From Black Skies

by The Fanatical Christian

Day One [Human]

"Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.
-Robert Ardrey

---

Scootaloo slowly woke up from her unconscious state.
She opened her eyes slowly, expecting to wake up in her bed.
But to her surprise she was in a hospital bed.
"uh, what?" She said as she rubbed her eyes and looked around.
A stallion walked in wearing a" doctors uniform with a clipboard.
"Oh good your awake."
"Um yeah. what happened?"
The stallion looked puzzled.
"You really don't remember?"
"not that much."
"You were walking through the town square and you collapsed."
"Really?"
"Really."
"What do you think it was."
"Well there's only one disease known to pony kind that causes the victim to just pass out like that."
"Homins disease."
"Homins disease? What does it do?"
"Causes head aches, fever, fainting and can sometimes cause death."
She flinched at this, very few diseases ever caused something as severe as death.
"But we were informed that it may be a side effect of a future sight spell."
Scootaloo sighed a breath of relief.
"There are ponies waiting to see you when you woke up. I'll send them in."
"Uh, sure."

---

Commander Jones looked over the map projected on the ships control room table.
The island was baron, no life had been found anywhere.
No plants, no animals, no insects.
Just humans...and a lot of firepower.
Not to mention the fact that the island was a goldmine of resources.
The cave at the bottom of the crevice was a maze of tunnels that stretched out for miles that was lined with metals and other important resources and led to a cavity that was full of precious metals and other important materials.
The table was surrounded with marines of a high ranking.
Hudson was staring at the map, probably thinking about defensive troop placement.
"Alright," Jones started.
"What do we think. Hudson?"
"Need to get a wall up as soon as possible and get our defences up. Send some tanks out to patrol the area until night. Marines and the rest of our tanks can guard the base and VTOLs can stay in the air. Get our armoured vehicles to form a perimeter around the base at night, can't rule nocturnal predators out."
Jones turned to one of the marines.
"Get on that."
"Sir yes sir."
"What about our fabricator and resource processer?"
"Their being set up now sir."
"And have we detected any alien lifeforms yet?"
"No sir. Not even microscopic."
This didn't make any sense, what happened here the caused all life in the area to disappear, even microbes weren't present.
'Everywhere else on this planet has life, except here."
He scratched the back of his head.
'At least that means no interference.'

---

Ryan checked the safety on his assault rife for the seventh time that day.
"Man, guard duty is the worst." Alec said before kicking a rock.
"Better than heavy lifting." Dereck replied.
"Yeah well, I can just think of better things to do."
"Like what?"
"Shooting at aliens."
"We haven't been here for twenty four hours and you already want to kill things."
"It's better than this, and shouldn't you be doing medical things instead of standing around out here."
"We have a medical facility set up yet, I've done all I can for now."
"So we just get to stand around here?"
"Yes." Cole answered him.
"Yeah but, Oh come on!"

---

The small group of marines approached the sandy beach.
The four marines and four mechanized infantrymen walked cautiously towards the water.
They stopped at the waters edge.
"Well, we're here, lets do what we came to do." One of the mechanized infantrymen with a Russian accent said.
One of the marines stuck a cylinder shaped device into the water.
One of the marines bent over and looked into the water.
"Looks like seawater, and smells like it."
The other marine took the device out of the water.
"No bacteria and a high level of that strange energy, but other than that it's normal seawater."
The marine by the water stuck his finger in the water and tasted it.
"Tastes like seawater."
"Command this is Blok, mission accomplished. We're uploading the data now." The man in the exo-suit said
"Receiving your data now, return to base for debriefing,"
"Copy that command," He said gesturing for the marines to start moving.
"We're Oscar Mike."

---

The marine kicked the rock into the pile.
The cave tunnel had lead into a massive cavern that was lined with resources.
Now it was his job, along with a few other marine squads, to mine the materials and transport them back to base with the limited amount of mining equipment.
Back to base to be fed into a processer and a fabricator.
Two building sized machines, the first breaking material down into its components and the other fabricating machinery, building materials and the like.
"Hey are you actually gonna get back to work or are you just gonna stand around there?"
"I'm going now sarge."

---

Ryan looked at the massive tanks rolling out of the ship, the hulks drove straight out of the base and started to divide into groups of three.
"Hey Liamson what's going on here?"
Ryan turned his head to see Davis talking to a tank commander in one of the massive hunks of armour.
"Command wants us to patrol, or something."
"Patrol for what, what do you need all these tanks for?"
The tank commander shrugged.
"This is our island now, guess we better make sure it stays that way." He finished.
"Do we have enough spare power cells to keep all these tanks moving?" Ryan asked.
"These power cells last three weeks, each." The tank commander replied.
"What so that's like nine weeks?" Dereck asked.
"At least."
"So now we can all be bored together." Alec finished.

---

Scootaloo watched as her friends entered the hospital room.
There was Applebloom and Sweetie Bell, obviously.
Rainbowdash, her honorary sister.
Fluttershy and Twilight as well as her parents.
Rainbowdash had practically tackled her as soon as she got in only to be stopped by Twilights magic.
"Scootaloo!"
"Hey rainbowdash."
"Scoots what happened, we were so worried."
"Don't worry I'm fine, it's a long story."
It was at that moment that Twilight dropped Rainbow Dash.
"What do you mean?" She asked.

---

Ryan watched the sun as it neared the end of it's journey.
The humans first day on New Terra had been peaceful, to put it lightly.
The day had gone in with incident.
He briskly walked with his squad to one of the barracks that had been set up as tanks formed a tight perimeter around the base.
The quickly approached the three buildings near a courtyard.
The four stopped in front of the smallest of the four buildings.
"So this is where we'll be sleeping for the next 60 years." Alec started.
"I'll be honest I thought it would be more than one floor." Dereck said.
"Least' its sturdy." Ryan said.
The four continued to look up at the building for a few minutes.
After they had stood and looked up at the building for more than an uncomfortable amount of time, Dereck looked to his team mates who were still staring up at it.
"Are we gonna go in?"
There was silence for a few seconds.
"Yeah." Cole answered.
The four then entered the barracks.
"Wow," Alec started.
"I was not expecting that."
"That's one way to save space." Ryan said.
The room was filled with metal poles going from the floor to the ceiling with two sheets of fabric one above each other, in other words, hammocks.
Two per set of poles.
"Did we miss the meeting about sleeping arrangements?" Alec asked.
"I don't think so." Ryan answered
"Far from the worst thing I've slept in." Cole said grinning.
"Hey," The team heard someone shout to them.
They turned to the source of the calling.
There were two marines standing by the door, one with blankets and another with pillows."
"You want one of these or not?"
"Uh, yeah." Alec said.
His team nodded.
The men took the sleeping gear quickly and searched for the poles with their names on them.
Instead of military paint, or a plaque with names on it, the names on the rectangular poles with marker.
Two of the sets on the right, close to the centre was marked with their names.
The team looked at the names on the poles.
The set on the right from the door was marked with Dereck on top and Ryan bellow him.
The other set had Alec on top and Cole on the bottom.
Ryan threw the blanket and pillow on the hammock.
There was 2 metal boxes under the hammocks, The boxes were also marked with his and Dereck's name on them.
He opened the box with his name on it and confirmed that it was in fact his personal storage crate from the ship, and judging from the state of the contents they had actually handled the crates quite well.
He closed the crate.
"Well this is nice." Dereck said
"Don't know if you'll think that after sleeping like this for a year." Alec responded.

---

Jones pushed one of the buttons on the elevator and tightened the straps on his armour.
As the doors began to close Hudson put his hand in the way and forced the doors opened and walked in.
"What's the plan commander?"
"We get out there, give a report, get a reactor set up, build a wall around the firebase and sit tight for a few weeks and then send out recon."
"I meant about Jameson."
"I guess we'll see."
The doors of the elevator opened to reveal a very angry looking Irish man.
"Alright Jameson, what's the damage?" Jones asked.
"Oh nothing," The engineer said in a obvious sarcastic tone that only Jones caught on too.
"Really?" Hudson asked in a dry tone.
"Oh well other than the reactor being out of fuel and the emergency power cells being nearly out we're fine!"
"Is that all?" Hudson asked.
"Look, how long can we go on the solar panels and remaining energy on the reactor power cells."
"Um," He looked at the data pad in his hand.
"About 2 days."
"We'll get you fuel for the reactor before then, just keep it together down here. Understood?"
"Understood. Sir."
The two turned around and got back into the elevator.
"So I assume the plan is the same?" Hudson asked.
"You assume correct."

---

The squad made their way out of the barracks and into the centre of the base.
The area was a large open space, with the ships hangar bay at one side and buildings around it.
A courtyard of sorts that was filled with marines
The squad filed in at the back and waited for one of their commanding officers to come out of the ship and give them a briefing.
Something that would become a daily occurrence from there on out.
Basically a briefing of what was going on that day in the morning and a report on any relevant information at night.
Luckily for them the commander came out almost immediately after the team exited the barracks unlike the marines who had been waiting for almost fifteen minutes.
The crowd slowly fell silent as their leader approached them with a data pad in his hand.
"Okay I'll have to keep this short."
He started as the marines waited to be called to attention, a call that wouldn't come.
"Okay, day one there has been zero alien contact, not even microscopic life except for what we brought with us. FOB is under construction and ahead of schedule. A cave has been discovered and being mined for resources.-"
Ryan listened intently as the commander went over a basic rundown of the day and other important day to day information when on base.
"And one last thing, this planets orbit is irregular, the sun moves much faster when it's closer to the horizon." The commander finished with that and simply turned and walked off.
The marines broke of as well and began to talk amongst themselves.
"What was that last part?" Davis asked looking at his team.
"This planet is all types of weird." Ryan said staring off at the sun as neared the end of its journey, its brightness dimmed by his visor.
Then, as if by some magical force Such as gravity, the sun was ripped from its place in the sky and disappear beneath the horizon.
This unsurprisingly caught the marines attention and caused them to respond with how they were trained to, by pointing their guns where the sun had disappeared.
After a few seconds the marines realised what had happened and slowly lowered their guns.
"Agreed." Cole said.

---

It was almost dark by the time Scootaloo had explained everything to them, and by the looks on their faces they were about as confused as she was... except Twilight.
She looked more scared than Scootaloo was.
"I think I needed a minute." She said, before falling flat on her face unconscious.

---

Ryan lay awake trying to fall asleep, trying and failing.
Needless to say his first day on a planet that had never seen the likes of his kind had been in some ways exciting but overall overwhelming underwhelming.
This combined with the fact that the he couldn't sleep was somewhat agitating, and he would need sleep.
'Who knows what's out there." He thought.
He sighed.
Whatever was out there, he knew deep down, somehow that it would be nothing like the mutants back on Earth.
Probably people like those back before the war.
Only more primitive, and completely unaware of the war machine that had claimed their homes.
Or what would come.

Author's Note:

Important things coming in the next chapter.

Comments

[Earthpatriot117]

This chapter was filled with grammar errors.
Still readable, but it just seemed kinda rushed.
Still very interested reading more of this dude! Keep up the good work.

[Night-Watch-The-DAD]

Good story and I'd like for you to continue. I agree with Earthpatriot though. There were quite a few errors.