//------------------------------// // Alive And Awake // Story: [Forlorn Ascension]|[Rites of Dominion] // by Desrium //------------------------------// The shuttle was a distant shadow in the radiance of a blue star surrounded by many worlds. Somewhere among the millions of miles of the solar system, a battle was going to take place. He felt the cool air rush into his lungs with his gasp before the white light subsided. He opened his eyes, the black expanding in the blue, his thoughts bursting forth as if they had been dammed. With awareness came revelation. "They have been reigning terror across the stars no matter what has been done to stop them. You're lucky we found you instead of one of them," Romaz once said. "They found me? I found them." His once inactive body burned with anticipation. He looked over to the pod's panel. Vitals were stellar. Time elapsed: five days. "Not long. Not long at all, Startrot," Phineas muttered to himself. Immediately afterward, he pushed the screen up and vaulted out of the stasis pod, his stiff joints sounding off in unison. By time the room's lights brightened in full, the shuttle's pilot was gone, already passing through the doorway. There was no time wasted in getting to the cockpit, there he was rummaging in the locker, pulling out the gray plated armor and suiting up. Around his right wrist went his PDA. On his flanks went his toolboxes; after all, a good engineer always had their tools on them. Even if that engineer had the mindset of a warrior, mad like a bat out of hell. Phineas then strapped himself into his seat, the shuttle's displays and readouts popping up and arranging themselves across its screen. His face beneath the expressionless helmet was tranquil and still, hiding the storm which brewed within him. A storm of thoughts thundering through his mind, contemplation of tactics, of fear, of retribution. Target HCG-87: HOOF-TALONS discovered the ship reported with a projection. It was followed by a hologram of the Hoof-Talon vessel that it came across. Another Draconix; a large dragon enslaved and bound by the will of magi-tech. It looked like a crocodile moving through its aquatic domain as it powered through space, its body rigid like an arrow with its limbs held off to the side. Its claws did not give off their deadly glow. In fact, the "craft" seemed like it was simply going off on its routine rounds, whatever they may be. It and its controllers were oblivious to the pony hounding after them. "That will change soon enough..." It was no fault of the Hoof-Talons that they overlooked the ship. It had been coasting through space, occasionally adjusting its heading as per the instructions Phineas left it to carry out. As it closed in on the cyborg, the ship appeared no different from a piece of debris hurtling through deep space for its energy signature was so miniscule. The same could not be said of the enemy "vessel", however. Its engines were burning bright, the Spell-cores making it all too easy to track the cyborg. To most, that would have been enough to warrant mass exodus. None wished to be in the path of the feared Hoof-Talons, the scourge of the galaxy! Why should they have to worry about such trivial things such as stealth? Surely their might meant they could annihilate any so foolish as to actually oppose them! This day would be a day of reckoning. Not too long ago a cruiser class vessel was felled by a shuttle. Now, that very shuttle would slay a dragon. "And all the evil in the galaxy will learn to fear Phineas Startrot..." thought the silver stallion bitterly. "And Luna was smiling down at me every time I pointed my telescope at the sky." *** Explosions of purple light marked the activation of the shuttle in full, the black and white vessel tearing across the distance between it and its much larger enemy in minutes. Its approach was rife with phaser fire from its extended cannons, alternating orbs of gold smashing against the dark hide of the Draconix. The cyborg dragon turned itself over, seeing the trails left by the speedy ship. It turned its head toward where it had zipped off to, the thing a speck in the beast's red gaze. A speck which was getting larger by the second -Phineas was coming in for another pass! The phasers battered the face of the cyborg, the blasts going off right before its eyes. The dragon shook its head and quickly oriented itself to return fire, its engines flaring up to turn it around to where the shuttle had gone off to. It locked onto the small craft, a white triangular reticle hovering over Phineas' shuttle in the Draconix's vision. Alien symbols and numerals appeared on either side of it, complex calculations being computed in nanoseconds. With that, plating on the dragon's back lifted and retreated, openings from which turrets and light laser arrays rose into place. The immediate darkness was lit up with a thrilling display of power, beams streaking toward the shuttle, Phineas deftly weaving through the brightly colored streams of energy and dodging the blazing spheres that made his phasers look downright paltry in comparison. Things had heated up awfully fast! This Draconix was much better equipped than the one Phineas fought before. Was it a direct result of his actions then? Or was this "ship" just meant to counter agile enemies? The shuttle's magical shielding rippled with each hit. It was being depleted at an alarming rate, even with Phineas' upgrades. The silver stallion bared his teeth as he watched his readouts, warnings starting to appear. Had he been too impulsive? Had he picked a fight that was beyond his capability? He grunted after an explosion of magical energy dispersed across the shuttle's shield and rocked the shuttle, the lights in the cockpit flickering. It soared out of a crackling expansion of sallow colored electricity, its dancing bolts reaching out in all directions. Just being near it was sapping the shuttle's Spell-core! "Oh you clever bastards... what's that supposed to be? A Spell-core disruptor?" Phineas muttered angrily under his breath. "I'll admit you've got some fancy toys, but I don't think you know just what it is you're up against!" The purple streams of the shuttle's engines jumped to a searing level of brightness, almost white with purple at their outer fringes. The shuttle roared out of the Draconix's line of fire, flying around the machine-animal in a wide arc. The cyborg's engines flared up again to match the smaller ship, the Draconix's bulk being turned about, its weapons unending with their assault. It was a mistake Phineas relished greatly. He redirected the surplus power from his engines, the exhaust reverting back to the incandescent purple as he returned the aggression with a golden barrage. By time the Draconix cancelled its own momentum and repositioned itself to attack, the shuttle was out of its firing range. The cyborg had lost its hold on the agile craft. Phineas had the advantage once again. He wasted no time in his attack, twirling around the Draconix and lining himself for another pass. The turrets started to swivel around to face the shuttle, only to explode into magical flame, the charged phaser beams cutting across the dragon's back. One by one they burst into a shower of shrapnel and singed metal. "And now for the engine- hey! What gives!?" The Draconix's engines fired up, belching a plume of hot reds and oranges and twisting around so that it was facing away from the black and white ship. Phineas was stunned -so much so that he had desynchronized with the ship! The almighty Hoof-Talons, bane of all...was fleeing? Fleeing from him!? For some reason the thought ignited Phineas' blood and made him see red. How dare they try to run!? They were destroyers of lives and practitioners of atrocities! They did not deserve mercy and Phineas was not going to show them any! Though he might have started this particular battle, the Hoof-Talons started the galactic war centuries ago! Did they only ride of the tide of victory? Did they never consider defeat, especially a defeat brought about by a lone combatant? Such arrogance surely deserved punishment! Phineas wrangled the mental link between him and the shuttle and took off in hot pursuit of the departing Draconix. He closed in like a hunting hound, bearing down on his query, hammering it with phaser fire. This continued for the entirety of the escape attempt, the Draconix attempting to out maneuver the shuttle and Phineas blasting away at the dragon, causing further internal damage in the gun ports and whittling away at the engines. In time, the Draconix was on a course for a nearby planet -a last ditch effort to evade the furious marauder. As it skimmed across the atmosphere, Phineas hit it with charged phaser blasts, rupturing one of its engines in a violent explosion. Smoke billowed out from the stricken cyborg as it streaked across the world's skies, rapidly heating up. Its dark hide started to glow like the exhaust from its rockets. *** It was a frigid planet of rock, ice and snow. Dark gray clouds blotted out the sun and pelted the ground below with white frost, burying the alien planet with snow in a perpetual frozen storm. Glaciers dominated the landscape, as they were the only things not utterly buried by the frozen onslaught; them and mountains, the rock faces so covered in snow and ice that they were practically glaciers in their own right. The wind howled, whirlwinds swept the tundra's dunes. The surface of this world was dark. Then came the falling dragon, which punched through the cloud cover as a plummeting star. Its body was alight, burning up through the sky. At its front was a compression cone, the dome accompanied by smoke and steam. Trailing it were these huge wisps where the moisture in the air around it was instantly vaporized. The shuttle came afterwards, flying through the ring left in the clouds before they went rolling back into place, engulfing the world and continuing their reign of the skies. Phineas dove after the falling giant, the vertical stabilizer deployed at the aft of the shuttle. Even now he battered the Hoof-Talon construct as it hurtled towards its frozen demise. "You don't get to run! You don't get to run!" Phineas kept snarling as he did what he did, teetering on the verge of madness. After what he thought to be an eternity, the Draconix collided tremendously with the ground. It struck a glacier at a steep angle and the aftermath was nothing short of explosive, a massive shockwave which ripped across the tundra, ejecting boulders of ice into the freezing air, the sound like that of a behemoth's bellow. Frosty tendrils reached for the peaks of mountains before the snow settled out of the air, coming back down on the mangled cyborg at the bottom of the crater. It sizzled and smouldered there, steam rising from its burned hull. Its eyes were darkened. Its blackened scales were no longer lined by pulsating energies. The shuttle swooped down low at the lip of the crater, slowing down and deploying its landing gear: two skids which folded out from the lower hull. The ship came to a hover at the edge of the giant dip in the ground before touching down, blowing away a layer of snow in the process. The canopy disengaged with a hiss of air and swung upwards and the ladders lowered. Phineas undid his fastenings, got out of his seat and started to climb down the side facing the crater -after he had pulled the screen down to keep the snow out of the cockpit. Nearing the snow covered surface, he pushed off of the ladder and used his jetpack to descend to the Draconix. Wary of the machine despite its fall from heaven, he had his rifles hovering beside him, trained on the defeated cyborg. *** His entry point was one of the gun ports, the surrounding plating as black as Phineas' mane and tail. He jetted into the port, his helmet adjusting his sights to the darkness. His jet exhaust reflected off of the desecrated walls where the explosive shots of the shuttle's phasers met their mark, eventually disappearing completely when the stallion had ventured deep into the cavernous compartment. It was not his intent to explore the ship. While he was certain a comprehensive study of a Hoof-Talon vessel would have been invaluable, dissecting the workings of the Draconix was just too great a task for just one pony. "Maybe if I had Tsubar with me..." he thought in jest as he surveyed the port. While a full study was an unrealistic expectation to be had, Phineas did have something specific in mind in his exploration. The Spell-core disruptor would be an invaluable asset to him. "A good engineer always has his tools," Phineas said to himself smugly when he found what he came for. It took a lot of time and like before, his application was trial and error; and mostly error in that regard. However, patience and persistence won the day in the end. Phineas closed the shuttle's phaser ports, having installed his own modified Spell-core disruptor into both cannons. It would be an alternate firing mode for the guns and one that packed a wallop of irony with each shot: Hoof-Talon technology being used against them. Little by little, the stallion's ship grew more imposing for something so small...