The Fermi Object

Unfriendly Skies

The aliens were not subtle when they made their approach. Sure, the ones up in the air kept circling,but they did so silently, as if they weren't trying to draw attention to themselves. What the convoy did start to hear was a great roaring off in the distance, as if some large things were angry. If Firelock weren’t so tense, he would have noticed that the roaring had almost a musical quality, like military drums.

They were actually approaching the part of the swamp known as “Cragodile Alley,” a very understudied and basically unknown part for obvious reasons.

They hadn't seen a cragodile that hadn't run away for over an hour now. All the while, the roaring was getting closer faster than they were rowing.

Eventually it became too much, and Firelock ordered ponies to be ready.

They bowled out of the swamp's gangly trees like a wave, all bristled scales tipped in red.

Firelock froze. He was used to dealing with smugglers and criminals. This was completely out of his depth.

He could only stop and stare at the monsters out in front. They were huge; they were only seven feet tall or so, but that failed to account for the way their bodies were: massive quadrupedal, and angled so that all that could be seen from the front was a wall of scales. All the scales stood up well off the body, wherever it might be hidden in there. Throughout nearly every crevice, hanging off them like moss, was a tangle of bulbous grey translucent fungus that resembled hair. It wove and gave the creatures a seemingly even more tremendous volume.

They had two tusks sticking out of what could be called a face, and no visible mouth nor eyes, as they barreled through the water on legs that couldn't be seen above the water. Every one of them was in a perfect V formation, and every one looked easily big enough to overturn a boat and crush a pony on its own.

The first gunshot hit one of the bristled scales, as there was nowhere but scales visible to hit. It only made an audible almost disappointing ‘clack’ sound as the scale folded under the force of the shot and the bullet pinged off into the sky. Many shots followed, and none of them penetrated the wall of scales.

There was a moment there where both sides stopped. The ponies, because they needed to reload their ineffective guns, and the aliens, to let some some strange, similarly bristled and shaggy heads poke out from behind the larger monsters, and peer at them with alien three-faceted eyes. There was only a faint glimmer of animal intelligence there, they didn't look at them curiously, instead they were looking expectantly.

The scales had already re-bristled up, seemingly not worse for wear for their shooting.

Firelock decided that this wasn't going to work without more serious ordnance and took command.

“All right, all of you are going to retreat NOW!” He barked. “Drop anything you don't need and get the hell out of here! Ponies are more important than equipment!”

This had a very unfortunate effect: every single one of the aliens snapped their heads towards him with a decidedly unfriendly glare. There was no attempt at subtlety or any attempt to hide it. If he had been paying attention, he could have even seen one or two of the fliers above adjust their course to get a better look at him.

Firelock noticed what effect his words had almost immediately, it was almost impossible not to. So he decided to try and do something stupid on an impulse now that he had their attention. He stopped reloading his Jezail, dropped it into the boat and took to the air.

“Firelock, what the hell are you doing?” Spitfire shouted at him in an authoritative tone. Instantly, the aliens turned to face her and began moving in a very unfriendly manner.

“Quiet!” He shouted forcefully. “They seem to be looking for our leader, and guns don’t work, so I AM the leader here. You have to get everybody else out of here.” He then proceeded to bark some nonsense words in an authoritative voice to prove his point.

Like clockwork, the aliens turned to face him the moment Spitfire started to back down, but Firelock was already flying off to the side away from the boats. He stopped to wait not too far off, to make sure he could get back in time to help, in case all this didn't work.

This turned out to be a mistake for him, as all of the aliens diverted off to chase him. Something whizzed by his head, and would have hit him square in the face if he hadn't turned around to fly just in time.

Physically unable to stop himself, he looked back and realized his wings were out of shape after so long on a boat; there weren't any wing drills on the high seas, after all. The aliens were keeping up with him handily, but importantly, to his relief, he could see a line of boats slowly making their way away through the dense foliage.

Something else whizzed by his head, and Firelock glanced down to see that one of the curious creatures had shot it, seemingly, from its mouth. It looked like a pointed cellophane packet of nothing, dense and bulging out in the middle. All he could do now was flee and hope to group up with the rest of the ponies later.

The next one hit him on the side though directly, and it opened up, puffing out air and nothing.

Then Firelock started having trouble breathing, clearly this was some kind of odorless gas. Hastily, without being able to see where he was going, he dove down back into the swamp and back down among the foliage.

He couldn’t risk flying higher, not with those fliers in the same airspace, and something on the ground seemed to be able to hit him very easily at any height he’d be comfortable at. Which forced him back down into the swamp, where it was impossible to fly at all.

Firelock did have one advantage though: those aliens were too big to move through the undergrowth as well as he could.

At first he just ran, splashing through the water and trying to ignore all the broad-leafed plants slapping him in the face. All the while, he could hear them behind him, they were in the distance, but that never seemed to change. Firelock could keep pace on the ground, so this seemed like the best idea for a long time (as best as time can be measured when you’re running for your life). Until he stepped into a puddle without looking.

Even if he had been looking, it wouldn’t have helped him out all that much. It looked like any other puddle: Stagnant plant-filled water, accentuated with translucent gray plant life, and much deeper than it looked. It turned out that it was very deep, even when his head was two or three feet under, he still could not feel the bottom of the slimy, stagnant water.

That wasn’t the dangerous part, though.

The real danger was the plants, as they tangled around him, almost seeming to drag him down. Thrashing about only wrapped his hooves more into the tangle of aquatic plant life. He couldn’t see, he could barely remember which way was up, and all the while water surged into his lungs. If Firelock hadn’t caught a hoof on shore, he would have drowned there.

Heaving, he pulled himself back onto what looked like the shore, but it fell through and sunk into the water, unexpectedly dunking him back into the water along with the floating lump of grass.

When he finally, exhaustedly, made it back to shore, all he could do was exhaustedly cough and heave water out of his burning lungs. As Firelock lay there, something hit him harder than the dry heaves he was going through.

His wings were soaked. There was no way he could fly like this.

Things weren’t supposed to go this way. He was supposed to be a distraction: move the aliens away, lose them, fly back and regroup. Animals weren’t supposed to be able to follow him like this, or shoot little suffocating packets of… whatever, at him.

Firelock wasn’t about to give up that easily, though. His wings would dry out soon enough. All he had to do was buy enough time, not even a lot of time. Maybe as little as fifteen minutes, and he would be able to fly again, if he pushed himself.

His ears perked up to a hopeful sound: Nothing. There was no sound of any pursuit at all. Perhaps they passed him by, or gave up.

“Well good luck catching the rest of us like that!” He said into the empty air, feeling just a little bit smug, and very hopeful for the immediate future.

Whatever the case, Firelock decided to take full advantage of this by slowing down and fanning out his wings whenever he could, flapping them in an attempt to dry them faster. He still kept moving away in the same direction, mostly just for something to do while his wings dried.

Minutes later, as he was just barely beginning to get any lift out of his wings, he heard a sound that re-instilled the naked dread he had before. Feet, not hooves. Lots of very fast-moving feet.

They didn’t look the same as the other ones. They were smaller, but they resembled the others very strongly, right down to the bristled, seemingly-bulletproof scales. These ones were smaller than a pony, but they were fast, and they just seemed to end with two solid-looking eyes split into thirds, and two tusks that stuck straight out where their neck would be. Still, they had no visible mouth.

Now there were more of them, and they were faster, weaving in and out of the foliage even as they scraped off bark in their haste. They moved at dangerous speeds. Even if Firelock left his armor on, he didn’t think it would do much good. He would need chainmail for puncturing tusks like that. Even then, they moved so fast that all it would take would be one good hit to stun him, if not impale him, and then they all could move in.

They didn’t circle around him. Instead, they formed in and made themselves into a wall around Firelock. They almost had a military discipline in the way they did it. They didn’t run into one another, and they didn’t slow down. Firelock didn’t even try to run. They were much faster than him on the ground.

However, looking up, they had trapped him in a clearing in the mangroves. All he had to do was fend them off for just a minute then he could be in the air again.

Knowing these buggers, they’d probably sprout wings and fly after me. Firelock thought to himself.

He ended up staring at one for too long, and it crouched down, as if ready to pounce at him, and revealed where its mouth was. Its mouth was actually below its body, somewhere around the middle of its barrel. It started making a low growling noise at him. It also waved two small clawed trunks at him that folded out from below its body.

The first one leapt at him from behind without even crying out first, no scream, no roar, just the scrape of paws from behind him.

He only managed to dodge by chance, and that seemed to be the signal for the rest of them. They didn’t wait for him, or come at him one at a time, they came in from three directions at once.

He managed to dodge the first one. The second managed to scrape him. The third got his leg, and he screamed as he felt the tusk go all the way through. Then they pulled back.

They’re playing with me. Firelock thought. They know I can’t run so they’re waiting to see what I do.

He only had one chance to escape from this situation now: dry or not, he had to get airborne. Adrenaline giving him strength, Firelock managed to take to the air. As he gained height, he gained confidence, forgetting about his rear hoof hanging limply. He looked down at the aliens below him, the tormentors in his dreams, and he laughed at them.

“HAH! I’ve outsmarted you this time. Let’s see you try and catch me in the air!” And he surged his wings, pushing himself through the air at great speeds, bolstered by the fire of adrenaline in his chest.

That's when he saw one of the fliers making its final descent from a dive, its wings locked as it pulled up at a fantastic speed. The large watermelon-sized lump that it had left behind careened toward Firelock perfectly, so that his own flight was adding to its velocity when it hit.

It smashed into his back with a resounding crack, something in his spine moved in a way that it shouldn’t, and Firelock found himself spiraling out of control, back down into the clearing, back into the waiting circle of aliens.

The last thing he saw was an even larger alien looming over him, blurry at this point, that was probing at his head with razor sharp claws attached to the end of trunks.