Frank stormed down the hallway towards his office, pissed off and muttering to himself. Behind him a technician was still babbling about the mess on the production floor.
"-upset the resonance or harmonics. Everyone going out got dumped back violently, and I don't know if we will be able to recall those who are already out. Then there is the damage to the landing bay, the processing facility-"
"I don't care about the details, just give me the basics. How many people did we lose? How soon can we get back up and running?"
"At least one hour before we can launch or receive pods again," the tech stated, "provided the blast didn't upset something in the void. There is a good chance we lost about seven percent of the on site conversion pods for good and two of the jumpers on the floor were seriously injured. There at least one pod was transitioning in when the explosion occurred. We are pulling records now to see what it might have been carrying to cause such a disruption."
"Get on it. Prioritize cleanup for landing, I don't want to lose anymore employees or hardware-"
A woman in a heavily stained coverall ran up the hall towards him. "Sir! We might have a code 7R on our hands!"
Frank came to a halt, brought up short. "Why? What's happening?"
"Something just ripped through the companion chamber!" she exclaimed, leaning against the wall to catch her breath. Frank's eyes widened as he realized just what the stains on her clothes were. "Every companion A class or higher was released or banished except for the Devouerer Parasites. It- they...." the woman paled at the memory, "s-so much blood."
The tech's phone went off with a high pitched alarm ringtone. "It's the Jumper Dorms emergency line!" the tech shouted, answering the phone and switching it to speaker mode. An unearthly wailing erupted from the speakers, the sound of men and women screaming, crying and yelling nonsense. The bloodstained woman let out a cry and fled the noise, running down the hall as fast as she could to get away.
"What is going on over there?!" Frank yelled into the phone. "REPORT, DAMN IT!"
"MOST OF THE PEOPLE HERE ARE SCREAMING, CRYING OR GIBBERING WITH FEAR!" someone yelled back over the noise. "AND THE REST ARE CATATONIC!"
"How many injured? How many dead?!" The tech called out.
"MASSIVE INJURIES AND EVERYONE IS SUFFERING SOME KIND OF MENTAL TRAUMA!" the person on the other end responded. "BUT ZERO CASUALTIES, THANK GOD!" The screaming in the background picked up for a second before the call ended.
"Right," Frank said, flipping out his phone and hitting an emergency contact. "Code 7R, put isolation protocols in place, we have an extra dimensional invader. Have security start a sweep of the building starting with the exits and working in." He ended the call and turned to the tech. "Call me if anything else happens, I'm heading to my office." The tech nodded and turned to leave.
Running up to the door he could hear his secretary juggling calls.
"Mr. Harrison's office, please hold. Mr. Harrison's office, please hold. Mr. Harrison's office, yes, I understand, please hold," she said politely but quickly. She spotted Frank coming down the hall and muted her current call. "Mr. Harrison! You have fifteen messages and requests for calls back from regulators, news outlets and one John Oliver."
"How did they find out so fast?" Frank growled. "They will all have to wait until we have a better grasp on the situation. "
Frank dodged past a cleaning woman and ducked into his office while muttering to himself. "We have a decent stockpile of anchors for power at least. We don't need to worry about running dry any-"
The computer was on. His computer was on. His personal computer was on and logged in and some kind of program was running on screen.
What the fuck? Was the cleaning person using it without permission to play some web game and got it infected? Just what I need, I'll fire that bitch! Even more pissed off, he stormed over to his desk. "Jennifer!" he called to his secretary, "find out who that cleaning woman was! She...."
He stared at the screen, his brain not processing what he was seeing. Several folders were open on the desktop, each showing files that should have been heavily encrypted. There were private spreadsheets, notes on worlds targeted for raiders, memos about the deadliest combinations of companions, even his personal list of which jumpers had been expendable and how they should be... expended.
The left hand side of the screen displayed his outgoing email. In the last few minutes letters with attachments had been sent out to a long string of addresses. State regulators, board of directors, CNN, Fox News. Realizing what this kind of data dump meant, Frank tried to shut down the computer, but the keyboard and mouse wouldn't respond. He held down the power button and still got no results. Desperate to stop whatever hack or virus this was, he tried to yank the power cable from the machine.
The power and network cables were fused into the tower. A quick check found them fused to the wall ports as well.
"What- what the fuckis-?"
His cell phone rang and he answered it with a snap. "WHAT?!"
"Sir!" the tech answered in a panicked voice, "Another incident! Your car!"
"My car?" Frank asked in disbelief.
"Yes, sir! It's on fire!"
The building fire alarms began to blare, strobe lights and sirens working to turn Frank's headache into a massive migraine.
His computer dinged and he looked down.
To: AcqVP@ARCO.com
From: SJordan@ARCO.comSubject: My Dearest Frank
Fuck You
-S,N,M,D
The sprinklers started, the deluge of water tripping a circuit breaker somewhere and finally killing the computer. He was ruined, even if ARCO as a company could survive all the damage and scandal he personally was ruined.
"SJordon?" he asked aloud. "SARAH! I should have shipped a nuke to that piss ant world as soon as the talking candy horse mentioned you were still alive! You may have destroyed me but you don't have anywhere to fucking run! I'm going to hunt you down and wring the life from your worthless neck if it's the last thing that I-"
"SIR!" the tech on the phone cried out again. "New Contact! R and D was just hit! The prototype multi-point jump ship was just stolen!"
~~~~~Six Months Later~~~~~
The wide clearing that had been the battlefield still held many scars. Craters pockmarked the field, and the blast shadow of the daemon's last shot was deeply etched in. The wide path blown into the Everfree by the soulshard rifle would take decades to heal, even with the forest's strange magic. Six months was too short a time for the damage to the land to repair without aid. No aid had been given or asked, the damage had been left as a reminder of the sacrifice that had been made here. The only alteration to the clearing was an six sided pillar. On each face was a carved image of one of each species that had fought, and under the image were the names of the fallen.
Princess Twilight shifted her new wings slightly as she looked out over the clearing, trying to hide the nervous energy she felt while looking over the pillar. So much had changed, relations with the other races had opened up and those who had been outcasts in the Everfree were being lauded as heroes in their homelands. Almost everyone had celebrated the victory like the end of some great war.
Almost everyone. Princess Luna and Princess Celestia had not taken more than a days rest. They had tasked her with uncovering as much as she could about the dimensional travel Sarah and the raider had used. While Twilight had been unable to produce a working jump ship or even an inter-dimensional probe, she had been able to reverse engineer the detection array Machina had built into the library. With that knowledge, she had managed to set up a massive detection grid and listen for any incoming jumps much further out than Machina had.
Which was why she was standing in the field now next to Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, Queen Chrysalis, her friends, and Discord. Each of her friends wore their element, and stood ready at a moments notice. Two dozen of the strongest unicorn sorcerers in Equestria stood by, along with fifty changeling warriors.
Beyond them were nearly fifty of Equestria's newest troop, the Equestrian Mechanized Guard. Lance wore his latest model armor, powered by a diamond that shone like the sun. Starlight stood by his side encased in her own variant armor. Shining Armor, Princess Cadence, and a massive multinational army stood ready only a short distance away. Though, Twilight thought, if whatever was coming could get past the princesses, Chrysalis and Discord, the army is going to be hard pushed to do anything.
A few moments later, and a massive machine appeared in the field before them. It was larger than the pod Machina had described to her, almost as big as Sugar Cube Corner.
A door on the right side opened, and a man stepped out. Naked from the waist up, he had glowing golden eyes, and fiery red hair that seemed to flicker and shift in an ethereal wind. Coiled around each arm were long serpentine dragons, gold on the left arm and silver on the right. The three of them scanned the crowd and frowned, moving a little away from the pod.
After him came another creature. It looked male, and resembled the fiery one from the waist up. From the waist down he was a thing of nightmares. A massive metal body like some daemonic scorpion supported him. Each limb ended in a mixture of vicious blades and threatening barrels. Both guards circled the pod slowly, looking over the area and the forces gathered against them. Finally the fiery one leaned back into the door.
"llA raelc!" he called.
A woman emerged with long dark hair. A pair of black wings hung from her back, each looking like they were cut from the night sky. Her left arm was studded with thick dark crystals glowing in deep reds and purples, and ended in a vicious claw that easily twice the size a normal hand should have been. Her right arm was silvery metal with painfully bright light seeping through the seams, hinting at the barely contained power. A disfiguring burn covered the left side of her face, highlighting the empty eye socket. She ran her right hand through her hair, and the dark tresses swirled over the empty eye. A soft glowing turquoise eye opened in the hair, it's dragon slit pupil narrowing in the sunlight.
The woman stepped forward until she was roughly halfway between the pod and the Princesses. "Princess Luna," she said with a chorus of four voices, three female and one male. The Equestrians all cringed away from it for a moment, Chrysalis raised her eyebrows in surprise, and Discord smiled unnervingly. "Princess Celestia," her gaze fell on Twilight and she raised an eyebrow. "Princess Twilight Sparkle, Bearers of the Elements of Harmony."
Sarah bent on one knee and bowed low.
"We are in need of your assistance."