Pilot's Story

Chapter 23: Stormfront

Rainbow Dash dove.

Wind whistled past her ears as she plunged through the morass of dense muggy air, shouting her warning to the caravan before leveling out and barreling through the tree line.

The last light of day left the forest as a quagmire of muted colors and shifting shapes. Though she could not see the forest for the trees, a single golden glint peered out from the vegetation. The eye of a hunter, lurking nearly out of sight. Excruciating static filled her head as the steely sentinel returned its gaze.

She could hear shouting from the caravan behind her, more surprise than terror. They needed to move quickly. Her lungs ached to yell one more time, warning them of the impending horror.

But she could not.

Every ounce of energy drove the angry stamp of her hooves. Briars and branches tore and snagged at her precious primary feathers as she charged headlong through the undergrowth, her legs pummeling the leafy soil with the stupid consistency of a locomotive’s pistons.

The noise that nopony could hear grew loud and shrill within her mind, a sharp stabbing icy pain that threatened to send her forelimbs clamping across her forehead. The probe rose quickly from it’s still recumbrance, buzzing up and away with all the mimicry of an angry wasp.

It flew. She flew faster.

With a spring loaded leap and a strong flap of her wings, she hurled herself toward the glinting spheroidal object. Her front hooves connected painfully with the outer shell, driving it straight into the solid trunk of a gnarled oak tree. Sparks danced across her fetlocks a she pulled her hooves free, the metal probe fell to the ground, dead. The harsh buzzing within her head went silent, leaving her ears ringing.

A warm wet feeling oozed down through the fur on her face. She rubbed her leg against it, attempting to squeeze away the sweat before it could sting her eyes and blur her vision.

It was blood.

Another metal sphere glinted in the sunlight near the edge of the forest. And another. And another. Her blood ran cold. The buzzing within her head resumed with a ferocious resolve.

She turned quickly towards the road, shouting to the caravan as she tore away from the golden glow in the periphery of her vision.

"Run! Get out of here, try to make it to Ponyville, I'll hold them off!"

~~

A flash of prismatic light filled the cockpit, replaced by the sullen glow of the setting sun. The interior lights flickered and died at the same instant, followed shortly by an urgent and dreadful alarm.

“Sink rate. Sink rate. Sink rate,” the cockpit dashboard droned in a mechanically unconcerned voice.

"The hell was that?" James asked as he stared over at the instrumentation panel, noting that the compass was spinning like a top and the altimeter was dropping rapidly, despite the complete lack of a sensation of descent.

“Engines are fine, flight controls are fine. It’s the avionics going nuts,” Eva remarked after a few terse moments. “What the hell was that flash? Did we get nuked?”

She leaned forward to stare through the side window. A rainbow colored corona tore through the sky in a shallow arc leading toward Ponyville.

“Oh.. my. Tommy, you have to see this. Tommy?” She whipped her head around, but he was nowhere to be seen. “James! Where’s Tommy?”

And then the entire cockpit went dark. Eva toggled the main power disconnect back and forth to no avail, engine displays were dead, avionics was dead, cockpit lights were out, running lights were out. The only light on the flight deck was the orange glow of the rapidly setting sun.

"Tommy--" She started as she turned, only to notice that Tommy was gone, his bag along with him. "James your brother's gone!" She yelled across the cockpit in irritation as she tried to guess their current airspeed.

"He's probably trying to fix this, we've still got engines and flight controls, we can get through this, we're not that far out. Little better than Korea. right?" James asked with a glance across the cockpit. His left hand was gripping the control yoke while his right gripped the throttle quadrant. Eva noticed, for all his trying to keep her calm, his knuckles were white from the death-grip he had on the controls.

A vivid magenta aura passed through the cockpit suddenly, sending sparks from a few of the consoles before passing through the windscreens. The instrumentation sprang back to life almost immediately thereafter. Engine readouts slid back into the green, altimeter and airspeed indicators rose back to their original positions and the cockpit illumination came back up.

"That was anticlimactic." James deadpanned.

"Dash went supersonic..." Eva said dumbly as she watched the prismatic trail arc through the sky.

"She can do that?" James asked incredulously.

"Yeah... she can, at least she said she can. 'Sonic Rainboom' she called it, I've never seen one but that fits the bill," she said as she gestured with her forehoof, "I don't like this, something isn't right here. I'm throttling up, we need to hurry back."

Her hoof pressed the throttle levers forward and the engines responded with a louder exhaust note and the needles on the gauges climbed higher in the green arc.

"Easy, don't push it too hard," James warned as the airspeed indicator rose.

"Somehow I think that's the least of our problems."

~~

The tears streamed from her eyes as the wind whipped through her mane. She passed low across the tree tops, the ambushed caravan in the distance behind her as her momentum carried her closer to Ponyville, closer to safety. Her courage had failed her, the fear set in and she ran.

I felt the yoke of her guilt resting upon her as she descended towards the town, the first buildings already showing on the horizon. There was a time in her life that nothing would have stopped her, she'd have fought to the bitter end. She'd gone up against that manticore, and yet those stupid metal balls drove her off.

'I couldn't win... They told me to run, I had to run!' she thought with a look of disgust. Disgust at herself, disgust at letting them injure her, disgust for letting them wear her down, take the fight from her. Disgust for running away.

But she continued forward, she couldn't go back, couldn't fight them any more, not then. The first time a pony sees a dead body changes them a little, and she'd seen it happen....

'No! Not like this!' The thought blazed through her mind, fighting back against the fear, the pain. She grit her teeth and dropped her left wing, curling into a tight u-turn as she snapped her wings down with a powerful flap. The mach cone narrowed as she tore a hole through the sky.

'If I can't save them... I'll avenge them!'

~~

"Reversing thrust now!" Eva yelled as she reversed the pitch of the propellers, she felt the g-forces pressing her into her harness as the plane bounced along the grass. Short field landings were never fun, and the patched-together nature of this aircraft made it more harrowing than normal.

Forward velocity was bled into the brakes as they bounced along the uneven terrain; one of the cleared pastures that Applejack had 'donated' the use of. The engines dropped in pitch as Eva pulled the throttles back, the bouncing smoothed out as the craft rolled to a stop.

"Well, that could have gone worse. I'm gonna head down and check on my brother, you think you can take care of things up here?" James asked with a grin as he pulled his headset off and slid out of his seat.

"Yeah, I've got it handled..." Eva trailed off, not paying much attention to her friend as her hooves slid across the panels, running through a few post flight checks; making sure nothing was knocked out by the interference during the flight.

She felt a slight vibration through the deck, one of them must have opened the ramp. The sound of a diesel engine cranking up a few seconds later confirmed her assumption. "Well they're not wasting any time..." she muttered as she finally pushed her headset off. She pressed a few more toggles, shutting the engines down and disconnecting the main battery.

The sudden sound of hooves on the deck plate startled her, she caught the sight of a cornflower blue coat out of the corner of her eye and turned to face the unicorn she knew it belonged to. "Trixie? I thought you'd be outside by now. What brings you up here?"

The mare laughed nervously, "I was checking to see if that magic dispelling spell had worked and... I guess it did." She hesitated and continued, "things have been... different, lately. I know you used to be just like them but..." she trailed off and stared out the window.

"But... you wanted something familiar," Eva finished with a smile, "I know what you mean, when we were in Korea we'd hang out with anybody who looked like they were from our part of the world, even if we'd never met before. Helps make you feel less like an outsider."

Trixie looked over at the pilot and tipped her head, "Maybe you're right. I don't even know why I'm here. Something about all of this drew me in, made me think that maybe this would be the next big thing I'd do with my life." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, "You know, I hadn't felt like this since my first show, when I started performing years ago. Maybe what I learn will help me with my shows or..."

Eva leaned forward in her seat, a soft smile on her face, "Well, go on?"

Trixie paced the cockpit a few times, her eyes wondering between the various panels and displays, "Well, Cutie marks are supposed to be a representation of what a pony is supposed to do with her life, her special talent, the thing that makes her unique. It's destiny but... What if you're destined for something greater? What if your special talent isn't the only thing you have... or what if it's not what you thought it was?"

"I've never been one to believe in destiny. Maybe there's a higher purpose... maybe there isn't, but I've always believed that your 'destiny' is whatever you make it out to be. I think that ponies are a lot like humans, everything so far has lead me to believe that's the case, so I think you've got the potential to do whatever you want with your life, even if it's not what you thought you were going to be doing with it," Eva explained as she dropped out of her chair onto all fours, "Maybe you're going to go back to show magic, maybe you're going to become the next Tommy, but either way I think that's up to you, not destiny."

Trixie hummed and scrunched her face up a bit in thought, "You really think so? Maybe you're right. I'm supposed to be good at magic, but--"

Trixie was cut off by yelling from the cargo bay, James was sprinting up the ramp, his face red, his breathing labored, "We got a problem!"

~~

The loud whip-crack of teleportation pierced the air as Twilight snapped into existence on the edge of Ponyville. Her head immediately started to pound as a familiar loud buzzing filled her ears. Those metal 'probe' things were pouring out of the everfree in mass numbers, a quick count had her well over fifty. "This is really bad..."

Ponies fled from the outskirts of town, seeking the illusion of refuge within dark alleys and between wooden walls. They huddled in the broad daylight of the machine’s infrared vision.

Twilight flinched as a hoof tapped her shoulder. She turned with a start, coming face to face with the Doctor’s wild shifting eyes, a manic expression conveying the sense of ‘I have a plan for everything - except possibly this’.

A breath of relief burst forth from her chest, but it did not last.

“Doctor, what should we do? I’ve sent word to Celestia, but I don’t know if they’ll make it in time!”

The Doctor looked out over the forest, and then back towards town, his face twisted up in a grimace.

"I imagine Eva and her friends will want to fight. You need to get as many ponies out of here as possible, evacuate the town. No shelters here are going to be strong enough, they've got to get out, flee towards Canterlot!"

“But they’re coming too quickly! Somepony has to slow them down,” Twilight shouted over the oncoming roar of the drones.

Without hesitation, she turned and leveled her horn towards the encroaching formation, charging her horn and letting loose with a bright purple lance of arcane energy, obliterating one of the darting spheroids in a shower of sparks.

The Doctor reared onto his hind legs and slid a metal cylinder out of a pocket into his hoof, it emitted a loud buzzing that seemed to counteract the buzzing given off by the drones. He swung his hoof wide as a drone buzzed close, a glow emitted from the end of the device as the drone fell from the sky and bounced along the road, inert.

The Doctor pursed his lips, failing to hide his admiration of the raw destructive force unleashed from the meekish librarian.

“You don’t think I’m going to let you go it alone, do you?” he shouted in no particular direction as he struck another drone at a distance with a high pitched buzz from his silvery implement.

~~

“Come on, we’ve got to get to the library! Take as many magazines as you can carry. There’s enough guns in the basement of that place to stock a whole militia, but the only ammo we got till we get there is what we can take.”

Eva explained as she wheeled a dirt bike down the loading ramp, "We're going to push for the library, from there try to arm as many as we can and drive them back, failing that we'll stall them long enough for a full evacuation."

"Tommy, I'm going with Eva!" James yelled as he ran down the ramp towards the mare, his rifle was already slung across his chest as he rounded the corner out of the cargo bay. Age was catching up with him, his brow was already damp from even that short sprint.

"No," Eva said, shaking her head, "Tommy can't fly this thing out of here, we've got to get as many ponies out as possible before the town is overrun, take as many as you can and make for Canterlot."

"What about you then?" James said, his expression strained, obviously holding back something he didn't feel the need to add to his statement. He shifted to his other foot, looking out at the horizon, towards town. Fires were burning in the distance, the smoke coiling up into the setting sun.

"You know what I'm going to do. Gonna raise some hell,"

She stomped the kick starter and revved the engine into a throaty roar.

“Tommy! Let’s go!” Eva yelled as she spun the throttle and kicked up a cloud of dust. The bike roared into the dusk as her figure shrank and she peeled off towards town.

James turned around to see his brother and the cornflower blue unicorn climbing into the truck, "You watch her. She's right, but... if I can't watch her back, I need to trust you to, Tommy."

The younger man nodded and spared a glance at Trixie, "Yeah, we're not gonna let you down, brother. I'll make sure she comes back to you."

Author's Note

Gonna throw this out there, give me some motivation to do the next chapter some time this year probably. yeah.