Planet Hell: The Redemption of Harmony

by solocitizen

1. Icarus Dreams

The blue pegasus raced across the sky and Thunder Gale followed. Each beat of their wings raised them higher and through the tufts of billowing clouds below. Light from the setting sun shot through the layers in the sky and painted the cloudscape gold and orange. The blue pegasus led Thunder Gale in circles around a cloud that, with its misty pillars and domed peak, resembled a palace straight out of legend. Then, she peeled away, and he lost sight of her.

“Wait!” Thunder Gale kicked off a cloud and cut through the air. “Come back!”

A haze encroached on his path but his intuition guided him through it. When he emerged, the view of the domed peak was there to meet him.

As he climbed for the peak, sunlight poked out from behind it and seared his eyes. His wings ached with fatigue and purple splotches blotted his vision, but he pushed aside the pain and squinted through the light.

The blue pegasus stepped out onto the edge to meet him. Her rainbow mane flickered on the wind. Even while squinting, Thunder Gale saw her red eyes zero in on him.

“I don’t think I can make it!” He reached out his front hooves for her. “Help me, please.”

The heat on Thunder Gale’s wings boiled until it overshadowed his fatigue and muscle pain and the light flooding his eyes. He screamed in agony; the rhythm of his wing strokes broke. When he glanced to his side, he saw a fire spread over his wings. They turned to ash, and when there was nothing left of them, he tumbled out of the sky.

The blue pegasus extended a hoof to help him up.

He reached for her, but he was already too far gone.

No longer did the clouds support his weight and no longer did his wings propel him through the air. They were gone, replaced by the scent of charred feathers and flesh.

Down he plummeted, kicking, flailing, and screaming as the ground rushed to meet him.

Thunder Gale opened his eyes and gasped.

He coughed and moaned. His hind hooves dug into the soft-soil beneath him, but he lacked the strength to pull himself up. So there he stayed, on his back, staring at a sky painted red and orange ahead of him. Thunder Gale’s wings ached, and in a panic, he rolled on his side and checked to make sure they were intact. They were; he had only lain on them poorly.

Scorch marks blackened his blue-grey coat and left holes in the black and red paint covering his officer’s cuirass. The royal blues and whites of the Pegasus Empire beneath were exposed. His entire body tingled with electricity, and the smell of burning hair and plastic wafted off of him.

“Thunder Gale...” That was the voice of his friend, Hill Born, and it was close.

His head snapped off the ground and for a second, just a second, he thought he found the strength to get back on his hooves.

Then he found the source—a datapad a few feet away from him—and he dropped his head onto the ground again. His memory was a bit hazy, but the last thing he remembered was being on the bridge of his ship and he had had the thing on him then. Whatever happened to him must have triggered Hill Born’s message.

“I hope this finds you quickly. I’m working for a research company—I can’t go into details about it now, but this entire project has spiraled out of control. So much is hopelessly wrong; I didn’t know monsters were real until today. I’m taking a huge risk by sending you this message, but I don’t see any other choice. I need your help. Go to the third planet in the Azrael system and bring an army.”

The message paused, and then looped back to the beginning.

“Thunder Gale...”

He tried to pick himself up again, first by rolling onto his stomach, and then fighting his way back onto his hooves. He stood up, eventually, but he spent a minute with his head between his legs trying to puke.

After his head stopped spinning, he ambled over to his datapad. He shook the dirt from his blue mane and then paused the message, and tucked it under his wing.

“Well, Hill, here I am.”

South of Thunder Gale’s position, towers dotted the horizon. Mountains framed the north and west edge of the expanse and cut into the sky, but in the east they dwindled to low hills. Ground as scaly as dragon’s hide filled in all the places between and shimmered whenever unbroken by the occasional building or dried up tree. It occurred to him that he was standing in an ancient lakebed. Moaning winds blew in from the towers and rolled over Thunder Gale on their way to the mountains in the north; they carried a foul odor. With the message now silent, he caught a song playing in the background.

“Spitfire this is Helios, over.” He tapped the radio crammed in his ear. “This is Helios to Spitfire, do you copy?”

All he got was static and the winds and that faint music playing under it all.

Thunder Gale bit his lower lip, scanned his eyes across the landscape, and tried again. “Spitfire, Spitfire, Spitfire, this is Major Gale, do you copy? Can anypony hear me?”

Again, no pony answered him so he decided to follow the music.

He tracked it to the edge of a nearby pit and called out the whole way there, but when he looked down and saw the thing below, he froze.

At the bottom of the pit stood a statue—of what he didn’t know, but it wasn’t a pony, griffon, or anything from Celestia’s green Equestria. It was male, and wore a set of armor not dissimilar to his officer’s cuirass. Thunder Gale wanted to call the thing an ape, but it walked on two feet and carried a shield and a spear in its hands not unlike a pony would with his mouth. Aside from its short curly mane no hair or fur covered its body. Whoever—whatever— had crafted the statue with intelligence in its posture and decision in its expression.

Although only a statue, it was nothing short of a fear-inspiring predator to Thunder Gale, a herbivore half the creature’s height. On instinct, he unfurled his wings and darted away.

Thunder Gale waited until the shock wore off and his heart slowed down, then he took a few deep breaths and inched his way over to the edge and down the side of the pit.

Picks, shovels, toothbrushes, and rulers lay scattered around the pit, along with notebooks, datapads, and a set of speakers that were blasting out a song he had heard one too many times. Everything there bore the same logo: a heart set against a shield encircled by the words “Sigil Tech”. Searching through the stuff, he stumbled over a pair of feathered wings cast in the same bronze as the statue.

What deeply unnerved him, much more so than the statue itself, was that whoever had dug up the statue left without covering it up, gathering their supplies, or even turning off their music. He grabbed a datapad and tucked it into his cuirass.

As he shifted on his hooves he stepped on something metal. When he picked his hoof up and looked down, he found a bullet casing for a high velocity rifle, and when he turned the soil over he discovered three more.

Thunder Gale scrambled out of the pit for higher ground. “This is Helios to Spitfire, respond, damn it!” He tapped his communicator and scanned the horizon for any sign of his ship.

Above the hills to the east a red flare zipped up into the sky and burst. It was the first of three to shoot up from behind the hills, followed by one white. They hung high and spread their light over the hills and valley. That flare pattern was used in the Pegasus Imperial Fleet to signal distress. Thunder Gale could only think of one ship that side of the galaxy that would use that pattern.

“Spitfire, Spitfire, Spitfire, this is Helios, please copy.”

He set off galloping east towards the hills, and didn’t wait a second longer for a response. His body ached, but he sprinted through it. If he maintained a fast gallop he’d make it to those hills well before sundown.

As he passed by a derelict garage, right out of the corner of his eye, a light flickered. Thunder Gale skidded to a stop and turned.

“Hello?” he called. “Is there any pony there?”

He waited a minute but the building remained silent.

“I’m Major Gale of the Spitfire. We’re not with the Pegasus Empire, we’re just, uh, remarkably well armed. A friend of mine sent a message from here not too long ago asking for help. I’m looking for him and any other survivors. Maybe you know him. His name is Hill Born, have you seen him? Please come out, I’m here to help.”

No lights turned on, and nopony peeked out of the windows above the door, but he was certain something was in there; a light had flickered in there not a minute earlier. He started to approach the door, then stopped. Thunder Gale glanced over his shoulder at the flares hanging over the hills to the east.

They needed him.

For a long time, Thunder Gale stood between the garage and the hills. He glanced between the two frantically, but never did he inch closer to one or the other. The emergency flares from his ship faded, and new ones took their place in the sky.

Before he could make up his mind, the ground beneath his hooves rumbled and fusion engines screeched overhead. Thunder Gale turned around and, with a hoof shading his eyes, faced the source: a dropship painted in the red and black scheme of The Manticore Mercenary Company descending from the cloudless sky.

Thunder Gale cast his hoof up and waved.

The dropship positioned itself between Thunder Gale and the sun, and a squad of power armor troopers leapt out, and broke their falls with a burst from the micro-fusion thrusters on their legs and wings. They quickly fanned out to establish a defensive perimeter around him, while the autocannons cranked around on the dropship and prepared to open fire on anything that didn’t identify itself as a friendly.

One of the power armor troopers broke away from the squad and trotted up to him. It was Second Lieutenant Cloud Twist, judging by the markings on his suit and the way he wore it as though it were a sock three sizes too big. As the Commanding Officer of a starship, Thunder Gale didn’t allow himself to pick favorites or hint at anything of the kind. That said, the only reason why Cloud Twist was ever promoted to Second Lieutenant in the first place was because a bridge fell on his predecessor and there weren’t any other qualified ponies around at the time.

“It’s good to see you in one piece, sir.” Lt. Cloud Twist’s voice was almost lost under the roar of the dropship’s engines.

Thunder Gale met him halfway.

“What’s the status of the Spitfire?”

“Grounded, but more or less in one piece,” said Lt. Cloud Twist. “I can’t tell you much else about what’s going on, the XO kinda rushed us out the door before I had time to ask, so we’re in the dark. We found you, though, so that’s good.”

“What do you see on thermal?” Thunder Gale pointed at the building. “Any sign of survivors nearby?”

“We didn’t see anypony coming in, sir.”

“Then what’s with the defensive formation?”

“Sir, from what I do understand, you vanished off the bridge in a flash of light and puff of smoke.” The lieutenant shuffled on his hooves and tucked his armored wings against his side. “The XO assumed you had been transmatted off the ship somehow, and had been captured, or killed, or maybe eaten by something out here. We didn't know what to expect. Our orders were to locate and escort you back to the ship by any means.”

He glanced around at his squad and at Thunder Gale, kicked at the ground, and added: “It’s good to see you’re still in one piece, sir.”

The dropship spun around and lowered itself to about a foot off the ground. Thunder Gale and the power armor squad piled into the cramped belly of the ship as soon as the thing had stopped moving. He sat down on one of the crash couches with the rest of his troopers. Before Thunder Gale even had the opportunity to strap himself in, the thing peeled away from the ground and zipped toward the western hills with a roar.

Beyond the dropship’s reinforced windows, the desert sped by. Thunder Gale spied more dig sites that had been cut out of the earth with surgical precision. Then he cast his eyes to the south and gazed down into a chasm filled with concrete and steel.

The buildings he had seen earlier sprouting up to the south were the tips of a massive industrial city planted in the walls of an enormous chasm. The mouth of it stretched on for miles. Each tower was a ruin sandblasted clean, to uniformity, but some still clung to bits of facade.

Thunder Gale leaned close to Lt. Cloud Twist and shouted above the roaring engines. “Lieutenant, are there any search teams deployed in the chasm to the south?”

“Just one, sir: us,” he said. “And to be frank, I’m glad we found you before we had to go in.”

“Why’s that?” Thunder Gale stiffened.

“The techs tried doing some drone recon over the area, but it didn’t work out.” Lt. Cloud Twist tapped a button on his forehoof, and the latches on his helmet snapped open. “That’s not what had me worried, though. What made me glad we found you out here, instead of in that hole, is the fact that every compass and piece of guidance equipment we have is convinced that the bottom of that crater is magnetic north.”

“We’re here on a search and rescue mission,” Thunder Gale said. “Our top priority is the safety of the civilian population. The buildings look like they were heavily fortified. If a firefight broke out, the civilians would have tried to hold up there. We have to be ready to go in and pull them out.”

“Understood, sir.” Cloud Twist pried his helmet off with his front legs and shook out his cream-colored mane. He gulped for fresh air like a fish back in water; it was always surprising to see just how eager he was to get out of that suit.

Thunder Gale turned his attention to the desert racing by underneath the dropship. He waited for the low hills to pass into view, and for the first sign of his ship. Fighting not to bite his hoof, waiting on the edge of the seat, Thunder Gale trained his eyes out the window, searching, waiting. Then there it was: the gunship Spitfire.

Nestled at the base of two merging ridges, the Spitfire sprawled out on the brittle earth, wounded and motionless. Her wings, designed to help expel heat and stabilize her flight in an atmosphere, lay disheveled and crooked. The head of her main autocannon, which was capable of punching holes in ships one hundred times her size, was buried in the side of a hill. Scorch marks left holes in her black and red paint, not all of them recent additions. Her crew scurried around her hull, licking her wounds.

The dropship hovered outside the docking bay while waiting for a grappling arm to lock around it and pull it in. Once docked, Thunder Gale and his troopers piled out as soon as the dropship door opened. One trooper nudged him with plated wings right in a sore spot as they leapt out, and sent pain surging through his body. He winced and landed on the docking bay’s catwalk on his face.

“Logged, the Commanding Officer is aboard,” a digital voice said over the ship’s intercom. “XO Lighting Fire stands relieved.”

Thunder Gale scrambled back on his hooves before any of the ponies behind him got the chance to help him up.

“Are you alright, sir?” Lt. Cloud Twist rushed to his side and extended a helping hoof.

The entirety of the squad was gathered round him.

“Yes, I’m fine.” Thunder Gale got on his hooves, brushed himself off, and turned to address him. “Lt. Twist, have you and your squad report to engineering as soon as possible and provide any assistance you can to the repairs.”

“Aye, aye, Major.” Cloud Twist saluted him before disappearing down the hall with his squad.

In the Imperial Marines, everypony worked and everypony fought. A small gunship like the Spitfire couldn’t ferry a company of marines and a large dedicated support staff into battle while still maintaining her lethal agility. With the exception of two individuals, everypony onboard was both a professional power armor trooper and whatever the ship needed to keep flying. It worked differently in the Mobile Infantry and on bigger ships, but not on a marine gunship.

He sighed, glanced over his shoulders to make sure no pony was watching, and massaged his brow in a futile attempt to ease his throbbing head. He didn’t know if it was whatever had dropped him in the desert or just the heat, but it only got worse since he woke up.

His radio chirped, and the voice of his XO followed. “Lightning Fire to Major Gale, please report to the bridge.”

“What’s the Spitfire’s status?” He set his hooves down and trotted out of the hangar. “Is she in any kind of immediate danger?”

“No, sir. She’s a little crispy, but it’s nothing our repair teams can’t handle. I’ll fill you in on the details when you get up here.”

“I’m going to make a detour to sickbay. I want to make sure that whoever brought me to the desert didn’t do anything to my head. Gale out.”

Nose to tail, the Spitfire was only three hundred and eighty feet long, and not all of that was habitable. The company of soldiers and a hoof full of noncombat personnel crammed into her put every inch of her to use. There were no long corridors or empty rooms. The mess hall tripled as a rec room and the gym. Hot bunking was a standard practice. The captain’s cabin even saved space with a low-hanging ceiling.

On his way to sickbay, Thunder Gale ran into about a third of his crew and nearly tripped over a dozen more. The ship was alive with yelling, the sound of power tools, and the clippity-clop of hooves on the metal floor.

Despite the fact that the Spitfire was no longer a part of the Imperial Marines, Thunder Gale still demanded the same level of discipline and efficiency out of his crew. At her core, the Spitfire was still a military vessel, not a merc ship.

But once the doors to sickbay slid apart and he stepped inside, all that changed. In his mind he was in Doctor Breeze Heart’s domain now, the most compassionate pegasus he’d ever met. She was smart, well read, and a brilliant surgeon, but her patients remembered her for a bedside manner as disarming and gentle as the pink of her coat and the charm in her voice.

At the moment she was at the bedside of an injured marine. She kept her eyes locked on her work and on a hologram levitating to the right of her face as she held one end of the bandage in her mouth and wound it around the marine's injured wing while her patient stared holes into the ceiling.

Breeze Heart looked up and spotted Thunder Gale and her wings sprung open. She looked as though she was trying to gasp but was too shocked to do so.

He cocked his head ever so slightly, and his eyes lit up as if he were smiling ear to ear. He wanted to rush over to her and sweep her off her hooves, but even if he had the strength he couldn’t; professional ethics didn’t allow it. They made eye contact, but he broke away to point at the marines beside her with his eyes.

Breeze Heart nodded and recomposed herself.

Not wanting to attract any more attention, Thunder Gale retreated behind the edge of the door to sickbay, and stayed out of sight while Breeze Heart finished with her patient.

Once Breeze Heart showed the marine to the door, Thunder Gale darted inside.

The very instant that door shut and they were alone, Breeze Heart threw her hooves over Thunder Gale and rested her head around the back of his neck. The hologram floating next to her face vanished.

“By the princesses, you’re back!” she said. “No pony knew where you were or what happened. I thought you had been captured, or worse.”

“What, didn’t think I’d be coming home? You know me better than that.”

“We didn’t know what happened. The XO was worried about finding you before the scavengers did, or even finding you at all. How I stayed calm in front of Private Drizzle for so long, I don’t know.”

“I’ve been through a lot worse than a botched capture attempt.” He stroked her mane with his hoof.

“This was different. You disappeared right off the bridge during a crisis in a puff of black smoke no less.” She pulled him tighter and his legs buckled. “Transmats don’t make black smoke.”

“Gently, gently! I’m still pretty sore from whatever that was. Do you think you could put me in the medi-pod and run a scan?”

“Yes, of course.” She backed off and led him over to a plexi-glass pod at the far end of sickbay. “This will just take a second. Climb inside and we’ll get started.”

Thunder Gale hopped into the machine and lay back on the metal bed. A plexi-glass dome sealed him inside. The medi-pod was fresh with the scent of disinfectants. Holograms flashed over him and danced around at Breeze Heart’s touch.

“That’s unusual.”

“Is there something wrong?” He flicked his tail.

“No, that’s the confusing thing, I can’t find anything wrong with you at all.” Breeze Heart dragged a hologram up and down his body.

“How’s that possible? I feel like I’ve been struck by lightning. You sure they didn’t do anything to my head?”

She dragged the orange hologram over his head and held it there.

“No, there’s nothing out of the ordinary with you.” She dismissed the holograms and kicked a switch somewhere near his head, and with that the medi-pod dome retracted, and he jumped out of the bed and onto his hooves. “At least, not from what I can see. I can give you some painkillers, but that’s about all. I wish there was more I could do.”

“That’s fine. I’ll take what I can get.”

Breeze Heart trotted over to a medicine cabinet, picked out a bottle rattling with a lonely pair of pills, and set it down next to Thunder Gale. Biting down on the lid and wrenching her hooves the other way, she popped it off and tapped the last two pills out on the countertop.

“It’s not a lot, but it’s what we have left.” She pushed the pills over to him and lowered her ears. “If that doesn’t do it though, I’d like it if you considered taking some time off. I know, it’s a lot to ask right now, but Lightning Fire has been managing the ship very well, so I’m sure she could handle things if you need her to.”

“I don’t think that’d give the crew the right idea,” he said. “I’ll keep it in mind, though.”

“I understand.”

Thunder Gale scooped the pills off the counter and swallowed without water, and then he scratched the back of his head. “I’m, uh, sorry for giving you a scare like that.”

“It’s okay.” She took a long breath. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

“Yeah, but it still sucked, and you deserve better than that.” He put a hoof on her shoulder and then reached down her leg for hers. “Let me try to make it up to you.”

She looked up at him and tilted her head ever so slightly.

“Tonight’s still a date night, right? We have that unopened bottle of hard cider from Hearts and Hooves Day, why don’t we start there and have some fun?”

“Okay, I’d like that,” she said. “It’s a date.”

“The usual time?”

“Why, of course.” She tipped her head to him. “And don’t be late.”

“Sounds like you’ve got something planned.” He leaned in closer. “Do I get any hints?”

“Maybe, but just one: I had a lot more planned for Hearts and Hooves Day than just a bottle of cider, my love.”

“In that case I’d better get there on time.”

She leaned in so close their noses touched, and then she tilted her head and he tilted the other way, and then they closed their eyes.

A throat cleared at the other end of sickbay and the two of them turned and froze.

In the doorway stood XO Lightning Fire. Everything about her, from her eye patch to her officer’s cuirass, was kept neat and precise. She never let her red mane or tail reach longer than regulation length. She kept her hooves together as rigid as a soldier on display. She was one of the finest generals the Imperial Marines ever produced, but stepped back in rank to take on her current assignment. Her assignment, and everypony else’s on the ship, was supposed to be temporary. She was a begrudging permanent exception to the ‘everypony fights’ rule.

“Is the Major fit to return to his post?” she asked Breeze Heart.

“I believe so.” She avoided the XO’s gaze and scurried a foot or two back. “He’s experiencing pain I can’t account for, but I see no reason why he can’t return to duty.”

“Which is why I’m on my way there, right now.” Thunder Gale pulled himself away from Breeze Heart and the counter. He looked her in the eye, nodded, and that was that.

Thunder Gale and Lightning Fire hustled out, and left Breeze Heart staring out the doors of her empty sickbay.

The two cantered around repair teams at work throughout the hall and climbed into one of the hyperlifts down the way. On any other day it would hum up the ship in under sixty seconds—a figure Thunder Gale had also committed to memory—but today it climbed at a glacial pace, and creaked, continuously.

“Have the search teams found any sign of survivors?” Thunder Gale asked.

“No, sir, I recalled the dropships after Lt. Twist’s team located you.”

“Then our next course of action will be to begin search and rescue operations.”

“You’d know better than I, but what little the scouts have to report suggests we’re a bit late to the party. Anypony who’s managed to last this long without us is probably so far off the grid we’d have no way of finding them unless they wanted us to. I know this Hill Born trusts you, but what if he bought the farm? Does anypony else even know we were coming?”

Thunder Gale stiffened. “We’ve spent too much time and too much of our resources just trying to get here; it may be too late to save the whole colony, but we’re not leaving here empty-hoofed. Understood?”

“Aye, Major.”

After a minute of staring in silence at the bulkhead in front of him, Thunder Gale stood up on his hind legs and shook his cuirass until the datapad from earlier tumbled to the grated floor.

“I want you to take a look at this.” He dropped down onto all fours again and slid the datapad to her. “Have the contents downloaded to the ship’s computer and get—I don’t know—somepony a lot smarter than the two of us to look through it. I’ll review it as soon as we get this operation back on its hooves.”

“What’s on it?” Lightning Fire picked it up in her mouth and tucked it under her wing.

He looked her right in the eye and stepped around to meet her head on, and pulled his wings tight against his body.

“I don’t know, but it scares me,” he said. “It’s something you have to see for yourself.”

“You’ll have to try better than that if you want to spook me, sir. I’ll get on this right away.”

They went back to staring at the walls while the hyperlift groaned along. Lightning Fire broke the silence after a few minutes, snickering.

“What?” Thunder Gale asked.

“I’m not about to make a jab about walking in on you and your special mare friend, sir, but it’s really hard not to.”

“Whatever you’re about to say, I’ve heard worse.”

“All joking aside, everypony on this ship knows about you two, and I’m not going to remind you just how important that maintaining that façade is, but do not let the others catch you with your mortal side showing.”

“Don’t worry, if I get shot, I’ll bleed,” he said, “but they’ll have to get me in my heart or my head before I show any sign of slowing down.”

“Seeing your superior officer limping is one thing, seeing him rub noses with a shipmate is another. Not that I need to remind you.”

“I know.”

The hyperlift groaned to a halt and doors parted.

“Commander on deck!”

A room alive with the bustling pegasi and the rustling of their wings snapped to attention. The ponies embedded in the alcoves along the walls pulled themselves away from their stations and let their holograms idle in the air. Even the pilot pulled himself away from the helm and gave a salute. There was silence, and the air was thick with blood, grime, and sweat. The only light came from the emergency lighting and the glow of the holograms.

“As you were.” Thunder Gale marched onto his bridge and his crew went back to work in an explosion of movement and chatter.

He approached a long table at the center of the room, and it burst alive with white light coalescing into the image of the Spitfire. Lightning Fire cantered around to the side opposite of him and waited.

“What’s our status?” Thunder Gale spun the hologram of his ship around with a gesture of his wing.

“We’re running on reserve power right now,” said Lightning Fire. “There was a fluctuation in the planet’s electromagnetic field as we entered the E region of the ionosphere. It scrambled up the dark matter reactor something awful, but once we get it recalibrated we’ll have primary and secondary systems back online. ”

Kicking a button at the base of the table, Thunder Gale cycled through the holograms until the table projected an image of surrounding landscape.

“This planet is supposed to be populated, so where is everypony?” he asked. “I know for a fact that they all can’t be dead. Somepony had to teleport me off my ship.

“There’s a massive complex to the south.” He zoomed out and dragged the hologram until the outline of the chasm entered view. “There’s a good chance they hunkered down there to ride out whatever it is that happened here. We’ll concentrate our efforts there for the time being.”

A marine trotted up to Thunder Gale from out of the orange glow of her station.

“We’ve got drones in the air en route to the complex,” she said. “We should have a good view of the site in three minutes.”

“Recall them.” He tapped a touch-screen next to the projector and scrolled through a wall of navigational data. “They don’t grow on trees and we can’t afford to have any more of them drop out of the sky. I don’t want to start sending search and rescue teams in without some idea of what’s down there, but that’s starting to look like our only option.”

XO Lightning Fire stepped around the side of the table next to Thunder Gale and gestured for the hologram to zoom out using her wing. At that level of magnification, the planet was little more than a ball of white light, the Spitfire a blip on its surface, and their ride out of the system a red triangle positioned above their position.

“I hate to even suggest this, but our FTL ferry is still overhead,” said Lightning Fire. “The Ursa Minor could provide us with detailed scans of the chasm.”

“For a steep fee, I’m sure.” Thunder Gale unfurled his wings and sighed. “I don’t want to deal with that griffon any more than I have to, and in all honesty we can’t afford his services.”

“I don’t like the idea of it either, boss, but in this situation it’s either we try to do business with him, or we send armed ponies in there blind.” Lightning Fire’s eye darted at the ponies to the right and left of her, and for a second her inscrutable face looked the slightest bit mortified. “Of course I’m just offering my two cents. Whatever you decide, we’ll make it happen.”

Thunder Gale sighed, and walked over to comms station and stooped over the shoulder of the marine operating it. She glanced up at him and he pointed her right back down at holograms surrounding her face.

“Let’s make this quick,” he said. “Open a channel to the Ursa Minor, and be prepared to close it immediately.”

With a few gestures from comm officer’s face and hooves, the holograms in front of them turned into a single orange circle. Out morphed the Interplanetary Express’s logo and the registration data for the Ursa Minor. She touched the hologram and the station beeped. The orange icon faded, the beeping stop, and a cough echoed on the other end.

“If it isn’t my favorite pegasus in the whole wide galaxy, Major Gale,” said Gerard, the Ursa Minor’s pilot. A griffon who was also somehow part lamprey. “So are you going to pay me for dragging you all the way out here on the company’s time, or what? I thought this Hill Born fellow you were after was going to help you pay up.”

“Not just yet.” Thunder Gale propped a hoof against the wall of her alcove and leaned closer to the microphone. “We’re still looking for survivors. I wanted to ask if you could run some detailed scans on a settlement to the south of our position.”

“Tell you what,” said Gerard. “Add another fifteen percent on to what you’re supposed to be paying me now, and I’ll sync up my great and powerful sensors array to your ship.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not one bit.” The pilot at the other end of the channel coughed. “I know you need my help, otherwise you wouldn’t ask, so unless you kick a little extra cash over here for my trouble, I’m not gonna help.”

“Listen, we’re short on funds as it is.” Thunder Gale leaned in and kept his voice below a whisper. “An extra fifteen percent is outside of our price range, but the ponies down here need our help, and we can’t do that without yours.”

“Well then, I guess it just sucks to be you. Bye!”

With that, the sound at the other end of the channel broke off, and the hologram popped back to an inactive shade of orange. Thunder Gale blinked. He was already paying him a small fortune for ferrying them to the planet. With that extra fifteen percent, Thunder Gale could restock their drone supply and feed his crew for a month. Without it, in a week the food synthesizers would start running dry.

Sending a platoon in to scout the area was always an option, and the next logical course of action, scans or no scans. But sending armed teams of power armor troopers into a potentially dangerous situation blind never ended well. That chasm and the buildings lining its walls would make an excellent spot to set up an ambush. Even if they stumbled upon friendlies down there, an edgy marine in an unfamiliar setting was more likely to shoot first and ask questions later.

The mission and the safety of his marines were his top priorities. He’d sort out the budget later. Thunder Gale reached over comm officer and tapped the floating Interplanetary Express logo.

“Did you change your mind?”

“Yes, we’ll pay you another fifteen percent.” Thunder Gale gritted his teeth. “But these scans better impress me.”

“Oh, they will; you have my personal seal of approval,” said Gerard. “I’m going to go smoke a bowl while my AI copilot works on syncing everything up. And if you need any help with the sensors, or anything else for that matter, feel free to go fuck off.”

The channel cut silent, and the hologram at comm station switched to a display of fast moving numbers and technobabble. Thunder Gale hurried to the table at the center of the room and propped himself up on his front hooves. The air vents overhead kicked on, and an influx of fresh air brought a relief to the smell of sweating ponies. The words “sync in progress” flashed in red letters over the table, and then the white hologram flashed to a real time projection of the chasm and the buildings inside. All of it was rendered in precise detail.

Crater was a better word for it, the walls sloped down and down, until they reached a natural point at the bottom. There, a wad of concrete sat with all the obstinacy of a festering pimple at the exact tip of some pony’s nose. Construction machinery the size of small houses clustered around it. Thunder Gale tried to zoom in on the concrete mass, but the sensors revealed nothing else.

“I don’t like the look of that thing.” Lightning Fire squinted and pointed at the concrete mass. “I don’t pretend to be an engineer, but I was there during the Themis Incident. When there was nothing more they could do to stabilize the reactor, the very last thing they did before evacuating the entire continent was entombing the damn thing in concrete. It looks like they were trying the same thing here.”

“I’m not giving up on them just yet.” Thunder Gale zoomed out until the rest of the area was visible on the hologram. “Bring up thermal imagining, is there any sign of survivors?”

Blotches of color running the spectrum from blue to red cropped up all over the complex, illuminating the machinery still hard at work, and piping that sprawled over the surface and weaved down into the ground and fading away. Thunder Gale hung his head low and stepped away from the table. Plenty of machines, but no pony-sized orange and red lumps were anywhere in the complex.

The background bustling from his bridge staff quieted to just above a murmur. They knew it too, and they only pretended to work while waiting for his reaction.

“What are your orders, Major?” Lightning Fire straightened out a twist in her eye patch, and her eye aimed straight ahead.

“Put together the search teams,” he said. “At least now they have some idea of what to expect. I’ll be in my ready room.”

Thunder Gale retreated toward his broom cupboard of an office. Right then, comm officer’s station beeped.

“Uh, Major, sir, we’re getting an incoming transmission on the Ursa Minor’s channel,” she said.

“Tell Gerard to buzz off,” said Thunder Gale. “I’m busy.”

“I don’t think it’s him.”

Thunder Gale stopped, pivoted his ears toward her, and then cantered over to her station. He parked himself over her station and swiped at the Interplanetary Express logo. When he did, static screeched through from the other side.

“For tapping into your frequency, please forgive me.” The voice of a stallion, thick with an accent Thunder Gale did not recognize, forced its way through the static. “Chain Gleaming is how they call me. I am the last member of the Sigil Tech Corporation surviving on the planet. Please send help—”

Thunder Gale darted all over the comm officer’s controls and wedged himself beside her.

“Hello, Chain Gleaming?” he asked. “This is Spitfire actual, do you copy? Over.”

“It looks like it might have been a mechanical error on his end,” the comm officer said. “We’re probably not going to be able to raise him again.”

“Can you at least triangulate his signal?”

“I can if you give me enough room to do my job, sir.”

Thunder Gale pried himself out of the station and nudged the comm officer back in. He bit at the edge of his hoof as he stood to the side and watched her work the holograms flashing in her station.

At that time Lightning Fire, who had been watching the situation unfold from afar, strolled up next to Thunder Gale and joined him in waiting.

“Given the time it took your friend’s message just to track you down, there never was much of a chance that we’d get here in time to save him,” Lightning Fire whispered to him. “Surely you must have realized we probably weren’t going to get here in time to rescue everypony. I’d count us lucky just finding the one survivor, given our chances setting out.”

“There were over ten thousand ponies living on this colony.” Thunder Gale didn’t take his eyes and ears off the comm officer and her station. “This Chain Gleaming guy can’t be the only one left. We have to hold out hope that there are others and he might know where to find them.”

“Understood, sir.”

“I got it!” The comm officer turned around and poked her head out of her station. “The transmission originated from a structure five miles from our current location. I’m uploading the coordinates to the tactical computer now.”

“Good work, ensign.” Thunder Gale clapped his two front hooves together and spun to face Lightning Fire. “General, have an away team assembled and prep one of our dropships. I want to launch in ten minutes.”

They spent the next minute sketching out the details of the operation: Thunder Gale would lead the team to track down Chain Gleaming, while Lt. Cloud Twist took a small platoon into the city to begin searching for survivors. Once Chain Gleaming was secure, he’d be able to provide them with information to help narrow their search. Lightning Fire didn’t like the idea of the CO galloping off into the desert right immediately after they managed to rescue him from it, but she didn’t have a say in the matter.

He took the quickest route to the hangar he knew of, but as he cantered down past sickbay a voice cried to him. When he stopped and turned to look, Breeze Heart was there staring back at him.

“I want to go with you,” she said.

In truth, Thunder Gale wasn’t sure how to react. Although it had never been said, but Breeze Heart was the other exception to the “everypony fights” rule. Officially, she was the ship’s surgeon. Unofficially, it never came up and Thunder Gale was hoping it never did.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Thunder Gale said.

“Well, why not?”

“What about sickbay?”

“What about it? I don’t have any patients and I’m sure that the medics can manage while I’m gone. You have a very capable crew, after all.”

“I guess what I'm trying to get at is why.”

“Well, I heard about the survivor you made contact with, so I figured that as the ship’s doctor I should be there to provide whatever help I can, if that’s alright with you.” Breeze Heart shuffled on her hooves, and then added, “Actually, I want to go because I’m worried about you.”

“Worried about me?” Thunder Gale feigned a chuckle. “I’m just going to meet with this guy, and then come back. I won’t be gone long and I’m not even going armed.”

“Not even an hour ago I wasn’t sure if you were coming back at all.” Breeze Heart checked up and down the corridor to make sure they were out of sight, and then stepped closer to Thunder Gale and put her hoof to his cheek. “I haven’t seen you act like this in a long time. I’m worried, that’s all. Let me be there for you.”

“I, uh, let me think.” He checked over his shoulder more than twice, then glanced at his hooves and sighed. He didn’t have very long to make up his mind. “Okay, you can come, but if word gets out that I gave you some kind of special treatment it’d—”

“Don’t worry, it won’t. I know how to keep a secret.” She gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

They didn’t discuss the matter any longer; they cantered down corridor to meet up with their crewmates and the dropship waiting to ferry them into the desert.