Chapters Prologue
The first of what came to be known as a rilok arrived in Equestria in a great explosion of light and fire. Metal chunks, and something more dry and organic burned as it screamed down and leveled a chunk of forest.
For almost a week nothing happened. The forest fires went out, and the lump just sat there until it rained. If you were close by, and could hear over the hollow metal sound of the rain, you might hear the first sounds coming from inside. However, eventually, as the rain pooled in the as yet undisturbed crater, a low rumbling like a tired engine emanated from the wreckage.
Something inside the ancient, pockmarked amalgamation of steel and fossils was still alive. It started to bang around inside its metal meteorite shell, forming dents until it finally found a weak point. Then the first invader from outer space burst its way onto Equestrian soil.
The creature looked haggard, almost like it was starving and dehydrated at the same time. Its muscles moved strangely, as if they hadn’t moved in far longer than the creature should have lived in the first place.
It had a long angled body with four thick but short legs that almost couldn’t be seen in the mass of bony layered scales and hair that covered its body. It seemingly had no face and no eyes, and its entire body was covered in a fungus that tangled in with its hair and stuck off its body at odd angles. The fungus had roots that were nearly indistinguishable from the creature's hair, and sticks stuck out, with bulbs on the end that resembled grey blown glass.
Its mouth was not visible from the front, being hidden underneath its body among the bone scales. Inside was a set of clearly omnivorous teeth. On either side were two clawed trunks that folded back down along its body, but right now hung limply, as if the thing were exhausted.
As it stumbled out of the wreckage awkwardly, it stopped to slurp at the mucky water in the crater. The entire creature looked worse for wear. Scales were missing, dents were apparent in others, and even the strange fungus bulbs looked oddly deflated.
The creature didn’t appear to be concerned to see some of its own fossilized and covering holes in the wreckage, nor the other bodies contained within. It only groggily acknowledged the thunderstorm above it when lightning crackled out of the sky. It ‘saw’ the lightning before the thunder even arrived without any visible eyes.
As it began to wake up, though, something was clearly different about the scales as compared to most reptiles. The scales raised up slowly at first and each one had a small spot on the tip of each. As the creature stretched them out, it became apparent that the bristling bones sticking out of its back could all be raised and lowered individually.
As it climbed out of the crater, the rilok spat out a lump of mud from its mouth in obvious distaste. Even as it did so, it seemed more aware now, prone to turning its body to face small movements. It even jumped and faced down another lightning strike from miles off, even before the sound hit.
After determining the lightning was no threat, it wandered off into the forest and began to voraciously eat anything that came into sight. If it was green, if it was alive, even if it was moving, the creature’s hunger appeared to know no limits nor restrictions.
Then as its stomach slowly filled from its swath of grazing anything, from grass to small animals, there was an urge coming into its simple mind. It needed to dig, find a place underground to lay its eggs.
Author's Note
This is the story that I will be working on in the off time between chapters of "The Last Changeling Queen" basically I can almost feel myself getting burnt out on that story and the chapters are taking longer and longer. I'm hoping that by bouncing back between this and that I will be able to put out chapters more frequently, after this has been posted I will go back to the Last Changeling Queen's next chapter.
As per usual don't post comments, I don't read comments and I will delete them. If you need to contact me send me a PM through Fimfiction.
Commander
Commander Firelock was part of the Equestrian Coast Guard. He was actually from a long line of Equestrian military ponies, and looked the part. His jaw was set and held no trace of stubble. His dark grey hair matched his coat and his wings. There was even a rumor that one of his ancestors was the original model for the Royal Guard illusions at the palace.
In short, he was a proud military pony down to the musket and anchor cutie mark on his flank. On the outside, personality-wise, he’d inherited a keen tactical mind, and pressure from his father, who was in the Marines, had pushed him into the coast guard out of a teenage spite.
That isn’t to say he disdained of fighting, he would probably have joined some other branch of the Equestrian military if it weren’t for his father. This lead him into the Maritime Enforcement branch, and thus to Baltimare, where he commanded the ESS Barding, the most advanced steamship in Equestria.
Commander Firelock spent a lot of time at the Baltimare Museum, more time than most ponies, and for a military pony of a certain rank he had a highly advanced interest in astronomy. He had a more or less self-taught bachelor’s in astronomy, and kept a telescope on his ship at all times.
The ponies at the Planetarium there knew him personally, and during his vacation, well, stay-cation, they even let him do talks in the hopes of bringing young minds into the field of astronomy.
The one place that drew him in most often whenever he visited the museum was the Fermi Object. Everypony knew about the Fermi Object. Fifteen years ago it was the most talked-about thing on the planet, and scholars from all over the world flocked to try and unlock its secrets.
Firelock remembered the first time he saw it as a foal, it was a strange thing made of simple steel, and quite frankly boring. At least, until you came around to the side and saw the monsters fossilized into the hull itself, and the Hole. The Hole, where, after floating in space for uncounted years, something had gotten up and left.
“Never thought I'd find you here.” came a voice that echoed around inside the nearly empty museum.
Firelock turned around to see Captain Spitfire approaching him in a businesslike fashion.
“I like to hang around here sometimes.” Firelock tried to reply casually.
“I'd say something like 'you'll go mad staring at something like this.' But from what I've heard you wouldn't go mad if you had to stare at a rock for a week, and it’s been a bit longer than that since you’ve been looking at this.”
“So you've been talking to my crew. What else they been saying about me?”
“Ohh, this and that, they don't know how far away a pegasus can hear things.” Spitfire said in a wishy-washy tone.
“That's something I endeavor to keep them ignorant of.”
“It's nothing you probably haven't heard, something about scrubbing.”
“AH, so you met Dull Blade, he's the pony I can't teach musket discipline to to save his life. He probably knows more about scrubbing floors than he does firing a gun.” Firelock rubbed his chin pensively. “I've actually put in to have him transferred.”
“Well anyways, it’s fortuitous you're here because I was actually going to come get you and bring you here. Wasn't even sure if you knew about this or not.”
Firelock looked back at the object, the sole exhibit in this room, forgetting Spitfire was even there. It consumed his thoughts, shaped his mind.
The unfortunate thing about it is that despite how revolutionary it was to Equestrian thinking about the universe, it was possibly the most useless thing ever discovered from an information standpoint. The aliens fossilized onto the hull had been there so long that any traces of DNA had long been broken down into meaninglessness. The artificial material wasn’t anything special in the slightest, it was just simple steel, plated with ceramics they themselves had developed years ago.
Even the aliens outside of the hull refused to give up any information without a fight, as millennia spent floating through space had done quite a bit to erode at them. Many, many scholars came to study them, and there seemed to be as many theories as there were scholars working on these thoroughly alien species.
In the end only three things ended up undebatable:
This object was foreign to the solar system.
There had been some sort of cocoon inside the object.
Whatever had been in the cocoon had escaped.
It was a sobering thought to Firelock, who remembered looking out at the forests and swamps around Baltimare as a child. The image of how large the cocoon was, the burning fire above the sky, his own shattered window.
Just imagining a creature that could survive that haunted him whenever he cared to remember it.
Firelock awoke from his reverie to find Spitfire awkwardly waving a hoof in front of his face.
“What? Sorry?”
“I was just asking you how much you know about the Fermi Object.”
“As much as anybody I guess...” Then Firelock reflected on that thought. “Well probably a lot more than most people.”
“Good, cause we might have finally tracked down whatever crawled out of this thing.”
Firelock laughed. “What, are we going to track down Bighoof as well? It's been fifteen years now, don't tell me you've been roped into a hoax after all this time.”
Spitfire wordlessly handed him a folder.
“You're kidding me with this, right? We've been seeing variations on this from amateur photographers since I was a foal.” Firelock didn’t even bother opening it up.
“Those were taken by our division no less than two weeks ago.”
That actually caused Firelock to open up the folder and look inside. There were four pictures of a small stumpy creature with blue and red scales centered, and off in the distance the terrain around the creature matched the swamps around Baltimare far too well, matched the fossilized aberrations on the hull.
Firelook looked at the picture, then back up at the Fermi Object. Then he turned to Spitfire, chills running down his spine.
“Why me?” he croaked.
“You're practically a specialist on this subject, you have a strong military background, and you're very close by. We don't expect you to command troops on the ground, but we'd like you in an advisory role here. Also we may have to go into the swamps, and your expertise may be necessary.”
Firelock stared at the picture, which had been undeniably confirmed for him. The obsessive gnawing at the back of his mind since childhood, the fear, the monsters flooded to the forefront of his mind. All of it was real, his fears after all these years were justified. Something that could survive re-entry had crawled out of there and now there were more of them.
“I'll do it.”
Swamps
Commander Firelock didn’t like the swamps south of Baltimare. They were swamps, he was a pegasus, there shouldn’t be any reason for him to go here except to fly over them. But that was where they saw the alien, so he buckled down clutching his rifle and sulked.
“You don’t look too enthused about this, Firelock.” Spitfire jabbed at him.
“It’s a swamp. I hate swamps. They smell and there is no reason we should be going into one. That's why we have wings.” He didn’t have to shout over the motor because it was silent.
Behind them was a minor fleet of a combination of Wonderbolts, Equestrian Guard and scientists. One, armed to the teeth with everything from knives to the latest tech in cartridge based guns. The other, armed to the teeth in every measuring device Canterlot could possibly come up with. Firelock KNEW that a great deal of those were extraneous, as there wasn’t a chance in hell they could use a rectal thermometer in this situation.
On top of that, not a single one of them knew how to deal with a swamp. First there were the mosquitoes. They brought bug repellent, not a bad idea when you’re camping next to,say, a lake, but here, there were at least ten mosquitoes for every cubic foot of space, probably for miles. Any kind of repellent wouldn’t cut it against the swarm, even if the mosquitoes wanted to get away, they were so dense the mosquitoes’ sheer volume prevented that. But that wasn’t what got Firelock into his sulking mood. There were perfectly good pegasi here who could just as easily take turns kicking up a breeze and blowing them all away.
“Nope, that wasn’t regulation.” That was the constant litany of his misery. Even in his head he couldn’t think to maintain a respectful tone while thinking that.
“We can’t blow away all these mosquitoes, Firelock, that’s not regulation.”
“That's not regulation, after market motors should not be installed on these boats.”
So here they were, with gummed-up propellers full of tangled plants, in a smelly mosquito-bitten hellhole, with ponies having to take turns rowing through the swamp. AND they were out of bug repellent.
Obviously, there were reasons for all this. Somebody higher up had wanted all caution, and probably had thrown their weight around to ensure the safety of the scientific staff. Firelock suspected that even the most harmless of the scientific crew were ticked, gnatted and mosquitoed off, to the point they would give whoever gave that order a stern talking to if not a punch in the face.
Spitfire, on break from rowing, decided to come down and talk to Firelock.
“So what’s the story of that rifle you got there?” She asked.
“This? This was an heirloom from my grandfather.”
Firelock ran a hoof down the gun with its long rifled barrel, curved pegasus stock and almost out of place engraved magazine and receiver.
“Bullshit, that receiver and magazine didn’t exist even 15 years ago. Especially not on a Jezail.”
“AH!” Firelock held up a hoof. “But they still make some of the better rifles over in Saddle Arabia, and that's where I had it refitted with modern parts. The receiver, and the magazine are brand new.”
“Your willingness to maim an heirloom aside, that barrel looks new, and it wouldn’t exactly fit modern caliber weapons.”
“They actually melted down the old barrel and recycled the metal into this new one, see this sight here?” Firelock pointed at the welded on piece of metal at the end of the barrel, “That's actually the original iron sight of the gun, they took it off before they re-made the barrel. They even re-purposed the old flintlock as a firing pin at my suggestion.”
“I still can’t get over how casual you are about defacing a family heirloom like that.”
“To me, it’s a reminder.” Firelock moved far away with his mind, back to something his grandfather said. “When I was about five, my grandfather, a military stallion, took the gun down and told me this: ‘this is the gun that won the skirmish of Pasternwar. In a battle, a war, a fight, you must always realize the rules. Not the rules other ponies have told you, but the rules imposed upon you, so that you can change with them.’ ”
“Sounds like a smart stallion.”
“Didn’t win him the skirmish though, kept a bullet from that in his leg til the day he died.”
“What’re those up there?” A wet and smelly member of the science crew pointed off to the distance some hours later.
Firelock woke up out of his frustrated stupor to look.
“Birds.” He grunted, and put his head back down to stare holes into the boat.
“No no no, those aren’t birds, at least not any that I’ve seen.”
“So, they’re birds a long way off. Not having been in a swamp like this, there are bound to be plenty of birds you haven’t seen.”
“I’m an ornithologist.” said the Earth pony. “I know all the birds in the area. There aren’t any vultures or gulls in these swamps, very few birds of prey, and nothing that would circle in those kind of numbers.”
Firelock looked up at the birds, closer this time. His advanced pegasus eyes noticed something an Earth pony would have a lot harder time with.
“What’s your name?” Firelock asked suddenly, looking down at his cutie mark.
“Silica Chert.” A name said proudly, by a pony whose name didn’t match up with his wing-and-book cutie mark.
Before Firelock could even ask the question Chert was already answering it.
“Couldn’t abandon the family name, even after I moved off the rock farm.”
“Well, then, you need to talk to Captain Spitfire, because despite me hanging on as an advisor in this situation, it seems I have as much pull as a dingleberry across military lines.”
It only took a hop from one boat to another to find Spitfire rowing herself, a sheen of sweat doing its best to wash off the bug repellent.
“Yes?” Spitfire asked tersely. They were destined to butt heads after he’d made a comment about how he was right about the outboard motors.
“Chert has spotted something odd off in the distance, he thought it should be brought to your attention.” Firelock carefully put Chert in-between them in the conversation, where Chert succeeded to flounder like a chicken in the water.
Unable to find words, he resorted to pointing at the “birds” off in the distance. Spitfire took one glance at the birds and then a grumpy look back at Chert.
“Yeah, so? They’re just birds.”
“I don’t think so. Look a bit closer.”
Spitfire squinted into the distance before her expression of annoyance changed to that of shock. She turned back to bark at the soldiers, lazing around at their posts on the small boats, resigned to the mosquitoes.
“We’re moving NOW.”
Chert squinted at the dots in the distance. They were getting bigger, but they were getting bigger than they should have, and it was taking longer to get to them than was expected. So to pass the time, he looked at them through his binoculars to try and get a better idea of what he was looking at, and possibly cross reference it to one of the magical species of birds, or possibly a gathering of dragons.
Through his binoculars he could just make out some details, but the sunset obscured most of the fine detail.
They were pot-bellied, with a thin visible head that glinted in the distance. Their wings were huge, and he believed them to not be feathered. As they flew in slow circles, he began to notice their behavioral patterns. Not once did he ever see one of them land. They also seemed to have some kind of purpose to their circling: As they got closer, it seemed more and more like they were taking turns making long glides in the convoy’s direction before circling back into the flock.
Eventually, though, a cloud moved between him and the “birds,” and Chert frowned at it. This was important research and shouldn’t be interrupted by the presence of unnatural, un-pony -controlled clouds. He was about to put his binoculars and notebook away when he saw something remarkable.
The “birds,” whatever they were, had began to skim the cloud, and in doing so, had come a lot closer. Hastily he brought his binoculars to bear and just could barely make out what they looked like.
They had leathery wings with extremely thick joints connecting them to the shoulder. It was hard to make out details at this distance, but it looked like they had brightly colored scales of some kind that didn’t sit flush with their bodies, instead they seemed to bristle out. The scales seemed to be red-tipped, with a bluish sheen to them, almost metallic. They had a thin head that Chert thought was impossible, it shouldn’t have been able to hold a brain in there, because he believed he could see the eyes from all the way back here - he thought he was seeing either eyes, or a very strange third or fourth mouth.
What really stuck out about them, though, was that they were skimming the clouds with their gaping mouths, or possibly gills of some sort, as they seemed to have two holes on either side of their neck, eating away at the cloud in some unknown fashion. Within minutes, the cloud was entirely gone and they seemed to be flying a bit heavier in the air than before.
Turning to look about in the sky, he noted that there were plenty of other clouds that they seemed to be ignoring, and it was only this one that they took offense to.
“So what have you learned so far?” Spitfire demanded of Chert, who seemed to be the only pony both lazing around and getting work done at the same time.
“They aren’t birds. They could be dragons, however, they lack features we normally associate with dragons, like only having one mouth. They have scales, like dragons, but they seem to flock, like birds.” Chert paused, unsure before continuing. “Oh yeah. And they’re watching us. And they seem to be able to eat clouds?”
“Yeah, how do you know about that last part?”
“Well, for the last hour they’ve been taking turns making long glides in our direction, and as soon as a cloud got in their way, they attacked it. They don’t seem to take offense at any of the other clouds in the area.”
“So, do they look dangerous?”
“I don’t think so, however their level of coordination suggests that they’re watching us for something else, some specific reason.”
“Well, that's not a comforting thought.” Spitfire rubbed her chin while squinting into the distance at the things. “Anything else you can tell us about them?”
“From this distance? No.”
“Keep an eye out anyway. If they start looking aggressive, start making a lot of noise.”
Everypony in the entire convoy tensed up when they heard a rumbling off in the distance. There was alert in the air as muskets were raised by what looked like tired soldiers. Even Firelock had raised his own jezail. The air was tense; it sounded like some rumbling beast was approaching them directly.
Then Firelock laughed and everybody nearby turned to glare at him.
“That's a gryphon smuggling airboat. I never would have thought to use row boats to catch them.”
Sure enough, minutes later, two gryphons on a flat-bottomed fan-backed boat appeared from the undergrowth, to meet a blockade of angry ponies with guns. Instantly, they shut off the boat and raised their claws in the air before immediately trying to fast talk.
“We have rights!” said one.
“None of you have a warrant for our arrest! This is clearly an illegal holdup, and bandit activity.” said the other, better-spoken one.
Firelock didn’t even have to look at them to know who they were. One was a puffed up (literally) little punk who looked like a pigeon. He would probably fail most middle school tests you could throw at him, but Tippler could out-fly, out-hide, and out-shoot three quarters of the ponies under Firelock’s command.
The other was basically a giant runt: What he lacked in height he made up for with bulk. What he lacked in looks, he made up for with not only being mechanically minded, but legally minded, which tended to surprise his prosecutors when they attempted anything. Canarien or Canar looked like a brick, but he could talk lawyers around like a cart salesman convincing you to take a bad loan. By the time they recovered their balance, he would already have them on the defensive.
Even as Canar was being fitted with a wingclip, he was already making legal arguments about how they were being treated.
“No need for that, Canar.” Firelock spoke up. “I know who you are, and I signed your arrest warrant myself. You’re criminals on Equestrian soil. Not only that: you got yourselves up against a military tribunal this time. Should have left that jewel thief back in Baltimare.”
And that was that.
Firelock could still remember the first time he put a wingclip on the meat smugglers years ago. It didn’t actually clip their wings, it merely messed with the primaries and forced them, if they could actually get in the air, to spiral around on one wing. He wasn’t quite sure how wingclips worked back then, so the way he had put them on, the two criminals crashed directly into one another.
They weren’t friends, not by a long shot, but he could understand their point of view. You couldn’t get meat from Equestria, too many animals were sapient, due to its closeness to the magical pole, which haphazardly dumped magic out on a huge scale. Ponies in Equestria didn’t eat meat, unless it was something like shrimp at a high class party. Both of these things led around to strict laws with unintentional effects.
One of these effects was that monstrous creatures, like cragodiles, became illegal to hunt for meat, despite actually being outright dangerous to ponies. Many creatures in wilder places, like the Everfree, and even the swamps down here in Baltimare. were similarly off limits. Combine that with strict meat license requirements, and that's how you get meat smugglers.
“You gotta tell them we didn’t know they were an artifact dealer, Lock.” Tippler said. “They said they were a jewel thief, and we didn’t get why that was a bad thing. If we woulda known about what they did with the amulet, we wouldn’t have touched ‘em.”
“I’m certain Canar will probably argue your sentence down, or something.” Firelock said unconcernedly.
“Yeah, but you know us. We try and keep our beaks clean for that stuff. It looked like the guy was paying a lot to run away from a bitland theft. Aiding and abetting a guy who stole maybe fifty bits worth of stuff couldn’t have gotten us more than a fine.”
“And you weren’t at all suspicious about the amount of money he was offering?”
“Well, no. We just figured he was some rich brat who didn’t know how little he was running away from. I mean, we didn’t see no massive sack of gems, so we just thought we’d take his money, get him on his way, and make sure not to tell him what he had to worry about. If we’d’ve known...”
Firelock knew the two gryphons well enough to know they weren’t lying. Not enough to prove anything in court, but they might well call him up as a character witness. He actually tended to agree with them about the meat laws in Equestria. Gryphons on occasion needed what they couldn’t get without a license, and that lead to more crime than was necessary. More crime, heavier sentences, more distressingly unhealthy gryphons he had to arrest.
“Yo, Locky, why we goin’ that way?” Canar spoke up.
“We don’t have time to row back and drop you off back in Baltimare, when we’re almost where we were going in the first place.”
Once again, military regulation shot them in the foot. Convoys couldn’t travel faster than their slowest component, so while there was a perfectly good airboat and plenty of fuel, nobody could use it, and it had to be a rowboat.
“There have been reports of creatures from out of the Fermi Object out that way. We’ve been sent to investigate.”
“Yeah, I mean, those bird things are different, but we had to stare down a monster larger than a cart, really angry lookin’ thing with lotsa scales, it just took down a cragodile. I don’t think we should be goin’ that way. Maybe you should take us back for the trial.” Canar never played poker, he had a courtroom face. He was using his courtroom face.
“Well, why don’t you tell us about this monster then.” Spitfire said from behind them.
Canar didn’t jump, he only jumped internally; Firelock did jump.
“I dunno, miss, it’s never a good idea to talk to officers without a lawyer.”
“Then why were you talking to Commander Firelock here?” Spitfire jabbed.
“I know him, and if we’re going where I think we’re going, I’d like to get out of there alive.”
“So what, with all these armed and trained ponies. What could possibly worry you in this company?”
“Those things have become a lot more active lately. They aren’t friendly, and they don’t like gunfire.” It took a lot to make Canar crack, but he looked close to letting something slip past his guard.
“I don’t see the problem here,” Spitfire said, taking up the unspoken challenge. “We’ve got plenty of guns, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I know, but I mean, guns only piss ‘em off. Bullets just bounce off like they’re tennis balls.”
“And you haven’t told me about them before...?” Firelock inquired.
“They’re just swamp creatures. They look like cragodiles, hydras, and ‘dose crab spider things. We thought you’d know about them.”
“Spitfire, can I talk to you for a moment?” Firelock asked.
They hopped off onto another boat, away from the two convicts.
“All right. So, the scientists have some sort of plan if the creatures aren’t hostile. What's our plan, in case they are?”
“That’s why you’re here. I'm here in command, but this is still technically a naval action. Didn't you read your job description?”
“Oh, I thought I was in more of a general advisory role here. That explains a bit.” With that, Firelock walked off, to try and save a bit of face from his sulking earlier, which was the reason he didn't fully read anything given to him when all this started.
Hopefully, she thinks I’m going off to come up with a plan. Firelock thought to himself, with a hint of shame.
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.
Regrouped
Spitfire was having a bad day. The gryphons had slipped away in the confusion, leaving behind their boat, but carrying information about the aliens to who knows where. Firelock was most likely dead, but officially only MIA. And nobody could agree on what should be done about the aliens. They probably didn't have much time either. Knowing those two, they would go directly back to the gryphons.
The politicians (the few who knew about the alien survivors) wanted action taken immediately, because this could upset the international community. But they lacked the coordination to put together a statement beyond “something should be done” in any definitive sense. That's why having the princess in power was important: a special case, where an immortal benevolent ruler really came in handy.
The science team wanted an unfeasibly large military action in the swamp to contain, and PROTECT, the aliens. This was something they were not geared for, in a location where aliens could simply wade through swamp waters, and ponies would have to swim. Not only that, but Spitfire knew that before anything could be done to contain them, the military would have to know something about them, to make sure they wouldn't eat through the containment walls and wards, or cast magic over the wards, or outright through them. There were just far too many unknowns there to even count.
The military wanted them exterminated, subdued, anything. Having aliens that were immune to guns, especially modern ones, was a major threat to their doctrine of pegasus mobility, earth pony stability, unicorn superiority. There wasn't any current animosity with the gryphons, but the second they found out about aliens that were immune to guns were on Equestrian soil, there might be. That was the problem, it was this nasty loop of things that were worth going to war over, because they were good to have if one were in a war, but without there being any actual reason to go to war in the first place.
The expedition, by far the smallest and most outspoken of the groups, urged caution on all sides. Chert was the one Spitfire remembered the most, speaking up to both sides.
"They seem highly coordinated, almost a hive mind, with armor strong enough that even if we were to try and trade pony lives for theirs, I would imagine that we would be losing both ways in the exchange."
Spitfire had advocated similarly but for a different reason.
"Somehow, these aliens were able to take out a highly trained pegasus guard, and if they had wanted to, they probably could have hunted down our entire party. They're after something, and we know nothing about what they're after, or what we can do to stop them."
Both ponies had actually been presented as a sort of ace in the hole to try and convince the other that they were completely right. Spitfire didn't even want to think of the logistics problems involved with a large-scale operation inside of a cragodile swamp, but what Firelock showed her indicated that a larger expedition would have even more problems without the swamp's usual fauna getting in the way.
Taking down a hydra was hard enough, taking one down in the middle of a bug-ridden, filthy, muck-encrusted abomination of geography would be a nightmare.
Now they were stuck in a room with the science team, who Spitfire considered actually open to negotiation. The science team was led by a wiry diamond dog named Pablo. Once Spitfire found out who he was, she liked him a lot more for his practical approach to complicated problems.
Pablo was a very thin, floppy-eared diamond dog, with a thin tail that curled up at the end. His fur was brown, except on his forearms, which were white. All of his fur was very thin, just like himself, which gave him an almost emaciated look.
Pablo was also the expert on these aliens, and head of the very well-funded, and also very frustratingly slow-to-progress, research into them. He had actually named them "Riloks" after the first information they had extracted from mostly still intact DNA, or DNA-A as he nicknamed it.
"WAIT!" shouted Pablo. "The first contact with an alien species and you SHOT AT THEM?"
"I don't think peaceful relations were exactly going to happen." Chert said. "They were VERY aggressive. And showed no signs of intelligence beyond coordination. Sort of like ants in that respect."
"But still, this is our first contact with an alien species. What if those had been just mindless scouting drones?"
"It's very easy to say all of this in hindsight, Pablo. You weren't there. They started attacking the second one of us started giving an order. If Firelock hadn't figured that out so quickly, we probably wouldn't have made it back here."
That only made Pablo more angry.
"If I ever get my paws on him..."
"Then I hope you give him a proper burial. It's his sacrifice that allowed us to even know this much about the aliens. All of Dr. Chert's, and all the other scientists’, notes would be gone, and I have no idea how many of them we would have been able to get out of there."
"Yes but, but..." Pablo still seemed angry, but was unable to find a way to argue. "It's just so frustrating for me. We've found out so little about these Riloks from the ship piece alone, that the idea of them just... dying on us, scares me. There is just so much we need to learn from them..."
Pablo slumped into a nearby chair.
"I was the first one to do the Potassium 40 test, you know. That's why I'm head of this department. I'm not even all that great a manager here, I'm just good at finding and thinking up new tests to use on them." Pablo laughed awkwardly. "I guess I wasn't thinking about you guys there. It's just that they've traveled so long to get here that I can't lose them now, not when we still have living specimens."
"What's potassium-40 dating?" Spitfire asked, "I mean, I've heard of carbon dating, wouldn't that be better?"
"Carbon-14 dating doesn't exactly work in space, you see, you need an atmosphere, and to be relatively close to the sun for it to work. Even if it did work, it only goes back a couple thousand years, it doesn't go back as far as we need it to." Pablo seemed to be getting into explainy scientist mode. "Potassium-40 works because it has a much longer half-life, somewhere around 1.3 billion years, and doesn't require an atmosphere."
"I've heard about that. Those numbers aren't true, are they? They sound absolutely absurd." Chert piped in.
"We've tested them for potassium-40 dating so often I could do it in my sleep. Those aliens have been traveling through space for somewhere around 900 million years."
"You're kidding right?" Spitfire said, looking around. "Nothing could live that long."
"That's why I need a living specimen. I have to figure out how the hell they did it. That could be the secret to anything from cryostasis to interstellar space travel." Pablo seemed to have regained a bit of his composure. "You can see why I was so angry at you for shooting at them now. If possible, I want a long, LONG time to study them."
"Yeah, but you weren't there," Chert spoke up gravely before Spitfire could. "As far as we know, they've already killed a pony now. If nothing else, you need to treat them with respect. They are not just test subjects."
"I'm still holding out some hope for Firelock." Spitfire said, having been the one to put him down as only 'MIA' on her report.
Silence awkwardly sat around before Spitfire forced herself to break it.
"OK, so what can you give me to give those military bigwigs and convince them that these things are worth keeping around to study?"
"Surviving 900 million years in space isn't good enough?"
"They think they're enough of a threat that we can get that from them after they're dead." Spitfire said, with some distaste.
"Well, let’s see, we could find out how there are more than one of them now. Find out what alien biology is like. Find out how they digest local plant matter. Find out some definitive answers as to what life on other worlds would look like." Pablo scratched his chin. "We couldn't find out how those scales work unless we captured one alive, since those are an active component. I would like to examine the eye structure of the fliers, as they seem to have very acute eyesight. I'd like to know their social structure, how they seemingly gave and received orders without magic or verbal communication."
Everypony was staring at Pablo, but he wasn't done yet.
"Also, the alien plant life is a complete mystery; possibly a symbiote, or a replacement for hair."
"I think that's enough. Could you write all that down for me though? I don't know if I'll remember all of it and I doubt I could give it the proper scientific terminology." Spitfire emphasized the last few words hoping to imply to Pablo that's what she wanted.
"Oh, uhh, I'm not too confident that I'm the right dog for that."
"Come on, Pablo, this is just like renewing your grants. You've done that enough to know what you're doing in that department." Chert spoke up. "That's what we all have to do, and if you can't do it then you shouldn't be leading this project."
"All right, I'll see what I can do."
Later, Spitfire had to meet with her military superiors, none of which were too happy.
For the moment though it was only General Destrier, who was named after an ancient general. Spitfire felt a lot of tension in the air between them for some reason.
"So." Destrier hadn't turned back to actually face Spitfire. "You don't think we should wipe out these aliens."
"There are too many unknowns. We don't know how many there are, and the appear to be immune to small arms, even without any sort of armor." Spitfire didn't like the atmosphere Destrier was giving off. "If they have any amount of intelligence behind them at all, they would be able to ignore a great deal of the Equestrian military."
"So you don't think we'll be able to beat them on equal terms then?"
"Not in a swamp like they are now. Even if we had the terrain advantage I wouldn't put it past them to have another surprise for us."
“Not confident in magic eh? I've never met a beast who didn't recoil from a good fireball.”
“It's a swamp, they're probably too damp to burn. Even then I don't want to go in with magic as our only unverified hope. It didn't work on the Windigos there is a distinct chance it won't work here.”
“But you don't know that.” Destrier shot back.
“Exactly. Neither of us do. I'm strongly advocating that we try and find out, it's cheaper in both lives and bits.”
Destrier finally turned to face Spitfire. He almost didn't look like a pony, if Sombra himself met that gaze he may have recoiled himself. Spitfire had heard of ponies who had broken fighting terrible things like quarry eels and hydras that nested with Equestrian borders, but she had never seen a pony remain stalwart and tempered in the face of such adversity. The fires had left behind only hardened steel, even down to his looks, down to his missing ear and nasty tooth-mark scars on both sides of his face that left little pockmarks of skin, as if something very large had bitten directly onto his head.
"So, what do the eggheads say about this?"
"They want to stand back and observe. I agree with them there. We may be able to single one out for study, or find some weakness."
Destrier looked at her for a long moment with that harrowed look. Finally he spoke.
"Very well. We're going to stand back and let your scientists do their work." Destrier held out a hoof to shake. "Thank you for your counsel here, I'll make sure the word gets through."
Spitfire decided she should just accept that she got what she wanted and leave, but before she could, Destrier spoke up again.
"I've been told you have my son's rifle..." There was another long pause. "I would like to have that back, it's a bit of an heirloom from my father."
It took a second for Spitfire to put the pieces together in her head.
"You're Firelock's father?!" Spitfire knew he came from a military family, but for it to be one this prestigious was unexpected.
"Yes, we hadn't talked in years before now. We barely even wrote." Destrier paused again before finally asking another question. "Did he go out honorably at least?"
"He grasped the situation faster than anybody else and saved the life of everybody on that expedition."
"That's... good to know." Prechetov Destrier turned back to the window to glare back at the swamps again, as if he could destroy them with his mind.
Airship
Two weeks had passed, and cooperation between government agencies had produced fruit already. Spitfire stood at an empty dock, waiting for the rest of the first crew to arrive.
The crew was a strange mismatch. Spitfire was on it as a supervisor because she was a survivor of the first official encounter. It was a position she debated her qualifications, even formally, only to be told that she was a uniting influence and that “We have confidence you can learn from others’ mistakes.”
Pablo was the first to show up, five minutes early and organized to a fault. Spitfire took one look at his messenger bag, and knew it was over-engineered and probably customized to an extreme degree, possibly even costing as much as those expensive saddle bags they used up in the snooty districts of Canterlot. This wasn’t something Spitfire felt she should comment on out loud, as her well-used suitcase probably cost as much.
Pablo clearly didn't feel like talking and neither did she, so he just pulled out a book and plopped himself down next to a shipping crate to wait. While waiting, Spitfire couldn't help noticing that the book was one of those cheap sci-fi thrillers you could get for four bits with the even cheaper wood engraving printed covers.
The next to arrive was an assortment of special ops; Spitfire couldn’t help thinking of them as one entity. They were here on guard duty, and even if she learned their names, she wouldn’t try to remember them afterwards. It wouldn't be their real names anyway. They looked inconspicuous and blended into the Canterlot crowds too well. Here, they resembled little more than a random mix of tourists and nobility waiting for an airship to dock.
Time passed, and Spitfire wished she had thought to pack a book somewhere in the outer parts of her suitcase. Sure, it was only five minutes until everybody was supposed to be here, but as the leader of the expedition she had to maintain some air of command, and nobody seemed up for conversation.
Prechetov was the next to arrive. The air around him was as cold as ever, but he seemed to have calmed down since yesterday.
“I wasn’t aware that you were going to be coming on this expedition, General.” Spitfire said, tossing off an informal salute. In this bizarre case she was technically a general herself, or at least elevated to the rank of one temporarily.
“I’m not. I’m far too close to all of this to hold any command over it.”
“Oh, did they take you off this case?” Spitfire inquired.
“No, I took myself off of it. Reflecting on myself after we last met, it was clearly the best option.” Destrier smiled. “Had good timing on that too- got to tell them I shouldn’t be in charge here before they could tell me I shouldn’t.”
The both had a chuckle at that.
“Anyways I thought I could borrow some of your optimism before seeing you off officially. I’d like to ask that you keep looking for my son.” Destrier looked her in the eyes. “Just a personal request, mind you. I’m not expecting you to find him standing on top of a pile of fallen foes, exhausted and ready to come home, but I gave up on him too early and I shouldn’t have.”
Spitfire nodded back at him, unable to think of a reply to that.
It was then that Silica Chert showed up, out of breath and almost late, followed behind by the rest of the scientific delegation. It was apparent that several minutes ago, they were prepared and even early.
"Got the wrong dock," Chert waved a hoof off at the only dock to have an airship in it. "Saw the ship and just assumed."
"It's fine." Spitfire said. "This isn't a cruise liner or a ferry, we wouldn't have left without you anyway."
"What isn't?" Chert asked, looking around the empty dock for an airship.
Unconsciously Spitfire looked down to confirm where she was on the dock, noting the wooden slats at her hooves and a small mark she left to remind herself. Then she turned to her right, grabbed something invisible, and opened up a door that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
The outside of the door was invisible, but inside was clearly the inside of an airship hanging there in mid air as if suspended on nothing.
"Ah, the special ops spyship." Destrier said, in a good-natured inter-department manner. "Only heard rumors about it, never seen it myself. Well, you can't see it, that's the point."
He paced down the dock, while everypony else remained shocked, waving his hoof around as if trying to find something.
"Magnificent, not even a trace of an air current anywhere, magnetic induction and Pegasus magic eh?"
Here, Spitfire thought, was a nerd: not of comic books, or radio shows, but of military hardware.
It was a strange thought for her, a thought she had to roll around in her mind to get used to.
"I'll confess, I mostly came out here to see what they would give you for this mission." Destrier said with a smile on his face. "Only the best. Now." Destrier turned to Spitfire, all business once again.
"I don't know what they say in the spying agency, but go out there, and find out how we can give those bastards hell."
That bizarre change in tone was enough for Spitfire to forget herself in shock, until they were already on the spyship and closing the door. Inside was closed and a little cramped to accommodate the massive amount of magical and mechanical tech, as well as provide the lower levels as a viewing area. Since there was no upper deck, all of the mechanisms went fully up to the gas envelope above them.
She wasn’t piloting the ship, that was down to one of the faceless specialists, so Spitfire and the rest of the scientific crew moved to the back of the ship to the cabins. The cabins were small, shared a toilet and a “kitchen” which was an electric stove, a fridge, a sink and shelves upon shelves of cans. The bathroom didn’t even have a sink and amounted to little more than a toilet closet with a lock. However, this wasn’t actually where ponies were expected to live, this was where they were expected to sleep. Everything else, even eating, was to be done down on the observation deck.
The observation deck was huge. It ran the entire bottom of the ship. There were numerous tables spaced around, stools, telescopes, infrared magical detectors, radios, and even what Chert pointed out was a spectrometer.
“Why would we need a spectrometer with something like this?” Chert asked out loud.
“It’s not really a question of why we would need one, more that a reason couldn’t be expressed to exclude it. Maybe these aliens burn hydrogen instead of eating. That could explain how they survived in space for the better part of a billion years.” Pablo said, taking the spectrometer out of Chert’s hooves and putting it back down on the desk. “We have so little to assume and go on, even with the decayed ones we’ve studied, that leaving out unusual scientific instruments could deprive us of information.”
And so they set off into the swamps south of Baltimare.
Nothing happened on the way, apart from a heated discussion as to what the most bizarre of the scientific instruments was used for. It turned out that it was a prototype toilet unclogger that somebody had thought to put a screen onto. It had a name that told you nothing about it, and none of the scientists could immediately think of a use for it.
The swamps themselves were as unexciting as they always were: mud, plants, fetid water, dead trees and mangroves.
Spitfire came back from the crew quarters to find the first bit of excitement they’d had all day. One of the scientists, a botanist, had spotted something down in the water she didn’t recognize.
Spitfire peered down at the plant, it was a dark greyish bulb that looked like a half-formed glassblower’s experiment. It didn’t have leaves, just a stem that expanded into a bulb.
“I want to go get a sample!”
Spitfire immediately stepped in.
“No. That’s up to our specialists.”
“But, it’s the first alien plant life ever discovered! I HAVE to go see it!” the botanist insisted.
“You’ll see it plenty when it’s safely put away somewhere. We’re going to send down a specialist with a neck guard and scuba gear.”
“For water that shallow? I can see the bottom from here.” Another scientist, this one a biologist said.
“Assume nothing about these aliens. The ones we’ve already met have been far more dangerous than you can imagine. It’s not out of the picture for those plants to leap up, pull you under, and start strangling you.”
The tension could be cut with a knife as a pegasus in full scuba gear with a neck guard and a patented “unkinkable” air hose was lowered down to grab a sample of the plant. And… nothing.
The plant was just a normal plant and everypony breathed a sigh of relief.
That was where things went wrong.
One of the Riloks showed up, a new one. If Spitfire wanted to slap a name onto this one instantly she would call it a “Brain Monster”. It was clearly the most intelligent of them, as it looked like it was designed to look in six different directions at once, and it was the largest of the Riloks she’d seen by a large margin.
It warbled at the pegasus seemingly hanging out of thin air. Spitfire, able to hear even through the spyship’s glass could have sworn it was trying to say something.
Even as the specialist was hoisted back up into the ship, and the orders were given for a random course correction for the next half an hour so the ship couldn’t be tracked, Spitfire couldn’t keep her eyes off of that Rilok.
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.
CH. 07 Half Spoken Perfeclty Understood
Half Spoken Fully Understood
Spitfire had to be pulled out by the parachute tether. Nobody was quite sure what to do with her. She just sat in the cargo bay, as scientists without a clear goal in mind rushed about, lacking in leadership--as their supposed “leadership” was sitting in the cargo bay in shock, or gushing over the new alien find with a camera.
It took a long minute or two before somebody had time or wits to notice that Spitfire was actually not responding and nopony else was doing anything about it. The actual trigger for action was somepony shouting “What did it do to Spitfire?!”
Later, Spitfire would deny remembering having to be wheeled up to the medical bay with the whole group following behind. She remained unresponsive until they actually got there. The first thing she remembered is hearing somepony say:
“Get the MT scan out here! We need to know what it did to her brain!”
She sat up to find a good portion of the ship’s crew surrounding her bed, looking at her with interest ranging from scholarly to medical.
Then one of the crew she couldn’t quite remember spoke to her.
“Spitfire?” she said. “Are you still in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, we’re gonna need you to tell us what happened down there, because from our perspective it didn’t look like much.”
It took Spitfire a while to collect herself again and remember what they were asking about. She just couldn’t wrap her head around it.
“It, that thing, it spoke to me.”
About half the room started talking at once. It took Pablo speaking up and taking control of things to calm them down.
“What did it say? Was it some sort of spell?”
“Did it try to brainwash you!?”
“What secrets of the universe did it reveal?”
“Was it a lottery number?”
It took the group a long while to calm down, which fortunately gave Spitfire more of a chance to catch up to where she was now. Not enough time to fully process what had happened down there, but enough for her to get her bearings as to the situation.
“It told me my name...”
This time there wasn’t an uproar like Spitfire was predicting.
“Then it pointed back at itself and gave me Firelock’s.”
Pablo was the first to break the silence.
“What?”
“It wasn’t some kind of mind magic. It spoke to me in broken English*.” Spitfire repeated.
“Uhh… Well if you’re fine, I guess we should get down there and… interrogate it.”
As the shock faded, Spitfire wanted to know what was going on... no, she NEEDED to know what the Tartarus was going on.
They found the creature slumped in its cage where it had been at first. Spitfire couldn’t get over how pony-ish its movements were. The slumped, clawed trunk-like appendages, its wedge-shaped body flopped over, with all those strange upright scales. Its head mostly seemed to arch up from behind its body like it was operating a standing forklift. That somehow seemed apt to Spitfire: the creature seemed very… designed, like this thing was designed to run directly into the line of fire, except for its head which Spitfire could only call “the one that should go on the big brain alien.”
It looked over at them with its three segmented eyes with the armored lids half closed over the eye. Even its head and neck were armored the same way its body was. It had no visible ears, but it’s face remained surprisingly expressive despite the armor plates. The creature sighed as they came in, and Spitfire noted that the armor plates puffed out a bit and stayed that way, on its face and down the center of its neck.
That really hammered home that this thing was designed to take a bullet. The whole creature looked like it was made so that you couldn’t get a head-on shot anywhere along its body at all except from directly behind it. Even the scales were articulated such that they looked like they could flip forward if need be.
As she walked down the stairs into the cargo-hold, Spitfire could only guess as to what it meant when it had told her that it was Firelock. Was this a mutagenic process? Magic? Some sort of mind transfer?
Things went wrong when they actually reached the cage, where the chattering scientists behind her started trying to communicate with the creature. It was pretty clear to Spitfire that the creature couldn’t speak well enough to answer one tenth of the questions thrown at it.
That was when they all observed a great indication that a rilok was becoming agitated: all of its scales started to stand up, then it started to rattle them together. This did have a silencing effect. For all of three seconds.
The group from Canterlot were not used to field work. They were put together for their being on hoof firstly, then their expertise. Not to say that these weren’t some of the top minds in their fields, they just weren’t the most wilds-aware. By approximately 3 hoof-steps from the alien by Spitfire’s estimate, which meant she had a good vantage point behind the crowd for what happened next.
The rilok raised one of its thick clawed trunks into the air and slammed it down, not only rattling but causing an alarmingly large dent in the cage.
Now Spitfire was the farthest in front of the group.
The monster in the cage pulled its trunk out from the indent it made in the cage floor and pointed it at Spitfire and crackled out again in its animal-like voice.
“Sssseak, hhh-” It made a hacking sound in the back of its throat. “Hhhh-er. NNNNNN, NNNO Otthher.”
Reluctantly, Spitfire walked forward to meet the creature. Who, rather than speaking, motioned her to talk with its trunk.
“Assuming that is you in there Firelock, how did this happen to you?”
“Rrrrun, ffffffly, dddrooopp icce cccrahs, ccccattuud.”
That was not terribly descriptive , Spitfire thought, but how else to get this thing to communicate?
“Does anybody have a pen and paper?” Spitfire asked aloud.
Unsurprisingly, there was a set proffered by nearly everypony in the room.
“Okay, if you really are Firelock, could you try writing that down?” Spitfire said rolling up the paper and sliding it through the grate alongside the pencil.
The creature silently picked up the pencil and paper with it’s ponderous trunks, rolled the paper flat on the metal floor and began to write. This was possibly the most informative thing the creature had done so far.
It grumbled as it wrote, clearly frustrated as it got letters wrong. Spitfire could hear a small army of pencil scratches coming from behind her when the creature successfully used the eraser at one point. As it went on, its hackle of scales went up, as it got frustrated with writing in a clearly unfamiliar way.
However, eventually the piece of paper and pencil were pushed out to her again. Naturally, it looked like somepony had been writing with a pencil loosely tied to the end of a stick, but the end result was something like this:
“Flew away from aliens, chunk of ice dropped on back, crashed, captured, woke up like this.”
Or, at least, Spitfire had to assume that was what it said, as the hoofwriting was terrible. Granted this was trunk-writing, so she didn’t have a good fix on what a good standard for that was.
“How can you show us that it’s really you in there?” Spitfire asked before starting to roll up another piece of paper to shove through the grate.
However, she stopped when the creature tapped on the metal grate to get her attention and spoke again.
“Sssssow.”
Everypony pulled in close, as the creature turned its side to them then it flopped over on it’s side. Spitfire noted that even the underbelly had those same balloon scales, like the neck and face. Everypony’s eyes were drawn to a pouch on its belly that slowly opened up.
Inside was something that would keep Spitfire up at night. She could hear a few ponies beside her speak an expletive out loud.
There, clear as day, as the scaled underbelly opened up, closed off underneath a layer of film and attached to the inside of the rilok itself...
Was a pony brain.
*AN: The native language on Equis. Nobody knows how it developed everywhere alongside other languages.
Author's Note
Sorry this one took so long to edit, bad things have been happening up here.