Death Fillies from Above

Death Fillies From Above
Chapter 1
By CDRW

"Captain! Pegasus scouts have located the Luna One!" the communications officer called from his station.

Captain Octavia of the airship Celestia turned her one-eyed gaze towards him and uttered a single word. "Report."

Her voice was soft and she spoke with cultivated propriety, but none of that was a comfort to the poor communications pony who had reluctantly drawn her attention to himself.

The Captain was a grey earth pony with a long, straight black mane and a treble clef cutie mark. An eyepatch obscured one of her eyes, and a huge scar ran underneath it from her temple to her jaw. It wasn't her missing eye that was so frightening though. It was the one she still had. She still would have been beautiful if it wasn't for that cold, soulless eye.

Octavia had a reputation as being the bravest, smartest, and most heartless bitch of a pony who'd ever sailed the seven skies. And anypony who'd ever met her gaze instinctively knew all the stories about her were true.

Captain Octavia always carried a cello bow with her, using it as a pointer or occasionally as a switch to discipline crew members. They said that before she captained her first airship at thirteen she was a prolific musician, and that when she'd taken command for the first time she brought the bow with her as a memento because her cello was too big to bring onto an airship. Then one day a cabin-boy went into her quarters without permission and started rummaging through her underwear drawer while she slept. She'd woken up, grabbed that bow from where it sat on the nightstand, and rammed it through his eye. Then she'd called the entire crew on deck and made them take down the ship's figurehead so they could mount his body in its place.

"Your captain just gave you an order sailor!" barked the first mate, Vinyl Scratch.

The communications officer jumped, and he was finally able to break eye contact with the Captain. "S-sorry ma'am! Uh. The report is coming in from Scout Rainbow Dash. She says she's found the wreckage of the Luna One a hundred and twelve clicks east of here. The ship is in bad shape but still sort of intact. She also says it's swarming with changelings, including at least three dozen surface-to-air plasmoids. We won't even be able to get close." The stallion paused and put one hoof up to his earpiece. "She recommends you just use an ICBE and Sparkle the whole area ma'am."

"Not an option," Octavia said calmly. "The Luna One was Equestria's most advanced science vessel and was the main laboratory for Equestria's weapons development program. Her Majesty needs the contents and data from those experiments and we're going to deliver them. Helmsmare! Set course for the Luna One!"

"C-captain?" the helmsmare stammered.

Octavia nodded at Vinyl Scratch for her to do her thing.

"You heard the Captain!" Vinyl strode across the bridge and bellowed in the helmsmare's face with a voice that could rattle the windows in Canterlot from here. "Get this ship turned around or I'll personally throw you overboard with a boarding hook embedded in your belly! Do you understand me sailor! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

"Y-yes ma'am!"

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!'

"YES MA'AM!'

"Good!" Vinyl looked around at the rest of the bridge crew. "What are you all looking at me for? You have jobs to do, now do them!" She swept the bridge with her eyes. "BLUEBLOOD!" A white unicorn who was trying to hide something in the jumble of maps at his station jumped about three feet in the air. "WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT READING PORN MAGS ON DUTY? GIVE ME THAT! I OUGHTA..."

Octavia let her first mate continue to motivate the crew and busied herself with a panel on the arm of her captain's chair. She flipped it up to reveal an array of switches and buttons underneath. With a flick of her hoof, she flipped a switch in the upper right corner, and all throughout the ship the yellow alert sirens started going off. Then she flipped a second switch and an intercom crackled to life.

"Hello Captain. My ears detect a clamorous bellow. Is there a reason you've gone to alert stage yellow?"

Octavia ignored the zebra's question and snapped out an order. "Start prepping the fillies for a drop, Zecora." On the other end of the line she heard a chorus of three voices shouting "yay" in the background. "No artillery or firearms. This is a retrieval mission and I need the objective intact, so hoof-to-hoof combat only." Two of the "yay"'s turned to "aw"'s but the third just cheered even louder. "Have them waiting in the ready room in fifteen minutes. I'll be there to brief them myself."

"Yes ma'am, Captain. I'll see it happens."

With that, Octavia cut the line and settled back in her seat, watching the clouds stream past the bridge windows like an ocean of cotton candy as her ship turned hard to port.

When Vinyl finished yelling at the bridge crew she came over to stand next to Octavia's chair. For a long moment, she just stood there, watching what the Captain watched, but eventually she tired of that, or gathered up the courage to say what she wanted to. She leaned down to whisper in Octavia's ear. "Do we really have to use the fillies 'tavi? We shouldn't even have those monsters on board. They're as bad as the changelings. You know we can't keep them under control forever."

"We don't have any choice but to use them Vinyl. You know as well as I do that they are our best weapon against the changelings," Octavia said, her voice never changing from its steely monotone. "We have to use them because those fillies don't love anypony."

"All right, I trust your judgement on this 'tavi, but those three are scaring the crew. They're unstable and dangerous. Please tell me you have a plan to deal with them if things get out of hoof."

Octavia didn't say anything. She just started humming an eerie tune and watched as the clouds floated by. Only Vinyl was close enough to see, but there was a ghost of a smile on her lips.

I hope you liked the first chapter of Death Fillies From Above. I'm doing this just for fun and am mostly writing by the seat of my pants, so if you have any ideas for awesome stuff I should totally do, go ahead and suggest them. I might even write it into one of the future chapters!