//------------------------------// // Chapter 7 - Aftermath // Story: Of Aerial Dominance // by Sorren //------------------------------// Slipstream rolled in her bed. Her body shivered, the cold of the night penetrating her coat. Sometime in her sleep, she had kicked off her covers and was much too tired to wake herself up fully and pick them up off the floor. However, her nose itched, itched very badly. With a groan, she moved her left hoof to scratch it. Pain like a million white-hot needles shot up the length of her hoof and settled in her brain as agony. Her eyes flashed open and she screamed, ceasing the movement immediately. Faint, blue light met her eyes, and there was a low, mournful whistling in her ears. Body shaking, she let out a long breath from where she lay sprawled awkwardly on her side, steam of the heat from her body and the moisture on her breath fanning out in the air. She must have left the window open. She turned her head to look towards where the window sat in its frame, but her vision was still blurred from sleep and she couldn’t make anything out apart from blurred figures and silhouettes. Her neck felt stiff, like she’d slept using a cinder block as a pillow. In fact, everything felt stiff. What wasn’t sore hurt like fire and what didn’t hurt was numb. She smacked her lips a few times, metallic copper assaulting her tastebuds. She sat up with a grunt and a grimace. The aviator glasses that were still on her face were twisted and had left cuts where they rested on her muzzle, the right lenze missing completely. Sorely she pulled them off her face with a bloodied and cut forehoof and her vision cleared a little more. Another shiver racked her, and she tensed up to the cold. Looking down to examine herself, she followed the lines of more cuts and bruises on her hindlegs and rump. Snow. She was sitting in snow. Now that she focussed, she noted it was everywhere, all over her coat, speckling her wool-lined aviator jacket. She rubbed her head, which was—unsurprisingly—sore. “What the...” The corner of a black box about four feet away caught her eye. As not to anger her nerves, she ambled carefully over to it and pawed the snow away. It was a radio, the readout on the front bashed and broken, half of the switches and buttons missing. Everything rushed back to her and she nearly jumped in surprise. “Sweet Celestia!” She threw her head left and right, blinking frantically in the gloom. All around her was snow and the occasional piece of scattered wreckage. Ten or so feet away, a long, twisted I-beam stuck out of the snow, a tendril of maroon fabric waving from it like a flag in the wind. “Where am I?” Slipstream spun two complete circles. She remembered up until the crash, but that was it. A thought struck her: she could fly up to get a grasp of her location. She meant to flare her wings, and her brain sent the command, but all that met her senses was numb. A dagger of fear began to whittle away at her brain as she assumed the worst. She looked back. Her wings were still there against her silver coat, though they were caked in frost. She tried to flare them again, focussing on the muscles she knew were there. Her left wing stayed stuck to her side, but the right extended rather lackadaisically. Slipstream whimpered. The feathers were clumped together with a crackled layer of ice created by her body’s heat against the snow. She had been lying on her left side, so the other was bound to be worse—probably why it wouldn’t even unfurl. She swallowed heavily, legs now shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering like a typewriter. The next phase was death. She had to find shelter, and quickly, though there was nothing around her. She spun another circle, looking up at the sky in hopes of spotting a silver airship. “Hello!?” she called. “Anypony else?” Only the wind. The sky was completely hidden amongst the clouds, and as she stood and panicked, the wind was beginning to pick up, carrying snow with it across the ground in snakes of biting, white frost that licked at her legs like sandpaper. By some trick of luck, she spotted it: a tendril of gray smoke whipping away in the wind, the source just over a hill. Letting her excitement flow, she started up the snowy hill as fast as her limp would allow. Already, her hooves were going numb from sinking through the one-foot top layer of fresh snow on the ground. The wind bit into her coat, parting the silver strands and icing her flesh. Climbing the gradually-steepening snowbank was two steps forward and one step back, every foot gained counteracted by a half a foot of backward slippage. Though the tedious climb worked her heart, it seemed to do nothing to warm her body, and by the time she finally hauled herself over the crest of the bank, belly brushing the snow, she was on verge of collapse. There were still ponies. Ahead was the hulking frame of what was left of the Friendship. The last hundred feet of the tail rose into the air like a crooked tower, the rudders waving in the turbulent winds. Wreckage lay scattered everywhere, massive sheets of maroon and silver fabric waving about like a pseudo forest fire. And there, amongst the carnage and debris, was a faint, orange glow. Slipstream guessed her distance to be about five hundred yards, though it would be easier to travel downhill. As Slipstream lumbered her way downhill, she passed wreckage of other vessels, broken equipment, unfired rounds... She shivered, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. Flashbacks of the initial attack on Canterlot clouded her mind. They had never seen it coming, had never been prepared. So much destroyed, so many dead, and only in a matter of minutes. Her hoof collided with something beneath the snow and she fell forward into the freezing pillow of white. Cursing around a mouthful of snow, she swam back to her hooves and tried to shake the cold out of her ears. Bringing her head around, she looked to what had tripped her. A brown stallion’s face looked up at her, having been unburied in her stumble, eyes wide open, dead and frozen. Slipstream gasped and backpedaled, only to trip again. Stomach convulsing, she scrambled away, mouth going juicy like she’d been sucking rocksalt. They were everywhere. Ponies of every color lay around, dead, some simply frozen, others terribly ravaged, staining the snow crimson-black. Her breathing quickened, breath misting from her nostrils to be swept away by the wind. She’d never seen them before, not like this, not after they fell. Usually, they were just specs that disappeared into the clouds or out of sight... Now they were too real. One of them stood out more than the others, having not yet been buried by the snow. A golden-yellow coat, uniquely spotted with silver along the spine. “Minnow?” Slipstream whispered. Panicked with worry, she trudged over to the rigid mare and placed her forehoof the Minnow’s yellow coat, peering down to look at her face. Slipstream’s heart lightened the tiniest bit. The mare still had warmth to her. “Minnow!” she hissed, shaking the warm—yet still terribly cold—mare, hoping for even just the tiniest twitches of movement. She shook harder. “Minnow!” An ear twitched. It was a small, usually-dismissible movement, but in this case, it was a shining light in the darkness. “Minnow!” she cheered, brushing the snow off the mare. Minnow’s eyes fluttered, but still nothing. “Help!” Slipstream howled. “I need help!” Though she dreaded the truth, it was undeniable: there would be no help coming for her. The increasing wind and snow whipped her words away before they could travel more than a hundred feet. Despite her drastic need for shelter, Slipstream bent over and fastened her teeth in Minnow’s aviator jacket. “I’mth gettinth you helpf.” It had been slow going in the thick snow before. Now, limping on an injured hoof and dragging an unresponsive pony through the snow, the pace was agonizing. Every ten feet it seemed, Slipstream threw a look backwards, and the light was closer, but at such a rate she believed it might as well be moving with her. Unsure of how long she walked backwards dragging Minnow, Slipstream went on, breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps, each step smaller than the last, until, finally, she gave. Hooves collapsing, Slipstream fell onto Minnow’s limp shape, now colder than before. “No!” she hissed, trying to regain her hoofing, hooves lost to the numbness and shaking madly. She looked back. The light, whatever it was, glowed bright behind a large sheet of canvas erected amongst the debris, so close she could make out little tears in the fabric. She collapsed again. “Help!” she screamed, the word clumsy and slow, formed by numb lips. “We’re here! Somepony help!” A third attempt to stand up only caused her vision to fade. The numbness had now seized all four legs, and was penetrating deep within her chest, fighting its way to her fluttering heart. There were voices, ones that didn’t belong to her, and shadows of movement in the orange light. Slipstream only watched through murky eyes as they moved around her, speaking words she didn’t understand. “Help,” she breathed, brain swimming in murk. Like someone had draped a blanket over her senses, they smothered. She took another drink of her coffee and looked at Sudsy over the outdoor diner table, half-closing her eyes against the afternoon sun that washed down between the buildings, warming her coat and face. “All I’m saying is, he shouldn’t treat you like that. You know?” Sudsy clumsily nodded her large, gray head and shrugged. “Well, I don’t exactly have too many options, you know. I mean, my cutie mark is a bar of lye soap; I clean dishes at a resturaunt.” Slipstream looked up, searching for a semi-familiar growl she knew too well. No dirigibles would be scheduled to pass over Canterlot, so why was she hearing engines? “Are you even listening?” Sudsy scolded. Slipstream flushed. “Sorry, Sudsy... I’m sure I can hear something.” She kept her ears perked. “You’ve always got your head in the clouds,” the gray mare teased. “When does your shift start anyways?” Slipstream shot a sneaky look up when Sudsy went for a sip of her drink. “In about an hour.” She reached for her mug, and missed as the entire table shook like somepony had kicked the base, splashing her, and Sudsy’s coffee all over the decorated surface. Though it wasn’t only her table. Ponies sitting around them let out indignant cries as the ground shook for a violent second, knocking tables around and stumbling ponies in the street. There was silence for about a second, ponies hushed at the sudden disturbance, before the quiet was interrupted by a throaty rumble from the distance. “What in Celestia’s name was that!?” a stallion yelled. The day was broken by a loud, worried murmur of dozens of ponies conversing frantically. Slipstream could hear the growl from above. It was louder now, more demanding, and it seemed to be coming from all around. “Slipstream,” Sudsy asked, sounding flustered, “what in the hay are you looking for?” She spotted it. Over the gutter of a building across the street from her, she picked out the distinctive shape of a dirigible nosecone. The massive airship traveled at a steady thirty knots, Slipstream estimated, traveling about five hundred feet above the rooftops. The envelope blotted out the sun and its warmth, and the street went from golden to gray in less than a second. Everypony had gone quiet. “Why’s it red?” a mare asked quietly. “Do we have any red air thingies in Canterlot?” Slipstream shook her head, keeping her eyes on the maroon vessel, eyeballing the cabin as it passed almost directly above. “No,” she replied dejectedly. “Equestria doesn’t even have red dirigibles.” “S-so who’s is it?” Six panels along the bottom of the cabin folded open, revealing bays loaded with large, cylindrical shapes. The ground shook again at some sort of disturbance somewhere else in the city, and Slipstream finally realized exactly what must be happening. “Run!” she bellowed, flaring her wings and hovering up above the street. “It’s a bombing run!” “What’s that!?” a stallion shouted back to her. The first set of bombs began to drop, wobbling clumsily in the air for a moment before forming a nosedive and straightening out. “What are you talking about?” Sudsy asked, looking up at Slipstream from the ground as if the mare had sprouted an extra hoof from her chest. She had to tear her eyes off of Sudsy’s worried face and flee. She rocketed down the street as fast as her wings would allow, ignoring all of the ‘pegasi, please do not fly’ signs. Fire lit up the street behind her, and the earth shook again, this time much stronger than before. Her eyes turned to the sky, stretched wide and unbelieving. There were maroon airships everywhere, silver tubes raining from every one in a coordinated assault. This was war. Slipstream opened her eyes. An orange fire burned before her, protesting the wind as it whipped and bit at the tip of the flame. She lay on her left side, again, hooves drawn close to her. Minnow was nowhere to be seen. She panicked. In a flurry of hooves, she tried to scramble to a stand, but collapsed almost immediately on rubber muscles. A hoof patted her on the flank. “Take it easy, you’re hurt, bad.” “Minnow,” Slipstream croaked, “where is she?” The hoof pointed towards a spot on the other side of the fire between where two ponies sat. The shape of Minnow lay immobile, a pony leaning over the poor mare. “She was lucky to have a heartbeat when we found her.” “Help me sit up.” Slipstream grunted as the hoof wrapped around her foreleg and helped her roll to her haunches. “Thanks,” she said after she had positioned herself semi-comfortably in front of the tantalizingly-warm fire. Five other ponies sat around the fire, all Equestrian by the looks of their coats. Slipstream looked to the owner of the hoof. “Wiltings?” she breathed, cracking a wide smile. The mare bowed cheekily. “At your service.” Slipstream shook her head slowly. Wiltings had survived the landing as well, how so was impossible to guess—the wreckage of the Friendship advertised the fact that the landing had not been smooth in the slightest regard. Though, Wiltings had not gone without harm. There was a nasty cut on her cheek that had been clumsily stitched with a snag of her own tail, and her left front foreleg was swollen at the knee. She had taken three strips of framing and cinched them to her leg with steel twine to form a brace. The flank of her jacket had also been torn, causing Slipstream to wonder of the injuries beneath. Slipstream looked down at herself. Bandages had been wrapped around her middle, where the sword had gotten her. Her jacket, she spotted, hung on a steel beam stabbed in the ground by the fire. All of the much smaller cuts peppering her body must have been too numerous to treat, so they had been left to scab on their own. “Is this it?” She looked around at the six ponies, herself, and Minnow who was unconscious in the snow. The way the firelight cast their proportions in the dark seemed to illuminate the wounds most of all, causing them to show most apparent; nopony was unscathed. “There could still be others,” Wiltings answered, grabbing up a can and pouring oil into the firepan. “We had to set up shelter before the storm hit.” Slipstream eyeballed what Wiltings had called their shelter. They had taken beams from the remnants of the Friendship's framing and set them up in a full circle around the fire, then wrapped canvas around them and used more canvas to cover half the roof, leaving part of it open to the sky to allow the putrid oil smoke to leave. Slipstream was also grateful of the canvas which she lay on, protecting her from the icy snow. “Though, after this storm... if they can’t find shelter, there might not be. We found others, but they were so badly injured, we couldn’t move them...” She trailed off and motioned towards a stack of rifles against the canvas wall near the entrance. Slipstream didn’t recognize any of her crew around the fire. Her heart swelled up in her throat. This was her fault. She had caused this. “I’m so sorry,” she breathed apathetically. Wiltings sat down beside Slipstream, shivering from the cold despite the fire. “We were going down no matter what.” Her chest hitched. “I led them to that battle. I led them all to death.” She couldn’t bring herself to cry, no matter the screaming agony in her gut of the combined guilt of hundreds, possibly a thousand lives; the most she could form upon her face was apathy. Sighing, Wiltings reached out her good forehoof and wrapped it around Slipstream’s waist, pulling the mare close. “You did what you had to do,” she whispered. “It’s okay.” Slipstream felt the mare beside her shiver, shaking like a filly blind with fear. “We’re going to die out here,” she murmured absently, staring into the base of the fire. Slipstream was unsure if Wiltings had meant her to hear that last part, though now it seemed her turn to give comfort. She unfurled her left wing, which must have defrosted, and slung it over Wiltings’ back, returning the embrace. “We’ll find a way.” She had trouble believing it herself when she spoke the words, and judging by the way the others shifted uncomfortably around the fire, neither did they. Wiltings felt warm, not warmer than the fire, but warm in a different way, a more comfortable way. It was warmth in a way that soothed her body and nerves, letting the troubles relax so she could simply be. “Sage,” Wiltings said suddenly. The pegasus mare who had been fussing over Minnow looked up. “Yes, Captain?” “How’s she looking.” “She’s warmed up now, but it’s up to her body whether or not it wants to wake up. I can’t really do anything about her burns though. She’s going to lose a lot of flesh later, and it’s going to hurt.” “Burns?” Slipstream asked. “I found her in the snow.” Sage looked up, showing her cobalt mane and pink coat. “It must have happened before she fell. She’s burnt off most of the feathers on one wing; that’s probably why she fell in the first place.” Slipstream looked back to the fire. As easy as it was to sit and stare, to stop caring, something had to be done. “Ideas,” she demanded suddenly, giving WIltings, who had been dozing off against her, a little shake. “We’re stranded in the middle of snowy nowhere. From our last coordinates... uh.” Initially, she would have turned to her navigator, but he had gone down with the Departure. “How far are we?” “From the last point of Equestrian civilization, about four hundred and twenty miles,” a white stallion said. He shrugged when Slipstream raised an eyebrow at him. “I was navigator aboard the gunship Aspen.” Slipstream sighed. “So, walking isn’t an option. We’d be lucky to average ten miles a day in this snow, and as far as I’m aware, we have no food.” “Well,” Wiltings intervened, “there was a box of ration crackers aboard the Friendship. After the storm, we can see if we can retrieve it.” Slipstream pointed to her. “That’s good, but still, not enough to get us four-hundred miles.” She pinched her eyes shut as a pain throbbed intensely in her head for a moment. “Okay, um... barding, warmth. Our jackets aren’t going to cut it.” Wiltings clicked her tongue. “That’s... going to be a little harder.” Slipstream took a deep breath, and was suddenly struck by how tired she was. She felt like a filly trying to pull an allnighter, and realizing at six-AM just how tired they were. She slumped against Wiltings and her muscles laxed. “You okay?” Wiltings asked, now supporting most of Slipstream’s weight. “Yeah,” she murmured, slumping further. Wiltings was a firm, yet comfortable thing to lean against, her earth pony traits shining through in forms of strength. “I can’t... I just can’t do this right now.” She buried her muzzle in the mare’s side. “Not right now.” Her flesh burned, having gone completely numb and now exposed to heat, heat that felt so great, yet stabbed like needles soaked in allergens. Wiltings shifted uncomfortably and patted Slipstream with the hoof she had wrapped around her waist. Seeing the commander in a state such as this was not the most reassuring, but Slipstream didn’t seem to care what she or the others thought. The normally-strong and commanding mare closed her eyes and sighed a long breath, then she was out like a light “Now what?” a stallion asked cynically. Wiltings leaned back, and with her slumped against a might-as-well-be unconscious Slipstream. “Call it a night, and we’ll organize in the morning. Hopefully the storm will have passed by then.”