//------------------------------// // Into the Great Unknown, Part II // Story: A New World, A New Threat // by boredhooman //------------------------------// Yousef strolled lazily across the street, taking in the sights and sounds of the town’s main street. He was picking at his AKS-74, a variation of the standard rifle of the Syrian army since the revolution of 2014. He pulled a small twig from the bolt. How long had that been there? “Stop that,” a voice commanded from his side. “Or what, Aali? The Americans will come and get me?” “You’ll shoot yourself in the foot.” Yousef gawked at his patrol partner. “You think I’m that stupid?” “Yes,” came the curt reply. “You know w-” -CRACK-    “What was that?” Aali yelled, bringing his rifle to his shoulder, scanning for threats among the crowd and buildings as he ran off the road and crouched by a nearby dumpster. “Americans?”         Yousef followed suit. “Sounded more like an explosion. But just a single mortar isn’t usual for them.”         “Sniper?” Aali suggested.         “Since when do snipers actually shoot?”         “Whatever,” Aali conceded. “But we still need to check it out.”         Yousef searched in the direction from which he heard the explosion and spotted an alley between two stores. “Down there.”     Aali nodded and raised his rifle. He crept up to the edge of the wall, careful to not make a sound. He quickly turned the corner, his rifle up and scanning for any threats, as Yousef followed from behind. Fortunately, he found none.         “Nothing’s here.”         Yousef shook his head in disbelief. “I could have sworn I heard-”         “Wait,” Aali interrupted. He pointed towards the corner of the alley. “I see something. Is that a...”         Yousef nodded. “Yes. Yes it is.” * * * * * Yousef strolled lazily alongside a small group of hurrying soldiers carrying stretchers, which were recently stored in a covered lorry. As they passed, several of the men gave him looks that would melt ice. Yousef didn’t mind, however. As reward for taking initiative and finding the horses in the first place, Captain Sabbagh had given him and Aali guard overwatch while other lazy bastards who fulfilled the role of warm bodies perfectly were put to work ferrying the cargo from the truck to a more secure location inside the compound’s main building. Oh no, he thought. They have to do something for once. Poor them. As his patrol route returned, he came in the vicinity of the captain himself. “What do you make of this, Lieutenant?” Yousef heard Sabbagh ask a third man as he watched the truck back into the compound, writing something on a clipboard.         The lieutenant shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I have a feeling we should be careful in trusting them.”         “Why would you think that?” Sabbagh asked, turning to address his subordinate.         “They are so... unhuman, sir. They came out of nowhere with a bang. That should be impossible. They-” “What, you think they are the works of the devil?” he interrupted, but received no response. “The world runs as God wills. Unless you mean to imply...”         “No, I would never,” the lieutenant quickly added before the thought could be fully expressed. “I’m just nervous.” “Very well then. You see, I believe that these creatures are a gift, with untold potential for our cause. We must simply take advantage of our opportunity.”         Yousef continued his route as the lieutenant left to concern over his own personal job, while the captain stayed to make sure the cargo was secured to his liking. He eventually caught up with Aali, who had a lit cigarette between his lips and was blowing out the occasional puff of smoke through the other side of his mouth.         “How’s the patrol, Aali?”         Aali shrugged. “Well, no Americans attacked. So I guess we’re fine.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “Thoughts on the whole matter?”         “I’m not sure,” Yousef admitted. “I am not going to make up any theories. There are twelve horses of different colors, six of which are in armor, and that’s all I care to know right now. I will not delve into how this affects our understanding of the universe.”         “Yeah, that’s for the Imam to decide. We’re just soldiers.”         Yousef nodded. “Oh, we’ve also been assigned as part of their protective detail. Maybe we can talk to them. Lessen the boredom.”         “Wow,” Twilight remarked in amazement. “Your people are very eloquent in storytelling.”         “Yes, I guess we are,” Aali agreed. “A tradition as old as humankind itself.”         “Oh, I can’t wait to report all of this to the Princess.”         “Princess?” Aali questioned.         “The leader of all of Equestria,” Twilight explained, if a little too eagerly to Yousef. “She has been my mentor my entire life! When I was a little filly she accepted me into her school as her personal student! She’s almost my second mom!”         Yousef nodded in understanding. “I can see how important this person must be to y-”         A large thud shook the building, causing dust to fall from the ceiling. “What was that!?” Twilight cried.         “Americans!” he yelled, panicking. How close were they? How long have they been there? How long have they been waiting? These questions and many more raced through his mind as he tried to think of a way to protect the hor-ponies. “Get under that rug,” he commanded. He wasn’t sure what good that would do, but getting her as far away from the Americans’ sight as possible wouldn’t hurt.         He faced a couple of soldiers who were also in the room. “Guard her. I will check on the others.”         The grim-faced soldiers nodded in obedience and turned their attention towards one of the doors, which led to the outside. One took a directed explosive and tied a string to it and put it across the door frame, creating a trip-wire. The booby-trap complete, he stepped back and took position behind an overturned couch the other was already behind, his weapon aimed the door.         The Americans may defeat them, but not without a few scrapes and bruises first. Minutes before David drove the Humvee through the narrow Syrian streets, following the convoy of trucks and Armored Personnel Carriers hounding towards the objective.         He turned to Meyers and asked, “Weapons Platoon in place?”         “Yes,” the sergeant answered, “mortars will be ready as soon as we’re there, and machine gun emplacements are already firing.”         “Well, things don’t seem to be going catastrophically wrong yet.”         David stopped the truck by a pair of blown-out and smoking buildings and pushed the door open. He brought his M16 up to his shoulder and kept it pointed down the street in case Syrian soldiers appeared, but none did. He could hear the Weapons Platoon’s guns firing nearby, and there appeared to be little, if any, fire back. The rest of the fireteam came up behind him.         A second later, the second and third Humvees arrived with the other two fireteams. They disembarked similarly and came up to Meyers.         “Bravo and Charlie here, sir,” Alex Jameson, Bravo’s fireteam leader, announced.         Meyers nodded. “I see you, Corporal.”         Meyers jogged up to a nearby apartment complex where a Weapons squad was emplaced with the squad in tow. He pushed open the remains of a door and stepped into the room. As he walked through the room, he could hear the machine guns clearly enough for his care, chattering away at Syrian units throughout the nearby compound.         He passed several Weapons Marines carrying ammunition to the upper stairs, as well as a radio operator setting up a communications line. The squad passed through into the street out front, which was littered with craters from mortar strikes.         They deftly crossed through blown-out buildings and the smoking husks of vehicles under the lethal arcs of suppressive machine gun fire which had kept the heads of the Syrians down and allowed them to cross unimpeded. But now that they were at the edge of the apartment complexes, there was a clear field between the squad and their objective, a rather large two storey building, with machine gun nests and heavily reinforced foxholes scattered around.         The other two squads came in by the same route. Second Squad continued going along one side under cover, while Third Squad entered the building next to them and began setting up a forward suppression position. Soon after, a second platoon came, and began spreading throughout the residential complex surrounding the objective building, and took up supporting positions overlooking the field.         Meyers took out a small notebook and scribbled down some numbers. He turned to Boot and said, “Radio these coordinates to the Weapons platoon for a the mortars. Two rounds of fire. Fragmentation then smoke.“         Boot did so, and soon after shells rained down on Syrian foxholes, which erupted with cooked off ammunition and body parts. They continued falling until all of the coordinates had been fulfilled, and soon after another round of shells came. However, rather than exploding into deadly fragments, they let out a thick blanket of smoke across the field and around all sides of the building.         Meyers stepped out from cover and ran towards the smoke, squad in tow. He looked around himself for threats through the smoke, taking note of every dark shape that appeared at the extent of his vision. Behind him he heard David curse. Meyers glanced back and saw him grasped by a Syrian, body shredded like cheese, presumably from cooked off ammunition. The Syrian was pleading for help, and David was looking to him for guidance.         Meyers shouldered his rifle and fired.         “What the hell was that!” David yelled.         “Half his liver’s a yard over there,” Meyers answered, pointing along the trail of blood the Syrian had left. “Wouldn’t have made it even if we called in for an evac right now.”         He turned around and continued through the smoke, stepping over debris and other terrain until he reached the wall of the objective.         Alpha Team lined up next to the corner of the building while Bravo and Charlie teams took up positions at other entry points. Meyers stood a dozen yards back with a SMAW aimed at the corner from an angle, ready to make a new entry point rather than use the enemy’s. As soon as he launched the rocket, FAST teams, inserted from above by helicopter, would breach the upper levels a second later and secure the creature.         He squeezed the trigger.         The rocket left the tube and impacted on the end of the wall, blasting through and creating a large hole. The explosive force continued, opening another hole on the adjoined wall. Ronnie, because of the size of the small mouse-hole opening, crouched down and turned into the room, with a series of quick trigger squeezes along chest-height downing several of the occupants. With his call of “Clear!” David burst through similarly, but only half of the room, opposite side from where Ronnie had ended. He yelled “Clear!” and Boot came in, sweeping his corner and on his “Clear!” Mason came in, opposite side of Boot. “Clear!”         Meyers jogged up to the mouse-hole and came through as Boot took position near the door, guarding against any Syrian soldiers who may have wished to make an untimely entrance. He took a look at the Syrian bodies on the floor. Two were on the ground, dead.         “Sarge,” David called. Meyers looked at him. He was crouched over something covered in a rug. Meyers walked over and gave the rug a pull.         “The Hell?” Meyers stared in wonder. The creature they were looking for was there. It was the size of a huge dog, it was purple, and its legs ended in stumps. Meyers studied the creature for a few more seconds before reaching into a pocket on his vest. “Something’s off.”         In his hand he held a colored photograph taken a kilometer away that peered into one of the windows on the upper floor. In the center of the photo was a small orange creature, head up to the chest of the man next to it, and it was wearing what looked to Meyers like a cowboy hat.         “Aw, shit,” he muttered. He reached to his chest and keyed his personal radio. “Jameson, Lewis.”         “Yes, sir?” they responded simultaneously.         “This is a bit more complicated than we thought,” he informed. “One, the creature was down here. Two, it looks nothing like the picture.”         The light blinded here when the rug was torn off, but soon the pain in her eyes subsided and she cracked them open to be greeted by the site of more of these ‘humans’. However, these had significantly lighter skin and sand-colored uniforms with a bulk of pouches and pockets over their torsos.         They tried talking to her, but their voices were garbled and unintelligible. “What?” she asked, but when they responded they were still as hard to understand.         One tried to pick her up, but she kicked at him and yelled, knocking the wind out of him and sending him to the ground. Two others grabbed her by the legs and picked her up and she tried to continue her fight, but she was a librarian, not a soldier. She stopped, deciding to conserve her strength. She could have tried to attack them with her magic, but escaping and running off confused in the middle of a war zone was probably not the best idea she had come up with.         As she was lifted, her body was turned, angling her head towards the bodies of the two Syrian soldiers. She screamed.         “God dammit!” Ronnie yelled, tightening his grip on the purple horse thing. “Stronger than you’d think, for how adorable they are.”         David sighed. An action, he found, to be quite common when Ronnie was around. “Just help me carry the fucking thing.”         “This way,” Meyers said, leading them out the building. “The Maxxpro can’t fit in the tight streets. We need to hoof it.”         Ronnie chuckled. “Hoof it.”         Meyers said nothing, either because he didn’t hear the remark over the sound of distant and close firefights, or was simply as tired of the corporal’s sense of humor as David was.         “Shouldn’t we give the horse thing to the FAST teams?” Boot asked. Meyers answered, “I radioed them. The found a lot more of the things above, and so did our other two fireteams.” The five caught up with Bravo and Charlie teams, who were carrying mini-horses of their own. Two with armor, and one with rainbow-colored hair. The thirteen Marines backtraced through the myriad of building complexes until they made it back to the line of Humvees they had rode in with. “Fucking unreal,” David muttered. He turned towards Meyers. “Where’s the Pro?” “It has to come here from the FAST teams’ rendezvous. They have more and they’ll dump ours in while we ride back in these.” David nodded in understanding and leaned against the Humvee, pulling back his sleeve to check his watch. “Hey, why do we call them ‘FAST teams’? The ‘T’ in FAST means team. Kind of redundant.” “Because ‘fast’ is an adjective,” Ronnie answered. “Using it as a noun sounds awkward as all fuck.” “Bu-” Before David could finish his thought, a squad of Syrian soldiers appeared at the other side of the street. They appeared equally as surprised, as the Marines and Syrians locked eyes with each other for several tense seconds, both groups too shocked to move. Ronnie suddenly raised his rifle and fired, hitting one of them in the chest, causing the man to fall to the ground as a puppet cut from its strings. “Fucking shoot them!” he yelled, and moved behind the wheel of his Humvee. The squad followed suit, pouring lead at the enemy soldiers and moving towards cover themselves. The Syrians retreated back into a building and took positions at the windows. Some climbed up stairs and appeared in the second floor windows. “Get in the Humvees!” Ronnie yelled to the squad. The Marines followed his command. One by one, under cover of their fellows, they climbed into the side of the trucks that were safe from enemy fire and activated the engines. David climbed in from the front passenger seat, managing to squeeze himself across and into the driver’s seat. Luckily the metal and treated glass of the Humvee afforded ample protection against the 5.45 millimeter rounds, and he started the engine. To his side he heard a Weapons squad sending fire at the Syrians from occupied buildings, and David urged Meyers into the passenger seat, wanting to get out before the mortars started hitting. He hated urban warfare. “We’ve got to get the fuck outta here,” Ronnie warned. “Those guys came out of nowhere. Gotta be reinforcements.” David pressed the gas pedal, sending the armored vehicle screaming down the street and away from danger, the two other fire-teams following him closely. “Can’t be. They wouldn’t’ve been surprised if they were looking for trouble.” “Maybe they just thought they’d catch our backs or we were in an odd position.” David gave him a queer look. “They couldn’t be that stupid.” “Rookies I guess,” Ronnie countered. “We’ve killed most of their experienced guys from that ‘13-’14 revolution, and this is a pretty backwater place. Wouldn’t send their brightest guys.” “Makes sense. I guess,” David conceded, focusing his attention on driving through the relatively narrow streets. Down the corridor of buildings, a hundred yards or so, there was a huge grey blob blocking the road. His eyes widened in realization. “Is that-” “T-80!” Ronnie yelled. “T-80! Turn the fucking car!” As safely as he could, David turned the Humvee into an alley just as the turret of the tank turned in their direction. Contrary to his fears, the other fire-teams were also able to turn in time, and made it to momentary safety just as the massive cannon blew a hole into nearby masonry. David sighed again. “This’ll be fun.” “I’ve done some calculations. We have more time than we originally thought, but not much.” “Thank you, Luna,” Celestia said. “That is certainly a relief.” Luna nodded. “How is the evacuation going?” “I’ve sent for runes to be placed just outside our borders. I’ve received reports that they are being successfully enchanted in place, and I’m receiving more on an hourly basis. The Crystal Empire and Badlands will be saved.” Luna raised an eyebrow. “Even the Changelings?” “Yes, Luna,” Celestia said, an edge clearly present in her voice. “Even the Changelings. What a small number of them had done in no way deserves extinction.” “Of course.” “What of the sun? How exactly long does it have?” Luna reached into her saddlebag and pulled out a hoofull of papers. “The details are on here. If we conserve its movement and slow it down, that will give us an extra week at least.” “Slow it down?” Celestia questioned. “Wouldn’t that lengthen the day?” “Yes, it would. But better than dying, I presume,” Luna said. “Oh yes, what of the other continents?” Celestia’s head dropped slightly. “They will be gone. Griffons, zebras, everyone outside the runes will be left here as the sun tears itself apart.” “And I presume there is no way to save them as well?” “No. If I extend the runes too far, the spell will become too complicated and taxing for us and no one will be saved. Those griffons, minotaurs, and all other species inside our borders will be the last of their races.” “What of the Zebras? I heard they can reproduce with ponies.” Celestia nodded in confirmation. “Oh, yes, they are practically earth ponies,” she explained. “You know that. But their children won’t be zebra after a generation or two.” “And luckily the Great Dragon Migration is in its local stage.” “The dragons are very lucky. They are a week off from the extended doomsday.” Before Celestia could talk further, a small yawn escaped her lips, followed by a stretch of her wings and forelegs. “I need to get to bed. Only a few hours until I need to raise the sun again.” “I will have you woken up later,” Luna said. “We need to start conserving the sun now. Get some sleep.” Celestia nodded and cantered to her bed, plopping down onto the majestically soft sheets in a particularly un-ladylike manner.