The Forward Unto Dawn had seen better days, in fact, it was almost exactly half the ship it used to be, but it still had the most important parts of what made her a ship.
She still had a reactor, which was going strong, feeding Cortana with all the power she needed to do whatever she wanted with the loads and loads of empty space at her disposal.
She still had a communications array, which had never stopped broadcasting one simple plea for help.
She had a secondary sub-light engine, letting her make gradual course corrections. They were still drifting, but now they were drifting towards UNSC space, albeit infinitesimally slowly compared to slipspace travel. They might as well have been dead in the water, but at least she wasn’t actually dead in the water.
Lastly, and most importantly, she still had a handful of sensors, to which Cortana devoted most of her processing power. They weren’t much compared to the suite of equipment she was used to commanding, all of that had been lost with the front half of the ship when the portal collapsed, but it was enough to detect the anomaly months before they entered its system.
Months, that she had spent debating her options.
In the end, she had decided to do a flyby of the system, giving its gravity well a rather large berth. It wasn’t a major course correction, it turned out, and at the very least it would add a little to the collective knowledge of the scientific community.
The anomaly was curious, if nothing else. An oddity. It appeared that a star was moving in tiny circles around some sort of object. Now, Cortana was not particularly enthralled by astronomy, though she had extensive information on the subject thanks to her passing need to guide starships through space, but with little else to occupy her time, she had turned to mapping and analyzing the stars around them.
She had arrived at a number of possible theories regarding this particular anomaly, but the one that best fit the available data was that some kind of, much more massive, dead star had captured the younger one in a stable orbit in passing.
A few months later she was close enough to disprove that theory. All indications pointed to the star orbiting around a planet-sized object, as odd as that seemed. Still, after all she had witnessed, she would not be surprised to find that this was some kind of forerunner artifact world.
This theory carried with it some interesting implications; namely, that the means to return home might very well be found on such a forerunner planet.
She would have to scan it more thoroughly to be sure, but that meant that she would have to get closer to it.
If it really was a forerunner installation then she was confident she could repair the Forward Unto Dawn; even get a slip space drive up and working if she could find even a broken one to salvage parts from. If this proved impossible, there was always the possibility that it had some other manner of interstellar transportation. Perhaps something analogous to what the covenant had dug up on earth…
She sent instructions to the reactor, diverting power to the engines.
It would take her time to get there, but she had all the time in the world.
The surface of the planet registered as relatively benign. From what she could ascertain from the edge of the system, it wasn’t overly hostile to life. Several blue oceans framed a few continents, and what was probably a breathable atmosphere shrouded the world.
She had been able to tell for the last week that the system’s star was considerably smaller than it should have been, only an order of magnitude or two more than the planet it orbited.
That’s right. Cortana had double-checked the outcome several thousand times, her sensors still showed the miniature star orbiting the planet at a distance of roughly 0.836 AU. Now that she was in system she could also pick up the moon that managed to stay perfectly opposite the sun, orbiting the planet every 28 hours.
What she didn’t find was any blatant sign of Forerunner technology.
She found hints though. The ‘star’ was orbiting in a perfectly circular orbit, a feat that was clearly artificial. The planet was registering a gravity roughly 3 ½ times what was considered ‘earth normal’ and yet was actually a few dozen kilometers smaller than earth in diameter.
There were several natural ways the seemingly higher density planet could be explained away, yet there was also the very real possibility that the seemingly natural exterior of the planet hid a core of forerunner technology.
The Forward Unto Dawn’s momentum was propelling it along a tangential arc. Eventually it would take them out of the system entirely. Cortana had to make a choice.
She wasn’t getting any younger. Already she was pushing the time-limit on rampancy. In a few years she was more than likely to be dead or insane. It was no longer something she could ignore, with almost nothing else but herself and her memories to occupy her thoughts in the endless vacuum.
The next nearest star was at least a dozen light-years away in any direction; this would be her only chance.
They had won. Together, the Chief and her had stopped the Flood, and stopped the rings from firing. Their mission was a success.
There was a very real chance that the planet held the key to her making it back to UNSC space before she ‘died’, but there was also a very non-zero chance that the planet would prove nothing more than an oddity filled with nothing but rampant vegetation.
One thing was absolutely certain. All projections of the state of her ship pointed to one conclusion. If she landed on it, she wouldn’t be able to take off again without extensive repairs only a shipyard could provide.
If she landed, sensors indicated that she would have access to the raw materials needed to synthesize air and food, the two things she needed to keep the Chief alive. She would be able to bring him out of cryo, and they could search for a key to getting home.
And if they failed to find anything…
Cortana re-ran her spectral analysis of the planet’s surface.
It certainly looked like a good place to die. At least she couldn’t think of a better gravestone than a fascinating astronomical anomaly.
Her decision made, Cortana diverted power to the engines and gradually nudged the Forward Unto Dawn into a degrading orbit around the planet.
Part of Princess Luna’s job was the arrangement of the night sky. It was the sky she worked so hard on each night, relishing in the act of re-creating her masterpiece each day. Of course, keeping an eye out for strange objects was also part of that duty.
Tonight was like any other night, except this time she sensed something wrong. An object appeared in her sky tonight that was not supposed to be there, marring her work with its presence. Reaching out with her senses, she felt for it, only to feel cold metal under the grip of her magic. It was a rather large object too, and it was heading for Equestria.
Without needing to look, she addressed one of her night guards, one of whom were always somewhere nearby her, by name. “Aurora, I require the use of a telescope. The royal astronomers should possess the one I need. Retrieve it for me.”
The bat-pony bowed from where she had materialized next to her and departed with barely a whisper.
While she waited, Luna cast a few spells on some illusory models she was projecting, and continued to observe the object. She could feel its velocity with her magic, so projecting its path was child’s play for any unicorn, really, if said unicorn were able to sense it as she could. The spellwork was simple, yet informative; the object would brush their atmosphere in half a day’s time and then pass them by. Luna made a mental note to send out a proclamation detailing the event, it would likely cause some sort of light show, glancing their atmosphere like that.
What she didn’t know was what the strange object looked like.
Which was why she had sent for the- ah, here it was.
Aurora returned, carrying the massive piece of equipment with the help of half a dozen other night guards. Luna admired the grace with which they maneuvered the massive telescope onto her balcony. She was rather out of practice when it came to precision flying, she’d be the first to admit.
With a word of thanks, the guards vanished once more into the shadows, leaving her more or less alone with the device.
It took a few minutes of calibration, but she eventually got it pointed at the strange object. It helped that she was rather awkwardly aware of the strange object’s presence in her sky. She hoped that feeling would fade come sunrise; then her sister could deal with it.
Peering through the eyepiece, Luna beheld something that was rather far outside of her considerable experience. The object was made entirely out of metal, but that was not what arrested her attention. It looked decidedly artificial, like some sort of pony-made structure, except teleported out into space, and with some of the oddest architecture she had ever seen.
Worse was the strange text on the side of the object. She couldn’t decipher the words, but their mere presence carried far-reaching implications.
What confused her was how the object looked… incomplete somehow. The side of it that was most easily seen showed honey-combed compartments with bits of material floating around, and lots of jagged edges, whereas most of the rest of the object showed smooth, if angular, faces. This face of the object screamed “broken”.
Luna inhaled sharply.
Was that it? Was this some sort of broken metal construct, drifting through space? No matter, this was already something unique enough that she would be remiss were she to not share her findings with other ponies.
As she contemplated how she would tell Celestia about it, she idly re-ran the spells that projected of the object’s path, just to be safe, before pausing, confused at the results. She ran the spells again. And then once more, her eyes slowly shrinking to pinpricks.
The object had been slowing down, she realized. Not only would this now delay its arrival to a full day or more, but her spell now projected that the object would not be able to escape the planet’s gravity well at all. The strange object was going to crash land here.
Quickly, Luna hurried from her balcony. She was going to wake her sister a few hours early today; if the object could control its own path through the sky, and was coming to Equestria, then there was no telling what fresh horror from Tartarus they might have on their hooves.
As the Forward Unto Dawn began its final approach of the planet, Cortana had the handful of drones that still functioned correctly busy finishing the sealing of various access ports and reinforcing her weak points. The re-entry was going to be rough, but with a little bit of chief’s probability bending luck, they should be alright.
As the ship made contact with the atmosphere, and the air around it started to ignite, the proximity to the high-gravity planet started to take its toll on the broken ship. Groans of stressed metal reverberated throughout her, and briefly, Cortana felt a flicker of irrational fear that it would break up into pieces and she would lose the Chief.
She purged the faulty program, reconstructing it to place more faith in the calculations she had run earlier. There would be hull-breaches yes, but the reactor was very well shielded against this sort of stress and the structural integrity of the ship as a whole shouldn’t suffer.
From what the sensors could glean through the heat of the re-entry, the Forward Unto Dawn would touchdown in some grassland, before grinding to a stop in a thick forest. Cortana had more experiences with crash-landings than she might have liked, though to be fair she had always managed to keep the Chief alive during them.
In a few notable cases, the Chief had been the only survivor of said crashes; his armor and altered physiology saving his life. Cortana’s algorithms produced guilt over the loss of life, yet weighed against what the Chief and herself had accomplished, thanks to those sacrifices, it was a more than acceptable trade-off.
Her perusal through her memory banks was cut short as the Forward Unto Dawn made contact with the surface, carving a furrow several kilometers long in the landscape as what was left of the ship’s hull took some heavy punishment.
As the Chief slowly regained consciousness, he noticed something was different from when he had entered cryosleep. As he became more aware of his surroundings, which consisted solely of the inside of his cryo-chamber, the Chief realized what it was: gravity.
He could feel the weight of gravity upon him. This meant that either Cortana had reason to believe that she could run the artificial gravity generator again without worry, or they had landed somewhere. Either way, this was good news.
It was a rare day that he avoided a quick-thaw when being woken from cryo, but Cortana was easing him into wakefulness this time, for some reason. This meant there was likely no immediate danger, unlike the vast majority of his experiences waking up from cryo-spleep.
Of course, the question of why he was being woken if there was no immediate danger needed to be addressed as well.
“I see you’re awake, Chief. All systems are running optimally; feel free to climb out of there.”
The door to his chamber hissed as it equalized the pressure, before it opened and rotated up out of his way. As he climbed out of the chamber his joints lightly protested the motion after so long being immobile. It wasn’t as bad as a quick-thaw, but it still wasn’t pleasant. Long experience with pain served to give him a sense of how injured he might be, or rather, tell him how remarkably uninjured he was. It would seem Cortana found a way to heal him while he was in cryo, or perhaps as he was slowly waking up, as he definitely remembered having a few cracked ribs, at the least, when he had entered it before.
“Why did you wake me?” he asked.
“I just need you to make a few repairs and reach places the drones can’t.” she remarked off-handedly. “Oh, and we landed on a planet that’s either a forerunner construct, or the scientific find of the decade.”
He reached over and grabbed his assault rifle off of the rack next to his cryo-tube, checking it over for any damage or maintenance issues. It had withstood the inactive period well, he decided, still perfectly serviceable, though he’d go over it with a cleaning kit at the earliest opportunity.
“Are there hostiles on the planet?” he inquired.
“I didn’t have good enough scanners to get detailed readings from orbit. I had to re-purpose some of the point-defense sensors to get what little I do have, and most of those were knocked out in the landing.” Cortana sounded slightly annoyed at her reduced capabilities, but she recovered a more pleasant tone easily. “Good to see you up and moving. You’ve been out for a while; two years and three months, in fact.”
Chief was somewhat surprised that they had reached a planet in that time using only sub-light speeds, though in hindsight he hadn't asked where exactly in the galaxy the failing portal had dropped them off before he put himself on ice. They could be anywhere for all he knew. Cortana probably knew though, and that was good enough for him.
Their goals were still the same as they were two years ago: return to earth. Though now that his ship had landed…
“Is the beacon still running?” he inquired.
“That SOS has been running non-stop, and is still in perfect condition, if I do say so myself. And as far as I can tell, the strange properties of this planet aren’t interfering with the signal, so in time it will reach UNSC space.”
How much time? Chief wondered to himself.
“Strange properties?” he echoed.
“It wasn’t clear until after we landed, but there’s something impossible about this planet. It’s actually smaller than earth, yet has a gravitational field as a planet three times as massive. At least, from orbit. On the surface, I can’t even get a consistent value for it! The average gravity acting on the whole ship fluctuates around 1.3 gees, though the vast majority of the time a brief scan of any one area comes up with exactly one standard earth gravity. When I track the descent of objects outside the hull, I get numbers all over the place; sometimes a fall is nearly instantaneous, other times a short fall takes several seconds longer than it has any right to! It’s not just beyond our grasp of physics, it’s inconsistent!” Cortana went on a miniature rant, and he could understand why. This flew in the face of everything he had been taught about physics. He wasn’t about to call it impossible, however.
“If it’s a forerunner world, could there be a gravity generator fluctuating nearby?” He asked as he left the cryo-chamber and started following the waypoints Cortana flashed on his HUD.
“Possibly. If I had the right equipment I could probably extract more useful data. Your armor has the right systems, but the logistics of using it to gather the data I would need are non-trivial. You’d have to travel to wherever I needed a reading, and even then, I’m not sure I could figure this out without more direct access to the technology causing it, and I have no idea where to even start looking for that.”
The Chief was beginning to understand why she had woken him.
“So, what’s first?”
“The Forward Unto Dawn took the landing well, but until I can reprogram them to compensate for the planet’s abnormalities, the drones are worse than useless. First objective is to get the automated defenses working again; the wildlife here has proven to be rather… vigorous.”
Chief stepped though a doorway and found himself in the armory. Wasting no time, he started gathering equipment.
“Threat assessment?” he asked Cortana. Knowing what to bring might be invaluable.
“Thermal imaging shows some pretty large critters, Chief. Take a big gun.”
Slinging a sniper rifle over his back, the Chief placed his assault rifle on a rack with a few others. He was slightly surprised at the condition of the armory, actually. It was better maintained than some of the other parts of the ship he had passed though, as if Cortana had paid it special attention.
Remembering something, the Chief approached a large locker, and entered in the security code. It opened to reveal a large selection of covenant weapons, courtesy of the Arbiter’s Elites. He grabbed one of the very small handfuls of energy swords they had been given, securing the weapon on his thigh. The charge had never lasted as long as he’d liked, but it was a very potent weapon, and he was glad to have it in his arsenal; especially when so much about this mission was unknown.
“Cortana, can you recharge the covenant weapons?”
“I think I could, if I had some time to tinker with the reactor and cannibalized a few for spare parts. That would stretch our ammunition for quite some time, come to think of it.” Her voice took on a more playful tone. “Finding ways to keep on shooting things, I see. I expected nothing less.”
“I try,” he deadpanned, grabbing a plasma rifle and exiting the armory.
Now fully awake, the Chief knew exactly where he was on the Forward Unto Dawn, and made his way to the nearest airlock from memory. Along the way, he stopped by one of the ship’s many terminals, Cortana’s holographic image suspended in the air above it.
“Ready to get back to work?” he asked her, his tone decidedly professional, as always.
“I thought you’d never ask!”
Removing the data chip from the terminal, he inserted it into the slot at the back of his helmet, already braced for the feeling of cool mercury that always accompanied her presence.
Instead of coming solely from his internal speakers, whenever she was in his armor he could essentially hear her speaking in his mind. It had taken some getting used to at first, he recalled, but by now her presence felt more normal than her absence.
Wasting no time, the Chief quickly arrived at the airlock and cycled though it without much trouble.
On the other side, the Chief beheld the expanse of grey plating that was the ship’s hull. Moving across it, he took note of the sky; a field of blue, with a few clouds scattered around. A sun shone high in the sky, and his armor informed him that the temperature outside was a comfortable 34 degrees Celsius.
What caught his eye, however, was the bird flitting between the clouds, high above him.
Unslinging his sniper rifle, he peered down the scope and zoomed in on it. It was definitely some sort of bird, possessing talons, wings, and a beak. What was strange was the way it appeared to be on fire, yet it didn’t seem concerned about that fact in the least.
“That’s interesting, I wonder what it burns for fuel,” Cortana remarked. “Perhaps it converts its food into heat?”
The Chief offered no comment, having decided that the creature wasn’t a threat for the moment. Instead, he re-slung the weapon and approached the first gun emplacement, mentally assessing it as he walked.
“What do you need me to do with this one?” he asked. From the looks of things, it was intact, though he could see a few signs of heat damage from the re-entry. It wasn’t as bad as plasma scoring, which it was designed to withstand, so he was more concerned at what seemed to be a few disconnected or missing pieces.
“I lost contact with this one, which means it’s been cut off from the power grid. Check that panel there.” She lit it up with a waypoint.
He pried it open to reveal a tangled bunch of cables, some of which were knocked loose from their moorings, or bore signs of trauma.
“Well this part’s easy enough. Go ahead and grab that welder behind you.”
Chief grabbed the welder and focused intently on Cortana’s instructions.
Luna soared through the afternoon skies, trailing a small contingent of her night guards behind her.
They flew in formation, for the most part, making use of the cloud cover to stay hidden from the hungry eyes that lay below. There were always hungry eyes watching from the Everfree forest.
The flight had taken the better part of the day, coming from Canterlot, but her guards were trained for this, and she had the endurance of an Alicorn. The flight barely winded them.
They followed the trail of destruction the object had caused, deep into Everfree. The trail had begun a short distance east of Ponyville, which consisted of mostly grasslands.
Any damage to the little town from the event had come from the thundering roar and earthquake-like shaking that accompanied it. It was fortunate that they did not have to re-build the town again.
Of course, the event demanded investigation, though until now the object’s resting place in the Everfree had discouraged any attempts to reach it. In the end, Luna had volunteered to lead her night-guard on the expedition.
Many ponies had wanted to join them, but she had insisted that this initial foray be done solely with trained members of the guard. There was no telling what surprises the strange metal object held.
The silhouette of the object was visible from a long distance off; as it stood much taller than the trees it rested among. As Luna got closer, the details started to resolve into a striking picture. The metal object was clearly artificial, as nature could not shape anything resembling that which stood before her.
The massive object rested in the trench it had dug, it’s angular, almost block-like architecture a strange sight to behold. Out from what appeared to be the main body, spread two wing-like protrusions, though they were curved downwards, as if to protect the rest of it. On each wing rested two large, concave, circular protuberances, the purpose of which she could not fathom.
As they reached a suitable distance, they altered their path, beginning to circle around it. Luna could see that what looked like smooth surfaces from afar were anything but. Hundreds of small jutting points of metal could be seen scattered around, but their alien shapes gave her no real hints as to what they might be.
As they slowly circled the object, she saw the same giant lettering on the side she had seen through the telescope. Even up close, where the words were massive, she couldn’t read them; the alien script defying any attempt at interpretation.
As they reached the other side of the object, Luna gazed again upon the jagged edges and honeycombed openings. It was clear that this strange structure was one part of a larger whole at one point.
Still, what purpose did this serve? What had damaged it? Would whatever that had hurt it so badly come back for it?
Luna didn’t know, but the answers likely lay inside.
She called out orders, and her guards descended towards the wreck, they would enter through the wounds on its side and-
*CRACK*
The Chief leveled the plasma rifle at the creatures and filled the air with fire. The little hybrid-creatures screamed as their flesh was burned from their bodies. Those that still could move fled into the forest.
Quickly policing the bodies, he granted a few mercy kills to the vermin and tossed them out of the gaping hole in the hull to the floor of the forest a dozen feet below.
The little feathered reptiles had been all too prevalent on the lower decks, and ever since he had gotten the automated defenses up and running, Cortana had had him cleansing the ship of foreign bodies.
“That’s the last of the ones in this section of the ship,” Cortana’s voice confirmed in his head.
Chief examined the empty space that had once been the other half of this corridor with a critical eye. He was estimating how many sheets of metal he would have to haul out here, just to seal this entrance.
Doing a little geometric math in his head was child’s-play, but it took him a moment to recall the dimensions of all the bulkheads he had crossed through on his way down here from the mechanic’s shop, and account for how he would have to pre-cut the thick metal plates before carrying them, just so he could get them down here. Eight should do the job. he decided.
Turning quickly, the Chief began his march back to the mechanics shop.
He hadn’t made it a dozen steps before an alarm sounded from the nearest intercom, sending a small jolt of adrenaline through him, and prompting Cortana to instruct him. “Something must have triggered the automated defenses; put me back in!” Immediately, he began to sprint down the corridor, following his memory to the nearest console.
Laying his eyes upon it, he quickly removed Cortana’s data-chip and re-inserted her into the ship’s systems.
“Accessing video-feed… Huh.” Cortana sounded a lot less urgent, and rather confused about something.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A flock of bat-horse hybrids tried to gain access to the ship, which triggered the turrets. They retreated, though the biggest one and a dozen others were neutralized before they cut their losses and ran.”
John waited patiently, knowing that she was likely stalling for time to try and figure out whatever was confusing her before mentioning it.
“…This is bad,” Cortana stated flatly, “They used a flight pattern optimized for evasive actions, and they wore armor constructed with forged metals, if spectral analysis can even be trusted on this damn planet... They were probably sapient.”
He considered this for a moment. The presence of a sapient alien race on this planet altered the situation. The mission objective of: return to UNSC space, alive, still stood, but now he had a new reason for that objective. The presence of another race in the galaxy was important; they had met only the Covenant races and the Flood until now. If nothing else, ONI would want to know this place existed, even if it was only to know where to strike when the bat-horses developed space flight and came to exact revenge for the deaths that had just taken place.
Actually, the threat of revenge was very real right now. Let ONI worry about the distant future, his concern was dealing with the present.
“Are they a threat?”
“Unknown. The recordings note a warping effect as the slugs hit that appears to have mostly negated the damage, and imparted high kinetic energy to the target. I’m theorizing some kind of new personal shielding effect. Their offensive capabilities have yet to be documented, so if they do come back we have to be ready for anything.”
“When they come back, we’ll be ready. Will we see them coming?”
“Now that I have a profile for them, I’ve set the video feeds to run through a filter while I’m not in the ship. No matter where we are, the coms should be able to get a signal through to us, and the point defense should auto-engage if they come too close. If they’re flying above the canopy we should get about twenty minutes warning, judging by their airspeed. If they approach on foot, we’d only get around two, on average.”
John nodded at the holographic display that Cortana was currently projecting her avatar from. Twenty minutes would give him plenty of time to prepare, and he knew quite a bit about setting traps in case they approached on foot.
“We’ll be ready next time. Ready to get back to sealing the ship?”
“Yep.” Cortana paused in a familiar way that he had come to associate with her transferring herself to the tiny data chip. “Yank me.”
With Cortana safely in his head again, the Chief returned to work; backtracking a bit, and heading off to the mechanics shop.
If he was lucky, no more of the little chicken-lizard creatures would be waiting for him by the time he got back to the gap in the hull.
The Chief stood braced against a bulkhead, communicating quietly with Cortana as the sound of something large moving around could be heard on the other side of the blast door.
“What did you say was in the hanger?”
“I didn’t. The cameras for the hanger bay were knocked out of commission in the crash, and the thermal imaging from the external sensors doesn’t penetrate our hull.”
A pair of roars reverberated through the solid walls of metal, along with the dull thumps of large bodies moving around.
“That door is supposed to be soundproof.” Cortana sounded a little irritated.
“Then why can we hear them through a soundproof door?” John asked. If there were more breaches in the hull somewhere, they needed to be found and fixed.
“I… don’t know,” she replied playfully, “How would you suggest we find out?”
On the other hand, if the creatures were simply that loud… “Thorough autopsies,” Chief suggested as he reached over and activated the door controls.
As the doors silently and slowly slid open, John slid a fiber-optic probe around the receding corner and took in the scene as it was patched through to his HUD.
Large mammalian beasts with bat-wings and scorpion-tails had turned the large hanger-bay into a nest. In the center of the open space, two larger ones were brawling each other, the dull thunder of the impact of each cat-like paw reverberating through the walls and floor.
Chief counted six of the beasts, and noted that the smallest one, also the one closest to him, had its ears perked and was facing in his direction.
If I’m going to keep the element of surprise, I need to act now.
Quickly stowing the probe, Chief opted for using his energy sword, seeing how close the small one was to the door. Chief darted around the corner, the blade of energy snapping and sizzling into existence even as he closed the distance to his target.
The large beast was able to do little more than let out a surprised gurgle, as the Chief thrust the sword through its throat, the dual pronged tip of the blade emerging slightly out the other side.
The flesh let out a harsh sizzling sound as the blade, which was even hotter than it was sharp, cauterized the very wounds it had caused. Vocal chords, or whatever passed for them in this alien creature, being safely obliterated, Chief deactivated the blade, reattaching it to his hip as he ducked behind his new piece of organic cover.
With the creature quietly thrashing on the ground in its death throes, John was able to retrieve and load his sniper rifle out of sight of the others and relatively undisturbed.
Clicking off the safety, he rose from his crouching position behind the beast and took in the positions of the remaining five targets.
The two large ones were continuing their brawl, totally unaware of the Spartan only a few dozen meters away. The others had not been quite as distracted, and were noticing the distress of the smallest of them, though they had not yet seen the Chief.
*CRACK*
The brains of the right-most of the creatures coated the walls, opening up a larger area he had to maneuver in, and narrowing the cone of fire he had to watch.
*CRACK*
Another one fell, and the element of surprise was now quite thoroughly spent. The remaining three creatures now saw him as the very serious threat he was, and they reacted exactly the way Chief had expected they would, trying to run him down.
They never just run away, do they?
*CRACK*
One of the big ones that had been brawling died, the round from his sniper rifle shattering the beast’s skull and spraying gray-matter and blood all over the ceiling and floor. The fresh corpse landed a few meters in front of the Chief and threatened to trip up the other big one. Instead of buying him enough time to get the last round in the magazine off, the death of his brawling partner seemed to enrage the monster, and using its wings, it leapt over his fallen brethren, unsheathed claws landing precisely where John had stood one moment before.
To the Chief, events seemed to occur in slow motion; giving him all the time he ever could ask for to think through his actions. At the last moment Chief blurred into action; he abandoned the sniper rifle, slinging it into the relative safety of the hallway he had first emerged from, and dive-rolled out of the way in the opposite direction.
When he finished rolling to his feet, the plasma rifle was in his hands, and before the beast could recover from his missed pounce, spots of its hide and flesh began vanishing under a barrage of superheated plasma.
It began to scream, and then Chief ducked. Between his motion tracker and his peripheral vision, he had never taken attention off of the last of the monsters. It attacked from the side, sending its armored tail arcing up over its head and stabbing at him in one quick motion. It missed him by a carefully calculated margin.
Swipes of its claws followed, forcing him to dodge more vigorously, unless he fancied finding out how strong these large creatures were in comparison to Hunters. Throughout his evasions, he kept the Covenant weapon trained on the other (heavily wounded) beast, as it began to overheat from use. A few more plasma bolts connected with the head of the large one, and as the plasma found its way into the creature’s brain, the screeching stopped.
The plasma rifle began venting heat, so the Chief returned it to its magnetic moorings on his armor, and drew his combat knife. While he supposed that he could have used the energy sword, he wanted to conserve its charge as much as he could.
Practically the moment the knife left its sheath, Chief was stepping inside the last beast’s long reach, arcing out with the blade, and slicing at the joint in the monster’s arm. With his other hand he delivered an armor-clad punch to the creature’s jaw. The impact reverberated through the creature’s teeth, breaking a few of them, but Chief was surprised to discover that the monster had felt much more solid than he had been anticipating.
Aspects of his environment jumped out at him, the long scratches and shallow gouges in the walls and floor, the several large dents in the same where the two big ones had been fighting each other, even the shredded and torn foliage and remnants of trees that the creatures seem to have hauled in here and built nests with.
While the metal floor didn’t hold a candle to the Titanium-A armor plating that the hull was made of, tearing into it with just one’s own claws was still a feat worth noting. These creatures were stronger than they looked, and they looked plenty strong. The Chief was suddenly very glad that he hadn’t let them land a hit on him yet.
This all flashed through his mind in the instants following that punch. Already, Chief knew what he should do next. Before the monster could recover adequately from his punch, he reached across with his knife and sunk it to the hilt in the beast’s shoulder. He then used it as a point of leverage in hauling himself over the creature and onto its back, the force of his motion driving the beast face-first into the ground, even as the knife continued to cut.
The monster screamed in pain and rage as it stood and reached for him, trying to buffet him with its wings, but not having enough flexibility in that particular joint.
Ripping the knife free, Chief turned to take note of the position of the beast’s tail, just as it began its descent. Kicking out, he caught the descending barb between both of his booted feet with a grunt of effort, and then jerked harshly to one side, snapping the poisonous barb off of the tail. Using his momentum and the beast’s pain as a distraction, he rolled off the back of the creature, reaching across and drawing his knife across its unprotected throat as he fell to the floor.
The sounds it had been making abruptly dissolved into gurgles that were unsurprisingly similar to the ones that the first beast to die had made.
Stepping away from the dying monster, Chief returned to the entrance way and retrieved his sniper rifle.
“Well that was one-sided.” Cortana remarked, dryly.
“They were animals.”
All in all, it had taken only about a minute and a half to deal with this infestation.
He spent a few minutes clearing the hanger bay of the biggest pieces of debris that the beasts had brought with them, and another one lining the mangled bodies up in a neat row.
Stepping over to the left-most one, one of the ones taken out by the sniper rifle, he drew his combat knife and held it with the careful precision of a doctor’s scalpel.
“Alright, walk me through this,” he said to Cortana.
“…You were serious about the autopsies,” she observed. “Alright then. I’ll admit this kind of opportunity doesn’t exactly present itself often. Contours of the body suggest a bone-structure resembling a rib-cage. Make an incision here, but only a centimeter deep.”
The Chief’s HUD lit up with a series of diagrams and he could hear some of his armor’s scanning equipment begin to hum softly, one of Cortana's signals that she was diverting them from their original tasks. He quickly and deliberately made the first cut with military precision.
When Luna regained consciousness, she was very displeased to discover that she was lying on the floor of the most dangerous forest on the planet.
Her mood was not helped by the massive headache she had, nor by feeling as if she had pulled every muscle in her neck simultaneously, and then proceeded to have someone pound each inch of her spine with a large rock.
Yet this was a pain she ignored as she laid eyes on the ponies she had come to this forest with.
A little over half of her night-guards still stood; keeping a perimeter around the edge of the small clearing they had made camp in. The rest of her guards lay around her, either unconscious, or quietly moaning.
“Princess! You’re awake!” Luna’s gaze settles on the speaker, one of her junior officers, and uninjured at that.
“Report!” She ordered him, spitting the word out through the pain of her headache.
He stood straighter, “Princess, the operation was a failure. As we approached the broken section, the object struck out at us, picking us off at a rate of about two of us every three seconds. You were its first target. Our evasions did nothing, and we were forced to retreat. The moment we did, the attacks ceased. We suffered forty-six percent casualties on this mission.” The night-guard paused, uncertain about his next words, Luna suspected. “We recovered something odd lodged in the armor of some of the guards that were struck down.”
He offered her a few misshapen lumps of metal. Each was deformed slightly differently, from impact, she realized as she took them with her magic.
At first she was uncertain as to what they were, but then she noticed the bruises on her guards. Each of them that did not have a massive dent in their armor instead had a rather remarkable bruise, centered squarely either on their center of mass or their heads. Luna suspected she would find one directly between her own two eyes, seeing how much that particular spot hurt. More importantly, both the dents and the bruises matched the size of the metal bits she now held.
They were projectiles, but how could they have knocked her and her guards out on the first shot? Even without armor or magic, Luna had withstood the sting of crossbow bolts while in battle before, in ages past, and kept on fighting. What in Equestria made these things so potent?
Luna could see the fear in the eyes of her guards, and she could feel it in her own heart as well. This object was dangerous.
Looking around, Luna noticed that those guards who had been unconscious were now rising, though they were very disoriented and in no shape to fly. She began performing healing spells, spreading the magic around to affect all of the injured at once.
She felt her headache flare with the effort, then ease as the spell took away her own pain. Slowly, her guards recovered from the worst of things, their bruises less prominent, and their thoughts more clear.
Luna herself felt her spine settle down, and stop aching.
Seeing that she had done enough, she stopped. Healing magic took quite a lot of energy, and she didn’t want to overspend herself, especially in case they came across a feral Ursa Major on the flight back. One never knew what might happen in the Everfree.
“We fly!” Luna declared, and as one the night-guards tensed, spreading their wings. She launched herself into the sky, followed closely behind by her ever-loyal guards. Reaching a decent altitude, she banked, heading towards Canterlot once more.
Some of the guards may have suspected that she might try approaching the structure once more, but she was no fool. She knew when a task was too much for her. Most of the time, anyway. She admitted to herself.
John let himself relax a little as he the door behind him closed shut tightly and formed an airtight seal. The gentle hum of electricity was all that was audible of the air filters and pumps that were hard at work changing the atmosphere he had walked in with out for a mixture of gasses he could actually breathe.
His armor could filter the planet’s natural atmosphere for what he needed almost indefinitely, and that same armor was capable of processing the native raw organic material into needed proteins and minerals, albeit in rather small quantities, but while breathing through a helmet and intravenous feeding was practically second nature for him now, he still removed his helmet and ate normally when the opportunity presented itself.
It was a good habit to be in, when working as a team, as eating together was a step forward in promoting the close bonds that true teamwork demanded. Not that he really worked as a team with anyone but Cortana anymore, but it was still a good habit to be in.
So it was that he sat down at a table in the med-bay that had been reinforced at some point to support the weight of his gear and removed his helmet, setting it aside.
Breathing in the relatively unfiltered air, John retrieved the canister that Cortana had prepared from a mixture of on-board rations and the processed flesh of what Cortana had dubbed “Manticores” after some old earth legends.
From what Cortana had been able to glean from what was left of the six he had killed, the animals and plants here could be used for food, but they had to be processed first, which meant it was reduced to this.
Taste was not something John paid attention to. He ate because he needed to in order to carry out his mission. In the absence of a mission, he ate because he needed the nutrients and the proteins in order to train effectively. In the absence of training, debriefing, or planning, Chief usually found himself on ice, in a tube.
There was always something else for his mind to focus on while he ate. Eating was valuable and necessary, but it didn’t require his mind. As he robotically filled up on the paste of questionable taste, his mind focused on the events of his day, examining what had occurred and devising ways to do better in the future.
After the ‘manticores’ had been dealt with, he had finished cleaning the hangar, and had then had made the two-foot hop to the ground outside the hangar bay. He had spent the hour before sunset collecting readings with his armor’s various sensors for Cortana.
Then he had rigged a few landmines and placed them around the hangar entrance.
Cortana returned to the ship’s systems, and had been trying to get the drones working ever since. He on the other hand, policed the ship, putting fallen weapons back on racks, noting the locations of damaged equipment or places with damaged lights. While he was trained in basic ship maintenance, the scope of the project meant that he likely wouldn’t run out of things to do or fix for a long time.
John couldn’t help but wonder if that was a good thing or a potential problem.
On the one hand, he needed to wait for their distress signal to reach UNSC space, but he could just as easily do that from the safety of a cryotube. Then again, Cortana had suggested that there were bigger creatures out there than manticores, which meant that if they came calling, having a well-oiled back-half of a ship to work with might actually save their lives.
Of course, if this actually was a forerunner world, and they could salvage or use the technology in it, spending inordinate amounts of time working on the ship rather than tracking down that tech might mean the difference between returning home, and dying out here among the stars.
John wasn’t exactly concerned about dying out here; the likelihood of death in his line of work was increasing all the time, but if he was needed and he was too dead to fill that need, then he would have failed in his mission. And a Spartan doesn’t fail the mission. Right now his mission was to get home.
The safest way to get home seemed to be to repair and defend the ship until the signal finally fetched help.
The fastest way to get home would be discovering forerunner tech they could use or repurpose into a method of interstellar travel. A long shot, to be sure, but he’d signed on for missions with worse probabilities of success.
Perhaps he could do both?
If he could guarantee that nothing was capable of destroying the ship while he was away, searching for forerunner technology would improve the chances of his getting home, and therefore was the preferred option.
Satisfied, with both the meal, and the conclusion he had come to, John replaced the helmet to its natural position, picked the bed that offered him the best field of fire in case of a late-night surprise, and went to sleep.
“You’re sure about this?”
“I am. While the object was clearly built, it was just as clearly damaged. I believe it to be incapable of motion, and it only attacked when we approached it. To protect our ponies from it, all we need do is forbid them from approaching it. It’s location deep within the Everfree alone should discourage any curiosity.”
“Still, it was powerful enough to strike you down, sister. Surely that warrants further investigation?”
Luna scoffed. “It attacked without warning, and I had not the foresight to shield myself, for I saw no threat. It is powerful, yes, but I will not be caught off-guard next time.” Luna frowned and stomped a hoof in irritation. “Not that there should be a next time, sister. Whatever secrets it holds, it guards jealously. Would you sneak into an elder dragon’s horde, just to see what it held?”
Celestia angled her head and nodded slowly, acknowledging her point.
“So long as it stays in the Everfree, I will agree to let it lie in peace. Though you can’t deny that you are curious, sister; a hoof-made metal building falling from the sky? One that defends itself? Fascinating, you must admit.”
Luna smiled, “Yes, it is curious, isn’t it. Perhaps in time the opportunity to freely investigate will present itself. Even a dragon trades its treasure from time to time.”
Celestia tilted her head in agreement and levitated a stack of scrolls over to them along with plenty of inkwells and quills. “We should get started on the proclamations, should we not?”
Luna sighed, but accepted both quill and parchment readily. Paperwork was just another part of ruling Equestria. At least they had each other to share the load.
Climbing up the side of a mountain was proving to be difficult.
That, in and of itself, drove home how odd this planet was.
Given his augmentations, the suit amplifying his motions, and his life-time of training, climbing the occasional vertical cliff face should have been easy.
At worst, he could punch hand and footholds into the rock, and indeed, he had done so before, yet for the first time in several years, the Chief found himself struggling with the exertion.
Cortana, of course, had an explanation. Apparently the variable gravity decided to ramp itself up whenever he started to climb.
Whenever he reached the top of a cliff or found a ledge he could rest on, as he was doing now, gravity returned to hovering around one standard earth gravity.
“The pattern is consistent enough, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
John didn’t answer Cortana; he was breathing too heavily, and didn’t really have anything to say that wasn’t self-evident.
“Force due to gravity, this last time, increased on your person by a factor of eight point three, and only on your person, the moment your feet left the ground. The rocks around you, the air you breathe, nothing else is affected by this kind of gravity. If this was being caused by a fluctuating generator, your armor should have been able to detect it, but even then, it doesn’t explain why it only affects you, only when you try to climb, and only when you try to climb this!”
Everything she was saying was true. They had even experimented a little, climbing a few trees and observing a hybrid dragonfly-monkey creature as it clawed and fluttered its own way up the mountainside. Chief didn’t have an explanation for it, but he knew that each time the exertion always left him gasping for breath.
Come to think of it, despite resting in-between climbs, and the distance between resting places being drastically different lengths, he had felt about the same level of raw exhaustion each time. It was the only real consistency, really.
Wait…
“It’s the only thing that remains constant,” John whispered, though Cortana heard him easily.
“What is?” Cortana sounded interested, almost eager, to figure out what was happening and how to predict it.
“Me,” he said simply, “I feel exactly the same after each climb. It’s as if-”
“-something is regulating how tired the climb makes the climber,” Cortana finished his sentence for him. Her tone had taken on an air of incredulity, but she seemed to agree. “But that would imply that whatever regulates it knows both the extent of your strength as well as your endurance, and can exert forces at a distance with exacting precision on the cellular level.” Cortana hesitated, and then said pointedly, “And it would have to be watching us right now.”
It was a sign of exactly how exhausted the climbs had made him that he hadn’t come to that conclusion himself.
As it was, he was on his feet with his plasma rifle out and panning across his field of vision not even a second after Cortana had finished pointing that out.
His eyes traveled across the beautiful vista before him without care, searching for the tell-tale glint of a sniper’s scope, or the hide of another twisted alien creature, observing his every move. One eye on his motion-tracker, he found nothing and began expanding his visual search to include the vast swathes of clear skies, the edges of the ledge he had climbed to, the wall behind him, and everywhere he might think to hide a camera.
The quiet hum of his armor’s sensors started up, the input he was receiving from them shifting as Cortana used them to help in his search.
After a few minutes, he was satisfied. If something was watching them, he couldn’t detect it, and therefore, he could do nothing about it.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“It’s the only theory we have that fits the data. Though the idea of a hidden entity using that kind of power just to make sure you tire yourself when you climb this mountain is hard to swallow. I’ll keep looking for another explanation, thank you.”
Cortana was silent for a long time after that. John supposed that she was just focused on analyzing the environment and its inconsistent physics, and went back to climbing.
It wasn’t all that long, just two more exhausting cliff faces, before he reached the destination they had been aiming for.
As he rested on one knee, the Chief looked out from the broad ledge of open ground he had finally reached. It gave him plenty of room to move around, and from the ground it had seemed to stretch all the way around the mountain.
From here he could easily see his downed ship, a few kilometers south of here. It had been a long trek, but it was time to see if it was worth it.
“You ready?” he whispered to Cortana.
“As ever. Just try not to die.”
He began to circle the mountain, looking for the cave they had spotted from the ship. They had climbed up on the eastern side of it, hoping not to alert whatever might live inside to his approach.
As the slow curve of the path finally brought the entrance in sight, he was glad for his precautions. At the edge of his motion-tracker range several large signatures shifted. He started to hear sounds too; scrabbling claws on stone and loud, rhythmic breathing.
“Damn,” Cortana swore quietly, “I was hoping it was empty.”
It wasn’t the end of the mission, John supposed, it just made it more dangerous. They could still collect Cortana’s readings from this height without worrying about interference from the forest, and they could still map out the surrounding geography and match it to the orbital imagery she had taken before.
John knew the value of knowing your terrain, and this was the fastest way to get the kind of detailed maps they wanted without the aid of satellites. Of course, with the unknown creatures here, it just got more dangerous too.
Suddenly, the yips and growls of the creatures were drowned out by a particularly loud one. The growl was deep and fluctuating, reverberating through the rock of the mountain easily, and forcing him to shift his balance a little to compensate.
His slow approach to the cave entrance halted. Whatever had made that noise was far bigger than he really wanted to tangle with.
“Cortana?”
“Get close and use a probe to look around the corner. We need to know what’s up here, especially since it can see our ship from here.”
Cortana sounded uncertain, but he couldn’t fault her reasoning. If whatever was in here was a threat, he would have to deal with it eventually anyway.
Edging as close to the entrance as he could, John slid the little camera on the end of the cable around the surface of a rock and kept his eyes on the video feed and his motion tracker.
The shadows of the cave brightened as the lack of ambient light was compensated for, and the Chief almost sighed in relief. Eight reptilian creatures were present, some of them sat in a circle, occasionally growling at each other. Three of the smallest ones looked like they were play-fighting, or training, Chief observed.
“Bad news chief,” Cortana whispered to him. Most of the time he could hear her voice as well as a sort of echo directly in his mind, however, whenever they were running stealth ops, and he really couldn’t afford to be overheard, even through his thoroughly soundproofed helmet, sometimes she would forego the audible words, and feed her meaning directly into his brain through his neural implant.
Apparently she felt this was worth the added secrecy, so he said nothing as he waited for her to continue her inaudible warning.
“The ones sitting in a circle are talking to each other. My algorithms identify variations in the vocals that are consistent with spoken language. Given time, I could even translate it. These creatures are sapient too.”
Very calmly, he retracted the camera, and began making his way back the way he had come.
As soon as he was out of sight of the cave, he began questioning her. “What else did you find?”
“I can only make guesses, but considering what we learned from the creature designated as ‘Manticore’, I’m going to assume that those inside the cave were not full adults. The smallest of them didn’t possess wings, and on the largest they appeared vestigial, yet on a mountain of this height, they only are getting up here by flying or climbing. In all likelihood the loud voice from earlier was an adult talking to his or her children, and yes, they appear to have two sexes, like every other observed creature on this planet.”
“That makes two sapient alien races on this planet so far. How?” Chief asked.
“I’m not sure. All previous records suggest that a planet evolving one sapient race is rare enough. Evolving two is improbable, but not impossible.”
“And if this is a Forerunner planet?”
“Well…” Cortana hesitated, crunching some numbers, “it would explain a lot, but not everything. The fluctuating gravity isn’t any kind of Forerunner tech we’ve seen before. I don’t necessarily understand how all of Forerunner technology works, but I can usually see it working, and can work with it often enough. With this, I can’t so much as detect anything happening, other than the end effect. I want to believe this planet is Forerunner, but… it’s beginning to look like something new altogether.”
As he listened to Cortana, the Chief walked along the mountainside, stopping every fifty paces, and running his suit through a full scan of his environment. It required him to power down his shields so there wasn’t interference and stand almost perfectly still for a few seconds, but all the effort was worth it. Once they were done up here they would have an incredibly detailed 2D map of the area for several kilometers, and a more general one that covered everything within line-of-sight.
Once he climbed another mountain to the south east of the ship, the map would be even more detailed. A third farther west and the map could become a 3-D model that they could run all sorts of projections and simulations on.
They had done this before; though never quite this alone. More often than not they had a team to work with, whether that team consisted of other Spartans, or more ordinary marines.
Sure, they had done plenty of Lone-Wolf missions over the years, but that usually had been because the rest of his team had died off one by one, in spite of his efforts. Never him, though. He was always just lucky enough to survive to see the completion of his mission through to the end.
It was a trend that had not escaped his notice. More and more, the presence of marines at his side filled him with a cold sense of dread, knowing that he was going to have to watch them die, and more recently, knowing that the very bodies of his allies would be getting up to attack him once the Flood got to them.
The Chief really grew to appreciate the brutal efficiency of Energy Swords in times like those. He would thank the Arbiter for the gifts if he ever saw him again.
“Chief!”
John felt a jolt of adrenaline rush through him, and he startled, whipping his plasma rifle up and scanning for threats. “What is it?”
“You weren’t responding, Chief; I was telling you that the creatures in the cave resemble dragons from earth legends.”
“How close is the resemblance?” he asked, his heart-rate slowly leveling as he found nothing threatening.
“Very. If they breathed fire it would be a near-perfect match. Though to be honest, we don’t really know much about them. Dragons were supposed to lay eggs, for example. Do these creatures? Anyway, are you alright Chief? You were unresponsive for a full minute.”
“I was just remembering the Flood.”
Cortana was silent for a few moments, likely remembering herself.
“We did it, though, Chief, the Gravemind is dead. Humanity is safe from both the Halos and the Flood. We won.”
John looked out at the rolling plane of forest, letting his eyes wander behind his visor.
No waypoint guided his eyes as he looked around at the raw wildlife of this world. Trees large and small scattered everywhere, providing shadows for predator and prey alike to hide in. He saw rivers flowing from some far off source, winding around mountains and vanishing further into the forest. He even saw a point where a river spilled into the furrow the Forward Unto Dawn had dug in the land, pooling into a small lake that emptied out the other side. A brief magnification on the lake revealed a structure of wood and mud building up the sides of the lake.
Idly he wondered if he was going to need to add some sort of beaver-like creature onto the list of sapient creatures in this world. Moving on from the oddity, he unmagnified his vision and perused over the rest of the forest, noting feature after feature of the untamed landscape.
He hadn’t been to Earth many times, or for very long, but he let himself imagine that this was what Earth looked like in the days before the cityscape grew to dominate so much of it.
Still, neither this place nor Earth really felt like home. His home had been glassed by the Covenant. Reach was dead, and had been for quite some time. A familiar cold rage began bubbling up to the surface of his thoughts. Rage at the Covenant for their part in Reach’s death, and those of his team that had died with it…
Amused at his lapse in control, Chief drew his mind away from the memories and emotions and focused on the present.
In the present, the Covenant was allied with humanity. In the present, the Flood was no longer anything but a bad memory. In the present, he had work to do.
He turned away from the edge, where the scan had long since completed, and continued his trek around the mountain, this time coming up on the northern side.
“We did win,” he affirmed.
“Well would you look at that,” Cortana exclaimed, lighting a pair of distant objects up with a waypoint, “civilization.”
Out past where the forest ended, a tiny dot expanded to his suit’s magnified vision to reveal dozens of small buildings arranged to form streets and markets. It was some kind of town, though the architecture was ancient by their standards.
Farther beyond that lay some kind of structure on the side of a mountain. From what he could see at this extreme distance, it was some sort of superstructure that featured several large towers. Either the crazy local physics or the engineering genius of the locals kept a significant portion of the structure suspended over thin air.
Any lingering doubts about the sapience of the locals were shattered.
After a pause he returned the conversation to their present situation. “We are not authorized to initiate first contact with a new aliens species. Protocol dictates we carry out our mission while minimizing the amount of contact or impact on the locals. So that’s what we do.”
“That’s all fine and good,” Cortana replied, “but they’re going to seek out the strange object that fell from the sky eventually, just like the bat-horses did. We can’t avoid contact forever unless we abandon the Forward Unto Dawn. That means we either need to be ready to fight them off for several years, or we need to learn enough of their language to negotiate a truce when it comes to it.”
The Chief considered it. The beacon that was broadcasting their distress signal to UNSC space needed to be hooked up to the reactor or it would eventually shut down. That meant the beacon stayed with the ship. As for him, he needed to stay near the beacon, so that when help came, he was there to receive it.
That, however, was long-term. It was likely going to take years for the UNSC to receive their signal. In the meantime, he was free to abandon the ship, so long as he could guarantee its safety in his absence.
That was another reason why this jaunt up the mountainside was a good idea, now that he thought about it. If something really was watching him, influencing how gravity affected him and who knows what else, this would be an opportune time to attack the ship.
If he returned to find it unmolested, chances were that the unknown entity didn’t care enough about it to attack it. Of course, the dozens of deadly traps that he had set before leaving also gave him a certain peace of mind, but that was beside the point.
Twilight finished casting her spell, and opened her eyes to see the effects. Outwardly, the construct of wood and mud seemed no different, but her spell should keep it from eroding away for many years to come.
“Oh thank you for your help Mr. Beaver, we’re very grateful for your help,” said Fluttershy, who had secured the help of a large family of beavers for the project.
Sending up a flare, Twilight realized that, her spells aside, she couldn’t take much of the credit for this endeavor. The structure wouldn’t even be here were it not for Fluttershy’s friends, she reminded herself. Trotting up the side of the construct, Twilight watched as the flow of the river finally began flowing again, the temporary dams upriver having been released at her signal.
The massive furrow that the space object had carved in the ground had bisected a rather large river in the Everfree that not only fed the lake near ponyville, but also housed a certain river-serpent that hadn’t taken too kindly to the river drying up.
“Thank you so much! I don’t know what I would have done without you, Lady Rarity!”
Twilight suppressed a grin as her friend was swept off her hooves in what looked like the hug of her life, all while trying to deflect the praise. In reality, Rarity had done a huge portion of the work; having honed her levitation to a degree of fine-manipulation and multitasking that left Twilight almost envious at times, Rarity followed the relayed instructions of Fluttershy’s beavers to the letter, assembling the structure flawlessly from the gathered materials.
It was really an impressive project, and the more that Twilight thought about it, the prouder she was of her friends for managing to pull it off.
A low growl from somewhere off to the right reminded her why it took the Elements of Harmony to come out here and repair the river. Despite the furrow having carved a relatively safe path through the forest, they still were quite a ways inside the Everfree; it wasn’t exactly an ideal work environment.
The protection offered by Mr. Magnet’s presence would only go so far. There were bigger fish in the forest, so to speak, and now that the repairs were finished, leaving as soon as possible was their biggest priority.
“All right girls, we’ve done a good job here today, but we need to go home now. No sense in staying in the Everfree longer than we need to.”
While they’d been able to ignore the forest while they worked, being reminded of their situation subdued everypony’s enthusiasm a bit.
It didn’t take long before they began to head back, following the muddy furrow the space-thing had left.
Twilight couldn’t bring herself to participate in the conversation; her thoughts were occupied by the space-thing.
The Royal proclamation hadn’t told them very much, other than that it was an object that had come from space, and was very dangerous, though it couldn’t move from where it sat, deep within the Everfree.
While Twilight was a loyal subject and a faithful student, she couldn’t help but be curious about the thing.
There wasn’t much that could cause such devastation to the forest; not even the strange properties of the Everfree had saved its trees from destruction when the space-thing had landed. Twilight couldn’t recall a single example in all of her history books where ponies had been required to fix something in the Everfree. Sure, rivers had been redirected, repaired, and even turned into lakes in other parts of Equestira, but in the Everfree?
Never.
It was enough to make Twilight consider going against the proclamation, but she never seriously entertained the thought.
Really. She didn’t.
“What do you think, Twilight? Spike could totally take on that Space rock if he went all giant again, right?”
Of course, the fact that her friends couldn’t stop talking about it wasn’t exactly helping.
Twilight was saved from answering Rainbow’s question by Rarity “My Spikey Wikey would never stoop so low as to trigger a greed growth just to brawl in the streets Rainbow Dash! Besides, it’s entirely too obvious that Spike would win.”
Applejack, too, was participating in the debate. “Ah don’t know Rarity, not even Spike could make a trench this wide and this deep. Right under this mud here, that’s bedrock Sugarcube. Spike may eat gems, but digging this here trench? And in the space of a few minutes to boot?”
“But, what if the big space-rock-building was actually some kind of boat, and the ground was like its water! As long as Spike wouldn’t let the big space-rock-building, go sailing on him, he’d be fine!” Oddly enough, Twilight thought, Pinkie Pie was actually contributing to the conversation in a rational manner she could follow.
“Did you see how fast it was going though? I’ve never seen anything like it! It was trailing smoke, and engulfed in fire!” Twilight’s ears perked and she looked at Rainbow Dash. She had been reading during the event and had missed seeing it, despite the warning Ponyville had received the day before from Princess Luna: that it was going to be landing a ways south of Ponyville and it was going to be loud. “If it goes that fast, there’s no way Spike could ever catch it, let alone beat it! Not even I could go that fast!”
“Even so, a giant Spike would give it a run for its bits!” Pinkie asserted.
“Ah don’t think it really matters. Even if Spike could trigger another one, and even if he could beat the thing, ah don’t think we ought tah go anywhere near it! The princesses declared it off-limits.”
Twilight jumped in the conversation to support AJ. “Applejack is right. The princesses trusted us to come out here and repair the river, without getting too curious for our own good. I’d like to prove them right about us, even if that thing is the scientific find of the century and just leaving it there is akin to dropping a gala ticket in the middle of town and being too lazy to come back and look for it.” She kept her head high and facing forward, risking a glance back to see if they suspected that she really wanted to go see it.
The others were looking at her knowingly and hiding grins.
Apparently she wasn’t as good at this as she thought she was.
“Alright, Twi.” Rainbow said, sagging a little in defeat. “But you mark my words, eventually you’re going to wish we had gone and poked around. That thing is big and dangerous!”
Fluttershy hadn’t contributed, but the way she was glancing nervously over her shoulder to count her animal friends and look at the silhouette of the massive space-rock in the distance told Twilight volumes about her own opinion.
After a moment, Twilight turned to face Rainbow and sighed. “I guess we’re just going to have to take that risk.”
John leaned against a bulkhead as he watched Cortana work.
Programming the drones to account for the strange physics had turned out to be more difficult than she had anticipated, but she was making good progress.
The machine in front of him was operating rather efficiently, he thought. The drone was manipulating one of his firearms, a magnum he had found wedged in a half-shut bulkhead, of all places, with multiple cracks in the casing.
The drone was repairing it, the micro-welder sparking every few moments as it made tiny corrections.
After a while, the machine concluded its work and approached him, offering the pistol to him grip first.
Taking it, Chief approached the firing range, and tested the weapon, firing off the whole magazine in a few seconds. To his satisfaction, the weapon did not jam, and when he inspected it, his sharp eyes found no evidence of the stress cracking the myriad tiny welds. It was still accurate, too.
“So the drones are operational,” he said to the empty room.
“It would seem so, though I’m still working through the bugs. You would not believe what the key to the gravity issue was. All I have to do is throw physics away and reason like a child… It’s irritating that this actually works.” Cortana’s voice sounded through his radio. Even when she wasn’t with him, they could still communicate easily enough.
“Like a child?” Chief asked.
“I… can’t really justify it, but eventually I just threw code at it until something worked. What I ended up with was modeling a prediction algorithm to accept visual stimuli and estimate the power requirements of outcomes based on the statistical averages associated with small children who were asked to determine the difficulty of specific tasks. A child would think that climbing the mountain is exhausting, so climbing the mountain is exhausting. Similarly, healthy creatures with wings typically experience low gravity when soaring, but high gravity when diving.”
Chief looked at the drone skeptically. “So the drones now think this way?”
“More or less. My solution isn’t perfect, but I’ve cut down on the frequency of their mistakes by 54% and the severity of their over- and under-compensations is below tolerance again. I still shouldn’t leave them to their own devices for long, but we can afford to take longer trips.”
Longer trips… How far could they go? Chief had discovered a number of vehicles in various states of disrepair in the engineering bay. If he could get a Warthog up and running his operational range would increase drastically. It would increase even further if he could find parts for the half-melted Hornet.
“How much longer?”
Cortana hesitated, running a few simulations. “Without me here to provide oversight, errors will exceed acceptable parameters after an average of 200 hours. That’s just over a week on local time.” she concluded.
So, three days out, one day to gather information, three days in. Repair, resupply, and repeat. With access to a Warthog, configured with the right equipment to regenerate fuel supply on the go, his operational range would be limited only by the size of the continent and the difficulty of the terrain.
With a functioning Hornet, even the difficulty of the terrain would cease to be a problem.
Chief holstered the pistol next to his energy sword and left the firing range, following his mental map of the ship to the engineering bay.
“Good. I’m going to work on acquiring a vehicle; can your drones start work on modifying the reactor to recharge plasma weapons?”
“So long as I’m here to oversee their work, it should be safe enough. I’ll be grabbing most of the fuel rod cannons for parts though, just so we’re clear on that.”
John allowed himself a small smile. “Go ahead.” So long as she left him more than two, he wouldn’t need to worry about the reduction in heavy ordinance much. After all, in the short-term he still had plenty of rockets left. He wouldn’t be wanting for explosives for a while, seeing how well-stocked the Forward Unto Dawn was.
Turning into engineering, Chief located the dismantled Warthogs and began pouring over them, categorizing the parts in his mind as he tried to work out if all the critical components were present.
“Chief? I just thought I’d let you know… I have a visual on some anomalous weather several dozen kilometers north of our position, and it’s spreading at a remarkable rate.”
Chief paused, setting down a chassis he had been inspecting for flaws. Anomalous weather? And Cortana saw fit to warn him?
“Cortana?”
“Have you ever seen pink storm clouds before?”
Discord grinned widely. “-you see, this is the first rule of our game: No Flying, and No Magic.”
“The first rule?” little Rainbow Dash asked.
“The second rule is that everypony has to play, or the game is over, and I win.”
And now for the dramatic exit. “Good lu-”
“It doesn’t matter what your rules are, Discord! We won’t lose!” that purple upstart interrupts me, and I level a glare at her, irritated.
“Oh? Twilight Sparkle fancies that the game too easy for her?” In a flash, I’m hovering menacingly behind her hornless head.
“Perhaps you are right, Twilight,” I say, my sarcasm dripping everywhere. “I see you need more of a challenge, then.”
I snap my talons.
A heartbeat later the roar of monsters echoes out from the depths of my deviously altered labyrinth.
“The third rule is this: Everypony must stay conscious, else the game is still over, and I still win.”
Their expressions are priceless. Now they’re looking at the labyrinth with just as much fear as determination.
“Good Luck everypony!”And I’m gone in a flash.
There’s my dramatic exit, now to split them up…
A bright flash of light was his only warning.
One moment earlier he had been outfitting a Warthog, when suddenly, he found himself in a totally different place.
Chief was no stranger to teleportation. However, it’s something he'd only ever encountered on forerunner installations.
While his sudden and unannounced teleportation to a strange location was concerning for a multitude of reasons, the added evidence of forerunner tech was somewhat reassuring.
Sweeping the area, he found himself in some sort of large garden. He was in a small clearing, filled with a great many fruit trees, and lined with thick walls of greenery. His motion detector was silent, and there were no threats in sight.
He seemed to be alone.
Taking inventory, he found that his pistol still had its magazine as well as two spares, and his energy sword was fresh and ready to go. He supposed that the rest of his non-standard equipment was back at the Forward Unto Dawn.
While he needed to return to his ship, he quite obviously had been brought here by something. That meant that whatever had teleported him wanted him for a reason, and since whatever it was didn’t appear to be present, it was likely hunting him down that very second. This in turn meant that if he wanted to avoid being captured, he needed to get moving and get back to Cortana as soon as possible.
Selecting the northern-most exit, his pistol at the ready, the Chief began walking at a brisk pace.
The greenery was thick enough to block sight, but not sound. After half a dozen turns in the path, the deep roars of what was in all likelihood another manticore joined a host of other creatures’ vocalizations as a strange sort of background music. He could pick out quieter yelps and growls; the refrain of twin predators fighting for dominance was one John easily recognized from times long since passed.
The walled corridor he had been walking down ended at a T, and Chief took the rightmost path, one eye on the flickering dots of his motion sensor. At the extreme of his range, he found lots of movement, but so far, nothing had come very close at all to stumbling across him.
His radio crackled to life, spitting out Cortana’s voice. “-G201, Forward Unto Dawn, to call sign Sierra 117, please respond.”
Isolating the frequency, Chief quickly responded. “Forward unto Dawn, this is Sierra 117, I read you, over.”
“Chief! What happened? You vanished into thin air!”
“I’ve been teleported into some kind of maze.”
“Triangulating signal…You’re about 81 kilometers north of me, give or take.” Cortana hesitated, “That places you pretty much exactly at that large structure we saw from that first mountain.”
“So, once I escape this maze, head south, right?”
“You could, but I’m also curious as to what teleported you and how. There is no teleportation grid here.”
“I can’t exactly ask the locals.”
“No, but if you record any spoken audio, we can go back and translate it if we ever decode their language.”
“You can pull whatever you need from the mission logs if that happens.”
“Good to hear. So what’s this about a maze?”
Chief checked another corner, this one, unlike the dozens of others he had passed in the last few minutes, did not give way to an empty corridor. No, this one revealed another corridor with a small flock of familiar creatures in it.
The chicken-reptiles, and bizarrely, they were pecking at a statue of some kind of small horse.
“I appeared in a maze full of animals,” Chief said.
“Nothing tried to kill you? Or talk to you?” If the sound of chicken heads being crushed under his booted feet was being transmitted through the radio, Cortana gave no indication of hearing it.
“Nothing so far. Ran into more Chicken-Lizards though,” Chief punctuated this by twisting the neck of the last of the vermin. Given how much of his ship he had found infested by them, he was more than willing to curb their population wherever he found them.
As the last one died, however, the sound of cracking and crumbling stone came from the statue behind him.
Chief turned to face it, only now drawing his pistol in preparation, seeing as he was dealing with an unknown factor.
As he watched, and backed up a bit, the cracks in the statue continued spider-webbing across its surface, before the whole thing shattered.
Where the statue once stood, an identical creature remained, coughing out stone dust. It was as if the creature had simply been coated in stone, and the shell had broken. How the creature survived that was a mystery for Cortana to solve, Chief thought.
The creature seemed to recover from some disorientation and then just looked at him, with large, expressive eyes. This was no mindless animal, John mused, this was an intelligent creature, one with fear in its eyes.
That alone made it far more dangerous than any mindless animal could hope to be.
He needed to get out of here, preferably undetected, and he needed to minimize interaction with the local sapient life, as protocol demanded. But this one had been a statue. Did that make it some kind of prisoner? Did he accidently release it?
The creature vocalized something, its voice undulating and very much indicative of a spoken language. It took a half-step forward in his direction.
Chief came to a decision and shot the little purplish creature once, right between the eyes.
The creature jerked from the bullet wound and collapsed in a heap, but all Chief could do was stare. There had been no blood spray. Its head didn’t even have a hole in it, just a rapidly swelling bruise. To all appearances, he had just knocked it out and given it severe whiplash.
There was something very wrong about this. Chief took a single step towards the bizarrely unconscious creature, and then everything burst into the strange sensation of teleportation again.
“Well, well, well, looks like somepony couldn’t handle a little run-in with some forest critters!” Discord snapped his talons, returning the ponies their missing appendages.
“Oh my gosh, Twilight!” Rarity exclaimed, rushing to the side of the unconscious unicorn.
“What did you do to her, Discord?” Rainbow Dash flared her regained wings and lashed her tail angrily.
“Me? I did nothing, looks like she ran afoul of one of the course’s hazards. Regardless, you six didn’t find your precious elements!”
The five ponies were terrified and directionless. I couldn’t have planned this better if I tried. Even better, they looked defeated. I didn’t even have to corrupt them; they’re dumb enough to just accept their defeat at face value.
Well, that’s that. The elements are hidden and their bearers are out of commission. Nothing is stopping me now! Cackling maniacally, I snap my talons. “Looks like we’re in for a big ol’ storm of Chaos!”
“Alright, I have a theory,” Cortana began over breakfast, the next morning, “The bat-horses bear a number of convenient similarities to both the horned, leader-type they were with, as well as this new specimen from your logs. This is mostly speculation, mind you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all different breeds of the same species. I can only imagine how it factors into their social structures, but the one with feathered wings and a horn is also physically larger by a significant margin.”
Chief was having trouble seeing where she was going with this. “So?”
“So, if the ones with feathered wings are leaders, it’s a safe bet any peaceful or military encounters with this species will hinge on them. If we could only gather more data-”
“Minimal contact, Cortana.”
“I’m not suggesting contact, John, I’m suggesting reconnaissance. Find a place to set up some bugs; if you can get us enough hours of their language I can translate it. Get me footage of their behavior to go with it and I can start making cultural evaluations. Once we know how they tick, it’ll be that much easier to stay out of their way.”
John mulled this over as he finished eating. If it worked, the information Cortana could gather would certainly be useful, both to ONI, and to them if they ever needed to negotiate a truce. But there were many things that could go wrong. They could be spotted and targeted, the bugs in question might be discovered and interpreted as an attack or a threat.
Worst of all, Chief had yet to successfully defeat that strange personal shielding they possessed. True, he had not yet had much of an opportunity to try, but it was still uncertain as to whether he could permanently silence a threat if he was compromised.
In the silence, his mind was working overtime, analyzing what little he knew about the aliens, and coming up with various plans. There was much about this planet that had yet to be explained. The secret to the fluctuating gravity remained elusive, though with Cortana’s breakthrough, they could compensate for it well enough. Still, there were even more bizarre circumstances.
“Have you come to any conclusions about that anomalous weather?” Chief asked.
“A few. I suspect that the pink clouds were artificial, though they dissipated long before they would have been close enough for a proper spectral analysis. The atmosphere must mess with the sensors at such distances, as I kept getting results that didn’t make sense. Even if the clouds were pink, I highly doubt they were composed of spun sugar.”