The convoy’s first warp was to a depot star system named Urithal. It was one of the territories claimed by the Harmony as an entirely militarized zone. Such places only fueled the ill feelings between the Peace Corps and those it was meant to protect before the attack on Thymal. Currently, it was a stretch of ruins. A red star shed its light on huge wrecks throughout the system. Destroyed ships and facilities alike hung in the vacuum, memorials left for the survivors. They were dark husks with breaks in their walls that allowed beams of light to shine through.
“It’s a graveyard…” one of the escort pilots messaged to the others.
“Did we really expect it to be anything but?” another asked.
“May we recover the bodies of our comrades should we come across them. They deserve a proper farewell from this realm.”
There was a somber silence thereafter. No one wanted to continue talking about the forgone conclusion that the fall of this system was.
After much thought, Phineas was back at the shuttle’s controls, strapped in and looking over the data windows projected on his screen. His scans were returning results that weren’t especially promising in terms of ammo caches and weaponry, but there were other assets that the convoy could have made use of. Scrap metal for repairs, for example, was plentiful. He patched into the comms and said: “Start scavenging what you can. Fighters, stay in formation around the gathering parties. Transports, keep your Spell-cores primed for jump in case we get blindsided here.”
The convoy’s goal was to gather whatever resources they could from the old Harmony territory; Phineas had his own personal objective to go about completing, however. His scans were turning up all sorts of strange readings, though they were not completely unknown to the shuttle’s data stores. They were the same readings detected from a vast majority of the Harmony ships that fateful day, overlooked by the stallion at the time as he was caught up in the ensuing mayhem. Knowing what he did now, Phineas took it upon himself to investigate.
The convoy spread out in the debris field, each transport having a group of fighters circling around them tightly. The transports hung over the space husks, ramps and loading bays open. People in spacesuits traversed the hull with pulses from their jetpacks, equipment kits in tow as they went about collecting materials. They were all shadows against the red star in the distance.
The Equestrian shuttle was landed on the exterior hull of the remains of a warship, a broad semicircular construct that would have had had a steadily rising superstructure, but at present it was completely blown apart, the fragments of metal suspended above and around it. A designated transport loomed overhead, a crew of just a little more than ten jetting down to the wreck. The pony pilot was already walking across the hull, magnetic clamps keeping him fastened down in the zero-g environment.
With the bulk of the ship’s structure missing, the thick hull plating on the side walls were reduced to stringy-looking slabs of metal with melted edges. Phineas surveyed the damage, noting that the failures in the hull were most likely caused by concentrated ballistic weaponry. Not beams, but considerably powerful rounds that passed right through the ship’s armor. There were patterns of overlapping holes where numerous shots hit the same area. The ship’s command center was bombarded by them, perforating the hull until the whole section came off. Phineas was able to look into the lower levels of the warship from the edge of the giant hole left, the edges scorched and eroded away.
He did not want to enter the dark crevasse that awaited him. But he had to. He knew that it was something he had to do if he wanted to start answering some of his questions, and it was about time that he followed up a tangible lead.
“So the Harmony decided it’d be a good idea to incorporate the Hoof-Talon tech into their ships, hmm?” Phineas said to himself. He took a deep breath. “Then it’s time for me to take a look at what they’ve done. How considerate that the defenders decided to take out the upper decks… makes my job a whole lot easier…”
As the gathering crew started to cut out pieces of hull plating with Magi-Flux Harmonizers, Phineas stepped over the edge of the hole and deployed his boosters. He angled their ends upwards and fired a short burst of red exhaust, descending into the shadows. His helmet promptly compensated for the lack of light. All around him were hallways but they might as well have been catacombs, ancient relics filled with all kinds of mysteries.
”Engineering block,” Phineas told himself mentally. ”Find that and you have the root of all this evil… literally”
He spent the next few minutes maneuvering around the gaping wound in the ship, his boosters lighting up the darkness every so often as he changed directions, investigating the numerous corridors surrounding him. One hallway in particular had something of particular interest: a word. It was written in large alien symbols on the left wall, the text darkened by scorch marks and strange stains. Phineas jetted over to it and held a foreleg out to stop himself when he neared it. He eyed it curiously, thinking it might have been a location marker. He raised his PDA up to it and attempted to scan the word with the Universal Translator, but got a failed reading. The burns and stains made the translation inconclusive.
“Shit,” Phineas mumbled. He pushed himself away from the wall and jetted out of the passageway. “I suppose I can find a terminal and try to reactive it like I did back on that science vessel… will be a bit harder, what with the ship being shot to pieces and all…” he said to himself as he thought out loud. Hearing his own voice in his helmet helped him deal with the absolute silence of his surroundings.
After searching for another stretch of time, Phineas came across a wall terminal a few levels further down in the warship. He felt a surge of hope at the find, but quickly found it to be inoperable. The screen was cracked and dim, unable to display anything.
“Damn,” he said, pressing a hoof against it. “Solutions… solutions… ah! I know!”
He sat on his haunches, pulled out his Magi-Flux Harmonizer and proceeded to try to establish a mana charge in the computer’s assembly. After spending another few minutes messing around with the internal components, the stallion was successfully able to restart the terminal. The light on the screen flickered on, the image scrambled.
He put away the Harmonizer and connected his PDA to the console, turning on its projector afterwards. After a moment, streams of text ran across the little plane of light above the device. “Map,” said the silver stallion. “Phineas needs map to go do things with.” He paused, looked up from the PDA and over the computer. He was staring at the wall ahead of him when he thought: ”And once again… I fear for my sanity.”
He decided to leave contemplating his mental health for a later time, when he didn’t have a mystery he was trying to solve. He tapped the PDA’s buttons, scouring the ship’s databanks for schematics and finding that a large portion of the information was either lost or corrupted when the vessel was disabled. He settled for a general overview of the ship’s layout and disconnected from the terminal. He put the Harmonizer back in his toolkit and he started to study the graph, looking for the area he was currently in so that he could find a route to the warship’s engineering section.
The layout was a 2D diagram listing off the deck levels and the various functions that went on in each designation, such as the forward lower level decks being devoted to light plasma weaponry the likes of small gun turrets. Phineas found the now missing superstructure on the overview and started counting off the levels until he came across the one he was currently on.
“Hex-drive missiles… what the hell are Hex-drive missiles?” Phineas muttered.
Apparently, the new type of warhead was stored where he was, possibly still loaded up in launch silos located further down the hallway. Being on board a ship with potentially live ordnance like that made him very uneasy… but then again, he didn’t feel at ease flying into the dark bowels of a defeated warship that had been wrangled over to evil’s ends in the first place.
“Whatever they are, they can’t be anything good, that’s for damn sure.”
The pony continued studying the layout until he found what he wanted: A maintenance access tunnel he could use to reach the engine core. There were several located around the ship but this one was the closest one to him. Even then, it would be a winding trek through the dark innards of the warship.
“And now the fun begins,” he said dryly while he tapped a button on the PDA.
The hologram faded away and he got up onto all fours. He started walking down the hallway, his entry point and the terminal nearby disappearing into the shadows behind him. The faint glow from his helmet’s visors ran along the deep red colored walls. Eventually, he came across the door to the maintenance tunnel and he attempted to administer a magic charge to its control panel. Failing that, he relied on the next best thing.
“Open you bloody bastard!” Phineas grunted. After cutting the doorlocks with his Harmonizer, he put his crowbar to use. With one redoubled effort, the stubborn obstacle gave way, one angular half of it sliding into its frame. Phineas put the crowbar back in its toolbox and pushed the other side of the door aside before stepping through the doorway. He looked back at the opening and muttered, “I thought one of the good things about doors was that they opened when someone wanted them to.”
He turned around and tensed instantly, seeing a dark shape rushing towards him from around a corner a short distance away, grappling the walls with multiple limbs. They were long and thin, segmented in an insectile manner, tipped with claws that stabbed into the metal. The body the limbs were connected to was burly, reminding Phineas of the more muscular species of beings he came across –save for the fact that said body stopped roughly past the creature’s stomach and had various bits of organic matter dangling freely from the nasty gash where its waist should have been.
Phineas was immediately poised to react, spreading out his hooves in a combat stance as he deployed his hover-platform rifles. The white-blue light the muzzle flash produced lit up the tunnel, bolts of magic boring searing tunnels through the undead. It positioned many of its limbs ahead of itself and tugged forcefully, slingshotting itself at the armored stallion.
Phineas stopped firing and swung himself around, split-seconds away from deploying his energy blade when the undead collided with his flank, flooring him. It tried to using its mass of insectoid limbs to pin him down and he looked up into the monster’s sickly eyes and snarled, “Oh fuck this!”
The rifle in between him and the undead turned to direct its lethal end at the creature, but several of the limbs caught the length of the barrel and forced it aside. But in doing so, the creature released its hold on Phineas’ leg and he took full advantage of that. He started to kick at the torso, landing several good blows and subsequently dislodging various organs. They fell out onto the floor in a blackened heap, coated in a disgusting slime.
Aside from making him feel progressively sicker in the stomach, Phineas’ efforts did not seem to have any other effect other than forcing the monster away a few feet. It gnashed its bony jaws ravenously, bits of flesh floating around in zero gravity.
Phineas whipped his tail around and deployed the cutting energies from the end of the sheath, slicing apart the limbs holding onto him. He then rolled away from the undead and got back on his hooves, stepping backwards while putting his reticles back on the undead.
In turn, the monster grappled the walls with its remaining limbs and climbed up to the ceiling, where it proceeded to scramble toward the pony to attack him from above.
”Oh no you don’t!”
He opened fire again, searing bolts of magic slamming into the undead and eating through it. It threw itself at the pony again, but by then it sustained so much damage that it fell apart, a sizable meaty chunk slamming into the floor beside the pony before bouncing and floating back up, deflecting off the wall and continuing to drift down the tunnel.
The rest of the deathless squirmed in front of the pony, its cauterized limbs groping for purchase in order to drag itself at its target. Phineas grimaced at the display. Steeling himself, he approached it, guns aimed down at it should it try anything bold.
“You used to be… alive once, weren’t you?” Phineas said as he looked at the abominable creature. It continued reaching for him with lopped off limbs, snapping its jaws. It never took its burning, pupil-less eyes off of him. “By my merciful Celestia, what in the hell have they done to you…?”
He stopped at the very edge of the undead’s reach and fired both his rifles simultaneously into the undead’s head, putting an end to its unsettling movements. Its limbs floated lazily about like the vapor rising out of the dimly glowing holes in the monster’s flesh. With a sigh, Phineas stowed his rifles.
He noticed the pendant the undead had around its neck and shook his head. He recognized it because many of the displaced Harmony soldiers still wore them. “So Tsubar probably looks like you then,” Phineas said somberly. “Just how the fuck did you lot using a bit of machinery end up causing all this…”
He shook his head again. With the possibility of there being more of these twisted undead creatures prowling the halls of the warship, he started to wonder if it was really worth it to press on to the engine block. ”I need to know how this happened. It may be the only way to get closure on this whole mess happening with me being unable to stop it…”
So Phineas went on with his venture. He did not run into another deathless on the way to his destination, but saw the evidence of a grisly event splattered on the walls. He tried not to think about what could have occurred to leave such ghastly imagery but found himself victim to his own nature.
When he finally reached the engine, he was greeted with the sight of a strange construction. Giant cylinders were locked into a central unit with all kinds of extensions coming out of them, creating thick bundles of cables and metal fixtures. The containment chamber for the engine was completely dark, but with his helmet’s enhancing function Phineas was able to make out the runic writing etched on the pylons.
“So this is what is called a Hex-core, huh?” the stallion commented. “By Luna’s tail, the damn name sounds evil!”
He spent some time just… looking at the thing. It was just a construct of metal and magic, yet there was something so much more to what a Hex-core truly was, he knew. It was technology gained from the Hoof-Talons, who in turn developed it under the influence of incomprehensible power to forward an agenda he could not begin to understand. And it was the critical flaw of the Harmony, crippled and corrupted by their own spacecraft.
“Could it be that this was all planned by the Star Terrors?” Phineas asked himself. It was an unsettling thought. If that were true, what did it mean that he interacted with the Iopteryx? What did it mean that he saw it in his dreams, and even when he awoke from stasis? His actions indirectly set the stage for this crisis, so was he a pawn in an immensely greater cosmic game?
These were hard questions to ask, much less contemplate as much as the silver stallion did, sitting before the black mass of machinery and occult sorcery. Sitting there, he could have sworn he felt a presence, barely tangible, as if he were being watched. He knew then that these vessels built around blight were wards for evil, things to be destroyed.
“If you all are Gods,” said the silver stallion as he stood up, his eyes fixed into glares underneath his helmet’s visors as he gazed upon the Hex-core. “This galaxy… this universe… would be better off without you.”
There was a strange sound then, one that Phineas heard outside of his helmet. A low groan, a far off roar, a mad cackle, they sounded off as one around him. “Then do not delay, pony. We eagerly accept your challenge.” he heard a collection of voices say, alien languages and… unnatural sounds, twisted into words that he could understand.
Phineas grunted, defiant as ever. “No force from heaven or hell could turn me into its puppet.”
“Such pride… such foolishness… it will not go unpunished. Your friend learned this. You will learn it as well, in due time.”
And with that, Phineas turned away from the Hex-core. Not because he was intimidated by the threat, but because they went too far. Now, he felt that fire burning inside him. This wasn’t a fight to regain sovereignty over the galaxy. This was a war to bring divinity to justice.
Phineas jetted out of the warship, bathed in the light of explosions all around it. The gunships unloaded their weaponry into the husks of former Harmony ships, sending them and the undead infestation within them into oblivion.
“And what better way to start a war than to destroy all symbols of the enemy?” he asked himself as he made his way toward the shuttle.
All in all, the gathering mission was a respectable success, a small step in the right direction.