Star Trek: Into Equestria Part 3 of 4: Contagion

by admiralthunderstorm

Spread

So after two days, the Federation's fastest, newest, and most heavily armed starship hadn't arrived yet and Samuel had spread the Influenza virus to 18 other ponies, including Princess Celestia, who had spread it to 300 other ponies. So, we had accounted for 318 ponies infected as well as 1 human and an estimated 200 other ponies unaccounted for. This planet's population being in the 1-2 million, it hadn't turned into a pandemic yet but, with these ponies immune systems, I believe it will soon. Magic has no effect on the human strand. So, we're left waiting for the cure to get here. I sit down in my chair in the banquet hall and look out the window. There is a freshly fallen layer of snow on the ground and my mind starts to think,
Is the weather causing the Shackleton to delay?

Boy, was I horribly wrong...

Out in the Targus System, 210 parsecs away from Equestria, the Shackleton was reviewing its star maps looking for where this 'Equestria' was. For a starship that could be labeled down as a sentient being and operate without single crew member, it was doing pretty horribly with a compliment of 3500. What makes it even worse, the crew built the ship, so, they should know how it operates. Captain Kevin Thomas Reynolds pushes his shoulder-length blonde hair out of his face, pushes his glasses back up in front of his dark blue eyes, and gets up. He'd just been beaten down by his first officer and chief medical officer, Rhomulus Mharlow.
"We are trying to find this planet as fast as we can, Kevin! Your father, the admiral, might have said that you were 'captain material' but, you are not acting like it!" Rhomulus said.
"You know this is my first time commanding a vessel, right?" Kevin said.
"Yes I do. But, you need to act more like a captain."
Kevin bowed his head as his helmsman, John Karton spoke up,
"Kev, sir, I have found something. A planet named Exeter was renamed Equestria last year. We need to look for a planet named Exeter on our star maps."
Kevin sat in the Captain's chair and said,
"Make it so."
Two days later, back on Equestria, I had just gotten my coffee for the morning and started drinking it when i got the news, a royal guardsman had contracted to virus, broken into a shuttlecraft, stolen a Phaser, and had shot himself with it. He was found dead this morning. I got up, finished and my coffee. I sat the cup on the table and walked to my office, knowing Celestia would blame us for this. I sat in my chair and looked at my computer. The fate of this planet rested in my hands and there was nothing I could do about it. The Shackleton should be here by now but, it isn't. The snow outside had stopped falling as I opened up the text document on my computer and changed the numbers of infected and dead. The virus had been spreading for four days and our situation looked bleak.

I thought about the last line for a bit and with one-quarter of the world's population being either infected or dead, I backspaced the last line and typed in the most feared words of any disease. The line looked like this,