Pilot's Story

Pilot's Story

Chapter 7: Run

"Transponder detected, tracking."

"No, I don't think you will," a brown coated stallion with a messy mane said in an... almost laughing trottingham accent, "In fact, I think I will do the tracking, thank you very much, tracking down all the information in your databanks!" His voice bordering on downright gleeful as he pointed a metal cylinder at the computer terminal and pressed a button.

There was a sudden high pitched whine as the end of the cylinder glowed a bright green. The terminal sparked and the lights in the bunker dimmed. The tube beeped and the stallion spit it out onto his hoof and looked at the display, "Oh my, you are a clever little species."

"Databanks c-c-c-c-compromised dispa-a-a-a-atching sec-c-c-c-c-u-u-urity."

"And that's my cue to run!"

~~

"What have you got down there, Dash?" Eva asked as she throttled back her engines, throwing the plane into a sharp corkscrew maneuver to shed speed, "Casualties?" she asked even as she dropped the landing gear, lining herself up to land straddling the rails.

"There's a lot of confusion down here, Eva, a lot of ponies are hurt, and there's a fire spreading to the passenger cars. came Dash's uncharacteristically panicked voice. "We're trying to get everypony out but the fire is spreading so fast"

"Alright, you keep getting peo...ponies out, I'm going to set down in front of the locomotive, tell any of the un-injured to meet me there to turn the plane around, we'll load up as many as we can fit and get off the ground as quickly as we can." Eva yelled into her headset over the sounds of the engines.

The aircraft started to settle in over the rails, headed directly for the locomotive. Eva didn't waste time, she nosed the aircraft over and retracted the flaps, spilling lift and forcing the main gears into the soft dirt. She pulled the throttles back to idle and leaned hard into the wheel brakes while pulling the yoke back, causing the aircraft to rapidly shed airspeed.

The locomotive was getting bigger in her windscreen, she started to sweat, had she overshot her landing speed in her haste? A few tense seconds later the tail finally dropped all the way to the ground and her forward speed dropped. Without any further delay she threw all the engine controls to idle and tore her headset off, charging down the aisle.

She stopped by the still open doorway to grab the fire extinguisher and jumped out the door, running flat out towards the passenger cars, most of which, she could now tell, were fully involved. She charged past a group of ponies dressed up in what looked to be uniforms of some kind and she stopped, spitting out the fire extinguisher onto the ground.

"Hey, you six, go to the locomotive, turn the big metal thing in front of it around so it's facing the other direction and do not touch the spinny things on the wings or you'll be cut to ribbons, I'm going to fly the injured out." She yelled, the stallions stood stunned for a moment, just staring at her. Her face flashed in anger as she got into the face of the nearest stallion, he was wearing a pony version of overalls, "Hey, move, now!"

Seeing the ponies finally start to run, she grabbed the extinguisher in her teeth again and ran towards the familiar looking rainbow maned pegasus trying to push through the flames engulfing the exit to one of the train cars. She planted her hooves in the soft dirt and skidded to a stop, pushing Dash out of the way as she dropped the oversized extinguisher into her hooves and tore the safety pin out with her teeth.

She brought herself up to her hind legs and held the red cylinder in her forehooves, took a deep breath, and charged up the stairs into the inferno, spraying the contents of the fire extinguisher at the flames as she went. The heat hit her like a freight train but she pushed deeper, spraying the flames even as they licked at her fur, singing it and in some places burning her down to bare hide.

She saw a group of ponies, foals if she had to guess, hiding under some of the seats behind her. She turned her head to them as she fought the fire away from the stairway, "Run, get outside before this thing runs out, I can't hold the fire back much longer!" Already the pressure was dropping, soon she wouldn't have anything left.

The fillies, if her guess of gender based on facial structure was right, rushed out, leaving the car empty. Taking one last look around her, Eva saw nobody else in the car and dropped the empty extinguisher and jumped out of the open doorway as the flames pushed back, the extinguisher no longer there to fight them.

"Dash!" She yelled as she hit the ground, "Get as many ponies as you can onto the plane, injured first, and then fly back to Ponyville as fast as you can, tell them to expect injured and try to clear out a place for me to land near the hospital." She started coughing as she trotted back towards the plane, trying to clear the smoke from her lungs.

"You heard her! Injured on the plane, come on!" Dash yelled to the passengers gathering off to the side of the burning train.

~~

"We could talk about this you know, I like talking about it, find that helps out a lot more often than you'd think!" the stallion rattled off as he was pushed into a corner by the advancing machines. "I mean, you all seem like very reasonable automatons you know?"

The robots raised their wrists, red glow emanating from the palms of their hands. "Unauthorized access, security protocol activated." they yelled in unison.

"Guess not then, thank you Captain Jack!" He said to himself as his left hoof stomped a button on the device strapped to his right fetlock, an instant later he was gone.

~~

Eva slammed her hoof against the throttle and pitch levers, running the engines up to rated power in an instant, the aircraft lurched forward from it's standstill on the soft earth next to the railroad tracks. "Dash, I don't know when you'll get out of range, but... I might not be in very good shape when it comes time to land this thing, make sure there's a really long landing strip in case I screw this up." she said into her headset before punctuating the statement with another cough.

"I'll do what I can, just hold on!" she heard Dash reply, the transmission already crackling from the distance; Dash was flying for all she was worth in the opposite direction.

Eva pulled back on the control yoke as the airspeed indicator clicked over one hundred, the tail lowered and the wings caught the air, lifting the craft gently into the sky. The radials thundered as they dragged the aged airplane through the sky. Pulling the controls to the left she set the plane into a shallow roll, arcing towards the original direction of travel and towards Ponyville.

She pulled up on the landing gear handle and keyed up the intercom, something she hadn't had occasion to do very often, "Alright, everybody just keep calm for the next forty five minutes and I should have you back-" she coughed loudly and took a breath, "anyway, I should have you back in Ponyville. Dash went ahead to let them know we're on our way. The ride might get a little bumpy, don't worry, that's normal."

She checked her altimeter, twelve hundred feet, she turned on bleed air and pitched the nose up. 'Get up over eight thousand and I can hit top speed, should shorten travel time but... it's going to be hell on the fuel supply... should be fine as long as there's enough left that I don't have to dead-stick it in.' she thought to herself as she manipulated the controls.

She leaned back into her chair and rested her eyes for a moment, relaxing after the mad rush to get the injured ponies onto the plane. It was at this point that her burns began to hurt. "Marvelous."

~~

The brown stallion crashed through the blue double-doors in the back of his clock shop, the interior of the room was almost pitch dark, with the exception of the glowing metal tube in his mouth. He sprinted across the room, in fact going much farther than she should have been, granted the size of the shop, and plugged it into a round console.

"A-ha! That's why you can't go anywhere... or anywhen!" he exclaimed as part of the console lit up and text rapidly scrolled across it, he smiled, he laughed even. "This planet shouldn't even be here, and yet, here it is, the star shouldn't exist, nothing should exist!"

He sat against a chair mounted near the cylindrical console tower and sighed, "Not to mention magic, real magic, they invented magic!"

With a sigh the stallion dropped back onto his hooves and started walking towards the doors, leaving this 'room' of his shop behind him.

It was for that reason that he never noticed the soft glow at the base of the round console he'd been sitting in front of moments before.

~~

"Backup drives accessing..."

"System reinitialized, countdown resumes."

"The protocol has been complicated."

"The Doctor has survived."

"Must adapt to unforeseen circumstances."