Starbound

by Rytex

Sand and Star Land

Starbound
Chapter 05 - Sand and Star Land

“Now watch closely,” said Jack though his helmet, as he and Twilight stood within the depths of his mine. There was almost no light, so Jack had injected a yellow stim-pack into Twilight, which made her glow like a mini-sun. It was the most curious feeling, as if fireflies were actively flying around inside her skin, but with no actual sensation. “This is going to make your resource-gathering this much easier. Now, use your magic to scout out minerals and such in the sand above us.”

Twilight extended tendrils of energy into it the ceiling and sent them out in a sort of sonar-wave. As the wave of magic passed over thicker, denser materials, she was made aware of it, including some sizeable chunks of ore she couldn’t identify.

“Now then, watch what happens. Keep a bubble of air around your head at all times, because we’re going to be doing some climbing upward here in a moment.”

He hefted his steel pickaxe down below his waist, before swinging it up and digging into the compressed ceiling.

“See,” Jack explained, as he pulled the pickaxe down and slung it across his back, “that one little hit is going to work its magic for just a moment. Still keeping tabs on the ores in the sand?”

Twilight nodded.

“Good. Now get a bubble of air around you; it’s about to--”

But his words were drowned out as the crack he had caused in the ceiling split open and sand flooded downward. Twilight instinctively flinched, but Jack just calmly stuck both his hands up, as if he were going to dive into it.

Twilight managed to successfully get a second spell keeping oxygen around her just before the sand was all over her. Everything was just a blur of yellowish orange, courtesy of her glowing. She could sense Jack next to her, and he was already starting to sort of climb his way up, as if he were slowly swimming in all this sand. Twilight decided to emulate him, and soon enough, she was ascending slowly, working to get close to him as quickly as she could.

Before long, she managed to get right beside him, and bumped him to let him know she was there.

“Oh, you’re there?” he asked, voice muffled a bit. “Good. Now, still know where all the ore is?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Let’s start moving towards it.”

It was a slow process, but the ease with which the two of them could dig for ore simply by loosening the sand was astounding. Within twenty minutes, they had found large quantities of coal, iron, copper, and even some silver and gold.

After almost half an hour after first delving into the sand, Twilight broke through the top of the sand surface, breaking herself back out onto the surface of the world. Thanks to her being able to store items within her Source’s massive space, she had kept all of the ore she had gathered squirrelled away there.

With another cast of her Ore-Finding spell, she could see a large collection of ore in one place, directly beneath her, and it was moving upward, fast.

A hand popped out of the sand right underneath her. Twilight yelped and flew up into the air, having not expected Jack’s emergence a la Jaws.

As Jack climbed out, Twilight landed, smiling sheepishly at herself. Jack didn’t seem to notice or care, though, for as soon as he had climbed out, he was emptying his pack of all the sand that had found its way inside when he had begun pocketing all the ore.

“Nice haul we got,” he said, as Twilight cast a spell that repelled all the grains of sand from her fur. “With all this ore, we might be able to get us a good set of armor for you from one of my friends on another planet.”

“You mean, you don’t make your own armor yourself?” Twilight asked, confused.

“Nope,” Jack said. “I ain’t that talented. Had to steal this armor from the USCM. Some experimental lab in one of their asteroid belts had it locked up in a storage cupboard. Nicked it when they changed the guard. I don’t know why the secrecy, though. It’s not even that strong. It’s just iron and silver, part of their prototype ‘Scout’ class of armor. At least, it was when I stole it.”

“Why is it so special?” Twilight asked. “It just seems like a normal bit of armor.”

“Beats me,” Jack shrugged. “I had to have my friend who made the armor modify the helmet so it could sustain me when I went for a spacewalk. I had to craft the Survival System and everything else.”

“So when do I get to meet this friend of yours?” Twilight asked as they started walking back in the direction of the encrypted transmitter signal Jack had left in his base to lead him back.

“Today, Earth-time, if all goes well. His community isn’t far. It’s even protected by a fragment of the good varieties of the USCM. You might even get to see some other alien species, aside from the Avians. Maybe an Apex, a Floran, or a Glitch.”

After only a few days of knowing her, Jack immediately regretted that last statement. He was forced to answer Twilight’s every question about them for the next couple of hours, even as he piloted the Ulysses to a planet back in Sector Alpha with her and their recent haul aboard.

“...and if the Apex evolved from the same apes the humans did, how is it that they and you are so different? It just doesn’t seem scientifically possible for two species to evolve from one. Oh! Maybe if I meet one I can study its DNA and compare it to yours!”

“With what equipment?” Jack asked as the ship came out of warp above another temperate, grassland planet. He, of course, wasn’t going to tell Twilight that he didn’t like the idea of her slicing off part of his skin to study.

“Magic!” Twilight exclaimed, almost salivating at the thought. “I’ve examined such particles with my eye, though I used magic to focus my sight down to that level. Equestria isn’t quite on that level of technology just yet. My ship’s only the first space ship we’ve ever built that’s capable of interstellar travel. I mean, we’ve explored our own solar system and a couple of the planets, but this is the first one to go further than that. And it’s miles ahead of some of the other non-arcane technology we’ve come up with.”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Jack said, getting up from the pilot’s chair and walking back to his transporter, pausing for just a moment to drag a hand up Twilight’s neck an distract her before she could continue. “We’re here on business, not science.”

---

The city was significantly more advanced than the Avia village on Alpha Prime III B had been. Where the Avia town had been full of wooden buildings, here were metal constructions. Everything from small square buildings to towers that would rival some of the skyscrapers in Manehattan. Twilight could hardly believe her eyes as she beheld the city ahead of her.

“Welcome to the city of Terra Stella,” Jack said, smiling at the look on her face. “In the old Latin language of Earth, it literally translates to ‘Star Earth.’ This was one of the first human colonies we built that survived the first months, almost a century ago. Here, the humans, the Avia, the Florans, the Glitch, the Hylotl, and the Apex meet in peace, guarded by a coalition of soldiers from all six races. The peaceful part is quite an achievement for us, given the history of the Florans and their penchant for violence.”

“It’s huge!” Twilight exclaimed as they passed through a gap in the large stone and metal walls surrounding the city. “I’ve only ever seen three cities this big in all of Equus.”

“It’s amazing what seven races can build when we all work together, instead of just killing each other because we’re different.”

“Seven races?” Twilight asked. “I thought you said there were only six here.”

“There used to be a seventh,” Jack said, countenance darkening. “The Novakids.”

“The Novakids?” asked Twilight as they started walking down a street while dozens of speeding ships flew above them in orderly lines from tower to tower.

“The Novakids,” confirmed Jack. “I think they were the first alien species the humans ever met in our travels. Their species is much, much older than ours, and they’re really spread out across known space. Or at least, they were. The known Novakid colonies have just vanished.”

“Vanished?”

Jack nodded. “Novakids are a strange race, to be sure. They’re very flighty, have a poor grasp of history, and yet have some of the best memories you could ever come across, so it’s not uncommon to see them go from the Stone Age to technological marvels and then back to the Stone Age in as little as ten generations of Novakids. And they really love new and interesting things. No one knows where they’ve gone off to or why they’re even gone. There are, however, signs of a struggle at some of them. And most people have their suspicions on who or what chased them off, but there’s no proof. They are, after all, notoriously difficult to kill. The fact remains, however, we’ve no hard evidence that tells us what happened to them. And the ones who are still around, well...” he smiled wanly, "they couldn't tell us anything because they weren't there, and even if they were, no guarantee they'd even want to tell us."

Jack led Twilight to a station with several yellow speeders parked around, handed a human attendant some pixels, and then hopped into the speeder. Twilight was quite impressed with the attendant because he didn’t seem to bat an eyelash at the sight of her. She figured with all the species in the galaxy, nothing surprised him anymore.

“Industrial district, please,” Jack said to the driver, who nodded and began to pilot them past the central collection of towers that made up downtown.

“So, allow me to school you on what all the different races look like. You’ve seen a human and several Avia, so they should be easy. Now, see that ape-looking one?” he pointed to a monkey-looking being walking along the road with a human, carrying a strange metal device she didn’t recognize. “That’s an Apex. Name kind of gives it away. And that plant one there? That’s a Floran. Again, the name should give it away.”

“What’s that one?” Twilight asked, indicating an amphibious green creature with three red eyes, which seemed to be in an argument with a Floran.

“A Hylotl,” answered Jack. “Expect to see them and the Florans fight a lot if they’re together. They have a history of wars, but they aren’t allowed to come to blows under penalty of imprisonment here.”

“And what about those robots?”

“The Glitch. Don’t tell them they’re robots. Not to their faces, anyway. They’ve been programmed to believe they’re actual life-forms, and they can get quite violent if someone disrupts that view. They’ve even destroyed their own kind when they become self-aware.”

They rode in silence, with Twilight being content to gaze around the city with wonder and excitement while their taxi sped them off to wherever Jack’s friend was.

“Oh! I forgot, there’s one more race you might want to be aware of, even if we won’t ever run into them in all probability. They’re called the Agarans, and the best way to describe them is that they’re bipedal mushroom people who live on random planets that no one’s been able to nail down any kind of formula to finding.”

“Wow,” she breathed, still taking in the vast quantity of different forms of life that she was the first to meet as an Equestrian. “This is all so amazing…”

“Eh,” Jack shrugged, “I’ve seen it all before, so the new-ness of it is lost on me.”

“You mean the novelty?”

“Whatever. Almost there,” he noted, peering over the edge of the yellow speeder to the ground below. “My friend’s name is Jason Jones, and he’s a damn good smith. They’re employed to shape the metal around here for anything other than large sheets for building these towers, and they’re pretty efficient. I bet we’ll have your armor and be out of here within a day.”

When the speeder landed in a much dirtier section of the town, Jack began to lead Twilight through the masses of alien life forms. The industrial district wasn’t too crowded, but it was very busy, judging by the different mostly-human workers moving from building to building at quick paces. To Twilight’s slight self-consciousness, the workers were giving her interested looks as they went from building to building, but they didn’t stop to chat.

“And right through here,” Jack said, leading Twilight into large hangar-sized building. Upon entry, Twilight’s first impressions were of light and heat. A massive black machine occupied the middle of the room, where several workers of varying species were operating at different stations. Some were throwing coal into a depository, some were loading ores onto a conveyor belt to be dumped into a smelting pot, some were maintaining the various machinery parts, others were collecting the smelted ore and wheeling it over to smithing stations to be crafted…

Twilight was very impressed with the organization and teamwork of this group of smiths.

She couldn’t see any faces, as most were wearing welding shields to protect them from sparks or other unwanted stuff getting into them and causing damage. One such person noticed Jack and Twilight, waved to Jack who waved in return, and jogged over, flipping up his mask as he went.

He was a weary-looking man, with a lined face, full cheeks, green eyes that sunken into his head, and a hooked nose that looked like it could have been broken more than nnce. Despite the weary look, he smiled cheerfully and shook hands with Jack.

“Well well, if it isn’t Jackie. What have you been up to these last couple of months, eh?”

His voice was rather baritone. Twilight had been expecting such, but it was very deep and rich, deeper and richer than Big Macintosh’s had gotten over the years.

“Well, making first contact, for one. Jason Jones, this is Twilight Sparkle, a pony of the planet Equestria.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” Twilight said politely, extending a hoof, which Jason reached down and shook.

“And you as well,” Jason said. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Twilight’s horn lit up as she levitated the backpack with the ore off of her back and set it down in front of her. She didn’t miss Jason’s eyes light up with surprise at the sight of her magic, nor the lingering gaze on her wings, which had been uncomfortably pinned to her back by the the ore-laden pack.

“Armor and weapons,” Jack said, opening the top of it to reveal all the lumps of ore they had collected. “She needs a good set of steel armor to wear, as well as maybe a spear or something to defend herself with.”

“Hmm,” Jason said, looking through the pack. “You’ve brought plenty of iron and coal, I see, as well as some silver and gold too. Do you think I’ll need to add a full face mask as well?”

“Might be best,” Jack answered, “but try not to make a helmet that interferes with her magic.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jason said, looking Twilight over. “Making armor for a new species is not going to be a swift process, I’ll be honest. We’ll have to custom craft the plate molds, the face mold, everything. It will probably be a good month or so before it’s all ready. And considering you’ve brought the materials, I can give you a good discounted price on the pixels, but we can discuss that later. I assume you have adequate payment?”

“How much is adequate?” Twilight asked.

“About 50,000 pixels.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. The most she had ever had at one time was in the neighborhood of a few hundred.

“I… I don’t. Jack?” she asked, but Jack groaned and shook his head.

“I was expecting it to be expensive for a new race, but not this bad,” he admitted.

“All I have in payment are these, I suppose,” Twilight said, conjuring a few gems from her Source. “Will these suffice?”

Jason blinked. “Ma’am, you’re offering payment with gems?”

“Is it too few?”

“It’s too much,” Jason said, laughing wryly. “Ma’am, these are worth several thousand each. I suppose you’ll want to get them appraised first so you can be sure what they’re completely worth, but why do you even carry those around with you?”

“Magical energy storage,” Twilight explained. “Gems are created when a unicorn stores magical energy within a crystal. They’re so common in Equestria, they’re barely worth anything.” She gave a small smile of disbelief. “I didn’t expect them to be worth so much here.”

“Well, if they’re as common as… hang on, did you say unicorns?”

“Yes…” Twilight said nervously. “Unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies make up all the types of the pony race. Pegasi can fly, earth ponies bless the land, and unicorns use magic. All three are equal in total number, if their proportions are skewed in different regions…”

Jack shrugged. “Well, I suppose if unicorns are as common as I think, and these gems are as easy to make as they sound I guess, they really wouldn’t be worth that much there. I can only wonder what it is they consider to be a luxury resource.”

“Cloth,” said Twilight. “With our coats, we have no need for clothing like you humans do for climate survival, not to mention it is a slow and laborious process for a pony to weave something without using magic.”

“Actually,” Jack said, tilting his head, “that makes a surprising amount of sense to me.”

“Well, from what I see,” said Jason, shaking his head in disbelief at the drop of information, “you’ll still want to get them appraised and sold. Can’t pay with gems alone, only pixels. I think if you’re willing to trust Jack with the money and gems, he can get them sold. He knows some pretty good places around the city.”

“I can do that,” Jack said. “May I?” he asked, reaching out a hand.

Twilight nodded, dropping several gems in his hand. He pocketed them, turned right around, and started walking out of the shop. Jason, however, indicated that she should follow him, and so Twilight followed the large smith back to a small room in the corner of the large smithing building.

“You’re a new species to us in the city,” he explained as he started grabbing different materials down off of several shelves and started pouring measured amounts into a bucket that he had grabbed and propped on a table. “So lucky you, we get to make a mold for your face for this. Making body armor is easy, in that all we need is a sketch and some measurements, as well as a mannequin to style it on, but faces are damn difficult. Normally we use a generic bust to shape the armor on, but since we don’t have one for you ponies, you get to stick your face in plaster to make one.”

One the bucket was filled with a viscous white liquid, he picked up two halves of a buckling box and set them both down, open ends up, and began to pour into each one until the liquid was reaching the lip. One he was satisfied, he drained the bucket and washed it out, but meanwhile Twilight just stared at the strange goopy white liquid before her.

“What do I do?” she asked, confused.

“Well, when you’re ready, you’re gonna stick one side of your face in there, and I’m gonna close the other side with the other half for a few minutes. When it dries, which it does really fast, we’ll pull it off and we should have a perfect mold of your face for us to build a bust for shaping.”

“I just stick my face in there?”

“That’s all there is to it. Be sure to take a deep breath and hold it in as long as you can.”

It really wasn’t as bad as Twilight thought it was going to be. It lasted only a few seconds, cold and sickly sensation aside, but once finished, they were unfastened and Twilight removed her head, leaving a perfect impression of her face behind.

“Now we’ll fill it with a special gel that mimics flesh, and within the day we should have your bust. After that, it’s all about the styling of the armor. But we need to get you measured for that too. Wait right here, we’ll do it as soon as I can get measuring tape.”

While Twilight had been left in the capable hands of Jason Jones and was making tremendous progress, Jack Thomas was feeling very incapable of going through with his simple task of finding a gem appraiser and selling for enough pixels, and as a result, his progress was absolute zero.

“What do you mean you won’t appraise it!?” he shouted at the Apex sitting across from him, who stared at him down the length of his nose through his oh-so-breakable-looking pince-nez.

“I mean, sir,” the Apex said in his snootiest voice, “that I will not judge the quality of the gem. It is closing time, and I have already recorded all of the day’s transactions. If you wish to make one, you may come by tomorrow, but I, frankly, am not in the mood to appraise likely-fake gems for a would-be adventurer such as yourself.”

Jack was seriously considering reaching across, grabbing his suit by the tie, and hitting him square in the nose just to break the pince-nez. He did seem to value it quite highly.

“Hey look buddy,” Jack said, “I’m no would-be adventurer. I took down Dreadwing.”

“Oh yes, the villainous pirate penguin,” the Apex rolled his eyes. “Likely story. If you would kindly remove yourself from the premises, I have no wish to do business with you tonight. Otherwise, things could get ugly.”

Jack snatched the gems up and stormed out, grinding his teeth and making sure to ever so slightly move one of the delicately-placed items in the store nearly to the edge of the table, leading the smug Apex behind him to scramble to try to reposition it.

Maybe it didn’t help things, but damn, did it make him feel better.

---

“...and we’ve traced the warp trails to a desert-biome planet in Sector Beta, where their most recent trails lead to Terra Stella.”

“I see,” Captain Jensen said as he examined the datapad that contained all the information from the investigation. “Any news on any other USCM activity, Lieutenant?”

“No sir,” the aryan lieutenant replied, shaking his head. “Only the usual. More ships headed into Sector Chi, but other than that, we know nothing.”

“Hmm. Good work, Ross.”

Lieutenant Ross saluted his captain, then turned and walked out of the command center, back to his room where he could take a nice sleep. Interplanetary day/night cycles were worse than Terran jet lag, and that was saying something.

Captain Jensen, however, was even more troubled by this recent development. They had gone to Terra Stella? If Jensen’s little outpost wanted to find these unknown entities, but they wanted to hide, they had gone to the right place. Needles in a haystack, they would be, unless…

Unless…

“Veers, Piett, front and center,” he barked, struck by an idea.

Two of the soldiers in white USCM gear moved in front of their CO quickly and snapped to attention.

“Have either of you ever been to Terra Stella before?”

“Sir, no sir.” answered Veers, identified by the deeper, sterner voice behind his combat mask. Piett nodded, though, which made the job easier.

“Since you have, Piett, you’re familiar with its sheer size, yes?” he asked, to which Piett nodded. “Good. I’m going to inform you now, we are operating under the assumption that they are extraterrestrial and thus hate the USCM. We cannot simply walk up and tell these beings to come to our outpost because we’re the friendly ones, either literally or figuratively. We need to approach this delicately.”

“How so?” asked Piett, his lighter voice sounding a bit out of place under a soldier’s helmet.

“All warp ships must carry some kind of record of coordinates,” he explained, knowing that Veers was never much of a pilot himself, despite his proficiency with a lot of technology, “so that starpilots don’t get lost and lose track of where they came from. This being said, your mission is to trace these ships’ warp signals and plant the coordinates of this planet on them. We need to see what they’re after and see if we can keep them under the radar from the other USCM. Are your orders clear?”

“Sir, yes sir!” they said, saluting.

“Good. And for Terra’s sake, don’t be detected! That’s the last thing we need, is for them to notice your break-in.”

“Understood sir.”

“Good. Try to time it to where you do this when it’s very late at night in the city.”

“Sir!” they exclaimed again, before exiting. As the doors slid shut, Captain Jensen signed and turned to stare out at the jungle again. Why do I even care so much about these unknown entities? It’s not like they’ve done me any favors.

His gaze shifted from the thick foliage below to the starry sky above. He couldn’t explain why, but he had a gut feeling that these two or more beings were beings he needed to befriend. How he knew that, he couldn’t say.

“Motti,” he barked again.

“Sir!” one of his staff at one of the many computers around the room looked up.

“Sign into the USCM comms frequency,” he ordered. “I think it’s time we started making preparations for Project Terminus.”

A hush fell over the room.

“Sir, you-- you can’t be serious,” one of the men said.

“Captain, we’re just one small outpost. What can we possibly do against--”

“I don’t know,” Jensen answered. After the meteor fell, and the USCM gave Terra its ultimatum, the UN had to pull their support from the project, but... I don’t know, I have a feeling like this is it. This is going to bring Project Terminus to fruition.”

“This what?” asked Motti.

“The two ships. I can’t explain it,” the Captain answered, turning to face his men, “but these beings took down Dreadwing. Dreadwing! Scourge of the Alpha Sector! Not even an elite USCM strike team could down his ship, and somehow, these two ships are our best lead at finding who is responsible for downing and killing that mad mutated bird, if it isn’t their pilots themselves who did it. If we win them over, we could have ourselves just the very weapons we would need.”

The men didn’t look convinced, but Jensen didn’t need them to. Not when he himself wasn’t convinced, but his gut had never led him wrong before.

“Gentlemen, ladies, with the USCM distracted with whatever they’re in Sector Chi for, this is the perfect opportunity to begin our preparations. So with that being said...” he turned back around and intentionally struck a dramatic pose, arms clasped behind his back as he stared out at the starry sky.

“Start focusing all our resources toward the fulfillment of Project Terminus. Today’s the day we start preparing for the destruction of the USCM.”

Author's Note:

Finals are over, all classes passed, back to writing as usual.

Also, if you want a quick visual comparison of what Terra Stella looks like, here's a picture of Kaas City.

By the way, for those who haven't figured it out yet, Sector Chi and Sector X are the same place. X is the Greek notation of the letter chi (pronounced kye). I interchange them regularly purely to keep that reminder fresh.

Rytex out. Have a good day!

Comments

[Commander Darklight]

finaly

[Palibakufun]

Fun stuff. Can't wait to read more.