Applejack was relaxing in front of the campfire after a hard day’s work. From here the sounds of fusion cutters were muted, almost sweetened into melody. She nudged a log deeper into the embers and felt a satisfying whoosh of heat, heralded by sparks that danced with dizzying motions up into the sky. Yawning, she poked a marshmellow onto her pointy stick and leaned it on the log. It balanced neatly at the edge of the flame. Hoof free cookery, the best kind. She took a small swig of whisky from a small flask she’d fashioned herself in the orbital’s machine shop.
Dust and ash kicked up by wings dragged Applejack from her reverie and she choked down the burning drink. A blue hoof prodded Applejack’s sleeping bag with something between accusation and amusement. “You know you have a bed, right?” She gestured the small mountain of metal behind them, towering over the horzion, the huge parabolic dish seeming to share in secret conversation with the night.
Applejack wiped her face and grumbled. She fished her stick from the fire, but it was too late. Burnt through and through, Applejack scraped the marshmellow off and fed it to the flames. “Course I know that. I’m out here ‘cause I want to be.”
She didn’t mind working in the orbital. Didn’t mind. Trying to rest in there, though...too cramped. Too bloated. Too busy with strange whirring things and clicking motors.
Dash regarded her and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I know what you mean. Can’t fly at all in there. Building flies and I can’t. That’s just wrong.” She plopped down next to Applejack with a teasing, hopeful look.
Applejack sighed, passed the flask. The mare coughed and cringed as the full weight of the alcohol hit her, but soon gave way to a pleasurable sigh adding its melodies to the night.
“I don’t know where the marines keep getting it from. I’m starting to think they spawn right from the barracks with a handy little stash.” It was a fact Applejack had come to begrudingly live with. She’d decided not to go looking too hard at the issue, because you couldn’t take ten steps with these guys without tripping over some breach of regulations, law, or common decency. So long as nobody took it too far, nobody got stupid and forced her to see the little creature comforts of contraband around the place, she wasn’t going to bring the issue up.
Applejack did still wonder how she felt about the marauders’ lingering smell, one distinctly...herbal. It was, she figured, another part of that same unwritten understanding. Break the rules, break the regulations, we don’t care, everyone does, that’s all just words on a page somewhere that ain’t here. Just don’t cross the line, and that you won’t find on no page nowhere, ‘cause the line is everywhere, we all carry it with us.
“Whatc’hoo thinking?” Dash asked.
“Stuff,” Applejack replied.
“Hmm.” They sat back and stared into the happy little fire. Only the flames and the flask moved.
There was a scream from the mineral line. “It’ll be that damn Lingaling again,” Applejack growled.
Dash was up in the air in an instant. “That zergling? Again? Wait, you named it?!”
“Yeah, so what?” Applejack shook her head. “Not the time, Dash. Go get the medivac, have it boost right over, quick as can be. I’ll see if a pony can’t wrassle it down.”
“I’m on it!” She was gone a blur of light in the dark.
“Right,” growled Applejack, adjusting her hat back into place. “Disturb my quiet evening with Dash, will you?” She set off towards the cries for help with determination in every stride.
She found the SCV’s exactly as she’d expected to: in panic and dissarray, scooting about in their construction frames, crashing into obstacles and one another, mechanical arms flailing about in the air. Lingling - for nothing could be so vexing and remain nameless - was at it again. Sometimes he scuffed up a supply depot, sometimes he scratched off the panels on a missile turret. Once he’d tore up a key cluster of wires and the barrack’s tech lab had caught fire before the SCV’s could rush to repair it.
Dash had crash landed the entire Orbital Command on top of him once. It hadn’t worked.
He could outrun everything but Dash herself, and he could outburrow her, scrambling down into the earth in a plume of grit, and no matter how quick they dug up the stony soil and shoved their rifles in, he was gone, and they’d all groan in frustration.
Lingaling was gnawing on a worker’s leg, crunching the outer plating while the SCV babbled and wailed helplessly. Applejack hit the zergling with a running tackle and the tumbled through the work-flattened ground. She came out on top and yanked a likely looking leg into an even more painful looking hold. Lingaling screeched angrily and slapped her aside with his sickle like claws and the mare spun off his back.
He leapt claws first. Gritting her teeth, Applejack dropped under the strike, then heaved hard as she could upwards. The zergling scrabbled for purchase he could no longer reach as Applejack brought him over backwards and down again like a hammer, slamming them both into the dust with an audible crack of chitin.
Applejack twisted and was on him again. A struggling kick knocked her head aside, she snarled and pushed her weight, Lingaling’s claws trapped under him, her hooves snaking under a leg and over his neck in a grappling hold.
The zergling snapped and shrieked, but couldn’t land anything, not claws or teeth. A zergy knee, however, snuck its way in there, and Applejack was knocked away with a grunt of expelled air.
He snapped upright, hissing. He flared his claws and stabbed them at her, forcing the mare back to some range. This time she dodged forwards, under his guard, lifting him bodily on a hoof and dropping the same elbow heavily in his zergy chest, driving him into the hard earth with a shrill cry of pain.
Teeth snapped at her now in desperation, and a one-two from the mare knocked away more than a few. Applejack grabbed the stunned zergling, dragged him around in an accelerating circle and slammed the crown of his skull into a mineral patch with a resounding impact.
Lingaling went limp in her hooves and slumped. Trembling, caught between grin and grimace, she noticed the spectators. Dash, the medivac, the SCV’s, everyone.
“That. Was. Awesome!”
Applejack despite herself felt a blush coming on.
“Where did you learn to do that?” The pegasus asked, her eyes wide as her mouth. It seemed to be the universal expression of the moment.
“Do what?” Applejack asked as she adjusted her hat.
“All that, you know, martial arts stuff!”
“Martial arts? I don’t know no martial arts.”
“Then what the hell was that?!”
Applejack followed Rainbow’s hoof to the still zergling. “Oh. That. I wrestled a lot when I was younger.”
“Secretely on the pro circuit?” the pegasus asked in a daze.
“What? No! Course not. I mean just around the farm. You know. Big Mac, Apple Bloom. The relatives when they were a’visitin. Silly games is all.”
Dash was silent in a moment of contemplation. “Did you always win?”
Applejack only chuckled. “Yeah, but only ‘cause Big Mac is too gentle and won’t be rough with a girl, even his own sister, the silly pony. But then Granny Smith took an interest, and getting beat by her was too embarrassing.”
Rainbow Dash struggled to imagine that, then gave up. There was a twitch of motion from the zergling. “Hey, look at that.”
“Still breathin, I know. But he’ll think twice about harrassing my mineral line again, I gurantee you that.”
Dash’s expression darkened, and with it the atmosphere. “Do you want me to, you know...if you don’t think you can...”
“No,” Applejack said flatly, to Dash’s explicit relief. “I’m thinking we keep ‘im prisoner. Something ain’t right. If there’s one zerg there’s a hundred. Everyone knows that. This feller spotted us even as we were arriving, and nothing’s come for us yet in all this time. Not that I ain’t thankful for that, I am, but it don’t add up. There’s something in this we ain’t seeing. I know you can’t exactly interrogate a zergling, but if there’s anything he can tell us, he’ll have to be livin, not dead. I’m sure we got something or other we can use for a cell in the meantime.”
Dash smirked. “Hear that, all of you? We got ourselves a pet now. Find him somewhere cozy.”
Applejack’s eyes narrowed, her lips thinned. “No, Dash, not a pet. A prisoner. There’s a difference.” To the rest she roared, “And no ‘little accidents’ or boots being misplaced into his ribs or what-have-you’s you hear? I will find out and I will not be happy about it. Might have a little ‘little accident’ of our own, am I understood? Good! Get to it.”
The area cleared quickly. Something about bare hoof fighting a zerg to within an inch of its life lended an authority to Applejack’s voice that she didn’t feel. Dash’s expression of bafflement shifted to worry. “You don’t think I meant...”
“No, Dash, I didn’t,” Applejack said wearily as she started her way back to her secluded little campfire. “I know you. You ain’t cruel like that. But the rest of them? I don’t know what I think about them.” She sighed as she found her flask tipped over, a patch of very inebriated dirt testament to it having spilled its contents. She picked it up and shook it a little, felt the little waves slapping about inside. There weren’t hardly nothing of it left now. She’d have to confiscate some more of that particular contraband in the morning.
“Here,” she said, offering the flask. “Polish that off, would ya?”
Dash drained the last drops with a swallow and a sigh. She wiped the back of her hoof across her lips and settled in her seat by the fire. They didn’t talk much.
So much for a quiet night with Dash, Applejack mused sullenly. Well, at least we're here together.