Author's Note
Distance, time, etc. units are in Earth English for simplicities sake.
I imported this through the less-than-reliable "copy-paste from a Word doc" method. If you notice some words running together that I missed (or any other formatting, spelling, grammar, etc. issues) let me know in the comments and I'll fix them as soon as I can.
Mission Begins
The rattling and clanking of compound materials didn’t register at first. It took several minutes for him to even have enough awareness to connect the sound to any concept other than, “this is interrupting sleep.” Soon enough his training kicked in and he awoke with a startled gasp. Shoving the cover off his hibernation capsule, he attempted a rolling jump onto the ship deck, but thanks to the lingering effects of cryo-sleep, it became something more reminiscent of a pot of spaghetti being tossed on the floor.
With a groan, he forced his eyes open and blinked the blurry vision that accompanied waking from stasis. There was very poor lighting, and it was flickering, something which shouldn’t be happening on a ship.
“SHIT!” he exclaimed, adrenaline crashing his system as he realized the flickering was flames that the auto-suppression systems weren’t putting out. He scrambled to his feet, lunged for the panel labelled “EMERGENCY” next to the portal in the bulkhead wall, and ripped off the cover. His second major clue (the first being the fire) that something was seriously fucked was his repeated slamming of the big red “Push for Fire Retardant” button was doing nothing. The Navy ship-builders were damned thorough, though. Right next to the big red button was a glass panel covering a device whose design hadn’t changed appreciably in centuries.
He smashed the glass with an elbow and pulled out the red canister, pulling the pin and aiming. He realized in that moment that he hadn’t actually taken in the full extent of his situation, running primarily on his training. The fire, he realized, wasn’t that big, but it was in the walls, the flickering light from the flames coming through the access panels that had been popped off from heat and pressure.
Keeping his small firefighting resource handy, he got as close as he could to the wall. A hand to the metal, pulled away very quickly due to the high temperature, earned a few more swear words. A glance around showed no other options, he pulled off his undershirt and wrapped it around a hand. The improvised mitt wouldn’t last even pull cookies from an oven, but it could protect his hand just long enough to let him grip the access panel release and give it a pull. The panel clattered to the floor below, the fire fortunately didn’t pull a backdraft, the open vents providing enough circulation that it was already getting all the oxygen it needed…which was naturally a problem, as he needed it, too, and fire generally didn’t share.
Holding his undershirt over his face as an improvised gas mask he sprayed the fire retardant into the wall space. Fortunately, it wasn't a serious fire, it smothered quickly and save for a few lingering flickers (which were dealt with quickly) the fire was no longer a problem.
He took a few moments to look around as he put his shirt back on. It was about that time he realized the gravity was significantly less than it should be and rapidly decreasing. He bounded over to a hatch, which was jammed halfway, and squeezed through to see a flickering display, the only sign of power he'd seen so far since waking up. While he was no Navy tech or engineer, he knew enough tricks and “percussive maintenance” techniques that he was able to get the display to stop flickering long enough to show a basic diagnostic.
“…the fuck?!” he gasped as he saw a display full of red indicators. The large blinking one was telling him that the power to engineering was cut and the terminal was subsisting off battery power only, and that said battery was discharging at a, frankly, alarming rate. Falling back on his emergency preparedness training, he ran through the standard power conserving measures. Keep life support on, keep gravity on half if possible during triage then shut it off to conserve power, shut down forward thrust, etc. It took about twenty seconds, but the power drop-off was now reduced to about two percent per minute. Considering the gauge now read 64%, that left him about half an hour to figure out what the fuck was going on.
His first stop wasn’t confidence inspiring. Once the power and environment were handled, the next step was to check the rest of the crew. The story wasn’t pleasant at all, as the rest of the members of his squad, including the Staff Sargent and all the other privates, were freezer-burned. The phrase was inaccurate, but the colloquialism for a failed cryo-tube killing the occupant in their sleep had been coined a couple hundred years prior when humanity first reached out for the stars and had remained part of the human lingual lexicon to this day. He took the crushing pain of losing his squad-mates and shoved it away to the back corners of his mind to deal with later.
Not wanting to deal with seven corpses in even partial gravity, he went back to the panel to shut down the gravity. A few button taps later, and he was gently floating off the deck…but not as fast as he expected. Abruptly, he realized the ship must be in a gravity well.
With ease that belied practice and experience, he pushed himself gently over to the hatch he hadn’t gotten around to opening and triggered the emergency release. No sense using the automatic door opening systems when the ship was running so low on power. Fortunately, since the gravity was off his only challenge was friction and inertia, and two centuries of space-born engineering had made humanity very good at building ships to be low on either factor. It took him a handful of seconds to get the door open, allowing him to push through to the portals that granted a view outside the ship.
The planet he saw through the portal didn’t surprise him, though he was pleased to see the light, white wisps of clouds over blue oceans and green and brown continents. That meant he was likely over an M-class planet, obviously supporting life if the green was any good indication, and he had a place he could make landfall and survive longer than half an hour.
The bad news was much closer, and told him that he’d better find a way to get down to said M-class planet, because he wasn’t going to be able to stay on the ship. Visible where the hull of the Marine-pod portion of the Navy cruiser should be was the jagged tear of metal indicative of hyperspace shear. At some point after he’d gone into cryo and the ship entered hyperspace, something had gone wrong and destabilized the hyperspace matrix. Sometimes all that did was leave scorch marks on the hull of the ship and earn the navigator some razzing the next time the crew sat down for mess, but sometimes it literally tore part of the ship off and cast it out of hyperspace, usually in a completely random part of the universe. If you were one of the unlucky S.O.B.s to be on the sheared off part of the ship, you could consider yourself blessed by every god in every pantheon if you were even in the same galaxy as the Confederation.
Another piece of emotional baggage got stuffed into the back corner of his mind. He had a feeling that corner was going to get very full, very quickly.
He returned to his cryo tube and popped open the drawer beneath it, revealing all the personal belongings he was permitted to carry during a deployment.What belongings he had were mostly still packed in his duffel, but he did pull out his field uniform top and shrug it on, the name tape reading “Pvt. Jeff Chaichian” over his left pectoral and a UTC flag on his right shoulder. His left shoulder had a badge with an equine skull wreathed in blue flame and a single, sharp unicorn horn jutting from its forehead, the Standard English language lettering above read, “The Ghost Riders” over the skull and “LUX ANIMA” below it. A bright red ring that read “143 BATTALION, FIRST MARINES” in black text circled the patch. He retrieved his cover and put it over his short cropped sand-colored hair, the action dislodging his duffel and setting it lazily floating into the cabin proper. Private Chaichian sighed and resecured the bag in the drawer. No need to have it floating around while he handled the bodies and the evacuation packing he’d be doing.
At that point he was mostly relying on the training and drills he had done for years, ever since joining the Corps. His squad-mates were quickly dealt with using a field cremation kit, a piece of equipment normally reserved for Staff Sergeants and above, but as Staff was currently a dead human-sicle, the chain of command fell to him. It was a grim duty that ate up valuable survival time, but no marine worth their pay would leave a fellow marine behind.
Next up was equipment, and he was pleased to note that the entire marine packet had remained mostly intact, allowing him to use the automated systems to do a single-person drop loadout and reserving a drop pod for a D.O.A.G. The D.O.A.G., or Droppable Orbital Assistance Gantry, was one of the most humorously misnamed pieces of tech in the modern military. While "droppable" was accurate, in that it was explicitly designed to be part of an orbital drop loadout, the unit was designed for planet-side operations, which meant it wasn't "orbital," it's "assistance" required pairing with a marine's neural interface comms unit, meaning it was more of an extra set of limbs than any sort of assistance, and it was a "gantry" in that it could be loaded with supplies, was vaguely gantry shaped, and it could be used as an elevated moving platform in a pinch. In short, it had fallen victim to one of the oldest traditions in military naming convention; the acronym was more important than the actual name. What was worse was the extra A meant that it failed even that metric, invoking two ancient adages, "Military Intelligence is an oxymoron" and "It means someone really wanted to spell 'shield.'"
In the second half of what he knew would be the last half-hour anyone would spend on this particular marine packet, he double-checked the planet below using his mil-visor paired with the packet's computer to calculate his drop zone...and swore mightily when he saw the tell tale lights of civilization as the day-night terminator passed beneath the ship. That meant he'd need to find a drop zone well away from possible people (which would mean a likely looooong hike through a desert or tundra, since forests and jungles could hide buildings) and then set what remained of the envelope to self-destruct before its orbit decayed further.
He managed to get all the preparation tasks done with five minutes to spare, including minor details like downloading the ships log to the D.O.A.G.'s portable drives and securing all his personal effects into one of the drop pods, took a last look around the place that had been his home for the last six months, then strapped himself in for drop.
From outside the packet, three vents of atmosphere could be seen as the decompression bursts were used to launch the drop pods into their trajectories. Minutes after the pods hit the atmosphere, the battered remains of the marine packet exploded violently from the force of a pocket nuke kept aboard for that specific purpose, and the dust cloud remains would slowly either fall into the planet's gravity well, or drift off into the cold vastness of space.
Princess Luna sipped some tea as she contemplated the night sky above. "Blasted light pollution..." She grumbled half-heartedly to herself. While it was true that she couldn't see as much of the stars as she would have liked, the very presence of the lights in Canterlot meant that there were ponies up and about appreciating the non-celestial aspects of the night, something that ponies a millennia prior were never able to.
She sighed and turned her contemplations more inward, pondering her next foray into the realm of dreams. In the seven years since she returned from exile, she'd managed to calm the dreamscapes quite a bit, especially upon discovering that in the thousand years of her absence an entire body of professions and soft sciences dedicated to helping ponies deal with problems of the mind, something that had been her sole purview as the only multi-generational dream-walker. She had taken to becoming the patron of many of the colleges and hospitals that focused on the realm of the mind and subconscious, and had even started a few new paths for magical training and careers to provide more dream-walkers for the ponies of Equestria. In all, in spite of the population of ponies have grown by factors of hundreds, her workload every night was actually significantly less than what it had been.
Thus it was that she was not otherwise occupied when she felt an unusual mental presence in the dreamscape. It was...alien, was the only word she had for it, and even though it was only felt for a mere moment before the being creating it woke up, it was also remarkable in that it was in an odd location and speed. Unknown to most ponies, Luna's ability to dreamwalk was somewhat limited by space and time. She did, after all, have to sync up her magical energies with the world around her, then carefully resonate her magical field with her target, which required an ability to sense the location of said target. This 'target' was over 300 miles above the surface of Equestria and moving at nearly 200 miles per hour.
Casting her eyes to the heavens, she summoned her telescope with her horn. Orienting the equipment was child's play for her (literally, she had learned to do so as a child when Starswirl realized her aptitude with all things astronomical), and almost without blinking she put the device to her eye and started scanning the heavens.
She nearly missed it. It was so brief that had she not been looking directly at it, she might have never known it happened at all. A tiny bloom of light, high in the heavens, as bright in its tiny spot as a miniature sun. She watched the patch of sky for a few minutes longer, hoping simultaneously for it to repeat and that it would remain a solitary incident.
Finally lowering the telescope from her eye but not taking her gaze off the stars, she shouted, "Guard!"
A flutter of bat-like wings behind her accompanied a barked, "Yes, your highness?"
"Wake my sister," answered the moon princess, "Tell her I must speak with her immediately. There may be...something...coming."
A perfunctory, "Yes, your highness," followed by the rustling of wings told her that her soldier was off to execute on his task. She didn't turn to visually confirm this, her eyes fixed on the sky, squinting slightly in a futile attempt to block out the ambient city lights. "...blasted light pollution!"
