Alone on the bridge of the starship Eclipse, Captain Kal Razoah sat in his black leather command seat. His shoes, socks, and white jumpsuit laid scattered around him on the shiny black tiled floor. The ceiling and walls of the bridge were all one big screen, currently displaying a live video feed of the outside of the ship. It gave the impression that there was nothing between the room’s occupant and the hyperspace vortex.

Before the captain, a small black orb hovered in the air and projected a live, life-sized, holographic video feed of a very attractive young woman in nothing but her underwear. She was also sitting in a command seat, but on a different vessel of the flotilla. She had long, straight, well-kept, crimson hair, and big green eyes that glowed slightly from her optic nanites. Her skin was pale, as was the usual with spacers, but her complexion was clear and smooth. The lady captain’s body was very pleasing to Kal's eye. She wasn't exactly thin, probably right on the edge of being overweight, but it went to all the right places, like her curvy hips and large breasts. Breasts that were barely contained by her bra. All a result of her eating of actual food. Her vessel, the Mi Amora, was a massive agricultural ship, with greenhouses and livestock farms.

“Show me your titties, thems the rules.” Kal said, with a smug smile.

“Why do I always agree to these strip poker games with you?” She asked, then undid her bra and dropped it on the floor. Her bare, big, genetically modified breasts looked like they belonged in an art museum. Kal felt like he could stare at them for hours. “I lose every time.” The lady captain said, as she cupped one of her plump tits in her slender hand and ran a finger over her nipple. Kal could feel his erect manhood pushing against the fabric of his boxers.

“You have a terrible poker face, Zane.” He said.

“I have a great poker face. I win all the time with the other captains. Why are you so different?” She asked.

“I guess I’m just good like that.”

“If I find out you’ve been cheating, I'll tell Garo to come pay you a visit. I wonder, how much do you like your teeth?”

“Garo, huh? He and his brutes won’t get out of bed for anything less than a pirate attack, much less a guy cheating at a computer game. And batting your long pretty eyelashes won’t work against the achi.”

“Maybe Garo could be persuaded. I hear he really doesn't like you.”

“He doesn't like any human.”

“But he especially doesn't like you.”

“Well, if Garo doesn’t help you, Zane, you could always come over to the Eclipse and teach me a lesson in person. Maybe we could wrestle out our problems. You don’t even need to put on your clothes.” He said, giving her a wink.

“Tempting, but no thanks. We both signed the contract. As captains, neither of us can leave our ships until we reach Katrix 3. You know that.”

Suddenly, the words FOREIGN CONTAMINANT DETECTED IN ENGINEERING hovered before Kal, followed by an alarm.

“You should take care of that.” Zane said and closed the feed.

“Angel, what’s going on?” Kal asked, his boner no more.

“FOREIGN CONTAMINANT DETECTED IN ENGINEERING.” The ship's artificial intelligence said.

“No shit! What's the foreign contaminant? Has there been a hull breach?” He asked.

“FOREIGN CONTAMINANT IS ORGANIC. PRESSURE LEVELS NORMAL, NO HULL BREACH.”

“Organic? Are you sure?” It was impossible to see into engineering while the HS drive was active. The energy it emitted disrupted many electronic devices, including cameras.

“ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CERTAINTY.”

Kal wondered if one of the crew went into engineering without his permission, but he couldn't think of anyone stupid enough to do that who wasn’t in cryosleep. It would mean losing their career (and possibly their life) to be in the presence of a hyperspace drive while it was active.

“Angel, connect me to the Leviathan.”

“CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.”

The floating orb projector displayed a large, but not particularly fat, middle aged, bald headed man with a black beard and a burn scar over his right eye and down his cheek. His expression was dour, as was usual with Mace Karth, the flagship's captain. He wore a white NHC issued jumpsuit with regalia identifying him of his title, unlike Kal, who was wearing just a tank top and boxers.

“This better be important.” Captain Karth said in a gruff voice, not hiding his open dislike of the Eclipse's captain.

“I need the flotilla to stop. I have to turn off the Eclipse's HS drive.”

“Do you now?”

“Please don’t play games with me today, Karth. Stop the flotilla, there something that’s alive around my active hyperspace drive that could very well die if it’s around it any longer.”

“Then let it die.” Karth said, grimly.

“It could be one of my crew. If they die, their death is on you. You don’t want to add murderer to your infamous rap sheet, now do you, Karth?”

Karth let out an irritated sigh. “Fine, but be quick about it. I want to be back in hyperspace in three hours.”

“Thank you.” Kal said, closing the feed.

“Calling all ships. Disengage from hyperspace in ten. I want no one getting separated from the flotilla. All AIs must confirm.” Karth's gruff voice said over the flotilla’s main channel.

“Angel, confirm.” Kal ordered as he put his clothes back on.

“CONFIRMATION SENT.”

Fully clothed again, Kal exited the bridge, and headed towards the tram.

“ECLIPSE EXITING HYPERSPACE IN T-MINUS FIVE MINUTES.” Angel announced over the Eclipse's main channel just as Kal reached the tram station, where he got on an awaiting tram. He selected engineering from a console, and the tram took off down the rails at high speed.

“The fuck's going on, captain?” Asked Chen Hao, the head of the Eclipse's security over Kal’s personal com channel.

“Meet me at the lift to engineering. Someone or something is in there.” Kal responded.

“Or something? How foreboding. I bet it’s just some lunatic with a case of space dementia. I'll bring my stun gun.”

About ten minutes later, the flotilla had successfully exited hyperspace, and Captain Razoah had made his way to the lift, where Chen Hao was waiting for him.

“20 credits, it's Crazy Joel in there.” Chen Hao said as the captain had his retina scanned, resulting in the elevator door opening.

“Nah, Crazy Joel might have a bunch of insane conspiracy theories, but I don’t think he'd do something stupid like this.” Kal said as the two stepped into the elevator, the door shutting behind them. In a few seconds, the door opened again, and they stepped out onto a catwalk.

The Eclipse's massive sphere-shaped energy core was the only source of light in the enormous room, and it shrouded everything in an eerie blue glow. All that stood between the two men and over a million degrees was an immensely powerful energy shield that was, ironically, powered by the core itself, which sat in a gigantic metal cradle that would melt instantly if the shield ever went down.

“You walk the catwalks around the core. I’ll check the drive below.” Kal said.

“On it.” Chen responded.

With that, the two men separated. Kal descended a ladder to the floor of the room. With a thought, he activated the optic nanites in his eyes, allowing him to see infrared light. The cables underneath the removable grated metal floors glowed with heat as he treaded over them, cautiously making his way to the drive.

And that's when he first saw the creature. It seemed to be inspecting the HS drive, which was a small rainbow hued ball of energy hovering in the air, surrounded by two spinning rings, and cradled by a machine protruding from the floor.

The creature, which hadn’t seen Kal yet, had its rear to him. From behind, it looked like a domesticated Earth animal, known as the horse, he remembered learning about as a child. This one, however, was much shorter than a typical horse. It couldn't have been taller than four feet.

Over Chen's personal channel he whispered, “Come to me, I found the contaminant.”

“On my way.” Chen responded, from which Kal heard through an earpiece.

Captain Razoah wondered if this was some kind of stupid prank by one of the engineers. Sneaking an animal onto the ship and getting it into engineering was a whole new level of idiocy, not to mention animal abuse. When the HS drive was active, it occasionally emitted bursts of short range energy that could not be contained by any known shield. With electronics, the energy would act like an EMP blast, but with living beings, it would destroy neurons and other brain cells. Fortunately, it seemed like the HS drive had been shut down before the horse creature experienced one of those harmful bursts.

Thinking it was a simple pet of some kind. Captain Razoah approached the creature and placed a hand on its flank. “That's a good tiny horse thing.” He said.

The tiny horse thing's response was to yelp and utter something that sounded a lot like speech in the voice of a young woman. Kal did not expect this reaction and stumbled over himself, falling to the floor in an attempt to quickly back away from the creature.

The tiny horse spun around towards him, then backed itself into a corner, saying a few more words in an alien language. She sounded terrified. Kal, in return, just stared at her with dumbfounded awe. Her face did not look like a horse's. She had an eerily human-like expression, ridiculously large eyes, a horn protruding from the top of her head, and was all adorable. He suddenly had the urge to scratch her behind her cute pointy ears.

After a few moments, his brain, both synthetic and organic, finally processed the reality of the situation. It was a first contact scenario with an alien race. With no sudden movements, Kal got to his feet. “I’m not going to hurt you.” He said, even though he knew the alien probably couldn’t understand him, but still, he tried to make his voice sound calm and gentle. He bent forward a bit, to make himself seem smaller, outstretched his right hand towards the creature, and his left off to the side in a peaceful gesture. Then he cautiously began to approach the creature.

“It’s okay. No one's going to hurt you.”

The fear on her face soon seemed to melt away into curiosity, and the creature began inching its way towards him. She said a few more alien words in a voice that sounded calmer than before.

And that's when Chen Hao appeared and zapped the talking horse creature with eight million volts of electricity. She fell to the ground, convulsed for a bit, then passed out.

“Holy shit, man! That thing was about to take your hand off!” Chen exclaimed.

“H-how could you possibly think that adorable horse creature was a threat?!”

“Never trust cute things. It's a sure way to get yourself killed. On Furopa, there’s this animal called a Zinx. It’s adorable, too. So much so that the humans that discovered it took it back on their ship to domesticate. Then it slaughtered half the crew in their sleep.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment of silence before Kal asked, “Are you high?”

“Depends, will you report me if I am?”

“I might.”

“Then no.” Chen said, then snickered.

“You know, people like you are the reason we had a two hundred year war with the achi. Now, help me get her to the med bay.”

--

The atmosphere of the recovery room that Chen and Kal took the tiny horse alien to was thick with tranquility. The screen covering the ceiling and walls displayed the vista of a peaceful countryside with rolling hills of tall, lush, green grass, which rippled as a slight breeze blew by. The sky was a beautiful, endless light blue, with two suns high above, one of them covered by a puffy white cloud. Also hanging in the sky was a distinct, large, full moon of orange and red.

Chirping birds flew overhead, and herds of wild morses, herbivores that looked like a cross between a monkey and an antlered deer, roamed the countryside, grazing on the grass. It was only recorded imagery, but the incredibly realistic, 3D, flawless definition made Kal occasionally forget he was on a starship flying through space as he sat in a chair while he pretended to read a holographic book.

On either side of Kal, there was a hospital bed. On the hospital bed to Kal’s right, Chen, who had quickly grown bored of waiting, was taking a nap. His plasma pistol and stun gun laid within arms reach on the end table beside him. To Kal's left, the cute purple horse creature laid unconscious, her chest calmly rising and falling as she breathed the sterilized, recycled air of the starship.

Kal Razoah considered himself a decent man, and had attempted to cover the alien's exposed nether regions with a sheet, but she had repositioned herself in her sleep, and the sheet slipped off, leaving Kal with a front row seat to the show. He found himself staring at the oddly enticing sight. For the first time in eleven agonizing months, he was seeing a pussy in the flesh, and it was driving him crazy. He wondered what it would feel like inside her. His perverted thought process derailed as the alien stirred from her sleep, letting out a whine, as she opened her big purple eyes.

Kal closed his book, and got up. The alien looked at him as he started to greet her, “Hey th-” Before he could finish the sentence, the air was sucked from his lungs as a purple-hued force picked the man up and flung him against the wall as if he were a child's plaything, knocking over a tray of medical supplies and damaging the display screen, turning a portion of the wall black in the process.

In an instant, Chen jumped out of bed, grabbed his plasma pistol, and aimed it at her head, shouting, “Move and I'll melt your fucking face off!”

She was standing on the bed at this point, shaking and wide eyed. “I-I c-can understand you?” She asked, sounding and looking a mixture of shocked, confused, and terrified.

“Stand down, Hao!” Captain Razoah said, finding his voice again.

“She’s going to kill us all if we don’t get her first! She's a vicious Zinx!”

“Y-you attacked me first, monster!” She exclaimed.

“Put down your gun, Hao! I will not have you starting an interspecies war on my ship!” Kal shouted as he got to his feet.

After a very tense emotional moment, which Hao likely spent contemplating whether or not to fire super hot plasma at her face, he chose to lower his pistol, but not holster it. He sat back down on the bed with the gun across his lap, never once taking his eyes off the quadruped.

“Good, now that we got our action for the day out of the way, let’s start over with introductions. I'm Kal Razoah of the human race.” He said, trying to keep things simple with no titles, just name and race.

“Chen Hao, also human.”

After a moment of staring at Hao's weapon, the quadruped found some of her composure, and sat down on her haunches before uttering, “Twilight Sparkle, pony.”

Hao snickered.

“What?” She asked.

“Is that really your name or are you just fucking with us?”

“I assure you, that is the name my parents gave me. May I ask a few questions? I have a lot of them.”

“Ask away.” Kal said, walking over to to the chair, and taking a seat.

“How come I suddenly understand your language, and you, mine?”

“That would be the nanites I injected into your brain. They’re communicating with the our neural implants, allowing us to understand your language.

“You did what to my brain!?” She exclaimed, going wide eyed again.

“Relax, the nanites are harmless.”

“What are nanites, some kind of parasite?”

A holographic image of a nanite suddenly appeared. It looked like a see-through octopus. “They're microscopic robots.” He said.

“What are robots?”

“An electro-mechanical machine that is guided by a computer program.”

“What’s a computer program?”

Now this is interesting, an alien that managed to get onto a starship, but doesn’t know what a computer is. “Computer programs are a sequence of instructions, written to perform a specified task with the computer.

She opened her mouth to ask something else, but Kal interrupted her, already knowing what she was going to ask. “A computer is a device that can be programmed to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations.”

“How does-”

Kal interrupted her again. “Let's save your questions about our technology for later. I have a question for you.”

“Okay.”

“How did you get onto our ship?”

“Oh, is this some kind of boat?”

“Something like that.” Chen said.

“Well, I’m not exactly sure how I got here, but I was experimenting with this long distance teleportation spell I discovered from a scroll written by Starswirl the Bearded. I must have done something wrong, because this tear opened up and sucked me into it. Then I ended up in that big strange blue room. Hey, is Equestria nearby?”

Now it was Kal’s turn to be confused. Not even humans had discovered how to teleport yet. How could this primitive pony, who didn't know what a computer was, do it?

“Oh my god, she's a mage!” Exclaimed Chen.

“Huh?” Kal uttered.

“She can use magic like in video games.”

“Magic is not real, it's what primitive cultures call things they do not understand. There is only that which can be scientifically explained, and that which has yet to be explained.” Kal said.

Twilight looked at Kal like he had two heads. Then her horn as well as the stun gun on the stand next to Chen glowed with purple energy as the stun gun proceeded to float through the air over to the pony. “Understand that.” She said, inspecting the non-lethal weapon.

Kal was left speechless, suddenly re-remembering the burst of energy that knocked him against the wall earlier. Neither his synthetic or organic brain could even begin to comprehend what she just did. Sure, gravity manipulation to cause things to hover wasn't new to him, but the stun gun was a simple device, with no anti-gravity capabilities. What she just did seemed to defy physics.

“Magic...” Kal uttered. The word felt strange rolling over his tongue. Is it possible?

“Do you guys think you could drop me off at port in Equestria?” She asked, still thinking she was on a boat in some ocean.

“There's something you should know.” Kal said

“What's that?”

“This is not a boat. You’re on a starship in space.”

She giggled. "Do you think me a fool?" She asked, clearly not believing him.

“Angel, display the live feed of the outside of the Eclipse in recovery room three.”

“ESTABLISHED.”

The screen on the walls and ceiling showed the black of space, dotted with countless stars, and all around them was the flotilla, twenty other starships, varying in sizes and designs.

“How, this, you, me, space?!” With that her eyes rolled up into her head, and she fainted, likely from having a mind-blowing revelation.

Author's Note

I'm looking for proofreaders that know what they're doing. If you're interested, send me a private message.