PONYHAMMER 40,000. The Warp Incursion.

by Duskrunner

Chapter Eight - Forging

Fluttershy was holed up in one of the smallest rooms in the fortress, talking to herself. She was busy building a defense for herself in response to a challenge that hadn't yet been put in words. Thought of by everypony in the room, but never thought aloud.

"I don't know that I should be here. I mean, I don't think I know... No, I just don't know."
Except she wasn't talking to herself. Unlike everypony else who had fought off the niggling voice Fluttershy knew exactly whose voice was in her head.

"Really my dear, is it safe to say this is any time for you to lose your nerve?"

"Oh but I haven't lost it. I never had any to begin with and really I'm fine with it."

Discord exhaled and pulled himself from the back of Fluttershy's subconscious into the space inside her pupils, literally looking at her from inside her own eyeballs.
"You don't want to be here but your friends need you and you're frightened because this isn't a situation you can just stare down with authority."

"Oh yes, I'm very aware of that."

"You're worried about how they want you to help."

She replied with meek nodding.

A faint, translucent image of Discord stepped out from her head into the real world and walked up to a set of white power armor stacked on top of a gurney. Sighing he pointed at it.
"Fluttershy, this poor deluded demihuman is what they call an apothecary."

"Um, that armor is empty."

"That doesn't mean doctor. He did the best he could with mostly the computer -that's the little flashing window on his arm there- telling him what to do every step of the way.
He spent ten years becoming a Space Marine; his masters weren't going to wait another ten sending him to medical school.Aim, read and do what it says. Add a little compassion and you'll do better than its last owner."

"Oh but... isn't it a human encyclopedia?" Fluttershy asked using the word that best matched what she thought 'computer' meant: a magical pageless book. "That won't help with ponies at all."

Discord's eyes went big when he realized she had a point. He then shrugged it off: "Details."
A snap of his fingers and the device flashed- but didn't look different at all.

"Um." She asked while fidgeting on the screen.

"Software my dear. That should now tell you what you need, 'Brain Surgery for Fillies' as it were even you-"

"OH DEAR!!"

"Oh come on I wasn't that mean..."
Looking around Discord noticed Fluttershy had rocketed away. The apothecary's bracer and every device he'd shown her was gone as well. Fluttershy had bolted into a hidden side room. The medical scanner had revealed the remains of an avian servitor and Fluttershy had torn the wall apart finding the release to get in and take care of it..
"Please Mr. eagle, please get up. Speak to me."

Discord sighed. "Fluttershy it's a robot. See how its head and breast are metal?"

"Oh that's not a problem. The sapphire moths of the Crystal Empire are living gemstone, and the Everfree cragadiles and stone tortoises of the San Palomino Desert are real rock."
She aimed the medical auspex at the shelved servitor-beast and the readout detected brain activity and a weak heartbeat. Fluttershy made sad eyes at Discord.

"Ugh, fine." He snapped his fingers again and the cogitator's memory banks were expanded with the data necessary for psyber-animals.

Discord blinked as he noticed his physical body began to fade away. Too busy with the device's instructions to retrieve devices listed Fluttershy didn't look for him until after she'd finished scavenging through part crates and restored the psyber-eagle.
"Curious," he said after his outline had completely vanished. "I think that's why she had to be here after all."

Twilight was making the rounds. First item on her list, the armory.
She crossed the door into a long bunk-room and saw her first team.
"Let's see what we have to work with girls."

The barricade was cleared out, broken footlockers and bed rails were tossed.Twilight wondered what their erectors had hoped to achieve. Desperate hope, that was probably it. A last futile hope that stacking some garbage in a doorway was somehow better than standing by and doing nothing.
When the barricade was breached it was penetrated by something that left craters in the far wall: Shrapnel and scorch marks marred every single surface. Twilight met Cheerilee and her annotated copy of the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer. The book was quickly becoming worn and dog-eared.

"This is the furthest room on the south wall?"
There wasn't really any north or south, Twilight just chose the main doorway and declared it north.

"Second furthest Twilight. There's a dormitory like this one on the other side but I thought you wouldn't want to risk accidentally opening a hole to the outside."

"Agreed. It sounds like we're ready. Bring 'em out."

Cheerilee went over to the empty crate where they stored the stack of weapons and pulled out several rifles.
"Every one of the humans carried one of these. The big ones smell a bit like fireworks and the small ones smell like the air after a thunderstorm. Guessing from the size and the damage to the walls some are more lethal than others."

"Discard all the chaos weapons. If it looks corrupted I want it gone."

"Agreed but I'd feel bad if I didn't point out that there isn't a big difference between their big guns and the clean ones. Both have skulls stamped on the sides."

"I want to give humans the benefit of the doubt and hope it's a general warning that these things are dangerous. Pictographs are common to all primitive cultures and we can't assume they're all literate. Let's start."

Roseluck and Derpy hauled in the armor sets they pried from Chaos Marines. They stacked them but without internal props all they could manage was a group of sitting marines with their arms resting on the floor at their sides with the helmets sitting unevenly on the necks.

"These are the 'lasguns'. Normal humans carried them. The barrel has a lens and a prism that slips out. It's heavy and solid. The other guns have prisms loaded with small metal cylinders like rockets. Besides the barrel the only thing these have in common are these handgrips."

"So how do they work?"

Cheerilee looked embarrassed. "There's a guide to dismantling and cleaning but not one for firing. I think it's common sense to them."

Twilight sighed wishing she had someone like Spike whose anatomy was closer to a humans when Lyra walked past the doorway. Of course Lyra's here listening in. Oh well, her curiosity's a plus here.
"Lyra, what do you think?"

Heartstrings came out from a side panel she was examining. She was keeping busy nosing around any hidden caches she could find since she'd finished the final touches on the vox-caster on the roof, not that anyone was asking her about it. Her hoof was wrapped around a canteen: She'd been drinking its contents while rummaging.

"Well these are food packets but I don't know if it's safe for us to eat. The water is alright. I popped one these containers open and it's orange juice. It's fresh enough to drink even if it tastes a little funny" She shrugged. "Maybe they just have weird oranges."

Twilight nodded doing her best to avoid looking annoyed, imagining Cadance's breathing exercises. In this new world every bit of information helped.

"That's good news but I meant these. Lyra you're the... anthropologist, or the closest we've got. Help me out."

Lyra took the lasgun from Twilight's magic field and brought it to her hooves, standing upright on her hind legs and holding it like a human would. She looked down the length of the barrel.
"Hmm, if they're like us most humans are right-hooved, I mean hand-ed... I think. Right-handed? Does that sound right to you?"

Everypony shrugged.

"Right. I don't feel anything moving on the left so I think the key is this thing inside the ring. It'll probably activate it."

"Aim at the armor just in case."

Lyra nodded and used her horn to squeeze the trigger while her hooves held the barrel straight. The lasgun fired and a beam of red light crossed the air and burnt into the far wall. She missed the chaos suits entirely. A smell lingered.

Twilight nodded at Lyra and brought up the bolter in her hooves just like Lyra had and used her magic to squeeze the trigger. The bolter roared and everypony's ears ring.
Twilight wasn't ready for the recoil and when she dropped the firearm she was thankful that her squeamishness pulling the trigger made her release it after one shot. Her shoulder hurt but at least she hadn't filled the room with stray fire.

"Lyra, you should have warned me that thing bucked like that!"

"Buck? What buck? This thing didn't move at all. It definitely didn't roar like yours did!"

"Everypony all right in here?!" Applejack poked her head in the doorway, Pinkie Pie's head was just beneath hers.
"We heard a noise echo terribly."

Twilight waved them off.
"Fine, we're fine. Just trying get a grip on these... things. You'd better warn everypony there's going to be a lot more noise for a while."

"Gotcha sugarcube."

Twilight exhaled as her friends took off then levitated the lasgun from Lyra. The pastel green pony let it go without resistance.
Twilight held the lasgun, looked down the barrel, and repeated her action more cautiously than before. This time her magic field secured the entire weapon.
Lyra was right: the weapon fired its beam of light with barely a noise and absolutely none of the hideous recoil of the bolter. She got a better sense of aim and her next few shots glanced off the power armor at the far end of the room.

"Makes sense if you ask me. Bigger guns for the bigger, heavier guys" Lyra said as she drank.

Twilight agreed before picking up the bolter again. Everypony else stepped out of the room, cautiously looking in from the doorway. The princess wanted to take no chances.
Holding the weapon firmly Twilight fired off the first round, grit her teeth trying to overcome the noise and fired again. Her third shot hit the power armor and made a loud impact noise as it deflected off like the las shot had.
Her fourth shot ripped through it and sparked inside. The impact seemed to blow the armor outwards, like a chest inhaling, and knocked the horned helmet off from the neck.

Twilight set the gun down and her party rejoined her as they went over to the armor.
"Definitely a heavier weapon."

They examined its insides: More scorch marks and that burning smell.
The gun had blown up to fire the missile and then blown up again.

Twilight chided herself for repeating some childish nonsense Spike had once said but there was no arguing with the facts: the gun was loaded with tiny rockets, the rockets shot out the barrel ejecting a shell out the side of the gun, and the rocket blew up after it tore into whatever it was it hit. She admired the cleverness of the idea even as she was appalled that someone would use it on another living being.

She pulled out the magazine and managed to pry loose the bolts.
"I think we can draw the obvious conclusions. This one seems to hold" she pried the last round from the feed and counted twenty "maybe thirty of these. Lyra, can you test a theory please?"

Lyra intuited what she meant and raised the lasgun to the opposite wall. She fired a round, used to the dull noise by now, and then ejected the magazine. She squeezed the trigger again and was met with silence.
"It's not full of rockets but something in that metal prism holds the light the gun shoots. Bigger here means bigger there."

"Yes, and it's also pretty obvious what it means for those weapons too."
Twilight said as her brow narrowed. The other ponies followed her gaze.

Their princess was staring at the inventory of weapons they had stockpiled, including the storm bolters with their twin-fed high capacity ammo drums, the heavy bolters loading the largest-sized bolts yet, and at the bottom of a heap of its smaller lasgun cousins sat the lascannon.

Applejack and Pinkie Pie trotted along back to the storage room where Rarity, Octavia and Sparkler went through supplies.

"Is everything alright? We heard the most dreadful noise." Rarity asked.

Sparkler came out from a massive box, pulling out a pair of shields. "We were pulling out stuff to block the doors with."

Applejack nodded but replied disheartened. "I reckoned as much but you aren't the first to try it. A couple of the rooms here look like someone chose 'em to board up to weather a storm. It didn't go well for them."

"Does that mean we're moving out?"

"Not quite, at least not yet. Twilight's going through everything they got here. It's looking like it'll take a while. The thought of spending the night on this here planet gives me the heebie-jeebies something awful but since we've gotta choose I'd rather stick around here than try my luck for something better."

The five of them had sorted the entire crate when Twilight and Cheerilee joined them. "What have you girls found?"

"Nothing too special; swords, axes, a couple of maces and some spears." Sparkler answered.

Twilight levitated a heavy, blocky device with metal teeth.
"Is this supposed to be a saw? It's so heavy and... complicated."

"It looks like farm machinery alright, Twi. But it's not exactly a saw."

"May I?"

Twilight and Applejack blinked and looked behind them. In the rush of everything it had been so easy to forget everypony that was with them.
In what was perhaps an exaggerated gesture, Blueblood held out his hoof.

Applejack handed him the machine while Twilight looked out the corner of her eye at Rarity; so far she wasn't visibly reacting.

"Hmm..." He had taken the saw and was testing it, holding it out at various angles. "The design is unusual but the hilt is unmistakable and the balance to the weapon is exact. This is not a common tool or farm implement. It is a sword."

"But that doesn't make any sense. They have perfectly good swords over here. And other not-so-perfectly normal swords also. That thing's a clumsy club if ever I saw one."

"Yes, it is unusual."

"Why would someone make something as simple as a sword so complicated?"

Twilight had an epiphany.
"Blueblood, is there a trigger to remove a prism on that thing?"

After pressing a series of buttons he managed to release a smaller piece of the device

They found a crate full of pieces exactly like it. "They're filled with something that smells like oil." Sparkler said as she handed one over. Blueblood removed the empty canister and loaded the replacement before he toyed with the device again and it roared to life. The chainsword buzzed loudly.
He glanced at Twilight as if asking permission and she tipped her head.
He raked the whirring weapon against the side of the wall, producing a horrible screech and filling the area with sparks. He let the blade die down before examining the device's teeth: they had barely left a scratch on the surface. By the same token the weapon itself looked undamaged.

"This is... brutish. I don't know what technique they use, I simply know I won't be the one to attempt to recreate it."

He turned to the other modified swords, the ones with wiring, conduits and piping welded to the strangest locations. Octavia quietly fiddled with one of them, making sure to keep the blade away from her: the chainsaw would made a nasty accident, no telling what the others could do..

"That sword." He said.
Sparkler realized he was talking to her and levitated it to him.

He examined the edge, feeling a proper sharpness to it and tested its elaborate crossguard. "This is far more ornate, very refined. I think, yes this is the same chamber for a power source." Blueblood pressed the activation rune and the power sword flickered to life as the blade's surface crossed with flashes of lightning.

The girls watched as he raised the sword and went through a warm-up routine culminating in his striking the wall again. The blade scarred the masonry, a long vertical nick that cut deeper than the chainsword had.
"Yes... yes this is most excellent. The lightning field allows one to wield a rod as powerful as a greatsword with the ease and speed of a rapier. Energy fields like this would redefine fencing in Equestria."

Twilight nodded but said nothing. She gestured to Cheerilee and the two of them moved on.

"Princess Twilight, what do you think?"
Cheerilee asked as they entered the Inquisitor's office.

"We have weapons. A lot of them." Twilight looked wistfully at a mirror, seeing her reflection as she held a copy of the Primer. She blinked and saw her reflection as a little filly, a unicorn with her big brother's copy of the Oubliettes and Ogres rulebook.

"What?"

Cheerilee looked up from her notes. "I'm sorry, did you ask me something?"

Twilight blushed. Her reflection was just her alicorn self. "No, sorry. I... just thinking out loud."

"Um, is there a chance you were asking about me?"

Twilight and Cheerilee turned to the doorway. Standing there, trying to make herself smaller, Fluttershy was blushing embarrassed.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, it's just that I met someone and I think he needs to speak with you."

Twilght and Cheerilee's muzzles fell open as the golden mechanical eagle on Fluttershy's back turned its head to them and demanded in a mechanical tone.
"Unit damaged, uplink to Lord severed. Requesting current ranked officer for re-uplink."

Comments

[Duskrunner]

3636187

I was afraid that would happen in the chapters that are conversation heavy.
'Show don't tell' means don't let the narrator point out everything, and "don't write in a play format" means I have to add actions even if I have none to put in.
The story is cast heavy so I'm going to use the standard Mane6 colors in the wheel, hopefully that'll cut the problem to manageable size. The change is in the latest chapter. If general consensus is that it makes it better I'll apply it to all chapters.
Hope to hear from you all soon.

[FluffyPanzer]

I like it .. not to be one of THOSE people, but im pretty sure apothecaries have more training than just "listen to what Narthecium Gauntlet tells me to do", i mean Techmarines have to be inducted into the Mechanicum for years before they cn return to their parent Chapter...now that ive said my piece ill say it again, love this story keep the updates comin

[Duskrunner]

3643413
I was sorely tempted to make a joke about how Space Marine bodies fix themselves up mostly but I feared the onslaught of Ork boyz coming onto my page and flaming me for appropriating their shtick and i don't really need that...

they're gonna be pissed off at me enough for what happens in chapter 15 or so

now back to work I go. If I can get the next two chapters up I can finally gush on my personal blog about the awesome stuff I found that I'm hopping Santa Ork or whomever the mlp version of Santa Claus is will get me for Xmas.