Sons of Equestria

Prologue, Part 1: Dark Beginnings

  I remember that day, that dark they that started me down the dark road I now am on. My father, mother, and I were in the Rift Maker Facilities. Two acres of computers with programs to aid in the transport, each backup half a dozen others to provide a fall back in case of failure, generators to provide necessary power without destroying the cities electricity grid, and one machine that received it all to provide only a traveling sequence of ten seconds, if not shorter. Ever since my father had built it, the other scientist had been advancing it, adding support structures, making the whole machine one giant thing of a teleporter. It had been two years since my father had gone to Equestria, and finally the moment arrived when my mother agreed to go. But that was two months ago. We had done the week my father had asked for, and my mother loved it. We had come back to pack a few more things and now we were ready to go to Equestria. My father had told me that we would be the last to go into Equestria from our world. He said that he would have it that no other humans could go to Equestria because he did not rightly trust most other humans to be civilized enough from Equestria. Baedeker had commented to my dad that the coding wall was complete and would activate after we were through. My father, mother, and I all walked to the Rift Maker and heard it start humming as the energy started flowing through it. The field of red energy formed around us as the machine truly came to life. At that moment I knew something was wrong. My father had said that the teleportation flow would start feeling like a crisp autumn’s breeze then shift violently into a hurricane like wind, all I felt was an earthquake under us. I quickly looked at the labs different sensors, mostly at the seismograph, and it was quietly tracing normal activities. Suddenly my father pushed me and my mother from the field. I looked back and saw him trying to run from the machine, but a beam collapsed and… I never saw him again. One of the lab workers grabbed me as another ushered my mother out the room and into the staircase that led up to the surface. My father had just died because of me, because I didn’t try to stop it. Ten days later we had a funeral. Being as his corpse was never found, we simply used one f his lab coat’s ashes and put his name tag on top of it in the casket. I watched as the four men lowered the memories of my father into the ground, and no sooner had the men finished filling in the hole with dirt did some men in black suits come up to my mother and ask her to sign away the rights of the Rift Maker to them. Those four identified themselves as Uranus Innovation agents, and since then I never knowingly bought something from them.  A little back story to those guys is in order. See, Uranus Innovations was trying to buy the Rift Maker since before my father even built the first one. Uranus was very deeply involved in military operations and built a lot of the things that the military used. Uranus was deeply involved in everything from kitchen appliances to pizza in a can sold for three quarters in a cheap vending machine. Anywhere you turned they had a product in one hand and a money clenching fist for the other. Well, as you might imagine, my mother refused saying that it was not her right to sign over any of the rights since she was not one of the right holders. My father had mentioned that he had three right holders besides him. I could guess two of them were Baedeker and Hartman although I could never think of the third so I only naturally assumed it was my mother until she said she was not. These men were obviously going for my mom and Baedeker since Hartman was already one of their employees and only a slight adjustment to a pay check could get him to give it with a VERY large smile. I could see it in their body language and the way they whispered after leaving that they thought my mom had lied to them.

  Two years later I heard a knock on the door and my mom answered as quickly as possible. I suspected it to be one of my few friends visiting like they said they would that day. I was finishing up a level in my game and I knew that they wouldn’t mind since we usually played the same game when we were together at my house. Soon enough I finished and went down the stairs. I was about to ask my mom who had come when I saw her crying near the kitchen’s island. I saw that there was a man in front of her a very tall man in front of her. I instantly recognized the W suit that my father had made a year after he had come back from his inter-universal trip, but I noticed that it looked different than the Mark III, which was the last version I had seen my father make. Suddenly the man saw me and started walk towards me, shaking the ground with every step he took. I fell backwards, petrified by fear. What was this man doing, and why was he even here, and why was my mother crying? All these questions and more were answered in a second.

  “Jason Paladin Webster, you are here by entered into the United Forces as a recruit for a W unit. You are to come with me either by force or by will, which one is it going to be?” I chose force as I ran upstairs, only to be caught by the man quickly and slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He hauled me back to his jeep and strapped me in and drove off with me.

  Ten years change a lot in a person, in my case it changed me on the outside, but as with many, my inside stayed the same as always, determined to return home. I was by that time twenty, and extremely tall and muscular due to the excessive training I had received to enter as a W unit soldier. Through those years I discovered that Uranus had taken over the W suit since my father was the only right holder on it. By that time I had heard reports of how the W units at the time were taking down armies at a time with their Mark V armor. Well, to continue, it is said that when you are twenty you reach full maturity, but in the army that isn’t all you reach. You reach the final augmentation process of your combat training. In my ten years previous I had thirty or so augmentation sessions preformed by mandate of the army, and Uranus for the cause of ‘maximum field performance’. In the last several times I had done this process before, then I had my bone density and height worked on for the most part. Now they said they would not only do that but do a muscle work out. The way muscle usually grows is it is stressed and then it gains more cells and fibers, and so becomes larger. In this artificial version of that process your muscles are shot by electricity and so are stressed, a while they regain themselves and become stronger the scientist inject each muscle with a solution that continues the work long after the process is finished. It is estimated that muscle growth will continue in this process for two years and then when those two years are done, these chemicals maintain your muscle bulk and make it increase twice as much as usual when exercised. Of course all the scientists knew that muscle is heavier than fat, but being able to lift three times the weight of a usual human your age could has its perks in that in the future you will be the one lifting a one ton suit of armor. I entered the machine as what many would call a half man, and left a full W unit worthy fighting machine, but even this augmentation of my body would not gain me entrance into a unit. Two more years of training were ahead of me, making full use of my already expanding muscle mass and adding to it by extra exercise. I was sent to a hangar to be shipped over to the north training camp. As always, the military wanted their soldiers to be able to handle anything, and polar training in nothing but your boxers is used to either make you a Nord or give you hyperthermia. I hoped into the jet-helicopter and waited as the engines fires up. A jet-helicopter is one of the few original ideas of Uranus where their scientists actually thought about something without using someone else’s work. The helicopter looks like any other at first glance, but if you look at it again who will notice the differences. The top propeller of a helicopter isn’t there; instead the four propellers are in twos on either wing. And under each propeller there is a jet engine. Since each propeller can move to adjust where the helicopter is going, when the copter is going forward the pilot turns on the jet engines and gets all people inside to where they are going in a flash. The helicopter lifted off the ground as the propellers fired up and lifted it slowly, mostly because of all the weight of the machine plus to men.

  “I’m glad you’re my pilot today, Baedeker.” I said to the pilot over the radio. Baedeker had been drafted around the time I was first kidnapped, unless you are going by Uranus perspective which would say I went through ‘forced juvenile draft’. Baedeker was given a choice between two things they said he was good at, science or helicopter flying. Being as being a scientist would mean he would be under Uranus, he chose flying. Two hours passed and we already we’re almost there. Five hundred or so miles in that time was extremely fast, even for a jet-helicopter which was rated for two times the speed of sound. Suddenly the ship shook violently.

  “I don’t believe this!” Baedeker yelled over the radio, “Either an engine on our right wing blew out because of nothing, or my radar isn’t malfunctioning and we got several tails on us. They all appear to be ground-to-air ballistic missiles, and in all likelihood their also shrapnel missiles. I’m tracing their launch location now. BRACE NOW HERE COMES ANOTHER!” I put my head on my knees and covered the top of my head with my arms. Once again a blast was heard and the ship shook with even more violence. Suddenly I felt the air ship rise higher into the air, only to be hit once more. By now my eyes were clenched shut, being as I was unwilling to open them. I could feel the ship leveling out, only to be shook by another blast. I looked up and saw both sides of the ship consumed in fire. “Grab a parachute, kid, we might need to bale.” I slung the parachute closest to me and put it over my shoulders. “Currently I’m trying to glide this thing to the camp; the landing gear is good so we should be able to land this thing.” I heard a bleep as Baedeker lifted his right hand to his ear piece. “This is Fulcrum Jet-helicopter 007896, come in landing zone 784 come in landing zone. Do you copy?” I looked at the radar and saw two more missiles coming our way.

  “Baedeker, we got two bogies on our tail. What are we going to do?”

  “Well there isn’t much we can do, kid. We are stuck in a glide with no ailerons for turning or adjusting altitude, and not only that but we’re stuck in a glide heading straight for the training camp. Son, I think it’s time to bale, those two missiles are showing up bigger than the last, probably the big boomers to take us down. Wait… that’s not possible!”

  “What isn’t possible?”

  “The scan on where those missiles are coming from says they came from a Uranus base not two miles from here! I’ll bet you they’re after me! Blasted idiots are willing to do whatever to get the rights on your father’s machine! Well they’re not getting them because we’re baling out!” I nodded and slid the side door open and prepared myself to jump. I could hear the proximity alarm going off, and because of it I gathered my courage to jump out. After three seconds of free fall I pulled the rip cord and felt the jerk of deceleration as the parachute deployed. I looked back up and didn’t see any sign of Baedeker baling out.

  “Baedeker, what’s wrong? Why aren’t you jumping?” He heard the sound of something struggling on the other side of the radio.

  “This dumb door won’t open! It’s jammed! I’ll bet you that when those missiles hit the damaged more than just the wings and engines.” I saw the missiles slowly gaining on the quickly descending jet-helicopter. “I’m sorry, kid; it looks like I’m going down with the ship.”

  “No, Baedeker!” In that instant the two missiles hit and cause the helicopter to get knocked out of it glide and crash into the forest, soon to be met by three more ‘over kill’ missiles.

  Two years later was my initiation ceremony along with around a dozen other soldiers. Since Baedekers death there had been claims that a group of U.N. had hijacked the Uranus headquarters that shot down Baedeker. To some it might be confusing why U.N. forces would hijack anything on U.S. soil, but you must understand that things have changed. No longer is the U.S. part of the U.N., the U.N. is our enemy and has been like that for fourteen years. Ever since China and Russia started attacking U.S. only to ask for forgiveness then do it again, we eventually caught on that they were trying to kill us off. And so U.S. disbanded from the U.N. and declared war. To get back to the ceremony, to be fully entered into the army you were to receive you’re A.I. and new unit. To say I was thrilled when I found out Orion, a remake of one of the original six, would be a mayor understatement. I was assigned to W unit A1, the first W unit to be formed primarily out of ‘infant’ trainees. Not only had I received an A.I. that was a remake of one of the original, but also my unit leader was one of the original six soldiers to be given an A.I. with the one A.I. that was considered the best of the batch. The soldier was Colonel Armando Sanchez and the A.I. was Draco. In the original six there was him and his A.I, brothers Kent and Marcus Jenkins with A.I.s Ursa Major and Minor respectively, brother and sister Logan and Bonny Connors with Lupus Major and Minor respectively, and there was Arnold Johnson with the original Orion. These six were the best of the best and were alive during the time that the Mark III as still in use, which was around ten years ago. I was also given my armor, The Webster suit Mark VII, a rather revolutionary suit actually, being as it came with more add-ons than any other suit before, it also was the first to use a E.E.R. (Energy Emitting and Restricting) shield producer. Before this suit they would use the Polarization Shield method with consists of your suit having an electromagnet that produced a field around you and when a bullet or another projectile came at you the suit would polarize the incoming object to be a like pole with your suit thus making it bounce back from the suit. However this method of shielding was very primitive and only was there to soften the landing of the bullet. It most scenarios the suits metal would stop it while the polarization field would just slow it down enough. But with the Mark VII it had a shield that was made to completely deflect a projectile. It would catch the bullet, at cost to shield power, and make it so the user would not be hurt but know where the bullet came from with the smart function of bullet tracing by using the same technology as the jet-helicopter or any other vehicle’s radar. The suit was also the first to allow you to have you’re A.I. with you at all times. Before the Mark VII the A.I. relied on you to tell it what was happening, thus making them more math crunchers of possibilities than preemptive warning systems and telling which way of two ways is better in an instant. To make it easy, the Mark Vii was going to be the favorite of many and was going to be standing in longer.

  Even though I never stopped being amazed about how I got matched up with Orion, certain other things lost their splendor. One of those things was the fact of being matched up with Sanchez and Draco. It ended up that the original user of Orion had certain issues with Sanchez and Orion had a grudge match going with Draco over fact wars and who could out do the other. I would have to say that Major Johnson had a right to be upset with Sanchez. In the code of conduct it had certain things to say about how leading officers off a unit should act, and most of the time Sanchez broke them and got away with them. But overall, when it came to in action missions, I had fun. Working with my unit and Orion was completely immersive work. When in battle Sanchez and I could actually set aside our anger over a few cartridges at the enemy. Orion and Draco would assist each other and their two respective fighters during battles, giving info on enemy positions to the other so he could tell his fighter before it became too late for action, thus changing entire battles for the better.

  Three years had passed and more changed than I would have had. Four years ago Uranus had taken all rights to the Rift Maker and were already sending out team to encounter other universes while computer scientist worked on finding the ‘Golden Line’, the one line of coding that would not allow any future Rift Probes to detect sector A1 and make it so that the Rift Makers themselves could not teleport there. Soon enough my team and I were transferred into being the first P.E.T. (Peaceful Entry and Treaty) unit, whose main mission was to make contact with other universes and forge alliances before the U.N. could make it to them. At that moment in time we didn’t know if they had a version of the Rift Maker, but we weren’t about to take the chance of finding out they did to late in the game to stop them.