//------------------------------//
// Evacuation by Hawkeye92  
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons.  Competition Compilation 
// by Katarn 
//------------------------------//

“Wave off or you're going to die!” The carrier dispatch screamed in Windhover's ear.
His gyropter was hovering a few metres above the evacuation centre's landing pad for the umpteenth time that night. In the distance, innumerable fires burned, reflecting from the low, angry clouds as Equestria came to its end.
Throughout the day, balefire missiles had rained from the sky, Windhover thanking Godesses for each missile that wasn't aimed at him, every nauseating flash killing thousands of other ponies instead and allowing him to ferry more civilians to the Radiant Dawn, hanging like a steel leviathan in the sky above. Below were hundreds, maybe thousands of earth ponies and unicorns desparate to escape. Any pegasi or teleporting unicorns had already taken their leave a long time ago, leaving those poor souls who couldn't to fend for themselves.
Of course, luck always runs out.

Word must heave spread about the missile being tracked coming straight for the centre because ponies were panicking and rushing the gyropter's landing pad. Some down there had probably given up their places on the last few craft to injured ponies, unwittingly dooming themselves. Windhover looked down at them, with the calm air traffic controller in one ear announcing that the Radiant Dawn would be performing an emergency teleport jump in three minutes and his dispatcher in the other pleading with him to get back aboard.
Windhover had been a rescue flier since before gyropters had even be invented, it felt wrong for him to simply leave all of these ponies to die. He was fairly certain his girlfriend had perished in Cloudsdale, so noble an end trying to spare as many ponies from the cataclysm might not be so bad after all.

“For Celestia's sake you're going to be left behind!”
Almost instinctively Windhover pulled back on the control stick, the gyropter eagerly leaping higher into the air. His courage failed, Windhover couldn't help looking at the ponies left behind through a veil of tears as his machine roared away towards the waiting carrier.