Pressure

She charged back into the clamor at the control stations for the machine, ready to take charge. It was her job, after all, and she would do it. "This is the last time," she told herself, "but we're gonna do it."

The crew of the Pegasus Device was in a panic. "It 's not gonna work. It's too much!"

The chief engineer hollered, "All stations, switch off automatic, this is way past program!"

"What's the problem?" Dash asked him.

"Everything's haywire. I knew it would be a big job, but we're crossing safety protocols," he worried. "I was about to call it off."

"Red Spectra is at double normal pressure!" someone alerted. "Blue at double pressure! Green at double pressure… ALL SPECTRA at double pressure!"

"The capacitor is spiking!"

"It's overheating! Coolant valve one is wide open, but we're overheating!"

Desperate eyes turned back to Dash and the chief engineer, the two senior staff. "Do we hit the emergency release? Sir, are we gonna stop?"

"No!" Dash declared, "Don't you dare release anything till the process is complete. He wanted us to make this rainbow, and we will! Screw protocol, I don't think we're even at max yet."

After a tense pause, the engineer nodded. "She's right. The Machine has got more in her. We can take double—remember your training!"

The crew made necessary adjustments.

"Both coolant valves open."

"I've stabilized the pressure at two and a half standard."

"Rotating the coils, that should buy us some time."

"Good work!" the engineer called out, but relayed his concern to Dash, "Gross rainbow energy just passed one thousand, and it's still rising." The Device held steady for a while, but problems returned as it crossed the two-thousand mark.

Fear started to spread through the technicians again as their attempts came up short. "Nothing we can't manage! Hold, we can hold this!"

"Is it decelerating past two thousand?" Gauze Wrap asked.

"We're still under critical values," the engineer replied, but his face was pale.

Unsatisfied, Gauze Wrap called again, more urgently, "IS IT SLOWING DOWN?"

"It's accelerating," he admitted. "My goddess—Three thousand, and it's accelerating!"

Everypony on the control deck stopped what they were doing. Dash could see from their horror that things had become downright dangerous.

"Dash, give it up!" Lobo challenged. "You're gonna get us killed! We shut this down, or I'm leaving!"

"Not now everypony! If we quit now, we're dead anyway. Harmony didn't die for nothing. He told us to do this, and he's not going to kill us." With their fears being tangibly realized in front of them, they didn't give her reasoning much value. The whole crew was on the verge of rushing out together.

"ARGHHH!" Dash finally yelled at them, as if she lost it. "FOR ONCE IN OUR MISERABLE EXISTENCE, WE'RE DOING THE RIGHT THING! DO YOU REALIZE HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS?! IF YOU QUIT NOW, EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER DONE WILL BE FOR NOTHING!" She caught her breath and watched them.

Almost half of them—including Lobo—got up and hurried toward the main hall. "Are you IN THIS?" Dash demanded of the rest. They confirmed, and returned their attention to the controls.

At this point most of the dials were in the red. "If we don't do something, it's gonna blow." Electricity arced off of the massive coils like lightning.

"Isn't that what the auxiliary capacitor is for?" Dash remembered that Yeshua made them prepare the rusted and unused backup.

"Hell, it's not engaged! I ordered you to turn it on!" the chief shouted angrily.

"I've never done it," the tech confessed. "Where are the controls?"

The engineer jumped down and pulled him to a small panel on the other side of his work station. "Look familiar?"

"All this time, I thought these were someone else's controls. Yes sir, I can work it." The second bank of coils took some of the charge, and the lightning stopped for the moment.

As he returned to his post, the engineer grumbled, "We needed a real audit."

"The whole system is overheating!" came the next alert.

"Are you using ALL the coolant?" Dash asked. "There's no tomorrow."

"Overpump it!" the engineer directed.

"It'll ruin the coolant units, but here goes."

"The pressure!" someone else hollered. "Pressure is critical on all spectra! The meters just blew."

"Isn't there something we can open up without losing material?" Dash demanded.

"I've already opened the recirculated chambers," the chief engineer replied as he shook his head. "There's nothing more we can do from here."

Gauze Wrap shouted, "Come on, we'll have to open the valves manually." Several workers followed him down to the bowels of the contraption and started twisting a series of red valves the size of dinner plates.

"Any hotter and we'll crack the crystal matrix! That is, if we don't melt all the gaskets first."

There weren't any more measures to control the heat—on paper. Dash flew to the wall and tripped the sprinkler system for the factory floor. Where water fell on the device, it hissed and boiled. Something cracked. Dash winced; hopefully it wasn't necessary. So many things were going wrong at once, it was hard to tell.

"Almost ready to reconstitute! Distribution team, on the floor! Get ready for liquid product. Be advised—Spectra's gonna surge out of there like Discord himself."

The chief engineer hesitated with his hoof on the main lever. "All the crazy stuff we've been doing comes to a head when I pull this," he warned. "I don't know what's going to happen."

"We can't wait any longer, hit it!" Dash insisted.

He complied, and stepped back. "I can't believe I'm doing this. The energy—it's theoretical! I don't know what we're making. It can't be liquid, we've got to be mixing gas—or plasma!"

"Distribution team, abort!" Dash barked into the intercom. "Everybody away from the Machine! Get out of there!" Ponies scampered and flew in all directions.

Princess Celestia was still collapsed near the maw of the crippled steel giant. Gauze Wrap and another worker grabbed onto her and started pulling her away to safety.

Everything was within seconds of catastrophic failure as the rainbow process neared completion. All the buttons were pressed, all the switches were toggled, and all the gauges were blown. Now it was the vibrations of the machine that shook the factory. "Rainbow energy—still rising!" the chief engineer marveled. "Dash, we have to—"

A massive explosion split the machine. Dash's vision went white, and she was hurled backwards.

Dash struggled to open her eyes, but it was uncomfortably bright even through her eyelids. She felt herself on a slant, resting against the wall. Everything seemed sideways. Her eardrums were blown, but she could feel the vibrations. She covered her eyes with a hoof and squinted at the hot light. She couldn't bear to look directly at it, but she could see brilliant colors reflected from every surface.

An enormous rainbow of magic ether had blasted its way out of the machine and through the thick cloudcrete that encased the compound. The building tilted sideways. In fact, an entire district of Cloudsdale was listing by almost thirty degrees from the recoil as the glistening stream launched itself over the horizon. With unrelenting force, the phenomena was still ripping chunks out of the machine and the factory and spewing them into the sky. Finally the back end of the rainbow pushed out to freedom, and lifted the new beam of daylight through the roof. Gaining altitude, it quickly stretched across all of Equestria and beyond.

The Harmony Rainbow had arrived.