Pilot's Story

Chapter 19: Answers: Part Two

"And you did this at night?" Eva asked incredulously as the DC-3 orbited the landing site, "I'm not saying it couldn't be better, but you didn't really pull a Korea either." She eased back on the throttle as she took the plane lower, tightening up the circle as she notched the flaps down.

"Well like you said, you remember Korea being a lot worse than I do," He laughed, "So, you think you've got enough room to set down?"

The plane rumbled softly as it pushed through pockets of rising hot air over the damp ground. The clearing looked almost too large to be natural, and yet bore none of the signs of having been mechanically cleared. The L-100 had landed along the narrow axis of the ovoid clearing, and aside from having been burried in the soft earth from the hard landing, didn't seem to be damaged, at least from two hundred feet up.

"I think so, might have to bring it in on a three pointer though," she answered as she reduced throttle again and took a shallow curve out over the forest again. "Twilight, I'm gonna land on this next pass, hold on again!" She yelled over her shoulder towards the rear of the cockpit.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Twilight yelled back over the sound of the engines as she braced her forehoof against the bulkhead.

"No, but I'm gonna do it anyway," Eva admitted as the craft settled into its approach, the sound of the landing gear deploying whined through the aircraft's aluminum structure and the sound of the engines dropped in pitch.

"Gear locked," James called out as he watched the panel. Another whine indicated the flaps were lowering and the aircraft started to noticeably slow as it descended. The nose pitched up and a few moments later the deck jumped as the mains touched down.

Eva leaned into the wheel brakes hard as the aircraft decelerated, the other aircraft became larger and larger in the windscreen as the speed dropped. The deck bounced and jerked as the rough terrain jostled the aircraft around.

Two hundred feet from the other plane, one eighty, one fifty. Eva leaned harder into the brakes and started to arc the plane to the right. One hundred feet, eighty, seventy, sixty, the plane stopped and settled into the ground.

Eva throttled back the engines and let them idle, "So, that wasn't so bad huh? Let's take a few minutes for a breather and go check out the damage."

~~

"So far nothing too science fiction in here," Tommy commented offhand as he hunched over the partially disassembled spheroid. Screws and wires and plates of metal lay out across the wooden table top around it as he dug deeper into the machine.

"What do you mean by that?" Trixie asked as she peeked over his shoulder into the neat, yet crowded inside of the device. She'd been asking questions throughout the process, even helping when his hands were too large or unwieldy to reach a part.

'But why do I feel like she's trying to figure out how to build her own' he thought to himself with a grin. "Well," He started as he pulled another circuit free," aside from a few parts I don't recognize, probably related to why it can fly, everything in here looks reasonably similar to what I'd expect in any radio transceiver. Parts are way more high tech than anything I've ever seen but not enough that I can't recognize what they are, but it's strange."

"I think all of it's pretty strange, but what, exactly, is it that's wrong?" Trixie asked as she mentally recorded as much as she could.

"Well, it's just that they way some of this is put together, especially what I suspect to be the anti-grav unit... It's almost like whoever built this had to go out of their way to make the transmitter assembly low-tech," he said with a frown.

"Why would anypony or... anything want to do that?"

"I couldn't even begin to guess at what would motivate that kind of anachronism in design. This thing might be made out of scrap parts somebody had laying around, maybe they didn't want to give away any designs if it was captured, maybe they had a lack of resources," He sighed, "without actually finding where it came from and asking, I can't really know."

"Maybe whoever made it was trying to match you or... your technology. You did say you recognized some of it, maybe they were trying to... talk to you, or your radio?" Trixie offered with a raised eyebrow.

"That's kind of terrifying, if that's the case then that means something with this kind of technology knows we're here, and it's looking for us. You didn't know what we were, it's safe to say that most if not all of your kind don't know what we are, and you certainly couldn't have built this..." he trailed off and then started writing on his notepad, "I'll need to think about this."

~~

"This one is a lot bigger," Twilight remarked as the group ascended the boarding ramp into the stuck plane, "you could fit a lot of ponies in here, that's for sure."

Eva turned her head back and nodded, "Yeah you could, bought this plane last year, was planning on scaling up my operation but then the economy tanked and it was all I could do to keep from going under, not enough cargo work to even break even flying this."

"I... see." Twilight said hesitantly, "I just have a hard time imagining something as incredible as this not being useful for something."

"Well it was about to be useful but then I ended up here and... well the rest you know," the pegasus explained as she hooved open an access panel, "I see what you mean about the relay panel, those were going to be replaced anyway, there should be a box of spares in here somewhere..."

"We didn't really look that hard," James admitted, "we were caught up in trying to find you so we packed up the truck and hit the road."

"What all did you bring anyway? The truck looked fairly loaded up from what I saw," Eva asked as she pushed the panel closed and walked across the cargo bay and started hoofing through a stack of boxes.

"Ammo, provisions, shelter, tools, fuel, a pair of dirt bikes, spare parts, the usual," he listed nonchalantly as he walked over to a very large tarp in the front of the bay and started pulling it back, "we also brought these, just in case."

"What are those?" Twilight asked as she stepped closer.

Eva lifted her head out of the pile of boxes and turned towards James and Twilight, she smiled, "Those would be engines for the DC-3, I didn't think they were ready yet. How did you pull that off?"

"Well, I had to pull a few strings, but we had to be prepared for anything right? Once Tommy figured out where you were I wanted to make sure we were prepared for as many contingencies as we could be," he explained with a shrug.

"There is such a thing as being too prepared, but I'll overlook it this time. You said you figured out where I was? Where is that, exactly?" Eva asked as she stepped closer to take a look at the engines.

"Well, that's kind of the funny part, apparently, and since it worked I guess Tommy was right, this is the future, at least from our point of view. Future earth, but apparently humans are not part of it from what we've seen so far," he explained as he finished pulling the tarp off and started to fold it.

"So, I traveled through time and turned into a horse-"

"Pony," Twilight interrupted.

"Right, pony," Eva continued, "I can accept that, I guess. Celestia knew what I was though, she knew what the DC was, even if she didn't know exactly what it was, she recognized it. So much for finding answers, I just have more questions." She sighed and sat against the wall and stared out the back of the plane and towards the forest.

"We've been through worse, we'll figure this out, same as we've figured everything else out," James offered as he sat next to her and put an arm around her shoulders, "We'll figure out how to get back home, my brother is the brightest guy I know, if anybody can figure it out, he can."

"Time travel..." Twilight said softly under her breath. Suddenly she turned around smiling, "I might be able to help, I read a book that referenced a time travel spell written by Starswirl the Bearded himself, if I can find that spell, maybe we can get you home!"

"See? Things are looking up already!" James said with a grin as he squeezed the pegasus against him. "With a magical unicorn and my magically egg-headed brother on the case we can't possible fail!" he joked.

Twilight rolled her eyes and laughed, "now that sounds like something Rainbow Dash would say."

Eva snickered, "Yeah it does, you know I can't tell if I'm rubbing off on her or if she's... rubbing... hey can anyone else hear that?"

~~

"What the hell?!" Tommy yelled as the spheroid before him started to emit static and then a series of rapid tones and shook the table. The wires and circuits and scraps of metal vibrated off the corners of the table onto the floor as the tones increased in volume.

A flash of light distracted him and he turned to see Trixie's horn enveloped in an icy blue glow, her stance widened as a bolt of energy sprang forth and impacted the probe, encasing it in ice and ending its activity abruptly.

"That was a hell of a thing," Tommy deadpanned as he stared at the panting mare. "That was magic?" he asked with eyes wide in shock.

The unicorn nodded, a slight tinge of red across her face, "Freezing spell." She answered, "I didn't want to break it but... I had to stop it, it was making me all... dizzy." She blinked and shook her head and sat down, "Still a little dizzy."

Tommy nodded and then frowned, "But why did it try to re-activate like that I wonder..."

~~

Eva hoofed at the pile of scrap before her, the smoking fragments of what was once another of the metal spheroids now reduced to nothing but parts. "Another one of these damn things!" she yelled in frustration.

James stood over her, rifle still in his hands as he scanned the treeline, "I think we can safely assume that whatever or whoever is sending these things is sending them after us."

Eva turned towards the DC-3 and rubbed her chin with her hoof, "You know, I met a pony the other day, he said I sounded American, I think we ought to talk to him and I think I know how to draw him out."

Author's Note

I lied, it's going to be three parts.