Holding Cell, LOCATION UNKNOWN
DATE UNKNOWN
Rose Blossom languished.
The pegasus had lost track of exactly how long she’d been stuck in the gray, lifeless cube of a room. She hung in air near one of the edges of this cube with a hoof hooked around one of the strange industrial-yellow bars that subdivided the walls of the room. It could have been a week. It could have been a month. Her sense of time had been obliterated.
All she knew was that she was alone and at the mercy of alien creatures that she knew nothing about.
She had been stripped of everything; her armor, for all the good it had done, her uniform, her equipment, even her Harmony pendant. She’d gotten the necklace back and the clothing had been replaced, but only after a barrage of forceful and humiliating examinations, tests, and procedures that had left the mare feeling sullied afterward. It had been terrifying, being marehandled by faceless, inequine goons. The only comfort was that they hadn’t seemed to have gone out of their way to mistreat her.
She grit her teeth as her ruined hip ached again. Rose rubbed at it, hoping to massage the pain away. The aliens had been kind enough to put it back together, after a fashion, but they had also been the ones to destroy it. She wouldn’t complain, though. Considering the circumstances of her capture, she felt lucky to be alive at all.
She moved through corridors of the alien building. The distinctive clip-clop of hoof-on-stone met her ears, with with an occasional metallic clang whenever she stepped on one of the grates that were spaced intermittently along the concrete floor.
The maze-like layout of the structure had separated the marine from her squad and she felt every bit of the isolation. It didn’t help that interior of the structure was cavernous, dark, or sparsely lit from a variety of screens and harsh, blood-red lights. The sounds of combat, yelling, screams, spells, and weapon fire, echoed through the empty spaces, nearly driving Rose up the pipe-and-conduit-adorned walls with paranoia.
She was sure that something was following her, stalking her. The numerous rooms and side passages provided ample opportunity for ambush. Clearing them only wasted the mare’s time and degraded her sanity. As much as she loathed them, fighting the changelings was almost straightforward in comparison.
But her goal, Sergeant Rye’s locator beacon, goaded her into continuing. She was close, and it was a straight shot down the corridor.
She emerged from the maze into an even larger room, lined with monitors and filled with desks and computer consoles, many overturned or otherwise moved; most of those showed evidence of a firefight. The beacon was close, in the same room. Rose wound her way carefully through the mess, unsure of what she would find.
“Hello?” She queried, almost at a whisper. Nothing about the situation felt right in any way. She was within bodylengths of the beacon now. “It’s Corporal Bloom. Anypony there?” Silence was her only answer. She found out why when she reached the beacon.
There wasn’t enough left of anypony to answer her.
She ducked back before the sight of the mangled bodies made her sick. She had to get out. Back to other ponies. She -
BANG!
The impact threw Rose against the console with enough force to daze the pegasus. She slumped to the ground with a moan.
One fact made itself abundantly clear through the haze of pain. They were coming for her. If she didn’t get up now, she was going to die.
Rose struggled to her hooves. Or tried to. Shaking her head to clear her mind, she tried again. Left front, right front. Left rear. . .
Why won’t my leg work!?
Alien footsteps thundered in her direction. Fighting back panic, the mare reached back with a trembling hoof, only to draw it back, covered in blood. She twisted to look, straining against the bulk of the armor to look at her hip.
It was drenched in blood. The joint was a pulpy mess and the limb itself hung at an unnatural angle.
The footsteps drew closer. Rose stood shakily, overcome with fear and pain, and tried her best to hobble into cover. She heard the footsteps enter the room and instinctively turned to face the threat.
The massive armored frame vaulted over the obstacles in its path with an unnatural speed and grace, charging the pegasus at a breakneck pace. It was in the moment before contact that Rose finally got her first good look at the alien. It was bipedal, towering over her taller than even one of the Princesses, garbed in a bright-white suit of armor. There was no helmet, only a spherical metallic-orange faceplate where the head would be. One hand was empty, while the other reached for the handle of what could only be a knife.
Acting on instinct, the marine raised her rifle. The weapon chattered, bullets bouncing uselessly off of the creature’s armor. And then it was on her.
A scream of agony tore from her mouth as its weight slammed into her. It ripped her rifle away, taking part of the armor with it. Its hand was at her throat before she could breathe.
The knife at her eye cinched it. She was going to die. The life of Rose Blossom, daughter of Cherry Blossom, was about to end and there was nothing the pegasus mare could do about it. She gave up and let herself go limp, waiting for the end.
It never came. The knife never descended. The vice-grip on her throat never tightened. Instead, muffled barely-audible sounds came from the faceplate.
Rose simply laid where she was, too tired to really care anymore. She soon heard more footsteps, lighter and slower than the ones that had come from the behemoth that now had her pinned.
“Youto sad`chte vi zhouyo midik.” If she had the energy, Rose might have giggled at the absurdity. It sounded just like a pony stallion. The armored one responded, its words again muffled and quiet. “Dtha. . . whe nouzhyo nihsh nif.” The impossibly equine-sounding creature moved closer, and she saw it, out of the corner of her eye, kneel over her. And then it touched her. Instincts, this time much more primal, took over and she tried to buck, spasming painfully when the motion aggravated what was left of her hip.
“Jivehs yehsou!” The force of the command broke through pain and fear and shocked the marine into stillness; when it touched her again, she didn’t move except to shiver. “ Louzha.” The voice was gentler this time, and she felt a hand pat her barrel. “Poust`ta houshi” The hand on Rose’s throat let go, leaving her free to breathe once again, and moved to her shoulder. She coughed weakly.
With her energy gone, all she could do was lie still and wait to die.
The sound of tearing fabric met her ears and she could feel, barely, the back of the alien blade as the knife, which she now noticed was no longer pointed at her eye, sliced through the fabric of her uniform with ease. What was it-
She gasped as something metallic dug into her hip. The pain was intolerable, and she would have screamed if she had strength to do so. As it was, she could only whimper as the probe dug cruelly through the ruined flesh. The pain didn’t last long. Nearly as soon as it had entered, the tip of the probe exploded, releasing a wet-feeling substance that. . . that. . . numbed everything wonderfully. The pegasus sighed. Tension she had been long past feeling faded from her. All that was left was a bone-deep exhaustion. Maybe if she-
“He, he! Jivehs ton who!” Something snapped rapidly near her face, and the weary pegasus forced her eyes open and looked into the face of the other alien. Camera lenses stared back. The strange sight barely stirred her. “Jivehs proshni! Proshni! Whome nouzhyo veh`geht ta`veh`dtheh shatl!”
Immense hands lifted her up, surprisingly gentle in their touch. The armored one placed her on its shoulder as though she weighed nothing, and the world faded to black.
Aliens don’t take prisoners.
This was irrefutable fact. A lesson that Equestria had learned the hard way. Aliens are the enemy. Aliens will destroy you as soon as look at you. Aliens have no regard for other life. Everything she knew told Rose that she should be dead.
Every second that she continued to breathe, every movement of her repaired leg, said otherwise.
These aliens fed her, clothed her, had tended her wounds. She couldn’t understand it. The changelings would have turned her into so much meat long ago, if they even waited that long, and yet these aliens had not only kept her alive, but had saved her leg.
Why? She hadn’t been captured on a whim, she knew that. Looking back, it was obvious that her capture had been deliberate. But why?
What did they want with her?
Sol system, Luna, Federal Intelligence Bureau Headquarters
January 14th, 417 a.g.w.
On dozens of screens within the darkened room, the final moments of the Lance Held High played out.
Lieutenant Coleman’s distress call had been troubling, but not unexpected. Pirates, after all, were not an uncommon occurrence on the Fringe, and were the reason that the lieutenant and his men had been stationed on Farpoint in the first place.
But when the contents of the frigate’s black box, which the agents of the Farpoint Task Force now viewed, had uploaded into the Navy’s servers over ansible, mere minutes later, the attention of the powers that be shifted to the frontier system post haste.
The loss of a capital ship, especially in a system facing away from any powers capable of mounting such an offensive, was no trivial matter.
When the Venus’ Light had showed up in the L372-58 system with nearly the entire population of Farpoint, and a very unexpected guest, it provided an explanation that no one had expected, and that many found disquieting in the extreme.
Mankind was not alone. Other life roamed the stars of the Milky Way galaxy. Humanity had neighbors.
And they weren’t friendly.
This revelation, arguably the most profound in human history, had led to the creation of the Task Force, and subsequently to Lazar Jenkins sitting in a room with dozens of other intelligence agents and experts, within and from outside of the Bureau, watching the deaths of fifty Confederate spacers.
Again.
Manipulating his console, the agent switched perspectives, from within the frigate’s service module to an external view of the same. The shadowed hull was lit only by the starship’s running lights and appeared as a dark blob at the bottom of the image. This blob was briefly illuminated by the light of the blood-red beam that suddenly bisected the screen before dissolving into static an instant later when the camera melted under the onslaught.
Whatever those weapons were, they had gone through the ship’s armor like it wasn’t even there. The video made it very clear exactly what eight-hundred years of human spaceflight research and development counted for.
“Eighty centimeters of unobtanium-composite armor. Might as well have been tin foil.” Jenkins looked up to see a similar clip playing on the main screen.
Absolutely nothing.
“You think that’s bad? Look at this.” Another agent flicked her hand as though tossing something and yet a third video clip appeared on the main screen a moment later. This one showed one of the alien ships, a destroyer-sized craft which had been designated a “frigate” due to its apparent role and relative size to its companions, as it appeared to the Lance’s telescopes. The elegant delta-shaped craft was maneuvering, presumably to bring a spine-mounted weapon to bear.
A barrage of the frigate’s anti-ship missiles streaked through the frame. Against a human-built craft of the aliens craft’s size, even a handful would equal a mission kill, if not the outright destruction of the target.
The alien “frigate” simply shrugged off the missiles that made it through its defense screen. But it wasn’t armor that they impacted.
A shimmering sphere snapped into place around the alien ship an instant before the projectiles hit.
Lazar could think of only one way to describe the sight of physics as humanity knew it being snapped in half.
“That’s not good.”
“Understatement is my schtick, Jenkins.” Lazar looked over to his right as his fellow agent spoke up. “It’s not entirely bad, though. Take a look at. . . this.” The agent popped up his own video clip. This one showed one of the alien “destroyers”. It also had one of the inexplicable spheres around it. The timestamp indicated the clip took place within seconds of the Lance’s destruction.
The alien craft vanished in a flash of light and shrapnel.
A Hyper-Velocity Impactor. The single-most powerful weapon in any nation’s arsenal. One, of sufficient caliber, was enough to level a continent. Enough of them could resurface a planet. They were, before now, the only weapons capable of cracking the armored shells that protected humanity’s capital ships.
They were the Alderson Drive taken to its logical extreme. The ultimate evolution of ballistic weapons. A guided projectile capable of “accelerations” upwards of ninety-percent of the speed of light, the HVI was the modern nuke.
It was with one of these weapons that the Lance Held High took of her foes with her into death.
“Enough chit-chat folks. This is all well and good, but save the analysis for the boffins,” Agent Crowe, the head of the Task Force, indicated half of the assembled group with a nod of her head. “The purpose of this little show was to impress upon you why, exactly, we’re here today.
“Make no mistake people. We’re looking at another first contact situation. Only this time, it’s not a couple squabbling colonies, and no one is going to step in and mediate like we did last century.
“This could be a horrible mistake.
“This could be how these things say hi.
“This could be a declaration of war.
“Our job is to learn everything we can from this farce so we can figure out which it is and advise the bigwigs in Parliament once the Navy gets done kicking Ee-Tee’s ass up and down the Farpoint system.” Crowe tapped a few points in thin air, causing files to appear in everyone’s inboxes.
“You have your assignments. Let’s get to work.”
Lazar opened his own inbox. I seem to get the interesting assignments.
He was going to help question their “guest”.
LV-218 system, Planet Five, Alien Compound
June 7th, 1173 a.n.m.
“We think they’re terraformers.”
Mint Glimmer blinked. “What?” She and her first officer stood in a large room, mostly cleared of the debris of combat. What furniture was left had been repurposed, every available surface filled with charts, tablet computers, and various pieces of equipment. Mint took in these details, trying to parse what she had just been told. “What?”
“Captain, these machines,” her first officer highlighted the dozens of dots on the map representing the alien compounds, “are dumping oxygen into the atmosphere in absolutely massive quantities. As far as we can tell, this planet’s entire magnetic field seems to be artificial; one of the poles is about twenty miles west.
“There are other machines, here, here, and here,” the mare highlighted various sets of dots, “ that seem to be affecting the environment in other ways. Somehow; we haven’t been able to figure out what kind of spells they’re using or for what. The few computers we’ve been able to access, without being able to understand their language, are filled with what look like weather simulations and equipment manifests.
“We’ve found no cities, no shipyards, no armories. There are no tanks, no personnel carriers, we haven’t even found any guns bigger than the we-think-they’re-rifles we found on their soldiers.
“Captain, I think we’ve made a big mistake.”
The unicorn’s mind shut down. A mistake. They had made a mistake. She had attacked these people and Rose Quartz called it a mistake. Was her eye twitching?
No. No. She hadn’t attacked them. They started it and it got out of hoof. None of this would have happened if they hadn’t been so hostile and aggressive. This was their fault; they were to blame. She just did her job. And she was going to keep doing it.
“Finish your investigations and then get everypony back on the ships as soon as possible.” Equestria needed to know about these new aliens. This new threat. “We’re leaving.”