“Applejack, don’t go.” Rainbow wasn’t trying to sound plaintive — she was aiming for commanding, not whiny — but a note of it crept into her voice anyway.
“I can’t stay,” Applejack answered, her eyes still scanning the corridor, her back against the doorframe and her muzzle just poking through. “No more’n you can. We gotta get movin’.”
Pressed against the wall to Applejack’s left, her wings splayed flat against it, Rainbow Dash swallowed. “Yeah, but…” she tailed off. What excuse could she possibly give?
“C’mon, Rainbow.” There was a touch of impatience in Applejack’s voice now. “Ain’t you meant to be the brave one?”
Her feathers fluffing up, Rainbow sucked in an outraged breath. “I am too brave! Just because I think—”
“—Quiet!” Applejack hissed, spinning back toward the other mare to clap a hoof over her mouth. “Do you want it to hear you?”
“Obviously not,” Rainbow Dash said, at a slightly reduced volume. “But just because I think that splitting up right now is a dumb plan, doesn’t mean I’m a coward. It’s basically suicide, AJ.”
Applejack snorted. “Quit your whinging. We’ll be fine. We got two jobs to do, and they’re both a one-pony mission. Ain’t no reason to take twice as long gettin’ ‘em done. Splittin’ up’s the only plan that makes sense.”
“But you heard Twilight’s announcement,” protested Rainbow, knowing already that she was fighting a losing battle. Once Applejack set her mind to something, there was no budging her. She was stubborn as a mule. “The ship’s been breached. Something got in.”
“Oh, horseapples. It was a meteor, Rainbow. There ain’t no lil’ green alien pony runnin’ round out there.”
Rainbow crossed her forelegs. “You’re in denial. We are in trouble, like major T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
“Wowee,” said Applejack drily. “You must’a done well in the Cloudsdale High spelling bees.”
“Ugh.” With a huff, Rainbow threw her hooves up in the air. “Now is not the time for joking around, AJ.”
“Look, it’ll be fine. I’ll find the spare fuel for the pods, and you sort the oxygen in the airlock, an’ we’ll meet back at the escape pod. I don’t rightly know why you’ve gone and gotten scared now of all times, but—”
“—Uh, because we’re in space on Twilight’s janky-ass broken down rocket and there’s something in here with us—”
“—But,” went on Applejack, as though there had been no interruption, “We’ll be in an’ out, lickety split. All you gotta do is flip the breaker in the control room to get the oxygen flowing again in the airlock. Round up any of the girls you can find, and meet me at the escape pod, like I said. Simple.”
“Yeah,” said Rainbow sourly. “Simple.”
“Well alright then.” Applejack smiled broadly, and tilted her hat to Rainbow. “See you on the other side, partner.”
And then she leapt forward from her spot at the door, landing silent and catlike. She rolled as she touched down, and came up with her back pressed against the corner where the corridor turned. And with one last flash of white teeth in the dark as she grinned back over her shoulder, she was gone.
With her heart in her mouth, Rainbow watched the place where Applejack had vanished. The silence pressed in on her, muscling in to fill the void Applejack had left behind her, and her ears folded flat against her skull.
Without all the fancy electric lights Twilight had been so proud of, it was really, really dark on this thing. The emergency signs overhead flashed a dull neon-red every few seconds, providing only sporadic flashes of illumination and leaving the scarlet afterimage of the letters imprinted on Rainbow’s eyeballs until the next flash came to renew them.
Rainbow spread her wings, and then thought better of it. Flying at night was one thing — and not even a thing of which she was particularly fond — but flying in the confines of this darkened rathole of a spaceship was another thing altogether. There were an awful lot of very sharp and sudden corners, all of them metal, and Rainbow had an awful lot of breakable little bones in her wings.
Alright. Alright. Focus. She tried to pull herself together. It’d be simple, AJ had said. Just go to the control room, flip the breaker to get the oxygen back on, and then head to the airlock to catch an escape pod out of there. It sounded simple enough.
If she could remember which way the control room was.
They’d spent too long finding their way to the cockpit to get the diagnostics on what the damage was. Rainbow had expected to find Twilight waiting for them, Rarity and the others at her side, a great big egghead list of stuff to do to fix the ship ready and waiting.
But the cockpit had been empty, the captain’s seat long-cold. Only the flickering computer screens showing a litany of errors and failures. Applejack, thank Celestia, had enough technical knowhow to figure out what they needed to do to get the escape pods up and running; restore oxygen to the airlock that led to the pods, and find the spare fuel for them. How the first lot of fuel spheres had gone missing, Rainbow didn’t know. Probably the alien that Applejack insisted wasn’t real. As if they hadn’t both heard Twi over the intercom with their own ears — bzzt…girls, the ship’s been…hole in the hull, we need to…bzzzt…get to the escape pods and we’ll…crrrk — as if the massive clang of the impact hadn’t been enough to prove conclusively that they’d been hit by something that wasn’t natural. They were all the way out in space, which Twilight insisted was ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent empty, and something hit them, and they were supposed to believe it wasn’t an alien? Rainbow Dash had read enough AK Yearling books to know that when something looked like an ancient curse and quacked like an ancient curse, it probably was an ancient curse.
And this crash? It quacked like an alien, all right.
There had been no sign of anypony else since the lights went down, almost an hour before. Rainbow had been helping AJ in the hydroponics lab — well, more truthfully, she had been watching the muscles in AJ’s forelegs as she dug up the potatoes, and thoroughly enjoying the show. The slight sheen of sweat on that orange-furred forehead, the hyperfocus of those sharp green eyes — ahem. Rainbow refolded her wings pointedly. Time enough to think about that sort of thing later. When they were off this crazy murder-ship.
“Okay,” Rainbow muttered. “Okay, okay, okay okay okay. I can do this. I can do this. Ten minutes, in and out. Meet her at the escape pod. Just like she said.”
But her hooves wouldn’t move an inch.
“Ugh, come on.” She tried again, but she stayed right where she was. Rooted to the floor of the cockpit, staring into the blinking red eye of certain doom.
Some serious self-persuasion was going to be needed here.
“You’re a Wonderbolt. You — you’re awesome.” Her wings spread again, and she took one slow, hesitant step forward.“Yeah. Your Rainbow freakingDash. Danger’s your middle name.”
Another step, and then another.
“Come on,” she snarled. “Mister Alien. Come and get me. If you think you’re tough enough.”
And just like that, she was off. Hooves clanging against the steel floor — maybe a little too loudly, a cowardly voice at the very back of her mind whispered, but she quickly strangled it back into silence. She was Rainbow Danger Professionalism Dash, and she was going to bucking crush that alien into the ground.
Moving with newfound confidence, Rainbow cantered down the corridor, using the sporadic flashes of the emergency signs to light her way. She took a left, then a right, then another left — she was making great progress, and at this rate she might even beat AJ to the airlock — another left, another right, and then suddenly her gallop faltered. What exactly was the route from the cockpit to the control room?
Skidding to a halt at an intersection, Rainbow turned slowly in a circle, looking from one identical corridor to the next. She circled twice more, looking for something, anything, to tell her where she was — and then sat down with a thud. Which of these hallways had she even come from?
“Stupid bucking Twilight,” she said aloud. “Princess of dumb spaceship designs. Why aren’t there any signs?”
The only answer was the echo of her own words.
Hesitantly, Rainbow took a step towards the nearest corridor. How long had it been since Applejack left her. Five minutes? Ten? Celestia’s horn shavings, she wished she’d worn a watch.
She trotted down the hallway, and arrived at another intersection, exactly the same as the first. Oh, buck. This was a nightmare.
“Applejack?” she called. “AJ? You there?”
And this time, as well as the dim metallic echo, there was another noise. A scraping noise, in the distance.
“T-Twilight?” Rainbow tried. “Fluttershy?”
Another scrape, and a slurp, too — from a different direction this time.
“Pinkie Pie, that you?” There was a distinct quaver in her voice now.
Another splashing noise. Something crawling wetly towards her.
“C’mon, this isn’t funny, Pinkie.” Rainbow was turning slowly on the spot, trying to work out where the noise was coming from.
“Isn’t it?” It was a wet, horrible voice — like the sound of vomit and water and oil sloshing around in a bucket together — and it was right behind her.
Rainbow Dash spun to face it, and it smiled down at her, dripping viscous green fluid everywhere — on her face, her wings, her mane.
“Hello,” it said, and Rainbow opened her mouth and screamed.
“Time’s up,” squelched the alien, its goopy jaws opening wider and wider as it leaned closer, ready to swallow her whole.
Rainbow screamed again, louder and longer, and in one convulsive motion, reached up and tore the VR goggles right off her head.
The light was almost blinding, and as the headset clattered to the floor, she slumped back onto her haunches, one hoof clutching at her chest.
“Buck, buck, bucking horsedung!” Her sides heaving, she stared around her. “That felt so bucking real.”
A giggle from beside her. “Oh, I know, darling. Wasn’t that green beastie horrifying?”
Rainbow Dash looked over at Rarity, and her wings fanned out a little from her sides as her breath began to return to her. “It got you too, huh?”
Rarity shrugged one shoulder and patted her elegantly curled mane with her other hoof. “I was the first one. Great beauty leads to great suffering, as they say. Fluttershy was with me, but it chased me instead. I screamed like a filly when it caught me.”
Rainbow turned to Fluttershy, trying to reclaim her usual air of carelessness. “Did you scream too, Flutters?”
“I…I tried,” said Fluttershy a little sheepishly. “But no sound came out.”
“At least Spikey is having fun,” said Rarity happily.
She pointed a hoof across the room, where Spike sat, an overlarge headset slipping down over his muzzle, a grin on his face as he gestured to move his character through the game.
Rainbow frowned. “Who’s he playing?”
“He’s the alien, of course,” replied Rarity, as though it should have been obvious. “You didn’t really believe him when he said he was just going to stay out here and put the kettle on, did you?”
Wrinkling her nose, Rainbow shrugged her wings. “I guess I thought he just didn’t feel like playing.”
“Pass me the wrench, Pinkie!” Twilight said sharply, and Pinkie’s hoof moved through the air, holding nothing. “I’ve just got to…tighten this here, and then…”
“And then we’ll be on our way!” Pinkie said brightly. “I can’t wait to get to the moon.”
“We’re not going to the moon, Pinkie,” Twilight said patiently, her face mostly obscured by the giant black goggles. “The ship was breached, remember?”
Pinkie giggled. “Oh, yeah, like a whale!”
“No, not beached — oh, never mind. Pass me the screwdriver now.”
“Rainbow Dash!” hissed Applejack, making Rainbow jump. “Darn it, where is that no-good shilly-shallier?”
Rainbow narrowed her eyes at Applejack’s sightless face. “Well, it’s nice to know what she really thinks of me.”
“Oh, nonsense, darling,” Rarity said comfortably. “You did shilly-shally, you know. We watched you do it. Now, why don’t you make yourself useful and make some tea, since poor Spikey-wikey is otherwise occupied?”
With a sigh, Rainbow rose to her hooves. “Fine.” It was not as easy to be awesome in space as it was on Equus.
