The Free Skies

Twilight yawned as she walked down the C-D aisle in the second to last cargo hold for the night. Even with all of her lists and previous planning, she was still just barely going to make quota on her monthly audits thanks to her ravenous questions that morning. Only her brother, Shining Armor, coming to the tavern and chastising her had broken her out of more questions.

It was late enough that everyone else should have been gone, though faint noise from a few aisles over reached Twilight’s ears and the surge of alarm woke her fully. Setting her clipboard into her right bag she pulled out her radio, turning it to the channel her brother kept for her, only to notice the time on the screen on her radio and sigh. It was after the end of his shift. Turning the radio’s frequency to the right channel, she says in a quiet voice, “Centurion, do you have any guards in the forward cargo hold of The Peach’s Pie?”

She waited a minute after letting the button go before trying again. “Centurion, do you read me?”

A shiver ran down her spine as the seconds ticked away without an answer. Was it just that everyone was dealing with something already, or was this a sign that there were Shadow Soldiers aboard? Her mind raced as she stood there, straining her ears and sending out a scanning spell that returned nothing to calm her nerves.

Nothing but silence greeted her for several minutes before she heard another sound just one aisle over, making her jump. Turning her radio off she quietly made her way to the end of the aisle and carefully looked into the one she had heard the noise from.

The lights were dim but she could make out two figures about halfway down messing with what looked and sounded to be bags of flour. She sighed in relief as she came out fully into the middle of the aisle with her horn glowing. She said, “Stand down now and you’ll get a lesser sentence.”

“Crap, run for it!” One of the two figures said as they both dropped the bags they were carrying, the one that stayed quiet disappeared suddenly as the other started to run.

“Wha- hey!” Twilight rushed after the one running away, turning to follow the wall and loosing the spell she had been preparing. She smiled as she heard a yelp of surprise ahead of her and chuckled as the intruder turned into a lit hallway, exposing a singed cloud and multicolored lightning bolt cutie mark on a light blue flank as they ran. Twilight settled into a pace that was just fast enough to keep up, making use of her tracking spell to stay just in sight of the intruder’s rainbow-colored tail as her mind started a second train of thought. The chase now became a game of cat and mouse as Twilight kept track of where they were on the ship and their path through it.

After the first couple of turns it was obvious that the pony was trying to lose Twilight in the maze of passageways, so Twilight stopped and twisted down a corridor to the side. She was going to waste her own time, she wouldn’t be able to backtrack because of the guards likely swarming behind them, which meant there was only one exit the pony would be able to find in time to escape. It’s a good thing the ship didn’t have just one way to its keel.

Keeping track of her spell and the turns the intruder took, Twilight soon came out onto a walkway under the ship. The walkway in question went along most of the length of the ship and right in the middle another walkway met up with it in a T-junction and off to the left of the intersection was a cruiser-sized ship, clamped to the bottom of the agri-helicarrier. At the far end of the walkway she watched as her target came to a stop at the bottom of an identical set of stairs to the one she just came down.

The distance between them was too far for them to hear each other, but Twilight knew the other pony had to be cursing her out as they stared at each other. She took a moment to glance at the cruiser-sized ship clamped to the hull near the intersection, noting the rope that was just falling away from it that was still attached to the railing of the walkway by a grappling hook. “Damn, wasted too much time and that other one’s on the ship,” Twilight said as she panted from the run. Her eyes returned to the pony she had chased, stomping a hoof on the walkway as if in challenge.

At the other end of the walkway, her opponent crouched and spread a pair of wings. The whine of engines starting up made her glance to the cruiser, only to curse herself and immediately start to run towards the intersection, the pegasus having leaped forward in her momentary lapse in attention. A motion in the corner of Twilight’s eye and the sound of an Arcano Cannon charging up were all the notice she needed to hastily throw up a shield at an angle, the dozens of motes arcing across the keel of the ship and shaking the walkway to where Twilight tripped.

In the next second the pegasus reached the intersection and leapt for the cruiser, quickly disappearing inside as Twilight quickly stood back up and raced to the intersection, sliding to a stop as her mind raced to think of a way to stop them. She was torn from her thoughts as in a screech of metal and the cruiser fell under the walkway before its engines caught it and slowly pushed it under the walkway.

Shaking her head she paused for a moment as an insane idea popped into her head. She took the grappling hook in her magic and started running down the middle walkway, spinning the hook as she gathered up the rope. As she reached the end of the walkway a few seconds later she let the hook fly forward, wrapping around a dangling pipe as she heard some sort of cry of alarm behind her. Leaping off she used her momentum to swing her towards the escaping ship, getting closer and closer until she let go of the rope... barely missing the railing on the back of the cruiser.