Solar Sails: Marooned In Equestria

by Bluecho


02 - Shipwrecked

02 - Shipwrecked


“Congratulations, soldier, on completing your first mission.”

“Thank you sir!” said Sarin Miles, standing up straight and cracking a salute.

She stood before her commanding officer, Lieutenant Vockter Jons. Like any proper imperial officer, his skin was brown like toasted almonds, his hair stark white and cut short. He wore a serviceable military frock and great coat; a uniform he wore well. A second generation G4, his series marked the first truly successful set of super soldiers in the Empire's command. They lacked many of the “tricks” that later series would become notable for, but possessed what many a scientist and officer dubbed “the peak of Fatae physical potential”.

That he could still wrestle cadets to the ground, even at his age, impressed those who served under him. Including Sarin. That the man was handsome certainly harmed him none in her books. Just looking at him, soaking in his praise, sent a shiver down her spine. She felt weightless.

“I received word from command for another assignment just this morning,” Lieutenant Jons continued. He fished through the memos scattered on his desk, snatching up one in particular and holding it up to read. “You are to proceed to the Glencost system, where you will receive further orders.” He held the memo out to Sarin.

She took the memo, but her hands shook. Something deep in her stomach sank. “Glencost system? But...” she mused, frowning. Felt wrong, terrible. Dread draped her, spilling through.

“Is there a problem with your orders, cadet?”

“Cadet? What?”

The room shook violently. She staggered.

“What's wrong Cadet?” said Jons, his voice seeming distant. Distorted.

Instinct, or a familiar subconscious directive, told her to reach up over her head. Sarin did so, just in time for the world to fall away beneath her. She yelped, gripping the parallel bars directly above her.

“What's wrong Cadet? Get moving!” shouted a strong voice below. It was that Drill Sergeant. The one with skin the color of burnt almonds. Both his good eye and his blind eye stared up at her, a scowl on his face. The scar over that milky white eye told of combat experience. His tone told of a combative mindset.

“Sir! I-I...” Sarin stammered, vertigo building at the base of her skull. She didn't like looking down, feet dangling, poised over a drop a very primal part of her brain told her was unsurvivable. She also thought she heard the sound of coconuts banging together nearby...

“Stop whimpering and move, Cadet! They told me you G7-Hs are rated for celerity, so I want to see you move those arms!”

“I can't!” Sarin whined. Her hands started to slip. The sound of coconuts drew closer, as did the sound of fluttering wings. The distance to the ground only seemed to expand.

Not that the Drill Sergeant's voice became any less pronounced. It rang louder even. “No excuses, Cadet! The Empire doesn't take excuses! Get your ass in gear, or I'll make you wish they hadn't popped you out of the tube! Get. Moving. NOW!”

In desperation, she tried to move one hand to the next rung of the horizontal ladder, but the effort was too much. Sarin's other hand lost traction, and she fell. Screaming, she saw the ground rocket towards her...

The force of the stop shot Sarin awake. She gasped, looking around her at a sea of green and brown. She realized she was hanging from branches by her open parachute. A glance down revealed the forest floor, only three meters below. Looking up again, she saw that the chute was caught on a particular branch, one that was beginning to bend in increments. She spied a break at the base of the offending limb, where part of its girth had splintered. But the limb was pretty thick, so it held her weight.

So far.

Three meters. I can fall three meters, the soldier thought, eyeballing the drop. It was either drop or attempt to climb up the ropes holding her. The branch could snap at any second, so Sarin opted for the former. She carefully worked the latches on her pack, then allowed herself to drop.

She kept her knees bent as she fell, and upon reaching the ground pushed forward so as to roll. Using the momentum of the roll, Sarin settled on her feet, squatting. Perfect landing. Better be perfect, she griped to herself. After learning to cross over the gap, the Drill Sergeant made me fall from it until I mastered landing.

Or had that been a natural consequence of trying to cross the length? She didn't care to remember the Drill Instructor. She didn't care to remember many parts of her life.

Sarin Miles took in her environment. Temperate forest, calls of birds. Looking through gaps in the canopy revealed the sun at midday. Sarin hadn't paid enough attention to the sun's position while in the dory – there being more pressing matters like a transonic animal or the life-threatening fall – so she could only guess how many minutes or hours had passed while she was unconscious.

Oh wait, she had a watch. Embarrassing blunder. Sarin checked it, and figured her nap had lasted somewhere around thirty minutes.

It was at that point she remembered the two crewmen. The crash site needed to be found. Sarin determined one direction was uphill, remembering the mountain. She started a hike in that direction.



The Lady was on her side, at least in that instance, as Sarin ran straight into the crash site within five minutes of setting out. When she saw the shape of the site, she almost wished she hadn't found it.

A small clearing had been made by the breakage of branches upon the boat's landing. The dinghy itself was trashed. Hull splintered, engine crushed and spewing smoke, mast bent, sail in tatters. And the Fatae inside could be deemed deceased at a mere glance. Sarin averted her gaze for a moment before setting to work dislodging the remains. She also found a small trenching shovel amongst the intact tools, which made the next task easier.

Shoveling dirt gave the modified soldier time to think. She hadn't known the two solar sailors. Not even slightly. She could swear their names had been given, but she assumed there would be time over the course of the mission to learn them properly. Then she had to stop digging once she realized the two did have names; they were etched into their tags. Further embarrassment.

Sorchess and Bidd. That had been their names. She debated carrying the tags around her neck to remember them by, before deciding that if discovered, they would need identification on them. A courtesy to the two of them and to whoever might find them. Whatever those might be.

The sun settled on the horizon, casting the landscape in a curtain of warm colors. Sarin shoveled the last of the dirt atop the makeshift graves. She opted not to mark the spots. While the prospect of the bodies being found and identified was accounted for with the tags, she really didn't want them being found at all. Could give her presence away, could alert the residents to the Empire's existence, and could give natives a head start in finding weaknesses. The only reasons she wasn't outright burning the bodies to dispose of them was 1) it could create (more) smoke to signal her position, and 2) because a rescue party would want to retrieve the bodies for their families.

Not that a rescue party was coming anytime soon. The radio in the dory was, like practically any other piece of sophisticated equipment, smashed and inoperable. Which is not to say the Docket Lot wouldn't know to send help. The plan had been to radio the Lot once they hit land. Several hours without word was more than sufficient to know the mission went awry, let alone what they would conclude the next day.

Plus, there were telescopes watching the surface of the planet at all hours. Someone would have noticed the rainbow colored explosion. Whether they saw the crash in progress was unlikely, but Lieutenant Jons was smart. He'd figure things out.

Jons will rescue me, thought Sarin, watching the sunset and its pretty colors. He'll send another dory to investigate. Right?

She took the chance to begin hiking uphill, partly to shut out the niggling doubt already growing in her mind. She carried whatever tools she could salvage, knowing she didn't have time to deal with the wreck itself before it became too dark to work. In the fading twilight, she found her salvation: a cave nestled on a cliff. The Lady was further generous by making the path to it thin but workable, so it was barely a climb before she had shelter. Enough of a challenge to ward off casual investigation, Sarin hoped.



The next three days were damage control. The engine on the dory finally stopped smoking, so she cobbled together a crude sled from planks and hauled it back to the cave. She did the same for the radio and sails. If nothing else, she couldn't permit those advanced pieces of technology to fall into native hands, assuming they could reverse engineer them. The remainder of the wood could be hauled in bits and pieces. All told the task took the entire day. A long, arduous day.

Second day was mixed between finding fresh water – succeeded within the morning by way of a convenient creek – and to retrieve her parachute. This required a fair bit of climbing, but her sub-series, the H3s, were uniquely suited towards agility. The parachute was a goldmine of useful ropes, and the fabric could be used to make an impromptu bed roll.

Sarin slept reasonably well that night, despite obvious problems.

By the third day she couldn't deny her hunger anymore. The dory and her pack had been furnished with provisions, but most of the dory's were smashed and ruined by the impact. Rot was already seeping into most of the tinned goods, so they were useless. Her light provisions kept on her ran low quickly, so by day three she was already preparing weapons for the hunt. She had merely one all-purpose knife and one light pistol – that is to say a pistol that discharges light but took a lot of power to charge. Not useful for hunting, so Sarin took to sharpening sticks.

If nothing else, the pistol would be useful in case she felt the need to off herself. A prospect she hurried to ignore.

The afternoon of the third day was unproductive. No wild animals seemed to come within her range. Either no substantive creatures happened to live in that neck of the woods, she was just really bad at finding any, or the animals were really good at avoiding her. Did the commotion of the crash and her activities scare them away?

She did find a number of berry bushes however. Experiments determined that no, they weren't poisonous. In retrospect, popping the berries could have gotten Sarin killed, but she wasn't in a particular mood to be cautious with her diet.

Because as she trudged back to her hole in the wall, Sarin Miles got the distinct impression that the crew of the Docket Lot weren't going to send any rescue.

Three days. Three days and no sigh of another solar dinghy. Granted she could have simply missed them. Tree cover blocked much of the sky, so it might have behooved her to simply wait on the mountain cliff and watched for flyovers. But pressing needs had to be met, and she couldn't stay still all day. So during her tasks, Sarin had looked through the canopy as well as able, watching for flying boats. None revealed themselves.

What she did notice was unusual cloud activity. Every so often she would look up to see clouds, only to look again a minute later to see the sky cleared of them. Not dissipated, not thinned. Completely missing. When this happened repeatedly over the course of days, she began to wonder if it was her mind playing tricks or some kind of magical effect ambient to the world. It seemed to shift the position of planetary bodies at odd times, so why not have inconsistent weather?

Or maybe it was just the trees blocking them? At times, Sarin would feel silly and reprimand herself for seeking conspiracies where none existed. Other times she would wonder if she could afford to ignore conspiracies if they existed. This was a strange country.



On the morning of the fourth day, the in-name-only Sergeant found a boon. She uprooted the plant, discovering a sweet potato. Not a root vegetable that looked like a sweet potato, as if the result of convergent development between this planet and the worlds of the Empire. A real, legit sweet potato. At first Sarin was glad; free sweet potato. But then she was confused. She tilted her head at the boon.

How is a sweet potato, orange flesh beneath brown skin, growing on an alien world? Had there been other visitors from the Empire or related systems that had carried seeds here? And then she wondered further: how is any of this forest here? All the plants looked like plants found on worlds she was familiar with. She could hardly account for worlds that had been discovered (and conquered) by Fatae civilization; those had their fair share of unique plants and animals. Some had firm places in Fatae diets. But the worlds terraformed under the Genesis Initiative were based on existing standards, and hosted many of the same species. Species like the ones growing on this world.

Sarin shook herself out of that mystery spiral. No point in wasting mental energy thinking about subjects that have no answers, she thought. I need to get back to gathering information on things that do have answers. I need to return to my mission.

As she walked back towards her cave, spear in hand and yam under arm, Sarin heard a sound that had been absent for the last few days. A voice.

“I think it might have landed in this direction.”

Sarin Miles ducked behind a tree and looked to the direction of the voice. A creature floated over the forest floor, held aloft by beating feathered wings. It was four-legged. Its fur was cyan...and its mane and tail a vibrant rainbow.

You.