“As you wish, Captain. Forgive me,” she said in resignation and began walking again with Captain Swordstorm resuming his walk alongside her. This had always been a point of contention between her and her Royal Guards. Royal Guards took their honor very seriously. Any injury or slight against one of the Princesses was something they considered an affront to their honor, even if there was nothing they could have reasonably done to prevent it. But pointing out to them that there was nothing they could have done, or suggesting it wasn’t their fault, was to insult their honor even further because they took it as a downplaying of their responsibilities to the Princesses. She had never understood it herself, but it was an integral part of Royal Guard culture that was as firm and unchangeable as the strongest mountain. In the past, she had tried to argue with several of her captains about it, but they would have none of it. And so she’d decided long ago to yield to them on this issue. It was a rare event these days that she slipped up and tried to argue with them over it as she had done just now.

“How have your intelligence gathering efforts with Michael been going?” she asked, changing the subject.

“He’s been very helpful. Very willing to talk,” he responded conversationally, all hints of anger in his voice having vanished as if they had never been there. “There’s large variations in the military strength and capabilities of the various nations of this world. The country we are in is one of the most powerful in both military size and capability. They have advanced technology, but no magic capabilities and no ability to defend against magic. It’s likely they wouldn’t even recognize magic if it were to be used on them. He’s provided me with the locations of most of the important military installations around the world.”

She nodded in response. “And in a hypothetical situation where our two words had contact with each other, would they be a threat to us?”

“Some nations, yes. Others, probably not. Some would likely be friends. Others would certainly be foes. One thing that is certain is that we would not be able to treat the human world as one nation. We’d have to pick and choose our friends carefully. And the friends we keep would play a large part in determining who our enemies are.”

“Good work, Captain.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty. Do you have any thoughts on what we will do if there is ever contact?”

“The next dimensional alignment won’t happen for more than a thousand years, so we have at least that long to prepare for it. And if the time comes, our foreign policy with the human nations will be the same as it has always been with the other nations in our own world. We will turn as many of the human nations into our friends as possible. And we will be ready to defend ourselves against the ones that reject our friendship and decide to threaten us instead. But that’s a problem that’s far off into the future. I’m afraid you have a much more immediate problem to deal with, Captain.”

“Your Majesty?” he questioned?

“I’m afraid you have to develop a tactical plan, and lead a group of college students on a mission to capture a highly advanced scientific research facility in a country called Switzerland. And you must carry out that mission in about one month’s time. Come on, let’s both get some sleep,” she said, turning around and making her way back towards the cabin ...