Capture

As the airship moved away from the monster, Spitfire met eyes with Pablo, who motioned for her to go somewhere to talk about what they just saw. They found themselves in Pablo’s cramped crew cabin, which was the largest, on account of how much room the lanky diamond dog actually needed to lie down.

“So what did you think of that monster? That type wasn’t in your reports so I’m assuming it’s something new.” Pablo said, lounging inside his hammock. Even though this room was bigger, it appeared that it was just a bit too small for him.

“That depends: how much can we assume about it’s body language and motivations?”

“Let’s just assume that we can for the moment.” Pablo replied.

“Well, then, it looked like somebody trying to catch a train.”

Spitfire caught something out of the corner of her eye through the cabin’s porthole behind Pablo’s hammock. On a hunch, she decided to push Pablo out of the way and take a look at it. Out there she saw the creature again. She had no idea how body language could translate across species. Especially ones a billion years older than her from who knows where. The monster seemed to have deflated at the reaction it got from the ponies and it had flopped its wedge shaped body into the swamp muck. Its trunk-like arms lay flat at its side. Its head folded back onto its body lethargically.

“What is it? I can’t see!” Pablo asked.

“it’s just kinda sitting there. It looks, well, depressed.” Spitfire’s exceptional eyesight was able to see the creature clearly, even this far away.

“Something is clearly different about this one. It didn’t match the description of any of the riloks you encountered either and it seems, I dunno, it looked like an alpha rilok or something.”

“We should confer with the rest of the science team on this one. Maybe one of them saw something we didn’t.”

After which they both nodded, and proceeded to get stuck trying to leave through the door together, before they managed to sort out trying to leave the still incredibly small cabin for two people.

“It could be an outcast, some sort of mutant, maybe it isn’t connected to whatever hive mind they seem to have.” Chert suggested. He was the only other one who knew the rilok was different, being one of the few scientifically minded people from the first expedition willing to come along. “Perhaps it’s going to set up a new hive of some sort, like those flying ants.”

“That doesn’t explain why it was going after the airship.” Pablo said back.

“I don’t think ‘going after’ is quite the right word.” A botanist, Spitfire thought her name was Daisy Doo, or some last name like that. “It looked like somebody who couldn’t hail a taxi in Manehattan.”

Spitfire smiled at that, pleased that she didn’t seem to be the only one who noticed that little aspect.

“Yeah,” Pablo replied. “But unless it’s got some pretty incredible eyes, and initial dissections of fossilized ones indicate they probably aren’t THAT good, it couldn’t have seen the airship. All it could see would be the pegasus, and maybe the air hose.”

“So it was after a pony then?” One of the four biologists asked, this one a brown earth pony with a book-and-quill cutie mark. “To attack them like before?”

“I don’t know. Before, they not only knew we were coming, but they seemed most aggressive to whatever pony was in a position of leadership.” Spitfire concluded. “When I gave an order they were all after me, but when we seemed to follow Firelock’s orders, they instantly all turned on him. This didn’t feel the same way.”

“Yeah,” Chert said, “they didn’t make a sound the first time, they were there to watch last time.”

“So what changed? What is different about this one?” Another biologist asked, this one a mint green pegasus.

“Could those others be drones of some kind? Not intelligent like us, but like ants, and they just wanted us off their territory?” The earth pony biologist suggested. “Perhaps they were attacking our leader as a sort of territory challenge?”

“I don’t know. What we’ve been described have some mammalian-esque features and are much less like an ant, and more like some sort of articulated pangolin with those scales,” The green pegasus said. Spitfire thought her name was something strange like ‘Susan,’ but would have to check later.

“What I’m taking from all this, is that the alien was interested in a pony.”

A moment of silence in the room passed as everypony considered this, before everypony realized this was an entirely new speaker. The group turned to see one of the specialists, whose no-doubt-fictional name was something like Night Watch.

“And that means we could probably use a pony as bait.”

“Too dangerous.” One of them concluded, and everypony nodded their heads in agreement.

“I think we could probably set something like that with a reasonable degree of safety, provided it’s just that one creature.” Night Watch said with confidence.

“How?” Spitfire asked. “I want the full details before I agree to put anybody at risk for this.”

“Well one of us is reasonably good at shield spells. We have the extraction system we could rig up to pull somebody back if something gets dicey. Then we obviously have the specimen containment area below this deck here.” The operative patted the deck below him which, coincidentally, was the observation deck with all the scientific instruments.

“So when can we set it up?” Spitfire asked.

There was a silent moment where everypony immediately looked at her, without saying anything, for an uncomfortably long time. That was about the time Spitfire realized she’d been volunteered, as she was the fastest flier present.

“Oh.”

Now Spitfire was sitting, waiting for other people to spot the beast, so they could set up an ambush with a magical cage. Provided the creature wasn’t amazing at burrowing.

She found herself in some sort of re-purposed parachute harness suit modified for pegasi. It had straps around all her limbs except her wings. There were awkward cuts in the back where an earth pony or unicorn wouldn’t have wings, and a collection of mounting points on the back so they could use the pickup system to jerk her back into the airship if the need arose.

“Why do I need this thing again?” Spitfire asked Pablo.

“Bludgeoning attacks, incapacitating gases, hypnotizing magic, stun magic, sticky goop that gums up your wings, something else we can’t predict.” Pablo replied, also facing the dilemma of having to hurry up and wait, but too anxious and excited to sit down and read.

Spitfire decided now was the time to try and get to know him better.

“So why do you want to study these aliens? What do you think you can learn from them?”

“I want to learn all kinds of things about them, but chief among them: how one of them managed to survive for a billion years on a spaceship with, as best we can tell, nothing but some kind of mucus sack.”

Spitfire could tell that Pablo was getting excited.

“The applications of that alone are incredible. It could be the discovery that lets us regrow limbs, or revive coma patients, or preserve dead bodies. Interstellar space travel, invulnerable immortal underground bunkers, radiation shielding. Possibly, it might even unlock a way to bring back the dead with science!”

At the last bit, Pablo stood up and was posing like he was in a play of some kind.

“Think about that, that’s something we’ve been able to infer indirectly from one absent specimen. Just imagine what we could learn with time to study a living one!”

“So which one of those is it?”

“We have no idea. That’s why we need a living specimen, it could be multiples of those, it could be something entirely new.” Pablo replied.

“And what if it’s magic?”

“Would you believe we’ve ruled that out almost entirely?” Pablo replied. “We tested the metal the hull was made out of, and we discovered that it was formed in a minuscule magical field, something difficult to measure, much less come up with a use for.”

Spitfire was impressed, after all there were all kinds of magical beasts that were remarkably tough. Dragons for example, were only bruised by bullets. That was when another forgotten detail came to the forefront of her mind.

“What about cragodiles... you know anything about them?”

“Huh?” Pablo looked confused.

“This swamp, particularly out where we’re at used to be filled with cragodiles. Now they seem much less common.” Spitfire rubbed her hoof across her chin in thought. “In fact, even the ones we saw were kinda skittish our first time through this swamp, very out of character for them.”

“Incredible!” Pablo exclaimed. “I hadn’t even thought about macroscopic changes to the biosphere, I was more concerned with microscopic ones.”

Unconsciously Pablo put his paws on the book in his coat pocket, but Spitfire found that she had managed to get ahead of him.

“Ah, thinking of your classic literature are you?” Spitfire teased. “‘Course, I’m not much for reading. I prefer them on records... when I have the time, anyways.”

“Sci-Fi? I didn’t take you for that type.” Pablo looked amused.

“Oh yeah? What type did you take me to be?” If Spitfire had her sunglasses she would be looking over the edge at Pablo with them.

“I don’t know, something more a Tom Prancy novel. You know the ones: big, thick military pocketbooks. The kind you see all the time in second-hoof stores.”

“I’ve never even tried one of those, they aren’t a comforting thought in my line of work.”

Just then, one of the specialists came in.

“We’ve found the creature again. You’re on, Spitfire.”

Spitfire’s magical bubble was lowered into the swamp and she couldn’t help but feel there were other applications these shield bubbles could be used for. Underwater tours, for one. Lower one off the side with some backup scuba gear, and it would put any glass-bottomed boat to shame.

And that was all she had to do for more than ten minutes: Sit there, in that uncomfortable parachute harness, waiting for things to happen. She did her best to not look at the cage that had been hidden in the water in front of her. It had three sides, and one side that was removed, that would be replaced with a shield spell so it could come up around the creature, and also so the cage could sit directly in front of Spitfire’s shield bubble.

In the water, she noticed that there was more of that alien plant life. It looked so simple, so primitive in the water there, just a stem that ended in a greyish bulb.

“Come on... bright yellow pegasus, in the middle of a glowing bubble, in the most drab and flat place in all of Equestria.” Spitfire said aloud. “Surely they aren’t THAT stupid.”

Spitfire fully expected the riloks to show up then and there to rush them and attack.

Nothing.

When it did show up, it was one of the most surreal experiences she had ever seen.

The creature slumped out of the swamp very slowly. It looked exhausted, worn. Seeing all these tells was even more bizarre from the creature’s alien biology. Its bone scales sat flat on it’s back, and its head looked downward constantly, listlessly. It didn’t move brush out of the way, it just slapped the plants aside. Occasionally, though, it would grab a plant and put it in its mouth to chew on without rhyme or reason.

There was an extremely tense moment when the creature knocked one of its legs into the cage put in front of Spitfire. Nobody, not even the creature, moved for a second after it noticed the iron bars of the cage under the murky water. Then it walked directly to the center of the cage and flopped down again. The unfortunate side effect of this was that the way it had bumped the cage, Spitfire’s little shield bubble was now poking inside one end of the cage.

And still more nothing happened.

Then a pony with more sense up on the bridge activated the mechanism for the cage and it slammed shut. However, even though the shield spell on Spitfire’s side of the cage was compensated, the procedure couldn’t go perfectly. A lump of floating plants got stuck in one side of the cage between the cage wall and the ceiling above it. Spitfire stared at it.

Then the alien monster from a race who had floated in space for almost a billion years did something that nopony expected.

It used its head to lever up the lid, pulled the clump of grass out from the cage, and then let the cage slam shut again. Then it settled down in the cage and turned to Spitfire, who could only stare in shock.

Slowly, hesitantly, it pointed at her with one claw at the end of its right trunk. It looked her right in the eyes and grunted out a word with great effort, as if it was difficult to even form the syllables.

“Spffttfrrrr.”

It was very clearly trying to say HER name, which raised all sorts of questions.

HOW did it know her name?

Where had it learned her name?

How did it have any idea about Eqquish?

Then it did something else that rocked Spitfire to her very core.

It pointed back at itself.

“Frrrrlok.”

Author's Note

This is what I've been building up to with this story, I didn't want to show my hand and call this "invasion of the brain stealing aliens from outer space" because A: that wouldn't line up with the tone, and B: I didn't want to just reveal what I was doing right off the bat.
I would have had this chapter out last week but when we were going to edit it... well we heard about TB and... nobody felt like editing that day. Going to write the next chapter of the last changeling queen next.