In the throne room, Shining Armor reports to the two sisters, “The Wonderbolts are dispersed to disaster control and command positions. All pegasi are stationed at all cloud sectors. Every able-bodied earth pony, crystal pony, and unicorn in the kingdom and the crystal empire has mobilized for disaster relief. All teams are standing by.”

“Well done, Captain. It seems that our subjects are prepared.” Princess Celestia turns to her sister, “Luna, do you understand the plan? It is much as the Summer Sun Celebration, with only a few…differences. Are you okay, my sister?”

Luna replies, eyes and head lowered, “Yes, sister. It’s just… I have visited their dreams. So many would die!”

“I know, Luna. The fleet’s crews obey their leader and defeat is the only language they understand. The dark ones now know that we are here. They are not like our foes of Equestria, Luna. They know our true nature. Their hunger for power drives them to enslave whole species. To deny power to their enemies, they would destroy not only us, but every single creature that walks upon Equestria, swims in its oceans or flies above it. It is our duty as protectors of this world. We will keep our subjects safe, and we will let Twilight and Cadence keep their innocence a little while longer.”

“Yes, sister. The dreams of the young are light and joyful, so hopeful.” Luna looks her sister in the eyes, “I will do this for light and dreams and for the sake of new hope!”

“Well spoken, my Luna. My heart is heavy that your burden should be so great, but they may leave us no choice. The dark ones’ power leaves scant room for mercy and none for hesitation. Let us proceed while we are still resolved.”

With a flash of red and black lightning, Luna and Celestia disappear from their throne room and appear in the cold blackness above their world. A transparent glow of delicate blue-grey surrounds them and hums with confident power as it protects them from the vacuum of space. Below them in the distance, shines the dark orb and blue-white crescent of Equestria’s night side and daylight terminator. In all other directions, a multitude of stars, perfect and still, greet them amidst the milky ruffle glow of the galaxy. The sisters pause like alerted deer and turn together to gaze galactic spinward. They sense, with sight beyond sight, the streaking hyperspace wakes of over ten thousand metal arrowheads still light-years distant, and amongst them, a metal sphere the size of a small moon. With other senses, they see the skeins of forces suffusing space and scores of higher dimensions. Nestled in these realms, two tremendous holes of hate and darkness travel with the multitude of grimly determined minds now streaking toward their home. Unexpectedly, there is another. But this presence is light and not dark, and it is latent, only the faintest ember. The sisters look at one another, surprised.

Luna’s expression changes to dismay as she speaks, “Our plan is undone, sister. I could not do it with her onboard. Though strange and unlike us, she is innocent. And one day, in a different way, she will also be magic.”

“Our plan is still good. You must rescue her, Luna, while I talk to…him.”

The sister’s glowing magic auras merge. A torrent of rapid calculations passes between them as they adjust their plan. Another flash of red lightning crackles between them and expands into a sphere as they teleport again. The sisters appear elsewhere in the cold blackness, where they know the fleet will momentarily appear.

The fleet arrives with furious speed but then stops as if freeze-framed. The enormous battle station looms before the sisters but is lost in the sky-engulfing array of ships the width of a continent, nearly twenty times the station’s one hundred sixty kilometer diameter. Horn glowing, Celestia sends her thoughts, “Go now, Luna. Rescue the princess!” Luna disappears with a red flash and the smell of ozone, as Celestia turns towards the sphere of the station, bright in the harsh, unfiltered sun of space.

Meanwhile, Admiral Ozzel surveys his flagship’s bridge from the height of its walkway — annoyed. Against his better judgement, he had listened to his obsequious executive officer. As usual, Captain Piet counseled against modifying the Emperor’s orders. Normally, an assault fleet of this size would never appear so deep inside a system, so close to an inner planet. The hyperspatial calculations for such a deep jump in-system are complex and fraught with the possibility of disaster and tactical compromise. An enemy could stage a surprise attack from behind a large moon, for example, and this was precisely the kind of moon that the target planet had. Never in all his years of tactical study would he ever have imagined an order like: “Take the fleet to orbit well below the moon’s Roche’s limit. Listen to me this time, don’t be a flibbertigibbet!” As it was, the orbital station-keeping for a properly sized defensive formation at that altitude would burn enormous amounts of fuel to compensate for the differing orbital velocities. As a compromise, he had reduced the fleet’s planned size upon reentry to normal space. Normally, no commander would use such a compact formation, except perhaps to hide a large fleet behind a moon. From the far side of the bridge, a crewman announces, “Reentry to normal space complete. Systems show a navigation anomaly for lunar position.”

Then a tall, black helmeted, black cloaked figure turns abruptly about and walks towards the Admiral with the sound of labored mechanical breathing, his displeasure audible even in his footsteps.

Far away in the void before the flagship and the battle station, Celestia floats in the darkness. She spares just a microscopic sliver of her telekinetic power to keep her mane from becoming a ridiculous and inconvenient ball of fluff in microgravity. Eyes and horn glowing white, she focuses the rest of her powers on the obscene world-destroying sphere now floating before her. She reaches out with invisible tendrils of power and finds the battle station…so small compared to the heft of her planet. For a moment, she wonders if this power would work on something so small. Then with concentration, she brings forth the same warping of reality used daily to “make the sun rise,” and casually spin the six septillion kilogram, spheroid of mostly iron, oxygen, silicon, and magnesium called “Equestria.” Otherworldly senses reach through the lattice of the station as she “hears” the hum of its power conduits and “feels” the stresses of its skeleton of beams and girders. Every last bolt, wire, and splinter of it floats there in her mind’s eye. With the equivalent parallel calculation capacity of an entire technological world, Celestia borrows angular momentum according to meticulously calculated vector fields, redirecting the vast dark energies of expanding space itself. With inhuman care, she cancels out forces of a magnitude usually seen on the surface of a neutron star. Without so much as a jostle, she squeezes the angular momentum of a dozen such planets into a ball one thousandth the weight and only one eightieth the size. The battle station spins so fast, Celestia’s normal eyes can see it only as a grey spherical blur with horizontal streaks.

On board, nothing feels at all different, but thousands of crew members, sensor-connected subsystems, and droids, with a direct view outside, see the outside universe do the impossible. To simpler subsystems, the entire navigational catalog of stars and calibrated pulsars simply disappear. Every inertial position instantly and completely disagrees with every star-fix. In every targeting and location-dependent system, programs coldly log an unending stream of error. The errors pass along networks to every other system in an exponential cascade. In a few seconds, nearly every crew duty station descends into chaos as klaxons sound and obscure requests for manual input beep and appear on nearly a hundred thousand consoles. Urgent reports flood the comms. Automated launch procedures freeze. Some magnetic doors fail and a few entire starfighter bays explosively decompress and spew into space. Some pilots are brave enough to launch their fighters manually, but as their ships cross the shear boundary of Celestia’s inertial compensation field, they shred into a confetti of high speed debris. Panicked officers shout orders to close the bay doors. In a few minutes, the battle station is unable to navigate or maneuver, unable to fire weapons, and unable to launch or recover craft — rendered by the absurdly rapid rotation, as nonlethal as a child’s spinning toy.

Aboard the station, away from the chaos engulfing his crews, a robed figure sits with face greenly lit from below by the panels of his high technology throne. The gnarled man sits facing a sweeping cupola window in a dim echoing chamber the size of a cathedral, atop a dais guarded by four figures in crimson robes and helmets. With a throaty “vorp,” a blue-white ghostly image of Celestia appears standing before the dais. The throne slowly turns to face the translucent projection. The robed figure rests his arms calmly on the control panels at his side and gazes on Celestia’s hologram and speaks, “A most impressive display! As powerful as it is futile.”

Celestia sends her thoughts in reply, “Creature of inner darkness, I know not your name, but you will leave our world as you came. Depart this instant, or I will…”

“Destroy me. Yes, yes, Celestia, I know. You will slightly relax your inertial compensation, and crush everyone onboard.”

Celestia resumes, “Then leave, or with a single thought, I will destroy you and this station.”

“My dear Celestia — so strange and impressive — I cannot see the future for an entire parsec around you. No matter. My probe droids found your charming planet. I have the information needed to plan your defeat. Oh, yes, I have been watching for quite some time. Defy me and the fleet will begin orbital bombardment. Your planet has no deflector shields, no high energy weapons. You have no fighters or starcraft of any kind. We will burn the land and boil the sea. Of every city, farm, and town, only glowing craters will remain. Your precious subjects will die, and there’s nothing to stop me, not even you and your three fellow princesses. Oh yes, my pet, I know about them too. The four of you now belong to me.”

“Your ships are no match for us. We can destroy every one.”

“Of course you could destroy my fleet of ten thousand ships, given enough time, perhaps in hours, perhaps in days. But by then your subjects and your world will long be smoldering and dead. There is only one thing you can do, my pet. Order the surrender of your planet and give all your ‘magic’ to me. Only then, will I spare your world. With my powers, I already the rule the galaxy. With your power, time and space itself shall serve me!”

Celestia warns, “Your overconfidence will be your undoing!”

“Your faith in ‘friendship’ will be yours! We are well beneath Roche’s limit, my pet. Anything your sister can do with her power would tear your world apart!”

At that moment, Luna’s hologram appears beside Celestia, sending, “The princess is safe!”

“Good, Luna! You must do it now!”

It is at this point that Luna swats the Death Star and the entire Imperial galactic fleet with the moon.

With hundreds of thousands of hyperspace micro-jumps, Equestria’s moon flits with inertialess speed, like the spot of a searchlight beam swept across the sky. As seen from the ground below, the crescent moon streaks across the night and looms monstrously large. Ponies whinny and gallop in a panic, fearing the falling sky. As seen from the fleet of ships, the moon arcs from over the horizon into a head-on collision course at an apparent one quarter of the speed of light. Emergency klaxons blare aboard every ship, and at the rear of the fleet, there is even time for captains to begin shouting orders. The most alert helm crews throw their ships into emergency maneuvers, and others begin emergency hyperspace jumps, but it is already too late. As it passes through the fleet formation, the surface of the moon blossoms with ten thousand giant glowing orange and red explosions. In turn, every starship dives into the moon’s surface with its real-space orbital velocity of over five kilometers a second, or eleven thousand miles an hour. In a moment, the moon has passed through the location of the fleet and gathered the station and fleet into its own mass. The glowing molten crater field spans a full third of the moon’s circumference. On the ground looking up, Pinkie Pie is confronted with a spectacle of a kind and scale not seen in the star system for over four billion years, and for once, she has stopped bouncing and has absolutely nothing to say.

Even with the destruction of the fleet, Equestria and the ponies remain in danger. From the ground below, the moon visibly shimmers as quadrillions of tons of regolith over its entire surface flies off the ground. With her avatar-mode senses, Celestia “hears” the cold basalt of the entire moon groan and creak in a single, apocalyptic earthquake. This entire-moon quake comes not only from the titanic force of the collision, but from the three and a half thousand times greater force of gravitational tides, which also tug at the crust of Equestria below. She senses Luna hovering next to her moon, her horn and eyes also glowing white. From her, telepathic anguish rings through to Celestia’s mind to the pit of her own stomach, carrying cries of horror and regret that only a goddess could bear. For a moment, a fear-stricken Celestia doubts her own calculations and fills with fear. The bruised and crumbling moon looms ominously low over Equestria at zero orbital velocity, beginning to free-fall towards the planet. For a half second, it hangs there, pelted by a trickle of still orbiting debris. Then it flits back across the sky, returning to its proper orbit and distance, sixty times as far away as a moment ago. With no time for relief, Celestia hovers over the nightside of the planet, eyes still glowing white. She concentrates to quell invisible tsunamis racing over every one of the ocean deeps. Far below her, every able pegasus-pony desperately battles a howling sky full of tornadoes and hurricanes. Rainbow Dash exults in the wild sky, but remains uncharacteristically silent, while many others hear Fluttershy’s voice, strangely confident and clear above the winds as she commands the animals below fighting to survive.

Hours later on the ground in Canterlot, Celestia has reappeared in the throne room with Luna, Cadence, and Princess Twilight and her friends. Though many thousands are injured, nopony has died, and Equestria is saved. Nopony celebrates, however. Instead, all of them gather around Luna, who lies, eyes tearful, her head on the floor. Celestia again senses an the strange latent ember, and sees a human female dressed in white, her brown hair pulled back in two buns, standing alone at the far end of the room. Next to Celestia, Twilight looks up at her teacher as her astronomical studies suddenly meld with the night’s strange events. Discovery and realization flash across Twilight’s face but quickly change to an open-mouthed frown. Looking up at her teacher and mentor, in amazement and dismay, she asks, “So then the whole galaxy is…Why didn’t you tell me!?”

Epilogue 1: At that moment, Darth Vader pilots a lone T.I.E. fighter through the void, and thinks, “Could such power…? Padme?”

Epilogue 2: Hours before, as the moon sweeps through the fleet, the Millennium Falcon descends through the peaceful blue skies of Alderaan. Aboard it, a startled Ben Kenobi touches his brow and says, “I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

Epilogue 3: For weeks on end, debris from the Imperial fleet and the battered moon falls into the atmosphere of Equestria, creating the wildest meteor showers ever seen. The remaining orbiting debris gradually forms into beautiful planetary rings. Three alicorn princesses craft an enchantment to give those rings the colors of the rainbow, and wishing she could see it, the three wonder about the whereabouts of Luna.

Q: What is this?

A: I just thought I’d have some fun with My Little Pony, the Summer Sun Celebration and related abilities, and some physics calculations combined with some good ole space opry and planetary science. If you assume that Equestria, its sun, and the moon are the same size as our sun, the Earth, and its moon, then the implication is that Celestia can impart more than the entire rotational energy of an Earth sized planet, effortlessly in a single action. As it so happens, the rotational kinetic energy of Earth is just about 1/100th its gravitational binding energy, which is the theoretical minimum which must be produced by the Death Star Superlaser to blow up an earth sized planet. Furthermore, devices like power plants tend to become more efficient as they get larger, mostly due to the square-cube law. Since engineers will try to make machines as efficiently as possible, and would be both enabled by the square-cube law and motivated by huge costs, it’s quite likely that the Death Star has a power to weight ratio that’s higher than any device in the Star Wars universe. If we go on that assumption, then by implication, Celestia has a higher power to weight ratio than any ship in the Star Wars universe, by a factor of about two million! Basically, these assumptions imply that Celestia is a space goddess able to swat entire space fleets for fun — given a bit of luck and some time. However, even Celestia doesn’t hold a candle to what Luna seems to be able to do — which is to slew the moon around the sky at large fractions of the speed of light. This is why I invoke the trope of an inertialess drive to let Luna flit the moon around. Otherwise, swatting the fleet with the moon would produce so much energy, the resulting blackbody radiation would fry everything on the night side of Equestria. (Luna can still impart kinetic energy to park the moon in a new orbit, however.)

Q: Why would the Emperor go to Equestria himself? Is he carrying the idiot ball?

A: He would have been carrying the idiot ball had he not gone himself. The fleet alone couldn’t hope to stand against the sisters. If he had simply sent Vader, then Vader might claim the power for himself, then return to destroy the Emperor. He and Vader must both go to have any hope of prevailing. Vader is there aboard Executor to prevent a decapitation strike on fleet command, and both the Death Star and the fleet have the potential to threaten the destruction of Equestria. Admiral Ozzel is carrying the idiot ball here, which was his function in the movies. Had he surrounded Equestria with the fleet at extremely low orbit around the entire globe, Luna would not have been able to swat it with the moon. Instead, he prioritized protecting the Emperor, which isn’t so silly. Since presumably only “snub fighters” would be able to engage targets as small and powerful as the princesses, Ozzel opted for a defense in depth.

Q: Why doesn’t Celestia use Twilight and Cadence?

A: They haven’t yet been trained in the space goddess techniques. Through the probe droids, the Empire had determined that neither of the other two had become spacefaring yet.