Applejack had decided to skip the night of drinking and revelry Pinkie had planned. She'd escorted herself to the med bay for some burn salve for her many blisters. The training las guns wouldn't kill or even blind if a shot hit directly in the eye, but they did sting like a bastard! The only reason she'd succeeded in the simulation is that the rifles she'd been holding had soaked most of the shots fired at her. So the rest of her body that had been exposed was covered in small blisters. That however wasn't the reason she'd ducked out of the night's festivities. She needed a minute alone to calm down. She'd roared.
She'd gotten more mad then she'd been in a long, long time. She had only roared twice in her life. The other time was. . .
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A younger Applejack sat on her cot whittling a small piece of hickory. This voyage was said to be a milk run. Pirates usually didn't bother challenging convoys that didn't have anyone or anything valuable in it, especially if it's escorted. The convoy was just moving food from her ag world to Terra so she wasn't terribly worried. Plus there was a detachment of fighters escorting the convoy so it'd be foolish to try and raid it.
Applejack was anxious to get to the Capital world and get home. She didn't have any business on Terra, but they didn't have FTL broadband on her planet yet, so transactions still had to be done in person. A whole three weeks of space travel just to sign a tablet, and unload a cargo of apples. She didn't mind the down time mind you, but it's dangerous to be away from home too long. Just because pirates probably wouldn't raid this particular convoy didn't mean they wouldn't raid an isolated farm on an isolated ag world. More than once she'd had to use the harvester walker as a makeshift mech unit to fight off slavers with her brother and grandmother, and not having her there was one less set of eyes and one less line of fire.
Applejack accidently cut herself when the ship's alarm blared suddenly and she sprang off of her cot. She opened her foot locker and racked the slide on her shotgun. She wasn't allowed to go armed, and they'd scanned and searched her luggage before allowing her onboard, but ag worlders have a thing about not being told what to do. The cosmopolitan notion of gun control is fine for hub worlds she thought, but on ag worlds with unpredictable super fauna, you don't go to the outhouse without a gun.
Applejack jogged down the halls to the armory, the agreed upon rallying point during an alarm. During boarding actions every able bodied person was required to defend the ship. The ship's armsmen were already handing out rifles to two distinct and completely opposite groups of people: Over enthusiastic ag worlders, and terrified ship's custodians, cooks and merchants. An armsmen reflexatorily tossed Applejack a las rifle. She raised an eyebrow and jiggled her shotgun. His eyes went wide and he shook his head "no" very quickly. She tilted her head in confusion. He pointed to a poster picturing adorable little cartoon characters being sucked into the void with big bold letters at the top reading: BEWARE EXPLOSIVE DECOMPRESSION!!!. Her eyes went wide for a moment and she nodded her head then slung her shotgun over her shoulder.
"Oi! They've just breached the tertiary landing deck let's go!" a security officer called out. Applejack followed a group down the corridor. Right before she was going to round the corner the ag worlder in front of her got baked by a hail of las fire. She paused a moment and saw in the singed reflection of the steel that three pirates were running towards her. She gave a blind spray of las fire.
The armsmen spilled out from behind her and began laying down a wave of suppressive fire. The pirates fell back to behind their mechs. A few tried to scramble back inside their mechs but Applejack picked them off from inside the doorway before they could open their canopies.
The fight was going well. The pirates were pinned down, the armsmen were pressing forward, Applejack decided to end this little skirmish and started to run around the other side to try and flank them. All of a sudden she felt a horrible pain from her side and a deafening roar. She hit the deck hard and blacked out. She heard an almighty clang and the pain rose up to greet her. She tried to cry out in pain but her side hurt too badly even to cry out. She rolled over and saw she was covered in her own blood. That's when she noticed the crew members. They were strewn across the deck like roadkill. She looked in horror at the mech unit she hadn't noticed landing. She'd been so cocky about flanking the pirates she hadn't noticed the pirate's flanker.
Just as she had decided to lay down and die the mechs canopy opened up. Through her blurry vision she saw someone running from the landed mech to the other group. She was out of her mech! She was vulnerable! Applejack could get her! She clenched her teeth hard and shakily got to her feet. She picked up her las rifle and immediately regretted it as the blood she'd gotten on it caused it to short circuit and shock the shit out of her.
She tossed the rifle down angrily and unslung her shotgun. She racked a round, completely ignoring the fact that she expended an unfired shell. It helped pump her up for what she needed to do. She inched around the cover of the furthest mech and peeked around the corner. She looked just in time to see the other mech's canopy snap shut. Applejack growled in frustration. What could she do now? She glanced at the other mech. She looked back to the mech the other pirate had entered. It didn't seem to be powering up. All of a sudden it started flashing lights and blaring a horn. "Who in the fuck puts a car alarm in a giant robot?" Applejack muttered to herself.
She refocused, now was her chance. She darted towards the other mech and scrambled up the ladder into the cockpit. She looked at the controls and it hit her, this was a completely different set up from a harvester. She had absolutely no idea what anything did, and absolutely NOTHING was fucking labeled. She tried a few buttons and was almost thrown out of the cockpit. She'd hit the emergency evasion boosters and crashed into the wall of the landing bay.
She painfully, slowly scrambled into the seat and settled in. When her head stopped spinning she spared a second to glance at the other mech and saw it was still standing still in place, lights flashing. It hadn't moved. She could still get her revenge. She looked at the controls and delicately moved the joy sticks forward. She felt the mech's boosters start to fire and the legs start to grind on the metal floor. She eased off and tried a different set of controls further forward on the dashboard. She mercifully found the canopy controls and she at least wouldn't be thrown out of the cockpit now. The mech started to lurch jerkily forward with its legs. She looked closer at the other set of joysticks and figured out these were the ground controls. Suddenly the mech seemed very reminiscent of her harvester back home.
"So that's forward, so this must be." She tried moving the thumb toggles on the sticks and the arms moved. She clicked down on the toggles and the hands opened and closed. She grinned predatorily. Now this pirate was gonna get it. She stomped forward and began to beat on the canopy. After a few strikes it became apparent that there arms of the mech would wear out before the canopy did. She seized the canopy of the mech, and started to tear it open like a rusty bear trap, gears whining and hydraulics snapping. Finally the canopy tore straight off and she tossed it aside. She reached towards the pilot but before she could click the control to close the hand she saw her enemy.
It was a small woman, not much older than her. Her hair was all the colors of the rainbow. She looked like such a small thing crouched there in the cockpit. Applejack looked on the face of the woman who was seconds from being crushed like an insect and yet she saw no fear on her face. She saw defiance. She wasn't afraid of Applejack, she was mad about not getting a fair fight.
Applejack went slack in her cockpit and stared at the woman. All she could do was drink in the sight of the personification of the fighting spirit, and suddenly her heart burned in her chest. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen in her short life. Right then it didn't matter that this woman was a pirate, it didn't matter she'd killed dozens of innocent crewmen. All that mattered was that Applejack was able to see her. That she was able to be in her presence. It was like seeing a rainbow after a storm and all she could do was stare at the sheer beauty of the sight.
Her rapture was cut short by an earth rending blast that knocked the other mech suit off its legs. Applejack saw the pirate thrown from the cockpit and land heavily several yards away. She turned and saw that the other pirate was reloading his missile launcher. He hadn't missed her. He'd been aiming at a member of his own crew, and he was preparing for another shot. Applejack saw red and suddenly saw herself from outside of herself. She saw a woman enraged, eyes blood red. Her ears were oppressed by a deafening roar. She was screaming like a hound baying for blood.
Before she knew what she'd done she'd splattered all of the boarding party all over the landing bay. She came back to herself and her hands shook on the joysticks. She looked at what she'd done in horror as tears started to trail down her face. Suddenly she remembered the other pirate and turned to see she was still where she'd been thrown. Applejack stomped in the suit over to where she was laying and the pirate stood up. A wave of relief washed over Applejack and she pushed a few buttons and finally one of them opened the canopy. She stood up and her and the pirate stared at each other in mutual awe.
Unfortunately another moment with her pirate was cut short as the relief and the blood loss caught up with her. She dropped heavily to the flight deck and blacked out for several minutes. She woke to a sharp pain from her side, and was vaguely aware that she was in the med bay of the ship. She looked blearily about for her pirate and saw a security officer with his hand on her wrist, and fear in her eyes. Applejack's hand lashed out as if she was trying tothe crunch the hand off the wrist like she'd crunched heads off of the pirates.
She heard her own voice come unbidden from her mouth saying. "She was a slave of the pirates and she's seeking asylum." As she dropped back into unconsciousness she thought, "oh yeah, that's a good idea, that'll keep her out of trouble."
She awoke hours later with the third worst headache of her life. She felt like she was going to puke and the lights were too bright. Suddenly a voice roared out. "WHY DID YOU SAVE ME?!" Applejack held her throbbing head and groaned for her to shut the fuck up. The pirate shouted again and Applejack inhaled deeply. She buried the need to vomit and growled, "You're loud."
Applejack heard the most beautiful laughter she'd ever heard and suddenly the nausea of blood loss was replaced with butterflies in her stomach. Just hearing the sound of this pirate laughing made her so happy that she couldn't help but laugh with her. The laughing woke her up enough to realize she looked downright feeble laying on a medical cot with tubes stuck in her.
She scrambled shakily to her feet and ripped the I.V. out of her arm, which was a mistake. She tried to play it cool and hoped against hope this pirate wouldn't notice her hand shaking. "Ahm Applejack." She said, hearing the quiver in her voice.
The pirate flashed her a heart stopping smile and said. "Rainbow Dash." Because of course she would. Of course she would have a distinctive name.
The three week journey now took two months as repairs to the convoy had to be made in the void. It was a magical time for Applejack. She'd spend all her days with her little pirate and found she was the orneriest, stubbornnest most foul mouthed woman she'd ever met, and she was positively smitten. The only downside to having her around was that she couldn't find any private time to fantasize about her.
Rainbow Dash mentioned the fact that Applejack didn't know how to pilot a mech properly, and they spent most of their free time practicing in the void. By the time the convoy finally made it to Terra Applejack was a right and proper mech pilot. She did her business in ten minutes and got to spend a drunken blur of a shore leave on Terra with Rainbow Dash.
A small snag occurred as they stumbled from one bar to another. Rainbow Dash got in a brawl with a certain band of pilots and when the authorities came and asked for papers Applejack had to do the talking for both of them. Before she realized what she was saying she'd blurted out that the two of them were mech pilots escorting the I.N.S. Appleloosa. When the authority looked up the ship in question it didn't show any information on either of them.
Applejack put on her best ag world drawl. "Way yell ya see out thur in the atter rim ag woilds com you knee kay shuns tayk a kiddle longur ta reach Terra. Whah don't ah just fill in are information for ya. Y'all can verify it after we get back to our home world."
The officer rolled his eyes. "Fuckin ag worlders." He muttered under his breath. He brought up a holographic screen and Applejack lied through her teeth and wrote them both completely fictitious credentials. When they'd been sent on their way back to the Appleloosa Applejack was almost in tears. She despised lying. Now she had just falsified documents and lied through her teeth. They stopped in for one last stiff drink before returning to the ship to drown Applejack's conscience.
The ship launched without issue and halfway home an errand runner came to Applejack's quarters and summoned them to the armory. When they arrived they were told they'd received orders to return to Terra with their mechs for repairs and reassignment as the rest of their unit had been wiped out. Applejack left instructions as well as a tastefully edited recounting of the facts of the matter for her family and suddenly her and Rainbow Dash had bullshitted their way into the Navy.