Flashpoint

Chapter Two:

'Bog Party'

Chase shook his head to clear it, and yanked the release on his crash harness. He glanced over to see Lieutenant Harris doing the same, and then moved to check his patients. There had been surprisingly few injuries from the surprise attack by Deimos Station--the worst was certainly Helmsman Calvino, still strapped from head to toe in traction webbing, held immobile to an exam table. As he stepped up to release the webbing and continue his exam, the Lieutenant spoke up.

“What’s wrong with Yoshi, Doctor Pritchard? Will he be okay?” She looked abstractly concerned.

He looked at his readouts for a moment more before replying, “Mmm...looks like a moderate concussion, along with some accelerative spinal trauma--’whiplash’ to use a simple term. It looks like no nerve damage, but some of the musculature is pretty badly abused.”

“So, nothing that won’t heal, right?” Lydia asked apprehensively.

“Yes, yes.” He injected the young man with a sedative-painkiller-regenerative cocktail. “I’m going to keep him under for at least a day, for the concussion to heal. He’ll be off-duty in a brace for a few weeks afterwards, but he should recover fully.”

Even as he spoke, more casualties entered the medical bay, while the helmsman was the worst of it, it became readily apparent that he wasn't, however, the bulk of it.

Chase glanced over to Lydia. “If you don’t have anywhere to be, could you help Nurse Ratched with triage? I’m sure there 's going to be more than this coming in. I’m going to finish this exam and get him into a proper brace before we run into anymore trouble, then I’ll have a report you can take to the Captain.”

The Lieutenant hesitated for a moment, but before she could respond, the intercom came to life with the Captain’s voice.

“All hands, this is the captain. Anybody who’s up and around, tend to the wounded. Dubrovsky, Harris, meet me on deck five, we’re going to have a look outside.”

Lydia shrugged at the doctor, "Looks like I'll have to take a rain check on the report."

She nodded, and with a final glance down at Yoshi, departed.

***

“Is very strange, Captain: is like plasma reconnection rate slightly different. Throws off entire system--reactive field adjustments, wakefield injectors, extraction manifold--off just enough to make reaction unsustainable," The engineer explained with a frown.

Olivia paused in checking a hull inspection kit to give her engineer a sharp look. “What the hell can throw off the reconnection rate, Anatoly? I thought that was based on basic kinetics and electromagnetics.”

The Russian shrugged, “A great mystery. Have team doing deep scans to look for interference source now, but...” he sighed “...I have feeling direct countermeasures unlikely.”

She pursed her lips, and glanced at the other crewmen she’d rounded up for the inspection. Leaning in closer to Tolya, she quietly said, “So you’re telling me we’re SOL on main power?”

He vigorously shook his head, “No no no, is direct which I doubt possible.” Pulling out a tablet, he tapped at it a few times before continuing, “I am thinking rate difference small enough that we can adjust system components and live simulators to compensate.”

Letting out a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding, she nodded, “It’ll work well enough to break for orbit?”

“Da. May be more or less efficient, but should work enough for full thrust. If we can deploy emergency solar cells, should take, ehhnnn, few hours to run rough simulations to optimize adjustments. Then is just need APU bootstrap capacitors charged.”

“Okay.” She nodded her head as the soft tip-tap of shoes on deck-plate reached her ears. She turned towards the hatch and immediately recognized the owner of those shoes, “Harris! How’s Calvino?”

The Lieutenant approached, “a concussion and a tweaked neck. He’ll live, but probably out of action for a few weeks. You know, head injuries right? Wouldn't want him to crash... the... ship..." she trailed off, as if suddenly aware of exactly where she was.

Olivia stared at the weapons officer with a flat, unamused look. “Okay. Outfit for light threat response, hull and RCS scanning, and deploying emergency solars.” She handed the Lieutenant a hull kit, “This is good to go. I want a PDW on everyone--we don’t know what kind of nasties might be out there.”

Lydia took the hefty package and tucked it under her arm when the glint of steel caught her eye. She smirked and turned to the captain, “Still carrying that stone-age lead slinger around?”

“Mmm.” Olivia picked up the original Colt 1903, a family heirloom, and slid home the magazine she’d been checking before returning it to her side holster. “What can I say? Tradition dies hard.”

Lydia's eyebrows rose and she smiled a bit, unable to counter the statement, and walked over to the equipment racks to separate out equipment kits for the ground teams.

Olivia shook her head a little at Lyrdia's question as she scrolled through the ship status reports on her eye-tap. She frowned as the red indicators scrolled past again and turned to Anatoly, “About the RCS...any thoughts?”

“Ehh,” he looked doubtful, but not worried, “at least seven burnt out--the forward ones that gave the primary braking thrust, plus couple down below. A few more, unsure, will need to scan. Most will have slagged regulators, maybe manipulators too. Not so bad, plenty of spares, but some are submerged, so I worry about swamp water exposure.”

“Well, the sooner we get out there, the sooner we get out of this muck.” She picked up her last pieces of equipment, a relay for her eye-tap--to allow her access to the ship while groundside--and her PDW. She waved at the Russian. “Okay. Finish gearing up, and we’ll head out.” She glanced over at a screen showing the world just outside the nearby airlock, “Looks like the sun’s coming up.”

***

Kite made some final checks of her teams’ gear--they were all well-trained, but most were untested. Lengthy periods of peace tended to have that effect on a fighting force. She noticed Twilight was making her way over, and mused at how strange it was to see her charge out of her normal princessly attire: the alicorn was in deep mud boots, with a long, light cloak around her neck, the only sign of her station being the simple tiara atop her head.

“Looks like we’re about ready to go?” Twilight had that look in her eyes, the same look when a new crate of books arrived for her growing library in the Keep.

Kite nodded, “Yes’m. Sun’s up enough to see now, and the scouts say it looks like we got lucky with the weather.” She eyed her princess’s bulging saddlebags, and raised a hoof to gesture at them. “Um...are you sure you don’t want to leave some of that behind at the staging camp?”

Glancing back at the bags, Twilight looked surprised, then gave a shrug, “I don’t really even notice them. One of the benefits of alicorn physiology is slowly increasing strength. Truthfully, I hadn’t even realized it had kicked in, but it’s pretty useful. Never know when you might need a particular book!”

Flashing her aunt a carefully controlled skeptical look, Kite Shield gave in. “Okay, well then, it think we’re ready to go.” She turned away to address the waiting guards, “Alright, scouts off. Form up, ponies, you know your groups! Diamond formation, five meter spacing, let’s move out!”

***

Lydia suppressed a sigh, knowing it would be unprofessional and also that it would just cause her to suck in more of the fetid wetland air. She idly scanned her zone, then glanced back towards the ship, where the captain and the engineering team were working on another RCS cluster. She was glad she hadn't taken the engineering track, hot humidity was one thing, laboring in it was entirely another.

Over the past three hours, they’d deployed the emergency solar panels, done a rough scan of the hull, and scanned three thrusters. Two of them had been easy fixes, which had raised spirits, but the heat of midday was beginning to set in. Lydia--who had spent most of her life in carefully controlled space habitats--had already just about had her fill of planetary living.

She noticed the captain breaking away from her cadre of engineers and head in her direction. She glanced back to her zone, then raised her eyebrows as Olivia came alongside. "Ma'am?"

“Enjoying the fresh air and sun, Lieutenant?” Olivia asked with the hint of a smirk on her lips.

“It’s, ah, different, ma’am,” She answered with a neutral expression that came far less naturally than she'd have liked. In the same way that 'fun' and 'torture' are different, she kept to herself.

“Mhmm. I may have grown up on a farm, but I’ve been spaceside long enough that this is a bit much even for me,” Olivia offered with a sympathetic shrug. The captain looked up at the sky, her hand held above her eyes to block out the majority of the light from the system's primary, "Looks like there’s still another hour till noon, which means it’s going to get unbearably hot, and I don’t want anyone passing out. Let's break in about fifteen minutes.”

“Very good, ma’am.” She looked expectantly at her captain, knowing she hadn’t come over here just to talk about the weather.

Her eyes were flicking over the too-close horizon, into shadows that even the near-noon sun couldn’t pierce. “Seen anything? Anything at all?”

“Uh, a few small flyers. Birds, I guess. Nothing else that I’ve noticed. Nothing big anyway. Nothing human either. Garden world like this, you'd think the colonists would have come looking by now, unless we're the first ones to find it...” Lydia trailed off as her imagination ran away with her. It was unprofessional but it was a nice distraction from the lack of climate control.

“Hmm..."

Lydia waited until the moment was stretched too thin, then gave up and asked, “Are you...expecting something?”

Olivia hit her with a blank look, which quickly changed to one of slight worry. “Maybe I’m just paranoid, but maybe you were hitting on something there. Maybe this is a 'new' planet, so that explains why no people have come out here yet... but I feel like a wetland like this should still have more life.”

Lydia nodded, the idea made sense after all. “Okay, but wouldn’t our landing have driven everything away?”

“Oh, for a while, sure, but we’ve been quiet since then. This place is so wild it seems unlikely that anything would be afraid of human hunters. The native life should be filtering back in by now," the captain explained with a shrug.

Lydia just looked back to the forest, her mind processing the information as she scanned the treeline.

After a moment, Olivia shrugged, and nodded. “Well, just stay sharp,” she said as she started to walk away.

“Captain.”

She paused and looked back, eyebrows raised.

“I think...” she mused on it a moment longer “...yeah, I think with the solar panels up, we should have enough power hitting the capacitors to run one of the Gatekeeper turrets.”

Brow furrowed, Olivia asked, “Can that work? There’s nowhere near enough power to run the active cooling systems.”

“Well, you wouldn’t get much.” She thought about it. “Maybe a little over a second of firing time before it overheats...might even need repair afterwards. But I don’t want to think about there being something out there that can’t be deterred by a burst of forty millimeter high explosive.”

The Captain snorted at that. “What would you need to get that online?”

“Oh, the software will fall back gracefully. If only one gun is powered, it’ll use that one. Targeting will be Friend-or-Foe through the main CIWS oracle. The power though...engineering will have to dump enough into a Gatekeeper-accessible capacitor bank.”

Nodding, Olivia said, “Okay, I’ll talk to Tolya about it. Good thought, Lydia.”

She nodded, "That's what I'm here for ma'am, tactical assessment. If this turns into a bullet festival I'd like our side to have the bigger guns.” and turned back to concentrate on her watch.

***

After the fact, Lydia was never sure who called it out first. It was almost noon, and the engineering team was almost done with what must have turned out to be a badly damaged thruster. She was stretching her neck, trying to work out a kink, when she heard an exclamation from somewhere to her left. Her eyes shot open, scanning the treeline in that direction, and she couldn’t miss it. A whole cluster of trees about 200 meters away were moving--hell, it looked like some were even falling.

She keyed up her comm unit, “South perimeter, break into fireteams, other lines stay alert.” She glanced back and saw Olivia talking to Anatoly, who was simultaneously talking into his comm and tapping at a tablet.

The Captain glanced up and met Lydia’s gaze, then flashed a hand signal: delay. Then she turned back to the engineers.

Wonderful. She checked her PDW, and set it to burst fire. As the motion drew closer to the treeline, she started to get a sense of what was in there. It was...big. She activated her command HUD and keyed her comms again, “All other watch lines, form up and get over here. Whatever we’ve got incoming, hold fire until I give the order.” She saw the remaining three fireteams of four signal acknowledgement.

As it broke through the treeline--knocking a few more trees over in the process--her brain froze up for a moment. What in the...? The creature was some sort of reptilian, with scales and a tail, but it had four heads. They were clearly independent, too, as each one seemed to choose a different area to look at. As it looked around at the crash site, Lydia almost began to wonder if it was a threat, but then one head howled angrily, and others followed suit, before the beast began to stomp its way towards the ship.

“Fire!” she screamed as she pulled the trigger on her weapon, a burst of tracers lanced out and into the target, serving to guide the other soldiers' aim. The eyes seemed to flinch, obviously vulnerable if a bullet happened to hit an open one, but she could clearly see shots ricochet off of its face, doing no apparent damage.

Looking at the other heads as various shots rang out all around, she started to get very concerned. “Anyone seeing signs of damage?”

Her eyetap HUD lit up with a series of confirmed negatives from the units under her direct command. Their small arms did appear to lack the capability to penetrate whatever the creature possessed for armor.

“Alright, we can make it flinch though! Four heads, left to right, one two three four, teams North South East West. Concentrate fire, aim for the eyes, staggered reloads. We need to hold this thing off!” She ordered as she snapped off a burst at the head's left eye.

Even as ack signals came in, a slow but steady staccato of fire began to accost the creature. As Lydia added her own fire, she was satisfied to see its forward progress slow to a halt, as all four heads began to flinch nearly constantly, whipping around to try to avoid the incoming stings. She fell into a steady rhythm of firing and reloading.

It felt like hours later, but her HUD said only three and a half minutes had passed. Half of her mags were gone. She noticed that the damned monster was still making forward progress. Stumbling, blind steps were drawing it closer and closer to the ship. The teams had fallen back a bit, but they were almost out of room to retreat, and they were close to the creature--maybe too close.

Before she could even move from that thought to a new plan, it happened. With a twist of its body, the creature swung its tail out at the offending humans, smacking half of a fireteam and sending them flying to the ground. The movement seemed to travel in a wave along its body, and one of the heads stretched out and whipped along, taking out three more crewmen.

With five streams of incoming fire quieted, one of the heads found itself free to choose a target. The body moved forward a bit, still questing towards the ship. Lydia slammed home a fresh mag, and switched to full auto. She tried to deter it, but the head was determined now.

Suddenly a new stream of fire joined in, as Olivia broke away from the engineering team--Anatoly still banging at his tablet--to fire her own weapon at the beast. This drew the attention of the still-unflinching head.

Lydia continued firing until her mag ran dry, and reached for another. Then the Captain’s ran out too, and she could only watch, helplessly, as the serpentine head took the opening to dive for the Captain. Olivia ignored the PDW mags on her thigh, and drew her sidearm, aiming calmly into the gaping maw headed directly for her. It closed the last few meters, sharp teeth glinted in the noontime sun, and...

...stopped, abruptly, as the creature plowed into a shimmering, translucent purple energy field that appeared between it and the Captain.

***

Twilight swore she could hear a crunch as the Hydra’s attacking head slammed into Kite Shield’s warding spell. The field flared with power, but held strong, and the head gingerly swung away, looking crumpled and dazed.

“Advance on the hydra!” Kite called out, “pegasi, harass with halberds, keep it from rallying any more attacks against the bipeds; cav, go for flanking charges, aim for the belly with spears.”

The guardponies spread out around the hydra and began their attacks while all four heads were still confused by the pain the shield-abused one was still recovering from. Two of the heads roared in frustration as a new form of annoyance pecked away at it.

Twilight watched for a few moments, but the beast was still occasionally casting around at its initial targets.

The bipeds--some sort of relatively hairless primates?--had taken the momentary distraction to begin to pull back their wounded members, and had stopped firing, appearing to recognize that the pegasi were likely to be hit by the kinetic weaponry they used.

“Princess! Even our enchanted steel just bounces off the thing!” Kite sounded frustrated. “I don’t know what we can do to end this! It looks like it’s just waiting to go for the wounded.”

She nodded, “I’m going to try to draw its attention, be ready with a shield.” Taking a deep breath, she drew as much power as she could muster at short notice. The overflow flashed around her, fiery purple lancets of energy stabbing into the air. The Hydra the girls and I met before was resistant to magic--but I bet I can still give it a good tweak. She released the power in the form of a basic electricity spell, flung at the neck junction of the beast. Crackling arcs of purple lightning sizzled along its hide, as the power ran through the Hydra’s body, and down its legs to the ground.

Howling in pain, all four heads snapped around, and Twilight couldn’t help but flinch as eight eyes stabbed at her, seeing the last ripples of overflowing power still dissipating around her. It charged.

She glanced towards the primates as the Hydra moved away from them, and briefly locked eyes with one of them--the one Kite had saved from being devoured. She wasn’t exactly sure what passed between them, but it felt something like gratitude.

***

Olivia winced as the monster slammed into the same sort of purple field that had saved her. This time, it was ready, and it began slamming its heads, tail, and even kicking at it with its legs. It was furious, and already she thought she could see the shield slowly shrinking.

She turned back to her engineer, “Now would be a good time Anatoly!”

Her attention was drawn back to the fight, as a repeated cracking noise sounded off. Bolts of light flew from the purple creature--was it really a horse?--that had locked eyes with her, and slammed into the monster, but only seemed to enrage it off further. The flying ones were still harrying it, the larger ones on the ground stabbing at it with spears they held in their mouths, but they all seemed to have as much luck actually hurting the thing as the humans had.

Suddenly, her eyetap beeped and her HUD lit up with scrolling text--init sequences--as the CIWS oracle connected. She rapidly toggled her interface over to tactical targeting and streams of data began marking local moving objects using telemetry from the remaining active shipboard sensors.

“Is good, Captain! Fifteen seconds and turret will be mobile!”

As the main Gatekeeper control software finished connecting, she raised her hand to initialize the haptic interface, then triggered the thermal-detection function of the basic HUD scanning software, it was nothing to the shipboard systems but it would suit her purposes.

Power finally available, the third aft-starboard-dorsal turret unlocked and turned towards her field of view, seeking towards her line of sight as its own fire control radar engaged, adding a new data stream to her HUD.

The imaging code churned for a moment, then picked out the blobs of heat the equines were emitting, quickly separating them into individual entities as they moved around. But it did not find the reptilian monster.

“Shit! The damned thing is cold-blooded!” She looked around and found Lydia already looking her way. “I’m not getting a thermal lock on it for the FoF! Can I get manual fire control?”

Lydia stared into space for a moment, then ran over and grabbed Anatoly’s tablet. “I think the Icarus software has enough API compatibility. I can fudge an interface, gimmie a minute!”

Olivia gritted her teeth, and looked back at the fight. She swept the already-selected equines up in her HUD, and designated them Friendly. Their outlines became green just as one of the heads slammed into one of the flyers, sending it crashing into the ground. “Lydia...”

“One second!” She tapped a few more frantic commands into the tablet. “Okay! Almost everything’s going to be screaming bloody murder about telemetry and traverse errors, but just give it a target region and execute!”

Another flurry of init messages sprang up in her vision, and, indeed, red warnings and big yellow exclamation points sprang up afterwards. She swept her hand to clear them, then looked at the monster. One second of fire, huh? The heads were still weaving wildly, with flying horses all around them. Hmm... Triggering the freefire-target-zone-designate function, she drew a circle around the base of the rightmost neck. Party time. She hit Freefire Execute.

A whine was audible as the turret spun up, and then a teeth-vibrating, recursive thunder pierced the area, as a tracer-defined line of death shot into the beast’s neck. The line seemed to pause nearly imperceptibly as it met the creature’s scales, but then cut right through. The turret fidgeted to fill its defined region with fire, the line of fire moving through a cone. A few shots hit the edge of the purple shield and glanced off, but the angle was good, and most of the piercing shots flew off into the forest beyond.

As the turret’s roar stopped--and even more red warning lights sprang up on her HUD--the head and neck finished falling, to hang lifelessly from the few remaining strips of meat and skin that remained.

Everything stopped. The equines were frozen, the flying ones just hovering in the air. The remaining three heads stared at the blood coursing from the ravaged neck. Then, simultaneously, all three heads let out what could only be described as a scream, Olivia likened it to the sound livestock made during a barn fire from her youth. They cast about wildly, then the beast lurched away from the equines, and charged into the forest, still screaming as the lifeless head flopped behind it.

Olivia remembered to breathe again. She signaled a power-down to Gatekeeper, and the turret retracted, then she turned off her targeting HUD, and glanced at the equines. They were tending to their wounded. She turned to her officers. “Lydia, assign people to get the wounded inside. Anatoly, I want Icarus online and ready as quickly as you can.”

She waited, until both were done. Then turned away. “Alright then. Let’s go...make some friends.”

Author's Note

This was mostly the doing of Alamais, so firebomb his house if you don't like it.

That said, you ought to like it.