Cross The Amazon

by Chatoyance

13. The Little Red Hen

Chapter Thirteen: The Little Red Hen

Dropspindle gazed sideways through half-lidded eyes at a deep blue sky. Below the intense, dark cerulean was a brightness, fuzzy and indistinct. Gradually, it began to become evident to her sleepy mind that there was no wind, and that her view was shielded by some wide, curving, transparent material.

She tried to roll to see more of where she was, and that was when the pain hit. Her barrel pulsed now with a sharp ache that cut and sawed through her previous dreamy calm. One of her ribs hurt terribly, and instinctively she enshrouded the area in her telekinetic field. She ran the blob of thaumatic force up and down, over her own chest, searching. Gingerly, delicately, she felt out a region on the left side where her flesh was swollen and angry. Her barrel was wrapped in gauze of some kind. Bandaged, she had been bandaged up. Daring the icky feeling of reaching inside herself, she sent her hornfield deeper, until she could make out her own ribs.

Dropspindle felt carefully, slowly along the ribs within her thaumatic grasp, and found that one of them, the third down on the left, had a crack in it. The crack was fine, thin, and the rib had not actually broken through - but it was very painful. The memory flooded back - the impact with the beams of the crane, the numbness, at first, as she climbed above the water. Then pain and darkness. Pain, more pain than she had ever felt, or that she had ever even considered to be possible. Pain greater than her very imagination.

Carefully - very, very carefully - she turned her head to look around. She was in a small chamber, with a curving wall. The wall was mostly window, a huge, rounded window. She was in a bed. The walls of the chamber were white, with orange details. Everything - the open doorway, the drawers and cabinets in the walls - was rounded, with no sharp corners. The rounded doorframe was wide, metallic, and had large bolts all the way around it.

Dropspindle turned her head again upon the pillow, her throbbing pain forgotten in an instant at the view, now clearly seen. Outside the great oval of glass-like substance was... the world. The human's world, curving below her, so very far below. The sky was deep, almost dark azure, and the global smog layer was beneath, a yellowish-gray and sunlight-bright arc of puffy, dirty cloud. It stretched forever, as far as she could see. There was a thrum, her ears informed her, from all around. It came even from the substance of the bed. Engines. Human machine sounds, resonating through everything... even her own body.

White and orange. Curved. She could only be on the Mamá Gansa, the airship that she and Calloway had tried so hard to jump to. Somehow, she had fainted from pain and lack of air on that crane, and then awakened flying high over the Southamerizone in the Mamá Gansa. Calloway must have made it. Somehow he had found her. Somehow, he had pulled her from the tilted construction crane and put her in bed.

And bandaged up her rib, too.

Dropspindle wanted to get up to thank him, to see him again, but it still hurt too much to try to turn over, much less clamber out of the bed. She sighed and relaxed. He would come and check on her sooner or later. Probably flying the ship right now. She turned her head and watched the smog layer drift by, below. Above, in the deep blue, were streaks of cirrus and cirrostratic clouds. They were so high that they hardly seemed to move at all. The human world had such a tall sky. They said it had no ceiling at all. That the stars did not live on the dome of the sky, that there was no dome. It just went on and on.

Dark sky that went on forever. The emptiness of it, the lonely infinity it represented made her shudder with a quiet horror. She suddenly felt terribly homesick. It was comforting to know the sky was bounded, that the stars lived on its surface, that everything was cozy and cared for by the loving, immortal princesses.

There were no princesses here.

"I'm alright! Quit fussing!"

Calloway was ineffectually trying to help Dropspindle to the impromptu picnic he had arranged on the flight deck of the Mamá Gansa. The dining cabin on the airship was built only for humans, and it was small, like all the compartments. The chairs were high and narrow, and not built at all for quadrupeds with injured ribs. Calloway had taken to serving meals on the flight deck, on a bed cover, picnic style. Dropspindle could fold her legs and lay down comfortably, and Calloway sat tailor-fashion across from her.

The meal tonight was prepackaged nanostructed and reconstituted macaroni-and-cheese-like-mealproduct. The tiny galley of the airship was well stocked, as befitted an executive runabout. Sadly, most of the space was filled with expensive Pre-Collapse liquors. Whoever had owned the Mamá Gansa had enjoyed using his enormous wealth to impress alcoholic elites, apparently. Calloway had described it as 'social climbing'. Dropspindle had quietly chuckled at that. It seemed such a primate way of putting things - monkeys liked to climb trees. Society was a tree to them, even still.

The mac-and-cheese mealproduct tasted like chemicals and sadness but it was filling. Calloway would help her in the restroom later - necessity had made them overly intimate in certain ways. It would be beyond wonderful to get back to Equestria and real food once again.

Dropspindle had heard about Newfoals living in gargantuan human cities on earth, building gardens on every balcony and roof. Supposedly the 'sky-scrapers' looked like greenery-covered mountains. Even still living on earth, they worked together to make good, real food to eat. How could these humans think food was chemicals that came out of boxes? This universe was such a strange place, these creatures so very bizarre.

"Yes, it was quite a problem getting this thing started up. I almost gave up, until I found that journal!" Dropspindle had asked Calloway about how he had gotten the Mamá Gansa to fly.

"Getting the power on fully wasn't an issue. MarIA was. The ship's A.I. wouldn't do more than turn on the lights and tell me where the toilets were unless I provided the proper passwords. That's plural. There were several, all obscure as hell, and without that journal... well, you wouldn't be here... and really... neither would I."

"Wait..." Dropspindle swallowed her mouthful of mac. "How could you read the journal? You don't know Spanish!"

"Mnn...yes." Calloway swallowed. "That's true. It was mostly gobbledegook for me, but on the back page there was a list of things..." He took another bite, and a swallow of bubbly club soda with artificial lime. "...words, numbers. Some were in English, which I thought was pretty weird. Lists, passwords. What else could they be. See?" Calloway reached behind him, half stood, to grab something from the console. He flipped through the journal after sitting down again, then laid it flat on the deck.

"The guy must have been an old movie buff. Maybe all they got down here was old Pre-Collapse movies, I don't know. But check this out - " Calloway pointed to the handwritten passwords. "'Reindeer Flotilla'. That was the first password I had to enter. It's from an old movie about cyberspace."

"Siber... what?"

"Um... inside a computer. Sort of. And this one, oh this is a gem - " Calloway moved his finger to the next line of handwritten humanese symbols. "Five eight one, Tee-Ess-Dee-Arr, X, Dolphin and Over! Nobody but a true, well, geek, like me, would ever get that reference! I feel like I almost know this guy. Damn. A Godzilla reference for a password. He may have been a rainforest raping burger-lord, but he liked 'Tron' and 'Godzilla'. I guess there is good in everyone, if you only look hard enough."

Dropspindle sipped her bowl of soda-with-sort-of-lime. "Maybe the burger-lord couldn't help... destroying... the forest. You seem so harsh toward our host."

Calloway half smiled and half looked confused. "The guy who... our 'host' as you put it... he's one of the reasons your princesses insist on ponification before letting us into ponyland! He wanted money, he wanted a mansion and a fancy car and a super fancy airship, and he clearly didn't care one whit about all the millions starving in poverty around him! He took the forest - that all the people depended on - burned it down, put cattle on it, slaughtered the cattle, and left a desert for everyone else to suck on. This is the sort of bastard that owned this ship we are on. Imagine him, unponified, in your candy universe? How long until it was a desert too, if he couldn't have a palace or whatever?"

"I was taught that humans couldn't help themselves. 'Humans are the suffering victims of a harsh and cruel cosmos'. We are taught to forgive humans for the things they do, because it isn't their fault. They weren't created, like we were. Humans just sort of 'happened', like monsters from the Everfree. You don't have princesses to make you correctly. So you can't be blamed for the things you do to survive." Dropspindle took another nibble of fake mac-and-cheese.

"SURVIVE!" Calloway put down his glass. "The guy had a mansion while everyone else lived in dirt-floor shacks! You were there, you saw! We scavenged through where everyone else lived. Only airship-boy here had marble floors and air conditioning. He didn't share, he didn't help anyone but himself. He just took the forest as his own, and probably grinned at how little he could pay people to burn down the only valuable thing they had for his benefit! We know he threw big parties for his rich friends, do you think he invited common folk to any of them? How can you defend this man?"

Calloway seemed upset. Surprisingly so. Dropspindle stared at him.

Of course. Calloway was the darling of the human elite. He found them their 'petrochemical' stuff. They let him have anything he wanted for that. Calloway was feeling guilt. Or shame. Something like that. He had lived well, like the elite did, while most humans had nothing. Dropspindle thought carefully.

"Humans are the product of their universe, they cannot help what they are. That is what my excursion instructor taught me. He said that you live in a monstrous universe, and so you had to be monsters to survive - but that we shouldn't focus on that. We should focus on how, despite that, you made music, and art, and had friendships and tried - despite everything - to be more than what the universe made you to be. He said that if it got to be too much, or if we felt disgust at you, we should remember that deep down you already had the makings of being ponies inside you... and that once you were converted, the worthwhile bits would finally have their chance."

"So... pity. They taught you to pity us, so you would not hate us." Calloway sighed, and spooned another sporkful of mac into his face. "I guess it makes sense. You come here, you have to deal with a lot, and us on top of it." He sipped his beverage. "I guess pity is better than hate. I don't have much pity left, myself. Sorry." Calloway rubbed his lower back. Sitting on the deck like that hurt him. "I just... that forest? The one that isn't there, down below us? It was once the greatest, most magnificent forest on the entire planet. 'The lungs of the earth' they used to call it. The loss of it is one of the reasons earth is dead meat. That and the oceans. I... I can't forgive that."

"Then think of Equestria. At least we came, right? And there are endless forests and oceans in Equestria!"

Calloway looked out the windows. They curved in a semi-circle all around the flight deck. "Yeah. You came. Equestria showed up in the nick of time." He turned back to his food. "If you hadn't, we'd just all be dead. And stupid dead, too. Stupid greedy dead. Too stupid to live."

Dropspindle lifted her muzzle from her plate. "No. Not stupid, or... any other bad thing. We are the product of Celestia and Luna, you are the product of your... random and uncaring universe. You expect too much of humans, Calloway. They can't help it. They just can't help themselves. If they could, they would, right?"

Calloway gave her a soft smile, as if to agree. But her words sounded too much like a mantra, like some propaganda created to make ponies able to tolerate humans at all. Ponies were clearly suckers for propaganda; it obviously wasn't a normal part of their lives. They hadn't learned to be suspicious and untrusting of every official statement.

It was a funny sort of propaganda, though. Instead of trying to get people to see another nation as an inhuman enemy, ponies used propaganda to convince themselves to forgive and accept others. If it was propaganda, it was the strangest he had ever come across.

Calloway pressed the active surface display again. The holo-icon changed from a three dimensional, floating image of a map to an image of a magnifying glass. That wasn't helpful in the least. He still couldn't get the navigational view back. The only thing that showed on the holotank were the same floating words that had been there for the last many hours.

"You're sure that you can't remember any Spanish at all?" Magic had turned from wonder to annoying. Dropspindle had awoken completely incapable of understanding even the simplest Spanish word. At the moment Calloway knew the most Spanish of the two of them, and he only knew three words. 'Si' for 'yes', 'Que' for 'what' (he wasn't entirely sure about that one, actually), and something like 'Banyo' which probably meant restroom. Maybe. And he knew the names of some Mexican dishes. 'Taco'. 'Enchilada'. 'Salsa'. Or was that last one a form of music? He couldn't remember.

"I've told you several times!" Dropspindle had her hooves on the edge of the holotable that filled the hind area of the flight deck. They ate their meals in the flat space between the holotable and the flight chairs that faced the airship controls. "I don't understand why you keep asking!"

Calloway thought for a moment. "I... you know, that's a very good question. Huh. I guess... I think humans just don't trust each other very much, deep down, so... we are always expecting that someone else is lying to us when we hear bad news. Something like that. Basically, I'm desperate, and I want you to be lying, because then maybe there'd be hope you'd suddenly pop up and say 'I'm kidding! Here's the answer!"

Dropspindle considered this. She stared at the floating, incomprehensible words. She turned her bright, magenta eyes to Calloway. "I'm kidding! Here's the answer!"

Calloway glared. Then he half smiled. "Cute. You're becoming more human every day." He tried pressing the other symbols - something that looked like a wrapped present, a little cube with an upside down question mark in it, and what appeared to be a bunch of the extinct fruit called bananas. Nothing about the display changed. "'Navegacion' - that sounds like navigation to me, so I'm sure we've got the right section still. I shouldn't have tried to scroll and zoom the map... I did something wrong and now... I don't have a clue. 'Activa' - that either means the thing is turned on, or it's an advertisement for some kind of snake oil - Jesus! Why isn't there a nice clear 'English' option on this thing?"

"Are we lost? Do you need this machine to fly this ship?"

"Well, yes and no." Kotani ran his hand through his raven hair. "I can fly the airship manually - it's actually pretty simple. It's as easy as flying something in SlaughterStrike. There's even vehicles in the game that fly just like this, so that part isn't a problem - heck, I got this thing to hover right beside that crane - there's a simple icon for hold position and everything. MarIA just takes over. Good A.I. on this barge, even if I can't speak its language. The problem is knowing just where to fly the ship."

"Wait... I thought that was the easy part. Just go East until you reach the ocean. Across the ocean, if necessary to... that other continent."

"Eeeeyeah. About that. You see..." Calloway brushed nonexistent dust from the holotable. "This thing here... it tells you which way to go, and what's down below, and out the window, well... look for yourself."

Beyond the windows was an endless surface of smog.

"Then away from Equestria! You have to be able to see Equestria up this high, just steer in the opposite direction! Or I can..." Dropspindle opened her thaumatic eyes and looked around. The bright, sky-filling luminance of Equestria was behind them. Good. "You are already moving in the right direction. I just checked."

"No, that's easy... thank you though, for double checking, never hurts to do that - the problem, as usual, is stuff."

"Stuff?"

"Material. It's a material world. Of scarcity. And we're getting low on hydrogen. Not fuel for once - we have enough high grade nano-adjusted petroleum in this baby to let us fly around the entire planet. What's left of the planet. We're spoiled for fuel. But hydrogen..."

"I thought that was... sealed... or something?"

"Yes. Very well. And safe. Even if a sac had direct contact with oxygen and a spark and blew up, the explosion would be contained. Nanomesh, just like the troopers, only better. But hydrogen is a funny thing. It always gets out. It's very small, and... it always finds a way. Sneaky little bastard of an atom. This airship has been sitting unattended, no maintenance for months. Months and months. In terrible heat and... I don't think mister Burger Lord understood the value of maintenance in the first place. So, there's leaks. Really slow, super slow... but because we've been using this contraption... and pushing it hard in some ways... the leaks have gotten worse."

"We're going to fall, aren't we?" Dropspindle had been getting used to a sort of earthly rhythm to events. On earth, anytime things went well at all, inevitably everything would go bad again, and usually in the worst possible way. Having the ship fall from the sky was the obvious next thing to happen.

"No, there is zero chance of that." Calloway moved to the primary pilot seat, Dropspindle followed. He sat down and indicated the holodisplay there. He was careful not to touch any unknown icons. "See? We have enough gas to last for quite a while. Weeks, maybe. I wish I could read this." He studied the floating words and symbols for a moment. "And there has to be all kinds of warnings and alarms and such should buoyancy ever become a problem. We'll have plenty of time to land safely. That's not even a concern."

Dropspindle was relieved, but baffled. "Then what actually IS the problem?"

"Weeks of flight are not enough to get us across the continent, much less the ocean to the Afrizone. This is a blimp, and while it's fast for a blimp, it's still pretty slow as an aircraft overall. I don't have the skill or knowledge to try to get us into an... airstream or whatever it's called up at high altitudes. If a ship like this could even do that. I don't know enough to use the full capacities of the ship right now at this altitude. I'm sorry. I can land, I can take off, I can point us in a direction and fly, and I can hover. I'm good at those things... but that's about it."

"So we're safe."

"For now, yes."

"It's just that we can't depend on this ship to get us all the rest of the way to safety."

"Pretty much. Sorry. I'm doing my best."

Dropspindle put a hoof on Calloway's shoulder. "Then... that's great! Calloway... you saved me, you saved you, we're okay, we're moving away from the Barrier, and we can travel for weeks before we are forced down. That's not bad! That's pretty good, if you think about it! You've done great!" Dropspindle looked out the wide front windows. "And I have an idea about navigation, too."

"What?" Calloway checked the altimeter. 300 meters. It was actually above the suggested zone of 200 meters, but he had wanted to clear the smog layer entirely.

"Just navigate by sight. Why can't we drop down, below the clouds, and watch the land? We don't have my paper map anymore, and the fancy holo thing isn't working, but land is land. We can follow that dry river, the big one, and look out the windows for... buildings. Villages. Another big bunch of tanks and stuff. Maybe we can find a... an airship re... um... gassing... place? Or maybe another jitney to drive instead of flying! I assume that's the issue, right? Finding stuff, since we need stuff!"

Calloway grinned. "Yeah, that's pretty much the plan I had, my backup plan. But I really wanted to get the holomap back. If that wasn't... not working... and if you still knew Spanish, we could have told MarIA to take us to the farthest large city or settlement to the East. The A.I. would have just... made it work out. With no mistakes."

Dropspindle pressed close, and let Calloway scratch her mane. She had to adjust her stance, because her rib still hurt, but Calloway needed her. "You'll do okay. You've done really well already. Well...except for one thing."

"What?" Calloway felt a rush of fear. He really didn't want to disappoint this mare for some reason. It really mattered to him, and the strength of that feeling surprised him.

Dropspindle turned her face to Calloway and glared at him with her large magenta eyes. "Don't you EVER lie to me again, Calloway Kotani! You treated me like a foal back at that petroleum plant, and you made me think we would be alright only you had given up and I don't know what the pretzel was going through that monkey skull of yours but it was wrong, understand? I mean it - don't ever, EVER treat me like that again!"

The little unicorn was faintly shaking with anger. Kotani raised his hand from her mane. That was new. She looked like she was ready to cave in his 'monkey skull' with a swing of a hoof, and considering her apparent strength, likely take his head right off entirely.

"I am very, very sorry. That was wrong. I... I thought I was sparing you from horror. I thought that it would be less terrible if you didn't have to face waiting for me to fry. And there was nothing else I could do for you. Just... not fill our last days together with worry and fear. I screwed up, and I'm sorry. I won't do it - or anything like it - ever again."

Those red eyes. The scary, creepy anger faded. "Okay, then."

Supposedly, Equestrians were incapable of murder or unprovoked violence. They couldn't even think that way. Supposedly.

Calloway turned back to the controls. 'Supposedly' had just seemed kilometers away from the look in those angry alien eyes.