It was the image of a horse, but not a horse. Sure, the taxonomic differences were negligible. What set this one apart was the bold fact that this one was bright blue. The more he looked, the more this strange creature deviated from the unintelligent beast of burden that was everywhere in his childhood memories. This was visibly very small for anything equine, the head was very round with a small mouth situated on a small snout. The eyes were positively enormous! Less like a dumb animal, and more like a human. And strangely enough, the horse ...well, pony... sported a brand on its flank like he had never seen.
Patterson spoke up. "Is this some kind of joke? What is that supposed to be?"
"Take a guess lab coat, and no we would not pull you out of the private sector, have our men die for you and show this top secret image as some kind of joke," Colonel Winters brutally replied.
"Is it still alive?" Dr Mcentyre asked.
"No, being that it had attacked first, the patrol did not have the means to subdue it without killing it. And that's not all, the soldiers in the platoon reported that it spoke, more along the lines of angry shouting than actual conversation."
Aaron kept looking at the strange pony, and the longer he looked the less he believed it. "That can't be possible, maybe they just heard neighing that they thought was speech."
Winters shook his head. "I doubt it. Corporal Salazar!"
At his C.O.'s order, a young soldier orderly entered the room and took place in front of the Colonel.
Corporal Salazar snapped a salute to his commanding officer. "Sir!"
"Salazar, tell everyone here what happened, down to the last detail."
The corporal began to sweat profusely, breathing like he was reliving the scene out on the battlefield.
*********************************
Night ops always sucked. Corporal Salazar tried hard not to yawn, but building the Hoover Dam must have taken less effort. Here he was at 11 pm. bouncing down some dirt road in a cramped Hummer with five other sleep deprived grunts, all because some small town had a problem with the phone line.
Salazar tapped his sergeant on the shoulder. "What's the deal Sarge? I should be in the bunk right now screwing the Dreamville all star cheerleading squad."
The other soldiers grinned at the corporal's jest, but it didn't make up for the fact that this little jaunt to the country was cutting into their only scheduled R and R for the next month.
"Keep it in your pants Salazar, we received a radio transmission from this town about an hour ago, some sheriff losing his mind about animal attacks or something, then we lost the signal. Our job is to investigate and beat the shit out of some punk kid if this is a hoax."
Private Nimitz, who had taken roof gunner, leaned in to say something. "Sir?"
"Go ahead private."
"Something isn't right, I see the light from the town ahead, but it isn't right somehow. It looks more like the light from a bonfire than streetlights."
"Add smoke to that Nimitz," Corporal Salazar threw in. "It smells like a barbecue, roasted meat and all."
The sergeant slapped a hand on the driver's shoulder. "Screw speed limits, get us there damn it!"
The scene they found was from some horror movie. Rolling down main street, the fire team encountered no resistance. Buildings burned as a testament to the chaos which had ruled the town not more than an hour earlier. Cars had been piled into barricades by people desperately making a stand against the unknown attackers. Not a single soul came to meet the soldiers, neither in joy or in attack. Bodies were found, suffering not from gunshots, but cuts and heavy impact trauma. Posters for a local rodeo flapped in the heated wind.
"This is what happens when we vote for fucking left wing extremists! If these people had guns this wouldn't have happened," some private shouted.
"What the fuck happened here?" Salazar muttered.
Suddenly, a crash came from an alleyway, with each of their hearts leaping into their throats, every armed man took hasty aim.
Their sergeant motioned to Private Nimitz. "Nimitz! You're on point, go check it out!"
Nimitz glared at the sergeant. "Screw you man! I don't wanna end up like these bastards!"
"That is an order private. When we get back to base I'll see you court martialed for insubordination!"
Nimitz swore under his breath. "Alright, I'll go." Carefully he crept forward, kneeling behind a dumpster, preparing himself mentally.
Breaking cover, Nimitz stood with his M16-A2 shouldered. There he saw the most nonthreatening creature that ever walked the earth. Nimitz breathed a sigh of relief and lowered his rifle.
"Guys, it's just a pony. Must be a pet or something." He reached out with a hand. "Come here little gal, I'm not gonna hurt ya," he directed to the pony as he reached out a hand.
The pony recoiled, opening her mouth. "Don't touch me you human scum!"
The expression on the private's face turned from confusion to horror as the "harmless" pony grabbed a crude spear with her mouth and impaled him through the larynx.
"Nimitz!" the sergeant roared, and recovering from the daze the situation had brought on. "Take it down!"
Every man in the fire team opened fire on the animal. "Hostile down! MEDIC!!" screamed Salazar.
***********************************************
"We tried everything we could, but it wasn't enough, the damn spearhead was barbed. He didn't bleed out, he suffocated there on that street. He fucking choked out there on his own blood." The last words had the corporal shaking. This man was a veteran of the Irani-Israeli war, and here he broke down after the things these cutesy looking ponies did.
Colonel Winters nodded. "Dismissed, corporal."
Every man and woman in the conference room sat stunned. Dr Patterson spoke first.
"Why? How? Why become so aggressive? How could they possibly become so smart in mere hours?"
Winters clicked through a few more images showing fairly normal charts for a horse. "Autopsy so far has revealed no sign of viral infection, cellular inclusion, parasites, or pollutants. No mutagens whatsoever. Your theory of rapid evolution is the reason for us being here Dr Patterson."
"What? Even I admit that was a load of shit! No species can change its biology within that short of a timescale. Not without a deadly amount of mutagenic exposure."
Dr. Mcentyre spoke up."What about the energy surge? The one that destroyed all the satellites."
"What about it?"
"Isn't it possible that it had some kind of effect on these creatures? It can't be a coincidence that the two events would happen at roughly the same time last night. A surge of an unknown type of energy and suddenly horses decide they want to take over? It can't be coincidence."
"Colonel, didn't you say you were able to detect the energy with ground level detectors?" Patterson chimed out.
Colonel Winters nodded. "Yes, we were able to track its spread evenly across the planet surface."
"Then couldn't we use the same technology to see if there is a residual amount of The Surge in the biopsied corpse?"
"You take a crack at it doc, I'll have a detector sent down to the lab immediately."
**************************************************
Being in a military lab beat the hell out of a university or hospital. Every piece of equipment was new and the absolute latest in available technology, not half-broken and donated by hospitals who got better stuff. Good, solid equipment from the 21st century.
Dr Patterson was enamored by the high amount of extremely expensive equipment. Most labs could barely afford one of the latest generation of gene sequencers, this lab had four. "I could get used to something like this." Dr Mcentyre led the way, swiping her card to enter the restricted biology labs.
"Okay kid, suit up. Just in case this energy is some form of gamma radiation, we've got to wear lead suits. Also keep you from being sterilized when we x-ray it. Be a shame if that happened."
"Ha-ha, Dr Mcentyre, that's so funny I forgot to laugh."
"Cut with the doctor stuff, just call me Eve. Makes things run more smoothly around here."
A pair of soldiers brought in a decent sized device, setting it down in front of the double set of doors to the containment room. Since it had a technical name that was too long to hear before falling asleep, most called the device an omega detector. A pair of rods jutted out from a black box, the rods detected and recorded various wavelengths of energy. At the back of the device lay a readout screen that displayed the wavelength and amount of an energy present. Such a device had been invented as a more accurate way of detecting un-enriched nuclear materials for the war in Iran.
The corpse was stored in a vacuum sealed containment room. The detector was surprisingly small, Dr Patterson only had to grunt and go red in the face to lift the device. Dr Mcentyre punched in the entry code for the first door, stepping inside while suited. With both scientists inside, the first door closed and a torrent of sterilizing gas poured down on both to prevent cross contamination. Wearing lead-lined bio-hazard suits, they weren't worried about getting any contaminants from the specimen.
Like everything else, the containment room was mostly white. Of course, the bright blue pony on the surgical table in the middle of the room did clash with the color scheme. The various organs and blood samples spread across the room did add sort of a feng shui feel if you looked at it right without losing your last meal.
Dr Mcentyre pointed a gloved hand towards the corner of the room. "Set it up in the corner over there, I wanna take a look at this first," her voice chimed in through a headset inside the suit.
Eve got closer to the killer equus. The organs were right, no major differences were visible. The only thing striking was the color of the coat, the massive cranium and the strange tattoo on the flank. A ribbon, a purple ribbon. Why would it be tattooed with a purple ribbon?
"Alright, we are all set up." Dr Patterson gave the omega detector a pat, "Weird device, eh? They made it to track energy frequencies put off by nuclear weapons back in Iran in 2015. Too bad there are no nukes to detect anymore."
"I don't need a sales pitch kid, the Irani war was only two years ago. Just tone down the power and decrease the scanning field to the lowest possible setting."
Dr Patterson flipped on the device, setting the scanner to search for low frequency energies like radio waves and microwaves. "Scanning, nothing out of the ordinary."
"Try a higher wavelength."
Aaron's fingers worked the various knobs on the detector, the device showed no evidence of any energy traces. "No infrared except what we're putting off."
Dr Mcentyre nodded. "Higher."
He worked the knob up into the more dangerous areas of radiation. "All clear on X-ray and ultraviolet."
"Keep going."
Aaron twisted the sensitivity knob, when the detector reached the highest possible wavelength detection, the device began to crackle as it picked up something. "Getting something, pretty faint but still there."
"What is it?"
"I don't know, I'm not a physicist. It's not radioactive, but it inhabits a wavelength way past normal gamma rays."
"Okay, part two of our test, step in front of the scanner kid."
As Dr Patterson's body crossed the scanner's viewing field, the readout stopped.
"Okay, a rare moment in science, we just confirmed two theories. One, the energy is present in the subject. Two, the energy is present ONLY in the subject."
"You forgot something, now we tell the Colonel that we have a way of detecting these ponies. Mount it on helicopters and the whole crisis could be over in a week."
*******************************************************
Like MLP itself, the story gets better as you progress. The best part is easily the later half of the story.