• Published 4th Oct 2015
  • 3,001 Views, 38 Comments

Warriors - PseudoFiction



Princess Twilight Sparkle leaves the safety and comfort of the Horsehead System to find the warriors who would help save her world.

  • ...
4
 38
 3,001

“Just like Christmas!”

They pulled up to the target compound and parked in the lot among several abandoned ‘hogs and trucks. From there they approached the front door on foot and hoof.

Twilight Sparkle was following in the rear as the headhunters cleared every inch of the concrete plaza. The sprawling compound was an enormous building, as big as the Canterlot palace and Twilight was pretty sure just as high. There was a single chimney like structure at the heart of the building, flanked by ridges of re-enforced concrete and complex looking arrays of comms-dishes and antennae.

The front doors were like a set of blast doors striped with brightly highlighted warnings about the fate that awaits trespassers and vandals. They hung ajar and the trio slipped in boldly without a care. After all, those who had forced the doors opened had not heeded any of the UNSC warnings. So it was up to the Spartan-III warriors to learn the intruders some manners.

The way into the heart of the facility was clear, and Marko and Ishmir would sometimes separate to branch off and make sure adjacent rooms were unoccupied. They moved with silenced sidearms until they reached a set of sliding double doors at the end of the main corridor. They hung ajar just like the front door and while the headhunters took up positions and drew their primary weapons Twilight managed a sneaky peek inside.

She saw movement. Sleek blue armour, short orange clad figures and glowing round energy shields. The Covenant were inside. She looked to the Spartans.

Ishmir was checking the sign above the door that read “control room” and slipped a pair of cylindrical objects from a pouch on his thigh. At the same time Marko worked the front grip of his shotgun back and forth with a quiet ‘cha-chick.’

He held up a hand to the princess, the universal signal for wait. Going prone under the weight of the gear she was carrying the alicorn gratefully caught her breath, watching intently from the shadows as the Spartans prepped to breach.

Ishmir popped the pins from his 9-bangers and gave Marko a preparatory nod before slipping the devices into the control room. Their helmet visors polarised and external audio muted in anticipation for the blinding twin flashes and rapid fire crackle of deafening bangs that followed.

Over the inter-headhunter comm came Ishmir’s single order. “Bust ‘em.”

Marko rushed the aliens inside. Still reeling from the effects of the flash bang, the lot of them were essentially helpless. Not being one to waste the upper hand, Marko pressed the issue, driven by a terrible motivation that sat at the source of his hatred for the Covenant.

Following his shotgun in, he fired, pumped then fired again. Enemy shields flared and faltered. Blood sprayed and elites toppled with clean close range hits delivered by the CQC weapon.

As he entered his eyes did a quick sweep of the control room. Marko took in the contacts, prioritising aliens from the Covenant pecking order in order of most important down to metaphorical shit-stains. He also sub-divided in order of those effected by flash bangs and considered those facing him and those blind firing.

A plasma bolt winged his shield and Marko let his shotgun turn the offending grunt inside out before returning his attention to the bigger baddies. As he did though he swept past one of the terminals and noticed a picture. Some of the staff who had been working here had decorated their workstations with pictures of family, friends and loved ones.

It reminded him of his own family. The one the Covenant had killed in the sacking of Marko’s home world. Only he and a select few had made it off world during the evacuation. Everyone else had perished, his mother, father and two sisters included – vaporised into dust and ash when the aliens glassed the planet without a moment’s consideration of the innocent lives they were ravaging.

Marko lined his sights up and squeezed the trigger, all too eager to return the favour.

As the buckshot peppered the nearest elite, ragged holes in the sangheili armour spitting clotted strings of blood and flesh like strings of saliva from the maw of a ravenous beast, the momentary sadness brought on by the memory of his family’s smiling faces dissipated. It was replaced by a simple, comforting thought that was more than a little malicious.

Marko smiled with glee.

His muzzle swung right and let off another roar, dropping a stunned jackal. Ishmir swept around Marko’s back, firing a comparatively quiet pop-pop-pop into the Spartan’s blind vector. The chatter of MA5 fire matched by an alien wail of pain told Marko his buddy had met his mark.

With the heavy hitters down, Marko and Ishmir polished off the last of the enemy infantry before declaring the control room as Spartan turf.

“Clear,” Ishmir reported, and Marko echoed “Clear! Warlock, move up!” out the door so Twilight Sparkle could enter.

She did, timidly at first. Peeking around the door she checked left and right, then sidled in and observed some of the headhunters’ gory handiwork. They were ruthlessly efficient, but at the same time a little messy. Bodies were scattered, sprawled into odd poses like someone had gone around and purposely posed them as a joke. But Twilight imagined this was what a battlefield should look like.

Marko and Ishmir weren’t watching as they double checked the adjacent corridors and rooms for stragglers. Ishmir was paused over a console running along the front of the control room where a shutter was pulled down over the main observation window. Behind him Marko loitered looking out one of the side doors in case there was movement out there.

But there was movement right next to them. Or more precisely, right next to Twilight Sparkle.

She screamed, charging her horn on knee-jerk reaction but was rewarded with only a splutter. One of the elites she thought dead in a puddle of tar-scented blood suddenly gasped and scrambled to his full height.

The sudden swiftness of the elite’s transition from dead to alive startled the princess so she fell onto her side, stunned with eyes wide as saucers. But the elite was unarmed, hooking his fingers into claws that he needed to sink into flesh. He bore right over Twilight and stared for a second to assess this strange colourful creature before him.

But at the sight of the two demons who had such a short while ago filled him with bullets the elite’s priorities changed and with a roar he ignored Twilight completely.

With eight ragged holes pockmarking his torso, Marko thought him dead already. Must have been faking. Not something the Spartans had seen before, so Marko had to commend the ugly bastard for a sense of imagination.

That was all he gave the elite credit for though, as charging a pair of headhunters still riding an adrenaline high clearly put the alien far outside the brains department.

As if he were simply swatting a fly, Marko tapped the trigger of his pistol twice, putting a bullet in each of the sangheili’s kneecaps. The shots from his sidearm were whisper quiet – the sangheili may have seen Marko draw on him, but the only thing the alien bastard heard was his face hitting the floor.

The beast fell flat out, sliding to the deck at Marko’s feet. Struggling to stand, the sangheili only managed to press its hands to the ground and look up only to see the headhunter’s armoured boot-heel come crashing down.

Helmet and skull buckled as the elite’s brains were smooshed across the deck, Twilight wincing and looking away from the gory mess Marko had reduced the sangheili to. Ishmir walked over business-like though, unphased by the bloody mess he’d seen all too often before already.

“Overkill much?” Ishmir asked.

As if to answer, Marko levelled his M6C/SOCOM on the dead elite’s chest and fired four more rounds, each whispered ‘thwip’ of gunfire – thwip, thwip, thwip, thwip – answered by the kiss of punctured flesh and ventilated lung.

Looking up to Ishmir’s stare of disapproval, Marko gave a nonchalant shrug.

Ishmir moved to where Twilight Sparkle lay and helped her to her shaking hooves. “Are you okay, Warlock?”

Twilight swallowed and nodded, but she could tell by Ishmir’s stare that he knew she was lying. She was not okay. She was anything but okay. But this ordeal was far from over. She couldn’t break down now. Marko and Ishmir were counting on her to keep up.

Equestria was counting on her to be strong.

“I’ll be okay, Ishmir,” Twilight Sparkle promised quietly.

He locked his mirrored stare on her a second longer then nodded, giving her an affectionate pat on the shoulder-blade. Rising to his feet he stepped around the bodies and dead checked them with his pistol on his way out. They twitched with every puff of air from the silencer, but none of the corpses moved beyond that.

As Ishmir was inexplicably leaving, Twilight gingerly moved up to Marko’s side as he leaned against a console and checked his weapons.

“H-how do I do it?”

Marko didn’t seem to understand at first and looked down at the lavender pony. “Do what?” he asked blankly.

“You know what, Marko,” Twilight said more firmly with a nod to the pile of alien corpses.

“Kill?” Marko scoffed. He thought about it then shrugged, honestly not really remembering a time when he wasn’t prepared to kill every hostile motherfucker he came into contact with. “You won’t have to kill. Not while I’m around.”

“But what if you’re not around? My friends and I were the wielders of the Elements of Harmony. They were the source of the most powerful magic in Equestria. They protected us from all evil, but now the elements are gone! There are horrible things out in the galaxy. Problems that cannot be solved with the magic of friendship.”

Her voice suddenly grew desperate and her eyes watered. “I am a princess of Equestria. So how do I protect my friends, my family and my home from the likes of the Covenant if I can’t kill them when everpony else is unwilling to?”

Marko made a slashing motion with his hand to stop her there. “Hey, no crying.” Her lip trembled and Marko added, “And don’t pout! Look, we’ll figure something out, sparkle-butt. I promise.”

Twilight sniffed with a meek little grin, the friendly name-calling cheering her up a little. “Thanks, willy-muncher.”

The Spartan tousled her hair and he was pretty sure he saw some glitter sparkle in there. “Don’t thank me yet.”

As they stood in pause Ishmir walked back in. glancing between them he asked, “Hey. You two okay?”

“Great. How fucking else would we be?”

“Bad. Because there’s good news and bad news,” Ishmir said. “The bee-net is buzzing, but I can’t hail anybody. Not orbital, not fob, nobody. Our extraction window didn’t just close, someone boarded and bricked it up.”

“Fuck. So what’s the good news?”

“That was the good news,” Ishmir broke on them and Twilight cringed. “Bad news; Covenant ships are moving in. This base turns to glass in thirty mikes.”

Twilight interjected. “That means…?”

“It means that in thirty minutes we’d better be gone,” Marko explained, “or we will be goners.”

The princess was glancing between the headhunters. They were still standing, holding their weapons high and shoulders back like they were squared for a fight. Her hope hadn’t run out yet because evidently theirs hadn’t either. “But you have a plan right? We can get out of here… right?”

The Spartans shared a look, and by Ishmir’s nod she knew there was a way out.

He walked to the front of the control room and keyed the shutters. The metal slid upward over the glass panes and Twilight Sparkle found herself looking into the massive tower part of the facility she had seen on the outside. Nestled deep within layers of re-enforced structure was a ship, standing upright on its tail with the wings stretched out to the side, nose pointed at the heavens and rammed up its backside a long stack of bright orange fuel tanks and solid fuel rocket boosters.

Twilight stared, her brain slowly piecing together the escape plan Ishmir had in mind as a loading ramp craned out the parallel walkways and connected with the cockpit at the nose of the craft.

“Whoa.”

“Princess Twilight Sparkle, I’d like you to meet the XS-1000 Prototype Anti-Ship Spaceplane, codename: SCALPEL,” Ishmir introduced, not only for the pony but for Marko’s benefit as well. “Highly manoeuvrable and capable of breaking orbit un-assisted, she’s outfitted with the latest space-combat weaponry, stealth systems, e-warfare suites and even an experimental slip-space drive for interstellar jumps. That’s what we were sent to secure. And that’s our ticket off this planet.”

“Can you even fly this thing?” Marko asked.

“Does it even matter? We gotta bang out now or not at all.” Ishmir pointed the alicorn and his fellow Spartan in opposite directions. “Warlock, with me. Marko, grab everything you can carry from the armoury.”

“Fuck yeah. Just like Christmas!”

As Ishmir led Twilight Sparkle onto the gantries connecting with the spaceplane, Marko back tracked down the corridor they had followed into the facility. He turned off into an adjacent room he had cleared earlier and gave the armoury a once over before holstering his shotgun.

With lines upon lines of weapons, ammo and other gear still stacked up, Marko was spoilt for choice. But he contained his excitement and secured a pair of duffel bags

In one bag he packed a broken down sniper rifle system, pistols, assault rifles, submachine guns and battle-rifles with enough magazines and ammo boxes to liberate a small country. In the second he stuffed enough explosives grenades and ammo to nearly split the seams.

Hoisting the bags, one on each shoulder, Marko broke into a heavy jog and ran to the SCALPEL. Ishmir had taken the front seat and placed Twilight in the second where the RIO would sit. They were running pre-flight checks, Twilight reading off a clipboard and Ishmir checking gauges, switches and lights, answering “go-fly” for each question. If any one system was “no-fly” they’d be fucked.

Marko shoved the bags into the cargo compartment behind Twilight’s seat, then crawled into the cockpit, placing the relatively light pony in his lap.

“Ready for launch,” Ishmir announced as they strapped in. The cockpit canopy slid up from the nose and sealed over their heads with a click and a hiss. “Launching in five… four… ready… steady… go!”

The ignition switch clicked audibly. Twilight was nervously gripping the seat that was Marko’s lap with all four hooves. But the Spartan thought for a second that nothing had happened.

Then the engines kicked off.

Marko took back his opinion of the most powerful sound the human hearing could experience. The back-blast of a rocket launcher thumping out a round had nothing on ignition of the starfighter’s solid-fuel rocket boosters.

Fire and smoke flooded the launch chamber. Every panel, surface and pane rattled and shook. The whole of their world came alive with an earth-shattering quake. And then ever so slowly at first, picking up speed as they went, the SCALPEL began to rise.

Moving up at a crawl, Ishmir looked over each shoulder and rolled the control yolk from side to side, giving the flaps and control surfaces one last check before opening up the throttle. The commands keyed in, the roar of the SRBs loudened and they picked up speed. Both Marko and Twilight were sucked into their seat and they shot into the sky on a pillar of smoke.

“Brace for gravity roll,” Ishmir reported having gone full astronaut on them. Marko would have thought his buddy was just living out a childhood fantasy if it weren’t for the fact they’d done stuff like this in the Spartan version of kindergarten on Onyx.

The world pivoted and whirled, and Marko was sucked into his seat so hard he wouldn’t have even noticed if it weren’t for the movement of the clouds rotating around the cockpit canopy. The sky darkened. The bright blue shaded to violet and then navy, and suddenly he could see stars without the filter of the atmosphere. Nothing had fallen off, cracked up or burst… yet.

That was when they ran out of fuel.

Ess-arr-bees at zero. Separating.”

The ‘thunk’ of the separation columns releasing was felt throughout the entire airframe. If Marko could look back he’d see the outer fuel tanks flare outwards like the petals of a blooming flower, then short bursts of fire separating the rest of the boosters from the SCALPEL.

The moment they cleared the debris he pushed the throttle forward and spooled up the starfighter’s engines. They started their usual song, starting at a low-pitched hum and working up through the scale to a soprano whine and then a sensation of nothingness that only a dog might hear. The sudden burst of acceleration was easy to sense and accustom to as they broke out of atmosphere and settled into velvet safety of space.

Marko and Ishmir were consumed with checking readouts and checking off items on their orbital checklists. Twilight was however pressed up against the cold glass of the cockpit canopy, staring at the planet they had come from.

High above atmosphere, way beyond the reach of any alicorn or pegasus-pony; they hung seemingly motionless in the silence of space. As the planet pivoted, to an onlooker it would have seemed the sun was moving just over the world’s event-horizon. The ions in the toxic upper atmosphere of the habitable planet glinted cool aqua mixed with fiery oranges and reds glinting in the sunlight, giving the impression the planet was bleeding out into space.

The view was tranquility incarnate...

A plate of metal swung across the view. The white flags and UNSC insigne were obscured by splotches of black scorch burned into the armour causing the surface to warp and bubble. More metal spiralled past. Bits of girder. Particles of scaffolding. Doors. Deck plates.

A human body drifted by. The man wore a grey jumpsuit glistening with ice crystals and hung frozen in space for a moment before toppling out of Twilight’s view.

She jolted at the sight and stumbled back across Marko’s lap. The Spartans didn’t say anything and the princess followed their golden gazes.

There was more debris. Entire ships, monoliths of steel, gutted and spiralling out of control. A graveyard hung all around them.

“What happened?” Twilight whispered.

Ishmir answered by pointing out ahead. “They happened.”

Twilight peered past the spinning rings of debris making up the foreground and gazed into the stars. Out there in space holding high orbit she saw them. Ships, bulbous sleek vessels with the profile of fishing hooks and stabilising fins under the rounded prows. Their engines glowed cool blue leaving a shimmering haze in their wake as the ventral lights charged and glistened. Every so often one of the many Covenant ships dotting space above them would unleash a beam of blinding light that cut through a piece of wreckage or a limping UNSC ship.

There were too many of the enemy ships to count and Twilight suddenly realised the fleet of infinite destructive proportions made absolutely no sound compared to the heavy hammering of blood in her ears.

“Ish… are we going to make it out of here?” Marko asked slowly, staring at the drifting Covenant army. “I’ll believe you if you say yes.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna make it, Marko,” Ishmir answered as he pulsed the thrusters and guided them into the shadow of a dead frigate.

“Well at least try not to make it sound like a fucking lie! We can’t hide in here forever. We should try and jump this baby to Earth!”

Ishmir shook his head. “We can’t. Cole Protocol. We can’t risk leading the Covenant home. We’ll need to make a few stops before heading to Sol.”

“Okay, do that then.”

“Yeah. Problem.” Ishmir shook his head again. “We only have enough power for one jump. We better make sure wherever we go is safe.”

“Safe? Did you not see what just happened down there? Reach is being turned to glass! And up there the entire Reach defence fleet is being turned into chum! There is nowhere safe left in the galaxy!”

“Head to the Horsehead System,” Twilight Sparkle interjected. “To Equis. We’ll go straight to Equestria.”

There was a pause of silence as Ishmir checked the instruments. “It’s in range. We could.”

“Yeah, and we might lead the Covvies there too.”

“It won’t matter,” Twilight Sparkle argued. “The Covenant are probably over Equestria by now anyway. You need to convince Princess Celestia of the danger so we can defend ourselves before the worst happens. We’ll deal with any Covenant re-enforcements if and when they arrive.”

“Good a plan as any. Locking co-ordinates and moving out of gravity-well.” Ishmir chuckled as he fed the computer targeting data and commanded the slip-space drive to spool up. “Hell, this experimental slip-space drive might just explode anyway.”

“It might just what!?” Marko was interrupted by sudden acceleration.

They arched around a length of what used to be the hull armour of a destroyer and made the short sprint into open space. Ishmir rolled them to narrowly avoid a piece of obliterated support frame without having to veer off course. The Covenant fleet was on their side now, sliding into view as Ishmir metaphorically righted them in space.

All the SCALPEL’s systems were at full power, thrusters answering a full burn and the vector funnels on the engines glowing with the heat produced. They were an enormous blip on enemy sensors. And looking across space Marko saw several of the colossal Covenant destroyers peel out of formation, turning about to face them.

Those sickly plasma cannons charged and any minute now they’d unleash a beam of energy that could cross the space between them and vaporise the SCALPEL in the blink of an eye.

Behind his visor Marko’s eyes widened and he commented with icy calm, “Ish, the giant alien armada is looking at us.”

Ishmir saw it. “Drive charged. Jumping.”

The satisfying ‘click’ of a button press filled the SCALPEL’s cockpit and the experimental slip-space drive answered. Space tore in two right before them. White light engulfed the Starfighter and as they vanished in a flash, Twilight’s last thoughts were concerning that elusive little plane of rotation…